The Writers and Artists Yearbook blog has some excellent advice for giving your novel life. Particularly at the editing stage, where I find myself now:

…ask yourself in each scene what is at stake for the various characters involved. If there is no great danger: either of someone’s long buried secret being revealed, or fortune, life, or honour being lost, then there is little motivation for the reader to keep on.

One of the feeds to which I subscribe is a journalist case-wants lists. Basically, if you’ve got a story to write and you need someone to interview, you post a note and see what turns up.

This one appeared today:

I am doing a feature called ‘SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW WHAT A VEGAN LOOKS LIKE?’ for the February 2010 issue of a high-circulation glossy.

I am looking for 3 stylish vegans – two women and one man – in their 30s or 40s. We are trying to make the point that not all vegans are mung bean eating sandal wearers anymore but now, urban professionals with style and intelligence who have varied reasons to choose this lifestyle.

Now I’m not a vegan, but please… mung beans? Sandal wearing?

Is that really what the general population thinks?

And most bizarre of all, this article wants to prove that vegans now have ‘intelligence’, as if not eating animal products previously made you somehow mentally deficient.

I really find this bizarre. Almost as bizarre as the classification of veganism as a ‘lifestyle’. It’s not much different to spurning all desserts other than custard, and you’d hardly call that a lifestyle choice, would you.

Something is amiss.

Look at this:

That nice big peak at the beginning is the regular number of unique visitors a day I was getting at blagger.co.uk. The sudden dip was the point where it was up and down for a few hours as I changed servers and, when the switch was over, it all went back up to where it was before.

Breathe a sigh of relief.

But since then it’s been a sudden, dramatic decline that has now pretty much bottomed out, leaving me with just 5% of the number of daily visitors I used to get before the switch.

‘Move to our professional hosting package,’ they had said. ‘It’s easy, and you won’t trip your bandwidth limits any more.’

Little did I know that the reason I wouldn’t trip it was that moving servers (while keeping the domain and everything else the same) would kill the hits.

That makes the increased bandwidth somewhat redundant, doesn’t it.

I’ve finished my book… and I’m one paragraph short.

I swear, finding the right words on which to tie it all up is more difficult than the whole of the rest of it combined. There won’t be a sequel, so I don’t need to find something commercial and open-ended that will bring the characters back. That, at least, is something, but how do you tie up the final loose end when all of the others have been brought to a logical and satisfying conclusion?

Anyhow, 83,464 words done, and in fairly short order. I started the week after Easter, when I’d outlined the premise at dinner in Darlington and thought that if it was ever going to be more than a brief synopsis I ought to put in some work.

Now I need to go back through for the first edit and rewrite and, you know what, I’m really quite looking forward to it. I loved writing it, and actually looked forward to sitting down and getting my fingers on the keyboard, and now that I feel like I know the characters so much better I can direct them more effectively and make their dialogue better fit their personalities.

There will be some cringe-worthy bits, of course, but that’s what rewrites are for: ironing out, rounding off, and excising the worst of your literary excesses before they escape.

From The Guardian:

The demands of complying with the Freedom of Information Act have cost the BBC more than £3m since the act was introduced in 2005, according to figures obtained through an FOI request by the Guardian.

Source: Guardian

So it turns out that having two holidays in quick succession is fun, but it takes a lot of catching up. Not long after France, we went to Whitby. This post is part of the catching up, along with the hectic days at work and busy weekends that have kept me away from blogging.

It was worth it.

We’ve done a lot of Yorkshire in the last few years, but it’s full decades since I’d been to Whitby. Since then it’s always been somewhere on the telly without much significance. What a shame. The town may be past its best (according to some), but its little hilly streets are quite charming and there are some great views to be had from the top of the hills that enclose the bay.

We went up to the Abbey at sunset. It was closed by then, but we wouldn’t have been paying to get in anyhow, as you can see all you want over the wall. At that time of night, the sun is right behind the old ruins and it casts long shadows on the grass and reflects off the water. Evocative.

We had rented what billed itself as an old farm house, in the grounds of a one-time slightly grand manor that even now is being transformed into an exclusive spa-like resort, so I guess that by this time next year it will be all changed. Three floors, loads of bedrooms, and a barn-sized kitchen that happily seated eight of us and could have taken more. We woke up each morning in our clapboard bedroom of whitewashed walls to the sound of the waterfall on the river outside and opened the curtain (it was a small window) to see a tall bank of hydrangeas. It was one of those places you were properly sad to be leaving.

Paths through the grounds led to Whitby in one direction (via a healthy crop of nettles) and Sandsend the other (via a field full of cows), and from there we took clifftop walks around the headland.

The Volkswagen press office had very kindly loaned us another car for the week, and so we spent the rest of our time skimming the moors in our yellow tin banana, standing out against the immature heather as we zipped back and forth between Whitby, York and the Dalby Forest.

That latter spot was a bit of a disappointment. It’s supposed to be a bit like Canada, but in reality it was just a toll road through some woods. Big woods, admittedly, but it felt more like Norfolk than Quebec. I guess the best you can say about it is that in the largely rolling, treeless moors it does make for a bit of variety, but it’s not really worth the £7 fee.

We did York in the rain and sheltered in the enormous National Railway Museum, of which we saw about half. I was sure they used to have an APT there, but it was nowhere in evidence, despite me promising Rich we would see it. Turns out it’s at the neighbouring railway museum in County Durham.

It was a brilliant break that I’ve taken far too long to write about. Shockingly, looking at the next entry down, I only blogged once here in the whole of August. I did do much better over at Blagger, but that’s really not a decent excuse.

Fortunately I’m now back. We’re in a new month, a few deadlines have passed and, rather excitingly, I’m two chapters away from finishing the first draft of my book.

Normal service should be resumed.