A sore thumb

It’s the first day of my juice diet: and I’m not talking fruit juice. This is hard core vegetable juice. Raw, natural, and tastes as bad as it looks. I’m getting used to it, though, and if I stick at it for long enough the local pie and cake shops are going to feel the pinch. And I hope I do stick at it because the detoxification process helps me sleep better and dream better, and that increases my creativity and my ability to feel inspired.

There’s no point in being inspired, however, if you haven’t enough time to use it. Today has been overloaded with those annoying tasks that get in the way of writing, and I only managed to dedicate about an hour to the novel. During that hour I cut a paragraph that I realised stood out like a sore cliché. It’s a relic of the early days of my work on this book, probably penned in 1997, back when I used to write with a pen and a notebook before typing it into my lovely DOS word processor.

This was the original passage from my early draft:

“The row intensified. One of the men shoved the other as emphasis for his point of view, and promptly received a punch in the face as a logical progression of the argument. The first guard summarised the finer points of his opinions with a high kick that met his colleague in the stomach. Having recovered from being winded, this man reminded the other that his philosophy was backed up by learned opinion by spitting in his face and drawing a knife from his belt.”

It has a silly, tongue-in-cheek tone which is incongruous to the rest of the chapter. Much as I enjoyed these Moliere-inspired lines, I had to accept that they had no place in this novel. After 13 or 14 years sitting safely in the manuscript these words were today cut back to:

“The row intensified. One of the men shoved the other and promptly received a punch in the face."

Harsh, but necessary. The book cannot be a harbour for little snippets of irrelevant literary humour, and the passage had to be cut in the greater interest of creating a coherent tone for the novel. So the book shrunk a little today to just over 168,000 words. And I think after one day on the juice diet I’ve probably shrunk by about the same amount.

Is 'The Sphinx Scrolls' hard to say out loud?

The earliest word processor file I have for my novel dates from 1996. It was back in the days of Wordstar, a wonderful DOS-based word processor on which I started my digital scribble, and that first file was simply called 'Nov'. It didn't even have a suffix. A year later I started calling the story 'Earth' because it seemed to encapsulate an entire lost history of the planet. By 1998 the story had a much clearer direction and I knew what it was really about, and from then on it became 'The Sphinx Scrolls'. Job done. Sorted.

Or was it? I'd always found it tricky to say 'Sphinx' and 'scrolls' out loud in quick succession. Perhaps it requires excessive or uncomfortable mouth movement, or maybe there's some important phonic law that I'm breaking by trying to connect that group of sounds. In 2001, when the novel reached its peak word count of 216,000 words, a brilliant solution occurred to me: why not simply call it 'Sphinx'? That was far easier to say, I decided. So for the next year my computer filled with various versions of 'Sphinx.doc'.

As I began the long process of writing 'backwards', tightening up the story, plotlines and dialogue and in the process cutting 50,000 words from the book (ouch - that's enough to make a separate novella!) I began pining for the word 'scrolls'. It's such an integral part of the plot that, tricky to pronounce or not, I decided it had to be on the cover. 'The Sphinx Scrolls' emerged once again onto my computer in 2002, leaner, meaner and harder to say.

Now I'm committed to that title, and if anyone has trouble pronouncing it, as I do, I can only recommend speaking slowly and taking a breath between words if required. You might sound like you've just sprinted into the bookshop, but you can't put a price on clarity.

Back to the job in hand. Today I continued working through chapter 2, checking if the replacement skyscraper at New York's 'Ground Zero' has been built yet, since my Matt Baker character refers to the 'new hole in the skyline' of his hometown. That hole was definitely there when I wrote the line 8 years ago, so I needed to check whether it was still there. Looks like they're only about 4 storeys up so far, so I'll keep the line in for now.

I noticed an amusing detail in the book. Writing the first paragraphs in 1996, under the influence of a large glass of Port (which, incidentally, is why the heroine was called 'Ruby'), I fantasised that one day this story might be made into a film and that Harrison Ford could play the 40 year old Matt Baker lead role. So I described Matt as having a scar on his chin just like Harrison Ford. Hmmm. At 67 I think Harrison might need to forget about playing that one. Hope he's not too disappointed.