I’m not going to do that thing that I and so many other bloggers do after a protracted absence. You know that nobody has noticed in all probability, because you yourself rarely notice when a blogger you read has disappeared for a little while. You only notice when their name pops up again and you think ‘oh they’ve not posted in a while,’ but then you see the first line of their new post is an apology for not having posted in a while and you think ‘pshh, I hadn’t noticed actually you egotistical so and so.’ But then you go away for a while yourself and sit down to write and think ‘well, it can’t really go uncommented.’ Maybe you wirte something a bit like this paragraph, which is neither one nor the other. Then you re-read it and think about deleting it but then it took ages to write it, so you don’t.

Hi there.

So yeah, been a bit busy. I’ve been writing. Like an actual writer. It’s quite fun! You see what happened is that I finally got round to reading ‘On Writing’ by Stephen King. I grew up reading Stephen King’s books, I think he was the first author I really started to collect, my younger years spend obsessively trying to find the last book of the Green Mile series, or trawling charity shops trying to find a copy of The Stand that wasn’t missing forty pages in the middle. Although these days I haven’t particularly kept up with this I still admire the man, his ability to create worlds full of full characters and twisting plots. I think my work falls into a similar kind of universe, in fact sometimes I have to try very hard with Blood… to make sure I’m not aping The Stand too much, set as it is in a post apocalyptic world of few survivors.

I have always meant to read On Writing, since it is has always been well regarded amongst new writers as a helpful tool (in fact just the other day I heard Radio 2 stalwart and Mark Kermode collaborator Simon Mayo espousing its usefulness while he completed his own first novel) and I was not to be disappointed. King keeps the nuts and bolts stuff to a minimum, tells you to ignore a lot of the waffle you hear about writing and just sit down and write the thing.

There’s also some terrific advice in the book about plotting, or at least it’s useful to me since it confirms that the approach I tend to take is actually not stupid after all, and that letting your characters drive the action through their choices is not a bad way to go. His advice about not letting anyone else into the process until you are at the very least at the end of your first draft is pretty good too. I think I was getting way too hung up on seeking some kind of approval as I went along that I started tinkering around with what I had down already instead of ploughing on.

King recommends a first draft should take no longer than three months and should be completed by writing 2000 words a day, six days a week. Which may be all well and good if you are a multi-millionaire celebrity author with grown up children and a house in the middle of nowhere, but I’m trying to fit writing around a full time job, two young children and needing to retain some semblance of ‘downtime’ for myself. So I’ve adjusted the settings somewhat and am now keeping to a strict writing regimen; 500 words a day, 5 days a week. In particularly hard weeks (such as this one right here) I can let a day or two slide so long as come Sunday night I have a full 2500 words in the bag. By my reckoning my first draft should be pretty well finished in about 30 weeks.

Blimey, that’s a sobering thought.

A month into this endeavour and I’m actually holding up pretty well. The result has been that actually the whole process has gotten easier. No longer do I feel the need to take a run up to a writing session, spending the first hour biffling about on the internet doing anything but writing. Now I find myself spending five minutes choosing my playlist before diving straight in.

So that’s where I’ve been, and in probability it’s where I’ll be for a while.

Sorry.

My shiny new laptop has remained to me a very shiny and lovely thing since I first bought it some months back. Having written a whole NaNoWriMo novel on a tiny netbook with accompanying tiny keyboard some months earlier it has been a delight to be tip-tapping away on something not so reminiscent of a child’s toy. But the night before last my affection for this collection of synthetic materials failed and it turned on me and punished me for daring to have such faith in it. The writing has been a little hard of late, my sporadic sessions rarely bearing more than a couple of hundred words of fruit.

Friday night was a real low point, with a night in the house by myself (and therefore perfect writing conditions) leading to a very paltry 50 word haul. Mind you, I was actually pretty happy with those 50 words, so it wasn’t all bad. Then last night, like a light, I sat down in my new writing environment and 700 words came tumbling out of me. It was bliss, the kind of writing experience that you hope for every single day, where your characters seem to be talking amongst themselves rather than you prodding them with a stick. I came to the end of a chapter, chirruped my success on Twitter and went to start a new chapter, full of enthusiasm and hope at what might be achieved.

At which point the computer froze. We’ve all been there, I’m sure. Those thirty seconds of staring blankly, willing it to somehow unfreeze, which it never does. Then a minute of fervently tapping away at every single key and hacking away at cntrl-alt-del with a wild abandon you’d never normally dare muster. Then finally, blank acceptance and holding down the power key and rebooting with crossed fingers. I sat and rebooted calmly, serenely assuring myself that Open Office’s data recovery would kick in, or that I had pressed save after all. Of course neither of those were true. The auto-recovery opened, then squawked an error message, then gave me back the same document I had opened earlier, unadorned by any of the words I had mustered earlier. There were very nearly tears. There were certainly expletives.

I’ve been here before. Some years back, when internet in the home was a distant dream and laptops were barely functioning copies of their desktop brethren, I entered my first NaNoWrimo contest, and spent thirty days furiously hammering out an odd little tale of psychic children and psychotic farm hands. By the end of the month I had not only my first ever completed longform story, but also the first draft of a novel that I thought was quite promising. I had composed the whole thing on my then girlfriend’s aunt’s laptop, which ran so slowly that you had to turn it on and then go make a hot drink while it booted up. Looking back I imagine that my novel was probably not as good as I thought, but it wasn’t terrible, either. Not that I can tell anymore. The laptop died before I could muster the enthusiasm to get back and re-draft, and in those pre-internet days I didn’t have a single back-up copy of it anywhere. 50,000 words, all gone. It still hurts.

Seeing my words go up in smoke this week, I could easily have given up and headed downstairs to watch Boardwalk Empire, but I grew strong. I was pretty pleased with what had come out last time and knew that if I walked away that whole scene would be gone forever. The dialogue and feel of the scene were still fresh in my mind, and given a day’s distance I wouldn’t have the same feel in my head. So I picked up right where I had before. The pleasant surprise was that half an hour later I had the whole thing back down on paper, perhaps even marginally better than the last attempt. Sure, I had written 1500 words and ended up with 700, but actually I had a pretty good bit of productivity under my belt now. But once I was done, I made damn sure I hit the save button.

In order to aid my effort, I have signed up to GoodReads, which will help me track what I have read this year, as well as let me contribute reviews of those books, which the writer in me will benefit from by trying to get a deeper understanding of what I have read, what I liked and disliked about it, and all that Jazz. I’ll also stick these reviews up here, because I am a shameless whore for self promotion. I’m already on book number three for the year, which sounds impressive until you realise I started the first one last year, the second one is only 200 pages long and I only started the third one today. Not quite as impressive but a good start to the year. I’ve also got a to-read pile that is a nice mix of classics and new, and different genres and levels of accessibility.

American Pyscho – Bret Easton Ellis

The perennial ‘I must get round to reading that’ American Classic, all my information around this book came from the buzz that accompanied the film. As is so often the case everyone who read the book maligned how little of the book’s greatness made it into the film, and since I loved the film I made a mental note to read it someday. While I am now exceptionally glad I did, unlike the film I will not be feeling any need to revisit the book again.

The story of one man’s descent into an utterly unbridled insanity that goes completely unnoticed and unremarked in the greed centred Wall Street scene of the late Eighties, this book has a tremendous sadist’s eye view on the world. Nothing is left aside in Bateman’s life, not the inane conversations about restaurant bookings, the obsession with eighties pop music, or the stomach turning gore drenched descriptions of his killing sprees. After reading the book I had a conversation with someone who loved the book but couldn’t get past the gore. I felt the same, which is why by the end I was skipping whole chunks until things went back to normal (for Bateman anyway) again. In fact, I think this is what Ellis wants us to do. He signposts the need to skip ahead early on when he has Bateman spend five pages of dense unpunctured text going on about Genesis and Phil Collins. To me he is saying to his audience ‘yes this man is utterly unhinged, why don’t you go and make a cup of coffee and when you get back he’ll be back to taunting the homeless or something more interesting.’

The whole book is like one great long diatribe against a cruel and empty world, a world that taunts the unfortunate and the poor, that sees anyone not like them as utterly devoid of merit from a man who looks around him at this world without meaning and jumps to the wrong conclusions about his own place in it. It is both captivating and repulsive, and as the book goes along and Bateman gets less hinged so too does the gore and the madness. The utterly unfulfilling end only adds to the bewildering state the novel left me in. A tour de force of language, of imagination and well worth reading, even if I’ll never want to read it again.

How To Leave Twitter – Grace Dent

As someone who has an often fluid relationship with the world’s greatest networking site I wasn’t sure what I’d make of this going in. The title suggests a missive against social networking and yet it comes from someone who a quick check reveals is still very much ‘on Twitter.’ I also saw that many reviewers found the book preachy and dictatorial over how should behave on Twitter, and non-tweeters might find it all too dense and difficult to get into.

I can kind of see their point to an extent, but I also think they are missing the point entirely. This is an extended ode to God’s own social network, from someone who has a huge amount of affection for it and happens to also be a thoroughly entertaining writer. And that is the point; this is Grace Dent’s view on how the twittersphere should be, based on how she enjoys using it. Because that is what makes Twitter such an enjoyable experience, it is what YOU make of it. You shape your own Twitter experience by choosing what you post, who you follow, it is your own personal corner of the internet. Think someone is irritating on Twitter? Hit the unfollow button and problem solved. Dent’s book is quite vociferous in setting out her opinions of what the do’s and don’ts are of Twitter, but that doesn’t mean you have to live by them.

There are parts of Dent’s Twitter that I don’t recognise at all. She alludes to a constant stream of flirty sexual contact between tweople, but as a man who has been in a relationship since I joined I’ve never partaken, nor seen much evidence of it in my timeline. Or it could be that I’m so utterly dreadful at flirting that I utterly missed the massive amounts of flirtatious behaviour right under my nose. I also disagree hugely with some of the parts where she points out behaviour that she sees as unacceptable on Twitter. I’m pretty sure she’d unfollow me within a couple of days out of boredom. But that doesn’t really matter because that’s her view, not mine, and she puts it across with flair and excellently crafted humour that means that even when I disagree with her I’m still chuckling at her observations.

As a directional tool for how to use Twitter, it’s flawed. Which means it’s a good thing that isn’t what it is. It’s a personal take on a modern phenomenon which will have its audience of Twitter users chuckling at its honesty and its ire, as long as they are not so utterly pompous as to think they themselves have all the answers. I’m pretty sure Grace Dent doesn’t really think she does either, but it’s fun watching her pretend she does.

The urge to do this has been somewhat overwhelming of late. I don’t really know why, apart from never having been all that happy with the opening chapter. Oh, and I have a much better idea of where I’m going now, which will impact the bulk of what I’ve written so far. But all that is for another time, the old second draft. For now I must resist the temptation to start again and take comfort in those bits of the story I’ve already done and keep going into the scary unknown.

On top of this I’ve managed to get a few pieces written for Demon Pigeon, one of which felt like a novel when I wrote it and possibly also the same for the poor few who read the whole thing. It’s strange the two different writing voices that seem to come out of me for the two separate tasks. Blogging for me is all about that foolish and hopefully funny voice within. I take not sounding serious quite seriously. But when it comes to fiction I have a completely different voice, and for a while I wondered if I wouldn’t be better trying to get a bit more of the blogger in the fiction, but I’m coming around to realising there’s nothing wrong with either voice.

My (rather lovely) partner was remarking the other day that I have a really good style for Crime, and I can see what she means even if I have no real interest in delving into that particular genre. I love reading crime fiction when it is well done but I don’t really have the patience to get into the seriously dense and methodical plotting that is required to keep a crime audience on their toes. I have nothing but respect for those who can, but I’m a bit too meandering for all that, which is why I think horror suits me better. That and I seem to take a lot of joy in trying to creep out my readers. Or you know, my eventual readers. But if I have a crime style, I quite like the idea of crossing the two over, which is why I was really pleased to have the character of Burnett suddenly pop into life and join my novel. Now I get to have a detective running around my apocalyptic horror story, and I’m having a lot of fun writing him. So much so that it has made writing my other characters more fun again as well.

Two weeks in then, and in terms of word count I’m not that much closer to the finishing line, but the words are coming, and they’re coming along nicely.

Yes, before you get started it does seem rather odd to be doing a ‘wistful looking back piece’ on a website that is younger even than my son, who has only just learnt to grip things in his hand and spends his days dribbling and looking adorable. But hey, ‘tis the season and all that. 2011 has been a really productive year for me in a writing sense, and so it seems prudent to look at where I’ve been this year, and to see where I want to go in the year ahead.

It’s been a singularly busy year, probably the busiest I’ve ever had. I’ve moved job twice, and spent the first two thirds of the year with an increasingly pregnant partner. This was then followed (predictably enough) with spending the last third with a newborn baby and all the attendant time constraints that places on you. So the fact that I’ve gotten anything done with my writing is something I can be pretty pleased with.

The main thing to celebrate is the fact that Blood On the Motorway (the novel) is in a much healthier place that it was twelve months ago. In fact, back then it was a couple of rough chapters from a completely different story that I was in the process of appropriating as the start of this story. On top of that I had no idea what the story actually was, save for it being a post-apocalyptic tale. Now it is the end of the year, I’m about 30k words in, I’ve got three entirely separate plot threads and a pretty good idea of where those threads are going. My characters are starting to become quite well defined, and overall I’m actually pretty pleased with how it is going.

There’s a long way to go, but now at least I’ve got a sense that it is something worth the effort. I think I’m improving as a writer as well, so by the time I finish this first draft I’ll be in a much healthier place. So on that front, 2011 is a definite success.

That’s not all. This year I’ve really started to take the whole writing thing seriously beyond just the novel itself. I’ve met some like-minded people online and I’ve joined a writing group (even if I’ve not been able to attend for a while) who have been able to give me the constructive criticism of which I’ve always been so terrified. Turns out it’s not so painful, and is a really useful tool. Who Knew? (Oh right, all of you, ok.)

I have started taking an evening class, which has again allowed me to improve my writing style, think differently about where to get inspiration, take on new ideas and actually directly given me an entire plot strand to the book that I wouldn’t previously have had. Not only that but I have learnt more about writing poetry and drama. Together these things have made me feel a part of a writing community I’ve never had any interest in joining before, and has actually validated me in some regard and made me feel that actually this is something I can do. All my years as a writer before this one have been spent very much in a self-imposed isolation, and in the end I had no idea whether I was deluding myself. It’s nice to be told I’m not.

Then there’s this place. Early doors it may be, but over the next year I have some very definite ideas about this fine .com that I hope I’ll be able to bring to fruition. But we’re up and running, and finally this domain is not just an empty space mocking me for paying for its upkeep.

But then that does squarely bring me onto this year’s disappointments.

At the beginning of the year back on my other blog, I set myself the challenge of blogging every day for a year. Well, I didn’t say a year, but that was the ludicrous aim I set myself in my head. Clearly this was never going to come to pass in such an insanely busy twelve months, but once it fell away in March, my blogging activities pretty much ground to a halt. On top of that my overall contributions to Demon Pigeon are in the single digits this year, and as a result of my absence and that of one of the other key people, that site has almost entirely ground to a halt. This is a damn shame because I think it could be a thing of almost majestic beauty and importance. Or at least as much as any website can be given its obsession with Pokémon. But if there is a disappointment to find in 2011, the paucity of my blogging is it.

I’m not going to beat myself up about it too much though, because it is not a lack of ambition that leads me to fall short, but instead a lack of time. Unless someone decides to provide me with a large wad of cash on a regular basis and instruct me to do with it what I will, I suspect that’s not something that is going to change. I just need to be a bit more disciplined in sitting down to do stuff.

So, 2011 good, on the whole, and we haven’t even spoken about the amazing event of becoming a father again and being handed responsibility for another tiny little human and everything marvellous that goes along with that. That’s a post for another time on the other blog. For now I want to look ahead to 2012, and set myself some targets that I can utterly fail to achieve.

1. Finish the first draft. Maybe I’m being a tad optimistic, but I want to have a working first draft in my hand when it comes time to write next year’s retrospective post.
2. Blog more. My blog (which you can find here) needs a bit more love next year. I’m not about to commit myself to the kind of ludicrous target I tried this year, but I must do better.
3. Reanimate the corpse of Demon Pigeon. I’m supposed to be the editor, and that has this year translated to one meeting where everyone came out re-enthused for a week and then activity trailed off again. I think I’m going to need to bring in fresh blood, but next year I’m going to turn things around, by hook or by crook, if for no other reason than I want to get Noel Oxford writing some more of his tremendous album reviews and to stop him writing about Pokémon.
4. Sort out this place. I’m predicting big things. But then I do that a lot. I’ll be happy if I can get readership into double figures at this point. Only kidding. I want to turn this into something more approaching my favourite online writers hangout Do Some Damage, but I need to think some more about how I’m actually going to do that.
5. Read more. Fairly obvious one this one. Good writers are good readers, and I’ve barely managed a book a month this year. I’m ending the year strongly, having read my first Hemmingway, reread the Great Gatsby and now onto American Psycho (on a bit of an American Classics bent as you can see) but still, I need to read more next year, and read more widely.

So that’s my wish list. Check back in twelve months and I’ll inevitably be apologising for not having done any of it, but that is for the future. For now, all is optimism.

When we had to write a free form poem, I suddenly found myself writing a post-apocalyptic poem, with the voice of one of my characters in a place I’ve not even gotten to yet in the plot. Then last week our homework was to create a short story of 1500 words, using a randomly assigned photo as a starting point. I took this and started writing a short crime piece, thinking it would be good to try writing something in the detective mould. By the time I had finished it I had not a short story but a new character introduction for the book, and a whole new plot and narrative arc to the story. Which was a bit unexpected.

So seeing as I then had to present it in class (and because it wasn’t immediately laughed out of the room) I thought there’d be no harm in relaying it here, either. It may or may not make the book in the long run, but I quite liked writing it.

Burnett

Even in the glare of the mid-afternoon sun the doll was hideous. As a harbinger of what was to come it was also very apt, but Detective Burnett wasn’t to know that yet. The truck stop was abandoned, walls burnt out and boarded up, the charred contents stacked up lazily by the side, and there, laying in front of the building, the doll.

Its heritage seemed Victorian, at least that was what the blood flecked dress suggested to him. The hand looked mauled, like some wild dog had toyed briefly with devouring it before giving up and discarding it. The paint on the face was mottled and worn, the expression one of panic. From where the detective was standing it was as though the doll was reacting to the scene of devastation behind her, to the charred human leg jutting out of the shrubbery, or the four human corpses that lay beyond that.

And yet for all that he knew it to be an irrelevance, he could not tear his eyes away from the discarded porcelain and focus on the job at hand. He turned to the uniformed officer beside him, who seemed to be struggling to retain his lunch.

‘Bag it,’ he said coldly, motioning to the doll. The officer seemed to be pleased to have been given a distracting task, and hurried off for an evidence bag. Burnett knelt down so his face was nearly at eye level with the doll.

‘What did you see?’ he asked it quietly. He heard a snigger, but as he looked up everyone suddenly looked very busy. Fuck them, he thought to himself. This was his fourth straight murder scene in a row, and he’d been up 24 straight hours. By comparison, this lot were the new shift. They knew nothing of the things he’d seen today. Last night, today, it all blended into one now. Anger rose up in him, but he knew it was nothing more than exhaustion and beat it down. Officer Evidence was back, so Burnett got back to his feet, his knees popping as he did so.

Fuck this, he thought again, walking over to the pile of bodies. He’d never known a day like it. Four bodies in the car park of a drive through McDonalds, among the rotting food waste. Four more in an old people’s home, at first glance all the hallmarks of a Shipman enthusiast. Then four teenagers found butchered in a car off just outside of town, and now this. If he knew that in less than four hours he’d also be facing the apocalypse then maybe he wouldn’t have put the effort in, but like everyone else he wasn’t to know, so forlornly he set his gaze to the fresh bodies.

He felt utterly depleted. Like the other scenes, there was little here to suggest much of anything, save that there was at least one utterly sadistic bastard running around his small town. Two years since the last murder. He’d even had to justify his job at the last performance review, a trumped up high-up from the county force asking him if his talents wouldn’t be more suited to helping Traffic catch idiot upper class toffs speeding in their four by fours. Now this. It never rains but.. The thought petered out as he caught sight of a gold bracelet on the ground.

He couldn’t do it any more, that much seemed clear to him now, as he rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. He went around the scene and took notes on a little pad, but they were disjointed. How could anyone make sense of this kind of scene? It was too heavy.

After an hour the dark was falling, the late autumnal dusk creeping in around them all without them noticing. In two more hours an electrical storm would light up the sky, and ten minutes later the twelve corpses Burnett had seen today would seem like a drop in the ocean.

The evidence was collected, and his notes now ran to nearly a full pad. Someone was putting up a marquee tent now, and there was starting to be a media presence, even the local rags having been caught out by the day’s events. Burnett walked slowly past them and back to his car. He sat on the cold leather for a moment and tried to collect his thoughts. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

His phone rang. He stared at it a second, dreading the thought that this might yet be another call to a crime scene. It was the station. He hit accept.

‘Burnett,’ he said, his voice catching in his throat.

‘Get back here,’ came the voice of his Captain. ‘We’ve got him.’ The line went dead.

On the verge of sleep deprived nausea, he drove back along country lanes at a ridiculous speed. He got back to the station just as the sky was starting to bruise.

‘What happened?’ he demanded of the desk clerk as he burst through the doors.

‘He came in and handed himself in,’ she said in a thick Norfolk brogue, the shock still evident on her face. ‘Covered head to foot in blood he was, just said he wanted to confess.’

‘Where is he now?’ Burnett asked, his head a mixture of relief and anger. Relief at having caught the bastard, anger at not getting the chance to do so himself.

‘Interrogation room,’ she said, and Burnett flashed her a quick smile and a ‘good work officer’ before storming through the doors.

Captain Thornton was waiting for him.

‘You’ve had a rough day,’ he said. Burnett nodded grimly. ‘It’s about to get rougher. He’s admitting to the lot but I want a full and detailed confession, and I want it on tape. You got it?’ Burnett nodded again. ‘Don’t fuck it up Burnett,’ came his Captain’s final endorsement as he opened the door to the interrogation room and the monster held within.

Burnett could barely look at the man sat opposite him. Smallish man, glasses. If he had to chose a word it would have been unassuming. If he weren’t caked in dried blood Burnett would have assumed the wrong man was sat in front of him. Burnett sat down opposite and performed the necessary taped introductions. When he was done, he finally looked up, and caught the eyes of the man. Deep black pools, like oil slicks.

‘So, for the record can I take your name?’

‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ The voice was calm, even. Burnett didn’t feel like rising to the bait.

‘Ok, so Mr Worlds, tell me a little bit about why you came here today.’

The man fixed him with a half curled smirk.

‘Why? Because I have done some very bad things, but because they are not going to matter very soon, and because I didn’t want you to die knowing you hadn’t caught me.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I can be quite generous like that.

‘So you think I am going to die then?’ asked Burnett, not remotely concerned.

‘Not just you,’ came the reply. ‘Everyone.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m not going to die.’

‘And why not.’

‘Well I would call it divine providence. But you can just as easily call it blind luck.’

Burnett shook his head in amusement. He wasn’t even sure this piece of shit was the right person, or some lunatic deluded fool who watched the local news and smeared himself in pigs blood to fuck with him.

‘Ok, well let’s put that aside for the moment shall we?’ Burnett said, conscious of the crowd who would be watching this on the station CCTV loop. ‘Tell me about the very bad things you have done.’

‘Oh, I don’t think we really have time,’ came the reply, and the man across the table looked at his watch. Burnett heard a rumble, deep enough to shake the walls. There was commotion outside, he could hear people rushing back and forth in the corridor.

If Burnett hadn’t been locked in this room with this man, if he had been outside in the dark night, he would have seen an electrical storm that sent great arcs of lightning dancing in the sky. But all Burnett knew was that a sudden pain had appeared in his head, momentarily knocking him out of his train of thought. He looked at the man again, who was now appraising him with a serene look of expectation.

Burnett felt a trickle of thick blood hit his top lip. He panicked, and sprang up from his chair. He reached for his keys to the interrogation room, but as he pulled the door open he was shocked by the scene beyond him. All around him people were falling down to their knees, their faces smeared in their own blood. He too was on his knees now,and as he slumped to the floor, the last thing he saw was the man in the bloodied clothes stepping over him, and the last thing he heard before the ringing in his ears overwhelmed his senses was one line;

‘Told you.’

Mind you, when I look back on that first novel, it’s hardly surprising that the plot fell into my head so easily. I mean, when you are dealing with a kid with telepathic powers on the run from government agencies and escaped from a secret government facility, and then have him hiding in the same town as a deranged serial killer with severe absent mother issues and the strength of a drunken rugby team, then it’s inevitable that the telepathic kid will use his powers to catch the murderer, thus endearing him to the local constabulary enough for them to engineer his escape from the aformentioned government scientists, right?

I said I did plot. I didn’t say anything about doing good plot.

Nonetheless, perhaps it is my advancing years, maybe it is my severely diminished mental capacity. Maybe it’s all the years I spent smoking weed and watching Buffy, but for some reason I’ve had a real plot problem of late. As I approached Blood On The Motorway I had a very definite start point in my mind, which traditionally has been all I need. Not this time. Recently it occurred to me that I was 25,000 words into the novel, and had no clue what was going to happen in it, which as you might imagine somewhat depressed me. I had been thinking all this time that a shiny plotline would just show up and announce itself and beckon me to jump on board and take my characters for a spin.

Nothing.

Worse than that, in the absence of any real plot I was treading water. Everything I was doing with my characters was episodic, not driving anything forwards. Given that the subject matter is somewhat post-apocalyptic then you can forgive a certain amount of episodic problem solving, but the lack of direction was killing me. I asked around on the Twitters and got much advice along the lines of keep writing and see what turns up. As one put it, ‘plot happens.’

Unfortunately I had already utterly drained that well.

So I decided to take a new approach, and wrote out what I had in plot terms already into short pithy sentences, pure plot only, no character notes. But I stopped when I got to where I already was, save for planning maybe the next scene. Then I stared at the screen for a while. I went onto Twitter to distract myself. Then stared at the screen again. After a while it occured to me to throw the laptop out the window.

Then my good lady came and had a look. Normally I hate people giving me specific plot advice, but I was desperate. Being the rather splendid lady that she is she cut straight to the nub of it and asked me one simple question. ‘Do you have a bad guy?’

It hadn’t even occurred to me that my characters would need an adversary beyond the circumstances they found themselves in. I had discarded any supernatural tint to the story, and in doing so had jettisoned any adversaries at all, a rather rash and foolish decision.

Quickly plot ideas came tumbling out of my head, and before long I had one complete story arc, and ideas for two more. Suddenly I need a lot more characters to fill up the action, and while I still don’t quite have my end point in mind, I have enough plot threads that if I start pulling at them all an ending is likely to fall out.

So, plot happens, that much is true, it’s just sometimes it takes a slightly different way of looking at it to see the obvious. Now if you’ll excuse me I have some bad guys to invent.

Well hello there. So this is the first post here at Blood on the Motorway. You must be wondering what this is all about, or at least I imagine you are at least vaguely curious, given that you’ve gone to all the trouble to click on the link and that. The best way to explain is through some tedious expositionary backstory.

I bought the URL www.bloodonthemotorway.com a few years back, for the reason that I was writing a novel called Blood On The Motorway, and the idea I had at the time was that I would publish the novel myself through the said website in serialised form. The problem was that I was still writing it, and I wanted to get a bit further with said writing before publishing. But then I discovered that writing a novel, an actual proper novel, is quite a lot harder than one might imagine. So it was an age before I had enough to start putting up. By the time I got to that place, howver, I decided I hated the serialisation idea, and actually just wanted to write the bloody thing.

Also, the more I wrote, the more I started to learn about writing, and the more I realised I had a long way to go. Now this isn’t my first time round the writers block, not even the first novel that has spewed forth from my fingers, but it was the first one I really cared about, and the first time I have started to take myself seriously. As it stands I’ve been working on this story for a good four years now and I’m currently sat on about 30,000 words. I have changed stories, erased whole chapters, rewritten things until they were only a fraction as interesting as things I wrote before. Writing is hard.

So that is half of the story. The other half is that I’ve been a blogger for the best part of a decade now, back from around the time when blogs were mainly howls of impotent angst shouted into Livejournal (Ican legitimately say this as this was where I started) and so when I first bought this site it made perfect sense to move my blog from squatting on my friend’s server and lodge it here, which I did. In a moment of obvious genius I rechristened it Blog On The Motorway (I know, I’m brilliant, aren’t I?) and you can find it here, if you aren’t already one of the seven people who read it.

One thing my blog has never been, however, is a single issue blog. I talk about essentially anything that falls out of my brain, and of late that has often meant blogging about writing the book. Now I don’t imagine for one second that many of my regular readers are that bothered about reading how I’ve gotten bogged down in plot, or am having trouble finding the voice of one of my characters but until today it had never occurred to me that I have a perfectly good place to vent all my feelings about writing, leaving the rest of my blog free and clear to wax lyrical about Vin Diesel films. To boot, I also end up with what I’ve always suspected I needed, a single issue blog.

So, tedious backstory out of the way, the more I thought about moving all my writing related blogging here, the more I thought it might be a good idea. Since I started taking the writing a lot more seriously I’ve started finding some excellent writing blogs out there, but these tend to be by successful people who are handing down the advice they have. That’s not me. If you’ve come here as a struggling writer, then you have found instead someone who is going through the same things. I might not have the answers, but I think sharing the pain is just as important.

Through the joys of Twitter (@formulaic666 if you’re interested) and writing groups and such, I’ve also met a number of rather lovely people in the same position, amongst them some clearly very talented people, and though they don’t know it yet I’ll also be plaguing them for some guest posts, and if you are in the same position then I want to hear from you too. It seems to me that there’s strength in numbers, and support is every bit as good as advice.

So that’s about it, my rather confused mission statement. For those of you who only came from my blog, have no fear, that will trundle along at its normal molasses-esque pace. To any other aspiring writers out there, don’t be shy, please say hello.