Okay, so, to make things easier for new visitors I’ve put some of my more essential thoughts (heh) along the top row. ‘Shop’ now links straight into Lulu to minimise clicks from browse to buy. ‘The Pledge’ explains my financial plans. ‘About Comments’ explains why it’s almost impossible for you to comment on my posts in here. Finally, ‘About Reviews’ explains what it is that you might like to know about my reviewing preferences.

Hope that clears everything up for all of you!

So. Waaaaaaay back in the middle of October I published my NaNoWriMo 2005 children’s adventure Figure of the Sorcechanic and when I ordered my proof copy of the book I also bought a couple more for review. One was a mistake, the review of that title can be found by clicking here. The other didn’t arrive.

Actually. When I got my copy of FotS I also got with it two volumes of, er, well I think it was poetry. It was in Italian so I’m not sure. Anyway, I didn’t order it. So I wrote to Lulu and said where’s the stuff I did order and they said sorry we’ll send it right away. A week later I received one of the two books I was owed and I wrote again saying “where’s the other one?” and they replied saying it would be with me in a fortnight.

So I have been waiting a month for a copy of Within Confinement and in the meanwhile a preview has gone up and this has made me even more desperate to get hold of a copy. And today it arrived. For the first time in ages I am itching to get cracking on a book and it’s a great feeling.

And not only that, but in celebrating my received purchase I found that someone had actually bought a copy of FotS *weeps with joy*.

So all in all a good day.

Here’s the deal folks:

There are far more talented authors on this planet than there are ways to support those authors to write.

I have resigned myself to the fact that I could waste my life chasing the fulfillment of my best seller potential in today’s world. I could die never having sold the movie rights to any of my books because no movie producer ever read any of them. I could be overlooked and ignored so easily that my life could read in retrospect like some great tragedy.

And so could any other half decent author.

When I reviewed The Shade I didn’t know I could be uncovering a tragedy such as the one this article (PDF) describes from the archive of history. You have ot read between the lines of course. Cool Publications no longer has a website. It doesn’t exist. In two and a bit short years it has gone from a going concern to nothing. In this light I found the story so heartbreaking to read that I thought everyone who comes here should read it too. And maybe take note of a few things:

1) Cool Publications does not seem to have been a scam.

I mean, it would be easy to characterise it as such, I cannot imagine that the company’s final days were pleasant for anyone concerned. I can imagine the reason that The Shade’s author Thomas M. Hunt has disappeared without trace is because his Cool Publications experience was so distressing he never wants to write again.

That’s a terrible thing. That business should be allowed to ruin someone’s soul that way and it makes me angry and it reminds me why I do this.

2) Cool Publications seemed to be a dreamer’s organisation and many authors are dreamers.

It seems obvious now. I mean, who’s really going to buy a PDA just to read e-books? I tried my hand at producing a PDA version of one of my old books and it was a disaster. PDAs just don’t lend themselves to this kind of thing and if you spend the time to configure them you’re one of a handful of users who will. PDAs are for contact management and diarising, reading is a luxury function and Acrobat is not a PDAs killer app.

David Amerland, the man in charge, was not a shyster, he was an enthusiastic businessman who never had anyone deflate his vision by pointing out its limitations. No businessman could. He was unlucky in a situation where being unlucky was more likely than being lucky.

Actually I have no proof that it wasn’t a scam and that Mr. Amerland wasn’t a con artist but I have no proof to the contrary either and the article above reads more like the sound of dreams shattering than a snake oil salesman’s patter.

3) Of 200-300 submissions even a shaky e-publication venture only published 5-10 in a year.

Here’s the skinny, no wonder The Shade was a good book, it had been quality controlled just like the books of a “legitimate” publisher. Cool Publications only printed in e-format and that killed it. The net result of this was that the author was put through exactly the same process as a “real” author at a “proper” publishing house and their work got tanked by prevailing marketing conditions.

The Shade over it’s four years of digital existence may have done roundabout as well as any of mine will in the same period i.e. hardly making enough to pay for a good night out at the pub, or even a rubbish night out at the pub. The author believed that, in some modest way, his dream had come true. Okay maybe it wasn’t the top of HarperCollins most promising list but it was a real publication. It was a step on the way. It was…

It was a dream waiting to be urinated upon from a great height, stabbed with knives and then set on fire. That’s what the world is like.

4) The dreamers wouldn’t allow reality to interfere with their dream

Cool Publications said in 2004 that they wouldn’t publish on paper because it was too expensive. POD sites would have given them the economic model that they needed and would have increased the chances of good luck befalling them not bad luck. When Mr. Amerland tells us: “We’ve thought about [print publishing], but decided not to… because the publishing world is quite entrenched and it is very hard to break into. Instead, we can tap into the more open digital market.” I just wanted to scream and throw things. This is reality. If you can sell a product in a particular way for a low overhead then do it.

I bought an ISBN for “Hidden Predators, Dangerous Prey” because at the time it cost little enough for me to indulge in such prideful activity. Then the price went up too high. Now my books are referenced by the lulu ID because it’s a unique identifier that costs nothing.

If someone wants to buy a copy of my book, on paper, they will always be able to. They can preview it generously first and I will always cut my royalty back to keep the price as low as I can.

Still nobody’s buying my stuff and I have maximised my chances of selling. If Mr. Amerland had seen my efforts compared with the results of those efforts he may well have thought again about everything he was doing. Maybe.

The point is, if you are an author out there, you have to face the facts. It doesn’t matter how much better than Dan Brown you are - or Clive Barker, or Dean Koontz, or whoever - the likelihood is you will never sell anything or even gain representation for it. That’s not me being mean, that’s the way things are. If you are cruising for the midlist and hoping to get bigger from there that’s hard work with the same guarantees of success (e.g. none) and with infinitely less reward. And sometimes even when you sell yourself to a reasonably hard market, like Thomas M. Hunt did, that market could float away and evaporate in moments, leaving you with nothing but heartache.

I am hoping that one day the traditional midlist will no longer exist. I am hoping that places like Lulu will replace the midlist and that the access to proper publishing deals will rest upon a more meritocratic system of POD sales. While people still think that chasing rainbows is going to work that’s not going to happen.

Not to say POD will guarantee any sales or interest. Actually, I’ll be straight, you’re probably looking at less sales than any conventionally sold midlist title. The difference is YOU are in charge of your no sales. YOU control all the rights to your book. YOU stand or fall on your own merits. YOU will probably know every one of your readers personally, I do.

Most importantly, YOU will never be so traumatised with the process of publication that you are moved to give up writing forever. Unless you publish utter dross that I later savage which wounds your ego so much you put us all out of your misery and never boot up yWriter again.

If you are Thomas M. Hunt I would urge you not to give up. Write something new. Publish it on Lulu. Tell me you’ve done it. I want to read your work and I don’t think you should be beaten by an explosion in the dream factory.

And that goes for everyone else as well. Hell, you may not sell any books but the least you could ask is that you have fun creating them. Right?

The Book: The Shade By Thomas M. Hunt

Review Category: Bad Moods > Nearly

The Blurb: The Balance has been disturbed and the Adversary is coming. In the timeless struglle that is to follow strange protagonists play strange roles. Out of the desert a swordsman comes and our hopes all ride with him. Past the nameless town, in pursuit of the blond man, through the lightless mines, burdened by a man who’s dead and the bond of life Letitia has placed upon him, he struggles for us all.

Preview Available: PDF of actual e-book style thingie replete with hyperlinks to bits of the book that don’t exist in the preview and so on and so forth. Probably would print leaving ridiculously generous margins on A4 paper. Good sized chunk of prose included all fairly clean and superbly written. Good sense of story trajectory from the actual preview.

Why not buy this? It’s e-book only and I don’t read stuff that isn’t available as a printed and bound product using paper and ink. Had it not been for this factor (and had the price been under the magic £7 printed) this would have been a shoe-in for essential purchases… from which you can probably tell where this is going.

The Product: Nice cover, lacks a very minute amount in polish. E book must be professional looking. Nice stuff for a string of 1s and 0s

The Nitty Gritty: I am upset.

I am more than upset. There is a book out there that the author does not wish me to own at any price. I can own it as a data file, sure, that’s okay, but if I want some cardboard, glue, paper and ink I’m flat out of luck. It wouldn’t matter so much if the indications were that this book was going to be awful but they’re not. The generous 8 page preview is well written and involving, this looks like it could be an exciting read.

But at the moment I will never know for sure.

And I have to ask myself, is it worth getting upset about anyway? This book was e-published in 2004 (with copyright from 2003!) and in 5 weeks it will be 2007. The book has never been rated and the author’s page is, er, not the author’s page. It belongs to someone else entirely. Someone who has a bunch of other people’s e-books on his list and a connection to some long dead small press called cool publications…

So I go digging and find this:

Whatever happened to Cool Publications? (PDF)

And I weep.

Poor old cool publications, poor old Thomas M. Hunt, poor old readers. So there’s all the answers we ever need. Because of the way that Mr. Hunt chose to market his story everyone lost out.

For the record. The book itself is a story that blends Eastern mysticism with Wild West grit and some good old fashioned Greek style prophecy. The beginning, especially the opening paragraphs are so intensely reminiscent of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger that I had to go and re-read the beginning of that to be sure there was no plaigarism.

This is part one of a never completed trilogy. So there’s no point reading the book because it won’t resolve and never will resolve.

So essentially, don’t buy this. Not because it’s not good, but because it appears that it’s a dead story.

Shame. It had real potential.

The Book: A Tortured Soul by Richard Wheatley

Review Category: Bad Moods > Dear God Why?

The Blurb: Forty thousand years ago a Great War was fought in heaven. At the moment of ultimate victory the Lord of Death was betrayed by the one he trusted the most. Demonkind was forced to retreat into Hell and the betrayer, left in Angelic hands, pleaded for death. They created the Earth as his prison, and left him there was all eternity. Forty thousand years later Earth, now teeming with life, has become the new battlefield and the only one who can lead the race of man to survival is that rebel of darkness and light, despised and respected by all his own kind.

Preview Available: In MS Word 3 and a half single spaced pages in Times New Roman

Why choose this? I must have blinked and missed how terrible the blurb is and at the time I didn’t see the preview… otherwise I would have saved my money.

The Product: Lulu default cover which is most popular amongst my bad mood selections the red one with the blurry silhouette of thorns in the foreground. The story starts bang, first page after the front cover, no attempt to render this as a regular book with title pages and the like. The MS Word Spellchecker corrections inside would have been acceptable if not for the fact that the typography is appalling. The word ‘indent’ does not seem to appear in Mr. Wheatley’s vocabulary. Basically the book looks like one long, rambling paragraph as does the preview. This should be a clue…

The Nitty Gritty: I am glad I own a copy of this book because I want something to show to people when they ask how not to self-publish their work. I don’t even need to go into how terrible the actual content is because the author has done such a sterling job of putting people off with the actual look of the product.

You don’t even need to read any of the actual words inside the book to appreciate that this volume seems to be an ‘as is’ dump of a hastily spell-checked MS Word document. No care has been taken in the cover, in the typesetting or in the clearly laughable proof-reading process (if this was any more than a swift once over with the spell checker - misapplied homonyms and slightly misapplied similar words ahoy!).

This is precisely the kind of thing that gets Self-Published authors a bad name. I tried. I mean I really tried to read it. I went outside with nothing else to do and sat in a cafe and plugged through the first ten pages. I was waiting for a moment when it would click, when something would happen that gave some indication that the author had any clue how to tell a story at all, whatsoever, the merest inkling would have done.

But no, there’s a bit in italics that declaims some stuff about some demon or other and proudly proclaims that A.D. as in 2000 A.D. stands for “after death” (I remember believing this to be true once… when I was six years of age, then I asked someone to be sure and that was the end of that), for those of you in the dark it stands for “Anno Domini” Latin for “In the year of our Lord”.

The thing is I can forgive a declamatory style. I can forgive minor factual errors and even major ones. IF THERE’S A STORY!

But then there’s some woman who’s being attacked by imps, no… no… she’s watching imps fighting. And she has a name but the author can’t even seem to decide which tense he’s writing in so it seems dangerously like for a few moments there’s about three women with the same name who all do different things. Then you think, no, they’re all the same woman. They have the same name. I’m not really getting a sense of this.

Then there’s the devil and he has a daughter. Then they attempt to speak to one another and, oh my God was that a mistake. This is classic Lucas-ese, you can write this stuff but you sure can’t say it. The conversation basically added up to the daughter having a cunning plan for taking over earth, or something and daddy dearest replying oh, okay then. But they were drinking some blood and whipping some slaves and cackling evilly as they did it.

I mean, I can’t describe to you how terrible an experience it is to try to make sense of this jumbled buffet of half-thought out concepts. I’m not even going to mention how cliched it is because cliche is the least of our worries. The point is it doesn’t begin at the beginning and it has no middle and I’m sure it probably doesn’t end at the end. It’s a structure free writing exercise that no one should be forced to read.

I don’t really know what else to say, except, this is precisely the kind of writing I would never attempt to actually criticise. Mr. Wheatley would have to give me some iota, some tiny inkling, that he had even the merest clue about how to tell a story before I could even start.

Compare this with my review of Mayhem At Grant-Williams High. That volume did not garner from me the highest praise ever but it was a million, billion times more complimentary and constructive than I could ever be about this.

As always with any review I am prepared to accept that this is my opinion. Some other hardy reader may indeed find this to be an undiscovered gem of the dark fantasy genre. They may, it is possible. The fact is that it is hard for me to imagine such a situation. My only criticism of the writing that should mean anything is this:

This is garbled to a point where it is impossible to tell whether the story is any good or not. I don’t really know what the story is. Except the blurb kind of describes what it should be. But what I read bore no resemblance to that and neither does what is outlined in the book’s preview.

I implore you not to fall into the same trap as I did. Read the preview and if you think I am being at all unfair please feel free to buy this. Otherwise avoid it at all costs because the only tortured soul I came across in my time with this volume was me.

Keep an eye on that ever escalating body count!

Ritual Sacrifices - 4
Wolf Maim Fatalities - Probably round about 40 give or take.
Werewolves Offed - Um, 24ish
Soul deaths following possession - 3
Actual deaths of possessed bodies - 2 (Soul died first so only counts as part of the latter aggregate)
Casualties of War - 601ish
Casualties of Haunted Nightclub - Around 100 confirmed
Peaceful deaths of old age - 1
Possible deaths resulting from a berzerker rage gone wrong - 1 (possibly so not counted for rigor’s sake)
Ghoulish Supernatural Cannibalism Incidents - 5 baby - but one is counted in the night club so only really 4 unique ones.
Running Total: 773 and counting.
Total rise since last update: 147 yeah, baby

Chapters Nailed: Prologue - Mait’ Carrefour, Chapter One - Cernunnos, Chapter Two - Animus The Bone Eater
Current Chapter: Chapter Three - Thomas Rempstone
Word Count: 70562/50000 oops
Coffee Consumed: Possibly round about 13 litres
Snacks Consumed: Approx 24 mini flapjack bites, 6 bananas, 3 fried egg sandwiches, 20 coconut bites, 3 yoghurts, 1 enormous bacon sub, 3 custard doughnuts, half a tube of plain Pringles.
mp3s listened to: 160ish
Mood: Quintus Petilius
Sounds: Grrrrraaaaaarrrggh

So having a meeting cancelled and waiting on some materials from another third party I found myself browsing my favourite publish on demand site and decided to get down to the business of ferretting out potential reads from the Sci-Fi Fantasy section.

Well, blow me down with a feather. Every book now has a preview of some sort. I cannot tell you how enormously fantastic this is. I just went down the list page 1 to page 5 and organised the things I saw into two broad boxes with several sub boxes below.

The two broad boxes are Buys and Bad Moods. The former for books I fully intend to buy and read properly, the latter for works which can be adequately reviewed from the preview alone and trust me, if this is possible, it ain’t a good book.

Within Buys books come under the sub-categories to be considered in the order: Priority, Roused Interest, Expensive, Barely. The reason for this is that I want to buy a book for under 8 of your English Pounds, and I want it to be interesting and if it has that something special then so much the better. Books that may be expensive and somewhat lacklustre teeter in the void of barely.

Basically, next time I buy from Lulu, which will be when I order a proof of Starfall I imagine, I can order two or three books. Authors beware. If I have something in my priority list it’s getting bought. If I’m done with all the things in my priority list then anything cheap that roused interest will go next. If I’m really pressed I’ll fork out for one expensive item and if I’ve really managed to slog through all that then I’ll look grudgingly in the barely folder.

Trust me, that’s what competition is like. So far I have two priority titles. Only because the three other titles that would have made it straight into priority with a bullet had been stupidly priced above 8 pounds. Don’t play a player dimwits. I know how cheap a book can be produced for none of mine even crest 7 pounds and nobody’s buying those. So you got bumped below very possibly less talented authors because they priced their wares more modestly.

Moving on to the bad moods pile.

These are subclassified: Nearly, Preview Only and Dear God Why?

Nearly books are books I had to read at least two pages of the preview of to decide that they were, in fact, dross. When I review these previews I will be kind but critical. I would never buy a bad mood book, but I will try to give the author encouragement that they could make the buy list in future if they tidy things up a bit.

Preview only books are deeply flawed with no rescue at all but they’re kind of mundanely bad. Nearly authors have some writing ability and I’m trying to get them to write better. Preview Only authors really need to take a good hard look at their work before showing the world anything else.

Lastly there’s the evil depths of “Dear God Why?!?” this is a pestilential category reserved for a) works so mind-bendingly incomprehensible you wonder how a human being could even have authored such a fractured jumble of linguistic spaghetti. And also b) for books that approached readable but had some deep and obvious flaw that made the work totally unreadable. These books may have sentences and structure and characters and all that jazz but you wonder how the author failed to notice the stinking conceptual offal that made the work utterly unapproachable.

Oh, and c) books which may even have made it into the buy pile but for some incomprehensible reason are not available to the buyer as a paperback. This is scummy behaviour. If I want to pay £7.99 or less for a paper printed copy of your book rather than £0.69 for an e-book that should be my choice. Not yours as the author. Or are you trying to send people away?

When I review these books, of which I have so far found only one example, it will be to encourage them to make the book available via tangible means. Whether it then goes into the Barely/Expensive/Roused Interest or Priority list will be reappraised at the time. In this case the title I’ve seen stands every chance of going into Roused Interest unless, of course, it’s too Expensive.

I shall be including in future reviews each work’s classification and sub-classification. For the record Mayhem at Grant-Williams high, had it been previewable at the time, would probably have been a Bad Mood Book in the Nearly Category. I hope my review reflects this.

Back soon with, unfortunately, another bad mood book review. Still waiting on the delivery of my first *Essential* purchase which I made by accident.

This article is one of a continuing series designed primarily to help aspiring authors get their word count up in response to those struggling during NaNoWriMo 2006. The articles outline a planning technique for any given novel which once completed aim to make it hard to stop writing the next necessary piece of information for the audience. The technique is based on structuring concepts and information and, as this is a blog, are to be read from the bottom up. They will later be collated into a single volume.

It used to be so simple. The beginning was “Once Upon A Time” the end was “And they all lived happily ever after” and everything else was the middle.

Then came the novel and everything changed. You were expected to deal with a hook, and a set up, and possibly multiple character threads and something called “in medias res” which meant something like “start in the middle”.

I mean what?

Start…

In the Middle?

And then there’s all those smug journeymen novelists with two or three works under their belt who pull out the old “Stories really have no beginning and no end, they’re all middle…” speech and it’s enough to make the beginner feel lost and frightened and alone and demotivated.

It’s really no fun thinking about structure these days. So most people don’t and they just pick up the thread somewhere that seems suitably in medias res and hope they haven’t forgotten anything.

Of course, if there are no real beginnings then you can’t help but start in medias res.

(For the record: this means something more like “start in the middle of something happening”. Because we know you were planning to start three days before your protagonist lost their parents in a freak ballooning accident and were going to detail their tedious life before that point for 20,000 words before anything actually happened… naughty you.)

Are you banging your head against something hard and flat yet? You knew there was a reason why you never really thought about structure before.

Well calm down. It’s really not that difficult.

First thing’s first. Structure is not plot and vice versa. So this isn’t a lesson about plot.

This is a lesson about beginnings and middles and endings. In a way we’ve already covered it. It’s introducing the conflict, describing the conflict and resolving the conflict. As always conflict just really means tension and it’s all about the way that you make your audience care about your story at all.

You could get all postmodern about it and ask why pander to the audience? And point out how art should not have to contain tension to please the sheep-like masses. In response I would say quite right, here’s your coat, there’s the door and the cheque for the full refund is in the post. For the rest of you I will just quickly re-iterate: Opposition/Conflict/Resolution, that’s all you need.

So we have Arturo Gatwick and his Grandpa and that whole deal and we want to tell that story. Where do we begin?

Well, we already know that the story really cannot start:

“Arturo Gatwick placed the rusty old key into the lock and felt the lock complain as he tried to work it inside.”

Why not?

Well,actually there is no real reason why not except the matter of Arturo entering the basement room does not really allow us to tell anyone who Arturo is without some serious literary backflipping. You could do it, it would look like this:

“Arturo Gatwick placed the rusty old key into the lock and felt the lock complain as he tried to work it inside. He wondered, for a second, whether the key would turn or whether the lock’s innards would just break apart when he moved it, leaving his grandfather’s basement door locked forever.

He didn’t even know why it was that he had been given this key by his grandfather’s lawyer. He didn’t even know what his grandfather had kept in this musty old basement. He had always thought he knew his grandpa, it seemed that he was wrong.”

So that does in fact give the audience all the necessary information to know who Arturo is and what it is he is doing and to a certain measure we could even infer why he is doing it.

But it isn’t great.

Why not?

Well, we now have to mingle the description of what Arturo is doing now with his memories of what lead up to him doing them. This is actually fine. Authors do it all the time. I do it all the time. There is a difference between me now and me doing it in one of the novels I am working on, though. Here, I am making it up as I go along. I have no structure. I am not sending Arturo anywhere.

Even if I know for certain what it is that Arturo will find in the basement (which I still don’t although I have a fair idea) I can have him find it but it won’t mean anything because all we know about Arturo is that his grandpa had a secret thing locked in his basement. Even if we know specifically what that thing is we don’t know what impact it will have on Arturo because we know next to nothing about Arturo. Worse, after the secret is discovered we cannot round off our piece because the conflict cannot be described and therefore cannot be resolved.

We look like we’re set fair for a literary adventure but we’re almost out of boat fuel and we’ve left our sail in the boathouse.

That’s really why that’s probably not the start of Arturo’s whole story. It might be the beginning of the chapter where our hero gains ingress into his Grandpappy’s inner sanctum but it’s not the very start.

This actually illustrates a very central point of first time novels very neatly. Eventually you do develop a sense for it but if this is anything less than your fifth novel you will almost certainly not start the story in the correct place. You may think you have, and to be fair, you may have enough material to get from word 1 to word 30,000 or so but unless your preparation can be sure to get you the whole way it’s going to fall flat.

The good thing about this is that you can just start somewhere else and alter your original beginning to fit in with what you thought it was when you reach it. Or, if you have made the rare mistake of starting too soon then you can just cut the bit that wasn’t relevant. Although that’s almost guaranteed to be a heartbreaker.

So how do we know that we are beginning our story in the appropriate place?

Sad truth is we never will. Until the thing exists we just don’t know. We can, however, provide ourselves with some kind of creative insurance.

Let’s do that for Arturo and Gramps.

The first thing every story needs is a timeline. The fact is stuff needs to have happened in the storyline before the reader comes into it. Even if I tell the reader:

“Once upon a time there lived a man called Arturo Gatwick who went to his grandfather’s funeral.”

Then the reader knows that way back in the mists of time a child was born who had another child who in turn had a third child and that child grew up to be Arturo Gatwick. This is only implied but it had to happen.

Some smart ass authors have elected to start their story “In the beginning there was darkness… etc” I am one of them, but even that’s just a way to say “I know that there are things that happened before this sentence which opens my story but bear with me and they’ll all become clear”.

So, if you start a story that way you’re really telling the audience you’re not so sure about what it is you’re doing. You, on the other hand, will not need to do that. Starting a story in the middle and just ploughing on with it tells the audience you have planned. You are going somewhere with this. The audience are in safe hands.

In this modern age of self-publishing you can actually look at the train wrecks caused by writers who do not care whether anyone can understand their story, they just write it any old way they like with a bunch of random characters floating in a void of inconsequential action. In Lit Fic this can be the point. In genre fiction it just means you hate your audience and want them to die unfulfilled not knowing what your story is about.

And all any of this comes down to is not having a plan and then not sticking to it.

So, the timeline.

You, as the author, have to sit down and pick a point in time when the first event that is directly related to the thrust of your story actually occurred. My latest novel has one and the first date in the calendar is 61 AD. Just to be exceptionally picky I also added an entry for “Before 61 AD” but that is just because I’m fussy like that.

In the actual body of the novel you only find out what happened in 61AD in the memories of someone whose present action is in 72 AD. So 11 years have already gone by when the reader picks up on that event.

That’s how particular you’re going to be.

Running parallel to your timeline should be a much looser general story event turnover. You may even choose to do this first. This just says, then this happens and then this happens and then this happens. And you go through time from start to finish placing one event after another. You can assign those events to actual years/months etc. later on.

In fact the present action of the whole novel I am currently writing is, oh, November 2006. So the chapter from 72 AD is actually just, well, something that happened in the distant past.

Not every event in your timeline or event plan will be explicitly described in the story. And although a story has a beginning a middle and an end those titles are conceptual, never merely chronological.

So you have your timeline and your general idea about things that happened in the story and you want to know how to combine these to make an actual narrative structure. The secret to this one is really dumb.

You start: “Once Upon A Time…” and you tell your story as quickly as possible with each piece of information only adding to the pile of information your audience needs to understand what the hell you’re on about. If you like you can end this process with the words “…and they all lived happily ever after.” as well.

You should do this twice. Once when you have your basic conflict but before you do your actual timeline and once when you have your timeline to fix the story with the new information.

So that’s basically today’s exercise. I’ll run through it step-by-step to reduce confusion.

• Pick one of your evolving stories. At this stage it should consist of an opposition/conflict/resolution arc, a list of questions from your annoying five year old about some central event and a quick series of notes about what the nature of the doozy could be. If you have more that’s great. If you have less you at least need a protagonist and a conflict.
• Write the story, as quickly as possible. Ignore everything that isn’t the central story. Just tell the whole story in as few words as humanly possible. Start “Once Upon A Time…”, end “And they all lived happily ever after.”
• Write a timeline. This can include events you know must have happened but are only implied in version 1 of the story. Make it as full as possible.
• Write the story again. Start it in the same place you did the first time as this is most likely (although not guaranteed) to be the actual start of your story. But you must, in the course of the story, fill in what happened in all the events in the timeline. Feel free to add any additional detail you feel might add colour as you go.

As an example I will leave behind my scribblings, here goes:

The Tale of Arturo Gatwick 1

Once upon a time there was a man called Arturo Gatwick who received a key in the will of his dead Grandfather. He found a door in his gramps’s cellar that the key fit into.

Inside the basement he found a mirror. The mirror lead to a magic kingdom where Arturo found that his gramps was a magician who had been forced to flee the magic kingdom.

Arturo could not believe the news that his grandfather had been a magician in a magical kingdom but he had a meeting with his boss tomorrow for which he really needed to prepare a presentation. So he left his grandfather’s house never to return. And Arturo lived happily ever after.

Then the timeline:

The Timeline (In Earth Time)

1922: Mellifluous Gatwick born.
1942: M Gatwick becomes highest magician in the kingdom of Harroo.
1951: Darkling Stansted does a deal with the King of the world below to raise an army of evil ogres.
1952: D Stansted begins a fight against M Gatwick with his army of evil ogres. M Gatwick flees to earth and finds love in the arms of Mildred Keynes he never returns to Harroo.
1956: Gatwick and his new wife have a daughter, Edith.
1978: Arturo Gatwick is born to Edith Gatwick
2006: M Gatwick dies of old age and inherits the secret to M Gatwick’s past in the form of a key to the basement room where Mellifluous kept the door back to his study in Harroo. Arturo is amazed but returns to normal life.

Then the expanded version of the story:

The Tale of Arturo Gatwick 2

Once upon a time there was a man called Arturo Gatwick who received a key in the will of his dead Grandfather. He had always got on with his grandfather and had visited his house many times before but he had never seen a lock that looked as if this key might fit in it. Arturo went to grandfather’s house and looked upstairs and downstairs. Then he noticed a door he had never really seen before. It was behind a side table covered in ornaments and looked as if his grandfather had tried everything in his power to ignore it for all of his days.

Arturo moved the table and tested the door. It had no lock but it lead down to the basement. At the bottom of the stairs was a door that lead through to the main basement and this door was locked. Using the key which was very stiff in the old lock Arturo opened the door and went into the cellar.

He found a desk on which were placed several heavy books that were titled “The Practise of Magick” and ran through volumes one to seven. There were also a bunch of maps rolled up on one side of the desk bu they were not of anywhere Arturo had ever been. The continents and places on the maps were unknown to him and the names of the cities seemed strange and foreign.

There was a curtain draped over a large square object right next to the desk and when Arturo shifted it to one side he found a gigantic mirror. Although, on closer inspection Arturo decided it couldn’t be a mirror because he was not reflected in it. Even stranger the room on the other side of the frame was not Arturo’s grandfather’s basement. It was a completely different room in what looked to be a much older house.

Arturo went through the mirror, finding that it was in fact a doorway and discovered himself in a stone walled room which was bare of everything but a desk identical to the one in the basement on which was a very old letter sealed with wax. Arturo opened the letter and read the contents:

Dear Arturo,

If you are reading this it means that I am dead and you have inherited your birthright. You are standing in my old study in the Land of Harroo where I was once the most powerful magician in the whole of the world (a world, incidentally, called Primaris). In the winter of what you would know as the year 1952 I was involved in a mighty battle against my arch-nemesis Darkling Stansted and I was lucky to escape with my life. Darkling had done a deal with the lower world and the King of the Demons had assisted him with a horde of evil ogres which my own armies could not defend against.

Maybe I was a coward but when I escaped to your world I found the lack of magic most refreshing. After a brief time lost and alone I found your grandmpother, darling Mildred, and settled down to a happy existence far away from Stansted and his ogres.

You are free to do what you like with this knowledge but suffice to say that I have explained as much as I need should you choose to forget about this incident. Should you choose to explore the world of Primaris you will need the signet ring I gave you when you were 12 years old. In our world it is nothing but an attractive piece of jewellery. In this world it will be the guide you need to assume the mantle of the Gatwick magicians.

Yours,

Mellifluous Gatwick,
Highest Magician in the Kingdom of Harroo (Retired.)

Arturo could not believe the news that his grandfather had been a magician in a magical kingdom and that he was possessed of the genes to be the same. But he had a meeting with his boss tomorrow for which he really needed to prepare a presentation. So he left the letter on the desk, covered the mirror with the cloth, locked up the basement, replaced the side table and left his grandfather’s house never to return. And Arturo lived happily ever after.

Brilliant… I mean, it doesn’t really go anywhere and all we really learn is that Arturo Gatwick would rather work in an office than be a magician but it’s all there, beginning, middle, end.

The idea of that story is, in all seriousness, to highlight the weaknesses in our set up. I mean, really, if I were to discover that my grandfather was a magician in a fantasy kingdom and I could be the same I might be intrigued but I’d be too scared to by default go charging into a battle with the evil Darkling Stansted and his army of ogres. I’d need some persuading to get involved in that.

I might think about just going for a walk in Harroo. But what if I looked just like my gramps at that age? I might be shot on sight. I don’t know.

Better to get back to the office.

So if we want to make Arturo more than just a five minute hero we have to get down to the nitty gritty of forcing him to be the hero our readers are going to want. And to do that we want to a) develop character and b) develop the timeline a bit more.

I mean it’s not just Arturo that needs a bit more oomph, what of Mellifluous? and Mildred? And Arturo’s mum Edith? and the Evil Darkling Stansted? We’ve made Harroo a kingdom so what’s the king like? And we’ve made a lower world, so what’s the king of the lower world like?

Oh look, the annoying five year old’s woken up… best go and feed it.

We have a cast. We have a story. The next thing to do is to find out more about our characters because that will push us onto the next stage of our story.

Till next time, when we’re going to come back to those pesky archetypes, we can all live happily ever after… now how reassuring is that?

Here’s that body count in full, read it and weep:

Ritual Sacrifices - 4
Wolf Maim Fatalities - 1 (dream only so not counted in final score)
Werewolves Offed - 8
Soul deaths following possession - 3
Actual deaths of possessed bodies - 1 (Soul died first so only counts as part of the latter aggregate)
Casualties of War - 601ish
Casualties of Haunted Nightclub - 5 confirmed
Peaceful deaths of old age - 1
Possible deaths resulting from a berzerker rage gone wrong - 1 (possibly so not counted for rigor’s sake)
Ghoulish Supernatural Cannibalism Incidents - 5 baby - but one is counted in the night club so only really 4 unique ones.
Running Total: 626 and counting.
Total rise since last update: 9, but they’re all really personal.

Chapters Nailed: Prologue - Mait’ Carrefour, Chapter One - Cernunnos
Current Chapter: Chapter Two - Animus the Bone Eater
Word Count: 49042/50000 confirmed
Coffee Consumed: Possibly round about 10 litres
Snacks Consumed: Approx 24 mini flapjack bites, 2 bananas, 3 fried egg sandwiches, 20 coconut bites, one yoghurt.
mp3s listened to: 120ish
Mood: Papa Legba
Sounds: Spider Man (does whatever a spider can)

It’s the one thing that all writers hate. It’s the doozy.

You’re happily there, writing along and all of a sudden you realise that you have no way to write what comes next and you don’t know how to get to the end without it.

The annoying 5 year old has stumped you with a question.

My first major encounter with the doozy came when I was, surprise, surprise, writing my first ever novel. I’d met the doozy before but that had often ended in project termination. It’s not a major encounter unless you win and move on.

I had started writing this chapter about an incredibly screwed up teenage wild child who was liable to get offed by my monster in the next few pages. Or get saved. Or at least be in some way involved in some encounter with the big bad.

I happily wrote an introductory paragraph about her being dropped off at her friend’s house. I wrote about how the friend’s house was at the end of a long alley behind a bunch of shops. I wrote how she was glad to be out of the car and away from her mother and then…

Then it struck me.

I was a 17 year old boy, who got on reasonably well with his mum. I didn’t know anything about being a screwed up 16 year old girl who loved and hated her mum all at once. I didn’t have the first clue how to describe their relationship. I couldn’t think of a way to write it so it didn’t sound trite and rubbish and patronising.

Heroes… heroes are easy to write, they don’t have problems, or at least not ones that can’t be solved with enough ammunition. Villains, ha, a breeze, even easier. But flawed, female, protagonist style minor characters. The wrong gender, the wrong subject matter, the wrong everything.

I didn’t write a word on the novel for three months.

So how did I get through it?

Well, at the time I took the most obvious course. I blitzed it. I glossed over it. I just didn’t talk about it. I mentioned that she and her mum didn’t get on and her mum took too many tranquilisers and I moved on.

That, people, is not the way to deal with the doozy.

It did teach me one important lesson. Don’t write characters you’re not happy about answering the annoying 5 year old’s questions about. If you simply don’t think you have enough information to answer the questions then don’t even try.

So really the proper resolution to that problem was just not to start at all. I’ll be coming on to laying out your pitch for maximum writing convenience in a later article. It is vitally important what you bring to the match and how much planning you’ve done. But even with the best will in the world you’re going to come to the doozy. So today’s article relies on you having prepared adequately enough that the doozy may be overcome. If you’re more in the position that you’ve written yourself into a corner then you’ll have to wait a wee while.

As far as writing the opposite gender, or from any other distant perspective from which you have little perspective, please remember:

People are all, really, just people.

In reality that’s a bit of a glib little saying that is of limited use. To a fiction writer it’s absolutely golden. As long as you write a person as a believable person who’s to say you are wrong. If you are way out of your comfort zone then some people will take a pop. Live with it. I am currently writing a novel in which the protagonists are a 23-year old battered woman and a 27-year old Haitian descended vodun practitioner. Both characters have a built in sensitivity that require me to portray them in a way that won’t irritate the vast majority of those minorities bearing in mind that it’s one of those smug, white, 31 year old males that’s writing about them.

My only defences are that I love people, and all my characters are written with a love for who they are warts and all; plus I have paid the respect of doing deep research to make the characters somewhat real.

Because I don’t want all my books to be about smug white men, or smug white boys. I want to mix it up a bit.

In the end if an individual’s motivation for doing a given thing in a given way is plausible given their circumstances then it should be alright.

But maybe that’s all a bit weighty for right now. After all we’re supposed to be thinking about Arturo Gatwick and his Grandpa and the secret that kept them apart.

As it happens Arturo and Gramps are both smug white males so I should be on safe ground. No research need be done. Yet I am still stuck without inspiration. What to do?

Easy.

Bear in mind: Somebody has written your story before.

Not exactly your story, of course. That would lead to copyright issues and an all pervading sense of pointlessness and anguish. But given any dramatic situation somebody will have written it before.

What you have to do is use that fact to break the blockage. Someone else has done the legwork so you don’t have to. You need to take a step back.

You have to use archetypes.

Now at this point in the proceedings it may seem that things take a turn for the dull and prescriptive. And to be fair they kind of do. But when you’re in a jam most of the time you tend to wish somebody would just tell you what the hell to do.

So here it is.

We have a situation in our example where Arturo and his grandfather have a secret in between them. So let’s take a step back. Arturo is our hero or protagonist, he’s clearly a young man in comparison to his grandpa and therefore we can label him “the young hero” even if really he’s more of a “middle aged protagonist”. The grandpa, standing on the opposite side of this equation, is therefore to be labelled “the old man”.

Now there’s a bunch of stuff you can read about archetypes and what they represent but it’s all kind of piecemeal. I guess I’m going to have to put it in a future article. For now though just take the specific characters that you’re having difficulty with and label them up like that so you have: “a young woman” or “a romantic lead” or what have you.

Now just run through the situation like this:

“What story have I heard where these two characters are in conflict over this?”

In our example:

“What story have I heard where a young hero gets involved in the mysterious past of an old man?”

What surprised me was that my answer was “The Da Vinci Code”. If you recall, should you have had the pleasure of Dan Brown’s myth-busting potboiler, the character Sophie in that novel was given a huge, mysterious responsibility conferred upon her by her grandfather after the old man’s death.

So in that story why didn’t the old man mention the secret to his beloved grand-daughter before his unfortunate demise?

Well, there were several reasons:

• They had been quite close, then had fallen out but the grandfather still loved his grandchild
• The secret was dire and involved with something he wanted to protect his grandchild from coming to harm because of
• The secret was immense and generally controversial on a global scale; the grandfather was protecting himself as much as the grandchild
• The grandfather had made a pledge to others not to reveal the secret except under certain circumstances

All or any of these can help me re-approach the doozy question. What is gramps’s problem? Could be any of those. Thinking about what kind of secret might have lead Arturo to grief had he known it is more of a fun kind of task because it could be loads of things. Suddenly the brain is working again. Or it should be.

To be honest, if it’s still not working that’s just because you haven’t got prescriptive enough. But that’s for a later article. For now, the exercise:

Well, this is going to be fairly obvious now. I want you to take the three doozies you should have left over from the last exercise. I want you to deconstruct them and then I want you to find another story where that general situation came up and note down the possible answers that whichever story it was came up with.

That’s all, although as always if you’re really keen to plug on you could attempt to respecify those reasons and add them back into your own practice stories.

In the next article I’ll be talking about beginnings, middles and endings, how you as the author can identify where yours are, and how to systematically begin working on a more elaborate story plan.