Sunshine Stopped Play - Writing is just not Cricket

Lingering. Not malingering - I think -  today. Sunshine has waylaid my plans for writing. No bad thing. Time for reflection and letting the book settle. I could never up sticks to Provence or Tuscany (even if I could afford it.) I would never get anything done, except - perhaps - in the two months either side of Christmas.

I tell myself that I can undertake ebook formatting of Badgerman & Bogwitch and revisions of the new book in the evenings if I feel inclined. After all there is time. I have set a deadline for end of September 2012 to start full-tilt on an entirely new project.

I have been reflecting on the Wind in the Willows, as I do every Spring when it suddenly appears. It is a book I can admire from the perspective of childhood. I indulge it. It is beyond criticism. It is synonymous with sandwiches eaten by ten-thirty a.m., hungry again by twelve, ravenous and pooling small change for wine gums by three.

I have ordered a second-hand edition of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine (my copy has long gone - and you can't get it on the Kindle.) I want to read the scene again where Douglas Spaulding puts on his new tennis shoes and races off into summer.

And all the while, I have been contemplating The Hunger Games and what it means for childhood. I have not read it yet or seen the movie. So I can only have fears and no opinions. Who knows, The Hunger Games may yet prove to be a metaphor for publishing?

ebooks: lazy ways & easy money - why proofreading matters

Have you ever read an ebook on Kindle that doesn't have some formatting problems: spacing errors, randomly indented paragraphs, typos? I haven't.

I am not just talking about the free out of copyright classics, but recently published novels like David Guterson's Ed King, (Bloomsbury pub.) which I am enjoying. Fortunately I bought it on the Kindle Deal of the Day promotion for £0.99. At the current price of £5.00 I'd feel less charitable about the formatting errors (of course it could be a problem with my particular Kindle Keyboard 3, bought in 2011.) You wouldn't accept a printed book in this condition, so why do we have to put up with imperfect ebooks?

Formatting an ebook is not an easy option, as I am finding with Badgerman & Bogwitch. It is straightforward to convert the file from a Scrivener document. It took less than thirty seconds. It is only when you look closely at the .mobi (Kindle format) or epub file that you come across formatting errors, that have to be painstakingly corrected by going back to the original word processor file. And much of this seems to be trial and error - it could take days!

If you publish an ebook you owe it to your readers to get it right.

Cloud Gazing & The Book Without a Story

On my third attempt, after eight hours work (well, a lot of sitting around actually) across two days and downloading some more software, I have uploaded a competent time-lapse movie (32 seconds covering a period of two hours).

It is technically ok. I solved a few problems along the way, like making sure I switched off the autofocus on the camera. My first attempt was dizzying, because the lens kept zooming in and out every 24th of a second during my first movie attempt. (N.B. You have to take 24 still pictures to create one second of video.)

So what's wrong with it? At first sight, nothing. Have a look for yourself. (Click here for Movie.)

But it's like a book. Without a story, without artistry and without a heart it is nothing. It is a doodling; a lesson learned along the way to something better.

Funnily enough, all this has helped me re-focus on my writing.

Time-Lapse and other Displacement Activities

What to do when you have just finished your first draft? While it settles like roast beef straight from the oven, (vegetarians be not offended - it has been said that I was born politically correct), I am leaning about making time-lapse movies. It seems an appropriate thing to do and keeps my imagination engaged.

The photography - and I only claim to be competent at it -  also engages me with the local landscape which is so important to my books. My stories are set in the small towns and the five valleys around Stroud, or an imagined version of them.

Of course the sudden interest in time-lapse movie-making might be another displacement activity. My next task is to finish the revised Badgerman & Bogwitch for ebook publication. What's putting me off? Filling in the Form W-7 and sending my passport off to the American Embassy for a US IRS Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, so I won't have to pay income tax in the US. That's Amazon.com for you, good or bad.

Meanwhile, as I drink tea, my DSLR is clicking away every 4 seconds, and will continue to do so (I hope) for the next couple of hours.

A time-lapse movie I made earlier: Selsley Common.

It's a 1st draft - 373 Words that make all the difference!

An eight o'clock start is always a good sign. Forty-Five minutes and three hundred and seventy-three words later I had finished the first draft of the new book.

I stood up from my desk with the same joyous abandonment as finishing the last paper of my Finals. At that time I took two weeks off to laze around and read. (Why would I do that when I'd been reading five books a week for three years?)

What shall I do now? Well, I won't start my revisions immediately. I shall leave it for a week or two and potter about with a new idea. Maybe start a third book.

As for the first draft being finished, I simply reached the point where I could safely leave it. For now it will do, like an electrician making the wiring safe for the weekend, but needing to come back to do a permanent job on the Monday.

So it weighed in at 53,626 words. Numbers are important. I want the MS to be 48,000. In revising I reckon to lose 25%-30% of the words simply by writing better sentences, which would leave me about 8,000 words short of my target. This difference will be made up by the writing of new scenes and the deletion or revision and development of others.

It may take another two or three drafts - three months' work. But I shall get there in the end.

iTunes is not as sweet as birdsong - but it has its uses

When is the world silent? Never. Hopefully. My writing world is full of distracting noise; birdsong mostly, calling me outside. It is a shame to blot it out, but I do if I am to get anything done.

How do I do that? With music; my iTunes Writing Playlist. (100 tracks, 7.7 hours of music - I rarely get beyond 2.5 hours, the length of a typical writing session.)

The music serves two purposes. The first one I have already mentioned. The second is the most important. The music provides me with continuity. Like in a film it adds atmosphere and links the scenes and silences. It is a signal that tells me it is time to start work. The familiar playlist is the continuity I need for writing the story; it links one day with the next. Throughout the course of the novel I never change it.

But the music must never have words. It tends to be someone playing the piano, occasionally accompanied by an orchestra. The volume is set to the level of a secondhand bookshop with a Mozart string quartet in the background; it is like mites of dust in a shaft of sunlight. Greenery beyond.

It works for me.

Playlist: click here.

Ten things that tell you the novel is done

How do you know when the book you are writing is actually finished?

1. It tastes like a crisp apple.
2. It burns in your throat like homemade ginger beer on a summer's day.
3. It smells like clean cotton sheets.
4. It preens like a Drake in breeding plumage.
5. It is like dozing in sunshine.
6. It is as if you have discovered Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine for the first time.
7. It is your eleventh birthday.
8. It is the first day of the summer holidays
9. For me, it seems like 1964.
10. ... someone else agrees that it is ok.

If it is all these things and it just feels right, then it is done. You have to stop somewhere.
Sometimes you have to be content with good enough.

Why I walked away from the book.

Sometimes a book in the making becomes an entrenched position like one side of an argument. It is best to walk away and reconsider one's standpoint; there's nothing to be gained in spoiling a good relationship by hanging onto a view you know to be wrong, but can't work out how to change.

I walked away from my book this morning, because it felt a little like that. There was no purpose in getting worked up about it, because I knew the plot wasn't going to budge. And basically I was too tired to argue with it as well.

Besides, the fog had cleared outside. 1 March - nearly Spring. The sun came out. I took someone else's book outside and started to do some gentle research for a future project.

It's true, a cup of tea and a fresh perspective cures most things. Today will become tomorrow; the earth turns.

Now I have come back to my book. The answer was obvious really. I should have listened to what the story was telling me in the first place.