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!

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")

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")

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")

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")

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 "achives")

Quarantine Project Day 34

Had to spend a lot of time recently going through the copy edits on my forthcoming book The Silent Land.  It's one of the characteristics of professional novel writing that while you're in the middle of writing a new novel, you are called on to deal with edits or check proofs of work you are emotionally done with.  It's not easy to devote the proper focus to these sessions because you are - well, I mean that I am - impatient to be getting on with the next project.

Copy editing is an enormously focussed skill and copy editors are the great unsung contributors to a novel.  Quite apart from the grammatical and punctuation errors (and even though I think I'm a stickler for all that stuff my work is littered with tiny typos or errors or inconsistencies) they bring an astonishing eye and an almost legal sensibility into play; one that can highlight anachronisms, non sequiturs, contradictions and hidden absurdities you would swear were all inserted by a dark fairy after you'd turned your back on the manuscript.  (Yes, you can occasionally get enraged by obtuse copy editors, but that's not so common.)  Anyway I've just had the superb services of Lisa Rogers on The Silent Land and all praise to her.

I know I couldn't manage without editors and copy-editors, and my work has always been improved by their inputs.

Anyway, with all that going on I still managed to turn out a fair amount of material on the new novel - title still a secret - in which, no doubt, a week has six days, the snow falls in July and the cock crows at noon.  You can't always shout: I meant that to be there!

1493 words.

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

Got my mojo back today, as they say in some parts, and broke the 2K happy line.  I have only a vague idea what a mojo is.  It's certainly American, or African-American, and probably voodoo, but I'm glad I got it after the trials of the previous day, and I'd quite like to hang on to it. 

'Mr Joyce, thit is an Amiricinsm,' as my English teacher used to say, 'and in my class an Amiricinism is an affectation up with which I shall not put.'  I went to a large comprehensive school and this drip had been to Cambridge or some place where they used to put water on their combs, and he took me to task in my essays for using transgressive words like Okay and monkey wrench and parking lot.

Even today I have to suggest to students to break free of the spiritually dead conformist bureaucratic English prose that would get you high marks at school or college but which suffocate literature.  Thankfully the informal and exuberant constructions of American literature showed the way even back then, when I was probably trying to import language from American super-hero comics into my essays.

So I looked at why yesterday's work was so stiff and I could see it was choked with formality.  Once I'd spotted that it was... mojo rising.

Not only that but from sweet informality my title came to me.  What is it?  Sorry, can't tell you.  But I'll tell you this: 2083 words today.

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

Fighting it out today, it was, and what came was not good quality.  It's the kind of stuff that has to be either seriously re-worked later or discarded.  But it has to stay in place as it is right now because it is the bridge to tomorrow's work, which I hope will be better.

I'm not sure if it was Tchaikovsky - if not, some classical great - who said that his overtures were bits of inspirational work bolted together by a lot of dull but necessary engineering.  What a generous remark.  It helps enormously to understand how the creative arts work.  You hope that God or Nature sends you a line or two of pure inspiration and then you roll up your sleeves for the rest of it.

Only a late rush gave me a decent word-count.  Were it not for this blog I wouldn't have got past 500 words, but I would have blushed to report that.  I seemed to spend most of the day making coffee and fumbling about with my guitar; and then feeling sheepish for having spent the day drinking coffee and playing only the easy chords.  So, even if no-one is reading this, the illusion that they are is motivating me to persist.

Sleeves-rolled, sooty-faced engineering has bolted together an industrial 1764 words.

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

Quarantine Project Day 31

A teaching day today, so got very little writing done.  But because I'd been mouthing off yesterday about rhythm in prose I decided to spend a half-hour-or-so window writing in long-hand.  I mean on paper.  I mean with a pen.  Yes!  Scratching glyphs on a piece of tree, compressed, pulped and bleached!  What a shock to recall how it feels!  Like suddenly remembering you know how to speak Latin or Greek.  Or that you'd learned marquetry in a passed life.

 Guess I just wanted to see if it affected the rhythm of my writing and of course it does.  There is such an intimacy in writing with a... well, not a feathered quill, but an implement that whispers to the paper in place of the usual keyboard rattling.  But the danger is, like a visit to the fairy realm, time passes differently.  The intimate whispering can easily persuade you that those extra adjectives and adverbs have their place after all.  And of course they do, under another star, but we all know what happens when you find your way back from the fairy realm: time has rushed by and everyone else has grown old.

As for the teaching of writing, I was in the middle of giving my normal feedback - not harsh, but as clear and balanced and as helpful as I could make it - and I saw that the author of the manuscript under examination, a lovely young woman, was in tears at my comments.  Oh God, that's not the idea of teaching.  Sometimes I want to say: don't listen to me, just write and then write more, and more again.

Hand-crafted, but perhaps of higher count in another realm: 564 words

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

Someone asked me what music I listened to while I'm writing.  I must have had my jaw open too long by way of response, but the question did astonish me.  I can't listen to any music while I'm writing.

Firstly the idea of any lyrics yodelling in the background would probably make me want to break something; but I can't deal with instrumentation either.  On casual enquiry I find that quite a few writers do play background music while they are working.

They must be wired differently is all I can say.

I have this notion - foolish mayhaps - that prose writing is a rhythmic and temporal art.  That is to say, whatever the style or the content or the genre, the idea is to seduce the reader with engaging rhythms, like a poet but not so much.  The basic English language is spoken in the only slightly varied iambic pentameter of one unstressed followed by one stressed beat.  So when old Billy Shakespeare says, in strict iambic pentameter:

            Now all the youth of England are on fire

he is only simulating the natural rhythm of the English language, but formally.

So, writing is also about sustaining, varying and operating a very strict control of the cumulative rhythms of the language.  Don't matter how informal you make it.  And if you have music playing behind you, isn't that going to govern and manipulate the beat?  Or at the very least influence it when you are in the semi-trance state of writing.

My story.  My book.  My rhythms. I don't care if it's Bach; I want some bloody quiet around here. 

Written today without the unconscious assist of music: 1916 words

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

Something mildly alarming does happen when I stop writing.  I get odd, dislocating moments of random character rush.  At unpredictable times I'm likely to become an ebullient Greek or a bitter Mancunian or a parsimonious Yorkshireman in a short, semi-comic flight of improvised ranting.  Black slope? Call that a black slope?  Why when I were a lad we'd slide down slag heaps steeper than that etc. I don't know where it comes from but it's an affliction that tends to swell in direct relationship to the number of days taken off from the word-mines.  It annoys the hell out of the savages, which is a positive, but it does take even me by surprise occasionally.

Everyone, then, is sort of relieved when I get back to work and this multiple-personality-disorder begins to subside.

Though the break did have me rethinking one or two things about the work-in-progress.  I was half way down an icy mogul-mangled black run in Les Arcs when I decided to drop a particular plot point (a pregnancy, since you ask, which was rather too similar to a situation I used in the soon-to-be published The Silent Land.)  It was a bit of a sudden body swerve.  (In the plot, not the skiing.)  Anyway I'm not going to tinker with earlier pages.  I intend to press on and discard all that now redundant stuff in Draft 2. 

Look, don't think for one second I'm going to discard the word-count for those previous pages. Oh no.  You don't get away with that, dear reader.

And as for the word-count, today's waxed and edged skis carve out a trim 1969.  Hey!  Moon landings!  Erm.

(For previous entries click on Archives.)