Deadlines

 Only 9 days left until the deadline for the Yeovil Prize, and my submission isn't ready yet.

 Oh, it's nearly ready... still. Seems to have been almost there for weeks. But I've trimmed and edited enough that the Word Count fell to barely 8k, and since the maximum is 15k that might be a wee bit low. So I'm adding another chapter, which I have to do right now because I'm at work for 6 of the next 7 days... sigh.

 Also I get married in 3 months and 4 days. I swear, it was only a little while ago that Caz and I had most of a year left, and now suddenly it's rushing up on us. And my lady comes first, whatever else is happening; she and our lives together are more important than anything else. Has to be that way, doesn't it? Otherwise we might as well not bother.

 Troy III is done now. Final edit finished, text polished and buffed, and the cover is ready. Here it is;

 I should really thank Mark Watts, the old school friend who designs my covers for me. It's interesting, because I tell him what I want and he then gives me his interpretation of that, which is usually better. We've been friends since we were 14, so he knows me pretty well. Cheers mate, it helps a lot.

 Now, finally, I can write something else. I thought I'd need a break after so long immersed in Troy, but actually I've dived straight into Cold Kingdoms - and this time, thanks largely to Rebecca Alexander's advice, the story seems to be unfolding better. I've tried to adjust a few things and the result is a tighter style, maybe a bit more like my earlier work, such as The Risen King. I don't think my recent stuff is bad, but it could always be better.

 With which I sign off. Summer is here and the sun is shining, so this indoorsy writer is going for a walk. With a hat, of course. I might enjoy the sun but there are limits y'know.

 Cheerio.

Something Subtle

 It's been a busy few days. I volunteered for two years in a charity shop, Cancer Research UK, and was disappointed to have to stop when I found a paid role at a JD Wetherspoon pub. But the area manager has worked out a way for me to train as a manager one day a week, which means that by the end of the year I'll be able to return to work I really enjoy. Helping people through serious problems is about as good as anything I can think of.

 Wetherspoons did not see it this way, and instead of giving me one day off a week, they fired me. Oh, they said I'd failed an assessment... but I wasn't due one, and they just happened to decide to do it on the day I asked them for the time. Freaky, eh? It doesn't matter - I already have another job - but you could almost feel a bit suspicious.

 I'll be better able to write now, too. One problem with 'Spoons - and boy, there were lots of problems - was the hours. Some evening shifts didn't finish until 4am; morning starts were at 6am. So I always seemed to be either sleeping late or going to bed early, and whatever I did I was always exhausted. I'd open Word and just look at it for a bit before starting to snore. That isn't useful for getting work done.

 By the way, it's only my beautiful fiancee who says I snore. Don't believe it, myself. Gosh no.

 But I have, somehow, managed to do the last redraft of Troy volume 3, and I'm now doing the final edit - just rereading, over and again, in search of any grammar/punctuation errors, or phrases that just clunk. It's amazing how many get through. I know that I could check it a hundred times and still miss a couple of mistakes, which of course I'll spot the moment I look at the published book... something which could make me get used to swearing quite quickly. But it's almost done. Troy, after some two years, is almost finished.

 I've said in previous blogs that I think Troy is the greatest story ever told. It's just fabulous, a sweeping tale that takes in bravery and betrayal, honour and pride, and the fall of nations and whole peoples. But there's something more subtle, too. Amidst this great saga of battle, it's easy to miss the fact that the great warriors - Achilles, Hector, Ajax - all die. The ones who survive are the thinkers, Odysseus most of all. Homer seems to be saying that courage and skill at arms are not enough, and in the end it's the clever ones who come through - who are blessed by the gods, in his terms. It might be, I think, that Homer wrote The Iliad as an anti-war polemic.

 It might not be, too. But I like the idea.

Damn It!

 I was lucky enough recently to have a successful local author review one of my unpublished novels for me. Reb has a good eye, and a good way of making criticisms without seeming negative. But it doesn't make things easy to hear.

 I like to start chapters by setting a scene, then bring in the characters. Wrong, it seems; that can confuse the reader. I thought my way worked to be honest, but there's no point asking for advice if you then ignore it, so out go the "soft" chapter openings.

 That I use too many point-of-view characters, I can't deny. Once Reb pointed it out I started to think of ways and occasions I can write the same scene as before, but from the main character's POV. That will smooth the text, make it easier for the reader and also, rather importantly, for an editor. So I'll go through my "trunk" novels, those not yet published, and rewrite like a crazy man. Seems like a lot of work to end up with the same book, doesn't it? But it won't be the same book, it will be a better one, if I do it right.

 I do need to keep some of those POV characters, though. Not in every book, but this novel, Black Lord of Eagles, tells the tale of what happens to a culture when it's invaded by people it never knew existed. I can't do that from one point of view, or even two. I want to show the central story, but also how it affects the little people, ordinary people caught up in these great events. So I need to follow threads in the country and in the towns, among priests and warriors, some of which never collide - so one POV is not enough. My job, then, is to cut the number of point-of-view characters as much as I can - and I can cut several - but still keep that structure. Tricky, eh?

 Some of these criticisms have been made of me before. I listen, I understand... and then slowly I slip back into my old habits, because in the end as a writer you're sat alone with only your own opinion to judge by. The irony is that to stop this happening I need an editor to constantly nudge me back to the road, but in order to get an editor I need to stay on the road in the first place. In common parlance this is known as "a bit of a bugger." It makes the help of a friend doubly important, so thanks Reb, your time and advice is very much appreciated.

 It might even keep me on the road until the end of the year... except I have a bit of a distraction arriving in August when I get married. Two cheers for distraction!

Bewilderment

 I've broken my reading glasses - typically, on a Bank Holiday weekend when I can't get them fixed until Tuesday. I'm wearing my old glasses as I write this, which is OK but a bit annoying. It sums up the last few days.

 You see, my fiancee Caz has been away, visiting friends in Exeter. And I have been lonely.

 I'm a bit of a lone wolf. Always have been, and it's been all right. I haven't been happy, usually - but I haven't been unhappy either, and experience has taught me that I should settle for mild contentment, because trying (or hoping) for more just leads to heartache. Feeling not too bad is, well... not too bad. It gets me through the days.

 Now there's Caz, and I'm happy. Ridiculously happy in fact, delirious half the time, when I'm not stopping in bewilderment to wonder what the rubbery f*** has happened to me. But when she goes away, oh dear me, things are difficult. I can't do the usual 'being alone is not being lonely' thing any more. I miss her voice, her scent, the awareness that she's next to me even when she isn't speaking, or when I swim halfway out of sleep and reach over to make sure she's still there. Finding an absence is horrible. There's a wrenched place inside me that won't be soothed until she's back, and laughs with my arm around her.

 All this is new to me. I managed to reach 46 years old without falling in love, but when I fell I fell hard. Of course it's grist to the mill for a writer, new experiences to use and expand on... but I don't much care. My writing can go hang. I want Caz back before I start weeping in public.

 So there it is. I'm a wet end. A sad truth for a man who's always been so independent, but somehow I can't really feel sorry about it. Funny, that.

Glissandos

 I've been absent for a bit - this is my first blog for a month. Mostly that's because I have a new job which has me working ridiculous hours, starting at 6am some days, finishing at 4am other days. I'm exhausted pretty much all the time. But I still shouldn't have left it a month, so for those of you who've missed me (thousands of you, I'm sure), I'm sorry.

 Anyhoo.

 It's very upsetting to read a book so good that you know, whatever you do, that you will never write anything to match it. Sadly there are many such novels. Stephen King's IT, Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of al-Rassan, Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, to name a few. The one on my mind today is Six Moon Dance, by Sheri S. Tepper. I've read it before, but as with the other stand-out tales I'm drawn back from time to time, to immerse myself once more in the world and the characters as the story plays out.

 That, my friends, is the definition of that elusive term 'good book'. It's my definition, anyway - a novel to which you keep returning, to read again and again, and each time find yourself caught up in the passions and fears just as you were before.

 I covered some of this in a post last year, Telling Stories, so I won't bother rehashing every point. But I'd add that literature has an edge over other art in this sense, because if you hang a painting on your wall then sooner or later you stop really seeing it. Same with a sculpture. But writing, and also music, have the capacity to keep drawing us in with the same words and notes, the same segues and glissandos. I'm not sure I know why.

 But isn't it interesting?

A Bit Every Day

 Much is changing. I have a new job, for a start - though here in my first week I've got the flu, or possibly Ebola. But never mind that.

 Caz bought her wedding dress today. Which I'm not allowed to see, by the way, and how is that fair? I'm excited too y'know. Anyway, yesterday we booked the venue - the Guildhall in Barnstaple, which is an old-fashioned colonial sort of room, full of pictures of the men who built Barnstaple when it was just a shabby little port on the estuary. Given that at low tide a large rabbit can wade across the river, you'll know that was quite a while ago. It's a nice place though. I'm going to enjoy getting married there.

 So... preparations for the wedding, a new job working in the kitchen of a very busy seafront pub, and not much time to write.

 They say an author should write something every day. Maybe not thousands of words, or even hundreds, but he should open the document on his PC (or whatever) and type in a couple of lines. Or think about the plot and where it's going, though that has to be in his writing chair, at his work desk, because you have to make a place for the Muse to come. So the advice goes. I nearly always do write, but sometimes it's just not possible. When I do a 10 hour day, rushing every moment, it can leave me just too weary to summon the energy. Writing is art, it takes emotional input to do it, and when your battery is flat the spark just won't catch.

 Which is why this is only a brief blog. I'm just too tired and flu-ridden to do much. I think I'll go to bed and sleep for a bit. Night all.

Enough Drama

 I've just finished the rewrite of Troy: The Ancient Dead, the concluding part of the trilogy. Bit of a relief, to be honest. The latter half of the book is full of talk of the end of civilisations - the Hittites have fallen, Troy is ruined, and there's a leftover fragment of the Minoans that gets Odysseus thinking about all this. It's got me thinking too, about all the dangers our own  21st century culture faces.

 Meteor impact, for example. There are claims that a "shotgun" impact destroyed the Indus valley people, when pieces of an asteroid rained down in the Indian Ocean. But in the past civilised areas were too few and small for this to happen often. Today we know the risk better, and the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter on 1994 shows us how bad it could be.

 Or super-volcanoes. Toba in Indonesia was the most recent to erupt, about 75,000 years ago, but the best known is probably Yellowstone, in the USA. It erupts every 600,000 years or so and is due anytime. The results would be catastrophic - vast clouds of ash settling on the ground, more in the air blocking sunlight to create a volcanic winter, sulphur mixing with water to produce sulphuric acid which we'd breathe in, and so on. It would likely affect the whole Northern Hemisphere, and kill billions.

 Or a pandemic. You can take your choice on this one; Ebola, swine flu or bird flu, Marburg, Sabia, Mapucho - or something else we haven't noticed yet, perhaps. Our mobile lifestyles mean that air travel provides thousands of very rapid vectors along which a disease would spread. Back in the 1500s the Spanish brought smallpox to the Americas, and in the ensuing decades up to 80% of the local people, with no immunity to the virus, died from it. Something similar is quite possible today. Any serious virus to which humans have no immunity could do it, and history shows pandemics break out quite often.

 All of these three threats are almost certain to happen, given time. But even so, the greatest threat to human cultures is probably still ourselves. I don't mean nuclear war, or biological weapons run amok. I just mean the seemingly endless, crippling stupidity of people.

 Got an unspoiled wilderness? We'll strip-mine it for coal, or mine tin and leave the tailings to poison the river. We'll use pesticides on our fields which are made using oil, so we leave a petrochemical sheen on rivers. When we need new housing we'll overlook the brownfield sites in cities, and build instead on fields outside. And worst of all we'll breed and breed, without any apparent thought for the consequences.

 In my school days there were 4 billion people on Earth. Today there are more than 7 billion and the number is still growing. All of them need food and water, clothes to wear, a home, the prospect of a job and some kind of decent life. How will we sustain them? How we will cope when the number reaches 8 billion, then 9?

 Civilisation throughout history have fallen because they outgrew their ability to feed themselves. The Mayans of Guatemala, the early Chinese of the Yellow River area, probably even the Achaean Greeks I've just been writing about. We're not immune, just because we have computers and neon lights, and tell each other that "it couldn't happen now". Of course it could. The rules which applied to them still apply to us.

 It's a bit less dramatic than seeing a culture wiped out by invading dragons, or by invaders with wicked spikes on their chariot wheels. But I suspect that living through it would feel quite dramatic enough.