Things have been quiet on the short story front because I've been working on getting my novel into actual send-out-able manuscript form. Since this has involved pulling all the separate chapters together into one file for the first time since the early drafts, it has also enabled me to search the whole document for redundant or repetitive words and formations - things like the 'actual' and 'working on' in the first sentence above. Other words I've searched for include pointless little qualifications like fairly, barely, nearly, almost, quite and as if; as well as that sneaky little grace note, little itself. 

Then, of course, (and there's another couple) there are the words that unnecessarily frame the narrative through the characters' perceptions: they heard a..., she sensed..., he thought he..., etc. Those seemed to add something, somehow, first time around. And they do. They add distance, delay, indecisiveness and, worst of all, word count. (As for that persistent use of something, somehow and seemed, that's lack of belief in your own storytelling. I should know; I had to cut out dozens.)

What a Find and Replace search won't help you with is spotting those unnecessary adverbs and adjectives. I'm not talking about style here - as far as I'm concerned, that's between you, your conscience and that other nagging voice in your head that may or may not be Stephen King. Actually, I think it depends totally on context and you can't have a hard-and-fast rule (and every time I pick up one of his books I spot adverbs galore). No, I'm talking about getting rid of them or replacing them to reduce word count without affecting content. And this throws up an interesting conundrum...

You see, it's one thing to scrap an adjective or adverb completely. Often that works. Sometimes it doesn't. And, yes, there might well be a better and more economical word to use: dazzling instead of very bright. But what about if you wanted to say very bright? What about if the character whose POV this is (but who's no longer being described, unnecessarily, as perceiving these things) isn't himself very bright? It might feel artificial for him to find something dazzling when that's not what he would call it. Likewise, everybody will tell you to replace he ran quickly with he sprinted, but what about if the sentence continues: and then, when he remembered who he was running to, he ran not-so-quickly...? Another example, also from the first sentence above: the use of the made-up adjective 'send-out-able'. 

Obviously there are better ways to say that. Shorter ways (let's not get into hyphens-reducing-word-count now). But what are they? Sure, I could have said presentable, but that suggests the look of it and then you're into a discussion about formats, fonts and so on. I could, I suppose, have said submittable, but that, being a particular submission management system, opens up a whole new can of worms. Plus, of course, I was aiming for an artless, folksy tone of voice, so as not to sound like someone pretending to be a professional who knows what they're talking about. The thing I've learned is that sometimes the wordier, clunkier phrasing is the effect you wanted and tightening it up spoils it. Hemingway knew this. Imagine if he'd changed a sentence like 'It was very hot in the sun' to 'It was scorching'.

So those are some of the things I've been wrestling with over the past few months as I whittled The Borodino Sacrifice (the first and, at this stage, only Chasing Mercury novel) down to size. And by that I mean getting it down from an unwieldy, overwritten 144,000 words to just under the magic number of 120,000. Why - and indeed if - that is in any way a magic number should be a subject for another day and most likely a more experienced sender-outer of manuscripts...

But hey, baby steps (with or without baby shoes). I did it!

I was delighted to hear from the wonderful folks at FlashBack Fiction that they were going to publish one of my flash pieces on their website. And horrified when they suggested I tape an audio version to sit with the text. I truly hate hearing the sound of my own voice: that's what writing it down is for!

But the editor was so nice about it that I thought I'd better give it a shot. And despite the massive cringe-factor, I'm glad I did, not just because people are being very supportive about my efforts on Twitter, but because it was genuinely a learning experience and one that might help my writing in the future.

You see, although I've long subscribed to the idea that you should read what you've written aloud, to yourself, to see if it's properly readable, with the right sort of rhythm and tone, that's just reading it to yourself, not projecting it to others as any kind of performance. And when I started to do the latter, besides having my own flashbacks to horrible, red-faced work presentations I'd rather had stayed buried deep in my unconscious, I realised that reading it out like this presents a whole new challenge.

It's as though you're overlaying another dimension of meaning on the text. You have to think about the tone not just of the whole piece but of every single sentence - is that one confident, is that one sly? And then of course you start seeing where maybe the text shouldn't have left it all up to the reader's interpretation, where perhaps you needed to make the intended tone more obvious on the page.

I'm just a beginner. I haven't got my head even halfway around what it all means, but I have learned this: it has the potential to be such a valuable exercise that I'm going to do it from now on, for myself, and not just with finished stories but with early drafts. I can always delete the files straight afterwards.

So thank you, FlashBack Fiction. And for the record (yes, I'm cringing) here it is: Kom-bat.

Of course I've been here many times before. I'm sure a lot of us have. You come up with an original idea, linked to another original idea, but somehow the combination of the two ideas makes it look like you ripped something off.

Maybe it was something you'd never heard of. Doesn't matter. Forever after there'll be that doubt in people's minds, possibly even your own... had you read or seen something and then forgotten it... was it subconscious?

Or maybe - and this is the really galling one - it's something that didn't fricking exist when you had your idea and someone else came up with it subsequently. Because your thing is unpublished, chances are no one ripped you off, it's just an unfortunate coincidence. But because your thing is unpublished and theirs very obviously isn't, nobody's going to believe that.

And sometimes, let's face it, the waters are muddier anyway. You were inspired by something else, maybe the other writers were too. (That's usually the answer to improbable conspiracy theories like how James Cameron ripped off the Jon Pertwee Day of the Daleks serial when he wrote The Terminator.)

So here's the thing. The boys just got me to watch the trailer for the new Stranger Things, the first series of which had at least partly inspired my coming-of-age-with-alien-invasion-except-not-really novella 76. And of course it looks like there's going to be a setting in the next series that's taken straight out of my story: the open air swimming pool with the morally compromised, Aviator-shaded lifeguard. 

Not too surprising. There were a lot more open air swimming pools in the old days and I daresay a lot more morally compromised lifeguards as well. Plus, for all I know, this scene is pretty much irrelevant to the rest of the action in Series 3; it hasn't aired yet, after all.

But that's the point: I'm just getting my disclaimer in early. There's a key scene in 76 that's set at the Upper Deck swimming pool by Molesey Lock - long vanished now beneath neo-neo-Georgian commuter apartments but once the venue for many a heart-stopping drama of one kind or another. And it's not in there because of Stranger Things or Stephen King or anybody else. It's in there because it happened.

More or less.




​


Photo credit here: http://www.moleseyhistory.co.uk/pictures/pages/S03_0505B.htm 

​On August 20th 1968, the day of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, a striking, dark haired woman known only as ‘Connell’ walked into the central post office in Prague and made arrangements to send a package to London.
 
Had she been followed by the secret police? Had she thrown off her tail? Or had surveillance during the Prague Spring grown so lax that she and her parcel slipped through unnoticed? The latter seems unlikely. In the run-up to the Soviet-led invasion, tensions were high and wild stories had been circulating.
 
East German propaganda claimed that the woman’s Hollywood entourage were fifth columnists come to arm the counter-revolutionaries. Another rumour had a CIA team in the area – under the cover of the movie unit – hunting for buried Nazi loot.
 
So who was the package meant for?
 
Well, that would be me.
 
You see, this isn’t the start of some potboiler; it’s the third of three blog posts about family stuff that has inspired my recent stories. First there was the box under the bed that may have had a human head in it (but didn’t). Then there was the typewriter that genuinely did have a connection to ‘Lucky’ Luciano. And now it’s the Czech stamps my mother kept for me – my birthright, she said - because of the historic postmark.
 
Maureen Connell was a family friend, although all those ties have sadly unravelled now. She was an actress, later a writer, who was married to the film director John Guillermin. (It was Guillermin who always called her ‘Connell’, and it stuck.)
 
The movie he was shooting - with or without embedded CIA agents – was The Bridge at Remagen, a big budget war picture starring George Segal, Ben Gazzara and Robert Vaughn, in which newly liberalised Czechoslovakia was doubling for Nazi Germany in its dying days. The way things had turned out, with the Red Army massing at the borders, 20th August 1968 was a pretty bad day to find yourself in an American film unit equipped with a squadron of M-24 tanks and other assorted weaponry. (There was a Radio 4 play a few years ago, Solo Behind the Iron Curtain, that dramatised some of the ensuing events, with Robert Vaughn playing himself, escaping for the border.)
 
But much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of any ex-Stasi conspiracy theorists, the truth is that the contents of the suspicious package posted by Connell in Prague that day had very little to do with a reactionary plot, or even the Štěchovice treasure, I’m afraid. It was a little camel coat she’d found that she thought would suit three-and-a-half year-old me. And it did. So thank you, Connell, wherever you are.
 
And thanks, Mum, because even though Dad threw away all your stuff when you died – including my birthright – from doing my research and talking to people I got a story out of it in the end. It’s called The Liberation of Vaclav Voracek and strictly speaking has nothing to do with Connell or that side of it, instead taking its inspiration from some of the other events of that day and how they might have impacted upon the poor Czech students involved in the production. Hopefully it will appear in my Animus collection sometime soon.
 
As for what was really in the package...

​Last time I blogged about my mother and the severed head she kept in a box under her bed. This time I thought I'd focus on the typewriter my uncle took with him to meet the godfather of the modern Mafia.

It was 1960. Uncle John had been keeping busy, with a string of screenwriting successes under his belt that included a BAFTA nomination for Yield to the Night (retitled Blonde Sinner in the United States but here in Britain an important step in turning public opinion against the death penalty). Between jobs, he was approached by a Hollywood producer, Martin Gosch, to co-write a semi-fictionalised mafioso script that no American writer would touch. The first step would be to fly out to Naples and interview the 'historical consultant', one Charlie "Lucky" Luciano.

So John packed his trusty Olympia SM3 portable (this one here, in fact) and off he went. He met Luciano, said he was a very friendly if somewhat scary guy, and even worked with him on the script, presumably on this very machine. Until that is, by various accounts, the fellas back home decided that they didn't really need the extra publicity and instead made everyone involved in the project an offer they couldn't refuse. John came back to London to work on Spare the Rod with Max Bygraves and Gosch produced a book instead, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, in which he claimed the mobster had spilled the beans on his life story before dying in Gosch's arms at Naples airport - although one account has a furious Luciano raving 'Gosch is a f***ing lying son of a bitch and I'm getting him back to Naples to take care of him!'

All things considered, I'd say Uncle John - and his typewriter - got out at the right time. Perhaps that's why I keep it here, not just to remember him by but as a writing talisman. What's yours?

I don’t remember the presence of a valance, or even the existence of such things. If my immature apprehension gave a name to the veil that my fingers had suddenly grown so reluctant to lift, it would have been bedspread; counterpane perhaps.

No, what I remember is the box behind it, and how, as I prostrated myself against my better judgement and lowered my cheek almost to the dusty Axminster, it slid shadily, shakily into view. The shape of it. The picture on it. This picture.

What kind of mother keeps a head-sized box with a picture like that on it under her bed?

Because I’m sorry, I know René Gruau was a pretty influential fashion illustrator and the logo he designed for Dickins & Jones of Regent Street was fabulously stylish but come on, COME ON... Here I am, really little and left alone in the house (things were done differently in those days) and of course I’m going to goad myself into sneaking into her room and getting down for another, terrified peek. Because even I, at God knows what tender age, can tell it looks like a severed head on some cloth, not a rose – and who would tie a black ribbon on a rose anyway?

And did I mention the head-sized box?

I never found the courage to look in it, of course. In those early, different days it was enough to catch sight of it, and skip a breath or a heartbeat, and beat a hasty retreat. Later, the space under the bed would fill up with other stuff. Pads. Dad’s pictures. A tartan picnic basket filled with slides and Kodak wallets. Those strangely orthopaedic-looking boot stretchers. But even though I’d only happen on it now and then, by chance, still the box would be under there somewhere.

After she was gone, Dad threw it all away. I asked him what had been in the box.

​Her wedding dress, he said.
 

When I set up this website I included a page that I called Works in Progress. However, since everything I discuss throughout the whole site could be described as unfinished in one way or another, what this somewhat misnamed page turned into was an interactive Title Survey for one particular work in progress: my proto-Cold War spy thriller novel set in the aftermath of the German surrender in 1945.

I had two possible titles for it, one of them reminiscent of the kind of Robert Ludlum/Desmond Bagley/Anthony Price books I grew up reading (and of the Modesty Blaise novels that have provided a sizeable chunk of its inspiration), the other less generic and more suggestive of hifalutin 'literary' aspirations. For the record, these were The Borodino Sacrifice and Chasing Mercury.

But as I've indicated on the Works in Progress page, this isn't just a case of alternative titles. The two options are tonally so different that they change the whole look and feel of the book. You could, for example, use a whimsical cover design for Chasing Mercury - although it would be a bit disingenuous for a novel that begins with a sniper watching a secret handover and ends with an Alamo-style shootout - but The Borodino Sacrifice (to mix game metaphors) needs to lay its cards on the table.

There's also the question - clumsily addressed but by no means insignificant - of appealing, in an ideal world, to both male and female readers. In crude terms, I have a pair of protagonists with a mix of male and female motivations. It would be nice if the look and feel were able to reflect this in some way.

The point of the blind survey was to get an impression of which version of the book people - whoever they might be - would be more likely to pick up or click on, and to that end I mocked-up a couple of very different covers.

And now the results are in... Or rather, having taken bloody ages to get the form entries up to double figures, I've decided to call it, for the time being. Chasing Mercury got twice the votes of The Borodino Sacrifice. 

However, none of these respondees (and many thanks to all of you!) have read the book. Apart from the little bit of blurb/log-line above the survey, they didn't really know what they were voting on - it was always just an instinctive thing, a snapshot of changing tastes. 

But I do know the book. I know how it ends. And I've made a decision based on that. You see, it doesn't end, not completely - it opens the way for a follow-up, possibly even a trilogy.

So yes, as you preferred: Chasing Mercury is the overall title. But with The Borodino Sacrifice as the subtitle for this first volume. 

I feel another blog post coming on about the titling of novel sequences. Numbered books... Colons... Franchises... But I need to go away and think about that first.

In the meantime, thanks again for the input. The chase goes on!

In the haunting words of that sadly neglected, oft-rejected film score composer, Stanley Rogers: 'Don't be a pro-cras-tin-ator'.

But it's not as easy as that.

I'm not talking here about putting off the act of writing. (Cue the clickbait lists and quotes... Yeah, thanks a bundle.)

I'm talking about when you have typed THE END, and you are reasonably happy with this latest draft. But you have another project on the back-burner and this is the perfect time to start looking again at that. So you do, even though you kind of know what's going to happen - how you're going to leave the newly finished work a little too long before re-reading it, and spend a bit too much time in another mindset, hearing another voice come through, so it'll sound a little off again when you do.

Or, rather, when I do. It's me we're talking about here. My hang-ups. My pro-cras-tin-ation.

In the past year, this is how it has gone. 12-14 months ago I was getting demoralised pulling together the short story collection. Although I was still happy with the linking concept (which this week has proved more topical than ever, dammit), individual stories weren't performing as well as I'd hoped and I was talking myself into cutting more and more of them, so I called a timeout before the whole thing disappeared up its own Aristotle. Instead, I developed an idea that had been buzzing around, a longer-form story, which became my novella, 76. I was 80% happy with the early drafts of that, but there were (and still are) nagging concerns, things that need fixing and need some inspiration if that's going to happen. So while waiting for that I decided to use my time productively (ha, ha) by getting onto some revisions that I'd been putting off making to my novel Chasing Mercury / The Borodino Sacrifice...

And that went well. That's the point. I did another draft that cut out a ton of flab and fixed some clumsy head-hopping that I'd always known would need fixing. I was happy with it at last. Still am.

Only... now I'm straight back on the novella and its problems, because deep down I know that I can't wait for inspiration to arrive and I have to grind it out myself, somehow. But the more disturbing psychological conclusions we can draw from this are these: a) yes, I'm letting my fear of rejection stop me from taking the next step, Duh, and b) nowadays, I'm not even allowing myself a brief, shining moment of optimism and illusion - instead heading straight for the next mess, the next morass.

Whereas Stanley had it right all along. 'You've got to have your Apocalypse Now, don't leave it to later...'