For various reasons, I’m looking for Victorian characters of note who were in London in 1871/1872, preferably ones who were doing notable things at the time. All suggestions welcomed.

This has been a long time in coming and for no better reason than I’ve busy with edits and rewrites und so weiter.

Anyway, I parted ways with my previous agent, John Jarrold, back in April time for reasons I won’t go into, and having hunted around a little while, I’m now signed up with Robert Dinsdale of the AM Heath agency. That was pushing a coupe of months back.

It’s early days, but so far I’m impressed. So far Robert is very hands-on and not afraid to ask for things to be done again, better.

Review: The Warlock’s Shadow at Lowly’s Book Blog

Review:The Black Mausoleum from the British Fantasy Society

Review: The Black Mausoleum from the Falcatta Times

If you know of any more, please let me know… A new book will be up for giving away tomorrow. Dragon Queen rewrite continues. Everything else continues to be SEKRIT and thus DULL.

Online activities are largely suspended for the duration of September. And possibly October and November and December, if work I’m chasing comes in. Currently working on The Black Mausoluem III: The Splintered God which needs to be drafted by the end of the month. Also the edits for the first two volumes of the Sodium Hydride project have come back. Also also there’s a joint project with a Gollancz SF author in the works, although that’s just bouncing ideas about right now. And then there’s some ghostwriting, about which more later.

News updates will be rare and far between for a while. See you at Fantasycon.

The Black Mausoleum came out a couple of weeks ago. Here are the opening words of what’s coming two books further down the line. This is the first draft, unedited, so excuse the typos, and it’s also a prologue so there’s a very good chance it won’t ever appear in any published version. There are many rewrites to come and for these few paragraphs, each is an opportunity to die. But hey, why not…

I don’t even have a title or this book yet. But if you read this and then read The King’s Assassin in October, and have a bit of a hang on a minute moment, then come back here and tell me about it because there is an Easter Egg.

—————————————————————————

The Soap-Maker emerged from the gloom. He beckoned at the shadows in the corner of the room and a bronze stand shaped like the limb of some terrible lizard and covered in carved scales slid across the wooden floor towards him. The air filled with a grinding sound. It stopped obediently beside him. On its top the metal began to writhe and squirm and then flowed like liquid as a silver claw rose through it with a clear glass globe nestled within its talons.

“Sometimes we guide them,” he said. “Sometimes we place obstacles before them. Sometimes their own fates guide them and we merely watch and crackle our fingers with gleeful smiles. Listen and you will learn. And then you will listen and learn again, and you will do this over and over and over, every day for the rest of your short life. When your eyes fail, then you will see the shaping I have made. These will play out without us for a time. A path shall be made, pick-pocked with signposts that cannot be missed, for the one who will come, to take him to the end that we desire. Now!” The Soap-Maker clasped his hands together. “Potions and herbs and silly tricks. All I have shown you, you could have learned from a hedge-witch. I dismiss them. We walk the true path to power, not some fancy dance of spirals with no meaning. You will understand this. Not be told, but feel it in your bones.” The words that marked the start of that path were as familiar to both of them as the dark stains on the Soap-Maker’s fingers: The first basic principle of knowledge is to understand that the animating force that brings life to all creatures differs. . .

“Above all else, I will teach you one thing. I will teach you how to hide.” The Soap-Maker snapped his fingers and a box made of old black wood slid into the air hovered between them. It opened, lined with a deep red velvet like fresh blood. Inside was a knife. They both stared at it.

The Soap-Maker reached in and took it, and then held it as though it was something more precious than life itself. “I will how you how it feels to have a piece of your soul cut out,” he said. “I will show you how to makes yourself into scattered pieces so that nothing can ever find you.” The box shut itself and drifted away, and the Soap-Maker came closer. “From such journeys come enlightenment, and from enlightenment comes understanding. Are you ready Skyrie?”

Mwahahaha…. I have an ARC of Justin Cronin’s Twelve. To give away. But embargoed for now so you’ll have to wait

Another giveaway tomorrow. More dragons I think.

<exeunt cackling>

Endings, especially the endings to trilogies or series, I often find are the hardest part to get right, shortly followed by beginnings. There’s a desire, probably rightly, for the ending to be biggest climax in a story, although I not that both Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords defy such wisdom and it doesn’t seem to have done George any harm. Upbeat endings I find particularly difficult – surely to be the biggest climax there must be the toughest struggle to achieve a success? Maybe this is why I tend to go for bittersweet and downbeat endings more often than not. But then again I’ve enjoyed plenty of books where the ending has been obvious for many chapters and yet remained thoroughly enjoyable. Mumph. Sometimes I convince myself I know nothing. Please feel free to tell me your favourite endings, whether they were obvious or a complete surprise.

I’m posting this while England are in extra time against Italy. At this point a win would be a complete surprise…

Meanwhile, a couple of reviews have sprung up. Apparently The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice is full of pubs and The Order of the Scales is too slow.

The Apprentice is a fun and rapidly moving fantasy novel with elements of coming of age and rite of passage, along with thieves, villains, pirates, rogues, wizards who seem to do nothing wizardry and pubs. Plenty of pubs. Bookgeeks.

“Pacing aside, it’s very difficult to resist getting caught up in the cold, calculating behavior of Stephen Deas’ majestic and determined dragons.” Citybookreviews stand out from the crowd by finding the story moves too slowly.

Ever wanted to sponsor a football team? Number two son plays in a local juniors team who are looking for sponsors for a three year deal with next season’s under-8 A-team (which will be their under-9 team in the 2013-14 season and their under-10 team in the 2014-15 season). So £250.00  will get your logo on the team shirts (which are basically pretty close to being a Celtic strip unless they change it) for three years. The squad has ten or possibly eleven boys in it  so the sponsorship will obviously reach them and their parents, but beyond that there are two other similar-sized squads of the same ages, the teams they play against and, to some extent, the rest of the club (which I understand is a fairly sizeable outfit as far as these things go with around 500 fixtures every season across all its teams).

The team coaches and the club officials will have final say on what they consider an acceptable sponsor and logo. Usually sponsorships come from local small businesses and I’d do it myself if I wrote books for children. As it is, there’s an opportunity for a publisher or author to market books directly to a group of children and I will enthusiastically shout about it if anyone does.

Anyone interested, please get in touch.

New covers for old words: The Memory of Flames re-release has entirely new art. Although less entirely new if you’ve seen the US covers.I’ve never quite been able to decide which ones I like more…

Or

A timeless classic sort of look… or DRAGONS! RAAAARRRR!

And I get to have both

Not that this is going to make sense to almost anyone who reads this, but the the first volume of the project has finished its last rewrite and is submission-ready. Rewrites to the second volume have started (February’s novel-inna-month project). The third volume . . . Let’s not talk about that just now.

I’ve been so immersed int his I’ve almost forgotten what else I’m supposed to be doing. What’s a dragon again?

I’m not blogging much this week partly because it’s half term and partly because the internet is turning me into Mr Grumpy. I’m largely uninterested in the Jubliee, ambivalent about the monarchy, vaguely Yay! about the Olympics and fairly Boo! about Workfare (or at least the way its been implemented), but right now the people to whose view I’m usually largely sympathetic are leaving me feeling like a nazi-grade nationalist for not being a rabid republican and a plantation slaver for sometimes demanding that my children do their homework before they’re allowed to play on the Xbox. An just let’s not even get started about Prometheus, OK? I haven’t seen it yet and I seriously don’t want to know, so you can all just get off of my cloud for a bit.

I have books to give away again, this time paperbacks of The King of the Crags and The Order of the Scales as one lot (again). That’s the UK editions and I will sign and line them if you want. Perfect for anyone who got The Adamantine Palace but never got around to the others.

MOPNOWRIMO Day 37. Up to  99000 words now. Trying to make myself write the ending now I know what it is. The muse demands I go back to the first and second books and rewrite those instead, the schedule says finish this one. Meh.

Target Wordcount: Done

Actual words: Not done (OK, 95500 with probably about 10000 to go).

Sometimes my editor randomly tweets something that makes a lightbulb ping on in my head. I was about to give up on this and come back to it in a month or so after rewriting the first two books of the series, but I can see a little better what’s not working in this one now. First problem are the new characters. Not that they don’t serve a strong purpose, but they don’t get enough airtime to have the strength of the new characters that came into the second book (and took it over) and so they come over as a bit bland and dilute and fade into the background a little too readily. I think maybe this can be dealt with by introducing them earlier in the series, even if they are little more than named spear-carriers at that point. Second thing that’s not right is the antagonist. Not selling himself. And for a while I was going with a Mysterious Dark Force In The Background which is, in hindsight, weak. And not foreshadowed in previous volumes enough. And not necessary when there’s been a perfectly good antagonist waiting in the wings all along.

So a bit meh, but all is not lost, and here’s the great thing about doing three books at once – I can go back and change things in the first book to first the third. Even for us “seasoned professionals” it’s far from a smooth wride. I’m going to stop posting updates now. Maybe once the rewrite is underway. The mental consolation I take is that the book that’s with my editor now had serious problems at the first draft, grew by 60000 words at the second draft and I reckon it to be the best thing I’ve done yet. Ho hum.

Other news: The Alchemist of Souls has been my most popular book give away yet, which is cool for a début novel by a writer I’ve known for a very long time on and off. Winners have been mailed. Not sure what’s going to come up next but I still have that copy of The Witcher II for the Xbox.

Favourite spam this week: A link to a weight loss website (or so I assume from the site name) in a comment on The Order of the Scales congratulating me on “some great advice here.” Not sure what particular advice they meant, but yeah, I guess being chased by dragons across half a kingdom would do some good for the old waistline. I shall begin work on my next book at one: The Dragon Book of Dieting.

Target wordcount: 80000, actual words 74000

The big multi-strand climax is kicking off nicely enough and the Unassailable Fortress of Utter Impregnability in which our heroic heroes are heroically . . . well . . . barring the doors and muttering pleasegoaway pleasegoaway a lot is turning out to be quite a challenge but my antagonists appear to be up to it. Two unexpected strategies for bashing their way in already and I appear to have foreshadowed another and . . . and . . . Well, it’s working out as a denouement, which is a relief given how the rest of this has gone.

There is an inciting incident behind this series of books that was originally written as the prologue to the first one and then met the Devourer of Prologues and ended in the Big Prologue Bin In The Sky. It involved three people trying to steal a glimpse of something that had been snatched away by the Thing That Isn’t Quite Human because of it being a Secret With Which Man Was Not Supposed To Meddle. This trio has supplied my protagonist and my principle antagonists and here I am at the end of three books and the protagonist is in the right place (albeit currently imprisoned by the heroic defenders for being the Wrong Sort Of Person) and so is the antagonist and all is set up for the inevitable showdown. If this were a movie, we’d be heading into the final twenty minutes or half an hour or so where a bunch of CGI creations fight with another bunch of CGI creations and lots of CGI stuff gets smashed up and I frequently start to get a bit bored.

The story has written itself such that I have two minor characters stranded in the middle of enemy territory. Right now they almost literally don’t dare to move. Sooner or later, however, the principle antagonist has to pass by where they’re hiding. They know this. That’s why they’re there. And right now it’s so incredibly tempting to let it work. Let the hidden snipers take out the antagonist. Don’t have them fail with a near miss but let it work. Deny the story its great showdown, because in the real world it almost never happens.

I probably won’t. And if I do, I suspect my editor will object. But it IS tempting.

[1] Actually they’re not, but they wish they were because they’re stuck with not being able to move for days.

Target wordcount: 75000, actual words 69000

Is it just me or was this more fun last time round? The final battle has started at last. That’s something. Not sure how long it’s going to go on. A while.

At this stage in writing a book, it usually feels like being on the home straight. I’m Red Five and I’m going in, and one way or the other there’s going to be a bang at the end. It’s not usually difficult to fly these last 20-30k words. This time…

See, a part of me knows I’ve got the right characters and I’ve got the right relationships between them and it does all come together in the right place at the right time, and everything that needs to be foreshadowed or at least mentioned before someone turned up and uses it has either been written in to one of the volumes or noted for inclusion (and there are several of those). The overall timeline is finally in order, the geography well enough set, the history finally all lined up. The next week of working on this isn’t going to change any of that, and now it feels like a wasted week. I want to go right back to the start of the first book and sweep through all of them and start putting all the details right. There are a couple of reasons for this – first it’s much much easier to do those rewrites, and secondly because I want to run from the start, now I finally finally can, and put it all together properly. Oh and also I want to submit some manuscripts.

However, I won’t be pandering to that urge. In part because it’s bad practice and poor discipline and the ending will always look like it had one rewrite fewer than everything else. But also because there’s always the chance that I’ll write the final page and some character will show clutching an antimatter bomb and it will be entirely right and proper and fit with absolute perfection into the narrative and the ending, and the only trouble will be that at no point ever in the three volumes up to that point has anyone ever mentioned that the viking-esque savages happened to also have an antimatter bomb.

So no, Stick it through right to the end with that first draft.

Wordcount target: 59000. Actual words 57000.

I have completely lost sight of whether what I’m writing is any good or whether it’s rubbish. There are now half a dozen tweeks and twiddles that need to be engineered back into various scenes in the first half of the book, some of which I continue to forget when I should be remembering them and others are now being written in as though they were there all along. The result is what we, in the writing world refer to through our uniquely obscure jargon as A Write Mess(TM).

At this point I’m into the last half of the story and since that;s also the last sixth of the trilogy, the pace will be ramping up and the action will be building all the way to an end in which all the threads will spectacularly come together in a grande finale that is as inevitable as it is rewarding, or else they won’t. And in writing that section of this first draft, I will completely forget the rambling nonsense or insightful and swift yet precise character portraits of the first half. And by the end, I will have just as little idea as I do now as to whether what I’ve done is any good and will have completely forgotten all the fiddles that need to be done until I start the rewrite and look at the notes I’ve left for myself[1]

To some extent this happens every time. With the last one, it felt distinctly uneven throughout the first half too, and then settled later, and with the first half recast into that shape, it worked. At least, I think it did. The rewrite seemed easy enough anyway.

So I cross my fingers and my toes and prepare to send all my small attack craft on their final all-or-nothing mission to destroy the death star and come back covered in glory, and all the while, it’s never quite certain that Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon are actually in the story at all…

Nine days left. This isn’t going to be finished in a month this time.

[1] Things like A is going to have sex with B later. So they should act like they might at least secretly be interested in each other. Which I then forget in once scene, remember in another, and then forget again afterwards and it’s all like it never happened except for two chapters somewhere in the middle. Or the whole bit about the stuff that one group of characters are supposed to be carrying around with them that I keep forgetting they have. Sort of like the Wages of Fear where they not only keep forgetting that the nitro is there but it really does keep vanishing .

MOPNOWRIMO update: Target: 45000 (mumble mumble) Actual Words: 45000, and no, after mid-afternoon Wednesday there was some , er, playing Dungeons and Dragons instead. Now I have to work weekends. Meh.
I continue to know exactly where this book is going. I have no idea how it’s going to get there or why it’s doing what it’s doing. I think I’ve largely given up trying to have any say in this one at all. It seems like its aiming for roughly the right conclusion. Maybe. People will have angst. People will manage their angst by a) exchanging angsty stories, b) having sex and c) hitting things. Not necessarily in that order. At the end, a lot of angst will be resolved, hopefully by hitting things rather than having a massive group therapy session.

In the book give-away, Eric was won by an Eric, which seems fitting, even if wasn’t chosen by something related to elephant seals in the end.

Spam. Spammers and spambots, you are rarely, but sometimes funny. Apparently I have killed 46,500-odd of your comments over the years this site’s been up, but your persistence, I feel, deserves some reward. So now and then I shall acknowledge you

“of course like your web-site but you need to take a look at the spelling on quite a few of your posts. Several of them are rife with spelling issues and I to find it very troublesome to inform the reality however I will surely come back again.”

I feel I should respond to what is, after all, a very fair criticism:

Dear Spambot,

It is true. There are many, many spelling mistakes on quite a few of my posts. There are grammatical faux pas. This is because I inform the reality a great deal and do so at high speed with little application of critical judgement or peer review[1].

There. Other spam of note:

I’m curious to find out what blog platform you have been working with? Apparently from a purveyor of tutus.
Thanks for another informative blog. On a post from years and years ago on the crapness of a local supermarket.

…your “Diamond Cascade” page was difficult to find as you were not on the first page of search results. Yes it was, muppetbot. No site EVER pips me to top spot on that search term. Who the hell searches for “Diamond Cascade?” anyway[2]. Fuck off.

watch game of thrones episode 8 season 1 I thank you for your wise advice, spambot.
I enjoy what you guys are up too. Such clever work and coverage! Keep up the wonderful works guys I’ve incorporated you guys to my own blogroll. No you haven’t. Fuck off.

Spam: A fine way to while away the minutes when you were supposed to be writing. Heh.

More books to be given away on Monday.

[1] I’m even worse at novels.

[2] people interested in jewellery apparently

Wordcount target: Sod this not-having-a-plan lark. Strictly 60000 by now but I used to work in an industry where no deadline was ever met if we could possibly help it and re-planning consumed 90% of the available resources (more if we were doing particularly badly). So it is and always was 35000, right.

Words written: 35000 (which tells you I re-baselined my plan today, doesn’t it).

Two weeks ago when I was writing the first chapter of this, I had an idea that this story was a straightforward action-adventure, the culmination of a battle for racial freedom and personal identity that was going to be resolved by lots of macho shouting and speech-making and hitting things with axes or plasma bombs or whatever else came to hand. With a nice satisfying resolution in which the Forces Of Bad(TM) are soundly beaten (despite it being touch-and-go right to the end) and the hero maybe gets the girl or maybe, for a slightly tragic twist, dies nobly in the Last Stand That Saves The Universe and gets to have his savaged body[1] wept over a little before all the Ewoks come out and the celebrations begin and there are fireworks everywhere for no apparent reason (did the Ewoks have firework technology? I think not. So what, some bright spark of a rebel logistics officer sat there and thought I know – assault on the new Death Star? Better bring some fireworks just in case?)

Apparently I was wrong. Apparently this is a story about two people who desperately want to be together but somehow neither can quite give the other what the other wants and needs without compromising what they believe in. With all the other stuff, too. If the Laser-toting Deathknights are absent for the next few chapters, that’s because they’re off getting basic training in relationship counseling and when they come back, it’s going to be with cups of tea and comfy chairs. Sheesh.

Sometimes, when the opportunity for a good run at this comes, I’m laying down 2000 words an hour. I dread to imagine the quality of it, but right now, I just need to get to the end of the damned first draft so I can find out what this story is actually about. Please?

[1] or the sub-atomic particles that used to be his body, in the case of plasma bombs

Wordcount target: Apparently writing an number down and then crossing it out and pretending that I’m pretending not to have one doesn’t count as just letting it happen at its natural pace.

Words written: 16500

I feel like this novel is roughly back on track. Taken a third of a month to get there but I might yet finish before the end of May. Meanwhile the fallout continues. I can see the characters who took over the previous volume fading right back into the background. This is maybe no bad thing, but so far they’ve shown no interest having any of the limelight whatsoever. Meanwhile the abandoned wife of my protagonist has snatched a chapter for herself and is greedily demanding more. This is a little awkward since her position has always been that going off adventurin’ is all irresponsible when you’ve got family to look after, and while there may be place in the genre for a domestic drama on the trials of single parenthood in the middle of a war, this novel isn’t it. Or at least it wasn’t supposed to be. Laser-toting Deathknights it is,then – don’t think I won’t!

Meanwhile my protagonist is drunk in a corner feeling sorry for himself because no one wants him and another secondary character has turned up who I suspect will make a similar bid for extended air-time. But this is all good.

The thing, I think, that went wrong, was this: I had my story arc all lined up. I didn’t give much thought to the characters because they were established characters from a previous volume. I reckoned they’d take care of themselves. And they did, and it wasn’t compatible with the story I’d set up for them and so the story was broken right from the start. Should have given some more thought to what I’d done to my characters and what that meant to them. This is what I mean when I say things like “my characters didn’t do what I wanted them to do.” Even though they’re basically my puppets. Mumph.

Other news: I’ve seen the draft covers for the re-issue of the Memory of Flames trilogy and if you’ve been following Gollancz on Twitter then they’ve given a glimpse of them too. I’ll wait until the final versions are ready but they’re going to be delicious.

I’ll put up the winner the winner of the Fenrir competition tomorrow, along with the next book up for grabs.

Wordcount target: 35000; words written 10500

A case of going backwards to go forwards, having moved the resolution of the protagonist’s core dilemma back into the previous book; but that’s done now. Most of what I have now is an extensively rewritten version of the first four chapters I wrote last week. It still slightly bugs me that the first three chapters read like an extended prologue and lets-remind-ourselves-of-the-important-bits-of-what-has-gone-before but perhaps that can’t be helped. It bugs me slightly more that I’m already seeing warning signs that this book is going to be even less centered on its nominal protagonist than the last one. However, neither of these are necessarily bad things and it’s early days. What matters most right now is that the words are coming and the (a) story has started to flow.

I’ve been wondering over the last few days why I’ve had so much trouble with getting started on this month’s project and why the last one, by contrast, went so smoothly. I went back and read through the posts from those opening days, looking for any hint of fumbling for the story and that was how I remembered that last time I’d cheated by writing the opening three or four chapters quite slowly in odd pieces of spare time over the previous month. There’s a lesson there. Now I’m left wondering how important it is.

Word count target: <sounds of tumbleweed> Words written: Look! A squirrel!

The last couple of days have been more about February’s project than this month’s one. Amazing how it had a perfectly good ending of its own and left such a bomb waiting to go off. And much thankfulness that it’s not too late to change. So the last project has a new chapter to deal with that and this month’s project can get on with it. Changes the tone of the last one a little but fits quite nicely, although it’s a fine balancing act to get one particular secondary character right. Final rewrites for that one in June and then July (hopefully). Work on May’s project restarts properly on Tuesday.

Sometimes a book is give a soundtrack, sometimes it acquires one all by itself. This and this. A touch overblown? Yet this is what it wants.

Wordcount target: La-la-la- not listening, Achieved: Possibly none.

I realise at this point that in the denouement of the previous book (February’s effort), I’ve written myself into a head-on collision between the two driving motivations that have kept my protagonist going up to now. He’s spent years trying to get home. Having finally achieved that, does he stay or does he immediately walk out again to try and save a friend? Irritatingly it’s take a week of writing scenes and chapters and bits of chapters almost all of which have rung hollow to realise that I’ve put my protagonist in such a bind that I need to make a fundamental choice about who he is and it’s going to be a choice whose consequences ring through the whole of this story. The last time he abandoned his family to “do the right thing” he was gone for far too long. Does he do it again? Which is it that actually matters more?

I think I have my answer now. A curiosity in getting there has been how little the rest of the story has mattered to making this decision. It’s obvious (to me) that the two choices lead to very different stories but that’s as far as any thinking about it goes. I’ve written two books with this protagonist and the only thing that really matters is that he does what it feels that that character should do. I could make it easy for myself by rewriting his wife into a bit of a wet blanket across the series, but I don’t feel inclined to do that either. I also find that I’m not at all keen on starting a book with this dilemma and the choice he makes. It feels more like an end than a beginning.

So where I’m now at is this: The previous book needs an additional last chapter, probably a rewritten version of the second prologue I’d written for this one. May’s project pretty much has to start again from scratch. Some of it can be salvaged. A talk with the editor is also needed just to make sure that my new planned direction for the last book in this little series doesn’t make him run around screaming NOOOOOOOOooooooooo!

Lessons? A few. First thing is, maybe if you write a few opening chapters and your story is already feeling lacklustre, maybe that IS a time to stop and rethink instead of the usual advice I’d off to simply keep going no matter what. Plans don’t survive contact with the enemy, but the lack of any plan survives even worse. And the problem I’ve hit here isn’t a first-in-a-series problem, it comes from trying to write a story with established characters and an established world already locked into place by previous volumes. Maybe that needs a different approach. Maybe that DOES need more of a plan. You might have thought, on the whole that’s I’d have figured that out by now. Slow learner again, I guess.
Reset time. I’ll redo the ending to the previous book this weekend (fortunately I still can – I’ve tried throughout all my books never to completely lock one volume of a series down until at least the first draft of the next is done). On Monday we start again. From scratch.

Also Aaaarghswearswearswearswear.

Wordcount Target: 15000 Apparently I don’t do these any more, Achieved 11400

I think I managed to pass a good half an hour renaming the prologue to be chapter 1 in order to spare it the Devourer of Prologues and then changing it back to being a prologue again, standing proud for the truth of what it is. Actually the real truth is more that the first four chapters (or three and the thing called prologue) are actually the prologue. I could call them an overture and set them to music. Yes, that would waste some more time and be quite a diversion from writing the rest of the book.

Also I have some copy-editing to do. See, that’s useful, that is. And important. And a really good excuse for not having met today’s wordcount target (that I don’t have any more because I’ve been told). Or would have been, if I’d done any of it.

Truth now though: Yesterday, is became unambiguously clear that the plot for which I had such a nice synopsis, was dismally failing to survive even the first skirmish with the characters I’m now left with from February’s effort. The protagonist and the embryonic rebellion that he was now supposed to lead have parted company. Neither want anything to do with the other, thanks very much. They haven’t even parted on good terms, although at least we’ve managed to avoid a custody battle over the secondary characters. Under the circumstances, I think I did rather well to write anything at all. Fortunately, this wilful running-away from the plot is something I’m completely used to from my D&D days and I have a many ways of hurling the plot at wilful parties, most of which involve wrapping it around a +4 exploding half-brink Of Doom and lobbing it.

Protagonist thinks he can just go home to the quiet life, does he? The elegant and sophisticated way to deal with this, of course, is to work with the character’s existing motivations and make adjustments to the rest of the world so that those motivations now seamlessly direct him to his or her intended place in the story such that it seems from the outside afterwards like that was what you always meant to happen anyway, duh! Protagonist just wants to go home? Fine. Let it happen and move the story so it unfolds on his or her doorstep. Protagonist just wants to be with his or her lover? Excellent! make the lover go to where the story happens.

The less elegant and sophisticated way is to take your protagonist’s entire life, family, homeworld, ideology, religion, circle of friends and their families too, and crush them into fine dust under AN UNIMAGINABLY VAST ARMY OF LASER-WIELDING DEATH-KNIGHTS until the only possible motivation left is to go beat the living shit out of whoever did it. Like in Star Wars, maybe, or Gladiator except with more lasers.

Subtlty? Or Deathknights? Hmmm.

Wordcount Target: 10000, Achieved 7400

That thing that I always tell anyone who asks never to do? Going over and over parts of the first draft again and again trying to get them just right instead of getting on with the rest of the story? That.

In my defence, maybe that rule doesn’t apply quite as strictly when we’re talking about the general subject matter of the opening chapters. As in totally throwing them away and doing something different. So that was what I did today. Prologue gone, new one written (and a much better one, I think). Chapter one survived unscathed, mostly because I couldn’t bring myself to look and just assumed it would still work. Chapter two substantially re-written but from a different viewpoint and incorporating parts of the old prologue. Better but still not great. Chapter three started.

Wordcount target seriously failed, but my therapist tells me I should take a couple of weeks off from having hard-and-fast targets and just write when the mood takes me.  HA HA HAHAHAHAAAAA!!!

What’s done feels as though it’s in much better shape than what came out yesterday, so I try not to let the wordcount bother. What DOES bother me is that the original synopsis for this book had my chief protagonist becoming a hero/leader of the rebellion, whereas the previous book largely failed to establish this and it’s clear from just the opening chapters that the rebellion doesn’t want him and he doesn’t want it. So, er… what was this book about then?

Um?

Wordcount Target: 5000, Achieved 4120

Procrastineering[1]: v. The completion of many useful but previously uncompleted tasks (usually previous victims of various forms of procrastination) in order to avoid starting on The Thing That Really Needs To Be Started, Like, Today.

So my day went like this: I need to knuckle down and write. So, a good bit of exercise might me in the mood, right? So I set on cycling into town, quietly ignoring the fact that the cycles paths all follow the rivers around here and the rivers are, well, a little bit full at the moment. Well, not so much full as let’s go all Third Reich on all the surrounding land.

Yes, it really does just vanish into a watery horizon. So that took a bit longer than it was supposed to. And then I’m really, really fed up of that slow puncture that’s been bugging me for  ages but I’ve never got around to fixing, but today was clearly the day to sort that out.

Words written at this point: 24.

Also, of course, it was absolutely essential to post something about starting this project as opposed to actually doing the starting. Necessary. Oh yes.

And then there’s this other thing I’ve been meaning to do which is sign up with the local leisure centre, and then having done that, well, might as well get in a quick swim in the pool and a work-out in the gym, right, because I’ve been meaning to get fit for, oh, about ten years I think. Well my procrasinteering failed in the gym on account of not being able to get on a machine right then, but there was still the pool and a quick swim. A hundred lengths to knock some rust off those muscles, right?

I will not say how many lengths I achieved. A small number, so small that number is barely a deserving description. So my utter lack of fitness sort of saved me and some words were done after all.

They’re a bit rubbish. First draft I keep telling myself. First draft. It doesn’t matter. Also, the first thousand of them were a prologue, and since my editor is The Great Devourer of Prologues, they will certainly be cut, and in a way that’s actually helpful, since it’s much easier to accept the crapness when you’re writing crap that you KNOW is going to be cut anyway. Although I suppose I could have claimed a thousand words and done nothing and had a coffee instead.

Hmm.

Anyway, prologue and first chapter done, in which I attempt to recap on the most significant points of What Has Gone Before via the reflections of a man about to be hanged while all hell breaks loose around him. Action and recap seamlessly merged. Not a bad idea, actually. Shame about the execution.

REWRITES, I WORSHIP AT YOUR ALTAR!

I suppose I could have written another thousand words of chapter two and hit my target instead of doing this.

[1] There is also procrasturbation, it’s rather less useful cousin. But I shall primly not talk about that.

Time to write another novel in a month. It’s been time for a while but I’ve been poutting it off. Starting is always the hardest part. It’s not made any easier by having a couple of kick-ass trailers around at the moment:

For Prometheus (and it’s the soundtrack more than anything that sends shivers down my spine). The link is in case you’re one of the three people in the world who hasn’t see it already.#

For The Witcher 2. Please, someone buy me a book-trailer that’s this good? Anyone?

This sort of thing makes it that much harder to sit down and write, knowing that whatever happens, it’s not going to be this. Meh.And even though I know the feeling goes as soon as the story starts to flow, and even though I know the story starts to flow almost as soon as I force out the first words, stil meh. And procrastinate procrastinate procrastinate. Hence I’m writing this instead of laying down the prologue chapter one.

Today’s wordcount target: 5000.

Avalanches. My my, what a lot I know about avalanches now.

So there’s this scene, halfway through February’s opus, in which our hero and his friends are on the run from a band of lo-tech savages and have very little by way of gear with them. They cross a snowfield and descend to a ravine crossed by a narrow rope bridge, cross the bridge and cut the ropes and voila! They escape.

However . . .

At the time of writing, I had one of them linger to set up a trap that would in turn set off an avalanche that would sweep away half of the chasers. On in particular. This was one of those scenes that I wrote at the time thinking ah well, that’s a bit of a daft way to set off an avalanche and no one will ever believe it, me included. So I’ll change it into something more plausible in the rewrites. And moved on. Which is how first drafts are made, after all. Usually I get away with it.

I have found out that avalanches usually occur on slopes with a slopes angle in the range 25-45 degrees. From my long-past days of skiing, I could perhaps more usefully reclassify that as the range Ooof that’s steep to Oh my god that’s not a slope that’s a fucking cliff and I’m going to DIE. I’d imagine that those slopes look much the same to a man on foot. Seriously, who would try to walk through heavy deep snow on a 1:1 incline with a ravine at the bottom?

Cue some adjustment to the slope geometry. And the reactions of the characters to seeing it. And how the address it. And I have to go for the lower end of the range, I think, and that means making the slope more prone to avalanche for other reasons. Like generally facing away from both the sun and the prevailing wind. Cue some more adjustment to the geometry and a slight re-orientation of the world map. And a recent heavy snowstorm. Cue some rewriting of several previous scenes which previously thought they were having some relatively balmy weather up until now. And that’s just to set up some likely conditions.

And then there’s the triggering of it. What triggers an avalanche? Wind, snowfall, a prolonged rise in temperature, stuff like that, but what I need is a specific human trigger. A bunch of people tramping across it might do the trick, but what might set it off on cue when there are already a bunch of people tramping across it? A bomb. That’s pretty much all I can find. A bomb, and no character in this scene, quite categorically, is carrying a bomb.

Bugger.

It “just happens”? Plausible? Maybe. Looks like a bit of author divine intervention on the behalf of his characters? Definitely, even though the cutting of the bridge serves all the necessary plot progression.

And thinking about it, an avalanche dropping my chief antagonist down a ravine just gives me the problem of WHY HE ISN’T DEAD. In fact, the avalanche a) serves no purpose and b) actively causes plot problems that I then have to solve.

Half a chapter that was. A whole day and a half of rewrite effort. Stupid avalanche. And the lesson? That pretty, cool, cinematic scene you wanted to have just because? Maybe it just isn’t meant to be there, y’know…

I did find some pretty pictures though. This is pretty close to the location of the scene in question. Only maybe not quite as big and with a ravine at the bottom…

Todays excuse for procrasintion – mountains with good cliched fantasy names!

I have a Mount Terror in antarctica …

… another in North America …

I have a Mount Fear here too …

So the competition is this: Tell me what country this Mount Fear is is and you can have a copy of King of the Crags and The Order of the Scales flying over to you. If you haven’t already got The Adamantine Palace then sorry – no copies left in my stash

The mountain from the last competition was Mount Cook, for anyone who didn’t read all the comments…

Day 6:

The first act is finished.

No it wasn’t.

About a third of the planned second act has vanished in a smoking hole of unexpected narrative decisions, but on the whole, it’s not too bad.

Yes. Well. Little did the author know how far his narrative would stray from his plan in the second act at this point . . .

It has a prologue, of course because all my stories have prologues, almost none of which survive the editor.

Both still true.

Just for fun I’ve given the second act a prologue too, and that probably won’t survive either.

Well yes, when we finally get to the second act, the prologue is still there.

This is a first draft, though, so some serious pruning during the rewrite is to be expected.

No, this lot survived largely unscathed. As opposed to . . .

Days 7 and 8

In which chapters are set in a series of underground grottos and on a snow-covered mountainside, and if all of that has nothing to do with an evening back on Skyrim and then getting six inches of snow overnight and spending most of the afternoon throwing snowballs at each other, then my secret identity is Chairhead from The Tick.

and

It’s tempting to throw the whole lot away. Certainly the bit where someone builds a snowman in order for someone else to shoot a it a few pages later and thus trigger an avalanche that wipes out a whole bunch of people needs a serious slap in the face with a haddock.

Yeeesss . . . It’s nice to know that I saw how preposterout the whole avalanche scene was even back then.

I’ve written enough novels now to know that it takes, on average, about an hour to write one thousand words in the first draft and about half an hour in the first rewrite, maybe twenty minutes in the second and a little less for any that follow. What matters is the on average part of that statement. So, in theory, what happens now is that I’ve worked how many hours this rewrite will take (about fifty) and carved that up so that I’m working on it for ten days, five hours a day and then it’s all done. Thus is the plan. So the idea is that I work on the rewrite for five hours every day and never mind how many words I cover each day, since on average it should all work out fine in the end. I’m not supposed to be trying to cover tent thousand words every day, I’m supposed to be working for five hours. On some days I’ll cover fifteen thousand and on others I’ll cover five und so weiter etc. and so on. And because it’s all on average it’ll all balance in the end and when there’s a slow day, I won’t get hung up on it because I know that. Right? RIGHT?

And I’m sure it would work fine if I did it like that and didn’t stop every day bang on ten thousand words and go oooh! An hour early! Time for another couple of levels of Prey then!

Or alternatively it would work fine if I didn’t hit chapters I’ve left for myself like the one with the stupid avalanche. It’s possible that the next few updates may get a bit ranty on the subject of avalanches. Stupid avalanches.

So now I’m behind. Meh. Yet another level of Prey then. Surely that will help . . .

Back in February I set myself the goal of writing a hundred-thousand word novel within one month and then blogged about each day and how it went. Other projects have taken priority since then but over this last week and the next, I’m going over what I wrote back then and rewriting it. Hindsight and a refreshed pair of eyes combined, you see . . .

Anyhow, observations from the first week of rewriting:

There’s a prologue. I rather like it, but really, what was I thinking when my editor is acknowledged as the Devourer Of Prologues? Have decided to keep it in so he can ask for it to be cut and thus feel useful.

I have lost interest in Skyrim over the intervening couple of months. Main quest completed, tanking around in heavily enchanted dragon-plate armour, it’s become a bit of an exercise in finding enough shops where I can sell all the stuff I keep finding, and that’s a bit dull. So no Skyrim getting in the way this week. Apart from me talking about how it’s not getting in the way, obviously.

Day One:

This was a really dialogue heavy day and it’s all pretty bland stuff. Today’s scenes have a fair amount of recapping of the previous book in the series (this being the second of three), too much talking and about as much atmosphere as the inside of a synthetic duvet. In short, they’re a bit crap and if I read this aloud.

This section wasn’t nearly as grim as I thought it was at the time and was easily rewritten. The dialogue was too verbose and too stiff in places, but some simple cutting and straightforward editing appears to have sorted that out. One of the “difficulties” of the very first draft was that the relationships between some of the characters weren’t entirely clear to me at the start (in fact some relationships and indeed entire characters weren’t anticipated at all). Now I know how it’s all going to pan out at the end, sorting these relationships properly out at the start has been easier than I feared – more a case of cutting spurious dialogue and infodumps than anything else. Cutting is always easier

Day Two:

Less talking, more fighting.

That day came easy and it didn’t need much work in the first rewrite either. I think It was mostly expanding the descriptive passages which were a bit terse in the fight and also changing the geography a little. One mistake I made when I wrote the first draft was not to make any kind of map either before or as I was going. That led to some slightly bizarre inconsistencies which are now being ironed out as I go. I’m also making a map this time. I still like the bit where I throw someone off a cliff.

Days Three, Four and Five:

This is about the point in the first draft where all that planning starts to fray at the edges. Ideas that looked fine in a two-page synopsis now appear dull and contrived when put into proper prose. The characters are mostly as they were intended, but one of them is developing more, ah, personality than expected and the main threat has turned out a bit crunchier that intended. This is all to the good, but has made one of the intended relationships quite different. At the same time, the lead character finds himself in a situation that wasn’t quite as I’d intended it at this point and a character I didn’t even know existed when I started looks like they might be making a significant part for themselves. So far none of this seems to derail the main storylines and merely weaves them in a different way.

I seem to have a gatecrasher.

Thought I’d got rid of yesterday’s intruder, but like a bad penny, he shows up again.

And that all turned out to be about right and to the good. The relationship between the principle protagonist and antagonist is much more ambiguous throughout than originally conceived and I think that panned out well in the end (now I know what the end was). My “gatecrasher” – I’m not entirely sure whether I meant the protagonist’s intended sidekick or the character I had never even concieved of until I needed someone to help him escape the overly-comptent antatagonist. Either way, those two characters ended up largely stealing the story in my view (along with the antagonist), which only goes to show that if you’re me, at least, you should just shut up and roll with whatever the muse throws onto the page. Sod plans.

I don’t notice the chapters that were cut from the plan at all and the unexpected character did end up very significant indeed. Most of the rewriting from this section has been easy enough although quite extensive in the dialogue and  the reactions of characters to one another as the relationships I now want are quite different from those I originally expected. It’s maybe worth noting that even despite quite substantial changes to the story and the people, a lot of words remain unchanged. Places still look as they did before, journeys are still from the same A to the same B using the same means of transport and so on. So although the atmosphere is quite different, the level of change isn’t as much as you might think. One pair of chapters did have to be gutted and rebuilt from scratch where one character was behaving oddly. This involved changing the progress of the story (the protagonist now goes from A to B via C instead of directly and gets dumped by his companion en route – so there is now a brief scene at location C and then a lot cut from what happens at B).

There’s also a new short chapter to foreshadow events that come much later. I knew this was probably a good idea when I did the first draft, apparently, judging by the note I appear to have left for myself…

Heading towards the close of act one now, which from memory was where I had a major falling out with my muse about several characters. I think the way things have now been changed will find the end of act one running much more smoothly, but we shall see. I also remember I sequence in which a character starts an avalanche in a totally ridiculous fashion and there is some very confusing geography. One of those things that seemed totally cool at the time but has left me queasy every time I think about it. I anticipate some cutting…

To be continued.