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.

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.

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.

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.

The wall of post-it notes has grown.

A picture of all the post-it notes on the wall as I head into the novel's 2nd part.

Every time I add a character or a plot point they go up, in a certain place, arranged for their proximity to another character or place or event.  The pink ones are people; the yellow are events or keystones; the green are also characters or situations, but slightly different ones, tied to a different narrative thread.  I’m going to be adding two more colours as soon as I can get to the supermarket as well, one for Places and the other for something else. Ah, ambiguity! I’m not ready to spill the details on the plot yet, but I will tell you this:

* Currently I’m at 18 thousand words.  If all goes to plan, this will be around 1/4 to 1/5 of the novel, which will have 5 parts, or movements.  I have just started on Part 2.

* It is written in first person, past tense (mostly), and from the point of views of lots of different characters. For emphasis: LOTS. Each of those Pink post-its has a narrative voice, and, if you’re interested, it’s a nightmare, attempting to convincingly write so many different voices without making them muddy themselves or fall into pure cliche. I’ve taken to speaking them aloud as I write, in accent, trying to capture each character. It sounds pretentious but, thus far, it’s been working.

* This is pure speculative fiction. I would call it Sci-Fi, but there’s absolutely no science in it. In fact, it features something quite the opposite.

* I’m writing very quickly. I used to regiment myself, but that has never ended up working. Now my best work gets done in the brief snaps between lunch and Vikki getting home from work, and I’ll usually carry on an hour or so into her being here.

So, there you go, True Believers; all the information that you can have right now. It’s a hard one to write this, despite my speed of working. The story is very intricate and, some might say, almost fiddly, and it’s not like anything I’ve ever written before. I’ve been discussing it a lot with Vikki, actually, throwing ideas around, which I’ve never done before, and I’ve taken to thinking about this far more than I usually do my writing before committing it to the page. I wouldn’t say it’s planned – I still don’t yet know exactly how this will end – but it’s certainly very considered.

Oh, and:

* It has a working title: The Testimony. It’s the sort of working title that might even stick, and all.

-

In other news, I’ve got a short story coming out in a collection of fiction, published by Parthian, entitled Nu. The story is called Decoration, and I wrote it especially for the collection, so there. It’s quite vulgar and features some of my patented hateful characters, and was me trying to write something quite human, and as dragged away from the fantastical as I could. Oh, and it allowed me to use the name Yaphet for a character, which I’ve wanted to do ever since discovering how much I love the actor Yaphet Koto (of Homicide: Life On The Street fame). I’m also starting to get somewhere with both novels I’ve got completed – well, somewhere further than a series of rejection letters, at least. I’m still proud of them, and I still want people to be able to read them. One thing that they have done for me is make me realise how much I need an editor in my life. I need somebody to chop and cut everything, or I’d be writing twice as much as I am. I wonder how writers who have never had experience with creative writing courses or workshops etc do it: I would have no idea what was good and what wasn’t if it weren’t for the people (professors and uni colleagues) who read my stuff and – unbiasedly – tell me if it’s rubbish or not. Are you an unpublished writer who hasn’t had work read by people like that, or workshopped? Find a workshop group where you live and take your work. Honestly, it’ll pay off in the long run.

-

I’ve got a new website in the works. It’ll be launching soon – it’s currently being built and designed by lovely people, of whom more another time. For now…
-
In sadder news, the game that I was writing for looks like it’s had to shut down production due to this abhorrent recession, though I’m assured that this was nothing to do with the quality of the writing that I did. I wrote some Goblin Poetry and Slaver Drinking Songs that I’m really quite proud of, and they were a great bunch of guys to work with. I won’t say any more in case the game does a Lazarus, or I get to work with them on future projects.
-
And, last but by no means least, I was recently hired by the lovely chaps at Sawhorse Media – those guys behind the Shorty Awards, which you can’t have missed if you read an article about Twitter recently – to write a book all about Twitter and business and that sort of thing. It’s finally done, and currently being designed, and it’ll be appearing on (virtual) shelves very soon indeed. Check out this page to sign up for more details and information on when it’ll be available.

[This might be a rant. I haven't decided yet.]

I haven’t been on here in a while, and I’m sorry – the emails asking if I’m okay have been nice, so thanks.  I am. I wish I could say that it’s because I’ve been so busy writing, or getting published, or even getting (and doing) a job that offers me the magical combination of satisfaction and pay. None of those things are true. I have been sending off the novel – this is John The Baptist – to agents and publishers, and I’m still waiting for replies. I’ve had one: the unnamed agent said that they really liked the novel, compared it to Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis and then said it wasn’t violent enough for them. Heavens! Imagine writing a thriller novel that doesn’t fill the first hundred pages with violence and gore, preferring to stick with characters and hints and insinuations? Anyway, this isn’t about me being bitter: it’s about me worrying.

I knew that this would never be easy. I wasn’t under those preconceptions. Only 1% of authors actually make money on their writing at first, and that number only creeps to, what, the ten-percentile in life generally? Writing isn’t done for money, and it’s a fool who thinks that it is. And I’m not writing novels that will do a Zadie Smith and unite readers (and publishers) in their quest to throw money, so I was never that person. I never saw writing as a career – it’s what I love, and I want it to be a major part of my life, but I realise that, for the next few years at least, I need to find alternative incomes. And my income was to be the other thing I love: teaching creative writing. It’s a love that nearly equals writing itself, actually giving people suggestions, tips, advice, feedback, guiding their writing, and reading the writing of people who want to get better. But – there’s always a but, right? – I can’t get that job. I have the paper qualifications, the PhD, the MA, all that jazz, but I don’t have a published novel. 

See, that’s what university institutions want: something that they can show to their students, something that they can wave under the research council’s nose, something that might get them more money than just A Great Teacher. So, in order to find my job I have to get published, which skews things a little. I never wanted money from my deal. I wanted to be on shelves, and give people the chance to buy the book, and I wanted to write what I wanted to write, whatever the genre, whatever the style. But that’s changed. Because, if I have trouble selling John The Baptist (as I had trouble selling Hereditation, which now sits, dusty on my desktop), I need something else to sell. And, right now, I am diving headfirst into a world of commercial reasoning.

Ah ha! That’s the way, right? You write what you want to read, but that isn’t necessarily what others want. Most of the time it isn’t even close. I would buy Hereditation if I saw it in a shop, read the blurb, flicked through it, but then I buy Jonathan Safran Foer novels, Paul Auster novels, Alasdair Gray novels. I would buy John The Baptist, but then, I buy Bret Easton Ellis novels, Jonathan Coe novels, Iain Banks novels. Not everybody does. And if there’s no money in it – or, less money in it – people don’t jump at the chance to spend money on you themselves, and put your book on shelves, or in 3-for-2 deals at the front of a Borders. So, since finishing John The Baptist I have been writing, yes, but in no way has it been successful. I’ve written 15 thousand words of a young adult novel about Time Travel, 10 thousand words of a novel about a horrendous modern family in London, 5 thousand of a horror thing and have just now started writing a crime novel set in Cardiff. Why? Because none of these ideas are sticking. Because what I want to be writing – the twists on lit fic, the genre fiction that is torn out of the genre – doesn’t sell. I’ve had feedback by the ton from agents saying how I’m a good writer, how they “love” my writing, but can’t sell it. I’ve had feedback from one of the world’s leading Crime Fiction specialists saying how good John The Baptist is. I’ve had people read my stuff and love it, but that means nothing. It isn’t boasting, by the way: it’s this way for hundreds, thousands of writers. It’s the most told story in the world, just about. 

Anyway, this all reads very doom and gloom, I’m sure. It shouldn’t. I’m not giving up or anything, I’m just readjusting my priorities. I don’t yet know what that means, but I know I have to get a job, and right now it’s looking bleak, like the last 7 years of my life have been wholly wasted. SADFACE. I don’t want to be one of those people who gives everything up to write a novel, to make my fortune: I know that isn’t how the world works. But I do want to be somebody who writes for a living, makes people proud – makes himself proud – and manages to live a happy life. I don’t think it should be that hard. 

***

In other news, I’ve recently been writing some script stuff for a computer game coming out next year, called Dungeon Hero. Its a sheer delight to be writing something and getting paid for it, I have to say, and, whilst I may not yet be getting paid to write my own stories, at least they’re my words. 

I finished the second novel I have written a week ago. It took me about 8 weeks, which is an absolute record for me. It is currently titled something about John The Baptist, but I don’t know what yet.  I flit between “Vs. John The Baptist” and “The Ballad Of John The Baptist” and “Touched By The Hand Of The Baptist” and something about Baptism, I don’t know. Some things happened between me starting to write it and finishing it.

1. It became a very straight-forward novel. I usually love playing with time and language and all that, but I don’t in this one. It is utterly linear, a straighforward progression of story with constant characters and nothing obtuse, not really.

2. It because a firm genre novel. It is crime fiction. There’s huge elements of what people would conceive to be literary fiction in there, but the basics of the crime fiction genre (criminal, detective, mystery, reveal) are all there.

3. It’s tight as all hell. A brisk 65 thousand words, it’s relatively fat-free (he says, before anybody has read it). 

I finished it last wednesday and have spent the last few days reading it over and over and making notes on stuff that I think needs tightening and changing and altering, and then on the next pass I am making those changes. I’m on the fifth pass now, I think, and I’m still finding things I know need changing, and I’m still unhappy with some of the changes that I make. I don’t like the ending (but no change there, as I didn’t like the ending of the first novel) and I am not entirely sure about what happens to the main character, but I suppose my test readers will either affirm or deny my fears. For now, I would like to record this: the two pages of notes based on the first two passes of the novel. They may contain spoilers, but then, if you worry about, don’t click to read them bigger, eh?

Next step: proper editing.  I’ll report back when I know what the readers say.

Apparently, these are of vital importance to writers.  ”Write down EVERYTHING that feels like an idea,” I tell my students, and they don’t.  I do.  I currently have four notebooks on my desk.  All are Moleskines.  Here’s what they look like and what I write in them.

That one on the end was a gift from my girlfriend for my birthday, and has been embossed.  I am absolutely terrified to write in it.  This is important, as I mark everything, usually, like a dog.

Every time I get something to write in/on, I write something on it to spell what that thing is going to do. This computer, for example – I wrote a section of my first novel, Hereditation – a chapter about a man called Quaid Sloane, which ended up being one of my favourite things from that novel.  Here’s a bit of it, if you care:

Italy agreed with Quaid, and he grew fat and complacent over the months that he searched for the woman that he knew he would marry.  Eventually he found the publishers of the calendar in Rome and they pointed him down a side street, to a small diagonal house that barely 
stood.  Quaid knocked on the door and when she answered – and she looked better in person, he thought – he went down on one knee and showed her the enormous diamond ring that he had to offer her.  She saw the ring and his clothes and said “Si”.   

They traveled back to America the next day, and married on the ship.  At night they would lie next to each other as they didn’t speak.  Quaid wondered, out loud, if they would have anything to talk about if they could.  Then, ten days into their trip Quaid’s new wife – he thought her name was Filomena, but it could have been a variation, her accent was so thick and impenetrable – sat with him on the bed before they slept.  She kissed him on the side of his face, on his unkempt sideburns, and he could feel her saliva in the hairs.  They had sex then, sex that neither of them would ever remember, frantic and disquieting.  This was how Ezra was conceived.   

During Filomena’s pregnancy she learnt American (Quaid refused to call it English, so proud was he of his heritage).  Her favorite word was “Tomato”. 

And that set a tone for the rest of the novel.  I was a hefty chunk in – 11 thousand words when I got the computer –  but that was only far enough (in the way that I write) to really establish character and basic pacing of the novel.  That chapter decided upon a broader tone – that of a slightly more sarcastic and damning narrator than I had first conceived, one who was more willing to judge.  

And voice is on my mind, right now.  I am writing this new thing, this El Lobo De Plata thing, and the novel is in danger of taking a different voice than the one that I started with.  Trouble is, I love the one that I started with.  The novel is intended to be in three sections – here is the first paragraph from one of those.  

His father was a proud man, and when his mother abandoned them for a mining captain he decided to maintain a façade of the ordinary for the sake of his son.

“She is at the shop!” he would claim when Hector asked about her. “She has gone to Church, where she will pray to have her sins wiped clean!” For three months Senor Chavez kept the act up, and Hector didn’t realise. His mother was, for the most part, a mysterious woman. When he had been seven she had spent the three months immediately following Christmas cooking only food where the primary ingredient was soft, white flour.

“It will make your body strong,” she told him when he complained, and then showed him a sketch that she made which explained that white flour was the primary component of human bones. When, two months later she began to make only fruit based concoctions he asked her where the flour had gone. He told her that he wanted his bones to grow strong.

“There was a mistake in the research labs,” she told him as she kneaded plums under her knuckles, “and flour had no effect. For now, the thing that will work is the fruit.” She gave him an apricot, and that was the end of the discussion. 

I am thinking about this one in ways that I hate myself for thinking, concerned with frontloading the novel with excitement, and with things designed to make the reader  - in this case, and every case until I get one, I think, an agent – want to read more.  It’s an easy mistake to make, as a writer, and I am making it.  I know that I am making it.  I can sit here right now and say that I wonder about whether, were I to have rearranged Hereditation, some of the agents who said no might have said yes.  I can’t help but wonder.  It started, as I have grown fond of saying, with a conversation littered with casual racism between characters about getting shoes mended.  I wouldn’t read that, I don’t think.  

[So, we've gone somewhere other than notebooks.  That's fine.]

With most agents in the UK you get the chance to send them 3 chapters of your novel.  Or, rather, you get to send them the first 3 chapters.  And, based upon those chapters they work out whether they want to read any more.  But it’s tough: one of my replied said that they loved it -the three chapters, that is – but not enough to take it on.  And that love didn’t even make them want to read the rest, as they have too much to read.  So, you think about that open: cold or hot? soft or hard? There’s that hateful idea that the first line of a novel is the most important – that’s rubbish, by the way, utter rubbish – but I think, with agents, you can extend that to the first chapter.  Because if you don’t have them you have lost them.

So, for the last 2 copies I sent off to agents I mixed things up.  I changed that conversation about cobblers (LITERALLY LOL ETC) to be the second chapter, and added a prologue that was actually a bastardised and edited version of the final chapter.  It means that the concept of INTRIGUE is established from the get-go, and will hopefully will one of those two agents on to read more.  Hopefully.  

So, when thinking about this next novel, I am really thinking about how to grab the reader.  I hate gimmicks and stuff, and don’t want it to be a pointless grab, but there are ways, I think, to ensure that the reader wants to carry on reading, above and beyond Good Writing.  

Hm.

*****

This is going to be a rocky road, I’ve realised, for you and for me.  I think that we’ll get there, but you’ll have to stick with it, and that might mean reading more about MY creative process than perhaps you think is necessary.  Still, we’ll get there in the end, right?  Right?