Critical Death Theory, second draft: 51.8% complete
Looking forward to next week, when I will be returning to Moniack Mhor for a writing retreat. Moniack Mhor bills itself as Scotland’s creative writing center, and some of you may recall that I went there last year and had a really productive time of it. Back then, I was busy finishing the second draft of E_________ and Critical Death Theory was little more than a scattered collection of thoughts. Now, E________ is sitting with the publishers (I hope to have news to share on that front soon) and I am hoping to finish off the second draft of CDT and maybe even start playing around with my next project. Something SF, almost certainly, but nothing is written in stone (or anything else for that matter).
Unlike last year, I do have a bit of a deadline issue in that the completed CDT manuscript is due at the publisher’s next month. I really do have to finish the second draft up there or that timetable will slip. I am full of confidence, however! Even with the vast amount of napping the highland air seems to induce in me, I’ve made sufficient progress already that I will be shocked, shocked, if I fail to get it over the line. Also, and keep this to yourselves, publishers’ deadlines are distinctly more flexible than the legal profession’s, so I’m not going to put too much pressure on myself if I miss it by a few days. And who could blame me? Winter in the highlands; howling winds kept at bay by thick walls, roaring fires, and good company. There’s more to life than meeting deadlines.
Except, of course, that I’m a lawyer, so I don’t believe what I just said at all.
Critical Death Theory, Second Draft: 6.7% complete.
Best wishes of the season to one and all! No white Christmas here, alas. I’m sitting at my usual coffee shop, staring out through the rain at Edinburgh Castle. Plenty of precipitation: none of it of the white, fluffy variety. It’s at times like this that I miss Pittsburgh – and Chicago. Although, I don’t think they’re doing any better than Scotland this year, I have many happy memories of walking dogs through Christmas snow in both cities. These are memories, of course, in which the bone numbing cold has been edited out!
I have been comparatively inactive on the writing front since finishing the first draft of Critical Death Theory. I’ve been writing an essay for MIT Press and was thinking of turning my mind to a new project when I got struck down by the man cold. When it comes to colds, I am not one of those people who can “power through.” I find them completely debilitating and spend at least a couple of days lying around feeling sorry for myself. Even after the worst is over, I lack the energy to write anything, which is my excuse for taking three times as long as I should have done to finish the essay, for making zero progress on the new project, and for the complete absence of a blog entry until now. You can interrogate me as much as you like: that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Now that I am (more or less) recovered, I have started on the second draft of Critical Death Theory. Starting on a second draft is, for me, an exercise in barely managed terror. I know I’ve written a first draft but I have no idea if it’s any good. All I did was write down what came into my head as I followed the rough guide of an outline. Whether it makes an actual, half-coherent story is quite another matter. And what if it turns out that I’ve forgotten how to write? What if the whole thing is a dumpster fire from beginning to end? How can I possibly fix that??? It’s thoughts like these that crowd into my head as I open my laptop for the first day of revision.
Fortunately, although Critical Death Theory still requires work (it took me two hours to revise the first page), the bones of it look pretty decent. My writing is as good or bad as it ever was, so there is still a fighting chance of turning out something that the mystery lovers among you will enjoy reading. And now that the terror of Day One is over, it’s time to settle down and enjoy the process. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, page by page.
The best Christmas present I could ever hope to have.
Anyway, having taken a final (for now) liberty with my TBR pile, here is my take on the last of them: Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a work of fiction that has a bibliography at the back but, then again, Emily Tesh is a schoolteacher in her other life, so perhaps it makes sense. And when one considers that the bibliography refers the reader to treatises on North Korea, fascism, and the Spartans, it makes more sense still. Because, right there, you have the baseline themes that make Some Desperate Glory (itself a quote from the (anti) war poet, Wilfred Owen) such a stunning book.
Tesh’s hero, Kyr, is a teenage girl who lives aboard Gaea Station, a small out-of-the-way place that houses the last human resistance to the majoda, a confederation of alien races that, after a long and bloody conflict, brought humanity to its knees by destroying Earth. Although there are human survivors scattered throughout the universe, they live under the aegis of their conquerors. Only on Gaea are there humans still willing to take the fight to the enemy.
Outnumbered as they are, the humans on Gaea, Kyr included, are prepared from birth for the waging of war. Everything, their education, their organization into small, tight-knit cadres, even their free time, is geared toward creating the perfect soldier. Otherwise, Gaea will be overrun and humanity lost forever. Why a hollowed-out asteroid of 2,000 people would present any kind of military challenge to a civilization that cracked open Planet Earth like an egg is not a conundrum that occurs to her, such are the narrow confines of the world Kyr lives in.
It is only upon graduation, when Kyr is assigned to a role that makes a mockery of her training scores, that she begins to question the rightness of the world she lives in. Coupled with her brother’s departure on a one-way mission that makes no military sense, she is moved to disobey orders and leave Gaea Station, determined to strike a blow for humanity that will really count for something. Unfortunately for Kyr, the wider universe turns out to be nothing like she’d been led to believe, propelling her on a path far different than the one she’d imagined.
Some Desperate Glory is one of those books that leave you thinking about it long after you have returned it to the bookshelf. It is layered and deeply intelligent and, while written from an unashamedly progressive viewpoint, manages to tell its story without jumping up and down on a soapbox or descending into tokenism. What is humanity’s role in the wider universe? Should humanity come first? Does it deserve to come first? Does the question of humanity’s future really matter — even if you, yourself, are human? There is much to consider here as the book presents Kyr with a series of momentous choices. I’m not at all sure that Kyr’s choices would be the reader’s choices. And it is that, above all, that makes this excellent book such a haunting one.
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). At bottom, NaNoWriMo is a challenge/incentive to get people to buckle down and write that novel: 50,000 words in 30 days. It is not easy but, as I write this, thousands and thousands of people all over the world are attempting to do just that, and good luck to them!
Now, that said, as longtime readers of this blog will know, NaNoWriMo is something I prefer to admire from afar. I reckon it would take about four hours of my day every day to hit the NaNoWriMo target. That is too much for my personal wellbeing. I have a day job and a family I would like to still have in December. I have been known, however, to crash NaNoWriMo group events in libraries and the like. It’s kinda fun to write surrounded by a bunch of like-minded (albeit tougher) people trying their very best to get a decent novel onto the page. Plus, there is free tea and coffee.
The thing I find slightly jarring about NaNoWriMo, though, is not the difficulty of the target but the assumption (refuted, admittedly, in the fine print) that 50,000 words is a novel. That might have been true when NaNoWriMo started but it is certainly not true today – unless you’re writing for middle grade or younger. There is an excellent Writer’s Digest article by Chuck Sambuchino on the subject of how long novels should be. For adults, Chuck’s range runs from 70,000 to 110,000 words depending on genre. This partly explains why my first attempt at a novel, a middle grade sci-fi adventure, did not get picked up. It ran to almost 120,000 words which, for reasons I can’t fully explain, seemed to me to be the right length for a book. Any book.
It is also possible [sound of gritting teeth] that my first attempt was not very good. Maybe with a bit of editing . . .???
By the time I got around to writing my fourth manuscript, the one that turned into Braking Day, I was a bit more savvy about word count. Science fiction requires a lot of what is called world building, because the environment the characters inhabit needs to be explained to the reader. If a character gets off a plane in Paris, France, most readers will have a decent idea of what just happened. But what if you step through a Lenz portal to Aldebaran Station? What the heck is going on? The reader needs to know! This need to explain the characters’ world in greater detail means you need more words to get your plot to the same place as a romance, say, or a thriller. As a result, SF (and fantasy) novels tend to run long, so, by the rule of Chuck, 100-110,000 words is OK. Knowing this, the draft of Braking Day that went out on submission to agents came in at 109,000 words.
Which was great. The manuscript got picked up (so few words for such a giant, life-changing event!) and the first thing my agent and then my editor asked for was . . . more words. By the time Braking Day reached the shelves it was 130,000 words long. In the terminology of the industry, I had written an “epic.” Adam Oyebanji, epic author. I can live with that!
A Quiet Teacher, my next novel, was not science fiction. It’s a mystery, and very firmly set in the “real” world. Mysteries, particularly fair-play ones like A Quiet Teacher, come in at the opposite end of the scale, mostly for the simple reason that there are only so many clues you can plant in a story before the mystery ceases to be one. Chuck’s view is that 70,000 to 90,000 is about right.
The problem, though, was that my original draft of AQT was barely 65,000 words. Then I decided it wasn’t really a problem. First, that was the “natural” length of the story I had written and, second, rounded to the nearest 10,000 words (there’s no law against this as far as I’m aware) it’s as close to 70,000 as makes no difference. So, I sent it out and my agent and editor asked for – you guessed it – more words. The final, published version comes in at 68,000. Not 70,000, to be sure, but near enough.
Why am I boring you with all this? Well, as of yesterday, the first draft of Critical Death Theory passed the 65,000-word mark. I have written enough to make it into a novel! I always worry, as the word count creeps up from zero, that I don’t have enough for a full-length book. Sixty-five thousand is, in my head, a minimum safe distance from the starting point. I can stop worrying about whether I can write a whole book and concentrate on whether said book is any good.
Ridiculously excited to know that Braking Day is now out in Japan, courtesy of the good folks at Hayakawa Publishing (株式会社早川書房). Hayakawa Publishing is the largest science fiction publisher in Japan; almost all winners of the Seiun Award for Best Foreign Novel are published by the company. I still remember when my agent, the estimable Brady, let me know that Hayakawa had agreed to take Braking Day on. If, like me you are a person of a certain age with a certain taste of music, you will understand that it took me days to get Alphaville’s Big in Japan out of my head!
As is the case with most publishers, Hayakawa were kind enough to send me courtesy copies of the Japanese version. Ten, in this case. My son was addicted to Manga when he was younger, so I was prepared for the fact that it has to be read “backwards.” The Japanese read top to bottom and from right to left. What I was not prepared for though, was the size. The book is beautifully built, with a transparent vinyl cover to protect the contents, but it is tiny. A true pocketbook.
L-R: UK hardback, UK paperback, Japanese pocketbook
I do not, unfortunately, read Japanese, but for a page or two it is fun to pretend. Here is page 326 of the Japanese version:
which overlaps with page 143 of the English version:
Of course, once the pretense is over, reality returns. I still can’t read (or speak) Japanese and I have nine beautifully made books that deserve to be read. I am on the hunt for suitably good homes for them. Some of you will no doubt recall that the publisher sent me ten copies, not nine. But I’m definitely keeping one for myself!
Anyway, having taken further liberties with my TBR pile, here is my take on the second of them: Ten Low, by Stark Holborn.
One of the great joys about reading science fiction is that it gives you a lot to unpack. You have the surface level story, of course, but bubbling away underneath is a ferment of ideas and what-ifs that seep into the reader’s subconscious without them necessarily knowing. Holborn’s Ten Low is a great example of that.
On the surface, Ten Low is a gritty, sci-fi Western, heavily reminiscent of Firefly. Watch the pilot episode of that much-mourned TV show and it is easy to visualize Holborn’s adventure playing out against a near-identical backdrop of dust, horses, and advanced hardware in the bitter aftermath of a failed war of independence.
A combat medic who fought on the losing side, Ten Low finds herself washed up on the desert moon of Factus, a backwater world where the central authority is weak and people’s lives are dominated by armed gangs, an organ-stealing cult known as the Seekers, and a mysterious half-sensed presence that may, or may not, be real. She spends her time here trying to use her considerable medical skills for good: a course of action that brings her to a crashed spaceship and a badly wounded child. The child, it turns out, is a ruthless, genetically engineered soldier responsible for the death of many of Ten Low’s former comrades. Despite this, and somewhat against her better judgment, she nurses the child back to health, fully aware that said child might kill her for her troubles.
That, though, is the easy part. Hostile as her patient is, the two are forced into an uneasy alliance as it becomes clear that the crash was no accident. Forces from both on and off world would like to see the both of them dead. Woman and not-quite-child flee across Factus, enemies known and unknown in hot pursuit. This is breathless, action-thriller stuff, well executed and fun to read. If some of the incidents feel ginned-up just to keep things moving, it is a small thing and easy to forgive when everything else is so good.
So much for the surface. Beneath the action-thriller stuff lies a nest of intriguing concepts that I don’t have room to lay out and which, I suspect, will be different for every reader: SF at its best! For me, though, three things really hit home.
First, point of view is everything. Two people sitting on opposite sides of a table will see the same pepper pot. But to one, the pepper is on the left, to the other, the right. The very human inability/refusal to see the other side is very much in play here. Ten Low and the child see the war and its aftermath from the perspective of their own side. Each makes sense. Neither is inherently right or wrong. Holborn has the wonderful knack of twisting the reader’s sensibilities as she jumps effortlessly from one side of the table to the other.
Second, a focus on where the pepper pot sits on the table can blind everyone to the fact that the table itself is rotten. Now the war is over, both Ten Low and the child have been cast aside, their “usefulness” at an end. Large organizations, be they governments or corporations, only care when it helps them achieve their aims. Once that time is past, the people who relied upon and trusted them find themselves either abandoned or crushed underfoot. Something for the reader to think about long after the pages are closed and Ten Low takes its place of honor on the bookshelf.
Third, there are a whole slew of ideas here that have not yet been fully developed. Holborn’s world is far bigger than what we see in Ten Low. Ten Low is a fine, stand-alone book but it leaves the reader wanting – and expecting – so much more from the sequel. A lot of writers, when writing a series, write one story and chop it off arbitrarily at page whatever, leaving the reader feeling they’ve been conned. A long story is not a series, it’s a long story. The writer should finish it in one go. Holborn does not make this mistake. Ten Low is a story with an ending – and a good one at that. It’s simply that there are more books here to be written. Holborn’s is a world of depth and nuance with room to go deeper into the rabbit hole. I, for one, will be delighted to follow along.
So. The Bloody Scotland Crime Festival. Bloody brilliant. As I always seem to do at book festivals, I had an absolute blast. Stirling, Scotland, where the festival was held, is only 30 or so miles up the road from Edinburgh, so it was a much less epic journey than Shetland Noir. I hopped on the train and, a few minutes later it felt like, there I was.
The good citizens of Stirling will probably not thank me for this but their downtown comes across as a mini-Edinburgh: all medieval stone and steep hills. It is exceedingly picturesque. The city makes a real effort around the event: there were posters everywhere, and the first thing the wait staff at Rishi’s Indian Restaurant asked when I dropped in to be fed was, “Are you here for the festival?”
Not this year’s parade. I was too wet to take a photo! Courtesy Barry Ferguson.
This is Scotland, so there was an alcohol-fueled reception under the 15th century arches of the Church of the Holy Rude. King James VI of Scotland (later First of England), the son of Mary Queen of Scots, was crowned there in 1567. I half-expected a party in a church to feel faintly blasphemous but it felt like nothing of the sort. The ancient nave was filled with crime fiction buffs determined to meet each other and have a good time, together with a large number of volunteers ensuring that a good time was actually had. The fact that it was absolutely chucking it down with rain did nothing to stop the attendees from marching (or weaving) up to Stirling Castle for a flaming torchlight procession to the city’s Albert Halls for a prize-giving ceremony. For obvious reasons, no umbrellas were allowed!
Unfortunately for yours truly, I had to skip the ceremony in order to prepare for my spotlight presentation the following morning. It is a paradox of public speaking that the shorter the talk the longer the preparation. Aimless rambling takes no preparation at all. I, on the other hand, had three minutes to introduce myself, my book, and do a reading. I was up half the night.
Fortunately, the final product was well received. A Quiet Teacher sold out at the bookshop, I got to spend time with the great James Naughtie and Charles Cunningham, and people came up to me all the rest of the day to tell me how much they’d enjoyed the presentation. It’s a somewhat surreal sensation to hear someone you’ve only just met quote your own words back to you. Forget about walls, it’s the people who have ears.
I’m sitting in my usual weekend coffee shop here in Edinburgh, taking a break from Critical Death Theory and looking up at Edinburgh Castle. Even though Edinburgh Castle is bathed in sunlight, I’m wondering why it looks almost exactly the same as Edinburgh Castle not bathed in sunlight. That is one dour, dour building. Which probably has a lot to do with its dour, dour history. I don’t know if this is true but it’s said that the infamous red wedding in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones was inspired by the so-called black dinner at Edinburgh Castle, a murderous — and all too real — event that took place in 1440. One of many, I’m afraid.
Stirling Castle
I also don’t know if Stirling Castle, which is about thirty-five miles up the road from here, has a similarly bloody backstory but I intend to find out. I’m visiting the city for Bloody Scotland, the international crime writers’ festival, next weekend. I shall be wearing my (still new-feeling) crime writer’s hat and doing a short, spotlight piece on A Quiet Teacher. By happy coincidence, A Quiet Teacher has just been named a Top-10 thriller/mystery debut by Booklist Reader. So flattered about that! Anyway, the spotlight piece should be a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to it. It’s at 10:30 on the Saturday morning, after which I can take in the rest of the festival free of further obligation. A whole host of really cool authors will be there, including Val McDermid, Lisa Jewell, and Mick Herron. It’s going to be a blast!
Still wearing my crime writer’s hat, my publisher tells me there’s a distinct possibility that I will be turning up at another festival in the early part of next year. I will let you know more once (if!) it gets nailed down.
And for the SF readers out there, I have not forgotten you! E________ is in (I hope!) the final stages of editing. Hopefully, there will be more to say on that front in the not-too-distant future.
The problem with going to book festivals is that you buy books. Books that then get added to your TBR pile and sit there mutely demanding to be read. The Cymera festival was no exception. Worse yet, I attended a panel with three authors entirely unknown to me. They were so funny and engaging, I had to buy their books. Had to!
Anyway, by admittedly taking liberties with other books in my TBR pile, here is my take on the first of them: Winter’s Orbit, by Everina Maxwell.
To call Winter’s Orbit Bridgerton in space is a lazy shorthand that does justice to neither the TV show nor Maxwell’s excellent novel. Nonetheless, as laziness is a major specialism of mine, Bridgerton in space is what you’re going to get. Winter’s Orbit is an engaging romance with just enough space opera in it to allow it to sit on an SF bookshelf without blushing.
The premise that launches the book is an arranged (for arranged read forced) marriage between Prince Kiem, a minor royal of the Iskat Empire, a grandly titled but minor galactic power, and Count Jainan, a noble from one of the Empire’s vassal planets, following the sudden death of Jainan’s previous husband. The marriage is a prerequisite for the renewal of a treaty with a shadowy organization known as the Resolution, which has a monopoly on interstellar navigation. It is the Resolution that prevents more powerful empires from traveling to Iskat and swallowing it up, as will surely happen if the treaty is not renewed.
There are, however, a couple of flies in the ointment. It turns out that Jainan’s former husband might very well have been murdered, and that the marriage certificate on its own will not be enough to renew the treaty: the relationship has to be genuine. High jinks of a mostly romantic nature, albeit with a side helping of thriller, then ensue.
Romantically, this is a story of contrasting personalities who are hilariously unaware that the attraction each feels for the other is, in fact, mutual. To say that Maxwell has a dry wit is rather like describing the Sahara as not very rainy. It is deployed frequently and to good effect throughout the novel as miscommunications and misunderstandings pile one on top of the other to the point where you begin to wonder if these two will ever find a way through. Spoiler alert: they do, and it is beautiful. What I most liked about the dynamic between Kiem and Jainan is that they are both wonderful, talented individuals with low self-esteem. Each needs the other to hold up a mirror to their true worth.
On the SF side, the novel is somewhat weaker. I concede that I am out of step with a lot of people these days in that I like to see some science in my science fiction, so take my grumbling on that point with a large grain of salt. I do not, however, feel the need to issue a health warning when it comes to my only other nit: both of these highly intelligent characters are sometimes uncharacteristically thick. If you know that someone on your list of suspects is sabotaging aircars but you don’t know who, why would you then take an aircar to which the list of suspects has access and let said suspects know about it? Predictable consequences followed — but it was extremely romantic!
Winter’s Orbit is a sweet, funny, deftly written book that I had trouble putting down. If Bridgerton-style romance is your thing and you are at least SF-curious, this could be the perfect book for you.
A Quiet Teacher at the Shetland Noir bookstore. It sold out!
Critical Death Theory: first draft, 15,400 words
Shetland, to which I recently traveled for the Shetland Noir crime writers’ event, was something else. I wouldn’t call it beautiful, exactly. Bronze age sheep denuded the islands of trees, leaving behind an ancient landscape of close-cropped, rolling hills that end abruptly in spectacular rocky shorelines: either the North Sea or the Atlantic, depending on which side you’re on. Stone Age boundary markers rise suddenly out of the thin soil, and the wind blows across everything. The overall effect is stark: handsome, rather than pretty. Austere instead of lush.
With the cleanest air I’ve ever breathed in my life.
And the hospitality was amazing. I always feel like a bit of an impostor as a crime writer. I didn’t set out to become one, it just happened. I woke up with Greg Abimbola in my head one day and he wouldn’t go away. A Quiet Teacher was born and now, here I am, working on its sequel, Critical Death Theory. But no one treated me as an impostor. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The Mareel. Home to possibly the strongest cappuccino on earth.
The whole atmosphere at Shetland Noir was like a big, not dysfunctional family. Even though some of the giants of the genre were there – Ann Cleeves, Val McDermid, Shari Lapena, among others – there was no sense of hierarchy. Everyone just mingled and chatted and it was quite impossible to tell who was who just by looking at how they were treated. And the Mareel, the center where all the activities took place, turned out to be the perfect venue, with amazing coffee, a suitably broad selection of alcoholic beverages, and stunning home baked cakes, courtesy of the islanders. All with a sea view!
Highlights for me included meeting some fellow Nigerians, pygmy goats, on a coach tour of the Mainland, emceed by local author Marsali Taylor, a wonderful writer and a driving force behind the whole Shetland Noir enterprise. At the gathering itself, I had forced myself to sign up for something they called speed dating. You paired up with another author, in my case the delightful Shari Lapena, and spent a couple of minutes each pitching your book to a table full of readers before moving on to the next table, and the next, and the next . . . To be honest, I’d been rather dreading it, but it turned out to be an absolute blast. Everyone was very receptive, the questions they asked were really interesting, and there were plenty of laughs. Plus, all my books sold out at the bookstore!
A long way from home. Nigerian pygmy goats in Shetland.
On the last day, I attended a workshop on how to write a crime novel (better late than never) and found myself sitting next to Dea Parkin, who is not only the coordinator for the Crime Writers’ Association and an editor but also, it turns out, someone I was at college with. Small world! I paired up with Dea on the workshop’s sole exercise: tell the story of Goldilocks in twelve sentences of no more than eight words each. I babbled some words, Dea edited them into coherence, and we knocked it out of the park. “Join the CWA,” she said. “We’d love to have you.”
