I do loads of writing to their two publically available albums but recently found this track by them that hasn’t been released outside of the industry. Anyways, this might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s been buzzing round my head for the last couple of days.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about my novel Refugee. The book has been drafted and has sat dormant for a year whilst I work on other projects, but always in my mind.

It features a young protagonist, and whilst he isn’t the only one, the framework of the novel largely hangs around his character.

I’ve been very reluctant to consider it a possible YA book. For a start, I’ve documented my issues with YA in the past (mainly concerning age barriers in fiction). Secondly, there is a horrific scene on which the plot pivots that whilst I’ve taken great care to not exploit or make graphic, is quite shocking none the less. From a career perspective, given the type of stuff I want to write, do I want to be labelled as a YA author? There’s also the reverse psychology of having friends who work with YA – you want to feel you are leading and doing your own thing, not following and being a sheep.

But on my trip into town on Saturday I entertained the possibility. I removed my ego from the equation. Would it be a stronger book if it was YA? Was I capable of writing it? Would pushing other protagonists into the background cause the book to lose some of its magic? Was the book ‘Refugee’ or ‘Refugees’?

The first thing I considered was that if this book was a single person’s story then it should be first person. The character goes through enough of an emotional journey that I think seeing it through their eyes would give the book more depth. Of course, my brain then tells me as I think this, they go through such changes during the course of the story that it has to be told in present tense. Woah! That one came from nowhere but made absolute sense.

But there’s still that scene. The one I want to approach correctly and with sensitivity.

So I’ve decided I’m going to rewrite that scene in first person present tense and show it to a few people. If they come back thinking it works, I’ll try that route with the rest of the book. If they don’t, I’ll take their criticism on board and work from there.

Now let me start from the outset that I love fantasy’s breadth. It’s a genre so wide that it’s possible to love one end and hate the other, and because we are creatures of individual tastes, when I say hate, I mean “not to my taste” not “bad”. There’s little more interesting than talking about the genre with people, sharing a love of some books and then raising an eyebrow at one of their choices and saying “really?” I love that there is a diversity of opinion and think that’s really, really healthy for the genre. And at the end of the day, it’s just that… an opinion. My personal tastes are no benchmark by which to judge against.

So when I say I have dissatisfaction within the genre it’s just personal taste and in no way meant to be some form of universal declaration.

For me, everything went wrong with George R R Martin. I think Game of Thrones was a very, very clever book. A book that tried to step out of Tolkien’s shadow, stripped away the myth and magic and gave us a hard-boiled ‘gritty’ fantasy. But if I have one issue with gritty fantasy as a sub-genre, is that it’s as much in Martin’s shadow as those 80s fantasy novels were in Tolkien’s. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of it is well done; a lot of it, I love. And I mean love. If I could marry Scott Lynch’s descriptive prose with Abercrombie’s characterisation, I’d die a happy, happy man.
But within gritty fantasy I read a subtext that says “we reject the old” rather than “we build on the old”. It may just be me, I’m more than willing to accept that.

It also really, really irks me that we’ve put some magical races in the fantasy ghetto. That instead of taking the universal image of dwarves and elves and trying to do something new and different with them, there’s a lot of looking down noses when they are mentioned. People argue that they are trying to move away from Tolkien, and this just gets me mad because “Tolkien… did… not… invent… elves!” If there is room in the market for dragon and vampire novels, whilst not to everyone’s tastes (including mine in some cases), surely there is still some mileage for dwarves. After all, they’ve survived in folklore for hundreds of years. And I’m not arguing they should be in every project, I’m just saying they should not be off the table as I currently feel they are.

Worse still, are books (books I love, by the way) that feature ‘elves in disguise’. Pointy ears? Check. Love of archery? Check. Slightly derogatory opinion on other races? Waitaminute….

Don’t even get me started on the prevalence for strong women not being strong before they’ve been assaulted in some way! (That’s for another more serious blog post, rather than this light-hearted rant).

And while we’re talking about fantasy tropes let’s look at the medieval world setting. I love it, want more of it, but at the same time want something different. Fantasy doesn’t HAVE to be set with castles and feudal systems.

And then there’s China Mieville, a man who could spit words as bullets, a man who uses sentences like a ninja uses edged weapons. I love how he pushes the boundaries, how he takes fantasy into other genres. I loved the concept of the City and the City but hated the end. I loved how the middle section of Iron Council just enveloped me. But why is it that a large number of the writers I meet, both published and unpublished want to be him? I’m not stupid enough to dislike the man and his work because he is popular (indeed, whenever I have seen him talk at panels and signings, he’s been interesting polite, fun and wise). But I can’t understand why any writer would want to be another, no matter how successful and revered.

Perhaps, other than Clive Barker, the New Weird has never been an area of fantasy I’ve particularly felt at home with.

For me, the best novels are ones that take very complex ideas and boil them down to such a simple metaphor. Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely a place for challenging novels, but equally there’s a place for gateway novels. I just want great stories with great characters… and maybe, just occasionally, the odd dwarf.

Just because something is simple, doesn’t mean it’s unintelligent. Stories can be accessible and intelligent and move the genre forward.

And this is why I write. As much because of what fantasy is, as what it is not. And dependent on the day of the week, I’m allowed to swap my views, love things I’ve previously hated and vice versa. It’s all part of having a passion for the genre.

I’m at around 50,000 words on Gods which means I should be entering mid-book territory. It’s around now that earlier strands would start being pulled together, moving the story towards an end. It’s also an infamous milestone in the creation of a book as a lot of authors tend to get to this stage, throw up their hands and proclaim they don’t know what they are doing.

I don’t know what I’m doing. *throws up hands*

There’s part of me that loves the concept of discovery. I go into writing without any demands. There are no scenes I have to work towards, no herding of characters towards certain events (a job that any writer will tell you is as difficult as herding cats). It’s freedom, an open house to ideas.

I pretty much knew the opening of Gods: Lone ex-sheriff living in the hills sees a helicopter crash and uncovers a plot to murder the president’s wife (yes, it’s a fantasy novel). I knew the Vulture God was involved but that was about it.

Whilst writing it, my brain presented a story to me of how our hero became the man he is. It all came at once, 15 dominoes in a row, and so I thought I’d go and write the flashback.

And it’s the fact I’m 25,000 words into the flashback (still the same dominoes, nothing changed at all) with possibly as much as another 20,000 to go that has me questioning my whole process. You see, in an early draft of Four Realms there was a similar thing happen with the history of the Vampirwaffen. I knew how they came about, the social conflict they presented within the vampire ‘community’; heck, I spent weeks reading up on the Russian Front to make sure their story matched up with history. It was, quite frankly, brilliant. I tried to shoehorn it in with an infodump because I so wanted to tell people their amazing story, but in the end it got cut. It’s an idea for a prequel book if Four Realms and its sequels ever got picked up and did well.

And so, as I write Gods and this flashback of indeterminate but ever increasing length (I know exactly what happens, I’m just bad at estimating the number of words), I’m thinking more and more that this, whilst a nice story, is going to get cut. I’m fine with the cutting, but it really, really bothers me that it’s taken 25,000+ words to realise this whilst at the same time still not being sure about what I should be doing.

The other thing, discovery isn’t doing for me, is story beats. With Four Realms, I spend a lot of effort on the two narrative strands ensuring that when one was up the other was down, that there was always something that would want to make you read ‘just one more chapter’. It’s a page turner, whereas Gods feels… well different – and I’m still unsure whether that’s good or bad.

I’m also aware that this last week has been tumultuous. SFX Weekender feels like a lifetime ago as I have a new day job starting next week and will be moving next month. There’s excitement, stress and a hundred other emotions washing over me right now and it’s enough to make me question my own judgement.

Sometimes though, projects need a step back to assess them. With Four Realms, I did similar when I realised what I was writing was two books – a decision that resulted in some major structural changes and a new subplot. It was needed, and I’m glad I made that decision. I think Gods needs something similar. I feel it’s missing that one final something, something I’d hoped the discovery progress would have brought out.

That said, I don’t think what I’ve written so far is bad (at least from a “it’s a first draft” perspective), it’s just very different in terms of actual novel-crafting gubbins to stuff I’ve written before. It feels like a story you soak in rather than get catapulted along. I don’t think one type is necessarily better than the other, but I’m usually the latter.

I think it’s healthy to play with process. Going and trying new things to see whether they work or fail is something few writers have the time or luxury of doing. I’ve learned that discovery doesn’t work for me – or at least I don’t believe it does. Coupled with a novel without chapters, anything I write is in danger of becoming long. tangential and waffling. It lacks foreshaowing, simply because I’m not sure what happens next (and I love decent foreshadowing). Of course, it’s a first draft, and worse still, it’s a first draft at *that point* in the book’s creation. But discovery writing means far more work in subsequent drafts and I don’t feel this is efficient.

So what now? Well, I intend to keep writing Gods, especially since that it’s at *that* stage and all this just might be writer angst. There will be a book at the end, possibly even a sellable one but I suspect that in order to turn it into the type of book I want to write it’s going to need a lot of work in the second draft. Behind the scenes, I’m going to attempt to put some structure in behind it to help focus the writing, but most of all I’ll be soldiering on.

It’s big and messy and I can see why some people hate it, but there’s something about intertwining narratives that really appeals to me. I love the idea that whilst in one street Spider-Man is fighting Sandman or Vulture, in the next Daredevil is hunting a criminal, that there are lots of stories carrying on at the same time.

Of course, you then get those odd panels where Spider-Man talks to Daredevil and there’s a little asterisk, telling you in the box out to read more about the other character in their own title.

Trying to read all these comics normally would be expensive and not very satisfying. With so many writers and so many stories, there are always going to be those you love and those you hate. It’s not really been possible for me to really investigate the nooks and crannies of the Marvel Universe.

However, in recent years, I’ve had a Marvel Digital Comics Subscription, and unlike something like Comixology where you ‘buy’ comics, this gets you access to the Marvel digital library of over 10,000 comics. You have to read on your PC (it requires Flash so impossible to read on an iPad) whilst online and your access ends once your subscription expires, so there are downsides. I also don’t think you get anything more recently published than a year ago. But for me, it’s a great way to explore the Marvel Universe.

I started a project last year to read widely within the universe and starting with 2005’s Civil War I’m reading my way forwards using an extended reading list of the chronology including all the minor tie-ins. The idea is that as comics drop into my list, so I will read them going forwards until I am reading everything through the major event milestones of Planet Hulk, World War Hulk, Dark Reign, Secret Invasion, etc.

It’s a big project and I’m still in the middle of Civil War, ticking off issues in the extended chronology I have (I think it’s well over 100 comics). I’m in no rush, and even though I read Civil War at the time, I’m really enjoying seeing how these different titles link into each other, and even how they contradict each other.

Persistence is so important in this industry and something every writer fails at from time to time. I used to think that because sometimes I never got round to writing every day or procrastinated, that I wasn’t a real writer. But falling off the writing wagon happens, procrastination happens. It’s picking yourself up, dusting yourself down and getting back on that proverbial horse that matters (although why you’d be on the horse if you had a wagon is beyond me!).

Anyways, I need to go write!

If you’re on foot (or I presume on horseback though I do not ride), you have to interact with your environment. There’s no Highways Agency or Railtrack maintaining the routes. The ground underfoot can change from chalky rock to waterlogged grass. Weather can aid or hamper you. If you encounter a blockage, there’s not always another easy route. A diversion might take days. Travelling by foot is an adventure, with no guarantee of reaching your destination. I rarely go out for a long day’s walk without some injury (usually a twig in the eye due to Geocaching) or tale to tell.

Environment isn’t universal either. Go into any large wood and you’ll see it has places: that rocky outcrop, the clearing, the scary tree, the rotting log. Of course, urban environments aren’t universal either but they do tend to generally be LEGO sets of different architecture, mixed and matched in endless permutations. But with the urban you can just turn a corner and suddenly find yourself somewhere else. A few steps is often all that is needed for the architecture to completely change. The joy of the urban are finding those hidden places tucked away, a passageway that, in just a few steps, leads to somewhere so different to from where we’ve just come. The countryside is big and open. It blends and changes, and for me, it’s what fuels my wanderlust; knowing that what’s over the next hill will be unique and possibly unlike anywhere else in the world; that I don’t need to find a hidden passage to get to the wondrous.

And all these places both, the urban and the countryside, have histories and stories, from the shop that has been in the same family for generations, to that tree that lovers carved their name into. These histories overlap and intermix, just like the visuals. Landscape is a rich cake.

As suburbs extend and the amount of pure wilderness in the world diminishes, so I find less and less books where travellers interact with their environment. Instead, the chapter ends and the next one begins several days later with the protagonists arriving at their destination without injury or tales to tell. Most of the time, it’s down to the fashion of telling compact stories that avoid anything not directly related to the story (I talk more about this – and repeat and probably contradict myself – HERE). But it’s hard to incorporate well without it seeming like an info dump. Tolkien was a grand master of it, an author who understood landscape as well as he understood language. Few have dared to try emulate him, even fewer have been able to do it even moderately successfully.

Yet, still I crave it; that feeling that the book’s characters, or indeed the author themselves, has experienced that same sense of adventure of travelling by foot, has that same sense of environment. The landscape is alive and not just a slideshow you watch from a window.

We arrived in darkness, and morning found us in something between a council estate and a prison, a gated holiday-community in the form of Pontins. We were lucky, we had gold accommodation. However, having to choose via a ominous switch on the wall between hot water and the cooker, the lack of a microwave, the need to bring our own towels, and the large iron mark on the carpet in one of the bedrooms, one couldn’t help but wonder what extra hardships those in silver would have to endure? Even the television, a relic of the 80s cabled into their ‘network’, had worse reception than my first ever wire-aerial TV.

This would not be the type of place I would ordinarily come to. I could live with the basic accommodation, I could even put up with the crappy onsite chip shop that shut at 6pm and made ‘chips’ so thin, you wondered if there was any potato in them at all. Though maybe I’d draw the line at the cheeseburger that was so thin it redefined the word flaccid.

No, the reason we were here, far removed from the real world was for the SFX Weekender, and in contrast to the venue, the actual event was fun, open and enjoyable.

For a weekend, Pontins got transformed into a SF Penal colony containing Sci Fi’s greatest monsters from Daleks to Aliens. Where else could you be woken in the morning by a Dalek trundlling past your chalet? There were also a smattering of heroes as well, from numerous doctors to a couple of Judge Dredds. Oh, and about 4000 Sci Fi fans.

There’s a lot to be said for SFX Weekender. Yes, the venue is a bit crappy but this is a more general crowd than your Eastercon or Fantasycon. Here be SF fans, of which some do not read.
And so whilst there are some valid online discussions going on about gender balance (I know of at least one female writer who said they’d elected not to come in an official capacity) and the stilt walkers (whose costumes I felt were more SF and less exploitative than last year – I thought the Judge Dredd was awesome), it’s easy to forget that there’s a lot SFX Weekender is doing well. It’s a big con, with big guests and a nice mix of attendees.

Stilt-Walking Judge Dredd

On the writer-front, I don’t know whether the infamous Tor Cottage turned SFX Weekender into a behind the scenes mix of writers’ retreat meets annual publisher get-together, or whether the fact that the vast majority of attendees of SFX are the type of people you wouldn’t see at an Eastercon or Fantasycon, but it is very well supported by publishers and their writers. The fact that the book dealers reported fantastic sales isn’t bad either!

As a result, aside from big name TV stars like Eve Myles and Brian Blessed, you get a lot of writers at the event, not all of them on panels.

My Chalet-mates and I had decided that we’d all do our own thing as we all had different interests and this worked out well as there was always lots to report back on when we met up. I ended up hanging out with some of my usual convention buddies and catching up with all their recent successes : great reviews, their own imprints, upcoming publication.

Even so, there were so many people I never got time to really chat to. Either our paths never crossed or when they did, they were busy. Never even got chance to say “Hi” to Mark Charan Newton or the Pornokitsch team, amongst many others.

I was at least pleased to be able to support the Kitschies, a growing award with a name I can never spell, from the wonderful Pornokitsch. It’s an intelligent award (with a remit beyond a simple ‘best’) coupled with a complete lack of snobbery. Any award where a YA book goes up against a MIeville is going to be interesting and the fact the YA book won goes to show just how progressive their thinking is.

The highlight of the weekend, however, had to be Paul Cornell’s ‘Just A Minute’ which I sold to my chalet-mates on the basis that “Sarah Pinborough would swear a lot”. All the participants really played to the crowd and it lead to a very, very enjoyable hour. We even got to see Joe Abercrombie correct China Mieville on the English language.

It was a good weekend that clearly worked on multiple levels, as was evident by our chalet and its occupants’ different interests, all who had an excellent time. Couple this with a disco each night for us to “get down with our bad selves” and the oppressive accommodation, poor food and long drive were made worthwhile.

The view from the chalet

Prestatyn seemed to be the only place in the UK to avoid the snow, and after tales of people having to push buses, we left relatively early on Sunday and hit snow almost as soon as we were over the border. The roads were surprisingly clear, only for the danger to be reinforced every couple of hours with an accident, jack-knifed lorry or car on its side on the opposite carriageway. I had to drop my Chalet-mates off in Cambridge before heading home, a route that seemed to take in the hotspots of the weekend’s snowpocalypse, and as a result it was a long and intense 8 hour drive back to my home.

Chaletmates toast a successful weekender

As to whether I’ll go again next year? I’m not sure. I typically leave booking cons until the last minute, and if one of our party hadn’t won a competition, it would have been quite an expensive weekend. And frankly, it’s only the money that puts me off. But then a year’s a long time and a lot can happen in that space.

Since I stepped down as editor of Action-Figure to concentrate on my writing, I’ve not had too much to do with the toy and collectible industry. I miss it terribly at times but enjoy the new found free-time my retirement has brought about. However, I was honoured when I was asked to be one of the judges for The Poppies awards. Michael Crawford runs the best toy and collectible reviews site out there and so his Poppies awards are one of (if not THE) most important awards in the industry.

I really enjoyed being a judge, especially with so many companies doing so much great product out there, and I spent a lot of time considering my votes. Check out the winners over at MWCtoys.com

Last year’s event proved a lot of fun. Despite being hosted in a holiday camp that looked like it was made to hold prisoners of war, there was a good crowd there and whilst I attended very few panels (I was nearly permanently in the bar) it was quite a laugh.

Even so, I hadn’t planned to go this year. January is the worst time financially and a tumultuous year this year means I’ve cut back on pre-booking cons. But a friend won tickets and so a posse of us will be heading up to the new Prestatyn venue via Cambridge on Thursday. Seems like a lot of people are going as well, so it will be good catch up, especially since Eastercon currently looks unlikely for me this year.

Because I’m on a very strict budget, I’ve been shopping to get a few bits of food (soup and pot noodles) today and doubt I will be drinking very much at all. But I’m looking forward to the event and look forward to seeing some of you there.