The Girdle of Melian

Here is the brand new opening to The Face of A Lion (if I decide to keep it this way. Still not happy about cutting out the bazaar entirely. This version was created for Nathan Bransford's Suprisingly Essential First Page contest): Austin met the cat on his first afternoon in Turkey. Bored with helping his parents clean their villa, he set out to explore the neighbourhood. Every couple of minutes he climbed onto the stone wall edging the road, as a car or bus full of tourists whizzed past, a stench of diesel fuel wafting behind. Once the roar of each vehicle faded, the seaside sounds rushed back into his ears: children’s shouts, the drone of motorboats slicing the water, cicadas buzzing in the distant tops of fir trees. And below everything, the rhythmic crash of waves breaking one after another on the sand, carrying through all other sounds, like a low note in an extended piece of music. He waited on the wall as another car zoomed by, then peered through the exhaust and added up t...

I spent half a day yesterday and all day today fixing my opening chapter to submit to the Surprisingly Essential First Page contest on Nathan Bransford’s blog . I started with roughly 1500 words that I knew I had to edit anyway, and have already tackled once as part of my ongoing revisions of the completed MS of The Face of A Lion. I’m trying to keep all sorts of advice in my head and have Jo’s words ringing in my ears (Simple terms (“farmer” not “man from the village”). Exact Terms (“subaltern” not “guy in the army”).), along with some other advice I’ve picked up from the wonderful people at the Books and Writers Forum and links that they’ve posted. I also have my own voice in my head: “this line’s crap, this simile’s crap, this metaphor’s crap – tighten it up!” It sounds like a lot, but I do actually have enough head space for this and for the teeny weeny voice that goes, “it’s getting better, keep going, this is FUN!” BUT I’ve now reached the point where I can’t tell if I’m making...

Claire's hosting the next contest to win a signed copy of Spymaster's Lady and a book thong courtesy of Firefly - from Australia! - here . I'm going to ask if I can enter twice - my mom is in Istanbul, Turkey with the book right now, and I read it in Montreal. Then I can give it to my sister and she can read it in Ottawa... Regular Writing Blog will resume. I'm at home today and as soon as I Step Away From the Computer plan to spend the afternoon writing/editing.

I got this from a random blog that someone on the Outlander Yahoo Groups linked to. There's also a contest involved! Consider yourself tagged! Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews? Usually anything by a first-time author who's "essentially Canadian" or who's an ethnic Canadian and has just written something scathing or revealing about their homeland. Boo-ooring! If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be? Well Jamie and Claire from the Outlander series obviously. They count as one character :-) Possibly Hercule Poirot. I'll make my life easier, I'll stick with adult humans (i.e. no hobbits!). And Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey. And Lord John Grey. Right, that's four. I would be extremely nervous and very shy, so we would have to be at an event that wouldn't m...

I was perusing a glossary of Roman/Latin names, waiting for ones that would strike me as being particularly apt for a few of the characters in the story that had not been named yet, and came across the name Aulus. I thought, aha! that's Theseus and Antonius' father! He supports the invasion of Britain. Today, I was rereading some of notes on the Roman invasio of Britain and noticed that the general who led the invasion, under Claudius was Aulus Plautius... A senator from Rome... Serendipity.

I asked a few questions of the folks on the forum, here , drawing on the breadth of their experiences. My snake-related questions were: is there a criteria to eating snake meat? That is, if you were stuck in the wilderness, and found a dead snake (probably dead of natural causes), would you find this snake under cover or out in the open, and is there any snake you would avoid eating? As a thank you, I posted the following snip at the end of the thread (only a couple of square brackets (questions) left!): Here's the snip where the snake-eating comes in... The Face of A Lion by Deniz Barki “I’ll come with you.” Austin swerved to avoid a large snake a few steps away in the grass, then turned back to look more closely at it. “Pliny! What is that?” Pliny followed the direction of his forefinger. He advanced a step, broke off a reed and slowly pushed aside the plants around the snake’s head. Austin could see the length of its body through the grass, wending in a long line back in the dir...

Jen of Random Thoughts started a new thread on the writer's forum : When It Starts Feeling Like A Job. She asked: "How do you cope with pushing through when your...I guess you'd call it your muse...is being a snippy beeyotch who doesn't want to acknowledge she knows you?" I replied: "I've never struggled through this feeling before. Usually what happens is, I write and write and write, get to the end or near end and when the inspiration dies down, I stop. Thanks to this forum (already been a year and a half!) I am now more than ever eager to actually see an MS through to the real end - querying agents. And because of that I'm having to slog through periods of "I suck!" more often than ever before (the only other times have usually involved short stories, either published in literary anthologies at university or submitted to contests (Surrey... sigh... I suck!)). It seems that I have been unconsciously following Diana's advice. I console...