Posts Tagged ‘A Nation of Shadows’

Whilst I’ve been flailing around in an attempt to master the skills required to be a better editors, I seem to have forgotten that sometimes, other people are better at presenting your ideas than you are. Such is the case with the Particle Surge Productions re-release of A Nation of Shadows, now available on amazon.com.

The reasons for buying this volume are, if you don’t mind me saying, myriad. The most important however, is that it is a much cheaper volume than the 2003 edition, weighing in at $19.99 as opposed to $27.95. This new edition also corrects the mistakes that so beleaguered the initial version as well as incorporating additional extras by myself and new pieces by the very talented Lee Smith and, of course, Mister Watts himself.

For me personally, one of the most important additions to the text are the brief notes I wrote for my website at the time of publication.

At this point, I genuinely felt A Nation of Shadows was the abortive end of my attempt at carving out a niche for myself as a semi-professional writer.

I had lost my agent to very important real life matters, we were living in a tiny flat in an area I disliked and I was working uncomfortable shifts for a company that I had little respect for. From start to finish, the book was like passing blood with the final editing period seeing myself and my wonderful wife holed up and struggling – and, sadly failing – to proof read the text ourselves in an attempt to eradicate errors. Many of the corrections did not make it into the first edition of the book and many more went unseen.

The book became the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The release of this version corrects much, if not all, of what was at fault with the original, making this, without a doubt the ‘author’s preferred text’ edition of the title.

Hopefully, second time around, this book will find more of a home than it did with iUniverse.

"Once we are close to St. Paul’s, we shall await nightfall."

On Saturday, my wife and I took a short walk around St. Paul’s in order to take a few photos for the cover of the ‘remastered’ edition of A Nation of Shadows.

Walking back along Ludgate Hill, I tried to suggest that in order to sell more copies of Sophistry, she should dress up as an old lady whilst I dressed up as a bear and we could walk up and down between Ludgate Circus and St. Paul’s Churchyard, yet she seemed oddly resistant to this idea.

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.

I want to talk to you about a spoiler for Love Amongst Strangers (Again)…but I won’t. Suffice to say, it is extremely gratifying for me to finally be writing a character who is not exactly in A Nation of Shadows but appears a lot in the back-story of those events.

This week I passed the 100 page mark on the lecteur de tarot novel. I’ve been getting very anxious about the shape and feel of the book (and how very different it is from Sophistry) for some time but I’m somewhat reconciling myself to the fact that this isn’t the kind of story that can be told in one sitting.

Prior to work on the book, I’d written 27 other lecteur de tarot stories, all of them slowly building up the storyline. The first story in the series was completed at exactly 00: 44: 46 on the 15th December, 2002 as a habit of Christmas storytelling borrowed from my brother-in-law. Since then the series has overlapped a lot with whatever else I’ve been writing, making the central card game my prop of choice for magical explanations in genre fiction. Because of the nature of this, the lecteur de tarot book has become something of a ‘big screen movie’ version of a familiar TV series thus there are a lot of cameos from characters in those 27 stories and, in slightly altered form, from a variety of other stories I’ve penned over the years.

Hopefully all of this won’t be too confusing for new readers and the story of Maus and his friends travelling from the village of s’Hertogenbosch on their adventure will be exciting and interesting for people who aren’t me and aren’t as familiar with the various characters of those 27 stories.

Thus, in order to tempt you, I’m going to post a fragment of a scene here:

Her shrill cry echoed through the trees, tears streaming down her cheeks as she sat uselessly upon the forest floor, sobbing with all her heart.

Joan Winters, like many other children of Orthen, had resolved to restore Eoz and free the Mononoke king, Martin Strauss Mousk from the enchantment of the evil Empress. She had travelled thus in the company of her sister, Charley, into the forests, battling against prowling crocotta and subterranean lindworms along the way.

Both sisters, no older than 12, wore heavy plate armour the like of which was suggested in certain cards of the basic and hero decks but only reached full fruition of form in the advanced knight and associated dragoon classes.

Unlike the soldiers of Cale Corporation, the knight was more a noble progression of the hero deck, a set of additional cards that focused exclusively on mêlée weapons and sturdy, metal armour, leaving no room for magical trends or skill.

It had not been the most traditional path for two girls from Orthen to follow but, ever since they were young, Charley, the older of the two by almost a full minute, had been insistent on becoming a knight. Joan had followed because she wanted to safeguard her sister’s dream but, in actuality, she possessed little skill in combat.

The fact that she had managed to progress beyond hero level was testament more to her perseverance than her aptitude in hand-to-hand combat. Thus, when she had found herself separated from her sister and lost amongst the forest and when, upon being confronted by a curious bear in a trailing red winter scarf and a wide-brimmed Cavalier helm and challenged to a ‘nose fight’, Joan Winters’ first reaction had been to burst into tears.

The bear, a short character with gingerbread coloured fur and heavy Borametz leaf gauntlets, had frantically tried to pacify the girl following his initial challenge. He had apologised again and again, waving his paws manically, offering half-eaten bars of chocolate and sticky sweets and had attempted to explain that he was very sorry and, due to the nature of her armour and the obvious fact that she was a knight, like himself, he had thought that she might be interested in fighting. He then continued to apologise about how wrong he had been and implored her to stop crying.

There was a sudden explosion of movement and a second girl came bursting through the trees, her face red with exhaustion and her expression one of anger and panic.

Quickly the bear turned to face the new girl, noting their similarities of features as well as the differing hair colours but before he could explain himself, his words were drowned out by a fresh bout of wails from the girl sitting before him.

“You!” Charley Winters cried, pointing a finger directly at him, her eyes fierce with anger, “Get away from my sister, you heartless útlagi!”

The bear waved his forepaws frantically and shook his head.

“My dear girl, you are quite mistaken!” he protested, “I assure you I am nothing of the sort. In fact, if you’ll allow me to just introduce myself, I shall soon…”

He stopped abruptly, staggering back as he parried a blow from the older girl’s trusty sword with his own rapier.

“How dare you attack my sister? Don’t you have a heart?” Charley swung the sword again and, again, the bear staggered backwards.

“Please, my girl, if you’ll just let me explain!” he protested.

“Explain what?” she hissed angrily, “Explain how you were going to steal her money and cards? Is that what you want to explain?”

“No, not at all, I simply…”

She lunged forward again, her fair blonde hair spilling out over her shoulders and her blue eyes full of anger. Their swords clashed once more and the bear struggled to hold her back with his own thin fencing blade.

“Please, my girl, this has all been a terrible understanding, you must understand…”

The opposing knight lifted her side again and slammed it down not once but twice, the metal screaming as its weight collided with the other’s blade.

The shorter Mononoke staggered again and then fell to his knees, blinking his dark eyes in desperation and struggling to find some way in which he could disarm the girl without hurting her for long enough to explain the situation.

As for those other 27 stories, I’m still hoping to compile them, together with some other material, as a short story collection but we’ll see how that goes. In relation to the events of the lecteur de tarot novel, I’m already convinced that I’m going to return to the time-frame of the book and write a side-story featuring different characters.

As I say, it’s not the kind of thing that can be told in one sitting, but rather a story that develops by continually overlaying new elements and new fiction.

Hopefully all of this will seem inspiring rather than daunting. It’s on days like these that I truly doubt my ability to communicate effectively.

One of my guilty pleasures in writing is alternative history and the art of reconstructing – some might argue correcting – time by depicted differing portrayals of the equally loved and hated ‘Second’ British Empire of 1783 to its final decline in 1997. Like any expansive regime, there were astounding advances and hideous atrocities. Only through examining the shadows of these events in our own everyday life can we truly understand where we come from and this is where fiction is such a wonderful and insightful tool.

I defy anyone who has ever picked up a pen and scratched a few words of narrative on paper not to take joy in inverting the familiar and exploring the dynamics of the country they grew up in.

During the reign of the Empress, there had been a brief but distinct drive to eliminate regional accents. From within the walls of the Imperial Capital to Mauretania and even as far as the world of the Nimravidae, all dialect terms and accents were considered improper, especially for those in governmental or influential positions.

Far from being tyrannical about the issue and beheading people left, right and centre – a style of government comparative with the satirical Queen of Hearts in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Abroad, a charge that had been levelled many a time by dissenters – the Empress had allowed the government to commission a campaign intended in engaging the hearts and minds of the people.

The government subsidised Imperial Broadcasting Corporation had been swift to build up a multimedia campaign of stereovision adverts, billboards and periodic announcements featuring popular boy-band UKXD expounding the delights of ‘Empress’ English’.

She still remembered the annoying tune and the irritating holograms projected out from the boards of Leicester Square in Imperial Capital.