Stumbling Over the Finishing Line

So I've been a little quiet of late. That's largely due to the usual end-of-semester marking frenzy, and also a trip to Sydney last weekend.

But, that's not what I'm here to talk about. I've got bigger news.

About an hour ago, I FINALLY FINISHED MY NEXT BOOK!

Thank God.

Sure, when I started it, my plan was for it to take six months (it's only 55,000 words, after all, how long can that take?) and it's ended up taking almost bang on eighteen. And during that time it's felt like a complete monkey on my back.

But now, it's done. And I've got a nice warm pile of paper, hot off the printers, sitting here on the table beside me, just waiting for me to launch into it with a red pen, and start slicing the crap (of which there is an abundance) out of it.

This, for those of you who've been silly enough to hang around here for the last year and a half, is my action / adventure book. It's different to all my other stuff. It's faster paced. Sillier. And has been a lot of fun to write. It's also intended to be the first of a series of (probably) four or five books. Which means that I'm really going to have to speed up my output a little, I suspect.

It's a strange feeling, finishing the first draft. There's an odd mixture of elation and relief, in equal parts. I've now got this big blank(ish) space looming in front of me, which I can fill with all sorts of other projects and ideas. I'll be able to sleep at night without worrying about this book possibly never being completed. And, of course, I've got to start editing it, now, which is where the fun really starts. Particularly for a book that's been written in as many fits and starts as this one.

Still, it's done. And soon, I might need some proofreaders. 13 - 16 year old guys with a penchant for action would be ideal.

Volunteers, anyone?

Aaaand.... back to reality...

So it's the first day of semester here, today.

For the first time in a couple of months, the campus is thronging with students. There are lines to get into the bookshop. The nearest parking spaces are roughly 45km away. Someone is driving a lawnmower outside my office window*

As is my custom at this time of the year, I've spent a good proportion of the day trying to lever several hundred students into just-slightly-fewer-than-several-hundred-places. It's up there with doing a Rubik's Cube. Or self surgery. It generally works out okay in the end, though. By this time next week, touch wood, everyone will be happily allocated to a class which (almost) suits them.

Actually, I think it's going to be a really good semester. Numbers in my classes are up on last year, which is gratifying (and much better than the alternative), and we're doing some fun things in both of them. Later in the semester, we have the lovely Melina Marchetta coming to visit and speak to us (we're studying her fantastic novel The Piper's Son as part of my Lit Studies unit) and in a month or so I'm off to the Perth Writer's Festival. With Toby in tow. Which should be fun.

I'm also within spitting distance of finishing the much procrastinated 'Orion' (which I'm thinking I'm going to have to rename, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.) As of this afternoon, it's at 48,500 words out of an anticipated 50,000**

Of course, late last week I decided that the big final scenes, which I was just launching into, needed to be set not in Melbourne, as I'd originally planned*** but in New York. Luckily I have spent more than a little bit of time in the Big Apple, and so it shouldn't be too big a leap to move things there, though it has involved a few days of re-visiting my old travel photos, and cruising around in Google Earth (what did we writers do before Google Earth? How did we cope?)

I've also had to research private jets, plus a few other interesting bits and pieces that I'd never expected to have to delve into.

So, all things considered, writing wise things are looking up. Today's writing time was a little interrupted by the necessities of life, but from tomorrow I should be back into my daily routine, as per the schedule. Yay.

And then, hopefully within the next week, Orion will be finished. More than 12 months in the making, but finished.

Then I only have four more books to write in that series...

*to be fair, this is nothing to do with the influx of students, and everything to do with, you know, building maintenance.
**Though, to be honest, there's no way I'm going to be able to finish it in 2500 words, and it'll probably blow out closer to 60. But then I'll edit the hell out of it.
***Not, I want to make it clear, that I have anything against Melbourne. I love Melbourne. It's just that Melbourne didn't love this chapter...

A Little More on Inertia

Last week I wrote briefly about inertia.

This was largely because I didn't feel like I was having a particularly good week. I got a lot of little stuff done, but somehow the big stuff (like writing, for example, or working on the couple of academic papers that I've been plugging away at for what feels like forever) wasn't getting done, and not for lack of time, but motivation.

In my rather bleak post last week, I put this down to inertia, and suggested that; ...it's irritating when the brain and the willpower don't come into alignment. For a writer, it's dangerous.

But today, I'm going to disagree with that.*

Because after due thought and consideration, I've come to the conclusion that inertia isn't dangerous, or even bad. It's a necessary part of the whole creative process.

At the moment, I've got my next book sitting on my computer, almost finished. It's somewhere in the region of about 35,000 words, and I expect it'll top out at around 50ish. (It's going to be a lot shorter than my last few books, which is not a bad thing, in my opinion.) It's been at that point for roughly two months now, on a sort of jumpy pause, halfway through chapter twenty-three.

But where last week I was letting this really bother me, the weekend gave me a chance to recharge my batteries and get a little perspective. (There's nothing like working in the garden to help clear the mind...)

And the conclusion I've reached is this: The book will finish itself when it's ready to be finished.

Now, I suspect that this isn't the way a lot of writers work, or think. But it's the way I need to work and think, for a few reasons.

One is because this book is going to be an important one for me. It's different to all my other stuff; very different. It's much more commercial than most of my previous works, but that's not a bad thing. Up to date, it still has an awful lot of me in it; I'm enjoying writing it, I'm loving the story, and most importantly I'm having a lot of fun with it, and I want all this to continue right through the draft. This book is going to involve a little bit of re-imagining of myself and my writing, and if I try to force it out onto the page, all I'll end up with is a disingenuous piece of writing, that has nothing of myself in it. So for that reason, I'm loathe to try and force it out.

Another reason is that the reality of my life now is very different from what it was a couple of years ago. Back then - when I was writing 'Into White Silence' for example, I had the luxury of being able to put a couple of months aside and just bury myself in writing. Not so much any more - now I have fatherly duties which take up (and are the best part of) most of my weekends. I have my job at uni, which is work I love doing - both the teaching and researching - but which leaves me mentally wiped at the end of most days. Time has become a commodity, and if there's one thing that good, genuine writing needs, it's time. So I'll just have to accept the fact that I might need to space my writing more widely across the year, and get used to writing in those periods where I have my mojo on.

Finally there's the requirements of the book itself. During these last couple of months of inertia, I realised the other day, I've been mentally tweaking, exploring and shifting a lot of tiny aspects of the story around in my head, and improving it as a result. This makes me wonder if, just perhaps, this story isn't ready to be confined to the page quite yet.

So there you have it. I'm reversing my position on inertia. For the moment, at least. It's not dangerous, it's natural and probably necessary.

Now, I'm going to have a nap...




* I read somewhere that all good blogs engage in public debate. Well, that's just what I'm doing here. Only with myself.

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Lennon was being ironic, of course, and not without good reason.

I've never been a gun person. Never really got the whole fascination with firearms thing like a lot of other people, especially guys. When the other boys my age were drawing guns, I was generally drawing airplanes. As an adult, I think its reasonably safe to say that I'm anti-guns. Min and I are agreed on the fact that we won't be buying toy guns for Toby, or even really anything resembling a gun. During our visit to the USA last year, one of the most confronting things for me was watching a little girl getting measured up for her first handgun, in an outdoor store in Texas. She can't have been older than ten or eleven, and the idea of inculcating somebody into 'gun culture' at so young an age is a difficult one for me to come to terms with.

So no, not into guns.

But, I'm also a writer, and currently working on a book I which my protagonist is intimately familiar with weapons of all sorts, including guns.

Which, naturally, poses some problems.

The main one being that, while I'm writing the book in such a way as not to glorify gun use, I still feel very strongly that its the responsibility of a writer to get the details correct - my character uses a handgun, on more than one occasion. I've already written one of the scenes in which this happens, and like always, I did some homework before writing it: a lot of reading up on various types of guns, calibre of ammunition, weights, recoils, type and shape of grip, number of bullets in the magazine, that sort of thing. But, when push came to shove, the scene just didn't rIng true. All the reading in the world wasn't enough to tell me what it feels like to fire a handgun, especially a weapon designed for one purpose only - to kill or injure another human being.

So, this morning, I took myself to a shooting range here in Perth, hired a Ruger 9mm automatic pistol - the same model that I'd chosen for my character, was taught the basics of handgun handling and operation, and then left alone to blast away at some targets.

And, despite my misgivings, I'm glad I did it. For a number of reasons.

Firstly, the physical sensation was nothing like I'd expected. The feel of the gun in my hand, the leap of the recoil, the concussion of the noise, the smell of the gunpowder, the smell of gun oil, the satisfying 'ka-ching' of the spent cartridge ejecting from the firing chamber, the pleasure of seeing a hole punched in your target downrange.

Yes, I'll admit it: I actually enjoyed the experience.

Firing a handgun is a tactile experience, and a powerful one. There's implicit menace and danger in that lump of metal, and when you pick it up off the bench, slot home the magazine and release the safety, there's an odd feeling of implicit power, even in the controlled environment of a shooting range.

I'm also glad I went because of what I learned, and that the whole point of doing research, when all is said and done. By the time I'd shot off my 30 rounds, and then had a good chat to both the range technician and the range manager, I realized that I'd given my character the wrong gun, for the wrong purpose, and based on wrong interpretation of what I'd read. I'm going to be reworking those scenes in my book when get home next week.

I'm also glad I went because it gave me an unexpected respect for the people who handle and use weapons as part of their day to day lives: the police, the military. I never really understood, at a visceral level, how much those sort of jobs include the power of life and death. I know for certain now that I could never point a weapon like that at someone and pull the trigger, or probably even cope with the possibility that I might have to.

So, all in all, a valuable and interesting experience.

Am I still anti gun? Yes. Perhaps even more so. Especially small, concealable, automatic weapons like the one I fired today.

Am I still anti gun-people? Not so much. I won't be rushing back to the firing range, or taking up Olympic shooting, but at least now I can understand, to a degree, some of the appeal.

A Language Warning.

Not going to write a great deal here, today, chiefly because I had a particularly good writing day today, having clocked up just a touch over 4000 words since I started writing at 11.00 this morning.

So, I'm a little typed out at this point in the afternoon.

It's strange, though, because last week I had a complete shocker - at least in writing terms. Got perhaps a couple of hundred words down, in dribs and drabs, and found it almost impossible to get myself settled into the rhythm of the story, so I kept giving up and finding other things to do, and while this is good for my wider productivity, it's not good for my writing career. It's not writer's block or anything like that - I know what I'm going to write, and I know I have to write it, and I know how it's going to come out. It's just the opposite of writer's block, in fact - it's writer's procrastination.

It's not the first time this has happened to me, and it probably won't be the last, either. In part, I think it occurs due to what I generally refer to as the 'This is all shit' phenemenon.

This is something which most writers I know deal with from time to time. With me it's pretty much a constant occurance. Put simply, when I'm writing something, generally there's a large part of my mental energy taken up with telling myself how completely and utterly crap it is. At the same time as I'm plugging the words out onto my computer, there's a little bit in the back of my brain which is constantly whispering 'this is shit. this is shit. this is shit..."

Of course, it generally isn't shit. Well, not more than about 50% of the time, anyway. It's all a matter of perception and self belief.

For me, one of the biggest writing hurdles is just shutting that little voice out and keeping on writing, secure in the knowledge that it probably isn't as bad as I think it is, and that even if what I've written turns out to be unreadable, I'll probably still be able to salvage a couple of hundred words from it. After all, if you don't write anything - even rubbish - then you never get anything written.

But, sometimes, it's just too difficult to get past the feeling that you're going nowhere fast. Especially if you have a lot of other things on your plate, which is the situation I was in last week. And on those occasions, it can be a bit of a vicious spiral; the less you write, the less you want to write. It's why momentum is so important with writing.

So, anyway, this morning I took the Labour Party's election advice and just 'moved forward'* And by mid afternoon, the 'this is shit' voice had finally quietened down a little. By the time I knocked off, about fifteen minutes ago, my book had just ticked over 20,000 words, which is always a nice milestone to hit. I also made a fairly major decision regarding the narrative voice, which means I'm probably going to have to go back and do a bit of rewriting before I get a lot further, but that's all positive stuff. It means I'm re-engaging with the story.

And that's what helps keep the momentum going.

So, wish me luck for tomorrow. If you see me on twitter too often, then shoot me abusive messages.

I'll thank you for it.

Promise.

*Couldn't let a post go by without some sort of a political reference. It is an election campaign at the moment, after all...

And Awaaaay We Go.... (Home Alone Day #2)

This morning, I was at work just a little after 7 am. This is actually not as bad as it sounds because:

a) It's 38 degrees in Canberra today. My office is air conditioned, my house is not.
b) Getting here early means that I don't have to feel too bad about leaving here early (which I'll be doing very soon) and
c) Thanks to the motivational effect of my poll over there ---------------------------------------------------------------------->
I've been able to pull my finger out and have actually written the better part of 5000 words today! Woot!

This, of course, means that I don't get to hire a Porsche, unless there's a last minute run on the voting, but even so, it's a good result.

The best part is, I've been working on this new book in small dribs and drabs for about three months, but today I hit the point where I'm really starting to break inertia with it. By the time I stopped writing this afternoon, at just a shade under 9000 words, both the story and the writing were just flowing, and I know that when I sit down tomorrow morning and start again, they'll keep flowing.

And the story?

I don't want to say too much about it yet, in case I jinx myself, but I can tell you that it's fun. It's loaded with action, it's got a really nice suspenseful backstory a lot of which is revealing itself to me as I write (A new experience for me - I'm usually a meticulous planner), and it doesn't require a trip to Antarctica to research it. In fact, the sort of research required can largely be done by Googling things like 'fast cars' and 'big handguns' and 'breeds of pygmy iguana'

Actually, I've only had to google two of those three. You can decide which is the odd one out.

But it's nice, you know? To be writing something that hasn't been in my head forever, and which hasn't been hanging over my head, either. My last two big books were both contracted a long time before they were finished and it's really refreshing to be just writing for the spontaneous fun of it again. I'd forgotten what an important aspect of creative writing that is - to write for the adventure of it.

So thanks to all the people who took the final option on the poll and gave me a well needed kick in the bum. I appreciate it.

Of course, the poll is open for another day, and it's not too late to pick the Porsche, instead...

T'was The Night Before Christmas...

...and all through the house, 

Not a creature was moving,

Except for my son who, on Christmas eve, decided that it was time to start walking. There we were, down at the lovely little beach house we'd hired for the week, and suddenly Toby is strolling across the kitchen. Literally like that. One second he's crawling and cruising around the furniture  just like always, and the next he's standing in the middle of the room looking at us all and wondering what all the fuss was about.

And since then, he's been on two feet as often as possible.

So now we have a toddler. For real.

It's really strange - yesterday while tidying my study I was looking at some photos from a year ago, when he was just a tiny little squidglet of a baby, and it's hard to believe that this little fella toddling around and getting into everything is the same person. I've been looking forward to him walking all year - looking forward to the independence and increased interactivity that it brings with it. But now that it's happened, there's also something ineffably sad about it. I hadn't expected that at all.

So... on to other news. We had a lovely week down at the coast. It involved beaches, swimming, lots of reading and sleeping and playing games and eating. Christmas day we cooked a nice lunch, and called families, and just generally had a mellow time. Our internet access was basically non-existent, which was a great excuse not to even think about work. The dog got to go to the beach, which she loved. Toby came to like the beach, although at first he was a little reluctant about the entire experience:

But he soon came around:

Now we're home again, and have another week until work opens again, which I intend to use to get a few outstanding jobs done around the house. I've also got vague plans to do some writing. I've got the first five thousand or so words of something new done, and I'm hoping to make a real dent in it over summer. It's tentatively called 'Orion: The Hunter' and it's a high pace, just a little silly, action adventure mystery - really different to my last couple of books, and is proving a lot of fun to write. I'll post a few more details as it progresses.

Anyway, the boy is awake, so now my day begins in earnest. Hope you all had a lovely festive season.