Potted History

I started this blog in 2010 as I was finishing a book called Sleepwell and Fly, writing as Fletcher Moss, a name I stole from a park a few miles from where I live. (I'm still @fletchermoss on Twitter, and @fletcher__moss on Insta if you want to say hello.)

Eventually, in 2012, that book won the Times Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition. It was published as The Poison Boy in April of 2014.

The five years' of posts here cover 2010 to 2015, including my struggles with the original novel, stuff I learnt along the way, being longlisted for the competition, eventually winning it, and the process of re-writing, editing, and eventually publishing the book.

It did OK and I got another deal. My second novel is called Lifers, and I've shed my pseudonym. I blog now at martingriffinbooks.com.

I won't be updating this site beyond this post, and for a few years I took it down. But then I thought what the hell. Someone might one day find it useful.

Cheers,

Martin

Interlude: We've Got an Elephant!

Some writers seem to understand shape at some preconscious level. It’s in their damn DNA, it’s so deep. Ian Rankin talks quite openly about being his detective in first drafts – he has no idea where the story is going; he discovers things at the same time as Rebus. But the result is shapely and satisfying nonetheless.

Me? Most days it feels like I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

At its worst, it feels like if I can screw up the structure of a story, I will. To use an analogy: I’ll pitch a beautifully sculpted elephant, then deliver a camel and a heartfelt apology. And my editors have to patiently unpick it all. (Thought about taking those humps off? What about adding a trunk? Plus – just asking Fletch – can we bulk this baby out a bit?)

Eventually, it looks sorta elephantine. But it’s miles away from the thing I first conceived.

Imagine my relief, then, when I saw this:

Thank you, Maureen McHugh. Thank you Austin Kleon. And most of all, a massive thank you to my editors. We’ve got an elephant at last. 

Water and Ice

A post that first appeared on the very splendid Author Allsorts website.

There’s this thing about writing and liquid – people talk about the writing process like we’ve each got some sort of creative plumbing system, and it’s either running smoothly or mis-firing. When things are going well, we say the words ‘flow’, as if all our valves and chambers are flooding beautifully, and when the process slows or stops, we say the words have ‘dried up’ or worse still, that we’re ‘blocked’.

I guess one of the reasons I don’t ever worry about or experience ‘writer’s block’ is because I don’t particularly subscribe to this metaphor of flow or block in the first place. This isn’t an act of will on my part; even on a subconscious level I don’t ever consider the creative process in terms of water.

Unless it’s frozen water, that is.

I was struck recently by American sitcom writer and comedian Amy Poehler’s much more revealing comparison that writing is like hacking icefrom the inside of a fridge with a screwdriver. Now this is way more my line of thinking. Poehler’s image emphasises hard work over ease; dogged persistence ‘chipping away’ over effortless ‘flow’.

So my advice in short? Don’t believe in writer’s block, and suddenly, it doesn’t exist.

Instead, writing becomes a process that requires effort and optimism. Sit down at your desk with a song in your heart, friends. And as you spend a few moments contemplating the task ahead of you, try the following:

• Don’t write in sequence. Save a killer scene for those days when hacking ice feels like it isn’t much fun. Avoid death-by-chronology.
• Jump the problem. Put a long “…………….” for that particularly tough icy outcrop, and carry on as if you’d already dealt with it. (Tip: Don’t then submit your mss having totally forgotten to sort it out. Been there, done that.)
• If you don’t fancy the piece you’re hacking at, switch to a scene with lots of dialogue. Tune-in to everyday talk and write. You chip away at lots that way.
• Use ‘The Ten Minute Rule’. It a psychological trick that goes like this: “This section is really hard and I can’t see how to hack through it. So I’ll write something – any damn thing, without any critical assessment – for just ten minutes. Then I’ll stop.” I’ve done this a whole load of times – and found myself returning to reality half an hour later, the ten-minute curfew totally forgotten, with a bunch of words. Which is a bunch better than nothing. (Tip: This one works even better with headphones on, and playlist cued up.)
• Hack out the final scene of your novel, right now this moment. If you’ve never considered your final scene, this can be fun. If the actual problem is your final scene, sit yourself down and watch the last five minutes of five great movies, then read the last five pages of five great novels, then try the ten-minute rule.

Or finally…

• Write a scene you know will not be in the novel, but will appear in a lavishly-illustrated fully expanded ‘director’s cut’ version of the book that one day will be greeted with rapturous critical acclaim, sell millions and keep you in beer and sandwiches for the rest of your days.  

Magical Thinking: The Tyre, Mud, Two Kids, Rules of Summer

When I meet distant acquaintances who know me as ‘that guy who wrote a kids' book’, they politely enquire after book two. “Writing another?” they say.

I say yes.

“Is it for kids again?” they say. (There’s an implication here, and it’s “Are you going to do a proper book next? One for grown-ups?”)

The answer: Yes, it’s for kids. I love writing for young people. I’m having a blast.

This post is an attempt to weigh and measure what it is about writing children’s fiction that’s so exciting. I hope you’ll check out the four texts mentioned; you probably know them – each in some way captures the same magic about what it is to be a child or young adult, and what, by extension, it is about writing stories for and about children that is so magical.

Next time anyone asks, I’ll tell them this:

The Tyre is a poem by Simon Armitage, based on a childhood memory of finding a huge abandoned tractor tyre up on the moors above Meltham and, along with a gang of mates, lifting it upright and rolling it across moorland and onto the road. Once on tarmac the tyre accelerates, breaks free of its captors, and rolls over the lip of the hill down towards a nearby village. Terrified, the kids chase it, imagining a trail of devastation. Instead?  

…down in the village the tyre was gone,
and not just gone but unseen and unheard of,
not curled like a cat in the graveyard, not
cornered in the playground like a reptile,
or found and kept like a giant fossil.
Not there or anywhere. No trace. Thin air.

Being more in tune with the feel of things
than science and facts, we knew that the tyre
had travelled too fast for its size and mass,
and broken through some barrier of speed,
outrun the act of being driven, steered,
and at that moment gone beyond itself
towards some other sphere, and disappeared.

That’s why, incredulous-bloke-at-party. That’s why.

Researcher’s-friend Wikipedia tells me that, “Magical thinking is the attribution of causal relationships between actions and events which cannot be justified by reason and observation.” Neat. Childhood not only gives permission for magical thinking, but positively encourages it. There’s pretty much no other kind at all at that age.

Want some more magical thinking, some – as Armitage puts it – being in touch with the feel of things? Try these:

Mud is a coming-of-age drama written and directed by Jeff Nichols. There’s a boat high up in a tree, two boys called Ellis and Neckbone, and a superb central performance from Matthew McConaughey.

Two Kids is a song by Anais Mitchell. Dad has “plenty of Campbells and beers in the basement” in case at some point in the future, no-one can leave the house. The kid’s just trying to figure out why. It’s borderline-heartbreaking and beautifully conceived.

And Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer is a list of lessons learned, like this one:

"Never forget the password" is the rule printed neatly in the centre of the left-hand page.

Damn right, because through those doors is a realm of magic, mystery and unspeakable wonder.

A lot like childhood, I guess.

The Sound of Missed Deadlines

A few days ago, the wonderful Chicken House announced the shortlist of their Children’s Fiction Competition. I wish everyone on that list the very best of luck. I’m a huge fan of the competition, and with good reason; I won it in 2013.

But the shortlisting process this year reminded me of a particular day back in 2011. It was a memory I’d pretty much let go, and it came back in a rush of anguish and frustration.

Here’s the tale. It was deadline weekend for the Chicken House competition and I was still working on a book that at the time was called Sleepwell and Fly. It was a bit of a ragged young tyke – an ugly street-urchin of a story – but I was happy with it and keen to get it delivered. Sticking an 80,000 word manuscript in the post and sending it to Frome in Somerset is no straightforward task. It costs a few quid, and you need a working post office.

So why had I chosen that particular weekend to take off for a break in Derbyshire I don’t know. I had the book with me. I had a super-strong envelope and a fist full of first class stamps. I went for a long walk with my girl, had a pint in the afternoon, unwinding after a tough time at work. The footy results started coming in; the sky darkened and the sun went down.

Then it hit me full in the face. Bloody hell. There was nowhere I could post the frickin’ manuscript. It was too big for a post box. The post offices were closed. Tomorrow was Sunday. Then it was deadline day.

I lost the plot. I swore and raged at my own stupidity. I cursed and paced. Then I went all broody and silent and furious. I ruined the rest of the weekend, barely able to live with myself. The following week or two was just as gloomy. I was horrible.

About a month later I had the courage to return to the story. I pulled it out of its envelope and started reading. Two things happened almost simultaneously. The first: I started wincing at the prose. Christ, I thought. This is clunky. Ouch. I began tweaking it. Second: I had a couple of ideas. Hang on, I remember thinking. If I just add this character; chop this section… you get the picture.

The year after, I submitted the manuscript, three weeks or so before the deadline.

These words have been typed here before but I guess they bear repeating: I’ve made these mistakes so you don’t have to.

Dial-a-Song

Dial-a-Song was an answer-phone song-service set up by John Flansburgh and John Linnell in New York in 1983. They had a scratchy lo-fi college band called They Might Be Giants and at the time, it was faltering. Flansburgh had his apartment burgled and a bunch of his kit lifted; Linnell broke his wrist in a bike accident. They wouldn’t be touring anytime soon, but needed to stay current and present. This was their solution.

Basically, if you called a Brooklyn number; (718) 387-6962 to be exact, an answering machine played back a song in the place of an outgoing message, via a cassette tape. Flansburgh and Linnell recorded demos, jingles, experiments and rough cuts of studio tracks onto cassettes and then queued them into the machine so they’d rotate. Then they’d drop fliers, place magazine and newspaper adverts, and wait for the calls to come in.

Only one person could call at a time (one of the Dial-a-Song slogans was, “Always busy, often broken”) and this made the experience curiously personal.

 

From where I’m sitting, there’s a lot to be gleaned from the whole Dial-a-Song idea.

First, as Ira Glass says, “Put yourself on a deadline.” These guys excelled at keeping busy. I’m writing this now partly because They Might Be Giants have recently announced the service is to re-open. The details are here. Every Tuesday in 2015, there’ll be a new song.

Second; a joyous, rough-around-the-edges prototype that’s shared with others and reaps the rewards of feedback beats a polished to near-perfection masterpiece that stays in a drawer any day of the week. Get your stuff out there.

Third, there’s the discipline of restriction at work here. The medium closes down creative possibilities. Flansburgh has talked recently here about how the band width was so tiny, and the audio so poor, that Dial-a-Song compositions could only have a voice – always weirdly high in the mix – and a couple of instruments, max. Nothing else. Counter-intuitively, shutting down your options helps.

And fourth? Flansburgh used to sit in his apartment listening to the calls come in. Some people would give whatever new song was on there fifteen seconds, then hang up. “That,” says Flansburgh, “was the cruelest thing about Dial-a-Song. This is a very cruel business,” he goes on. “It takes a lot to hold people’s interest.” Learning that lesson day after day in the most bruising way must have been hard. As a schoolkid I used to call the service from my mate’s house – my Mum wouldn’t let me call a New York number – and listen in. I remember once I had to hang up half way through a tune cause my pal’s mum came home from work unexpectedly early. Odd to think Flansburgh might have been on the other end of that call, fretting.

Forged as it was back then in trying circumstances and against the odds, the story of the Dial-a-Song service is a fascinating one, not least for its triumph-in-adversity narrative.

I for one will be tuning in on coming Tuesdays.  

The Thing in the Gap

A post that started life out at Author Allsorts.

You may already be familiar with Ira Glass’s beautifully expressed insight into the thing he calls 'the gap.'

If it’s new to you, I’m glad – you’re going to love it. I’m just standing on the shoulders of giants here, but for those of you who’ve never seen the quote, witness. Ephiphany, choirs of angels, glory and splendour, etcetera etcetera…

And if you want to hear the great man speaking, and watch a lovely film to go with it, go here and spend a very special couple of minutes.

It’s this gap – between what we imagine and what we end up with – that’s the hardest part of being a writer for me. Because for me – like you guys too, I guess – it’s not just the gap, but the bad things that live in there.

Really bad things live in that gap; bad things with insistent voices – our inner critics.

I was in London last weekend meeting up with some writerly types, lovely people one and all, and after a couple of drinks we fell into talking about the gap and the voices in it. There were folks there that admitted to crippling bouts of insecurity. Guys and gals who shared terrible tales of wrestling their inner critics, fighting the voices who told them they weren’t good enough, or it couldn’t be done, or the last book was better, the last chapter was better, the last sentence was better. There were folk who’d ditched whole novels; burnt them up or ditched them.

It happens to the very finest of writers. John Le Carre once set fire to a whole abandoned novel on a clifftop. The guy's got a flair for ceremony, clearly.

That day I met writers with novels that were a chapter away from complete, but the victorious voice in the gap had convinced them they weren’t worth finishing. There were tales of battles with subconscious demons that had prevented the putting of pen to paper for weeks on end.

And there didn’t seem to be any relationship between experience and exposure to the voice in the gap. First-timers like me were fighting it, sure, but people three or four books in were having the same trouble. It doesn’t seem to be something you simply grow out of.

What can we do about it? 

Keep going, I s’pose. Like Glass says; “It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

So here's to all those Nanowrimo-ers who've done just that. Whatever your 50,000 look like by Sunday night - there's 50,000 that weren't there before.

And that's got to meaning something, right?

For A.K., who asked me where I find the time

This was June. 

I got into work at 7am so I could leave on the bell. Then I drove into Manchester and skirmished with afternoon shoppers trying to find a parking space near Victoria Station. I knew if I managed to get the Newcastle train on time both ways, I’d be back for 11pm. Had my laptop and notebook with me – I was planning to kill a couple of chapters on the way there and back. Turned out I needed close to a tenner in coins for the parking meter. I only had a note. Twenty minutes until the train.

I legged it across zombie parking lots under the shadow of Strangeways and through derelict industrial zones in my supermarket suit and tie. Found a half-empty boozer, the snug full of brawlers, bought a packet of crisps, fed the change into the meter, sprinted to the station.

My train was delayed by an hour. I wasn’t going make the North East Book Awards if I hung about; the whole thing kicked off at 6.30pm. A pissed off businessman said Newcastle was three-hours by car. It was 4pm. Back in the car park, I gave my ticket to a guy in a Range Rover and started driving. The writing I planned to do on the train wasn’t going to happen.

Back in the summer, my Citroen had this thing where over 65mph, the steering wheel buzzed and shook like a dental drill. It was like gripping an electric fence as I sped north on the A1. I listened to talking books. Got to Newcastle at 6.50pm, sprinted from the car park to the event, knackered and starving. There wasn’t any food on, but I got a couple of glasses of water. My good pal Dan Smith was there, looking dapper, and other shortlisted authors, the lovely Emma Carroll and my fellow Chicken House author and general live-wire Sam Hepburn. It was great to see them. We were up on stage within minutes.

It was a brilliant evening. Kids read clever and thoughtful introductions, and in turn, we all stood and talked to the crowd in the auditorium, then answered questions. Emma won. Dan got highly commended. Brilliant books, wonderful writers.

They were going for dinner and drinks but it was getting on for 9pm and I had work the next day. The roads were quicker and quieter on the way home. I was in Manchester, quietly opening the front door of my house before midnight. Upstairs, J was asleep.

I levered open a couple of beers, lined up a playlist, and started writing. By the time 3.30am came, I was wiped out. I got three hours’ sleep then drove into work.

I’m not saying days like that one are typical, but they’re pretty close to. The sections I wrote late that June night never made the book, but that’s all part of the process. 

Later that summer, I took the Citroen to a scrapyard in West Point and got £90 for it.

Second Cheapest on the Menu

This post first appeared on the terrific Author Allsorts site, and in lieu of anything proper to say or news to report, I re-post it here. Everything's at crisis point at the moment and Nightwardens swallows all my time. There'll be a new post soon - I just need to survive until week three of October, deliver the mss and collapse.

Here's the post. Enjoy.

‘Second Cheapest on the Menu’ was one of the many books I never finished back in my twenties. It was (ill) conceived as an autobiographical celebration of holiday food. Here’s its story.

I was ten when we went abroad as a family for the first time. I remember my mum carefully cutting the rind off a camembert at an autoroute service station. (“Is it meant to be like that?” we asked, staring open-mouthed as she prodded it dubiously.)

I guess my parents got wise to France pretty quickly, though. We went every year from then on. After each day’s driving, they took turns unfolding the big map and colouring in the roads we’d travelled on. By the time I was fifteen, the map was full, and every time we went out to eat, we’d choose the ripest roqueforts we could find just to prove we were seasoned explorers.

The family’s eating out rule was an unspoken one, but studiously observed. You could have anything on the menu, as long as it was the cheapest, or second cheapest, in its category. So dad could begin the meal by opening the menus and saying, with a flourish, “Choose whatever you want boys!”

A few seconds later he’d be selecting himself the onion soup and the poulet frites, and the message was as clear as if he’d communicated it using a series of handy flags. We chose cheap.

The second-cheapest-on-the-menu rule lasted five years. Then, one night, our world collapsed.

We were in a bistro near a campsite. It was a cool little place with red-and-white chequered table cloths; candles jammed in wine bottles; wall-mounted plates, carafes of local booze, lots of noise. The five of us sat and dad said, “Choose anything you want boys!” whilst, naturally, semaphoring his expectation that we’d go for the salad and the goats’ cheese and bacon tart. The waiter came over. I was eldest so I chose first. I went for the salad and the tart.

Then it happened. My brother smacked his lips, placed the menu carefully on the table, fixed the waiter with an innocent gaze, and ordered a steak, medium rare, with mushroom sauce and frites on the side. There was a terrified silence. Everyone looked at dad.

He nodded, and with that gesture, the world changed.

When my brother’s steak arrived, we stared at it. My tart was suddenly rendered as colourless and unappetising as a photocopy. Jon offered the meat around in carefully 

sliced morsels.

It was heavenly.

Anyway. Imagine if you will ‘Second Cheapest on the Menu’ by Fletcher Moss, a combination of childhood memoir and comic road-movie in which I travel those autoroutes again, paying homage to the family rule and only choosing the cheapest meals available in bistros and cafes up and down France. It’s got ‘hit’ written all over it, folks.

Or something close to ‘hit’, anyway.

Tagged! The Chocolate Book Challenge

Last month a good friend of this blog - hell, a good friend of mine though we've only met once - the tremendous Sarah Naughton, tagged me on The Chocolate Book Challenge, a neat little meme in which each blogger recommends three books in a chocolately kinda way.

Personally, I don't regard chocolate to even qualify as chocolate unless it's astringent, midnight-black and bitter as Martin Amis in a really shitty mood. But that's not the issue right now.

White Chocolate: Retribution Falls

Lots of frothy laughs. Then after a while, maybe a bit cloying, maybe a bit insubstantial - but man, you want some more.

Imagine a knockabout sci-fi romp in which your protagonist is the twin brother of Han Solo. Then surround him with a quality crew of well-drawn, distinctive crazies; stick them in a battered ship called the Ketty Jay; send them out into the great blue-black yonder, and propel a gang of cops after them. Brilliant stuff. But if you're reading this on the bus, make sure no-one you know has taken the seat behind you. Strictly your secret, right? Until you mention it on a blog.

Milk Chocolate: The Goldfinch

It's on everyone's list, sure. The whole world's doing it. But that don't mean it isn't total quality...

I know a guy - let's call him Argyle for the purposes of this post - who has a problem with D.T. He, like me, is a massive fan of The Secret History. He, like me, thought that second one was just slightly rubbish. But the thing is, he's irked by those passages where she wears her education prominently on her sleeve. "Hey Donna," he says, acting out a conversation I'm pretty damn sure will never happen, "I've got Wikipedia too, you know." I'm here to tell you to ignore him, folks. The Goldfinch is very very good. 

Dark Chocolate: Joyland

This is my stuff. Yeah, it's not to everyone's taste. Some may call it gloomy - dismal even. But it's distinctively dark and magnetic.

I both love and hate amusement parks. Like clowns, they represent two things at once; a child-like joy at innocent idiocy - an adult fear of something distorted, fake and ugly. Joyland enters this hinterland and tells a brilliant, haunting tale that won't go away. King is good at those chilling one-liners that represent the failure of language to cope with the supernatural. In 'IT', Pennywise says, "Everything down here floats." In Duma Key it's, "My father was a skin-diver," a killer line if ever there was one. In Joyland it's a character, choked by terror, who says, "It's the way she held up her hands!" The book is one of his best, and it's got a lovely pulp cover to boot.

Next, a brilliant writer for both children and adults; Dan Smith. (You'll be hearing a lot about Dan in the coming months - some big titles on the way!) Looking forward to your answers, Dan!

Tagged! Seven things...

Much thanks due to the dauntingly interesting, multi-talented Kerry Drewery who kindly tagged me on the Very Inspiring Blogger Award tag. Kerry's YA novel A Brighter Fear was shortlisted for the Leeds Book Award in the same category as, but a year before Poison Boy. Look out for A Dream of Lights too - Carnegie nominated no less!

Her brilliant Seven Things You Don't Know About Me can be found here. And here's mine...

1. Fletcher Moss is a pseudonym. Yeah, you'd never have guessed, right? I named myself after a park. 

The park was named after a dude of some considerable local import. He wrote books too, though his titles don't inspire fevered excitement; not in me at least. Still, if you're interested, you could check out 'Pilgrimages to Old Homes'. 

2. I support Huddersfield Town. Oh well. The thing is - you don't chose your team - your team chooses you. I grew up there and when I was young I supported anyone but Town. But then I faced up to my responsibilities and embraced the mediocrity.

3. My brother writes for The Guardian. My cousin has a killer menswear blog. They're both better writers than me by a mile.

4. What's the best bourbon money can buy, I hear you ask? That'd be Maker's Mark. You're welcome.

5. Every year since 1992 me and my brothers have dutifully listed our top five albums of the year. We're pretty damn geeky when it comes to lists. Looking back, I made some tragic decisions. Here's me drawing up my shortlist for 2004: 

Beastie Boys? Good call. 'Egypt' by Youssou N'Dour? Well... it hasn't lingered long in the memory, put it that way.

6. Apparently I graduated from Manchester University in the same year as crime writer extraordinaire Sophie Hannah. I've been the green-eyed monster ever since. An embarrassing admission but there you are; I'm not above a bit of envy.

7. I played in a five-a-side footy team for ten years. We were called the AFC Chieftains and we were terrible. Once, we got this great striker to play for us - he was whippet thin, lithe and strong and he was thumping in goals week after week. We got promoted. Then he got arrested and couldn't play while he was on remand. Our heaviest loss without him was 12-0. That was a tough night to get through. The following week, the ref suggested we try the veterans league. That's when I knew quittin' time was imminent. 

Aaand that's your lot, folks. But don't despair; good times are just around the corner - I'm passing this one on to the amazing Sarah Naughton.

Sarah is a Costa-shortlisted YA author who's first two novels have been critical smashes. Check out The Hanged Man Rises and The Blood List - both brilliant.

Her blog is here. And you can follow her on twitter too!

Radio Silence. Again.

A cursory check of archives down on the right will tell you that this happened before a couple of years back. It’s late Spring. The sun is hot and high; I can see the valley barbecues from my windowsill, see the blue pools in the squinting sun – and I hit crisis point.

The thing is; I've got close to 30,000 words of re-writes to do and at some point I need to give my family a break from all this and go on holiday. 'The Nightwardens' needs to be delivered in July and there's a way to go yet.

 

So rather than beat myself up for not finding the time to put the #pb52s up here, or write that post about Into the Woods I promised myself I would, or any of the other myriad little jobs I need to clear - I better just vanish for a bit.

 

Have yourselves a slow and easy summer... 

#firsttwentyminutes

...started a few nights back. I had a rare hour or two on my own and a half bottle of wine. The Walking Dead – my go-to entertainment if it’s late and I’m alone – is losing its appeal a bit. Season One started with a rush of promise but Shane took the vibrancy and energy with him when he shuffled offstage and The Governor’s no kind of replacement.

No, the early stages of this particular story were the best, I’m thinking.

That’s where #firsttwentyminutes started – me thinking about early stages of stories. Here’s the maths. An average movie’s, say, 120 minutes. The first twenty are roughly the 20% point. Time isn’t something I’ve got very much of, so twenty’s the point where I’ll happily bail out if its not killer. (Recent victims – Dragon Tattoo, re-make of Dragon Tattoo, Golden Compass, Hobbit, Sherlock 2, new Star Trek 2, that thing about a boat in a storm with Robert Redford.) 

Equally though, twenty’s the point where you know you’re totally aligned with the world of the story, the motivation of the characters, the direction of travel, the mood and theme – and you’re going to follow it all the way to the end.

I thought to myself: if I watched the #firsttwentyminutes of three films I really 

like, I might learn something.

So I did… and I did. Here’s what happened:

(i) 28 Days Later

An iconic opening reminiscent of The Walking Dead. I’ve blogged about it before here but what really struck me was this: the story-proper begins bang on twenty minutes. To the second, I mean. It goes like this: we get the activists raiding the animal-testing facility, the grotesque apes hammering at the glass of their cages, the beasts released, the initial infection, the go-to-black, then those phenomenal shots of Cillian Murphy wandering a silent and empty London in his hospital pj’s. Twenty minutes clocks up, and he steps into a church. His adventure begins.

(ii) The Ghost

This was uncanny. Again: it’s to the damn second. There’s a lovely opening scene on a ferry. An abandoned car is towed away after the ferry docks at Vineyard Haven. The body of its driver is washed up on a nearby beach. Cut to London: Ewan McGregor chats with his agent about a potentially exciting new job – ghosting the ex-PM’s memoirs. He gets the gig, flies out to New York and travels out to Martha’s Vineyard, the scene of the ferry-death. He steps out of the back of a cab after a punishing 16-hour journey, ready to start his new assignment. His adventure begins; twenty minutes, on the nose.

(iii)Signs

Three in a row. In the first twenty, we get an introduction to an ex-priest living on a farm surrounded by acres of deep corn fields. Strange stuff is happening and his kids are attuned to it. Water tastes odd. The dog’s going bonkers. There’s something out in the fields, and we soon learn it’s responsible for the appearance of a massive crop-circle. The cops come to investigate. “Don’t call me ‘Father’”, says Mel Gibson, a man with a tragic past. The following night there’s another intruder on the farm – unidentified. Crop circles are turning up all over the world, according to the TV news. Cops return. Refer to Mel Gibson’s character by his first name. The adventure begins – twenty minutes exactly.

Insert conclusion here, eh? The first thing I did once this all came together was work out the equivalent for a YA novel of approximately 76,000 words. 

It’s the 12,000 mark. 

If you want – and I do, given my inability to plot a book that actually works – a rough rule of thumb, everything’s gotta be sorted by 12,000; the protagonist, their motivation and flaws, the mood and atmosphere, tone, world. It’s the place where ‘the adventure begins’. That’s roughly the end of Chapter Six if you write in Fletcher-sized sections.

I’ve just re-read book 2, The Nightwardens, up to the end of Chapter Six. The news is… mixed.

Someone pass me the wine.    

Lists and Prizes

Gather round, gather round.

I had the enormous pleasure of attending the award ceremony of the Dudley Teen Book Award a few days ago. I met Ally Kennen, shortlisted for Midnight Pirates, and Marie-Lousie Jensen, who’s novel Smuggler’s Kiss had made the shortlist as well. And I got to meet a nice big crowd of fantastic young people who very graciously and politely listened to my blather and queued up to get their copies of Poison Boy signed. It was a great occasion. Mostly because I won! The Poison Boy pipped a whole bunch of brilliant books to the post, and I’m delighted.

Thanks to everyone who organised the event and all the kids who took part for making the day so special.

Coming up are a few more awards for which I’ve been lucky enough to be shortlisted:

The Leeds Book Award has an amazing shortlist in three categories and a killer website – where kids can vote for and review the shortlisted books. I'm getting trounced, but what the hell. The winner will be announced on May 22^nd.

On June 18^th, The Calderdale Children's Book of the Year will be announced, and the longlist is waaay good. PB's an outside bet at the best, I reckon.

The Staffordshire Young Teen Fiction Award is open for voting now – you can vote up until the end of June. Go!

And I’ve also been lucky enough to be shortlisted for the North East Book Award. Details to follow on this one.

I know what you’re thinking. ‘Hey, Fletch – surely Poison Boy on the Branford Boase Longlist was a mistake, right?’ Well, it’s certainly a wonderful turn-up for the books. I get booted off when the longlist becomes shortlist, so expect my name to be missing when the announcement is made in early April.

Right. Back to work…

Reading in the Sun

When I was ten I went on holiday abroad for the first time. And so I became acquainted with one of the greatest of life’s pleasures, namely: reading in the sun next to a swimming pool. Ever since those Elysian days, I’ve been trying, one way or another, to recapture the sheer self-indulgent carefree joy of lying on my back on a towel, holding up a novel until my arms ache, taking a dip to cool down, and starting all over again.

 

So when it was recently suggested to me that I could save space by taking an e-reader on holiday this year instead, I shuddered. No chance, pal. I want a suitcase full of battered books. That’s the whole point. I’m no luddite guys, honest, but bear with me while I take three key images of childhood holidays camping in France and expand on them a little by way of explanation.

Image one: melting paperbacks with black covers

You’ve never done this? C’mon. It’s formative. You’re reading a novel with a black cover – usually Stephen King or James Herbert I seem to recall, though my Fellowship of the Ring was also black – and you splay it open face down on the dashboard of your parents’ car. Park the car – a green Capri – in full sun for three hours or so; go and play table tennis with your brothers or something; then return to find the binding-glue has completely evaporated in the baking heat and your book has become a cracked and melting spine inside which are clotted sections of pages still stuck together like little mini novels, usually no longer than eighty or a hundred pages each. You can shuffle them about and read the book in the wrong order. It’s ace.

Image two: sand between the pages

…which empties out into your sleeping bag as you dip back into a book you’d been reading on the beach earlier that day. The scene is this: it’s late, but still light. You’ve got a torch with a knackered battery, and you’re reading. It doesn’t matter what time it is. It doesn’t matter what’s happening tomorrow. You’ve no mobile phone or internet connection – you won’t have for another twenty years – and you’ve haven’t seen a telly for close to two weeks. You’re utterly calm, centred and carefree; so much so you happily recline in the sand rather than brush it all out. That night, you sleep like a log.

Image three:  swollen and bloated books

Choose an appropriately epic summer read – the key here is to make sure it’s already a whopper. Then leave it near a source of water and engage in the kind of vigorous play which usually frightens other kids away from the pool. Return to your reading spot to find your novel, sopping wet, has warped and inflated into something close to twice its size. Dry it in the sun and the pages get stuck with a pleasing ripple, never sitting flat again. The spine arches into an inverted U shape. When you get it back home, it won’t fit the slot you withdrew it from; it looks like you’re trying to put Lennie Small in your bookcase.

Seems strange writing this now, it being early March and all, but praise be the sun’s been out for two days now. I know there’s rain on the way. There always is. But here’s hoping we get a hot one this summer - a long, drowsy and endless sequence of books by the pool.

Oh, and e-readers? Get lost.