Do Not Choose to Ask My Name

It occurred to me earlier that part of the reason for keeping a blog such as this is to spare my wife from being woken up in the middle of the night by me wishing to discuss the finer points of my own obscure personal continuity. Being the first person to read through my initial rough drafts after I complete them, I think I sometimes expect her to memorise too many of the ‘facts’ and plot points that I have rolling around in my head.

Now that I’m forcing you, dear reader, to listen to this, you will be pleased to hear that my wife sleeps better at night – certainly better than she did over ten years ago when I woke her up in order to drink cheap champagne from Tupperware cups to celebrate the conclusion of Do Not Choose to Ask My Name (and to try and convince her to begin editing).

So thankfully, she no longer has to suffer the burden of insights that come with my worries that the path of lecteur de tarot’s central character, a 10 year old boy named Maus, is comparative with the way the old woman’s journey in Sophistry unfolds. I think this is mostly because I’m the author of both works but there is a comparison to be drawn between the events of lecteur de tarot’s seventh chapter and Sophisty’s chapter five, although I guess I’m okay with this as chapter five was one of my favourites from the latter book.

One thing that’s been interesting with the current book is that, especially during the last two chapters, each part has become like its own little short story. Again, this happened in Sophistry – see chapter fourteen for an example – but not to this degree. I’m not arguing with the book about the way it’s evolving because though. Whilst Sophistry has ties to A Nation of Shadows, I made a determined effort not to re-read my previous book before or during writing it so as to avoid become wrapped up in concerns of continuity at the expense of the story I wanted to write about the old woman, the Bear and the distant king. lecteur de tarot however spans a period of time touched on in those 27+ stories of the fabled forthcoming compilation and deliberately interweaves with events in them – hopefully not to the detriment of the actual book though.

More so than my previous books, lecteur de tarot is connected with a wider world of stories, one that I want to share with you when the time is right. Hopefully you won’t be disappointed.

In other news, the original pressing of Love Amongst Strangers has turned up again on amazon.com, although the price is so extortionate that any prospective readers might be better off buying the copy listed on amazon’s Japanese site and enduring the shipping costs. Alternately, readers may wish to hold onto their money and consider the possibility that a hypothetical e-book edition could be somewhere in a hypothetical pipeline and may or may not be made available for free to those who purchase a copy of the forthcoming sequel.

Just saying.

I’ve mentioned briefly (i.e. scratched the surface) that music is a significant influence on mood when writing. Another important part of the process is to make sure that I don’t read anything detrimental to the way I write.

I will fully admit to being omnivorous in my tastes and I have more than a fondness for disposable pop culture but, whilst in the process of writing a book, I find it imperative to only read books that are either so far in theme and style from the content of what I am writing as to make them impossible to reconcile or to read non-fiction. I call this my ‘reading diet’.

When not writing a book, then the diet’s over and I’m allowed to ’snack’ on franchise media ties, pulp titles and teenage fiction. This isn’t to say that any of these genres don’t possess their own charms and qualities and shouldn’t be considered as important books in their own right but, like I said, I’m omnivorous and I will devour and incorporate anything and everything into what I’m doing even if it’s detrimental to the story I’m trying to tell. This happened for a while when I was reading a lot of Doctor Who tie-in fiction.

I’m a big fan of the old Doctor Who and I really enjoyed some of the ways in which Virgin Publishing pushed the envelope with the style and context of the series’ central precepts but the company did have the unfortunate habit of also hiring some really bad writers to write some really bad books. I’m not going to name names but, after a while, I found myself so mired in the drudgery of what I was reading that it utterly sapped my energy to write. This happened smack bang in the middle of working on Do Not Choose to Ask My Name, and again (I think) during A Nation of Shadows. It didn’t result in a happy atmosphere as I am, of course, not the kind of person that leave a book unfinished once he’s started reading. It becomes like a challenge, a test of sheer bloodymindedness. Thus, everyone suffered.

By the time I had committed myself to writing Sophistry (I think I made the final decision to write the book sometime around November 2007, having ‘met’ the characters on a bus journey to work a year or so previously) I resolved to change my habits and hence my reading diet came into effect. The only two books I touched during the five or six months I wrote Sophistry were Peter Ackroyd’s epic London: The Biography (which actually influenced my writing in a much more positive way) and Nabokov’s Lolita, which I had, until then, had a terrible record of beginning to read and then falling asleep – this is, of course, no judgement on the quality of Nabokov’s writing.

This time around I’ve been reading Emma by Jane Austen and Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. So far, Murakami is working out better for me than Austen but I also feel that this is because I’m kind of learning some life lessons from him.

I would also be lying if, despite my best efforts, his memories about his early writing career weren’t party in my attempts to make this blog a solid collection of ideas about how I write.

He’s also almost convinced me to take up running…but that’s a conversation for a different time, I think.