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.