The snow is falling

Writing is often referred to as a solitary activity. Even though you may choose to undertake it in company, by  its very nature unless you're writing collaboratively you're obliged to spend a lot of time inside your own head. That's not conducive to social intercourse.

If anything, as a self-published author, it's even worse. No agent to engage with, no editor, no publisher, no cover designer, no... well... you get the idea. And while you're engaged in all that editing, proof reading, polishing, formatting (for Kindle, etc), and spending time wondering what meta-writing to put out there on Facebook and Twitter to promote your work, and what NOT to put out there so as to avoid totally pissing off your mates by blathering on about it the whole time, there's not an awful lot of time left for yer actual writing.

And then one day you find, as Pink Floyd famously did, ten years have got behind you. Only it's not quite ten years since I finished War of Nutrition. It's "only" four. Or one-and-a-half if you count the rewrite (which you should, because that's the one that eventually got published).

So, ever conscious of the passage of time, I've been trying to decide what to write next. And then, having chosen what I thought was the strongest contender from the list of two or three dozen ideas ("log lines") I've assembled over the years, I've been trying to get my head around exactly how I can turn it into a novel-length story.

After several months (intermittent!) work, I'd fleshed out quite a rich world - two worlds actually, since the story moves from one to the other - in which the action could take place, together with a fairly strong (I thought) cast of characters. Trouble was, at this stage, I didn't know what they were all going to do. I mean, I had the germ of a story idea, but beyond that I started to get a bit bogged down in exactly what all these people in this marvellous new world were going to do that was interesting enough to make you all keep reading.

Breaking out of the inside of my head for a while to talk this over with Blythe during one of our journeys back from Yorkshire, she introduced me to Snowflake. I'll just take a sip of tea while you get over your surprise that I'd never heard of it. Sorry, but no, I hadn't. But it sounded like just the ticket to get me over my hump. When I was writing WoN I worked to a template that was ideally suited to a thriller, but this new work is a science fiction/fantasy fusion, and that old template didn't fit. The Snowflake method is open-ended enough to suit pretty much any genre, so I thought I might give it a go.

Today I finished Step 3. OK, much of the work for the first three steps I'd already done while prepping the world and the characters, but that aside working within the framework has already even at this early stage thrown up some great new ideas and directions, and vastly strengthened my view of the characters, who they are, what they can do, and what they will be able to do by the end of the story. It's fair to say that so far, Snowflake is working out pretty well.