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.

The action moves to France

I’m almost half way through the current draft of The Sphinx Scrolls novel. So far the majority of the book has taken place in Central America, in particular Guatemala and Belize (although I still have to write a few scenes in England for that part of the book where Ratty follows a trail of historical clues). But now the action has moved to France. The reason for this is that the French government is helping Guatemala in its research into the ancient artefacts that they have found, with the plan being for them to share the benefits of any knowledge gained. So Ruby has just arrived in France, forced to work on the research project, only she’s now afraid for her safety after a dissenting co-worker disappeared.

This presents Matt with a challenge: he’s a wanted man, currently hiding in remotest Belize, and he has no passport or cash, and yet he needs to get to France to save Ruby (again). Only this time she’ll let him, if he can work out how to get there. This will be dealt with in the next writing session tomorrow.

The edits progressed well today, but it’s not purely been a writing day. I knocked 32 seconds off my PB for 5km on the treadmill this morning. The shed was shaking so much while I ran that the music centre, perched on a toolbox and blaring out an muffled and very ancient Cliff Richard and the Shadows tape, wiggled itself to the edge and then fell onto the floor with a bang, bringing my very uncool music to an abrupt end. And coincidentally, this was the same tape that I had played 25 years ago on a hand-held mono tape machine when hitch-hiking to a campsite in Provence (and which I wrote about in my travel book, Don’t Lean Out of the Window!). That hitch-hiking journey took me past a French lakeside location where Ruby has just arrived. Small world.

I also found time to watch An Education, starring that English baddie from Spiderman and that new actress who didn’t quite win an Oscar. The cad character in the film drives a Bristol, which is the same brand of rare and aristocratic car that Ratty drives in The Sphinx Scrolls.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get to the half way point in the novel and will start sensing a great deal of forward momentum with this draft. I want to get it done because the next draft will fill in a lot of interesting blanks that I’m very much looking forward to writing.

My writing routine

I’m almost a month into my novel rewrites, and I think I’m getting into quite a good routine. Every day this week has begun with a five kilometre jog on the treadmill in the shed behind my office. When I say shed, it’s actually pretty cool for a shed. It’s a log cabin that we built last year in the corner of the garden. 12’ x 18’, double-glazed windows, power, lighting, aerial and phone sockets. This is a picture of its interior when I was lining the inner walls with insulation and then covering it with tongue-and-groove.

Unfortunately that job was abandoned half way through because we had to use the shed as a dumping ground for furniture while the house was being renovated, but I’ll get it finished eventually. The plan is for it to become a luxurious, soundproof and well insulated gym. At the moment one corner has been set aside for the treadmill, so at least I can do some exercise there, but when it’s finished it will have a rowing machine, cycling machine, a ‘wobble’ machine and space for aerobic and floor work. It could, equally, be a fantastic writing room if I feel I need a change of scenery from the converted garage. As you can see, the garage has become a pretty smart office. And I really do need all those computers and machines to write with, of course…

Back to my routine, the next daily task is the language course which usually takes half an hour each morning. At this rate I expect to get through 60% of the course before I go to Brazil, and I don’t know if that’s enough to be able to communicate in any meaningful manner. Having got those things out of the way (plus breakfast and a shower etc) I’m awake and ready to start work.

This morning I had a meeting with a business partner: we decided to go for a drive to a nearby motorhome dealership, and we sat in the back of one of their camper vans for part of our meeting. Cheeky, but cheap. Then I showed some prospective tenants around one of our rental properties (they seemed utterly underwhelmed), drove home and buried the dead pigeon in my garden, booked some British Airways flights to Brazil, and, finally, started work on my novel.

It’s good to have a routine, even if the novel gets pushed to the back of the queue much of the time. But at least it gets done, it moves measurably forward, and it feels good to tick off a nice long list of things each evening. Although I hope not to be burying pigeons every day.

Writer's block

It’s late evening. I’m barely able to keep my eyes open having been up since 6am. I’m staring at my blank blog screen without a clue what to write. I did a lot of things today, but I don’t know if any of it is interesting for anyone to read about. So I’ll write about it anyway, just on the off-chance.

The day started with a five kilometre jog on my treadmill (tried to beat my personal best for the distance, and did so by 20 seconds). Yawn. That was followed by half an hour studying some strange foreign language that I’ve been struggling to get to grips with for a few weeks now. Brazilian Portuguese, I think it’s called. I can say ‘the cat is in the hat’ and a few other useful phrases already. Boring. I went to Blockbuster to return a couple of DVDs, took ‘er indoors to a shop that sells synthetic flowers, then had meetings with a bank manager and an accountant. Anyone still awake?

The problem is that I didn’t get down to working on the novel until it was dark. I managed to edit about 3,000 words, but I have no energy in reserve for writing an entertaining blog about today’s edits and new bits. My quill is dry. The proud tower of my muse lies forlorn. Writer’s block has truly hit me this evening.

Or has it? I haven’t actually engaged my brain very much to produce the paragraphs above (yes, I know it shows, but bear with me while I attempt to make some kind of tenuous point). And that’s the thing about writer’s block. The only way past it is simply to write. Write about why you feel you can’t write. Write about your frustration at feeling uninspired. Write about why it’s so unfair that everyone else seems so easily to be able to get their creative juices flowing freely while the movement of your juices is more akin to that of a glacier.

Write about what you had for breakfast. Write about you wished you’d had for breakfast if you hadn’t run out of eggs and sausages. Write about how you’ll be glad you didn’t have a fry-up today when you next step on those bathroom scales. Before you know it, you’ve been writing hundreds of words and the idea that you’re suffering from writer’s block suddenly seems ridiculous.

That’s 400 words so far. Turns out I wasn’t suffering from writer’s block after all.

PS The injured pigeon didn’t survive the night. I’ll give it a decent burial tomorrow.

Budget analysis-free zone

Today was the British Chancellor’s final pre-election budget, which I watched on the Internet whilst not really doing much writing at all. And wouldn’t you know it, Darling has not done a single thing specifically to help writers of archaeological thriller novels. Typical. We’re always last in the queue. But that’s enough politics for the moment.

After the budget was finished I was disturbed by a scuffle outside my garden office. I opened the door and discovered a blackbird pecking aggressively at a young pigeon. I shooed away the blackbird and waited to see where the pigeon went to: it limped to the edge of the garden and tried to hide, not very well. I fed it some seeds I found in the kitchen cupboard, but I don’t hold out much hope for it. It’s lost a lot of its feathers and it can’t seem to fly. My little dog sometimes takes a passing interest in it, although he’s too much of a wimp to attack it.

So from the action in my garden to the action in the novel. The chapters I edited today required very few changes because they had already been radically edited in the past. The only major thing still to do is to weave in more subplot sections to keep the parallel plot lines running. This will be done in the next editing sweep. Right now Matt and Charlie are in Belize having just been told that it’s no longer a tax haven… no, wait a minute, that was the budget again. They’re in Belize having just hidden their kombi in the edge of the jungle and are currently floating down a primeval river on what until very recently was the camper van’s fibreglass pop-up roof. All goes well until they hit some rapids, and suddenly the two are sucked under the water where they must wait until a later chapter before they discover what happens to them.

I would imagine that a river in the Belizean jungle is the perfect place to avoid all the media tittle-tattle about today’s budget. Wish I was there enjoying the dense, humid air so that I could avoid the news about cider costing a bit more than it used to and all the interviews with the Chancellor. I’ll finish my writing early today because I’m concerned about what’s going to happen to that lame bird. But it’s all part of the natural cycle of things, and what will be will be, I suppose. In any case, he’ll just get a consultancy job if he loses his seat at the next election.

Armageddon outta here

After all my talk of doomsday films yesterday I saw on the news that Western Australia has experienced a storm of Biblical proportions with hailstones the size of tennis balls and considerably more rain than they are accustomed to. I was concerned for the safety of the lovely people who run eBooks.com in Perth, which suffered the worst of the weather’s aberration. At least their website was still up and running, which was a good sign. Some of my books are available as eBooks on their website, so while I was there I took a quick peek at how my writing guides were doing and was delighted to see that How to be a Writer is the number one bestseller in the Language Arts section: www.ebooks.com/subjects/language-arts-disciplines/. Cool. I hope my novel can achieve that kind of success when it eventually sees the light of day.

I reached a small milestone towards that goal today. I’m now at page 100 (A4, single spaced) in this editing sweep. Just 176 to go, and then it’s back to the beginning to work on specific aspects of the book such as character vocabularies, subplot, tension etc. Today I worked on another fun scene involving the old Volkswagen camper van: it runs out of fuel and gets pushed down a hill into the jungle so that two characters can hide out in it for a while. They figure that with the engine, fuel tank and gearbox at the back it should still be a runner even if it hits a tree.

As I go through this edit there are times when I think a new chapter is needed to break up the ongoing main plot with a peek at what’s happening in the subplot, but I’ve reached a stage where I can’t write those subplot scenes because the detailed sequence of clues, their meanings, and the way the characters interpret and act upon them have all still to be decided. So for now I’m putting in notes such as ‘SCENE WITH RATTY IN HIS HOUSE?’ or ‘ANOTHER RATTY OR ORLANDO/OTTO CHAPTER?’ where I think such a scene would be appropriate, and I’ll pick up on those loose ends in the next edit. Hopefully by then I’ll have all the intricacies of the interweaving plots worked out.

It might be necessary to storyboard the plot on postcards so that I can get a visual impression of how everything fits together. I also have some novel writing software somewhere that’s supposed to help with that sort of thing. I’ve not used it before, but I might give it a go if I can find it.

By way of a change I started work on a couple of non fiction projects today. I have a series of guides for writers planned, and today wrote a little about how to find time to write and about how to find a place to write. Both are very important topics for writers who also have to work for a living, and I think they’ll make great little books. I won’t progress very far with them until the novel is finished, though. I may be good at finding time to write, but I’m not that good.

2012 and all that

Mayan prophecies about the end of the world are having quite an influence on popular culture. The film 2012 was a kind of ultimate disaster movie with a mega budget and the best special effects that money can buy. Not exactly Citizen Kane in terms of cinematic excellence, but an enjoyable couple of hours nevertheless.

At the other end of the scale is the low budget, straight to DVD film 2012: Doomsday. This latter film was interesting to me for two reasons: it featured Mayan temples; and Tesco was selling it for only a fiver. The film, however, had some interesting quirks. In one scene the camera tracks back so much that you can see the dolly track that it’s riding on. Shredded bits of paper are used for snow special effects, which almost works until it clumps together and gets stuck on the actors. There were some strong performances from the cast, but they were let down by a script that was so weighed down by its unsubtle agenda that it kept grinding to a halt. On the plus side, it was nice and short, aided by the fact that it sort of stops rather than bothering to put in a proper ending.

So did I learn anything useful for my novel from either film? Only that I can’t use ‘2012’ in the title. I don’t really want it associated with the themes of either film. Mayan prophecies do form part of the background to my novel, but I interpret them in an entirely fresh, original and more interesting way which makes my denouement totally different to all these earthquake-laden stories.

Today’s edits in the novel went smoothly – nothing new was added, and just a few minor changes to a chapter where Matt is driven in the kombi to the Guatemalan-Belize border and spots some things along the way that disturb him. I can’t reveal what those things are, but you can rest assured they are not earthquakes, volcanoes, towering infernos or any other form of doomsday-style disaster.

The Repping Book

Summersdale sadly didn’t get the award for Trade Publisher of the Year last night at the IPG bash in Windsor, but awards season is now in full swing so we have one or two other chances coming up. If you’re interested, the award went to Blake Publishing. They thoroughly deserve it, if only for being the first publisher to recognise Jordan for the literary genius that she turned out to be.

I didn’t let the disappointment get to me. The rewrites in my novel are at such a fun stage that I was up and writing at 7am on this Sunday morning, and I made great progress after practical research yesterday got in the way of computer time. The new scenes with Ratty investigating the Arundel tomb are going well, and I wrote a few hundred new words this morning as well as editing a few thousand of the existing text. Good progress overall.

When I started writing this novel I didn’t have a laptop. I think I may still have owned a typewriter. But the book was started with a red biro: I still have the original notebook in which I wrote 45 longhand pages having first come up with the idea for The Sphinx Scrolls. On the front cover of the notebook I had scribbled ‘The Repping Book’ because I was initially using it to plan my sales trips to UK bookshops. The first pages contain lists of bookshops within an area, and I ticked them off as I visited them.

Also in there are occasional ideas for books (such as Classic Shakespeare Poems – which we never published in the end), the guitar chords for the Oasis song Wonderwall (which I had worked out for myself one evening), and the phone numbers of various television researchers that I needed to call back to arrange appearances on their shows to promote my latest books. The shows included the dubiously titled The Erogenous Zone, the more familiar This Morning with Richard and Judy, and The Morning Show on the now defunct channel Live TV.

It was quite common for me to have to rearrange my bookshop schedule in order to fit in a television appearance at short notice. It probably raised a few eyebrows when the producers of these shows saw me turn up in my delivery van. I once had a sales meeting with a bookshop manager the morning after appearing on a television show. I pretended not to be the author of the book I was trying to sell to this manager, but I explained about the television publicity the book had received. His response was, ‘I saw the author on telly last night. Thought he was a right arse.’ I pretended to agree with him and took his order. I got used to that kind of thing.

Anyway, back to the notebook. It’s about halfway into it that there’s a particularly scruffy entry, outlining in red ink the premise for what would become The Sphinx Scrolls. I was obviously pretty excited about it, possibly quite drunk (I was on holiday with friends in the south of France at the time), and it’s clear that I wrote the ideas down in a hurry so that I wouldn’t forget them. The next two pages were written the following morning once I had sobered up, and they went into more detail about the plot. Then the novel itself begins. From those two pages of plot notes I was able to generate five chapters. Much of it has since been edited from the text because it was just a rough first draft, but it’s normal for most of my first drafts to be on the shaky side. We can’t all be blessed with Katie Price’s natural talent for penmanship, after all.

Medieval tomb time

I haven’t written or edited a word of my novel today. The 170,000 word document remained unopened for the first time since I set myself the goal at the beginning of March of getting it completed within 90 days. This was in part due to today being another Ikea flat-pack assembly day (a white bedside table to go next to the four poster bed – turned out perfectly first time for a change). The lack of writing progress was also due to a more interesting cause, which was that I finally made it over to Chichester cathedral to take a close look at the Arundel tomb to see how I can incorporate it into the plot of The Sphinx Scrolls.

The Arundel tomb, in common with most of my self-assembly furniture, has a few bits broken off. A carving of a dog is missing its nose, giving it a distinctly porcine appearance. The knight himself has a rather unconvincing replacement nose which is black (the rest of him is grey stone) giving him the look of a dark-nosed drink enthusiast. The stone sword that once lay by his side has clearly met with an unfortunate end, and only its hilt remains. His wife is lacking a finger. Other than that they’re in pretty good shape considering the effigies were carved about 635 years ago. Philip Larkin’s poem is hanging on a pillar next to the tomb, and very few people paid it any attention.

Here’s how the tomb looks:

And this is a close-up of them holding hands:

One of the most interesting features of this cathedral is the remains of the significant Roman building that lies beneath it. The cathedral was built almost 1,000 years ago, and by then the Roman ruins they built over were already themselves 1,000 years old. The sheer scope of history visible in this place is phenomenal. Here’s a picture of the Roman mosaic and pottery found beneath the floor of the cathedral:

The fact that this cathedral was built over the remains of an earlier civilisation is an interesting parallel to one of the themes of the novel, so I think I’ll bring this into the story somewhere.

Flat pack clues

I’ve spent the day wrestling with the clues and their potential meanings in the novel. Well, actually it was only half of the day, the other half having been spent wrestling with the construction of an Ikea four poster bed. Inevitably this involved building a large section, realising that a key component in the middle of it was upside-down, then taking it all apart and starting again. I now have wood glue on my fingers, which I love peeling off, and in my hair, which is somewhat less enjoyable. But some of the glue ended up in the joints of the bed where it was supposed to be, and the bed is finished. It looks like a bed, and it seems to be the correct way up. This success was achieved with only the occasional glance at the instructions. I prefer to regard it more as a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with one piece giving me a clue as to what the next piece might be.

That’s similar to the way I put clues into my novel. I don’t have an instruction manual to follow (not that I’d bother with it even if I did), so I like to take one idea and see where I can run with it. An inscription on a stele is my starting point, but that will lead to other clues in other locations and by solving those mini-mysteries the characters will progress through the key parts of the plot.

I can’t go into detail about the clues investigated by the characters in the novel, other than to say that I’m working with ideas that are complex, inter-related, subtle, elegant, and mind-blowing. They also have to fit together in a watertight way, be logical, believable and enjoyable. I didn’t make it to the cathedral today to investigate the link in the chain represented by the hand holding stone effigies and the Philip Larkin poem, but it’s Saturday tomorrow and I’ll try to get down there in the morning. Sherlock Holmes would always pick up on clues and their significance very easily, saying the logical process of deduction was ‘elementary’. Creating sophisticated clues from nothing isn’t elementary at all: it’s very intricate and challenging, but I’m confident I can make it work.

Sometimes a trail of clues will progress steadily before suddenly, without warning, reaching a dead end. No matter which way I look at it I can’t find a way to make it work and I’ll have to unravel it and start again. It’s frustrating to create something that looks like it’s going to be brilliant only to have to undo it all and work backwards. But as a regular buyer of Ikea flat pack furniture I’m pretty much used to working that way.

“Time has transfigured them into Untruth”

I’ve really enjoyed today’s progress on The Sphinx Scrolls because it involved writing a new chapter for Ratty, who is a delight to write for. He’s back in England investigating something Ruby said to him enigmatically in Guatemala. She had quoted a line from a Philip Larkin poem about a medieval tomb on which two stone effigies lie hand in hand. Ratty had taken her to that tomb on their one and only disastrous date together back when they were undergraduates. After reading the poem to her and then suggesting that he and Ruby might spend eternity together like that she had scarpered very quickly.

“Time has transfigured them into Untruth” is the line from the poem that gets him thinking. She is trying to make a subtle reference to something important that Ratty would be able to understand but which would wash over the other person present. It has something to do with the significance of the Mayan stele he is trying to sell, and it’s enough to make him decide not to go through with the deal. And I have to do some research myself to find a way to fit all the pieces together. The tomb in question isn’t far from I live, so if I have time I might swing by there tomorrow and see if there’s anything useful for Ratty to notice that could shed some light on what Ruby means.

The new chapter has pushed the word count to almost 170,000. It’s comforting to see the novel grow once more after having cut so many tens of thousands of words some years ago. At least I can be sure that the sequences I cut back then added nothing to the story – they went off at right angles from the plot line, then simply doubled back to where they started. Cool scenes in themselves, but completely unnecessary to the success of the story. Whereas these new chapters (which mostly deal with subplots) I’m putting in here and there serve a dual purpose:

1. They interrupt the main plot at suspenseful moments to create a need to keep reading in order to find out what happens, and
2. They add layers of mystery, depth and intrigue to the story.

This particular new chapter I wrote today helps to delay a big plot revelation and feeds the reader a new mystery to keep those pages turning. I hope I’ll have the Philip Larkin connection all figured out by the weekend, otherwise I’ll be keeping my character Ratty larkin’ about in a cathedral in a state of befuddlement. And that’s not unlike how I expect to be when I start researching the tomb tomorrow.

The big revelation

The edits I’m doing to The Sphinx Scrolls have today reached a chapter containing a major revelation in the book. Hints appear here and there earlier in the text, but 30% of the way into the book Ruby learns something astonishing about the Mayan sarcophagus she is studying. I’ve prolonged the reader’s suspense by chopping up one of the chapters and inserting a scene from the subplot in the middle: you would need to read on in order to find out where the hints are leading. One of the clues lies in the doctorate qualifications of some of the scientists sent to study the sarcophagus with Ruby. They are specialists in areas that she considers irrelevant to archaeology, and the reader is about to discover how wrong Ruby is about that.

To make the story flow better I’ve had to write a few new scenes, and the word count has crept up to a little over 169,000. Today’s additions including details from the road trip across Guatemala in the ancient VW camper van. There’s a lovely moment when the camper van misfires with a bang when the engine starts up after refuelling at a petrol station. The bang brings the twitchy station owner running out from his hut with his hands in the air.

This book delves deep into history, and history is full of what-ifs. What if that meteorite hadn’t killed off the dinosaurs? We probably wouldn’t have had a history to start with. What if Hitler had won the war? We’d probably have emerged from that regime at about the same time that communism fell away in Eastern Europe. What if Hitler had never started the war? Most of those post-war baby boom kids wouldn’t have been born, so my parents wouldn’t have existed and therefore nor would I. It’s quite disturbing to think that I owe my existence to the mad decisions of one of the most evil men in history. And I’m not the only one – millions of people are alive today who wouldn’t have been born without that war taking place. Equally, millions of people have never had the chance to be born for the same reason.

My point is that history is full of chance events: things happened, other things nearly happened which would have led to other things but didn’t, and so on. What if Charles Babbage had not argued with the man he was employing to construct his Difference Engine so that the thing had actually been built? The world came within a hair’s breadth of having computing power almost a century earlier than its eventual arrival. Think about it: a powerful, logical, mathematical computer could have been the introduced in the Victorian age. Electricity was already in use by then, so the mechanical machine might have become an electronic computer very quickly.

Was electricity in use far earlier than we think? There are objects in museums, dating from thousands of years ago, that appear to be electroplated. There are painted tombs with no evidence of scorching from oil or other naked flame lanterns. There is a giant, ancient ‘battery’ discovered in Baghdad, close to where the electroplated items were found. What if that brief spark of electrical usage hadn’t died out for two thousand years, but had developed steadily, as it did starting from its ‘rediscovery’ in the 17th Century? Could Galileo have been an astronaut instead of an astronomer? Could Chaucer have been a screenwriter instead of a poet? All these things were possible. Humans stopped evolving tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. The raw material brain power to do everything we do today has been around since before the Ice Age. We are fortunate to live at the culmination of a few hundred years of progress in science, medicine, technology and philosophy. It hasn’t been steady progress, but the result of all the random and crazy things that have happened in known history is the world we live in today.

What I wonder is, are we the first civilisation to experience this compounded growth in knowledge? Was there someone from prehistory who, like the maker of the Baghdad battery, created a technology which for a time was developed by succeeding generations before being lost due to natural disaster, disease or war? Was the Baghdad battery not a giant leap for mankind but the tail end of a more sophisticated knowledge base that was dying out? Archaeology has unearthed many clues and suggestions that could point to this. That’s what makes the big revelation in The Sphinx Scrolls so interesting…

Mayan archaeology

The rainforests of Central America are chockablock with overgrown temples, pyramids, stelae and broken pots. Ancient Mayans believed that pottery contained spirits: they smashed their pots in order to release the spirits, which is why it’s rare to find any that consist of less than a hundred pieces.

As my rotund student archaeologist character, Charlie, puts it,

‘I reckon that belief was invented by the pot makers. Stands to reason: persuade guys to smash their pots and they have to buy more from you. There must have been a few millionaire potters.’

Mayans were partial to doing odd things in caves. They thought they were getting close to the underworld and would sometimes leave offerings deep underground. I explored such a cave in Belize, guided by a British ex-soldier (who inspired a similar character in the novel). Accessing the cave required a two hour march, constantly in and out of the water, with a final swim across to the cave’s entrance. We left our shoes inside the cave entrance so that our feet wouldn’t damage the delicate treasures inside. Another hour of marching, swimming, climbing, and crawling deep into the underworld followed. My M&S socks were ruined. Then we found this:

Smashed pots from a ceremony that took place about 1,500 to 2,000 years ago. As if that wasn’t cool enough, we crawled on for another half an hour and squeezed into an opening so tight that I could barely fit. 

But it was worth the effort, because we then found this:

The bones were calcified. The victim had a hole in his or her skull. Even more tragic was the sight of a set of baby bones in the same part of the cave. Thousands of years had passed and these bones had remained undisturbed, exactly where they were sacrificed, for that whole period. We photographed the scene, but didn’t touch anything. To this day the location of that cave remains a secret in order that those remains can be protected.

Counting words

Ever wondered how many words a professional writer produces in a working day? I’ve heard of one successful novelist who tootles down to his shed after breakfast, writes no more than 1,000 words in the morning, takes a leisurely lunch and then edits those same words in the afternoon. Hardly a punishing schedule, in my opinion. And yet working at that pace, five days a week, is enough to produce two novels, each of 130,000 words, every year. Redrafting many times in order to get it right can halve that output, of course, but if a novelist releases one book a year it is usually deemed to be a productive career.

That’s fine for full-time novelists who are fortunate enough to know that their words will be published when completed, but for amateur authors trying to squeeze writing time into their busy lives it’s another story altogether. Holding down a day job and a family and then trying to produce 1,000 more-or-less publishable words before bedtime is hugely challenging for anyone. My own novel progressed in fits and starts over many years. A typical day’s contribution, when I actually managed to write anything at all, was often around 500 words. Any movement in the right direction felt good, no matter how small. I found that the word count progressed faster during dialogue scenes, and things moved much more slowly during descriptive passages.

Actually, if I average out the total words written in my novel over the 7 year period in which they were produced, it only comes to 75 words a day. Not exactly blistering performance. Kids write more than that each day in their illiterate txt msgs.

There were times when I was able to take the novel on ‘holiday’ with me, and this was when the word count really started to fly. I discovered that I could comfortably manage 2-3,000 words a day, tucked in a Mediterranean villa with no other work to do apart from occasional sunbathing. One week I experimented to see how far I could push the limits of my creative output. The word count nudged upwards: 4,000 a day, 5,000 a day, 6,000 a day. Then I relaxed and dropped back to 3,000 for a couple of days. I had this section of The Sphinx Scrolls plot already mapped out and my characters were sufficiently developed to enable me to progress quickly.

Then, totally ‘in the zone’, I wrote a massive 7,000 words between sunrise and midnight. I know, you’re thinking quality not quantity. This was all first draft stuff, of course, so literary perfection wasn’t essential: getting the story completed was the goal. I knew I could then go back and tidying it all up (which is what I’m doing now). I think it’s more important to finish a very rough first draft than to have a few pages of exquisite English that never become a novel because the writer’s progress was so slow that they couldn’t maintain their motivation.

The level of concentration needed to write 7,000 words in a single day was phenomenal. Other people were staying at the villa too, but I barely noticed them even though I was working on the kitchen table and they were cooking and chatting around me. At the end of the day I felt as if I was punch drunk, my head throbbing from the marathon it had been asked to run. It was like being immersed in a virtual reality, living and breathing the story of the novel and the lives of the characters. My dreams were about the novel. My waking thoughts were about the novel. It was a great experience.

It takes a long time to warm up enough to be able to get the writing juices to flow so easily. You can’t do it from a cold start. You have to know your story, your characters, your style and your goals for the chapter. You also have to sleep well, be in a relaxed environment, and have people to feed you, water you, and even bathe you if necessary. You have to make sure your brain doesn’t need to think about anything except writing.

Getting all of these stars to align is a regrettably rare occurrence for most of us. The editing sweep I’m doing at the moment involves a mixture of reading, writing and rewriting. It’s been two weeks since I started this edit and my progress has averaged just under 3,000 words a day. The stars are not in their magical alignment yet. When they do, I’ll look forward to some amazing progress.

This blog is about 750 words, but that doesn’t count.

Writing at the beach

Well, the sun lived up to its part of the bargain so I lived up to mine. I said I’d write at the seaside if the weather was good, so earlier today Katia and I stepped out towards our micro camper van with our micro computers and our micro dog, and we headed off to do some work at the beach. After a journey of almost a mile (we’re pretty intrepid travellers) I parked on the shingle and sat on a little seat in the back of the van. The camper van has an overhead air conditioning unit that limits my headroom in this seat so I had to bend my neck and my back at weird angles. Also, the table was too small to handle two computers at the same time so Katia, sitting opposite me and with headroom to spare, worked on her lap. Pooch was happy to curl up on a cushion and dream about chasing chickens.

Outside, hardy people wrapped themselves up against the biting March wind and crunched their way along the stony beach. Noisy kids skateboarded in the adjacent park. Ferries chugged sedately through the chilly, green Solent. But inside the van we were cosy and warm, and were both feeling inspired to write. Katia was writing a film review, and I was rewriting a scene which, if it were a movie, would occur at the start of Act Two of the film.

The Matt Baker character has come through a situation from which there is no going back. That was the ‘turning point’, and he is now firmly set on his mission. In case you’re interested, the first act of a film usually takes half an hour of screen time, which is typically 7,000 words of script. The number of words taken up by my novel to reach the same turning point is about 40,000. That’s how far I am with this draft.

‘Act Two’ begins with Matt Baker’s chance encounter with some archaeology students having escaped from being in a bit of pickle (to use a phrase that he wouldn’t understand). One of the students mistakes Matt for Andy McNab, which really winds him up. In the original text I edited today Matt tries to persuade the students to help him rescue Ruby and get her out of Guatemala. I felt that this didn’t work because it seemed unlikely that he would ask strangers to do something so dangerous. It would be more convincing if the students’ enthusiasm for the idea of a rescue made them beg him to take them with him, despite his misgivings.

The best bit about this scene is that the students have a 1970s Volkswagen camper van (‘kombi’) which they have kitted out with secret compartments for smuggling Mayan relics. I’ve owned three of these Volkswagens in the past (minus the smuggling compartments), each van a historic relic in its own right. I know all the quirks and problems of trying to keep such a vehicle running. My first kombi broke down in the Dordogne: turning the ignition key failed to make any connection to the starter motor. As luck would have it, a kindly Welsh car thief happened to be taking a well-earned break on the same campsite. He helpfully by-passed the ignition lock with a nifty bit of hot-wiring. The van then started by means of touching two bare wires together behind the steering wheel (not the easiest thing to explain to a policeman when crossing international borders). Anyway, I thought this would be the perfect thing to put into the novel, so I made sure the student’s kombi suffered from the same problem, and this provides some useful plot devices later on.

Happily my current camper van, which is about half the size of a kombi, started up first time and brought us safely home. But I can’t help thinking it would be nice to have one of those old 1970s brick-shaped busses again. They make wonderful mobile offices for writers.

Deleted scenes

I am the proud driver of a micro camper van. No bigger than a 6 seater MPV, it has a pop-up roof with a double bed, plus a sink, a gas hob, an electric fridge and some cupboards large enough to store a couple of biscuits. One of the cupboards is officially a ‘wardrobe’, though it has a big water pipe running through it that would prevent anything being hung in there anyway, besides which there’s no rail for hanging things on. And that brings me, via the most tortuous and tenuous link in the history of blogdom, to the chapter I edited today: Chapter 8, in which some hangings take place.

Chapter 8 is about a fifth of the way into the book. Ruby’s lover, Matt, is a political prisoner due to be executed, and despite Ruby’s close attachment to President Orlando he refuses to grant a pardon: the hangings are to proceed as planned. But this whole scene is vastly different to the one I originally penned in the late 1990s, which I called the ‘shark scene’. I have fond memories of that scene, but it was too unconvincing. One person read it and found it ‘hilarious’, which was something I badly needed to avoid in an archaeological thriller. The scene involved the President keeping a shark in his lake, and the executions were to involve throwing the prisoners into the lake to feed the shark. Yes, I know that smacks of early James Bond villains, but at least my character was aware of that and had even mentioned it. The President and his retinue all went out on unseaworthy boats to enjoy the spectacle, but the shark knocked their boat and President’s wife fell in the water. Someone then drained the lake via a sluice gate in order to save her, which resulted in the death of the shark. Turns out the President would have preferred to keep his shark alive than his wife and he was furious. This scene had to be replaced with the more realistic and less comical one that I edited today. I’ve kept a copy, though. Maybe it will get included in some bonus features one day?

Having survived the revised execution method (now by hanging) by means that I won’t reveal, Matt has another cool scene at the US Embassy. When I originally wrote that scene I envisaged a nice old colonial-style building into which anyone could walk and ask the nice receptionist if the ambassador could see them. Oh no. Not with an American Embassy, and certainly not in Guatemala. The US Embassy in Guatemala City turns out to be a heavily-guarded fortress, and I had to devise a whole new way to get Matt past the security. Then I had to rethink how to get him into the next bout of trouble I needed him to get into, but I think I have it all worked out now.

If the sun shines tomorrow I might take the micro camper van down to the beach with my laptop and do some writing on the pathetic little table it has in the back. Tomorrow’s scenes will be fun to work on. The next chapter contains the massive revelation of what the 12,000 year old relic actually is. This is something that was originally given away on page 1, and now it will be a quarter of the way into the story where its impact will be all the more powerful. It will be a shock for the reader as well as for Ruby – they will learn of the artefact’s purpose together, and that will propel them jointly into the next phase of the novel. It’s only right to make this revelation now. After all, it would be unfair to leave the reader hanging.

The writer’s voice

One of the challenges of writing this novel is that I need to use two distinctly different narrative voices. The first is the usual omniscient third person narrator, which is fun to use because it’s like playing God: in this voice I have total power over the lives of all of my poor characters, and can dip in and out of their scenes causing as much havoc as I choose. The majority of the novel is written in this standard, modern way. The second is the voice of the author of the Sphinx scrolls themselves. These are written in the first person, which immediately places restrictions on what the narrator knows and is able to write about.

In my earliest drafts of the book I wrote the scrolls in the third person, but I realised I could make this part of the story far more powerful and emotional if I rewrote the scrolls in the first person. The shift from third to first person required many changes to the plot, since the narrator cannot be in more than one place at a time, but I was able to find techniques to get round those problems.

The creation of a tone of voice, a vocabulary and a writing style for the ancient scrolls was particularly hard. The ‘translation’ of these scrolls runs for 22,000 words, and in that section I had to portray a culture and civilisation that is virtually alien to us. Their assumptions and prejudices, beliefs and habits, manner of speech and ideas of what mattered all had to be invented. However, I wanted to make sure the scrolls were not so obscure in their points of reference as to be unreadable. So I settled on a voice that was formal but also very personal. This is an excerpt of the first Sphinx scroll, and it’s currently the paragraph that opens the book (although it’s been rewritten many times and I may well change it again):

What remains of my body now imprisons me. I am rotting like a fallen Ceiba tree in the rainforest. I have a memory of hair on my head, but when I touch my skull I feel nothing. I remember breathing smooth, clean air, but now my lungs rattle and jump inside my chest. Scar tissue that once sealed old wounds can no longer maintain its repair. To walk is excruciating, and even the process of writing is more than I can bear.

This is the voice of the person who wrote the scrolls at the end of his life, following a great tragedy that destroyed his civilisation. At the start of the book we get a little taster of his predicament and the reason he wrote the scrolls, and then he is not heard from again until the scrolls are actually discovered.

All of the editing work I’ve been doing this week has been in the omniscient narrator’s voice, and one of the goals of the editing process is to make that voice consistent in its style. But actually the style does need to alter according to the character whose perspective I’m following at the time. The changes in tone need to be subtle and should flow readily from one to another. This is proving to be quite hard to achieve, and I think I have plenty of work still to be done to get that aspect of the narration right.

Did I ever toy with the idea of putting the whole novel into the first person? Yes, but doing so would have made it an entirely different book and I wasn’t even sure if it could work. But I wouldn’t mind trying a first person narrative novel from scratch in the future. Just need to get this one finished first (and possibly its sequel, but that’s another story…).

How old is the Sphinx?

I didn’t make many changes in my edits today. That’s a good sign, of course. So I thought I would talk instead about the age of the Great Sphinx of Giza. No one denies it’s very old, but it’s hard to put a precise date on it because it’s mostly carved from natural bedrock that has been there for millions of years. Its ‘precise’ age (give or take a millennium or two) is crucial to the plot of The Sphinx Scrolls. I’ll let my archaeologist protagonist, Ruby, explain the theories – as taken from the chapter I edited today (the other voice is that of President Orlando):

‘…there’s evidence to suggest that the Sphinx in Egypt is far older than people originally believed. Its pharonic head has confused Egyptologists into believing it was built by Pharoah Cheops four thousand years ago, but the latest thinking is that Cheops only discovered the Sphinx with its original leonine head at that time, and had it re-carved in his own image. When Cheops found it, the Sphinx was already eight thousand years old. So rather than the Sphinx marking the beginning of mankind as an advanced, technological race, it may actually mark the end of its first advanced period, the Age of Leo.’

‘What is the evidence for this?’ His voice was cool, assessing, no longer the soft cadences of a would-be lover.

‘The Sphinx was carved out of an outcrop of natural rock, so there’s no certain way of dating it. But geologists studying the erosion of the stone noticed that most of the fissures were vertical, caused by rain, rather than horizontal from wind and sand. And yet there hasn’t been a rainy climate on the Giza plateau for seven thousand years… There are other clues to its age, besides the weathering. If it was built twelve thousand years ago, that was the Age of Leo. The eyes of the Sphinx at that time would have been looking straight at the constellation of Leo. The constellations have since moved around the sky. It’s as if the Sphinx was built as an eternal marker for that point in history.’

The geology she describes is real. The movement of the constellations is real (usually referred to by the catchy phrase ‘precession of the equinoxes’). The conclusion that the Sphinx dates from the Age of Leo, however, is a theory. It is not widely accepted in academic circles due to lack of conclusive evidence. That’s fair enough, but for the purposes of this story I’m running with the idea of the Sphinx being 12,000 years old, a symbol of a lost common ancestry we didn’t even know we had. As the novel progresses it is revealed that other traces of this lost civilisation have survived right under our noses, undetected or misunderstood for thousands of years. It is only when a full understanding of our forgotten past is achieved by the lead characters in the novel that they are able to equip themselves to deal with the sinister legacy they are about to inherit.

The ancients didn’t just predict the end of the world: they caused it

I recently watched the clever low budget Duncan Jones sci-fi film, Moon. On the DVD case was the line ‘250,000 miles from home the hardest thing to face… is yourself’. Every great film has a short distillation of its theme splashed across its poster or DVD box. They call it a ‘tag line’. Good ones include ‘Reality is a thing of the past’ (The Matrix), ‘The greatest fairy tale never told’ (Shrek), and ‘He’s the only kid to get into trouble before he was born’ (Back to the Future).

Fiction publishers tend to prefer a more sophisticated approach to book covers, using quotes from friendly critics or mentioning any awards won by the book or the author, but sometimes they use a tag line to create a kind of subtitle for a novel. Sophie Kinsella’s Twenties Girl has the tag line ‘She’s having the time of her life’. Robert Harris’ Lustrum has the lines ‘Blinded by ambition, seduced by power, destroyed by Rome’. So I reckoned it wasn’t unreasonable to give my book a tag line. And I think I’ve come up with a corker:

The ancients didn’t just predict the end of the world: they caused it.

Is that the sort of thing that would make you pick up the book out of curiosity? What it’s saying is that something was set in motion many thousands of years ago that will affect us today. The race to find the exact nature of this threat and to prevent it from coming to pass is really what The Sphinx Scrolls is about. It’s not easy to guess how anyone from eons ago can create a modern disaster, which is why I hope people will want to read this book.

I think publishers can learn a lot from the film industry. Why shouldn’t all great fiction have a tag line? If you let Hollywood publicists loose on the classics we’d see George Orwell’s Animal Farm with the obvious tag line ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’ Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge would be ‘He sold his wife, and bought a tragedy…’ Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables would be ‘Feeding your family can lead to a ‘loaftime’ of trouble’. Sorry about that one. Feel free to add your own literary tag line suggestions in the comments link below.

Does the subject of tag lines have anything to do with my editing progress today? Not exactly, but having that sense in your head of what the book really boils down to is helpful. I’ve just been working on the scene where Dr. Ruby Towers is told by Guatemala’s new President that she must work for him under duress. He hints that important archaeological discoveries have recently been made in his country. This man is obsessed with healthy living and boasts that he hasn’t had a cold in 15 years. Remember that boast: it plays a crucial role in the dénouement. Anyway, this scene originally contained revelations that I decided should be kept under wraps a little longer. It’s a much more exciting read now that I’ve revealed less in that chapter.

I’m starting to see how important it is not to spoon feed too much information to the reader too soon. Keeping the reader guessing is a crucial part of making a novel a real ‘page-turner’, and one of the problems that needed fixing in my earlier drafts of the book was that I gave information away far too early. I now know that it’s better for the reader to discover what’s happening at the same time as the protagonist (or sometimes even later than the character), rather than to be told straight away, Columbo-style, who did it. Certainly the movie Moon wouldn’t have worked for me if I’d known that the guy on the moon was something that rhymed with a ‘moan’. I won’t give it away in case you haven’t seen it, but the tag line says it all if you think about it enough.

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A sore thumb

It’s the first day of my juice diet: and I’m not talking fruit juice. This is hard core vegetable juice. Raw, natural, and tastes as bad as it looks. I’m getting used to it, though, and if I stick at it for long enough the local pie and cake shops are going to feel the pinch. And I hope I do stick at it because the detoxification process helps me sleep better and dream better, and that increases my creativity and my ability to feel inspired.

There’s no point in being inspired, however, if you haven’t enough time to use it. Today has been overloaded with those annoying tasks that get in the way of writing, and I only managed to dedicate about an hour to the novel. During that hour I cut a paragraph that I realised stood out like a sore cliché. It’s a relic of the early days of my work on this book, probably penned in 1997, back when I used to write with a pen and a notebook before typing it into my lovely DOS word processor.

This was the original passage from my early draft:

“The row intensified. One of the men shoved the other as emphasis for his point of view, and promptly received a punch in the face as a logical progression of the argument. The first guard summarised the finer points of his opinions with a high kick that met his colleague in the stomach. Having recovered from being winded, this man reminded the other that his philosophy was backed up by learned opinion by spitting in his face and drawing a knife from his belt.”

It has a silly, tongue-in-cheek tone which is incongruous to the rest of the chapter. Much as I enjoyed these Moliere-inspired lines, I had to accept that they had no place in this novel. After 13 or 14 years sitting safely in the manuscript these words were today cut back to:

“The row intensified. One of the men shoved the other and promptly received a punch in the face."

Harsh, but necessary. The book cannot be a harbour for little snippets of irrelevant literary humour, and the passage had to be cut in the greater interest of creating a coherent tone for the novel. So the book shrunk a little today to just over 168,000 words. And I think after one day on the juice diet I’ve probably shrunk by about the same amount.

Forget the Oscars, it’s the Independent Publishing Awards that count

I woke this morning to the delightful sight of GMTV’s Carla Romano rudely interrupting Tom Hanks: he was in the middle of answering her question on the red carpet after the Oscars when Colin Firth walked past. Romano decided she didn’t need Hanks any more and practically shoved him aside in an effort to get Firth’s attention. She deserves an Oscar herself for having the guts to treat an A-lister like that.

After the fun of those interviews I staggered along my own red carpet in my office (the carpet tiles are officially ‘tomato’ colour – I think that counts as red) to review yesterday’s new chapter. Just as I thought: it read like a first draft and needed ripping apart and carefully stitching back together again. What started out as a 600 word scene is now a much more coherent and tense 900 word mini chapter. I still haven’t worked out exactly what the enormous seed I’ve planted in that section will grow into, though. The bath and the sleep didn’t spark the inspiration last night like I was hoping. However, I still have another 80 or so sleeps before my self-imposed deadline for finishing the book is upon me (not to mention two or three scheduled baths as well), and having spent another half day working on it I was satisfied that it was time to keep moving forward and continue my editing skim as far as chapter 6.

Those who don’t want me to reveal the plot should look away now. Still reading? You might as well look away, because I can’t give away the story in this blog. What would be the point in writing the novel? But it’s hard to write about my progress through the drafts without giving a few snippets away, so I’ll give a general overview of what’s happening in the pages I edited today…

Basically, some characters interact with other characters by means of dialogue and actions, creating exciting and interesting results that push the story forward and heighten the mystery and tension.

What, too vague? It’s been a few years since I wrote blurbs for books. Probably lost the knack. But it won’t hurt to reveal that archaeologist Ruby Towers is being taken against her will to meet a dangerous and powerful man with an obsessive interest in ancient Mayan history, whilst her lover, Matt Baker, again fails to get to her on time.

Anyway, no sooner had I recovered from the excitement of this morning’s Hollywood red carpet interviews when awards fever struck again: the Independent Publishers Guild announced its shortlist for this year’s Independent Publishing Awards. This may not attract quite the same level of international hype as the Academy Awards, but it means a lot to those of us in the British publishing industry. And would you believe it, an e-mail arrived at 11am saying that Summersdale has been shortlisted in the category Trade Publisher of the Year. Last year we won E-Publisher of the Year, and it would be great to win the Trade Publisher category this year. The awards take place on Friday 19th March: if we win I hope Carla Romano doesn't interview the MD and then shove him aside when someone more interesting comes along.

The E-Publishing award we won last year would look great with a companion.

A new chapter emerges

I had a lively debate with my better half this morning about whether there was any point in inserting a new thread into the story if I didn’t know exactly how it was going to play out later in the book. She thought it made sense to take the time to work out exactly when and where this new storyline would appear and how it would affect the main plot and the characters. In a book of 166,000 words I simply can’t calculate the intricacies of those events in advance. But I have a tried and tested system of redrafting that involves the introduction of a new theme, followed by a systematic edit sweep of the whole novel during which I bring in instances of the new theme wherever it seems appropriate, and I adjust dialogue, actions, and plot devices as I come across them.

When I get into a routine of daily writing I find that the book comes alive in my head to the extent that complicated plot situations resolve themselves while I’m driving, having a bath or even fast asleep. It’s not unknown for me to wake up with a brilliant new twist or scene to add to the book. So sometimes the impact of a new theme in the story can be arrived at subconsciously.

Characters speak to me when they are fully developed. They each have their own voice, their own vocabulary: great characters have sufficiently distinctive turns of phrase that you know who is speaking without being told. You can chuck them into a situation and let their own dialogue flow from them according to the personality traits, attitudes, fears, ambitions and motives that you as the writer have already given them. Changing a theme or adding a subplot requires changes in dialogue, but the characters are very helpful in dictating those changes themselves.

So back to the ‘lively debate’: OK, so I might end up writing pages that end up being cut in a later draft because they don’t lead to anything worthwhile. It’s happened to me before and I’m sure it will happen again (see my comments about ‘bonus features’ in novels in yesterday’s blog). But if a chapter doesn’t work it won’t harm the final product because it won’t be in the book by then. The worst that will happen is that I write something that doesn’t work and have to cut it.

Anyway, I wrote the beginning of a new thread in the story today. It’s a 600 word short chapter, and it was horribly difficult to get right. I rewrote the first paragraph dozens of times, trying to establish a tone and style that was appropriate for the scene. I think I’ve got there in the end, but it’s getting late as I write this and my judgement is getting cloudy, so I’ll probably review it tomorrow and rewrite it again. The scene is about the significance of a broken stele (an ancient stone tablet engraved with enigmatic writings). The owner, Lord Ballashiels (known as ‘Ratty’) wants to sell it to the sinister Professor Otto, but something Ruby Towers, the archaeologist, said to him has made him realise its true importance. When he tries to back out of the deal tensions rise and Ratty fears for his safety. So what is the significance of this Mayan stele? What is this new thread which will obviously play a major role in the novel? Why does Otto want it so badly and why has Ratty changed his mind and decided not to sell it?

Let me go and take a bath, and then I’ll sleep on it.

From taxi to tuk-tuk

I'm keen to make everything in the novel as believable as possible. I want details to be based on reality, and today I thought about the small issue of what kind of car do taxi drivers use in rural Guatemala. I've been in one myself, but it was ten years ago and I was too fascinated by the Mayan pyramids to notice what kind of car I was travelling in from Flores to Tikal. So I looked it up on the web today and discovered that Flores is now full of delightful-looking tuk-tuks: hybrid vehicles in a more traditional sense of the word, being made from the front half of a motorbike welded to a rolling bench at the rear. Inserting this detail added a little colour to the chapter by making Matt Baker’s journey to the edge of the jungle all the more uncomfortable.

With all the little edits I've been doing this week the word count has crept up to 167,000. Then there's a new scene I need to weave in near the beginning to develop a subplot about Ratty's attempt to sell a priceless carved Mayan stele before realising its true significance and trying, too late, to back out of the dodgy deal. That will add another thousand words or so. Adding to the word count is not my goal, by any means, but I have to admit that it's more satisfying when the document grows than when it shrinks. I sometimes look back at the 50,000 words I cut from the story a few years ago and wonder if I made the right decision. Why can't a novel be like a DVD of a movie, with deleted scenes and bonus features at the end? I'm sure some people would be interested to read the sequences that ended up on whatever is the writer's equivalent of a cutting room floor. A waste paper basket, I suppose.

Matt Baker has a scene in today's chapter where he meets a dying man who has read his book. Matt is a kind of Andy McNab character, a war hero turned writer, and people in the remotest parts of the world all seem to have their opinions on his work, good or bad. Those opinions crop up at the most inconvenient times for him in the story, and it's fun to have someone tell him with their final, rasping breath that his book sucks.

I’m nearly a week into my edits and I’ve worked on about 10% of the book. I need to speed up, because this redraft is meant to be a relatively straightforward matter of re-familiarising myself with the text and the story, cleaning up the book a little here and there as I go. When I’ve got the whole book freshly ‘uploaded’ into the RAM of my brain I can then tackle the more interesting and challenging aspects of the redrafting process, such as exploring each character’s true motives, deciding how much of those motives to reveal to the reader and when, finishing the subplots and ensuring they interweave seamlessly. Plus a million other things that are needed to make this book as good as I know I can make it. It’s Sunday tomorrow – no days off for me. I’ll try to finish a couple of chapters before Monday.

Is 'The Sphinx Scrolls' hard to say out loud?

The earliest word processor file I have for my novel dates from 1996. It was back in the days of Wordstar, a wonderful DOS-based word processor on which I started my digital scribble, and that first file was simply called 'Nov'. It didn't even have a suffix. A year later I started calling the story 'Earth' because it seemed to encapsulate an entire lost history of the planet. By 1998 the story had a much clearer direction and I knew what it was really about, and from then on it became 'The Sphinx Scrolls'. Job done. Sorted.

Or was it? I'd always found it tricky to say 'Sphinx' and 'scrolls' out loud in quick succession. Perhaps it requires excessive or uncomfortable mouth movement, or maybe there's some important phonic law that I'm breaking by trying to connect that group of sounds. In 2001, when the novel reached its peak word count of 216,000 words, a brilliant solution occurred to me: why not simply call it 'Sphinx'? That was far easier to say, I decided. So for the next year my computer filled with various versions of 'Sphinx.doc'.

As I began the long process of writing 'backwards', tightening up the story, plotlines and dialogue and in the process cutting 50,000 words from the book (ouch - that's enough to make a separate novella!) I began pining for the word 'scrolls'. It's such an integral part of the plot that, tricky to pronounce or not, I decided it had to be on the cover. 'The Sphinx Scrolls' emerged once again onto my computer in 2002, leaner, meaner and harder to say.

Now I'm committed to that title, and if anyone has trouble pronouncing it, as I do, I can only recommend speaking slowly and taking a breath between words if required. You might sound like you've just sprinted into the bookshop, but you can't put a price on clarity.

Back to the job in hand. Today I continued working through chapter 2, checking if the replacement skyscraper at New York's 'Ground Zero' has been built yet, since my Matt Baker character refers to the 'new hole in the skyline' of his hometown. That hole was definitely there when I wrote the line 8 years ago, so I needed to check whether it was still there. Looks like they're only about 4 storeys up so far, so I'll keep the line in for now.

I noticed an amusing detail in the book. Writing the first paragraphs in 1996, under the influence of a large glass of Port (which, incidentally, is why the heroine was called 'Ruby'), I fantasised that one day this story might be made into a film and that Harrison Ford could play the 40 year old Matt Baker lead role. So I described Matt as having a scar on his chin just like Harrison Ford. Hmmm. At 67 I think Harrison might need to forget about playing that one. Hope he's not too disappointed.

Getting to grips with chapter 1

Today was a good writing day. I tore into chapter 1, tightened up the wording, gave it a cliffhanger ending. It's still quite long because it contains a lot of flashbacks, but I think they work well structurally. I also worked on the first 'Sphinx Scroll', the 'translation' of which appears in the book as a kind of prologue. It gave away a bit too much of the plot, so I cut out part of it and inserted it into a later instalment of the scroll translations which appear towards the end of the book.

So what's happening in the story so far? Archeologist Ruby Towers is having a bad day in Guatemala. In the middle of a civil war she is summoned to a new dig at the ancient lost city of Tikal (see picture above, taken on my research visit - you may recognise the scene from when George Lucas used it to represent an alien planet in one of the Star Wars films). Soldiers belonging to the rebel army take over the dig because their commander is interested in a large artefact that has been found. Ruby and her team are held at gunpoint, and things are not looking good. Her lover, Matt Baker, is a former special forces officer, and he's due to meet her today. He is Ruby's only chance of rescue but he's late.

While that is going on, Ruby's life starts to flash before her eyes, which really annoys her because she knows it's a cliche and she hates that kind of thing. She recalls a meeting with 'Ratty', an aristocratic fellow Cambridge alumnus who inherited a curious Mayan stele that seemed to depict things that were thought not to have existed in ancient central America, including paper scrolls.

So that's where I'm at right now. There are seeds planted in this chapter that have yet to grow elsewhere in the book, and I'll work that stuff out later. Looking forward to working on chapter 2 tomorrow. This really is fun - it's been so long since I've looked at this manuscript that some of the twists of the story actually take me by surprise.

Day 1. The huge redrafting process begins.

Today is the day that I planned to restart work on my long neglected novel, The Sphinx Scrolls. Started way back in 1996, this writing project has involved research into ancient mysteries and histories, dozens of drafts and a research trip to the jungles of Guatemala that included taking part in an archaeological dig at an old Mayan temple with tarantulas under every rock. I stopped work on the book 7 years ago when my publishing business grew so fast that I didn't have time to complete the necessary final drafts. I estimated then that I would need 3 months' solid work to get the manuscript ready for publication. Those 3 months start now. Nothing is going to get in the way. Well, that's the theory at least.

In preparation for my grand revival as a novelist I cleared my e-mail backlog (which has the effect of clearing the equivalent amount of junk from my brain), tidied my desk, and opened the most recent version of the document ('The Sphinx Scrolls - 18 May 2009.doc' if you're interested - that's when I last looked at the file and maybe edited a couple of lines). This document contains 166,990 words and runs to 270 A4 pages, single spaced. It's not that I need to write more words: the story is finished. What I want to do is to make it sparkle and sizzle by weaving a new subplot, adding some deeper layers of meaning, giving some characters a twist, and generally polishing it to perfection.

However, having read a couple of lines from the first chapter to refresh my memory, I then closed the file. It's only a tentative start, but hey, I've still got most of those 3 months left. It's hard to dive straight into a complex manuscript after such a long gap. And it's not as if I wasted the day - I finished writing a book of Unusual Character Names for Writers in February, and I spent the rest of today turning it into an eBook and putting up on this site. I think my first job when I tackle the novel tomorrow will be to look at my character names and see if I can make them more interesting and symbolic using my new guide.