Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) (36 page)

The shortcomings of Flashback are two-fold right now. First, my prose style in the first couple of chapters - where I’m obviously trying very hard - has become so hardboiled that, unless the reader is working out the implications of every scrap of dialogue, they can’t know what’s going on and feel stupid. I put this down to ‘high standards’ (the quote marks are to signal to the irony, since the product doesn’t seem to achieve this) and reading
Cormac McCarthy
and
Thomas Harris
. After
The Road
, I don’t think I’ll be able to write the same way again. But poetic prose doesn’t have to be obscure; you don’t need to write cryptically to write well. After all, McCarthy has been writing for years. I need to weed out the self-conscious metaphors, and put in about forty years more writing practice. One of my reviewers wrote, ‘If you publish this, you’ll be the first person since
Virgil
to write a thriller in poetic verse!’ I thought that was wonderful.

The second shortcoming follows closely on the heels of the first: obscurity. Because I’m a fan of McCarthy and
Raymond Chandler
and others for whom the style is equal to, and occasionally outguns, the plot, I’m quite used to narratives where the reader is not party to the motivations or specific driving factors of the character until later in the story. Now, this is obviously a dangerous game to play, and you’ve got to get the balance right. Readers won’t follow characters they don’t identify with in some sense. So...the lack of information has got to be an
interesting
lack. When you read about a mystery like the loss of the
Star Dust
, the absence of an accepted explanation isn’t actually irritating; it’s a positive force that makes you want to know more, and makes you interested in the story itself. You feel like you are about to discover something. This kind of anticipation can make twists (i.e. re-configurations of a story’s identity) quite powerful, and I used it a great deal in
Déjà Vu
. It’s something I need to get right in Flashback, and the solution will be to go slightly easier on the reader. I want to avoid the fatal pitfall of, with apologies to his fans,
Murakami’s
Kafka on the Shore
.

So these are just some random thoughts about the editing process. Back to work.

Snakes and Ladders

An excerpt from
my blog
, 26th January, 2006. Read the
original
.

Well, I must confess to a couple of shitty days, work-wise.

First up, I noticed that some joker - no, I won’t provide the effing link - has placed
Déjà Vu
in his top five worst books of 2005. At that point, I wasn’t having a bad day. It was just middlin’. Next, I get one of those standard ‘Sorry, try again,’ emails from
MacMillan New Writing
; I’d sent them my comedy novel ‘Proper Job’, which an agent recently wrote was ‘fresh, lean, original and inventive’ (though, to be fair, that same agent did go on to say that humour is virtually impossible to sell, and I should give up immediately). By then, I would describe my mood as ‘mildly piqued’. Gumblings: Hah! What do they know? I’ll show ’em. Etc.

Then, to round off the day, I get a call from the agent who is currently considering Déjà Vu. You might remember from a previous post that
Scott Pack, chief buyer for Waterstone’s
, saw this blog and asked for a copy of my book. He read it and enjoyed it. Amongst other things, he said, ‘the thriller element would hold its own with most of the books we sell in quantity...the characterisation was very strong...the ending left me impressed as I put the book down’. Scott then contacted some literary agents, one of whom contacted me. We chatted on the phone and I sent him a copy of Déjà Vu.

So away. The agent called me back yesterday with the ‘thanks but no thanks’ speech. Very polite, and refreshingly honest. He got half way through the book and decided that he would not be able to champion it at meetings.

Arf. Mood meter drops somewhat.

I’m appropriately jaundiced about this industry. I mean, it’s getting on for eleven years since I sold my first short story as a teenager, and in that time I’ve written four-and-a-half novels. I’ve read a number of good books and a number of crap ones. I’m aware that publishing is a lottery, and I’m aware that a writer is, essentially, a foolish person who works - often for years - in the face of long odds. The writer doesn’t expect the reward of fame, or fortune. Like a carpenter or any other manual worker, he only wants people to buy his stuff so he can afford food while he’s making the next thing.

Me: ‘Can I interest you in this lovely mahogany number? I made it myself. Took me five years, and the sideboard-critics love it.’

Customer: ‘No, thanks. We just bought a sideboard from Ikea.’

Me: ‘Why? They’re flat-packed. They’re mass-produced and lack heart. Look, I’ve carved little mice into the legs. They’re practically scampering. Here, micey -’

Customer: ‘But our sideboard has a
vaguely sexual Swedish name
. It’s called Smegsmog. And everyone’s talking about it. The Stockwells at number five just bought one, for Christ’s sake.’

Me: ‘But what about the sideboards of tomorrow? What if they only came from Ikea?’

Customer: ‘Good-bye. You might shift more units if you served meatballs.’

Anyway, reasons to be cheerful: (1) If Déjà Vu attracted one agent, it might attract another; (2) Wonderful girlfriend, who seems to believe in me despite these constant messages replies of ‘not good enough’ from publishers and agents; (3) Good health; (4) Blog on which I can moan.

Arf.

Long Distance Running

An excerpt from
my blog
, 25th February, 2006. Read the
original
.

Well, as promised, the Saturday post will be less of a navel-gazing enterprise than usual. Below I include the usual word gauge for progress on current novel
Flashback
, and it appears that I’ve only written four thousand words in the past week. This is a poor show quantity wise (fortunately, I don’t have a deadline). I can trace the problem to a complete lack of research.

OK; not a complete lack. I spent most of last summer reading about aviation, and now my knowledge of aircraft safety and the principles of lift are second to none (I’m using ‘none’ in the special sense that means ‘Practically everybody’). Regrettably, not much of a novel comprises technical asides on power-to-mass ratios. Everything is seen through the lens of character. This means lengthy diversions into, for example, the size of an Avro Lancastrian cockpit; how much a passenger might see and hear if he stood at the rear of the flight deck. Halfway through a sentence I realize I’m talking
bollocks
and, grabbing my surfboard, run into the cool water of the Information Superhighway and come across a site like
this
- solid gold! This guy will certainly get a big thank-you in the acknowledgments when Flashback sees the light of day. It inhibits the word count somewhat but results in some excellent material that will place the reader precisely inside my imagination.

Flashback Completed

An excerpt from
my blog
, 25th February, 2006. Read the
original
.

Well, today I wrote the final words of my current book, a technothriller called
Flashback
. (The final words? ‘Like a ghost.’) The first draft comes in at 125,410 words, which is shade over the word count I aimed for when I started the manuscript in November. It’s only the first draft, but there’s not just the satisfaction of having written the book - there is also the knowledge that the story works. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the story worked as well as it could; for that, it will take some months of editing. But the story did grip me as I wrote it (there were no moments of writer’s block, whatever that is) and if it doesn’t work on the page in its present form, that probably means some superficial rearrangement is necessary. I say ‘superficial’ rather lightly, of course. Superficial changes like ‘make this scene less intense’, ‘improve this character’s motivation’ and so on will seem progressively unsuperficial as the editing process bites.

I’ve noticed some posts over on
John Barlow’s
blog and
Grumpy’s
about the amount of time some novelists spend writing a book. In some senses, the question is a little like ‘How long does it take to build a house?’ Depends on the amount of land, your materials, and what you want to end up with. But since I’ve just finished the first draft, it might be apposite to consider how the writing process went.

Flashback began as a loose collection of ideas at the beginning of last year (around May, when I was coming to the end of
Proper Job
). I knew I wanted to write more about a character called Saskia Brandt, from my first novel,
Déjà Vu
. Spoiler alert: Saskia has traveled backwards in time to the year 2002. She has already seen herself as a middle-aged woman in the year 2023 (still following?), so she knows that, at least until the year 2023, she cannot be killed. I wondered how this would make Saskia feel. Fearless, because she can’t die? Trapped, because she understands that all her actions have been predetermined? Anyway, I had an image of Saskia climbing aboard a aircraft to ensure - for a some reason - that it would not crash. In its final form in the book, the idea is a little different, but the spirit of the idea remains. I had other flashes of ideas: Saskia is German, and I wanted to incorporate the connection that Germans feel with the forest; I wanted to have an English character lost in Germany too, perhaps to serve as a proxy of the disconnection that Saskia must feel, since she is stranded in our time.

Following a ‘research’ trip to the Bavarian National Forest in July of 2005, I read up on aircrash investigation, re-read the Grimm fairytales, and stared out of windows a great deal. Towards the end of my research, I came across an interesting aircrash in the Andes (the
crash of the Star Dust
). This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about that crash, having seen the excellent Horizon documentary a few years ago, but it fit perfectly into the revenge backstory. I knew, immediately, the fate of the Star Dust was - in my fictional world - connected to the crash of Saskia’s plane in 2002. That was the point I knew I had a book’s worth of story.

There were a couple of surprises along the way. The finished book didn’t turn out anything like the rough synopsis I had when I started (summarisable in a sentence). Another surprise came in the form of the nature of the book; I thought it would be a sequel to Déjà Vu, but the book is basically standalone. It actually took a little longer to write than I thought, too. I started writing on Friday 21st October 2005. Aim: Write 1000 words per day, seven days a week. My work rate was 820 a day, so I missed the target. But some days were research intensive, and I was careful to avoid those ‘brain warming up’ paragraphs that would eventually need to be removed during editing, and I treated the prose like I was writing a short story: tight, to the point, and entertaining.

So, the process of writing Flashback has been a positive one. Some of the days were long, some were dark, but there were no times when the story got hard to write; the characters were always engaging and it was never difficult to ‘fall through the hole in the paper’, to use a Stephen King phrase. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I will adjourn for a beer.

★ Flashback

An excerpt from
my blog
, 22nd May, 2011. Read the
original
.

It’s been five years coming, but my novel
Flashback
, sequel to
Déjà Vu
, is now available in the Kindle store. The price is £2.13 in the UK and something approximating that in the US. To be honest, this is a little more expensive than I intended. I was - and still am - aiming for something closer to £1.80 or £1.70 and it is probably muppetry on my part that the price has come out higher. If I can figure it out, the price will probably drop a few pence over the coming week.

There are many people to thank. Beta readers, those who helped me with research into air crash investigation and aeronautics, my editor
Clare Christian
and cover designer
Emma Barnes of Snowbooks
all get major, major props.

How do I feel? I feel fine.

Also by Ian Hocking

In the Saskia Brandt Series

Déjà Vu: A Technothriller
(Book 1)

Comedy

Proper Job: A Romantic Comedy

Literary Short Fiction

A Moment in Berlin and Other Stories

Table of Contents

Book Two of the Saskia Brandt Series

Prologue