paperback writing

I haven't seen the cover art yet, so can't post any images, but in the spirit of full disclosure I just thought I'd mention that my western from the other year, NO FIRE WITHOUT SMOKE, is due a paperback release in the first quarter of 2019. It's being published by Throrpe, as part of their Linford Westerns range, and they're the same lovely people who put out the paperback of my first western, HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF.

NO FIRE's official release date is January 1st, but I can't see many people out on New Year's Day seeking it out. Still, it should be good.  We of course thank the people at Thorpe kindly and look forward to seeing the copies out there in the real world.

I'll just reiterate something I've said before, because it bears repeating and remembering. It's a treat to be published, and shouldn't be taken lightly. Seeing a book alive and in print is a rare enough and special thing, given how many folk are out there, writing without reward. Seeing a book go from hardback into paperback is a heart warming experience, and a help getting through the cold months of winter.

So. The paperback of NO FIRE WITHOUT SMOKE should be in the libraries next year, and there will be copies available on all the good - and some of the not so good - bookselling websites.

(Incidentally, and should you be interested, I've notied that a couple of copies of the hardcover of NO FIRE have sprung into existence on amazon.co.uk. For a while no such copies were available. Both the hardcover and paperback of BLACK WOLF sold out quickly, and are only available through dealers these days, some of which I would suggest are being a bit hopeful by listing the hardcover for over a hundred pounds . . . But, you know, maybe they have children to feed. If you so fancy, you're allowed to buy a copy of NO FIRE at less than the cover price on amazon. I promise you, it's fine. It's no crime. And Christmas is coming, if you were still looking for gifts . . . Click here for a copy.)

after that, this

I’d just come off the back of a big book that I was then calling HEARTSTONES TO ALAEDORNIA. It was a fantasy novel, and it was complicated, and it had hurt my head to write. The first draft was just over 200,000 words long and if it was ever going to look like something anyone would want to read – including me – I was going to have to do a lot of work on it. It was a messy first draft, but okay, at least it was something to work on, and something to work on is better than nothing.

Over the next year, as I continued to write new short stories, I did do that work. I found the thread of the narrative and pulled it tight, pared away the excess (including the TO ALAEDORNIA in the title), and got the book down to a leaner 136,000 words. I polished it. Buffed it up. Then I started to send it out.

During the time HEARTSTONES was collecting rejections, I started on a new book. After all, that’s what you do if you write, isn’t it?

(I mention this because I have met a few people who write their first book and then sit on their hands while they send it off to agents and publishers – and they wait, and they wait, and they wait. Uhm . . . No. Don’t do that. Write the next thing you have to write while the first book is going out. After all, if the first people who see it accept it, you’ll be expected to write another one anyway. So why waste your time? Get on with it. Write.)

HEARTSTONES was a pretty serious piece of work. In my mind, at least, it tried to do all the things that I thought a good book that aspires to be more than disposable entertainment should do. It had themes and subtext, a challenging narrative, a complicated set of characters who grew and changed over the course of the book, and a resolution that felt like it had always meant to be that way. It was technically challenging to write, in that it was really only a one-character point-of-view piece but took place over different times in the characters’ lives and in some unusual locations. But it was a pretty satisfying experience for me, and I thought I had done a good thing in making it, even if it wasn’t perfect. Because, after all, no book is perfect, however hard the writer works on it. I was probably as pleased with it as I could be. Somewhere along the way the book had become the book it wanted to be and not the book I had wished it had been, and that is fair enough and something I have learned to accept when it comes to writing books. They often know what they want to be more than the writer knows.

But . . .

There was one thing I kept coming back to, though, when I thought about the book. That fantasy novel, it was pretty serious, I kept thinking. It was quite grim in places and pulled very few punches. There weren’t many moments of levity in it.

For my own sake as much as anyone who might read it, I decided the next book should be a little lighter. The tone should be easier, even if darkness crept in – which, seeing as I was writing it, I suspected it would.

I didn’t have a title or a plot. I had vague ideas about a couple of characters, including one of their names: Rusby Once. The location for the first part of the book would be the country lanes in which I used to play as I’d grown up, and I wanted to use an old folly in the area as the basis for something, some plot development, some important part of the narrative. That’s about all I knew. Apart from one other thing: I knew I wanted the prose to set up the way the book might come across. I like long sentences, and have to fight with myself not to go on and on when I write. So, with that in mind, I decided to do something a little more punchy than usual. Shorter sentences, shorter book, I was probably thinking. And more dialogue to convey ideas. Make it more easily accessible than HEARTSTONES.

I had an opening line, and like most of the lines that I write, I had little idea where it had come from. But I went with it anyway, deciding to follow where it led to. Here’s what I had for the opening:

Weird 24.

That’s all. But it felt right. I carried on from there, trying to keep things sharp like that, while allowing room for the characters to introduce themselves. In relatively quick time they did, and when the characters come alive then some sort of plot inevitably follows. After a few months that stretched to close to a year (with a few months’ break in the middle thanks to pesky old real life interfering in the process) I had a first draft – what I like to call the story draft – of about 90,000 words and I thought it hung together pretty well and had some nice light moments in it, and yes, some dark ones too.

My girlfriend read the book, while I went back to sorting out what was going on with HEARTSTONES (after a few rejections I did yet more work on it to make it a little shinier, a little more polished, so I could submit it to a few other places). Anyway, the good news was she liked it. She made a really good suggestion, too. That I should up the age of the leads. In the first draft they were 11 and 12. She thought that, by beefing things up a little, the book would be better served with them as older teenagers, and the moments of darkness wouldn’t be traumatic to any younger audience that the book might naturally have picked up with protagonists of more tender years. I thought about this and realised she was quite right, so Gideon Sawyer became 16 years old and Rusby Once fast-forwarded through a few summers at the flick of a pen to become 17.

In the meantime, as HEARTSTONES continued to pick up rejections, and on the back of finishing the first draft of the new lighter fantasy, which at this point I was calling “the Rusby Once book”, I had a sudden window of good health and energy and, in a fit of pique at the fantasy novel getting rejected so sorely and surely, I wrote what would become my first published book, HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF. It was written at break-neck speed and first drafted in 10 days, and like the Rusby Once book, had some lighter moments in it. It was about 56,000 words long. It was accepted on first submission, on condition I made some revisions. So I did, and it went through the all the usual steps of being professionally edited and proofed and published without a hiccup. It even picked up a couple of good notices when it came out. If there’s a moral to this, or a life lesson to take in and abide by, then I don’t know what it is.

Baffled but pleased, I went back to sending out the big fantasy, and started on the rewrite of the Rusby Once book, wondering if it and HEARTSTONES would find a publisher as easily as HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF had done. All I was sure of was that I could breathe out now, that I was finally someone who’d had a book professionally published. The rest would happen as it would. Or wouldn’t. But for a working-class kid sending out his own untutored prose, I thought I had done well.

As it happened, HEARTSTONES found a publisher, and then wasn’t published. Because of me. But that’s another story. And I found a better title than “the Rusby Once book” for the Rusby Once book. I decided to call it A CLASH OF ICHOR AND BLOOD and I sent it out to the few agents who’d made nice noises about my earlier books. They made more nice noises but that was about as far as it went. I didn’t have the heart to go through the dreary task of hunting out new agents only to be turned down by them. It felt too depressing and time-consuming. (After all, if you keep repeating the same actions you’re going to get the same results, and I really didn't want the same results.) So I decided to do something different with A CLASH OF ICHOR AND BLOOD.

In future posts we’ll get on to what I’m doing, have a guess at why things have turned out as they have, the good and the bad and the ugly, and what I’m doing about it.

hour of the black wolf in paperback

So the paperback edition of my wee Western, Hour of the Black Wolf, is out and available in a large-print edition for the hard of seeing. Or, frankly, anyone else who wants a copy. It's published by FA Thorpe in their Linford Western Library imprint.


Here's what it looks like, the book:

 

And here's where you can buy a copy...

In the USA

In the UK

Your local library should, if you ask the nice librarian sweetly enough, be able to get a copy in for you  . . . And you should be using your library, you really should, for all sorts of reasons.

meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .

Things have been hectic.

Hospital stuff, poorly relatives, Christmas, hospital visits, New Year, hospital visits, poorly relatives, poorly me . . .

Somewhere in all of that I have managed to get some writing done, honestly. But none of it has been on this blog. That will, I hope, change shortly.

Next post I'll tell you about the paperback edition of Hour of the Black Wolf.

See? Ending on a cliffhanger, and in such a short post. Sometimes I amaze myself.

ten questions

 
1) What is the title of your Book?
Hour of the Black Wolf.


2) Where did the idea come from? 
I don’t think there was one specific originating point for this one. Ideas drift around idly in the deep currents of your subconscious, bump into one another, cling together and expand. If you’re lucky the better ones come to the surface. If you’re unlucky, the bad ones turn up. You know, things like – But then again, no, perhaps wiser not to go there.

The way I remember it, for a long time I’d had the idea about writing something based around one of the European landscape painters who first went to North America. Confronted with a whole new world, in effect, what must it have been like? Wild, untamed vistas everywhere. New geologies. All to capture in paint. Thing was, I didn’t have the resources to properly research it, let alone the skill set required to produce such a novel. 

But I liked the idea of an artist in the Wild West, and over time and through some arcane process of evolution I thought it would be interesting to use the artist as someone gigging as a Wanted poster illustrator. Characters tend to present themselves to me more than plot ideas. Plot can be found through exploring your character. That character of someone exploring the Wild West with pencil and brush rather than with a sidearm stuck. Not so much of the macho. You know?

Anyway, when I learned that Robert Hale were open to unsolicited submissions for Westerns, that character jumped back up onto my shoulder and said, much like Jim Kerr but with a different voice, “Don’t you forget about me” and I started writing to see what would happen.


3) What genre best defines your book? 
Western. More the entertaining end of the genre than the thoughtful, literary market. We’re not talking historically – or even geographically – accurate here. But it’s a fun read. Or is supposed to be.


4) What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie?
Hm. Well, I jokingly had the two male protagonists down as younger versions of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne when I was asked this a while ago, but when I was writing the book they were only references for myself. Ciphers really. In real life, I don’t know who’d play anything. I guess Dick Dastardly would be a good villain. You know, the whole twirly moustache thing. Were he still alive, John Denver would have done well as the Reverend.


5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 
Sheriff Gus Dudgeon attempts to keep alive a witness who could reveal the identity of the feared outlaw Black Wolf, while Gus’s friend, former Texas Ranger Will Tayling, fights the Wolf’s gang to bring a wanted poster artist into town to draw up an illustration of the outlaw.


6) Is the book self-published or represented by an agency? 
The book’s in print, published in the summer of 2012 by Robert Hale Ltd, under their Black Horse Western imprint. It wasn’t represented by an agency. I subbed it directly to the publishers.


7) How long did it take you to write the first draft?
Ten days. Had a first draft just shy of 72,000 words.

Believe me, things don’t normally happen for me as quickly as that. I just happened to have fourteen days without any commitments, and those fourteen days coincided with a stint of good health. It’s remarkable the things you can do when your biorhythms are in sync.

I started writing on the first day and instead of stopping at an acceptable word-count, or at the point where I’d usually have to give up through tiredness, I just kept going, producing four to eight thousand words a day, sometimes more than that. At times I felt sad to be breaking off to go to sleep at night. Ten days of that and I had my first draft.

What did I do with the spare days after I’d finished the first draft? Sat around drinking decaff tea and feeling smug and a bit of a buzz.

 
8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I think it most closely resembles the movies I remember watching as a kid, and aspects of the Western TV series being screened back then, than the Westerns I read. Though no particular story in particular. Certainly the made-to-measure characters and set locations come from my hazy memories of The Lone Ranger and Bonanza and even Champion the Wonder Horse. Maybe Champion the Wonder Horse accounted for the role of a couple of kids in the piece, now that I think about it. 


9) Who or what inspired you to write the book?
It was a set of circumstances. I’d written four books to this point, published a couple of handfuls of short stories in various genres ranging from science fiction to mainstream to chick lit. But the first book was wallowing in slush piles with agents. Because of the very slow response times I was getting – as the manuscript was mused over and kicked up the chain of command to head agents, seemingly enjoyed, and then mused over again as they met with the harsh economics of “is this commercial enough for us to spend time with?” – I’d written new books while the first was still stuck in the never-never world of presentations. 

It was taking six months a time to get nowhere and I’d manuscripts that no agent had yet seen, let alone presented to a publisher. When I saw that there’d be somewhere to send the Western to, and because, as I said above, there was the window in which to try to get a first draft down, I went for it. And had a fun time doing it. And whaddayaknow, I got a published book out of it, brought out by a long-established, respected publisher, and it happened without the complications of involving the middlemen and women and worrying about all of that “business” stuff. It really was that easy.


10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest? 
The theme of the book, if I may be so bold as to suggest there is a theme, is identity. I have some fun in the book playing about with that theme in ways that you wouldn’t be able to do in, say, a movie. So far the reviews for the book have managed to avoid spoilers, which I’m happy about. There’s a little trick in the book that I’m quite pleased with, and readers’ reactions to it so far have been a lot of fun. 

hour of the black wolf -- a review

There's some rather nice words about HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF up on the Western Fiction Review blog, right here. Thanks to Steve for writing that. He flatters me, so do be warned. A guy could blush.

chibi

So here, as a bit of fun, is a chibi version of the cover of the Western. It's nice when people do nice things for you. Here's Dee Skye's interpretation of the original artwork. You could go look at Dee's other stuff here.

hour of the black wolf - cover art

31 July 2012. Make a date.