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.

Portofino

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

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.

Easter Sunday and volcano wine

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

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.