Tag: writer

Waterstones Scotland Book of the Month

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I should have written about this sooner, but the month since we returned from Thailand has been a blur of college, film and writing. In short, I’m honoured beyond measure that The Visitors has been February’s Book of the Month for Waterstones Scotland. It’s been incredible – my excellent friends in Scotland have been sending me pictures of the book for sale in Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and beyond, and some of the window displays have been absolutely breathtaking. I’m a very lucky writer.

window display

The good people at Quercus asked if I could pop up to Scotland to sign some books and do a reading – which fortunately fell over half term. Cue a manic two days on the road with my wife – first dropping off Dora with her grandparents, then staying with my aunt and uncle in Edinburgh, stopping off at Waterstones stores in Edinburgh Princes Street and George Street, then Falkirk, on to Glasgow Argyle Street and Sauchiehall Street, and finishing up at the Braehead shopping centre. It was a real whistle-stop thing, calling in long enough to sign a stack of books, chat to the staff, and push on again.

I’m delighted to report that it seems to have been doing well – aided in no small part, I’m sure, by Leo Nickolls‘ stunning cover. Some stores only had a couple of copies left, and it had made the charts in others. It’s also been cropping up in Blackwells, W.H.Smiths, and Waterstones south of the border.

While we were in Glasgow Sauchiehall Street, I read a few chapters from The Visitors. I’ve read from it before at spoken word nights, but this was the first time I’d done anything like a proper talk on the book. I read three chapters. Having been so immersed in The Hollows, it was even a little strange to be back on Bancree and inside Flora’s head, but I enjoyed it. The reading was followed by some excellent questions from the audience, then catching up with old friends. Within 48 hours, we were back on the road to Cumbria.

I’ve been lucky. I know I’ve been lucky. I’m incredibly grateful to Quercus, and to Sue at Conville & Walsh, and to Waterstones, for showing this much faith in my work. I hope I won’t ever take that for granted, because I want to write until the day I drop. I’m still rising early to chip away at The Hollows. I’m finding that it doesn’t really matter how much I write in these dawn sessions, as blackbirds squabble in the garden and the radiators creak into life; whether I write 100 words or 500 words, it’s much more about keeping in touch the story, tagging in every day. Last year, I had to spend months at a time without writing at all, and I fell away from the manuscript. There were times I returned to it and couldn’t remember a word of what I’d written previously. Even if, or when, I get that busy again, I’m going to try to keep going with these little sessions every day – they mean that when I have a full writing day, I can hit the ground running. I’ve written more good material this February alone than all of last year put together. That gives me courage.

signing

Baby steps

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In the end, I decided to start again. I didn’t feel I could salvage enough of The Hollows (take one) to make it worth the while. I was certain I’d be left with a scrappy patchwork of pieces, and that joining the dots between them would give me more trouble than reward – as well as colouring whatever came next with so many prior wrong turns. So I started again.

As I mentioned in my last post, I probably shared too much about The Hollows (take one) last year, and I’m not going to to do that again. I feel like I got ahead of myself, and jinxed it. This post is more of a reflection on how freeing the Kate Mosse incident has been for me. Having decided to bin all 30,000 words of the first draft, I was a little intimidated about starting again. But the huge amount of time I spent with pen and paper in Thailand – dozens of hours – gave me the space I needed to settle myself. Having transcribed thousands of words of notes into Scrivener, I found I had a chapter structure. And having fleshed out each of those chapters, joined a few dots and bridged a few gaps, I realised that, with as much luck as design, the narrative was essentially complete.

I found myself almost arbitrarily drawn to a chapter somewhere in the middle of the story, and tentatively started work. I’ve now had five full writing days on the second draft, as well as five or six mornings before work, and somehow I’ve written 23,000 words. Here’s the thing. I’ve written damn near the same inside two weeks as I managed in all of last year put together, except it’s better. That’s left me feeling slightly staggered. What the hell was I doing last year? Did I really wallow so much in the first draft? For a whole year? What made it so hard? I can’t remember. I suspect, in essence, it’s because I was writing fundamentally the wrong story, and I therefore owe Kate Mosse a debt of thanks.

Nothing guarantees the quality of what I’ve written so far, other than I’m feeling curiously relaxed and cautiously happy in what I’m doing, and excited about what comes next. That’s a far better measure than word counts. (Although, if I’m being honest, word counts help – as long as I’m content with the words.) I don’t even yet feel that I’m immersed, that I’m drowning, and that’s what I’m pitching for, that’s what I want. These first sessions are building my sense of the world. It’s knitting together geographically, culturally, socially. It’s growing. It’s almost ready to get lost in.

Thailand two

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Bangkok is smoke, Samui is steam. Flying into the airport was like flying into Jurassic Park. Even as we arrived, a cloudburst yammered on the tarmac, and the airport sprouted with gigantic, alien plants I’d never seen before, spines folded back on themselves like Escher prints. Samui has mountains in its interior, all pasted in dense jungle, crisscrossed with broken roads and coconut plantations. The coast is a ring road of shacks, tourist bars and holiday resorts. We stayed on the north-eastern tip of the island in an apartment overlooking the sea. On our first day, we saw Brahminy kites cruising above directly above us, hanging on the breezes, terrifying the coast. Tiny tailor birds perched on palm fronds beside the balcony, and myna birds hung upside-down from the rafters while we drank our beers and watched the sea.

I’m not very good at relaxing. Even the things I do for fun – writing, climbing, drinking with my friend Banks – are bruising, high-impact activities. So it was strange to have so much enforced time away from home, away from work, away from my computer. I even felt a little edgy during the first few days, but soon drifted into a gentle routine of swimming, reading, telling stories, and writing. The writing in particular was vital time for me. I sat with my pen and notebook and spent a few hours every day battering out what The Hollows is about.

Each night, we went to eat in local restaurants or hooked up with with friends. We’d gone to Samui in particular because our pals Helen and Michael were getting married on the beach. We spent a few days either side of the celebration with their excellent Australian mates – really good people. On the way back from their wonderful wedding, we were driven by the craziest taxi driver I’ve ever met. He laughed without pause for the entire twenty minute ride. He had a photo of his son on the dashboard.

‘What’s your boy called?’ I said.

‘His name is Mr. iPhone,’ said the driver, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. ‘England is cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold!’

Ang Thong marine park is an extraordinary place. After a stomach-churning ninety minute boat ride to the first of the two islands we were allowed to visit, we climbed lethally steep stairs to a viewpoint, overlooking a hidden lagoon on one side and the marine park archipelago on the other. With a little help, Dora counted off every one of the hundred and fifty steps, chanting all the way. Having climbed down to the lagoon, we told her about pirates and mermaids and the giant fish that eats little girls who don’t listen to their mummies and daddies about not swimming in the water because that’s what the sign says, poppet.

On the second island we visited, we stood no more than two metres away from wild monkeys. They sat at head height in scrubby trees above the flat white sand, eating figs. They weren’t even slightly interested in us. We watched them for a long time before they disappeared into the jungle. In the trees behind them, set back from the beach, was a shrine. Dolphin skulls, monkey skulls. Shrines everywhere.

The sea had blown up by the time we had to leave. We’d taken seasickness tablets, and Dora promptly passed out on me, but there were people screaming as this horrible damned tub of a boat skidded and crashed and shuddered in the waves. There were three Irish women on the boat – a mother and two daughters, I think – and they started singing in Gaelic, sweet and soft as nursery rhymes. I don’t know if it helped the shrieking Finnish lady, but it helped me. I believed them to be songs of sailors’ wives, praying for the safe return of their men from stormy seas. They might have been pop songs, I guess, but hopefully I’ll never know.

On our third-to-last day, we had the truly bittersweet experience of taking a Samui tour. Every island tour offers elephant and monkey shows. You can’t do it without. So we went, agreeing that we simply weren’t going to take part in the animal shows.

The first part of the trip was a visit to some extraordinary floating temples. We’d driven past them in tuk-tuks a dozen times without knowing they were even there, these gigantic statues of Buddha. That was special. I have no religious faith, but I respect and enjoy the measured spectacle of religious achievement – of cathedrals, of temples, of such conviction. Wandering amongst the statues in the fire of early morning – the first of the day’s tourists, joined only by the temple dogs – was awe-inspiring in the true sense of the word.

The elephant show was next on the itinerary. We were swept along with the crowd, and ended up watching it. There were two elephants. They were brought from different parts of the compound. As soon as they met, they touched trunks, then their handlers finagled them into jigs, into standing on their hind legs, their fore legs. One kicked footballs. One of them was bleeding from the skull. A string of cheery, gormless volunteers came down from the crowd, and the elephants placed a foot on their backs. One elephant pretended to give a honeymoon massage, rubbing a man’s penis with her trunk. We felt humiliated for her. What was worse was realising that at least the show was something to do. Immediately afterwards, the elephants were chained up again – far apart – and each began a heartbreaking, relentless, moronic swaying. One elephant waved her head for a minute or so, then lifted her trunk, as though she’d heard something – and resumed her swaying. I watched her repeat this for twenty minutes. The other did an imbecile dance, lifting her left foreleg, waggling it in the air, replacing it, lifting it, replacing it, lifting it. It was depressing beyond measure.

We explained to Dora that the elephants were unhappy. She was at first puzzled, then very upset. When we came to the monkey show, the first thing anyone heard was Dora, asking why the sad monkey had a chain around his neck.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said the Australian lady beside us, ‘if a three-year-old can see it, what’s wrong with the rest of them?’

There’s nothing to say to that.

After these miseries, we powered up and down gut-squeezing mountain roads in ferocious 4x4s. A Latvian girl we’d collected from a yoga retreat (‘I no eat, I no eat, I on detox, of course!’) had a shrieking meltdown when we went off-road, and demanded to be let out and abandoned in the middle of the jungle. ‘Faster, faster!’ yelled Dora. The Thai drivers adored her for that.

Orchids overgrowing in the road. Bamboo exploding skywards in thickets too dense for light. Coffee growing wild in the hills. Palm trees fifteen metres high, clustered with coconuts. The mummified monk. He claimed he knew he was about to die, so had the others build a glass case around him, and spent his last months meditating inside. That was forty years ago. The case was only opened to give him sunglasses after his eyes had desiccated. The heat, the haze. I dropped our camera in the river. We swam in a waterfall, against the current, with the setting sun glittering in the top few metres of the water and the rest of it falling into jungle gloom.

The hours before evening, when the heat had gone from the sun, and the wet fragrance of the jungle filled our lungs. Arguing with drivers, taking the tuk-tuk into town, decoding every menu for vegetarian options. The warmth of night envelops and cradles and doesn’t want to let you go.

We found a thousand shells on the beach, all their perfect whorls and spirals broken open by the sea. I found ten metres of rope, as thick as my wrist, and dragged it along the beach in an anaconda trail. I left it in a spiral. The plastic bottles that wash up in the foam, each encrusted with a hundred tiny mussels. I found a shark’s tooth and a sunhat.

Mosquitoes. The microcosm of expats. A wasp, longer than my finger, black as jet, trapped beneath a glass and rattling a fury.

‘Of course, I emigrated when they started letting just anyone into Britain,’ he said without irony. ‘I couldn’t handle it now.’

A butterfly, purple and white, the size of both palms together, shadow shapes on candlelit walls. The beaming Thai waitress, eight months’ pregnant, pointing a lost Westerner towards his friends. He didn’t give her so much as a look in acknowledgment.

‘The slitty-eyed gits,’ said another. ‘They’ve stitched me up again.’

Everywhere we went, the Thais continued to be the friendliest, most welcoming people we’d ever met. In one local restaurant, where they spoke no English and we communicated in gestures and smiles, they took Dora off to play. In another, they brought her nine peeled tangerines. She ate them in a state of grateful awe, watching the ceiling fan spin beneath the palm frond ceiling. Pat and Enjoy, the girls who ran the cafe where we ate our breakfast, took endless pictures of her running around the garden, leaping between stepping stones, a bundle of sweat and freckles. One morning, she spontaneously told us her first ever story.

We couldn’t escape the end. It gathered into the last days, mountains on a long-distance drive. Normally I sleep like a bag of bricks, but for some weird reason, on our last night on Samui, and then again at our stopover in Bangkok, I managed only two hours a night; and none at all on the 14-hour flight home. I was in something of a delirium by the time we actually made it back. In Heathrow, a drunk man had been stopped at Arrivals, and was howling at a security guard.

‘I’m a citizen of the UK! This never happened before we let people like you come in here!’

Welcome home. I can’t even use the word Great anymore. It was great meeting my dad in Manchester airport, though, and catching up with our families over the next days; then floating back to ground, restocking the fridge, washing our clothes, putting the suitcases away, putting the books back on the shelf.

I usually read relentlessly on holiday, but this time was different. The only book I really enjoyed was the incomparable Wolf Hall. I spent far more time with pen and paper, working on The Hollows. I’m not going to talk much about it, this time. I feel very much like I overextended myself in discussing the book prior to the Kate Mosse incident, and I’m not going to do that again, other than to say that I talked it through at great length with Mon, who is the most amazing reader I could ever ask for. I’m excited by what I have planned, and I’ve written the first 12,000 words in three days. In this respect, jet lag has been a friend to me; I’ve been waking at 5.30 in the morning, ready for my day, and writing before I go to work. I’ve always been envious of writers who wake early to write – it’s never worked for me before – but it’s working this time. I’m not going to set an alarm for it, but if my body keeps waking, I’ll keep writing. No matter how rough my day at college, there’s a little kernel in my heart that knows I’ve written something, anything – a hundred words, five hundred words. That burns inside me even if I’m too wasted to write at night.

So that was Thailand. Every travel, every trip, is an inherent contradiction, both coming and going. The xenophobic ex-pats were outnumbered a thousand times over by the honest, open smiles of friends and strangers; for every caged bird and poor demented elephant, there were Brahminy kites, indigo butterflies and geckos inside paper lanterns.

When I first left Britain, I was wired with stress, working too much, making myself ill. Thailand gave me the space to recover, to triangulate the things I want to do, and to spend time with the people who matter most to me. That’s what this life is about, if it’s about anything at all. Ultimately, I don’t feel like I’ve travelled very far, because distance is measured from home, and I took mine with me.

Resolve (again)

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It’s that time again. Last year, I cribbed together some resolutions. Looking back at them now, I’m quite pleased. The Hollows didn’t go according to plan, sure, but I’ve already talked about that, made my peace and moved on. I finished both Marrow and The Year Of the Whale, and I performed at Verbalise, Sprint Mill, Dreamfired, Bad Language and the Flashtag Short Short Story Slam. The only thing I didn’t tackle at all was writing and submitting more short stories. There simply wasn’t enough time on top of the chaos of everything else. Indeed, 2014 actually marked the first year since I started that I didn’t write a single short story, but that’s OK. I’ve been kinda busy.

People can be pretty disparaging about resolutions, but I’m coming to quite enjoy the process of making and sharing the things I’d like to do. Writing them out makes them more tangible, and leaving a record of what I’d like to do makes it more achievable. So here are some resolutions for 2015.

Climbing

I kept last year’s resolution, and started climbing again. Not all that often, I suppose, but more often than never. I’d like to do more of the same this year. I’ve started going for a few hours on Monday afternoons, after I’ve finished work, and that’s been a perfect fit with my week. My fingers are slowly beginning to toughen up, week on week, and those little successes feed into each other. I’ll take my climbing shoes to Thailand to do a little bouldering on the beaches, and I hope to get out on some Lakeland rock this summer – the Langdale boulders won’t exactly be quaking with fear, but they give me plenty to aim for.

Writing

Yup. Again. It doesn’t stop, does it? This year, my writing ambitions are twofold. Even then, the first part is for fun: I want to release another flash fiction collection, which will possibly be called Real Life. I’ve been doing a night class in graphic design, and that’s really helped with the various processes involved. Making books is fun, and it’s addictive. A lot of the stories are ready, but my flash fiction took a back seat in the second half of 2014, and I want to tighten up the whole collection. Even then, though, I mostly want to direct my flash fiction for reading aloud, which is where it works the best – there are dates in my diary for 2015, and I’m already looking forward to stomping my way through some stories.

The second thing is bigger. I’d like to finish a first draft of The Hollows. I had the same ambition last year, and it didn’t happen for a bunch of reasons I’ve moaned about already. But this year is different. I’ve cleared most of my film jobs, I’m not going to work on other big writing projects (unless someone pays me a lot of money, which seems unlikely) and that gives me the space to be a bit more structured with my writing time. In the unlikely event that everything goes to plan, then I’ll get a solid two days a week from February to start finding my way again.

The Hollows is proving exactly as tricky to navigate as the swamp I initially wanted to write about. My head is a zoetrope of ideas, all glass pots and ghosts, ashes and blackened timbers, lost keys and tarot. Mon and I are going on honeymoon this year – we’re going to Thailand with Dora – and I’ll be taking my notebook and my fountain pen. Spending some time away from the internet, away from screens, away from everything except the people I love best, will give me space to work it out with pen and paper. At the moment, I’m not even sure if I’m dealing with one book or two. I’m orbiting the right story, peering down between the clouds, catching glimpses of what it’s going to be… but I still don’t know what it is.

I use a lot of metaphors for talking about writing. The weaving of a tapestry, the nurturing of some unknown seed, the orbiting of a strange moon, the navigation of a swamp. It consistently amuses and baffles me how I find it easier to clarify my thoughts on writing using almost anything other than writing itself. The act of making marks, in ink or pixels, is excruciatingly simple. But getting them in the right order? Damn. That bit is hard.

Dora is learning to write. She knows her letters, and she’s trying to form them all the time, trying to construct a sense of meaning. She can write her name, and if I help, she’ll try her hand at anything. The other day, she wanted to write ‘moose’ against her picture of a moose. I spelled it out for her – M – O – O – S – E – but she ran out of room, so went back to the beginning for the last letter, so the final word looked like ’emoos’. I tried to show her the correct way to spell it, but she wasn’t interested.

There’s probably a metaphor for writing in there, too, but I can’t make that out either.

Resolutions, like word counts and climbing grades, only matter to the person who makes them. And – like word counts, like climbing grades – they only matter if you push yourself within them. That means weaving a tapestry – nursing a seed – orbiting a moon – navigating a swamp – or, sometimes – making a mark that matters to you, even if you get it wrong.

wisp

Happy New Year, folks.

 

2014 and all that

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This year has been both breathtakingly excellent and occasionally extraordinarily hard. I’m focusing on the good stuff though, because we’re all spinning through the mind-boggling vastness of space on a giant oxygen machine and really, when you think about it, where’s the sense in dwelling on the rough?

So here we go; in no particular order:

1. The Visitors being published

The culmination of two years’ work and the start of an awful lot more to come; in June, the wonderful folks at Quercus Books were kind enough to publish The Visitors. I wrote about the publication here, and it kept on running. Somehow, people keep enjoying it. I’ve summed up the reviews here, and there are reviews from actual real life readers on Goodreads and You-Know-Where. Writing was hard, editing was very hard, and now it’s out there in the wild – it doesn’t need me any more, if it ever did. I haven’t really come to terms with the book being published, other than it makes me scared, humble and really, really happy. Writing is all I want to do, but sometimes every step feels like the first step.

visitors

2. The Hollows

In the twelve months – to the day, madly – since I started, I’ve probably written about half The Hollows. Unfortunately, for reasons like this and especially this, I’ve had to cut gigantic chunks of it; so much, in fact, that I’ll basically have to start again next year, and crib the pieces I can still use from the manuscript. This would be a very bad thing, were it not for how excited I am about those pieces that are left. It’s been bruising, definitely, but the process is now beginning to tip me in positive directions I probably wouldn’t have gone by myself, and that’s terrific.

3. Flashtag short short story slam

Over the last two years, I’ve been trying to read more of my work aloud; I pushed myself further this year by entering a story slam in Manchester. I memorised my three stories so I could concentrate on performing them, rather than reading them, and I was lucky enough to win. That was great, and I was delighted, but what really blew my mind was the culture of live literature I witnessed in Manchester. It’s raw, it’s funny, it’s friendly, it’s immediate. It’s everything short stories and poetry and flash fiction should be about, and it completely affirmed the value of storytelling as an act of community. Stories are a thousand things, and one of those things is churches.

4. Clowning

Way back in February, I attended a clowning workshop run by Belgian storytelling maestro Fred Versonnen. This is the best £25 I’ve ever spent, and it’s true to say that my life hasn’t been quite the same ever since. I see things differently now – I write differently now.

fred

5. The Year Of The Whale

I started this novella more than five years ago. Getting it finished was a thrill – I surged through the final chapters, and I’m pleased with it. It still needs redrafting, but I’m not quite ready to get back into it. It’s waited five years – it can wait a little longer.

6. Marrow/Cerys Matthews reading Circle Stone

Finishing Marrow was another big deal in my writing year. I haven’t written as much flash fiction this year, because I’ve been mentally wasted from work, and that kinda gets in the way, but I did, finally, finish and self-publish a flash fiction collection called Marrow. Of the hundred I printed, I have about twenty copies left, and people seem to like it, which is a source of constant wonder. I wrote about my decision to self publish here. I sent a copy to the excellent Cerys Matthews, and because she’s absolutely awesome, she read out one of the stories on her BBC6 Music show. This is, and will always be, the coolest thing that ever happened to me.

7. Gruff Rhys at Kendal Library

Gig of the year, hands-down. I wrote about it here, but in summary, Gruff was majestic, wise and funny.

8. Greece

One of my favourite ever holidays. A week of sunshine, warm evenings, seashores, swimming and the boundless comedy available on tap from my daughter Dora. We had a fantastic time: ruins, eagles, Mythos and pizza. I love holidays because I’m with my favourite people, I get to read a lot, and I get to think a lot. It went like this.

9. Friends

It’s been another good year for my friends. Iain Maloney published First Time Solo, his excellent debut novel, with Freight Books; also with Freight, Anneliese Mackintosh’s debut novel/story collection/autobiography Any Other Mouth was released to stupendous acclaim, going on to win the Green Carnation Prize; Salt published one of my books of the year, The Rental Heart by Kirsty Logan; Kirstin Innes landed an agent and then a publishing deal for her debut novel Fishnet; and I was lucky enough to read a draft of Ali Shaw’s new novel, The Trees, which is simply scintillating. I’m delighted that Bloomsbury are going to publish it, because Ali is a wonderful human being, an outstanding writer and a great friend.

10. Getting married

Just amazing. We did damn near all of it ourselves, and when I say ‘us’, I mean that I did 10% after I’d finished work, and my tireless, hilarious, wonderful, perfect new wife Mon did the rest. It was a lot of work to pull it all together, but we basically hosted a mini-festival in a back garden with a marquee, a stage, a band, a PA, scores of hay bales, lighting and decoration. We then partied till the following morning with our wonderful friends. My brother gave what was widely considered to be the best best man’s speech anyone had heard, and local legends Seven Seals played their very finest. It was phenomenal. What a day – a thousand thanks to everyone who brought it all together.

Mon is my everything, and I’m beyond proud to call her my wife.

si mon

So there we go. It’s been a good one, despite the harder stuff. Some of the things that have knocked me hard – like the Hollows, like the Scottish independence referendum – will come around again, and next time we will get them right. And other things – like working too hard – will change, because they have to.

Dora’s gone to bed. This is the first year she’s been old enough to really understand what’s going on. We helped her write a letter to Santa, which she signed herself, then made sure to leave a whiskey for Santa. (Jura, in case you’re asking. Santa’s quite particular about that.) I read her Where The Wild Things Are, and we roared our terrible roars, and gnashed our terrible teeth, and she asked me what the words mean: “…and …it …was …still …hot.”

These are the moments we’re working for.

Happy Christmas, folks.

dora

In The Empty Places

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A very worthy work was published last week, and I wanted to take a moment to shout about it. In The Empty Places is an anthology of art and short stories published by the Bantuan Coffee Foundation, an amazing organisation that provides shelter and education for victims of child prostitution and trafficking in Indonesia. It’s a fantastic cause delivering real, practical solutions on the ground, and I’m honoured that they considered some of my work for the anthology. The editors accepted a short story about the Chinese cocklers that drowned in Morecambe Bay in 2001. I lived in Lancaster at the time, only a few miles away, and I never managed to shake off a sense of uncaring tragedy; relentless winter skies, the media circus, the restaurant owners protesting their innocence.

My piece is in the extraordinary company of writers including Toni Davidson, Rodge Glass, Tendai Huchu, Kirsty Logan, Anneliese Mackintosh, Iain Maloney, Suhayl Saadi and Chiew-Siah Tei. Some of these stories are appearing in translation for the first time. The book also includes artwork by Tomi Muller, Mayra Martins Redin and my wife, Monica Metsers.

In The Empty Places is helping to provide real solutions and real escapes for children who have been forced into prostitution. If you’d like to help too, then follow this link for a copy of the book; there are far worse ways to spend your money this Christmas.

Cover_Page_1-940x1329

Crossroads

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I haven’t blogged for ages – sorry. The reasons are almost too mundane to mention, but the short version is that my workspace has been out of action for two months. This has cut my video editing and writing time down considerably, and in what time I’ve had, the video jobs have to take priority. I wrapped up my second promo for Born Survivor, and I’m a whisker away from finishing my long-running hay meadows project. I’ll write some more about that when it’s finally complete; unlike any other job I’ve taken on, the meadows film has changed the way I think about the world. This is tied up in Scottish independence, vegetarianism/veganism, and plastic. To be discussed.

I’m writing this post as something of a confession. After months away, the last fortnight has actually given me three solid days to write. In that time I’ve added 11,000 words, and surged from despondency to exhilaration. I’ve now levelled out somewhere in between. (I’m a lot more neurotic than I probably appear.) This is a confession because, in these last few days in particular, my imagination and awareness have been completely invested in The Hollows. I haven’t had much space for anything else. I’ve been ratty and irritable – not because I’m actually feeling ratty, but because this story is a sore tooth – constantly nagging, constantly distracting, always there – and I’m struggling to live in two realities at once. I’ve now written about 26,000 words, which I estimate is about a third of the finished manuscript, and I find myself in the extraordinary position of not knowing where to go from here.

That sounds bad, but it isn’t. I very much believe in giving stories space to breathe, in letting them evolve, and this one has evolved radically around the busiest year of my entire life. I’m positive about all of the routes I could take, though each of them entails some changes. I’m now brewing on which way to go. Bluntly speaking, my choices could be defined by genre, but it’s not that simple. It’s about my sense of self-worth, and the value I take from the act of writing. This story feels entirely right to me, but I don’t know what it is. It’s like reading a map in another alphabet: the world is removed from me yet fleetingly familiar, and I haven’t yet worked out where I am. At a crossroads, perhaps. Each route has pitfalls and detours and summits to climb. (My friend James Hannah says to turn left. If it all goes wrong, I’m blaming him.)

I’m spending hours at a time with my notebook. I’m listening to Rachel’s and Balmorhea. I’m floating in a sea of puzzle pieces. If I can pin down one or two, I’ll build the rest from there, but they are quick as fish.

Writing is easy, and writing is hard.

Notebook

~ simonsylvester ~ 4 Comments

On the rare occasions I’ve been asked for writing advice, one of the things I always suggest is to carry a notebook and a pen. I’ve lost count of the thoughts, ideas, plots, characters and dialogue I’ve let slip through the gaps in my atrocious memory. It’s heartbreaking. I took to carrying a pocket notebook years ago. Sometimes I fill one in a month, and sometimes in six months, until it disintegrates to dust and fibres and I need to tape the spine. I keep them all on a shelf above my desk. Once, while backpacking in Australia, I spilled a hipflask of Maker’s Mark all over my notebook, and the whiskey erased the ink. I lost my bourbon, and I lost weeks of passing thoughts. As my friend Ali said, it was the very definition of two wrongs not making a right.

Notebooks aren’t just for the utility of capturing ideas. It’s important to remember how to write the hard way. I’m a thug of a typist, but I’m pretty fast, and I spend a huge amount of time glued to my computer, whether that’s writing or editing. My default setting is electric, and when I have an idea, I tend to go to the computer first.

This is all relevant because I’m finally dipping my toes back into The Hollows. I started on Christmas Eve 2013, wrote sporadically through the new year, and hit 25,000 words around June. I haven’t worked on it at all since then, but last week I finally had the space to look at it again. On reading it through, I was a little unhappy with some of my work. Parts of it read well, but simply weren’t right for the story any more. No matter how much I shuffled chapters or copied and pasted paragraphs to try and make it fit, the story wouldn’t gel. Instead, I put on some music and sat back with a fountain pen and an old office diary I nabbed years ago to use as a notebook.

The diary was a red hardback day-to-a-page thing, brand new and unused from 2006, a ribbon bookmark folded flat between the crisp blank pages. It was perfect. I started scribbling down my worries and woes. I made lists of characters I liked and characters I didn’t need. I wrote down what worked, and what never could. I drew lots of dots and stars and arrows connecting things that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. I wrote questions and answers. I wrote until my hand hurt and I had a dent in my forefinger. A few hours later, the mist was beginning to clear, and some new ideas were beginning to show themselves.

That night, I talked it through with Mon. She’s so good at giving me space to shape my ideas. Often the act of explaining a story to Mon explains the story to me, too. Vocalising something gives it clarity. After chatting it through, I spent another hour or two jotting down new ideas, new people, new places to explore.

This is all the planning I do when I’m writing. Rough notes and loose association. It works better with ink than on a screen. It makes the process tangible. I couldn’t do what Ali did with his last novel, and write the whole thing longhand – that wouldn’t work for me – but I’d forgotten how healthy it is to make a mark, to scribe into the fibres of the page. The act of writing with a pen has conjured new ideas, too – things that couldn’t have occurred in pixels.

The hardest part is making the decision. I went back to the manuscript, and cut 11,000 words. It hurt, but it was important. There were good scenes in there – good chapters – but they’d sent me off course, and they had to go. Now they’re gone. My draft is 11,000 words lighter, but I’m more confident in what is left. The shape of the story has changed. The characters are starting to stir, beginning to show themselves.

It’s insane to think I’ve achieved so little since starting it almost a year ago. I feel like I should have a finished draft by now. I know, looking back, that we’ve been extraordinarily busy this year, and that I’ve completed a multitude of other things, but The Hollows is back in my life and shouting louder than ever. I’ve spent some time on the wrong path, but now I think I’ve found my way. A pen, a compass.