Announcement: A Break

Hello, reader! Thank you for your interest in my blog. I am taking a break from posting here while I run an interactive story at voteadventure.wordpress.com. If you like the idea of being able to vote to influence a story in progress, then please do hop across and get involved. If not, you may like to buy my debut novel, Glassworld: Out of the Darkness, or take a look at the index to see if there's anything on my website that may yet interest you.

Normal posting will resume in due course!

Parts of the Novel: A Perspective on Editing

I spent much more time editing and revising my first novel, Glassworld: Out of the Darkness (Amazon link), than actually writing it. In the process, I noticed that not all edits or revisions are alike. This is an attempt to categorise the types of edit that I did and explain how they differ.

This information is most likely to be of use or interest to other novelists or writers of longer fiction, but it might be interesting to readers to see inside the process of polishing a novel at least from the perspective of this writer.

My categories fall into a reasonably clear hierarchy, so it makes sense to refer to them as levels and describe them starting from the most significant and working down. I'm going to refer to the work I did to create Glassworld to provide examples of the concepts I'm discussing. I have tried to avoid spoilers, but if you really don't want to know anything about the book in advance of reading it, you had better stop here. In that case, I suggest going to the index to choose something else to read!

1. Message-level Edit: To me, this is the top level because, perhaps ironically, the deepest motivator for me to write is to impart some kind of message. In my first draft of Glassworld, I managed to satisfy the wish to impart messages about authority but, in my eyes, that draft failed to get my environmental message across. Therefore, a fair proportion of the eighteen months I spent on my second draft was about developing and clarifying my environmental message. My message-level edits involved writing a new beginning to clarify that the world was disintegrating at the edge and developing the idea that the Device had caused much of the fabric of the world to crack.

2. Plot-level Edit: The plot is the backbone of the novel and comprises its major events or segments. This is the highest level element that actually describes the action of the book, but its fundamental purpose is to deliver the message, so plot-level content is inferior to message-level content. In some ways the plot operates obliquely to the message because it interfaces more closely with characters and actions. Nevertheless, the plot is relevant to the message because it broadly permits the writer to show how characters are affected by their circumstances, which may be a source of the message.

In my second draft of Glassworld, I created a new strand of plot in which First Citizen Solarquin inserts a recording device into Skantriftic to force them to become unwilling agents for the government. This was only partially a message-level edit because it only enhanced the message that power is corrupt, but it definitely forced me to alter and add to the sequence of events over the following eight chapters, almost a quarter of the book.

3. Story-level Edit: The story is essentially the details of how the plot is developed. It includes the specifics of which characters were in which places at what point in the novel. Plot and story are nearly synonymous in everyday language, so I'll try to detail what I think the difference is. The fact of Skantriftic and Stranshiftic travelling to the First Citizen's palace to demand an explanation for the descendance that destroys their Community Pod in Chapter I is plot. It's plot because it's the second significant event in the novel, evidenced by its taking from Chapter VI to Chapter XVII to be described. It's plot because any summary or synopsis of the novel would include it.

Whereas, their encounter with some officious guards who try to block their progress in Chapter XII is story. This is story because the related characters and events are fully contained within that chapter. It's story because it's just one of several events which demonstrate the arbitrary and cruel use of power in the novel. An example of a story-level edit would be when I took the dance festival in Aixh-Glsu-Mhellen in Chapter X and added the governmental attack which now takes place subsequently.

4. Character-level Edit: In this kind of novel, the characters serve the story rather than vice versa, so I think it makes sense to say a character-level edit is inferior to a story-level edit. In another type of novel, they might be structured differently. My addition of the scene where Skantriftic and Stranshiftic are seized and taken to the palace to meet First Citizen Solarquin, although it introduces Solarquin earlier in the book, is a story-level edit because its primary function is to satisfactorily conclude the second major plot element (the journey to the palace to deliver the petition). Whereas, my efforts to show that Mastatric felt betrayed by what they learned about the government in Chapters XXI and XXII were character-level edits. It was a character-level edit because it helped to explain how Mastatric became less didactic and more compliant towards the end of the novel.

5. Scene-level Edit: As scenes are the relatively non-dynamic locations in which characters appear and actions take place, we can say that the scenes serve the characters and other higher level parts of the novel and so take an inferior position in the hierarchy. In Chapter XXXIII, I decided to change the location where Skantriftic meets Ultrageldian into the reception room of the Society of Affectionate Companions, rather than the Union of Atmospheric Replenishers, which it had been previously. This had no impact on the novel other than to indicate that escorts existed in Glassworld and operated within the law. Therefore, it was a scene-level edit. I did slightly alter Ultrageldian's dialogue to reflect their different position, so there was a minor character-level edit involved here too.

6. Format-level Edit: Format is my word for how the story is presented at the lowest level of detail and it covers grammar, vocabulary, spelling and layout. Although a format-level edit is the lowest level of edit, it is probably the most time-consuming. One format-level edit involved ensuring that I had used -ward/-wards endings correctly through the book, i.e. 'forward-facing' but 'going forwards'. An example of a format-level edit would be my choice to change 'descend' for 'decline' at the beginning of Chapter XXII. I made this change to subtly indicate that the situation is worsening and that immorality is being exposed, so this is a format-level edit.

I hope these descriptions provide an interesting exploration of my perspective on editing and that I have clearly dealt with edge cases where they arose. If you have a different approach to editing, I'd love to hear about it. Please comment below!

Collection Room

This short story was written in August 2020.

In the collection room, lit only by the light from a small window, over a thousand ugly sculptures cast their shadows. Figures are posed leering, scowling, and gesticulating. Individually, their awfulness is fascinating. Collectively, the room is a pandemonium, a carnival, a festival of hate. It belongs to my great aunt Bernadette, who is a witch. She knows she’s a witch, of course, but possesses the merest fragments of an idea of just how powerful she is.

Right now, Bernadette is on her way to collect me from the bus terminal. My parents have sent me to stay with her for a week or so, during the summer, to give them a break from my overbearing exuberance. She sits on the bus, handbag clutched to her chest. She likes to sit on the aisle side and put her shopping on the window seat, creating a small empire of her own, on the public bus.

The bus jerks around a corner and the bus terminal consumes the bus, becoming its external space. She gathers all her bags around her and forms the back legs of a queue centipede. Shortly, as she exits the bus, a young man in the uniform of the bus company pushes past her, speaking on his phone. She grimaces but alights mutely. Breath somewhat taken, she rests her bags on a deep window ledge in a nearby corner.

She feels the familiar weight in her pocket and, turning away from the human traffic, concealing her hands in the corner’s shadows, reaches in. It’s a tiny model of the uniformed man, his face arrogantly red, his oversized arms pushing, shoving. Later in the evening, she’ll put it in her collection room and an appropriately sized plinth or shelf will be there, waiting. She’s been doing this for years and nobody knows about it except her, so far.

She pushes the figurine back into her pocket and, as she turns, I catch sight of her.

“Great Aunt Bernadette,” I bellow, and hurry towards her, oddly lopsided as my legs haven’t quite recovered from the long bus journey.

“Hello, Joanne,” she enunciates perfectly. Her voice sounds soft though hoarse as she hasn’t used it for a while.

Believe it or not, that amounts to affectionate gushing coming from GAB. She’s not really a people person and hasn’t had a lot of kind words to say about anyone in my limb of the family. So, is it just me? I always got the impression that I was an odd but likeable girl, and seem, now, to have become an odd but likeable young woman, so maybe so, but the family is full of quirky, interesting and hospitable characters, and yet I’m the only one my great aunt would answer the phone to, never mind put up in her flat.

We make our way back to her abode, chatting pleasantly, until we get on the bus, which seems to bring the conversation to a determined hush. I notice that she spends a lot of time looking around, nervously, particularly as people get close, and they are not nice looks. She was always nervous about people, tending towards outright anthropophobia, but this is more extreme than I remember. Has the little satellite town of Flaxham gone to the dogs in the last few years? Well, perhaps there is a seething crime world behind the town’s art galleries and hatteries, but, if so, it’s far from apparent.

In due course, we enter her building and make our way up the stairs at an appropriate pace for mature ladies of unaskable ages. Somewhere between the third and fourth floors, a woman runs up the stairs, panting, talking loudly into her phone.

“Hang on, Jacob, honey, I’ll be there in a moment. Just keep squeezing the ball. I’ll be there soon, honey. Hold on!”

The woman’s hot worry blows past us, leaving behind the uncomfortable chill of Bernadette’s discontent.

“That’s really much too loud for the communal stairs,” she concludes.

“Alright, auntie, but it sounds like someone’s in trouble. If anything, we ought to go up and try to help!”

“You, perhaps, ought,” she is carving the words out of the air, her lips are so taut, “but I am sure it is none of my business.”

Preferring heated distress to the iciness of my great aunt’s words, I zip off after the concerned mother and try to lend a hand and, shortly, am dismissed with gratitude by the mother and her etiolated, but alive, son.

Later in Bernadette’s apartment, a punishingly small mound of couscous is served with a handful of steamed vegetables and a coin of lamb. It is a poor offering to my gargantuan appetite. I drink great volumes of water and try to distract myself with twenty year old editions of Reader’s Digest, occasionally glancing longingly down at the bakery on the street. Evening conversation is sliced between period dramas and Countdown and my ten days with Great Aunt Bernadette stretch before me as if over shimmering sand dunes, to a distant, beige horizon.

Later still, at night, the stomach rumbles have coalesced into a dull ache and although I belong in the hallway even less than I belong in the guest room, I decide to get up.

In the hallway, the electric fuzz of the dark gives way to the night-gowned form of Bernadette lingering, uncertain and ghost-like before a doorway I had not registered until that point.

“Are you okay, Auntie?”

She does not reply, and wonder if she is embarrassed, or still angry with me for trying to help her neighbour. Her actions are vague but I detect the linear glow of a key in moonlight, which she is raising to the door and then moving back to her side. She is mumbling an incessant muffled rant. My teenage work experience at the residential home has left its mark on me and I very gradually help her to lift her hand to the lock and insert the key. Once in, she wriggles it around in the lock until it gives with a faint reverberation.

She doesn’t go in. She turns back towards her bedroom, looking through me, and then, with a force that cannot logically have a point of origin in her unsteady physique, she strikes the door open with her right elbow and turns to face the room with unseeing eyes.

From behind her, my vision roams around the numerous, almost familiar characters in the room. It is a legion marching into reality from some other dimension. Glancing around at the array of sneering faces, lizard eyes, I am forced to conclude that whatever place gave rise to such an abhorrent parade must be foul indeed; a veritable hell.

“Auntie!” I gasp, and suddenly her eyes are on me, her expression somehow reminiscent of a mortified pug, and then I see it; a single glittering statue, a young woman with milk-smooth skin and strawberry hair, hands on hips and smiling from her glittering eyes to her pigeon toes. She’s beautiful and I wonder who she is.

Bernadette follows my gaze and gasps. I look closer and at the base is written ‘Joanne Marie Shepley’. It’s me. The single solitary statue amidst this Dantean free-for-all who looks remotely benevolent is of me. And as I watch, my avatar’s hand unfolds from her hip and points a judgemental finger, a frown forming on her earthenware brow.

“No, no, no, Auntie, no! I understand. I’m not against you. I want to help.”

She is conscient, now.

“You can’t help me. Nobody can.” I have never heard a voice so dejected, so lost, in all my twenty-two years on this Earth.

“I don’t believe you,” I tell her, and then notice something in her hand.

“What’s that?” I whisper in panic.

She lifts her hand towards me and opens it, fingers opening, her gaze focused on mine.

There are two more malevolent manikins in her hand; a uniformed arrogant figure and a mother-in-flight yelling into her mobile phone. She has already immortalised the woman who dashed past us a mere twelve hours ago. Not only that, but there are two small clearings on the plinth before us. The room is ready for them. I examine the plinth and find that this is the space for irritating neighbours, including the dark-skinned family next door, who are frightening and primitive to her. Well, her collection is well-curated, I’ll give her that.

I turn to suggest she place the new entries in their allocated place but she is gone. By the muffled bangs and clings, she is in the tool cupboard. I get as far as the door before she returns with a hammer in her hand and a look of grim determination.

“Let me past!” she shouts, and pushes me aside. Surprised by the sudden force, I stumble. She hefts the hammer and crushes a model of six demonic children into a mound of particles and then, again and again, she is smashing one after the other. Dozens upon dozens are rendered into dust before my eyes, to the sound of irregular percussion, and gradually heavier and more jagged breathing. I am relieved when she collapsed into a chair.

It is so sad to see her weep, the way she tries to wipe away the tears with the cuff of her pyjamas and misses, but what happens next is all the worse. The fragments of the statuettes begin to rise from their mounds. They are reforming! But now as the pieces of their faces bunch together, cracked and broken, they look all the more hideous. The pair of us look on in horror and despair. There will be no easy way to deal with this.

“You need to talk to them.”

“What? All of them?”

“Well, not all at once,” I say, gently.

She contemplates it.

“But I can’t. I don’t have long enough. I don’t know where they are!”

“You know where Mrs Henderson is,” I said, trying to stay calm.

“Who’s she?”

“Her,” I said, pointing to the figurine of the woman who rushed past us earlier, now jawless and with unsteady eyes.

“Not now!” she exclaimed.

I shrugged.

“In the morning, then.”

“But I’ll never find them all. I’m old and disgusting and nobody will help me,” she sobbed.

That is when I noticed a twitch behind a curtained off area at the back of the room. In the darkness, the main exhibit had remained unnoticed until now. The contents of this private booth were growing. Bernadette looked too struck with trepidation to move forwards, so I stepped towards it, but somehow she summoned the strength to get there before me.

“I think I know what’s behind here. I think I remember.”

She slid the curtain slowly back, the curtain’s metal rings grinding along their overhead runner.

It was disfigured, withered, and decrepit; its spiked fingernails were like talons, its arms reached out to throttle and yet it bore the expression of one shrinking away. It was like gothic horror’s reincarnation of a Dali woman, without the sensuality. If the discovery of myself in Bernadette’s collection had made my eyes pop out, it was a walk in the park with sandwiches compared to the discovery of Bernadette’s own twisted self-image.

“Yes, that’s exactly right. That’s what I am.”

“That’s not what I see, when I look at you.”

She gazed up at me.

“I’m very fond of you, Bernadette, and I’m so sorry you’ve got so lost.”

And then she fell into my arms and wept, with grating sobs that sounded like the last of the bath water going down the plug hole.

The rest of our holiday was extraordinary, if repetitive. We tracked down everyone we could identify and find, so Bernadette could have a chat with them. She invited them to coffee and asked about their children. When I saw her lose herself in a memory, her eyes angering, I would give her a nudge. Then, at the end of each day, we would unlock the Collection Room to marvel at how the statues were untwisting, ungnarling and, very slowly, starting to shine.

That one hideous statue at the back still looks pretty bad, but its features are softer and it doesn’t look so old. It’s an immense tragedy that my great aunt didn’t put her magic powers to good use earlier in life. Just think what she could have achieved. However, the tale goes to show that there’s always hope for the cynical old witches (and wizards) amongst us.

Extracts from A Botanical Grimoire

i) Barking Moss can be found in the shadow of a dog rose. If you scratch it behind your ear, it is said to diminish dental pain and improve the sense of smell.

ii) The Nightcap has been located at the eleventh hour during a full moon. Drunk from a small glass with water and ice, it has a soporific effect and causes you to think well of friends.

iii) Wishing Veil grows on moist wood in cool darkness. It should be drunk from a basin of fresh water on your birthday. It is said to focus the mind on its deepest desires.

iv) Drowning David is often seen on the banks of still lakes. It can be rubbed on the eyelids to stimulate periods of reflection. However, it can cause weakness in the upper arm and thigh.

v) Droop has been collected at the bottom of steep valleys. Its potent odour can be inhaled through the nose when the head is lowered. It can induce sleep and feelings of low self-worth.

vi) Yellow Eye is found in abundance in woods and tall grass. Its small bright petals can be infused to make a mild, sour tea. It is reported to enhance night vision and provoke surliness.

vii) Bitterweed is usually observed in wetlands or shallow water. It should be eaten immediately after it is plucked. It improves caution, but excess usage may lead to troubling dreams.

viii) Creep can be found clinging to drainpipes and windowsills. It prefers the dark and takes the form of short, stubby fingers. It is often taken against procrastination but can induce psychosis.

ix) Icy Ismaril is said to grow just under a thin layer of snow. It is often recommended in cases of romantic difficulty such as unrequited affection. Strong doses may cause cynicism or emotional distance.

With thanks to the makers of the game Strange Horticulture, which inspired this piece.