A Literary Life

How y'all been?   Busy, I hope. What have I been doing?   Well, today I sent my new novel out into the world, to find representation and love.   It's called 'Shadow of the Mountain', and it's a contemporary novel about love and faith, about what leads a young man from a small town in Wales to fighting a war in Afghanistan.   I'm incredibly proud of it.   I spent two years writing it, poured everything I had into it - and then some emotional reserves I didn't know I had besides - and the result is something I hope you, and many other future readers, will want to buy in the not too distant future. It's hard work, writing a novel.   It's not something you can truly do just on weekends, around your other jobs and hobbies and social life.   I mean, I know many do - many even have success doing it his way - but you do have to make sacrifices.   For two years I've barely been out socialising.   I've spent most of my free time bent crooked...

I never blog as often as I'd like.  This doesn't mean that my life has become a hollow void, no siree, it actually means I'm very busy.  Somehow we've gotten almost to April and it seems like just yesterday it was 2012.  So the world can know what is new in my world, here is where we're at: I've a script with a small film production company, currently in the semi-finals of one of their talent searches.  This is good.  Very good indeed.  Even if it goes no further, I had such great fun writing it, and it has me thinking about writing something else in the genre the script is in. 'Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters', my novel, is currently doing the rounds of literary agents and publishers.  One has come back to me so far, with a rejection, but a rejection letter in which they called me, and I quote, " clearly a talented writer" and had this to say of my abilities, "your narrative style is understated, elegant and very compelling." ...

I started a novel in December 2010.   I talked about its genesis in an earlier blog post (“ Origins of a Novel ”).   Now the screenplays I’ve written are out in the world, trying to find buyers, I’ve returned to the novel.   Here’s the thing: the few months away from it have allowed me to see it in new light.   It’s funnier than I remember.   A few pages I thought worked really well are actually quite clumsy (and unnecessary) and have been done away with.   For the majority of its 300 pages, though, ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’ works a treat.   Yeah, it needs tidying up.   A few scrappy lines here.   A missing scene of explanation there.   But the base, it’s solid.  Its walls are strong.  The whole thing works.   The titular characters work, their interaction is strong, and there is a real sense of romance, loss and tension between them.    I want to talk about the three sisters of the title: I...

This comes almost two hours into Saturday, when it should have been a post for Friday.   But being called into work early, and getting home after one am did not allow me time to post at all in Friday.   As sleep is calling me, I will leave you with a description of my novel and a little insight into the writing of it. The Inheritance of Things Past, Ben J Dutton The Inheritance of Things Past [2008] (hence TIoTP), tells the story of Will Hargreaves, a man in his early thirties diagnosed with a potentially fatal cancer.   It is a novel predominantly constructed by Will’s memories – of familial ties, his lifelong friendship with David, of his love for a young woman named Sarah Crowe at university, and his more recent relationship with Laura Johnson.   These relationships – familial, friendly, sexual, romantic – become the background to a life shown through four decades.   They become the things that define Will Hargreaves. It is a novel that wa...

I mentioned in Saturday’s post – Origins of a Novel – that there was another completed novel that I wasn’t sure what to do with.   I have actually been rewriting that novel, transforming it from an American-set thriller to a British one.   I’m going slow, finding that things an American setting allowed me work not so well on British soil, and so I’m having to find new ways of expressing them. Beautiful Vermont vs. Here’s the thing.   American landscape is epic, vast, and in places untamed.   It is conceivable that in that vast wilderness there might be a secret laboratory unknown to the rest of the world.   Try and put an unknown lab in the British landscape – we’ve pretty much tarmacked over it all, there is nowhere for it to be – so I’ve had to retcon certain aspects of the beginning of the work.   Such work has meant that later material won’t work either, so I’ll have to reconsider that as well.   This means I’ll end up with a novel ...

I’ve been busy preparing a final draft of the first three chapters of my second novel, currently titled ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’, to send to literary agents and potential publishers in the hope of securing a proper book deal that will actually see my work reach readers.   I’m inordinately proud of what I’ve achieved with this second novel.   I started writing it in December 2010, after a few months of thought, and wrote the first fifty or so pages through to mid-January 2011 when I stopped.   I was starting to write screenplays for the first time, and they took over.   Through 2011 I returned to the novel rarely, writing just ten or twenty pages before stopping again.   I completed the first draft of another novel in that time (a novel I can’t decide what to do with, as it’s good, but not great) and I wrote at least seven screenplays (three of which hit either the BBC Writersroom, where they recieved reader commentary, a rare honour, or The R...