My face hurts.

The author I enjoy the most, the one whose writing style I find the most appealing to me, is Stephen King. His book, On Writing, is an incredibly good read and proved to be something of an inspiration to my own work. His novel The Stand is a fantastic multi-character story dealing with large themes such as the actions of humanity when faced with oblivion, personal conflict opposed to the greater good and a renewed belief in faith. I have nothing but respect for the guy, a brilliant character writer who puts the words down honestly and tells stories which have impacted modern culture.

The author whose stories I enjoy the most is David Gemmell. His tales of flawed heroes standing in the face of overwhelming odds is one of the (many) reasons I wrote the book I did. The common aspects of his work - courage, loyalty and respect - run through plenty of his characters. My dad recommended him to me, passing me the book Legend to read. "Take a look at this," he said with more than a little enthusiasm. "There's loads of violence in it, with guys having their guts torn out and head cut off. You'll love it." I was about thirteen at the time. He was right. There's a lot of violence in it. I reckon he found the morals and lessons within the book just as enjoyable, of course, but he needed to sell it to me first. Decapitations worked, and Legend is one of the best books I've ever read.

Anyway, updates, updates.. I've spent the week with toothache while the missus swished her way over to Italy for a few days with her friend. I've been sitting here, in something of a pillow-and-blanket nest, on the couch of a brilliant little cabin on the shores of Norway. During that time I have been completely unproductive. I'll be honest, I haaaate toothache, and this one was an absolute belter. But it got me thinking; How long can I reasonably slack off from doing any work?

Then I remembered I'm meant to be writing full time at this point, so I'm essentially my own boss. So I have to kick my own arse when I'm being lazy. I'm curious to know if I'm going to be any good as a boss. I have an employee staff of one - me - and I know I can be incredibly good at avoiding doing anything at all if given the chance. I'll have to take steps to train me.

That was a bit confusing to write.

I read this article on what to do between the first and second draft of a story and found it quite useful. At least, it gave me something to think about. I'm still quite a way away from picking up the book and going through it, but I think about it often. I'm really looking forward to that first read through. It could be dreadful, of course, but I have an idea that I'll enjoy it either way, just as proof to myself that I am capable of writing a full novel. Once that's done, if the people I choose to be my first test readers dump all over it, then I can just go 'Ah well' and stick it in a flash drive somewhere and move on to something else. (I was going to write 'stick it in a drawer', but I don't have it on paper and I don't have any drawers on my desk. So that buggered that one.)

I'm going to write a short story for this competition and then review a Dungeons and Dragons campaign the missus wrote up - she'd sent a pitch in to D&D Magazine and recently received a mail back from the editor asking her to submit the full thing. I'm dead proud of her. It would be excellent if she got it published as a first time writer.

(bitch.)

I kid, I kid. Anyway, that's my workload for the week. I have to think of something I want to write about for 5,000 words. Hmm.

Prologue, Pt.2

So there is an objective to this blog. I have three objectives directly. Between those objectives I have some other stuff I’m going to write about, such as the second draft of the book, the process of revising and researching the bits I blagged the first time around (Like how to build a windmill. No, really), and anything I read which generally proves useful to me. I should start by giving a little more information about all this, so you lovely people have a reason to come back and read more. I’m not sure how successful my ramblings would be otherwise.

The book is called ‘book’ at the moment. I haven’t decided on a title but I have a few in mind. I wanted to wait until I’ve reviewed what I have before naming it all. The book is a fantasy story of a young girl’s adventure as she finds herself in a situation she knows nothing about. Forced from her home and chased across the country, she finds herself escorted by a reclusive woodsman in the search for her brother in the hope that he can protect her from the people who hunt her.

Now that’s about as basic as I can get it. Being honest, when I write it with such a vague tone it sounds a little unoriginal as well (It isn't, I hope!). I don’t want to give a full blurb just yet until I’m sure all the elements I’ve used so far are retained in the second draft. Also, don’t be scared by the word ‘fantasy’. There is not an elf, dwarf or dragon to be found in my tale. That sounds snotty, but it’s true (Don’t get me wrong, I love high fantasy novels with monsters, magic and mythical beings). The story is intentionally character driven, and while it may not be a modern day story, I think certain aspects of the story can be adapted to everyday life.

I like the story. I’m proud of the book so far. I had the idea in my head for a good three or four years before I sat down and put it down in words. Let’s be honest, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have made this blog. I would have waited until I had a ‘better’ book with a greater chance of success. As it is I think I this story is good enough to push. I’m looking forward to finishing it completely and getting the ball rolling. For now, I’m waiting a few weeks until I’ve forgotten about it to an extent. Apparently it’s important to leave a first draft for an extended period (experts!), but I do want to just get back to it. Rawr.

Anyway, here’s the main three objectives of this blog:

1. Find an agent.

No, I probably don’t need one yet. I mean, I’m one guy with a big chunk of text at the moment. I don’t have any writing credentials, publishing credits or anything. However, it appears that a lot of authors who seek the traditional publication route (I.E want their books in the stores) could do worse than have an agent to help them do that. I also like the idea of have a literary agent, Californication style. There’s a few I’m interested in but until I’ve finished up the second draft, I can’t really send off manuscripts.

2. Find a publisher.

Yep. Get someone to print the book. Not a real hard one to understand, but for me the best part of writing is having other people read it. If someone’s willing to put in the time to read the three or five or seven thousand words committed to page then that shows that what I’ve done is at least vaguely interesting. Now I’ve got 131,289 words, though. Mwuahaa. Anyway, it’s been something of an ambition of mine to have something I’ve written on the shelves of a Waterstones or W.H Smiths. I think I’d get a hell of a kick from achieving that. Suppose it’s the same from a band seeing their record on a CD rack, or an actress having their name imprinted on a theatre poster. It’s certainly an ego thing, but also a validation that they’re getting somewhere.

3. Failing those, self publication.

In recent times, authors skipping the old school publishing houses and going straight to Amazon Kindle, E-books and iPad typeofthings has become pretty popular. Last year e-books sold more copies than regular books. Now bear in mind that there’s a fair few reasons for this – e-books are a lot cheaper, it’s more convenient to just download a book than go to a store, internet shopping as a whole is still rising, to name a few – but it’s interesting to note. It has been said that self publication (termed also as ‘vanity press’) is for those people who’s work is not deemed good enough for regular publication. I feel that’s quite a cheap way of phrasing it. With the advent of companies like Createspace you can supply paperback copies of your book to those who buy it online. I think the main difference is that publication companies will provide a much more stable route to the bookshops. I really want to get my book into the regular publishing machine, but self publication is always a fall back option.

I’ll probably learn much more about this over the coming months. Come back to this page later in the game and we can laugh together about how completely uninformed I am/was.

Oh, and feel free to share and follow this blog. I’ll try not to spam you too much, and it’d be nice to hear what people think about the process. <3

Prologue, Pt.1

Bosh.

Alright, so this could be a massively failed experiment. I am notoriously bad for not keeping these things up to date. I used to have a blog when I was, what, seventeen or so, which I kept fairly regularly updated for a few years. I either got bored with it or I ran out of things to say. When you're seventeen there's little of importance to be said anyway. Don't get me wrong, I remember that it felt important at the time. It was the most important thing in the world to have my say. I guess it was just easier to ignore the amount of absolute cock I was typing while I said it.

Fast forward to the present day. I have done lots more with my life. I learnt more, experienced more, seen things I didn't really think I would see and got fairly drunk along the way. The main focus to be discussed here, though, is my writing and my attempts to become published. I've just completed the first draft of my first novel. Three days ago, in fact, and I'm pretty chuffed with it. I've spent the last couple of days celebrating with my fiancée. Maybe it's not a big deal - I mean, it's just a lot of words on a text document at the moment, right? - but considering the story surrounding my attempts at writing the bloody thing, I felt it deserved a little celebration at least. I'll get into that eventually. (Since actually getting the book to the point where it's ready to mail out to publishers will take a while I'll need to fluff out these weekly posts at some point. Next week, maybe.)

I'll also be updating on my thoughts and experiences along the road to getting the book into print. I'll provide links to any good articles I find on agents, publishers, the writing market as a whole, self publishing, the ebook revolution and anything else. I'll try and steer clear of the cute kittens, though. Don't get me wrong, I love a cute kitten as much as the next person, but there's a million and one other kitten blogs and I'm going to try and keep this semi-professional. Hah, that's an idea. Give it a few months and see how many uses of the words 'dick' are here. (smiley face!)

Also, I'll try and avoid the use of smilies. I'm useless for spamming them everywhere on my Facebook page.

There could be hundreds, maybe thousands, of similar blogs up already. I just couldn't find too many. I mean, there's author's blogs and journalist blogs and blogs about the state of the literary market at the moment. I simply couldn't locate any directly revelant to the challenge of getting it from my brain to my word processor to someone willing to publish it, or at least a blog that was being updated at the same time it all happened. I'm basically making it all up as I go along, y'know. I don't know about blog groups or author review trading (Read it in an article somewhere that that happens!). I consider myself fairly well versed in the use of the Internet as a tool for communication and information distribution, but not so much when it comes to writers and readers getting a dialogue going.

If my book sucks and I lose interest, I'll just post some cute kittens.