Discipline

  Troy: Heirs of Immortality is now out!

  It was a day late going live on Amazon Kindle, because the ratification check took so long. Very strange, but complaining/ asking why does no good, as a reply takes so long to arrive and is usually a bit rubbish when it does. So sorry to anyone who was looking for it on Monday, the official release date. I'll try not to let it happen again.

  The print version will take a little longer as the cover design was refused (sigh...). That should be sorted out in a few days.

  Volume three, The Untrodden Sanctuaries, will be mostly written (I hope) before the end of the year - the first draft, anyway. NaNoWriMo is coming in November - National Novel Writing Month - and I hope to complete a good chunk of the book in those 30 days. I quite enjoyed NaNo last year. It's a bit daft in some ways, because it prizes the number of words and makes no mention of quality. I could write wah wah wah until I hit the 50,000 word minimum and I'd be classed as a winner.

  But still, NaNo is an excuse for writers who struggle to find time to set some aside. It gives us a target of 1,667 words per day, about what a professional writer might aim for, and challenges us to match it. There's a discipline in that, if you treat it right. Some don't - a couple of people reach 50,000 words on day 1, which tells me they understood the target but not the point. But most do. And if you end on 40,000 words, or half that, you've still managed to write a goodly bit, and hopefully learned a little about how to manage your time too.

  I'll be playing in the local pool league during November, and beyond. I'm also now engaged, and will be married almost exactly a year from now. Finding time for NaNo is going to be a wee bit interesting.

Heirs of Immortality is $0.99 by the way. Find it at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heirs-Immortality-TROY-Book-2-ebook/dp/B00NU6X0B2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411586760&sr=1-1&keywords=ben+blake+heirs+of+immortality

Fast and Breathless

  Hi everyone. Summer may be on its way out but there's still lots to look forward to, including crisp autumn mornings, mist on the water, and this;

  This is the first glimpse of the cover for TROY: Heirs of Immortality. It's the second volume in my Troy series, and will be out on September 22nd. If you like your Fantasy fast-paced and breathless, this is for you. From the ports of Greece to the beach and plain of Troy, Agamemnon and Achilles argue and Odysseus plots, while Hector defies them and the walls of the city stand impregnable above it all.

  In other news, I've arranged a personal appearance at Bideford Library on Saturday October 22nd, from 10.30am. It's only a small library and a small event, but if you're in the area, come along for a chat, I'll be glad to see you, and I'll have books to sign.

  When I did my last PA, at Barnstaple, one of the copies of The Risen King which I sold went to a woman called Gill. I saw her recently, and she said she'd been on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales and had found herself looking down on a moorland valley, lush and green with high rocks all around. In a moment her mind went back to the place where Kayl finds the Brethren, right at the start of the novel, because (she said) I'd described what she was looking at so vividly.

  Thanks, Gill. I can't expect finer praise than that.

All Roar and No Teeth

 Hi everyone, I hope you're all well. I'm doing great at the moment, largely due to developments in my personal life which are taking up a lot of time. Mostly I mean my lady, Caroline, who I love to spend hours with. But that hasn't stopped me writing. Volume two of Troy is still on target to be published in a month's time - the edit and redrafting is nearly done now, there are just some final checks to make to catch rogue punctuation and try to cut out a few more adverbs.

 Next time on this blog I'll reveal the cover design, which as usual was created by Mark Watts. For today, I thought I'd share an excerpt from the text, as a taster. Volume Two, Heirs of Immortality, rattles along at a much faster pace than the first book did, because this is when the struggle really begins. There are some familiar faces in the excerpt.

 Enjoy.

*

 "So," Achilles said. Rage bubbled in his voice. "The Lion of Achaea can conquer only a strip of sand, without Achilles."

 Isander was looking at Agamemnon then, and he saw utter hatred flash across those thick features before it could be masked. There was no mistake. Agamemnon would nurse those words as a mortal grievance all the years of his life, even if the Fates spared him and he lived on and on into great old age. They might poison his soul - if he had one - and still he'd hold them close around his heart. Achilles had made an eternal enemy today.

 And he didn't care. That was obvious as well. Achilles wasn't merely angry, he was eaten up by fury. It came off him like heat, baking into the Greeks gathered round. Isander, near the front, began to wish he'd hung back. Blood might be spilled here.

 "Be warned," Agamemnon said. There was rage in his voice too, the anger of a man unused to being defied. "I would not forgive that tone from a king, and you don't have a crown."

 "I have something better," Achilles snapped back. "I have something the High King can gain from no other man. I can kill Hector. Or did you call me back for a different reason?"

 Gulls cried above, but the beach was utterly quiet.

 "I thought not," Achilles said. He was still stiff with anger, a bad-tempered boar which might charge at any moment. "I will do it. Tomorrow I'll challenge Hector to single combat, with the war hanging on the outcome. He wins, and the Greeks sail home. I win, and the Trojans hand Helen over, and half their treasury beside. Will you honour those terms?"

 "Show respect," Agamemnon began.

 He was cut off by Achilles' laughter. "Spare me your bluster. Will you honour them?"

 Agamemnon glowered, lips twisting. "I will honour them."

 "Then know this. And let all men know," Achilles added, raising his voice. His words carried over men's heads and out to sea. "I do not do this for the High King. I don't care of Greece wins this war or Troy does, it's no matter to me. I fight for my own name and my own causes... and I fight for Patroclus. For the memory of my friend, who was cut down while I fought elsewhere, sent from the beach of Troy by the pride of a fool.

 "And after I have killed Hector the bards will sing that this was my war - my glory, my victory. If they remember the name of Agamemnon it will be as an afterthought. The man who tried to keep Achilles from the fight and failed, the man who tried to win without him and failed. Perhaps we should put that on his tomb, do you think? The Lion of Achaea: he was all roar and no teeth, and had to call on stronger men in his need."

*

 That's all, folks. Heirs of Immortality will be published in the second half of September - exact date to follow.

Hidden Tension

 There was an article posted on Facebook recently by CreateSpace, Amazon's paperback division, asking one question - what is the most important element of fiction?

 I think it's got to be tension. Raymond Chandler once said When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. Anton Chekhov put it another way; If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. Both comments mean the same thing, that an author must keep the tension high.

 Not that you need a gun. The romantic fiction genre survives on the basis of "she will, she won't, she does", as a woman dithers over whether to marry her lover. (Yes, I'm sure there are exceptions, but that's the general rule). Wuthering Heights is a tale of people caught in in their own tangle of love and envy, and destroyed by it, with nary a gun in sight. And so on; you don't need a list. The point is that tension can be created by any conflict, physical or emotional or anything else - but you do need conflict. Without it your story might end up like this;

"OK Dave?"
"Fine, Bob. You?"
"Fine. Kids all right?"
"Not bad. Well, see you."
"Bye Dave."

 Tension comes partly from pace. The fashion today is for fast-paced tales, in which one event is barely over before the next is upon our protagonists. Look at The da Vinci Code as an example. It's not very well written in truth, with cardboard characters and a predictable plot, but it does rattle along at a very high pace. Sometimes that can distract the reader enough that he doesn't realise the book is a bit rubbish, the same way that big explosions do in some films.

 But tension can also come from characters. They can lie to each other, betray friends, plot and scheme together against an enemy. Or they can be driven from their comforts and forced to embark on a journey they never wanted, perhaps to regain their former lives, perhaps to find themselves liberated. If we have the skill, we can create enough tension this way that we don't need a rifle hanging on the wall, or a man with a gun bursting in (Well, not very often).

 The Harry Potter books are a case in point. In the early volumes - up to number four, The Goblet of Fire - there's hardly any clear danger until the end, and not much threat of it either. We all know the danger is coming, but it takes forever to appear, which creates tension for Harry and his friends, and by extension to the reader. And it works: for the most part the Potters are very tightly written indeed. I know it's fashionable to criticise JK Rowling these days - as it is to criticise Dan Brown - but in Rowling's case I think it's unjust. The realisation of the wizarding world is brilliantly done, and as Stephen King says, the books are also cracking good fun.

 But you know. other people will have their own ideas about the most important element in storytelling. God and all the little fishes know there are lots of important things. Tension is only my choice. If you can make a story work another way, then good luck to you.

So Bends the Tree

 Every artist - writer, painter, whatever - draws on his or her own experiences. I don't wholly buy the popular advice of write what you know, because if we all stuck to that there would be no sci-fi (who's ever really flown between stars?), no Fantasy, not even any Victorian Gothics. But the things we know and feel do find their way onto the pages, because they're what shaped us as people - we're each the sum of our own experiences.

 The most important factor of all this is family. Nothing does as much to form our character as that. There are proverbs about it, such as give me the child until he is seven and I shall give you the man. Or as grows the sapling, so bends the tree. As children we can be conditioned to respond a certain way, and as adults we still do. Habits like that run very deep, and are fiercely hard to break.

 Now, I don't have a great family. I knew it even as a small boy, the sort of age when most children accept their world almost without question. My parents made a bad marriage and I can't remember a time when they didn't hate each other. My elder brother was effectively a functioning sociopath, unable to feel or empathize as normal people do; he saw others as pieces to be moved, there for his own amusement but without valid lives or cares of their own. And my mother couldn't see that - wouldn't see it, in truth - because she'd invested such hopes in him she couldn't bear to see them crushed, or accept he wasn't capable of achieving the things she dreamed of.

 (Incidentally, I think it's interesting that I saw this so young. Even aged 6, maybe before, I'd begun to stand aside from events and watch them. see how people behaved and how it differed from what they said. Any artist needs that distance, I think, while also being involved enough to empathize. It's a curious thing. Some people believe writers are born, not made; when I think about this I suspect they might be right).

 Anyway.

 All that conflict and chaos in my childhood affected me. Of course it did, it's inevitable. I'm sure there are people who suffered worse and dealt with it better; I know some of the wounds I carry are due, in part at least, to me not coping well. But I was a child, and it's hard to beat myself up. It was dreadful and too often there was nobody there who would protect me from the barrage, but I got through it and here I am, still standing. If we find a way to deal with our scars and move on, that's a win.

 As a child, I used to think my friend Mark's family was perfect. I'd wish I'd been born there instead of to my own parents, but of course I hadn't been and I'd missed all the internal arguments, the shouting and tears, a thousand things that would be inconsequential to anyone else but are agony for a child living through them.

 As an adult, I've discovered there are families much worse than mine was. Forget the child abuse cases on TV, these are just ordinary people who don't seem able to stop hurting each other, day after day. People for whom the love and bitterness have become so entwined they can't be separated anymore, so they twine around each other in spirals that go on and on and on... There might be no major events, nothing that would make it onto Jerry Springer, but there's a parade of little things, like the Death of a Thousand Cuts. And even in the good families there are still sore places, memories nobody speaks of at the Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner. Everyone's wounded. Nobody grows up unscarred.

 Cheery thought, eh? Actually I think it is, in a crooked sort of way. Because scarred or not we do grow up, and we deal with the shit and move on - and that's a win.

Packed with Good Stuff

  Well, there's been a bit of a change in my life this past fortnight. I'm now in a relationship with a woman named Caroline, who's clever and tough and brooks no nonsense from anyone. I've known Caz for some time, and liked her, but since she was seeing someone else I couldn't speak. However, we're together now, and I couldn't be happier.

  But it's going to cut into my writing time....

  The good news there is that TROY: Heirs of Immortality is finished. The first draft is, anyway, so now I'll leave it for a month and turn to other things, tinker with another story or start a new one, and then return to Troy II to edit. I loathe redrafting, it's just boring and technical most of the time, and has none of the creative spark that actual writing does. But it has to be done, in both online and traditional publishing, so there's no point complaining. I knew the deal when I signed up to it.

  What I'll actually spend this month or so doing is a new version - the fourth - of a story called Starfire. There have been so many because I haven't been able to make the story work. It has masses of good ideas and elements; different magics and cultures, non-human creatures, ancient power struggles and a secretive group of archivists, to name only some. But the story won't let itself be told. The third effort failed because several people told me the opening sounded like an info dump, with too much information thrown at the reader too fast. Trouble is, avoiding that meant restructuring the story from top to bottom, and I didn't really know how to go about that, besides which Troy was under way by then.

  This is a pain.

  But I was thinking about it the other day and I had an idea about an 'in'. Essentially it involves throwing away nearly everything I wrote, and coming at the story from a different angle. It should be more immediate and direct, so what I throw at the reader isn't dry info but a series of events that slowly come together to reveal what's going on. There's a good story somewhere inside Starfire, it's packed with good stuff, and despite all the problems I still believe in it. My job is to find that story and tease it out.

  So... my To Do list now reads: redraft Troy II, write Troy III, redo Starfire, keep sending Black Lord of Eagles to conventional publishers, redraft volume one of Chained Dragon and then do volumes two and three, and proceed with The Playground of Fawns (set in an analogue of ancient China). Including all the sequels it adds up to ten volumes. That's five years work right there, minimum, and I somehow have to do this while also making Caz happy and taking her out now and then.

  My life. Packed with good stuff.

A Leap of Courage

  In a Fantasy novel there's going to be some fighting. Maybe a pitched battle, maybe a riot, but there's nearly always physical conflict of some sort. In my work I try to show it as an ugly thing, which means a degree of realism. I remember that I'm telling a story, people don't want to see anything too graphic, but I also think of Saving Private Ryan and know there's a place for a certain amount of gore.

  In the real world we've come to disassociate war from its horror, to a large extent. We've all seen the images taken from cameras on aircraft, or tracking a missile to target, and they really do look like video games, all green flickers and numbers down the side of the display. It's the reverse of what the ancient Greeks did, in a world where warfare took place at a distance, in an exchange of arrows and stones. Greek warriors were farmers who couldn't be away from home for long, and their homeland was mostly mountains with few flat places, both of which factors contributed to their preference for close up, hand to hand fighting. This was a choice, not a last resort: it's how they wanted it. But it was a genuine transformation of warfare, because up close combat is visceral and personal, and it takes a leap of courage to brave it. An arrow is aimed at an area, but a swinging sword is meant to kill you, and you can see the eyes of the man who wields it. The awfulness of death is right in your face the whole time.

  In truth, war is still like that. So is suffering, for people in pain or hunger. In the Western world we rarely come closer to such things than a picture on a TV. They're far-off events, made impersonal by distance. Yet hundreds of thousands of people have died in Iraq over the past eleven years, many of them killed with knives or marketplace bombs. Tens of thousands have died in Palestine over recent years, either at Israeli hands or one another's. Perhaps more than two million have been killed in DR Congo during its long civil war, often hacked to death with machetes in the bloodiest conflict since World War Two. In those countries, and many more, war isn't a distant or impersonal thing, it's a horror that walks at your shoulder every day.

  I have an upcoming series called The Blessed Land, in which the battles are made very shocking. I do it deliberately, because part of the story addresses a group who trigger a war simply for their own interests, and I wanted to show what they caused as unflinchingly as I could. I'm also writing the TROY series, of course, which of necessity includes a lot of battle scenes; there's no way around that. But having written these stories, I want now to move away from it if I can. There are other ways to show conflict, other means of raising tension.

  It's very hard to think of a Fantasy novel that doesn't include armies in battle though. Guy Gavriel Kay's The Sarantine Mosaic makes a stab at it but does have some scenes. Mark Chadbourne manages it sometimes, Storm Constantine goes through much of the Magravandias series without it, and there are Peake's Titus books, but for each of them, there are dozens which revel in it. Anything by David Gemmell or David Eddings, Jordan's Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, most of Terry Brooks' Shannara stories... the list just keeps going.

  There's a place for battle in Fantasy, of course there is. I'm not saying I want to cut it out completely. But I want some of my books not to focus on it, or wallow in it. If I'm any good at all I ought to be able to create an intriguing plot through more subtle conflict. After all, as the countries I mentioned above show, there's quite enough war in the real world without us escaping to invented battles as well.