Who Ate My Brain?

Waiting and Learning

2013-06-14T12:00:00.000+01:00

Kathy Evans's burst of unpublished author insecurity this week led me to reflect on where I was in the process and how I felt. Kathy and I have been in the trenches for quite a while, waiting for the call-up to publishing glory – we even shared a blog post at the end of 2011 as writers who were "Almost There". We're still just as Almost There as we were back then and I was briefly tempted to title this post "The Waiting Room of the Damned"! But that would be an overly negative assessment that doesn't entirely reflect how I feel about things.

In many ways, the state of being Almost There is an agonising one – you've won approval for your writing, perhaps signed with an agent, and yet the publishing part stubbornly refuses to happen. You know that your work is publishable and editors love it, but somehow it never goes to acquisitions, or worse, it gets there and is turned down. To build your hopes up so far and then have them crushed is truly awful, especially if you don't have the luxury of rival publishers waiting in the wings to pick up your book. It can be like climbing almost to the top of Everest and discovering a sign that says "Summit Closed for Essential Repairs".

And yet, people do still sneak through. I look to Jackie Marchant or Teri Terry, who sat in the waiting room for far longer than me before they passed on to considerable success. That time you spend as an Almost There can be the making of you, allowing you to hone your skills, make contacts and discover the right voice for yourself and for your audience. I find myself harking back to a blog post Teri wrote in 2010, about the realisation that who she was as a person was getting in the way of the books she was trying to write. By taking her own personality and background into account, Teri was able to find publication with the incredibly successful Slated trilogy. Now perhaps, she was also lucky with her timing in terms of catching the dystopian wave before it crashed, but when I see the plaudits and awards that Teri is gathering (from real live teenage readers), I feel greatly encouraged.

Perhaps my current hopeful state of mind is because I've got something new I'm excited about, a book that's yet to be tainted by rejection. Or maybe it's because I've finally reached the "better place" I've been hoping to find for the last three years. I still want to be published, but I no longer need to be – which is an important mental shift for me. Will this new and improved mental attitude have any effect on my chances of publication? Probably not. But if I can stay feeling like this, then waiting (and learning) doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world anymore.

Nick.

Another Disposable Blog Post

2013-06-07T14:02:00.000+01:00

Someone I was chatting to earlier in the week described blog posts as "disposable" and implied that they had a lower worth than other, more traditional media. It was a throwaway comment, but something I've been mulling over all week, wondering what it means for the state and perception of blogging.

As Blog Editor of Words & Pictures, I get to read quite a few blog posts - maybe fifteen to twenty a week. And then I get to write yet another blog post about the best four or five. In many ways, I welcome the role, because it forces me to actually read these blogs every week, which was something I always told myself, in the past, that I didn't have time for. I would feel guilty that I was expecting people to come to this blog every week, but often failing to read or comment on theirs.

Blogging has always been a medium based on reciprocity, which is one of its inherent strengths and also its weakness. You can see the strength of it where a community comes together (such as on LiveJournal or Tumblr), because people are actively encouraged to chat on and across blog posts, with new topics being sparked by a personal reaction to someone else's post. You can also observe this effect at work across the SCBWI blogosphere, but it is often more diffuse – unless a journalist or adult author says something mean about children's books, at which point everyone piles into the discussion like a well-mannered rubgy scrum!

Group blogs, especially sites like Notes from the Slushpile that attract a wide and diverse audience, do see a lot of comments and a lively discussion. But the weaknesses of the reciprocity model can be clearly seen on individual author blogs, especially where that person has yet to be published or build up much of a following. When your social capital is low, it's hard to get people to read and comment on your blog – even if you're writing something fresh and appealing. Although people will keep reading your blog if you're regularly offering good writing, getting them there in the first place is more about networking and promotion. And as we know, writers are notoriously introspective...

To get back to the core subject, a lot of blogs do begin to feel disposable, simply because we perceive a lack of endorsement by our peers. But the most obvious marker of success – the number of comments – can be deceptive. I have had blog posts with a large number of hits and few comments, and vice versa. Some subjects open themselves to further discussion and others do not. Also, there's the way you write the blog post: I like to cover a subject and then close the loop with a hopeful conclusion, but if I was more open-ended in my summing up, then perhaps I'd attract more comments (not that I'm complaining).

Maybe I could substitute a different word for disposable. How about "topical?" If we consider blogs as an offshoot of journalism, then perhaps it makes absolute sense that many posts are up-to-the-minute and date quickly. No-one complains that the BBC's news output is disposable because it changes so frequently, even though their rolling news channel comes perilously close to this status. What I find wonderful about a blog post is that it captures something of the moment – both temporal and emotional – an snapshot of what the writer was thinking and doing at that point in time. I often like to go back two or three years on this blog and revisit how I was feeling or thinking. People always praise me for the honesty of my blog posts, but there's a lot I have to hold back - there are some weeks in my life where I'm amazed I managed to write anything without collapsing into a sobbing mess.

So, to try to bring that all together into a hopeful conclusion – I think there's life in blogging yet, even if the overall numbers of bloggers are dropping. The blog post offers a deeper, more emotional experience than a Tweet or Facebook update, while still remaining easily digestible. I hope that the "Thou Shalt Blog" diktat that publishers give to newly-signed writers is dropping away, allowing authors to make a choice to blog for the right reasons. And finally, the best blog posts aren't disposable at all – they can continue to attract readers for years after they're posted. There are many books that aren't half so lucky.

Nick.

The Book as Object

2013-05-31T15:46:00.000+01:00

I was lucky enough to participate on a panel today, at the University of Oxford English Graduate Conference, speaking on the subject of The Book as Object. I was joined on the panel by Paul Nash (Oxford University's chief Printing Tutor) and Stephen Walter (a text/map artist). We each spoke for 10-15 minutes and then had a fascinating panel discussion afterwards.

If you were at the conference, here is the link to the Transmedia article I mentioned.

If you weren't at the conference, read on for an edited transcript of my speech on the subject of The Book as Object and how that role is changing in the digital age:

Despite the fact I hail from a digital background, I'd like to misquote Shakespeare by emphasising that I come today to praise the print book, not to bury it. In fact, I once half-wrote a blog piece in which I conducted an imaginary interview with “The Book” to find out about its long history and how it felt about these young digital whippersnappers who were busy prophesising its imminent death. I did consider re-enacting that interview for you today, but I realised that it would be a bit like when Clint Eastwood had that conversation with a chair! So instead, I want to look at the state of the book from four perspectives: beauty, utility, tactility and interactivity.

Let’s start with beauty, because it’s the easiest one. Here are three digital devices – an iPhone, a Sony Reader and an Amazon Kindle Fire. You’ll notice how all three look fundamentally the same.

And here are three books I picked off my shelves this morning – Maggot Moon, Scott Pilgrim and Stardust.

You’ll notice how different they look from each other, how aesthetically pleasing each is in their own way. I’m not a minimalist (as you’ve probably gathered), I don’t worship at the throne of Apple and find it quite baffling how people get together to compare smartphones when they all look exactly alike! Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a marked contrast if I had a pile of mass-market paperbacks in front of me, but I do think that books are beautiful and each one is genuinely unique.

Of course, the content displayed on a digital device can be beautiful, and the high resolution, deep colour screens offered by the best tablets can make for a visual feast. But unlike the books that overflow from my shelves, once you turn that device off it becomes a featureless mirror, reflecting nothing but middle-class boredom.

I saw a recent article where a photographer was charting the visual development of various household objects through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. And what I found so depressing was that for many of these myriad different objects – the music player, the alarm clock, the telephone – the final modern incarnation was the same object – a smartphone. We seem to have swapped objects of beauty for an object of multi-functional utility – which handily brings me on to the second perspective of books I wanted to talk about.

Utility is an area where the dominance of the print book is less clear-cut. If we’re choosing something purely on its functional merits, what wins out – the single-function, single-title print book or the multifunctional Swiss Army knife that is the modern smartphone?

I believe that for deep, linear reading of either fictional or non-fictional texts, the printed book is still the best vehicle. It’s light, portable, needs no batteries or subscriptions. It contains no intrusive adverts, hyperlinks or surveillance technology. In the absence of a direct brain-to-brain link, it is the purest way of transmitting content between author and reader.

But for non-linear content, especially in the world of reference where I work, the book has (up until recently) merely been the most convenient way of delivering the content, not the best. If you consider a printed dictionary, it has an A-Z structure only because that has been the most efficient method for the user to find the entry they’re interested in.

When we free the dictionary from the printed page, we discover all sorts of new ways to index the content that greatly improves the experience. When you want a dictionary definition online or in an app, you can simply type the word in and get straight to the entry, or even use voice control if you don’t mind looking a bit mad. No need for endless page turning, or the disappointment when you think the definition isn’t in there because you’ve momentarily forgotten how to alphabetise! Dictionaries, along with journals, are the areas of academic publishing that are experiencing the most aggressive digital growth and the fastest falling off of print sales. And this, to my mind, is not a cause for concern.

So, on to tactility, which is to say touch. I could have picked smell here, which would have been incredibly easy to cover because books have a wonderfully evocative smell and digital devices don’t really smell of anything at all. But touch is interesting, because it’s been one of the selling points for smartphones and tablets since the iPhone first emerged. We’ve all got very used to using touch to navigate through apps and around the home screen, even to the extent of using two and three finger gestures to execute specific tasks like rotating and zooming. And I’m sure you’ve seen the videos of these poor young children trying to tap on the pictures in a printed magazine, because their parents consider that leaving a baby with an iPad is a suitable alternative to reading them an actual picture book.

But for all this digital tactility, the touch of a printed book remains a very individual and evocative thing. We feel the weight of the volume in our hands, run a fingertip along the binding. We can navigate from one end of the book to the other at incredible speed, just by using our thumbs. There are a lot of claims made for the ease of use of touch screen devices, but really, what could be simpler and more intuitive than picking up a printed book?

My final category is interactivity. Again, the digital medium seems like a slam dunk. E-books can have so many hyperlinks embedded in them that your fingers get sore from all that tapping and swiping. But I think this ignores the effects of reading a linear printed book at a neurological level. Getting engrossed in a linear fiction book is a very interactive experience – it sets off all kinds of fireworks inside the brain, and can literally change the way we think and approach the world around us.

Digital publications, however, offer totally new ways to interact with words and language. I’ve already talked about how dictionaries can be searched and interrogated, but this applies to many other subjects. Pioneers in the field of true digital books such as Touch Press are producing fascinating new iPad apps based on existing texts like T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. These apps go beyond the capabilities of the printed book, allowing users to examine the original folios, hear dramatisations of scenes and delve into the related sources that inspired the work. They complement the original book, without supplanting it, like having a mini research library in your hand.

Sally Gardner’s award-winning Maggot Moon is another example of a title that’s had a digital makeover that really enhances the original text. The protagonist of Maggot Moon is dyslexic, and the iBook version offers iPad users a host of quizzes, videos and activities to help readers see the world through dyslexic eyes.

The iBook index

A test of memory

(Click through to see larger versions of the screenshots)

All this digital augmentation is great, but I’m most excited about the possibilities for interactivity within the narrative itself. Where can we take the story in this brave digital age? Rather than providing distraction, could carefully curated hyperlinks within a story actually serve to deepen the emotional experience for the reader? In the form of storytelling called Transmedia, readers are presented with a tale that spans many different forms of media, with narrative threads jumping between websites, comics, books, TV episodes and even Twitter feeds.

As a final interactive possibility, what about reading an intelligent story that tracks your emotional response and uses that information to make the narrative even more scary, even more thrilling? There have already been successful experiments with branching films that monitor the viewer’s heart rate and skin temperature. With the developments in eye tracking technology and facial recognition on modern digital devices, can the artificially intelligent story be far behind?

In the past, it’s always been the case that you were the one reading the book. In the future, perhaps it’ll be the book reading you.

Nick.

Writing as Therapy

2013-05-24T12:00:00.000+01:00

Although my last post was totally flippant concerning writers' mental health (which you all seemed to rather enjoy), I wanted to change gears this week and try to treat the subject a bit more seriously. I've heard quite a few authors say they use writing as a form of therapy, and I thought it was worth exploring in further detail. What does that statement mean and is writing a good way to work through your problems?

Let's face it, a lot of writers have "issues" (myself included). Throw a rock at any writers' gathering and you'll hit someone with a traumatic family history (only don't try that for real, as they might have unresolved anger issues to boot). Even those who grew up in a stable, nuclear family have plenty of other pressures to contend with: career, relationships, kids, health issues, etc. So the act of channelling and making sense of our emotional responses through our writing seems eminently sensible.

The act of writing itself can be therapeutic, there's no doubt about it. Escaping from the pressures of everyday life into a safe, fictional world that's totally under your control? Sounds good, right? A novel can also be a sandbox where we try things out, playing with weighty questions like "What makes a good person?" or "How do you define evil?" We talk about the need to make a character face their worst fear, and very often it's our own fears that we've mapped onto them. And this is great therapy, because, being clever writer types, it's our job to find them a way out of that situation. In doing so, we are, in part, answering the question of what we would do when faced by our worst fear. This is just one of the many ways that writing can offer deep catharsis.

But amongst those benefits, there are also risks. Quite a few writers start out with a serious need for recognition and that presents an instant problem – how can you use the act of writing as private therapy, yet also expose those issues to the whole world? It's no wonder that many of us feel rejection so painfully, so personally. You wouldn't expect to see a counsellor every week for a year, only for them to publish the transcripts of your sessions for anyone to read. But in some ways, that's exactly what many writers hope for with their books!

Another risk with using your writing as therapy, is when the writing itself becomes part of the problem. This happened to me – I started writing a deeply-felt novel inspired by my experiences of depression and discovered that it began to make me depressed again. In addition, I was putting myself under a lot of pressure to get the book exactly right and as a result my writing ground to a halt. Luckily, I was also seeing an actual therapist at this point, but I felt a bit phony when our sessions began to consist of me moaning about how difficult my writing had become. It seemed like I had tied myself up in knots, making a new problem where before, none had existed.

So, in summary, writing can be good therapy, but treat it with caution. Don't use it as your only outlet, and remember that there are plenty of professional counsellors and therapists out there if you need them. It all comes down to balance - do keep immersing yourself emotionally in your writing (because that's how you'll do your best work), but make sure you also come up for air from time to time. A bit of perspective can make all the difference to a book and a life.

Nick.

A Guide to Common Writing Disorders

2013-05-17T12:00:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I wrote a funny blog post, but this is not it. Oh no. This week, I'm taking a very serious look at some common phobias, irrational beliefs and other mental disorders that can affect writers. As a former sufferer of some of these conditions, I feel it's my solemn duty to dispel the stigma surrounding them through full and frank discussion. Although some of these disorders might seem bizarre or even humorous, on no account do I expect to hear any sniggering out there. Do we understand each other?

Pleonasmaphobia (A.K.A. Dan Brown Syndrome) - This is the fear that you will put too many words into a sentence, a horror – if you will - of including a profusion of lexical units in a given construction while also trying to cram in too many words, many of which will be superfluous, unnecessary, unwanted or even redundant to the overall meaning of the sentence, whose import will be forever clouded by the excess of words. The only treatment for Pleonasmaphobia is a course of aggressive editing, preferably at gunpoint.
Moleskinomania - The compulsion to buy nice stationery in the hope that it will improve the owner's writing. Doctors recommend that the condition be treated with the application of a splash of petrol and a lit match.
Lineditophilia - The belief amongst novice writers that poor proofreading is the root cause of their continual form rejections. This leads them to spend ever more time on formatting, spelling and grammar checking, while completely missing the fact that it's their writing that totally sucks. See also Querymania - the compulsion to endlessly rewrite your query letter rather than your novel.
Submission Submission - This condition arises from a writer's belief that literary agents know better than them, and that they must do everything an agent says in order to get published. Crueller agents have been known to exploit this disorder for their own amusement, sending sufferers to buy tins of stripy paint, making them hop for hours along the North Circular or by playing sadistic games of Simon Says via email.
Pigeonholophobia - A fear of being easily located amongst a genre or category of writing. Sufferers will claim that their work is "unique beyond measure" and make grandiose predictions about how they will change the world of publishing forever with their brave cross-genre experimentation. Unfortunately, this also leaves retailers unable to work out where to place the books on their shelves, leading to high return rates and royalty cheques that are too small to see with the naked eye.
Commentoriasis - Also known as Blogger's Cramp, this is a creeping disorder that manifests over many weeks and months. New bloggers are especially prone to the condition, as they post excitedly about grammar checking and puppies, while receiving no comments on their blog posts. At all. Commentoriasis can be relieved through the topical application of marketing or by giving up blogging altogether. Left untreated, however, it can cause the sufferer to question whether the internet is broken or induce delusions that convince them they are the last person left alive on planet Earth.
Blankpagitis - A severe form of procrastination that leads the sufferer to attempt increasing pointless and desperate activities in an attempt to avoid beginning a new novel. Symptoms including dusting, ironing and the vacuuming of curtains, while sufferers can often be identified due to the large quantities of cake they make and ingest on a daily basis. If left untreated, this condition can lead to dust allergies, third degree burns and an appearance on The Great British Bake Off.

Nick.

Passive Obsessive

2013-05-10T12:00:00.000+01:00

If there's one criticism that's been regularly levelled at my work over the last ten years, it's that my main characters are too passive - they allow themselves to be dragged into adventure rather than initiating it. Well, no more – I finally have a protagonist who is feisty, focused and determined. But re-watching The Graduate last night, I was reminded of why passive characters carry such a strong resonance for me. In the film, Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) spends much of his time in a state of near depression, paralysed by the expectations heaped upon him. He hates himself almost as much as he hates the smug, moneyed world of his parents, and his affair with Mrs Robinson is more like self-harm than a quest for pleasure. For much of the running time, Benjamin doesn't know what he wants and moreover doesn't know why he should bother trying to find out.

Even though I'm closer to Mrs Robinson's age, I still identify very strongly with Benjamin. That feeling of being adrift in a world full of people who seem so sure of themselves, while you yourself remain so uncertain. What should I do with my life? What is the one thing that I love to do above all others? These are questions I still regularly ask myself. But many readers, especially young ones, aren't particularly interested in waiting around while a character goes through the process of questioning their motivation. They want characters with clearly focused goals that will drive an exciting plot. Robert McKee's Story is very specific on the use of character motivation to resolve a scene – a protagonist wants something and goes into the scene trying to get it from someone else. Almost every time, they will fail and actually end up further from their goal than they were when they started. Thus, there is rising tension as the goal becomes ever more important while the protagonist faces an ever larger struggle to reach it, prompting them to take ever bigger risks.

It's fair to say that there are some of these mechanics at play in the last third of The Graduate as Benjamin becomes infatuated and chases the object of his desires. But this would be far less affecting if it hadn't been preceded by Benjamin's inability to find his path. The famous final scene on the bus is almost a reset point, sweeping away the excitement of that final act and indicating that perhaps none of the characters really knew what they wanted after all.

Despite my enthusiasm for passive characters and the mirror they hold up to society, I have to be honest and admit that this is a subject better suited to adult literary fiction, where plot takes a backseat to social commentary and writing technique. When we choose to write for children, we don't just sacrifice vocabulary, we also have to accept the wider restrictions of the form. To truly connect with a young audience means presenting and structuring a story in a way that will resonate with them, from a killer first line through rising tension to a meaningful resolution. Active, motivated characters are a key component in that journey.

Nick.

How Not to Write the World's Greatest Book

2013-05-03T12:00:00.000+01:00

I finally met the lovely Kate Scott at a book launch this week, and we had a fascinating conversation about writing that will probably yield several blog posts (thanks Kate, the cheque's in the post). I do a lot of my best thinking in conversation, and while we were chatting, I talked about my last book Die Laughing and the high hopes I'd had for it. Readers with very long memories may remember my excited post about it being THE ONE (you know, like in The Matrix).

After the failure of my Undiscovered Voices winner Back from the Dead to reach publication, I was determined not to make the same mistake with my next novel. Die Laughing would be my magnum opus, the breakthrough novel that would be so good that it would be impossible for publishers not to accept it. I would build a complex and innovative world, layer it with challenging themes and guide my characters to a shocking climax. I took inspiration from other groundbreaking works of fiction, in particular the iconic HBO TV series The Wire. To pitch that series, creator David Simon wrote a letter to HBO exhorting them to take up this opportunity to change television. There was a particular passage that stuck in my mind:

If we do this right – and we will – the critical response will be that HBO has turned its gaze to a standard of television fare: the cop show. And the cop show can never be the same.

And what do you know? He was absolutely right. I took this sentence and tweaked it to fit my own needs – as a mission statement for Die Laughing:

If I do this right – and I will – the middle-grade novel can never be the same again.

Looking back at this now, it seems kind of ridiculous, but at the time I really believed it. It isn't that I've since developed a problem with ambition, because nothing of significant artistic worth ever got made without the creator having ambition. The problem was how much pressure this mission statement put on me when it came to actually writing the book. No idea was good enough, no sentence well-enough constructed. I laboured over a never-ending first draft, becoming ever more anxious about how many times I had to move the deadline with my agent. By aiming so high, I took perfection to a crippling new level.

The irony, of course, is that the book didn't get published, didn't change the world and the middle-grade novel is doing rather well on its own, thank you. For all my high ideals, what I mostly succeeded at was making myself miserable! Once I finally settled to writing the book I'm on at the moment, I made a choice to do things a different way. I wouldn't say that writing it has been exactly easy, but nothing could be as hard as Die Laughing.

So right now, I'm approaching the end of the first draft of a book that will never win the Carnegie Medal for children's literature. Frankly, it's a rather silly romp, although I have smuggled in some real-life issues and a bit of emotional depth. But it should prove to be a gripping and enjoyable read, which is as much of a mission statement as I want to contemplate at present. I'm also reminded that for every successful masterwork like The Wire there are many more artistic failures like the Matrix sequels, where the creators took on too big an ambition, and then crashed and burned in the process.

But never say never – there may be another magnum opus in my future. For now though, I'm happy writing non-life-changing books about slapstick heroes and cool robots.

Nick.

Back from the Dead - My 2010 Undiscovered Voices Extract

2013-04-26T10:48:00.000+01:00

I try my very best to do something new every week on this blog, but this week I'm doing something old! Inspired by the inclusion of the 2012 anthology on the SCBWI Undiscovered Voices website, I thought it was a shame that you weren't able to see the extracts from the earlier anthologies. So here is a small piece of that puzzle, the Undiscovered Voices 2010 winning extract from my own zombie horror comedy Back from the Dead. I hope you enjoy it, and if it inspires you to enter your own work for this year's competition, then all the better.

Looking back at this now, four years after I first wrote it, I'm mostly just pleased that it all makes sense! It was a wild ride for me once the anthology came out and I ended up rewriting 80% of the novel before it went out to publishers. Although it didn't quite make it to publication, I remain immensely proud of it. And who knows what the future holds? After all, you can't keep a good zombie down!

Nick.

MONSTER

Gnash. Spit. Thrash.

Red.

Ropes. Hands. Gloves.

Blood.

Bite. Tear. Chew.

Needle.

Taste. Struggle.

Pink.

Snarl. Spit.

White.

I’m … me and I’m … somewhere. Plus, I hurt. Jagged pains run across my shoulders. I rub my forearms - they’re crusty with something.

“You’re safe now.”

Open my eyes and try to focus. In a white room - medical room. There’s a boy sitting across from me, wiping his nose. He takes off his round glasses and peers at me, like he’s trying to see through my misty eyes. I test out my voice. “Safe from what?”

“Safe from yours…” He polishes one lens with the corner of his handkerchief. “Just safe, ok?” He’s posh, posher than me anyway.

I sit up on the bed, trying to ignore my aching back. The crusty stuff on my arms is mud - my cracked fingernails are full of it too. I make a fist and watch brown flakes spill onto the mattress. “Where is this? And who are you?”

“Well, you’re chock-full of questions.” He stands and walks over, pushing the peach-coloured hanky into his trouser pocket. He’s got perfect black jeans on, like they’ve never been washed, a white shirt with buttoned-down collar and a floppy blonde fringe that he’s combed just so. It’s hot in here, this … this white room. I can see pearly beads of sweat on his forehead as he comes closer.

Smells. Juicy.

“Did you say something?” My stomach is growling and twisting like a caged animal.

“Hearing voices, are we? Don’t suppose it’s uncommon.” He leans over, really close, his button nose going out of focus. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

Taste. Him.

Before I can stop it, my tongue flicks out, scooping a drop of perspiration off his face. It tastes gross, all salty and …

“Hey!”

Crusty hands shoot forward, grabbing his hot neck, pulling him close to my teeth. I try to fight it, turn my mouth away.

“Gerda!”

I’m so hungry. I want to eat him. I want to be sick.

“Relapse, Gerda, relapse!”

Door bursts open.

Teeth. Hands.

Needle. Struggle.

White.

“Any change?”

There’s a voice coming into my dreams. An older man, kind sounding. I imagine he’s my uncle, come to save me from the …

A finger pokes my side, into the soft flesh above my waistband. I go rigid, blood freezing in my veins.

“Oh, definitely some response there.”

I feel tight strapping across my arms, holding me onto the bed. My head is fuzzy but somehow clearer too, a distant rumble in my stomach the only memory of that terrible hunger.

“Muscle reflex - make a note of that, would you Gerda?”

There’s pressure on my chest, and a scratching, scrabbling sound, like rats on a wooden floor. I can’t keep my eyes shut any longer. I open them, see a clipboard balanced on top of me. The curly-haired woman called Gerda makes a tick on the chart and looks upwards into my face. She makes a long, silent scream as she stumbles backwards, mouth clamped open in terror. I can’t move to look behind me, to see what’s made her so scared. Then I realise. It’s me.

“Now, now, I’m sure he’s quite harmless.” The man bumbles forwards and grabs Gerda from behind, steering her through the doorway. He turns back to me, mouth pushed to one side - wrinkling his ginger goatee beard. “Terribly sorry about all this.” And then he’s gone too, copper-coloured head wobbling out of sight.

I don’t know who or what I am. Where, seems to be some kind of laboratory. Glass bottles and jars cram the high shelves, while test tubes, microscopes and stuff cover the long bench along the white wall. A dead chill runs down my back. What if I was built here – some kind of Frankenstein experiment?

I wait for a minute. Two. I start to wriggle from side to side, testing my bonds. They’re tight, but not impossible to slip out from. I have this sudden flash of memory; being tied up for a magic trick, standing in front of an audience with all of this silken rope wrapped around my wrists and ankles. I try to hold on to the vision long enough to look at the magician - I sense he’s someone important. I stare and stare in my mind’s eye, but it’s no use - he doesn’t have a face.

“Gerda, be reasonable.”

The voice is some way away - I still have time. I squirm, pulling my right hand across my stomach, catching my fingers in a rip on my T-shirt. I free them and move the hand across my chest, up to my left shoulder. A little higher. A little bit higher. A little … and then it’s free. The hand goes to my face, searching for fangs or big stitches joining flaps of dead grey skin. My palm is rough, but my face is smooth – eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, ears – all in the normal places.

“… I’ll have to continue the tests without you.” Echoing footsteps, coming downstairs, coming this way. If I can’t fight like a monster, then I need to think like a man. I pull out my other arm - if I can only get my chest and legs out, then stand behind the door, grab the fire extinguisher.

“What’s all the rush?”

A voice - right in my ear. My body wants to jump, but most of me is still strapped down.

“We’re not here to hurt you. Quite the opposite.” A figure walks around the bed - the boy in the very black jeans. He’s been here all the time, watching from behind my head, where I couldn’t see him.

“Who are you people?” I tense, waiting for a punch, or worse. He stops, just beyond the reach of my arms, smirking. I can see a patch of dark bruising inside his button-down collar.

“I’ll call the police! You can’t keep me locked up like this.”

Another smirk. “Yes, yes, call the police. Join the waiting list.” He’s a little older than me, a little taller – but I’m quicker. I reach out and grab the strap across my chest, pulling hard at the slack where my arms were. It doesn’t budge - there must be a catch below the table, where I can’t reach. The boy watches with great amusement, arms folded.

“James, I hope you’re treating our subject with proper respect.” The older man returns, his black shoes slapping against the tiled floor.

“Yes, Father.” James looks away from him, towards me, and rolls his eyes. “It can talk, by the way. I think I forgot to mention that.”

“Talk?” The father comes nearer, careful to stay out of my range. “You can talk?”

I study the man’s unruly hair and mud-splattered clothing. He has two pens and a syringe in his shirt pocket, every inch the mad scientist.

“Come along, amaze us with your skilful conversation.” James slips two fingers beneath his collar, stroking the bruises.

I feel like a parrot in a pet shop window. “Let me go!”

The father continues to stare, but with wonder, not curiosity. His eyes are wide and I can see his chest heaving faster. James sighs and shakes his head.

“This is kidnap.” My shouts echo in the tiny room. “You can go to prison for kidnap.”

The father doesn’t seem to register this, or the kicking of my threadbare shoes as I struggle to escape. Instead, he grabs my hand and pumps it up and down. “We’re going to save the world.” He turns to his son. “We’re going. To save. The world.”

James continues to look unimpressed. “Saving the world, one boy at a time.”

The father drops my hand and steps away. Too late, I wonder if I should have grabbed the syringe from his pocket and used it as a weapon.

“James,” he slides his arm around the son’s thin shoulders, “I knew I should have bought you that bunny rabbit when you were six. How about we rescue a girl next time?”

“Oh, a girl. Even better.” They stride through the door, turning the light off as they go.

I lie alone, in a dark windowless room, ankles and chest strapped to a bed, body shaking. I imagine the endless night and then the sunless morning, when a mad scientist and his sarcastic son will restart their experiment, coming back to cut me open with a razor-sharp scalpel.

Light floods the room. “Sorry, forgot you were there. Not used to having guests.” The father slap-foots his way towards me and leans beneath the bed, loosening the straps with a flick of his wrist. “Come and have some dinner, won’t you? You must be starving.”

HOSPITAL

“So,” I take another slice of pie, “you’re telling me I was a zombie?”

“That’s about the size of it, yes.” The father, whose name turns out to be Hugo Curzon, watches me stuff my face. I’d been wary of the food to start with, in case they were trying to poison me. Hunger quickly got the upper hand.

“You don’t seem very surprised.” James arranges his knife and fork on his empty plate.

“I guess I knew something was wrong, something inside me.” The idea of a zombie is strangely comforting. I know what they are, how they work. “My memory’s really weird, still. I can tell you how to beat Resident Evil 5, but not my address.”

Hugo’s brow creases. “Resident …”

“It’s a video game, Father, about fighting zombies.” James takes a sip of his lemonade. “Rather overtaken by current events, I’m afraid.”

I savour the last rich mouthful of steak and kidney pie. “That stuff you injected me with, is it a cure?”

“An … experimental treatment.” Hugo reaches across the table, takes my plate and stacks it on top of his. He’s still wearing the latex gloves that he had on in the lab. “I call it Remedion 6.” He smiles. “One better than Reticent Evil 5, don’t you think?”

I nod, deciding not to correct his mistake.

“We had some … ah … problems with the dosage earlier.” Hugo stretches over and hitches up James’s collar, hiding the bruises. “You’re quite free of the virus now.”

The dining room has a window big enough to make up for the lack of one in the basement lab. I look out towards the harbour, summer sunlight rippling on the water. “The last time I remember, it was autumn. I was on a train coming here, to Whitby.”

“Alone?” James crunches an ice cube between his teeth - his dad flinches.

“I was with the magician.” He’s there again, in my mind’s eye, the man with no face. I look instead at his long black hair and the ring on his finger - a chunky black metal band with a gold snake on the top, its body curled like a back to front question mark.

“Oh, the magician.” James points at me, whirling his finger around. “Perhaps it’s his fault. Maybe he cursed you.”

“James!” Hugo butts in before I can get into a shouting match with the smug son. “I want to talk with …” He raises his eyebrows towards me - I think he wants to know my name. The problem is, I don’t know myself. He watches me shrug. “I’ll talk with … our friend alone.”

James makes a huffy little noise and leaves the room, his brown slip-on shoes half-buried in the deep pile of the carpet.

Hugo pushes the door shut. “Regarding the events of ten months ago, I can assure you that there was no magic involved.”

I shrug again. Shrugging seems a pretty good response to this weird situation.

Hugo squints at me, then reaches for something on top of the dresser. “I’m most surprised by how you’re coping with all of this.”

“It’s post traumatic stress disorder.”

“Well, yes.” He laughs. “It could be. Where did you learn a phrase like that?”

“I don’t know.”

He pats my arm and passes me a small pile of stories cut out from newspapers. “Here’s what we do know.”

The Times Saturday 3rd November
Teesside Water Contamination Scare
Residents of Darlington and Stockton have been advised to boil drinking water due to unspecified “contamination” of the supply. A spokesperson for Northwaterland PLC blamed new operating procedures at the Broken Scar treatment plant for the lapse and stressed that any risk to the public was “very low”.

So far, so boring. I flip to the next story.

The Guardian Tuesday 6th November
Water Link as Darlington Health Crisis Deepens
Darlington Memorial Hospital is fast becoming a public health flashpoint, as staff struggle to cope with the mystery illness that has afflicted hundreds in the Darlington, Stockton and Middlesbrough areas.
Symptoms of the disease include high fever, disorientation and memory loss. The condition, which affects young and old alike, is proving highly resistant to treatment; a situation not helped by the aggressive behaviour of many of the patients. Since yesterday morning, private security guards have been patrolling the hospital corridors, with builders fixing bars to the ground-floor windows.
Government scientists remain tight-lipped about the nature and cause of the outbreak, but sources link it to an incident at Broken Scar water treatment works on Friday. All of those affected are within the water plant’s supply area.

Ok, I think I see where this is going. There’s a creeping feeling in my skin as I pick up the next page, even before I read the headline.

Daily Star Thursday 8th November
ZOMBIE RAMPAGE AT HORROR HOSPITAL
Brave Staff “Forced to Fight”
Terrified doctors and nurses were sent running for their lives after victims of the zombie bug turned nasty. Shocked witnesses revealed how hundreds of drooling fiends took control of Darlington Memorial Hospital, smashing life-saving equipment worth millions of pounds.
“They was everywhere,” recounted hospital orderly Dennis Singleton. “One came up behind and I thought he was going to bite me,” continued Dennis, who fought off the monster with a bedpan. “Some of them haven’t eaten nothing for days - I reckon they’ve got a taste for human flesh.”
As the riots took hold, operations had to be cut short and desperately ill old people winched to safety. For many, escape proved impossible when they found windows had been barred from the outside.
“They’d best send in the army,” said staff nurse Bernice Todd. “What’s the point to them unarmed guards, standing around wanting to reason with them zombies, while all goes to hell in a bucket? You can’t reason with animals.” Nurse Todd had her own solution to the problem: “Shoot them, I says. There’s only freaks left inside the building - our boys should blow the whole place to kingdom come.”

I stop reading, aware of my heart pounding in my throat. “I’m very tired.” I push the stories across the table to Hugo. “Is there somewhere I could sleep?”

“Of course, of course.” He smoothes the stack of paper with his hand. “I had Gerda make up a room for you.”

My mind is popping and pulsing, trying to deal with everything. It’s like a tap just opened in my head, flooding it with toxic water. Fears and questions slosh around, shouting for my attention. Was I there? Did I hurt someone? Did I eat someone?

“Sure you wouldn’t like pudding?” Hugo holds out a plate of mini apple pies.

Bite. Tear. Chew

“No thanks.”

Gnash. Spit. Thrash.

“They’re home-made. Puff pastry.” He puts a gloved hand on mine.

“Don’t touch me!” I smack the plate from his grasp. “It isn’t safe to touch me.”

He jumps up and away from the table, massaging his fingers. The thin china plate has broken in two, the pattern of yellow tulips ending in jagged chaos. “First floor, second door on the left.” Hugo stands on the far side of the room - by the window - flinching away from me. “Your room, I mean.”

A pie smashes under my foot as I sprint away.

BACON

Morning. I can hear Mum calling me. “Griff!” she’s saying, “Your dad and I are going now.” That’s all very nice, I think, next time can you leave without waking me up? I snuggle further under the duvet, into the warm safety of darkness. “This is it, Griff,” she calls up the stairs, “you’ll never see us again.”

I’m bolt upright, panting. This isn’t my bed or my house. The sheets are too blue and the duvet has this horrid Noddy design. It’s a tiny room, just enough space for a single bed and a mouldy old wardrobe that looks like it floated in on the last high tide. I miss my stuff, even if I can’t quite remember what I had. I just miss stuff that’s mine, I guess. My pyjamas are borrowed from James, all baggy round the knees and frayed along the cuffs. At least I remembered my name.

“Griff.” It sounds a tiny bit familiar as I say it. “Griff.” Suppose I’ll get used to it.

I get out of bed and walk to the dusty window. Standing on tiptoe, I peer down the wall of the house; that was how I got to sleep last night, by managing to convince myself that zombies couldn’t climb up these sheer bricks. It looks really quiet outside.

Maybe everyone else is dead.

“Wake up sleepyhead.” It’s James, knocking at the door. What a shame the zombies haven’t got him yet. Probably he stays indoors with his carpet slippers, his brown pyjamas and a book of poetry. “It’s bacon for breakfast, though I expect you’d prefer it raw.”

“Get lost!”

He chuckles and I feel the vibrations as he walks along the landing and down the stairs. I wish I had my own clothes, maybe a pair of trackie bottoms and a big orange fleece. I pull on a pair of hand-me-down chinos and a striped shirt, deciding not to look in any mirrors.

Pulling the door open slightly, I put my ear up to the crack. No sounds. I open it wider and look out across the landing. It’s empty. Carefully - feeling like a zombie myself - I walk across it, towards the dark corner where the landing ends and the carpeted stairs turn sharply downwards. The smell of bacon swirls up from below, tickling my nose. One of the family is eating very noisily, slurping and chomping. Funny that I can hear that upstairs.

The closer I get to the end of the landing, the gloomier it becomes - there are thick curtains drawn across the high window, making the dark corner look extra menacing. I start to see shapes that aren’t there, imagining rats and worse darting in and out of the banisters. I put a hand against the nearest doorframe to steady my shaking legs. Just a little rest, I tell myself. Hang my head to cure the dizziness, study the flowery landing carpet and the white vinyl floor that meets it from the doorway. A shape on the vinyl draws my eye, a perfectly round shape.

A drop of blood.

I hear my breathing quicken, and I hear the eating noises again, very close now - just beyond the door. There’s slurping, yes, but worse are the snuffling noises. They sound like a pig rooting through a trough, or maybe rooting through a human body, searching for the tastiest morsels.

I kick open the door, unable to stand it any longer. There’s another drip of red and then another and then a table and Gerda sitting at it, a raw steak in her hands. Blood smears her nose, lips and chin - I can see light through the hole she’s bitten in the uncooked meat. We stare at each other, frozen by confusion. Her eyes are sad and empty, like a captive polar bear I once saw at the zoo.

The sudden jolt of memory spikes through me and I turn and rush down the stairs, not worrying about rats or breaking my neck. My head is full of awful images, scenes from zombie films I must have watched: Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Braindead, The Evil Dead, Resident Evil. Hardly 12A friendly, all those flying limbs and brain-munching and gore. I’ve forgotten thirteen years of my life, but those films are so vivid to me, so … bloodthirsty.

My feet hit the hall carpet and my stomach cramps and I fall on my hands and knees, ready to puke. The sick feeling passes, but there are purple spots in front of my eyes and a pulsing in my legs. I can feel panic spreading upwards from my toes, past my waist, making my heart clang against the inside of my chest. The terror wraps around me, boiling my blood and turning my skin to ice; freezing my forehead to the floor while my pulse goes bom-bom-bom-bom through the veins in my neck.

Why me? Why pick me for this? Why bring me back from the dead to this world where I know all the rules? The zombies are going to win and I’m going to die, trapped in this house with no hope and one bullet left in my pistol.

“Please do be sick on that carpet, I’ve never liked it.”

I keep staring at the blurry pattern of leaves and flowers, avoiding James’s face. “I’m not going to be sick.”

He makes a nervous little laugh. “What are you doing down there, then?”

“We’re all going to die!”

“Of course we are.” I feel his hand on my arm, trying to pull me up. “Not before breakfast, I hope.”

The bacon smell wafts up my nose and my stomach cramps again. “I’m not hungry.”

“Shall we go out then? Father’s given me some money to buy you clothes.” James loosens the grip on my arm and bends down towards me, waving four twenty-pound notes in my face.

“Tell me …” I take a breath and then push with my arms, rocking back into a sitting position. “Tell me about Gerda.”

“She was our first live test.” James folds the notes and slips them into his shirt pocket. “A partial success. She’s mostly human.”

“Apart from the eating.”

“And the speaking, yes.” He rubs the purple marks on his neck, the ones I gave him. “Shall we depart?”

My heart is still beating double-time from earlier, but it accelerates to a sprint as James grasps the front door handle. “Don’t go out there!”

“Why ever not?” He turns the key with his other hand.

“Because the zombies will get us.”

“Ha … the zombies? Ha ha ha. They’re completely harmless.” He opens the door and steps outside, into the hazy sunlight. “See?”

I wait for a zombie to lurch out of nowhere and rip James’s head off. I wait some more. Finally, James comes back in and drags me out by the hand, his grin so smug that I have to stop and throw up in the flowerbed.

Anything for a Laugh?

2013-04-19T12:00:00.000+01:00

After reading Celia J. Anderson's article for Word & Pictures this week on Writing Humour for Children, I commented that I was glad she'd covered the subject, because some writers can get a bit snooty about funny books. But in the hours following, I realised that I was just as guilty of being snooty. Reading Celia's impassioned defence of toilet humour for nine-year-olds, I'd thought "That's all very well for her, but not for my book."

So what caused that reaction? It's fair to say that I'm writing for a slightly older middle-grade audience (I'm guessing that Celia writes for 7-9), which gives me more latitude in terms of character, plot complexity and subtlety of humour. But I think it also reflected my own fears that my work-in-progress – which I'm describing as a comedy adventure – might not be funny enough for my intended readers. I do love slapstick (and there's plenty of it), but so far no farts or burps, and only one pair of amusing underpants. Will my otherwise dry comedy of family manners translate to a preteen audience?

It's ironic that I'm apparently seeking some higher moral ground for my writing, because when I'm with my own children I'll do anything for a laugh. Bad puns, stupid names, deliberate mishearings or humour on all manner of bodily functions – nothing is too cheap if it gets a reaction. Even in my professional life, I have a habit of joking in haste and repenting at leisure. Just last week I got a huge laugh at a staff meeting for a joke at the expense of a colleague, then felt bad afterwards for my meanness. It wasn't a career limiting joke (I hope), but it did make me acknowledge the dangerous adrenaline hit that pleasing an audience can bring.

Should I sacrifice my artistic vanity and be prepared to stoop to any level to please my readers? After all, one of the virtues of good children's writing is its transparency and lack of distance between writer and reader. But I would also point out that humour is a subjective thing that's very much in the eye of the beholder. I couldn't possibly write a "funny" book that I didn't myself find funny – that would be a horrible experience for everyone. Looking back over some of the other comments left on Celia's post, it seems like I wasn't the only one wanting to approach humour in a different way – which makes me feel better.

Perhaps this whole internal debate is another stick to beat myself with, something I shouldn't be worrying about at the first draft stage. I had another small wobble regarding voice last week (and thank you to everyone who assured me I did have one), so maybe it's reflective of general self-confidence issues as I try to power through to the end of the story. One of the things I love most about this blog (apart from you, dear readers) is the way it allows me to channel my fears constructively, rather than just letting them bounce endlessly around my skull. Which, in turn, gives me more spare time to pour custard down my pants or shout "Bum!" at passing policemen.

Nick.

The Book That's Just Like Mine

2013-04-12T12:00:00.000+01:00

When I'm in a low mood, I try to avoid children's book stores. It isn't that I don't love reading children's books, it's just that sometimes the shops themselves give me the fear. Row upon row of books by authors who I've never heard of, all of them scrapping and struggling to find an audience. "What chance for me?" I ask myself, and then sadly turn away. Anyway, this week I found myself in the children's book section looking for a present for my daughter. And that was when I saw it:

The Book That's Just Like Mine

I turned it over in my hands, reading the title and looking at the illustration on the front. It wasn't exactly the same story I was currently writing, of course, but it was close enough. I flicked through and put it back on the shelf. On the way home, I knew what I should be hoping, that the book would be a success, so that every publisher would want their own version of the story. But I couldn't hold back the self-flagellation, cursing myself for being so slow at writing and letting someone else get there first. Suddenly, my book idea wasn't as fresh and new as it had felt that same morning.

A kind of low-grade panic overtook me, a feeling that I needed to accelerate the process of finishing my first draft so I could get my book out there before it was too late. I sat at my computer and composed an email to an editor, attaching the first chapter so they could take a look at it and hopefully start building an early buzz about the book. My cursor hovered over the Send button and then I clicked Save Draft instead. In a moment of clarity, I had realised what I needed to do most of all at this point in time, and that was to:

Hold My Nerve

I wrote the first half of this blog, then went back to my book with renewed purpose. And what do you know, this is the best I've felt about it in weeks. My low mood has lifted and I've carved out a couple of chapters that I really like. And all of that from a situation that would have driven me to despair just a couple of years ago.

As authors, we're always being told by agents that the worst thing we can do is send them a book too early, that it's better to take the time to get it right. But on the other hand, we also see them chasing trends and rushing to get books ready for the London Book Fair, Frankfurt and Bologna. So it isn't surprising that we're conflicted! I've been affected by bad timing with my last two books, in both cases caused by oversaturated YA trends that affected the market for middle-grade acquisitions as well. Both books were eminently publishable, but as yet, neither has been published.

So here I am, still holding my nerve and looking forward to returning to my manuscript when this blog is finished. But I know from experience that this won't be the last bump on the road – what happens the next time I feel the jaws of failure approaching? Hmm, maybe I'd better delete that draft email...

Nick.

The Art of Transgression

2013-04-05T10:00:00.000+01:00

Long-time readers will know that I like to play the odd video game, and we’ve recently bought one called Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Unlike most games, it has no real plot, characters or story. It simply dumps you into a high-powered supercar and invites you to drive around a beautifully-realised American city, crashing into other vehicles, accelerating past speed cameras, evading the police and taking part in illegal street races. Its whole raison d’être is to provide the player with endless opportunities for transgression, and it’s hardly surprising that my kids love it.

The game features no bad language or sex, and any violence is confined to vehicles crashing, crunching and rolling over. There are no pedestrians to be seen and the drivers of the various cars are rarely glimpsed (and never injured, even after the worst accident). So it’s a game with a 7+ rating that I’m happy for my children to play, but clearly not everyone feels the same way. My daughter was breathlessly describing the gameplay to another member of our family the other week, and he was visibly disturbed by what she was saying. He kept interrupting her with questions such as: "But you wouldn’t do that in real life, right?" He seemed to need assurance that she wasn't going to run out into the street, steal a Porsche and smash it into the nearest police van. I should mention at this point that she’s only nine!

In my experience, we are all fascinated by transgression, but none more so than children. Through video games, films and books they're keen to explore the boundaries of society, to enjoy the thrill that comes from breaking the rules, but without the danger of doing it for real. From chapter books upwards, child protagonists find themselves sneaking out, keeping secrets, breaking rules and generally going against the wishes of adults. Transgression and the associated risk of punishment are key mechanisms for raising tension in children’s writing.

But sometimes, well-meaning adults will try to restrict children’s ability to explore transgression, believing that exposing them to such things increases the risk that they will actually carry them out. This leads to the seemingly endless debates about the influence of violent video games and arguments about sex, drugs, self-harm etc. in YA fiction. Personally, I think children are a lot cleverer than we give them credit for and are able to play-act from an early age, clearly distinguishing fantasy from reality. I also think it’s my responsibility as a parent to vet what my children read, watch or play. I welcome consumer advice on films, games and even books (such as what Hot Key provide), but it’s ultimately there to help me and the kids select what’s appropriate for their age and emotional development.

Exploring transgression can be educational and, more importantly, a whole lot of fun. What writer doesn’t enjoy crafting those parts of the story where someone does something very very bad? Without the risk of transgression, our world would be a safe and boring place indeed. So please excuse me, because I’m off to crash a few more hundred-thousand-dollar cars.

Nick.

The Price is Write

2013-03-29T11:00:00.000Z

I'm not sure that pun in the title entirely makes sense, but bear with me. I wanted to talk this week about the price of being a writer – how much it does and should cost in monetary terms. Clearly, there is also a massive cost in terms of time and an emotional cost of delving into the darker parts of your psyche, but for now I'm just going to talk about money.

When I first started out as a writer, I don't think I perceived that the activity had much actual value. Of course, I was going to be more famous than JK Rowling and give up my day job in a blaze of success, but I didn't want to invest any actual cash to make that happen. So I would "borrow" notepads and pens from work, while also eschewing any form of writing tuition. We had an old laptop at home, and I used that to type the book up, even though the keyboard randomly failed to register certain key presses unless you stabbed it really hard. Even so, there was a certain romance to that and I could imagine I was some kind of Ernest Hemingway type, locked in my garret with only a manual typewriter and a bottle of scotch (although I'm a lightweight and mostly drank tap water). How amazing would it be to transcend my circumstances, to prove that all you needed to write a brilliant book is pure talent?

Unfortunately, I did not write a brilliant book. The next one was a lot better, though, and I took my first tentative steps into the wider world by joining an adult writing group that cost me £3.50 a week – quite a commitment at the time. I found myself paying for other things too, a laser printer for printing those all-important 3 chapter samples for agents, as well as the stamps and envelopes to send them with. Slowly, I was beginning to value my hobby and put some actual cash behind it.

A major psychological shift for me was when I joined SCBWI for the first time. Previously, the idea that I would spend $75 (as it was then) to join a writing organisation would have been preposterous, and I still needed the prospect of entering Undiscovered Voices dangled under my nose before I ponied up the cash. But from my perspective now, I think the SCBWI membership fee is a great thing. Not only does the money keep the organisation running, but it also ensures that each and every member has made a commitment to their writing or illustration. Suddenly, you are put in a position where you want to get value from that investment, and I'm sure this is one of the reasons that the organisation is so vibrant and the members so engaged.

In recent years, my spend to support my writing has continued to rise. There are conferences and retreats, writing courses and events to attend. I bought myself a decent netbook and am gradually getting with the times by writing my first drafts directly into it. I do also buy all my own stationery and haven't "borrowed" anything at all from my last 3 employers (honest). Just this month, I decided to buy a web domain that's prominently featured in my work in progress, even though the book isn't finished yet. It's something I've thought a lot about previously, usually so I could fret about someone else taking the domain before I could get the book published. However, I've also been aware that titles and character names change, and it wasn't worth setting anything in stone before I had a publishing contract. But somehow, buying that domain has solidified my determination to see the book finished and published – now I've put my money as well as my time behind it.

My very latest thought is that I'm sure I would get a lot more writing done if I went out at lunchtime every day and worked in a cafe somewhere. My best writing sessions are always the days where I leave the office, because I can get a clean break from work and the walk helps to clear my head. Plus, I find caffeine and cake are very conducive to the creative process ;-) My problem - beyond the idea being hugely self-indulgent – is the cost. I'd be spending roughly £5 a day, which quickly becomes £25 a week and a massive £1,300 a year! Is my writing worth that much? Hmm, I'll get back to you on that...

Nick.

Words & Pictures & Where I Fit In

2013-03-22T15:36:00.000Z

I hope you like shameless self-promotion, because this blog post is one huge puff piece about the new SCBWI British Isles Words & Pictures site, and how it couldn't possibly exist without my invaluable expertise and input.

Actually, I hope this post won't be like that at all, and you have my permission to give me a slap if I get too big for my boots. With a staff of 50 volunteers involved with Words & Pictures, I'm a pretty small cog in the overall scheme of things. I do hope, though, that my role of Blog Network Editor is a significant one because I get to highlight and sing the praises of other SCBWI members, in a similar way to Kathy Evans, our Celebrations Editor.

So what does the Blog Network Editor actually do? Well, it's my responsibility to maintain a list of SCBWI BI member blogs and bring those blogs to the attention of Words & Pictures readers. For the launch of the site, we decided to start small, so I've invited a cross-section of 20 bloggers to participate in the SCBWI Blog Network. The guiding principles of Words & Pictures are to be representative, inclusive and diverse, so the blogs cover a range of disciplines within writing and illustration, and their creators come from a range of social backgrounds. I found my own preconceptions being challenged during the process – where else but in children's writing could white males be considered a minority group?!?

My other job is to actually read those blog posts and pick my favourites for inclusion in a weekly feature on the Words & Pictures site called Ten-Minute Blog Break. The idea behind this is to offer readers a guide to the essential blogs they should read if they only have a ten-minute tea break. Or coffee break if you prefer – like I said, we're very inclusive in Wordsandpicturesland ;-)

Don't worry if you're a SCBWI blogger who's not included in the first wave – that doesn't mean anything about the quality of you or your blogging, just that I didn't have enough space to include you. As the site finds its feet, I'll be slowly expanding the list to include everyone. I'll also be including notable links from around the web in my round-up posts, so that could include your blog if you've written a really good post.

I feel the new Words & Pictures is a really significant step in the evolution of SCBWI British Isles. As a site open to everyone (not just SCBWI members) it's a fantastic marketing tool and shop window, demonstrating the benefits of SCBWI membership and promoting our members' wonderful books. And it's also a place for members to hang out and discuss the topics of the day, enter competitions, learn about better writing and contribute to the growing well of knowledge that is SCBWI British Isles. Much of the praise for this should go to head honcho and Editor Jan Carr, who has taken on a ridiculously complex job and very much made it her own, motivating a large group to deliver a really good looking site full of fabulous content, a site that will continue to grow as time goes on.

Words & Pictures launches this Monday 25th March, when you'll be able to find the site at www.wordsandpics.org. My first Ten-Minute Blog Break post will be live on Tuesday 26th March and every Tuesday thereafter. And have no fear, this blog will continue every Friday.

Nick.

A Time to Write

2013-03-15T16:52:00.000Z

A short post this week, because I'm suffering from a bit of a time crunch. Work has suddenly revved up, and I'm juggling several projects at once, often with no clear priorities. The SCBWI Words and Pictures relaunch is imminent (more on that next week), and I'm very aware that I have a load of outstanding tasks still to do. There's also my SCBWI Webmaster stuff, which has been receiving less than my full attention of late. On top of all this, we're in the midst of renovations at home, so last weekend was spent moving out the entire contents of our living room so we could decorate, and this weekend will doubtless be spent moving everything back again.

With all of this going on, I suppose I shouldn't feel too surprised or guilty that my fiction writing is losing out. But yet, I do feel guilty about it, probably more so than failing at any of the other activities. How strange that the thing I do supposedly "for fun" is the one that gives me the most heartache (the irony that I'm here writing a blog post, rather than working on my novel, is not lost on me). I know I should be enjoying the period when I'm still writing entirely for myself, with no deadline pressures, but I'm having trouble doing that.

I try not to measure myself against other writers, but in truth, that's very difficult to avoid. Watching others speed through their first drafts or rewrite a whole book in six weeks, I feel impossibly slow. Have I been trapped on chapter 18 forever or does it just feel like that? Of course, the answer to why I'm not able to speed through a first draft is simply that I'm not making enough time in my week for writing. But how can I rearrange my life to make that time available?

So this is where you come in – tell me your tricks for making that precious time for writing or simply not feeling bad about the fact you're unable to do it. All ideas gratefully received.

Nick.

Unfinished Business

2013-03-08T11:58:00.000Z

A close colleague announced her retirement from work the other day. Aside from the fact that she's a lovely person and will be sorely missed, she's also due to leave in the middle of a big project that she's masterminded. Luckily, I work in a large, well-resourced company, so covering her role for the remainder of the project won't be a logistical problem. But I thought it was a shame for her to be going without seeing the project through. Would she be left with a feeling of unfinished business?

Writing, too, has these questions of completion. We can never know when we might be hit by a bus, have a stroke or suffer writer's block so debilitating that it turns us into the next J.D. Salinger. Sometimes we'll put a difficult book down for too long and the moment is lost – it's impossible to resume writing it because you've become a different person in the meantime. There are all those terrible "what if" questions as well. What if I'd started writing earlier? What if that book had got through acquisitions?

I found myself reflecting on my own career so far – both in writing and publishing – and wondering about where it goes next. Preparing for my appraisal recently, I was pulled up short by the question "What would you like your legacy at OUP to be?" This is the first company I've worked for that has had enough of a history to prevent that question sounding preposterous, and I'd never considered "my legacy" before. Barring any of the bad things mentioned above, I have maybe 30 years left before I retire – what should I be looking to do with them? (I have voiced the idea that I never want to retire at all, but I also know that ill health has a habit of forcing your hand)

Is a "life well-lived" one in which we achieve all our goals and die satisfied, or one in which we're constantly pushing ourselves and striving to reach the next level? I have to lean towards the latter, if only because the days of our life are so long and the moments of regret at the end comparatively short. But there's also a balance, because we can spend so long pushing towards the next milepost that we forget to celebrate passing the last.

The more I thought about these issues, the more I could see a continuum in what we do. In both life and work, we join the timeline at a certain point, make our contribution and then depart. There is history before us and what will become history to follow. So in that sense, nothing is ever really finished. Certainly, when considering books or dictionary applications there will always be corrections and changes, new editions and new formats. Though my colleague is leaving, her work will live on for a long time. Let's hope that's true of all of us.

Nick.

Whisked Away

2013-03-02T10:28:00.000Z

What is it that makes some story ideas more attractive to us than others? I'm sure that many of us have had the experience where we've started work on a perfectly good book, only to be suddenly sideswiped by another idea that we have to write about. Kathy Evans mentioned the phenomena in her blog this week and it's also something I touched on during my own creative dithering last year.

I've heard Sara Grant talk about finding the heart of your story, the emotional imperative that will keep you working on a project even while the logical part of your brain is screaming at you to "give up and get a proper job!" And I think it's this emotional pull that characterises the new idea that comes out of nowhere and whisks you away.

Being carried away on an idea is a wonderful creative moment, but for me, the problem is its unpredictability. I must have gone through seven or eight ideas for a new novel (all of them interesting and commercial) before I stumbled upon the one that became my work in progress. I found the process of moving from idea to idea to be quite frustrating, because no matter how good the concept was, I couldn't quite muster up the enthusiasm to start writing the book. Presumably, that reticence was due to me not finding the heart of the story – once I had my final epiphany, I was able to start writing the book straight away.

I hate the down period between books, for a number of reasons. Firstly, because it means I've just sent my previous book out on submission, which is a time fraught with its own stresses. Secondly, because I have a rather overactive brain, and having a project on the go helps distract me from worrying about something else (generally submissions). And thirdly, I dislike that moment where another writer asks what you're currently working on, and you have to say "Oh, not much. Just dabbling with stuff, you know." I started to tell people that I was "between books," though it sounds like a euphemism for being unemployed. How do you define a writer who isn't writing? To my mind, that person was a failure who wasn't using their time effectively.

However, I read an article in The Guardian last week by author Andrew Simms, whose new book Cancel the Apocalypse argues that our route to avoiding global catastrophe is simply to do less – work less, consume less and stop expecting endless financial growth. In the article, he takes inspiration from nature by talking about "the importance of fallow time: no ecosystem can be 100% productive all the time." And perhaps that's a good way to characterise that time between books – a sort of mental equivalent of crop rotation.

Rather than beat myself up and ask why I couldn't have thought of that perfect novel idea first, perhaps I should consider that I couldn't have thought it up at all without going through those initial stages. In fact, I saw that process at work yesterday when brainstorming with a colleague on a publishing project. It took two or three failed concepts before we hit upon the one that caught both our imaginations, and then we started generating ideas so fast that I could barely write them down! The small downside with the brainstorming session being so successful was that it consumed my whole lunch hour, which is why you're not seeing this blog until now. But if creativity was predictable, perhaps we wouldn't find it so fascinating?

Nick.

Identity Crisis

2013-02-22T13:25:00.000Z

I had an uncomfortable surprise this week, when I discovered that someone I'd been communicating with online was not (as I'd been told) a woman, but actually a man. There was no Catfish style conspiracy involved, the third-party who introduced us had simply made a mistake. Our discourse had also been purely professional, so it wasn't as if I'd proposed marriage or anything! In fact, nothing had changed except my perception of who this person was, and I was further surprised to discover how much that perception meant to me.

It got me to thinking about all the assumptions we make about people we've hardly met, a subject that seemed particularly appropriate in the wake of all the allegations about Oscar Pistorius. Here is someone who most of us had only seen for a matter of minutes on the TV at athletics events and in the run-up to them. Yet, it seems that a great many of us had formed a perception of a brave, heroic and balanced individual, a perception that has been very quickly swept away.

Do we make similar judgements about authors when we read their books? One of the joys of fiction is that we begin to believe that the author is speaking directly to us, so it's very hard to stop ourselves building a mental model of the kind of person they are. Yet, all of us writers know that the process of creating fiction is about trying on different personas and seeing the world through someone else's eyes. Just this week, I wrote a story from the viewpoint of a vengeful fourteen-year-old medieval princess – a state of being that I'm very unlikely to find myself in during the course of my everyday life!

I think back to the way that Joanne Rowling chose to call herself J.K. on the Harry Potter books, a move supposedly designed to avoid alienating boy readers. Later on, this naming became a moot point, because everyone in the world knew who she was, but I wonder how this affected the early readers of her works? Did they imagine that the writer was an avuncular, Dumbledorish figure, or a grown-up version of Harry himself? Perhaps the story was so smoothly and skilfully told that they didn't form any perception of the author at all, but those who wrote fan letters must surely have had their own ideas.

I'm writing a middle-grade book for girls at the moment, and I wonder how much my own gender might affect the way that the book is marketed. Will I have to become "N. Cross" to avoid a female readership rejecting my book in droves? Could I pretend to be a Nicola or Nicolette? Having daughters myself, I like to think that female readers aren't so fickle as male ones, that they will read books featuring boy protagonists, whereas most boys won't go near books with girl protagonists. As the book is also something of a commentary on perceived gender roles, perhaps my gender is a selling point rather than a detriment. Anyway, we shall see (when I finally finish it).

The Internet has demystified authors and it's now much harder to prevent fans from finding photographs, biographies or Facebook profiles. Indeed, if I'd bothered to do some Googling in the first place, I would have found out that my mystery person was very definitely male. But much could be said of finding out that Daisy Meadows or Adam Blade are not real people, and that doesn't stop schools trying to book them for visits! Our internal perceptions of other people and our environment are what form the thing we call reality, and clearly each person's reality is a little different. Thanks for spending some time in mine every Friday.

Nick.

The Difficult Second Act

2013-02-15T11:50:00.000Z

I've been thinking about second acts this week, prompted by Ben Affleck's comments at the Bafta Awards on winning the Best Film award for Argo:

This is a second act for me - you've given me that and I'm so grateful and proud. I want to dedicate this to anyone that's trying to get their second act because you can do it.

Affleck was referencing the oft-quoted line from F. Scott Fitzgerald (author of The Great Gatsby), who said "There are no second acts in American Lives." A prodigious alcoholic, Fitzgerald famously failed to reach his own second act, dying at the age of 44. Affleck, still only 40, has however managed to navigate a transition from actor to award-winning director. Even more remarkable is the fact that ten years ago, he hit a career low-point and became the most derided man in Hollywood, winning two Golden Raspberry awards for his performance with Jennifer Lopez in Gigli.

While Affleck is a talented director, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised by his resurgence. He's still a handsome man and has the advantage of being able to cast himself for free in the lead role of his films. He also no doubt has a huge address book that allows him to call upon Hollywood contacts the rest of us can only dream of. Plus, there's nothing the self-mythologising film industry likes better than a comeback story – it's the American Dream writ large.

So where does that leave the rest of us, who are also working on our own second acts? Perhaps you got a job straight out of school or decided to stay at home and bring up some kids. And these were the things that defined you, until you got the itch to start writing. And if you're the kind of person who's persistent enough to keep writing over a period of years, that gradually begins to define you instead. Once you're passionate and committed to an activity, it's only natural you want to make that your primary career. But most of us aren't as well-groomed, well-paid or well-connected as Ben Affleck. Which is a problem when trying to get that second act off the ground.

I look forward to the forthcoming SCBWI Professional Series session on Making a Living as a Writer for tips on how to make the transition to full-time author. But I also have to step back and wonder whether the idea of life having distinct acts isn't rather outdated in our age of rapid change and portfolio careers. Perhaps there isn't just one story running through our lives, but several, and we are at different stages in each simultaneously. This also fits in with the major preoccupation of our modern world, which is trying to juggle the various aspects of our lives to achieve the fabled "work-life balance".

Writers have always been tempted to frame life in the terms of a story – "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players," was the version that some bloke from Stratford-upon-Avon came up with. There may be few second acts in American lives, but perhaps in the UK, every scene we appear in is a chance to grow and do something new.

Nick.

Ask Agony Author

2013-02-08T11:30:00.000Z

This week marks the introduction of a new column on the blog. In Ask Agony Author, I'll be inviting writers to tell me about their embarrassing problems and then using my years of experience and wisdom to ~~ridicule and abuse them~~ guide them to a solution. So, without further ado, let's...

Dear Agony Author,

You may know me as the creator of the bestselling children's franchise Artichoke Foul, a series I memorably pitched as "Die Hard with vegetables." My Foul series has brought me fame and riches, but it has also left me with an terrible yearning that I cannot seem to shake. Agony Author, I have an awful secret – I want to write books for adults.

I know this seems wrong, and I tried to disguise my intentions to avoid a backlash from my loyal fans. By starting off with a tribute to my late hero Douggie Adnams, I hoped to pass off my sequel to The Hairy Bikers' Guide to the Galaxy as the book that Douggie never wrote.

However, once I had set foot in the filthy world of fiction for adults, it became like a depraved virus, eating away at my self-control and self-respect. Since then, I've come out of the closet with a full-blown adults' crime novel called Unplugged and even sunk to writing about that clapped-out Saturday night time-traveller Dr Whoa!

Every time I see my adults' books on the shelf, I'm overcome by feelings of guilt and shame. I just know that my children's writer friends are laughing at me behind my back. Tell me, Agony Author, is it ever OK to write for adults?

Yours self-disgustedly,
Owen Cauliflower

Agony Author Replies,

Thank you Owen, for your painfully honest letter. It took a lot of guts to write to me, especially since I was one of the people laughing behind your back. The emotions you describe are natural and understandable. Many people feel ashamed to admit that they even read books for adults, and that is why popular series like Fifty Shades of Grey are available with special children's style covers for reading on the tube.

With the advent of the e-reader, many more people may find themselves able to secretly read books for adults, though it isn't clear whether they should be allowed. It has long been a well-known fact that anyone can write an adults' book and get it published, such is the lack of discernment amongst adult readers. Commuters in particular seem happy to read any old rubbish provided there is a sadistic murder every ten pages or a fatuous plotline about female empowerment through expensive shoes. Literary connoisseurs, accustomed to the fast-moving and innovative narratives in children's literature, are often appalled by the indulgent, navel-gazing tosh that constitutes most grown-up fiction. These books may win literary prizes, but I'm sure you could feel an equal amount of pride by winning the "County Wexford Best-Kept Wheelie Bin" competition. If nothing else, it would give you a handy place to shelve your adults' novels.

All of these unarguable facts might not help you, Owen, but I wanted to make sure you were fully aware of the cesspit of mediocrity you're stepping into. Rather than try to make you feel better about your choices, I'd like to emphasise that it's not too late to step back from the edge. Adult book readers, who have the mental capabilities of a guppy, will quickly forget you, while children's book readers have long memories and are fiercely loyal to their favourite authors.

Short of becoming Doctor Whoa!, you won't be able to persuade Douggie Adnams to write another book. You can, however, bring your own career back from the dead.

Yours tough-lovingly,
Nick.

Escaping from Reality

2013-02-01T12:00:00.000Z

I've often heard authors say that writing is their escape from reality, even to the extent that some consider it an indulgent pleasure. Frankly, I'm a bit jealous of people that can look at it that way - as regular readers will know, it doesn't generally work out that way for me. In fact, I've often found writing more of a punishment than a pleasure. It was therefore with interest that I read Matt Haig's recent post, in which he describes how he escaped the destructive power of his depression through writing.

For my own part, though, I found it very hard to write my way out of depression – it was like being in a deep, slippery pit and what I really needed was a ladder, not words. It wasn't until I was in recovery that I found the compulsion to write again – before that it had (like everything else) seemed a supremely pointless activity. Never say never, though, and it was in the spirit of experimentation that I tried using writing to escape from reality when I was sat in the dentist's chair yesterday. Of course, I couldn't physically write, or even talk, but that couldn't stop me thinking about a story could it?

I'll answer that question in a minute, but for context it's worth talking about what a good writing week I've had. My current book is moving along nicely and I've found the technique of alternating writing and drawing storyboards to be immensely helpful in getting over writer's block. This week I also wrote a short story, for the first time in four years! It was a great experience that made me wonder why I didn't write them more often; it was such a buzz to finish something in a single day and, even better, the person I wrote it for really liked the end result.

So, back to the chair. My dentist has assured me that I won't need an anaesthetic and I'm gripping the armrests as he drills into my molar. I know that my expectation of pain is probably far worse than the actuality, so I try to focus on something else. Another short story idea pops into my head and, for long seconds, I lose myself in possibility. Then I'm jolted back to reality by the dentist asking if I'm OK. Perhaps my lack of frantic squirming has made him worry that I've passed out. I attempt a small noise of assent and he goes back to his work while I return to mine. Later, he takes a photo of my drilled-out tooth and shows it to me, but sadly my mouth is too full of various probes and bits of metal to make a suitably sarcastic comment.

By the end of the appointment, I've sifted through ideas and mentally composed a few bits of prose. The act of writing has made a difficult situation easier, and in my small way I've begun to see what Sally Poyton was getting at in her quietly devastating follow up to Matt Haig's post. Maybe all I actually need to do is simply give myself permission to enter the fugue state where stories are made, regardless of the situation I find myself in?

Anyway, I'll keep experimenting, though I'm not due back at the dentist now for another six months. Perhaps I can find a less painful situation to escape from. Maybe one involving cake?

Nick.

Out with the Old, In with the New

2013-01-25T11:57:00.000Z

Never let it be said that I don't try to give you something different every Friday. I'm going to kick this week's post off with a bit of 1960s Situationist philosophy on the nature of consumerism, so pay attention at the back:

Wherever abundant consumption is established, one particular opposition is always at the forefront: the antagonism between youth and adults. But real adults — people who are masters of their own lives — are in fact nowhere to be found. And a youthful transformation of what exists is in no way characteristic of those who are now young; it is present solely in the economic system, in the dynamism of capitalism. It is things that rule and that are young, vying with each other and constantly replacing each other.

That particular quote is taken from The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, published in 1967. It probably loses something in translation from the French, but I was really engaged by his ideas about the consumer society, especially that last sentence. In some ways, we take for granted the idea that newer is better, that young people are the true dictators of what is cool in this world, and the rest of us just hang around, smelling a bit mouldy and generally getting in the way of progress.

In Debord's view, the perceived conflict between old and young is simply a marketing gimmick, a way of driving consumption by convincing us that buying into the "new" is far preferable to sticking with the "old" things we already own. Nowhere is this dynamic more in evidence than in the technology market. Every day brings a hail of new product announcements: e-readers, smartphones, tablets, laptops, tablets that transform into laptops, smartphones that make candyfloss (ok, I made that one up). Each new technological advancement makes the printed book seem increasingly old-fashioned, as we find more and more ways to deliver content electronically.

But is this progress illusory? Are we really gaining from the move to digital, or just transitioning for the sake of it, because the new technology seems to offer us a more convenient way of accessing content? Yes and no. Digital does offer a lot of opportunities, new ways of publishing that make it easier to access and interact with the written word. Digital also offers a wealth of feedback that wasn't previously feasible – it's now possible to see how quickly people read books, which sections they reread, even which page makes them abandon the book and never return. But all this doesn't stop the printed book being a very effective (and attractive) delivery method in its own right – not better or worse than digital, just different.

Guy Debord's ideas are striking in others ways, not least that they are still so pertinent, over 45 years since they were written. Perhaps in that time, the nature of consumer society hasn't changed that much, because it still seems that the teenager rules much of popular culture. How many times have you heard people complaining that books, films or technology are predominantly targeted towards teenagers and young adults, rather than the majority of the population? You only have to look at how many YA books are being read by adults (84% according to a recent survey) or notice that the 12A has become the go-to certification for blockbuster movies. There is a worrying trend too, in the US, towards commissioning YA novels from younger and younger writers, many of them barely out of their teens. Some of them are very good (Divergent by Veronica Roth springs to mind), but many others feel more like youth-driven marketing gimmicks.

Will Debord's predictions continue to be proved right? Perhaps change is coming - as the consumer society looks increasingly shaky, it can no longer rely on younger people to set the trends and do all of the spending (especially when they can't get a job). In the publishing arena, the apocalyptic predictions for the death of the book are yet to be fulfilled, and the decline in print sales has slowed. Rather than the old ways being swept aside to allow for the new, it seems as if print and electronic products may coexist in the marketplace, each serving a different purpose. Indeed, it may be e-readers that are swept aside, as more and more people choose to use multifunctional tablet devices to read their e-books. The competition between the things, it seems, will continue as long as we have money in our pockets.

Nick.

Going Global

2013-01-18T12:40:00.000Z

I was pondering a post on story franchises yesterday, when, as luck would have it, a link to this article was posted on the SCBWI British Isles Facebook group. In it, Eric Huang from Penguin Children's (who I interviewed for the SCBWI Transmedia panel last November) talks about globalised story brands and his vision for the future of publishing. This is a topic that Eric touched on during our panel and Eric is a passionate defender of the place of publishing in a cross-platform world. As he says at the end of the article:

We [publishers] were the first storytelling industry and I feel that I am not going to let our sister industries be the ones that survive because I think we are the master storytellers.

Eric's approach to ensuring this survival is for Penguin to take on the role of brand curation for authors and other creators. In this model, the publisher becomes the guardian of the story world and is able to control how that story, its characters and settings are exploited across media. Not coincidentally, it also means that Penguin will control all of the rights to that property and will have a guaranteed slice of the revenue if it's a success. This kind of strategy finds the publisher putting a foot firmly into the world of the agent, who would normally seek to manage publishing and other rights for their clients. But then, if you look at how many agents are publishing books directly these days, perhaps it is just another example of traditional roles becoming blurred.

In the movie world, global consolidation has long been the norm. Movies are immensely expensive to both make and to market, which makes a worldwide business approach essential. Click the image below to see a huge infographic at Empire Online about who owns which movie franchise:

Franchises and global brands are now seen as being essential to the movie business, to the extent that it's much easier to adapt your ideas into a reboot of an existing property, than it is to strike out with a truly original idea. And that gets to the crux of the problem, because the vision of the future that Eric and others are promoting sounds terribly sterile. There aren't many creative people outside of advertising who get up in the morning and think: "I know, what I really want to achieve today is to create a globally recognised brand." But the paradox is that most of the major story brands in the world today were started by just one person. Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, The Simpsons, James Bond, The Muppets – the list goes on.

Large companies are rarely a good environment for the kind of original thinking that's needed to birth a franchise. But once that initial concept has been successfully launched, corporations are much better placed than individuals to take a story world and turn it into a long-term money-maker. They might also ruin it in the process, but the good news is that corporations like Disney are becoming much more adept at running story businesses without running them into the ground. There's even a chance that the new Star Wars movies might invigorate the franchise, rather than taking it still further from where it started. Here's hoping, anyway.

Nick.

Finding the Fun

2013-01-11T11:59:00.000Z

Last month, I wrote the following on this blog:

I do wish writing could be more fun for me – I lost much of the joy during my own rush to publication and subsequent depression a couple of years back, and I'm still struggling to find it again.

This is a subject that I've been thinking about a lot recently, especially with the change of year and the change of habits that implies. And it seems like I'm not the only one with this problem. Everywhere I look, I see articles encouraging writers to be playful or find the fun in what they do. It makes me wonder if these tough times have brought on an epidemic of joylessness.

However, just as you can't cure depression by telling someone to "cheer up," so you can't make writing fun for someone by telling them that it should be. In fact, such advice can have the opposite effect by making someone (i.e. me) feel guilty that they're not enjoying it! Part of my motivation for presenting the Museum of Me was to turn the clock back to a time when I was having fun, simply creating for the hell of it.

But is "fun" even the right word? It's a term that encompasses the lighter parts of the process but not the darkness or the emotional catharsis that writing can bring. Perhaps satisfaction is a better way to look at it: I want to be more satisfied by the process of writing.

It's not that I lack a writing routine. Every day I sit down at lunchtime with a pad or my netbook, but then I invariably freeze up. By the end of an hour, I will have a hundred or so words, but it will also feel like I've had to winkle each one out with a sharp implement. This happens pretty much every day except Thursday, when suddenly the words start flowing. Except they're not flowing into my book, but into this blog.

I'm driven to wonder what makes it so much easier for me to write a blog post than it does to write a novel. Is it the immediacy of the format, or the clearly defined length and schedule? Is it that I get to talk about something completely different every week with no need to get myself back into the world of a novel? It's been a weird thing for me to realise that I'm probably much more defined nowadays by my blog output than by my children's writing.

There was a great blog post this week on Finding Your Voice. It's aimed at illustrators, but a lot of the advice can be easily adapted for writers. The author suggests making a list of the things you like drawing, so you can include some of these to personalise your own work. I was inspired by the article to start a list of the elements I enjoy putting in a story. Here's what I have so far:

Bad puns
Alliteration
Slapstick
Jokes about Star Wars (these seem to creep in without me noticing)
Bizarre action scenes
Social comedy
Tonal shifts (eg. from comedy to danger)
Mental health issues
Subversive behaviour
Made up technology

Interestingly, pretty much all of these things feature in my work-in-progress, which leads me to wonder how much this list is influenced by what I'm doing right now. Clearly, I need to dig a little deeper and keep adding stuff, but it did make me feel that – however hard the process is – I'm on the right track with this book.

I'll report back in a few months on my progress at putting the satisfaction back into my writing life. I'm going to keep adding to that list of thing I like and also try to apply what I enjoy about blogging to the novel writing process. I will try new techniques as well, like writing in different places or dictating the story instead of typing it. Here's hoping that I can make 2013 the year that I start writing books purely for my own enjoyment again.

Nick.

Eight Rules for Better Action Writing

2013-01-04T13:44:00.002Z

Wait a minute, is it 2013 already?

I'm very pleased to say that my first article of the year is a guest post about writing action scenes for Lorrie Porter on her excellent This Craft Called Writing blog.

You can find the post right here.

Nick.

The Museum of Me (2002 - 2012)

2012-12-28T12:31:00.000Z

Welcome back to the second half of The Museum of Me for a trip through the last ten years. Don't fret if you missed part one, there's still time to catch up on knockabout blasphemy, duelling fanzines and videos of me playing James Bond (badly) by clicking here.

The period I'm covering this week is the one in which I started writing for children, but I'm going to restrain myself from dumping a 300 page unpublished manuscript on here for you to read! One of the things I dislike about writing novels is that you often have nothing easily digestible to show friends and family - in many ways a book doesn't really exist until you get it published. Compare that with my wife, who's an artist - she can finish a beautiful picture in the morning and have it up on Facebook attracting likes before the day is out (sigh). Accordingly, I've tried to select my more visual side projects for your viewing pleasure.

Philosophy is Fun!

I used to make such amazing presents: mix tapes; books; mix tapes and books (with each page telling the incredibly untrue story of a different track on the tape). The most elaborate present I ever attempted was the Existential Distress Kit.

Existential Distress Kit (2002) - Click to enlarge

This box of goodies was an attempt to cheer up my best friend Stefan, who was at the time stuck working a job in construction that he hated. By subverting the ideas of the very best philosophers, I hoped that I could pull my friend from his existential funk. In the kit, you could find:

Existential Door Hanger (2002) - Click to enlarge

Then there was a t-shirt that I can't imagine anyone wearing unless they wanted to get into a fight:

Existential T-Shirt (2002) - Click to enlarge

We were mad keen on collectable card games at the time, so I designed some cards of my very own, printed them out on proper cardstock and wrapped them in a foil envelope - all designed to look like an actual booster pack you might buy in a games shop.

Moral Vacuum Collectable Card Game (2002) - Click to open in new tab

Pride of place in the Existential Distress Kit was my first (and so far only) finished picture book. It was inspired by a children's Star Wars book about C-3PO called I Am a Droid, but my version took a very different approach. The PDF here doesn't really do justice to the original artefact, as I painstakingly glued the pages onto thick cardboard, so the whole thing looked and felt like a board book.

I Am an Existentialist (2002) - Click to open in new tab

Wow, I did like loads of different fonts, didn't I? Even if they were occasionally unreadable...

Was the Existential Distress Kit a success? Well, I think Stefan was a little nonplussed when I originally gave him the present, but since then, he's gone back to university to get an MA, then a PhD and is now a full-time lecturer. Coincidence? I think not!

A Richly Imagined History

In 2004, we decided to move from Guildford to Abingdon, Oxfordshire. We exchanged a character Victorian cottage (which was actually a creaking money pit that would have bankrupted us) for a boring but solidly-built 1970s suburban residence. Tasked with producing an invite for our housewarming party, I was struggling to find anything notable about the house, apart from the slightly pretentious name fixed to the porch: "Dalmore." Suddenly, I came upon a perfectly simple solution - if the house needed a history, then I could just invent one!

Years of poking around stately homes had prepared me well for this task. The finished invite was designed to look as if it had been torn from the pages of the National Trust guidebook:

Dalmore House Invitation (2004) - Click to open in new tab

As if organising a party for fifty people was not enough work, I also "researched" the history of the site and recounted it in loving detail. I put these information boards on the walls of each room, so our housewarming guests could discover the whole amazing story as they toured the house.

Dalmore House - A History (2004) - Click to open in new tab

JK Who?

Writing children's books was not a task I fell into particularly gracefully. Stubbornly self-taught, I refused to associate with other writers or even read books about how to write for my first five years. Instead, I took whatever I was dealing with each day in my own life and worked it into a scene featuring my characters. After a couple of years of writing this way in longhand, I had filled numerous notebooks and typed none of it up. A sensible person would have junked the whole project at this point and started again with something more structured. Never mistake me for a sensible person - I took it upon myself to wrangle the 150,000 words into a coherent narrative.

The result was The New Janice Powley, a YA comedy/drama/satire that was as unfocused as those multiple slashes suggest. The premise was a simple one: What if you became the next J.K. Rowling? I invented a thinly-veiled J.K. analogue called Janice Powley and her boy wizard Tom Farley, both of whom my teenage protagonist David hates with a vengeance. In an act of retaliation, David begins to write his own book spoofing Tom Farley, while weaving in elements of his own life. His book finds its way into the hands of a washed-up writer who smells gold, and David is suddenly catapulted into the literary stratosphere.

Yes, there was more than a little wish-fulfilment at work here. I was writing a book inspired by my own life about a character writing a book inspired by his own life, and we had both been inspired by the success of J.K. Rowling. I think I'd seen Adaptation one too many times and fancied myself as the Charlie Kaufman of the children's publishing world. When sending the book to agents, I decided to run with the concept a bit further and create a rather unique query letter:

New Janice Powley Agent Letter (2007) - Click to open in new tab

Despite (or because of) this letter, I managed to secure a couple of full manuscript reads from agents, which in retrospect was an amazing achievement for a first novel. Of course, I didn't see it that way, because the book didn't make it any further and I was crushed. But it's been five years since I put the book to bed, and I can see that the whole thing was too scattershot to work, no matter how much professional editing it might have received. But there are still moments of rough charm, and I wanted to pick out my very favourite scene for you here. Sex, Shakespeare and school subversion - what more could you ask for?

New Janice Powley Extract (2007) - 1,800 words - Click to open in new tab

SCBWI Style

Most of you reading this know that I didn't avoid other writers forever. In fact, I joined the SCBWI a few years back and discovered a wonderful community that's helped me through some tough times. For several years now, I've entered the SCBWI conference badge competition, and somehow I still haven't won first prize! But true to my pigheaded nature, I keep entering in the hope that maybe all the illustrators will lose their crayons one year or something. Here is a small tableau of all the badge designs I've produced so far, some of them winners, but many of them sadly neglected. Sob.

SCBWI Badge Designs (2010-2012) - Click to enlarge

And that's all from The Museum of Me. I hoped you've enjoyed this rummage through the archives, as much as I've enjoyed revisiting the artefacts from my past. It's a process that's reminded me how much more comfortable I am with words than pictures nowadays, how moving pixels around in Photoshop feels more like work than pleasure. But never say never - perhaps there is some amazing graphical Transmedia app project around the corner, just waiting for my dubious design skills and mastery of clip art. Until then, I guess I'll keep on writing books for children. Because I'm stubborn like that.

Nick.