I can't find the memory card, Jim...

Tomorrow I head back to Essex for good. Back in my old bedroom until I find a job. Back in my old home town until... Well, until something else happens. I originally left four years ago, moving to Cork in Ireland. Feels a bit like I’ve come full circle.

I’ve travelled a lot in my life. Now that’s relative, of course. Compared to plenty of other backpackers I don’t think I’ve done that much, but in comparison to the average guy or gal I think I’ve seen a fair bit. I use my memories as the base for describing scenery in my work. If I need a coastline or harbour, I think of Porsgrunn and Arendal in Norway. If I need mountains, valleys and other such grand scale, then my time in Queenstown, New Zealand works well. Similarly Vietnam for vast areas of countryside covered in both trees and farmland, while Hanoi specifically provides a platform for writing about dense population. Ireland and England, being quite similar, is where I think of when I need rolling acres of grassland and hills. Morocco for deserts. Spain for the heat of a summer in the city streets.

I’m blessed with quite a good memory. A lot of people I know will argue against that, but I tend to remember the important stuff. I can be quite bad with names, dates and shopping lists, but in general when I witness things happen I can recall it with a fair amount of clarity. So, for example, when I see pictures of myself in Malaga when Spain progressed to the semi finals of the World Cup in 2010, I also recall the sounds of the celebrations (fireworks, chanting, drums, people banging on the sides of busses and cars as they drove by), the smells (firework smoke, exhaust fumes, sweat and beer) and the atmosphere (jubilation at the victory, mischievousness at the chaos the crowd were causing in the traffic, tension when the police turned up in riot gear to chase everyone away). This helps me when I’m writing since I can usually draw on a memory like that to help remind myself of more than just the visual.

In my last post I touched on how much of your own personal experience should be put into a story. I think with dialogue, emotions and people you know it should certainly be held in check. But with description it’s definitely a case of the more you know, the better. I think that applies to plenty of stuff you don’t know, also. So if you’re writing Science Fiction and have never been to space (surprisingly!), you can probably get a sense of scale if you were to, say, go scuba diving. Now I’m not saying you can compare being in the ocean to being in the great expanse of nothingness outside of our atmosphere, but it should help get a taste of it. Like, say you want to write about a person being thrown out of a plane BUT you’re too scared to actually go skydiving. How about a bungee jump? It still involves a freefall. Can’t drive but want a car chase scene? Go-karting. It’s not like you’re applying for a job here. You won’t get laughed at for twisting the truth of your experiences slightly. Besides, all that stuff is just fun. Fun times are always worth a crack, regardless of why you do them.

Anyway, saying to someone ‘I just got my nose pierced, booked a flight to Peru and spent all my money on motorbike with a dodgy gearbox clutch because I’m researching a novel about a post-apocalyptic gangland war’ sounds so bad-ass that it could be worth it even if you never write the thing.

As for me, I’m going back to Essex. Picking up where I left off four years ago. It’s like rebooting your
PC; all the same shit will be there if you need it, but you just have to load it all up again.

Peru does sound nice, though.

Oh, and my final publisher edits came back yesterday. So it’s time for the final draft of Queen of the World. Plenty of work to be getting on with this week, which I’m looking forward to. Also I’ll meet a new marketing intern from Inspired Quill this week who’ll be helping me get the novel out to the hungry masses, which should be bags of fun. They and I will probably know roughly the same amount about launching a book – as in, not very much at all – so it has that ‘school project’ feel to it. Can’t wait. /glee

I'm gonna have me some fun.

This has been an odd, sad but enlightening week, so this post will be a little more personal than usual. But there is a saving grace to keep us all on topic with the following question: How much of your own emotional experiences should you put into a fictional story?

Since plenty of people who read this blog know me personally, I’ll keep things short and sweet: This week my fiancée and I broke up. It isn’t fun, but we remain close friends.

One thing that made me laugh, though, was remembering which scene I have to write next in the follow-up to Queen of the World. Ethanei, an incredibly drunk vagrant, has recently found his estranged wife in bed with another man. The start of the chapter cuts to him lying sprawled over a table spilling his emotional guts between sobs and curses to one of the series’ main character, Kanderil, who listens with a patient unease. He’s heartbroken, resentful and has given up trying to keep a lid on things, preferring instead to drown out his thoughts with alcohol. The guy’s self-destruction is in full-swing.

I can say with absolutely sincerity that this is a coincidence. The scene was the next in line and is not being written as result of my newly-found single status. There are plenty of written notes and around four preceding chapters to support my claim. Also the scene I described isn’t what I’ve been doing personally. There’s been a lot of beer involved but I haven’t quite reached the stage poor Ethanei has. However there are certain similarities between his current scene and mine. I reckon I could lay out a lot of my feelings – that is, the way I’m thinking and the things I want to say right now – through Ethanei’s actions and words, slipping them between the alcohol-fuelled excess and limb flailing. Being a fictional fantasy story I could get away with it too, most likely. In fantasy? Pfft. People expect angry men to fuckin’ RAGE, violent men to murder innocents on a nightly basis, and heartbroken men to start a quest or adventure or something equally redemptive. (They should at the very least write some poetry or sit in a bar staring at the same tepid ale for hours.) It wouldn’t be too hard to be metaphorical about the literal.

But I don’t want to pour too much out on the page. I want to focus and direct my personal experience into the dialogue, to give them a little realism and direction. But the rant Ethanei is going to give must be directed as his ex-wife, Claira. The words shouldn’t be directed at my ex-fiancée. So there’s the trick. It’s a fine line because I’ve already shared this joke with her and she found it kind of funny as well, but it also means she’ll be acutely aware of the scene when she reads it. I don’t want to offend her or come across as an idiot.

The adage ‘write what you know’, which I touched on a few posts back, is mightily applicable here. Other events in my life have been introduced to scenes and characters. Little sayings. Mannerisms. Almost all of them are so far in the background, or so layered underneath good ol’ fashioned fictional nonsense, that I don’t think even my closest friends of family could point out a line when Queen of the World launches and say ‘Oh man, this is so based on that time you...’ But my personal belief is that my experiences should add texture and a touch of reality to my fictional work. It shouldn’t dominate or make my created world semi-autobiographical. I need to save my real life stories for when I’m stinking rich and famous and am encouraged to pen my memoirs, after all.

Anyway, we’re getting to around two and a half months before the book should be released. Things are a little behind schedule – well, actually more than a little – but I retain my immense faith in Sara and Inspired Quill to get us back on course and keep things ticking over. I like to think I’ve had quite a lot of stuff going on this year, but it’s nothing compared to the amount of work and various other projects my editor has planned. I do my best not to stress her out with my occasional panic about things. Pretty sure it’s working so far.

As for now, I’ll be in Norway for another couple of weeks and then shipping off back to Essex for the foreseeable future. That’s going to be a barrel of fun. At the very least I will be doing much more writing in my old bedroom, which is the plan for now – type like a machine until I find a job to get things ticking over again. Good thing we’re heading into springtime. I haven’t spent a summer in England for about four years. Pub gardens, suspect barbecues and music festivals. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?