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.