Discuss

From a review (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2051699,00.html)

Philip Ardagh

Skulduggery Pleasant
by Derek Landy
368pp, HarperCollins, £12.99
I know I've quoted this before, but, for children not mad keen on the forest of fantasy tales out there, nothing says it better: "I find it difficult to take much interest in a man whose father was a dragon." Thus spoke Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Morris, apologising for not being gripped by the latter's epic poem Sigurd the Volsung. It can equally be applied to the fantasy epic. But there are many other types of fantasy out there too. The most common of these seem to fall into three main camps: the ironic, knowing, humour-led fantasies (of which Terry Pratchett is the undoubted champion); the Buffy the Vampire Slayer school of fantasy (of the cool, butt-kicking, bring-it-on style); and the likes of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, where the battle of good and evil is very real and played out on a very human stage with believable contemporary characters.

The kind of children's fantasy which has been less successfully achieved, and is consequently much thinner on the ground, lies somewhere in between. This is the fantasy that doesn't take itself too seriously, but neither does the humour make the dangers an irrelevance. [...]

And, in case you were wondering, Morris did have a response to Rossetti's comment about his hero's father being a dragon. "I don't see it's any odder than having a brother who's an idiot!" he said. See? There's humour everywhere. Though, of course, he may have meant it.

My Novel Week End - Part 1

[This needs some links in, which I'll do later]

I suppose this needs a little contextualising. A year last Christmas I decided that I'd been writing nothing but non-fiction for too long and - to borrow a line about Larkin in his later years - I was putting all of my creativity into minutes. Taking photos helped, but there was that bit of me that wanted to be a novelist. I'd written two novels in my late teens, which I probably have the handwritten forms of somewhere, and I'd even sent a chapter off to Gollancz. But since then I'd not got further than a few chapters.

So that Christmas I decided to get back to it, and draw upon some of my experiences, and go for it. Perhaps over ambitiously I wanted it to be four overlapping narratives - I'd just seen Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky - and I set myself a target of 500 words a day, which would take me up to mid-July. Of course I couldn't afford the time, but sometimes you need to do it for yourself. I also had someone who was enthusiastic to read it, and I ploughed through to finish in June.

I knew I wasn't finished with the setting and the characters, and I'd want to go back. National Novel Writing Month comes at the wrong time (I was deep in minutes) and things like Novels in Ninety felt too public. Someone suggested people wrote a novel in a weekend - in homage to Moorcock - but it was the wrong weekend. I rushed to get a second draft of The Four Loons complete by the end of the year, but I knew any sequel would impact back on it.

Write it at Easter, I thought, but I need an idea.

The basics were there within an hour. One of my four focal characters from Loons had spent a numbers of years away - perhaps in prison, perhaps on the run. I'd dropped hints about what he had done before he vanished, but I was unclear of the mechanics. From the hints that were there, it was obvious that there was a story to be told. I didn't want a single viewpoint character, and I didn't want omniscient, so I fixed on two story arcs, one in the first person, one in the third, but focalised on the first person narrator. I wanted the counterpoint between the two voices.

I jotted down twenty four chapters titles and a sentence for each one, and even wrote a first line - "I nearly lost my fingers in a till when I was seven." - then let it percolate for sixty days. I'm mad, but I did the sums. If I have four days to write 100,000 words that's 25,000 a day, and in three four-hour shifts, that's just over 2,000 an hour, 35 words a minute. I can type thirty-five words a minute.

A doddle.

Oh yeah.

No, but the point is to put down a marker that will take the rest of the year to be rewritten, and I can go back to the Loons and head off continuity issues, and even think about sending it off somewhere. But can I make it.

( Good Friday )

( Friday pm )

( Friday Night )

( Saturday )

( Saturday Afternoon )

( Saturday Evening )

Further updates will be here - it may be Monday or evening Tuesday before I summarise the second half.