The Sphinx Scrolls on television

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

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

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

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

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