Tuesday 27 September 2011

Making a Villain


So, I had a vision of one key scene in the story , I had a world in which the story could happen, and I had at least the first part of the story plotted. I even had the hero, and some of the subsidiary characters , although I still needed to do a lot of work before I could think about writing much about them. What I didn’t have , though, was a villain.

It’s always seemed to me that in the kind of book which I was going to write, you’re going to have a villain, and he, she or it is every bit as important as your hero. Maybe even more so. So its vital that you’re clear about just how you are going to use him ( I shall use the male pronoun for the villain from now on for the sake of brevity ). Are you going to have a shadowy figure of great power to terrify, who you never see clearly, and whose evil is achieved through is minions – such as Sauron in Lord of the Rings ? You could make a similar claim about Voldemort in Harry Potter, although to be fair he does play a far more active part in the books than Sauron does, and in my view he’s a far more fully conceived character than Sauron. Or do you create a villain who is far more on a level with the hero ?

It was a thing which I had to devote quite a bit of thought towards, I don’t mind telling you. I think I started to make headway when I started thinking about the kind of killers who make the headlines in the papers, especially those who commit multiple murders. Its certainly not a very pleasant thing to think about. Still, when one of these ‘monsters’ is finally discovered, one of the things which is often said by those who know them is that they seemed perfectly normal – the people around them , who had dealings with them in their everyday lives , had no idea that they were killers, and frankly, warped. This was something that I thought might be interesting to explore, and so my villain, I decided was going to be outwardly respectable. Obviously a man of some power as well. It would be interesting to explore the idea of a seemingly weak, pathetic and powerless individual actually turn out to be a monster in human form, but I didn’t want to stretch credibility too far.

I certainly haven’t studied serial killers at all extensively. Still, another thing which came across from the little bit of research that I’ve done is that although we can’t understand what motivates their actions, indeed, its madness to us , they often can understand it. To them, there is a sense , a reason and logic behind their actions. This was something I wanted to explore. My villain does some terrible things, but he can explain why he does everything, and he has a reason for doing it.
One other thing which helped me create Absalom, my villain, was to consider the effect that doing evil has on the psyche. You can call it conscience, or guilt if you like, but whatever the case it led me to one of the most intriguing motifs in the second and third parts of the book. Here’s just an extract to give you a little flavor of it : -

“The threads of the web withdrew from Ermine’s scalp, and before his astonished eyes now began to snake through the air towards Absalom. They curled through his long dark hair, and then, in the middle of the thread, a loop appeared, which stretched out towards Ermine, and floated gently over his head, settling upon his brow like a crown, or a noose. Once again ermine lost the sensation of being in his body, but only for a brief moment this time. When he regained feeling he was no longer inside Absalom’s room. Instead, he was inside Absalom’s head.

He was on a vast and endless ocean. Standing on it, rising and falling gently with each wave, but never breaking the surface. He was instantly reminded of the insects that Harold had told him were called pondskaters, insects with ridiculously long legs that managed to stand on the surface of a pond without breaking the surface tension of the water. Slightly ahead of him he could see Absalom Havelock, running away from him across the surface of the water, and he could hear his voice screaming. Absalom was being pursued by many many figures, dressed in robes, dark and grey with long hoods. The closest one to Absalom , who seemed to be on the point of catching him, was obviously a woman. Her hands like claws continually reached out and grabbed, forever falling a fraction of an inch short.

Ermine began to chase after them as fast as he could, but this was not very fast at all. Running on water was like running on treacle, although Absalom and his pursuers seemed to be having no difficulty. Falling further and further behind the mad chase Ermine took a gulp of air and shouted,
“Stop !”

Absalom ignored him , and so did most of the pursuers, but the closest figure, the backmarker stopped. It turned to face Ermine, its face shrouded within the dark expanse of void within its hood, but it beckoned him, and in a voice no more substantial than sea mist whispered,
“Come.”

Ermine did as the ghostly figure commanded. He walked, carefully and with difficulty up to the waiting figure, straining to see beyond the blackness where its face should have been. Eventually he did so, seeing the face of a man, indistinct , but a man nonetheless, a large man, middle aged and rather sad. The man spoke, his voice made of shadows,
“ What do you want, magician ? What business do you have invading this man’s dreams ? “
Ermine did not know how to make reply. He didn’t know what to say.
“How do you know that I am a magician ? “
The ghostly man did not laugh.
“Only magicians, or the Dead, can enter a magician’s dreams. What is your business in Havelock’s dreams ? “

Ermine decided that the truth, such as it was, would probably be the best thing to say.
“ The iron spider brought me here. I don’t know why. Anyway , “ and here he tried to sound braver and more cocky than he felt, “ what are you doing in Absalom Havelock’s dreams yourself ? “
To Ermine’s eyes it looked a little like the shadow man was laughing, but no sound came from his lips , before he replied ,
“What would a shade be doing in any magician’s head ? ! We’re haunting him, of course ! He killed us. All of us. “
Ermine stated the obvious,
“You’re a ghost ? “ The shade made an exasperated tut and raised its eyebrows .
“Yes, obviously. My name was Ingo Seivebaecke. “

Seivebaecke’s shade so obviously was not human, or not human in the sense of being alive, that ermine found no difficulty in accepting what it had said. This was partly the effect of finding himself within a dream, standing on the ocean without his feet getting the least bit wet watching his master receding into the horizon. And so he listened, as the ghost of Ingo Seivebaecke told him its sorry story of how Absalom had come to be his apprentice , and how the nineteen year old Absalom had raised the Leviathan of the Deeps to sink the Mary Rose, killing him and many of the sailors on board.

“A magician who uses his magic to kill must expect to have his dreams plagued by his victims, “ concluded Seivebaecke. “I bet that your master has never taught you that truth. “
“He hasn’t taught me anything very much at all. Did he kill all of these people ? How ? “
“They are most of them poor sailors from the ship. And as for the others . . . “ The shade stopped talking abruptly.
“Go on. “ urged Ermine.
“I cannot. “ replied the shade. “He is waking. “
With these words still in his ears, Ermine lost all sensation, then found himself back in Absalom’s room. “


Of course, these things, while important, weren’t enough by themselves to create a character. There were still many secondary questions I needed to work out the answers to – his back story , and what exactly made him the monster that he is – his exact connection to Ermine in the first place – the way that their relationship has to develop – and so on. But as much as questions about Ermine and Harold drove the development of the plot of the first part of the story, questions about Absalom were just as important in helping me develop the plot of both the second and last parts of the story.

Mind you , there is one other important element of the story that I haven’t mentioned at all yet.

Monday 26 September 2011

A World Is Not Enough


- Or to put it another way, I’d gone to the trouble of creating the world in which the story would happen, but I didn’t actually have the story.

Actually that’s not quite correct. I did have one small part of the story. My original inspiration had been this vision I’d had of the grumpy, grotty old magician trying to register a boy as his apprentice within the guild of magicians on London Bridge. The world of the story grew out of this vision. As I explained in the last post it grew out of a question – what would an England which gave birth to a guild of magicians based on London Bridge actually have been like ? Well, the time had come to start asking more questions.

I think I’d better stop there for a second. Since there’s something which complicated the whole issue of working out a narrative, something which could be summed up in 2 words.

Harry Potter.

Now, don’t misunderstand me, the Harry Potter books are wonderful classic works of children’s literature, fully deserving all of the acclaim and praise that they have earned, and none of the criticism. But it means that the moment that you put pen to paper – or finger to keyboard – to begin writing a story about boys who do magic , you are inevitably inviting comparisons. In fact, if you’re going to write in the genre , you’re probably better off never having read any of the HP novels in the first place. Not because you might be tempted to ape them, but simply that you might be so worried that people will make comparisons that you consciously go too far the other way, and consciously try to write something, anything that clearly ISN’T trying to be Harry Potter. It’s not easy, but what helped me concentrate on MY story without worrying about this was having created the world for the story to happen in.

So as I said, I had to start asking some more questions. A key one to begin with was this – why were he magician and the boy – as yet both unnamed – having so much difficulty with the bureaucracy within the guildhall on the bridge ?

Some questions can act as catalysts to creation . This one certainly did. It led me to draw the conclusion that the two of them probably had no business applying to the London Guild. With the York Guild being the other pre-eminent magician’s guild in England, it stood to reason that they must have come from somewhere within the jurisdiction of the York Guild, which would probably arouse suspicion in London. Which begged another question – why couldn’t they apply in York ? Well, possibly because the two of them shared a secret which would be too easily found out if they applied in York where the magician was well enough known . I’m sure that you can see that this in turn led to another question – what secret ?

I’m not trying to suggest that the plot emerged swiftly through a barrage of questions leading to other questions in a very short space of time. No, it turned out to be quite a long process, but as I’m sure you know, time used in planning is time well spent if it leads to the plot becoming tight, and holding water.

Here’s another short extract from the story.This is from Chapter Three . Harold is the name of the Magician, while Robin Inkpen is a disgraced scribe, whom he has hired to forge the genealogical documents he will need if he is to pass the boy , Ermine , off as a member of his family, so that he can be made an apprentice through the London Guild.

Nothing explained how the boy knew about London, though. Harold hadn’t mentioned it to Robin, so it would have been natural for him to assume that he’d present Ermine to his own guild at York. Of course, this would be impossible. York simply would not do. The whole success of the application would rest upon the guild accepting the genealogy they presented as being genuine. Harold felt sure that the parchment, the ink, and Robin Inkpen’s craftsmanship would stand up to any magical scrutiny . However he did have some misgivings about the scholarship of the bloodline which he’d chosen.

Too many guild brethren took a particular interest in the magical families of the three thrithings of Yorkshire . If there was the slightest flaw in his scholarship then they would surely spot it. So York was ruled out, and Durham, Chester and Winchester followed in quick succession. Too many questions would be asked by these guilds, why a man of York would insult his own guild by coming to them.

Which left just London. As soon as Harold had thought about it seriously he could see that this was the only realistic choice that he had. London had guild brothers in practice all over London, and even beyond its boundaries. In its drive to show itself as the foremost of the five magicians guilds, it tended to welcome members of other guilds, and treat them as their own brethren. It looked unlikely that members of its guild court would worry themselves too much about minute historical details of the minor magical families of Derbyshire.

All of this had been going through Harold’s mind before he even found Robin Inkpen, but he had mentioned it to nobody. A shiver ran the length of his back as he reflected once more on his would-be apprentice’s strange abilities.

It wasn’t just Ermine’s abilities which were on Harold’s mind in the few days that followed. As they collaborated on the genealogy, Harold became more and more impressed with Robin’s skill and dedication to his craft. Even after such a long, enforced break from his trade he was an extremely skilful and knowledgeable scrivener.

Harold had decided to present Ermine as a member of the Havelock family. Like the Halfdans, the Havelocks were a minor family of village magicians. Harold’s maternal grandmother was a Havelock herself, and this gave him a ready excuse for taking the boy in , and wanting to make him his apprentice. It also meant that, by and large, Harold could steal details from his own genealogy to use for Ermine’s. For Ermine’s father, Harold decided upon Samuel Havelock. Samuel was Harold’s distant cousin – they shared a great great grandfather. The other things that Samuel had in his favour were the fact that Samuel had once had a son. His wife had died giving birth to the child, the same year that Ermine was born. The baby had actually died a few days later, and Samuel then disappeared for years, eventually returning to Matlock, where he died in miserable poverty. But these were not commonly known facts, and Harold believed and hoped that in London at least it should be easy to pass Ermine off as the boy Daniel. Always providing that the genealogy passed the tests. “


This took me only so far. The story of what happened leading up to the apprenticeship hearing in London is only really the first third of the book. So I needed more questions. Not only that, but I needed to start thinking seriously about characters. I had my hero, although I hadn’t sketched out much more than his name by this point in time. What I didn’t have, not yet anyway, was a villain.

Ermine Stone and the Iron Spider

Is available on kindle – just follow the link under My Books and Web pages on the right.

Novel Idea

Non fiction and poetry are good and noble genres. However the fact is that, like I would imagine a majority of first time and unpublished authors, it was fiction I really wanted to write, and in particular, novels.

Twenty five years ago and fresh out of university I did try. I wrote one children's novel as a student teacher, and one in my first year as a teacher. With the blithe innocence of youth I bought my copy of Writers' and Artists' yearbook, and sent them off to a couple of publishers. The inevitable rejection letters followed, and that was that.

Actually the first one really was no great shakes - even I can admit that. I think you really need to actually write a novel in order to learn HOW to write a novel, and this can have the effect on that first attempt that you make. The second I have a lingering fondness for, although the typescript disappeared or was thrown out years ago. I did use it with a class in school once twenty years ago, and it seemed to go down quite well. Still , there we are.

Lets fast forward to 6 or 7 years ago. That was when I had the idea for the novel which eventually became my first to be published in ebook format, called "Ermine Stone and the Iron Spider". I wasn't looking to write a novel , and I wasn't looking for an idea. It just happened, and this is how it happened.

I read a wonderful book all about London Bridge, by Patricia Pearce. I loved this book so much that when I came to choose my subjects for Mastermind in 2007 I knew that I wanted to do London Bridge as my specialist subject for the final. Not long after I finished the book I had a very brief scenario , almost a vision really, come into my head, of a disgruntled magician having to undergo all the bureaucratic inconvenience of registering an apprentice with a union, or an association of magicians - who would have their headquarters on old London Bridge.
- Interesting - I thought to myself, and filed it away in my memory , and didn't think about it again.

The idea wouldn't completely die, though. Every now and then I'd keep coming back to it, and I began to do what led to me actually writing the story. I asked myself a question.
What kind of England would it have been in order for there to be a Society or Guild of Magicians openly practising on London Bridge ?
Well, if I didn't answer it, nobody else was going to. So without actually having a story, I began putting some ideas down on paper about how the guild would have worked. I thought I was writing this just for my own amusement, but without realising it I was actually starting to create the world in which the story could happen.

I enjoyed writing these background pieces very much, and when I started to plan the narrative it occured to me that I could use these in a very particular way. When I was 16 I read Frank Herbert's "Dune ". It knocked me out, I thought it was the finest science fiction novel I had ever read, and I still think its a remarkable piece of work. One stylistic feature of the book is the way that Herbert introduces each chapter with quotations from the literature of the universe he creates - some of which are very long indeed. This gives the book remarkable depth and texture. Now , I don't claim for one minute that my work is of anything like the same kind of scope as "Dune", but as a stylistic device I thought that using my background pieces in this way could be very effective.

Here's an extract from that first background piece that I wrote, all about the magicians' guilds and how they worked. In the novel it comes before the start of the narrative of Chapter five : -

"Chapter Five – Leaving for London

Five English cities currently host a Guild of Magicians. These are London, York, Winchester, Durham and Chester. Both Canterbury and Carlisle also claim to have such guilds, but neither have had any members for over two centuries, and are therefore assumed to be defunct. The magician’s guild of Carlisle was unable to compete for members with York and Durham. To be a magician in Canterbury was to make oneself a social outcast, and to risk starvation in such a church city.

According to Sir James Tolley’s “The Ancient Canon Law, Common Law and Customs of England“
“ Only a member of a magicians guild may practice any form of magic within this land. If any person shall be found to have performed magic of any sort within the boundaries of England, or any land or lands which fall under its protection and jurisdiction, then that person shall be deemed a witch, and shall be prosecuted with all due haste. The penalty for witchcraft is death.”

In theory each guild polices the use of unlicensed magic. Each guild exercises authority over a considerable region of England. The guild of Winchester exercises authority over the west and south west of England, inclusive of the Duchy of Cornwall. The guild of Chester exercise authority over the whole of Wales, and that part of England commonly called the Middle Lands as far east as Warwickshire. The guild of Durham claims authority over the counties of Durham, Northumbria, Westmoreland and Cumberland.

So much is straightforward. However the two remaining guilds, of London and York, not only claim authority over part of their neighbours’ territories, but also pre-eminence over each other. It is true to say that York exercise authority over a greater area than London. Even without disputed areas in Westmoreland and Northumbria the York guild has effective authority for all of the Middle Lands east of Warwickshire, the three thrithings of Yorkshire, and the whole of Lincolnshire.
However London claims pre-eminence through being the oldest of the Magicians Guilds. Its own area of authority is by no means negligible either. Since the demise of the guild of Canterbury , London’s authority effectively extends throughout Kent and Sussex, the ancient kingdom of east Anglia, the University shires of Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire, and all of the counties of South East England.

Needless to say, there is little love lost between the guilds of York and London.

Members of each guild take a justifiable pride in their own guild’s individuality. Chestermen, with the whole of Wales under their jurisdiction, boast of their skill in traditional Celtic magic, as do the men of Durham, who have strong Scottish and Pictish influence. The Winchestermen also point to the great magical traditions of Cornwall. Men of York boast of their strong Scandinavian traditions, but this is also just as true of the men of Durham. The men of London traditionally have a far more catholic approach to magic, although in the past they have drawn on magic from Gaul, and even Iberia.

Although each of the five guilds does possess its own unique character it is far easier to catalogue their similarities than their differences. As a rule the magicians guilds have strongest links with those guilds concerned with construction, for example the carpenters, joiners, masons and shipwrights. The magicians also have excellent links with the various metalsmiths and the cutlers. The guild of poets and the musicians have an understandable affinity with each of the five guilds, especially those of Chester and Durham. Of course, the magicians’ closest link is with the guild of Genealogists, and also the Most Worshipful Company of Scriveners, whose services are so vital to their own functioning.

Conversely there a traditional antipathy between the Guild of Magicians and the company of Apothecaries, and the Alchemists’ Guild. This is understandable, considering that the magicians’ skills can encroach upon their businesses. In bygone years this was a cause of much strife between the guilds, which was only resolved by the far sighted fifth master of the London Guild of Magicians, Gilbert Wace. Wace introduced what we would now call a code of conduct for magicians, clearly setting out what a magician might reasonably do in the course of his trade, and what he should not do in case it encroached upon the province of brother guilds. The Deed of Wace was not only adopted by the London guild, but also by each of the other magicians’ guilds in England, seeing how the prestige and status of the London magicians were enhanced through this selfless act. Eventually this led to the election of Gilbert Wace as Lord Mayor of London during the final year of his tenure as master of the Guild of Magicians. To date he is the only master of the Guild of Magicians ever to rise to this exalted position. He is also the only member of the guild to be buried in St. Paul’s cathedral.

This is not to say that there is now never any hostility between magicians, apothecaries and alchemists, but it rarely erupts into open warfare.

Wace also instituted the court system, to bring the guild in line with the other worshipful companies of the City. He decreed that the guild would be presided over by a master, elected for a period of three years. At the same time three officials with wide ranging powers and authority would also be elected, called the Upper, Middle and Lower Wardens. After the three year tenure of the Master is complete, then only the Wardens may stand for election as master. If only one candidate stands then there is no need for an election, but in practice this rarely tends to happen. Once a magician reaches the rank of warden he knows that the next election is his only realistic chance of becoming the master.

In the next rank below the wardens are the court assistants. The guild may elect as few as three or as many as ten assistants, depending on the number of eligible candidates. Once the three year tenure is over the court assistants may stand for election to position of warden. These elections tend to be hot blooded affairs, where ill feeling can lead to illegal use of magic, which results in expulsion from the guild. Once a magician has completed a tenure as court assistant, unless elected as a warden he may not stand again for election for the next six years. Once a magician has been master, he may never stand for election again.

Once again, where Wace and London led, the other guilds followed, despite what they may claim. The other four guilds have almost identical hierarchical structures to London, and only the titles that they use are different.

Each of the five guilds has established suitably impressive premises in which to operate. York led the way, establishing a fine hall in the Coppergate, the Viking quarter of the city. The men of Durham built an impressive stone hall, almost adjoining the castle, much to the annoyance of the cathedral authorities. A similar building was built by the men of Winchester. The Chestermen built a good and serviceable edifice around the Wolf’s gate in the city’s sturdy walls. The last to establish a new and permanent home was the London guild. However it is fair to say that the London guild’s Guildhall is the most impressive of all. Walter Newdigate, the seventh master of the London guild, persuaded the guild that their hall should be built in no other place than on London Bridge itself, between the drawbridge gate, and the Chapel of St. Thomas a Becket, the patron saint of the City of London.

One last noteworthy similarity between the five guilds is their strict conditions for acceptance and entry to the guild. The most important of these are the conditions of acceptance for an apprentice. This needs careful explanation. Becoming apprentice does not mean acceptance into the guild itself. However with a little diligence and application an apprentice will, in time, progress to guild membership on his qualification as a novice. Most novices attain the level of competence necessary to reach the rank of journeyman within a few years, and more skilled magicians achieve the rank of master magician. This is not to be confused with the rank of Master of the guild of magicians, of which there is only ever one.

A boy must be apprenticed within his twelfth year. He may only be apprenticed if he is sponsored by a member of one of the five guilds. Crucially he will not be accepted unless he can demonstrably prove that he comes from a family of at least three generations of magicians, which must take the form of a genealogy produced by a member of the scriveners’ guild, working to the instructions of a member of the worshipful company of genealogists. Finally the boy will be accepted, provided that he passes a test of magical competence.”

From “The English Cities and their Ancient and Honourable Guilds “ by William Tirrell" "


I also tried to weave London Bridge into parts of the story where possible, and this extract hopefully demonstrates this - it comes in the middle of Chapter Six-

"Robin Inkpen’s work was not an obvious forgery. What Justin Quilp saw was an aged document, as it should be , which showed the work of several scriveners, probably of different generations of the same family, which again was as it should have been. However , he could see that this was the work of northcountrymen, and although Justin Quilp had seen applications from men from all over the country at one time or another, it was sufficiently rare for him to feel a little more cautious than normal. So he decided to show the document to Old Tom.

Old Tom was so called because he was the oldest inhabitant of the Guildhall. This was because he was a stone statue which had been sculpted to adorn the exterior of the hall when it was first built in 1399 under the direction of Walter Newdigate. This made Old Tom 174 years old. He was actually a statue of St. Thomas a Becket, the only statue ever to adorn the exterior of the hall, and he had been carved upon the north side as a nod of respect towards the chapel.

In the year 1436, during the annual holiday for the anniversary of the birth of Gilbert Wace, the only member of the Magicians’ guild ever to become Lord Mayor of London, two of the guild magicians had rather too much to drink. To be honest they were both blind, roaring drunk. This is not a wise state to get yourself into when you are standing on a bridge. More than one magician had lost his life in the waters of the Thames as it swirled through the narrow arches. These two managed to keep well in the centre of the bridge street, but they had an idea which would never have occurred to them if they had been sober. They wove a spell of enchantment on the statue of St. Thomas , so that its head came to life. This would have been bad enough, for the statue was in a very prominent position on the side of the hall, facing the city. But it was worse than that. They enchanted the stone so that it would shout violent obscenities the moment that it saw anybody coming out of the chapel, especially if they were wearing the robes of a monk or a priest.

The next day a huge crowd gathered outside to watch the spectacle of the statue of St. Thomas screaming at Abbot Godefroi that he was a fat, ugly warthog. Two magicians shamefacedly confessed to their crime.

Of course the crowd were all for having the magicians leave the statue as it was, but this was never an option. To be fair the two perpetrators tried their best to remove the enchantment. They managed to make it stop swearing and cursing. But try as they might they never managed to send the head of the statue back to sleep again. So the guild court decided that the best thing would be to find a mason who would be prepared to hack the statue off the face of the building, whence it was taken into the Great Hall while decisions would be made as to what could actually be done with it. What happened to the two magicians who enchanted it in the first place, History does not record.

Sometimes it would take the guild court a long time to make a decision. 137 years later, in 1573, a final decision over the fate of the statue had still to be reached. To be honest nobody really saw the urgency of making the decision now. Over the years the men of the guild had become extremely fond of the statue, or Old Tom as he had now become known to one and all. Old Tom himself , although he could not move any part of himself except his head, had no wish to be put back to sleep himself either. Although he had been cured of the swearing sickness he was still quite prone to turning the air blue whenever the subject of standing outside in all weathers, and being used as a public lavatory by seagulls and pigeons was brought into the conversation.

Old Tom would tell anyone passing through the hall that one of the good things about being made of stone is that you never forget anything. Once a memory is held in stone, it is held forever. Of course, a stone mind doesn’t tend to work as fast as a flesh and blood one, so whenever people went to ask Old Tom something they might well be in for a long wait. But his memory was completely reliable, and his opinions and ideas, formed over so many decades of experience of guild business, were usually to be trusted.


So that's how the one basic idea for the book came about - the boy being taken to the guild of magicians on London Bridge - and that's how I started trying to create the world in which the story could happen. How I actually started to construct the narrative I'll explain in the next post.

Ermine Stone and the Iron Spider

is available on kindle through Amazon - just click on the link in My books and web pages on the right

Sunday 25 September 2011

Poetry Please


Well, versifying, at least, if not poetry. The second ebook I published on Kindle is The Verminator and Other Cat Monster Poems.

Unlike “Be A Quiz Winner !” this wasn’t written to be sold. The first poem, “Tabula” – (Tabby Dracula ) came to me almost fully formed while I was invigilating an exam at work. As soon as the exam was over I jotted it down , and that was that. Or so I thought.

In fairness, this wasn’t that uncommon an occurrence. Back in the days when I first became connected to the net, I joined an online community. It was a lot of fun, and one of the things we used to do was to play a game called poetry tag. As a game, it basically does exactly what it says on the tin. A poem is written, and at the end the poet leaves a tag, based on something within the poem. The next one to play has to write a poem which fits with the tag, and leave a new tag etc. etc. I’m not suggesting that this is a recipe for real poetry at all, but it was fun, and it did show me that I enjoy versifying very much.

So, I wrote Tabula quite a few years ago. To be fair to the poem I did use it from time to time with classes in school, where I teach English. In the poem , which you can read at the end of this post, I mentioned two other monster cats, Furry Fred, and Baron Catkinstein. Several of the children at work asked me if I had written poems about these two. Well, it was a challenge.

I left it at the three of them for a while, but over a period of a year or two I would come back every now and then and add another monster cat to the group. Eventually this came to encompass the 14 poems that make the collection.

Why cats ? Why not ? ! As it is cats are the only pets I’ve ever had. I’m owned by two of them at the moment – Hero and Gus. I’ve illustrated each of the poems – if you do decide to buy on Kindle I’m afraid that you won’t be able to see them, since I was unable to transfer them across. However if you buy on CDROM you get the illustrations at no extra cost ! OK – hard sell over – here’s Tabula.

Tabula

A monster lurks down our street
With an evil yellow eye
He's mean and he's green
And he's always seen
When the full moon's in the sky
He's worse than a wolf, or a bat
Or a rat
And he'll give you a bigger fright.
He's Tabula, the vampire cat
And he haunts the lanes all night.

He comes from Catsylvania,
At least, that's what they say.
But nobody knows
Where he always goes
When the night turns into day.
Is it a tomb where a ghost cat groans ?
Does he sleep among the dead
Where his kitty coffin guards his bones
Until the daylight's fled ?

He would give a rabbit nightmares
He can make alsatians shiver
He can rip apart
A hamster's heart
And mash a mouse's liver.
He's known to Baron Catkinstein
Who raises up the dead,
And a fearsome beast
Joins his nightly feast,
The were-cat, Furry Fred.

We keep our pets indoors at night
By bribing them with treats.
So you'll never see a stray cat stroll
In our moonlit, silent streets.
You'll never hear a barking dog,
Nor the hoot of a lonely owl
When Tabula, the vampire cat
Sets off on his nightly prowl.



The link to the Kindle version of the book is in My Books and Websites on the right

Getting Started - Be A Quiz Winner !

I don’t want to get all precious about this, but for many of us I suspect that writing is something that we do anyway, whether there is ever any chance that someone else will read it or not, and not because we think that we may have identified some niche in the market , and be able to make a few bob from it.

Not that I would have a problem with this happening.

“Be A Quiz Winner !” is the first piece of writing that I have sold commercially. I didn’t write it in response to any perceived need, and I didn’t see that there’s any huge market out there crying out for it. No, its simply that I thought that for this first go at trying to make any money at all out of writing that I’d go back to first principles. Write about what you know. And while I will never be classed among the ranks of the really great quizzers, its fair to say that I do know about winning quizzes.

I’ve loved quizzing for over 20 years, and its been a source of a huge amount of enjoyment in my life. As with any essentially competitive activity, over the years you do learn how to get the best out of yourself- if you’re any good, anyway. The challenge was to put all of this down in writing, in a way which would make sense even to the casually interested quizzer, or the complete beginner.

I settled on some section headings to start with. These ended up as : -

My credentials and experience
The Glittering Prizes
Quizzes – what to learn and how to learn it
Pub quizzes , and how to win them
Skullduggery !
League quizzes and how to win them
Television and other broadcast quizzes
A Few Last Thoughts


My first thought was that I’d better start off a little defensively, and justify why anyone should bother to pay any attention to what I say on the subject. I thought that I’d better explain just what you could win in the average pub quiz as well – which to be honest is not a lot. I explained the differences between pub, league and TV quizzes, the legal ways to win, and the less than legal ways that some people use.
At 15000 words its not a very long book at all, but I looked on it as a start. Which led to the next questions – so you’ve written it – all well and good. But how are you going to sell it ?

All I could come up with at first was eBay. However that is not without its own problems. For one thing they don’t let you sell something which you are going to deliver electronically. The best way for me to sell it would have been to deliver it as a document file via an email attachment, but you can’t sell that on eBay. So then I decided to sell copies from my own PC printer. But then printing is expensive, as is the cost of sending it through the post. I compromised by stating that I was selling it as a CD ROM document – and that when people bought it I would send them a free complimentary copy by email as well as the CD ROM. This compromise was the best solution I could come up with, and it worked reasonably well. If nothing else it was nice to get some feedback from people who read it.

I looked into self publishing on Kindle, and when I was fairly certain of all the ins and outs, I went for it. Since then I’ve published another 3 books on Kindle. But Be A Quiz Winner ! was first, and its still my best seller.

Just in case this has whetted your appetite, here’s a little extract , from the book : -

“Quizzes – What To Learn and How To Learn

While it is not actually always the case that the team that knows the most will win a specific quiz, it is true for the majority of the time. So it’s fair to say this : -
• If you want to win more quizzes, then somewhere along the line you are going to have to learn some things.
Its stunningly obvious, yet you’d be surprised how many people won’t ever bother to learn anything they might use in a quiz. We’ll look at the best ways of doing this later on. Still, if you are going to invest your precious time and energy in something as frivolous as learning things for quizzes, then you want to make sure that you’re not wasting that time by learning things that you don’t actually need to know. So what do you actually need to know to win quizzes ? Well, in order to answer that question, we need to think about the purpose behind any pub quiz.

Whatever format your local pub quiz may use, it’s there to provide an evening’s entertainment and amusement for the participants, so that all of them will want to come back and play again next week. I refuse to believe that anybody goes along to play in a quiz because they like being made to feel ignorant or stupid. So any question master who set out to continually ask whole quizzes full of questions which would have this effect on the participants surely wouldn’t last very long.
This means: -

The vast majority of questions you’re likely to get asked in a quiz are meant to be answered - they’re gettable !

You don’t actually have to have a mind like an encyclopedia to hold enough knowledge to ensure that you will always do well in a pub quiz. So what information do you need that will help you to become a successful quizzer ? Let’s think in terms of categories. Yes, if you want to be a regular winner, you can’t really afford to have any categories or subject areas which you can’t stand and so don’t want to know anything about any more. “


If you want to read more, then there’s a link to the Kindle edition in the list of my books and websites on the right. Alternatively you can buy a CDROM from my web store - there's a link to that on the right as well.

Welcome - and a confession

Before we go much further I think I'd better introduce myself.

Hello.

I'm Dave. Once upon a time, when I was a wee lad, an older person, as older persons sometimes do, asked me,
"And what do you want to do when you grow up ? "
I thought for a moment or two. Well, even when you're nine or ten , its a big question, isn't it ? After giving it due consideration I replied,
"I want to win Mastermind."
When this didn't provoke a response other than a raising of the eyebrows I thought I'd better add something,
"Oh, and I want to be a writer as well. "

The best part of 40 years later, and I've achieved the first of those. Yes, I won Mastermind back in 2008. I'm not going to go on about that - well, I'll try not to, anyway. But it is part of the story. You see, the urge to write is something which was there at a very young age, and has never gone away. John Lennon once said
"Life is what happens while you're making other plans."
It happened to me, certainly, and don't think for one minute that I'm complaining about it either. Still the demands of going through university, becoming a teacher, getting married and raising a young family did mean that writing became something which I stole time for, since it is , at best, rather a solitary pleasure.

So, lets fast forward to 2008, a few months after the broadcasting of my Mastermind final. I can't say exactly what it was that made me decide to create a blog. But I had the idea of making a blog devoted to my interest in quizzing, and my experiences in quizzing, and so on. For someone with pretensions as a writer its something of a matter of shame that I'd never before managed to maintain any sort of journal for more than a few weeks. But I created it anyway. Its called Life After Mastermind. I figured that the title might just intrigue a few people enough to make them read a bit. but I certainly wouldn't have been surprised if nobody had ever read it, and I'd given it all up in 6 months.

Well, three years, and hundreds of posts later, Life After Mastermind - LAM for short - is still going strong. I'm not going to bore you with statistics, and we're not talking about millions of visitors , but for what is essentially a specialist interest blog, the visitor numbers are very healthy.

If I never expected anyone to read it, I certainly never expected people to leave comments, or even to email me and tell me how much they enjoyed reading it. Now, if you write yourself, then my next comment will not come as a shock to you. But the fact is this - writing something , and having somone else a) read it without being asked to , and b) take the time and trouble to tell you that they enjoyed it, is one of the biggest thrills you can get.

Emboldened, then, by the positive feedback, I have kept up the blog, but also written other things besides. Hence the reason for this blog. Allow me to explain.

After a year or so, once the regular readership of LAM had reached significant numbers, I kept getting people leaving comments with links to commercial websites. I'd also get people emailing me and asking for a plug on the blog as well. My response has always been that LAM is not a commercial opportunity for anyone - me included.

This blog, on the other hand - I make no such claims about.

This blog is about the books that I have already written, which are commercially available to you, but also about the whole process I have undergone in writing them, and to keep you updated on the latest things which I'm working on.

Obviously I'm hoping that people reading about the books might be tempted to give them a try. But also I hope that you'll feel you want to share your own writing experiences as well.