​Here I go again, thinking with my pen – finding out what I think about something by writing about it. (It’s almost as though writing were an intellectual, exploratory, ambitious endeavour and not an action that can be reduced to its component parts and imitated by a machine…)

Anyway, cut to the chase… In fact, cut to Chasing Mercury, my series of what looks like being three espionage/action adventure thrillers set in the immediate postwar period.

I’ve touched on this before, when I talked about some historical authors seemingly fighting the urge to give their characters cellphones in my piece about world-building and wordcounts. But there I was discussing different stylistic conventions of historical novels, from the modern-day framing narrative to the ‘plunge right in and make it feel immediate’ lobby...

Here I’m thinking about honesty (and how to fake it, as Groucho Marx, Sam Goldwyn, George Burns, Jean Giraudoux or ChatGPT might have said).

And specifically, honesty in representing the way people thought and felt during the period. Not necessarily how they expressed these thoughts and feelings, because representing period dialogue must always be a balancing act and a stylistic choice, especially the further back in history you go. But being true to the kind of underlying mindset and reactions that your characters would have; that goes to the heart of motivation, plot and everything.

And of course it’s still a balancing act. No one wants to read a hero who’s loaded with all the prejudices of his age. Nor, I think, should we be happy with one who is so anachronistically ‘woke’ that he or she (or they) has none at all. Or not in a genre novel, anyway, even if you’re playing with that genre in other ways.

But let’s get specific and look at my period, WWII or just after. In recent years there has been a very dishonest propaganda campaign waged to misrepresent the national mood during the war – and thereby to undermine the narrative of its aftermath. Yes, I’m talking about that bloody poster. I know the bookshop it was miraculously rediscovered in. (You would be hard pressed to find so many pairs of green wellies in any other secondhand bookshop!) And I also know the inconvenient truth about KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON – that it wasn’t used, because when this poster campaign was tested on the public, the establishment was told in no uncertain terms to come back with something less patrician and more inclusive. And they did, adopting a new tone of mutual respect and responsibility that would contribute, when the fighting was over, to the shift in the notion of national duty and, ultimately, to the introduction of the welfare state and the NHS.

And if you don’t believe that the efforts to popularise this poster were a desperate propaganda campaign – to bend national positivity-in-the-face-of-adversity to sinister, retrograde ends – look at what was going on at the same time. Look at the 2012 London Olympics. Remember how great most people thought the opening ceremony was, despite all our gloomy predictions. And remember those few, bitter voices raised in dissent: the unreconstructed Tories whinging about multicultural claptrap. What they hated, as in 1945, was the emergence of a new kind of national pride, one open and optimistic and far removed from the narrow, outdated narrative they thought they owned. In that moment they sensed their own irrelevance (even the Queen and James Bond were against them!). And so, yes, spoilt brats that they are, they decided to smash everything up. And the rest is indeed history. And tragedy. But my point here is how insidious the misrepresentation of the way people actually thought and felt can be.

And if you want another example, look at the (to me, genuinely) astonishing success of the latest All Quiet on the Western Front movie, which not only plays fast and loose with the history and the source material, but also reanimates the same betrayal narrative advanced by the Nazis. Apart from the Germans, who think about these things, no one else seems to have noticed.

But back to the Chasing Mercury books. No, I don’t want to lazily write my 1945-48 characters as though they somehow have access to 24-hour rolling news and decades of perspective. Nor do I want them to feel like ghosts (using the terms of that previous blog post, these are ‘plunge right in’ stories, not framed historical pieces). And so I have to juggle, of course. Whilst walking a tightrope. Over a minefield (where the Allies are using POWs to clear the mines and redesignating them Surrendered Enemy Personnel to get around the Geneva Convention).

And I think what it comes down to is honesty of intentions. So here, a bit like an accidental or impromptu manifesto, are mine:

To weave my fiction into the historical events in such a way that the reader is neither misled into thinking that the fictionalised events are factually true nor insulted by obviously inauthentic representations of the period.

To do this by drawing on a variety of research, where possible some of it original, rather than serving up the same old detail from the same old history book that every other author refers to.

To limit the extent to which this context is ‘info-dumped’ on the reader – and ideally to achieve this by limiting the knowledge and understanding of each character to what they would actually know and understand at the time.

To do all this without losing their relevance and appeal to a present day audience.

KEEP FAITHFUL & STAY FRESH!


The Borodino Sacrifice, Book One in the Chasing Mercury series, is on sale now. Book Two will be released on 31 August 2024.

​It started so hopefully.

Carefully researched, carefully targeted approaches to carefully selected agents – literally just a handful of the ones I really thought… really wanted…
 
Yeah, right.
 
After the seventh form rejection, with no full requests, I had to consider two alternative but equally plausible explanations.
 
One, they were reading the letter and sample chapters and were so uninspired they didn’t think I warranted a personalised reply, let alone a request for more.
 
Two, they weren’t reading them, not properly, or not at all.
 
I may be an insecure writer but I am not ready to accept option one.
 
So then I saw invitations on social media for authors to submit directly to this new (to me) kind of publisher: digital first. The reasoning here being that since they don’t do print editions, or only print-on-demand, or only after the success of the eBook, they can afford to publish many more titles than trad publishers/imprints. No advance, but supposedly you get help with the marketing and a decent slice of the profits.
 
I did my due diligence and sorted the rip-off-artists/hybrid publishers from the (reasonably) respectable-looking firms, which in at least two cases were actually divisions/imprints of big trad publishing groups.
 
I looked at what they published, carefully prepared my pitch and sent off my full manuscript with the promise that this time, they WOULD read it.
 
And got pretty-much-form rejections.
 
Now, I realise that my book(s) do not fit snugly into the illustration-of-a-woman-against-a-backdrop-of-two-up-two-down-terraces-with-Spitfires-in-the-sky/illustration-of-a-woman-walking-away-from-us-with-the-White-Cliffs-of-Dover/Auschwitz-in-the-background-(Spitfires-optional) market, but in another way, they kind of could. Enough, as I intimated in my carefully worded query letters, to warrant a discussion about cross-genre marketing possibilities – or at least a considered/considerate reply, you’d think (well, I thought; maybe you’re smarter).
 
And then what I thought was this…
 
Shit.
 
Because I realised that I had painted myself into the proverbial corner. How could I now go back to querying agents, having taken it upon myself to do their job and submit to publishers directly, even if only a couple of the twinsets-and-Spitfires ones? You can’t write to someone and say I think publishers will be excited about this novel series, and by the way I’ve already been rejected by x, y and z.
 
So there you go. I always wondered what would finally make me take the plunge and decide to self-publish. Was it going to be 10 form rejections from literary agents? 20? 50?
 
No. Turns out it was seven and an assumed/probable rejection. Plus two-and-a-probable from digital first publishers. And the strong suspicion that no one was even reading the letters that had taken me hours, sometimes days, to write, let alone the stuff that had taken me years.
 
Which isn’t right, is it? Just like those assumed and probable rejections from the ones who say they’re so busy they can’t guarantee they’ll get back to you at all.
 
Anyway. Looks like the next time I write anything here I'll be complaining about how hard it is to get started in self-publishing.
 
Help!

​(But not like that – you’re not getting my money as well as all the years of effort. It's time for a bit of DIY.)

​​I've thought about 1976 a fair bit over the last few years. You might remember I wrote a novella and mentioned it here. (And in this post about log lines, where I even shared a mocked-up cover.) I've come to realise that it was a formative year for me.

Hardly surprising. I was 11, tentatively dipping a little pink toe into the encroaching tides of puberty and adulthood. How? Well, here's an example. My father actually used to come home from London more often than he does in 76. Like any other commuter (although of course he was anything but) he would bring with him his half-read Evening Standard. And I, starved of what I never even imagined would one day be termed 'content', would pore over it that night or next morning.

Despite the massively different media environment, I don't think kids have changed that much. At 11, I instinctively avoided current affairs, as well as most of the sport my father was interested in. Star Wars may have been shooting nearby but it was still far, far away for all of us and 'Cod Wars!' didn't have quite the same ring to it. Everything else seemed to be to do with the IRA, which even the adults didn't understand.

So instead, and with that little pink puberty-toe (!) tingling, I flicked through the fingertip-smudging newsprint in search of fresh imagery. Cinema ads! Tiny photographs in magic-eye halftones with mystical titles bespeaking a higher level of adult understanding that was to prove illusory. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. What even was that? An Oedipal-Nietzschean ​drama set in the world of merchant shipping, starring Kris Kristofferson and adapted from the novel by Yukio Mishima. I'd love to see an elevator pitch for that now, in these days of Chris Hemsworth in tactical gear on Netflix...

Then (because we're coming to it), a page or two later and probably after dipping into the completely unintelligible horoscopes in search of pre-toe-tingling promises of true romance, the comic strips. (I told you we were coming to it!) 

MODESTY BLAISE by Peter O'Donnell, illustrated by Romero. Black and white. Three frames a day, no more. None of the subtlety and charm that I was to discover had predated Romero in the original art of Jim Holdaway. But I was hooked.

The daily strips were painfully brief but the stories were long-form, often lasting several months, with complex plots and great scrapes. The set piece captures and escapes were thoughtfully put together. Most of all, the characters were compelling and the relationship between Modesty and her sidekick Willie Garvin completely unique and intriguing.
​
Soon I was clipping out the strips and collecting them as graphic novels in mismatched binders. In time, O'Donnell's actual Modesty Blaise novels would follow. And although their quality would fall off somewhat as I brought myself up to date with the classics from the 60s and began waiting for new releases in the 80s, these more sophisticated and substantial versions of the stories – and their influence, which is what this is about – would stay with me all my life. 

Was it just me? I was able to pick up those earlier titles because every secondhand bookstall was full of them back then, usually with embarrassingly unrepresentative sexploitation covers courtesy of the unscrupulous Pan Books. But then there were the quotes from the superfans, of course. Like Kingsley Amis calling Modesty and Willie "one of the great partnerships in fiction, bearing comparisons with that of Holmes and Watson". Quentin Tarantino would later join in too and in fact you see O'Donnell's peril/resolution set pieces influencing thriller writers and filmmakers up to the present day, more often than not unacknowledged.  

Much more importantly, there were girls who liked Modesty and who saw her as a progenitor for female characters from Buffy to Lisbeth Salander, not just as a bit of ill-cast cleavage on a Pan cover. Yes, she was written by a male author, but somehow (even if in other respects Modesty is admittedly a product of her time) he had gone far beyond the Male Gaze and won plaudits for it. Anyway, it was a female-male partnership he was writing, so there was justification aplenty.

​So there you are. The seeds were sown. One day, I would create a series of action adventures that would be inspired by (or reflect, or reimagine...) the Modesty Blaise comic strips and novels. And because I first came to them not as contemporary thrillers but as period pieces (the mid 60s is literally a lifetime away when you're an 11-year-old in 1976), I would set them in a historical context. Which would let me throw in other influences from my content consumption as a young man, from Bond and Le Carré to Where Eagles Dare. 

That's how the Chasing Mercury series was born. I thought it might be useful to describe it in terms of its inspirations rather than purely as a reaction to a perceived market opportunity – as I began to do when I asked recently Why are my novel's influences not the same as its comps? And I wrote this follow-up post, too, because I have been thinking about how to address the issue of comparison titles for a blurb, if I decide to self-publish – and because I have to say something that means something to me as well as to the Amazon algorithms... 

So thank you for bearing with me, if you have. Now you know where it all started.

OK, first things first... I'm not speaking from any place of authority, just picking things up as I go along, but by 'comps' here I mean comparable or comparative or comparison titles – the ones we've been told to provide in our query letters to literary agents, yes?

And I don't know about you, but I found it very hard to come up with two or three examples of published novels that are sufficiently like mine to be cited as valid comparisons.  Until, that is, I realised something...

The novel(s) that I want my novel(s) to be like are novel(s) that I like but are not necessarily the novel(s) I'd say my novel(s) are like because the novel(s) I'm going to say my novel(s) are like are not necessarily novels that I like.

(And breathe...)

​Or to put it another, less feverish, way: I used to get hung up on thinking that my comps should be the beloved novels that inspired and influenced my writing, the novels I dream of one day seeing mine alongside in a library or maybe a favourite secondhand bookshop.

Whereas, of course, one's comps should be contemporary examples of novels whose readers might be tempted to pick up yours if they spotted them alongside their customary purchases in a modern bookshop, especially one like Amazon. That way, you can show an agent or a publisher that you've thought about where yours would fit in the market – and that you're familiar with the market – even if you think (as I do) that yours offers that market something different or (God forbid) that you could do it better.

I think that's a valid way of looking at it, don't you? Of course you need to understand what works and what might not work so well for today's readers. But surely it's still OK to be inspired in the first place by other, older titles than the ones you use as comps? I mean, if your inspiration comes from a novel you found on the bestsellers list a year ago, well, let's just say I'd hate to see you at your uninspired...

​Now, in my case there's an added complication. I don't necessarily have a single target audience. But I can't be alone in this. Isn't that why there are all those easily mockable 'Finding Nemo meets Last Tango in Paris' type pitches? And surely that's why they ask for two or three examples of comps...?

So anyway, I reckon I've come to terms with why I might have to appeal to readers of x, y and z – and why I might be asked to specify who I think x, y and z are. I just thought it might be useful to share the way that I've come to terms with it.

Which is by holding onto my motivation to do it differently.

​And maybe even better.

I was late to the party with Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, having only seen it recently on Netflix. But what a party! And what an unexpectedly poignant effect she achieved by linking the gaiety and naivety and anxiety and immoderation and sheer bloody fatedness of the ancien regime to the experience of any teenager who has had to grow up – and especially a teenager who did so in the late 70s/early 80s.

The astonishing sequence in the movie that begins with Bow Wow Wow's I Want Candy ends with a Kevin Shields remix of their Fools Rush In that is so fragile and intimate we feel that we have somehow tuned in and are hearing her sing it in her own head. But here's the thing: I think I can hear us doing the tuning-in too; and I think I've heard that before.

​It's late October 1981. I'm sitting at the counter in our little kitchen in Hurst Park, listening, with Mum, to the charts on her old tube radio. I presume I'm taking a break from my soul destroying A-Level homework. Or maybe it's half-term. Mum is preparing the evening meal before she goes to pick Dad up from the station. The dog is mooching around at our feet. And, hard though it is to believe now, we're listening to Laurie Anderson's O Superman. 

I'm looking at the names of faraway and fantastic places on the tuner. I'm checking the (more or less kaput) glimmer of the magic eye, tentatively poking my finger into its little votive niche... and what I'm getting, now, right now, is the same kind of indefinable ethereal resonance that's there in Sofia Coppola's movie. It's there in the Laurie Anderson piece, of course, of course, but also in the opening of its neighbour in the charts this week, Altered Images' Happy Birthday. It's there, especially, in a brand new entry to the charts, OMD's Joan of Arc, and it's even there in that deeply odd cover of It's My Party that's hanging on at No.1.

Not a message, not a signal, but a carrier wave, maybe. The promise of picking up something from the other side.

Hello, this is your mother, says Laurie Anderson. Are you coming home? And then, for God's sake, there's Andy McCluskey singing: say the right words and I'll be coming through...

So what is this random little time-slip telling us? That a bit of 80s reverb in a movie is enough to spark an almost supernatural Proustian rush in a basket case like me? Possibly. But also, I think, that there's always a way out of the echo chamber. That in supposedly familiar stories and even memories might still be hidden stranger truths, deeper layers and bigger meanings. That you have to be brave and ever so delicately retune your sensibilities. That even without moving on to fresh pastures, there are new revelations to be found out there, in the past, in the ether. That it's the job of creatives, through fiction, through non-fiction, through music and magic, though a whirling jumble of the lot, to reach for them, like Sofia Coppola did.

And our job too, to sing their praises for even attempting it.
​

​I don’t want to arse drop (I do) but this old sofa on which mine is planted has seen many more illustrious posteriors in its day, including that of the original Dumbledore, the late great Richard Harris, back when he was getting my father arrested outside the Britannia pub in Kensington.
 
And the reason I’m thinking of him and his arse now, in particular, is because of a half-arsed theory I’ve been half-formulating (and half-shooting-down) which is this:
 
Movie dialogue is more memorable than dialogue in novels.
 
I posited this in the Twitter #WritingCommunity a few weeks ago and have had some fascinating discussion, as well as plenty of suggestions for novel dialogue that does (or at least appears to) feel every bit as sharp as movie dialogue.
 
But let’s start at the beginning, because you never know, it may resonate with someone. I was reviewing an exchange between two characters in my first Chasing Mercury novel, The Borodino Sacrifice. It was dialogue that I wanted to be both throwaway and yet cleverly emblematic of the whole book. Cutting out the tags and so on, it was this:

“You don’t send people into action without telling them what you’re planning on doing.”
“Don’t be naive, Bill. That’s exactly what you do.”
 
Leaving aside the fact that I’ve just realised how heavily influenced by The Godfather that is, I knew it wasn’t quite what I wanted. What I want, as Michael Corleone would say, is a line like Yul Brynner’s in The Magnificent Seven: ​“I’ve been offered a lot for my work, but never everything.” Or like Bogart’s in Casablanca: “I remember every detail. The Germans wore grey. You wore blue.” Or like Errol Flynn’s in The Adventures of Robin Hood (to the accusation “You speak treason!”): “Fluently.” Or, yes, like: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” In other words lines that seem to sum up the characters and the story in one, and a lot less ponderously than that overwritten speech in Taken, when you just know the baddie would have hung up on him halfway through...
 
And then there’s the kind of dialogue that you’d put on the poster: “Houston, we have a problem.” “With great power comes great responsibility.” “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Etc., etc., etc... (This is not a post about movie taglines.)
 
So... that was when I got to wondering: Hey, how come I can’t immediately come up with a comparable example of a memorable line from a novel, that is dialogue not narrative...? Because all that “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”, all that “Call me Ishmael”, all that “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, and yes, all that “Reader, I married him”... you remember it as speech, because a great author was addressing you personally, but it ain’t dialogue, none of it. You can’t have “It is a truth universally acknowledged...”; you’ll have to make do with “I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine”. And sure, that last one is pretty good anyway, but couldn’t it have been tightened up a bit? Isn’t it the case that a lot of these really good authors seem to spend more time getting the key narrative moments snappy or emblematic than they do their characters’ dialogue...?
 
Which brings me, possibly by way of  “A fire,” he cried, “in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!”, to Dumbledore the Grey (and yes, we’ll come onto him as well...). You see, talking to my youngest, I’ve discovered that some of the Harry Potter quotes that are attributed to the books (and an awful lot of those from The Lord of the Rings) are actually the somewhat snappier ones from the films.
 
A case in point. Here’s one you could put on a poster:
 
“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to your enemies. But a great deal more to stand up to your friends.”
 
We all remember that, from book and film, eh? Except in the book, what Dumbledore says is:
 
"It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
 
I don’t know, it’s a subtle difference but that seems a little bit... flabbier.
 
And as for those times when your memory (and the Internet) tells you it’s from the book but it’s not, how about:
 
“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”
 
Nope, not in the book.
 
“A boy’s best friend is his mother.”
 
Nope. Frequently attributed to Robert Bloch (who can certainly have “All of us go a little crazy at times”, so credit where credit’s due) but actually from Joseph Stefano’s Psycho screenplay.
 
Now, clearly there are plenty of great, quotable lines of dialogue in novels, including the one above. Khan knew it when he spent most of that movie quoting Ahab (whereas Kirk and Spock fell into the aforementioned trap of quoting narrative from A Tale of Two Cities). Gatsby, Gollum and Sherlock Holmes have very distinctive voices that spring to mind. And in 1984, O’Brien’s “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever” is such a perfect poster line I swear I’ve seen it used by the Conservative Party recently. I definitely quote Alice’s “Curiousier and curiouser!” regularly in my everyday life (or variations thereof); I bow to the suggestion of the opening of Charlotte’s Web “Where’s Papa going with that axe?”; and I can’t argue with “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
 
Other great examples? Atticus Finch saying: “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” Don Corleone (of course) saying: “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” (Although in the movie Brando mumbles “I’m gonna make him an offer..”) Then there’s the English Patient’s “All I ever wanted was a world without maps,” lots of The Little Prince, a lot more of Alice, a large helping of Terry Pratchett, and I’m certainly not going to attempt to argue with Catch-22 (“That’s some catch...”).
 
Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, if you want viral dialogue, there’s the likes of the Bible and The Hitchhiker’s Guide... But the former isn’t a novel, whatever some people might say, and the latter, well, it was a radio series first, which means it was constructed as dialogue right from the start. I think that’s outside the remit of this debate, so that’s adieu, adieu, adieu to Shakespeare too.
 
But now that I’ve thrown out the great monologues, I will pause here to consider other, shorter bits of internal dialogue. Like when Clarice Starling sees Hannibal Lecter in the book and says/thinks to herself: He's a cemetery mink. He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.
 
No. I can’t allow it here. But it’s f**king brilliant and I’ve never forgotten it.
 
So anyway, I’ve basically disproved my own argument haven’t it? There’s plenty of cracking dialogue in novels, and just because the narrative offers us a great deal more, that doesn’t mean the dialogue isn’t just as good, does it, Dumbledore?
 
I still don’t know. There’s something about the movie lines (the good ones at least). Maybe, as one contributor to the thread pointed out, it’s what the actors are bringing to them. Or, as someone else suggested, it’s because movies are a common experience – we share that moment differently from how we share what we read. And/or, as I tend to think, the screenwriters have often made the lines work that little bit harder, because they don’t have the luxury of supporting narrative, not in the same way as novelists.
 
Which may or may not be a lesson, but was certainly fun thinking about. Thanks to all.
 
P.S. One further thought. Twitter can help. For example, using the weekly #1linewed prompt and getting an extract from my WIP(s) down to 280 characters often means tightening up some dialogue that I was previously happy with. Plus you get to read other people’s better efforts.
 
 
 

 
​

​We’ve all encountered books that feel the wrong length. A supernatural mystery that plods on a hundred plus pages past the predictable twist. Or the third instalment in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. I've read thrillers with a protagonist named Jack that err similarly on the side of brevity. And others, featuring a different Jack, that are positively tantric about getting to the finish line.

Yet with some novels, the setting's created, the story plays out, the characters intrigue and develop in a way that seems so effortlessly right you don't even notice how long or short the book is. If it never occurred to me Gatsby was a famously slight 47K, nor did I spot that The Corrections was getting up to – depending on which blog you read, or maybe which edition – 175-195K and therefore into Moby Dick territory (which certainly does feel like it). With plenty of others you're quite aware they're doorstoppers but that's OK because you never want them to end. Isn't that how we're meant to consume a lot of SFF?

At the same time, most of us will have received well-meaning advice, or been on those blogs and forums, or subscribed – for our sins – to the YouTube channels, and heard over and over how no one will take your manuscript seriously unless it falls within the accepted word count range for each genre. And that you can forget those outliers, those exceptions to the rule, because if you're a first-time writer (as if there were such a thing), you'll never get to be one of those.

And... fair enough. That's your industry. I accept it. It may be particularly discouraging for the first-timer, for the unpublished writer, let's say. But I get it. Tough love. It's meant to be.

So no, this isn't a rant. Nor is it offering any insight into what the market is looking for (I'd just be copying from the same websites you'll find if you Google anything about word counts – seriously, there is so much out there). No, what this is is a question, or a series of questions and attempted answers, drawn from something that I can talk about with the authority of experience, namely the difference between the length of the first novel in my Chasing Mercury series and the likely length of the second.

Book One is around 115K. Book Two looks like coming in at 80.

How did those word counts turn out so different? Is there a good reason for it? And if so, does it suggest that yes, there is a natural length that each individual story needs to be, in order to 'breathe'?

Book One, The Borodino Sacrifice, was my first proper attempt at a spy/action historical thriller and as a result, even after a few drafts, I could tell it was overlong and overwritten. The truth is, it was up around 145K, and the received wisdom is that only SFF or full-blown historical sagas can be that sort of length, and then only from established authors. (Longer books cost more to print and bind and store and distribute and they’re not going make that kind of investment in an unknown. It's hard to argue with the logic of that. Although I presume there's a discussion to be had about ebooks.)

Anyway, after doing the Googling, getting horrified, Googling some more, then disingenuously elbowing my novel through into a historical category (although I’m not sure the postwar espionage environment really counts), I had it in my head that there was an upper limit for a book like mine, which was – being generous – 120K. Sure, I understood that a thriller of such a length might put off overburdened agents or publishers, who would gratefully consign anything above 80K, or 90K, or 100K to the trash, but I hoped that others might just give it the benefit and read on. 

So I cut it down, and yes, losing 25K of those precious darlings really helped to tighten up the story and pick up the pacing. But I knew that I was reaching the limit of what I could do without professional editorial input. Possibly I was reaching the limits of the story itself. Any further cutting line-by-line and the whole tone and voice got muddied. Any further cutting of scenes or characters and I felt I was losing the narrative's vital organs – and for what? No, no, 120K would be the limit. Or, after one last pass to trim any infodumps or lengthy descriptions that had survived the Great Reaping, 115K.

​Now I come to the point of this. Because as I documented in my last blog, I haven’t waited to get Book One published before embarking on Book Two (chance would be a fine thing, etc, etc.) No, for various reasons that I might break down and analyse another time, I’ve been working on The Herrenhaus Forfeit these past few months. Like Book One, it took a while to find its natural pace and shape, and it has thrown up some surprises along the way – minor characters taking unexpected turns, etc., yes, I know… oh, and the realisation that what it needs to distinguish itself is a big bloody heist drama sitting right at the heart of it. But I have been working to a plan. I’ve known where and when the story pivots in the middle, and I’ve just reached that point in the first draft – bang on target at 40K!

But hang on... bang on whose target? Ah, yes, of course. I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew I wasn’t going to put myself in that position again: wearing a fixed smile as I listened to people tell me that 80K was really the perfect length and 120K the absolute upper limit and honestly that's pushing it... Especially when those people included me. 

What amazes me is that I took that on board and have written – conceived, constructed, peopled, narrated – the story accordingly. And OK, the second half of the book might end up being longer or shorter, but not dramatically so, because it really does need to be this length. I can’t imagine it having some of the epic or world-building elements that made the first book feel like it needed to be longer. And it’s lean enough that I certainly can’t imagine it getting any shorter. So until a professional tells me otherwise, I think it has a natural length. And, by implication, maybe, if I half-close my eyes and suck in its tummy, so did the first book. One day, perhaps governed by different objectives, so will the third.

That was what I wanted to say. Perhaps to reassure myself. Perhaps to reassure others. I had an exchange on Twitter with another writer who had encountered something similar with word counts in her series of novels. I was also going to include a footnote or a postscript relating to my not-entirely-frivolous confession that I'd tried to justify the 120K target by pretending my book was a proper historical. But two further, final thoughts occur on that subject...

Firstly, are these generic terms really set in stone? I'm already mixing two when I say mine are espionage/action thrillers. And it seems to me that some books like this, set in the WWII period, feel more 'historical' than others. Some use historical conventions like a frame story while others plunge you straight into the period as though it were the present day. Some of the former use that structure to depict the past as another country, while others don't. Some of the 'plunge right in' lobby read as so modern you can feel the author struggling not to give the characters cellphones and you wonder why they didn't set it in Assad's Damascus instead of Nazi-occupied Paris. Others are more convincing. 

Secondly, leading on from that: if we accept that a lot of SFF and purer historicals are given the leeway of extra word count because they have more heavy lifting to do in terms of creating an unfamiliar setting, doesn't it follow that some hybrid historical thrillers need more space than others? Although The Borodino Sacrifice visits Paris and Berlin, the main action takes place in the less well-trodden territory of the former-Sudetenland Czech border zone during the first, fluid phase of postwar occupation by east and west (a phase that even many history books gloss over or get wrong). Am I not permitted some world-building word count for that – compared with, for example, all the books set in occupied France and inspired to varying degrees by the well-known stories of the female F Section agents? (By the way, my Uncle John, he of The Typewriter That Went To Meet Lucky Luciano, was brought in to do uncredited script doctoring on Carve Her Name With Pride. He had some stories to tell.) 

What's that you say? 1984 is supposedly something like 90K (other confidently quoted word counts are available) and it's hard to imagine heavier-duty world-building than that? Yeah, but Orwell never wrote a sequel did he? It seems to me that the first book in a series might well have more lifting to do. Maybe 1985 would have been shorter, the same way The Herrenhaus Forfeit is. Or, maybe, I had just learned my lesson by the time I started writing Book Two – and I still can't learn my lesson about Book One.

One thing's certain. The word count on this post is high enough.