Farewell to Maurice Sendak, who has enriched so many children's lives. Where The Wild Things Are was one of those books I had to buy for my daughter's bookshelf when she was little (and we bought a copy in Spanish too). But Sendak's sets and costumes for the Pacific Northwest Ballet's production of Nutcracker are even more important to me. My sister's birthday is in mid-December and going to the Seattle Centre to see Nutcracker was one of our family traditions for many years. The Christmas tree that grew and grew – and grew – is genuinely breathtaking.

Photo of Nutcracker Christmas Tree courtesy of Pacific Northwest Ballet

I spent over a decade missing the stars, except when we travelled out of London on holiday and the darker skies meant they were visible again. I just assumed light pollution in the capital was so bad that it wasn't possible to see them anywhere here. Then in November we moved house – less than a 10 minute walk from our old flat, but critically, farther away from the busy, well-lit High Street. And I can see the stars again! Orion, how I've missed you.

For most of the post month we've been planet spotting. The other night Venus, Jupiter and a thin crescent moon made a perfect arc across the evening sky. In April it should be possible to see four planets in the evening. 

I was passing through Richmond train station last week and came across these old train posters. It made me feel like I'd slipped through a time portal and ended up in London in the 1980s, doing that year's study abroad I was dreaming about but didn't have the money for. I could almost hear the sound of slam-door trains.

A recent news story about Roald Dahl's writing hut launched me into daydreams of having a writing hut of my own one day, or even just an ordinary garden shed like the one where Philip Pullman famously wrote the trilogy His Dark Materials. I have even in the past spent a few indulgent hours looking at sheds and summerhouses online, wondering which one would be my ideal writing space (though having a garden of our own is also a slight hurdle that would have to be overcome first...).

But as lovely as it is to dream about the perfect writing sanctuary, my best writing moments have occurred in very ordinary places. A small alcove in our bedroom, wide enough for my desk (a slab of plywood on top of a pair of short filing cabinets) and with wall-mounted bookshelves above, is where I sit down to write from 9-11pm almost every evening of the week and it's pretty much perfect. For several years when I was working at a large university I used to spend my lunch hour writing in a study carrel in the graduate library, and that was perfect too.

It's fun to daydream about, though. Where do you write? What sort of space would you love to have just to write in?

The Guardian ran a series on "Writers' Rooms" a few years ago, and the Independent has just posted a slideshow of famous writers' sheds.

I'm about 1/3rd of the way into rewriting Winterturn, which I think means I'm officially in the middle. This is always where I get bogged down. I love beginnings (so full of possibilities!). The characters are new and fresh and they often do things that surprise me. But once I get to the middle my energy starts to flag, I get worried about whether I can keep all the story elements I'm juggling in the air, and I'm often tempted to go back and rewrite the beginning ... because that will solve all my problems, right? (Wrong. It just creates a huge tangled mess.)

The slough of despair that is the middle of a novel doesn't seem so bad this time, perhaps because I've got a synopsis I'm really excited about. There are a lot of unanswered questions I still need to figure out as I go along, but I'm feeling pretty confident it's going to come together. I'm also trying to slow down in this section of the novel ... to write fewer words per day and give myself time to think about the characters and the story while I'm coming up with things that will make their lives more difficult.

I've been away for a few weeks, on holiday in the Lake District and the Scottish borders. The highlight of our trip for my daughter was an hour-long pony trek; for me it was taking a Victorian steamer ferry across Ullswater, which is (according to the tourist literature) the mythical "Dark Lake" of Arthurian legend. There's something really calming and inspiring about seeing new landscapes, and the weather that day made for a seriously atmospheric sky:



I made great progress on Winterturn while we were away – I am now 30,000 words into my new draft, which I'm really thrilled about. I found that not having any internet access in our holiday cottage really helped me to stay focused, so I'm trying to figure out how to use my online time more efficiently. Should I ration my time to 30-minute blocks? Should I set aside different days for certain tasks? I'd love to hear how other writers manage this!

Twenty summers ago I put most of my possessions onto a freight train, packed the rest into my ancient VW Beetle, and travelled northwards along the West Coast to Seattle – accompanied by my newly adopted kitten, Liam, who travelled in a cardboard box punched full of holes. I drove through a redwood tree en route (maybe this one?), stopping to take a photo of Liam peering out the back window of the car. This image is very distinct in my memory – luckily, since I didn't have any film in my camera.

I was coming home to Seattle, after several years at college in Northern California and a few more years juggling writing with a swing shift office job. I was also on my way to Clarion West, the 6-week boot camp for writers of science fiction and fantasy. During those 6 weeks living in a dorm on the Seattle University campus and going to classes at Seattle Central Community College, I learned to read stories with a critical eye, recognise critiques that would help me improve my writing, and gain a better idea of the stories I really wanted to write. I also embarked on a transAtlantic romance with the Writer I Still Live With.

So Clarion West changed my life in many positive ways, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to pursue a life of writing speculative fiction. Every summer the Clarion West Write-a-Thon runs in conjunction with the workshop; I've never participated myself, but this year I decided to sponsor another writer for the first time. Stephanie Denise Brown is a 2010 Clarion West graduate and her goal is to write at least 750 words a day of her YA novel, which in her own words is about "basketball, physically enhanced teens, and corporate intrigue". Good luck, Stephanie – and best wishes to everyone attending this year's workshop.

Several years ago I used the phrase "the dog days of summer" in a manuscript I was working on, because I love the ancient idea that during a certain period of the year the weather is hot and heavy and it's difficult to do much of anything, because of the influence of the dog star Sirius. It makes me think of dogs lying on a porch in the heat with their tongues hanging out.

Here in London the weather has cooled down the past few days but it's still humid and heavy. I've been reminiscing about a stretch of hot weather one summer in Seattle, when I was working full-time and writing a novel, but the heat in the evenings made me so limp and drained that I found it almost impossible to concentrate. I started coming home from work, eating an early supper and going straight to bed about 8pm. Then I would get up at 10 or 11 and write until 2 or 3 in the morning in the peaceful cool hours, accompanied by the occasional sound of a siren through my open window. I wrote fast and furiously, completely immersed in my story. By 8 the next morning I'd be back at work. My office job was so undemanding that it didn't matter that I was only half-awake, and still half-dreaming about my novel and my characters. I managed to keep this routine up for about a month before exhaustion sent me back to more conventional sleep patterns.

My last entry, I realised I few days after I wrote it, was mostly about fear (fear masquerading as reasonable decision-making). One of my deepest fears -- the kind that sometimes occurs to me if I wake in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep -- is that I'll spend years trying to construct a novel with a coherent plot, but never succeed. How much more sensible it would be just to decide that at a certain point, I should throw in the towel and move on with my life. Except that, as the Writer I Live With pointed out last week, I probably couldn't stop. Writing is too much of who I am, and walking around with ideas and characters in my head is a daily part of my existence.

Over the weekend, while reading a writing book, I paused to think about pushing characters to their limits, making them do outrageous things that most people could never imagine doing themselves. And I suddenly had an idea for one small but significant change to Winterturn, an alteration to the backstory that meant my protagonist can make a choice that propels the plot into motion. For about half a minute I wondered if it would work ... then I realised that it definitely would, and not only that, it would introduce new layers of conflict and character motivation throughout the entire story, right from beginning to end. It was like being struck by lightning. 

Since then I've furiously written 8000 words of a new synopsis, and this one idea seems so essential to the novel that I can no longer imagine Winterturn without it. I wake up thinking about my story, I go to bed thinking about it, and in between I'm scribbling every spare minute I can find. I can't believe that a week ago I ever imagined I could give this up.

I've spent the past two mornings in a café, reading my completed manuscript Winterturn while drinking cappuccinos to give me fortitude. It's been a sobering experience.

I have written some beautifully evoked passages of description which are, unfortunately, lacking in tension and plot movement. My characters sometimes leap into life but often appear too passive. My plot has a beginning, a middle, and an end – and long stretches where not enough seems to happen.

It's normal for a first draft to seem pretty awful to the person who's written it. But this isn't my first draft – this is my fourth completed and completely different draft of the same novel. I think I have a realistic view of my own writing abilities. I don't believe that I lack confidence, but I do know where my flaws lie. Much of my story is really nicely written, but much of it drags. I'm pretty good at evoking a vivid fantasy world, not too bad at characterisation, and I've been told by several critiquers that I write good dialogue. But plotting a story that makes readers want to keep turning the pages, while holding their breath to find out what happens next, is something I've struggled with for years.

I'm making a concerted effort to improve this. I've read books on plotting and I've tried out different methods of structuring a story -- having discovered, through trial and error (many, many errors) that I'm not a seat-of-the-pants plotter.

But I'm starting to wonder, realistically, how many more years I want to spend mastering my craft.



I've been writing since I was a teenager and when it's going well I love it. Even when it's a struggle, I enjoy the process of problem-solving, especially those moments when a solution to a sticky plot difficulty arrives out of nowhere. But I enjoy other things too, and like most people (not just writers) I find myself torn. When my writing is going well, everything else gets neglected – time with my husband and daughter, my overgrown weedy allotment, meal planning and my part-time day job. When I neglect my writing and focus on other things I feel guilty; when I focus on my writing I feel a bit guilty too.

I know I'm not alone in this, that none of these struggles are unique to my own life or to the lives of writers in general.

But this morning, while rereading my manuscript, an idea slipped into my thoughts, one that I feel almost treasonous putting into words: what if I give myself until the end of 2013 to make real progress; to revise my novel to the point where I'm ready to start submitting? Two and a half years to decide if this is really how I want to spend the rest of my life.

I have spend so many years writing fiction, so many years giving up other things I enjoy in order to dedicate as much spare time as possible to writing. My major life choices – what jobs I pursued, where I lived, what kinds of relationships I had – have been framed within the context of ensuring that writing had a place of prominence in my waking hours, my days, my months and years. How would my life look if I decided to to refocus my creative energies elsewhere? This doesn't need to be a negative choice. Many people throughout history have had lives that were meaningful to themselves and to others without writing fiction.

I need to know that if I continue writing for the rest of my life, it's because I really want to – not because I made a promise to myself as a teenager that I could never reconsider.

So I'm going to give myself another two and a half years. I'm going to put as much time and energy into writing as I can find: learning to plot, developing my craft, revising and polishing Winterturn to make it as good as I can. In the meantime I won't question whether I'll carry on writing, but at the end of 2013 I will look at what I've accomplished and decide whether to continue.

I'm going to think of it as a journey, a long sea voyage perhaps.

I would be really grateful to hear from anyone who's faced a similar choice in their lives.

"In the middle of the journey of our life," Dante says in the opening lines of The Divine Comedy, "I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost." This is a good metaphor to describe what happened to me when writing my fantasy novel Winterturn. I spent longer than I care to admit wandering through the plot, lost in the the forest of my imaginary world. The opening chapters didn't seem right as a foundation for the rest, so I reworked them several times. The transitional middle section wasn't moving the plot towards the climax, so I rewrote and rewrote it, while the story I had in mind became more and more tangled.

I've always worked from an outline, several pages long with detailed notes for key dramatic scenes, and I counted on the rest of the story to reveal itself as I went along. But over the past few years, with just an hour or so to write in the evenings, usually in a haze of fatigue, I would become absorbed in the scenes I was writing and forget to progress the plot. Late last summer I finally admitted that my outline was no longer working, and I began to read everything I could find about how to plot a novel.

Inspired by the snowflake method, I calculated how many scenes I had to tell my story (including those I'd already written) and jotted them onto index cards, which I used to write a detailed 20,000 word synopsis. Then I sat down and finished it -- finished the novel I'd been labouring over for years -- in just a few months. When I was tired and couldn't think straight, when I couldn't even remember what I'd written a week earlier, I had my synopsis to refer back to. Sometimes I felt I was writing by rote, colouring by numbers the scenes I'd imagined, but then the story would leap into life again. Despite my fears, a synopsis didn't pin me down -- in fact the characters often said or did things I hadn't expected. The synopsis, contrary to my expectations, set me free to write the story.

It's a mess, a glorious mess, just as it should be, but now that Winterturn is finished I can begin to see the shape it wants to be. I can finally see the forest instead of just the trees