Into the Dragon's Lair

It started off quite well.

Or so they told me.

In terms of standing up, walking to the place they wanted me to go, positioning myself in a very strange surrounding, and doing so without tripping, falling, or otherwise embarrassing myself, I had done exceptionally well.

Now I was standing in a room full of my fellow writers, my peers, and a panel of professionals all looking directly at me, and the thought occurs to me.

What in God’s name have I done?

What on earth possessed me to think that this was a good idea?

“Where are you from?”

The question brings me back to where I am and I find myself staring at a writer, whose books I love, staring back at me.  He’s expecting an answer.

Hand to my forehead as I try to remember where I am from.

Hope he doesn’t ask my name, or it’s game over.

“Er…” I stammer, “Scottish Borders.”

He tries to engage me in a little light banter, “You don’t have much of an accent.”

“Don’t I?” I try to joke back, doing all that I can to sound as English as possible and make the most of this.

He smiles and I think he’s doing his best to help me relax and not feel like the ground is about to open up beneath me.

God bless Mark Billingham.

He asks me if I have completed the book I am pitching and I say yes, I finished it last year and I’ve just finished book two. 

He smiles and nods, introductory part over.

It’s time for the pitch.

I try to smile and mutter “Hello” at the panel before me.

I lift the cards up and hope that my voice doesn’t shake as I begin to read from them, glad that I decided on cards over paper.

They shake a lot less.

About halfway through I am very awake that my legs are shaking, and not just a little tremble around about the knee.

Oh dear me no.

I mean the kind of shaking that can lead to stumbling, collapsing, and sitting on the floor.

Probably not the kind of professional image I am attempting to portray.

I shift a little in my stance, hoping it doesn’t show how much the shaking is affecting most of my legs now, and carry on reading.

I don’t look up at them.

It’s the kind of thing that is usually encouraged in pitches but it is all I can do to recall how to look at words, understand those words, read them out loud, and make them sound  a little like a story.

I am almost at the end when the bell goes and I stop.

“Oh dear,” Mark says kindly, “Did you have much left.”

I raise a shaking hand to indicate a gap of two inches, “About this much.”

Then he asks the panel to make their comments.

And one-by-one they do.

It's not at all what I was hoping for.

The general consensus of opinion seems to boil down to one thing.

They don’t get it.

My pitch confused them.

Which confuses me no end, because I am hardly known for writing complicated stories, and will always choose to err on the side of simplicity.

Or so I thought.

What didn’t they get?

Well, this is where it does in fact get complicated.

Because the more I tried to explain what it was all about, the more I seemed to get tangled up in my own words.

The words mix around inside my mind as I try to answer questions, and I seem to get even more caught up.

And she becomes the Tangled Writer at last.

The truth of the matter, which I managed to figure out later after many, many glasses of red wine and a very good friend, is that I wasn’t properly prepared.

All the questions that a writer must answer within the realms of her own work, the world she must know backwards, every detail and nuance, must be absolutely nailed down.

Without question.

Every piece of research must be done, and no stone left unturned in seeking the truth about this world and its characters.

Plus, obviously, writing a great pitch.

Would I do it again?

The thought alone makes me stop and smile, taking a pause to consider, but I think with enough preparation then, yes, I would.

I can see now how it could have all been so much simpler.

How squeezing an entire novel’s synopsis into a hundred or so words was probably not the right way to express the story, but rather gave them far more than they wanted to hear.

I’ll tell you this much, though.

It will make future rejections by email and letter so much milder by comparison.

I’m almost looking forward to them.

Almost.

Reaching The End

It’s the end of an era.

Over seven months in the making, but it had to come to an end sometime.

Yes, I know that it doesn’t seem like a long time in the grand scheme of things, but when you spend that much of your time, of your life, writing a book, it feels like that when you come to the end.

I’ve heard about writers who love it.

They get to the end of the first draft, they type those two final words THE END, and they celebrate with the happiness of getting that first full version completed.

I’m not there yet.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s better than it was last year.

Last year when I typed those two words, I cried, I wandered aimlessly around the house, not really sure where I was, what I was doing, or what I could possibly do next.  It was weeks before I could pick up and write again.

So clearly this year I am doing better.

I typed those final two words three hours ago and already I’m back writing again.

The time before that was worse.

I got to the end, wrote those two words (yes, I was doing everything on pen and paper then) and had no idea what I would do next.  I couldn’t face even thinking about a new book, or re-writing the one I had just completed.

When it finally came time to rewrite that book, I pulled it all apart, I saw how it could go back together, and put it in a file.

It is still there.

The time before that was much worse.

I never got around to typing THE END because I couldn’t face finishing it.  I still haven’t finished that book.  Unlikely now that I ever will.

Not even sure I know where it is.

So by that comparison, today was a relative success.  No tears, no aimless wandering, no huge gaps before reaching for the keyboard again.   

It helps that I have some experience of this now.

It also helps to have wonderful friends who are also writers, who understand so much better than anyone else on this planet what happens when you reach the end of writing a book, and are there for you when you need them.

I have good one.

I don’t think you really need more than one good friend who is a writer, though it can’t hurt to have more, but as long as you have one good friend, you have the world entire.

Can’t remember who said that, but I am sure they are right.

It also helps to have more books planned, more series of books planned, so much in fact that taking more than three hours off between finishing one piece of work and beginning a new one feels like a luxury.

Too much to do.

Not enough time.

And too many people to meet in between.

More to Give

 

It’s a tough life to live.

As an undercover agent, you are purposefully choosing a life of isolation, danger, and possibly even death.

Your ties to anyone and everyone you have ever known or loved are cut, temporarily severed for who knows how much time.

Until the assignment is done.

Or until you reach another level of ‘under’.

Which makes it sound a little like a computer game, where you have to be successful at one particular level and avoid all the traps and people who want to kill you, unless you kill them first.

If you succeed in getting to the end of level one without being killed, captured, tortured or turned, chances are you have made it to level two.

Where it becomes more dangerous, more complicated, with a greater chance for success or failure, and further to fall.

Except you are not rising up through the levels to the point where you can see all the levels below you, quite the opposite.

You are sinking deeper and deeper into the world that is pulling you under, further and further into the darkest recesses of the cover you’ve created for yourself.

And you have to do it alone.

There is no room for mistakes, no-one to back you up if it all goes wrong, no-one to stop the man holding the gun to your head from pulling the trigger.

No second chances.

Makes you wonder why they do it.

It’s important work, for starters.  They uncover the biggest, baddest secrets that anyone has to hide, and expose them for who they really are.

Still, a decent accountant can do the same thing, and all from the safety of his desk.

But they can go places that accountants can’t go, where information is passed by word of mouth, not written down in nice shiny ledgers.

Fair point.

There are police officers who work undercover on a daily basis, being a different person from one day to the next, being exactly what is needed in each situation.

They never know who they are going to be, and are constantly having to remember a new identity, a different persona.

And they get to shrug off that persona at the end of the day, and go home.

To their wives and their families, to their loved ones.

But what of the others?

The ones who choose to stay in that persona for months, sometimes years, never able to shake it off, never able to set their feet back on the ground in their own world.

Or when they finally do, to discover that their own world is no longer there.

It has moved on and become something else without them.

And so have the people in it.

They are barely recognisable to the one who left, as he is to them.

It isn’t surprising he leaps at the next assignment when it comes along, more comfortable in the world of the unknown, than in a world that he once knew.

A sporadic, nomadic lifestyle that seems to have little to recommend it.

And so the question looms again, why do it?

The answer, I believe, lies in who they are.

It is a profession they feel drawn to purely because of who they already are, who may have wandered in and out of other, similar jobs for years, taking a crumb of what they feel was worthwhile about each one.

Until they find the undercover life, or it finds them.

And when it comes time to become that other person, they find it is not all that hard.

Easier yet is letting other people go, shutting them out and cutting them off, so that the stone-cold persona can be free.

Deep down, they always felt like they weren’t like everyone else, like there were aspects to their personalities that were ‘different’ or ‘wrong’.

They were so used to playing different roles with different people that it became second nature to them, and were never truly fixed on who they pretended to be.

Ever the outsiders in a group and self-reliant to a fault, all the parts of themselves that seem anti-social to the rest of society will keep them functioning and alive in the world of undercover.

They may even revel in it.

As an escape from the realities of living within the boundaries of a society that makes slaves of the best of us, they are able to exist beyond these walls.

Living outside of society, outside of the rules, a freedom all of its own.

I think I’m beginning to see the appeal.

It just depends on how much you are willing to sacrifice in order to truly embrace that other world, to let go of all the worldly possessions you are ever likely to own.

Everything you ever held dear.

Including people.

It’s the way of sacrifice that holds them apart from others, the willingness not only to give up everything they have, but everything they are ever likely to have.

And if they don’t feel like it’s a sacrifice, then its simply not enough.

There’s always more to give.

Sitting in the Mouth of the Shark

 

I had a dream that was more of a nightmare. 

I was sitting in the top storey of a wooden building that floated on the sea, not very secure.  

 Out of the window with no glass I could see a huge wooden shark, and someone was sitting in its mouth. 

They were riding around in it, seemingly oblivious to the potential danger they were in. 

Perhaps because the shark was wooden they thought they were safe. 

As I watched from my vantage point, I saw the shark's mouth begin to move. 

I watched in horror as the shark's mouth clamped shut and ate up the person who had been sitting there, turning the sea a murky red with their blood. 

I was afraid because I thought that  my rickety floating building would collapse, and I would be taken into the mouth of the shark. 

That’s when I woke up.

I thought of it as being a metaphor for the publishing industry, which keeps you in its mouth as long as you feed it well, and when you stop feeding it, eats you instead.

Why would someone sit in its mouth?

Wooden or not, a shark is a shark and will eat you eventually.

I suppose if sitting in the shark’s mouth is the chance you take to become a published writer, then we are all willing masochists for wanting it.

Why would writers, known for their overly-sensitive nature, even want to put themselves in a position like that?  Goodness knows they have to fight hard enough and endure rejection after rejection to get there, and that is bad enough. 

But they do all of that so they can sit in the mouth of the shark?

For the chosen few, they get to stay there for the entire length of their career, one that can last even after their death.

If the shark eats you after that it doesn’t matter, because you are already dead.

But while you get to swim in the sea of creativity and explore all its boundless depths, perhaps it is right that the one to show you the way through them is the Big Fish that rules the sea.

The Shark.

So instead of fearing the mouth of the shark, perhaps there is much to be gained from being there.  A position of influence, of knowing that the words you write will be read by other people and the responsibility that comes with that.

Accepting that it is all temporary, and that one day the shark will more than likely eat you.   

Question is, did you make the most of it while you had the chance?   

Did you live up to the potential you claimed to have when you chose to sit in its mouth?

If the shark is an extension of the sea, it too represents creativity.

Did you feed that creativity with new experiences and people?   

Did you give it what it needs to fuel your own creative processes?

Did you keep moving, as the shark does?   

Did you try new things even though you weren’t sure of the outcome?

In short, did you stay one step ahead of being eaten up?

It’s no wonder I’m so cautious about jumping in.

Which is unusual for me because I am so often the person who leaps into the unknown waters with both feet, who throws herself in at the deep end and then learns how to cope.

It works because it makes you learn and you have to think on your feet, which you don’t have beneath you, because they are furiously treading water.   

But with something as huge as the publishing industry, why would you leap in when you have no idea what to expect?

Or when you are unprepared?

I can see the benefit now in the weeks of market research I did, opening my eyes to the number of writers out there and, more worryingly, the ones that only lasted two books.   

The ones that were chewed up and spat out.

I do not want that to be me.

When I wrote my first novels in my early twenties I was fortunate enough to be working for a bookseller and saw for myself how brutal the industry could be.   

I tested my work out on a few industry professionals and the best advice I got was to get some life experience, prepare myself for the market, and come back.

It was good advice.

And those writings are now confined to the vault of time where they will never again see the light of day.   

Just as well.

And I don’t know when I will be ready.

I do know that the more I write and learn my craft, and take advice from those already negotiating the waters I have yet to enter, the more I prepare myself before I take the leap, the better my chances once I am there.

I do not know if I will get to sit in the mouth of the shark.

But if I do, I hope it is not to be eaten.

More that Unites Us

 

You’ll be in trouble if you get caught.

And not the usual kind of trouble that you can apologise for, pay a penance, and seek forgiveness.

Oh no, it’s bigger than that.

You can take a chance, of course, that you will never be caught.

If you hide it well enough, if you disguise it cleverly enough, there’s a good chance that the truth will never be revealed.

Yes, and there goes another pig at thirty thousand feet.

See it?

No, my point exactly.

The problem is, stories and their characters must be completely and utterly believable.

And whether we are aware of it or not, we draw everything from the world around us, then use that wealth of knowledge and experience to create, in our own unique way, the world of our fiction.

And its characters.

Are we conscious of the traits that we choose for them?  Sometimes.  Deliberate choice of certain character idiosyncrasies can help to populate our fictional worlds with a broader range of people, and expand the stories that can be told.

What about the rest?  How much do we depend on our own abilities to build a character from the complexities of our own subconscious?  That’s trickier to answer, and I can only speak for myself but I rely on that quite a great deal.

I sometimes feel like a massive sponge

No, not yellow and full of holes.

Honestly.

It’s like everyone and everything around me gets drawn in, soaked up, and kept for when it is really needed.  Then just give it a good squeeze to release a conglomeration of experiences and people into one, unique individual.

A character ready to be chucked in at the deep end.

Thing is though, no matter how individual we think our characters are, they all bear some relation to the people around us.

Those with the strongest influence will get drawn in the deepest, and get pushed out the most during the creation process.

Makes sense.

Problem is, how do you hide it?

How do you prevent the person you have drawn on from recognising themselves in the world you have created?

I’m not entirely sure that you can.

Or rather, I’m not sure that you can stop someone else from recognising the person you have drawn on.

How many of us would recognise ourselves in a fictional context?

How many of us are that self-aware?

And if they catch you, oh boy are you in trouble.

Claiming the writing is fictional works only if the characters are not recognisable as real people.

And if you work with the people you have drawn from, oh boy, oh boy.

You will have to see them every day and withstand the torture of their presence while they denounce your work and at the same time demand a share of the profit.

There is another way.

You can deliberately make them a part of your work.

And they can help.

I’ve tried it with my most recent book and it came about purely by chance.

During the editing process of the previous book, I was incredibly grateful for the help of one particular reader, and offered her the usual rewards.

Wine, a meal out, night with a male escort.

Kidding.

A meal out on my salary?

Anyway, she said she didn’t want any of those things.

What she really wanted, more than anything else, was to be a character in the next book.

I was surprised.

I offered more wine.

She said no, she wanted to be a character.

Fine, I said, good guy or bad guy?

Bad guy, of course.  I want to be a killer hooker.

At which point I quite naturally had a good laugh, and so did she.

But it was what she wanted, it wasn’t going to cost me anything, and opened up the next book to a whole new storyline I might never have considered.

Turned out that the character sketch she wrote was rather similar to one I had already been working on, and I combined the two.

Now I’m sure you’re thinking that she made all sorts of demands with regard to her character, on how she wanted to look mostly, but surprisingly she didn’t.

The only thing she wanted her character to have, was revenge on the one person who had hurt her the most.  The father who had abandoned her.

I understood.

Of the many people who had hurt me in my own life, there weren’t many on whom I wanted revenge, but my own father had done the same as hers, and it naturally struck a chord.

It would seem we are not so individual after all.

In the wealth and realms of human experience, there are only so many hurts that can be pushed upon us.

Our unique experiences are in fact shared one.

Rather than dividing us, there are more that unite us.

Time Will Allow

 

The general consensus seems to be Hot.

What do you mean, what am I talking about?

Revenge, of course.

All those I've spoken to are much more of a mind to strike while Hot, rather than dish up Cold.

You could plan for years to get your own back on someone, and then when your plan is finally ready, they have gone.  Nowhere to be found.  Or if you’re really unlucky, already dead.

Nope, I think it’s best to act while you can.

What?  No, not me.

Did you really think I was planning revenge of my own?

Of course not, I was speaking for those whom I represent.

My characters, of course.  They get put through the emotional wringer and get to act upon what they feel.

They get the means and the opportunity to act on their dark motives, to take the revenge they feel is so richly deserved by those who have wronged them.

Which is a very freeing thing for them to be able to do, and for us to read about.

If they choose, they can trap the source of their revenge and take them to a deep dark place, to be tortured and held captive.

They can do all the things to them that they have dreamt of doing.

They can hurt, they can maim, they can kill.

Up to a point.

And here's the rub.

The world they inhabit has rules.

The rules of cause and effect.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Very smart man said that once, in between apples, and they are few and far between.  Smart men, I mean.

The rule of cause and effect is forever present.

And it does not let them have their own way for long, without the consequences coming to hunt them down.

So for those who choose to capture and torture the object of their vengeance, we know that there will be a consequence.

We do not know what it will be, but it must be equal to the pain they have caused.

It feels like a giant cycle, with everyone causing each other pain throughout time, linked back to the very first people.

And who knows why the first tormentor struck out.

Who was it that put upon them?

I have an idea that they might have done it to themselves, and decided it was someone else’s fault, so began the circle of punishment and justice.

Taken to extremes, this is where you find the mafia.

It is expected, even honourable, to have your revenge or your ‘justice’ on someone who has wronged you or a member of your family.

But they know just as everyone does that there is a consequence.

A price to be paid for having that vengeance.

And woe betide those who do not pay it.

It seems like a never-ending spiral of pain and vengeance, with no hope of reprieve.

But there is another way.

There are ways of getting justice without resorting to violence, without feeling the need to exact bloody vengeance on those who have wronged us, even if we think it will make us feel better.

Or make the characters feel better.

There is a right kind of justice that keeps them this side of the line, the one they occasionally step across to take the action they feel they must, and then come back across to accept the consequences.

I suppose in the end its down to the moral sensibilities of the writer, the creator of these people in this world.

Do I enforce my moralities onto those whom I create, or do I have only the power to control where they start from, not where they end up?

Do they reflect sides of who I am and what I believe, or purely mix-matched amalgamations of everything I have seen, heard and experienced?

Questions for further and much deeper thought.

When time will allow.

Hot or Cold?

 

So, did you find the button yet?

What do you mean, what button?

The one you press to make everything all right, to make the world a happier and more joyful place to be.

No, I’m not talking about that button, smutty.   

Honestly, one thing on your mind these days.  Although that is a good one to press…

But I’m getting sidetracked into thinking with a smirk.

No, the button I spoke about last week, the switch that turns the emotions off, or the bad ones at least.

All in the mind, or so they tell me.

I’m sure that’s right.  Although when the pain is so intense that the body drops to the floor from the leaden weight of sadness, I’m struggling to believe it.  Actually in that state it’s a struggle to even think.

Okay, so how do you put the thoughts of sadness and pain out of your mind when it inhabits the whole of your body.

The only solution that works so far is to indulge it, experience it in its fullness, give it the space it deserves to let itself out, and then close the door behind it.

Shut.

And locked.

Perhaps there is no button.

Thinking bigger, it has to be a door.

One that gets closed on the thoughts and those emotions causing the pain and the sadness to hurt and devastate.

That makes a little more sense.

If the emotions are so big that a switch isn’t going to turn them off, then pushing them all out the door and closing it behind them makes perfect sense.

That’s when it’s all in the mind.

But when the thoughts return to build up again this side of the closed and locked door, regenerating themselves into the deep pool of pain and sadness you know far, far too well, they can become a comfortable place to be.

Crazy, right?

Only to those who have never felt it.

Not to those who have hollowed themselves out of the pain and sadness, who have let it all go only to find there is nothing left to fill the void.

Drinking doesn’t work.

Eating comfort food doesn’t work.

The only thing left big enough and all consuming enough to fill the giant void where the pain and sadness was is … well, fresh pain and sadness.

Either that, or denial.

Denial that the one who has hurt you and caused this pain and sadness will not do it to you again.   

And again.   

And again.

So you forgive them because the love you feel for them is a warm and comforting place to be, and you deny to yourself that it will only end the same way again, returning you in pain and sadness.  And that you might like it there.

Because who on earth would like it there?

So what do you do?

This is where the strength to fill up the void with something other than pain and sadness and denial comes in.

And you have it, you know.

We all do.

We just forget that it is there because the emotions are overwhelming the body and the mind.  But with enough release of pain and sadness, with enough reminders that there are other people out there going through the same thing as you, and how you overcame it the last time, you remember.

You remember your strength.

You see that even though the hurt caused may have initially come from someone else, the repetitive way you have tortured yourself with that knowledge has been yours.

And yours alone.

And therefore under your control.

You can choose to let go of the pain and sadness.

You can release all the feelings that are hurting you, and bring some new ones in instead.

You can choose peace.

You can choose love.

You can choose joy.

Or you can choose revenge.

Ahh, the dish best served to your own liking.

Which leaves me with one final question for you.

Do you like it Hot or Cold?