This week’s mistakes

Leave a comment

Anne of Green Gables was one of my favourite books as a child. One of the things I have always remembered Anne Shirley saying was:

“Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”

 

It’s been my writing mantra for a while now. Each day can be both literally as well as metaphorically a blank page, which is good, as every day I find a few new mistakes to make. anne of gg

So, these are the mistakes I have made this week!

  1. I called one of my characters Ellie. I always confuse the names Ellie and Evie (my daughter has friends called both and I can never remember which is which!) Half way through Chapter 6 Ellie went out of a room, and in Chapter 7 she came back in called Evie. That one was easy to solve – I changed both Ellie and Evie into Emma, which for some reason is much easier to remember!
  2. Chapter 13 was just a big mistake from beginning to end. I started it, hated it, deleted it all and started again. I needed a character to show up who had no reason to be in the scene at all, I came up with reason after reason for him to visit, none of them plausible. I was tearing my hair out. I went to bed, woke up the next morning, and realised that if I had him call the heroine’s mobile it meant he didn’t have to be there at all but could still have the conversation. Problem solved (and it’s a good job I’m not writing a historical).
  3. Biggest mistake of all? Apparently it was National Writing Day today and I’d never even imagined there was such a thing. I should have done something to celebrate – some writing, perhaps!

What I learnt this week: Fun with a random name generator

Leave a comment

faceless lego

I have a few characters sculling around in my WIP who are currently without names, and as name is such an important part of building character, I thought it was time to try and create names for them. I did not even suspect the existence of such a thing as a random name generator, but one of my writing friends just happened to mention it – what a great idea! I’m going to use it all the time from now on …

So, first challenge – a character in his fifties, regional manager of a large heritage organisation, white British. For a while there I was considering Eusebio St. John or Xavier Riddle … But I settled on Stephan McClellan. Happy.

And what about the ageing lord of the manor, very definitely English? What could it throw up for him? Well, Eldon South had quite a good ring to it, or Wilford Layne – not so sure about Antonia Richard though, last time I looked Antonia was traditionally a woman’s name … So it was back to the drawing board with that one. It eventually came up with Roland Talbot, which I quite like.

Then we have a female also in her fifties, also working for the large heritage organisation. She already had a first name, Caroline, but I’d struggled to find a surname that sounded right (and didn’t already belong to somebody I knew). First round of suggestions – Garrett. I like that, named!

Now it’s onto a name for a 19th century pre-Raphaelite artist. This proved far more difficult! Newton Bradbury sounds too much like a service station on the M1, Brendon Gabriel should probably be a male stripper and Chet Kyle would be more at home in a cowboy novel. Maybe I’ll not be using the random name generator for EVERY character, then …

A new beginning

Leave a comment

Welcome to a new venture – an author website! I’ve never been a “proper” author before, so now I have finally finished a book that I am proud of, this is the start of a beautiful journey of discovery … Actually, no it isn’t. That sounds far too pretentious even for me. It’s the start of a website, that’s all!

image2 (1)