Michael Jecks's Blog, page 22

The Last Week of Work

Sorry to have been quiet last week, but I was working on the latest book. I still am, which is why this is likely to be a short blog too.

However, it occurred to me that I ought to share the results of my last week’s work.

I am in the period which I normally think of as the ‘Power Writing’ stage. When I embark on a new story, the first part, finding the best beginning, is always the hardest. It can take weeks to hit the right sort of atmosphere and get the correct momentum so that the reader gets into the story running, if you see what I mean. Then there comes the power writing. This is the stage where everything is still up for grabs. Basically, it means that the story is writing itself. You will have heard of the authors who say that they feel as though they have someone sitting on their shoulder and dictating? This is the power writing bit. It’s easy because the story is still easy enough. For me, it’s a straight line at this point: uncomplicated, straightforward and a doddle to write.

If only that stage lasted a little longer!

I’m still in the back end of that stage, but now I’m into the headache section. You see, I find that when I’ve passed through the easy bit, I crash and burn against the brick wall of narrative plausibility and logical catch-up.

In other words, I suddenly realise that X would never have behaved like that, and Y is actually two hundred miles away when I put him at Nouaillé. Worse, I realise that I killed Z thirty thousand words ago, and yet he’s popped up again now.

So, although I’m still working at some speed, this is the time when all the missing links have to be rediscovered in a hurry, and rectified so that as I cruise along to those two wonderful words ‘The End’, I can be moderately sure that the story is functioning!

And now, having said that, I have the pleasure of announcing that the next book is now in my hands. BLOOD ON THE SAND is a great adventure, which I hope you’ll enjoy. And in case you have any doubts, you can go to my page here and download THE BOY’S REVENGE free of charge. It’s a short story that is based on Ed the Donkey and his early life. What led him to have such a hatred of the French? What made him leave his home and join the army as a boy? Not only that, you’ll find you have the first four chapters of BLOOD ON THE SAND included.

Yes, you have to buy the book to learn what happens later. It’s called marketing. Devious, eh?

This week I’m thrashing through the book. Think of the poor author while you enjoy the fruits of his labours!

Tagged: author, Berenger Fripper, blogger, Blood on the Sand, book writing, Calais, Dartmoor, Devon, fiction, fiction writing, hints and tips, historian, history, Hundred Years War, Knight Templar, knights templar, library, medieval, medievalist, Michael Jecks, novelist, Q&A, questions, questions and answers, scribbler, stories, story, Templar series, writer, writing

My review of Michael Jecks Fields of Glory

With thanks to Clive for this review!

 

My review of Michael Jecks Fields of Glory.

Getting the Ideas Right

This is one of those little posts where I discuss the way that I get things done. Not that my methods will work with everyone. They certainly won’t! However, if you are trying to write up a report for the boss, or get ideas down for an important essay, or even a dissertation, and you just don’t know where to start … well, perhaps this post may help.

I’ve always been an extensive scribbler. I love letting ideas gel in front of me on paper. People complain about writer’s block, but most of the time it is caused purely by the author sitting and waiting for inspiration to strike. Sadly, this doesn’t often work. As I have said often before in these pages and during other interviews, the main thing for a writer is, that you write. Sitting dumbly waiting for something to happen is fine in an insurance claims office, but it won’t bringing the bacon for a novelist.

Scribbling is good. It starts to free up the mental muscles, and means that you can begin to plan and plot. My favourite approach is to think of “Someone is dead” as the middle of a sheet of paper. From that I radiate out with “Why is he dead?”; “Who killed him?”; “How did he die?” I build a series of realistic characters, all of whom could have a decent motive for murder, and from there the story evolves.

However, although I adore my pens and pencils for notes and scribbles, sometimes it’s better to have technology to hand.

Some years ago I was tempted to mind-mapping software. At the time I owned an iPad. I found it a little over-simplistic (this is going back several years) and gave up. Later, when I got an Android device, I was delighted to see an updated form of mind-mapping software, and took that … but the firm was bought out and that package grew hellishly expensive.

Still, I’ve kept with it. In recent years I’ve been using SCAPPLE, which is designed and written by the same folks who wrote the superb SCRIVENER, which is the software on which I write every book. I first bought it in 2007 (I think) and it’s therefore been the main tool for my last twelve or thirteen books. I love it.

Scapple has a massive advantage over other packages. It is fully integrated with Scrivener. This means that you can outline, plan, develop and plot in Scapple, throwing ideas at it at random, pull in odd links and basically play to your heart’s content, and when you’re done, you can output those headings as Scrivener headings – which means you already have your main contents, scenes or themes mapped out before you even open the Scrivener files.

But it’s not quite perfect, sadly. At least, not for me it isn’t.

The problem I have is, sometimes I want to have the mind map with me while I’m out walking, or when I have to go to meetings. For that, I need something that is portable on a mobile device. Scapple is being converted so that it will work on Apple iOS. This means you will be able to create and edit Scapple files on phones and iPads. But that is no good for me because I’m in that low category of humanity that simply cannot justify the expense of an iPhone. I love the look of the iPhone 6 and 6+, but the cost of the phone is out of my league. I am an Android user, and it looks as though I will be for some time to come. So with regret I will have to discard Scapple for personal use.

Just now I am considering my next phone, since my Sony SP is now some two years old, and bits are beginning to feel a little ancient. The on/off button is loose and not always effective, for example. And while it does have a very usable 4.3 inch screen, it’s now time I updated the phone and screen size. I’m going to move to the One Plus, I’ve decided, which will give the performance and screen size I crave.

And I have discovered a software app that will allow me to use mind mapping on the phone and my iMac. It is called SimpleMind, and there is a desktop version for Apple or Windows, and mobile versions that work with iOS and Android. Cheap it is not, but it has the flexibility I need, and in fact on Friday last, while in between meetings, I designed, created and edited three new mind maps. One for a book I’m writing, one for a new book, and one for a new talk I’m developing. It worked flawlessly and when I got home, each of them fired up happily on my iMac too.

Simple to use, easy to create handy outlines and plans

So, for now I am very happy with SimpleMind. Take a look if you too need easy, flexible software that can be used on mobile or computer. One day, perhaps, I’ll figure out how to port the fields from this into my Scrivener files too!

Tagged: author, blogger, book writing, Dartmoor, Devon, fiction, fiction writing, hints and tips, historian, history, Knight Templar, knights templar, library, medieval, medievalist, Michael Jecks, novelist, Q&A, questions, questions and answers, Scapple, scribbler, Scrivener, SimpleMind, stories, story, Templar series, writer, writing

Trials and Irritations!

This is one of those blogs where I have a brief rant.

And why not? I’m sitting here before a computer that is gleaming and lovely, when outside the birds are singing, the sun is shining and  … yes, I’m sitting here indoors, in a Dartmoor granite house that is freezing. It’s so cold I’m wearing my main, thick pullover from last winter. That’s how cold it is. So I’m grumpy.

I am a keen early adopter. I would dearly love to be able to afford all the Apple and other gizmos there are going. For example, I’d love a new iPod. Not a Touch, but a simple, old-fashioned Classic – but they’ve stopped making them. Why! They have space to store all my music. I don’t want a section of my music, I want all of it. For now my old one functions, but when it dies I’ll be bereft.

However, I need a new phone.

I cannot afford a new iPhone, and it’s a pain. The new iPhone 6 is pretty. I really love it. If only the darned thing wasn’t so expensive, I’d almost certainly buy one. However, and it’s a bit “however”, I cannot justify the cost. The cost of the phone plus contract is over £1,200 over two years. The phone itself is over £600 for a small screen version with reasonable storage. That is just crazy, compared with the prices for other equivalent devices – nearer £500 over two years. £1,200 for a device to last a couple of years? One that will be likely dropped and smashed or get dunked in a puddle and wrecked?

There are things I need with a phone. I don’t only want something to let me talk to people, I need something that will help me with my work. I need to be able to read documents on it, I need to be able to generate mind-maps, I need to be able to make Evernotes, comment on this blog, work with news outlets, edit files.

All of these things could be done on Apple. However, on iPhones (of the sort I can afford), the screens are too small. If I buy an Android phone, I can get a good device for under £300 that has a 5.5 inch screen, whereas if I go to Apple, any device will cost £450 or more for a substandard (i.e. older) device with a screen only 4 inches. The newer, larger iPhones are daft money. That, for me, makes Apple a poor choice. The Android world gives me screen considerably larger, and with my eyesight, that makes a significant difference. Especially when working on mind-maps or when navigating complex websites.

If I had the cash, and money was no object, I guess I’d probably give the Apple world a try. After all, having Apple texts, Apple cloud storage, FaceTime etc would be good. Really good. I have lots of friends who use Apple, and I do use them on the Air and iMac. But that’s the point. I already have them available, and since I spend most of my day here at my desk, so do I really need to spend over £700 extra in order to have the cachet of the latest Apple? Basically, no. What I need is a tool for my work. Other devices will do that work just as well. If they don’t have additional bells and whistles, I don’t care.

So, I think in two months or so I may be getting another Android phone. And I’m already looking forward to larger writing I can read!

Mind you, I still reckon that the most important and useful technology for me is a pen and paper. It works every time. Unless, like yesterday, I leave my pen in the shirt that is going in the washing machine. That is the problem with smaller pens – they can be forgotten too easily. Luckily my Visconti is too large to leave accidentally in the pocket of a shirt!

This is now a really clean pen …!

Tagged: author, blogger, book writing, Dartmoor, Devon, fiction, fiction writing, hints and tips, historian, history, Knight Templar, knights templar, medieval, medievalist, Michael Jecks, novelist, Q&A, questions, questions and answers, scribbler, Templar series, writer, writing

Distractions All the Way

One of the hardest aspects of writing is the fact that there are so many damnably attractive alternatives. You sit at the desk and try to focus on the day ahead. That involves thinking about the coming scenes, planning, plotting, getting the mind into the right frame for envisioning bloody murder or a battle scene, and all the while, from the corner of the eye, you can see the bright sunlight playing over the buildings opposite.

Today I sat down filled with good intentions. I wrote my to do list on the whiteboard, where I could see it from my desk. Then I turned on the computer.

Many hours later, I have achieved a lot. I’ve made coffee for the postman, I’ve spoken twice to the artist opposite who was promised that the parcel delivery firm had correctly delivered her box to me (nope), I’ve spoken to my daughter and wife, I’ve tucked in the hound when she complained about the cold, I’ve made myself two cups of tea…

Yes. Her.

I have also written several emails, updated Twitter, I’ve selected the seven books I need for research for my next book, and I’ve spent some time on the web. I have thought through a website redesign I need, and done a little mental dabbling with paints, planning a picture I want to paint, and chosen a book as a gift.

There are days like that. Generally they mean that I’ll end up feeling dissatisfied. However, all the bits and pieces are important. All the conversations were important, the dabbling with paints could well end up with a profitable sideline, my thoughts about the website could be crucial for the future, and even the chat to the postman and the artist opposite have given me ideas. Okay, so tucking the hound into her bed is perhaps less directly business related, but all I can say to that is, that if I don’t tuck her in, she’ll give me hell and stare at me meaningfully, and unless you’ve had a Ridgeback staring meaningfully at you, you cannot understand just how disruptive to logical thoughts that can be!

However, the real distraction today is, that I’m waiting for a new dog. We are to rehome a lovely Dalmatian, a pooch we’ve known for several years, and whose owners find themselves with too little time, since taking on new work commitments, to be able to cope with the exercise the dog needs. She gets on well with our hound, and she will be a spur to me to get out more, which is all to the good as far as I’m concerned. Except, of course, that means another daily distraction.

So, how do you cope with distractions?

I have the same rules as I do for breaking writer’s block. Basically, crack on! If you’re distracted, you need to either absorb the distraction or work. When I say absorb the distraction, I mean that it may be work-specific and work-justified. If you have to put in place a new business plan, or have to write some emails, or need to read a book for research, then set time aside to do those things. When my wife became self-employed, some years ago, she was advised to plan for marketing. Her business plan had to allocate time for admin and selling her services. That should be one-third of her work time. The other two-thirds should be enough to do her job, but had to pay for the one-third as well. Whether that third is spent every day, or is accounted for by some mornings each week, is entirely up to you. But if you aren’t in those sections of the week, you have to sit down and work. Writing is only another form of work, after all. So, work-specific tasks can be built into the working week, and those distractions that are nothing to do with work, well, they have to be set aside until you have time to deal with them.

That means, no web-surfing, no reading that latest thriller you’ve been trying to get to, no chatting with a postman over a coffee, and no daydreaming about a new Dalmatian …

Hey ho.history, medieval, writing, writer, novelist, Q&A, hints and tips, questions and answers, medievalist, historian, author, blogger, scribbler, novelist, writing, book writing, questions, Devon, Dartmoor, Michael Jecks, Templar Series, knights templar, Knight Templar, fiction, fiction writing, library, story, stories,

Tagged: author, blogger, book writing, Dartmoor, Devon, distractions, fiction, fiction writing, hints and tips, historian, history, Knight Templar, knights templar, library, medieval, medievalist, Michael Jecks, novelist, Q&A, questions, questions and answers, scribbler, stories, story, Templar series, writer, writing

Interview with Karen Maitland

Medieval Murderers with Sharon from Northern Ireland Library Service

I was lucky enough to meet Karen Maitland some years ago at the Lincoln Festival, and we hit it off immediately. We had a great afternoon with a large audience, and at the end of it, I invited her to join Medieval Murderers. Since then, she’s been a hugely popular member of our group.

However, when you know someone professionally, you don’t actually know very much about them, so when I was asked to review THE RAVEN’S HEAD, it was good to get the chance to ask Karen about her background and how she views her writing.

MJ Karen, I know you have had a pretty peripatetic life. Where were you born, where did you spend childhood?

KM I was born in Malta and my earliest memories were of the vivid colour and spectacle of their religious ceremonies – carrying life-sized statues of the saints out into the sea to bless the boats; torchlight processions of the three kings on horseback. This probably helped spark my later fascination with medieval ritual.

I had curious childhood. I lived in several trouble-spots round the world, but just thought it was normal. I wasn’t frightened, children generally aren’t. Many people who were children in England during the World War II will tell you they found it exciting. But because I grew up with war, it wasn’t until I was about 11 or 12 that I discovered people could die of old age or natural causes. My family were mortified one day when a neighbour told us that her mother had died, and I innocently asked  ‘Who killed her?’

MJ An ideal background for a crime writer, then!

KM Thinking about it now, I realise that children’s books and films reinforced the idea that you only died if you got killed. The wicked witch in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is killed when the girl’s house is dropped on her. Bambi’s mother is shot. In fairy tales or adventure stories the baddies are killed. Children were packed off to stay with eccentric uncles, because their parents got eaten by cannibals. I can’t recall a single story I read as a child where anyone died of old age or a heart-attack. It probably accounts for why I have a fairly high murder rate in my novels.

MJ If you were spending so much time in war zones, did your family have a happy time (many people reckon authors must have had a miserable childhood to write, and I’m keen to dispel that myth!)

KM I was happy when I was alone. I’d make up elaborate adventure stories using different coloured marbles as characters and the bedclothes or furniture legs as landscapes. Some of these serials would go on for weeks. I hated being made to play with other girls of my age because they just wanted to play house or dress dolls – games which had no story – so I couldn’t see the point.

When I was around ten I was given a miniature ex-army radio which I would smuggle under the bedclothes at night and listen to all the adult plays that the grownups would have been horrified I was hearing, like ‘Murder on Black Tor’ and ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’. Hearing the sound effects of bloodhounds hunting someone across the moors and imagining the scene, is far more scary than seeing it on a film.

MJ Oh, I agree there. I still think Radio is far better than the equivalent TV material. I know that later you went to live in Africa. Could you talk a bit about that?

KM I went to work in Nigeria in my early twenties, teaching technical English in a College of Agriculture. I was promised technical English text books to teach from, but the British Council supplied only two books – Cold Comfort Farm and The Mayor of Casterbridge. Presumably someone thought having agriculture settings they’d be suitable. Have you ever tried explaining to bewildered Nigerian students that wife-selling is not a regular occurrence in Britain?

MJ Actually, no!

KM The house had no water, sewage or electricity. Water had to be fetched from a river; lamps filled with oil before it got dark. You had to make sure you extinguished the lamps at night when they were still half-full, so that you could relight them if there was an emergency, like thieves trying break in or rats getting back into the bedroom. (Many locals kept a large python loose in the house as a rat-catcher, but I mistakenly got a cat and the rats were bigger than her!) You had constantly think ahead to survive – if I want water to wash in or to drink at breakfast, I’ll have to fetch it before it gets dark today and boil it.

You could never plan what you were going to eat. I’d have to go daily to market, exchanging jokes with the lepers who were begging at the entrance, and bargain for whatever was on sale. One day you might get some eggs, the next a fish or goatweed. I didn’t think about it then, but I was living a medieval life, month after month, not just for a re-enactment weekend with a hot bath waiting at home.

MJ I’ve always thought that those experiences would have really coloured how you write. Your imagination for the medieval life is so vivid.

KM The other thing you learned quickly was how vital it was to be part of community. There were no telephones and if there was a crisis, you relied on your neighbours. One day, there was an explosion in little shop across the market square. Children were trapped inside the burning hut and we all ran to try to tear it apart with our bare hands to reach them. But on other occasions I saw someone who was ostracized attacked and no one would help. That what’s it must have been like in the Middle Ages if you were excommunicated or shunned for some reason, it could become a matter of life or death.

MJ You’ve already mentioned living in trouble spots: last year you told me that you lived in Ireland during the Troubles. How come that happened?

KM When I returned from Nigeria I was desperately in need of a job, because the situation there had broken down into civil war. No one had been paid for months and we weren’t allowed to bring anything out of the country. I saw a job advertised in the Royal Victoria Hospital in the Falls Road in Belfast. I had been cut off from any news for months, so had no real idea of the situation in Belfast, and found myself starting working there the day Bobby Sands went on hunger strike.

MJ Ye Gods, woman! I’d have hoped someone else could have warned you! What was it like?

KM The hospital was on the dividing line between the two communities, which meant the road was often blockaded by burning vehicles, so we were doing back-to-back shifts, because often staff couldn’t get in or out. And it was where many of the causalities of explosions or shootings ended up.

But they had a really good system in Northern Ireland: if you worked on the front-line emergency services for three years, you could get a full grant to go to university in Northern Ireland. Having left school with little in the way of qualifications, I went to the University of Ulster as a mature student, which was brilliant, and stayed to do my doctorate there. I think you value university education far more as a mature student than as if you go straight from school.

Last year, I went back the Northern Ireland with you and Susannah Gregory to give a couple of Medieval Murderer talks there. The first time I’d been back since the peace talks. We all went out to pub after the talk the first night and I found myself physically shaking, because I could see cars parked outside in the street. When I’d lived there you couldn’t park a car in a shopping street, unless someone sat in it, and if you saw a parked car, you’d cross to the other side and try to run past in case it exploded. The three of us and our host sat in front of the window of the pub, something I’d never have done before, for fear that if a bomb went off somewhere the glass would shatter.

Then, the next day, one of the librarians took us on a wonderful walk round Belfast which was buzzing with life and I realised for the first time that I could see into the shop windows – before they’d all been covered with metal shutters – and I could walk into a shop without being searched. Where were soldiers and the armoured trucks, the roadblocks and the helicopters? Belfast had become the most amazing vibrant city. The people of Belfast don’t seem to notice, because the change has happened gradually, but for me the difference  is miraculous.

MJ I remember your response when we were at the airport and you were surprised that there were no police anywhere! Okay, let’s chat about your writing. You started writing with The Company of Liars some years ago. Was it the first book you completed? I cannot recall whether you had other mss lying around or not?

KM I’d had a modern futuristic thriller The White Room, published by a small publisher funded by the Arts Council in 1996. As a result of that being short-listed for a national award, I started to get commissioned to write some non-fiction. When people are offering you money to write a book you know will be published, you can’t afford to turn that down to write a new novel that might not be.

MJ I know that feeling only too well! We have to write the books we’ve been paid for. Keeping the wolf from the door is pretty crucial!

KM Yes. So non-fiction diverted me for a while, but I was desperate to get back to fiction and I had an idea for a historical novel bubbling away inside.

That novel was The Owl Killers, which I actually started writing first. I created the character of the camelot, a minor character, who was only supposed to deliver the prologue and epilogue to The Owl Killers, but as I wrote that character’s backstory – what happened to them before the novel begins – the character took on a life of its own and started to demand their own story in a different novel. I had to stop writing The Owl Killers and write Company of Liars just to shut them up and get them out of my head. So in the end I completed Company of Liars first, then finished The Owl Killers.

MJ It’s a pain when characters start clamouring for attention in your head, I know. It’s hard always to get them to shut up. Anyway, company was a great success, wasn’t it? Did that come as a big shock to you? Having a book suddenly achieve such great sales can terrify some people, but you always seem so calm and ‘grounded’ – or are your swan’s feet paddling like the clappers underneath?

KM I never realised the book had become a success. I think authors are divided into two groups – those who regularly check their rankings, sales, and what is being written about them and those like me who refuse to even google their own name out of abject terror!

But I am always anxious about the book I am currently writing, always paddling desperately. The strange thing about writing, which may be true of all of the arts is that whatever you achieve there is always something more you feel you should be achieving. When you first start out, you think – if only I could get just one small article or a short story published, I’d be happy. But when you get that article, you think, if only I could get one novel published, I’d die happy. After that it’s, but will they ever publish another novel of mine?

Mike, you are so prolific and have so many novels published, it always makes me feel like a complete failure by comparison. OK I know that like all of us, you need to keep writing because you need to keep earning in order to pay the bills, but do you think you’ll ever get to the point of looking back and feeling satisfied by the wonderful body of work you’ve produced?

MJ I’m very happy with the books I have out there. I love the stories, and I love making up new ones, but you’re right. It is hard, and getting harder, because so much of our time is taken up with social media, marketing and publicity. Loads of effort is constantly spent doing things that distract from the writing. That’s the most infuriating thing, I think, for any author. It’s just making time to write. And of course there’s the other aspect, which is research. You have clearly undertaken a great deal of research to write your books. Do you find that makes starting each new novel more of a challenge?

KM It took ten years of research into the Medieval period before I felt confident enough to begin writing historical novels. But now that I have that basic background, for the new novels I tend to focus down on the information I am going to need for that particular story. The Middle Ages was a period of extreme weather conditions – droughts followed by floods. I often write about characters who live in rural villages or in the case of The Vanishing Witch one family earns their living carrying cargoes on the river, so I need to know what the weather was like during the months in which that particular novel takes place. Fortunately, manorial and church accounts often carry detailed records on the weather, because it affected crops and income.

In The Gallows Curse, one character was castrated before puberty, so I needed to find out how that was done in medieval times and I read modern medical research papers to discover what affect early castration would have a man’s long-term physical and psychological development.

MJ Interesting always to see where our researches can take us!

KM In contrast, in Falcons of Fire and Ice, there is long sea voyage. Ships were made of wood and caulked with highly flammable materials included pitch, so how did they cook at sea for crew and passengers without setting the whole thing ablaze?

But there are some details like that I don’t realise I’m going to need to research, until I actually start writing the scene. In the book I’m writing now, one character has to examine a wound in the hairy thigh of a male corpse (don’t ask!!!). So I realised as I was writing, I had to find out how high a man’s hose would be worn in that decade and whether my character would have been able to see the bare flesh of the thigh without cutting the hose away.

MJ Studying a fellow’s underwear, eh? So some research can be fun! You write with a degree of sympathy and empathy for medieval people that is quite extraordinary. Does this come from intensive research, or do you find it comes from some other source?

KM That’s a lovely thing to say. Thank you. It’s probably to do with the type of people I write about, those who were on the fringes of society. When I research their lives, which have often been written out of history, I passionately want to tell their story, so it shouldn’t be forgotten – the boys who were sold into brothels which appear in The Gallows Curse or the lepers who were declared dead to their families and communities in The Owl Killers.

But I often find myself acting out the dialogue of the characters and I certainly take on their moods. I become that character. So if I’ve been writing a scene in which someone in angry, I’m in a foul temper for a couple of hours afterwards. I think it’s a writer’s version of method-acting.

MJ I know that feeling. Sometimes I have to stop writing and read something else, do some more research or anything, before I go to speak with my family! Your writing is very natural and delightful with all your books. As you know, I am a keen fan of your writing, however with Raven’s Head I was surprised to see that you immersed yourself in alchemy. Did you find that easy, or was it difficult to discover new information about this curious religious/philosophical approach to life?

KM The alchemists constructed an elaborate code of symbolic languages and images to conceal the experiments they were constructing, but also to describe the mystical side of their work. They began to read this code into literature and paintings which not alchemistic in origin, looking for hidden signs in everything. They were a kind of early ‘Dan Browns’, finding secret messages wherever they looked, not only in man-made things, but in the natural world too.

The information on alchemy is there to be found. They left a lot of writings and drawings. But the hard part is trying to interpret the alchemist writings and symbols, as they would have done, not through the prism of the twenty-first century. Today the image of son slaying his father, is overlaid by modern psychology and we’d call it an Oedipus complex. But as an author, I have to look at that image and think – what would it mean to them?

It is the same with animals and plants, we’re so used to the modern classification of plants and animals that we almost forget they are only convenient labels. We would not group the fern once known as moonwort together with white poppy as being in the same family of plants. But the medieval alchemist would have put them together, because they were both ‘governed by the moon’ and both had the same function of aiding lucid dreaming. It is a different way of looking at the world.

MJ All your books seem to form from legends, history and genuine events. I am thinking of the women living together in Belgium, of the stories of the sin-eaters, the case of Alice Kyteler – when you find these stories, do your books immediately spring into your mind?

KM For me three things have to come together to make a book, and they can often occur to me several years apart. So, I might have two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but I can’t tell what the picture will be until I stumble across the third.

One will be the location for the novel or at least part of it. For Falcons of Fire and Ice, the location that inspired it was a volcanic cave in Iceland I visited years ago. For The Raven’s Head it was accidentally coming across the ruins of Langley abbey in Norfolk one evening.

The second strand is a key character, as you say, often inspired by a real historical person or group of people such as the beguines in the The Owl Killers or the bewitching widow in The Vanishing Witch.

The last element is something contemporary in the news, which has a medieval parallel. The London Riots, when ordinary people went on an orgy of looting and destruction, gave me the idea of the setting of The Vanishing Witch at the time of the Peasants Revolt in 1381. For The Raven’s Head it was hearing scientists talk about bringing extinct animals back to life by cloning from dead samples that reminded me of the goals of the medieval alchemists to create life from death.

When those three elements come together I have a novel.

MJ In Medieval Murderers we all tend to work differently. When you sit down to write, do you have a comprehensive plot and story that you have in your mind or does the story develop as you write?

KM I know in a quite a lot of detail what’s going to happen in the first third of the novel before I start writing, and have a very rough idea of what will follow. But by the time I’ve written the first third of the novel, new characters that I wasn’t expecting have walked on stage; subplots have started to burrow their way up through the main plot and the minor details I added while I was writing have suddenly become important. So in The Raven’s Head, Felix pushed his way into the novel without any invitation from me and proved to be a key character.

At this point, I stop writing and bullet-point plot the story that I’ve written so far, chapter by chapter, and then try to bullet-point plot the rest of the novel in the same way. But apart from Company of Liars where I knew before I started writing what the end line of the novel would be, the endings of all the other books have taken me by surprise when I got there.

MJ When you first started, was there something in particular that grabbed you about the concept of The Raven’s Head?

KM The Raven’s Head was the alchemist symbol of death and decay, the symbol of the first of the four alchemical deaths, Nigredo, the black death. It’s a sinister symbol and ravens have long been associated with death, because they are seen pecking at corpses on gibbets and battlefields. Ravens were also the messengers of the old gods such as Odin and carried all the gossip from the world back to them. But King Arthur was said to have turned into as raven when he was killed, so he could watch over his people and warn them of danger.

When ravens are depicted in medieval alchemy it is usually with their beaks wide open and a serpent-like tongue vibrating in the air. Are they crying a warning to protect us, or telling all our dirty little secrets to their true master? Which is the raven’s true nature?

MJ Most people who set out to write a book will inevitably fail because they do not realise the dedication that is required to write 120-140,000 words. I had the easy incentive of no children and no TV when I started. Do you find the process of writing to be a pain, or a pleasure?

KM I wrote my first novel The White Room in the evenings and weekends, round working fulltime. It was a book I was driven to write, because that was based on experiences of terrorism which I need to get out of my head. Writing now is a pleasure, but it still requires discipline, even more so now that I’m doing it full time. It’s very easy to procrastinate. Deadlines are both a blessing and curse. A curse because of the immense pressure, a blessing because they force you to get on with it and write!

If you’ve got a week to return a manuscript to an editor, you have to be prepared to work weekends, and at other times when you’d love to go out. Friends can’t understand why you refuse to come out for lunch when they have a day off from work, or why you won’t chat on the phone, or invite them round for coffee. Sometimes, you have to say I can’t go on holiday or even to that wedding or funeral, because the clock is ticking. If you don’t deliver, there are plenty of other authors out there who will.

MJ When a first novel is written, there is invariably a hideous shock when the manuscript returns with pencil marks all over it. Do you still find that horrible, and are there any other elements of the process of writing that irritate or grate on you?

KM My commissioning editor sends me pages of suggested changes to characters and plot, and once I’ve got over the initial biting the carpet and sobbing into a whiskey moment, I’m happy about that.  She has a huge talent for spotting exactly what isn’t working and it’s usually something I’ve felt deep down, but haven’t been able to pinpoint, because I am too close to it.

MJ Yes, I always feel that too. People rarely appreciate how important a good editor is to a successful book.

KM The annoying bit is often the later copy-editing stage, where different editors are checking the details such as – Has the author mentioned the man was wearing a sword before he uses it? Is the Latin prayer quoted the right one for that period? Is that river tidal? It’s a huge relief when they spot something I’ve got wrong before it goes to print. Mistakes can easily creep in. For example, if you move a scene to earlier in the novel, shifting it from June to January. You remember to change all the major things, like the weather and how long the character has been pregnant, but it’s easy to miss that tiny detail where you mentioned a daisy flower in the grass.

But often, things get queried at this stage that I know are right, because I’ve painstakingly researched it. But if a copy-editor questions it, I immediately start having doubts and have to double check in several different sources, which can take hours, and it’s generally at the time I’m going through the copy-editor’s changes against a tight deadline and I’m also trying to finish the next novel, battling that deadline too. So it can get fraught. But in the end I remind myself that it’s much better I check it before it goes to print and then if a reader queries it later, I’m not thrown, because I know for certain it’s right.

MJ And you spend days and days finding the one relevant quotation to justify the fact in the book, when all the time you know the copyed has forgotten mentioning it, is into the next manuscript, and probably enjoying a large glass of red wine while you search frantically … yes. I know that feeling too.

RIght, when you sit down to write do you have a set routine – a set number of hours per day, a set number of words or something similar? Do you always have a tidy desk, a lucky charm, or some other ‘comfort blanket’?

KM I try to keep office hours roughly 9 to 6 with half an hour for lunch when I watch ‘Doctors’ on TV. (I get really sulky when they take that off for Wimbledon or something.) I don’t set a word count per day, because that would make me feel like constant failure. I accept that at certain stages of the writing process, the words will tumble out by the bucket load, and on other days I could spend an hour or more trying to get one paragraph right.

I have a very untidy desk. I cling to a maxim I once heard that ‘the more untidy the desk, the more creative the mind.’ (Maybe I made that up!) But I can’t work unless I am surrounded by books, even if they are not the reference books I’m using. I need silence, solitude and wall of books, then I’m happy.

MJ I am fond of saying that no one knows what untidy is, until they’ve seen my office! What would you say was, for you, the most rewarding aspect of writing novels?  And what is the main downside?

KM The downside is that at the end of every book contract, you never know if you are going to get another, so it’s a precarious way of earning a living. It’s also like constantly sitting an exam for the whole of your working life, because you submit the mss to the publisher then wait for the results – will they like it? Have you passed? Then when the book comes out, will the readers like it? Have you passed that test?

The rewarding bit is being able to earn a living doing what you love, creating worlds, characters, adventures. It’s the closest thing an adult ever gets to being totally absorbed in playing like a small child.

MJ Are you an instinctive writer or editor? I love putting words down on paper during the creative period of a book, but Susanna Gregory and others much prefer the detailed edits when they tighten their prose and hone the story. Which are you?

KM Definitely with Susanna on this one. I love the edit. I’m constantly tense and agitated when I’m doing the first draft. I ‘bare-bones’ novels for the first draft, sometimes writing whole scenes without punctuation, or ‘he said’, ‘she said,’ and definitely without checking spelling, just to get the action or dialogue out of my head and into the pc. I only relax when the whole of the first draft is there and I have something to play with. Then I set about polishing, finding the right word, adding the descriptions. I probably delete at least half of the original words of that first draft when edit, but add twice as many again.

MJ Authors are always being driven to take on more and more marketing responsibilities with social media and events. What are your feelings about interaction with people on the internet?

KM I enjoy writing The History Girls’ blogs, but blogging does take time away from writing books. I’ll gladly answer readers emails or direct messages, but I don’t facebook or twitter. Not least, because as you’ve seen from the length of my novels, I am not able to write anything short, so flash-fiction and tweets are out. And I am always worried I might respond quickly to something that annoys me and regret it later.

MJ Publishing is so difficult nowadays, and even successful authors are finding life difficult. You have had the double whammy of moving house and of moving publisher. Did you find that very difficult/unsettling?

KM I had to move house very quickly at a time when I had tight deadline on a novel, so I moved without furniture into an empty house, just with a laptop, bed, kettle, desk, one chair and a box of essential books and files. I camped in the bare house and wrote. I got a huge amount done, because there was nothing else to do except write. The phone wasn’t connected and I couldn’t do any housework, because there was nothing to dust!

Fortunately I was changing publishers to follow my brilliant editor, because I trust her judgement so much, I didn’t want to lose that partnership. So, although it was incredibly nerve-wracking during the many months the contracts were being negotiated, I buried myself in my novel and tried not to think about anything else. Fortunately, I had a wonderful agent who sorted it. It’s times like that when a good agent is worth every penny they get and much more.

MJ I do so agree with you there. Agents are essential, if you want to be left alone to write. Thinking of marketing, though: authors tend to be fairly private people. Do you like going out and talking to readers and fans, or do you find it a strain and annoying interruption?

KM Yes, it’s odd isn’t. For months at a time, authors need to be the personality type who is prepared to work in solitary confinement for hours. Then every so often we emerge and have to perform in front of an audience which requires almost the complete opposite personality. Maybe that’s what gave the author Robert Louis Stevenson the idea for his novel about Jekyll and Hyde.

But actually I do love going out and giving talks or leading workshops, maybe because I always wanted to be an actor. Readers often tell me snippets of folklore or history at events and those give me ideas. And the comments they make and questions they ask, shape future books too. It’s also wonderful when you can do events with other authors, who otherwise you rarely meet, because you spark off them and learn from them. That’s why I’ve enjoyed being a part of the Medieval Murderers so much.

MJ I was delighted when you agreed to join Medieval Murderers. Was that a daunting prospect?

KM Ever since the first MM book came out, I’d always bought the new novel every summer to take on holiday, because it was the perfect beach read. So, I was astounded and thrilled when I was actually invited to become an MM, but also scared witless that I’d let the other MM authors down. I felt like a kid who’d watched their favourite professional football team play for years from the stands and suddenly got picked out of a crowd to play with them.

MJ We are an astonishingly daunting bunch! What would you say was the most useful piece of advice about writing that you have been given?

KM It was from the historical novelist and poet William Bedford, who has been a great friend ever since I started writing. He said – Do the research, read all the background material you can until you are steeped in it, then close the reference books, lock them away and concentrate on telling a good story. 

MJ That’s excellent advice. Hmm. Wish I’d had that. What advice would you give to someone about to try to write a novel for the first time?

KM First time novelists often make the mistake of trying to write in a genre just because they think it will sell or because it sounds easier to write than others. I know dozens of would-be writers who start writing children’s, young adults or romance novels, because they mistakenly think they are short and simple. But they can be the hardest.

If you don’t love that genre yourself as a reader, the chances are you won’t understand what elements true fans of that genre are looking for and you can easily produce a plot which you think is original, but which others have read a hundred variations of before. (And you need to read what is being published now in your chosen genre, not what you read ten or twenty years ago.) Almost every novelist hits a sticky patch somewhere in the writing process, so if you not really excited about the novel and that genre to begin with, you will stall when you hit a problem with it and never finish the book.

MJ Well, thanks very much for all that, Karen. It’s been a really interesting time, and good to find out a bit more about you and your way of writing. Best of luck with The Raven’s Head, and with the book you’re writing now!

Tagged: alchemy, crime, Karen Maitland, magic, medieval, superstition, The Company of Liars, The Owl Killers, The Raven's Head

Technology

Welcome to another Jecks wittering.

There are times when I sit at my desk and type and think about all kinds of happy things. There are times when I happily wallow in blood and guts in my mind – which is why I, like most crime writers, am such a well-balanced, pleasant, amiable fellow. I get all my violence out on the page, rather than in the street. I remember someone making the observation that someone had brought murder back into the home, where it belongs, but I tend to have my killings in fields, backstreets or other places. I don’t think homes are suitable for murder.

But I was working happily on Saturday night, when murder entered my heart. Family dispute? No. Litigation? No. The price of beer? No, not even that.

I was infected with computer blues.

Put it like this. There I was, happily playing with three new paintings (and I was quite pleased with them, too), when I took a call from my parents.

They’re both quite old, and they don’t get to travel all the way to see me too often, so I like to keep in touch. And on Saturday I painted a picture of my brother Keith on a walk over Dartmoor. They’d like that, I thought, so I sent a copy to my mother. However, it never arrived, so while speaking to my mother, I said I’d post it again, this time to their other account. Easy, huh? Done similar things loads of times.

My brother Keith out walking the Moors

So, I went to the computer, fired it up and forwarded the main. Or would have, but Mail suddenly quit. So I fired up Mail again, only to be told that there was a problem and Mail would have to import 152,000 emails to the newer version.

Hmm, I thought. Perhaps it was a glitch. So I closed Mail, and tried it again. Same result. So I restarted the computer (you can tell I’m computer literate, huh?). Same result.

This was time for some head-scratching. In the end, I hit on the only logical answer. You see, some years ago I spent £100 buying a special back-up drive from Apple. This Time Capsule was a clever device. Together with Time Machine, it would allow you to automatically backup your computer as you went merrily along. Then, in the event of a disaster, you could call back your computer’s state at any day. So I could go back to Saturday morning, say, or Friday. In my case, all I wanted to do was bring back my emails, so I fired up Time Machine to see what it would do.

It told me it could recover everything. Fine, I thought, and hit “go”.

Bad mistake.

As a result of that happy keystroke, I now have no computer. The machine started to work, but then the damn thing died. Apparently, the first thing Time Machine does is wipe the old disk. Then it tried to reload with the backup. However, it decided that the files I wanted to backup weren’t good enough. So, fine, I thought. I’ll go back and fix it some other way. Except, I couldn’t. Because of that first stage I mentioned. The disk is now wiped.

So, tomorrow I’m off to Apple to chat politely about backups and things, and see if they can save anything from my blasted backup drive. I hope they can, because there are some photos I cannot replace, and some work (not much, because I have always been keen to backup everything). But it is a massive irritation in a week that is already full of children on holiday, time off for Easter and deadlines.

Computers are essential, of course, but they are also the bane of my life.

For example, my daughter is now studying for her GSCE exams. She needs a computer. She has been able to use my laptop in the past. This one which I am using today! She ain’t having it back for a while, sadly. If I can’t fix the desktop, I’ll have to think about buying her a small notebook or something similar. Or should I get myself something like that? I don’t want to throw out my Apples, but replacements are hellishly expensive, so I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Just now, I am hoping the old machine will be mendable, and that the backup drive will work so they can rescue my backups. Wish me luck.

Anyway, at least I got three good paintings out of the weekend!

Dartmoor walking in winter

And now, having got that out of the way, what is good? Well, this week I am sitting down with a large book all about the Poitiers campaign, ready for the third and final book in my trilogy about the Hundred Years War. The first, FIELDS OF GLORY, has got to be enormously popular (I can recommend it) and the second, BLOOD ON THE SAND, has been great fun to write, if hard work. There is a lot to fit in with that book, but it works well. Hopefully it’ll sell well. To help things along, my publishers are sending me on some mini-tours. I’ll be wandering around the country, with luck, in June and July, so keep your eyes open or call publicity at Simon and Schuster UK if you want a Jecks visit.

There is also going to be a short story available for free (oh, I hate that word!) for those who want to find out a bit more about my characters, too, so there’s a fair bit for all readers who like my books. And I am hoping to get more books written this year. I am hoping to write  series of shorts involving Sir Richard de Welles, and a new Baldwin/Simon story, although whether or not they ever get into print is hard to tell.

All in all, I have a busy year, this year. I am intending to write four novels. That would always be hard, of course … without the damn computer, it’ll be harder!

Have a great week. Don’t forget my YouTube channel. It is called writerlywitterings, oddly enough. There’s a new video every Thursday, and there are now a good 55 up there, covering my books, my writing, and hints and tips for aspiring writers or students. Hope you enjoy them!

The lovely Chateau Poinsouze

Tagged: author, backups, blogger, book writing, computers, Dartmoor, Devon, fiction, fiction writing, hints and tips, historian, history, Knight Templar, knights templar, library, medieval, medievalist, Michael Jecks, novelist, Q&A, questions, questions and answers, scribbler, stories, story, Templar series, Time Capsule, Time Machine, writer, writing

Big Data!

I was reading in a magazine an article by the excellent Simon Brett earlier today. It was an obituary for Phyllis James and mentioned that some time ago, while talking about writing, they discussed the worst questions authors are asked.

My own favourite worst is, “Where do your books sell?”

It’s a natural question. It’s the first thing people ask me who are interested in my books and sales. A friend is trying to help me with marketing. She asked me. Another friend is keen to see how to analyse my sales data to increase sales. He asked me. Many people ask me the same question.

How should I know? That kind of data is not given to the poor old authors scribbling away in their garrets. I have asked for it, many times, but apparently the vagaries of the publishing industry mean that data of that sort just isn’t available.

Let’s get down to basics here.

Many of us get really hacked off with the notes from Amazon about what we ought to be interested in. I do, anyway.

You know how it is, you sign into Amazon, and are presented with a series of items that should be just up your street, because other “Customers who viewed this also viewed” etc. Which is brilliant for me. It means I get to see all the teenage/young adult books coming around. That is, after all, what my daughter looks for on my Amazon account.

She doesn’t have her own account.

But big data is very important nowadays. Much more so than most people realise. Your supermarket knows what you eat, it knows what cleaners you use, it knows how much you value your heart and arteries. It knows how many children you have, and even how much petrol you buy. There is so much data about you sloshing around, it’s hardly surprising that a computer-driven firm like Amazon wouldn’t be making as much use of it as possible.

And there are two problems with this.

First, publishers get only a small amount of data. They can see where books are sold, generally, and they can get a feel for whether or not a special promotion has worked. But for the majority of the sales data, Amazon has a clear monopoly and doesn’t share it. Why should it? Amazon wants to publish its own books, and that means they’ll own all production and selling of books in the most efficient manner because they know what we buy, when we buy it, what we highlighted in books, what we bookmark, even which books we never finished. That means publishers have no idea where to market new books. How can they? Meanwhile, Amazon retains control of all book markets. They know what to stock, who to target for specific books, the works.

Painting of Josselin Castle, Britanny

Second, let’s just think about the concept here. Let’s suppose Amazon were to share all their data with publishers. Would that be good? Publishers could then focus on the ever-reducing number of authors who are producing exactly what the buyers want. Brilliant! At a stroke all the wonderful, less-than-bestselling books could be trashed. Instead readers would be presented with a wonderful array of near-identical genre books. The readers’ choice would reduce dramatically, with only the top-level bestsellers winning new contracts, producing the same works with all the names changed.

Okay, perhaps there would be more variety than that, but at the end of the day, where would the flair of the individual editor show itself?

The appalling thing, for me, was to learn that Amazon doesn’t use humans any more. A programmer had a brilliant idea: people who bought one product may often buy a second or third. If you have enough people in a sample, you can predict with some accuracy what the second and third products will be. It’s the same as an actuarial calculation: you may not be able to say when Joe Bloggs is going to die, but if you have a sample of 100,000 or 1,000,000 people, you can predict how many of them are likely to die in any year. You can predict based on age, based on health, based on occupation, or any number of other attributes. All you need is the data, which Amazon has now acquired.

Editors provide an essential function in publishing. They find the oddball books that can fire the imagination of a generation. Take Harry Potter. Who could have predicted that the series would grow to be so popular? I seriously doubt that Amazon would have predicted that. Similarly with Vampire series, or dystopian futures in which children are forced to fight to the death. These books would not have achieved anything if pure data sets were used.

So, from an author’s perspective, I really wish Big Data didn’t exist. Since it does, I’m sure Amazon maintaining a monopoly is not good for anyone.

The other side is, authors cannot be driven towards one type of book or another. That is good. Authors need to write with their own authorial voice, they need to be fired with enthusiasm, anger, love or loathing before they pick up a keyboard. If they are seen as mere word-jugglers, who can be instructed to “write another story like X and Y, with these factors added to the plot”, we shall all be the poorer, but that is the inevitable direction Big Data will point in.

So, as an author, I am glad that my publishers really don’t have much of a clue about where my books sell. The main thing is, they appeal to all ages. That, for me, has to be enough.

Mind you, the next few years are going to be very interesting indeed.

Tagged: amazon, author, big data, blogger, book writing, creative, Dartmoor, Data, Devon, fiction, fiction writing, hints and tips, historian, history, Knight Templar, knights templar, library, medieval, medievalist, Michael Jecks, novelist, Q&A, questions, questions and answers, scribbler, stories, story, Templar series, writer, writing

Marketing for Authors

For those who weren’t aware, I have a YouTube channel on which I discuss many aspects of writing. If you haven’t seen it, look at this one, all about marketing your books – whether you’re an indie or published author! See the latest video here.

Review The Raven’s Head

 

 

I first met Karen some ten years ago now, at a literary festival in Lincoln, and I was delighted to do so. Only a few weeks before I had read her stunning and evocative book THE COMPANY OF LIARS, and it had blown me away. I was fascinated by her depiction of a group of travellers passing through the plague-torn countryside of England, especially by the chilling development and end. It still remains with me now.

After one hour on a stage with her in front of an audience, I asked if she’d like to join Medieval Murderers – she has been a firm friend ever since.

However, I have a firm policy here on my blog. I will not review any book that I do not think deserves to be here. If I have a bad book, no matter who wrote it, I will not review. If I think it’s really a stinker, I just won’t review it. Often there is a good reason. In recent years I have had to refuse to review books by the world’s best-selling writers because, to be honest, I couldn’t finish them. The writing was sloppy, the plotting poor or the characterisation rubbish.

So, I picked up my friend’s book with some trepidation. I needn’t have been concerned.

The Raven’s Head takes us a little earlier in time, to 1224. In England, a boy is taken from his family to the local monastery. He has been promised to the monks. Meanwhile, in France, a lord demands a mysterious proof from his librarian and scribe. A trainee scribe, Vincent, watches in bafflement as the old man searches through his records before suddenly beginning to write a long item. This is greedily accepted by their lord.

But Vincent saw the fraud develop. He takes his knowledge to his lord and attempts the gentle art of blackmail to procure for himself a rather better lodging than the tower with his master.

That is the start of the story. These two, intertwined with the story of Gisa at Langley, are the key to the book. And it is another of Karen’s stories that is utterly impossible to put down.

Basically it is set around two concepts: Karen has been influenced by the medieval troubadours, and brings their peripatetic existence to life in Vincent, but the other driving narrative force belongs to magic and alchemy, and the terrible conflict between them.

Karen has a way of bringing to life the people of the medieval period. She can describe them and their lives with precise, but never dry language that draws the reader in. You are involved in the lives of her characters in a way that few novelists can manage with modern people.

At the heart of much of Karen’s work lies superstition and religion, and this book is no different. She has researched medieval magic and alchemical tomes, and uses quotations from early Christian and Islamic alchemists for each chapter. However, although these fascinate (and occasionally appal!), Karen never lets them get in the way of her story. It thunders on relentlessly, while you feel the panic and rising terror of the players on her stage, all the way to the final climax.

I have written about Karen before. I love her as a friend, I admire her as a professional, but this, I think, is her best yet. She is consistently astonishing in the precision of her knowledge and the sheer inventiveness of her stories.

I thoroughly recommend this and all her other works.

You can find my comments on her last work, THE VANISHING WITCH, here.

THE RAVEN’S HEAD by Karen Maitland

Trade Paperback: 9781472215062

Ebook: 9781472215079

Also available in hardback or as audio download from Headline Review.

Tagged: alchemy, author, blogger, book writing, Devon, Headline, hints and tips, historian, history, Karen Maitland, magic, medieval, medievalist, novelist, Q&A, questions, questions and answers, scribbler, The Vanishing Witch, witch, writer, writing