Nearing The Halfway Point

Current mood.

We're almost at the end of May (both the month and the Prime Minister.) Not halfway through the
year yet, but getting there. So, not a bad time to take stock of where things are.

Healthwise, it's not been the best year. I spent the first couple of months of it virtually bedbound with agonising knee pain (and with codeine medication for it leaving me wiped out half the time and with my sleeping patterns completely banjaxed), and been off work with anxiety for the last week. As a result, I've piled on a lot of the weight I lost last year. Next month, I'm heading back to Slimming World, where I'll start to put the damage right.

Not been a great year story submissions wise either - in fact, I haven't had a single acceptance all year, with stories I was very pleased with repeatedly knocked back. But that has had the effect of making me reflect on what I write and why, and made me determined to strive for excellence in my work. The last couple of years have also reminded me, very strongly, that I do what I do because I love it. And if I don't love what I'm doing, I shouldn't be doing it.

I hit a crisis point last year, where I realised I'd lost all sense of direction in terms of novel writing - the old, perennial trouble of trying to write what I thought was popular instead of what I needed to write. Two things helped me resolve it. One was realising that the projects of mine my agent was the most excited about were the ones I'd written out of sheer love and passion - the ones I'd thought no-one would be interested in. The second was asking myself one very simple question:

"If you could only write one more novel, what would it be?"

As it turned out, the answer was the novel that I'd been writing - but very differently from how I planned it. What was to have been a bog-standard psychological thriller became something else - a ghost story, a love story, a horror story... it's very rough at the moment (and not even fully typed up from Dictaphone notes) but it's something different.

I've written two novellas this year, as well, while also working on The Song Of The Sibyl, the huge

quarter-million word epic. There has been a shedload of work to do on that (two novels' worth, effectively!) but it's close to being finished and sent off to The Agent.

In addition, my Patreon is running and bringing in a stream (well, trickle) of income, featuring the ongoing serial The Harrowing.

One thing I was determined to do in 2019 was to write a screenplay; I've been working on something, a little bit of a time, in between work on the novel; slow going, but it's taking shape.

So, a lot of work, that will hopefully pay off in the future.

But there are also good things happening this year.

The big one, of course, is And Cannot Come Again, due out from ChiZine Press soon, complete with an Introduction by Ramsey

Campbell and blurbs from Angela Slatter, Reggie Oliver, Gemma Files and many, many more. The paperback will be released on the 11th July; if you can't wait that long, the ebook version will be available from the 18th June.

July will also see the release of A Love Like Blood, consisting of my novelettes Fitton's Ghost and Burns The Witchfire, Upon The Hill. It'll be launched at Edge-Lit in July - and who knows, there may be some copies of And Cannot Come Again available too.

Another good thing happened a couple of weeks ago, when Ellen Datlow's anthology The Devil And The Deep, featuring my story 'Deadwater', won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology. Congratulations to Ellen and the other contributors!

Well, that's all the news that's fit to print so far. Now on with the rest of the year.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho...

Well, today has been the last day of my rather long absence from my day job. Almost four months in all.

In a bizarre way, I think it's actually been one of the best things that's happened to me in a while. 2011's been a funny year; on the surface, things looked pretty good, and they should have been. I have good friends, I finally got a second novel commissioned... on the surface, stuff seemed good. But wasn't. I've been unhappy for some time, I think. The time off has given me a breathing space, a time to take stock, reflect and think about what I really want to do.

Writing, of course, remains a big part of it. I've written elsewhere about how I'm changing my approach to writing to make it less of a bloody ordeal and more of something fun, enjoyable, exciting, exhilarating... the way it used to be. In many ways, it's less of a new approach than an old one- going back to my roots.

Tomorrow, I start back. It's a phased return to work, so I won't be flung back in at the deep end. My employers have been pretty damn decent about it all, I have to say.

In a way, it's almost welcome, even though one of the conclusions I came to was that I'm going to have to change careers. (Me and the rat race are not made for each other. We never have been, but the bills have to be paid. I just lacked the gumption and self-confidence to believe I could do more.) Writing The Faceless gave me structure and a routine while I was off work. With that finished, it got harder to maintain that routine, and that's not a good thing. That way lies not going to bed till 4am and staying in bed till 1 in the afternoon. For me, that tends to mean nothing gets done, and I hate that.

I'll be going back for now, and I'll do my job to the best of my ability. But I'll also be studying part time for a counselling qualification. Oh, and writing. I think I finally know how to rewrite The Song Of The Sibyl into publishable form. And after that, there's a new novel or two to write.

And I'm going to have some fun as well. Another thing I realised this year: I've been putting my life on hold, letting work and writing consume my whole life. And that is not the way things are supposed to be.

So 2011 has been a funny year, a mixed bag- but one, I hope, that finally started to make things right again. I'm hoping that 2012- as long as that Mayan calendar bullshit is just that- will be a year where I'll build on what I learned here, and go on to new and better things.

Thanks to everyone who's listened to me moan and bitch, or given support or advice. It's been greatly appreciated.

So- tomorrow, back to work. Wish me luck!

This And That

Well, it's been an odd few weeks since I last posted here. Among other things, I've watched someone I've known for a number of years, who I'd had quite a lot of respect for, savage one of my closest friends, in the most vicious, dishonest and cowardly terms, in a public forum. It probably goes without saying that I will have nothing more to do with said person, who's managed to sink to such a depth that I'd need a bathyscaphe to find him if I wanted to. Which I don't.

Meanwhile, The Song Of The Sibyl was turned down by the second publisher I sent it to. Funnily enough, though, that actually comes as a relief, as the process of rewriting the fekking thing was turning into the kind of marathon session that might very well have lasted the rest of my life.

Now, however, I can put that novel aside and start a new one- a decision I made a while back. Two full chapters have been completed along with part of a third, and a general outline just needs some tidying up. By next week I should be ready to rock again...

A Short Blog About (Re)Writing

No, I haven't forgotten about the WHC stuff, don't worry. I'll be sticking the next load up at some point, honestly. I'm just a tad busy right now. But not so busy as not to tell you about it.

A couple of my fellow writers, Gary McMahon and Conrad Williams, are blogging about their works-in-progress, and the rather wonderful Cate Gardner (who will soon have her first collection out, guys, so keep your eyes open for it) does so on a regular basis. So might as well jump on the bandwagon...

Somebody once said that writing is rewriting. He or she was right, at least when it comes to novels. You might remember The Song Of The Sibyl, first draft of which was completed back in February. Rewriting is now underway. Here's how it works- at least for this author.

Hunter S. Thompson once said that good writing is all about taking notes. A certain number of notes, musings, bits and pieces, dribs and drabs, have to be jotted down before the story you're telling comes to life and you know how to write the first lines. Next, generally- once the first chapter or two has been roughed out- comes the outline, the plan, i.e. your attempt to con yourself into believing that you have an idea, however vague, of what the hell you're doing and more to the point, where the hell all this is going.

Once that's done, most of the work tends to be showing up- you just write the next right thing and carry on, crossing off the points on the outline one by one. And along the way, you're taking more notes. About stuff that's to happen later on- all the really interesting stuff that's not in the outline, because you didn't know anything about it till you got your characters acting and reacting and talking to each other. Some writers claim not to like writing but to love having written. Never understood that. The actual process of writing, of feeling all these unknown elements flow through you and create something new and (hopefully) vital and interesting, is a blast. Like exercise, maybe- at first you have to force yourself to do it, but once you're underway it's just great and you get used to it, hate doing without it.

Other notes are about things you need to check up on. You know, boring stuff like research. I used to hate that. Now it's interesting. Generally, do the bare minimum before you start, or don't do any at all and wing it. Apart from anything else, once you've finished you'll have a much better idea of what actually needs to be researched. The first draft is the raw material, the framework. The second draft is where salvation lies; the second draft is where you fix things. And you'll find lots of things to fix.

As well as research, there are additional characters who pop up and then vanish, whose little stories need finishing. There are passages where you're telling people what's happened, rather than showing it. There are recurring themes, little subplots that spring into being and have been imperfectly realised, because you can't focus on everything at once in first draft- you have to keep forging ahead and lay the basic framework of the novel- and again, they have to be made complete.

This one's a case in point. Basically, it's got pretty massive, major things happening. Another apocalypse, in a nutshell. And there's chaos, and madness, and suffering and death. All that stuff. It's pretty big and epic. And it's all seen through the eyes of one character, who has a lot of psychological problems to begin with and who also, as the novel progresses, sees ghosts, has visions and generally has quite a few episodes where the reality of what she's experiencing is, well, open to question. All that and, of course, there are other characters in the story, each with their own agendas, their own missions, obsessions, wants.

So on the one hand there's one story, but on the other it's made up of a multitude of others, each of which has to be got just right. This means more and more notes- notes about what needs doing, and how. At first a blizzard of random scribblings, they then get typed up and start getting sorted into order, under different headings. And then, finally, each separate section needs to be looked at and the changes broken down into a series of concrete, specific steps.

There are now 42 pages of notes on The Song Of The Sibyl, and the things that need to be done. It's grown steadily over the last week, not shrunk. But now the first of the changes are being put into place. Please god, let them start to shrink now.

Once that's done, here's still the task of visiting a lot of the locations used in the novel and getting things... just right. Oh, and then, finally, the task of going through the manuscript- which was 171,151 words in first draft, is now a couple of thousand words longer and will be god alone knows how long when all of this is done- and cutting, cutting, cutting. The most famous of White & Strunk's rules- 'omit needless words'. You don't realise how many words you can do without until you get to this point. Alan Garner, of course, is the king of that.

All this has to be done, bear in mind, while still holding down a day job.

So if you run into me and I look a bit tired, dazed and like I might not be quite all there (in the sense of living wholly in the same world as you) hopefully, by now, you should have some idea why.

So much for this being a short blog...

Have a happy Easter, everybody.

The Song, At Last, Is Sung...

Yup- last night, or rather in the early hours of this morning, I finished the first draft of my new novel, The Song Of The Sibyl.

I started work on this nearly a year ago now. Bear in mind, I tend to write pretty fast, so that's a long time for me. Took nearly five months to get the first five chapters written as samples for an interested publisher. Normally if something is such tough going, I'll abandon it, assume that it's just not time to write this yet... but the novel wouldn't let me go.

In the end, I realised that one of the storylines I'd put in there was just pointless and unnecessary, so out it went. And the rest of the chapters were easily written.

So writing this mother started in earnest back in November, with a break over Christmas/January to write a couple of short stories, and finished last night, around about 4.00 am.

It's one big Bertha of a novel. 171,151 words in first draft. I'm knackered, but proud.

Of course, the work's barely started. I still have to do a megaton of rewrites and research, and find a publisher- the interested one decided it wasn't quite right for them- but right now, and for the next few days, me is just gonna chill out, bask (to the extent you can in the weather here oop North right now) and recharge a few batteries.

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to post on this blog more often- like, say, once a week- and to post about shit other than me and my writing. That one needs some catching up on, I know.

But until next time, be excellent to one another, dudes.