A new novel is born

A weird literary phenomenon happened yesterday. I got up fairly early to start work, about 7am, but ‘Er Indoors was sound asleep – as was Pooch on the end of the bed – so I left them in their slumber. Ordinarily I would go back an hour or so later, armed with a cup of coffee, to begin the slow process of bringing her back to consciousness. Only I didn’t. I left it until nearly 10am before putting the coffee next to the bed. Still she didn’t wake up, so I crept out and left her there. The day before she had been working incredibly hard restoring our house and I knew she needed to rest.

So there I was in my converted garage, tapping away on my computer and making hardly any progress at all on my novel, when at about 10:15 Katia showed up, barely awake, telling me she had just downloaded a future bestselling novel from the cosmos in her sleep. She knew the story in great detail and had even witnessed scenes from its movie adaptation. Apparently Einstein used this trick – he didn’t actually think up boffy stuff himself, he just downloaded it into his subconscious from the cosmic eBook library in the sky.

I’ve experienced useful and creative dreams too. When I was eleven years old I bought a bottle holder to put on my bicycle, but despite a whole day trying to fit it I couldn’t attach the components to frame of the bike. I went to sleep frustrated, but in my dream I solved the problem –the flat metal brackets needed to be bent backwards around the frame. In the morning I tried it out, and it was a perfect fit. More recently I’ve had dreams about movie plots which seemed totally logical and exciting whilst I was asleep, but the moment I woke up I would realise that the story was insane and full of holes.

Katia’s story, unlike my own dreams, was completely coherent from start to finish. It was also interesting and original, and not entirely unrelated to some of the themes in The Sphinx Scrolls. Probably wouldn’t be a sequel, but it could be an equal. She was convinced it was a bestseller because that was how it appeared in the dream. So I put my own writing to one side and opened a new Word document called ‘Katia’s Story’ and wrote down everything she told me. I then added details of my own which I thought would enhance the story, and now I have the basis of a plot for a new novel. I can’t give away the plot here, I’m afraid, but it’s going to make a really exciting book, believe me.

Having taken 14 years to get close to finishing my first novel, I hope that some shortcuts might be available if I write my next book based on her dream. Perhaps she can download a chapter at a time in future dreams, or dictate to me in her sleep? Perhaps I can stick a USB cable in her ear and download the whole thing straight into my laptop? I love the idea that this whole book is already sitting up there in the cosmos waiting to be downloaded. Maybe that’s how all inspiration occurs – we build a connection between our minds and a huge cosmic database of songs, poems, jokes, plays, sitcoms and novels? It’s a lovely idea, but it could prove complicated for intellectual property lawyers.

For now I just want to focus on finishing my book. It’s 173,000 words closer to being finished than Katia’s story, after all. But I am happy to interrupt that progress if the next book is handed to be on a cosmic USB stick…

Let the next draft begin...

Right. It’s been almost two weeks since I completed the previous draft of The Sphinx Scrolls, and I thought it was time to review my progress since then. Well that won’t take long, because there hasn’t been any. But I know from experience that each draft starts slowly and gathers momentum, and I’m at that daunting place I was at three months ago when I started the previous one.

During the last rewrite I kept a parallel Word document open as a ‘scratchpad’ for notes, ideas, and deleted passages that I might want to re-use sometime. That document in itself consists of over 3,000 words, so my first task was to sort the notes into categories: character notes, plot ideas, deleted text, general notes about sections that need improvement, research notes about Sphinx archaeology, ideas for a new ending and even notes about how I could take these characters into a sequel. So that’s given me a rough framework to guide the next draft. I thinking of picking some of the easier notes first and making sure the issues they raise are fully resolved before deleting them from the scratchpad document and moving onto the next one.

There’s a risk that I might make changes to the novel by following one suggestion from my notes only to find that those changes are then negated by following a later note. For example, one of my minor characters is rather too similar to a real, well known Egyptologist. When I first put this character into the story it was 1997 and no one had really heard of the person he was based on. But since then he’s become famous, in the D-list sense at least, and I need to make my character far more differentiated. Today I decided to change the sex and the age of the character, which will open up new opportunities to develop that person in an original way, and will require partial rewrites of a couple of chapters. However, I have to accept the risk that I might change part of the plot afterwards, and may end up deleting or changing again the lines that I’ve recently written. But hey, that’s novel writing. In fact, that’s all kinds of writing. You have to keep on rewriting until it’s right.

So with this great task still ahead of me I’ve spent the days since my return from Brazil last week catching up with e-mails to the point where my inbox is joyously empty. I love that feeling. I spent much of my online time in Brazil unsubscribing from just about every commercial e-mail that I received. I must have unsubscribed to almost a hundred e-mail alerts, services, newsletters and promotions, and that is finally helping to reduce the flow of timewasting and distracting messages to my inbox. Somehow an empty inbox gives me a clear head, and a clear head provides the space I need for my brain to focus once more on the creative process.

Let the next draft begin…

Celebrating the completion of the latest draft of the novel

Today I completed the latest draft of my novel. Phew. Decided to celebrate with a ride along a deserted south Atlantic beach on a rented bicycle followed by a pizza and a can of Coke. We novelists know how to have a good time. This draft was started at the beginning of March, so it’s taken me almost three months to complete. That’s nothing in the grand scheme of this book, which I started way back in the last century, and which received practically no attention from me at all between completing the first draft in 2001 and waiting until I had the necessary time this year to devote to the task of completing the rewrites.

For this draft I’ve gone through the entire novel, sometimes making changes to details of punctuation and word order, sometimes rewriting extensively, and sometimes adding entire pages of new text where I felt it was needed. I didn’t have a specific agenda for this draft: I felt it was important just to refamiliarise myself with the story as well as fixing and improving the writing along the way. Sections have been cut and sections have been added, but what started out as 167,000 words is now 174,000 words.

In the final few days of this edit I needed to update a few things. For example, in one scene the hero, Matt, is flown by the US Air Force in an F14 fighter jet in my original draft, penned late last century. Turns out that the F14 was retired from service in 2006. Rewriting this sequence required almost a whole day researching the type of plane that replaced it, together with its fuel capacity and range, its inflight refuelling techniques, its weapons and defensive systems, its ejector seat system and the survival rations a pilot would have if he had to bail out. Readers can be very fussy if they discover any details like those are inaccurate.

There was also a section that I had already updated twice before in previous drafts to bring it up to date, but which now seemed antiquated once again. Originally the Guatemalan scientist characters were storing important information on floppy disks. I updated this in the late nineties to writeable CDs, and then in 2001 to writeable DVDs. But people don’t really do that these days – it’s currently either USB flash drives or USB external drives, so I had to change it again. In the future most storage will probably be online, but that doesn’t make for great drama: I have special forces soldiers fighting their way into a research compound to steal data, and it wouldn’t be as exciting if they just sat in an Internet café and downloaded it.

The scrolls referred to in the title of the book appear towards the end of the story. I’ve written each of the scrolls in full, and they tell the story of the rise and fall of an ancient civilisation and the terrible thing they have set in motion that threatens our world today. The description of the actual discovery of the scrolls was rather skimpy in the original draft. Maybe I was writing quickly, knowing I was close to finishing the first draft after writing it for several years, keen just to get it finished? It needed more dramatic tension, more detail, more realism. So I’ve spent this week researching the Dead Sea Scrolls: what they were made of; why they survived for two thousand years; how they were handled; how they were scanned. Now when the archaeologists see the scrolls for the first time the detail and accuracy make the scene so much more gripping.

I also researched whether ancient scrolls could be read without unrolling them – turns out there’s a machine in England the size of a small village that can read rolled-up text using ultra-powerful X-rays. But this won’t be available to my characters in Cairo so I had to develop an alternative system for them to use to open and scan the ancient texts without inflicting too much damage.

So what’s next? I wanted to have this novel completed by the end of May, which would have required at least three or four drafts to have been written by about now. Those subsequent drafts won’t take as long as this one, but I do have some fairly complex subplots to weave in and I think I need to extend my three month schedule by an extra month. So 30^th of June is now my deadline for finishing the book. I’ll keep on blogging about my progress as much as I can during that time, and I’ll also remind myself of the big celebration that awaits this novel’s completion: a really big pizza and two cans of Coke.

Then it’s time to start thinking about the sequel, and I’ve already got ideas for that. One of the ideas is to write the book in 6 solid months instead of spread over 14 years, which I think is the best idea for a book I’ve ever had.

Searching for a decent cup of tea

One way of summarising The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is to describe it as an Englishman’s travels through the universe in search of a decent cup of tea. I’ve had a somewhat Arthur Dent-esque experience in Brazil this week, with the café equivalent of a Nutrimatic machine serving me something that was utterly dissimilar to what any British builder would consider to be a proper cuppa. My seemingly run-of-the-mill request for milk resulted in the delivery to my table of a separate cup full of steaming hot white stuff. I added a little of this hot milk to the ‘tea’ that was brewing in the first cup (it’s not easy to pour from one cup to another without collateral spillage), which created a drink that can only be described as hot, white water with sugar. It reminded me of the old sketch in which wealthy old men tell competing stories about how poor they used to be, and the best line went something like ‘I was grateful for a cup of tea. Without milk or sugar. Or tea.’

I took a trip to a supermercado to look for some PG Tips. No chance. I might as well have been looking for snow shoes. Next to the coffee shelves were some boxes of tea bags, but they were all what I would refer to back home as ‘lady’s tea’. Devoid of caffeine, unable to stain my teeth brown, and scented with pointless flowery flavours. Not my cup of tea at all. Happily my Brazilian host recommended something called black tea. I was sceptical, but was prepared to give it a try. There was no kettle in this house, so I boiled the water in a pan on the stove. I had to leave the tea bag in the cup for twice as long as usual, as it seemed to be a junior portion (probably only had 1,000 perforations instead of the 2,000 that I’m used to), but the result was a satisfactory beverage. Finally I was able to boost my jet-lagged energy levels and get down to some serious writing.

However, before the writing could begin I was invited to join in a spinning class in the local town. Not having had any experience in weaving or wool-making previously, I thought I’d check it out. Turned out to be a room full of vicious exercise bikes and superfit women who pedal like crazy for a whole hour. The instructor set a bike up for me and then kept picking on me during the session because I was a bit crap at it. But I blame the altitude. This place is 2,500 feet above sea level, which, while not exactly Everest base camp, is approximately 2,490 feet above the level of my home gym. I should have been wearing oxygen and having a Sherpa to carry my gym bag for me.

Finally the writing got underway towards lunchtime, only to be interrupted by a six hour long barbecue party that my hosts are holding today (and which is still going on as I write). I did manage to edit some scenes in which Matt is sprung from police captivity by Guatemalan agents, and later the same day he is grabbed again by US forces. Oh what it is to be popular. Recent edits have cut the word count to 171,000, but there are many notes to the effect of ‘buffer chapter needed here’ in the manuscript at the moment and I’ll therefore be adding plenty of words in the next draft. I expect the novel to hit 200,000 words before being trimmed slightly in the final drafts.

Hey-ho, time to put the pan on for another cup of ‘tea’ to give myself some energy to continue editng. 192 A4 pages edited so far in this draft, 97 still to go…

The International Archaeology Conference

While the political world was rocked by the surprise revelation that Gordon Brown is actually a normal human who hates having to talk to plebs in the street (thank the invention of radio mics and incompetent aides for that story) I was busy dealing with a far more important issue: a delivery of 20 tons of gravel for my driveway. There’s now a small mountain of tiny stones in front of the house, which means we have to leave one of the cars on the street until I get the strength to rake it level. This could take me several days, meaning that the car has to stay on the road all that time. And Gordon Brown thinks he has problems?

The novel edits are progressing steadily. The massive historical revelation in the book is something that Ruby has to present to her sceptical and bearded peers at the International Archaeology Conference. I made up the existence of this conference, although I’m pretty sure most male archaeologists enjoy extravagant facial sproutings. Ruby is guarded by Guatemalan agents so she can’t escape even though she’s giving a talk to hundreds of academics.

Right now I’m now editing the chapter in which American special forces try to snatch Ruby away from that conference at a venue in Marseille, right under the noses of her Guatemalan guards. I love this scene because the special forces soldiers arrive pretending to be archaeologists. Their crew cuts, clean shaven faces and complete ignorance of history and archaeology make them stand out a mile, totally undermining their attempts to blend in with the other attendees. One of them is asked an archaeological question that he’s so unprepared to answer that he simply reaches for his gun.

I bet Gordon Brown would love to have the option of whipping out a Beretta whenever he didn’t like the tone of a voter’s line of questioning. It would certainly liven up those political walkabouts.

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.

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.

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.

Creating memorable characters

I’ve come across a little problem with my novel today. There are some chapters involving four French scientists, all of whom arrive at the same time. They are different ages, they have different specialist skills, and they have different personalities. And yet I realised when I read through those chapters that I was finding it hard to remember which name related to which person. If the writer of the novel can’t work out who is who, what chance does the reader have?

This is something I’ve experienced sometimes when reading other people’s novels. When too many characters are introduced to the story too quickly I forget which one is which, and when that happens I cease to care about them. That is a bad thing for a novel. I’m not going to name any novels where I’ve experienced this because maybe it’s just me (I’m hopeless at remembering real people’s names when I meet them in any case). Maybe it’s just that the phone rang half way through reading that chapter or Pooch decided it was time to go out and pee on the cat’s grave again. These little distractions can make it difficult to retain small details in the plot, like when did this person come into it and what on earth have they got to do with anything anyway?

On an earlier draft of The Sphinx Scrolls I came across a related situation. There were three student archaeologists, and I eventually realised that the third one was superfluous. He didn’t contribute much to the story, his personality wasn’t as interesting as those of the other two, and it made things too complicated for the reader. So I decided to write him out of the story, adapted some of his lines for use by other characters, and basically streamlined the plot.

What I think I’ll have to do with these French scientists is review their scenes carefully and decide if one of them can be ‘deleted’ without the important parts of the story being adversely affected. Professor Jean Lantier, Dr Berger, Professor Philipe Eyzies, and Michel Lecour had all better tread carefully because I’m going to be watching them closely. Whether or not I decide that one of them is for the chop, I’m going to have to work harder at differentiating their vocabularies, their mannerisms and their attitudes so that I can have a clear picture of who is speaking as I read. And I think if I can follow who is who, then anyone can.

Writer's block

It’s late evening. I’m barely able to keep my eyes open having been up since 6am. I’m staring at my blank blog screen without a clue what to write. I did a lot of things today, but I don’t know if any of it is interesting for anyone to read about. So I’ll write about it anyway, just on the off-chance.

The day started with a five kilometre jog on my treadmill (tried to beat my personal best for the distance, and did so by 20 seconds). Yawn. That was followed by half an hour studying some strange foreign language that I’ve been struggling to get to grips with for a few weeks now. Brazilian Portuguese, I think it’s called. I can say ‘the cat is in the hat’ and a few other useful phrases already. Boring. I went to Blockbuster to return a couple of DVDs, took ‘er indoors to a shop that sells synthetic flowers, then had meetings with a bank manager and an accountant. Anyone still awake?

The problem is that I didn’t get down to working on the novel until it was dark. I managed to edit about 3,000 words, but I have no energy in reserve for writing an entertaining blog about today’s edits and new bits. My quill is dry. The proud tower of my muse lies forlorn. Writer’s block has truly hit me this evening.

Or has it? I haven’t actually engaged my brain very much to produce the paragraphs above (yes, I know it shows, but bear with me while I attempt to make some kind of tenuous point). And that’s the thing about writer’s block. The only way past it is simply to write. Write about why you feel you can’t write. Write about your frustration at feeling uninspired. Write about why it’s so unfair that everyone else seems so easily to be able to get their creative juices flowing freely while the movement of your juices is more akin to that of a glacier.

Write about what you had for breakfast. Write about you wished you’d had for breakfast if you hadn’t run out of eggs and sausages. Write about how you’ll be glad you didn’t have a fry-up today when you next step on those bathroom scales. Before you know it, you’ve been writing hundreds of words and the idea that you’re suffering from writer’s block suddenly seems ridiculous.

That’s 400 words so far. Turns out I wasn’t suffering from writer’s block after all.

PS The injured pigeon didn’t survive the night. I’ll give it a decent burial tomorrow.

The Repping Book

Summersdale sadly didn’t get the award for Trade Publisher of the Year last night at the IPG bash in Windsor, but awards season is now in full swing so we have one or two other chances coming up. If you’re interested, the award went to Blake Publishing. They thoroughly deserve it, if only for being the first publisher to recognise Jordan for the literary genius that she turned out to be.

I didn’t let the disappointment get to me. The rewrites in my novel are at such a fun stage that I was up and writing at 7am on this Sunday morning, and I made great progress after practical research yesterday got in the way of computer time. The new scenes with Ratty investigating the Arundel tomb are going well, and I wrote a few hundred new words this morning as well as editing a few thousand of the existing text. Good progress overall.

When I started writing this novel I didn’t have a laptop. I think I may still have owned a typewriter. But the book was started with a red biro: I still have the original notebook in which I wrote 45 longhand pages having first come up with the idea for The Sphinx Scrolls. On the front cover of the notebook I had scribbled ‘The Repping Book’ because I was initially using it to plan my sales trips to UK bookshops. The first pages contain lists of bookshops within an area, and I ticked them off as I visited them.

Also in there are occasional ideas for books (such as Classic Shakespeare Poems – which we never published in the end), the guitar chords for the Oasis song Wonderwall (which I had worked out for myself one evening), and the phone numbers of various television researchers that I needed to call back to arrange appearances on their shows to promote my latest books. The shows included the dubiously titled The Erogenous Zone, the more familiar This Morning with Richard and Judy, and The Morning Show on the now defunct channel Live TV.

It was quite common for me to have to rearrange my bookshop schedule in order to fit in a television appearance at short notice. It probably raised a few eyebrows when the producers of these shows saw me turn up in my delivery van. I once had a sales meeting with a bookshop manager the morning after appearing on a television show. I pretended not to be the author of the book I was trying to sell to this manager, but I explained about the television publicity the book had received. His response was, ‘I saw the author on telly last night. Thought he was a right arse.’ I pretended to agree with him and took his order. I got used to that kind of thing.

Anyway, back to the notebook. It’s about halfway into it that there’s a particularly scruffy entry, outlining in red ink the premise for what would become The Sphinx Scrolls. I was obviously pretty excited about it, possibly quite drunk (I was on holiday with friends in the south of France at the time), and it’s clear that I wrote the ideas down in a hurry so that I wouldn’t forget them. The next two pages were written the following morning once I had sobered up, and they went into more detail about the plot. Then the novel itself begins. From those two pages of plot notes I was able to generate five chapters. Much of it has since been edited from the text because it was just a rough first draft, but it’s normal for most of my first drafts to be on the shaky side. We can’t all be blessed with Katie Price’s natural talent for penmanship, after all.

Flat pack clues

I’ve spent the day wrestling with the clues and their potential meanings in the novel. Well, actually it was only half of the day, the other half having been spent wrestling with the construction of an Ikea four poster bed. Inevitably this involved building a large section, realising that a key component in the middle of it was upside-down, then taking it all apart and starting again. I now have wood glue on my fingers, which I love peeling off, and in my hair, which is somewhat less enjoyable. But some of the glue ended up in the joints of the bed where it was supposed to be, and the bed is finished. It looks like a bed, and it seems to be the correct way up. This success was achieved with only the occasional glance at the instructions. I prefer to regard it more as a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with one piece giving me a clue as to what the next piece might be.

That’s similar to the way I put clues into my novel. I don’t have an instruction manual to follow (not that I’d bother with it even if I did), so I like to take one idea and see where I can run with it. An inscription on a stele is my starting point, but that will lead to other clues in other locations and by solving those mini-mysteries the characters will progress through the key parts of the plot.

I can’t go into detail about the clues investigated by the characters in the novel, other than to say that I’m working with ideas that are complex, inter-related, subtle, elegant, and mind-blowing. They also have to fit together in a watertight way, be logical, believable and enjoyable. I didn’t make it to the cathedral today to investigate the link in the chain represented by the hand holding stone effigies and the Philip Larkin poem, but it’s Saturday tomorrow and I’ll try to get down there in the morning. Sherlock Holmes would always pick up on clues and their significance very easily, saying the logical process of deduction was ‘elementary’. Creating sophisticated clues from nothing isn’t elementary at all: it’s very intricate and challenging, but I’m confident I can make it work.

Sometimes a trail of clues will progress steadily before suddenly, without warning, reaching a dead end. No matter which way I look at it I can’t find a way to make it work and I’ll have to unravel it and start again. It’s frustrating to create something that looks like it’s going to be brilliant only to have to undo it all and work backwards. But as a regular buyer of Ikea flat pack furniture I’m pretty much used to working that way.

Counting words

Ever wondered how many words a professional writer produces in a working day? I’ve heard of one successful novelist who tootles down to his shed after breakfast, writes no more than 1,000 words in the morning, takes a leisurely lunch and then edits those same words in the afternoon. Hardly a punishing schedule, in my opinion. And yet working at that pace, five days a week, is enough to produce two novels, each of 130,000 words, every year. Redrafting many times in order to get it right can halve that output, of course, but if a novelist releases one book a year it is usually deemed to be a productive career.

That’s fine for full-time novelists who are fortunate enough to know that their words will be published when completed, but for amateur authors trying to squeeze writing time into their busy lives it’s another story altogether. Holding down a day job and a family and then trying to produce 1,000 more-or-less publishable words before bedtime is hugely challenging for anyone. My own novel progressed in fits and starts over many years. A typical day’s contribution, when I actually managed to write anything at all, was often around 500 words. Any movement in the right direction felt good, no matter how small. I found that the word count progressed faster during dialogue scenes, and things moved much more slowly during descriptive passages.

Actually, if I average out the total words written in my novel over the 7 year period in which they were produced, it only comes to 75 words a day. Not exactly blistering performance. Kids write more than that each day in their illiterate txt msgs.

There were times when I was able to take the novel on ‘holiday’ with me, and this was when the word count really started to fly. I discovered that I could comfortably manage 2-3,000 words a day, tucked in a Mediterranean villa with no other work to do apart from occasional sunbathing. One week I experimented to see how far I could push the limits of my creative output. The word count nudged upwards: 4,000 a day, 5,000 a day, 6,000 a day. Then I relaxed and dropped back to 3,000 for a couple of days. I had this section of The Sphinx Scrolls plot already mapped out and my characters were sufficiently developed to enable me to progress quickly.

Then, totally ‘in the zone’, I wrote a massive 7,000 words between sunrise and midnight. I know, you’re thinking quality not quantity. This was all first draft stuff, of course, so literary perfection wasn’t essential: getting the story completed was the goal. I knew I could then go back and tidying it all up (which is what I’m doing now). I think it’s more important to finish a very rough first draft than to have a few pages of exquisite English that never become a novel because the writer’s progress was so slow that they couldn’t maintain their motivation.

The level of concentration needed to write 7,000 words in a single day was phenomenal. Other people were staying at the villa too, but I barely noticed them even though I was working on the kitchen table and they were cooking and chatting around me. At the end of the day I felt as if I was punch drunk, my head throbbing from the marathon it had been asked to run. It was like being immersed in a virtual reality, living and breathing the story of the novel and the lives of the characters. My dreams were about the novel. My waking thoughts were about the novel. It was a great experience.

It takes a long time to warm up enough to be able to get the writing juices to flow so easily. You can’t do it from a cold start. You have to know your story, your characters, your style and your goals for the chapter. You also have to sleep well, be in a relaxed environment, and have people to feed you, water you, and even bathe you if necessary. You have to make sure your brain doesn’t need to think about anything except writing.

Getting all of these stars to align is a regrettably rare occurrence for most of us. The editing sweep I’m doing at the moment involves a mixture of reading, writing and rewriting. It’s been two weeks since I started this edit and my progress has averaged just under 3,000 words a day. The stars are not in their magical alignment yet. When they do, I’ll look forward to some amazing progress.

This blog is about 750 words, but that doesn’t count.

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.

The writer’s voice

One of the challenges of writing this novel is that I need to use two distinctly different narrative voices. The first is the usual omniscient third person narrator, which is fun to use because it’s like playing God: in this voice I have total power over the lives of all of my poor characters, and can dip in and out of their scenes causing as much havoc as I choose. The majority of the novel is written in this standard, modern way. The second is the voice of the author of the Sphinx scrolls themselves. These are written in the first person, which immediately places restrictions on what the narrator knows and is able to write about.

In my earliest drafts of the book I wrote the scrolls in the third person, but I realised I could make this part of the story far more powerful and emotional if I rewrote the scrolls in the first person. The shift from third to first person required many changes to the plot, since the narrator cannot be in more than one place at a time, but I was able to find techniques to get round those problems.

The creation of a tone of voice, a vocabulary and a writing style for the ancient scrolls was particularly hard. The ‘translation’ of these scrolls runs for 22,000 words, and in that section I had to portray a culture and civilisation that is virtually alien to us. Their assumptions and prejudices, beliefs and habits, manner of speech and ideas of what mattered all had to be invented. However, I wanted to make sure the scrolls were not so obscure in their points of reference as to be unreadable. So I settled on a voice that was formal but also very personal. This is an excerpt of the first Sphinx scroll, and it’s currently the paragraph that opens the book (although it’s been rewritten many times and I may well change it again):

What remains of my body now imprisons me. I am rotting like a fallen Ceiba tree in the rainforest. I have a memory of hair on my head, but when I touch my skull I feel nothing. I remember breathing smooth, clean air, but now my lungs rattle and jump inside my chest. Scar tissue that once sealed old wounds can no longer maintain its repair. To walk is excruciating, and even the process of writing is more than I can bear.

This is the voice of the person who wrote the scrolls at the end of his life, following a great tragedy that destroyed his civilisation. At the start of the book we get a little taster of his predicament and the reason he wrote the scrolls, and then he is not heard from again until the scrolls are actually discovered.

All of the editing work I’ve been doing this week has been in the omniscient narrator’s voice, and one of the goals of the editing process is to make that voice consistent in its style. But actually the style does need to alter according to the character whose perspective I’m following at the time. The changes in tone need to be subtle and should flow readily from one to another. This is proving to be quite hard to achieve, and I think I have plenty of work still to be done to get that aspect of the narration right.

Did I ever toy with the idea of putting the whole novel into the first person? Yes, but doing so would have made it an entirely different book and I wasn’t even sure if it could work. But I wouldn’t mind trying a first person narrative novel from scratch in the future. Just need to get this one finished first (and possibly its sequel, but that’s another story…).

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.

Day 1. The huge redrafting process begins.

Today is the day that I planned to restart work on my long neglected novel, The Sphinx Scrolls. Started way back in 1996, this writing project has involved research into ancient mysteries and histories, dozens of drafts and a research trip to the jungles of Guatemala that included taking part in an archaeological dig at an old Mayan temple with tarantulas under every rock. I stopped work on the book 7 years ago when my publishing business grew so fast that I didn't have time to complete the necessary final drafts. I estimated then that I would need 3 months' solid work to get the manuscript ready for publication. Those 3 months start now. Nothing is going to get in the way. Well, that's the theory at least.

In preparation for my grand revival as a novelist I cleared my e-mail backlog (which has the effect of clearing the equivalent amount of junk from my brain), tidied my desk, and opened the most recent version of the document ('The Sphinx Scrolls - 18 May 2009.doc' if you're interested - that's when I last looked at the file and maybe edited a couple of lines). This document contains 166,990 words and runs to 270 A4 pages, single spaced. It's not that I need to write more words: the story is finished. What I want to do is to make it sparkle and sizzle by weaving a new subplot, adding some deeper layers of meaning, giving some characters a twist, and generally polishing it to perfection.

However, having read a couple of lines from the first chapter to refresh my memory, I then closed the file. It's only a tentative start, but hey, I've still got most of those 3 months left. It's hard to dive straight into a complex manuscript after such a long gap. And it's not as if I wasted the day - I finished writing a book of Unusual Character Names for Writers in February, and I spent the rest of today turning it into an eBook and putting up on this site. I think my first job when I tackle the novel tomorrow will be to look at my character names and see if I can make them more interesting and symbolic using my new guide.