Let the next draft begin...

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

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

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

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

Let the next draft begin…

Celebrating the completion of the latest draft of the novel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Repping Book

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

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

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

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

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

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