Here is some random stuff I’ve been up to this week 🙂
Beautiful art by Em Niwa
I bought some beautiful art cards recently from an incredible local author I love Em Niwa🌙 You can check out her Instagram HERE.
I really love art and often collect books with beautiful illustrations, so decided to start sharing some of my favourites here on this blog, and also on my Instagram, just for fun really!! So this is my first one, by one of my absolute favourite artists ever, as you can see in the lovely photo of her art card above!
Instagram Writing Challenge!
Name your current writing project! 🌙
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So, I’ve never done one of these Instagram challenges before, but I thought it might be fun to give it a go?
Basically, I saw this #NaNoLifeChallenge come up by @sachablackauthor and thought it looked fun :)
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To be clear, I’m not technically doing nano (and I actually haven’t ever done it, though it looks crazy fun!) but I thought I’d join in for some of this challenge anyway!
So today’s post is: NAME YOUR PROJECT! Mine is pretty different from anything I’ve worked on before, and I am deep into the editing stage of it.
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The manuscript I am working on currently is a very dark and twisty fantasy book.
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For now, I’ll just call it Fantasy Project!
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This is what I’ve been obsessively working on behind the scenes for a long time now, and is a very different kind of project that I am enjoying so much (though it is VERY dark, so ‘enjoying’ seems like a weird way to put it, haha). I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy books, a lot of noir detective mystery books, and a lot of history books, and am working on something that blends all that together!
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This photo shows some of my world-building notebooks and brainstorming notes for the story and world. I’ve never written fantasy before, and the funnest part of all was in creating a whole world, with its own culture, history and laws. Wow! World-building is seriously the BEST! I am obsessed.
What inspired your current writing project?
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Day 2 of the #NaNoLifeChallenge from @sachablackauthor is asking what inspired my current WIP. I mentioned yesterday that I’m working on a fantasy project, that is rather a dark little story!
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Lately I have been obsessed with fantasy (the darker and grittier the better!), and have also discovered an intense love of Noir detective fiction (absolutely triggered by the incredible German language show Babylon Berlin on netflix, which is the best show EVER!). I’ve also become SO interested in reading about history, which contains the most amazing (and horrifying!) stories ever!
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So here are some books and / or genres that have inspired by current Fantasy WIP, which I hope will be a bit of a noir detective story, set in an expansive and history-inspired fantasy world.
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I’m hoping my story can have the grit and darkness of Mark Lawrence’s Red Sister, the wild frontier fantasy vibes of the Vampire Hunter D series, mixed with the noir, twisty detective stories (that definitely don’t provide any easy answers or neat endings, and feature a LOT of corruption) of crime novels like Six Four, Darktown and Babylon Berlin.
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Also, the world I am trying to build for my fantasy story is heavily inspired by history, which I love to read about. It is also definitely not hard to write a dark noir type book inspired by history, because history is always very scary and disturbing stuff, haha.
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Anyway, those are my inspirations, among a whole host of other things too. I really take small pieces from everywhere and then try to mash it all together into something new, haha!
What genre do I write?
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Today is day four of the #NaNoLifeChallenge from @sachablackauthor
and the question is WHAT GENRE DO YOU WRITE?
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The project I am currently working on is an adult fantasy mystery thing!
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I think my new manuscript has been a chance to really let loose for me, and to delve into some of the darker themes and topics I really find interesting and wanted to explore. I really love stories that have no neat endings, and mysteries with loads of moving parts, and I also have recently rekindled a love of fantasy and expansive worlds. It’s been so much fun for me to delve into all these things!
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So my current WIP genre is definitely fantasy. It is very dark fantasy 🙂 With a little bit of mystery thrown in there too! (or a LOT of mystery really, haha).
Do I read while I write?
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It is day three of the #NaNoLifeChallenge from @sachablackauthor
and the question is DO YOU READ WHILE YOU WRITE?
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Yes, I definitely do! I also watch an enormous amount of television shows too, haha. I am the kind of writer who loves to consume stories non-stop while I am working on something and I am always reading something, and never really take any breaks. Sometimes, I have less time to read and it takes longer to get through a book, and other times I get through quite a lot very quickly.
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When I am woking on a writing project, I just read whatever I feel like, and don’t always try to match it to the manuscript or anything like that. Right now, I am reading the first book in Australian author Sulari Gentill’s Rowland Sinclair mystery series, which is set in 1930s Sydney and is a very fun historical mystery book.
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I’m really enjoying this one!
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Introduce your world.
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It is day seven of the #NaNoLifeChallenge from @sachablackauthor (I might have missed some days already!!! Eeek!) and the challenge is INTRODUCE YOUR WORLD.
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I’ve taken a little photo of the messy map I drew for my world, which was created just to give me an idea of where things lay and what places characters could refer to in the story, and I found that a great help in my world building and writing. Actually, this is my first time ever doing any world building on this scale (and my first time writing fantasy!), and I am just loving the process of making up history, culture, laws, landscape and superstition. It has been such a fun experience!
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The world my book is set is a pretty gritty one, and though there is a level of magic that exists in the margins, it is mostly a medieval (ish) type of society. Although I love writing about it, I think it would be a pretty scary place to live!
Favourite scene in the WIP I’m working on right now!
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It is day eight of the #NaNoLifeChallenge from @sachablackauthor
and the question is WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE SCENE IN YOUR BOOK?
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Wow … that is a very hard question, haha. The photo I’ve used shows my WIP in its latest draft stage, and it is a pretty thick book! 130k right now, so the biggest I have ever written! It is adult fantasy though, and I feel like with the twisty plot and world building, it needs the space.
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But it does make it hard to figure out a favourite scene!
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I suppose if I had to pick … my main characters are both investigators, and are sent from the capital city on the mainland out to a small frontier town within a wild island chain to solve a crime. I really enjoyed writing their arrival to the frontier island. It was fun writing about the differences between where my two investigators had been sent from and this new place, which is wild and isolated and filled with strange superstitions!
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So that was definitely a fun scene to write :)
What I’ve Been Reading!
Bloody hell! I picked this book up recently (which is translated into english from Chinese) and it is SUCH a page-turned I cannot put it down. I spent the whole weekend madly reading.🌙
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This one is a thriller / crime mystery, but focuses in on the world of internet bullying and hackers, and is a slightly frightening look at how fragile our online selves are. I still haven’t quite finished, but so far, it has been such a good read, so if you like crime fiction or thrillers at all, definitely check it out!
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Here is the blurb for SECOND SISTER by Chan Ho-Kei:
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A schoolgirl—Siu-Man—has committed suicide, leaping from her twenty-second floor window to the pavement below. Siu-Man is an orphan and the librarian older sister who’s been raising her refuses to believe there was no foul play—nothing seemed amiss. She contacts a man known only as N.—a hacker, and an expert in cybersecurity and manipulating human behavior. But can Nga-Yee interest him sufficiently to take her case, and can she afford it if he says yes?
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What follows is a cat and mouse game through the city of Hong Kong and its digital underground, especially an online gossip platform, where someone has been slandering Siu-Man. The novel is also populated by a man harassing girls on mass transit; high school kids, with their competing agendas and social dramas; a Hong Kong digital company courting an American venture capitalist; and the Triads, market women and noodle shop proprietors who frequent N.’s neighborhood of Sai Wan. In the end it all comes together to tell us who caused Siu-Man’s death and why, and to ask, in a world where online and offline dialogue has increasingly forgotten about the real people on the other end, what the proper punishment is.
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SUCH a good book!!!!
And that is enough for one week!! 🙂
THANK YOU FOR READING
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PJ Nwosu writes dark mystery novels set in epic fantasy worlds.
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