(Planet Me)
Sunday, January 02, 2005
 
Whilst we are here, and I am sat at the computer, and Ellen is on the phone, I suppose now it's time to tell you about novel four : Wake Up Dead Man. After I finish a novel, it sits in my drawer for six months (or these days, a hard drive), and then I go back and re-read it so that I'm happy with it, as well as perform ruthless editing, cutting and pasting. I may post a chapter of two on my other blog : I will let you know when or if I do this.

At the moment it sits at 54 chapters, and 90,333 words. Parts of it are too long, parts are too short. I've already taken about 10,000 words out of it (and lost another 10,000 words on a tragic disc crash that happened on a train between Leeds and London in August 2003, a disc crash so infuriating I shelved the novel for about six month : I'd written the words, I had no desire to re-invent that particular wheel for a while).

I wrote it between July 27th 2002 and July 29th 2004. Why did it take so long? Well, life took over. I often didn't pick it up for a week or a month at a time, the reason being it wasn't in me. The central premise, one I'd been picking over for about a year before I even wrote a word, was that of a unrequited, bizarre love triangle, where one party is unable to let go of the one they lost, and the other two were fresh new lovers on a grand adventure.

In some respects, this reminded me of my personal life, (I had been, at one point, on both sides of that particular table to varying degrees), especially as one character - the male lead - has recently divorced. To give the story an arc, that of a complete relationship from singledom to love to back again, I started at probably the worst point, that of finding out you'd been dumped by coming home and that she'd moved out whilst you were at work.

It had happened to me three weeks previously. I didn't write the "so you've been dumped" passage (chapter 2) until some twenty months later. I knew it belonged there, I just didn't want to have to relive that part of my life ever again. With every day it gets further away, and I can't say I miss it.

At some mid point, our newly single narrator meets someone a girl. They fall into a collossal, brilliant love. She has secrets as everyone does. One of them is her ex-husband, who firmly believes the vows "Til Death Us Do Part" are always true. True love never dies.

Naturally then, the plot revolves around, and leads to a meeting of him, her, and the ex-husband. You would think that this is a relatively straightforward tale of stalk/slash horror up to this point.

Here comes the twist. It's not a shock. It's not revealed at the last minute as a cheap joke. Our narrator is murdered.

And he lives on as a ghost, unable to die or leave until he fulfills his role, his unfinished business on the mortal plane. Now, from the way I described that, it could potentially sound bollocks. Instead I approach it realistically : the characters are real people, not ciphers pushing a plot forward to a confrontation. They get distracted, they talk bollocks, they pick their nose and fancy people they shouldn't. Imagine if you found out one day that you had died, that you were a ghost : what do you do, how do you live, why and where do you go?

In the end it comes down to someone who has to re-examine his whole belief structure in order to survive. He has to throw away everything he's ever believed in, become a monster to kill a monster, and the question is : can he do it? would he sacrifice all he has ever believed in?

Anyway, that's enough of the guff. I finally finished it this summe,r fed up by entropy and laziness, I hunkered down and typed it all out. It's - in terms of writing quality, plot, ideas, execution, characterisation, - about a hundred times better thana nything else I've done. For me, the big pull is the idea. What if I get bored? If I can't keep myself interested in the idea, the central premise, for the time it takes to write, then it's not going to have any longevity, it's not going be anything other than a waste of time. Thanfully this one kept me intrigued iuntil after I finished writing it. The central questions, who am i? why am i? what am i? will, I suspect, intruige me until the day I die and very possibly beyond, and these are the central themes it covers.

Since then, it's also the only work that I'm not painfully embarassed, at least in parts, by. It's also the first one I'm thinking will not embarass me in the future. It's also one that our son will not be moritifed with shame to read in the future, if he's a geek like me.

But that's enough of my yakking, Episode III looks brilliant...




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