This Writer's Life

Hello from a very wet and cold Ireland,

I’m just beginning the third re-write of my new book, After. Its this stage of the writing that makes the book readable, when all the tangents come together and all of the wild inaccuracies are ironed out.

Writing is brilliant, it is so easy to just sit down and let words pour out. The re-writing is the tough bit. Now I have to make sure the characters are consistent, that they have blue eyes (or whatever) on the last page, if they started with them on the first one.  I also have to check the timeline of the book, making sure that they seasons move consistently and that a character isn’t shivering in the dark when the action takes place in the middle of the summer.

When I write I have a pretty good idea of where the characters are going to take me, but sometimes a book is halfway written and the characters start doing their own thing. This can mean tweeking the manuscript to make sure everything works as it should.

Sometimes it feels like trying to gather up a huge mass of unravelling strings.

After my light bulb moment with my author branding I’ve been working with a designer to revamp my website. I don’t write about horses, even though the characters in my books usually live in worlds where there are plenty of them. I write about relationships, but I also have books that are a lot darker, so I needed a website that would encompass all of what I do rather than just be targetted at one audience.

That was the cue for a lot of work on a suitable tagline. What was the central thread through all of my books, asked a branding expert. Strong women. They definitely featured. Beautiful environments, they were there too. Lives that had been turned upside down. They were definitely there. Eventually I came up with ‘Strong Characters and Shattered Lives.’ But how to describe the beautiful worlds they lived in, that began with S to keep in with the central theme. Eventually the deisgner finished my site and I signed it off as complete with the tagline ‘Strong Characters. Sumptuous Worlds. Shattered Lives.

The day after I realised Sumptuous was the wrong word. I abandoned the idea of multiple S’s. The right word was Privilaged.

So back to the designer today. Have to hope after all of my changes and dithering about the site, he will let me make just one more tiny change! My website is www.louisebroderick.com I’d love to hear what you think about the new site and the home page image.