Ooh I forgot to let you know about my National Novel Writing Month progress.

My page is here: nanowimo
I didn’t win. I didn’t reach 40,000, let alone 50,000.
Oddly it felt better than last year when I missed out by the tiny amount of 421 words. But it is 40k more words than if I didn’t participate, I suppose…
I worked out a couple of issues with the story. One of which involved the old stand by of index cards, several pens, and an expanse of dining table. After a few days off, I will get back to it. I don’t think it’s going to have a huge word count in any case, and that’s okay.
If the whole story fits, and it’s a good story, then it doesn’t matter how long it is. The days of precise page counts are gone.


One of my many half to three quarter written works is a Bluebeard re-write.

I was talking to someone this week and saying how hard it was to work on my current National novel writing month [nanowrimo] work when it was a romance and right now men are just… ugh. *shudders*

‘But that’s the thing with romance,’ she said. ‘There’s got to be a happy ever after.’

Well, yes… but then I remembered Bluebeard. My version of that story is probably technically a tragedy.

She loves him. He loves her. At a certain point she understands that he is going to kill her anyway. She survives. He does not. She goes on alone having killed the love of her life.

There is no happy ever after here.

‘So write that,’ she said.

Flash to today… I’m beetling around on Twitter and I see a post where a woman says her next movie is going to be a rewrite of Bluebeard.

I have a moment of full on panic. I’ve spiralled off into self hate before I’ve even read it. My inner critic is shouting: If only you’d finished that story, published it, you could have been ahead of the game, now it’ll look like you’re just copying someone else’s great idea blah blah blah.

I breathe.

Then I go read the article.

It seems there are any number of books and films that satisfy the ‘bluebeard’ story tag. And I didn’t know that. It was a favourite topic for pulp writers because it put a woman into a position of peril. Life Insurance scams with up to ten wives, right back to Gaslight and Hitchcock movies like Marnie, or Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear. The writer argued that Dracula fits this ‘woman in peril’ genre too, as does a whole heap of Gothic romance.

Huh. I love gothics. It all makes sense, now. It’s just the next level up from the ‘bad boy’ romance. He can be sexy and charming; which just makes him more dangerous, right? He’s not just ‘bad’, he’s life threatening. She has to work out if she’s just frightened of him, or if he really is a killer. And that’s the story.

Perhaps I’m in the wrong genre with tragedy. It should be a thriller, suspense melodrama, woman in peril. [Shawn Coyne would be so proud.]

A story where a hunted, threatened woman fights back and takes down the man who is threatening her. Right now, there’s plenty of room in the world for all the different versions of that story.

So good luck with your movie Anna Biller and I’ll finish my version as well.

 

Links:

Me on twitter: @mtr_amg

Sudden Fear

Anna Biller’s post

 

I make sourdough every couple of days. It’s about the only thing I got from The Artist’s Way self-driven course. I don’t mind that; it’s tasty and it makes the house smell great.

But recently my loaves have not risen properly. I thought there was something wrong with my starter. To explain, you grow your own yeasty concoction and feed it plain flour and water every couple of days. Mine lives in the fridge where its growth can be slowed and contained and I feed it every four days.

I imagined throwing it all out and starting again.

*shudder*

I hate waste and I’d have real problems doing that but after a couple of failed batches I realised the problem was ME! [Isn’t it always?] We still ate the ‘failed’ bread. It was more doughy and flat but still good. Truthfully I ate it, the kids avoided it.

Before you bake, you put aside a bowl with a tablespoon of your yeasty starter and a small amount of flour and water. It grows happily overnight. I put mine up on top of the fridge where the temperature is warm and constant.

The first step of the recipe is pouring that starter (or leaven) into water. If it floats, your bread will work. If it doesn’t float you should chuck it out and start again.

I’d been ignoring that part.

I put extra starter in the mix, thinking that more of a good thing was better and it obviously isn’t. Too yeasty and the bread doesn’t work.

I’m going to try to turn this into a writing metaphor.

I get lots and lots of ideas, but not all of them can be whole stories. They don’t float to use the leaven metaphor. And I reckon it doesn’t matter how much effort you put into every step after that first one with an idea that won’t float. It just hasn’t got the buoyancy. It isn’t the right balance. If it rises too fast and too early then it collapses later.

Now if only I can remember that.