A Dream Come True

Last week I had a dream come true.

It's not often you can say that. It was a dream I've had since - probably - age seven.
Yes. I can fly.




No. It's a different dream. It's the one I've had since I learned 'Roger Hargreaves' on the Front of the Mr. Men books was the name of a person, not a company, like Ford.
The dream was too have a book in print. Of course, back then, I had no idea it would look like this (massive thanks to the creative genius of Mr Oliver Prentice).

The first long story I wrote was more or less a rip off of parts of the Green Grass of Wyoming and Silver Brumby books (you can find them HERE  and HERE). I think the plagiarism is forgiveable. I was ten.

In the last twenty years I've completed three novels, three screenplays, two TV pilots, two radio plays, and written the first halves of five different novels. I've sent a couple of hundred submissions to agents and publishers.

Nothing stuck.

Then I heard about Amanda Hocking's success, thought 'I can do that' and last September published SONG TO WAKE TO as an eBook. I never planned to self publish in paperback, in fact, for years I've felt a little bit sneery towards self-publishers. However, once I released the eBook, it became the natural next step.

Though it was only natural thanks to Createspace, Amazon's astonishing one stop shop. You upload your text and they tell you what to do to turn it into a book. They tell you how to create a cover (or in my case they tell Olly how to make a cover). You decide how much you're going to charge for it, and BANG, it's on sale on Amazon. Every time somebody wants one, they print it. Plus now I have things to give away as prizes in competitions, bribes to reviewers, etc, etc.

But most importantly, those of you who don't read eBooks can get a copy for yourself, HERE

Song to Wake to is FREE

June 29th and 30th Song to Wake to is free on Amazon. If you've already read it, you could take the opportunity to tell your friends, or maybe even get them a copy...

HERE.

The Clockwork Prince, Levels latest, Euro 2012 and Ronaldo in tears

The last month has been all about teams. I've been reading the Infernal Devices and watching the European Championships. It's been dramatastic.

Beautiful young men, running around trying to save the day, while gorgeous girls watch them with bated breath and vicious villains hack them to the ground. Crowds of remorseless enemies attacking like robots and success and failure balanced on a knife edge.

And then there's the Infernal Devices, Clockwork Prince, one of the best books I've read in a really long time. The breadth of characterisation and the complexity of the plot is breathtaking. The romance becomes perfectly complicated, and the mysterious ambitions of the Magister become ever more twisted. The setting is fantastic, Victorian London and Yorkshire and there is such attention to detail. There are minor characters - a slightly deranged old Yorkshireman, and a gloomy Irish kitchen maid who are beautifully drawn and much more than walk on parts.


My one problem with the book is that the reason Will Herondale is like, well, like Will Herondale, is revealed and for me it didn't quite work. It requires the reader to believe that a series of quite odd actions and convictions are possible, and more than that, they can continue for years with nobody finding out about them. I'm sorry if this sounds a bit cryptic, but I don't want to give anything away. if you've read the book, you'll know what I mean.

Returning to my original point,  The Infernal Devices divides its readers into teams. Team Will, or Team Jem, while the book itself is jammed with teams, there's the Magister crowd, there are the Shadowhunters and the Downworlders - themselves split between the Lightwoods and the Institute crowd, and werewolves and vampires. And they all play against each other.

Which of course, the footballers don't, they face off one at a time. The Greeks and the Germans in an occasion crammed with drama, tragedy, a bit of austerity. The English and the Ukrainians, mistake fuelled and cagey. Every night ends in tears. Fat, shirtless men wipe their eyes in the stand. Tonight the Spanish and the French. Each occasion is loaded with excitement, but it's only ever a two-way affair.



And this is why the Infernal Devices beats football. It's just more complicated. Though, at the moment I could do with it being much less interesting and the football itself being very dull indeed. I've got  ,  Song to Wake to to release in paperback and as a free eBook in a week's time and Lullaby of Lies to polish. The 3rd Levels book will hopefully - like Clockwork Prince - split readers into Team Eddy and Team Jon.

No time for distractions!

In the footsteps of Indiana Jones, skirting The Capitol, avoiding Alicante to the Eighth Wonder of the World, accompanied by The Petshop Boys

This was me last week. Really. If you saw this in the movie and thought Steven Spielberg has a fantastic imagination, well you're right, but he didn't invent any of this. Petra is real, and it's completely amazing. You enter it down a winding road through what is essentially a long, narrow crack in the rock.

At the end of the road-in-the-crack you come to what was once the main square of Petra.

Two Thousand years ago. It’s really amazing and it’s really real. Who needs Alicante, or The Capitol, when you have this… I've been to a wonder of the world, and it's pretty cool.

As well as seeing Petra, I was driven around the desert a lot, which is interesting at first, but then all gets a bit samey. Fortunately I filled the time by finishing off the first draft of Lullaby of Lies, the third Levels book.

Now I’m rewriting it, as well as getting ready for the other exciting events this month… I’m going to tell you about two, now, but watch this space.

Song to Wake to is going to be released in paperback.

I’ve given it a bit of an edit (the eBook version as well). The marvellous Oliver Prentice is working on the cover, and it’s going to hit the shelves of Amazon and hopefully other places on my birthday, June 30^th.

The other thing I’ve done is started a TUMBLR for Song to Wake to. Essentially, it’s bits of text and the music or film that goes with them, or maybe even inspired them. Guess which scene THIS marvellous song goes with. Answers on a postcard...

Please go and have a look at all the other bits HERE and tell me what you think. If you've got any suggestions for other clips and bits of text that go together, then pleeeease let me know. Anybody really inspired will probably win a free book, or something.

Suzanne Collins versus Cassandra Claire: Celebrity Author Deathmatch

uses one of the favourite tricks of YA and kids literature.

Got to get rid of the adults.

Ever since Enid Blyton sent the Famous Five on absurdly dangerous summer holidays, up Mount Everest and through the Amazon Jungle (practically) authors have been finding ways to evade watchful eyes.

Boarding schools are a classic example (more about them HERE)  as are absentee parents, like in Twilight or Amanda Hocking's My Blood Approves.

Suzanne Collins way around it is to essentially have the government isolate the children on purpose. Basically the state takes on the role of the evil stepmother, forcing the kids to the worst chores imaginable.

Cassandra Claire's take on this old problem is innovative and refreshing. She has young people who are that extraordinarily able that they take the roles of adults, then combines that with a life that is so tragically prone to early death that they have to get on with it before it gets on with them.

I read The Hunger Games back-to-back with Cassandra Claire's . the second work is set in the same shadow hunter world as the Mortal Instruments series, but winding it back 150 years to Victorian England. It's nicely Gothic, without over doing the top hats and goodness gracious ma'ams.
And as in the Mortal Instruments there's an institute inhabited by a bunch of teenagers who seem to run around the city, doing more or less what they want. Just like the Mortal Instruments, too, it has a haughty, distant, handsome hero. Jace Wayland as a brunette.
For all the familiarity the story motors along nicely. The plot is excellent, stacks of twists and turns, and the characterisation is very strong, there are a couple of flawed characters who are especially well drawn.
So who wins the death match?
I read these two books, but only when I finished one of them did I buy the sequel straight away. Which one?
Clockwork Angel.

Buying shares in Cassandra Claire, The Hunger Games, Emma Watson and JK Rowling Dress Contest, and Lord of the Flies

The Hunger Games. Current flavour of the month, or at least until they bring out the first of the Mortal Instruments movies.

Let's pause to think about that, for a moment. Outside of teen paranormal fiction fans, Cassandra Claire is a bit unknown. JK Rowling is a billionaire megastar. it's not going to be long before they will be mentioned in the same breath, then Claire will be famous for having out-Rowlinged Rowling. She's got two series on the go, with more to come. the potential is galactic, if you know of any way you can buy shares in Cassandra Claire sell all your shoes and gettem!

But anyway, the Hunger Games. A dystopian YA thriller, without any paranormal elements, but lots of death and suffering. It's about kids at each other's throats, running around in a forest setting traps for one another. At school everybody in the UK has to read William Golding's Lord of the Flies, about a bunch of schoolboys stranded on a desert island, who descend into savagery. I didn't like it. I was in the Scouts, and I wanted to believe we would do better. Hunger Games gets around this issue by having the kids FORCED to fight one another, then Suzanne Collins, the author, gets around it a second time by having her heroine, Katniss, somehow - more by luck than judgement - never actually have to hurt somebody who's nice, or who doesn't deserve hurting.

I liked that, it made the story easier to read, but somehow it's not completely buyable.

The other slight downside is Katniss. Though she's a great heroine, especially in contrast to the typical female lead in YA books (think Isaballe Swann) in that she's resourceful, independent, tough, smart and brave, she's also a bit odd. Her response to incredibly intense situations is often muted, and her response to the first romance, ever, in her life is weirdly cold. I didn't get it.

As far as downsides, go, those are it. The world created is believable, tangible, scary and captivating. The characters are rounded and interesting. More than anything it's exciting, man is it exciting. Twists, turns, twisting back again, turning over, then just when you think everything's going to be okay it twists itself all around in a loop again.

Solid recommend, and I'll be writing more about this next week...

Rainman, Belle Dame Sans Merci and Lullaby of Lies

Writing first drafts of novels can turn you a little bit into Rainman. You start off, and it's all about the small numbers. You go as fast as you can to get to a hundred words, three figures. Next is 111 ( you need to get rid of the zeros) next is 125 (an eighth of a thousand) 200,  222, 250, 300, 333, 400, 444 and 500.

That's ten results to celebrate before you've written five hundred words. If you know what to say, if there's nothing on TV and you can stay away from the internet for long enough, you can do it in twenty minutes.

The first five hundred words of Lullaby of Lies is mainly preface. It's going to be re-written, of course, but it includes this line, that I like enough to be fairly sure it will still be there when it's finally available.

'Morgan’s fingertips brushed against the wall and two fingernails fluttered to the ground, like the pale wings of a dying moth.'

It's all the same on the way to 1000. From then on, the thousands are the milestones. They're the excuse to stop and have a cup of coffee and stare out the window. But of course there are new super milestones. 1111, 2222, etc. These are cool, as are 2,500 and 7,500, up to 10,000 then you add 11,111 to the mix, as well as the mega-super milestones, 25,000, 50,000, and 75,000.

Which is where I am now with the first draft of Lullaby of Lies. 75,000 words. Hopefully today I'll get to 76,666 and tomorrow 77,777. How awesome will that be? To be honest, if you're not completely sunk in this thing like I am, not very awesome at all, but like I said, writing novels makes you even odder than you are to start off with.

This is going to be bad news for those of you who are waiting eagerly for Lullaby of Lies, and I'm sorry. When I finish the first draft I'll set a definite release date, but I guess it'll be August. Between then and now, though, there are going to be some pretty exciting Levels events and give aways, so watch this space. In the meantime, here's the last sentence I wrote, including word 77,777.

'I ran back towards Kieran. His face looked like a hideous skull with the jaw strained unnaturally wide and all his teeth gleaming as he forced out the end of a dying scream.'

What do you make of that? 

Oh, and one other little clue. take a look at the picture at the top of this post. 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci.' It's not there just cos it's pretty...