The Sphinx Scrolls writing blog

Why I’m A Writer

2011-03-11T22:51:00.002Z

It’s an odd calling. Frustrating at times. I’ve often thought it would be nice not to have a creative streak. I’d love to be able to spend a day doing nothing and not feel guilty about it. But I feel a deep, entrenched shame whenever a whole day passes without any words making it from my head to my word processor. For those fortunate enough not to be afflicted by this curse of creativity it’s probably hard to imagine what it feels like. Perhaps if you imagine you’re still at school and you go to bed having failed to finish your homework, and you know the teacher’s going to make you regret your laziness the next day. It’s a bit like that feeling. Conversely, at the end of a productive literary day the endorphin rush is immense. There’s no greater feeling than knowing your book has taken a giant leap towards completion. That’s the force that motivates me to write.

I’ve thought of myself as a writer since Lady Di haircuts and leg warmers were the height of fashion. I haven’t actually been a writer during every one of those intervening years. Some years would go by with no creative output at all. Others would see plays, books, songs, sitcoms, or other literary products taking shape. Some went nowhere other than the filing cabinet (and later, the virtual filing cabinet of the computer); others saw publication, production or recording. By the age of 15, I had a folder crammed full of ideas for books, plays and films that I wanted to write, and almost 30 years later I still have that folder and I still haven’t had time to work on them. It doesn’t really matter now: I think the time for topical satires about Thatcher’s Britain and sketches written for Frankie Howerd may have passed. But the failure to complete the unrealistic mountain of ideas for writing projects I had in my youth is yet another source of irrational regret.

Being a writer is emotionally tough. It’s a self-punishing existence that demands anti-social hours and which rarely pays a return that bears any relation to the number of hours worked. So why am I a writer? That’s not easy to answer with words, even for someone who thinks they’re a wordsmith. I think I can answer the question more fully with a photograph. Last Tuesday was Pancake Day. I’ve always loved pancakes, but this year was the first time I ever attempted to cook my own pancakes. They’re great, those little flat discs that flip so beautifully in the air and taste delicious with maple syrup. Here is a picture of the first pancake ever to come from my batterie of culinary skills:

And that is why I’m a writer. Nuff said.

Ancient and Modern Egypt

2011-03-06T21:21:00.000Z

Egyptologists have had a worrisome start to 2011. It’s hard to feel sorry for the undemocratic Mubarak regime that was overthrown last month, but sudden and chaotic political change has had unfortunate side effects. The Egyptian army protected the country’s historic sites for the first ten days of the uprising, and then shifted their focus to other priorities. This left the Tourist Police and unarmed security guards with the job of protecting all those sites, which has sadly been a logistical impossibility. Robbers have been able to steal priceless artefacts including statues of Tutankhamen from the Egyptian Museum. Tombs have been destroyed. Storage warehouses containing antiquities have been looted.

Another unexpected turn of events was the resignation this week of Dr. Zahi Hawass, a government minister who has been in charge of the Giza Plateau for almost 20 years. When I started writing The Sphinx Scrolls I quickly learned that Dr. Hawass controlled all archaeological digs and research at the pyramids and the Sphinx. He seemed to be strongly patriotic, and would usually refuse permits for any ‘New Age’ inspired excavations that might find signs that these great monuments were not built by Egyptian Pharaohs. In particular, the search for a possible ‘Hall of Records’ at the Sphinx, has made slow progress.

Since the existence of such a repository of ancient knowledge is key to my novel, I’ve had mixed feelings about the difficulties researchers have had in trying to establish whether such a thing exists. On the one hand, it would be fascinating if permission would be granted to excavate the fissures and chambers that ground penetrating radar surveys have identified close to and under the Sphinx. On the other hand, it might take away some of the magic of my novel if a time capsule of lost knowledge were discovered. After all, the Nag Hammadi Library was found in a mostly legible state after almost two millennia, so it’s possible for properly sealed texts to survive far longer in the dry conditions of the Giza Plateau. On balance, of course, I’d be delighted if the chambers could be opened up and investigated, and for any long hidden knowledge to be discovered.

If the exit of Dr. Hawass results in a more liberal replacement in that role, and if that opens the way for archaeological digs that have hitherto been refused, and if those digs actually find something unexpected about the history of humanity (and that’s a lot of ifs…), then I’d have to rewrite the end of my novel. Might take me a few months, but it’s not that big a deal. I won’t mind. It’s far harder for humanity to rediscover the wisdom it may once have possessed. If our ancestors took the trouble to write some advice for us and put it in a very safe place, I think we should take the trouble to find it and read it. And that, in a nutshell, is what my book is about.

World Book Day

2011-03-03T18:58:00.000Z

By my calculations (extrapolated using a wooden 30cm ruler and an O Level in Maths) the 200,000 ish words in my novel would fit once around the world… if printed in a continuous line using a typeface large enough for each word to stretch a tenth of a mile. And a bit. Not sure what size type that would be: my copy of Word only goes up to 72. And that doesn’t look like a tenth of a mile (and a bit) to me. Anyway, by that extraordinarily dubious link I come to World Book Day, which is today. Actually it’s not quite that simple: World Book Day is today in the UK and Ireland, but, for reasons that are beyond the comprehension of a humble book person such as myself, it is not World Book Day anywhere else in the world. Other countries, it seems, prefer to celebrate their tomes at other times. Wherever you are in the world today, though, I hope you buy a book, or read a book, or at least think about reading a book. In an age where even dogs have their own laptops it’s important to remember the advantages of the simple book:

I might have invented the bit about dogs having laptops, by the way, although there are probably some Californian pooches ahead of the curve in that respect.

My novel has already moved forward satisfyingly today, and tonight’s dinner engagement has been postponed due to sickly, spewing hosts, so I’ll take advantage of a spare evening and keep editing until late, possibly until World Book Day closes its global doors on the two countries in which it’s taking place.

Writing Backwards

2011-03-02T22:05:00.000Z

On 1^st March 2010 I set myself the challenge of completing the rewrites of my novel in three months. In the books I’ve written about writing (How to be a Writer etc) I’m always going on about the need to redraft a book many times until it’s perfect. I thought I’d be able to get through several drafts in three months, but it took that entire time to do one draft (remember this book is more than 180,000 words). And at the end of that draft I still had sections of the book that simply contained notes such as ‘Otto chapter needed here’ or ‘Insert Ratty chapter’.

Towards the end of the year I made a small change to one of the lead characters, and the knock-on effect of that change necessitated that I cut 23,000 words from the text (instead of being a true war hero I made him a fake war hero – more interesting and original, but all the fighting sequences in which he featured had to go). This was just as well, since the new chapters I’d written to fill in the gaps had pushed the word count above 200,000, which I see as a sensible upper limit. So the word count peaked at, I think, about 203,000, was then trimmed down to 180,000, and has since crept up again to 189,000. It’s like a bush that keeps growing and needs regular trimming to keep its overall shape. It means I’m writing backwards sometimes, but it really is like cutting out the dead leaves and giving space for the rest of the plant to bloom.

I’m going to set myself a new three month challenge, now. I’m going to attempt the following:

Finish the current draft, which involves major restructuring, new characters, new chapters, a new beginning and a new ending (I’m 80% through that draft right now).
Complete a fast read-through and minor editing draft, just to make sure the major changes and new themes hang together well.
Complete a slow ‘quality of language’ draft. This will involve saturating my head with bestselling contemporary and literary fiction to ensure that the quality of my writing (stylistic techniques, imagery, vocabulary, pace etc) stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of them. My possible distant relative Joshua Ferris is already inspiring me with his demonstration of the craft of writing in his new bestseller The Unnamed which I started reading yesterday.
Complete a quick logic and consistency draft (checking for logical progression of events, revelation of information, consistency in characters and speaking styles).
Proofread the book.
Read the whole book out loud to ‘Er Indoors. It’s amazing how many mistakes jump out at you when reading aloud even when you think the book is already perfect.

There are bound to be further issues to fix after that, but I’m confident I can finish this book by summer 2011, a mere 15 years after I scribbled the first draft of the first chapter in red biro in a hammock in the south of France. I certainly hope so, anyway: after 200,000 words I’m almost out of ink.

The Sphinx Scrolls on television

2010-09-17T21:30:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

4th July and nothing to celebrate?

2010-07-04T23:18:00.005+01:00

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

Part of the reason for not writing anything last month:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new novel is born

2010-06-11T12:39:00.001+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let the next draft begin...

2010-06-02T20:46:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

Let the next draft begin…

Celebrating the completion of the latest draft of the novel

2010-05-20T02:27:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Searching for a decent cup of tea

2010-05-08T22:46:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

My new manifesto

2010-05-08T00:00:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Boys from Brazil

2010-05-07T03:34:00.000+01:00

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

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

And how do I know about this heinous and dastardly cloning project? I arrived in Brazil yesterday and went to a bar. In this bar was a projector showing a futebol match between the two biggest teams in

Brazil

. Many of the players in this match will also represent their country in South Africa. The game turned out to be a draw, and a penalty shoot-out followed. A Brazilian player went up to take the first penalty. A Brazilian player, remember. From the country that invented Pelé. These guys start kicking balls while they’re still in the womb. Taking a penalty is no bigger deal for these players than taking a shower.

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

If Brazil fields their clone army this summer then

England

might finally be in with a chance of making it to the final.

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

The International Archaeology Conference

2010-04-28T23:21:00.002+01:00

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

2010-04-25T20:19:00.004+01:00

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

2010-04-21T21:36:00.002+01:00

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

2010-04-17T22:23:00.002+01:00

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

2010-04-15T22:26:00.002+01:00

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

2010-04-13T23:06:00.000+01:00

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

2010-04-12T22:46:00.000+01:00

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

2010-04-11T16:43:00.000+01:00

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

2010-04-11T00:00:00.003+01:00

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

2010-04-09T22:01:00.000+01:00

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

2010-04-08T22:51:00.000+01:00

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

2010-04-06T22:17:00.000+01:00

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

, 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

2010-04-05T23:54:00.002+01:00

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

2010-04-04T23:59:00.002+01:00

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

2010-04-03T21:22:00.001+01:00

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

2010-04-02T21:19:00.000+01:00

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

2010-04-01T21:29:00.001+01:00

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

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

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

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

Extending the search for inspiration

2010-03-31T23:21:00.002+01:00

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

2010-03-30T21:13:00.000+01:00

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

2010-03-29T21:25:00.000+01:00

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

2010-03-28T22:51:00.001+01:00

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

2010-03-27T22:34:00.000Z

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

2010-03-26T21:27:00.000Z

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

2010-03-25T22:09:00.000Z

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

2010-03-24T18:36:00.002Z

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

2010-03-23T22:38:00.000Z

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

2010-03-22T21:06:00.002Z

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

2010-03-21T20:19:00.000Z

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

2010-03-20T19:35:00.000Z

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

2010-03-19T23:10:00.000Z

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”

2010-03-18T21:20:00.000Z

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

2010-03-17T19:49:00.000Z

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

2010-03-16T20:30:00.004Z

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

2010-03-15T22:59:00.001Z

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

2010-03-14T20:21:00.002Z

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

2010-03-13T22:31:00.000Z

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

2010-03-12T22:30:00.000Z

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?

2010-03-11T21:52:00.000Z

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

2010-03-10T22:41:00.002Z

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

2010-03-09T18:56:00.000Z

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

2010-03-08T20:57:00.003Z

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

2010-03-07T22:54:00.001Z

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

2010-03-06T21:44:00.002Z

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?

2010-03-05T20:17:00.001Z

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

2010-03-04T18:13:00.005Z

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.

2010-03-03T13:58:00.001Z

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.