Writing Update, Proctor: The Art of Killing.

This blog post's going to be largely about writing, but before I go on to do that, a quick note on why there's no mention of boats.  The second hand boat market remains steady.  There's no real changes over my thoughts and plans on boats, basically what I said last time.  There's no point in me going in to it much further until I get some idea of exactly what I'm dealing with and how much dosh I have to play with.  Soooo... On to:

When I started writing this novella, the idea was to get all the description and geography out of the way early and then just get on with the action - basically a romp from start to finish.  I rapidly realised that this made the rest of the story too two-dimensional so I went back and allowed myself to delve a little more deeply in to the characters.  I added a few additional details to set each scene, but as the book is basically a chase with a twist, past ensuring that the reader understood a few details of the locale of each scene, there wasn't a huge lot to do so the whole thing chases along nicely with little in the way of distraction, and I like that.

I allowed myself to get a little hooked on the idea of exploring each character and I made a few changes to the over all structure of the book, changing the point of view of each chapter to tell the story from the perspective from several of the major players.  In places, this puts the action at one step removed.  Chapter four is done in this style and it was very difficult to write, but it was the only way to really introduce our hero's nemesis.  To really understand him, you have to see the darkest recesses of his mind, and telling the chapter from his perspective allows me to freely explore his darker thoughts.

Then I hit something of a wall.  Certain realities of the upcoming year came home to roost, as did my son.  I wasn't happy about the way the novella was progressing - the idea of it being one long chase/ action scene had really appealed to me at the start and as I wrote the first three chapters, I felt that it was progressing nicely and Chapter four's exploration of the top bad-guy's character gave me a sense of achievement and I liked what I'd created, but with chapter five, things were moving back to the chase, fight and action scenes, and I became worried that the story would become flat and a little tedious.

For two weeks I struggled with it and finally just sat down and wrote Chapter five.  As you'll have read in my last blog post, I was very pleased with the result and because of the success of the third dimension that developing the characters more fully had given me, I chose to write the chapter from the point of view of one of the book's minor characters.  Chapter six moves us away from the action again and fills in more details in another of the main characters.  It introduces the final battle-ground and starts to give some clues of exactly why the book is called The Art of Killing and exactly what that means to me, the author.

Chapter seven is back to Proctor and fills in some of the gaps in the story as seen so far from the perspectives of others and explains the reasons for some of the events in the story so far.  You start to understand the broader picture and in some ways, the chapter hints that things may not be quite as they seem (did you seriously think they were?).  Anyway, I shall say no more about that!  Chapter seven is definitely firmly back in to romp mode and sees Proctor take on his most dangerous opponent yet, here's a short quote:

"A form pushed upright, silhouetted by flames. Proctor grabbed an extruded metal I-beam that had once been a lintel from amongst the debris between him and the remains of the building, lined it up with the black form and once again pushed to go as fast as he was able. Power surged through his muscles and was amplified and driven through his augmented bones and the layers of ceramalloy that encased him. He held the I-beam out like a lance and plunged in to the ruins of the building, slamming the end of the beam against the man's armour, hitting just under the base of his chest plate. He drove them through the shattered remains of the thin wall that separated the store room from the shop-front and pushed on until the form in black dropped over the mostly intact counter beyond."

Just a taster...

Writing Update, Proctor: The Art of Killing, and a ramble on about boats.

Rather than the usual thing of breaking down the blog in to sections, I'm just going to do a flow of consciousness thing - maybe you think I'm trying to be clever, but frankly, after a heavy weekend of writing and editing, I just can't be arsed to be more organised with my thoughts.  I'll bold a couple of words so you can skip through to the bits you want to read.

After my last blog an all-too-brief push to get writing again followed, then a couple of things happened in my personal life that drew my attention away from writing.  This led to a week off and a realisation that perhaps things are just too complicated in my life right now for me to be able to commit the time needed to add eight to ten thousand words to a book every week.

In the lead up to the summer, I need to work out how I'm going to get a boat, what sort of boat I'm going to get and most importantly, how I'm going to manage to live on it over the winter.  That includes earning a little money and having heating on board.  To earn money I need power - electrical power.

OK, so a little about boats - you can skip this if you're only interested in the writing things.

I think I'm going to have around £6k to spend on a boat *and* to get it ready for winter.  The sort of things I'm looking at vary in price from around £3k to around £12k and only a very few of them are kitted out to live-aboard.  The price variation is around how clean and tidy they are as day/ weekend cruisers and not about their practicality for living aboard.  A £6k boat is generally clean inside and out, though dated.  For £10k you'd expect pristine.  But what I need is the following:

• Power - 240v to occasionally run a few power tools and plenty of battery for everyday use
• Hot Water - a gas water boiler for a shower and washing.
• Heating - either a hot air heater or a wood-burner
• Insulation - an inner lining with high performance insulation

Quite a few boats have one or two of these things, but very few have all four.  Very roughly, I'll need around £500 to effectively sort each of these things, ready for the winter:

• Power - A generator and/or inverter depending on whether the boat is inboard or outboard engined - an inboard engine generally has a greater charging capacity.
• Hot Water - A reconned Paloma or similar and gas and water piping, water pumps for the supply and a sump and pump for the shower.
• Heating - One of these babies set up in a fire-brick surround, vented through a double-walled chimney through the roof.  It's not much bigger than a shoe box.

• Insulation - epoxy batons to the inner GRP surface then line with two layers of 'Reflectix' (foil backed bubble wrap) sandwiching a layer of PE foam (camp mats), all lined with 3.6mm ply.

OK, so the point is, even if I spend £10k on a boat that's nice inside, I'm going to be stripping it all out and re-doing it, sooner rather than later, so basically it makes sense to get a sound shell with a sound engine as cheaply and as quickly as I can and get to work making it cosy for autumn and winter.

What this means is that I'm spending more time planning it now and working out how to do what I need - for instance, you'd imagine that putting a six hundred degree stove inside a plastic boat would be asking for trouble, but it is possible and will warm the space very well without making the air wet.  But you have to do it properly and it'll need to pass a safety inspection.

My daughter's off to Uni in September as well and there's lots of planning to do for that.  We went to Northampton a couple of weeks ago and had a look around and she's very much looking forwards to it.

And all of this leaves less time for writing.

Having said that, I've added around 5000 words to The Art of Killing this week - the word count is now 27000 and I've finished chapter five of ten, so probably about half way through a 54000 word book - getting on for two hundred pages.

I am really happy with what I've written so far - I think my writing style's starting to mature and the book flows nicely.  Yesterday I completed Chapter Five which introduces a new character that I'm going to have some fun with.  I went back and did chapter notes for Chapter Three.  Chapter Three introduces the top bad guy and I guarantee you will utterly despise this one - I'd have to shower for three days solid if I ever met someone really like him - he makes my skin crawl.  Then I edited Chapter Four.  The whole of the last seven pages of the chapter are an extended action scene - it was quite demanding to write and edit, but it's got this feel... well, you'll just have to see when you read it - I hope it does what I think it should.  A few hours ago I got started on chapter six, which, in a different way, will also be challenging.  A man starts to unravel and you should begin to pick up on exactly what the Art of Killing is all about.

Whilst I'm busy working out how I'm going to make the boat thing happen in a do-able way, and I'm working hard to supply the funds, the writing's going to have to take a bit of a back seat.  With that in mind, I imagine I'll finish The Art of Killing in around six weeks after which time, I'll focus my energies on other things for a few weeks then I think I'll move Machine War forwards and get started on that - I am really looking forwards to writing Machine War and my mind's overflowing with ideas for it now, so I think it'll soon be time to get some of that down on paper.

If you've read The Art of Living, please leave me a review - if not, give it a try, it's less than the cost of a pint.