The memories that never leave you

Somebody was asking me the other day how I came up with the idea for my thriller The Doomsday Testament. I said that I just sat down one weekend, thought of a long forgotten artefact with world-changing potential, created a suitable myth around it set in a time I was interested in, then gave my character, Jamie Saintclair, the job of solving the mystery of where it had vanished to.

I now realise that isn't true.

The Doomsday Testament is actually about the secrets that men keep, even from their families. For years, ever since I was little, I'd asked my father that age old question 'What did you do in the war, daddy?' and he'd just smiled. Only gradually did he reveal that he'd been in Malaya during the Emergency (they were too coy to call it a war), but not as one of the famous Virgin Soldier conscripts, he'd had a great time and the only injury he'd suffered was on the football field.

My dad, centre, with two soldiers from an Irish regiment

It wasn't until he was in his seventies that I learned what really happened. At that point, he seemed to need to recall what had been the most traumatic and vivid time of his life and pass it on to me, his eldest son. In the late 1940s and early 50s he'd served one tour of duty with the Seaforth Highlanders, mainly in the uniquely dangerous position as platoon scout, patrolling the Malayan jungle looking for the enemy, CTs or communist terrorists. He'd killed and seen men, including his friends, die, some of them in terrible ways. But when he returned to Britain he immediately asked for a transfer so he could go back to Malaya on a second tour. This time he had to watch as his comrades in the Gordons went through the same deadly learning curve he'd already experienced, officers shunning the advice of a mere private. It culminated in one of the deadliest ambushes of the war, with a British major, a captain and a lieutenant killed along with many others.

He kept all this bottled up for more than fifty years, but I doubt that never a day passed without him remembering one or other aspect of that time in the jungle. When he did eventually speak, it was obvious those events had changed him and that the mental scars they'd caused still remained. A few months before he died last year he left me a history of his life in about 30-odd tight written pages.

I didn't see that 'journal' until many months after I'd come up with the idea for The Doomsday Testament, but the central theme of my book is a young man's journey of discovery through his grandfather's diary of the last days of World War Two.

And my point is? I don't really know. I just thought it was worth mentioning.

No news is good news

As I looked out the window today at the rain bouncing six inches off the pavement I was reminded of Juliette Mills in Avanti, telling Jack Lemmon how pleased she was to be in Italy because the British summer was two weeks in May and a week in June.

Simon, my editor, liked what I'd done with The Doomsday Testament, which was a relief, and I took a couple of days off during our few days of summer last week and drove up to Dunkeld, the little Perthshire town on the River Tay. It's a beautiful place, packed full of history and with gardens and walks along the river where I watched a fisherman catch a salmon (a rare event in my experience) and then lose it (which isn't). Earlier, we'd driven a couple of miles out of town to the Loch of the Lowes nature reserve where you can get incredible views of ospreys at the nest there. Once rare, you can now see these beautiful birds from the Highlands to the Borders. I once watched one swoop to take a trout from the Forth while I was fishing a couple of miles from my house and it completely took my breath away.

The bridge over the River Tay at Dunkeld

One of the most pleasant aspects of the past couple of weeks has been to sit back and watch all those big news events from a distance, instead of being in the middle of a freaked out newsroom and about two steps from a nervous breakdown.

The Royal Wedding? Managed to avoid it entirely, there's only so much oily sycophancy a man can take. Osama Bin Laden? How could the White House make such a hash of the aftermath? If you're going to commit state-sponsored murder what's the point of making feeble excuses about it? The Scottish elections? Utterly compelling. I've met Alex Salmond a couple of times and he's a charming man with an ego the size of Edinburgh Castle. Giving him an electoral majority is like putting a chocaholic in charge of a sweet shop. Mark my words, it's going to be messy.

So now it's back to Avenger of Rome and head down for a couple of months. Valerius ships out for Antioch and a date with destiny in the Armenian mountains. Can't wait to get there.

The write stuff

I've just pressed the button on the latest rewrite of The Doomsday Testament and I have to admit to a sigh of relief and reaching for the nearest wine bottle. It was the toughest writing assignment and the tightest deadline I've had since I started writing full time.

A few weeks ago I did a blog on the impact a copy editor has on your books and I had quite a few comments either through the blog or on Facebook. A few of them were a little mixed up about the various stages a novel goes through, so I thought this week I'd try to explain the difference because I think it's important for anyone being taken on by a publisher, or who's considering self-publishing their book, to know.

Once you've completed the first draught of your novel and struggled through all the emotions and doubts that go hand in hand with the process you'll want someone to read it. Maybe it's a friend, maybe it's your agent, but if you have a publisher it will be your editor. You may think you've written a masterpiece (though I haven't met a writer yet who ever does), you might think it's got more holes than a Swiss cheese; whatever your opinion, your editor's job is to make it a better book.

For The Doomsday Testament my editor suggested improvements in three major strands of the novel: the bad guys, the love interest and the fact that I'd given my characters a rest in the middle section. It meant taking an overview of the whole book, removing entire sections and writing in others, all of which changed the dynamics, introduced new personnel and affected the way the characters thought and felt. It turned out to be a major, mentally challenging job that affected about seventy-five per cent of the novel and I still don't know if I got it right. Would I have put that amount of effort in without the encouragement of an editor whose judgement I've learned to trust? I doubt it. I knew the book wasn't quite right, but I would have tinkered with a passage here and a character there and felt I'd done a great job.

I think that's the fundamental difference between an author who self-publishes and one who has a publishing deal and one that every writer should consider if they're faced with the luxury of choosing between an established publisher and going it alone. There are a lot of great self-published books out there by committed, talented authors, but how many of them would have been even better with the support of an editor? Unless you're very fortunate you won't have someone with that sort of experience,  professional detachment and stake in the end result willing to encourage you to push it on to the next stage, and the one after that. It's like a trainer working with a sprint athlete to knock another tenth of a second from their time.

The next stage in the process is the copy editor, whose input I covered in Mistakes, I made a few   a month ago. The copy editor looks at the minutiae and the actual writing, saves you from your mistakes and tightens things up. After that it's down to the wire and the proof-reading stage, which a few people have confused with editing. A proof-reader's job (two work on my books) is to spot mistakes and typos. While all this is going on I'll be working on the manuscript in tandem with them, making my own cuts, changes and improvements. The end result, hopefully, is a book that's as good as we can make it.

Like watching crocodiles dismember a baby zebra

Over the past couple of days I've been keeping an eye on a literary soap opera that perfectly illustrates the power of the internet to make or break a budding author.

On March 16, a blog called BigAl's books and pals, which specialises in critiques of independently published e-books, reviewed The Greek Seaman by a British-born author called Jacqueline Howett. I haven't read the book, but the review seemed fair enough. Al's conclusion was that it was a good story marred by spelling and grammar errors and he awarded  it two stars.

One of the first things I learned as a writer, largely thanks to putting my early stuff up on the Youwriteon.com website, was that you have to roll with the punches. There's always the temptation when you get a review that is painful or just plain wrong to hit the keyboard and tell the reviewer why he's so mistaken. You don't. You take a deep breath and start the next paragraph.

Unfortunately, Jacqueline didn't.

Two days later she posted three five-star reviews from Amazon that said just how good her book really is. Perhaps it's a measure of her innocence that one of them came from someone with the same surname.

Her counter-attack got up the noses of some of Big Al's 606 followers, who pointed out that he was only giving an honest opinion. But Jacqueline still didn't let up. Fast forward a week and we're into a debate about which version had been reviewed and the author is upbeat that all the attention has increased her sales. If she'd just walked away then, maybe it might have worked out, but she always had to have the last word, which even more unfortunately turned out to be F*** Off!

By now Al's pals had alerted their friends and the debate had gone viral. Everyone knew about Jacqueline and wanted their say. The blog had 300 comments before Al, who comes out of all this pretty well, closed the gates.

But you can't shut out the internet and the pack had scented blood.

The battle moved to The Greek Seaman's Amazon page and a feeding frenzy in which the book was dismembered, her reputation as a writer destroyed and ultimately buried under an avalanche of ill-informed, sometimes vicious 1-star reviews (50-odd at the last count) from people who had evidently never read the book, and who I doubt have ever put in the hours of effort required to write one themselves, It was horrific to witness, but fascinating in the way of one of those wildlife documentaries where you watch the baby zebra come down to the waterhole where the crocodile lies in wait.

What do I think?

Jacqueline shouldn't have risen to the bait, but there's something sickening about this pack mentality and the way the internet allows faceless, nameless individuals to tear apart someone who has at least had the guts to create something and put it out there. Get back to the keyboard, write another book under a different name and think Amanda Hocking, but, please, this time get a professional editor to take a look at it before you publish it.

A face that launched a thousand quips

Some people collect stamps or old vinyl records, I collect faces. Not, I hasten to add, in a Hannibal Lecter kind of way, but so that I have a bank of characters for future books.

On the trip to London the other day, I picked up half a dozen, male and female, and all shapes and sizes. So if you were on the 10.30 Edinburgh to King's Cross and saw a furtive looking bloke intermittently staring at other passengers and writing in a black notebook, don't worry, that would be me.

It's not just about physically describing the features. Eyes are OK, because there are any number of colour permutations, and, to a certain extent, your eyes are the treasure chest of your secrets, but noses, though (see above) they come in all shapes and sizes, aren't all that interesting to record, and ears are large, small, possibly delicate, and occasionally cauliflower, but that's about it. Chins? Don't get me started about chins. No, the secret, and the greatest test for a writer, is to use the face as a window into the soul of its owner.

I've had a couple of so-so reviews of Hero of Rome lately, the kind of thing that you're always going to get if a book's selling well, because you know you're never going to please everybody. But the odd thing about these reviews is that they both took me to task about the same thing. I'd made the lead characters too handsome, intelligent or beautiful. In an odd way its something of a compliment, because I always intended Valerius to be strong and likeable. Maeve had to be striking enough to immediately grab his attention and draw him across the cultural divide. One of the fun things for me is creating characters who are my exact opposite, which is why Valerius is tall and clever, with sculpted features and hair he can run his fingers through, not short, bald with a head shaped like a baked potato. So I make no apologies for taking the decisions I did. My question is: when did it become a crime to put good looking people in a book?

The face I liked best on Thursday and Friday wasn't on any of the pretty girls or handsome blokes. She had a heavy forehead, a strong jaw and a nose that took no prisoners, in fact features that were quite mannish. Yet the moment she opened her mouth to speak she turned into a different person: it was like witnessing base metal turn into gold. She seemed to caress every syllable and turn it into a musical note, and it was only when you heard her speak that you noticed that the beauty of her voice was matched by her eyes. I don't know her name, but I suspect she'll be appearing in a novel near you quite soon.

Mistakes, I've made a few ...

I've spent the past week going through the copy-edited manuscript of Defender of Rome. The MS is about three and a half inches thick and made up of 338 pages of A4 that contains, at the last count, around 110,000 lovingly crafted words chronicling the continuing life of Gaius Valerius Verrens, hero of Colonia, after his return to a Rome ruled by an ever-more erratic Emperor Nero.

There are a lot of vital stages in the production of a book, but the copy-edit is right at the top. It's a process that every writer has to go through, and for some it's a chore, but I thought it was worth giving you an idea how it works.

For me it's always a time of part-pleasure, part-frustration. The pleasure comes in knowing the book is another step closer to becoming a reality, and the fact that your character has developed in ways you would never have imagined when you wrote the first novel. The frustration is that I've had to drop my next book, Avenger of Rome, half way through, and that I'm having to face up to the numerous mistakes I made writing Defender.

My copy-editor, Nancy, has a wonderful eye and the Classical education I wish I'd had. She came up with twenty major queries or suggestions, which isn't bad in a complex story of over 100,000 words, and an average of about three minor tweaks (cuts, improvements or corrections) a page, every one of which improves the book in some way. While I checked what she's done (was I tired when I wrote that the world 'spun on its access' or just stupid?) I made my own corrections etc, which amount to a 3,000 word document affecting around 250 of those 338 pages. I'm never sure whether to be pleased I'm able to make such a difference even at this late stage, or embarrassed at the amount of work I've had to do on something I once thought was the finished article. Again, every change should be a further improvement in quality, whether its historical accuracy or the standard of the writing. Bear in mind that this is after my editor, Simon, has taken the novel through a similar process, focussing on the storyline and the writing rather than the facts, and I've probably checked it six or seven times already.

I'll have a chance to give it at least one more read through before I head off next Thursday to do an event with Manda Scott at the Transworld LitFest just outside London, and I already have another few changes in mind. After that, there's only one more stage I'm involved in, the final proof read, and the next time I see it, it will look like this.

Reviews: the dark side

Just a short rant on the subject of reviews again. I was interested in a new book by a Scottish writer that has barely been out for a couple of days and I took a look to see how it was doing on Amazon, as one does when one should be writing.

It was performing pretty well for a debut novelist, which is encouraging for everyone. But I was surprised to see that barely a day after it was out it already had three reviews, all of them five stars, all of them raving about the book and the writer, and all of them written on the same day. The opening lines read:

A page turner from the very beginning.
It made me sit up right from the start.
I was gripped from the start.


The first was by someone who had only ever written a single review, which is always a bit suspicious, but it was the second and third that really got my hackles up. The second reviewer had written seven reviews. Every single one of them was five stars, with not a single flaw to be found in any of the books, and even more incredibly every single book had been published by the same Scottish publishing house. Lo and behold, the third reviewer had written thirteen five star reviews for books by the same publisher as reviewer two.

I think we get the picture. What really annoys me is that I suspect this is a very good novel, by someone who will be a very good author, but I'll never know because I'd never buy a book that seems to be being 'promoted' by something that's the publishing equivalent of a Nigerian inheritance scam. It demeans the writer and it demeans her work and most of all it demeans the people who log on to Amazon expecting to see an honest assessment of the product.

They're our readers and our customers and they deserve better.