Quick update and locations

I’ve got some time on my hands at the moment. Last week was all excitement, because I got my NWS report back on The Welsh King’s Spy and was told it’s ‘almost ready’. As a result I devoted all my spare time to making the suggested adjustments, which I finished on Sunday. Now it’s with my beta reader (the gorgeous Janice Preston—if you haven’t read her wonderful debut novel, Mary and the Marquis, yet, drop everything and order it now!) So there’s nothing more I can do on TWKS until I get it back.

It feels wrong to be doing nothing writing-wise, though. I do have two novellas that are at different stages of editing, but I’m finding it hard to immerse myself in the lives of those characters when I might have to get back into the heads of Matilda and Huw in a few days. Therefore I’ve decided to start planning my next full-length novel. 

I had an idea for a hero and heroine back in the summer. Of course I was committed to my rewrite of TWKS by that time, so I jotted down the idea in my notebook, wrote the opening scene that had come to me, then forgot about it. I dug my notes out yesterday and I think the story has potential. So I’ve decided to develop the characters and come up with a plot outline. There’s just one problem – I’m not very familiar with the location.

Hawkstone Follies - I always find inspiration here

So far all my novels/novellas have been set in Shropshire and just over the border in Wales. It’s where I live, which makes research dead easy. I just have to go for a walk or bike ride and I’m exploring the landscape that my characters inhabit, seeing the same skyline, the building materials, the trees, plants and animals… I have visited the place where my new story is set, but I haven’t built up anything like the same feel for the place. Still, I’ve decided to go for it – any excuse for a research trip to a beautiful location!

Do you prefer to set your stories in familiar locations, or would you rather research new places?

What next?

Following on from my last post, I'm pleased to say that the editing was far easier than it's been on previous projects. I think it helped to have a deadline - I was entering it into the Harper Impulse Winter Wonderland competition, so it had to be finished by last Wednesday. I finished it and entered it with a day to spare and now it's the agonising wait!

This was the first novella I've written - it ended up at 30k words - and I found it a lot of fun to write. It forced me to focus on the relationship between my hero and heroine and their emotional journey, which was something I found hard to sustain in the last full-length (75k) novel I wrote. I feel much more confident with that now. It's also encouraging to see the finished story take shape so much faster than when I'm writing a full-length novel. I'm not into delayed gratification ...

I've pretty much decided to write another novella next. I had loads of ideas as I was writing my last one and most of them seemed more suitable for that length. For the next few weeks I'm going to work on creating some characters and then plot out their stories. I can't wait to get stuck in!