Black Hours Diary 10 - Milestone 1

Today – actually one hour ago to be precise - I completed the first draft of The Black Hours, and I can honestly say it’s the finest first draft I’ve written. Period.

Usually my first drafts require a shitload of re-working (see The Horde of Mhorrer, but then I’m sure I'm in good company there), yet this time I can’t see the same thing happening with The Black Hours. It just seems to work. The characters are dynamic and colourful, the situations are largely believable for alternate history, and the action unrelenting. At times I’ve broken my own rules of writing (and a few others’ rules I might add) but still it works. It’s like I’ve stumbled on a great recipe by throwing things in by instinct rather than looking through any book on writing thrillers.

The proof will be in the tasting, obviously; I’m not overly fussy when it comes to food, so I’ll be seeking a second opinion when I get the “readers” together to view the third draft some time in Spring 2009.
Yep, it’s going to take that long, because I’m taking a break before the 2nd draft (and another break in Jan 2009 before the 3rd draft to deal with publication matters). The pause until September will be a relatively tiny one, but enough to recharge the ol’ brain-cells. I might finish a couple of the half-done short stories that I’ve tinkered with this year already, or perhaps revisit the children’s book that Macmillan have had sight of.

Or I might even just take a break from writing completely for a few weeks. After 130,000 words in roughly three months (give or take a vacation to Greece and those hectic Mhorrer proofs), I think I’ve earned it.

Part Black Hours diary entry No.9, part fish

It’s been a week so far of getting back into the old writing routine and other writing relating gumph. It’s surprising how much disruption two weeks away can cause (I’m sure Tim Stretton will attest to this once he’s gotten through the month or so of publication-publicising and euphoria to return to the work in progress). And talking of Tim, I picked up the monthly edition of Deathray to find Tim waxing lyrical on Jack Vance. He’s posted some of the article on his blog, but like a tease he’s left the rest to the magazine buying public.
As well as Tim’s piece, this month’s Deathray puts out the usual high-quality commentary (including interviews and articles on Alan Moore, Alan Garner and Asimov's Foundation series) that I expect of a genre magazine that, in my view, is way ahead of the rest. And long may it continue (or rather force its rivals to up their game – something that’s long overdue; in my opinion Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror in this country demands at least two quality monthlies).

The second news of note is that on my return from Greece I was delighted to find a package from the British Fantasy Society, lying stamp-side up and bearing gifts – i.e. the quarterly mailing that includes New Horizons (a recent addition to the BFS publication schedule and titled so because, and I quote “the intended emphasis is on the new"). For a Macmillan New Writer this attracts me like a moth to a roman candle.

More importantly, mailed out with New Horizons was The Dick and Jane Primer for Adults, an anthology based around the old Dick and Jane children’s books but deliciously twisted. One of the stories is Envy by Neil Ayres of Veggie Box blog and one half of Whiteley and Ayres (sounds more like a solicitors firm).
I met Neil earlier this year at Aliya Whiteley’s book launch in London and he’s a really nice guy, so this feels especially good. Neil’s story (that's just a little disturbing) is up alongside such luminaries as Adam Roberts and James Lovegrove (whose book The Hope was one of the best I’ve read in the last two years), so he should be pleased with the company. It’s also another example of the high quality output from the British Fantasy Society; these publications alone are worth the yearly membership.

So apart from reading through this growing stack of publications (which has been added to by the King/Straub collaboration, The Black House – a bloody good book but almost as thick as Middlemarch and lovely example of the patterns and perils of a constantly changing POV), I’ve embarked again on The Black Hours, and the final push to complete the first draft. And I’ve done it in style, writing 6,000 words over the weekend. This time I won’t be stopping until the first draft is done and dusted (20,000 words to go, and yes The Black Hours has gone from being a slim thriller to another mini-epic) which means no more pauses and no more distractions, if only because Jane of How Publishing Really Works might try to pinch my ASUS Eee PC when I’m not looking, or its AI chip that’s been giving off a strange scent of lemons recently, might suddenly pack in or decide that it’s bigger than this author’s wishes…

Wachter der how much?!

As a little side-entry, on returning back to ole England, I checked up on Amazon UK (as you do) to find that someone there is selling Wachter der Schatten (the German translation of The Secret War) for £1,945. And it isn’t even signed (I know, because I’ve only signed two copies of the German paperback).

If this price is right, that must mean I have £5,835 worth of paperbacks sitting on the shelf over the telly.

Better tell the insurers quick…

What if…

…Two words that can mean different things to different people, almost disproportionately so. For the scientist or engineer “what if” can be a moment of genius. For the emerging kleptomaniac it will be followed by the thrill of running down a shopping mall away from a security guard with a bright pink bra flapping from their fingertips. From the lips of a pestering or ‘naughty’ child, "what if" can be the warning before the storm - histrionics or severe chiding will inevitably follow “Mummy/Daddy what if I..?”.

For the fiction writer, however, “what if” is the perfect catalyst for Story.

Sarah and I have just returned from a well-earned break to the Greek island of Kefalonia (or Cephallonia if you’re a local). It was a week of sun, sand, sea and… not writing. And you know I almost, almost achieved the latter. Almost, apart from those two little words that have been going around my head since I was twelve years old (though probably since I was about 3).
“What if” has been behind everything I’ve written from my very first story, The Vent (“what if” I was stuck in a ventilation vent? “What if” I wasn’t alone in there?) to The Secret War (“what if” angels and demons were walking the streets in Napoleonic Europe? “What if” my lover was murdered by a slavering, unholy creature of fire and flesh?). It’s never far away, to the point that my workspace (see below) reminds me of the very reason I write: to answer that “what if” question in the best way I can, even if I have to make it up, because let’s face, that’s what fiction writers do – we bullshit our answers but try to make them as plausible as possible. Hell, if we can make you - the reader - believe them, then they must be right, right?

But I’ve rudely interrupted myself, we were talking about “what if” weren’t we? And that whole thing about not writing while taking a holiday in Greece?
Best intentions and all that, well I failed, but not spectacularly. I did write, but only a handful of handwritten notes with a handwriting pen that seemed to dry out at every crucial point in the writing (if you were in Lassi, Kefalonia last week and saw a bearded tourist, slightly sunburnt and flapping his hand around like someone with an absurd version of OCD, then that would be me trying to shake his pen into working again).

In my defence - like I need one (yeah, phoney bravado I know, but I promised Sarah I wouldn’t write while I was away) - it was Sarah who prompted the “what if”. It was Sarah who brought up The Isles of Sheffield, how she enjoyed the sound of the story/anthology and wondered what I’d do with the project now. And so I got talking about it, and while I was muttering about how little time I have to devote to it, and how the next three books seem pretty set in stone, I got that tingle at the base of my neck, the goose-bumps over my arms and those two words came into my thoughts: “what if”. In this case, it was “what if” Sheffield now resembled the Ionian Islands, such as Keffalonia? Could that be stretching the imagination a little? Not so, if you take global warming, rising seas (the core setting for The Isles of Sheffield) into consideration, and it seemed at that moment the place where we were holidaying could be the setting for the anthology: cicadas, sun and sand and sludge.

And then the following day “what if” went that little bit further. What if there were no more sunbathers? What if it was too dangerous to sunbathe, or because the world has moved on, no one has time to sunbathe? There are no more bikinis, the brown frothy slop of the sea is no longer fit to swim in, and the sandy beaches are under many feet of stagnant water. Yet, in this fiercely hot world, on a bank of wasteland and shit-coloured swill that stinks like swamp, a lone sunbather appears. Why is she there in a world that has moved on, horribly and catastrophically so? Where did she get that washed out bikini that’s frayed around the edges? Who is she doing this for? “What if…”

So there it goes, how it starts, and the rest is history written on the page in quickly congealing ink. Honestly, I didn’t write much of the story while I was away. I spent very little time on it, and Sarah wasn’t really mad with me. I think. But when those two little words take hold, it’s hard to shake them loose.