Pulling teeth and other removals: The Secret War Files No.6

I used to love vampires. When I was a kid, the idea of Christopher Lee imprisoned in a castle just waiting to rip the throat out of an unfortunate passer-by, scared the crap out of me. Salem’s Lot did the same thing to middle-class America, and to a middle-class English kid too. As a nine year old I thought if it could happen in the States, it could happen here. I Am Legend reinforced this fear, but then it all started going down hill in the 80’s.

First there was Lost Boys, a brilliant modern take that I loved – and still do – enjoy thoroughly. Near Dark was more brooding, more serious and readdressed the balance of fear. But then Buffy the Vampire Slayer arrived, and while it was fun, vampires became dumb. After that it just went south and vampires have been denuded and diluted over the last two decades, turned into something that doesn’t resemble the fears of Matheson, Stoker or the makers of the Hammer movies.

The problem with using such an icon in fiction and movies is there are many vampire fans out there now, and when you read that vampires exist in a story it can attract readers of those stories. But when the vampires advertised in your book aren’t their version of what a vampire should be like, it’s gonna annoy the vampire faithful. Thanks to True Blood, the Twilight books, countless vampire-softcore porn both commercial and self-published, the modern vampire is a brooding teen-to-twenty something, immaculate, pretty, and charming, someone to be mooned over as well as feared. There are exceptions, books that have tried to get back to the bare bones or have a wit that makes the rise above the norm – Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula being one, but I haven’t bought a vampire novel in years now; this creature and his troupes have become trite.

~

When I wrote vampires into my Secret War books way back in 2001, I wanted to go back to the basics, the mythology of how the likes of Stoker could have dreamt them up – to make them scary again. I wanted to tinker with their lore, make them more grounded and show how the legends were abused by chinese whispers. In most cases, the creatures in my books are referred to as vampires because the locals call them so, not due to the facts which are very un-vampire like. It’s this thing we do to transfer those anxieties that can’t be rationalised, onto our greatest feared myths because it’s more comforting to know our enemy than not. Thus the disappearances of hunters are down to Big Foot, the slaughter of live-stock has been caused by werewolves, and immortal, half-daemons are in fact vampires.

So what about my vampires? Well for a start, they’re called "vampyre", and for another they’re not about sex, which is bound to disappoint some. My vampyres aren’t afraid of crosses, do not suffer garlic, and a stake in the heart will just annoy them. Some will lose cohesion in direct sunlight (their skin is extremely sensitive, and with some, is almost gossamer), but all will perish once decapitated. They do not drink blood. They drink wine, or spirits, or ale, because it tastes good – not because they need to. They eat because they can, not because they are hungry. They are undead. They are animated by the spirit of a daemon who does not need food, drink or blood to keep going. Their energy is a constant, coursing through the cells of the host, keeping them alive and immortal.

Really they are half-daemons, creature’s seduced by the promise of immortality but enslaved as servants to Count Ordrane of Draak, the super-half-daemon if you will, hell-bent on enslaving the rest of humanity. They are the Knights of the Lost, the brotherhood of half-daemons who believe they are masters of their own fates, when in fact their fate was sealed the moment they allowed themselves to be turned.

There is nothing glamorous about being one of these vampires. In one of the later Secret War books, Baron Horia tells Captain William Saxon that he made the choice after seeing his grandfather die of pestilence, slowing rotting away piece by piece. He did not wish to go the same way.

Fear drives my vampires to becoming the undead.

And really that’s what they are, undead, not truly alive or free. They exist only on the whim of daemons, and that is slavery not matter how you look at it. Is it tragic? For some, maybe, but it was their choice, their cowardice that made them so. It’s difficult to turn a man or woman into my vampires unless you really want to be one – too difficult to be done on a whim as so often happens in the flood of vampire-related fiction these days. There is nothing romantic about it. No ideal that makes them attractive. The undead are naïve at best; cowardly in the worst cases.

~

All this amounts to one thing: my vampires aren’t vampires in the modern sense, and its the modern sense that has won-out. I think there might have been room for my vampires say in the 70’s, and definitely when Stoker’s books came out, but not now. They just don’t fit the bill.

So during the revisions of the first book, I’ve deleted references to the name “vampyre” and replaced them with the “Knights of the Lost” and “undead”; truer references.

The Secret War books aren’t vampire books. Not in any sense of the word. I don’t want to be seen as mis-selling a fantasy series by saying otherwise.

But more importantly, I think vampires have had their day. For me, in a modern world of serial killers, cannibals, flesh-eating viruses, zombies and religious fundamentalists, vampires no longer frighten me.

And that’s the scariest thing of all.

Evolution of Covers: The Secret War Files No.5

I'm a big believer that readers do judge a book by its cover, including e-books. Cover design isn't an after-thought. It's a necessity.


However, the biggest problem with the revised edition of The Secret War, is that there is absolutely no budget for a cover...


... which means I've had to design one myself.

~

My first attempt at designing a cover, using Photoshop, was your basic heroic, battlefield-type e-book, with the solitary sword stuck in the ground:

Which really didn’t tell you much at all about the book, other than there were swords in it.

So I went for a bronze cover next with stock images of mayhem and Hell:

Which I thought looked okay, and was closer to what I wanted, but you could tell I was using Bosch in the background and while he’s not a bad reference, it still didn’t get the mood of the book.

So I thought, why not do an original drawing? I have a sliver of talent, and lots of enthusiasm, and as long as I still remained objective then the endeavor would be worthwhile. 


For this third attempt at cover design, I used Artrage and bought two reference images from a stock-photo store. I used these as the basis for my “soldier in a tangle” and the “grisly inferno”, digitally painting in the other elements and inserting the titles and the Thirst eDition Fiction logo. It all came together as this:

And this is how it looks on the Thirst eDition Fiction site. But while I’ve been looking through the copy-edits, I’ve been tinkering with the cover again.

I’ve always been a fan of pulp fiction covers, with that aged, “loved-book” appearance, and I thought why not do an e-book cover the same way? The Secret War has definitely a pulpy feel to it – it’s essentially an adventure romp, not too dissimilar to the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, though a war fought on Earth between Angels and Daemons, and not between John Carter and the Martians. I thought that creating an e-book cover that looks pulpy, might not be a bad thing. 
So, again using Artrage, I began marking the cover, saturating the colours and ageing the picture to come up with this:

I’m still not sure whether to run with this cover or not. I’m sure there’ll be some people who think the pulp cover is pants, indeed might even say the same about the original covers, but those I have spoken to say the cover is no worse than the hardback or paperback editions at the very least.

So, I am a relieved professional writer, and a happy amateur artist - I don't think it turned out all that badly considering I'm not a trained graphic designer. 
But as with the writing, I'll let others be the judge of that ...

Being clever is sometimes good; sometimes it’s shit: The Secret War Files No. 4

The worst part of writing, and publishing, is the proof-reading or copy-editing stage. It’s a killer. It’s the moment that you let go of your baby and let someone else cut it up into something publishable. A moment where someone tells you that your book aint bad, but could be better.

And apart from the fact it feels like eating your own ego through a straw up your nose, it’s also intensely boring. It requires you to trawl through your book for the bazillionth time accepting or rejecting changes that could make or break a novel. And it’s for that reason the copy-editing and proof-reading stage is the trickiest part of the whole writing thang. You have to be on your game like someone concentrating on defusing a bomb, whilst at the same time sucking in your pride.

And it takes t-i-m-e. You’re not at the finishing post quite yet. Shit. At this point, it’s not even in sight.

And I’m at that stage right now with the revised version of The Secret War. And this painful part of writing has just gotten trickier as we are pioneering the use of the Kindle to do the copy-edits. And this is where it gets "geeky", because we’re eschewing the standard paper-based copy-editing for something more pixel-orientated. 
As the book will be going out as an e-book, where better to pick up errors and general editing than an e-reader?

Sounds ideal, doesn’t it, especially as the Kindle has a highlighting/annotation function. But Amazon is half-a-job. They’ve created something that could be the dream of all writers out there, but have crippled themselves by the lack of functionality available. Just like Apple...

For those not in the know, the Kindle has the ability to annotate text, to make notes and general suggestions and save them in a file called “My Clippings.txt”.

Now, what would be ideal is if you could save the text document with the notes embedded in them, kinda like “track changes” on Microsoft Word. However, Amazon have decided that’s something we don’t need, so what you get is the ability to make notes, and what you don’t get is the ability to link them to the text unless it’s on your Kindle; you can’t export the two together. BIG mistake. You would have thought this functionality would be common sense. Alas, Amazon seem to be fresh out of that.

So what I’m stuck with is this: an e-book version of the new Secret War, the Word version of that same book, and a file of notes and annotations that mean naff-all without a reference. I’m having to manually match those suggested changes onto a Word document, and each change takes around 2-5 minutes to make. Multiply that by the number of changes and you can see that just 12 would take an hour; 120 would take ten hours.

If we went back to paper, it would take almost as long because it would require posting reams of paper over to me, whilst it’s easier just to e-mail the clippings file over on a weekly basis. So there are pros in doing it the Kindle way, but boy, it’ a ball-ache and should be so much simpler (are you listening Amazon?).

~

So, inevitably there’s now a delay with the publishing date of the book. It’s been rescheduled for 20^th August, which isn’t great but I’m not going to rush it. The whole point of this endeavour was to get the book to you, the reader, in the best possible state. That means poring over all the copy-edits, matching them to each location point on the e-book and then the Word Document; and yes, it’s like having your fingernails being pulled, and my patience is tried to breaking point. But it needs to be done.

It has to be done.

Many writers fall at this stage – thinking this is the end, and it isn’t. I don’t intend to be one of them.

The Secret War - the Next Chapter: The Secret War File No.3

Back in 2006, after Macmillan Publishers signed up The Secret War, I was asked what would I write next? What followed was the kind of excited panic felt by a child in a sweet shop surrounded by hundreds of different toffees, hard-boiled delights and mallow sweetness, but then being told they had only a few minutes to choose one or two before closing. It was a delight, but the pressure to decide on a path for the Secret War was immense.

The original premise for the series was something around 12-18 books, going as far back as the beginning of mankind and ending with the last battle between Heaven and Hell. But after watching other authors being saddled with a long series by their publishers - asked to churn out an ever decreasing quality of work - I had my concerns. These concerns were founded later on, but my initial reaction was to hang the series and just do three books. I could get what I wanted out of a trilogy if it was done my way, so that seemed the sensible route.

What I came up with was The Hoard of Mhorrer and then The Fortress of Black Glass. While I was pleased with The Hoard of Mhorrer it missed five years of William Saxon's story that needed to be told - story that was only hinted at in Hoard. I soon regretted this the moment that I was asked to edit out a whole sub-plot and one that was key to the entire series. I had been so eager to wrap up the books in three pieces, that I had missed the point, as had the publisher - the series needed to be longer.

When it came to writing the next book, The Fortress of Black Glass, I had to deal with that excised sub-plot for it to work. The sub-plot therefore became a book in itself. So the amended series now included The Traitor of Light - an intermission devoted to the Dar'uka; but Macmillan wanted only William Saxon stories, and this was also shelved. 
So in true Hollywood style, I embarked on a third book that I wasn't prepared to write, with a plot that would not make sense (because such a big part would be left unexplained) and with my confidence in myself and my publisher diminishing.

It was inevitable that I would leave Macmillan, perhaps the moment I was asked to change The Hoard of Mhorrer, or perhaps earlier than that. Maybe it was the moment I was asked what I would follow The Secret War with and I gabbled out that it would be a story set five years later. Maybe that was the moment my relationship with Macmillan was doomed.

Six years on, and I have a chance to rectify the mistake. Two weeks ago I started writing the first draft of The Blood on the Seine. It's the book I should have written in 2007, and is - chronologically - book 2 of the Secret War series. It takes place mere months after the events of the first book, is set in occupied Paris in 1815, and is very much a Gothic piece, but with the similar action and adventure of the first book.

But it is a pebble being tossed into a pond with regards the rest of the series. With The Blood on the Seine becoming book 2 - and there will now be at least three books after that - The Hoard of Mhorrer becomes book 6 with The Traitor of Light and The Fortress of Black Glass  becoming book 7 and 8 respectively.

This doesn't mean the whole series is being changed. Readers of The Hoard of Mhorrer aren't missing out, they're just being treated to the previous five years of adventure concerning William Saxon and co. These five books will set up the events in The Hoard of Mhorrer nicely (for example, there's more about the Rassis Cult) and will explain events in The Traitor of Light and finally The Fortress of Black Glass. It's a longer series, yes, but one that will be worthwhile to write, and I hope, read.

~

This wouldn't have happened if I hadn't regained the freedom to write. The Secret War books have a new home - Thirst eDition Fiction, a self-publishing venture that was started by several like-minded commercial authors. Book 1 - The Secret War - is being reissued by them later this month as a revised edition with a few tweaks to the writing.

It kicks off a renewed interest in a project that I thought might die because of the problems I've had along the way. It felt like leaving a folly half-completed, to lay in ruins; now I get to tear down some of the walls and build a better story, the decision-making driven by the architect rather than an accountant.

As with other self-published books - the Secret War series might be picked up by a commercial publisher in the future, but if it does, then the publisher will have a series that has been better thought out; by a writer who will be more bullish with regard his vision; a writer who has more experience about dealing with publishers and will not be swayed so easily by promises.

After all, it's the books that come first. That and the people who read them.

#Ourwritingworld

Well, considering this was an experiment pulled out of thin air, it's been quite a lot of fun. There's been a few responses to this so big thanks to everyone who has taken part. I'll update the blog as more roll in, but here's what a few of you have been writing today for "Our Writing World":


"I had begged Mum to give this man a job and now I needed to do all I could to rid ourselves of him." - @eliza_graham (Eliza Graham)


"Night. The tap of the branches on the window was broken only by the mournful hoot of an owl. A creak from the other bed..." - @swiftstory (Deborah Swift)


"Dorin appeared from behind a stove, wearing a grease-smeared apron over his fine shirt. He looked quite odd." - @mfwc (MFW Curran)


"Annais looked to her father. 'This man gave me hope when I needed it. He can be trusted,' she said." - @SirReadalotUK (Stuart McAllister)


"Carefully, I straightened up. Now that I knew it was her, I wasn’t sure what to do for the best. Williams would be expecting me ..." - Alis Hawkins


"....rapid loss of consciousness and death. There would be no post mortem; no-one would ever find out." - Frances Garood


"...special in me. My tenacity, my ability to do the worst jobs, make the tough decisions. My gullibility." - Aliya Whiteley


"An icy gust tugged at my cashmere scarf. OK, that wasn't, strictly speaking, Goldfarb's fault." - Len C Tyler


"My name is Saskia Maria Brandt. Repeat it, please, so that I know you heard it." - @ian_hocking (Ian Hocking)


"Linda's husband had left her the previous year and she had been struggling to cope on her own ever since." - David Budd