Dec 14, 2023
I have a natural inclination towards orderliness. I like everything to have its place and to put things away where they belong when I have finished with them. On my computer everything is neatly filed away in the correct folder and the desk where I write is arranged so that it doesn’t get cluttered. It gives me a sense of peace to work in an orderly environment.
For years, I have tried to write in an orderly manner, but I am coming to the conclusion that the process is inherently messy. Ideally, I want a system that I can follow each time, which should generate minimal debris. The way I have set that up is to plan stories using Goodnotes on my iPad, then using the plan I come up with there to write the first draft in Scrivener, to then export as a PDF, so I can do the edits on my iPad again and then type them up and the whole thing should be neat and easily contained.
That’s not how it works, though. Every time I try, I find myself compelled to get out pads of paper to make notes there rather than on my iPad. I jump back and forth between paper, Goodnotes and Obsidian.
It used to frustrate me, but I am coming to the conclusion that doing that isn’t a failure in my process, it is the process. Switching from one medium to another (even between two that are pretty much the same) is where the story comes alive. There is no way to systemize this process and there is no point looking for a single tool I can do everything in.
Planning a story is a messy process, I guess, and I just have to make my peace with the piles of paper that litter my desk. They aren’t a sign of failure, but of a system that has evolved naturally over the years.
Dec 12, 2023
When Jude died, life felt impossible. There are entire months of time that I can barely remember. Somehow, we got the important things done; Oscar went to school, we ate, we slept. We had a lot of help. We watched a lot of television.
The television we watched was mostly old stuff that we’d seen a dozen times before. It was comfort food. One thing I remember watching was Friends. It was a good show to watch because nothing about it was too serious and we had both grown up watching it as kids, so it was familiar. There were a good number of episodes, so we didn’t have to think about what to watch next. Just start it on Netflix and let it keep going until we started falling asleep in the evening.
It was also the first time I realized I had a problem with endings. Not just me, either. Without needing to discuss it, neither Tamzin nor I wanted to watch the last episode of friends and have it end. I have noticed the same thing with books and other television shows.
The books I read tended to be things that went on for a long time. I started re-reading the Discworld books, and even now I haven’t finished the series. It is just there, unfinished.
You don’t need to be a psychologist to realize why endings were such a problem for us; we had just dealt with the ultimate untimely ending and the idea of anything else finishing was hard to handle. Plus, there was no need for us to handle it. No one cared whether we watched the last episode of Friends. It didn’t matter whether I read the last few Discworld books.
There is one place where it does matter, though; my writing. If I can’t end a story, then I don’t really have a story. I quickly found that I did still have the desire to write (which surprised me, in the early days I had assumed I would never write again) but couldn’t bring myself to finish any of the stories I wrote.
It took me a long time to get over that, and along the way I found other ways to get the comfort I desperately needed from books that I was reading and books that I was writing. But it still isn’t easy.
Endings are tough.
Dec 11, 2023
Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems as if there is a fundamental difference in the way we think about books and other mediums. The longer a book series goes on, the smaller the readership. It feels as if we have accepted that each new installment will only appeal to a percentage of the readers who liked the previous book.
On the surface, that makes sense, but we don’t think that way about other things.
No one is suggesting they should stop making Star Wars or Marvel films because they will only appeal to a few existing fans! No one expects viewers of Doctor Who to have watched 60 years’ worth of stories.
In film and, to a lesser extent, television, we view each new entry in the series as a potential entry point for new fans, but I rarely see books talked about in the same way.
There are reasons for this. Films are more self-contained; you can watch the latest super hero film without having seen all the others leading up to it because all the relevant information will be explained. I don’t feel so confident about picking up the latest in a book series.
So then is it because of the way we write books we expect each new edition to sell worse than the one before? To an extent, and if that’s the case, then can we overcome it? I think so.
The only long-running series I can think of that doesn’t have this problem is Discworld. You could jump in at any point in the 41 book series and enjoy the story. That is largely down to the brilliance of Terry Pratchett, but also because the stories themselves are self-contained, like films are.
As I begin the process of re-launching my series with new titles and remastered editions of old books, I’m looking at these lessons closely. I want each book, or sub-series, to be something that anyone could pick up and read. Sure, you will get more out of it if you read them all, but they should be accessible to all. And as I think about that, it seemed interesting that the best lessons for how to do it are contained in films and television, rather than books.
Dec 7, 2023
It started off as an idea for a television show about a super hero called Champion. I came up with that while I was at college, so around the year 2000. It was a pretty good idea, highly influenced by the Tim Burton Batman films and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I produced a lot of notes and plans for it, and then, because I was dreaming big, I came up with an idea for a spin-off that would be set 150 years before.
The spin-off, was called Blood Hound and that went through various incarnations before ending up as a quartet of books that were published in 2018. Which seemed to be the end of it, but the idea didn’t go away.
In the years since then, I have written other books set in the same world, some in the Blood Hound era, some in the modern era. Some were published, others have not been yet. The idea kept growing and I started thinking that I should rewrite the whole thing with all the new information and ideas. I made some notes on that as well, but it didn’t get very far.
Now I once again find myself working on a story set in Otherland, which is the name I’ve given to all the titles set in this universe. This new story is set in the modern world, which is very similar to our world, except there is magic and monsters in it.
I have written a lot of stories but it is rare that a world sticks with me the way this one has done. There are a lot more stories to tell about it, and I’m excited for this new era. There are going to be some changes to the existing stories, nothing major, just a few names and things that need to be updated to bring them inline with one another.
The first new releases are a series I wrote a while ago and never published. Currently called Night Hunter. That’s almost done and should come out in March 2024. There are three books, with more to follow. Then it’s the new series that I’m starting now.
This world is not done with me yet.
Dec 5, 2023
I couldn’t tell you the number of times I have thought about writing this. It’s something important, and it’s difficult. Although it is never far from my mind putting it into words, let alone writing it down, is painful and I have been avoiding it. But I can’t keep avoiding it. Writing this preamble is a form of avoidance. The original title of this post was Honesty, and that was also avoidance. And it’s time to stop avoiding this and start being honest.
Jude Robert Victor Loscombe died on 1st June 2021. My son. He was seven years old. It was the most painful thing I have ever felt and two and a half years later, that pain is still there, barely beneath the surface, ready to come out again with the slightest provocation.
Jude was our first child. He was amazing. The most loving person I have ever met. Losing him was worse than losing a limb.
We don’t know why Jude died. He was at a holiday club when he went to sleep and never woke up again. Something happened in his brain. Tamzin got a phone call from the people running the club who told her he’d been sick and gone to sleep, but he seemed okay. She went to collect him and on the way home, he stopped breathing. She gave him CPR in a lay-by until the ambulance arrived.
I was working from home and my mum had collected Oscar. When I got the phonecall, she drove me to the lay-by and by the time I got there Jude was in the back of an ambulance and a paramedic was using a device to breathe for him. The police had closed down a lane of traffic and took Tamzin to the hospital. I took the car home to get stuff we would need and arranged for Oscar to go to my mum and dad’s house. Then I went to the hospital.
The whole way there, I was telling myself I was overreacting. Jude was going to be fine. I almost convinced myself because who can really accept the fact their child is dying?
At the hospital, there was a lot of waiting before a doctor came to see us and tell us that Jude had had a catastrophic brain incident and that it was unlikely he would live. We cried. We didn’t want to believe it.
They had put Jude in a private room and he was covered with tube and wires and it was awful. The next few days were terrible. We told Oscar that his big brother wasn’t coming home. Our families came and said their goodbyes. The nurses and doctors were amazing. It was the worst experience of my life.
I want to be honest, but I need to do justice to Jude. There is a lot more I could say about those final few days together, but Jude was much more than how he died. So much more.
Jude had additional needs and never learned to talk, but he had other ways of showing us what he wanted. Of showing us, he loved us and was happy.
He loved music and books and writing things with plastic letters. I miss finding the little messages he would leave for us around the house, things he’d seen written somewhere and copied out. He used to come and get us and lead us over to what he’d written so we could read it out for him over and over again.
There is no way to adequately sum up a life in the space of a blog post, but I can no longer avoid writing about it here. My son died, and that has really fucked me up inside. As it should. There’s no way you can go through something like that without being damaged.
It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but there was more shit coming my way. Five months after Jude died suddenly, my dad got diagnosed with terminal cancer and a month later he was gone as well. Shortly after that we moved house and then our cat died and then I lost my job and then some other shit happened that I’m not going into here, but it was unpleasant.
It has been a really bad time and I still don’t know how to talk about it properly, but I feel like I have to. I can’t keep acting like nothing has changed while my world is falling apart.
This post isn’t the end of talking about this stuff. It’s the start. It isn’t enough, but it is a beginning.
