Category: zero moment

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writing zero moment

Jam (and writing, but mostly jam)

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I woke up this morning thinking that I really wanted some homemade apple-and-raspberry pie, a sure indication that pie season has begun. However, a simple idea of pie became a trip to the pick-your-own followed by a big jam-making session. It’s been ages since I made jam, and never from your fancy farm fruits like strawberries and raspberries. Before it’s always been jam from the wild blackberries that grow on a mass of brambles on Sunnymead meadow. But last week a friend from Manchester dropped by with a pot of homemade strawberry jam from his own family’s trip to the PYO. It was so delicious – and nearly all gone by now.

So now I have 5 jars of strawberry jam, 2 pots of raspberry and since I had 500g of jam sugar left over, thought I might thaw the left-over blackberry pulp and jam that too.

That’s a year’s supply of jam, in one evening. More, to be honest. We’re not big jam eaters. Now I have to make scones to go with that jam. Jeez. I’m going to wind up a blimp.

This has to be my most boring blog post ever…apologies. I WAS going to write some thoughts about how important it is to develop a writing method and how listening to a Radio 4 programme this morning about Method acting made me realise that there might well be some parallels with writing. Then I remembered that my agent has firmly instructed me Never To Tell Anyone How I Write. Not for fear of being copied – for goodness sake! But for fear of casting light on some mysterious process, exposing it for it’s quotidian normalcy.

A writer and actor I greatly admire, Victoria Wood, recently said – I think on Desert Island Discs – that she learned how to write jokes. And that she wouldn’t tell her method – for the same reason.

Anyway. I hope readers have as much fun reading Joshua book 3 as I’m having writing it. Yesterday I wrote the first scene of High Drama, which occurs around 55 pages into the book. Very exciting, set in the giant sand dunes of Genipabu, Brazil… (well I found it exciting to write. Only time will tell if it actually makes for an exciting read…years in fact! March 2010…?)

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ice shock readers writing zero moment

Editing ICE SHOCK, getting deeper into Joshua book 3

Editor and I have almost finished working on the manuscript for ICE SHOCK.

We lost a couple of chapters but gained a new opening – a scene I’ve been wanting to write for ages. Benicio visits Josh in Oxford and takes him for an early morning spin in a Muwan, over the dreaming spires of Oxford and out to Josh’s school…yes you’ll finally find out which school Josh attends.

Meanwhile I’m getting deeper into book 3. When I visit kids in schools and libraries, I’m often asked about working titles so I might as well own up that the working title of book 3 is TIGER KIDNAP. I hope it sounds cool, action packed and intrigiung… But it also means something.

Go ahead…Google it…

Today I wrote one of the most difficult scenes I’ve ever written. It wasn’t an action scene – they aren’t particularly easy but that’s about being focused, visualising the action and expressing it in some non-tedious, non-repetitive, ideally thrilling sort of way. No; I was writing a scene where Josh experiences some new and rather teenage emotions. One emotion piles on top of another, sometimes conflicting with each other. Getting that across without wallowing, whilst showing not telling, staying in character as Josh, I find pretty hard.

In terms of what was happening, it was sort of a childish (and for that read very non-adult) version of the brilliant scene of the newlywed’s devastating row at the end of Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach”. In McEwan’s story, two newlyweds have a row which effectively ends their marriage on the night of their wedding. McEwan’s male protagonist has been – although unintentionally – badly hurt by his wife. In revenge, he lashes out in an orgy of of self-stoked, self-justifying anger. Even as he says the words which he knows will end things, he simultaneously enjoys whilst also horrified by his own actions.

I thought McEwan did an amazing job of conveying how lovers can simultaneously enjoy and suffer the process of hurting and tearing down what was between them. Not a nice fact of life but very true.

On a small scale that’s what Josh does in the scene I wrote today, which also takes place on a beach. Josh is unintentionally emotionally wounded by someone…and so he hurts them in return. He’d rather be angry than sad. So he stokes his own anger.

But what I learned from McEwan is that it’s at this point that you lose sympathy for the male character. Self-pitying, self-justifying rage – not too attractive as it turns out!

So I didn’t let Josh enjoy it. Instead, he is shocked to the point of numbness about making this person cry.

 Ah but who…?

That would be telling.

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Joshua Files zero moment

Late night blogging session

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An explosion of tulips in a neighbour’s garden, snapped by Blackberry.

While I was sick in bed, all the leaf buds on trees decided to unfurl, the apple and cherry blossoms bloomed and the tulips popped open like goblets. Walking on my usual route to Summertown for coffee one sunny morning, I suddenly noticed…

It’s good. Spring and summer in southern England are definitely something to get excited about. Winter, on the other hand…gah. I swear if it wasn’t for the kids schools I’d consider spending winters in Australia…

I’m almost 4500 words into Joshua book 3 and I’m already a little overwhelmed by the grip Josh’s psyche has on me. If Josh begins book 2 with a big emotional load, it’s even more intense with book 3. Now that I know the age of some of the readers -including my six-year old daughter – I wonder what they will make of these complex emotions.

Don’t read book 3 until you are at least 10, kids!

Josh has choices and problems that would flumox an adult, but has to deal with them with the experience of a teenage boy. In this one he’s so far above his head that he’s ill-equipped to even debate the issue. Actually that makes it easier. There’s almost no dialectic going on; Josh knows exactly what he wants – from his gut.

Ah but cruel author. Josh can never have what he wants. Or can he…?

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Joshua Files science zero moment

Report from my sick-bed

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I should be in bed in bed but I’ve been there most of the day fighting off dengue fever. Okay it probably isn’t dengue fever but it’s plenty unpleasant enough and I brought it from Brazil. It’s my fifth day so I’m feeling a bit pathetic.

“How come you aren’t better yet, Mummy,” my six-year old asked. And then paused before adding, “Cos Daddy’s better. He got better right away. He’s been doin’ shoppin’ and cookin’ and other good things.”

It’s always got to be a competition, hasn’t it…?

I managed to rouse myself to beginning Joshua Book 3 today. Hurray! Only other writers can appreciate how big an achievement that is. I haven’t written for six months, astonishingly lazy underachiever that I am.

And before you cry ‘false modesty’ – University academic friends of mine are expected to write scholarly tomes whilst holding down a full-time college fellowship and University lectureships. Last year one of these friends, with four kids mind, published a book and also ended up delivering a speech at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. Another – who has two kids – was voted Woman Of the Year.

So – I know what I am. Lightweight and proud of it!

Gosh my head hurts. I only started this post really to alert you a recent issue of New Scientist, which I have been trying to read between bouts of languishing feebly. It could have been written for me! Articles about the possible collapse of civilisation, the real-life possible existence of time-travel and telepathy and a groovy little thing about an upcoming innovation in social networking Websites that neatly solves a plot problem for me.

Anyway. I’ve tried non-pharmaceutical remedies all day – cold compresses, cooling gel patches, Tiger Balm. Nothing. So I’m going to cave and take some proper medicine.

Ah. Sweet oblivion of an anti-histamine mild sedative combined with OTC analgesics.

That’s me out for at least 12 hours.

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brazil zero moment

Thoughts turn to Book 3

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I’m not trying to make anyone feel jealous. I just want a nice image to look at.

I usually try to avoid going on holiday to hot countries whilst it’s miserable and cold at home – inevitably you return home to spend three weeks going around looking at the grey drabness in disbelief and thinking ‘Why do I have to live here, again?’

I can see I’m going to have to make my list of Great Things About Living In Oxford, England.

Or I can pretend I don’t, continue in denial and write another book set somewhere warm.

Warm and inevitably, rather threatening.

I lay awake in bed at some very late hour this morning thinking about book 3 of Joshua, I had forgotten that in my bedside notebook I’d once written an idea to use a certain song as a symbol (a sort of literary synecdoche, if you want to get clever) for a certain character in the book. But in the work of constructing the plot, I forgot.

Screenwriters often use a visual image – or colour as a symbol. Oranges in “The Godfather” symbolise death; fallen leaves in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Great Expectations” – and also “Y Tu Mama Tambien” symbolize encroaching chaos. The main symbol in ‘Joshua Files’ is the natural body of water – it spells mortal danger for Josh. And characters in Josh’s family are sometimes referred to via a song.

So I’d had this idea to use a song like that…and then totally forgotten. But just as my subconscious mind used to kindly wake me at 3am after a long day in the lab with the reminder that I’d actually thrown my experiment in the bin instead of the freezer…this morning it woke me with this great suggestion for book 3.

I was dreaming about this fox in a garden that suddenly started being very friendly, and then saw it’s cub, even cuter…meanwhile music was playing and I recognised the song as ‘Dream A Little Dream Of Me’. And I remembered that I’d had this idea to use it in book 3, but hadn’t been able to decide how.

Well, the dream gave me the idea…from that came a way to develop what will be probably the most important subplot in the last 3 Joshua books.

When it strikes really full-on like that, inspiration can be very fruitful.

I think I have dengue fever, by the way. I have a slight temperature, headache in an unsual part of my head, and a disastrous stomach…