Masochism

Yea gods – why am I doing this?  Why must I torture myself so?  Is life not filled with enough trouble and strife that I must actively seek out more, just to ensure that levels of misery are constantly at their maximum?

And yet I’ve done it.  It has been requested – paid for no less – and it has arrived and now here it sits, staring at me.  The source of a year’s worth of frustration, simultaneously a concentrated pool of genuinely useful information and a seemingly endless supply of despair.  Never has something that caused me so much excitement when I first received it, that filled me with such hope, that taunted me with such dreams and aspirations turned out to be something I would literally despise and cringe at the sight of

And yet, here it sits: The latest edition of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook.

Why is it here?  That’s right, boys and girls, it is here because I am going to try once again to get a publisher interested in my work.  Over a year has passed since my last attempt at this and in that time I have published my book through two digital distributers, produced an even more error free edition and secured artwork for both it and its sequel.  Does this raise my chances?  Probably not.  The publishing industry is still in its death throes and the UK is in the middle of a financial depression: hardly a sterling time to be getting people to spend money.

 

But you know what? To hell with all that.  I still believe in my work, more strongly now than ever in fact.  During my (seemingly endless) stretches of editing, I have actually come to appreciate what I have created.  Enough time has passed since I finished writing it for the work to become unfamiliar, allowing me to view it through the eyes of its audience instead of its author, and you know what? It turns out I don’t suck.

So, with one book out and selling, another in the pipeline and a further 8 planned novels, I feel I have as good a chance as any to tickle some publishers particular fancy.

Time to print out lots and lots of sample chapters and write a fantastic cover letter.  Like I said in my first post here to a chap who made a comment: we can’t let the bastards get us down!

Giving the game away

This blog is stalling badly but not for want of things to write.  Every day, with every chapter I write of the new book, I have 5 things I want to blog about but every last one of them would involve talking about the plot of said book and giving away far too much before I release the damned thing!

The process really is fascinating to watch from the drivers seat as you feel totally out of control.  Constantly I am having characters say things I never planned or making decisions I never envisaged, as I discussed last post, but it is utterly startling each and ever time it happens.  It is a wonderful thing to see something you wrote be so immediately unfamiliar and to know that when you stop stressing over the writign and just let it happen, it really does happen.

The book itself is chugging along though it seems to get more complex by the day.  So far their are 8 distinct threads in play, all following very disparate paths and all to be brought together later in the book.  One thing I am very glad of is the removal of considerations or worries about the length of the book.  As I said earlier, KotK kept getting trimmed in an attempt to get it down to a more “publisher friendly” length but as this book will go straight to electronic publishing, I have no such concerns.  Probably a lucky thing too given that all I have written so far is a large chunk of introductions (for the 8 threads) and a few sections of back story and it is heading for half as long as KotK!

In the meantime I am really enjoying writing The Keepers of the Fire.  It is good to be back to these familiar characters and it is good to be expanding those who got rather short shrift in the first book but above all, its just good to be writing!  It is still the most dazzling experience I have ever had and I only can hope it remains as such.

Remembering the forgotten

The actual process of writing a book of fiction is, as has been said at length in many places, pretty damned hard but what is striking me more and more is not the difficulty of the task but the utter weirdness of it.  While planning out your opus can be tricky, ensuring that your plot unfolds in an interesting way can be tough and actually sitting your ass down and just doing the work can be outright difficult, all of these things can be overcome with simple, dogmatic determination.  Force yourself to sit at the keyboard long enough, set yourself goals and markers, reward yourself for your achievements and the words will come.

The bit you don’t know about from the outside, the bit that you simply cannot imagine before you begin work and the bit that I had entirely forgotten after writing book one, is the utterly baffling feeling you get when you actually write.  Let me see if I can explain this, though I am not certain I can.

You have a plot.  You have characters. You have scenes, ideas and an over-arching design for your story.  You  are good to go.  The thing is that no matter how anal-retentive you are about your planning, your note making and your designing, it is not until you come to actually write a given section that you give form and flesh to your ideas.

This may sound obvious, that you have not written it until you have written it, but it is far more than that.  Your charters are alive, in very, very real terms.  Many is the time I have sat down to write a chapter, absolutely comfortable in the knowledge of how it will play out, only to find that, upon writing it, something else takes over.  Your characters simply refuse to do as you tell them and instead, happily amble off in a  somewhat different direction, apparently making their own damn decisions.

For example:  The other day I was writing a chapter for The Keepers of the Fire in which Julie and J from book one were working with a Denier (a “class” of demon from the first book whose purpose was not explained therein) to, essentially, save a man from dying.  I created the idea of Deniers years ago, had planned out how they looked, how they “worked” and what exactly it was they did.  When I came to write the chapter, a chapter that gives the reader their first insight into these creatures, my whole construct went out the window and a new back-story, demeanour and role suddenly emerged from nowhere and casually wrote itself across my screen.

I honestly had to stop and sit there, blinking in utter confusion, and read back what I had just written as I had no bloody clue what was going on at all.  I even tried to rewrite it, forcible jamming my characters back into my original plot but no matter how hard I tried, it simply would not go.

The feeling of disassociation this induced was incredible.   And it is not the only place I feel it.  Clearly, as I said at the top of this post, I have forgotten a lot of the process that created the first book as, when I reread The Keepers of the Key (as I do quite often) I am struck over and over by one question: who the hell wrote this?  I recognise my characters and my plot but in many, many places, it feels as though someone else took my ideas and ran with them.

It really is like having a ghost writer that simply steps in and inhabits my body at times, merrily doing as he sees fit with the insides of my head.  Clearly whoever this other chap is knows what he is doing but it would be nice to get a little warning before the bugger decides he is gonna rewrite entire story-lines!