Growing Pains

Vamps II has hit a familiar point at just short of 17,000 words: is this a novel or a novella? That's to say, is there enough story here to make a short-ish novel, or is it heading for around the 40,000 word mark?

In a sense, and following the logic of the last couple of posts, it doesn't matter; it will take as many words as it needs for the story to be told, especially if the publication will be online. On the other hand, I've been wondering whether to make it part of a collection. In my head, the model for that would be Viriconium. I mean that in a broad structural sense only, I'm not making any comparison between myself and Harrison.

One of the features of Viriconium was its deliberate focus on undermining the tropes of fantasy writing. In this case, it would be the tropes of the vampire novel, but I feel disinclined to do that if I was doing it just for the bantz. Alternatively, I described Vamps II as YA, but a YA who had grown up in a war zone. Maybe it is YA writing (about which I am deeply ambivalent) that needs to be got at. Joe Abercrombie has been here already, of course.

Playing with ideas just now, I hit upon having the Margaret/Ephraim relationship turn in part on competing ideas of what human society ought to be (in their terms). In that case, could I use, for example, Plato's Republic as a straw man to play with? In the end, there has to be a good story, but that doesn't mean I can't bury other things within it. If I still had them (and I might) I could use my old Moral Philosophy lecture outlines as a source to mine. Sure, that's cliched, but I am without shame.

My ambivalence about YA writing, by the way, is that it seems to me to be ossifying into a writing/publishing/marketing category which is in danger of missing what it is that the putative target audience might actually respond to. I have only my own experience to draw on, but I clearly remember that when I was a young teen, say from twelve onwards, I was reading what, these days, would not be marketed at young adults (Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Alastair MacLean, Dennis Wheatley, Isaac Asimov), and by eighteen I was reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I don't think I was especially precocious. On this general theme, and for a pleasant change, the discussion of Young Adult fiction on Wikipedia (accessed today) is quite helpful.

Musings

 I'm thinking about the plan I mentioned in my previous post. The issue is what do I want to get out of this? I'm putting some thoughts here because almost nobody reads this anyway :-)

• I don't need the money that comes from commercial success. Of course, I'd like it, but I don't need it: We're comfortable on my pensions.
• I don't require literary credibility. Again, that would be nice, but I don't need literary acclaim to stroke my ego. That doesn't mean I'm cavalier about craft and style and good writing.
• I do like people reading my stuff and being either enthusiastic or at least polite about it. That is a nice ego boost.
• This is quite freeing. It means I can write whatever takes my fancy without regard to what the market wants and without even being under any requirement to be formally 'good'.
• The aim, therefore, is to write as best I can, and keep working at the craft, while making my work available for those who want it. I need to figure out what that means in terms of shaping the product and marketing it, but the drivers aren't to do with commerce or credibility per se; they're second-order benefits.
• My previous efforts to attract an agent in the current climate are therefore not where I should be putting my effort as, by definition, they are keen on commercial prospects and literary merit because they are commercial operations. They would take one look at this post and walk away, I reckon. And that's fine because they are businesses.
• So my primary focus should be on writing; my secondary focus should be on further analysing the possibilities open to me in a practical sense.

A Plan?

 Point one of David Southwell's Hookland Manifesto reads:

• you will not be talent-scouted however good the work you do. Live with this and create for yourself.

This is a large part of my philosophy anyway, but that point resonated. It has a number of consequences. The first is that I began to think more seriously about that creating for myself. For me, I think that boils down to:

• Not judging myself or being frightened of being judged by someone else's standard, even if it is someone I admire. The mental approach I need is to develop and maintain my own standards and write my own stuff, not a pale imitation of someone else's.
• If I want other people to read my stuff, I need to pay more attention to marketing in the broadest sense: what is my most accessible material? How do I plan what I release?
• Self-publishing is the way to do it.
• I need to figure out how to differentiate myself in a very crowded market.

***

I've resurrected Vamps 2, which I put aside in 2017. I was reading New Scientist and a McGuffin leaped out at me. I have a bunch of research to do, but I'm doing something--and it is a something that ties in with my emergent plan outlined above.

All the World's A...

                                All the world’s a tweet,

And all the men and women merely tweeters;

They have their retweets and their lists;

I think it is a requirement that writers must use social media channels to push their 'author brand' through daily 'engagement'. It pisses me off when I see writers whom I admire for their craft and self-awareness taking time to retweet praise for themselves in an unironic way (some at least, such as Joe Abercrombie, seem to be happy to take a rise out of themselves).

In terms of Twitter, my favourite authors would be Hilary Mantel, who set up an account purely to make sure the name was taken and has never tweeted; and Thomas Pynchon, who doesn't have an account, or, at least, not a publicly acknowledged one.

A Discovery of Toxicity

I saw the new trailer for A Discovery of Witches season 2. I've read Deborah Harkness's books several times and credit her with, inadvertently, spurring me in my fifties to take seriously the idea that I might be able to write something. I wasn't so taken with the fourth book in the series, Time's Convert, but three out of four ain't bad.

The first series of the TV adaptation had its moments and had its longeurs; since the former largely outweighed the latter, I wasn't too bothered. But something new has emerged, a kind of self-satisfied tone, spurred on by a vocal fandom that swoons at Deb's every pronouncement, or so it seems (Professor Harkness herself seems to be much more grounded and self-aware). I also, as I often do, preferred the books, which had more room for nuance and detail than was compressed into the series.

(Yes, I know books and TV are different things and comparisons can be problematic.)

The online reaction to the trailer has been adulatory whereas I found the trailer overblown. I'll watch the series, which starts in January, but the trailer didn't move me.

I've been idly pondering something that I've thought for a long time now, a bias which is daily confirmed: fans are great; fandom tends to toxicity, one way or another. I'm not likely to attract the attentions of either, so I have no personal stake in this 😉 The toxicity manifests in several different ways. Sometimes it is the vocal entitlement of a small number who consider themselves to be some kind of super-fan; that kind of entitlement begins and ends in ego. Sometimes it is a culture that grows around a product or author that becomes uncritical while, outside that culture, the casual reader/viewer quietly falls away. Sometimes it goes to the heads of the creators themselves. However it manifests, it tends to be accelerated by social media.

Reading

Since finishing the first draft of the second novel, and somehow retaining the discipline of not diving back into to revise some more, I've made a start on the backlog of books in my to be read pile. First up was Susanna Clarke's Piranesi which I enjoyed a great deal. It was instructive that a paper-thin plot and clear, simple sentences, could produce such a thought-provoking a story and raise all sorts of issues of identity.

Second, was a revisit to James Blish's A Quincunx of Time (1973). These days this would be regarded as a novella: it features only three principal characters and two secondary ones and occupies around 40,000 words. The plot of this, too, is paper-thin, and the core story is almost all told via extended dialogue on issues of determinism and free will. The story isn't without its flaws, and conveniently dismisses quantum mechanics by means of an offscreen McGuffin, but it is nevertheless a good read, even if 'old school'.

The third, that I'm about half way through, is M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again. I'm finding this one harder going as I get into it. Harrison is a writer I like and admire, and I was looking forward to this, his latest. It has been been widely praised, leading me to wonder is it just me? My issue is I feel the presence of the narrator too strongly, feel that I feel I'm being manipulated into something, bullied into feeling unsettled. I'm not convinced that I like it, particularly as I wanted to be bowled over by it.

***

I've started to sketch out little scenes and fragments, mainly as exercises, but knowing they will likely end up as part of something bigger.

Two Down

Well, it's been a while.

When I wrote my last we had never heard of Covid-19, did not know that our world was about to be upended. I had just finished one of the stories that make up my second novel and was having some difficulties getting a handle on the other parts. I did, finally, figure out what I would do and then along came the virus and anxiety and pretty much a complete creative block. I wasn't reading much either.

And then the creativity thing came back and the words spilled out and I have completed the first draft of my second novel, which is now with first readers for initial thoughts and feedback. It is not what I originally thought it would be, but that's OK.

In the meantime I also sent revised versions of the first novel to several more agents, most of whom have not responded.

I think this one is 'better' than the first, and by that I mean I have been less concerned with faux realism and, in leaning in closer to fantasy, opened a creative door for myself. The primary thing about the first novel, irrespective of its merits, is that I wrote it then revised it and revised it some more: I completed the process. I proved to myself that I could sustain a story over 116,000 words, and people who read it liked it (aside from people actually working in publishing, but we'll let that pass). 

So when writing this second, I already knew that I could do it, and that was itself a form of liberation. Of course, I still had to wrestle with writing it, but my mood was different when at the keyboard.

Thoughts inevitably turn to what's next. As it is I have several potentials floating around, but as yet I am not committed to any of them. The obvious one is a third novel in this universe, and I'm open to that if I can come up with a story I think can sustain 100,000+ words. Another option is a set of short stories spinning off from this universe, and that has its attractions.

However, whatever it is will be different again. Partly this is because, having written two, I'm OK with the process of writing a third and I'm that much more confident of getting to the end. The larger part is that, knowing I can do it frees me up to think about how I write stylistically. My reading tends to be in speculative or 'slipstream' fiction and the two I've written have been relatively conventional. I know I have room to grow as a writer, and with two novels and a novel-length collection of stories under my belt, now is the time to start playing with style and form, I think.