A new novel is born

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...

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.

Searching for a decent cup of tea

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

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:

1. Give them safe cars to drive. Airbags everywhere, radar activated emergency brakes, that kind of thing. A big Volvo, basically.
2. If possible, give them chauffeurs.
3. 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.
4. Provide them with fast track medical care including pre-emptive scanning and regular testing to catch any diseases early.
5. Give them chefs to provide nutritious food.
6. 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

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

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.