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’m clearly not any good at this blogging thing.   I broke my promise, twice now.   So I can’t blog continuously for thirty days.   But I will try and blog frequently(ish) or until I got so lost in something new that I haven’t the focus any more. So what’s new?   I’m about to embark to London Town for a one day workshop with James Moran (the wonderful writer of Severance, the Pompeii episode of Doctor Who, amongst many other ghoulish outings) and Dan Turner (director of the very scary Stormhouse, written by another ghoulish writer, Jason Arnopp) so that should be fun. Insights into how to get my brand new, sparkling scripts into the hands of people with money (and hopefully the passion to throw lots of it at me to make the thing).     I’m reworking my script for the BBC Wales Drama Award 2012 – an award open to all new writers of Welsh residency that I just know is going to be swamped with material of such high quality that I’m going...

In 1955, Vladimir Nabokov published his most famous work, Lolita .   Lolita was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and was fourth in the Modern Library's 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.   Its reputation is vast; its influence is bigger still.  What follows is an extract from my PhD where I discuss this novel and gives great insights into the creation of one of the greatest novels ever written. Lolita did not come to Nabokov fully formed in the mid-1950s.   In 1939, he wrote a novella that remained unpublished until 1986, following his death in 1977.   That novel, entitled The Enchanter , Nabokov would go onto describe as “the first little throb of Lolita ” in an essay that would subsequently be attached to that great novel.    Like Lolita , it is concerned with ephebophilia and the same technique of a predatory older man to gain access to his desire as Humbert Humbert...

So I missed a day.  It wasn’t my intention, but again being called in early to work, and then meeting friends for a few drinks after finishing at 10pm meant that I failed in my intention to blog every day for 30 days.  So, because this is my blog, and my project, I will modify my original intent to state that I will blog Monday to Friday and then only if I get the chance on the weekend.  The weekend I work crazy hours.  I can easily do 30 hours in those two days.   As it’s been a steaming hot weekend, with thousands of tourists pouring into our ordinarily quiet little town (quiet, that is, apart from summer months and holiday times, and then not really all that quiet at all – we are a World Heritage Site, afterall), I have barely stopped this weekend and so, unless I bore you with stories of abusive customers, drunk customers, drugged-up customers, confused tourists, confused locals then I have little of interest to say.  Certainly nothing ...

A long walk.   There’s nothing like it on a summery day, with the barest of breezes.   Along the beach, and around the breath-taking scenery of the Great Orme, a limestone headland jutting off Llandudno into the Irish Sea.   The gulls riding on thermals.   Strange insects scurrying over stone, sand-spiders hurrying over undulating dunes.   Sitting on grass, looking out over Anglesey and Puffin Island, watching kayakers in the sparkling water below, but otherwise alone.   Bliss. A walk to a writer is about more than just getting exercise (though that is a key factor, as we do spend too many hours sitting at desks, tapping words into computers or running pens over paper that any excuse to get up and move around is welcome, even if it is just dancing along to a Scissor Sisters song and hoping nobody catches you!).   A walk to a writer is about allowing the creative juices to flow.   There is something strangely conducive and seductive a...

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 ...