Sabbatical

2009 has been a chaotic year for me and I’ve been trying to catch my breath as well as my bearings.
This is perhaps not the news you were expecting, but I have parted ways with my publisher, Macmillan, due to the turmoil of this year and other mitigating factors. It means that book 3 of the Secret War series is on hold for a while as I decide which project I should be pursuing. I have not made a decision as to whether I continue writing The Black Hours or the planned third book of the Secret War series, The Traitor of Light. But I have made a decision to shelve The Fortress of Black Glass for the time being until it feels right to write it.

I will, of course, keep updating the blog as and when any relevant news comes out, but the impact of family and working life has been too considerable to ignore. In this current climate, I’ve had to look to my family first than my career as a writer and have been forced to make some tough decisions on where I go from here. It does mean that in the future I will have more freedom to approach projects that I want to write, but with an uncertainty over whether those projects are commercial enough and their frequency.

But then, that’s why I do what I do, and why I wrote The Secret War in the first place. Not for the money (which was nice but could never match the wage of the day-job) but because I have an unequivocal belief in what projects I want to pursue.

So a big thanks to everyone who has been supportive on this blog and the Macmillan New Writers blog. It’s made the last four years very special, and hopefully in the near future there will be some news on a new “MFW Curran” book. (For the foreseeable future, any contact should be made via the link to the right i.e. musketsandmonsters@mfwcurran.com).

Until then, best wishes

- MFWC

Amazon’s deal with the Devil

Some sharp soul has alerted me to Amazon UK which is selling my horror fantasy, The Hoard of Mhorrer hardback at £9.66… a number not too dissimilar to 666.

I’d like to go on record saying I had nothing to do with this.

I can’t say the same thing for Amazon,
nor the protagonists of this book…

What’s in a blog?: a change of tact

It’s been quiet here of late, not because there hasn’t been anything going on, but because there has been plenty going on behind closed doors and I haven’t had the time to put it all down in the blog.

To me, a blog is an on-line diary, somewhere to put down one’s thoughts as well as news, and lately I haven’t been in a position to be opinionated on anything (which shouldn’t be confused with not having any opinions – I’ve recently had plenty, littered amongst the MNW blog, other writer blogs as well as Bookseller). However, time is not just at a premium, it’s like gold-dust or worse: hen’s teeth, and this blog is falling down the priority pecking order at a fast rate. I can no longer justify to friends and family and my publisher, spending hours a week on blog entries, not while I’m writing a new novel, a day job and while I have a 6 month old baby to entertain.

So the short term future of this blog has been decided. Musket and Monsters will cease to be a blog until further notice. It will still reside on Blogger; it will still exist, but it will be rarely updated and only with news items to do with the books and appearances as and when they happen. It’s easier and quicker to update this site than it is with the MFWCurran.com website which is updated every five months or so. It means you can feel free to visit as usual, and you can expect a news item every few weeks or so (sooner in the next couple of months as I hope to provide some news on Book 3 of the Secret War), but my ruminations on writing and publishing will be taking very much a back seat from now on.

This is not ideal, but then as soon as Sarah and I decided to start a family it was never going to be.
At least the novel writing still continues and that’s the main thing, getting the books to my publisher, and getting them to you.

Everything else, as they say, is a bonus…

Raising one’s game mid-sentence

Firstly, an apology for not blogging so much recently. There’s been plenty going on and blogging time has been relegated down a priority list that looks like this:
1. Baby Daniel,
2. Sarah,
3. writing the new book,
4. the day-job,
5. eating,
6. sleeping,
7. seeing friends and family,
8. and finally this blog.

If I get a spare twenty minutes, then I get to write a blog entry, which hasn’t been so easy recently, and I doubt will get much easier. I’ll persevere because I enjoy blogging and it’s a great way of keeping in touch with readers and friends, but sure, blog entries here will be even fewer than before I expect, but unless I mention otherwise (in a blaze of vitriol and consternation) the fiction-writing side will continue unmolested.

So the good news is that the hand is getting better which has had a positive effect on the writing. It’s no longer about “how do I get the words onto the screen” now, but the “words” themselves, as I seamlessly use both the keyboard and the speech recognition software to write. I’m one breath away from completing the first third of the first draft of The Fortress of Black Glass; I’m over 40,000 words into it as it happens. Considering two weeks were lost with the dodgy hand not to mention getting used to the speech recognition software, my progress is better than I’d hoped for.

But even though I’ve hit a stride I’m reluctant to break from, break from it I must because matters of publishing must intervene.

Earlier this year I was handed the task to provide my editor with one chapter of the new book (a near-polished chapter that is), an outline for the book and a very brief outline for the next trilogy I have in mind… by October. Due to all things hand-related, the deadline has been extended, but regardless of my progress on the first draft of the new novel, the task remains uncompleted.
So after I finish Chapter 7 sometime this weekend, I’ll be returning to the matter of getting something to my editor as promised. It will mean doing something that won’t come naturally to me, something that probably wouldn’t feel natural to most writers: halting in mid-book to return to the beginning for a spot of polishing and redrafting. Over the next two to three weeks, I’ll be re-writing, chopping, trimming and grooming the first two chapters (“two chapters” because the first chapter won’t suffice to get a feel of the new book). I’ll also be cutting down the 40 page monster of a chapter-by-chapter outline of Fortress… to something more manageable and punchy; and then I need to write the brief outline for The Last Trilogy (which is shaping up to be like “Heroes” meets “Brian Aldiss’ The Hothouse” meets “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”).
All whilst sitting in the middle of a first draft.
(Whatever stride I had found will be completely interrupted. Which is a bit of a bugger, but as I said before, it’s necessary.)

I’m fully aware that whatever I send to my editor will need to be the best work I’ve ever written. I’ll need to sell myself like never before, and I’m feeling the pressure. It’s not unwelcome, it’s not uncomfortable, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel nervous about it, not because I think what I’m writing will be crap – I’m confident that what I write will be the best of my abilities – but because it’s getting tighter and tighter amongst the mid-list authors and more and more seem to be falling from publishing-grace, their books cancelled, their contracts torn up.
It’s getting more competitive in here.

All authors - save the lucky few who have been embraced by the public and carried to bestsellerdom - need to raise their game. Some have been arrogant to believe they are untouchable, and have seen contracts torn up in front of their eyes, while others have taken publishing for granted and now reside in limbo. Some have not delivered, and again face being without a seat when the music stops, or those that have, have not been lucky enough to sell in sufficient quantities and in an age when every pound counts, fiscal matters have curtailed careers.

So I’m raising my game mid-sentence, mid-book. I’m going to work my arse off to write something that will sell both this book and the next trilogy (or trilogies, if you include another Secret War threesome I have planned) to my publisher, so they can’t say no.

Which will probably mean even fewer blog entries here…
Ho hum…

“Due to work on his new novel, M F W Curran isn’t in at the moment. Please leave a message after the beep..."

Learning to flocking write again

Monday was frustrating. Very frustrating. It was the first day I sat down to dictate the novel, and boy was it hard work. You see writing a blog is very much like talking to someone about your writing, or anything else for that matter. Writing a novel, or any fiction, requires you to think a lot more about what you say before you say it. So this blog entry for example, is very much written, or in my case – spoken, on the hoof. (I’ve said it before, you can get away with a lot more here. Try that with a novel and you'll only get rambling prose.)

I would say the other important impact on dictating a novel, especially a fantasy novel, whatever speech recognition software you're using has to cope with the myriad of fantasy names that aren't part of everyday speech and cannot be found in the average dictionary. So when you talk about “Count Ordrane of Draak” what you actually get is “count ordering of drought”. Or perhaps “count ordering of drug”. Either way you find yourself amending the text but also the dictionary to make sure it doesn't happen again... Which invariably it does: computers are clever, and they are so intuitive, but they are also fallible
On Monday, what with all the correcting and deleting of erroneous text, I managed to write 1500 words in the time it would normally take me to type 3000 words. So basically dictating at the moment is halving my productivity. I am not the most patient of people, I admit, and my frustration often boiled over yesterday. In fact if one had read the unedited text from Monday one would have found various expletives dotted around paragraphs. Or rather they might have been expletives, but the software could not recognise swear words so instead of the obvious, “flock” or “ flocking hell” or “for flock’s sake” appeared time and time again as markers of my compounded frustration. Instead of a book about vampires and Demons, it was starting to look like a book about the migratory habits of birds.

And obviously a bit of frustration here and there means I am less thinking about the text, but more how I can achieve the text without having to type it. So I guess the quality in this first draft might be a little hit and miss while I get used to using speech recognition software. I can later change the contents during the drafting process and it's something I'm not too bothered about right now, but being an impatient soul, it galls me that it won't be perfect or near as dammit perfect from the start.

Not that I'm complaining too much. My learning curve is quite steep and I'm learning very quickly how to manipulate speech recognition software to recognise my voice and so that I can navigate around the computer with the least fuss possible. In fact I should be quite pleased with the way it is going, you see my dad had one of the first speech recognition programs on his computer and I remember trying to use it; it took an entire evening to write a simple paragraph. That was in the early 90s, and speech recognition was quite quite primitive (though still a little exciting, after all operating anything by speech alone is the stuff of science-fiction).
Now the software is a little bit more sophisticated, and it seems to recognise most of what I say. It seems a long way from the 80s and I can't help but think of that scene in Star Trek: the voyage home (come on, you don't have to be a Trekkie to remember this) where Chief engineer Scotty is sitting down at a 1980s computer trying to talk to it to make it work, resorting to talking down the mouse thinking that would work. What I'm doing now 13 years later is a far cry from the 1980s but not that far from the technology present in shows such as Star Trek, and while this technology is not quite perfect, it's getting there, and with computer power increasing with each generation of PC, speech recognition software will become more and more important in our lives.

Until then, and until I can get this thing to work 99% accurately to recognise my voice, I guess I'll have to get used to “flockings” and “ships”, and try to control my frustrations. Like the British rail advert said, and with a little tinkering, “we might get it wrong, but we're getting there
-- for flock’s sake...”

Change part one

Some of you might have gathered from the last blog entry that I've been suffering from RSI and because of this my visits to this blog and the Macmillan new writing blog have been few. A writer or any artist is expected to suffer for their art, which is perhaps a romantic notion of how one follows their craft. In reality when you have RSI or anything approaching a tendon or muscular strain doing anything such as using a mouse or typing on a keyboard is bloody hard work and painful. Add to that looking after a baby and practical concerns intrude. So where does that leave my writing? Well, I guess it means that I've had to put the third novel on hold. It's not something I wanted to do and it's been forced upon me, as my editor told me there is no point trying to write when in the back of my mind I’m trying to block out the pain curling up my wrists and throughout my fingers.
But I am a writer. It’s what I do. But how does a writer write without actually putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard? My imagination is not impaired, nor is my enthusiasm and I can’t stand not to write.
So apart from rehabilitating my wrists which may be a long process, I've been looking into other means to write. Dave Budd reminded me that Barbara Cartland used to dictate her novels (indeed I remember a comedy sketch on this very thing which at the time I thought purely daft -but now the irony is not lost on me), and so I thought ‘why not?’. But it's not so easy dictating anything let alone a novel. Writing is about what comes naturally to you, and I suppose simply sitting somewhere dictating fiction is not the most natural thing in the world. Indeed it's almost narcissistic in the same way it would feel to give your acceptance speech to the mirror for an award that doesn't exist. Most writers don't like the sound of their voices. We're not talking narrative voice here, but the sound of their own incessant droning as they sit in a quiet room talking to no one in particular. Believe me it's not easy but it can be overcome.

Indeed you might be surprised to know that this blog entry is entirely dictated, which might explain the slight change in narrative voice. After all some writers - including this writer - have an altogether different voice when it comes to writing than they do general conversing. But I can get away with it here because let's face it there are no airs and graces on informal blogs such as this.
Fiction is different. Writing books is different. Especially a series of books. Because in my case with the Secret War books, I have different a narrative voice and it's not the narrative voice that is present in this blog or when I talk to people. It will take a lot of getting used to to dictate a new book in an old voice. I am trying to do it now; I've been talking to myself in the shower a lot and at other times around the house to the point that Sarah must be thinking I'm losing my mind. I haven't quite graduated to talking to myself on the streets though that might happen... but it's something I must do if only to save myself discomfort and for the ability to do things that I've previously taken for granted.

This blog entry has taken around half an hour to write. It's not been that accurate and at times I've had to delete what I've dictated, but the majority of this blog (I'd say about 90%?), has been written using a speech recognition program on a computer - not a trusty assistant typing away while I lounge in a comfortable chair with tea and biscuits at my side. That's just as well because I have a habit of changing my mind and changing the order of what I want written – a trusty assistant would probably have quit by now!
I'm not entirely sure how long it will take to dictate fiction from the top of my head. It could take a lot longer than it takes me to type usually, because it does not feel natural. But I think with much perseverance, it will do. In fact it might even be a blessing, after all don't many writers speak their prose aloud after they've written it? I guess what I'm doing is the opposite or perhaps just the other way round; I can be sure that what I write sounds fine once enunciated rather than I hope what I write on the page may sound okay once I speak it aloud.

But I'm beginning to babble...

What I'm talking about here is a new regime. A regime where I might sound crazy talking to myself, but as long as the words are put down on screen and put down the way I want them to be written, then a little insanity is not much to ask for, is it?

Two good things, one blind thing

Well the good news is that I’ve started writing the third book today. I’m now 4,000 words into the first draft of The Fortress of Black Glass, and I’m quite pleased with how it’s gone. Other than showing I’m able to write under the influence of a three and a half month old baby (who wants constant attention and has started to laugh at anything and anyone), I’ve written these words with a burst blood-vessel under my eye-lid, looking more like Le Chiffre from Casino Royale, than a thirty-something writer, having to dab the blood from my eye periodically so I can see what I’m bloody doing. But it’s there on the screen, and it reads well, especially for a first draft (it usually takes me a couple of drafts to write something I’m that happy with.)

The second thing to be pleased about is that the MFWCurran website has been updated again, with interviews and reviews, the books and other announcements you may have caught here or might have passed you by. The contact details have yet to be updated but to beat the SPAM filter - if you want to get hold of me, e-mail mfwcurran@talktalk.net and put in the subject header: “Muskets and Monsters”. I’ve got a rule running on my e-mail that will weed this out from the spam…