The Chimney Rabbit

This week I decided what my next project is going to be. After finishing The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice, I had several options. I could have written the third book in the series, I could have written something completely unrelated, or (and this is what I’ve decided on) I could write a related but stand-alone book.

So my next novel will be a sort of prequel to The Chimney Rabbit – set several years before, and not featuring Giovanni or Pezzley in starring roles (although we may see some cameos). It’s definitely going to be set in the same world, albeit in a different part of it. Where Book 1 and Book 2 were set in the Great City, a sort of pseudo-London, Book 0 will start in a sort of pseudo-Florence. Which is nice, because it’s a beautiful city that I’ve loved visiting, so reading up on it is turning out to be a pleasure. It turns out that Florence still had its medieval city walls until half-way through the 1800s, which suits my city under siege nicely.

Writing a stand-alone prequel has one big advantage – once it’s complete, I can submit it to agents. That’s something I can’t do with The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice – as a sequel, it can’t stand alone, and nothing will get you rejected more quickly than sending Book 2 in a series to an agent. But a prequel has to stand on its own, so I can pitch it to agents on its own. Also, if the prequel gets any interest, I can use it as an opportunity to offer the first two books, too.

So I’ve started the research and planning, and maybe sometime soon I’ll start the actual writing. The writer Jeremy de Quidt on Twitter said:

There’s only so much background research needed to start a story. Any more is just procrastination.

I’m not quite at the procrastination stage – but it’s approaching fast. With any luck I’ll start getting the words down soon.

Earlier this evening, I booked tickets for a performance by the Philharmonia orchestra here in Leicester in June 2014 – normally I wouldn’t book anything so far in advance, but the good tickets seemed to be selling pretty quickly already, and my other half has recently become a huge Shostakovich fan, so the chance to see a first-class orchestra play his 5th Symphony wasn’t something we wanted to miss.

I’ve never been much of a classical music buff, but recently I’ve been raiding our shared music archive for some new writing music, and I’ve found Shostakovich fits the bill quite admirably. There are quiet, reflective passages, and huge apocalyptic bombastic passages – there’s delicacy as well as blood and thunder. We have a copy of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 performed by the Houston Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Stokowski that I’ve played over and over while writing The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice – we bought it for pennies from the Amazon MP3 store, and I’ve definitely got my money’s worth out of it.

I used to work or write while listening to a whole array of different types of music, but in the past few months I’ve been finding that I can’t listen to songs – the words seem to get in the way and affect my concentration when getting my own words down. So in addition to the Shostakovich, I’ve been listening to a lot of the Skyrim soundtrack by Jeremy Soule, four discs of ideal writing music, as well as other video game soundtracks, including Brian Tyler’s Far Cry 3 and Jesper Kyd’s Assassin’s Creed 2. I’ve been listening to film and TV soundtracks, too – Howard Shore’s score for The Hobbit, and Murray Gold’s Doctor Who music. Whenever I’ve needed the musical equivalent of a double-shot of espresso, though, I’ve always been able to turn to the albums put out by the trailer music outfit Two Steps from Hell – usually one- to two-minute tracks of condensed epic music, ideal for getting the brain juices flowing.

It’s strange how my writing moods change over time, too, and how sometimes I have to flick to my music player and change the album because what worked yesterday just wasn’t working today.

But sometimes the most important thing about listening to music is that when I’ve got my earphones on, my other half knows that I’m not just fiddling about on my laptop, but I’m “in the office” – it’s a handy replacement for a big “DO NOT DISTURB” sign. She’s always been great about giving me the time to do my writing – probably because she’s a writer herself, and knows how valuable maintaining your concentration can be – but it helps that I’ve got a way to indicate that I’m working without having to say anything.

After I completed my first draft of The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice, I took a break from writing for a little while. I’d gone straight from finishing The Chimney Rabbit into editing it, then straight into writing the sequel, and while working like that does have some benefit in the momentum it generates, it’s still pretty exhausting when you’re doing it on top of a full-time 40-hour-a-week job.

I intended to get back into working on my writing at the end of last week, but a combination of a nasty cold and some really rather upsetting family news didn’t leave me in the right state of mind, so I extended my hiatus for a little longer.

Earlier this week, though, I decided that I’d be able to find excuses for not writing indefinitely, so I fired up Scrivener and started an edit of the first three chapters of The Chimney Rabbit.

These three chapters form the core of the majority of submissions that I’m making to agents – there’s usually a covering letter and a synopsis, too, but the bulk of the submission is the 3-chapter, 10,000-word start of the novel. This is the part that has to grab the attention of the agent – it’s no good you having a story that builds to a thrilling denouement if no-one is interested in reading past the first three chapters.

So far, no-one’s been interested in what I have to say. But as I was polishing those chapters this week, I came more and more to the conclusion that I’m happy with what I’ve written. OK, maybe “happy” isn’t the right word – it could always do with a little bit more polish, or a tweak here and there, and if you gave me a thousand years to work on it, I’d probably still be making changes around year 999. But still, I think that I’ve managed to write the story that I set out to write. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to pander to the tastes of agents and publishers. I’m not writing for them – I’m writing for myself. If I were somehow to come across the magic formula for a children’s book that would make it irresistible to agents up and down the land, I wouldn’t write it.

The Chimney Rabbit is my story, and contains my characters, and while I would dearly love for it to be read widely, if no agent or publisher is interested, then so be it. At least I’ve written the story I wanted to write.

Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

- Andy Warhol

Two nights ago I completed the first draft of the sequel to The Chimney Rabbit, entitled The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice. They say that everyone has one novel in them – at least I know now that I’ve got more than one. After so many years of writing without ever coming close to completing a novel, despite many starts, it’s a relief to think that my first book wasn’t a one-off.

Of course, it’s not done yet. I’ve still got to read it over properly, then carry out at least two full drafts before I consider it even close to complete. But there’s no rush for that. With The Chimney Rabbit still no closer to finding an agent than when I started three months ago, there’s no pressing need to get the sequel in publishable form. I think this is an advantage – it means I can leave the book in a metaphorical drawer so when I come back to it, I come back to it fresh. It’s very easy to be so close to your work that you miss the most glaring of errors.

Writing The Underground Mice went a lot more smoothly than with the first book.  I started The Chimney Rabbit in March 2012, but because I had an enormous hiatus after Easter that took up most of the summer, I didn’t complete the first draft until the start of December 2012.

I’ve been much more disciplined in writing The Underground Mice. I haven’t written every day – sometimes I’ve needed to take a couple of days off to take some long baths and ponder where the story was going – but while the total time spent at the keyboard writing was probably comparable to the first book, the elapsed time is much, much shorter: I started The Underground Mice on the 14th of January 2013, and I’ve completed the first draft of 77,000 words within three months.

So what’s next? I’ll do a read-through (Scrivener produces excellent ebook output, so I’ll read through the whole thing on my Kindle, phone, or tablet) then get a draft copy printed at Lulu.com. This is so that my partner can read it – she’s a resolute Kindle refusenik, so it has to be a dead tree edition or she just can’t read it. I’m always amazed at the decent quality you can get from Lulu when printing a single paperback copy, complete with colour cover, for about £7 delivered. It would probably cost me more in printer ink to print a copy on my own printer.

Once I’ve done that, I think I’ll turn back to The Chimney Rabbit. I learned a lot from writing the sequel, so I think it’s time to see if I can apply any of that to the first book. When I wrote Chapter One of The Chimney Rabbit, I’d never completed a whole book – now I’ve completed two, so I’m sure there’s a lot I can do to improve it. Who knows? Maybe I can improve it enough to catch the eye of an agent.

After that, I’m not entirely sure. I’ve got some ideas for a third book in the series, but I’ve also got an idea for a stand-alone prequel, set in the same universe but several years before the events of the first book with a different cast of characters.

I’ll just have to see which story grabs me and demands to be written next.

I grew up by the sea. From the time I was four years old until long after I’d left home, my father was a lightkeeper for the Northern Lighthouse Board, which meant that we lived all around the coast of Scotland, usually moving home every four years. While sometimes my father worked at remote lighthouses where families weren’t allowed, and he did month-on, month-off shifts, at other times the whole family lived right next to the lighthouse.

Growing up, I can’t recall living anywhere I couldn’t see the sea from my house. Sometimes we lived so close that strong winds and heavy seas could send splashes of spray right in our front door if we’d been careless enough to leave it open.

Even when I went to university, first to St. Andrews and then to Dundee, I was never far from the sea.

A lot of my early writing was shaped by this constant proximity to the sea. I’ve got an abandoned novel set in a sea-port where the first chapter (which almost, but not quite, starts “it was a dark and stormy night” – give me a break, I was 20 when I wrote it) is concerned almost exclusively with the arrival of strange dark ships into port. I’m not sure if it’s conscious or not, but every city or town I’ve written about has been a coastal one. Even if it wasn’t mentioned, in my mind, it was near the sea.

I’m still doing it. Whole chapters of The Chimney Rabbit are set at sea, and The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice has incorporated the return sea voyage.

The strange thing is, I’ve now lived in Leicester, right in the heart of the Midlands and about as far from the sea as you can get, for nearly 20 years. Oh, I suppose I still spend most holidays near the sea – the last few trips in this country we’ve taken have been to St. Ives and Whitby and Brighton, and we had a long trip to the coastal cities of Melbourne and Sydney at the end of 2010, so I suppose I’ve had the salt in my blood topped up from time to time, but you’d think that spending such a long time living so far from the sea would have tempered my inclination to write so much about it.

I suppose it’s the early exposure that has the most effect. And growing up with the sound of the sea so close has shaped me permanently.

I’ve just realised that my initial notes and thoughts for a third Chimney Rabbit book are even more sea-based. It’s even got “sea” in the title – The Chimney Rabbit and the Sea Wolves.

Maybe it’s just time to accept this obsession with the sea as a permanent feature of my writing. No-one ever complained that Patrick O’Brian wrote too much about the sea, did they?

It’s very easy to be influenced by what you read – or at least, it is for me. When I started writing, I started by imitating the sort of books I liked – one of the earliest stories I can remember putting down on paper was, effectively, Willard Price fan fiction. I was probably about eight or nine years old, and I’d just read about three of his “Adventure” books in a row. I didn’t know anything about exotic places or wild animals other than what I’d read in his books, so I’m pretty sure I just regurgitated his stories, retelling the same events in my own words.

Around the same time, when I made a stab at drawing my own comics (despite my complete lack of artistic ability) they featured stories shamelessly ripped off comics like Warlord – I’ve got a recollection of trying to draw Harrier jump-jets and ending up with something that looked like smudged pencil pterodactyls.

Even now, when I read something I enjoy, the urge to imitate it is quite strong. I’m not quite as blatant or specific about it as I used to be, of course – I might read a fantasy book and get the urge to write some fantasy, or read some H.P. Lovecraft and start knocking some ideas around about horror short stories. On the whole, though, I try to keep my writing as original as I can.

But recently, I made the mistake of reading Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales, his reworking of the folk tales made famous by the Brothers Grimm. Each story is short – very short – and the clear, simple form of the tales becomes utterly seductive. There is little characterisation or character development, and most characters don’t even get the dignity of having an actual name – often you have a princess, or a huntsman, or a tailor as the hero, and that’s all they’re ever known as. It’s completely foreign to the way we write stories today, but still, they can be tremendously effective.

So when I was writing a chapter of The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice, and our heroes were discussing how lucky they were that there was a glowing fungus growing on the ceiling that let them see as they journeyed through the underground caverns, I couldn’t resist one little mouse telling a story that her grandmother had told her of the origin of that light – a story in the form of a Grimm-like folk tale.

It’s a pure indulgence, and it does pad the chapter out considerably, so it may happen that I need to edit it out. But still, it was fun to write, so I might as well post it here:

Once in an underground kingdom, a great wizard invented a glowing fungus that he could spread on the ceiling of their caverns and provide light for everyone to see by. However, the wizard refused to give the secret of the fungus to the to the King; instead, on New Year’s Day each year, he would provide the King with enough fungus to cover the ceiling of their capital city. After a year, the fungus would grow dull and start to die off, so the King would have to go back to the wizard on the next New Year’s Day and pay him a thousand pieces of gold for a new batch of the glowing fungus.

After this had gone on for a few years, the miserly King grew tired of paying out gold every year, so he called his three sons to him. ‘My sons,’ he said, ‘you must go to this wizard and find the secret of his fungus.’ His sons agreed to try.

The eldest son, who was a rich merchant, went to the wizard and offered him five thousand pieces of gold if he’d give up the secret. ‘Why would I give up a lifetime of money for just five thousand pieces of gold?’ asked the wizard. The eldest son went back to the King and admitted his failure.

The second son, who was a great warrior, went to the wizard and threatened him with a sword, saying that he’d chop the wizard’s hands off if he didn’t give up the secret. The wizard laughed at him. ‘If you chop my hands off, the severed hands will creep into your room at night and strangle you.’ The second son was terrified by the wizard’s threat, and went back to the King and admitted his failure.

The youngest son listened to the reports from his elder brothers, and thought to himself. ‘I am no rich merchant, like my eldest brother. And I am no warrior, like my other brother. I have no way to persuade or threaten this wizard.’ So he disguised himself as a commoner and asked the wizard to take him on as an apprentice. The wizard agreed, and started to teach him all his secrets. All his secrets, that is, except the secret of the glowing fungus. After five years of apprenticeship, the youngest son was no closer to learning the secret of the glowing fungus than when he’d started.

He was on the verge of giving up and going back to the King to admit his failure, when out of the blue the wizard called him into his study. ‘My boy,’ said the wizard, ‘you have been a faithful apprentice, and a good friend. I have told you all my secrets, except one – the secret of the glowing fungus. I feel that I am coming to the end of my life, and I now wish to pass this secret on to you.’ At this the youngest son was overcome with grief. Over the five years he’d been the wizard’s apprentice, he’d grown to like and respect him, and the thought of the old man dying made him terribly sad. The wizard had spent his life doing good for the people of the city, curing their ailments and cleansing their houses of spirits and providing good advice, all without payment. The thousand pieces of gold he received each year from the King for the glowing fungus was used entirely to help the people of the city.

He said to the wizard, ‘Great Wizard, you have been like a father to me for five years, but before you tell me your final secret, I must tell you one secret of my own – I was sent here by my father the King to take from you the secret of the glowing fungus.’

The wizard laughed. ‘I have known for five years that you were the son of the King. Do you think you can simply put on commoner’s clothes and a great wizard will be unable to see the resemblance between you and your brothers? But you have been an able pupil, and this city will need the fungus when I am gone. So come closer, and I will whisper my last secret.’ With that, the wizard told the youngest son the secret of the glowing fungus. Barely a month later, the wizard was dead.

The youngest son saw to the funeral arrangements of his friend and teacher, put on his finest wizard’s robe, and went to see his father the King. ‘I suppose you are here to tell me that you have failed, like your brothers before you,’ said the King.

‘No,’ said the youngest son. ‘I have the secret of the glowing fungus.’

The King was delighted. ‘My boy, my boy! That’s wonderful news! We shall have glowing fungus forever now!’

The youngest son smiled at his father. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You shall have glowing fungus forever. As long as you pay me one thousand gold pieces, once a year, on New Year’s Day.’ And with that, the new wizard turned around and went back to his business of helping the people of the city.

So there you have it – my attempt at the classic folk tale, with a miserly king, three sons of different skills, a clever wizard, and a little twist at the end. If I were to write it as a stand-alone story, I wouldn’t make it about glowing fungus – that makes sense only really in the context of The Underground Mice – so I’d probably make it a spell that kept a dragon at bay or something like that.

Great. Now I’ve got the urge to write about dragons.

The buzz in the world of publishing this week has centred around the contracts being offered by Random House’s new digital imprints Hydra, Alibi, Flirt, and Loveswept. These contracts mark a departure for a genuine, non-vanity publisher, in that they put the costs – all the costs – of publication on the shoulders of the author, and pay no advances whatsoever.

What’s more, while these are digital-only imprints, the publisher retains the rights in all formats – digital, print, audio – in every language, across the entire world. For the duration of copyright, which is the life of the author plus 70 years. This gives the author no opportunity to sell the book in other markets should it do well. Let’s not talk about the automatic option they have for the next book you write.

So this is a terrible contract. Possibly the only good thing you can say about it is that you don’t have to pay anything up front – all the costs are covered by the publisher, and you just don’t receive any money until the revenues from the book cover all those costs.

Not surprisingly, writers have not been happy about this. John Scalzi tore the contract apart on his blog, and the Science Fiction Writers of America have declared that Hydra is not a qualifying market – basically, that it’s no different from a vanity publisher or a self-publisher, and if you’ve been published by Hydra it doesn’t really count.

It’s a terrible contract. I’ve already said that, but it bears repeating. It’s truly awful. But today I received another rejection for The Chimney Rabbit and I started to wonder how many more rejections it would take for the contract to start to look just a wee bit attractive.

For years I wrote primarily for myself. But when I decided that I’d spent enough decades being a dilettante about writing, and it was time to a) complete an entire novel and b) take it through several drafts, it was clear that there was a c) in the list – to try to get it published.

Publication is the validation that you’re not just kidding yourself. That you do have some ability. It wasn’t easy for me to take the step of sending my query to an agent for the first time – I felt terribly exposed and nervous. But as the weeks have gone on, and the rejections have piled up (slowly – oh so slowly) my emotional investment in being published has increased, rather than decreased. I’ve put my work out there – now I want to see it on a shelf.

There is something magical about seeing your work in print. At school, when my pastiche of Kafka’s Metamorphosis made it into the school magazine; at university, when my series of humorous fantasy stories were printed in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Society magazine Sirius Moonlight; when my first short story appeared in Exuberance magazine; even when my first technical manual came back from the printers – there’s something about seeing your own words in another context, in stark black and white, and knowing that other people can read them too… It’s not a feeling that gets old.

If Hydra or Alibi or a similar imprint were to offer me their standard terms for The Chimney Rabbit, not for a digital-only publication, but a physical print run, would I accept? Would I be able to turn down the opportunity to see my work in print, on a shelf in a bookshop?

I really don’t know.