I’ve discussed this before, but really, I have never thought of this – what I’m doing here – as ‘platform’. The concept that blogging, maintaining a site, setting up a page, being active on twitter, attending cons… that all of that could be merely some effort to ensnare potential readers, that always struck me as slightly nefarious. Dishonest at worst, a mistake of priorities at best.

I always figured on doing all those things because I like doing them. I like here tapping away and throwing my words out into the churning void of bandwidth and opinion that is the internet. I liked going to Genrecon and meeting a community of people who shared my passions, or gave me new insights into passions related but different, or even new insights into my own. I like interacting with people on Twitter, on Facebook, wherever else it might be. So I hadn’t really felt the tension between these things and the craft of writing, other than the obvious mismanagement of time that could occur.

But Jane Friedman’s post on Writer Unboxed got me thinking about this tension anew last month, and as a result I went away from the website here, I left neglected my Facebook Page, I went away from Twitter… ok. That last one’s not true. Twitter is a difficult thing to shake. I did though take a more passive role on twitter, allowing those I follow to guide me to links and such, but not tweeting (much).

What then has been gained from this month of social media ‘sabbatical’? What gained from a month devoted to craft rather than the building of ‘profile’?

• I finished writing my draft of Old Man Madigan. It comes in at 10,000 words and I’m wondering now whether I submit it to a market which may be prepared to serialise it, or whether I go in hard with the editing shears and cut.
  
• I started expanding some ideas for other short stories, tentatively entitled: Pareidolia, Watchers, Melange. They run a gamut of weird urban/psychological, scif-fi futurism, alt world Fantasy.
• I wrote a draft of ‘The Witch Way’, a Fantasy short story  at 5,000 words and in need of an edit.
• I completed a draft of ‘Leaving the Farm’ which had been kicking around in my head and on my computer for years, never really having much structure or purpose. It’s 2150 words and not really genre fiction at all to be honest, straight up Lit Fic with a rural bent.
• I did a heck of a lot of reading: Chuck Wendig’s Bad Blood, Shotgun Gravy, Bait Dog, Blackbirds, and Mockingbird; Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country; Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns (and currently reading King). Reviews to come.
• And I sent out a query email for Exile, in the hope that an agent may be interested.

An agent was, and requested chapters, and so I’ve sent them now. I’m cautious and nervous and excited and apprehensive and uncertain and hopeful and worried and blasé… all at once or vacillating between the states. In one sense it’s not a step I haven’t reached (and stumbled upon) before, but I feel it’s progress. The last time an agent requested chapters it was on the basis of a face-to-face meeting, not so in this case. The agent currently considering my submission asked to see more based solely on the few paragraphs into which I distilled my novel. So that’s a good thing, to know that the query email worked, to know that I can pique the interest.

All in all a productive month, especially as I look back on it now. So what’s in store for this month? I hope to edit those two stories that are complete drafts, and to send them out. I have a list of markets to which I can submit (thanks Peter M Ball and  Alan Baxter) and I intend to put that list to use… and of course to check my emails obsessively, in the hope of good news.

As Abraham notes the moniker “Grimdark”  is taken from Warhammer 40,000 (affectionately known as 40k). I played the game as a young fella. I had my armies (Eldar predominantly, but I did put a bit of an Orc Horde together and was compiling some Imperial Guard when I gave it all away. The miniatures  including some incredibly carefully and poorly painted Banshees and Scorpions, were sadly lost in a house-fire) and would spend long afternoons plotting the fractional m, movements required for victory or poring over a codex seeking some tactical advantage. I didn’t get too much into the surrounding mythology of the 40k universe, but it grew exponentially whilst I played and subsequently. I am aware now that entire novel series are devoted to the expanded universe, in much the same way you’ll find with Star Wars and Dragonlance and such.

I am familiar with the line from which “Grimdark” apparently comes: In the grim darkness of the future there is only war.

Two of my favourite modern Fantasy authors (Abercrombie and Richard K Morgan) have been labelled as writing Grimdark, as well as Mark Lawrence,  an author highly recommended to me and near the top of my to-read list (after I finally finish Red Country, which I am powering through at amazing pace). Judging by Abercrombie’s thoughtful response, and Richard Morgan’s, neither of them are thrilled at the assignation (though Joe seems to have embraced it with his twitter handle), but more on that latter.

Mark Lawrence’s response basically summed up my own, but seeing as we’ve made it this far, let’s unpack it a bit.

Genre is a fraught concept. At its best it’s a useful framework for understanding tropes and narrative archetypes, at its worst it’s a cage, a ghetto, a straight-jacket. Mieville’s reference to Tolkein as the “Big Oedipal Daddy” of Fantasy is perhaps a starting point in identifying how the Fantasy genre came to be seen both from within, and from without. Fantasy was escapism for nerds. It was largely derivative to it’s progenitor (and “Author of the Century” no less) and it operated within variations of his British agrarian idyll being threatened by malevolent forces.

Arguably this continued until recently, arguably very recently, arguably it continues still. Many would point (as Abraham does) to Thomas Covenant, and fair enough. Others would point to George RR Martin, whose Game of Thrones was published in 1991 and featured many of the traits now assigned to Grimdark: the amorality, the incest, the rape (so much rape, so casually put to the page), the murders, the attempted (and successful) infanticides, regicide, ultimately (spoiler alert of sorts) the death of the apparent protagonist before the end of the first book.

But Grimdark seems a more modern label than either of these. Perhaps it is the HBO effect and GRRM’s ever-growing fanbase, but even that is older than Grimdark, being in place for two years at least. And so the finger is pointed at Abercrombie (whose First Law books were published in 06,07 and 08), Mark Lawrence (Broken Empire 2011, 2012…), and Richard K Morgan (A Land Fit For Heroes 08, 10…).

Morgan is particularly interesting, because it’s his Fantasy books that see him labelled as Grimdark, but his previous series (published between 2002 and 2005 and focussed on Takeshi Kovacs) wears a label of sci-fi/noir. As Morgan himself points out it is the elements of Noir that he brings to Fantasy which are most likely what is used to label his work Grimdark. The Kovacs novels have been credited with reviving Cyberpunk (the genre spawned, or at least identified, by William Gibson‘s Neuromancer) by grafting “the Gibsonian subgenre” back onto pulp fiction, and I think particularly in this Noir Pulp. It’s a link Abraham makes as well in his Clarkesworld piece, though by Abraham’s distinction I personally see Kovacs as more Hard-boiled than Noir. Kovacs does make moral decisions that go against his self-interest, the difference perhaps is that Morgan makes his protagonist pay the cost of those decisions. Kovacs gets no free pass for having done, or having tried to do, the “right thing”.

Likewise with Abercrombie’s flawed “heroes”.  Logen Ninefingers has a past he wants to escape, but he can’t. In much the same way as Morgan’s protagonist Ringil Eskiath (who shares a name with a Tolkeinian sword), Ninefingers isn’t given the freedom to just put aside the consequences of his past acts. He wants to be a better person, but it’s not going to be easy to change, and will be harder still to convince others of the change. Shivers suffers even more-so. The change in the Northmen is pronounced, from when we first meet him during the final stages of the First Law, through his Styrian experience and his final, decisive, blow in The Heroes. It is not a change for the better. And yet it is a change we, as readers, can understand, perhaps even sympathise with. Is it enough to mean well, even if your actions bring ill consequences? Can we redeem our wrongs by good acts? Would I not too struggle to maintain the finer parts of myself if I had suffered as he suffered? I think these are essential questions for readers of this sub-genre, whatever we decide it should be called. I think these are essential questions for readers of all literature. Especially that last one.

Is it not this question that we ask ourself as Casablanca ends? Would I send the woman I love away, on a plane with another man? Would I risk something of myself for others, even if there was little hope of personal gain and a genuine risk of personal suffering?
When Harry Lime, atop the ferris-wheel in The Third Man, asks how much money it would be worth for one of those specks to simply stop moving, are we not being asked how much we value human life? and being challenged to explain that value, or at least to respond in some way to a character who values it little at all?

Certainly in gritty stories, in amoral characters – or just overly pragmatic ones – we are challenged. I enjoy as a reader that I am. I enjoy as a writer exploring those questions and developing ways in which I can use characters to provide different perspectives on these questions and others like them.

The problem then with Grimdark is that it is used so often pejoratively, and often by those who are seeking to define what they dislike about a certain type of story. Abraham sub-titles his piece “Literatures of Despair” – a phrase he explains, but which I don’t accept. Morgan’s response dialogue is telling. The complaints (of the straw man) become ones of taste and of subjectivity. Some blood, but not too much. Some danger posed to the protagonist, but don’t kill him. Some hint of the enemy being evil, but no rapes or torture. A little military-based murder is ok, but no gore please.

I think allowing anyone, even a readership, to define a genre in such a way, to set up boundaries and borders in which writers should (or must operate), is a stultifying influence. Even more so if those arbitrary borders are then policed by self-appointed guardians, wielding indignation and harking back to a supposed Glorious Age.

If Grimdark is Noir come to the Fantasy worlds then it is no new thing. Indeed it’s taken a generation or two to move from the mainstream into Fantasy. In 1991 Silence of the Lambs swept the Oscars:  Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Picture. The cinema-going audience were ready for a story in which the secondary character, an advisor to the FBI (and thus in some way on the side of the ‘good guys’ even if reluctantly) was a cannibal serial-killer. Lector’s escape was celebrated, anticipated not as a defeat of the ‘good’ but as a victory for a character with whom the audience had become fascinated.

On television we watch Dexter, the serial-killer with a ‘Dark Passenger’ and a mission, and hope he doesn’t get caught. We admire Omar Little, a man we have witnessed murder and steal. We hope that Walter White can keep cooking and distributing crystal-meth, because doing so doesn’t make him a bad guy… not exactly… kind of… I don’t know. And that’s the point. These characters are fascinating and exciting and wonderful precisely because I can’t answer that question.

Is it any wonder the audience of modern Fantasy is ready for similar characters? Is it not a good thing that I started questioning why I should still be barracking for Monza to get her revenge, that I should question whether the world wouldn’t be better off if the ‘bad guy’ had’ve just killed her off in chapter one? I want characters who are flawed, who make mistakes, who do things I would never do, who suffer in ways I hope never to suffer. If it serves the story put those guys through the wringer. Carve them up, piece-by-piece, and let’s examine what’s left at the core of them.

All of that’s fine. All of that means that I – now only two chapters into Red Country – honestly don’t know if I want Shy South to catch up to the bandits who took her brothers or not… and surely that uncertainty, that hesitancy, surely that’s a powerful narrative force.

So to mark the occasion I give you some of the more unusual Google searches by which people have found their way to me:

The gayness of Joe Abercrombie, or his characters, seems to lead down my path. Several people used variants on this theme, including:
“joe abercrombie the heroes gay characters”, ”joe abercrombie gay characters” and “joe abercrombie gay.”

Someone was evidently looking for the “gaiman mieville ghetto”. A scary sounding place indeed.

Someone was hoping for a “midichlorian triumph”

I’m not sure the person who typed in “pet monkey climbing nets” really got much help from my website. Likewise the person who wanted to know “how to summoning the jinni” was probably in the wrong part of the internet.

And then there’s the inexplicable:
“new vw commercial starts with children laughing then adults laughing then elderly laughing”
“short story the toyota with characters,setting,conflict,resolution and theme”
“how does empress wu zetian relate to the disempowerment of women”
“jar jar stretched tongue”

and… drum role please…

“mike tyson gender change”

How the hell did ‘Mike Tyson gender change’ get people to come here? I don’t know. If that was you please comment below. I can’t figure that one out, but they count to the 2,500 views. Hopefully the whole process is interesting enough to keep you cooming back and pushing me toward and beyond 5,000 in 2013.

They rode out with the intent to kill Old Man Madigan, and the means to make it so.

This happens to me sometimes. Sometimes a line, sometimes a description, sometimes dialogue – even whole conversations. I use the notes function on my phone, or I scrawl this stuff on scraps of paper that I then keep in a completely chaotic and highly intuitive mess around my house, or occasionally in a notepad I bought, long ago, for the purpose.

And so this line about Old Man Madigan sat ignored for some time, until I came back to it and questioned what I had made. Who is/was this old man? Who was out to kill him, and why? why ‘riding out’?

Initially my answers to that were confused collisions of genre, or reductive allusions to things I’ve liked elsewhere. I wanted them a long way from authority, such that they had to take ‘justice’ into their own hands. I wanted to explore that ambiguity of authority, or its absence. I wanted to question whether these men seeking to deal death were agents of justice or of revenge. Was this a community coming together against a predator, or was this mob rule, unfettered in its attack on an outsider?

I liked the idea of a posse.

So the US perhaps? A western? Shane, or The Searchers? It made sense of the ‘riding out’, but it just didn’t grab me. A space western? Perhaps Joss Whedon’s fault. I could almost see Nathan Fillion sneering my line. Awesome… and yet not my own. The space thing was interesting though.
So they’re in space, a long way from Earth. Colonisers then? Something between LV426 and the Wild West writ extra-planetary? Barely more original than channelling Mal, but perhaps something I could work with. If I could steer clear of a Takeshi Kovacs analogue. No horses I suppose. Are they riding out on bikes? Hoverbikes?

I followed this path for a while. Researched light-speed, the fastest man-made objects, the nearest goldilocks planets. Nothing there unless I’m prepared to have spacecraft travelling up to percentages of light-speed  and even then the travel time is decades. So perhaps a moon, Saturn has plenty, Jupiter too, some potentially life supporting. But these men riding out should not be in space-suits. That’s not what I see. That doesn’t work for me.

Back to the notepad and disorganised filing then. For weeks. Months. I start writing other things. I’m in the middle of something that’s pretty hefty. Novella at least, perhaps room to grow. And then Madigan’s back.

Australia. Red dust. Post the exploration, pre-Goldrush. Madigan’s an impossible survivor from the prison fleets, fled or released upon his term and free now either way. He’s impossibly old, and the means of his longevity have earnt him the antipathy of the young community nearby his secluded home. He had fled other men, at least the white ones, but now the communities are growing, the Europeans spreading, and it has brought him into conflict. How? A young girl, missing, killed perhaps, perhaps used by this secluded old man. An angry father then, a community of angry fathers. The men of a fledgling town drawn together by their hatred and fear against Madigan, their common enemy.

But if Madigan is so long lived? Will he be so easily killed? What means do these men have? What assumptions do they make, and are they valid? And what is the role of the local inhabitants, considered fauna, shunned, ignored. What do they think of Madigan, what is he – this European interloper who will not die?

The images were coming thick and fast now. Red dust, hard men worn by weather and work, stern women with determined jaws, children casting off their parents’ culture for one all their own, the Aboriginal tribe, shifting and displaced, those caught in the middle – part of both worlds and neither…  and in this Madigan – a spider in its web. Or is he? Is he really the villain of the piece?

So I started writing. And suddenly I had 4,000+ words and a couple of thousand to come. A short story. Not yet born, but gestating nicely and not far off.

Excerpt here.

This is an excerpt from a new short story, set in Colonial Australia, elements of the Weird playing on the edges. For the story of its creation see my blog post here.

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They rode out with the intent to kill Old Man Madigan, and the means to make it so. So they thought.

It wasn’t going to be easy of course. Madigan had been around before any of them had come to this parched and barren patch of earth. He’d been living amongst the red dust and scrub through droughts and fires and famine. He was a survivor was Old Man Madigan, not one of them doubted that.

When the trading post had first been raised, and the telegraph station beside it, and eventually, by accretion of corrugated iron and stubborn will, a town had formed, Old Man Madigan had been there. Watching them. Separate even when he came amongst them on that skinny-ribbed nag of his.

The rumours about him had been passed between drovers and wanderers for years. Some were plausible, others wild… most fell into that wide crack between the two. It was widely accepted that he had a thing for children. Everyone frowned on that of course – furrowed their brows and tutted amongst themselves in the public bar or on the steps of the church, glared at him when he came to town. As long as he just took the black-fellas kids it was a quiet rebuke. Excuses were made by some: She lured him, she was drunk on cheap whiskey, she weren’t that young really. In the end no one much cared what Madigan did to the little black girls in that hut well out of town. He took boys too though, and that was harder to explain.

The black-fellas weren’t stupid. Their mobs moved around, and soon enough they moved away from Old Man Madigan. When they came back it was in large groups – the men painted for war, carrying long spears, large shields, wooden clubs barbed with bone shards. Maybe that’s when Madigan got desperate. Maybe it was because the black-fellas had enough of losing their sons and daughters. Whatever it was, when Davey Thomas’ little girl went missing tongues were quick to wag and fingers were pointed into the north-east, along that narrow track that would lead to Old Man Madigan’s door.

Taking black girls was one thing, Madigan wouldn’t be the first to put a brown bastard in a black belly, but taking a pretty little town girl from a good church-going family, that was quite another. That was the sort of thing that would get folks riled.

John Ryan had been one of the first to stand on the step of the church and urge the men of the town to come together.

‘For justice,’ he’d cried, and the other men had nodded. Father O’Malley had called upon the gathered crowd to bring Old Madigan to the Lord for absolution, but Ryan had a different view of what justice would be and in the end more men had agreed with him than with a priest so new in town.

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I got to the end and wanted to read more about Coburn, the vampire protagonist. As a character he really grabbed me, despite their being a pretty fundamental shift in the dynamic of his character in the final pages (I’m trying to keep this spoiler free – I will kinda hint at a few broad thematic points though, so there may be a bit of spoiler slippage. Sorry). It got me to thinking on how he had changed and what it was that still made him interesting to me, and I found it was quite a different kind of interest to that which had initially drawn me to the character and kept me there at his side throughout. And it set a nagging little question in my mind.

As a reader I seem readily to accept that people can be changed by a corrupting influence. I don’t think I’m alone or controversial here. Power corrupts, etc… but it’s more character relations I’m thinking of here. It seems utterly plausible that a basically good person can be brought low, can be turned to the dark-side, can be corrupted by the influence of an evil person. Grima Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings (seriously – don’t trust guys named ‘Wormtongue’ – rookie error), Emperor Palpatine – firstly on young Anakin and unsuccessfully on Luke, the corruption of Jack Torrance during his time at the Overlook, all these things we (or I) accept because it seems we (or I) believe / fear that there is an evil in all people, perhaps even within ourselves, a malevolence that must be kept in check, and which can be brought from us by outside influences. This is perhaps a negative view of humanity, but there you have it.

What I had a harder time accepting was the reverse, that an evil character, a nasty misanthrope, un-empathetic, revelling in his ways, could be redeemed by a character of pure goodness. In some small way I felt unsettled by this, not quite cheated, not really unfulfilled, but just that it seemed a little far-fetched.

And so having finished a book about a vampire in the zombie apocalypse, I’m left feeling that the ‘unrealistic’ part of the narrative was that a good person could influence and evil one to be better.

Is this just some deep underlying pessimism of mine? Or is it that we are more ready to accept the ‘gritty’ truth of corruption, and less prepared for the more optimistic process of salvation?

So it is with great excitement that I receive the news that Genrecon 2013 is up and running. The start of the guest list was announced today and none other than Chuck Wendig is one of the International guests. I’ve mentioned his work and his website here before. I’m a big fan. When I came away from 2012 and thought about who would make a great guest for 2013 Chuck Wendig was right at the top of the list. I and several others tweeted as much at the time and if you don’t believe me check the records.

So what a year 2013. Neil Gaiman was here recently. China Mieville’s at Perth Festival (unfortunately I won’t get to go to see him, unless I make some irresponsibly hasty decision to skip work and fly across the continent).Apparently as part of the Supernovas and as side shows both Raymond E Feist and George R R Martin will be in Australia this year. It’s like my bookshelf come to life.

So check out Genrecon 2013 people, but not yet. Wait until I get in on the early bird special, then you can check it out.

Covers are vitally important, despite the old adage that does not bear repeating. Perhaps in the ebook market this is less true, as opening a new ebook usually will take you to page one rather than to a cover, but with the flood of product a good cover is still an effective way to draw clicks to your Goodreads, or Amazon, or Kindle store presence.

I was surprised to hear from published authors how little control they had over the covers with which their novels appeared. I did here some anecdotes of cover artists communicating with the author, or perhaps even reading the book, but these were told as exceptions, remarkable precisely because they were not the rule. In some cases the author hated the cover which the publishers used.

Some years ago my sister recommended a book to me:

This is (I think) the 1997 edition.

On the back cover, below the blurb, there’s an image of a white wolf running through the snow.

Here, I thought, is everything I hated about Fantasy.

The swordsman in black, the black warhorse, the snowy castle, the raven…

Could these images look more hackneyed and clichéd?

It looked terrible.

I read a chapter or so in case she asked me about it, then it was shelved.

Some years later I found this book in a book store:

This is the 2003 edition under the Voyager imprint.

There’s a few extra endorsements, as over the intervening years and sequels Mr. Martin’s work had gathered a following and some rave reviews, but they’re mostly the same.

The blurb is much better on this than on the original, and I’m certain that that played a role in my selecting it too.

I bought it and began reading it without ever making the connection to the book my sister had given me.

It was only when I was several chapters into the book, and hooked, that I started to make connections with the earlier book I had shelved (or in fact, by that time, boxed-up and stored under the stairs).

For five years I had ignored a great Fantasy novel because of its cover.

Another example of a cover leading me to great fiction is Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes

I had a voucher to a bookstore sent to me as a Christmas gift, and I went in to buy China Mieville’s collection of short stories “Looking for Jake”, but I had some money left over and no real plan so I browsed the shelves.

Abercrombie’s views on maps have been well explained, and he included none in his First Law trilogy (which also have great covers), but this cover (as with the covers for “Best Served Cold” and “Red Country”) manages to convey I think a very real sense of Abercrombie’s world and the style of Fantasy he writes.

I like them far more than the hyper-real close-ups of the US covers.)

I bought it, loved it, and went back through the First Law and “Best Served Cold” in a matter of weeks.

Here’s the jacket of Heroes in all its glory (click the image to enlarge):

Recently the author Mark Lawrence responded to some suggestions comparing his cover for King of Thorns to GRRM’s Game of Thrones (specifically the Sean Bean cover that was released to tie-in with the success of the television series)

Lawrence’s response was to refer to similar covers back through the history of genre and still being released:

His point of course is well made. The mere similarity of having your protagonist (if Ned is the protagonist) sitting a throne is as much a part of Fantasy as the heroine swooning in the strong arms of her hunk is a part of Romance.

It’s always tempting of course to judge these covers. Whether they are examples of the best the genre has to offer, or some of the worst covers in the history of literature, there’s no denying their effect. It was suggested that the success of Fifty Shades of Grey in breaking beyond the Erotic Fiction market and into the mainstream was (in part) because it didn’t look like a typical Erotica cover.

It’s also worth acknowledging that the covers do not always reflect or represent the novel in the way the author would wish though, so in the interest of dispelling that hoary old cliche and admitting that of course we all do judge books in this way I invite you in the comments to nominate others.

What covers have made you pick up a book you went on to love?

What covers have drawn you to a book that you hated?

What covers have chased you screaming away swearing never to inflict such rubbish upon yourself… at least until they repackage it?

You may wish to head over to Chris’ blog and have a look around, he’s been doing this a while longer than me I feel and has some really interesting resources on his planning process and novel writing. Far more organised than my general musing and occasional update of progress.

But I digress…

1) What is the working title of your book?

It’s currently going under the title of Exile. I like the idea of a shorter title, and I like the idea that ‘exile’ functions as both noun and verb, that as a noun it can apply to a person or a condition or perhaps even a place.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

It has changed so much since it was first conceived that I’m not sure that I can answer the question well. I didn’t think so at the time of writing, but looking back I suspect it may have come from the experience of my own family’s circumstances. When I started writing I had a very clear idea of who the main character would be, but I’ve drifted away from that, perhaps as I’ve matured, and it’s more an ensemble piece now.
It draws from my studies of history and the Classical world. I kept wondering how different historical cultures would have reacted if they ever were to have met. I also wanted to explore the social contract we enter into, that decision to submit to an authority and the assumption that the authority will act in your interests, or at least not directly against them. I’m interested in how that social contract is currently functioning in various cultures, and I wanted to explore how it functioned in a Fantasy setting.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

It’s Fantasy, but that’s not really specific enough is it? When I describe it to others they use the term Epic Fantasy. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that. Certainly I think there is an epic back-drop in terms of the scale of the world-building.  The plot is influenced by inter-continental events, the clash of great powers, and yet that’s not the focus. It’s not about the saving of worlds, or the shaping of history through great deeds and prophecies fulfilled, and I think to be Epic Fantasy these are pretty important.

Low Fantasy then perhaps, but not quite as dark as Abercrombie, Morgan, Lawrence et al.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I have deliberately avoided thinking in these terms. In many ways because if it ever were to be made into a film that future is so distant and unlikely that references to current Hollywood stars would be meaningless.

So I would choose up-and-comers. I would (given my ‘druthers) avoid the star-powered path. That said, I think there’s a part in there for Djimon Honsou and for Chiwetel Ejiofor or Idris Elba. Cristoph Waltz almost certainly. Stellan and Alexander  Skarsgård. Probably more European actors than American.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

When three siblings are separated by a conflict they cannot control, each must adapt to a new life, and perhaps find a way to thrive.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I have pitched to an agent, who requested pages, so the process is under-way. I’m thinking the agent to publishing path is my preferred, so I’ll try and exhaust that possibility before looking too closely at others.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

This is another interesting question. I started writing the manuscript that would become this manuscript about 15 years ago. That’s not to say I’ve spent 15 years writing it though. I wrote as a hobby, when I could. I had only the most nebulous dreams of one day being a ‘writer’ and I didn’t ever think I would reach the point of having a manuscript that might interest anyone else. That original writing has changed so much, been rewritten so often, been so edited that very little of it survives in the current manuscript.

I’ve been seriously working to make this a novel for the last 12 months or so.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I’ve mentioned a few. I’ll use the usual suspects and some new-comers as landmarks and maybe place myself that way:

Not as stolid as Tolkein, not as genealogical as GRRM, less graphic sex than Richard Morgan, less bleak then Abercrombie. Not as weird as Bas-Lag. Not as dense as Viriconium. Not as overtly allegorical as Dune.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The foremost influence was Feist’s  ’Magician’ I think, at least initially. It wasn’t the first Fantasy novel I had read but it was the first time I had read a novel and seen the constituent parts that built the story. I think it stands as an excellent example, perhaps the prime example, of what it is. I cannot think of a Bildungsromanin the Fantasy genre that does it quite so well. It also opened up the idea of non-European cultures in Fantasy, and of those cultures being something more than the indistinctly drawn enemy. It seems that Feist will use Tsurannuani this way, and yet there’s that scene where he gives us their POV: We see the characters we’ve followed as they saved Crydee and we see them as a respected enemy, and from there of course we learn about the fractured nature of the Tsurani and their internal political disputes.

From that point, that I decided I could write a novel, I drew inspiration from many places. From history’s many tales. From Chaucer’s Middle English, Anglo-Saxon poetry, medieval bestiaries, the eddas and sagas, the myths of India and Africa, the common human myth identified and explained by Joseph Campbell.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

What indeed. I suppose that depends on the reader.

A huge secondary world with a living history?

Fallible characters who err and face the consequences, who are uncertain, who lack-confidence or over-commit, who cannot rely on divine prophecy or enchanted trinkets?

Political intrigues played out in the chambers and courts of nobility?

Bloody battles played out in the mud, ringing with the cries of warriors and the clash of spear on shield?

Forests filled with strange beasts?

Death, love, betrayal, suspicion… all the confused emotions that from people trying to find their way toward the life they wish to lead.

And my recommendation for the ‘next big thing’?

Richard Marek, whom I knew online long before I met him (recently – at Genrecon), and has shown me some of his work and I sincerely hope he  continues with his efforts to publish.

Now that was more an effort than I realised it would be.

I removed about 40,000 words from my manuscript over the past few months. That’s nearly a quarter of its weight!

Many of these were removed on a line-by-line edit: clarifying sentences, dealing death to adjective clusters, seeking out adverbs remorselessly and casting their brutally beaten bodies from my work. I did away with many dialogue tags. I found ways to say with ten words what I had said with twelve or fifteen. I found all of these little slivers of fat that still clung to the meat of my tale and I carved them off with a wicked sharp blade.

Then I had to really get stuck in.

This wasn’t my first pass with the scalpel, and on a project this size trimming fat didn’t shrink the manuscript by the requisite amount, so I started cutting away at the muscle, the flesh, in some cases the connective tissue. That hurt. I lost some good stuff I think. A character was erased from existence. Another had his role cut significantly. Two characters became so peripheral that to survive they had to undergo a melding of bodies and minds and become one. Details were lost, poignant moments, not-quite-salient anecdotes, slightly obscure back-story, geographical references, subtle foreshadowings… but these things ultimately were bloating the story into something more than what it should have been.

So now I have 131,000 words. Still big by the standards of a debut novel, but it’s a manageable big.

I asked a few agents (through the wonder of Twitter) what would be a maximum word-limit they would consider as a submission from an unpublished novelist and the answers were in the range of 140,000 to 150,000. I’m happily below that upper limit, and I’m sure the manuscript is much better for it.

I said at the outset that my goal here was not necessarily to become a professional writer, not even necessarily to become published, though both of those are measures of success. My goal is to become a better writer, and whatever comes as an outcome of this process I feel that the process has already achieved some success toward that goal. I made brutal decisions, but they were the right ones. Some years ago, perhaps even some months ago, I would have baulked those decisions, and I would have remained in a comfort zone of bloat and easy-living. That is not a good place for a writer to remain.

I also now have a much clearer delineation of writing and editing. When I was starting I would open the document and start editing the material I had just written the day before, and so writing was a crawl. I would write a couple of hundred words in a day, but then spend a day or two editing those before adding another couple of hundred and restarting the edit process. It’s a dysfunctional approach. It’s the wrong one. To borrow from Chuck Wendig:

“Writing is when we make the words. Editing is when we make the words not shitty.”

I believe I have done that. I believe my words are not shitty.

And now? Now I get the query letter dressed up. Now I nail that synopsis. Now I go back to Chapter One, Page One, Paragraph One, Word One. Now I make that opening irresistible. Because this week the queries go out (agents be warned) and I think I’ve got a good chance now of putting my best foot forward. That might or might not lead somewhere, but at least I’ll be stepping out knowing I’ve put the work in to make it possible.