Tag Archives: writing

2 Jul 2013 · 3:19 pm

Dangerous situations: How not to do the school run.

This morning, I was a bit of a tit.

Actually, I was a wanker of monumental proportions. Not intentionally, I hasten to add. It was just that an amalgamation of badly made small decisions culminated, this morning, in one catastrophic misjudgement. It was Victorian day at school and McMini was all got up as a Victorian boy. He is small and mercurial, with blonde curly hair. The epitome of cute. But he can take a while to get ready. So we were a bit late and after a weekend gardening, I’m a bit stiff. Consequently, though I needed to get a wiggle on, it was a bit of a labour getting us going on the bike – he sits on a seat behind me – and we start out with a hill. It can be a bit of a grim haul sometimes, getting us up that hill. Today was particularly pants, I felt very stiff and tired and seemed to be going incredibly slowly.

However, I’m not so sure I was. I’ve got a lot fitter over the course of the term without noticing. So when I get to the top of the hill, I build up speed and go faster sooner. I did notice this a couple of days ago, when frustrated with my snail like speed I looked down and realised I was cycling up the hill at 12mph which, at the beginning of term, is about as much as I can achieve on the flat. I suppose the nub of it is that when I think I’m going quite slowly, I’m actually riding faster and it could be that my judgement has not caught up. Yes, this is the making excuses for myself paragraph. But despite noticing I was cycling faster in places, I hadn’t really hauled in the implication of what that meant.

So this morning, after creeping up the hill I am trundling along the top and I approach the cross roads at the top. It’s a pretty blind junction so I always slow right down and either stop completely or roll very slowly, so I keep a bit of momentum to get across and get going again. Today, I got there, slowed down, as I usually do. I saw a car coming up the road but it was far enough away not to worry and braked some more, saw nothing coming the other way and started pulling across the road. Then I noticed there was another car. Very close. Something a bit panicky happened about the braking, here. I recall worrying that I hadn’t gripped the levers; whether it was true or borne out of the shit-I’m-not-stopping aspect of it, I don’t know. But I remember consciously ditching Plan A: stop because I knew that I wasn’t stopping and that braking or no braking I was going to overshoot the junction into the oncoming car’s path.

“Shit!” I thought. “Not with McMini up.”

My brain dropped words after that. They took too long. Instead, a picture of us being pushed five yards along the tarmac, trapped under the bumper of the stopping vehicle flashed into my head. I had to get out of its path. I pedalled like fuck. She got our back wheel, there were about 4 inches in it I reckon. There was a massive bang, the back of the bike came round, I didn’t consciously put my foot down but I knew I had because I felt my knee pop and then we were on the road, and McMini was crying, but clearly fine and trying to get his seatbelt off and get up. I unclipped him and held him tight. Telling him it was OK. Telling myself it was OK when I knew damn well that I’d almost killed both of us.

The first thing everyone said; the policeman, the nurse, the doctor – if you’re going to get knocked down, outside a Doctor’s surgery is a very good place – was that it could have happened to anyone, that we all misjudge things. I know this is true. And I know that when I do stuff up, there’s nothing to be gained by worrying about it. Keep calm and carry on. But there are times when I wonder, because either I misjudge things a lot more than other people, or I’m unlucky enough to receive full retribution every time. The short of it is, I don’t usually get away with my misjudgements, or maybe I’m no different to anyone else, but just more prepared to admit it.

And what does this have to do with writing?

Well, all this made me think about how I write about pain and danger. I write them from my own experience. I have endured the kind of pain, in both knees, that has made me whimper and reduced me to tears. The most recent moment being just now, when I went to the freezer to get a frozen chicken out. I’d say there are levels of pain I haven’t experienced but I definitely cry at about level 6. The most pain I’ve ever experienced was, er hem, wind after a c section. Yes ladies, they don’t tell you about that. Sudden evil pain that makes you cry and apologise to everyone round you for the fact you’re rolling about about whispering swearwords under your breath – an 8 for that one. Gripe Juice fixes it in minutes.

So when I put my characters in pain, or danger, they tend to react the way I do. Because using my experience is the only way I can make it believable. But I’m not sure it would be believable to everyone, because we all react differently to peril and pain.

So far, though, through any amount of pain, my thoughts have always been clear. Likewise, in danger, though I may make the wrong call, I weigh up the situation before making a decision.

Likewise, in pain, I’ve always been able to think. Which means I probably haven’t experienced the heights of agony I might think.

To be honest, four out of five times in moments of peril I’ve had very clear concise thoughts. As usual, I was surprised after this morning, at how incredibly clear and fast my thoughts were. But also disappointed at how, if I’d just been that little bit smarter, I could have kept braking and turned the bike sideways, allowing the girl to move her car out round me. I think that in some ways, it’s rather harder to write dangerous situations realistically once you’ve been in some. Because the way they unfold is so different to the way you would expect. And I suppose that’s why you can only really make things in your plot work if you, yourself, can believe that they can. And I suppose that’s how so many of those mad 1960s shows like the Avengers, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and the like were so popular. Because while you have to have that grain of truth upon which to hang it all, it’s that writing with conviction, rather than what actually happens in real life, which allows us to suspend disbelief.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and have a bit of a lie down.

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3 May 2013 · 11:30 pm

Note to self: Must buy fairy dust.

A slightly dodgy post tonight because my life is officially like pushing a rock up hill. I’m not sure what’s going on but the chaos gremlins won’t leave me alone… and I seem to be waiting… for everything. (sings, ‘the waiting is the hardest part… one more day sees one more yard’)

For example, I decided to put a thing on my bike and McMini’s bike that means the two are attached like a tag along.

In the whole container there was only one screw that was bespoke, that I couldn’t have replaced if I’d lost it. So after I’d put the rest of the contraption onto both bikes, which screw did I discover was missing? That’s right. And to be honest, while I know how to do some fairly comprehensively mechanical stuff to an engine, I couldn’t for the life of me work it out. I gave up. McMini has decided he likes the seat anyway, so we’ll stick with it.

My car. No fascia. No dash, no petrol gauge. The 50 mile journey to the garage down a road bristling with speed cameras… interesting. The solution, discovered by the garage, disconnect the battery. Doh! Why didn’t I think of that? Then again, if I had, I’d have only broken the alarm.

Other areas of life… Flat.

I think it’s book sales that’s getting to me. They look terrible, going backwards, but the demographic is different so I’m clinging to the hope that when I finally come to do the figures, it’ll be the same numbers over a wider selection of platforms. If it is, that’s good, but I have to face the possibility that my books may just be bombing.

Writing the books? Well at the moment, I feel like I’m chasing a mirage, the more I write the further away the end seems to be. I would like to finish the K’Barthan trilogy before I die but I’m really beginning to wonder if it’s going to happen. Rolls eyes. Yes it’s taking that fucking long.

Actually, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a trilogy, I’m about a third into the last book and it’s already as long as the middle one but I think it best to finish it and see if there’s a neat point to halve it.

There are times, when I just have to accept that however ‘real’ writing feels to me I’m not really a ‘real’ author because the only thing I have the capacity to do full time is bring up my boy. Sometimes that’s quite hard, other times I wonder why it might possibly matter. At the moment it’s hard.

Different people have different commitments and also different capabilities – I really can’t write books unless I’m on my own in a quiet room. That does hamper me somewhat. I know other people who can sit to one side at a kid’s party and bash out a couple of chapters. I am in awe, and obviously, seething with professional envy. In any job you’re going to encounter this. There are going to be people who are more productive than you there are going to be people who succeed faster and you have to suck it up.

However, working within your limitations can be quite hard. I always knew my career was going to happen slowly but there are days when I wonder if it’s too slow. Is being an author like escaping the Earth’s gravitational field? Will it be impossible to escape the oceans of dross without rocket boosters? Will writing and producing books in slow motion render me a failure? Unless I achieve escape velocity will I be trapped here in the one sale a month club for eternity?  Only time will tell but very probably yes. Then there’s the really evil one. Am I deluded? Have I, actually, written two shit books? Is that why they are only read after prolonged begging… or at gun point?

OK, so we’ll put the maudlin, self-pity back in the box now and think about what can be learned. What are the lessons here? What have I learned that might be useful to anyone else? Hmm. Well it’s these things:

  1. Something that applies to pretty much any endeavour in life. Avoid looking at other people’s output except to learn positive things, like what works for them that might work for you, that kind of stuff. NEVER compare someone else’s output to yours. That way madness lies. Switch off the internet if you have to but don’t do it. Set your own targets. Make them realistic in the framework of your life and your abilities and then stick to them – if you can. Should you hit them feel glad and when other people produce six times as much stuff in half the time, chill. Yes you may not be achieving the standard norm but you’re achieving something and that’s better than nothing.
  2. Don’t worry about other people’s sales figures – yes I am a fool, I’ve been to kindleboards again and depressed myself reading the threads about how well everyone’s doing. There will always be people doing better than you and for many of us it will be most people. This is the way of the world, if you have less time, people who have more will write more books, faster and achieve success faster. Embarrassingly, people who are way smarter than you will use less time than you have more wisely and write their books faster.  Yes you will feel left behind. This is the harsh reality of life. Deal with it.
  3. Sometimes it will feel as if you are standing still and everyone is running past you and disappearing into the distance. Try not to think about it.
  4. Don’t start your writing career with a trilogy, or at least not unless you’re absolutely lulu. A series of stand alone books, yes, but a trilogy? No. Because a trilogy merely extends the first book angst for three books. That’s OK if you bash out a book every six months but if it takes you two years…? It’s been 16 years and counting. Mmm, I’m sure you get my point.
  5. Hard work begets success but unfortunately, so does luck and no amount of hard work will make up for that 1% of luck on top that puts you onto another level. This applies to anything. I’ve always had to make my own luck and to be honest, I’m piss poor at it! Phnark.
  6. Be patient; with your books and yourself. Yes Tom Petty was right, the waiting IS the hardest part. Aim to enjoy what you do and look upon anything else as gravy because however hard you work, the fairy dust may miss you.

So I reckon that’s some great advice, which I know and understand but seem to be pathologically unable to accept. Especially number 6. I think if I had the smallest modicum of patience, I wouldn’t be feeling quite so pessimistic. Or it could just be that it’s May and it’s sunny and although that’s absolutely lovely it does mean there’s a very high probability that it’s going to sodding tip it down for the rest of the year. If I’m not around so much it’ll be because I’m writing. I have to write because if I don’t finish my magnum opus this year, I fear I really will go crazy. After that it’s going to be short, commercially viable books. Oh yeh. No trilogies. Not ever, ever again.

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8 Apr 2013 · 9:00 pm

Treasure hunting. Naval gazing.

It’s the school holidays so work on my book has stopped for a week or two while McMini and I do stuff.

Today was particularly good. We went round to some friends; mine and his. The weather was lovely, we sat on the leeward side of the house, in the warm, out of the wind, and while the kids played together we had a gossip. Then, as their house is 14th Century I thought I’d have a go with my metal detector.

Despite owning it a while, I seem to be taking a terribly long time to get the hang of actual metal detecting. All the permissions etc required take time and so far, I haven’t got round to it. This has made it tricky, well, illegal actually, for me to practise outside my own garden. And therein lies the problem. The detector does several different tones of beep for different metals. However, in my garden it usually gets all the beeps in a single sweep. It makes it rather tricky to pinpoint any of the beeps individually or work out where to dig. Added to my severe lack of experience and you have a recipe for if not disaster then, very slim pickings. All that had come to light, before this morning, was one old nail and I was cock-a-hoop to find that.

However, today I finally felt I might be getting the hang of it. Just like my garden, it was a case, not so much of failing to find anything, as finding too many signals. Three or four different tones on one swing and no obvious indication as to where to dig. The truth dawned that it is not my garden that’s full of rubbish – well it is, I’ve never dug up so much aluminium foil but I digress. Where was I? Ah yes. The truth hit me that metal detecting isn’t walk, walk walk beep, ah yes, dig here, indeed it is clear that my garden is the norm rather than the exception.

So, clearly, I realised, it might be smart to filter out some of the beeps. I played with the settings and chose ‘coins’ because that cut out about half the spectrum including iron, which, frankly, seems to be in most things. I get signals for iron off everything, even the sodding grass. Thinking that there was bound to be the odd coin lying about and at least I’d start to get the hang, not only of finding things, but also of actually digging them out.

The machine reported some coppers – it’s American so it suggested they were 1c pieces but let’s not split hairs. They were pure signals, no interference, so I was able to pinpoint them fairly quickly and dig. So have I found a gold sovereign? Have I been like the blokes at my club who turned up last week with Edward II coins, coins from the reign of King John, Saxon beads and other amazingly ancient things? Am I like the guy who arrived the month before with an Iceni gold coin?

Well… er… no.

After digging two enormous holes in her lawn I came up with well… yes, two coins. They weren’t old, they were pennies, not even pennies, one pence pieces from 1971 and 1979, respectively.

For some reason this caused both of us an insane amount of mirth. Even so, both of us admitted to feeling a slight frisson of excitement that the machine had beeped, that we’d dug and that we’d managed to get something out. Even if it was only 1p.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? Success is relative. If I’d been using a metal detector for the last twenty years I’d be expecting to turn up some pretty good stuff. But I haven’t. This is the third time. I went there hoping that I might learn how to find a metal thing and successfully dig it up. So while today’s er… can I call it a haul? was laughable in most respects, I think I might actually have gained that knowledge. Job done then, right?

Food for thought.

Where does writing come in you ask? Well, here’s a short list of THINGS about my books:

  1. I’ve written two books and I’m writing another one. That’s something I never thought I’d achieve.
  2. There’s a chance they might be good books.
  3. People who have read them often like them. Some people like them a lot.
  4. People like the covers… and the merchandise.
  5. Are people buying the books? Are they buffalo?

What worries me? What do I dwell on the whole time? Number five. Because the other four, they make it look as if the K’Barthan Trilogy is a quality product that should walk off the shelves. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t. I don’t know if that’s my fault or if I’m deluded or whether it’s just a reflection of the difficulty of the market and if I think about any of that stuff I will be undone. That way madness lies.

What the metal detecting thing has taught me is that, actually, I’ve done quite well and that maybe I should concentrate on being happier with things 1-4 and on what I want to do next. In other words, I want to find something a bit more interesting than a one pence piece with my metal detector, but until I’ve gained the skill to locate one of those with a reasonable level of consistency, I probably won’t.

In short, when it comes to selling books, no-one really seems to know what works. So all an author can do is show people where to find them, or tell them – where permitted – and hope someone, somewhere will pick up on them. Because the only thing that’s really going to sell your book, ever is readers, who love it, telling their friends. So, let me leave you with the seven golden rules of happy authordom;

  1. Write, as much as you can. Write, to pick yourself up. Even if you can’t think of anything to write, write something. Because every authorholic needs authorhol, and when you’ve written it, get it edited, honed and primped until it’s the best you can possibly achieve. You owe yourself a decent product.
  2. Avoid checking your sales figures more than once a week it’ll only depress you.
  3. Avoid any places where authors who sell hundreds of books a month hang out, because you may find them complaining that their sales are piss poor almost as often as you do, that’ll make you want to weep. Also avoid the it-can-happen-to-you-too stories. It might but it probably won’t. Accept that and don’t beat yourself up.
  4. Try not to be disheartened if you discover that the only place you can persuade anyone to buy any of your books from is Amazon.
  5. Avoid going to forums to sell your book except in specifically designated areas. Go there to chat. If people like you and you’re lucky, they might buy your book eventually but nothing’s less appealing to them than a hard sell.
  6. Always remember that behind every overnight success are usually several decades of hard work.
  7. Remember that the only thing that will sell your books, ever, is readers who have loved them, banging on and on about them to their friends.

There you go.

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15 Jan 2013 · 10:58 am

Awards, rewards and stuff…

I don’t know where to start this morning. Two cool things happened in one day on Sunday. Eee – fans hand in front of face – I’m all teary just thinking about it. The thing is, they’re so different I don’t know how to marry them up into a coherent blog post. Never mind. When have I ever let that sort of thing stop me? Exactly. So here goes.

First up, The Wrong Stuff has won an award and trust me, nobody is more surprised than me. As you can see I’m proudly displaying my new badge from Indie Book Bargains in my widgety bit. Please do have a look at the site or click here, and scroll down… a bit more… a little bit further ….annnnd there!

Whahoo!

That’s all I can say.

OK that’s the authory gubbins done… now here’s another important thing. Remember this post yep, that’s right, the cheery one. A few days after writing that I found out that one of my friends from school had had a heart attack and was in hospital in a coma – because life is always absolutely brilliant, around Christmas, isn’t it? The prognosis was not rosy although his Mum was convinced that he was going to make it and I have to confess that once I saw him, so was I. He is the most bloody-minded, pig headed person I know. Apart from me. I haven’t seen him for ages but he’s one of those people where that doesn’t really matter. My parents and I consider him pretty much family so I nipped home last weekend to say hello.

He’d made it to high dependency by that time and although he’d had a crap day the day before he was able to focus, communicate with blinks and he also managed the ghost of a smile and an eye roll when I told him he was the only person I know who is pig-headed enough to get better. He also managed an eye roll when I asked him if he wanted me to carry on holding his hand, seeing as my hands were disgustingly sweaty and covered in that gloop they make you put on them at the door (he blinked me a ‘no’ unsurprisingly). I left him some snurd cards – not that I’m an egomaniac or anything but actually, he’s a massive petrol head so he might like then.

Anyway come Sunday and his sister posts his picture on Facebook. He is sitting up, holding his head up and looking very lugubrious but also very much himself. Whatever the brain damage is, and we don’t really know yet, his intellect and personality are clearly undamaged. I would post the photo but he’ll fucking kill me when he gets better.

The link to writing…? Not a huge one, just that my current work in progress is not going well. In fact, it’s like pushing a giant rock up a hill but at the same time, while my normal cure for this would be to write something else, I can’t seem to leave this one alone. I suppose, when you know what you want to achieve, the steps towards it can seem very small and the goal a long way away. Perhaps the secret of attaining a difficult goal is not to evaluate your progress too often, or at least, if you do to look at how far you’ve travelled rather than the distance you have to go.

Over the past few weeks, it’s been hard to write in quantity because I’ve been worrying about people. And that’s fine. But it has occurred to me there are a lot of them in my life, right now, with much heavier rocks and much steeper hills than me. OR to put it another way, think I should really stop fannying around, get my finger out of my arse, and just write the bloody book.

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1 Jan 2013 · 10:23 am

Happy New Year. Hung Over?

Why not blow away the cobwebs with one of Gladys and Ada’s famous cheese and pickle sandwiches? You know, the pickle that’s famed for its chilli heat.

No? Suit yourself. But if you are nursing a cup of black coffee with a couple of Alka Seltza in it this morning, if you have the shakes but, at the same time, are able to focus vaguely, here’s another brief snippet from One Man: No Plan, K’Barthan Trilogy, Part 3. Once again, it’s a work in progress, not yet professionally edited but here’s hoping you’ll enjoy it anyway.

One Man: No Plan, second sample.

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15 Dec 2012 · 4:27 pm

Hang onto this…

It’s been a tough few weeks. Decidedly grim in fact. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worst. It’s age and atrial affibrilation – which is treated in such a way that gives you brain damage over time so if the person doesn’t die of a stroke or heart attack caused by the atrial affribilation they die over ten or fifteen years from the treatment. It’s a bit of a worry.

So two weeks ago, I had to make a mercy dash down to Dad and Mum. We sorted out a lot of things they will need to help with this, the new level. They have decided to stay home rather than visit my brother’s for Christmas so they will be alone. This is the right decision but it’s sad for my brother and for Dad and Mum. I know they’ll miss each other. As it’s our ‘turn’ to visit McOther’s side of the house there’s very little I can do to help because they’re having an even worse time of it.

One of McOther’s brothers died. Like my Dad, he was unwell but he managed his condition with good humour, common sense and intelligence. We thought he would be around for a lot longer than this. It doesn’t quite seem possible. We got home to discover that my Dad has had another fall but that he and my Mum didn’t want to worry us while we were down at the funeral. They are being well looked after by their ‘network’, which is reassuring but a worry because I can’t see any way I will get near them until after New Year.

McMini was excused school last week and we took him with us. Doubtless some of you will raise your eyebrows at the merits of taking a 4 year old to his uncle’s funeral. The fact is, we wanted to say goodbye and if we want to do something, McMini has to tag along. Because the buck stops with me and his dad. There is no-one we can leave him with. In the event, he coped extremely well.

However, as you can imagine, everything has felt a little unreal the last few weeks. I wondered if that’s why I seem to have kept a level head. Those feelings of unreality insulating me from the truth, but now I think it’s something else.

When we got home we had some parcels to pick up from the Post Office Sorting Office which they’d tried to deliver while we were away. So while McOther and his other brother stayed home with McMini I drove up there to pick up the parcel. On the way home, I went to the supermarket to get some milk. As I bipped my bottles at the auto pay station I could hear the automated voice of the machine beside me saying.

“Unexpected item in bagging area.”

The ‘unexpected item’ turned out to be a two year old girl, ‘helping’ her Mum. It made me laugh and I realised that it’s been these small normal things; shopping, conversations with McMini, washing up the dishes, stuff like that – and, yep, even writing – which has kept me grounded among the unreality of grief. I am a mum and I must look after my son many of these things which, on my own, I might have let slide, have to be attended to. And now I realise that these small events are the solid earth upon which I stand.

It struck me that this aspect of Real Life is relevant to writing fantasy science-fiction. If you want people to get their heads round bizarre creatures and outlandish locations you have to build these things on a credible bedrock. Your readers have to have that level place. There have to be certain generalities of geography or custom – or personality in your characters – for your readers to hang onto if you want them to ‘get’ the rest of it.

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2 Dec 2012 · 10:27 pm

A little of what you fancy does you good.

Today McOther whisked McMini and I off to a wine fair. We met up with another couple and agreed that the boys would taste wine in the morning while we girls nipped off with the kids, we’d have lunch and then the boys would nip off with the kids while we did some tasting.

It was a beautiful sunny day, blue sky, bright sun and we headed to a local garden centre to meet Father Christmas… but to meet him we would have to trek back to another part of the site, buy Santa tickets, come back and queue.

On the other hand… outside… was an ice rink. It was all white (real ice) and the sky was all blue and it was calling…

Mmm, would 4 year old McMini take to skating? Probably not. Should I be skating with my comprehensively bollocksed knee? Absolutely not but what the heck? The timings didn’t quite fit, the next session didn’t start for 15 minutes so we would only have 15 minutes to skate but that was good right? Time to get the skates on and 15 minutes, half a session. Time enough to have fun but hopefully not to break any thing.

We decided to give it a go.

Now, me, I am the ultimate urban jungle bunny because I grew up in a school. We lived on site. Do you know how much smooth concrete and tarmac the average boarding school contains? A sod of a lot, I can tell you. If there is one thing I miss about having two functional knees it’s the ability to wear wheels instead of shoes. As a kid in the 1980s, I lived on wheels. Even when, aged 11 I was banned from all sport because of my dodgy knee, I was allowed to skate on the grounds that it was “low impact” and “the child has to be allowed to do something”. I liked taking exercise and since I wasn’t allowed to do anything else, I spent every Saturday and every evening after school with wheels attached to my feet, cruising the concrete cloisters and smooth bricked quads… and hiding when the bell went and the big, scary boys changed classes for lessons.

My Mum decided to turn a blind eye to my preference for wheels over shoes So, I was a pretty dab hand at it. Even after I reached the point where my knee was utterly shot, when I couldn’t physically run, I could rollerblade, and did, although the tricks were way beyond me by that time. First rule of aggressive skating; don’t do anything on skates on that you couldn’t try out with them off first. So that, for me, was everything…. except going forwards, and backwards, and jumping over the odd small obstacle… but nothing ritzy. Eventually that got too much and about 10 years ago, I had to hang up my skates. I really, really miss it but it is just not possible to do it with only one proper leg and until they invent some kind of skater’s zimmer frame (phnark) that’s the way it’ll stay.

Back to today… there it was… ice, white ice, blue sky. Mmm. Not as easy as wheels but oh so tempting. So we gave in, we hired the skates and stood on the rubber bit at the side with severe misgivings and butterflies wondering who would break which limb first. Finally, we got on and the four of us made one disastrous circuit with two petrified children; McMini almost in tears and me realising that my left leg was really, really not working, at all and that it probably wasn’t safe for me to do this unless I could find some way of skating with a walking stick.

The answer was a thing that looked like a banana with handles. Seats two, slides beautifully and gives just enough support for the dodgy kneed lady. We had a gas! We slalomed in and out of the other skaters at speed – controlled, of course – and on the corners I could safely throw the banana sideways, shouting,

“Feel the drift!” while the kids screamed with glee and shouted.

“We are going faster than anyone else!”

As the banana went sideways I went straight… leaning on the handle. Jeez, I could actually do crossovers! I was safe and in control. Indeed, leaning on the handle, I could skate pretty much normally, with the banana taking some of the weight, the knee held up. And the kids shouted,

“Faster! Faster!” and well… it was churlish not to oblige.

Eventually the pain hit the warning threshold and I knew the time had come to quit while I was ahead. We’d had our 15 minutes, anyway, and we didn’t want to be late for lunch. So we parked the banana and skipped off the ice, two cheerful rosy-cheeked women with two (equally rosy-cheeked) and utterly gleeful bug-eyed kids. Sure, I could be walking with a stick for the rest of the week but… bloody hell that felt good.

So the point of this story is this: every now and again we all need to throw caution to the wind do something a little bit out there. I confess I thought I did, but clearly, not enough. Many of us live lives which are hectic or busy and we can’t vary the mix that often. But I have always believed that if an opportunity crops up, everyone should. And I suppose, in my case, the exuberant glee I’ve been feeling all day bears it out! Because that ten minutes on the ice, doing something I’ll be paying for all week, something I really shouldn’t have been doing but that I miss, left me feeling absolutely fantastic. It was a tonic. So there we are. A little of what you fancy does you good. Especially if it’s naughty and you’re not meant to.

Even better, right now, I’m buzzing with ideas. And I know why K’Barthan 3 isn’t clicking. And I might even be able to fix it. Funny how sometimes, the the best way to find a solution to a problem is to stop thinking about it; and the best way of writing is not to. I suppose, if you’re endlessly dragging ideas out of your brain it’s only sensible to do something off piste now and again; to put things in.

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25 Nov 2012 · 11:37 pm

Glamour, glamour everywhere…

Reading another post today here made me think about whether or not being a writer makes a person a bit different. Is it one of those all-consuming jobs which all but consumes you or is it just necessary to be a couple of bricks short of a hod to even contemplate writing a book.

It would be nice if I could give you a snappy answer. Sadly, I’m not much of a one to give snappy anything. However, for what it’s worth, I do think that if you embark on the process of writing a book with even the remotest idea of what is entailed then you do have to be a little doohlally – or seriously addicted to that feeling of completion. To be honest, I think most people who write stuff do it because they can’t not. Trying to work out where it started in myself is impossible, I started daydreaming too early to actually remember the point when I began but I think something that has helped me to have ideas, or at least gestated the whole writing thing, is seeing the world cinematically.

Approximately 100 years ago, when I lived in London, I used to ‘enjoy’ if that’s the right word, a 50 minute commute – well it was 50 minutes unless I walked briskly up the hill to West Hampstead and took the train. Then it was a 20 minute walk and a 10 minute sauna courtesy of Network South East… if I took the tube, the sauna was 20 minutes but It didn’t begin until Baker Street. The exercise was nice but I have an idea that most people in the carriage with me saw their commute as a boring section of downtime – you couldn’t do anything constructive like read a book because by the time the train got to Kilburn (or West Hampstead if it was a non-rainy, let’s-do-the-20-minute-yomp-up-the-hill morning) it was rammed and a spare seat was rarer than unicorn pooh. For my own part, I saw it as an opportunity to listen to music without the remotest feeling of guilt that I should be doing something more edifyinge [I know, typo, but it’s so Pythonesque that I couldn’t bring myself to remove it… sorry]. So, even though you practically had to take out a mortgage to buy one in those days – a bit like buying anything made by Apple – I bought a personal stereo.

Nothing prepared me for the inside-your-head sensation of listening to a Walkman for the first time. Blimey! And when you actually… well.. walk about with one on, I mean, in a town. The minute the first notes hit my ears the rain-sodden drabness of North London was suddenly sparkling with cinematic fairy dust. Every dreary concrete vista gained a panoramic grandeur. My mundane, farty little life was all big screen drama. Soon it was impossible to go anywhere without the musical accompaniment required to turn each dull tramp into a music video, a cut scene from Bladerunner, a piece of film noir or a scene from StarWars… It wasn’t long before the music carried my imagination away beyond London, and every morning, while the rest of me blundered robotically through the streets; fodder for the foetid belly of the train, my mind wandered the roads and cities of K’Barth.

One of the few things I miss about my life pre-McMini is being able to listen to music like that. I miss the big screen experience of every day life. The curtailment of my own peculiar brand of ‘home’ cinema is probably one of the main reasons why I had to write things down. Because my brain had become used to wandering off and wouldn’t come in from the wild.

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1 Nov 2012 · 11:08 am

Few Are Chosen Officially Declared Awesome.

A quick post today: Awesome Indies have already been kind enough to list Few Are Chosen but here is the site’s review. I am pretty damn chuffed about this one, I must admit. So, if anyone’s interested, here it isReview: Few are Chosen by M T McGuire – fantasy.

Thanks to Tahlia Newland for taking the time to review Few Are Chosen!

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17 Oct 2012 · 10:18 am

The Next Big Thing…

This week, the Next Big Thing blog chain has landed here. If you’re following it round the writing world, welcome. And everyone else, hello too. I have been tagged by Jack Barrow, so feel free to go backwards up the chain and look at his post if you haven’t already.

So, the idea of this is that it gets viral. No, don’t worry, not that kind of viral. Everyone hopes that you guys will get to discover lots of new writing, in all sorts of different genres, by people you’ve never heard of and really enjoy it. Very laudable, eh? At the bottom of these ramblings you will find links to the blogs or websites for five other writers who will be answering these same questions on their blogs, next week. They are a varied bunch – that was the point, so I did try to mix it up – so why not pop over and have a look at them?

Right then, without more ado, here are my answers…

What is the working title of your book?
The one I’m writing at the moment is called One Man – No Plan, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 3 it’s the third in a trilogy, the first two of which are:
Few Are Chosen, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 1
The Wrong Stuff, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 2.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
OK, look, you know the first scene on the oil rig in Cars 2? Well, that’s pretty much what’s going on inside my head all the time. Every now and again, I drag myself away from it to give Real Life some attention but most of the time, that’s where my brain is. So it seemed logical to write all these adventures down.

The idea behind the K’Barthan Trilogy; of another version of earth in a parallel reality, has been there since I was 8 years old. I’ve mixed it up with a bit of religion, a bit of ju-ju and a bit of  quantum physics, or at least some of the theories behind it. I love science, it’s brilliant, there is so much interesting stuff about nature and the universe that we have yet to explain and I can’t wait for the answers.

However, for the moment, I’ll content myself with making them up.

What I tend to do is get some of the questions, some of the suggested answers, add a HUGE dash of salt, shake ’em up and, ding dong, you have things like K’Barthan Reality Theory and Random Physics. That said, having happily made Reality Theory up, in order to avoid mistakes with my Chaos Theory, I discovered, a couple of days ago, that its a real science. Which is somewhat disturbing. Then again, it probably only  exists in very exclusive, expensive labs in America, or China, staffed by people called Leonard… and Sheldon – and OK let’s face it, the law of probability states that there will be at least one Colin – or their Chinese equivalents.

Obviously many of the ideas in the third book are there because they’ve developed from the other two but I am also looking at telepathy, the idea that you can ionise water molecules so you can use a fish tank like a huge computer memory bank, talking with body pigments, the way squid do, and space junk reclaimation. I’d love to write a book about the bus and coach industry, too, although I’d set in space so that no-one realised it was all true.

What genre does your book fall under?
Humour and the twilight world between sci-fi and fantasy.

There are made up races and creatures but it’s not about space and there are no dragons, orcs, dwarves, vampires or any of that malarky. Actually I’d never dare write about actual established mythical creatures, like those because I can guarantee that if I did, a lot of people, who thought they knew more about these things than me, would bombard me with disgruntled e-mails telling me how WRONG I’d got everything.

That’s why I invent all my own creatures. My species; my rules; no arguments

Basically it is full of jokes, futuristic technology and sarcasm. There’s some romance in it too. .

Hang on! Wit a minute, I know! I’ll call it ‘speculative fiction’ that’s a suitably loose fit, I reckon.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Hmm… that’s tricky, especially the girls because they look like people I know rather than people who are known. And in half the cases, to get the right look you’d have to pluck the actor or actress in question from further back in time. So, I have some very bad drawings of the characters from K’Barthan 1 on Facebook. If I was casting the film, I’d say, get people who look like this.

The gallery is here…. I hope. Gallery

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
When The Pan of Hamgee falls in love he thinks he’ll do anything to get the girl’s attention, but isn’t saving the world going a bit far?

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Self-published.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Pretty much all my life, well, OK, I guess it took 13 years give or take a bit to really crack my first book, Few Are Chosen. I appreciate that some readers my well have felt as if it took me another 13 years to write the second book, The Wrong Stuff, but I promise it was only about 18 months. K’Barthan 3 looks as if it will take a similar amount of time. I was hoping I could do it in a year. Sorry.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Well, I’m not aiming to sound like a particular author but I guess it might appeal to Adams, Pratchett and Red Dwarf fans because people reviewing it have compared it to them. They’ve also compared it to Rankin, Fford and Holt but Adams and Red Dwarf crop up the most often – they’re neck and neck, those two, just edging Pratchett out of the frame into third – the others trail a little behind.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?
Everything! I’ve always wanted to write a book. I wrote my first book when I was five. It was called ‘Charles the Dragon Slayer’. Charles was a man of few words because writing them down was so hard, ah if I could have touch typed back then. K’Barth was born soon after, I reckon I was about eight years old when I drew my first map. It wasn’t called K’Barth then, of course, but that’s what it was. Eventually, aged about 10 I discovered StarWars and James Bond at about the same time and my own particular brand of ‘hi-tech fantasy’ was born.

The stuff that goes in is… well…

1960s Telly: all those programmes like The Avengers that they used to show on BBC2 at 6 o’clock when I was a kid. I watched hundreds of episodes of bad 1960s sci-fi and fantasy. Including StarTrek, of course. EDITED to add and Dr Who! How could I, a pathological whovian, forget to mention that?

Music: I love music, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Stranglers, Blur, The Divine Comedy, Air, Schubert, Mozart, Bach and any number of other bands and composers.

Books: I loved books and as a kid I read the Narnia stories, lots of historical stuff like Rebecca, Children of the New Forest, Moonfleet. I probably read more E Nesbitt than is wise or prudent, Hilaire Belloc cautionary tales – they are brilliant – Goschinny and Uderzo, Viz.

TV Comedy: The Young Ones, Mock The Week, Have I Got News for You, Saturday Night at the Apollo, Bottom, Vic and Bob, Blackadder, The Fast Show and Little Britain – it all goes in.

Amimation: pretty much anything Dreamworks or Pixar ever did.

Then we get to the biggies, StarWars, Bond movies, Pratchett, Adams, Wodehouse and cars.

Oh lord I am an incurable petrol head. The best bit of the K’Barthan Trilogy has been working out what vehicles to base the snurds on. Even now, I’m a little distressed that there was no room at the inn for the Ferrari GTO, the E-Type Jaguar, The Triumph Spitfire or the GT6. And I was going to give Sir Robin (aged 70) one that looked like an Austen Allegro but I couldn’t find a way to jemmy it in. I have never driven a sensible car for long, indeed, in 15 years I think I’ve only owned a car for 6 months that had more than two seats. My current car is very new and very shiny but sadly, despite an extensive search I’ve not found a way of making it take off… well… actually I have, in its predecessor, but I don’t think I’d like to do it again.

This bit seems to be the best place to give a nod (more than a nod) to Sir Terry Pratchett. Writing books took me a long time to learn. The gap between what I wanted to achieve and what I could was very, very large. So one day I e-mailed Sir Terry. He was kind enough to write back to me. I was on my second go at writing a book by that time. So, I asked him for advice on closing that gap, between what I want to achieve and what I can. He sent me a lovely e-mail back, which, I have since lost, to my eternal chagrin. But the gist of what he said was; don’t worry this is quite normal, be patient, keep writing. Write something every day and eventually, you’ll teach yourself. So I followed his advice and here I am.

Thank you, Sir Terry.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Snurds. Seriously, they’re the best bit. Cars which fly, with missiles behind the headlights and machine guns… and laser cannon and pulse weapons… and they look like this…

Snurds! In London! Mwa ha ha hargh!

And I want one. Really badly. So next time you’re stuck behind a caravan just imagine pressing a button on the dash… it slides back, there is a host of other buttons and levers, you select All Purpose Torpedoes, aim, fire and blow it out of your path… Mwa ha ha hahrgh… And my readers tell me my books are funny.

And on that note… I think I’ll stop.

OK, here are the five authors who have kindly agreed to take up the baton next week.

J A Clement
Will Macmillan Jones
Sandra Giles
Mira Kolar Brown
Lyn Horner

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