Getting technical

No matter what non-scribblers may think, writing is a technical occupation.  You don't just dream up characters and storylines and nurture them into a novel.  Before that happens, you have to get to grips with the tools of the trade.

I suspect as long as people have been writing, there have been writers muttering dark imprecations about those tools.  There must have been stone tablets that shattered just as the chisel was reaching the good bit.  For every breathtakingly illustrated medieval bible, there must have been countless sheets of screwed up vellum lobbed into the fire by a frustrated monk.  The advent of the printing press must have created so many new ways for things to go wrong that Caxton must have been cursed in the same way as a Windows fatal error that occurs just as you were about to save that crucial file.

Which brings me (clumsily) up to date: the writer's relationship with modern technology.  Now you may have noticed by the paucity of illustration and zippy effects on this blog that I am not the techiest of people.  For all their shiny futuristic glamour, computers are merely tools, albeit less straightforward than a hammer, sometimes to the point where I am tempted to juxtapose the two.  But when you dip a toe or ten in the chilly waters of self-publishing, you need to get to grips not only with word processing but with creating a cover image (OK, I ducked that - thanks Graham!), maintaining an online presence and grappling with uploads and downloads, all the time suspecting something somewhere has gone arwy (I'm yet to receive any royalties from Amazon, not sure if that's because I haven't earned enough or because I did something wrong when I put the book up for sale).

Regular writers have publishers to worry about that sort of thing.  When you're a one (wo)man band it can start to creep in and suck out the time and enthusiasm you were saving for the actual writing.

So what I think I need is something to take the next book out of my head and drop it straight into yours, for a small fee of course.  I'll see what I can dream up.

PS Looking for Buttons will be FREE from Amazon this Valentine's Day.  That's got to be better than some wilting roses and an overpriced box of chocolates.

This passes for a thought process, apparently

I was going to write something terribly interesting (or perhaps merely terrible) about writing and technology but that can wait.  I'm going to rave about someone else's book instead.

There are many ways I choose what to read, ranging from browsing idly to discovering something by an author whose work I've enjoyed before to a sudden craving for an old favourite.  And then there's the method which is more me than any other: going off at a tangent.

In the past this has led to some fantastic finds, particiularly when I've applied the priniciple to music (an interest in David Bowie's more obscure work leading to Iggy Pop singing Belgian jazz, for example).  The book I'm reading now is one I came across originally as part of a gift set when I was a student, which I suppose comes under idle browsing because I liked the look of the set but couldn't get to the blurb.  And it's an old favourite, establishing itself as such on first reading as one of the books I wish I'd written (although to have done so I'd have to been a) much older and b) deceased by now, which would make this blog marginally more interesting).  But I've come back to it through a classic piece of tangentery.  I shall take you through it in stages so you can tell if you too choose books by this method.

1. Over the Christmas holiday, the 1983 film Wargames was on TV.  I knew I'd loved it as a kid but couldn't remember enough about it to know why.  About ninety minutes in, John Wood turned up and I realised that was why, he'd made a huge impression on me when I was about nine.

2. So after the film I tried to think what else I'd seen him in, which meant a browse on the Internet Movie Database, very useful for settling 'oh, it's whatersname from thingy, oh you know, no, not her, you fool' arguments in our house.

3. And I saw that in the 1960s he'd been in an adaptation of Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, playing the poet Richard Cadogan.

4. Richard Cadogan is one of my Fictional Men For Whom I Have A Soft Spot.

5. John Wood would have been excellent in the role.

6. The series does not seem available to watch now.

7. Therefore I am rereading The Moving Toyshop and it is every bit as good as I remembered - and it's been a while since I read it so a lot of it is coming to me almost as new and it is a huge treat.

So, in a roundabout way that is no kind of useful review at all, I recommend that you try Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen novels, solving Oxford crimes decades before Inspector Morse while wearing an extraordinary hat.  Except Swan Song because that wasn't as good as the others.

Which brings me back, in a tortuously roundabout way, to my original question.  How do you choose your books?  Do tell...

Looking for Buttons is free for Christmas - oh yes it is!

The curtain rises to show a simple domestic scene of pre-Christmas pandemonium.  Downstage a young(ish) woman (LUCIE) sits amid a sea of wrapping paper.  She has bits of sticky tape in her hair and is sobbing brokenly into a piece of tinsel.

LUCIE:  Less than a week until Christmas Day!  How will I ever get it all finished in time?  I must wrap all these presents and get them to Father Christmas without delay, yet there is also the laundry and the cleaning and to do that I must find the floor under all this paper.  The tree is drooping and the Christmas cake is not made.  All I want to do is read a book!  (She sobs.)

Enormous flash, stage left.  Enter FAIRY GODMOTHER, with Kindle.

FG:  Oh, do stop snivelling, woman!  Buck up and pull yourself together.  You'll get it all done, because you always do, and if you don't, well, quite frankly, does it matter?  You don't even like Christmas cake and there's a packet of Cadbury's chocolate fingers in the cupboard.

LUCIE:  I've already eaten most of them.

FG:  There were two packets, so nil desperandum.  Unless you've already eaten both, in which case you are a glutton and I have no sympathy.  Now put down that sticky tape -

LUCIE:  I can't, it's stuck to me.

FG:  I shall ignore that remark.  Shut up and listen.  While you shall not go to the ball -

LUCIE:  Why not?

FG:  You're a hermit.  You hate parties.

LUCIE:  Oh yes.

FG:  Where was I?  Oh yes.  While you shall not go to the ball, you shall have a good book to read over the Christmas period, for - tra la la and abracadabra - Looking for Buttons will be free to download from Amazon for five days, starting on Christmas Day!

LUCIE:  Oh.

FG:  You're supposed to leap about for joy at this point.

LUCIE:  But I've read it several times.  I wrote it.  And I don't have a Kindle.

FG:  Flaming heck, you can't please some people.  All right, here's a second hand boxed set of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.  You can have an hour off from the chores to watch the one with David McCallum and then you'll have to get back to work.

FAIRY GODMOTHER waves wand and turns LUCIE into a teapot before turning to beam at the audience.

FG:  Meanwhile, those of you who love romance, happy endings and aren't whinging hermits can download Looking for Buttons free from Amazon, 25th-29th December.  Merry Christmas!

Writing? It's child's play.

I used to play with dolls as a child.  I gather this is What Children Do.  I used to stage grand extravaganzas, big budget, all action, non-stop thrills, conscripting all manner of household items.  Those aren't stairs, that's a cliff and there is a heart-stopping clifftop rescue going on.  That's not a mirror, it's a portal to another dimension.  The lift has broken off the Sindy house and is swinging freely: cue Towering Infernoesque disaster movie.  There were sagas that went on for weeks, if not months: the tangled on-off courtship of Barbie and Ken, the backstabbing world of the pop diva, the tragic little orphans in their garret.

Recently I spoke to a friend about this.  She seemed taken aback.  Didn't she used to play games like that? "No," she said, "I just used to brush their hair and change their clothes."

So:

Writers are born and not made.

Discuss.

Radio Ga Ga

Writing's a funny pastime.  You'd think all types (if you'll forgive the pun) of story would be the same, but it doesn't work like that.  At least, it doesn't for me.  Some come out as prose, others don't want to work that way and insist on attempting to be drama, and some are amenable enough to let me try them out in different ways.

A confession: I have had a lifelong love affair with the spoken word.  As a child I listened to my favourite stories over and over again on LP and cassette (oh, just google them, young people, I'm not going to digress now).  I spent teenage illnesses in bed listening to Journey Into Space (a repeat, I hasten to add - I'm not quite that old).  And had BBC Radio 7 (now Radio 4 Extra) not launched when it did, I'd have finished my thesis a year earlier instead of losing hours pretending to study simulation results while listening agog to Fatherland and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, headphones clamped over my unkempt studenty hair.  Which is why, despite its stubborn refusal to turn into anything coherent, I have persisted with the Difficult Second Novel.  It may not be working as a book, went my reasoning, but perhaps it would work for radio.  Perhaps the problem was that I was trying to tell the story in the wrong way.

So I'd poke and I'd prod and I'd try to work out the casting and play it in my head and still the damn thing wouldn't come.  And then last night I pulled at the threads again after a gap of nearly a year, expecting the knots to bite harder, becoming more intractable and impossible to resolve than ever, only this time I tugged from a slightly different angle and suddenly there I was, standing in a windswept garden near midnight (I'm not being poetical, I was out in all that rotten weather) with an armful of yarn that needs knitting into a workable narrative (yeah, that was the poetic bit).  And I think it's going to be a novel after all, not a radio play.

Which is a Good Thing, of course, but I've been so set on hearing this one rather than reading it that I'll have to get it published, just so I can have it as an audiobook.  Can I have Anton Lesser reading it, please?

Probably nothing sinister

I thought that once the book was out there that would be it.  Looking for Buttons is finished, there is nothing more for me to glean.

Then this evening I realised that Fergus is left-handed.  I can't understand why I hadn't noticed before.  This is bugging me.

Honestly, you think you know someone so well and then you find they've been holding out on you...

[Adding the labels to this post, as I clicked on 'fictional characters' I distinctly heard a Scottish voice shout, "Oi!"  I think this is the point where I have a strong cup of tea and a little lie down.]

Turning back at the last minute

I stopped writing a while ago.  Nothing was coming together and sales of Looking for Buttons have not been particularly encouraging (yes, I know admitting this is not good PR but I am nothing if not a realist) so I was pretty much ready to call it a day.

And then today, I wrote a poem.  It was a peculiar experience.  Past attempts at poetry have been jolly fripperies, pastiches of childhood favourites.  I did go through the adolescent angst-poet phase twenty years ago, but that - I hope - left no evidence to condemn me.  But today was something else entirely.  I wasn't trying to do anything writerly, in fact it was as crushingly mundane as brushing my teeth prior to getting one of them filled (I have a kamikaze wisdom tooth).  And there, without warning, was the poem, nebulous at first but clearer by the second, like wiping grime from a railway carriage window with the hem of my sleeve to catch a fleeting glimpse of something true.  It wasn't writing, it was more the process of remembering something I didn't know I knew.

I'm not going to publish the poem here, not now.  I need to live with it for a while and I suspect it might be more personal than I realise.  Showing it to other people might be like flashing my knickers at the Archbishop of Canterbury: perfectly feasible in this day and age but not terribly wise.  But it seems that although I've given up writing, my subconscious hasn't.

And so on I plod...