The Magic 50,000

One of Stephen King's classic novels, The Stand, took me about six months to read. It's a tale about post-apocalyptic America, where the survivors of a devastating plague form two antagonistic groups for a final battle between good and evil. The book is staggeringly long. Really, really long. Length is, I would guess, one of those things first-time authors find most daunting about writing a novel. In his preface to second - uncut  - edition, King replied to fans who asked him how he could write such long novels. 'One word at a time, man,' he wrote. 'The Great Wall of China was built one brick at a time and you can see that fucker from the moon.'

Though I'm past the point where I'm daunted by the blank pages ahead of me, I admit to feeling relief when I pass a particular word count. The fact is that, if you've managed to write half a book, there's a good chance that your choice of characterisation, situation and theme have worked out. I write without a synopsis, so I never really know whether the story is going to 'work'. On the other hand, because I make it up as I go along, I'm closer in my perspective to that of a reader; like the reader, I'm experiencing the story for the first time, and it makes decisions about pacing, toning, and overall story arc more straightforward. I'm not forced to write duff set-up scenes. I write the scenes I think will be fun and, in the second draft, I cut the ones I don't need.

This morning, I passed the 50,000 word mark on my new science fiction novel, a sequel to Déjà Vu. According to my excellent novel-management software Copywright, I began the manuscript on November 3rd, 2005. I've spent 290 hours writing it. All just numbers, of course. Is there something special about the figure 50,000?

For those of you more used to page counts than word counts, 50,000 words is, roughly, just over half the length of the average novel (as a rule of thumb, Terry Pratchett regularly comes in under 100,000 words, Stephen King regularly over). I can now regard the half-written novel as reasonably successful. Though I do not yet have an ending, I'm well into the second of three acts, and the narrative has its own energy - in other words, the characters are driving the story through their own motivations. This is something that a creative writing teacher will tell you explicitly: character-driven stories are generally more effective than plot driven stories. Where the finale of a story is considered by the reader to be the inexorable conclusion given the prerequisites of character and situation at the start of the novel, you know you've got a tight story. Whether or not it's a good story...that's another matter, and will depend on readers' individual reactions to characters.

What else goes through a novelist's mind at this stage? Somewhat surprisingly, I'm thinking a lot about the title. I write 'surprisingly' because, in one sense, the title is tiny proportion of the overall work that a writer has to plough through per book. But the title is also bound up with something crucial about the novel: its identity. It will become the name of the project, and if it's a good name, it can even be inspiring. The genre of my current project is 'thriller' (sub-grenre: technothriller) - though I consider it to be science fiction (I'll hold these thoughts about genre for another post).

Here are some of the titles I've come up with: The Magic Bullet, Keystone, Black Box, Game Over, Femme Fatale (God, that one's awful), The Rosetta Division, Freefall, Firebrand, Thin Air, The War of the Ghosts, Meridian, Guardian Angel, Contact Lost, The [insert word here] Trace, Final Transmission, Afterimage, Flashback, Thin Air, Black Box, Wake Vortex, and Memoriam.

Of these, my current favourite is 'Flashback'. Not only does it have a hint of time travel about it, it also foreshadows the narrative structure of the book, and it's nicely dramatic. It's also the name of a brilliant old Commodore Amiga game that I spent hours playing with my mate Edward. As a point of little interest, I named a character in Déjà Vu Jobanique, following our teenage mispronunciation of Jobanque, a character who was the boss of time agent Falcon in the excellent Falcon gamebook series (note to lawyers: I only took the name! Everything else I made up.)

A good title can help motivate you when times are hard (i.e. when a scene is just plain shit, or you're ill (as I am now)) and give you an overall feeling of what the book may look like. Having a sense of its final form can help with decisions about chapter length, pace, and tone.

One final, crucial thing is the jacket blurb. The word 'blurb' is used to refer to different things: sometimes snippets of review that grace the cover of your book, sometimes the hooky summary on the back (or inner flap) that entices you to buy the book. In this instance, I'm referring to the summary on the back. Terry Pratchett, no less, has claimed that he writes a jacket blurb before he begins the manuscript. This might seem a little narcissistic, but it's a another good way of entering the world of your book. One sad fact is that, unlike Mr Pratchett, if you can't come up with a good blurb for your book, the chances of getting your complete manuscript to an agent or publisher will drop. They don't read manuscripts routinely; they need to be hooked.

Well, I've had a stab at the jacket blurb for 'Flashback'. It does not even begin to describe the story, and needs better 'topping' and 'tailing', but it's a start. Just posting it on this blog has forced a little rewrite, and this can only be a good thing.

A fifty-year-old mystery is about to be solved.

September, 1947: Converted Lancaster bomber 'Stardust' reports a successful trans-Andean flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, and signals its intention to land. Four minutes prior to touchdown, it sends the letter sequence 'S-T-E-N-D-E-C'. Queried by puzzled ground controllers, the young ex-RAF operator aboard the Stardust rapidly keys 'STENDEC, STENDEC'. Then silence. The Stardust vanishes along with all passengers and crew.

October, 2003: German Air flight A628 impacts vertically with the Bavarian National Forest. The only clue to its fate is the co-pilot's final transmission, spoken against the roar of failing engines: 'Stendec.'

Within hours, air safety investigators have been dispatched to the crash site. Investigator-in-charge Hrafn Óskarson has more questions than answers. Who erased the flight data recorders? What is the true identity of passenger Saskia Dorfer, whose documents have proved fake? Who torched her Berlin apartment? Why did Saskia's English friend Nina Shaw refuse to board the flight?

The mystery of German Air flight A628 will be solved by a startling conspiracy that reaches twenty years into our future - and fifty years into our past, to the final moments of the Avro-Lancastrian 'Stardust'.

So there we go. Now all I have to do is work out what the bloody mystery is. It had better be good.

PS: There really was a Avro-Lancastrian called 'Stardust' that crashed in the Andes in 1947. You can read all about it here.

Current progress on 'Flashback'

52,939 / 110,000 (47.0%)

My Waterstone's Adventure

In lieu of working on my next podcast - which will appear 7th Jan - I thought I'd fill you in on what happened with Scott Pack, Chief Buyer for Waterstone's. Constant readers (i.e. my dad) will recall that Scott Pack came across an article of mine that bemoaned the difficulties of getting my book into Waterstone's (among others). Scott emailed me thusly:

I enjoyed your blog piece.  Perhaps you’d like to send me a copy of your book and I can see if there is anything we can do with it.  No guarantees but would be happy to read it.

(Scott has, by the way, given me permission to quote from his emails.) Pausing only to spray my tea over my lovely iBook, I sent Scott a copy of Déjà Vu forthwith and sent about being unnecessarily grumpy to my girlfriend, staring out of windows at the rain, and clicking send/receive on my email application while I hissed, "Reply, damn you, reply!"

Well, Scott did indeed reply, one week later:

I did finish it (and there are lots of books I don't finish - life's too short) and enjoyed it. It is a good book that could be a very good, or even fantastic, book with a bit more work.

He went on say some nice specific things:

* The thriller element would hold its own with most of the books we sell in quantity.  The chase scenes have great pace and the airport scene is particularly good I think.
* The characterisation, often a flaw in this sort of fiction, was very strong, especially in the lead characters.  They were human, not just plot devices.
* The ending and how the last couple of chapters linked everything together - oxtail soup was a nice touch - left me impressed as I put the book down which is a good place to be.

But he also had some constructive criticisms:

* The virtual reality world was, and forgive the obvious irony, not as realistic as it needed to be to bring the reader along.  It is a bit too vague.  I am still not sure exactly what I was dealing with.  A reader more used to scifi may have happily accepted the concept but a thriller reader may need a bit more substance.
* The first quarter of the book does not have the flow and pace of the rest.  It was fairly ordinary and I was worried I'd have to send you a very depressing email but it really picked up after a while.
* The jacket and format.  Lightning Source are great at what they do but there are limitations. To be a real commercial proposition this needs to be an 'A' format (think Da Vinci Code size) with shorter chapters and a visually impactful jacket.  That would really drive some pace in the reading and would attract the sort of reader who would enjoy this book.

So how am I feeling about my Marvellous Waterstone's adventure? Generally positive. Scott liked the book, for the most part. He had some criticisms - nothing I don't agree with. I'm not the kind of writer who thinks the last thing he wrote is the best thing since sliced bread. On the contrary, I find the flaws in Déjà Vu bloom in my imagination the more I think about them.

The comment about the physical aspects of the book is bang on target. Though Lightning Source (the printer) have a done a good, professional job, the book itself does not suggest 'thriller' in same the way that a smallish, thicker book with larger text might. I can see how this could make the casual book-buyer pause. (The cover, incidentally, was designed, by me, to be visually impactful at thumbnail size, since I considered - accurately - that web sales would be the primary sales conduit.)

Of course, it would have been poptastic if Scott had requested, say, five million copies for special promotions involving an animatronic Saskia Brandt raising her left eyebrow in a 'This is all a bit familiar' expression. I'll save that idea for the movie, starring - as if you had to ask - the excellent German actress, Franka Potente.

Has this adventure helped me plough through the daft of Flashback (working title), the sequel to Déjà Vu? Well, I'm writing this blog entry instead of describing the last moments of an air crash (don't ask), but it's heartening to know that, at the centre of the Waterstone's web, there is a chap who (a) is articulate, measured and (I think) largely spot-on in his assessment of a story but (b) has a sense of those elements, not just the cover, that might stop a reader picking up the book, and (c) is happy to lend his brain to a young author (who is, let's face it, just some bloke what wrote a book).

So, though my dealings with Scott are perhaps not representative of his role towards publishing in general, I'm certain enough that the opinion I advanced earlier this year (here, for example) - that Mr Pack is someone writers and publishers need to worry about - is not truly grounded. Scott is frequently portrayed (see this Observer article) as a mogul upon whom publishers must lavish trinkets and tribute. This isn't consistent with my little Waterstone's Adventure. As far as I can tell, there was nothing stopping me from getting my book bought centrally by Scott. Well, one thing stopped me. The book did not quite reach standard. This is nothing to be worried about, because it is something, as a writer, I have complete control over. All I need to do is write better. I'm very happy with that conclusion, even if writing better is very difficult; it isn't, at root, unfair. While the publishing industry can seem unfair to writers who are starting out - and, let's be honest, there are important ways in which it certainly is unfair - there are, if you can get to them, people on the inside who are prepared to offer time, wisdom, and opportunity.

That's not a bad thought for the last post of the year, but here's a better one: Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Podtastic

The latest episode of my epic (it's starting to feel that way) podcast is now up and running.

Constant listeners should, hopefully, notice that the recordings have been getting louder and clearer as my podcasting experience grows. I'm still not reading to the standard of an actor (here's an example of good actor, David Goodwin, reading one of my stories) but the podcast should be more 'listenable' by now.

May I wish you happy listening, and en passant, happy Christmas!

Bric-a-brac

Déjà Vu Podcast

I'm pleased to report that my podcast has now passed the fifty-per-day mark. That means that the file is being requested more than fifty times per day. A slightly scary thought! I'll be recording this Saturday's episode later this morning.

Buy a Friend a Book

Do books make the perfect gift? Ahuh you betchya. Debra Hamel reports that buy a Friend a Book (BAFAB) week is nearly upon us, starting January 1st. You can see the BAFAB site for more information: http://www.buyafriendabook.com or http://www.dhamel.com/buyafriendabook.

Debra hopes that you will be motivated to do any number of things:

1. Celebrate BAFAB Week yourself by buying a book for a friend
2. Use the idea of BAFAB Week to somehow publicize your own book
3. Spread the word about BAFAB on your blogs and among friends

National New Writer's Month

Roger Morris is getting serious for a moment over on his blog about National Read A New Author Month, which has been designated April. Sounds like a cracking idea to me!

Stay frosty and alert.

New Deja Vu instalment available

The next installment of Déjà Vu is now up.

Never tell me the odds

The writers among us know that terrible, itchy-palm feeling when an envelope arrives with the address written in your own scrawl. Can it be? Indeed: It is the SAE you bundled with a manuscript you sent to an agent or publisher.

Well, today I received such an envelope, and my heart sank. "Crumbs," I thought, "It's the chapters of Proper Job I sent off to the Annette Green Agency not three days ago." Such a rapid turnaround, you see, cannot be good news.

I apologise if I've set this up to sound as though the manuscript was accepted by the agency - it wasn't - but I'm still feeling very pleased because, for the first time in long years, the letter was personalised. Whereas Curtis Brown and Darley Anderson sent standard letters (in the case of Curtis Brown, it was a postcard), David Smith over at the Annette Green Authors' Agency, actually took the time to write me a letter.

This makes me dewey-eyed for a time when I was seventeen and sent off all sorts of things to agencies. Most of the them replied with encouraging remarks like "We would be delighted to see your next novel" or "I particularly liked the bit when..." Those days are long gone, my friend. And, of course, there are good economic reasons why modern agencies - only twelve years later - will tend not to reply personally.

Anyway, on the basis of the first three chapters of Proper Job, Mr Smith, thought that my authorial voice was 'fresh, lean, original and inventive'. So why didn't he want to represent it? Because he doesn't think humour is a genre that can cross over to a large mass market audience. He suggests I concentrate on thriller writing, which I am indeed doing, having jotted down about one half of the sequel to Déjà Vu.

For the most part, I think his advice is sound. But I don't want to use this blog entry to air the opposing case, just illustrate that Mr Smith suggests the impression of someone a bit old school, someone who will take the time to give feedback. This is exceptional in my dealings with agents and publishers, so if you're a writer with good stuff you'll find him here (this might be construed as punishment, but I don't think the circulation of my blog is that vast). If you're a reader, you can show your support the old-fashioned way by purchasing books from authors he represents.

Meanwhile, on to the next agency...

Waterstone's and Ottakar's Merger

Hot off the Galleycat press - so hot that the story has yet to be run by BBCi or Guardian Unlimited - it appears that the Office of Fair Trading has not been convinced by the reassurances of HMV, the Waterstone's parent company, that their planned takeover of Ottakar's will not result in reduced competition in the high street. The OFT will refer the plan to the Competition Commission. (For more background on this story, see this Telegraph article.)

The HMV group is, understandably, not happy. This quote via Galleycat, citing an article by Fiona Fraser in the Bookseller:

HMV said it was disappointed that the OFT found difficulty in clearing the transaction. The company reiterated its belief that a combination of Waterstone's and Ottakar's will not give rise to any substantial lessening of competition and intends to pursue vigorously its position before the Competition Commission.

What does this mean for the average reader? A cut in the action, really. You won't see any changes in the high street for a while yet. Authors and publishers will, in the short term, be reasonably happy. A publisher needs as expansive a presence as possible to optimally tantalise readers with its wares, and a diverse retail environment would fit with this need. Authors want to know that their books have a chance of appearing in the high street irrespective of whether a centralised buying team (like Scott Pack's; see my earlier article) gives them the nod. Of course, there is no great certainty that a merger would be a bad thing for authors; we just don't know what kind of relationship neighbouring branches of Ottakar's and Waterstone's might have. My gut feeling is that fierce competition would not be in the interests of the parent company, but, then, I'm just a writer, not a high-powered exec.

I have an interesting footnote: Shortly after I posted this article about Scott Pack, in which I bemoaned the particular difficulties of getting my book into the local Waterstone's - difficulties I still have - I received an email from the man himself (I'm assuming it was genuine!) asking to read my book. It isn't every day that the chief buyer for the largest bookseller wants to read your novel, so I sent him a copy forthwith, along with my business card, a pressed flower, and a crisp fiver.

Tempting as it is to buy a Ferrari on HP, I'll remain in 'grumpy young man' mode and keep my upper lip stiff about the whole business. There are two halves to being a writer. (Not that I'm a veteran, but this is how it seems to me.) One is having the talent, which you are responsible for, and one is having the luck, which is at the caprice of larger forces. You need to be ready to surf those big waves of luck when they come. Will the wave peter out before it gets to me, or will it carry me laughing to the shore, or will it be one of those waves that's far too large and eats you up completely, tumbling you to its base, and then gives you a thump on the neck with your own board and dumps you on the shore, where you need a good lie down?

I'll let you know.

Progress report on the ol' podcast, one month in

The next instalment of Déjà Vu has now been uploaded. (Remember that you can subscribe to the feed too. Or type your email address into the form below to the cover graphic to the right of this post. If you have any technical problems, drop me an email and I'll see if I can point you in the right direction.)

For those writers out there who are thinking about doing a podcast of their own, I thought a brief progress report might be the order of the day. If you find yourself left cold by download statistics, feel free to check out some other interesting literary blogs.

Still there? Right, here we go.

How much traffic is the podcast feed getting?

The feed has received just over one thousand hits, not that this figure means a great deal when one considers all the bots crawling the web.

How many audio files have been downloaded?

The download circulation has risen steadily from one download per day during the first few days to an average of forty per day during the week prior to this post. In sum, just over 500 podcasts have been downloaded. Since there have been four podcasts (one intro, three episodes not including the I've uploaded), we can divide that number by four to get an approximation of the number of listeners: 500 / 4 = 125 (there are two reasons I can think of that make this figure untrustworthy, but we'll crack on!). A percentage of these listeners may have downloaded the first episode, didn't like it, and didn't download the next. I've got no idea how big a percentage that is; a rough estimation might be drawn from formal reviews of the book, where about 10% were negative, 90% positive. So call it 100 regular listeners.

The downloads ramped up considerably once I'd emailed some bloggers to let them know about podcast. The biggest blogs to advertise me were Chris over at Spike, Michael Allen aka Grumpy Old Bookman, Joe Gordon at Forbidden Planet, POD Girl, and Ariel at Alien Online. If you're a writer considering a podcast, blogs are an excellent way to spread word-of-mouth. Why? Well, the people who read those blogs are already interested in the subject (in my case, fiction). A regular blog reader might well use an RSS aggregator, which will make it easier for them to download your podcast, and might even use the excellent facilities within iTunes to download podcasts automatically. It's also worth noting that the same blogs carried very positive reviews of Déjà Vu, and regular readers might remember them (in most cases, the blog author linked back to the review, e.g. Andy Sawyer's review on the Alien Online).

How are people downloading your podcast?

Statistics are only available for the last twenty-four hours, but I haven't noticed them change overmuch from day to day, It seems that 77% of my listeners have subscribed to the feed through iTunes. (I'd recommend that anyone interested in grabbing good podcasts, from In Our Time to the Nature podcast, use iTunes; it's free and works well; remember that iTunes has a searchable podcast directory, and you should make sure your podcast is listed there.) A further 7% use the Jakarta Commons Generic Client, 5% use FeedBlitz and 5% use iPodder. The remaining proportions are so small I won't mention them.

Any tips on creating podcasts?

(1) Use MP3 format files. You probably know this anyway, but it's worth noting that this is the most convenient format for the majority of downloaders. It also compresses well for a small file size, which brings me to my second point.

(2) Check how much bandwidth your host allows you. My provider allows for 100 gigabytes of traffic per month, and I'm currently taking about 3% of that with my podcast. If you think you might reach your traffic limit with a small number of downloads, think hard about the settings you use to encode your audio. You can make a smaller file by reducing the bit rate, sample rate, and the overall length (in time). Bear in mind, however, that quality will be reduced as you lower these parameters. Sound like a voice on the telephone and your listeners will strain to hear you on the tube, while jogging, or whatever. Higher values for these parameters mean increased clarity.

As a rough guide, my podcasts have a bit rate of 64kps (variable bit rate, actually), a sample rate of 44,100Hz and tend to last for 20-30 minutes. That gives a file size of between six and seven megabytes (about twice of the file size of a song, if the song has been compressed a bit).

(3) Use a good microphone. I use a USB microphone. It doesn't help that I live in an area with constant traffic noise, but there's not much I can do about that.

(4) Use good editing software. You're bound to fluff the occasional sentence. To get about 20 minutes of audio, I normally have to record about 30 minutes straight through. I use Garageband, which came free with my uber-fantastiche iBook. I can't recommended Garageband enough (or Macs, for that matter). Garageband provides lots of copyright-free samples that you can use to spice up your podcasts. Here's a great page about using Garageband to podcast.

And finally

That's about it. I hope you enjoy the latest podcast. Remember to let me know what you think.

Oh, and here's a site I neglected to mention last week: http://www.shortshortshort.com/. This is the website of Bruce Holland, who will send you original short fiction (text-based) for a small fee. I read one the stories, about a dead boy, and thought it was excellent.

Bye for now.