Day 5: A break later

So I didn't write anything last night. A combination of starting back at work, having a trip on today and general rattiness on my part meant that I wasn't really in the right mood to write anything other than swear words and curmudgeonly moaning and ranting. Tonight I had the pressure to let out and have managed to impose some kind of order on the sections that I've written so far, so that there isn't really a contiguous section to post here tonight.

Mostly I now have a plot, ish, with a structure that helps it all make a modicum of sense. I have two plot lines that seem to be self-sustaining and a feeling that I want to pervade them both - it can best be summed up by that Eurovision song I was referencing in an earlier post, but I have no idea how I'm going to get that whole idea working and woven into the very fabric of the story I'm trying to tell.

I'm also this-way, that-way on whether to include a male MC this year. I mean, there's a potential one that I've written in tonight along with a semi-important supporting cast member who is also male that I already had (Tremayne) but... I don't know. I'm quite keen on having most characters as females, at least, most named and important characters, because most books do the opposite and I would like mine to be different. The other reason is simply because I'd like the challenge of writing that way, in a way that most readers would not consider to be 'normal' when, in reality, it's just as 'normal' as mostly male characters in books.

Also, it's not actually fundamentally changing the plot or the story, it's just switching the gender of the characters from what most people would expect. Meh, I'm like that from time to time.

Of my bits and bats, numbering some 2,000 words this evening, 750words tell me that I am feeling mostly upset (with anxious coming a close second) and concerned mostly about money (with success a close second). This is unusual for my writing.

Total wordcount is now 9,565 words. Yay?

The Space

I had an energy drink to help with the marking hell yesterday and then I had a business idea while out with my Boy getting chocolate on a walk whilst my Lovely took a driving lesson and the Girl to her own drama group.

Anyway, yes, I saw an empty building on the town high street, the business of people walking around, and heard the noise and the frenetic nature of the errands being run. And it got me thinking. What if you owned a business that was mostly automated doors, maybe a couple of private pods, and then simply sound-proofed them, removed signal for phones and wi-fi and charged by the minute for the use of the space? In somewhere like London, Manchester, Leeds, New York or Singapore you might get a bit of passing trade as people looked for somewhere quiet to be alone.

What would they do in there? How would you prevent abuse of the facilities? Well, CCTV, obviously, with monitoring. Wait! I thought, why CCTV? Why not a webcam to broadcast live to the internet? Then you could have a pay-per-view online. The rent for the space would cover the rent or lease on the building and the pay per view would provide a profit. Do it right and it would go viral too.

Then you could add another floor. What if you could rent beds by the hour? It may work out cheaper than a hotel in some of these locations. Add some cameras and you have a whole new area to exploit for money. By this point the beds would be pure profit as would any extra proceeds from the pay per view website. It would capitalise on our love of voyeurism and reality TV as well as play with the notions of privacy (people renting a space to be alone knowing that they are being broadcast on the internet but with no way of checking what they look like). And whilst it would probably work as a business idea I think it would be fascinating as a fiction project.

So, here I am planting the idea in my blog. I hope to start writing something to do with it soon.

If you use it for business or for fiction, let people know you got it from me, that's all I ask (though if you make money and want to send me royalties, that's nice too).

Mood Music

One thing I find very helpful when writing, and I'm sure I've mentioned it before, is music. Maybe it's just the way my mind works but I find it easier to immerse myself in something when I have a soundtrack. It's the same in films, but mainly effective when I get to set the tracks to events in books. It's why Iron Sky was somewhat jarring in places (and why I still haven't bought the otherwise excellent soundtrack) and why I enjoyed Fifth Element so much (and did buy the soundtrack, on a whim).

To this end I have two such soundtracks to share with you.

I think I've already said that my latest bout of contiguous writing, Nothing to Fear, was written to the Pet Shop Boys, for the most part, and structured around the track listing of their Fundamental album. That was because the album was very good for creating a particular kind of political narrative suffused with various love stories, all of them vaguely bittersweet, and that was a good background for what I wanted to do. I got as far as track 4 in terms of plot, partly due to the extended nature of the war that started, and found myself bringing in extra tracks to help various scenes and ideas.

However, these were not writing tracks. They were very specific and helped me do a job. Free writing, the kind I don't have much time for these days, is best done to proper immersive music. I have +Nina Mideast Journal, who is lovely, to thank for introducing me to Wait for her, a poem set to music, that fits the bill for what I'm talking about. But she also recently reminded me of the wonderful Ludovico Einaudi whose Una Mattina and Divenire are just divine and work so well to help the flow of words onto the page.

So, the first soundtrack to share is Divenire, which is just beautiful, and always gives me images that are similarly stunning and uplifting. Except maybe Ascolta, which is just raw emotion and sadness - I still love it of course, but it is a different scene that stems from the playing of the emotions.

Musicals are another good thing to write to for me, because they have to do so much with the voice to express emotion with the lyrics. They are actors, yes, but they are forced to rely on the song to get across their thoughts and must show as well as narrate. This means that the combination of instrument and voice can really crank up the emotions if done well - a double act by singer and composer from the beginning. Even brilliant musicals can be botched and awful lyrics saved by the cast.

My second soundtrack is Closer to Heaven by, you guessed it, the Pet Shop Boys. At the moment the stand out tracks are Closer to Heaven (reprise I) and Positive Role Model, neither of which appear to be on youtube and therefore I can't share them directly. But I do urge you, dear visitor, to seek them out and listen. While the gay love story is not to everyone's taste it is a love story. I'm not gay but I can recognise the power of the lyrics and the emotions contained within them well enough - that crosses boundaries in a way that sometimes I can't quite get. For instance, I love Chess the musical but I can never quite buy the love triangle between Florence, the Russian and Svetlana - they sing well, with emotion, but I never 'get' the love. They are, of course, straight, so I should recognise it from my own life experience. But it is nowhere near as powerful as the love in Closer to Heaven.

I think I may have strayed on a tangent here...

Opening words and centenaries

I've been reading a lot about how to start novels lately, it's a habit of mine, and how to introduce characters quickly and in such a way as to draw in the reader. And, I'm sorry to say, much of what I read is uninspiring. I don't mean to say that this should not be the aim of authors or that anyone who writes should not emulate those that are successful, but I worry that there has been a dumbing down of what we mean by this.

Swiftly put: I'm not at all convinced that some of the examples I've been reading do any of the jobs that people who quote them say they do. None of the 'great' openings by mainstream authors that I have read seem to do it terribly well, in fact, they instead seem to plumb for the long opening that leaves it until, say, the third or fourth page to draw the reader in. What do I mean? I mean authors that are famous enough to trade on their name tend to skimp on this art, because it's bloody hard to do, and these authors are the ones that get used by newbie writers and wannabe authors to explain what they mean. It does both sides something of a disservice.

My other thought, for my time is tight, is that the First World War nears a centenary and this will mean a sudden influx of books, films and plays about that area of history. My own novel may well be badly timed in this regard as there will be bigger names making plays at publishing for the next five years and many many unpublished authors also trying to get noticed with 'novel' takes on the First World War novel. Given that's what my own novel has become I'm not certain that it would get noticed at all.

Novelling

I have a confession to make.

I have never actually finished any writing of any length. I have countless short stories that I have finished but they were written between the ages of about ten and twenty. They are not the most edifying of things. After I finished my degree, well, I haven't really been in a place where writing short stories would work.  In that, well, those stories were... bad.

So, in 2006, after much fruitless furtling about trying to write an actual first draft of anything, I tried my hand at NaNo.  I wrote 85,000 words plus about 21,000 words that I deemed unfit to be in the final project. But it was not a novel. It was unfinished and I had no real idea where I was going with it all. Anastasia may or may not have had imaginary friends and may or may not have had her memories altered by some shadowy government agency (or not) for some reason. My plotting remained as amorphous as that. 8,000 words were devoted, in one instance, to her waking up routine.

In 2007 I tried again, but got about 12,000 words in before the lack of plot killed me and the lack of characters became a major issue. 2008 was two projects, both very boring with no plot and no real attempts at characterisation. In 2009 I actually wrote something that had been fulminating since 2007 and got about 26,000 words done. However, despite having a much more vibrant setting than I was used to and some actual real characters I still had no plot for them to live. As a consequence it remains totally unfinished because I have no clue what's supposed to happen there (that is, what I fill that vibrant setting with). In 2010 I tried the same setting. Again the lack of plot killed it at around 18,000 words. In 2011 real life prevented any writing at all for most of the year as I struggled with my day-job and the day-job won.

Now, this year is different. No, I haven't finished the novel at all. However, I know where it is going. I have a character and a plot that live and a setting, though not as vibrant and real as the one from 2009, that will stand the story I want to tell there. And I do want to tell that story. I am maybe half way through that story, I don't know (the war that takes up so much of this year's project was planned to be a short three or four vignettes, so about 4,000 words, and is currently about 38,000 words), but I feel happier with this than any of the rest of my projects.

Why the wall of text? I told my mother that I "won NaNo" and, after explaining it to her (again), she replied "Well, you never finish anything, do you?" Thanks, Mum. My father was interested until I explained that there was no judging and then sort of let it drop.

I have a reputation, you see. :)

Evil?

So, tonight, I have found myself writing a kissing scene and a rescue from a burning building with a playlist that rattled between Angel by Massive Attack and Fire by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown.  I have also found myself deciding that my main character is not a person I would particularly like to meet in real life.  I fear he holds up a mirror to humanity that I do not find terribly flattering but, at the same time, I worry that his mirror is more accurate than I would like.

Basically, well, after that conversation I wrote last I began to wonder about him.  I already knew that he was going to rescue his love interest from a burning building and that his own ineptitude in romantic affairs coupled with the near death experience of his paramour would lead them to cheat on him.  I knew that.  I also knew that, in order to make the relationship believeable, there would need to be something physical beyond hands around shoulders and hints in dialogue.  What I was most certainly not prepared for was what happened.

The kissing scene held a predatory passion that I did not know the character possessed and the fire rescue carried the discovery, and the deliberate leaving for dead, of a young girl trapped in a room.  The latter one leaves me with the most qualms.  I don't like it very much, though William was perfectly happy to ignore it afterwards, and even though I wrote it... well, it doesn't feel very much like me.  I think I'm channelling Billy-boy, and it's not an experience I relish!

On a happier note, the plague has passed the household, the children are sleeping better and so I have time to write again.  Hurrah.  3,468 words today and a pizza.  That's worth celebrating.

Conspiracy?

Idea sleet ahoy!

Ages ago I had the idea for a detective-esque story set in Prehistory.  Oetzi, the ice mummy discovered in the Alps, seems to have been killed by a blow to the back of his head with a blunt object.  Otherwise he was alone.  It would appear that we are dealing with a murder.  Some form of murder mystery in such a time is therefore not totally improbable given the enormous level of societal sophistication we can find evidence for.  However, I have steered away from indulging it because of the immense amounts of research such a thing would require.

I mean, I would first have to read the Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean Auel before even knowing where to look to find the sort of things I would need to actually write anything of merit.  Then there's the issues of language, of pan-European movement and climate to consider.  It gets complicated fast.

I have been doing quite a good job of avoiding thinking about it as a viable idea in the run up to this year's madness.  Then Radio 4, yes I am officially that old now, decided to do a number on me.  There was this show on whilst I was waiting in the supermarket carpark and there was someone on talking about the possibility that homo-sapiens and Neanderthal Man may well have interbred and inter-mingled as separate species.  They came from a common ancestor and were cut off by an elongated glacial period when some got trapped in Europe and some got trapped in Africa.  This meant that the original homo sapiens would almost certainly have been black whilst the Neanderthals would have been stockier, stronger, whiter and likely red-haired and green-eyed according to the studies done on their genome.  It would appear as though red-hair in homo sapiens was brought, perhaps, by interbreeding with Neanderthals, though studies have been entirely inconclusive - not even correllation!

It would therefore be fascinating to write about that period and to postulate on the interaction between two such different species as they met.  The lady on the show did a fine job of setting up a scene whereby they would spy members of the opposite species for the first time, separated by a couple of thousand years of development and having similar size brains and capacity for speech the difference would not have been insurmountable.  Furthermore, given the relatively short separation in evolutionary terms, they would have been able to interbreed and may even have shared linguistic roots!

Exciting.  But not possible for NaNo?

Mount Trepidation

I am so looking forward to NaNo this year.  I know, I know, everyone talks like this and I become one with the sea and tide of opinion.  But, seriously, I haven't done it since 2010 and, in that year, my experience was marred by a whole welter of nastiness elsewhere in life - mainly work - that meant I didn't enjoy it.  I'm anxious to be back.

That said, I do worry about time.  I mean, I've managed to hit the target twice in the past but one year  was without anything else to do.  I mean, I had my job, but that was it.  I also had massive disposable income and several hours a night with nothing to do in them.  I hit 85k words that year, but they were mostly pants (about 8k were usuable and quality) and the story remained stubbornly elusive.  In other words, I hit the target by sheer babbling.

The other success, if it can be called that, was simply writing 55k words in the month.  Three projects were undertaken and each one was abandoned before starting another.  The first, and most boring, was an 'official history' of an alternative First World War in which the Germans developed tanks (see, told you) first.  The second was an attempt at Socialist Britain that got no further than a conversation and a poor bit of background.  Final one was just a general ramble including a 5k piece that was a badly transcribed copy of the nuclear attack warning radio broadcast from 1975.

The rest... I've not hot 50k and I've certainly not got much of worth from the words themselves.  I haven't really attended write-ins though, and I did that first time, and I enjoyed it most when I did.  Even if the finished result was a bit pap.

So, I am looking forward to this year, but it is very much scaling Mount Trepidation now.  It's been four years since a 'success' and six since I really enjoyed it and got the bug.  Here's hoping I can recapture some of that!

Songs and Planning

Planning, yes, champing at the bit to get going.  Of course, still torn.

Also, I am beset by music and the idea, germinating in my head, to take about 15 tracks and use these to organise my writing.  That would imply approximately 3k words per track, and still be below target, as well as suggesting that each track would take about a chapter.

So, take the album Fundamental by the Pet Shop Boys and the film Hitler: the Rise of Evil and you pretty much have my autistic man becomes dictator and nastiness happens novel plot in a nutshell.  The trick will be to cover the early life in such a way that I can edit the order afterward and still make it interesting.  In films they often use isolated vignettes and time-lapse to cover aspects like this and most books I read don't actually bother with this sort of thing.  Those that do tend to be the more monstrous novels, those with huge doorstop plots (like Shogun) and they deal with the passge of time by, well, covering all of it.

I don't want to do that.  I'm not sure I enough sub-plot to make that sort of thing interesting and to advance characterisation and plot.  I'm toying with the idea of giving my MC a few more foibles to flesh it all out, such as maybe going for a homosexual angle.  Now, I'm anxious that my generally dysfunctional and slightly amoral autistic MC doesn't misrepresent minorities, so I don't think he'll actually be homosexual, but he doesn't know that and I figure he'll try.

I'm also moving more toward creating an independent world in which this plot can take place.  Why?  Well, partly laziness, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I would need to know inside out in order to make a political rise to power style of novel accurate and convincing in modern society.  To do it in a historical manner would necessarily invoke Godwin's Law and I would have a hard time escaping the allusions, however deliberate, to Hitler and the NSDAP - which would possibly make me look like I endorse their methods or their ideology.  That's a no-no.  But, if I do create a new world, then I will have to contextualise it enough without going overboard so that the reader feels at home enough there to make sense of it but not so at home that they make assumptions where they shouldn't.  They need to recognise that it is not our world but I shouldn't be hammering that home to the reader - they should be figuring that out for themselves and feeling clever!

Heck, at this rate, I could just publish my babbling and hit the target...

To prologue or not to prologue?

Time gathers pace and so my idea-sleet continues - of course.  I can't just have one idea for NaNo, I must have loads and then find that none of them are developed enough to actually manage to write and finish a novel or even a plotline!

Anyway, in amongst all of this there is a question to be asked.  Should one prologue?  I mean, with my autism-politics plotline I thought a prologue would be a good way to show how the end goes down in such a way that draws a reader in.  However, I also remembered that there are plenty of people and readers whose opinions I respect that say that they never even read prologues.  Which makes sense.

So, should I bother writing one or should I cheat and make it chapter one?  Or, horror, should I just not open and instead rely on the early life of my autistic future revolutionary to grab the reader?

Then there's the Aftermath plotline that keeps pootling around my head.  I originally cheated and added it to the end of the plotline that appears on this blog as Bradford Interchange but... I dunno, I have a soft-spot for the idea of a non-linear plot but for the fact that I would have to write it linearly to begin with - that would be hard for me to do.  In that sense it would be the perfect candidate for NaNo because I would be forced to write it and get it all done - and I may even edit it - but in another I worry that I would destroy it and get bored and then abandon it.

NaNoWriMo

If you haven't heard of this, it's worth a peak.  I'm intending to try again this year, first time in a while, and, as part of the challenge, I'm intending to post up here anything that I write on a given day.  That is, without revisions, and I shall publish all of the entries at the end of the month on a date in the past for the blog (so that I don't clog this place up with needless verbiage).

In other news, has anyone else had an idea for a story based on an album?  I mean, I know I am a bit of a freak with my zeal for the Pet Shop Boys, but I always feel like there are stories lurking in their music - especially using Fundamental as a skeleton and adding things like It's a Sin and Try It to give chapters and extra plotlines...

Okay, so first post here since MAY and I'm babbling as always.

The Day the Tanks Came

What if the Nazis had 'won', inasmuch as it were possible, the war in the USSR?  I recall Richard Overy saying that such a thing were possible in Virtual History in a rather well-researched 'what if' history.  He postulated that the organisation of the Ostmark that was to be created would have been cataclysmically badly done and chaotic, much like the Nazi state at large, and that the economics would have caused a collapse of Greater German finances in a few years.  Indeed, he seemed to suggest that the situation was critical even before the war had reached the turning points of Stalingrad and Guadalcanal.  In fact, the implication, made elsewhere in Overy's studies, was that the war prolonged the Nazi's power in Germany by allowing loot and pillage to fill the gaps left in the shoddy economic planning and fantasy-land ideas.
Anyway, I have an idea about writing a short story set in one of the NSDAP veteran farms in a place where that particular victory was run.  Greater Germany would be an almost anarchistic economic basket-case with some form or Nazi-dictatorship (there were no other politrical avenues open to the German people following July 1933) and that village would be created in line with the few clear organisational guidelines.  I guess Himmler would still be in charge too.

But what if the USSR, a more industrially minded country after all, had managed to survive along the border of perpetual warfare and created new factories utilising the mineral wealth of Siberia?  Ecological disaster almost certainly would have occurred but they may have lasted long enough to mount a counter offensive.  Against a pastoral economic basket-case like the Third Reich an ecologically bankrupt industrial USSR would have an intriguing relationship and reasons beyond ideology for fighting.  I'd love to explore that whole thing.

Anyway, when I have some time, that's an idea I would like to expand on this blog!

Historical?

I've always avoided proper historical fiction because of the research involved and the fear of not getting attitudes correct.  After all, we can't just port back the sort of behaviours we see in our society.  That said, I saw a series of images whilst pootling the other night that really makes me want to try for something about 1400AD.

However, my get out clause in any of this is 'alternate histories'.  Yeah, it's a cop out, I know, but part of me wants to try it some day.  Maybe not tonight though.