Why I like to kill my friends on a semi-regular basis

Hello again, everyone, and apologies for the long spell incommunicado. Numerous events have eventuated, including a weekend spent in Berlin, home of more leather-boot shops than you could shake any reasonable length of stick at, and also home to a world-class zoo which had two month-old baby jaguars (any women reading this, you may now go ‘Aww’, though I insist you do so only in the privacy of the inside of your own head). But I’m back, and I’m back to the daily grind, and part of that grind includes writing the current novel.

I raise this with slight triumphalism, because in this last week I have managed to break the 60,000-word mark. Every time I manage to change the first integer of a five-digit number it’s a big thing for me, because by-and-large it means I have managed to complete another chapter. Those of you possessed of more than usual cunning will have worked out that this means that my chapters tend to average 10,000 words each. Well done: you may have a sweetie.

10,000 words is quite a lot. 10,000 words is equivalent to a Masters dissertation, although 10,000 words of fiction is considerably easier to write, because fiction doesn’t require anally-retentive levels of footnoting every two sentences.  Even so, the effort involved is considerable, partly because on one hand I’m trying to drive the story forward in a relatively determined manner, while on the other everything I write has to agree with everything that has preceeded it in the narrative thus far.

That gets tricky when the narrative is as long as mine (these 60,000 words push me over the half million in total). One of the reasons why big stories are difficult to tell is that sustaining a concept over such a long trajectory isn’t easy. Ideas have a natural tendancy to change and evolve, so you need to keep a very firm grip on them right from the beginning. That can be a simple as making sure the names of the protagonists retain the same spelling throughout or as difficult as creating character motivations that have room to be fleshed out over the story arc while remaining internally consistant. And, again, scale is a complicating factor. In a file simply entitled ‘Ships’ on my hard-drive there are the names of all the vessels that have, or that could, appear in the story. There are more than 1,000 of them. The same goes for named characters. There are more than 300 of them.

300+ is a lot. It’s so many, in fact, that actually just thinking of names for them all becomes something of a trial, and I have to delve into my book of baby names and the phonebook in order to make them up. Or, alternatively, I can simply lift them wholesale from my friends.

There are people walking around an entirely fictional universe who I nevertheless run a real risk of bumping into in the street. Sometimes I take the name but not the character: in the universe of the Fulcrum War, for instance, President Alex Burton is quite the baddie, whereas in real life my friend Alex Burton is a thoroughly good egg. That’s a simple name theft. Sometimes I take physical characteristics and put them under a new name and give them a new attitude: there’s a character called Dana Greer who, in my head at least, looks like my friend Diane.  Or I tweak names and attitudes but have them still recognisable: Dave Wark became Dave Warrick. Susan Rendel (as she was then: she has subsequently married and changed her name) became Susan Rondahl. But there is a danger in doing this, and it is not merely that someone might get offended by what you’ve written. The danger is that characters develop a mind of their own. ‘Susan Rondahl’ was written in primarily as a one-scene joke to amuse Susan Rendel, with whom I worked at the time, but ‘Susan Rondahl’ swiftly took over that initial chapter and now she is arguably the primary female protagonist of the entire thing.

So much for authorial control.

If a character begins to get too wilful, of course, I do have ultimate recourse to the final authorial Big Stick: charactercide. I can kill my characters. I can do so for many reasons, not least of which is if it seems like a good idea at the time. But there are a couple of reasons why doing this is a wrench. First of all, you’re dispensing with an asset. Characters enable you to do things with narratives:by definition, they propel the plot (I can’t think of any books that have characters who impinge on the plot in no way whatsoever). Removing a character removes a tool which facilitates that propulsion, and so moving forward becomes more difficult. Secondly, when you’ve gone to the trouble of including your friend in a story it becomes particularly painful and problematic to tell them that actually they just came to a Bad End. Unless you have a grievance, in which case it offers a peculiarly therapeutic resolution to the whole affair (and yes, I have done that too). I must admit to feeling fortunate, in that no one thus gotten rid of has told me they felt aggrieved at the treatment dealt out to their namesakes. Some have even encouraged it, requesting heroic or, as their temperament leads them, spectacular deaths.

It’s on my mind particularly this week because I am about to kill off another friend. His death will occur at the end of a chapter (the 10,000 word thing is only a rough guideline, so although I already have 60,000 words this will be the end of chapter 6, ‘PURITY’) and it’s a slightly unusual one in that it’s the death of a friend whose name and character and occupation I have sequestered for my own devious ends. His demise is, therfore, both heroic and spectacular. It seems only fair. Although I’m not sure how enthused his wife will be when she finds out what I’ve done to her man.

Using friends’ names and characters in this way is a slight cheat for me as an author as well, and not just in terms of not having to think of new names. It’s a short-cut to emotional involvement. I care what happens to these fictional constructs because some part of them is based upon people about whom I care in real life. So for that reason, I like to put them in dangerous circumstances. I want them to pull through, and hopefully that sense of engagement will rub off on the reader because of how I write the characters and the humanity I give them or observe in them. But sometimes putting them in harm’s way leads to harm befalling them, and sometimes even I, the author, have no idea who will survive and who won’t.

It keeps me on my toes. It keeps the readers on their toes. And it keeps my friends worried. What more could any reasonable man ask for?

Today’s Zen is another, brand-new Starlingford video: some of better pictures collated and accompanied by one of my favourite songs. Enjoy!

Bringin’ The Boogie #3

Hello Dear Readers! – and once again, it is that time of the month when I bring you great tunes, courtesy of Youtube.

This month, I thought what I might do is bring you some tunes that remind me, or that I have used, with regard to my Fulcrum War books. Those of you who are still confused as to what I mean by this can use the headed pages that provide ‘back-cover blurb’ on the three books in question found above: everybody else, let’s start with Ghost Among Thieves…

The book begins with an act of sabotage on a ship isolated and alone: as such, I found this to be the perfect soundtrack to that event:

At the novel’s conclusion, I knew that both sides, no matter what defeats and reversals of fortune they had suffered, would continue to fight. I was also thinking about Paul Ray, the principal architect of revolution, and I knew that in him the Confederates had found a figurehead big enough and strong enough for the role of leader they placed upon him. So what could be better than this?

The next book, The Passage of Daemons, features a strategic biological attack. There is one song that I simply could not get out of my head in relation to this (and, in fact, a couple of the lyrics made it into the manuscript), partly because it is used to spectacular effect at the beginning of the TV miniseries of Stephen King’s epic The Stand, and partly because it’s just so damn spooky in its own right:

As the third book is still very much a work in progress (it is only about one fifth complete at this stage) it would give too much away to include any of the music going through my head in relation to it, so instead here are a couple of songs that always come to mind when I think about Paul Ray, the ‘hero’. The first song is by Zero 7, a truly wonderful and laid-back outfit. This is my favourite of their tracks. It comes from their album ‘The Garden’ and it comes to mind because of a fantastic line halfway through, which describes Paul to a T: “Wearing smiles like Colt .45s”.

Finally, if this doesn’t sum up Paul, nothing will: a genuine, kick-ass, double-fistin’ lazy-grinnin’ rock classic:

Could You Write Decent Fantasy?

I have been having an odd, bitty kind of a day thus far, swithering in my efforts to concentrate on what I’m meant to be doing (historical research on a couple of bombings in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s) and what I want to be doing, which is writing a sermon that will appear at a pivotal point in the current novel.

(This is not as dull as it sounds. Dan Robertson gave me a few pointers on the sermon he would try to preach if his topic was ‘The End of the Church’. This is an eminently suitable topic, as warships attack the church in question while this sermon is being delivered. This is an action sermon, with explosions.)

Because I am, clearly, a bad man for distractions, I wandered over to Alan Campbell’s blog. Alan Campbell is a fantasy author whose work I am reading at the moment. I finished his first novel, Scar Night, last week and liked it well enough to go out and buy the sequel, Iron Angel. Campbell is no Mieville (who is? Mieville is so far ahead of anyone else writing novels in Britain today that it’s not even funny) but he makes a decent fist of writing fantasy. There are problems, of course; his dialogue isn’t all that it might be and I want to know how a glass syringe survived a fall of several miles down a rocky abyss, but overall I wasn’t disappointed. Anyway, one of the links in his archived posts was to The Fantasy Novelist’s Exam, which I read and laughed at. Although fantasy isn’t necessarily my genre of choice, I’ve read enough of it to recognise the tropes…

One ought not to assume any connection, therefore, to today’s zen, which is of a breakdown train…

The Civil Engineers, out in force, with Class 37 'British Steel Hunterston'

A Call to Arms

Hello again, dear readers, and what a post I have for you today. It’s a section of my first novel, Ghost Among Thieves, which is the first of the Fulcrum War trilogy (the latter two being The Passage of Daemons and The Wings of the Dawn). It’s the story of how a single man, Paul Ray, manages to provoke a war on a scale no one in all human history has ever seen before. The speech I offer you now comes from the President of the New Confederacy of Free Planets (the good guys) after an enormous battle on the planet of Kaandas. The battle, between the Confederates and Terrestrial Forces (who are the bad guys) concluded with the use of thermonuclear weapons, and President Geoffrey Fox must now refute claims made by the Terrestrials that these were Confederate warheads.

The speech serves as a good introduction to the whole scenario presented by the books, I think, because while the first half explains the course of the war thus far, the second explains why war is neccessary at all. Fox moves from the informative into the emotive, quoting Thomas Hardy, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Jesus Christ and…err…Tom Clancy in order to get his point across, and he explains the new, stark reality that faces the galaxy as a result of the events described in the book.

Enjoy… and grab a rifle.

“My fellow citizens,

“There are things I must confirm, and there are implications we must acknowledge, and discuss, but here are the facts, recorded by all and deniable by none.

“The state of Risor, the planets of her system and those of her allies, are at war. We are at war with Earth – a war we did not choose, but that has been thrust upon us. The first battles have already been fought, but they did not begin yesterday. Yesterday was merely the most recent, the biggest, the most bloody. The planet Kaandas, reinforced by our volunteers, was attacked by units of the Terrestrial Navy, the Terrestrial Assault Army, and the Colonial Marines.

“These Terrestrial forces, led by Admirals Rate, Sagitta and Burton in the air, and Field Marshal Hansig and General Wallis on the ground, began a systematic campaign of destruction that culminated in the use of thermonuclear weapons.

“There were eight nuclear detonations. All were in the region of sixty megatons. All were detonated over the capital city, Begynnelse; all were cobalt-type fusion weapons whose lethality is compounded by their radioactive after-effects. These are cancer bombs. The Terrestrial military puts them in missiles, W-435C Fireflies. Neither Risor, nor Rahn, nor Kaandas, has anything comparable in their inventories. The capabilities of the Firefly, on the other hand, have been publicised for many years.

“These are all facts. These can all be independently confirmed. Here are some more: this was not the first battle of the war. This was not the first time Terrestrial military units have attacked Risorian forces. This was not the first time Terrestrial military units have killed civilians. Our embassy in Caliz, on Alegaron, was destroyed by Terrestrial fighter-bombers. They did this in order to murder a woman they believed to have killed three Terrestrial pilots. The woman was cleared of these allegations within hours, yet forces from the carrier Gladiator eventually killed more than 500 people and reduced our embassy to rubble in an attempt to seize her.

“A few brief weeks later, Terrestrial forces tried to prevent Tjaru from joining the still-forming New Confederacy of Free Planets. The Tjaran Navy engaged with the Terrestrial Navy’s Sixth Battle Fleet and, assisted by twenty-five vessels of the Risorian Navy, destroyed nearly half of Sixth Fleet. Terrestrial casualties, incidentally, included the carrier Gladiator, which seems…apposite.

“We then learned that the Terrestrial Navy was preparing to seize the planet Kaandas. We, the Confederacy, undertook to reinforce the planet’s indigenous defences and protect it against imperial aggression. Unfortunately, one of our materiel convoys was ambushed off Ibutar by a specialised terrestrial Navy interdiction unit called a ‘Panther Group’, and this prevented our effective consolidation of the units we already had in place.

“Nevertheless, our forces managed to hinder the Terrestrial landings to the point where they were facing defeat. Unable to accept that possibility, Terrestrial commanders took the decision to use thermonuclear weapons, and in so doing, they committed mass murder. This was a war crime. Thousands of troops were killed. And millions of civilians.”

Fox surveyed the room. Until now he had delivered the briefing severely. He had presented the facts as though he were a surgeon explaining a procedure. Now, however, his demeanour changed. He had talked the press through the sequence of events leading up to war: now that they were there, they needed to see who would be taking them further. He took off his glasses and stepped to the side of the podium, abandoning his notes there, and stood in front of them not as a politician addressing journalists but as a general briefing his troops. Fox looked like a warrior.

“This ends now.” Fox glared around the room. No one moved. Even the incessant whirr of motor-driven cameras ceased. There was silence, shared not only by those in the room but by those watching across the galaxy. Fox’s words echoed across the lightyears, a declaration as final as a gunshot.

“The New Confederacy is at war, and we issue a call to arms to every freedom-loving person in this galaxy. We will not countenance a government, fifty thousand ‘years away, that reaches into the lives of those closest to us and, if it so chooses, extinguishes them. This ends now.

“There is no place in this galaxy, any more, for tyranny. There is no place in this galaxy, any more, for inequality, for Imperial hegemony… or for slavery. All this ends now.

“Hundreds of years ago a Terrestrial poet wrote ‘Do not go gentle into that good night…Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ We did not listen to him, and now, on hundreds of worlds, we who grew complacent in the sunset saw the light fail as Terrestrial warships blotted out the sun. The shadows of the Empire have left this galaxy cold and bleak and hard, in the grip of a new Dark Age. We have seen diversity die. We have watched corruption flourish. We have allowed ourselves to be subjugated – and why? Because it was easy.

“It was easier to accept the will of those whose desires were backed by force than to oppose it. It was easier to surrender liberties than to fight for them. We allowed ourselves to be controlled because we feared the effort and the cost of regaining our self-control, our self-sufficiency, our self-determination… our self-hood.

“All this ends now, because now it is time to rage against the dying of the light.

“The New Confederacy will fight. It will fight with all the power and all the fury and all the might it can muster, and it will fight even unto the last full measure of devotion, because without victory there can be no survival in the face of tyranny. In opposition to oppression, in defiance of domination, in rebellion to all injustice, the Confederacy makes its stand. It stands against all that Earth’s dominion represents. But equally, it must stand for something.

“We stand for justice. We stand for equality. We stand, ultimately, for the peace that is worth fighting for. Too long we lay broken and craven and meek before the Terrestrial military. But the time has come for the meek to inherit the Earth.

“To all those who would fight against us, I say this: you do not know the wrath you have awoken. You do not know the anger that is about to fall on your houses. Our ships will hunt you from stronghold to stronghold, and there will be no world too far away, no cave too deep or too dark, no fastness too fortified to escape the rage that will bring all you have built down about your ears. You face your end. Your slavery will finish.

“To those enslaved, I say this: your chains shall be broken; your manacles sundered; your yoke shattered by the spear. As rises the Confederacy so too rises the sun, and in the light of the red dawn of war we offer you hope and a refuge. To you who are poor, to you who are tired, to you who are shaken by the storm and beaten by the journey, we offer you sanctuary.

“To those whose worlds are not their own, to those whose worlds are claimed by Earth, finally, I say this: today, I present a choice. Today the Universe changed, because today open war came upon us all. The war is real. The Confederacy is real. The stakes are real, and high, and this is where your choice lies: for what are you going to fight?

“Make no mistake. Whatever you choose, you fight. Should you choose inaction, you fight to maintain the status quo. You fight to permit the rape of your world and its society by those who simply do not care about it.

“I am here to offer you another way. I am here to offer you an escape plan. Fight with us. Fight with the Confederacy. Fight for freedom. Fight for everything that is good and noble and just.

“Your worlds have been taken away from you.” Fox turned and looked directly into the ECNN camera lens. He offered it, and everyone watching, a hard smile. “Now it’s time to take them back.”

Your moment of appropriate Zen:

An armoured convoy carries soldiers to the troop train, hauled by Albert Hall, arriving in the country station

The Name Game

Good afternoon, dear readers.

Just a quick blog today, as I’m trying to get ready for heading home tomorrow for a week. I have to confess I haven’t spent the morning too productively in that regard: I was researching biomechanical armour systems for my novel. Now, I suppose, is as good a time as any to introduce you to that universe…

I am writing a science fiction trilogy (because that‘s never been attempted before) with the overarching title of ‘The Fulcrum War’. The first two books (‘Ghost Among Thieves’ and ‘The Passage of Daemons’, respectively) are now written. The first is about 180,000 words long; the second, 252,000. The third, upon which I am working at the minute, is going to be called ‘The Wings of the Dawn’ and will wind up being somewhere in the region of 350,000 words, I suspect. I’m having fun with it: things have just gone catastrophically badly for the good guys (yay! – it makes for more interesting writing and increased suspense) and I’m now writing the ‘aftermath’ scenes. The baddies, having been bad, are jubilent, and in a shocking move are going to increase their badness elsewhere. But the goodies aren’t quite out of it yet…

If I finish the Fulcrum War stories perhaps I will someday write the prequel trilogy. I even have names for the books. The trilogy itself would be called ‘Stargazers’: the first book is/would be ‘The Parliament of Dark’; the second, ‘All the Colours of the Night’; and the third, ‘Songs of the Nephilim’.

I like coming up with names for things (the aforementioned armour that I’ve spent the morning working on, for instence, I’ve decided to refer to as ‘Sergeant York’), so this caught my attention: http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/name_ISS/index.html. I’d quite like to name part of the International Space Station – I shall have to go away now and think thoughts around that theme…

I really do like thinking of names for things. I have just been writing about two of the goodies’ very best ships, Technomancer-class Radiation Cruisers. These two are called ‘Minerva’ and ‘Cloister Bell’. There may be a small prize for anyone who can remind us all of the sci-fi pedigree of that latter name…!

Anyway, here it is: your moment of Zen for today.

Black 5 'The Glasgow Highlander' passes Dundrumemlagh Castle with a coal train, while on the Down line a J39 leads a freight train of 12-ton vent vans.