Posts Tagged ‘Sophistry’

Last Friday, I had a chance to visit the wonderful Plurabelle Books in Cambridge. I say that I had a chance, actually it was more a case that I simply turned up having decided on taking them over their mail as an excuse to talk to them.

It’s impossible for me to do justice to the beauty of this quirky little book shop located off Hills Road. I think that everyone who has a love of books has this idea of their ‘perfect study’, the one place where they would be able to write and read and generally nuture the creative process. Walking into Plurabelle was, for me, like seeing that idea made real.

The entire shop is piled high with books, some on shelves, other on old arm chairs and others still on coffee tables. Stacked high upon the floor where issues of Punch magazine, antiquated Victorian maps and old His Master Voice 78″ records whilst on the tables and amidst the shelves where volumes of 20th century fiction in Hebrew and Greek, leatherbound Arabic volumes and 19th century collections of Goethe. It’s a place that you can fall in love with.

On a whim, I sent over a copy of Sophisty and a little message to the owners in the hope that, in someway I will be able to contribute to the atmosphere of this wonderful little shop.

"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.

Love Amongst Strangers (Again) features a conversation between Ophelia from Hamlet and Oscar Diggs from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

That is all.

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.

Sophistry is out now on amazon for those of you interested in picking up this variant of the book.

There’s no actual changes to the content but I believe the amazon versions are printed via a different method and possibly from a higher grade/different paper stock.

Links below are as follows:

Great Britain and the Commonwealth
United States of America

Both amazon.co.uk and amazon.com are also listing copies of Do Not Choose to Ask My Name and A Nation of Shadows.

Love Amongst Strangers however is out of stock and out of print on both sites…but it is available for ￥2,438 on amazon.co.jp. This news and the book’s presence in Singapore come as something a surprise for the book’s negligent author, however it’s nice to think that a small book by a teenage boy about Birmingham and faerie stories could have travelled so far.

SOPHISTRY
by Jacob Milnestein
Printed: 211 pages, 10.79 cm x 17.46 cm
ISBN: 978-1-4092-5051-7
Paperback book £7.96
http://www.lulu.com/content/5151008

“I thought you might have forgotten about me.”
“I lost sight of what was important. One by one my family slipped away…”
“You’re not the dreamer,” he said firmly, “London is.”

From Camden, an old lady sets out in the company of a soft toy to pass through the seven gates of London in order to kill a distant and heartless king.

* * *
I often find I don’t have much to say when it comes to things like this so I’m not going to say too much. In short the fourth book is out, for better or worse, just in time for Christmas. What better way to say ‘Merry Christmas’ to relatives than by giving them the tale of one old woman in search of a corrupt monarch? After all, isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

Maybe not.

The writing of this was relatively easy and took about five or six months to complete, making it the second quickest book I’ve worked on thus far – at least in the first draft. For the most part, despite not really knowing what the middle of the story was about when I started, things were very easy. The characters did what they did and revealed of themselves what they wanted to reveal, even when I frustratingly tried to coax more out of them they still carried on with their own agenda, meaning that perhaps in hindsight certain voices may be weaker than others. Results may very.

As a writing experience, it was somewhat like suffering form an illness. Midway through the book I became very sensitive about the world I was writing from to the point that I began to experience strange dreams in which I was convinced that the Demiurge was attempting to manipulate my perception of reality. I don’t know what to say about that.

I know that I started the book with one opinion and ended it with another but I’m not sure what this information can help to convey to you about the story. It’s probably full of all the sort of things you didn’t sign up to read about when misfortune first caused our paths to cross – there is no girlslash, there are no superpowers – and whilst I can’t tell you that you will enjoy it, I’m posting this here in the hope that you might.

So please, if you have the time, read this. If not, then thank you for reading this.

Thanks go once again to Team Sophistry for their input and for everyone who helped get this off the ground, especially my wife for her patience and Mister Erlend Larsen for his input, editorial skills and last minute cover construction.

Other than that we shall consider the matter closed and these voices now, at very long last, finally silent.

Thanks once again.