Genre

 This genre thing really bugs me.

I spend too much precious time and mental energy trying to crack exactly what genre my writing might fall into. I know genre is important for publishers and booksellers and librarians (I am, or have been, a librarian) so that they know what shelf to put the damn book on but, and it's a big but, it does not help me as a writer. It destroys my confidence and undermines my vocation.

The advice I received early on that, if it wasn't Romance it had to be Crime or, by extension, Thriller or Mystery, all but destroyed my first novel and I am left with the feeling that it is no more than a shadow of its former self - the former self being the novel it should have been, the novel I had imagined, the novel that wanted to be written. I feel robbed.

Children's picture books I get. Young Adult? I'm not sure I know where the boundaries are, at least at the upper end. When does YA become, you know, Romance or whatever? And then there is that catch-all Literary Fiction. Is what I write Literary Fiction? I would not want to claim such a distinction. Surely, it is a classification that can only be bestowed retrospectively by a readership or through the arcane labyrinths of Literary Criticism?

So what do I write? Looking around my local library, I cross off the shelf markings one by one: not Crime; not Saga; not Biography; not Large Print (well, who knows?). I write Life Stories. I write about people and how they deal with the circumstances in which they find themselves. I don't see a shelf mark that fits.

I'm left with the feeling that I am an outsider, that I don't fit in. That's ok. I guess I have always been an outsider. That is who I am so perhaps it is no surprise that my fiction defies categorization. It is what it is and it will be what it will be. And, no, there is not a body on the first page.

Oh! Wait a minute! 

There is a body on the first page. 

How did I miss that?

The student dig

 An extract from the beginning of Chapter 2 of Small Finds:

It is Friday evening when the students begin to arrive: the first-years.

They pitch their tents in a semi-circle, facing inwards, like wagons drawn up in a corral, as if they were setting up camp in a hostile environment.

The beginning of the student dig. Everything's good

Everything's the way it should be

As long as he forgets about everything else, it will all be fine

This is what he enjoys most: being out on a dig with the students

There will be plenty here to discover ...

A late 4th century Roman villa in the Cotswolds. What's not to like?

Six weeks. Starting now

Small Finds, a novel about archaeology ... and everything else

Small Finds - the beginning

Where did it all begin?

It began with Paulus Aurelius Sendico and his friends, and family, back in the 380's

That's AD 380

Specifically, it began with his nephew, Septan, but Septan was not yet born or even thought of in the 380s. Septan, his sister Helen and their friend Lydia were simply a dream conjured out of nowhere, an idea.

Septan and Helen led to their mother and their mother led to Paulus Aurelius Sendico and to his sudden departure from these shores and to his subsequent adventures in the world of the Late Antique

I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Although, in another sense, I am only now catching up with myself

That is how we got here, to the archaeolgical dig in a field just outside the village of Lynchcombe Sandicott, not far from the town of Ancester, Roman Antium, in the county of Gloucestershire in England, on the eastern fringes of the Cotswolds, in the year 2010 

That's AD 2010

2010 CE

It starts with a mess and gets messier and messier as the dig progresses

Monday 28^th June 2010

You know what it’s like. Things are going along just fine and then someone pulls the rug out from under your life and everything starts falling in on top of you, like Sampson in the Philistine temple. That’s how it feels. Falling masonry.

When he arrived on site, it was like a scene from a film about Passchendaele: all mud, water and ruin. It put him in mind of the poets Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen and of Vaughan Williams’ second symphony. 

It had been the wettest June on record. 

The story continues here:

Small Finds Chapter 1

Sendico - novel #4

 I've been digging into the archives. 

I knew I had something somewhere but, could I find it? No. I dug away all day, went though every file, every box. Nothing. I was sure I had seen something, found something, a week or two back. 

Why couldn't I find it now?

The whole day wasted, I thought. I felt depressed. 

Then I had a brainwave. It was an inspiration. 

Perhaps. 

There was something underneath that pile of stuff on the trolley in the corner of the Hut. Could it possibly be ...? I lifted the weight off the trolley and yanked out the papers trapped underneath. 

Yes! Here it is!

The date on the papers was 2009. 

I had written, or perhaps dreamed, the best part of a novel set in the last years of the western Roman Empire, that period known to those who know as the Late Antique, peopled by Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, the usurper Magnus Maximus and the emperors Theodosius, Valentinian and Honorius and Ellen of the Armies, Justinia, Marcellena, Paula, to name just a few. 

It was the year AD 385. It was all happening. 

A young man, rejected at home, joins an expeditionary force, absconds and travels the Mediterranean world in the company of those we now call great. His journey takes him via London to Trier, Milan, Rome, Jerusalem and, finally, Bethlehem.

It is the year AD 415 and he wants to go home.

Paulinus Aurelius Sendico; it is his story I want to finish next. 

This will be novel #4.

These printouts from 2009 are the starting point. There is more somewhere. I am sure there is more. I will go on looking in old notebooks and old computer files, always assuming that MS Word now will read the files from MS Word then ... I will look and I will find what I can and I will summon up my dreams from all those years ago. 

And I will write Sendico, novel #4.

It will take a while, a year maybe, maybe less. I have novels #2 and #3 waiting to be published. 

There is work to be done

That was fun

 It was

I must do it again sometime

I have two more novels ready to go

Perhaps in the autumn, I'll let lose another one

For now, though, what did I learn?

I learnt that it is possible to blog a novel

I learnt that there is no limit to the number of pages you can have on Blogger but sometimes you do have to clear the cache or it won't let you add another tab or logout and log back in or restart the computer or something 

I learnt that blogging your novel concentrates the mind and helps you concentrate the story. Mostly, it went up as it was but there were some strategic edits, some deletions and some additional writing - usually, no more than half a page or at the most half a chapter

I learnt that blogging your novel helps you understand your story and the people in it. You begin to see more clearly what makes their lives tick

And I learnt that blogging your novel gives you closure

It's been twelve years and more I've lived with this story. I tried to do it as a dual timeline novel but it became too cumbersome and unwieldy so I concentrated on the contemporary story. I went to various writing workshops looking for advice and was told I had to have a body on the first page

"But, I'm writing a novel about archaeology!"

No. You have to have a body on the first page

It took me several years and several rewrites to extricate myself and the novel and my head from that experience. You can still see the ghosts of those years haunting the novel as it now is

And Broderick Arnot. It has taken me until now to really begin to understand Broderick but I think he has, at last, begun to come to life as a man

And that's another thing. It is a novel about a man. Elyssia Gadnall, among others, made a determined bid to take over the story and had to be put back in her place more than once, again and again ... and again. It is a novel about men and women. Staring into the past, as I've done for the past twelve or more years, you realise that this is what makes the human world go round

So, there it is: a novel blogged

I know self-publishing is the coward's way out but there is no way that I am ever, being the person that I am, going to hack all the razzmatazz of the publishing merry-go-round

I think it's a good novel. 

I think it stands up against published novels I read

I would like to think that you would agree

Thanks for (listening) reading

The End

Here it is!

The end of a journey

The end of a novel

The end of this blogathon

Six weeks have gone by in a flash

The summer dig is done

Loss and love. Discovery and understanding

Have a cold beer. You deserve it

Chapter 52

Small Finds

The story is complete. Or has it just begun?

On the tab Ch 51 & 52 above

Go well

Sunday

After all the tumult of yesterday, I think we deserve something quiet

Time to reflect

Time to recollect

Time to think

On Sunday morning, the Arnot and Gadnall families go to church in the village

Elyssia is preaching

It's her first time

Complete with broken arm

You have to feel for the kid 

Small Finds

Chapter 51

Not quite the end, but almost