Resolutions Before the New Year

I am not a fan of the ‘New Year Resolution’, I just never saw the point in it. If you are going to resolve to do something then do it, here and now, don’t wait for some social convention to come along once a year; that is just procrastination!

When it comes to doing things I try to get on and do them once I’ve made up my mind that way. I do agree that there is often a certain amount pf preparation involved in many undertakings. That is just common-sense. If you want a successful outcome to what you are going to do then you have to pay attention to the not so interesting stuff, like organization, research, logistics, etc. This part of any activity is not my favourite but I console myself with the reminder that it is not going to last, that it will pass and that it will lead to me doing the thing that I’ve set my mind to do; the enjoyable bit in other words.

Where is all this leading? It is leading me to resolving to getting my writing back on track. I have had a major interval of not being able to do very much at all. It is not just the writing either, although that is the most important aspect to me, there is also the social side of making your presence felt as an author through the internet.

It takes time to get your name known, and your face if you care to put it out there, but all that work can be undone by an unplanned absence. Personally I found it very frustrating to be forced into a kind of hiatus caused by building work and the subsequent redecoration that followed, but I am not complaining. It happened, it was necessary and my wife is very happy with the end result, which makes me happy too. My working environment is still not perfect because the Christmas holidays have arrived but I love Christmas so I am going to embrace all the work, I am responsible for the Christmas decorations and I cook as well, the interruptions of family visits and getting together with friends, the lack of a routine, and all that is best in the festive season.

Most of all I am resolved at this time of year to get my writing career back on track!

I will be doing this in as positive a way as I can, simply because I am a very positive kind of person. I made a resolution once to write a book and I did it…twice! I resolved to fly an aeroplane and I did that as well. I did not wait for New Year to come round to make these resolutions, I committed myself when they occurred to me and I the very idea of them excited me.

The point is that life can pass you by in the waiting. Two weeks ago I said good bye to someone and did not see them again for four days. At the end of that interval I discovered that this person had died suddenly and unexpectedly. This is not the first time that something like this has happened to someone I have known but it reinforces the realisation of how fragile life is all the more powerfully. I love life and I love living it, even when it hurts.

I may never write an international bestseller or see one my books turned into a movie or be lauded by the intelligentsia but I don’t do anything for those kind of reasons. I write because I love telling a story, using words to craft a tale, entertaining people. I draw and paint because I love losing myself in the creation of an image. I cook because it brings pleasure to my wife. I socialise because it gives pleasure to me to spend time with family and friends, including those I never really get to see across the internet. I live life because it is all we ever have, this very moment, right here and right now, and we can lose it in a split second. I wear an ankh to remind me of this fact.

Next year there are many things that I am resolved to do but I am not going to wait until one minute into January 2015 to commit myself to doing them; I’ve already made that decision. I choose to live life now and pass through the mundane to reach those highpoints that become our memories tomorrow.

Can I Get Back to Writing Now?!

Up to the end of August everything was going swimmingly. I was putting the finishing touches to the manuscript for Rapture for Ravens and feeling very good about it. Also, I had started work on my third novel Eugenica, which has nothing to do with Saxons or Vikings whatsoever. The writing was flowing, I was feeling all creative, everything looked good, and then September arrived!

The thing about September was that we had to have some building work done by a company called Bricks and Mortar, local builders. Our house was built in 1910 and needed some serious maintenance and these guys came in and did a fantastic job, absolutely no complaints there. They were totally professional but the thing about building work is that it causes disruption by its very nature.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not looking for sympathy here, I knew what we were getting into when we started, I just didn’t realise that the work would go on for so long and have such a massive impact on my writing!

The same week that Bricks and Mortar finished work on the exterior of the house the carpenter arrived to rip up the floorboards in three downstairs rooms and replace them with something more structurally sound and do the job properly. He only finished last week! Again, that is not a complaint. Les the carpenter is a very skilled craftsman and a very amiable gent, he took his time because he cares about what he does and he does it to a high standard. Also my wife kept finding him extra little jobs to do, which delayed him somewhat.

As Les was finishing the woodwork Jim the painter arrived. He’s also a great guy who takes pride in his work even though it is not what he wants to spend the rest of his life doing. Jim is still here working on the hallway, the last room to require his attention.

Since September we have lived in a house that had furniture moving around as if beset by hyperactive poltergeists! We spent a lot of time living in the bedroom because there was no room downstairs! It was by accident that we disappeared to Barcelona for a break in the middle of all this, but a happy one at that.

During all this time my writing simply dried up. There was not a lot of time to begin with but when I did get the odd hour here and there I found everything covered in dust, the rooms felt cold and cramped; I lacked inspiration! I also started to feel disillusioned because I hardly wrote anything; sort of a Catch-22 situation I think.

Today, however, marks a change in all this. The woodwork is mostly finished, just a few odd jobs left. The painting is also almost finished. New furniture is now arriving and we are reclaiming the rooms back in time for Christmas. Suddenly I feel like writing again and my wife understands, in fact she wants me to sit down at my keyboard and start work once more. There’s one big clean up to do before Christmas and then when I sit down to write again it’s going to be in a warm, comfortable, clean, family environment without a builder or carpenter or painter in sight!

Writing Angry

For my new book I have temporarily left behind the period of 1066 and taken up a new subject in the guise of an alternative history story based upon the popular ‘what if?’ premise. I did not start out with the intention of writing an alternative history it is just that this genre proved to be a very suitable vehicle for the story that I want to tell. There is still a considerable amount of research to be carried out in the name of authenticity, just as with Historical Fiction. It may be an alternative account but that does not mean that I can abandon everything prior to the moment in time when actual and fictional history diverge, if I did that then really it would be a fantasy novel but what I want is something with a bit more relevance to the real world and I think that fantasy might lack the kind of bite I am looking for.

Once I had chosen the genre and did the preparatory research I started writing and it all came together very quickly. I had already assembled a team of beta readers and it did not take me very long to provide them with the prologue and opening chapter for them to read, digest and critique. One of the more interesting responses to come out of the early stages of the read was that there was a lot of anger behind the text.

Now this observation came from someone who knows me very well and has done so for many years. I think that the relationship we have with each other has allowed them an insight into my writing that most of the other beta readers lack, which is not a bad thing as it clearly gives a different kind of perspective on my work.

The other point to perhaps to consider is that I am writing about some of the subjects from a genuine point of experience; some of these things happened to me! I call my new novel ‘Eugenica’ and it examines what might have happened if Britain, the birthplace of modern Eugenics, had gone done down the path of eugenics based social and health policies in the 1930’s. Other countries actually took this route, Norway, America, Canada and, perhaps most notoriously, Germany for example. The results were usually devastating upon the individuals who suffered under these systems.

Although Britain, if we return to the ‘real’ timeline, did not take the path that most commentators of the early 20^th century expected it to being a disabled person in this country is not an easy existence. I know because I am disabled!

In many respects I have had it easy compared to other people, some of whom have been treated appallingly and still are sadly. From my formative years I was the subject of medical investigation because I have a very rare muscle condition; Becker’s variant Myotonia Congenita, which was first identified in the same year that I left school. My symptoms are severe and I suffer impaired mobility, which is pretty obvious to most observers.

Recently the current government waged a very effective propaganda war against the disabled prior to dismantling the benefit system that supports them. It was clearly a move to win over public sympathy from the cripples to the politicians and it worked. The government won hands down and the majority of society seem to have a so what attitude to the outcome.

This, I believe, was the starting point of the story that I wanted to write. Clearly life in Britain today is nowhere near as bad as it might have become if the country had fully embraced eugenics, there’s no suggestion of forced segregation and sterilisation for example, or state enacted euthanasia for that matter. Nevertheless I feel angry about the treatment that some disabled people have been subjected to, not just by politicians or the media or an apparently uncaring society but also by the medical fraternity. You might not believe some of the things done to me in the name of medical research?

They say that the best writers concentrate on the subjects that they know and I can see the logic in that. I am writing a book that, amongst others, examines the treatment of the disabled, admittedly in an extreme social setting, and I have an axe to grind, which is probably why I am writing angry, is this a good thing?

I think that it is. My reader expressed concerns that some people might find it a little uncomfortable, objectionable even, that it might stir things up. I understood what they meant but my immediate reaction was ‘so what?’ Eugenica has discrimination and prejudice as two of its core themes, they are thorny subjects. It also has dehumanisation to facilitate the war on the weak as a major theme, not a topic that you can deal with using kid gloves. There are some more positive themes in there as well but it is the ones just mentioned that are the tinder lit by my own personal experiences that in turn ignites my anger I suppose? I ask that question because here’s another observation, entirely subjective, I had not realised that I was writing angry!

I am now very curious to see what they other beta readers made of my early work on this project. I want to see if they come to a similar conclusion about the element of anger already suffused into the text. It is going to be interesting to see if they recognise it and if I am going to continue writing angry now that I have been made aware of something that I seemed to have been conducting unconsciously?

Writing about death

Death is a natural part of life so it should be no surprise that it makes an appearance in a writer’s work. I knew that I was going to have to refer to it at some point in The War Wolf as this is a book about violent events and violence often ends in death; especially when there’s a battle!

There are several approaches that one can take with regards to this subject and it all depends upon the nature of the death that you are writing about. The Battle of Fulford Gate gave me two kinds of approach. The first was a more objective account in which large numbers of men meet in combat and a significant percentage of them died. The removed nature of the account actually results in a kind of distance being achieved between myself and the often undefined characters that I am writing about. I did put in the occasional more detailed account of someone dying horribly on the point of a spear but these were largely cameo appearances.

The more subjective accounts came when I involved the characters that I had defined, moulded and developed. In this instance I actually found the writing more emotionally charged. I don’t know if that came across to the reader, no one has actually mentioned it yet, but for me the scene in which Hereric commits the ultimate act of courage, sacrificing himself to save his lord, honouring his death-oath as a huscarl, meant a lot when I wrote it. I wanted it be heroic and not just another bloody event. When I thought about it I was humbled by what I imagined to be the courage of a man who accepts the price of his own loyalty on a field of battle will be his death. To stand there before your enemies knowing that you will not live beyond the encounter and yet not shirk from it; that is true bravery.

There are other deaths, however, and they are not all as brave. In my new novel Eugenica, a work currently in progress, I wrote a scene where a young girl dies as the result of a severe beating. I found actually writing the scene surprisingly easy, I thought that I might have had a problem with that as I have no experience of visiting such violence on another person, but it flowed from my keyboard. The real emotional response came after the beating when she is rescued by a friend and dies in the company of what few other friends she had. That actually got to me. I remember reading an interview with J. K. Rowling in which she admitted to crying over a death scene that she wrote for Harry Potter, I don’t think that I was too impressed. I was wrong to have that attitude. When you invest time and effort into a character they do come alive and start to live in your imagination, then you kill the off and although they never leave you they are never the same either.

What I discovered was that it was not the moment of the death of the character that I had a response to, it was the impact that that death had on the other characters. In For Rapture of Ravens I had to deal with the aftermath of the Battle of Fulford Gate and one of the characters has to grieve for her husband. I’ve attended my share of funerals so I was able to set the scene well enough, I think, but what came out as I wrote the dialogue surprised me. I think it is one of my better moments of writing but I’m going to have to wait for the book to be published to verify that.

Art imitates life, they say, therefore so should writing. In life the moment of someone’s death can be terrible, painful, quick; slow, observed by a crowd or go unknown. The moment of death is not the part that provokes the real emotional response; that comes as part of the realisation that this person really has died. It is the reaction of one human to the demise of another. We are largely empathic beings and we feel the hurt of another otherwise would a reader be affected by the death of a person who is just a figment of the writer’s imagination?