Start small, think big!

A few different points on today's post...

After talking with a couple of good friends last night I have decided to take my first baby steps towards the horrific soul crushing mincer of rejection!  I have submitted The Binary Man to both an agency and a small independant publisher, one of each, just to start with.
The fact that The Binary Man is such a convoluted mess that I could barely write a synopsis does not fill me with confidence, but it will be an honour to have my first rejection notices.  I will wear them as badges of honour. 

On the paperback front, my new proof will arrive within the next five days or so, and I will hopefully be delighted and skipping around the house with glee.  I may end up cursing it and throwing it on top of the other textbook-esque monstrosity, but lets hope not.  Cream paper, people, cream paper.  Ahhh yeah.

Heal The Sick, Raise The Dead is pottering along, though the end of the first draft is proving a tough cookie, although I had a nice idea this morning which I will hopefully be able to do justice to.  I am still considering writing two or three last chapters and getting opinions on which works best.  People may say that shows bad planning.  They are right.  But I don't care.  HA!

Anyway, have a good weekend!  It looks sunny from here..

Preview

For anyone who doesn't follow my facebook page (search Jacob Prytherch!) here is a link to a preview of the first chapter of Heal The Sick, Raise The Dead, in it's raw, un proof read form!  All opinions welcome.

Heal The Sick, Raise The Dead - Chapter 1 - There were three

The problem with ambiguity

As I hurtle towards the end of my first draft I now find myself with the sticky question of how much to answer and how much to leave unanswered.  Obviously mystery is a key factor in drawing readers in, but if I leave things unanswered when situations arise that should answer them, I'll annoy people.  I am using an unreliable narrator, which I think helps to add to the mystery, as there is only so much he can see, only so much he can understand.  By the middle of the book it is more and more obvious what certain parts of the book refer to and I'm hoping that the reader's knowledge of this will add a sense of power and interest in how differently the protagonist views the world.  But if the reader is too far ahead of him in working out what is truly going on, will they get sick of him?  I am now in the position where I could conceivably answer all, some, or none of the questions in the book in the ending... I may have to do all three and see which works best.  To the people who have been reading my book so far and giving your opinion, I may soon be asking for your feeback on this point.  Gird your loins.

The proof is in the dustbin...

What's this oversized, text book looking jive turkey that seems to be sitting on top of some perfectly respectable books?  It's my proof, and I'm damn glad I took the site's advice before I approved it for shipping, getting one for myself to check. 
It was my own fault really, not double checking the size (is this really the most popular size of book in the US?  Are they all huge print?), going for the cheaper option of white paper as opposed to cream (enabling me to get over a dollar in royalties, as opposed to 53 cents which is what I will take when I do get cream paper).  But my biggest mistake of all?  Not justifying my text!  What a plum duff.
Also, somehow the margin got obliterated when I moved my text over to my master file, so the text lies dangerously close to the edge, looking lame.
But I still love it!  It's one of a kind!  Believe me, there will not be another one made like this.
The new proof with be classic 5x8, cream paper, new page count of 410 pages (instead of the bit too thin 290 in the bigger book), and even the title looks a bit more pleasant!  It will be £8.99 though, as otherwise I lose money on each book.
I also decided to check again to see if I could embed fonts using openoffice.org, and lo and behold I found by exporting it as a PDF first I could do just that!  Consequently my next proof will be very, very tasty.
Just another two and a half weeks to wait for the new proof... oh my lord.

Releasing the grim!

(This is not my mum, but you get the idea)

This morning was a good morning for my new book.  I got about 2,000 words down before the day of fatherhood began and have also managed to rewrite a large chunk that was both reducing the urgency and horror of the book and also undermining the ending.  But it was also a tough morning because of what I have been writing about.

My book is not simply about gore, blood and guts, as books with these things as a selling point by themselves simply don't interest me.  Torture porn movies are in my eyes the soap opera of the horror world - shallow, lazy and detrimental to the genre.  They are more of a "disgust" genre than horror.  Horror should be about fear, with the unknown being the greatest weapon.  Yet I have found it necessary to insert one or two violent scenes, to drive the story forwards and show the very real threat of some very human antagonists and also to provide a moral contrast.  I feel myself becoming disgusted as I write the words, which hopefully shows they are having the right effect, but it's not easy.  The worst part is... my mum will want to read this.  I've already told her, time and time again that it's going to be a lot darker than The Binary Man, but still she want's to read everything I write.  Part of me is considering writing a fake "vanilla" version especially for her, with comedy fisticuffs in place of raw, visceral combat.  I know that would be pointless, as it always is when writing with self imposed restrictions.  I just have to push through, write the best book I can and hope it holds together.

It's only the first draft and there is still scope for change, but I have a feeling there will still be a lot that makes the cut.  I just have to hope that it works.  A candle always looks brighter in total darkness.

I'm still not writing about sex though... not yet.

Calling all reviewers!

I need words!

First of all, a big thanks to everyone who has bought The Binary Man and those who intend to, you are helping a large and balding waif (I still consider myself a bit waify.  Waifer?) into a career as a writer.  You've done me a huge service, but you can do more!  How, I hear you cry?  Well, three little words... review my shizzle.

Thats right, for every review my book gets a little more visible to the world, which in turn leads to more sales.  I don't want any shill reviews either, I want good honest wholehearted critical analysis.  How else am I going to get better?  And I do need to get better... (see, I just started a sentence with "and"!)

Bring out the views, give it to me straight and I will love you for it.

But only if you've read the book.  If you can't even finish it, feel free to come round to my house and slap my bad knee.  I will give you my address on request.
For those of you who bought the book when it had a lovely cat's eye nebula on the front, please bear in mind that I've completely re-edited it since then, cleaning up the grammar like no-one's business.  I even removed the infamous "Lord Mint double paragraph" that was such a glaring error it could be seen from the top of Quarry Bank high street (and you know that s**t is high).

That's all!  Oh and I must give a big shout out to whoever is checking this blog in Russia.  Cheers!

Avoiding the Z word.

The stand-in cover.

Ah, the living dead, walking corpses, rotting sacks of putrescence on shambling feet.  But not zombies, oh no, not in my story.  Why not?  It's obvious that's what they are... they're hardly a new occurrence in our pop culture, having grown hugely in popularity in the last ten years, virtually entering the mainstream.  Every week at HMV a new schlocky zombie film is released.  Every week they sell, dead this, dead that, whatsit of the dead.  By now everyone knows what to do when the dead walk.  Get a weapon.  Get high.  Cardio.  Etc, etc, etc.  It's the same as preparing for war.  It's the same as preparing for a terrorist attack.  A few little details that defuse and deflate all of the gut wrenching horror of seeing someone that you knew or loved return from a horrific, slow and painful death before trying to consume you.  With a label comes a separation, like referring to those in the axis as simply Nazis rather than "humans who perpetrated horrific unspeakable acts that all humans may be capable of", which is a lot more terrifying.  Call them zombies and you get rid of everything they were, slotting them into a genre, with all the burdens and constraints that come with it.  There are so many rules for every form of genre threat - sunlight for vampires, silver for werewolves, gravity for giant worms in tremors (love that film, motherhumpers) - that it's becoming dull, expected, mundane.  That being said, I do have one rule that I don't mind abiding by.
My walking dead are exactly that, walking. 
This is not because I consider running dead to be "wrong", but simply so I can ground the book a little more into the small amount of science I actually know.  The bodies are rotting, liquefying as the break down, leading to weakening muscles, tendons snapping.  These are not ideal conditions for sprinting after prey.  As it happens, I do actually consider running dead to be wrong, but that is by the by.  It just feels too demonic, too mystical, too angry.  I like my dead to be hungry, unceasingly famished, but that is all.  Why?  Who knows.  Maybe they crave the air in our blood.  Maybe they skipped breakfast.  Anyway, I digress.
I will not refer to my threat as zombies, simply because it leads to expectations that defuse the mystery of the unknown, which is the greatest weapon in a horror writer's arsenal.
Ah, with all this bitching you may then wonder why I'm even writing a book about the dead.  Put simply, they terrify me, ever since I first saw a program on tv when I was about five.  It was about a house by a swamp with some slow moving dead creatures walking out of the mire and terrorising the owners (I have no idea if this exists or was just a dream, but I'm sure I saw it!  If anyone has an idea what it might be, please let me know!).  I do not for one second think they will ever exist, but their unceasing pursuit, their inevitability, their single minded hunger is somehow more plausible to me as a threat to humanity than a group of blood sucking emo gimps who dress as toffs and are sexy because they don't die.  Where are the fatty boombatty vampires?  Just saying.
The dead have no need to hide.  They take over, slowly but surely.  They are just like us, slowly spreading out to cover the world.  They are the dark side of humanity.  And they want us for lunch.  It's enough to make your balls shrink.  Just don't call them zombies.