Musical Inspiration
A lot of people have asked me a lot of questions about writing, most of which I do not have the answers to as I am still very much learning about this myself, but “where do stories come?” from and “how do you get them on the page?” are the most common two. The answer to the first is: no clue. You either have stories in you or you don’t, and if you do, you HAVE to get them out; its not optional. As to how you get them on the page, well, largely you just go for it, get it horribly wrong, sink into despair, drink your way out and start all over again. Whilst doing this though, I found it very helpful to gather together a collection of music tracks that would become my soundtrack for what I was working on at the time. These didn’t give me inspiration or help me generate ideas, but they do let me keep focus, keep in the mood a given chapter needs or keep in the mindset of a character.
To that end, I have playlists set up for both books I have written (and one for the screenplay) and ones for each thing I am planning to write in the future. I shared the playlist for The Keepers of the Fire with a friend and he found it interesting, so I thought others might too.
Be warned: my taste in music is very broad so there is a right mixed old bag of stuff here. Also, while I will avoid spoilers wherever possible, I have given some indication as to what each song means and I cannot promise that said comments won’t provide hints (nothing major though: I swear!).
The Keepers of the Key
(Spotify Playlist Link)
Warrior’s Dance – The Prodigy
This track, particularly the opening phrase, became the theme song for J and Amélien. Whenever either of those characters are about to do something, or even when they just “come into shot” I hear this music in my head. It is especially poignant at the end of the book when J is confronting a certain something in a carpark…)
Mechanize – Fear Factory
WARNING! LOUD TRACK! Chapter 65. The docks at Dover =)
Bells For Her – Tori Amos
J and Alice. I’M NOT CRYING, YOU ARE!
A Warm Place – Nine Inch Nails
Dowd, in the snow…
Omen – The Prodigy
Uriel and the Fury.
Flavour – Tori Amos
The end, looking out through that window…
The Keepers of the Fire
(Spotify Playlist Link)
Citizen of the Planet – Alanis Morissette
Rock-climbing, and any time you see her afterwards.
Warrior’s Dance – The Prodigy
Same reasons as book 1 =)
Love the Way You Lie – Eminem, Rhianna
This is…odd, frankly, and shows how books change as you write them. It was originally in my head as a symbol of the tempestuousness between B and N when they lived in A (this will make sense when you get there!) but the relationship never really went that way. The song stuck, however.
Icarus – Michael McCann
B and the mountain =)
Tomorrow – Ozzy Osbourne
This…this is a joke. See if you can work it out (it’s not hard).
Spitfire – The Prodigy
Feiyan (not a spoiler, as you will have no clue who they are till you meet them).
Let You Go – Chase & Status
J takes a walk…downwards =)
Tonight – Skold
Legion being shown some birds and bees.
Then the Quiet Explosion – Hammock
The consequences of being Alexander…
The End of the World – God Forbid
WARNING! REALY LOUD TRACK.
The end of all things…
Far From Home – Five Finger Death Punch
An expression of alienation and loss, that can only have been felt by three specific characters in the book.
Gimme Shelter – The Rolling Stones
J and Mike take a drive.
Johns Walk – Jamin Winans
J makes a choice. (I know this is from a film, but in my head, it fits perfectly.)
Born To Die – Lana Del Rey
“The lie is enough…”
The Keepers of the Fire is out!
Finally! It is done! Link has been added to the top of the page, but here it is again:
So, after 4 years, I am finally done with this story. Yes, there is a third part to write, but there is no force on earth that could make me write that as my next project. More on what’s next in the next blog post…
Silence is good, for once
It means I am working =)
Its been a while since I finished Book 2, but trust me, I have not been idle. Weighing in at nearly 350,000 words, The Keepers of the Fire, is no pamphlet, and giving it a genuine, thorough and constructive editing has been extremely time consuming.
So far, since I finally declared it complete, I have produced 3 pretty different drafts. Large sections were rewritten, new chapters were added, old ones were binned and a whole new ending to the book was crafted. After that, the whole thing needed to be read through to sense check it, then read through again at a much higher scrutiny level to pull out all the typos and check for grammar. By this point, however, I had hit my wall. After more than a few years of writing, followed by nearly half a year of editing, I was completely word blind, unable to find any more errors or do any more useful editing, and so it has been handed off to another.
As has been (every so slightly) ranted about by me before, there is simply no way I can get this professionally proofread, as it would cost well in excess of £10,000, so I am afraid there is no way this process could be sped up. That being said, though, the end is now officially in sight. A few more weeks of final editing are in order, and then it will take me a few days to apply all the marked changes and finalise the book, but after that, I am declaring it done, no matter what. There is simply nothing more I can do, so I shall just have to hope it is in a good enough state that you all don’t tear me apart! =)
I will keep you posted, but I would place money on this being out sometime in mid September.
The Final Leg and a New Journey
And so, the end is near…And all that.
Yes, Keepers of the Fire is just about done now. It is still being read through by some of those that do that sort of thing for me, but by and large, it is good to go. I just need to to finish my last run through then implement the various corrections and minor changes I have highlighted and then renumber all the chapters after my shuffling of them (had to do this FAR too often – must look to finding an automated method for this next time).
So, all things being equal, book 2 of the Keepers Trilogy should be out for you lovely people to buy within the month! Woot!
Which brings me to my second point: what’s next?
The obvious answer would be that I settle down and get The Keepers of the Truth written and finish off the trilogy, but while that book is taking up a sizeable chunk of my brain right now, I think I need a change of pace.
I’m still very much learning and growing as a writer and so I think, if only to keep myself fresh, I will write something different next before returning to polish off the trilogy. At the moment I am working on a screenplay (probably just for the experience of it, I don’t really see myself pitching a TV show to anyone) and I am also finding myself drawn to another story of mine I had a crack at a few years ago.
Whatever happens, I assure you all that The Keepers of the Truth will get written, and that particular adventure will get the conclusion it deserves.
Mind you, none of you have read book 2 yet, so who knows? Maybe you wont want any more? =)
Missing Post Two
And here is the second “missing post”. This was something that was troubling me enormously as I was finishing the book and now, as I prepare to release it, it is frankly troubling me a great deal more…
Typos are becoming the bane of my existence and I fear that they are about to overshadow the release of a work I am really rather proud of, but the reason they will become such an issue is more bothersome than the actual errors themselves.
Let’s be clear, while I am not the world’s greatest wordsmith, I know my grammar and punctuation and I know how to smack the English language around sufficiently well enough to enable me to tell the tale I want to tell, but after the release of the first book, I got a frankly bewildering number of reviews on Amazon that banged on about spelling errors and grammatical mistakes rather than giving me feedback on my work.
I just do not bloody understand that.
Anyone who has read any of my work can see I am at least vaguely competent, you know? I don’t do anything too awful, I don’t throw apostrophes and commas around like confetti and my narrative capabilities are, while still in development, a decent way above the thronging masses of the average eBook: indeed, having read a lot of the more recent and highly successful book series currently available, my opinion of my own writing actually went up!
My point here is that it is not a matter of me being too stupid to edit my own book, it is just a simple fact that typos and grammatical errors will happen in any work of any real length. I could reach for any book from the shelf next to me, open to a random page and probably find something wrong there. Hell, I have a copy of The Lord of the Rings that is the most recent edition and even it has errors in it, and that book has been through the hands of dozens of professional proofreaders.
“Well, why don’t you just get your book proofread?” the Amazon reviews cry: this annoys me even more! I am selling a book for less than a bag of crisps and you are so incensed by me typing ‘form’ instead of ‘from’ that you are unable to continue? I have to ask, with all due respect, what kind of nutter are you? The Keepers of the Key is nearly 200,000 words long! That is longer than The Deathly Hallows, for reference. It is not a short book. I have edited it dozens of times, but after a few reads, you go utterly word-blind to your own work and can only read what should be there, not what is there. As to getting a professional proofreader to give it the once over, I think people are wildly deluded as to how simple that is, so let me offer some numbers.
A proofreader can proofread approximately 1000 words per hour (and that is proofread, not edit) at an average cost of somewhere between £20 and £30 per hour. That means that The KotK would have cost me up to £5000 to be proofread and the KotF would cost me just shy of ten grand. The absolute cheapest price I can find for the service is a “final polish” read-through that will only point out the most obvious of errors, and that would still cost nearly £2000.
I sold book one for 99 cents (69p) per copy and got 20% commission: you do the math.
My point is this: my first book had errors in. My second book, I assure you, will have errors too, though none of them will disrupt your reading. They are both big books. They are both, in my humble opinion, worth both your time and the money I am asking for them. Can we not just cut me a little slack, read on when you spot an error and enjoy the story?
Missing Post One
Well, bless Keep for maintaining a backup of itself – I found the two posts I thought I had lost, so, in the interests of looking like I am doing something, I shall post them:
So, my last post was a little cryptic and…scary, I guess? Sorry about that, and sorry for the lack of updates (and the lack of a Book 2, come to that!). Essentially a whole host of things happened at once, starting with me moving across country and losing a couple of months to general unpacking, building flat-pack furniture and persuading Amazon to stop sending all my bloody parcels to Sheffield (!), but was then made infinitely more complex by me, about 4 months after we moved, suddenly having attacks of simply indescribable pain.
Much to-ing and fro-ing ensued to doctors and hospitals and eventually, a minuscule 10 months later, they diagnosed me as having, as the specialist put it, “a whole shit load” of gallstones in my chest. The little blighters were so numerous that they were essentially popping out every few weeks and, just to keep my attention, one of them decided to get lodged and give me an infected bile-duct.
I was not having fun.
In the end though, the offending organ was removed with extreme prejudice and, aside from some bloody sore points on my chest were a knife-wielding maniac had his way with me, I am all good. Writing picked up once I was out of the worst of it, and I am making good headway to be back on track with Book 2. Will let you know more as it develops!
(Note – as stated, this is an OLD post that got lost. Book 2 is now done and in editing: don’t panic!)
Update about missing updates
So. Yeah. The WordPress Android app apparently let me down and did not in fact post the last two updates I wrote. Also, I cannot recall what they were actually about.
Helpful.
So, anyway… My next book, The Keepers of the Fire, is complete and is just going through some editing and proofreading. I have 2 more small inserts to write and 2 chapters to rewrite (as they are, frankly, icky), but with that done, the book will be complete, and it will simply be a matter of giving it a last read through to make sure the worst of the typos are taken care of!
With any luck, Book 2 will be out to buy on Amazon within the next 4 – 6 weeks! Huzzah!
The Pain of Change
Months have passed, dust has gathered and posts have not been forthcoming, but I will not ramble about wherefores and why. Instead I will talk about something else entirely:
Pain. Pain is something we all know, or at least think we know. I thought I knew it, pain. I thought it was a thing accompanying me throughout this life, scalding me and teaching me, reminding me of failures and showing me what not to do. I have been beaten and battered like so many others, fallen foul of accident and malevolence. I have broken things, sliced things, burned more parts of me that I care to mention, trimmed the ends of digits with poorly wielded kitchen knives and experienced (far more times than I am comfortable admitting) my share of full-body electrocutions. I thought I knew pain, how it looked and felt, of what it tasted and smelled. I thought I knew what it did to you, what it made me think and how it made you act.
I was completely wrong.
By and large, pain is a thing of moments. You may break a leg, a thing that hurts like so many shades of hell, but the worst pain, the locus of your suffering, is that first moment as the snap rings through your body and your brain has a chemical fit. A brightness explodes within you, rushing out via your lungs, but it is as though that release, that expulsion, cleanses you of the worst of it, driving the sharpness away. You may cut yourself, tearing apart skin and tissue, but the ache you feel afterwards is dull, wrapped in haze and uncertainty, the initial burst already becoming nothing more than memory.
Pain is brief and pain fades.
But pain does not have to be like that; pain can be so much more. Pain can wake you up so violently that you are halfway across your bedroom before you even know who you are. It stabs at you, piercing you, sending a blinding wave of heat and acid and nausea rushing through you, lighting up your whole body, your whole mind, from one small spot on your chest. You claw at it, seeking to grab hold, to cradle it, to squeeze it, knowing that just your own touch can bring the pain down, lower the heat, reduce the torment, but you can’t reach. The pain is inside you, and the pain is not letting go.
You try to breathe through to, try to relax, all your years of experience shouting that its “just a pain”, it cannot go on forever; but it does. It rises, higher than you realised possible, dancing and swirling, hammering at you, concussing you with its fury, pulling at you without relent, without mercy, without consideration. You adjust, you steady yourself, you breathe through it once more, but again it rises. After an hour you don’t even realise you are crying as your hands spasmodically scrabble at your chest. After two hours you begin to panic, the waves rolling over you one after another, relentless and apparently inexhaustible. After three, you don’t know time any more, cannot say when it began, cannot imagine it can end. After four you hear the begging, coming in gibbering streams, the words meaningless and hollow, pleading with the universe that it has to stop, uncertain if it is you speaking the words. After five, you doubt yourself and all around you, the light seeming sickly and unreal, the person holding you, steeped in panic, as distant as an actor on the screen, the hollow sound of your animal wails as unconnected as everything else…
Eventually it stops, the ball of nightmares lifting away from your chest, the sound returning to the world as your eyes finally find focus…but nothing is the same. Your mind cannot stop its thoughts: Has it gone? Did it really end? You don’t trust your senses, don’t believe what they are trying to report as your hands still twitch wildly in your lap, your back ever so slightly rocking you to and fro as your eyes slip and slide around the room, the cornered animal within you still fully expecting its next beating. You try to explain, you try to verbalise what you went through, but you cannot; how could you, for you have no clue what happened yourself. You were visited by something, touched by a force, and that force changed you. Days go by and you still cannot snap out of, cannot pull away from the end of the nightmare, the part that grips you just before you wake, where everything has turned to surreality and all that you see is blurred and terrifying, filled with a waiting, unseen darkness. Wrapped tightly on your couch, you wait; wait for the next beating that you fear is due. How far can you move without triggering it? How much can you do with without inviting your tormentors return? Without knowing the cause, without understanding what happened, how can you avoid your fate this time?
But no answers come and you must wait, wait for the passing of hours, of days, of weeks and of months, until you realise you are no longer afraid…but of course, the pain was waiting too, and it is no more merciful the second time…
(Writers note: This was not done for empathy nor for sympathy, but expressly as an exorcism. To be able to describe the trauma you faced is to be able to look at it without emotion. Only then can recovery begin. Normal service will be resumed shortly…)
The Trilogy Effect
Writing is turning out to be a never ending learning process it seems, and the fun fact for today is: Trilogies are damn hard!
It has been a little while since I finished the rewrite/second-edition of The Keepers of the Key and so I have set-to with working on its sequel. After finishing writing Book 1, I thought that Book 2 would be an easier, more carefully thought out process and that I would not fall foul of all the pitfalls that I did first time.
Wrong.
Ever since I settled the plot for Book 1, many years ago now, I have had the “grand plot” reasonably straight in my head. I knew what would happen in the next 2 books, what the over-arching themes would be and which of the characters would return where and for what purpose. With all that in mind I finally got about 50% of the way through writing Book 2 when, thanks to the input of my unpaid, unofficial (though much loved!) editor, I realised that I was going nowhere. My plots were riddled with holes and failings of logic, certain characters lacked any depth or real function within my world and were being tagged along simply out of habit and, generally, I was on a hiding to nowhere.
So, before Book 2 is even anywhere near complete, I am starting a rewrite. About 50% of what I have so far written is being scrapped and I am now pitching at a very different set of themes with a tweaked cast and rather different end-game. How I came to be quite so lost in the wilderness is genuinely beyond me. The notes I have made for this book are 5 times larger than those of Book 1 and while Book 2’s plot is far more complex, I really though I had a handle on it and would be able to just push through, but all that I had thought to be cut, dry and set in stone is rapidly coming undone once I get down to the actual writing.
I know Book 1’s legacy was going to leave me with work to do, as several of the “main” characters were under-formed due to there being simply not enough space to really give everyone their day in court, but I thought the familiarity of already known and liked characters would balance that out. What it in fact has done is made everything ten times harder. When brainstorming for Book 2, this familiarity has essentially bred laziness in me, leading me to conjure nebulous ideas that sound great in theory, but lack actual substance or depth when I came to write them. It is as though I have written the trailer for a film without actually having any clue how the envisioned scenes link together.
To say that I am starting to see why so many writers bemoan series and complain about the difficulty of actually getting them done is a wild understatement.
Anyway, time to go and write chapter 10. Again. =/
The Second Edition!
You may have come here from my redirect on Amazon. If so, welcome. Pull up a chair, grab a beer and make yourself at home. Hopefully you have all now received your new, shiny, second edition copies of my book but I bet you have some questions right? Right. So then; why the second edition? This is why:
A new version of an existing book might sound a little controversial, and I suppose it is, but there are a lot of factors at play here and many reasons why I think this new version is needed. For starters, and most simply, this was my first book and I was, certainly at the beginning, a little out of my depth. The book was written in two main stages, several years apart, and the work that comprises the first 40% or so of the book is in fact much older than the rest. As a result, my lack of experience shows through far more starkly there as the earlier chapters meander around and are littered with slow, uninteresting sections that drag down the whole pace of the work. This alone was enough for a new version, but it might have yielded less changes overall.
What has in fact changed in this new daft is as follows:
The book that Jonathan finds is gone. The book, as a plot device, was never my first choice. In my earliest drafts of this story, Tel had found a device, left in this world by Ashna, that led him to the first part of the Sword, thus triggering the story. For reasons I do not fully remember, I could never get this mechanic to work however, so I abandoned it and came up with the idea of a Templar codebook, thus giving J and Dowd something physical and tangible to interact with and giving them something to do in the early chapters. Unfortunately, this slowed the book down enormously and led to some very long, tedious chapters were they both waded through the encryption. Moreover, the encryption was just tosh and would never have worked (and my use of the Mousehole in the picture bugged the hell out of me – mouse holes are a product of Tom and Jerry cartoons from the turn of the last century. An 11th century priest would never have heard of such a concept!)
Dowd and J both are developed more as characters. Dowd is painted in a very, very bad light in the first edition. He is miserably, reactionary and distant, constantly sniping and barking at everyone and this is not what I intended at all and it certainly is glaringly different to the kindly, gentle professor I paint him as in his flashback. Dowd and J are now old friends from the start, speeding up all their conversations and giving them both a bit more time to shine. J has stayed much the same but is just given more chance to show his talents. As a friend said to me, there is no way someone as rich, handsome, successful and determined as J would spend a lot of time alone in bed!
The final change is regarding Alexander. At the start of the book, Alexander is preaching to his companions about how they all must stay out of the way, not interfere and not tip the scales but not two minutes later, he is knocking on Dowd’s door and handing out cryptic clues and vague hints. Total nonsense. With the code book gone, Alexander remains in the shadows, only appearing as our heroes exit Mousehole before whisking them off to Italy to tell them just what the hell is actually going on.
So, big changes but changes for the better. The new plot device that replaces the book is fun and leads to some good comedy and solid interaction and has also allowed me to add back in some cut work, giving Larry a far bigger moment in the spotlight and letting the comic relationship between him and his flunky, Travis, shine through. All in all, the book moves faster, is more engaging and, thanks to the device, ties better into what I had already written for the sequel, the Keepers of the Fire, which features Ashna’s work quite heavily. I hope that those who have read the book will forgive me these changes and embrace the fact that they are genuine improvements that do not dramatically alter the structure or events of the book and that you will enjoy the coming two sequels as much as I am enjoying writing them.
Oh – a quick note for those who have found this blog from Amazon: There appears to be some confusion regarding the process of getting your book onto the Kindle market. A few people have pointed out that there a fair number of typos in this book, and rightly so. Let me assure you that I am a more voracious grammar Nazi that any ten people I know and every single one of those errors a) annoys me more than it annoys you and b) is an actual error, not a confusion on my part. Amazon offers no help whatsoever in the formatting and editing of your book, it is all down to you. I am far from being a good typist and so, between fat fingers and an overly enthusiastic spellchecker, there were errors galore in the first, complete draft of this book. I have done my best to correct them all but, at the end of the day, this book is nearly 200,000 words long and I am not a professional copy editor. There comes a point where you are simply snow blind to your own work, so I would ask that you cut me and all the other hard working, amateur authors out there some slack. I own books half the size of mine that have been republished 20+ times that still have errors in them, so that there are so few (comparative to its size) in mine is a miracle.
All that said, I hope you guys enjoy the new version. With that done, I can get around to writing the second part and hopefully get it published before you all stop caring. Speak to you all soon!
WorldScapes 