NaNoWriMo Take 2

I'm participating in NaNoWriMo again, the thirty day feels-like-a-constant-hangover event where you try and knock out a 50,000 word novel in the month of November, but this year I'm doing it a bit differently. I spent November 2012 pounding keys and reached the 50,000 word target, leaving me with a book that was very rushed and needed a ton of work doing to it (gibberish taken out, and descriptions and grammar put in) but I've found it a real struggle to sit down and edit. I always prefer writing new things to tidying up my old work anyway, and with such a mammoth task I just keep putting it off, overawed at the size of the mountain in front of me. To put it into context, when I write a 3000 word story I will usually end up reading through it and editing it about twenty times or more, so multiply that over the size of a novel and it leaves me wondering how anyone in the history of the world has ever completed a book before.

I found NaNoWriMo a really good motivator, mostly because you get a little graph that shows your progress throughout the month, so I thought why not use it to help me edit this year. For every hour I spend on my novel I'm giving myself a thousand words to my total, in the hope that come the end of November I'll have managed to spend fifty hours on it, and then I can keep doing the same in the months following. So far, halfway through the month I'm a bit behind, and have only given myself eighteen hours, but that's a hell of a lot better than last month, when I would have given myself zero hours, should I have been keeping count. Even though now I've got into it the task seems even bigger than when I started, with that little graph helping me tick along editing my novel doesn't seem quite so daunting. I've managed to get back from hiding my manuscript in a drawer to spreading it all over my desk and constantly thinking of how it can be improved.

All I've done in eighteen hours work is read through the first of six parts and make a load of changes and notes (admittedly it is the longest part, so that's probably a third of the whole story). I've then split that part into eleven chapters and I've edited the first two. I should have a novel completed some time after I die of very old age.

If you'd like to you can follow my progress here: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/adam_bowman/novels

Loch Ness Fun

I'd love to be out in the middle of Loch Ness in the dead of night, sat alone in a rickety wooden rowing boat, hearing pins drop all around, just waiting for the monster to appear. Surely even the biggest skeptic would be absolutely terrified.

Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

I’ve recently got into running, and after the initial pain and suffering, have managed to break through a barrier and really enjoy it. I find myself some days at work looking out the window and longing to be out tramping the roads, huffing and puffing my way to ever-increasing distances. To begin with, I was just desperately trying to regulate my breath, feeling every pound of my feet as I struggled to keep going as long as I could, but now I’ve reached a miraculous level of zen when I’m running, so I can almost even forget that I’m doing it, my mind wanders and I can plod along almost meditatively. Since I got that feeling I’ve been desperate to replicate it, and running has become a drug to me. I’ve been going out three or four times a week and it has become routine.

I wish I could say the same about writing, but at the moment I’m struggling to get anything done. Since we moved house I’ve been so busy, and the room I’ve made my study is currently full of stuff as we decorate our bedroom. I know that, like running, when I start writing, make a nightly habit of it, I’ll get that druggy buzz again and want to be doing it all the time, but it’s just getting in the room, sitting at the desk, starting, that so difficult. Last year I found taking part in NaNoWriMo really helpful in spurring me to do a ton of writing, so I might try and keep to the schedule again this year, except this time instead of writing 2000 words a night I’ll be editing 2000 words. Making time is hard when you’re settling into a new home and job, but I just need that first step onto a country road, that first injection, and I’ll be back feverishly editing my novel.

A Little Tone Shift Goes A Long Way

Some prankster posted this silly, yet ingenious, video on Youtube; it's a trailer for slapstick Robin Williams cross-dressing comedy Mrs Doubtfire, sinisterly recut as a psychological thriller. Mrs Doubtfire could never be accused of being serious or dark in any way, but with careful editing and some dramatic/ scary music and heavy breathing on the soundtrack, the film appears 100% different to the finished product. It adds yet another string to Mrs Doubtfire's bow as the greatest film of the 90s.

It's amazing how little you have to do to completely shift an audience's perception of something, and shows how important it is to strike the right tone to get your message across. There are tons of little things that might affect somebody's reading of literature, from what they've read in the past to their own life experiences, and you can never truly know how anybody is going to take an idea or plot. I've written stories and people have completely missed the point I was trying to make, or reached an entirely separate conclusion. Mostly this has been my fault because I thought things were obvious when they weren't, since the story in my head is so much bigger than the words that make it onto the page. It's hard to put yourself in a reader's shoes, coming at the story fresh rather than having read it fifty times and edited it to death, to put the right number of clues in to make your meaning clear, but not overdo it and spoonfeed your message. Writing is difficult!

Inside Dehli's Magician's Ghetto

In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie refers to Delhi's magician's quarter, a fabulous place in which fire-eaters, snake charmers, fakirs, contortionists, jugglers, and fortune tellers live in a presumably Harry Potter like reality, with spells crashing through the air, an endless stream of juggled objects being hurled around and kept off the ground by thousands of people, and inhabitants whizzing around on magic carpets. I just assumed it was a wonderfully unrealistic creation of the author, until I looked it up and found that it was the real deal: there genuinely is a slum section of Dehli in which the city's various conjurors congregate to live in crudely raised shacks. From there, they can draw in passing tourists with their displays and scrape a living, or venture out to entertainer jobs in wealthier areas.

It's probably pretty far from the fantastical version of my mind, a 24-hour circus where the fun never stops, where a succession of wild and crazy performers jostle for the attention of any passing tourist, diving in front of the camera to perform their wondrous feats before being jostled aside and having their place taken by another magician, but just the idea of an area in which all the city's entertainers live together is enough to make the world sound a jolly place. Perhaps it's a good juxtaposition between the fantasy of a perfect world and the true world we live in when the actual place is nothing like the dream, but is instead like any other slum, in which people are crammed together under leaky tarpaulins, half-starved, but just happen to be professional conjurers. The most up-to-date article I could find on the Magician's Ghetto suggests that in 2010 India were looking to bulldoze it to the ground to tidy the area in time for the upcoming Commonwealth Games. After this article the trail runs cold, so hopefully it never came to pass and the Magician's Ghetto lives on.

The Cooping of Edgar Allan Poe

On October 3rd, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found wandering dazed around the streets of downtown Baltimore, wearing clothes that didn't belong to him (perhaps a fetching bikini/ sarong combo). Poe was taken to hospital and four days later he was dead. With all medical records lost, and the author incoherent until his death, it was unclear how he went missing in the first place, how he turned up wearing a stranger's clothes, even what caused his death, until a conspiracy theory emerged, maybe a figment of imagination, or maybe a sinister truth of America's shady past.

The theory was that Poe was a victim of cooping, an old-school form of election fraud in which shady government characters would employ heavies (in nineteenth century Baltimore maybe a time-travelling Stringer Bell) to kidnap people from the streets, keep them bunged in cages, and ferry them around to different voting wards to rack up multiple votes for the same candidate. As fitting a fate as this sounds to befall a great eccentric such as Poe, it seems a strange way to get extra votes in a country that at the time was so corrupt that senators could trawl library records and pull the details of dead men for some extra support. And if you were going to coop somebody, you might not choose someone of such a ghoulishly terrifying appearance as Poe. It's not said whether he had his trademark moustache when he was found. In the theory's defence, there's no rational explanation for Poe going missing and turning up in borrowed clothes, other than that he may have been kidnapped and forced to perform nightly strips in Baltimore's gentlemen's clubs alongside a host of other moustachioed beauties, and after a few days, worn out, he was slipped into the nearest outfit and dropped on the streets.

Whether the cooping story is true or not, whenever I think of Poe I have the image of a scary wide-eyed horror writer locked in a cage and wearing a giant fake beak, fluffy downage glued all over his body. It makes The Tell-Tale Heart less scary if you imagine it being written by a giant man-chicken.

A Game of Thrones: Page-Turning and Mind-Boggling

Game of Thrones is probably the best thing I've ever seen on tv. Dragons and magic and political intrigue and mountain men called Shagga make it ridiculously exciting and imaginative, and the grey lines between good and evil that nearly all the characters operate on has left me rooting for everybody in the series, even those trying to kill each other. One thing I never thought I'd do though, was read A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of books that inspired the show. By the time I'd watched the first episode, five sumo-sized books had already been released, and with a couple more still due I decided that rather than dedicating a year of my reading time to George R. R. Martin I'd just watch the tv show and forget the books. I can't give up that much time to reading a fantasy series that might go on forever, or be left unfinished when its ageing, overweight author pegs it, when there are so many wonderful books out there that haven't been turned into tv programmes.

This all changed when I rewatched the first two seasons of Game of Thrones in anticipation of the third season starting in May, but unfortunately watched them too quickly and left myself with a week gap of shaking excitement before I could watch anything new. At this point I was consumed by Game of Thrones, desperate to immerse myself in its world, to find out any tiny detail the tv show might have missed, and horribly unable to use Google for more information for fear of spoilers. So I had to read the first book, titled A Game of Thrones to confuse people. I've never been so excited to read something in which I knew every single thing that was going to happen. It truly is a remarkable book. I've spoken before, when I was reading the Hunger Games trilogy, of the problem with a page-turner being that they're usually light on detail or thought-provoking passages, but Martin seems to mix the two, page-turning and thought-provoking, into a delicious cake that he's been gorging on for the last twenty years, since he began the series.

The depth in A Game of Thrones is staggering: tiny details are dropped only to became major plot points a few hundred pages later, insignificant characters are carefully given back-stories that may or may not emerge in later novels, and there's even a whole recent history to the events of the novel, that is only summarised but would make a great story in itself. It's amazing to immerse yourself in what at times seems like an alternative history to the world (but with dragons). It's huge, and brilliant, and if you like the tv show and are thirsting for tiny little extras you really should give it a go. And if you haven't seen the tv show then you're a damn fool.

Monsters of the Raj: R.E. Dyer

Since reading Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, I've found myself in the middle of a big Indian phase: eating curries and listening to Ravi Shankar, and moving on to another Rushdie book, Midnight's Children. It's actually the second time I've read this masterpiece, but there's so much going on that the first time through some of the events depicted in it washed straight over me. On my second reading I've been looking stuff up as I've gone along, and came across the horrific story of the British Indian Army Officer, R.E. Dyer.

After the end of the First World War, Indians were increasingly noisy about wanting the British to get out of their country and leave them to it, and Britain, desperately clinging to the remnants of their fading empire, were none too happy about the protests that were breaking out. In Amritsar, a few Brits had been injured after being attacked by a mob, causing Dyer, the man in charge of the area, to impose a rule on the street of the attack that anybody wanting to pass through the street would have to do so crawling on their belly, and impose a general curfew on the region. There was tension in the air.

On the 13th April, 1919, Dyer thought it fair, given that the offenders were breaking curfew, to command fifty officers to fire upon a crowd gathered peacefully to celebrate a religious festival. The Indians were in a courtyard surrounded by tall buildings, and Dyer ordered the few exits blocked, and then told his squadron to unload their weapons on the all-ages crowd. Around 1650 shots were fired, and even the British admitted to causing 350 deaths, although Indian estimates are closer to a thousand. The incident became known as the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre. Perhaps most shocking is that when Dyer was removed from his position and sent back to England in a little bit of a disgrace he was seen as a hero for standing up to the 'rioters',and his commanding officers praised his actions. Living in Britain you don't hear too much about this kind of thing (the British doing nasty things), but the Empire must have been full of mad and ruthless thugs if they approved this kind of savagery. I guess there's a lot of stuff going on right now in the world that the media don't report. Scary!

Magical Realism in the UK

Since I first read Gunter Grass' brilliant mad dwarf chronicle The Tin Drum, Magical Realism has become one of my favourite genres to read. In Magical Realism the wackiest ideas sit alongside narratives that are usually important historical and cultural chronicles, meaning you get to read some fantastic ideas and at the same time learn a lot about the particular country or time period in which the story is set. It got me to wondering if the UK was a setting that would lend itself to the genre. To me the UK never seemed magical enough, but that might just be because I was born and raised here (apart from a few years in Holland) and so the red phone boxes and fish and chips just seem completely run of the mill. So I set about the task sometime last year, struggled a bit to keep the pace up, stopped in November to write my novel, and just recently got back into Magical Realism, while reading The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie, and decided to finish my story.

Now I think I'm left with a prime piece of English Magical Realism. There's still a bit of editing to do, but I've got a story about a Cornish giant who wrestles his way up the country to fame and notoriety in the fifteenth century, before becoming a lieutenant to Richard III and fighting in the Battle of Bosworth. In the present day he's dead and buried in the Atlantic Ocean, but something's rumbling off the Cornish coast... I think it's pretty good, and when it's finished I'm going to do my damnedest to get it published.

Book of the Year 2012

The grand year of 2012 may be a very distant memory, but I still haven't handed out my award for the best book I read during that golden age, and the literary community are getting on my back about it. I thought, given the four books that won my quarterly battles have shed enough blood for a lifetime, that for this final installment I'd give them a rest from scrapping and just choose my favourite. So here are the contenders to be named my Book of the Year 2012: firstly, from the icy depths of January-March, the hypnotic Japanese odyssey of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; from April-June, Stephen King's thrilling dystopian novel The Long Walk; from the icy depths of July-September (it was not a good summer), David Foster Wallace's mind-boggling short-story collection Oblivion; and from October-December, Philip Roth's Nazis-in-the-USA imagining The Plot Against America.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was my fourth Murakami novel, and the one I'd been waiting for. I previously found his style and imagination amazing, but was just looking for everything to come together in the perfect package, and Wind-up Bird was that package. It made Murakami one of my favourite authors. Wind-up Bird is the story of a typical everyman (the same as nearly every Murakami main character) whose wife (and cat) leaves him and forces him into a twisted narrative full of fantastical characters and mind-bending adventures. I loved everything about this book and it left me really excited to one day visit Japan.

The Long Walk proved to me that Stephen King is a truly great writer, when previously I'd always put him alongside more pulpy popular authors. It's the story of a not-too-distant-future-sport in which a hundred teenage boys gather at the northern-most point of the USA, and walk as far as they can, non-stop at a minimum of four miles per hour, until gradually they drop and are slaughtered by referees and only one is left standing, the champion, winner of "the prize". I was absolutely mesmerised by this novel, and for a long time afterwards it made me concentrate on every step I took, noticing any tiny niggle, wondering how long I could keep going before I collapsed. In a strange way it was a knackering experience to read as I followed the slowly dying boys as they strived to just keep moving down the road. A phenomenal book, both with a great original idea and told excellently. I'm surprised that it doesn't have a higher reputation, and I'd love to see a film version.

I read a lot and have come across many different authors, but David Foster Wallace stands alone as a truly unique voice. Every word he uses seems to be chosen with scientific precision, and he brings stories to life in a way that I've rarely seen matched. Sometimes he can become a bit too much, and although I would one day like to read his gargantuan novel, Infinite Jest, for now I found it a lot easier to read the short stories collected in Oblivion. Every one concentrates on subjects I would never have expected to be entertaining, and is told in such a way that no other writer could imitate. I've since heard that he's got even better shorts out there, so considering how highly I rated this collection I think I'll be in for a treat when I get around to reading some more of his stuff.

The Plot Against America is a frequently terrifying novel, in which Philip Roth fantasises a 1940s in which the USA becomes progressively infatuated and embroiled with Hitler and the Nazis. At first, it seemed so far-fetched that it was unrealistic, but it's shocking how little Roth actually has to rewrite history to make it plausible that America could have sided with Germany, a possibility that doesn't bear thinking about when you consider the impact such an alliance could have had on our world. Roth focuses his story on a personal level by showing how this creeping Nazism would have ostracised and affected America's Jewish population, and the awful racism his characters endure is made all the worse when I briefly reasoned that it was just fiction, that this didn't happen, but a split-second later realised that, of course, this happened to Jews all over Europe at the time. Scary reading, but brilliantly told, and the fact that the central characters are all based on himself and his close friends and family makes it all the more realistic.

I read a ton of other great books in 2012, but these made the final shortlist, and though it's a very tough choice (I almost decided at the last second to switch to The Long Walk), I'd have to give this prestigious award to the book that made me fall in love with an author I know will be one of my favourites for a very long time, was constantly inventive and engrossing for over 600 pages, and made me desperate to go to Japan. Cue the wild celebrations, my Book of the Year 2012 is The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. And, just for fun, it picks an Uzi off the ground and blasts the hell out of the other three.

It's Been A While

Gosh, I haven’t posted on here for ages. It turns out when you’re trying to buy a house you really don’t have time for anything. So many headaches, so much advice, so very tired. But now we’ve bought one and moved in so things will hopefully get back to normal. I can start reading books at a normal pace, and maybe, shock horror, do some writing too! The manuscript for my novel is tucked away somewhere in the thousand boxes of the move, but once I track it down I’m going to plough on with my second edit, and hopefully soon it’ll be in the kind of shape where I’ll let a couple of people read it, and then send it on to some agents to get some stinging criticism or complete ignorance. Just wanted to let you know that I’m back and raring to go again, and hopefully my beautiful new house will inspire my writing on beyond my wildest dreams.

The Fourth Quarterly Book Battle

Hmm, I'm running slightly behind on my glorious blood feast of all the books I've been reading: by rights I should now be pitting the books I've read in Quarter One of 2013 against each other, but time slips away so quickly that I'm only just now finishing up last year's carnage. Here's the fight between all the books I read between October and December of last year, the winner of which will go on to contest a grand final of 2012 with the other quarter winners: Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, The Long Walk by Stephen King, and David Foster Wallace's short story collection Oblivion.

Here are the lambs to the slaughter and the roaring lions I read in the final three months of 2012: Narcopolis, Going Solo, Steppenwolf, The Plot Against America, Snow, and The Secret Life of Harry Houdini. This is going to be a tough one, there don't seem to be any lambs...

I think this is the most consistently good set of books that I read in 2012, and accordingly there's a lot of ducking and diving and false attacks as the combatants feel each other out. The slathering crowd is becoming restless, when Snow makes a power move and attempts to place the entire arena under military siege. But what's this? Just as Snow is delivering the order to take the other participants into custody, that fiend Narcopolis sneaks up and injects a filthy superdose of heroin into Snow's bulging neckveins. As Snow drops to the ground its eyes scream "why?", "why am I considered the worst book you've read in a three month period? I'm so good" but unfortunately the competition is just too fierce for it to survive. I really enjoyed Snow and it showed me a battleground dividing East and West I'd never known before, but ultimately it just wasn't quite as enjoyable as the other books. Narcopolis sags from the energy used in delivering the death blow, and suddenly realises it's used all its smack and needs to get to an opium den pronto. It turns nervously to look for one, and lo and behold, a back-alley heroin shop stands right behind it. Narcopolis gratefully enters, but seconds later The Secret Life of Harry Houdini appears from nowhere, pulls down the facade of the opium den, and reveals the lifeless body of Narcopolis floating in his famous Water Torture Cell. "How did he do that?" the crowd gasps. Narcopolis is a brilliant book, one that really fuelled my interest in visiting India, but it's very episodic and struggles to hold together as an individual work; not really a problem for me in reading it, but against such staggering competition in this Book Battle it means it comes up short. Houdini throws a blanket over himself and vanishes, then reappears, then does it again, evading attacks from the other book battlers, until Going Solo has enough and flies a crude fighter plane into the arena, gunning Houdini down before he has chance to disapparate. The Secret Life of Harry Houdini is a mostly great book, unfortunately very occasionally spoiled by the authors' very silly insistence that Houdini was a spy (backed up by very circumstantial evidence). Also, every time it revealed how Houdini performed a particular trick it was deflating to see how easy it was to do. Not that this is the book's fault: it taught me that sometimes things need to remain magic to be magical. Other than its spy stuff, which only covers a few pages out of 600, this is an amazing book about one of the most interesting characters of the twentieth century.

We're down to just three books vying for the title, and since Steppenwolf, although thrilling from first page to last, makes so little sense that it would take me hours to come up with a way in which the book could kill another (unless maybe it turned into an actual wolf), Going Solo swoops for another strike and takes the impenetrable German beast out of the running. I think I need to read Steppenwolf five or six more times to really have a handle on what's going on. I can't believe I enjoyed a book so much despite having no clue as to what was happening, either on the surface or subtextually. It's staggeringly good, but it needs a few years to sink in. Going Solo, Roald Dahl's autobiography of fighting in the Second World War and the dangers of poor organisation coupled with bombs, crashes its plane and stumbles from the wreckage to face The Plot Against America, Philip Roth's goosepimply scary tale of creeping Nazism in an alternative forties America. It's the Nazis against the Allies! I've always loved Roald Dahl, but Going Solo was one book I never read, and after seeing how fantastic it is I have no idea why. The thrill and wonder of his young life that moulded him into a magical storyteller oozes from his early adventures, and his terrifying tales of flying deathtrap planes on doomed missions gives a bone-chillingly individual take on the horrors of war. The Plot Against America, on the other hand, broadens its targets to the international Jewish community, painting a thrilling picture of what could have happened should America have swayed under Nazi control. The most terrifying thing is how far-fetched that possibility sounds, but how little fantasy Roth has to incorporate into the novel to make it seem a distinct possibility. I was left reading through my hands as Jews were steadily vilified by the alternative US government, coming back to the fact that, well it didn't really happen, but then knocked over again when I realised this seeming far-fetched ridiculous hatred took place for real in countries all over Europe. The two combatants strap in to their respective planes for a dogfight, Going Solo in its rickety Tornado, The Plot Against America in its sleek Messerschmidt. In the kind of senseless waste that cost so many lives in World War II, as they dive through the sky for each other the Tornado gives up the ghost, crumbling into pieces before battle can be engaged, and dropping Going Solo into a spludgey pulp on the arena floor. The Nazis win! The Plot Against America just scared me too much not to win.

So that's that: a year's worth of books condensed into my four favourites. I'll be back very soon to determine which of the four will be named my Book of the Year for 2012. Start holding your breath.... NOW!

A Book of Two Halves

At about the halfway mark of The English Monster I was enthralled. The book is set partly in the early 1800s, at the scene of a pair of horrifically spooky mass-murders (that are actually true to life) and the bumbling police attempts to catch the killer, and partly way back in Elizabethan England. The back cover boasts of a character embarking on a journey to trade in human souls, and as fantastical as this sounds it soon turns out that the souls come with breathing bodies attached, and are those of the first black slaves. The hero, William Ablass, sets out innocently to crew a ship, meeting a young Francis Drake on board, and soon finds himself capturing unsuspecting West Africans and porting them to South America to trade with the Spanish. All of this stuff is thrilling: the book jumps between the two time periods easily even though they seem entirely unconnected, and gives a really thought-provoking history lesson. Imagine the fear and plain stupefaction of one day being with your family and people, doing as you always do, and the next being shoved onto a ship by men with weapons you've never seen before, and later being forced into work without pay, never returning to your home again.

It's when the author, Lloyd Shepherd, tries to blend the two strands of his novel that things unraveled for me. I recently read an article on writing which stated that there is one important question an author needs to answer: "why should the reader care?", and with this stuck in my mind I struggled towards the end of The English Monster. It just seemed so desperate to tie things together, and a hundred pages before the end of the book everything that was going to happen was already clear. I've had brilliant (I think) ideas before that have trundled away as I wrote them down, and I wonder if Shepherd experienced this with The English Monster: whether he felt his ending was just as strong as his beginning, or if he found it a slog to get the words "The End" onto the page, unable to string his ideas to novel length. I've only ever struggled to complete a short story, easy enough to abandon if it starts meandering, but I can't imagine the frustration of being 200 pages into a story and running out of things to say. It's such a cruel thing on the author: if I had started at the end and read backwards, by the time I'd finished The English Monster I would be eulogising on how it gets better and better the more you read, but instead I'm left slightly cold at the steady decline of the book.

I Want to go to Murakami-land

When I read multiple books by a particular author I start to feel as if, rather than being set in a new world each time, each successive book takes place in a land in which all of that author's previous books are true-life stories. For example, if I was reading David Copperfield I would fully imagine the events of Oliver Twist to be known in that world, to the point where Copperfield could walk past the Artful Dodger in the street and continue on minus his wallet. When I recently read Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance, the characters of Murakami's other books (the few I've read) came vividly back to life and left me desperate to read them again. Even 1Q84, which I was a bit disappointed with, became much more than the sum of its parts when placed in the fantastical world inhabited by all his other characters.

I used to think that if I went to Japan it would satisfy my desire to visit Murakami-land, but I've come to realise that this clearly isn't the case, that the world Murakami writes about is much bigger than real-life Japan. It's not just the fantasy in his writing that sets him apart from reality: even the bare bones of his vision is something far removed from anywhere you could ever visit. I'd love to see his characters interacting across novels. This is something I've always loved about Bret Easton Ellis' work, how a bit-part character in one novel can become the central protagonist of his next, how various inhabitants of his world are name-dropped in books that don't concern them at all, making the fantasy all the more a reality. Maybe a meeting of Murakami main characters could become a bit confusing, since they're always thirty-year-old-odd plain men who have no idea what's happening around them, but a face-off between the psychics, murderers, high-powered businesswomen, sheep-men, and prostitutes they hang around with would make a great party.

Fake History Lessons

I love getting lost in a mad fictional world, and I love finding out about the world's equally bizarre history, but I worry that by reading historical fiction I'm giving myself a very warped version of the truth. James Ellroy has been one of my favourite authors since I read the magnificent LA Quartet (four books that include LA Confidential) a few years ago, and recently I finally got around to reading American Tabloid, a sprawl through the lives of shady American secret police in the years preceding the Kennedy assassination. Tabloid's three main characters are fictitious FBI/ CIA men, all drawn towards organised crime to varying degrees, but the novel also features JFK, Bobby Kennedy, J Edgar Hoover, and Jimmy Hoffa, amongst other notable sixties movers and shakers. My problem is that I immersed myself so much in the novel that the womanising, party animal JFK of Tabloid is in my head now the man himself, however close or far that depiction is from real life, and to my mind the assassination was a devilish Mafia conspiracy, despite all the evidence to the contrary. More than messing with historical facts, it's more my perception of people that gets warped by reading these books, like finishing Wolf Hall and thinking you've got a really good idea of what Thomas Cromwell was really like.

James Ellroy is an amazing, exciting writer, his style like classic hard-boiled detective fiction but with a dense layer of overblown historical fantasy plastered over the top. American Tabloid spins a staggering web of deception that often leaves you in a muddle as to who's working for who, and who's double-crossing someone else, against the backdrop of one of the most puzzling and thrilling episodes in American history. It's the first part of a trilogy itself, and I can't wait to see what false facts and half-truths the next two books stuff my head with. I can't believe that more of Ellroy's work hasn't been filmed, especially considering LA Confidential was such a hit. His stuff is perfect for adaptation, very Boardwalk Empire-esque, and all of the action is right there on the page, you'd barely even need a script. Apparently, James Franco is currently working on a film version of American Tabloid. If it's anywhere near as good as the book it'll be amazing.

The Wonder of Fresh Eyes

My novel is on hold because I've found out about a short story anthology that wants sci-fi stories with female protagonists, and I thought my story Meet the Veals would be perfect for it. I thought Veals was edited to death: I submitted it for a short story competition last May and must have read it dozens of times before that, eventually making it so unrecognisable from the original that only the basic story remained, all the words were changed. But now, nine months later, my pen was out straight away crossing out line after line and making innumerable changes. It's amazing what a fresh pair of eyes does to a story: no matter how close to perfect you think something is, putting it away for a few months will always leave you with a ton of changes you can't believe you didn't see all those edits ago. I just hope one day I can actually finish something and read it back a year later without cringing and covering it in red pen.

Inside the Labyrinth of The Sound and the Fury

To say that William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is a difficult novel is something of an understatement: when you've ploughed the first sixty pages and have no clue what's going on it's very tempting to give up, and when the first part ends and instead of a breather you're presented with something even more difficult it's almost painful to keep going, but to reach the end of the book is a beautiful experience, and well worth the headache. Fury was written in the 1920s, when stream-of-consciousness writing was all the rage, and guys like Joyce and gals like Woolf were fiendishly trying to make their books as impenetrable as possible, in the hope that a hundred years later people would think they were great novelists but run screaming at the thought of having to read their books. This plan worked well. Faulkner was a similar kind of chap from the USA, and wrote his masterpiece chronicling the disintegration and decay of a formerly well-to-do Southern family in four parts: the first written by a mentally disabled man-child who flits back and forth and back again through numerous time periods whenever any tiny detail catches his memory's attention, and the only thing to help the reader is a line in italics when the focus shifts to a different time period. The first part is set over thirty years and features around fifteen different time lines, and if that's not hard enough two of the characters have the same name. Apparently, Faulkner intended originally for the different time periods to be printed in different ink colours to make things easier to follow, but they didn't have the technology to do this.

After a few pages of trying to follow the action, I realised the best way to read was to just go for it, let the scenes slide past me and head for the finish line, and hopefully eventually all would become clear. And by the time I got to part three, hard shapes started to appear out of the misty background, and I saw just how remarkable a piece of writing this is. In a similar way to the stream-of-consciousness employed at the beginning of the novel, my mind is jogged to realise that in fact I did understand certain things from the first parts of the novel, I just didn't know I understood them until they were placed in context. Although it seems that nothing going on makes sense and none of it is going into your brain, it really is, and you just have to enjoy the ride and get towards the end and some clarity. The entire thing is a complex metaphor for the mind, thoughts and memories swirling around and catching when a couple fit together. On finishing it, my first thought was that I'm really looking forward to reading the book again in a few months when the dust has settled in my brain, in a similar way to how a mind-boggling film like Donnie Darko begs a second viewing. In fact, I think I could read Fury again and again, each time fitting more pieces into the jigsaw, but because of its fragmentary style, never quite completing the puzzle. The Sound and the Fury is truly an amazing book.

Annoying Habits In My Writing (One Edit Down)

I've been through my novel once on paper and made tons of changes, so I'm just on the typed version deleting, adding in, and correcting everything before my second edit, which will involve a lot more new things going in and restructuring of the story and the way it's told. The first edit has helped me to identify a lot of terrible habits I have in my writing, that hopefully in the future I'll be able to cut out at the first draft. The biggest culprit is my gross overuse of the word "that": I must have deleted over a hundred "that" 's out of my 50,000 words, so many that every time I use the word now (like just then) I start worrying it's completely redundant and shouldn't be there. Very occasionally, "that" needs to be in a sentence but I've used it badly so many times I can't work out when it has a justifiable place in a sentence.

Another very common thing I do to clunk up my writing is use the word "would" or variations of it all the time, for instance saying "Ethan would tell us..." rather than "Ethan told us...". It's just adding in words for the sake of it, but my novel is littered with it, killing its impact. I think I just got a bit confused with tenses as I wrote the thing so fast. Even with a lot of stuff added in, I've already cut a thousand words and I'm only half way through the edit, so the whole thing must be becoming much more readable every day. I wish I had a little barometer like I did when my word count was going up each day as I initially wrote the story. With taking words out it's difficult to see exactly how much good you're doing, and I'll never be able to read it fresh and see the difference, as in my head the perfect version is already done, I just need to get it on the page.

Right now, I'm shocked that anyone can ever complete a novel, sit in front of a manuscript and say, yes, this is done, I'm not going to make any more changes to this. I'm a long way off that golden moment right now, but even when I get there I'm worried I'm not going to be able to let my novel go, that I'm going to want to skim it for "that" 's one last time. For now, that dilemma is way off in the future though, I've got a lot of work to do, a lot of unnecessary words to cut, and a lot of exciting new writing to add in.

The Perks of Imagining a Book Character as an Actor

Last year I saw the film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and when I recently read the book it was impossible not to imagine the characters as the actors who played them in the film. It's so annoying that my imagination isn't able to override actors and actresses, no matter how hard I try. Even when I've read the book first it still gets me, although quite often I have trouble picturing characters in books anyway: my brain automatically switches off when a person's looks are described, and when I'm reading characters are usually just vague outlines. Even worse is when they get mixed up between films, so Sam from Wallflower and Hermione from Harry Potter now both look identical, and somewhere deep in my mind I'm sure I link the two characters together, despite the fact that they have nothing in common. It's sad that once it's gone I can never get back the innocence of a character with a blurry face, who just looks however I want them to look that day.

There are parts of Wallflower that wouldn't work as well without the film to complement them; when you have two mediums of a story that have different advantages in storytelling a lot of the blanks are filled in. For example, in the book it seems a bit stretched that Charlie, the main character, easily makes a group of friends, given how painfully shy and awkward he is, but in the film this is shown a lot more naturally. If you've seen the film first then problem solved, if you'd read the book first it might seem to fall into place  for him a little too easily. Since I had to read Dangerous Liaisons at university (one of the most boring experiences of my life) I've been a bit wary of epistolary fiction, but Stephen Chbosky uses it to really get deep into the character of Charlie and his confessions of being a horribly troubled teen. But I'll still never know how much of my empathy for the character would still exist if I couldn't picture the puppy-dog face of actor Logan Lerman when I was reading about Charlie's heartbreaking troubles. I suppose this is film messing with my ability to interpret the book as an individual work, but my brain just doesn't have the power to take on the might of Hollywood and its wicked ways. I loved the book, I loved the film, and I loved all of the characters, even if in my head one of them has magic powers and is friends with house elves and owls.

Harry Houdini Was a Very Interesting Man

Harry Houdini was a fascinating character, spending his life travelling the world astounding the general public, going to greater and more dangerous extremes as each of his showpieces became old hat. He began with simple handcuff escapes behind a curtain, but graduated to challenging the general public to bring any container up on stage to try and hold him (he once even escaped from a giant fake sea monster made of sewn-together flesh), removing himself from prison cells around the world to drum up publicity, and jumping into rivers and escaping underwater from cuffs and chains. Sadly, as with all magic, when you find out how it's all done that wondrous sheen is removed from his tricks. Before you find out the mundane truth, it's always tempting to ignore logic and think there must have been some superhuman mastery taking place, but often the least interesting solution you can come up with is the right one. So, when Houdini was escaping from any container an unknown member of the public could build, these were usually confidants, or he'd met the challengers beforehand and bribed them to leave a few nails loose so he could escape; or when he escaped from jail cells, he had keys or lock picks hidden on his body. Of course, being a contemporary of Houdini and not knowing any of this made him seem like a voodoo master, and he was still an amazing contortionist and lock picker. He always performed his escapes behind a curtain, and it's unbelievable to think that he could hold an audience rapt for an hour with nothing but his writhing shadow and an orchestra to keep them entertained.

Later in his career, riddled by the injuries inflicted by years of contorting his frame to escape from seemingly impossible positions, Houdini slowed down his stage routine and became a full-time Spiritualist debunker, disguising himself as an old man and infiltrating seances to show up phony mediums. He had run-ins with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an advocate of Spiritualism and Houdini's one-time friend, who once released a mocked photo of a little girl with fairies from a story book superimposed on it, believing it to be evidence of spirits. It's a funny photo. Doyle thought that Houdini himself possessed Spiritualist powers without even knowing it, so bamboozled was he by the tricks the master performed.

All of this stuff is in the book The Secret Life of Houdini, a thrilling read. The only minor problem with it is that the authors were desperate for a USP to make their biography different to any other, so cobbled together a silly theory about Houdini's life as a spy, based solely on wild conjecture, including at one point a claim that Houdini escaped from a crate in half an hour, but his diary confirms that he didn't appear to the audience until an hour had passed, giving him the perfect alibi to engage in spy work. Um. Ignore the spy stuff, and focus on the life of the best magician the world has ever known. Neatly, the book leaves a few of Houdini's tricks as mysteries, so if you want you can (like me) still pretend that there was something supernatural in his abilities.

Worlds of Fiction, Worlds of Fact

At the moment I'm reading a biography about Harry Houdini, and although I'm really enjoying it (Houdini was a fascinating person), like all non-fiction it makes me yearn to read something made up. I often have trouble getting through a non-fiction book, no matter how interesting I find the subject material, because I love the way that fiction creates its own world, even if what is happening in the novel could be placed directly within our own lives. It's almost like a book delivers a slightly warped parallel universe, and even if the contents are very sober and realistic, there's always this magical possibility with fiction that anything could happen.

Orhan Pamuk's Snow, about a Turkish city blocked off by heavy snow from the outside world and thus at the mercy of a military coup, is a book that opened an entirely new world to me: a place and political landscape that I knew nothing about. It's a world in which girls who choose to wear headscarves are banned from education and the state battles Islam for control, and it has been happening in Turkey for the last few decades, with headscarf girls only recently being tentatively accepted in the classroom. It's funny how living in England leaves you mostly ignorant of anything that isn't happening in either the UK or USA. Pamuk perfectly captures the mood of a nation divided, one in which a life can mean so little as to be expunged in the same way that a writer might decide a character is superfluous and just delete them from the story. Life seems like such a fragile thing in Snow: people die for their beliefs at the drop of a hat, little caring as long as they stand up for what they feel is right. It makes me feel small that I basically see myself as the centre of my world, and don't think I could ever see a cause as worth dying for, as big enough to give my life to. I love learning about new places and ideas, and with them presented in fiction I find them much easier to grasp than reading a factual book. I suppose it's the personal touch, the microscope that is placed over a story, that I identify with.

From the Desk of the Editor

After a nice December break, I'm back in the saddle and deep into editing the novel I wrote in November. I thought that the writing of it would be the most arduous part, but now I'm confronted with 50,000 words that need changing and shaping into the finished product, and I'm beginning to realise how long this is going to take. Usually I read through and edit a story about ten to fifteen times, and they're typically around 3000 words, so if I'm going to do the same with my novel it's going to be a mammoth task. I'm currently a third of the way through my initial read through and edit, and at the moment I'm enjoying the story as much as I can, because I know in a few months I'll be sick of it! After a couple of edits I'll post some extracts on here.

I'm still pinching myself that when I've finished I will have a book that theoretically could be published if it's good enough and I'm lucky enough. Just to have that possibility if Mr Vintage or Ms Random House were going door to door and offering to publish anyone with a finished book is a wonderful feeling. A good thing is that as I was writing I was worried that a lot of it wouldn't make sense or hang together, but that doesn't seem to be a problem; it seems I have written a coherent novel.  That's the first step out of the way, but there's a nice long marathon ahead....

Life in Nazi America

Books like this scare me, because they force me to think about the question of what I might have done if I was unfortunate enough to live in Germany as it was being overrun with Nazi ideology, and face up to the answer that in all likelihood I would have done nothing except for quietly be relieved that I'm not Jewish or a gypsy or gay or anything else they decided they didn't like. It's a horrible potential to face, and must have been a horrific truth for the millions of Germans who let the horrors of fascism wash over them and did nothing.

The Plot Against America is Philip Roth's nightmarish vision of Nazism supplanted to the United States, and although at times it seems a little far-fetched and fanciful, if you run with the initial premise everything that comes after as the USA slowly degenerates into a Jewish-ostracising, Hitler-loving hole seems possible. First, Fascist sympathiser and celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh becomes president in 1940 on an anti-war platform [the idea that the US could ever be anti-war was for me the hardest thing to imagine!], and then he gradually brings in measures to side with Hitler and persecute the Jews of the country, planning to separate Jewish communities and move individual families to far flung Southern towns under the guise of integrating them with the wider community. The disintegration of freedom is shown as a delicate change masked by the government and shined up to look positive, and you lose yourself in a world in which Jews become hated in America in the same way as in Nazi Germany. Non-Jewish citizens quickly latch onto the fact that they are in a position of safety as long as they target the Jews, and the country becomes perilous for the minority. Roth throws up so much to ponder that it took me ages to get through the book, as I could only read a couple of pages before becoming lost in thought. I cannot imagine the fear in Jewish souls as their home countries in Europe were engulfed in the wave of Hitler's domination, and they lived on the edge of being sent to concentration camps. The Plot Against America is an amazing book, and though it requires some suspension of disbelief, it's frightening how little you need to be caught up in it.

Another thing that struck me about this book is how easy it seems to be to slander dead people and get away with it. Although Lindbergh is historically reported to have vague Fascist and anti-Semitic leanings, Roth gets away with turning his character into a Nazi pawn who at times seems close to ordering genocide, and nobody seems to have a problem with it! If Lindbergh was alive Roth would have lawsuits coming out of his ears, but apparently turning frantically in his grave counts for nothing. I found it strange that an author could get away with such blasphemy. And Henry Ford seems like a monster, too, although if you look him up on Wikipedia that one seems justified.