T.S. Sharp's Blog, page 12

Unfamiliar Country on Relax at Night

My short story, Unfamiliar Country, is now featured on the Relax At Night site. It's run by Tim Roux's Night Publishing company, and features books from various genres. Unfamiliar Country sits in the Crime/Gangster section alongside some very accomplished crime titles, so I'm very pleased with this new arrangement. Thanks goes to Tim for setting this up for me.

The link for Unfamiliar Country directs to the US Amazon site as well as Smashwords. I could do with some reviews on the Amazon US site to enable me to showcase my story on review sites such as Booksprung and DailyCheapReads etc, so if you have 70p/99c spare and some (hopefully) kind words, I'd really appreciate it.

Do you finish bad books?

So, you're reading a book, but you've decided for whatever reason that you don't like it. Do you read it all the way through, or ditch it and move on?

I'm a reader, I persevere to the end. Not to give the book a chance to redeem itself by suddenly transforming itself, that rarely happens. More so that I can say I've completed it. I don't like having half-read books on my shelves. I've got a few un-read books on my shelves. I'm fine with that as I know I'll get around to them eventually, but I don't like abandoning books before I finish them.

I can see the value in ditching them and finding something else to occupy your valuable time with, but for some reason I just can't do it. I've read a few books that I really should have sent to the charity shop after a few chapters, but I read them to the bitter end. I tend to read books in small chunks, snatched in chapters before bed etc, so I probably get through less books per year than others, but I always finish them.

I could provide a list of books I hated or simply didn't enjoy reading, but I don't want to get into the subjectivity here (Although I might be tempted if people start commenting on books they couldn't finish but I loved).

Someone once leant me a book saying 'you've got to read this, it's the worst book I ever read…' She didn't finish it, but I did. And it did suck, but I had to finish it just to make sure it sucked all the way through.

What do you do? Read or ditch?

Home time

This is an extract from Seven Seconds, my novel which is complete but I can't stop myself from endlessly editing it. It's almost the last scene of the story, the prelude to the climactic last act.

~

I'm definitely ready to go home now. I've caught enough sun, eaten well, drank like a sailor on shore leave and totally forgotten about work. But I'm now ready to re-acquaint myself with my flat and all my stuff, be surrounded by the claustrophobia of familiarity, but most of all I'm ready to see Kat again. I didn't think I'd miss her as much as I do now, but without having her around I am starting to feel listless. With my stuff packed and ready, I skim through TV channels, watching nothing in particular, glancing at my watch and counting the minutes.

"Got everything?" Rob asks as I toss my bag onto the backseat of the Landcruiser.

"Yeah, think so."

We clamber into the vehicle and back away from the villa, allowing me a last look at the place, and onto the hillside road down toward the rest of the island. We drive in silence for a while, fragments of last night filtering back to me. I remember the cocktails and meeting Gemma and Penny, Rob's boastful stories and his plans for the boat hire company. I smile to myself as the rocky dry landscape slips beneath us, edging me closer to the airport. Rob slows and takes a turning off the main highway onto a smaller mountain road, away from the direction I thought we'd take. He senses my confusion.

"Traffic will be a nightmare at this time of day. This is more scenic."

I shrug and resume looking out over the rocks and dark volcanic earth and out onto the ocean, looking like a flat expanse of polished steel. There a few boats on the water, mere dots on the surface, and I imagine Rob out there in the future, taking tourists on fishing trips or families on sunset chasing excursions. The likelihood of it actually happening seems as distant and remote as the lonely craft I watch from the road, but once I leave Rob behind on his island who knows what he'll end up doing.

The car slows again and this time we pull off the empty mountain road into a long gravelled lay-by. The space is perhaps a hundred metres long, lined by a low steel barrier before a long shelving drop down into the valley below. The lay-by is empty apart from a silver Mercedes saloon with Spanish number plates parked at the other end, facing the road. I look across at Rob, who is staring ahead at the car.

"Why are we stopping here?"

Rob doesn't answer. He continues to stare intently at the car, stopping us about 20 metres short of it.

"It's pay day," he says. He reaches under his seat and pulls out a small backpack, then opens his door and jumps out of the Landcruiser.

Totally confused about what we're doing here and anxious to get to the airport, I follow him into the dusty lay-by and the dry heat of the mountainside. Rob has marched ahead toward the parked car, but stopped short of it, standing equidistant between the two vehicles.

"Rob, what the fuck are we doing here?"

"I told you I'd made a decision about this, well this is it."

At this point it all becomes clear. Up ahead, the driver's door opens and a man climbs out and strides purposefully towards us, carrying a plastic bag. It's Harman. He's older than I thought he looked in the grainy CCTV footage, maybe late forties. He's shorter than both Rob and I, wiry and slim. He looks every inch like the bloke most likely to kick off in a pub, despite not being the biggest guy in the room. He's dressed in jeans and a shirt, with a light jacket over the top, wearing expensive looking aviator style shades. His hair is receding, shaved short to his head, giving him a flat expanse of forehead creased with wrinkles. Harman snatches his shades from his face, an expression of concentrated annoyance written all over it.

"Who the fuck's this? We said just us," he snarls, pointing at me but talking to Rob.

"Don't worry about him, he's just the guy your apes gave a beating to when you couldn't find me," Rob replies.

Harman turns his gaze to me, but he looks like he's staring through me rather than at me. I can feel my heart pounding and the sun suddenly feels a million times hotter than I've ever experienced it before. Stunned into grim fascination, I can't speak. I just watch the events unfold before me.

"Have you got the money?"

Harman lifts the bag up, which appears to have something substantial in the bottom of it.

"Have you got the tape?"

Rob swings the backpack off his shoulder and holds it aloft by one of the straps.

"Let me see it," Harman demands. Rob unzips the bag and lifts out the tape we watched back at the apartment above the pub, the eye of this shitstorm I now find myself in. The two men swap items silently. Rob peers into the bag, then reaches inside and holds up several bundles of bank notes, all in Euros. It's more money than I've ever seen before.

"It's all there, twenty thousand, like we agreed," Harman says.

"That will do for starters," Rob says.

Harman looks as bemused as I do.

"This will make a nice down payment, but I want another twenty to ensure total silence, otherwise copies of the tape go to the police."

"Are you fucking insane?" Harman spits, echoing my thoughts exactly. I still can't speak. I'm rooted to the spot, a spectator at a show I don't want to watch.

Kindle for PC

I don't actually own a Kindle. But I do have the app for my iPod Touch as well as the version for PC on my laptop. Kindle For PC is free, you just download the application and install it, and while it's not very portable in that format, it's still very good.

I was most impressed with the way it synced with my existing app on the iPod, meaning all my books are available on both formats and it updates every time you obtain more content. Even more impressive was the fact that when opening a book I was previously reading on the iPod it automatically resumed where I was on the PC! (Assuming you are online with both versions) But then I am easily impressed.

The free Kindle For PC application is also a good way to get people reading your work without them having to invest in a Kindle. I bet a lot of people read all the talk of the great books by Indie writers who have self published via Kindle and think 'but I'd have to buy  one to read this'. Hopefully more people will starting using the PC version and will subsequently get into electronic format books. A good way to start would be to install the software and then hoover up all free books on there, that way you'd be able to become familiar with the format and no doubt hooked on buying electronic literature!

Digging holes

I've got an idea for a novel that's been rattling around my head for a few days now. It's at that stage now where I want to start putting pen to paper/fingers to keyboard to get some of the stuff out to see if it's any good. I'm still not sure where it's going to go or whether it's even worth pursuing, but it's definitely worth doing some of the writing to see whether that nucleus of a story concept is going to grow or become stillborn.

I usually pursue an idea like this. I have an idea of the concept or a rough plot idea, then I jump straight in and start writing. Often I get ahead of myself or run down a blind litarary alley, but quite often more ideas are spawned, all helpful in the creative process. This is the first piece of writing I've done for this new work in progress, at least in a narrative sense.

~

Billy remembered digging the holes last summer. With his Uncle Gary and his mate Mark he'd helped excavate three deep holes into the immaculate lawn of Gary's big house. Dave had said they were graves. Gary had laughed it off, but Billy was uncertain. Why did Gary need several large holes dug in the garden and why was he being asked to help? Why not one of the many labourers and lackeys that worked in his haulage company?

Billy doubted they were graves. They were deep enough, but they were too square and definitely not long enough. Once the men had broken the ground and heaved the thick clods of soil onto the growing pile of soil, they sent the teenager down into the hole to square off the walls and flatten out the bottom.

"Why are we doing this?" Billy asked for the second time.

"What's the matter, scared of some hard work?" His uncle said.

"No, but I dunno what they're for."

"You don't need to know. You're getting paid. Just get digging." Mark told him.

So Billy dug with the two men.  Under the pearlescent sky of a spring day in Warwickshire he helped to dig three deep holes for an unknown purpose.

Flights home

Time for some more excerpts to leech their way on onto the net. This is from Chapter 28 of Seven Seconds. I was doing a read through and finding yet more edits – an unending process by the looks of it.

~

Rob floats on his back in the pool, arms out wide on either side of him, looking like a discarded corpse. Brian Jones in swimming trunks and Oakley's.

"Can I use the net for a bit?" I shout across to him from the veranda.

He raises a thumb in approval so I go back into the house and pad across wood flooring and marble and plush carpets to the study. A scan read of my email inbox reveals nothing intriguing. Marketing. Advertising. Promotions. The depressing dialogue of modern communication. Ordinarily I'd at least open these to satisfy myself they aren't of any interest, but I'm eager to book my tickets back to London, and back to Kat. The ideal flight has more than doubled in price since last time I looked so I opt for an afternoon flight in a couple of days time. Keen to arrange my return I click through to the purchase confirmation screen, input my credit card details and book my flight. Printing the confirmation details out, I smile to myself that the decision making process must have taken seven seconds to complete at most. In just over forty eight hours I'll be on a plane back to the UK. In about fifty five hours time I plan to be in the arms of Kat. Tenerife will be a brief but strange break in the sun and with Rob marooned in an exile of his own creation I won't need to worry about the affect he has on my relationship with Kat.

Since I've been here, I've noticed Rob seems to alternate between hibernating and going walkabout. In London I never really saw him for more than a couple of hours, either in front of the Xbox or in a bar somewhere. The rest of the time we were doing our own thing, which suited me fine, I just wanted someone to pay me rent and hang out now and again. Out here, Rob is confined to a hill top villa and beset by a paranoia which won't allow him to spread his wings beyond the two thousand square metres of the island. He'll lock himself away in his room for hours or he'll strike out in the Land Cruiser to god knows where, leaving me to roam the villa and stare at the hills and watch the sun turn the sky to crimson before disappearing.

This evening is a hibernation night. After lolling in the pool in the afternoon sun he watched some trashy TV shows then disappeared behind his bedroom door. Maybe he's just fully embracing the concept of siesta. More likely, he's flipping the decision of whether to call Harman or not over and over in his head like a coin. Outwardly, he said he'd made the decision, but this isn't about whether to order Chinese or Indian, or even whether to treat a patient or steal his iPod. This is taking considerably more than seven seconds to work out.

Rejection

Today I feel like a real writer. I received an email from Shortfire Press rejecting my submission of Unfamiliar Country. While they 'read with interest' it's 'not quite right for them'.

I'd actually forgotten that I'd submitted it to them to be honest. It must have been months ago, and I've since self published it on Amazon Kindle, so no great loss. Rejection is part of the lifecycle of creative writing, so I had a strange sense of achievement when I read the email. I haven't really submitted much work to traditional publishers, mostly because I don't feel my work is at that final draft stage, so the 'thanks but no thanks' email is a relatively new experience to me.

If I'd received it in the post I'd put it in a folder for prosperity, to no doubt accompany the others yet to be received.

Editing Woes

I was reading through some of my work recently and noticed a few little typos that had somehow slipped under my radar. Once I noticed a couple of things, other little errors or inconsistencies started to appear. Then I started to suffer from a period of self-doubt that must afflict all writers from time to time. Often it becomes an unkillable monster, threatening to throw you off course and destroy the will to write.

My recent editing woe is the possessive nouns issue. Books. Book's. Books' etc.

I thought I was reasonably proficient in terms of grammar. In fact I am quite confident in my use of grammar, but when writing with the purpose of making your work available for mass consumption and ultimately for sale, you have to make sure it's perfect. A recent re-read of Unfamiliar Country threw a couple of grammatical spanners in the works. I had the line;

What remained of his hair was closely shaved to his head which he did himself with barber's clippers every month.

This should be 'barbers clippers' – as the clippers are not owned by a specific barber. I made the change and then continued to read – except now I was thrown into confusion every time I saw an apostrophe and s together. Suddenly I was a fumbling idiot whenever it came to a noun that might or not be owned by someone or something.

Surely I am not the only one to have this crisis of confidence when self-editing? And I bet there are a million other things out there hidden in the grass waiting to trip me up. Split infinitives anyone?

PS – if you spot any errors in my writing along these lines I'd be keen to know.

Character Description

I'm never sure how much time and effort to spend on character description. I like to give a look and feel to the characters in my work, but I sometimes struggle with what to include and how to do it.

One of the problems I have with my novel, Seven Seconds, is that it is written in the first person perspective, so descriptions of the protagonist are hard to encorporate into the narrative. In fact, the main character, Steve, is hardly described at all, as I found it was like talking about yourself. Maybe I'll have to work on this, as leaving the reader with little impression of the main character is hardly likely to encourage empathy with his or her feelings or experiences.

My short, Unfamiliar Country, is written in the third person, so character description is easier to provide. Boyd is described as;

Boyd looked at himself in the small mirror above the sink. He was tall and thin and looked every one of his forty seven years. What remained of his hair was closely shaved to his head which he did himself with barbers clippers every month. His forehead was lined with wrinkles and he had almost a weeks worth of greying stubble on his face. He looked tired. He felt tired.

This is pretty much all the descriptive text I provided for Boyd, the main character, and you get it in one burst. Had it been a novel, I probably would have drip fed more description into the narrative, but I felt this was enough to give the reader a sense of who the man was and how he looked and felt.

Another character in Unfamiliar Country gets similar treatment when he is introduced to both Boyd and the reader. Farmer Griff Hughes is presented and described almost wholesale when he first appears, with a few little references to his physical attributes and mannerisms later on.

The farmer was like a children's book depiction of a farmer. He was short and stout, in his late fifties and wore green wellington boots with dark corduroy trousers tucked into them. He had a beer belly beneath a moth eaten jumper and wore a battered Barber jacket. His face was broad and weather beaten, his cheeks red and healthy looking. Wiry snow white hair escaped from beneath his flat cap which looked like it was permanently attached to his head.

Some writers spend a great deal of time and effort on character description. Dickens is revered for it. I think this is a fantastic skill to have and is often employed to great effect by accomplished novelists. I don't think this is one of my strengths, but I do like to provide something for the reader to engage with. I like to make up for my brief character descriptions by showing how characters act and the way they talk and the words they use, building up a mental sketch and profile that the reader can take away with them.

Steve's Lithuanian lover Katja in Seven Seconds is described as;

… petite and well proportioned with an almost heart shaped face with blue eyes which are maybe a shade lighter than my own, surrounded by dark eye shadow. She smells of subtly flavoured perfume when I lean in to talk to her.

This is our (and Steve's) first introduction to Katja, so he shares our first impressions. Later, as their relationship and Steve's feelings for her intensify, we have this;

I wait for Kat by the gates in the shade of the stone pillars and watch the flow of cyclists and tourists pour in and out of the park. She arrives wearing a white vest top and a cotton knee length skirt. Her sunglasses are pushed up onto her head holding back her henna coloured hair. Her skin is a soft golden colour and in the almost tropical midday heat her beauty is enough to revive my flagging energy levels.

Again, this is brief physical description, but more is revealed about her through Steve's thoughts and emotions, hopefully helping to build a more complex picture of the novel's characters.

How do other writers deal with character description? Do you enjoy revealing protagonists' characteristics and traits? Do you do it one direct delivery as they first appear or more gradually, building a portrayal as the story develops around them?

Author Biographies

In an effort to create myself a writer profile I recently joined Goodreads.com's Author Programme and Amazon's Author Central. Both sites run a small customiseable section where an author can supply details about themselves and their work to accompany the product. This seems like a sensible thing to do for someone who has work out there and wants to attract a following, and ultimately customers. But in completing these sections I ran into a common problem for anyone wanting to create a presence for the first time – the biography.

Read the biographical details of any established writer, either on their website or on the in-lay pages of their books, and you'll see the boasts and legends of their achievements. And rightly so. But what about the aspiring writer who has thrown his or her work out into the gladiatorial arena to do combat with the world's literature?

You end up talking about where you live and what jobs you've done. This is fine because it provides interesting background to the writer, but all you really want to write is 'Buy My Book'. Another weird quirk of the biography piece is that it is often written in the third person. This is probably the only time you'll refer to yourself as someone else. It takes a lot of willpower to not get carried away and write something ludicrous.

Something I should do is provide a photo of myself. I'll have to vet and photoshop a photo into something presentable. The biogs I've done so far are here;

Amazon's Author Central

Goodreads Author Programme

The one for this blog is written mostly in the first person and is less formal than the others. This is mostly because I am allowing myself some room to be sarcastic and hopefully come across at least in part self-depreciating. All my biographies are subject to change in the near future I suspect.