Learning Mayan and Cockney numbers

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

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.

My future self

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.

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.

Understanding Mayan glyphs

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.

2012 and all that

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.

“Time has transfigured them into Untruth”

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

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

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.

Writing at the beach

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.

Forget the Oscars, it’s the Independent Publishing Awards that count

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.