Turn a Different Corner

Science fiction writers have long had a tradition of creating works of alternative history, a subgenre telling stories based in some ‘uchronia’ – a time that doesn’t exist. The idea is simple: they take a setting or an event that we’re all (hopefully) familiar with and then twist the outcome a little so that the unexpected occurs.

But why do they write this kind of stuff and why do we, the readers, lap it up? Well all fiction begins with the simple question, ‘What if?’ and alternative reality tales ask more clearly defined ‘What if’s than most. It’s a plot device that can be used to answer big questions or show us something about ourselves and our world that we don’t (or don’t want to) usually see. Three famous examples are;

What if the Nazi’s had won World War II?
What if President Nixon hadn’t been assassinated?
What if the Apollo astronauts had found alien lifeforms already on the moon?

How would these changes in events effect regular people?  How would we have reacted in those circumstances? Would it have been how we’d like to feel we’d have acted? A good writer can hold a mirror up to us with these kind of tales while at the same time enticing us to read more with a rollicking good yarn. And that’s the kind of stuff we like. It has a built in backstory that we don’t have to go to the trouble of ploughing through chapters of prose to set up the payoff. We already know that Lee Harvey Oswald was waiting for the President in Dallas and that Neil Armstrong travelled through space in a Saturn V rocket. We don’t need much set up, we can get straight on with the story.

BBC’s Saturday teatime favourite Doctor Who has asked this kind of question for generations. In recent series they’ve had alternative histories involving the destruction of Pompeii, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare to mention but three shows from the last few years. They make little attempt at social comment, they usually just want to entertain and tell a good story. That’s the road that I usually go down too when writing fiction. I can’t see how my social or political views are more worthy of a platform than anyone else’s, so I just try to get a good tale down.

I’ve had my own attempt at this kind of story recently. It’s my first full length novel and it’s finally available for download via Amazon. It will be available through the i-store and other online shops in a month or so and a paperback version will hopefully be out in September. Its called ‘The Happiest Workplace On Earth’ and it asks the question, What If Walt Disney hadn’t died in 1966 but had continued the work that he was planning at the time of his death? What if he had completed the utopian city that he wanted to create and had actually managed to get people living and working in it? And what if that city became a terrorist target?

It's good to finally give people the chance to read it.

Centurion

It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks. I feel old enough as it is but even after I send my cards off to the recycler I’ll still be on the young side of fifty…  just. But sometimes I feel like I’m a hundred. My knees certainly seem that old when I’ve been hill walking or jogging. That’s what I get for playing American Football in my youth I guess.

My knees aren’t really a hundred though, nor is the rest of me. These blogs however, that’s a different story. This is my hundredth weekly report of my life as a struggling writer. I’ve enjoyed writing each and every one of them, even though the vast majority of them haven’t actually been about the art and craft of writing. I’ve written about cooking, sweating, hill walking, watching cricket, needing new glasses, music, things that annoy me (several times), the taxman, mental health and, on occasion, the writing and publishing process. And thankfully some of you have read them. I can’t thank you enough for your encouragement over the last two years.

In that time quite a lot has happened to me. I’ve ended my twenty-year career at a multi-national financial institution (not through choice – don’t believe everything you read about all bankers rolling in huge bonuses) and I’ve started living my life-long dream of being a full-time, self-employed writer. I figured that it was now or never so grasped the proverbial nettle and it’s been relatively successful, as long as you don’t measure success by monetary figures alone. I’ve had my work printed in several magazines and newspapers and have published a couple of short story collections along with half a dozen small quiz books and self-help books. Don’t mock, they pay the bills. Well, some of the bills. If I’m honest we’ve had to cut back on our spending as much as possible so those bills no longer include such luxuries as foreign holidays and satellite sports channels but I can’t say that I really care all that much. Those indulgences helped distract me from my unhappy working life so now that I’m doing something that I love, do I still really have that desire to travel to faraway places? Hell yeah, of course I do! But we take the life we’re dealt and make the most of it. And writing is what I most want to do. Amazingly I’ve got to a point where my long awaited (by me) first novel is on the brink of being unleashed on the market. That’s another ambition ticked off the bucket list.

I’m already well underway with the next novel (a cosy-crime murder whodunit) and there are a couple more quiz books coming, hopefully before the end of the year. And of course I’ll still be posting this blog every Friday for the foreseeable future.

Here's to the next hundred.

Stop!

There are several lessons in life that everyone needs to learn. How to tell the time; how to mix the perfect vodka martini; when to use an apostrophe correctly.

And everyone needs to know when they should keep on doing something and when it’s the right moment to say ‘Enough is enough, I need to stop this now’. When someone buys you the fifth tequila slammer of the night, for example, it’s probably time to quit. Or when you think it’s really cool to buy yet another Osmonds / Backstreet Boys / Westlife t-shirt (delete according to your age).

In my case at the moment, I’m having trouble knowing when to stop rewriting and editing my novel. It’s finished. I know it’s finished yet I can’t resist having just another little tweak at some part of it. And if I don’t think that particular section is as good as it can be then it stands to reason that the rest of it isn’t either – so I’ll start with another rewrite from the very beginning.

It’s so maddening. It’s been ‘almost there’ for a couple of months now but I seem unable to let go. Or should that be ‘unwilling’? I guess that what’s really happening is that I’m doing all I can to postpone the moment when I have to ‘send my baby out into the big wide world’, as it were. While ever I’m still working on it nobody can tell me that my book’s useless, so if I keep it locked up at home it – and me – will be safe from harm.

That’s ridiculous, I know, so it’s time to let go. It’s time to get the damned thing finished.

Now I’m sorry but I’ve got to cut this week’s blog short. I’ve got another draft to write.

Second Sight

So as I wrote in last week’s blog, I needed some new glasses. The nice lady at the opticians explained that because I write a lot and I’m getting old I should get varifocal lenses. I wasn’t happy at that, and especially not happy when she told me the price but I guess it comes to us all. I dug in to the rapidly shrinking savings pot and paid up.

‘They’ll take around ten to fourteen days,’ she told me, ‘but we’ll text you to let you know when they’re here’.

Fair enough. So I waited patiently like a good little Briton. On day fifteen I gave them a ring, just to see if there was any news.

‘Oh yes sir, they’ve been here a few days. Did nobody let you know?’

*sigh*

It’s not just me, is it? Is it too much to ask for people, especially in a business environment, to do what they say they’ll do, at the time that they’ve promised to do it? Or is honesty too much to expect?

Anyway, I finally got my new ‘ryans’ and I have to say that they’re seriously weird. For those (like me until a couple of weeks ago) who don’t know how varifocals work, it’s like this; instead of like in a pair of single vision glasses where the entire lens is ground to the same prescription, a varifocal lens has three entirely different areas ground into different parts of the same lens through which you can focus on different distances. So I look through the top part of my glasses to see things over a metre or so away, the  centre to see things like my computer screen and a small spot just above my nose if I want to read something close up. I know that it sounds really complex and as though it might take a lot of getting used to, but that’s only because it is and it does.

My Beloved has been suppressing chuckles ever since I first put them on. Not because I look stupid in them (on the contrary – the designer frames make me look sooo cool, don’t you know) but because I’m constantly bobbing and weaving my head like a falcon trying to get the perfect focus on its prey. In the most recent case the falcon was me and the prey was a Mexican meal that I’d cooked. The constant switching from looking down at my hand (close-up) to make sure I wasn’t slopping salsa everywhere to looking up at her across the table was almost nauseating. Nothing to do with her beautiful face of course, just the unusual struggle of getting used to looking out of the correct part of the lens. I almost became the first man ever to become seasick in landlocked Barnsley.

And as for peripheral vision, forget it. I can focus on whatever my nose is pointing at and that’s all. If I move my eyes while keeping my head still the world goes swooshing about like that famous “dolly zoom” shot in ‘Jaws’ where the seated Roy Sheider appears to move towards the camera while the background behind him recedes.

I keep telling myself that varifocals are a good thing...

First Sight

I need some new glasses. I’ve been wearing them for over thirty years now and, as you would expect, my prescription has been getting stronger and stronger over the years. I wore them every day from getting up to going to bed with no problems until a couple of years ago. Around that time I found that I was having trouble reading while wearing my glasses (which I wear for seeing distances) so I started taking them off to read. I looked so cool in ‘specs on top of the head’ mode. Honestly.

But then there came an even greater problem. While my glasses were still doing the business for my distance vision I began to notice that I could no longer read small print with or without my glasses.

It was time to visit the optician.

After a lovely consultation I was given the bad news. Not only did I need new glasses but I needed varifocals, the expensive kind. The kind that cost over two hundred pounds more than any glasses I’ve ever bought before. After several sharp intakes of breath I asked one of my more stupid questions.

‘What would be the cause of this then?’

I knew her answer before she opened her mouth. ‘Well your job as a writer won’t help’, she warmed be up before the knockout blow, ‘but mostly it’s old age’.

“Old age’. I’m forty-seven. That’s only just middle-aged in my book but perhaps I looked ancient to her. After all, opticians, like policemen, all look like they’ve only just left school to me.

When she’d finished removing my arm and leg in payment for my glasses she gave me the only piece of good news. ‘With these glasses you get a free pair.’ Ooh, that sounded good. So I picked out the first set of frames in the shop that didn’t make my Beloved roll on the floor laughing at the way I looked (that’s usually how man-shopping works with us) and was told that they’d be ready in about a couple of hours. That was fine as we were going to be in the area for a while. They even said they’d text me when they were ready. Now that’s what I call good service. Only it wasn’t.

As I was passing the opticians again around two hours later I thought I’d pop in and see if they were ready. 

‘Sorry sir, not yet.’ That was fair enough, I’d only dropped in on the off chance, so I thanked the nice lady and left.

Predictably I got the text within a hundred yards of leaving the shop. “Dear Mr Finnie. One pair of spectacles is now available for collection at your convenience.”  I turned and walked back in.

‘I’d like to pick up my glasses please.’

The lady looked confused. ‘I’ve just told you that they’re not ready.’ 

I thrust my phone at her face, showing her the message. ‘You’ve just texted me to say that they are.’

She wandered off to look for them and, twenty minutes later, came back. ‘I’m sorry sir, but they’re not ready.’

My Beloved grabbed my arm. Experience has taught her when bad service will cause me to lose my cool and she suspected that I was getting close. She was right.

‘Look again’, I suggested.  It’s difficult to remain calm when talking through gritted teeth.

The optician looked again. She got two colleagues to help. Nobody knew where my glasses were. Nobody knew who had sent the text. My Beloved asked if I minded if she left me to it and went somewhere else, anywhere else, for a short while. I seethed. The world spun on its axis, slowly… slowly…

Eventually they were discovered. I think that they were in a dark basement, in a locked filing cabinet behind a sign saying “Beware of the Leopard”. But I got them and the fit beautifully. Best of all I could see perfectly well and walked out with a round of apologies ringing in my ears.

So it was a stressful and very expensive trip. And next week I have to do it all again when the varifocals arrive.

Cover Versions

What makes a good book cover? Is it one that depicts what you can expect to find in the pages that it surrounds or should it be a little more obscure, teasing the reader a little?

There are basically three kinds of covers: Those that show the reader exactly what to expect in the book, those that deliberately try to be obscure and those that show nothing whatsoever. Which one is best? Well I guess that depends on the book and the reader.

The Harry Potter cover art was always a painted image of a scene from the novel. It was something to point the reader at a little something that they could expect. A wizard flying on a broomstick, taking a trip on a steam train or fighting a dragon. It showed an exciting world that the reader would hopefully be attracted to.

On the other hand a dull, colourless picture of a necktie with the accompanying title in a very plain Times New Roman font doesn’t sound like it would make an enticing cover, but it hasn’t done Fifty Shades of Grey any harm. A case could be made for the opposite in fact, that the sheer inoffensive and bland nature of the book’s cover hid its erotic content (at least in the early days before every ‘naughty mummy’ in the country owned a copy) and meant that reading it on the bus was a distinct possibility.

Or perhaps cover designers should take the Dan Brown route of just a small teaser picture of something vaguely relating to the story with the rest of the cover being deliberately obscure. That seems to have worked for him. And there are any number of best sellers that have featured no image whatsoever on the front, just the title of the work and the author’s name.

So a book’s front art doesn’t have to be too obvious, but neither does it necessarily have to be so obscure as to bear no relation to the contents. Ultimately a book cover has one purpose and that is to make the casual browser become interested enough to pick the volume up or click a link to find out more about it. If a potential reader doesn’t even look past that initial glance then the writer certainly won’t be making a sale.

All this is leading, of course, to the fact that I need a cover for my upcoming novel. There are a world of options.

Is It Me? Is It?

Every writer’s first stop when looking for source material is of course their own life. They have years, maybe decades of experiences to draw upon when looking for stories and characters to use as the backbone of their creative writing. Even when the main body a storyline is triggered from an outside source many of the details that flesh it out might come from things that the writer is familiar with. “Write what you know” is the old adage that each budding writer is taught as soon as they can hold a pen (or boot up a laptop).

So we all write about events, places and people that we know, whether we do it consciously or otherwise but at what point does that kind of writing become too intrusive? Should people that the writer knows and loves ever be able to recognise themselves in the prose, however disguised or complimentary their appearance in the text may be?

I’ve made no secret of the fact that many of my fictional characters and situations are taken from real life examples. The facts are stretched, often to the point of them bearing only a nodding acquaintance with what actually happened, but there’s a kernel of truth in many things that I write. It’s the same with the characters who populate my stories. Some are fictional versions of people I’ve observed in a coffee shop or on a bus, others are much close to home.

I try and disguise the people involved as much as possible, combining character traits and taking minor personality qualities from one person to fit onto another but still people occasionally claim to have recognised themselves. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes it’s just wishful thinking on their part. I always try to be coy and enigmatic about it, never giving them a denial or confirmation; I think that in cases like this people want to be right more than they want the truth. I don’t know if their believing that they’ve recognised themselves or someone else that we both know is a good thing, a bad thing or an irrelevance but it can be fun for all involved.

But there’s a problem with this approach. If I base a character on, let’s say, my Beloved then I already have a fixed view of that character. I’ve lived with her for decades and can make a reasonable guess at how she’d react in any given situation, just as she could about me. Writing a character like that wouldn’t bring any surprises at all; it would be difficult to write ‘her’ from a fresh point of view. That character wouldn’t be able to surprise me in the direction that she’d end up taking in the story as I’d have a very fixed view as to what she’d do. She’d probably end up reading as if she’d been shoe-horned into the plot.

That old maxim “write what you know” is fine to a degree, but we’re talking about writers: they’re supposed to be blessed with an imagination.