The Rounded Writer. Part 1: Time and Tasks.

This is the first in a series of blogs designed to help writers who have problems fitting everything in.

First of all I can’t tell you how to live your life. Only you can make your routine fit the way you work and what you can work round. If only one of the following things helps you feel in control, take it and run with it.

We don’t manage time, we manage ourselves. You’ve heard about giving a job to someone busy if you want it done. Why? Because they will be organized. Being organized takes self-discipline but I promise it will help you get what needs doing done. Use the power of the list, but don’t let it rule you.

At the same time you must remember you are a human being not a human doing and that’s why you must be organized and use your time intelligently. For example I am writing this on a Sunday. I don’t normally work on a Sunday but my husband is watching the Russian Grand Prix, so it is a good use of my time to do this piece now and have quality time with him later.

Keep in mind that you are not aiming for perfection, but balance. You don’t need to clean a room perfectly. Running a duster round and vacuuming the middle will make it look ten times better than it did. Make rough notes for a story but don’t panic about putting them in order now. Just brainstorm the ideas.

Don’t fill every waking moment with tasks. Build in down time. As a rule of thumb, you should allocate half as much time again or even twice as much time to a task as you think it will take.

Drop things that drain your energy, whether that is a person, people or a task. Look at your habits. Take a few days to keep a log of exactly how you spend your days, then you can see how much time you squander. Do you waste precious time surfing/checking FB & Twitter or reading the Daily Mail sidebar of shame? Is it a habit to talk to someone who moans all the time and saps your vitality? You don’t need that. Ditch them and don’t feel guilty. The energy-sapper will soon find someone else to moan at and the Daily Mail will survive without you.

We all have tasks that need doing around the house/garden. You don’t have to like doing them, you just have to get them done. Is there anything you love doing that your friends hate? Swop tasks. You cook a couple of meals for their freezer, they do your ironing. You write a letter for someone, they mow your lawn.

De-cluttering is vital because if your environment is cluttered so is your mind and that applies at work and in the home.

In the office you can’t work on more than one thing at once so why are there piles of stuff on your desk? Make one drawer a filing drawer. Pull out what you want to work on. When you’ve finished, put it away and get out the next job. Make sure you can shut the door on your work area at the end of the day. That applies whether you have an office or an office in a cupboard.

When it comes to the house, there are a few rules. Don’t try to do it all at once. Don’t try to do it perfectly. If you work from home, take ten minutes in every hour to move about and re-energize your brain. If you have no domestic tasks, then dance about or run up and down the stairs. If you have household jobs, now is the time for them. In ten minutes you can vacuum one room or wipe down the kitchen countertops or tidy the sitting room. Make the ten minutes energetic and make each minute count. Anybody can do anything for 10 minutes except whinge.

Do a 5 minute chaos corner tidy. Just that one corner, not the whole room.

Get out tomorrow’s clothes before you go to bed.

Make sure the draining board is clear before you go to bed.

Make a list of your main meals for the next week. (If you have time/energy, prep them and put them in the freezer. Then get one out each morning for that evening.)

I am a morning person. I’m up at 6am. Before 8.30am, I will have checked e-mails, Facebook and Twitter, walked the dog, swished round the bathroom, had breakfast, emptied the dishwasher and prepared as much of that night’s dinner as I can. I am now ready to begin my day’s work.

Deadlines: The end date is not as important as the start date. If you need something doing by next Thursday that will take 2 days, then start on Monday - remember the time rule of thumb. Don't start on Wednesday. All you will do is flog yourself to a custard. If your strategies are not working, brainstorm new ones. If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

Focus on what is important to you. Ditch the non –productive, time consuming stuff that doesn’t matter in the big scheme. What is the most empowering word in the world? No.

Cut a task down into baby chunks. If your aim is to write 2000 words today, don’t try to write them all at once unless that works for you. Similarly, don’t try and clean the whole house in one go.

You must look after yourself, both physically and emotionally.

Take a day off each week and do something for you. Pamper yourself. Potter in the garden. Read a book. Take a walk. Go to a local stately home or museum. Browse in the local bookshop or library. Listen to some music.

Interview with comedy/history writer Jodi Taylor

I am delighted to host Jodi Taylor on the blog today. For those of you who have not read the St Mary Chronicles, you have missed a  laugh out loud and some tears treat.

Welcome Jodi, now for the interrogation - evil cackle.

1. What were the beginnings of St Mary’s Chronicles for you and how did you build the world?

Actually, this is quite a difficult one to answer because there wasn’t a specific moment of blinding revelation, when I thought I would invent an organisation, call it St Mary’s and then write about it. I had a lot of vague ideas swirling around in my head, not going anywhere in particular. Max was very shadowy. She was always a redhead and might or might not be tall. Leon hardly existed. The identity of Mrs Partridge was not clear. Markham didn’t yet exist – and so on. 

I do remember the moment I decided to put pen to paper. I was painting a wall at the time. I put down my brush and went down the road to the local Co-op, bought a recycled notebook and three pens, and started the next day.

My thinking was greatly influenced by my previous job – Facilities Manager for the Library Service in North Yorkshire – a position which consisted mainly of somehow, anyhow, and against all odds – MAKING THINGS WORK. I sat down and thought about St Mary’s and how it would function. There would be historians, obviously, but also a security section to keep them safe, a kitchen to feed them, R&D to blow things up, and admin team to pay them all, housekeeping and caretaking to keep things working – and so on.

Obviously, they’d have to be located out in the middle of nowhere, not just because of all the explosions, but there was the security aspect as well. An old house would be ideal and the county of Rushford already existed from another earlier (and so far undeveloped) idea.

And then there was the actual mechanics of the job. How would they travel? I had a bit of a think about pods. What were the rules? What could they do and what couldn’t they do? What would be the dangers? What would they do with the information afterwards? To whom did they answer? And so on. And on. And on.

Gradually, a picture began to emerge. I actually sat down and wrote out an organisational chart and a list of responsibilities, a list of personnel, and a training and exam schedule, blu-tacked it to the wall in front of me and made a start.

 2. Your cast of characters is large, not to mention them running up and down the timeline. How do you keep track of them all?

Another tricky one! Originally, there was only going to be one book - Just One Damned Thing After Another. With all the ignorance of inexperience, I allowed characters to spring up like Japanese Knotweed because they were all going to die horribly in the last chapter.

However, as the book progressed, I thought I might have enough material for a second book and so some of them were reprieved. Leon, for example. Kalinda was originally going to be Max’s partner in crime, but I liked Peterson. Especially after he peed on her, so Kal became less important. I try to make even the minor characters interesting and I let little snippets of information drop every now and then. For instance, in Book 5, while breaking into an older version of St Mary’s, Markham lets slip that he has a criminal past. Mrs Mack is Welsh and had previously been some kind of urban guerrilla. Professor Rapson and Dr Dowson started arguing the moment my back was turned and haven’t stopped since. Incidentally, I have absolutely no idea where Markham came from. Once he’d run into that horse’s bottom there was just no holding him.

And yes, they do die, some of them, because it seemed to me that if you have a central core of characters who are frequently in trouble but always escape, it lessens the tension somewhat. I wanted readers to feel the threat and know that any of them could die at any moment. And share the sense of loss when that happens. And in real life, violence and death do suddenly erupt out of nowhere and I wanted to convey this sense of never being completely safe.

I keep on top of things by keeping the groups small. I start with whoever is selected for this particular assignment and their interactions with others before and after their return. I try to ensure everyone gets at least one mention during the book.

3. Do you plan or go with the flow? If the latter, have you ever written yourself into a corner ad how did you get out of it?

Yes, I do plan – but fairly loosely. The only thing that is fairly fixed is the ending because I like to know what I’m writing towards. Characters appear and are discarded. Or developed, depending on how things are going at the time. Scenes happen, are deleted, moved somewhere else, or kept for a future book.

I don’t start at the beginning of a book – I start in the middle, because when I am stuck, I can move either forwards or backwards in the story and then come back to the problem later. Which has often resolved itself by then. I choose a scene that is dramatic, or tragic, or meaty in some way and dive right in. Once I have that under my belt, it sets the tone for the whole book. I write the ending fairly early on in the process and the beginning is usually written near the end.

So yes, I do plan – and go with the flow as well. Sorry if that’s not particularly helpful. I have learned to scribble dialogue, scenes, ideas as they occur to me, because if I carry on neatly with what I’m doing, thinking I’ll make a note of it all later – sadly, by then, I’ve forgotten it all.

And yes, I have written myself into a corner. I did it in Book 4, when a scene written in Book 1 really came back to haunt me. I was in head-banging mode for a couple of weeks until I had an inspiration, lost 20,000 words and took the book in a whole new direction. It was, I think, a better book than originally envisaged. So I would say to anyone – if that happens, don’t despair. It’s your book’s way of telling you there’s a better way to go.

4. Which is your favourite scene in all the books?

Aaaghhh! Another difficult question! I have several favourite scenes for several different reasons.

The scene in A Second Chance when Max unexpectedly meets a younger Leon and so very nearly plunges everything into chaos by running away with him, is one of my favourites because it wrote so easily. The words just fell out of my pen. I saw it all so clearly in my head and it hardly needed editing at all. An example of how wonderful writing can be when everything goes right.

The dodos in A Symphony of Echoes were fun to write. That’s one of my favourites, too.

I enjoyed writing all of Roman Holiday. After the slightly darker A Trail Through Time it was lovely to do something so light-hearted.

My very favourite – so far – are the scenes at Troy. It’s so easy when reading about historical events, especially when they occurred several thousand years ago, to view them with detachment. Troy fell. What a shame. But these were people’s lives and they were completely shattered, probably in the space of a single day. Imagine seeing your male relatives slaughtered and the surviving members of your family divided up amongst your conquerors, all of them being shipped off to live as slaves in a foreign land for the rest of their lives and knowing you’ll never see your children or your home again.

I know that as historians, they’re supposed to know what is going to happen, but I still try to portray the shock they must experience when watching events actually unfold, especially after they’d lived amongst the people of Troy for so long.

At the other end of the spectrum, the bit in A Trail Through Time where Helen confronts Leon about his surgical abilities came spinning out of the blue and was a huge giggle to write.

5. What is my approach to comedy?

Ah, the most difficult question of all, which you snuck in at the end, just as I was beginning to relax!

Sometimes an idea or a phrase occurs to me and I write a scene around it. For example, in Just One Damned Thing After Another it was, ‘We hit a tree.’ I sat and thought about why they would hit a tree. How would I lead up to it? What would happen afterwards? And after that? So I ended up writing a whole scene with Max and Leon having to travel to Thirsk. In a car. So they could hit a tree. So they could have head-banging sex afterwards. So everyone at St Mary’s could collect the money they’d been betting on whether they ever would get together or not. All that just so they could hit a tree!

Sometimes, I want a contrast. I tried to do this in the last scene of A Second Chance, when Max and Leon are finally reunited, only to have a massive falling out because he mistakes her for Izzie Barclay and she thumps him with a blue plastic dustpan. It would have been so easy to have them just falling into each other’s arms but this is St Mary’s, after all, and nothing ever goes according to plan.

And there are different types of comedy as well. The one-liner. The odd pun. An old joke I hope I’ve reworked to give a fresh approach – the inch joke, for example, at the end of A Trail Through Time. And the big set pieces – when they paint themselves blue and lose a monolith, or blow up the lake and are attacked by swans. They’re all of them such fun to write!

Thank you for sharing your story with us today.

For more information, you can find Jodi on

Facebook - www.facebook.com/AuthorJodiTaylor

Twitter - https://twitter.com/authorjoditaylo

Jodi's author page on Amazon - http://amzn.to/1w0119W

Luke's London

I am in the process of adding a page to my website called "Luke's London" to show how the city would have looked in the time period of The Tudor Enigma series
.

This blog is a sneak preview and I decided to concentrate on just a couple of the photographs that will be on the web page.

London Bridge: Many people confuse this with Tower Bridge, but in Tudor times, the latter did not exist. London Bridge was the only bridge over the river until Kingston Bridge almost 15 miles upstream 
and not far from Hampton Court Palace.

Some of the buildings on the bridge were 7 storeys in height and included shops and houses. As more buildings were added, the bridge supports had to be strengthened and broadened. One effect was that the waters passing through the arches was very turbulent and made "shooting the bridge" very hazardous. It was not unusual for people to disembark at one side of the bridge and get back on the boat at the other.  At the same time, the strengthening of the starlings slowed the water flow under the bridge, something that helped the river to freeze. Henry VIII is known to have travelled downriver by sleigh on the frozen Thames and Elizabeth I also played "shooting at marks"- a form of archery - on the ice.

Tyburn Tree: Close to what is now the site of the monument called Marble Arch, is the location of the infamous Tyburn gallows. There is a plaque set into the ground at the actual site. Here felons were hanged, or if they were low-born traitors, hanged, drawn and quartered. A hanging brought out huge crowds . Houses close to the site would rent out rooms with windows overlooking the gallows. If the felon met a "good" end, he was praised.
In the case of traitors, the hangman might be paid to allow the felon to hang until he was dead before cutting him down and disembowelling him.

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Bringing history to life: the Outer Green of Hampton Court Palace

I write crime fantasy set in an alternate Tudor universe. Those of you who have read this blog before will know how Luke Ballard came into being but I needed a location and believable society in which to put my unassuming apothecary.

Hampton Court Palace is the most complete Tudor palace in England and, although I hate to admit it, that is in part due to William III who sliced through the Tudor building and adding what developed into the Georgian part. I am sure that, left as it was, it is likely the whole building would have been
destroyed by the Victorians. They were big on "improvements".

Once I became hooked by the Tudors in general and Anne Boleyn in particular, it was one of my main aims in life to visit the palace in which she and Henry VIII spent some of their happiest times. For me, Hampton Court has always been Anne's palace. Little wonder that the instant I stepped inside it, I felt I had come home.

For anyone who wants to know how the Tudor privy apartments were arranged, I can only recommend Simon Thurley's enormous book Hampton Court. Over the past years, it has become my bible for all things relating to this wonderful palace.

The Outer Green today is mainly lawn, but it also houses the ticket office and one of the palace shops as well as maintenance buildings. In Tudor times, it was a village outside the inner palace but inside the outer walls. Here were the Houses of Offices Without The Base Court and included a Great Bakehouse, a Privy Bakehouse a Poultry Office with its own Scalding House, a Knife House and a Woodyard. Just outside the main gate - now the Trophy Gate - was a Timber Yard occupying the space to what is now the approach to Hampton Court Bridge.

Henry made many improvements to Cardinal Wolsey's original palace, including building new apartments and offices. Bricks for these works were made on-site and at any one time there would be 250 workmen from all over the south of England working on the buildings.

Can you imagine the stink from the brick kilns mixing with the stench of the scalding house and the smell from the woodyard. The noise of these activities would also mix with the shouts of the young bloods practising in the Tiltyard. This area is now occupied by the Tiltyard restaurant and the palace car park. A perfect place for my apothecary to have his shop.

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Court of Conspiracy is available here:

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