A Gray Area

It’s been too long since I sat down to write. “Too long” being 3 and ½ weeks. So I’m setting pen to paper - or fingertips to keyboard - once more, to write a couple of short stories.

First up is “Gray Test Hits”, a sci-fi/noir tale about paranoia and contract-killing. I’ll follow this with a short story called “The View” which is a warm-up piece for The Isles of Sheffield, and I might even turn my hand to a Dar’uka short story. I’ve several bubbling around my brain, and depending on the result of The Burning Sands over the next two weeks, I may well set the ideas down.

So, like A Well in the Flesh, these will be mini-projects to keep the ol’ brain going, and the imaginative-ovens burning. I’m not sure about having them published – we’ll see how they turn out. I might seek a small-press publisher/magazine or website. Or I might even publish them myself on my own website (see link left).

Either way, I’m now back at what I do best.

Back to the ol’ chestnut:

Motivation.

Been there before, but it’s risen its head again. The reason? Well, I get my first royalty cheque this week, and I’m understandably curious about it. I already know what I’ll be getting for the German deal (half of it, anyway – the other half comes my way next April), but the money from book sales is a mystery.

And last week, during lunch with a few friends, the money-issue cropped up; once they discovered how much I could earn, I was asked: “why write if it isn’t going to pay very well?”

Now I’ve answered this question before here, so I won’t go into too much detail, but if I have any motivation outside of the desire to simply write imaginative fiction, it is the motivation to see my name in print and enjoy the benefits of an extra income…

…I’m blessed (or cursed, depending on your point of view) with a day-job that is not too demanding and allows me – at the moment – to earn a living honestly, and still pursue the dream of being a writer. It’s a secure job and it houses me, clothes me, feeds me, and provides me with a rather extravagant book and DVD collection. I’m not desperate for any more money than what drops into my account on a monthly basis – as Yoda would say, “Comfortable, I am. Steady income, I have.” So the extra dosh The Secret War earns me is a bonus.
It’s a fortunate position, and objectively, it might explain why my motivation to write is simply the joy of writing, and not purely a monetary return. Whenever I meet a would-be author who has no non-writing income at all and believes their writing will get them by, alarm bells start ringing and I can only imagine a life of hard-work and heartache in front of them (unless they become the next JK Rowling).

I know, because when I was 18 years old, I thought like that. I believed that I could write a bestseller, or become a freelance journo, or something like that. I achieved the journo part during university, but was paid in 7” singles and CDs (apparently this is not hard-currency in the real world). I soon realised there are dreams and then there’s reality, and rarely do they ever meet. Like that guy on X-Factor over the weekend (who left a high-paid job to become a singer, spent £50,000 on the dream, only to be told that he could not sing).
Yeah, respect for following the dream. But reality will always intervene…

…The simple truth – a truth that has been bandied about in countless writing sites, so I suppose I’m only adding my own voice to the chorus – is that writing very rarely pays. And it’s rarer that it pays enough money for a steady income.

And when the royalty statement drops onto my door mat, I’ll be grinning from ear to ear – sure - but it won’t mean I can jack-in the day-job.

Not yet, anyway.

Post Script:
In terms of the Macmillan New Writers, a bestseller has yet to rise from the ranks, but as David mentions in his blog, Brian McGilloway is perhaps the closest. His Inspector Devlin books have been snapped up by Pan Macmillan, and as David points out, he’s the first MNWer to sell rights to a US publisher.
So, yes, writing rarely pays beyond the dreams of avarice, but with his series of crime novels, Brian is on the way to living that dream...

…And you saw him first at Macmillan New Writing.

Secret in the States

After an oddly prolonged period where The Secret War was missing from Amazon.com, I was informed this week that you can now buy it from the illustrious site.

Oddly, the book is being published by Macmillan New Writng in the US. I can only assume it’s another imprint similar to MNW.

It’s also missing the following synopsis:

“For thousands of years a secret war has been fought between Heaven and Hell. Daemons and angels, vampires and knights, clash for the future of mankind, and as the two sides wage war across the world, innocent people are caught up in the conflict - men like Captain William Saxon and Lieutenant Kieran Harte, two great friends who have recently survived the horrors of the Battle of Waterloo. But now they face a greater struggle, against the daemonic forces of Count Ordrane, and the clandestine ambitions of the Vatican. They must try to survive assassination attempts, political machinations, epic battles on land and sea, and above all the power of a mysterious bronze pyramid - the Scarimadean - that brings everlasting damnation too all who come into contact with it. Their only allies are an old man, a fading secret organisation in the Church, and an enigmatic warrior, who may hold the key not only to the friends' fates, but to the fate of all mankind...The year is 1815, when angels and daemons walked our streets...”

A half complete Amazon entry, yes. But at the moment it’s better than no entry at all!

What does one do while one waits?

I received an e-mail from Macmillan New Writing today that gave me a rough idea when I will find out about the new book. All things being well, I should have some news, or rather a “yay” or “nay” in the first weeks of October.
Which is great, I guess, since I can relax for a couple of weeks and not worry about it.
Much.

Between now and then, it’s time to simply chill.
But I’m not sure I know how to.
I wasn’t planning to write anything between now and November, but already the first two pages of the Isles of Sheffield have been scribbled down and I’ve come up with yet another novel called “The Exiles” which has been added to the bulging file at the end of my desk.

I don’t really want to start on anything that’s going to aggravate my November start on the new project, so I might look at a couple of short stories if the urge becomes too great, and there’s always “A Well in the Flesh” which was part-way complete.
Then there’s this blog, which needs attention for the remainder of its shelf-life (one that’s been extended until I find out about the fate of the new book). And finally there’s the new blog which I’ll be tackling next week.

And If all else fails, I’ll just dive into this pile of books I purloined from my Mum’s loft over the weekend…

As I was walking to St Ives, I met a writer with seven lines...

A writer can never hide from what he or she is. So I suppose it was, with surprising monotony, that my week long break away from the laptop would inevitably see me clawing my way back to it, figuratively.

We’ve just been away to St Ives, a lovely coastal town that has banished all memories of Newquay, which (being frank here) isn’t the most picturesque place in Cornwall, (but hey, it has the best waves). St Ives, on the other hand, is – and without meeting any men with seven wives – an idyllic coastal town that under deep blue skies could be almost Mediterranean. I don’t often fall in love with places when I visit for less than a couple of days, especially if that visit coincides with a wretched foot-off-the-gas-peddle-cold (which only seems to strike once you wind down physically and mentally), but this little place stole my heart, hook, line and sinker…

The condition of this short-break was that no writing would be undertaken during the holiday, and certainly no book promoting. Having become a little weary of walking into bookshops to make small-talk to the owner in the attempt he or she would stock my book (I’ve been doing it over the last 8 months, so it was refreshing to simply go into a bookshop to look for books, and not my book) I managed to fulfil the latter part of the condition with no problems.

The former part proved a little harder to do.

In my defence, it was St Ives that was at fault. I was quite happy to sit back on a beach, to finish reading Jonathan Drapes’ Never Admit to Beige, and China Mieville’s Looking For Jake. But best laid plans and all that… well I ended up ducking into the local post office to buy a notepad and several ball-point pens.
You see, after a day or so of roaming St Ives’ compact, cobbled and white-washed streets, garnished with hanging baskets of vivid flowers and occasionally peopled by lost-looking tourists - stories began forming in my imagination. By the second day, one story in particular just would not budge from the ol’ brain, and I began to write it down in the glorious sunshine that has been quite remiss this summer.

It became a story known simply as “The St Ives Project” A story that will hopefully do to the Cornish fishing industry what Jaws did for beach-holidays. Yep, I’m looking at a real horror novel here, a little pulpy, but with some genuine (I hope) “fucking-hell” moments.
Like the coming Isles of Sheffield book, “The St Ives Project” will be a slim novel – a snip at around 300 pages – but for the next couple of years I’m looking at smaller projects until I embark on The Fortress of Black Glass, and the “St Ives Project” fits the bill.

And Mrs Curran has definitely been sold on the project too, especially with the prospect of a whole month in St Ives in September ’08 while I write it all down.

So I had a break… a slim one. But I’m just a writer who loves writing, and as my wife Sarah pointed out “it doesn’t matter where we visit, you always come up with a story based on it. You just can’t switch off from being a writer, can you?”

Like a sensible husband, I didn’t argue.
And like an amazing wife, who knows you better than you do, I realised she was dead right…