Notes I Never Wrote – Rafe McGregor

 

A Note on Notes

When I realised I’d published twenty books in twenty years (or, more accurately, will have twenty published or ‘in press’ by the time the anniversary arrives in a few weeks), my next goal was to have all twenty available in one form or another. Thanks to a belated and reluctant engagement with Kindle, I’ve now done that, with the five books that were published as large print paperbacks from 2008 to 2011 available on Amazon as of last month. They are all short and belong to two trilogies of short books. The Captain Jackson crime and espionage thrillers were all published in 2008 (ignoring my two amateurish attempts at self-publishing): The Secret Policeman (a novella), The Secret Agent (a collection of six short stories, originally published from 2007 to 2008), and The Secret Service (another novella). The two Forgotten Stories short horror collections form a trilogy with John Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in March 2010): Eight Weird Tales (September 2010, tales originally published from 2007 to 2010) and Six Strange Cases (February 2011, two of the cases originally published in 2009). These have been available on Kindle since 2024.

As I was putting the finishing touches on The Secret Agent, I realised that the three short story collections were published before a habit I subsequently adopted in imitation of Stephen King, including notes as a postscript. I prefer this to a foreword as there’s no need to avoid spoilers and I love reading other writer’s notes because they often mention the inspiration or origin of the stories – something about which most writers (and many readers) are curious. I wrote a short introduction to Eight Weird Tales, where I identified Conan Doyle, M.R. James, Anthony Hope, and H.P. Lovecraft as my inspirations, but it was so dull that I left it out of the Kindle edition. Instead, I thought I’d present the notes I never wrote here, excluding those on the two Roderick Langham stories, which were collected in The Adventures of Roderick Langham (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in 2017, complete with notes). That leaves all six stories from The Secret Agent, seven from Eight Weird Tales, and five from Six Strange Cases. 

The Secret Agent

Two: The Captain Jackson stories were all written in a two-year period from 2004 to 2006 and professionally published from 2007 to 2008. As such, they are my oldest work, fiction and nonfiction included, and full of the usual mistakes one associates with a novice author. ‘Two’ was my first published short story, appearing in Hardluck Stories at the beginning of 2007 and is the only one in this collection not to feature Jackson (though I made a weak attempt to frame it as what might now be called a spinoff). It was never intended to be part of the collection, but I needed a sixth story to include and the one I was working on, which would have seen Jackson in Boston, was taking too long to write. I started another one, set in Geneva, but didn’t finish that either and decided to use what I already had, i.e. ‘Two’. The inspiration for the story was something that nearly happened, didn’t, and made me think about what might have happened.

Clock Work: At the core of each of the stories in The Secret Agent is a single action scene and, in retrospect, I was very naïve to assume that writing these well would be enough to sell them for professional rates. The scene at the centre of this story was inspired by the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by two Special Operations Executive agents, in Prague-Libeň in June 1942. I learned about it from a military history magazine that would inspire several short stories and articles, which I first read in a Starbucks in Oxford, which explains the setting. Heydrich was probably the most dangerous of all of Hitler’s inner circle and would later be the subject of a Roderick Langham memoir, The Naval Cadet. The story was also published as ‘Murder by Numbers’.

Contre Temps: Many of the locations in The Secret Agent (and The Secret Service) were places that my wife and I visited while on holiday in our first few years of living together. (We lived near an airport in the days of the 99p ticket.) This narrative was inspired by a disappointing trip to Quebec. (In fairness, Quebec was fine; it was Quebec City that was a disappointment.) ‘Contre Temps’ was the first time I tried something different with the Jackson short stories because the action scene at its core never happens: Megan misses Jackson in consequence of her monolingualism, which almost certainly works out better for both her and Ashley (yes, this is the spinoff connection). While I don’t think it’s the best, it is the most widely read of all the Jackson stories courtesy of its appearance in a trade paperback collection of crime fiction.

Fall Guy: I think it’s fair to say that most inspiration for stories, whether they end up being long or short, requires a minimum of two sources, a literal coincidence of some sort. In this case, the combination was a misadventure while skiing and reading Tess Gerritsen’s The Apprentice (2002), the second novel in her Rizzoli & Isles series. I can’t remember which came first, but it doesn’t matter because the second event resonated with the first and I had enough to start writing. Subsequently, I was lucky enough to meet Dr Gerritsen briefly. A clever, kind, charming woman who is very generous with her time and was treated appallingly by Alfonso Cuarón and Hollywood with regard to the blockbuster feature film, Gravity (2013). Her chapter in Hollywood vs. the Author (2018) is quite harrowing.

The Secret Agent: This is the longest Jackson short story at eight and a half thousand words and might be more accurately categorised as a novelette, i.e. somewhere in between a short story and a novella. ‘The Secret Agent’ is the first and only time I’ve set out to write a narrative of that length and it was also the first of all eight of the Jackson stories to be professionally published (The Secret Policeman and The Secret Service were both initially self-published, in 2005 and 2006 respectively). The scene at its core is a story told to me by a colleague some years before the writing and to this day I’m still not sure if he made it up or not. The coincidence that turned a scene into a story was the 7/7 bombings, during which my wife and I were in London (albeit very far from harm).

Hit and Miss: The last Jackson story to be written and published and the last in the chronology, which is: The Secret Policeman, ‘Clock Work’, ‘Contre Temps’, ‘Fall Guy’, ‘The Secret Agent’, and The Secret Service. The inspiration is the most banal of any of these notes. While possessed of many virtues, not the least of which is putting up with me for so long, my wife is indeed messy. She left a hammer outside the garage one day. I picked it up with thoughts of how it could have been used to break into the garage or house and then reversed direction, thinking how fortuitous it would have been if it had been left on the other side of a break-in. By the time this happened, I’d already been considering how many of Jackson’s enemies might want to interrupt his retirement and how they would go about it.

Eight Weird Tales

The Letters of Reverend Dyer: As will be apparent from both The Adventures of Roderick Langham and The Memoirs of Roderick Langham (forthcoming from Theaker’s Paperback Library), I’ve been fascinated by Whitby, the Yorkshire Coast, and North-East Yorkshire in its entirety for a long time. This story was inspired by Whitby, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu cycle, and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s ‘The Drowned Geologist (1898)’, which was first published in Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! in 2003. I spent a very enjoyable day researching it at the Whitby Museum, which was then and is still run by the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society. ‘The Letters of Reverend Dyer’ was my first attempt at writing speculative fiction.

Fleet: The inspiration was a curious combination of unrelated things: my return to university as a mature student, James’ ghost stories, a comment I’d read about one of his stories (I can’t remember either which story or where I read the comment), and an interest in medieval military orders. Though I visited the location of the final scene, I couldn’t see any sign of the Templar priory at all and remain unsure as to whether I was in exactly the right place. After my wife and I moved to the East Riding of Yorkshire, I spent some time exploring the surrounds, but many of these excursions were conducted in haste and at a time when information on the internet was relatively limited and smartphones restricted to the rich.

The Signal Station: One of the locations I did manage to find and visited several times over many years of days and occasionally nights spent in Scarborough. Not the least of the fascinations of North-East Yorkshire for me is the Roman occupation, although very little evidence of it remains. The inspirations are Lovecraft again, the series of comics and graphic novels that feature the Irish hero Sláine MacRoth and were first published in 2000 AD in 1983 and in Warrior’s Dawn in 2005, and the first year of my postgraduate studies. I did attempt to visit all of the signal station sights in my travels, but – once again – can’t be certain if I wasn't in the wrong place for one or two of them. The story was also published as ‘The Chapel on the Headland’ and is revisited in ‘The Screaming Man’.

Devil’s Own: Another location I visited, though my tour of the Towton battlefield was very haphazard and probably missed at least one important site. While the UK’s most brutal battle can hardly be called banal, the coincidence that inspired the story was, simply, that either shortly before or shortly after my excursion, I saw a military history book with ‘blood-soaked soil’ in the title. (I can’t remember which title and I’m sure there are many anyway.) A more insightful observation might be that another of my fascinations with North-East Yorkshire is the way in which there is so much under the soil – foundations, fossils, gemstones, and…bones. The story was also published as ‘Black Mac Sween’ and is revisited in ‘The Red Trees’.

Spurn: The geography and history of Spurn (the Spurn peninsular) and Spurn Point (Spurn Head) are both intriguing and I won’t bore readers with either here. Like Towton, I know I found the right place but am less certain that I saw everything I came for. The location aside, the inspiration was a combination of several things: a pamphlet I picked up somewhere in the East Riding about the drowned city of Ravenser Odd, Mark Valentine’s notes on one of his Connoisseur short stories (I can’t remember where the notes were published), and some very shoddy historical research on my part. In 2022, the precise location of Ravenser Odd was discovered and there was an exhibition at the Hull History Centre in 2024. Unfortunately, by that time I was living on the other side of the country and wasn’t able to visit. The story was also published as ‘The Stones at Spurn Point’.

Murder in the Minster: This is a Ruritanian pastiche and its inspirations are: Hope’s originals, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), Rupert of Hentzau (1895), and the lesser known The Heart of Princess Osra (1896); the various homages that have followed, including John Haythorne’s The Strelsau Dimension (1981) and John Spurling’s After Zenda (1995); and a website called The Ruritanian Resistance. If anyone notices a correspondence between Rassendyll and Bauer on the one hand and Forrester and Jackson on the other, it’s because this story could – and perhaps should – have been another Jackson outing. At the time of writing, I was disappointed with the lack of commercial success I was having and thought I’d try something different. The location is based on a visit to Howden Minster, which also appears in ‘Spurn’.

Letter from the Helmand: This is the most unlikely source of inspiration I can imagine and also the most shameful. I went through a brief stage of reading the autobiographies of retired generals, which were usually disappointing as most had prioritised promotion over action and most toed the party line in their narratives because they had too much to lose. One of my selections was It Doesn't Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (1992), which I read shortly before or after reading about the first combat death of a British soldier during the War in Afghanistan (in 2006). Schwarzkopf mentions a story he wrote while at West Point, in which he deliberately and cleverly conflated two wars nearly two millennia apart. I pretty much plagiarised the whole thing, compounding my crime by plagiarising Doyle, who begins his most famous series with a military doctor returning from…Afghanistan.

Six Strange Cases 

The Short Spoon: This was originally intended to be the first in a mystery series that would feature a retired police detective and have more of a commercial appeal than the Jackson short stories. The problem was that even in its leanest version the story was a novelette, significantly limiting the paying markets to which it could be submitted. At about the same time, I started what was intended to be a noir novel, one that might end up as either a crime thriller with an occult atmosphere or an occult thriller with a detective protagonist. The retired detective mystery was absorbed into the Titus Farrow novel, which gave me about sixteen thousand words of work-in-progress. When my literary agent couldn’t sell Bloody Reckoning (eventually published by Lume Books in 2017), I suggested The Short Spoon, but she wasn’t interested in anything that crossed genres. I didn’t want to waste all that writing, however, and thought it could be published in a collection rather than a magazine, which was how Six Strange Cases was conceived.

Meet El Presidente: ‘The Facts of the Demon Barber’s Demise’ aside, ‘Meet El Presidente’ is probably my worst short story and its origin is at least partly responsible for that. In contrast, there is nothing wrong with the inspiration: over a decade, I kept coming across the phrase ‘el presidente’ in unusual and incompatible contexts (unusual if you don’t speak Spanish, which I don’t) and started thinking about whether there was a thematic link. I could have made a respectable narrative out of that idea given enough time, but I was in a rush to publish Six Strange Cases. So I combined the offcuts of The Short Spoon that I hadn’t used in ‘The Short Spoon’ with parts of an unfinished story that was called ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ and threw it all into something that was more pot than plot. All unfortunate because the inspiration was promising and ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ was shaping up to be one of my better tales.

The Month of the Wolf: Very obviously inspired by my many visits to and stays in Whitby and my longstanding interest in the Black Dog phenomenon. Less obviously, the story has its origins in a cycle of stories that begins with Lovecraft’s ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1936), continues with Robert Bloch’s ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1950), and concludes (for now) with Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories. Like almost everything in this collection and much of what I was writing at the time, this was rushed to publication and I felt I’d once again wasted a promising premise. I was thus very pleased to have a revised and improved version, ‘The Barghest’, published several years later. I have a third version planned, though I doubt I’ll ever write it.

Blue Mail: Notwithstanding the Roderick Langham adventure in Six Strange Cases, this is the only story that was previously published. Notwithstanding a different Roderick Langham adventure, ‘Blue Mail’ is also the best short fiction I have written. That surprises me for at least two reasons. First, I’ve already explained the dubious origins of Farrow in my notes on ‘The Short Spoon’ and ‘Meet El Presidente’. He was my attempt to write noir, which is not my forte, and the first and third narratives in which he appeared were bits and pieces cobbled together from unfinished work. What were the chances this outing would be any better? Second, I have absolutely no idea what inspired ‘Blue Mail’ other than several pleasant visits to Cornwall and St Ives. What turns another pedestrian outing for Farrow into something that I hope is quite good is the ‘twist’ in the middle, who is blackmailing whom, and I just can’t remember how or why it came to me.

The Facts of the Demon Barber’s Demise: I’m pretty sure this is my worst short story. It was rejected everywhere I sent it, including by a publication that was specifically seeking absurd, nonsense, bizarre, or surreal stories (whose title escapes me now). It is also my only attempt to write flash fiction and that’s probably for the best. Having said all that it hardly seems to matter what my inspiration was, but I may as well finish the full set of notes. Once again, there was a coincidence and this particular combination was learning about Russell’s paradox (sets that are not sets of themselves) in a logic class shortly after watching Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), which my wife enjoyed but I didn’t. No, I didn’t force her to read the story as payback and no, I still don’t understand Russell’s paradox.

November novel-writing: a few thoughts about what worked well this year

I didn't officially take part in Nanowrimo this year -- I deleted my account earlier in the year in dismay at their tweets about J.K. Rowling -- but in November I always write novels, and that didn't change. This year, I finished two novels off, Rolnikov the God, which I began writing in November 2019, and We Slept Through the Apocalypse, which I began back in November 2008. Finishing a book on which I'd been stuck for so long made me very happy, and that means I've now finished writing eleven of these daft novels. I think I'm going to keep going, and see if I can finish a few more, after catching up on my book reviews.

Anyway, for my own future reference as much as anyone else's interest, here are a few of the things that worked for me this month, roughly in order of where they came in the writing process:

Leaving Twitter and Facebook. I left Twitter and Facebook at the beginning of November and stayed off completely until I had finished a novel. To be honest, I wish I had stayed off until I had finished both novels. It's not just reading the posts on social media that is a drag on concentration -- though Twitter especially does offer a never-ending succession of interesting people with interesting thoughts -- it's writing my own posts, and then thinking about the responses to my posts, and then thinking about how to respond to those responses. I spent an entire week earlier this year arguing about the canonical sexuality of Velma from Scooby-Doo, for example. All thinking time better invested in the novels. I've become a big fan of just reading Twitter on the television, via the Fire TV stick, not logged in. It becomes like reading a newspaper then, much more enjoyable, with no sense of an obligation to respond to anything.

Moleskine squared cahiers. I love these. I've been using them for a few years now. I have one for each novel. I draw a front cover and write a blurb for the back cover, both of which help keep me focused on what the book is supposed to be about. The first few double-page spreads are for brainstorms, character lists, maps, mysteries that need to be resolved, and other things I need to remember. Then each chapter gets a double-page spread. On the left-hand pages go the things that are supposed to happen in that chapter, and on the right go the things that did actually happen, if different. It's so useful having my notes in these self-contained little booklets. I can take them anywhere, and they make it immensely easier to resume writing an unfinished book. I've just ordered another set of three, to help me finish off The Mysteries of Mygret Zend, The Triumphs of the Two Husbands and I Couldn't See Past the Spider.

Routine. I got into a very nice routine this year, helped, I have to admit, by one of our children having to quarantine in her room after being in close contact with a Covid-19 carrier. (Don't worry, both children seem to be fine.) That meant I didn't have to get up early with her, and also that the other daughter was sleeping on the sofa, so I couldn't play on the Xbox after half nine or so. Every night I would go in my office between nine and ten, start writing, and carry on till that chapter was done. I like writing in the mornings too, but that's a bit harder without a pub to go to, and if I don't get a chapter done in the morning it can be a drag on the whole day.

The Freewrite and the Freewrite Traveler. I wrote for most of the month on the original Freewrite, and then switched seamlessly to the Freewrite Traveler when that superb device arrived. Using the same device every day helped me to get into a routine, and it helped that the Freewrites are focused entirely on writing. There's literally nothing else you can do on them. When I sat down to write, everything else was already switched off and the Freewrite was waiting for me.

Alexa. I set up a routine on Alexa called Novel writing, with music. It tells me to write a hundred words, then plays a long, wordless song for seven and a half minutes, which is usually more than enough for me to write a hundred words. Then it tells me to aim for two hundred words and plays another long, wordless song, and so on until I reach my target of 1666 words for the day and the chapter. It's like putting myself on a train track. Once I'm on, I can't get off, I just have to keep going till I reach the station.

Hundred-word chunks. It's hard to write 1666 words, but it's easy to write 100. I marked each 100 words off with a cross on that chapter's page of the cahier.

Treats. Each 100 words earned me a treat. I'm getting a bit sick of Haribos at this point, but I finished two novels so they seem to have done the trick!

Playing cards. After each 100 words I also get to turn over a playing card. (I do the same thing with proofreading, where I turn over a playing card for each page read.) This acts as a surprise and a treat, but I think it also provides a physical manifestation of progress through a project that you don't get when writing or reading digitally. I have various sets of playing cards that I use (Doctor Who, James Bond, Star Wars, Judge Dredd, etc), but this year I mainly used a (possibly unlicensed) set that featured paintings of Tarzan, John Carter, Game of Thrones and Vampirella.

The Kindle. I have things set up so that when I finish the chapter, and press the SEND button on my Freewrite, it gets automatically forwarded to my Kindle. It was such a pleasure to go to bed each night knowing that I would have a new chapter of my own novels to read! I wouldn't recommend them to anyone else, but I find them hilarious. I would annotate the chapter while reading, then in the morning take in those corrections to the text file. It was good preparation for writing the next chapter, but also meant the novels were in pretty good shape by the time I finished writing them. Expect to see them in future issues of TQF!

Not reading anything else. I didn't read other books this month. I got that out of my system in October! I read the new chapters of my books, and the old chapters of those books, and chapters of other books I've written about the same characters. That meant I was constantly refreshing my memory of their lives, and noticing details I could work back into the story. It also meant that I didn't get drawn into thinking about other people's plots instead of mine, or get distracted by writing book reviews instead of fiction.

Well, that went badly. #nanowrimo

My November novel ran out of steam after about four thousand words this year, then I had the lead character start reading some chapters from another novel of mine (chapters I was writing specially for him to read), and that got me another six thousand words or so, making about ten thousand words in total. Disastrous! So, Stephen Theaker of 2017, here's where I think you went wrong in 2016:

• You didn't do a chapter plan. This always works very well for you, so why didn't you do it this time? I suspect it's because you knew it would be hard because you didn't have a plot. You knew what the book was going to be about, what its theme would be, but you didn't think about what would actually happen from one chapter to the next. Next time plan the whole thing from start to finish, at least vaguely.
• You did that thing again, that you do every time, where you begin the novel with a character on their own, with no one to talk to, in a featureless location where nothing is happening! In 2017 start your book with twenty people having an argument in a ghost house or something.
• You tried to write a novel based on stuff that you were still quite fed up about, so whenever you tried to think about the novel you just got fed up about the thing you were fed up about, all over again. That didn't work. Don't do it next time.
• You refused to relinquish the hour or so you spend watching tv each evening with your lovely lady wife. Yes, it's been great for your relationship over the last twenty years to have that time together each evening, drinking hot chocolate and laughing, crying, etc depending on the show, but if that had been sacrificed you'd have had another 30 hours or so to write your novel. And it only takes you about 50 hours to write your stupid little novels.
• You forgot how much your own books make you laugh. Yes, they're terrible, but you should have had a read of one before this month started to remind yourself how hilarious you (if no one else) find them, to encourage you to write another, for your own entertainment if no one else's.
• Your protagonist and your antagonist were the wrong way around. Yes, you wanted to write a novel about someone making a lot of bad decisions leading to a galactic disaster, but wouldn't you have found it much easier to write about the adventures of the chap being put in a series of tight spots by those bad decisions? There's a reason Spider-Man is the star of the comic book rather than J. Jonah Jameson.
• You made the classic error of planning to write less Monday to Friday and more over the weekends. November is birthday season! You aren't writing more at the weekends. You're struggling to write anything! In 2017, stick to the plan: 1666 words a day, every day.

Well, Stephen of 2017, I hope you take all of that on board, and do a better job than you did this time. I have my doubts, given that this year you didn't read any of the brilliant advice I left for me in previous years…

Freewrite: first impressions

Yesterday it finally happened! My Freewrite (originally known by the more distinctive name the Hemingwrite) arrived! Anyone who follows me on Twitter, or has not yet unfollowed me on Facebook, or indeed has stood next to me at a bus stop, is bound to have seen my excitement about this device.

It is basically an upgrade of the wonderful Alphasmart, which got me through the writing of a fair few novels, or going back even further the Sharp Fontwriter on which I bashed out Professor Challenger in Space: a dedicated writing device.

Where it scores over the Alphasmart is that it has a proper keyboard, and the files are backed up constantly to the web. I loved my Alphasmart (and still do, I'm not about to throw it away), but I would rarely have chosen to use it at home in preference to Scrivener and my Das Keyboard. The Freewrite shares the Alphasmart's portability, single purpose focus, and long battery life. To those it adds an e-ink screen that can be read outdoors. And where the Freewrite scores over the Sharp Fontwriter is that it doesn't have a big heavy printer built in!

So, what are my first impressions?

I like it a lot. I'm writing this blog post on it, and it's a really nice typing experience. The screen is easy to read whether I lean back or lean forward, and the keys aren't as noisy as I had expected – it's much quieter than my Das Keyboard, while being just as nice to type on. You probably wouldn't want to take it into a quiet meeting, but no one will hear it over the racket of a Nanowrimo write-in at a coffee shop.

(Oh, how sales of this device will soar once that crowd sets their eyes on it!)

The only big problem so far for me is that the device hasn't shipped with the promised Dvorak support in place, which reduces its usefulness dramatically for now. I can tap out a blog post or book review in Qwerty, but it'd be a pain doing a whole novel like that. Never mind, though, because the manufacturers have said it's coming soon, and you can understand why building and shipping the physical devices will have been their focus up till now.

Another slight niggle is that the frontlight, a last minute addition to the device, which is a great option to have, can't be turned off. It's not like the Kindle Ghostlight, which was totally spoilt by the permanent green tinge of its frontlight, but I'm glad that the option to turn it off is on the way.

Would I recommend the Freewrite?

That depends on how you go about your writing. If you like to start at the first word and keep typing till you reach the last word, like I do when I'm writing novels and my shorter TQF reviews, you'll like it, and probably adore it, if you can spare the cash. It'll fit the way I write to a tee.

If, however, you're the kind of writer who writes a line, then goes back to add something to the previous paragraph, then goes back to the beginning to tweak that, you'll find it practically useless, because there are no cursor keys. The only way of going back into the text is to use the backspace button. There are page up and page down buttons, but just for looking back over your text, not for editing. That suits me fine, it keeps me moving forward, but it's not for everyone, especially at this price.

Is it going to be the life-changing device I thought it would be when I bought it? Might be, once it has the Dvorak layout. Just knowing it's always there, always ready to be typed on, will be massive. What the Kindle is for books, I think this could be for writing, at least for me. Fingers crossed. Quite literally, since I'm typing this in Qwerty!

Calling all contributors! Issue 54!

We are now closed to submissions for issue 53, but as one window closes another opens up, and we are now open to submissions for issue 54.

This is going to be our first themed issue in a long, long while. We are looking for stories inspired by this art by Howard Watts, which will be the cover art for issue 54, guest edited by Howard! Here are his guidelines for this themed issue:

"What’s going on with these three characters? Their fate lies in your hands! TQF is looking for short stories based on this image, to appear in issue 54, guest edited by me, Howard Watts. Normal TQF guidelines will apply, but I’m looking for strong character, conflict and ultimately plot – a completely developed idea, with a resolution."

As a bonus, an online poll will then ask the readership to decide the most popular story addressing the theme, and the author of that story will receive a year’s subscription to TQF (or a cash equivalent if outside the UK), plus a large jpeg version of the art, with a white border with their story title beneath it – suitable for framing by one of the many high street photographic shops or online art sites, such as Snapfish.

Submissions to: howardsw@sky.com
Deadline: 31 October 2015

Theakerly thoughts: what's making me happy?

This time I’m going to concentrate on what’s been making me happy this week, in honour of the segment at the end of Pop Culture Happy Hour, one of my favourite podcasts. Please just take it as read that my adorable little family is, as ever, making me happy, and that I am thoroughly enjoying my day-to-day work. I just don’t tend to talk about that kind of stuff in detail on here. Because you’re all vultures who would steal my life if I let you.

So, what’s been making me happy?

Expanding my daily to-do lists from ten to twenty items. At the core of it is still the ten big things I need to get done each day, but the other ten give me credit for all the daily stuff that needs doing – dealing with email, my morning pomodoro of writing, taking the kids to school, collecting the kids, and, erm, weighing myself. It’s good. Instead of the morning run being a frustrating obstacle to my tasklist, it’s now a nice simple job to tick off. Best of all, my weekday scores now produce a percentage. (91% last week!)

The Logitech k480 keyboard. Admittedly it’s a bit plasticky, and the T and Y keys on mine don’t work very well (a replacement is on its way), but this is going to be my best friend during November. A groove along the top lets it hold a tablet, and a dial lets you pick between three Bluetooth devices – which might not sound that amazing till you realise that to achieve the same thing with the Apple keyboard you have to power off all the other devices with which it has previously been paired. Really looking forward to taking this out and about for my November novelling sessions, and writing away on my iPod.

The backlog of reviews is finally starting to melt away. Well, it’s down to twenty. Twelve if you only count things I was given for review, and not things I read and began to write about. My goal for issue 50 is to completely clear the backlog, even if it means re-reading some of the books. A pomodoro (25 minutes) of writing each morning isn’t a lot, but it’s a lot more than nothing, and applied to short stuff like reviews it moves things along quite nicely, without getting in the way of anything else.

The new Aphex Twin album, Syro. It’s a lot like the Analord records, and those come very close to my idea of ideal music, so I’m very happy with it.

The youngest of our family gave me some sparkly dinosaur stickers to stick on the side of my PC.

Using my old Kindle again. Reading about the Kindle Voyage make me realise I’m kind of sick of the Kindle Paperwhite, and its damnable lack of buttons. I’m leaning towards the view that touchscreen ereaders are an abomination. The Paperwhite works better than any other I’ve tried (a Sony and a Kobo), but still, it’s a relief to get back to reading on a device that switches pages with a button press.

Nanowrimo is coming and I have an idea! This usually doesn’t happen until October 30. And I learnt a lot from taking part last year, which is going to help a lot in shaping my plans. Even though it was my umpteenth time taking part, it was my first serious attempt in a while, and my first finished novel in a good few years. I wrote a bunch of blog posts about my experiences last year (here, here and here), so I’ll be studying those carefully in the next few weeks. One thing I remember very clearly: don’t start a novel with someone flying through the air over the ocean alone with no way to talk to anyone, because what the heck are you going to write about? This year’s Nanowrimo starts on a Saturday, which is pretty much ideal for getting off to a good start.

If something’s been making you happy, let us know in the comments!

Theaker's shorterly reviews

Hi chums!

You may notice that my reviews for our blog and zine, rarely very lengthy, get quite a bit shorter in future. It's not a general policy change for our publication: we're as happy as ever for reviewers to work at their own preferred length. It's just a change for me as a writer. I've been leaving an awful lot of reviews unfinished, because I don't have a lot of time to write, and it's been bugging me.

For one thing, the backlog has been a drag on my reading, because I don't want to start reading other books that are for review and thus add to the pile. And I think a timely hundred-word review is more use to everyone than a five hundred-word review that arrives three years after the book. I'll probably end up writing about the same amount in total, just spread across more items, and with reviews appearing more promptly.

As part of this change, I'm adding star ratings to my reviews. They're not universally popular, but if you're only writing a hundred words or two, a star rating saves a lot of time, saying quickly and clearly exactly how good you thought something was. I thought about returning to our old ten-point scale, but it doesn't have the equivalent of three stars, which I think is the perfect rating for something you enjoyed just fine but didn't adore.

Anyway, hope that's all okay. Just wanted to let you all know!

The Clockwork Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

I wish I had read The Clockwork Muse (Harvard, pb, 112pp) by Eviatar Zerubavel a decade or so ago. If I had, maybe I’d have an MA from the OU now instead of a measly postgraduate diploma. My dissertation work was interrupted by our first baby – boo-hoo, poor me! – but this would have taught me to plan properly for that interruption, and to keep pushing forward, rather than waiting for an endlessly receding week off when I would catch up on everything.

It is a short but intensely useful book about the importance of scheduling time for writing and making an ongoing effort instead of relying on unpredictable bursts of inspiration. As the title indicates, it’s an unromantic view of the creative process. Who would want a clockwork muse, you’d think? But as the subtitle says, this is “A Practical Guide” to getting the book done, a guide to doing the job without leaving blood on the keyboard and a trail of broken marriages in your wake.

Fifteen tips for completing NaNoWriMo

These are tips specifically to help people complete NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which challenges people to write a brand new 50,000-word novel in the month of November, from start to finish. These are not tips for writing a good novel, nor a ground-breaking novel, nor an important novel.

That’s not to say the results can’t be interesting or worthwhile. The novels I wrote while taking part in NaNoWriMo are infinitely better than any of the novels I’ve written since, because the latter don’t exist. And there’s much to be said for sometimes writing novels for your own amusement, rather than just because they might sell.

So, here are the tips:

1. Aim to write a 50,000-word novel from start to finish in a month. Yes, that’s the whole point of NaNoWriMo, but there are still people who plan to write the first 50,000 words of a fantasy brick, the back end of an unfinished project, or 50,000 words in their journal. If you’re not writing a novel from start to finish, you’ll be a hanger-on, and that’ll sap your enthusiasm for whatever project you’re trying to crowbar into NaNoWriMo. Use another month to write your memoirs.

2. Plan to write the kind of novel that is well-suited to being written in a month. Some novels are easier to write than others. Books with one point of view, with linear timelines, with quests from A to B, etc, or books that draw on clear memories, develop long-held beliefs and ideas, and are set in locations you know well. NaNoWriMo isn’t the best time to write books about the overlapping lives of multiple time-travelling, world-hopping protagonists, nor books that require historical accuracy and extensive research.

3. Write a treatment to narrow your focus. Before you start writing there are a million ways the book could go, which is exciting, but it can be hard to think very far into the novel until you’ve made some firm decisions. Take a sheet of A4 paper and set out your novel’s characters, plot, themes, setting and twists, just as if you were trying to sell an agent, editor or movie producer on the idea. If you’re not happy with it, write another, and another, till you are happy. Each one will only take half an hour or so: much better than getting thirty hours into writing the actual novel and then realising your mistakes.

4. Aim to write 1666 words a day. If you keep doing it each day it’ll build up your writing muscles. If you can’t make 1666, try to write at least something every day, anything to push that word count up. One day without writing can easily turn into two or three and before you know it you’re putting it off to the weekend and facing an uphill struggle.

5. Give yourself a nice, clear job to do each day. I tend to split my NaNoWriMo novels up into thirty chunks, one per day/writing session. It helps to be able to wake up each morning and think, this evening I’ll be writing a chapter where my character goes to see a psychiatrist to deal with his anger issues and discovers the psychiatrist is an alien. And make sure you get that task done. Tomorrow you have another. Don’t get up to 40,000 words and realise you’re still writing the prologue!

6. Draw a map as you go along. I’m not big on world-building: I don’t think it’s necessary for the kind of novels best written in NaNoWriMo. But drawing a map instantly suggests plots and events. How do they get over that mountain? Why is that city surrounded by forests? Who lives in that house on the edge of town? It’s also a good idea to draw a line marking your characters’ progress around the map, noting the dates and times they arrived at and departed from each location.

7. Use your router to block your internet access during the times of day when you’ll be writing, and have someone else set the password. In fact, do everything you can to dedicate a set part of every day to your writing.

8. Stop watching television for the month. Let it build up on the TiVo or Sky+. The only reason you’ve never written a novel before is that you haven’t set enough time aside for it. A novel this length is going to take something like 40 to 60 hours to write. Cut out two hours of television a day and you’ll be well on the way. If you can’t bear to quit the television, give up the Xbox, or reading, or drinking, or however it is that you spent your time last month.

9. Feeling stuck? Never ask yourself what should come next. Ask yourself what could come next. Your character’s thoughts on whether time should be decimalised (clue: it should!) may not be relevant to the plot you have planned, but if you can’t think what else to write, that’s a way to keep moving forward. You can always delete any crap in the second draft. You may find that the digressions turn out to be the best bits.

10. Give your characters a reason to talk to each other, different ways of reacting to things. When you’re struggling to make your word count, having a bunch of idiots jibber-jabber can be very useful. Give them different points of view. Think of something happening in Friends. How does Joey react? (Stupidly.) What about Chandler? (Sarcastically.) Rachel, Ross, Monica or Phoebe? (Selfishly, academically, anxiously, weirdly.) Every new reaction is a way to push up your word count.

11. Ignore the naysayers! Every time NaNoWriMo comes around you get lots of people, often professional writers, sniffily proclaiming their disdain of the event. No wonder, when you think about it: you’re doing for fun what they do for a job, and that can be irritating for them. They’re writing for the man, you’re writing for your inner child. Although some do take part, NaNoWriMo isn’t aimed at professional novelists who spend all day every day staring at a keyboard: writing a fifty thousand word novel in a month isn’t any challenge at all to someone who has all day to write. (Full time, you could be done in under a fortnight.) It’s for people who have other jobs, who wouldn’t clear the space to write a novel otherwise. And remember, however bad your novel ends up being, it has a valuable quality rare in commercially published work: it’s the book you wanted to write, not the book you thought would sell.

12. Give your main character some of the same interests as you. It makes it much easier to win. If you’re mad about the cancellation of Happy Endings, and your character is too, that gives you something to fall back on when you run out of steam. And you know what, while you’re writing what seems to you at first like a digression, your brain is working on a way to integrate it into your plot. An episode of Happy Endings will come to mind that reflects the situation your characters are in, your characters will start talking about that, and maybe it’ll help them to figure a way out.

13. Attend the local write-ins if you can, as long as they are actually focused on writing. The social pressure of being among other people who are quietly typing away makes it easier for you to do the same.

14. If you fall behind a bit, don’t immediately set yourself a increased daily target or try to catch it all up the next day. Focus on getting 1666 words done in a day, and then try to get the hang of writing 1666 words in a single writing session. Once you are confident about doing that, schedule two sessions for a day on which you’ll have time to give it a fair shot.

15. A bit late for this year, but learn to touch-type, ideally using the Dvorak layout. Makes it so much easier if you can type all day without your fingers aching. And look after your fingers this month: don’t play any button-mashing videogames. (Future Stephen, this means you: no Dynasty Warriors!)

Back when John and I were the Birmingham MLs, we created a handout for our local writers, with achievements, graphs to fill in, bits of advice, useful websites, etc. We haven’t updated it for a while, but it’s still available to download and print out on our old website.

Do you have any tips? Pass them on in the comments.

Good luck! See you at the finish line!

Wednesday is usually the list day on our blog. This is list #8.

Fifteen authors who influenced you

Denis, Denis!

It's probably obvious that many of the non-review items on this blog began life as Facebook or forum posts that got a bit out of control… Here's another in that line, a little something to distract me from a backlog of reviews in various stages of composition.

It's the usual kind of thing: fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. An acknowledgment here to Tej Turner, who tagged me with this on Facebook.

I'm not really a writer these days – or at least not a writer of fiction. It's been a few years since I last completed one of my terrible novels, and I've never really been one for writing short stories. But these are the fifteen writers I came up with, fifteen writers who have done a great deal to shape my thinking about writing, and, by extension, reading.

Jean Racine – for his plotting, his approach to the dramatic unities. In my memory his plays are structured like arrowheads, shiny, sharp and ruthless. I've never written anything like that, but I always begin with that intention.

Jack Vance – for the humour, the creativity, the language, the cruelty, the shared universe of his science fiction. There's very little I don't love about Jack Vance's writing.

Michael Moorcock – for writing novels in three days, and for writing even better ones when he took a bit longer. Stormbringer, The Final Programme, A Cure for Cancer, Count Brass, Byzantium Endures – every one of them was a revelation.

Lionel Fanthorpe – for showing how easy it is to write novels; he taught me to think about what could come next, rather than what should come next. (I have yet to learn how to write good novels.)

Diana Wynne Jones – for being so interesting, for never repeating herself, even in sequels.

Denis Diderot – for Jacques le Fataliste. Its narrative playfulness astonished me. In English, Tristram Shandy played similar tricks, but I didn't read that until much later.

Gustave Flaubert – for the care he took over his prose, and Bouvard et Pecuchet. He's not a writer I would ever have had the patience to emulate, but he's important to me nevertheless: Flaubert and Fanthorpe stand at either end of a scale which measures the care you take over your writing.

Stendhal – for the novels, of course, but also for his acceptance of the fact that not everyone would like his work: to the happy few. One particular comment about his work impressed me deeply; whether it was one of my tutors at university, or an essay , or an introduction to his work, I'm not sure: that his sentences will often end with a word or phrase that changes the entire sense of what you thought you had been reading.

Jean-Paul Sartre – for plays like Les Mains Sales and Huis Clos. Sartre had an immense effect on my life: an excellent GCSE essay score persuaded me to study French literature at sixth form and degree level. I should really have studied maths, IT or science: I would have been an awesome accountant. My spoken French, however, is so poor that as I left the oral for my degree I heard the examiners begin to laugh.

John Brunner – for his perfect little Ace books. I would love to write short novels exactly like them in every regard.

Grant Morrison – for constant invention, and never writing down to his readers. He's written comics that didn't work, or were a bit confusing, or where his late scripts have caused problems with the art, but I've never read a Grant Morrison comic that felt pointless, average or dull.

Rhys Hughes – for writing the kind of thing I would like to write, saving me the trouble! And for making me feel better about my over-enthusiastic use of exclamation marks!

Terrance Dicks – for the spare emptiness of his prose. I grew up a fan of the Doctor Who novels as much as the television series.

Roland Barthes – for the relationship between the author and the text, and the interpretation of the text – and indeed the interpretation of everything else, from advertising to clothes. I doubt a day goes by without me thinking a thought influenced by Barthes.

Robert Silverberg – for the brilliant short novels of the fifties and sixties. If I have a true ambition left, it's to write a serious and profound short novel in that style.

I realise now that I should probably have included Philip K. Dick (for his reality-bending), Harry Harrison (for his humour and action), Russell T Davies (for his approach to rewriting) and Philip Jose Farmer (for his big ideas), but too late now. I had fifteen minutes to make my list, and these are the names I came up with!

I'm sure in some cases I've got the wrong end of the stick about a writer – are Racine's plays really as well-structured as I remember them? would Terrance Dicks even be readable now I'm an adult? – but it is after all how I remember them, faultily or not, that influences me.