Tag: redraft

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 I’ve posted published and unpublished flash fictions, and talked about my writing processes.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.

Grimm’s Sheesha

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peter-full

Last night, storyteller Peter Chand performed his show Grimm’s Sheesha at Dreamfired in Cumbria, and it was bloody brilliant.

A sheesha is a mirror, and you probably all know about the Brothers Grimm; throughout the 19th Century, brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm collected and published folk stories from across Germany and beyond. Their books preserved many – if not most – of our classic fairytales. When they feel so intrinsically European, hard-wired into grey stone and rain and winter, it’s crazy to discover that threads of those same tales have existed in India for centuries. In retrieving and retelling the original stories, Peter’s show gives the Grimms an Indian incarnation – or, more accurately, reflection – and hence the titular sheesha.

Just like people, stories evolve as they travel, building on a core, becoming something new, fitting themselves around each new place. The same elements are plain to see in the fairytales of both cultures – family discord, revenge, blood, luck, magic – but Peter’s stories explode with language and laughter. His characters flit between between Punjabi and English – sometimes with translations, sometimes without – and the seamless interplay of both languages is dizzying, dazzling, mesmerising. The stories balance violence with humour, using voice and movement and body language and expression to conjure holy men and jealous sisters, gods and donkeys, poison and pakora, loom shuttles, bloody shawls and magic mango stones.

It was an electrifying show and an inspiring night. By the end of the performance, my face ached with so much smiling and laughing. I can’t do it justice; hunt down Peter Chand and hurl yourself headfirst into his stories.

I’m fascinated by the evolution of stories, and it was a delight to chat to Peter after the show and hear more about how he’d found and developed the show – and how the show had then evolved again, changing around him with each new performance. His medium is more dynamic than mine, but that idea of evolution is something I can understand; it’s there in my inability to let go of written work, returning to it time and time again, even years after publication, tweaking and cutting and expanding, improving, building towards something ever new. We also spoke about his performance style, which is both relaxed and spontaneous – at one point he said “Bless you” to an audience sneeze without breaking the suspense – and he was kind enough to give me some advice on how to improve. I’ll never be a storyteller of his calibre, and that’s not really where I want to take my work – but I absolutely strive to read and perform my stories with greater confidence, and it was useful to talk to a master! Peter also put me onto Festival At The Edge – the country’s oldest storytelling festival – which I think we’ll try and attend next year.

As a tangent to all this, my friend (and real-life Lovejoy) Ben Piggott claims there are actually only two stories: 

  1. Boy/girl leaves to find fortune
  2. Trouble comes to town

I’ve tried, but I can’t think of a story worth its salt where one or both of these sound hollow. And yes, they’re vast catch-alls, but that’s okay, because they’re also entirely true.

For a number of reasons, I’ve stalled on the novel redraft since discussing Freedom. As of today, I think I’ve found a way back into the light – but I need to brew on it for a couple of days, so that’s for another post. For now, here’s an illustration from The Old Woman In The Wood.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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The horizon

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What a couple of weeks. The start of college has been a bit rough, but we’re getting there. I’m spread fairly thin at the moment, and it doesn’t feel like I’m getting much done… but in the background I’ve completely redrafted my flash fiction collection Marrow, so that’s ready for typesetting when I find the time to get to grips with InDesign. Paragraph Planet published a 75-word story from that collection last week, too, which is pretty cool. I’ve also redrafted the longer short story I talked about in my last post, and started blocking out my new novel in the excellent Scrivener.

Even more exciting, Riptide is beginning to gather pace. I’m expecting notes from my editor this week, so I can start work on what should be the final draft, and I’ve just had a sneak peek at a rough of the cover art, which is scintillating. While I’ve been so busy drowning in real life, just trying to stay afloat, seeing the cover has been a timely reminder of what I’m working towards. The artwork is simply perfect, but I’ll wait for a final version before I share it.

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The 200th Spotlight Club in Lancaster is looming on the horizon. It feels like only last week I was reading at their open mic night. I’m excited about performing there again, and hopefully catching up with old friends Rich Turner, Dan Haywood and Paddy Garrigan (pictured above) – Paddy’s playing out the night, which should be a blast. I have two or three new pieces lined up. I’m going to start with a short story about guinea pigs, and finish with a very short 75-word piece about avocados. I think there’s probably time for another story in between, but I haven’t decided what just yet.

After Spotlight comes the Brewery open mic, if I can get a spot, and then Dreamfired in October. By happy coincidence, my storytelling uncle Rich Sylvester is up from London that night. I don’t get to see Rich very often, so if we’re organised enough, I’ll try and knock up a quick video of one of his stories.

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Keys

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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?

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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!

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

To Do

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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.