Disorder in Order

Following a meeting with my PhD supervisor yesterday, it would seem that my novel, DISORDER, is on the right track. There is more work to be done (isn't there always?), but not quite as much as my worst-case-scenario thoughts might have suggested. It's all good.

So, now follows a period of thinking time before I tackle it again. This will be facilitated by the kind folk who will be sending me their thoughts when they get a chance to look at the early draft. A few have even gotten back to me already. Many thanks, you absolute stars.

And so, mostly because I can't just sit on my arse ALL day and think about one book, I have other things to get done. Most of them involve sitting on my arse and typing. Thankfully, I'm back at the gym following an injury that became an excuse to be lazy long after it was healed, so I'll spend some time on my feet (and my back) as well.

Again, paranoid that if I release too much info on any of this stuff it'll curse it all, I'll be a little vague for this next paragraph or two.

I still need to seek out and woo agents of various stripes. My screen and stage writing badly needs representation. I have two television scripts, a movie script and I'm working on a play, but I have no idea what to do with this stuff. And while I would like to have a literary agent again, I can get by without one for now, so I haven't put much energy into securing a new one yet. So, maybe this would be a good time to look at agencies that could accommodate all three of my writing streams. Certainly, there's been little response to my half-assed "can anybody recommend an agent?" approach that I sometimes indulge in on Twitter or Facebook.

And while I know that the agent thing is important, I try not to allow myself too much time off from writing. That is the number one concern for a writer, surely? It might also be the reason why I've got stuff on my computer that I keep forgetting to send out to be read/considered/rejected. On the bright side, it also means that I'll be able to release a fourth novel through Blasted Heath this year. Not another Cormac Kelly just yet (but that's coming, trust me). I have a new character to put out there first. Detective Shannon McNulty's first adventure will be available in the near future. No actual date yet, but I'm hoping it'll hit virtual bookshelves by the summer.

So, that's an update that ran longer than I intended. It was my intention to simply list the books that were very important in the writing of DISORDER but I got a little chatty. Here's the list anyway:

Fiction
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key, Dashiell Hammett
The Friends of Eddie Coyle, George V. Higgins
The Hunter, Richard Stark
Cotton Comes to Harlem, Chester Himes
The Prone Gunman, Jean-Patrick Manchette
Interface, Joe Gores
The Man With the Gloved Hand, Joe McKimmey
Stumped, Rob Kitchin

Non-fiction
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Patricia Highsmith
Writing Mysteries, ed. Sue Grafton
Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon
The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield

There may be one or two books that I've forgotten about that contributed directly to the writing of DISORDER, but if they come to mind later I'll slip them into the list. I read quite a bit of academic non-fiction as well, but that was for the critical component of my PhD, and so it's not really relevant to this particular post. I'll maybe put a full bibliography on the blog when I've completed the whole thing in another year and a half, but the above will do nicely for now.

Go! Get Your POV On

Have you seen the movie Go (1999)? It's on Netflix (as is Swingers which has a directorial connection with Go), so if you haven't and you have access to it, I highly recommend that you check it out.

You see, I've been asked a few times about my influences. I usually tell people that life is my influence. This sounds a bit wanky and artsy (those aren't always the same thing) but to my mind it's true. Also, it's really hard to choose a writer who influences your writing when there is so much talent out there, especially since I cast my reading net quite widely. So if I didn't say, "Oh, I'm influenced by everyday life, really," my answer would be more like the question, "Have you read this guy, this girl or these people?" The response to that would be a blank stare. I'd ask you, "Have you seen this bunch of movies, then?" and list off a load of flicks that were based on books I've read and enjoyed. More blank stares. Then I'd move on to original screenplays, TV series, cartoons that my kids force me to watch... yadda, yadda, yadda.

Everyday life it is, then.

Except I re-watched Go for the first time in years. Possibly a decade. Apart from the fact that the movie has aged incredibly well, it's also a hell of a lot of fun. And behind that fun is a shitload of technical prowess in terms of writing (I'm a writer blogging about this from the perspective of a writer BTW so I'll not go into the great job the cast and crew did as well), from which a writer in any form could learn a trick or two.

For instance; I watched it over three days as a lunchtime treat to get away from the current manuscript once in a while. The structure of the movie lends itself to this style of viewing beautifully. The same timeline is basically retold three times from three different perspectives with the last ten minutes of the flick devoted to tying the movie up. Shot from Ronna, Simon and Adam & Zack's POVs respectively, it's basically a tale about having a little too much craic and the trouble that can bring.

As I watched, laughed and shook my head at some of the characters' exploits, I got to thinking that this was the style I'd been going for in the Point series of novellas (of which only two have been released so far -- there will be more, count on that) and the hapless characters that inhabit that universe. They're not particularly bad people (the protagonists, I mean, not the scumbags they get mixed up with), but they are pretty loser-ish.

In a few interviews and conversations I've asked about the direct influences on Breaking Point, the most recent Point novella. I answered with reference to the movie Pineapple Express. I would have preferred a prose example, but I couldn't think of one. And if I'm honest, I wasn't altogether comfortable with that comparison anyway. Pineapple Express is far funnier than anything I've written. The darkness is there, as it is in most of my work, but I can't compete with those chuckles a line delivered by Danny McBride or Seth Rogen can get. Go, though... it has a lot of laughs in it, as well as the hectic storyline and somewhat more realistic idea of consequence. Go is the movie that I should really compare most of my writing to. And if I did that more often, I think I'd write better books.*

Trailer:

*Disclaimer: By no means am I damning my work as substandard, by the way. I'll leave that to the critics who, for the most part, have been very kind to me. And I'll keep the artistic anguish, if and when it occurs, to myself.

Oscar Wilde (160 Years Young Today)

I might be having a similar kind of day today:

Future Posts

I'm up to my neck in a manuscript right now, but I plan to take a breather from it next week (I'm at the point where the questions raised need to be answered -- the mysteries need to be revealed) and then I can maybe do a little blogging.

So, before I forget all the topics I want to blog about (and before I make my lunch), I thought I'd turn this blog post into a list of posts-to-be-written. Some will be made available for guest posts. I receive lots of lovely invitations from people who run better blogs than mine, and I really have to follow up on them.

Topics/titles:

Writing and Happiness
Academia
Teaching Creative Writing (should/would/could?)
The Rory Cullen 'Auto'biography
POV in the movie Go (1999)
More on Behaviourist POV
I'm Going to Bouchercon! (Long Beach, 2014)
Wordcounts, Record-Keeping and Taking it Easy on Yourself (may be a two or three-parter)
Belfast Noir
A Review or Two of NI Crime Fiction
Please Don't Send Me Books Without Asking (unless you know me and it's a gift)!
Deus ex Machina

I'll add to this as the topics re-occur to me. Feel free to request one for your blog, and I'll see what I can do. And as always, if you're a Northern Irish writer and you want to be featured on the blog (most likely in the form of a Q&A, though I host guest posts too), then drop me a line. I'll get back to you eventually.

Peace.