Lately

Other People's Chutney

2011-12-02T13:51:24Z

That's a really interesting phenomenon: people who don't just want to poke their noses into other people's business (since we all do that) but who then presume to tell other people at length how they would do that business better. For various foolhardy and inexcusable reasons I recently agreed to be Acting Chairperson of the British Fantasy Society, you know, just for 12 weeks while we sorted out e things that had gone wrong with the Society of late. One of the issues was a stereotypical poisoned chalice sort of job - sorting out the annual Awards. Plenty of people inside the Society had plenty to say about how we should do things, as is right and proper. But what astonished me was the contribution to the debates by a few pompous oddballs who were not even members of our small society but who saw it as their duty to dispense, online, lengthy instructions about how we should order things.

This sort of behaviour always intrigues me. I know a nice elderly lady who runs an annual Women's Institute pickle-and-chutney-bottling award at a local agricultural show, so I asked her if the same thing happened in her equally small world. 'Oh, yes,' she said. 'There's always someone who won't pay the £3 membership fee but who will spend hours telling you why your rules specify the wrong size chutney jar.' I had to ask, 'So what do you do about them?' 'Well,' she said, 'they're just people who think they're important, aren't they? So you pretend that they are, but you take no notice.'
God I love that. Take no notice. I wish I could take no notice. My problem is that when these types thrust their noses in my blood pressure shoots up and I'm not happy until I've told them where they can go. Surely a lack of maturity on my part. But I'm 57 for God's sake, Heinz varieties, so when is this maturity going to come?

Part of the trouble is the facility and venue for these disproportionately opinionated folk offered up by the internet. Before the net these energy-vampires would have been confined to skulking in the Flower Show tent or mournfully scrutinising the Dog Agility Display; all before securing the full attention of the Village Idiot on whom they would lavish their portentous advice. Now they have an audience of indeterminate number and their self-importance can be puffed up to potentially infinite size.

Anyway my tenure is almost over, my blood pressure is coming back to normal and I hope I can return to my quiet writing life again, where the most stressful thing that happens is when the printer runs out of paper. The truth is I haven't done a lot while I took this on, apart from growling. But I've had some great support. Membership of the BFS was just over 300 when I took over and it is currently over 400, so we can't have done all bad. However I'll be quite happy to step down. I'm not cut out to be politic (which is a fancy word for being nice about people you don't much like.)

Meanwhile there have been promising noises from the film world. Focus Features attached Oscar-winning director James Marsh to direct The Silent Land. I can tell you I'm very happy with that. You never know if a film project will find its way into production, but if this one does then it will have a very fine director.

Secondly, my next book Some Kind Of Fairy Tale, which is scheduled for release this coming summer has also sold to Hollywood. Paul Lister, producer of The Men Who Stare At Goats has optioned the book and I had some fascinating conversations with Paul over the summer about how the book might be rendered as a movie.

Thirdly filming is complete on a lo-budget production of one of my short stories Black Dust. This supernatural story of mining people has been directed by James Lawes and was filmed over a few of week-ends in November.

I did script Do The Creepy Thing but I don't what's happening with it because funding was coming from the Regional Film Boards that have now been collapsed into an entity called Creative England. Future prospects are in the Dunno category. As for the French production of Dreamside, well the phone never stops not ringing about that.

On the subject of French I continue to collaborate on writing lyrics with Emilie Simon, whose new album is called Franky Knight. This is Emilie's 5th studio album and it is to be to be released on December 27th. The title is a direct reference to Emilie's former fiance, François Chevallier, who passed away in September 2009 after catching the H1N1 (swine flu) while travelling abroad. The album is delicate and powerful at the same time, and resolved. I think it's her best yet. You can sample a track here http://www.emiliesimonmusic.com/ Many tracks also serve as the soundtrack for the forthcoming film La Délicatesse, featuring Audrey Tautou who was the star of French movie-hit Amelie.

Aside from that I have made an ebook collection available with some short stories I'm not ashamed of. The collection is called Tales For A Dark Evening, and it contains the award winning novella Leningrad Nights, first published by the magnificent Crowther operation PS Publishing. In fact it was their first title. There are seven other stories in there for your Kindle at
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tales-Dark-Evening-ebook/dp/B006E2MC40/ref=sr_1_92?ie=UTF8&qid=1322830125&sr=8-92
Very good very cheap, as they say in the Arab souk.

In Search Of Heritage

2011-08-31T14:56:37Z

Just returned from some weeks in Norway, during which visit the horrific racist-assassin slaughtered dozens of young Norwegians. This in one of the world's most progressive - and least militarily aggressive - countries. Of course the killer turned out not to be a foreign terrorist as was initially suspected but a home-grown monster, a blonde-haired blue-eyed Aryan who in physical features resembles not only some millions of Norwegians but also my son and daughter, too. My kids grandfather was Norwegian. He was the sole survivor of a ship torpedoed by an E-boat in the in the English channel during the war. After that experience he settled in England.

So it was to Norway we went so that the kids could get a bit of a sense of that part of the family and ancestry, only to arrive on the day when one Norwegian disguised himself as a policeman all the better to kill his victims. The killer knew what he was doing: it was shockingly rational. Norwegian people tend to be extremely law-abiding and would respond immediately and positively to a policeman in a uniform.

All over Norway you see facilities offered on an "honesty system". Certain roads through National Parks have a voluntary toll; cabins with food supplies are available in the wilderness for anyone who wants to use them. You pay as you enter the road and you do likewise with the cabins, replacing the food before you leave. In England that system would be trashed and abused within a week or two, but in Norway it works out well. Norwegians don't honour these things because they are afraid of the law: they do it because they understand law as existing to help everyone. They understand that if the wilderness roads aren't paid for on a voluntary basis, they won't continue to exist for when they want to use them. Likewise the cabins. On a Norwegian motorway, you won't see many people breaking the speed limit unless they are foreigners. Speed limits haven't been put there to stop people having fun with their toy cars: they have been put there with safety in mind.

This system of law abiding goes back to the Vikings. Yes. Although the Vikings have been portrayed as bloodthirsty marauders (by a Church which detested their heathen Gods) they were actually a very ordered society. They were aggressive traders (exactly like the British in imperial days, backed up by military force) but they introduced the word "law" into our language. Viking leaders were chosen by the assent of the people through a kind of democracy or oligarchy. Land was shared amongst the people (and this system continued in England up until the Enclosures act robbed the people of their land and livelihoods). Early Viking pirates treated monasteries as fair game because they thought the Middle-eastern shepherd cult was an insult to Odin. But mostly they traded and bought legislation, and the signs of respect for law and order enacted by common consent are still there to see in modern Norway. You can walk anywhere you like over woods, fields, mountain and heath, and no-one can use the argument of "private land" to stop you. You can camp anywhere for a night so long as it's a hundred metres from anyone's door.

So all the more incredible that this horrific event should happen in Norway, perpetrated by a Norwegian. Believe me, amongst the people there the sense of disbelief almost outweighed the sense of grief. The gunman had targeted a summer camp of young socialist minded people because he concluded that they were anti-racist and stood in the way of his anti-Islamic agenda. We now know plenty about the gunman. He said his purpose behind this atrocity was to "execute category A and B cultural Marxists/multi-culturalist traitors." Democratic socialists are the same as Marxists? This sounds like weird and wild Tea Party rhetoric.

By his own definition he is a Christian; he'd had plastic surgery to correct his own "imperfections"; he is a Freemason; he liked gun-clubs; he had a taste for designer labels; he visited tanning salons and took steroids; and that this final act of his represents his personal bid for celebrity. He's certainly a coward. Little wonder that most Norwegians don't recognise him as one of their own, and no Viking would either. While claiming to be defending the Norwegian way of life he showed no respect for the law or the culture that his forbears so proudly constructed. His only heritage is the manifest danger of the virulent narcissism that blights our Western culture.

In Search Of Heritage

2011-08-31T14:56:37Z

2011-05-17T07:49:10Z

Blissed On White Powder
It does seem a bit perverse to publish a novel about people caught in an avalanche to then cheerfully set off on family skiing holiday. The Silent Land is set in the Pyrenees whereas we went to Tignes in the Alps but it was all a bit too close and while I was there over Easter I did keep a weather eye out for the avalanche reports. These are offered on a 1-5 basis. One is low risk of avalanches. Two is indicated as a "higher risk". Three is "considerable risk" and so on. Work it out for yourself. Anything other than One is too much like an omen. But all was well in ski-world and the cartilage in my knees just about held up to the annual implausible thrash down the Alpine slopes. When you ski this late in the season the conditions tend to be ice at the top of the glacier and slush at the bottom and anything and everything in between. But while I was on the chair lifts or the telecabins I did do some thinking about the ridiculousness of this activity.
"You. You. You don' be sacred." This was about the only thing my very first ski instructor said to me that I could remotely understand. I leanred to ski in communist Yugoslavia - don't ask why, it's a story that would take longer to tell than it took me to ski down my first piste - at a grim barrack of a Slovenian resort called Kranska Gorja. My equally grim-faced instructor (recommended to me as "English speaking" though I speak more Mandarin Chinese than he spoke English) did his best with me while barely able to conceal his disgust at my incompetence.
I mean, why would you be scared? Oh yes, here's a good idea, what we call in England a wizard wheeze: get yourself on a steep mountain slope on barely credible conditions of polished sheet ice. Done that? Good, now clamp two long thin slippery planks of super-smoothed fibreglass to your feet and point them down the hill. Which demented psychotic first thought that one up? Yes, some prehistoric aquavit-crazed Scandinavian, I know, I know; and he used antlers hacked off a (hopefully dead) reindeer instead of fibreglass technology in an extreme blend of chutzpah and stupidity that has long since passed out of vogue. It's unthinkable. Unless you've got someone yelling in your ear, "No, trust me, it will work, honestly, all you have to do is fall on your prat a dozen times then you'll be fine." Who was that deranged first downhill skier? I would never want to meet him.
"Don't be scared. Go!" Hell, I remember thinking, I'm paying for this minimalist instruction. I asked if he could be a bit more technical than "go". He wrinkled his communist brow and looked pained and tired. "Look look look," he sighed, lifting one ski a few inches in the air. "I put my wite on my another ski and now my wite on my another ski." For some reason I pretended I understood. Oh really? Is that all there is to it? If it's that easy why didn't you say so you old apparatchik-on-sticks buzzard!
Fact is I was learning on conditions of sheet ice. I thought it was normal. That whole week I didn't once experience the delight of turning on soft snow. I learned by a process of a brutal carving technique, trying to get the ski blades to make purchase on the dread ice mirror underfoot. It seems astonishing that I ever went back for more. But adrenaline is addictive and all skiing is the process of trying to recapture the edge: the condition of skiing just beyond the threshold of your competence. One time I was in the Spanish Pyrenees when a broiling mist came down late in the afternoon. There's no waiting it out: you have to find your way home. Our guide was adamant that he knew the trick, but he couldn't remember the English word to explain it to us; it was on the tip of his tongue; what was it? We waited as he struggled to remember the word for this vital tip for skiing completely blind over tricky terrain. That's it, he shouted in delight at last, use intuition.
I've been skiing regularly - if not intuitively - for twenty five years now and there is nothing quite like it. Every day the conditions change. A black slope on soft new snow can be easy, and a blue slope on sheet ice can be a bitch. Either way you just spend a few hours disappearing into yourself, blissed out on white powder; and I'm not talking about Cocaine.
I'm an experienced winter sportsman and I like to pretend I understand the mountain. I've been skiing in the Alps & the Pyrenees, the American Rockies & the Rila Mountains of Bulgaria, the Lefka Ori of Crete & the Tatra mountains of communist period Poland. They are all the same, in that you can't ever really know the mountain. We've Disneyfied the sport and we've made it as safe as possible, preparing and grooming trails and populating the slopes with brightly coloured designer ski suits, but it's still fundamentally hostile terrain.
There are many ways of seeing the world and on a pair of skis is just one of them. If there is snow and a slope and an opportunity I take it. One time I went skiing in the White Mountains of Crete. There were no ski-lifts nor any prepared trails. You swung your skis on your shoulder and you hiked up the crags. Three hours away from the nearest village one member of the party sustained a broken leg. Great I thought: I'm in the company of Greeks who, wonderful individually, as a unit can't organise the serving of a dish of olives without profound weeping and the smashing of crockery. But I was wrong, because a radio was produced and a helicopter was summoned with mysterious and Olympian ease.
By some unfathomable process of election or selection I was the person chosen to ski down to a piece of flattish terrain in order to guide the helicopter to earth. (Both my Greek and my memory are a bit rusty but it actually cropped up in the Greeks' deliberations - about who should go - that I was a foot taller than the rest of the party). Anyway the co-pilot was frantically signalling me with thumbs up signs to confirm if the ground was safe for landing. Now I can't honestly say I've got my health and safety certificate in helicopter landing, and like you I've seen too many Hollywood helicopter disaster scenes, but what the hell, sometimes you just have to manfully shrug and respond with the ol' upturned thumbs. Eventually I did get the chopper down safely. Sort of. Well, what did they expect?
But in the beauty of it all there is sadness. Snow is after all a symbol of death itself. In Austria one time I saw a photo of a boy from Finland who had died in an avalanche. The spring thaw had uncovered him some months later and there was his tender body preserved by the cold. His hand was under his head, as if he was sleeping peacefully on a pillow of white linen. He was just doing what boys love to do, what many of us love to do: plunging down a slope in a moment of exhilaration, experiencing the closest human beings can get to flying. The mountain flexed a white wing and took him; but as he lay there I liked to think that he was still dreaming, dreaming of skiing, and that he would remain in that moment in a kind of infinite ecstasy.
After all these years I'm still no good at skiing. Just plain no good. Luckily I don't go on the slopes to compare myself to other people. I don't need to. I've got a twelve year old kid who can ski the pants off me. This year he was skiing the off-off-off-piste bits of snow between the precipitous crags and for the first time I didn't go with him. I wasn't up to it. But it's a wonderful and proper thing to see your children outstrip you.
So I don't need telling I'm not a great skier. But some days, when everything rhymes, and the powder is perfect and you look back up the mountain and you see the tracks you've left like some miraculous script on an otherwise blank parchment you know you've been there. Where? Just there. You don't always have to be on your knees to pray to God or Nature.
That crusty stone-faced first-time ski teacher had one other precious tip up his sleeve which has always stood me in good stead. It's a piece of advice I still use to this day, and it always works. After a week of slipping and slithering and scratching and swan-diving on the Kranska Gorja shaved ice he took me up to the top of my first black slope. It was the last day. He made a slight bow and with a large and leathery hand he gestured down the terrifying and vertiginous slope, as if he was giving it to me, as if everything now belonged to the future, as if all of life lay ahead of me in the form of the plunging and precipitous trail before me. "Here ends the ski school," he said as if it had all been one long sermon. "Now ski as good as you can."

Meanwhile here are some great reviews of The Silent Land:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/graham-joyces-silent-land-brave-and-heartbreaking-novel/2011/03/14/AFARae3C_story.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/books/review/book-review-the-silent-land-by-graham-joyce.html

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2014893861_br01scifi.html

Graham Joyce

Creating and Dreaming

2011-03-17T19:50:27Z

I'm going to be at New York's Rubin Museum of Art on March 23^rd, where I'll be discussing dreams and creativity with Kelly Bulkeley. I can't begin to describe how much I'm looking forward to this. Dr Bulkeley may very well be one of the most accomplished and knowledgeable explorers of the phenomenon of dreaming on the planet. A former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, he has written and edited several books on dream research, approaching the subject from religious, psychological and even political perspectives. This is one talk in a series on the subject of dreams hosted by the Rubin Museum. The format of the evening is a free-flowing discussion rather than one person interviewing the other, and I can think of lots of questions I want to ask Kelly.

The only thing that bothers me is that if he's the psychologist in this discussion, it does sort of cast me as the twitching fellow in the straitjacket.

Anyway, like everyone I have been conscious of dreaming since infancy, but probably the moment when I was shocked into wanting to explore the value of dreaming was when I saw this.

http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/LEM/LE082~Promenade-Posters.jpg

That image disturbed me then and it disturbs me now. My reaction to it has always been ambivalent, because it triggers both the intense pleasure of dreaming but also the anxiety associated with just existing on the dreamside. There is a fractured quality to the painting, a sense that something in the lurid pulsing colour is either wrong or imminent; defying the delirious joy and the erotic impulse of the painting is a sense of ontological dread. Despite this, after seeing that Chagall painting I went to bed every night hoping for dreams: waking excited if I had dreamed, and disappointed if the night had produced none that I could remember. In that sense my life became amphibious and a duality came into the world.

Dreams are everywhere in my books, even if I've sometimes had to find ways other than falling asleep for my characters to access them.

Speaking of which, The Silent Land is released in the US this month. While it has attracted some of the best reviews of my dappled career some reviewers' or bloggers' comments have left me confounded. In particular there are those who claim to have "worked out what is going by page 50" when I thought I'd alluded to what is going on in a title drawn from a famous poem; hinted to what is going on in the first paragraph; and then made it very clear what is going on by page 30, just in case anyone thought it was supposed to be one of those books where you don't know what is going on. As a writer you are responsible for every word you write, but you can never predict the diversity of response from readers. One very strong review also loved the book but hated the ending, complaining that it doesn't reflect the existential emptiness of life. Fair enough, but it did make me protest that I'm not an existentially empty kind of bloke.

I'm just not. Life is full of meaning, even if that meaning is constructed as we go, improvised, tacked up, assembled on the hoof, torn down again and replaced as we find new materials with which to build. The possibility to learn something from any situation is always available even if we're often too stupid to see it; and the prospect of constructing meaning from life is always available even in the horrible inevitability and absurdity of death.

Just as it's possible to construct meaning, and messages, and patterns that might inform the journey of life from the interpretation of dreams.

I hope you've read The Silent Land, because I've written another one since that book, and I wouldn't want you falling behind. Imagine that! I mean what if these books are busy constructing a coherent dream oeuvre and one of them contained a key to all the rest? Had you thought of that? No, you hadn't. Neither had I until now.

Anyway the new book is called Some Kind Of Fairy Tale. Simon Spanton, my editor at Gollancz, describes it as Angela Carter meets Rob Holdstock meets Kate Bush. I'll take that triangulation in a heartbeat. When I've worked out what the book is about, I'll report back.

Other news. Film progress on The Silent Land: Waiting. Film progress on Dreamside: Waiting. Film progress on Do The Creepy Thing: First draft of script completed. How do you I know this about DTCT? Because I did the writing. It's now gone off to the Producer and Director and I await notes. In screenwriting you don't get editorial comment you get notes. Even though it is exactly the same thing. The problem with notes and the development process however is that you present the material in early-form stages, whereas for me a novel is much more evolved by the time you submit the thing. With this screenwriting process I have twenty new ideas before breakfast every day about how I'd like to change things, but you have to hold on to them until you get your notes.

It's all good. Creating and dreaming. Creating is dreaming and dreaming is creating. Though my dreams at the moment are awash with Japanese children that I can't help. No book in the world is worth the dreams of one kid lost in the water.

Finally Getting The Head looked At

2010-12-02T10:57:33Z

My new book The Silent Land is now available in the UK (and in the US on March 22). Early feedback is very warm. Here's an early review:

http://scotspec.blogspot.com/2010/08/book-review-silent-land-by-graham-joyce.html

You know - yes you, because you're in the habit of visiting these updates - that comparing one of my books to another is like comparing an apple with a kiwi fruit. In another sense writers always think their most recent novel is their "best"; or if they don't think that then they should be doing their damnedest to make it so. All I can say is that The Silent Land feels like my most balanced novel to date.

Um. Now I'm going to have to say what I mean by balanced. I shouldn't even start these blog things.

I mean it's a technical issue that might be more significant to writer than to reader; technical in the sense of trusting the story and not trying to strain the language. It's also a milestone because for many years I have wanted to write something that is a ghost story and a love story at the same time. So there, that's about as good an explanation of balanced as I'm likely to give you. And that means that for me it might very well be my best book to date, but whether it is or not readers will decide.

Eric Brown in The Guardian found it moving anyway: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/06/eric-brown-science-fiction-reviews

And so did Lisa Tuttle in The Times, which I can't link cos it's a pay-site. But I can quote: "Depicted with a refreshing lack of cliché or sentimentality, this portrait of a marriage is a deeply moving celebration of the power of love."

I'll take that, thank you Lisa. Meanwhile a bit of news about the film option. I'm told that the screenplay of The Silent Land is being written by producer and writer James Schamus. He just happens to be the Chief Executive Officer at Focus Features. Nothing is ever certain in the film business but this is a reason to be cheerful, part two, since it indicates that the project is important to the studio.

There's a huge disincentive to tell anyone anything about what's happening film development. Best say nothing really. All you hear for the rest of your life is: "Any news on that film?" I sold an option on The Tooth Fairy several years ago, about the time a friend was setting off on some serious round-the-world-travelling. In the six years he was away , he almost died from dysentery in India; joined a religious cult for two years; left it; got kidnapped in Peru; was briefly jailed in Mexico; got married in LA and divorced a month later; set up a couple of businesses and swore he saw a ghost in Sardinia. The first thing he asked me after he got back was, 'Did they make that film?'

So there you are. If the CEO can't get the project the green light, who can? More news as it doesn't come in, sort of thing. Meanwhile I'm working on the screenplay for Do The Creepy Thing for a UK production company after Development Funding was found. Though who knows where British film funding is going after the government announced the closure of the British Film Council. Who knows where anything is going: this government seems determined to dismantle anything state funded or state supported, including the entire university education system. It's pretty easy to see that the cry of "the country can't afford it" is a smokescreen for the act of shifting state responsibility to private capacity. We're going backwards, very fast.

Meanwhile an Arabic publisher http://albawtaka.com/whoareweenglish.htm published my story "An Ordinary Soldier Of The Queen" in Arabic in a hard-copy anthology. It seems brave since there is an Islamic taboo against mention of the djinn. All you Arabic speakers reading this can get it and report to me on the quality of the translation. No, don't, because it was translated by no lesser a figure than Hala Salah Eldin Hussein. Arab carpet makers traditionally left a flaw in the weave, because only God can be perfect, whereas I'm sure that she had to mend all the imperfections in the original. I'm in awe of translators. It's not just a job of getting right words; it's finding the right shadows between the words.

I'm just putting the finishing touches to the novel after The Silent Land, about which I'll say more another time. It's always one of the frustrations of publishing that while one novel is being published you tend to be immersed in a completely different project. I did want to mention to any Kate Rusby fans out there that the Barnsley Nightingale gave me permission to quote some of her lyrics in this book. If you're not familiar with Kate's music - and you should be - go here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3O1I1eqnF4

If you're not British, the vowels that you hear in her singing might surprise you. It's the way many of us (uz) speak in the UK, but very rarely do you hear it sung thus. In fact at school we were often clouted round the head by schoolteachers anxious to burn into us the hot-potato-mouth version of Received Pronunciation, an action which is the aural equivalent of slapping naturally left-handed children every time they forget to use their right hand. (Where I went to school it was normal to say yourn instead of yours and ourn instead of ours: pure dialect, but the teachers regularly made you feel like that banjo-playing kid from the film Deliverance if you persisted.)

Anyway have a listen to Kate. I do swear it makes me weak at the knees to hear the word love pronounced - in song - correctly.

On another note and as part of an ongoing project I've been invited by the Rubin Museum of Art in New York to be interviewed in the spring by a neuroscientist. Various creative people from diverse walks of life engage with neuroscientists in one-on-one conversations in order to better understand the workings of our minds. (Right! I know what you're thinking! You're thinking that I'm thinking what you're thinking!) As a starting point for what will hopefully be a wide-ranging conversation, the idea is for me to talk about the sort of dreams I have experienced, how they have influenced my life and work, and a neuroscientist would tell me and the audience what is likely happening in my brain as I experience them. I can't begin to describe how stimulated I am by this idea. I will want to talk about lucid dreaming and the relationship between creativity and dreaming.

And if New York in the spring is too far away then come to Coventry on Saturday 11 December, where I'll be signing copies of The Silent Land. Or talking. Or answering your own neuro-scientific or even non-scientific questions.
Stoke Library 10.30 am
Waterstones in Broadgate 12.30pm for book signing
Central Library 2.00pm

Kalokeri

2010-07-22T09:40:11Z

My forthcoming novel The Silent Land will be published by Gollancz on October 21^st, which according to my mother is my birthday, and she should know. But the nurse recorded me as arriving three minutes after midnight on the 22^nd instead of three minutes before. 'She was wrong. I looked at the clock,' says Ma. Why she didn't fix that, I just don't know. Leaves me with the sneaking feeling I've been celebrating my birthday on the wrong date these past fifty years. No wonder I have ambiguity in my life.

Anyway the novel will also be coming out, with the same title this time, in the US in the spring of 2011.

Focus Features in Hollywood continue to develop the movie of The Silent Land, but as is usual with these things I haven't anything to report. Just like with the Dreamside movie in France, which has gone to full purchase but about which I know even less. Meanwhile I'm also working on a screenplay for Do The Creepy Thing for a UK production company, so I know everything about that but, astonishingly, have little to report except to say I'm doing the script.

I've heard that some of these things do get made. Eventually. Possibly.

Beyond all that I have almost completed the next novel, which I reported in the Quarantine Project (an 80,000 word first draft in 40 days: see the archives if you want to know about that). I'll deliver that to my publishers after summer. August is to publishing what that unfinished dinner was to the Marie Celeste. Me too. I'll be in hibernation. No, that's wrong, since the word comes from the French word hiver for winter. What I mean is, it's kalokeri, meaning summer, and translated exactly from the Greek means "good-time". And as every good Greek knows, the kaolkeri ain't for workin'.

Have a great summer!

plain peculiar

2010-06-16T08:33:56Z

Saturday 19^th June at 2.30 at Lowdham Festival I'll be in conversation with David Belbin and Anthony Cartwright. When I was writing Memoirs Of A Master Forger I had no idea that my writing-teaching colleague David Belbin was engaged at the very same time on a similarly-titled project. He was also completely unaware of my enterprise, since we never discuss work in progress. David's fine novel, ultimately published as The Pretender came out at around the same time as mine. Fortunately we both know each well enough to recognise that neither of us has the least need to hunt down the other's ideas! It was a curious co-incidence (possibly of the kind that might lead to murder in the faculty, if this were a novel). It was a bizarre and rather fascinating meme, and we will be discussing this at the festival in the company of Anthony Cartwright, author of Heartland. Come along and find out what's going on. http://www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk/

Tea And Biscuits

2010-05-19T13:09:26Z

Beyond the Quarantine

The first draft of my new novel is done. Now if this were a movie I would type THE END at the foot of the page, centre it neatly, and open a bottle of champagne. If it were a high budget movie I would knock off the neck of the champagne bottle with a gleaming sword formerly the property of a French Hussar. In reality when you type those two words at the end of the first draft, your work is just beginning. All you've done is gone out in the dead of night and dragged your stone back to the studio. Now you have to sculpt and shape and smooth it.

But it is a significant platform. I'll probably celebrate by having a mug of tea and two wheat-free ginger biscuits. We know how to live high on the hog in Leicester.

The issues are pretty huge. For one thing I got half-way through and discovered I wanted to change the geographical setting. For another I made a massive plot-swing at about the same point. Then the character I believed to be the protagonist turned out not to be. Finally (no, not at all finally, because I just can't stand to list all the challenges available) the notion that a particular character was telling this story - though not in the first person - got me in a sudden stranglehold right at the end of the first draft and I've only just got her fingers off my windpipe. We're discussing it, like reasonable people. My character and I.

Um.

It would be sensible now to put the novel aside for a while. Let it dry out. Crystallise. Detumesce. All those things. Plus I have lots of other things to do. I have a script of Do The Creepy Thing to write. Plus a new William Heaney wants attention. Plus plus plus. But what I really want to do is to rush at it with the cold chisel and the hacksaw and get the electric sander on it. Today I can see the wings, but what if I can't tomorrow?

Does anyone have the faintest idea what I'm talking about?

(For the previous blog in the Quarantine Project click on "archives")

A Bit Of Latin For Yez

2010-04-28T11:02:56Z

Quarantine Project Day 40

Well that's it for the other one, as they say. The forty day project is up, and I can report a total word-count just shy of 70,000 words.

It's not a complete first-draft because the resolution isn't there yet, and the resolution to a novel or a story is the single most important piece in the jigsaw, which is why so many "literary" novels don't have a resolution. However, the resolution, though it isn't written yet, is well-formed in my mind. There are some plot points to work out yet, but plot points are so much less important than the resolution. Plot is variable; resolution, as my Latin friends tell me, is the sine qua non.

The truth is that I would never anyway have any idea about how long or short a first draft might be; but one thing of which I am certain is that the writing of this blog has encouraged me to produce my rough draft - my first draft - in a much shorter period of time than would have happened ordinarily.

The real work will begin after the completion of this first draft. Draft 2 will be when I bring in the heavy earth-moving equipment so that I can shift scenes around, delete chapters, fill-in new ones and smooth out those major inconsistencies caused by re-routing as I went along. Subsequent drafts will then employ more sensitive equipment until the final draft will be all about sentence-by-sentence polishing.

To those of you who have stuck with this blog - I appreciate it! It has helped to know that some of you have followed it faithfully. Plus I seem to have picked up the blog habit, so I might well continue the blog, widening it to include other things, such as my hatred of the casting of a child as the new Dr Who and other rabid prejudices. But I will also report on the progress of this novel, (maybe reporting it as Quarantine Project + 1 etc).

But not for a couple of days because I'm off to Germany on book business. Auf Wiedersehen for now

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "archives")

A Dark Mystery

2010-04-27T17:53:46Z

Quarantine Project Day 39

The penultimate day of the Quarantine Project. A strange day. Four rapid bursts, each weighing in at a half-ton. I'd love to know what happened in the interstices between these quantum burn ups. The horrible thing about my own creative method is that I don't know where I go in between.

I mean I must be "somewhere".

Let's be scientific. Let's say it's a seven hour day, minimum. There's probably an initial hour messing around, raising and lowering the writing chair so that it is poised at optimum writing position, sharpening virtual pencils and all that. Then there's an hour or so for lunch. Plus two three or four tea breaks (no longer than it takes to boil the kettle since I bring the tea or coffee back to the dark cave); a couple of comfort breaks; an intense peering-wistfully-out-of-the-window-break.

Now I don't know about you, but I can't make all of that that add up to more than three hours. That leaves four hours in the working day. The above-mentioned four half-ton productivity bursts came in a high-octane rush, probably lasting no more than 15-20 minutes apiece. That, if my maths is correct, leaves between two to three hours utterly unaccounted for.

Really, no idea.

Roaming the astral plane.

In the darklight of the above mystery it gives me little comfort then to report 2234 words.

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "archives")

Carpet and curtains

2010-04-24T07:56:10Z

Quarantine Project Day 38

Someone asked me if there isn't a tension between writing the novel and blogging about it here. The answer is no. I don't have a problem in talking about the technicalities or the daily issues. You'll note that I have kept well away from content. That's because the two things are governed by different areas of the brain. Writing, and writing about writing, are not the same thing. Writing is done by the writer; writing about writing is performed by the author.

Anyway another half-day swallowed by the peripheral business of being an author as opposed to being a writer, but made very pleasant by the arrival of Liz and Charlie to take some pictures for a magazine that wants a "Where I work" feature. Actually it's no-one's business where I work. Doesn't change the books, does it? Listen y'ere, I rove the vast continents and measureless caverns of the imagination, so why would you want to see what my carpet and curtains look like?

But, anyway, vanity. Try to make me look intelligent, wise, modest, appealing, fun, devil-may-care, perspicacious and pipsicocious was the simple brief I gave to Charlie and off she went, doing exactly that. Well trying to. For about three hours. Tall order, yes, and the principal quality I managed to project was... grumpy.

But after these exciting young women had left me in my lonely cave I managed a respectable 1719 words.

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "archives")

Some Acceleration Point That Turned Out To Be

2010-04-23T10:01:45Z

Quarantine Project Day 36 and 37

Look, don't brag about how you have hit something called the acceleration point is my advice, because if you do your computer will explode, or implode, or whatever they do that means that you have to call up PC World who want seventy sobs just for saying hello plus component parts and then you call up Wayne down the road who will fix the whole thing for a tenner plus component parts.

Needed a new Graphics card, apparently. Must have been looking too hard at those pictures of Dr Who's new assistant.

After listening to Vivaldi for ten minutes you select your option and here's what you get: 'Goooooooood morning this is Pete at PC World, we're happy to help you with your computing problem today etc etc etc zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Here's what you get with Wayne: 'Huh? Yeh. Bring it round then. Bye.'

Sixty quid for all that Vivaldi Plus Pleasantry corporate crap sung in your ear. Same component part fitted, but by a geezer in a pink shirt with a provocative name badge.

Either way you can't post your blog update. It made me long for the days when surly service was the norm. I mean we still get crap service at PC World and everywhere else, but we're now paying sixty quid just for the privilege of being tricked into thinking it's not crap service. So with all that I still managed 1287 words on my laptop.

As for day 37, I had to go back down to London. My Russian publisher the deeply erudite Alexander Guzman had arrived for the Book Fair just a little late, but since he'd travelled overland by train from St Petersburg, through Warsaw and Cologne, that could be forgiven. And since the train journey from Leicester to London is just a little over an hour I could hardly not. Anyway he arrived with the interesting news that they had bought out a second edition of House Of Lost Dreams, which is somehow my lost novel, set on the Greek island of Lesbos where I lived while writing my first book. But I'm thinking: why has that one sold so well above the others??? In Russia? Answers on a post-card please. (Oh you haven't read it? Yes I have copies for sale here etc etc zzzzzzz.)

So after a few glasses of wine with Alexander, and another glass of wine later with Simon Spanton, my friend and fantastic editor at Gollancz, I got on the train, took out my laptop to do a bit more on the novel and I thought, sod it. As you do some days. People are forcing me to drink, and Day 37 is a duck's egg.

Some acceleration point, and 0 words won't knit the baby a bonnet, as my grandmother used to say. Not when you only have THREE DAYS LEFT.

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "archives")

Acceleration Point

2010-04-21T13:36:06Z

Quarantine Project Day 35

Meetings set me back for Day 35 but I still managed to find some time for writing, probably because I've hit the acceleration point in the plot. (Don't google it, I just made it up, so I'll try to define it.)

That is to say, you assemble a cast of characters and push them up a hill until their aggregate weight demands that they roll down the other side of the hill. There is a human trajectory to a series of interactions, and if you've done a reasonable job the answers to what they will or won't do start to provide themselves. That's not the same as knowing the ending. It's just that possibilities for different endings begin to thin out. If a character has behaved in a certain way throughout a novel, you as a writer cannot ask her (or persuade your readers to accept) that she is going to do something that confounds the trajectory. Your characters no longer have free will.

So I've hit that acceleration point, and the words are coming easier. Finding an effective resolution is another issue.

On a busy day I'll happily take a 1154 word-count

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "archives")

Acceleration Point

2010-04-21T09:23:58Z

Quarantine Project Day 35

So I've hit that acceleration point, and the words are coming easier. Finding an effective resolution is another issue.

On a busy day I'll happily take a 1154 word-count

(For yesterday's blog in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")