So I signed up to a Russian evening class, Comrade

Like you do.

Or rather, like I did. I’ve stopped going now because I was excep­tion­ally poor at form­ing even the simplest sentences.

Aliya Whiteley is — apart from being a great comedo-tagico-Ilfracombo nov­elista — study­ing for an MSc in Library and Information Management. As part of this, she inter­viewed me about the resources I used to help me research the third Saskia Brandt novel. (For those who aren’t keep­ing up, which often includes me, that’s the third one; Flashback is the second; Déjà Vu is the first.)

Can I ask — in the case of your last novel, where did you look to find the inform­a­tion you needed? So where did you go to learn a bit of Russian, read oral his­tor­ies, etc? How did you decide that was what you’d need to know?

For the Russian, I signed up for a local even­ing class. I stud­ied Russian for two years. I didn’t expect to learn it very well, but I felt ridicu­lous writ­ing a novel set in Russia without know­ing any­thing about the lan­guage. The oral his­tor­ies showed up on Amazon. The book was out of print — ‘Women Against the Tsar’, I believe it’s called — and described the lives of sev­eral women anarcho-bolsheviks in the lat­ter part of the nine­teenth cen­tury. Another source of inform­a­tion was the writer Roger Morris, who was in the pro­cess of writ­ing nov­els set in the same period of his­tory (though a little earlier). I spoke to him about oral his­tor­ies and sent him links to some websites…which reminds me, the web was a very use­ful sources of inform­a­tion. I popped into one or two for­ums related to Tsarist Russian mil­it­ary uni­forms to ask the experts ques­tions about mater­i­als, col­ours, etc. I also looked on mem­or­ab­ilia sites for clothes that had been owned by people in the time period of interest — these were very good qual­ity pic­tures with lav­ish descrip­tions includ­ing the cor­rect ter­min­o­logy (some­times in Russian as well as English), which is quite import­ant when writ­ing prose.

Is it ridicu­lous writ­ing about Russia without speak­ing the lan­guage? Try writ­ing about Russia without hav­ing set foot on Russian soil.

Feel free to check out the full inter­view. This is part one.

★ Flashback

It’s been five years com­ing, but my novel Flashback, sequel to Déjà Vu, is now avail­able in the Kindle store. The price is £2.13 in the UK and some­thing approx­im­at­ing that in the US. To be hon­est, this is a little more expens­ive than I inten­ded. I was — and still am — aim­ing for some­thing closer to £1.80 or £1.70 and it is prob­ably mup­petry on my part that the price has come out higher. If I can fig­ure it out, the price will prob­ably drop a few pence over the com­ing week.

There are many people to thank. Beta read­ers, those who helped me with research into air crash invest­ig­a­tion and aero­naut­ics, my editor Clare Christian and cover designer Emma Barnes of Snowbooks all get major, major props.

I’ve settled on the fol­low­ing blurb (thanks for your com­ments, Ed!):

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

Summer, 1947: Airliner ‘Star Dust’ radios 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’, then silence. Star Dust van­ishes along with all pas­sen­gers and crew.

Winter, 2003: German Freedom Flight DFU323 crashes in the Bavarian National Forest. The only clue to its fate is the co-pilot’s final trans­mis­sion, shouted against the roar of fail­ing engines: ‘Stendec! Stendec!’

The enig­mas of DFU323 and Star Dust will lead back to a start­ling con­spir­acy that reaches fifty years into the past – and one hun­dred years into the future.

How do I feel? I feel fine.

Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series)

The End

Regular read­ers of this blog — hey Dad; hey Google robot — will won­der where my fin­gers have been for the past few weeks. Not updat­ing this blog much, that’s for sure. No; I’ve been com­plet­ing the first draft of the third Saskia Brandt novel.
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Twittering through Time

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a free social net­work­ing and micro-blogging ser­vice that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 char­ac­ters long) to the Twitter web­site, via short mes­sage ser­vice (e.g. on a cell phone), instant mes­saging, or a third-party applic­a­tion such as Twitterrific or Facebook.

You’ll have noticed that I include my Twitter feed in the footer text of this web­site. So, when I’m drink­ing a cof­fee and feel that the world needs to know; or I’m stuck on a train out­side Basingstoke; or I’m watch­ing Dr Who…then I can tweet.

Twitter is one of those tech­no­lo­gies that gives Web 2.0 a bad name. That is, whenever I explain it to people who don’t use social net­work­ing thingies, they look at me like I’m a com­plete idiot.

Just like you’re look­ing at your web browser right now, very probably.

For a long while, I’ve been inter­ested in some­how cap­tur­ing — live — the pro­cess of cre­at­ing a novel. I’d like to put together a form of par­al­lel art that mir­rors the inser­tion, dele­tion and move­ment of words around the manu­script, and per­haps make a time-lapse film of it. I’m still a long way from being able to do this. Some spe­cies of screen cap­ture tech­no­logy poin­ted at my word pro­cessor might do the trick, but the band­width implic­a­tion makes me dizzy.

So, as part of this exper­i­ment­a­tion with reflect­ing the ongo­ing devel­op­ment of a novel, I have cre­ated a Twitter account for my heroine, Saskia Brandt. The cur­rent novel (my third in this series; the first was pub­lished as Déjà Vu) is set in 1907. That’s where my time trav­el­ler has wound up.

Who is Saskia Brandt? (If you haven’t read Déjà Vu and think you might, look away now.) Saskia is phys­ic­ally fit, about 30 years old — nobody is quite sure of her age — and a former detect­ive with the European Föderatives Investigationsbüro, a spe­cial­ist organ­isa­tion set up in 2019 to address EU-wide com­puter crime. She was for­cibly put through an exper­i­mental pro­ced­ure that left her with a small, glass-covered chip at the back of her brain. It con­tains a digital copy of a murdered woman’s mind. It con­tains what is, essen­tially, Saskia’s per­son­al­ity. The ori­ginal per­son­al­ity of her phys­ical brain is sup­pressed; though it can usurp con­trol in her dreams and moments of stress. Various skills were flashed onto the chip before inser­tion, includ­ing weapons hand­ling, lan­guage com­pet­ency (she under­stands more than 6000 lan­guages), and spe­cial pro­grams that post-process sens­ory inform­a­tion. In 2023, she trav­elled back­wards in time and is cur­rently being hunted by her former employ­ers. Now she’s in St Petersburg in 1907.

Saskia Brandt is going to tweet her ‘status’ as the cur­rent novel is being writ­ten. You’re very wel­come to add Saskia to your Twitter friends, if you have an account. She’ll add you straight back. Her Twitter address is: http://twitter.com/saskiabrandt You don’t, by the way, need an account to fol­low her. Her status updates are now included in the page footer, and you can visit the above address manually.

Here are some rules:

• She will update her status about once a day; her time frame is ‘live’ in the sense that she will tweet about things hap­pen­ing to her in that day’s writ­ing session
• Her statuses will con­tain teas­ers, not spoilers
• Though she is updat­ing her status as though she had a mobile phone in 1907, the char­ac­ter in the final novel will not be stop­ping every few pages to send a tweet
• Saskia will reply to your ques­tions if you ask them, but will not spoil the story

Interested? Then make Saskia a Twitter friend. I’m cur­rently 4400 words into the manu­script (which will total around 100,000), so Saskia will be tweet­ing for the next few months. Here’s the latest tweet. For her, it’s November 1907 and she’s trav­el­ling into St Petersburg on behalf of a crim­inal organ­isa­tion which (I think) she’s just betrayed.

What’s the story, Hocking?

It’s been an embar­rass­ingly long time since I updated this blog. The last proper entry was pos­ted on the 17th of March. While there are sev­eral reas­ons for the slow down — a trip to Germany, a ton of stu­dent mark­ing — the chief prob­lem is that this blog is meant to doc­u­ment my writ­ing life and, to put it plainly, I haven’t had much of a writ­ing life recently.
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Saskia Brandt 1, Ian Hocking 0

There are many senses in which the writ­ing life is an easy one. For example, one sits down a lot. The com­mute is short. No boss pops up like the shop­keeper in Mr Ben to ask why you’re check­ing Facebook when you know very well that the invoice for eight thou­sand and one paper­clips should have gone out eight­een minutes ago.
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