Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 23

This is my 100th posted blog!

I was going to write about my megalomania and need for control and how that factors into my writing choices this week, because recently I’ve been all too zen talking about acceptance and revised visions of what success means to me nowadays, and I wanted to remind myself that I’m still a potentially delusional patient living in the writing ward of life’s hospital. Which of course I am currently okay with! But then I saw that this would be the #100 blog published, and thought I’d just spend this space being astonished at having come so far.

*Pauses for period of astonishment.*

It really has been a long road. I really do intend to do that Mystery Blogger award that Mitch nominated me for. I really am very grateful to everyone who has stopped by and read my burbling on this, that, and the inevitable other. Thanks folks!

I haven’t been paying close attention to the numbers, but they are slowly growing. The number of blogs, of visitors, of views, likes, comments. That is awesome, and is down to just persisting, and occasionally (not often enough) reaching out to my fabulous fellow bloggers. Thank you thank you to the bloggers who have, and continue to drop by regularly with likes and hellos, it means a great deal to me. My nose remains to the grindstone, that crank (thanks JM!) keeps getting turned. I’m enjoying this, even as it represents another chunk of time to be juggled. My pool game has suffered recently, as I’ve put in far less practice, just as I will be entering a bunch of local tournaments over the next couple of weekends – let’s hope muscle memory is real! My touch shots will be all over the place, alas… On the other hand, the writing muscle has been getting exercised, and boy does it need the work!

Anyway. I think that I and this blog have come a long way, and it is good to look back and see the journey as it was taken. I am looking forward to the next 100, and have no idea where I will be when I reach that bend in the path, but it is an exciting prospect, and I hope some of you will get there with me, as it is always better to travel with friends.

Thank you all once again. Here’s to 100, and many more to come!

The Writing Life: Feeling the Fear, but Still Having Time for Fun

I’m beginning to feel the fear. In a good way. I have deadlines looming, and many miles to go before dawn. Right now there is actual uncertainty about whether or not I’ll get everything done on time.

This is okay. Not the idea of missing a deadline, but feeling the fear early enough that I can act on it. It may well be that as zero hour on various projects draws closer I shall have to put this blog on hiatus, or cut down to once a week in order to satisfy my other commitments. I hope I can avoid this, but want to acknowledge the possibility, in the hope it drives me to work harder.

I wrote a difficult scene a couple of days ago. What I created is probably only a fragment of what will ultimately be delivered to the reader for consumption, but the core is there. I have to remember this is a draft, not the final product. Broad strokes for now, even if I like to paint them with a tiny brush sometimes!

Writing fresh scenes like that, discovering more in them as I go, even if I know some of those revealed details might not make the cut, is one of the quiet pleasures of writing. Feeling the fear and having the motivation to get that writing done, to put those ideas down, is another. New threads have been added that recall earlier ideas, reinforce motifs, perhaps create new wrinkles that I might decide to echo earlier in the book to give them more power – the joy of rewrites and editing! This aspect: the creation of the new that then needs to be retrospectively added in to the preceding text, is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing in that I feel it is refining the overall depth of the book, a curse in that I have to watch against falling in love with such extra echoes and keep adding them to the story’s detriment, either by padding it out unnecessarily, or by calling attention to my artifice by overdoing it, and risking the reader being broken out of their suspension of disbelief by the intrusion of the author showing off!

Often, in writing The Thief and The Demon, I would throw in lines that I realized echoed or paralleled things before or after simply because it pleased me to do so as I wrote, it made me smile, and felt right. The linked images, or mirroring lines could be hundreds of pages apart, no-one might ever spot that I did it, but for me, it was part of the fun, the pleasure of writing the book. I also thought at times they added irony, or pathos, or thematic reinforcement, and so took the risk of it perhaps looking arch or forced. I hope my readers do not find these touches leaden and overplayed, but that is the chance you take when at times you write for your own private satisfaction, but then justify it as something that improves the novel as a whole. There is a fine line to walk there, as is so often the case in writing, but when it feels good to me, rather than feeling intellectually forced in for the sake of a rhetorical device’s presence, then I am inclined to let it remain, and leave it to the audience to decide.

In feeling the fear might you might imagine that I would cut down on these little bits of writer at play, but so far I think that as I write, if the ideas are flowing, those little mental associations just pop up, and at this stage of writing it is fine to throw them at the wall and see if they stick to it in pleasing patterns. Ideas, images, word play, stylistic games and thematic structures are all there to be experimented with now, because if not now, when? There is always time to edit, to refine, to cut, to kill some of those darlings, and perhaps invent others!

Here’s to feeling the fear, and having it fuel some unexpected fun in the race against the dreaded deadline.

Why I Write Fantasy: Memories of Nature and Other Fragments

Glen Clova, orienteering like a ranger or druid or both, the summit of Arthur’s Seat at sunrise, the Trossachs and trout over fire, Loch Katrine swimming, the shock of freezing, the amazement of finding warmer currents and following their course, shivering anew every time they were lost, wet bracken and green ravines down to running water over black rock, narrow paths through clinging leaves that laid cold hands through damp clothing. Low cloud, climbs over muddy slopes and loose stones, and the danger of teachers walking off cliffs, calling to each other in the mist to be sure of location. Walks along overgrown railway cuttings, balancing on bridge parapets over drops that would kill the small boy I was. Rapidly grew out of such risk taking. The fields and copses of the borders, the wooded estate of Mellerstain with its fields and paddocks and farm tracks for a boy with dogs, a cat, and the occasional horse to explore. The hourglass eye of a horse, looking, as nostrils quivered in search of treats in little pink hands. The smell of harness and brass, molasses and oats, of ammonia and dung, the taste of hay dust in the air as you moved the bales, the dance of it catching the light, the straw scratching at your skin and then itching as you got it down to put in the stables after you cleaned them. Earlier memories of churning water and sky, low shoulders of land approaching, heather covered slopes and a stag that didn’t want to share them – though I doubt he really chased me, as I think an adult deer would easily have run down the 8 year old I was at the time, for all my terrified speed. The revenge of venison for Christmas dinner. Orion over sycamore trees, Drumbrae hill at night, the dark paths filled with dangers, all alone with my imagined and palpable fears, the cobalt of a predawn sky over Edinburgh, a special colour that never lasted long. Frost on stone and crazed pavements as breath hung in the air, dew turning to crystals to crunch underfoot, the sharp smell of silage and a hundred cows, udders bursting as they trooped in for milking. The silence of pine woods, the brown empty spaces of the needle covered ground between the high trees, the annoyance of spindly dead branches blocking your path when the ways got tight. The charge of water past a white prow, cold spray in the air, hands lifting me out over the waves, rushing beneath. Chestnut trees and the contented calls of pigeons on misty mornings, cooing to the sunrise, a gentle wake up call.

The Writing Life: Acceptance

Last week I talked about what success meant for me nowadays. A big part of why the shape of success has changed for me over the years is a growing acceptance of the things I can and cannot control in this writing life.

I was very unrealistic in my youth. I wanted it all, but without working for it. I wanted to be recognized and feted despite putting no effort into getting recognized or doing something worth celebrating beyond finally producing a first draft. The glory was just supposed to ‘happen’ for me, because I wished ardently for that to be the case.

I refused to do my research and work out what I needed to achieve beyond write a draft. I knew there was an industry out there, and I’d need to interact with it, but finding out about it seemed terribly bothersome, and very like hard work, so I bought a book or two about it and barely broke their spines, still hoping a literary prince charming would appear from nowhere to sweep me off to a land of endless parties and praise.

Now, that was all ridiculous, and I must say in many ways I was so lazy I didn’t even daydream that hard about it all, I just had the draft and was going to ‘do something about it’ later. I had a job and a flat and was getting on with life in my 20s and all the distractions that presented. My earlier self would dispute the characterization I have described above and say I was just editing, or busy, or even doing nothing, rather than say I was just hoping for something to come out of the nothing that was my utter inability to engage with making a career from my passion.

So what changed?

I accepted a lot of things. This took a long time, and happened incrementally over a number of years, and is still ongoing today. I’m not the finished article by any means, and likely never will be, which is fine by me.

First, I accepted I needed to start again with a new story. I accepted the need to rewrite and edit. I actually worked on learning what that meant: a spine or two, real and virtual, were actually cracked and creased as I put some time in. Eventually I accepted that I needed external help.

Once I decided to self-publish, I accepted that I was going into a crowded market, and would be responsible for my own destiny. I finally accepted that I could only control my own actions, and not impose my (daydreaming) will upon the world. I accepted I would make mistakes. For many years I had always described to other people the vast numbers of books written versus the tiny handful that were published traditionally, and then the vast number of published books versus the tiny handful that became genuine, life-altering bestsellers, so there has long been an acceptance that the simple numbers game was against me, but you always hope that you’ll beat those odds. Once I decided that I didn’t require the blessing of the publishing house gatekeepers, I accepted that despite my best efforts, it would be very hard for my writing to find its audience, and furthermore, I could not gauge the potential size of that audience. (You can do market research, but still I think with fantasy books in the current market, now fractured with sub-genres, it is difficult to say with confidence what your potential reach is. I decided to produce my best, and go from there. Perhaps naïve, but I’m stuck with it, for now! This may well be one of my many mistakes, but if so, it is one I will learn from. Eventually, haha! I’m okay with that, because right now what I am doing is fulfilling, and I believe in what I’ve written, and what I’m working on. Doing what you love and believe in is never truly a waste of time or effort, in my opinion.)

I am continuing to learn, trying to improve both the quality of my writing, and its ability to appeal to readers in a way which I hope is complementary, but I recognize that I have a lot to put together in that department, and perfection, while worth striving for, is far from within my grasp. I accept this, and the challenge it represents. Sometimes it is daunting, other times, like right now as I type this, it is exciting.

Acceptance is a strange thing. It isn’t fatalism, or ennui, or resignation. I’m still engaged with my dreams, am possessed of ambition and drive, yet I accept that for all my efforts my writing may end up as a small brief ripple in an oceanic pond. I accept that, because to rail against it, to demand that I am somehow due the attention of large numbers of readers requires a reality-denying level of ego I’m not inclined to feed. I think it would be damaging for me as a person. Now perhaps if I had that intense focus, and decided to settle for nothing less my wildest dreams come true, perhaps that would increase my chances of success a fraction more, but it would also make the failure to beat the odds sting much harder. So is this acceptance a self-preservation tactic? Maybe. But just as I accept I have a lot to learn from writers of all genres, from commercial fiction to experimental abstraction, so I accept that perhaps my shift in focus over the years has been a way to soften the blow of failure. The funny thing is, accepting everything I have mentioned so far has advanced me further down the road to success than denying it ever did, because in acceptance I found ways to overcome the fear of failure that for years held me back. I never expected it, but the slow altering of my attitude has enabled me now to do more than I thought possible, with much much more to come. I will continue to learn, and strive, and enjoy what I have and am doing. For me, right now, there really is nothing better than that, and acceptance has helped me to get to this place, and I feel very fortunate indeed to have got this far.

 

Why I Write Fantasy: The Games of Fantasy Part 1: Game of Dracula

First things first: I don’t write fantasy because of games. I was entranced by fantasy first, games came later. However, there can be a positive interaction between playing games, exercising imagination, and coming up with story ideas. There is one as-yet unwritten story cycle that is definitely based on something I wanted to do in a game, but never happened. Most of the rest of the time it is imagery, or atmosphere that has lingered in my mind and become part of the subconscious soup from which strange ideas can often emerge. The feeling of playing a good game, being immersed in it, is similar in some ways to being hard at work writing. That feeling does not come along often, but it is a lot of fun when it happens!

The first game that really hooked me, that I waited for the last day of each school term for because someone (Jimmy Law) brought it in and everyone in the class took turns playing, four eager players at a time, was Game of Dracula. Once again – it is the horror theme that allowed the fantasy imagination to flourish early on, when other avenues were not yet available! (We played with our own variations on the rules, I discovered years later when as a triumphant (and too old, but I didn’t care) thirteen year old I found it for sale in Woolworths, ran home for my paper round money, went back and finally owned my own version, which I still have to this day!)

In the game you ran around the thirteen unlucky rooms of castle Dracula, trying to escape while avoiding the bloodthirsty count and his evil minions, especially the green vampire, who was controlled by the first player to be captured by Dracula. (He only took sips of blood in this game, it being for kids and all.) So in this game was the excitement of creeping around a dusty old castle, the thrill of escape, and the embracing of a new role if you became the green vampire, (a first unrealized-at-the-time taste of role-playing, complete with cheesy cardboard mask that no-one actually wore!) who then chased the other players around, and if it caught another player, that player became the green vampire, and the person who had been it reverted once again to a person trying to escape. It was/is awesome. I occasionally inflict the game on my wife, who wins almost every time. In playing the game I was transported to another world of childish gothic horrors, long predating the Hammer movies, but perhaps helping to explain why they struck such a chord with me years later. This imaginary space was filled with monsters and terror, (the plastic Dracula and vampires were well detailed for the era, and made a very satisfying thunk over the simple playing pieces that represented the escaping players when they were captured) where you could safely become the monster too, for a little while at least. Despite the blood and horror elements, the game was never truly scary, just exciting, and it also promised a happy ending in the form of victorious escape to a flower filled field, the gloomy castle left behind. For me it is a simple classic, which when added to the competitive urgings of childhood, made the game wildly addictive. That game was the #1 draw each time we were allowed to bring toys in to school. Cheers Jimmy!

I liked that game so much that the first thing I made in pottery class was a mini castle, complete with corridors to run around in. It was far too small for playing pieces, and my maze didn’t actually work, but the thought was there! I kept that ugly thing for years, not for what it was, but for what it meant to me, the ambition to one day create a bigger, better version of that castle. Perhaps not with clay though – my sculpting skills were quite limited!

Games existed for me as another way, along with books, to investigate the unfamiliar, engage with the unknown or the supernatural, and to escape the ordinary world that seemed so lacking in the magic that existed in worlds of imagination. At first it was horror that led the way, but true fantasy soon arrived, courtesy of the Fighting Fantasy game books, and the grand-daddy of fantasy board games, Talisman. I’ll maybe talk more about them next time!

The Writing Life: Definitions of Success

It’s a long road I took to publishing my own book, and being comfortable with calling myself a writer. A longer road than I would advise most other folk to take. But the good thing about taking the scenic route is I’ve made sure by now of what I want, and what I’m prepared to accept in and from this writing life.

You can have dreams, but not unrealistic expectations. You can work hard, but not feel entitled to reward. You can feel pride, and not have it distort who you are.

I am a writer. Whether or not success as others measure it comes my way, that fact, for me, cannot be contested. I’ve always been a writer, I just used to whisper it in life, shout it in my reveries. I used to enjoy the imaginings of success so much that I did little to actually achieve them. It was easier to imagine, than to do. Living in cloud cuckoo land, I think that’s called.

Now, I don’t really want success in the way I once did. I don’t want fame. I don’t crave fantastic wealth. I do not want ego massage and the adulation of others: that least of all. Once, so wrapped in my insecurities as I was, I wanted that the most: the magic mirror of external validation. I needed the mirror on the wall to tell me how talented I was, because I felt that only other people could reassure me and remove my doubts, and that if other people loved what I wrote, well then I would truly be as talented as they said  I was.

What a horrible trap to fall into, living for the opinions of other people. What then happens if the mirror changes its tune? If you are only as good as the regard in which you are held, how can you not help but become a creature who chases positive regard? What does that do to the things you produce in order to garner favourable attention? Nothing good, I’d wager.

I’m glad success did not happen to me when it was all I craved.

So what is success for me now? Living, writing, being content. Each reader is a success. Each and every one. I hope to find an audience, but I know I’m not entitled to one. I have to work for it, one reader at a time. Success is writing a book, finishing it, going through the process, being satisfied, perhaps even proud of what I have created, and then setting it free into the world, in the hope that readers will find it. Of course I’ll try to help it reach an audience, but there are no guarantees in a bookish world overflowing with new releases, all desperate for attention.

Now I know there may be some who might wonder if this is the triumph of lowered expectations. How can I expect to reach my goals if I am not reaching for the stars? Should I not visualise something more powerful than just one reader at a time? I don’t really have a pithy answer for that. I’m reaching as hard as I can as a writer, to better myself in my art, but as a person I do not yearn for the trappings of success, only to do the best I can in my writing. That is the difference for me now.

Success is having stories to tell, and a voice to tell them. Success is waking up and knowing I have a plan, and a purpose. Success is an Iggy Pop song that always makes me smile. Success is being here, now, and saying hello and goodbye to you again, as always.

Why I Write Fantasy: The Influence of Horror

I grew up in the 70s and 80s. Fantasy existed in book form, but in other media it was pretty scarce, especially in a UK where only three TV channels existed. For a child looking for images to fit his imaginings of monsters and adventure, it was to the creepy and the kooky that it was easiest to turn.

In an era when fantasy was thin on the ground, horror and horror adjacent imagery was available, and helped to fire my imagination down darkened, inevitably velvet draped corridors. My favourite Top Trumps deck was not one of the many they had of cars (though I did love those), but their horror decks, dripping with gore and unafraid to be blood spattered in a way I’m sure today’s parents would be (ironically) quite horrified by. See the gruesome pics here! I have uncertain memories of an incompleted horror sticker album, (lushly painted with the stickers filling in the illustrations) like those produced by Panini for football, (in 1981 the craze swept my school, by 1982 nobody could be bothered anymore) but a brief internet search has revealed nothing to jog my memory banks.

Perhaps it is the yearly advent of Hallowe’en, but ‘frightening’ masks and costumes were readily available, and as children were permitted to indulge in it, images of horror were tolerated, allowing ghosts, skeletons, ghouls, the odd devil or demon, and of course vampires entry into everyday life. Zombies too, but I never really got into zombies. As a kid we had horror-lite in the form of Scooby doo and his gang (don’t talk to me about Scrappy), with all kinds of monsters to be debunked, but always the thrill of “What if it’s real this time?” and the occasional episode where something else possibly unexplained was seen by Scooby and Shaggy and slid away unapprehended as the grown-ups of the group laughed off the sandwich obsessed duo’s tale.

Of course Dr. Who scared the pants off me, with its wobbly sets and rubber monsters that drove me behind the sofa time and time again. Really, it was not just a cliché. I did hide behind the sofa. Dr Who could be a bit of everything: sci fi, fantastical, historical, contemporary, but the best episodes were the ones that scared me silly.

As I grew into a teen, and He-Man and Thundercats cartoons were still about the most fantasyesque offerings on TV, I stayed up later, and discovered the bodice-ripping glory of Hammer horror movies.

I still love watching these movies. I haven’t done so for a few years, so I think a binge watch may be in order, from the original 50s classics to the 60s retreads where you could play spot the reused sets and even shots from film to film, to the dog eared 70s, which, though the studio was struggling, still produced some flashes of past glories. Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter was a late classic, much beloved by me and my role playing mates, and not just for Caroline Munro!

What I found so great about the hammer movies was the atmosphere, especially in the early classics: Dracula, The Curse of Frankenstein, The Mummy. The set design was so gothic, so opulent and over the top, that it created its own sense of place and time – you could not mistake a Hammer movie for anything else. Moreover the early movies especially took the time to linger on those details, and create a sense of something coming to upset that richly realised world. That combination of anticipation and suspense made a lasting impression on me. Yes, the movies got samey, and the impact muddled – I later tended to watch and rewatch them during my college years and after when they were running from 12-4 am and I’d got home from a night at the dancing and didn’t quite feel like sleeping yet. (Or, more often, when I was broke and couldn’t afford to go out, so stayed in and found what I could to watch on the now expanded four, yes four TV channels!!) Those movies became familiar companions, each with its own charm of Transylvanias filled with English folk sometimes bothering to do accents, most of the time giving it a miss.

So it was in horror that monsters lived, and magic was real, if often not on the side of the angels. A fantasy Top Trumps deck did finally appear, after I’d stopped playing them. Horror was a way into other world and realities, lush and atmospheric, thrilling to the mysteries of the unknown. Yes, they all too soon became campy retreads (which had their own fun charm), but some of the old magic still gleamed through at times! (Most often in the first act.) Horror became a channel for my desire for the fantastical, and perhaps some of it transferred the other way too, with my taste in fantasy having lingering elements of the touches of horror I so adored growing up.

Nowadays we live in a golden age of fantasy, with the insane cultural dominance of Game of Thrones that followed on from the massive impact of Harry Potter, which came on the heels of The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Each wave has felt bigger than the one that came before, and now multiple TV shows have elements of, or are outright fantasy. It is hard to imagine now that once upon a time the closest we got to seeing the fantastical on TV (outside of cartoons) was by watching horror.

The Writing Life: Everything Requires Research

The title pretty much says it all, folks. When I’m writing, I’m constantly needing to research things: medieval clothing, swords of various eras, ships, rigging, rope names, sewer system management, tidal estuaries, mercantile societies and the role of guilds within said societies, pre-industrial food staples in different parts of the world, the burial rites of various cultures and much much more. And that is to write fantasy, which when I was young I thought wouldn’t need any research, because heck, I was going to make everything up from scratch! The optimism of youth right there.

But no. Everything requires research.

Advertising on amazon: research. Once you’ve done some and worked out the rules you then have to research keywords that’ll work. Or genre categories that best match your book. Then you can move on to researching Facebook advertising. If you wanna. But maybe I should research my overall marketing strategy first. Or maybe I should have done that before I did my research into how to build my website. Or perhaps do it as part of my ongoing research into what to have on it. (Announcement: I finally made the first chapter of The Thief and The Demon available here on my website, under the Books tab. I meant to do it months ago, but swithered over just the first, or the first four chapters! Just one for now.)

Hiring people to help you with aspects of book production? Research. Wondering about tax implications of book earnings? (Don’t laugh at the back!)  Research. How to run a blog? Research. (Clearly ignored in my case.) Which sales platforms to use and why? Research. What font would I prefer my print edition to be in? Research.

It truly is never ending. And I try to cut it into one hour chunks so it doesn’t get overwhelming. One hour on X subject, then switch to Y before X becomes a rabbit hole and I learn far more than I ever needed to about Scandinavian clinker techniques in shipbuilding. In the 9th-11th centuries. Don’t judge.

The one hour then switch is good for all the stuff around the business of writing, and helps me to nibble away at the things I need to do. Currently it is keywords, and an hour at a time of coming up with new ones and inputting them is about all I can take at one sitting. Then I can spend an hour trying to fashion new advertising copy. Or reworking the old stuff to freshen it up. Or researching what makes the most effective advertising copy!

I think if you turn it into tinkering, rather than labouring, it becomes slightly more fun, and each hour becomes useful, rather than turning into what can often feel like a lost afternoon or evening.

One hour, and one research topic at a time.

Oh yeah, and there’s actual writing to do too…

Good luck to all writers, and may your researches be enlightening, amusing, and fruitful!

Why I Write Fantasy: Inspirations – The Music of Fantasy Part 3: Gothic Dreams

Now the 80s weren’t just the metal years for me, though metal was undoubtedly my first true musical love. I was a mostly closeted Prince fan. (Not metal enough, despite the outrageous guitar skills – I tried to point that out, but my mates weren’t buying it back then.) I went to see the Sign o’ the Times movie multiple times at The Cameo cinema in Edinburgh because it was just so good. The memory of that drum line still gets me every time. I got into electronica and house/dance music, because like metal, you could get lost in the sound and dance until your lungs were burning. Walking home on cold Scottish nights in clammy clothing was not unusual after either a night at a metal or a dance club. Industrial sounds blended both dance and metal and seemed raw and fresh back then – Front 242 and Ministry were a revelation to me when I first stumbled across them courtesy of my much more plugged in friends.

The gothic genre has its own cross-over elements: the rock stylings of The Cult, the industrial and experimental aspects of The Sisters of Mercy, the alternative 80s sound of Siouxsie and the Banshees, who were also unafraid to experiment with their sound from album to album whilst never sacrificing their own unique character, the romanticism of The Smiths, the art house sensibility of Bauhaus. These were what I considered my gothic canon, though of course some readers might disagree with the classification! For me, at that time, these bands felt related in terms of what they were saying and how they said it.

The music and the lyrics were a stark contrast to the pomp and self-indulgence of hairmetal, and did not necessarily promise escape as Dio did in his elaborate fantasies. The viewpoints were different, markedly so, and alive with their own vitality: The Smiths looking at the commonplace with new, outsider’s eyes, Siouxsie opening windows into worlds of experience I had never known before, and barely grasped after having been introduced to them. Sexuality, yearning, the forbidden were discussed in frank new ways, wrapped in dark bows and left for listeners to commune with.

There was a sense of a whole other universe in their music; a different way of interacting with our landscape seemed to exist in this genre. Negative emotions were expressed and explored, rather than repressed and brushed under the carpet. It was okay to not feel okay. Pain and depression could be spoken of at a time when it just wasn’t the done thing in polite company. The Smiths especially were ridiculed for being depressing – I rather think because the lyrics cut too close to home sometimes, and it was easier to laugh at them than it was to admit how common those experiences were.

And it was popular. With the exception of Bauhaus, all the other bands were semi-regular visitors to the charts of 80s UK. Regular appearances on Top of the Pops (so cheesy, but it still ruled the roost as I was growing up) both showcased how different they were from standard 80s pop, and also made them somehow acceptable – a kid growing up in that era would have been exposed to all these bands, and more, like The Mission, New Model Army, The Cure. (Lots of ‘The’ bands!) Getting into gothic music, the gothic style, while strikingly different from the mainstream, wasn’t so outlandish as to be disconcerting to the general public, who had so recently been more horrified by the punk explosion in the late 70s. (Again I wouldn’t really call New Model Army gothic, (more punk, but even that doesn’t cover it…) but they were most definitely not mainstream of that time, and had a look and feel that was not out of place among their truly gothic brethren.)

As it was I ended up a strange hybrid of metal,gothic,glam and industrial, and had a great time with it! Your teens – identity experimentation is go, or it was for me, anyway.

Gothic music gave me another strand of thought, another vocabulary with which to express yearning and desire, different imagery with which to experiment, to incorporate into the realms of fantasy I wanted to create. Most of all I discovered new perspectives that I would never otherwise have been exposed to, expressed by artists of intense creative power. I had always loved the dark, but now it possessed new and alluring textures, that haunted my gothic dreams.

The Writing Life: Managing Priorities

Life has recently gotten a lot busier for me. I’ve started a new job. I’ve set a final editorial schedule for my next book. I’ve got a panel to moderate at Denver Comic Con. Each of these three things takes up time, and mental energy. I have a lot to learn, a lot to do, and a lot to research. Time, something I had plenty of just a few weeks ago, is now something to be tightly rationed and used well. That’s a challenge I embrace, first because I have no choice, and second because I wasn’t making the most of my time off before, so having this structure to work around may actually be to my advantage. Yes, that is what I’m telling myself, and for now, I totally believe it!

Having a job and income has enabled me to set my editorial schedule in stone. I believe in working with an editor, and paying a professional for their work – I tried to save money by foregoing editing for a number of years, and wasted a lot of time in the process. Eventually I hired an editor, and almost immediately realized the massive benefit to my writing (which remained my writing) it represented. I regard editorial services as a necessary step to producing a polished piece of work I’m proud of. Now maybe after four or five more books I will have learned a lot more about all the ins and outs of editing and feel I don’t need quite as much assistance, but even then I suspect I’ll keep using the service, just work through it faster, utilizing the lessons I’ve learned. I believe outside editing is indispensible for me, because as much as I might wish it, I’m no Joseph Conrad, turning out perfect copy on demand. If even he did that!

I’m looking at developmental, line, and copy editing passes to be completed by the end of November 2018. So I’d be planning to publish The Killer and The Dead by the end of this calendar year. During the periods of time when my editor is working on that book, I plan to use those weeks starting in on the first pass of the next novel – the more I get done of that, the better shape I will be in to get the next book out during calendar year 2019. I think the goal of a book a year is not unreasonable, though it is a lot of work.

Of course between now and July, when the developmental edit is scheduled to start, I will need to juggle the new job, finishing and tidying up the first draft, and prepping for and then moderating the panel at Denver Comic Con. And of course continuing to write these here blogs, and trying to keep up with what other people are writing and doing. And and and… With less time available, the emphasis will be on using the free hours I get productively, being able to plug in and go when I have the chance. Everything will be about priorities, what has to be done now versus what can wait a while; when to try to carve out time for longer tasks, when to make sure I don’t slack off and miss out on a chance to get some work done on a blog or panel research.

Having multiple hard deadlines has always tended to focus my mind usefully. I can’t say I’ve always hit them, but I learned severe lessons from the occasions I did not, and have avoided missing one since. And of course time and tide wait for no man, and I’ve let enough time pass that being forced to work harder now to keep up with my schedule is to be welcomed: if I don’t think I can afford to let up, then maybe I won’t.

One book a year is the plan, with life, love, and travel thrown in. And here we go.