A Fond Farewell

I went to see Battle of Five Armies today. Life will never be the same.

In years past I have watched Jackson’s Tolkien movies at one minute past midnight on the day of their release, so I could watch them the first minute I could. On this final occasion I was in the cinema a whole thirteen hours later - an indication perhaps of the lessening hold this last trilogy has on me.

Nevertheless long before the credits rolled I had tears on my cheeks and plenty more in my eyes. Billy Boyd sang his song and I had to catch myself lest snot lay waste to my dwindling tissues. I was the last one in the cinema, lights up and bleary eyed as the last of the credits rolled. A lone VUE girl in her black shirt and trousers, baseball cap, brushed up popcorn and cartons and pop bottles. In some respects I was afraid to leave. Peter Jackson has shaped and driven so much of this creative mind, I was struggling to say goodbye. I know it is not goodbye of course but to Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth the journey is at an end.

It is now twelve years since Jackson and friends first lit a creative fire inside of me. In that time my writing adventure has been filled with journeys. From writing endless blogs after realising I had no words to paint fiction narratives. The marvel of joining a book club and realising there was a world of fiction outside commercial genres. Learning, learning learning. From World history, religion, psychology. Writing short narratives that evolved to short stories that became writing a book. The five year passion of Chasing Innocence and learning traditional and digital publishing on the way. Joining a writing group and the first meeting with my book clasped tight in hand. Through shared experiences these last three years with the writers of WordWatchers. Always easier in my own company I surprised myself and made a few friends along the way.

Mixing with writers offers endless opportunities for distraction, often following a common cause to better writing. It has helped me discover the type of writer I am. Significantly in these three years I have failed to finish a single book despite working on three.

The lack of completion has come largely with my ambitious goals for these projects - I had to further evolve as a writer to be able to write them. Recently I also realised I'm not finishing books because I'm a method actor of writers, all or nothing. Which doesn't work well with distractions.

As I sat in the cinema with the credits rolling it dawned on me it wasn’t only Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth that had come to pass. If I wanted to write these stories and bring life to the characters my time with WordWatchers had too.

It was a bitter sweet moment, realising a goodbye and in the same moment the excitement of an obvious path. I've a lot of treasured memories these last three years and friendships I hope will continue.

For now I bid you a fond farewell.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ir8rVl2Z4

What are you reading?

Character driven story

AllYouNeedIsKillCover-thumb-300xauto-34952

The likely improbable

Destiny and time

Very often in social chit-chat with other writerly types the question comes around to books. When we’ve exhausted conversation on our own masterpieces I’ll usually ask what book the other writer is currently reading. To which the surprising and frequent answer is that they rarely read books while working on a project. Often these projects have lasted years.

‘Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.’
Stephen King, On Writing, 2000

Oddly the substance of the above quote is routinely refuted. I never debate, we are after all masters of our own destiny. This writer, the John Potter writer, seldom has less than three books on the go. Here is the most recent example of why.

Back in 2009 I had an idea for a book about a man whose wife was murdered and his unsuccessful attempts to track down her murderer. I wrote half of it between other projects through 2012.

Smart but different

The original title was The Man Who Would Right a Wrong (TMWWRAW) and focused around a simple man called Marcus. He was not stupid but a man who struggles with the world and people. When he can’t find his wife’s murderer he begins dreaming of her, and in the dreams she leads him towards her killer. I struggled to get a grip on his internal thoughts and voice though. What was his mindset? His kind of simple would be a long way from Forrest Gump but somewhere on the same dial. Rain Man was also another character I looked at. I couldn’t get traction.

By the middle of 2012 the story was out of control and had grown way beyond anything I actually wanted to write. It had become closer to an international and political thriller mess I couldn’t dig myself out of. The story came to a dead stop. TMWWRAW went on the back burner.

Chasing Innocence was published 2012 and I wrote a novella called Mahrie, published April 2013. June 2013 I properly started the sequel to Chasing Innocence and on we went. Always finding time around writing to read books and watch movies.

Truman

In July 2013 I watched Capote and was bewitched by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s incredibly nuanced performance. I was also very intrigued by Truman Capote as a character himself. As a consequence I read Capote’s highly acclaimed In Cold Blood, a non-fiction account of four brutal murders, which starts with a beautiful and visual description of a mid-Kansas rural landscape, the farms and the communities grown around them. The book traces the impact of the murders on the local and very close community, who all suspect each other of the murders. It also creates a detailed insight into the minds and lives of the men who actually committed the crimes, who were far from local. I have never read anything like it. Not one breath of sensationalism and you would have to go a long way to find that kind of honest insight into the mind and background of a psychotic murderer.

Feel good

In August I read 600 Hours of Edward, a captivating first person account of an Asperger’s sufferer attempting to deal with family, neighbours, life and the colours of his garage door.

Idly browsing my Kindle after finishing Edward I found and read Christopher Hitchens’ essay on George Orwell: Why Orwell Matters. A key theme was Orwell’s belief many of those in western politics who retained power after WWII had been busily working through the war to ensure they retained power in the event of a Fascist victory: Just who are the good guys?

All of which was feeding into my writing of the sequel to Chasing Innocence, called Hunting Demons, the lead male character of which is very much influenced by characters played by Mel Gibson, notably Gibson’s ‘Porter’ in Payback. Listening to the Payback audio commentary by Brian Helgeland, led me to Point Blank written by Richard Stark, the book Payback was based on. Richard Stark was the pen name of Donald Westlake, a very successful American literary author. Several of Westlake’s novels have been made into movies. Most famously Point Blank but also most recently an adaption headlined by Jason Statham. At the front of Westlake’s novels you will often find an endorsement by Elmore Leonard.

Character driven story

The writing of my sequel continued at pace during August while reading some of Elmore Leonard’s books, which I’d never done before. I read The Hunted, Raylan and 310 to Yuma, many other Elmore Leonard books await on my Kindle. His books consist of focused narratives built around a single story with few tangles. They are almost entirely driven by character and a simple premise. No wonder so many have been turned into movies when the structure and beats of his books resemble those of a movie.

The link between books written by Leonard and Westlake, so often turned into moving picture, led me to start breaking films made from books down into fifteen distinct beats found in both book and film.

Time and Destiny

Which led me via a random sequence of events, to deconstruct the beats from Tom Cruise’s recent Oblivion and to listen to the informative audio commentary by Cruise. A quick check on IMDB and I discovered he was currently working on a movie called, The Edge of Tomorrow, which I learned was based on a book titled, All You Need is Kill, by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. I read the book – a sublime Groundhog Day, see also Source Code, narrative charting a single day in the life of a rookie soldier, a day in which he dies in combat and is destined to relive over and over until he can acquire skills enough to survive the day. This was such a different, well structured story, full of real character and invention, I added the audio book to my Audible library and have so far listened to it about five times during various car journeys or zipping about with headphones while hoovering.

The likely improbable

In September a friend recommended I watch Stardust which I found to be a good concept ruined by filmmaking. The original book was written by Neil Gaiman and I doubted the disjointed story of the film came from his writing. On a flight to Cyprus in September, I read Stardust and realised the movie’s flaw was in trying to re-work Gaiman’s adult fairytale for a young audience. I was struck by how Gaiman’s writing made a world of implausibilities seem totally natural. In Cyprus I spent the week reading in the sun or in the shade beside the pool. Towards the end of the week I was escaping the wonderfully relentless heat, sat beneath an open veranda beside the children’s pool and the all inclusive bar. I think there might have been a cold Keo in a frosted glass on my table.

Amid all the splashing children and attentive mothers in the pool, was a man with his young blond haired boy. The man had a very happily wide grin on his face. It never left his face. He looked almost insanely happy as he weaved the boy backwards and forwards through the water. In complete contrast to the other bare limbed children his blond boy was clothed in a child’s version of a wetsuit, socks, armbands and legionnaires hat, complete with neck flap. He looked well protected and idolised. The mother was sat just off to the side, reading an iPad. She was attractive, a few levels more than the almost stupidly grinning man.

It occurred to me the man and his wife seemed familiar and then I realised – they were how I’d always imagined Marcus and his wife in TMWWRAW. Immediately after, out of nowhere, the random musings of my unconscious (non-conscious for the psychology buffs) came together and there it was – a solution to my dead in the water TMWWRAW problem a year after it was mothballed. I now knew the story needed to be focused around a simple, meaningless murder of the wife. A small story, nothing big and grand. The power would come from the characterisation and the loss and the need for closure. It would be a whydunit and the conclusion, as clear as anything in my head, would echo Orwell’s observations relayed by Hitchens – a theme of who are the good guys? I also had Marcus’s perspective nailed right there – a combination of my perceptions of this madly grinning and happy dad in the pool and what I’d learned reading about a man with Aspergers in 600 Hours of Edward. Pulling off the fact the murdered wife leads Marcus to her killers through dreams would be tough, I’d just have to study how Gaiman pulled off the improbable in Stardust, just as I would study Aspergers and read more Orwell.

Destiny and time

I also realised the TMWWRAW title needed to go and swapped it for The Handyman and in contrast to the whiz bang opening of TMWWRAW, this revised opening would have a clear and simple narrative and echo Capote’s open landscape of In Cold Blood, swapped for the rolling skyline of Devon in the summer, the narrative retaining some element of the journalistic in witness statements to build a sense of Marcus’s abilities. The opening would feature an outwardly innocent man (Marcus) and child playing with a kite. A family gunned down, Marcus desperately trying to save them. And we think we know why his family are dead, because of his past, immediately correlated from the deep recesses of my recollection to Andy Mcnab’s Last night Another Soldier…, which I’d read and reviewed three years before. The concept for duplicating Gaiman’s ability to make the improbable sound probable, went a little bit out of control as I daydreamed by the pool. The intriguing construct of All You Need Is Kill re-wired itself with a distant memory of a movie I’d watched at the cinema twenty three years before: Jacob’s Ladder – could this be a story with a twist on time and destiny at the end? Even the structure for a 55k word novella was in place, having spent so much time reading the books of Westlake and Leonard and breaking them down into the core beats of story. This would not be a novel with a wide and messy scope. It would be a novella, echoing those core story beats I had been studying. It was all there. In my mind’s eye Marcus was Tom Cruise, diminutive, silent and intense. Fast and deadly but mentally unable to resolve by himself who murdered his wife.

This all came together in about 90 seconds as I sat beside the pool in Cyprus, watching the happily grinning dad and his wet suited little boy. I might have welled up with the excitement of it all.

I quickly had two very different endings in mind, a crowd pleasing, no dry eye in the house version and a harder to pull off thought provoking ending that floated at the very border of my imagination and defied all attempts to reel it in.

Back home I was faced with a need to keep working on Hunting Demons and finish a 2nd edition edit of Chasing Innocence. I needed to park The Handyman for later and then I had a brainwave. I’d write it in November, NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. I’d do some planning in October in downtime, then put everything else on hold for November with the goal of writing and finishing The Handyman in one go. But how would I plan for such a condensed writing experience?

Early October I broke First Blood the movie down into the key story beats, which you can read here. Writing the trivia section of the post I got to wondering what the original book’s author was up to these days. Quite a lot it turns out. David Morrell is a very interesting and very accessible author who has written at length about the processes involved in writing First Blood and the subsequent movie adaptations of Rambo II and Rambo III. He has also written a book based on his writing career and methods that offers insight on a par with Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’. Right in the middle of David Morrell’s book, amongst all the interesting detail, was one of the greatest pieces of writing advice I ever heard. I immediately put it into practise and started to plan for my NaNoWriMo.

I’ll be updating my progress through NaNoWriMo and when the dust has settled afterwards, I’ll let you know whether that planning advice by David Morrell was successful.

If you’re interested:

I just finished Fahrenheit 451 and the excellent companion study guide by Bradbury’s. I am listening again to David Morrell’s The Successful Novelist on Audible, conversationally and captivatingly read by Patrick Lawlor. I have also been listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s intriguing David and Goliath, also narrated by Gladwell. Next up on Audible is David Morrell’s Creepers.

On my kindle I’m currently reading Ashes to Dust by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and Rambo and Me, The Story behind the Story by David Morrell. Next up is Land of Midnight Days, YA fiction by Katrina Jack and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday.

Potter's February in Writing

Right. It’s now 18:00 on the 5th of March, which means I have just an hour to do this blog and make myself beautiful for WordWatchers tonight. I could of course just go straight to cosmetics but it’s been a glorious month for the WordWatchers collective and I wanted to get this down, else I’ll just go off on some parallel vaguely related discourse tonight and, well, it doesn’t do, really.

Mahrie Kindle Cover

So apart from Charlotte being voted the best historical romance author in the world ever, or something very close, and John Hoggard’s heroics in social media, there is something I wanted to tell you. In fact a few things.

First, Mahrie is almost done. I finished the cover this month which I LOVE and I get editorial feedback from the group tonight. Then it’s two solid weeks to make alterations before it goes to the copy and proof editor. That process should take us to the end of March at which point Mahrie will be released, initially for free for a brief time. So keep your eyes peeled.

In trying to raise awareness for the Potter brand I thought I’d run a final KDP Select promotion for Chasing Innocence. I also wanted to try and up the number of reviews for the book, which I have found are more likely to be given when a book is given away for free. The promotion went extremely well and you can see in this video I created what the results were.

I have for the time being decided to shelf TMWWRWs as I've had to admit, after eight months of hard work, the main character isn't there for me yet. His (dead) wife is, but... It's heartbreaking because so much has been invested but I know when I do come back to Marcus Hangiman I will have written two other books, several novellas and hopefully been stewing his character development in the background all this time. We will see.Which means that Hunting Demons is well on it's way. Hooorah! Sarah Sawacki is back, she's not alone this time but she's got a whole lot of people making life difficult. Where Chasing Innocence was about Sarah protecting and surviving, Hunting Demons is about her evolution, her putting a foot in the ground and saying enough is enough. Facing down her demons. I'm so excited. The book starts in court as we briefly recount how we got to this moment in the series. I'm having SO much fun.It was always my intention to also write about Detective Boer's past and while we touch on this in Mahrie, I have another novella planned for the end of the year which focuses on Boer as the protagonist and excitingly (for me at least) shows as part of a bigger story, his POV in the Mahrie case, as opposed to hers.What else? Well the antagonist in Hunting Demons is particularly scary, So I can get some idea for what is acceptable in the particularly scary antagonist stakes I'm currently reading the first two novels in both Tess Gerritsen and Mo Hayder's Crime series. The first two novels because I'm also interested to see how they transition the key female character between book one and two.I also read the wonderfully literary but brilliant thriller writing of Helen Zahavi this last month. I loved Donna and the Fatman and would highly recommend you check her out. Especially if like me you have an interest in strong but put upon women coming to terms with particularly nasty men. Very much looking forward to Helen's Dirty Weekend.Time's running out. Now to put on my glad rags and get ravaged (editorially) by WordWatchers.Wish me luck, I'm going in. 

Potter's month (or three) in writing 2012

It's been about three months since I did one of these so there's a little bit of catching up to be done. First, I guess, we should start with writing.I had plans a year ago of finishing the first draft of TMWWRWs during 2012 and being well into Hunting Demons as we turned into the new year. The reality is I struggled mightily with TMWWRWs. I've gone on about the struggles through the year but round it up quite nicely in this post about emotional colour.In trying to raise my profile and that of Chasing Innocence I thought I'd publish some of the longer stories I'd written back in 2006. Only three were of a commercial grade and I wanted four, so I needed another one. The result was the devoted and quite enigmatic: Mahrie. You can get a preview for each of the stories including the cover art, in Snapshots are coming.During the last quarter of 2012 WordWatchers decided they'd publish their first anthology, which I'm pleased to say features my short story: 'Eye for an Eye'. Abbie Todd edited the stories and Chris McCormack produced the paperback via CreateSpace with cover design inspiration from John Hoggard. I did the Kindle conversion which I'm very pleased to say dynamically supports both the advanced features of the Kindle Touch and Fire devices, along with the basic features of the older Kindles. Chris additionally produced the iBook version.I love doing Kindle book conversions and am currently producing a number of tutorials you'll seen be able to see on my blog and youTube. Hopefully I'll have some links next month.As for writing this couple of months I've been busy editing Mahrie . The story is set between 1950 and 1980 and required a lot of work researching and then editing the detail from that time. In spare writing moments I've been editing the first part of TMWWRWs to reflect the slightly altered point of view.Because I've spent so much time struggling with TMWWRWs the next Sarah Sawacki book has had chance to ferment and really take shape. The story planning is so full of rich detail with three primary threads, with all the main characters from the end returning. There is a really great concept for the main bad guy: really, really bad guy. It makes my toes curl just thinking about it. I can't wait to start writing it, which is all the more motivation for me to finish TMWWWRWs.I've read some pretty excellent books these last couple of months, starting with Christopher Hitchens' memoir: Hitch22. There is something remarkable about Christopher Hitchens' writing that leaves me feeling somewhat wiser come the last page. Reading Hitch22 and Christopher's attempt to understand his mother's suicide led me to William Styron's incredible look at depression, titled: Darkness Visible.I love a book recommendation, which is how I came to the haunting dystopian 'Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood. It left me with an adjusted perception of the female mindset and for society's almost default stance of devaluing woman.If you're looking for a fun read then you can't go wrong with the very original 'Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window and Disappeared', a compulsive tale not only of what the 100 year old man does after he climbs from the window, but also of the incredible life he has led. Very much reminded me of Forrest Gump in places and quite charming.My top pick for you though as a must read is David Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas', the most innovative and brilliant pyramid of separate but related stories covering almost one thousand years of a single soul.Happy writing, see you next month.

Potter's month in writing - May 2012

I have been giving some consideration to whether planet earth might be spinning a little faster these last few months. It seems 2012 is flying by. It's June, the jubilee is over and summer is upon us, at least in name. Before we know it the Olympics will be history, Netherlands will be Euro 2012 champions, the nights will be drawing in and Santa Claus's smug red face will be staring at us from shop windows. So lets take a deep breath, slow it all down and revel in the month that was May 2012, from a Potter perspective.The month started with the hiring of my very own writing assistant, who I'm pleased to say spends a lot of time sprawled across my lap. Bella the little black kitten has shown an amazing capacity for knowledge and technology despite weighing less than a kilo. She started her own blog here a couple of weeks ago. I understand more posts are being prepared.In April Wordwatchers member Abbie Todd finished the first draft of her second book, so the Wordwatchers collective proof read it during May. This YA novel was wonderfully imaginative with a mesmerising first person narrative of a young girl negotiating adolescence, loss, love, a young mother and a troubled past.Fellow indie author Jo Price's second Kate Linton mystery was published by Aston Bay Press at the end of May, with the Kindle version created by yours truly. Recreating the look and feel of a paperback printed book on a Kindle is something I enjoy immensely and find the process very cathartic. Of course I also got to read Eeeny Meeny Miny Moe before everyone else. It's entertaining and complex, mixing classic whodunnit themes with the modern detective genre. I'd love to hear what you think of the story and my kindle formatting if you do get to read it.As an Indie author I'm always looking to share information and collaborate. It was to this end I signed up to the Alliance of Independent Authors (Alli) back in April. Alli launched its website during May and I wrote for them a post on writing craft, which detailed the critical difference between writing the book you want and writing for yourself. This should appear on the website sometime during June.In trying to add interesting and entertaining content to my blog I wrote about my experiences this year of the much discussed Kindle pricing. This became the most read post ever on my blog in under 24 hours. I additionally plundered the questions from several Guardian interviews of commercial authors. I arranged these into a pseudo interview with me, that I hope was informative and amusing. I got a lot of positive feedback from the interview which I was very pleased about. It was great fun to do.Wordwatchers as a writing group hold two short story competitions a year, with the first one due in July. As I want to spend all of June making headway with my current book, I decided to write the short story in May. I did and I love it. The theme was to base the story on a song title or lyric. As I didn't want to take my mindset outside of my current book I made the short story a possible epilogue for the book, in an event that may or may not appear in it. Once the short story event is done I'll post it here and make it available for download in ebook formats and as a podcast.Back in April I entered Chasing Innocence into three International Independent Publishing competitions. These cover the whole scope of non-fiction and fiction genres. The first - the Indie Excellence Awards, is very heavily subscribed and judges books on overall quality, not just the page to page. Chasing Innocence was entered to three categories of the Excellence Awards and I'm very proud to say it made the final five in both New Fiction and Thriller fiction. I was hugely thrilled that my UK based book did so well in a US based competition. It gives me the confidence it might compete at the Indie Book of the Year awards which announces its finalists July 1. GulpSo we come to the tricksy topic of the next book. The truth is I'm currently working hard planning Hunting Demons: the second in the Sarah Sawacki series, while writing TMWWRWs: the first of a new three part series. If you can figure the title of TMWWRWs you get my forever admiration. I have struggled mightily writing TMWWRWs for a million different reasons, mostly documented on my Creative Crow blog. Largely it's because my head hasn't been in the right place. Marketing Chasing Innocence has been a steep learning curve, exhausting and time consuming. In reality I have been unproductive because I haven't been focusing. TMWWRWs is a action thriller with a sprinkling of paranormal and romance with a dash of gritty erotica. It's an idea that steadily grew as I closed off the first draft of Chasing Innocence (2009). It has been growing ever since, has some incredible themes if I can make it work, but getting  it written has been like getting proper Heinz ketchup onto a plate. However, something wonderful multiplied by three happened this month.

• The first multiplier was realising that the soundtrack for TMWWRWs most certainly is the sound of the book. It has me endlessly daydreaming scenes. It's not however the creative catalyst for writing the book. Any music by Moby is and was my almost constant companion during CI. Hearing the voices of characters in my head is what allows me to progress story. I have been listening to Moby a LOT this last week and I hear the voices.
• The second multiplier was writing the short story I mentioned earlier, which features Marcus Hangiman, the main character of TMWWRWs. It allowed me to see him in this moment at the very end of the book and really centred how I see him now, approaching the half way point of the book.
• The third and final  multiplier came from the fact I haven't read a lot of commercial fiction this year, mostly because I've been checking out my Indie rivals. As I aim to write novels that are at least commercially contemporary, I decided I need to start reading more commercial fiction. Someone at work mentioned Neil Gaiman after I explained the plot of TMWWRWs. Then John Hoggard - possibly the biggest Gaiman fan on this earth - recommended I start with American Gods. I did. Incredible. It, along with audio supplied by Moby has really kick-started all those neurons that had been either dormant or focused on everything other than creative writing. Importantly, what needs to happen in TMWWRWs now sits in my mind as a multi-layered, interconnected latticework of ideas and threads. I produced five thousand words in just the last week. Importantly the characters are busy chattering away in my head, it frenetic. It's fantastic.

Finally. I received some great reviews this month for Chasing Innocence in both the UK and US, including one from indie author James Viser and another from the all seeing eye of Wordwatcher's own Abbie Todd. My absolute favourite though was by Stauroylla Papadopou, who read a book that isn't written in her first language and then took the time to write a review in English as well. What she thought comes across so strongly. That someone should invest the time and effort means so much.That's it for now folks. See you here this time next month. In the meantime I can be found on Twitter @johnpottercc and am always scheming on content for my Creative Crow blog. If you haven't already read my almost award winning book, you can download and read a PDF sample or choose your preferred Amazon outlet here.