Writing the first draft

Usually when I write, I have a habit of editing on the go. That means on a good day I might get out seven hundred words, which I'll go over and check, re-write and re-type, adjust and mull over, and so forth. At the same time I'll jump back into the body of a manuscript and fix whatever apparent errors or mis-phrasings I happen to come across, as well as checking things like continuity errors. All this can stretch the time needed to write a manuscript of about a hundred and thirty thousand words to several months at the very least.

I've been trying a different approach with Dakota book number three, a method other writers apparently swear by, of writing an almost entirely unedited first draft at a rate of no less than two thousand words a day, every day. That can produce a hundred and thirty thousand words in about sixty-five days, or just a little over two months. I haven't managed to hit two thousand words every single day; just most days. Nonetheless I've gone from just under ten thousand words at the end of October to just under sixty thousand about a month later.

For someone like me, this approach can't really work without having a very, very good idea of how the story is going to progress, as well as what's going to happen to whom, when, where and the reason why. I have an eleven thousand word synopsis sitting on my hard drive, which I don't often need to refer to since by now it's all pretty much tattooed onto the inside of my skull.

Now that I've tried it I find this approach quite refreshing, actually, since it's really nice to end a month with the knowledge you've produced almost half a novel in about thirty days. That it's 'National Novel Writing Month' in the USA (and everywhere else,I guess) is purely coincidental.

Another reason it's nice to produce that many words so quickly is it makes up for the niggling conviction over the previous several months that when you were working out the details of the plot you were really just sitting around and doing nothing. But it's been a hard genesis for this book, which will be my fifth published book when it comes out in - good grief - 2010 (the expected hardback publication date for Nova War, the second book, is September 2009).

The original plot featured a brand new central character, with Dakota a little more on the periphery of things. The plot centred around this new character's life and how they'd got to be where they were, and indeed there are one or two places and events in Nova War and even as far back as Stealing Light which were intended to foreshadow this character's appearance. I worked up an intricate arc for this character, and three months ago I had about twenty thousand words of fiction down, a little over half of which introduced this one person.

And then I chucked almost all of it out. Once I got to twenty k, I realised it just wasn't going to work and I was going to have to effectively start again. But if you're serious about your writing, you don't cry about it or gnash your teeth. You just knuckle down and figure out what it is you have to do to come up with a story that feels 'right'. And by 'right' I mean sufficiently dramatic and engaging as well as having whatever it is that propels a narrative towards a satisfying conclusion.

So out he went. Sayonara. I heavily restructured the plot and replaced him with another character with a different background and different motives, and at the same time I brought Dakota far more into the centre of things.

But I hate to completely waste old stuff. Before I wrote Stealing Light, I submitted several prospective novel outlines to Pan Macmillan after completing Against Gravity. One of them looked hopeful so, rather than just sit around until they made their decision about whether to take it on or not, I wrote nearly forty thousand words of a novel. Then Pan decided they wanted something else (which turned out to be Stealing Light) and I abandoned those forty thousand words. Several thousand words of it, however, eventually ended up in Stealing Light; I lifted the Freehold out of the abandoned work and inserted them into SL. Various other bits and pieces of prose from the abandoned story were also lifted effectively wholesale and dropped into the new, contracted book (such as the conversation between the pilot and Dakota on the way down to Redstone on her first visit there in Stealing Light). That pilot was the central character of the abandoned book, but he gets a few brief appearances in Stealing Light.

I'm not at all sure right now what I'm going to do after the third Merrick book. I could write more books set in that universe, or I might come up with something different. That depends on a lot of factors, not least whether Pan are interested in them. But at some point I might resurrect that abandoned plot outline or rip bits out of it to put into other, future projects.

Anyway, I was talking about taking a different approach to writing books. It's working for me, basically, which is nice, the payoff of course being that you have to spend a lot more time editing that rapidly written first draft once it's completed. I'm also trying to make the most of the opportunity I have to write full-time here in Taipei before going back to Scotland next spring, and I especially want to get this book finished before then.

Now if I could only think of a damn title for it ...

Stealing Light on the Iphone

Apparently Pan Macmillan have launched a new initiative to sell non-drm ebooks specifically tailored for the Apple iphone/itouch, in a deal with the makers of the Stanza book-reading software. Although I prefer e-ink devices like my Sony Reader, apparently a lot of people like to use their iphones for reading e-texts on the go. I picked up the details of the following press release by way of Walker of Worlds and Teleread:

"Clive James, Peter F. Hamilton, China Mieville and Neal Asher Among the Authors Available to 500,000 Stanza Users

London, UK – November 24, 2008 – Pan Macmillan and Lexcycle, the maker of the highest rated electronic book reader for the iPhone, today announce the availability of the first set of Pan Macmillan titles for Lexcycle’s popular Stanza electronic book reader for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

Stanza users will have access to free excerpts from selected best sellers. Over the course of the next 12 months, more of the Pan Macmillan ebook catalog will be made available on Stanza."

So there you go. And it's nice to see I'm still prominent on that iphone display .

Fossed

Neal Asher wins the no-prize for being the first in the previous posts's comments to spot something curiously Chris Foss-like about the cover illustration for Nova War. That's no accident.

Years ago, I remember hearing the now-deceased Glasgow sf writer Chris Boyce talk at cons about how he kept putting Fossian space ships into his books. The reason he did this was that no matter the content of your book, if it was published anytime in the Seventies it had a very good chance of getting a typical Chris Foss illustration of big spaceships shooting at each other. But when Chris described distinctly Foss-ian craft in his own novels by way of a small in-joke, it seemed to guarantee he would never get covers to match.


So when I was writing certain scenes in Nova War, just for fun I described them in Foss-like terms, not really imagining anything from them would wind up on the cover. Surely, I thought, they'll immediately spot what I'm up to. But oh no.

I think I've probably had Foss on the brain ever since I got hold of a copy of 20th Century Foss when I was a teenager. I had a look at that book last year for the first time in many, many years and discovered something curiously relevant to the Moebius illustrations for Jodorowsky's never-made '70's version of Dune that have been floating around the internet. What a lot of people don't realise is that Chris Foss was also commissioned to create many concept paintings for that movie; many of which can be found in 20th Century Foss and are, frankly, incredible (he's also responsible, er, for the original illustrations in The Joy of Sex). In fact, the book in many ways is worth finding for its introduction, which is written by Jodorowsky himself (21C Foss, you idiot, not Joy of Sex). You'll love the man's ideas, but you'll be glad he never got the chance to make Dune.

Some of you may be interested to know that fellow GSFWC alumni Hal Duncan has a new book, Escape From Hell!, out from MonkeyBrain in December. Go buy. Mike C's epic space opera Seeds of Earth should be out by Easter next year, I think.

Nova War

I think this is about as final a cover as it's going to get, and Tor were good enough to send me initial sketches and drawings of the concept for this cover and ask my opinion. This is the kind of thing that can cause some authors to gnash and grind their teeth with envy, since it's more common in the world of publishing for an author to be entirely ignored when it comes to the cover art they're going to get. Mostly I've been just fine with the art Tor have given me. There was one initial design for Against Gravity that had me nearly running screaming in the streets, but Tor were kind enough to listen to my gibbering pleas for mercy and your eyeballs were saved from a terrible fate as a result. At the same time, of course, I don't want to be too pernickety.

As yet, I have absolutely no idea what the release date for this is, bar that it's sometime next year. At a guess, I'd say about July. What you see below here is the full wraparound cover for the hardback. If you want to see them in more detail, click on each image and it should open up much larger than you see it here.

Kitty Overload

Presidents: Well, America actually got what appears to be a halfway decent President for once. By 'decent' I mean 'capable of forming a coherent sentence or thought while on national TV'. With any luck, he'll turn out to be everything the people who voted for him are hoping for. A bit like we thought Tony Blair would be, but unfortunately wasn't. Knowing our luck, Britain'll lose its free national health system just about the time America finally gets one.

Mike Brotherton is a hard sf writer who enjoys the wonderful distinction of being a working astrophysicist, which means he actually knows what he's talking about when it comes to the science behind his stories. I've found his blog to be very enjoyable reading. I stumbled across him because, according to the US Amazon website, people who buy Stealing Light also most often buy his latest book, Spider Star. His previous (and first) book, Star Dragon, is available in full as a free download from his website, if you fancy trying before you buy.

Look at this picture below.



Terrifying, isn't it?

Every now and then I fly from Taipei to Hong Kong and back again. Most often my departure lounge is the Hello Kitty! lounge. To get the full effect of the picture, it's best to put on a cd of punk-pop hits as sung by midgets overdosing on helium. The stand-out 'kill me now' track pumped out regularly at the Hello Kitty! departure lounge (at Taipei's Taoyuan airport) is "Ça plane pour moi", originally a hit in '77 for Plastic Bertrand. I don't actually wait in this lounge, I hesitate to add, I wait as far from it as I can humanly get before making a fast dash through it and onto the plane as quickly as possible.

If you're very unlucky, one of these days I might post a picture of the Hello Kitty! passenger jet.

Television: if I were to trace the exact moment at which I decided my life might be better without a television set, it would be the moment when, slumped on my couch in Glasgow about five years ago, I found myself watching - remote in hand - as a couple with a failing relationship were offered 'relationship advice' by an 'expert'.

This 'expert' advised that they should listen to opera in the bedroom while the lady in question reclined upon silk sheets. The gentleman in question, despite not having an artistic bone in his body and all the verbal sophistication of a nightclub bouncer, was required to sit at an easel and paint his girlfriend's portrait. He sat there dabbing at the canvas like a bored four-year old stuck in the house when it's raining outside, making random marks with a brush. I watched his cheek twitching spasmodically with the promise of incipient violence. I knew he had the same image in his head that I did; that of sawing the expert's head off with one edge of a blunt easel. It was one of the most cringe-worthy things I've ever witnessed.

The point of this is the obvious contempt not only for the couple in question, but for the audience watching. I wondered if I really wanted to keep on paying my TV licence, which costs me about £140 quid a year. And yet I did keep on paying, since outside of visual slop like the aforementioned, the BBC, in particular, is capable of some stunningly high quality programming.

So imagine my joy when I recently discovered that the license only relates to live television. If you don't have a TV receiver, but you do have a computer with a biiig monitor and a broadband connection, you're not required to pay. Instead, you can stream programming from both the BBC sites and the various sites that cater for the independent UK channels, since these don't qualify as 'live'.

Even before I left the UK I was using a DVR to pre-record only those shows I wanted to watch to a hard disk. So when I get back to the UK, the TV goes. And in comes a bigger monitor. Or maybe even a table-top projector.

Things I Learned Today

Today, I learned that Google has the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Also, that some people really, really don't enjoy the experience of shopping in big chain bookstores. One can only pity the poor but honest bookseller concerned ("our music selection is really bad"), and hope that his employers can't work out who was on duty at that particular Borders on that particular day at that particular time by careful study of the article.

I feel driven, however, to think back on some of my experiences in much smaller, single-proprietor bookshops, which owe much more to Bernard Black than to some rose-tinted post-Victorian vision of a kindly old gent in bifocals with a cat sleeping on top of a mound of poetry. There never was a Golden Age of small bookshops, I'm afraid, whatever the perceived faults of the modern chain bookstores.

I particularly recall one small bookshop - and I mean about the size of your living room - which contained The Worst Toilet In The World, that had never, never been cleaned by the establishment's owner.

The owner himself was indistinguishable from a vagrant who had simply wandered in one day and plumped himself, all wild hair and unwashed tattered clothing, behind the counter in order to eat jam tarts, read dog-eared novels and shout at anyone who dared ask where anything was. Said owner was also in the habit (I kid you not) of designing helpful signs pointing to different sections of the bookshop in the form of hastily scrawled notes written in biro on sheets of A4 paper. These were then sellotaped to bits of string whose opposite ends were, in turn, sellotaped to the ceiling. As you entered the shop, the gentlest of breezes would rush in and send a blizzard of paper flapping around your head in a most disconcerting fashion.

I also learned that Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a better book than Walter M. Miller's Canticle For Leibowitz, or at least that Sam Jordison at The Guardian makes a convincing case. As Jordison himself notes in the comments following his article, "... I do wonder if part of the issue is that books get classified as 'SF' rather than 'literary fiction' because of flaws that are common across the genre... information dumping, technology fetishisation, or (as here) a lack of modulation on the 'preach' button."

The Career Novelist

If you either fancy yourself as a writer, or you're shopping your first novel around, or even several books deep into a career, you could do a lot worse than reading The Career Novelist, by American super-agent Donald Maass of one of New York's largest literary agencies. Although it's focused almost entirely on the nature of American publishing, much of the information (and the stories Maass tells about the way publishing works) is universal.

Fortunately, you can now download that book entirely free in PDF format directly from the Maass agency. I'm most of the way through it, and there's a lot to discover about the nature of modern publishing and why things work the way they do. If you're a writer like me, some of the information contained within it is pretty much invaluable.

Luckily a lot of the information is directed particularly towards genre writers, since Donald Maass does indeed represent a fair few science fiction and fantasy authors. It should be further noted that Robert J. Sawyer, a Canadian science fiction author who turns up on the awards lists fairly frequently, apparently regards The Career Novelist as one of four books essential to any would-be professional writer.

Hong Kong

We spent a couple of days in Hong Kong weekend before last, and although it was an enjoyable experience I came away from it with a particularly bad case of 'flu that left me bedridden for at least half a week upon our return to Taipei. Even now I don't feel entirely recovered. Hong Kong, meanwhile, was dirty, messy, overcrowded and faintly hostile in nature; and whoever said the food in Hong Kong was of particularly high quality should be shot. We tried the local food on several occasions, and came away disappointed almost every time. Certainly compared to what you can get in Taipei, the food was frequently badly prepared, low quality, stomach-churning gunk. And expensive, to boot (a friend of Emma's told me that after spending several days touring around Hong Kong, he wound up eating almost exclusively out of McDonald's because so much of the food otherwise was so intolerably bad).

At one point we visited a cafe apparently famous for its 'tea/coffee'. Tea ... and coffee, mixed together. I was dubious when we went in, and even more dubious when we came out; they don't mix. But perhaps I might have expected no less of a city where they design buildings according to the principles of feng shui.

So, no, I can't say I was entirely blown away by Hong Kong. Nice place to visit for a while, but that's about it, although in the few days we were there we didn't really get a chance to see nearly as much of it as we might have liked. For that reason, we may return there at some point next year, finances depending. We didn't even make it as far as the New Territories.

I finally finished revising the outline for the third Dakota Merrick book and got working on the actual manuscript, which is still very much at the early stages, but feels much improved thanks to the changes. I also got through some early designs and sketches for the cover of Nova War. Too early to show you yet, but hopefully in the next several weeks I might have a cover to post.

new writers

"John Jarrold has concluded a three-book World Rights deal for Scottish-based Finnish SF writer Hannu Rajaniemi. Hannu’s debut novel (presently untitled) plus two further books were pre-empted by Simon Spanton of Gollancz for a high five-figure sum, on the basis of one chapter."

I know Hannu through the Writer's Bloc spoken-word events that take place most frequently in Edinburgh, and others might know him through his story in the Nova Scotia anthology and a recent piece in Interzone (or maybe it's about to come out, I'm not sure which). Hannu's material, from what I've read, falls squarely in the Stross/MacLeod school of hard sf and is annoyingly clever. Annoying, because he has a PHD in maths and physics and actually knows what he's talking about. Unlike ... er ... me.

But anyway, he's a very nice chap and it's nice to see another Scottish - or Scottish-based, really - pro author in the making.

character assassination and teddy bears

Working on major revisions to Dakota Merrick book three; I decided the way the story was going wasn't the right one, so I'm taking a step back to write a new, very detailed outline (for my own benefit) of the whole book. About half of what was already written - which is from the viewpoint of a new, subsidiary character - is going to be torn out and replaced by completely new material.

I think part of the problem was I originally had a very detailed, very carefully worked-out background and plot for the original subsidiary character; I had his entire life story ready, and my intention was to tell his story in a series of flashbacks until he reached the point where his story intertwined with that of Dakota. Unfortunately, as interesting and fun as his life was to construct, I finally had to admit it had bugger all to do with anything that needed to happen in the third book. So, and not with some considerable regret, out he goes; but that regret is tempered by the knowledge that the new outline feels far more cohesive and interesting than the old one. Sometimes you know when the story is finally right, because it just feels right.

Talking of writers ... an interesting essay here, by the author of The Tao of Pooh, in which he explains his decision to abandon novel-writing altogether. One can only feel for him.

"Months pass. The Tao of Pooh is about to be printed and released. For what seems a long time, you have been dealing with a very prickly editor and a very cold-blooded publishing house. But the book-to-be reads well, and you have some hope for its success. The editor tells you that he will be visiting the Dutton West Coast sales representative at his home in Olympia, Washington -- a two-hour drive from where you’re now living -- and that he would like to buy you a dinner to celebrate the upcoming release of your book. He suggests a certain restaurant in Seattle, a forty-five-minute drive north of Olympia.

You show up at the restaurant carrying a stuffed bear made by your mother, very closely based on Ernest H. Shepard’s Pooh drawings. You meet the editor and the sales rep, and the latter's girlfriend. The editor orders a tray of cheese blintzes for the table. He tells you that the new foreign corporate owners are authorizing only $1,275 to advertise the book, and that Dutton is planning to spend the money on little ads in The Village Voice. As if to demonstrate that you the author are not the only one to suffer from the publisher’s austerity program, he shows you his broken glasses, which he has taped together as a cheap fix. By now, you are convinced that the man is not only prickly, he’s crazy.

The sales rep’s girlfriend, who says she is studying art in college, tells you that she believes it’s good for artists to starve, because poverty (which she seems to have no first-hand knowledge of) strengthens character. Having grown up with professional-artist parents, your viewpoint is somewhat different; but as the conversation indicates that your viewpoint is not of interest, you decide not to pursue the subject."

Which, along with the rest of the story, may well have many an author nodding and tutting to themselves, except after I'd read the whole thing I thought, 'hang on ... he turns up to meet his publisher with a fricking teddy bear ... and he thinks the editor is crazy?' I mean, okay, yes, the bear is fundamental to the story ... but, still, c'mon ...

Seeds of Earth

Fellow Glasgow writer Michael Cobley, who previously wrote a series of fantasy novels in the early years of this century (the Shadowkings series), has a new book coming out from Orbit in March next year. He's switched to space opera this time with Seeds of Earth. I would have to say that the cover design, by Steve Stone, is jealousy-inducing (click on it to get full size). From the blurb on Amazon:


"First contact was not supposed to be like this. The first intelligent species to encounter Mankind attacked without warning and swarmed locust-like through the solar system. Merciless. Relentless. Unstoppable. With little hope of halting the savage invasion, Earth's last, desperate roll of the dice was to send out three colony ships, seeds of Earth, to different parts of the galaxy. Earth may perish but the human race would live on ...somewhere. 150 years later, the human colony on the planet Darien has established a new world for Humanity and forged a peaceful relationship with the planet's indigenous race, the scholarly, enigmatic Uvovo. But there are secrets buried beneath the surface of Darien's forest moon. Secrets that go back to an apocalyptic battle fought between ancient forerunner races at the dawn of galactic civilisation..."

Mike has a blog, linked to in the right hand column of this page.

Harry Wars

I've been playing around with ideas for the book after the last Dakota volume, which could be set on Mars (New story! New characters! And possibly a new head after the voluminous corrections to Nova War I've been wading through). I had a notion - possibly terminally pretentious, or cleverly postmodern (or so I like to convince myself) - that the characters could spend some time discussing the 'monomyth' story structure, the Hero's Journey found in different cultures and delineated in detail by Joseph Campbell in Hero With A Thousand Faces. A bit of googling brought me to this page, which contains the scan you see here. If you want to see it clearly, click on it and you should see it at full size if you can't already.

I award this 'most entertaining jpeg of the week' by a long shot.