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…

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.

Living under a cloud

Most of Europe’s airspace has been closed for a couple of days, and it looks set to continue. With the London Book Fair starting on Monday this could be disastrous for publishers seeking to buy and sell international rights. Without any visitors from overseas it’s going to be unusually quiet at Earl’s Court this year. And that’s a shame, because Summersdale has just invested in an impressive new exhibition stand which not many people will get to see. At least anyone stranded elsewhere can enjoy our new website which is planned to go live on Monday. www.summersdale.com

Volcano dust permitting, I’ll be heading to Brazil in a few weeks, so I’m ramping up my daily study time (from half an hour to about two hours) in the desperate hope that I’ll achieve some degree of fluency by the time I get there. I’m getting to the point where the pathetically limited vocabluary of Portuguese words in my head is starting to float around my consciousness all the time. I look at a white cup and describe it in Portuguese. I see a number and I convert it to Portuguese. I look at my dog and work out the phrase to say that he smells a bit whiffy. I look at a bottle of wine and realise I haven’t got to that part of the course yet, so I just drink it.

The extra language study time has had an impact on my novel writing and editing time. Yesterday I wrote virtually nothing, but at least I managed to work on an entire chapter today. I extended my research into my Portofino location beyond Google Street View, this time incorporating amateur video footage of the marina and the town from footage uploaded by individuals to YouTube. I’m currently on (A4 single spaced) page 168 out of 289. Progress has been too slow this month. I really need to get through this draft before the end of April so that I can concentrate on writing the next draft in Brazil. I prefer to start a fresh draft there than to have to finish off an old one that’s been dragging on for too long. If Iceland doesn’t stick a cork in its volcano soon, however, I might not be going anywhere, and all that lingo studying will have been for nothing. Oh pederasta.

The third day

Today is terça-feira, which I think means ‘third day’. That makes sense: it’s Tuesday, after all. For some reason in Brazil they think it’s appropriate to name some (not all) of their days sequentially by number, but they start with Monday as ‘second day’. There is no ‘first day’. This revelation was the gist of my Brazilian Portuguese lesson this morning, and it’s doing my head in. Why can’t they name their days after Roman and Norse gods like the rest of us? Naming them sequentially leans towards Esperanto in its lack of imagination, although starting with ‘second’ instead of ‘first’ shows a spark of originality. At least whoever thought of it must have had a sense of humour.

The same can’t really be said of the ancient Mayans, who cleverly decided upon having 260 different days of the ‘week’. That’s an awfully long time to have to wait for a weekend after spending all ‘week’ building pyramids and sacrificing people. Must have been exhausting. No wonder they died out. But I wasn’t studying their numbering system today – I was still working out the details of the Sunseeker yacht that gets stolen in the novel, which involved yet more drooling over luscious photos of how the other half lives. Apparently they can hold three thousand litres of fuel (the yachts, not the rich people) which is enough to heat my house for a whole year (or for a fortnight in Mayan), and is more than enough to get from France to northern Italy.

The word count of The Sphinx Scrolls has now hit 171,000 as I continue to add more colour to the narrative here and there. On the next draft it will shoot up beyond 180,000 words because there are several new chapters to be written.

After lunch I printed out my pages relating to the helicopter ride in the previous chapter and posted them through my pilot neighbour’s letterbox for his perusal. He’s quite excited at the idea of doing some fact checking for my novel, and I’m looking forward to finding out how inaccurate my completely imaginary chopper flying techniques turn out to be. I found an old black and white clip of Whirlybirds online, and it looks pretty easy to me: just waggle a stick around between your legs and maintain a serious expression on your face whilst chasing bad guys.

My writing routine

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.