Friday, 26 September 2008

This Writerly Craft

There is a positive Trilogy of Interviews with yours truly up at Writer Unboxed, a site devoted to the craft and business of Genre Fiction and run by a whole set of writers, including Juliet Marillier, who ran this interview. It focuses a lot more on my approach and techniques of writing than the usual array of dumb jokes and me making an ass of myself. A glimpse behind the grease-paint happy clown face at the tortured artist's soul beneath? Perhaps, my friends, perhaps...

Part the First
Part the Second
Part the Third

But don't worry, I was interviewed for a podcast the other day and really made an ass of myself there, so if that's what you came for, you've never got long to wait.

Labels: interviews

Wednesday, 24 September 2008

Finished ... Kind Of

Much to my delight, I finished the first draft of the final part of Best Served Cold while I was away, on holiday (rolls eyes toward heaven). That means I have an entire first draft, running from beginning to end. Currently just over 235,000 words long, which is about the same length as Last Argument of Kings. I was aiming at the start for something between 150-175,000 words (still a big book by most reasonable standards) so you could say I've spectacularly over-fulfilled, or you could say I've spectacularly mis-planned. Either way, it's long been plain I wouldn't realise my ludicrous ambitions in anything less, so I'm actually quite pleased it's as short as it is. Hopefully I'll cut another maybe 10,000 words during the process of revision and editing, though oftentimes I find I add as much as I remove... Perhaps something shorter in future, Joe?

(sigh)

So the book is finished! Pop the Asti Spumante, motherf*ckers! Right?

Well ... not quite.

In fact ... not at all.

There's always a lot to do following a first draft, but more in the case of this book than with the books in the trilogy. That's partly deliberate, in that I felt since this was a standalone I could go back and revise the entire book en masse, rather than trying to get things right as I went along. I've therefore pretty much written each of the seven parts on their own, revised them, then left them as they are while I pressed on with the rest, the characters and the methods of writing them changing, developing, taking shape in my mind as I went, and the plot shifting a bit with them.

So the earlier parts of the book feel like a cupboard that's rammed full of rubbish from my childhood that I know I need to sort out but somehow never can. Daren't go near, lest when I open the door the contents fall out and crush me. The time has now come when I must open that cupboard and gaze upong the wreckage within. As with most tasks long put off, I'm sure it'll be a lot less daunting when I actually get stuck into it. I hope. But there is certainly work to be done. A fair bit of work is needed both to introduce elements of the plot that came to me later in the writing process, or became more (or less) important as I got towards the end, to add details of the world that came to me as I went along, and (most importantly) just to impose a much stronger and more consistent sense of the characters, some of which didn't necessarily take shape until I was a fair way into the writing process. Knowing the end sure does help with the direction of the beginning...

So from here, for anyone who cares, the plan is:

1. Make any significant changes to the actual events that happen, if they're necessary. Mostly this is small stuff, slipping in hints of things that will be important later, and introducing a couple of characters and themes earlier on that have turned out to be more significant than I thought. I also need to write a small chapter to insert near the front, as things have turned out.

2. Kick the shit out of the first part. Which currently doesn't have the right feel at all, partly due to just slapping it together and getting on, and partly due to the fact that I was still very much fumbling around with the characters and overall arcs at that point, especially with the main character, and my conceptions of how they should behave and develop have changed quite a lot. So it needs to be reworked to match how I see the whole thing now. The front is the most important bit, right?

3. A quick run-through of the whole thing. Mostly a read-through, just to try and get the whole shape into my head, see what works and what doesn't, hack out any obvious crap (what, me?), see if anything needs a lot more work, see if there are any plot points I didn't resolve well enough or, er, forgot about as I was going along. Also to remove some tricks I was trying earlier on and proved to be too clever for their own good (or not clever enough, depending on how you look at it), and to find if there are any tricks or constructions that work nicely and could be applied more widely during...

4. Character Pass. And now we come to the meat of the exercise. You have to imagine me being interviewed, probably on a darkened stage with a single spotlight, in a black leather armchair like Mastermind, by Melvyn Bragg, possibly? I'm wearing a corduroy suit and a thoughtful yet slightly sour expression like I just tasted a fine wine and detected the slightest aroma of piss about it. And I say something like, "well, you understand, Melvyn, this is when I take on the mantles of my various characters, this is when I absorb them into my id. This is when I become them ... Or do they become me?" (humbly apologetic smile, round of applause from the sycophantic audience, you get the idea). Basically I try and get as complete a sense of each point of view character as possible in mind, often taking one particular chapter that worked particularly well as a model. Then I spend a few days going through every chapter and part of chapter from their point of view trying to get as strong a sense of that character down on the page. Usually involves some cutting down, some tinkering with the prose style to try and get it consistent across every appearance of that character, some work on the dialogue to get the voice right, some application of clever tricks and catch-phrases, or repeating constructions, and so forth.

Also during this phase, and particularly with the three more important characters, I'll be trying to draw out some of the theme relating to that character a bit more strongly, especially early on when I wasn't (ahem) totally sure what their themes would, like, be. I will be trying to sketch their arcs more distinctly. Trying to boil them down to a more decisive essence of person. Melvyn. Whoever said I was pretentious? I'm just like any other master craftsman or great artist at work...

When this pass is done the book should hopefully be coming together nicely. (Not that it isn't already brilliant, you understand. You understand, right?) The groundwork should be laid for...

5. The axe-man cometh. Time to read through in order with an eye for anything overly repetitive or redundant, cut down and simplify as much as possible, try to correct any factual blunders and pick up on any mistakes or wooliness that I might have missed out in my previous goes at it, smooth out any crappy writing (as much as I'm ever going to, anyway) or clunky exposition. Up until this point, the chapters are all separate documents. At this point I'll probably combine them into their seven parts and work on them as units. Also, and you'll laugh here, you really will, I occasionally MAKE THE TEXT REALLY BIG. I've got a big monitor which will usually fit two pages side by side. Now I zoom in so as to fit only a half-page or so on at a time. Sounds absurd, but I actually find the big letters can sometimes help you to focus on the details...

This will probably all take me a month or two (I hope). During that time I'll also be absorbing general comments from my editor into the process, as well as from the folks from my family who act as readers (Mum, Dad, Brother). Ideally, when it's done I'll be, like, WELL happy. For about 10 minutes. This is my happy time during the year, so I'll make the most of it. I might even smile.

Then the more specific editing will begin, with a detailed look and a proper marking-up. The process goes a little something like this. Of course, during that period, I'll be working up ideas for the next book.

(gut wrenching sigh as from the dead in hell)

Indeed, that YOU may be entertained, MY torment must never end... Melvyn...

Labels: process

Sunday, 21 September 2008

Back from Italy

Phew. Back from a two week holiday in Italy, last night, absolutely knackered. Probably the hardest I've worked all year. We were in Rome for a week, then in rural Tuscany for a week (beautiful country). I think we slightly miscalculated the difference between taking a 6 month old on holiday (sits in a buggy smiling at tourists while not asleep) and a 2 year old (runs madly around cathedrals screaming with laughter/rage, refuses to sit still for more than four seconds at a time, demands to be constantly entertained etc.) Plus Rome was crushingly hot, 38 degrees at the most, rarely less than 33 in the day. Brutal heat when you're pounding the streets on foot, which we mostly were.

Anyway, partly because of the heat, which made it impossible to really laze around the flat we'd hired, and partly because Rome doesn't really seem to have a lot of public space, we ended up doing a lot of the touristy cultural stuff. So apologies for my hi-brow-ed-ness. Some of the high, and not so highlights:

Vatican
Raphael rooms, check, Sistine Chapel, check, Unmatched collection of ancient sculpture, check. Washed over me a little bit, I must admit. Very hard to separate the art from the experience of seeing it. You tend to walk through kind of thinking "when do we get to the Sistine Chapel, when do we get to the Sistine Chapel, are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet," as the endless corridors and magnificently frescoed salons slide interminably by. A kind of Sistine fever descends, partly induced by all the tour parties rushing through to get there before the rush starts, and becoming the rush themselves. The Sistine Chapel itself is, yeah, amazing, but rammed, and the police endlessly hissing "silencio", kicking people off the steps and haranguing Japanese tourists for taking photos is a bit distracting, so you feel somewhat uncomfortable and forced through. It also suffers from that inevitable mild disappointment of seeing something incredibly famous that you already knew loads about. Seems that eternal problem of hype applies to the world's greatest artworks as well as fantasy books. The highlight for me, actually, was a gallery of maps. This is, I'm guessing, about 300 feet long, about twenty feet high, the entire space literally covered in the most fantastically beautiful painted maps of 16th century Italy. Seriously, for map lovers amongst us (and yes, I am one of them, whatever you may think), this might make a trip to Rome worthwhile on its own. It is the Mecca of maps. Also intriguing was the Pope's collection of twentieth century interpretations of devotional themes - futurist crucifictions, cubist madonnas and so forth, featuring in particular, wait for it ... one of Francis Bacon's screaming pope studies. I guess irony can be pretty ironic, sometimes...

Barberini Palace
A heavyweight art collection in an old palace in Rome, it was kind of the opposite experience to the Vatican, in that it wasn't that big, was mostly free of crowds, and you could just sit and contemplate. I actually enjoyed a magnificent ceiling by Pietro da Cortona(who I'd never come close to hearing of beforehand - the picture does it no justice, by the way) a lot more than the Sistine chapel just because I could lie down and take it in (they'd even provided rather comfortable leatherette benches for the purpose) without being trampled by tour parties. Also notable, Caravaggio (everyone loves a self-destructive nutcase, don't they?) and my own favourite of the era, El Greco, plus loads more. I recommend a visit.

St. Peters
Man. Man, oh man, St. Peters really is something else. The outside is a bit of a let down, in a way, partly due to compromises and alterations in the design, which took over a century to realise (the story's quite fascinating if you're into that sort of thing, which I am). But the inside. Holy shit. Really holy. As you walk up the frontage seems to grow (which apparently was the intention of the way the square in front was designed), and by the time you step through the doors, tardis-like, the place has become the definition of immensity. I'm in no way a religious man, but I think I came about as close on walking into St. Peter's to a religious experience as I'm ever going to. The simple scale. The towering, awe-inspiring, breath-taking space that it encloses. The incredible quality of decoration, mosaic and statuary that covers every surface. It's no surprise that it can supposedly contain 60,000 people, it makes even epic fantasy conceptions of vastness and opulence seem ... all a little bit silly and understated. Perspective goes all weird in there. You see a statue on a monument to a pope and think, how funny, he's really small. You walk over. Ten minutes later, you're standing in front and he's twelve feet tall. You see writing round the edge of the dome, a long way up, sure, and you think, that's impressive, some nice bold capitals. You climb to the gallery up in the dome (not for the vertiginous, it's the highest in the world) and realise the writing is seven feet high. It's amazing, I kid you not.

San Gimignano
The definition of a Tuscan hill-town, and a really strange contradiction. A medieval settlement in which rival families vied with each other to produce really, really tall towers, the highest is 180 feet tall, in fact, and given that it's on a massive hill in the first place the views from the top are pretty frickin' amazing. The black death crippled the place, as a result of which it became kind of frozen in time, and offers an amazingly complete sense of a medieval city. Except for the thronging tourists, incredibly cheesy souvenir shops and rubbish restaurants offering "touristic menus" that occupy pretty much every inch of street frontage.

Florence
Only a day to sample the cradle of the renaissance, which meant a visit to the cathedral in the morning (I fear after St. Peter's I'll never be impressed by a church again) including climbing the campanile. Really high. I was scared. Then the Uffizi gallery in the afternoon, the greatest collection of renaissance art anywhere. An onslaught of Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo, roomfuls of Titian and Raphael plus much, much more. So great a collection, in fact, that it was all a bit hard to take in. Pretty strange seeing pictures in the flesh - like Boticelli's Birth of Venus - that are so well known they're pretty much part of popular culture, but ubiquitous tour groups inevitably bum-rush the really well-known pieces, meaning that you tend to spend more time in front of the lesser-known stuff, and odd things jump out at you. At random, then, Titian's Venus of Urbino - is she covering up, there, or, you know ... And another El Greco. Like seeing a painter from the 20th century sat in amongst a load of old masters only, he is an old master. An expressionist 300 years before his time. They all thought he was a loony back then. "What's with the stretched out figures, stark compositions and crazy sky, El Greco?" I wonder if he might have been a time lord. Or perhaps a Goa'uld.

Siena
You have to imagine me singing Ultravox's Vienna, really loud, only after the oooooooooooooh bit, I'd sing Siena, instead of Vienna. How my wife laughed. The first time. By the fifth, she was no longer amused. By the fiftieth, she was ready to kill me. I still have it going round and round in my head. Anyway, Siena is well beautiful. A real flavour of a medieval brick city, the famous piazza del campo is stunning but also nicely inviting and friendly, a really pleasant public space. There's a really high tower there. Really high. We climbed that as well. I was really scared. The frontage of the cathedral is pretty damn impressive, as is the inside although, you know, it ain't St. Peter's. There are some great medieval frescoes in the Palazzo Pubblico. Again, in a way I found that more enjoyable than the Uffizi because there was less to see, and in a more relaxed environment.

Other stuff? Ancient Roman remains are very impressive, especially the colloseum, but I don't know, I just found it a bit underwhelming. I guess if you've been to Egypt, nothing else is anywhere near so old, so big, or so intact. Italians have really strange, hard bread, which didn't work for me. But undeniably they have great coffee. In fact food there in general cannot be knocked. Casole d'Elsa, the hill town near where we stayed is really nice if you fancy going off the beaten track, no real things to see apart from the feel of the place itself, but they've got a damn good restaurant there.

Oh, and, when in Rome, visit St. Peter's.

Labels: art

Friday, 5 September 2008

Italy, Germany, Greece

Konigsklingen, Heyne's german translation of Last Argument of Kings, is out a month early, and now available on amazon.de. Get 'em while they're hot, German speakers...

In great news for the ancient nation of Greece, Unicorn publishing have secured rights to translate the entire trilogy into Greek. I think that's fourteen translation deals for The Blade Itself now, though I could easily be miscounting there. Tis humbling to think of people scattered across the globe enjoying (or indeed despising) stuff what I made up in the middle of the night.

And I'm going to be away on holiday (so working harder than ever, probably) in Italy for the next couple of weeks. A week in Rome, a week in Tuscany, so we'll aim to take in a bit of Florence and Siena as well. I'll probably be off the interweb in that time, and not responding to email, but for those of you who simply can't get through a week without the sound of my voice, There's a new interview with me up at SFRevu, discussing such matters as worldbuilding, the state of epic fantasy, change, and failure. Yeah, like I know anything about THAT. Well, apart from the last one, of course. There's also a reprint of John Berlyne's review of Last Argument of Kings. Mmmmm, smells like ... victory.

See you all in a couple of weeks.

Labels: interviews, news

Monday, 1 September 2008

Uncharted Soul Overlord: Raising Fortune IV

This past month I played 3 games on the Playstation 3. See how I have amusingly combined their titles to make the name of this post sound like a badly translated Anime series? I will now discuss them in the order of playing. Simple as that:


Overlord - Raising Hell

A dark lord a la Sauron (and owing not a little in terms of styling to Peter Jackson, not that that's a bad thing, necessarily) is defeated by a load of squeaky-clean heroes, and many years later returns from the the dead to wreak vengeance upon them. Yes, we've been here before, except in this version you are the dark lord in question, and the heroes have become even more evil than you were. The halfling is a monstrously overweight fascist, the paladin has become a pervert, the dwarf got so greedy that he invaded the elven realm and enslaved the fair folk, and as for the wizard ... man, it's always the wizard you've got to watch ...

Anyway, as overlord you control a load of mischievous minions with varying powers, and need to grind assorted cliche fantasy lands (halfling hills, elven woods, dwarven mines) under your spiky heel and return your dark tower to its former sinister glory. Naturally, ever since that pathetic excuse for a piece of rubbish disappointment, Black and White (a game which bore the tagline, 'find out who you really are', to which my answer was, 'bored') there needs to be moral choices. So you have the option of evil, or really evil. Force the peasants to do your bidding, or slaughter them to a man? It's a laugh, this game, it really is, with nice graphics and great design throughout. The designers obviously have a deep understanding of cheesy fantasy mores as frequently expressed in the video game scene, and take great glee in taking the piss out of them. This being an expanded version, there are also a load of hell-like abysses over which you can extend your totalitarian dominion. These really are pretty funny at times, something you don't see often enough in computer games, that's for sure. A giant incompetent theatrical show portraying the destruction of the elven race to an audience of bored demons. Death rocking out on his scythe while giving it the metal fingers. Using a paladin as a giant mop. Well, maybe you had to be there...

Anyway, a nice little game with which to while away a few evenings, nothing too mind blowing, but does what it says on the tin, nicely styled, and has a wicked sense of humour, especially for those of us in the fantasy business. 7/10


Soul Calibur IV

Man, I loved Soul Edge when it first came out in the arcade. To those who don't know, it's a sword-fighting beat 'em up, in essence. At a time when 3d meant virtua-fighter and characters as blocky as the Thing, Soul Edge really did look frickin' amazing, with revolutionary texture, gravity and detail. And the gameplay was new and exciting too, with real variety to the different characters. I used to run down to Wizard Video on Harrow Road (from whence I also rented lots and lots of crap sub-John Woo oriental action films) with pound coins in my hot little hands and hammer that arcade machine with limited competence but great enthusiasm. Ah, happy days. Later, when it came out on the Playstation 1 (called Soul Blade for reasons I've never understood), I played the hell out of it with mates. It was almost like Street Fighter II all over again. Ah, happy days. Again.

I had Soul Calibur II, I think it was, on the PS2, and it was good, but it didn't quite seem to have the magic, so I was keen to see whether they'd pushed things forward on the PS3. Have they? Not really.

The graphics undoubtedly get better with each iteration - better shading, better textures, all the stuff we expect from next gen and yada yada. I must say though, that I kind of feel some of the personality has leaked out of this series with each iteration. The female characters in particular seem to have become more and more identical wide-eyed big-boobed manga dolls, like they've all visited the same crap cosmetic surgeon. I mean, they never covered up, but these days several of them seem to sport costumes that would make a stripper blush, let alone an expert in armed combat. And though they've added more characters (frankly too many, to my mind) the old favourites don't seem to have changed much in terms of moves and movement. They even do the same victory celebrations and say the same tough putdowns as they did not one game ago, but two, only now the camera angles appear to be a lot less varied and inventive. It feels like the developers are phoning it in. I remember the first version of Tekken that came out on the PS2 - can't remember the name of it, but basically it was identical to Tekken 3 with better textures. This game feels like a similar upgrade (or lack of one), but at least they had the excuse there that the console just came out. PS3's been out a while, and this is the best they can come up with? Bit weak.

This version also doesn't feature the cornucopia of one player modes that earlier ones had. The plotting (such as it is) is cursory at best, the one player experience feels ... a bit dumb. Yeah, I know, it's all about the internet, and that makes a lot of sense. I mean, what kind of saddo plays beat 'em ups on their own? Erm... [nervously raises hand] But still, I don't see any reason to make the one player actively worse. You get into the one player enough, maybe then you decide to be embarrassed by the army of brilliant twelve year olds waiting sweaty palmed to destroy you.

I loved the first of these games. It's still fun bashing the crap out of assorted freaks with a sword, and you still have the most ludicrously over the top voice-over guy in the world spouting magnificent gibberish like, "transcending history and the world, a tale of souls and swords, eternally retold!" which is a plus, but I don't think the series has got better, overall. It's got ... the same. 5/10


Uncharted - Drake's Fortune

Well, now, talk about saving the best til last. This just came out on platinum on the PS3 (half price, that is), and I hadn't really heard much about it (why would I, since I have a two year old and almost never leave the house?) but it turns out to be pretty much an object lesson in how to make a great game.

I guess you could describe it as a video-game Indiana Jones, or perhaps Tomb Raider with a sense of humour and much more sophisticated combat. Pretty much every aspect, from control system, to storyline, to music and sound, to design of the characters and settings, to the way the opening and loading screens look, hits the nail squarely on the head. Everything is beautifully smooth, intuitive, seamless. This is the polar opposite of designers phoning it in. This is a game in which every aspect has evidently been polished until it shines, huge effort has been expended to create a feeling of effortlessness (is that a word?)

There's a great variety of settings and feels. Jungles, ancient tombs, flooded cities, crumbling forts, overgrown monasteries, cargo ships, even an abandoned U-boat pen. There's also a good variety of gameplay - gun-based and hand-to-hand combat, running, jumping and climbing, exploration and puzzle solving. Some sequences near the end are genuinely scary, as well, as it steps briefly and very effectively into horror territory.

For a game that isn't necessarily a full-on shooter the combat sections are excellent, fluid, exciting. Use of cover is slick and responsive, hand to hand fighting is neatly managed, enemy AI is impressive, and there's a range of weaponry that's interesting enough without getting in the way. Particularly good, oddly, is that you can't carry more than two weapons at once and not that much ammunition, so you tend to just toss guns aside regularly and use whatever's to hand - just like Indiana Jones would've done - rather than feeling like you have to scrounge every spare shotgun shell as you often do with these sort of games. In combat, as everywhere else, the whole experience is improved immeasurably by the variety of animations and the way the personality of the main character constantly leaches through. He'll cower behind walls under fire, he'll fling himself from one crate to another with suitable desperation, he'll say, "oh god, oh god, oh god," when a grenade lands next to him, or quip, "that'll hurt in the morning," after butting some pirate off a cliff.

And it's the personality of the whole thing that really lifts it. The three leads - everyman out of his depth tricky but basically decent main character, slimy old conman sidekick and spunky love-interest - are eminently likeable, the cut-scenes are well acted, involving, but not intensely over long (I'm looking at you, Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!) They look like real people (no enormous boobs in sight). They even kind of talk like real people. Or at least like actors from a good pulp action-adventure film, which is kind of the idea. This is one charming-ass game. Even the villains are kind of likeable. I played the whole thing with a smile on my face. I even started thinking I should make my characters more likeable. For about 10 seconds. But that's a long time for me.

You could point to some trifling shortcomings, maybe. The climbing and jumping sections feel relatively straightforward, kind of obvious, and not particularly challenging, but perhaps that's partly because the controls are so damn good and the character moves so smoothly. It feels like quite a linear game, with very little deviation offered from a set path. Plus the continue settings are pretty forgiving, on the whole, and it offers frequent hints, so the experienced gamer will no doubt find themselves tearing through it in double quick time. The result is the game is quite short (though it doesn't necessarily feel small), but I guess there is a comparable upside in that the experience feels extra rich, packed with cinematic moments and very rarely frustrating or boring, and I'd certainly consider playing the whole thing through again on harder difficulty, which I don't often feel in these days of limited time.

The whole thing bursts with personality, is full of detail without ever being finicky or fussy, and offers great, responsive, polished gameplay. I'm reluctant to give 10s out without due consideration, since I think for a 10 something needs to stand the test of time, feel like a classic in hindsight. But I'd say this has a good chance of getting there. Supposedly a sequel is in the pipeline. Here's hoping this is the start of a long and beautiful series. 9/10, and we'll see about that extra point ...

Labels: games