Category Archive for ‘progress’ rss

Part IV

February 2nd, 2012 • 57 Comments

And you thought all I’d been doing was playing Skyrim and D&D with a selection of the world’s most bodacious fantasy authors, didn’t ya?  Admit it!  False!  For I can now reveal that I have finished a first draft of Part IV of my latest, which puts me about 80% of the way through.  Much work still to do when the first draft’s finished, mind you.  Publication is looking like late autumn in the UK, possibly a little later in the US.  Still no cast iron dates for ya, I’m afraid, but very much this year, anyway, so far as can be predicted in this unpredictable business of ours.  Soon as I’ve got a firm date it’ll be yours.  In the meantime, the sketchiest of synopses to whet your ravenous appetites:

“Shy South comes home to her farm to find a blackened shell, her brother and sister stolen, and knows she’ll have to go back to bad old ways if she’s ever to see them again.  She sets off in pursuit with only her cowardly old step-father Lamb for company.  But it turns out he’s hiding a bloody past of his own.  None bloodier.  Their journey will take them across the lawless plains, to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feuds, duels, and massacres, high into unmapped mountains to a reckoning with ancient enemies, and force them into alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, a man no one should ever have to trust…”

And no, I’m not telling you anything else, no matter how much you plead in the comments.  You can give it a go, though, just in case I change my mind…

Part 3

November 29th, 2011 • 37 Comments

So you see it’s not all Skyrim down my way, as I’ve finished a first draft of Part 3 of my latest book.  Since there are five parts that means I’m well over half way through.  Starting to come together now, I hope, but it’s been a bit of a struggle this time around, I must admit.  Not absolutely sure why that is, in many ways it’s a much more simple story than the Heroes.  Perhaps that’s the problem – there are only two central points of view so they each have to carry more weight than might have been the case in my other books, and one of them I’m continuing to have some problems with.  It’s also the most organic, garden-y approach I’ve taken with a book so far and I may well be finding that it doesn’t suit me all that well.  Though I’ve got rough ideas of the content and a sharp notion of the final scene, I still don’t have the precise sequence of events in the fourth and fifth parts worked out in any detail.  Probably that’s the next task, just as soon as I’ve done a quick review of a short story I wrote at the start of the year for a forthcoming anthology…

(A) Red Country

August 15th, 2011 • 103 Comments

So I’ve finished the first draft of the second part of my latest masterwork, workingly titled, ‘A Red Country,’ or possibly just, ‘Red Country,’ we will see on that score.  For those who have failed to follow this blog religiously for the past few months (shame on you faithless scum), it is another semi-standalone set in the world of The First Law, and fusing fantasy elements with western elements, in the same way that The Heroes was a fantasy/war story and Best Served Cold fantasy/thriller-ish.  That puts me about 40% of the way through a first draft, though I suspect there’ll be a fair bit of work to do once the first draft is complete.  Isn’t there always?  Now the terrifying wait for feedback from my editor and readers while I try and sort out what exactly I’m going to do with my next part.  I guess one could say that if Part I was a little bit Searchers then Part II rolled into Lonesome Dove territory and Part III has something of a Deadwood/Fistful of Dollars motif.

I feel a fair bit more comfortable with this second part than I did with the first, as you’d expect or at least hope.  One generally aims to get a better and better handle on the plot, settings and characters as one goes through a draft, until by the time you’re finishing your first draft you know pretty much exactly what you’re aiming at, and editing becomes largely a case of bringing earlier parts into line with that final one.

I’ve made quite a significant change to the personality of one of my two central characters – or perhaps not a change but a clarification, a shift of emphasis and a refinement of style – and he seems to be working quite a bit better now.  In essence, I’ve made him a bit more of a shit than he was before, which tends to be a fruitful direction for me to go in with characters on the whole.  Who knew?

It’s taken me a little longer to get this part together than I’d hoped, what with one thing and another, but if I can up the pace a little from here on in we should still be looking at delivery early next year and publication somewhere around late summer early autumn 2012.  Such is the hope.  But you know what they say about hopes.

Don’t make a parachute out of ’em.

 

Can You Tell What it is Yet?

March 1st, 2011 • 103 Comments

A little selection of influences, inspiration and research for my forthcoming project, a third semi-standalone book set in the world of - and featuring some characters from - The First Law:

Anyone got a notion of what genre I shall next be breeding with my take on fantasy to produce another despicable mutant offspring? 

I find starting a new book is always the hardest part of the job (if you can call it a job).   You’ve come off the high of editing and completing something (my favourite part of the job, if you can call it a job) and put it out to the delight (and otherwise) of an adoring (and otherwise) public.  You’ve trimmed it down, tidied it up, sharpened the story to its most effective point, and ended up with something you’re (hopefully) very happy with and proud of.  You’ve reached a point of being comfortable with the characters, understanding who they are and their place in the story.  You know the lay of the land intimately.  Then suddenly you are cast adrift upon the fog-wrapped sea of something new.  You’ve got ideas, sure, you know who the characters might be, roughly what they’ll be doing and where, perhaps how things will end up, but will any of it actually work?  It’s like moving from an area filled with old and trusted friends to a new one where everyone’s a sinister stranger.  Will these characters be interesting, and just what the hell are they like, anyway?  Until you really start to write them, and often for some time after, you really can’t know, and so you’re inevitably left with a shed load of doubts.

Still, doubts are part of the job (if you can call it a job), even for a writer with my massively bloated sense of self-worth.  The only way to overcome them is to get stuff written that you’re happy with.  And the only way you’ll get that done is time in the chair, grinding it out, if not with an all-encompassing mastery and understanding of what you’re doing, then at least by trial and error and laborious cutting and revision.  Let’s see where we stand in six months…

In other news, you can find me over at Borders’ Babel Clash over the next couple of weeks, blogging alongside urban fantasy author Anton Strout.  Our current topic of conversation is gaming, currently old skool roleplaying gaming and the influence a childhood full of it has had upon our writing.  Maybe we’ll see you over there…

Updates, Extras, Extract, New York

September 3rd, 2010 • 26 Comments

It’s all good news!  Some overdue updates to the site over the last few days, which include an updated home page, a fully fledged information page for The Heroes, with space for all the glowing reviews which will no doubt appear over the next few months (ahem) and, some among you will no doubt be delighted to see, a considerable new extract.

I’ve tried something slightly different with this book.  I’ve already talked briefly about the six main characters, three on the Union side and three on the Northern, and the great majority of the book is narrated from one of their points of view.  But there are also some chapters in which the point of view switches rapidly between a whole range of minor characters – extras, if you will, some closely involved with the main players, some not.  The idea was to give a sense of the vastness of events, of the epic nature of the battlefield, to follow the development of the combat without losing touch with the individual experience, to look at the way small decisions, accidents and quirks of personality can ripple out to have profound consequences, and also to paint what are hopefully some quick and engaging portraits of lesser characters.  Probably easier to see what I mean in practice than to listen to me try and explain it…

Anyway, with these chapters my character run-through is finally complete.  I’m taking the opportunity before the copy edit comes back to actually read the book.  You know, just sit there and read it, like a reader would.  One gets so bogged down in the details that you lose any idea what it’s like to just … read it.  I’m still not sure I have any idea.  Perhaps if I read it in a few years…

In other news, it looks like I will be making my first professional visit to the US next month, attending the New York Comicon October 8-10.  I’ll probably also be doing a bookstore event in New York on the evening of the 7th.  Not sure exactly where I’ll be when at this point, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do, you can depend upon it…

Special Day, Special Bottle

April 19th, 2010 • 42 Comments

Down our way, every day is whisky day.  What would be the point of being a writer otherwise?  But today is a special day, and so I have cracked open one of the special bottles:

It was a 20 year old when my grandfather bought it, and since he died in 1979, it’s safe to say it was distilled over 50 years ago.  Admittedly, they say whisky doesn’t really get better in the bottle, and since these old school bottles have screw-caps not corks it’s probably got worse.  But the fact is that, unlike computers, when it comes to whisky oldest is supposedly bestest, so I don’t care if it tastes like woody vomit I shall drink it with the smugness of the man that knows he is destroying something rare.  And anyway regardless of how it tastes I just really admire the way it looks like something some toe-rag might have tried to cosh John Thaw over the head with in some dodgy soho club in an episode of The Sweeney. 

But wherefore the celebration, you ask?  Ah, rejoice, my children.  Well, not in fact my actual children, for they are too young to care a toss about my writing.  But you, my metaphorical children, can rejoice, for I have finished the first draft of The Heroes.  Of course, when I say first draft, it’s not quite at that stage.  And when I say finished, you know, a book is never really finished.  But the fact is there is a book now which runs all the way from a first sentence to a last one, and with some 210,000 words of violence, swearing, warfare, and investigations of the nature of heroism in between.  There are some issues between those two sentences, I will admit.  And those two sentences themselves could also do with a little work, thinking about it, but nothing that several more months of graft won’t fix.  In fact now, in many ways, the real work begins…

Of the six characters, and therefore the six central ingeniously interweaving stories (ahem), two work pretty well already, two need a good beating with a claw hammer, and two may need some heavier equipment brought to bear.  The writing certainly needs a good bit of sharpening up, plus an injection of personality (I tend to start with a relatively neutral voice then work in more of the relevant character later).  The weather and the countryside need some more zing, there needs to be more colour to the supporting cast which is large and in need of differentiation, and overall there needs to be some heavy cutting, mostly in the detail, but also in the arena of thoughts and feelings and a few characters being removed for the sake of focus and simplicity.  I want this book to come in well under 200,000 words, so more Blade Itself length than Last Argument of Kings length.

So this week I’ll mostly be doing a basic revision of the final part, making sure it works on a chapter by chapter basis and that there’s nothing in it that’s really shit (depending on who you ask), plus thinking about how some of the earlier sections might have to change (especially in the first part, which is a bit of a speculative mess if I’m honest) to suit the way things have ended up.  That’ll go off to my editor and we’ll have a meeting to discuss how the whole thing looks, any areas of it that seem particularly ineffective or unconvincing to her expert eye now that the endings are before us.  Then I suspect I’ve got a heavy month in may doing the serious plot stuff, followed by a heavy month in june attending more to the detail of the writing, probably on a character by character basis.  And the work won’t end there either.  There’ll still be a detailed edit, a copy edit, and a proof-read to attend to, as well of course as giving my input on the artwork as it begins to appear.  Ah, the work of the writer is truly never done.  In the words of one of my personal filmic heroes, Captain Redlegs Tirrell from The Outlaw Josey Wales:  “Doing right ain’t got no end.”

Progress Report March ’10

March 22nd, 2010 • 31 Comments

Grappling with our ongoing building project at the moment, now more than nine months in the planning.  Waiting for quotes from contractors, sorting out a few intensely irritating and time-consuming details, looking for a house to rent when the builders come in (hopefully at the start of may) which is all, of course, a bottomless pit into which time and energy is sunk without trace.  Or, on the whole, noticeable progress.  It’s going to be a hell of a year…

But I can’t grumble.  Writing, nonetheless, crawls ahead, teeth gritted, blood pounding in its ears, dragging itself by its fingernails, leaving a trail of gore through the mud, and the rotten leaves, and dead pine needles in its wake.

The main event, of course, is my latest novel-length effort, The Heroes.  I’ve just started the final part of five, and hope to have the whole first draft finished by the end of April or thereabouts.  There’ll then be a period of heavy cutting down and revision in which I’ll bring the earlier parts of the book into line with how my sense of it has developed as I’ve gone along.  Part of the charm of writing standalone books is that you can revise the whole thing in one go, and you’re therefore free to plunge ahead to the end, and see where you stand without worrying too much about the start.  The downside, of course, is that the start then needs to be whipped into line in quite a big way.  Certain themes have emerged as important and need more emphasis in the earlier sections.  Certain characters have proved important and need to be fleshed out earlier on.  Others have proved unimportant and need to be cut, particularly since it’s an epic kind of affair with a whole lot of characters, and a bit of simplification wouldn’t hurt.  The personalities of the central cast and the methods for their writing have developed over time, and so they need to be brought into line and made consistent.  The secondary characters need to be given more focused personalities, styles of expression, physical characteristics that can quickly distinguish them and lodge them in the reader’s head – particularly important when there are so many to keep track of.

This is the bit of the process I most enjoy, in fact.  Taking something that’s a bit of a mess and sharpening it up, cutting it down, refining and improving it, drawing out the central points and cutting away the superfluous ones (hopefully).  Taking the uncut gemstone and polishing it to a brilliant diamond, you might say.  Or at any rate a flashy zirconium.  Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the way it’s going.  A few months ago I was concerned that it would end up really long – quite possibly my longest book yet.  It’s drawn together a bit towards the end, though, and I’m intent on pruning it down as much as I possibly can in the editing, hoping to bring it in somewhere around the 210,000 mark.  Still considerable, but not quite up to Best Served Cold or Last Argument of Kings, which were both around the 230,000.

What’s that you ask?  When can you actually read it?  Still looking like February 2011, and if I find out any different, you’ll be among the first to know.  The first several thousand, that is.

News on various editions of my already published work:

Last Argument of Kings is out in its new A-format edition, joining the other two First Law books on the shelves of all good (and not so good) UK booksellers.  Particularly pleasing is that (from my brief examination of Bath Waterstones) they seem to be stocking both editions of the paperbacks, which is nice.

Mass Market Paperbacks of Best Served Cold are due out in June in the US and UK. 

Audiobooks of all three First Law books are due out on digital download in June as well, and from what I heard when I visited the recording, they’re going to be good.

My short(ish) story, The Fool Jobs, is coming in the anthology Swords and Dark Magic (along with stories from a cornucopia of great fantasy writers of the last half century), when else?  June.  My Mum’s birthday is in June as well.  What is it with June?  The signature sheets for the Subterranean Press limited editions of the anthology are currently wending their way across the world between the various authors, which means, in fact, I have the addresses of many of my closest rivals.  The Uruk Hai hit squads are already on their way, crashing through the suburbs of Sydney in search of Garth Nix’s house… 

The Subterranean Press limited edition of The Blade Itself is still in the pipeline, but it’s taking us some time to find an artist we all agree is right for the project and is able to do it.  More news on that as and when I have it.

And finally, the West End stage version of Before They are Hanged is due to begin its run at the Gielgud in August.  I went along to pre-rehearsals and it seems to be shaping up nicely.  When I heard Ross Kemp was playing Glokta I really wasn’t sure, but he’s actually very nimble in the musical numbers.

Alright, that last one was a joke.

Progress Report

December 4th, 2009 • 17 Comments

Posting has been erratic lately due to the necessity of playing Dragon Age until the small hours of the night. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to take the fight to those pesky darkspawn. You all are lucky to have me and my plucky band of heroes out there fighting the good fight on your behalf. Consider that.

In the few moments I’ve had in between struggling against the forces of evil, disciplining my wayward children, and trying to exert control on my as yet unstarted building project, I’ve finished my first draft of the third of five parts of my latest book, The Heroes. Ah, it hardly feels as if I’ve even begun and already over half way through. 140,000 words so far, or coming up on three Great Gatsbys. I really should write some shorter books one of these days.

Still, I think it’s starting to come together. Central characters are taking shape, some themes and threads are becoming more important while others fade into the shadows to be brutally murdered and dragged away to unmarked graves during the editing process. With any luck I’ll plan out the final two parts over the next month and have them drafted out by spring, largely edited by summer, and therefore ready for publication Feb 2011 as previously promised with fingers well crossed behind my back. Naturally neither I nor anyone else even faintly connected with me takes any responibility for possible failures to meet this deadline. I suggest you read the small print on the contract with the reader. Those things aren’t worth the paper they aren’t printed on.

In other news – The Fool Jobs, my story for the Anders/Strahan edited Swords and Dark Magic, is now copy edited and done, and ready to proudly take its place as the rearguard to a fantastic collection of writers. The anthology should be along June 2010, and I’m very excited to read it myself. Well, not my story so much, I’ve read that one. But the other stories, definitely.

In other, other news Chris McGrath has turned in artwork for the alternative UK Mass Market edition of Before They are Hanged, and it is GREAT. Seriously, I was a little surprised by the chequered response to the alternative Blade Itself, but if anyone doesn’t like this one I will turn up at your house and BURN YOU. I’ll post a copy as soon as design sorceress Laura Brett has worked her evil-but-oh-so-good magic upon it, then you can all whoop and snap your outrage like the pack of mangey curs you are.

Right. Back to Dragon Age.

The Heroes

August 25th, 2009 • 46 Comments

With Best Served Cold already three months out (can it really be so long?), perhaps the time has come to talk a little about my next book. Like Best Served Cold it’s intended to be a semi-standalone, which can be read on its own (hopefully) but has a few characters and settings in common with the First Law.

It is called:

The Heroes

Both because the action centres around a ring of standing stones called the Heroes, and because it’s about heroism and that (meant semi-ironically, of course). It mostly takes place over the course of three days, and is the story of a single battle for control of the North. Think Lord of the Rings meets A Bridge Too Far, with a sprinkling of Band of Brothers and Generation Kill. It’s about war, you get me? Principally it follows the (mis)adventures of six assorted persons on both sides and different levels of command, whose paths intersect during the course of the battle in various fateful, horrible, wonderful, surprisingly violent, surprisingly unviolent, and hilarious ways. With the Northmen: a veteran losing his nerve who just wants to keep his crew alive, an ex-Prince determined to claw his way back to power by any means necessary, a young lad determined to win a place in the songs for himself. With the Union: A depressive swordsman who used to be the king’s bodyguard, a profiteering standard-bearer, and the venomously ambitious daughter of the Marshal in command. But of course a fair few familiar faces show up on both sides…

I’m just finishing up the first draft of the second part of five, so two fifths of the way through, about 85,000 words in. Which means the whole thing is looking like about 220,000 words – similar length to Best Served Cold and Last Argument of Kings. Really want to write some shorter books one of these days. REALLY want to. Provided I keep writing relatively smoothly (which is by no means a certainty given that we’ve got a massive building project starting over the next few months), the whole first draft will hopefully be done spring next year. A fair bit of editing will no doubt be required, though, meaning that an October publication is just too tight. For small fry like me November through January is pretty much the zone of death, which means February 2011 is probably the soonest you guys can expect to see it lighting up the shelves, alas.

That’ll mean 20 months between books, which is a fair bit more than I’d like in general but, hey, maybe I’ll be able to get a head start on the next thing (yeah, right). It also means no book from me in 2010, though I’ll have a short story out in an anthology. So, the headlines:

The Heroes. It’s about War. February 2011 (hopefully).