Sheila's Guests and Reviews

There's a young adult book I'm really looking forward to reading soon called Untimed --isn't that a perfect title? The cover's pretty intriguing too. And author Andy Gavin's previous book, the Darkening Dream , was very enjoyable ( read my review here .) I'm delighted to welcome author Andy Gavin to my blog today to tell us a little about where the story and characters came from, whether our time, another time or none, but read on and find out. Over to you Andy. Typically, Untimed began from a fusion of ideas. Lingering in my mind for over twenty years was a time travel story about people from the future who fell “downtime” to relive exciting moments in history (until things go wrong). I worked out a time travel system but had no plot or characters. Separately, in 2010, as a break from editing The Darkening Dream , I experimented with new voice techniques, especially first person present. I also read various “competition.” One of these was The Lig...

My husband went to a seminar on writing software specs yesterday. He very kindly brought home his notes to see how they'd apply to fiction-writing. It was kind of fun discussing character and plot as they might appear in computer code. If you write a list of steps to be taken and instructions to be followed, is that a plot-driven story? It's also well-specified software. But what if you know the beginning and end but you're deep in investigation of what's going wrong--like when you're assigned to fix a bug by writing a new algorithm? My husband pointed out you can't specify the path till you know what's wrong. I suggested maybe that's like a character-driven story--you need to know the characters before you can plan the plot. In the end, of course, you still write an organized list--a computer program, a story with beginning middle and end. But maybe even software engineers have to work in different ways at different times, and maybe fixing a bug is like...

Not so very long ago I was writing the second in a series of middle-grade novels. It was going pretty well, as I remember. But then I got distracted when someone invited me to join textnovel. I set my magical teenagers aside so I could write a romantic mystery. Then I worked on my website and my blog. And then I caught up with some reading, long overdue. Last weekend I decided it was time to get back to those mysterious teens. And today I finally got round to opening the file. I was pleased to see I'd already written forty out of fifty chapters. How hard could this be? So I greeted my characters with glee, rereading from chapter one and happily pleased to remember the tale. I watched their new school year begin. And then... And then I realized I hadn't the faintest idea what I'd written. Plotlines that I'd completely forgotten were taking me places I'd no recollection of seeing. It was fun, for sure, and I was thoroughly intrigued with the read till it all came to a...

I’ve just finished reading the second Claire Hanover mystery, and I’d have to say Beth Groundwater’s main character is another one strong enough to my interest through a series. Claire, of course, is a very different character from Sam Acquillo or Gus LeGarde . For a start, she’s a woman. Plus, while enormously resourceful, she really doesn’t have the kind of background or physical strength to be an action hero. But she does have lots of character, or chutzpah, as one of her friends has been known to say. Claire has the confidence to believe what she sees and to tell it like she sees it. Just because no one else saw the ski tracks doesn’t mean they’re not there. Just because no one else sees the danger doesn’t mean she shouldn’t protect her daughter. Just because… So she walks into police stations and describes exactly the sort of details that someone unaccustomed to such places would notice—the presence or absence of family photographs, the pictures on the walls… She walks into a ni...

I read two thrillers recently. One was un-put-downable, even when I was only halfway through, while the other, though I was definitely interested, was easy enough to leave for the next day’s reading till I got near the end. For myself, I’d like to write so the reader is hooked all through the book. So I found myself trying to analyze what the two authors had done differently. Both books were thrillers. Both involved somewhat unlikely premises about the characters that required me to temporarily suspend disbelief. In one case, I wondered how the author would make the premise more plausible. In the other, the information that worried me was just background to the character. So perhaps I should learn to make sure that any special features feed more directly into plots. Both books included flashbacks and background information on the characters. The character studies in the slower book were fascinating, but often answered questions I hadn’t thought to ask, or not yet anyway. The other stor...