http://stephenwest.net/index.phpHot News!enuser@domain.comCopyright 2011 Stephen West2012-02-18T18:36:03+00:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Sun, 19 Feb 2012 19:22:19 +0000user@domain.comnoir urban fantasyAngry RobotBooks2012-02-18T18:36:03+00:00http://stephenwest.net/files/dead-harvest-chris-holm.php#unique-entry-id-11http://stephenwest.net/files/dead-harvest-chris-holm.php#unique-entry-id-11Angry Robot, responsible for Zoo City and Empire State. They ran a Twitter competition a little while ago, and I was lucky enough to be one of the winners! My prize was an advance reading copy (ARC) of the not-yet-published debut novel by Chris F Holm, entitled Dead Harvest. The ARC came together with a cool fridge magnet and bookmark directly from Angry Robot publisher Marc Gascoigne, and it was pretty exciting to get a book that’s not yet available in the shops. I took it with me on my recent trip to Australia to visit my family, and after completing Monsters of Men, the final book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, I picked up the shiny new ARC.

I literally had no idea what to expect: no preconceptions whatsoever. I was quite prepared to give up after a few pages, as I have absolutely no compulsion to finish any book, or to continue reading a book that does not grab me within a few pages.

Fortunately, Dead Harvest grabbed me. And how. It’s an urban fantasy, so think angels and demons, but in a modern, realistic framework. Our hero is Sam Thornton, a collector of souls. Not technically alive, he has the ability to inhabit the body of any living or recently dead human in order to carry out his grisly task. Until the day he tries to collect the soul of Kate, a young multiple murderer, and becomes convinced that she is innocent. He is soon on the run from the forces of both Heaven and Hell, trying to prevent a cosmic calamity. I found myself racing through the book in a few hours, completely caught up in the relentless drive of the narrative.

What I really liked about the book was the pitch-perfect evocation of Sam through the first-person narration. Honest and self-deprecating, he wins your trust early on. But we see things only through his eyes. Is Kate really innocent? Is Sam right to go against the angels themselves? We can’t know these things, we have to wait for events to unfold to find out if our fears are realised. And there is a lot of unfolding. Events come thick and fast, nothing is predictable, and the ride takes your breath away.

In short, I loved it and I can’t wait to read the next one! Dead Harvest is published March 2012, but you can pre-order it from Amazon now:


]]>user@domain.comWritingAeropolis2012-01-05T20:25:43+00:00http://stephenwest.net/files/rewriting-aeropolis-again.php#unique-entry-id-10http://stephenwest.net/files/rewriting-aeropolis-again.php#unique-entry-id-10
Unfortunately it wasn’t an acceptance. But it was the most positive feedback that you can imagine, short of actual acceptance. The editor said some very nice things about my writing (I just love it when people do that!) and is prepared to look at anything I write in the future, including a rewrite of Aeropolis, because…

Well, here we get to the less positive bit. She felt that Aeropolis as it stands is not a true young adult (YA) novel, because of the way I had written the lead character Joseph: he comes across as much younger. (Interestingly one of my beta readers now says she missed the part where I give his age, and simply assumed throughout that he was much younger than a teenager!) This is not in itself problematic, except that this particular publisher only does YA, not middle grade.

So I have the choice of trying to find a middle-grade publisher, or rewriting to take advantage of the incredibly valuable opportunity that an “open door” with an editor represents. Since the manuscript is out there already, being considered (I hope!) by various agents, in some sense I am already trying to find another publisher. So how can it harm me to hedge my bets and start the rewrite? It will be a good experience in any event, responding to editorial feedback, and an exercise in technical skill.

So I thought when I started the process. But now that I am actually into the nuts and bolts of the rewriting process, I’m having a lot of fun doing it as well! There is something pleasing about going back to a scene and looking at it from a new angle, trying something different, exercising the awesome authorial power to go for something radically different.

Of course there will be difficult points, hard choices, struggles to make it work. But I’m really happy just to be writing again!]]>user@domain.comWriting2011-11-23T19:11:37+00:00http://stephenwest.net/files/650f9f235c7ca01e568c4eea683294bf-9.php#unique-entry-id-9http://stephenwest.net/files/650f9f235c7ca01e568c4eea683294bf-9.php#unique-entry-id-9first instalment I covered how I actually generate the text that makes up a book, by bashing it out on my iPhone. But of course there is much more to writing than just putting words into a document. I’m not one of those writers who can just start typing with no idea of how things are going to turn out: I need to outline the plot in a fair amount of detail, using index cards (one card per scene, usually), so that when I am writing, I can just concentrate on the description and the dialogue and so on, without also needing to generate the plot on the fly as well.

Obviously I don’t stick to the index cards slavishly: sometimes things turn out differently from the plan, as I realise that a character would behave in a different way, or if something isn’t working. But it’s what I need to get started. I went through the first couple of drafts of Aeropolis with just index cards and the individual iPhone documents, pasting them all into a big Word document when I wanted to revise, or give them to my beta readers (at that stage, it was only my wife). This was a huge pain, and it was then that I heard about Scrivener, through a writer friend.

Scrivener is writing software that was developed from the ground up (by a writer) to be a fantastic writing tool, and it succeeds in this task admirably. It’s an incredibly comprehensive offering, with tools that are useful for a wide range of writing, from journalism to academic articles, to screenplays, and of course, novels. The brilliant thing about Scrivener from my perspective is that it uses a system of individual documents, one per scene usually, that you can split, merge, drag around to put into a different order, et cetera, and then compile into a single complete document at the press of a button. In one of its views, you can even represent the individual documents as index cards!

So it was fairly straightforward, conceptually, for me to transfer all of my individual iPhone documents into Scrivener, and once this was done I was even able to synchronise Scrivener with the Elements folder in Dropbox, so that any writing or editing which I did on the iPhone was updated to my Scrivener project whenever I did a sync. Fantastic!

I was greatly aided in this endeavour by David Hewson’s Writing a Novel with Scrivener. David is the author of the popular Nic Costa thrillers, set in Rome, but his informative blog posts on his writing techniques have fascinated and informed me in equal measure. And this book is just wonderful, setting out in great detail how he uses Scrivener to produce his awesome output, with plenty of invaluable tips and tricks.

Scrivener makes revisions a lot easier, because you can easily see the flow of plot in the novel. You can even track things like point of view, so that you can compile a single point of view into one document, to check that it makes sense on a standalone basis. Structural problems become easier to see and to solve.

I use both paper and Kindle to revise, and Scrivener can output a very serviceable Kindle file, or a Word document. You can choose at the compile stage how the document should flow together, with page breaks and chapter headings (auto numbered if you desire), and of course you can recompile with different settings within seconds if something isn’t quite right.

I’ve heard it said that whenever two writers get together the conversation almost invariably turns, sooner or later, to a discussion of how great Scrivener is. I can well believe it.



]]>user@domain.comAeropolisWriting2011-10-20T23:50:34+01:00http://stephenwest.net/files/Aeropolis-finished.php#unique-entry-id-8http://stephenwest.net/files/Aeropolis-finished.php#unique-entry-id-8
I went to hear Sir Terry Pratchett talk about his latest novel and writing in general at the Theatre Royal on Tuesday night. It was an inspiring and enjoyable experience, and the love and respect of the audience was palpable. Long may he continue to delight us all.]]>user@domain.comGame of Thrones2011-09-17T08:38:11+01:00http://stephenwest.net/files/game-of-thrones-bonus-chapter.php#unique-entry-id-7http://stephenwest.net/files/game-of-thrones-bonus-chapter.php#unique-entry-id-7Game of Thrones after watching the Sky Atlantic production of George RR Martin’s epic sword and sorcery reinvention. Despite already knowing what was going to happen, I still enjoyed it immensely. In fact, knowing the story in advance allowed me to spot and appreciate some of George’s foreshadowing, and there was a richness of backstory that inevitably a TV show is not going to be able to do justice to.

I enjoyed it so much that I have immediately moved on to reading the next book, A Clash of Kings, even though production of the second series has barely started, and so I am likely to have finished the book long before it makes it onto our screens. So I will have the opposite experience with the second book and series: watching something I have already read!

By the way, if you read the Kindle edition of Game of Thrones, and possibly the paper edition too, George has included a chapter from A Clash of Kings at the end of the book, which I read. It is not the first chapter, though, and when I came to it in the second book, I decided to read it again. Good thing I did, because George has expanded it somewhat. So don’t skip it!

]]>user@domain.comAppleiPad2011-09-15T08:54:50+01:00http://stephenwest.net/files/ipad-tablet-parable.php#unique-entry-id-6http://stephenwest.net/files/ipad-tablet-parable.php#unique-entry-id-6
There was once a poor man, who managed to find a job working as a driver for a wealthy merchant. He spent his days driving the merchant in his fine carriage to his appointments around the town. In the evenings, after leaving the carriage at the merchant's opulent mansion, he walked home to his hovel, where his wife had a meagre meal of barley gruel waiting for him; they had not the money for meat.

One evening, however, the driver came home to his wife in a state of great excitement.

"I know how he does it!" he exclaimed.

His wife looked up from the stove. "What do you mean, Yakov? How who does it?"

"Goldstein," said the driver. "When I drove him to his last appointment today, with Shlomo the tailor, instead of waiting in the carriage like I usually do, I went to the window and watched what he did!"

"You foolish man," said his wife crossly. "If he had seen you, Goldstein would have fired you! And then how would we eat?"

"Pah!" replied the driver. "Now that I know Goldstein's secret, I don't need to work any more. Soon we will be as rich as he is!"

"But how?" asked his wife, frowning. "How does Goldstein make so much money?"

"It's so simple! He has a little book, and I saw him open it, and show it to Shlomo the tailor. In it were little pieces of cloth, of all different types, each bound into the book. Shlomo leafed through all the cloth pieces, and then he pointed at a certain one. Goldstein made a note in his diary, and Shlomo gave him a bag of gold coins!"

His wife looked baffled. "Are you certain that is what you saw?"

"As certain as I am that my name is Yakov!"

She nodded. "Well, I have some scraps of cloth here and there, and we could cut some pieces out of the curtains. I could make you a little book like Goldstein's," she said.

So she sat up half the night making a little book out of all the scrap pieces of cloth that she could find around the hovel, and the next morning, just after dawn, Yakov ran eagerly with it to the house of the tailor Shlomo.

"Who are you?" asked Shlomo blearily.

"I am Goldstein's driver!" said Yakov eagerly.

"Oh. Well, in that case, you had better come in," said Shlomo, thinking that Goldstein had sent him with a message or a parcel.

Once in the parlour, Shlomo turned to Yakov. "So what do you have for me?"

With trembling hands, Yakov handed over the little book. Shlomo looked at it, a trifle perplexed, and then started to leaf through the swatches. He shook his head.

"If Goldstein thinks -- "

Yakov interrupted him. "This is my book. Nothing to do with Goldstein."

Shlomo looked even more perplexed. "Your book? So what do you want from me?"

Yakov clasped his hands together. "A bag of gold, like the one you gave Goldstein yesterday."

Shlomo threw back his head and laughed out loud. "A bag of gold? For these shmattas? You must be joking!"

Yakov shook his head angrily. "No, I am not joking. I want a bag of gold! For showing you this little book, just like Goldstein did!"

When Shlomo saw that Yakov was serious, he sat him down at the dining room table. "My dear fellow. You clearly do not understand. Goldstein's little book is his book of samples. He shows it to me so that I can see the quality of the cloth that he has in his warehouse! All of it is much finer stuff than the scraps in your little book, but even so, I would not pay him a copper for his samples. I gave him a bag of gold so that his warehouseman will deliver five hundred bolts of the finest silk to my shop this morning! No other reason. Do you understand?"

But Yakov did not understand. He became even more angry, shouting, accusing Shlomo of treating him unfairly. Shlomo tried to reason with him, but eventually he lost patience, and had his servants throw Yakov out onto the street, where Yakov continued to rage about how stupid and irrational Shlomo was to anyone who would listen. Few would.

The experience of Yakov the driver is similar to that of the other tablet manufacturers. They see Apple reaping great riches from their little iPad, so they decide to create their own tablet computer. They cobble it together from bits of technology that they have lying around, and they show it, hopefully, to the buying public.

"Look!" they say. "It has all the same things as the iPad! A touch screen, an app store, this Android operating system which is just as good as IOS. It's thin and light. It's just the same! So give us bags of gold!"

But unfortunately they do not truly understand the iPad. They are offering, cargo-cult-like, a set of technical specifications to people who want the finest, most beautifully crafted user experience. They think that they can simply cobble together something that looks like an iPad, and they will instantly reap the rewards of Apple's years and years of painstaking product design and development. They really do not have a clue about the true nature of the transactions between Apple and their customers. And they show no inclination to learn.



]]>user@domain.comWritingAeropolis2011-09-15T08:39:21+01:00http://stephenwest.net/files/rewriting-aeropolis.php#unique-entry-id-5http://stephenwest.net/files/rewriting-aeropolis.php#unique-entry-id-5Aeropolis. I know that all writing is rewriting, that writing is when we make the stuff but rewriting is when we make it good... but still. Every page of the printout is covered with revisions. I often think “How did I not see that?” I’m very glad I followed David Hewson’s advice to print it all out and read it through. As he says, there’s something about seeing it in a different format -- paper instead of on-screen -- that helps you to pick up problems.

My aim is to get finished in time to submit Aeropolis to a contest. I’m not certain that contests are a good idea, but even if I don’t actually submit it, the deadline is serving as a useful spur to get the darn thing finished. Once it’s done, I’ll decide what to do with it!]]>user@domain.comKindle2011-09-07T08:28:30+01:00http://stephenwest.net/files/kindle-screens.php#unique-entry-id-4http://stephenwest.net/files/kindle-screens.php#unique-entry-id-4


These two look quite nice on the Kindle. To download one or both for your own Kindle, just click on an image to get a Kindle-sized one. Then right-click and save!]]>user@domain.comBooks2011-06-15T18:07:34+01:00http://stephenwest.net/files/e5ec3c6823faf962d8f471024d880290-3.php#unique-entry-id-3http://stephenwest.net/files/e5ec3c6823faf962d8f471024d880290-3.php#unique-entry-id-3
Unfortunately I didn’t like many of them. I started three or four, and just gave up after a few pages. Some self-published books are that way for a reason, I found. One book had about three pages of exposition and back-story before anything happened. And all of this detail seemed to have been lifted straight out of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Others just dumped me into an incomprehensible world of weird names and unfathomable things, with no hint that it would be worth making the effort to understand. So it was a great relief to finally start reading Zoo City.

This is the Arthur C Clarke award-winning novel by Lauren Beukes, a South African writer. Now if you think great SF can’t take place in South Africa, you obviously haven’t been paying attention to the District 9s of the world. And like that movie, Zoo City has the gritty authenticity of life in South Africa. I can vouch for this, because I lived in Johannesburg for most of my life. And I felt like I was back there.

The story is told in the first person, hard-boiled noire style, with all of the laconic wit that one could hope for. Beukes has an outstanding way with similes, absolutely nailing the descriptions with acute observations. First-person is hard to pull off, but the heroine’s voice is utterly believable and compelling.

The conceit is clever: in an alternative reality, some people have developed a psychic connection to a particular animal, something like the familiars in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. This endows them with a specific sort of magical power. Zinzi, the heroine, has a Sloth that gives her the ability to find lost things. But in using this gift she becomes entangled in a murder...

This book is available in paperback and Kindle versions. At time of writing it’s cheaper on the Kindle.]]>user@domain.comWriting2011-06-11T09:45:09+01:00http://stephenwest.net/files/03b37d528eed4e18536017588b4a24c7-2.php#unique-entry-id-2http://stephenwest.net/files/03b37d528eed4e18536017588b4a24c7-2.php#unique-entry-id-2
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I was waiting for someone or something to come along and say, “Now you can be a writer.” Or I was waiting for inspiration to strike. Or for the time to do it.

I dabbled with writing at times, writing a short story, or a screenplay. But there was always this sense of uncertainty. It’s almost as if I wanted a guarantee of success before I put in what I imagined to be the enormous effort required to write a book. I was scared by all the stories of rejection after rejection. I was too focused on the external result.

But finally, late last year, I decided that if I was ever going to write something, I just needed to do it. There was never going to be a perfect time, I was never going to have the luxury of the perfect writing space, with lots of free time in which to do it. Now is all I have, but it’s enough.

I decided to write every day, and to use the one, consistent chunk of free time that I had every day, my morning commute on the train. I have to spend more than an hour commuting each way, every day, time which I usually spend reading, but I realised it would be great to use it for writing too.

The only question was how. I thought of using my little netbook, and even experimented with it a bit, but its short battery life and tiny keys were frustrating. Also, typing on a keyboard held in your lap is really uncomfortable. Your wrists are bent too much. And there aren’t any tables on my train.

Balancing the computer on a bag on my knees worked better, but it still wasn’t great. I also didn’t like the attention I felt that someone working on a laptop got from the other commuters.

So I decided to try to write on my iPhone. I’ve had an account with the amazing Dropbox service for some time now. Dropbox lets you back up your files online, and also share them across computers and devices like iPhones, keeping everything synchronised automatically. I knew there were some apps that use Dropbox to save their files - I needed an easy way to get my stuff off the iPhone, and I’m also paranoid about backup.

I tried a few apps before settling on Elements. It uses a special subfolder of your Dropbox account, and you can create subfolders and text files very easily. So I started to write Aeropolis. I already had an outline on index cards, so I simply started with card one, created a new document, and wrote.

I’ve had my iPhone for many years now; in fact my current iPhone 4 is my second one, I had one of the original, first-gen iPhones first. So I’m very used to the soft keyboard. It does take a couple of days to get used to, but once you are used to it, it’s pretty nice. Obviously I cannot type on it nearly as fast as I could with a “proper” keyboard, but holding the iPhone in my hands on the train is a comfortable thing to do, and I’m not copy-typing anyway; I’m thinking up what to write as I do it, so if it takes slightly longer to actually type, it’s not a big problem.

I listen to music on the iPhone as I write, to block out anyone who is talking on the train. Some days I can write to anything but other days I prefer classical or electronic music with no lyrics.

I wrote Aeropolis in a number of small documents, usually starting a new document when I started on a new index card from my outlining. There were a number of reasons for this: I didn’t want to have to scroll down to the bottom of a long document each morning to start writing, and I was also concerned about backup. When you are editing a document, Elements constantly saves the document up to your Dropbox. But while travelling on the train, there are long periods, in tunnels, when there is no connectivity, and I worry about Elements losing some of what I have written, or (nightmare scenario) overwriting the entire document with a blank one when connectivity is restored. So by breaking the writing up into lots of little documents, I would be limiting the damage.

(I’ve never actually lost an entire document. But I did once lose a few paragraphs when I started a new document, and connectivity was lost before I had written anything.)

So that’s how most of Aeropolis was written, or at least the first two drafts. It worked well for me at the writing stage. But it was a pain to copy and paste those individual docs into a single Word document, and revising is also difficult with such a long doc. Fortunately, by this time I had heard of the amazing Scrivener! More on that in the next part. ]]>user@domain.comBooks2011-06-04T12:15:26+01:00http://stephenwest.net/files/coffin-dodgers.php#unique-entry-id-1http://stephenwest.net/files/coffin-dodgers.php#unique-entry-id-1
It’s very well-written, with characters that feel like old friends within a few pages. The plot moves forward at a frenetic pace, keeping you guessing and the pages turning, and it builds to a satisfying climax.

Coffin Dodgers is available at Amazon.


]]>user@domain.comMeta2011-06-01T08:58:32+01:00http://stephenwest.net/files/e4b0a16239a570a7db7082d897ba4521-0.php#unique-entry-id-0http://stephenwest.net/files/e4b0a16239a570a7db7082d897ba4521-0.php#unique-entry-id-0
I am writing my first novel, Aeropolis, about James Samson, a fifteen-year-old airship fanatic who gets the chance to go to Aeropolis, an enormous flying city. But things don’t go entirely according to plan...

I’m currently working on the third draft, and I think this could be the final major draft, the one where it all comes together. I hope!
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