Urban Occult: Pre-Order Your Copy for Infinite Win

As I may have mentioned before, I am dead chuffed to have a story in Urban Occult, a new anthology of weirdness coming soon from Anachron Press; on the scale of "effed up-ness", I believe this story, Spider Daughter Spider, has an effed up factor of 11, and I'm very proud of it - not to mention that it's appearing alongside some absolutely stonking stories by some tremendously talented writers. It's going to be ace.

The good news is, you can pre-order this little beauty (and I mean really, the cover is a piece of fried gold right there) and the universe will smile upon you for doing so. Here be the deets:

Urban Occult Limited Pre-Order

 

Limited to 50.

 

Behind urban life, weird and horrific things fester. 

The whispers and chills of things long gone… the promise of power from the darkness… the seduction of those that lie in the shadows… the occult is all around us: in town houses, in mansions, and in your very own street.

Editor Colin F. Barnes collected together fifteen stories by a cast of critically acclaimed authors from around the globe who look into the stygian gloom, explore the dark corners of our houses, and peer into the abyss of human temptation.

Featuring stories by: Gary McMahon, Ren Warom, Gary Fry, Mark West, K.T. Davies, Nerine Dorman, Alan Baxter, Adam Millard, Julie Travis, Jason Andrew, James Brogden, A.A Garrison, Jennifer Williams, Sarah Anne Langton, and Chris Barnham.

Special Pre-Order Edition Limited to 50.

This pre-order edition means you will get the book at least a week to two weeks ahead of general release and:

A FREE ebook version (for any eReader)

and A FREE ebook of Day of Demons. (eBooks will be emailed to you on the 4th of March).

Just £9.99 (+£2.99 shipping anywhere in the world).

Pre-Order here: http://www.anachronpress.com/product/anthologies/urban-occult-limited-pre-order/ 

 

The State of Play

Greeting from the mysterious mists of editing! I thought I’d just pop my head over the battlements so you know I’m still here; we might be down to chewing the shoe leather and eyeing up the rats for dinner, but the People’s Republic of Novel Revisions is still going strong.

 

No, I don’t know where I’m going with that either.

 

It’s been a busy few weeks. I’m in the midst of revising The Copper Promise and that has proven to be an oddly exhausting activity, at least mentally. It’s fascinating though; when Juliet gave me her pointers for smartening the thing up, it gave me a new perspective on the book, and now I understand rather more about the characters than I did previously. Which just shows how incredibly useful a very perceptive reader can be.

 

So yes! It’s very exciting, actually. One of my biggest jobs (ahem) is to reduce the word count as The Copper Promise is rather on the hefty side. On the face of it, to my delicate writer’s soul, this feels nigh on impossible. “I’ll never manage it!” I wail, chewing on my pens in Eat and worrying the Kenny Everett look-a-like who makes the coffee. “Every word is essential!”

 

Except it’s not, of course. I have spare words all over the shop, and scenes I am perhaps not utterly happy with, and so the Big Fat Chunky Word Count is being whittled down to a slightly more slippery number. It’s oddly satisfying, plus it’s enormous fun to be back with Wydrin and the gang. I’ve missed them.

 

In other bits of small news, Dark Fiction Magazine has reopened to submissions, and for our March episode we’re looking for stories inspired by folklore (a favourite subject of mine) so get scribbling! And yes, I am still doing the Everything and the Cat Project (even if one night of booze almost made me forget to upload the thing) and at the end of this month I’ll do a little post rounding up my favourite pictures so far. In the meantime, if you feel the need for random photos of trees and Lego in your life, you can follow me on instagram (username sennydreadful, as ever).

The Other End of the Year Post

Well, essentially 2012 was the year of The Copper Promise. As you might remember, it was around this time last year that I released the very first part onto the wild plains of Amazon; The Copper Promise: Ghosts of the Citadel was supposed to be the first in a series of short sword and sorcery novellas. They were supposed to be fast, written and released one after the other, and they were supposed to be short.

 

And then while I was writing part two, at the beginning of this year, several things happened at once to change that. Firstly, I realised that releasing each part after I’d written it just wasn’t going to work – maybe if it was a silly thing that didn’t really matter, I could get away with that, but TCP was growing more complicated, and if I wanted it to be good, I would need to be able to go back and polish. And that was the other major thing: The Copper Promise was growing. I loved the characters, who felt frighteningly real to me, and I loved the story, which had accidentally grown into some sort of weird epic/pulp hybrid.

 

So I threw out the idea of instant gratification and wrote parts 2, 3 and 4 in 2012. And then I redrafted, and edited, and then edited some more, and ended up with a book nearly twice as long as anything else I’d written (it’s still too long). And what happens to it now? Well, that is the question.

 

Thanks to some quirks of fate and a writing buddy who always seems to know what’s going on before I do (I’m looking at you, Adam) The Copper Promise ended up on the desk of the fabulous Juliet Mushens of the Agency Group, and in a sudden twist of awesomeness that I’m still getting my head around, I got an agent. Undoubtedly one of the highlights of my year was meeting Juliet for the first time (who is every bit as sharp and hilarious in real life) and hearing her quote bits of my book back at me. I mean, you wouldn’t think that would be weird, but it is. In a brilliant way. Next year proves to be very interesting indeed.

 

There were other things happening in 2012, of course. After ignoring it for a year I finally summoned up the courage to read and edit my Urban Fantasy book The Snake House, and much to my huge surprise I didn’t totally hate it. I also started work on a YA Fantasy book called London-Under-Sea (all weird religion, sea monsters and fishpunk) although that is on hold for the moment while I revise The Copper Promise. In non-book stuff Mass Effect 3 came out and proved that it is indeed the greatest video game series of all time, if not the greatest SF trilogy of all time, and I sobbed and cheered my way through it in an epically messy fashion. I finally watched Avatar: The Last Airbender and utterly fell in love with it.

 

Other, more random moments of 2012: I saw two sets of friends get married and danced at their weddings, I wore a corset for the first time and didn’t die, I oversaw new episodes of Dark Fiction Magazine, and I attended Bristolcon, which was brilliant. I got hugged by a wookie in Wales, saw my name in the acknowledgements of a real, live book (twice, technically) and partially helped nag my lovely boyfriend into taking up writing regularly again.

 

And that’s all I can really remember at the moment – no doubt I’ll have left something significant off the list, but all in all, I reckon I can chalk 2012 up as a goodun’. Wishing you all a fantastic new year full of excellence and joy!

 

Rejections, a New Perspective: Or Developing Your Crusty Carapace

I haven’t mentioned it all that often on this blog, but these days I edit the audio fiction website Dark Fiction Magazine, and over the last year or so reading submissions has given me a new perspective on the short story market.

 

I know what it’s like to get rejections. I even have one from Black Static which I’m quite proud of, just because it came on a slip of paper and this somehow made it seem ancient and special, and I’ve lost track of how many I’ve received by email. It’s a very painful process, and I have ground my teeth and cursed the gods and the demons and all the little goblins in between, but after a while it doesn’t hurt as much. There are those markets, of course, which you’re desperate to break and each “no thanks” email is a kick in the writerly-ball-sack, but eventually you do start to form the beginnings of a crusty carapace that protects you from the worst of the agony.

 

Now, as the editor of DFM I’m the one sending rejection notices, and for a writer that is a very odd experience indeed. I feel bad. I feel conflicted. I occasionally cackle with the power of it all and stroke my evil cat. Mostly though, it’s a sobering process because it demonstrates exactly how complicated a rejection can be. I have, for example, said no to plenty of stories that are actually very good, but not right for DFM, or not a good fit for the upcoming episodes. I struggle with this a lot, because I don’t want to say to these writers, “you are crap”, because even though the email will say this isn’t quite right for us, it always feels like you’re being told “you’re crap”. Often though there simply isn’t room for everything good that hits the slush pile; last year we did five episodes (four stories an episode) and next year we’ll probably do four episodes, and that just doesn’t leave much space. Every story has to be very, very good and every story has to fit the episode – that leads to a lot of rejections.

 

There’s a lot of crap too, of course. For every story I agonize over there’s probably another two that get chucked pretty swiftly. Most of the time someone’s had an idea for a story and hasn’t quite got the craft to tell it yet, or, being a genre magazine, the story falls into common genre patterns, such as “It’s horror! Stick loads of blood and guts and possibly some uncomfortable sex in there!” I do, admittedly, have very high standards for short stories and a lot of submissions will come a cropper, and that’s as it should be; I want DFM to host the best weird fiction, after all. Some stories we receive just aren’t SF, Fantasy or Horror at all (which puzzles me a little – the website banner is a giant green zombie person, so you’d think that would be a big clue) and some are just too long or obscure.

 

If knowing how these things work hasn’t quite made rejections easier for me to stomach, it has at least made them easier to understand, and a year of chomping through the slush pile has taught me an awful lot about editing as well as writing. For 2013 we’re going to announce the themes of the episodes beforehand, giving writers more of a chance to refine their stories for the magazine, and hopefully this will lead to me sending fewer rejection emails. Plus the cat finds all the cackling puts her off her lunch.

NaNoWriMo Day 4: Weekend Writing

Today’s writing mascot is Duncan. I imagine his writing advice would be something like: “In war, victory. In peace, vigilance. In November, too much caffeine and fingerless gloves.”

Historically I’m not very good at writing at the weekend. I have quite a strict writing routine during the week so my brain tends to flop into SUPER RELAX MODE on a Saturday and it’s a minor miracle if I’m out of bed before midday. Although I always have good intentions of getting some words down, by the time I’m dressed and awake, it’s time to eat dinner and slip into a food-induced coma.

This weekend though I have behaved myself. I’m about 2,000 words ahead of where I need to be for Nanowrimo, and London-Under-Sea is moving along at the pace I want it to. We’ve witnessed Esther’s troubling beginnings, had a quick swim around the submerged city, and met Isaac, who is smouldering in an angsty and brooding fashion. At the moment I’m feeling quite happy with where it’s going, and looking forward to seeing where this book wants to take me.

 How about you? I’d love to hear some Nanowrimo progress reports in the comments!

NaNoWriMo Day 1: Mascots and Pigs

The first day of Nanowrimo is under my belt, along with half a packet of Percy Pigs and too much pasta, and I have to say it’s gone quite well.

            That’s not tremendously surprising, as the first day is always the easiest. Now, the third week, that’s a bitch, when you’re tired and you’ve forgotten what this was supposed to be about and you’ve bought so many packets of Percy Pigs that the people in M&S are starting to give you slightly fearful looks… but all that is a way off yet.

            I’ve had the opening scenes of London-Under-Sea in my head for a few months now, and it feels good to get them out onto the screen. With the characters walking and talking and generally getting into trouble they’re starting to fill out, to become real people, and the little details of the world are dropping into place. I didn’t know before I started writing this morning, for example, that Mr Tallow was actually quite liked by the children, or that the object Esther was remembering is a golden plate. I love finding this stuff out; it’s the joy of a first draft.

            I’m giving my eyeballs a rest now and ruminating on what might crop up on day two. I doubt I’ll be blogging every day, but I might just throw up the occasional update, more for my own reference than anything else.

 

Oh, and Grumpy Bear is today’s writing mascot. I should point out that the word next to him is “Sea”, and not… the other word.

 

Halloween Shorts Part 2: A Very Short & Quite Silly Story From Me

A brisk little story for Halloween - do let me know what you think!

Behind_the_Scenes_FINAL.docx Download this file

The Next Big Thing Blog Hop

I got tagged in a blog thing by the marvellous and handy-with-a-sword Fran Terminiello, so witness my rambling answers…

What is the working title of your 
The Snake House

 

Where did the idea come from for the book? 
Originally I wanted to write a story about someone who has to make a journey into hell; in the end, Felia doesn’t quite go to hell, but she goes somewhere pretty close. I also had an urge to write a book set in London, something I’d tried before and utterly failed at.

 

What genre does your book fall under?
Too my own surprise, I suppose it’s Urban Fantasy with strong elements of horror.

 

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 
I never really picture actors as my characters while writing a book, but if a fabulously wealthy Hollywood producer gave me a fat wad of cash to film The Snake House, these are the people I’d suggest (I will never reveal how long I spent agonizing over this):

 

Zawe Ashton as Felia Jones

 

Ellen Thomas as Wilhelmina Sunbow (although she’d have to be aged up rather a lot)

Maggie Smith as Katya Orbison

Miriam Margoyles as Mavis Bickerstaff

Damien Maloney as the adult Stanley Cubb

Robert Sheehan as Hob

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 
I’m cheating slightly here, but:

 

Felia Jones is less than pleased to be moving to a run-down council estate with her mother and half-brother – she is even less interested in the ravings of three old ladies who claim she has the “sight”. But they know a darkness is growing at Cornwall House, a shadow of a past so terrible it has been forcibly forgotten, and if Felia Jones can’t face it down they may all be lost.
 

Because what happened on the third floor left a scar that won’t heal, and the Snake House is hungry again.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 
I would love for it to be published in a way that means I don’t have to make the cover…

 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I wrote the first draft in two months, thanks to the slightly unhinged process of Nanowrimo.

 

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? 
The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch has a similar feel (London, magic, weirdness) as well as Kate Griffin’s Matthew Swift sequence.

Who or What inspired you to write this book? 
I really wanted to write a horror novel, or, in a way I felt it was expected of me; I’ve written lots of short horror stories, but all my books are fantasy. Let’s see, I thought, if I can maintain the creepiness. I’d also done a lot of reading on serial killers (cheery stuff) and I really wanted to explore the nature of evil and what lies behind a monster.

 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
There are three brilliant old ladies in this. And there’s a sequence that genuinely still freaks me out big time, despite having written it myself and having read it several times now. Oh, and the last couple of chapters make me cry.

What stage is your book at now?
It’s been read by my lovely beta team, and it’s been redrafted twice, so now it is winging its way out into the wider world, hopefully to find a home somewhere.

 

 

Here we go! Tag, you’re it:

Andrew Reid

Adam Christopher

Emma Newman

K.T Davies

Stories From Another London - One Eye Grey anthology

I'm pleased to report that my short story London Stone has made an appearance in the latest collection from that delightfully ghoulish penny dreadful, One Eye Grey. Details below!

 

Press_Release_stories_from_another_London[1].docx Download this file

 

NaNoWriMo - A November of Novel Adventuring

Yes, it’s that time of the year again.

 

And I do appear to have signed up, partly because I can’t bear not to, and partly because I do have a new book project waiting and raring to go. It’s exciting to browse the forums again, reading about everyone prepping for the long month of madcap novel writing to come. It may not work out this year – things are a touch up in the air for me, in several ways – but I think I’m going to be there at the start line at least, fingerless gloves and cheap Halloween sweets in hand.

 

I’ve participated in Nano for the last four years. In my first (2008, I think) I wrote a short children’s book called Bird and Tower. Next up came Ink for Thieves, a book I still love and hope to find a home for, followed by Dead Zoo Shuffle, a book I’m not that massively keen on these days but isn’t entirely hopeless. Last year I did the Beta month of Camp Nanowrimo, and followed that up by doing the official month too, managing to write the entirety of The Snake House in two months, which was something of a record for me.

 

And as everyone starts to get excited, there’s usually a wave of cynicism about Nano too, and I’ve seen the first trickles of this. All those amateurs, moan the weary cynics, thinking they can write. 50,000 words isn’t even really a book, and they’ve never even heard of editing…

 

Sod that, I say. Yes, a lot of young people take part in Nanowrimo, and yes, lots of them might be writing some rather familiar re-hashes of boy wizards, angsty vampires, and demon-hunting hotties, but so what? It’s very easy to sneer at these things (and at fanfiction, although perhaps that is unwise – fanfic led to the biggest publishing hoo-ha of this year, after all) but I’d much rather see people (particularly young people) getting excited and making things, than, say, the umpteenth wannabe farting Wannabe by the Spice Girls on Britain’s Got Talent. Or maybe that’s just me.

 

Besides which, Nano teaches you all sorts of important stuff if writing is where your soul rests. So the first book you harass into life via Nano might not be that great – it might even suck the big one – 50,000 words will still show you all sorts of wonders you’d never even have guessed at on November the 1^st. Plus, Nano shows you (albeit in a slightly extreme way) that it is entirely possible to fit writing into your life, and that is often a wonderful and life changing thing to learn. It certainly changed mine.

 

So come, mighty Nano Vikings, with your cups of coffee and writing mascots, let’s go kick November up the plot bunny!

(and while you're here, tell me how you prepare for Nano)

 

Where do you get your ideas? And all that jazz.

Supposedly one of the most exasperating questions a writer can get is “Where do you get your ideas?” Presumably this is because we’re not allowed to answer with: “My grandfather bequeathed to me an ancient and magical book, and within these goblin-encrusted pages new ideas breed like rutting succubae…” or “I stole them off my mate”. I have to admit I can’t recall ever having been asked (although I do occasionally get: “You enjoy that, do you?” and “Why, Jennifer, why?”)

I think it’s a largely impossible question to answer, because most of the time we just don’t know. I was considering this yesterday when I started writing a short story out of the blue. I haven’t written a short for yonks, and when the initial flurry of activity had died down, I did stop and think: “Where on earth did that come from?”

You’d think there would be something. Was I looking at a particular word at the time, or was it the tinny beat of someone’s MP3 player that triggered it? I don’t know. The thing is, short story writing is like hunting an animal, something lithe and speedy with a twitching nose and twisty little horns. Once you get the scent of this shy creature, you’re off, streaking through the forest after it; you follow it wherever it twists and hops and leaps, and you can’t stop until you’ve got the bugger.

And then when you’re sitting down, picking fresh deer meat from your teeth (or idea meat, see what I did there?), you stop and think: where did that come from? And for that matter, where am I? Because now there’s no following the trail back, and even if you did, there would just be more of the same forest, looking back at you blankly.

That’s why writing can sometimes be so frustrating, because there is no faking that out of the blue moment. Not even if you think really, really hard (I’ve tried). What you do end up doing, I suspect, is building up a set of weapons with which to encourage these reluctant ideas from your flighty subconscious. In the past, I have found the following to be helpful: going for a walk, having a shower, reading a really good book, flicking through a copy of Brewers Phrase and Fable (always worth doing anyway), being somewhere quiet, being somewhere noisy, looking at art, and getting a decent night’s sleep.

I think we all develop our own tools, and you instinctively go with what works. Because really, as long as the ideas do keep on coming, I’m not going to think too closely about where they come from. The tricksy little bastards.

Relaxing and Holipops and Stephen King

Last week I had a mini-holiday with my lovely bloke. We saw friends, drank too much, ate some ice-cream, watched some jousting, and even spent a couple of days in Brighton, one of my favourite places. It does me good to be near the sea I think; the sound of waves crashing on a shingle beach is one of those odd memory triggers, and instantly I am nine years old again, badgering my nan for another quid to go and play in the slots (we also spent a good couple of hours rediscovering the joy of tuppeny pushdowns and earned a whole five pieces of useless tat for our efforts!).

 

So I managed to relax for a bit. I’m not very good at being relaxed… now, I can hear some of you snortling from here, and yes, it is true I can give off an aura of being so laid back I’m horizontal (hush, you) but I’m normally thinking about stuff. I’m normally being worrisome. I do find it very hard to just, you know, turn my brain off and shut up for five minutes. But for a little while, sitting on Brighton Pier contemplating a polystyrene cup of mussels and watching the blinding sunshine on the water, I managed it.

 

Of course, then I got home and immediately started making to-do lists and generally panicking about all the things I needed to finish, but then, you can’t have everything.

 

One of the things I needed to finish was a guest post over at Insatiable Booksluts, who are having a Stephen King week at the moment. Pop over there and have a look!

My post is going up tomorrow I believe (very 19) so I’ll flag it up on here as soon as it appears.

To Plan or Not to Plan, And Other Meanderings

I haven’t blogged for a while because I haven’t had very much of use to say. I’m like one of those Magic 8 balls that comes up with gems like “Maybe later”, “Buggered if I know”, “I’ve no clue” and “um...” when shaken.

 

So I have no useful answers to any sensible questions you might have, but I am in that sweet zone of novel writing that comes just before you start the actual writing, where the place and the characters and what actually happens are all in a glorious flux. Sometimes I think I like this stage the best because nothing is quite nailed down yet and I’m still chasing research across Wikipedia (lately I have been looking at prehistoric sea creatures, the tallest buildings in London, and how gills work), while the characters are slowly forming in the green room, arguing over the biscuit tin and making endless cups of tea (there’s a girl called Esther who isn’t sure what she is, and a grumpy boy who isn’t happy with my decisions about his hair).

 

Planning though, planning’s the bitch. How much is too much? To plan everything within an inch of it’s life, to know the outcome of every decision and squabble, or to “pants” it and make it up as you go along? These are questions I’ve jousted with before, of course, over and over, and these days I use a mixture of both disciplines – know just enough about where you’re going to get started, and then see where the journey takes you. This is the way that seems to make sense to me, but I’d love to hear from anyone who is a planning purist or a dedicated by-the-seat-of-your-pants-er; how do you approach your next book?

 

Writing, Telepathy and Merricat's Sugar Bowl

Since I’ve been editing and reading more than writing at the moment, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes me stick with a book. More than that, actually, what makes me love a book. There are lots of things, of course, but I think part of it is writing that really makes you see.

 

When I was a kid I wasn’t tremendously fussy about what I read. In fact, I would read anything left in front of me for too long, including my grandad’s newspaper, my nan’s historical novels, cereal packets, instruction manuals… These days I’m a lot pickier, and I will dismiss a lot of books out of hand because they don’t grab me in the first few pages, or give me a clear idea of what my mind should be looking at. Does this make sense yet?

 

In Stephen King’s book On Writing (which is a great read even if you’re not interested in the writing process) he talks about how writing is the truest form of telepathy, and I think that’s what I’m trying to get at. Through words on a page the writer attempts to convey to you what is in his or her mind; when the writing is really good, you see it vividly, almost as if you were really there.

 

Not all fiction works this well. Sometimes you plod through a book and although you enjoy the story and like the characters well enough, you never really feel like you’ve been transported. You never experience that delightful sense of dislocation that comes when you’ve been so immersed in a story that coming back to reality is a serious jolt to your sense of self. I love that. I search for that when I’m looking for a book to read.

 

Terry Pratchett is a good example for me; the Discworld has always felt like home, Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are practically family. I can see the Chalk and I know the streets of Ankh-Morpork. When I was reading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House I felt disorientated right along with the characters, and in an even creepier example, the section where the House tricks them all into being relaxed and happy, I felt relaxed and happy. That is a strange and wondrous piece of magic right there.

 

Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (one of my all time favourites) was almost like a fever dream, full of vivid weirdness – I could see Merricat clearly in my mind’s eye, and will see her forever, I suspect. You know when the writing really sings – the world around you drops away and you’re with Merlin in the crystal cave, or trawling through the haunted halls of Faerie in search of the man with the thistledown hair…

 

George R.R Martin said that we write fantasy to see the colours again, to speak in the language of dreams, and I think that’s what I’m looking for when I’m reading (and when I’m writing too, of course). Writing is magic, like friendship and My Little Ponies.

Ramblings on the Goodreads Hullabaloo

My brain is full of editing at the moment and I’m not very capable of forming reasonable sentences, so here are a few random thoughts in place of a proper blog post.

 

There’s a lot of unpleasantness flying about over Goodreads at the moment – it’s a site that I’ve only recently started to dip my social media toes into, and although I have yet to pay attention to even one of its recommends I do quite enjoy updating my book reading status; adding those extra few percent to my progress bar is so satisfying…

 

Most of the drama basically boils down to “authors are whiny babies who need to shut up” vs “reviewers are sadistic bullies with an agenda”. I think maybe we need to step back and consider the equality of the reader/writer relationship. Maybe, just maybe, we should try and reconcile the idea in our minds that they’re both equally important. Without writers, we’d have nothing to read. Without readers, there would little joy in writing (I know that we all say we write for ourselves, but in the end, you want to share that world, don’t you?)

 

I suspect we’d all avoid getting our knickers in a bunch if we could remember a couple of things:

 

Writers: Just ‘cause you’ve written a book, doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to lord it up over everyone.

Reviewers: Just ‘cause you’re reviewing a book, doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to personally attack the author.

 

The thing is, and I think we forget this on the internet quite often, you are totally free to say what you like. Of course you are. But please do not be all shocked if you say shitty things, and then people point out that you are saying shitty things.

 

We can all chuck our tuppence worth in. That’s what freedom of speech is.

Why a Book is Like a House, and I Can't Juggle

See the full gallery on Posterous

 

I was in the pub with my brother a few months back and he asked me how you go about writing a book. We were, at that stage, reasonably tipsy, approaching that point in the evening when taking part in the pub quiz seems like a really good idea, even though there’s only two of us and I’m terrible at all geography questions. After all, how can you fail when your team name is Simply Williams? (Or Simple Williams, as I suggested afterwards).

 

My brother is a very practical person who thinks in, I think, a structural way. He works at the Globe Theatre making sure all the sets and props do what they’re supposed to, and designs awesome stuff with a 3D programme on his computer (he’s frighteningly clever, despite our general failure at pub quizzes). That sort of thing boggles my mind; I can no more design solid structures than I can juggle chainsaws or solve a Rubiks cube – I don’t have great spatial awareness, and tend to walk into the walls of our flat when I’m thinking a bit hard.

 

So I tried to think of a way of explaining it to him. I couldn’t at the time, because I was drunk, but I’ve been considering it since and I have decided it’s like this:

 

It’s like building a house in your head.

 

Only, you have to imagine all the parts separately, and then you have to keep imagining them all the time so the thing stays up. So, you have to create the foundations in your mind (for me, the foundations are probably the characters) and then you have to keep them there, solid, in your mind, while you build the walls and the floors and the windows and the roof (or the plot, the sub-plots, the side characters, the character motivations). And then when you have the structure, and you can see it all in your head at once without having a nosebleed, you can start decorating; you imagine the wallpaper and the hideous floral carpets, the curtains, the tables, the doors and the funky fireplace with a dead body wedged up inside it. You can see the details, like how a certain character speaks, their foibles and liking for cheese, and the theme is like the central heating system, winding through the house and keeping it cosy.

 

Eventually, you must be able to see the house in its entirety without effort. It must become as familiar and lived-in as the house you grew up in, and you will know what is hidden in every drawer and shoved down the back of every sofa, even if you don’t need to show that to anyone.

 

And that’s what our books become, I think; a home inside our heads. And if we’re lucky, other people will want to come and stay there for a while too.

 

Which is what I would have said to Paul, if I wasn’t drunk.

The First Draft Is Done!

I HAVE WRITTEN ALL THE WORDS!

That is to say: the first draft of The Copper Promise, all four parts, is finished. 

I am drinking wine now, toasting Wydrin, Frith and Sebastian, and looking forward to beating the whole unwieldy thing into shape with the editing stick.

*snoopy dance*

The Copper Promise: Latest News and Also Cartoons

Time for a quick update from Admin5000!

 

So, the last Copper Promise post was a few weeks ago now and I think I was on Chapter Three of part four, which I had yet to give a firm title too. Well, a month later and I’m on Chapter 25 and part four appears to have morphed into Upon the Ashen Blade, which hopefully means I am making progress – quite a lot for me actually, as I seem to have finally developed a system of writing in small bursts that has boosted my word count. Hurrah for that!

 

I’m into the endgame now. There will be perhaps another two chapters (the endings always take longer than I expect them to, so take this with a healthy pinch of salt) and the first draft of The Copper Promise, in its entirety, will be complete. At which point I will probably crawl into a dark room and hide under a pillow for a while, making small uncertain noises as I contemplate the editing job that must take place.

 

This book has turned into a monster. Wydrin would probably find that hilarious, the moo.

 

In other news, isn’t Avatar: The Last Airbender amazing? I’m aware that I am horribly late to the party on this one, but we’ve just started watching series 2 and I’m a bit in love with it. The writing is great and utterly persuasive (how much do I adore Zuko already? It’s ridiculous), the world building and mythology is top notch, and the animation, which benefits from a lovely clean anime style and healthy dollops of slapstick, is just an absolute pleasure. New favourite thing!

Kissy-Face and the Horizontal Charleston

So, how much sauce do you like with your fiction?

 

I’ve been thinking about this lately, partly due to the marvellous Sam Sykes talking about romance on his blog, and partly because it’s a question that will inevitably come up when you’re writing most types of books.

 

I am not a huge fan of romantic fiction, by which I mean actual wild horses and possibly even hot things driven under my fingernails would need to be involved before I actually read any. This is, obviously, due to my own tastes and predilections, and no reflection on romantic fiction or even rom coms or what-have-you, it’s just the way I am. I sometimes wonder if this was because the only books that weren’t mine in the house where I grew up were often Mills & Boon, and I was still at that stage where the sight of a bloke with his muscles bulging out of a torn shirt was firmly in the “Eeew, stinky boys” category.

 

I suspect my other problem with it is, particularly in regard to films, the female character is so often a) the only girl in it, and b) only there to be the love interest. You see, as soon as a woman turns up in some films, you instantly know that she’s going to be getting off with the main character at some point and boom, half the plot is immediately obvious. No surprises for you, young lady! I hate that sort of thing.

 

However, having said all that, I like a sprinkling of the lovey dovey stuff, I do. Love is, after all, often the biggest and most significant emotion we feel in our human lives, and to have that missing from stories would make no sense at all. It’s who we are, of course it should be there. The question is, how much?

 

One of the things that interests me as a writer is the flirtatious relationship, the sort where there is a definite attraction and significant looks are exchanged, but no one is quite sure where they stand. I’m thinking here of Mulder and Scully, and even Niles and Daphne, or, you know, Moonlighting. I always enjoy those sorts of relationships because there is always conflict. I enjoy less those sorts of romances where the main characters meet and instantly fall in love (Legend by David Gemmell is the example I’m thinking of, although I should make it clear I loved that book – not for reasons of romance, mind). When the two characters have arguments, fights, saucy looks, uncomfortable-situations-where-they-might-have-to-spend-the-night-together-in-a-damp-cave, then it’s always interesting.

 

But what happens then? Do we want it resolved? And how much… resolution… do we want to see? I distinctly remember losing some of my passion for the X-Files when it was fairly obvious that they did in fact love each other, and general opinion is that Frasier jumped the shark when Niles and Daphne got married. Not everyone will feel this way, of course, but I wonder if anything is quite as much fun once the conflict is removed. Sex scenes are a tricky subject too, particularly in books – again, it’s an important part of human life and certainly needs to be in fiction, but once the pants are on the floor and the chandelier has been firmly rattled, where do we go from there? What else is there to anticipate?

 

I’d love to know what people think about this. Do you love the lovey-dovey, or do you prefer a seasoning of it? Does sex in a book ramp up your investment in a character to another level? Or do you go for the quick snog and lovers-torn-asunder type of deal? Tell me!

 

Self-Doubt and the Ego and All That Gubbins

Writers and their egos, aye? I mean, blimey. Yowza. We’ve got ‘em, all right.

            There have been a few flare ups online recently, a few megaton drama disturbances in the force set off, shall we say, by a writer’s ego. There was the very recent self-publishing hoo-ha featuring the author now referred to in our household simply as 92K (a drama that has probably actively harmed the profiles of all self-published writers, so thanks for that). And there was the infamous blog post by Christopher Priest concerning the Clarke Awards; say what you like about him, but Mr Priest clearly isn’t burdened with a howling lack of confidence in his own abilities (I loved The Prestige, didn’t love the blog post so much, mainly because it was a bit rude, and the need to be polite at all times is written in big bold letters on my British DNA).

            Self-belief is good, I think. It’s important even. There are times, of course, when it tips over into a slightly obnoxious belief that you can do no wrong, but I suspect you need a strong core of self-belief just to keep going with writing; the road is long, and the set-backs are many.

            Which worries me sometimes. Where others have self-belief, I have doubt. Lots of it. You know, I think I’m pretty good, and I’m proud to have earned compliments from readers and writers I admire for my work. But I doubt everything I write (I’m doubting this right now), I agonize over every line, even continually reassessing the current project to make sure I’m not thundering off in the wrong direction. This doubt, this lack of confidence, can make writing very hard sometimes, because the sense that I might be writing a load of old gibbering rubbish is always there. And maybe it would be easier if I just believed that every word dripped from my pen was glittery deep fried genius. It probably stems partly from shyness, a general dislike of blowing ones own trumpet, and partly from feeling that super over-confidence is unsightly and rude (that British DNA again).

            The writers I most admire are not, I believe, towering ego monsters. Writers like Neil Gaiman, Michael Marshall Smith, and John Connolly are always gracious, witty, wise. They are extraordinary writers, which I am sure they are aware of, but always you sense that their feet are planted safely on the ground somewhere, and there is no danger of any heads disappearing up buttholes. I admire writers who behave with grace and charm, and twitter is gratifyingly full of them (you only need to scan the list of people I follow to find a ton of them). Terry Pratchett, who I sense probably doesn’t suffer fools gladly, radiates kindness and wisdom, and at no point can I imagine any of these writers having a hissy fit online or banging on about how everyone else is wrong.

Perhaps my discomfort with writers who are utterly convinced of their own genius is my own problem, and perhaps I need pump up my own ego, but there is a kind of wisdom, I think, and even a joy, in knowing that you haven’t quite learned everything yet.