Tag: Quercus Books

RedraftredraftBRAINMELT

~ simonsylvester ~ 8 Comments

For the last eight weeks, this has what my life has looked like:

RedraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftredraftBRAINMELT.

In case you hadn’t noticed from my incessant moaning, I’ve been redrafting my novel. Again. It’s been a vast job, because – following discussions with Jane Wood, my amazing editor at Quercus – we decided to change the ending quite substantially. This isn’t as simple as knocking off the last few chapters and rewriting, alas; to make the climax and conclusion fit, organically and emotionally, the threads of the plot need to extend a long way back into the story. Because The Visitors is already woven rather tight, unravelling the narrative to make the new ending fit has been tough. Around college and film jobs, I’ve been working on it in evenings and spare days since mid-October. After the first fortnight, I took to saving the manuscript as a new document at the end of each session. This is what the folder looks like:

redraft of death

That’s right. It’s called the REDRAFT OF DEATH.

But check it out, humans; I have actually finished. I sent the new draft off to editor Jane and agent Sue late last night, along with a summary of everything I’ve changed. On reflection, it’s been a massive rewrite. As well as the new ending, I’ve changed names, moved locations, cut chapters, written new chapters, tightened dialogue, tightened prose, and – perhaps biggest of all – introduced an important character at the start of the story, rather than halfway through. Maintaining his presence from this early beginning meant a light rewrite of the entire first third. I’ve also made a big change in the death of another character, which brought a new angle to the idea of ‘killing your darlings’.

Dealing with the sheer volume of information is what causes brainmelt. Trying to keep everything in perspective – emotion, story, plot, character, description, geography, chronology – is exhausting. To help manage the changes, I riddled the manuscript with notes to myself, so I wouldn’t lose track of the things that needed work. It was quite telling to come across these messages, later on, and reflect on my thought processes. Here’s an example:

“Move the distillery to the island where it should have been from the beginning, you dick.”

So yeah, it’s been tough. I’m expecting another round of line edits, at the least, but hopefully the bigger structural stuff is now finished. I would have worked quicker but for the day jobs. Trying to switch into a more creative mode and recover a spark is tough. There have been times I’ve sought out any distraction to keep me from inflicting more destruction on my work. That’s where Freedom has really helped. I can’t recommend it to writers (and other procrastinators – YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) highly enough.

For all the effort, I still wouldn’t be doing anything else. I saw a great quote the other day. Though I can’t remember who said it, it was something like, “For all that writing is incredibly tough, it’s worth remembering that it’s still making up stuff for fun.”

True dat. More than anything else, I’m increasingly looking forward towards my next novel. It’s called The Hollows. It’s mostly planned, and I’m champing at the bit to start work. Now term is almost finished, I’m going to give myself a few days off to clear my backlog of video jobs, then try and take a day or two over Christmas to get writing.

After dealing so exhaustively with a manuscript of 94,500 words, it’s very strange to be faced again with all the promise and terror of a blank, white page.

A century of…

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

I realised, after posting this video about a ballerina dancing on butcher knives, that I’d hit a hundred posts on the blog. A century is still pretty arbitrary, really, but it’s as good a place as any to stop and think about why I keep a blog.

I started writing the blog six months ago to track the progress of my novel. The book was called Riptide Heart, back then. It’s now called The Visitors, and it will be published by Quercus Books in 2014. All that has happened in the lifetime of this blog. I’ve tracked my highs and lows and uncertainties throughout the publication process, from finding an agent (a year ago) to signing the contract (last week).

As well as the novel, I’ve written a lot about reading my work live, and the struggles I’ve had with my nerves. Each of my various readings has been painfully revisited, but that return has helped me filter and understand the experience. I’ve also explored my decision to gather my flash fiction into a collection, which is called Marrow, and will almost certainly be self-published, and teaching myself InDesign to lay it out professionally. (More on this soon! As I approach the end of my redraft and clear my backlog of film jobs, I should have the time and space to push ahead and get this wrapped up and printed.) I’ve posted published and unpublished flash fictions, and talked about my writing processes. I’ve written about my film work, and catalogued some of the things that I find inspiring or magical. I’ve posted galleries of the threshold spaces I’m so obsessed with.

All in all, then, my blog has ranged far wider than I ever thought it would. More than anything else, I’ve been surprised at how personally I’ve addressed some of these subjects. When I started, I expected the blog to be fairly analytical, for want of a better word; dry, professional. But in struggling with my live performance readings, and in wrangling my novel redraft, I’ve found myself at times alarmingly open about how I feel about my work. I like that the process of writing has taken me in that direction quite organically.

One of the joys of using WordPress is browsing through the stats, which tell me what brings people to the blog, what they look at, and often where they come from. I’ve had visitors from as far afield as Mozambique and Mongolia, searching for everything from devil dogs to gay porn. (Hopefully not everyone will be as disappointed as those two internauts.) I’ve had a week without any views, then hundreds of visitors the day Neil Gaiman retweeted this post about libraries. Have a look at this screen grab and see if you can guess which day that was:

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The two things that bring people to the blog most often are on the periphery of my interests; this post about a nursery rhyme and this post about a WW2 fighter pilot preserved in a peatbog. People have searched for Bancree, which is the fictional Scottish island I created for The Visitors, and for novelist friends like Iain Maloney and Ali Shaw. Lots of people come to the blog looking for information about my agent, Sue Armstrong at Conville & Walsh, and my publisher, Jane Wood at Quercus.

More than anything else, though, the blog is for me. It’s how I filter my ideas and monitor what I’m doing. Writing about my life is what I need to live my life.

Freedom

~ simonsylvester ~ 7 Comments

This is another post about editing. Until today, it hasn’t been going very well. A variety of things have built into a general malaise, and I’ve been struggling to get myself out of it. Yesterday, I read this from Matt Haig: “As a writer, you need to have a thick skin. But you also need to be a hypersensitive wreck to write in the first place.”

Well, for the last few days, I’ve been in hypersensitive wreck mode. I swing in and out of these phases. When a novel is going well, I’m buoyed up and float through life, with at least half my mind firmly in my story, and nothing else really gets in the way. But when it’s going badly, I obsess over and over again on all my many failings and how terrible the novel is, convinced that the universe is going to wake up at any moment and realise that I shouldn’t have made it even this far.

This is my half-term from college. Although I’d done a few line edits on The Visitors, I hadn’t had a chance to really get to work until this week, and it began really badly. I started by making the huge, ugly structural changes I was worried about, cutting and pasting and wreaking a sweeping destruction on the first third of my manuscript. And that left me really despondent. I won’t run through all my paranoias here, but I was really wallowing. There seemed an insurmountable amount of work to do, and part of the plot was now back to front. I convinced myself that I’d shattered whatever was good about it in the first place. I spent some time moaning on Twitter, and went to bed feeling very sorry for myself. At the end of the day, I listened to this about twenty times, trying to summon some strength:

 

…but to little avail. I started today prepared for more of the same. Scared of going back to the manuscript, I farted around on Twitter, and on Facebook, and read the paper, and spent half an hour trying to read all of the internet. I’d made myself quite genuinely scared of the novel, and was looking for distractions to keep myself away from it. Then I remembered reading about something called Freedom. It’s a program which blocks the internet completely, and can’t be disabled without turning your computer off and on again. It cost $10, and I bought it. I installed it, and I set it to run for eight hours. Then I opened the novel, returned to the redraft, and tried to spend the day at work. Here’s how it went:

There are obvious breaks – between chapters, mostly – when I used to check my email. I couldn’t do that. Instead, I had to keep writing. I used to post updates about my progress, or lack thereof – I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t build a Spotify playlist. I couldn’t read my students’ blogs. I couldn’t add to my Pinterest boards. I couldn’t check my bank balance, or look at lenses I can’t afford on eBay. I couldn’t blog about how shitty I was feeling. I could only work, and so I did. I only stopped for cups of tea and to feed the cats. I checked my email at lunchtime on the iPad, but otherwise went without. And it was brilliant. Immersed in the novel, without distractions, I worked hard, fast, and well. I was coming up with good stuff for the first time in a week, building bridges between ripped sections, smoothing out the prose, and even discovering new connections to expand and consolidate the plot. More importantly, I was feeling good about again. That feeling is so important. Without confidence in your story, it’s impossible to write with conviction.

Strange to reflect that I needed technology to rid me of technology. Freedom truly gave me freedom to work. I know it’s daft to spend money on something willpower should do for free, but Freedom even removed the choice. Even after a single session, I believe it’s the best money I’ve ever spent on my writing. To be clear, I don’t have a motivation problem. When I’m in the flow of my story, I can write continually for hours without stopping. But when I’m as full of dread as I was yesterday, I seek any reason to avoid dealing with the thing that causes me dread.

This redraft is hard. I’m making big changes, and some of them have left me feeling a little divorced from the story. One of my characters has changed her name, and it’s taken me a full fortnight to feel like I know her again. As petty as it sounds, I worked with MS Word’s ‘Track Changes’ function for the first few sessions, and it was driving me distracted, churning out balloons and dotted lines for every tiny change. Thankfully, Jane at Quercus gave her blessing for me to move onto a plain document. I know it’s daft, but that’s helped a lot.

I suppose that demolishing parts of the story was always going to be demoralising, and perhaps it’s no surprise I’ve found it so hard to stay positive about the redraft. But now most of the destruction is done, and I’m starting to rebuild, I’m feeling better all the time. When things go well, it gives me a surge of confidence in what I do, and where I want the story to go. I’m not all the way there yet, and there’s still an awful lot to do, but – for now – I’ve turned a corner.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Here’s a picture of a steampunk sperm whale hot air balloon. Writers – get Freedom. It changes everything.

whale balloon

Loki

~ simonsylvester ~ 2 Comments

Well, that’s my first Dreamfired done and dusted. It was a really good night – more people need to know about the Storynights.

First up was banjo virtuoso Bill Lloyd. He’s a legend in Cumbria and the north, and he didn’t disappoint, starting with a haunting ‘Wayfaring Stranger’, and segueing into a range of folk songs from America and Ireland. My storyteller uncle Rich Sylvester had the next slot, relating an anecdote about exploring the London Olympic equestrian venue at midnight with a bellyful of Russian beer. It was very funny. Rich is an extremely affable raconteur, and his stories are always engaging – I haven’t seen his work for a few years, and it was great to be part of the audience.

I was on after Rich. I’d decided to get into the traditional spirit by performing without notes. In the minutes before going onstage, my nerves were worse than ever, but I settled fairly quickly.  I read two stories I’ve been practising lately – Circle Stone and The Lion Tamer’s Daughter.  I stumbled once in Lion Tamer, and for a moment I thought I would go entirely blank – but I recovered, found my place and delivered the rest without a hitch. Circle Stone is an extremely quick flash piece of only 75 words, and it’s surreal enough to counter the darkness of Lion Tamer. The two work well in combination, but I’m going to semi-retire them now. They’re both destined for my flash fiction collection Marrow, and I’ll try and get them published elsewhere first, but I’ve read them a lot recently, and it’s time for some new material. On reflection, though, the reading went well. I don’t think I’ll make a habit of performing without notes, but Dreamfired was a perfect place to give it a whirl.

After me came a poet, whose name I didn’t catch, who read some playfully nostalgic pieces; and then a story about a 21st century Grim Reaper. Bill Lloyd returned to round off the first part of the night with another couple of songs – his cover of Frankie’s Gun, which I absolutely love – it was Bill who introduced me to the music of The Felice Brothers – and one of his own compositions, a haunting Armenian lament.

This is what Frankie’s Gun looks like:

After the interval came Emily Parrish, aka Scandalmongers. She walked onto the stage singing and beating a drum, and launched without preamble into the Norse creation myth. Her show explores the role of Loki, the trickster god, and all his jealousies and cruelty and fun. What made the show all the more remarkable was the way she entwined Norse mythology with her own childhood. The transitions between the Cotswolds and Asgard were frankly astonishing – from the top of a perfect climbing tree to the horrors whispered into Baldr’s troubled brain. It was lyrical, visceral and intense, and it left the audience stunned.

emily-loki

Loki comes highly recommended from me – catch it if you can.

Thanks, too, to Kat Quatermass, who organises and hosts Dreamfired. Lovely to meet her after months of email contact. I’m definitely going back in November to catch Peter Chand performing Grimm’s Sheesha.

What’s next for me, then? I’ve been thinking about my novel edits for a week or so – a process I refer to as ‘brewing’ – and I’m almost ready to start work. I mentioned in a previous post the structural changes I need to make, and my uncertainty about how to make some of those changes. That has passed. I now know where that character is going to enter the story. Although it means a lot of work, I feel secure in the knowledge of how to do it, so a lot of that worry has eased.

My next booked reading is at the Brewery’s Spoken Word night in February, though I’ll try and land a few more open mic spots before then. Stay tuned. And go to Dreamfired.

Little paranoias

~ simonsylvester ~ 2 Comments

Jane Wood, my editor at Quercus Books, sent her notes on my novel this week. It’s a moment I’ve been dreading and craving in equal measure, and I wanted to take a moment to think about what it means now it’s actually here.

I’ve already done four drafts of The Visitors. Some of the drafts were very heavy, and some were extremely light. Redrafting is essential to all writing – I still, even now, return to stories published years ago to tweak and rework them. I have little paranoias about all my work, and can’t help but return to it. Sometimes I make changes of single words, and other times I excise entire scenes. Sometimes I catch myself totally rewriting published work, and I have to make myself leave it behind – I have to take stock and force myself to walk away.

On the second draft of The Visitors, I pussyfooted around Sue’s notes, making tiny changes, scared of diving in. When I came to a third draft, I made myself stamp on it, brutalising the manuscript with broad changes and moving onto the next alteration, no matter how ugly the massacre I left behind. Then, when it looked like a crime scene, I started rebuilding again. That’s what I’ll do this time, too, no matter how hard I find it. And I’m going to find it hard.

Whenever I come to editing and redrafting, I think there are two broad categories of change:

Cosmetic

These are the easy ones, often little more involved than line edits. Cosmetic changes this time include switching a character’s name, cutting some internal monologue and reconsidering some of the vocabulary used by my main character. I could blitz through that in a day, tops. Unfortunately, the other editing category is:

Structural

…and this is the big stuff. Making structural alterations means redrawing the map of the story while trying to maintain the same emotional trajectory, and that can be difficult to keep in balance. In this case, I have two substantial changes to make. Firstly, a minor character needs to become a major character, and he needs to appear much sooner in the story. I already know this is going to be awkward, because I attempted something similar in the third draft, and I struggled to bump him up the narrative even to his current position. It’s going to be tough to find or create somewhere to introduce him sooner.

The second change initially felt even more challenging, but on reflection perhaps isn’t quite so bad. Jane has suggested a different direction for the ending that I’m really excited about. At first I was really worried about it, but I’m starting to see it as a case of unravelling the current conclusion and retying the strands of story into a different shape of knot. This will involve more writing, but actually it’s less of a challenge – with the current ending gone, I’ll be writing into blank space. That’s a thrilling proposition at this late stage of the manuscript.

While it’s still a skeleton, a novel plot is essentially arbitrary. Things can be changed extremely quickly and easily. New characters come and go, and the story shifts like a dune, blown into organic and occasionally bizarre shapes by the wind of imagination. But the more developed a story becomes, the less arbitrarily it can change. There comes a point where making big alterations means breaking the momentum you’ve fought to generate, then patching up the holes and hoping no-one can tell the difference. That’s where a writer needs to have paranoid convictions about the emotional tone of their work, and strive to make it as cohesive as possible in plot, character, voice and soul, then work it again and again and again, hammering and thrashing and beating and combing through the manuscript until it’s carved against your optic nerve.

Editing is frantic. It’s really hard. Throughout the process, a storm cloud hangs over you, an implicit sense that you didn’t do it well enough the first time. Then there’s the crashing changes you wreak on something you loved. And then there’s the dread that whatever you make to take its place won’t come close to what you had before. It’s an exciting time, too, but the whole process is riven with a crawling, monstrous, excruciating anxiety.

This is mostly my load to carry, but I’m glad I’m not taking the journey alone. I’m now far too close to The Visitors to critically appreciate it, and working with other people helps triangulate my own perspective about the story. I’ve often stated my belief that writing is as much about the community as the individual – not least as it counts for little without a reader. When I write short stories, I read them to Mon, and I send them to writer friends. And I pay attention to what they say, even if I disagree. Working with other people – and working with Jane and Sue, now – has repeatedly shown me the importance of opening myself and my ideas to an audience. I have people I can talk to, and that makes me lucky.

Of course, I say this before actually beginning the edits. Try me in a week.

miniscule

Photo lifted from ‘Minuscule Series’ by Maité Guerrero

What’s in a name…

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

This post is about names for stories. Sometimes I come up with a title first – I have a story called You Don’t Talk To The Driver, The Driver Talks To You, which developed entirely from the title. And sometimes the title is really obvious – The Lion Tamer’s Daughter couldn’t be anything else. Sometimes it’s lifted from a phrase in the story, like The First Time I Died. Sometimes it evolves after a struggle, like my novella The Year Of The Whale (which I will finish one day). And sometimes, I just can’t think of anything at all. And all this is relevant because we’ve just changed the name of my novel.

I’ve been calling it Riptide for the last six months, but my novel has had dozens of different names. I went through bucketfuls of working titles – occasionally to the point that I was changing it two or three times in a single writing session. Nothing stuck. I’d reached a point where the novel was finished, and I wanted to send it away, but it didn’t have a name. After another few days dedicated only to looking for titles, I called it Riptide Heart because it had to be called something, then sent it to some friends.

“Love the book, mate,” came one of my first responses, “but the title’s balls.”

In the end, a lot of people said pretty much the same thing. But no-one had any better ideas, so I sent it off to Sue as Riptide Heart. I used Dora’s grubby paw to click the send button. A week later, Sue got back to me, and here we are – a year has passed, and once more I’ve been driving myself up the fucking wall looking for a name for the book.

We moved on from Riptide Heart fairly quickly, and I was fine with that. Everyone involved has been calling it Riptide, because that’s better than ‘the book’ or the ‘the novel’. But the closer we’ve moved towards publication, the more important the title has become. Sue and Jane and I have been searching for a month. Churning through endless combinations of possibilities has turned my brain to mush. I’ve ransacked the manuscript half a dozen times and tried literally hundreds of potential titles. Last week it reached a point where not only could I not think of anything better, but I was no longer capable of judging other suggestions. That’s one of the reasons I’m fortunate to be working with such professional people at Quercus and Conville & Walsh. Linking wonderfully to the stunning cover art commissioned by Jane, I’m delighted that we’ve finally settled on a name which I’m happy with – my first novel is now and forevermore called The Visitors.

So, what’s in a name? A rose would smell as sweet, and so on… but a novel is like a child, and you spend so much time with it as it grows, learning what it wants to be, getting to grips with its tantrums and moods, guiding its ambitions, and being constantly surprised and amazed by what it becomes… I can’t imagine Dora by any other name. Knowing that Riptide was a temporary title hasn’t lessened the jolt of losing it; after so many months, it had become Riptide.

The Visitors grows on me by the day. It has the human element I wanted so badly, and it has a ghostly feel which I love. As my friend Iain pointed out, I spent so long looking for The Best Name Of Any Book In The World Ever Ever Ever – which doesn’t exist, of course – that I stopped being able to consider what was right in front of me. I’ve often used the idiom of not seeing the wood for trees when discussing writing – and writing novels in particular – and it’s proved true for this title search as well.

I can barely express my relief of being out of those woods…

Jane’s editorial notes have arrived, and I’m really excited about some of her ideas. Next stop: the final draft.

trees

Keys

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

I’ve just been paid for a big film job I completed earlier in the year, and I decided to treat myself. It’s not exactly special, but I’ve invested in a new keyboard. Here’s why:

I work on a Mac, which is the only sensible choice for my video editing. The Mac came with a wireless keyboard and magic mouse. Now, the mouse is superb. No complaints. It’s a dream to use, and I don’t begrudge it batteries. And in isolation, the feel of the keyboard is ideal – the keys are low and responsive, and for a clumsy typist like me (for the most part, I’m a four-finger thug) there’s nothing to trip over. As a result, it helps me type quickly and efficiently.

BUT… it’s too damn short. Look at it against the new one. It’s smaller than my last laptop keyboard. Where are the number keys?

IMG_0492

I fact, I don’t care about the number keys. But why are the cursor keys packed together like urchins in a bus stop? My hands are big and I type too fast, so I constantly hit Shift when I’m pitching at Up. And where are the Home/End travel keys? And where’s the Delete key? I miss all of that, and I want it back. Pus I resent dripfeeding batteries into it every two months. Plus it gives me RSI in my right hand little finger, which hangs useless and suspended while my middle and forefingers hammer out der stories. I don’t know why, but the pain goes away with a bigger keyboard. A wired mouse is a pain in the ass, but when I work glued to a screen, a wired keyboard makes no difference whatsoever to my workflow, either for editing or writing.

So there you have it: time for a new, full-size, slimline, wired keyboard. Happy days. If you write a lot, then it’s important to be comfortable in the tools of your trade; over the last few years, I’ve used keyboards that I cursed every time I touched them. Or thought about them. Keyboards with stuck or missing letters. A keyboard where the space bar only worked if it was smashed on the left. A keyboard with a dodgy USB cable, leading to entire lost paragraphs when the thing came loose; though maybe this is my fault for staring at the keyboard, rather than the screen. I wore through the keyboard on my old laptop to the point that my most frequent letters ceased to function. I’ve written on typewriters before, too. I love the clunk-thwack-bang of a solid metal typewriter, but all romance aside, those things are completely unsuited to the way I work: constantly revising, deleting, reshuffling, backtracking, jumping ahead, cutting and pasting and stitching it together. I use Cmd+S, X, C and V more often than full stops. And I often work out of sequence, too; a necessarily chronological workflow would drive me distracted.

Speaking of which – I’m currently giving the free trial of Scrivener a run, on the advice of novelist pals Ali Shaw and Iain Maloney. For the most part, I’m extremely impressed at how it helps me organise my work – but I’ll write more on this another time.

For now – a pox on miniaturisation!

huge_hands_10_Reasons_Why_Big_Boobs_Suck_King_of_Fighters_Animation-s425x535-278909-535

Postscript: my friend Tom has just alerted me to this. Oh, my.

To Do: Part Two

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

Okay, back to work. College returns in three weeks, which feels frighteningly imminent. I’ve films to finish for Cumbria Wildlife Trust, Three Dimensional Tanx and Seven Seals, some short stories to write, the Riptide edits to complete for Quercus, Scrivener to learn, family and friends coming to stay, a log store to build, readings to practice, paperwork as deep as my hand, and Marrow to edit and complete.

Head down. Press on. Fail better.

miranda3a

A little light reading

~ simonsylvester ~ 2 Comments

We’ve just returned from a brilliant fortnight in France. We racked up 2,500 miles in a round trip that encompassed Ile de Noirmoutier, which is reached by a two-mile causeway at low tide; Rauzan, where we camped in the shadow of a ruined medieval castle; and Marais Poitevin. This last spot, nicknamed ‘Green Venice’, is one of the most amazing places I’ve ever seen. Centuries ago, it was a vast swamp, but Dutch settlers drained it with a labyrinth of canals and ditches, leaving hundreds of island pastures connected by causeways and bridges. The architecture is just as unique, with balconies and shutters adorning every house, and punts moored to jetties in gardens. Poplars and alders tower into the sky, the canals are thick with lurid green algae. Fat dragonflies zip and pop between shrubs and creepers, and the trees are alive with cicadas. Filtered through high branches and reflected from the water, the light itself is tinted green.

marais_poitevin bluehouse

It’s genuinely one of the most incredible landscapes I’ve experienced and, much like Grogport for Riptide, it’s been a real inspiration for my next novel. In the space of a few days, I filled an A4 pad with notes and dialogue, and I feel really excited about starting work. There’s still plenty to do before I can begin, but the foundations now feel firmly set.

The other great thing about the holiday was having time to read. I managed six books, which is no mean feat when juggling a toddler in a campsite. And I had a great run of books – not a single dud:

The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht was bold and convincing, subtly switching a range of voices to make folk myths contemporary through personal memory. I enjoyed it a lot, but found it ever so slightly cold, and wasn’t as blown away as its reputation suggests.

Cumbrian Folk Tales by Taffy Thomas was a fascinating collection of the county’s legends and myths, made all the more immediate through its connections to a landscape I’m starting to know. It was amusing to recognise the names of not just local places, but also local people – people I’ve met, worked with, drunk with. The tales were strongest when connected to geography, giving meaning and history to a witch’s cauldron or a devil’s bridge.

I read The Blackhouse by Peter May – this was a present from Jane Wood, my publisher at Quercus. She thought I’d like a look because, like Riptide, it’s a crime story set in the Hebrides, though it doesn’t have the supernatural elements of my book. I enjoyed it a lot. The plot was dovetail-tight and engrossing, and the landscape was intoxicating.

Next up was I Love You When I’m Drunk by Empar Moliner, Spanish short stories in translation through the tremendous Comma Press. Despite some uncharacteristic typos from an excellent publisher, it’s a solid collection, each story exploring and exploding conceits of modern life. Some of the stories felt a bit like shooting fish in a barrel – taking aim at soft targets of liberal, middle-class pomp – but the writing was good throughout, and there were many outstanding moments.

Moliner’s collection was good, but the next book was astonishing – a class apart. The Dog Of The Marriage gathers Amy Hempel‘s four short story collections into a single volume, and they are consistently superb. There isn’t a single wrong note across dozens of stories. Hempel’s work is voiced through emotionally damaged or stunted narrators, trapped or somehow left behind in their lives, caught between stasis and decay. The stories are not without hope, though, and Hempel writes with unceasing, unfailing humanity. Her sentences and structure are scintillating. I cannot recommend this highly enough. This is the sort of book I buy two copies of, expecting to have one out on loan.

the_dog_of_the_marriage.large

Finally, I read Snake Ropes by Jess Richards. This was another corker. Alternate narrators explore life on a mysterious island, ‘just off the edge of the map’, eventually combining to bring the distinct halves of the story together around a single, long-forgotten trauma. This novel holds trade and barter at its heart, exploring themes of presence and absence, balance and weight; of exchange, and what it means to give and get. It’s a real triumph, made all the more masterful in how Richards weaves the fantastical through the fabric of base human instinct, conjuring talking keys, sentient trees, and a walking doll with a seashell for a heart:

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The last fortnight has reminded me, as stupid as it sounds, of how much I love to read, and made it painfully apparent how little reading time my regular schedule affords me. I’m determined – on top of carving out more writing time – to read more. I miss it.

This holiday has been essential. I’ve worked stupidly hard over the last two years without much of a break, and I’ve badly wanted some time off. Looking ahead, the next two months are going to be frantic – but I feel better for a break. I have my next novel blocked out and the sights and scents of a swamp fresh in my mind. One more draft of Riptide to go, and then I’ll be starting my new story.

To Do

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t been writing very much lately. I’ve been too busy with real life, scrapping my way through end-of-year marking for my film students and working on videos for Kendal College and Cumbria Wildlife Trust. I’ve still some way to go, and there’s plenty more to do – my Dad’s popping up to help me build a fence, and I need to build a log store. But hopefully the end is in sight. Most important, I should be getting Jane‘s notes for Riptide in the next few weeks, and then I need to work my way through that final draft.

For a bit of a change, I’ve been using the odd evening to (slowly) teach myself the basics of InDesign, trying to put together a booklet of my flash fiction. It’s no big deal – twenty-five stories between 50 and 500 words, provisionally entitled ‘Marrow’. I’ve also booked in my next two readings – first for the Spotlight open mic in Lancaster in July, and then as a support slot for Dreamfired in Brigsteer in October. And in the background, I’m reading and researching towards my next novel; quietly brewing on the story, blocking out the plot. I still have some narrative strands to tidy up, though I know where the book will finish emotionally.

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For the moment: research. I wrote about rediscovering P.V. Glob’s The Bog People a few months ago, and I’ve finally had a chance to actually read the thing. For a 1970s archaeological review – even one designed for jumblies – it’s surprisingly well-written. Some of the bog bodies have held astonishing secrets in their graves. One poor woman was staked down with crooks and buried alive. A man was stabbed through the heart, smashed on the head and strangled. It’s all great stuff for the novel, generating context and building ideas. By happy coincidence, one of the jobs I’m doing for Cumbria Wildlife Trust is on wetland restoration, so I’ve been spending some time ankle deep in peatland. I need some more books, and I’d like to take trips to fen country at some point.

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It’s a thrilling stage, all the researching and blocking and plotting, preparing the ground before the hard work starts. I learned a lot from writing Riptide, and I’m excited to start work on a new book. Just need to clear away the hundred other things on my To Do list, first.

It hasn’t been all work. Friends Steve and Clare took us to Chester Zoo yesterday. We went straight to the orangutans, and spent a gloriously peaceful 20 minutes with them before a dozen school trips caught us up. Dora especially loved the bat enclosure, a vast warehouse where the bats swoop and skitter in artificial night. This morning we’re off to Dentdale Music & Beer festival, too. I’m going to take my story dice and drink ale.