The Sphinx Scrolls on television

This morning I hammered some lengthy nails into my front lawn. I’m not known for my gardening prowess, but I was rather pleased at my innovative lawn care technique. Strips of gleaming new turf were laid a week ago onto the Teletubbie-style mounds that we created in the front garden. The morning after, I discovered that a gang of delinquent crows had been attacking the turf for fun, peeling back the corners and dragging the smaller pieces from the top of the hills down to the driveway. They weren’t searching for worms beneath the grass. This was wanton, blatant vandalism. As the local scarecrow competition finished a few weeks ago I would have felt self-conscious about erecting a crucified straw man, so I had to find more subtle means of dealing with them.

Anti-social behaviour order? That doesn’t work, of course. It’s just a badge of honour to a crow with no sense of social responsibility. Shoot them? I think that’s frowned upon in some quarters. I read online that shiny CDs dangling from trees are effective bird deterrents, so I gathered some old, unwanted discs and strung them up in much the same manner as I would like to string up the crows. Next morning, same criminal damage once again. Oddly, though, the crows seemed to be going for the same patches of grass each time. I knew then what I had to do: nail the tempting turf to the ground. So far it seems to have worked.

What has that got to do with my novel? What, indeed, have I been doing with my novel since I last blogged more than two months ago? To answer the first question: nothing at all. And as for the second, quite a lot, really. August was spent mostly in Spain and the south of France with the usual intention to write but without much to show for it other than a mild suntan to the forearms, nose and neck. But literary things began to flow towards the end of that month and into September. The rewrite of chapter one was completed and I think it’s true to say that scarcely a single line of that opening chapter was retained from the previous draft. It reads like a new book, and a far more interesting one at that. I cut about five thousand words from the old draft, and I don’t miss a single one. The fresh writing style of this new chapter carried over into the rewrites of chapters two and three. The story is now awash with new ideas, twists and surprises and the prose is imbued with elegance and maturity. Having found ‘my voice’ I’m finding it easier to push ahead into the next chapters.

Monday this week was spent at the Southampton Boat Show, researching details for the scene in which one of my characters steals a large motor yacht from its mooring in Cannes. I had chosen a Sunseeker Manhattan 63 as the gin palace in question, but the original draft of that scene was written using information obtained online. Dressing smartly enough to be taken seriously as a potential buyer wangled me a guided tour of the real thing in Southampton. I told the helpful chap from Sunseeker that I was featuring one of their boats in my novel, and asked how my character might go about stealing such a vessel? Is there a weakness in its security? Do owners usually hide their keys somewhere on deck? Would my character get caught before he left the marina? Oddly enough, Mr Sunseeker thought it would be imprudent to reveal how one might hotwire one of his lavishly equipped and even more lavishly priced boats, so I shall resort to working out my own theoretical criminal method based on what I had seen, and no revelations will be made that would threaten the ability of any owners of such boats to get a good night’s sleep. After all, I might eventually sell enough copies of my novel to buy one myself, and I don’t want to have to worry about joy-riders taking it for a spin.

Other than this blog I haven’t done anything to publicise The Sphinx Scrolls, but then I became involved in a television show earlier this month. I had a visit from one of those antiques programmes made by the BBC. They filmed the presenter’s arrival at my front garden, then took a shot of him walking up to meet me in the back garden where I was working on my laptop. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘what are you doing today?’ ‘Writing my novel,’ I replied. ‘And what is your novel called?’ ‘The Sphinx Scrolls,’ I told him before he proceeded to sell me a set of 1963 porcelain jugs shaped like the heads of The Beatles. I don’t know if my book plug will make it to the final edit, but the show will be on BBC2, I think, some time in October, so I’ll look out for it then. Hopefully it will be the first of many television spots for this book. The only disappointing thing about the filming was that it was done the day before the turf was laid on my Teletubbie hills, so the front garden won’t be looking its best for its TV debut. But at least the viewers won’t see dangling discs, six inch nails and leather-clad, tattooed crows tearing the place apart.

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.

Luxury yachts and big choppers

There’s a chapter in The Sphinx Scrolls in which Matt has to steal a helicopter, which he duly crashes because he’s not a chopper pilot and can scarcely remember the minimal training he was given in one back in his army days. I’ve never been a passenger in one of those things, let alone actually piloted one, so my description of it is based purely on imagination and my experience of failing to get off the virtual ground in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Happily I have a neighbour who is a qualified whirlybird, so I’ll be dropping some pages round to him to check for any blatant problems with my depiction.

Immediately after crash landing the helicopter Matt has to steal a motor yacht from a French marina. I’ve decided to make it a specific kind of yacht, and I’ve gone for a Sunseeker Manhattan 60. It’s sixty feet long, sleeps eight people in four cabins with four bathrooms, cruises at twenty knots and is powered by twin diesel engines. A ten year old model will set you back only half a million quid if you’re interested. I’ve studied dozens of mouth-watering photos of these vessels on the Internet in order to collect realistic data for use in the novel, but since they are built just an hour or so from where I live I might see if I can get over to the factory for a closer inspection. If I do that, I’ll have to make sure I leave my chequebook at home in case I get tempted.

In my original draft of the novel, Matt navigates his way to Italy on the stolen yacht using something really exciting called a ‘global positioning satellite navigation system’. Yes, we all have them in our phones and in our cars now, and soon they’ll be implanted in our pets and our kids too, but back in the late nineties when I first worked on this chapter satnav systems had only recently started to come onto the market. Prior to that the military had exclusive use of the GPS satellite network, so only soldiers like my character Matt would have had experience of using it. I had one of the first handheld GPS devices in the nineties. It cost a fortune and only showed numbers which had to be plotted onto a paper chart. Not exactly a friendly TomTom, but it was enough for me to find a route around a dangerous sandbank that threatened to capsize my boat in high winds. Anyway, in the novel I had made a big deal about how Matt’s special forces training enabled him to use the GPS system on the stolen yacht, and I went into far too much detail about how the system worked because it was so new and exciting back then.

It’s all gone now. There will be a brief mention of him setting the course in the GPS, and that will be that. Time changes things so quickly. I want to get this novel finished and published before yachts and helicopters get replaced by Star Trek-style teleportation systems and make my book look obsolete.