All posts by Paul

I am a self-employed writer, which means I’m working for an idiot who doesn’t pay me enough – but the holidays are great. I’m ex many occupations, from the respectable ‘career-ladder’ to disreputable “somebody’s- got-to-do-it”. All a good way of seeing someone else’s point-of-view. Best job, apart from writing, was dispatch-riding on a motorcycle in the 70s, though I’ve also enjoyed teaching, librarianship, counselling and helping to run a community-centre. Sometimes I’ve looked respectable in a suit, other times a bit more wild and woolly (though still stylish) as a biker. It’s strange how differently people treat you, depending on what you’re wearing. A suit means I’m sometimes addressed as ‘sir’, but in motorcycle leathers I’m always referred to as ‘mate.’ The worst job that I’ve done ? You really don’t want to know, but it was in a processed food manufacturer’s factory – put me off bacon, sausages and quiches for a long time, and made me look at pet food in a new way. I’m very glad that I don’t have any pictures. I’ve been writing since I was eight, when I penned a story about a desert island and attempted to compile a dictionary – as Clarissa does in my short story ‘The Moon Is Out Tonight’. I’ve written for magazines under a variety of pen-names, ghost-written a couple of biographies and had a column in a local newspaper. I used to concentrate on non-fiction of an informative, how-to instructional nature, as I’m a firm believer in the dissemination of knowledge to enable people to do things for themselves. Knowledge is power, and in these troubled times of economic downturn and increased intrusion into our lives by government agencies, its vital to know how to get through. My fictional stories also show people coping and finding ways to survive. I’m based in a Celtic nation, the county of Cornwall or Kernow. I’ve been here for twenty years, and have lived all over the country, as well as abroad in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and the U.S.A.
Writing

The naming of characters

Leave a comment

Character names often outshine the titles of novels, lodging in readers’ minds and entering popular culture as nouns, a shorthand way of describing an acquaintance, such as Tarzan, Sherlock, Gandalf, Hermione or The Wicked Witch.

I’m currently reading James Lee Burke’s novel The Jealous Kind, whose protagonist is distinctly named Aaron Holland Broussard. He’s the grandson of Hackberry Holland who featured in four of Burke’s thirty-six novels.

Image result for novel The Jealous Kind

I try to make my fictional character’s names memorable and am blessed that Cornwall, where my detective stories are set, has a rich array of unusual family names from its Celtic roots.

Thus, I called the owner of a chain of massage parlours Caradoc Honeycombe, which suited his gelatinous nature. Gordon Honeycombe was a popular British newsreader in the 1970s and 1980s, who organised a get-together of 160 members of the Honeycombe clan in 1984. There are 350 Honeycombes worldwide, all descended from one man called Matthew Honeycombe, who lived in the Cornish moorland village of Saint Cleer 350 years ago. Caradoc was a Knight of the Round Table during Uther Pendragon’s time.

Other of my character names include:

*Cleaver— for a heavily-scarred bodyguard who favours blades.

*Noah and Nina Shrike—ex-secret agents, who turn out to be cannibals. A shrike is also known as a butcher bird, as it stores dead prey on spiked vegetation.

*Luna Moth—a massage therapist from Vietnam, who has a large tattoo of this green-winged insect on her back.

*The Watcher—the title given to a sniper by his comrades in the Croatian War of Independence. He was turned into a killing machine by his traumatic experiences as a boy soldier, sating his bloodlust in peacetime by playing a real-life murderous role-play game. I didn’t mention his original family name; he’d dissociated from his origins.

*Esau Tregenza—a reclusive farmer whose mummified body is found in the kitchen of his remote farm, where it has been sitting for five years. A staunch Methodist, all of his ancestors were named after characters from the Bible.

*Tabitha Anstock-Struthers—Devon & Cornwall Police Authority’s press officer. More of a spin doctor, she has the soul of a cyborg.

Some of the names I use hint at the personalities of my heroes and villains, and there’s research evidence that how we’re named affects out entire lives:

The Name Game: how names spell success in life and love

Have you invented any memorable fictional character names?

Image result for celebrity baby name cartoon

Writing

Clichés!

Leave a comment

In 2017, Ben Blatt published Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve.

It uses statistical data to analyse such things as how often an author mentions the weather, what is their favourite colour and how often they use exclamation points. Elmore Leonard hated them but ignored his own advice about how often to use them.

I’ve been mindful of his dislike, ever since reading his 10 rules of writing. I don’t often resort to exclamation points, but in closing my last novel I used them twice in consecutive sentences. I tried removing one, but it insisted on being there! (see…!)

Blatt’s book looks more accessible and relevant than the pure data fest of Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers’ The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of a Blockbuster Novel.

Image result for ben blatt nabokov

Even this Publishers Weekly article about the book contains some fascinating data:

Danielle Steel Loves the Weather and Elmore Leonard Hates Exclamation Points: Literature by the Numbers

Image result for writing cliches cartoon

Writing

Using Posh Words

Leave a comment

One of the joys for me, as a young reader, was learning new words. I loved looking up meanings in dictionaries, gradually learning how modern English words came from ancient languages.

As an author, I try to make my use of words appropriate for the character who’s speaking. For instance, a regular presence in my series of Cornish detective novels is a 65-year-old forensic pathologist. She was raised as an army brat, in India during the closing days of the British Empire, and has a formal way of speaking that’s quaintly Victorian and militaristic.

As the omnipotent narrator of my stories, I’ll use long and unusual words if they suit the description. Thus, a specialist auditor would scrutinise a dodgy businessman’s account books. I’m not showing off by doing this, more honouring my readers’ intelligence.

I have a large vocabulary, but even so, I was challenged by a novel that I read recently. My eye was caught by Kim Zupan’s debut novel The Ploughmen, as it was the last book in the fiction section of my local library. It’s a brilliant crime thriller, with a highly unusual plot. Zupan looks to be in his sixties, (which gives me hope!) and is an admirable stylist in his descriptions of landscape, wildlife and weather.

Image result for Kim Zupan ploughmen

He used at least twenty words that were new to me, including albedo, canzonet, arcature and bindlestiff. I guessed the meaning of the last one from the context, and it may be familiar to American readers of this post.

Zupan’s use of such words demonstrated his love of language, and it made me think about whether I was providing enough linguistic gems for my readers.

Do you use posh words?

Have you come across any good ones?

Image result for writing quote fancy words

Marketing, Self-Promotion

When a Writer becomes a Brand

Leave a comment

As a writer soon learns, it’s not the quality of one’s writing that counts, more how you’re going to sell it.

These days, that means selling yourself too, as your image is as vital as the plot of your book. Any aura you can generate, along with the concept created by your stories can live on, long after you’re dead. Cynics have long said that ‘dying is a great career move’. It’s especially true of musicians: just look at Michael Jackson’s sales, and Jimi Hendrix has had more albums released bearing his name since he died than he made in his lifetime.

I first became aware of this marketing phenomenon in publishing back in 1995, when I saw a sequel to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, on which the Bladerunner film was based. Dick, himself, refused to write a novelization of the movie, though a writer-for-hire later did so. Since he died, there have been three sequels. I tried one, and it was as horrid as I anticipated.

Image result for book sequel blade runner

There have been many continuations of long-established fictional protagonists’ adventures, written by contemporary writers. James Bond has been given new life by Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz.

Scores of writers have written Sherlock Holmes stories. Contemporary authors have had their protagonists kidnapped after they die, as with Robert B Parker‘s private detective Spenser and several other of his creations, who’ve thrived in at least fifteen novels. Sold by the owners of his estate, his relatives are coining it in! Such authors were undoubtedly glad that their family would have financial security, but I bet they’d deplore how their fictional characters have been altered.

Image result for detective spenser books

As a purist, I object to this, as it comes across as misrepresentation to me, a pastiche put together to capitalise on the gullibility of readers. That some people are so hooked on a character, that they don’t care who writes about them, is another matter. It leads to things like fan fiction—from which writers of the quality of E.L. James pulled themselves out of the swamp—proving my point that nothing good can come of it.

And yet, well-respected authors write their versions of literary heroes. The financial inducement must be attractive, and their hubris helps propel them through people asking, “Why the hell are you writing that, can’t you think up your own characters anymore?”

What do you think of this form of literary grave robbing?

How would you feel if your lovingly created characters lived on after you died?

Image result for ghost and grave robber

Writing

Chapters: Numbers or Names?

Leave a comment

It’s recommended by writing gurus, that a cliffhanger teaser at the end of a novel, can generate interest in the next book, which set me to thinking about how a fictional story is organised.

I finished my fifth novel at the end of 2018. I’ve applied the same format to all of my books, a template that makes it easy for me to navigate around where I’ve been and where I’m going.

Aiming for the recommended 80,000 words of my crime genre, I produce an average of 38 chapters that vary in length from 1,800 to 4,000 words. The longer chapters have two or three section breaks—I love section breaks—a great way of suggesting connections in a plot.

Image result for chapters in book cartoon

I number and name my chapter headings, (Chapter 37—Under the Skin), which may be a bit belt & braces of me, but there’s a method in my eccentricity. The main reason is, to help the reader remember where they are, and also a named chapter acts as a hook to pull them in.

From my experience as a librarian, I know that readers use odd reasons to reject a book…too many pages, too many chapters and chapters that are too long. I’m kind of playing the odds here, for polls of readers show that it’s mainly women who read anyway, and most readers of crime fiction are female, and there are more older readers than young. Hopefully, my anticipated demographic of readers will appreciate me keeping things neat!

I’ve observed from the novels I’ve been reading, that most use numbered chapters, with only a few having titles. Some dispense with chapters completely, and the text is laid out in paragraphs and section breaks. A few separate the story into parts, to describe things from a different point of view or when there’s a chronological gap.

There’s been a trend recently, to have chapters alternate their POV. Gone Girl and Girl On A Train did this with each chapter bearing the name of which character was speaking.

Image result for alternating pov cartoon

I don’t think that it’s always the author who chooses how to lay out their chapters, as there may be editorial decisions made by the publisher to have the layout conform to a house style.

How do you organise your story?

Humour

‘His novel was refused, and his movie was panned’

Leave a comment

A bit of humour for those us wondering why the hell we do what we do, by writing stories that never see the light of day.

Things can come right, even if it means waiting…hopefully not until the afterlife, as in Johnny Cash’s version of Loudon Wainwright III’s The Man Who Couldn’t Cry.

Lyrics here for those of you who want to sing along.

Johnny Cash – The Man Who Couldn’t Cry Lyrics | MetroLyrics

Publishing

Never Give Up! Rejected 200 times, then wins book award

Leave a comment

A heartening story about an author who persevered for ten years, through 200 rejections, before getting published. 

Brian Conaghan found himself in the running for the overall Costa Book Award, having won the children’s prize.

Coatbridge writer Brian Conaghan wins Costa book award – BBC News

Hope for us all!

I’m too bloody-minded to quit—some call this determination—others stubbornness.

I just hope that I don’t end up like one of those fighters who won’t admit defeat, staying in the ring until they turn the lights out!

Humour

Planet Spell Checker

Leave a comment

I’m interested in learning if anyone knows where companies who produce writing software get their spell checkers from.

I’d have thought that to support their product, the spell checker would be of the highest quality, perhaps produced by, and bought from, an expert in dictionaries, such as Oxford, Collins or Chambers. This is hard to credit when I see the words my software queries. It’s easier to believe that spell checkers are based on an outdated children’s dictionary acquired for a few pennies at a charity shop!

I use LibreOffice Writer to create my novels, as it’s easier for me to understand than MS Word and more importantly, is free! It has a thesaurus and an automatic spell checker, which I’m sometimes grateful of, other times irritated by.

Grammarly provides useful support, and I’m particularly glad of its punctuation checker as I tend to suffer from comma-itis! Its spell checker is just as elementary as LibreOffice. Words that I’ve typed recently, and which have been questioned, include track, moor, wizard, mauve and siphon.

I’ve added them to the spell checker’s dictionary so that it doesn’t query their use again. I well understand, why British novelist Will Self declared that the one thing he’d rescue from his burning house would be his laptop—not for the WIP—rather, to preserve his spell checker!

Occasionally, the software cautions me in a humorous way. Just this morning, I was writing about a dangerous guard dog, which my detective protagonist sees prowling the house of criminals he has under surveillance. When it barks, it reminds him of the Hound of The Baskervilles. Spell checker sprang into action, asking me ‘Do you mean Hound of The Basketballs?

Writing

Getting Mad, Baby! What angers you about writing?

Leave a comment

Since returning to creative writing six years ago, I’ve scrambled up several steep learning curves to do with the business of writing. These include formatting, book cover design, marketing the ebooks I self-published on Smashwords and Amazon and the all-important lessons of how to write a synopsis and query agents.

I made another round of supplications to the ‘gatekeepers’, in February, after spending the previous two months editing my fifth novel. As any writer knows, that feels like wading through porridge, but there’s still a discernible feeling of achievement in having polished a manuscript.

I’m at a stage where I feel like I’ve created a potentially commercial product—which is how I’m increasingly coming to view my novels—rather than taking joy in them as a readable story. Despite this confidence, I know I’m a nobody, an unpublished author looking for his first publishing contract. Any marketability I have comes from where I live in Cornwall, which is popular as a holiday destination and from being the location of the successful television adaptation of Winston Graham’s Poldark stories.

I know that some bestselling authors are poor writers, but what makes me mad is that if my manuscript was submitted to the gatekeepers by a media celebrity (who’s already got fame and wealth), then it would be snaffled up immediately. Commercially, it’s the way of the world in publishing that someone with an existing high profile, a ‘platform’, will be more attractive a risk than someone anonymous who will take more effort to promote—but it still makes me mad!

Image result for snarl cat gif

It’s proof that no one cares what you’ve written. Would-be readers are more enticed by already knowing who the author is, than anything to do with the quality of the story. As an example supermodel/supertwit Naomi Campbell has ‘written’ several novels and biographies—I don’t know if she’s read them! 

That’s what makes me angry—realising publishing is a business and has little to do with art.

How about you?