Creating an Animated Banner Advert

advertising, publishing, self-publishing,

There are sev­eral joys pecu­liar to the inde­pend­ent writer. One of them is the respons­ib­il­ity of advert­ising. A few weeks back, I made the decision to plough more of the earn­ings from my books into these adverts. One of the places I wanted to advert­ise is a site call kboards.com, a busy hub full of Kindle writers and readers.

What Goes into the Ad?

It needs to cap­ture interest with min­imal inform­a­tion. I kicked around some ideas using the ‘rule of three’: this, that and the other, or ‘not this, not that, but the other’. Since I don’t really have graphic illus­tra­tion skills bey­ond cre­at­ing book cov­ers, I’d need to use text. I came up with:

One heroine

Three books

Lost in time

Overall, I’m happy with them. They’re short. They tell you that the main char­ac­ter is a woman, that there are three books (so far) worth of story, and that the genre is sci­ence fic­tion (time travel).

My girl­friend looked at a draft of the fin­ished GIF and said that read­ers wouldn’t know any­thing about the qual­ity of the books. I agreed, and added a quote from an SFX of Déjà Vu as a ‘zero slide’ at the beginning.

How Does it Look?

The stand­ard dimen­sions for a ban­ner ad is 728 x 90 pixels. Once I’d stuffed that full of my text, there was no room for the book jack­ets, and it gen­er­ally looked shite. #advertfail

Fine, I thought. I’ll just cre­ate an anim­ated GIF.

For the unini­ti­ated, an anim­ated GIF (pro­nounced ‘fish’) is a little video.

Creation: Keynote

I don’t have any fancy anim­a­tion soft­ware. I do, how­ever, use Apple Keynote to give psy­cho­logy lec­tures. Keynote is a par­tic­u­larly advanced present­a­tion plat­form that has text effects, slide trans­itions, and tim­ings. Crucially, it can also export a present­a­tion as a Quicktime movie file. That file can then be dropped into a Mac app called GIFBrewery to make an anim­ated GIF.

  • Open Keynote and select one of the stand­ard templates

  • Next, you’ll want to have Keynote change its slide size to 728 x 90. Guess what? It won’t, because 90 is too small. You will need to cre­ate a slide with the ban­ner ad pro­por­tions but more pixels. I’d sug­gest 2184 x 270.

Keynote slide size

  • Create as many slides as you like. Each one of these will be a ‘moment’ in your anim­a­tion. For my own ban­ner, there were seven moments.

Slides

  • Set the tim­ings and trans­itions between the slides. You’ll see that, for the example below, I’ve set the trans­ition between the first slide and the second to be the ‘sparkle’ effect; the sparkle moves left to right; and the trans­ition activ­ates auto­mat­ic­ally after three seconds.

Transitions

  • Once you’ve set up auto­matic trans­itions between slides, Keynote should be able to play through the ‘present­a­tion’ without manual inter­ven­tion. About five-ten seconds long is prob­ably enough—but if your ban­ner ad is awe­some, maybe people will watch it for longer. Who knows.

  • Now export the present­a­tion as a Quicktime video. Go to the File Menu > Export > Quicktime. Keynote will offer the fol­low­ing options, which are set accord­ing to those I used for my own banner:

QT Options

Creation: GIFBrewery

The Quicktime file is some­thing that GIFBrewery can hap­pily use to pro­duce your banner.

GIFBrewery has many options, which you can explore. The two main things to point out are:

  • ‘Resize’ will allow you to reduce the pixel dimen­sions of you video. If you’ve impor­ted from Keynote, these dimen­sions will be too large, so here is where you can reduce it to 728 x 90 pixels.

  • The ‘GIF prop­er­ties’ pop-up allows you to tweak the frame-rate (and there­fore over­all speed) of the GIF. You will also find options for redu­cing the num­bers of col­ours. Remember that the webpage host­ing your advert needs the GIF to have a very small file size. In the case of kboards.com, this is less than 60K.

GFBrewery

Wrapping Up

Here is the fin­ished GIF:

2013 05 20 22 24 09 SB

I hope that’s help­ful. It took me a couple of nights of pokery, not to men­tion jig­gery, to real­ise that I could use Keynote to pro­duce a movie file, and then a good piece of soft­ware to gen­er­ate the GIF.

If you want to use my files as a head start, here they are:

The GFBrewery set­tings file

The Keynote present­a­tion file

The Keynote Quicktime export

Writing ‘Red Star Falling’: Part Three

the writing process, writing

I heard back from my editor yes­ter­day. He’ll be tak­ing a look at my final­ised manu­script on the bank hol­i­day week­end (next week). Ahead of those edits, won­der­ing what they might be, I thought it would be use­ful to post another instal­ment of my writ­ing journal.

In the last excerpt, I had fin­ished the first draft of the story, which came in at 15,000 words. I next turned to the prob­lem of deal­ing with an editor.

Thursday, 4th April

For my next trick, I’ve been in con­tact with an editor. A few things are rolling around my head on this sub­ject. First of all, the cost. It’s expensive.

As I’m going to pub­lish this short story (call­ing it a novella, now!) to the Amazon Kindle—i.e., in elec­tronic format—it needs to be in good shape. That means edit­ing. What does an editor do? Well, there are dif­fer­ent types of edit­ing. There’s noth­ing about these types that a writer can’t do alone (indeed, many writers edit the work of oth­ers, too), but they usu­ally find it dif­fi­cult because they lack per­spect­ive. The editor gives a kind of ‘san­ity check’. They work as a pro­fes­sional, exper­i­enced sound­ing board. I liken them to record pro­du­cers. They don’t fun­da­ment­ally change the text itself, but they lend it a cer­tain per­spect­ive that can be help­ful. They sug­gest dele­tions, addi­tions, and so on.

Is it worth it? Undoubtedly. As a writer, I feel it’s my duty to get my work into the best shape pos­sible. If my story were a boxer, this would be about hir­ing the best trainer.

Friday, 5th April

It’s a struggle to make the story as alive as it can be; what is the best way of present­ing it?

I’ll need to increase the ten­sion in cer­tain parts. I’ll prob­ably do this by set­ting the char­ac­ters against one another rather more. The final scene, in par­tic­u­lar, is a bit too friendly.

I go on to write:

There’s a char­ac­ter I’ll prob­ably delete, and another I need to be very care­ful about. His iden­tity is

(Redacted.)

For that [redac­ted] to work, his motiv­a­tions need to seem con­sist­ent dur­ing the ini­tial read (when the reader thinks [redac­ted]) and also when the reader goes back over their memory of his actions and thinks, ‘Aha!’ My model for this ‘Aha!’ moment is the reveal at the end of The Usual Suspects. That is to say that I aspire to cre­ate the same effect.

Good luck with that.

During this stage, the story tends to dog my thoughts and give rise to that faraway look that friends often com­ment on. The story is a multi-piece jig­saw puzzle where I’m allowed to change the size of the pieces as well as their arrange­ments. There’s no way this can hap­pen con­sciously. You have to let your uncon­scious percolate.

One more thing is hap­pen­ing. As I become more famil­iar with the story—dream about it, pon­der about it dur­ing idle moments—I think of cer­tain meta­phor­ical con­nec­tions that could be made. For instance, I’ve decided that Saskia should be ‘awoken’ at the begin­ning of the story by a vase of flowers fall­ing over. Not entirely sure, at this stage, whether the flowers should be red or white. Anyway, it com­ple­ments the end­ing of the story, where [redacted].

Sunday, 28th April

I often recall some­thing that Steve Jobs said about design­ing a product. Good design, he claimed, is about leav­ing things out. By elim­in­at­ing what is not great, you leave the great bits. I’m often reminded of this when I read stu­dent work, like an essay. I’ll look at a para­graph and think, ‘You should have left that out,’ because the other para­graphs were writ­ten at the top of your game; they work well. Only leave in the stuff that works well. If some­thing doesn’t work—a char­ac­ter, scene, metaphor—then you can try to fix it, but must always remem­ber that dele­tion is also a fix.

Structurally, I’ve decided not to include some flash­backs (of the future, where the main char­ac­ter comes from). This should give the story a tighter, more focused feel. You can’t have too much focus.

I’m aim­ing for this story to work in the same way that a third act works.

The final draft was 20,000 words. That’s the ver­sion I sent to the editor.

Waterboarded by an Angel

publishing

M’colleague and gen­er­ally excel­lent writer Aliya Whiteley is cel­eb­rat­ing the launch of her new short story col­lec­tion, Witchcraft in the Harem. How to describe it? Well, World Fantasy Award win­ner Lavie Tidhar says:

The exper­i­ence of read­ing this col­lec­tion is like being water­boarded by an angel. Shocking, heart­break­ing and laugh-out-loud funny, this is some of the best writ­ing I’ve ever seen. If you like Aimee Bender or Etgar Keret, you will love Witchcraft in the Harem.

I had a high old time on Monday night at the launch. Given that I’m talk­ing occa­sion­ally on this blog about the cre­at­ive pro­cess, I thought it would be nice to ask Aliya about how you get the full world feel in some­thing as small as a short story. Take it away, Aliya.

How do you make a short story feel full?

Thomas Hardy was an amaz­ing nov­el­ist. You only have to read the first pages of The Mayor of Casterbridge to real­ise you’re enjoy­ing the powers of a mas­ter of descrip­tion. And there’s a lot of descrip­tion to get through. I mean enjoy. There are long para­graphs about the Wessex coun­tryside and the mean­ing­ful weather. However much you love Hardy, you have to admit that the mod­ern taste in prose has moved away from such lov­ing build-up. A book that starts with three thou­sand words describ­ing the land­scape is unlikely to meet with the approval of a big pub­lisher nowadays.

Description gives depth, but if you’re work­ing on a short story, then you need to provide that roun­ded feel­ing in other ways. And if you write flash fic­tion, then you need to cre­ate the entire world in under 1000 words and lose none of the real­ity. So how do you do it? Here’s some help­ful advice. Bearing in mind that I don’t give good advice and can­not be trusted.

Set your story at the bot­tom of the ocean.

Deep, see? No, okay, that’s not entirely ser­i­ous. But do set your short story in some place that will be evoc­at­ive with very little work from you. The Orient Express, for instance. Or choose one really good detail and describe that rather than going large-scale. Describing the swivel of the golfer’s hips as he hits his first shot is as mean­ing­ful as writ­ing about all eight­een holes.

Don’t bother to set it anywhere.

If you’ve got bril­liant char­ac­ters, amaz­ing dia­logue, and an excit­ing plot, then let them do all the work for you and for­get describ­ing the col­our of the car­pet. The set­ting doesn’t always mat­ter. Sometimes it’s more power­ful if we’re not provided with a framework.

Piggyback.

The first story in my new col­lec­tion is called Galatea. It’s a piece of flash fic­tion about a lonely orphan boy who grows up to be obsessed with naked flesh. There’s no men­tion of the Pygmalion myth in the story but the title brings with it a whole myth­ical set of expect­a­tions that say more than an extra thou­sand words could manage.

Avoid the nat­ural world.

If you find your­self describ­ing the types of trees in the field behind the house the char­ac­ters live in (and they aren’t even look­ing out of the win­dow) then you’re not keep­ing the word count down. Unless you’re writ­ing a story about killer plants or the passing sea­sons or some­thing, obviously.

Use default settings.

When it comes to describ­ing what people look like, there’s very little point unless it’s remark­able. We all assume people look a cer­tain way. Alas, Hollywood-style pleas­ant beauty has won over our ima­gin­a­tions in this regard, so instead of wast­ing time with hair and eye col­ours con­cen­trate on the way the char­ac­ters respond to each other. If they’re attract­ive, don’t bother describ­ing your idea of attract­ive. A reader might hate muscled men or women with long legs. But what hap­pens when they enter the con­ver­sa­tion? That’s more inter­est­ing, and it tells us all we need to know. Then the reader becomes the detect­ive of the story, solv­ing the clues you leave behind. Artfully arrange your bread­crumbs rather than sup­ply­ing a whole loaf of bread. It keeps them hungry and takes up less word­count too.

So that’s what I know about turn­ing a short story into a sat­is­fy­ing and roun­ded exper­i­ence. I’ve set stor­ies in the Canadian Rockies and in Viennese Concert Halls; I’ve used myth­ical fig­ures and fairy tales; I’ve pared back the weather reports and the nat­ural world. Except in the one story that’s set in a cab­bage patch, obvi­ously. And I’ve kept them all short and sweet. Even the one set in the Mariana Trench.

No, okay, I made that bit up. I told you I couldn’t be trusted.

Writing ‘Red Star Falling’: Part Two

the writing process

In this second part of excerpts from my writ­ing journal, which out­lines my thoughts while writ­ing Red Star Falling, I’m assem­bling the first draft and think­ing about the revi­sion process.

Saturday, 30th March

So the theme today is a some­what tech­nical. I’m try­ing to get myself out of plot knots that I’ve become ensnared in. For this story, I’ve given myself a gen­eral view of what goes on—a high-altitude ver­sion, if you will—and relied upon my unpar­alleled writer’s brain (sar­casm alert) to fig­ure out the fine details dur­ing the pro­cess of com­pos­i­tion. This is one way of doing it; it’s also a way of cre­at­ing panic. That said, the panic is prob­ably neces­sary. What it means is that I must solve prob­lems as I go along. It makes me focus much more. They aren’t really dif­fi­cult prob­lems, to be hon­est. They’re prob­lems like ‘Character A needs to do X because oth­er­wise things will be bor­ing; but why would Character A do that?’ and selling them to the reader.

The theme of ‘selling’ is cer­tainly one that I keep com­ing back to. The story itself might be mundane, but it can give the impres­sion of being a crack­ing story if it is sold well. A magi­cian will have only a small staple of tricks—misdirections, etc.—but they can be sold as things like mind-reading and lev­it­a­tion. That’s why you can para­phrase a story like Hansel and Gretel and it sounds like a piece of crap. In selling it, in put­ting it together as a story that the reader can almost exper­i­ence, almost touch, you cre­ate some­thing like fic­tion. So much of my ‘prob­lem solv­ing’ is really about doing up with solu­tions that the reader will ‘buy’. Not to have the char­ac­ters be clever but seem clever. Much the same applies to the writer, I’d suggest.

Sunday, 31st March

The struggle con­tin­ues. Since I fin­ished the writ­ing ses­sion last night, I’m bugged by the little uni­verse in my head. The story has reached the point where sev­eral inter­est­ing things have to hap­pen sim­ul­tan­eously. To be spe­cific for a moment…

Redacted!

Last night in bed, and this morn­ing in bed, I’ve been think­ing over the mech­an­ics of what needs to happen.

In my last ses­sion, I left Saskia…

As the Fonz says, redactamundo!

I did that accord­ing to Hemingway’s prin­ciple that one should always leave some­thing in the tank for the next ses­sion. That is, you should always be able to pick up where you left off.

But once I’ve writ­ten the next bit—which is fairly easy—I’ll then hit the murder-wall of the com­ing action scene, where all things come together. I know I’ve writ­ten good action scenes in the past, but it does, at moment, seem dif­fi­cult to scope out.

As ever, the best way of get­ting the thing done is to do it. Let’s rock. (Pun-tastic!)

Wednesday, 30th April

Well, I’ve fin­ished the first draft of the short story.

Came in at about 15,000 words.

The idea now is to let it mellow—but not too much! The first draft works, essen­tially, as a rough map of the final ter­rit­ory. It now needs to be fin­essed in a couple of ways. The first is a ‘devel­op­mental pass’. I’ll need to read through the thing in its entirety and check that there aren’t any major errors of geo­graphy, motiv­a­tion, and so on. Next, I’ll do a ‘research pass’, where I’ll ensure that visual descrip­tions, etc., are accur­ate. Finally, I’ll fin­ish the text itself; this will involve re-writing the story from the ground up. I’ll prob­ably start with a blank doc­u­ment and have the ori­ginal open to one side.

Developmental pass

This comes first. It’s about a high-level over­view. Here, I can change struc­ture to max­im­ise things like pace, clar­ity and parsimony—but how­ever it’s described, it means pro­du­cing a struc­ture that is the best way of telling the story. In a sense, when you change the struc­ture, you change the story, but there’s a dis­tinc­tion between plot and story. (There might be a tech­nical one; but I’m using my own dis­tinc­tion here.) The story is what the text is about; the plot is what hap­pens, and in what order. What is the story about? This is a ques­tion I don’t like to ask before­hand, because it stifles the cre­at­ive pro­cess. It’s import­ant for me that I don’t really know what it is about to start with. This needs to be dis­covered dur­ing the writ­ing. In the case of Red Star Falling, I guess the story is about a woman going…

Redacted.

Research pass

This is quite good fun, though there is a per­vas­ive anxi­ety that I’ll uncover a cru­cial detail that renders implaus­ible a key aspect of the story. What I need to do in this stage is identify loc­a­tions, the weather, sound pat­terns, smells, fashion—anything spe­cific to the situ­ation of the story that I’ll need to men­tion or imply. Red Star Falling is set in Switzerland in 1908. It begins in a mor­tu­ary and fin­ishes on the Eiger Nordwand, or ‘north face’. I’ve been look­ing up descrip­tions and pic­tures of Edwardian mor­tu­ar­ies and drop­ping them into an applic­a­tion called Evernote. I’m not sure how much of the detail I’ll need to use, but I want to have it at my fingertips.

It might be worth say­ing some­thing about the inter­ac­tion between the research pro­cess and the first draft. I’ve learned, over the years, that the story-based ele­ment is quite inde­pend­ent from the research-based ele­ment, even though they may appear to the reader (and the ama­teur writer) to be tangled inex­tric­ably. The prob­lem for the writ­ing pro­cess is that you’ve already got a ton of stuff rolling around your head. Essentially, you are try­ing to sim­u­late an inde­pend­ent real­ity in your head. The less you need to think about research the bet­ter. If you write peri­pat­et­ic­ally, the flow of the story will suf­fer, and it will be very hard to write. It’s bet­ter just to crack on. So, these days, when I write (and this is true of the draft as it stands today), I’m writ­ing the let­ters TC (stand­ing for ‘To Come’) whenever I need to write some­thing that I would need to look up—time of dawn, name of a minor char­ac­ter, or street, and so on. This means that I can crash through and get the draft fin­ished. However, it’s not easy, because you’re well aware that what you’re pro­du­cing reads like a god­damn lub­berly mess. (It doesn’t help that prose is shot full of cliches, either, but you’ve also got to post­pone beauty to a later draft.)

Finalising the text

This will be lay­ing down a new bed of prose that is all-guns-blazing, pos­sibly over­blown, and cer­tainly purple. It’s when I’ll start to think: What is the abso­lute best way, aes­thet­ic­ally, to describe a night/mortuary workbench/lake lit by moon­light? The draft will prob­ably be much longer than the first draft. Decisions of tone, pace, and all that will need to be made. Then it will be draf­ted a few more times. Probably, that’ll involve print­ing the thing out, cor­rect­ing the lan­guage, and doing it again.

The fun you can have. Next time, the journal will look into issues like the cover for the book.

Writing ‘Red Star Falling’: Part One

the writing process,

The term ‘lacuna’ means a couple of things. (Etymologically, it comes from the Latin for ‘lake’.) People use it gen­er­ally in the sense of ‘gap’. From this we get lacunar amne­sia, where the indi­vidual com­pletely for­gets an epis­ode in their life (though they may retain learn­ing from that period). We get the lit­er­ary lacuna; in this sense, we mean a piece that is miss­ing from a manu­script. Beowulf con­tains lacunae. As do many full length novels.

I’ve been think­ing about an epis­ode in The Amber Rooms where (spoiler alert) our own Saskia Brandt jumps into the body of a par­al­lel uni­verse Saskia Brandt. The par­al­lel is called Saskia Beta. This Saskia Beta is on a mis­sion with a mys­ter­i­ous agency (per­haps gov­ern­mental, per­haps private) that sends people back­wards in time for unknown reas­ons. The agency is called Meta. Our heroine, Saskia Brandt, left the body of this Saskia Beta with the mis­sion incom­plete. Our Saskia con­tin­ued her story as we read it in The Amber Rooms. Of Saskia Beta, we hear no more.

A couple of months ago, I decided that I wanted to find out more about the mis­sion of Saskia Beta. What was her goal? What is Meta, for her? I’m look­ing to fill in what you might call a lacuna from the manu­script of The Amber Rooms. So doing, I’m invest­ig­at­ing, along with Saskia Beta, her lacunar amne­sia of those days when her body was pos­sessed by the first Saskia.

Sounds com­plic­ated?

It is. But com­plex good (The Big Sleep; Fire Walk With Me), I hope.

Anyhoo, I’ve been keep­ing a private journal of the writ­ing pro­cess as part of a wider pro­ject to get at cre­at­ive pro­cesses in writ­ing (in my day job, I’m a psy­cho­lo­gist). The journal is private only because it con­tains spoil­ers for the new story.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be post­ing extracts from this journal. I’ll redact some of the spoil­ers. My aim is to give you some insight into how I put the story together. Without get­ting too meta (ooh, see what I did there?) I’ve included some com­ments about the comments.

Draft cover incoming.

Red Star Falling 4566790 c

March 28th, 2013

So, this is the first epis­ode of my journal. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. The main issue is the choice of what to include. These choices will prob­ably shape up over the course of the work; I shouldn’t think too much about them now.

Oh so mysterioso.

Let’s start with what’s wor­ry­ing me. In order of import­ance, I sup­pose I could start with audi­ence recep­tion. It’s the case that, thus far, I’ve been lucky to have some read­ers who liked Déjà Vu (book one of the Saskia Brandt series) and Flashback (book two). However, reac­tion to book three (The Amber Rooms) has been mixed. The book moves away from the high-tech feel of the first book until we’re almost into lit­er­ary ter­rit­ory (shock; not to say hor­ror). I don’t feel bad about doing this on one level. After all, I con­sider The Amber Rooms to be a bet­ter book. But I’m saddened that some of the people who were look­ing for­ward to the work (for more than a year in some cases) found it disappointing.

I remem­ber one guy who wrote that The Amber Rooms was the biggest dis­ap­point­ment of the year. That was depress­ing to read.

So that is fore­most in my mind as I make the decisions behind Red Star Falling.

Cool title.

I’d like to have an impact not dis­sim­ilar to Déjà Vu but with the qual­ity of The Amber Rooms. Hah! Like that will ever happen.

Looking back, from a 90%-done per­spect­ive, I’d say I’m approach­ing some­thing like that. There are the ‘lit­er­ary’ things that I always struggle to keep a lid on (cer­tain repeat­ing meta­phors; visual images I return to) but the story should also be a kin­etic, third-act-type of story in the mold of Déjà Vu.

Time pres­sure is another issue. I never have enough time to write. And because my day job involves using a com­puter, I often sit down to write with a cer­tain amount of fatigue. I’ve tried writ­ing using pen and paper but it’s not quite the same. Rather too manual, and not how I like to write.

What else? There’s a fin­an­cial aspect. The cover I plan to use involves a pic­ture that will be quite expens­ive to buy. Is it worth it for some­thing that will a short story alone?

Ultimately, I went for a much cheaper option, which the image you see in this post.

Then there’s the wider busi­ness side of things. I’m try­ing to arrange an editor for Red Star Falling and there are plenty of mach­in­a­tions involved. They take away from the writ­ing time and are quite annoy­ing, but… I do know from exper­i­ence that it is bet­ter to be aware of all these pro­cesses than to cede con­trol to a third party who might very well fuck it up.

That’s quite enough for one day, Ian.

Yes, I believe it is. Such lan­guage! I hope Dad’s not read­ing this.

The next journal entry, which I’ll pub­lish in a few days, will look at some of the tech­nical aspects of the writ­ing the story.

Writers Needed For Science!

science, ,

As some of you might know, I’m an exper­i­mental psy­cho­lo­gist. I’m cur­rently run­ning an online exper­i­ment for which I need writers. It takes just over half an hour — I’m afraid I can’t pay you, but you might find the exper­i­ment fun, and you’ll be doing your bit for science!

If you’re inter­ested, do read on:

The exper­i­ment will ask you to con­tinue writ­ing a scene after a brief genre-based prompt to get you going. You’ll do this three times. There’s also a brief pre-experiment ques­tion­naire and post-experiment ques­tion­naire. Your par­ti­cip­a­tion is entirely vol­un­tary and you can stop at any time.

There’s more detailed inform­a­tion on the exper­i­ment page itself, which you can get to via this link:

https://cccusocialsciences.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_08jkUORvegQXDcF

Pencils Down

Uncategorized

I’ve never been one for obfus­ca­tion when it comes to the writ­ing pro­cess. I don’t want to start now.

When I retired from writ­ing and pre­pared to let my books lay down and die on the Kindle, I was as sur­prised as any­one when they did well. Since March 2011, I’ve sold almost 20,000 cop­ies, and they’re still selling.

I’m now out of books to pub­lish and it’s good time to take stock.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. You can read more about my per­sonal his­tory in this post, which is rather more emo­tional than this one, partly because it was the first time I’d voiced those thoughts, and partly because it’s now a Sunday teatime and we all know how dampen­ing to the spirit they can be.

So, one the pos­it­ive side: I have many read­ers. It’s been a pleas­ure to receive their emails and respond to them. They’re nice people. Can’t have too much of that.

On the neg­at­ive side, writ­ing exacts a toll. I spent the few days before Christmas sort­ing out my taxes, for instance. I spent the entirety of yes­ter­day sort­ing out format­ting issues with The Amber Rooms. In the months lead­ing up to now, I’ve organ­ised my own edit­ing, proof­ing, type­set­ting and all the other crap that comes with pub­lish­ing a book—even one pub­lished for the Kindle.

Parenthetically, I should say that the pub­lic­a­tion of The Amber Rooms has not been pleas­ant. This is my fault. While I think that each of my books has been bet­ter than the last, my idea of what makes a good book has changed some­what between writ­ing Déjà Vu (fin­ished when I was about 27) and The Amber Rooms (a grand old 36). There’s a good dec­ade of life and writ­ing exper­i­ence between the two. The Amber Rooms is too dif­fer­ent a book to work well as the third in a series whose read­ers prob­ably think it should con­tinue on a Jason Bourne-meets-Back To the Future theme (not den­ig­rat­ing either of those; they’re great movies). You can read the extent of the dif­fer­ence between my expect­a­tions and those of my read­ers in the Amazon UK reviews (as of writ­ing, there are six; four of them trash it.) I’m not so flighty as to down tools in reac­tion to so few reviews (like most writers, I’ve writ­ten for years in the total absence of feed­back other than my own, which is largely neg­at­ive), but I have a feel­ing that sub­sequent reviews will be of a sim­ilar nature. It would have been bet­ter to write the story as a stan­dalone. Either way, it’s a les­son, and doesn’t bode well for any future Saskia Brandt nov­els I have in mind, which would be more like The Amber Rooms than Déjà Vu.

Reader, it’s a seesaw. On the one side, we have the joy of actu­ally pub­lish­ing the books. On the other side, we have the paper­work, the usual artistic frus­tra­tion, and the com­plete absence of any­thing approach­ing a spare time. Since August of last year, final­ising The Amber Rooms has taken up most of my even­ings and week­ends. Routine: Come home from work around six, eat some­thing, play one of three musical instru­ments for a bit, work from seven until nine, and then relax. I could just about man­age that for one aca­demic term, but I can’t keep up that kind of pace for the next one. And bear in mind that I have day job that reg­u­larly requires me to work even­ings and week­ends; indeed, it’s expec­ted, and I can’t per­form on par without doing so.

I could prob­ably write fif­teen minutes a day, but God knows what kind of rub­bish I’d pro­duce under this cir­cum­stance. I could write just for myself, a la Salinger, but that would be equally point­less. Real artists ship. Am I going to write my own bed­time stor­ies? What about the spoilers?

The seesaw is fur­ther weighted on the neg­at­ive side by the con­tinu­ing absence of any interest from tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers. I joke about this a lot, but it is frus­trat­ing because I don’t have any wish to organ­ise my own cover, edit­ing, type­set­ting, and the thou­sand other smal­ler things you need to do when ship­ping a book. These are far more time con­sum­ing than the actual writ­ing. They’re one of the reas­ons I’ve been writ­ing The Amber Rooms since 2007. Over the past couple of years, my hard­work­ing agents in both the UK or US have had no interest what­so­ever from any pub­lisher bey­ond, wait for it, ‘inter­est­ing’. I find chaotic pro­cesses in con­nec­tion­ist mod­els of arti­fi­cial neur­ons easier to under­stand than the edit­or­ial decisions of publishers.

There is one more pos­it­ive thing; a pro­duc­tion com­pany in the US may option the film rights—but (i) that’s ‘may’, (ii) we’re talk­ing about an option, not the rights them­selves, (iii) the prob­ab­il­ity of a film being made is van­ish­ingly small.

There was a Steve Jobs quote I always liked. I believe it’s taken from his Stanford gradu­ation address. To para­phrase, he said that your job is some­thing you’ll do most of your work­ing life, so you might as well do some­thing worth­while. For me, writ­ing is a job, even though it is syn­onym­ous with my spare time. I have to ask whether it is worth­while. I feel more worth­while play­ing music with my friends, or hold­ing a Beaver by the ankles while he coughs up glit­ter, or read­ing fic­tion that isn’t my own.

I won’t say that I’m never going to write again. I’ll revisit the situ­ation later in the year. September, per­haps. But if you ever see a new book come out with my name on it, I will be sur­prised; more likely, you’ve mis­read the latest from Amanda Hocking.

Thanks to all those who’ve read my stuff. It’s still out there.

Adventures in the Screen Trade

screenwriting, the writing process, Three act structure,

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

The man who wrote these words is William Goldman. They are taken from his clas­sic movie, The Princess Bride. He is also the screen­writer behind Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, All the Presidents Men, The Great Waldo Pepper, and A Bridge Too Far. In short, he’s been around the block a few times, and he knows what he’s doing—although he would have you believe that he does not.

The notion that nobody knows any­thing about movies, least of all Goldman, per­meates the book Adventures in the Screen Trade. It is not wholly a prac­tical guide on screen­writ­ing. That aspect of the pro­cess is covered in a short but inform­at­ive sec­tion towards the end of the book. Rather, for the most part it is a record of his jour­ney from nov­el­ist to screen­writer. As you can ima­gine, the jour­ney is not a smooth one, and in the pro­cess, Goldman has col­lec­ted many anecdotes.

I won’t relate any of them here. Indeed, I don’t really remem­ber them in any detail. Dustin Hoffman does not come out well. Laurence Olivier does.

The really inter­est­ing thing for me about the book is that Goldman finds a way to speak enter­tain­ingly about the cre­at­ive pro­cess behind screen­writ­ing. His main mes­sage is that the screen­writer is a some­what impot­ent fig­ure within the movie mak­ing pro­cess, con­stantly usurped by the dir­ector, the pro­du­cer, and any friends of the dir­ector all pro­du­cer who wish to improve his screen­play. It’s not a happy situ­ation. He recom­mends that the screen­writer try to make as much money as pos­sible from his scripts, and then return to some kind of prop­erly cre­at­ive pur­suit, such as novel writing.

Nothing very new here, then. But the book is enga­ging non­ethe­less. The real value in this book lies in its final chapters. In these, he begins with a short story that he pub­lished many years before and then con­verts right there into a screen­play, out­lining along the way his struggles in trans­form­ing it. He goes on to inter­view a cine­ma­to­grapher, editor, pro­du­cer, and dir­ector to get their impres­sions on pro­du­cing a movie from the final­ised screen­play. The inter­view with the dir­ector is worth the price of admis­sion alone. The dir­ector is not a big fan of the screen­play. Indeed, he rips Goldman a new one. It’s a great illus­tra­tion of the com­bat­ive pro­cess through which a movie is constructed.