Top Ten Tips for Manuscript Revision (How to Deal with Rejection)

There is no writer alive who has never received a rejection slip. Or, probably, dead for that matter.

This is the test of fire; one you have to undergo time and time again. Because for every “Yes! We'd love to publish your book and give you a squillion pounds advance!" There are 100, or possibly 1,000 “Thank you for sending us your manuscript, but I am afraid it does not suit our requirements. We wish you the best of luck elsewhere".

There are several possible reactions to receiving a rejection letter:

Suicide:

Retiring to a monastery:

Falling into despair:

Taking the same manuscript around every agent and publisher in the world:

Looking again at the manuscript:

By the way, this is a page from the edited manuscript of George Orwell's 1984. Now there's a book I wish I had written.

Of the above options, my personal recommendation is for the fifth. I have tried two of the other four, but I'm not telling you which ones.

This is because, as everyone knows, persistence is the handmaiden of luck, which is the catalyst for success.

But being able to appraise and revise your own work objectively is a skill, and probably the most difficult part of writing.

Even more difficult than appearing on chat shows.

So here are my top ten tips for revising a novel. (And by the way, I am talking mostly about novels for young adults.)

1. Go through it and look to see if your viewpoint is consistent. If we are not following the action through one particular character's point of view, there must be a very good reason why. If you dart into another character's head or perspective, or find that you are giving your own description of a scene, during the same scene, steer it back to the primary viewpoint.

2. Are we as close as possible to the feelings of the character? Are their feelings reported and described, or evoked and given? This is the difference between "She felt a jolt of shock" and her shouting: "How dare she?" Don't distance the reader from the action and emotion; maximise the effect you are after.

3. Put it through a cliché strainer. Hang the manuscript up in a net so that everything falls through the holes except the clichés. We all write clichés; they're a kind of shorthand put in at the first draft when you want to get on with the plot. Then, we don't always notice them later. Here's a list of some cliches I strained out of a recent novel:

‘makes a beeline for’ p8, ‘spot it a mile away’ p21, ‘stand out a mile’ p98, ‘head is reeling’ p22, ‘mouth falls open’ p22, ‘cold as ice’ p25, ‘knows it like the back of her hand’ p34, ‘coast is clear’ p109, ‘dead to the world’ p41.

What do you replace them with? Inspired images!

4. Apply a similar filter for speech words. Really, the modern reader doesn't want to be held up in their appreciation of the plot by a variety of inappropriate speech verbs. Here is another list of mine, that you won't find in the latest draft of a novel:

‘trilled’ p9, ‘croaks’ p24 & p42, ‘breathes’ p45, p52, p88, p90 & p114, ‘laughs’ p46 & p89, ‘gushes’ p50, ‘giggles’ p71, ‘grins’ p76, p79 & p151, ‘weeps’ p82, ‘growls’ p88, ‘muses’ p94, ‘wheedles’ p111, ‘blurts’ p169 and ‘starts’ on p173.

5. Check the pacing. If it feels like it's dragging, or you feel a bit bored at any point when you're reading it, cut it down. Be ruthless. Sometimes you find you have rushed where you should have taken your time to paint the scene a little. Throw in some nice imagery. Evoke that sense of place or person using all of the senses.

6. Check the transitions. These are how a chapter ends and the next chapter begins. Each chapter should end with a cliffhanger of some sort to keep your reader up until four in the morning because they can't bear to put it down. In some way there should be a link with the beginning of the next chapter, but vary what kind of link it is. This could be a word echoed, or an image subverted. It could be similar in mood or theme, or violently contrasting. After a period of high tension, you probably want a light moment of humour, or take the opportunity to insert some vital information.

7. Add emotion. Scare me. Shock me. Make me fall on the floor laughing. If there is any dramatic moment, make sure you have made the most of it. If there is any interesting concept, make sure you have explored it. But always do it from the point of view of your characters.

7. When you've done everything you can yourself, pay an editorial critique service to do a professional job. It may cost £300 or so, but the business that does not invest in itself will lose out to one that does. And you are a business. You are serious about your success. Think you want to spend the money on a nice weekend at a writers' retreat? Or a glitzy conference where you rub shoulders with the famous? Fine, but do this first. You will learn far more from the detailed, specific, personal attention that you will get. Even if you disagree with it. And, you probably won't.  Choose the service based on recommendation from other writers.

8. Rewrite the beginning, then the end, then the beginning again, then the end again. Make sure that you match up the themes that you establish at the beginning at the end. Use similar imagery, for example. Make sure the opening is as arresting, direct, and suspenseful as possible.

I have learnt a lot by reading the opening three pages of bestsellers, and analysing how they achieve their effects.

9. Print it out. Read it out loud. Reading it out loud will show up things you won't notice otherwise. Apply the spelling filter and the grammar filter at the same time. Don't rely on spell checks, do it properly yourself.

10. Give it to someone else again to read. One more eye never hurts.

This is just my top 10. This list is by no means exhaustive although it might be exhausting. The perfect manuscript is an elusive creature that requires much patient nurturing to tame and train.

Of course, you will always think you did all of these things before you sent it away in the first place. The fact that you found loads of things to change means, quite simply, that you were wrong. And the reason is: you needed some time to get a fresh perspective.

Conspicuous in its absence on my list is:

11. Take seriously any hints or advice contained in the rejection letter (if you were lucky enough not to get a standard letter).

This kind of goes without saying. But then again, I find that these letters are often written in haste, or perhaps not by someone who is particularly qualified, or contain only a general impression, not anything that is necessarily useful. Sometimes the reason given for the rejection is just an excuse thrown in and the real reason is totally different. In other words, it's not a technical response.

If, after all the above, your next draft is still rejected, then at least you will know that it's simply because the agent or editor concerned does not go for this particular type of work, or their list is already full for this category. It's not that it's not perfect!

Here is an extract from one rejection letter I had recently which illustrates just this approach:

“Should you write a comedy or another piece that has a little more light in the darkness, we'd be happy to consider it. You can clearly write."

Good luck. And by the way, if you want to compare the edited with the original version of 1984 have a look here.

May Big Brother always ignore you and your manuscript avoid Room 101.

www.davidthorpe.info

Fame at last.....

Those nice people at Headline Environment have done a short interview with me!

From the intro: 

 "'Low Carbon Kid' blogger, speculative novelist, comic-book writer, freelance journalist, environmental author and news editor of Energy and Environmental Management, David Thorpe reveals some of his secrets, not least his super-powered plate-spinning abilities. From photovoltaic business briefings to futuristic 'hybrids', it's all about keeping the mind open and the windows shut..."

Children's publishing is growing - the message from the Children's Writers and Illustrators Group Conference

I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday at the Children's Writers and Illustrators Group Conference.

It was nice to meet old friends and to make new ones, and reassuring to hear that children's book sales are up, albeit more in e-books than print. Someone who went to the session on ‘Mid-list crisis’, reported the statistic that children's book sales had doubled in recent years, great news, although there was no detail on which sectors or whether it was just down to top-selling series like the Hunger Games.

Talking of which, there was much discussion over the extent to which series like this distort the market for other authors and types of book. In the session on ‘What shall I put in my book?’, the most popular of all the breakout sessions on Saturday, authors were told to keep one eye on the market, but with the rest of our body and soul to write with passion, conviction and originality, the greatest story we possibly can.

At least that advice doesn't change!

Roz Asquith had the audience in stitches during her morning presentation of her illustrious career, complete with us sneak preview of her early (i.e., age 15) magazine try-out ‘Horse Magazine’ – "the magazine by horses for horses, complete with 'horse of the day', and a 'horoscope'".

Her character Doris featured largely, and she told a hilarious anecdote. Doris (ex- of the Guardian newspaper) is an unassuming cleaner, who never speaks, but whose sensible thoughts we are allowed to share, which always cut through her employers' pretensions.

The story goes that she was visiting a convicted thief in prison, who said he loved Doris because it reminded him of his mother, who was a cleaner. As a child she would take him along to work, and he would sit in the corner while she cleaned rich people's houses. He told Roz, “I couldn't wait to grow up so I could rob them".

There seemed to be an awful lot of authors writing for young adults at the conference. Reassuringly, there are more markets for this kind of work. New publishers are starting up with business models more appropriate for the ongoing publishing revolution, like Hot Key, and some of the companies are at last learning to understand the new markets, like HarperCollins with their Voyager project.

Also, there are more collective blogs for authors promoting their young adult writing like UKYA and The Edge.

Especially good as speakers were Roz Asquith, Patrick Ness, Charlie Higson, Joe Godwin (BBC Children's),  and John Dougherty, whom it was good to meet for the first time, as he helps to run the Awfully Big Blog Adventure to which I contribute.

Joe, who has the most desirable job in the world, programming all of the best of children's television in Britain, proudly said that of the 35 children's television channels that there are in the UK for its 12 million children, CBeebies and CBBC have the highest viewing figures, the latter having an audience of 1.8 million.

50% of productions are made in-house, and the BBC has 400 employees working on them with a budget of £80 million a year. Making top-quality, diverse children's television is one of the corporation's top five priorities, and all programmes have high production values with a mission to create “unforgettable content".

Although CBBC is intended for 6 to 12-year-olds, Joe said that actually children as old as 15 watch some of the dramas. A new series, Wolfblood, is aimed at teenagers, and another from the same team that produces the Sarah Jane Adventures, Wizards versus Aliens, is in the pipeline. Sounds fantastic.

I particularly like the long version of the story that Charlie Higson gave of how he got to write the young James Bond novels. He was taken by the owners of the Ian Fleming estate to a secret hideout underneath a volcano, where all the other competing writers were sitting in a circle. He pulled a lever and the rest of them fell into the boiling lava below. Including Anthony Horowitz.

I'd like to thank Charlie for signing a copy of The Enemy for my stepson Sam, whose birthday was also yesterday, and dedicating it to ‘Big Sam’. For those who haven't read the book, the main character is called ‘Small Sam’. He was absolutely delighted!

Patrick Hess was also inspiring. I particularly liked his advice to writers to exceed expectations and astound readers, not to 'give them what they want' but to ‘make them want what you give’.

Thanks to all of the speakers and all the organisers!

Oh, yes, and it was nice to see my book Hybrids sold out in the bookshop, too! I had to give them my own copy to sell!

And I'll leave you with this awesome video, by John Dougherty, shown at the start of the day. It speaks for itself!

'We Can Improve On You'

I've just had a standard rejection from a well known children's publisher for a novel (with the above title) I submitted over a year ago.

Conventional publishing sometimes seems self-destructively inefficient, and unable to respond quickly to events and to changing demand; why is it so hard for them to change?

Publishers are debating how they are going to move forward and adapt. Simultaneously they are struggling to cope with the weight of received manuscripts from authors.

This is why, of course, most of them have stopped taking unsolicited manuscripts. Writers therefore need agents to approach these publishers, and agents are struggling too.

I think it should be possible for authors to be part of the debate that publishers & agents are having amongst themselves.

For example, one of my new commercial publishers for my non-fiction work, Do Sustainability, is adopting an entirely new business model.  I am currently writing my second e-book for them.

Both Cambria, the publisher of my recent ebook, and this publisher have the advantage that they can move quickly and respond to a new market demand, or process manuscripts, more cheaply and faster.

I believe that traditional publishers should be looking at doing the same thing.

Is it any wonder, if publishers are taking so long as a year to respond, that more and more authors are turning to self-publishing, through e-books or print-on-demand?

Let’s see this Olympic spirit change politics for the better

The world's greatest athletes have packed and gone home after the most inspiring and emotional of Olympic Games.

The spirit that they generated throughout most corners of this motley land has infused in it a renewed sense of optimism and self-confidence, channeled by Sebastian Coe into his hope that it will inspire a generation.

Galen Rupp's act of self-sacrifice so that his training partner, Mo Farah, could win his second gold medal and enter the history books, exemplifies this spirit, and the best of human nature.

Everybody now wants a share of this Olympic spirit. If they could bottle it, it would sell by the tanker load.

David Cameron hoped that some of this euphoria and excitement would rub off to the economic benefit of the country; this was the motivation behind UK Trade and Investment's business summits held concurrent with the Olympics.

It is also the motivation behind the Downing Street Hunger Summit, which Cameron hopes will secure sufficient commitments from leaders and multinational firms to help improve the nutrition of 25 million children by the time of Rio's 2016 Olympic Games.

This has been backed by many Olympic stars. They have urged the prime minister to go further and make alleviating hunger the top priority for the UK's presidency of the G8 next year.

Mo Farah, whose story is perhaps the most inspiring of many inspiring and humbling stories to emerge from the Games, has lent his support. He has already set up his own Foundation to give aid to the Horn of Africa. Merely by tweeting about its first fundraising ball on 1 September to his many new followers, he caused the server that hosts its website to crash.

It does make you wonder why a similar sense of global togetherness and teamwork cannot come together at other times; like the Rio+20 sustainable development summit, or the annual United Nations efforts to find a global agreement on ways to limit climate change.

Anyone who has attended these gatherings as a campaigner immediately senses a similar coming together of thousands of people from all over the world, and their enthusiasm for a common cause, and knows full well the origins of the blocks to attaining these goals.

The Olympic opening ceremony, depicting coal-smoke belching factories functioning with the indentured labour of millions of workers, reminded us all that Britain began the industrial revolution, thus inaugurating the process of climate change.

Mo Farah's campaign to combat famine in Africa should also bring to our minds that it is this continent which stands to suffer the most from climate change.

The closing ceremony, in turn, by having a children's choir sing John Lennon's Imagine, attempted to make us think that if we all come together we really can save the world. As the song goes: “it's easy if you try".

It may be easy if you try, but as every medal winner at London 2012 will tell you, it's the trying that is hard: years of painful effort. But the result is worth it, even for those who do not succeed; they will cherish forever the joy of participating.

So, if the Hunger Summit succeeds, why not, in four years time, when we are back at Rio de Janeiro, home of the Sustainable Development summits, be even more ambitious?

If we do not have a global agreement by then to tackle the most pressing problem facing all life on earth, then we should use the opportunity, the euphoria and optimism, to force world leaders to sign up to one: an Olympian pact to limit emissions.

Never mind how, or who gives the most. Cease this useless bickering and destructive posturing. Show us the same generosity of spirit we have witnessed in East London.

We need from our world’s politicians displays of teamwork, cooperation within competition, and self-sacrifice, like those that have mesmerised us this last fortnight.

Olympic competitors have stunned us with their world-beating achievements that have exceeded our wildest expectations of what human beings are capable of. We expect it of our athletes.

How much more should we demand it of our political servants?

How I made my first e-book

Are you e-experienced? Until a week ago I wasn't. But, in the last three weeks I have made and published my first e-book.

It feels a bit like giving birth to, I don't know, some kind of strange mutant mongrel beast, some hybrid child whose destiny is unknown, who may grow up to mock me, betray me, give me glory (but only by leave of the wayward capriciousness of viral flukeiness) or, even worse, disappear completely without trace in the infinitely absorptive sponginess that is the e-thernet.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I thought I would share my experience. Some of you may be teetering on the edge of this mysterious pool of brave new publishing opportunities, debating whether to take the plunge. I expect many of you already are e-experienced swimmers with Olympian credits. If so, you can poke fun at my ineptitude.

I kindled thoughts of these waters for a long while. Some of my books had been converted into ebooks by my publishers, but they were like the offspring of alcohol-obscured one night stands; unknown and unclaimed. The publishers didn't even tell me they had been born, I only found out by accident, and I don't have a clue about sales figures.

In a tentative way, I had previously offered PDF downloads of one or two stories or chapters for sale through my websites, but they had languished as forlorn and undownloaded as an unfertilised dandelion in a meadow of opium poppies.

I own no e-reader; nothing I cannot read in a bath without fear. Every work of fact or fiction in my library looks dissimilar from every other, and I like it like that.

What persuaded me to dip my sceptical toe in these waters was partly the persistent encouragement of a local publisher, Cambria Books, whose manager, Chris Jones, is passionate about their new business model.

OK, I said. But I wasn't sure what content to offer first. Then, an old colleague and the series editor of some of my non-fiction, suggested that I republish an old novella of mine. (Thank you, Frank.) This seemed a perfect way of testing out the market, since I knew it would have an existing audience, and that there'd be a new one to which I wanted to introduce it. All I would have to do was find those readers. (The expected readership, by the way, is YA, most likely readers interested in humour, politics, science fiction, and comics/graphic novels.)

I still am sceptical, so I'm going to be watching sales with interest.

The whole process of preparing the content from start to finish took two weeks, which itself is very attractive: contrast this with the swimming-through-jelly tempo of traditional publishing - two years start to finish?

Here are the stages it went through:

One of the illustrations, by Rian Hughes

1. Scanning in the original book using OCR (optical character recognition) software. I used ABBYY. The software is remarkably accurate but does need a bit of an eagle eye for spotting 1s that should be Is and Os that should be 0s.
2. Scanning in the 12 illustrations, which different comics artists from Dave McKean to Simon Bisley had contributed to the original edition. This was the fun bit.
3. Designing the cover, which included colourising in Photoshop a black-and-white illustration that had been on the inside. That was fun too.
4. Adding a short story on the same theme to give extra value, that had been published elsewhere in another collection but not widely seen.
5. Writing a new afterword. This involved a nostalgic and enjoyable expedition into overgrown verges along the side of my personal memory lane. I took my butterfly net for effect (a butterfly effect) to catch those extra special chaotic moments.
6. Completing the whole thing in Word. Word, the software, is not my friend, although Word, the archetypal personification of language, is. But sometimes you have to dance with the Devil, since the e-book conversion process requires a Word file. How did Microsoft sew that one up?
7. Making sure all the prelims were hunky-dory and accurate. That included researching and writing up short biographies of all the artists, updating them from the previous edition, and making sure I thanked everyone.
8. Then I thought I ought to add some adverts for some of my other books at the back that readers might be interested in. Why not? 70-90 years ago, most books had adverts in the back - and the front, sometimes, just like magazines. Perhaps this is the way to go to finance this new form of publishing? Interactive ads for acne-banishing face creams in the back of YA novels, anyone?
9. Then I got carried away and added a real ad from the 1940s for a chemistry set for boys that included real uranium! Most people don't believe that I didn't make this up.

I sent the file to the publisher, who checked it over, made more corrections, added the ISBN and converted it into the .mobi format, which Amazon likes.

I chose to go with Cambria Books, but there are many other companies offering similar deals. It may be worth shopping around, but I didn't bother. Some of them offer print-on-demand as another option. This may be worth considering as well. If you want to get reviews you should have a few print copies to send to reviewers. Also, if you don't think you will sell more than 1000 print copies, print-on-demand is generally cheaper than a conventional print run. Over this number, you should go down the conventional printing route.

The publisher then sent the e-book file back to me to check. I was horrified. I had designed it in Gill Sans font, which I love, and it came back in a frankly disgusting, evil, serifed font. All my lovely formatting was strewn about like weatherboard in a hurricane, and my unique work was reduced to the same common denominator as everything else that you see on a Kindle.

I had to resign myself to the fact that there is little you can do about this, except to control where some page breaks go. It's a bit like designing for the web, except you have even less control. That's the nature of this homogenising beast.

Then, holding a stiff drink, I muttered: “Go!" The publisher uploaded the file to Amazon and it was live - for sale - in less than 24 hours! Wow.

However, I didn't just want to sell it through Amazon and merely contribute to their increasing domination of the market. I wanted people to be able to read it on something other than a Kindle.

So the nice publisher also gave me a version in the .epub format, which works with other e-readers.

Cambria Books also made a Facebook page and a webpage on their company website for the title, to promote it alongside all of their other titles. For all of this Cambria charged £200, which includes £50 for the ISBN. The book is for sale at £1.84. So, I need to sell, bearing in mind the cut that Amazon takes, just 125 copies to get my money back.

I could also have chosen to do all of this myself, but I'm lazy, and I figured that it's worth it, especially since this was my first time.

But I wasn't finished yet.

I then chose to make the files available on my own website. I already sell books on my website through PayPal. Selling e-books is slightly different, because there isn't a physical product to ship, and you need to create a place where buyers can download the file, after PayPal has checked that they have paid for it successfully.

This place has to be completely inaccessible to search engines, otherwise people will just grab the files for nothing.

Here's what I did:

• I made the webpages holding the downloads, one for each format, which just need to be very simple, and put them together with the files in a folder on the server. At the top of the web pages is this text: <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />.
• Just to be safe, I also uploaded a text file to the folder named robots.txt, which simply contains the following:
  
  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /
• Both of these little tricks should prevent search engines from indexing and making public the content of this folder.
• The next thing to do is to get an account with PayPal, if you haven't already got one, and, once logged in, go to the Buy Now Button-making page (if you can't find it just type those words into the search function), which allows you to create a button for a single item purchase.
• All you need to do here, is to put in the name of the e-book, a product code that you make up, and its price. There is, of course, no shipping cost. You probably want to check the button that says “Track profit and loss".
• Then you come to Step 3, subtitled “customise checkout pages". This is the important bit. Answer the questions the following way:

1. “Do you want to let your customer change order quantities?" No, because they won't order one more than one e-book.
    
2. "Can your customer at special instructions in a message to you?" No, there's no need for that.
    
3. "Do you need your customer's shipping address?" No, because messages will go to their PayPal e-mail address.
    
4. Check the box saying “take customer to a specific page after checkout cancellation" and type or paste in the full website address for your shop page.
    
5. Check the box saying “Take customer to a specific page after successful checkout". Here is the really, really important bit: type or paste in the full website address for the page they go to download your e-book. Make sure this is right! This is the complete address for the page that you made earlier and uploaded, the one at the otherwise secret place.

• All you have to do now is click “create button" (don't worry, you can go back and change things if you made a mistake, as I did), and, when happy, copy the code and paste it on your page exactly where you want the button to be.
• Save your page and upload it to your website.

That's it!

The things writers have to do these days.

But I still hadn't quite finished. I had to write a news item publicising the e-book for the front page of my website, in which I included a link not just to the page where people can buy my books, but to the exact part on the page where they can buy that e-book, to make it super-easy for them.

On that page, I include all the options for them to make the purchase: a link to the Amazon page, because most people will be comfortable doing that; and the two buttons for both formats that I made using PayPal.

You can see the news item on the front page of my website here.

I then wrote a post on my blog promoting the book, which you can read here.

Of course, I also had to promote it on Facebook, on both my own page and the page made for the book itself, and on my Twitter account.

And, I launched the e-book at what was billed as the UK's first festival for e-books, in Kidwelly last weekend. My publisher had a stand there.

Unfortunately, this event was poorly promoted and badly attended (having it in a more accessible place would have helped), but there were many excellent speakers, not to mention, for children, our own Anne Rooney, plus Simon Rees and Mary Hooper, Clive Pearce and Nicholas Allan.

Several speakers told their own experiences of publishing e-books. Notable for me was Polly Courtney, who confessed her lamentable experiences with HarperCollins that made her realise that self-publishing was a far better route than being with one of the big five, and Dougie Brimson, who has sold over one million self-published e-books, because he knows his audience really well.

Listening to the speakers gave me confidence that it really is okay to do it yourself and publish ebooks. It doesn't mean you have to give up working with mainstream publishers. You can do both. But given that we all nowadays have to spend at least 25% of our time marketing ourselves and our books, in practice it is not that much more work.

As one of the speakers said, most readers don't care who the publisher is, as long as the book is good.

Did I leave anything out? Is there a better way of doing this? Perhaps some of you will share your experience. After all, I'm just a beginner, but at least I'm no longer an e-book virgin.

Doc Chaos - "a comedy of terrors" - lives again

Cambria Books and Hooligan Press have published a new ebook version of my 1988 novella, Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect. 

I love the tag line:

Inside a nuclear reactor, no one can hear you scream - with pleasure.

"DOC CHAOS is one of the most exciting and refreshing pieces of graphic literature I've seen in a long time." said Alan Moore very kindly in his introduction to the original comic series.

As a love story, it makes Fifty Shades of Grey look like kindergarten games...

Doc Chaos, the scientific prodigy who sold the promise of nuclear power to the most gullible, power-mad people in the world - politicians - did so not just because he likes seeing humanity "trip on its own banana skins" (as Graeme Basset put it), but for a much darker, more erotic reason... to reach the ultimate climax.

This new edition, (available here),  contains 12 illustrations that were specially created by prominent stars of the comics art world:

Simon Bisley (who did the cover, which has been coloured for this edition) ~ Brian Bolland ~ Brett Ewins ~ Duncan Fegredo ~ Rian Hughes ~ Lin Jammett ~ Pete Mastin ~ Dave McKean (who did the illustration on the right) ~ Savage Pencil ~ Ed Pinsent ~ Bryan Talbot.

It also contains a new short story, The Last Laugh, completing the Doc Chaos narrative at the coming apocalypse, and a new Afterword by me, which sets the two pieces in their creative context.

I believe DOC CHAOS takes the literary genealogy of doctors Frankenstein, Faustroll and Benway into the nuclear age and beyond.

The tragic Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the world’s worst, happened in 1987, and, having campaigned against nuclear power for twelve years, while living under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction during the Cold War, the absurdity of civilisation’s perverted fixation on this doubled-edged technology seemed to me to be a good fit for the story of the Bad Doctor.

Written in a post-modern frenzy, it provided me with a lot of fun, especially when I mixed in elements of my own personal narrative, which those who know me recognise without necessarily knowing where truth ends and fiction begins.  It seems obvious to me that there is a macho, psycho-sexual element in mankind’s love affair with nuclear power.

A special word of thanks to the artists who contributed original illustrations to this edition. Each of them was given a copy of the manuscript and invited to draw anything they liked based on a particular episode or scene. Every single one of them responded marvelously, getting totally under the skin of the project. Brian Bolland even contributed two pictures, in the style of the Mr Mammoulian strip he was sporadically producing at the time.

What amazes me is how each artist has their unique vision for Doc Chaos, but all of them encapsulate its spirit. I like every one of them. They really make this book come alive.

The virus that began in a 1981 journal, mutating to continue its survival, is still on the loose.

As the bad doctor says: “You can’t keep a good disease down.”

Hate profiteering water companies, banks and utilities? Let’s mutualise the lot!

With one shining exception, water companies are making huge profits on the backs of hard-pressed householders, with deteriorating performance and rocketing prices.

There is a better way, it's working right now in this country, and I believe we would be better served if all water companies, and even all banks and utilities were to be run this way.

Why this system doesn't work

There was outrage last week as Thames Water's CEO Martin Baggs, already the best-paid water company boss, was awarded an annual bonus of £418,359 on top of his £425,000 salary. This was despite a fall in profits and ‘deteriorating’ satisfaction rates among its 8.8 million customers. He also took home £1.67m in 2010/11.

Of course, he's paid not so much for the service he gives to customers but for continuing to maintain a good cash flow back to shareholders. Investors like water companies and other utilities, because they provide a cast-iron guarantee of cash flow.

Thames Water is owned by Australian investment bank Macquarie, with 12% owned by Chinese investors. They took £179.5m profit from British householders out of the country last year. That's our cash and it will not be reinvested here.

As I have noted before, Thames Water increased its prices to consumers by 6.7% in April, way above the rate of inflation. Other privatised companies increased prices by 8.8%.

The national officer for the water workers' union, the GMB, slammed Baggs’ bonus since it comes from “the hard-earned income of hard-pressed householders" and said the current hosepipe ban was evidence of a long-term failure of management at the company.

I won't go on. There's been enough about this subject in the mainstream press.

The system that works better

Instead, let's praise success. Over in Wales yesterday, Dwr Cymru (Welsh Water) announced a reduction in cost to its customers, and that it will invest £1 billion over the next three years in infrastructure projects across Wales, Deeside and Herefordshire.

Average household bills will be £30 a year lower (before inflation) by 2015, probably the only area in the country where this will happen.

The business plans to reduce its day-to-day running costs by 20%, while further improving its operational and environmental performance.

Its Chairman, Bob Ayling, said the investment package was possible due to its owner Glas Cymru's unique "not-for-profit" business structure.

He said: "The Glas Cymru model means our first priority is to our customers and looking after Dwr Cymru's extensive infrastructure for future generations.

"At a time when many companies and public bodies are cutting back on investment, this investment programme is employing some 10% of the construction sector in our region with more than 50% of spend going to local companies in the supply chain, supporting some 1,500 jobs."

In its new annual report it says it has invested over £1.5bn during the last five years, equivalent to more than £1,000 for every household in its area.

It was also able to pay a customer dividend of £22 each, bringing the total paid to customers in the last seven years to over £150m, because, like the Co-operative, it gives dividends to all of its customers, who are its members.

It's a genuine, not-for-profit, social enterprise that works, superbly.

The social model pays off

Do you need any more evidence before writing to David Cameron and Vince Cable urging them to implement this model as widely as possible?

Then take the oldest co-op in the book. The Co-operative Banking Group goes back to 1867. It has made a profit doing the whole of the recession so far, with comparatively small write-offs of toxic investments and bad loans.

It is lending to small and medium-sized enterprises at an increasing rate: up 31% during 2010 and 33% last year, and is now about to increase lending.

It attributes this success to the fact that it follows the instincts and values of its members, who own it. “Sustainability is in the DNA of the business," says its acting chief executive Barry Tootell.

In 1974, it was the first bank to offer free banking to those in credit. In 1992, it introduced an ethical policy, refusing to do business with the groups it considered unsavoury like heavy polluters and arms traders. Since 1994, customers have voted to choose the charities their spending should help fund via the Co-op Bank. Since then it has donated £3 million to more than 80 charities.

The bank backs wind and solar power. The CIS Tower in Manchester, the tallest office building outside London in the UK, is decked out in solar panels. “We are investing £1 billion in renewable energy and £700 million has been committed already," Mr. Tootell says.

The Co-op prioritises young people, it offers banking services to prisoners on the basis that if they learn to manage money inside they fare better when they return to the community. And the bank is growing; it wants to buy 630 branches from Lloyds Banking Group.

It works, superbly. It is sustainability in practise.

Let's apply this model more widely

So here you have it: sustainable social enterprises, owned by members, doing better than their counterparts in the fully private sector and, what's more, continuing to recycle their profits back into other UK businesses, as well as providing better value for customers.

Now, imagine all water companies and energy companies run this way. Not to mention banks. It wouldn’t be a case of ‘us’ and ‘them’, but just ‘us’.

Would David Cameron love this? What about Vince Cable?

When the Prime Minister looks at the water companies as a whole, he understandably regards them as a success because of the profits made for their owners, regardless of the fact that most of them are abroad.

He wants to apply this same model to finance other infrastructure, particularly Britain's roads. In March, he said in a speech: "Why is it that other infrastructure — for example, water — is funded by private sector capital through privately owned, independently regulated utilities, but roads in Britain still call on the public finances for funding?"

You know it would be a disaster if British roads were owned by Chinese or Australian investors. Just imagine paying through the nose to get to work after another toll hike, while the potholes aren't getting mended because head office in Beijing hasn't given the go-ahead.

What a potty idea. Yet Mr. Cameron is aware of the value of co-ops and social enterprises. He has even backed a bill, the Co-operatives Bill, that supports this business model. But he is not prioritising it. In January, Number 10 said that it "will be put before parliament before the next election", but currently there is no schedule for it.

The Postal Services Act 2011, which paves the road for the privatisation of the Post Office, does contain provision for the possible mutualisation of the Post Office, i.e., turning it into a co-op. Some individual branches of the Post Office are already owned by mutuals, such as Lincolnshire Co-operative.

Ed Mayo, the secretary general of Co-operatives UK, supports both the Co-operative Bill and the mutualisation of the Post Office, calling it the ideal business structure to best benefit the public.

So come on, David Cameron. If you really want to give value for money to hard-up householders and increase the chances of water and other utility companies and essential services revitalising the British economy, then study and learn from the success of Welsh Water and the Co-operative Bank, and encourage others to follow suit.

Could underground coal gasification save our coal industry?

In April, I was lucky enough to witness the first night of a revival of Close the Coalhouse Door by Alan Plater, a joint production by Northern Stage and Live Theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, before it went on national tour. I recommend it thoroughly: go see it if it comes near to you.

Plater gave rise to some of the country's best known plays and television series including the pioneering cop shows Z-Cars and Softly Softly, wrote The Beiderbecke Trilogy and a film adaptation of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, not to mention a television adaptation of Chris Mullin's novel A Very British Coup.

He was a working-class man from Jarrow who loved the north and the coal industry, and this play is a stunning attempt to tell the history of coal mining and the struggle of the miners for their human rights.

It's incredible to realise that 180 years ago children as young as six were forced to work down the mines seven days a week up to 16 hours a day. It took 150 years of campaigning for the mines to be nationalised and decent working conditions instituted.

Unlikely as it may seem given its subject matter, the audience was rolling in the aisles through its celebration of northern humour using songs and jokes; the production manages to make this narrative not only wonderfully entertaining but educational too – a kind of drama-documentary-musical-comedy.

The play was first produced in 1968, but it has been updated with a prologue and epilogue for this production by Lee Hall, best known as the writer of Billy Elliot.

Of course we all know what has happened to the coal industry since 1968, so the epilogue satirically suggests an alternative world in which the miners won the battle against Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives and are right now controlling a socialist paradise.

In reality, there are now just 3,000 UK working miners, down from a peak of 1.25 million in 1920. Most of our coal is now imported and much of it that is home-produced comes from surface mining. The power of the labouring class has been destroyed.

But coal still forms an important part of our fuel mix, and its consumption rose by 9.3% last year.

The big difference between now and then is that now we know that burning coal is the biggest threat to global climate stability.

So we should stop using coal, right? It is the big evil. Leave it in the ground.

But what if we could find a way of burning coal without increasing greenhouse gas emissions?

After all, there is still a great deal of it in the ground. Three quarters of the coal in the north-east and in most of the other coalfields is still underground despite over 200 years of mining.

What if it could be used as a feedstock for refineries without damaging the atmosphere?

Prof. Paul Younger

There may be a way. I was unconvinced when I first heard about it, but after a director of Live Theatre, my brother-in law Jim Beirne, told me about the work of one of its committee members in Newcastle, Paul Younger, I am prepared to believe it could be.

Prof. Younger is the Director of the Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability and is a distinguished hydrogeologist and environmental engineer who is renowned for his pioneering research into community-based, remediation techniques for water pollution from abandoned mines and the man behind a project to source geothermal energy from under Newcastle for a district heating system.

Writing in the programme for Close the Coalhouse Door, Younger makes the case for a revival of the coal industry using underground coal gasification (UCG) with carbon capture and storage.

He says UGC “now appears to be economically viable" and is ripe for exploitation because the polluting side-effects of its combustion would remain “locked away hundreds of metres below ground, permanently unable to access our freshwater resources".

It works by leaving the coal deep underground where it already exists, turning it into gas by injecting oxygen and steam through one set of boreholes and extracting the gas from another set.

Building on the North East's experience of safely mining coal far out beneath the North Sea, he writes that we now know both how the voids created by the process will settle and what this will do to the overlying strata, and therefore how impossible it would be for any fluids in the settled zone to migrate to the surface.

His strategy is to reinject the carbon dioxide generated by burning the extracted gas back into those voids deep underground “where it can remain until kingdom come, safely out of reach of the atmosphere"; a form of carbon capture and storage.

He is convinced that the modelling his team has done proves that it is safe and will work. For the last two years they have been compiling a technical and business model for a venture, which they call Five-Quarter after the seam which lies beneath his house.

“We hope to break ground within a year or two of the curtain coming down on this play," he says, “and the jobs which will be created will be safe, clean and hi-tech," more like in a chemical plant than a traditional coal mine.

The business strategy includes pouring some of the profits into restoring the fortunes of the former mining communities of the Great Northern Coalfield celebrated in Alan Plater's drama, and into initiatives to accelerate the development and deployment of renewable energy that would employ the descendants of miners.

As an old North East miners' slogan, which Younger is fond of quoting, puts it: “the past we inherit, the future we build".

Perhaps the story is not yet over for coal and the no-hope North Eastern towns like Ashington and Easington still devastated by the closure of coal mines twenty five years ago. We shouldn't close the coalhouse door yet.

Six things that must happen to reverse this headlong rush to an illiterate British generation

Halfway through 2011 came a horrifying National Literacy Trust survey of more than 18,000 children.

It listed the following staggering statistics:

• one in four children is unable to read or write properly when they leave London's primary schools
• three in ten live in households that do not contain a single book
• one in six people in the UK have the literacy level expected of an eleven year old
• in 2005, 1 in 10 of the children and young people surveyed said they did not have a book of their own at home; but by 2011 this figure had increased to an incredible 1 child in 3.

Why is this not seen as a national scandal?

I believe it's because we have two cultures in this country. Those of us who are educated and read all know other people like ourselves who encourage their own children to read.

For these statistics to be true, we must be outnumbered by those for whom reading books is virtually an unknown pasttime.

All my life, newspapers have been wringing their hands about the levels of childhood and adult literacy.

Successive education ministers of every political hue have experimented with different teaching methods.

And all this time the problem has been getting worse and worse.

I believe that it's a root problem of our British culture; a culture that is leading to the closing of so many libraries.

Library closures

I learned my love of books from my local library.

But the latest figures on closures are that 415 libraries (323 buildings and 92 mobiles) are currently under threat or closed/have left council control since the beginning of this financial year out of around 4612 in the whole country.

Librarian professional body CILIP forecasts are even worse: it says that 600 libraries are under threat (inc. 20% of English libraries).

This does not include school libraries. Here, as this article from the Guardian reveals:

• school libraries are facing drastic funding reductions
• many school librarians are being downgraded or even made redundant
• School Library Services are closing
• some children’s book awards have folded
• book gifting schemes have had their funding reduced
• some schools have postponed author visits.

Every month brings bad news: in December we learnt that Hertfordshire Schools Library Services, one of England’s largest and most respected Schools Library Services, is set to close in the New Year.

The latest library visitor figures, covering the year to March 2011, showed overall library visitor numbers down 2.3% to 314.5 million and book issues down 2.9% to 300.2 million.

Although this is a reduction, it is less than what you might expect given these closures.

In November, Alan Gibbons called for a moratorium on the closure of libraries.

Tackling illiteracy and library closures was also the subject of Patrick Ness's Carnegie Medal acceptance speech, which he won with Monsters of Men, the third of his Chaos Walking series.

Too often, writers are told by publishers (I was told myself this year) that teenage boys don't read books and so we can't publish your book.

What can we do?

As writers, we must join with Ness and Gibbons. We can no longer be complacent. Our livelihood is at stake.

Yes, we have to keep writing compelling books. But we also have to act.

Here are six things that need to happen:

1. We must be prepared to occupy libraries faced with closure, just like the occupy movement.
2. The government must stop closing libraries and encourage more children to read in every way possible; even if it comes to giving away books. This happens in developing countries where the level of literacy is higher than ours, for God's sake!
3. Publishers must reconsider the pricing of books. Books are expensive compared to other media which children enjoy, much of which is free, like television, the Internet, radio, music and video games. There needs to be a range of cheap books aimed at less literate children to get them reading so they can later migrate to more difficult books for their age group.
4. The pricing of e-books needs to be much, much cheaper (for the iPad etc.), with all kinds of promotional tools like the vouchers used by iTunes, which would be the modern equivalent of book vouchers.
5. Reading books must be made more cool. Celebrities rated by children need to come out and encourage children to read.
6. You should get involved in CILIP's advocacy work on school libraries and schools' library services, if you aren't already.

It's going to take a lot of effort to turn this devastating trend around. But for the sake of the next generation, we have to do it.

Welsh music is refreshed by a wind from the east...

Several Welsh bands are experimenting with the Eastern European Klezmer tradition and finding intriguing parallels.

Klezmer is a strong part of a musical tradition that originates with the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe. It is lively dance music, infectious and laden with emotion - both happy and bittersweet but ultimately lifting the spirit.

Like traditional Welsh music, it has been largely passed on from generation to generation by example rather than written down.

Several Welsh bands are now experimenting with playing Klezmer and, in one notable case, hybridising the style with Welsh music.

Cardiff's Klezmer Kollectiv are an eight-piece who play all around the Cardiff area. They employ the traditional instruments of clarinet, accordion, bass and guitar, but also add cello, sax, trombone and cajon (a box containing a snare for percussion) to give a full, romping sound.

Similarly the Llanidloes-based Klezmonauts, while gigging less often, are educating audiences in this infectious dance style.

Machynlleth-based ex-Ember member Rebecca Sullivan is also experimenting with Klezmer at the monthly Ceinws acoustic sessions.

South Wales duo Fiddlebox, however, are unique in trying to meld that tradition with the Welsh one, and in so doing to redefine the boundaries of Welsh traditional music.

Fiddlebox claim to have invented a new musical style, which they call 'Klezreig' - a synthesis of Cymreig and Klezmer that is proving highly popular with audiences everywhere.

The duo are fiddle-player Helen Adam and George Whitfield on accordion. They have just recorded their second important album, On The East Wind, and will be launching it on 30th November at a special concert at Burnett's Hill Chapel, Martletwy, Pembrokeshire, at 7.30pm.

Nowhere is the Klezreig style better exemplified than by a Klezmer version of the traditional song 'Machynlleth' which, by being played in a Klezmer scale, immediately gains emotional poignancy.

This version arose from an improvisation at a party in Machynlleth, between Helen and Tony Corden, the guitarist and organiser of the politics and music festival El Sueno Existe.

I interviewed them at George's house in Narberth, Pembrokeshire, and wanted to know first of all about the story behind the title.

Helen began her answer by referring to one of the album's key tracks, The Girl From The East: "The Girl From The East takes its starting point as an English folk song, The Girl I Left Behind Me. I wrote three variations on it... the first of the variations is written in the Klezmer style".

George has a more poetic attitude to the identity of the Girl From The East. "She's got her eyes on her own country in Eastern Europe, but is dancing in these green hills of Wales!" he smiles. "The Girl From The East is actually Helen!"

Helen Adam is a quarter Lithuanian Jewish, and a quarter German, on her mother's side, a part of her heritage of which she is increasingly aware. So you could say she arrived in Wales on the east wind.

A recent visit to the Jewish Museum in Berlin led her to reconnect to her Jewish heritage.

"My grandmother emigrated to Germany and converted to Buddhism to marry a German Buddhist writer!" she says. "Then she left him and came with my mother to England and became a Catholic. But she ended her life in a convent in North Wales! The Klezmer track Hora Dorothea on our first album called, simply, Fiddlebox, is about her."

If you didn't know Fiddlebox was a duo, at times you'd think there were four of them, especially since they both sing.

This is in many ways also due to George Whitfield's ability to make his custom-made accordion, which is vital to the unique Fiddlebox style, sound like two instruments at once.

George had his accordion specially constructed by a top craftsman, Claudio Beltrami, in Stradella, Italy. It employs a unique bass switching system, designed to his specification, with an electric midi on board (that he doesn't use for the purely acoustic Fiddlebox), three rows of bass buttons that permit more complex bass lines and four sets of hand made reeds.

Together these produce a big sound with chunky chords, that is usually only achieved with larger concert accordions.

The bellows have a short delay time enabling a punchy reverb effect, which George uses eerily to open his song Simply Fly.

Helen and George are both immigrants to Wales, where they met, but they have made it their home.

Helen is fluent in Welsh and has represented Wales at the International Celtic Congress. Fiddlebox are a regular at events at the National Botanic Gardens and the Royal Welsh Show.

So, the Girl from the East "is happy to be here, but remembers her country," says Helen. "She feels an interloper, but that's how I present the Welsh material we play because I don't think I can pretend to be Welsh."

"We are trying to channel Welsh music through the prism of our own identities."

George nods. "We are doing what no one else is doing. I think it's a shame that Welsh culture has a lack of extension outside Wales, unlike Irish culture which extends all over world. One of the reasons for this is that there is a perception that Welsh music is just scales and arpeggios and we are trying to say it's not true."

Helen attributes this to the point at which Welsh music was written down. In fact, its historical development up to date seems to have gone through two phases.

Firstly, before the advent of Methodist religion, Welsh music was highly social, just like Klezmer, and centred around community celebrations, both seasonal and familial. It was jolly and upbeat.

In the eighteenth century, however, Methodist ministers frowned on such profane practices and the music became more sombre, or overtly religious. There are stories of musicians' harps being stowed away and falling into disuse.

Secondly, there is a feeling amongst some historians of music, such as Phyllis Kinney, author of Welsh Traditional Music, that the scale in which Welsh music was originally played was the Dorian scale, which contains notes similar to those used in seventh and minor chords.

However, when it came to be written down, by collectors such as D. Emlyn Evans and Llewelyn Alaw, there was a tendency to regularise it to fit with accepted musical theory. For example, seven-bar phrases might become eight-bar, and Dorian might become minor. This is how it is now played.

A further change is that originally tunes were closely associated with the lyrics, and thus followed the stresses and cadences of the Welsh language. Often, the original words are now lost, and this has contributed to a further regularisation of the tunes.

Therefore, in the past, it is likely that Welsh music would have had more emotional depth or breadth than it does now, perhaps something like the blues and gospel music.

Fiddlebox's Helen Adam offers her own angle on this: "For me, Welsh music must be robust enough to stand it own against others, and not have too much preciousness about it," she says.

The implication is that we need to keep an open mind about how to present this material. A culture is not static, instead changing in reaction to the times. Just as it has been forced to change in the past, nowadays, as Wales opens up to welcome visitors from abroad, this is bound to influence its culture and its music.

But Fiddlebox's new album is not entirely Klezreig. George Whitfield cites his influences as rock, country, blues and folk, while Helen also is classically trained and practices contemporary composition.

Between them they offer the full emotional range and some very catchy tunes, from George's upbeat Simply Fly to an update of the gruelling traditional English song Pills of White Mercury which is about syphilis in the 18^th century.

George observes, "On the whole album, nothing was recorded that wasn't played live first, and much of it was played live for 6 months beforehand to make sure we had it down".

Fiddlebox were insistent that they wanted no special effects like echo or distortion. It would all sound exactly as it would at a live gig (watch them playing live below).



The album was recorded in an old Welsh chapel by producer David Unlimbo. The chapel also contained nesting swallows, and the mikes picked up their chirruping songs. Listen closely to the album and you can hear them, deliberately left in.

The swallows are gone now, blown on the east wind far away for the winter. Perhaps they are like the Girl from the East, and dream of their homeland. Except Fiddlebox's girl has made Wales her home, and Welsh music is all the more enriched for it.

An e-book, Hybrids update and more...

Here's a round up of recent news! Besides moving into my own custom built eco-studio, which I designed, and where I can now work surrounded by all my books at the bottom of the garden and be lovely and toasty warm with the superinsulation, triple glazed windows and underfloorheating, I've been a bit busy on other stuff:

• Boulder Media has now started work on visualisations of Hybrids in preparation for the proposed TV series. We're very excited and can't wait to see them!

• I've been commissioned to write an e-book on solar photovoltaics by a new publisher, Sedition. This will be a pilot for a whole series of e-books on sustainability topics. It only has to be finished by the 1st week in January!

• I'm in discussions with Earthscan/Taylor & Francis for a new non-fiction book to be written next year on solar architecture.

• I've written an article on graphic novels, called What Pencils Were Made to Create. It's in the current issue of the New Welsh Review.

• I've finally finished the latest draft of his novel Stormteller (this is a link to a special website I made about it) which, along with my other recently completed novel, We Can Improve On You, is currently being read by the excellent David Fickling books. Fingers crossed!

• I gave a talk on solar PV at last month's Solar Flair '11 conference.

• My new book Solar Technology, The Earthscan Expert Guide to Using Solar Energy for Heating, Cooling and Electricity is doing well, as the seminal introduction to all solar technologies and practices, and solar energy itself. It covers solar space heating, architecture, water heating, solar cooling, solar power stations and photovoltaic electricity. It's full of pictures, and easy to read!

• You can now buy copies of this and my other books direct from me on my website's bookshop page!

• Of course, I am still producing daily news and weekly opinion pieces for the Energy and Environmental Management website.

On discipline...

These days, writers are supposed to be a brazen brand - masters of mobile and internet wizardry; and magicians of marketing!

It's easy for the time required for the craft of writing to be squeezed, and this has led me to consider the nature of 'discipline'. (And I don't mean perverse sexual practices!)

"Discipline" is a frequent topic of questions in interviews, as in that awful one: "It must take a lot of self-discipline to write a novel/be a writer..?".

Well, no, we tend to answer patiently... self-discipline is not an issue. If you really want to be a writer, actually you can't help it. In fact, you go crazy if you DON'T get the time to write.

Like, when unable to write for prolonged periods, I get to feel that I will start scraping the wallpaper off with my fingernails or yelling something deeply regrettable if I can't get back to it very soon.

OK, others might call it a form of mental illness, but, as anyone will know who has read biographies of many top entrepreneurs (like Steve Jobs), scientists or artists, this kind of obsessive-compulsive behaviour goes with the job description in many fields.

This is not to be considered weird! 

Now, I'm one of the lucky people who make most of their living from writing. I have to do several different kinds of writing to survive rather than just write fiction (my favourite form), and I feel that I've worked hard to be in this place.

Discipline as craft
Another meaning of the word 'discipline' is craft or skill.

For the past year, my work pattern has changed, involving a new discipline, and this has had an interesting effect on my writing.

Every weekday morning, I have to write an article, as soon as possible and usually within two hours, of about 700-1000 words, and post it on a web site.

This is an enforced discipline, but one that pays off well in terms of developing the discipline of the craft.

Typically, I have no idea before I start what the subject will be, and have to research it as I write it.

This type of journalism, for a specialist, largely business, audience, demands many qualities apart from accuracy and readability.

In particular, there is an instinct for what people want to read that no one else is providing, which can only come from knowing the field intimately.

There is also the kind of fluency that comes from being able to trust oneself that the process of writing at speed will result in something that isn't completely unintelligible and is of great interest to my readers.

This is a very different process from writing a novel, partly because it operates on a totally different timescale. It is topical, and so consumed, like a meal, within hours of preparation, after which it is likely to be forgotten; although one hopes that it will have greater influence, just as a top chef's creation may be talked about for long after it has disappeared.

The self-editing process is therefore different. When writing a novel, one can leave a draft for a few weeks so that, when re-reading it, one may see it afresh and notice errors and omissions that were obscured by the afterglow of creation.

Since adopting this new work pattern, and because I cannot expect my editor to spot my errors, I have developed new techniques to force myself to both edit as I write and to see my work freshly as if I had left it for weeks, even though it was only minutes. These techniques have fed into the novel-writing process.

I continually edit as I write, checking that I've said what I meant to say. I write in a text editor, not a word processor, so I can concentrate on the words alone, not be distracted by how they look.

I re-read and correct it, then copy and paste it into OpenOffice. I do the same there. Then I copy and paste that into TextEdit (I use a Mac) and repeat the process. Both of these have spell-checks that notice different words (OpenOffice doesn't check American spellings).

Each time I paste it into different software, it looks different, and my eye is forced to notice different things.

So I'll have read and re-read, continually correcting, this blog copy several times this way before posting it. Even so, I won't be surprised if someone spots a mistake!

There we have it: two types of discipline. One, that is about finding the time to write; the other, that is about the development of the craft.

This blog post has no title

I have just changed the title of the novel I'm currently working on.

Again.

I just can't decide on the right title. I almost feel like letting the publisher decide.

Just think how important the title of a book is. A good one will not only be memorable but make potential new readers actively seek out the book.

It will resonate in your head like a tuning fork. Stick in the mind like stubborn egg stains. Have an emotional punch like Mohammed Ali.

A good title even becomes an icon or a touchstone in its own right.

Catch-22. 1984. Brave New World.

It can also signify the genre.

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen could not be anything but fantasy.

The Unquiet has to be a thriller.

It can be eponymous, like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary; or signify the theme, like Crime and Punishment or Pride and Prejudice.

Or it can be quirky, like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, or The Knife of Never Letting Go.

And just silly and quirky, like Puckoon, or The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

At the same time as thinking about this I'm reading an autobiographical monograph by Haruki Murashami called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

People, he says, often ask him if, while running, he is thinking about the novel he is currently writing.

"No," is his answer. Actually, he is thinking about nothing. Or, as he puts it, The Void.

Now, here is an interesting place. I love The Void so much I have a room permanently reserved there.

The problem is, I often lose my way when trying to reach it.

The Void is variously also known as The Still Point of the Turning World (T.S. Eliot), The Supreme Point Where All Contradictions are Resolved (André Breton and the Surrealist Manifesto), and The Uncarved Block (Chinese Taoist Art training).

In a world drowning in a surfeit of words, to which we are all, writers par excellence, fatally addicted, the Void is reached by taking a Journey to the East - which is East of Eden - by jumping off Brighton Rock, following the Songlines along the Road to Wigan Pier, through the Heart of Darkness, crossing the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, at the end (where else?) of The Road Less Travelled.

Not enough people go there.

It's quiet: in The Void you can't even hear yourself think.

Here, you can try without trying, be without wanting, start without stopping.

All opposites are reconciled like identical poles of a magnet brought together as if they were north and south.

And here, as Pierre Reverdy said, is the place where the most successful poetic images are generated.

"The image is a pure creation of the spirit. It cannot emerge from a comparison, but from the coming together of two distant realities. The more the relations between those two realities are distant and right, the stronger the image will be - the more it will have emotive force and poetic reality."

Is not this also what we require from a successful book title?

So what, you're hopefully wondering, is the title I have settled on (at least until a better one comes along)?

In truth, it's not one I thought of myself. I have my fiancée, Helen, to thank.

She, being a musician and composer, knows the Void well, since music is another conveyance that transports to it the sympathetic mind.

The rejected titles were: The Drowning. The Essence. The Ending.

The new one: Stormteller.

Would you pick up a book with such a title?

How I write my novels

I'm going to share with you very quickly how I write my novels.

I did a workshop on some of this in my local writers' group and people really appreciated it so perhaps others may find it useful.

[Yes, I said novels. Okay, I know I've only had one and a half novels published, but I have written a few more, plus several unproduced screenplays and published and unpublished comics or graphic novels, and have two novels in manuscript form ready for publication. So I live in hope that at least one more will be published one day...!]

So here goes.

The idea

Firstly I come up with the ideas, which may or may not include ideas for characters at the same time. The ideas have to be gobsmackingly mindblowing, and usually there are too many ideas, because you can't have too many ideas. Or is it that you can have too many ideas?

The idea usually involves a beginning. The problem is this means you need an end - a resolution in some form of the problem set at the beginning.

And if I don't have an end then I don't know where I'm going - rather like setting out on a journey without a destination in mind. I can have a nice time wandering around, but I might never get anywhere interesting.

The summary

Then I formulate the plot in four sentences. The first sentence summarises the setup (the problem which the protagonist must solve), the last sentence the resolution, and the middle two - well, I think you can guess.

For example, here's a stab at King Lear in 4 sentences: an abdicating king separates his kingdom between two hypocritical sisters, leaving a third, who loves him the most, unrewarded. Having retired, he and his retinue seek in turn the hospitality of the two sisters but they are not so pleased to see him. Their greed and unpleasantness is reflected in civil war in the country at large and the king falls into despair and madness. He finally realises that it was the third daughter who loves him the most, but by then it's too late and everyone dies.

As you can see, this synopsis leaves out rather a lot; it's more like a sketch.

One thing it leaves out is subplots; actually it's helpful to come up with the same kind of four sentence summary for each subplot.

Next, I draw a line and put the main plot points on the line. I then think of more plot points and add them to the line as well. I add as many plot points as I can fit onto the line!

Maybe I will draw another line that is longer.

The scene cards

Then, I dig out a pile of blank index cards. Each of these is going to contain a scene or plot point.

Using the line as a reference, I write all the points out, one on each scene card. This is the really fun bit.

Notice how both generating the line and the scene cards can be done non-linearly. This is great, because that's exactly how the creative mind works. It darts all over the place like a busy bee.

I'm looking at my cards and thinking: right, if this is going to happen in this scene, then this needs to happen in a scene much earlier, and I need to add another scene in between this scene and that scene.

Maybe I need to switch these scenes around.

And so on.

I spread all of the cards on the table - or maybe the floor if I don't have a table big enough. Now I can see the layout of the entire plot like a bird of prey scanning the landscape below!

Amazing!

I can switch the cards around, add more points as I think of them to each card.

To start with, the cards might just contain a quick summary of what happens at that point. Just scribbled notes. But if I think of a scintillating line of dialogue or a beautifully poetic descriptive phrase, I will add that to the relevant card rather than just hope I will remember it later.

Next, I will assign colours to characters, and colour appropriately every card in which a given character appears.

Usually, characters live only in particular plot strands. For example, minor characters usually hang out for the most part just in their little own sub-plot, suddenly popping up in the main plotline - most likely to knock it off kilter.

Now I can take out all of the cards that have a particular colour on, and check this particular character's journey through my narrative to make sure that it makes sense.

I can do the same with subplots.

Alongside all this, I will create character sheets, detailing as much as I can possibly know about each character, usually by interviewing them in my head pretending to be either a cop, private dick, journalist or maybe they are on Desert Island Disc and Jenny Murray is asking the questions!

To this, I will also add what
each character thinks of each other character. That way I know, should they meet each other in the narrative, what their attitude will be to each other.

If there is a particularly important McGuffin, that might have its own colour as well, and this is recorded on the relevant cards just so that I don't lose track of it and always know where it is. Even if my characters don't, I need to!

The first draft

Playing with the scene cards might take some time and only when I am completely happy that everything is down there and there are no plot holes, loose strands, or undeveloped characters will I embark on the first draft.

The fact that the plot and character development are already now sorted out, means that in writing the draft, I can concentrate purely on style - which words to use to best describe what I want to say, and come up with scintillating lines of dialogue.

At this rate, I can write one or two thousand words a day, either dictating or typing. (Sometimes I dictate, as I am doing now, using a voice recognition program which is much faster than typing although the style is usually more conversational.)

On a good day, if I have more than a couple of hours free to write, I can write 5000 words. This means that a 50,000 word young adult novel can be written in a month.

But that's only the first draft. I mustn't get too excited! Actually, I probably think this draft is the best thing I've ever written. But of course it isn't. The novel of which I have just sent the opening pages and summary to David Fickling, has been through 11 drafts. That process has taken three years.

A novel is not to be undertaken lightly - at least by me.

Editing

The editing process is the one which I find the most difficult. Seeing your work as others might see it is usually only possible after you have put aside for a while.

I try to fool myself that I haven't seen it before. I do the basic editing on-screen. Printing it out makes it look different and I notice a different set of things to correct.

The same thing happens when reading it aloud - an essential step - new mistakes become obvious.

I give it to as many people as I can who I think will provide constructive feedback. Sometimes this produces conflicting advice and I am plagued by indecision.

Different drafts must be given to different people so that they are reading it afresh.

Even printing it out in a different typeface in a different format can force my brain to look at it in a different way.

But there really is no substitute for putting it aside for some months and then coming back to see it, as if for the first time.

That's when I notice the really huge howlers and wonder how I could possibly have missed them the first time around.

It goes without saying that I will use a spell check, but this is a poor substitute for proper proofreading.

And it should be properly proofread after the very final draft before sending it away, and assuming that anybody could possibly have any interest in these words which I regard as vital but which in the huge ocean of words that are out there, comprise but an insignificant drop.

This is why I am never precious about my work and always open to any kind of constructive criticism and observation.

It all goes into the mix, it is all useful.

But ultimately, it is on my judgment that the strength of the finished piece finally rests.

The end - but in real life there are no endings - except the big one!

Did I say finished? That's a joke. I don't regard anything as ever finished. It is only the existence of the deadline enforced by the publisher that makes it so.

Why is it that musicians may keep on reinterpreting and changing a song or piece of music that they have written forever, and an artist may keep painting variations of the same image, but that even in subsequent editions, a writer is never allowed to change anything but the slightest semi-colon once it is in print?

[By the way, I'm happy to run workshops on this topic if anyone would find it helpful.)

Lets celebrate a new library extension!

Here's some bright news in all the doom and gloom!

We've heard a lot about library closures - both in schools and in the community.

Earlier this month the outgoing Children's Laureate Anthony Browne warned society "will pay the price in the long term" for closing school and public libraries.

In a letter to his successor, Browne urged them to campaign against their closure. Browne said: "Do everything you can to support libraries – God knows, they need every bit of help they can get nowadays. I find it incredible and outrageous that public and school libraries are being forced to close – we'll all pay the price in the long term."

And Philip Pullman has been telling Wales Online that it's all due to the death of "post-war altruism" and everything being "measured and assessed by cost". He said: "This approach is tearing apart the invisible bonds of duty and loyalty, belonging and togetherness in the name of an ideology that nothing is more important than money."

He's largely right - but there are always counter-examples, and here is one I love - not only a new library extension but an inspiring one. Although it's not in Wales, it's not too far away - Coventry!

Foleshill library was originally built in 1913 and sits in a residential suburb.

And it's been renovated! Not only does it now have improved access for disabled visitors, the extension has created a meeting room and an events and activity room which means it can host story time and reader group sessions for children and be a base for activities hosted by a youth worker who is based at the library.

But what I really like is its curved back wall, designed to demonstrate the library's core theme of ‘imagination’.

It uses multi-coloured glazed bricks that are vertically stack-bonded to simulate library books, and to represent the multicultural diversity of the community.



But the brilliant thing, which any kids interested in code will love, is that the bricks are positioned to spell a message in Morse code, with one white brick representing a dot and three coloured bricks representing a dash.

Can you work out what it is before I tell you?! Go on, have a go! The link above takes you to a page with Morse code spelled out! And if you click on the pics they will enlarge.

OK, here is comes...... See if you got it right!

The pattern of bricks repeatedly spells out the words ‘Supposing’, ‘I Wonder’ and ‘What If’!

Isn't that great? Isn't that how we all dream up our fictions, and what we hope we can inspire kids to do? Well, they do it automatically of course anyway!

Manfred Baker, a Partner at Rush Davis, the project's architect, told me: “It was important that the design of the building reflected the vibrancy of this multi-cultural area. By using coloured glazed bricks we were able to create a design that had real meaning and represented what the library was all about - imagination."

So remind me - why do we need libraries?

Richard Collins has The Quality of Lightness

Is it life that imitates art or art that imitates life?

Richard Collins new book, The Quality of Light [the link is to Amazon but they have the wrong cover!], out today, is his third novel, written three years ago, three years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

This beautiful, poignant work is constructed ingenuously around events that happen over six days both currently and six years previously.

It is about the effect of cities upon people, and how love can echo and change over time, constricted by the vagaries of coincidence and geography.

In fact, its original title was to have been Psychogeography for Beginners, but its final title is much more evocative.

One of the main characters, Michael, also suffers from Parkinson's. Richard writes obliquely and modestly about the effect it has on people through Michael's experience of it, although this is by no means a theme of the novel.

It is an insidious and progressive disease which punishes its victim with intermittent and unpredictable lashes.

Richard bravely fights the disease by remaining as active as possible, often cycling 40 miles in a day or walking up a mountain, yet on other occasions he can be stricken down so badly that he can't even get on a bus or stand up.

He is aware that if Waterstones were to offer him a signing, as they had before, he would have to decline, because he couldn't be confident that he could actually control his hand. I took him my copy to sign but had to leave it there until a moment arrived when it became possible for him to do so.

I love Richard dearly, he's one of my best friends. This deserves to be as much a success as his first, The Land as Viewed from the Sea, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread first novel award.

So where does the ebook leave a writer?

I've got a new post on the Dragontongue blog site about this.