Writing – art imitating life.

Romeo! Romeo! Hurry up it’s fucking draughty up here!

This has the potential to be a slightly embarrassing subject for me, but I thought I’d go for it anyway. I have this mole…

I don’t have a mole. Sorry, couldn’t resist, but I use humour as a defence mechanism. Seriously. Only last week I smacked a burglar with a joke book…

That didn’t happen. Anyway, this could go one of two ways. Other writers could read this and say “actually, I do that too” or there could be some pointing and laughing involved. Either way, I would strongly advise you to consider trying your hand at a little acting.

Dialogue can be tricky because these characters don’t speak like you, they are NOT you (at least not all of them) and their dialogue has to flow naturally. It has to feel real; it has to sound like the sort of thing a person might say at that moment and in that context. Darth Vader’s famous, “No. I am your father,” line is a fantastic example. This is a PIVOTAL moment in that movie and the franchise as a whole and, I’d be willing to bet, one of the most commonly (and incorrectly) quoted lines of dialogue of all time. Spot the difference a moment:

“No. I am your father.”

“Actually you labour under a misapprehension. It is I that must claim parental responsibility.’

How shit does that second one sound? Of course, no-one would have written that line of dialogue and it’s an over-blown example of what I mean, but what if it was a close run thing? What if it was a tossup between that and “I did not kill your father. I AM your father.” That’s not half bad, but which is more natural? Which sounds like a retort and which one sounds like a carefully prepared line? See, the line was spontaneous. Darth didn’t sit up all night, looking in the mirror and going over the possibilities for when he bumped into his son. “Actually, funny story… no, that’s not right. Your father is I! No no no, that’s not it! PUT THAT LIGHTSABRE DOWN AND GO TIDY YOUR FUCKING ROOM! Is that something a father would say? Oh I don’t know… maybe I should ask Palpatine…”

He had it in mind that now was the time to do the big reveal, but that line was delivered like a blade. In that moment, with Luke at his mercy, he finished the deal with five words that lead to the girliest scream in cinematic history. That line is perfect in that context and as such, it is one of the most easily recognisable lines ever delivered, even to people born years after the first three films were made.

Now, my characters are somewhat… caustic. My universes are unforgiving and the trials I put my protagonists through… horrible. These people are hammered by life in a way that I simply can’t relate to off the top of my head all the time so I’ve gotten used to saying “right, that doesn’t work” and acting the lines out to my shadow like a scene partner. Sure, you feel like a bit of a prick at first (I don’t do this when anyone is around) and it’s so tempting to scream “Gimme the keys you fucking cock-sucker-mother-fucker-aaaaaaaaargh!” but once I’ve had a few moments, I can usually tell whether or not something works. Has the speaker just been punched in the face? Trying delivering that long line while cradling your swollen jaw. Try speaking at length when you’re gasping for breath after a run. Trying firing that retort quickly and seeing how it feels.

Of course our protagonists have the luxury that everything they say has already been filtered by you, the writer, so it isn’t as spontaneous as it sounds, but believe me, this is a fantastic way to make it sound the way you want it to. Soon enough you’ll be able to get right into that character’s shoes without having to do any amateur dramatics at all, but it’s a great technique to refer back to.

Other than dialogue, I would definitely recommend this for fight scenes. I have the luxury of a modest degree of fighting ability and a comfortable knowledge of technique, so I know roughly what moves link one to another. Most of you with common sense will have worked out that you generally can’t deliver a knock-out blow as you’re flying backwards away from the target. You know that if you’ve taken a knee to the stomach you are NOT likely to do much more than go WOOMPH and bend over like an enthusiastic soap hunter, unless you have justified such a capability within the story.

Stand up and act out each strike, block, parry and counter attack in super-slow-motion and see if it’s possible. Go through the motions, make it real and be rewarded by breathing a shit-load of realism into your work. Watch UFC videos on Youtube, do your research and you won’t go far wrong. Prime example: elbow strikes. Seen those in movies, where a guy gets six elbows to the face in quick succession and stumbles back but, unbleeding, continues to fight? Bullshit. Think of the skinniest, least threatening kid at your school and think of the toughest. That kid, connecting ONE solid elbow to the face, probably just won that fight. No shit you have NO IDEA how much power a knee or elbow can deliver and believe me, you want to find out by watching it happen to someone else or not at all.

That’s it for today so the message is this: learn by doing. Sure you’ll feel a right prat if someone walks in and catches you at it, but hey… I bet there’s a least one thing you do regularly that you wouldn’t want to be caught doing and at least this is productive…

Writing that masterpiece and doing what’s right for you.

Everyone thought this was shit. Hopefully you won’t have to die before people recognise your genius.

I’ve been caught up in a project for some time now; far longer than an editor would be happy to wait for me to complete it. By now I would probably have either been black-balled or had my ass kicked for taking a ridiculous amount of time to finish a simple novella. Luckily for me though, I don’t have an editor! Haha! Fuck you Mr Hypothetical editor! Up yer arse with knobs on!

Don’t misunderstand me, especially any editors reading this (you’re all wonderful, just like those agent people I’ve heard about and I think you should all get medals. And hours of foreplay delivered by the True Blood character of your choice. Doffing cap now and fucking off back onto the point. Ahem.) it would be fantastic to have an editor and be properly published as a novelist but at the moment, I’m still a rookie. Perhaps more appropriately, I would say that I consider myself an apprentice.

A masterpiece isn’t a genre-defining piece of work. A masterpiece is the project that an apprentice would present to their master to prove that their training was complete and that they were now ready to become a master themselves. That, as far as I’m concerned, is what my first novel is going to be. Though it started as a novella, with the hopes of self-publishing it and then writing a series of novels based in that same universe, it has since grown to the point that it will become my first novel and the piece of work with which I intend to sell myself. It’s basically my book-pimp and I’m its private dancer, hanging around on metaphorical corners with my pen hanging out.

A lot of writers spend a huge amount of time picking up projects, putting them down, polishing them and generally changing their minds about what they want to do. I’ve been there and I know I could name several others who have and while it’s frustrating, it seems to be a natural part of the process. So don’t get pissed off and lose faith if you keep flitting from one thing to another, deliberating about what you want to do. The world of literature is vast and is only going to get bigger as people have new ideas, new trends appear and old ones resurface, with new writers adding to them endlessly. You will find your niche eventually so don’t feel you have to rush off in one direction and stick with it, even if you feel you’ve taken the wrong path. Would you do that with any other job? I don’t think so. Unless you’re a bit strange. If you are, good for you. Now get away from me…

Though most writers will tell you to focus on your work and finish it I, in my humble opinion, think that the most important thing to do is remain proactive and remain positive. It’s not good to keep on and on twiddling to the point that you are stagnating as a writer and it’s not good to get bogged down in something that isn’t going anywhere. Maybe it will if you keep going, maybe it won’t, but if you’re getting frustrated with it and keep farting around with it, it’s incredibly unlikely that the result will be your best work. Put it down, take a break to do something else and come back to it later. Maybe get someone to read what you’ve done and have a good old chat about it. Maybe make them some tea. Maybe do a sexy dance. I don’t bloody know how you coerce people into reading your drivel! Stop looking at me like that! I’m married so I just get my wife to do it. Hey she expects me to put out so it’s the least she can do.

Anyhoo…

If you find your attention wandering it’s possible that you need a breather. Maybe you need a change of scenery. Maybe you’re writing the wrong thing. The point, which as usual I’ve taken a circuitous route in getting to, is that you needn’t be afraid to say “fuck it, this isn’t working” and ditch what you’ve done. I’d urge you not to throw it away because it will be great to refer back to either for ideas or to see how far you’ve come in a year or two, but that’s another point for another day. In the short term it’s fine to hop from one thing to another as long as you’re searching for your groove, but be aware of one simple fact: identifying a project that you can see through from the planning stage to being submitted as a high quality draft is a skill that EVERY successful writer has. When you ditch something, know why. Understand what didn’t work and don’t repeat it. By knowing what doesn’t work and why, you will move closer to being where you want to be. Learn from your mistakes and improve or you won’t get there, but don’t put yourself under pressure to write that amazing novel immediately and be gutted when it doesn’t go the way you expect.

A large number of the unpublished writers I know have a damned good shot at getting published one day and, just so long as you treat your apprentice years as the learning curve that they are, you have every chance of getting there too.
If you get there and realise that this advice has helped you, you own me money. Bitch.

The Importance of Freeing Norris.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find that at times, being a naturally creative person SUCKS. There’s nothing wrong with referring to yourself as creative by the way, you don’t even have to be good at anything to be creative, you just need to have that urge to make stuff where there was previously no stuff. It’s a free-to-join club that simply lets you say to the world hey, I want to add to you, and that’s a pretty cool club to be in. It’s better than being destructive, though now actually I think we should call a vote that allows me to ban people who want to make stuff as in “smoking craters in the ground where there was previously stuff” from the club. Or at least they should have their own night and hold their meetings in a subterranean lair that can withstand a nuclear blast from the inside.

And that, my good people (and assorted pricks, I’m being inclusive here) is a fair example of what I mean. Creativity isn’t like a lot of other aspects of a person’s makeup in that creativity just won’t leave you the fuck alone. It’s always there at the back of your mind, telling you to do stuff, invent stuff or just prodding at you with ideas and images that you should TOTALLY use for stuff later on. Your creative mind (hereafter referred to as “Norris”) is basically sat there with a sheet of sugar paper the size of a universe and a Pritt Stick the size of my schlong (helloooooo ladies) urging you to turn your life, your friends, your family and everything around you into one giant collage. That would have totally been a poetic reference without the dick joke. Damn it, Norris! Back in your basket.

I find being creative to be, at times, enormously frustrating. Like most of us I work regular hours, have a regular schedule and in general do things as regularly as a clockwork ass. Norris, on the other hand, doesn’t work that way. Norris likes to shout things at random when I’m trying to get to sleep, which usually results in me having to wake up, reach over to the BlackBerry and email these things to myself so that Norris will go back to thinking about pornography and let me go back to sleep. Norris also likes to yell things at me during phone calls to boring members of the public or while I’m driving, while I’m doing something I actually get paid for or, with rather embarrassing regularity, when I’m on the toilet. I now with absolute honesty take my BlackBerry with me every time I go to the toilet and, I’m sorry to say, that every one of you that has read more than a couple of pieces of my work has almost certainly taken a little mental jaunt with me to wherever my mind goes when I’m on the toilet. But don’t blame me, blame Norris.
Sometimes, for me at least, having Norris on my shoulder at all hours of the day can colour things in my routine rather darkly. It makes me feel like I’d rather be anywhere other than at work and doing something that I feel I was born to do, rather than something that, while I enjoy doing it, is something that I do for practical reasons and to put food on the table. This isn’t a stab at work, I’ll have you know, because it has been the same with every job I have ever had regardless of my level of enjoyment within that position. The fact seems to be that Norris simply does not do well with an imposed structure and, at times, seems to actively rebel against it. The greater the level of external control within my environment, the harder Norris pushes against his restraints and tries to get me the hell out of there, leaving me very frustrated and unfulfilled by anything other than pouring these ideas and flights of fantasy out onto paper.

This isn’t all a bad thing but at times I’m certain that it makes life difficult for all owners of a Norris, who is constantly trying to draw their eyes away from their Excel spread sheet so he can have a look out of the window. It leads to resentment and to itchy feet, combined with a longing to escape that you are neither willing or really able to fulfil when you have commitments, such as family, that are far more important to you in real terms than the screaming, demanding Norris that won’t leave you alone.

So what does this mean for those of us on the nine-to-five grind? (I’m on eight to five, you bloody part-timer). It certainly doesn’t mean that you have to suffer endlessly with that voice in your ear and that constant tapping on your shoulder, but it does mean that you need to find an outlet. It isn’t easy to make time for that creative output when you have a career, a family and all of the other commitments that most of us have, but if you want to shut Norris up for long enough to let you get on with your life free of interruptions and the stress that comes with the horrible feeling of being trapped that you sometimes experience, you have to find some. If that means half an hour of frantic typing of an evening or relentless scribbling of notes during your lunch break then do it. Keep a pad of paper to hand to jot those notes on (just so long as it doesn’t take you away from your actual job for more than a few seconds), keep ideas on your phone or put up a whiteboard in your bathroom. Maybe you won’t have time to write, draw, paint, sing, perform or achieve everything that your Norris wants you to, but by adding that pressure relief valve to your world you will at least be able to take the edge off.

The more time you make for Norris, the better off you will be, though I’m not telling you for a moment to drop everything and indulge fully in your passion when you have bills that need paying unless Norris is in a position to pay those bills for you. You have nothing to feel guilty about if you have a Norris on your shoulder and you certainly do not have to feel like a failure for slogging away at the grindstone with the rest of us, even when you feel you should be holed up in a shack somewhere drawing a picture of a squirrel that should grace the walls of the Louvre. Creative output is good for the soul and utterly essential to those of us who have creativity in our veins.

Whatever the avenue you choose, good luck, I hope you find a way to shut the little bastard up, because I know my own Norris is driving me insane. That said, since I started writing a daily blog, taking more notes, completed another draft of my novella and hammered out the plans for more creative writing over the rest of this year and well into the next, he’s been giving me a lot less hassle. He’s even been quite affectionate of late, for a hypothetically constructed creativity daemon.

Perhaps all he really wanted was to be let out to play.

Just fucking DO IT.

I was going to blog about family today. I was going to talk about working your writing around your children, your career and your home life in pursuit of one day being able to call yourself an actual writer and not a pretender or a hobbyist, but I’m not going to do that. Not today, at least, because there is only one thing in my life today that I can bring myself to even consider writing about, and that is just getting your head down and writing when you feel like you really don’t want to.

Right now, as I write this, I’m at work. It’s lunch time, I have a sweet potato and some chicken, and I want to throw them across the room. Things are not going my way, people are asking me questions and not listening to the answers, I feel thoroughly trapped and that is ALL that is stopping me from trashing my desk and walking out.

I am looking at the stats for my blog and realising that those closest to me, with a handful of exceptions, are singularly uninterested in reading anything that I’ve written. They don’t take the time to read the blog, to take an interest in my writing, my hopes, my dreams or my interests. They didn’t say anything when I got published for the first time, don’t respond to any mentions of my recent advances or successes, don’t voice any form of support at any time and are in no way helping me to achieve my dreams of being a writer, full time or otherwise.

Is this a tantrum? Nope. This isn’t me trying to get any help or attention because, as I’ve already said, I KNOW those people won’t ever read this, only those who do support me will, plus the randoms from the internet who happen upon my blog by whatever means.

To those fine people, thank you. I really do appreciate everything you’ve done, the small gestures of love and support and believe me, those are invaluable to me, but this isn’t why I’m writing this. I’m writing this to say that there will be days when you want to smash things, throw things, scream a massive “fuck you” into the face of those that are making things harder for you, and on those days you may well not want to write. Maybe someone’s upset you or you’ve had bad news, maybe you’re just not in the mood, whatever. Write.

Maybe you can’t bring yourself to write what you’ve started? Fine. Write something else. Maybe you’re too mind-bogglingly happy to write about the harrowing sex-crime that you’re in the middle of detailing. Fine, go write about fluffy bunnies. Maybe you’re too pissed off to tell the world about how Cotton-balls and Mr Plim are having such jolly japes at the Wiggly-Piggle Circus. Fine! Write about feeding Piers Morgan into a bacon slicer. Just WRITE.

Writing is freedom. It’s also captivity. If you want to do it and be successful at it, by whatever measure of success you are applying to yourself, you have to just keep on doing it. Don’t spend your life reading lists of spurious facts that will make you a success, just go out like anything else in life you want and fucking GRAB IT. Bleed for it, live for it, do it because it is what you have to do. Pour your heart, blood, sweat, tears, fury and sadness into it. Nurture and love it while you curse it and wish it would die. A real story that lives and breaths and is honest is a sliver of your soul distilled in prose. You can’t create something so vital and truthful by waiting to write until a day comes along where you feel wonderful and everything is going your way.

If you do, you’ll never, ever fulfil your potential.

Characters – an endless parade of bastards.

Prior warning: Today’s blog entry is brought to you by a tired, irrational and somewhat exhausted Alec. He may bite if startled.

Ever heard of a Mary-Sue character? If you have, well, tough. Go on, smart ass, fuck off to Wikipedia and read about Latvian Gorilla-Llamas for a few minutes while the adults are talking.

Basically a Mary-Sue character is an idealised version of the writer, with all the strengths they lack and without their weaknesses, or something. There’s some debate about precisely what makes a character a Mary-Sue as opposed to a boring, overpowered cretin of some other creed, but frankly this is the definition that suits my current aims. If there was a door, I’d be directing the disgruntled towards it at this moment. Just poke yourself in the eye and kick yourself firmly up the arse and we’ll pretend I’ve just evicted you from the blog, ok?

The point is, don’t write a Mary-Sue. Unless you’re including one for a good reason other than polishing your own cock (or lady cock) they’re a dull, lazy way to write a character that smacks far more of self-indulgence than it does of creativity. Filling the pages of a book with a Mary-Sue is almost rude, it’s almost a form of masturbation and frankly I don’t want you flopping your wedding tackle out where I am forced to look at it.

What we need, or at least what I need, are flaws. That doesn’t mean Kryptonite, before any rabid Superman fan-boys approach, flapping their limp-wristed, clammy little hands in my general direction. Look to the mundane and go from there. Is your character unspeakably badass? Are they the sort of person who could kick the asses of 90% of the population unarmed? Fine! That’s cool, just hamper them enough to make them interesting.

For example:

Meet Jimmerz. Jimmerz is a boxing champion, billionaire, super-genius philanthropist who is capable of anything. Sound interesting? Maybe, at first, but now imagine meeting him. He’s tougher than you, better looking than you, smarter and funnier than you. Though your wife would swear different if she’d had to choose her partner from what’s on paper, she’d be doing him now and not you. And yeah, he’s bigger than you too. In that way.

You would HATE him. Or become his Igor or something, if you swing that way. Loser.

Add any flaw, any flaw at all to the above, and it will make him more interesting. Again, for example;

Meet Jimmerz. Jimmerz is a boxing champion, billionaire, super-genius philanthropist who is capable of anything. Sound interesting? Maybe, at first, but now imagine meeting him. He’s tougher than you, better looking than you, smarter and funnier than you. Though your wife would swear different if she’d had to choose her partner from what’s on paper, she’d be doing him now and not you. And yeah, he’s bigger than you too. In that way. But his left nut is haunted by a former chancellor of the exchequer who constantly screams his latest budget ideas at the top of his lungs.

Or he’s got a radioactive nipple. Or no elbows. Or an ostrich growing out of his ass.

ANYTHING is more interesting than a god made flesh, so for the love of crap don’t make one. There’s no need to just write someone incredible and insert a dark past or something obvious, but remember that characters are people, and people suck. We’ve all got something wrong with us, from the mundane to the harrowingly dreadful, and it is often what is wrong with us that makes us interesting. Sometimes, like it or not, it’s the presence of flaws that make people comfortable in our presence. They equalise us and provide us with opportunities to improve and to learn. They inform and direct us as people and they are essential to your stories.

Without flaws, what are your characters overcoming? Nothing. What are they learning? Very little. Why should we care? We shouldn’t, not even for a moment.

Now, bugger off and write something. I’m going back to sleep.

The importance of inspiration.

Sitting there, scratching your head, simply is not likely to work. Not forever, anyway. No matter how fertile your imagination might be, sooner or later you will run out of ideas, you’ll lose that spark of ingenuity and your brain will need topping up and this, my delightful sun dodgers, will mean going outside, reading, listening to music or doing something else to reinvigorate your exhausted noggin.

For me, my most recent foray into blatantly stealing ideas from my environment was yesterday’s Steampunk festival and I can tell you, it’s given me some fantastic ideas. You see, at events like that everybody is working from the same brief. Come dressed up if you so wish, the theme is Steampunk. It’s a mish-mash of old and new, with Victorian influences, a dollop of HG Wells and a smattering of Isumbard Kingdom-Brunel to create something totally unique and interesting, all for the sheer hell of doing it.

I personally lean towards the military aspect as I’m sure you might have guessed, but this isn’t about me. It isn’t really even about Steampunk or about anything in particular; it’s simply about how the environment can charge your mind with ideas at random and how other people’s ways, dress and behaviour can create images in your head with only the token effort of note taking and a touch of observation. For example, yesterday there were pith helmets, militaria, gypsy dress, jet packs, all manner of bizarre weapons (mostly wielded by some very well behaved and thoroughly cheerful children, which immediately spawned a race of gun-wielding diminutives from somewhere or other), some fantastic gizmos and an assortment of goggles anyone would be proud of, all of which sparked different ideas for my upcoming novels or at least became notes for potential use later on.

It isn’t like I was sat there with a notebook all day, in fact I was joining in and having a great time while my brain refilled itself all of its own accord, though my trusty BlackBerry does contain a few things I actually bothered to commit to proper storage. 

Rambling as always but the message is simple; if you’re out of ideas, don’t sit there pounding your brain as though a boss is likely to appear and fire you for being unforgivably shit, just go and do something else for a while. Go read a book, go for a walk, go take a leak or get a change of scenery. Real life is the inspiration for basically EVERYTHING. If the idea you’re looking for just isn’t in there at the moment, it most definitely is out there. Somewhere. Just go have a look.

An outdoor festival… and it’s sunny… almost seems too good to be true!

Steampunk isn’t exactly something I’m that familiar with or that involved with from the point of view of dressing up, but there is certainly something about the combination of old, new and futurism that appeals to me as a writer. Taking many apparently disparate ideas and mixing them together produces such surprising results and leads to all new avenues of thinking, so it has to be said that I’m really looking forward to our trip to the “Steampunks in Springtime” festival, event thingy over in Laddock today, organised by our friend Seraphina Sprocket-Twitcher (who also goes by the name “Abby,” but in a community it’s good to have a name that immediately announces what you’re about when people first hear it, especially when you’re trying to organise things.)

I don’t think I’m ever likely to dress up in as intricate a fashion as some of the community do, but it does present an interesting opportunity for self expression and having a bit of a laugh, possibly at my own expense, so I’ve dutifully put together a costume that at least shouldn’t make me stand out too much while being far more interested really in seeing how everyone else dresses up, hopefully giving me a little inspiration for future writing projects and characters. It’s also given me an excuse to paint a Nerf gun up in Steampunk fashion (I think, I’m certainly no expert) and it’s come out very nicely indeed as I’m hoping you’ll agree.

For those who may be interested, there is a very slight Steampunk vibe in my novella “Spares,” which I should be self-publishing in the next month or two and a considerably larger Steampunk vibe to come in the three novels that follow on from it. I decided that rather than throwing myself into that style of writing from the get-go my protagonists, faced with being cut off from resources and modern technology, turn back to basic industrial ingenuity in order to prepare for a war that they have no chance to avoid. So if you like the idea of the undead combining some incredibly unpleasant surgery with the sort of thing Brunel would have probably kept in his tinkering shed, they may well be for you. If not you may want to block this blog, my FaceBook page and my Twitter account, as when they’re written and I’m trying to get them published, I’m going to be talking about them A LOT.

Enjoy today, because this weather isn’t going to last!

To milestones. Hip-hip, somethingorother.

Today is a milestone day for me. Well, the milestone itself technically came yesterday, but while the completion of a project might make you want to celebrate, it also sometimes makes you want to slump. I chose the latter, in as much as it’s possible to slump a few hours before waddling off to my Thursday evening Muay Thai class.

As usual, I digress. I’ll probably do so again in a moment.

I completed a full chapter-by-chapter plan for my first novel, currently entitled “Lucher,” yesterday afternoon. So ok, it’s a part of a project as opposed to the project itself, but there is a very good reason for this being a milestone for me that is perhaps greater than the completion of a piece of writing in and of itself: I never plan anything.

Beyond a swirling vortex of notes on paper, my computers at home and at work, my laptop and my BlackBerry, there is never anything resembling a structure on which to pin my ideas, an idea of where I’m going or how I’m going to get there. I’m a disorganised mess in many aspects of my life and it has served me very well, or at least it did up until the point where I had a family and decided that somehow, more was expected of me. This has rubbed off on me from my wife who is super organised, makes lists, keeps large sections of my brain in her diary and generally is the scaffolding that holds our family together. I won’t gush but she’s brilliant and, thankfully, quite tolerant of my slightly erratic nature. Very fond of my wife. I’ll probably name the planet after her once I take over.

It’s not all bad though; it isn’t that I don’t get things done it’s just that I have a very direct approach to things in general. Life’s planners are often highly valued and rightly so, as they make the world go around and keep the buses running on time (har-de-har-har) and that is a strength that my wife has in abundance. I, on the other hand, have an entirely different skill set. If you want to organise a music festival (for example), Kat would find a way. She would remember to book the porta-loos, would get estimates on the numbers expected and how many cars to prepare for and would have ample first aiders on hand. All the required permits and licensing would be dealt with and for every eventuality she would have a contingency, within reason, that would make the whole thing a success. She’d also have organised a clean up crew and would leave the place as she found it, with everyone having been paid and having fully enjoyed themselves.

But what if aliens invaded during Iron Maiden’s encore?

That’s where people like me come in. I would probably make a reasonable go at the organisation if I put my mind to it, but it would cause a major headache for me as it goes against my nature. Kat would have it all running smoothly until the first mothership loomed overhead, and then she would phone me. I’m the sort of person you drop into the centre of unmitigated chaos and then stand back and let them get on with it. I think on my feet, deciding on solutions and dishing out tasks to other people and shooting from the hip, grabbing anarchy by its dreadlocked testicles and pounding it with sheer determination until it gives up and does as it’s bloody told.

When things go wrong, I’m your man. When you want to plan something so it probably won’t go wrong, Kat’s your lady, and between us there is nothing we can’t manage.

But, ever eager to improve myself, I thought I’d give this planning thing a go, and I have to admit that it has gone fairly well.

It isn’t the super-anal, well thought out and bullet-pointed sort of a plan that some other people seem to swear by, but it’s certainly a happy medium that will make writing this novel considerably easier for me. It’s very “stream of consciousness,” not a little disjointed and quite scrappy in places, but it undoubtedly plots the entire story from beginning to end with all of the appropriate stops, character points and even some “witty” dialogue options inserted along the way. It isn’t the sort of thing I would send to an editor who insisted upon seeing one (let’s hope I can avoid that for the time being) but it represents a point of personal and, hopefully, professional growth for me as a writer, and as a person.

This may be the last of these that I ever write but it might well also be the first of many. This could mark a failed experiment in altering my approach to my work or it might represent an epiphany that leads to a smoother, more productive creative process for me. I’m betting on the latter, and it has to be said that I have my wife’s example to thank for that.

While I’ve got you here…

Quick blog-plug for all-round good egg and Mslexia runner up Nichola Vincent-Abnett, who is celebrating her 100th blog post! She’s written a blog every day for the last 100 days and I think you may enjoy them.

http://www.nicolavincent-abnett.com/

The curse of the expansive slush pile; a self published blog by Alec McQuay.

It’s a frustrating time to be a writer, no doubt. Whether dedicating every waking moment to the putting of words onto paper or chipping occasionally away at that manuscript between feeding a baby and juggling a forty hour working week, the world and his/her wife seems to be writing that novel we’ve all supposedly got inside us.

This has a variety of consequences, not all of them good. Editors have slush piles at risk of avalanche, small publishers are springing up and publishing works that lie anywhere from the incredibly good to the absolutely pants-shittingly awful both in writing ability and editorial quality and, thanks to the dubious wonder that is the shopping and porn-drenched wasteland of the internet, we also have the phenomenon of the self published writer. People have been self publishing for years of course, but never before has it been so simple. Within moments even the dullest of semi-literate fuckwits can have their name on Amazon as a “published” author, complete with or without any form of editorial process and in return for a small quantity of your money should you wish to buy.

Cool, huh? Well… it really depends on how you look at it.

Becoming a professional, semi-professional or at least published author in the traditional sense can be incredibly daunting and it really isn’t easy, and it shouldn’t be easy. Self publishing is fantastic as it can provide an audience for those who are starting out, can provide the truly great writer with a larger return on their time and effort in the form of considerably larger royalties and it has that awesome indie vibe, like unsigned bands playing in dismal bars in return for free beer for the evening and perhaps a kebab if they’re not totally shit. It’s fun, it’s a bit cool and feels a little edgy to me and all of those points are great, but in self publishing you really do have a “diamonds in shite” situation. The cream will rise to the top and the muck will sink to the bottom, as will those who publish but fail to promote and don’t maintain their presence. Getting it out there and getting it sold are two different things, and doing it for a living is something else altogether, but it can be done. This all, of course, alters the state of the competition.

Slush piles are growing larger, inboxes are crammed to the gunwales and the signal to noise ratio is not necessarily favourable. In a world where word processors and spellcheckers do a fair amount of turd-polishing on our behalf for a sincere and hard working writer on the up-and-up, it can all be a tiring, long winded and unrewarding experience to get their beautifully honed manuscript through the massive wall of crap and get it onto the desk of the person best placed to get it published. Jumping up and down at the back of the crowd is not a pleasant experience for anyone, particularly when we know that a large percentage of our competition is utter dross (a bit of literary X-Factor I suppose) and has no business in being submitted in its current amateurish, poorly planned, badly executed and almost totally unedited form.

My point? It’s a bit of a ramble of course because this is a complex issue that isn’t going away any time soon, but the whole thing makes me smile. Sure the playing field has changed and we have to shout above the noise to be heard, but we also have to makes sure that our manuscript really jumps out at the poor bastard tasked with reading through the tottering heap in the inbox. It presents a greater challenge to overcome and yes, it lengthens the process considerably, but frankly I am so, so pleased to live in a world where so many people are writing, whatever the quality of it may be.

All I ever heard as a child was that children were rude, ill mannered, dirty, lazy little wastrels. As a teenager we were all stoned, violent, barely literate, sexually charged thieves and compulsive masturbators. As a young adult my kind were lethally poor drivers, scrounging dole money from the government and popping out children at a rate that would alarm any self-respecting rabbit. I was looking on to my thirties as an overweight, football shirt wearing, heavy drinking, chain smoking, thuggish moron. In my mid-life I would be glued to my sofa while my teenage children picked up where I left off and I could focus my efforts on becoming older, more and more miserable and complaining that things were not “like they were in my day.” All to the constant glow and throbbing background noise of the television.

But do you know what? Children are reading. So are teenagers, young adults, adults, middle aged people and the elderly, of both sexes. A great many of them are so inspired by the world around them, the world that they see on TV, the music they hear and the books that they read that they are writing about it. Reading and writing have positively exploded in the last few years and I, for one, could not be happier about it.

So yes, it makes it harder for the writer to get published, but as far as I’m concerned the best of us will be the ones that get the good deals, the best pay days and the greatest exposure.

Cream floats and shit sinks, for the most part. Of course you’ll get the odd floater from time to time, but you can’t please everyone.

Apologies for the numerous comparisons between dairy products and faeces. I’ll adjust them during the editorial process…

Progress report on “Spares” and the following novel.

Well I’ve been busy, to say the very least. The novella is very nearly complete and I am simply awaiting feedback from a couple of truly wonderful people (cheques are in the mail, honest) before I can get it totally polished, completed, formatted and ready to publish, which I intend to do via the self publishing route.

Other projects have been leaping up and down in my field of vision but I’ve swatted those aside in favour of going straight into the novel itself, so that when I come to actually publish the novella the novel will be very much in progress. I get the feeling that it won’t take too long to write either, given the level of information and inspiration I have for this book, and I hope to be able to make it available to agents and publishers at some point in either late 2012 or early 2013. The novella will be on sale and will serve as an introduction to the world I’ve created but, of course, the novel will be written in such a way that you won’t have to have read the novella for it all to make sense. I’m doing this in the main to ensure that when I approach an agent or publisher, they won’t be given a product that makes no sense without something published elsewhere, from which they will possibly never see a penny. If I can persuade them to include it as a promotional download or similar than I will, because the novella is a story in its own right and adds something to the story, but no-one’s going to be scratching their heads if they don’t ever see it.

Cool, huh?

In the meanwhile I’m busily planning away and have the beginning of the novel plotted and ready for writing, shifting everything forward several years and shifting the focus of the novel away from the first person and into more familiar third person territory.

Over the next few months I’ll keep you all posted with updates, samples and any news I have about the progress of the novella reaching the weird, digital shelves of Amazon and the like.

You never know, this could just work.