The week after The Week

It's all bit weird here, in this corner of the universe. The foundations have moved. The constant, the taken-for-granted, the always-there is no longer there. The new Elizabethan era of Queen Elizabeth II is just that, an era: complete, finished and consigned to the history books. 

And the unconscionable, the abomination of desolation, is here, front and centre, set up in the holy of holies of our national life. Perhaps it will go away if we bury our heads under the pillows, perhaps it won't. It won't, not for a while yet. And the carnage it wreaks will last for generations.

To cap it all, the equinox has passed. It is now Autumn, promising Winter.

In all this turbulence, a week has come and gone; a working week, more or less, and I have set out for myself a work plan for the autumn. This is a weekly writing schedule comprising six days for six novels and one day for review. This is the day for review. 

Six novels? Writing? Are you mad?

Probably.

Let me explain.

One novel is complete and published, if only by me on the blog here: Small Finds. (Not that that stops me from thinking of things I should change and things I should have done differently.) The job here is one of marketing and promotion. Ha! In practice, that means the odd post on Twitter.

Two more novels are already written. Their working titles are Theresa & Tom and Andrew Bridges. These two are (near) contemporary stories.

One of them, Theresa & Tom is in manuscript form in two large notebooks, so the job is to type it up into the old laptop in the writing hut. It is set in the final years of the twentieth century.

The other, Andrew Bridges, was written directly into the laptop so the job there is to read, review and edit. This story was written in real time during 2021 and early 2022.

The fourth and fifth novels are fragmentary and both derive from writing I did a decade or more ago. They are both historical and they are related to each other. They are, in effect, two parts of one story. This story is the history underlying the archaeology of Small Finds. 

In both cases it is a matter of finding extant material, piecing it together and reworking it into a sound narrative. Some of this material is in notebooks and some of it is in redundant computer files. The stories have had various titles over the years. For now, I'll call them Paul Aurelius and Septan. The action takes place at the beginning of the fifth century in Britain (Septan) and beyond (Paul Aurelius).

I spent an interesting time on Thursday, recovering text from archived, obsolete MS Word 7 files from 1998! To my delight, I discovered what amounts to half a novel already written (Septan). 

In the light of this discovery, this has been a Good Week.

And the sixth?

This is a glimmer in the mind, a mirage in the desert, a fantasy. It is a sequel to Small Finds. 

This idea would, if it does become something more substantial, pick up on a couple of the characters in that novel and follow them into the contemporary future. Small Finds is set in 2010. This follow up fast-forwards to now and, beyond now, to 2025 and ... well, I don't know yet where it ends up. 

The job here is to plan a narrative arc and I spent a happy hour Friday afternoon doing that. It's a rough schema. When it comes to the writing, it will change. But that's half the fun, isn't it?

It is, as a say, all a bit weird in this corner of the universe at the moment.

Little teashop by the sea

Talking about genre

(which I was last time I was here)

I have unexpectedly discovered that I like books in the Little-teashop-by-the-sea genre

You know the sort of thing

I don't know what you call it

I call it Little teashop by the sea genre

I've been trying to break free from Crime and Murder Mystery and Thriller novels

I've had enough. Too much

I do not want to read another book with a dead body on the first page

There are rarely dead bodies in the Little teashop by the sea

More often there are interesting people

People who are alive. Living people

People living interesting lives

Friendly people

People with friends

Nice people

I want to read about nice people for a change

And, perhaps, I'm thinking now, this is the kind of book I want to write

If only I knew what genre it was

In some ways, Small Finds set out to be this kind of book

A little archaeological dig in the Cotswolds

That kind of book

Before a dead body turned up on the first page and ruined everything

Uninvited

Which I subsequently buried 

The page, that is, not the body

But then, I started thinking

They probably had dead bodies in Roman Britain, at a guess

So maybe, maybe it was not such a stretch

What if?

What if, the dead body on the first page were an echo ...

You know

And they did!

They found these bones between these houses

At this rescue dig they were working in the town at the new supermarket development

The Corn Hill development

In Ancester. Roman Antium

A young female

Inevitably

The hare was off and running and the dog followed

No matter how much I called and whistled, I could not get that dog back

What else could I do?

I ran with the hounds

So, hey!

So much for a (nice, quiet, friendly) Little Dig in the Cotswolds

Still. There are interesting people: nice, friendly people living interesting lives

It's all good, despite the body that's not on the first page

(And not in the teashop)

It's called Small Finds and you can read it here, on the blog 

(Check the tabs at the top of the page)

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