The empty frame

I walked into Cambridge with my son today and we happened to walk through Waterstones. I showed him the Feel Good Fiction table and we had a chuckle. A member of staff walked past so I asked him if he really thought The Outsider was 'feel good fiction'.

He looked a bit nonplussed and mumbled something about it not being something he would have put under a label like that. What about 1984? The Handmaid's Tale? The Great Gatsby? A man nearby chortled at the idea of The Outsider being on a feel good fiction list and the staff member said that perhaps the label ought to read something along the lines of 'Fiction that we really like' but after a couple more chuckles from the man nearby he took the label away, leaving only the empty frame.

Somehow the empty frame seemed a lot more appropriate.

Feel bad fiction

I went into Cambridge today. It was weird weather: one minute muggy, the next chilly. Big black clouds trying to rain but never squeezing out more than a few drops. I saw a heron fly over as I walked in across Lammas Land. I'm very fond of herons, and they look so fantastic in flight - like pterodactyls.

I was wandering aimlessly after doing a bit of food shopping and wandered into Waterstones. There was a themed tabletop of books with a little banner in a frame declaring it to be Feel Good Fiction.

I have no idea why I looked at the books. I can think of few labels more designed to put me off than one with Feel Good Fiction on it - bit look I did. The first book I saw was Albert Camus' The Outsider. If you haven't read it, then you will have to take my word for it that you should not come away feeling 'good'.

Nor, with its vision of the future as a 'boot stamping on a human face - forever' is George Orwell's 1984 a book that is ever going to put a spring in your step.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale? Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men? Feel Good Fiction? Has anyone at Waterstone's actually read any of these books?

Two spines

A delivery van brought a copy of Newton Compton's Gli Incubi di Hazel today - the Italian edition of Leander Deeny's Hazel's Phantasmagoria that has 'borrowed' the cover from Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror.

It is a curious thing. The book is weirdly padded so that you can squeeze it and it makes a slight hissing noise as you let go (unintentional I think). It is illustrated throughout with David Robert's illustrations from the Quercus edition of the book here in the UK - and one of them pops up on the back cover. He is credited and acknowledged as the copyright holder.

The plot thickens. . .

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. . .