Luke Walker's Blog: https://lukewalkerwriter.wordpress.com, page 23

If my heart's not in it

Quiet round here for the last few weeks. I've been working on the stories for Die Laughing (now all more or less done other than the line edits) which is obviously my main focus. Hoping to have everything ready for publication by the middle of January which sounds like it's still a way off, but it's not at all. The main bulk of the work is done; the cover's sorted and I'm about 75% happy with my back cover blurb. Once that's done, I'll post it here to give people a good idea of what to expect.

As busy as I've been with Die Laughing, what's really knackered me for the last month is a particular piece I thought would be a doddle. A writer friend (the excellent Gary Fry) mentioned to me a few weeks ago that a publisher had an open call for Lovecraftian short fiction - principally stuff set in a world after the gods have taken over. Of course, this made me sit up and take notice. Mirror of the Nameless is all about this so bingo bango, it's time to write a short piece set in a similar world and cross my fingers that the publisher likes it.

Not quite.

The first draft started off decent enough, but after about 3k, I started to feel a bit unsure. It didn't stand out. It didn't make me want to keep going to see if it ended up where I thought it might. So, I rushed the ending and decided to rethink the whole idea. Second draft starts and it's a bit meh from the beginning. Dull, lifeless and just generally poor quality. Worse, nothing much Lovecraft about it. Okay, I think. Time for round three.

I finished that one last night and while it's marginally better than the first two attempts, it's still nothing special. Two days ago, I realised what the problem had been all along. My heart wasn't in it. The publisher's criteria is detailed so there are a few factors to be included. That put with writing in someone else's world meant I couldn't get excited about my tale. And if I'm not, why should anyone else be?

I need to read through the third version and make a decision. It might be best to put this one to bed or something salvageable in the 7k might make itself known. It comes down to if my heart's not in it, then I'm not being honest, and that's not the sort of writer I want to be.

A new interview

Been a while since I've done an interview so I'm happy to link to this one with a new site. I talk writing, books, horror, Die Laughing and a bit of other stuff. Hope you like.

Interview

Some thoughts on NaNoWriMo

It's that time of year again. Time for NanoWriMo. For those not in the know, this is a yearly event held every November in which people sign up to a novel-writing event. The idea is you get involved with all the other people who've signed up and write a 50k first draft in thirty days while encouraging others who are doing the same. You tweet and Facebook your progress, and you power through (again with the encouragement and support of other writers) and you get that first draft written in a month.

We all following this so far? Good.

About a week ago, I came across an article online that left a really bad taste in my mouth. Here it is.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/10/attention-nanowrimo-fans-no-one-cares-how-your-fing-novel-going

I don't pretend I'm not irritated by people who talk about writing and consider themselves a writer without, you know, actually writing. I might as well call myself a footballer because I once looked up at the TV in a pub when a match was on. If you want to be called a writer, then sit down and write. Don't keep talking about it. Writing a book doesn't work like that and just about any writer will want to punch you in the face if all you do is talk. 

At the same time, this ugly article with its sneering bitterness can fuck right off. Absolutely yes, there are plenty of people writing a book at any time of the year let alone November who are so in love with what they're doing that they fail to see that writing a book is pretty dull for those outside the process. Lumbering through the 15k mark, then the 30k and wondering if this bag of crap you're working on will ever be finished is not fun. Same with edits. Same with rewrites. Same with the soul-crushing business that is querying the fucking thing. But that's how it goes and nobody in the publishing world gives a toss until you deliver them something that makes them sit up and take notice. Incidentally, emailing twenty agents on the first of December with your NaNoWriMo piece is not the way to get noticed. Well, it will get you noticed but not as you want to be.

However, the last thing writers need, especially newer writers, is bullying from other writers. If a hundred thousand people sign up to NaNoWriMo and 1% of them produce a book that will eventually be good enough to be published, then the only reaction to this should be encouragement. Given that it feels like fewer people are reading and even fewer give a shit about books in any form, writers should applaud those who might be getting started on a great tale.

There are enough people ready and willing to disparage any kind of creativity as a waste of time, and there are enough people who will listen to that negativity before giving up. Hearing that sort of shit from professional writers is, frankly, a load of disappointing bollocks.

Their pain is our pain

I recently came across a book (a crime/thriller, not a horror) which, over the first few chapters, describes the rape and decapitation of a woman in a sort of snuff film style. I say snuff film as it turns out the rape and murder are being filmed and the killer is apparently doing it for the money.

Pretty unpleasant, you'd probably agree, and it was. However, what really stood out to me - and made the scenes worse - was the piss poor level of writing. Depending on the story, situation and what mood the writer is going for, a kind of basic, emotionless style can work well. It didn't here. The scenes just felt amateurish and distasteful. Now obviously the publishers, editors and everyone else involved thought otherwise, and as the author has sold around a bazillion copies of their books, I'm guessing plenty of readers thought otherwise, too. That's not really the issue for me. It's the writing I'm interested in and why it was such a failure.

To start with, the chapters of around a page and a paragraph didn't help. It was like reading a kid's book or being told a story by a child who's so breathless with excitement that they have to speed their way through the tale, desperate to not leave out anything and equally desperate to get to the good bit at the end. Secondly, detailing an act as foul as rape in a and then he did this and then she did that...way doesn't work. Where's anything below the surface? The woman had nothing other than a body. All the reader knew about her as this went on was she was good-looking (because only attractive women are raped) and worked as a model. No personality, no character. Just an object for the killer to attack which could have maybe worked if we were reading the attack from the rapist's POV: he's turned her into nothing because she's worthless to him, for example. Problem was the POV wasn't his so all we have is a nasty situation described in an immature, base style.

It might sound strange and a bit hypocritical for me to slate a book featuring horrible, violent acts given I write horror. I don't think it's either. Effective horror and violence comes from character, not solely from shitty things happening to people or gore being described in graphic detail. It's exactly the same if we're talking happy or moving events. If we care about our fictional characters, then their reconciliations make us happy; their grief hurts us, and their triumphs are ours.

If we care about our characters, then their pain is our pain. If we don't know them or care, then the writer has failed.

Where it's at

It's been a while since I've done a general update blog post so I figure while I drink this fine cup of coffee and a Sunday afternoon in October ticks by and looks like every other day in October (did I mention I hate autumn?), it's a good time for one.

Writing-wise, it's all busy. My stories for Die Laughing are all coming along nicely thanks to feedback from a few writer friends and one of the best editors I've ever worked with - Dave Thomas over at DarkFuse. I've got another five or six to get feedback on before a final read through on all and deciding on titles and in which order they go. Of course, there's the whole technical side of doing it myself I need to look at in much more detail, but it's more important to get the work done first.

I had a read of my last novella this week. 38k at the moment. It's patchy with glimpses of some decent stuff so I'm about ready to note down the biggest issues and work out how to fix them. It'll need a title at some point - none have come to mind at all so I just call it The Building Story. Easier than Five People Are Stuck In An Office Building With Their Worst Fears. 

My last completed novel, currently titled Myrefall, still needs a fresh draft. Not quite sure how it's going to work out. I've never had as much trouble with a book as this one. It'll work out in the end; getting to that end is proving a problem. My original plan was to tackle Myrefall before the novella, but it'll be easier to work on short stories and a novella rather than a novel and the stories. He said hopefully.

Outside writing, there's not a lot going on. Our house is still on the market (so much for an upturn in house sales); I'm in the middle of a photography course for a work thing and it's my birthday in about a month. Three years off forty. Which is just stupid so we won't talk about that.

Enjoy what's left of the weekend, all.

Autumn. Bah.

I hate autumn. There. I said it. Controversial, I’m sure you’ll agree since it appears to be the whole world’s favourite season. Or at least it is according to my feeds on Twitter and Facebook. Lots of happy people describing the pretty colours of changing leaves, the burned oranges and reds in the trees; the fresher winds, the pumpkins, the soup for lunch and closing the curtains against the darker nights. Maybe it’s an American vs British thing. Over here, we don’t do pumpkins and, despite the attempts of the media and greetings card industry, we don’t really care about Halloween. For us, the end of October is not much more than a week before Guy Fawkes Night where we set off fireworks and think about having bonfires to commemorate several blokes who tried to do a V For Vendetta thing on Parliament in the seventeenth century. I say ‘think about having bonfires’ because I don’t know anyone who’s had their own fire in years (my dad used to do them – the last one I remember involved burning down a fence with a Catherine wheel).  You say autumn to me, and all I get is the image of cold mornings, dank afternoons and being shocked by sunset before 7pm. The time between the third week of September to when the clocks go back the last weekend of October is a pain in the arse because it’s nothing but messing about until it all gets much colder. Those four weeks are the non-committal period where the weather and the days lay on the sofa, refusing to get up and get a job. I don’t mind winter. Not in a I’m a horror writer so it all has to be cold and bleak sort of way. It’s just that you expect short hours of daylight and wondering where the hell you put your gloves the previous March. Once we’re into winter proper, it’s fine, but the days of mouldering piles of soggy leaves and wondering if tomorrow, the temperatures in the high teens will halve overnight is just depressing. Summer’s gone. Spring is roughly three billion years away and it’s only going to get damper and greyer every sodding day until it finally stops messing about and winter kicks in. Say what you like about having to wear a woolly hat and having chapped lips, at least winter’s got some balls. So, no, I don’t like autumn. Autumn is the meh of seasons.

Die Laughing

So, here it is. The front cover (and title) for my collection of short stories which I'm publishing early next year. I had a few titles in mind but as soon as I saw this image, it had to be Die Laughing.

In sunny Spain

Well, I was in sunny Spain. We went for two weeks and came back last Friday. My wife and I stayed in an aunt's villa a little way outside Alicante. Here is a picture of me looking like a prat to prove it.






Proper blog update to follow soon. In the meantime, take in the delights of my sexy shorts.

Old friends

While writing yesterday, I got an email from my oldest friend. We don't live more than an hour or so apart, but we haven't seen each other for centuries. I'm effectively working two jobs and he's a parent in London who works as a doctor so free time isn't something either of us have much of. In any case, he was back in town for a few hours and wanted to meet up. Very short notice, of course, but possible for me on a Saturday afternoon. By the time he was actually free from family duties, he had barely forty minutes before his train back so we met for a coffee in the station at around seven yesterday evening. And here's the thing:

The time since we last saw each other did not matter. At all. We could have last met a couple of weeks ago, not a couple of years. We could live ten minutes' walk apart, not in different cities with a hundred miles between us. We caught up, drank our overpriced coffee and he jumped on his train to London saying he hopes to be back this way sometime next month. If he is and he's free, then cool. We can meet for a longer time, have a few cheeky shandies and talk much as we did yesterday. If it doesn't happen, then we'll do it if I'm ever London bound. The only difference being a pint in London costs about eight quid more than it does round my way.

Anyway, our catch up got me thinking about friendship and the power of it. The magic of it. It's often the case in horror fiction that people going through all sorts of awful, painful shit need anything good they can get hold of to combat that shit. Whether the good comes from family or a spouse or a friend, it amounts to the same thing: magic. Exactly the same applies in real life with or without something awful trying to break your spirit. People in fiction running from death (and that's pretty much covers whatever the threat might be - it's death wearing a different mask each time) need that magic if they're to have any chance of survival. People in real life need it even if they don't realise it.

Sometimes, the magic comes along when you don't need it simply to remind you it's there in the background of a train station coffee shop.

6/13 now available

My short story 6/13 is now available in a collection. Head over here for the UK release, and this way for the US version. I'm really happy with how this one turned out. I'll post a bit about the background at some point as soon as I can. For now, have a read and enjoy.