Black Hours Diary Entry No.3: Spreading Butter

It’s been almost two weeks since I started writing the first draft of The Black Hours. And boy, it’s been a productive two weeks. I’ve written 20,000 words, and unlike the first draft of The Horde of Mhorrer, they’re 20,000 good words. Words that I suspect will survive mostly intact come the final draft of the book (due Spring 2009… if everything goes to plan… It sometimes doesn’t, you know?).

The Horde of Mhorrer was a learning curve in many ways – how not to write a first draft. It was splintered, distracted, there was no writing regime and it seemed to stutter and falter, gathering momentum before running out of steam whenever something happened around the publishing of The Secret War. That I managed to get anything from the first draft was a minor miracle, but I reckon just a quarter of what was written in that first year survived to the final draft.
A change in approach was acquired for my third book.

The fall-out of this new 10,000 words-a-week regime for The Black Hours (fitted in around the day-job, don’t-cha-know?) is that I’ve been a stranger to this blog, managing just a fleeting appearance on the sister blog, Macmillan New Writers in the last three weeks.
It’s the butter effect, being spread over too much toast. I have probably 10,000 words in me a week, there or thereabouts. In the past I’ve expended some of those words on this blog or on short fiction, but not now. In fact I can actually feel myself drying up as I type these words...

Bugger.

The Black Hours Diary Entry No.2: Socialising

Now I know why the likes of Raymond E. Feist, the late Robert Jordan, Terry Brookes and Terry Pratchet etc. like to run with a series of books rather than dip into new worlds for every novel. The continuity is more than comforting.

For the last four disrupted weeks, I’ve been trying to jump start The Black Hours, my first “new” book in five years. I say “new” because The Horde of Mhorrer is really The Secret War part 2, and I’ve met the guys in that book already. I’ve chatted to them, dined with them, shed blood and tears with them, and seen some of them die. I’ve lived with them for those four years - longer really taking in the length of time it took to evolve from Metallica Demonica to The Secret War.

With the characters from The Black Hours, it’s like starting a new job, where everyone is a stranger and that to get along you need to get to know your colleagues. Usually that means going out on a few socials with them, getting pissed in some dingy bar while trying not to talk shop.
It doesn’t work that way when writing novels, unfortunately. I can’t take Silas Eldritch out on the piss (to be honest, I don’t think I’d like to – he can really take his drink, while I cannot), nor can I flirt with Miss Emily Grange (I don’t think she’d be very impressed even if I did) and I have nothing in common with the cold John Reynolds (head of an emerging secret service), nor the troubled inhabitants of an 1890’s Soho under siege.

So now I’m doing a few ice-breakers. I’m trying to get to know them better before I commit to paper again. I’ll be asking Silas Eldritch why he would prefer the company of the bottle, rather than the company of his boss, John Reynolds. I’ll be asking why such a gorgeous and elegant woman like Miss Emily Grange happens to walk around London with a revolver in her hand-bag. And exactly what happened between Silas and Catherine Boyd, and how on earth did she get to be the leader of one of the most notorious gangs in the London underworld, and he one of the British Empire’s foremost, and now disgraced, spies?

But most of all, I’ll be asking what they might do if a bubonic plague hit late Victorian London. Would they stay and try to save the city?

Or would they just run like everyone else?