Tuesday 28 August 2012

50 Shades of Butterflies in the Amazon (remixing something you don't agree with)

First a little context.

While having a beautiful and relaxing holiday in the South of France, we noticed an odd phenomenon: most of the British women at our camp site had a copy of 50 Shades of Grey, or one of its sequels.
One afternoon, I was lying on a sunbed, listening to to wonderful noise from the pool when two women walked slowly passed, one was holding the third book from the trilogy. As they passed, the women not holding the book said: "So is it good?" and the woman holding the book said: "Nah, it's crap, but you kind of want to know what's going to happen next. I think you'd like it."

Chalk up three more sales.

So I started talking with Alison (she had read books 1 and 2, but couldn't be arsed to buy book 3) and, in the process, came up with the idea of rewriting 50 Shades and making it 'better.' Of course, this relies upon me being a better writer than EL James and my ethics would never permit me to say such a thing. No, scratch that. I am. Much better.

Anyway, I made the decision to rewrite the first couple of chapters when I had the time and see how it went. If it was OK, I'd continue. If not, I'd drop the project and go back to thinking about aliens in strange Victorian dress and an apocalypse that happened very slowly. The idea was given added impetus by China Mieville's recent talk about fostering remix culture in literature (I think what I'm doing is a cover version, rather than a remix, but the principle is similar enough for it not to matter).

But. I have just finished chapter 2, and I've hit a major stumbling block. It's this.

I am enjoying the writing. Reading through someone else's work and thinking about how to make it better (which is something I do everyday, though with a much lighter hand, in my day job), and then writing out an improved line of text is very satisfying. It's like someone came in and took care of the broad brush strokes of a painting, allowing me to concentrate on the detail - to try to take lumpen dialogue and romance novel cliche, and turn it all into something sparkling without betraying the central ideas of the text.

And therein lies the problem. I think the central ideas in the text are deeply problematic and, this is the kicker, the central character in the story is refusing to go along with them. I've tried to make her into a simpering simpleton searching out validation and the love she never really got from her parents, but she is resisting. In each encounter with Mr Grey (I renamed him Mr Severin in honour of Severin von Kusiemski), she pushes back - occasionally embarrassed by her complicity in his attempts at control. This does interesting things to the characters, but in terms of romance novels, may not provide the desperate escapism that is so often regarded as the core demand of the reader.

So that's problem one. I have changed one aspect of the character and it's started rippling through the plot. And this leads to problem two.

Every novel has a line, paragraph or section upon which the entire structure pivots. It is an anchor holding the whole thing steady. In my other book, it was nine words and a piece of punctuation.

In 50 Shades..., it's the moment when Christian reveals his 'dungeon' to Ana - and thus reveals who he truly is - though of course, deep down that isn't his true self, cos that would be bad.

I haven't got to that part yet (I'm writing as I read), but hearing other people talk about it, the only thing I could think of was the bloke from The Lovely Bones taking the girl into his hole in the ground (genuinely revealing his true self) and trying to convince her that everything was OK. The girl in that story understands far more than her captor. She knows who he is, and what he wants, while he maintains the pretence that he is a cool old man and is in control. We know that in life he envies power but has none. And so he exercises what little power he can attain (though even this is false and fleeting, and always in need of topping up) over children.

You have to imagine how creepy it would be to have a new lover take you into a room and say: "Basically, the thing I'd like to do is hurt you. You can trust me though. Yes, I know you don't really know me, but you can trust me. Cross my heart and hope to die!"

This scenario is no good for either party in 50 Shades... or for the audience.

Ana is an innocent. I've made her less innocent, but nonetheless, EL James has made her pure and even a little hesitant about her own sexuality. I'm pretty sure her reaction would be: "Fuck off! Creep." And rightly so. She's not an idiot.

But Christian is supposed to be about control, about measured exposure. He is the kind of person that would never blurt out a secret to someone he barely knows, especially if he is investing his emotions in that person, and the revelation might fuel his own self-loathing. James paints him this way, and then splurges her efforts on this one moment. He would need to know he was going to get what he wanted.

A more realistic scenario involves the pair flirting, becoming close, learning to trust one another, discussing fantasy, experimentation, etc. Even if one character is driving these conversions and moments towards a particular goal - or confession - it would only make sense to do it within the confines (and I use that word in a positive way) of a trusting relationship.

I'm going to continue writing this (I quite like the notion of the romance/erotic novel, though in the examples I've read, I get bored quite quickly) for another two chapters and see how it goes. My theory is that the butterfly flaps that have just happened in the hardware store where Emma Wainwright (Anastasia Steele was the first cliche to go) will be amplified through a short (much shorter, in fact) photographic session, into a flirtatious but chaste car journey and into arrangements for a first date.

The interesting thing is. If we understand that Christian Severin has unusual tastes, and is working towards revealing this to his new love, there is the prospect of a story that has loads of sex, but also loads of sexual tension. It's not the love or consummation that is delayed, as in traditional romance, but the understanding. We know. He knows. She (sort of) knows. But who tells first.

The other interesting thing is that, shorn of its rape fantasy pillar - and the joy of relinquishing control within the confines of a book - does this kind of story still work for the target audience? For any audience?

First draft (straight to page, no edits) of Chapter 1 is here.


* Standard disclaimer: should something brighter or shinier bash into my brain, I may not finish this. The value of trousers may go down as well as up. You home may be at risk if you do not keep up repayments on it. *

* Second disclaimer: If you think I'm nicking the beginning of EL James' novel for my own moneymaking purposes (and especially if you're a lawyer working for the suddenly loaded Ms James), it might be worthwhile searching out one of my university projects in which almost exactly the same thing happens. It's even conducted mostly through emails and texts. *

Saturday 25 August 2012

One drink and then home


Just a coffee, he thought. One coffee to show solidarity and then back home. Back to normal. But it was a mistake. As soon as he'd positioned the baby buggy next to table and sat down, he noticed the hush that radiated away from him like the tiny drops of blood in his shaving water this morning.

Two years ago he would have been almost hard at such a reaction, would have looked each person is the eye with one of his too thick eyebrows raised quizzically. Come on fuckers.

Not now. It wasn't shame he felt - real shame was something he'd discovered at the hands of his dad - but a kind of humming disappointment. The ripples of quiet were not fear or awe, he knew, but a pause of discovery: phones were raised surruptitiously, apps consulted and symbols disscussed in hushed tones, glances as people walked passed became scrawled images on beer mats that he would pick up as he left. No, it wasn't fear that people felt now - even after Anders had shown what real men were capable of - but raw, unwavering contempt.

Beer or coffee. Irma was having coffee, which meant she'd be sober to put Liam to bed, so he ordered a beer and waited patiently in the silence that wasn't silence for the ragged waitress to serve him. Irma talked to her friend - what was her name? - about the festival the previous weekend, her high-pitched nasal whine doing nothing to mask the tap and slide of research going on around them.

At some point someone would see the life rune, turn their eyes to the baby, and make the inevitable connection. Someone might say under their breath as they passed "rapist" or "cunt" and he would pretend not to hear.

One drink in a public place to show solidarity - Christ whose idea was that? - and then home. Back to normal. Maybe stick some of the uniforms and flags on ebay and let someone else get the use of them.

It was Liam. Little boy sucking his dummy, occasionally looking over with massive eyes to make sure mummy and daddy were there, as though they might disappear in a puff of black smoke. It was little Liam, a year older than his first steps, happy to enjoy the sunshine and listen to Irma's whining to Clare - her name was Clare - about the heat and the sun and the hangover from the festival.

It was little Liam first crawling, then holding a branch as he walked hunched from the carnage behind him. It was little Liam who watched the man in the tight black and blue outfit raise his gun and calmly fire into a crowd of children, the sweat on his brow not a consequence of fear, but from the effort of killing, of carrying his machinery.

It was little Liam running, calling quietly for mummy and daddy, calling under his breath so the man with the gun wouldn't hear and turn his machinery to his left, fumbling for his phone to send a text to the world before dying.

It was little Liam crawling along the rocks, palms and knees bleeding, to swim through bodies in the water like logs unaccountably wearing bright summer clothes; listening to the cries of help from friends who could no longer swim and would sink beneath the unwavering water; climbing inside a kitchen cupboard almost deaf from the noise of gunfire; holding his breath knowing that a few more seconds under the water was impossible, but breaking the surface would be death; praying someone would arrive to save him before there was no one else left. Little Liam pleading for his life into the blank eyes of a man who knew nothing, understood nothing, felt nothing.

As he waited for his beer, a flush of blood crept slowly from his collar to his cheeks.

Kids change things.

Thursday 14 June 2012

And then, while on the train home from work...

Something else popped into my head. It felt urgent, coherent. It felt ready to start thinking about. Feels great having so much going on in my head, though it makes sleeping a bit tough. I'm quite lucky in that I can shut somethings down - ie, when I go into work, I think about work - because otherwise it would suck to  live in my brain.

Tuesday 12 June 2012

Finally, a way into the big idea

I've mentioned to a few people that my big idea for a second book is likely to be controversial. Really controversial. And so I've been trying to work out the best way to approach the whole idea. My first idea was to just leap straight in with the first real scene, but I think that would be a little too shocking and doesn't provide the kind of little turns I like to put into these things - that 'WTF just happened?' moments that I enjoy. And so, inevitably I think, I went back to Frankenstein and the recursive structure from that. So I have someone telling a story, of someone else's story of the main narrative. That should give me the distance that I like, and the slightly disreputable enveloping narrators should make the whole thing a little more 'unreliable'.
I managed to bang out a 1,000 words of Chapter 1 (the first envelope) tonight while watching the Poland-Russia game in French and planned a little of the second envelope. Now the second envelope is controversial, but is nothing compared to the nugget of the story.
One other interesting thing to ponder: this story has a lot of real people in it, so I'm thinking as part of my mitigation strategy, that the narrator for the first envelope could be me.
What does that do to the story?
Interesting questions.

The first paragraph (so far), by the way, is this.

The last message I got from Davy was a text a couple of days before he pegged out. It just said “ur story” and then had the address of a hotel and a ‘code word’ to say to the receptionist. By the time I landed in Miami, he’d gone.

Sunday 10 June 2012

It’s time for a revolution in King’s Landing

Something is wrong in the seven kingdoms. George R.R. Martin’s Westeros has become something of a second home for me and, at times, it feels a little more vital than the real world. But there’s one thing that keeps dragging me back to reality. Westeros is a land in which curiosity is curiously absent.

I have just begun Dance with Dragons and I think I’m getting quite a handle on the history of the place in the broad brush strokes that reflect the characters’ level of education. There are a few ‘facts’ - I’m assuming they’re facts - that have emerged so far.

The Wall, for example, has stood for 8,000 years, keeping the world safe from wildlings and other assorted beasts; and the kings of the Iron Islands have reigned (before the seven kingdoms were united) for at least 2,000 years and maybe as long as 4,000. Swords such as Ice, Longclaw and Heartsbane, forged from Valyrian steel, have been handed down through generations, so we can be sure that there is history beyond living memory.

Now think of the same period in human history. Let’s be conservative and take as our starting point the Targaryan’s history from their relocation to Dragonstone to the fall of the house at the hands of Robert Baratheon. This is 500-ish years of development.

Over the 500-ish years since the War of the Roses, where has curiosity led humanity? Gunpowder, concrete, water filtration, childhood, coffee, movable type, clockwork, universal suffrage, radio, radioactivity, powered flight, plastics, medicine, mass literacy, libraries, law, gas, microelectronics, space travel, sexual equality (a bit), artificial intelligence and nuclear fission. Not forgetting the continual revolutions in art, architecture, agriculture and armed conflict.

This is all missing from the history of the seven kingdoms.

One theory about this lack of development is that, following the age of the dragons and the terrible tragedies this wrought on the land, people became so afeared of change that any innovation was seen as a call for the return of magic. But this would suggest that every mad idea has been suppressed or self-censored for fear of upsetting the status quo, and we know that humans do not work like that.

Another idea suggests that faith has been the brake on progress, but the Enlightenment in Europe happened despite the antipathy of the church and against the wrath of the inquisitors. Midwives didn’t stop delivering children because their sisters were burned as witches, astronomers didn’t stop measuring and asking questions about the motions of the planets because their families and reputations were poisoned. Humans do not work like that.

Someone as ruthless and clever as Tyrion Lannister, or as crazy about fire as the Mad King would be innovating, if only in the development of new ways to kill their enemy while protecting themselves. They would have seen a wildfire explosion - the way it propelled stones or shattered ships through the air - and thought, I wonder if a steel tube could harness and direct that force like a catapult or arrow? That moment of contemplation leads to the cannon, guns, internal combustion, rockets, space travel.

We also know that a nation constantly at war with itself will rapidly develop a new understanding of anatomy, pain management and infection control - new ways to save lives as well as take them - unless they are actively prevented from asking questions, taking chances, and upsetting accepted wisdom.

A Song of Ice and Fire, then, is a warning. An example of a world in which challenges to authority are met with violence, and important questions are answered only with steel and fire and guaranteed misery. It tells us that a population that slavishly follows its leaders from mundane peace into mundane war and never kicks against the pricks is destined to remain with their faces and spirits trampled into the shitty mud. It tells us that change will never come from deferring to one’s betters. Revolution is driven by curiosity. Curiosity by revolution. Vive la curiosity!

Wednesday 21 March 2012

Where to get ideas from?

Ideas seem to come in two forms. The first is a kind of magical thing that pops into your brain as if from nowhere. It might be inspired by an overheard snatch of dialogue between two people, a near-miss event (what if that had happened?), or a random thought. I've had lots of these, but in the main they don't feel solid and often I'll start writing and hit a block fairly quickly. These ideas get filed away for later, but I think the initial rush makes it difficult to return, even though the blocks are probably easily resolved.

The second belongs to a process. This morning I woke up thinking, I've actually finished my first attempt at a fiction book, and in a few days people I care about will have a beta version in their hands. But what do I do next? Despite the fact that it is hard, I love the process of writing and editing and so sitting back and doing nothing is not an option (I've also discovered that if you neglect your Forza 4 skills they disappear very quickly) so when I was awake at 5am this morning, I thought: "Right, let's have an idea..." I went through a ton of things from my past - some obvious, some obscure - and there were a few good things there that could be excavated, but nothing that you would want to hang 75,000 words on alone.

Next up I started putting myself into other situations to see how that would work. Then I started looking at objects in my apartment and thinking about the various associations I have with those things. And there it was: a germ of an idea.

So I have added three core characters (all fairly blank lego people at the moment), and started thinking about their relationships and the tensions that may arise between them. There has to be conflict, so if you have a happy relationship - and I thought it was important to have at the core a strong, stable relationship - where does that conflict arise. That's my next challenge. I have a partial solution based on ideology and history and the compromises we make in any relationship, but it needs a little thinking about.

I have a beginning, now I need the ending.

Oh, and while all this is going on in my head, I also need to think about what happens beyond the last page of the first book I wrote, because there's a whole world to explore there...

Sunday 18 March 2012

First draft almost done - now for the feedback

I finished writing my first draft (hurray!). I was stumbling for a while over a late chapter until I realised that the reason I wasn't making much headway was that the chapter wasn't really needed. The whole thing would be filler, so I cut it. It's obviously missing too, so I think it might be a little enigma for people who take note of these things.

Over the last few nights, and this weekend, I've been through the whole text with my handy red pen (which is neither red, nor a pen) and noted the changes I need to make - unintended spelling or grammatical errors, title changes for characters, etc. On the whole it's a pretty clean text, mostly I think because of the forward planning. The themes come out well, but not too obviously and the little easter eggs I've left in various places work really well.

It's also very spare. Because of the nature of the narrative voice, there's no room for purple prose, so it's mostly stripped down to events and the narrators reflections.

The plan is to make these changes on the typeset version of the text and then send the whole lot to Lulu for a very short print run for my beta testers. No idea what Lulu's turnaround is, but I'm looking forward to handing out actual books to friends and family and getting their impressions. I just hope they don't all hate it.

I was very happy reading it. I think I've judged the language development very well.

Friday 9 March 2012

Pushed: A short story


As the numbers on the signs got smaller, the group increased its pace. It was inevitable that Anne and Leon were left behind. The wheelchair that had amazed them in the small town outside Bristol, was now falling to pieces. Earlier in the day, Leon had slid himself down the embankment on the edge of the thick road to pluck some of the fat pieces of long, dark green grass to stuff into the flattened tyres, but now they were falling apart and leaving a narrow trail of crushed grass and perishing rubber on the grey road surface. By the time night fell, they couldn’t even see the fire of the group ahead.

“You alright pushin?” she asked. Sometimes she’d do half hour with her arms but the rotting grass wheels made it painfully slow.

“Aye. Just. Need rest soon though.”

Anne listened to his ragged breathing for a little while in the darkness.

“Can I ask you summin?” He asked.

“Course,” she said.

Leon stopped pushing, came round in from of the chair pulling his baccy from his pocket, and sat heavily on the road, using his bag to lean on. “Stop for a smoke s’well, I think.”

Slowly, with great care, he rolled his cigarette. “We’ve not seen anyone coming or going on this road, except for Alan’s lot up ahead, yeah?”

Anne agreed.

“But loads of people take the pilgrimage. So are we going the wrong way?”

She watched him strike a match on the road and light his pathetically thin rollup. Finally, she said: “We’re going the long way. ’S’no way we’d outrun the bastards in Dover and Folkstown… Well, you might. I ain’t got a chance.”

“My mum told me Folkstown wasn’t real,” he said. “But my dad said there was a hole there that meant pilgrims didn’t need to cross the water.”

“Your mum tell you the bastards made up the hole story to make people go that way?”

“No. She just said it wasn’t real.”

“I dunno love… but we’re well on our way now.”

Leon shrugged the large bag from his back, and began pulling out the popup tent they had used for night shelter since Birmingham and some unlabelled cans.

“We staying here then?”

“Looks like it. Good as anywhere else.” His knife was a dirty red, but the blade he used to open up the dented can was oiled and sharp. As it cut into the tin - his rollup dangling casually from his dry lips -  the noise set Anne’s teeth on edge, but she felt her mouth begin to water as she smelled sweetcorn. He was a good boy.

“Do you reckon we ought to get off the road?”

Leon puffed a long stream of smoke into the dark. “Nah,” he said. “Like you said. We ain’t seen nobody going back or forth. It’s good.”

The fake leg was as useful as her real one, but symmetry was important to her and so she went to the trouble of attaching it each morning, and removing it only after sundown. Leon didn’t really understand but felt too uncomfortable asking questions. He watched her unstrap it and heave it over her shoulder to hang on the handle. The top of her body, as she carried herself out of the chair, moved with grace, but her remaining leg was an obstacle. She had talked, briefly, about working out a way to take it off and make everything easier, but the thought of it left Leon - and surely it would be him who was called on to wield the axe or saw - with a deep, unpleasant tingle in his stomach and groin.

Some nights, Anne would listen to the boy beside her and wonder how she had been so lucky to find him. While the others had ignored her or made it obvious she was holding them back, he had stayed, helped and even cuddled her occasionally. One night he had kissed her gently on the neck and said: “Thanks for looking after me.” She lay awake then, baffled.

Slowly they made their way to the smell of the ocean. The others had waited. They said they knew crossing the water would be impossible for “the slackers” on their own, so they had rested in a tall building with smashed windows and a facade whose old gray paint resisted the warm colour of the spring sun. A white flag had been hung on the colonnade as a signal for Anne and Leon.

Of course, Leon was the one they really needed; not even someone with Alan’s supreme confidence would wonder the roads of France and Spain without a map.

In the four days they had been waiting, the group had found a boat and made sure it was seaworthy. Someone had painted COMPOSTELA on the bow in exuberant tar letters.

After two days at sea, the last of the food had been eaten and there was still no sign of anything on the horizon. Alan said they had some hard decisions to make. They argued most of the night as though Anne wasn’t sat crying just a few feet from them, cold and unprotected. They took the difficult decision, and as a bruise yellow sun broke the horizon on the third day, three people struggled to lift her over the side. The wheelchair - lighter, more compliant - followed.

The thick woollen coat that kept her warm on cold nights dragged at Anne’s body. She knew she would sink as quickly as her carriage. Her arms were growing tired and even crying took too much effort. But still she fought, not seeing the confused and appalled face of Leon watching from the stern of the boat. Right until she could no longer stay above the water; until her disloyal body insisted on trying to breath in the salty water; until her arms became as heavy and useless as her leg, she fought.

Thursday 8 March 2012

My disloyal mind

Here's a funny thing. Barring any massive changes, I have about 2,000 words left to write. Ordinarily that would take me an evening. But I have been pondering this last stretch for a couple of days, and have yet to make any effort to actually get them done.
It's not like I don't know what each word is going to be - the three chapters they come from are all done in note form, and I know what I want to say - but still I find myself writing other stuff (including this rumination, and rambling things about the genius of the songs Duel, Jewel and Jewelled by Propaganda) and not getting the final bit done. Why is this?
Two nights ago I woke from a really horrible dream in which I was being chased around my hometown by a very large male lion. I did everything I could to shake it off and ended up cramped between a red steel bar and a glass roof, quite high up, hoping the lion wouldn't realise it could jump on the bin as I did and eat me. Despite being incredibly scared, I kept saying to myself "Of course this is a dream! Where the hell would a lion come from in Thornbury?"
Luckily I woke before the beast realised that the bin would be a good springboard, but did a status update on Facebook about the nature of my night. A colleague suggested that dreams like this meant either a fear of authority (ha!) or a fear of not being able to live up to expectations. I think this is something my dad suffered from - he would rather throw out substandard work than let anyone see it - and so I can only conclude that this bout of procrastination (and my god, am I good at procrastinating) might be due to a worry about saying "it's finished" and then having people read it.
I've been pretty confident through the writing process itself, so find myself a bit baffled by this apparent bit of doubt. I thought I'd left that behind me, but apparently not.
Anyway, another of my bits of procrastination activity has been writing some short stories, including the slightly horrible one I'm going to post in a minute. As with the Flight Fiction I did earlier (there will be another of those on Saturday, btw) it's a first draft + line edit.

Wednesday 29 February 2012

I do actually have one thing to worry about...

I've been reading quite a lot of comment and comments about how self-publishing is going to destroy the very notion of quality in publishing and that, without the gate-keepers of old, any old rubbish will be competing for the eyes of the public.

The other thing that gets mentioned is that publishers are risk-averse because they're looking for guaranteed profits. So here's my worry. I am a pedant. This book is supposed to be written by a 13-year-old girl with no formal education, at a time when grammar was being solidified in the English language. This means that I can't begin like this.

Excerpt one - common sentence, grammar and language structure.

Dear husband. Three days ago I became the last girl in the world. In 40 pages I will be a woman. My father says that I am bound by tradition to tell you how I 'became' a woman, but Jon Mair - the doctor - says I should use these pieces of paper to write down the herbs, spices and recipes that will make farmers better so they can continue to work.
But I want to tell you about Jenna. You probably know her, but if I don't write down my memories of her, I will forget the way she looks, and the things we did when we played like sisters and friends. Pa says I can remember her just like I remember Ma. But I don't really remember Ma. I forgot her face soon after she died. Now I can't recall her face or hair, or the sound of her voice. Sometimes, when we make tea with lots of honey, the smell makes me feel I can almost see her, but not enough to really see her in my mind.

Excerpt two - my sentence, grammar and language structure.


dear husband. 3 days past i became the last girl in the world. in 40 pages i will be a woman. pa says i sposed to tell you how i turn into a woman but jon mair says i must write down the herb and spice plans to make farmers better. i want to tell you all about jenna. you know jenna but if i dont write her into my pages i will forget how she looks and the things we did like sisters and frens. pa says i can keep her in my mind like ma but i dont have ma in my mind anymore. i cant tell him that when she went to the old island she left my mind fast. now i dont no her face or hair or the sound of her voice. sometimes i will smell the house after a long time away or smell hunnytea and i can see some of her. but not enuff.


(this is draft one, and I've just realised my spelling of 'write' doesn't work. It should be rite (same structure as bite) and also 'anymore' might be a little bit complex). So excerpt two is a little more difficult to read than one, because there was uncommon spellings that work phonetically in the main, no capitals, no commas and no apostrophes. It is the way I would imagine someone writing if they had grown up in a largely oral culture.

Now I could go over and edit the text to make it modern (which is the first thing I imagine an agent would suggest), but then the book would lose its spine. The language develops through the text as the girl becomes more confident, and so to blunt these early chapters would ruin it. It would, in fact, make me hate it.

That's a bit of a dilemma, because if you take chapters 1 - 5 out of context (they're short chapters, I promise), or even just ripped out a single sentence, then you would assume that this was written by one of a million chimps who had just struck the typewriter keys with uncommon luck. When you read beyond chapter 5, things start falling into place (the grammatical progression has been the hardest thing to manage so far, and it still feels a little abrupt at times) and it starts to feel more like a more traditionally written piece.

So. What to do? How do I get people beyond the first five chapters?

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Cover concept 2


I think I prefer this one. It has the paper, which is the most important bit, but having it made into a toy is perfect. I think I might need to make and photograph my own boat though, as the paper should have some handwriting on it. I think I prefer the classic looking type rather than the hand-written look of the last one.

Monday 27 February 2012

More worry about self-publishing (hey, I've got to worry about something, the writing's going well).

I've never read a 'how to write a novel book' before (with the exception of Stephen King's On Writing and George Orwell's six rules) but I thought as I was being serious with the book writing this time, I'd splash out £8 (from a birthday Amazon voucher) on a Writer's Digest book of collected articles on writing and selling fiction. There was some pretty good advice in there about managing outlines and dialogue, as well as rather too much rubbish on how to write 'Christian fiction', but the section on publishers and agents was pretty enlightening. Mostly this:

"The moment the contract was signed, you lost rights and control over how your manuscript will be published." and:

"Similarly, when it comes to your book's title, know that it could very well be changed, and that it's your publishers prerogative to do so."

No thanks. While publishers have distribution channels, they don't appear to involve themselves in significant marketing or advertising for books lower down their lists, instead leaving that to the authors themselves, leaving me wondering why I would need one in the first place.

Here's Anthony Horowitz saying that publishers do provide a valuable service, in making sure a manuscript is edited and ready for mainstream consumption.

As a professional editor, I think that all texts will benefit from a decent edit. But how do I approach this as an author. I might see if I can find a fellow editor who'd work for a percentage. Or I might just do what I did with essays at university and read the pages very closely in a random order and rely on the fact that I'm very, very good at my job.

Saturday 25 February 2012

Flight fiction (Apostrophien short story)

Here's the idea. I took off today from Geneva. 10 minutes into the flight, I was allowed to switch my laptop on. I had approximately one hour before the 'Prepare the cabin for landing' announcement, which meant I had to switch the lappy off.

1 hour = 500 words (1st draft + line edit)
This is what I wrote.

The Last Cows (An Apostrophien vignette)


The last time Jenna saw her parents they were towering over her, concerned and angry as she clung to her stomach and threw up in the garden. Her father’s hand on her shoulder gripped more than it needed to.
“Stuffed with honey again?” It wasn't really a question.

Jenna tried to reply so Pa wouldn’t be so fierce, but her gut wasn’t finished. With a huge, painful burp she threw another load of tepid sick among the stalks of long dead giant daisies.

“I… I didn’t."

Her mother’s sleeve was already damp with tears and small splashes of vomit. She used it to wipe across Jenna’s eyes and flour cheeks. “Somethin' got in there that wanted out.

“And you were with Abigale.”

“No honey! Just felt sick!”

Ma's voice was a little softer. "You'll be alright today won't you." It wasn't a question.

"Yeh. Felt sick."

They left her crying in the garden.

The sick feeling hung around like a grudge for the rest of the day as the girl amused herself looking at pressed flowers and trying to remember the plant poem Abigale sang on the beach yesterday. She put the corn dollies out, tatty now after two seasons of love, and sang to them in voice thick with the second cold of winter.

The play was a distraction. She was waiting. Waiting to explain and fix the injustice of her parents' anger. She didn't touch the honey. Didn't gorge herself. She was eight now, not five. If she told them, they would believe now. Because she was eight.

Eventually she held down cool water from the stream, then ate stale bread as the light beyond the open windows faded, taking the last wamth of the day with it. The stars came out.

It wasn't Paul and Katie Vizard who returned though, it was Jon Mair. The town doctor being guided by a visibly wilting Father.

"Hello," Jenna said.

"Morning missy," Mair replied. "Can we go in." Not a question.

One of the cows had keeled today, Mair told her, and her parents would have to spend 40 days in Crofter's Cottage to be sure they were good and safe. The keeled cow had already been burned, he said, and the other two would be skinned by Hans Rish and then their meat burned.

"Can I go with them?" Jenna asked.

"No," he said. "But don't worry. You'll stay with me until they're safe. You'll all be back 'ere in no time, I shouldn't wonder."

It didn't happen.

40 days passed and Paul and Katie Vizard died, Jon Mair told the girl, in Crofter's Cottage from the same sickness that keeled the cow over.

Five days later the girl stood on the beach with the rest of the town and watched as the burning raft floated out past the surf, orange flames grabbing at the sky and sea like a thousand desperate wishes pressed into a dirty page. She felt Jon Mair's hand land on her shoulder.

"You'll be fine."

Friday 24 February 2012

Stewart Lee's lesson for concerned writers everywhere

OK. I've never got this far before and I have discovered something beautiful as near the final parts of draft 1 and start thinking about draft 2. There are very definite themes running through the text that I wasn't expecting, and the one I had planned is actually fairly strong already and will require just a little shifting of the POV's thoughts to reinforce things. The beauty is that these have bubbled up organically so (to my ear at least) don't feel forced. It would be easy to make the themes too obvious and contrived, so I have to make sure I haul things back and make sure I don't leave the character's voice behind.

While writing the last four chapters I've been reading Stewart Lee's books about stand up comedy and his attempts to both annoy and captivate the audience at the same time. This, obviously, is not my intention (Radiohead tells us you have to gain an audience before trying to alienate them), but the idea that the audience is willing to follow you through plainly difficult moments if you can reassure them early on that you know where you're going, and everything will come together in the end, is something that I think is easy to forget. The reader needs confidence in the author. If it's your first go at a novel, that's quite difficult to achieve.

Part of the appeal of writing stuff here, I think, is the ability to prepare the reader (look, I'll just assume I'm going to have a reader) for the fact that the beginning is not traditional, but that things change as the story develops. It would be easy to pick up chapter one or two and, because of the nature of the voice, think: 'this person just can't write. Can't even spell!'

Some of the short fiction pieces that I plan to post here (character/event pieces written with a more traditional voice, but within the same history) will hopefully provide this sense of comfort that allows me to take the reader along when things go strange.

The other thing I've done, which makes me very happy, is writing the final line. I know how it all ends.

Thursday 23 February 2012

First cover idea


First cover idea. Designed to look good on the Kindle screen. I like the graininess of this kind of black and white and the title text is supposed to look written with a rough charcoal stick. And a bee because I love bees.

Wednesday 22 February 2012

First line audition

The last to join was a girl who called herself Abigale. She had a gun.

Bloody miracle

This is a short story I wrote a while ago. It has nothing to do with my novel. It got to the stage of an outline for a complete novel, but this was the only bit I decided to save.

Bloody Miracle

Pilgrims set to arrive at church to witness bleeding window

Church officials have denied that a window featuring a depiction of Christ as a child at St Mary's church in Banton has begun to 'bleed'. The window, which graces the eastern wall of the church's Lady Chapel, has been covered since March 2001 and can only be viewed from inside the church.


Rev. Daniel Fable, the vicar of St Mary's said he couldn't comment on the claims as the church had launched an investigation into the matter. "St Mary's has been, and remains, open to anyone who cares to visit," he said. Since the rumours began, though, Rev. Fable said that the congregation had slowly been growing, but that movement within the church would still be restricted to the main building.


"We're glad to see so many people interested in the church, but the Lady Chapel remains off-limits to any visitors as it's currently not safe," he said. The Bishop of Bristol said the window was damaged during a storm in 2001 and, while a fund-raising drive had been launched to repair the damage, it had fallen far short of the £20,000 needed to refurbish the window. 


"The Lady Chapel at Banton was damaged quite severely during the storm and the repair bill has so far been beyond the funds of the church," he said. 


"Suggestions that we're covering something up, or keeping people from 'a miracle' are nonsense. It would be irresponsible for the church to put parisioners in danger." Banton resident and churchgoer Edward Sampson said the church should come clean about the window. "My wife and I have been members of the congregation at St Mary's since we moved into the town 15 years ago. To deny us access to one part of the church smacks of a cover up," he said Sampson claims another member of the church saw the blood spattered window after getting lost in the church. "My friend was too scared to come forward," he said. "But she didn't think the church should keep quiet about the miracle any longer. I've written to the Bishop, the Archbishop and [local MP] Quentin Neil demanding answers."


Banton Herald and Guardian. May 16, 2008.


The window was bleeding, but Dan Fable – the reverend Daniel Fable – couldn't recall when he'd actually known this. It must have been more that two years ago but less than seven. Oddly, he'd grown to accept the faint visions he'd seen above the head of each parishioner as he stared out from the pulpit, and just put it down to stress or madness. Mrs Johnson always dreaming of her mangy cat Jerico; Mr Johnson thinking of dear departed Paula who didn't reach her first birthday thanks to the bad aim of a Luftwaffe pilot; Edward Sampson's desire for money; and his wife's constant subconscious pleading for Edward to avoid her arms next time because summer was near and she'd look silly wearing long sleeves.

It probably would have come to light earlier, Fable thought, except the window was in the back of the church, and as the congregation diminished, so too did the reasons for anyone but him going beyond the main building. But it was bleeding, and bled still. And now someone knew – someone who wasn't Dan Fable – and things were changing fast. The Bishop had scheduled a recce for the Archbishop and the congregation had started to look hungry.

The really terrifying thing was that Fable had seen everything that would happen, including his actions that would destroy the window and shatter the hopes of millions of pilgrims, but was helpless to stop any of it happening. He was a passenger screaming bloody murder into the ear of the driver, but totally unable to force himself – themselves – from the path of an oncoming double decker bus. After two years of floaty-parishioner visions and destruction dreams, he'd finally given up trying to stop things from happening and had let events wash over him: a baptism of apathy.

No, not apathy. It had become a fascination, a meditation on the power of God and a surprising anticipation of his role in the coming five week tragedy. The very opposite, some would think, of a test of faith; but it was a test nonetheless.

The test was this: Fable knew exactly how and when he would smash the window; he knew precisely how many souls would be lost, spared, resurrected and saved because of his action and could see – and occasionally feel – the grief of those who lost the opportunity to seek fulfillment under the bloody gaze of the Son of God. The test was also this: the moments after the event (as he came to think of it) were the deepest darkest void; like witnessing the picosecond before the big bang on an infinite loop. He knew that, for everyone on earth who wasn't Dan Fable, he would be Judas. Some days he relished the notion, but most of the time his terror was like a living thing pushing simultaneously at his guts, heart and brain. Often he thought the knowledge would kill him, except he knew and understood (did he understand?) God's plan.

The first real pilgrim arrived on May 17th. The sun was bright and high in the sky as Julie-Anne Eldridge negotiated the narrow path, her father wheeled before her like a chariot of piss and cancer, and hammered at the black door of the church. Her knocking persisted as Fable carefully put down the hymn books he'd been inspecting, smoothed down his white shirt and crossed slowly to the door, his footsteps eventually matching the pace of the knock.

He grabbed the sliding lock aware of, and in many ways prepared for, the flood that would follow. He fixed the smile to his face and greeted his destiny.

"Hello," he said. "I'm Dan, would you like to come in?"

Sticking it to the man (and doing a little maths)

How do you become a publisher? I made a decision a few months into the actual writing of this that I would probably not attempt to ‘get a publisher’*, but rather do it myself as both a physical thing and as an e-book. It might be that this is not suited to a mainstream publisher anyway - for example, there are no missing scrolls or plots to kill the pope in it - but also I have worked for a publisher before (you can still buy my lovely software books) and the rewards for long nights, difficult conversations and relentless hard slog are... underwhelming. Of course I still enjoy the royalty cheques when they arrive, but the remuneration was nowhere near as good as, for example, producing similar content for magazines. Also, there is a difference in work done as a commission and work done for personal satisfaction.

My rough economic breakdown is this. As a single author of a book that retailed in the region of £20, the royalty I picked up per copy was about £1 (although the statements are written in gibberish so I can’t really be sure). Obviously a technical book has various additional needs (they need techie editors, tend to be thick, and have lots of images in), but the author take seemed to me to be on the low side. There didn’t seem to be an awful lot of marketing, but the publishers did have established relationships with tech reviewers so the likelihood of coverage in the trade press was improved. I’ve no idea what this did for sales.

By the same token I can self-publish this book, set a relatively low price (around the £1.50 to £2.00 mark) to make it a viable impulse buy, and earn about the same per sale as I did for the techie books. Also, of course, I get to keep all the rights to the book, characters and everything else - some authors seem to lose those, by accident or choice. Both Amazon and Apple have revenue sharing models based on 30/70 in the author’s favour, and as I have a lot of design and editing experience, I think I could put together a professional looking package without too much additional expense. Once that’s done, I would just need to find ways of publicising the book and growing the audience. I think in this, I will have to be as creative as when actually writing the book, because I will have a small budget and need to make a big impact.

So there may be a tiny audience for this kind of fiction, but that’s not the same as there being no audience for it (unless there is no audience for it). Accepted wisdom is that larger publishers seek out books which can be pigeon-holed as ‘the next X’, where X is the latest blockbuster that found fans in Richard and Judy, Costa Coffee or the great and powerful Hollywood, and that they’re less interested in quirky or difficult stories (mine is quirky but not difficult).

It seems there are plenty of tools available for publishing to the various platforms and devices, and also a couple of print on demand outfits who can manage the - more expensive - physical copies.

* This also means I don’t have to deal with Beatles/Rowling type rejection by publishers who ‘don’t understand what I’m trying to do.’

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Title reinforcing structure, voice and intent

I really like restrictions. And so basing a novel in 1511 in a small community with an oral tradition, little written grammar, and a very limited space in which to write means I have to really think about word choice, sentence structure and the expression of ideas that I’ve taken for granted since I could write.


One of the things I spent time pondering during the think phase of this was the development of the apostrophe (hence the name of the book) which came into general use (Wikipedia says) in 1530 as a form of elision or omission, and then was also adopted to denote the possessive.


But it has an earlier meaning. The Greek version of the word (which is the title of the book) means 'to turn away' and was also used to denote a character in a play who was addressed, but wasn't present on the stage. In this epistolary novel, the apostrophien is the first named character - dear husband - in the story and he is also unknown because he exists only in the future. These letters (it's still a little difficult to think of them as letters) are a form of telepathy where the thoughts of the girl are transmitted via a common form of magic to someone months or perhaps even years away from their initial existence.


We take these things for granted, but if each piece of paper was precious and irreplaceable, and each piece had to impart something meaningful, how would that impact on the ways we communicate?

Structure reinforced by the first line

There is no other way to write this than as an epistolary novel because the act of writing is central to the culture I have created. The interesting thing - I think, at least - is that this is the only thing the girl is expected to write in her life; the culture is largely based on oral teaching and histories and this act of writing is a well-trodden rite of passage (and I thought of the punny 'write of passage' in bed last night) that all girls must complete. I don’t know where I got this idea from, but maybe it came from the experience of being at university and noticing the way my writing changed as I became more adept at that particular mode of address. Unless you’re Sheldon Cooper, the academic mode can be a challenge to adopt (especially if you’re experienced in more florid or journalistic prose), and the critique can feel a little harsh in the first year, though it’s still nothing compared to the attentions of an attentive newspaper sub. However, as I progressed through my undergraduate and graduate studies, I grasped the form quite well and became a better (academic) writer. And as my methods of expression grew more sophisticated, I think I was able to articulate more sophisticated ideas, which possibly allowed me to think more sophisticated ideas. There’s probably been some work done on this... or work to be done.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that being able to express ideas well (or at all) allows for a person to examine those ideas more critically.

While pondering the meaning of all this, I read Frankenstein (I started reading just after arriving in Geneva, knowing that I’d be walking the same locations as the doctor and his monster), and the thing I noticed most about its structure - and I have no idea why I didn’t notice before - was its Inception-like parcelling up of individual narratives. I found it to be like a well-formed piece of XML code with it’s closing tags all in place (unlike The Turn of the Screw which fails to close off any of its opening tags, reinforcing that it’s a story all about unfinished business, inconclusive conclusions and poor intranet coding).

<Captain>

<Victor>
<Monster>
<Family>
</Family>
</Monster>
</Victor>
</Captain>

So, the captain is writing to his sister, and tells her what Victor told him, Victor relates the story of the monster and the monster relates the story of the family he watches. One thing that always struck me about this was that the passages of narrative were far too long - Victor would not have remembered the feelings and thoughts of the monster so well - for an oral telling, and so I wanted to break mine up and, as luck would have it, the structure presented itself in the form of the first line of the story which came to me one evening as I was talking with some friends outside of the pub.



The first part goes:


dear husband. 3 days ago i became the last girl in the world. in 40 pages i will be a woman.





Monday 20 February 2012

Hello. This is the start.

It’s time to start writing some stuff about my writing. I’m just about two-thirds of the way into writing a novel. It’s very exciting because I usually start writing with what I think is a great idea and then after about 10,000 words I kind of tail off and the story languishes. There are, I think, a couple of reasons for this.

1. Thinking ahead. I become bored with the story because I know what’s going to happen.
2. Time. It’s difficult to devote enough time to writing when writing and editing is your main job - it just feels like homework.

So, why have I got further this time? Dunno, but I suspect that it’s because I think the story is so good, and the moments of transition are so novel, that I’m actually excited about letting people read it. I want to know if people think it’s as clever as I do. Also, though I have plotted this thing to within an inch of its life, I left gaps in the structure for the free flow of the kind of ideas that just seem to emerge from your fingers as you type, so there are still elements of surprise for me which can have an impact later because the broader structure is still quite flexible.

The last thing that has sustained me has been the complexity. Now, I am writing a very simple story about curiosity, but in order for it to work I have to construct a culture - complete with a novel mythology about its own origins - that works, and this means thinking about everything that might exist within that culture. It’s not enough to say what the characters had for lunch, I wanted to know where it came from, whether the culture could sustain it as a product and what happened to the waste. Who cooked? What did they eat off? Often I used a combination of finding stuff out in books or the internet, talking with family and friends, or just making it up as I went along (oh, the glories of inventing your own society).

And so I began writing this by walking around with the story in my head for a couple of years, thinking through the plot points, lines of dialogue and issues that need to be solved within the culture before writing down any notes. Once I had the whole story sorted in my head, I started plotting the lead character’s path through the events, writing down a single sentence to sum up each chapter (told you it was a simple story) and then thinking about how she would find out about things, and - a more challenging proposition - relate these events in her writing.



There are some particular problems which I have to negotiate and chief among these is the difficulty of adding surprise to an epistolary novel that is being written by a young girl because 'she' doesn't have the same sense of pace that I have. Therefore, if she discovers one day that her house has been ransacked by thieves, then that's the first thing she will relate. It won't be:


"I came home after eating out with Barry. The food was OK, but Barry kept going on about jazz music - as though I was actually interested - and eventually some tiresome anecdote about Dizzy Gillespie made me want to chew my own face off. So I cried off a little early. Ever the gentleman he walked me home, and ever the lady, I offered a kiss on the cheek in thanks. When I walked through the door, I noticed the chair in the hall had been tipped over and all the lights - including Dad's never extinguished desk lamp - were out."


But more like.


"We've been robbed. I don't know what's gone, but there's no one else here so I called Dad and told him to come home. If I'd left the cafe earlier, I might have disturbed whoever was in here. Might be dead."


So each chapter, or significant section, has to begin with the big information, then a follow up with context or colour. Difficult.