J P Smythe’s Website.

So, brief update – but I promise I’ll be back for more soon. I’ve been under NDAs and told I can’t talk until things are formally announced, so I kept quiet. But the quiet is over! Here’s a formal announcement, courtesy of my new publishers at Blue Door/HarperCollins…

THE TESTIMONY by J.P Smythe. Trade Press Release (draft)

Patrick Janson-Smith at Blue Door has acquired what he describes as “one of the most startlingly original thrillers I have read in a very long time. Think Independence Day crossed with The Stand. What excites me most is that it’s a novel which divides opinion sharply as to what’s actually happened; the literary equivalent of Memento and Inception. It is accessible, yet intellectually challenging, and should provoke heated debate. It’s also a shoo-in for cinematic adaptation.”

What happens when nearly everyone on earth hears the same thing at the same time? First it is just static, then come words: ‘My Children’ then ‘Do Not Be Afraid…’

Both global thriller and meditation on the ideas of faith and love, The Testimony is a novel of a world suddenly confused and afraid.

J.P Smythe received his PhD in Creative Writing from Cardiff University, where he also taught.  He currently works as a computer game writer, and has published a short story and novel, Hereditation, though the Welsh Books Council-funded Parthian Books.

Janson-Smith acquired UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights to The Testimony and the author’s next novel, as-yet-untitled, from Tim Glister at Janklow & Nesbit UK.

Plus, not to forget that Hereditation is released in under a month! Madness…

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.

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.

So, I’ve been thinking.

I went to watch Watchmen today and really liked it, as an adaptation.  I enjoyed it as a film; as a way of making something as perfect as the comic/novel workable on film, I really enjoyed it.  The ending was changed, the squid gone, the characters not necessarily as whole as they were, some of the sub-stories chopped out like mangy hair, but the spirit was there, I think.  It felt like the same story, but with better credits and slightly worse writing. (On the writing: lots of it was taken from the comic. I actually felt cheated for Alan Moore that he didn’t get a writer’s credit: David Hayter grabbed whole chunks of dialogue that weren’t his, particularly with Rorschah’s journal, and then somehow they get credited to him. Peculiar.)

But what I most liked about it was the memory that it gave me of the novel/comic/whatever from when I first read it: that sense of the pre-apocalyptic, of what could conceivably be to come, of what might end up happening. We have in Watchmen a piece of alternate-reality speculative fiction that deals almost entirely with how we – royal, as humans – adapt to the vaguest of threats to who and what we are. In Watchmen’s case, that is the threat of The Bomb, of being torn apart and blown up and reduced to ash. I’ve always seen it as something very psychological, where each of the modern Minutemen represent a different part of our psyche. (Don’t run away.) Dr Manhattan is our God complex, that part of us that believes that we are masters of our own destiny (and yet, inextricably tied to fate); The Comedian is our tempers, our misplaced rage at the world that we have created; Dan Dreiburg is that part of ourselves that we have allowed to become fat and complacent; Silk Spectre II is scared and broken by what came before us, and unsure of our place and influence on the world; Ozymandias is our belief that we can change the world, our own situations, lumped in with our selfishness; and Rorschach is our self-hatred, loathing, our sense of mystery, of intrigue. He’s the part of us that questions everything, that won’t stand for what we’re offered. Each of those parts is a necessary chunk of the whole, needed to provide both a narrative and moral centre, and actually is – I think – tied to the concept of apocalyptic fiction.

The thought that everything could end in a heartbeat, suddenly, no going back, is a terrifying one. Who can’t be scared of that? But there’s a pattern to that ending, a routine that leads to it, a series of (unfortunate) events that means we’re all doomed – and it’s human nature to assume that we’re to blame for our own failures, our defeats. If the world was going to end tomorrow, chances are that we’re to blame. And those characters in Watchmen play directly into that paranoia AND that egoism. What would an apocalypse be without a combination of terror, self-pity and blame? Nothing. Throughout fiction we see evidence of the three when faced with apocalyptic events, and Watchmen needs to be no different, or we would never worry that the world is ever in any danger. Without that danger, the threat means nothing. If the book cannot end with the world being destroyed, by Russia, giant alien squid or Dr Manhattan, then there’s no point in having any concern over your character’s fates.

In a roundabout way, this leads me to me. (I would like it stressed that I am in no way likening my current writing to Watchmen, either in tone, mood, style or quality. But…) I’m writing what I’m thinking of as pre-apocalyptic fiction – albeit not nearly as simple as that idea may sound – and I have been trying to work out how to ensure that the reader cares for the world that I’m writing about. There’s a lot of characters – more than I’ve ever had to write about/for before – and not all of them are meant to be cared for. But the world that they inhabit, that is. I think that those characters archetypes, or the tropes that they embody, have to appear amongst the characters that I’m creating. Alan Moore hit it perfectly by making every single character have some trait that we, as readers, as humans, can relate to. (It took the film to make me have that with The Comedian, actually, and he was the last one to go: the breaking down, crying, realising what he’s done – it made me forgive him.)  It made me think about the implications of our characters to their worlds far more than I usually do – usually a character comes and forms as s/he goes, developing more organically. I think for this novel their development – their backstories – might need to come first, even if they’re never used.

I think this is why apocalyptic fictions need groups of characters, incidentally. No single person can embody all that must be embodied to give the apocalypse the respect that it deserves/requires, so you need a gang. You need Buffy and her chums, you need Bruce Willis’ merry gang of oil-riggers, you need all of Neo’s chums, you need – as seen in the Terminator: Salvation trailers – a friendly terminator, a rapper and Claire Danes. You can’t do it alone: you can’t have that fear, that guilt, that terror and that sense of being your own God all in one person. Unless, of course, you’re the maniac who pushes the button, and you’re all that’s left when the dust falls.

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.

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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.

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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…
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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.
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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.