24/09/2020 - Emotion Words

The world’s quickest entry today, because I’m tired and don’t really have a lot to say. However, I’ve come across a piece of advice which seems really useful - avoid emotion words when trying to establish a character’s emotional state. I.E. Don’t write ‘I was scared’ - write how the fear manifests. The feeling in the character’s stomach, their nervous tics, their dry mouth and so on. I’d already intuited this advice to a certain extent, but as a rule I quite like it. I’ve gone back over my most recent manuscript using a ctrl+F for ‘fear’ and, whilst most of them are used quite well, there was one sentence that read, in its entirety: “Fear rose in me.”

That’s not exactly a bad sentence but it smacks of telling the audience what the character feels rather than demonstrating the emotion and having the atmosphere carry that across to the reader. This sort of advice is sometimes called ‘show don’t tell’ but I hate that term, because it’s advice that comes from screenwriting. When you’re making film or television, you have a choice between showing the audience what’s going on with character action, or simply having a character tell the audience what’s going on. Show vs tell.

With text, 100% of what you’re doing is telling the reader what’s happening, unless there are pictures. The advice, when applied to novels, is better phrased as ‘demonstrate, don’t report’ or something similar, although I admit that’s less catchy than ‘show don’t tell’.

17/09/2020 – My Problem With Self-Editing Advice

I’m going to be taking part in an editing course in October because that’s one of many areas of my writing that still needs to improve after however many years I’ve been doing this thing. The course sent over a reading list, and part of that was the book written by the two people who run the course. I got the book and I read the book. It was a good book. It had useful advice and one piece of advice I vehemently disagree with for reasons I may go into later. I do, however, have one specific problem.

After I read the book, I went back over a couple of sections of the book that’s currently out with an editor to see if I could apply any of the lessons I’d just learned and the answer was ‘…not really’.

So, there was a whole section in the editing book on expository narration – the idea that you shouldn’t just have a first person narrator just tell the reader what’s going on, and they should demonstrate it through action. Great, good advice. So I read a section I’d wrote after a particularly fraught emotional scene. In the immediate aftermath of the scene, my narrator is caring for her best friend. They’ve both been traumatised. The friend is crying and the narrator is hugging her whilst she thinks about what she just went through. She wonders if she can trust her own experiences, her own senses.

So, here’s my problem: Is it expository to have the narrator ponder things like that? Is it okay? Is it expository? I genuinely don’t know. I suspect the answer is probably ‘it might be expository and it might not, even if it is expository, it might not matter because the quality of the material might justify it, but then again, it also might not’.

The problem I’m having at the moment is my writing is good enough to not fall into a bunch of common writing traps, but it’s not good enough to not fall into subtler versions of those same writing traps.

This, as I hope you can imagine, is a little frustrating.

10/09/2020 – Starting with a Bang

I’m part of a facebook group where writers and editors discuss various technical and business issues. Recently, someone on this group posted an article talking about a subject that always gets my teeth grinding: How quickly should a novel’s plot kick in?

The TL;DR of the article was: It used to be a novel could take as long as it wanted to start the story, then it had to be within the first 30 pages, then 20 pages, then 15 and now you have to get things started within the first 10 pages.

Personally, having read a bunch of classis Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, only to be frustrated by the authors insisting on opening their novels with a load of irrelevant drivel, this sounds fine to me. People want their stories to start at the start of the novel, this shouldn’t be massively controversial. People may complain about short attention spans, but I think it’s more likely to be there are a surplus of good books being published regularly now, so we don’t have to put up with glacial storytelling.

My problem, conversely, is over-correcting. As with Sense of Place last week, I tend to want to get things started on the first page rather than let things breathe and start at their own pace. It’s something I’m working on.

03/09/2020 – Sense of Place

On the 23rd of July I wrote about my editor telling me that there was a flaw in my writing. Through a long and bloody process, I found out what that flaw was: My writing, particularly in the early chapters, didn’t have a Sense of Place.

For those that don’t know, a Sense of Place is how a text immerses the reader in a location. The text gives the reader enough information for them to understand where a scene is set, and maybe some thematic information about the scene as well if they’re feeling fancy.

I’ve always had a problem with description generally. This stems from trying to read William Gibson and Margert Atwood, whose writing generally goes like this:

“The neon lights of the alley reflected of the fetid pool of water etc. etc. etc. etc. etc for five lines.

Jane walked down the alley and saw a cat.

The cat was atypical of its kind, its matted grey fur was thinning at the etc. etc. etc. etc. for five lines.

Jane stoked the cat.

Stroking the cat reminded Jane about her childhood home, whose walls were as furry as the cat was, soft as knives and twice as spikey. The light had always hit the walls like a cat hit the ground, with all four paws etc. etc. etc. for five lines.

Jane stood up and walked to the end of the alley, where she saw a rubbish bin.

The rubbish bin was small and square, like a lie, a terrible lie that etc. etc. etc. for five lines. “

-          Every book by authors who think telling a good story is secondary to describing in exhausting detail what the lighting is like in the protagonist’s bedroom

I’m being a little unkind to two very talented authors there, but I have problems concentrating and I can’t get into a story if it grinds to a halt every thirty seconds to describe things for a paragraph or eight. Atmosphere is great, it’s very important. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle has amazing atmosphere, thanks to its description, but it also knows when to hold back.

So, for the longest time, I’ve been neglecting Sense of Place in my novels. I just went back and checked on a book I wrote that got rejected by every agent I sent it to (around fifty I think). The first two chapters went like this:

The protag is in a room (no description at all), dies, then wakes up in her bedroom (no description), she looks out of the window (the absolute bare minimum of description). She then steps out into a corridor (no description) walks up some stairs (no description) and to a room (no description) where she sees a woman (tiny amount of description), meets the antagonist of the novel (no description), brief chat with the antagonist (a little description), goes to important location 1 (no description)… you get the idea.

Now, this book is a particularly bad example because it’s set on a ship and I don’t find describing ships particularly interesting. In our heads, we all know what a ship is like, right?

Having had this pointed out to me, this is obviously terrible writing. Yes, we know what ships are like, but we don’t know what this ship is like. Is it made of metal or wood? Is it in a good state of repair? Is it a nice place to be in? What does it look like in any way? Readers do genuinely need this stuff.

I talked to my wife about this, as she has a bit of the same problem, and she said that she didn’t do description because Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books don’t have description… except (as she pointed out) they do have quite a lot of description, actually, Pratchett just made it look easy. It didn’t break up the flow like the Gibson/Atwood parody I wrote above.

So, when I realised (thanks to some poking from my editor) that this was a serious problem, I broke out three Fantasy books I like: The Lies of Locke Lamora, Senlin Ascends and Six of Crows. I went through the first three chapters, highlighting every section of description. They varied massively, but they all had at least one big block of description of the environment every few pages, and two to three lines on each page. So I went through the book I was writing and followed that formula.

Not all of the description I added is good or will improve the text, but I figured it was much better to overcorrect and put in too much description, then cut things back down, than it was to have to go through again and add yet more description.

Doing this wasn’t particularly easy. When I introduced the Lancer, for example, any description I added really messed with the flow of the scene. I only ended up including pretty minimal flavour, so I’ll probably have to go back and tweak that at some point.

Anyway, the reason this is fresh in my head is this morning, I went through the opening chapters of that book I’d set on a ship and put description of the locations and characters in. It was super fun, and dramatically improved the text. Really I should do this for the whole book but that’s a bit of a waste of time, given it’s already been rejected by everyone. Learn the lesson for the next book and move on.

I have two final thoughts:

Number 1: This lack of Sense of Place thing is an advert for those ‘are you ready to submit’ services that editing agencies operate. They would (hopefully) have picked up on this problem. This is yet another thing that makes books really expensive to write, and therefore keeps low-income authors from breaking through.

Number 2: I noticed, in the three books I read to get a feel for how much description was a good amount, each one started in a location that either was never returned to by the characters, or (in Six of Crows) was only returned to once, much later. This is probably a co-incidence, but I’d be interested in seeing how many other fantasy novels start in a place to give a sense of what ‘normal’ in the world looks like, and then just drops that location because it’s normal and therefore uninteresting.

27/08/2020 – Recovery

I finished up my edits two days ago. It felt like letting out a breath I’d been holding for nearly a month. It felt like racing for a finish line that only existed in my head and where no-one was competing against me, but I still felt compelled to race.

Yesterday I crashed, hard.

Part of having Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is being tempted to fall into a boom and bust cycle when it comes to energy. The short version is: You feel tired 75% of the time, so when you feel less tired, you feel the need to do all the things that you couldn’t do the rest of the time, so you try to do ALL THE THINGS, so you burn through your energy and crash.

What happened to me in August wasn’t exactly that, but it was similar. Anyway, it’s done now. I’m happy with the state the book is in. I’ve sent it out to an editor to get it evaluated so I can find out what the next step is. For those keeping score, the current amount I’ve spent on editing for this novel is around £3,100. Just over a sixth of that was the evaluation, the rest was the developmental and line edits the book has gone through so far.

I should do a full post about this at some point, but whilst I remember: Writing books is really, really expensive. By which I mean: To write something good, you need an editor, and editors are expensive as hell, because editing requires a lot of skill.

The upshot of this is that writing is becoming extremely classist. Poor people will find it much harder to break through with their writing because they might be able to afford to get one of their books edited, but can they afford to get the book after that edited if the first book isn’t picked up? What about the one after that?

My book that’s currently with an editor is book #7. My first book wasn’t edited by anyone other than me (and WOW it shows), my second and third book were edited by friends (I should be clear that I paid them). My fourth and fifth books were professionally edited, but pretty far down the line, so there were structural problems with them that it was quite hard to deal with by the time editors got on board.

My sixth and Seventh books were my first work to have editors on board as soon as they’re supposed to, I.E. – I write a first draft and send it to an editor who says ‘yes’ to some parts, ‘no’ to others, and I then go back to make massive structural changes when writing the second draft.

The only reason I was able to do all of this is because I have ready access to money. Not a lot of it, I’m not doing massively well financially, but I can still afford to. People in lower income brackets than mine wouldn’t necessarily be able to do this. This is one of a hundred thousand ways capitalism maintains the status quo. It keeps poor people poor by blocking off ways they can break out of poverty.

This post got away from me a little.

13/08/2020 – Editing

It’s 4am, it’s a million degrees in the shade and I can’t sleep, so I’m editing. This may or may not be the reason I couldn’t think of a good title for this post. I initially went for something quirky and self-referential but after about twenty seconds I couldn’t stand to look at it any more so I changed it.

Where was I?

Editing. So, I got my book back from the editor and I’ve been having fun developing a plan for how to approach the edits and subsequently starting. I’m doing some quite technical stuff right now with a focus on ensuring the sense of place in the book is rock solid as it’s a bit of a weird setting. I’m also addressing some of my editor’s easier comments as I go, and it’s one of those that I wanted to talk about today. This morning. Tonight. Whatever you call 4am.

My editor left a note basically saying the ending of the book was good, but I introduced a bunch of stuff late on which made things convoluted and messy. I thought about this and asked her if she meant these two characters that pop up in the penultimate chapter, shuffle the main characters from point to point like tour guides and then immediately disappear. She said yes.

What I found interesting was that before my editor suggested cutting the ending down a bit, I’d thought the ending was a bit rushed. I mentioned this, and she said yes, it probably does feel rushed, because you’re trying to cram things in that don’t belong there.

This interested me, because if something feels stuffed or oversaturated my instinct is always to draw things out a bit and give those elements room to breathe.

Cutting the characters in question turned out to be the right call. I learned this after I went through and removed them from the text and found they never actually did anything. They talked to the characters a bit, provided some context and lore, acted as tour guides and then disappeared. This meant that when I removed them the story still worked exactly as well as it had done before. There were continuity problems – the characters teleported around a bit, but these problems were nothing that couldn’t be solved by writing ‘and then we went here’. Although I ended up writing something with a little more character.

06/08/2020 – Quiet Week

I was having a good time writing a first draft of the next book, but then my editor got in touch to say she’s nearly ready to send the current big project back to me. So I’m having a quiet week now, trying to reset, clear my head and rest in anticipation of getting that project back. That means doing very little writing, including this blog thing, so this will be a short one.

So, let me talk about something I’ve been meaning to get down in writing for ages, even though it’s massively egotistical: What do I want from this writing thing?

When writers or creatives complain about getting harassed by internet mobs, there’s always someone in the comments saying ‘that’s the price of getting famous’ or ‘why did they start down this road if they couldn’t handle it?’.

Well, I’m going on record as saying I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want a large public profile. If I did become famous and if I did get a public profile I wouldn’t turn my nose up at it, mainly because I enjoy talking about my work and I can go on for ages about my inspirations and processes. But the fame isn’t the point. It’s not the reason why I’m doing this.

I want to make a living from my writing, whilst writing the sorts of things I want to write – innovative, diverse fantasy and science fiction. My health means it’s extremely difficult to hold down a normal job, but writing fulfils me and I can do it even when my health is pretty bad. I want to get to the point where I can make, say, £20,000 a year from writing. That’s an unbelievably unrealistic goal as the industry currently stands, even successful authors like Claire North still hold down a second job in addition to their bestselling novels. But still, there it is.

30/07/2020 - Processing The Delay of Not in My Name

As mentioned earlier, the publisher and I talked about the state of the industry right now and decided to push back the launch of my political murder mystery Not In My Name back until next year. Since then, I’ve been gradually processing how that feels.

I signed two book contracts back in May: One for Three Arachnids in a Warship, and one for Not In My Name. What this meant was I more or less knew what my year was going to look like from June on – book promotion in the wake of Three Arachnids and book promotion in the run up to NIMN. I’m a very ill person, so I probably wasn’t going to have time for much else.

I was gearing up to a massive publicity push for NIMN when we decided to push it back. I’d reached out to major industry figures for endorsements (none of whom have got back to me, which is unsurprising but still disappointing), and was about to start sending the thing out to reviewers. This means a lot of the prep has been done already, I just need to start pulling the trigger.

So, when we pushed NIMN back, I felt a little like I’d been walking up stairs in the dark and had tried to keep climbing once I’d reached the top. A little surprised, a little disappointed and a little shocked by what to do next.

I’ve started writing again. I’ve written 10,000 words of a new novel over the last week, which is fast, even for me. A lot of pieces suddenly fell into place. I had a jolt of inspiration that lined up with a project I’ve been wanting to write for months but didn’t know how to start, I was coming out of a major health crash and I suddenly had a lot of free time.

So I’m back writing again, and it feels really good. I’m feeling a little sentimental because I’m listening to the Your Name soundtrack and… I want to make people feel vibrant and alive in the way I felt during and after that film. I want to excite people. I want to surprise them. I want to take them to new worlds and tell them interesting stories there.

It’s 6am. I haven’t been able to sleep since 4am. It’s time I got back to writing.

23/07/2020 - Self-Improvement Is Hard

There is a flaw in my writing.

No. There are many flaws in my writing, but one of the flaws has been identified. I don’t know what this flaw is, because the person who has identified it won’t tell me what it is yet.

I’ve started too far into this story. Let me back up.

I currently have a book out with an editor. It went through a developmental edit, where a bunch of issues were identified and I ended up re-writing about 80-90% of the text because I’d written the protag with a learning disability and that was making the text a little opaque. One of the sad realities of writing about things like learning disabilities (like the one that I have) is you either have to make it A Thing that the text Deals With as a Primary Theme or you just have to… not go there. Learning disabilities are big things, at least in my experience, and it can be hard for people who don’t have one to gel with the text.

Anyway, so I made those changes and sent the book back to the editor for the next round of edits. She’s been playing with it for a couple of months now. She sent me an email saying she’s identified a flaw in my writing generally which is holding me back. This is really great news. If a flaw is identified then I can deal with it. If I can deal with it, I can improve. If I can improve, my writing will get better. If my writing gets better, I will write better books. If I write better books, then that’s it’s own reward, but also it will aid my chances of commercial success, which shouldn’t be a consideration, but it is because capitalism.

My editor won’t tell me what the flaw in my writing is. She hasn’t told me exactly why. She’s explained that there is a process for this sort of thing and I need to trust her. I do trust her, so I’m happy to wait.

Well, I’m impatient and want to get to the fixing part, but I’ve done enough therapy to know that’s not how life works.

This coyness about what the flaw in my writing is might seem strange to some people so let me dig into that a little. We know that people find it strangely hard to change their minds, even when presented with evidence that they’re wrong. I almost certainly believe wrong or harmful things, and would struggle to change my mind if presented with data that should be sufficient to prove me wrong. Well, this principle also applies to writing.

Whatever the flaw is with my writing, it has almost certainly been present for a long time. I’ve been writing books since 2014. That’s time for a lot of bad habits to build up. I have a degree in English Literature, and studied English at A-Level, but those were a long time ago. My creative writing has essentially been self-taught, and that can lead to problems. For example, the more I learn about things like genre and tense, the more I realise I don’t actually understand them, I’m just running on instinct. The more I learn about these subjects, the more I understand that I don’t have a base theoretical understanding to underpin my work.

What all this means is, if the editor turned around tomorrow and told me that my fundamental understanding of (for example) storytelling structure is wrong, my instinct would be go say ‘no it isn’t’, rather than to stop and listen and accept what’s being said. Even knowing that’s the case doesn’t help, because the idea isn’t to get me to intellectually understand the flaw in my writing, the key is to get me to emotionally connect with the flaw to understand it fully.

16/07/2020 - Writing The Book Is The Easy Bit

Another piece of writing advice I read a long time ago is ‘writing the novel is the easy bit’. I thought this was insane when I first read it. It’s absolutely true, if a little simplistic.

Writing a first draft, for me, in my personal experience, is one of the easiest parts of writing. In fact, let’s try for a list of things starting at what’s easiest and getting progressively more difficult.

1)      Planning a new novel (writing a plot outline, doing character interrogation etc.)

This one is a bit variable because I sometimes am able to write but not plan because of my health, but generally it’s the easiest thing to do.

2)      Write a first draft

I can bang out a first draft in two weeks. I did that last year in fact. I can only do this thanks to comprehensive planning, and I know now that this is part of a boom and bust cycle I’ve been falling to for years thanks to my chronic fatigue syndrome, but still. I can do it.

3)      Getting feedback on work

I’m aware that some people hate reading feedback on their work. I don’t really get this. I want my work to be in the best shape possible and for that, feedback is absolutely essential. It can sting sometimes, but mostly finding out something that’s bad in my work is a great opportunity to turn it into something awesome.

4)      Do a draft re-write based on editors notes

5)      Self-edit a draft

One of the things I hate about the process is working out what’s wrong with my own story, working out what I can do to fix it and then implementing those fixes. This isn’t a universal rule – sometimes an idea for a fix comes to me and I enjoy the process (one of these fixes recently led to me re-writing 90% of a draft – around 70,000 words – but it was still fun and relatively easy) so, again, the difficulty of this one is a bit variable. Generally, however, I find it easier to edit things if someone tells me what to do and why. Hooray for editors!

6)      Selling books

Back when I was a little healthier I went to a bunch of book fairs to sell books. This was tricky but fulfilling. I’m not a natural salesman, but as the end point of the process it felt good to be out there and getting my work into peoples’ hands. Selling the things is definitely harder than writing them, however. For me. People have different skill sets.

7)      Publicity

This is like selling books but way more abstract. You’re not making direct contact with customers, you’re trying to work out where and how you should spend your time to maximise potential sales, which is just… bizarre, alien and terrifying.

8)      Dealing with the financial aspect of being an indie author

Money is terrifying, and trying to be a professional writer is unbelievably expensive. In order to self-publish a novel,  and for that novel to be good, requires you to pay for multiple rounds of editing, a proof reader, a cover design, an audiobook if you’re feeling really fancy, and all the publicity stuff such as facebook advertising. You could, in theory, spend every penny you have on one single book and see less than £100 in return.

9)      Submitting novels to agents

This isn’t technically challenging, but I’ve been rejected… hundreds and hundreds of times at this point. Definitely more than two hundred times, very possibly more than three hundred. That has taken a psychological toll.

I’ll cut the list off there but I hope that communicates the truth of the statement ‘writing the novel is the easy bit’. The top 5 are all writing based, the bottom 5 are all the things that come afterwards. If I’d known this before I started writing my first novel I very well might not have started.

09/07/2020 - Adventures With Publicists

I hired a publicist for my second novel – Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid. They worked miracles, to be honest. They got me a couple of good reviews for an incredibly niche book. These reviews didn’t translate into any actual sales, because book publishing is a capitalist nightmare and it’s almost impossible to achieve any level of real success in this or any other industry.

So, I decided after that experience not to hire another publicist. Fast forward to 2020 and I have a cosy mystery due to be published later in the year. The publisher and I have been working to source reviewers and, after a lot of googling, we have a list of 20 reviewers. 20 is a pretty terrible number, given only a third of that number might ever read the thing and even fewer than that might actually review the thing. So, I reached out to a publicist with the brief of ‘find us more reviewers, nothing else’. That means the publicist wouldn’t be making us a press release or media kit (we had that stuff already), they wouldn’t be doing follow ups with the reviewers…

Anyway, so the publicist wrote back and said: “Yeah, we’re in the middle of a plague, all reviewers are completely swamped. Our professional opinion is you should delay the launch.”

There are a lot of people in the fiction industry whose entire business model is to take money from fresh, naive writers who believe their first book is going to be a bestseller. There is an endless supply of such people. I have book publicists on this lists. So, when a publicist talks to me and doesn’t immediately say “Whatever you want, give us money and we’ll do it for you.” I listen. The publisher and I have delayed the launch.

02/07/2020 - Struggling

It used to be the case that… no matter what my health was doing, I was always able to write. For the last couple of years that’s been less true. I’ve been plodding along with this new project and it’s pretty fun but when I’m at my lowest, I just can’t bring myself to do anything, let alone write.

I think this has probably always been true and I just need to cut myself a break. Generally speaking people need to be kinder to themselves.

25/06/2020 - Planning vs Writing

When I started writing what would (eventually) become my first book, I didn’t know what I was doing. I opened a blank word document and started typing. What I ended up writing was a 54,000 word mess which started with a teleporter accident and ended with humanity ascending to a new plane of existence. I had no real plan. I didn’t have any character arcs in mind. I just started writing. I started my second book in much the same way. And my third.

It wasn’t long before I started noticing the problems this approach was causing. Tentatively, I started planning my novels out. The first time I did this, I realised a problem with my story immediately. I saved myself countless hours by scrapping that story outline and starting again. Since then I’ve found myself planning more and more and more. These days I rarely start any project without a full plot outline, character biographies and a full portfolio of inspiring artwork.

That being said, I am a very ill person. My health prevents me from holding down a job with fixed hours (I.E. almost all of them) and it has left my concentration in tatters. This means planning a novel is very hard for me at the moment. Over the past month, I really wanted to start writing a project about spies and redemption. It’s a very complex project. I wouldn’t be comfortable starting it without fully planning things out first and, sadly, planning is something that’s just a bit too abstract for my brain to deal with at the moment.

So, instead, I’ve gone back to an old project I abandoned two years ago. It wouldn’t be what I spent my time writing in an ideal world but if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we don’t live in an ideal world. What this project is is fully planned out. To my surprise, I have been finding coming back to this long-abandoned project hugely enjoyable. I can’t even remember why I abandoned it in the first place, but it was probably something to do with depression.

18/06/2020 – Reading the Text Out Loud

There are these articles on the internet with titles such as ‘How To Edit Your Novel Like A Pro!’ and most of them are filled with tips that would make anyone who’s been writing for a while roll their eyes. I picked up one piece of advice from one of these articles that was invaluable. I’ll save you the time of reading the articles and just tell you: read your text out loud.

By reading your text out loud to yourself, you spot errors and pick up on sentences which don’t scan correctly. If you stumble whilst reading your text, is there a reason for that? Could you phrase something so it reads with more clarity?

I love this advice. I’ve been enacting it since Three Arachnids in a Warship and it’s dramatically improved my editing skills. That being said, in my experience, it had one specific limitation: you can’t do it too many times.

I’m in the process of writing a short story for a publication owned by someone I get on with (it’s not what you know). I finished the story, I sent it out for feedback, I implemented the feedback and I then read the story out loud to myself. I ended up completely re-writing most of the first page because the way it was written was a little awkward. I then left it alone for a bit and came back the next day to read it out loud again.

The second read-through was important, because I spotted five errors I’d missed the first time around. Proof reading, it seems, is another of those things that is never completed, only abandoned. I was noticeably less efficient with my reading the second time around, however. I have problems with concentration because of my health, maybe I should have left the text alone for longer, but I have deadlines.

The idea of reading an 80,000 word novel out loud to yourself can seem daunting. It did to me, when I first heard this piece of advice, but take it from someone who has tried this on multiple novels now: It’s absolutely worth it.

11/06/2020 - Making the Best of Time

My mood has continued in its downward track. This is another way of saying I’m having a depressive episode. This isn’t what I wanted to talk about but- when I was still working full time and I started getting signed off work due to depression, I got really annoyed when the doctors wrote ‘low mood’ as the reason. It felt like such a weasel-y euphemism.

‘Aw, is your mood a little low bab?’ – Doctors, presumably.

I don’t mind the phrase so much anymore, probably because I’ve lived with this nonsense for so long now that I’ve become quite confident about how I’m feeling, which I definitely wasn’t when I first went to the GP.

Anyway. That wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about was making the best of a bad situation. I woke up at 4am today having had a nightmare about writing. I think I’m stressing about the next project. I don’t want to start it, because I’m feeling really negative about writing at the moment. The problem is, writing is also the thing where a lot of my self-worth comes from, so I only ever abandon it for short periods.

In order to try and break from some of the negativity I’ve been feeling, I’m doing a few writing exercises, although I’m not thinking of them as writing exercises, because that’s writing and writing is bad in my head right now. I’m just writing stuff down in a notebook, who can tell why? Certainly not me, the person doing it, who made a plan to do this in order to trick myself out of my own negative head space.

It’s weird having depression. I don’t know how everyone else deals with it but for me I occasionally have to just lie to myself like this in order to get anything done.

So, I have the setting, the set up and what the story is going to be about for the next project. I won’t go into details here because whenever I’ve done this in the past I’ve been mortified whenever I’ve gone back and re-read such entries.

Stop getting distracted, Michael.

Sorry, Michael.

Ssh, you’re doing it again, Michael.

Yes, I am.

So, I’ve got those bits I outlined above. What I really need now are characters and a plot outline. The plot outline can come later. What I’ve been working on today are ideas for characters, details of the settings and ideas for cool scenes that I can use for writing exercises (shh, they’re not writing exercises, Depressed Michael, don’t worry about it, shhhh)

If this entry has come across as a little confused and disorientating, that’s appropriate because I am both confused and disorientated. I have a headache.

I wonder if this entry is interesting or just a bit sad.

04/06/2020 - Three Arachnids in a Warship Has Been Released, and Why That Doesn’t Make Me Happy

I have a new book out, which is always a strange experience for me. Many, many years ago I went to the doctor. I told him I’d been feeling depressed for a long time, but I really struggled to articulate what that actually meant. I had to see several doctors because I got them to take me seriously. What finally broke through was when I explained that my first book (then called The Unexpected Death of a Soldier) had been published by an independent press, and… I didn’t feel anything. No excitement, no pressure, no expectations… just nothing. I knew intellectually that it was a good thing to get a book published. It was an achievement. Emotionally, I had no reaction.

This is still the case. Today isn’t the day a book I’m really proud of was released into the wild. It’s just Thursday.

Still, I don’t want to go on about depression, because it risks dragging the rest of you down with me. Instead, I want to tell you a little story about writing Three Arachnids in a Warship:

I love P.G. Wodehouse’s writing. This is crucial to separate from P.G. Wodehouse the man, who collaborated with the Nazis. It’s a little more complicated than it sounds, but ‘Nazi collaborator’ is a difficult label to shake. Anyway, despite loving these celebrated comic novels from the early 20th Century, I’d never read Three Men in a Boat, which was in many ways a precursor to Wodehouse’s writing.

This changed when I read the novel To Say Nothing of the Dog, which involved time travel, a mysterious artefact and has a large section inspired by Three Men in a Boat. My wife Jen read the book after me, and asked why I’d never read Jerome K. Jerome’s book. I said I didn’t know, so I read the book and loved it. When I finished it, I knew where my inspiration to my Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid sequel would come from.

I wrote a lot of Three Arachnids in a Warship in the bath. Not the typing, I did that on a computer, boring old traditionalist that I am. I came up with a lot of the plot of the book in the bath. This was because I’d moved into a new flat and the shower broke. It was winter and we didn’t have central heating, so the flat was perpetually cold. There were only a few ways to warm up and one of them was to take long, hot baths.

So I found myself regularly lowering myself into hot water and drifting off into free association. Thankfully, Three Arachnids is the sort of novel that benefits from this loosely structured approach. I’d never be so lax as to start a project without fully planning it out these days, and these days I have dog walks for free association purposes. My publisher Charlie, when editing Three Arachnids did, however, say (I’m paraphrasing) ‘yes, Michael, this is very good, but could you maybe give us some closure on these plot threads you’ve left dangling?’

This is why writers need editors.

28/05/2020 - Pre-production

I finished up a novel draft this week, which means it’s time to start working on the next one. Normally I might have a bit of time off but we’re still under lockdown in the UK, and writing is giving me a sense of purpose.

One of the most enjoyable parts of novel pre-production, for me, is gathering a Pinterest board of inspiration images for characters, locations and miscellanea. Here is the one I did for my self-published book Drown the Witch:

I find this helpful in the early stages because it lets me think about what sort of characters I might want to include, what sort of setting I want and so on without getting too caught up in the details. It’s essentially free association planning with no consequences. ‘Would I like this sort of thing to be in the book? Maybe, save it. Would I like this? Probably not, move on.’

So, with that in mind, here is the Pinterest gallery I pulled together today for the novel I’m hoping to write next:

21/05/2020 - Commercial Success vs Creative Freedom

There is an idea that is popular on the internet: big business stifles creative expression. There is some truth to this. All you need to do to understand this truth is to look at the films put out by the largest production companies, or the games produced by EA, Ubisoft and Activision.

Obviously, if all you want is to experience less conventional art, all you need to do is watch independent films or play independent games. The ‘business stifles creativity’ argument is more about wanting more variation in high budget productions. I have some sympathy with this. I can only watch so many Marvel films before they all start to blend into one another.

I am someone who started his career writing whatever he wanted, with no consideration for how commercially viable it was. I wrote the sort of books that I wanted to read. This led to me writing a comedy of errors about giant spiders in the style of P G Wodehouse.

This is one of the big problems with the ‘business stifles creativity’ argument: Creative people are weird, and when you don’t put any restrictions on what they create, people rarely engage with the results.

Some people loved Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid. It got a 10/10 review from a respectable magazine. Many, many people took one look at it and thought ‘Nah, mate, I’m alright, thanks’. They weren’t wrong to do this, Confessions is extremely niche.

My career so far has been about trying to write the sorts of books that interest me, but are also commercially viable. Many people would call this ‘selling out’. I call it ‘trying to write the sorts of books people would actually want to read’.  

14/05/2020 - 500 words

Here is an incomplete list of my health problems:

• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

• Depression and Anxiety, likely as a result of the CFS

• Skin Cancer (in remission)

• Dyslexia

• A possible sleep disorder

These things together mean maintaining a daily routine is hard. I can never garauntee how much I’ll be able to do on any one day. I can pretty easily garauntee that I’ll be able to work 20 hours a week… but I can’t say that I’ll be able to work the hours of 9:00am to 2:00pm, monday to friday. I spent all of my 20s and a good chunk of my 30s trying to live like that and it resulted in my health deteriorating rapidly and required several trips to hospital.

So, currently I am trying to write 500 words a day. This is pretty low by my standards. In the past I’ve peaked at around 5,000 words a day. That wasn’t sustainable and led to a crash which resulted in me being unable to write at all for about six months. Health is wierd. So far, I am finding writing 500 words a day to be sustainable.

26/01/2018

I wrote an end of year Top Ten list at the end of 2017. I am uploading it now.

Life is hard.

LIST:

Top  ten TV shows of 2017

1)      The Good Place – Series 2

What is it?

The Good Place follows four characters who are in the afterlife. In this universe there is a ‘good place’ and a ‘bad place’. In series 1, the characters are told they are in the ‘good place’. But, as we found out at the end of series one (spoilers) this isn’t true. They are actually in the bad place, being tortured.

Why is it good?

I actually abandoned series one of The Good Place because I thought it wasn’t going anywhere. Boy, was I wrong. Series two starts off at some speed and then just picks up from there. Episode three, for example, covers over a hundred incarnations of Michael’s Good Place project. Series two has switched up its formula so many times, I genuinely have no idea where it’s going. No show has managed to consistently surprise me like The Good Place. It helps that the characterisation and comedy are really solid.

2)      Dark Matter – Series 3

What is it?

A science fiction show about a crew of mercenaries on the run from their past. It features great characterisation and a plethora of entertaining self-contained storylines.

Why is it good?

Dark Matter placed second on my list last year as well, that’s fun. Dark Matter is just really good television. It’s never really great but that’s okay. The story is well written and interesting, the characters show consistent growth and act according to their motivation… it’s just really good.

Sadly, this is the last series of Dark Matter we’re going to get as it was cancelled after the end of series three. This was seemingly to prove that we’re not allowed nice things. In order to rub salt into the wound, the infinitely inferior Killjoys (Dark Matter’s sister show) was renewed for two more series. Urg.

3)      My Hero Academia – Series 1 & 2, Little Witch Academia

What are they?

Two anime shows about life in a school for superheroes & witches respectively. I’m including anime this year because I went on my honeymoon to Japan last year and that got me back into anime in a big way.

Why are they good?

I’m including both of these shows in one slot because they’re basically the same show, it’s just one is designed to appeal to boys, the other to girls. My Hero is a long running action series focusing on themes of responsibility, ambition and abuse. Little Witch is a lovely, heart warming show about friendship, perseverance and bringing joy to those that need it. They’re both great. They boast great characters, good story and wonderful animation.

4)      Game of Thrones – Series 7

What is it?

Don’t play that game, you know exactly what Game of Thrones is.

Why is it good?

Game of Thrones is only this high on the list because when it’s good it’s really good. This series saw more than a few wobbles, though. Inconsistent plotting, constant disregarding of the laws of physics and endless teleporting armies and fleets. It also decided what the series really needed was to replace Ramsay Bolton with an equally annoying, boring character. Euron Greyjoy, I hate you so much.

5)      Lucifer – Series 2 / start of series 3

What is it?

A show about a crime solving devil. It makes sense, don’t overthink it.

Why is it good?

It really shouldn’t be. There is no way in hell (ha!) that this show should be as good as it is. Despite the, frankly, ridiculous premise, it manages to be really smartly plotted and has really grown beyond its crime procedural roots. Tricia Helfer was introduced as Lucifer’s mother/Charlotte Richards in series 2 and has really helped the show explore themes of maturing, betrayal and identity. It’s also really funny.

6)      Speechless – Series 2

What is it?

A heart-warming comedy staring Mini Driver about a special needs family.

Why is it good?

Its treatment of disability is wonderfully positive. It’s really funny and (as with basically every show on this list) it has really great characters. A stand out episode this year was the Halloween special where JJ taught an Exorcist-daemon about life with a disability.

7)      Recovery of an MMO Junkie

What is it?

A woman in her 30s quits her job and throws herself into living in a massively multiplayer online RPG. Hijinks, hilarity and romance ensues.

Why is it so good?

It’s an anime that stars a non-objectified woman in her 30s. This makes it almost unique for an anime. It’s just a really cute, heart warming story. It’s got enough plot contrivances to fill a standard Shakespearian comedy but I think it gets away with it. We’ll have to see how the series progresses (only six episodes have aired at the time of writing) as there is potential for the romance between two of the main characters to get a little creepy, but so far it’s really good.

8)      Doctor Who: Series 10

What is it?

Steven Moffat’s final series of Doctor Who. I fear I may cry.

Why is it good?

Fun fact, I initially placed this series much higher on the list. The final two episodes were so good, they pretty much eclipsed the rest of the series for me. I then went back and went through the episode list to remind me what the rest of the series was like.

Not Very Good is the short answer.

Most of the episodes had decent ambition but fell back on cliched writing. Some had a flimsy premise and failed to do anything interesting with it. Others fell into the trap that has plagued Doctor Who’s revival since its inception and relied on weak, hand-wavey conclusions.

Pearl Mackie’s Bill was a great companion who had a nice arc and Michelle Gomez’s Missy was just stunning. In fact, the characterisation in this series of Doctor Who was possibly the strongest it’s ever been. It’s just a shame the storylines weren’t there to back up the characters.

9)      Brooklyn Nine Nine – Series 5

What is it?

A sitcom about a group of misfit detectives in a New York police department.

Why is it good?

Remarkably, Brooklyn Nine Nine is still really quite funny. Sitcoms never usually manage to stay funny, let alone entertaining past their second series. Nine Nine has managed it!

10)  Robot Wars – Series 10

What is it?

A fighting Robot show

Why is it good?

I’ll be honest, this year Robot Wars is only here because there haven’t been that many good shows and I needed to pad the list a bit. That’s not to say the series hasn’t been good, it’s just nothing particularly wonderful. That being said, we have seen possibly the biggest surprise of any series of Robot Wars ever this year, in that Nuts 2 won a place in the grand final. Not by luck, not by a technicality but by being genuinely better than every other robot it went up against. And it went up against some pretty good robots. I don’t think anyone expected that. I’ll be so happy if it wins the series.

Top Two TV Disappointments:

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend series 3

Last year I was worried that the writers wouldn’t be able to keep up the quality of their work. I was right to be worried.

Teachers series 2

I remember series one being funnier than that was on offer in series two.

Top Ten Games of 2017:

1)      Hellblade

What is it?

A walkie-talkie/third person hack and slash game starring a woman with severe psychosis.

Why is it good?

It’s good just good, it’s great. The story is amazing, the graphics are wonderful, the gameplay is inventive… but most of all, this is a game that provided me with a completely unique experience. I have never felt like I understood what it is like to have psychosis before this game. I now feel like I’ve taken a glimpse into that world. It’s pretty bloody amazing.

2)      Prey

What is it?

Sci-Fi Dishonoured

Why is it good?

Prey took everything I liked about Dishonoured and turned it up to 11, whilst losing a lot of the more tedious stuff. Its middle act is a bit weak but I still love the freedom the game offers. The story is surprisingly smart and I had a great time with mimics.

3)      The Sexy Brutale

What is it?

A game where you prevent the murders of your best friends, who are caught in a time loop.

Why is it good?

It’s got a nice original gameplay gimmick (for those, like me, who haven’t played Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective) and a really good story. The design and characters are really good and it’s got some nice, if simple, puzzles.

4)      Echo

What is it?

A third person action game where the game learns from your actions and uses those actions as the basis for the AI.

Why is it good?

This isn’t so much a unique idea as a refinement of something that has been tried multiple times before. It works so well in Echo because it doesn’t try to hide the process by which the AI learns from you. On the contrary, it draws your attention to every new move it learns from you. Because of this, the game is never unfair, it’s just very brutal. It’s a great horror game. It’s oppressive and relentless. It also boasts a good story and wonderful art direction. It’s only so far down this list because there have been so many great games this year.

5)      Wolfenstein 2

What is it?

The sequel to my joint favourite game of 2014.

Why is it good?

It boasts the same awesome gameplay from The New Order, which helps a lot. It is quite a lot darker, at least in the early hours, which is both good and bad. There are a few dud levels and it does struggle to follow in The New Order’s footsteps. There are a few great moments and the gameplay is as good as it was… it’s just that there are a few mis steps and missed opportunities. We didn’t need to know the protagonist’s back story, for instance. Also, it’s a real shame we never really got to massacre the KKK, especially in the current political climate.

6)      What remains of Edith Finch

What is it?

A walking simulator about the Finch family who may be cursed or may suffer from being absolutely terrible human beings.

Why is it good?

Edith Finch made it onto this list because of the Cannery level. Those that have played the game know why. Generally, it’s a good walking simulator. It didn’t grab me as much as Gone Home and it’s not as inventive as either of Davey Wreden’s efforts. Still, it’s good, just (in my opinion) not great.

7)      X-Com 2: War of the Chosen

What is it?

It’s an expansion to one of my favourite games of last year.

Why is it good?

Well it’s not great. There’s a bit of a quality dip at this point on the list. War of the Chosen is good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not exactly mind blowing. It makes X: Com 2 a fair bit better, but it compensates for this by fucking the difficulty curve up really badly. For me, the game was either far too hard or annoyingly easy, depending on how the random elements fell. 

8)      The Surge

What is it?
A Souls-like game with fewer boss fights.

Why is it good?

I’ve never played a Souls-like game before because I hate hate hate boss fights. The Surge was pretty fun. The gameplay is good, the fight system is entertaining. I think the difficulty is a bit of a crutch. The game levels are really quite small and I’m suspicious that the game is so difficult in order to disguise the fact that this is a five-hour game stretched over thirty hours.

9)      Dishonoured: Death of the Outsider

What is it?

A stand-alone expansion for Dishonoured 2.

Why is it good?

It’s not really. Not that good anyway. Death of the Outisder really needs you to have played the expansions from Dishonoured 1, which I haven’t. So the plot had nothing for me. And when you’re not on board for the story, Death of the Outsider doesn’t have much to keep the player around. The levels are fine, but not great. It particularly suffers given it came out in the same year as Prey.

10)  Mass Effect: Andromeda

What is it?

The latest Bioware disappointment.

Why is it good?

It’s fine. It has some good characters and some good plot moves and some fun gameplay… but it’s nothing special. The days when Bioware used to be relied on to make the best games around are well and truly behind us.