Process

Process

First draft to finished book

The first draft of book 5 in the Highland Gazette series is almost done, and publication of book 4, North Sea Requiem is three weeks away. The two events may even co-incide if I give up my almost non-existent social life.

Lead-in time from writing a novel to publication is long. To produce a book per year is a, necessarily, disciplined process - else you go doolally. I compare it to a pregnancy (when you can go doolally also) which medically is described in three trimesters. My writer's journey goes like this:

First three months of a calendar year is taken up with checking proofs and corrections of last year's book. Plus new book percolating. 

Next three months, first draft of new book (which may contain what you detailed in the synopsis --or not) and a traumatic, sleepless, process that can be. Wrestling with the demons of insecurity, tears dripping into the keyboard over the traumatic bits,  moments of utter joy, having your characters take over your life, neglecting friends and health in the real world, all of that and more is the lot of an author.

Then revise, edit, revise, edit until you can't stand the sight of the thing and send it of to the editor (who is a saint). If you had a propensity towards bi-polar disorder before becoming a writer, then writing the first draft of a book will be all too familiar.

Second draft; the manuscript comes back with a few pages of notes and comments marked up chapter by chapter. You despair. A few days pass. A few red wines are consumed. You re-read the notes. Ha! you didn't see the notes of encouragement --all you saw were the negatives, the quiet suggestions as to where it wasn't quite working. You sit down, go through the marked manuscript steadily, patiently, get to the end and another read-through from the editor. This can take three months, but hopefully less.

The final draft; time to let the sunshine in, a time to read the words aloud, to hear it, to smell it, to polish. And if you are very lucky, it sings to you - in parts.

Then it's off to the copy editor. The manuscript comes back, and again, time to work methodically, trying not to be too harsh,  because by this time it is mostly too late for big changes and by this time you are sick of the whole thing, and all you can see are the faults. But this makes you vow to do better  next time. And you start all over again!

When about to embark on the next book - mostly because you want to know what is happening in the community you created, and because to produce a better book than the last one, you forget the pain of producing the previous adventure -- much like giving birth.

So that is my year. And hopefully the next, and the next...

Aa' the best.

PS Watch out for North Sea Requiem from 3rd September available in the USA and Canada in multiple bookstores and online, the rest of the world via ebooks and online. 

Halfway there

Sun is shining,
Weather is sweet...
...come to the rescue...

So said the great Bob Marley. And so say I.
How to write when the weather is perfect, the sea also, when swimming in the early morning, the ocean flat calm, the fishing boats dotting the horizon, the Cham Islands clear, on that long stretch of sand that is a short stroll from my cottage...it's torture!

Then again, swimming and aqua aerobics, yoga, tai chi, anything that stretches the spine is essential to someone who spends hours crouched over a keyboard.

And the weather is affecting the book. Somehow, I've conjured up those few perfect summers in the Highlands when the novelty of heat remain etched into my brain. From this distance, cynicism reminds me that they were probably only days at a time, or hours. Perhaps a few days 'between weathers' as they say in Shetland, but there were days of perfect beauty.

The main difference between then and now, here and there, is in the sea temperature. Swimming in the North Sea is a form of masochism only attempted by the foolhardy and children. Here it is a balmy 26C.  There -- I shudder to think. Blue feet after a short paddle is what I recall from the summer of 2011 when I ventured ankle deep into the Moray Firth.

And yes, I'm halfway there - 44,861 words. Phew!

Aa' the best.

Thoughts at 3.27 am

Yes, 3.27 AM.

When in the midst - or at least 40,764 words into a new manuscript, I reach the point when I am consumed, inhabited, overwhelmed, totally in the clutches of the muse.
Now we all have a muse --mine is an oh-so-cynical- Scotsman, who says, "Is that it?"Often.
But at 3.27?

Nothing for it but to get up, make a cup of tea, (toast and marmalade helps too - fooling the body into thinking it's breakfast time) then write down the thoughts.
Problem is between the making of the tea, and writing down the idea, you've forgotten what brilliant notion awoke you. So better to write first, then make the tea.
Problem with that is, in the morning, 6.03AM, you can't read the hen's scrawl that is 3.27AM writing.

Next joy at being at 40,764 words. The Doldrums.
An Aside: I remember learning about the Doldrums in geography - or was it history? Probably both as the history of world exploration was dictated by the wind and being stuck in the Doldrums stopped many a sailing ship - before and after Columbus- from reaching parts unknown.

The Doldrums is the place where a writer can become stuck in what is technically known as "the soggy middle". This Wednesday past, stuck, about to waffle on in the hope the characters might point me to something exciting, I thought I might re-read the original outline - the one usually  abandoned when the story takes on it's own momentum.
So I did. Then shouted at myself, "The idea you wrote six months back is perfect."

That should teach me to re-read synopsis, scribbled notes, voice memos on my phone, the backs of envelopes, the  phrase written in lipstick on the inside of a diary no other writing implement being at hand. I mean, what's the point of making notes if you never read them later?

Here endeth the lesson to self (and anyone else who does the same)

Aa' the best.

...love what you write, write what you love.

"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.    ~ Ray Bradbury

Recently, at a literary night in Bar Luna, in Ubud, Bali, I was the guest speaker. The 

 This is the hardest lesson --to love what I write. To love what I do is easy. But that voice of self- doubt, or the voice of John Knox or whatever deity bewitches or curses us Celts, is loud and clear.

My school reports - all those "could do better" remarks --how do the teachers decide you could do better when you wrote your heart out,  thinking your 'composition' (the word for essay in my day) was pretty good. Over imaginative perhaps, but that was what writing was about, so I thought, making up stories  that were weird and wonderful and nothing like ordinary life. 

So there was seldom a - well done, seldom a nice wee tick, or a gold star as later became the fashion, for my stories. A miserly 'B or 'A-'  was the best I could hope for in English composition.


Maybe it was a nineteen-fifties thing; an 'A' would swell a child's brain. To give praise  was probably an infringement of some educational theory taught in pre WW11 teacher training colleges. 
To punish, to instil fear, through liberal use of the belt - a length of extremely hard leather - that was thought to be the way to educate children aged five and upwards.

I remember clearly being taken from my classroom - I must have been about 8 - to help calm down my sister who would have been 6. She had to be punished, I was told, and she wouldn't hold out her hand to be hit with this medieval instrument of pain.  I was supposed to tell her "it was for her own good." All I can remember is being equally terrified and saying, "You'll have to ask my Mum."
What happened after that I don't recall but if it didn't scar my sister for life, it certainly scarred me.  

interlocutor, a wonderful writer and woman, Cat Wheeler, asked why my books are based in the nineteen fifties. I can't recall exactly what I said. It was a light, fun evening. I certainly didn't relate the story of my sister.
Maybe I should have, because a partial answer is, "Nothing since has been as cruel as some of the events of my childhood." 

The 1950s: the crucible of us baby-boomers; corporal punishment, polio, rationing, the fear of nuclear war. And as the decade ran out towards the sixties, television, and telephones in the home - if you could afford them - Elvis on the wireless, occasionally clothes bought in shops and not made by your mother or granny, holidays further than Nairn 17 miles away, all signs of changing times. 

And a never to be forgotten change in my worldview was a book,  borrowed from the library inadvertently, and probably because it had a lurid cover, the "The Martian Chronicles". 

Ray Bradbury changed my life; he showed me that in your imagination, anything is possible. Even other worlds. Worlds outside of the Highlands of Scotland. 

And that led me to Iain M Banks. A worthwhile man is ever there was one. And sorely missed.

Aa' the best.

A writer writes - no matter what.

I came to Ubud in Bali to write - that and escape the heat of my hometown.

And write I did--storming my way into the manuscript, in the zone, pleased with what was coming out through my fingertips. Then the house I was renting was burgled; computer, iPad, camera, all gone.
Sure I'd backed up --bless you iCloud. Sure, I'm insured. But that was not what made me pause (word used advisedly - stop more appropriate but I'm Scottish, so superstitious); it was the sense of violation.

Now Ubud is a good place to confront your fears so, off I went and did Qi Gong, Healing Sound Meditation, Poetry Night at Bar Luna, hung out in coffeshops and bars and went shopping -- there are more distractions here than you can poke a stick at. But I avoided anything with the word Tantric in the title --you'll never get me bending over backwards to please anyone, especially in Ubud where bending over backwards is the done thing. Literally.

All the posters for workshops with beautiful people in preposterous poses reminds me of a Glaswegian friend I had in the sixties, Sadie was her name. She was describing one man who thought himself a particularly cool dude. He taught spiritual tantric sex. He was trying to recruit her. She turned her back on him and said loud enough for him to hear...cue in a stunning blonde with a strong Glasgow accent ... "See him? He's so laid back he can lick his ain arse."

Right, the manuscript.  I tried writing by hand - you know, pen, pencil, paper --remember? But something odd happened. Firstly I couldn't always read my own writing it has been so long since I've done a sustained piece of writing by hand.
But that was not the real revelation; in writing by hand the work changed. Majorly changed. Became more literary. Good writing, pleasing writing, just not what I'm being paid to do. Not what my contract says. Not what my readers expect from me. Not me at all at all. Or is it?

Deep within ourselves we wish to be better writers or else we'd never do it again. After the first book, we know what it takes. We know the hours of staring at a blank screen at the wall, we know the loneliness the fear, the back pain the stress.
For a woman it can be like giving birth in that the resulting child makes you forget the childbirth experience. Or is it some cunning evolutionary process that temporarily wipes out the memory of the pain?
And you do it again. Then again. Each time hoping that it will be better than the last --a better book, not a better child -- although that thought too can occasionally surface.

But this? These sentences, these paragraphs, flowing out in lovely ink on a French notebook? This stuff is more poetry than genre fiction. And poetry doesn't sell. And I need to earn my living. And the style, so different, doesn't fit the previous computer written part of the manuscript.
But it's writing. Perhaps it will become my secret writing. My personal literary porn. Whatever it is, it is writing. It leads to the Zen like thought that if I stop writing am I am no longer a writer? I like being a writer. I like being able to say I am a writer. A published author.

So I'm packing up the new computer and heading for the hills where hopefully there is no yoga, no Qi Gong, no Sound medicine other than birds and running water and no, no, no, tantric anything.

Aa' the best.

Here we go again...

Happy as can be...well, not quite.

A new book is in the making. Plot plotted -- as far as that goes as I tend to let the story run its own course, much like highland burn in spate.
Not doing so, not sticking to the plot, sometimes results in a wonderful run of words where you feel the ideas and pictures flowing from the fingertips. Sometimes not; sometimes you are so engrossed in the free flow that you literally lose the plot. And weep.

Embarking on a new novel is exciting, yes. Scary too. And writing this book in a new country (Bali, Indonesia) in a new temporary home (my friend Oksana's house) I have everything I need - except for THE chair.

There is a beautiful chair, a large recycled wooden chair, a Daddy Bear chair, but it is NOT MY CHAIR. My chair at home in Viet Nam is a cheap, bought from a supermarket, nasty fabric, office chair, tastefully hidden under a Cambodian Buddha-orange silk blanket and it works just fine, supports the back, doesn't give me varicose veins, and cost about twenty dollars new.

Here in Ubud do you think I can find a chair? Not a hope! I can find endless tourist tat, endless yoga schools, more organic spas and cafes and groceries that even Julia Roberts would ever need. I can find centres for Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and more isms than I know how to spell, but an office centre, forgedaboutid.

But the writing will happen. It must. Guilt about not writing now outweighs excuses. And too much thinking -- aka procrastination, makes for sleepless nights.
Now it is time and the ripening rice surrounding the house, growing higher than the bedroom windowsills, the late afternoon swallows, followed by early evening bats, followed by early darkness fireflies, followed by diamond studded skies and a moon filling to full, is sheer magic.
Just the place to sooth the savage whatsit. Yeah yeah yeah, eat pray love.

How about write write write? I will, I promise. But first a chair.

Aa the best.

Now is the hour

Now is the hour that longing turns around
For sailors towards what they left behind...
                                        Dante Alighieri.
                                       Translator, Clive James

I have left my home in Viet Nam, temporarily, to try a new setting, with yet to meet new friends, in Ubud, Bali.

Here to regain my health and equanimity, here to write the first draft of a new book, after only four days, the longing for what Ive left behind hit me.
The change of place started in joy soon morphing into, the chair is not right, the desk too high, the insects are different, the sounds unfamiliar.
But now I know that none of this means a thing; it is only that this is not my desk, my chair, my sounds.
and the compensations are too tremendous to complain: fireflies in the early evening dark darting across the rice fields outside the bedroom window; the four hour cremation ceremony yesterday starring a casts of hundreds, a dragon with a twenty metre tail, a giant bull with huge carved horns, a tower creation three stories high with atop the construction, presumably, the bones of the 4 years dead prince; the yoga barn; the massages; the yummy organic food ...Stop. Wait. The Writing? Not yet.

Now is the time to remember what I have left behind. And who.
Now is the time to remember that no matter the environment, the task is the same --to write the best book I possibly can.
Now it is time to lose myself in that world, the Highlands, 1958, the Highland Gazette, to re-join the cast and crew of my invented world, invented yet based on what I know, who I knew, and most of all those remembered hills and mountain, glens and burns, the wind, the air, the rain, and the constant sound of trees moving, water running, and my mother singing. Once upon a time, before she succumbed to the bullying, she sang often.
So now I embark on another novel, I will keep that sound of her singing with me.

And once again, before I start, I have the pivotal scene that leads me into the work. Last time it was nits (head lice).
This time, it is Sunday morning, beach-side mission, Salvation Army tambourine beating the rhythm and we children singing "Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam" whilst all around us the ungodly are trying to catch the rays to turn Scots-white-blue skin a deeper shade of red to prove they have indeed been on holiday if only "doon the water" to the islands in the Firth of Clyde.
Happy Days.

I hope I can pull it off. But then again, that is why I, we, write.

Aa' the best.

PS yet to find a working title ---'Doon the Water' doesn't work in English.