Zornhau

Ray Bradbury famously went to the doctor with a lump in the front of his throat. “Congratulations,” said the medic. “You've discovered the Adam's Apple. That'll be five dollars.”

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I feel so at home in this place, it takes a while to realise that it reminds me of my study.

Weapons and armour roost on the walls, occult tomes jostle for shelf space with with history books and classics, and little fragments - locks of hair, an ancient book, or a  scrap of stone or pottery - remind us of a real and concrete past.

Yes, it's like my study, except it's an entire house... Abbotsford House on the Tweed near Melrose, the absolute archetype of a Fantasy writer's perfect mansion, except that it was built by the grandfather of historical novelists, Sir Walter Scott.

Sir Walter Scott is Scotland's Edgar Rice Burroughs, only his prolific muse took him to the local past, rather than into space, and he wrote to wipe out a debt, rather than to escape a boring job. His Targe and Tartan yarns put Scotland on the 19th-century tourist map. If his text is past its sell-by date, his stories live on on the screen, big and small. He was so famous in his day, that both Blucher and Wellington were glad to meet up when he visited the field of Waterloo. When he fell ill, the government lent him a Royal Navy frigate so he could tour the Mediterranean. Oh, and,  Hail to the Chief? Guess who wrote the original verses...

But it's not Sir Walter's fame that draws me back to his home, and has done since I was a child. Nor is it is books, which I confess I have not read. It's the place he created. Abbotsford House is an eye in History's storm. A sort of static TARDIS decked with the trophies of a time-travelling imagination.

A fragment of stone embeded in the garden wall boasts that a Vexilla of the 20th Legion did... who can say? Nearby, naked Classical heroes brandish spears in the company of weather-worn medallions of Renaissance potentates. In the Hall, bullet-riddled cuirasses echo with the screams of the wounded at Waterloo, and a pair of 16th-century armours, Pompeii-like, preserve the imprints of German knights who might have toasted the Reformation, or helped to toast the heretics who sought to shrug off the yoke of Rome. On another wall, bucket boots and black armour seem to reek of the 30 Years War - burning flesh and the egg-stinking gunpowder. A few paces way, exotic Persian maces and Indian gauntlet swords jostle for space around an original portrait of James IV. He seems too refined to have fallen with steel harness on his back and a sword in his hand, until you notice the bullish neck. The king who fell at Flodden, shares the company of a horned Celtic chamfron that once lent a terrible aspect to a tiny pony as it trundled a war chariot along behind it while painted savages chanted prayers to Morrigan and god knows what gods.

And then there are the books. Just the titles - because that's all the visitor ever gets to read - are enough to transport you to otherwhen. Histories of sorcery, of war, of architecture, of Romans and Greeks, knights and warriors. Classical texts and classic texts. Gazetteers and guidebooks...
 
To wander Abbotsford House is to confront the reality of the totality of History. Any of the doors could open out onto a world of Romans or warriors, or knights or knaves. All you need is the imagination to turn the key.

Very useful D&D post here. See especially the comments.

My chapters received the usual useful evisceration. I'm mashing up three genres this time, so it's hard to keep my eye everything. This means I'm very very grateful to have the safety net of the crit group.

In other news, I waved at andrewducker, who I think did not recognise me.

Borders Books. The History section whispers to me, "You want to write a historical. You want to write a historical." Not a whisper, but a chorus, because it quickly loses all unity.

"Strength and Honour! Romans!"

"1900s. Khaki and sabres! Can you resist?"

"Take ship on the Baltic! Visit the Teutonic knights!"

"Walk the Silk Road with us!"

"Robert E Howard's wake is fading. Rove the Irish Sea behind a dragon prow!"
 
Because, to write fiction about something is to experience it, or at least to enjoy the illusion that you have.

You think reading a good novel is intense?
 

Alan Campbell, who we're lucky enough to have in our crit circle, got a very nice review in Scotland on Sunday.

EDIT: A pity the reviewer used the opportunity to take swing at the worst examples of the genre as if they mattered. Imagine a review that started, "Most Literary Fiction is belongs to a sort of academic circle jerk. However...."

It feels like I've come out from under a dark cloud of Tullish proportions. It's not just been the work, it's also been a lingering feeling of fatigue. I had thought I was just wearing myself out, or - admit it - getting old.

But then I had this conversation with two of the local mums:


Then andrewducker  pointed us all to an article claiming that 30K people in the UK have probably already sneezed and grown curly tails. I wonder...
( Query letter behind the cut... )

I'm starting with agents who accept email submissions, and only want a synopsis and sample chapters. Next I'll do postal queries. Then move onto those who want outlines - which I'll need to write. The aim is simply to get moving.
 

Well, after some brainstorming/venting with cairmen ....

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Obsessive though it may seem, I outline scenes in detail. It stops me getting lost!

Still stuck on Chapter 2. It is very hard indeed to write a chapter where nobody kills anybody or blows something up. And yet it's a critical chapter that kicks off most of the main threads: Hero vs Officers, Hero vs Men, Hero vs Batman (i.e. military manservant), and Hero & Girl vs Romance.

Most of the scenes come easily -

• Hero vs Officers: Hero arrives in the Officers Mess for the first time, only to find somebody has run up a bill for him.
• Hero vs Men: Hero takes command of men, but his NCO privately warns him no stupid heroics at the expense of his lads, or else.
• Hero & Girl vs Romance: Hero gets technical aid from girl, but she is hostile because she once had a crush on him, and he thinks she's a bitch. (The social context jacks this up a little - her class and his are not supposed to breed, so any relationship will be free of any marital imperative. When he turns up asking for aid, she's bound to suspect he's trying to cash in on her teenage crush from the safety of their social barrier.)

Hero vs Batman is much harder. Batman is cyncial ex-teacher on the run from gambling debts. He's a smart jobsworth, and doesn't give a shit about military life or values. The conflict between them is very much a sub plot, resolved when hero rescues batman from enforcers. Most of the actual meat, however, will be minor irritations, ones that will piss off Hero, but which - frankly - I don't care about.

Writing your second novel is... daunting.

To me, at least - as for most writers - my first novel rocks. The characters are real, the plot rolls along like a old-fashioned pulp serial, and it's woven from lashings of sensuality and dollops of magic and mayhem, all integral to the plot. In short, (I think) it's a finished novel.

I got there in part by a process of selection.

If you listen to published writers, a first novel in particular isn't a single evolving entity. Rather it's a family tree of drafts swimming in a primordial sea of creation. Some are horrible mutations, and, as they grope towards the surface, shrivel into nothingness. Others surprise us by forming a new line, consigning the old to extinction. Finally, a draft scrambles up onto the shore. If something doesn't leap out of the water and haul it back in by its tale (deliberate spelling), than that's the final draft and the novel is all but done. Whether it'll survive on land is another story.

This is why you hear exhortations to just write crap. Green sludge can evolve. Anything is better than a blank sheet of paper.

The horrible thing is, when you come to the second novel, it's back to square one. Sure, you're probably slightly better at cull/feed decisions, but now your initial scratchings are trying to thrive in the shadow of a completed work. The crap now really does look crap.

This is why - I think - second novels are notorious career breakers. The poor neo-pro must do the whole thing all over again, but in half the time. The result is broken or stretched contracts, sloppy novels hammered out in a rush, or a sort or imaginative pedestrianism born of over analysis.

Right back when I started on this path in earnest, I knew I didn't have time for that. It wasn't enough to write a novel of (perhaps) publishable standard, I also had to learn how to do it again, and again.

I evolved - and God it was painful - a set of tools that worked for me at least. After much flailing and floundering, I worked out how to outline my kind of story: in short treating a story as a game, driving the plot with nested story questions, and building scenes from blocks of conflict and consequence. I also bullied MS Word's Outline View into supporting this system.

Sins of the Father - a title that tells you precisely nothing about [HIGH CONCEPT REDACTED] - started off as a disposable Military Fantasy piece. I was supposed to knock it out in six months. The thing is, its story world is rather cool, and pretty soon it showed signs of wanting to stretch out into a full size Fantasy novel. From my personal Asgard, I could see the high-points above the mist, glimpse cool stuff whenever the clouds cleared, but had absolutely no idea how to get from here to there.

But outlining is like throwing a Zwerchhau - you just have to trust the technique, or it doesn't work.

So I sat down and - rather than writing crap - dreamed up characters and motivations, summarised plot threads, developed provisional story questions, and finally let the players battle it out in earnest in the story's DNA, its plot. 

Yes there's evolution. Sometimes the dice roll wrong, sending the plot wombling off into mediocrity. But then I just backtrack and try again. And each time I look at a complete plot, I can see ways to add richness.

This is more or less what non-outliners do. My advantage - I hope - is that when I kill off two chapters, I'm binning 60 words, rather than 6,000.

You'd think outlining was a dry cynical process, but I find it gives me the tremendous, exhilarating, breathtaking freedom to create. Whole worlds appear then vanish at the twitch of a mouse. A few words of outline conjure up the fore-echo of a thousand of words of prose, to be weighed then rejected or conjured into being. My imagination scurries down the  all the possible futures for my story, and all I have to do is choose one.

So, watch this space.

Writers Workshop today, and up for evisceration was the opening of Chapter 2 of "Sins of the Father".

It comprised a chunk of cinematic fleet on the move stuff, then dived into the protags first, call it "amphibious", action.  The way I saw it, I was writing a tight [HIGH CONCEPT REDACTED] Military story focussed on one protagonist. The fleet's travails are cool, but essentially backdrop. So, cinematic seemed a good idea.

The group as a whole seemed to like the way I'd managed to [HIGH CONCEPT REDACTED], but felt I'd thrown in too much [HIGH CONCEPT REDACTED] in too short a space. Comments ranged from "WTF? This isn't Robert Louis Stevenson!" (yes, not everybody in the group reads SF) through to "Argh my brain hurts" - pretty much what both cairmen and jlawrenceperry had also said.

One of the pros nailed it when he said, "This section is... what?.... five pages, when it needs to be twenty-five."

And so it is that my second attempt at writing a tight military story has been derailed into something bigger and more complex. This is probably a good thing, since the setting I've built could potentially be as creatifely flexible as Pratchett's Diskworld, so I it makes sense to exploit it to the full. However, it raises the stakes for me personally. I'm going to have to invest much more time in this project than I intended.

But hey, as the Master once said, "If you are afraid of swordfights, then stay away from swords".

Bring me my broadsword....
---Jethro Tull, "Broadsword"

More than half a lifetime ago, in rooms where cheap joss sticks barely masked mingled adolescent musk and acrylic paint, we tried to ride our polyhedral dice into Fantasyland.

Jethro Tull provided both soundtrack and anthem for our exodus:

Tull - to the non-cognoscenti - is Clannad with testicles. Where Clannad wallows in clouds of Celtic Twilght(tm), Tull romps through the dry ice, swiving lusty wenches and collecting heads...

...or so it seemed to us. God knows, we didn't really listen to the lyrics. Back in the early 80s, it was enough to have somebody singing anything about broadswords. What we - I, at least - craved was the significance, the purpose, that went with the broadsword.

Alas, the dice, they tended to lodge against the garishly painted miniatures, catapulting the passengers back to grinding, frustrating, reality. But it was questing after that echo of significance that filled my bookshelves with grimoires and Howard reprints, diverted my academic path from the career certainty of the hard sciences, to the nebulous future offered by Medieval History.

If I am an aspiring swordsman and wannabe pulpster now, it is because of the false promise of those dice in those days, long ago, which is why I treated myself to a Tull CD.

Listening to the music took me back to my roots. Even as I grinned and bobbed my head to the beat, part of me looked on with the detachment of an archtectural salvage expert treading the creaking boards of a crumbling mansion. The joy is there, but not the urgency. Now I am no longer trying to ride my creativity, I can lead it to new and wilder places.

I do not regret for one moment the imaginative threads that took root in my teenage. However, if I had but listened to the lyrics, I might have more easily discovered what would ultimately let them flourish.

Here are the lyrics, with the bits we ignored highlighted:

And there is what the years have taught me, laid out where as a teenager I could have found it.

Significance and purpose is as easy as embracing hearth, home, kin, and clan.

These are all a man needs, and I have them. I do not need to defend them with a broadsword, but I would and I could, and so I find my contentment, not in the Middle Ages, but in my own middle age.

Kurtzhau: Daddy, when will you read your book like that writer person we went to see?
Me: Neil Gaimon? Um, somebody has to buy it first.
Kurtzhau: Will a bookshop buy it, Daddy?
Me: Um. No. A publisher.... Oh god. It works like this....
Kurtzhau listens intently, then: When you sell your book, will you buy me that radio control tank?
Me: WTF?

But yes, I did once answer the question, "When can we buy that radio control tank" with "When I sell my novel." And five-year olds have long, but selective memories.
 
 

 

I'm of course stuck on the first chapter of my novel and I realise that in my analysis of the Sharpe books, I have of course missed out one vital thread: the Romance.
The Sharpe stories are like spinning coins with life on one side, and death on the other. If there is blood-spraying body count, then there must also be... emotionally-charged swiving and tussling, and plenty of it.

This is no place for a bolt-on subplot which intersects with the main story only because the hero must choose (yawn) between his vocation and normal life. Nor is the lady a mere hero's reward; boy bashes bad guy, boy beds bird (in an act of homoerotic sublimation?).

The love interest must be part of the story so that it feels real. The romantic scenario must support more than a single amorous encounter, and those encounters must be narrative building blocks, rather than soft focus interludes with grunting and squealing.

So, how does Cornwall pull it off?

 

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Merlin's Snake Oil, that is the magical or SF'nal elements, is the not-so secret fuel of SF&F literature.

( On the one hand, we, the readers, love wallowing in the stuff.... )

It's often said that if a story can be told without its Fantastic elements, then it should go find its real genre. 

( I disagree... )

So I'm done, admittedly provisionally – my certainty is in inverse proportion to the knowledge or industry clout of the person offering feedback.

It's sitting in front of me, 500 pages of Sword and Sorcery, with my name on it. Now all I have to do is hack out the bloopers and the bleeding obvious. Then...

...well, fear is a genuine emotion. I'm allowed to experience it.  

EDIT: And add a 200 word reaction shot.

Sometimes I see forum threads on self discipline - "How do I motivate myself to write?" And sometimes, the same questions crop up amongst my fellow writer wannabes.