Cover reveals are a bit of the thing… Apparently. But as a break from the second draft, I was messing about on https://www.canva.com/ this evening. That and deciding on a title for the short novel I was talking about in the previous post helps…
I find making a cover, even if it doesn’t end up being the one you go with, helps make the whole project feel more real. Hence the messing about cover building. It may not stay like this, but I kind of like it at the moment…
I’ve just finished writing the first draft of a short Hannibal Smyth crossover novelette that is set in Esqwiths Passing Place. I’ve not made mention of this before now because it started out as an experiment a week ago when I was ‘editing’ the ‘final’ draft of ‘A Spider In The Eye‘ the Hannibal Smyth novel I have been writing for over a year.
The words ‘editing’, and ‘final’ are somewhat erroneous here because I have been ‘editing’ the ‘final draft of that novel for quite some time without really getting anywhere with it. I have been, not to put too fine a point on it, avoiding ‘editing’ it far more than actually doing so. As for the ‘final’ part I suspect that it is only one of several ‘final’ drafts to come. Oh, what beautiful lies we tell ourselves when we are editing… Stalled is the word I am looking for here. I was utterly stalled and needed a break away for old Harry Smith for a while.
Or so I thought, until early last week when I realised the biggest problem I had was also something for which I had a creative solution. There were a couple of chapters that did not really fit in the novel. There was nothing wrong with them, they told a complete little story all on there own that fit into the overall narrative, they just did not need to be there and altered the pace of the narrative in a way I was just not happy with. Indeed that was the problem I was having, the whole novel just did not feel right while these chapters existing. The few minor plot points contained within them worked better elsewhere but stayed where they were to avoid those couple of chapters just being a meander down a side road. They needed cutting, but despite this, I really liked the chapters themselves and the story that they told…
So here was my creative solution, ‘Passing Place’, my somewhat sprawling second novel is, in essence, a story about a place where people tell stories. It is a lot more than that, but ultimately it is a novel of layered storytelling. And Esqwiths, the Passing Place of the title is the ideal place to set a short tale within a wider world. So I decided to try and do just that, mostly if I am honest because I needed a change of pace from just writing Hannibal, and because I thought I would have fun writing characters from Passing Place again and writing Hannibal outside his own narrative.
I was right, I did.
So much fun in fact that the writing came easily, and in the space of a week I have gone from nothing to a full draft of, an admittedly short, but self-contained little novelette. Which I now need to do a swift edit of and then get proofread, final edit / drafted/reproofed… all the usual gubbins. But a complete draft all the same. (Its just under 10k words in total so short is the word here)
From the timeline point of view of both novels, the story falls in the middle, mostly to avoid there being any absolute spoilers to the great plot of either novel within it. Though there are plenty of little snippets contained in the narrative that I hope adds to the both for a reader.
I had no real intention of doing anything with it beyond treating it as a kick start my writing exercise for my own amusement, but I am actually very pleased with what I have sat in front of me. So, once I have it all neatened up and complete to the point I could publish it, I am going to do just that, probably as a free novelette you can download from here, and put it on Amazon and elsewhere for the absolute bare minimum they allow. As well as offering it out free whenever possible, because while I abhor just giving away my writing as a whole, I would not feel right selling this one as it so short. It is, however, the perfect ‘reader catcher’ (it’s like a dream catcher for readers, less native American, more bloody obvious ploy…)
It also solves my niggling problems with ‘A Spider In the Eye’ so I can crack on with that now.
All of which makes me very happy all things considered. I am however faced with one little niggle…
What the hell do I call it?
I hate thinking up titles…
Like most people who blog, I read a lot of blogs. I probably don’t read as many blogs as I should, as I am forever saving a link to my bookmarks and never quite getting back to them. Or, on Mondays, I get an update email from a blog I follow, and as I get a lot of these on a Monday, I don’t quite get around to reading them all, or even half of them. I get all the emails on a Monday because I set them all to weekly emails so my inbox is not swamped with update emails every day which would irritate me somewhat. Instead, it gets swamped on a Monday, and I flag the ones I find interesting to read at some point that week. Some weeks I read them all, most weeks I don’t find the time to do so.
Which is why this post is a somewhat pointless list of wonderfulness, as there are only so many hours in the day, and so, dear readers, I suspect you’ll all have less time than you have things to do with it, but if you do have the time, and want to read something interesting, inspiring , thought-provoking , or just plain amusing, here is a list of so of my favourite blogs I never quite have the time to read as much as I should, and that may well be worth following if you have the time.
https://planetstef.wordpress.com/
If you have ever read Oliver Twist and wondered if the life and world of Oliver could translate to the modern world Planetstef has some insightful observations on the subject for you. As well as lots of other insightful delving into the dark underbelly of Victoriana, books, culture, counterculture and lots more besides, with the occasional gem, you could never find somewhere else hidden in the blogs pages…
https://lynnefisher.wordpress.com/
As a writer myself, I am all ways interest in others thoughts on the art. I also have done quite a few posts on the subject of writing. Lynn has written extensively on the subject, and probably more insightfully than I. So if you are a writer of any kind I would suggest you delve into her archives, you may find much that informs and inspires.
https://fitfulfearfulphantasmal.wordpress.com/
I don’t really do poetry, I don’t read much of it, I seldom write it, and if I am honest, I have never really got it as a whole. Wordsworth may have wandered lonely as a cloud, but I always suspected that’s because no one wanted to hang around with him and listen to his accursed poetry. Fitful Fearful Phantasmal is full of poetry, all of it I find weirdly beautiful… (there also a lot of other stuff as well, that’s is well worth reading.)
Stephen King, whom I have been known to quote often, says: To be a writer you must do two things, write a lot, and read a lot. Odd Mad Land is a little online publisher of short speculative fiction. The stories tend to be very dark, very well written, and as such always worth an indulgent lunch hour on a slow afternoon at work… And I love to read short fiction… There is a lot of the macabre, the strange and the odd here in this mad land, which probably explains the name of the site… (if I have a quibble, its that they never say whom the author is…)
https://thewytchinghourblog.wordpress.com/
I tend towards long sprawling posts as you may have noticed. I also tend to read a lot of long spawlings posts, and on occasion when I review things they tend to have long sprawling reviews. This horror loving librarian writes reviews of movies and books I have often never heard of before which are short concise and yet invariably insightful and interesting. Which makes it a touchstone for finding new things to watch and read. There is much more than just reviews to be found in these woods, however, so well worth a wonder. (I actually realised I don’t follow this one, I just keep stumbling across it, so rectified that )
That I am sure is enough homework to give everyone for now. I’ll do another list of sites to visit at some point. Happy wandering through the strange world of blogs to you all. (and feel free to suggest any other blogs you think I may be interested in, in the comments if you wish)
It was back in the 80’s when I first came across the literary universe of H.P Lovecraft, and I came across in it a way that many people fo my generation did, in the form of the Call of Cthulhu Role Playing Game. To be more specific, I first encounter with Lovecraft was in an RPG magazine called ‘Imagine’, and took the form of a game scenario inspired by one of his stories. I could not tell you which story, in particular, inspired it, as I can’t remember a great deal about it. I can just remember reading the scenario and thinking it all sounded both bizarre and wonderfully interesting. It was also completely at odds with the majority of 80’s RPG fodder. Whatever Call of Cthulhu was, it was certainly not Dungeons and Dragons, Runequest or Travellers which were the big three RPG’s at the time. This was a game of investigation, madness, dark atmosphere and a lurking sense of doom. It was in a word, different. Which is I suspect why CoC is still incredibly popular today when so many DnD clones have fallen by the wayside. CoC is also responsible in part for the resurgence of interest in old tentacle hugger in the last thirty years. So indirectly responsible for this series of blog posts.
Which leads me to the subject of this instalment ‘The Horror at Red Hook‘, because if ever a Lovecraft story read like the background to a CoC scenario its this one. Which is also probably why it has been used for several over the years. It is quintessentially everything you could desire as a CoC player. A mystery set among the dank, dark streets of the Red Hook district of New York in 1920’s. A place ‘more people enter … than leave it on the landward side’. A mysterious cult practising ancient rites in the cellars of dilapidated brownstone’s. Kidnappings and disappearances, an eccentric scholar, delving into old tomes and mixing with criminals and gangs. A police detective with a hobbyist’s enthusiasm for the occult investigating. Events moving towards a climax, with tantalising hints of dark secrets. An innocent draw into this world unknowingly as a sacrifice. Madness, dark events and the brooding suspension that despite all the events, in the end:-
… Red Hook—it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a terror gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses, and prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear. Age-old horror is a hydra with a thousand heads, and the cults of darkness are rooted in blasphemies deeper than the well of Democritus. The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook’s legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and howl as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither, pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand. As of old, more people enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward side, and there are already rumours of new canals running underground to certain centres of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.
As a story, this tale has its detractors, quite a lot of them in fact. Not least of which is the old tentacle hugger himself, various critics say of ‘The Horror at Red Hook‘…
‘rather long and rambling, and I don’t think it is very good’ ~ H.P Lovecraft
“a piece of literary vitriol” ~ Lin Carter
“horrendously bad” ~ ST Joshi
But then Lovecraft and the rest of these critics never played Call of Cthulhu… So this may be the reason their views are not reflected by my own, and indeed the opinion of many others who came to Lovecraft through CoC I suspect because this tale is exactly what you would expect to find in almost every CoC scenario. Which is also something of a problem, however, because what makes for a good game scenario does not necessarily make for a good story. Yet ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ managed to be just that. A well-paced yarn that doesn’t dwell too long on any aspect of itself. It suffers from none of the problems of the last story I reviewed ‘The Shunned House’. It moves on at a steady but informed pace that lays the story out before in its entirety without ever languishing in excessive exposition. You can read between the lines to add your own ideas to the mix, but the story works. Which puts me at odds with the critics once more, but at least in a positive way this time.
The more damning criticism is probably that of Peter Cannon who says of it…
“racism makes a poor premise for a horror story.”
Which is an unfortunately very valid point. There isn’t even an argument I put up against that view, and I wouldn’t even if I could think of one. Lovecraft was, as we know, a man whose racial politics were rooted firmly to the right, in an ear when the right was a fair step further to the right than in the modern era. I can forgive him generally as a reader, as I take the view he is a writer from a different time and social politics were very different. His views, abhorrent though they are, were far closer to the mainstream in the 1920’s, so he is a reflection of the times he grew up and was educated in. Despite the opinions held by some people when they discuss Lovecraft, his writings do not (for me) stand out as any more racist or misogynist than the majority of writers of his era, at least most of the time. That said though some tales are nastier than others in this regard, and there is indeed much that can make the modern reader cringe uncomfortably about ‘The Horror at Red Hook’. A word or two here and there, the choice of description, his use illegal immigrants as the basis of his cult… Let’s just say this Lovecraft story would be popular in the Trump White House if the residents were inclined to read…
It is also noticeable that Lovecraft lived in New York when he wrote this story, which was also the inspiration for the next tale in this series ‘He’ which was written around the same time. He was not fond of the city because, as he stated in a letter to C.A Smith talking of his inspiration for this story, of the…
‘herds of evil-looking foreigners that one sees everywhere in New York’
Which is about as openly xenophobic as its possible to be. While the illegal immigrants he uses as the backbone of his cult in the story as stated as having been ‘rightly turned back at Elis Island’ and it doesn’t get much better in this regard going forward. But if you can get past the racist elements of the story, it’s a cracking tale. Certainly as an idea it of itself it has a lot of legs, and some of the imagery towards around the scenes in the improvised temple below the Red Hook streets witnessed by Thomas Malone the ‘hero’ of the tale are astounding, there is much to love about this…
There is also much that could be made from the core idea of ancient cults still existing beneath the radar of society, strange rites being practised and encouraged by an antiquarian in search of ancient powers, it has echoes in more contemporary works like ‘The Wicker Man’. Its far from a unique idea in Lovecraft either, it is the basis of the plot for ‘The Festival‘ for a start… but this is one of the best examples of the idea in his work. It is also the kind of Lovecraft which most inspired the RPG version of his universe. The investigator slowly being drawn down into a world much dark and more terrifying than they ever imagined from the mundane facts they started with. Evil laying underneath society waiting to consume you should you misstep. Harbouring the knowledge that there is more going on than you can perceive and the darkness hold madness if you look too closely… it’s enough to make me reach for my dice…
So as you may have gathered from that, I like this story quite a lot. Even if old Tentacle hugger disagreed with my opinion. So I don’t really wnat to explain too much of the story, its one I would encourage you to read, which you can here… It loses a point for the racism and comes with a definite warning about it, but it still gets five out of six little suckers covered tentacle from me. Enjoy, but be warned, what awaits you, waits for you in the darkness below the streets…
As ever Further Lovecraftian witterings await you here
‘And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt.’
It may be a sign that the end of times is upon us. Or perhaps just a sign that some people believe it is so. Or a sign of a strange convergence, that the stars are right, or becoming so. Or just one of those things that strikes me as odd yet is utterly benign in nature and just an odd little twist of coincidence. More likely still it is none of these things, but in the darker echelons of my mind it strikes me as vaguely sinister and amuses me at the same time.
You’re probably wondering at this point what I am going on about… perhaps I should explain.
Recently, in its wisdom, WordPress informed me that I had posted 200 posts. Which in itself is not entirely correct, because a fair number of posts available on this blog were actually ported over from my old Blogger blog, but all the same was still a bit of a milestone. As such, I thought it would be a good time to ‘audit’ my blog, for want of another word. I don’t generally pay all that much attention to the statistics the blog generates, beyond a vague interest in how many views a new post gets in the first couple of days and the overall stats for the month. Vague interest being the word, no part of this blog is commercialised, the number of hits is not significant, I care far more that those who do read it enjoy it, than the I do about the footfall it generates, and I write what I want to write here, rather than try and produce clickbait. I abhor clickbait sites almost as much as I find myself enjoying the odd wander through them … As such I don’t really look that closely at the stats, but there is a degree of wisdom in look at which posts prove to be the most popular all the same.
Which brings me back to Nyarlathotep… With the exception of a couple posts that for one reason or another generated a huge footfall at the time, it the one post is consistently being read. Nyarlathotep, the harbinger of the old gods, he who appeared at the beginning of the end of times and…
…prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and that in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not…
It strikes me as odd… and slightly worrying, that of all the posts on this blog, which I will admit has a fair degree of Lovecraft, but let’s not dwell on that, of all the post on this blog it is Nyarlathotep which draws the crowds in these latter days of the Facebook, Instagram, twitter generation… I mean, Nyarlathotep is not a name you type into google by accident now is it? Not unless you drunk enough to collapse on your keyboard and roll your face around a while. Or perhaps if your cat walks across the keyboard… No Nyarlathotep takes some typing… You have to actually seek out Nyarlathotep, you don’t just stumble over it with a typo…
And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.
Yet here he is, drawing in a crowd of the virtual kind. He who is the harbinger. He who talks of the end of times and preseeds them. And I get hits on that one page from all over the world. So, by extension, people all over the world are thinking of the end of times, and Lovecraft’s dark Pharaoh. Of all the click bait I could have generated, of all the impact I could have on the virtual world, it is this post, Nyarlathotep: The complete Lovecraftian #24 that sparks interest. Which draws people in with a darkly bizarre fascination… A post about a dark stranger issuing in madness and the end of all. If you think about that for a moment, its a little worrying…
Or of course I drank too much coffee yesterday and I was just staring up at the ceiling half the night half imagining the dark terrors that lurked within the shadows while my mind wandered about with, to be frank, a mind of its own… And I decided to write this as an experiment to see if saying Nyarlathotep enough times would magically draw people in… but that would be incredibly cynical of me if that was the case, and I really do find the whole attraction to Nyarlathotep very very strange…
On a side note… If you’re interested the all-time most popular posts in regards to this blog were NaNoWriMo: Or how to first draft… and That Offensive Word… the latter of which proves that click baiting works (not that I set out to write it as clickbait at the time) because it has a picture of The Hound from GOT and is about the use of swear words and basically offensive language in literature. The Hound was just the perfect character to illustrate the point I was trying to make. Having that picture and a tagline ‘That Offensive Word’ created a surge of traffic. But as I am not interested in producing clickbait as such, I won’t be learning any lessons from that 🙂
I know, I know, I am fully aware, yer thanks for pointing that out… Yes, I did say last time I was back on the horse, and the Lovecraftian side of this blog would be back on track, after the hiatus caused mostly by this story when I first read it for this post back in December… But then I had to read this story again before I wrote this and.. Arrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And yes, to quote a different author entirely …
Reading ‘The Shunned House’ however, makes me want to do so…
Normally I go to great lengths explaining what I think about a story, or what the story brings to mind. I try to examine the text and come up with exciting things to say. Or at least, things to say I find interesting about it. Here in I have a problem, because I find nothing interesting at all about ‘The Shunned House’. That this frails against some popular opinions, among them, fellow author Robert Weinberg’s. He described “The Shunned House” as:
“one of Lovecraft’s best short novels”
It’s not, at least in my opinion, it’s not even the best of the worst of his ‘short novels’. It is a dreadfully long ponderous tale which would work perfectly fine as a short story. About a thousand words, maybe two thousand words at the most would have been enough. The reason I say this is because ninety percent of this tale is exposition. Long maladroit exposition on the history of a haunted house, because in essence, this is a ‘haunt’ tale. So that ninety percent exposition could have been removed and replaced with:
The house had a long dark history of strange occurrences, unexplained deaths and madness in the night…
I am not saying that it would be better for doing so, but believe me when I say I would have sooner read that line followed by the final events and a little background on the characters involved than trawl my way through the agonisingly slow, dry to the point of arid, relentless and glacial crawl, that is the rest of the story.
This was apparently going to be Lovecraft’s first actual printed book, rather than just be published in a magazine. Some 250 copies were printed, then never bound and never sold. My suspicion is whoever was funding this venture actually got around to reading it sometime between the printing and the binding then decided to cut their losses.
Lovecraft has a habit of writing a lot of exposition. Indeed its sometimes works in his favour, building character and a bit of depth to the story. ‘The Rats in the Walls‘ is a fine example of this. But here he goes so much further into infinitesimal details that bring nothing to the story. Even that would not be a problem if the exposition itself weren’t just so terminally dull. It just drones on like a slightly turbid uncle at a family gathering telling you about his foot fungus for several hours, while you really want to go talk to your second cousin thrice removed over at the bar who seems at least to have some life about her. Even if the best thing you can say about her is she is unlikely to have a three-hour story about her foot fungus she feels the need to tell you.
So, look at it like this, if your a completist with a masochistic streak determined to read them all then fine. Read ‘The Shunned House’ and don’t say I did not warn you. It may just be my opinion, but it’s also noticeable that there are no Scandinavian Death metal bands called ‘The Shunned House’. No band under another name has recorded an album called ‘The Shunned House’, there is no low budget short movie made by fans of the story. There is no comic strip, no interesting artwork, no new genre or significant writer that I can find that has ever been inspired by this story, and I looked in the vain hope fo something to say about it other than,
‘Festering old ones that spell doom to humanity it’s dull!!!!!!!!!!!!!’
So there you have it, it gets one solitary, and frankly ill-deserved tentacle.
Its only one because unlike Sweet Ermengarde it is actually a horror story. Though ‘Sweet Ermengarde‘ is a far better read than this. So I also have to amend the picture below form the main Lovecraftian page…
Which says it all…
We all need the odd moment of wonderfulness to brighten our days. Sometimes it’s a geeky little meme that just makes us smile or a quote from a favourite author that amuses us. On a rainy Tuesday after a rainy (and snowy) easter bank holiday, back at work, little things that make you smile are even more important. As is the general niceness of people. It’s too easy to forget when you listen to the new on your way to work or have to deal with a few crappy work emails that had hung over from the long weekend when you got in, that people are, in general, actually nice.
As an aside, I seldom use the word nice. As words go, I find it too twee and undescriptive. But sometimes its just the right word, and the world is actually full of nice people, it just that we mostly hear about, or from, the few that aren’t. It helps in the darker days to remember that I find… And occasionally people go out of their way to remind you of this fact. ‘Bless their little socks of cotton…’ to quote the font of all wisdom (my mother has some odd sayings.)
So first there is this little picture of joyous geekiness which only fans of the ‘Evil Dead’ movies will probably get, but made me smile this morning when it appeared on my faceache feed…
Then there was this piece of Dark Legacy, World of Warcraft inspired joy that just made me laugh in my tea-break. http://darklegacycomics.com/623 You probably have to play the game to get all the context, but I think anyone can appreciate the idea of silly superstitions, that you stick to because they actually work, if for no other reason than the universe has a sense of humour…
Then there is this little piece of joy (reproduced here from Jennie Breeden’s http://thedevilspanties.com/archives/12410 ) I’ve been a big fan of Jennie’s humorous and occasionally oddly slanted slices of life for some time…
Then there are the things, which webcomics and humorous memes aside, actually matter. Things that may you smile and give you little moments of joy. Like logging on last night and going across to Amazon and finding two new reviews have appeared in the last few days for Cider Lane. Excellent reviews from people who have really enjoyed the novel, who left a review for no reason other than they enjoyed the book. If that doesn’t make a writer smile I don’t know what will…
First, there is this nice little one I noticed a few days back…
on 17 March 2018A fantastic story, I found it had a great flow and pace to it. I could picture every scene perfectly, very descriptive. I really enjoyed this book
Then last night I stumbled on this one, which fair took my breath away…
and the journey we are taken on to that meeting is delicately handled as their storylines are woven together beautifully and sensitivelyon 2 April 2018Right from the first chapter I got hooked into this novel and from there on in I didn’t want to stop reading.
A horrific car accident sets the scene as a vivid introduction to the main character of Susanna, where the writing is such that the reader’s sympathy is with her right from the start and we learn about her internal struggles stemming from the past and her overwhelming need for withdrawal in the present. We are then introduced, in a separate thread, to misfit traveller Colin, with his own history of personal conflict and mental health problems. Both characters are destined to meet and perhaps help heal one another, and the journey we are taken on to that meeting is delicately handled as their storylines are woven together beautifully and sensitively. It’s a great plot with a totally believable romantic relationship developing which keeps you guessing as to where it will end. The only thing wrong with this novel is that it had to come to an end at all.
Highly original characters, great setting and storyline – a must read!
The read-through is a task I always approach with a certain ambivalence. I both love and hate doing it, but I also recognise just how essential they are, both as a writer in general and when you’re working on an edit. It’s very tempting when editing to just work your way through one chapter after another polishing the text. Indeed that usually is my approach, but not until after I have done a full read through with notations. It is an attempt to become omniscient in a way, because as Stephen Kings so aptly puts it…
It is the notations that I find to be the important thing here. In first, second and even third drafts it is far too easy to build inconstancies into your writing, both concerning how you present it and more importantly in some regards in what is written. But first and foremost you need consistency, for a very simple reason, when a reader reads your work you want them to be drawn into it. Non-fiction, fiction, contemporary fiction, sci-fi, historical drama, whatever genre you are writing in, it doesn’t matter, the same rule applies. You want people to fully immerse themselves in the written world you have created, and if something is going to kick them out of that immersion, it will be the inconsistencies every time. This is why read-throughs and notations are important because their eye will be drawn to inconsistencies every time, and it is what separates the indie writer from the professional…
Why do I know this to be a truism you ask? Well, two reasons actually…
1/ I am an indie writer, who strives to be a professional, and thus, tries to learn from my own mistakes. I have lost track of the times I have been told by helpful readers they have spotted a typo or an inconsistency in my first novel ‘Cider lane’. There are far less in the reproofed version than there were in the original publication copy, but it still happens. So I know by experience that this is something you want to try and avoid…
2/ I have read enough indie novels to know just how many times something kicks me out of my immersion when I stumble over an inconstancy. Or to be more accurate they leap out at me in the dark alleyways of my imagination, bop me over the head and drag me back to the very reality I was trying to escape from for a while… It happens with books by big name authors too occasionally, but that’s maybe once or twice with printing errors… I have read indie novels where it has happened once or twice a chapter… I don’t blame indie authors for this, their resources are limited, and amateur proofreaders are amateurs, while cheap paid services are, as a rule, exactly what it says on the tin.
One of the more glaring mistakes I have come across in other writers indie novels are character names not being constant, A character might get briefly introduced to the reader as Maythorpe, only to become Mapplethorpe a few chapters later. In a really bad case, they may go back to Maythorpe later on for half a chapter… Nicknames are another one, one character may refer to the other as ‘Darty’. A pet name, or half an insult, from years of association, but when the same nickname gets used by another character with no connection to the first it reads strangely. So knowing who calls whom what and when is important.
It’s also important knowing when you introduced a character to the story. It’s all too easy when skip-editing (editing back and forth through your manuscript) to introduce Mr Jobs three chapters after the reader meets them for the first time briefly because originally he had a small role, and then later you expanded his role and he needed more fully introducing to the reader. Or you write the main chapter they inhabit first, then when you were editing a few chapters further back in the manuscript you put the character in a bit where he fits well, now you knew of his existence… So when your main character meets him for what, they claim, is the first time and tells you a little about them, the reader would be left thinking ‘but you were talking to him three chapters ago‘. (if all that sounds confusing, that’s because it is…)
On top of this throw in things like this:
‘I hate you so much’, he thought…
I hate you so much, he thought…
‘I hate you so much’, he thought…
Which one of those stylistic choices is the correct way to express your characters inner thoughts?
The answer is any of them, as far as the rules of grammar are concerned. But, and it’s a big but, it needs to be written the same way throughout your novel whenever you write someones inner thoughts. The same is true of how you use punctuation, quotations, and everything else as you go along. You need to note it down, and you need to be consistent… Or it will stand out and make your work look amateurish, and yes you can pay people to do this for you, but it’s your work at the end of the day, it’s you that has to carry the burden of how it is presented, and be happy with it.
The same is true of calling someone Mr Spleen. It can be Mr. Spleen or Mr Spleen. It doesn’t actually matter which, though it has become very uncommon to have the period after Mr in the last fifty years or so. And then there are other things, for example, Sleepmen, or Sleep-men is your prefer, or even Sleep men. These strange heavy coated, gasmask wearing thugs, come automatons, who work for the Ministry…
There is no rule of grammar which tells you how you write the name of these villainous beings. Neither is there any president you (or to be exact in this case me) can go to which will tell you how it should be written. They are an invention of my own, a fabrication that fits a role in my latest novel. So how I chose to write it is entirely up to me. It is only a problem if I manage to write it all three ways at various points in the novel. Then it becomes a typo of my own invention.
To press the word Sleepman only appears 36 times in a word count of over 80000, but it is written at least three different ways or was until I started this read through and used ‘find and replace‘ the most useful tool in the whole of the word editing suite… The other examples I have used (apart from Mr Spleen who is from a different novel entirely) are all from the same manuscript. They are not alone either, the document is riddled with such inconstancy, quite apart from the inconsistencies in the plot itself.
Hence the need for read-throughs with notations, and if you wonder what I mean by notations I mean I write furious notes about everything in a fresh notebook, separate to the one I originally used for ideas when I was first working on this story. Every character, no matter how minor is written down in a long list, with the chapters they appear in. Thier names, any nicknames, any descriptions that keep occurring and anything else that seems important, who they like, who they hate, who they are lying to…
Because I am a writer, I make stuff up as I go along most of the time when I write first drafts, I scribble down notes all the time, but lots of things don’t really occur to me as important mid flow, I might, for example, write some mildly throwaway line like this:
Maythorpe was the blue-eyed boy of the service, despite having the dark brown eyes of his mother’s mixed heritage…
Its a nice bit of description that hints a level of resentment towards this character from the POV of the narrating character, and it even betrays the merest of hints of the POV’s innate low-level racism (a product of the imperialistic society he inhabits). While giving Maythorpe a little background and heritage that has shaped his own character along the way. Minor character though he may be (or was at the time) it adds a little depth. So while this seems a throwaway line is important in establishing the main characters flaws and making the world I am writing in greater than the sum of its parts. Little details matter, that ‘despite‘ in the above sentence speaks untold volumes. And little details add up, after all, everything both literary and in the real world is at the end of the day made up of lots of little things. Think of that ‘despite’ as a narrative atom (it’s too big to just be a proton…). At the end of the day, any novel is made up of a lot of narrative atoms.
If then, half remembering the first bit of the above, several chapters later I write something along the lines of:
Maythorpe’s steely blues stated back at me down the sight of his revolver…
Someone somewhere is going to notice the error or one like it. Maythorpe’s brown eyes turned blue, and not because of the Crystal Gale song… Suddenly his whole backstory is different. I have accidentally split the narrative atom and any child of the eighties who grew up in the cold war will tell you what happens when you split atoms…
So all these little details get written down while I read-through next to each character so I can check them against whats written. As does everything else important, while each chapter gets its own notations.
All this has a lot to do with how I write, in theory, a writer could make all these notes as they go along, or before they start, but I write better when I leave myself room to run and once I have the words flowing the last thing I want to do is slow them down. So I prefer this method, it’s cumbersome, and it takes a while, but it works for me.
A lesson, I may add, I learned the hard way by making mistakes with my first novel, which is why it was reproof four months after I first published it to fix of the narrative A-bombs and other inconsistency that slipped past the naive self when I first put it out there… Both my current in print novels are free from narrative A-Bombs and have consistent style choices throughout (hopefully). But that said I do know of a couple that people have helpfully pointed out to me in the last year, luckily they are very minor ones that most people would never spot, but it still bugs me they exist at all…
There is a reason a large publishing house takes six months or more to publish a book from receiving the authors final draft. As an Indie writer, I can not compete with their resorces, and it’s a damn sight harder to spot these things yourself as you go word blind after a while reading your own work…
The read through, and copious notation is my solution, it’s also the next stage in finishing ‘A Spider in the Eye’. It’s gonna take a while, defusing bombs always does…
While it is no more than an excuse to do so, as it was my birthday a few days ago Both my in print novels are available on Kindle this week on a special sale price of 99c / 99p depending which region you live in. I seldom do this so please take advantage of this offer while you can.
Helpful little links below that also let you read a couple of chapters each for free…
While I never ask for people to like and share stuff, due to the vain assumption people just will if they are moved to do so. It would be really nice if people did on this occasion and much appreciated
I may be alone in this. For all I know, every other writer who has ever lived or ever will has never experienced this problem. I could be entirely an exception to the norm in this, but it is still a significant problem for me. The problem of endings…
I’ve spoken before about beginnings, I talk about beginnings rather a lot, because a lot of my favourite quotes are about beginnings. Beginnings are child’s play, you just sit down and write… Yes, that first word can be daunting and I am well aware this may not be everyone’s experience but beginnings for me are the easy bit.
When it comes to beginnings, I bleed easily…
A dozen beginnings occur to me every day, if only I let my mind wander. I have notebooks that date back years, decades in fact. Notebooks which hold within there pages hundreds of beginnings. Sometimes a few lines, sometimes a few thousand. Those first tentative steps down the path of a story. The net that catches the wild idea and tames them into something small and beautiful, the germ of an idea. A spark of narrative, a few words of dialogue and I’me away… Beginnings, they’re easy… But endings, endings, now that’s another matter…
To get to the point, (yes, I know I seldom get to the point quickly, but who doesn’t enjoy a good ramble?) I am having a problem with the ending of my latest novel. To be more exact I am having the problem of too many endings. I honestly don’t know which I am going with. I had the self-same problem when I was writing both my previous novels, so it’s not a unique issue… This is not to say I don’t know how the book ends, quite the reverse, in fact, I know how the book ends in every possible way it could end. If there is anything in multiverse theory, then my writing agonies about the last third of a novel are probably connected, because if there exists an infinite number of Mark Hayes, the writer, then he (the infinite me) will write every possible ending to a novel somewhere. Perhaps, therefore, they all bleed back into this reality leaving me with so many endings to contemplate and write towards. And that’s the problem; I don’t know which one is the right one.
Even this would not be a problem if I could just convince my characters to play ball. If they would just follow the script, I would find out the same as the reader does, but the script keeps changing, just about everytime I think about it.
I’m about 5000/10000 words max from the end of the novel. I know this due to a number of factors but mostly just down to pacing, and the pulling of all the threads into the weave. It’s the final act, or would be if I could just nail down things down a couple of chapters beforehand. In essence, I have been writing the last few chapters as an act of belligerent avoidance. There are about 10000 words more of them than there should be. I have even titled the last four chapters or so I have written with the same title because, in essence, that’s what they are. ‘The Wells Idiom‘ as this bunch of chapters is currently known should be two chapters at most, its supposed to be the crossover point where a few things are revealed and the march towards the end begins, but instead, I have been meandering about avoiding pushing on to the end. With every new idea, with every new possible direction ‘The Wells Idiom‘ has grown. All of it is relevant to an ending, but it is all relative to different endings. Basically, I need to make a decision, stick with it and hack the Idiom back. Tame the wild narrative flocks, and stop writing myself in circles.
I have a couple of chapters of both Cider Lane and Passing Place that ended up on the cutting room floor. They were meanders of avoidance too. I may reuse the Passing place ones in another form at some point because they would slip into Something Red (the long impending sequel I have theoretically started) quite easily. At least if they were reworked properly, indeed it is stuff that really now belongs in the second novel. The Cider Lane ones, on the other hand, are just digital dust to gather in the darkness of the hard drive. They relate to a different version of events and while I know they form part of the overall story, they are not part of the story any reader needs to know. If that sounds odd, it shouldn’t. Every writer knows far more about their characters’ lives than ever makes it to the printed page. We have to, but the reader never does, arguably never should, and almost certainly doesn’t want to either.
‘The Wells Idiom‘ is an important chapter, as it is the pivot, but I need to stop writing it. So far I have maybe three solid endings, and a couple of shaky ones that could work just as well. As well as one that occurred to me in the day between starting this post and finishing it. As soon as I know which I am going with a whole lot of The Wells Idiom will vanish from the manuscript… Some of it will be needed elsewhere in the novel in the final draft, I suspect, as that also tends to happen. But until I chose the path, the path remains unclear.
So, I have a plan, all the possible ends on post-it notes stuck on the wall and the throwing of a hypothetical dart may be involved… But I am going to take the evening and nail down exactly where this novel is going one way or another, and then write the last line… Because when you know where the ending is you can finally write toward it… Some rum may be consumed in this process…
A final thought from Garry Trudeau, who is not a writer of novels but a writer of a different kind who knows much about stories. In a vaguely damning summing up of me and my fellow novelists, which makes me smile whenever I stumble upon it.
For my own part, and despite all the horrible things I have done to poor old Hannibal Smyth in this novel, the one thing I am sure of about the ending is I don’t feel guilty enough…
The Passing Place 