Oh Happy Day!

Greetings on this day of God's own County, according to the golden telephone story, its a local call, and in the spirit of generosity for which the men of this fair county are legendary. The coupon codes for the Grange series will continue to be available until August Bank Holiday Monday, at the end of the month.

 

There is time to spend the price of a decent cup of (Yorkshire) tea - OK, it's product placement and the only benefit I get is the pleasure of drinking the product of the family namesake from the posh bit of Yorkshire - 'Arrogate. 

Do it now and you can have it on your leccy book thing ready for the beach. 

Iceline is, as always, a freebie. Summat for nowt 

Enjoy

Martyn

Shameless little plugger!

June is fizzling out, the brief spell of unseasonable weather here in England is ending. The brilliant blue skies, tropical heat are once more sliding into familiar greys and rain speckled pavements, but despite the gloomy weather we still have July to look forward to and the Ninth annual Summer/Winter event at smashwords. Discounted ebooks for the avid reader, From the 1st of July, right through to the end of the month literary treasures will be available on the promotions page.

The entire Grange series will be available. Come back to the series page for the Grange on the first of July and check out the offers. Iceline is entered automatically as a permafree ebook, the rest of the series will be joining the list at a discount.

Interview with an author

Smashwords author interview, an idea from the people at Smashwords to bring the author and the reader together.

The first question came before I started the interview; how to answer?  Do I think about it for hours and come up with something deep and meaningful, or as a live interview, taking each question in turn and answering off the cuff. I stayed with the pre-set questions and answered off the cuff and published. There is an option to write your own questions, to unpublish, edit the answers and republish; effectively giving the chance of re-interviewing the author on  a regular basis. 

A couple of the questions made me think, asking me to reach back into the recesses of my memory for the first story I wrote and the first book that had a major impact; I tweaked the answers, I honestly don't remember the first story I wrote,and so many stories have made an impact it is difficult to choose the one which made the greatest.

Put something in front of me and I will read it, even the cereal packet at breakfast has been seconded as reading material. As a youngster I read very little fiction, apart from the weekly comics and Commando war stories (Kurt Langhers' name comes from a character in the Commando War Stories), Instead I devoured reference books and factual accounts. This may be why I prefer to write stories based in reality rather than science fiction, fantasy, or any other genre.

I was challenged to read a Mills and Boon romance after making disparaging comments and forced to admit I hadn't actually read one (Cautionary note; research first then open mouth). I was pleasantly surprised, a well crafted story in an enjoyable style. Judging by the number of romance novels sold and distributed through ebook channels the readers are not a community any writer would wish to hack off.

I digress, flying off at a tangent again. The upshot of the questions was a look at where The Grange came from, along with the inhabitants and visitors. The original idea was focused on an officially sanctioned security team based in the country house scenario, the shift to a freelance operation came slowly and by degrees.

The idea was kicked around and played with for the best part of twenty years before Iceline was written and back then Steel wasn't Steel and Josie was someone else too. Bill Jardine appeared with the house, and I really must find out how he came to be there. It feels like that sometimes, that the writing process is based on an interview with the characters, and every so often a new one appears, like a guest arriving for the week-end.

The Thirty Nine Steps, Casino Royale. Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare, The Eagle Has Landed are all part of a long list of books which have influenced me, and the authors; Ian Fleming, John Buchan, Alistair Maclean, and Jack Higgins. There are others, remembered for fragments rather than the whole story.

John Buchan's The Thirty Nine Steps is always a favourite, a simple plot of one man against the conspiracy with only his wits and stamina, unsure of who he can trust. I like the idea that he's a relatively ordinary man, given the period he may have had some military experience. Richard Hannay, a mining engineer had recently arrived from South Africa and grown tired of London, he is on the point of going back when his adventures begin. 

Jack Higgins is different, "The Eagle Has Landed" was his breakout. He was advised to allow his characters to tell the story, not force them to fit the plot.  "The Eagle Has Landed" was a massive success.

That idea: of letting the characters tell the story struck a chord with me. The first Grange Novel was the culmination of a long journey and arrived at a distinct way point (Twenty Five years service in post), and through a lot of forced planning and preparation, false starts and frustration. The more detailed the planning and preparation the greater the frustration. I was itching to get on with telling the story!

In NaNOWriMo terms I write by the seat of my pants, start at the beginning, usually with an end in sight and let the characters show me the way. Bare notes and jottings are the sum of my preparation, years of fighting the frustration ended in the local bookstore chatting about an interview with Philip Pullman. Who apparently admitted that he rarely planned his novels, and the one occasion he did the planning found he couldn't write the story because he had already done so. 

Pieces fell into place with a battered laptop and printer and the determination, or desperation that it was now or never happen kick started a four month dash through a hundred thousand words and the first draft was finished by the second week in December 2002.

I struggled for years, frustrated by the detailed planning everyone said was involved and  fighting the urge to throw it all away and sit down and write. I finally sat down, told the story and bounded through Iceline, and then I discovered NanoWriMo.

I'll talk about that another day...

Why do I do it?

One day I'm going to... Then November comes around and the challenge hits you between the eyes. OK, so one day... today is that day. The First of November starts National Novel Writing Month; a day of hope and trepidation for anyone who has ever thought of writing a novel. A whole month of creatively splurging words across whatever typeface you are working at; paper, screen, Ipad, Android and  all wrapped in a tidy package. Thirty days to reach the target.

Why? What is it that encourages myself and thousands of others to sign up and squirrel another workload into already busy schedules at the time of year when the decorations are starting to appear for Christmas; as carols and Christmas songs begin to drift through the speakers in the shopping malls and supermarkets like an aerosol drug designed to loosen the bonds on wallets and purses.

It's the challenge, the taunt of come on then, come and have a go if you think...you have it in you. The pressure  of the words and the daily tally, 50,000 in 30 days is the sort of pressure that crushes doubt in a mad frenzy of scribbling, typing or both. Can you hold the mental,  creative and imaginative threads together long enough. Can you mix the stamina and bloody minded determination to see it through, cross the 50,000 word line within the 30 days and watch the validation screen flag up a winner; or still be in there when the clock ticks 11.59.59 on the 30th and see the figures change to 00.00 Dec 1, battling onwards.

Does anyone really lose with NaNoWriMo, or is it the real win-win scenario.  The challenge pits you against your strongest and meanest opponent, who knows all your temptations, weakness, and strengths and exactly how to undermine you; and you have your greatest ally with the same information, and the twist? They are the same; you!

That's the winner; you arrive at the end of the month having learnt something about yourself, and you have tasted what it must be like to write professionally, a daily workload, a climbing word count drawing towards a fateful The End where the story pauses, most of the loose ends tied up, but with an opening perhaps to lead the story arc into a sequel and beyond.

I was asked what NaNoWriMo means to me, and I chewed over the answer for a couple of weeks. It was a release, a confirmation of a way of doing things. There are two main personalities in National Novel Writing Month, plotters and pantsters, the question is where are you when the clock strikes midnight and the writing begins. Are you surrounded by plots and plans or unfettered by detailed preparation and plunge in, writing by the seat of your pants, winging it through the days towards the December deadline.

I go for writing by the seat of my pants,  I tried the planning and plotting but it felt like I was puling in two directions; bashing myself over the head with plot it, plan it and then write it only to find that when the characters found their own voice I was completely stuffed, they had read the notes and were determined to do anything except what the plot-line demanded. 

I wanted to go straight in and tell the story, see it unfold before my own eyes so the words dancing across the page were new and fresh to me. 

NaNoWriMo's uncluttered approach felt right, here was a bunch of people fired by enthusiasm and, apparently, caffeine with the nerve to go for it. Careering along a storyline waiting to see what the characters would do next is invigorating and scary! 

Make your characters believable and believe what they are telling you, it's their story, they live in the world of your imagination, but you are not in control of them,. Respect and they will respect you, and hopefully give you a story worth telling learn to trust what they are saying. Storytelling is a natural part of being human, so why make it unnecessarily difficult. If the Novel is intimidating, look at yourself as a  storyteller and be part of that great and ancient tradition, there have been storytellers, sat around  wood fires in ancient camps and propping up the woodwork in hostels and public houses for centuries, millennia, or multiples of both.,.

Writing is part of day to day life, too long without scribbling and I start to feel edgy and uncomfortable, and I go back to the typeface. The deadline of NaNoWriMo gives me a much needed boost, naturally it kicks the word count into orbit, but the confidence that I can meet the pressure and have the commitment to see it through without sweating about the details; just getting the story down in any shape ready be knocked about and rebuilt where necessary is welcome.

Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo and author of "No Plot, No Problem" cites the deadline as the writer's most powerful tool, the Damocles' sword hanging over the keyboard. It works for me, focusing the mind and boosting concentration, and NaNoWriMo? 

Ancient cave paintings were the visual aids to storytelling and the themes are eternal, and for me National Novel Writing Month is a reminder that however solitary writing can be,, I am not alone, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people with something to say through the medium of the story. Whether plotting the minutest detail, winging it with half a wing missing and an engine shot away, literally on a wing and a prayer. Whatever your first line, Once Upon A time, in the beginning, it was a dark and stormy night, the scream shattered the night and his blood ran like ice through his veins. Be the storyteller and leave the day to day, step into the eternal and explore; travel in time and space, past, present and future - not necessarily in that order - or look at your own backyard through another pair of eyes.

NaNoWriMo is over for this year, but I'll be there next October waiting for the clock to strike the hour and shift the calendar from October the 31st to the 1st of November. I won't be alone, and if you chose to make the journey for yourself for the first time or for a return visit; travel well my friend. 

Imagination to the power of...

Do you think NaNoWriMo is craziness squared, 50,000 words in 30 days, OK, shift the perspective and walk another path. Imagine this; you are the guide at a historic building somewhere. A place where history and the personal stories of people ooze from the walls.
The mission, should you accept it, is to tell those stories and unfold that history in a lively entertaining way, to draw the visitors in and hold their imagination with your words. There is no rehearsal, you go live with one chance, this will be your first and only draft. It is a different group of people every time you open the door.
Your talk will last at least an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, at between ninety and a hundred and ten words a minute.
No notes, just the prompts from the things around you. You are passionate about it and once you start the words flow freely. Work an average, 100 words a minute for 75 minutes, 7500 words. That's a little less than one seventh of NaNoWriMo in an hour and fifteen minutes.
The challenge is fifty thousand words in thirty days.
Now tell me that my first draft should be anything less than my best.
Write your first draft as though it was your last.

Who's the hero?

The scene is familiar, shelf after shelf of books, brand spanking new books, never opened and straight out of the box. Slowly working your way through the rank and file of literature laid out for your inspection and every one you pick up, you put it back; why?

The Blurb, I can't help it, as soon as I read the words ex-whatever, and it is usually one of the elite special forces familiar to us all I lose interest. Don't get me wrong, I have enormous respect for the standards and achievements of special forces, especially those serving with HM forces at home and overseas. I know they are special, very special.

When the manuscript of Iceline was handed back after the first reader had finished with it he said it read like a combination of Jack Higgins and John Buchan. I took that as a compliment, they are writers I have admired and enjoyed for many years. Buchan's "The Thirty Nine Steps" was on the edge of my mind while I was writing Iceline. I'm not sure how many times I have read it, it isn't a long book, but the action never stops from the moment Richard Hannay hears the tale of his unknown visitor.

Hannay is the key, both to the Thirty Nine Steps and to the way the Grange works, he is you and me! A mining engineer, bored out of his skull with the social whirl and on the brink of chucking the whole lot and heading off in search of another adventure, then adventure kicks open the door and crashes in - come and have a go!

He isn't a trained agent, anything but, but he's quick, intelligent, he has life experience and can handle himself. Richard Hannay is a sort of Everyman hero, you or I could reasonably slip into his shoes and take the journey he does.

That's where the idea of The Grange starts, any one of the team could be you or me, we all have our talents and given the chance to rise to the occasion would probably give it a go and discover something about ourselves we didn't know...

Steel, Langhers, Josie, even Hannah with her finger on the Morse key, none of them have a military background, but they all have that something Jardine spotted and brought out. He created the Grange to develop teamwork and individual thinking. Initiative or whatever you want to call it - he wouldn't call it blue-sky thinking;to him that's a vast blue emptiness with nothing going on. Bill Jardine would consider membership of the Cloud Appreciation Society, clouds are a sign of activity on a grand scale. Just what he's looking for, along with the necessity of paying his way.

A group of ordinary people working in an unusual situation, all it needs to bring out that something extra, and the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Teamwork, flexibility and initiative, looking for that edge to keep the show on the road. Check out the team at the Grange in the first three Grange Novels, Iceline, Control:Escape and What You Ask For ( WYAF is still in the raw draft stage, free to download.)

Registration Call

Names, our own personal keywords, the labels that pick us out from the crowd and are almost never chosen by ourselves, even the characters in books are chosen by me, and getting it right can be difficult. Tagging a first name on to a surname sounds easy but when you say it for the first time it can feel strange, artificial even. It doesn't ring true. (If you're really stuck, wander around an old graveyard or church and read the monuments).

I haven't done that yet, but I do find myself reading names on memorials and monuments. My characters draw their names from a variety of sources, even down to snippets of conversation. Take the feisty auburn haired female in the Grange stories, Josie Burke, her first name is diminutive, shortened from Josephine (she would call that her best name, a Sunday name, only used formally) Josie is the name she lives and works with and Burke, that came from a number of suggestions. Burke and Hare were the infamous body-snatchers supplying the Edinburgh medical schools with cadavers, James Burke was a presenter of science and technology programmes in the Seventies (Do you remember Connections?) and someone is a Berk when they do something daft. Josie refers to Burke and Hare in Control Escape, and she expresses something about how names influence our character and development. Names can become nicknames, and a source of humour for other people, and discomfort for the carrier.

Steel carries that baggage, Don Steel, what on earth was I thinking about, a character who reportedly grew up in Sheffield called Don Steel. Sheffield steel has been known about since the days of Geoffrey Chaucer. In the Canterbury Tales he mentions a simple working blade called the thwitel, made in Sheffield, and the earliest literary reference in fiction to knife making in the area.

The River that Sheffield straddles is the Don, can you see where this is going, his name caused trouble for him, and if you call him by his full name, Donald, it doesn't seem to be getting any better does it, but that was part of the selection process, the thinking behind his insistence that people use his surname, an expression of character. The inner circle who know his full name are people he can trust, and because of the trust he can accept the banter, but the banter is absent because of the trust. The logic is circular, but it works.

His first name is used, usually by Josie and only in specific circumstances, whereas Kurt Langhers uses and is referred to by both names on an almos casual basis. Kurt's name originated with the Commando comics I read as a young boy, given to a German officer in one of the stories, I liked the name and remembered it, and the character grew out of that. A German name, but with a Yorkshire accent? Unlikely, but not impossible perhaps a German grandfather, POW, who stayed behind after the war because the part of Germany he grew up in was on the other side of the wire. Did it happen, could it happen, turn the parts around, a National Serviceman from England posted to Germany after the war returns with a German bride, and they ran a local shop for years just down the road from where I grew up.

Fiction, isn't part of that taking what is real and making something novel out of it, recreating it with the imagination as another reality? Then we come to Bill Jardine; Jardine is a Scottish town, in one part of Sheffield it's one of a cluster of street names with a Scottish connection. Bill, is a name with many connotations, Dicken's Bill Sykes the thuggish criminal, Bruce Bairnsfather's World War One cartoon character Old Bill,  a world weary soldier with his distinctive walrus moustache (the cadet pub "Bill and Alphie's" at the Royal Military College of Canada is named after him) and the Metropolitan Police are  "The Bill"  Richmal Cromptom created Just William, mischief incarnate, but William grows up and somewhere along the line becomes Bill, and that was the transition I saw as Bill Jardine developed, a poacher turned gamekeeper, his wilder younger days a precursor to the activities and operations he would oversee at The Grange, and the place itself, a grange, historically a farm, a working place with an air of its own identity planted by time in the ground on which it stands. Not pretending to be something it isn't. Grand enough, but not too much. It's about playing with words, turning them around and seeing what happens and I'll leave the last word to Wally Barnes. Here again Wally can mean someone a bit daft or stupid, but he used his own name and the way the school register was called, especially when answering the phone. He wrong-footed people, and catches Steel in What You Ask For (currently a work in progress at smashwords.com), with "Barnes, Wally speaking."

Formally he is Wallace Barnes, a bit of a mouthful, the school register called him out as Barnes, Wallace. Now there's a name to play with, and if you think fiction is strange, imagine trying to sell the idea that a 500lb bomb will bounce along the water like a skimming stone. We can look back and see how it works, Wallace couldn't,  I could not resist that homage in one of the technical crew of the Grange.

Some names work well, others are more difficult to find a character for, and the most challenging one, Azubah, I found it on a gravestone, it means Desolation, Biblically, she was the wife of Caleb.
But then, hmm, maybe there is something...I am going to think about that one!