It's Friday in Mumbai!

[whipchick]

Today is technically a travel day, but I don’t fly until after midnight so I’m enjoying my last day in a pretty apartment in a fun neighborhood. I love it when there’s a vegetable market on the way to the train station!

**
Travel Tip: Be tight with your money at the beginning of the trip, when you’re still high-energy and making discoveries about

Comments

[comedychick]

Read the link to see how well it matched up with how I wrote my novel. I think I did it pretty much the same as he suggests. I have lots of questions that I don't answer until much later (the big one being "How the fuck did a 17th century pirate come into our century?" which isn't answered until chapter 12). And so far the feedback I've gotten seems to suggest I have a page turner because readers want those questions answered. They tend to get through it pretty quickly too.

[whipchick]

Excellent! And sounds like you've got great stuff happening!

[sweeny_todd]

oh gosh yes! I bought have bought a lot of Leigh Childs for my travelling! I actually just got an aging kindle, so I will be loading that up with books. I can see the benefit during travelling, but I still love me some hard copy.

I gave myself an A-minus, and the note, Legibility, please. Handwriting, you are still my nemesis.
I laughed ^_^

[whipchick]

:)

Yeah, I keep thinking how sensible a Kindle would be...and how much I don't want one.

[sweeny_todd]

I would never have bought one new - as it was I got my friends bike and kindle for $100 when she left... I still haven't turned it on!

[whipchick]

I keep traveling places where it's much safer to open up my $2 paperback than a $100 piece of electronics on the bus...

yay!

[drwex]

I am distinctly pleased to have been of some use in my suggestions.

How did you come to teach those workshops? (I hope you got paid for them!)

And now to check out your links, thanks!

Re: yay!

[whipchick]

When I signed up for NaNoWriMo, I signed up with Mumbai as my home location so i could meet Indian writers. We had a NaNo meet-up, and the local leader liked what I had to say, so she organized the two workshops. I got paid for one (donating most of it to NaNo) and was given a lovely gift at the other. For me right now, in this location, it was more about formulating the workshop and seeing if this lesson plan worked, and making connections. Later, I'll start a regular price :)

Enjoy the links!

Re: yay!

[drwex]

I guess I hadn't realized how global in scope it was, nor how organized.

Re: yay!

[whipchick]

I hadn't either - there's groups all over the place. I think how organized an individual group is depends on who's running it, but it was a surprise to me that it wasn't just Americans.

[kathrynrose]

I love your Friday posts.

I just did the 8 point thing with The Pelican Brief. Interesting. Seems a couple of those points are kind of fat, though. :)

[whipchick]

Thanks - I always sit down to write them thinking I don't have anything to say, and then the format saves me :)

Yeah - I wish there was more breakdown on the Surprises thing, because I think that's like, 80% of the book! Though it makes sense that a short story would have one surprise and a novel many - what's helping me is seeing each scene also as a loop of the eight points, but ending with a climax or a critical choice to carry the reader into the next chapter. Also, I already added "longing" to the stasis part - there has to be a dissatisfaction for the protagonist. It's the "I want" song in a musical (Like Belle's thing about "there must be more than this provincial life" in Beauty and the Beast). Musicals are a good format for this, because they almost always open with a Community song (the stasis, this is the way things are around here) and the second song is almost always the I Want song.

John Grisham is the master plotter of the universe :)

[halfshellvenus]

I love your descriptions of how it feels to hit "Send"-- always so creative and entertaining!

The Lee Child article was interesting. He described the process well, in a way that wasn't too esoteric. Now, having an idea that can sustain an entire book's worth of suspense without having the reader think, "Is that all?!?" at the end... that's a trickier question!

[whipchick]

Thanks, they're a fun challenge to come up with each week!

Yeah, I agree - once one has a grasp of the technical elements, the pay-off has to be worthwhile.