Why Edinburgh?

Why are my three novels (The Great Project parts 1 &2, and The Perilous City, in progress) all set in Edinburgh?

Three vital reasons.

1. I love Edinburgh. If I didn't live in Glasgow I would live in Edinburgh. Or if I could afford Edinburgh now. I love it's mixture of old and very old (not so mad on the new). I love the juxtaposition of landscape and city. What other city has a view of Arthur's seat from its front door; what other city has a viewpoint like Edinburgh Castle in it's centre; what other city gives you a view of the sea (well the river that runs to the sea)? Some cities may have one of these, no other has them all. More than this, I love the village feel of Edinburgh. It is a small city, and one which feels like a lot of little villages tied together. Dean Village, Stockbridge, Bruntsfield, Morningside. Glasgow is metropolitan. Edinburgh is whatever the village equivalent of that is - micropolitan?

2. Edinburgh is a magnificent setting for stories. Stevenson showed that, and Ian Rankin, and I would like to think in my own sometimes humble way I'm adding to that lineage. The old city is a fabulous setting for stories. It has something of a Tardis-like quality to it, small on the outside, big inside, or on its underside. Go down Mary King's Close and get a sense of what the City must have felt like when it was surrounded by a wall, fingers of tenements pointing at the sky. Wonderful, dark and full of real mystery and danger. Furthermore, Edinbugh has not been used enough. I don't think Edinburgh has been properly exploited - the above company excepted - as the backdrop for stories. It fires the imagination, but it hasn't fired enough imaginations and I hope to redress that balance.

3. It's real. You don't need to make Edinburgh up, it's there already. You just have to walk it. And the beauty of the City is that you can go there now, today, and see and feel and breathe the history of the place, in its buildings, its streets, the remnants of its wall, the eternal geology of its rock, and so much more. Who needs a Harry Potter world when you've got Edinburgh?

Writing Groups

I could be going to a writing group in Glasgow tonight, but I'm not going to. Why not? At this stage writing groups are not for me. I'm trying to get published and I don't feel that a writing group is much help with this. It's a hard slog, trying to get published, and sooner or later I may have to go down the self-publication route. I don't think I can get anything from a writing group that helps me to do that, other than some of the good and useful advice I've already had at early meetings.

Some of the speakers have been great and very useful, but I think at this stage in my journey I have become, and have to become, quite selfish, and focused on my own needs. I wouldn't for a moment say that I can't learn things about the process of writing itself, but that's not the kind of group this is. And I would venture to suggest  I am my own worst and best critic. I have friends who read what I write, and I bounce off them, but in the end I know a lot of what's wrong, and what's right with what I produce. If I didn't believe that I don't think I would be doing this at all. Of course I would love to get editorial opinion on my writing, and I do and would edit my work, heavily. But in the end you need self-belief, don't you?

My Six Rules of Fantasy Writing (Part 2)

Rule 4: Plot, Plot, Plot
Having said that character is King, it doesn't meant to say that plot doesn't count. Quite the opposite, plot is hugely important. Obviously you have to know where the book is going, but the reader also needs a sense of where they are going, and a sense that they are on a journey. Plot is not just about deciding whether you're travelling to a, b or c, it's also about the shape of that journey. My feeling is that a lot of fantasy novels again don't put enough work into the shape of the plot (nor do a lot of books overall). The journey doesn't have to be linear, in fact quite the opposite. Subplots, circular journeys, digressions and diversions are all key plot elements, but they all need to fit within an overall shape and sense of direction. Perhaps I'm using plot as a catchall term and including in it dramatic shape, because I also believe you have to think carefully about where the rises and falls of your narrative lie, when and where the climaxes come. There's nothing more frustrating, to my mind, than a narrative which peters out, dribbles to an end, or is filled with forgotten digressions which run into cul de sacs. I could be accused, in my own writing, or having plots which are too complex, and I know that complex plots are sometimes the hallmark of fantasy writing. Look at Game of Thrones for goodness sake - a much better TV programme than book. But complexity is neither a vice nor a virtue in its own right. Used well its a way of giving your writing layers and texture. Used badly it is a pain in the narrative.

Rule 5: Big Emotions
One of the things I do love about fantasy writing is that it trades in big emotions. I love building towards scenes which have heroic interventions, massive disappointments, sudden rescues, daring escapes. It has always been one of the key things that has attracted me to the fantasy genre. Some of the scenes in Lord of the Rings I could read over and over, and I have to confess that there is a scene near the end of my own City of Fire and Ice, part 2 of The Great Project, which makes me cry every time I reread it. So, although I want my characters to be complex, to have real emotions, to have everyday lives in lots of ways, I don't think you should forget, avoid or ignore the big emotions in fantasy writing. It's one of the attractions of the genre.

Rule 6: Core Themes
A fantasy novel should be about characters, it should be driven by plot - yes, yes. But it should also have at its heart some core theme/s, idea/s. In other words, as well as writing a fantasy novel you're trying to explore some ideas. That way the book will stay with the writer after they've finished. That way you have something else driving the plot forward. That way you have implicit or explicit links building between all the disparate components of your novel. For me the book begins with the idea. With The Great Project it was the idea of two opposed approaches to magic which were gender specific, and were different ways of seeing the world. Tertia, heart, Alexander, head. Out of that then came all the ideas in the book of male and female differentiation and opposition, and it made sense to set it in an increasingly patriarchal society. Men rule, and rule badly, for the time being. The Perilous City, which I'm writing just now, started with the song by Jacques Brel, Amsterdam. I heard it for the first time and instantly fell in love with it. Then I read a translation of the lyrics and I fell in love with those. I listened to the song over and over, dozens of times.

Dans le port d'Amsterdam
Y a des marins qui boivent
Et qui boivent et reboivent
Et qui reboivent encore
Ils boivent à la santé
Des putains d'Amsterdam
De Hambourg ou d'ailleurs
Enfin ils boivent aux dames
Qui leur donnent leur joli corps
Qui leur donnent leur vertu
Pour une pièce en or
source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/j/jacquesbrellyrics/amsterdamlyrics.html

In the port of Amsterdam,
The sailors drink
And drink and drink again,
And drink one for the road.
They drink to the health
of the whores of Amsterdam
or of Hamburg or elsewhere.
In fact they drink to the ladies
Who give them their beautiful bodies
Who give them their innocence
For a coin of gold.
source: http://strangelyperfect.tv/390/jaques-brel-amsterdam-a-new-translation/

Then I started to form an idea for a story. About sailors, metaphorically shipwrecked. Men who once lived in the moment, who once drank and loved, but who now envy those who do. Men who want to lose themselves, but who are tied to one another by circumstance and guilt. That's the story I'm writing, I hope. As well as it being a prequel to The Great Project.


My site: http://www.greatproject.co.uk/

My Six Rules of Fantasy Writing (Part 1)

I don't even like the term Fantasy writing. Nonetheless I use it, because it comes closest to describing what I write, though Dark Fantasy is another. But I have been thinking about why I don't like the label 'fantasy' and it's because it tends to get used as an excuse for bad writing. A lot of fantasy that I have read seems to me simply to be badly written, and the weaknesses in the writing come from things which are excused by the genre. So I have my own set of rules for writing fantasy novels. These are:

Rule 1. Real World
I don't like fantasy worlds, I like fantasy to be set in the known, real world. Seen through a distorting mirror, yes, but the real, known world. I suppose that's why I use historical settings (so far), though I have plans for a novel set in contemporary Glasgow. I know that this type of writing tends to get called Steam Punk, which is fine as a label, but the name is not really important. What is important for me is that the geography, the landscape, the physical rules come from the real world. I get really frustrated by books which start out by inventing every single blade of grass from the bottom up. You can't locate in it, you can't visualise it, it is frustrating and annoying - for me. I hate books beginning with whole lists of names and titles. Having said that Lord of the Rings is still an all time favourite. But then Tolkein was reimagining the English countryside.

Rule 2. Rules
This comes from rule 1. I like my fantasy worlds to have real physical rules, and clear ones, which cannot be transcended and put aside just for convenience. I don't want my hero to be free with a single bound, or to suddenly be saved by some trick of physics which I hadn't explained before. To me that is just lazy writing. People are constrained by the world. If you pick up a thing you have to put it down again before you can do something else with that hand. If you leave something in one place it should be there when you come back. A bit like film continuity. For me characters should interact with their world - get cold if it's cold, wet if it's raining. To avoid that or misuse that is bad writing as far as I'm concerned. And that applies to magical/supernatural elements too. If you fire a gun the gun kicks back - it has a physics. Why shouldn't magic have a physics too? At the very least you should be clear about what is and isn't possible, and set yourself boundaries to work within. I like the books by Ben Aaronovitch, the Rivers of London series, because that's one of the things they concern themeselves with - the physics of magic. Anyone who says 'But it's magic, it doesn't need rules' is again a lazy writer, and is probably preparing the ground for something utterly inexplicable and stupid to happen in their book just because it's convenient.

Rule 3. Character, Character, Character
After that rant a simpler rule. Everything that happens in fantasy writing should still be driven by character. It is a rule which underlies all good writing, why should it not apply to the fantasy genre? What drives a story forward is character. You don't move someone from a to b, from Scotland to England, say, just because you need to get them there. There has to be a reason that comes from the character's motivations. I know external forces shape us, but internal forces shape us so much more. And in the end what people want to read about is people, not things. It is one of the problems with action/adventure books sometimes - they concentrate on the hardware, not the software. Frederick Forsyth could have been a much better writer if he'd listened to this. So, I don't want to know all the ins and outs of the politics of the Empire of the Dragons, unless you tell me it through people, through the people who make it and the people it affects. Consequently, characters need to be rounded and whole. I don't want my books to have characters like second troll or third magician. I don't want characters to be cyphers. That doesn't mean I always achieve that and to be honest there are only perhaps two characters in The Great Project, Fettle and Tertia, who I'm 90% satisfied with. Alexander, Jamsie and Ventglove75%. Actually the Princess Mary too. As I get better at writing I think I will get better at writing characters. That means thinking a lot about them before you even begin to write them. I've done that more with the new novel, The Perilous City, and I hope I will get better and better at it. This was a rant after all.

My site: http://www.greatproject.co.uk/

Visualising Characters

I really need pictures to get a fix on a character. At least for my main characters that is. So when I am researching/planning a novel I try to find images online, or elsewhere, which give me the essence of the character. The pictures aren't always perfect representations, but they give me a sense of the person which matches with the nuculeus of character traits, experiences and background already forming in my mind. And when I have a picture to work with I can read things into that picture, or highlight small details, which then help to bring the character to life.

So, two examples here of the pictures I found for the central characters from my new novel, The Perilous City. (Click on the names to go to the original web pages.)



JACK

RENNIE

 







Both pictures were found in a search for images of bare knuckle boxers. These are like the characters, but not precisely them.

 

For example Jack is a cripple, who has lost his legs. But what I liked in this picture was the face with almost pointed ears, nose and chin; a strange satyr's face. Jack has been made bitter by the accident which crippled him, and is often called Black Jack. He has a wicked tongue and can be harsh. But there is also laughter in his eyes sometimes. I saw all that in the picture.

 

Rennie is bigger and heavier than in the picture here, and I used another picture along with this, of Mickey O'Rourke in his boxing days. So Rennie is really a compound of the two. He is a bare-knuckle fighter, but a man sickened by his skill, and hiding from himself in drink. And he is tied to Jack in a way which we only gradually come to understand. Both Jack and Rennie are also ex-sailors, so in both pictures the eyes were important to me. They both seem to have the far-seeing look, a sense of distance in their eyes.

My site: http://www.greatproject.co.uk/

Full Steam Ahead

I seem to be hitting my straps again. Towards the end of last week and now this week I've picked up the pace of writing and I seem to be finding it much easier to keep to my quota, and sometimes exceed it.

I'm pretty religious about achieving my target each week. Two written pages of foolscap each day, then typed and corrected. Approximately 600 words a day, every day and roughly 4,000 words a week. That usually translates to a chapter a week, but it varies with chapter length. The first draft of a novel should then take something like 30 to 36 weeks, between 7 and 9 months.

But it has been a bit of a slog for the last month or so. I've not been falling behind, in fact there's never been a week when I haven't made my target. But it has been a grind recently, and I haven't been going over target. Some Sunday nights I have had to push out those last two pages painfully, like passing a gallstone - except I've never passed a gallstone.

Then, suddenly, we're flying again. I'm not sure why. The section that has been hard work deals a lot with personal relationships, between the two main characters, Jack and Rennie, and Rennie's conflicting relationship with Jinty. Perhaps that has been harder to write, and now I'm moving into a part of the narrative with more open space. On the other hand I find dialogue much easier to write than straight prose description, so the character parts usually flow well. Maybe it was the post Christmas blues. Doesn't matter, we're through the sluggish channel and into fast moving currents again. Nautical metaphors definitely apply with this book. Full steam ahead.

My site: http://www.greatproject.co.uk/

Planning

Because I'm deep in the middle of writing book number 3 (The Perilous City) I should be writing more and planning less. That was how I set out to do things this time. It hasn't quite worked out that way. I did a very thorough plan at the outset, 36 chapters in six parts/sections of 6 chapters each. That fell by the wayside as Part 1 came out as 12 chapters. So it was revised to 3 parts at 12 chapters each. But Part 2 has now reached chapter 25, and is not finished yet. I had to do a re-planning session on Friday, to see where it would end and it's going to be around 30. 

But do you know what - I don't mind. I was a little bit uncertain at the outset that it was going to prove possible to plan the whole book from beginning to end, and I have been proved right. Characters do things you don't want them to do, or didn't intend them to do. Situations change and develop; something you thought made sense to do now doesn't. To me that is an organic process and it means that the characters and the situations have taken a hold of you. The characters aren't puppets that you just manipulate - go there, do this - they have a life of their own, and as they grow and develop (hopefully) so they help to decide their own path. The intended route and outline of the book stays the same, the direction of travel, the end point, some of the key scenes and climaxes, but a whole bunch of twists and turns (and serendipitous opportunities) emerge as you go along. I would be daft to ignore them. 

So hopefully Part 2 will be finished before too long, and actually I'm now thinking that Part 3 will be slightly shorter than planned. It feels like a really huge momentum is building, which will hopefully make the last part rip along. And I will surf that wave, I hope.

My site: http://www.greatproject.co.uk/

Another Rejection

Just got a rejection from Sparkling Books today. That was the quickest ever, less than a week since I submitted sample chapters and an outline through their online form. Well, at least they are quicker than some. I got turned down by Pilrig Press two weeks ago, and I think I submitted to them something like nine months earlier. I still have one current submission to hear from, to Snowbooks, who feel like a good fit to me - they have a fantasy and 'Steampunk' range, some of which involve re-imagined histories. And of course I continue to wait to hear from Luath, the Edinburgh publishers. They requested the full manuscript, but I then haven't heard from them for over six months, more. 

On the whole the online submissions tend to respond quicker - and most of them want submission online now it seems. The online form, such as Sparkling Books use seems aimed at weeding the no thankyous out more quickly, so maybe that is why they responded so fast. Plus they only wanted one chapter, whereas most others ask for three.

The rejections don't hurt as much now as they did at first, though they all carry a small sting. Almost always they say the same thing - 'like it but not for us, too many books too little time, yadda, yadda'. Which is fair enough, except that the similarity of the responses robs them of any comfort. If someone said 'read your chapters, they were crap, don't want the book' that would actually be better feedback. Thing is I don't think they are crap, or the book, and I think it really is a matter of getting the right fit and the right timing. But then I would say that, wouldn't I? 

The key thing is not to lose confidence. I am 100% confident that my book is great. The reader feedback I have had tells me that. My own instincts tell me that. So I am unshaken in my core belief that I have a great book. Self-publishing looms nearer.

My site: http://www.greatproject.co.uk/

Work in Progress

First blog post - reporting how things are going. I'm at work on the follow-up to The Great Project at the moment which in fact will be a prequel, looking at events before 1570, and dealing in an indirect way with how the Magister came to be possessed of the Dragon. 

The working title for the new book is The Perilous City, which is a quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson, describing Edinburgh. I started work on the book in earnest at the beginning of August 2013 and progress is good. I'm keeping to my usual quota (for part-time writing) of 4,000 words a work and roughly a chapter a week. At the moment I am rounding off chapter 25, and the word count is currently sitting at about 110,000. The novel is in three parts and I'm nearing the end of part 2. I should be done with that by the middle of February. Then part 3, with an intended completion date somewhere around the end of April, and a likely word count of 160-170,000. Too much, I know, but then the serious editing work begins. I'm hoping to take anything up to a quarter of the content out, and in the process tighten and improve things. 

My original aim was to have this as a smaller, more self-contained novel than the two parts of The Great Project, but somehow it hasn't worked out that way yet. Like everything I write it has grown like topsy, even though I planned this one quite thoroughly. However, I enjoy that element of organic growth in writing, and I wouldn't want it to be any other way. 

My site: http://www.greatproject.co.uk/