J P Smythe’s Website.

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.