Jonathan L. Howard's Blog, page 23

Greetings of the Season from Our Great and Benevolent Founder

 Hello. 

I should really hold off writing my address to a grateful planet until after Christmas, but I should be too stupidly busy to do it then so I shall impose upon your holiday cheer earlier rather than later. Specifically, a brief report on my year for your elucidation and delight. 
Firstly, and I shall be hearkening back on this repeatedly so you had better get used to this, I have finished writing three novels this year, which makes me awesome even unto mine own jaundiced eyes. I can't say I wrote three, full stop, because one has been floating around two or three chapters from completion for a good while now.

To be precise, in the first instance I finished the "zero draft" (my new favourite term for the shitty first draft, all awash in typos, non sequiturs, repetitions, ugly phraseology, and general cackitude) of Cabal #3, which bears the title of Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute and specifically not Johannes Cabal and the Fear Institute. I'd prefer it to just be The Fear Institute, but apparently it must have "Johannes Cabal" in the title, just like all the 007 novels had "James Bond" in the title. Such are the strange ways of marketing. 

This novel is currently in the process of being polished to create a submissible first draft, a process that is not going brilliantly due to the Christmas logjam of things-that-must-be-done and possibly a degree of burnout because I finished three novels this year and the mortal human frame can only bear limited quantities of awesome. Hence, I anticipate being ridiculously busy between Christmas day and New Year's in an attempt to catch up. 

The second novel that was written all in its totality this year was my shot at the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November. I took it as an opportunity to get a monkey off my back -- a story that had been nagging me for about a year or so demanding to be written. It's a sort of pulp thing that required a headlong energy to work, and I realised NaNoWriMo would be the ideal opportunity to start it. I wanted it to be a short novel, as I for one dislike shootin'-an'-'plodin' novels that don't know when to quit. It's like having a hyperactive eight year old boy hopped up on sugar and caffeine screaming in your face for four hours. My NaNoWriMo novel clocked in at about 55 000 words in its draft zero, and that sounds just about right to me. It'll pick up another 5-10k words in its rewrite, which puts it in about the sweet spot for the kind of thing I had in mind. Getting it published is something else ("It's a novel about what? Set where? Set when? Are you nuts?"), but I have a feeling it will see print if only because it's fun and unusual and I think it might intrigue those strange bods in marketing. 

The third novel, the one that was largely completed already, is a book for children inspired by a conversation I had with my daughter four or five years ago. She was just riffing away on strange ideas, one of them took my fancy, and the next thing I know I was writing a novel about it. As is usually the way with my stuff, what was supposed to be a fun, upbeat story got rather darker in the telling, but it works so what the heck. That one in its roughly hewn form is about 70 000 words, and will again pick up about 5k in the first rewrite. My agent is particularly keen to read it because its working title "sounds like a Pink Floyd song," which is as good a reason as any.

I won't say much more about this one except to say that my daughter used to love the "Rainbow Fairy" series of books until her lucid eye noted that they all had the same plot, near as dammit, and they changed the artist to one of whose style she could not approve. I wasn't sorry she turned against them, because after a promising start and perhaps unexpected success, the publisher's cynicism became obvious and they churned out sequel series basing the fairies on ever more desperate themes. I think the last one I saw was "The Internal Organ Fairies" or something similar. Wilhemina-Rubin the Bile-Duct Fairy. Whatever. As somebody with an interest in folklore, the unremitting blandness of the stories and the somewhat disrespectful casting aside of a huge mass of myths and legends irritated me. So, I decided to tell a story that, if nothing else, shows the broadness of European folklore in general and British folklore in particular. It's still disrespectful -- and I expect the Folklore Society will take out a contract on me -- but it is so fondly. 

On the subject of previous projects, this year saw the publication of Johannes Cabal the Detective, which -- like its predecessor -- seems to be doing respectable business. That will be coming out in paperback in the UK in a couple of months, but I have no idea when the US paperback comes out, I'm afraid. Probably closer to June or July. Last November saw the publication of the Cabal short "The Ereshkigal Working" in the anthology The Way of the Wizard , edited by John Joseph Adams. Next year should see the publication of another new Cabal short, "The House of Gears" published in the Fantasy ezine. Also, some new non-English versions of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer are coming out including the Polish and French translations, the latter published by the splendidly named Bibliothèque Interdite . So, it's all go for 2011. 

That's my terribly self-congratulatory spiel done (did I mention I finished writing three novels this year?), so it only remains for me to thank you for your continued interest in my work, to send all who read this my very best wishes and a warm season's greetings for the midwinter celebration of your choice from me and mine. 

TTFN
JLH

Well, that was easy.

 Relatively speaking. 

As will be evident from my previous entries pertaining to Nanowrimo, I was not at all convinced that I would be able to complete it, and that if I could even hit 25 000 words I would be happy. Well, as it turned out I passed 50k last Tuesday, the 23rd, and finished the novel the following day, hitting just shy of 55k. 


So, I'm assuming that natural human curiosity will make you want to know just what I wrote for Nanowrimo and, unhappily, I can't really say in any sort of detail. Suffice it to say that it couldn't be any further from Cabal in content even if the style ended up being closer to the Cabal stories than I anticipated. I think that might be because I went straight from one to the other and was still in Cabal-mode.

There was one great surprise for me, though. The novel was intended as a straightforward, uncomplicated adventure yarn with the forces of good and evil clearly delineated and a well defined victory for the white hats. I'd been playing around with the story for ages, I thought I had a pretty good idea where it would go and I had a few scenes planned out in note form. I really didn't think that something so simple would have the opportunity to surprise me. But, yes it did, big time. Along the way the story mutated in unexpected forms, the line between the good and the bad guys blurred, and the protagonist's character changed profoundly. This was supposed to be a one-off since my belief was that the protagonist would just carry on being heroic beyond the end of the story in a predictable and slightly anodyne way. Instead, I truly hope Sam, my doughty literary agent, is able to place the final version of this with a publisher because the sequel is absolutely burning in me, begging to be written and has been since I typed THE END on the end of the first one. It seems a bit of serendipity that I ended up with an opera scene because there is an operatic feel to the whole thing, a sort of overheated madness of passion that drives the characters to do extraordinary things, for the villains to show virtue and the hero to look too long into the abyss.

I appreciate that seems a lot of hyperbole for what is, after all, just a bit of an adventure yarn. What can I say? I've just spent a month with the damned thing, day in and day out. I should be sick at the thought of it. That I'm not is token of something. I want to start rewriting it now, but that would be counter-productive. Instead, and as planned, I shall do the Cabal #3 rewrites through December and start rewrites on my Nanowrimo novel while waiting for feedback from Sam.

So, what shall I be doing for the rest of today and tomorrow? Well, that would be writing another novel. Gods, I am so productive at the moment. 

Thus Far...

 Well, I said I'd stick the occasional update about the whole NaNoWriMo thing on here, so here we are. 

So far, so good. 

Oh, you were expecting more detail than that, were you? Very well, then. After eleven days of writing, I have written 23 677 words according to the word counter at the NaNoWriMo site (MS Word begs to differ with that, suggesting 23 623). There have been a couple of difficult days, but by and large it's gone quite easily. Of course, I have the huge advantage that this is most of what I'm doing at the moment work-wise, so it's not the mountain it is for people finding time to do it in the evening. On the other hand, I can't regard what I'm doing as purely fun; the intention is to have something that can be whipped into publishable shape at the end of it, so I can't afford to write in sequences that I know are just there for padding and will need to be cut in editing. Thus, despite my intention specifically not to, I've found myself doing a little light editing and more detailed research than I was intending. Little of this has required more than a swift foray into Google, Wikipedia, or *gasp* opening a book, but it's still time consuming. I can't help it; details bother me and I hate getting them wrong. 

I also have to admit that my word count includes the dedication. It came to me yesterday and, as I felt it helped set the tone for the book that follows, I've included it in the file already. I will just say this about who it's dedicated to -- it's nobody living. Or dead. 

Or undead, so you can stop thinking along those lines right now.

One thing that's surprised me (apart from actually managing to keep up a decent rate of work) is the style. I was expecting it to be stylistically quite sparse and spare, cut to the bone due to the time pressure. To the contrary, however, it has similarities to the Cabal stories in terms of asides and digressions. I wasn't sure if it was the right style for the story, but I've written almost 24k worth of the damn thing, so it is now. 

With regard to the story, you will appreciate that I can't discuss it in any detail at this juncture. I can say, however, that it has no supernatural occurrences in it at all, but stupidly large numbers of guns, fire fights, explosions and, most horrifyingly, there may be KISSING, eew, spew, yuk. Or there may not be -- I blush easily. 

Tomorrow, barring disasters, I pass the halfway mark. Onwards!

To Do the Stupid Thing

 Well, now. I finished the rough -- very rough -- first draft of the third Johannes Cabal novel the other week and I've had a few days break just writing scrips and scraps. I don't intend to go back to the Cabal until the beginning of December when I've had a chance to forget what I wrote and can go back to it with a more objective eye. Now, however, I am girding my loins for what I shall be doing in the interim. I've had a few ideas for other non-Cabal books I'd like to write, but was wondering when I might have a chance to actually sit down and turn one from ideas into prose. 

So, because I like setting myself up for failure, I've signed up to the National Novel Writing Month (NaNiWriMo), a global (despite the "National" bit) frenzy of verbiage during which one tries to write fifty thousand words constituting either a novel or the beginning of one in the space of a single month, specifically the thirty days of November. 

I must be mad.

I'm not a fast writer at the best of times, and the chances of me managing 50k in a month is cracking on towards zero. Still, even if I fail miserably and only manage, say, 25k, that's still 25k of hopefully usable prose that can be built upon. The story I want to write is pretty high energy and would work better at a short novel length anyway, so I shall try for the 50k in any event. I'll just have to see how it goes. I will also try to keep updates here and on Twitter (the account name is jonathanlhoward) to keep folk informed as to just how badly I'm doing. 

Wish me luck.

On Splattering and Goo

Good heavens. Two months since I last posted. I had no idea it was so long.

One of the non-fun things about writing a novel is how solitary an endeavour it is. It's just you and the recalcitrant words and the infelicitous phrases in a throwdown battle of domination, trying to steer a path between the text reading like a shopping list or alternatively ending up with the plot so buried under a coral of fancy-schmantzy prose that it becomes invisible. It's a grind, especially when one's trying to keep to a schedule in order to get the thing done in a timely fashion. So, one looks for ways to make the process more entertaining and to keep one's energy up generally.


In this case, I tweeted the following in a surfeit of glee.

Those who thought JCtD was lacking horror should be happy. #JohannesCabal 3 has oodles of ugly deaths. Ugly, sticky, oozing deaths...

"Oodles" in this context is a very vague term meaning, "More on-page deaths than usual." As to "ugly, oozing deaths," it should be understood that there is a hierarchy here: there are deaths; there are ugly deaths; there are sticky deaths, that are therefore ugly; there are oozing deaths, that are therefore sticky, and therefore ugly, too.

Now, the reviews for Johannes Cabal the Detective have been gratifyingly good, with no outright bad ones, at least to my knowledge. There have, however, been some middling ones, and these have been almost unanimous as to why they don't like Detective as much as Necromancer; it's because the horror elements are fewer. Linda Marotta's review in "Fangoria" is a good example of these; she loved Necromancer, but was left a little cold by Detective. That's fine and -- after all -- being "left a little cold" is still a good distance from actively disliking it.

As it is, I was in a position to think, "Well, you might like the next one more in that case," when I came upon such reviews. I should emphasise that I had the idea for Cabal #3 a year or two ago and its writing was already well underway when Detective was released. Thus, the reviews bemoaning the paucity of horror in that novel had no impact on the plot of its successor. Heaven forfend that they should do so, because then I'd essentially be writing to order, and that way lies suckage.

So, I sent the above tweet purely in a spirit of "This is very vaguely what I'm doing. Cool, eh?" And for this, I am a fool. It hadn't really occurred to me that, while there are plenty of people who would welcome a more horrific Cabal excursion, there were also plenty who preferred the tone of Detective to Necromancer, and who would regard more horror as a retrograde step.

Thus, I feel I should clear up a few things. Importantly, every Cabal story long or short is its own creature. Some of them are relatively cerebral, and some involve much splatter. I can only say that I am not nor have I ever been a fan of splatter for splatter's sake. Even in the 'seventies when the new wave of extreme gore came in, despite being a schoolboy who should have been easily enamoured of such explicitness, it didn't do much for me. My favourite early James Herbert, for example, was actually Fluke, far and away his least gory. I also remember actually jumping up from my reading and pacing back and forth in mad excitement at the ideas behind Blackwood's almost bloodless "The Wendigo," a courtesy that I never extended to any tale of chainsaws, cannibalism, or giant, vigorously carnivorous animals, usually contained within a novel entitled "The (Noun)," plurals optional. So, when I talk about "ugly, sticky, oozing deaths," this is ugly, sticky, oozing deaths within the Cabal universe, and all that it entails.

There is, however, definitely more horror in Cabal #3 than Detective. There just is. The story will not work or even make sense without it.

So, to come to some sort of conclusion, I suppose I should be more careful with my teasing. Anticipation is one thing, but inadvertently creating misconceptions is something else. My apologies to anybody who got the impression I was reaching for a five gallon bucket with one hand and the formula for Kensington Gore with the other. That is not the case.

I was planning on using the three gallon instead.

And so, to vaguely related fare. I've been asked a number of times in recent weeks about the possibility of a Cabal short story collection. In principle, I'd love to do it. I am and have always been a great fan and supporter of the short form, and sneer mightily at those who regard it as a poor cousin of the novel. Between the two published, and the one due out in November, plus several unpublished examples, I have about 50-60% of what I'd consider sufficient to create a collection. Add to that the ideas for shorts I have noted down, and there should be enough. Lying between now and that happy event, however, is actually getting the stories written and securing a publishing deal for such a collection. So, the will is there, but there's also a muckle of work and a friendly publisher necessary before it actually sees the light of day.

Doctor... Who the Hell..?

For your amusement. Writing the post for the Book Smugglers about some of my formative influences as a very young child, I was reminded of a short story that I wrote for an amateur Doctor Who anthology for charity a few years ago that unfortunately never saw the light of day as far as I know. The idea for the connecting theme of the stories was a nice one; imagine if it were1963, and that you were a producer at the BBC who had just been handed a very vague proposal for a programme called Doctor Who. Really, the only givens were that the central character was called the Doctor, and that he had a machine that allowed him to travel through time and space. What might you come up with given such a broad brief?

As witnessed by the Book Smugglers piece, I remember the 'sixties pretty well albeit from a very particular perspective, so I decided to write my story coloured by that perspective. I rather like this story, I must admit -- partially for its tone, and partially for the large number of cultural references it picked up simply within the process of being written. I've also noticed that it's punctuated in a way I don't use now (i.e. really badly, as distinct from my current standard of just fairly badly), but I've decided to leave it as is.

Here then, for your delight and delectation -- or, failing that, your confusion and condemnation -- is the first episode of Doctor Who from November, 1963, just the way that it wasn't.

 

Copyright Jonathan L. Howard 2010

 

That Difficult Second Album

Well, as I write this, Johannes Cabal the Detective has been out in the UK for six days and North America for just over twenty-four hours. It’s always an odd feeling when something gets released, as I’ve mentioned before. The sense that something amazing should happen on the day grows fainter every time, but never entirely goes away. Still, there have been three reviews I know of so far (The Agony Column, Warpcore, and a very slightly spoilery one at Amazon.co.uk, so you might want to skip that until you've read the novel yourself), all of which have been encouraging.

 I believe I have written a decent book. I may be deluding myself – that happens – but I would not have submitted it if it was going to embarrass me by being utter bobbins. Regardless of how things go, though, one thing I am fairly confident about is that, at the very, very least, I have not fallen into the second album trap.

For those unfamiliar with this bit of musical lore, back in the day bands almost always followed the same path to a recording contract. They formed, rehearsed, gigged, and gigged, and gigged. They played working men’s clubs, pubs, student unions, and anywhere else that would have them. All the time, they would desperately hope that somewhere in the audience was an A&R man (artists and repertoire) from a label who would be bowled over by their performance and sign them up to a recording contract. You will note the absence of TV talent shows in this process. I digress.

When it came time to go into the studio, the band would of course choose their best material, the stuff that they know from experience works well when they perform. The first album would be filled with it, because one only makes a first impression once, and they want to be successful.

So, when it comes time for the second album, they have a problem. They’ve shot their bolt, and used their best stuff. There is some frantic writing, but no time to test it on the road, so they hope for the best and put on what they can. This then is the reason why, historically, so many second albums suck gristle.

Something similar can happen in books, as pointed out by Ros Jackson in her review at Warpcore, if for slightly different reasons. The first book was written at leisure, with time to rewrite and polish before any publisher even sees it. On the second and subsequent books, however, there will be deadlines to hit, and the second book is the first time when this new discipline will bite. Thus, there is a good chance that the strain will show. As a famous example of this “You want it when?” syndrome in action, I would suggest J.K. Rowling’s The Chamber of Secrets. It’s not a bad book, but it lacks the playfulness and ingenuity of the first in the series, and with the best will in the world, the plot is essentially The Philosopher’s Stone recycled. To me, that smells of deadline fear. Admittedly, Jo Rowling then had the happy experience of subsequently writing in her own time when the success of the early books gave her more executive wallop than just about any writer I can think of. So, she just sublimated that deadline fear into her writing, used it to raise the Dementors, and let them on their way. That’s my theory, anyway.

I’m happy to say I dodged that bullet simply through experience; I’ve spent years in the games industry writing creatively to order.

The other way books can suffer the dreaded second album syndrome is simply because the first one was the author’s Big Idea, an idea that they have spent years nurturing and improving upon. Once it has gone off into the world as the first novel, sometimes a second Big Idea fails to come along in a timely fashion. The author either ends up writing a jumble of unrelated events, or rehashes the first book with a new wig and dark glasses, and hopes nobody will notice.

Luckily, and it chastens me to admit that it was luck and not razor-sharp judgement on my part, my bright idea was never really all that business with the carnival in the first book. It was the character of Johannes Cabal himself. All I have to do is to come up with dangerous or unusual situations, throw Cabal into them, and then watch him climb out again, usually running up a body count in the process. In fact, that’s what I’m doing at the moment, work wise. I’ve come up with the biggest, most dangerous, and highly unusual situation yet, dropped Cabal in by the scruff of his neck, and... Oh, you’ll find out. Sometime next year.

Frank Sidebottom RIP

Well, I'm back online, and the first notable thing I find to write about is another obituary. This year sucks so far.

Frank Sidebottom, if you are unfamiliar with him, was a comic character created by Chris Sievey, a former punk who was rather too clever and nice to make a convincing punk. His band, the Freshies, had one moderate hit with "I'm in Love with the Girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk." I seem to remember that he also released a solo single about a year later, the B side to which was a program -- written by Sievey -- for the ZX Spectrum. You loaded the program, then pressed "Enter" when cued on the A side. This synched the program to the music, and so you ended up with an 8-bit video to watch while you listened.

Sievey's greatest invention, however, was the eternally naive, slightly egotistical surrealist, celebrity, and banjo ukulele player, Frank Sidebottom; a man with a papier-mache head who lived with his mum in Timperley in south Manchester. Timperley is a real place, but seen through the distorting lens of Sidebottom's perceptions, it became something like a friendlier version of Royston Vasey.


Over the years from his debut in the mid-'eighties, Sidebottom/Sievey's fortunes ebbed and flowed, but he never stopped. I was delighted to see a poster in Bristol a few months back for a Sidebottom performance, albeit after the event. Never mind, I thought, he tours like a mad thing. He'll be back again soon enough. That anticipation feels rather sour now.

Even if I never see him on stage, however, I did have the curious pleasure of meeting Frank Sidebottom (I never met Chris Sievey, as will become apparent) when he did an episode of “Radio Timperley” from my front room after I unexpectedly won a competition. He arranged the time to visit by 'phoning in character, but I had this vague idea he would turn up as Chris Sievey, we would roughly thrash out how the show was going to go and then record it. No chance. He turned up on the doorstep all Franked-up with Mark Radcliffe in tow, and never broke character for a second. If the show had any failings, it was entirely due to me being so obviously banjaxed with astonishment throughout.

The thing I remember most was how brilliant at extemporisation he was. I was living in a shared house at the time, having long since moved out from the parental home. This was a concept that Frank Sidebottom was bound to have problems with.

“Where’s your mum?” he asked.

“About twenty miles away.”

“Ooooh!” he replied, impressed. “What a big house!”

It's fair to say that Frank Sidebottom was one of those acts that you either "got," and found hilarious, or didn't "get," and found pointless. Personally, if you can't find anything at least intriguing about a man with a papier-mache head, who has a ventriloquist puppet that looks exactly like him but for a two dimensional body, an obsession with Kilvert's lard, and can cow the likes of Iain Lee, then I suggest you go back to your TV and wait for the next thing Simon Cowell has planned for you. Your soma is waiting.

Oh, yes it is. It really is. Thank you.

The New Stone Age

I'm currently sitting in the corner of a room full of junk lying around on the floor. So far the move has gone pretty well. We've moved most of our stuff but there is still a good quantity of crap just strewn around, and a few small bits of furniture that need removing. Happily, we have over a week in which to clear the place.   Less happily, it turns out that BT need a fortnight's notice before closing a number, and you only go on the queue for engineers once that period is over. It will therefore be the 8th of June before we get a 'phone line in the new place, and a little bit after that before we get our internet connection. None of us are happy at all about this. Plus, the TV aerial in the new place isn't connected so we will be without TV for a few days. No TV or internet. We're having to talk to one another. It's so barbaric.

Just a Quicky

Or should that be a "quickie"? Hmmmm...

A swift status posting. Here's what's happening.
 

 

We are moving soon, and the house is in a greatly disrupted state. Internet access will become problematical over the next few days, and we may have very limited access for the next two or three weeks while the new place -- a new build -- has its 'phone points installed and we transfer our internet access. So, my apologies in advance for the possible forthcoming silence.

 

Later this year, a new Cabal short story will be published in "The Way of the Wizard" anthology, edited by John Joseph Adams. Herr Cabal will be rubbing shoulders with work by the likes of George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, and C.C. Finlay. The story is "The Ereshkigal Working," (working title "An Army of One," should that sort of thing interest you).

 

After the sad loss of Christopher Cazenove last month, the gig of recording the entirety of Johannes Cabal the Detective has gone to Robin Sachs, a veteran of all sorts of Right, I have things to put in boxes.

TTFN
JLH