I found Josh’s ‘voice’ in the beginning of ICE SHOCK

You hear a lot about writers finding their ‘voice’ or the voice of their narrator.

It can take a while.

I found Josh’s voice in the first draft of a manuscript I was calling THE FIFTH CODEX. It was to have been the second book of the series.

(Yes indeed. Imagine – in the original drafts I didn’t even let the hero find the codex in book 1 – he only found the city. And book 2 was finally going to address the mystery of the lost codex…and why a famous British Mayan archaeologist apparently suppressed the process of deciphering the Mayan script.)

So I’d written this manuscript: Todd Garcia, Boy Archaeologist.  It was sitting in the offices of a few literary agencies and two publishers. I was waiting to hear (the answer from all would be ‘no thanks’.) And I got to thinking that I wished I’d made young Todd a bit more sensitive. He was a pretty confident, feisty guy. Things didn’t get him down; he took on the world of puzzles with confidence. His world was much safer, much cosier than Josh’s.

So I wrote this blog entry, imagining a troubling dream the boy might have had. (There’s something else to tell about that dream…but that can wait until ICE SHOCK is published.)

And that was it – Josh walked out from those pages, almost fully formed.

When the agent who took me on told me he wanted a complete rewrite with a more vulnerable main character, I knew exactly where to find him…

That chapter has become the first blog entry in ICE SHOCK. When you read it, if you do, remember that in many ways, that’s where Josh was conceived.

The blog entry is called ‘Blue In Green’. I wrote it whilst listening to the Miles Davis track from ‘Kind of Blue’. The YouTube video is some old footage of the Bill Evans Trio playing ‘Blue In Green’.