And we’re off…

Well, that’s the old 2004 rumbling to a close, like a chesty cough. And I have to say that I expectorate a much better 2005. Now that’s not to say that 2004 hasn’t been a blast: ‘cos it has. This year has been, over all and taking into account the various ‘qualities’ of work, not too bad at all. I’ve got wonderful publishing deals with wonderful publishers all over the world; I’ve met a lot of nice, but f***ing WEIRD people through this blog (with the exception of David V**** who is not weird at all, but super special – first person I know of to actually order my book and therefore a star of the highest magnitude); I’ve gone part time from my ‘lovely job’; I’ve been out to dinner with lots of pretty ladies from HarperCollins ;}# ; We’ve got a new cat (more of whom later when I get some web space sorted out for pictures); and Fiona’s horse, Jasper, has come out of permanent invalidity to perform again.

So all in all a pretty bloody great year.

2005 is going to be scary as a badger with a hand grenade, but I’m going to try and rise to the challenge. After all, if I screw this up, it’s back to the poopy IT Project Management grindstone for me until I die (which probably won’t take long).

So: anyone out there – have a great eighteen minutes and an even better 2005! (just as long as you remember to buy my book… {Rickards - this means you!})

;}#

Alas poor Yorik…

Well, it’s been a while and I’m still not on the old internet full-time, but I have been able to sneak onto the Ethernet for long enough to revisit the old haunts. And I see that Little Rickards is doing a special on “things what have died this year”. Well, I was going to do an upbeat thing about the fact this is one of the few years, in the last dozen, that I can actually look back on and say: “You know what: that didn’t suck!”, but his clarion call to the melancholy has got me in its spell.

Chapter 32 – I dist love thee… though not enough to avoid rolling over you with the Pit Bull Terrier of re-write. Now I must here confess that it’s a rare occasion that sees me buggering about with a chapter once it’s writted, but poor old CHAPTER 32 is the exception to the rule.
Now I must coinfess that the last time I looked at it I cut out about two thirds of it and stuck it away in a file of its own… Then I put it all back in again. But now I am determined: get thee behind me 32! Though are but the trinkets of a whore! (or something like that).

This dreadful lack of desire comes out of a meeting I had not two weeks ago with the procurator fiscal in Aberdeen. Now that may sound like a ‘so what?’ to you, but this is basically THE head honcho for law enforcement in the North East of Scotland. Head honcho of the third largest city in the country. Ultimately responsible for every single court case in the whole bleedin’ place. And a jolly nice lady to boot: early forties, blonde wavy hair, pink suit like one of those Jackie O jobs, only without the nasty black buttons and piping – you know, the bits that make it look like a clown outfit – all in all a class act. And she tells a mean story too, unfortunately none of which can be repeated for legal reasons. BUT: one thing she did do was poop around with the story I had written so far. In order to bear even a marginal resemblance to reality I would have to go back and make sweeping changes to the book. So I did.

Now this in itself is painful enough (lies, all lies, I just had to change the bits involving the procurator fiscal, but it sounds more dramatic this way), but it did afford me the opportunity to go through the whole book from the start. And I got to say: it actually hangs together. Reads like someone clever wrote it (which is a bloody shock), or at least someone not thick as three short planks (again: huh?). But it did mean that poor chapter 32 had to go.

Out with the bathwater you go. Your burning remains floating up to the heavenly chorus – and other pish like that.

However (and you knew this was coming) it has raised a number of interesting questions. I think I’m going to have to present them what make the big decisions with two endings to book two. One ‘standard’ and one ‘a bit not’. Wonder which one they’re going to bet the farm on…

Darling you’ve got to let me know…

I have to point out that I’m not propositioning anyone here (my wife disapproves of such behaviour), it’s just a title thing. Should I stay, or should I go? This then is the question that’s been plaguing me for the last ten months. Ever since that gilded trumpet sounded, bringing with it the angels from HarperCollins in all their publishing glory. Now, to put this in context I probably have to tell you that my expectations on the old publishing front were modest, to say the least. So when HC came back with their pretty swanky offer it was beyond my wildest dreams. Well, not my WILDEST dreams, those featured a telephone number advance (with international dialling prefix), but way, way, way, way more than I ever thought I’d ever realistically get.

But, dear browser, there is a dark side to this tale of joy: what to do about work. Now you may notice that I don’t mention my job much on this blog malarkey. That’s mostly because we are expressly forbidden from complaining, or criticizing the company in any public, or private, forum. Which is why I don’t tend to talk about my job. Suffice it to say that I don’t enjoy what I do for a living a whole lot. AND, as I’m not a writer yet (as one can’t call oneself that, IMHO, until that first book actually hits the shelf, so until March 17^th I’m still a Project Manager.) For them what don’t know; Project Management in the IT industry is not a great deal of fun. In fact IT Manager was recently rated third in the top 100 crap jobs, loosing out only to Toilet Cleaner on a North Sea Ferry and Phone Sex-Line Operator. But it pays the bills.

The longer this year has gone on, the more… inclined I have become to just jack it all in and leave. Give this writering thing a good crack of the whip. It’s not like I like the job after all… And yet… It pays the bills.

Fiona is much more decisive: “S******g them!” she says (with asterisks instead of naughty words as she is a lady and doesn’t mind flouting Rickard’s F*****g Law) “Go write for a living. Look after the cat. Stop being a grumpy b****r and do it!”

But you see: it pays the bills…

Maybe I’ll feel differently after I come back from Norway in March with an actual, genuine, cast in paper and cardboard and some sort of fabricky-leather-ish stuff in a nice dust jacket. Then I shall throw caution to the wind and say, “Look at me! I’m a write-ist!” …

Till then, I suppose: it pays the bills.

Broadband? What broadband?

As you can probably tell from the preceding chunk of silence the whole “I know, I’ll get broadband in for Christmas,” thing has been about as successful as Anne Widicome’s nude modelling career. Not for me sitting in the comfort of mine own home, surfing the net, accessing the old hotmail and posting to the blog. Nope. Not an electronic chipolata for me this festive season.

The main reason being that British Telecom can’t differentiate between that bendy bit in the middle of their arm and the two wobbly things they sit on. Probably because both are really close to their shoulders (given where their heads are). Two numpties turned up on Monday morning – in two separate, grubby BT vans – with no damn clue as to what they were supposed to be doing there and why. Nor would they deign to hang about for the two minutes it would take to call up their office and find out what the hairy-arseholes was going on. No, instead they belched, clambered back in their vans and sodded off, never to be seen again.

So no broadband for me. And, as the modem and micro switches have to be posted out, there’s not likely to be until 2005.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

Swearing – not big, not clever…

And yet we all do it. Unless you’re some kind of saintly nun, living on Rich Tea Biscuits in a remote convent’s broom cupboard. John Rickards had a rant the other day about people who use the naughty language, but hide it behind coy asterisks. Which got me to thinking: as an occasional offender – and thus at risk from what’s swiftly becoming known as ‘Rickards’ F*****g Law’ – why do I use much, much filthier language when I write books than I would anywhere else? I mean, I have been known to let fly the odd torrent of abuse, but most of the time I’m pretty tame on the old vocabulary front.

When we were doing the line edits on Cold Granite – way back when – I asked if we should maybe cut back on some of the swearing. But Sarah, who is a lovely lady at HarperCollins and not prone to the ribald phrase, liked it just as it was. Lent a sense of realism. OK. I can live with that (in a smug, haven’t-I-been-a-good-boy kind of way) But after John’s stunning impersonation of a hairy Victor Meldrew, I went back to the final edit of the book and did a find and replace on every rude word I could think of at the time, adding up all the ‘Word had finished searching the docment and has made 126 replacements’s. Hmmm… five hundred and fifty five incidents of profanity (including your basic, entry-level blasphemy). Now that’s in a book of 127,733 words, or 0.435% for those of you with a pedantic bent. And I honestly can’t say whether or not this is a good, or a bad thing…

And if you are one of those pedants, here’s how those number’s breakdown. Those of you with a nervous disposition should look away now:

#	Naughty Word	Times		#	Naughty Word	Times
1.	Bastard	126		2.	Fuck	118
3.	Shit	85		4.	God	73
5.	Arse	56		6.	Damn	42
7.	Christ	32		8.	Bugger	22
9.	'Lady's Front Bottom'*					1

* Sorry, just too rude to write on the internet.

Anyone else looked back at the end of writing a book and though f**k me, my d*****ing language is h****ed worse than a g*****king-f****-monkey!?!

Urrrrrrnnnnnnnggggggg…

Well, maybe not the full groan, but it can’t be that far off it. Last night there were ‘Christmas drinks’ at the subcontractor’s place: champagne, wine (I know champagne is also a wine, but hey: give me a break, I’m fragile), and nasty, nasty canapés. Well, maybe not nasty, nasty, but certainly nasty. Lots of vegetarian things with nuts and lentils in them. None of those filo pastry wrapped prawns that we all know and love. And the, after the high-heedgins had all gone – after telling the staff to stay put and drink the other 23 cases of wine if they liked – it was off to the pub. Beer sits not too well on top of fizzy wine.

Needless to say, today the office is pretty much like Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. Me? Well, if you must know, I woke up at seven, had a bit of a groan, a shower, a HUGE cooked breakfast, and a couple of ‘fizzy make feel good’ tablets. So although I’m not exactly gambolling like a freshly-minted lamb (no pun intended) I am at least functioning. If only on partial thrusters.

Maybe I need a holiday? Or just to curl up under the desk and slip, quietly, into the land of velvet slumber… Except I think my snoring would wake the other people who managed to drag their corpses – reeking of second-hand alcohol – in to work today.

Ahhhhhhhhhh Christmas: the great hangover.

Second book FEAR!

This is something that comes and goes at the moment: the fear that the book the second won’t be anything like as well received as Cold Granite. This is partly because I’ve never actually read Cold Granite and partly because I can’t believe the thing is anywhere near as good as everyone keeps saying. Well, it can’t be can it: I wrote it. (Maybe they’ve all gone mad?)

The trouble with all this enthusiasm for book one is that while I’m writing book two, there’s a fair amount of pressure to make sure it’s as least as good as a book I’ve never read and can’t figure out why everyone likes. OK the pressure is all of my own making, no one from HC is breathing down my neck – far from it. They’ve not even demanded a synopsis or a treatment. I sort of gave them a rough idea of what it was going to be about while quaffing fizzy wine at their offices, and they seem happy with that. Godblessem. So the problem isn’t them, it’s not Agent Phil (Double-Oh-Four-Foot-Three-Inches) and it certainly isn’t the cat. It’s just me.

I suppose most people out there writing books feel the same way. What if it’s a steaming sack of poo? And can I fix it, before anyone else finds out?

Worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry.

Maybe I’m just being paranoid… Or maybe I’m not being paranoid enough?

Perfect conditions

Business class to Heathrow this morning. Mmmm… Lovely, lovely business class. Doesn’t happen often, so I have to enjoy it while I can. BMI – gotta love ‘em. Perfect seat for getting some writing done: left hand side of the plane - where there’s only two seats instead of the usual three, so you get an extra wide armrest space in which you can deposit your laptop bag and complementary breakfast box of goodies – and no one sitting in the other seat! Wheeee. Perfect. Get the laptop out and write away at 30,000 feet, free from prying eyes. What could be better?

Only the captain man says on takeoff that there’s loads of lumpy air and he won’t be switching off the seatbelt sign until well past Edinburgh. Which means portable electronic equipment must remain switched off until that point. Which means no writing. Grrrrr… And to add insult to injury the air between Aberdeen and Edinburgh was about as lumpy as a super model’s chest. You could have ironed on it. So it was just a bit of thinking and planning, rather than the full-blown writefest I was looking forward to.

And I’m flying back steerage, so there’s little chance of getting anything done tomorrow on the plane home. AND we’re having project Christmas drinks this evening straight after work. So no writing tonight either.

Phil still thinks I can get book 2 finished by Christmas, but I’m beginning to think he’s wearing some pretty rosy-tinted eyewear. But you never know, I might just pull the weasel out of the sock yet.

(fingers crossed and all that)

No entry today…

Too tired.
No writing.
Bad Stuart.
Naughty…

An odd thing this ‘publishing a book’ stuff

Fell over the new St. Martin’s Press catalogue thing today. How odd to see someone else writing a synopsis to the book. The weird things that stick in other people’s head from those four hundred and twenty pages, rather than my own, pretty fuzzy recollections. (For some unfathomable reason, Fiona has started looking at me, grinning, saying: “Watson was in her bra and pants!” and dissolving into fits of the giggles. Previous to this, her favourite quote from my work was “Bottoms, bottoms, tee-hee-hee…” Classy stuff, no?) I suppose this is what happens when the book finally starts to get out there. Until now it’s felt like a pretty personal thing, but this finally makes me appreciate that as soon as it leaves my head, goes down on paper and ventures out into the big, bad world, it acquires a life of its own.

And the catalogue has a photo as well, where I look like a myopic walrus. Ah… the joys of taking your own photo in the garden with a borrowed digital camera. Gotta love it.

Bah, humbug and poo to the whole thing

Well, maybe not the whole thing, but definitely to the wandering about town all bleedin’ day trying to waste loads of money buying things that probably aren’t even wanted for people we rarely ever see! Arrrrrrrrrgh! Half eight in the morning we started on Saturday and still didn’t get finished until the back of five. But on the plus side, we did manage to pick up stuff for pretty much everyone, except the two most important people on the list: ourselves. So I’ve still got to fight my way back into town at some point to get something nice for She-Who-Must-Be-Indulged. Personally, I’m not that fussed about getting anything much this year. I got my Christmas present in May when I got my three book deal. (and yes, that still makes me smile)

Of course the worst thing about the whole Christmas shopping thing is that I’ve got absolutely no writing done this weekend at all. Not a sausage. Nada. Not one single, solitary word. Did a bit of thinking, but thinking butters no sprouts. This means I’ll have to knuckle down and try to produce something this week, or there’s no way I’m ever going to get this first draft ready for Christmas.

Bah and humbug!

They’ve changed the p**********y lights!

Yes, it’s now official: Aberdeen City Council have changed the Christmas lights. After years and years and years of ‘The Twelve Days Of Christmas’, they’ve now gone for multicoloured things involving angels and penguins (I kid you not), you can’t really see them on the webcam, but trust me: they’re there. Trouble is, pretty though they are, I’ve got the twelve flipping days of flipping Christmas in the book. How dare ACC change the Christmas lights without consulting me! Have they no grasp of the need for verisimilitude in crime fiction? Mind you, considering the HUGE number of other things I’ve probably got wrong I suppose one more won’t hurt.

Mind you, I have to ask: would anybody really care? I could have said Union Street was lined with inflatable Arnold Schwarzeneggers that glowed in the dark and sang ‘We Wish You A Merry Christmas’ in a squeaky falsetto. Who would have known?

First airports and now evenings…

Actually sat down at the computer and wrote last night, after getting home from work. Doesn’t happen very often these days, so I feel it’s something of an achievement. As I’m on this weird part time thing where I work for someone else 12 business days out of every 20, I tend to save up all the writing to the time I’m home. Oh, and weekends. And when I’m in hotels. Or airports… Anyway, managed some happy smiley scenes of post dismemberment blues. With any luck this will be the start of a trend and I’ll be able to get the book to Phil The Agent for Christmas. What lovely present that will be (he said with a smattering of sarcasm) the plan is to make sure it’s not a steaming sack of poo before letting HarperCollins anywhere near it. After all, I don’t want them throwing up their hands in horror, shouting “It’s all a steaming sack of poo!”, and demanding all their money back.

This would not be good.

Airport writing…

Writing crime fiction in airport waiting lounges isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. OK, so it was the BMI business lounge at Heathrow (thanks to the old silver card) and there’s free Gin and cheese, but I still only managed 694 words. Which is kinda poor. I had hoped to get a bit more done on the plane back to Aberdeen, but it was packed. And even though I had that coveted right hand window seat, the one next to me was occupied. Can’t do it if someone’s watching (and yes, I know that makes me sound like someone who can’t pee in public). So a meagre 694 words it is. Meagre, but fairly unpleasant. Which is nice.

And to make matters worse I forgot to take a book with me. So the journey home was spent sitting next to a nice, but nervous woman, reading a big thick murder mystery by someone I didn’t recognise, while I was stuck with a free newspaper. Urrrgh… I hate it when there’s nothing else to read but a newspaper – I always feel compelled to read the whole thing, cover to cover in order to fill in the time. From adverts for stair lifts to articles on some monkey-faced eejit who’s done something stupid to himself with a lawnmower, but isn’t it terribly sad and shouldn’t the government do something about it! Honestly, if you enter into an intimate physical relationship with petrol-powered gardening equipment, you deserve all you get.

The slow mambo of events

And then there were two: according to the lovely Fiona (not wife Fiona, who is also lovely, but HC publicity wunderkind Fiona) there’s an invite in the post to the Edinburgh Literary Festival. Don’t know to do what, possibly pick up all the sticky tissues after the next Ian Rankin reading, or maybe some sort of panel thing? Who knows?

This brings the total number of ‘Things What I Must Go To’ to two. So the dance card is slowly beginning to fill, but I’m obviously not the prettiest girl at the ball. Maybe it’s the big, manly beard? But I’ll be doing the new writers’ panel at Harrogate as well, which is supposed to be the proverbial good time had by all. A crime festival sponsored by Theakston Old Peculiar – how cool is that! (Phil tells a terrific story of The Woman In Red stalking writers, agents and anything else in a pair of trousers.) Maybe it’ll be an opportunity to meet John Rickards and smack him about the head and neck for not reading British crime. From the looks of his photo on his blog I’ve certainly got the weight advantage.

Beer sleep

As I’m down in Guildford on a regular basis at the moment, Phil – mine uber-agent – feels impelled to get together for a small glass of sherry every now and then. It takes him away from his lovely wife and kiddies, but he struggles through it, because he feels it is his duty. He certainly doesn’t enjoy drinking beer and eating bacon frazzles. No, no, no, no, no…

Last night involved a couple of small ales in a wee pub at the end of the High Street, wedged between a VERY LOUD PUB QUIZ, a speaker playing vintage rock and roll, and an open mike music thing. Like being in the middle of an extremely noisy Bermuda triangle of sound. So we drank up fast, and then had another one, so as not to be rude. Then on to a bit to eat, where we were savaged by a bizarrely-enthusiastic Canadian hockey player waiter who forced us to eat steak and drink beer. And then drink more beer on top of that. It’s a hard life ;}#

Just gotta hope Phil doesn’t get in too much trouble for picking up the tab – or getting home so late. I tried to split it with him, but even though he’s small (four foot three at last count), he can be a tenacious terrier at times.

P.S. mucho beer + hotel bed = more sleep than usual, but bloody weird dreams involving government spooks and ferrets.

Hotels: I love them

Well, that’s another night spent in a Guildford hotel – Holiday Inn, the most expensive one yet. Complete with mini bar and pillow menu. I had the goose down and porcini mushroom with a white port glaze. And still couldn’t sleep. Grrnnnn…

Worse yet: I’d managed to write a rather nasty segment for book 2 on the plane on the way down and was looking forward to expanding on the theme (involving as it does the removal of fingers) in the evening. But it was not to be. Instead it was ‘team building’ time. Whoo, and indeed, Hoo.

There’s something quite nice about writing tales of blood and gore at 30,000 feet. Comforting. Book 2 was started on the 06:45 BA - Aberdeen to Heathrow flight, so there’s a kinda familiarity to tippity tapping away while some nice lady comes round with the drinks trolley. OK, so as it’s the morning flight, the only things coming off it are tea and coffee, but it’s the thought that counts. Not that I get a lot of writing done on the plane, I need a right hand, window seat with no one sitting next to me for that: don’t ask.

A chapter a day keeps the publisher at bay…

Book two is finally beginning to show its true colours. After months of letting the stuff fall out of my head, it’s now entering the last 20%, which means that all that stuff I wrote and didn’t understand is finally starting to make some sense to me. ‘Ahhhh…’ I say to myself, or the cat if she looks like she’s listening, ‘so THAT’s why I made up that person / place / armadillo way back in September.’

It’s an odd thing this writing malarkey. I have come to the conclusion that it’s the old subconscious that does all the work and I’m really just tagging along for the ride. But this means the last chunk of writing is always the most difficult for me, as the subconscious chunk of my brain wants to keep on having fun, making stuff up. Going, ‘Hey, I know what’d be cool…’ and generally running amuck like an politician in a brothel. But the old non-subconscious is shouting at the top of its lungs, ‘Stop it! Behave!’ Otherwise I’d never finish the damn thing. It’d end up three and a half miles long: whole forests would have to die to print it. HarperCollins would kill me… OK, they’ve been nice to me so far, but you never know what kind of evil lurks within the hearts of women. Men usually – I suppose.

So, this all means that the book is either within spitting distance of the finish line, or it isn’t. And I’m not going to be able to tell until I get there.

What fun!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we’re back...

Well that’s a shock to the system. 12 days at home writing stuff – with the cat providing creative input – and now it’s back to the day job again. Which really, really hurts. I think it was actually easier when I was working full time and cramming the writing into the evenings and weekends. OK you don’t have a life outside a computer monitor, get a bit pasty and develop a taste for braaaaainnsssss, braaaaaainsssssss, but you don’t have the whole ‘getting back into the swing of things’ to get past the whole time. Now getting back into the writing is hard (took three days this time to get up to my usual 3500 words a day level) and the getting back into work is like covering ones willy with cod-liver oil and using it to frighten polar bears. It HURTS!

But, looking on the bright side, I do have access to the old internet now. Which means I can finally go sign up for broadband, which I can only do online… Is it just me, or does anyone else see the flaw in the logic?