You Can't Land The TARDIS There...

It's been a long year - I figured it might be time to kick back for a week to regroup a little, so after the Manchester Show last weekend (which was superb, thanks for asking) we headed out for North Wales in search of some kind of downtime. Thus, in a week that contained a castle, a crazy bookshop, a TARDIS on a pier, some cable cars, a river, a horse-drawn canal boat, a big old Roman city and some extreme head space, I also found some time to slot in a spot of research in the shape of a trip to a certain house which features rather heavily in Turn The Lamp Down Low. I'm still not sure whether to name it as being the actual venue of events (in or out of the book) but it's a pretty big deal to have the colour and the shape of the 'main character' fleshed out in their entirety before I go any further. It's been more than twenty years since I last visited 'the house'. Much has changed and yet, nothing has changed.

That's the way everything should be in life.

In amongst all of this, we managed to squeeze in a major family meal for 16 estranged people. We've had it on the table for almost a year now and you have to love it when a plan comes together. I think living rather a lot of life online can make you appreciate what life offline used to be like if you're of the mind to look at it that way. I got it into my head that it would be wrong for the next time we all saw each other to be at another funeral.

Take a look around. It's easy to fix if you find yourself in a similar situation. A phone call and a couple of emails is all it takes - and it was one of the best nights I've had in quite some time. It's good to see that despite far too many years disappearing under the bridge that everybody remains much the same. Like I said: Much has changed and yet, nothing has.

•••

Over the past weekend, I picked up a copy of  Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce. I read a tiny little review of it somewhere and figured I would give it a shot. Sometimes a book comes along that gives you a good kick in the ass just to remind you of a few things. Not in the way that those monsters like Jonathan Strange or Imajica did (for they are the Olympians that sit on the top of the mountain for me), but one that reminds you to be as consistently great as possible. To say it's easily the best book I've read this year so far would not be a lie.

From start to finish, it's absolutely captivating - I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it. When a young girl appears back at the family home after being missing for twenty years and swears on her life that it was the fairies that took her away, the book had better go one way (a full on children's fantasy) or the other (a magical journey into the dark side of the human psyche) in the most bombastic way possible and it's the latter of these paths that Joyce finds himself on. Give it a whirl. I've been telling everybody that cares to listen about it - there's no disappointment to be found here. It's truly beautiful. Beautiful enough for me to track down a copy of The Tooth Fairy by Joyce which has to be worth a damn.

I might even be ever so slightly jealous and that doesn't happen very often at all...

•••

As is always the way with my holidays, I come back with a head more full of ideas and concepts than when I left. This trip has been no exception. What I didn't expect was to find that somebody somewhere had tracked down my trial run of August Moon's first instalment - The Monster Magnet - and, better still, publicly say nice things about it. As soon as I've mastered the artwork for the covers, it appears it might be time to make the old beast public again and finally commit to the schedule I'd set up for it.

More later... lots of catching up to do.

Ker-plunk!

In the defiant spirit of Cherie Priest - who likes to write things in her blog such as Things accomplished in fiction and Things accomplished in real life, I thought I might bring these two items to the table for today's blog post as I really like the way her blog publicly flaunts information such as: Project: Fiddlehead

Deadline: September 15, 2012

New words written: 1669 (it’s a start!)

Present total word count: 1669 words

So bearing that in mind, Mr Smith's kinda goes thus:

Things accomplished in fiction: rewrote chapter two of Turn the Lamp Down Low which brings me to a much better place than I was yesterday (in which I wondered why I was crucifying myself over something so small). I had to get to chapter seven of the book and then backtrack somewhat to get this right so it took a little longer than I really wanted to due to the amount of research involved. I say research, but creating a world from scratch and a magical ceremony that doesn't really exist that's weirder than what actually goes on in real life are not things that drip off my tongue easily. Actually, that's a lie - they drip off my tongue very easily. Putting them into sentences that other people want to look at is another matter entirely. Time to go forwards in time again now and hope I don't ever have to do that to myself again. (Dear other writers - is this normal?)

Things accomplished in real life: decided to rebrand the site here with the publishing company logo in the background (that's the Twin Earth sun/moon icon type thing that's suddenly appeared) and clean up some other scraps that were bugging me. Listened to the rest of Peter May's audiobook version of The Black House (which is very highly recommended from this quarter) whilst I took the wrappers off my page at about me. Not really necessary to make it live agan for any reason, but not doing any harm either. Next up - proofing the magazine and signing her off for print which will push me a good few hours into the evening. Then I had better get started on the next one - or at least have a clue as to what's going into it. Watched John Carter DVD that I stole off the kids this afternoon too. Good movie - don't believe what you hear on the grapevine, it's great fun. Note to self - remember to phone your mother... maybe. Is that enough for you?

Project: Turn The Lamp Down Low

Deadline: August 27th, 2012

New words written: 1,765

Present total word count: 7,342 words

I might have to rework the deadline on this. That date seems a bit close for the word count I was working towards but it might work out. Let's see where we are at the weekend. Just trying to keep focus on publishing in November as promised - to nobody but myself obviously, but still...

Words, Pictures and a Bad, Bad Wabbit

I got asked on this very day to write a book for somebody. Not in ghost writing way - I don't know if I could do that even if offered all the money in the world. Well, OK maybe for all the money in the world I could but you know what I mean. This book is a bit special, I'm totally knocked out to be doing it. I'll (obviously) be blowing it from the rooftops once it's completed and I have a copy of it in my hands.

'What's so special about it?', I hear you ask. Well, on one hand, the guys that are putting it out have got the production values of NASA and on the other hand, it's something that I'm really into. That's enough said about it for now. Suffice to say, the final product could knock out an adult cow if you so desired and that's good enough for me.

Work on Turn The Lamp Down Low is coming on quickly now. I think that from here until Sunday will be a good chance to get a whole lot of it done before I'm going to have to stop again and come up for air - and that's OK. Plot is settling in. A new sharper synopsis has been written for the cover and promo stuff - I think it might even be the final version, but I'll sit on it a little while longer before I post anything on it.

I also hooked up again with my buddy Mark Poole and between us we resurrected the fallen giant that was to be The Ballad of the Goat-Faced Boy. I just need to make a few more tweaks at my side of things and then we'll reboot the whole damn thing and see what we can come up with. And this time, I'm not putting it down until the damn thing is finished. I'm sure I've posted previously about how long illustrated projects take to get off the ground but it's worth saying again. Illustrated projects take a long time to get off the ground and see the light of day - and if you're working with an artist of some value, you'll soon find out why.

Somehow, it's gotten to be quite late again - and for once in my life, I'm actually tired to go along with it. Our new-ish giant rabbit, who Eleanor calls Berry and I call much worse things, has taken to thumping her feet on the base of her house at night. Like at 4am. So far as we can tell, there's no particular reason for this but on the shortlist so far are:

1. Cat on the fence

2. Being an arse for the sake of it

3. The birds are annoying her (I'm reluctant to go with this one because she's also done it earlier in the night when there are no birds)

4. A full moon. I quite fancied this one as my favourite simply because it sounds cool but it wasn't a full moon last night. It was however a new moon. Maybe I'll make a note of it somewhere and try and figure out if there's any pattern to it.

As glamorous as number 4 sounds, it will probably come down to it being number 2, because sometimes, that's just how life is with animals.

Crossing The Frame

I've changed a writing habit ever so slightly and it appears to be working out pretty well, though it's possibly a little early to tell. A few days ago, Holly Black (new internet best friend although she doesn't know it yet because she liked my tumblr on her revamped Spiderwick covers) wrote about Rachel Aaron - who in turn had written an article on upping her word count from 2,000 words a day to 10,000 words a day. Coincidentally, that was something I'd been chewing over since I a) read what Stephen Leather said in an interview about knocking out 30,000 a day at a news-desk - or at least I think that's what he said, I can't find the interview again now and b) I stacked what I was producing towards my first proper fiction piece (Turn The Lamp Down Low) against what I was producing at the magazine. It's not unusual to turn out 5,000 words a day at the mag for something or other - under pressure too.

And so it was that I realised I was being a bit of a slacker. So this past Sunday, I shut the laptop and took up with a notebook and my beloved Waterman and simply wrote. I wrote until I had quite honestly run out of plot and my wrist hurt but found that I had turned out around 4,500 words. Doing some quick mental maths (not my best subject), I figured that if I did that everyday for a week, that would be 30,000 words (ish) - and if I committed to doing that every day for a month, that would be 120,000 words - which is pretty big novel that would need about 40,000 words editing out of it to make it  a good size and well edited. The important thing here though would be a first draft. Something to work from. The intricacies of the plot itself are easy because I've been thinking about writing this for about two years in the real world and about ten years in la-la land. That's a long time to figure out knowing what's going to happen - and should a publisher happen to be passing by, I'd like to point out it's not the only one I've been planning for that long, just the one I like the title of the most and as good a place to start as any.

Anyway, this filled me with a bolt of enthusiasm to get the hell on with it - and then when I got up on Monday, I remembered the magazine was going to print and it was all hands on deck for a couple of days which stalled me in my tracks like I'd fallen into a hole in the ground.

Which brings me to today. With the magazine finished for another few weeks (but still a ton of work to do for the next issue and a book that's looming for October), it's time to get back on the wagon with the 4,500 words a day average. Possible to keep it up? I think so. The most important thing here is what I have learned - it might help you out too - and it's this:

Accept the word count. Accept that it's possible and do it. If you need to write, write. You only have to make it sound feasible in  your head and you're away. My kids think 500 words is a lot and are constantly amazed, but that's just a blog post to me. Shrink the monster in your head and you'll be fine.

It sounds like a plan and right now, that's good enough for me.

Ham On Rye

Making headway with some good stuff here at the moment. Rather a lot of work continues on Turn The Lamp Down Low which is looking good right now - I'm not sure whether to start some pre-release promo five months early though. I've been thinking about making the hardback available for those who pre-order and then kill the whole hardback run after that to make it worth something to supporters - with some tickets thrown in to some of the signing sessions I have planned for it (though these won't be at bookshops) it could turn out to be quite a nice package. Let's file this under pending while I figure out what exactly such a thing would entail to get off the ground outside of kickstarter or any of those other crowd-funding sites. Can it be done totally independently? Who knows for sure, but I think so... Working at doing all of this yourself is interesting that's for sure. I was looking at the work the guys over at unbound are doing where (in a kick-startery kind of way) you put details of your project up, people who like the idea of it throw in some pledges and then, when you reach critical mass the button is presses and everybody who pledged gets a copy and maybe some other stuff. But let me throw in a question here - is it really that simple for the 'non-name' person? There's no two ways about it, Amanda Palmer changed the rules for musicians taking control of their own careers but as she herself states in no uncertain terms, she worked very long and very hard to put herself in a position whereby it worked out how it has for her. That's kind of how I see myself here - only er, several rungs down the ladder. The concept of being an author a la John Locke and making a stack of cash from the kindle model is fine, but it's not changing anything for the better in the big scheme of things. It's just proving it can be done and if that's what you want, that's fine. It's not really leaving anything behind though is it? Apart from thousands of other people also trying to repeat the formula which will obviously instigate the 'law of diminishing returns' at some point...

Anyway, the next work going live online will be a short story called The Undoing of Charles Walker. That should be published on Saturday at some point - which this morning got me wondering how many stories is a good number to have in a published collection? As many as you've written I guess, but somewhere around the 24 mark sounds like a good collection to me. I'll more than likely make a start on designing some covers for that over the coming months. Knowing myself as I do, I'll get through at least half a dozen 'finished' versions before I'm happy with the result... and then, there's what to call it. I love this part of the process. I love being creative with my own material.

Finally, I've revamped the tumblr blog over the last few days. Take a look. It's pretty neat if you love book design. Not so neat if you don't but it still looks great regardless.