Alt Fiction Horror

The Alt Fiction Convention was held at the Derby Assembly Rooms on 26 April 2008.

The session on Horror featured (in the order of speaking) Simon Clark as facilitator, Conrad Williams, Tim Lebbon, Mark Morris and Sarah Pinborough.

Click here to listen or right-click to download

Simon Clark

Simon Clark is the author of over a dozen novels, including This Rage of Echoes, Lucifer’s Ark, and the award-winning The Night of the Triffids. His latest novel is The Midnight Man, a story of ghosts, murder and madness, which features Vincent Van Gogh during the most turbulent year of his life. Simon is a firm believer developing new initiatives to increase the reader’s enjoyment. To this end, his website www.bbr-online.com/nailed includes short films as well as articles and news items. Recently he has launched a’making-of blog for The Midnight Man: midnightmannovel. blogspot.com This also serves as a gateway to web films about Van Gogh and to a virtual tour of The Yellow House in Aries.

Conrad Williams

Conrad Williams’ latest novel, THE UNBLEMISHED, beat Stephen King to an International Horror Guild Award. He is also the author of HEAD INJURIES, LONDON REVENANT and, coming in 2009, DECAY INEVITABLE. His collection, USE ONCE THEN DESTROY, was given a starred review by Publishers Weekly, who said, “Williams writes with a poetic brutality that definitely makes him a dark voice to note.” A past winner of the British Fantasy Award, Conrad lives in Manchester where he teaches creative writing.

Tim Lebbon

Tim Lebbon is a New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen novels, several collections, and many novellas and short stories. His work has won three British Fantasy Awards and a Bram Stoker Award, and has been shortlisted for the International Horror Guild and World Fantasy Awards. His novella White will soon be a major Hollywood movie, and several other novellas and novels are currently in development. Find out more at www.timlebbon.net

Mark Morris

Mark Morris was born in the mining town of Bolsover in 1963. He became a full-time writer in 1988 on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and a year later saw the release of his first novel, TOADY. Since then he has had nine further novels published, plus a short story collection and numerous other short stories, articles and reviews in a variety of anthologies and magazines. His latest novels are Nowhere Near an Angel (PS Publishing, 2005) and The Deluge (Leisure, 2007).

Sarah Pinborough

Sarah Pinborough was born in 1972 and lives in Wolverton, Milton Keynes. Her first novel The Hidden was published in Nov 2004 from Leisure books in the USA and is now under film option by a Hollywood production company. Her second novel The Reckoning was released in Oct 2005 and her third, Breeding Ground in September 2006. She squeezes her writing around working full time as Head of English in a Luton secondary school.

 

Alt Fiction Publishing Forum

On Saturday 26 April 2008 I went to the Alt Fiction Convention at the Assembly Rooms, Derby.

This is the first of several podcasts that record what experts in publishing science fiction and fantasy said. This one is from the Publishing Panel featuring John Jarrold, Sarah Hodgson, John Berlyne and George Mann.

Click here to listen or right-click to download

John Jarrold

John Jarrold (left) has worked in publishing for twenty years, running SF and Fantasy imprints in London for Macdonald Futura (now Time Warner), Random House and Simon & Schuster. He also published thrillers, historical fiction and some non-fiction. Authors he has published include lain M Banks. Michael Moorcock, Christopher Fowler, Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, Greg Bear, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Lorenzo Carcaterra, Stel Pavlou and Mark Gatiss. Since 2002 he has worked as a freelance editor, book doctor and, latterly, a literary agent. You can visit his website at: www.sff.net/people/john-jarrold.

I paid him to edit Time Crystal in 2007.

Sarah Hodgson

Sarah Hodgson has worked in publishing for ten years. She is now Editorial Director of Voyager, HarperCollins’ sff imprint, and also edits some general fiction authors.

The web site Sarah mentioned is Authonomy, a new community for writers, readers and publishers due to be launched soon.

John Berlyne

John Berlyne (centre right) has been the UK editor of www.sfrevu.com for over eight years and in that time has helped steer it to become of the Internet’s most respected genre review sites. In real life, he runs a delicatessen. He was the Chair of this session.

George Mann

George Mann (right) is the Consultant Editor of Solaris and the author of The Mammoth Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, The Human Abstract and Time Hunter: The Severed Man. He likes drinking gin & tonic at SF/Fantasy conventions and thus can usually be found loitering in the hotel bar (hell, any bar…), or re-mortgaging his property to enable him to buy the entire dealer’s room. Indeed, he spent the first decade of his working life loitering in bookshops, pretending to manage them but actually just fondling the paperbacks for his personal gratification. His favourite authors include Alastair Reynolds, M. John Harrison, Arturo Perez-Reverte and Neal Asher. He invented the name Solaris when, in a rare moment of clarity – he found it spelt out in his alphabetti spaghetti one lazy winter afternoon.

 

Voice

I’m really not happy with my voice. I don’t feel it’s engaging or colourful. It’s stilted, dry, terse, functional, monochrome, flat, toneless, dull, boring. I wish I could write about TC as well as I can criticise myself. It would be a masterpiece.

Reading Frank & Wall’s ‘Finding Your Writer’s Voice’ (St Martin’s Griffin1994) I stumble across the words ‘by following the voice and surrendering to it…’

Following? Surrendering! First you have to hear it. I can’t hear it, this voice that’s supposed to be inside me.

I hear John Lennon telling me to ‘turn off your mind, relax, float down stream’ and ’surrender to the voice’. It’s been a long time since I was in that sort of state, way back in the sixties. I gradually realise that I need to be father to myself. I have to believe that there is a child inside my, a real voice, a person capable of expressing himself with passion and conviction, with spontaneity and ‘urgency’ (Frank & Wall’s term). I have to give birth to this child, the communicator inside me who was never allowed to grow and develop when I was a physical child. Emotionally I’m still a child, and I need to give that child space to express and learn how to speak. I need to listen to the voice. I need to stop trying to tell the story, but to wait and give the story time to tell itself. I need to give the characters space, time, love. They are my children, and they need love and care, not constant demands to perform.

So much for what I need. What I actually DO is a different question.

 

It just might be a hit!

Yes I know it’s April Fool’s Day but I don’t think these people were fooling.

I just read two-thirds of the latest Chapter 1 to the Coventry Writer’s group and two of them said it was much better than before, that it was creepy and had good imagery and other positive things. They had both heard earlier versions and had never been so positive about any of them. In fact I don’t remember ever getting such positive responses.

One member said he liked it but had to leave before giving any more feedback.

The other two were more critical. One said he thought the characters were two-dimensional and that the emotion was told not shown. The other thought the pink planets were hard to imagine.

I accept these criticisms but they do not worry me. You don’t get time to paint rounded characters in this space as well as describing the environment. The first two people disagreed too, saying they found Michael creepy, not flat.

As for the imagery, I know it can be difficult to visualise, since I’m describing a fairly un-worldly scene. I guess some readers will need to read it a couple of times to get the picture. That’s life.

In general I left the meeting fairly elated, and feeling that, after six years of effort, I’m finally heading in the right direction. If I can keep up that standard I just may have a hit!

 

Italics in fiction — what do YOU think?

Should the professional writer use italics to indicate character’s thoughts? Fill_up_with_silence said elsewhere on this blog:

Please please get rid of the italics. To be honest, they’re what I call an ‘amateur’ technique. i.e. it’s a cheat for a lazy or unskilled writer. If you can’t think of how to embed the current POV’s thoughts in the text, then you probably don’t need them. The worst case, use ‘he thought’…i.e. “Bugger,” thought Zhang, “More italics.”

Honestly, if you want your book to stand any chance of being publshed, then don’t use this technique. Trust me on this. I know from whence I speak.

So here is the current version of the first few opening paragraphs without italics:

Michael heard a click, felt the tube grow hot in his hands and saw the black hole swerve down towards it. Down? Should go up! He watched the shadow curving gracefully towards the jagged metal and for a long moment his mind was filled with terrible realisations. Kissov must have reversed the current while Sam and I were reversing the tube. The black hole’s going to hit the magnet. Sam Fitzpatrick was standing before him, the top of the heavy toroid on his shoulder, watching the shadow slipping closer. He’s going to be sucked in first. Then the hole will come down, hit me and then the ground. It’s futile to try to get away.
Even though he knew he would be dead within a second, Michael continued to observe and mentally record, as his years of scientific training had taught him. He saw the black hole hit the heavy magnet, watched it lift off the concrete floor like a straw, saw it carry Sam up and felt himself dragged after it. He heard the heavy cables snap behind him. The cavern ballooned out and faded until he lost sight of it. Michael held his breath, waiting for the pain. Gravitational tides are going to tear me apart any moment.
But it took longer than he expected. He still had a few moments of lucidity in which he could observe and analyse. To his surprise he found himself enveloped in a red glow. I thought it would be black. Looks like the glow from something hot. Ahead of him the maelstrom of debris that the black hole had already absorbed from ATLAS swirled round in the redness, growing distorted as it fell. The red light could be from friction between these particles.
Then he felt himself being stretched and pain began to overwhelm him, pain in every part of his body. He heard Sam scream beside him: “Christ have mercy!” The whole Earth will be following us soon. It’s inevitable. Everyone is going to die like this. The pain grew to an unbearable level and Michael’s mind failed to function on a logical level. As the pain grew Michael was overcome by anguish. What a pity I’ll never be able to record this. No scientist will ever know what it’s really like as you approach the event horizon. But the regret at the loss of scientific information was replaced by a fear, not for himself, but for the whole of humanity. The pain filled his being and he felt his life ebbing away.

Yes, the reader can work out which part is the character’s thoughts and which are the narrator, but it requires effort. Every sentence he’s asking himself “is this the character or the narrator?” I want to make the reader’s life as easy as possible, to give him the least excuse for stopping reading.

With italics it looks like this:

Michael heard a click, felt the tube grow hot in his hands and saw the black hole swerve down towards it. Down? Should go up! He watched the shadow curving gracefully towards the jagged metal and for a long moment his mind was filled with terrible realisations. Kissov must have reversed the current while Sam and I were reversing the tube. The black hole’s going to hit the magnet. Sam Fitzpatrick was standing before him, the top of the heavy toroid on his shoulder, watching the shadow slipping closer. He’s going to be sucked in first. Then the hole will come down, hit me and then the ground. It’s futile to try to get away.
Even though he knew he would be dead within a second, Michael continued to observe and mentally record, as his years of scientific training had taught him. He saw the black hole hit the heavy magnet, watched it lift off the concrete floor like a straw, saw it carry Sam up and felt himself dragged after it. He heard the heavy cables snap behind him. The cavern ballooned out and faded until he lost sight of it. Michael held his breath, waiting for the pain. Gravitational tides are going to tear me apart any moment.
But it took longer than he expected. He still had a few moments of lucidity in which he could observe and analyse. To his surprise he found himself enveloped in a red glow. I thought it would be black. Looks like the glow from something hot. Ahead of him the maelstrom of debris that the black hole had already absorbed from ATLAS swirled round in the redness, growing distorted as it fell. The red light could be from friction between these particles.
Then he felt himself being stretched and pain began to overwhelm him, pain in every part of his body. He heard Sam scream beside him: “Christ have mercy!” The whole Earth will be following us soon. It’s inevitable. Everyone is going to die like this. The pain grew to an unbearable level and Michael’s mind failed to function on a logical level. As the pain grew Michael was overcome by anguish. What a pity I’ll never be able to record this. No scientist will ever know what it’s really like as you approach the event horizon. But the regret at the loss of scientific information was replaced by a fear, not for himself, but for the whole of humanity. The pain filled his being and he felt his life ebbing away.

I still think that italics helps the reader, but for now I’ll leave them out and see what happens. I’d be glad to know what readers think about this.

 

Warwick Writers’ Group

Read Chapter 1 to Warwick Writers’ Group. Entirely positive reaction. Kind comment about the dramatic effect of Danny’s flashback creating tension as the listener waited to know what he would decide.

There was no criticism. This is common in these groups. People don’t get enough time during a reading to analyse a piece deeply enough to identify errors. Afterwards Pam Dunston said she had some more comments. I’ll have to contact her. It’s constructive criticism I’m looking for.

 

Antagonists Point of View

Yesterday I was rewriting the first chapter (how many hundred times is it now?) trying to control point of view (POV) better, as prescribed by Dr Jarrold. I decided to start with the Michael Riley’s POV, an unsympathetic, eccentric, deceptive character.

This morning I decided that this is never going to work, for two reasons.

1. The reader wants to identify with an empathetic character.
2. He assumes that the opening character is the protagonist, or at least a sympathetic person.
3. Meeting a weird person to start with will put readers off.

So I will write it again today, taking Danny Kissov’s POV. I’ve done it this way before but this time I will make him much more well-balanced. Before he was far too single-minded.

 

Editorial almost ready

I’m waiting for John Jarrold to finish editing TC. He tells me it’ll be done next Monday.

I want to print 60 or so copies for review by the students I’m taking to Geneva in December, and others, but I doubt whether I’ll have time to incorporate his editorial and get it printed ready for them to read it before we go. That’s a pity, since it would be good for them to know some of the background to CERN. It might help them get more out of their trip.

 

Point of View

Geoff van Nelder also raises the question of whether the narrator should intervene or whether a character should have sole ownership of POV.

I’ve tried to write scenes using the character’s voice as narrator. The inspiration for doing this was James Joyces’ ambition for the novelist to be “refined out of existince” and let the characters tell their own story.

But I’ve found it doesn’t work for me. The POV character might use different names for other characters (Mummy, my darling etc) which are not appropriate for the narration. They also may also use inappropriate language. I’ve switched back to having a narrative voice, and indeed I’ve done work to develop that voice so the reader recognises when the narrator is speaking.

This is not just because of technical problems with character-as-narrator. In the story I’m writing (a multi-volume epic) the reader needs to know she is in safe and competent hands. She needs to trust that the writer is a professional who can get her safely and enjoyably through a long journey of several volumes. So it’s worth developing a narrator’s voice. However I don’t want to speak directly to the reader. The narrator should not be a character in the story but a sort of invisible guide, making sure that everything works but letting the characters’ voices come through.

So my technique is to use nature as the narrator. So we see things from the POV of the Sun, wind, birds, plants etc. These things have an anthropomorphic essence. This technique is fully integrated with the future of the plot. One final thought about POV.

Geoff in his critique says:

I think you have to be careful with your POV usages in this novel. You are head hopping and if it happens too much the reader cannot build a relationship with a main character.

In general I agree with him. A scene or whole chapter should be from a single character’s POV. If a chapter is broken across different POVs then I signal this by leaving a large gap and omitting to indent the first line.I stick to this rule except in the second scene in the first chapter. Here I am introducing three characters at once. I therefore deliberately allow POV to move from one to another in order quickly to introduce the inner lives of these characters. I am trying to establish inter-personal rivalry between two of them and felt this was an effective way to do it. However I’m willing to be convinced there’s a better way.

 

How to write character’s thoughts

Geoff van Nelder from the British Science Fiction Association kindly reviewed TC and commented:

One issue is that of italics or other means to identify when a character is thinking as opposed to thinking or when the narrator is commentating. In workshops I’ve attended it has been stressed that the owner of the POV has sole control of thoughts. There is no narrator’s voice as such unless you are using the Omniscient POV – not recommended esp for non-established writers. One important point here, is that there is NO convention on this issue. Different authors handle the display of thoughts in their own way. In mine there is no separation between thoughts and narration because as above, the POV owner has it for that scene / section. The problem in using italics or other differentiation technique is who is then the narrator?

eg excerpt from The
Dangerous Moon by Geoff van Nelder.
———–
Fred thought, ‘If I jump,
I might not make it across that gap.’ Fred knew that if he fell he would be
killed…
———–

Both clauses represent Fred thinking, don’t they? I know the first could be regarded as what he was thinking at that moment and the other is knowledge. Can you access knowledge without thinking?
Errmm maybe you guys can but this one can’t!

Of course we know that each editor has their own opinions on this and every other issue. The bottom line will always be: does it work? So does it really matter?

In writing speech there is a difference between direct and reported.

“I like this,” she said. (direct speech)
She said that she liked it. (reported speech)

The value of this is reported speech keeps us at a greater distance from the character. We don’t actually see the character talking. Instead it is the narrator who is talking, telling us what happened.
The convention of using italics for direct thought and saying what the character hought is exactly the same distinction.

If I jump, I might not make it across that gap. (direct thought)
Fred knew that if he jumped he might not make it across the gap. (reported thought)

In direct thought you don’t need to say “Fred thought” since the reader knows that italic means the character is thinking. Likewise you don’t need quotation marks. The distinction between thought and knowledge which Geoff draws strikes me as not relevant. It’s just a stylistic mechanism for controlling something we might call the character’s or narrator’s point of view.