Inca Roads, and a Bicycle

  Well, I made my long-planned expedition onto Exmoor last weekend, intending to cycle across the whole National Park. I managed 45 miles, hit a pothole and broke my back wheel, and had to abandon. All day I'd seemed to be riding a yard out from the road edge because the tarmac there was crumbling away. So of course this got me thinking - once the cursing had stopped - about how ancient cultures maintained their roads.

  See the way my mind works?

  So when I got home, I researched it. Turns out a lot of ancient peoples didn't really have many proper roads. Even Greece didn't: mostly they were content with dirt tracks that baked solid in summer and turned to mud every winter. The Egyptians were a bit like that too, except they built great causeways high above the plain, so they stayed dry when the Nile flooded. I'm sure they needed a lot of work to keep them intact, but they managed. The Romans built legendary roads, of course, engineering marvels, and so did the Inca. In South America the main north-south road was the Qhapac Nan, and ran nearly 4,000 miles along the Andes Mountains.

  4,000 miles, across one of the highest mountain ranges in the world, spanning deep ravines and boring through rock at times. And the Inca worked almost entirely with stone tools! But they could build and maintain a road like that, and many others besides, while in Britain we can't properly repair a road over a moor less than two thousand feet high.

  All this indicates two things. Firstly, I'm still rather vexed that my long weekend was ruined by a hole in the road. Secondly, doing the sort of writing I do requires a hell of a lot of research. This interest in roads likely won't matter much: I don't want to bore readers with endless minor details like that. But it might supply a line of prose, once or twice, and add a little to the feel and sense of the book. If I do that with ten different things I'll have quite a different story.

  Reviewers of my work constantly ask about the research I do. I take it as a compliment, because it means they've realised the background work that goes into each project. But I usually don't have to bust a wheel and skid halfway across the road in order to get there.

The Flabby Perils of Star Trek

  So I watched Star Trek: Into Darkness last night. I've always liked Star Trek, despite its sometimes cheesiness. Like a lot of sci-fi/fan, when it gets it right it really does get it right. The first J J Abrams/Chris Pine/ Zachary Quinto film was very good, not only decent cinema but a good plot too, and well told.

  Sadly the sequel isn't. It's still a decent film, but the 3D gimmicks are annoying me now, they're pointless and sometimes distort a film just so the director can fit in that really great shot with bits flying towards the audience... but mostly the story is just poor. The idea is good, but it isn't well told. There are too many knowing nods to the earlier Star Trek, that of Shatner and Nimoy et al, and the last hour (or nearly) of the film is just one flash-bang-scream piled on the last, which just made my eyes ache.

  A peril of being an author: you notice when a story is flabby, or when it wanders, or when something has been stuck in just because it goes wheeee but it doesn't help the story at all. There's an old saying; kill your darlings, which means that any writer has to be able to review his own work and cut out this, trim that, skip that whole scene... However good it is, or however keen on it you are, you have to cut. (Spoiler alert) An online reviewer called Caroline Sheehan said of The Risen King that there were scenes she'd have liked to see, rather than just hear about, for example the fall of Gailhom and the deaths of the king and Stefan, but I just couldn't fit it in. The novel is nearly 140,000 words long anyway, I had to cut like a madman just to keep it down to that.

  It's a shame J J Abrams doesn't seem to have done that with Into Darkness. It's the same malaise that ruined the latter three Star Wars films, when nobody was close enough to George Lucas to say No, stop, that bit of dialogue clunks like a wooden leg and by the way, Jar-Jar Binks is a REALLY bad idea. I'm not sure anyone can be trusted to do this editing all alone. Everyone needs a reader who can tell them where the clunks are, when the story waffles and grows fat without going anywhere, and so on. I can see it with Into Darkness, but I know from experience that it often takes someone else's eyes to see it in my own writing.

  And on that note I'll quit, before this blog post also becomes flabby.

Free Books, Contests and Getting Wet

  Well, first things first - Blood and Gold e-book will be free at Amazon Kindle on Monday 13th/Tuesday 14th of May. Feel free to pick it up, and please tell people about it, the more freebies the better.

  So, on to other things. I'm going to enter Black Lord of Eagles for the Yeovil Prize - that's a writing competition here in the South-West of England. I decided to do so after attending an event at the Barnstaple library on World Book Day, including an address by the author Sophie Duffy, so thanks to her and to the staff as well. Black Lord... has also just gone off to an agent for the first time; fingers crossed that someone will pick up on it.

  I can't get Starfire written though. I hit walls all the time: solve one problem and another pops up. I think there must be something wrong with the structure of the story, or the basic execution, but I can't put my finger on what it is. So that will have to be shelved until I can work it out (probably about 2019, the speed my brain chugs along at). On the brighter side, I've finished volume one of Chained Dragon, a book called The Bone-Smile, and I'm just starting on volume two. And I still have the ideas for The Pyramids of Saqoma, and The Cross-Tree, and also The Rainbow Bridge. Plus I've done some outlines for a series called The Playground of Fawns, which is very ambitious and just a bit scary, to be honest. I'm not ready to tackle that yet, but there's plenty to be going on with.

  Quite a lot of titles beginning with The, now I look at that. Maybe one or two will change as I go. Ho hum.

  Now spring has finally arrived, I'm looking forward to hiking up onto Exmoor at some point, to spend a few days with zero connection to the outside world at all. It's astonishingly liberating to do - blimey, I sound like a self-help manual - and if I take a few pens and some paper, I might get some good thoughts down. Of course I might also get very wet, and end up eating half-cold beans out of the tin because the fire won't light properly, but that will just make it easier for me to imagine the characters in my books.

  I'll keep telling myself that, anyway. And who knows, I might even get a handle on how to fix the problems with Starfire.

One at a Time

  I've been wondering. In this e-book age, why are we still writing novels the same way?

  We could publish one chapter at a time if we wanted to, and price each at ten pence. Or ten thousand words at a time, and twenty pence. When the story adds up to 80,000 words we could package it all together, stick a cover on and call it volume one, and publish it as a print copy.

  I got to thinking about this with a future book of mine, The Blessed Land, which is about 190,000 words long. I rewrote it into two volumes, but I thought; why not three? Or four, and give the first one away free as an e-book, to draw readers in? Why not do that as my standard approach, with Blessed Land and everything else too?

  People may already have done this, for all I know. But if so I haven't heard of it, and I'm not honestly sure if it would work anyway. Maybe oui, maybe non. It's just that we ought at least to be experimenting, trying new things, now publishing is so different to how it's ever been before. Though having said that, what I'm suggesting isn't so different from 19th century publishing, when Dickens and Collins et al published their novels as serials in newspapers. There really isn't much that's new under the sun, eh?

  Anyhow, that's what I'm pondering at the moment. Blessed Land would fit a four-part series well, with the first free, and in future I might write with that in mind. Divide the novel differently. Or perhaps there are other, better ideas, things I haven't thought of. If any occur be sure to let me know, won't you?

The Plunge

  Well, today's big news is that I finally decided to establish a website. I've been dithering over it, mostly because social media work for the books now seems to take up as much time as writing does, which seems a bit counter-productive really. But one thing and another have added up and so I took the plunge, using a company called Wix - silly name, but a pretty good system. I set it up in less than 2 hours, which means it must be so easy that a one-eyed budgie could manage it.

  The website's at http://benblak5.wix.com/benblakeauthor by the way. I'm sure I've made mistakes, so if you spot any please use the Contact page to get in touch and point them out. And let me know what you think generally, I have no idea how these things are supposed to look.

  Anyway, I'm also preparing to publish The Gate of Angels, volume two of Songs of Sorrow. It won't be until July, but I want to get ahead of the curve this time, and put out one or two previews and tasters before then. Very likely I'll try to set up some author events too, at the local library or maybe a bookstore, just to let people know about me. I expect the turnout will be tiny, but that's OK, it's not like I'm in the Rolling Stones or anything.

  Meanwhile I'm writing Starfire. I'm about 60,000 words in at the moment, so well into volume one. It's a much more mainstream Fantasy than my other work, with magic (or starfire) front and centre of the story, so it presents different challenges and will probably feel very different to the reader. That's OK too, because I don't want to write the same story over and over, as some authors do. Besides, it's fun to write, and that's what it's all about, isn't it?

Just One Review

  Well, it's only a week since my last blog, which is short for me. But a lot's happened, so here I am again.

  First up, my second novel Blood and Gold is now out on Amazon Kindle and as a print book, via CreateSpace, It's another Fantasy, if somewhat different to The Risen King. Secondly, Risen King itself is now on Smashwords, so it either is or soon will be available on mobile phones and suchlike which use different platforms: Android, Apple and so on.

  (It's actually amazing that although I've published before, putting out Blood and Gold still gave me a secret sort of thrill. I sort of suspect I'll still get that in 30 years)

  Anyway, the other big thing that happened is I picked up my first official review, from someone on the Amazon list of indie reviewers. This woman's name is Jennifer Hyndman, and after reading Risen King she was kind enough to say this;


   I have found a new passion and it is discovering indie author treasures. This is one of those. Immediately I was taken with the beauty of this authors writing... which draws the suspense in such as way as the intrigue kept me reading for two solid hours. What a great ability to define such nature and character within a story with mere words.
   I was very much surprised to find a new and original story line to immerse myself in. It is a personal adventure, and as I read on the author leads you into his world by attaching your mind to the characters. You live their world and their thoughts. You bond with them which seems and develop an emotional attachment... when you find an indie author with fluid prose and the ability to capture you into the tale, you should pass it on. (5 stars)


  I can't believe I was given such a review as that, especially as it was my first. Right away thanks are due to Jennifer Hyndman, who like most online reviewers is snowed under, and who took the time to read my book and offer her opinion. I know reviewers do it for the joy of reading as much as anything, but it must still be a brain-numbing task sometimes, so I'm grateful to anyone who makes the effort, whatever they say in review.

  But when someone says that... wow. It's a single review, that's all, but to we insecure, doubt-gnawed writers something like this is precious indeed. I've said it once, but again won't hurt: thank you, to Ms Hyndman and to all the reviewers, because you do an important job and if we're not grateful to you, we should be.

Bags of Bones

   Last time, I said I'd explain more fully why I use historical societies and cultures as a backdrop to my Fantasy novels.Now's a good time, because the TV series of Stephen King's Bag of Bones is about to air in the UK, and if you've read the book you'll know the quote from Thomas Hardy; "Compared to the dullest human being walking on the earth, the most brilliantly drawn character in any novel is nothing but a bag of bones." In other words, even the finest author can't hope to capture the complexity of even a simple, ordinary person.

   How much more true is that for a whole world?

   Take Lord of the Rings. Not counting the three books of the series, or The Hobbit, there are still at least another 16 novels in the series, from the Books of Lost Tales to The Road Goes Ever On. All that's been done because try as Tolkien did, there were holes in the background, things he didn't have space or time to tell - or which he hadn't created yet. He was trying to invent a new world from scratch, writing every myth, every page of history, naming all the previous kings and crediting them with achievements or failures. J R R Tolkien has been dead for nearly 40 years and still the new books keep emerging, some of them grown from a single note on a scrap of paper.

   Creating a world is a never-ending task. Robert Jordan did a similar thing even without finishing the Wheel of Time series - he wrote a novel to fill in the story of how Moraine met Lan, and then a compendium detailing the history of the world right back to the Age of Legends. As with Middle Earth, this only scratches the surface. The work is never done.

   But if an author takes an ancient culture as a model, half his work is done. People already know a little about the Celts (see The Risen King), or medieval Europe (forthcoming Songs of Sorrow duology), and so on. All I have to do is mention a few little things and the reader's mind will fill in the blanks, creating a world of sound and scent all on its own. As an extra bonus, where there are gaps in our knowledge, or arguments between scholars, I can pick what I want to fill the hole, morphing the culture into something new. Playing with history like that is fun for me, and I hope for the reader too.