J P Smythe’s Website.

I have read my work aloud, all told, once in the last five years.

It was last Christmas, at a Parthian event in a lovely little tent at the back of a cafe in Cardiff. I didn’t know anybody there – which, actually, was the optimum scenario, really – and I was shaking like the proverbial-yet-deceased Polaroid picture. My voice wandered, and the version of my novel Hereditation that I was reading from was a years-old draft, still going through the proofing/rewriting process. I spent hours (no joke) editing a chunk of the book together into a ten minute chunk that I hoped was a) funny and b) intriguing enough that people might want to read the book. Whether it was or not, I don’t know; that’s not the point. The point was, I’m going to have to do this a whole lot more.

Reading at events to publicise the book is a strange thought. You’re standing up and just pitching a chunk of a book that might not be to everybody’s tastes, and you’re forcing them to listen to you until you’re finished. Look at whatever launch readings might occur for this here BYT project; there’s four vastly different books here, in different genres, and the chances of us appealing to the same audience members are slim-to-none. My own book is a very very black tragi-comic dramady (SUB-GENRE OVERLOAD!); the readers who might love the other BYT books might hate that idea. Hell, the other writers might hate it, frankly. But they’ll all sit there and listen to me as I read extracts from chapter 5 and 17 (because I’m not starting with the rather slow-burning open, frankly). The other writers? If all goes to plan and we do a chaffton of readings over the next few months, I’ll have heard their extracts over and over. By the end of the publicity run for these books, I’ll probably be able to quote them.

[And aside, and a mental note to the other BYTs: we should swap books at a reading, pretend to be the others. Bagsy not playing Susie.]

The thought of these readings, at the moment, terrifies me. I’m used to presenting my work to others by now, used to telling people to read something. I know where my strengths lie (novel-length works of fiction) and where they don’t (almost everything else) and, unfortunately, I suspect that I’ll find a hard time of it on the stoop (as t’were). I lie in bed and think about what’s to come – about standing there at a podium, or maybe not, maybe just in a room full of eager/bored/listless faces – and I sweat. Unpleasant, sure, but true. It’s a curious thing, as I used to be in a comedy show on a stage, and I teach Creative Writing, giving lectures(ish) to classes of people, but there’s something far more personal about reading my fiction that I just can’t keep under control. I cannot control people’s reaction to the chunks of the reading, either; I give them small sections, they take what they want from those. If they aren’t something that teases them towards reading more, I could be pickled; or, alternatively, that could very well be for the best. (I’m not going to be reading the darkest bits for people who don’t know me, am I? If somebody doesn’t like what I do read, they aren’t going to like some of the more unpleasant situations that jaunt along as the book progresses.)

[Incidentally, another aside: I have somehow made my novel sound like the written equivalent of a Saw film. It is not torture porn. It's slightly strange, slightly twisted lit-fic. Not torture porn; lit-fic.]

And the questions! I went to a reading the other night in Cardiff, and the questions asked by the audience were, as always, unbearably evil!

How do you get your inspiration?
How do you actually write?
What advice do you have in this age of THE INTERNET?
and, the worst of all:
Is your writing based on real events/people/stuff?

It’s this last question that’s the most heinous, of course, because it’s always assumed that writers can only write what they know, write from their own experience. I suspect that this might be the most terrifying thing for me with regards to readings, because my novel features both events that I have never encountered, and a message that hasn’t actually been informed by my own life. When I’m reading aloud about affairs, about prostitution, infanticide, race, drug addiction, about murder, I’m petrified that the audience might assume that I know anything of these things. When I read the racist/sexist/slightly sexually pervy opinions of characters, I worry that an audience might transfer those opinions to my own mindset. As I read those motivations aloud, I actually worry about these things. I am, by any normal measure, a bit of a wreck, really.

Though, of course, you won’t see that, with any luck. With any luck I’ll mask my terror with sly grins, my sweat with antiperspirant, my shakes with a drink in my hand or a fumble of the lip of a podium. With any luck I’ll sleep the night before and be full of the joys pre-reading, and I’ll listen to the great writing coming from those around me and it’ll bloster my confidence, and you – the audience – will leave with signed book in hand, saying, “What a nice, confident and articulate young man.”

I have read my work aloud only once in the last five years. By the end of 2010 I’m hoping to have that number multiplied by a factor of [a big number], and I’m hoping that, by the end of it, I’ll find it all a damned sight easier.

Hereditation is ramping up – or, rather, my feelings towards it are, or something. There’s a draft with the publishers right now that my editor is reading, and I’m anticipating changes. It’ll never be perfect, as far as I’m concerned, but I want it to be as close to what they want as possible. The book’s been changed a lot since I first wrote it; adapted, I should probably say. Realistically, it’s been rewritten based on the publishers suggestions, and those rewrites were entirely for the best. The book used to be chock-full of footnotes and side-notes and other stuff, and was written to accompany a PhD thesis (which was how this blog started, if you look through the history).

(In 2008, I wrote, on this very blog, that the novel was “technologically bleeding-edge”. It’s not any more – if it ever was, once you cut through the swathes of hyperbole – but it is far more readable.)

Anyway, the publisher clearly has a vested interest in making it a hit, and is launching it along with four other debut books by young Welsh – or Wales-based – writers. Tyler Keevil’s Fireball, Susie Wild’s Art Of Contraception and Wil Gritten’s Letting Go will all be published alongside Hereditation as part of a series that the publishers are calling Bright Young Things; four books, joint publicity, with thematically matching covers. I’ve seen an early version of the cover and it’s nice, so that’s exciting; I can’t say more yet, but when I can, I will.

(The same goes for a really exciting digital thing the publishers are going to do with these four books, something I’ve suggested and have been shouting about for a while. Again, I can’t say anything yet, but if you’ve read this blog before, you might have some idea what I’m talking about.)

And then, today, I emailed my editor about my name. I’ve been giving some serious thought to what I should publish under. My name is James Smythe, but there’s something too clunky about it (even when I get past the hateful surname). So I think I’m going with JP Smythe. I was – my father claims – semi-named after JP Donleavy, and I am distant relation of HG Wells (my only even vague claim to literary familiarity), so something feels curiously right about using the initialed version of my name.

Anyway, the crux of this post is that it’s all starting to feel very real indeed; and that’s a great feeling.

It’s been a while, eh?

2009 was a good year, sort of. There was lots of stuff that happened that I enjoyed, and lots that – frankly – could have gone somewhat better. But 2010 is starting with promise and oodles of optimism, and I need to ride that wave.

I’m going to be redesigning this site – or persuading somebody else to do it for me – and heading back into blogging full-steam. I feel that, finally, I have something worth talking about again (in the process of the publication of my first novel, Hereditation); I’m going to discuss the blurb process, the cover process, the stuff that myself and my publishers are going to be doing with the digital area (which is VERY exciting, and stuff that I’ve been bleating on about for ages), and the marketing stuff – readings, that sort of thing. It should be interesting, or I’ll try and make it so. I’ll also be discussing the state of writing at the moment, and the state of reading, and the state of the internet; you know, all that good stuff you love. Oh, and I’ll be putting fiction up here. I’ve been writing more and more short stuff, and some of it has been (or is going to be) published, and some of it will go up here instead, for you, for no money at all.

I’ve just finished writing something, and God knows if anything will come of it. The Testimony – the novel that some of you helped me blurb – fell apart as I edited it. It was the first time that I’ve written something that, I felt, was harder to write than I was capable of. What I wanted to say isn’t what was being said in the end, and I didn’t know how to get that across. It was a different book than I intended, and I took it back, rewrote it (almost completely from scratch) and got stuck halfway through. I don’t know what I want it to be now, what I need it to be to actually put it out there, so I’ve just left it, stewing, in a folder. I’ll come back to it someday; I love it too much to not.

And so I wrote something else, something that looks and tastes like Sci-Fi but is actually not, not really. It’s a story about what happens when you can’t control your own life, when you want to do something but can’t. Some people might see this as a metaphor for my current and on-going process of applying for HE teaching jobs. I don’t.

Anyway, so, in summary; lots of stuff will be happening right here. I would say “Don’t go anywhere!” but that would be terribly selfish of me.

Over recent weeks I have been devouring computer games at the weekends. I’ve been working hard on editing during the week and have been left with these two day chunks where I want to do nothing but vegetate, so I’ve been doing that with my consoles. Two weeks ago I played Bionic Commando, last week was inFamous, and this weekend has been devoted to Red Faction: Guerilla. The quality of the games isn’t what I care about here (but if you want some reviews, here they are, in order: Mediocre, Quite Good, Great Fun But Gets Dull); rather, I’m concerned about the characters that these games are throwing at me.

There’s a joke/meme/thing about bald space marines this generation, and how representative they are of current game avatar stereotypes. It’s a sloppy joke, mainly because – I suspect – the baldness aspect comes from the difficulty of making decent looking hair in games (seriously!), and the space marine aspect comes from a lack of imagination with regards to the setting of the game. After all, who else are you going to have parading around alien worlds and abandoned space-craft? Nobody’s going to send a plumber, are they? The problem isn’t that they’re generic heroes; it’s that barely anybody takes the bald, plain-faced chap and offers them something resembling a personality. And when they do give them a design outside of this stereotype, they still fail to give them personalities.

Bionic Commando was an interesting game. The hero was designed to have dreadlocks and a big robot arm, and the story put him in prison for years until broken out when the government needed him for a mission. It’s not the most involved tale, but there’s potential there, right? And then they hired Mike Patton – Mike Patton! – to do the voice of Nathan Spencer, the main character, which meant it would be even cooler, right? Right?

Uh, no. Instead, the character swears. Mike Patton is paid to grunt a bit, bark angrily, and occasionally swear in what is actually less-than-inventive ways. The character design, whilst interesting, is utterly bereft of anything resembling charm. I thought that the game was dull as it was; playing as this absolute twunt just made me hate it. Seriously, by the end I ignored the story as it became more nonsensical, and the character became less likeable. (SPOILER: There’s a bit where you discover that the soul of your wife is trapped in your robotic arm. I am not even close to joking.)

So, the next weekend I played inFamous, Sony’s great hope for Summer 2009. Infamous is fun until it isn’t, but suffers horrendously at the hands of the worst characterisation I have ever seen in a game. The main character? Hateful, dull, arrogant, whiny. His best friend? Irritating, needy, unfunny (but constantly making jokes). The main character’s girlfriend? Piggish, bitchy, unpleasant. I was meant to want Cole, the main character, to get back together with her over the course of the story – particularly as, SPOILER: there’s a bit where you have to choose whether she or 10 doctors should die. It should be a hard choice, but it really isn’t. Cole was super-generic, and did nothing to warrant me caring about him – or, conversely, the world that he inhabited.

And this weekend I have been playing as Alec Mason in Red Faction: Guerilla.

Side story: On friday I went to see Terminator Salvation at the cinema. It was fine, wobbling between moments of awesome and awful, but bugged me at the depth of some of the character backgrounds. Common played somebody – tellingly, I can’t remember the character’s name – whose entire motivation was that they brother was killed by a robot once. Did I care? Not a jot.

As Red Faction starts, Alec Mason’s brother – tellingly, I can’t remember his name – is killed by somebody. That’s Alec’s motivation for freeing Mars from the tyranny of a weird corporation who seem utterly ineffective at doing anything, despite their fighting you with thousands of armoured troops when you only have a big hammer.

Coming out next week: Protoype, a game where you play a man called Alex who wears a hoodie. The week after, the PS3 Ghostbusters game, where you play the bald, nameless Rookie. It goes on, whole games that might just be ruined by the presence of these useless main characters. It’s not about what they look like, or where they live, or even – sometimes – what the story that they are involved in is. It’s about making you care, and want to be that person for 10 – 15 hours, and make you want to know what happens to that person in the sequel. It’s why people care about Master Chief, about Kratos, about Commander Shepherd: they had personalities, and those personalities bled through the controllers and into the people involved. A film or book with characters that you can’t stand to be around wouldn’t get watched or read, so why should a game be played? We don’t want generic heroes who curse constantly for want of anything clever to say, and whinge when bad things happen: we want them to rise to challenges, to be powerful and awesome, and to fix those bad things in a way that is great to play, and that the player will remember for a long while.

When I was working on Dungeon Hero I was writing a bald man with swords, no externally-individual qualities to speak of. He was almost autistic in his responses to danger, and he liked to hit things. But I tried to make him funny, give him real personality in his responses, give him real emotional investment at the points where it was needed, and provide him with other motivations when it wasn’t. I wanted him to be cool to play as, more than anything, something that none of the above characters provided, with their whining and moping and generic chattering. I wanted the player to think that – even though this character’s back story was shrouded in mystery – being the Hero of this game was the coolest thing in the world. Why is that so hard for other games writers to fathom?

So, confiction.com has launched. You should check it out. Basically, it’s a micro-fiction/flash-fiction/twitter-fiction site, stories written in 132 characters. It’s designed to work with Twitter (primarily), but will – in a few weeks – let people write stories from within the site itself. I’ll quote myself here, because I’ve written a couple of stories that I like on it.

He wrote a note and left with his suitcase. When she got home she saw it and cried, wondering when he learned to write.

is one, and

The present was belated. She opened it, grinning, saw the dismembered finger. Elsewhere, kidnap victims got a cake as proof of life.

is another. (Well, I like them.) The site will soon have accounts and a rating system – where you can give stories that you like Kudos – but for now it’s bare bones, the stories and nothing more. Still, there’s over 30 pages of fictions there after less than a week of being live, and there’s some fantastic material on there.

In other news, I was at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival last week for the launch of the collection that my story is in – the collection titled Nu, published by Parthian, you know the drill, click HERE to purchase – and, whilst I was there I did some discussing with my editor and the publisher’s publicity person about my novel Hereditation (being published June 2010 by Parthian, fact fans!). We discussed the launch next year – Hay again, joint launch with two other writers, one of whom is Susie Wild, and is a damned good writer, based on the thing that she wrote for Nu. So that’s nice.

Ah, other news, other news: this site here is going to get an overhaul in the next few months, put some writing up, some more actual content. I’m looking into putting my thesis up here, but changed a bit, and there’ll be some side-fictions from the novel when the time is right. More on that another time. I’m going to try and be better about writing here, checking in more often, but I’ve said that countless times before, so only time will tell.

Tomorrow – that’s Sunday 24th May 2009 – I am going to the Hay-On-Wye Literary Festival where, at 9am I am in a tent with some other people promoting this little book right here. It’s called Nu: Fiction & Stuff, and it’s being published by Parthian. It’s writing by some previously unpublished writers, and I have a piece in it, called Decoration. It’s totally different to all my other writing, and was one of the few things that I have ever written for a specific project, so it was interesting to see how it turned out. (It turned out to be a five thousand word story about a middle-class couple trying to inject some spice into their marriage by mutually seducing another couple that they invite to dinner. There’s some jokes in it, and some horrific people, so I did what I set out to do, I suppose.)

Anyway, pick up a copy if you’re interested in new writing from Wales – there’s some other names in there that promise some quality material, which is nice.

I’ll pop back next week and tell more about novels and their associated publications/perils/pitfalls, and also to tell you more about Confiction.com…

First draft was in ‘the can’, as they say, this time last week. That meant a lot. It was a novel that I hated to finish – mostly because I felt like it wasn’t, like the work that would then have to go into it was so great I couldn’t imagine beginning the edits/rewrites that would need to be involved. Then I passed it over to my trusted reader/editor/friend Holly, who read it, edited it, and then told me that she “really, really liked it.”  Her words, which made me feel great – she knows good writing etc. Second draft followed at a stupidly fast pace over the last few days, with characters getting chopped and their lives altered irrevocably at the touch of a delete key.

Now, that, coupled with the advances in my first novel’s road to publication – of which another post another day, when the ink has dried, but it’s looking good, all told – and I’m feeling good about sending this off to agents for their attention.

But here’s the problem: it’s a novel about God. I mean, sure, it’s not about God, per se, He just happens to be a character in it, and He does some stuff. The novel itself is about humanity, about people, but you know, you mention God in a synopsis and people assume. They assume even more when the crux of the novel is that God – Christian God, more Old Testament than New – is real, and suddenly makes himself known the world over. When one of the major plot threads of the novel is the journey of some characters, The Stand-style, to find God, it all tumbles apart around my ears and I start feeling like I’m a religious zealot. I’m not. In fact, I don’t even believe in God, let alone Christian God. As I read the synopsis over and over, however, I keep thinking about the reaction that I would have, were I a literary agent.

“Uh. Yeah. So, God is real and very powerful? And you’ve written a novel all about how awesome He is, and how everybody finds him all at once? Don’t we have a The Bible already?”

What I’ve actually written is a literary fiction novel (and quite a human, philosophical one at that) that leaps into genre fiction whenever it likes, most specifically into the genre of Apocalyptic Science Fiction (more of which Alan Moore (NO PUN INTENDED) writes about here). It’s not a novel about God; it’s a novel that uses God as a relatable Doomsday Event instead of Triffids, nuclear meltdown or global warming.

Anyway, so, a favour, please. Below is the synopsis as I’ve currently got it in my first letter, designed to be posted off tomorrow. I’d really appreciate it if you can read it and tell me (in the comments) what you like/dislike/approve of in it, and what you think I could change to make it more appealing, and sound less… gentle, I suppose. Also, do agents/publishers want a longer synopsis, detailed, breaking down every action of the novel? Or do they want shorter, as if I were selling it to them? Thoughts and opinions, please. And then, in 6-8 weeks, I can let you know how it’s gone…

Oh, and the novel is called The Testimony.

The Testimony revolves around a basic premise: What if (nearly) everybody in the world suddenly heard the voice of a God speaking to them? What effects would that have on their well-being, their thoughts, their attitudes? And what about the people that didn’t hear Him speak? What would it mean for them?

The novel is written in the first person, taking place over a seven-week period of time, and with a number of different narrators. Each of them presents their story, describes how the events of the novel affect them, and how their lives continue in the wake of hearing the God’s words. Each of them has a different experience, and many of their stories cross over with each other as their lives intersect.

At the start of novel we are introduced to our protagonists, among them a pair of French linguists, a Mexican preacher, a British MP and a Mormon family in America. Through them, and a host of other narrators, we get descriptions of what happens to their world. We see what happens when the God speaks to them on subsequent occasions, as people start dying directly at his hand when He misunderstands their prayers, taking them literally; and what happens when he decides that, based on the actions (and reactions) of people all over the world, He is going to abandon them, and reset the world to one closer to His original intentions.

Throughout the tale run many narrative threads: the story of the war that starts between American and Iraq as a gut reaction to hearing the God, and the protests and riots that occur as a result of that war; the story of the people unable to cope with the knowledge of God’s existence, choosing suicide (or worse) over their lives; the story of the delusional Mexican preacher founding his own church; and the story of the few people who can’t hear God, and their journey to find each other and, ultimately, a meaning behind what is happening.

Ultimately, the novel is a story about humanity as opposed to religion. It’s about what happens to us when faced with something that we cannot comprehend, that we have no control over and, in the end, threatens to destroy us.

It’s getting bigger and more elaborate. This will not become apparent until it’s finished and you can/might/should/will read it as a novel, but this wall is super-necessary to write it. Super-necessary.

1. Editing is hard. It’s far harder than I thought it would be. Two instances: When working on a project for some people, a freelance writing project, everybody seemed happy with the content that I had provided until an editor was hired, stepped in and changed thousands of words. Seriously, thousands, and they were changes that seemed to have very little consistency with themselves, and altered the overall tone of the piece. Frankly, they might as well have hired her to write the thing in the first place (or tell me, from the beginning, the tone that they were actually going for).  This isn’t a rare thing: Another friend has had an offer to publish her novel, only they want the ending completely changed, altered from it’s currently interesting ambiguity, and shifted towards something far safer and neutered. I don’t know how to feel about any of this, yet.

2. Lost is the best television show currently on the air. People complain about it becoming too complicated, too confusing, too must time-travel. Oh, boo hoo. I’ve got an idea: why not try and push yourself, think outside the standard format, work at something for once? It’s thrilling and exciting and hilarious and touching, and just happens to, yes, jump all over time and location like a 1.21gw powered pogo stick. If it confuses you, try harder, and if you don’t want to try harder, go and watch Heroes or something.

3. Heroes, in the above sentence, was originally Dollhouse, and then I thought that I should write about it more. Have you watched Dollhouse yet? It’s Alias, but less fun, and – somehow – less charmingly written. I expect cancellation, and I don’t think that nearly as many people will be outraged as were when Firefly hit the dirt.

4. Battlestar Galactica is the second best television show currently on the air, but it, of course, is roaring to the pre-destined series finale next week. It’s astonishing as well: beautiful, political and philosophical, making you think whilst it gives you action and twists at every corner, and, in Gaius Baltar, one of the best characters ever realised. It reminds me at its times of what would have happened had The West Wing been set in the future, with some robots that look like people. I know people won’t watch it because they don’t like sci-fi or whatever: those people are idiots. This is sci-fi in the same way that the Terminator films are: Human characters fighting against the technology that threatens to outgrow them. I will be sad to see it end.

5. The world is abuzz with leaky records lately, talking about the Grizzly Bear album hat appeared like it heralds the beginning of the end. It doesn’t, per se – it’s an awful rip, and anybody who thinks that it’s listenable must listen to all of their music in an upside boat somewhere in the ocean – but it does point towards something. Remember back in the day – the 60s day, this is, which you almost certainly don’t actually remember, but bear with me – albums would get released with only a couple of weeks of promotion in music magazines, and they would sell gangbusters, and then people would continue buying them? Why the hell hasn’t this new music climate of leaks and spillages pushed the industry back to this? Why aren’t albums getting released as soon as they’re done and then getting promoted? We need this trail of hype to pre-sell something, based on, what? an awful quality leak that some people on the internet are going insane for? Here’s an idea. Sell the MP3s of the Grizzly Bear album tomorrow, and then work around a campaign as to why it’s so good.

6. In other downloading news, why do the books that I buy not yet come with a download code for the PDF? I would have not bought a single book less this year, but I would have bought a Sony Reader, were this the case. Nevermind, eh?

7. Stephen King. I read that Kindle story. Please, please, for the love of everything I used to adore about your writing, don’t do that again. I’m all for more ‘Men In Yellow Coats’, but I just can’t accept the fictional equivalent of product placement. And, let’s face it, your writing today isn’t quite what it used to be. Take some time, write some stuff under a new pseudonym – maybe try something harder, less rounded and clean-edged? – and then we’ll talk again.

8. Robeto Bolano. The Savage Detectives is great, one of the best things that I have ever read, but far too long. It could have taken the title of best novel ever were that middle section – you’ll know the one, if you’ve read it – not such a chore to get through at times. The novel must be, what, 200,000 words? That’s a big novel, hard to read and harder to sell, and hard – for some readers – to even contemplate. They like the number of pages, that’s true – people love value for money! – but when the font is small (as, in a 200grand novel, it must be) that’s a tough sell. I noticed the other day that The Savage Detectives was in the CRIME! section of my local Borders, which is grossly inappropriate, I have to say, and would suggest that nobody in the shop had read it, but it also stuck out like a sore thumb with the rest of the books on the stand: they shared the same number of pages, but their fonts were twice, sometimes nearly three times the size, 12 words to a line. I don’t know what that tells you.

9. I miss bootlegs. I remember going to Camden Market of a sunday and buying bootleg albums of either concerts that I went to or concerts that I wished that I’d been able to go to. Two of my favourites were Pearl Jam Unplugged (finally being officially released, fact fans!) and a Nine Inch Nails live cassette called Nothing Can Stop Me Now. This latter one was notable for two reasons: awful quality sound, which I put up with then (but won’t put up with now for the Grizzly Bear leak!) and that title, torn from the lyrics to Piggy, from The Downward Spiral. I miss bootlegs for the thrill of getting something illicit, the thrill of hearing stuff that you haven’t heard before, and the titles, the way that it was presented as something semi-official because a bit of a lyric had been used for a title. If it were called ‘Live At Brixton Academy’ it would have been duller, somehow, more official, but it wasn’t: It had a title that I related to on a different level.

10. Speaking of things being Live At Brixton Academy, Faith No More have reunited. They aren’t playing Brixton Academy, but they are playing Download. I am trying to work out if it’s possible. I’m also toying with the Sonisphere bill. I don’t care about Metallica any more, and I never cared about Linkin Park to begin with, but Nine Inch Nails, Jane’s Addiction, Alice In Chains and Mastodon might be too much to pass up on the same bill.

11. In other news, I’m loving the new Cursive album, the new Phoenix album, The Antler’s Hospice, the new Richard Swift, Paul Steel and Stevie Nicks’ solo stuff. So yeah, get, or something.

12. Some friends of mine had a baby the other day, Avalon Joan Simpson. She’s terribly cute, and I’d like to congratulate them all.

13. You can follow me on Twitter here. It’s really nice to see it take off, and even nicer for the way that I’ve met so many people I wouldn’t have met were it not for Twitter, writers and artists and contacts. I have, thus far, had two freelance jobs from contacts that I’ve made, which is phenomenal. Yesterday, Facebook unveiled a new look that’s exactly like Twitter, now, only without the opportunity to meet people that you don’t already know – surely the point of Twitter in the first place. We’ll see if it works or not.

14. I broke the 30,000 word mark on the novel as I headed into section 3 of 6, where events really kick off. I’ve been thinking a lot about Freytag’s Pyramid, the pattern by which all narrative flow occurs.

This pattern sits in almost every incident of fiction, be it novel, film, or TV show, and it’s very hard to escape from. Not that you should try to escape: it makes perfect sense really, when you look at it. Many novels are the pyramid repeated over and over. My first one repeated it three times; my second only once, really. This latest one does it over and over again, I think, and all instances have proven that you need the first three and last three stages for stage 4 – Climax – to have any impact at all. If it comes from nowhere, it means nothing. If it fades to nowhere, it means nothing. Even if the individual points on the pyramid are single sentences, they almost invariably have to exist. My narrative is hugely disjointed: chronological, but broken up into the narrative voices of a great many characters, prefaced by their name and their location. See:

It’s not an original narrative trick, but it’s how I have to tell this story, so fine. But it’s a nightmare to keep track of, and the individual characters all have their own arcs as well as the arcs of the novel itself. So I have Freytag’s Pyramid to consider on two levels: as a novel, and for each individual character, and each character encounters the stages of that pyramid multiple times. Knowing that, I then have to balance it for the reader, ensure that you don’t spend too long on one character’s arc, or that you don’t spend long enough – another issue with this as a form is that some of the voices won’t be liked by the readers. Some aren’t meant to be liked, fine, but when you’re asked to spend time in the heads of others, you have to have a reason to want to stay there or you’ll rush to the next one, potentially losing something that’s important. It’s the same gamble when you write anything first person – What if the reader doesn’t like my narrator? – but it’s definitely more likely when your narrators number in the twenties, and are still growing.