Annabel Frazer's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

I'm finally nearly at the end of the latest draft of The Crooked Man. After a couple of drafts that went the wrong way, this one is the final major reworking one.

After this, it will be down to polishing drafts, one of my favourite stages of writing. All the hard work of dreaming up new settings and characters and untangling difficult plot problems is done (in theory) and it's just about tweaking the language, deleting unwanted copy and generally improving everything. It's such a satisfying feeling gradually editing out the bits that don't work and polishing those that do until what you're left is something that's rather better than you hoped, although still not as good as you dreamed.

In fact, the real trouble with the polishing stage is that it can go on forever! One of the main reasons I finally took the plunge and self-published The Day The Earth Caught Cold online was because I couldn't leave it alone. I was forever fiddling around with it when I was supposed to be working on something else. Now I can't.

Of course, the polishing stage is still hard work. TCM has characters whose plot arcs dwindle away to nothing. It has clues that appear out of nowhere and logical gaps that the characters can fall through. All of that needs fixing. But it's so much easier to fix when you have the entire novel in front of you, rather than still a question-mark where the end should be.

One of the most exciting things about self-publishing is the physical process of making a book. With my latest novel now finished, I have been learning about paper stock and considering typefaces, which I love.

Of course it's not the same as being snapped up by one of the main publishers and launched on the high street but not everyone gets that choice. And for those of us who don't, I feel really lucky that we now have the internet, ebooks, print on demand and other tools to help us do the best we can for our work.

Last time around, I went ebook only. But print on demand has improved so much since then in flexibility, quality etc, plus I was surprised by how many of my friends and family struggled with the ebook route. So this time, I'm going to enable print on demand - which apart from anything else, will mean I can have a paperback copy to keep myself.

Printing in paperback means you need to think much harder about the cover, something I've been slow to appreciate. For someone who reads physical books a lot, I took a while to grasp, for instance, that physical book covers have three sides! Thinking about the spine and back as well and needing to get the dimensions exactly right means I need to turn this one over to a professional designer, so that's what I'm doing.

It's remarkable to me how homogenous modern covers are - when I pop into WH Smiths in my lunch-hour, I see rows and rows of hard-nosed contemporary thrillers, all with harsh colours, a bleached out photograph of a gloomy location or a corpse and a short, aggressive title in shouty capitals.

I know what sort of cover I like as a reader. Illustrative or typographical and retro in feel. Luckily, my novel is a cosy crime/thriller which is also retro in feel so that should be a good fit.

Despite the prevalence of the hard-boiled type of cover, I do think publishers are lately starting to put more effort and creativity into covers, perhaps reflecting the recent recovery of the physical book against the ebook market. As a reader, I've fallen in love with so many covers lately and invariably bought the book.

Of course, covers are a very personal preference and it would be lovely to hear about what other readers like. Below are three of my favourites - it was impossible to name them all.

Circe by Madeleine Miller. This is a stunning cover and the book's stunning too, better in my opinion than The Song of Achilles, which preceded it.

The Call of The Curlew by Elizabeth Brooke. I fell in love with this cover the minute I saw it. I missed the hardback and the paperback isn't out yet, but I'm determined to read it purely because of this cover.

Between The Woods And The Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor's travel books are long, beautifully-written and slightly indigestible. This is my favourite of the covers, which makes you want to go wandering across Europe yourself.

This weekend, I'm publishing Death Comes In With The Tide. This is my sequel to Death Sees Most Of the Game and the first sequel I’ve ever written. It's so new that the GoodReads link doesn't work yet, so bear with this clunky link for now:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

To celebrate, I decided to blog about sequels. In the cinema world, the list of great sequels is well-established. The Godfather 2. Aliens. The Empire Strikes Back. Paddington 2. I would add Mamma Mia 2 to that list. But there is no such list of great literary sequels that I know of. So I decided to make my own list. This was surprisingly difficult, especially once I established some strict rules of engagement (see below). I'd love to hear other people's recommendations of great sequels, or any book you wish had a sequel but doesn't.

Rules of Engagement
1. No long-running franchises– Poirot, Miss Marple, James Bond, Harry Potter, etc. This made things incredibly difficult. Just as with films, once a book has been given a sequel, it seems to generate dozens. I wanted to celebrate books which only have one sequel and where we might not have expected one at all (the literary equivalent of The Jewel On The Nile, if you like).
2. No legacy sequels written by someone else.
3. Only books I actually rate and have read recently enough to have something sensible to say about them.

My resulting list is thus more of a selection box than a greatest hits list and a slightly odd selection box at that. In particular, I was disappointed not to be able to include E Nesbit’s charming The Phoenix and the Carpet, her follow-up to Five Children and It. Maddeningly, there’s a third book, The Story of the Amulet, which is far less well-known but nonetheless exists. Anyway, here it is, in no particular order – my very short list of single sequels.

The list
Rupert of Hentzau by Anthony Hope
This book at least qualifies with resounding conviction. This is the lesser-known follow-up to Hope’s hugely popular The Prisoner of Zenda. The first book is a classic of the adventure genre – English traveller Rudolf Rassendyll discovers he is a dead ringer for the kidnapped King of Ruritania and is persuaded to take his place temporarily as part of mission to save the king from his evil cousin Black Michael and his dashing henchman Rupert of Hentzau. As well as derring-do, the plot offers a lot of the fun involved in bodyswap comedies, as Rassendyll has to navigate the complexities of a foreign court.

The story has become a touchstone of popular culture and ‘Ruritanian’ a shorthand for fictional European settings for old-fashioned adventure and romance. (The modern trend for Christmas romantic comedies involving princesses from such places has given a new lease of life to the concept.) But you meet few people who are familiar with the sequel, in which Rassendyll returns to Ruritania and becomes drawn into a second conspiracy.

As you would expect from the title, secondary villain Rupert of Hentzau takes a bigger role this time which pleased me as I was a huge fan of his in the first book. Witty, charming and reckless, he might be a rotter but he’s far more fun than the rather poker-faced Rassendyll. (I thought everyone agreed with me on this but was once surprised to discover an passionate reader fan-base focused on the claims of neither Rupert nor Rudolf but Black Michael. It just goes to show there’s someone for everyone.)

The second novel is just as entertaining as the first and I don’t know why it’s less popular, other than the weak and unimaginative choice of title and a rather downbeat ending. The only other thing to add here is that I once planned to write a spoof legacy sequel myself called Return To Zenda, purely because I was smitten with that rather childish musical pun.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a beloved classic and most of the people who love it may not even know there’s a sequel or feel one is needed. I only know myself because it was just there in my bookcase when I was small, in the way that books arrive in your life without you necessarily knowing where they’re from when you are young.

The sequel starts at the exact end of the first book, when Willy Wonka, Charlie and Uncle Joe break through the roof of the chocolate factory in the glass elevator and go to fetch Charlie’s family. Having done so, Wonka presses the wrong button on the way back and the elevator shoots off into space where the group have a series of unlikely adventures.

Perhaps the reason this sequel didn’t take off as its plot did was because there were no wonderful chocolate inventions to hunger over. Nonetheless, I’ve always rather liked The Great Glass Elevator, mostly for the Vermicious Knids, giant spaceworms which appear about two-thirds of the way through the story. As vicious and dangerous as Rupert of Hentzau but far less charming, these deadly creatures descend in elevators of their own on the world the group have visited and like to spell out words with their bodies, even though they only know one word – it’s a bizarre conceit but I loved it when I was small.

The Lost World by Michael Crichton
This direct sequel to Jurassic Park came more or less straight after the first book, long before the parade of endless Jurassic film sequels we’re now into. (The second film entry adopts its title and quite a lot of its plot.) It’s not at all bad, either, although it suffers rather from annoying-child-itis.

The enormous, one might almost say monstrous success of the first film may have hamstrung the second book rather – for one thing, park creator Richard Hammond, firmly killed off in the first book but saved in the film, gave Crichton a difficult issue to address. For another, Ian Malcolm. In the book, he’s a thin man in black clothes who just says slightly annoying but clever things and probably also dies. In the film, he was given such a huge dose of charisma by the irresistibly charming Jeff Goldblum that he firmly establishes himself as the franchise’s most essential character.

The Lost World is not a bad book at all and could easily have led to further sequels but the film-making project was clearly already dominating the enterprise and author Michael Crichton had other ideas in his head.

Traveling with the Dead by Barbara Hambly
I do not need to preface this sequel with ‘not very well known’ as the first book was not well known either. Those Who Hunt the Night is an enjoyable fantasy set in nineteenth-century England in which former intelligence agent Jonathan Asher and his charming wife Lydia investigate a series of violent murders. They do this at the insistence of a charming but ruthless vampire who wants the murders solved – we are thus into ‘reluctant collaboration’ and even bromance territory and the uneasy alliance between humans and vampire generates some of the fish-out-of-water comedy and charm you might expect. I will say little more to avoid spoiling the first novel but the second involves a similar adventure, this time set in the capitals of Europe. Both novels are well worth reading if you enjoy fantasy.

My own book Death Comes In With The Tide is a sequel to Death Sees Most Of the Game, an old-fashioned thriller in which former security expert Xan Ross goes to a Wimbledon match and becomes embroiled in a murder. At the end of the book, I inadvertently left Xan exiled overseas and all his friends thinking he was dead. This seemed harsh so my new book addresses this situation, while also giving Xan a new case to solve.

I am going to conclude with two books which don’t have sequels but I wish they did. First up, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the wonderfully-written period fantasy that’s like Dickens with magic. Its open/ slightly downbeat ending means further magical adventures are clearly warranted. I am still hopeful that we might actually get this.

Second, Noel Streatfeild’s White Boots. I’ve never been a big reader of this author’s theatrical books, but in the 1980s, White Boots seemed to tap into every British child’s wish to be good at ice-skating and our secret knowledge that we never would be. Our temperate country does not have the weather to make skating a well-practised sport and there’s just something in the awkward British psyche which means we can’t easily see ourselves gliding gracefully on the ice like our northern European fellows. To this day, I feel socially anxious at the thought of ice-rinks and helplessly envious of anyone I meet who’s a confident skater.

White Boots is thus pure wish-fulfilment as convalescing Harriet is prescribed skating to strengthen her legs and we watch her gradually familiarise herself with this new world, make friends with child prodigy Lalla and begin to learn and enjoy skating.

At the end of the story, Lalla exclaims: “Giggerty-geggerty. Don’t you all want to know what happens to Harriet and me? Because I do.” YES, Lalla, yes I do.