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.

Defender of Rome

You wait six months and suddenly two come along at once.

This is the cover of my new G. Valerius Verrens novel, Defender of Rome, which will be published on August 18. Yet again, the designers and Simon my editor have done a fantastic job of producing a package that really adds impact to the storyline. Brilliant!

The story: Valerius reluctantly agrees to hunt down the leader of a mysterious sect which could undermine the whole social foundation of the Empire. But in Nero's court nothing is what it seems and he's soon drawn into a web of conspiracy, intrigue and betrayal that threatens not only his own life, but that of his family and friends.

As hunter becomes hunted the story races to an explosive climax on the shores of the Bay of Naples.

Castles, forts and the Jackson family tree

I was seething into my cornflakes this morning while I was reading this article Mystery of lost Ninth solved in the Mail on Sunday. It's a shameless plug for a new TV show, which itself is shameless piggyback on The Eagle, the second Roman film out this year based on Rosemary Sutcliff's novel Eagle of the Ninth. I've never read so much rubbish about the Romans in my life.

I don't mind any historian jumping onto the back of a movie to publicise himself, but this is about as relevant to history as a Kellogs advert. It's full of stuff we either knew already, has been disproved or is just waffle. Rubbish!

Historian Neil Faulkner, of Channel 4’s Time Team, said: ‘My guess is that the Ninth Legion was destroyed in a carefully executed ambush by northern tribes.'

Well my guess is that they were abducted by aliens and it's based on the same amount of evidence.


It almost makes me pine for Neil Oliver.


*

On a more pleasant note I spent four hours getting soaked, muddy and freezing while I was down in the Borders at the weekend. I had a walk round Lanton Wood, which covers the hill overlooking Jedburgh from the north. It was an old stamping ground of my dad's who lived on the farm at Monklaw when he was a boy.


It's an eery place full of muddy tracks and old logging trails and I hadn't realised it was quite so extensive. I was looking for what was supposed to be a Roman camp, but among the trees I came across an old hill fort I'd never even heard of. Then on the far side of the hill I noticed Timpendean Tower, which I've only ever seen from the Hawick Jedburgh road in the valley below. It's not much of a ruin, but when I went to investigate I discovered it's actually part of a much larger defended complex. Some of the banks and ditches even put me in mind of the Romans.

The tower is sixteenth century and belonged to the Douglas's, who held extensive lands around Jedburgh, where Sir James, the Black Douglas, had a stronghold at Lintalee. The earthworks are a lot earlier, probably from around just after the Norman conquest, but a Greek coin of the second century BC was found nearby, so the Romans were probably around here at one point. It was burned down numerous times during the Border wars, most notably by the Earl of Hertford in 1545 during the Rough Wooing, but always rebuilt until it was abandoned in the eighteenth century.


I love hanging about places like this, but eventually I had to move back into the forest, because I had something special I needed to find. Every family needs a family tree. The Jackson family tree is in Lanton Wood. In an act of tender environmental vandalism my dad carved the name of each of his grandchildren and great grandchildren in the bark of a beech tree. It was a long time since I'd visited it and I wasn't sure how I'd feel when I saw it. When I reached the part of the wood where I knew it was, I wished I'd brought a knife to carve his name in it. It was only when I finally found it that I discovered one of my brothers had been there before me.

The Jackson family tree

*
And finally, anyone who has been on my Facebook author site will already have seen this, but this week I got my first look at the front cover if my new thriller, which will be published under the name James Douglas (no connection to the above Black Douglas - my mum had me christened James Douglas Jackson). The subheads will be updated, but I think it's a real winner.

Some people find it odd that I should write across two genres, but the simple answer is that it keeps me fresh and provides a completely different challenge from historical fiction. The Doomsday Testament  is available for pre-order on Amazon and will be published on August 18