by Ian Hocking
‘Hello, Jem,’ said Ego.
~
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Your friend and mine
Danny,
She’s gone, babe. I got a call yesterday and she sounded bad, so I came right back to Berlin… despite everything. She wanted to go back. You know what I mean? Don’t ask me where she is now. I saw clouds, I think, and a lake. She wanted it to be the future—I hope it is.
I don’t blame you for anything. How could I?
By the way, get Mum to remortgage the house and put it all on Italy to win the World Cup—if you want to cop a metric assload of loot, that is.
I’m coming home too. Brace yourself.
End of.
Jemima
xxx
Exeter, Canterbury, UK; November 2005 to May 2011
---
Saskia Brandt returns in
THE AMBER ROOMS —Book Three
It is the night of September 5th, 1907, and the Moscow train is approaching St Petersburg. Traveling first class appears to be a young Russian princess and her fiancé. They are impostors. In the luggage carriage are the spoils of the Yerevan Square Expropriation, the greatest bank heist in history. The money is intended for Finland, and the hands of a man known to the Tsarist authorities as The Mountain Eagle—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
~
I’m an independent author and I work without an agent or publisher. If you would like to help others find Flashback, please consider leaving a review on the Kindle store.
Do you want to know when my next book will be published? Email me at [email protected] and I’ll let you know. You will also find me on Twitter: ian_hocking.
The Story of Flashback
Acknowledgements for the First Edition
As you can see from the dates above, it’s taken me five years to write this book. Flashback would have been published in 2007 if my plans went to plan. Of course, they didn’t. The mice got at them.
I’d like to thank a few people whose help made the book possible. Steve Fitzsimmons generously helped me research the interior of the Avro Lancastrian. Ed Waters of Plane-Design.com answered my many queries about the Lancastrian’s cockpit layout and managed to dig up the RAF flight manual for the Lancaster Bomber. Other pilots and aeronautical experts—including my friend Daniel Graaskov—helped on further technical points. Thanks also to Roderick Murray-Smith, Professor of Computing Science and member of the Brain-Computer Interaction group at Glasgow University.
Ah, my fearless beta readers: Neil Ayres, @by_tor, @Chobr, Sharon Coen, Isabel Ewart, Ana Fernández, Debra Hamel, Alex Mears, Nadège, Dennis Nigbur, Paul Roberts, and Aliya Whiteley. I sweat like Tom Jones to think of the rubbish I gave you all to read. You have my solemn promise that I will not do this again. For at least a month.
Jay Rayner’s book Star Dust Falling was an invaluable guide to the circumstances surrounding the crash of BSAA flight CS-59.
I refer to several poems in this book, sometimes explicitly, but sometimes not. (I’m using the term ‘refer’ in the sense that Elgin intended when he ‘referred’ a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures to the British Museum.) These poems include Because I could not stop for Death, by Emily Dickinson, Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past, by Francois Villon, and Richard Cory, by Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Pia Guerra very kindly allowed me to include her illustration of Saskia Brandt at the beginning of the book.
My partner, Britta, has been supportive in the countless ways that only she can be.
The author, May 2011; Canterbury, UK
The Magic 50,000
An excerpt from my blog, 30th December, 2005. Read the original.
One of Stephen King’s classic novels, The Stand, took me about six months to read. It’s a tale about post-apocalyptic America, where the survivors of a devastating plague form two antagonistic groups for a final battle between good and evil. The book is staggeringly long. Really, really long. Length is, I would guess, one of those things first-time authors find most daunting about writing a novel. In his preface to second—uncut—edition, King replied to fans who asked him how he could write such long novels. ‘One word at a time, man,’ he wrote. ‘The Great Wall of China was built one brick at a time and you can see that fucker from the moon.’
Though I’m past the point where I’m daunted by the blank pages ahead of me, I admit to feeling relief when I pass a particular word count. The fact is that, if you’ve managed to write half a book, there’s a good chance that your choice of characterisation, situation and theme have worked out. I write without a synopsis, so I never really know whether the story is going to ‘work’. On the other hand, because I make it up as I go along, I’m closer in my perspective to that of a reader; like the reader, I’m experiencing the story for the first time, and it makes decisions about pacing, toning, and overall story arc more straightforward. I’m not forced to write duff set-up scenes. I write the scenes I think will be fun and, in the second draft, I cut the ones I don’t need.
This morning, I passed the 50,000 word mark on my new science fiction novel, a sequel to Déjà Vu. According to my excellent novel-management software Copywright, I began the manuscript on November 3rd, 2005. I’ve spent 290 hours writing it. All just numbers, of course. Is there something special about the figure 50,000?
For those of you more used to page counts than word counts, 50,000 words is, roughly, just over half the length of the average novel (as a rule of thumb, Terry Pratchett regularly comes in under 100,000 words, Stephen King regularly over). I can now regard the half-written novel as reasonably successful. Though I do not yet have an ending, I’m well into the second of three acts, and the narrative has its own energy—in other words, the characters are driving the story through their own motivations. This is something that a creative writing teacher will tell you explicitly: character-driven stories are generally more effective than plot driven stories. Where the finale of a story is considered by the reader to be the inexorable conclusion given the prerequisites of character and situation at the start of the novel, you know you’ve got a tight story. Whether or not it’s a good story…that’s another matter, and will depend on readers’ individual reactions to characters.
What else goes through a novelist’s mind at this stage? Somewhat surprisingly, I’m thinking a lot about the title. I write ‘surprisingly’ because, in one sense, the title is tiny proportion of the overall work that a writer has to plough through per book. But the title is also bound up with something crucial about the novel: its identity. It will become the name of the project, and if it’s a good name, it can even be inspiring. The genre of my current project is ‘thriller’ (sub-grenre: technothriller)—though I consider it to be science fiction (I’ll hold these thoughts about genre for another post).
Here are some of the titles I’ve come up with: The Magic Bullet, Keystone, Black Box, Game Over, Femme Fatale (God, that one’s awful), The Rosetta Division, Freefall, Firebrand, Thin Air, The War of the Ghosts, Meridian, Guardian Angel, Contact Lost, The [insert word here] Trace, Final Transmission, Afterimage, Flashback, Thin Air, Black Box, Wake Vortex, and Memoriam.
Of these, my current favourite is ‘Flashback’. Not only does it have a hint of time travel about it, it also foreshadows the narrative structure of the book, and it’s nicely dramatic. It’s also the name of a brilliant old Commodore Amiga game that I spent hours playing with my mate Edward. As a point of little interest, I named a character in Déjà Vu Jobanique, following our teenage mispronunciation of Jobanque, a character who was the boss of time agent Falcon in the excellent Falcon gamebook series (note to lawyers: I only took the name! Everything else I made up.)
A good title can help motivate you when times are hard (i.e. when a scene is just plain shit, or you’re ill (as I am now)) and give you an overall feeling of what the book may look like. Having a sense of its final form can help with decisions about chapter l
ength, pace, and tone.
One final, crucial thing is the jacket blurb. The word ‘blurb’ is used to refer to different things: sometimes snippets of review that grace the cover of your book, sometimes the hooky summary on the back (or inner flap) that entices you to buy the book. In this instance, I’m referring to the summary on the back. Terry Pratchett, no less, has claimed that he writes a jacket blurb before he begins the manuscript. This might seem a little narcissistic, but it’s a another good way of entering the world of your book. One sad fact is that, unlike Mr Pratchett, if you can’t come up with a good blurb for your book, the chances of getting your complete manuscript to an agent or publisher will drop. They don’t read manuscripts routinely; they need to be hooked.
Well, I’ve had a stab at the jacket blurb for ‘Flashback’. It does not even begin to describe the story, and needs better ‘topping’ and ‘tailing’, but it’s a start. Just posting it on this blog has forced a little rewrite, and this can only be a good thing.
A fifty-year-old mystery is about to be solved.
September, 1947: Converted Lancaster bomber ‘Stardust’ reports a successful trans-Andean flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, and signals its intention to land. Four minutes prior to touchdown, it sends the letter sequence ‘S-T-E-N-D-E-C’. Queried by puzzled ground controllers, the young ex-RAF operator aboard the Stardust rapidly keys ‘STENDEC, STENDEC’. Then silence. The Stardust vanishes along with all passengers and crew.
October, 2003: German Air flight A628 impacts vertically with the Bavarian National Forest. The only clue to its fate is the co-pilot’s final transmission, spoken against the roar of failing engines: ‘Stendec.’
Within hours, air safety investigators have been dispatched to the crash site. Investigator-in-charge Hrafn Óskarson has more questions than answers. Who erased the flight data recorders? What is the true identity of passenger Saskia Dorfer, whose documents have proved fake? Who torched her Berlin apartment? Why did Saskia’s English friend Nina Shaw refuse to board the flight?
The mystery of German Air flight A628 will be solved by a startling conspiracy that reaches twenty years into our future—and fifty years into our past, to the final moments of the Avro-Lancastrian ‘Stardust’.
So there we go. Now all I have to do is work out what the bloody mystery is. It had better be good.
PS: There really was a Avro-Lancastrian called ‘Stardust’ that crashed in the Andes in 1947. You can read all about it here.
Final Words
An excerpt from my blog, 16th May, 2007. Read the original.
It’s a slow old business, is writing. The stretches of time involved are so staggering that I wonder how I manage to keep the story on the rails. Well, it’s reaching that happy time when a book is finished. This is ‘finished’ in the comedy sense employed by all writers, of course, which is usually defined as ‘wait till you get the editor’s report, Sonny Jim’.
I speak of none other than Flashback. It’s been a year and a half since I had an idea about a character from my first book, Saskia, who had travelled back in time to the year 2003 (with a chip in her brain that provides her personality, and so on and so forth). Saskia knows that, in the year 2023, she will be around to save someone’s life. So her death would represent a time paradox. Result: She cannot be killed. She is as indestructible as Cap’m Scarlet—SIG. But, I thought, death isn’t the only way a person can be in jeopardy (as I thought this, I dry-washed my hands evilly and stroked a gerbil).
Then I had another idea. Let’s say you’re a time traveller. You’re stuck in the past. You know that the ‘present’ (‘when’ you come from) will eventually pass in its exact form, otherwise ‘you’ won’t be ‘you’. You’d be someone else. It’s akin to shuffling your genes; that would make you your brother or you sister. Anywho, if you spend long enough in the past, you might come to think that all these people are zombies acting out a scripted existence with no free will. But, of course, you have free will because you’re from the present, aren’t you? But if the state of the universe at a given point is fixed, you must be fixed as well. Meet paradox number two.
I think most people would be driven slightly bonkers by this. Not Saskia, though. She’s made of sterner stuff. But the second time traveller—whom would be the ‘villain’ of this piece—has been shanghaied in the past for sixty years, and he is loop da loop.
Mixed up with my favourite quote from William James (‘I will act as though what I do makes a difference’), and the mystery of a certain aeroplane crash, I decided to write a book.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting some feedback from readers (on the first couple of chapters at least). Feedback is a tricky process. Some people are better at giving it than others; some can identify what needs to be done to correct the manuscript, whereas others have no idea; but all feedback is useful. It allows you to get inside the head of a reader somewhat.
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 -’