Behind the Writer: Inspirations and Influences

I've a post up today over at Book Smugglers all about what built me as a writer!

First Lines

A big deal gets made about first lines.  They're the hook, the main chance to catch a reader's interest.  With novels, this is more a first paragraph rule than a first line rule, but I thought it would be an interesting exercise to list off the first lines of all my books (including any unpublished partials longer than a single chapter).

This is roughly in the order the stories were initially written, rather than publication, though of course the first lines may have changed considerably since the first draft.

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Jame, scraping unruly brown locks out of his eyes, called Piotr every foul name that he could think of, including the ones the herdsmen called their sheep when they wandered off, but he said them softly, muttering under his breath, because Piotr would do more than call him names if he heard him.

Stairs that circled down and down and down, away from the dim light which was the night sky into a shadowy pit which resounded with echoes born a thousand years past.

A barefoot, smoke-scented girl sat above the River Milk.

"You two are disgusting."

"Nervous, beloved?"

They'd been poking through her gear again.

The Danai.

A lavish display of women.

Arlen EidAren refused to believe that someone could be following her.

"And then what?"

The inn fell sideways.

There was a point where you just had to stop waiting for the prince to ride over the hill, and take matters into your own hands.

Taine held one long-fingered hand against the plasglass and smiled.

The first few weeks in Jorbarra, Teale Rameidin was blithely unaware of the Mage Trap.

"Bloody Snakes."

Sunlight on metal.

Hands gripping her wrists.

After a morning spent sorting through the previous Champion's library, both Soren Armitage and the aide lent her by the Chancellor were so dust-laden that they were beginning to blend into their surroundings.

Looking north, Gentian Calder could make out the shadow of land.

Where the FUCK am I????

April Fool's Day. 

It's one thing to decide to save the universe, another altogether to find a way to go about it.

Wow – feels like forever since I've written.

ShhooTHuMP!

Even ignoring his nightmare predicament, Fallon DeVries would be glad to get back to the Arkathan and away from the ritual of saying goodnight to an idealised statue of his mother and sister. 

"The following students will report to the Vice-Chancellor's office at second bell."

Fifty-seven pence until Sunnesday.

Madeleine Cost's world was a tight, close space, a triangular tube tilted so her head lay lower than her feet. 

Sunlight picked out motes of dust, and burnished mellow wood to match Arianne Seaforth's hair as she strolled through the Southern Nomarch's library. 

There are no real surprises in an MMO.

The longer sentences, of course, tend to give a better idea of the story, but I think my favourite will ever remain "The inn fell sideways."  A most dramatic start indeed.  [The story involves an entire inn (with about 50 occupants) being transported instantly right smack to the centre of the deadly and abandoned land of magic will magic your ass.]

The Zone

First draft progress of And All the Stars = approx 20,000 words.

I'm not a writer with a daily word count target - that would drive me insane.  I also have a full time day job, a tendency to go through periodic computer game addiction, and reading (other people's books) is a thing which refreshes me and which I miss if I skip for too long.  Since I have a fifty minute daily commute, my best writing time is on the train in the morning, where I can put aside my distractions and settle in to write.  Theoretically my afternoon trip would be similarly useful, but since I get up at 6 am most days, and am a bit of an insomniac, often not getting to sleep till after 1 am, my afternoon trip will sometimes involve a brain-fuzzing haze and those jerk-awake moments where you've heard yourself just beginning to snore.  [I once ended up out at Liverpool thanks to not hearing myself snore.]

After dinner is usually game time, catching up on web comics, TV on in the background.  I enjoy writing, I like to write, but if I push myself to write when I'm not in the mood for it, it's going to take some of the fun away from it, and I see no particular reason to do that.  Since I've been writing the book since the beginning of January (a date I know fairly exactly because the book was inspired by a discussion on a Goodreads review), I can add up the days and a simple calculation tells me I'm averaging less than 200 words a day.  Since I'm guessing this book will be around 100,000 words, I can thus project a first draft completion date of halfway through next year!  [Meaning final draft around four months later.]

Statistics, so deceptive.

Yesterday, I wrote around 1,500 words.  Because I had found The Zone.

Sometimes the early parts of novels roar out like lightning, only to bog you down in mud.  Sometimes books are like this one, with an age spent lining up dominos, laying the ground work, not really writing while getting the characters sorted into distinct entities - and then you're off!  Words fly from your fingers, there are no stumbling blocks, the characters have become people, all keen to do their own stuff.

I doubt I'll have too many 1,500 days.  Yesterday was a chapter I'd been looking forward - it had a minor reveal, with an added bonus of blowing stuff up - and it had Noi.  Noi is a Thai-Italian apprentice chef who can talk.  Her dialogue just flows, and I'm going, "Gods, Noi, the things you say!"  There will be more complex and difficult chapters later on which will probably bog me down at 200 words a day again, but I'm still hopeful of getting this draft done by perhaps early July (at which point I'll let it sit while I revise Hunting).

And I'm having fun!

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table: Part 1: What's Fantasy For?

If you're interested in unpicking the bones of fantasy, check out Part 1 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, a series of discussions I'm contributing to which will be delving into some of the whys and wherefores of the fantasy genre.

Part 1 takes us broadly into the genre, asking "What's Fantasy For?" and has contributions from Sylvia Kelso, Theresa Crater, me, Carole McDonnell, Warren Rochelle and Deborah J Ross.

Future discussions will delve into gender, sexuality, language, and all sorts of fun questions behind the books we read and love. Come join in the discussion!

First Drafts

After spending a year revising and publishing already written novels, it's an interesting shift for me to go back to 'fresh' writing.

I'm what's known as a 'discovery writer', meaning I start with a situation or concept, create a character, and 'discover' more about the story by writing it (as opposed to those who write a plot outline of some description before beginning the draft).

Discovery writers and outliners are not so very different as some may assume.  While I don't write an outline, or plan the book before I start writing, I usually have a very good idea of where the story will end up by the time I've written a chapter or two.  Not committing an outline to paper doesn't mean I don't think ahead to where the story is going, though it does mean perhaps more changes (particularly in early chapters) than would occur if I wrote out a detailed plan beforehand.

With And All the Stars, I started with a statement (after a discussion with two readers) that I don't write post-apocalyptic or survivalist fiction - which immediately led me to wonder what I would write if I did write such a thing.  I do like watching apocalyptic/survivalist movies - I'm always fascinated by the disaster itself, and discovering what happened, the spectacle of the more dramatic ones, and then the adjustment stage, the figuring out how to supply basic needs when x and y are no longer available, the shifting of rules, the new dangers and the sharpening of old dangers.

However, many of these stories turn into psycho-dramas of 'good person' facing off against 'evil dictator', or everyone becoming gradually nastier and more compromised by the situation they're stuck living through, which is generally not a story I'm interested in, so it's rare that I like the ending of apocalyptic/survivalist stories.

I decided I wanted to start with what seemed like an alien invasion - the sudden appearance of enormous towers in cities around the world - and the immediate consequences of that for my protagonist, less interested in the alien invasion than she is in not being trapped under rubble.  Initially the rubble was Centrepoint, but I moved it to St James Station because the purpose of the towers is not destroying infrastructure, so all the arrivals are in parks and golf courses (St James Station is under Hyde Park).

My idea for the main character began with "curly-haired Australian girl" - because I've never written a curly-haired character before and think they're under-represented (I had to ask a curly-haired co-worker lots of questions about living with curly hair :) ).  Very unusually, I then began trawling stock photo sites for photos of curly haired girls to use for the cover, since I was planning to use a photograph rather than painted art for this cover (photos are a better mental fit for current-day disaster stories than painted art).  I came across a very striking photo of a green-eyed girl with very frizzy/curly hair.  She was nothing like the girl I was thinking of, but I was so captured by the image that my main character became a skinny very serious wanna-be professional artist instead of a short, sarcastic sporty girl.

I am definitely not a "quickly write a first draft and then come back and edit" person. I polish and edit and think about pace and structure all the way through, and will get hung up for long patches on finding the exact word or phrase, and whenever I sit down to write I will usually re-read the entirety of the current chapter.  At times I will re-read through from the beginning, but it's more usual for me to be able to move on from a chapter once I've a first draft of it (jumping back only to edit in details and remove contradictions).

It took two chapters to get my artist out of St James Station, but three chapters of writing, because the first draft of chapter two included a rescue of a trapped woman and her daughter.  Since Madeleine would never meet this woman again, and I didn't want to introduce the other main characters at that stage, I promptly deleted large parts of chapter two and rewrote it - the rescue was interesting, but served no overall purpose to the main story. 

By this stage I knew who the four other main characters would be (Noi, Nash, Pan and Fisher), had worked out where Tyler was (and his function), and had a rough idea of events up to the two-thirds point of the novel (to the chapter where all my readers will want to kill me).

When I'm thinking about later chapters while drafting earlier ones, I will sometimes create a file called 'Later' to store character names and fragments of conversation which I've been thinking about, which I can grab and use (or discard) when I reach the relevant chapters.

Once I'm past the very beginning of the novel I can usually 'see' the landmarks of the whole book - not just to the big reveal point, but how things wrap up in the remaining third of the novel - where, to some degree, the characters have a chance to act rather than react to their situation.  Certainly not every conversation or event, but the pivotal moments.  Even theme is starting to emerge.

By the time I reach the end of a first draft, it's usually structurally nine-tenths there.  At that point I'll put the draft away for several weeks/months and go write something else, and come back to the draft 'fresh', better able to polish clumsy phrases, pick up typos, measure pacing issues, and subtly emphasise the theme(s).

On the whole, I find the editing much easier than the initial drafting, but there is some pure pleasure in first drafts.  Being able to finally write That Scene is a particular one for me.  The scene I've been thinking about since halfway though chapter one, the one where readers will shriek and gnash their teeth, or laugh, or gape with wonder and disbelief.

Reaching That Scene is a major motivation for getting through a first draft for me, though I still have a lot of fun along the way.

Research - Apocalyptica by the Sea

Attempting to write apocalyptica (not post-apocalyptica - this is a [partial] apocalypse in process rather than one of those 100 years later jobs) set in the near-now is something which it helps to fact-check - or you'll have a percentage of your readers falling out of your story because they immediately spot an impossibility in your setting.

The first setting in And All the Stars, St James Station, was a fairly easy thing to research, since it's the station I use going home from work.  Even then I've blithely swapped the location of the toilets for the sake of dramatic convenience ( :) ), a change I'll probably have to include an author's note about.  Now that the unfortunate Madeleine is departing its dusty confines (with a brief side-trip to Circular Quay), I took a lunch hour last week for Actual Research on the next setting in the book, Finger Wharf in Woolloomooloo.

It's about a twenty minute walk from where I work, much of it through the grassy The Domain, and was a very useful trip for getting a good visual grip on the location for the next three or four chapters.  [Not to mention a chance to get a pie with peas from Harry's Cafe de Wheels, which sadly will not be open during the apocalypse.]

Finger Wharf is an odd place, sitting between two peninsulas, with a spectacular view of the Sydney skyline (and, ah, strange alien spires).  It's right next to a botanic garden/park on one side, and a naval base on the other, and is the home of very very rich people.  [I gather Russell Crow lives there, among others.]  And there I am, feeling immensely out of place wandering along past the row of incredibly expensive restaurants, and trying not to be too obvious peering at all the apartments and working out how one gets inside them.  I am by no means the kind of person with the chutzpah to try and talk my way inside for an inspection, though I did handily find some interior apartment shots thanks to my friend Google.

The trip did bring to my attention all the massive boats lined up outside.  They made me want to put a water chase scene in the book - I mean, Sydney Harbour, it cries out for water chases!  But there's the pesky issue of keys...

Anyway, And All the Stars proceeds apace.  I'm not a quick writer of first drafts, but progress is being made.

The Gap Between Thought and Text

So I've "written" all of And All the Stars.  In a strictly non-textual kind of way.

First there's Section One, "Arrival".  Section Two is "Watching the World Die".  Section Three is "Not Lord of the Flies".  Section Four is "Mythological References".  Section Five is "Let's Dance" and Six is "Did He Smile?"  Section Seven is the last.

I don't usually write books set on Earth, because of the need to get things right, and though I have some leeway because the story is set in 2016, I need to research a heap of things.  Which cities have a population of over a million.  Hinduism (though I'll barely use any of it - it's just so I properly understand one of the main characters).  And I need to go walk down to Wooloomooloo, since that's what Madeleine will do once I get her out.  [I used to walk down there occasionally at lunch, but I need to refresh my memory] 

I have a name for one of the major characters - Avinash - which was one of those fortuitous names to discover.  Another name will probably be Gideon, but that's still up in the air.  There's more sex in this story than I usually detail.  And more pain.

All of this is in my head.  Bouncing around, adding new complexities and layers, changing constantly.  Not the whole of a book, but the key notes.  The hotel.  The boy on the stairs.  The awkward conversation about sex.  The scene with the music.  And yet I still haven't moved my poor character off the slab of concrete she woke up on, in the ruins of St James Station.

It's a marvellous book.  Different from my usual stuff, but the characters have quickly become people and there's half a dozen scenes I want to get to, which is one of my main motivations for writing.  It's got its hooks in me hard, and I think about it come and going, gaming and walking.  I'm thoroughly enjoying it, and looking forward to seeing what people think of it.

But, oh, the GAP between thought and text!

The Fun Bits

People are always going on about how much work writing is.  Oh the agony, oh the slog, blah de blah.

And, yeah, it's rare that you can avoid the slog.

But, dammit, writing is fun!  I write because I love it.  There are far more highs than there are lows. 

My favourite parts are:

- Accidental coolness - when re-reading that paragraph you tossed off in a hurry makes you stop and blink and double-check that you can claim credit for it.

- Plans coming together - all those plot threads dovetailing so neatly you'd think it was deliberate!

- THAT scene - finally reaching the one scene you've been wanting to write for THREE MONTHS now.

- Unreeling the world - by far my favourite part, when you've got one page written and you're galloping through plot and possibility and why and wherefore and you're walking around with a huge grin because wouldn't it be cool to do that!  And what if, and EW!, and that could work and then, but, and if, and oh, damn, I love this story!

By which you might guess that I've had a first page 'musesploding' all over the place.  Wednesday (which will probably end up being called The Pyramids of London) is occupying every spare thought because I've been having way too much fun working out a world which I'm calling my "Didn't Fall" world.  Where the Egyptian Empire didn't fall because its God-Kings were weather-controlling vampires.  And the Roman Empire didn't fall because the technical difficulties of fighting weather-controlling vampires led to them harnessing lightning.  And Britain is just a bit different after being successively invaded by the Romans, the Vikings, the Egyptians, and something which vaguely resembles the Normans, but is now proudly independent with an airship force to be reckoned with, and coronations are held in the Great Grove dedicated to the Tri-Fold Goddess.

So, uh, yeah.  So much to write, so little time...

[I am faithfully working on Voice every morning, though, and making good progress now that I made it past a tricky bit.]

Novel Inclinations

Voice continues apace.  A very slow pace.  I'm attempting a tonal shift in a few critical chapters, and that's _hard_.  But progress is being made, despite self-sabotaging attempts to drag myself off course.

One of the suggested ways to get your name out as a writer (published or self-published) is to write short stories so people can get a taste for your writing, so I thought over possible short stories I could write this week, and came up with two new novels to add to my list of things I would really like to be writing at the moment.

I'm just a novel writer; it's my natural length.

When I'm seriously distracted by new story ideas, I usually write the first page or two, which gets it enough out of my head that I can go back to whatever I'm trying to _finish_, and gives me enough to pick up the threads if and when I come back to it.

You can see from this opening scene that I was pondering popular sub-genres and wondering what would make them interesting to me. ;)

The windows of the vampire's house were a sneer, a proclamation.  "Come, Sun!" they mocked.  "Find me.  Make me ash."

The sun was not slow to take up the invitation, flooding through countless squares of glass to burnish mellow wood and caress rows of leather-bound books.  But the vampire was in the basement discussing weather control with the Prime Minister, and the sun did not even reach the young man resting his head on one arm at the near end of the library's central table.  The broad sweep of light stopped just short of his other hand as he held it, thumb canted to form a partial frame, toward the window and the scene of controlled near-chaos outside.

A rope had snapped.  The Prime Minister's airship was canted to one side, and then bounced, the black and red ballonet threatening to smash the gondala against Sheerside Manor's sweeping back lawn.  The very problem Lady Buckmeer had come to discuss was likely to strand her in Heliotropus' bedeviled south.

That story, if I ever get around to writing more than an opening for it, will be called Wednesday.  But Voice first.  So many projects, so little time.

Not-Writing

I spent a lot of time not-writing this week.

My best writing time is on the train to and from work (50 minutes each way).  If I'm tired, writing doesn't happen (sometimes snoring almost happens, which is embarrassing on a train).  And, if it's rainy as it has been this week, I tend not to want to take my laptop with me on the 20 minute walk to the station.  So I've been reading and not-writing instead.

I'm almost always not-writing.  It's a valuable process, where I compose my books in thought instead of pixels, trying out ideas, settling what needs to be done.  It can be a trifle frustrating, because while not-writing I often come up with the perfect way to say something, and yet never can remember how it went when I get back in front of a keyboard.  [Sometimes I will jot in a notepad, if it's something I really don't want to forget.]

This week while not-writing, I:

- Truncated a cave-scene in Voice of the Lost.
- Turned over, yet again, the chapter which needs to be added where Medair meets people she hopes she'll never meet again.
- Amused myself with slight variations of a sex scene recently written.  [Or the pre-sex scene.  I'm one of those writers who always cuts away just as you get to the really juicy bit.  Except in the space naga smut book, because the technicalities of that sex scene was half the point.]
- Turned over things I really should do in Caszandra, to make sure Cass doesn't come across as a mere observer in all the big dramatic moments.
- Considered what I would do to Hunting (which is the first in a series of four books I wrote before Medair) and when I would get time to do it.  Refused to let myself go re-read it.
- Refused to let myself go re-read Wellspring.
- Thought of a conversation which should go in The Sleeping Life.

So, a productive week of not-writing!

I did do a little work on Voice of the Lost as well.  But just a little.  I'm in one of those modes where I re-read the first chapter over and over again obsessively changing one or two words each time.  Not productive at all.

Messing with Muses

Over the years I've written over a dozen novels, but started at least two dozen.  A few of these books will never be finished - they were ideas in chapter form which didn't go anywhere.  Others, such as "Surrogate", "Wings" and "Wellspring" are books I'm still working on, every so often.  "Surrogate" (space nagas!) was two chapters for about six years, until I developed a sudden blazing passion for it one week, and added another five.  I'll go back to it again, the next time the memory worms its way into my head.  "Wings" has been around even longer, and needs me to make a decision on how many viewpoints I want in the book.

"Wellspring" has derailed "Lab Rat One", if only for a re-read and some edits.  Wellspring's world is one which fascinates me: there are four sources of magic in that world, wellsprings with an 'emanation' range of maybe twenty kilometres, and you can't effectively carry unworked magic for a substantial distance outside the emanation range.  Magical devices fade unless they're "juiced".  So around these four wellsprings are massive, luxurious cities, full of manufactories and hospitals and light rail and beast masters and illusionists (and running water and refrigerators).

This is a world where I'm trying to show how much of a difference magic can make to day-to-day life.  My first instinct with mages is not to set them to fighting each other with fireballs, but to preserving food.  Keeping people warm in winter.  Lighting the night.  Wellspring is set in a city where magic and technology creates a kind of golden age, but only for twenty kilometres.  Around that, people who travel daily into the emanation range to bring back magic to "juice" their appliances.  And everywhere else is the people who can't afford to live there.

Beyond the wellspring, we still see great benefit from magic, through goods manufactured with magic but not requiring a continual charge.  But the disparity is great, and the desire to increase magic's reach is where the conflict of the story lies, and that's where my head has chosen to be at the moment.

This is one of the ways I write.  Hopping about keeps the current story fresh, and when I hop back for my next re-read of "Lab Rat One" I'll be fresher for not being in that world for a while.

Fools

"Lab Rat One" (Part 2 of "Touchstone") commences on 1 April, so after my week off to celebrate finishing "Stray", I intended to pick up and roll with the edits this morning in a nice example of good timing.

I wrote one sentence, then went back to reading a rather good murder mystery on my e-reader.  Rather good books are very distracting.

I am very caught up in "Touchstone", though, and even began re-reading bits of "Stray" _again_ over the past few days.  My head is firmly in the events at the end of "Lab Rat One", thinking through the relationship dynamic, and I find I'm glad I stuck with the diary format.  It will probably not work for everyone, but it makes the story very compelling for me to read.

But must resist too many rather good murder mysteries...

Demon of the Pharmacy

Reading bunches of Golden Age mysteries means occasionally encountering words and phrases which have mutated or fallen out of fashion.  One of these is "dope fiend", which is a vastly more interesting term than "drug addict", conjuring all manner of pharmacological daemons - hallucinatory mists, possession in a pill, creatures with syringes for teeth.

Chalk up another idea for an urban fantasy I will never write.

Time Travel

I not infrequently displace my characters in time.  Not, as a rule, sending them back, but bringing someone forward, so that they have to deal with a home that has become not-home, recognisable and yet wrong.

Going to Townsville for Christmas took me into vaguely similar territory - it has become not-home, recognisable but strange.  Whole new suburbs have appeared, the mall is being restructured, and the saplings in the middle of the big roundabouts are now large trees - but recognisably Townsville with the cascara flowering, and tamarinds littering the ground.  Familiar stores have different names, but the bones of home are still there. 

The worst change was speed bumps on "Sonja's Hill" (known by non-Hosths as "The Cutting", I believe).  This was a terrific street for driving really fast up and making yourself seem to fly when you crested the top.  Speed bumps take all the fun away.

The Townsville of my childhood was rarely anything but brown-gold - El Nino held sway and the hills were dry.  It was more than disconcerting to see everything so green, and that's not even counting the floods.

The 1000% humidity was also an excellent reminder of why I don't live there any more.

A Place to Write

I'm not someone who can write through a lot of noise and interruptions (which makes Christmas visits to relatives a rather unproductive patch).  The best place I've found to write is on my morning commute by train.  No internet, little in the way of distractions, and a great deal of predictability.  I can concentrate.

Little progress this past week - I'm meant to be doing a final edit of Stained Glass Monsters, but Word is not launching itself, and there are few occasions when I can find the "write moment".

Revising Medair

One nice thing about going back to a novel you wrote over ten years ago is the discovery that you've become a better writer.

I can see my misuse of semi-colons, for a start. And I am able to find tighter, more powerful ways to phrase particular sentences. I'm aiming to cut, particularly since the pricing of the books will be impacted by page number, and so it is a fortunate thing indeed that I seem to have become a more concise writer.

It's also nice to find that I wasn't that bad back then, that the story moves along less cluggily than I thought, that what I considered an info-dump in the second chapter is at least an interesting bit of information told in a way which entertained me.

It's good to meet these characters again, and like them.

Although going the publishing submission rounds for so many years was a draining and negative experience, it definitely benefited my writing to wait and grow.

Added to this is the excitement of receiving the first "thumbs" of one of my commissioned covers. It is amazing to have a scene which I've been picturing mentally for months now coming to life (with considerably more detail and compositional balance).

Fun times.

By Any Other Name

Twice this year I've found a name I've used in one of my books spending its time in someone else's novels.

To a certain degree this is inevitable, since names are rarely unique. My nephew, for instance, shares his name with a female guardswoman roleplaying character (and my space naga, for that matter). But distinctive or particularly well-known names are ones to treat with care.

It's entirely possible to use established real-world names which happen to feature in books (Hermione or Bella) and not cause a fuss (unless there are other similarities) but even so the reader will bring associations to the name, and may be jarred from your story. And distinctive names unique to or rarely encountered outside a particular novel or series (Rand, Menolly, Severus) are something which will almost always bring negative impacts to the reader/author experience.

In my current cases, my fallback term for magical schools (Arcanum) appears to have most recently shown itself in Patrick Rothfuss' novel. I will probably keep the name unchanged, since it is not nearly so distinctive as something like "Hogwarts". And today I found that the very distinctive surname of one of my main characters is the first name of a character in an extremely well-known series of novels.

Fortunately the spelling is slightly different, and almost everything else nothing alike, so I will also keep this name. But it was a close call. Giving up on a name you've spent a novel with is not an easy task. I can barely imagine how I'd cope if I found out Gandalf and Aragorn were also 'taken'.

Argh

Too many writing projects wanting my attention, plus I was distracted into reading a long and interesting MS (and then arguing about it).

Discipline, I need it.

Still, worked out the 'next action' on Wellspring, which has been sitting on the back-burner for a while. And, re-reading the last chapter, was very much enjoying one Duran, of beautiful voice and butterfly attention level.

Click!

I love it when a plot comes together.

Sleeping Life has been giving me issues, thanks to Fallon, who is there for a reason, but wouldn't tell it to me. I debated removing him altogether, but he's important to the story. He just wouldn't let me know just what it was he wanted, and why. This has been giving me problems for months.

Then I wondered whether he'd be more communicative as a point of view character and everything fell into place. Of course Fallon wouldn't tell - he has secrets - a big secret which would cost him too much to share. Secrets which handily will let me have fun with magic, and fall nicely into the theme of the story.

It means I need to write a new chapter one, but I'm looking forward to it.

Amiable Self-Deprecation

My reading taste revolves primarily around fantasy, science fiction, manga and mysteries. Although I was a wider reader when younger, it's a rare thing now for me to stray outside my genres. One exception is Saki, whose short stories simply work for me - particulaly 'Sredni Vashtar'.

Another is Bill Bryson, who came to me via my sister. Travelogues. I have almost all his books now, but have not branched out to other travelogues.

So why does Bryson work? No doubt the mixture of sharp dissection and affection, but I think there's also something Andy Warhol-ish about Bryson's writing - a celebration of the things we see every day and take for granted, which we see anew through his eyes.

He does make me want to write science fiction, to produce a Bill Bryson of the Thirtieth Century, returning to his home planet after a few decades away, and marvelling at the Thirtieth Century version of cup-holders. A near-plotless ramble complaining about how no-one drives any more, but merely teleports everywhere.

I have too many ideas.