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.

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)

About a year and a half ago, I finished the second Saskia Brandt novel, Flashback. My thoughts for the third one centred around Imperial Russia. I was particularly interested in placing Saskia – who derives her advantages from an almost direct connection between her nervous system and the Internet – in a situation where she could have no real advantage beyond her knowledge of the future.

Of course, it isn’t clear to me (and still isn’t, even at the close of this third novel), whether a knowledge of the future is an advantage or disadvantage. The theme of the first two Saskia books is determinism and how one can escape it. Let’s say you’re in a Georgian milk bar in 1906 and a handsome young man walks in. He wears a Caucasian hood and a chokha (a long, skirted coat whose chest is lined with bullet pouches). The friendly folk in the milk bar call him The Milkman, The Priest, Soso, or Koba. But you recognise him as Joseph Stalin. Do you want to find out more about him, or do you run?

So that was my starting point. I took the winter of 2007-08 to research Russia to a degree where writing about the period wouldn’t be too embarrassing. I began the manuscript proper in May and finished in September. Saskia Brandt, the heroine, was Twittering as I wrote (I explain more in this post).

Here’s her first tweet, which was sent from June, 1907, and arrived one-hundred-and-one years later, May 7th 2008:

Entering St Petersburg via train. There are men from the Third Section¹ in the next carriage and I think I might need to jump off.

Her last tweet, sent from the Hotel Europe on St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect in Spring 1909, and received on the last day of writing the novel, 4th September 2008:

Having breakfast with Robespierre.

The novel was a pleasure to write. I wanted to produce something that reminded me of Alistair MacLean, where the story’s structure reflects a heist and the reader not entirely informed about how much the protagonist knows. To help get this right, I plotted much of the novel in advance.

I usually hate to do this. If the story is plotted, it is told, and there’s nothing to discover during the writing process. However, with a novel that involved so many historical characters, I needed to set limits on character movements and plot timings. The final plan was a happy medium: a bulleted list of interesting pivotal scenes that would not undermine historical accuracy too much, but with plenty of interstitial space that represented problems to solve along the way.

So that’s the end of the third Saskia Brandt novel. It will require re-writes, but I think the essential elements of the story are in place.

What does it feel like to finish this book? A little sad in two respects. That far-away look in my eyes, so often noted by my friends, would represent a sudden solution to a plot or character problem inspired by a remark, or just an image that I was busting to put into the book. Now, I’m back to normal. I’ve got my brain back (just in time for the academic year). So it is good-bye to Russia for a while.

The point of writing a book, I suppose, is to get it published. I’m not confident that it will be picked up by a publisher – not because I lack confidence in the book, but because the second book hasn’t found a publisher yet. The third book isn’t likely to shift if the second one hasn’t.

I have a Lulu personal edition of the second book on my shelf, and occasionally I pick it up with the aim of identifying the elements that commissioning editors might have difficulty with. Apart from the odd clunky phrase, I can’t find much that I’d wish to change. I think the second book is far better than the first (see the top of this page for reviews of that one), and I think the book I’ve just completed is better than the second.

That said, it’s difficult to voice these opinions without seeming egotistical. Do I think I deserve to be published? No. That’s too strong. I mean this: I don’t write books so I can put them in a drawer.

Here’s a snippet from my blog dated 1st November, 2007:

Odd feeling; starting a novel, that is. You don’t know if it will actually turn out to be a novel. There is an equal likelihood the story will splutter and die like a suddenly beached fish. At the moment, I have some ideas that refuse to tessellate. I hope my gentle readers won’t be offended if I don’t go into them in too much detail. Suffice it to say that I’m reading some excellent oral histories of women anarchists in 1870s Russia. An intriguing architectural folly known as the Amber Room will feature. Much of my research, at present, involves listening to the Enemy at the Gates soundtrack (crikey, doesn’t it sound like the music from Schindler’s List?) and sketching young Georgian revolutionary poets.

And one more from 17th March, 2008:

So what is it? What’s the story, Saskia? Why are you standing on the threshold of the Amber Room, and what does it have to do with going home?

So. ‘The Amber Rooms’ – the third Saskia Brandt novel. First draft 91,180 words; May, 2008 to September, 2008.

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.

However, I determined that, this weekend, I would put away the marking. This decision is going to bite me next week but there you go.

This weekend has been a ‘creative weekend’. What creativity? Well, my last proper entry detailed the shenanigans involved in writing the third Saskia Brandt book. (There are three? you cry. Well, yes. The last one was finished up in September, and my agent, John Jarrold, is busy hawking it. Several almost-bites from a number of publishers but, so far, nobody has really sunk their teeth in.) That was 6000 words down the pan; it followed an earlier jettison of 4000 words. So this weekend I’ve been re-drafting the story.

It’s looking good. I’m trying to view the thing for what it is: a thriller. It’s meant to thrill. I’m listening, therefore, to various Hitchcock movie themes on my headphones. I want to maintain a sense of entertainment and not let – yet – the project get overtaken by more literary motifs that are crowding my brain for attention.

The result of this creative weekend: a basic template for the story. There are elements I’m still not happy with. The ending, for one, is quite downbeat, and might be regarded as a defeat for the heroine. And there is an element of very complex plotting around the beginning of the climax. But I’m happy with it.

Now: what for a title?

There are other senses, however, in which the writing life is excruciatingly awful. I’m having one those awful moments precisely now, so, striking while the iron is toasty, here are some words on the curious rage burning in my veins, boiling my eyeballs and singeing off what little remains of my hair with little ‘zip!’ sounds.

The Good Ship Hocking foundered this afternoon on a Charybdis called ‘lack of planning’. The skipper ran aground while avoiding the swirling waters of a Scylla called ‘planning too much’.

My problem is a classic one. The kind of book I’m writing is a thriller, and the genre is characterised by tightly-woven plot threads. The action needs to be particularly kinetic – each element needs to lead inexorably to the next. Characters must be under considerable pressure (usually for their lives) and need to deal in extraordinary ways with extraordinary circumstances. But that’s not my problem.

My problem lies with the deep structure of the novel. Not all novels have this deep structure. Few thrillers do. This deep structure is the metaphorical language of the novel. It informs virtually all decisions about small-scale metaphor (the things you, as a writer, make connections with during the text; ‘the floor was blank as drumskin’, etc.) and large-scale metaphor (the locations of important events, for example; choice of weather).

In my limited experience – three (publishable) novels – the deep structure only really comes once you’re well into the novel. You need to live and breathe the work for a few weeks and arrive at an understanding of its identity. The deep structure appears without conscious awareness. Sometimes, it’s there before you know it is. You might write a third of the book using ostensibly random metaphors until, that glorious third in, the metaphors suddenly make sense. It’s as if part of you knew what the deep structure of the book was – but hadn’t yet told you.

Right now, I don’t feel I have a sense of the deep structure. What is this current book about? My third book, Flashback, felt like a book about grief, pain, mystery, and the re-living of historical events, about the senses in which memory can be an artificial present.

The current book? Dunno. Saskia Brandt is trapped in pre-revolutionary Russia. I have strong, almost hallucinatory ideas about particular scenes: In one, Saskia is wearing a ball dress and standing on the threshold of the amber room (this means something very important to her, but I can’t tell what yet); In another, she is masquerading as a cavalry captain in a Tbilisi square and wheeling her horse to clear the area of passersby before they are hurt by an explosion; In yet a third, she stands on the balcony of a ruined palace (probably here, which contains the amber room), and looks out at a man on a horse, wheeling it and pulling it into tricks just as Saskia had many years before in that crowded Tbilisi square. The novel will be, in some sense, about getting home, and mistaken identity, and revenge. But that’s about all I can tell.

Somehow, I need to produce a surface plot that weaves through these moments of deep structure (whatever form they may take). I haven’t managed so far. There is a sense in which you have to just write, of course. If you don’t have this instinct, you’ll probably not set pen to paper. But my instinct is warning me that the initial conditions have not been correctly set for this novel. There is more thinking to do before the somewhat reticent part of my brain comes up with the goods.

First attempt: Four thousand words about a member of the tsar’s secret police arriving for work. Pretty good, but unnecessary. Not what the story is about. *Sound of aircraft nose-diving*

Second attempt: Nearly six thousand words of Saskia participating in a bank robbery. Was going well until the Okhrana agent I introduced on the train journey north, with the spoils, turned into a clone of the mnemonist Shereshevksy. *Toilet flush sound*

So what is it? What’s the story, Saskia? Why are you standing on the threshold of the amber room, and what does it have to do with going home?

I’m off to Germany for a few days, during which I won’t be writing. I’m relying on my brain to come up with the answers.