Guest Book Post: Bubblecow On Show - Don't Tell

There’s a critical problem dooming your book and you may not even realize!

At BubbleCow, we’ve edited more than 800 books. That’s a lot of books! One thing that this unique level of editing allows is for us to see beyond the problems with any single book and look at the wider picture.

That’s how we know that many writers face a problem that they don’t even understand exists.

The problem is… Emotion!

To be more precise, the problem is making your readers feel REAL emotion.

We are not talking about readers feeling emotion for a character, along the lines of ‘Oh, how sad that they died’, but your words and story triggering a true emotion in a reader.

I know this all sounds wishy washy, but stick with me.

I am sure you’ve read a book that made you cry! Think about it. I am betting that if a book has made you cry that you can still remember that book to this day. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you can still recall the exact moment you were reading that book, as tears rolled down your cheeks.

That’s the writer triggering true emotion. That’s the writer delving into your heart and ripping out feelings that leave you emotionally altered…. Now that’s writing!

If you are writing from a third person perspective (that is when the narrator is separate from the story and not one of the characters in your book, that’s first person), then you probably face a problem that you’ve never considered.

Writers become so consumed by TELLING the story, that they forget that the reader is actually part of the process. The reader is part of the story. They are not a passive observer; they are an active component in the process. The moment your reader becomes passive, they turn off, get bored and, eventually, stop reading.

If you TELL a reader that a character is sad, all you do is add a twist to the plot. What you don’t do is make the reader feel the sadness of your character.

This is important. There’s a world of difference between a reader knowing the character is sad and FEELING the character’s sadness.

What you must do, if you are to trigger emotion in a reader, is SHOW them how the character is reacting and then let the reader fill in the gaps.

If… you write with emotional honesty and with a universal truth, the character’s actions will trigger an emotion in the reader. On feeling this emotion, the reader is immediately engaged with your work on a new level.

In other words, by SHOWING not TELLING you are creating a narrative space between the reader and the characters. Because you are not telling the reader how to think and feel this leaves a narrative gap. The reader then leans into this gap and fills it with their own emotion.
Ok… These are big words, but let me show you an example.

Let’s imagine a scene where a young boy has just opened a birthday present to find a book he has been asking for all year.

Here’s the scene written with TELL:


John lifted the present from the table. His heart was filled with joy. He was happy to see the brightly colored wrapping paper. He pushed his finger into the paper and ripped a tiny hole. He was excited. He peeked inside, his heart racing with anticipation. Unable to control himself he ripped open the paper to find the book he had been dreaming of reading.


OK, not Shakespeare but you get my drift.

Now let’s look a little closer at what I’ve written. In the second sentence, we TELL the reader that John’s heart was ‘filled with joy’. In the next sentence, we TELL the reader he was ‘happy’. In the fifth sentence, we TELL the reader he was ‘excited’ and in the next, that his ‘heart was racing’.
This is a lot of TELL and leaves no space between John and the reader. In this section we are being told by the writer how John is feeling. We are not allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Now… here’s the same scene with all the TELL removed and replaced by SHOW:

John lifted the present from the table. It was a small package wrapped in red and blue wrapping paper, the colors creating a smooth swirl under his fingers. A smile crept onto his lips as he brushed the paper. He glanced from the present to his mother, his grin spreading to a smile. He held the present at arms length for a moment, his hand shaking. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, small breaths pushing from his lips.

The boy returned his gaze to the present. He removed his left hand and extended his middle finger into a poke. His head moved forward, his expression now one of concentration. His finger pushed at the paper, ripping a tiny hole. He leaned in even further, peering into the darkness.

A slight squeal slipped from his lips, an explosion of a smile on his face. Holding the present with his right hand, he ripped at the paper with his left. Long strips came away and were discarded to the floor. A small brown book sat in his right hand. John brushed the cover with the tips of the fingers on his left hand. He stood motionless for a moment, his eyes glistening with moisture. He looked at his mother and mouthed the words ‘thank you’.


The first thing to notice is that the scene is longer. The reason is that the moment we can no longer short cut by simply TELLING the reader what is happening, we are forced to add in description. This is what I call ‘crafting’. I have tried to conjure an image in your mind. If I am not going to write ‘John opened the present’, then I need to accept that I need more words.

The second thing of note is that I’ve tried to write with an emotional truth. I’ve tried to remember what it felt like to receive a present as a child. I’ve also plumbed my own memories of my own children receiving presents. The result, I hope, is a scene that has a universal truth. If I have managed to access this truth, this scene should trigger an emotion in the reader.

Finally, I’ve created a space between John and the reader. I’ve not TOLD you how John is feeling, I’ve just described his actions. It is left to the reader to interpret these actions. This is where I hope to trigger the emotion in the reader. As the reader fills the gap they are forced to tap into their own feelings of the joy of receiving a present. If I’ve managed it, then this suddenly turns into a powerful scene.

And that’s Show, Don’t Tell in action.

I feel strongly that this single technique can turn the most pedestrian of books into an engaging work that readers will remember. No, let’s scrub that. I know that this is true. I’ve seen it happen time and again. In fact, I’ve based our whole business on it! At BubbleCow, Show, Don’t Tell, is the backbone of the editorial approach we take to books written in third person. In fact, we feel it is so important, that we have created a free book to help teach writers how to use this technique in their own writing.

Let’s finish with a little writing trick that can work wonders. It’s called the ‘camera technique’. When writing a scene, imagine you are observing the scene through a camera. Now, just write what the cameraman can see. No thoughts, no short cuts, just the action. The result will be a scene packed full of SHOW and devoid of TELL.


Gary Smailes is the owner of BubbleCow, a company that helps self-publishing writers to produce publishable books. They provide book editing and proofreading.

Book Post: Writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

I found a sub-folder in my laptop's big mess of writing folders that contained a tiny snippet of text - an idea I'd jotted down at some stage. It was dated early 2004 and the Word doc in contained no more than:

Today I have been alive a little over an hour. The sea is very blue outside the window of my bedroom, which makes up most of one side of the room. The bed sheets are white and crisp, and they feel good.

It was an odd thing to find in 2013 - particularly as Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy starts:

Jason Hartmoor has been alive a little over an hour. He has recovered from his recurring nightmare and turned the damp side of his pillow to face the mattress. He lies, luxuriating in the bright light streaming through the window overlooking the sea. It takes up most of the length of the room. The bed sheets are white and crisp. Every opening of the eyes is a bonus, a thrill of pleasure. Sometimes he tries to stave off sleep, lying and fighting exhaustion until the early hours. It is becoming increasingly hard to push back the darkness. These days he’s lucky to hold out beyond midnight.

The idea seems to have stuck around, no?

The concept of MECAS - the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies - has long fascinated me. Somewhere up there in the Chouf mountains above Beirut was a building that had for thirty years housed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Arabic language school - known to the Lebanese as the British Spy School. Founded by Bertram Thomas, disgraced by George Blake, (taken from Shemlan and arrested as a Soviet double agent) and closed by the Lebanese Civil War, MECAS is an enigma and a minor marvel to me.

The idea of setting a spy thriller around someone who had studied at the school - around the school itself - had long nagged at me. I bought books about the school and sought out memoirs written by people who had studied there, life-long diplomats like Ivor Lucas, whose self-published memoir of his career was to inform Jason Hartmoor's mostly unremarkable diplomatic existence. Eventually, on a misty, rainy spring morning, I travelled up into the mountains with pal Maha and we tottered around the dripping village of Shemlan looking for the school. Or rather Maha tottered, wearing her usual mad heels and complaining that I was responsible for ruining her McQueens as we squelched around.

She found my comment about how she should have worn trainers unhelpful for some reason.

The locals didn't think much of being asked about the spy school by some Egyptian chick with a camera-toting Brit old enough to be her dad in tow. But we eventually tracked it down. I've been back to Shemlan a few times now - the village is lovely and the Cliff House restaurant an absolute delight that is alone worth the journey up from Beirut. It's odd how all roads lead to Shemlan - pal Dania 'Summer Blast' Al Kadi hails from the next village, as did a lady present at the recent How To Write A Book workshop I did for the Hunna writer's club (the How To Publish A Book one is at Dubai's Dar Al Adab on the 2nd November). Choueifat is just down the road, the home of the school that brought Sarah out to the UAE first in 1988. And Shemlan was home to Philip Hitti, the author of 'History of the Arabs' - a book I have long revered.

I had actually started writing Shemlan just before I published Olives - A Violent Romance. The book was shelved, paused about halfway through, while I got publishing Olives and Beirut out of my system. Originally called Hartmoor, the title was quickly changed when I discovered Sarah Ferguson's 'planned' historical novel of the same name was scheduled to publish in 2015. Having sent Beirut bobbing into the wide open sea last year, I took up the reins on Shemlan again earlier this year and finished the novel in a mad burst of frenetic activity, pumped on death metal and alternately smacked down by Arvo Pärt like a twisted druggie shredded by a mouthful of French Blues chased down with slugs of chilled vodka and warm dark rum.

And just in case you're interested, yes - I do know precisely what that feels like...

The story of Shemlan was, from an early stage, fated to travel to Estonia. We went to Tallinn for a magical week a couple of years back and I dragged Sarah across town to the British Embassy so I could photograph it for use in the book later - as it turns out, Lynch never does go to the Embassy to fall out with the ambassador in the final version of the book and so I didn't need the Embassy at all, but you can never be too careful.

Sadly, the other major location for Shemlan was Aleppo and the marvellous C14th Ottoman souk has been destroyed. In the overall devastation the last two years have brought, the loss is a small one, I know.

An odd footnote of interest to absolutely nobody but me is that the Urfalees church of St George's in Aleppo was somewhere you could still hear very early plainchant - the root of all European music lived on in the preserved practice of the Urfalees community. I use the past tense only because I don't know if it - and they - are still there. The little green orthodox church (Estonia is the most secular country in Europe - you don't get a lot of working churches there!) down by the port in Tallinn is also somewhere you can hear Estonian Orthodox singing, a rare and beautiful sound that is not only similar to the haunting echoes of Aleppo, but also the inspiration for Pärt's sparse, spine-tingling music. And it was to the aching soundscape of his 'Fur Alina' I finished writing Shemlan.

Do More Evil

 The Man in the Mustardy Shirt

I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have a large number of talented friends dotted all over the world. Some are online pals, others are ‘real world’ friends – and some are people I met online and subsequently have hooked up with' in analogue'.

One such person is my old authonomy buddy, Simon Forward. We joined each other in the race for the authonomy ‘Editor’s Desk’ and both got there, gleefully and manically mucking about in the forums as we plugged our respective works, promoting them to creaking point but also having a great deal of fun in the process. We became something of a double act: Simon’s schoolboy humour and my suave, sophisticated charm worked together like a dream.

Not content with bobbing around at the top of the foetid pool of festering books that is authonomy, Simon then tossed a second book into the ring, a kids’ yarn focused around hero Kip Doodle. And, damn me, but he did it again and so became the only writer to get to the top at authonomy twice. Not, you understand, that it did him the blindest bit of good...

Simon has, in fact, written several highly successful published novels, although sadly on other people’s behalf – he’s one of the writers of the massively popular Dr. Who books, for instance. This resulted in The Niece From Hell (who is Dr Who bonkers) getting a signed Dr Who book to add to her signed Caroline Lawrence ‘Roman Mystery’. Caroline, a highly astute million-selling kids’ author who knows a niece with a minted uncle when she sees one, seeded TNFH’s massive and ever-growing collection of Caroline Lawrence books by whipping one out and signing it for me when we met at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. But getting a signed Dr Who book awed the child into a rare (and prolonged) silence. For this alone, I owe Simon a great debt.

It is with great pleasure, therefore, that I can now report that The Man In The Mustardy Shirt has only been and gone and gone ‘e’. He's taken the plunge and released his hilarious sci-fi comedy, Evil UnLtd, on Amazon’s Kindle, which means you can get your hands on the book for a mere $2.99 and, what’s more, you can have it in your eager paws in seconds flat.

What better way to celebrate than talking to him about the project? Here’s the View From Forward.

Evil UnLtd is clearly something of a pangalactic caper - was this an escape from writing Dr Who books for you?
Pangalactic is the telltale word there, I think. As in gargleblaster.  The Hitch-Hikers influence is strong in this one, Obi-Wan, but it's fair to say that, rather than an escape from, this is an extension of my Doctor Who writing. Basically name a TV sci-fi series and it was an inspiration of one sort or another. Even the sci-fi series' I loathed played their part - if, for example, they were bland or boring, I thought how much more interesting even the same storylines would be if you replaced the wet goody-two-shoes hero types with a band of villains.

On a very basic level, saving the universe/world/space-whale then becomes a different ball game. Even if it's just saving the universe/world/space-whale for themselves. Then when it comes to the details, well, everything just spirals in all sorts of directions, which is just great from a creative point of view.

How would you describe the plot, briefly?
It's a very organic affair, kicking off with a sort of Reservoir Dogs bank-robbery goes wrong scenario, with a gradually unfolding mystery that culminates in what I hope is one of the bizarrest action-packed sf climaxes  you'll have ever read - until I can come up with a better one for Evil 2.

Do you not think we already see enough commercialisation of Evil without contemplating a future of evil commerce?
We see way too much commercialisation of Evil, yes. Which is why the world needs a brand of Evil we can actually laugh at.

Who's your favourite character in the book and why?
That would have to be Dexter Snide. I have a soft spot for all of them - and no it's not just the marsh world of Delta Magna - but there's something wonderfully odious about Dexter. He's essentially like the Master, I suppose, a sort of Moriarty figure - which means I should give him a thinly veiled Time Lord opponent at some point I guess - but he's also the pure unadulterated evil in me. That is, I'd never do or say the things he does, you understand, but I do love writing him.

I also love the Hatchling, as he's the most enigmatic of the bunch - spending so much time in his egg as he does - and the rare point-of-view scenes I do for him are a treat.

What's your proudest 'funny moment'?
That would have to be the climax. At the time, I didn't quite know how the whole thing was going to wrap up, and it just came to me in a flash. One of those things that just grows organically out of the plot and as I was writing it, everything just clicked. Although that may have been the RSI.

Did you ever sit back and think, 'Crumbs, this is just too silly!'?
Not really. I mean, there were times I had my doubts whether it would appeal to anyone else, but the curious thing about SF comedy, I find, is that the characters and the universe you're creating have to take themselves seriously. So it's as immersive in its own way as crafting a straight-faced sci-fi epic - for which, by the way, I have the greatest respect, and I think you have to love your 'proper' sci-fi in any case in order to write a full novel of the slightly dafter variety. There were probably a few bits and pieces I chucked out as too silly or not working, but if something is daft and makes you laugh, you just construct a rationale for it within the context of your universe and voila! suddenly it's part of that universe and as a bonus you've (hopefully) written an entertaining discourse on the ins and outs of a society of leaf-like aliens who eat music. (I haven't, you understand, it's just an off the top of my head example.)

Why did you decide to go down the Kindle road? Did you evaluate various 'e-publishing' options, or just go straight for the 'Big K'?
I'm afraid to say, I didn't really investigate alternatives and plumped straight for the Special K. Possibly out of a desire to fit into that slimline red dress, who knows. But more probably because, while I was resistant to the e-publishing route for a long while, one particular friend and my mum-in-law kept urging me to publish something of mine on Kindle. They happened to specify Kindle and so when I finally buckled under the persuasion, I opted for that route. When I think about it now, there's part of me that associates the Amazon brand with a degree of trust that perhaps wouldn't be felt with other options, so I'm hoping that people will see the book on the Amazon site and that might help persuade them to give it a whirl.

What's your hope for the project? 100 copies sold? International fame? Just get it out of your system?
Here I have to separate hopes and realistic aims. Hopes are to attract the attentions of a publisher or Joss Whedon. (Evil is already - for plot reasons - kind of a TV series in book form and Joss, for my money, is the man to head the screen version.)  But this is an experiment and there's a sales figure I'd consider a success, although I'm not sure what that is at this stage. I don't know enough about the general volumes of sales of Kindle e-books, although I gather recently they outstripped Amazon hardback sales for the first time.
If every one of my Facebook and Twitter and authonomy contacts bought a copy, that'd be a few hundred sales right there, and more if they spread the word and so on, but you know how it is, you invite twenty people to the party and only eight can make it.

How would you define success? If you reach that, would you take other projects online?
Real success would be, like I say, attracting the attention of a publisher. When (a sample of) Evil was on authonomy, it proved its appeal to a wide range of readers - not just sf-heads - but there was a forum in which people could be enticed to give a book a chance, even if it was outside their normal comfort zone, because you'd been helpful or entertaining or just plain daft in the online discussions.

Without that - and without the kind of budget a mainstream publisher can command - it's going to be a huge challenge to attract the readers and convince them to give Evil a chance. So I'll be tweeting, facebooking, blogging and quite possibly even putting together a book trailer and seeing how it goes. That said, if I do feel this one meets with a measure of success, I will be putting other projects online. At the very least, I'll be uploading Evil 2 and future Evil volumes, maybe make that an annual event. Because a) establishing a series might prompt more interest and b) I enjoy writing these characters and, damn it, some of my work needs to be out there, being read, by some of the people at the very least.

Why Evil as your first Kindle book? Wouldn't KipDoodle find a more ready 'e-reader friendly' audience?
I considered making Kip Doodle available - that one was even more popular on authonomy - but as much as adults do enjoy it, I didn't think it would reach many of its target audience - ie. kids - on Kindle. I may be wrong, but I didn't imagine a lot of kids reading e-books. Although a friend of mine pointed out there were something like 15,000 kids' books available on Kindle already. Whereas I figured there might be some crossover between, say, sci-fi geeks and the sort of technophiles who'd either have a Kindle or be into downloading the software to their PC/Mac/iPhone/whatever.

What has been YOUR favourite Kindle buy so far? Is there anything you wouldn't read on a Kindle?
It's early days for me as a consumer. I have my eye on a few titles, and if nothing else the novelty value has re-awakened my previously flagging enthusiasm for reading. But so far I've focused on some of the classics that I've overlooked - not least because they're free, or close to it. Most significant has been Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, which I enjoyed, not necessarily because it's his best, but because I've found it surprisingly ripe for comedy.

More inspiration like that can only lead to more Evil and is therefore very welcome.

BUY EVIL!

I'm sad to say that Amazon does NOT support the Middle East on Kindle and won't allow downloads unless you have a valid address in the UK, US or elsewhere in the world you can give 'em. This sucks royally, BTW.

However, if you have a Kindle (or the Kindle PC reader, which is surprisingly usable, BTW) and you can download books, you can buy your very own copy of Evil UnLtd for $2.99 from Amazon UK by clicking here or Amazon.com by clicking here. 

Ha. I want to see the silly bugger sign this one.

Book Post: When The Olives Weep

I've written a screenplay based on Olives - A Violent Romance. I have to tell you, it was a great deal of fun and a most fascinating exercise. And the first thing I did was give it the title I should have - if there were anything between my ears other than kapok - given the book in the first place - When The Olives Weep.

It all started when I gave a talk to the DIFC book club last year. They meet in that most hallowed of haunts for the city's self-proclaimed CIPs, the Capital Club. Apart from having a pleasant evening, I was struck by one of the members who reported on his experiences reading 'Screenwriting for dummies'. It sounded interesting and I made a mental note to get the book myself one of the days and see what it was all about.

This from a man who spent seven years refusing to read books on writing before he had to be bullied into it. You can see I've learned stuff, can't you?

I went one better. I bought and read Syd Field's (in)famous Screenplay: The Foundations Of Screenwriting. And I spent a lot of time on the Internet sucking up everything I could about writing screenplays.

There are some odd conventions to scripts. The first and most wonderful is that a page of 12 point Courier text laid out in the standard margins of screenplays equates to a minute on celluloid. Not that they use celluloid any more, but you know what I mean. It's an immutable rule of film and the rules and conventions of formatting are even more rigid than publishing. Indents need to be precisely standard, new scenes treated this way, dialogue that. Looking at a blank Word doc and all that convention, you'd be forgiven for throwing up your hands then and there. Which is where Celtx comes in. Celtx is screenwriting software and it's simply brilliant. Mind-numbingly, it's freeware - such a polished and useful piece of software being offered for nada is stunning.

Celtx does the formatting for you and lots of other useful things, leaving you to focus on the actual, you know, story.

The first thing you notice is how the two ways of telling the same narrative differ so monumentally. In a book, you're setting up the scene, building a sense of place and grounding the reader in the characters' Point Of View, carefully describing things and actions and pacing exposition, dialogue and action.

In screenplay, that's pretty much the job of the director and actors. You're straight in there, keeping it crisp and description down to a minimum. Most of what you have to get across is straight action or dialogue. Scenes keep the action moving, you move to a new room it's a new scene. Move out of the house to the garden, new scene. It's got to flow, dialogue is critical and much of the dialogue in your book doesn't matter. In fact, whole scenes don't matter. Loads of them. You're paring down the story to its bare minimum - if it doesn't move the story forward, it goes. Nuance and subtlety are kept, but they work in different ways - they're the actor's job to communicate through your dialogue. It's on screen - you really don't want to listen to characters pontificating about the meaning of life. Oh no, you want stuff actually, you know, happening.

Now you'd think you'd have done that anyway, writing a well-rounded novel, no? But there's so much description, scenes setting up characters that can go when you have visual cues to play with. Then there are different ways of telling the story - I told more of Lynch's 'backstory' in the screenplay, showed some of the 'behind the scenes' stuff Olives infers but doesn't actually tell. A couple of scenes equals a whole load of shortcuts that mean lumps of book stuff can go. Because the visual medium is in many ways more powerful, different ways it has to be said. I'm not putting one above the other. But Olives the book is 260 pages of full text and the screenplay is 120 pages of tightly formatted, mostly dialogue, 12 point Courier - for a nice, standard two-hour film.

It was a real eye-opener, in some ways a chance to rewrite Olives as a faster, more urgent story than the realistic, leisurely novel I set out to write - in some ways a way of testing how you write and what you can, despite your conviction you've gone as far as you're comfortable, still tear out of the bodywork and engine and leave a functioning vehicle that's faster and lighter.

Strangely, When The Olives Weep fits neatly into Field's structure (he's been blamed with creating a formula so powerful that all Hollywood films are cookie cut from the same convention) with no tweaking. It establishes in the right places, kicks off in the right places and resolves in the right places - all out of the box, I hadn't intended it to fit so neatly. It's just that Olives does that anyway.  It's all a bit pacier than the book - and I can see how authors get upset at how Hollywood mangles their books. At least I did all my own mangling!

I now have not the faintest clue to do with the resulting work and it's sitting in a desk drawer until I work out what the hell you do with a screenplay. But it's a rollicking read, I can tell you that much!

Books

I have previously ranted about Authonomy, the HarperCollins alternative to the publisher’s slushpile. I am glad I discovered it for any number of reasons, but one has been the chance to read a hell of a lot of original fiction that you, the consumer, are not and possibly would not otherwise be exposed to. It's Web 2.0 thinking at its best: the site is completely populated by content from its participants. And what content!!

It’s interesting that you have a chance to participate in this new egalitanariasm: if you’re a keen reader, you can sign up for Authonomy yourself and vote the type of books you like to the top of the chart, to the HarperCollins Editors’ Desk. Each month, the top five books are plucked for a read by HC editors. As I have said before, most authors would wax their bits in public for a chance to get that sort of attention.

So you can actually influence the kinds of books that are being sorted and selected. If, like me, you wander around bookshops wondering why there’s so much mediocrity there, Authonomy actually has the potential to act as a barometer of public opinion.

So here’s some of the writing I have encountered in my journeys around Authonomy: writing that has delighted me or otherwise convinced me that there’s more good and interesting work in all this unpublished stuff than there is in my local bookshop.

Incidentally, most people would expect me to use this as an opportunity to plug my own book, Space, on Authonomy. But I’m above that. It might be the No. 1 thriller, No. 2 comedy and No. 3 sci-fi on this site, but I’d hardly expect you to click on this handy link and read, laugh at and back my own book first. I am simply not that kind of chap.

Right. Here’s my guide to a tasting of smart new literature from unsigned UK, Australian and American authors.

The Banjo Players Must Die by Josef Assad is one of the more original and challenging books on Authonomy. It’s as mad as a hatter’s convention and insanely creative and funny.


Evil Unlimited by my mate Simon Forward is one of the top ranked books on Authonomy, a funny and madcap sci-fi comedy that somehow makes you think of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and then feel ashamed of yourself because it's an original book with its own life and style to it. Do try it!


Going to the Mountain, by JW Reitz. A luscious book about growing up as a settler in Xhosa country, about looking back on your life’s action: guilt, as the author says, and sex and death.


Sunday’s Child by Anne Lyken-Gardner is a dark but beautifully told tale of a childhood of abuse in Latin America. It’s a haunting and lyrical work that some will find traumatically evocative. It's one of my favourite things on Authonomy.


The Girl on the Swing by Ali Cooper is a book that attracted me for all the wrong reasons: not my kind of book at all. But its clever, dense language and descriptive prose soon turn into a book that captures you.


You want action, Asian gogo bars and big gun, move fast thriller stuff? This is the book for you, Hunting Buddha by Jamie DeBaisio is a really fast paced gangsta book set in Hong Kong. Guaranteed riveting read from Ch1.


How about a bit of ‘classic’ sci-fi? Bob Pickup is a train driver by day who composes intergalactic science fiction that’s about as ‘out there’ as you’d want and highly readable, too.


And, of course famed blogger Keefieboy's new (and timely!?) financial crash book, Tybalt and Theo, which time-switches between present day disaster and a distant, simpler past...


There’s loads more out there – well over a thousand books are now on Authonomy and anyone can go along, dip into them, chat to the authors and generally have an influence on the way new writing in the UK is shaping up.

And I, for one, find that exhilarating. Give it a whirl – and don’t forget Space!!!

Novels, Dreams, Stuff, Books, Things.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I started work on Beirut - An Explosive Thriller way back in November 2009, I posted this here lump of semi-prose on da blog. It was the dream/half-thought that was to lead to the book's creation, along with another nocturnal shade, a morning time dream-memory of a man being propositioned by a peroxide cropped-haired girl in the cold German winter night and brushing her off. These things coalesced over time and became the book that is the book it is.

Olives - A Violent Romance was also conceived from a dream-memory. I woke with a book in my head after sleeping to George Winston's February Sea - a track that made me think of a girl dancing in the rain, a scene that is actually physically and literally at the very centre of the book today.

And Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy started with a dream, too - although the dream sequence itself didn't make it into the final book: Shemlan opens with Jason Hartmoor wakening in a sweat after a nightmare.

I've, literally, dreamed my novels. If I've been stuck with a book's progression, I've taken the problem to bed with me and more often than not woken up with the solution - if not clear in my mind, somehow easier with me as I've tackled it the next day.

I love the story of the bloke who invented the sewing machine. Having wrestled with the problem to no avail, he woke up one morning having dreamed of being chased by pygmy head-hunters brandishing spears with a hole in their tips. Eureka!

I think dreams are our way of managing experience and input, a sort of file management routine that lets us sort our most recent experience and weigh it against our remembered relationships, a way of learning that prioritises and balances our memory, learning and experience. We discard the unimportant, re-calculate our understandings and problem solve our issues. We re-balance, based on the inputs from the day that was. I truly believe my subconscious helps me build books.

I might, clearly, just be a total loony.

Many, many years ago I woke with the below in my head. I shared it with my girlfriend at the time, who lived in Sharjah while I lived in Northampton, in the UK. She's my wife now (Oh dear, that was rather League of Gentlemen, wasn't it?). It's probably my first attempt at writing, although the very idea of writing books hadn't occurred to me at the time. The short story I dashed down while the memory was still clear in my head all those years back has queued patiently to take its turn, but now it is my main focus. This is the core of my new book and I can't stop working on it. I've started writing again, having just finished The Simple Irish Farmer or whatever it'll be called.

I swear to God, it's a disease - an addiction...

______________________________________________________________________

Martin

Ashridge was a welcome contrast from the grey oppression of the city. After only a week living by the forest I had recovered my interest in life and work. The only source of worry in my delight with these freshened circumstances was that Mariam hadn't been able to get away from the city to come up and see me yet.

The city! A memorable misery; three years of making do and being alone amongst millions. Spending my working days in an antiseptic environment, preferable to the dirt, smoke and rush of the morning and evening commute. Even the small bedsit I had managed to find was little comfort as a haven, depressing every sensibility with its Victorian plumbing and Edwardian wallpaper. The ageing shabbiness came with a very modern price tag. London evenings were just a gap to fill between work, food and bed.

Even then, late at night, the city intruded. I had grown used to traffic rumbling through my short time of clear reflection before sleep, too used to faces that had no time, no concern for anything other than their own secret miseries. Now, here in the country, I found light, laughter, sharp air and the heady scents of wet leaves and fresh grass. At night I sat by my own handiwork, a wood fire that filled the living room of the little house with warmth and the hint of pine in its smoke.

Before I went to work at the Institute each day, the cold morning light would find me padding with a little thrill across the rough flagstones of the hall with the makings of the fire to prepare for my homecoming. Scrunched paper, criss-crossed twigs, then a couple of larger cuts laid down ready to take to flame on my return in the chill night. A lifetime away from igniting the Bakelite gas fire that brought warmth to that dingy London flat.

Of course the dog took to his new life immediately, not a moment’s hesitation there as he pounded down the woodland paths each day. Even buying a dog had been a trial in London, the pet shop filled with animal screeches and the sight of puppies scrabbling for space in tiny cages forming a background to the spectacle of the owner in her shabby pink dress and painted face.

Her voice rasped with fags and an awful confiding leer in every vowel. ‘You can't keep a big dog like this in a flat, you know.’ She coughed at me. ‘They grow up hellish fast.’

But I wasn’t buying year-old Bill for a flat. I was buying him to move into the great outdoors and now the patter of his claws on the flagstones peppered the silences, barking as he rushed to meet me every evening, Bill The Happy Labrador. I delighted in the contrast: cold screens and air conditioned clean rooms by day, a red glow and glass of scotch at night. After five days in the country, the hammering in my head receded and my new employer had commented on the brilliance of his find. 

This was my first weekend at Ashridge, and I wasted no time in pulling the collar and lead off the coat hook (with the usual attendant barking and skittering) and sallying forth on a long Saturday walk. Bill pulled and my feet scrunched on the wet gravel path, clouds of breath in the bright morning air. Soon we were away from the road, and I let Bill off and stooped as he bounded away chasing ghosts in the undergrowth. The woods took us both in, the dog and I, and we meandered for over an hour together through the pathways, Bill racing in great, curving arcs through the heather, returning to tease me with his big, brown laughing eyes.

I heard the children laughing a long time before I saw the green light of open field through the woodland. Bill was off nosing through the undergrowth again, muddling through the heather and snuffling excitedly at the day-old scent of pheasant. Labradors, I have found, are the world's greatest optimists, becoming so ecstatic at the prospect of game that they rush off making the most awful racket, never seeming to mind that every animal for a mile around has instantly gone to ground. Making enough noise for six humans, poor old Bill would never catch even the most stupid pheasant. And believe me, pheasants are off the dial stupid.

Nevertheless, he was delighted to be pushing through the bracken, and I was happy enough walking the dark leaf mould and listening to the far-off tinkle of children’s laughter. It must have come a good ten minutes after I had first heard them, the red flash of a tiny figure running past the opening into a field. Bill re-joined me on the path, soil on his muzzle, and leaves on his back. I dropped my cigarette, careful to heel a hole and bury the smoking mottled orange stub in a shallow grave of wet leaves.

I will never know why I didn't just walk straight onto the common. It was the first time I had walked that path, although I had strolled in the vast woodland several times during my short stay in the area. I’d normally have carried on through onto the common, and into the next patch of trees visible past the gentle rise of the otherwise flat grassland. But I stood just inside the shaded boundary of the wood and watched the source of the laughter, six children playing by the other edge of the common, some two hundred yards distant. Four were boys, about eleven years of age. The two girls were distinguishable only because they had longer hair, all six dressed in jumpers and jeans. They were capering around one of the boys, the smallest, who was standing stock still, and looking towards the top of the trees bordering the third side of the grassland.

The girl in the red jumper seemed to be leading the whooping dance around the small, expectant figure. The boy, still fixing his gaze on the treetops, reached down, and touched the tip of a small brown pile with his index figure. As he straightened, Bill pushed against my leg and, in my annoyance at the dog for breaking the spell of my voyeurism, I almost missed the boy reach out his arm to the sky. Red jumper faltered, and fell to the grass, screaming. As the dancers stopped, and the girl on the ground kicked, a bird flew to the small boy, perching on his beckoning index finger. Quick as lighting, he grasped the bird with his other hand, and twisted its neck. I heard the faint, high pitched crack.

Again he reached upwards, and again a sparrow alighted, only to drop to the pile of dead birds. Red jumper screamed again as a third bird came to its caller and fell to the pile. A fourth. A fifth. The dancers had come close now, and were holding hands as a sixth bird died. Red jumper was silent as the pile grew, she staggered to her feet and joined the dancers but I could see her pallor, even from that distance. My senses returned and I blundered through the undergrowth towards the group of children to stop this wrongness. Something clamped onto my mind and I slammed against the trunk of a tree, grasping it like a long lost friend.

The boy had turned, and stood with his hand stretched out to me. Doubt and foreboding filled me as his beckoning filled my vision and the urge to go to him, to give my life up to him, hammered at me. I looked down to avoid that intense stare. Bile rose in my throat. Green stains were slashed across my chest from the lichen on the tree-trunk. My impelled legs were heavy, not mine to command. I fought, my arms clutching at the rough bark, my body compulsively jerking forward. An age of battling the urge to run to him and be consumed before a girl's scream broke the spell. ‘Martin!’

It shed the urge like the lifting of stone weights pressing the life from me. The desire to be another sparrow evaporated as the boy turned and fled with the others into the far woodland. I slid down the trunk, spent, its roughness scraping my back. I sat in the wet leaves, tears running down my cheeks and bewildered Bill licking at my face.

Back to Skool - Let The LitFest Fun Commence

I love school visits. They're sort of part of being at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. You don't have to do them but there's a lot of effort put into integrating the Festival with local schools and authors are asked if they will drop by a school or two and give a talk to students.

I always jump at the chance. I get to behave like I'm a real author and everything. The faculty usually gets a bit twitchy, because I don't do 'PC' so well, but it normally comes right in the end. I try and use the opportunities as something of a sales pitch to get students thinking about writing their own stories. It's not just about thinking you've got a book in you: narrative is a powerful tool in communications and story-telling permeates pretty much everything we get up to in the nasty, commercial world we're bringing up our kids to inhabit.

Which is sort of funny, given our mums always told us that telling stories was a bad thing to do.

Tomorrow I'm off to Al Ain, where two groups of students from Brighton College are going to spend an hour or two with a strange, shouty man bawling incoherently at them. Next week it's English College and Pristine Private School. I'll be testing the surfaces for dust at that last one.

It's hard to believe, but we're only two sleeps from the LitFest - that fine bonanza of all things narrative, bookish and even literary. 140 writers from 25 countries are set to workshop, panel session, chat, sign books and generally delight something like 37,000 visitors. This year's Festival theme is 'time' and there's a huge programme planned which will take place across two weeks, both over at Shindaga and at the Intercon Festival City where the main programme takes place.

The Festival has grown like a mad thing over the few years it's been running. It's created new writers and seen people getting publishing contracts, start writing for themselves and expand into writing for others.

People have been self-publishing books, forming writers' groups, book clubs and generally enjoying books all the more. The Festival has, in short, triggered all sorts of growth in the literary scene in the UAE and even beyond in the wider Arab world.

The increasing focus on the Arabic programme has created a new opportunity to expand readership and contemporary literature in a language that has seen all too little focus on literature in recent years.

We've seen UAE-based writers clinching publishing contracts, new writers emerging and a vibrancy in the literary scene here which simply didn't exist before the Festival started taking place.

And all because a lady with a bookshop in Dubai woke up one day and thought 'Wouldn't it be lovely to have a literature festival?'

It's staggering, really...

Slushpile

The publishing game is a funny one. You’d have thought that writing a book was one of the hardest things you can do, but you’d be wrong. The really hard bit is getting it published.

Most UK publishers won’t even look at your book unless you’ve got a literary agent, although some authors have done it the other way around (Iain Banks, for instance). So you have to send off the first three chapters of your magnificent octopus* to literary agents along with a letter outlining why it’s interesting and a synopsis of the book itself. You also have to enclose an SAE (stamped addressed envelope). Agents are aggressively analogue and won’t respond by email. 98% of them won’t take submissions by email and they are really, really picky about people following the rules, Manuscripts should be double spaced, printed one side, loose bound. Letters should be straightforward and informative, not quirky or different. And so on. Agents make aspiring authors jump through an awful lot of hoops. In the right sequence, too, if you don’t mind.

The putative author is lucky to get any response at all beyond a photocopied rejection slip. Most agents don’t even bother reading the contents of their daily ‘slushpile’ – the 40-odd envelopes that land on the agency doorstep every day. I rather suspect many give the job of going through these submissions to the secretary or an intern.

Some are better than this. But they are in the minority.

So it’s a soul-destroying process. You send off batches your manuscript (or MS as it’s called in the trade) and get batches of copied rejections back for your efforts. If you’re really lucky – and everyone involved will tell you how lucky you are to get this – you’ll get some feedback, a few lines of encouragement and perhaps even a tip or two on improving the book. Writers buffeted by constant rejection receive these occasional flashes of light with an almost pathetic gratitude. And all this, mind you, to get someone to agree to bother representing you and therefore take 10-15% of your earnings.

Enter a bit of Web 2.0 thinking: publisher HarperCollins has launched a brilliant new website called Authonomy. Writers can post their work up on Authonomy, anything from 10,000 words to a complete book, and people can visit the site and read their books. If people like a book, they can put it on their virtual bookshelves, which increases the book’s ranking. Every month, HarperCollins’ editors skim the top 5 books off the pile and take them off to read. Getting an HC editor to read your book is, particularly if you’ve been drowning in the shitty stench and mush of the slushpiles for a while, probably worth a finger or so.

So, new talent gets a chance and the slushpile gets disintermediated. And it will, if others follow this example. On Authonomy, new authors can support each other, read each other’s work and comment, as can readers in general. People can be as critical as they like or as supportive as they like. And, the theory goes, over time good work will get recognised and make its way to the top of the tree. There are also forums on the site where people can discuss writing and publishing in general, plug their books or make recommendations. Not bad, huh?

There are question marks, of course. Isn’t this all a bit demeaning, a sort of literary ‘Big Brother’ where people are scrabbling over each other, all pretending to be nice to each other as they seek out that top five slot? Yes, there are elements of that. Does it replace the slushpile? No, it doesn’t – but it’s a first step for a business that has remained maddeningly crusty, dusty and analogue.

Why do I know all this stuff about writing or even give a damn? Because my book’s up there with over 1,000 others. It’s called ‘Space’ and I wrote it a few years back because voices in my head told me to do it. It’s a wilfully self-destructive and scabrous little thing, intended to make you laugh and to generally behave as badly as a book could behave. It’s also been rejected by pretty much every agent in the UK. Irritatingly, it made all those that read it laugh, but many felt it was too different. I do hate that.

Anyway, do feel free to wander over to Authonomy and have a read of Space. If it makes you laugh, feel free to put it on your bookshelf and help propel me closer to getting an HC editor to read the damn thing.

Similarly, feel free to have a look at Keefieboy’s book, ‘Travels in Xanadu-du’, which is also up there!

* Magnum opus. It’s a Black Addder joke...

The Joy of Editing

Image via WikipediaI have taken against a number of words and phrases as a consequence of my nasty writing habit. Some of these are insidious little things that creep into manuscripts like cockroaches, infesting decent prose with their chitinous scuttling.

It's odd, but the vast majority of sentences containing the word 'that', for instance, are improved by its removal. I have started taking against that in a mildly unreasoning way, even attacking unsuspecting thats as I walk down the street. (Have you ever walked into a grocer and complained about his apostrophes? No, me neither, but I have oft been sore tempted, I can tell you. Avocadoe's my arse!)

I have just purged a manuscript of the word 'before', which is almost always a symptom of lazy writing. Excising before almost always leads to better sentence structure or to forcing you to rewrite the sentence more elegantly.

He stood before walking quickly out of the room.

Not only includes a before, it also contains two other weasel words - stood and walking. We 'stand' so rarely and standing is such a passive thing to do. Stood goes 90% of the time to be replaced by a more active occupation or, ideally, no explanation of the movement - we can infer it. Similarly 'walking'. We run, jump, dash, fly, leap and race. Why bother walking? It's so humdrum.

Put and putting are also very passive ways to describe an action which can often either go (giving way to inference) or be replaced with a more active description. We rarely put things down - we drop them, bang them, toss them or perhaps even gently place them.

And then there's 'and then', which I recognise is a nasty little habit I have to consciously sweep up after. It's always redundant. Friends have other habits like 'just' - and 'started to' is an indication that you can usually lose the action altogether. Things starting to happen rarely interest us - it's the happening that engages.

Any contributions to my list of words up with which I shall not put are more than welcome!

Sorry for the writing post. Normal service resumed shortly...

A Decent Bomber Is Finished.

I have finished writing A Decent Bomber (working title A Simple Irish Farmer). And I am glad. It's undoubtedly been the most arduous project of all the books I've completed, although Olives took many more years to become complete and Beirut and Shemlan both underwent major re-writes post-completion (Shemlan's, subsequently, undone).

One of the things that has made this one harder is likely my clearer and sounder understanding of what the hell it is I'm trying to do here. Actually following the advice I dole out so glibly when I do workshops and presentations on writing and editing. There have also been some major changes taking place in my life alongside the book project, which have been a little distracting, to say the least. And, yes, I'm going to go on about the Dunning/Kruger effect again.

I started the book a year ago, almost to the day. There have been weeks when I haven't touched it. Days when I wrestled with it and was tempted to ditch the whole thing. Gnawing angst, delirious joy, certitude, doubt. All of that. A real roller-coaster. Right now, I'm quietly satisfied.

I'd like to pause and thank Fred Venturini here. I've no idea who the hell he is, but he wrote one of those 'Five Things You Must Do When Writing A Book' sort of articles/blog posts and, rarely for me because I usually avoid them like the plague, I read Fred's.

Four of them were the same sort of advice everyone else has to give, but his fifth point was 'Whatever you do, finish the book. Don't get involved in side projects, start something else or otherwise kid yourself. Hunker down, man up and just finish the damn thing'. I'm paraphrasing and you'll clearly see Fred's outraged howls in the comments to this post at some stage.

But I printed out the word FINISH in big capitals - and Fred's name underneath so I wouldn't forget where the advice came from - and hung the piece of paper on the blind in front of my desk. And then I set out to do just that. Every time I wanted to nip off to Twitter or exfoliate my Pinterest, I'd look at that word and get back down to it. And it worked.

Thanks, Fred. Really thanks.

Now what? A big fat edit. Beta readers. Agents. Depending on the outcome of that process, publish or self publish. I've no problem doing the latter, but I'd clearly prefer the former. If the latter, I won't be doing a local print run again. And I'm really not sure how much energy I'll be putting into promotion, either. I have the feeling the book will be controversial, which I'm not really looking forward to, to be honest. But that's a long way down the road.

But we'll see. Meanwhile, onward with the editing!

* The image is an Easter Lily badge, traditionally worn by Irish Republicans in the same way Brits wear a poppy. It's mine - Sarah got me one and I had it laminated into a bookmark.

That Was The LitFest That Was

I'm feeling slightly shell-shocked this morning. The weekend's whirl is over and I realised, probably massively belatedly but then I am a bear of remarkably little brain, from the moment I started the process of editing and formatting Birdkill, I was preparing for it.

I got roped into a panel on science fiction at the last minute, which was a little bit strange. One of the panellists decided we were all going to start with a reading which I thought odd, but I was feeling benign and generally happy go lucky and so went along with the scheme. There should be a law banning people who assert they 'read rather well' from ever reading their books to an audience.

The invitation to a science fiction panel came because of the mad eugenics, drugs and battlefield enhancement program that's at the heart of Birdkill. I thought of explaining that it's actually reflective of some real-life, modern-day programs run by people like DARPA but threw that up and just agreed to it. In all things bookish, I have a policy of never, ever saying 'no' to anything - something I have rarely had cause to regret, BTW.

It all went well enough, I suppose and we chatted happily about how Sci-Fi has sort of grown up and is no longer the guilty secret read it was when I was a kid, how writing 'near future' Sci-Fi is harder than space opera and other stuff. I was there more as a fan than anything, I suppose. I managed to get in a dig about how explorer of suburban dystopias JG Ballard would have loved writing a novel set in Arabian Ranches, which was all rather fun.

I went to Justin Marozzi's talk about Baghdad which was great. One of the perks of being a LitFest author is your wee badge gives you 'access all areas' and you can attend sessions without a ticket - something I always manage to make all too little use of. I had read Marozzi's history of Baghdad with fascination and similarly enjoyed his presentation. Of course he had to tell the Haroun Al Rashid story. Tsk Tsk.

The how to find your route to publication and onto shelves panel was an absolute hoot. Having in previous years found myself debating the role of traditional publishing vs self publishing with people like Luigi Bonomi (the world's nicest literary agent) and Orion's Kate Mills (an eminently sensible and most likeable lady), it was nice to finally encounter someone who represented the face of traditional publishing I felt I could really disagree with. Jonathan Lloyd is chairman of Curtis Brown, a very big London literary agency, and he was eventually provoked into aiming a sentence at me starting with 'With all due respect' - a phrase all English people know means 'I am about to be rude to you' and Jonathan didn't fail us, advising me that perhaps I might better spend my time learning how to write well instead of dancing around wasting it playing at book marketing.

I am very glad, in hindsight, that I noted the English preamble to discourtesy rather than trying to address the assumption behind it. I'd have come across as an angry and defensive person and I most certainly am neither of those (at least when it comes to writing and publishing my books!). I'm perfectly happy that traditional publishing should continue to strive to exist, as I am that they have clearly decided the things that interest me and how I tell my stories are not for them. Given that, the swipe rather back-fired. Mind, I don't think I'll be signed up by Curtis Brown any time soon...

Arrow's Selina Walker took perhaps a more benign view of the changing face of publishing and the opening up of the market to wider choice and it was clear that publishers and agents are no longer quite as aligned as they once were. Jonathan's assertion that agents were on the side of the author while publishers were in it for themselves drew a polite, measured but I felt slightly pained response.

This was the stuff though - I would describe the panel as lively and it must have been highly entertaining for the audience, which is what you're after really, isn't it?

But I had the most fun the next day, with the panel on crime I shared with Chris Carter and Sebastian Fitzek, both of whom write about serial killers, psychopaths and really, really bad people. I noted to the audience that I felt like something of a fraud - my bad guys are just bad, but they're pussies compared to Chris and Sebastian's bad guys. My bad guys steal ice creams from small kids, stuff like that. They won't rape you while they're sucking out your brains with a straw. Truth be told, my good guys are more of a worry...

We talked about research - meeting IRA members, serial killers and forensic surgeons; about inhabiting the grey area between good and evil; about creating empathy for horrible characters and how you handle putting yourself in the head of a killer. I did a lot of book plugging, for which I am truly contrite.

Both Chris and Sebastian are very nice guys who have some worrying stuff going on in their heads, but they're engaging and genial talkers who conjured a great deal of laughter from the audience. We wrapped up on the hour and it was clear both authors and audience would gladly have stayed another hour and more bouncing all these questions, ideas and experiences around.

We signed books afterwards and some people turned up to have me sign my books which is lucky because that doesn't usually happen and I was dreading getting sandwiched between two international best-sellers with my usual queue of three (mind you, they put me next to 'House of Cards' author Michael Dobbs the day before. As usual, a line disappearing into the horizon next to the yawning space left in front of me after I'd signed a few books. Le sigh.)

As usual, the LitFest team were glorious, wonderful, patient and kind. If there was a single hitch or hiccup, I certainly didn't spot it. Tens of thousands of people, 160 authors, hundreds of sessions, events, happenings, talks and signings. And it was all as seamless as a seamless thing.

So here we are. Facing a world without the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature - at least for another year. What AM I going to do?

Not write another book for a while, I can tell you...

Book Post - So Wearily To Market

When I finished writing Space in 2002 or thereabouts, the idea of writing a synopsis after having dashed down 100,000 words of prose was really rather horrifying. I staggered duly to my feet and got on with it in the end, but I wasn't happy. Finishing a book should really just be about that. Finishing.

Now, of course, when you finish writing a book it's just the start rather than the finish. Probably as much effort again has to go into finding readers. And they are becoming increasingly adept at not being found, I can tell you.

So rather than putting my feet up and eating my way through the Hotel Chocolat website, I'm sending Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy out to reviewers - a list of a tad over a hundred book blogs being my secret weapon. Several of the blogs that were extant at the start of this year as I sent out review copies of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are now dead blogs, the bloggers having presumably succumbed under the dead weight of thousands of needy authors sending in their hopes and dreams in the form of ePub and Kindle files. It's worse now, the publishing houses have joined in and now court book bloggers like love-lorn lorikeets.

I'll be dreaming up other schemes, too, of course, including readings and shouting abusive gibberish at any audience that'll have me - I am, once again, popping up at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature as well as booked to appear on radio show Talking Of Books.

As I've said before - it's lucky I'm not shy. I have author pals who are altogether less outgoing and they find this stuff painful to point where it provokes much existential angst. I enjoy it very much. So if you're in a book club, do feel free to hit me up!

The Book Slog Blog

Image by vial3tt3r via FlickrActually writing a book is easy as pie. You just take 75-100,000 words or so and put them down on paper. The order in which you place them can be a bit of a bugger, but the principle’s simple enough.

Most writers will knock up an average of around 1,000 words a day, so that’s a good three months to crack off a novel. Allow for procrastination, cunctation and a few other ations and you could easily (and advisedly) take 5-6 months to finish the first draft of a manuscript. You can work faster than that – I wrote the original MS of Olives in just over four weeks, but I’ve been seven years in editing it. Some people will write their book in four weeks and create a work of tear-jerking genius without having invested a second more. These are not, you understand, people to whom I talk.

Having finished the MS, in my case usually with the reward of a snappy Martini or two, you can breathe a sigh of relief before getting down to the real work. Because actually spending months writing a book is nothing. The real work starts when you’ve finished the damn thing.

First off is the editing. Dashing down 80,000 words of story is all great fun, but then you have to review it and make sure you’ve spelled everything right, avoided awful continuity errors, remained consistent to your characters, maintained your storyline and honed your writing so that the dialogue works, the action fizzles and the moments when two people go ‘ping’ actually go ‘ping’ and not ‘splot’. There have been whole books – a great deal of them, in fact – written on this subject. Writer’s forums constantly buzz to questions of POV (point of view), the passive and active voice (oh, puhlease!), characterisation, plot elements and all that sort of stuff. And we haven’t even started talking about sentence structure, ‘showing rather than telling’ and the myriad elements that stalk the furrowed brow of the harried writer editing his/her manuscript (or MS, if you want to use ‘the lingo’).

Now, don’t forget, you’ve just written tens of thousands of words – editing them all over again is a real trial. By the time you finish, you sort of hate those words. The bastards have no right to be so demanding, so imperfect. But finally you’re done. The MS looks good to go. (It rarely is at this point, but let’s not pee in the firework box too early, hey?)

Now you have to write a synopsis of your book. This is a one or (at most) two-page summation of what your book’s about, what actually happens in the thing. Any agent or editor wants to see a synopsis to find out if the thing makes sense as a whole. So your synopsis not only has to represent the key movements of the plot, it should ideally show your ability to write as well. This is a hellish thing to ask someone who has just written a book, then edited it to shining perfection, to do.

But it must be done.

What happens to your character? Who influences the development of the storyline and who is just there for colour? Chances are, by the way, if you can cut a character out of your synopsis, you can cut him/her out of the story and are better off doing so. The synopsis is a straight story-line, a compelling narrative from a to c that validates quite why b was ever involved. Take your story down to five pages, then halve the word count, take it down to a little over two pages. And then you can start playing hardball with those cowering little words. Eliminate, and do it like a Dalek with a really bad hangover.

It’s like swimming through molasses with 10lb weights tied to your bits. It’s an awful, sorry slog of a task.

And we’re not done with you yet, matey. Now we want a ‘blurb’.

A ‘blurb’ takes your synopsis and hones it down to under 400 words or thereabouts. Here’s the blurb for Olives:

[BlurbStart]

When Paul Stokes runs out of choices, his only path is betrayal. 

The fragile peace is holding. Behind the scenes, the Israelis are competing for dwindling water resources as Jordan and Palestine face drought. Daoud Dajani has the solution to Jordan’s water problems and is bidding against the British for the privatisation of Jordan’s water network. 

When journalist Paul Stokes befriends Dajani’s sister, Aisha, British intelligence agent Gerald Lynch realises Paul offers access to Dajani - the man threatening to drain Israel’s water supply and snatch the bid from the British. Blackmailed by Lynch into spying on Dajani, his movements seemingly linked to a series of bombings, Paul is pitched into a terrifying fight for survival that will force him to betray everyone around him. Even the woman he loves.

[EndBlurb]

That’s not the only blurb for Olives, but let’s not complicate things. Note it’s not a contiguous description of events in the book – it’s a summation of the action and points of action that are intended to evoke interest in what the work’s about. (You can judge whether it works in the comments, and please be my guest!)

Now you have a ‘blurb’ you can work it into your ‘pitch’. A blurb and pitch are two different things, although they are necessarily interrelated. The blurb is the text you’d slap on the back of a book. A pitch is what you’d say to a top London literary agent if you got one minute of his/her attention. The best way to do this is crash their lunch at the Athenaeum holding a Scalectrix controller wired to a lumpy belt around your waist and screaming ‘I’ll take you bastards all with me’ before you start pitching. This might seem extreme, but don’t worry. Agents are used to authors doing this. The worrying trend emerging is agents are now doing this to editors as the world of conventional publishing slowly collapses into itself like Michael Moorcock's Biloxi Fault.

Not even the Athenaeum, it must be said, is a safe haven these days...

Anyway, now you have a book, a synopsis, a blurb and a pitch. You've also likely got RSI and a rocky relationship. Next comes the hard bit. I'll come on to that tomorrow...

Criminal Tendencies

Image via Wikipedia

Another writing post. The last blog reader is going to wander away now, but I can't help it. I'm on the home straight with new book Beirut and the next two weeks are likely either going to be writing posts or no posts at all. Sorry.

One thing that has amazed me over the course of writing Beirut is that I haven't been arrested. My Google life has been extraordinary and has mostly involved things like weapons, military assets, intelligence, police and other deeply dodgy stuff.

I can't imagine how writers did this stuff before Google - they must have spent months in the library, ordering books and poring through piles of obsessive esoterica. Actually, come to think of it, I have ordered books and stuff - some of which (I didn't realise until too late) had the potential to attract unwelcome attention down at Sharjah Post Office, too! Luckily the customs chaps there have long had me down as a harmless eccentric, so they don't look to closely at the books I bring in. I think my reputation, founded on a mixed shipment of chocolate and clothes which my mother unwisely thought would survive transportation to an area with a 50C ambient temperature and exacerbated by another shipment of educational toys meant for Sarah, was finally sealed when I tried to explain my jar of rather delicious chutney made by the fair hand of Australian novelist and pilot Helene Young. They'd really rather not know these days...

I've also depended on the expertise of a number of people as well as quite a lot of walking around that most glorious of cities in the company of various lovely colleagues or on my tod. There's nothing quite like just walking around a great city and Beirut certainly rewards the experience with an enduring intensity.

Put it all together and you have a demonstrable track record of a deeply unhealthy interest in a lot of things that go bang and otherwise kill people, an awful lot of phone calls and emails with people centering on military helicopters, missile systems and toxic substances and a nasty obsession with the military and intelligence services of a number of countries. As well as mooching around certain cities day and night taking photographs and generally just acting strangely.

Nobody's batted an eyelid. I'm not sure whether I'm relieved or worried...

The Unbearable Lightness Of Not Writing

English: Erik Pevernagie, painting. Representing the opposition with lightness of being (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm not writing.

I'm not editing or marketing, either. I'm not planning, plotting or playing with a new MS. I started a new book but it's come to a sort of 'meh' point and I've put it aside while I do other things. I've scribbled a few short stories and other things, but nothing really significant.

It's mildly embarrassing when you meet people who know you only as a booky person, because they invariably (and perfectly politely) ask what you're working on at the moment and 'I'm not really, I've just sort of got nothing right now that's floating my boat' sounds wrong.

But it's God's honest, guv. I see no reason to force things and the new project is nowhere near qualifying for that excellent advice that saw me race to get A Decent Bomber done, 'Finish!'

I'm glad I'm not under contract. The agent/publisher would be nagging, reminding me an MS is due in next month and I'd be going spare about it, wracking my brains to force words onto the screen as I write in the certain knowledge that it's not really what I want to do or, indeed, what I want to write. And, by extension, that it's not really quite good enough to put my name on it and be proud of what I've done. I'd hate that.

It's not like it matters, of course. As we speak I languish in complete obscurity as a writer, so my lack of a new project is hardly going to have the NYT worrying about the future of literature.

In fact, it's something of a bonus. There's a certain sense of relief at not having characters bumbling around in my head all the time, not worrying about getting that next scene down or being niggled by a piece of dialogue. I've been doing more cooking, ambling about on the Internet and going out at weekends to rediscover bits of the Emirates. It's amazing how you get blasé about living somewhere as downright wonderful and exotic as Lalaland.

And no, I've not been posting here very much. I realised the other day that this silly little blog of mine will turn ten years old next month. That's pretty venerable. I suppose I shall have to celebrate in some way.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying the, well, lightness of not writing...

Sexy Tweets

Image via Wikipedia

How can you sex up your Tweets?

It can be hard sometimes getting what you want said into 140 characters – particularly when you bear in mind that you’re actually closer to 120 characters if you want to get retweeted and 110 characters if you’re tweeting a link to something (which is the purpose of a great many Tweets). So how can you not only get your point across but also get it across so that people actually take notice of what you're sharing?

Here, in no particular order, are ten sexy Tweet tips.

1) Think like a newspaper – you’re writing a headline, so write in the present tense and in the language of urgency. Take out any waffle and stick to hard fact. Don’t do ‘man assaulted his dog by biting it’ but ‘man bites dog’. Tweets are great for practising headline writing!

2) Where possible and appropriate, use action words rather than passive ones, smashes, punches, kicks, breaks, shoots and that sort of thing.

3) Cut out prepositions (at, by, with, from, etc). You can always write around needing them, usually by re-forming the sentence in a more active way. ‘The Government has signed a big deal with the traffic authority’ becomes ‘Government signs traffic deal’. And so on.

4) Cut out articles, too – the definite (the) and indefinite (a, an) alike. ‘Durban to hold an ice skating championship for the first time’ becomes ‘Durban ice skating championship first’.

5) Adjectives are evil. Even the most awful sub knows that every time you use one in a headline, God kills a kitten. And it’s the same for Tweets, so avoid describing things (broad market, blue pony, ephemeral memory – the first word in each of these describes the thing it refers to and is unnecessary in the punchy language of headline or Tweet writing) unless it’s crucial to the meaning of your Tweet (which is, incidentally, highly unlikely).

6) Think about your followers and what they’re likely to be interested in. If you’re tweeting a link, you’ve already thought ‘the guys’ll be interested in this one’ but prioritise – what’s the over-riding biggie in there? Lead with that, the most colourful and impactful aspect of the link, not with an attempt to provide a deep analysis. The link will give the facts, you’re just looking to make sure people get why the link matters. A little extrapolation can help here – what will this move, fact or conclusion mean down the line, what will it lead to? You can do this by using a question, for instance, ‘MS Signs Bing Twitter Deal: Real Time Search a Reality?’

7) Do you need a hashtag? Hashtags make subjects easy to search and flags your Tweets as part of a conversation around a topic. I’m sure there’s a statistic somewhere for this, but the vast majority of Hashtags never get used beyond a few Tweets. If you do decide you need a hashtag, make it as short and yet unique as possible. One hashtag should do it - if you’re thinking of flagging a Tweet with two or more hashtags, take the hard road and drop the extras.

8) I’ve been interested by the evolution in the way we use emoticons and after a discussion around this with the team at Spot On Towers, I’ve started using emoticons as punctuation, rather than in addition to punctuation. It does rather go against the literary grain, but it cuts down on characters and ‘clutter’ too.

9) Use a link shortener. TweetDeck and other Twitter clients have automatic link shorteners, but my favourite is TweetBurner’s Twurls because it gives you statistics regarding how many people clicked through your link, when and so on. This means you can tell which Tweets are, in fact, most relevant to your followers – and if you’re Tweeting for work, gives you metrics.

10) Last but by no means least, apply the DIGAFF filter. (Do I Give A Flying) If you care about something you’re sharing, other people will. If you’re just passing something on that might be of interest to someone, it’s probably not worth passing it on. Also take a second to make sure that you’re not the 200th person to share that same fact! If you’re consistently sharing punchy, witty and relevant Tweets that link to cool stuff I, for one, want to follow you!

Book Post: Submissions. Oh joy.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Simple Irish Farmer, which I am assured is the thriller working title from hell by people who know better than I, is going out for a round of submissions to UK literary agents. Here's a handy Q&A for anyone interested in the whole area of novels and the process of submission. And no, there's no BDSM stuff going on here beyond perhaps a slight queasy feeling of impotence and pain the whole process engenders.

Why are you submitting your novel to agents?
Most publishers worth talking to won't talk to an un-agented author. If you want to get your work in front of an editor, the person who decides to take a book on within a publishing company, you'll need an agent. Agents are also useful further down the line for things like contract negotiations and a number of other things that make them worth the 15% of your income they'll charge.

No, I mean why are YOU submitting your novel to agents?
Mr Self Publishing, you mean? I've always sent my novels to agents. About 100 rejected Space, about another 80 rejected Olives - A Violent Romance, another 80 or so rejected Beirut - An Explosive Thriller before one signed me up and then 14 publishers rejected that book. Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy was sent out to a small number of agents, 3 or 4, including my own. When HE rejected it, my own blasted agent, I terminated our agreement. And when the others did, I self published it. Believe me, I am very, very good indeed at rejection. I can, we can safely say, handle it.

Why only a few agents for Shemlan?
I was weary then, (and I'm even more weary now) and was pretty much going through the motions before self-publishing the book. Shemlan didn't even get the promotion it deserved because of that weariness, which is a shame because it's probably (IMHO) my best work so far. I reckon if you pick up 10-25 rejections, you're self publishing or sticking it in a desk drawer.

Submitting to three million agents won't change your chances. Don't ever waste your hopes and talents on a desk drawer. Self publish. Hell, what have you to lose? Amazon, Smashwords et al don't cost a penny and if you earn $10 from that book, it's a) $10 more than you had b) been enjoyed by several more people than it took to write.

So you want a publisher?
Yes. I need a UK publisher to get some scale and traction into that market and beyond. With Olives and Beirut selling out their print runs in the UAE, a very small market, and all three books getting positive reviews from media reviewers as well as Amazon and Goodreads I still haven't managed to drive any scale. I need help to do that.

What if they all reject you?
Self publish. I've said this all along at workshops and things: don't do what I did and collect 100 rejections. Submit to a number of agents who are open to submissions and willing to look at work in your genre. If they all pass on it, self-publish rather than get caught in iterative Sisyphean loops of polishing the work and resubmitting it. In my experience the issue isn't necessarily quality.

What is it, then?
Serendipity. Is your book the kind of thing they're looking for? Does it press the right buttons? Does it deal with issues they don't think the market will buy, either for reasons of squeamishness, sensibility or ignorance? Is it in a genre that's selling, with a clear standout 'hook' that makes it a powerful book to market? All these things are commercial decisions agents take.

Being able to write well doesn't mean your book will sell well and knowing what will and won't sell is where agents pretty much stake their livelihoods. 15% of the author's 10% cut of the cover price of a book that doesn't sell is hardly going to send young Clarence and Philomena to Repton, is it?

What do you send them?
A query letter that clearly states who you are and what your book's about, a synopsis of the book as a one page document, a bio of yourself and 10 or 50 pages of the manuscript, depending on their guidelines.

It's very, very important to visit each agency's website, make sure they're working in your genre and that you identify an agent who would be interested in you. Make your submission to that agent, ideally explaining why you think you might be interesting to them. And then you sit back and wait, for anything up to a couple of months.

Do they ever give you helpful feedback?
Almost never. Getting feedback from an agent is quite a deal. An average UK agent gets about 40 submissions a day, an American one anything up to 200. Nobody in their right minds is going to give 40 free writing a book sessions every day. And if they did, they wouldn't be in their right minds for long.

A high percentage of those submissions will be way off the mark, so the winnowing is quite harsh. Very few will have enough spark to merit a closer look and a read of that 50 pages. And very, very few will get through to the next stage, which is a request for a 'full read'.

I've heard that term before. What's a 'full' vs a 'partial'?
There are three stages, really. A query, which is a letter saying I've written a book in this genre, it's about this and that, do you want to take a look? If they say yes to that, they'll ask for a partial read. Many will take the partial as part of the original submission package and, if the book's in a genre and has a hook they can see is commercial, they'll dip into the writing sample you've sent.

A 'partial' as I noted above is a sample of 10 or perhaps 50 pages which demonstrates to the agent that a) you can string two words together b) your plot and characters are developing as per the synopsis. Now, if they think your book's in a commercially viable genre (and they don't already have full complement of writers already working in that genre/area) and stands out within that genre AND you can write and your book seems to be delivering the goods, they'll ask for a 'full read' - that's the whole manuscript.

At this stage you'd better really have finished the manuscript and not be winging it in case someone says yes to it. You send 'em the full MS and they will read or, typically, pay a reader to look at it. Very few get through to the 'full' stage precisely because at this stage an agent is putting a lot of time or a little bit of skin in the game.

So you're almost there!
Yes, you are. But not for sure. I've known full reads come to nothing (and yes, it sucks), so don't go getting all puppyish about it. If the agent thinks the whole thing smells of roses, they'll sign you and go on to represent your books to the publishers they deal with. In an ideal world, loads of publishers will fight to get their hands on your brilliance and the agent will conduct an auction, getting your book into the hands of the highest bidding publisher.

Sounds exciting!
It doesn't happen so much these days, although it does still happen. Large advances are not so much a part of the publishing landscape. Agents like advances, because they pay for Tuscan holidays in nice, satisfying single transactions. Authors have to earn back their advances, so it's a bit like having a mortgage.

Can you play one agent off against another?
No! If you get an offer of representation, take it. Don't go playing silly B's at this stage, just take it. If you have two offers, take the agent you think you can work with - who will do the best job for you and with whom you could bear working. Sign and then sit back and let them get on with selling your book.

If agents aren't buying the kinds of book you're writing, why not write what they do buy?
I'm not really very interested in writing to order. I write what I do because the situations, locations and characters interest me. As a life-long voracious reader, I like the idea of different, intelligent thrillers. And if nobody's buying Middle East thrillers, or editors don't like books about people with cancer or retired IRA bombers, that's my tough luck. That's what interests me - and in my experience so far - has interested readers. I can't write Scottish romances. Not only would it bore me to death, I'd probably be really bad at it.

So what happens next?
You sits back and you waits to hear from 'em. You NEVER ever call 'em up. Just leave it with them. Welcome to your first taste of the passivity of the book industry...