The Sphinx Scrolls on television

This morning I hammered some lengthy nails into my front lawn. I’m not known for my gardening prowess, but I was rather pleased at my innovative lawn care technique. Strips of gleaming new turf were laid a week ago onto the Teletubbie-style mounds that we created in the front garden. The morning after, I discovered that a gang of delinquent crows had been attacking the turf for fun, peeling back the corners and dragging the smaller pieces from the top of the hills down to the driveway. They weren’t searching for worms beneath the grass. This was wanton, blatant vandalism. As the local scarecrow competition finished a few weeks ago I would have felt self-conscious about erecting a crucified straw man, so I had to find more subtle means of dealing with them.

Anti-social behaviour order? That doesn’t work, of course. It’s just a badge of honour to a crow with no sense of social responsibility. Shoot them? I think that’s frowned upon in some quarters. I read online that shiny CDs dangling from trees are effective bird deterrents, so I gathered some old, unwanted discs and strung them up in much the same manner as I would like to string up the crows. Next morning, same criminal damage once again. Oddly, though, the crows seemed to be going for the same patches of grass each time. I knew then what I had to do: nail the tempting turf to the ground. So far it seems to have worked.

What has that got to do with my novel? What, indeed, have I been doing with my novel since I last blogged more than two months ago? To answer the first question: nothing at all. And as for the second, quite a lot, really. August was spent mostly in Spain and the south of France with the usual intention to write but without much to show for it other than a mild suntan to the forearms, nose and neck. But literary things began to flow towards the end of that month and into September. The rewrite of chapter one was completed and I think it’s true to say that scarcely a single line of that opening chapter was retained from the previous draft. It reads like a new book, and a far more interesting one at that. I cut about five thousand words from the old draft, and I don’t miss a single one. The fresh writing style of this new chapter carried over into the rewrites of chapters two and three. The story is now awash with new ideas, twists and surprises and the prose is imbued with elegance and maturity. Having found ‘my voice’ I’m finding it easier to push ahead into the next chapters.

Monday this week was spent at the Southampton Boat Show, researching details for the scene in which one of my characters steals a large motor yacht from its mooring in Cannes. I had chosen a Sunseeker Manhattan 63 as the gin palace in question, but the original draft of that scene was written using information obtained online. Dressing smartly enough to be taken seriously as a potential buyer wangled me a guided tour of the real thing in Southampton. I told the helpful chap from Sunseeker that I was featuring one of their boats in my novel, and asked how my character might go about stealing such a vessel? Is there a weakness in its security? Do owners usually hide their keys somewhere on deck? Would my character get caught before he left the marina? Oddly enough, Mr Sunseeker thought it would be imprudent to reveal how one might hotwire one of his lavishly equipped and even more lavishly priced boats, so I shall resort to working out my own theoretical criminal method based on what I had seen, and no revelations will be made that would threaten the ability of any owners of such boats to get a good night’s sleep. After all, I might eventually sell enough copies of my novel to buy one myself, and I don’t want to have to worry about joy-riders taking it for a spin.

Other than this blog I haven’t done anything to publicise The Sphinx Scrolls, but then I became involved in a television show earlier this month. I had a visit from one of those antiques programmes made by the BBC. They filmed the presenter’s arrival at my front garden, then took a shot of him walking up to meet me in the back garden where I was working on my laptop. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘what are you doing today?’ ‘Writing my novel,’ I replied. ‘And what is your novel called?’ ‘The Sphinx Scrolls,’ I told him before he proceeded to sell me a set of 1963 porcelain jugs shaped like the heads of The Beatles. I don’t know if my book plug will make it to the final edit, but the show will be on BBC2, I think, some time in October, so I’ll look out for it then. Hopefully it will be the first of many television spots for this book. The only disappointing thing about the filming was that it was done the day before the turf was laid on my Teletubbie hills, so the front garden won’t be looking its best for its TV debut. But at least the viewers won’t see dangling discs, six inch nails and leather-clad, tattooed crows tearing the place apart.

4th July and nothing to celebrate?

June has come and gone with virtually no progress on my novel, and already it’s the 4th of July. So nothing to celebrate, then. Looking back over the past month my achievements seem mainly to reside in the garden: I built a log cabin for my mum (getting quite good at these things now) and planted some palm trees. And on one hot night we took my micro camper van to the New Forest and camped in it for the first time. It wasn’t a total success: I spent an hour inflating the airbed only for the valve to break just as I was ready to put it in the can, so we slept on the built-in rock’n’roll bed that came with it. The ‘double’ mattress was three feet wide and as soft as a slab of granite. Not exactly luxury.

Part of the reason for not writing anything last month:

buying, collecting and planting these two rather straggly trees on my front garden.

But the lack of writing during June meant that my brain recovered enough to find some inspiration again. I think I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the redrafting that still lay ahead, and one particular issue had prevented me from getting started: the flashbacks in the opening chapter.

It’s really important to start a novel well. We all know that. And that’s why I’ve rewritten the opening chapter to The Sphinx Scrolls many times. When I was working on the book back in 2001 I thought it would be cool to open the first chapter at the most dramatic point in the early part of the story – with the heroine facing execution. This inevitably necessitated a number of flashbacks to explain how she had come to be in this predicament, but the structure seemed to fit the situation because it was like her life was flashing before her eyes. So far, so good.

Things got messy during the more recent rewrites. I wanted to introduce a juicy subplot and add more depth to the novel, and this required more flashbacks in that opening chapter. Trouble was, the new scenes were jumping back all over the place in terms of location and chronology, and I had found myself with a first chapter that had become too long and too confusing.

The daunting prospect of fixing this chapter was the main reason for my literary procrastination for most of the last month. That, and the sheer exhaustion of building that log cabin under relentless and uncharacteristically blazing sunshine for two solid weeks.
 Today, however, I cracked it. I decided that I was not going to use my muscles today. No jogging, no construction work, and only minimal gardening. Today would be a brain day. It would have helped if Pooch hadn’t decided to wake me up at 6:20 am, but I compensated for my weary start to the day with a good dose of caffeine. My next trick was to allocate specific time to writing, and I scheduled three stints of two hours each, leaving time in between for essentials such as eating, watering the palm trees and watching Top Gear.

Having set out my plan for the day I decided it would be less overwhelming to extract the opening chapter and put it into a separate Word document. I knew it needed major surgery, but in case things went badly wrong I had the original version to return to. But if things went well I would be able to transplant the new, improved chapter in place of the old, rambling one.

The next step simply involved putting every jumbled up part of that chapter, flashbacks and all, into chronological order. I didn’t know if it would work that way, but at least it would tidy everything up and give me something easier to work with. That didn’t take long, just ten minutes or so, and as soon as I read the story in the correct order I realised how much the flashback technique had compromised essential detail. Parts of the story had been glossed over too quickly, creating a lack of credibility in places. Now I had a chance to build the story on stronger foundations. I decided to rewrite the first page entirely from scratch.

An hour passed. I had a sentence on the screen. Another hour: another sentence. Time for a break. Two sentences in one morning had exhausted me. Bearing in mind these were to be the first lines of the novel I didn’t feel that I’d wasted any time. It had been tough. I wanted my novel to open succinctly and memorably like The Day of the Triffids. I rejected line after line, word after word, until something started to emerge that I liked.

After lunch and a quick trip to the garden centre for fifteen bags of compost (so much for not using my muscles) I ploughed on with page one of the novel. Soon I had a whole paragraph. Wait – no, I had to scrub a line that didn’t work. The book went backwards for a while. Time passed while I researched the details of the scene on the Internet. I even watched clips of Guatemalan breakfast television to make sure I described everything correctly (I’ve never seen such a long-winded and pointless weather forecast for a country that’s always hot). Suddenly the lines were flowing again. I was achieving my goal of a more subtle, mature writing style. It was a huge improvement on the words I’d written ten or more years before. Into the third writing session of the day and I was getting a decent word count for this new chapter. By the time the electric guitar riffs of Top Gear dragged me away from my computer I had contributed almost a thousand words to the novel. No flashbacks so far, just an elegant introduction to the main character as she slowly becomes aware that all is not well in Guatemala City today.

So, after all, perhaps I do have something to celebrate today?

A new novel is born

A weird literary phenomenon happened yesterday. I got up fairly early to start work, about 7am, but ‘Er Indoors was sound asleep – as was Pooch on the end of the bed – so I left them in their slumber. Ordinarily I would go back an hour or so later, armed with a cup of coffee, to begin the slow process of bringing her back to consciousness. Only I didn’t. I left it until nearly 10am before putting the coffee next to the bed. Still she didn’t wake up, so I crept out and left her there. The day before she had been working incredibly hard restoring our house and I knew she needed to rest.

So there I was in my converted garage, tapping away on my computer and making hardly any progress at all on my novel, when at about 10:15 Katia showed up, barely awake, telling me she had just downloaded a future bestselling novel from the cosmos in her sleep. She knew the story in great detail and had even witnessed scenes from its movie adaptation. Apparently Einstein used this trick – he didn’t actually think up boffy stuff himself, he just downloaded it into his subconscious from the cosmic eBook library in the sky.

I’ve experienced useful and creative dreams too. When I was eleven years old I bought a bottle holder to put on my bicycle, but despite a whole day trying to fit it I couldn’t attach the components to frame of the bike. I went to sleep frustrated, but in my dream I solved the problem –the flat metal brackets needed to be bent backwards around the frame. In the morning I tried it out, and it was a perfect fit. More recently I’ve had dreams about movie plots which seemed totally logical and exciting whilst I was asleep, but the moment I woke up I would realise that the story was insane and full of holes.

Katia’s story, unlike my own dreams, was completely coherent from start to finish. It was also interesting and original, and not entirely unrelated to some of the themes in The Sphinx Scrolls. Probably wouldn’t be a sequel, but it could be an equal. She was convinced it was a bestseller because that was how it appeared in the dream. So I put my own writing to one side and opened a new Word document called ‘Katia’s Story’ and wrote down everything she told me. I then added details of my own which I thought would enhance the story, and now I have the basis of a plot for a new novel. I can’t give away the plot here, I’m afraid, but it’s going to make a really exciting book, believe me.

Having taken 14 years to get close to finishing my first novel, I hope that some shortcuts might be available if I write my next book based on her dream. Perhaps she can download a chapter at a time in future dreams, or dictate to me in her sleep? Perhaps I can stick a USB cable in her ear and download the whole thing straight into my laptop? I love the idea that this whole book is already sitting up there in the cosmos waiting to be downloaded. Maybe that’s how all inspiration occurs – we build a connection between our minds and a huge cosmic database of songs, poems, jokes, plays, sitcoms and novels? It’s a lovely idea, but it could prove complicated for intellectual property lawyers.

For now I just want to focus on finishing my book. It’s 173,000 words closer to being finished than Katia’s story, after all. But I am happy to interrupt that progress if the next book is handed to be on a cosmic USB stick…

Let the next draft begin...

Right. It’s been almost two weeks since I completed the previous draft of The Sphinx Scrolls, and I thought it was time to review my progress since then. Well that won’t take long, because there hasn’t been any. But I know from experience that each draft starts slowly and gathers momentum, and I’m at that daunting place I was at three months ago when I started the previous one.

During the last rewrite I kept a parallel Word document open as a ‘scratchpad’ for notes, ideas, and deleted passages that I might want to re-use sometime. That document in itself consists of over 3,000 words, so my first task was to sort the notes into categories: character notes, plot ideas, deleted text, general notes about sections that need improvement, research notes about Sphinx archaeology, ideas for a new ending and even notes about how I could take these characters into a sequel. So that’s given me a rough framework to guide the next draft. I thinking of picking some of the easier notes first and making sure the issues they raise are fully resolved before deleting them from the scratchpad document and moving onto the next one.

There’s a risk that I might make changes to the novel by following one suggestion from my notes only to find that those changes are then negated by following a later note. For example, one of my minor characters is rather too similar to a real, well known Egyptologist. When I first put this character into the story it was 1997 and no one had really heard of the person he was based on. But since then he’s become famous, in the D-list sense at least, and I need to make my character far more differentiated. Today I decided to change the sex and the age of the character, which will open up new opportunities to develop that person in an original way, and will require partial rewrites of a couple of chapters. However, I have to accept the risk that I might change part of the plot afterwards, and may end up deleting or changing again the lines that I’ve recently written. But hey, that’s novel writing. In fact, that’s all kinds of writing. You have to keep on rewriting until it’s right.

So with this great task still ahead of me I’ve spent the days since my return from Brazil last week catching up with e-mails to the point where my inbox is joyously empty. I love that feeling. I spent much of my online time in Brazil unsubscribing from just about every commercial e-mail that I received. I must have unsubscribed to almost a hundred e-mail alerts, services, newsletters and promotions, and that is finally helping to reduce the flow of timewasting and distracting messages to my inbox. Somehow an empty inbox gives me a clear head, and a clear head provides the space I need for my brain to focus once more on the creative process.

Let the next draft begin…

Celebrating the completion of the latest draft of the novel

Today I completed the latest draft of my novel. Phew. Decided to celebrate with a ride along a deserted south Atlantic beach on a rented bicycle followed by a pizza and a can of Coke. We novelists know how to have a good time. This draft was started at the beginning of March, so it’s taken me almost three months to complete. That’s nothing in the grand scheme of this book, which I started way back in the last century, and which received practically no attention from me at all between completing the first draft in 2001 and waiting until I had the necessary time this year to devote to the task of completing the rewrites.

For this draft I’ve gone through the entire novel, sometimes making changes to details of punctuation and word order, sometimes rewriting extensively, and sometimes adding entire pages of new text where I felt it was needed. I didn’t have a specific agenda for this draft: I felt it was important just to refamiliarise myself with the story as well as fixing and improving the writing along the way. Sections have been cut and sections have been added, but what started out as 167,000 words is now 174,000 words.

In the final few days of this edit I needed to update a few things. For example, in one scene the hero, Matt, is flown by the US Air Force in an F14 fighter jet in my original draft, penned late last century. Turns out that the F14 was retired from service in 2006. Rewriting this sequence required almost a whole day researching the type of plane that replaced it, together with its fuel capacity and range, its inflight refuelling techniques, its weapons and defensive systems, its ejector seat system and the survival rations a pilot would have if he had to bail out. Readers can be very fussy if they discover any details like those are inaccurate.

There was also a section that I had already updated twice before in previous drafts to bring it up to date, but which now seemed antiquated once again. Originally the Guatemalan scientist characters were storing important information on floppy disks. I updated this in the late nineties to writeable CDs, and then in 2001 to writeable DVDs. But people don’t really do that these days – it’s currently either USB flash drives or USB external drives, so I had to change it again. In the future most storage will probably be online, but that doesn’t make for great drama: I have special forces soldiers fighting their way into a research compound to steal data, and it wouldn’t be as exciting if they just sat in an Internet café and downloaded it.

The scrolls referred to in the title of the book appear towards the end of the story. I’ve written each of the scrolls in full, and they tell the story of the rise and fall of an ancient civilisation and the terrible thing they have set in motion that threatens our world today. The description of the actual discovery of the scrolls was rather skimpy in the original draft. Maybe I was writing quickly, knowing I was close to finishing the first draft after writing it for several years, keen just to get it finished? It needed more dramatic tension, more detail, more realism. So I’ve spent this week researching the Dead Sea Scrolls: what they were made of; why they survived for two thousand years; how they were handled; how they were scanned. Now when the archaeologists see the scrolls for the first time the detail and accuracy make the scene so much more gripping.

I also researched whether ancient scrolls could be read without unrolling them – turns out there’s a machine in England the size of a small village that can read rolled-up text using ultra-powerful X-rays. But this won’t be available to my characters in Cairo so I had to develop an alternative system for them to use to open and scan the ancient texts without inflicting too much damage.

So what’s next? I wanted to have this novel completed by the end of May, which would have required at least three or four drafts to have been written by about now. Those subsequent drafts won’t take as long as this one, but I do have some fairly complex subplots to weave in and I think I need to extend my three month schedule by an extra month. So 30^th of June is now my deadline for finishing the book. I’ll keep on blogging about my progress as much as I can during that time, and I’ll also remind myself of the big celebration that awaits this novel’s completion: a really big pizza and two cans of Coke.

Then it’s time to start thinking about the sequel, and I’ve already got ideas for that. One of the ideas is to write the book in 6 solid months instead of spread over 14 years, which I think is the best idea for a book I’ve ever had.

Searching for a decent cup of tea

One way of summarising The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is to describe it as an Englishman’s travels through the universe in search of a decent cup of tea. I’ve had a somewhat Arthur Dent-esque experience in Brazil this week, with the café equivalent of a Nutrimatic machine serving me something that was utterly dissimilar to what any British builder would consider to be a proper cuppa. My seemingly run-of-the-mill request for milk resulted in the delivery to my table of a separate cup full of steaming hot white stuff. I added a little of this hot milk to the ‘tea’ that was brewing in the first cup (it’s not easy to pour from one cup to another without collateral spillage), which created a drink that can only be described as hot, white water with sugar. It reminded me of the old sketch in which wealthy old men tell competing stories about how poor they used to be, and the best line went something like ‘I was grateful for a cup of tea. Without milk or sugar. Or tea.’

I took a trip to a supermercado to look for some PG Tips. No chance. I might as well have been looking for snow shoes. Next to the coffee shelves were some boxes of tea bags, but they were all what I would refer to back home as ‘lady’s tea’. Devoid of caffeine, unable to stain my teeth brown, and scented with pointless flowery flavours. Not my cup of tea at all. Happily my Brazilian host recommended something called black tea. I was sceptical, but was prepared to give it a try. There was no kettle in this house, so I boiled the water in a pan on the stove. I had to leave the tea bag in the cup for twice as long as usual, as it seemed to be a junior portion (probably only had 1,000 perforations instead of the 2,000 that I’m used to), but the result was a satisfactory beverage. Finally I was able to boost my jet-lagged energy levels and get down to some serious writing.

However, before the writing could begin I was invited to join in a spinning class in the local town. Not having had any experience in weaving or wool-making previously, I thought I’d check it out. Turned out to be a room full of vicious exercise bikes and superfit women who pedal like crazy for a whole hour. The instructor set a bike up for me and then kept picking on me during the session because I was a bit crap at it. But I blame the altitude. This place is 2,500 feet above sea level, which, while not exactly Everest base camp, is approximately 2,490 feet above the level of my home gym. I should have been wearing oxygen and having a Sherpa to carry my gym bag for me.

Finally the writing got underway towards lunchtime, only to be interrupted by a six hour long barbecue party that my hosts are holding today (and which is still going on as I write). I did manage to edit some scenes in which Matt is sprung from police captivity by Guatemalan agents, and later the same day he is grabbed again by US forces. Oh what it is to be popular. Recent edits have cut the word count to 171,000, but there are many notes to the effect of ‘buffer chapter needed here’ in the manuscript at the moment and I’ll therefore be adding plenty of words in the next draft. I expect the novel to hit 200,000 words before being trimmed slightly in the final drafts.

Hey-ho, time to put the pan on for another cup of ‘tea’ to give myself some energy to continue editng. 192 A4 pages edited so far in this draft, 97 still to go…

My new manifesto

With Britain now in political limbo and party leaders starting to kiss their opponents’ derrieres instead of slagging each other off, I think it’s time for me to suggest the policy I would require them to take up if they want to work with me to form a government. My new policy would be called the National Treasure Bill. Unlike the novel I’m writing at the moment it has nothing to do with archaeology. The National Treasure Bill is designed to create a framework for determining the people of Britain who are regarded as national treasures and applying laws to ensure that the country treats them like treasures in the interests of the population at large.

Why do I want to see a National Treasure Bill added to the statute books? Simple. This country has lost too many great people over the years. How great would it be to have Arthur Lowe still around, or still to be able to enjoy the mellifluous tones of John le Mesurier in Homepride adverts? If the nation had taken proper care of Benny Hill’s weight and heart issues he would still be entertaining now us with his same old joke, well into his eighties. If the nation had declared actor Desmond Llewelyn (Q in many of the James Bond films) a national treasure, he would have been provided with a safer car, a police escort, and a chauffeur, and he wouldn’t have been killed ten years ago in a road accident. If the nation had forced Peter Cook into rehab early enough it might have prevented his premature demise. If Kenneth Williams’ mental health issues had been taken care of he could still be delivering nasal-enhanced double-entendres on Radio 4 today. And so the list goes on… Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Princess Diana, Douglas Adams. All would have qualified as national treasures and should have been taken care of as such.

So what would the nation have to do to look after these special people? I propose the following measures:

1. Give them safe cars to drive. Airbags everywhere, radar activated emergency brakes, that kind of thing. A big Volvo, basically.
2. If possible, give them chauffeurs.
3. Give them bodyguards. Not to protect them from attack, so much as to look out for their best interests at all times – ensuring they put on their seat belts, making sure they don’t cross the road without stopping, looking and listening, and always watching out for any sign of excessive alcohol or drug intake.
4. Provide them with fast track medical care including pre-emptive scanning and regular testing to catch any diseases early.
5. Give them chefs to provide nutritious food.
6. Make them visit psychiatrists to keep them sane.

Of course, there will be people who object to the nation spending money on looking after celebrities who are all millionaires anyway. But we’re supposed to be a first world nation, a wealthy country who can afford the odd indulgence. And what better than to invest in the people who are loved by the nation in order to preserve them for our future enjoyment? These celebrities can’t be trusted to look after themselves no matter how rich they are – history has proven that time and again. So we need to take action to preserve these scarce resources for future generations. Let’s get this bill made into law and start taking care of Elton John, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Stephen Hawking, Dawn French, Norman Wisdom and all the other hundreds of famous comedians, actors, thinkers and great people whose obituaries we’re not yet ready to read.

And let’s not forget, of course, the writers of archaeological thrillers: national treasures all of them.

The Boys from Brazil

There’s a sporting event coming up soon called the World Cup. Something to do with football, I believe. It doesn’t happen very often, so you might not be aware of it, but I wanted to talk about a World Cup tradition that has evolved recently. This is the tradition in which the England team gets knocked out of the tournament in a penalty shoot-out with a much more competent, confident bunch of players like those found in Germany or Brazil.

This year, however, when England meets Brazil in the semi-finals, the legions of English plumbers and brickies desperate to support their team by gathering in pubs 6,000 miles away from where the players could actually hear them will have the advantage of a secret weapon. The book and film The Boys from Brazil described the attempt to clone Adolf Hitler. As far as I can tell, the cloning operation in Brazil has taken place, but it wasn’t multiple Hitlers they produced: it was a legion of Gareth Southgates.

And how do I know about this heinous and dastardly cloning project? I arrived in Brazil yesterday and went to a bar. In this bar was a projector showing a futebol match between the two biggest teams in Brazil. Many of the players in this match will also represent their country in South Africa. The game turned out to be a draw, and a penalty shoot-out followed. A Brazilian player went up to take the first penalty. A Brazilian player, remember. From the country that invented Pelé. These guys start kicking balls while they’re still in the womb. Taking a penalty is no bigger deal for these players than taking a shower.

So this player kicked the ball. It moved slowly and pathetically towards the arms of the goalkeeper. Actually the goalie had time to read a book (not that he resembled the reading type) before needing to block the ball’s passage. It was like watching Gareth Southgate in 1996 all over again. Then the other team had a go, and this next player gave an equally crap kick that again resulted in a save. This went on… and on… and on. Four penalties were missed by each team before one of the teams eventually had the brilliant idea of not using one of their Gareth Southgate clones, and instead used someone who could kick with confidence.

If Brazil fields their clone army this summer then England might finally be in with a chance of making it to the final.

In other news today, there was a plane crash involving a parliamentary candidate. They think the banner his plane was towing got caught around the tail. Ouch. As I was digesting this news on my laptop (or, bizarrely, laptop in Portuguese) in the shade of a Brazilian palm tree that sheltered me from the scorchio thirty degree afternoon, a Sky News video clip about the crash suddenly showed an old friend and radio presenter Duncan Barkes. I’ve known him for ten years and have had the pleasure of being interviewed on his radio shows several times. He is now the spokesman for the political party of the hospitalised politician who was rescued from the plane wreckage as well as being a great broadcaster with his own Facebook fanclub. If Brazil decided to clone Duncan Barkes instead of Gareth Southgate they would still be useless at penalty shoot-outs, but at least they’d get coherent and intelligent post-match interviews for a change.

The International Archaeology Conference

While the political world was rocked by the surprise revelation that Gordon Brown is actually a normal human who hates having to talk to plebs in the street (thank the invention of radio mics and incompetent aides for that story) I was busy dealing with a far more important issue: a delivery of 20 tons of gravel for my driveway. There’s now a small mountain of tiny stones in front of the house, which means we have to leave one of the cars on the street until I get the strength to rake it level. This could take me several days, meaning that the car has to stay on the road all that time. And Gordon Brown thinks he has problems?

The novel edits are progressing steadily. The massive historical revelation in the book is something that Ruby has to present to her sceptical and bearded peers at the International Archaeology Conference. I made up the existence of this conference, although I’m pretty sure most male archaeologists enjoy extravagant facial sproutings. Ruby is guarded by Guatemalan agents so she can’t escape even though she’s giving a talk to hundreds of academics.

Right now I’m now editing the chapter in which American special forces try to snatch Ruby away from that conference at a venue in Marseille, right under the noses of her Guatemalan guards. I love this scene because the special forces soldiers arrive pretending to be archaeologists. Their crew cuts, clean shaven faces and complete ignorance of history and archaeology make them stand out a mile, totally undermining their attempts to blend in with the other attendees. One of them is asked an archaeological question that he’s so unprepared to answer that he simply reaches for his gun.

I bet Gordon Brown would love to have the option of whipping out a Beretta whenever he didn’t like the tone of a voter’s line of questioning. It would certainly liven up those political walkabouts.

Running the London marathon from my shed

Since returning from the book fair I’ve been on a decluttering rampage. It’s a kind of spring-clean taken to extremes: two van loads have gone to the dump and a further two went to a charity shop. It’s not the end of the process because my house is still cluttered, but it helps clear my mind so that I can now focus on writing. Or at least I would be doing that were it not for the new distraction of the London marathon today.

For the previous two years I earned my little medal for coming almost last in this marathon, but I didn’t have a place this year so I stayed at home and set up the television in the shed in front of my treadmill and decided to try a half marathon whilst watching the BBC’s coverage. Fuelled by a cheese sandwich and a can of energy drink I started the machine at ten o’clock this morning, just as the real race got underway.

Watching the pre-race interviews on telly reminded me of how much easier it is to run in my shed than to attempt the real thing. Blackheath, where the race starts, is at the top of a hill. That’s a good thing, because it means that most of the race is downhill. However, you can’t drive up the hill to the starting area, so you end up walking half a mile up a steep slope just to get to the start of the race, cursing every wasted calorie of energy as you go. No such worries for me this year: I just strolled down the garden to the shed, shut the door, switched on Sue Barker and Brendan Foster, and was ready.

My ‘race’ started well, but without the support of the London crowds it was hard to sustain it after the first hour. The only support I had was from a completely uninterested Pooch peeing in the garden and ‘Er Indoors cleaning the barbecue and occasionally waving at me. At least I think she was waving support – she might have been asking for help scrubbing the blackened sausage fat off the grill, but the windows in my shed are double-glazed so there’s no way of knowing.

Anyway, eventually I started to fade. My goal of a half marathon (about 21 kilometres) was revised downward to 18 kilometres, which I managed to complete in an hour and 26 minutes. Since then I’ve barely been able to walk, which has made it tricky getting to the computer to edit my novel. But any pain I’m feeling is nothing compared to that of Cash in the Attic’s John Cameron who I’m sponsoring in his marathon effort. Despite a painful injury (and despite also being advised to drop out of the race) he valiantly battled on and completed the course with virtually no skin left on his feet! He truly deserves his medal today for completing the marathon on behalf of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. If anyone else would like to sponsor him I’ve put the link here:

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=john.cameron

The London Book Fair

I saw a strange shiny thing in the sky this morning over London. Not sure what it was, but it had flashing lights and seemed to be moving quite fast in the direction of Heathrow. Probably some kind of UFO, I expect.

I’ve not made much progress with my novel so far this week as I’ve just returned home from three days at the London Book Fair in sunny Earls Court. I lugged my heavy laptop around with me between meetings, thinking I’d get some writing done in a quiet corner, but I would always bump into an old friend or bookseller or publishing colleague and get chatting for ages.

The London Book Fair used to be called The London International Book Fair, but the International bit was dropped some years ago. I suspect they dropped it because it sounded a bit chippy, but the absence of that word made the show’s title accurately reflect the almost complete absence of overseas visitors this year. There were empty stands where exhibitors couldn’t even show up. The majority of people’s appointments were cancelled. Summersdale sent a rights assistant home after the first day, since there was no point just sitting on the stand reading newspapers. It was a shame, because we were showing off our new design of exhibition stand and there were not many people around to appreciate it.

At least Summersdale’s 20^th anniversary party went with a bang. The place was heaving with guests including agents, publishers, writers, illustrators, some lovely people from Waterstone’s and a couple of blatant gatecrashers. We had fun with stories of the early days in the business when we all lived in the office, showered in the car park with a hosepipe and travelled the country in old Post Office vans selling books into the shops.

I think it was in my book How to Get Published that I wrote about how authors dress when visiting book fairs. Male authors have a tendency to wear hats and scruffy suits at these events, for reasons best known to themselves. Female writers just tend to be a little dishevelled. Both sexes will carry a small rucksack full of copies of their manuscript. They come to book fairs to make contacts with publishers, to offer their manuscripts for submission in person, and to learn directly what kinds of books publishers are looking for. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Publishers, however, are generally there to sell rights to their existing books rather than to sign up new ones from passing scribes. So it’s not unknown for publishers to pretend to be in an important meeting when a writer passes by their stand in order to avoid being drawn into a long sales pitch. Writers only have themselves to blame for this: if they smartened themselves up and checked their hats into the cloakroom at the entrance to the exhibition hall they would be much harder for publishers to spot and would have a greater chance of being able to pitch their book proposal. In my ‘disguise’ as a publisher I pitched The Sphinx Scrolls a few times this week to publishers and booksellers, and came away highly encouraged by the response I received. I really must put a hat on and finish this book now… 

Living under a cloud

Most of Europe’s airspace has been closed for a couple of days, and it looks set to continue. With the London Book Fair starting on Monday this could be disastrous for publishers seeking to buy and sell international rights. Without any visitors from overseas it’s going to be unusually quiet at Earl’s Court this year. And that’s a shame, because Summersdale has just invested in an impressive new exhibition stand which not many people will get to see. At least anyone stranded elsewhere can enjoy our new website which is planned to go live on Monday. www.summersdale.com

Volcano dust permitting, I’ll be heading to Brazil in a few weeks, so I’m ramping up my daily study time (from half an hour to about two hours) in the desperate hope that I’ll achieve some degree of fluency by the time I get there. I’m getting to the point where the pathetically limited vocabluary of Portuguese words in my head is starting to float around my consciousness all the time. I look at a white cup and describe it in Portuguese. I see a number and I convert it to Portuguese. I look at my dog and work out the phrase to say that he smells a bit whiffy. I look at a bottle of wine and realise I haven’t got to that part of the course yet, so I just drink it.

The extra language study time has had an impact on my novel writing and editing time. Yesterday I wrote virtually nothing, but at least I managed to work on an entire chapter today. I extended my research into my Portofino location beyond Google Street View, this time incorporating amateur video footage of the marina and the town from footage uploaded by individuals to YouTube. I’m currently on (A4 single spaced) page 168 out of 289. Progress has been too slow this month. I really need to get through this draft before the end of April so that I can concentrate on writing the next draft in Brazil. I prefer to start a fresh draft there than to have to finish off an old one that’s been dragging on for too long. If Iceland doesn’t stick a cork in its volcano soon, however, I might not be going anywhere, and all that lingo studying will have been for nothing. Oh pederasta.

More volcanoes

Just when I thought I was safe from the threat of volcanoes (see my recent posts from Lanzarote), I come home to find that Iceland – not content with helping themselves to the savings of English charities – has the cheek to squirt a whole load of volcanic ash in Britain’s direction. I couldn’t actually see a single speck of the dust that is apparently up there somewhere, but it was sufficient to close all of Britain’s airports today. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to look at the sky without jet contrails streaking across it, so this afternoon was quite special in that respect. For producers of period dramas it was a great day.

It’s not been a great day for my writing, though. I ended up spending most of it catching up with e-mails and then visiting a garden centre to look at the prices of palm trees (I want some in my front garden and another one by the pool in the back garden to give it a tropical feel). A skanky, half dead tree with its fronds stuck on with Sellotape will set you back £600. Bargain. I wonder if they do them in plastic?

Next week is the London Book Fair, and I’ll be heading up that way on Monday. It’s my company’s 20^th anniversary party, so I’m really looking forward to an evening of nostalgia and being reminded of how old I am. I can still remember what it was like on the day the company was formed. I sat at the desk in my bedroom, told myself I was now a publisher, twiddled my thumbs, and wondered what to do.

Can’t say it’s all that different twenty years on, really.

The third day

Today is terça-feira, which I think means ‘third day’. That makes sense: it’s Tuesday, after all. For some reason in Brazil they think it’s appropriate to name some (not all) of their days sequentially by number, but they start with Monday as ‘second day’. There is no ‘first day’. This revelation was the gist of my Brazilian Portuguese lesson this morning, and it’s doing my head in. Why can’t they name their days after Roman and Norse gods like the rest of us? Naming them sequentially leans towards Esperanto in its lack of imagination, although starting with ‘second’ instead of ‘first’ shows a spark of originality. At least whoever thought of it must have had a sense of humour.

The same can’t really be said of the ancient Mayans, who cleverly decided upon having 260 different days of the ‘week’. That’s an awfully long time to have to wait for a weekend after spending all ‘week’ building pyramids and sacrificing people. Must have been exhausting. No wonder they died out. But I wasn’t studying their numbering system today – I was still working out the details of the Sunseeker yacht that gets stolen in the novel, which involved yet more drooling over luscious photos of how the other half lives. Apparently they can hold three thousand litres of fuel (the yachts, not the rich people) which is enough to heat my house for a whole year (or for a fortnight in Mayan), and is more than enough to get from France to northern Italy.

The word count of The Sphinx Scrolls has now hit 171,000 as I continue to add more colour to the narrative here and there. On the next draft it will shoot up beyond 180,000 words because there are several new chapters to be written.

After lunch I printed out my pages relating to the helicopter ride in the previous chapter and posted them through my pilot neighbour’s letterbox for his perusal. He’s quite excited at the idea of doing some fact checking for my novel, and I’m looking forward to finding out how inaccurate my completely imaginary chopper flying techniques turn out to be. I found an old black and white clip of Whirlybirds online, and it looks pretty easy to me: just waggle a stick around between your legs and maintain a serious expression on your face whilst chasing bad guys.

Luxury yachts and big choppers

There’s a chapter in The Sphinx Scrolls in which Matt has to steal a helicopter, which he duly crashes because he’s not a chopper pilot and can scarcely remember the minimal training he was given in one back in his army days. I’ve never been a passenger in one of those things, let alone actually piloted one, so my description of it is based purely on imagination and my experience of failing to get off the virtual ground in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Happily I have a neighbour who is a qualified whirlybird, so I’ll be dropping some pages round to him to check for any blatant problems with my depiction.

Immediately after crash landing the helicopter Matt has to steal a motor yacht from a French marina. I’ve decided to make it a specific kind of yacht, and I’ve gone for a Sunseeker Manhattan 60. It’s sixty feet long, sleeps eight people in four cabins with four bathrooms, cruises at twenty knots and is powered by twin diesel engines. A ten year old model will set you back only half a million quid if you’re interested. I’ve studied dozens of mouth-watering photos of these vessels on the Internet in order to collect realistic data for use in the novel, but since they are built just an hour or so from where I live I might see if I can get over to the factory for a closer inspection. If I do that, I’ll have to make sure I leave my chequebook at home in case I get tempted.

In my original draft of the novel, Matt navigates his way to Italy on the stolen yacht using something really exciting called a ‘global positioning satellite navigation system’. Yes, we all have them in our phones and in our cars now, and soon they’ll be implanted in our pets and our kids too, but back in the late nineties when I first worked on this chapter satnav systems had only recently started to come onto the market. Prior to that the military had exclusive use of the GPS satellite network, so only soldiers like my character Matt would have had experience of using it. I had one of the first handheld GPS devices in the nineties. It cost a fortune and only showed numbers which had to be plotted onto a paper chart. Not exactly a friendly TomTom, but it was enough for me to find a route around a dangerous sandbank that threatened to capsize my boat in high winds. Anyway, in the novel I had made a big deal about how Matt’s special forces training enabled him to use the GPS system on the stolen yacht, and I went into far too much detail about how the system worked because it was so new and exciting back then.

It’s all gone now. There will be a brief mention of him setting the course in the GPS, and that will be that. Time changes things so quickly. I want to get this novel finished and published before yachts and helicopters get replaced by Star Trek-style teleportation systems and make my book look obsolete.

Portofino

Ruby has evaded the evil clutches of her nemesis and made it across the border from the south of France to northern Italy. So far so good. But as I edited the text today I checked the actual location that I’d given for her to wait for Matt’s arrival, and realised that Formia was too far south to be a realistic journey for her to have hitch-hiked in such a short time. So I changed it to Portofino, which is in the Italian Riviera and easily reachable in a less than a day’s drive from France. The only problem is that the coastline in that area is very steep and there are no beaches, and Ruby is meant to spend her time as a beach bum whilst waiting for rescue. But I’ve heard Portofino is a very upmarket village, with a stylish marina, and I thought that might be an interesting environment in which to be homeless for a couple of days.

As ever, Google Street View came into play, since I haven’t been to Portofino before. I zoomed in and landed in the main piazza adjacent to the marina. When the photo came into focus it was like I’d arrived in some kind of heaven. The place is so beautiful I took myself on an immediate Google tour of its roads and backroads, looking at the restaurants, shop windows, and rows of mopeds parked neatly. I could see some toilets and showers in the marina that Ruby would be able to use so that she could look more respectable when begging for scraps of food. I could see the different types of boats in the marina, roadies setting up a stage for a concert in the piazza and pairs of policemen every hundred yards (in keeping with Italy’s policy of intense over-policing – which caused problems for me when I committed various infringements of Italian law in the 1980s by busking, sitting on a step, and, most heinous of all, waiting for a train outside Venice train station).

These photographic details will enable me to write more rich and evocative chapters about this place. Ruby is definitely going to have problems with the level of policing in the village – I’ll have to come up with a way for her to avoid being water cannoned, arrested and ordered to leave the country like I was. Happy days.

Life on Mars

I think I’ve overdosed on telly today. I bought the entire second series of Life on Mars on DVD last night and somehow managed to watch all eight hours of the show already. That’s the one where a policeman gets run over, falls into a coma, and ‘wakes up’ in 1973. I’ve now seen it all, including the twists in the ending. And I still don’t have a clue what’s going on. Great show, though.

In a way, Life on Mars is like poetry. Proper poetry, the kind that doesn’t seem to make any sense unless you analyse it with a full literary toolkit. Life on Mars is enigmatic, open to interpretation and discussion. It also doesn’t make any sense. But that’s becoming a popular twist in drama these days. Lost never made any sense (I think – I got bored of watching it after it started getting too silly). I wonder if this trend has come about because the basic construction blocks of any story have been used so much that it’s hard to offer anything that feels original any more? Perhaps the only way to write something that feels fresh is to set the whole show in a place where no one has filmed before, such as inside someone’s mind?

Fiction has been able to do this for a long time. The narrative style of fiction, especially when written in the first person, easily lends itself to explorations of madness and fantasy in a way that’s tough to do on screen. The Sphinx Scrolls has a more traditional style, however. It’s written in the third person, so getting to grips with the inner angst of the characters is harder to do with any degree of subtlety.

In spite of going square-eyed in front of the plasma television all day, I managed to spare a couple of hours to work on my novel. Google Street View was again very handy in providing me with wonderful views of the Parisian streets along which my character Matt is chased as he gets away from the British Embassy there. I know what kind of shops he’ll go past, which direction the traffic flows, whether there’s a gendarme stationed somewhere, and even where the dog turds are (which is almost everywhere).

Life on Mars is about being stranded somewhere that feels alien. Matt is alone in Paris, and for an American ex-soldier that kind of cultural overdose is almost as alien as going back to a 1973 Manchester riddled with political incorrectness, cigarettes and Cortinas.

Learning Mayan and Cockney numbers

I knew it. Getting back to a writing routine was tough. It’s partly the backlog of stuff that always needs to be done when you’ve been away for a few days, and partly because I’m disappointed at not getting a place in this year’s New York marathon. The organisers e-mailed me to say that I ‘had not been selected’ for a place in November’s race. I think that’s their code for saying I’m too fat and slow and will just get in the way of everyone else. Fair cop. At least I waddled for five kilometres on the treadmill in my shed, so that part of my routine is getting back on track. I also managed a few lessons in Portuguese, and achieved my lowest ever rating for a lesson. Those Brazilians sure do have some weird accents in their written language. They can’t need all of them? English manages so well without those things, after all. Even French seems like a doddle compared to this.

The weather was so warm today that the shed was like a sauna. I need to finish insulating the walls and the ceiling so that the sun doesn’t turn it into an oven. The work I started on lining the interior with wood last year was ruined by the shrinkage of the planks during the winter. All my carefully measured lengths of wood around the window frames, originally fitted so tightly you couldn’t slot a piece of paper between them, shrunk so much that you could almost put a finger between them. But the higher temperatures of recent weeks had the beneficial effect of closing the gaps. A few more weeks and the wood will be back to the right size.

The only progress on The Sphinx Scrolls today came in my latest attempt at understanding the bonkers ancient Mayan language. Today was the turn of their numbering system, which is even more complicated than my tax return. They have some scary numbers, with some carvings recording dates so old that they precede the creation of the universe itself. Spooky. A kin is a day. A uinal is 20 kins. A tun is 20 uinals. 20 tuns makes a katun, and so on. It’s like bartering with a Cockney to buy a car: ‘I want two bags of sand and a monkey’, ‘Come off it, gov, it only cost you a Lady Godiva. An Ayrton Senna at the most. I’ll give ya’ a monkey, two ton and a pony.’

I wonder if there is some enigmatic Cockney graffiti somewhere in south London predicting the end of the world in the year Two Bags of Sand, Ayrton Senna and A Bottle of Glue (2,000 + 10 + 2 = 2012)?

Failing spectacularly

About ten years ago in a London basement Malcolm McLaren said to me, from behind a haze of his own cigarette smoke, that everything he had tried to do in his life had failed. He was referring mainly to the bands he had managed (which had broken up, usually acrimoniously), and to the shops he had run (which had eventually closed). But he explained that he had a knack of ‘failing spectacularly’. He was not a person to fail with a fizzle: he failed with an explosive bang that got him noticed every time. I think that was how he created success. Sadly today he achieved his final failure and he’ll be missed.

I had a small fizzle of a failure yesterday, which was that I didn’t post anything new on my blog for the first time since I started it at the beginning of March. This was because I normally write my blog entries in the evenings, and I spent that evening at 35,000 feet trying to sleep despite the baby screaming several rows behind me. I got home at 1:00 am today and decided I was too tired to bother writing anything. And I haven’t worked on my book at all since I got back, so I have nothing to say on the subject today. I didn’t go jogging today, I didn’t study Mayan or Portuguese languages. All I did was catch up with e-mails, get a flat ready for a new tenant and collect Pooch from his own little doggy holiday. I think he had a nice time and got more of a tan than I did.

I’ve been offered a year’s free membership of a swanky London club. That’s rather lovely, thank you very much. I won’t name it in case anyone reading this has just had to pay a fortune to join the same place, but the photos of its rooms look pretty amazing on their website. I think I’ll take them up on the offer and give the place a go. Might be a useful and inspiring retreat for getting on with writing when I have to be in London for the Book Fair and other events.

Tomorrow I shall try to get back into my routine of fitness, writing, learning and whatever else needs doing. Probably the washing-up. But it’s hard to jump straight back in at the deep end. I’m still trying to get used to a world without Malcolm McLaren, having a Duchess of Cornwall with a gammy leg, and driving in a country that has road signs.

Election day looms

So the UK General Election is set for 6^th May. Judging by the hyped-up newscasters on Sky we’ll all feel politically burned out within a few days. No one can last a month of this stuff. It’s not like the good old days when the parties were separated by policies and values that made for a good scrap on the telly: the only arguments I heard today were that David Cameron had a privileged background (shock horror); Gordon Brown has ‘gravitas’ (although he can lose that if he visits the gym more often); and the Other One can sometimes argue passionately about Stuff. But no one knows quite what Stuff that would be. Looks like we in the UK, and those of us soon to be returning to it, are in for a month of luke warm debate about which party leader has the best haircut, the prettiest wife and the good sense to be born of a father who hadn’t been too much of a financial success.

At least I won’t need to pay too much attention to it all. I already know where my vote is going, which means I can focus on my novel for the rest of the month. Well, that and getting the back garden ready for barbecues on the off-chance that we get one or two days without torrential rain this ‘summer’. Today was a hot one in volcano-land, so I made sure I wore my jeans and jacket to keep the sun off me. Things started off with me driving with my Brazilian missus in a German car to eat an American breakfast in an Irish restaurant in a Spanish marina development a hundred miles from Western Sahara. After that things settled down a little, and I studied some more Mayan glyphs and continued to avoid the overly-enthusiastic sunshine.

In the evening I found an English language bookshop and browsed around its limited offerings. Most of its stock was second-hand, brought to this island by tourists who would read their Mills and Boon romantic novels and then trade them in for something else in this shop. The best thing about this place was that it stocked two second hand Summersdale books: Downhill all the Way by Edward Enfield, and Mañana Mañana by Peter Kerr. It was nice to see a book that I had been involved with so far from home (I worked on the cover design for the latter title). Keen to spread the word about our excellent travel books I bought the Peter Kerr memoir in order to leave it behind at the villa for the next tenants to enjoy. I hope that one day copies of The Sphinx Scrolls will find their way to remote parts of the world like this…

My future self

Sometimes I wish I could lie on the beach like everyone else and read pulp fiction. Or listen to music. Or just switch off entirely. Perhaps I’ve been working for so many years without a proper break that I’ve forgotten how to relax? I can still just about remember what it was like being carefree and totally at ease. It was a brief interlude between graduating at university and starting my own business, a few heavenly months that happened twenty years ago. The enormous goal of getting a degree in English literature had been ticked off my ‘to do’ list, and it was the final thing on that list. I didn’t have a job to walk into. I didn’t have a book to write. I didn’t have a business to run or a house to renovate. I was free.

I owned a guitar and an early 1970s camper van. I could drive anywhere on a whim and sleep wherever I parked the van. If I ran out of money the guitar would help me to earn enough cash for another tank of petrol. There were no mobile phones and no Internet. I didn’t even own a computer. It was a wonderful taste of how simple life could be before money, property, business, relationships and responsibilities anchored me down. Fair enough, I wanted those things, and the lack of freedom is part of the price that must be paid. It’s not dignified to live in an old van all your life, in any case. But somewhere along the way I think I’ve lost the skill of relaxing.

So I sat on the beach today, feeling decidedly unrelaxed. Actually, I didn’t want to relax. I wanted to learn about Mayan glyphs. I think it’s safe to say that I was the only person on this beach today reading about the history of the discovery and interpretation of Mayan writings. I finished the day more knowledgeable on the subject than I was at the start. I made the day count. This information in my head will in some way make a contribution to my rewriting of The Sphinx Scrolls. And that’s how I feel about every day: I want to make it count.

If a full day passes and I haven’t done at least one small thing to invest in my future self, then I can’t help but feel that it’s been a wasted day. Writing a page of my novel is helping my future self. So is making progress on doing up my house. So is going for a jog or learning another language. These things don’t have to take up the entire day – there is still room for fun, being charitable, daily chores etc. But if I manage to make progress on writing my book then I get the greatest sense of satisfaction because one day I will look back at my past self and be grateful that I put in the effort. I’m grateful that I bothered to write dozens of books when I was younger: some of them still earn me money today. A day spent watching sport or drinking in the pub to me feels like cheating on my older self. So does sitting on a beach all day doing nothing. It’s like spending every penny you earn and putting zilch aside for a pension. Your future self won’t thank you for that. Just do one small thing each day for your future self, however, and you’ll both get along fine.

And if you must sit on the beach, your future self will certainly be happier if you use sunscreen.

Easter Sunday and volcano wine

Easter Sunday in a remote Spanish outpost is just the same as in Britain, only without the obligatory chocolate eggs and without the DIY projects that get abandoned when it’s time to go back to work. The climate doesn’t suit chocolate, so I can understand the thinking behind that. But I saw plenty of evidence today of abandoned DIY projects. Or maybe that’s just the way they want their villages to look.

One location that is anything but a bodge job is Cesar Manrique’s gaff. He was a local architect, artist and visionary who designed the handful of tourist attractions on the island of Lanzarote (not including the volcanoes themselves), and who created for himself a magical home carved out of a section of a volcanic larva field. This house was reminiscent of an early James Bond bad guy’s lair. His designs work organically with the rock, which is ironic because very little organic life actually exists in that larva field. The view from one window is not dissimilar to a lifeless lunar landscape.

Locating Manrique’s house required the use of local road signs. On this small island it is clearly assumed that everyone knows their way around, thus avoiding the need for logical and comprehensive signage. Every car journey here to date has involved numerous extensive detours, sometimes all the way round an entire volcano or two, before finding somewhere to turn around and try a different route. It’s all part of the fun of visiting places like this. The roads are smooth and there is plenty of public art in the middle of the roundabouts. But providing road signs for tourists is considered superfluous. At least I can enjoy a kinetic rotating statue whilst circumnavigating a ring road for the tenth time.

Lunch today involved a bottle of the local rosé wine, made from vines grown in volcanic ash on the slopes of the fire mountains. It was good stuff. So good, in fact, that I passed out in the afternoon and didn’t get much novel editing done. I managed to finish the section where Matt is at the British Embassy in Paris, which now includes the added details and factual accuracy gained from Google Street View yesterday. After a couple of pages I went down to listen to a Scottish one man band singing by the poolside. And after a couple of his songs I went back inside again.

Improving realism in the novel with Google Street View

Last week I watched a documentary in which the writer and comedian Dom Joly dressed up as Tintin and followed the route of one of his adventures. The programme reported that Tintin’s author, Hergé, rarely visited the places he drew and wrote about, relying instead on photographs of the scenes where he set the action. In the 1930s, using other people’s photographic reconnaissance probably seemed like a modern technological shortcut for a writer. In the 21st century a new research tool for writers has arrived, one that Hergé could never have envisaged in his day. It’s called Google Street View (or Google Privacy Violation Tool depending on your point of view). I’ve managed to visit many of the locations in my novel, but there are a few that I haven’t got around to seeing yet. The early drafts of these locations were based either on guide books or on my imagination. With Google Street View I now have the ability to drop from the sky onto the street, look at the building I want to write about, the surrounding streets, the direction of the traffic, the angle of the sunlight, the detail of construction materials, window styles and even wall plaques.

I edited a chapter today about Matt’s attempt to get help from the British Embassy in Paris. My original description of the building was based purely on imagination and assumption. I had guessed it was a grand old place, but other than that I had nothing concrete to go on. Many critics have commented on inaccuracies in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, including myself (I mentioned in my book The Key to The Da Vinci Code that he made a geographic error in his description of Paris), so I’d like to be able to get my own Parisian details correct just in case Dan Brown ever pens an unofficial guide to The Sphinx Scrolls to get his own back.

Before resorting to Street View I discovered that there’s a grass tennis court in the garden behind the Embassy, which I thought was a cool detail that I might work into the narrative if possible. I also learned some of the details of the interior of the foyer area, and finally I zoomed into street level to take a look at the front of the building. Two details stood out that couldn’t resist weaving into the novel’s descriptive passages: first, that the plaque on the wall reads ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy Chancery’, which is a pompous phrase that is guaranteed to wind-up my American former soldier character, Matt; second that there’s an American flag visible on a building not far from the British Embassy. Matt’s a wanted man in America, and the sight of that flag adds to his discomfort.

So my study of Mayan writings went on the back burner today because I stayed in the villa and took advantage of the chance to forge ahead with editing the novel. I feel that I’ve added a useful layer of realism to this chapter, and I’ll be sure to check out Google Street View for any other locations that I haven’t had a chance to research in person. It’s not quite as good as being there in person, but it’s a step up from what Hergé was able to do.

Understanding Mayan glyphs

The weather was decidedly on the scorchio side today, with a hot sun burning through thin clouds by lunchtime and the thermometer soaring to almost thirty degrees. Being British I therefore put on my heaviest Levis 501s and a long-sleeved shirt, lest any of the aforementioned solar rays should get anywhere near my skin. It wasn’t sufficient to protect my nose, however, which is now glowing bright enough to distract passing ships.

The bulk of the day was spent touring the insides of several volcanoes, which I was shocked to learn had last erupted only two hundred years ago. In geological timescales that’s just a nanosecond, which means the whole island of Lanzarote is anything but volcanically extinct. I found myself wondering what kind of protection the solid roof of my rented Mercedes A class would offer from raining lava and pyroclastic flows. It didn’t look good, especially considering the size of the boulders that are strewn all over the place, but it had to be a smidgen better than being stuck in a convertible when one of the mountains blows its top.

With the touristy stuff out of the way I settled down to do some background research for my novel. I’ve always loved the look of Mayan glyphs. It’s a soft, curvy style of artistic writing, in contrast to the perhaps more familiar sharp, angular ancient Egyptian scribblings. The Maya communicated with squashed faces, stylised animal outlines and other shapes to depict words, actions, numbers and ideas. They were able to record complex and detailed histories in stone, although the meaning of their written legacy was forgotten by natives and foreigners alike until researchers in the 19^th century started to piece together the fragmentary clues that had survived.

I’m starting with the basics of the symbols today. I’ve learnt that there’s a pattern in the way each glyph is read, which is kind of from left to right and top to bottom within the square panel. Recognising what the pictures are meant to be is not easy, especially when dealing with the original rock carvings which are sometimes worn, mossy or damaged. My goal is to create an original stele for my novel. With the aid of a guidebook it shouldn’t be impossible: I think it might be a similar challenge to when I tried to write a ‘new’ Canterbury Tale in full Chaucerian English. Very slow going at first, but not all that hard after a while. Time will tell if that’s just hugely over-optimistic. I must go and put some cream on my nose now.

An old Roman road

Obviously I couldn’t take my treadmill with me on the flight yesterday, especially since I was limited to a less than generous fifteen kilos in my suitcase, so I’ve had to try running in the real world. That turned out to be harder than I expected: this town is so hilly it makes San Francisco look like Amsterdam. Running downhill is problematic because it’s so steep that there’s a good chance of falling over, and running uphill is just plain bonkers. But I gave it a go, nevertheless, and made it as far as the café where I had earlier breakfasted by the beach and then back again, totalling about 2.6 miles, most of which was vertical.

The edits to my novel flowed well with the assistance of some delicious rosé wine which cost me only two Euros for a bottle. It even had a real cork, which is a rare treat with bargain basement booze these days. I addressed the issue of adding depth to some scenes where Ruby is escaping from her captors in southern France which was just a fast-moving sequence of events in the first draft that had only a loose affiliation to the concept of ‘literature’. I wanted to get into the character’s head without slowing down the pace too much, and I think I’ve found a way to make it work. She finds a path in the woods and realises that it’s an old Roman road, and the archaeologist part of her mind starts to analyse its origins and significance. This makes her long to become again the person that she was meant to be, not the person that she has been forced to be.

The problem I’m having with writing here is that it’s not so easy to dip in and out of the Internet to research the background to things like this Roman road. The connection speed is too slow to be useful. In fact, it’s just like the old days when dialing up was a hit-and-miss affair, and even when you got through you could go and make a cup of tea whilst waiting for the first page to appear. In fact you could probably grow the tea leaves as well. But I have a back-up plan which I might instigate tomorrow. I need to learn to read and write Mayan glyphs, and I have a book with me that can teach me the grammar and styles of their carvings. If I can master this I’ll be able to create an original design for a carved stele which will feed vital clues to the characters in the novel, and even though it probably won’t be printed in the novel it might be useful for the back cover design or for an accompanying website with all the bonus features that I can add to it.

So as if learning Brazilian Portuguese wasn’t hard enough, whilst trying to recall the Spanish I learned a quarter of a century ago so that I can order eggs on toast in the local café, I’m now going to try to learn a language that’s been lost in the jungle for thousands of years and I won’t have any local waiters on which to test my skills. Er, piece of cake.

Extending the search for inspiration

I printed out my novel when I finished writing last night. It’s quite a major investment in paper given the word count, so it’s not something I do very often. In fact, it’s the first print-out I’ve done for years, and it’s great to see it on paper again as well as being reassuring to know that there’s a hard copy backup of the edits I’ve made during the past month. Luckily I have a laser printer that can do double-sided prints, so that helps keep the pile of paper manageable.

Years ago I used to print out what I’d written every day, no matter where I was. Whilst on a trip to India in 2000 I took a suitcase containing an inkjet printer in its original packaging, a laptop, charger, some floppy disks (remember them?) and very little else. When you’re writing several thousand words a day you get rather possessive over your creation. I was so paranoid that the laptop and floppies I was using would get damaged by the humidity, airport scanners, theft or the general abuse they experience when travelling that I printed two copies of everything I wrote, put one copy in my baggage and posted the other copy back to my home address via airmail. That all seems a bit quaint now that we have the option of ‘cloud storage’, whatever that is.

So, having printed out the entire novel I put it in my laptop bag along with my laptop, charger and some research books. Then I weighed the bulging bag on my postal scales, was relieved to see that it weighed less than ten kilos, and went to bed.

Skip ahead to today, which has been weird in a good way. It all started off normally, half and hour or so on the treadmill with unimpressive results. Catching up with e-mails, raw vegetable juice for breakfast (yum, yum). Did the washing-up, stuck some bags in the car, and drove to Bournemouth with ‘Er Indoors, hopped on a Boeing 737-800 with curiously bent wing tips, and landed four hours later on a volcanic island off the African coast.

It’s now almost midnight, I’m writing this blog in a slightly drunken haze (the obliging barman didn’t feel the need to use measures when serving spirits) sitting on the balcony of a Lanzarote villa with a panoramic sea view. If inspiration doesn’t flow here, it won’t flow anywhere. But to be honest, I didn’t come here for inspiration. I’m enjoying the rewrites and I wasn’t stuck anyway. Britain is suffering from blizzards this week, and I’ll be suffering from beaches, sunshine and sangria while I rewrite the next chapters. How awful.

Literary (hair) style

I had a haircut today, and then I took the dog to the groomers for his trim straight after. I had tried to negotiate a two-for-one deal with the dog groomers but they weren’t having any of it. They don’t know my breed very well. It all worked out for the best, since Pooch’s pruning session cost twice as much as my own anyway. I don’t tend to get many compliments after I’ve had a haircut, the best to date being, ‘Oh dear, you’ve had a haircut.’ It would have been slightly less insulting had it not been said with a tone of sympathy. Pooch looks a bit daft after his cut, but he’ll get used to it in a few days. So will I.

I hope to get a better response to the trims I’m making to my novel. Parts of it are a little dishevelled. They need a bit of a wash, a quick massage, and a short back and sides. But other parts need extensions (unlike this cringe worthy metaphor, which has already been extended more than I’m comfortable with). This evening I edited a sequence where the character Ruby is on the run in France. Step by step she needs to do various things to get money, food, shelter, and to stay hidden. I sometimes get a sense that writing this kind of chapter is like a school essay: ‘then she did this, then she did that, and then she did…’ Keeping a mature literary style when describing a sequence of events requires attention to the details of the scene. I have to remember to include the turmoil in the character’s mind and use all of the senses to create rich, evocative settings. But this kind of writing has to be balanced against the need to maintain the pace of the narrative. Phew… it’s not easy being a novelist.

What else is happening in the book? Matt, in Belize, gets a message from Ruby telling him that she’s been taken to France and that she fears for her life. Matt has to find a way to get to France without his money or his passport, and he has to try to get to Ruby before she tries something stupid like escaping on her own. Which is, of course, exactly what she has done.

I felt a little queasy this morning, so I didn’t break any new world records on the treadmill, just kept to a slow and dignified pace. The language lesson went well – I can now count up to 20, more or less. Took some furniture to a charity store, which has helped create space in my house. Now it’s time to go and rinse the loose hair clippings off my ears…

Half way through this draft

Today I reached the half way point of draft of my novel, The Sphinx Scrolls. It’s taken me 29 days to get this far through the draft. Hopefully the second half won’t take so long because I always find that I spend far longer on getting the opening chapters right. Later chapters are easier because characters and storylines are already established. What matters most at the start is how those elements are introduced in a subtle, elegant and interesting way, and that’s what takes so long to do well.

I’m at a point in the story where hints start appearing that the underlying military situation in Central America is getting critical. This prepares the reader for what is revealed in later chapters when the ancient threat to the modern world starts to emerge and the tension escalates.

Ruby is now at a French military base, but thanks to the influence of Guatemala’s President she is still unable to go free. She’s torn between her desire to escape and the excitement that she feels at being involved in this amazing archaeological project. When I get to the next draft I think I’ll get her to discover something new about the nature of the project she is working on, and that will give her a fresh, clear goal. The old draft simply showed her having a ‘hunch’ that she needed to get to the Sphinx in Egypt to find the answers. A hunch is a lame literary device, and I am ashamed that it was previously there. The new draft will follow far more interesting plot developments based on her friend Ratty’s research into a Mayan stele and a cathedral tomb.

In other news today, on the treadmill I knocked another 20 seconds off my 5 kilometre personal best – I’m now 7 minutes faster at this distance than I was two months ago. But it’s getting pretty tough to run at that speed. I need to lose more weight if I’m going to get any faster because right now I’m carrying far too much lard around my waist. I also finished a section in the language course I’m studying. And, finally, I had to return a DVD to Blockbuster by 9pm. My stupid cheap Blu-Ray player won’t eject a disk until it’s spent five minutes booting up, so I was five minutes late returning Marley and Me to the hire shop and I’m going to get fined for it. So the money I saved by buying the crappiest Blu-Ray player on the market is going to get eaten up by late rental fines. That’ll teach me. Hmph.

Creating memorable characters

I’ve come across a little problem with my novel today. There are some chapters involving four French scientists, all of whom arrive at the same time. They are different ages, they have different specialist skills, and they have different personalities. And yet I realised when I read through those chapters that I was finding it hard to remember which name related to which person. If the writer of the novel can’t work out who is who, what chance does the reader have?

This is something I’ve experienced sometimes when reading other people’s novels. When too many characters are introduced to the story too quickly I forget which one is which, and when that happens I cease to care about them. That is a bad thing for a novel. I’m not going to name any novels where I’ve experienced this because maybe it’s just me (I’m hopeless at remembering real people’s names when I meet them in any case). Maybe it’s just that the phone rang half way through reading that chapter or Pooch decided it was time to go out and pee on the cat’s grave again. These little distractions can make it difficult to retain small details in the plot, like when did this person come into it and what on earth have they got to do with anything anyway?

On an earlier draft of The Sphinx Scrolls I came across a related situation. There were three student archaeologists, and I eventually realised that the third one was superfluous. He didn’t contribute much to the story, his personality wasn’t as interesting as those of the other two, and it made things too complicated for the reader. So I decided to write him out of the story, adapted some of his lines for use by other characters, and basically streamlined the plot.

What I think I’ll have to do with these French scientists is review their scenes carefully and decide if one of them can be ‘deleted’ without the important parts of the story being adversely affected. Professor Jean Lantier, Dr Berger, Professor Philipe Eyzies, and Michel Lecour had all better tread carefully because I’m going to be watching them closely. Whether or not I decide that one of them is for the chop, I’m going to have to work harder at differentiating their vocabularies, their mannerisms and their attitudes so that I can have a clear picture of who is speaking as I read. And I think if I can follow who is who, then anyone can.