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.

Deleted scenes

I am the proud driver of a micro camper van. No bigger than a 6 seater MPV, it has a pop-up roof with a double bed, plus a sink, a gas hob, an electric fridge and some cupboards large enough to store a couple of biscuits. One of the cupboards is officially a ‘wardrobe’, though it has a big water pipe running through it that would prevent anything being hung in there anyway, besides which there’s no rail for hanging things on. And that brings me, via the most tortuous and tenuous link in the history of blogdom, to the chapter I edited today: Chapter 8, in which some hangings take place.

Chapter 8 is about a fifth of the way into the book. Ruby’s lover, Matt, is a political prisoner due to be executed, and despite Ruby’s close attachment to President Orlando he refuses to grant a pardon: the hangings are to proceed as planned. But this whole scene is vastly different to the one I originally penned in the late 1990s, which I called the ‘shark scene’. I have fond memories of that scene, but it was too unconvincing. One person read it and found it ‘hilarious’, which was something I badly needed to avoid in an archaeological thriller. The scene involved the President keeping a shark in his lake, and the executions were to involve throwing the prisoners into the lake to feed the shark. Yes, I know that smacks of early James Bond villains, but at least my character was aware of that and had even mentioned it. The President and his retinue all went out on unseaworthy boats to enjoy the spectacle, but the shark knocked their boat and President’s wife fell in the water. Someone then drained the lake via a sluice gate in order to save her, which resulted in the death of the shark. Turns out the President would have preferred to keep his shark alive than his wife and he was furious. This scene had to be replaced with the more realistic and less comical one that I edited today. I’ve kept a copy, though. Maybe it will get included in some bonus features one day?

Having survived the revised execution method (now by hanging) by means that I won’t reveal, Matt has another cool scene at the US Embassy. When I originally wrote that scene I envisaged a nice old colonial-style building into which anyone could walk and ask the nice receptionist if the ambassador could see them. Oh no. Not with an American Embassy, and certainly not in Guatemala. The US Embassy in Guatemala City turns out to be a heavily-guarded fortress, and I had to devise a whole new way to get Matt past the security. Then I had to rethink how to get him into the next bout of trouble I needed him to get into, but I think I have it all worked out now.

If the sun shines tomorrow I might take the micro camper van down to the beach with my laptop and do some writing on the pathetic little table it has in the back. Tomorrow’s scenes will be fun to work on. The next chapter contains the massive revelation of what the 12,000 year old relic actually is. This is something that was originally given away on page 1, and now it will be a quarter of the way into the story where its impact will be all the more powerful. It will be a shock for the reader as well as for Ruby – they will learn of the artefact’s purpose together, and that will propel them jointly into the next phase of the novel. It’s only right to make this revelation now. After all, it would be unfair to leave the reader hanging.