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Believe in you As writers, we’re constantly striving to achieve that end product. Our book, our novel, our short story, the epic fantasy that has been inside of us for so many years....

As writers, we’re constantly striving to achieve that end product.  Our book, our novel, our short story, the epic fantasy that has been inside of us for so many years.  So we set ourselves targets, goals that sometimes are realistic and sometimes just aren’t.  We go through ups and downs, highs and lows of the emotional rollercoaster that isn’t just our own lives, but our characters’ lives. …

New Year, New Starts

New Year always seems a little repetitive.  With each New Year that comes around it’s the same old things, the same promises and for about a week it’s something that we all manage to do – sometimes even a little longer than that.  With 2021 now in the swing of things, I’ve forgotten what most of my resolutions were and what few I did make, I’ve decided that they can wait a little longer before I…

A day in the life …

Ever wondered what would happen if you let your characters lose to write a journal entry about their experiences with you at the helm of their story, or their life in your heads?  Well, I thought I’d give it a go … 

“Dear Diary

Day … 10091812 actually, forget that I’ve lost count.  I’m not sure how long I’ve been trapped in here, locked away awaiting my release.  See, all I did was create…

A little magic …

There are times that we hate our characters.  And sometimes, we reallyhate them.  They do what they want.  You want them to do one thing, they tell you where to go and do what they want, and in the process change the entirety of the story that you had plotted out.  Then, there’s that one character who you intend to be a NPC, minor character that really doesn’t have any relevance.  Turns out that…

Words are hard.

They shouldn’t be.  They should come easy, pouring out of us as readily as a stream flows through it’s bed, dripping over a cascading waterfall and into the pool below.  That’s how we imagine writing to be, that it’s a never ending flow or words … we just never stop to think about what happens when someone puts a rock in the stream, or a drought comes and dries up the flow …

Sometimes the weather is brilliant for inspiration.  We have another storm hitting, and for the fourth weekend in a row we’re going to be battering down the hatches and staying in doors.  Ordinarily, it would start to drive me up the walls wondering when the end will come and if we’ll ever escape. If we’ll get our weekends back where we can go out for walks or other activities without worrying…

Expect the unexpected …

There’s a romance associated with the ocean; the rolling in of the waves, the lonely lighthouse or the abandoned house that sits on top of the clifftop as the mist rolls in early morning or at dusk and captures the ghosts of a time long since past.  There are days when it’s tempestuous and violent and others, calm and loving, wrapping it’s waves around those that visit it. It’s an ongoing torrent…

Back in the Game!

So, I think it’s fair to say that for the past year Charlotte and I have been struggling.  Our writing was suffering and more importantly so were our characters. Not for any particular reason, mainly because we weren’t realising what we were doing to our writing but also because of various things going on in our lives.  Mainly work … for both of us, our work lives have been kicking our butts in a…

Keep calm and write on!

As it stands, between Charlotte and I we have over 300 characters.  Not all of these are main characters and a fair few will be NPC or secondary characters by the time we’re actually done with things.  Some of these characters have been with us since day one and others are only a matter of weeks old. Some are characters that have gone and come back and others have never really left us – no matter…

Writing is hard.  There’s no two ways about it, sometimes you even question why you put yourself through the trauma of doing it.  Not only do you have to put words on the page, but you have characters to contest with … and sometimes those characters are the best and the worst.  Sometimes they act out, behave like children and sometimes they break our hearts because of the strength and power of…

Challenges ... heroes and villains

Sometimes, when writing it’s very easy to forget that there are heroes and that there are villains.  I’ll be the first to admit that I can wax lyrical about villains and how they deserve the same treatment as heroes in a story; but I’m also very bad at practicing what I preach.  It’s easy to look at a character and go ‘you’re a bad guy, lets make you bad through and through’ and not actually…

We’re Back!

So, Charlotte and I took a break.  Not from writing, just from blogging and a few other things so that we could focus on our writing and get ourselves into some sort of shape for the New Year.  We are very easily distracted and adding things in like social media, blogging or anything else really and we’ll happily focus on that rather than what’s important!  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it…

“Life finds a way”

Shuffling people around and you don’t expect it to have much of an impact.  Or at least, that’s what Charlotte and I somehow keep fooling ourselves with.  If we move person x to family y then what’s the worst that can happen?  We get a fully functioning family and character that’s more fleshed out and raring to go?  That’s true, absolutely true but … what I don’t think either of us banked in is…

As the coffee is slowly making it’s way through our systems, waking us up and preparing us for the day to come, we’re settling in to get back to sorting things out. With a project on this scale, organisation is vital. It’s very easy for us to loose track of where we are, what we’re doing, and who we’re doing it with. Organisation is key. I have to admit when we started, I didn’t think writing…

Love is a many splendid thing

Love is a many splendid thing.  It comes in many shapes and forms and sizes and it’s not always apparent of just what and how it’s capable of until you’re not looking at it.  Our characters know love, for some of them it’s a fuel, a fuel to fight with and for others of them it’s a tool to use and manipulate another with.  But it’s there, always, no matter what they think and no matter what price…

Developing characters is a treat. 10% of building a character is determining some features and a name. The rest? That’s mostly down to them. We don’t get a say in their personalities, their traits, everything that makes them unique. We have always tried to. We’ve tried making them a specific type of person, a good guy or a bad guy .. we’ve tried to shove life choices down their throats only for…

Sometimes, Charlotte and I are just that good.  Sometimes, we stagger ourselves with the amount of sheer brilliance we have.  No, scratch that … it’s not brilliance, it’s utter stupidity and self sabotage.  We’ve been talking for a while now about how utterly brilliant we are at self sabotage, at destroying our own pieces of work.  And yet … here we are, carrying on in the same way.  Old habits…