Ancient and Modern Egypt

Egyptologists have had a worrisome start to 2011. It’s hard to feel sorry for the undemocratic Mubarak regime that was overthrown last month, but sudden and chaotic political change has had unfortunate side effects. The Egyptian army protected the country’s historic sites for the first ten days of the uprising, and then shifted their focus to other priorities. This left the Tourist Police and unarmed security guards with the job of protecting all those sites, which has sadly been a logistical impossibility. Robbers have been able to steal priceless artefacts including statues of Tutankhamen from the Egyptian Museum. Tombs have been destroyed. Storage warehouses containing antiquities have been looted.

Another unexpected turn of events was the resignation this week of Dr. Zahi Hawass, a government minister who has been in charge of the Giza Plateau for almost 20 years. When I started writing The Sphinx Scrolls I quickly learned that Dr. Hawass controlled all archaeological digs and research at the pyramids and the Sphinx. He seemed to be strongly patriotic, and would usually refuse permits for any ‘New Age’ inspired excavations that might find signs that these great monuments were not built by Egyptian Pharaohs. In particular, the search for a possible ‘Hall of Records’ at the Sphinx, has made slow progress.

Since the existence of such a repository of ancient knowledge is key to my novel, I’ve had mixed feelings about the difficulties researchers have had in trying to establish whether such a thing exists. On the one hand, it would be fascinating if permission would be granted to excavate the fissures and chambers that ground penetrating radar surveys have identified close to and under the Sphinx. On the other hand, it might take away some of the magic of my novel if a time capsule of lost knowledge were discovered. After all, the Nag Hammadi Library was found in a mostly legible state after almost two millennia, so it’s possible for properly sealed texts to survive far longer in the dry conditions of the Giza Plateau. On balance, of course, I’d be delighted if the chambers could be opened up and investigated, and for any long hidden knowledge to be discovered.

If the exit of Dr. Hawass results in a more liberal replacement in that role, and if that opens the way for archaeological digs that have hitherto been refused, and if those digs actually find something unexpected about the history of humanity (and that’s a lot of ifs…), then I’d have to rewrite the end of my novel. Might take me a few months, but it’s not that big a deal. I won’t mind. It’s far harder for humanity to rediscover the wisdom it may once have possessed. If our ancestors took the trouble to write some advice for us and put it in a very safe place, I think we should take the trouble to find it and read it. And that, in a nutshell, is what my book is about.

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.

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…).

How old is the Sphinx?

I didn’t make many changes in my edits today. That’s a good sign, of course. So I thought I would talk instead about the age of the Great Sphinx of Giza. No one denies it’s very old, but it’s hard to put a precise date on it because it’s mostly carved from natural bedrock that has been there for millions of years. Its ‘precise’ age (give or take a millennium or two) is crucial to the plot of The Sphinx Scrolls. I’ll let my archaeologist protagonist, Ruby, explain the theories – as taken from the chapter I edited today (the other voice is that of President Orlando):

‘…there’s evidence to suggest that the Sphinx in Egypt is far older than people originally believed. Its pharonic head has confused Egyptologists into believing it was built by Pharoah Cheops four thousand years ago, but the latest thinking is that Cheops only discovered the Sphinx with its original leonine head at that time, and had it re-carved in his own image. When Cheops found it, the Sphinx was already eight thousand years old. So rather than the Sphinx marking the beginning of mankind as an advanced, technological race, it may actually mark the end of its first advanced period, the Age of Leo.’

‘What is the evidence for this?’ His voice was cool, assessing, no longer the soft cadences of a would-be lover.

‘The Sphinx was carved out of an outcrop of natural rock, so there’s no certain way of dating it. But geologists studying the erosion of the stone noticed that most of the fissures were vertical, caused by rain, rather than horizontal from wind and sand. And yet there hasn’t been a rainy climate on the Giza plateau for seven thousand years… There are other clues to its age, besides the weathering. If it was built twelve thousand years ago, that was the Age of Leo. The eyes of the Sphinx at that time would have been looking straight at the constellation of Leo. The constellations have since moved around the sky. It’s as if the Sphinx was built as an eternal marker for that point in history.’

The geology she describes is real. The movement of the constellations is real (usually referred to by the catchy phrase ‘precession of the equinoxes’). The conclusion that the Sphinx dates from the Age of Leo, however, is a theory. It is not widely accepted in academic circles due to lack of conclusive evidence. That’s fair enough, but for the purposes of this story I’m running with the idea of the Sphinx being 12,000 years old, a symbol of a lost common ancestry we didn’t even know we had. As the novel progresses it is revealed that other traces of this lost civilisation have survived right under our noses, undetected or misunderstood for thousands of years. It is only when a full understanding of our forgotten past is achieved by the lead characters in the novel that they are able to equip themselves to deal with the sinister legacy they are about to inherit.

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.