A Question of Marketing

It's hilarous really. How many years ago was it when I first attempted to get a book published. Just about two I think. It feels like an eternity.

Now I'm thinking about that again, I am torn on how to think about my first novel. I hate to abandon it, the single greatest thing I have ever finished. I dream sometimes of rewriting the whole thing from start to finish. Maybe one day I will.

It had great ideas in it, I think. Now, I know a lot of fantasy novels have magic as some externalisation, some metaphore for powerful emotion. I think where mine excelled was how the main character had to find singular emotions in himself, how he mixed them. The magic in my book was truly an art, not just something that burst out into the world by some contrivance. It was something the main character had to work hard and something the reader had a very strong understanding of by the end of the novel.

Another idea that the novel had was the idea of this unwilling king. A monarch who found power that he didn't desire through merely chasing his own desire for knowledge.

It was a decent book, really. I can stand by it. Now I'm really unsure of what to do with it, it's on kindle of course but there it's one of five hundred thousand self published books. My cousin recommended trying to find somebody to review it, I suppose I could try. What's the worst that can happen.

But I worry that I am being too sentimental. The single greatest thing I have completed is a failure, that's a hard thing to accept.

It's sold one copy but I would have bought a copy in any case, I'm biased.

I Will Never Give You Ground

The title of this post is from a song I'm listening to as I write this, I wouldn't read too much into it. Or should you? The particular group behind the piece is called Machinae Supremacy and I spent my late teens being inspired by their brand of incredible optimism and positivity. Music doesn't always have to be about sadness, broken hearts and unfathomable longing. Check the lyrics to this song out:

---

So we're finally united here
at the crossroads of our fears
Now the voice of god is everywhere
in our heads and in our ears

Turn the world into an enemy
and believe in me
I will make you see

I will never grant you ground
remember me and why you all bow down
to a metal forge dominion
Silent in a heart of steel

the voice that speaks so any man can feel
You believe in our dominion

Now the terror is the other we
and their unholy deity
It's time to boost the notoriety
of our great society

----

Now that's poetry. God knows what was in the song writers mind when he put it to paper but god damn if it doesn't stir something inside me. Listening to it now I feel like I did the first time I listened to it, every time I listened to it. I feel like I'll overcome every obstacle before me with gusto. Good stuff.

Now, onto my original intention for this post. Writing proceeds at a steady pace and my satisfaction from my progress grows in unison. Work is going good places, I can feel it. My personal goals and the goals of my employer seem like they will the same at least in the short term so I am expecting another Sun Burst of productivity on my part any time soon.

All in all, things proceed nicely. I'm looking at the chestnut, the one I picked up almost six months ago. I can't say that I've really grown much beyond what I was then, I still feel a good deal lost and unsettled but I have productivity and I have prospects. The garden has some seeds at last and there is potential in good quantity.

Parallel Progress

Right, so I like writing my blog posts in the coffee shop now. I prefer writing down here in general really, it's strange. You would think that a nice quiet apartment would be perfect for writing in, no distractions and the fridge only a few paces distance away.

The coffee shop is awful in comparison, surely. People go there to chat endlessly about the stupidest thing, aided by the wonderful power of caffeine and those coffee machines are not the stealthiest devices ever devised. Outside there is the constant buzz of traffic, there's an old man facing me eating loudly. How the hell does this work?

And yet, I tune out everything. The people, the pop music they pump in. Instead of distracting me they feed the simian part of my brain so my higher self can get on with the matter of writing. It's amazing that it works but it does.

But let's not just write about that, as fascinating as I find it right now. Let's write about life. That's what a blog is supposed to be about, it's supposed to track a persons feelings about a particular subject. This particular blog is focused on writing, so here are my current feelings about that.

I've been writing a long time now, when did I start seriously, on my first novel? It was during my internship with Avaya as a software engineer that I first scribbled together the concepts and that I read the book that inspired me to start. So that was a nicely round figure of five years ago. That's longer than I've been professionally software engineering, so why am I making a killing doing that and I haven't made a cent off my writing yet?

Well, of course I had a degree in software and a burning need to succeed. It was something that I had to do, that some people told me that I couldn't. There were people that needed to be proved wrong. In writing I've never had that, funnily enough. People have always liked my writing, of course I've written pieces that people didn't like but my craft has rarely been questioned beyond one or two points that I have worked on.

Of course it is not fair to compare the two, the fact of the matter is that there is a shortage of software engineers and an abundance of people who can write. To some extent everybody is a writer, how many of us are coders? There are no adverts on monster for fantasy writers or people with a vision for the next big novel. There isn't the structure in place.

But still, I write. Just for the hell of it I suppose, just because I love it. I am developing so much, identifying things in my writing that I haven't before. In a way I am seeing it develope parallel to Software skills, both grow the more I do it and so I find myself becoming this dual threat, which is great. Software is this immediate thing, you can tell instantly whether the thing you have made works or not. It is logical in that there is right and wrong but most of all it is fun because it gets so stupidly complicated for the littlest reasons.

So far I am running two years for a single novel, so it is two years until I can finally see if something works or not but out of that emerges patterns and themes. Ideas beyond the writing that can emerge from a rewrite. A process is emerging gradually from my work, far slower than from software but that is to be expected.

What makes a great Software Engineer is both experience and the intelligence to learn from that experience. It is the ability to try something, fail and then know exactly where you went wrong. It is exactly the same, I feel, for writing. Have vision and be willing to fail and you will develope your art. A hacker can make anything work and while there is a hacker in all of us we must aspire to more.

We must aspire to make something great. Something that can inspire others to walk the same road as we have done and see the things that we have seen.

Coffee Blog Notes

Change of tactic. I have a few minutes before running into work now, not enough time to start writing another chapter of my novel but perhaps enough time to throw something together for my blog.

It's funny, I always thought at the back of my mind how effective it would be to write at a coffee shop but there was always something so cliche about it that put me off. I imagined the people who worked there laughing at me and my little samsung netbook. “Haha”, they would say, “that's a funny looking mac.”

So I started just picking up coffee to go a few times on the weekend, feeling it out and seeing what other patrons did. Of course there is often another person in here with a laptop browsing the net or what have you. It was only after a week of scouting it out that I took in my netbook, picked a corner table and sat down for some writing.

I don't know how I ever did it at home now. The time is perfect, early before work, there's the best and freshest coffee available and especially there is a bit of life in here. Like most cliche it's so common because it's easy but that's what writing should be. It should just be a case of wandering in here every morning and cranking out a few pages, let the difficulty arise in the construction of the story, not in attempting to force myself to write.

I feel this is a little breakthrough, another step towards being where I want to be. It also means I turn up at work perked up and caffeinated so it seems everybody wins. It also seems reasonably economical, circa three euro for around fifteen hundred words isn't too bad. That means an average novel would come out at two hundred euro. And that's a price I'm willing to pay.

What Tower Is

So somebody somewhere was wondering exactly what my half finished novel titled Tower is about.  Since it makes up half of this blog's title I suppose it's worth explaining.  Synopsis go!

---

Solitary, on the battlements of a tall tower he looks down on the night city.  He picks out the various points of light, the greatest among them is the earth bound sun known as the Great Generator.  MC knows it well because it was of his design.

There were other projects too, a ruby statue that captured the humble grandeur of the Empress and perhaps greatest of all, MC's Colossus.  An impossibly powerful weapon of war which was now hidden somewhere deep underneath the earth by the Government.

Instead of pride at his work, MC realizes his tower and all his works now imprison him.  While he still can MC must return to the city and undo what he has done, hoping to find himself again in the ruins of his past.

He discovers however, that some things can never be undone.

----

And that's it.  I'll finish it one day!