writer

What Makes Us Who We Are?

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

A character building activity with my students

image from Amazon

This week in my creative writing clubs for children, we were looking at characters. The children I work with are well-rehearsed on the art of character building. They know how to create a basic character bio and how to develop it into a more complex character profile. This week I offered up a different way of building characters using clues and it got me thinking…

For the activity, we started with me offering some clues about a character. I picked a character I already had, and the clues were a camera, a cloak, some black boots, rolling green hills and a gift shop. They then had to create a character based on the clues. They had to name the character, give them an age, a physical description, a personality description and more. It was fascinating to see how close some of them got to my actual character!

We then turned the activity upside down and they had to give clues about a character they had created. Once they had a list of clues (they could use pictures or words) they had to swap with a friend and each try to create a character based on the clues.

Again, it was fascinating how close some of us got to a character by using the clues we had been given. One student, for example, posted pictures including some badges with aliens on, a purple scarf, and purple material. I instantly came up with a character called Deirdre Drake, who was obsessed with alien life due to an experience she had as a teenager. She loved watching The X-Files and wrote FanFiction. I got the gender right and personality mostly right, but I got the age wrong. I did get it right that she wrote FanFiction!

We had a lot of fun with clues and character building in our online clubs this week, and in the school clubs we turned the activity into a game of Who Am I? Or Guess Who? They could either draw or write clues about a character real or made-up then swap with a friend to fill in the answers and guess who it was, or they could create their own guess-who style board by creating characters and giving them different features. This was a lot of fun and it went down very well. It also prompted discussions about what makes a character, and indeed, what makes us who we are.

If you were to choose ‘clues’ to help someone get to know you, what would you pick? If someone was to turn out your coat pockets, rifle through your bag, or look through your CD collection, what would they be able to tell about who you are? If you were gone and only your possessions survived, what could people determine about your personality and life by looking through them?

It’s interesting to me as a writer how our physical looks, clothes, the objects we hold dear, and the places we visit shape who we are. These are all things writers should consider when building a character.

If someone was to walk into my house without me here, they would soon know that I love animals, books and music. The pinboard next to my writing desk and the books with my name on them would tell them I am a writer. The bag I take to school clubs full of glue sticks, scissors, paper and pens would suggest my day job. My CD and DVD collections would tell the story of someone clinging to the old analogue world. My coat, welly boots and Converse trainers might suggest something about my personality… How close could a stranger get to knowing me by looking at the clothes and objects I own?

As people we are a combination of the time we grew up in, the part of the world we were born in and the way we were treated as children. We are also a result of genetics, of chance, and of the experiences we have lived through. We inherit looks and personality traits from our ancestors, while the environment we exist in shapes us further. And then there is the part of us that is just us, not influenced or controlled by anything else.

I am always encouraging my students to be people watchers. The best way to build and flesh out complex characters is to observe other humans. Take note of their clothes and and accessories and determine what they suggest about them. Pay attention to facial expressions, gestures and ways of speaking. Think about the things they care about, their hobbies and interests, the objects they hold dear.

The little bits and pieces that make up who we are.

Why I’m Quitting Medium To Concentrate on My Blog

~ ChanAtkins ~ 3 Comments

Time to think about what works and what doesn’t as an indie author…

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

As an indie author with zero marketing budget it’s vital that every now and then I take stock of what is working and what is not in terms of reaching readers.

The trouble is, a lot of time it is hard to know! I am still getting steady sales – enough to make all this worthwhile anyway – but I have no idea where they are coming from or how those readers are finding my books. If I knew, it would make marketing decisions that much easier.

Originally, I started here. My humble WordPress blog. It was the very first place I shared my writing. Way before The Boy With The Thorn In His Side was published, I wrote and shared chapters of it here. I shared those chapters to my personal Facebook page and to my newly created Facebook author page. At the time it felt like a very brave thing to do and I was genuinely surprised when I got interest. A handful of people started reading along and asking for more. This response undoubtedly gave me the confidence to get on with writing and then publishing my books.

All these years later, I am still here, and still trying to figure out where best to focus my energies on the internet. I left Twitter, or X, when it went dark and crazy, but I’ve stuck with Instagram and Facebook. I don’t feel good about being on those platforms either and for multiple reasons. Meta stealing author’s work to train it’s AI models is just one example. Just recently, Meta have changed the rules on sharing links to your author page. Where once you could share as many links to other sources (such as Substack, Medium, WordPress, Amazon…) as you liked, you are now only allowed to share three a month. And guess what? Mark Zuckerberg is not rich enough yet so you have to PAY him if you want to share any more than that. Thanks Zuckerberg. That’s extremely helpful to struggling indie authors who want to share links to their work! It’s not enough that you stole our work, then?

I don’t want to be on Meta platforms and originally my plan was to build a big enough audience on Medium and Substack to replace what I’ve built on Meta.

With Medium at first, this seemed to be working. In fact, at the start of my Medium journey, I posted here many times about how amazing it was for writers. I joined in 2023 and instantly found an audience there. With Medium, if you are part of the partner programme, you can earn money on what you write. If your piece got boosted you earned more money. At the start, I kept getting boosted and I was earning a couple of hundred pounds a month from Medium.

I was thrilled and it made a huge difference to our finances.

But sadly it wasn’t to last. One moment I was doing everything right there and making money, and the next AI had crept in, the boost programme was changed, and nothing I did worked anymore.

I also started losing interest and inspiration. This last year I’ve tried again and again to get back into enjoying Medium and it’s time to admit it’s just not happening. This week I cancelled my membership and can no longer make money from what I write there, not that I was anyway! My plan is to download or copy across everything I wrote there and republish pieces here and in a short story/poetry collection I am putting together. Then I will close my account and turn my back on Medium for good.

In terms of losing interest, the reasons are as stated above but it’s also about inspiration and energy, or lack of…

I stopped reading the Medium emails and stopped writing in response to prompts. I found myself starting pieces of writing again and again only to never get around to finishing them or submitting them. It was time to call it quits and focus my energies elsewhere. The thing is, I don’t know about you, but with the crazy shit happening in the world right now, I’m kind of exhausted just keeping up and planning for an uncertain future takes up a lot of head space for me.

I realised my creativity was taking a hit, but only when it came to Medium. My desire and ability to write and edit my own books has not decreased at all. I didn’t want to run the risk of losing interest in writing altogether, so that was another good reason to quit Medium. There is just no point being there if I am not writing or reading anything.

I only realised lately how much of my headspace is taken up now with gardening, prepping and preserving. I woke up in a cold sweat one night in October as I realised I had totally forgotten to plan for Christmas! Normally I start in January and spread it out over the year. I have finally achieved a year round vegetable plot, I’ve added to my ducks and chickens, and I am busy clearing the side and back of my garden to grow more food and trees on. If I’m not physically working in the garden then I’m inside preserving, or I’m thinking about food shortages and climate emergencies!

There’s just not a lot of headspace left, which is a shame. Whatever creativity I have managed to cling onto needs to be diverted to my books, stories and poems, along with my blog and Substack.

As always, with writing my biggest motivation is getting all the untold books and stories out of my head before I die!

A Break in the Endless Editing Means The Relief (and the challenge) of New Writing!

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

It feels like a naughty treat…

It feels like I have been editing forever!

Black Hare Valley Book One: 1996 is out, and Book Two: 1966 is ready to go once the front cover is finalised. Book Three: 2026 has only just come back from my editor, and Book Four: I Remain is waiting patiently for its turn… But whenever I can’t work on that series, there is The Dark Finds You trilogy to edit. Part Two is ready for my editor but that will obviously have to wait until after the Black Hare Valley series is done, and I just recently finished a third draft of Part Three. As an aside, Part Three is the one I am less sure about and I’m curious to know what my editor thinks of it in time!

I will be getting to the Book 3: 2026 edits really soon but in the meantime I’ve been having a much needed break from endless editing. Which means the tantalising prospect of new writing!

God, I miss new writing….

Nothing beats that feeling of writing ‘chapter one’ on a fresh new page and letting the words flow! Of course, there will be a plan, a loose plot, planned scenes, research on location and character bios all ready to go and chances are they’ve been sat waiting for years! I absolutely adore that feeling of starting a new book and it feels like forever since I’ve experienced it.

So, while the two series mentioned above are waiting, I can place my attentions on two writing projects that have been hovering in the background. Neither project really means brand new writing, however…

First up and the one I have prioritised, is the rewrite of The 7th Child, a family mystery I wrote a messy first draft of over a year ago. I loved the plot, the location and the characters, but something felt off about the narration. I had chosen to recount the present day events through first person point of view of one character, while the past scenes were from multiple character points of view and in third person…. I just didn’t like it at the end, in fact I hated it! It took me a while to figure out a better way to tell the story and I decided doing the whole thing in first person with an unreliable narrator would be better.

I then had second thoughts about that….

I started with a simple read through as I needed to remind myself of what I wrote. I made notes as I went along on possible different ways to structure the book. I decided that it really does need an entire rewrite and change of structure, which is weirdly exciting!

A few days ago I started the big rewrite and I’ve done two chapters so far. It feels like a mix of writing and editing, which I am okay with.

The other project is a book with the working title ‘The Ugly One’. Now this is a book I wrote but never finished when I was just nineteen. In recent years the characters started to talk to me again and I had new ideas about how to rewrite it, as sadly I lost the original hand-written manuscript. For some strange reason I have only been letting myself write this book on a Saturday evening after a glass of wine… Don’t ask me why. A lot of it is set in the 90s so perhaps a glass of wine or two and listening to nostalgic tracks helps put me back there! It’s a bit of an experiment in many ways, this one. I will keep writing chapters once a week unless I get stuck.

But The 7th Child rewrite will take priority and I’ll keep you updated on how it goes!

Stupid Poetry…

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

Three poems I published on Medium recently

Here are three poems I wrote recently and shared on Medium. I hope you like them! They were all a mix of found poetry and ‘normal’ poetry – by that I mean they all contain some things I overheard such as songs, news, people talking, and they all contain things I was thinking or feeling or seeing at the time, but they also all contain some lines I made up to help it all fit.

Stupid Poetry

Early morning
a two-tier sky
a world of dead grass
sun in our eyes
we’ll get there in the end
if you really wanna go
what we need we can’t have
unreality — we know
we just dance ourselves free
until we feel all right
say we can change, we can change
and dance on through the night
and we’ll write stupid poetry
that no one will ever read
to make life better in the moment
stupid you and stupid me

The Stag and the Orange Moon

my Converse on the dash, your hands on the wheel
deep down into the cold shadows
we travel with echoes of past us
in every song, alongside rivers
and across mountains, we were there
but now we are here
and one day, we will both disappear
do you remember when we were lost?
but it didn’t matter?
and I was sad about the dead deer
and the stiff badgers until
a giant stag stepped out in front
of an orange moon?
I’m falling like the leaves
and the trees will swallow you
what if I keep sinking?
what if we both just fade away?
time slips away, anyway
because we both know nothing matters
my bones ache — am I even alive?
lost, never coming home
but bound together, I take you
everywhere with me, you say;
let it go before it kills you
the time we had is lost
but I will always remember
the stag and the orange moon

In The Dark

In the dark, I know
death is always closer than you think
something in my eye
something in my teeth
there’s bits and pieces of me everywhere
a world underground
a weapon drawn

I just let it go
I sneak past
hawthorn trees hunched, deformed
a figure in black shaking back hair
something bored through hell
something in my throat
something in my skin

the stench of decay
mayflower blossom
some ancient magic, mine’s broken
as I climb to find the waiting forest
I see a green giant
bloated corpses, mangled deer
dead trees, in the dark