The Blurb
Simon Mills, a solicitor, isn’t the kind of man to go to prison. His new wife Claire, an artist, isn’t the kind of woman to have a husband ‘Inside’. But one night, after offering to drive their dinner guests home, Simon is involved in an horrific crash down a narrow Devonshire lane and is sent to prison for two years.

‘GUILTY’ is written in two parts: the first deals with Simon’s life in prison and the second, with his life once he’s released. It is told in alternate viewpoints: Claire’s and Simon’s as well as the ghostly voice of Joanna, who died in the crash. This is a haunting modern-day story that could happen to you.

It quickly shows how Simon’s world becomes very small once he's in prison. So the littlest things become immensely important to him, like whether Claire’s phone goes straight to voicemail, or she picks up and speaks to him. I was reminded of when I used to watch Big Brother (when Channel 4 did it, and it could be described as a social experiment if you did the mental equivilant of squinting). In the BB house even a small issue like someone eating another housemate’s ham, or using someone’s shampoo became an immense deal, because the house was their whole world. Guilty shows how for Simon, that is exactly how he felt in prison. Tiny, inconsequential things which we all take for granted, when not in prison become so important for him.

There are often misunderstandings between Claire and Simon and assumptions are made in the gap between communications as he can't just call her whenever he wants.

The whole thing includes details about being in a prison which teaches you something as you read, but doesn't feel like any more than storytelling. I recognised quite a few facts and elements in the story from when Jane came to the RNA’s London Chapter in 2013 to talk about her experience as a writer in residence of a men’s category B prison. She has undoubtedly used this experience to give GUILTY its realism and authenticity. Examples of this include: the items prohibited from being taken into prison, ranging from sellotape to mobile phones; The Book of Uncommon Prayer which she produced with her class of inmates; the details of how prisoners spend their time; and the etiquette of not asking prisoners the crimes they committed to bring them to prison.

The story after Simon is ‘on the Out’ as it’s called, is just as interesting as when he’s in prison. It shows the impact of a member of the family being in prison, to both the individual and the wider family, ranging from house insurance to job opportunities.

The ending neatly wraps it all together, which is exactly the sort of ending I most enjoy. The characters are different, have grown and changed in ways they wouldn’t have realised at the start. And Simon’s prison sentence also has some unintended positive consequences to his family. 

It gave me an insight into life in prison and afterwards, without feeling like a textbook/ self help book. The story weaved the insights in, so you hardly notice you're acquiring this new knowledge. An interesting, and entertaining read.

Does this sound like the sort of thing you'd read? It's not my usual genre, but I thought I'd better take some of my own advice and read a bit 'off piste' for once, and I'm glad I did.

Liam LI

This is the first instalment of a blog story the five Spice Girls organisers of UK Meet are writing together. I shamelessly stole this idea from the Festival of Romance where they explained it was taken from the tradition of telling stories around a camp fire. This may be a mess as we all write very differently, but I’m hoping it’s a bit of fun. Do please share this by RTing, facebooking, blogging to spread the word to other writers and readers about UK Meet 2014 in Bristol.

I’m going first, so without further ado, here goes *opens first page of book*

Manchester

I stumbled back through the unfamiliar roads of Canal Street in Manchester. I leant against a lamp post while a drag queen handed me a light for the pink pastel gold tipped cigarette I’d just begged off her.

I raised my eyebrows as I cupped my hand around the cigarette.

She replied, wobbling slightly on her six inch red stilettos, ‘I smoke like I dress. Can you imagine me using rolling tobacco and papers darling?’

‘Fair enough,’ I replied then kissed her cheeks, thanked her for seeing me safely from the bar where my friend had deserted me, to the road where allegedly my hotel lay only a short walk away. ‘Five minutes you say?’ I turned to face the drag queen – bright red PVC dress with white hearts, a cleavage anyone would kill for topped with a pile of blonde hair so high she’d had to duck when leaving the bar.

‘Straight along there, sweetheart. Stick to the main road and you can’t miss it.’ And she was gone.

I arrived at the hotel. Surprised I’d made it, and surprised how posh it looked inside. My best friend had booked it for a ‘I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair’ weekend for me. My best friend Nigel – or Anton to everyone else. I knew he was Nigel, cos I’d known him before he had laser surgery on his eyes, and a few little nips and tucks and the odd little prick on his forehead. Since then plain old Nigel was well gone, replaced by shiny browed twenty twenty vision Anton.

When I’d told Anton, over a few too many vodka and cokes, that my boyfriend still didn’t want to move in with me, and still wanted to keep seeing some other guy ‘For a bit of fun, now and again,’ Nigel slapped my face, handed me a drink and said, ‘For the love of God, Darren. Grow a backbone. All you do is whinge about him. He doesn’t do this with me, he won’t commit to me, he’s seeing someone else behind my back. Why are you still with him?’

And at that moment, wiping sticky coke from my eyes, tasting the vodka, and staring at Anton’s shiny face, I couldn’t think of one real reason. I shrugged, downed Anton’s drink, before he bought me another, and another, and another. Then I went home chucked all my boyfriend’s stuff he’d left at mine, into bin bags then out the window of my little first floor flat. I left a message on his phone, words to the effect of: go away, I don’t want to see you again. Your stuff is outside my flat. Only it was a bit more colourful than that, as you can probably imagine, after a good seven or eight double vodkas with Anton egging me on.

Now, I took in the hotel’s foyer: a min water fall feature flanked the main reception which resembled the bough of a boat; walls in shiny black and white marble; lifts with art deco doors and a floor indicator which went to fifteen.

A bell boy in red uniform appeared. ‘Can I help you sir?’

Sir? I looked to either side before realising he was talking to me. I caught my reflection in one of the mirrored lift doors. I felt like I’d stepped into a Baz Lurhman musical. I half expected Ewan McGregor to start singing about how love lifts you up. I wish.  

I was miles away.

The bell boy tapped my shoulder. ‘Which floor do you require sir? Have you got your room key, sir?’

Again with the sir? I slapped my face and reassembled my thoughts. I pulled a plastic card from my pocket and tried to focus. ‘Eleven two two. What floor’s that?’ It was all I could do to read the room number.

‘That’s the eleventh floor, sir. The lift’s here.’ He tidied me away from my shambolic display in the entrance into the lift and pressed the button.  

I sat on the seat in the corner of the lift. A seat, in a lift. Anton really had splashed out when I’d told him to book the hotel to forget all about my ex. ‘We’ll go to Manchester, I hear Canal Street’s pretty wild on a Saturday night. Those northern lads, they know how to party!’ Anton had said. Then he realised the weekend we booked coincided with the award for the best cross dresser in Manchester. ‘As long as they don’t out dress me, I’m not fussed,’ Anton said, smoothing his perfect arched eyebrows in turn.

I wobbled as the lift stopped and a man in his thirties, wearing a pair of snugly fitting black trousers and a short sleeved white shirt, got in. He smiled at me and put his hands in his pockets. I enjoyed the view of his perfect abs, then lingered on his groin area for a bit too long. I stared intensely at the floor.

‘Alright, mate?’ he said, his accent strong with a Manchester twang.

I looked up at him.

‘Had a good night, have you?’

‘Yeah.’ I nodded, making more eye contact than I’d anticipated at this early stage.

‘Me too. Been in the bar downstairs for hours. I’m well pissed.’ He wobbled side to side in an exaggerated gesture to illustrate his point.

I smiled. ‘Me too.’ I gestured to the seat.

‘What you had?’

‘Vodka. Lots of vodka.’ I smiled. ‘And coke. You?’ Get me, being all forthright and talkative.

‘I’ve left me girlfriend and mates in the bar. Going back to my room if you wanna come.’ He folded his arms across his chest and I stared at them in front of my eyes, his abs and chest all on full beam. ‘I’ve got some vodka and that in my room.’ He sniffed then smiled at me.

‘I dunno...I’m...’

END OF PART 1
Next week it’s Charlie Cochrane’s turn...

I’ve done quite a lot of research about fast drafting since starting Nanowrimo at the start of November. I’ve listed some useful blog posts in my previous blog, about this for those who are interested.

Taken from a combination of these blogs, and my own experience, here’s how I ‘won’ nano in 21 days, which when I looked back at my diary and file history, was actually 13 writing days.

A word of caution about these points: this is what worked for me. I am not you, you are not me. Be wary of any writing advice which says ‘you must do x’ or ‘you must never do y’. Some people hand write all first drafts, others can not, no matter how hard they try, ever plot. This is what worked for me, it may work for you too, it may not. OK, got it? Then I'll begin...

Techniques for writing

• Trying to keep up the momentum with the story is really important. Try as much as you can not to have days when you don’t write.
• Do research after you’ve written the first draft – just put a @ in the manuscript meaning need to research. Part of the story was set in Margate, which I’ve visited, but didn’t’ have a great memory for. Rather than looking up pictures of the town, and re-reading my diary from the visit, which would have wasted a good hour or so, I just put in @ and stayed with the story. It’s quite refreshing actually.
• Permission – give yourself permission to write a first draft which is bilge.  This was really hard at first, but once I got back in the writing zone, and the words were flying onto the page, i found the dialogue flowed well, and the characters actually took me in more interesting directions than I’d originally plotted for.
  
• Also, don’t read what you wrote the day before, just keep going forward. I re-read the last paragraph to ‘get back in’ to the story, but that was it. I also found stopping half way through a sentence helped quickly get me back into the story.
• Write through the blocks. If you’re stuck on scene put XXXX that’s my code for ‘need to come back here and fix something’ write THEY HAVE AN ARGUMENT whatever needs to happen, and move onto the next scene you can write, the next scene you have excitement to write.
• Just vomit your words onto the page. You can’t edit a blank page. Don’t stop for spelling mistakes, repeating the same word twice in a sentence, leave  it, stay in the rhythm of the story, listen to the voices of the characters, move on. You can fix it later. As a writer at the RNA London Chapter told me, ‘Tell the story. Tell the story.’
• Get a team – I’ve used the #Nanowrimo on twitter to report my daily word counts, and total, it’s been so encouraging. There are a few other authors I follow on Twitter and their encouragement has been great to keep me forging on.
• Keep a diary/note paper with you at all times, jot down the dialogue you must include, an idea for a plot twist. I used lots of post it notes when I got stuck 1/3 from the end and needed to plot. 

Writing productivity

• On the first day, I wrote solidly from 8am to 5pm and wrote 16600 words. Yes, that’s right. I kept thinking I was going to reach a wall and get stuck for the next part, but because I’d planned it, and thought about the story and characters for a while before it just flowed. 
• Write in blocks of time. I found it most productive if I wrote in two - three one hour word bursts each day I wrote, timing myself for how many words I could write. Each one normally averaged about 2000 words an hour. This is double my previous average rate.
• Some techniques say you should just write the scenes in dialogue with no tags or action, then go back later to add in the setting. I found this really jarred, I see the whole scene in my mind, so it feels unnatural writing just dialogue without the other bits surrounding it. It might work for you, give it a go.  
• Interruptions - I had no internet, except for short bursts on Twitter on my phone while I was making tea in the kitchen. No email, no facebook, no Twitter, nothing on Gummidge, my laptop, while I was drafting. I rewarded myself with a burst on Twitter as I made another cup of tea after my 1hr writing sprints, as above.

I’m not sure what sort of state this first draft will be, and I’ll blog about what it’s like editing it, later in 2014 More later...

Did you do Nanowrimo? How was it for you?

Have you tried some of these techniques, and they’ve not worked for you?

Until next time,

Liam Livings xx

I did my first Nanowrimo in Novemember 2013. This is a post about what I did to get ready for it.

I heard about fast drafting at the Festival of Romance, so I did some research about it, before starting Nanowrimo. Below are some of what I think are the most useful posts about fast drafting.

http://taradairman.com/2013/09/19/first-drafting-now-96-faster/

http://yastands.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/tips-for-fast-drafting.html?m=1

http://labelleseditorialservices.com/blog/fast-drafting-a-word-count-builder/ I do internal dialogue too as I always seem to write in 1st person

http://writerunboxed.com/2011/06/29/kicking-out-a-fast-first-draft-2/

http://lynnettelabelle.com/blog/writing-tip-3-fast-drafting/

http://lifelistclub.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/fastdraft-how-to-do-it-successfully-and-what-you-learn-along-the-way/

http://turbomonkeytales.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/fast-drafting-wrap-up.html?m=1

What did I do to prepare for Nanowrimo?

Prepare – write blogs posts in advance, eat meals from the freezer, give yourself time to write for this much time over this period. Make life easy on yourself.  I had written some blogs already, and we did eat beans on toast and cheese on toast for a few evenings during that time.

Plotting - Do some plotting so you don’t get stuck. Even a confirmed pantser really can’t maintain that many words a day without knowing at least a bit where they’re meant to be going. It also stops you writing yourself into a dead end. If you really don’t like planning, you could just do a bullet point for each scene, to show how you move from one scene to the next. You can still do the creative *how do they do that, what do they say stuff* as you write, but at least you know you’re writing in the right direction. For most of the story I used my bullet point scene word document planner.

I reached a wall with 1/3 of the story left to write, and I couldn’t plot it on my usual word doc, so I stopped writing for a few days, I cracked out the Post its, pencil and paper. At the time I was anxious I should just be writing, but I didn’t know how to end it. A few hours with the post its and I was back to writing almost every day. Once I had that part plotted, I was back in the characters’ world.

Tell friends & family to leave you alone – I told the BF what I was doing, and he was very supportive with me having protected time to write.

Character preparation - I had character biogs for the three main characters – age, job, where they lived, their motivations, their character traits. I had worked on these for a few evenings before 1 November. So by the start of Nov I pretty much had them in my head, talking to me.

What were my Nanowrimo numbers?
I ‘won’ Nanowrimo on 21 November, when I finished the story, and had finished an additional chapter of 4500 words. I didn’t go back to work out where the extra chapter needed to go, I just wrote it, and it’s a separate word doc. Total word count = 77,293

Average word count per day = 77,293/21 = 3680

However, I didn’t actually write every day, life got in the way, I was away at the Classic Car show, we had the BF’s parents staying with us, I had an some mimsying around to do on the internet...etc

I wrote for 13 of those days, on the other days I wrote nothing, or I planned with Post It notes . That’s an average word count per day of writing of 77,293/13 = 5945

Trust me, I’m as shocked as you are!

How did you get on, doing Nanowrimo?

Readers, did this whole Nanowrimo thing pass you by?

I’d love to hear from you,

Until next time when I'll go over some *fast drafting tecniques* which worked for me.

Liam Livings xx

As we're 1/4 of the way through 2014, I wanted to revisit these. Don't worry, they're still 'On Ice' but I wanted to see how I'm getting on. *updates to them are in these below*

It seems most things are ‘On Ice’ nowadays, so I thought I’d have my writing goals in the same style *slides into the middle of the ice rink wearing tight trousers and blue satin top* so without further delay, here they are:

1. To write, write, write. I want to make creating new words my writing priority during 2014. I have plans to write three novels and two novellas and I reckon if I commit to 6,000 words per week for 48 weeks of the year – allowing for some holidays when I’m banned from taking Gummidge my laptop with me, that’s 288,000 words, excluding blogging. Let’s see how I get on with that stretch target – on ice. *So far I've written about 92,000 new words this year, that's blogging, stories, everything. I've taken some time off writing new words because I'm editing old words, see below.* 
   
2. As a separate, but qualifying part of the previous goal, I aim to write, prepare for submitting and submit these five stories, my Nanowrimo novel and And Then That Happened, during 2014. I realise it’s a big goal, but I’ve been polishing my ice skates and practicing my pirouettes during 2013, so want to give this a try in 2014. *I'm still working through edits and beta feedback of the things I wrote. I'm still to edit the Nanowrimo novel, probably during April. I'm half dreading this, and half looking forward to it.*
   
3. I will do something constructive and writing related with the Granddad Livings things in a suitcase in the attic. It's a random selection of photos, papers, ornaments and practical things which were sentimental to me, I took from his home after he died. *I am now using his breadboard, plates and glasses - seemed better than leaving them in the attic. I found some photos and a note book with an account of him working in a field surgical hospital in WW2, so I want to do something useful with those, rather than leave them in the attic.*
   
4. I will be more relaxed with blogging. In 2013 I had a blog schedule, which I completely failed to stick to. I am going to aim to blog weekly, but will be flexible on what I’m blogging about until nearer the time. I have some posts already written to keep me going over the next few weeks. If I don’t have anything to blog about on one week, I will relax and not blog for that week.*This seems to be working better without so much structure, hope you've enjoyed my blogs about Looking, Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves etc.*
   
5. I will use social media to interact with readers more. I use Twitter in this way, but admit I do need to use facebook in a similar way. This is mainly down to the fact that Twitter is on my phone, and my Liam Livings facebook isn’t.This is happening. *It does surprise me how different Twitter feels from facebook, they're like two completely different parties, or something...*
   
6. I will continue to attend RNA London Chapter meetings and my local writers group.Yep.
   
7. I will help plan and attend UK Meet 2014, and attend other relevant events. I've loved attending other events, and really enjoy working with the other organisers for UK Meet. *Oh yes, I'm still doing this, as June approaches.* 

Well, that’s me for 2014. Do you have any goals, writing or otherwise for 2014, or do you prefer to be more flexible in your approach? Have you set yourself goals which had all fallen by the wayside by February? I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time,

Liam Livings xx

*pirouettes across the ice rink and then disappears stage left*