I Just Finished A New Book

Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's a bit mad, but I've written another book. I finished it today. It's going to need some editing and tweaking and stuff yet; it's just a first draft, but it's done. 80,000 words of it. And it feels right.

Agents haven't finished rejecting A Simple Irish Farmer (almost certainly to be re-titled) yet and I haven't even had final feedback from beta readers preparatory to getting it edited and proofed, let alone published it. And I've gone and written another one!

It's been an amazing roller-coaster of a journey. As usual with my books, it all started with a dream, one I had years and years ago. And it ends with another dream, one which recurred for a while a few years back, enough to become an enduring memory. The two dreams became conflated in my mind a long time ago, I sort of knew this book was going to happen like this but ASIF sort of pushed in.

I've been blasting away for the last month, managing a good thousand words on most days, frequently more. Unusually for me, I took a good couple of weeks to outline the plot, pretty much chapter by chapter and scene by scene. That framework meant I was focused on making the writing work, setting and building the scenes more carefully rather than worrying about plot development. The plot still changed, of course, with scenes suggesting themselves and, in one case, two of my characters doing something I had most definitely not intended them to! I only turned my back for a second and they were at it like rabbits. But in general, the book follows the structure I had originally intended, with a few unplanned twists and curves and one major refocus of the plot later on because I was being lazy and that shows through when you write books.

I haven't written a book this quickly since Olives - A Violent Romance, which took four weeks. And this one won't take seven years of editing, I can tell you!

FWIW, Deadmau5 has been a major musical inspiration, with lots of Brian Eno and Harold Budd, perennial favourites Silence and Sigur Ros, a goodly dollop of David Holmes, some Nine Inch Nails and quite a lot of Professor Kliq, Rim Banna and a few slices of William Orbit.

And now, to celebrate, a visit to Bombay to celebrate its lovely Sapphire...

Tomorrow, it's edit time...

Of Writing Books And Vicissitude

An SSD in the wild.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have a new computer. It has a 4k screen and is basically very cool indeed. And then out of nowhere the other day that lavish and exquisitely detailed screen went green and the machine died and refused point blank to subsequently undie. It said it didn't have a boot device. The BIOS wasn't seeing the SSD - the solid state hard disk. This, in case you haven't realised by now, is really not very good news at all.

I sat staring at it, screaming inside. My book was on that thing. My novel. The new one. The one I've been fighting so hard to finish.

I have been writing A Simple Irish Farmer for a year now. That's not strictly true, I've had long breaks when I haven't been able to bring myself to face it, struggles with Mr Dunning and Mr Kruger and then (much shorter) runs of correcting what it was that was subliminally bothering me and getting back to work again. And then hitting another brick wall.

People often ask me about writer's block and I've always tried to be helpful but never really suffered myself. Now I'm an expert.

Why this book? Maybe because it's not a Middle Eastern book, maybe because I'm much more aware of what I'm doing as I work now. Maybe because there have been a number of changes taking place around me. And maybe because I'm setting myself a higher standard. There have been other factors, not least of which is everyone's insistence on telling me that there's no demand for books set in Ireland. Apparently the only place in the world that's nearly as unpopular as the Middle East among publishers and editors is Northern Ireland.

'Write a book set in Tuscany,' a best-selling friend told me. 'They holiday there. They understand Tuscany.'

I had another major knock-back when I interviewed a former IRA member last summer, realising that the aim I'd had for the book wasn't really coming through. I'm happier now, but the realisation hit me for a several weeks and had me unable to pick up my keyboard and set to. I'd tinker like an overfed cat playing with a dead gecko. For the last couple of months, though, it's been good. I know where the ending's going, my characters are dancing in spirited unison and a couple of hard edits have exposed the issues and corrected things.

I've been so busy, in fact, that I hadn't made the time to do something I do obsessively with my WIP manuscripts. I hadn't emailed it to myself - my version of making a backup - since the first week of December, in fact. I usually do that every couple of days when I'm working.

Three months' work, about 16,000 words and a lot of editing - on screen and by hand. At least two full edits of the 60,000 word MS. All gone.

I sent the machine off to be repaired and to have the data recovered. And found out that's the bugger with SSD's - when they go wrong, they go very wrong indeed. It's not unusual to see an SSD drive 'brick' and take your data with it. All of it. And that's what mine has done.

I started work again today. It all feels very Sysiphean, tell the truth. But if I do one thing, I'm going to finish this damn book if it kills me. Which, on current showing at least, it may well do.