Second Draft

Now I’ve begun the second draft stage of writing my book, I’m finding it as much of a challenge as the freeform creativity of the initial draft. I’m much more aware of the pitfalls in the writing, the structure of my scenes, what they are contributing to the narrative, and how they flow within themselves. I’ve also had to write tailor made scenes, to fit the specific needs of the overall plot –something I’ve found quite difficult to do whilst still trying to maintain a natural flow to the writing.

In this draft I’m also aware of some of the format constraints I’ve created for myself. The book, as I have written it, has a form of framing set up by the opening chapter, with the character speaking in first person –this has now lead to me writing all the flashback scenes in first person. The trouble with this currently, is the tense, I keep flipping between wanting to write all the flashbacks in present tense –which sounds better– or wanting to write them in past tense –which makes more sense in terms of reported experience. Present or past, flip-flip? I’m aware of the need for consistency, but at some point I will need to draw a line under it and stop re-writing.

This is a tiny flashback scene that appears very early in the book, which I have just updated to past tense, but as I write the subsequent flashbacks – concerning Melanie’s experiences at school– I’m beginning to wonder if it would be better as present tense after all.

Sugary Treatments
“Outside the big sash windows the wind shook red and yellow leaves from the trees, toying with its prizes as they fell, inside within the white painted room, with it's lofty ceiling and chipped edged desk, everything had a clean look to it, not sparkling-clean like the kitchens in adverts, but the worn-clean of things that get scrubbed almost daily. A hint of antiseptic tantalised my nostrils. I’d been here, or somewhere like it before, but those recollections were less clear. It probably wasn’t long after my third birthday.
Other than the desk and the wooden chairs the only other items in the room were a wheeled stainless steel cabinet against one wall and a high examination table-bed. The sort I’d often been lifted onto as the different doctors made clicking noises with their tongues or breathed loudly through their noses, checking me over –just a little test, it might feel a tiny touch cold, this won’t hurt a bit.
Maman would tell me ‘I’m a very patient patient’, which always made me giggle. Sometimes, if I’d been extra good, one of the doctors gave me a sweet in a wrapper or a lollypop, sometimes.
The room was on the second floor of a grand old Edwardian building that must, at some point in it’s long history, have been turned over from luxury mansion to austere health service clinic; with its high ceilings and wide halls that made ghosts of every footstep on our way up via a once grand staircase, lost beneath stratified gloss paint and linoleum.
I dandled my legs beneath the adult sized chair, attempting to pay attention. My parents either side, a comforting mass of texture and warmth. Daddy holding my hand, giving it an absentminded squeeze now and then. Maman elegant and straight backed. They were talking about me; grown-ups did that a lot. They listened with serious expressions, nodding occasionally at the specialist's turgid medical parlance. In my imagination each word became a long hairy caterpillar crawling about the neat desktop. He talked about some sugary treatments from America, I wondered where he kept them, perhaps the desk drawer, or in the metal cabinet.
Maman leant forward, her mascara painted eyelashes looking dramatically long from my low viewpoint, and interrupted him. Her tone suggesting she'd had enough of his caterpillar words. She wants me to be happy, she says. Then asks if it can’t wait until I’m older, old enough to understand what could happen, old enough to make my own choices.
The doctor tells them, that the choice is theirs, I’m bright and otherwise healthy, my quality of life shouldn’t decline. He stood and walked over to the shiny metal cabinet. I craned my neck to see as he opened the doors and pulled a folded paper object from a stack on one of the shelves, shaking it open with a flick as he brought it over to me. I glimpsed a pair of holes cut into the front as he lifted it and, not ungently, slid it over my head, using a word unfamiliar to my three year old hearing, a word I understood as something like ‘prophecy’, though the actual word was most likely prosthetic, or even prophylactic; neither of which is technically correct, but ‘prophecy’ was what I remember hearing as my head was enveloped by that first bag.”

Time to Draw

Is being self-employed ruining my creative potential?

I just drew the image above. It took me about ninety minutes. No reason, no mulling it over, I just picked up the stylus and let my hand put down what it wanted. It's been a while.

Sometimes I need to remind myself it's all still there, ready to be used. The reason why I don't do this kind of thing very often is simply that I don't allow myself to. Somewhere along the line I was programmed to see anything that was ultimately not going to pay the gas bill, or the shopping, or the astronomical cost of running the car, as bad, a waste of time that could be better spent on promoting myself or writing 'the book'. My self employed dream has become a bit of a nightmare. If I can't take the time and the pleasure to draw nice little concept doodles, how can I afford the time to do the same with my writing. This is something I need to address before it's too late.

I hate to admit it, but I think, that whilst self employment has offered a great many freedoms and benefits over the years I think the security of a salary in this current climate would be a good idea, though it would need to be a job that allows me enough spare time to sit down and appreciate the simple pleasure of being creative. Is that too much to ask for?

Today The Unforgiving Muse is playing host to the Immortal Blog Tour

I’m a big fan of novel approaches to any genre. Any author who looks at the accepted conventions and promptly marches sideways will catch my interest if they do it well. Gene Doucette has managed this with the fantasy genre in his novel Immortal.
The premise itself is interesting enough; Adam, the main protagonist happens to be something in the region of sixty-thousand years old, his memories stretch so far back through human history that even he has trouble recalling his origins, but in the twenty-first century, with its obsessive need to keep track of everyone, his immortality can prove more tricky to conceal. The casual sarcasm and grounded pragmatism make for an accessible character, even when he’s recounting events from centuries before, but as the story progresses we begin to learn a lot more about human history and the strange creatures from which our myths originated.
Gene has been promoting the novel largely through social networking, both as himself, @genedoucette and as the main character Adam, @adamtheimmortal on twitter and through his website. This is increasingly becoming an attractive method for indie authors to promote their work, but it takes a lot of hard work, especially if you choose to write as your main character as well as yourself. This blog slot has allowed me to put a few questions to Gene about Immortal and his writing.

A great deal of the story is a first-hand account of the past.  Did you have to do a lot of research?

Not terribly much.  I’ve read my share of history books, so for details I just had to go to my own bookshelf and flip through a book or two to get the information I needed.  For example, Barbara Tuchman is almost entirely responsible for the plague-era France story.  And when I needed an extra bit of information, there was always Google.  It’s also useful having the story told in first-person; I only need to provide the details Adam feels like imparting.  

How similar are you and Adam?  Is he “you”?

You mean is he a “Mary Sue” for me?  I don’t think he is.  On the one hand I have coworkers who insist Adam is me, but they only get my sarcasm, dark humor, and the occasional bitter email, and that’s pretty much the same place Adam comes from.  On the other hand my wife doesn’t like Adam, so if he’s me we have a problem.


Adam is fully capable of murder if he thinks it’s necessary; he’s mildly chauvinistic; and he’s an alcoholic.  I hardly drink, I don’t think I’m a chauvinist (but who does?) and according to the first appellate court, it wasn’t murder.  (Joke!  Laugh now!)  We share a sense of humor because while it’s possible to create a character that is smarter than you are, it’s not possible to create one that’s funnier than you are.  And we’re both INTJ personalities.  So I’d say we’re similar, but not the same person; we keep separate Twitter feeds, and you can tell us apart.

Is novel writing all you do?

It’s just what I’m doing currently.  I have at one time or another been a playwright, a humor columnist, an op-ed writer, a satirist, a blogger, and a screenwriter.  And for a short period of time, a standup comic.  I mostly concentrate on screenwriting, blogging and novel writing nowadays.  And I don’t even think of blogging as writing; it’s more like what I do when I’m not writing a screenplay or a novel.

When did screenwriting come into the picture?

Immortal had a long dark journey to publication, and there was a point—my agent had just dropped me after not being able to find a place for it, and had passed on my next novel Fixer—when I decided I needed to try something different.  A friend of mine who had known me first as a humor writer but was aware of my playwriting background dragged me to a meeting of the Rhode Island Film Collaborative.  I left that meeting thinking screenwriting might be fun.  A few months later I had turned an old novel of mine (Charlatan, which came before Immortal) into a feature script.  I’ve since gotten involved in a number of short film projects and Charlatan has won a few awards.  It hasn’t been optioned, but that might be because I don’t live in Los Angeles, frankly.


Immortal offers a flavour of a new form of urbanised fantasy that eschews any direct references to magic while toying with the standard perceptions of the genre. If you aren’t normally a big fantasy follower, but want something written with imagination, or you do like the genre but just fancy a refreshing change from the usual fare, then Immortal is worth checking out.
It’s available from a number of online distributors in ebook format, but paper copies can only be obtained from the US Amazon site.

Ebook Virus Warning

A new virus-form has been detected, infecting ebooks available for download onto the Kindle or reader-apps on Android based devices. The virus, dubbed the Hemmingway Virus after the Nobel prizewinning author Ernest Hemmingway, has already found its way undetected onto numerous devices after being unwittingly downloaded from Amazon and other sites distributing ebooks.

   A spokesman for Amazon stated ‘Last night we were made aware that a number of ebooks had become infected with the Hemmingway strand. We are currently taking steps to identify which have been affected and deal with them as we find them.’
   No reports of any Hemmingway affected books have been made yet for Apple’s ipad, but it is believed to be only a matter of time. In a statement Apple have said that they ‘are monitoring the situation’. Waterstones have also said that they are concerned that the Hemmingway strand may have already found its way into printed material, though so far they are playing down any rumours that Hemmingway books may have made it onto the shelves.

   The Hemmingway virus exploits a feature in ebooks using the Iceberg theory as well as the economy of style loophole. Though no antivirus software is made for the Kindle, Amazon are working on a patch for the system that will provide additional verbosity in any infected titles. In the meantime it is believed that they have a large number of writers working round the clock to address the problem. If you are concerned that you may have inadvertently downloaded an ebook affected by Hemmingway, literary experts have advised that it may be identified by the following method:

1. Open the ebook and read the first page, then jump to page 100 (or a page near the middle of the book), and read that page also.
2. Check the meaning of the text, is there any evidence of understatement?
3. Now check the way the sentences are constructed on each, do the sentences show signs of succinct editing, the removal of redundant clauses, overused phrases or adverbs?
4. Is the style compelling, does it make you want to read on?

If the answers are all yes, then you most likely have an ebook that has been affected by Hemmingway. So far, the only method proven to deal with a book that has been affected by Hemingway, is to read it through from beginning to end and then put up a post advising friends and colleagues to do the same.

Boost Your Blog -Start an Argument.

How can being wrong drive more people to your blog?

I read lots of blogs and articles that tell me how to drive up my blog hits and followers. Most talk about regular blogging, insightful and well structured posts, and slowly building a following that trusts your opinion. Needless to say, writing blogs about how to get more hits on your blog seems like a good way to achieve this –though I don’t expect a huge groundswell as a result of this little offering.

But something happened earlier this week that made me realise that there can be another way of rapidly upping blog hits. I posted on a relatively new blog I’d established at the end of last year, I'd written a short entry that was to be the first of several about the subject of the website it was linked to. It was simply intended to be a quick introduction, with more meaty and informative posts to follow. I was surprised then, at how quickly I got a number of comments, and how quickly the number of hits shot up. I assumed this was partly due to the fact that the first person to comment was well known and respected in the subject about which I was blogging. Another thing I noticed was that his comment strongly refuted the subject of my blog, and so did all the others. I knew I’d written something a little provocative, but I didn’t think I was so wrong that absolutely no-one was prepared to agree with me. Believing the argument was too one-sided I spent a couple of hours writing a good argument to defend my position. As a check I re-read my original blog and it was only then that I noticed I had made a mistake.
I had intended the piece to be a little provocative, to pique people’s interest, but when I re-read it, I realised that what I had actually written was an order of magnitude more provocative than what I had intended. This explained the comments. I felt a terrible embarrassment; how could I have published something so stupid in front of the very readers I was attempting to impress? Then it dawned on me; far from putting people off, it had drawn people in, and the hit count had risen far beyond my expectations.

So from an embarrassing mistake, my blog provoked discussion and interest. No news is bad news, as Hollywood agents are wont to say. It won’t work for everyone, and it shouldn’t be overused, but posting a blog entry that people disagree with can be a quick way to boost your exposure. So go on, start an argument; you might make new friends.