Writing Two Books at Once and Easter in the Marina.

Writing Two Books at Once

As followers of my blog will know, a while back now, I parked a book I started - a Virtual Reality novel called 'The Product of My Dreams'.  At the time of parking, I was around twenty-five thousand words in, just heading into chapter six.

Recently, I started work on 'Time Off: A Proctor Novel'.  Anyone who has read a few of my books will also know that although Night Time in Shanghai is still quite action-packed, I allow myself longer to explore the characters I create and the universe they live in.  The Proctor Novellas, on the other hand, are solid action from start to finish - I try to keep the pace up and give the reader plenty of action to get them flicking from page to page.  As 'Time Off' will be somewhat longer than the novellas - in the region of two hundred and fifty pages, compared to an average of one fifty for the novellas - it makes sense to slow it down a little and try and make a fuller, more descriptive story.  This may make it longer than the predicted two hundred and fifty pages, but I want to draw the reader in deeper than I did for the novellas, so I decided to aim for something pitched somewhere inbetween Night Time in Shanghai and the novellas.

Which brings me to the reason for revisiting The Product of My dreams.  As I have mentioned in my previous blogs, there's building works going on in the marina at the moment, and whilst the ground (water and boat) was shaking, it was hard for me to allow my mind to wander and achieve the extra depth that I hoped to put into Time Off, so although I have written most of the first two chapters (a total of just under ten thousand words) I decided to re-visit The Product of My Dreams and allow my mind to slip into a more in-depth and thoughtful mode.

The Product of My Dreams is a far more involved story with plenty of complications and three story threads.  It has proven to be quite difficult to write, but there's still plenty of action to keep the reader hooked.  Having said that, if you are to read it until it's end, you will have to put up with feeling a little confused until the pieces finally fall into place and you finally grasp how the three story threads come together and relate to each other.  As an idea, I was always very pleased with it, but it has been challenging to write it so far and I have little doubt that it'll be challenging to read and will be deserving of a re-read once you grasp the point of it.  Here's the first page of Chapter Three - Claudia.

"Claudia rammed her little hands tight over her ears and scrunched her eyes tight shut. Still, though it was all she could hear. Bang! Boom! Screech! The rat-a-tat tats and the deep throbbing sounds that just seemed to go on forever and made her tummy feel sick. Her mummy squatted down in front of her and pulled her hands away from her ears and Claudia's eyes snapped wide open again. Her mummy's face and long thick tied-back hair were covered in a mixture of black soot and grey dust, like it had been that time when she'd cleared out the old shed in the tiny back yard of their hab-mod and part of the back wall had fallen in. Mummy had been hurt then and that was all Claudia could think about now, her mummy being hurt. Mummy slipped her fingers from Claudia's wrists until she held her small hands enveloped in her own. She looked at Claudia's face and a couple of tears ran from her eyes. She sniffed and let go of Claudia's left hand with her right, and wiped her wrist across under her nose in the way that she'd told Claudia never to do. Black blended with grey on her mummy's face but a couple of clean streaks were added now and Claudia could see the medium brown of her mummy's skin underneath.

“It's not safe here darling!” her mummy shouted over the noise. Claudia looked at the mess and destruction all around her. Cars and vans were strewn around the main street, some pushed on to their sides, large holes torn through them or their roofs crushed in. Most of them burned, some of them so hot, it felt like sitting between daddy's legs in front of the fire at home. She wanted to go home, but that was where mummy said the rebels were coming from. The buildings that lined the streets were in ruins, some of them virtually levelled, others with holes big enough to drive a car through, torn into the cheap printed sheeting that made up most of them. Some of the brick and stone buildings had fared a little better, just every window smashed through, and in places flames licked out from inside. But where Claudia and her mummy were right now, behind a low stone wall in front of a small flower shop set back from the street, looked to be the safest place they'd been ever since she'd been hurriedly rushed from her school that morning."

I don't know how well this is going to work, but I picked up a somewhat jumbled half-written six chapters and spent the week editing and refining them and added another three thousand or so words to chapter six.  The word count is now nearly thirty thousand words and I'm far more pleased with it than I was when I decided to 'park' it.

After I've written another couple of chapters, I'll re-read what I've written for Time Off and maybe do some more editing there and write a few more chapters of that.  The aim is for Time Off to be somewhere between seventy-five and eighty-five thousand words (nearly three hundred pages), and as I say, I'm ten thousand words in.  The Product of My Dreams will be a far weightier tome - perhaps as much as one hundred and forty thousand words, or five hundred pages.  The aim will be to finish Time Off with The Product of My Dreams around three quarters written, then whilst Time Off goes out to a few publishers and agents, I can finish The Product of My Dreams.

So will it work?  Will I be able to keep  both story lines straight in my head whilst writing the other?  Frankly, I doubt it.  I think when I switch between them, the first few days will be spent reading, editing and absorbing what I've written so far.  Perhaps this means that they'll take me some time longer than if I'd just simply written them one after the other, but the point is that it will hopefully mean that when they are finished, the end products will be better.

It's my intention to take them both back out to publishers and agents and see what response I get rather than simply taking them to my existing publisher or self publishing them, but we'll have to see how that goes.  Sci-fi publishing is a very competitive market, and the big publishers take on very few unestablished authors... though maybe I am starting to establish myself more now, it's hard to say.  Plenty of people have now read Night Time in Shanghai and The Proctor Novellas... As always - if you have, get me a review on amazon.co.uk (pretty please!)

Easter in the Marina

As the weather warms, the canals get busier and more visitors jump into their cars and drive out into the country.  The Boardwalk Bar and Restaurant fills and people sit out in the sun.  And most of my friends are off work.  Barbecues are lit around the place and sausage sandwiches and bottles of Newcastle Brown start to flow, as does the traffic on the canal.  My feet are getting itchy, but as I'm sure I've said before, having the address makes working a lot easier for me, so I'm still humming and hahing about moving on.  There's always the idea of spending a few weeks out travelling around and seeing a bit more of the network and I'm sure that come the summer months, that is exactly what will happen.  But do I keep Mercia as a permanent base?  Or do I just move on to another marina.  When I've decided, I'll let you know.

Today (Easter Sunday), there's live music on and the place is bustling with visitors.  Righty... talking of The Boardwalk - I think a pint might be in order.

Andy Ellis, Mercia Marina, April 2017.

"Time Off: A Proctor Novel"

Just a quick post - this is the first page and a half (or so) of Time Off.  It's raw and unedited and may look quite different in the finished article, but hopefully it'll give you an idea of what I'll be aiming for in the finished novel.

It's progressing quite well - just under 4000 words at the time of posting - I expect it to be around 70,000 when finished, or 240 pages, so not an epic.  I'm pitching it somewhere between the deeply descriptive Night Time in Shanghai and the more pacy Proctor Novellas.  The Proctor Novellas are best read in order as they occasionally reference the earlier books, but this one is aimed to be more 'stand-alone'.

"Chapter One

Spreading the Good News.

He pulled the dark brown rough woollen robe over his head and stuffed his arms into the voluminous sleeves, then pushed the hood back and smoothed himself down. He reached for the white rope cord and swung it around his waist and tied it, then slipped on his sandals. Finally, he picked up his long thin-bladed knife and wiped it on the small yellow dress hung over the back of the cheaply printed white plastic chair next to the bed and slipped it's shiny ceramalloy blade into the sheath in his left sleeve. He looked around him.

As was usual with rooms aboard space stations, the ceiling was low. On three sides, the walls were covered with smoky mirrors with red light strips recessed behind the tops, casting an eerie soft light upwards on to the matt white ceramalloy. Set into the fourth wall's left end was a door which took you out to a corridor. Next to this was a cheap white shelving unit covered in worthless knick-knacks and trinkets of the type that you could pick up for a small handful of loose change in station markets and planetary bazaars across the whole of human space. Maybe some of them were gifts from her regulars. The only thing of any interest was a brass-bound dark wooden box with a small key jutting from it's front, pushed back on the right side of the shelf slightly higher than Sirdar's waist. He quickly rifled through it and removed a few items of jewellery which he stuffed into the right hand pocket of his habit. Maybe a few more gifts from punters, not really worth much, but she wouldn't be needing it any longer.

A large double bed filled three quarters of the floor space, butting up to the three wall mirrors. At one end of the bed, half a dozen large puffy pillows were covered with ruff-edged deep red faux-satin pillow cases over a sheet made of the same material. In the middle of the bed the small young woman lay, beaten and bloody, her body bruised and her life crushed out of her. Pools of blood seeping from the wounds in her chest looked black under the red lighting. The seeping would soon stop. Sirdar looked down at her and crossed himself and said a short prayer. Then he turned to leave. As he opened the door, he connected to the room's cameras and made sure that the short loop of video of the young woman fast asleep was still feeding back to the brothel's systems. He turned and looked once more at the small, dead, crumpled form laying on the bed.

“Tonight you shall rest in the loving embrace of Our Lord.” he said, softly and tenderly. ..."

Anyway - I hope you enjoyed that taster - back to writing it now...

Andy Ellis, 1 April 2017 (in Mercia Marina, but maybe taking a short trip out today if the rain holds off)