Went to a quick in my local pub last night, with Bas, an uncle of mine called Mike, and a neighbour called John L. I like a good pub quiz and have entered a few in recent years, always just for fun. But last night we almost won! We came second in the end, just 2 questions behind the winners. In a weird way it’s almost worse finishing so close behind than it is to wind up mid-table -- you go away cursing the answers you should have got right (such as when the Chernobyl Disaster happened, or the year of the Great Fire Of London). If only you’d thought a bit harder, you could have been top dog!!! True, it was only a small village pub quiz, but I’ve got quite a competitive nature once I get going, and to me it was the same sort of feeling as if one of my books got to second place in a chart but only sold a few less copies than the top-placed book. I was pleased to climb so high, of course, but dagnabit, when you get that close, it’s a pain in the butt not to go a tiny bit further and WIN!!!! Oh well -- maybe next time ...

Today I finished editing the third book of my four-book series. I also put together the April edition of the Shanville Monthly, and sent out an email to everyone who subscribes to it. The emails are still flowing out as I type -- there are over 16,000 email addresses in my database, so it takes a LONG time for my system to process them all, at least 12 hours, sometimes a lot more if the system hits a glitch along the way!!! I’ve been doing the Shanville Monthly for close to 8 years now, and even though the internet has come on in leaps and bounds since I first started (I used to send out the monthly emails using Outlook Express for the first few years!!), and there’s probably a better, swifter way these days to keep readers up to date with all the latest news, I like the old-fashioned feel of the monthly. It’s like a magazine or comic that comes out once a month. I look forward to bringing all the news together and sending it out in one big monthly lump, and I hope you guys do too.

If you read the April Monthly, you’ll see that I mention a new series that I’m tentatively edging towards making a start on. I can’t say anything about it yet, mostly because I don’t know much about it -- hell, I don’t even know if it will come together, if I’ll even start on it at all!!! But I think it has the potential to be a multi-book series, something on the scale of The Saga or The Demonata. I’ve been playing around with ideas for it for a few years, teasing away at the few scenes and ideas which have been knocking around my mind. It’s been slow, hard going, but I think it’s coming together -- in recent months I’ve been thinking about it more and more, piecing together different parts, running various plots and ideas through the mill of my imagination. I have the sense that I’m ready to push it further, to sit down and start putting ideas on paper.

This is the part of the job that’s hardest to explain, and the part that I think is of most interest to other people. It’s the creative maelstrom that comes before the actual beginning of a book. Right now I have scraps of ideas and story-lines which might one day form the core of a long series. But they’re nowhere near complete. There aren’t just gaps in the structure -- there are black holes!!!! I’m going to try to pull enough of those ideas together to get me started, to set me on the path of what will hopefully work out. But I can’t fully explain how I’m going to do that, because I don’t really understand the process myself. All I know is that I have to work on those ideas, bounce them off each other, ask questions of them, sniff around them. What happens if I do this? What happens if I do that? Will I throw in a bit of sci-fi to see what happens? Where do I want to set it?

So many questions. So many ideas. So many possibilities. If I sat down and thought about the scale of embarking on such a project, I’d be terrified and I wouldn’t have the courage to begin!! Something I often say to young writers is "Don’t think too much!" Writing can be a scary prospect if you brood about it. You just have to get stuck in. Of course you can’t actually do that until you have SOME idea of where you want to go. But a sliver of an idea is usually enough. Inever have all the answers to a book before I start it. Getting a few key facts straight is normally enough to get me going -- after that I just have to trust that the story will suck me in and reveal more of itself to me there further along I stumble with it. I said before on this blog that the trigger which made me sit down and write my four-book series was a scene set on a ship -- I saw the scene unfold in the cinema of my mind, and knew I had to start writing ASAP. In this case the trigger seems to be a personal trait about the main character. I had an insight last week, nothing major, but as soon as it flashed through my thoughts, I knew it was RIGHT, and it made me want to start writing. I think a lot of writing is like that. You ask questions, consider all sorts of answers, and wait for one to strike you as RIGHT ... as TRUE ... as MOTIVATIONAL. The answers are different for each writer, and in each instance, but once you stagger across it, you KNOW. I don’t know HOW you know. You just KNOW. And that’s when you begin to write, or at least begin to seriously prepare to write -- because something about a story (maybe a key scene, maybe a trivial detial) compels you to.

I don’t know how much sense all that makes to you guys -- or even how much sense it makes to me! Writing is both very simple and very complicated. When I try to go beyond the most basic advice, I always feel as if I’m skating on hair-thin ice. Anyway, the long and the short of it is, I’ve a germ of an idea for a new series, which may or may not happen, depending on how much mileage I can wring out of the idea over the next few weeks or months. Once I know more, you guys will too. Until then, like myself, you’ll just have to wonder.