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12 Books in 12 Months

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A Shocking Confession

The Rogue Verbumancer strikes again!  To find out more about what he’s doing when he isn’t asking me questions, follow him on Twitter @Glempy or read his blog.

Since you’ve been writing for so long there must no be one character you’ve created who now stands atop a mountain made from the corpses of his fellows screaming “Look at me! I am the best! I have conquered you lesser creations and made you unto nought but dust and memories!”. That is to say: of all the characters you’ve written about over the years which one holds that special place in your heart as “the favorite”? And what is it about them that makes them so special?

Is it really bad to admit I can’t remember that many of my characters?!  9 out of 10 times I write a story I put in on my blog (or in a little newsletter for my friends at school before that was an option… I was a cool kid) and then I forget most of the details.  I didn’t even print out copies of those older ones for myself, which was clearly an oversight.  They’ll be worth money some day!

To add insult to injury, I think at the moment my favourite characters might be some I haven’t technically written yet, unless you count a few pages scrawled out on loose paper that have since been lost!  They are going to be in July’s book, which is for kids, and they’ve been growing in my brain for a few years now.  Their names are Amelia Trousers and Snooky Jim – what’s not to love?!

I suspect that the more time you spend with a character, whether they’re loitering in the back of your mind or there on the page, the more you get to like them. That would explain why a lot of the ones I’ve come up with in the past have been banished to the misty watercolour corners of my mind – I didn’t start writing full novels, requiring large amounts of concentrated attention, till last year.  I mean, I started a couple (as you do), but never really got very far.

The first novel I began (she said, tangentially) was based around an essay I had to do for Religious Education when I was about 13.  We were asked to write creation myths for different countries from the perspective of the deity and I quite liked that notion.  The exercise stayed with me and a few years later a book started to grow out of the idea.

It was a fantasy thing that began with what I thought at the time was a pure dead original creation story, although now I have reservations on that score…  There were four gods – well, two gods and two goddesses, I think – and they represented the elements.  I think the plot was that one of them wanted to be mortal and the others weren’t happy about it, so she ran away.

I know I named a couple of them after classical names for the winds – googling it I’m thinking maybe it was the male gods I did that for because Boreas rings a bell… that tells you everything about how much they stayed with me, doesn’t it?!  But actually I still think there might be something in that story.  There’s a lot to be said for creating your own world to play with.

I don’t just forget characters out of hand – that would be churlish in the extreme.  I don’t have one favourite, though!  I still have a lot of time for the cast of Torchwood:Dundee, which was a spoof (fairly obvious of what) that myself and a couple of other people came up with in uni around 2007.  I had particular fondness for Shaktar, who was our Tosh character, and Teuchter, who was our Ianto equivalent.  I wrote one of the stories that decided their characterisation and both of them were quite tragically funny but generally useless people.

In terms of 12 Books, I’m quite fond of Victor McGlynn, my Western protagonist.  Overall this year I’ve spent more time thinking about him than some of the others, partly because the western was one of the genres I was less confident about, and I think he’s perhaps a more considered character as a result.  The downside to that was that he was much slower to write, as I felt I owed it to him to get down things he would definitely say and do – there’s a lot less stream of consciousness blethering in that book (with the result that it’s the smallest word count so far).  I’ve no idea whether he’ll appeal to anyone else, but I like him!

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What Do You Enjoy About Writing?

This week I will mostly be answering the questions of The Rogue Verbumancer, a scientician who occasionally masquerades as a writer on the internet, blogging here and tweeting as @Glempy.  Here’s what he had to ask me.

It’s obvious that you enjoy writing, otherwise you wouldn’t have embarked on a project of such herculean proportions. But why do you enjoy it? What is it about writing that keeps you coming back for more?

First of all, I find writing fun.  I don’t know why, exactly – I just enjoy doing it and I would blow other stuff off in its favour.

It’s an impulse I’ve had for a long time, I think because the process of creating feels good and I like the notion of engrossing people in a story as much as my own favourite authors engross me.  I remember being really annoyed when I was ten, because I wrote a story that was about 12 pages long for a language exercise in school and my teacher kept not reading it.  She probably had other marking to do, but I distinctly remember thinking she was being a hypocrite cause she used to bang on about how much she loved Gone With The Wind, which was much longer!  The story was about a ghost called Jenny, who I think lived in a cabin in the woods and needed a bloke to help uncover the truth about why she died so she could move on, and I think maybe they fell in love?  I don’t remember a lot more than that, although reading that back I wonder whether I should have re-used it for my paranormal romance!  But I do remember one of the girls in my class telling everyone it was only that long because I wrote really big and left massive spaces between the words.  I was deeply offended at the time an denied everything, but who knows, she might’ve been right!  Can’t do that anymore though as I’m typing everything out!

I find that writing helps you process things – particularly when something is bothering you.  That’s why the advent of blogging is a strange and terrible thing…  When it comes to fiction, it’s fun because quite often things come out that I wasn’t necessarily expecting (although sometimes these things aren’t necessarily that good – eg when I was a teenager I wrote a series of stories that included some very embarrassing, deeply personal monologues when I was in a bad mood. They’d probably have been better in a diary or blog, TBH..).  It’s only since I began doing this project that I’ve started trying to plan things, before that I’d sit down with a vague story idea and pretty much just write till it was done.  That’s not the best way to do a novel, though.  Not if you’ve only got a month, at least!

Is writing something that you’ve always wanted to do? Did you, from day one put your foot down and cry ‘I shall be a writer! And woe to all those who stand in my way!’ Or is it a career goal you’ve just stumbled upon unintentionally and decided to stick with?

In terms of how long I’ve wanted to be a writer, I can definitely date it back to primary school.  I remember in primary 6 thinking I was very cool with my 3 As that I had in my career ambitions – I wanted to be an actress, an artist or an author.  I kept up the acting in the local am dram group till I was about 18 or 19 but by that point I think I had lost my tendency to show off – I don’t know why, maybe because felt a lot more comfortable in my own skin so I didn’t need to borrow somone else’s anymore?  That sounds ridiculously trite, doesn’t it.  Clearly the real reason was that I could only do about 2 accents.  And to be honest the writing took over – I started writing for local press when I was about fifteen and thought yes, I could be a journalist and make a living from that and then maybe segue into fiction later.

I was always pretty interested in writing books for children, and I applied to art college to do Illustration because I wanted to write the books and do my own drawings. I was accepted, but by the time I got the letters back from the places I’d applied to I was going through a practical phase where I thought doing an English degree more sensible, because as I said before then I could go make a living out of journalism and be an author later on.  Essentially writing for a living in one form or another has been my goal since I was at least ten, so that’s fifteen years of it with varying degrees of focus! 

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Stumbling Round in the Dark

Another week heralds another new questioner keen to know what on earth possessed me to tell everyone I’d write 12 books in 12 months.  The Rogue Verbumancer is a scientist who occasionally masquerades as a writer on the internet, blogging here and tweeting as @Glempy.  Here’s what he had to ask me.

There is one thing that has rather astounded me about your little quest. It’s not so much the writing twelve books thing. That’s a bit mad. It’s an established fact. But it’s only really a surface to the madness. Admittedly knocking out some 600,000 words will be no mean feat, but there is something which I’m finding even more epically daunting. It’s the whole genre thing. I’ve always gotten the impression that writing for a particular genre requires a certain type of thinking and way of doing things. I personally could never even approach the romance genre. Not even with a particularly heavy dose of Dutch courage and a particularly long, pointy stick (Give me knights lopping each other’s limbs of with aforementioned pointy sticks any day). But here you are lunging head long into twelve completely different genres. Is this just a case of some form of prenatural talent granted to you by the strange and unknowable deities of writing? Or something learnt after years of study at the feet of bearded Tibetan writing monks?

Basically, have you discovered some sort of knack that you’re not telling anyone about or are you just stumbling about it the dark with stick?

There were a couple of reasons for changing genre every month.  One was to keep me from getting bored.  Another was to expand my horizons and challenge myself.  And naturally there was an element of cynicism – 12 books in 12 different genres, surely one of them has to be marketable?!

I have been trying to research genres each month, but it turns out I don’t have a lot of time for that what with all the constant writing.  So I think really I’ve just skiffed the surface of most of them.  My hope is to do some proper hardcore reading before I go back to edit the first drafts, so that if I’ve used any horrible cliches I can quickly edit them out before anyone else sees.

So essentially, what I am doing is writing books withing some very broad brushstrokes pertaining to each genre, and my own writing style permeates all of them.  Have I met the needs of each style?  To be honest, I’m not sure.  But I’m not too worried about it.  I read a post on Nicola Morgan’s fantastic blog when I was panicking about Book One (most specifically how accurate it needed to be, as it was historical and at least loosely based on real life) that really inspired me.  This is it here.

What I really took to heart was that with a first draft, all you need to do is sketch everything out.  You can afford to be a bit hazy at this point, on account of knowing you’re going to go back and fill the details in later, having conducted further research.  This makes a lot of sense to me.  After all, my arbitrary word count for each book is 50k, which is 22k short of the average first novel…  I’ve got words to play with, there!  And none of these books are going anywhere as is – they’re first drafts.

I guess that a lot of writers develop specific ways of working, particularly when they’ve been pigeonholed by their publishers into doing one genre.  But at the moment I haven’t fallen into any particular habits, because I don’t have to.  Maybe if someone gives me an advance for a Paranormal Romance, I’ll worry a little bit more.  But until that happens I’ll keep experimenting and having fun within the rough boundaries that each genre seems to inhabit.

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Chapter One

If you click below, you can listen to me reading chapter One of book 5, which you may remember is about a wizard sheep called Ovid.  And a small boy called Eric.  And an as-yet unnamed dragon.

I wanted to do the whole first chapter but am apparently limited to 5 minutes, but it’ll give you the general idea.

Let it… penetrate.

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Generating Traffic

According to an article I read and now can’t find again (I thought it might be on The Social Penguin or Contently Managed but apparently not), links on Facebook generate far more traffic than links on Twitter.  With that in mind, I would like to ask you all to click the ‘like’ button on the 12 Books in 12 Months Facebook page and then to post it to your own stalkerfeed by clicking the ‘share’ button on the left of the page.  It would be pretty good to get 200 fans by the end of the month, and I promise I don’t spam – I update a few times a week.

Image from xkcd

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Q&A with Ian Collings

This week I’m chatting to Shropshire based writer Ian Collings, who tweets as @ibc4 and blogs at Take One Step Back.  I’ve split this email into a Q&A format.

Which part of the writing process (condensed as it is into such a short period) do you find the hardest?  The editing? Re-writing? 

Because the writing process is condensed into such a short period with this project, editing and re-writing don’t actually get a look in.  Not yet, anyway.  The plan was to leave all the drafts for a minimum of 3 months before going back to look over them, but so far I haven’t had the time to go back and start editing any.  The hardest part of the writing process with this is therefore the purely practical aspect of fitting in writing time – when I sit down and do it, it’s a race against time to get the words out there so I just write and write, even if some of it’s nonsense.  These first drafts are littered with asides like “she said, by way of exposition,” which all add to the word count!  But generally speaking I think editing and re-writing are much harder work.

Secondly, have you ever wanted to ‘throw in the towel’ and walk away from  twelve books in twelve months?  Or, rather just concentrate on one through to publication there and then?
So far I haven’t wanted to walk away from the project at any point, although I’ve had to let go of the notion that I’ll make the 50k word count every time.  I think because I haven’t given myself the opportunity to get bored of it or even to get stuck by overthinking (there’s no time to think, after all!) that’s made it quite easy to keep going.  If I was reading back over it all the time I’d probably feel a crushing sense of doom about how much work there is still left to do on all of them, but the no-editing rule means I can just go yeah, I’ve written most of a book, go me! Now onto the next one!
How have other writers supported you? Have any derided your ‘project’?
Nobody has derided the project, although Debbie Taylor (Editor of Mslexia and author of The Fourth Queen) was a bit disbelieving when I told her about it at first.  She tends to write for a maximum of about a fortnight before having to take a break from it.  I haven’t really talked to a lot of authors about it yet though, although my intention is to do a series of author interviews on how they approach writing for book 13 (the one where I write about writing 12 books in 12 months).  Ian Rankin wished me luck on Twitter at the very beginning, which was kind of him, and I know from an interview I read with him that he drafted the first Rebus book in about a month – the difference there being that he didn’t then do the next 11 in quick succession, I guess!

I’ve had a lot of support from other people though, especially on Twitter.  The general consensus seems to be that it’s a slightly mad thing to do, but in a good way!

And finally, for today only, if you could take the credit for writing any book from the last hundred years, which would it be? Which of your current works in progress most resemble it?
The book I’d like to take credit for writing… brilliant question.  A difficult one, as well – there are lots.  I think maybe The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusack, because it was so clever and well written and made me cry – which is really rare, actually.  None of my books resemble it in the slightest, though!
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