Catriona Mackay

As I say in my profile, I'm yet another aspiring novelist. I've taken three months off my job as a civil servant to finish writing my first novel, Windrose Hall, which I synopsify as follows:

Windrose Hall is a young adult novel set in early seventeenth century England. Christopher (Kit) and Thomasine (Tom) are the children of a well-to-do but unconventional family living in Windrose Hall - a rambling Northamptonshire manor house. Cross-dressing, cross-tempered Tom longs to follow in her scientist uncle's footsteps; Kit is passionate about theatre and loves animals of all kinds... almost as much as he loves being the centre of attention.

Their comfortable lives are shattered when their parents die in a fire, and they lose the house and everything in it to their other uncle - a scheming Puritan. With Joan, their shy but resourceful housemaid, they set out to recover their lost inheritance, or find new lives amidst the stench and crowds of Shakespeare's London.

*****

Any thoughts on the synopsis? I'm not sure I like "cross-dressing, cross-tempered".

Aaaaaand done. Hurrah!

The random 'extras' I wrote at the end turned out to be more useful than I was expecting, I think.

Now a couple of days off for Messiah and readthroughs, then edit up some old short stories and enter them for competitions, then on to the editing!

Sorry for abandoning my daily update plan.

Today is a good day for two reasons:

1) I have finished the current draft of Windrose Hall - it stands at 66,000 words.
2) I have written 40,000 words during November.

These were the targets I said I'd have to reach in order to wear my shiny Nanowrimo t-shirt that arrived earlier this week.

I said I would consider myself a Nanowrimo winner if I finished Windrose Hall and wrote 50,000 words during November, however. So I want to write 10,000 more. I'm not sure what to do. I think the options are:

1) Short stories for competitions and/or my Yuletide assignment
2) Fragments of the sequel to Windrose Hall
3) Fanfiction on Windrose Hall - this would be like fragments of the sequel, but about things I don't think should happen canonically to the characters (though obviously I might change my mind).

Thinking about what might happen to the characters next would be useful, because it might inform edits I make to the current draft. And it's a bit more within the spirit of the challenge, since some books have little tasters of what comes next as a sort of epilogue.

Fanfiction on WH might be fun.

Yuletide I have to do anyway, so I should arguably make a start.

Another competition win or two before I start sending things to agents might be handy.

What do you think?

Today was an amazing writing day - I got through about 7000 words, and so am now only about a day behind.

Whether they are any good remains to be seen, of course, but I didn't feel I was lowering my standards any, and there was quite a bit I deleted as not good enough.

I think when it comes to editing, I'm going to have to take some of the booze out. Many of my characters are a bit repressed, so when I want them to say anything to one another I have to get them drunk. And other nefarious types in the story are also out to get them drunk, so what with one thing and another, they've been rolling through the last few chapters three sheets to the wind.

I'm fairly certain you're not supposed to do that in young adult books.

( Writing repressed characters )

Today I wrote two scenes: one from the point of view of the dog, and another in which two of my central characters get ready for bed together and have an awkward conversation about homosexuality.

The dog scene was written during a quiet point in a rehearsal. I managed writing during rehearsal better than I thought I would, though next time I'll make sure my tiny little computer is fully charged.

I ended up promising one of my fellow ensemble members a cameo role. I asked him what he wanted to be and he said a thief, which was quite a coincidence because I need a thief next chapter, and I hadn't got round to naming him, and the ensemble member is called 'Daniel', which works well, as it's period and I don't have a Daniel yet.

Feeling much happier about it than I was yesterday, although I'm getting more behind with the wordcount all the time.

Yesterday's research trip was excellent for my novel, but bad for my bank balance and my confidence in my novel.

I visited St Bartholemew's Hospital, the Globe Theatre and the Museum of London, and bought a copy of John Stow's Survey of London, and maps of London from 1520 and 1666. It's a bit irritating that they didn't have one from nearer 1610, but they are still very useful when supplemented with Stow and other sources.

Today I've done no writing but a lot of research, and uncovered lots of useful things, not least how much more research I'm going to need to do - a depressingly large amount. I enjoy research, but I enjoy writing more, and I'm concerned I won't be able to finish in the timescale I set myself. I'm wondering whether I'm cut out for historical novels at all.

I need to get myself down to the National Archives, to have a look at some real cases of disputed wills. My entire plot centres around a disputed will, so I need to get it right. I'm unclear whether that will help with some of the really basic stuff though, like who could act on behalf of a minor who is in a dispute with one of his two guardians about which of them (i.e. the guardian or the minor) should inherit an estate. Can he bring a case himself? Does the other guardian have to do it? What if the other guardian is out of the country and uncontactable? Can the court itself act on his behalf, and if so, how would that work?

The Chancery Proceedings page of the National Archives website says: "Suits are sometimes named In re Bloggs: these tend to be where the court is acting on behalf of someone incapable of acting for themselves: a minor, or a lunatic perhaps." So I think the last of these options is viable, but I have no idea how it would work in practice, or whether my vital plot device of Kit stumbling upon a friendly lawyer who wants to help, but turns out to have his own agenda, makes any sense.

Yesterday I remembered what prompted me to come up with this plot in the first place.

I was sick of all the stories about "feisty", "spirited" girls donning boy's clothes and running off to seek adventure, recover their family fortunes, escape from forced marriages and so on. I thought it would be interesting to write a novel featuring a boy who dresses up as a girl in order to recover his family fortunes.

On a tangent, "feisty" and "spirited" (as applied to female literary characters) are two of the ickiest words in the English language, in my opinion. They epitomise a view of the world which fetishises women struggling against oppression, usually hopelessly. They often seem to be coupled with an assumption that the vast (non-feisty) majority of womankind live up to all the worst misogynist stereotypes. And yet I often hear people claiming that a book or other work is non-sexist on account of one of the main female characters being "feisty". Yuck.

A good writing day so far today: 3048 words, and the roadtrip - which I've been having difficulty with for over a year - is just about nailed.

Today my characters were a bit dumb. I can't decide if they were too dumb.

( Excerpt )

( Translation )

We have atreic and emperor over for the weekend, which is fantastic, but probably won't be great wordcount-wise. I'm going to go and have a housework break, finish my Greek assignment due on Monday and then maybe write some more.

Today I worked out what the last scene of the novel would be, and thought I might as well write it while it was in my mind, which I did. It brought with it a very hazy idea of what the sequels would be about if I turn this into a trilogy.

Windrose Hall ends with a question, and the answer might determine whether Book Two is historical fiction or alternate history. I'm fond of that idea.

I'm also much fonder than I ought to be of the fact that in my head, [one of the two possible versions of] Book Three is entitled The Return of the King.

All alternate histories have a point where they diverge from real history, I think, but usually that happens before the book begins. Are there any existing examples of historical fiction that turns into alternate history quite a long way through?

I'm quite behind with wordcount in terms of Nanowrimo (3151), but I usually start out that way and I've never failed at Nano before, and of course this year I'd rather have 30,000 good words by the end of November than 50,000 not so good ones.

I intend to make a blog post every weekday during my writing sabbatical. The first one is where I think about why I'm doing this, and what I want to get out of these three months.

Overall goals

1) To write a novel that I'm sufficiently happy with to send off to agents and/or publishers, and send it.

2) To be ready to start a new job as a manager in Jobcentre Plus by the beginning of February.

But there are also other things I'm doing with my time:

- I'm a sort of 'extra' in an English National Opera production of The Messiah - this will involve three rehearsals a week, and ten performances in late November and early December.
- I'm organising two readthroughts - a small one in late November, and a bigger one in late January.
- I'm learning ancient Greek with the Open University.
- I'm starting to practise playing and singing music again after fifteen years of not doing very much on it at all.

I need to devote enough time to those things to make them successful.


Daily Targets

I think the best way of approaching these thing is to have certain things which I aim to do every day.

- Write fiction (average 8 hours, mostly novel, but can include other stuff). That's the main reason why I'm doing this.
- Exercise (average half an hour - this is going to be mostly Wii Fit). After 33 years of denial, I finally admit that exercise is good for me and makes me feel better. Bah.
- Work on learning ancient Greek (average half an hour).
- Practise music (average 20 minutes). I've promised myself a new recorder if I can practice every day for six months. I have yet to decide whether to bend the rules to let the three months I've already done count.
- Spend some time out of the house. I get grumpy and headachy if I stay in all day.
- Read. I can't make good sentences without studying how other people do it.
- Make the house more beautiful. Because I find it impossible not to.

In my daily entries I'll write something about how I fared in each of those respects, and try to also write about something I've learnt, or ask a question. There may be occasional brief excerpts of writing too, though they will be kept to a minimum as my intention is to write for publication.

They aren't hard and fast targets - they won't apply if I'm away from home, for example. And if the weather gets really cold, then neither leaving the house, nor half an hour of exercise, nor eight hours of writing is likely to be a possibility.

I've signed up for Nanowrimo, so another goal for this month will be 50,000 words of my fiction. Ideally, this will be 50,000 new words on my novel, but I'm being flexible and may end up counting substantially rewritten parts of my novel and/or short stories.