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Sci-fi and Young Adult author: sometimes both. Dad, geek, diver. Tea, no coffee. @MikeCamel

Tuesday 27 August 2013

My first children's novel

I've been rather quiet on this blog for a while.  It's for a couple of reasons: first, I've been sending the first and second novels to agents and waiting for replies.  I've had several positive ones, but none positive enough: nobody has yet offered to take me on.  I've also been writing.  I've found it difficult and dispiriting writing whilst being rejected by agents.

However, last night, I finished my first children's novel.  I've got two young adult novels finished, and a third on the go, but I started this one on a family holiday with my two girls and their cousins.  Catherine's sister, Jenny, was reading them Terra, by Mitch Benn, and I was frankly a little jealous that she was getting to read to them, and I wasn't.  So I started writing something for them to read.  They're 6, 7, 8 and 10, and an idea came to me.  I wrote several chapters that week, reading them to the girls as I wrote them, and finished it off last night.  I need to send the completed version off to Jenny to read to her girls, after I've done some editing.

It was great fun to write, and I had a number of good suggestions from the girls.  I'm going to edit it (see above), tightening it up and checking that the vocabulary isn't too difficult.  It's aimed at 6-11 year olds - girls and boys - either as readers themselves, or to be read to them.  It's fairly short - around 13,500 words, or 11 chapters before editing - and hopefully nice and fast-moving.

It's called Keith, my magical, talking sword, and it's about how much trouble a magical, talking sword can be to you.  Particularly if you're only at primary school.  It's supposed to be funny (the girls laughed a lot), and it was a lot of fun to write.  It has a main character who's a girl and two friends - a boy and a girl - and I've already got at least a couple of other lined up in the same series.  I'm looking forward to approaching agents with it.

Friday 10 May 2013

...parting is such sweet sorrow... - a #100wcgu post


Moving to Stockholm made me re-evaluate my life.  It's so stylish, so hip, so trendy.  Unlike the old me.  I changed my clothes.  I bought a new car.  I started listening to new music.  No more Engelbert Humperdinck: just dubstep, now.  I bought a Macbook Air and a new iPhone.  Now I am achingly, painfully with it.

But there's one thing wrong.  It's my hair.  I've sorted the designer stubble.  That was easy.  But my floppy fringe: it causes the locals almost physical pain with its lack of cool.  Yes, it's that bad: my parting is such Swede sorrow.

(I'm so, so sorry - I couldn't help myself...)

This is a 100 word challenge for grown-ups: for more details, and other entries, see #100wcgu.

Tuesday 23 April 2013

The urn - a 100wcgu post







Smug: that's the word for her. She's smug. Ooh, she winds me up. “Curvy is good,” she says, “not like you. You're short and squat. And common. I can't think why they even let you in.”

But I'm going to get her today. Some men like me the way I am, and I'm just waiting for one who wants to cosy up close and take some notice of me. Then I'm going to entice him round, just so. And he'll be looking at me, only me, ignoring her, unaware that she even exists, and … oh dear! How very sad.



This is a 100 word challenge for grown-ups: for more details, and other entries, see #100wcgu.

Monday 22 April 2013

Your favourite ... character

One of the questions that I ask my readers is who their favourite character is, and why.  The answer that I expect is either "Kate" (for Hacking the Dragon) or "Lena" (for Big Brother's Little Sister), for the simple reason that they're the heroes (heroines, if you must) of their respective stories.  I know that I've invested a lot of thought and care into them, and I can get quite emotional about some of the things that happen to them, and I also know a lot about them, their background, their motivations, fears and aspirations.

The answer, however, isn't always what I expected.  J, my eldest, for instance, chose Jess and Jagruti from the two books.  Both are more minor characters, though both have an important role to play in the action.  I suspect that one of the reasons that J is interested in these characters is that they both have a bearing not only on the main characters in the books - Kate and Lena - but also both have interesting interactions and relationships with them. 

It's surprised me how much interest I have in the secondary characters in my books.  There's certainly a tier of tertiary characters who don't have much to do, and are maybe a little less developed that the primary and secondary characters, but I know an awful lot about the first and second tiers, so although I don't quite understand quite why my readers aren't as taken by heroes as I am, it's also quite pleasing that they think that these other characters are worth investing time in.

Saturday 13 April 2013

Some great feedback

My last post was about feeling rather nervous about having adults read my 2 novels, and since then a few offered, and I've had some really, really positive feedback.  Some great feedback and questions on my first novel, Hacking the Dragon, raising some questions which I expected to come up, and which I hope to discuss with an agent and/or editor, when I find them.  Thanks very much, Stephen!  The best compliment he paid me was to want to know what happened to the characters - and the society - next.  The next best was to want to read the second novel, Big Brother's Little Sister, which he's now doing.  A very different read, in a different world, with different problems.

Another friend is currently reading BB'sLS, as is his 13 year-old daughter.  I've just got the first comments from her: she particularly liked the characterisation, which is very gratifying, as it's an area I worked hard on this time round, particularly.

Huge thanks to Sylvie, and to everyone else who's reading it.  I look forward to your thoughts!

Saturday 6 April 2013

Adult readers - a reprise

So, partly as a result of my previous post about getting feedback from adult readers, I accepted the offer of a few friends who said they'd be happy to read my a novels.  I've got 2 readers - both colleagues - reading Hacking the Dragon and 1 reading Big Brother's Little Sister, with his 13 year old daughter reading it, too.  I'm hoping that a good FB and Twitter friend will be happy to read the latter, too - she is, after all, the person who after whom the main baddy is named.

And 1 of them has already finished, and read the book really quickly.  I'm very, very grateful, and looking forward to his feedback.  Very much.  Except that I'm also quite nervous about it.  He's already mentioned that he found it a real page-turner, which is a great relief.  In fact, it's probably the very best thing he could have said, because the thing I'm most interested in, as far as my readers go, is that they want to read to the end and find out what happens.

But what else?  Is the characterisation awful?  Is the plotting obvious, or just unconvincing?  Is the pacing too quick, too slow?  I don't know.  Maybe there are some plot points that don't hold together.

We'll see - I have only myself to blame for asking for more feedback, but if I'm ever going to be a published author, or expand my readership beyond a few friends and family, then I need to be ready to accept that other people are going to read it.  And that they won't like everything they read.  Sometimes because what I've written needs work.  Sometimes because the style doesn't suit them.  Of course, in the latter case, it's their fault, because my writing is, in fact, perfect, and doesn't need any work at all.

Or something.

Anyway - I'm looking forward to hearing the feedback.  Whatever it is (almost).

Thursday 4 April 2013

State killings

There's a lot in the British social media at the moment from people calling for the hanging of two parents who killed 6 children in a fire at the home.  We don't have the death penalty in the UK, and haven't had since before I was born - so that's over 40 years - and there's little likelihood that we ever will again.  Although certain parts of the UK political scene would like to repeal the European Convention on Human Rights, part of the deal with that piece of legislation is that any state that signs up for it must remove the death penalty from its statue books.  In other words, any country that accepts the ECHR isn't allowed the death penalty.*

For me, this is a completely non-negotiable point.  I never approve of state executions.  There are times when I can see that it seems to be the only option, but there are too many reasons not to execute.  The first reason not to allow executions is that you can get it wrong.  And executing the wrong person would always, always be a tragedy.  The second is that the death penalty is not a deterrent.  Look at the figures: it just isn't.  The third is that historically, poorer, less educated and more socially disadvantaged murderers are, in all jurisdictions, more likely to be executed than their more privileged peers.  The last is that by being part of a society which condones killing, we become killers ourselves.  It's really that simple.

And what right do I, an author of YA books, have to talk about this?  Well, not much.  But it is a topic which I deal with in my second novel, Big Brother's Little Sister.  I don't go into the ethical issues above at all - partly because I suspect that for most of my intended readership, the idea of state killings would be anathema.  The killing of a character in the book is central not only to the plot, but also to our view of at least one other character.  For me, it was such an obvious device to use that it didn't require much thought.

We don't kill people.  No matter what they've done.  It's not what people do.  It's not what good people do: it's not what people even trying to be good people do.  Don't sign up for it.  Not in my name.



*This is my understanding - IANAL (I am not a lawyer), and could have it wrong.

Monday 1 April 2013

Big Brother's Little Sister - revision finished

It's done!  I took advantage of a quiet couple of days with the rest of the family away to complete the first revision of my second YA novel, Big Brother's Little Sister.  It's written for a slightly older audience than Hacking the Dragon, and at a little over 117,000 words, it's a lot longer too (Hacking the Dragon is currently around 65,000).  The main difference, though, is that it's a lot darker.

The themes they have in common is that they both have strong female protagonists, and in both cases, there's only so much help they can get from the adults in their lives to resolve the major problems that arise in their lives.  Pretty much everything else is different, though, including the worlds which Lena (Big Brother's Little Sister) and Kate (Hacking the Dragon) live.  Lena's world is technologically very similar to ours, though the political milieu is more right-wing, whereas in Kate's world, there are computer systems running people's houses and most adults have the Chip, a direct brain interface which, well, can cause problems.  That said, computer systems feature heavily in both - I'm keen to encourage characters (and my readers!) to engage with technology, whether they're boys or girls.

Now I need to decide what to do with it.  Hacking the Dragon is currently seeking an agent, but I've not got that far with Big Brother's Little Sister yet.  I think I need to find a few friendly readers to get their views, and to decide whether J, my eldest, is going to be happy with the darker outlook presented by this novel.  I think she'll be fine, but I suspect we'll spend quite a lot of time talking about the more adult themes that the book presents.

More later, but for now, it's time for a cup of tea (and maybe that chocolate éclair that's sitting in the fridge downstairs).

Sunday 31 March 2013

Favourite authors: Melissa Scott

The Womens Room UK is a great organisation which seeks to help the media in the UK find female experts on all sorts of topics, and was founded as a reaction to the under-representation of women's voices in the media.  It's a great group of people, and has a very active following on Twitter at @TheWomensRoomUK.  Today, they asked people to name their favourite female authors, and I chose Melissa Scott.

I can't remember when I first came across Scott, but I think the first of her books I read was Trouble and her Friends.  I hesitate to pigeon-hole her work, but it's broadly science fiction, and often has an element of cyberpunk.  It's also always refreshing, but what really stands out for me is the positive LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans) characters that she introduces.  A number of the books explore issues of gender and sexuality, but mostly, the characters are just, well, there, and the question of their sexuality, in particular, is incidental: it's just part of who they are.  There are times when this - or their gender - may be relevant to the main plot, but often it's not.  To give an example, I've just re-read The Shapes of Their Hearts, where one of the characters, Traese, is a woman living on her own with sporadic, but non-physical contact with another woman.  Is there a longing there for a deeper relationship?  She (Traese) also speculates briefly on whether two or more of the other (male) characters may be more than partners in the professional sense, but this feels like an honest and unforced reflection which fits effortlessly into the story.

I also like the fact that Scott's main characters are often female, and as the protagonists in both of my novels (Hacking the Dragon and Big Brother's Little Sister) are girls, I wanted to nominate her because her writing was part of what spurred me on to write books for my daughters.  She's exactly the sort of writer that I hope they'll grow up to read when they're a little older.

Whilst writing this, I've discovered that Scott has her own Twitter account at @blueterraplane, so go and have a look/follow.

Saturday 30 March 2013

Playlists

I'm not sure about everybody else, but I listen to music all the time, and particularly when I'm writing.  Sometimes I need to change what I'm listening to reflect my mood, or what I'm writing about, but there's almost always music on.  I'm currently listening to Tracey Ullman's classic "My Guy", for instance.  I'm a big fan of Spotify - though it sometimes means that I miss some of the great music I bought over the 20+ years before everything was on tap to be accessed whenever I thought of it.

I was on the way back home from a work meeting in Germany earlier this week with my trusty Moleskine (Star Wars special edition - sad, but true), and didn't feel like committing any actual writing to it, but with some music on my headphones.  It occurred to me that it might be interesting to create playlists for the two novels that I've completed - and to think about playlists for the writing that I'm planning.  I realised as I started committing some songs to paper that there were at least two different types of list per novel: songs that I'd listened to during the writing of the book, and songs which I thought might be interesting to readers and/or relevant to the book's subject matter, themes or atmosphere.

I decided to concentrate on the latter, partly because I listen to a lot of music, and partly because at least some of the music I have on my various personal playlists is either too weird or too explicit-of-lyrics for the intended readers of both novels.  As soon as I started, though, it became clear that it was a rather mannered enterprise.  Given my age, and the age of my readers, do they really want to be listening to the music I listened to in my youth - all those 80s hits?  What about the more self-indulgent electonika (yes, it's some if it's the German stuff) which I've been known to enjoy?  Would be it better to include some of the dubstep that I rather enjoy, to my lovely wife's considerable disgust: is that too much like an obvious attempt to down-wiv-da-kids?  It would be very easy to try to "educate" my projected readership, and I'm sure (well, I hope) that some of them would enjoy that. 

But how important is the author in all of this?  Coming back to the title of this blog, surely we should be deconstructed, and as little interested as possible in the text as possible?  What importance, if any, does what the author likes listening to - or feels his/her readership should be listening to - have to the text?  In fact, any playlist I might associate with the text changes the text, as it becomes part of the text.  Maybe I should have thought about the songs as I wrote the books themselves?  In fact, I did, a bit, but not in detail, and not to the extent that I wrote a list of tracks as I went along in a Nick Hornby "High Fidelity" kind of way.

In many ways, I'm more interested in what readers of the book would like to associate with the book, and if they do get published, I think one interesting exercise will be to help facilitate the sharing of associated media - playlists, photos, video clips, drawings, etc. - with the books.  J, my eldest, has already created a folder with a friend of hers (who's also read it) around the first novel, Hacking the Dragon, with drawings, blurbs and character sketches.

Lots to think about.  I'll leave it there, and settle back to listen to Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz".  Really.

Monday 25 March 2013

...looking at all that chocolate... #100wcgu post

... I knew there was only one option. You have a duty as a parent to do the right thing. It's not always easy, but if I can't put my children first, then what kind of a dad am I? Luckily, their mum agrees with me, and we take the difficult decisions together. Tomorrow would be Easter Day, and there were mountains of it, all for the kids. I looked at it, and made a decision. I reached for the first chocolate egg: lots of munching to do if we were to eat all of their chocolate before morning.


This is a 100 word challenge for grown-ups: for more details, and other entries, see #100wcgu.

Sunday 24 March 2013

Revising and editing - some pitfalls

When I started writing, I didn't realise how much time I'd spend having to rewrite what I'd first written.  There seem to be a number of reasons to revise what you've written, and here are the ones that come to mind:
  1. you've come up with a brilliant idea which you're going to have to change a number of earlier passages to sew in.  This is usually, in my experience, during the middle of the first draft, and is a great feeling.  The problem occurs later, when you realise that what you've written in ignores the thread that you'd been on when you wrote it the first time round, and you need to spend even more time revising later on.
  2. you realise that you need to tighten things up generally, so you need to pull out some passages.  The problem again occurs later, because the passages you wrote were more integral to the plot than you realised, so you have to re-re-edit.
  3. you realise that you need to cut things down because your word count is too high.  You choose some unimportant paragraphs, which clearly have no major relevance to the plot.  See above (2) for exactly the same drawbacks.
  4. you decide to improve characterisation, because a particular character was, at most, 1-dimensional.  You add more information about them which either contradicts what you wrote before, or changes what they would have done in later passages, requiring a much more major revision.
  5. you discover that what you wrote reads as if it were rubbish, and it contradicts or destroys a major plot point, but when you look at it in detail, you just realise that you wrote it in such a way that it was very unclear, and a little tweaking will allow your reader to follow what you meant to say much more clearly.
  6. you discover that what you wrote reads as if it were rubbish, and you're entirely correct.  The problem here is that you really did write rubbish, and it may have been compounded by any of the previous points.  This is a big one, and may require you to start again.  But it's only words, right, and at least you realised before you sent it to an agent.  You did realise, right?  
So, revision is vastly important, but there's a danger that when you come back to a piece of writing having let it rest for a month or more - as everybody says you should - that you're out of the zone of tight plotting that you were in when you wrote it, or at least believed you were in, and that it's therefore very easy indeed to mess things up royally as you revise.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't have to be done.

I didn't mention a final mistake that you might have to edit out.  You might have made some insane decision when you started writing the piece that looked, at the time, as if were bound to win you a major literary prize, or maybe a Nobel, but which, in retrospect, just shows that you should ensure that you're entirely sober when you start plotting.  I should point out that nobody would ever do something like this - it's the equivalent of writing your narrative from the point of view of a baby elephant - but if you were to do anything quite so crazy, it might be time to think about some major changes.

Friday 22 March 2013

100wc and 100wcgu

J, my eldest, is at a school where they participate in the #100wc or "100 word challenge", a weekly challenge where children across the globe (and there are participants from English-speaking schools all over the place, not to mention the equivalent one for Welsh-speakers!) get to write, well, 100 words based on a prompt.

This prompt could be a phrase, a collection of words, or even a picture, and I've seen some fascinating entries by Jo and her classmates.  The challange is run by Julia Skinner, and she's collected a team of commentators who are asked to visit the entries by the children and add a comment.  Some children's entries will have garnered comments from friends, parents, classmates or teachers, whereas for others, the commentator's comment may be the only one.  The cardinal rule is to encourage the child.  Tonight, I completed my first set of comments, and it's a real privilege to be encouraging children to write.

I joined after participating in a live 100wc session with J a few weeks ago, and deciding I wanted to be more involved.  It's fun, it makes you think, and it's good critical practice.  And Julia needs more people to help out.  Read some of the entries, and if you can spare the time (about an hour a week), then get in touch.

There's also 100wcgu ("100 word challenge for grown-ups), which is an opportunity for adults to practice the discipline of writing to a very short brief.

To find out more, visit the website, or search for #100wc on Twitter: it's fun, and it helps kids.  What more do you want?

Thursday 21 March 2013

On bad timing - Bologna

It seems that people don't expect you to be an expert in the Sitz im Leben* of the whole literary/publishing world when you're just starting out, which is a relief.  Obviously, if you're looking for an agent (as I am), then you might want to do things like study their submission guidelines**, and read the obvious canonical works (the most obvious one), but you can't be expected to know all the ins and outs.  I think that agents will cut people a bit of slack.  Well, I really hope they will.

There are, however, some huge pieces of misfortune that can befall you if you don't know some of the basics.  And I've just fallen into one of them.  As any new author would, I'm very keen to find out whether I can find representation and to get feedback on my efforts (which I have, natch, submitted according to the relevant agents' guidelines).  I realise that despite my sparkling covering letter and fascinatingly revealed personality, it may take a while for them to get round to reading my 2 chapters/3 chapters/first 20 pages/first 10 pages [delete as applicable].  I even realise that 6 weeks is pretty much the standard time that I should have to wait.  What I didn't appreciate was that I was sending out my lovingly (and painstakingly) crafted submissions just before the Bologna Children's Book Fair.

"But it's only 4 days long!" you cry.

"That's a working week or more including travel," I reply.  "And there's the week beforehand for preparation, and the week before that when they'll be ignoring anything new that's come in because they know that they've got a week of preparation due.  And after the week of the Book Fair (if my experience of conferences and trade fairs is anything to go by***), there will be several days required for recovery.  And the wine over in Italy is generally more than passable.  And then at least a week to catch up on all the important things that didn't get done at the book fair.  And then another week for them to read the manuscripts that they got from the many authors they met at the conference****."  And that's lots of weeks.  I can't be bothered to count them, partly because I've been exaggerating for dramatic effect, but it feels like I've made a newbie mistake here, and I probably won't hear back from any of them before sometime in July.  Next year.*****

Heigh-ho.



* Yes, I'm going out of my way to be somewhat pretentious here, and I'm also aware that it's not really the right phrase, but I nearly wrote Weltschmerz instead, so it could have gone a whole lot worse.

** Search online for using terms like "agent" "submission guidelines" and "ignore" if you don't believe me.

*** As I used to work for an academic publisher, I'm going to pretend that the children's book fair scene is similar, but it could be even more extreme.

**** There may be none, but I'm fearing the worst now.

***** I should point out that one agent, who shall remain nameless but is, in my brief contact with her, clearly brilliant and generally perfect in all aspects of her personality, contacted me to suggest that I re-sent****** the submission after the Book Fair was over, because she was very busy, and was having IT problems.  I salute you.

****** I first wrote this as "resent the submission", which made the whole sentence read rather differently.  See - re-reading your work is useful.

Wednesday 20 March 2013

... the unseasonal weather meant ...

... that the cats spent longer on the decking than usual, arriving soon after their respective breakfasts, ready to make the most of the baked-light wood, furrily repitilian in their worship of this unexpected spring. They lay at all angles: barlines across the grain, lazy numerals, or following the ruled lines in a feline cursive that could flex and morph to tell the story of the day - bluebottles tracked, birds half-regarded, human feet considered for half-hearted nuzzling - until, as suppers neared, they would stretch and erase themselves, leaving a surface yearning for renewed meaning on a new day.

This is a #100wcgu entry.

Sunday 17 March 2013

Adult readers - getting feedback

We had some family around this weekend to stay.  There are the two girls - T and M - and their parents - Jenny and Jake.  T read Hacking the Dragon in its pre-edited state several months ago (her verdict, "awesome, Uncle Mike" did great things for my ego!), but Jake hadn't been aware that she had.  We were discussing it over supper last night after the kids had gone to bed, and he expressed an interest in reading it.

I've generally taken a view that the more people who read it, the better, as I'm very keen to get critical feedback, so I sent a Kindle-formatted version to his phone, and he started reading it ("I'm enjoying it so far", after the first chapter).  The problem this raised again for me is that a number of adults have now seen copies of Hacking the Dragon, but I've only got feedback from one of them.  In fact, as far as I'm aware, he's the only one who finished it.  (Thanks, David!)  Why is this?  I can see 3 likely reasons:
1) people aren't getting round to starting it;
2) people start it, don't finish it, presumably because they're not drawn in, or maybe just because they're very busy;
3) people finish it, but don't give me feedback.

Kids, on the other hand, are no problem.  They'll read it - quite quickly, in my experience - and give honest feedback.  And so far, it's all been good.

The problem is a combination of the fact that I want to get feedback from adults (who are generally more experienced readers) and that I don't want to be seen to be hassling people too much.  They've kindly agreed to read something for which they're not the target audience, and I already feel that I'm imposing somewhat on their hospitality.  To be seen to hassling them is either rude or desperate - or possibly both.  And then there's the question of why they don't get back to me.  For either of the latter two reasons, I'd really, really like to know why.  I'm not going to be offended by their not liking the book: no book suits everybody.  It could be that they just don't think it's that good.  Well, I know that it's not perfect, and one of the main reasons I gave it to them was in the hopes of getting some feedback to improve it.  Maybe they think that this is just a hobby, and that's how it started, but now I'm committed to this, and I'd like to make a career out of writing - even if it's not my only means of income.  Feedback is important.

So - frustrating, but I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and start asking for honest feedback.  Beware, friends and family!

Saturday 16 March 2013

Harriet's homework - a short story for M

Harriet had taken a human name when her race had discovered that humans didn't have enough tentacles to be able to speak properly.  It was a little awkward, because they'd clearly wanted very, very much to be able to communicate with the Qziflll'm.  Now it was all the rage, having a human name, and almost all of Harriet's friends had one.  Harriet had chosen hers because the first letter looked a little like the fronds on her favourite popstar's front suckers.

Of course, scientists had quickly worked out how to speak human: that was easy. Anybody could speak human: even babies were being taught it now.  The thing about humans was how many of them there were, which meant that there were loads to study.  Lots and lots of them, and more kept coming to visit.  How easy their language was had been one of the things that Harriet had carefully etched on her homework metal.  There were lots of questions you had to answer, and Harriet wanted to get a really good mark this time round.  The previous time, she'd got meteors, meteorites and asteroids all mixed up, and got told off by her teacher.  She frowned as she remembered it, and looked back at the questions.

"How many tentacles do humans have?"  An easy one: 4, with 5 sub-tentacles each, but they weren't very useful for talking.

"What's your favourite type of human, and why?"  That was more difficult, and she had to think quite hard about it.  In the end, she wrote "the bald ones, because I like the way the blue sunlight bounces off their heads."  She wondered about changing that answer, because it almost looked as if she thought that some humans had more than one head, like any normal species, but decided against it.  She had drawn a really good picture of one at the top of the page, and had been careful only to give it one.  She'd given it hair as well, because it was fun to draw, but she hoped her teacher might give her extra marks for knowing that some of them didn't have any.

"Can humans fly?" Ah, she knew this one.  The answer was "not without machines," and had been discovered by scientists after several rather unfortunate incidents which had also provided the information that humans couldn't bounce.  Things had been awkward for a while after that between the races, but they seemed to have come to some sort of arrangement since.

The last question was: "Describe how you feel about humans in one word."  Now, that was difficult, even given how long some words were in proper language, using all your 13 tentacles, face scrunches and farts.  Harriet sat for a while in thought, and then glanced to her left, at the little building where her humans lived.  She reached out a tentacle and picked one up, gently so as not to damage it.  It squirmed and wriggled, and was making little noises, so she put it on an outstretched palm so it could calm down.

It stood, its little eyes looked straight at her, while it frantically waved it top tentacles at her, failing miserably, it seemed to her, to tell her something in her own language.  She shrugged, raised it to her 3rd head, and popped it into her beak.  She chewed.  "Crunchy", she wrote.  That was it: "crunchy."  And with the last question answered, burped, wrapped up her homework and slithered out to play.

Hacking the Dragon - a teaser

I was talking to J, my eldest, last night.  She's re-reading Hacking the Dragon after its revision.  I was surprised that she wanted to read it again, but very pleased.  In fact, she's got in on her Kindle, and is stopping and making notes, some of which are very helpful.  It turns out that she's a very discerning reader, thinking hard about what she's reading, and why it works, but given that she's only 8, she's quite inexperienced, which brings a breath of fresh air to her criticism.

While we were discussing it, she went and found a folder she and and a friend had put together when she'd read the first draft.  It included a few blurbs that they'd come up with.

"Lots of people have the Chip, maybe too many? Kate wants the Chip, but will she always?"

Maybe it's more of a teaser than a blurb, but I think it's really interesting. The Chip, as it happens, is a kind of brain-machine interface, and it's core to the story...

Thursday 14 March 2013

... despite the pounding in my head ...

... the little ones just would not shut up. I mean, we've talked about this year after year after year. Just one day of peace, please, I beg of them. And do they oblige? No. Never. "It's Christmas morning," they whinge. "We want our presents." Well, they would, wouldn't they? I'm sick of it, really I am. Don't they know how busy I've been? They've seen me! I'm always working. Don't they know how much I had to eat and drink last night? Anyway: once, just once, I want to sleep in. The chances? Zero. Stupid elves.


This is a 100wcgu (100 word challenge for grown-ups).

Wednesday 13 March 2013

On choosing names

First post on the actual craft of writing, and it's one of things I struggle with the most: how to name characters.  You have number of options, as I see it:
1) reflect real people's characters, using their real names (danger!)
2) make up names - Arkled'd, Hornwrinkle and the rest
3) look up names in other books/media
4) take real names, try to give them different characteristics

I lean towards 4, but worry that I may not have done a good enough job, and that people will think they recognise themselves, however hard I've tried.  I also worry about the mix of different ethnicities in my books, particularly as I live in a predominantly white British rural community. 

I'd love to hear other people's experiences.

What's with the title? Or "The wife is always right".

So, what's "Mike Bursell - deconstructed by default" all about then?  You may well ask.  Or not.  Well, the first bit, obviously, is my name.  I thought it would be useful to include it.  The second bit?  "Self-indulgent twaddle" Catherine, my lovely wife, would call that.  Did call that, when I told her.  Well, actually, she didn't use the word "twaddle", but an equally British but rather more "Anglo-Saxon" term.

You see, I spent the first 2 years of my university career (rather a grand term, but let's agree to let it ride) studying English with an achingly right-on group of tutors who were generally battling against what they saw as the reactionary literary critical methodologies of a painfully out-of-touch department.  Now, they may have been achingly right-on, and may have felt somewhat ostracised by the rest of their faculty, but they were also excellent and enthusiastic educators, and they taught me and my variously enthusiastic peers the joys (jouissances?) of Derrida, deconstructionism, post-structuralism and all the rest.  And the thing is, it stuck.  I can't pretend that I bring a deconstructionist critique or hermeneutic of suspicion to my every day-to-day encounters with each product manual, O'Reilly-published technical guide or online HOWTO or FAQ around me, and my initial thought on discovering a new author is not, if we are honest, "ah - this author is dead, and his/her intentions and biographical impact are zero", in a ho-ho-ho Barthes-ian way, but I did come away with a fairly postmodernist take on the world.

But let's at least agree to allow me to profess that I have "deconstructionist tendencies", and that, as a self-confessed "author", my first, and default position is to deconstruct myself and call, if you will, my own bluff.

Catherine will, at this point, turn her eyes to the heavens and require another glass of wine.  And she's quite right - as always.

You see: self-indulgent twaddle.

Being an author - first thoughts

I'm an author: there, I've said it.  I get the feeling that saying it - or writing it - takes you at least half way there.  I've finished 2 novels now, and I'm looking for an agent for the first one: "Hacking the Dragon".  The other one ("Big Brother's Little Sister") is currently resting - in the way of chronically-under-employed acting types - before I come back to it and edit it up. 

Hacking the Dragon has been through two re-visits, and now feels ready to face some agents.  I got some very good feedback on it just as I was starting BB'sLS, but was too far into that to risk working on Hacking the Dragon.  I'm glad I waited: BB'sLS was flowing very well, and I think interrupting that wouldn't have been good for it.  Equally, more time to let Hacking the Dragon stew in my unconscious let me come to terms with the suggestions, and give it a bit more space.

So - what's it about?  Well, it's probably fair to call it light cyberpunk science fiction for young adults.  That sounds awfully clinical, though.  Maybe best to explain who it's for.  To be frank, it's for my eldest daughter - let's call her J.  When she started to get really into reading, I looked around, and couldn't see the sort of thing that I like reading, but for children.  Particularly for girls.  That felt awful: my two daughters - J and M - enjoy science and watching geeky programmes on TV, and I was pretty sure they'd enjoy reading about it, too.  It turned out I was right.

I started writing it partly as an exercise in introducing the girls to Linux and geekery.  Which was a terrible, terrible idea.  I then carried on writing it because I thought that the plot was quite cool.  Which was better, but still a pretty bad plan.  I finished writing it because I'd grown interested in the characters, and how they were going to cope with what was going on around them.  The plot unfurled round them.  That was a significant improvement.

I'll save a synopsis for another post, but what I wanted to write about on this blog was the process of writing.  I really enjoy writing, and I find it fascinating.  I know that I've got better at the craft of writing between Hacking the Dragon (now around 65,000 words) and BB'sLS (currently around 115,000 words), and I wanted a place to reflect on the process of writing, and to get comments and feedback.

There may not be much in this post that merits comment yet, but if there's anything you're interested to say, or hear about, get in touch.  More will, as they say, follow.