Fantasy and genre

I'm currently finishing off China Mieville's novel Perdido Street Station, which I first tried to read two or three years ago. I remember bouncing off the first five pages, confused and unable to find my bearings, and feeling generally repelled by the whole thing, but this time I've devoured it in less than a week. It was far less forbidding than I thought it was going to be, more generous and fast-paced, and wearing its pulp heritage proudly. My experience of it perfectly illustrates the old truism that what you bring to a novel is as important in its reception as what the writer brings to the page. Something that can seem annoying or rebarbative one moment can, with a little internal adjustment, seem thrilling and transgressive the next. I think I'll write something at length about Mieville in the future, [I can't find any way on Blogger to add the acute over the first 'e' in his name, sorry], once I've had a chance to read a few more of novels. I've got Kraken up next. I can't think of a writer who's made me look askance at the page more often since I read William Burroughs as a teenager.

Perdido Street Station comes during a summer of reading fantasy for me, in part because I've finished the draft of a novel and wanted something more escapist to read (and I don't mean that pejoratively), and partly because I'm gearing up to have another crack at writing a fantasy novel of my own. When I signed with my agent, about three years ago, this was always part of our plan; that I would write 'proper' books as my main focus, and draw on my Black Library/Warhammer experience to write fantasy novels as a sideline. It's a genre I broadly enjoy, although I'm quite picky about what I read in it. I have an essay in Dan Coxon's upcoming anthology Writing the Magic exploring my experience writing for Black Library, and my sometimes conflicted thoughts about fantasy more generally. Last year I finished the first part in a putative trilogy, a more traditional low-fantasy affair, but so far it hasn't picked up any interest from publishers. Assuming the book isn't incredibly boring or just total garbage, I suspect this is in part because of the market, which at the moment seems more focused on chasing formerly self-published Romantasy from American writers, in search of the next Sarah J. Maas or Rebecca Yarros (which is fair enough; they've sold millions). Publishing more widely is a deeply conservative business, and trends will be flogged to death before the next one emerges for a similar course of greedy flagellation. But then, every book a publisher pays to have published is a gamble, and might make nothing at all.

Quite apart from this, a lot of the discourse surrounding fantasy, and genre more broadly, can be depressing. I'm occasional lurker on the Fantasy sub-Reddit, and I've found it surprising how much of the conversation turns around the concept of 'tropes'. People will ask for recommendations based on a  set of their favourite tropes, like they're choosing a sandwich filling. 'Enemies to friends', 'enemies to lovers', 'found family', 'cosy', 'chosen one', 'magic school'. The idea not just that genre fiction can be broken down to these tropes, but that it should be, is deeply strange to me. It's an approach to fiction that feels one step removed from what our AI overlords are going to foist on us before too long; that you can dial up any type of novel you want to read and have it delivered within seconds by ChatGPT, or the soulless entity of your choice. In a genre that already suffers  disproportionately under Sturgeon's Law (that 90% of anything is crap), I don't think this attitude is doing much to improve it.

But then that's only Reddit, and shouldn't really be taken as a representative sample of anything other than people who spend far too much of their time online. It does look like there's plenty of good stuff out there; I want to read Simon Jimenez's The Spear Cuts Through Water, a load of Jeff Vandermeer and M. John Harrison, Sofia Samatar, Pierce Brown. There's more than enough to keep me occupied as I plan my next assault on the bastion of fantasy.

Event

 

I've got an event coming up next week, as part of the Book Fringe in Edinburgh! It'll be at Argonaut Books in Leith, on the 14th August at 7pm, alongside Lucy Ribchester. We'll be discussing our novels The Unrecovered and Murder Ballad.

Various interviews

 A few things to catch up on, after the Bloody Scotland shortlisting: 

Here's an interview with me, Natalie Jayne Clark and Claire Wilson on the UK Crime Bookclub channel:

Here's an interview with all of the shortlisted writers on the Scots Whay Hae podcast. (I think there might be a video of this on YouTube as well)

Finally, I had a short interview with the Scottish Field magazine here.

(I managed to watch about ten seconds of the video: hearing your own stupid voice is one thing, but hearing it as it comes out of your own stupid face is another thing entirely...)

Shortlisted

 It just goes to show how terrible I am at social media and self-promotion more generally that I haven't got round to updating this blog with my latest piece of news. Anyway, The Unrecovered has been shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize, which will be judged on 12th September in Stirling.

Bloody Scotland is a literary festival specifically for crime fiction. I was interviewed on their podcast when the novel first came out (I wrote about it here), and although I wasn't sure if my book strictly counted as crime, it certainly counts as a literary mystery. I'll be on a panel with the other shortlisted authors (David Goodman, Natalie Jayne Clark, Foday Mannah and Claire Wilson) on the 12th, just before the prize announcement.

I'll also be appearing on a panel on the 14th September, with Sarah Hornsley and David Reynolds, entitled 'Gamekeepers Turned Poachers', looking at the experience of writers who have worked in other parts of the publishing industry:

I was in Stirling last Thursday for the launch of the programme, and was interviewed alongside the other shortlistees in the Courier:

There should be another couple of podcast interviews lined up with me and the other shortlisted authors over the next few weeks. I'll add the details here when I can.

I have an odd relationship with Stirling, on the whole. I was born there, but only lived there for my first 20 months or so, before my family moved to Trinidad for the next four years. For a couple of years, roughly 2000 - 2002, I lived down the road in Larbert and would head into the town regularly (because there was absolutely nothing to do in Larbert). Then, in the sceond half of 2004, I lived on my own in a poky flat on Cowane Street while working at the Waterstones in the Thistle Centre, before moving to Dumfries for a while. And now its the scene of The Unrecovered's first shortlisting for anything, so hopefully all these earlier attachments and associations bring me luck on the night.

Summer plans, proofs, genre

 The copy edits on the second novel* are done and have been sent back to Bloomsbury, and the next stage is to await the proofs for a last check-through before the book goes into production. Did I say a last check-through? Of course not; there will inevitably be half a dozen other chances to drag my resisting eyes through the text, cringing at every single word, until the book is actually published. I found with The Unrecovered that there was a strange cooling-off period lasting two months or so after the novel came out. During that time I absolutely hated the thing, and it was only after I had some distance from it that I could look on it with even the vaguest equanimity. I'm hoping that period is a bit more condensed this time round. This second novel was much harder to write and involved a lot more research, but going through the copy edits made me feel that I might actually have got close to what I was trying to achieve. It'll be interesting to see if that holds up when I look through the proofs.

I've also finished the very rough first draft of a third novel, the last part of my tentatively connected, thematically linked trilogy (which isn't a trilogy) about war, history and trauma, filtered through the lens of the supernatural. If The Unrecovered hints towards the gothic mystery, the second novel is going to be a sort-of ghost story, while this third novel hints towards cosmic horror. All three of these books are attempting to make their metaphors concrete; to use what the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro called 'the mask of genre'**, employing the fantastical to decipher and renew a shop-worn reality. As is my usual practice, I've printed out the typescript of this third book and will spend the summer carving it down and refining it as much as possible before sending it on to my agent in the autumn.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the rest of the year, unless it's tinker away at this third book until it's ready to submit. I've got plenty of ideas for a possible next novel, but it might be wiser to step away from the notebook for the time being. If you have a general facility for writing, there is such a thing as writing too much after all...

* Such is the opacity of publishing, I've no idea whether the title and plot of this second novel is a closely-guarded industry secret, but I'll keep everything unnamed for the moment.

** I cannot find the reference for this quote anywhere, but I'm sure del Toro said it. It probably comes from his superb book Cabinet of Curiosities.

Copy-editing

 I am currently working through the copy edits on my second novel. Copy-editing (or should that be 'copy editing'?) is the most mysterious and most mundane part of the book-wrangling process, and the last piece of the puzzle before the text is sent off to be typeset. It's where the copy editor makes you look good, by picking up on and correcting typos, childish misspellings, clumsy grammar and/or general infelicities, and ensuring the whole internal cohesion of the book, so that Mondays aren't followed by Wednesdays, or characters with brown hair don't suddenly have black hair a hundred pages later. Those are the mundane parts (and like most mundane things, essential).

The mysterious part comes from the sense of another creative intelligence looking over your text and, very subtly, saying something like: Hmm... Well I wouldn't have done it quite like that... 

A good copy editor is worth their weight in gold, and after my experience on The Unrecovered I'm pretty sure I've got a very good one. She's saved me from all sorts of minor mistakes, but there's still that wry sense of challenge whenever a word has been quietly replaced with something a little smoother. Sometimes the suggestion is a very good one, sometimes I'd prefer my original choice, and sometimes I really do want a comma there. I like this though. It forces you to look at things anew, and weigh up your choices once you've got a bit of distance from them. Going through the copy edits can be tedious in the extreme but, like everything in the publishing business, it really is in service of the quality of the book. It's the stage after this - going through the proofs - that's the real killer...

Events and interviews

 I've had a handful of events and interviews over the last couple of weeks, all of which went far better than I feared. I'm not a natural performer by any stretch of the imagination, but I found myself really enjoying these.

First of all, an interview with the new Bloody Scotland podcast, which can be found wherever you get your podcasts etc.

Bloody Scotland has been flying the flag for Scottish crime fiction for a number of years, and I was initially unsure why I'd been asked to talk to them. The Unrecovered might be many things (a new Scottish classic according to some discerning readers; a load of boring rubbish according to other, less discerning readers...) but it's definitely not a crime novel. However, there's certainly a mystery element to the story, one based in myth, legend and landscape rather than human action, and there's a reasonable amount of blood. It feels like Bloody Scotland are expanding their remit to cover this kind of fiction as well, and talking with Bob McDevitt and Lin Anderson (a celebrated crime author herself) made for a really interesting chat. As I reminded him, Bob used to work with my mum in the now-defunct branch of Waterstones at the east end of Princes Street in Edinburgh, all the way back in the 1990s. The world of writing and publishing, especially in Scotland, is exceptionally small ... 

Next was an event with the Far From the Madding Crowd bookshop in Linlithgow, which took place at the beautiful St Peter's Church on the High Street.

The sermon about to begin...

There was a good crowd of around 20 people and it was chaired by Sally, the manager. This was a really rewarding conversation, especially as I got to delve into my process a bit, and the questions at the end were great. There's nothing better than when an astute reader notices something in your novel that has escaped your own attention - it makes the whole process feel incredibly mysterious, and that you've been accessing levels you didn't consciously understand when writing it. And the setting for this event was just gorgeous, one of the most beautiful little churches I've ever seen.

Finally, a bigger event in East Linton hosted by Night Owl Books, and chaired by the manager Rebecca.

The crowd begins to gather...

Well over 30 people came to this, and it never ceases to amaze me that people would be willing to give up their time to come and hear me ramble on about my book. Again, the converstation was wide-ranging, I got to really dig into aspects of the novel and the whole journey to publication, and the questions at the end were great. I signed loads of books afterwards, including from someone who had already read the novel twice (!) and who said it was inspiring them to write their own fiction. That is high praise indeed, and really humbling. This was a great event, and Rebecca is to be commended for running these so well.

I don't have anything else lined up events-wise at the moment. I was hoping to get offered something from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, but given their funding woes I think I might have to wait for next year. In any case, I've surprised myself by enjoying these, once the initial nerves are overcome. In the run-up to the book launch in February I would idly daydream about changing my name and getting a job in the Hebrides on a fishing trawler rather than go through the nightmare terror of a public speaking event, but once they're underway they can be incredibly rewarding. It turns out I might be a secret egomaniac, and I quite like having a captive audience forced to listen to me wax lyrical about my own work. Who would have thought?