About Me

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Plymouth, Devon, United Kingdom
West Country author, winner of Piatkus Entice award for historical fiction 2012.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

15 minutes ...

Have been reading some wonderful advice from publishing blogs, and although it still conflicts, it's getting easier to weed out the relevant from the irrelevant (notice I do not say 'good' or 'bad' because it's all subjective.)
This morning's read, on Nathan Bransford's blog, was about showing and telling. Now, I always enjoy Nathan's blogs; full of great advice, and humorous too. But amongst the "Ooh, thank you, that was wonderful, please can I have your babies?" comments, it was nice to see some people start to question the hard and fast rule so many crits seem so delighted to pick up on.

I've lost count of the times I've read a crit (not always my work) that gleefully leaps on a sentence and shrieks: "THIS IS TELLING, NOT SHOWING!" And you can almost hear the subtext: "found something impressive to say, yay me!" But you know, I've read some of those sentences over again and thought: "yep, it is. But it works."

Lots of 'rule' breaking works. Let's just enjoy the writing process and not get too hung up on it.

To be fair, Nathan wasn't being heavy handed on the subject, he rarely is. http://blog.nathanbransford.com/ Always a good read.




Okay, writerly rant over, this is kind of nice:

http://www.inplymouth.com/newsindetail.asp?category=Around%20Plymouth&serialnumber=73 it's a little piece written about me on Plymouth's online presence.

This came from a simple tweet (@TerriNixon on Twitter) that mentioned I was writing, and a couple of e-mails where they asked me some questions about myself and my completed MS, The Dust Of Ancients.

The book I'm doing now is about as different as it gets, which is mad fun! I'm now at a little over 40,000 words, there have been some changes (including the working title) and I'm having a wonderful time with it.

Sunday, August 09, 2009

The New Project

Just a miniature update, to remind myself how to do this blogging thing.
Work's going well on the new project - bit of a departure for me to be writing something that doesn't involve anything vaguely paranormal or horrific. It's a historical novel inspired by the life of my maternal grandmother during her time in service, but the main character is completely fictional.
It's interesting to be able to put Grandma in as a secondary character though, gives me a lot of freedom to mess with the plot while still able to pay tribute to a rather extraordinary life.

I still don't have a title for this piece, but the working title is "Just Lizzy." It's set (the beginning) in 1912 and I aim to have it in two distinct and separate parts before and after the first world war. Don't want to give too much away (because, of course, you're going to buy the book when I get my huge publishing deal! *HAH*) but I intend to skip the actual war years - or gloss over them - and have Lizzy coping with a very different world when she rejoins it in 1920.

Thing I'm not sure about though, is whether or not to keep the whole book in first person; toying with the idea of maybe having part 2 in third, but not sure how that would sit with a reader.

Anyway, I'm up around 15,000 words (ish) and really enjoying writing it. Dom is going to be away next week so I'll have a really good push and maybe get the first part finished.
Which means staying away from Twitter. Yeah, like that's going to happen. Still, I'll try and moderate my addiction to that and to the new iPod apps I've been pointed at.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Exciting News!

Well well! Here I am after a very long absence - yet again! Been writing a lot, won a couple of minor comps and suchlike, still waiting to hear back from Mic Cheetham agency regarding Dust Of Ancients. I sent it off last October so it's been quite a long time, just starting to wonder if that's a good or bad sign, and if it's poor etiquette to now enquire as to whether it ever arrived ... hmm.

Anyway, good news is that Bound For Evil has been picked up and recommended by The Washington Post! Hooray! Here's the blog entry from Dead Letter Press, which will lead, in turn, to the article.

http://departmentofdeadletters.blogspot.com/2009/01/dead-letter-press-featured-in.html

Anyhow, back to writing ...