Files and folders

I spoke to Chris Riddell today. He and Paul Stewart have returned from their UK tour. Chris is always full of enthusiasm for what he is doing and always eager to know what I'm up to. Usually, a lot less than he is.

So what is the next stage of a book - what comes after thoughts and notebooks? Anything half decent from the notebooks quickly becomes a file on my computer. There is a file titled The Jet Brooch (see last post). These files cluster together into folders. There was (and still is) an Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror folder. The same for the Black Ship and Tunnel's Mouth.

In these folders are more stories than I ever use in the books. There are stories that for one reason or another I just felt needed to be bedded down for a little longer. If I have a story that I like I want it to be the best I can make it or I would rather wait until I can fix whatever bothers me about it. And so there is a Tales of Terror 4 folder filled with these spare stories that need a tweak of some kind.

The story that provides the setting for each of the Tales of Terror books has been the one I have most enjoyed writing. This is because it really develops as the book develops. The short stories have characters that make fleeting appearances, but Uncle Montague and Edgar, Ethan and Cathy in the Black Ship and Robert in Tunnel's Mouth are more rounded characters that hopefully grow as you read the book and get to know them. It is vital to me that the device of having a narrator and a storyteller does not become simply a contrivance. I want that story to be just as strong as the others.

This wraparound story is the key to the book and it is this plus a couple of the other stories that I showed to Bloomsbury to give an idea of how the book would end up. With Uncle Montague I more or less wrote the whole thing first, but because there is a format now, I can write the rest of the book under contract (and the accompanying deadline of course).

This process of thought-notebook-file-folder is the same in a novel like The Dead of Winter. It is just that whereas I was writing notes about individual stories, the notes where more to do with the solving the problems of a sustained narrative, so there were notes about characters and locations and what I would call the stand-out scenes - the ones that move the story on and need to be spot on. These scenes are the ones you hope are going to stick in your reader's mind.

Ideas

I spoke to Isabel Ford today. We had a long phone conversation going through the page proofs for the book, doing the last check through for errors and amendments on Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. This is the small but massively important stuff - the highlights in the eyes.

I have spoken before about the importance of the editing process, but I thought it might be good to just talk a little about the specifics of how this book has gone from a bunch of ideas in my notebook, to a book ready to be printed.

OK. Well, as I have just said, this book started, as all my books start, with little verbal doodles in my notebook. I always have a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook on the go, but I do have a tendency to keep things in my head too long (where they can be forgotten). I think it is best practice to get things written down.

Inevitably a lot of these notes are what you might loosely call 'ideas'. I was mentioning to Helen Szirtes the other day that I have become increasingly suspicious of 'ideas'. People often say 'I have this great idea for a book' but what they are really saying is that they have a premise. And having a great premise for a story is fine as far as it goes, but someone has still got to write it. Take twenty writers and they would all make twenty different books from that one premise - some very different indeed.

So what exactly are these notes in my notebook? Well, they are all kinds of things really. They might be notes on a character or a piece of dialogue. They might be a note on how to a untangle a knot of some kind that has developed in something I am writing. They might be the start of a story. They might be the end of a story. They might simply be a premise for a story or a title that suggests the possibility for a story.

For instance I have 'The Jet Brooch' written down. I like the title - I like the word 'jet'. A jet brooch would be black, of course, which is nice. I can see a lovely, sinister, glossy black brooch. But what form the brooch takes or what happens in the story, I haven't yet decided. I have a few ideas but none that is fully formed. It is there as an image, just to get me going. One day when I am on the train, or eating my lunch or falling asleep, a story will come to me about that jet brooch.

The Dead of Winter

I can finally reveal that the title of the novel once known as Ghosts, then as The Secrets of Hawton Mere, is now called The Dead of Winter. As I have already said, the title of a book is sometimes obvious and sometimes not. The changes in title for this one reflect to some degree how the novel itself developed as I wrote it.

I hadn't wanted to say this before I had confirmation from Bloomsbury that they were OK with that title - that they didn't have another book in the pipeline with the same one or whatever. But there doesn't seem to be a problem and everyone appears to really like it.

So The Dead of Winter it is.



As I have mentioned before I keep lots of pages torn from magazines - a habit I picked up as an illustrator. I still use them for reference on the odd occasion anyone asks me to illustrate, but more and more I use them in my writing - to give some authenticity to a description or to suggest a location or the look a character. Sometimes the atmosphere in a photograph or a painting is suggestive in itself.

I have a feeling that this photo - something I took from a colour supplement years ago - maybe twenty or more years ago - may have planted the seed for this novel. The Dead of Winter will be published early in 2010.

Helen has just returned the second draft of the manuscript to me with her thoughts. My next job is to go through those and take them on board and look at what needs to be done to resolve any problems or anomalies. But so far - if I say so myself - it's looking good.

April fool

I received another package from Bloomsbury today. This time it was three copies of the Japanese edition of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror. I had one advance copy of the book a while back, but I can't have enough of these: they look so great.

Neil Gaiman is so famous that people have been writing April Fool's pieces just about him. Check them out on his blog (listed on the left). The Guardian's April Fool was so lame this year that I wondered why they felt the need to bother.

Speaking of Neil Gaiman, Coraline the movie is out soon in the UK. I was looking at the trailer the other day and though it looks fun and seems to be very well done, it isn't weird like the book. I mean there are weird things in it, obviously. But the way it is done is not weird in itself. Coraline had a brilliant nightmare feel about it. I'm not sure this movie is going to do that justice.



I think I was seeing something much more like Jan Svankmajer's Alice in my head. Although I can readily accept that it would not have been a very commercial way to go. . .

Buy your own movies!

There has been a lot of fuss over the last few days about our fun-loving Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, whose husband watched a couple of blue movies and the charge later appeared on her expenses sheet at the House of Commons.

We have all been enjoying her embarrassment of course, and the delicious irony of a government so invasive of the privacy of its citizens being exposed in this way. It almost makes me want to be a political cartoonist again.

But personally I think the real outrage here is that the Commons passed, as a legitimate expense, the watching of any movies, whatever the type. Who cares what they watch in the privacy of their own home, as long as we're not paying. I am just as annoyed that my tax money was used to pay for Surf's Up to be quite honest. And there can be little excuse for watching Oceans 13 once - but twice? At my expense!

The affair of Leander Deeny, Newton Compton and the Uncle Montague cover is with the Bloomsbury lawyers, so it would be inappropriate of me to comment further.

But watch this space. . .

Tunnel's mouth

I received proofs of the cover for Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth this morning. The book is out this October in hardback, published by Bloomsbury, alongside the paperback of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship.

It is David's best one yet, I think. I look forward to seeing a version of it wrapped around Leander Deeny's next book.

Oi! That's my cover!

Someone left a comment on the blog today telling me that the cover for Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror was being used for another book entirely in Italy. I couldn't believe that they could possibly be right, but it turns out that they are.


The book in question is Gli Incubi di Hazel by Leander Deeny, published as Hazel's Phantasmagoria here in the UK, with a cover, like Uncle Monty, illustrated by David Roberts . It is published in Italy by Newton Compton; in the UK by Quercus. Curious, huh?

Why or how this strange state of affairs came about I have not as yet discovered. When I find out, I'll let you know.