Geoff Gore's Blog

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

The post Hello world! first appeared on Just another WordPress site.

As I inch closer to finishing the first draft of my next novel, (a psychological Meet Joe Black x Canterbury tales, set in a retirement home), in between thinking about the Roman Empire, I’ve been thinking a lot about opening sentences. Recently J.K Rowling’s first lines in the Harry Potter series were voted the best opening lines of all time:

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privett Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

Sure, it’s pretty memorable, and invites the reader to want to find out more, but really, among the best openings of all time?

The opening sentence is supposed to intrigue the reader, enticing them to continue forward beyond the first page. It’s an opportunity to showcase your writing style and introduce the main characters, or an incident that triggers the protagonist forward into the plot.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” From George Orwell’s 1984 immediately sets the tone for the dystopian world in which the story takes place.

My draft opening line from my WIP is pretty brief:

“If Eddie Malone had been born anyone else, he probably wouldn’t have liked him much either.”

Perhaps one of my all-time favorites is:

“The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end – began, so far as I know, or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper, floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

What in your view makes a grand opening, or indeed, would be your vote for your favorite opening line of all time?

My 3rd novel 'Spin' is available now on Kindle worldwide and in paperback on Amazon.com (paperback format will be available in other regions in the next couple of days).

John Dolion is a marketing genius with the gift of the gab who could sell a VR headset to Helen Keller. He's risen through the ranks to VP Marketing for one of the largest mobile phone companies in the world. The problem is the mobile handset market is at saturation, the market is mature, sales are flat, and the beleaguered company is in trouble. But JD has a plan.

Jessica Bain is a young San Francisco detective struggling to forge a career while balancing life as a solo mother to a teenage son. She’s frustrated by being constantly relegated to investigating cold cases and missing persons’ files. Cases deemed by her colleagues to need ‘a woman’s sensitivity.’ That is until a string of teenagers begins to go missing with one troubling thing in common – their mobile phones.
As the abductions increase their two very different lives are set to collide.

https://www.amazon.com/Spin-Geoff-Gor...

After an enforced hiatus I am now slowly building back my website after ongoing issues with my previous content management system.

I’ve converted my website to a much simpler template using WordPress, but the downside is I’ve pretty much had to rebuild the whole of the content from scratch, so bear with me while I restore my previous pages. In the meantime I hope you like the new look and feel.

You may think I’d have some extra time to do this now, what with the entire country being in lock down and enforced self-isolation, but in my case at least, working for an essential service means I’m currently even busier than usual, juggling the demands of working from home with family, home-schooling, and writing it may take a little while yet.   

This page is the first entry for my newly restored blog, so if anything hopefully it will encourage me to post a bit more in the future.

On the plus side, I’m pleased to say that I’ve completed my third novel, Spin, and am currently in the process of querying, so hopefully this too will be out soon. Watch this space!

After an enforced hiatus I am now slowly building back my website after ongoing issues with my previous content management system.

I’ve converted my website to a much simpler template using WordPress, but the downside is I’ve pretty much had to rebuild the whole of the content from scratch, so bear with me while I restore my previous pages. In the meantime I hope you like the new look and feel.

You may think I’d have some extra time to do this now, what with the entire country being in lock down and enforced self-isolation, but in my case at least, working for an essential service means I’m currently even busier than usual, juggling the demands of working from home with family, home-schooling, and writing it may take a little while yet.   

This page is the first entry for my newly restored blog, so if anything hopefully it will encourage me to post a bit more in the future.

On the plus side, I’m pleased to say that I’ve completed my third novel, Spin, and am currently in the process of querying, so hopefully this too will be out soon. Watch this space!

It’s been a while since I last wrote a post on this page, so I guess this is a long overdue update on where writing things are at.

This time last year I was preparing for my first ever attempt at NanoWriMo. This year I’ve decided not to do NanoWriMo, not because it wasn’t a particularly useful experience, in fact I got quite a lot done in NanoWriMo last year and while technically I didn’t ‘win’, I did get a very useful 35,000 word start on a new novel. NanoWriMo also got me back into a habit I hadn’t been in for a long time by helping me focus on finding, and then protecting, my writing time.

This year I’m concentrating on tidying up and refining (i.e. editing) my last years’ NanoWriMo project ‘Spin’ which a year on, is now sitting at 70,000 words. I’ve set myself a goal to be query ready by the end of the year and hopefully I’ll have something ready in time for the next Pitch Madness (#PitMad) Twitter pitch party coming up on December 5th

Six months ago…has it really been six months since I last wrote blog post? (I guess I’m a writer not a blogger)…I pondered doing NanoWriMo. Well, guess what? I’ve decided to take the plunge. Despite all my better judgement (I explained last post why November is traditionally a terrible time for me to start new projects), I’m going to give it a go.


Why - especially when I’ve been struggling to write regularly and consistently now?

Well firstly, I’m hoping that the short, sharp, shock of trying to write 50,000 words in 30 days might help me get back into a routine longer term. And if I can do that at a time of year that normally isn’t that conducive for me to do it in, even better.

Secondly, I’ve often heard other writers in my writing community tell me that NanoWrimo is a kind of a write of passage (pun intended). It’s something you should at least try once, and you may just meet other like-minded writers along the way who might be able to help with your own project.

And finally, I’ve had an idea burning away in the back of my brain for a while now, that I’m keen to get started alongside my current pick up, put down sequel to Gabriel’s Trumpet, to keep me interested in fun new writing projects. (I know, I should be finishing what I’ve started, right?)

So, what do I want to get out of it? To be honest, I don’t have any huge expectations – I’m not fixated on making the 50,000 word target, but I am keen on seeing just what I can achieve in a month. Nor do I actually expect to anywhere near complete a finished novel. Even if I assume I do make the full word count target for NanoWriMo, I would expect to spend some time polishing and editing it until it’s ready as a standalone story…otherwise I’ll run the risk of simply ending up with 50,000 badly written words.

On the plus side, since I’ve registered I’ve already been approached by a small local independent documentary maker who is interested in doing a documentary on NanoWriMo, and how part-time writers juggle the demands of full time work and their own creative pursuits.

You can check out their website here https://www.hiddenflamingofilms.co.nz/

This adds a whole new creative realm to this project for me, and I’m looking forward to working with these guys to document my journey along the way. Hopefully I emerge from the other side of November and be able to share it with you sometime in the future.

This year my writing has been a bit hit and miss. I get it, I’m not unusual. Like most non-professional authors it’s the usual juggling act between working a full time job, raising kids and any time that’s left in between gets used, if I’m lucky, for writing.

I’ve still been doing NYC Midnight’s Short Story and Flash Fiction competitions. I like these both because they force me to actually produce something to a deadline as well as make write to an assigned genre that I may not otherwise be comfortable with, and I figure that can only improve my writing as well as help me to find my own voice and style. However, I have a nagging feeling that they are also an excuse to tell myself I’m still writing, while I procrastinate from completing any of the other works in progress that I should be doing.

I said a while back, that I was working on a sequel for Gabriel’s Trumpet. This has been a struggle. When I wrote Gabriel’s Trumpet back in 2012, I really didn’t have anything other than a vague notion of what the story was going to be about. Looking back I’ve often felt it was trying to be too many things and that if I had the chance to write it again I would have pared back the core story line. But while I tied a lot of the loose threads together, I always felt like the story was unfinished. There were too many open questions. Hence I always assumed I would at some stage write a sequel. The problem is, now that I’m around 70,000 words in, I feel like I’m in the same place I was with the original. There’s too many plot lines and the book is trying to be too many things. The difference is, this time round I’m in less of a hurry. I’m going to try and take my time, sort through the mess and end up with a coherent story that will (hopefully) answer some of those questions I had left at the end of Gabriel’s Trumpet. I’ve now found that more than ever this is one of those books that I seem to pick up every now and then, work on, and then consign back to the dusty corners at the back of my mind until it nags at me to pick it up again and examine it some more. It may not happen overnight, but I will get there.

The other thing that’s been nagging at me lately is Nanowrimo. I’m slightly concerned at this because Nanowrimo isn’t until November. I’ve never done Nano, and nor, up until now have I ever had the desire to. I scarcely have the time to get what writing I have outstanding done now, let alone 50, 000, probably bad, words in a month. November is usually not a good month for writing for me. Working in the IT industry, November is typically one of the busiest months of the year, where projects have to be delivered before the usual Christmas/New Year change freezes are enforced. The school year is coming to an end, and it’s a busy month for me at home too. However every November my news feed is filled with updates from other writer friends encouraging each other. Last year, for the first time I felt a sense that I was missing out. I want to at least try it and see what happens. So, with that in mind, this week I started to plot out an idea that I’ve had in my head for a while. Next minute, I’ve looked up to find I’ve already done an opening and have 6,000 words. (While the sequel to Gabriel’s Trumpet has limped along at a couple of thousand words a month.) The problem now is to hold off this project as much as I can so that I still have 50,000 words left by the time Nano rolls around in November. I’d be keen to hear from any of you who have done nano before.

What was your experience like?

Should I really commit myself to it this year?

Have you ever experienced the paradox of poignancy in a thing of disgust?

This morning I had an American Beauty moment when I was looking for something in the garage and shifted a toolbox to come face to face with two freshly dead rats in purple plastic bucket on the shelves.

My initial reaction was one of utter revulsion. The stench hit me and I dropped the bucket on the concrete floor. But once I’d recovered from the initial horror and I returned to the scene like a serial killer focused on disposing of the bodies, I was mesmerised by the beauty within the repugnance.

The two rats lay there, neatly curled together, two lovers peacefully cuddling and comforting each other in the face of death’s final embrace. A vermin Romeo and Juliet, having ingested the poison that I had lain for them.

Tonight, I got Romance in the first round of NYC Midnight’s annual Flash Fiction Challenge. I have 48 hours to write a romance story in less than a thousand words involving a tour bus and some hair dye...and so far all I’ve got is two dead rats in a purple plastic bucket.

It’s been a while since I last posted, so here’s a quick update on what’s work in progress.

Like most non full-time professional writers, I’ve been struggling lately between my full-time real job, family and life in general to get nearly as much actual writing done as I probably should. That said, though it’s been a while since I last posted, I have still been writing some short flash pieces - mostly for the quirky crowd over at The Iron Writer, and of course it’s almost that time of year again for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Competition (starting next month).

Progress on a sequel for Gabriel’s Trumpet continues, albeit slowly. It’s been one of those books where I’ve picked it up worked on it for a while then left it to return a few weeks later. One of the reasons progress has been so slow, is at the moment the plot seems to have taken a turn I didn’t expect and I’m not altogether sure I like the direction it’s heading. Like the original, it seems to be trying to be too many things. Early on I wrote myself into a situation where there were way too many disparate plotlines that somehow needed to come together into a coherent whole. I seem to have rationalised some of them now, but there’s still a lot of work to do here.

I have several longer projects in very rough early stages, but so far none has really caught my imagination enough to take off. But I can feel a new story, incubating at the edges of my subconscious. In the meantime I’m still keen to branch out and try different genres. It occurred to me recently, that despite experimenting with finding my writing voice, I’ve yet to write something longer in the genres that I originally set out to – Psychological Thriller or Horror. Perhaps it’s time to revisit the dark arts?

Hello Darkness, my old friend.