Preparation and remembering the beginning

Okay. Deep breath. Time for a bit of nervous excitement – next week I start writing the first draft of The Fortress of Black Glass. Of all three books, this is the one I’m seriously nervous about for three reasons.

The foremost reason is that I want to finish the trilogy well – I want a big boom, rather than an anti-climatical whimper. There’s nothing worse than building up to a climax, especially in a series, only for a lack-lustre ending after 400,000 words or 7 hours of movie time. Just look at the Matrix trilogy, or Pirates of the Caribbean. I could mention a few writers too, but for the sake of solidarity (and because it’s my opinion only) I’ll not mention them here.

Secondly, after plans to write The Traitor of Light were scotched, I have to write book four without having written book three, so in effect The Fortress of Black Glass is book three now, making it a nicely rounded trilogy, though with a fair bit of exposition to be negotiated (no one really likes the “in last week’s episode…” thang, so I’ve got a fair bit of work to do tying up the ends of Hoard of Mhorrer with the opening chapter to Fortress).

The third reason is more immediate, and is not completely in my hands…

…Like it or not, I have a tight-rope to tread, but there’s a strong gale blowing. It’s quite obvious to me, from anecdotal evidence and what I’m reading in the Press and on-line, that the recession is taking a big bite out of publishing. Like it or not, the mid-listers who enjoyed certain creative freedoms at the expense of bestseller incomes are finding themselves without publishers, and new writers are finding they are having to prove themselves more and more, all because of the balance sheet. The recession is forcing the industry to shrink its output, adopting a gastric band to ensure they remain competitive but more importantly, solvent.
I have two published books to my name, but I am a relatively new author with a lot still to prove. Whether or not I am allowed to prove myself will largely depend on whether The Fortress of Black Glass is appealing enough, but also how the first two books are doing commercially. The latter situation is out of my hands now – other than turning myself into a crazed publicity machine, there is little more I can do to get the books selling more than they are (writers can sometimes spend too much time selling and too little time writing – you need to have that balance).

So that leaves the first condition for me to work on: making sure The Fortress of Black Glass is compelling. What I’ve learnt from my short time as a published novelist is that once you set out your store, you have very little room to change the merchandise. Publishers like it when you hit a winning formula and they like more of the same, as long as it’s fresh and entertaining. It’s almost a contradiction on the surface and there is a fine line between too much change and too little difference but that’s the tight-rope a series writer must approach.
For me, The Fortress of Black Glass needs to be a heavy-weight book. The previous two were romps, adventures that hark back to the old cliff-hanger serials with buckles that are swashed and feats of extreme heroism, tinged in the blood and the grime of dark fantasy. And largely they were quests, either for mcguffins or for experience. The Fortress of Black Glass doesn’t exactly break that formula, just bends it. This is a book about vengeance and will be so much darker. It will return to the adventuring element – there will still be the battles, the hectic skirmishes and the pyrotechnics of the first two books - but there’ll be that sense of finality with regard to the fates of quite a few of the characters, and how the whole story has gone full circle from the Secret War.
A big part of that is thinking about who my readers are - which I find ironic as I didn’t have a broad audience in mind when I started writing the first book nine years ago. The audience I’ve found since The Secret War was published isn’t exactly the audience I expected.
And as an entertainer, you ignore your audience at your peril.

When I wrote The Secret War I was writing for the big kid in me. If you want a category of age, I would say between 14 and 17. So really, if there was an audience in mind for the first book, it was teenage boys. The fact The Secret War has been adopted by each side of that age range and by women as well, means that I misjudged my audience – in a good way. I am not deluded into believing the Secret War books are high-brow literature. They were never meant to be. They're escapism. I think we all like a bit of adventure and hopefully I've delivered that for those who enjoy a bit of an escape now and again (misery novels they are not!).
If I aim for that audience again, yet without compromising on the dark stuff, I should achieve something that Macmillan can’t say no to, and a book that my readership will embrace with the same fondness as the previous two.
Well, that’s the plan anyway.

When I start The Fortress of Black Glass next week, I will do so with more pressure than previously put upon me. Some of it will be welcome, some of it will not. I know there’s going to be a few casualties over the next year or so in terms of my peers across the publishing world, and I know that where there is solidarity amongst authors (especially within MNW) there might also be discord from those outside this circle, but as a writer all I can do is write my best novel yet and let it be judged on those merits.
Everything else is sadly out of my hands…

A little love-in

It’s odd to think that in a vocation that’s clearly anti-social (are there many professions where you spend most of your career locked away from the rest of humanity?), solidarity for writers is an important thing, which is kind of apt in a week where the likes of Philip Pullman and Anthony Horowitz have been haranguing the Home Office for the quite ludicrous (and callously opportunistic) £64 levy for an increased CRB check for writers visiting schools (something that has pretty much kyboshed any future appearances by me at schools in the near future – though a CRB check is a good thing, I don’t agree with the fee either).

But it’s not just politics that brings a little love.
It’s empathy.

This lunch time I made a fleeting visit to the local Waterstones in Sheffield to meet John Connolly, a lovely guy who will give you all the time in the world if you have it. Armed with a few books, with Sarah and Baby Daniel in tow, the visit turned into a bit of a whirlwind which meant bombarding John with questions (sorry, John, if you’re reading this!) about the writing, and the experience of writing with everyday pressures of family and social life (something I’m experiencing to the nth degree lately).
But what I got out of the all too short meeting was more a feeling of solidarity, exemplified by John buying a copy of my book and asking me to sign it for him. “Writers should support each other,” he said to me with a broad smile.
And he’s so right. They should.
And I reckon they do. Especially with Macmillan New Writing. I’ve never met such a disparate collection of authors before, writers who are not bound by genre, but by experience. By empathy. It’s a fraternity, a group of wide-eyed and eager writers stepping onto the page for the first time. Like John did today, we buy each other’s books, pimping them to everyone we know (I’ve lost count of the copies of MNW books I’ve bought for people for Christmas and Birthdays) or the times I’ve asked for hardbacks of MNW titles to be ordered in the local bookshops; and when we can, we attend book launches or book signings (for a non-Londoner I’ve done six, which isn’t that bad…). And we support each other on the MNW blog, picking each other up when things don’t go right, or congratulating each other when they do.

Although this blog entry is sounding a bit like a love in, I don’t think there’s anything wrong in that. John has shown that you’re never too big, or too successful for solidarity. True, I can think of a few writers who don’t think that way, but with the market-place and writing conditions getting more and more competitive and restrictive (there seems to be mid-list cull at the moment that’s a little scary), it’s good to know there are writers out there who will go that extra mile to help other writers out.

And while we’re on the subject of John Connolly and a little love, if you’ve been lucky to attend one of his signings before and became a proud owner of one of John’s compilation CDs, you might like to know a lot of love, time, running about, hassle and John’s money goes into producing them (it’s where John’s advance goes!)
But when he told me this, there was a little gleam in his eye and I could tell that it didn’t matter to him. New writers can learn from this. The effort, the money – the fact he doesn’t sell any more books on the back of the CDs – doesn’t bother him. He loves the music, but more importantly, he loves the fans and he doesn’t just go the extra mile for them, but drives up to the airport and gets on a plane for them. For John, the fans are everything.

Now that’s love, folks…

(Update: I published the same blog entry over on the Macmillan New Writers Blog. To see more comments on this just click here).

It’s not swine flu

I’ve been under the weather the last few days, stricken with a cold that could be a mild dose of seasonal flu (the term “flu” is quite subjective, don’t you think? – one man’s or woman’s flu is another’s heavy cold, which I suspect is my case). But with the Media bashing on about a “swine flu pandemic” my paranoia levels have been creeping up.
Usually I return to work if I’m half well (as someone one said to me, if I’m fit enough to walk down the garden if there was a pot of gold sitting there, then I’m fit enough to go to work), but I’ve been worried about contagion, passing on my germs to my colleagues – just in case it is a mild dose of pig-fluenza and not just a cold.
And that paranoia has stretched to family too; I’ve been sat as far away as I can from Baby Daniel, despite the lure of cute baby noises and laughter. (He’s at that ten week-old age where he craves attention and gets all squeaky when he can’t see you.)
But it has got me out of nappy changing, so every cloud…

Anyway, call it a fear if you like, but while I’m not afraid of swine flu, I am afraid of Daniel getting it, and Sarah too (though with Sarah it’s more of a selfish thing – Sarah’s healthy enough to keep it at bay, but I would need to take time off work if she came down with it - if that happened I’d be looking after the baby in her absence).

As for my immediate fear... Well, for the first two days I honestly thought I had a mild dose, not strong enough to incapacitate me, but strong enough to make me lethargic and coldy. As the effects wore off, I was relieved but I kept that fear alive for personal reasons and I’ve now added that feeling of paranoia and denial to The Black Hours, a story that is more about paranoia of plague than it should be about politics (though admittedly, the first drafts were the other way around)...

...It might surprise some of you that I’m still tinkering with The Black Hours, but while I agree that nothing is wasted, in this case I want to see where I went wrong and to see if it is salvageable. And The Black Hours is, salvageable that is. It just missed out, and with a few tweaks I'm certain this could be the first "Frank Wallace" novel in print. I could be wrong, but one attempt is not enough to dissuade me.
I won’t have finished my tinkering by the time I start the third Secret War book, but I’ll have left myself a minor project to complete once I’ve laid The Fortress of Black Glass to rest. Hopefully I will have added enough fear in The Black Hours to make it work, to force the reader’s heart to beat faster. After all The Black Hours was meant to be a story about fear, about the end of the familiar in Victorian society. Yet somehow down the line it became more a James Bond thriller and less about the fear. After reading the last draft, Dave Budd mentioned that my plague “was not scary enough”, that “real” people weren’t being endangered.
Now they are and The Black Hours has become more of a tragedy than a straight forward adventure thriller; a catastrophe affecting not just the extras but the main characters too.

So I guess a recent bout of paranoia can do wonders for writing apocalyptic novels…

…And no, I’m certain I don’t have swine-flu.

How certain?
Oh, about 80-20.

(Or perhaps, 70-30…)