I do actually have one thing to worry about...

I've been reading quite a lot of comment and comments about how self-publishing is going to destroy the very notion of quality in publishing and that, without the gate-keepers of old, any old rubbish will be competing for the eyes of the public.

The other thing that gets mentioned is that publishers are risk-averse because they're looking for guaranteed profits. So here's my worry. I am a pedant. This book is supposed to be written by a 13-year-old girl with no formal education, at a time when grammar was being solidified in the English language. This means that I can't begin like this.

Excerpt one - common sentence, grammar and language structure.

Dear husband. Three days ago I became the last girl in the world. In 40 pages I will be a woman. My father says that I am bound by tradition to tell you how I 'became' a woman, but Jon Mair - the doctor - says I should use these pieces of paper to write down the herbs, spices and recipes that will make farmers better so they can continue to work.
But I want to tell you about Jenna. You probably know her, but if I don't write down my memories of her, I will forget the way she looks, and the things we did when we played like sisters and friends. Pa says I can remember her just like I remember Ma. But I don't really remember Ma. I forgot her face soon after she died. Now I can't recall her face or hair, or the sound of her voice. Sometimes, when we make tea with lots of honey, the smell makes me feel I can almost see her, but not enough to really see her in my mind.

Excerpt two - my sentence, grammar and language structure.

dear husband. 3 days past i became the last girl in the world. in 40 pages i will be a woman. pa says i sposed to tell you how i turn into a woman but jon mair says i must write down the herb and spice plans to make farmers better. i want to tell you all about jenna. you know jenna but if i dont write her into my pages i will forget how she looks and the things we did like sisters and frens. pa says i can keep her in my mind like ma but i dont have ma in my mind anymore. i cant tell him that when she went to the old island she left my mind fast. now i dont no her face or hair or the sound of her voice. sometimes i will smell the house after a long time away or smell hunnytea and i can see some of her. but not enuff.

(this is draft one, and I've just realised my spelling of 'write' doesn't work. It should be rite (same structure as bite) and also 'anymore' might be a little bit complex). So excerpt two is a little more difficult to read than one, because there was uncommon spellings that work phonetically in the main, no capitals, no commas and no apostrophes. It is the way I would imagine someone writing if they had grown up in a largely oral culture.

Now I could go over and edit the text to make it modern (which is the first thing I imagine an agent would suggest), but then the book would lose its spine. The language develops through the text as the girl becomes more confident, and so to blunt these early chapters would ruin it. It would, in fact, make me hate it.

That's a bit of a dilemma, because if you take chapters 1 - 5 out of context (they're short chapters, I promise), or even just ripped out a single sentence, then you would assume that this was written by one of a million chimps who had just struck the typewriter keys with uncommon luck. When you read beyond chapter 5, things start falling into place (the grammatical progression has been the hardest thing to manage so far, and it still feels a little abrupt at times) and it starts to feel more like a more traditionally written piece.

So. What to do? How do I get people beyond the first five chapters?

Cover concept 2

I think I prefer this one. It has the paper, which is the most important bit, but having it made into a toy is perfect. I think I might need to make and photograph my own boat though, as the paper should have some handwriting on it. I think I prefer the classic looking type rather than the hand-written look of the last one.

More worry about self-publishing (hey, I've got to worry about something, the writing's going well).

I've never read a 'how to write a novel book' before (with the exception of Stephen King's On Writing and George Orwell's six rules) but I thought as I was being serious with the book writing this time, I'd splash out £8 (from a birthday Amazon voucher) on a Writer's Digest book of collected articles on writing and selling fiction. There was some pretty good advice in there about managing outlines and dialogue, as well as rather too much rubbish on how to write 'Christian fiction', but the section on publishers and agents was pretty enlightening. Mostly this:

"The moment the contract was signed, you lost rights and control over how your manuscript will be published." and:

"Similarly, when it comes to your book's title, know that it could very well be changed, and that it's your publishers prerogative to do so."

No thanks. While publishers have distribution channels, they don't appear to involve themselves in significant marketing or advertising for books lower down their lists, instead leaving that to the authors themselves, leaving me wondering why I would need one in the first place.

Here's Anthony Horowitz saying that publishers do provide a valuable service, in making sure a manuscript is edited and ready for mainstream consumption.

As a professional editor, I think that all texts will benefit from a decent edit. But how do I approach this as an author. I might see if I can find a fellow editor who'd work for a percentage. Or I might just do what I did with essays at university and read the pages very closely in a random order and rely on the fact that I'm very, very good at my job.

Flight fiction (Apostrophien short story)

Here's the idea. I took off today from Geneva. 10 minutes into the flight, I was allowed to switch my laptop on. I had approximately one hour before the 'Prepare the cabin for landing' announcement, which meant I had to switch the lappy off.

1 hour = 500 words (1st draft + line edit)
This is what I wrote.

The Last Cows (An Apostrophien vignette)

The last time Jenna saw her parents they were towering over her, concerned and angry as she clung to her stomach and threw up in the garden. Her father’s hand on her shoulder gripped more than it needed to.

“Stuffed with honey again?” It wasn't really a question.

Jenna tried to reply so Pa wouldn’t be so fierce, but her gut wasn’t finished. With a huge, painful burp she threw another load of tepid sick among the stalks of long dead giant daisies.

“I… I didn’t."

Her mother’s sleeve was already damp with tears and small splashes of vomit. She used it to wipe across Jenna’s eyes and flour cheeks. “Somethin' got in there that wanted out.

“And you were with Abigale.”

“No honey! Just felt sick!”

Ma's voice was a little softer. "You'll be alright today won't you." It wasn't a question.

"Yeh. Felt sick."

They left her crying in the garden.

The sick feeling hung around like a grudge for the rest of the day as the girl amused herself looking at pressed flowers and trying to remember the plant poem Abigale sang on the beach yesterday. She put the corn dollies out, tatty now after two seasons of love, and sang to them in voice thick with the second cold of winter.

The play was a distraction. She was waiting. Waiting to explain and fix the injustice of her parents' anger. She didn't touch the honey. Didn't gorge herself. She was eight now, not five. If she told them, they would believe now. Because she was eight.

Eventually she held down cool water from the stream, then ate stale bread as the light beyond the open windows faded, taking the last wamth of the day with it. The stars came out.

It wasn't Paul and Katie Vizard who returned though, it was Jon Mair. The town doctor being guided by a visibly wilting Father.

"Hello," Jenna said.

"Morning missy," Mair replied. "Can we go in." Not a question.

One of the cows had keeled today, Mair told her, and her parents would have to spend 40 days in Crofter's Cottage to be sure they were good and safe. The keeled cow had already been burned, he said, and the other two would be skinned by Hans Rish and then their meat burned.

"Can I go with them?" Jenna asked.

"No," he said. "But don't worry. You'll stay with me until they're safe. You'll all be back 'ere in no time, I shouldn't wonder."

It didn't happen.

40 days passed and Paul and Katie Vizard died, Jon Mair told the girl, in Crofter's Cottage from the same sickness that keeled the cow over.

Five days later the girl stood on the beach with the rest of the town and watched as the burning raft floated out past the surf, orange flames grabbing at the sky and sea like a thousand desperate wishes pressed into a dirty page. She felt Jon Mair's hand land on her shoulder.

"You'll be fine."

Stewart Lee's lesson for concerned writers everywhere

OK. I've never got this far before and I have discovered something beautiful as near the final parts of draft 1 and start thinking about draft 2. There are very definite themes running through the text that I wasn't expecting, and the one I had planned is actually fairly strong already and will require just a little shifting of the POV's thoughts to reinforce things. The beauty is that these have bubbled up organically so (to my ear at least) don't feel forced. It would be easy to make the themes too obvious and contrived, so I have to make sure I haul things back and make sure I don't leave the character's voice behind.

While writing the last four chapters I've been reading Stewart Lee's books about stand up comedy and his attempts to both annoy and captivate the audience at the same time. This, obviously, is not my intention (Radiohead tells us you have to gain an audience before trying to alienate them), but the idea that the audience is willing to follow you through plainly difficult moments if you can reassure them early on that you know where you're going, and everything will come together in the end, is something that I think is easy to forget. The reader needs confidence in the author. If it's your first go at a novel, that's quite difficult to achieve.

Part of the appeal of writing stuff here, I think, is the ability to prepare the reader (look, I'll just assume I'm going to have a reader) for the fact that the beginning is not traditional, but that things change as the story develops. It would be easy to pick up chapter one or two and, because of the nature of the voice, think: 'this person just can't write. Can't even spell!'

Some of the short fiction pieces that I plan to post here (character/event pieces written with a more traditional voice, but within the same history) will hopefully provide this sense of comfort that allows me to take the reader along when things go strange.

The other thing I've done, which makes me very happy, is writing the final line. I know how it all ends.

First cover idea

First cover idea. Designed to look good on the Kindle screen. I like the graininess of this kind of black and white and the title text is supposed to look written with a rough charcoal stick. And a bee because I love bees.

First line audition

The last to join was a girl who called herself Abigale. She had a gun.

Bloody miracle

This is a short story I wrote a while ago. It has nothing to do with my novel. It got to the stage of an outline for a complete novel, but this was the only bit I decided to save.

Bloody Miracle

Pilgrims set to arrive at church to witness bleeding window

Church officials have denied that a window featuring a depiction of Christ as a child at St Mary's church in Banton has begun to 'bleed'. The window, which graces the eastern wall of the church's Lady Chapel, has been covered since March 2001 and can only be viewed from inside the church.


Rev. Daniel Fable, the vicar of St Mary's said he couldn't comment on the claims as the church had launched an investigation into the matter. "St Mary's has been, and remains, open to anyone who cares to visit," he said. Since the rumours began, though, Rev. Fable said that the congregation had slowly been growing, but that movement within the church would still be restricted to the main building.


"We're glad to see so many people interested in the church, but the Lady Chapel remains off-limits to any visitors as it's currently not safe," he said. The Bishop of Bristol said the window was damaged during a storm in 2001 and, while a fund-raising drive had been launched to repair the damage, it had fallen far short of the £20,000 needed to refurbish the window. 


"The Lady Chapel at Banton was damaged quite severely during the storm and the repair bill has so far been beyond the funds of the church," he said. 


"Suggestions that we're covering something up, or keeping people from 'a miracle' are nonsense. It would be irresponsible for the church to put parisioners in danger." Banton resident and churchgoer Edward Sampson said the church should come clean about the window. "My wife and I have been members of the congregation at St Mary's since we moved into the town 15 years ago. To deny us access to one part of the church smacks of a cover up," he said Sampson claims another member of the church saw the blood spattered window after getting lost in the church. "My friend was too scared to come forward," he said. "But she didn't think the church should keep quiet about the miracle any longer. I've written to the Bishop, the Archbishop and [local MP] Quentin Neil demanding answers."


Banton Herald and Guardian. May 16, 2008.


The window was bleeding, but Dan Fable – the reverend Daniel Fable – couldn't recall when he'd actually known this. It must have been more that two years ago but less than seven. Oddly, he'd grown to accept the faint visions he'd seen above the head of each parishioner as he stared out from the pulpit, and just put it down to stress or madness. Mrs Johnson always dreaming of her mangy cat Jerico; Mr Johnson thinking of dear departed Paula who didn't reach her first birthday thanks to the bad aim of a Luftwaffe pilot; Edward Sampson's desire for money; and his wife's constant subconscious pleading for Edward to avoid her arms next time because summer was near and she'd look silly wearing long sleeves.

It probably would have come to light earlier, Fable thought, except the window was in the back of the church, and as the congregation diminished, so too did the reasons for anyone but him going beyond the main building. But it was bleeding, and bled still. And now someone knew – someone who wasn't Dan Fable – and things were changing fast. The Bishop had scheduled a recce for the Archbishop and the congregation had started to look hungry.

The really terrifying thing was that Fable had seen everything that would happen, including his actions that would destroy the window and shatter the hopes of millions of pilgrims, but was helpless to stop any of it happening. He was a passenger screaming bloody murder into the ear of the driver, but totally unable to force himself – themselves – from the path of an oncoming double decker bus. After two years of floaty-parishioner visions and destruction dreams, he'd finally given up trying to stop things from happening and had let events wash over him: a baptism of apathy.

No, not apathy. It had become a fascination, a meditation on the power of God and a surprising anticipation of his role in the coming five week tragedy. The very opposite, some would think, of a test of faith; but it was a test nonetheless.

The test was this: Fable knew exactly how and when he would smash the window; he knew precisely how many souls would be lost, spared, resurrected and saved because of his action and could see – and occasionally feel – the grief of those who lost the opportunity to seek fulfillment under the bloody gaze of the Son of God. The test was also this: the moments after the event (as he came to think of it) were the deepest darkest void; like witnessing the picosecond before the big bang on an infinite loop. He knew that, for everyone on earth who wasn't Dan Fable, he would be Judas. Some days he relished the notion, but most of the time his terror was like a living thing pushing simultaneously at his guts, heart and brain. Often he thought the knowledge would kill him, except he knew and understood (did he understand?) God's plan.

The first real pilgrim arrived on May 17th. The sun was bright and high in the sky as Julie-Anne Eldridge negotiated the narrow path, her father wheeled before her like a chariot of piss and cancer, and hammered at the black door of the church. Her knocking persisted as Fable carefully put down the hymn books he'd been inspecting, smoothed down his white shirt and crossed slowly to the door, his footsteps eventually matching the pace of the knock.

He grabbed the sliding lock aware of, and in many ways prepared for, the flood that would follow. He fixed the smile to his face and greeted his destiny.

"Hello," he said. "I'm Dan, would you like to come in?"

Sticking it to the man (and doing a little maths)

How do you become a publisher? I made a decision a few months into the actual writing of this that I would probably not attempt to ‘get a publisher’*, but rather do it myself as both a physical thing and as an e-book. It might be that this is not suited to a mainstream publisher anyway - for example, there are no missing scrolls or plots to kill the pope in it - but also I have worked for a publisher before (you can still buy my lovely software books) and the rewards for long nights, difficult conversations and relentless hard slog are... underwhelming. Of course I still enjoy the royalty cheques when they arrive, but the remuneration was nowhere near as good as, for example, producing similar content for magazines. Also, there is a difference in work done as a commission and work done for personal satisfaction.

My rough economic breakdown is this. As a single author of a book that retailed in the region of £20, the royalty I picked up per copy was about £1 (although the statements are written in gibberish so I can’t really be sure). Obviously a technical book has various additional needs (they need techie editors, tend to be thick, and have lots of images in), but the author take seemed to me to be on the low side. There didn’t seem to be an awful lot of marketing, but the publishers did have established relationships with tech reviewers so the likelihood of coverage in the trade press was improved. I’ve no idea what this did for sales.

By the same token I can self-publish this book, set a relatively low price (around the £1.50 to £2.00 mark) to make it a viable impulse buy, and earn about the same per sale as I did for the techie books. Also, of course, I get to keep all the rights to the book, characters and everything else - some authors seem to lose those, by accident or choice. Both Amazon and Apple have revenue sharing models based on 30/70 in the author’s favour, and as I have a lot of design and editing experience, I think I could put together a professional looking package without too much additional expense. Once that’s done, I would just need to find ways of publicising the book and growing the audience. I think in this, I will have to be as creative as when actually writing the book, because I will have a small budget and need to make a big impact.

So there may be a tiny audience for this kind of fiction, but that’s not the same as there being no audience for it (unless there is no audience for it). Accepted wisdom is that larger publishers seek out books which can be pigeon-holed as ‘the next X’, where X is the latest blockbuster that found fans in Richard and Judy, Costa Coffee or the great and powerful Hollywood, and that they’re less interested in quirky or difficult stories (mine is quirky but not difficult).

It seems there are plenty of tools available for publishing to the various platforms and devices, and also a couple of print on demand outfits who can manage the - more expensive - physical copies.

* This also means I don’t have to deal with Beatles/Rowling type rejection by publishers who ‘don’t understand what I’m trying to do.’

Title reinforcing structure, voice and intent

I really like restrictions. And so basing a novel in 1511 in a small community with an oral tradition, little written grammar, and a very limited space in which to write means I have to really think about word choice, sentence structure and the expression of ideas that I’ve taken for granted since I could write.


One of the things I spent time pondering during the think phase of this was the development of the apostrophe (hence the name of the book) which came into general use (Wikipedia says) in 1530 as a form of elision or omission, and then was also adopted to denote the possessive.


But it has an earlier meaning. The Greek version of the word (which is the title of the book) means 'to turn away' and was also used to denote a character in a play who was addressed, but wasn't present on the stage. In this epistolary novel, the apostrophien is the first named character - dear husband - in the story and he is also unknown because he exists only in the future. These letters (it's still a little difficult to think of them as letters) are a form of telepathy where the thoughts of the girl are transmitted via a common form of magic to someone months or perhaps even years away from their initial existence.


We take these things for granted, but if each piece of paper was precious and irreplaceable, and each piece had to impart something meaningful, how would that impact on the ways we communicate?

Structure reinforced by the first line

There is no other way to write this than as an epistolary novel because the act of writing is central to the culture I have created. The interesting thing - I think, at least - is that this is the only thing the girl is expected to write in her life; the culture is largely based on oral teaching and histories and this act of writing is a well-trodden rite of passage (and I thought of the punny 'write of passage' in bed last night) that all girls must complete. I don’t know where I got this idea from, but maybe it came from the experience of being at university and noticing the way my writing changed as I became more adept at that particular mode of address. Unless you’re Sheldon Cooper, the academic mode can be a challenge to adopt (especially if you’re experienced in more florid or journalistic prose), and the critique can feel a little harsh in the first year, though it’s still nothing compared to the attentions of an attentive newspaper sub. However, as I progressed through my undergraduate and graduate studies, I grasped the form quite well and became a better (academic) writer. And as my methods of expression grew more sophisticated, I think I was able to articulate more sophisticated ideas, which possibly allowed me to think more sophisticated ideas. There’s probably been some work done on this... or work to be done.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that being able to express ideas well (or at all) allows for a person to examine those ideas more critically.

While pondering the meaning of all this, I read Frankenstein (I started reading just after arriving in Geneva, knowing that I’d be walking the same locations as the doctor and his monster), and the thing I noticed most about its structure - and I have no idea why I didn’t notice before - was its Inception-like parcelling up of individual narratives. I found it to be like a well-formed piece of XML code with it’s closing tags all in place (unlike The Turn of the Screw which fails to close off any of its opening tags, reinforcing that it’s a story all about unfinished business, inconclusive conclusions and poor intranet coding).

<Captain>

<Victor>

<Monster>

<Family>

</Family>

</Monster>

</Victor>

</Captain>

So, the captain is writing to his sister, and tells her what Victor told him, Victor relates the story of the monster and the monster relates the story of the family he watches. One thing that always struck me about this was that the passages of narrative were far too long - Victor would not have remembered the feelings and thoughts of the monster so well - for an oral telling, and so I wanted to break mine up and, as luck would have it, the structure presented itself in the form of the first line of the story which came to me one evening as I was talking with some friends outside of the pub.


The first part goes:


dear husband. 3 days ago i became the last girl in the world. in 40 pages i will be a woman.

Hello. This is the start.

It’s time to start writing some stuff about my writing. I’m just about two-thirds of the way into writing a novel. It’s very exciting because I usually start writing with what I think is a great idea and then after about 10,000 words I kind of tail off and the story languishes. There are, I think, a couple of reasons for this.

1. Thinking ahead. I become bored with the story because I know what’s going to happen.
2. Time. It’s difficult to devote enough time to writing when writing and editing is your main job - it just feels like homework.

So, why have I got further this time? Dunno, but I suspect that it’s because I think the story is so good, and the moments of transition are so novel, that I’m actually excited about letting people read it. I want to know if people think it’s as clever as I do. Also, though I have plotted this thing to within an inch of its life, I left gaps in the structure for the free flow of the kind of ideas that just seem to emerge from your fingers as you type, so there are still elements of surprise for me which can have an impact later because the broader structure is still quite flexible.

The last thing that has sustained me has been the complexity. Now, I am writing a very simple story about curiosity, but in order for it to work I have to construct a culture - complete with a novel mythology about its own origins - that works, and this means thinking about everything that might exist within that culture. It’s not enough to say what the characters had for lunch, I wanted to know where it came from, whether the culture could sustain it as a product and what happened to the waste. Who cooked? What did they eat off? Often I used a combination of finding stuff out in books or the internet, talking with family and friends, or just making it up as I went along (oh, the glories of inventing your own society).

And so I began writing this by walking around with the story in my head for a couple of years, thinking through the plot points, lines of dialogue and issues that need to be solved within the culture before writing down any notes. Once I had the whole story sorted in my head, I started plotting the lead character’s path through the events, writing down a single sentence to sum up each chapter (told you it was a simple story) and then thinking about how she would find out about things, and - a more challenging proposition - relate these events in her writing.


There are some particular problems which I have to negotiate and chief among these is the difficulty of adding surprise to an epistolary novel that is being written by a young girl because 'she' doesn't have the same sense of pace that I have. Therefore, if she discovers one day that her house has been ransacked by thieves, then that's the first thing she will relate. It won't be:


"I came home after eating out with Barry. The food was OK, but Barry kept going on about jazz music - as though I was actually interested - and eventually some tiresome anecdote about Dizzy Gillespie made me want to chew my own face off. So I cried off a little early. Ever the gentleman he walked me home, and ever the lady, I offered a kiss on the cheek in thanks. When I walked through the door, I noticed the chair in the hall had been tipped over and all the lights - including Dad's never extinguished desk lamp - were out."


But more like.


"We've been robbed. I don't know what's gone, but there's no one else here so I called Dad and told him to come home. If I'd left the cafe earlier, I might have disturbed whoever was in here. Might be dead."


So each chapter, or significant section, has to begin with the big information, then a follow up with context or colour. Difficult.