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 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 length, 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 -’

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.