End of the Holiday

So, Christmas and New Year have come and gone.  It has been a bit lazy.  We seem to adjust to a new time clock over very quickly:  up late, bed very late.  But I'm on annual leave until this coming Monday (7th Jan) so don't care overtly.  It has given me some space to write...and research.

To tidy up a few things, I finished the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  This was, in part, driven by the fact that my wife had bought me the next in the series: Girl who Played with Fire.

To close the book, so to speak, on GwtDT, like other crime thriller books I have read recently, the heroine of the title - said tattooed girl, Lisbeth Salander - only really gets involved with the hero 300 pages in.  For a book that's only just over 500 pages,  that's still over halfway.  She is in it early on but the threads of the story are only loosely linked.  Perhaps, it's my expectations that need to adjust.  Maybe it is a thing of this genre to wait for the real story to get going.  I don't know.  All I know is that I enjoyed the book and the accolades given to Larsson's writing are justified...in my opinion.

Off to one side, slightly, I convinced my wife to watch the Swedish subtitled version of the book because I remembered nothing about the Daniel Craig edition other than the girl getting on a motorbike at one point.  It was interesting inasmuch as whilst in places it had lines that were verbatim from the book, two whole romances for the hero were completely ignored, the timeline got distorted, the old detective on the case was instrumental in the solution where in the book he wasn't and one character was declared dead when she was very much alive.  It worked as a film but this is a case of:  read the book first.

In other news, my wife and I went to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War exhibition at the British Library.  For me, this was a fabulous two hours of gazing at the beauty of manuscripts over 1000 years old.  Some looked like they could have been written yesterday.  Others were so finely detailed you wondered how they did that with a quill.  Fabulous.

To give you an idea of what's on display until 19th February, there was:  the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Beowulf, the Lacnunga, Bald's Leechbook, Codex Amiantinus, the Utrecht Psalter, the Harley Psalter, the Domesday Book along with the Alfred Jewel (aestel), a largely complete digital recreation of the Ruthwell Cross, the stunning buckle from Sutton Hoo Mound 1 and lovely seax (a large, single-edged dagger alleged by some to be the source of the name Saxon) engraved with runes.

If you can get a ticket, go!

Moving on to my personal writing, I have struggled with the latest novella - still 'unnamed' although I am considering the rather unusual title of Lásabrójtur - you'll find out why if I ever publish it.  As for the writing itself, I know what the ending is, I know what the story is;  I just don't seem to be able to get it down in one coherent stream.  It has frustrated me to a degree.  What has surprised me, though, is that although I have struggled to write, I have already put more words down in this work than in the whole of the Stone Dead.  Inevitably, there will be a cut but I am still surprised and am wondering whether this will end up being closer to 40k words by the time it's complete - that's pretty much the upper limit for novellas.  Something else that has come out of writing this criminal tale is that I have had to do research into police and forensic procedures to reflect true Police practice rather than allow some of the more ludicrous efforts that appear on TV to cloud my writing.  They make a fascinating read and really are not that televisual in terms of excitement.

Right, it is time to go.  I have two items on my agenda for the next couple of hours: focus on getting my novella straightened out and eat food.

Until next time.

Where did the day...fortnight...go?

It's been a busy couple of weeks, clearly.  Three weeks, I think.  I suppose most of my absence can be put down to the gathering bank raid that is called Christmas.  Not that I am the least bit religious.  I am more interested in the Winter Solstice because it means the long daylight hours of Summer are on their way once more.  I'm not a fan of getting up in the cold dark, getting to work just before sun-rise, spending all day in an artificially-lit, over-heated office and then coming home in the dark squashed into a seat on the tube among a host of plague carriers.  I am not a Winter person.

Last time I wrote I was part way through The Sea Detective, a novel ostensibly about solving the mystery of two disarticulated feet found washed up on either side of a fictional Scottish Island.  At the time I was 108 pages in and only one foot had been found.  Well, the whole disarticulated foot thread came across as incidental to the actual story about the 'hero' finding out how his grandfather died during World War II and why he wasn't recorded on the island's memorial.  In fact, the foot crime struck me as being something of a footnote.  It also prompted a deeper thought:  is this a fairly standard ruse of crime fiction:  put the most outrageous part of the story on the cover jacket to snag a purchase and then tell a totally different story for the next 300 pages?  I had read two novels using that sort of approach on the trot so I needed a third to see if the premise was false.  My mother-in-law came to the rescue by lending me a crime novel by a far better known (deceased) author:  Stieg Larsson.  Yes, I am reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Having just read Midwinter Sacrifice by Mons Kallentoft who was hailed a the new Stieg Larsson on the jacket by his publishers, there was only one way to determine the truth or hype of the claim.  I'll go with hype.  I'm only about a quarter the way through Larsson's book but from the start there is a gulf of difference in the writing style, narrative, dialogue and story.  To me, Kallentoft's work read as if was intended for TV and the crime was slotted into the personal lives of the characters.  Larsson's novel is so much more and it is easy to see how this became an 'international sensation' made into movies.

It may be Christmas before I finish it.

Moving on, I am still writing my second crime novella set in Cumbria.  It's darker than Stone Dead and I continue to have no idea where it's heading...but I'm going with the flow.  I also continue to have no idea what to call it:  Novella McNovellaFace is not an option even as a working title.  It's getting sidelined a bit with all the pre-Christmas activity...and work, obviously, but I will finish it.  If it runs to a similar word count as Stone Dead, I'm about halfway through at just over 10,000.  And that brings me neatly to the grand opening of the envelope containing that 1st draft.

If you remember, six weeks ago I took Stephen King's advice and put the 1st draft of Stone Dead into an envelope and wrote 6th December on the front of it.  I then went and did something else.  This evening, I opened that envelope.  Now, if I follow Mr King's advice, I should take a red pen to the said draft and edit it before handing it to my Ideal Reader.  I thought to bypass that exercise as my wife is a much better editor than I am.  But she agrees with Mr King.

If I'm honest, I don't actually like reading my own work.  It's almost entirely because I see a betters way of writing a section and that mushrooms into major reworking which is where I get bogged down in detail.  I think I will revert to using a pen on the printed page to curb my editing zeal.

I'll keep you posted...

He's at it again...reading!

"Yes, it's true:  I've been reading.  I know it's a shock to many people but sometimes I just have to open a book and look at the words as well as the pictures.  That's when there are pictures because I've recently read one history non-fiction text, one Swedish Nordic Noir novel and am currently about halfway through yet another novel, this time set in the Scottish Isles and North Atlantic.  And as if to add 'awe' to the shock of me reading, I am a few thousand words into my next novella set in Cumbria.

Being less expected than the Spanish Inquisition, let's start with the non-fiction history book:  The Origins of the Anglo-Saxons by the late Jean Manco.

This is a fascinating book about the continental genesis of the people we know as the Anglo-Saxons both in terms of linguistically and genetically.  Having had a career as a Building Historian, Manco switched to writing about prehistory and archaeogenetics.

This text follows the Blood of the Celts and is a well-written tome but not one for people who have absolutely no idea about the Anglo-Saxons or Y-DNA analysis of (male) Haplogoups.  It seems to flip from being an erudite history of the people that later became the 'Anglo-Saxons' to complex scientific explanation of languages and the mixings of blood groups.  I found some of the dates of origins given by Manco surprising but cannot argue from my inadequate knowledge.  In some ways, it's almost like reading Tolkien where he hurls his characters headlong into utterly impossible and non-survivable battles only then to knock them out and find the giant eagles have saved them such are the changes of subject matter.

Manco actually references Tolkien, Pratchett and Cornwell for different reasons but notes how they all draw on the writings, storytelling skill and chronicles of the Norse to create they own worlds.

I enjoyed this book immensely because it was so broad in spectrum and actually read it from cover to cover; something I almost never do with academic works.  It is just a shame that Jean Manco is not longer with us to write another.

The next book is one I picked up in the Eden Charity shop in Brampton, Cumbria.  It's a Swedish crime drama called Midwinter Sacrifice by Mons Kallentoft.

Published in 2011, it was the first of a series centring around a single mother detective with a 13yr old daughter and everything that implies for the future.  It probably grabbed my attention because of the word sacrifice.  I ignored the comparisons to Larsson and Nesbo as that's the expected publisher hype.

As for a a crime drama, it struck me as if it was intended to be transferred straight to screen.  There is an enormous amount of print space spent describing the various characters as if they are to be seen not imagined and the story itself drifts alongside.  The murder of a local special needs male found hanging from a tree on the edge of a forest in the style of the Viking ritual of the Midwinter sacrifice starts off okay but doesn't really twist or turn as much as I would expect.  The subsequent investigation and denouement are satisfactory but do seem to be incidental to the lives of the various characters involved.  Then there is the constant portrayal of the location of the action - Linköping - as a dreary town in the middle of the Swedish plain south of Stockholm. Yet for all my lack of enthusiasm for this book, I did read it from cover to cover and never considered giving up on it.  It would not, however, induce me to become a 'fan'.  I may get the rest of the series from my local library (I know there's at least two) but won't buy them.

Finally, I am just about a third the way through The Sea Detective by Mark Douglas-Home.   I didn't buy this book, my wife did as it is for a book group she's a member of.  I just asked if I could read it because I had just finished Midwinter Sacrifice and found the idea of reading one of the two historical fiction novels I have at hand unappealing.

Anyway, this book was published in 2015, it tells is about an investigation into the discover of two severed feet from the same person washed up on either side of a fictional Scottish island.  Well, I say that.  I'm 108 pages in and so far there has only been one severed foot and the investigation hasn't actually got underway.  It's all been about Indian child prostitution and guerrilla flower planting in Scotland so far!  Still, the bits with the eco-activist have amused me when intended and the premise is promising.

I will, with any luck, finish this book this coming week.

And finally, I have been writing again.  It's another crime story set in Cumbria with the same Police personnel (bar one, so far) and covers a more regular sort of crime story.  I say that because there are echoes of a crime that happened on one of my refurbishment projects back in 1991.  I remember it because it was around the time Freddie Mercury died - the 27th anniversary of which, by chance, is today (24th).

That crime did not involve a corpse as my story does but it was just as sinister in it's own way in that  it was not far from the old BBC building in Wood Lane and was, I suppose, a foreshadowing of the whole Jimmy Saville affair.  I'll say no more on that but to round off, my novella is currently just over 5,000 words and, staying true to Stephen King's belief that plots are for dullards, I have only the vaguest idea where it will end up...and an even vaguer idea of the title.  It has a working title but I'm not publishing that.  Absolutely not.  It's way too weird.

Have a great weekend and see you soon.