Darryl’s Library

Anyone remember the old book reviews section of my website? For several years, I was in the habit of reviewing everything I had read, and the database grew to about eighty titles. I’ve let the reviews slip for the past six months, and even went as far as taking the link to the section off my main site.

I’ve decided to kickstart the thing again, in a new, friendler format: a WordPress blog. I’ve laboriously transcribed all the reviews into it. Before, the database was just a basic alphabetical list. Now, it’s a fully searchable archive, which can also be filtered by author or genre. I’ve also included a filter for self-published and small press titles.

So, have a peek at Darryl’s Library.

The Christmas holiday commences in a few minutes for me. I have promised Andrew Harrison that I will write the script for the next Midnight Pictures film over the break, so while he’s getting fat on turkey, I will be scribbling away at the word processor. I wouldn’t have it any other way, as I am likely to be bored and depressed otherwise. There’s a cheery note to end the post on! Merry Christmas, everyone!

Chion ready for publication

This is just a quick note to let everyone know that my new novel is now ready to go to the printers. All the editing is finished, the typesetting is done, the cover (front, back and spine) is designed. The only thing throwing a spanner in the works at the moment is Christmas and the expected postal service delays.

So, short of some unforseen catastrophe, Chion will be released in January 2007. The first thing I’ll be doing is ordering a couple of hundred copies to get the ball rolling.

Photography: Morning mist

Portadown has been wrapped in fog since yesterday afternoon. When I arrived at work this morning, it was still pretty dark, and the atmosphere was somewhat spooky. Mornings like this are rare, so I immediately wanted to grab the digital camera, before daylight arrived in full. Is this the basis for a future book cover design, perhaps? I have no idea. I just like to have images like this one banked. You never know when you might find a use for it.

"Captain Curtis, The Untold Story" wins the League of Freemen contest

I’m thrilled to report that my story “Captain Curtis, The Untold Story” came first place in the annual competition at The League of Freemen (fan club for the TV series The Tripods). The photo shows one of the items I won. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but these posters are actually super-rare. I’ve searched eBay for Tripods memorabilia many times over the years, and I’ve never seen this up for auction. The reason for its rarity is possibly becuase the only place you could buy one back in the mid-1980s (when the series was televised) was the BBC Shop. But the poster is not of value to me because of its monetary worth. The Tripods ranks among my personal top five sci-fi shows of all time, and that makes this poster special.

It’s actually quite a striking image, right up there with the four book covers I discussed in a previous post about memorable cover designs. Big sinister metal machine stalking across the River Thames, with Parliament and Big Ben in the background. Easily mistaken as an interpretation of The War of the Worlds, but never mind about that. I’ll be getting this framed and hung in the living room.

Effective editing

I’ve just finished editing my second novel, Chion, so I thought I’d share with you my thoughts on what I think is the best approach to the gruelling task.

1. Distance

If you choose to jump into editing your manuscript straight after you’ve written it, you won’t be able to spot all the mistakes. The problem is, you’re too close to the work. The memory of the prose structure is so fresh in your mind that you inadvertently jump to reading from memory while you’re reading from the page. Oh sure, you’ll catch plenty of mistakes, but you won’t catch anywhere near all of them. You also won’t effectively spot flaws in your plot, because you know it all off by heart. The only effective way to spot all your mistakes is with the eyes of a first-time reader. And you can achieve something close to that if you let the manuscript rest for a few months. Don’t read it, and don’t even think about it. Let yourself forget. Then, when you commence your editing, the story will seem fresh, and you will spot things you would otherwise have missed.

2. Knowledge

When editing your own work, chances are you don’t know everything there is to know about proper grammar. If your attitude is, “Ah, I’ve read so many novels, I’ve got an intuitive knowledge of what’s right and wrong,” you’re making a big mistake. I made this mistake with Ulterior. On retrospect, my grammar was still decent, and I didn’t make a mess of the thing, but having since read Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, I realise that my first book could have been better polished. There is no excuse for not learning the craft. The fact is, if you don’t know what all the potiential mistakes are, then you won’t know when you’re making them.

3. Peers

It’s essential to get others to help you with your editing, because unless you are prepared to read through your manuscript fifty times, you will never spot everything. So get four or five persons to proof-read for you. Writer friends are best for this, because they will spot more flaws than the average joe, but make every interested party welcome. I allowed six persons to proof-read Chion. Two were aspiring writers, who made such a detailed analysis that I should call them editors. Another was a woman (who brought something different to the table, since I had a female lead character whom I wanted an opinion on). And the other three were non writers, each of which spotted many typos of the kind not spotted by a word processor (e.g. missing words, and wrong words such as “know” for “snow”). One person’s list of typos was never exactly the same as another’s, so all input was valuable.

4. Attitude

When seeking help from others, you need to do it with the right frame of mind. When you finish a novel, it is so easy to believe you’ve written something wonderful and to expect that your peers will like it, too. The first problem is, you’re making it hard for anyone to give you honest criticism. And secondly, you’ll get your heart broken, if somebody dares to give you honest criticism. When I ask someone to proof-read, I always give them a little speech that makes it clear that the only reason I’m giving them the manuscript is so that they can tell me everything that’s wrong with it. And when one of them tells me, “I didn’t like chapter twelve. It was unrealistic. Nobody would ever do that,” I rejoice. Because everything that’s broken can be fixed. My only worry is that I won’t see everything that’s broken. I love to see lots of red-pen marks on a manuscript. They don’t scream, “You’re crap,” they scream, “Come fix me.” The time to seek praise for your work is when you’ve done everything you’re able to do and you’ve got the actual paperback in your hands. (Notice I said “praise for your work,” not “praise for yourself,” but that’s another story.)

5. Persistence

On the flip-side, don’t let the fact that you’ve got outside help prevent you from personally reading over your manuscript several times. It’s not all about spotting mistakes; it’s about looking for ways to improve your prose. Restructure everything that reads awkwardly. Keep your eye out for opportunities to communicate with your reader more effectively. Polish, polish, polish.

6. Scrutiny

My final proof-read is the most gruelling of all. I read the manuscript to myself whilst pressing a pen-lid onto each word. It forces me to read slowly and carefully. One of the biggest curses of writing is how hard it is to spot missing words like “the,” “a,” “of,” etc. When we read, we naturally skim past these minor details. There’s an old trick you can play on your friends where you write down a sentence that contains several instances of the word “of” and you ask them to count how many instances of the letter “F” they can spot. Almost always, the person will skip the “F”s in the word “of”. So, pressing a pen onto each word helps me catch these lapses in concentration caused by our naughty brains taking shortcuts.

7. Perfection -1

The sad truth is that even with all of the above, the chances are you’ll not discover every single error. I was fairly thorough when editing Ulterior four years ago. When the book came out, I kept track of every error reported by readers. There were six or seven in total. However, when I scrutinised the manuscript again recently, with a view to publishing a second edition, I found four or five more. The best advice I can give you is aim for perfection, but settle for a little less. Otherwise you will be re-reading your manuscript until doomsday.

That’s it. That’s what I do. It’s not a routine that anyone taught me. It’s my own, and I think it works pretty well.

Chion cover design - Part V

Thank you, everyone who commented on the last cover design. After some more fiddling, I’ve come up with the following “improvement.” James, I think you were right about the Aliens font, after all. To hell with being a copycat; it looks good, and it gives the cover a nudge in the sci-fi direction.

I wanted to move the title from the top of the cover to the middle, because the shadowy central section is a bit boring and is better covered. The translucent text didn’t quite work on the more varied constrast of the background, so I had to lose it. And since we’re now back to clear, obvious print, I’m putting the tagline back on again.

Another thing that struck me was that people tend to buy books according to genre, and my cover gives no clear indication of what genre the book belongs to. It could be about hunting down the Yeti, for all anyone knows. So, having a sci-fi font and a suitable tagline helps communicate the message: “sci-fi disaster story.”

It’s interesting that no one communicated any particular attachment to the other cover design, the one with the school and the dead kid. Sorry, Eddie (who posed as the dead kid), but the combination of images just never felt like they gelled quite right. I think we’re hitting the nail on the head now. Of course, Mark Stevens, who came up with the “blood on the snow” design, hit it long ago. I think that whatever changes I make from here on in will be small.

Confessions of a computer rage sufferer and other "accidents"

Take a larger look at the image on the right (from a MakeZine post). See that inset picture of water being poured over an Atari 2600 console? My, oh my, how that brings back memories. I was ten years old at the time, sitting alone in the living room, waggling my joystick (before comments ensue, did you hear me say ten?), when suddenly a wasp flew into the room and disturbed my happiness. I quickly grabbed the TV guide and rolled it up into a tube, ready to do battle. The wasp landed on my Atari 2600 woodgrain console. I seized my chance. Slap! Wasp-guts on my pretty games machine. So, I went into the kitchen, got a damp cloth, and proceeded to wipe old waspy’s corpse away. Then I took a closer look at the ribbed plastic section on the top of the console. It had always appeared solid, but if you looked at an acute angle you could see a circular air vent. Oh dear. Better switch it on quick and make sure it’s still working. Big mistake. My ten-year-old brain didn’t know that if I had waited until the console dried out, it would have been fine. As it was, my precious Atari was dead, killed by my hand as soon as I flicked the on switch.

Of course, that wasn’t the only electronic mishap I’ve had. When computers are a big part of your life, it’s unavoidable. Actually, some of what I’m about to tell was avoidable, if only I’d had more sense.

The next mishap I remember was Christmas Day, when I was fifteen. I’d been given a shiny new Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3 computer. I quickly attached a tape recorder to it, so that I could load my games (as you did in those days). But the games wouldn’t load. After a bit, I got a little miffed and wiggled the connecting lead in the socket. It seemed way too loose. I’d like to think it was that way straight out of the box, but I have to confess it’s more likely that I broke it. Man, that Christmas Day really sucked!

I don’t recall anything bad happening for a long time after that, not until I started my job as ICT technician at Clounagh Junior High School, aged twenty-seven. Now I’m about to talk about The Curse of the Trailing Lead, which has no doubt caught many a person. I wasn’t in the job more than a few weeks when I was setting up the internet connection. I had the router (a couple of hundred pounds worth of kit) sitting up on the desk with its lead trailing across the floor. At one point I stepped away from the desk, and the router decided to come with me; it had little choice, since its lead was around my ankle. Crash! My eyes almost popped out of their socket, because I was now looking at bare circuitry on the floor. The casing had split open and spilled the router’s guts. I panicked. How am I going to tell this to my boss when I’ve only worked here for a few weeks? Calmly, I put the router back together again. And you know what? I worked a treat! I got off lucky.

You’d think I would have learned my lesson: Don’t leave trailing cables. Well, I did learn my lesson. The trouble is, not every member of staff in the school has learned it. One day, several years later, I happened to be in the art room. There was a laptop on the teacher’s desk with its power lead running across the floor to the wall socket. Well, when I went to leave the room, the laptop decided to go walkies with me. Crash! Unbeliebably, aside from one small crack on the screen’s hinge, the laptop survived.

Sadly my luck would run out. Ah heck, what am I saying? My next mishap had nothing to do with luck; it was all my fault. I was using a school laptop at home. Unfortunately, there was an existing problem with one of the mouse-buttons below the touchpad: it would refuse to work intermittently. One day, I was in the middle of something important, and the button’s erratic behaviour riled me so much that I slapped the touchpad - quite hard. The noise that ensued sounded something like shhhhhh-click, shhhhhh-click. It was the sound of hard drive death. My heart sank. I thought, How do I get out of this without telling my boss? Aside from the shame of admitting I had done something like that, I didn’t want him suspecting me of vandalism every time a piece of equipment failed for legitimate reasons. And I’m just not the sort of guy who can tell an outright lie, such as, “Hey, my hard drive’s busted. Can we order a new one?” Anyway, I opened up the laptop. Lo and behold, the hard drive was mounted directly below the touchpad. I scoured eBay for the same model and size, and I found one. Phew! £50 got me the replacement hard drive, and all was well once again. A costly mistake.

There are times when I’d love to get away from IT and be a postman or something.

Chion cover design - Part IV

Somebody tell me if this is a stupid idea, but I’m thinking of using Mark Stevens’s cover design for Chion with no clearly visible text (click through to the larger image before you cast your verdict). I’m not usually a fan of gimmicks, but I think this one might work. I think that if I spotted a book cover on a shelf with nothing but snow on the cover and a blood-spatter in the corner, I would be intrigued enough to pick it up. Ideally, I would love to have a glossy cover with the title and author embossed colourlessly in matt, so that you don’t see anything until you tilt the cover, making it reflect in the light. But that kind of stuff costs money. So I would settle for subtle translucent text, as shown in the example.

In an attempt to make the right decisions, I’ve been casting my mind back to book covers of yesteryear. Four in particular leap to the front of my mind as being strikingly memorable. I’ve found the images on eBay, so you can see for yourself:

- O-Zone by Paul Theroux
- Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks
- Watchers by Dean Koontz
- Wolf in Shadow by David Gemmell

O-Zone doesn’t look like much until you realise that the “O” is actually a hole in the cover (there’s another gimmick for you), and when you turn the page you get a glorious sc-fi painting of a craft flying over a ruined city. Without exception, the common element in the four covers is a singular striking image that creates intrigue: a UFO on a beach with a native walking towards it; someone or something peering through the bushes at a lonely country house where somebody’s home; most spectacularly of all, the Titanic on dry ground with a cowboy on horseback overlooking the scene. If that one doesn’t pique your curiosity, nothing will. I think I’ve been concentrating way too much on the choice of fonts and the positioning of the various elements; I don’t think any of that really affected my attachement to the four book covers above.

My eBay search revealed further editions of these books with different covers. I couldn’t help but think that the more modern incarnations weren’t nearly as striking. I get the feeling something has generally gone wrong in the world of graphic design today, and that feeling is confirmed when I browse the shelves of the local bookstore. Ninety-nine percent of what I see is instantly forgettable. There’s also a heavy reliance on photographic material. It’s a far cry from the gorgeous airbrushed paintings of yesteryear. Unfortunately, my own limited graphic design skills require me to begin with photographs, too, so at least I’m competing on a even playing field with the pros.

Blog comments and RSS

I’d like to say a word of thanks to the four or five persons who are in the habit of regularly posting comments to the blog. Receiving comments is the most enjoyable part of the blogging process for me, and it lets me know that my ramblings are not entirely in vain. I’d like to encourage other visitors to comment, too. Please don’t be put off by the username and password prompt that appears when you click the “Comments” button (see below each post). All you have to do is choose “Anonymous.” There is no registration process, no need to have your own Blogger account, and no need to disclose your email address. Nothing could be simpler. If you have the urge to comment on an older post, rest assured it won’t go unnoticed, as Blogger notifies me of every incoming comment. I always take time to reply, too (at least, when I can think of something to say).

Now, a word on RSS. See that little orange square at the top right of the blog, beside the words “RSS Feed”? What the heck is that about? some of you will have wondered. Well, if you happen to frequent more than one blog on the net, then RSS is for you. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” and what it allows you to do is view all your favourite blogs from one place. All you need is an “RSS aggregator” application. I use the free online service Bloglines for my reading pleasure. Once you set up an account, all you have to do is copy and paste the RSS feed shortcut (i.e. the orange square) from any blog, and you’re all set. RSS works for news feeds and podcasts, too. Clear as mud, right?