New LEVELS story, The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness, The Wills Tower and Kyle Thompson

I'll tell you the good news first. The good news is that there's a new Levels story approaching.

The bad news is it's not the one people are expecting. I finished the first draft of Levels 4, and put it aside to get my breath, and got distracted by dystopian novels. Got so distracted that I wrote one...

Here's the idea: Song to Wake to is the springboard of the Levels series. It's the unveiling of the key relationship, and the paramount secret. What happens next is kind of the obvious way for the story to go, if the world stayed the same.

What if the world didn't stay the same?

What if in lots of ways it ended?

What would happen to the Levels series, and its characters - bearing in mind their special qualities - if society collapsed around their ears?

That's what THE WILLS TOWER is about. I  read and obsessed about Wool, by Hugh Howey at the beginning of the year. Then I read the complete Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness. Here's the first, The Knife of Never Letting Go:




It's set in a world quite like ours, but with two key differences: Men can hear each other think, and the world is inhabited by a second, very different, intelligent species. Patrick Ness really develops about these two things would really mean. People's thoughts are 'noise' and they're deafening, and maddening. The other species are communal, maybe aggressive, maybe not. They are so fused as a social unit that they don't even have individual names.

The story is about a boy, the last boy, trying to make his way through this world. So is THE WILLS TOWER. As well as being about Maddie and Eddy, it has a third character, a boy alone, called Roman.

We meet Roman when he is in love, and being picked on. He asks a girl out, and a bully mocks him. "Only if you were the last boy in the world," he is told. THE WILLS TOWER in part, is about the process of that coming true, and in part about how dealing with high school can be good preparation for dealing with the end of the world.

I'm going to call THE WILLS TOWER 'Levels 2B' and it can be an alternative sequel to Song to Wake to. It will be out before Levels 4, which is being slowed by rewrites and getting the cover perfect. I've just been inspired by the photo at the start of this blog, and this one.

You can read more about them here, the most amazing pictures I've seen for years. Hopefully the cover of Levels 4 'THE WALLED LAKE' will have the qualities of one of them.

Hopefully it won't take too long...

Beer, King Arthur, Pubs, King Arthur, 5 Places You Must Go on Vacation

King Arthur was real. Definitely real.

He might not have been called Arthur. His table may have been long and thin. But there was definitely somebody there who cast a shadow across all the history that followed.

Think about it this way. There's a definitely 300 year window where we know NOTHING that happened in Britain. It's like it went behind a curtain when the Romans left, and didn’t reappear until the time of King Alfred. The Britons were in charge, then when the lights came up again they had more or less gone, and the Saxons ruled the roost.

300 years of war and change. It’s IMPOSSIBLE that there were no awesome heroes in that period. Think of any history you know about the time from 1713 till now. There are warriors and leaders all over the place.

Like all the others Arthur left a mark. There are the stories of Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth. There are movies. There is the amazing Tintagel castle I wrote about HERE

And there are pubs.

The photo at the top of the post is a pub in Tintagel. I had to go there because of its relevance, clearly. The plate of bacon and eggs was incidental.

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This was a guest house.

And this, obviously, was a beer. Very tasty Dad said, brewed and bottled in the heart of Cornwall.

After Tintagel our next stop on the Arthur tour was Bodmin Moor, the third biggest moor in the south west, after Dartmoor and Exmoor. All three are high, bleak, and beautiful, but Bodmin is the most atmospheric and a big part of its gloomy charm is the fact that it’s associated with Arthur’s death.

We got lost twice and were helped by a, then stunned by a rare wild otter boldly crossing the road in front of us. Apparently the water in the Looe, the moor-river, is the cleanest in Britain.

We followed a narrow, winding lane between tall mossy banks to the highest point  of the moor. Up on the top is a deserted, windswept lake, called - amazingly - Dozmary Pool and it’s here that Sir Bedivere was told by the mortally wounded King Arthur to throw Excalibur. Twice he told him, and twice Bedivere hid the sword in the reeds and returned to his dying king. The third time he did as he was bidden, and a pale arm shot from the water and retrieved the sword, returning it to the Lady of the Lake.

I didn’t see a ghostly arm, but we did meet cheerful farmer who claimed he’d never been out of the county in his life.

I think that’s all of my Cornish adventures that are of any interest. The next post will be about something written, and published, and available to readers, I promise…

Levels 4 (The Walled Lake) FINISHED

So far Levels 4 stands at 112,843 words, though I've written and deleted far more. Today, though, I wrote the best two:

It's been hard going, weaving together a couple of different story lines from the first three books, giving prominence to all the old characters and adding some new ones, has been difficult. There was a patch in the middle where drawing all the threads together was really, really hard, but then, when I started to wind up the tension towards the end, writing got easier and more fluid, until this weekend I wrote the two big, climactic scenes not far from here:

This is the treasury at Petra, lit by candles. Relevant to the story in an Indiana Jones kind of way...

I'm giving myself a week to maybe knock out a quick short story, and let things settle, then I'm getting into redrafting and cover design. Hopefully it won't be long until the story is on your Kindle...

In search of King Arthur and the perfect English Breakfast

So last month when I should have been writing Levels 4 I was on holiday in Cornwall. Now, instead of writing Levels 4 I'm writing about it...

As I've said BEFORE King Arthur lived in the 400 years between the Romans departure from Britain and the Norman arrival. Where he lived is less clear, but it's generally thought to have been in the south and west of Britain. Camelot may have been Caerleon, or further south in Somerset or Dorset in the area of Glastonbury or Stonehenge, where Levels are set.

Cornwall, however, is where he might have been born, and where he might have been killed.

 This is Tintagel Castle, a jumble of ruined walls on a cliff overlooking this bay. The shadows to the left conceal the entrance to somewhere called Merlin's Cave...!

The hall, guardrooms and garden are marked out, though now all that remains are lichen covered stones and gull haunted grass. Steep cliffs all around once made it impregnable. Now they make it a bit scary, with stunning views all down the coast to places like this:

This is Bude, a little up the coast, where I stayed. I could have gone surfing, but instead hunted down the perfect full English fried breakfast and ate it vigorously on several occasions. 

Another Week, Another Distraction, Bernard Cornwell's Winter King, and Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak

Three weeks ago I went to London for the weekend. At the end of the trip, with two hours until I had to take the tube to Heathrow Airport, I finally achieved my goal of visiting a bookstore.
I bustled from Victoria Station, past the back wall of Buckingham Palace and through the beautiful, green dampness of St James's park, to the grand shops and mansions of Piccadilly.
Drizzle fell constantly. I didn't care, I was going to a bookshop.
In the end, though, I didn't go to a bookshop, I went to two bookshops. The first was Hatchards, in Piccadilly. It's the oldest bookshop in the UK, on five floors, and it looks like this.

 I bought a copy of Idylls of the King Publisher: Penguin Classics, and a history of the Kings of England (exciting stuff). More importantly I roamed around their five floors, got recommendations from their lovely staff, and browsed through all kinds of fascinating little nooks and crannies.
And then, from there, I went up the road to Waterstones Piccadilly, ANOTHER five floor book store. What an embarrassment of riches! it used to be a department store called Simpsons, and it's huge.
Here I bought this:

Because I thought it would be interesting to see a historical representation of the King Arthur years.
It turned out it was more than fascinating. basically, in British history, there's a 500 hundred year gap, after the Romans left, and before the Normans came, when we know NOTHING that went on. While the Romans were around they wrote letters about people, and drew maps, and recorded battles, and accounts. Then they went, and everybody pulled their palaces down to make pig sties, and let grass grow on their roads, and stopped recording anything.
It's like there's an invisibility cloak over the whole time. A cloak that Cornwell attempts to push aside. He makes a real historical time fascinating, and quite dreadful, and the characters amazing.
Recommended.

The Other Queen, Philippa Gregory, Levels 4

So the bad news is that Levels 4 'The Walled Lake' is growing slowly. The good news is that my distractions are fun....

The Walled Lake is a new kind of book for me. It has four main characters, for a start, and a dozen extras. Levels 1-3 were like threads that I woven together into a line from beginning to end. Levels 4 is more like a fabric, or a lace, with different stories criss-crossing each other, and some of them not reaching an end. It surprises me all the time, and so a big part of the slowness is caused by continually going back to the beginning to lay the foundations for exciting events I've just thought of...

Two of the characters are Maddie, the heroine of the first three books, and Oh Sanden, who you will know if you read 'Reason to be Shy.' Their relationship is complicated, and so it was a happy accident that I read 'The Other Queen' while I was working.

This tells the story of three women, Elizabeth the first of England, Mary Queen of Scots - her cousin and prisoner, and Bess of Hardwick, who is forced to use up all her resources and give over her house as Mary's prison. The women are forceful, and dramatic and they clash openly and surreptitiously.
Though you know how the story will end, because it's all true, it's completely captivating because of the strength of the characters, which is kind of a lesson for me.

Recommended.

FREE BOOK

Song to Wake to is now FREE on Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Song-Paranormal-Romance-Levels-ebook/dp/B005RFA1RU/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1368310480&sr=1-1&keywords=song+to+wake+to

That's all for now...

Where do those funny little things in your imagination come from? And Vampires.

So, this has taken a while. I'm usually up on titles well before a book finishes. Most of the stories floating around in my head, or on scraps of napkins from coffee shops on South Street, have titles. In fact I probably have more titles than stories. I think of them, and send them to myself as text messages, or scribble them on receipts.

If I had all the time in the world, a book shaped-flood would pour from my balcony, scattered with titles like 'The Cloud Ceiling,' 'The Course,' 'No Love Song Finer,' 'Jordan's Golden Shoulder,' 'Bath Night,' 'The Wonder of it All,' 'The Lost Ocean.'

But I don't have all the time in the world. Fortunately I have saved a little time by realising that a title I scrawled on a receipt from the internet cafe at Istanbul Airport, was perfect.
Once upon a time I lived in Bucharest, Romania (there's a lot of stories there, too. I know the real stuff about vampires...).

Anyway Bucharest is full of fascinating corners, where confusing fragments of the past sneak through the grey concrete of communist times. There are streets named for Greeks who ruled the city as the ambassadors of the Turks. There are cemeteries filled with men who fought the Russians when they came. There is a park, near a road called Basarabia Boulevard, named after the home of the people who once lived there. Besarabians, from a place now called Moldova, then also part of the Ottoman Empire.

Here's one of my favourite Bucharest Places:


What is the point in all these connections?

Of the titles I suggested for my stories, in my little survey in the post below this,  I liked the made-up words 'Giantorium' and the long ones 'The Girl who gave up her Name.'

You didn't. You preferred the places, 'Traitor's Gate' and the others. The one problem with those is there wasn't a connection between them all, not like the 'song' theme of the first stories. Two of them, 'The Locked Chapel' and 'Traitor's Gate' had the theme of openings/access. But I needed a third. Which is where the park in Bucharest came in.

All parks in Bucharest have lakes, but this one was different. It had been encroached on by the walls of the stadium next door. They pinched it between their high, grey surfaces, and gave me the idea for a book title that I never had a story for until about six months ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, Levels 4, Idylls of Merlin, book 1:

THE WALLED LAKE

The Half-Blood Prince, City of Heavenly Fire, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Once and Future King, and A River Runs through it

What's the link between these five books?

It's that I really like the titles. And why is this? To me great titles have to do three things. They have to have at least a little poetry, maybe from rhyme, rhythm, assonance, whatever.  Good titles have to hint at what's in the book (more important for kids' books than adult ones). Finally they have to be catchy, or memorable.

In addition, if the book is in a series, they have to link backwards and forwards through the series. Cassandra Claire, for example, achieves this with her 'City of...' titles.

There is of course a second link between all these books. I really like 'em. A River Runs Through it matches the poetry of the title in the rest of the story, and it's carried over into the movie. Take a look here:


The 4th Levels book will also be the first in a new trilogy. I've decided to move on from the song theme of the first books, and have come up with the following ideas for titles. It's soooo hard to decide.

What do you think?

A.
1 Wait
2 Want
3 Waste

B
1 The girl who forgot her own face.
2 The boy who lost his past
3 The girl who gave up her name

C
1 Traitors Gate
2 School of War
3 The locked chapel

D
1 Giantarium
2 Otherself
3 Enchantless

E
1 Broken Knights
2 Knight Fall
3 Dead of Knight

F
1 Damsel
2 Lady
3 Sorceress

G
1 Wizard
2 Knight
3 King

If you've got an opinion, please leave a comment. i want to stop referring to this as L4...!