My Man Booker Was Lost in the Post

In which there is a brief and not particularly happy update on the state of my writing projects.

Without a City Wall a.k.a. City Wall

I started writing this in Belgium in the autumn of 2007. At this time I had not yet learned what the craft of a novelist truly entailed and progress was slow. For a first book it was very ambitious as it had a split narrative structure with two separate but distantly related narrative arcs in alternating chapters. It's a Science Fiction novel that explores themes of interstellar colonisation, environmental degradation and the ceaseless urge of humans to create conflict.

By the southern hemisphere winter of 2010 the book was half finished and I was living in Australia. I still, it seemed, failed to grasp the centrality of hard work to the business of being a novelist. Over the years that followed my run rate did not improve and I finally finished it at the start of 2015.

In September 2015 I had managed, through the gift of flippancy, to acquire an agent who told me some hard and invaluable truths about the book which led to a rewrite. This much improved book was submitted to various US and UK publishers in February 2016. None of them liked it enough to loosen their famously taut purse strings and do a deal.

Redeeming Blood

I decided to build on the complexity of City Wall by doing something even more complicated. I spent most of 2015 writing another split narrative novel that would serve as simultaneous sequel and prequel to City Wall. Look at me! Look how very smart I am! Of course, the inescapable axiom that eluded me was that the sequel to a novel with no commercial viability also has no commercial viability itself. The positive aspect to the Redeeming Blood experience was that I wrote it in approximately eleven months from January to November 2015. If nothing else, I had finally realised that these things happen more quickly if one works harder.

City Wall, it has been observed, is a book about women and its companion piece, Redeeming Blood, exhibits pleasing symmetry in that it is a book about men. It also takes a giddying whirl through the topics of trans-humanism, representative politics, terrorism and first contact. I like it and its characters a great deal but, sadly, its a commercial dead end.

Six Sides

After City Wall failed to attract to a publishing deal I had the idea that it could be combined and resequenced with Redeeming Blood to form one novel that eliminated the split narrative structure and presented as one longer but more coherent work called Six Sides. I resisted the temptation for the pretentious neologism 6sides. I am in the process of doing this and the result is pleasing to me if nobody else. I have no idea what the plan for this is. 

Weft

Weft is a novel that sprang from two ideas: the titular word and my conceit that the definitive SF espionage novel had never been written and that I was the person to write it. Happily, I managed to sustain the fecundity I had exhibited in the production of Redeeming Blood and completed it withing the calendar year of 2016.

It is a much stronger and accessible than either of my first two efforts as I had learned a great deal from them. My eventual intention for Weft is to pursue a trade publishing deal as it has strong commercial appeal. Though this isn't going to happen any time soon.

A Dying King

This novel, which I wrote in manic burst of energy from January to July 2017, is my self-indulgent 50th birthday present to myself. I strongly dislike the formulaic strictures of the fantasy literature and wanted to write something that would challenge the conventions of the genre. It is the first work in a planned trilogy although I have no immediate plans to start on the second volume. I will not be seeking representation or a trade publishing deal for this book.

There you have it: 10 years, 4 books and 500,000 words summarised in one blog post.

Personnel Dossier: Khamitova, J.

Name: Yemilia "Jema" Alexandrovna Khamitova-Romanovskaya
DoB: 6th June 2156, New Novosibersk
Augments: Hwangso HXC-1000 visuals, Stage II retroviral cosmetic rejuvenation

Education: Graduate of the Alliance Naval Academy class of 2176, received the Sword of Honour for graduating at the top of her class.

Instructor's Comment: JK was not the smartest or the strongest but she was, by some distance, the most determined. She never, ever relents in anything she does.

Military Service:  Commissioned as an Ensign in the Special Activities Division of the Naval Infantry. Military occupational specialties: Close Quarters Combat (Armed), Close Quarters Combat (Unarmed), Firearms, Explosives, Trauma Medicine. Awarded Combat Service Ribbon for the counter-insurgency action at [REDACTED] and the Naval Cross for her actions during the boarding of the [REDACTED].

Commanding Officer's Comment: One of the bravest and most action focussed junior officers that I have ever served with in the Sads. She was the first person through the hull breach on the [REDACTED] when we boarded it and the last person to leave it as it was breaking up.

General Intelligence Directorate Activties: Transferred to the GID in 2179 on the specific request of the Executive Director's Chief of Staff. Now performs assignments of the highest sensitivity and importance under the direct control of the EDCoS. No ratings within the normal GID evaluatory framework are possible as all activities are executed outside the control of the Operations Section.

Losing My Shit

T. E. Lawrence once famously left the manuscript for Seven Pillars of Wisdom at Reading railway station and, despite an offer of reward and beseeching newspaper advertisments, had to rewrite it from memory.

So how do I protect myself from this manner of catastrophic loss. In the digital age it is both easier and more complex but to mitigate the risks we first have to understand what they are.

The most obvious and likely scenario that could cause a writer to lose material would be a hardware failure on their computer. The best way to protect against this is an online storage service such as Dropbox, iCloud or OneDrive. These services will automatically make an online copy of the work and if, stricken by a hardware failure, one could simply resynchronise a new device. Happily, this would also preserve your work for posterity should your house burn down with you in it.

What such a service would not protect against is some manner of encryption threat such as a ransomware attack as the local encryption would rapidly be replicated in the online copy. Anti virus will provide some but not total prophylaxis against such an attack. In order to preserve documents from a ransomware attacked there has to be a copy which air gapped, i.e. not physically connected, to the infected network.

One way to do this is by having another computer or device which is only sporadically powered on to connect and synchronise its copy of the documents. Obviously, having a seperate computer for this purpose isn't ideal for everyone so an external hard drive is only seldomly connected would also work but you'd have to manage the file copying operation for yourself.

There is also the remote chance that the documents themselves could become corrupt and unreadable across all your backups. This happens much less frequently than it did in the ancient pre-history of personal computing but I wouldn't say it's impossible that it can still happen; particularly with very large and heavily revised files like, say, a novel manuscript...

This is my practice:

• Every chapter gets its own file and sits in its own directory. This protects against file and directory corruption for a work in progress. The very most I could lose is one chapter.
• My entire body of work is synchronised online with Dropbox. This protects against hardware failure and house fires.
• Once a month I start up a virtual machine on my PC which connects to Dropbox and synchronises all the files. This protects against ransomware and other malware as the VM is usually powered off and therefore the files inside it are invisible. If malware that encrypts virtual hard disk files appear then I may switch this function to seperate physical hardware such as an Android tablet.

The Stages of Blogging

Denial - I'm going to blog every single. Penetrating insights and witty aperçus will pour out of my fingers in an endless torrent.

Anger - Fuck, I can't think of anything to write about.

Bargaining - I'll write a blog post after this next hour of YouTube.

Depression - Nobody reads the fucking thing anyway. What's the point? Hint: there is none.

Acceptance - I'll blog sporadically when I've got something to say and an interesting manner in which to say it.

I think The Rutter Continuum has arrived at the final stage.

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now, Baby

In vivid contrast to romantic rejection, which customarily arrives in a single crushing blow like a massive brain haemorrhage, literary rejection is more akin to having one’s muscle mass slowly consumed by flesh eating bacteria. The rejections arrive, one at time, heralded by the primitive two dimensional envelope icon of the Gmail alert. The effect of each rejection, while of minor significance in themselves, gradually accrete over time until the writer’s sense of self worth is nothing but a husk that will crumble to dust at a touch.

 The full article is on the Red Sofa NaNoWriMo blog.

Indestructible

For reasons over which we need not tarry I recently had cause to revisit the 1967 television show Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. There are several notable and interesting things about it which I shall get to shortly however the most amazing personal revelation was that, contrary to my recollection, I had never actually seen it.

Captain Scarlet, as it was ubiquitously called, was first shown in 1967 and, no doubt, repeated many times over on budget constrained British commercial television of the 60s and 70s. The theme tune, which was actually the closing theme, with its bombastic refrain of INDESTRUCTIBLE was a constant in the playground of my primary school in the mid 1970s. So I thought I was familiar with the Captain Scarlet canon. As I watched the 32 episode series I realised I was not and had never seen any of them.

To summarise, Captain Scarlet is was a Supermarionation, more commonly known as puppetry, production set in 2068 when Earth is engaged in some manner low key, shadowy war with Mars and its implacable autochthonous lifeforms: the Mysterons. The first notable observation is that the Martians, in an invention born of fiscal restraint, are depicted merely as projected circles of light. This gives a fresh and interesting take on the problem visualising alien life forms. They are also, for unknown reasons, oft given to broadcasting their nefarious intentions at the start of each episode.

The puppetry demonstrated several technical innovations over previous Supermarionation productions such as Thunderbirds. The puppets were larger and possessed of more conventional facial physiognomy compared to the Thunderbirds which had the goggle eyed look of a surprised pug. In Thunderbird and earlier shows characters walking always proved problematic as they moved as if having recently soiled themselves or suffered a grave injury to the genitals. Captain Scarlet skilfully obviates this limitation of string borne puppets by the simple expedient of never having any character walk anywhere ever. All scenes are transacted by stationary characters.

Captain Scarlet himself is a curious Christ-like figure whose resurrection from death is often a plot device. However, the most shocking thing about Captain Scarlet when viewed from these more sensitive times was the sheer scale of the violence and mayhem. Terrorism by crashing an airliner into the sea, assassination by suicide bomber and shootings too numerous to catalog were all considered perfectly acceptable early evening viewing for children in 1967.

On the whole, thoroughly recommended.

Three Full Time Jobs

That's what I've discovered writing to be. Obviously, theres no money in it so you are going to need a normal day job so that you can buy Gummy Bears and toilet paper. So that's the first job.

If you give the slightest fuck about the output then writing books is a job in itself. Not just the work of actually creating the book, but there is also the very considerable burden of proof-reading, consistency checking, research and general editing. That's the second job.

The third and final job is securing representation, writing proposals and marketing yourself and your work. It's immediately and transparently obvious to the most casual observer that publishers expect authors to arrive with an audience already attached and engaged. Why would they expend time and money marketing a book when the author can do it in between writing another book and bouts of Gummy Bear induced diarrhea?