To quote Professor Farnsworth: “Good news everyone…”

…This week I’m 33 years old, and to mark such an auspicious occasion I have a little publishing update which should answer a few questions that have assailed me over the last couple of months.

Macmillan New Writing have given me a provisional publishing date of April 2009 for the hardback version of The Horde of Mhorrer. It will be followed soon after by the mass-market paperback version of The Secret War (under the Tor imprint) with a redesigned cover for a consistent series look.

Yes, it’s quite a long way off (almost a year and a half) but it gives me plenty of time to complete The Black Hours with little distraction and time to plan The Fortress of Black Glass.

More news on covers etc will be revealed in the near future, but if you can’t wait for the paperback of The Secret War, you can still pick up a copy here, or a signed copy here.

Over there…

…on the Macmillan New Writers blog, I’ve just posted a slim blog-entry on the issue of e-books and Amazon’s new e-reader, the Kindle (click here to have a gander).

I’ve spoken about e-books on this blog before, but as the Kindle grows in popularity, and with MNW’s authors already electronified, I thought I’d raise the issue again.


And on the subject of being electronified, I’ve amended the side-bar to include a link to a sample chapter of The Secret War on the Pan Macmillan website… just in case you’re stuck for presents this Christmas and want something dark to lightened the festive season!

(And on other matters IT... BT still haven't sent me the required software to get me up and running again at home, so if you're trying to contact me through the official website, my deepest apologies. Normal service will be resumed soon, or I'll be going with another provider!).

Battles and Ruby Keys

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been to war. I’ve fought over the same ground for days, standing in blood and muck, watching as men I’ve known for over a year are struck down, some never to rise again. I’ve faced cannon fire, volley after volley of arrows, the clash of steel and giant warriors capable of pounding men into the ground with their bare fists.
And I’ve reworked this battle over and over and over until it’s invaded my dreams and taken over my everyday thoughts…

… I’m now emotionally and imagination-ally spent...

I have never thrown so many hours into a chapter before. Even without the time spent on previous drafts, I’ve worked out that chapter 20 has taken a further 18 hours of my life. But now that it’s done, I’m pleased. Tired, yes, but happy. I have only the last couple of chapters to revise and then it’s finished, so it’s quite possible I’ll beat the deadline of Christmas to return the revisions of The Horde of Mhorrer to Macmillan - with a month to spare.

And after that… well, I’m looking forward to a nice break in novel-writing until probably March next year – which is plenty of time to get some research done for The Black Hours.

As part of preparations for the new project, I’ll be “bedding in” my main character – Silas Eldritch - by writing a 2,000 word short story called “The Key with the Ruby Eye”. And I’ll be publishing that short story here on this blog, or maybe even on the official MFWCurran website.

It will be the first piece of fiction I’ve completed not set in The Secret War-universe for four years, and the first piece of completed fiction I’ll have published on the internet. Which can be risky, but I have my reasons:

The first is to see whether my main character engages with the readers of this blog. I wouldn’t say the entire book rests on his shoulders (he is not the narrator, and unlike The Secret War and The Horde of Mhorrer, The Black Hours regularly shifts viewpoints between several groups of characters). But if Silas Eldritch isn’t engaging then much of the drama and intrigue will be as effective as a chocolate fireguard.
As ever, visitors here will be allowed to comment on what they think of him as a character, and this could inform Eldritch’s nature in The Black Hours.

And then there’s the mood of the writing. The Black Hours will be a dark adventure, and while The Key with the Ruby Eye will be set in France, I want to get that whole atmospheric-thing I’m planning for London going in this prose. The story will be gloomily-lit, but I want the smog of industry to be in the back of the reader’s throat, the sounds of civilisation grinding endlessly forward in their ears, and their heart pounding as the intrigue mounts. There’ll also be a ruthless streak of black humour in the story, something I haven’t tried writing before. But then, isn’t that part of writing? To stretch yourself and write-out of the comfort-zone?

None of this will occur, however, for another six weeks or so, but it’s going to be fun throwing Mr Eldritch into Paris of the 1890’s…
…Not to mention reading what you lot think of the potential saviour of Victoria’s London.

The ‘Hours start ticking in 2008…

Set in Victorian Stone

It’s November, I’ve got a cold and I’ve hit a brick wall while revising The Horde of Mhorrer. I’ve spent the last three nights rewriting and revising half of Chapter 20 with all the skill of a short-sighted surgeon suffering an anxiety attack. I’ve written a total of 6,000 words, and two nights ago I deleted them all in despair as I realised this part of the re-write just didn’t work.

It’s not writer’s block, before anyone asks, and I suppose it’s not re-writer’s block either – but a severe lack of objectivity due to the intensive writing regime I’ve gone under to get the revisions done before Christmas. With three chapters to go, everything was revising smoothly. A distracting subplot was delicately removed and the book was looking pretty healthy.
It still is, but Chapter 20 now looks like one of the walking-wounded, and Chapter 21 might have to be re-written completely. So I’ve forced myself to cease editing for a few days in case I do something to the book I later regret…

…Yet as the dust settles about me, I have little chance to be idle. My imagination is difficult to switch off at the best of times, so I need to distract it for a few days with something else – the perfect opportunity then, to think about my preparation for 2008’s project:

The plot to The Black Hours is set in stone, as are the main characters, yet over the last couple of months the backdrop has been protean. I’ve looked at setting it in present-day Sheffield, Elizabethan England, New York, even on another planet, but there’s one setting I keep coming back to, time and time again: Victorian London in the 1890’s.
Now the difficulty with this setting isn’t that there’s bugger-all written about it, so it’s not hard to research; it’s actually the opposite. It seems every novel at the moment is set in Victorian London (as is almost every other Doctor Who episode). I recently scoured the internet, particularly Google’s Book search-engine, and the number of novels written for this period of history is phenomenal, especially in the fantasy/horror/sci-fi genres. Which is one of the reasons why I’ve looked for an alternative backdrop...

...But none of the other settings are good enough.

There’s something about Victorian London that provides so many possibilities. Which is probably why the setting is so popular. From crime to science-fiction, who can beat an exciting romp in the dark and dingy back-streets of 19th century London, with unspeakable characters lurking around every corner? I’ve dabbled in this setting before with a couple of chapters of The Secret War set in olde London town (my main characters fought vampires there in the British Museum), so the city in the 1800’s is no stranger to me. And like I said, there’s no shortage of reference material either – would you believe it, you can even buy 19th century street-maps of London from Amazon!

As for the politics of the time… bloody hell… Imagine wearing the most comfortable shoes ever made and that’s how well the politics of Victoria’s Britain fits the plot of The Black Hours. Even the U.S.’s current foreign policy isn’t a patch on the Great British Empire of the 19th century (The Black Hours will be political as well as a fantasy adventure).

So I’ve decided to stick with 1890’s Victorian London. It fits the plot, it fits the characters, like the period of history was tailored for The Black Hours. Sure, the backdrop isn’t particularly original, but it’s not the setting that’s important, but what the author does with it, right?

Technology woes

My PC is sick. It’s been doing stuff it shouldn’t do, and then finally the display resolution went a little queer and I couldn’t do anything with it (oddly it happened after watching an episode of David Tennant’s Doctor Who on DVD… an intergalactic conspiracy or just a dodgy BBC DVD?)

After a couple of weeks of nothing but a few clicks, flashing of L.E.Ds, and the whirr of the power-supply, I bit the bullet and restored my PC from its manufacturer’s setting.
It works again, but I lost all the files and installed programmes. Now usually this would have caused me to cry out in despair – but experience has made me prudent.

I’ve been writing by computer since I was 12 years old – when I started bashing out short-stories on my Dad’s old 086PC (a computer with nowt but 50k of memory - without Windows - on a jittery word-processing package). Over the last 21 years I’ve had several computer malfunctions, some disastrous that wiped out short-stories or novels in a single spasm of machine-code, causing me to weep in misery; once I even obliterated a keyboard in my fury.

Whether you believe it opulent or good sense, I have two computers now – one that I use for the internet, and one that I call my “clean-machine” where I do my writing. The latter is a laptop (takes care of mobility issues) and is never hooked up to the internet, and nothing is ever imported. I’m too paranoid of viruses and dodgy programming code to risk fucking up the finished novels, drafts of books in progress and ideas stored upon it. Sure I back up – once every week – but like I said, I’m paranoid.

Thankfully it’s the internet PC that’s having the “senior moment”. But it has forced me to resort to internet cafés to load blog entries and I’ve had little chance to update the Macmillan New Writer’s blog.

My internet provider is sending me new discs to install, so service here and there should resume. In the meantime, the Macmillan New Writers blog has attracted some more members, and has an interesting debate around “writing to music”, which I’ve also written about here…

Driven by instinct

The beauty of blogging – especially blogging on two blogs now – is that it shines a great beam of objectivity upon your writing, illuminating problems that you might not have been aware of in isolation.
While revising The Horde of Mhorrer, and reading the posts on writing approaches and writerly anxiety (kicked off by Brian McGilloway and Roger Morris on the Macmillan New Writers blog), it made me aware that my next project, The Isles of Sheffield, is not quite ready.
This might annoy some readers, or it might not; I hate announcing projects and then backtracking - makes me look quite impetuous or disorganised, when I’m nothing of the sort. But there is a good reason why I feel this way:

When I was a wee nipper my parents made their own wine and beer in the airing-cupboard of our house in Holmes Chapel during the 1980’s, when money was a bit scarce and making “moonshine” was perfectly legal (they sold these kits in Boots). The only problem with this home-made off-license was that both parents were far too impatient and kept drinking the produce before it was at its optimum taste. “Nice,” they would say, “but would have been better after a few more weeks.”

And that’s how I feel with The Isles of Sheffield. At the moment, the idea of starting Isles tastes, or rather feels “nice”. But it could do with fermenting a little longer. I have characters and scenes in my head, and the story is almost there, but not quite. In terms of confidence, I don’t feel that positive about starting a book in the new year that is still quite fractured. This is not about writing by the seat of my pants, but about giving one of my ideas “my best shot”. I’m not saying that Isles will never see the light of day. Like Smith, The Isles of Sheffield is a book I’m not yet comfortable with, and needs to bed into my imagination before I commit to it fully. And the inner-critic that Roger and David have spoken about has been too clamorous on the subject of The Isles of Sheffield for me not to listen. I think this time, my inner critic is right: I am not quite ready to write this book.

(…But unlike my parents – who never had a back-up while they waited for their “moonshine” to ferment – I have a contingency plan…)

Many months ago I mentioned a story called The Black Hours. Over the last couple of months or so, it’s been one of those insidious projects that have appeared in scribbled notes littered over my desk, or inserted between pages of reference books, and has even featured in my dreams. It has a main character – Silas Eldritch – and a cast of thousands, already. It has a ready-formed plot, some incredible set-pieces, and I’ve been looking to schedule the project somewhere over the next ten years – a schedule which is groaning under the weight of epics and shorter projects.
Because of this, The Black Hours is in a better position than Isles is, and has hopped the cue like an Olympic high-jumper. Between now and Christmas, I’ll post more about The Black Hours on this blog on the run-up to starting the project in the new year. It’s got me quite excited, and when I get excited about my writing, my blogs entries go into overdrive, so I apologise now if “A ‘Spot of Blood” becomes “Black Hours” heavy…

The one where…

…Matt cheats. If this blog were a TV show, it is quite possible this entry would be a compilation of the favourite parts of last season.

But it isn’t.
So it won’t be.

You see I’m rather occupied with revising The Horde of Mhorrer for Macmillan and have no time at all to write extensive blog entries nor get involved in the compelling debates on writing over on the Macmillan New Writers blog (which I advise anyone interested in this often masochistic craft to read).

Coming soon: something more substantial. Promise.