Gillian Bronte Adams

YA Epic Fantasy Author

Cause Everyone Needs a Little Inspiration Now and Then …

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It’s just one of those days.

Cold. Grey. Damp.

Not quite raining, but drizzling every now and then. The sort that makes you want to curl up under a blanket with a cup of coffee and a good book, though you know you should be writing. So you stuff the book under a pillow out of reach and pull out your laptop … only to find yourself staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page with no idea how to get the words out of your head and into the story.

Ever had one of those days?

When I find it hard to write, it’s usually because there’s something holding me back.

Fear.

Fear that I’ll ruin what I think should be a good story. Fear that I’m a failure before I even get started. Fear that my story is terrible … and I’ll just make it worse.

In fact, I wrote a whole blog post about it once: When My Pen Runs Dry.

One thing that I’ve found helps me when I hit a dry spot in my writing, is to go back through my story and reread my favorite parts. This time, I decided to take it a little farther and designed a “quotes graphic” for each of the main characters to use as inspiration while I write.

I’m not a graphics designer by any means … it’s one of my many non-talents … but I had fun making these and they serve their purpose such as it is!

Ronan
Ronan: A Fighting Chance
Ceridwen
Ceridwen: Strong

Ceridwen: Ashes
Want to design your own character-inspiration graphic? 

Here’s what I did:

Color

First, I settled on a color for the graphic. I tend to associate certain characters with specific colors even as I write. I knew automatically that Ceridwen would be a burned-to-the-embers fire red. Ronan on the other hand was a smoky blue, like the sea on a misty morning.

Words

Second, I found words to describe my characters. These can be words your character would use to describe themselves. Or names others associate with them. Or words that encapsulate their identity in the story, even if they would never see themselves that way.
Ronan’s tale is in many ways a story of becoming, so all the different words in his backdrop point to the many different identities he bears throughout the story.
The fire and ash in Ceridwen’s backdrop, on the other hand, point to her past. A past that continues to define her present and her future.
The Quote

This, of course, is entirely up to you! I chose quotes that I thought captured some part of the character’s voice and history to help me remember who the character is and inspire me to continue to tell their tale. I made several graphics with quotes that aren’t actually in the story, but fit the character so well that I knew I would work them in somehow.
Are there any random things you do for inspiration when you hit those dull, grey days?

The World Ahead …

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"Home is behind, the world ahead."

At the end of the summer, I wrote a post about coming home from a summer full of grand adventures. I wrote about how to me home is the Shire and camp is Narnia.

Well, I’ve received the call as it were, and the time has come for me to head back. To set off on a new adventure. To leave the Shire behind.

I have a new job.

I’ll be working full time at camp as a ministry specialist, overseeing the horse program, writing Bible Dramas, and who knows what-other-awesome-stuff! If I could have dreamed up a job for myself … well, suffice it to say it would have looked a lot like this.

So, I’m currently in the middle of packing and loading up and transporting one life to a new one. It always sounds easier than it actually is. At the moment, my room bears a distinct resemblance to a town decimated by a Kansas tornado.

I do have a sneaky sort of suspicion that packing up might be a whole lot easier if I didn’t have such an extensive library! But honestly … what is one supposed to do?

“I forgot we’ll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library.“
~ Ron Weasley, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

That would be me. :)

I intend to continue my writing of course. (Packing up my desk … now there’s a chore I’m not looking forward to!) The first draft of The Epic of Aedonia is forging ahead like a runaway forest fire. I don’t think I could stop writing it if I tried … or if I did, the characters would appear to me in my dreams and haunt my sleep.

“There is no agony like having an untold story inside you.“
~ Zora Neale Hurston

But generally speaking, I’m afraid posts are going to become somewhat sporadic on here over the next couple of weeks. Well, that is to say, more sporadic than usual. Adventures of this sort tend to be a bit time consuming. I’ve got to get moved in and settle into my new job and everything that entails … so the blog will have to scoot to the back burner for a week or two.

After that, I should be back on track, and we’ll be able to get back to our typical fantasy musings, character in costumes challenges, quizzes, reviews, etc.

Providing of course, I remember to pack my pocket handkerchiefs! :)

Mining for Gold

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“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.“
~ Jack London

Sometimes the best stories don’t chase after you, begging to be written. You have to hunt them down like the ever elusive white stag.

You have to dig them out of the deep places of the earth, like precious gems.

You have to dive into the depths of the sea and retrieve them, like ancient treasure from the wreckage of a sunken ship.

Victory won through sweat and sacrifice is that much more dear. And a story penned through tears and toil, mined from the depths of the earth, hounded from the farthest reaches of the forest, often rings truer than the story that springs nigh fully formed into your head one morning.

I’m still hunting the plot for my newest story, By Sword, mining my characters out of the rocks, and following their pathless trail through the forest. And it’s hard work. Discouraging, sometimes. But every once in a while, a tiny sliver of gold breaks through that inspires me to keep going, to keep hunting, to keep typing.

To hunt inspiration with a club.

Where are you in your writing? Are you hunting inspiration or refining gold?

Evoking Memory in Writing

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Insects chirped in the background and a faint breeze filtered through the screened windows, cooling my cheeks and lifting the hair plastered to my scalp. I settled back in my chair and closed my eyes with a contented sigh, resting my hands palms up on the table to keep from aggravating the raw blisters I had earned while mowing Haitian style – with a machete. It had been a long day full of hard work, but much had been accomplished and we now sat around the table to eat and fellowship.


The pungent aroma of spicy chicken wafted across the table, but before I could eat, I had to participate in the ritual sanitizing of everything in sight. There was a cholera outbreak in Haiti and we were being more than usually cautious about sanitizing everything with purell or antibacterial wipes – our hands, plates, eating utensils, water bottles… 

I poured a dollop on my hand and it seeped into my palms, setting the raw skin aflame. But even more than the sting, I remember the smell. The sharp clean fumes of the sanitizer covering everything in the dinning hall…

This was about my first trip to Haiti in early 2011. We used hand sanitizer to an extreme, but it worked! No one got sick that trip. To this day, the slightest whiff of purell brings me back to those wonderful meals we shared in the cramped dining hall, all squished around the table, sharing stories and exciting moments, talking about what the Lord was doing. I can’t even think about purell without thinking about those trips to Haiti.
It struck me the other day, that smell is a powerful tool for evoking memory, especially for writers. 
We try to write with all five senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell – to truly transport the reader from the words on the page into the middle of the scene itself. We want them to be able to feel the icy raindrops trickling down their cheeks, to smell the musty damp of a forest after a rain, to see the mountainous waves towering over a tiny craft, to hear the howling of a midnight storm, and to taste the chill freshness of a snowflake on their tongue.
But all of these things are not only powerful in the here and now of the story-world, but also as tools for resurrecting images of the past. When your character walks onto the page in the first scene, that is not the moment he is born. Your character has lived and fought and won and lost and run away many times before he ever shows up in the story. Knowing this is what will give your character that important third dimension so that he will stand out rather than blend into the flat page.
Our pasts define who we become and the same is true of characters in novels. But rather than giving the backstory download where you as the narrator outline your character’s entire history, you can drop snippets of backstory along the way, just enough to allow the reader to know who the character is today. One  method for doing this is through memory.
But memory doesn’t spring out of nowhere. You need something to evoke the memory and that is where you can utilize your five senses to transport your character’s thoughts to the past.
Perhaps your character smells something that they smelled before when (insert important event) happened. Perhaps it is a taste that summons the memory, or a certain feeling, or the sight of something familiar.
Out of all of the five senses, the ones I tend to use the least are taste and smell. I’m not sure why. The other three senses appear so vividly to me while I’m writing. I can picture what the scene looks like, can hear the sounds, even feel the surroundings, but often I have to force myself to taste and smell. But taste and smell are no less powerful than the others and I’m going to continue looking for ways to better employ them in my writing.
For me, the smell of hand sanitizer evokes fond and extremely vivid memories of Haiti. Are there any scents, tastes, feels, sights, sounds that evoke fond (or otherwise) memories in you?

The Story behind the Story

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         And the Starting of a New Adventure…
                 (In which I announce some epically exciting news!)
I hope you enjoyed all the subtitles.  I couldn’t resist!  In my last post, I promised you some very exciting news and here at last you have it:
Today I signed my first book contract!
Still tentatively titled Out of Darkness Rising, my novella is going to be published by Flaming Pen Press and is currently planned to be released in summer of 2012!
In October of 2009 I started a story.  It was originally written for a short story contest and supposed to be limited to 1200 words.  I hadn’t been writing for more than a few hours when I realized that the story I wanted to tell could not be adequately told in 1200 words, so I kept writing.  And a few days later, I ended the story at 9,000 words, scribbled “the end” at the bottom of the page, and buried it in the dust bound trunk of my computer’s hard drive. 
At the start of the summer of 2010, I rediscovered the story, blew away the dust, and discovered as I leafed through the moth-eaten pages, that there was still more to tell.  So, I started rewriting and expanded the story with the goal of turning it into a novella.  By October, after months of writing, rewriting, editing, and revising, I pronounced it “finished,” and having also spent the summer months researching publication, I sent a query letter to Flaming Pen Press. 
Several months passed while I waited to hear back, and in the meantime, I started work on a new fantasy novel Song of Leira, and for a while I forgot about Out of Darkness Rising.  In January, I went on a mission’s trip to Haiti and happened to share an excerpt from Song of Leira with one of my team members on the flight home.  I had begun to feel discouraged about my writing, but she was so encouraging about it that I came home ready to dive once more into Song of Leira and finish the first draft.  When I got home, however, there was another surprise awaiting me.  
I received an email inviting me to submit the complete manuscript for Out of Darkness Rising to Flaming Pen Press.  I hastily polished the manuscript and sent it off a few days later and then waited again… 
About two months later, in March of 2011, I again happened to check my email one night and discovered a message informing me that Scott Appleton of Flaming Pen Press had decided to accept my manuscript for publication!

We spent the next few weeks discussing book titles and cover ideas, etc.  Then I moved away to camp for the summer and only had computer access on the weekends, so further work was put on hold for a while.  Finally, last Saturday, I received an email with the book contract attached!  And now, after a few days of careful scanning and deliberation :) the contract is signed and sealed and en route to Flaming Pen Press!  
Signing the contract
signing the contract…
Needless to say, I am very excited about this!  A dream come true!  I know that there is a lot of work left to be done, but I’m looking forward to it!  It is said that adventures oft’ come in pairs and that certainly is the case in my life!  This past year has been a series of adventures, one right after the other.  And yet another adventure begins tomorrow: college!
Between one adventure and the next, I’m going to be very busy!  But it is a good kind of busy!  And I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next.  At times, life is like a wild stagecoach ride, but it’s nice knowing that God has the reins and I can sit back and trust Him to steer things according to His perfect plan!
~ A Servant of the King
Out of Darkness Rising
For the villagers on the accursed Island, life has only one meaning: death.

Bound to the Island by the curse, the villagers suffer beneath the iron claw of the serpent, daily breathing the poison of his breath, and dying to appease his insatiable appetite.  Darkness reigns unchallenged.  With the constant threat of death looming over her, Marya lives the life of an outcast, longing for something more, yet scarcely daring to hope… until the stranger arrives.  Kind, in a world of cruelty, unafraid in a place of terror, the stranger clearly is no ordinary villager; his footsteps echo with the forgotten lore. 

Torn between legend and the harsh reality of the Island, Marya gradually begins to realize that everything she has ever known is only a small part of a greater tale, an ancient promise marching down through the centuries to ultimate fulfillment on the Island’s barren shore in a sword abandoned and arms opened wide… yet which will prove stronger, the promise or the curse?  

‘Twas a Dark and Stormy Night when I Finished My Novel…

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Seriously though, it is and I did!

It is a dark and stormy night and I did finish my novel!

Amidst thunderous crashes and brilliant flashes of lightning, I typed two very important words onto the last page of my novel: The End.  

I stared at the screen for a minute, reveling in the beauty of the moment.  When I started Song of Leira in September, I had the tiniest smidgen of an idea, scribbled down one evening while working on another story and stored away until I had time.  That idea has grown into a story that was far bigger than I first imagined and will eventually fill three books – that’s the plan at least! :)

Right now, the first draft of Song of Leira stands at 121,441 words!  In Times New Roman, font size 12, double spaced lines, that equals roughly 408 pages on my computer!  Unfortunately, that’s a little too long for a young adult fantasy novel according to most standards, but that’s ok!

I know there is plenty for me to edit.  That’s why this is the first draft!  And I can’t wait to start going back through the story polishing, shining, cutting (yes, hacking away at my beloved story) until the diamond shows through the rough stone of the first draft.

And so, it’s not truly the end.  Well, the story has reached the end, but I’m not finished with the story yet!  And I’m glad because I really have grown to love my funny little characters with their odd ways and individual failings.

I’m so thrilled that I’ve finished!  And so thrilled that there is work yet to be done.  Thrilled that I don’t need to leave Leira yet, that I don’t need to say goodbye to Birdie, Amos, and Ky, or Gundhrold or George.

I am so thankful for the opportunity I’ve had to write this novel!  Taking a year off from school was a big step and there were many times when I asked myself why I did this and what I could possibly have been thinking.

But if I hadn’t taken a year off, my writing would not have grown the way it has, I probably would not have written this novel, and, well, I would be studying right now which is a lot less fun than writing the ending to my novel!  :)

So thank you Lord for the gift of writing!  I pray that my writing would always glorify You!

I can’t wait to edit this story and I can’t wait to start on book two!

But wait… I finished… so that means I get to go to sleep tonight!  (See previous post for context!)  Haha, but I’m way to excited to sleep right now… and tomorrow I will be wielding the dastardly red pen!

[The title of this post was suggested by my awesomely clever Mama!  Thank you Mom for your encouragement!]

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