And so on to book 9

 It doesn’t have a working title yet. I simply think of it as ‘that air crash book’.

Much of the early work has been done:

Getting the original idea. I asked family for suggestions for further writing. A few suggestions came back. One stood out, and immediately resonated with me. The challenge was to write a compelling tale based on a wartime airplane crash on the moors near to where I was born. I shifted the writing away from that real crash to a similar, but fictitious, one. That was the jumping off point for my thinking, as I sat on buses and trains, leading to disconnected sets of possibilities.

Sketching a beginning. I wrote out a set of potential opening sentences: There was the screech of metal as the plane failed, in thick fog, to clear the rocky outcrop on the top of the moor. Wreckage was spread across the bracken. It was told from the first-person point of view (to give it an immediacy), by a young woman who had been in the body of the plane and thrown out as the doorway twisted open.  ‘I went to check the pilot. He was clearly dead’. And then the introduction of a mystery. ‘I can’t be found here. That’s simply not possible. There’s nothing I can do for the pilot. My leg is broken. I crawl as best I can deep into a thicket of bracken and wait to die ….’

Was that it? If so, it was going to be a very short book. I sketched out what was likely to happen next: A local farmer had seen the plane come down and goes to check on the crash; the police are sent for; things get set in motion to investigate, as with any air crash; there will be a coroner’s report on the dead pilot, and some attempt made to contact any next-of-kin relatives. It still felt like a cul-de-sac – not really going anywhere.

At the time of starting the book it was an unusually dry summer, leading to large moorland fires having to be dealt with. This triggered an idea that the body of the young woman, long dead, could be uncovered by firefighters dealing with these major fires 80 years after the plane crash.

Settling on the approach and the narrator.  It was initially going to be a linear tale told by a young woman who is somehow, mysteriously, involved in the plane crash, As things reshaped themselves in my mind, it turned into an account of a group of people applying to be staff at a new centre for information analysts, told by one of the participants.

The story next pivoted to be centred on a two-day group training exercise for people being recruited as information analysts. As such, it is set out in the form of a Training Pack: Welcome; Day 1 exercises; Summary of ideas from Day 1; Introduction to Day 2; Day 2 Exercises; Summary of outcomes from the two days. The subject material for participants to work on could be in the form of separate documents that related to a World War 2 US Air Force plane crash in fog over moors in the North of England. A mystery emerges as the evidence gets progressively revealed during the training exercise. Day 2 information comes in the form of reports relating to the body of a young woman being discovered close to the crash site, but more than 80 years later, by fire service people dealing with a moorland brush fire. She seems to be both somehow connected with the crash yet can’t be. She appears to have no relatives, and no recorded connection with any part of the Air Force.

The documents could simply be presented as a collection of reports with no additional commentary ie there being no narrator. Ideally the text material would be a box of loose-leaf separate documents that can be spread out, shuffled around etc – but will, in practice, have the sheets gathered in order as the book.

The reader is put in the position of being a participant in the same sensemaking process. It is anticipated that the book will be informed by a number of themes: What counts as evidence? What sense can be made of things when you only have part of the information? What connections can be made? What is reliable? Another thread is around ideas about how events across time are connected through people’s lives.

Doing some initial research. None of this was familiar, in the sense of the advice often given to writers to write about what you know. Some research was necessary. I looked up details of World War 2 military air crashes. I looked up maps of US Air Force bases in 1944. I read articles on the nature of time and got lost in various theories of what constitutes Time. I diverged into wormholes, introductory quantum physics, time travel, history of the US 8^th Airforce. There were readings on what constituted evidence, or reality, or sensemaking. I dwelt briefly on New York hotels; the mechanisms of hotel key cards; the recruitment of teams to work on decoding at Bletchley Park, and other interesting side wanders. Some of this informed my ideas. Much was simply discarded.

Next steps:

The above was a process of looking outwards within a very loose framework – a process of scooping, gathering, sifting. The task now is to work the resulting melange up into a credible narrative – a process more like weaving, or painting, or doing a jigsaw. The whole thing has to hang together satisfactorily. The balancing act is to have sufficient detail to make it feel realistic and credible, but not so much detail as to become boring. Certainly, there have to be no cases where an expert (or pedant) can discount the whole with ‘But that’s not how things were in reality!’

This may take me a few months of writing, with blocks of text being shuffled around to get the best sequence. If the documents on which the book rests are evidence of something, then there will need to be decisions about what, and how much, to reveal to the reader, in what sequence, as things move along.

I am quite looking forward to doing the mechanics, the jigglings and jugglings – as much as the writing itself, getting some sort of flow going; finding words that do work beyond their allotted task; to do the editing, spellchecking, grammar revisions, realigning non-sequiteurs, the final polishing, the tightening up of loose and baggy bits, and the fleshing out of any sections that feel too sparse.

The aim is still to keep the whole less of a linear storyline, and more of a collection of discrete pieces of information/evidence to be played with, thought about, and linked together into possible chains of understandings …. with a structure that allows for a degree of flexibility but also provides a gradual structured revelation of clues and possibilities – asking the reader ‘So what do you make of it all so far?’

I don’t want it to be a straight mystery, nor a war story, nor an eventual romance – maybe more of an open puzzle. It may still end up as a very short book. An option would be to have a longer book with several parts: The story as above; then a section that is based on the people in the group – their actions, thoughts, relationships etc; and maybe a final section is philosophical/theoretical on the nature of understanding. None of this is determined at this stage.

There is no deadline, but I do set myself some outline intentions: Do the next couple of bits before Easter; aim to have a good enough draft of the whole by the Autumn; get final text up ready for publishing before the end of 2024 …. Leaving 2025 for Book 10.

Revisiting old stuff

In a society where one is urged to reuse, recycle, repurpose etc, at what stage is it useful to go back and amend stuff already written?

With most forms of publication there is the possibility of changing the existing text of a book. Writers can get an Author Copy of their book and sometimes, no matter how much editing time has been spent getting it right, there can sometimes be one or two errors. Usually nothing significant, but enough to get in the way of the reader’s flow across the page. This is a real irritant when a few hundred copies of an initial print run have been sent out into the world. You have to wait until a second print run to put things right. Mind you, there have been examples of famous books where the short-run first edition becomes suddenly more valuable because it has a couple of interesting errors. Of course, errorless proofreading before doing even a single copy is the ideal, but usually I upload the book text and cover, then run off a single Author Copy of the book to quickly read through. This gives me the chance to see any errors in a fresh light and allows me to see how the words sit on the actual printed page (the equivalent of getting the Printer’s Proof before running the public production). With print-on-demand there is no need to wait for a second print run, leaving a number of faulty copies already out in the world. I can nip in to the original text file, on the publishing server, as soon as I notice anything to change, make the amendment, and the very next copy printed off after that is error-free.

Beyond that, I have never gone back and changed things substantially. For me, once a book is felt to be finished that is it – best left well alone. If I did ever feel otherwise, then there might be some fun in producing different versions, over time, with different endings.

I have a different view of the articles on my web page (www.thewordsthething.org.uk). These articles were written at specific times, written in the moment, open to further development. I have administrator control over the website and its contents. I can easily go back into any article and immediately update parts, amend parts, or delete parts – either because the context has moved on or because my own thinking has moved on. I don’t do this very often because it feels more authentic to simply say that that was what I was thinking at the date of the article and I might do it differently if I were writing it now.

In a very different way, there have been some interesting repurposings of whole books. I have ended up with author copies printed off to spot the errant mistake or two and, having served that purpose, they are no longer of real use. These redundant copies have been repurposed via the art activities that sit alongside my writing activities. Sometimes the text has been cut out and strung along wires, festooned. Sometimes the whole book has been bound in red tape, or suspended from wires, or bored through with padlocks. Pages have been pulped and use as papier-mache, suspended on a wire to make a model yellow wrecking ball (the secret being that inside the ball is a screwed up sheet with handwritten secrets from 70 years of my life). In such ways part of the outcomes from my writing is finding new life as artworks.

Being Ernesto

And here it is.

One of my shorter books, but one that I enjoyed writing most.

Final version available via Amazon.

Cover from an artwork done by me.

I am quite pleased with it really

Book 8

My previous books are:

It’s Murder on the Eleven

Another Glorious Day

Five Men

Everything There Is

Metropolis: Art, Words and Cities

Fragments:Lives

Sides and Edges

So I am in the middle of writing book eight in the planned set of ten. These ten are designed to be quite different from each other. The remaining unwritten two exist in half-written form as several files on the computer and some hand-written outlines, plus a couple of potential timelines and diagrammatic outlines of how the book might be structured.

Like each of my previous books, this one is already throwing up a set of puzzles that need thinking through or practically working through. I don’t mind this at all. Part of writing, for me, is getting ideas turned into words; part is solving puzzles that come out of getting those words down on the page; and part is getting it all to flow structurally, in the best way I can, so that the reader has an easier time enjoying the story as it goes along.

This book had its origins in a previous one, ‘Fragments:Lives’. That book was about someone living temporarily in Vancouver in 2017. The backdrop to the main action was the various real events happening in Vancouver at that time. It was written in Vancouver as these day-by-day events unfolded around me. The main strands of the story are about what happens when an old female artist dies – What was her life like? Who deals with her legacy? Who has any right to make decisions about things? That book’s narrator is involved in this action, as the city gets on with its everyday activities, and he gathers it as material that might form the content of some potential novel – which he starts to write on the plane as he leaves Vancouver.

The last few thousand words of ‘Fragments:Lives’ thus become, after slight editing, the opening of this eighth book, which then goes on to have a life of its own.

So, I already had a main character, Lizzie, that the fictitious potential novelist had invented. I had a good idea of her character. I also had two or three minor characters already in place. The starter text ended with a good springboard (‘… and that is when my life changed.’) to move on from.

I soon got to around 10,000 words of this new story. I was enjoying writing it, even if it was beginning to present me with some puzzles that needed thinking about, and resolving, before the book went much further. Although these are listed separately below, they didn’t come at me in such an itemised linear way. I had to keep going back over them, separately and collectively, until I was happy that things were lining up well and I could see the next steps more clearly. Sometimes it was a matter of coming to a certain decision about a person. Sometimes it was about which order things happened in, and who knew what when. Sometimes it was about changing a line of development, then maybe changing it again.

Once I got past 15,000 words, there was a danger that a good idea I had got written in only to find, on reading through, that it had already been included. To keep track of what was in there, in what order etc, I did an A4 page of bullet points. Each bullet equalled one key bit in the story, in order that they appeared in the text. This gave me a way of keeping a summary overview to check on from time to time.

Title

The ending of ‘Fragments:Lives’ was copied into a new file and simply titled ‘First 4000 Words’. That stayed as the working title of the file for some time. Soon the story had become centred around a casket – so the working title became ‘Casket of …..’. I tried out various endings to that phrase: Casket of Fear; Casket of Hopes; Casket of Dreams – none worked brilliantly enough to stick, so it was left open-ended for a while longer. Towards the final part of the writing a new character had emerged. The text had a line about ‘….becoming Ernesto’ and, for now, that has stuck as a good potential title for the book as a whole. It might change again, who knows.

Tenses

The adopted-in starter text was descriptive of things that had already taken place (a choice already made for me by that fictitious potential author from Fragments:Lives). I carried on writing in the past tense but really wanted to move, as quickly as the story would let me, into the present tense. This would allow me to talk about things immediately happening to the character – giving the story a much more active momentum. The more the character described things as ‘This is happening now ….’ then later ‘This is happening now ….’ the more it became difficult to sort out the passage of time. I kept launching into present tense only to redraft it into past tense and move on.

Who is telling the story? Who is it being told to?

 Obviously, I (the writer) am the one telling the story -writing the text of the book – to anyone who wants to later read it. Within the book itself, there is the main character who narrates things as they happen. So, she gets to be the one telling the story. It is her tale to tell, from her perspective, in her voice.  Midway through, this other character (Ernesto) takes on some substance. How was he going to get a voice? (Particularly as he was dead). If his view was going to be left to Lizzie to narrate for us, how would she know what he was wanting to say? (Particularly as he was dead). Some device would be needed to make that possible.

Who is helping; who is hindering?

Besides Ernesto, Lizzie has a number of other characters to interact with: her mother, a police friend, a psychologist, a librarian, an archivist. Some of these were there from the beginning. Some emerged, out of a need, as the story unfolded. At each stage, the characters can help Lizzie in some way and thus move the plot along. There is also, always, the opening to bring in some deceit, some unintentional confusion, some distracting, some double-dealing etc. I have a tendency to make my characters nice enough people, people one can side with – but maybe that weakens things. Maybe there are times for some out-and-out baddie to appear on the scene. I don’t think that is going to happen, but there’s still time.

From the start I didn’t want it to be some simple Good vs Evil plot. I saw it in terms of people coming together (in some way; for some reason/s) and struggling to make sense of things. So the protagonists were Sensemakers and the ‘enemy’ was things not making sense, things not stacking up etc. Maybe that would bring in things like the nature of evidence; what can be believed and on what basis; what is real, if anything?

Tight writing and padding; and notes to myself

For the story to move along nicely, the writing needs to be kept tight – nothing in there that doesn’t contribute in some way to keeping the flow going. At the same time there were gaps emerging that needed to be somehow filled. If one situation jumped too suddenly to some different situation that would move things along, but might leave the reader behind wondering how all that suddenly came about. Anything put in to ease the change had to be more than simple padding – itself it had to contribute to the whole.

There were parts in the writing where I left a gap with a note to myself (in red font) saying More to go in Here. Sometimes the potential filler text was written quite quickly and loosely. This was done in a different colour (blue or green) to signal that I had to come back to it later. When I had time, I returned with a clear head and revised the text – which was then changed to black font (to show that it was a final version – for now).

Early constraints

The text imported from the end of Fragments:Lives gave me some things that had to be worked with: a map, a land document, a Will, a passing mention of Bolivia, and the specific name Ernesto Gottlieb. These had to be ditched or worked up in the a new storyline for which they were not initially intended. Each needed fleshing out. Each needed a backstory. This required some bits of research.

The initial character of Lizzie was a given at the start. One ongoing consideration was how to maintain her basic characteristics, whilst letting her grow as time passed.

Which brought another device. The story moves across a number of years. I didn’t want it to be Lizzie’s diary. Some of my other books had verged on being Journal in format. How does the story jump across any time gaps. Lizzie is the narrator, it is up to her to signal any such jumps eg ‘That was ten years ago, now.’

Historical and geographical crosschecking

The story was set in New York (and Bolivia), with specific locations mentioned to give things some reality. There were also some dates: A document dated 1834, a Will dated 1884 etc. Characters travelled around during the story – within New York; within Bolivia; From Bolivia to New York and vice versa.

This gave me various things to think about.

I needed to draft out a timeline for Ernesto and another for Lizzie: When were they born; when did key events happen to them; what about family history? This helped with fleshing out the character but also stopped me tripping myself up by having things happen before they could according to the sequence of dates used as a skeleton timeline.

There were bits of geography to get right: What place was located where in relation to other places – so that it became feasible for the characters to move in the right directions, taking an appropriate amount of time for the journey.

It was important to match the historical period together with the moving around of characters. A couple of times I had Ernesto getting on a bus – way before buses were a realistic form of travel. A simple change of ‘bus’ to ‘cart’ did the trick. If he sailed anywhere, would that be a sailing ship or a steam ship, and how long would that journey take etc.?

Some outline research was done on the history of Bolivia; the main events in late 19th Century New York; the structure of US census data etc. Not much of this made it into the final story. The research was still necessary though. It helped with getting the continuity and feasibility right; it helped with a few background details; and occasionally it sparked off some new line of thinking.

Underwriting and overwriting

Near the end of writing, with most sections in place, most things edited and fact-checked, there is still another task. This is about balance. Reading the whole text through, some bits may appear to go on just a bit too long – are overwritten – and need pruning down. This is different from the advice, in many How To writing books, which recommend cutting out all adjectives, adverbs, unnecessary words, to get to the bare-bones action. This is about fitting the overall volume of words to what went before and what comes after. The aim is to avoid a situation where the story is moving along nicely but then comes a chunk of text, and the reader eventually thinks ‘Oh, get on with it!’ It is an exercise in enabling the reader’s flow, letting it move along without getting bogged down.

The other thing to look for is the opposite – any parts that are underwritten. For example, a character is introduced and things happen. Suddenly, that character no longer plays any part – here one minute, gone the next. The action shifts to something else. This interrupts the attention of the reader, who feels puzzled that something has unexpectedly gone off a cliff. In this case, things can need a more gentle ramp from one topic to the next. This has to be done carefully, avoiding any sense of some padding simply having been stuffed in to fill things out. Whatever gets written in still has to add something to the story.

Finally there is the checking for any dangling ideas. Not everything has to be rounded off – some things can be intriguingly left open – but that is different from the writer having forgotten to bring some thread to a satisfactory conclusion, where it is needed to bring a sense of satisfaction that everything has been put in its place.

The book still has a way to go. There are sections to fill in. There are facts to check and research details to confirm. There are blue-font sections to edit and turn to black-font. There are transitions to read through to make sure they are as good as they can be for the reader. There are continuities to assure – Could that person actually know that at that time? There are decisions to be made about how it comes to its conclusion. And that just finishes off the writing. There is then editing of the almost-final draft text: Are paragraphs in the best sequence? Has it all been spell-checked? Are the names spelt the same consistently? Are there stray bits that are left dangling for no good reason, or that have mysteriously popped up from nowhere? Is the layout consistent? Finally, there is a cover design to find. Most of the books use my own artworks as a basis for the cover – Do I have something that will fit with the overall storyline?

Getting to ten: without repetition, boredom or deviation

The original aim was to write ten books: each different from the others; all within a framework of ideas that I work with on other things; each written for enjoyment, without too much focus on commercial aspects. The process would not be write/ publish/promote each separate book but write and publish to get a collection of books and then promote the package as a whole. I would try to avoid getting caught up in repeating something I had just written, and which I had enjoyed writing, so that I turned out sequels or series. Whilst being within the same mesh of interests each book would be as different as possible from the others – recognising that my own ways of writing would probably show through.

I am now at book #7. Already published (on Amazon site as paperback and as ebook) are:

It’s Murder on the Eleven: A light murder mystery, based on Birmingham’s famous number 11 bus route.

Five Men: Set in the decades leading up to the 1950s; based in a Manchester hospital ward as a device to throw a small number of male characters involuntarily together and see how they get on.

Another Glorious Day: A strange tale of a man unintentionally locked alone with his thoughts and memories.

Everything There Is: The 2097 diary of a teenage girl. This had to work as a young adult story, but also I wanted to explore what life might realistically be like in 80 years time (based on developments actually underway at the moment).

Fragments:Lives: Written in real time in Vancouver 2017, featuring the day-to-day events of that city but also follows a set of characters working out issues connected with legacies, art, decision-making, city life etc.

Metropolis: Art, words and the city: A set of fictions written in response to a Birmingham 2013 contemporary art exhibition that was focused on cities (real and imagined); plus some non-fiction exploration of the nature of cities.

Book #7 is part-finished. It tries to use current concerns about reuse/recycling/repurposing to take bits of previous texts I have written and rework these into something new – using fictional written portraits of people as the subjects of some imagined anthropological study, and interweaving this with notes about research in general (with some real references). It is in a final draft stage, ready for editing, and should get published fairly soon (I hope). It may (or may not) get titled Sides and Edges.

So I am doing OK on numbers (10 books on my list by 2025/6 doesn’t look impossible, but will still be a real challenge).

I am certainly doing OK on keeping each bit of writing an enjoyable thing rather than a drudge. I similarly enjoy all the challenges of the editing process, seeing it as sets of interlocking puzzles to solve in order to get the many parts adding up to something I am happy with.

In the books so far there is a variety of settings, contents, characters, plot lines etc. Four of the books did settle into a daily format, even if not a formal diary/journal layout. This is something I will need to keep an eye on in the future, or I might fall down on the ‘repetition’ criteria. Although there is this variety, there are recurring themes and ideas. These are all part of the wider framework of interests that I do all my work within (whether it be writing, or research, or tentative attempts at making art). These themes include:

falsehoods and truths

who has the authority to determine things

concerns of individuals, and societal expectations

identities – fixed and shifting over time

the influence of place

networks and interconnectedness of people

acting in the present without being able to know the future

legacies: what one leaves as a trace

social and political issues of cities

art and creativities

moral duties

what counts as evidence

layers and facades

fragments and wholes

So, still keeping thing enjoyable, still within the overall framework, are there three more books that might get written in the next five or so years? There is a list of possibilities (and if I don’t get there, I’m not going to beat myself up about it).

#8: A book I have started working on but which at the moment is lacking any driving power. It is envisaged as a set of documents that the reader can move backwards and forwards between, piecing bits of understanding together; starting with the crash of a World War 2 aeroplane on some isolated moorland, and moving across time periods.

#9: Another book that is underway – but really only just a few thousand words of text at the moment – picks up a thread from the final pages of Fragments:Lives without being a sequel to that book. It has very different characters, setting, storylines. The main narrator is someone with high sensitivities that respond to the layerings and histories of a city, and sets that person working on a puzzle from a casket of evidence. (You see how the themes recur, and how it can all slip into repetitiveness).

#10: A book that brings together a range of poems, many of which have already been written for a variety of purposes. A lot of the text exists but it all needs bring together, needs substantial reworking (I suspect), and will need a focus on editing to get things in an order that flows and makes some sense rather than ending up as a disjointed ragbag of stuff.

Alongside this is the need to seriously think through my approach to promotion and marketing so that, as the collection gets to 8 or 9 or 10 books, there is a credible – and interesting- plan in place from 2022/23 onwards.

What is the value of writing?

As with all my previous reflections on my own writing, I suspect that there is a wide range of approaches to any one deceptively simple question such as ‘What is the value of writing?’

The motivations for writing and the gains for the writer, from writing, are two sides of the same coin. If a person writes predominantly for money then the value is measured in cash terms. If a person writes for pleasure then the value is measured in terms of satisfaction. If a person writes as catharsis then the value is measured in terms of some sense of relief.

Some writers describe what they do as a compulsion, a vocation, a calling that has to be responded to: Something that cannot be ignored. Maybe, for these, a sense of value is felt as the progress made, the word-count produced, the pages of text edited.

For others, writing is a form of work, a financially-aspirational form of self-employment. Value comes as income generated over and above outgoings expended. Value may also be linked to feelings of job-satisfaction, and a sense of balance or control.

Or maybe the motivation is the lure of fame, with value being put on celebrity status, public recognition, Facebook likes and Twitter followers.

For some, writing may be a way of dealing with personal demons; a righting of wrongs; a satisfying of troubles. Value is seen as resolution, or as retribution.

For me, at my age and stage of developments, I write for a number of reasons.

If there is the sense in which I can now think of myself as Geoff Bateson the Writer, I had better write something in order to sustain that self-definition. I have a set of mechanisms. There are a number of blogs for which I have committed to producing content. There is the ambition to produce several ebooks that are at least readable. There is my main website to post a steady flow of articles on – articles that need writing. I sketch out my planned writings for the next three or four months and chastise myself when I start to drift away from that loose schedule.

I do not write with the expectation of immediate income. I am realistic enough about the economics of writing to know that I need to put more energy into promotion of what I write if I have any vague hope of it selling in sufficient volumes to create a liveable income stream. Fortunately, I am at a stage where my pension-income adequately covers my modest outgoings so I no longer need to sell myself and my labour. At the same time there is a long-term economic plan.

I have lived through enough periods of high inflation to know that whilst I am financially comfortable now this may not necessarily be true in several years’ time. The plan is to produce a steady stream of ebooks, to put these on an electronic bookshelf in a virtual bookshop (in this case Amazon Kindle Store) and to take opportunities, as they arise, to tell people about them. By the way, in case you are interested, the current stock of books is at https://www.amazon.com/author/geoffbateson

The plan is to add to those already on sale (and which sell slowly and randomly) until there are, by say 2025, at least 10-12 books of very different kinds on that bookshelf. These will then be more heavily promoted in the hope that there is a broad enough range to appeal to many people, and that someone coming to buy one of the books might opt to go away with two or three of them. Any income that is generated might make my elderly care a bit more enjoyable – and that will be very valued.

Beyond this, the main reason for writing at the moment is two-fold.

I see what I write as being part of a fifteen year creative undertaking that (for want of a better working title) I call R:2025. The writings (blogs, website articles, ebooks) sit alongside some seminars, some visits, some links to art galleries etc – all connected to each other within a framework of personal interests and social concerns. A fuller exploration of R:2025 is available at http://thewordsthething.org.uk/?p=492 .

I am enthused by this as a new way of being, and as a new set of interests and motivations. At the same time, as well as any personal gains, I want more. I want the writing (and other) aspects of R:2025 to have public value for a network of readers some of whom will be people already working on the social issues I am myself interested in. The social value of this, for me, will emerge if any of these writings and other activities start to connect across and begin to influence the ways that others think about, and work on, those issues.

The other reason, for doing all this, is part of an approach to try to remain healthy and sustain individual well-being. One document linked to this was the report from the UK Foresight Report on Mental Capital and Wellbeing (www.foresight.gov.uk).

This reviewed recent evidence on the everyday actions that were important for wellbeing (both as feeling good and as functioning well). These were summarised within five areas:

• Connecting with other people … investing in developing and sustaining links with family, friends, colleagues, others in the locality … building connections to enrich everyday activity …
• Being active … taking appropriate levels of physical exercise … having reasons to get out and about …
• Being curious … taking notice of things, being aware of surroundings and what you are doing … remarking on the unusual, or interesting … reflecting on experiences …
• Learning … trying something different … puzzling and working things out … challenging yourself … pulling in new skills when needed or developing existing interests even further …
• Giving time and energy to things … volunteering activity … supporting others … being able to feel that you are making a useful contribution …
• I already had my own way of personal development planning – a loose framework that would satisfactorily get me to age 80. This was made up of broad intentions, reviewed fairly regularly, against headings such as:

• Staying in touch with others; not getting isolated …
• Staying mentally and physically healthy as far as was in my control …
• Sustaining a set of interests – allowing me to be fully occupied …
• Having an adequate level of financial security and stability …
• Maintaining productive family relationships …
• Taking regular breaks, holidays, ways of relaxing …
• Staying aware of, and making appropriate use of, changes in technology …
• Having reasons to do things, go places, join in with events …
• Being in control of own time and stress …
• Maintaining some credible reputation/sense of identity …
• Being organised at home and at work (even where these overlapped) …From this perspective, writing holds personal value for me if it helps hold off mental decline, keeps me connected with people, gives me a reason to continue exploring thoughts and ideas, and gets me out and about (not just locally but, recently, to London, New York, Vancouver, and Whitehorse in Canada’s Yukon Territory).
• Will things work out that way? They may; they may not. It is an ambition. That is good enough.
• Bringing my long-standing personal development framework together with the five Foresight strands set me on a stronger path of transitioning from me as full-time city council employee to me as fully occupied, productively and happily, in quite different ways. In a sense it was a design project – outlining and testing a way of being. It enabled me to get a greater clarity – a larger degree of foresight – around what I might be and do with myself. Part of all of that was to write in a range of styles, for a variety of reasons, and with various different audiences in mind.

Where is it all getting to: Next Steps

This is the site where I reflect on my own approach to writing. In addition to a number of ebooks on Amazon’s Kindle site the bulk of my writing is held on a website at www.thewordsthething.org.uk . Some early posts on that website outlined the features of a flourishing organisation, and ways that agencies may need to think differently if they are to make progress. These arose from thinking about cities. They can equally be used as a framework for reflecting on any set of activities – and here are being used to assess where my own work (captured on the www.thewordsthething.org.uk website) might be going.

This has highlighted some of the things that I will need to emphasise more over the next three years. These include:

• Being able to clearly articulate why I wish to occupy myself in this way … the purposes behind what is being done … with sufficient ‘presence’/ confidence/ self-determination whilst still being tentative/ modest.
• Responding to current concerns and interests without slipping into populist reactionism … Still being at least a little bit different in what is being undertaken … having more challenge to the aspirations, pushing myself in what I am comfortable doing.
• Reflecting on what is being done, without endless internal activity that is of little value to anyone else
• Being more active in engaging with others (authentically rather than simply clocking up more and more links/ likes/ followings) … countering it being a solitary undertaking … looking for more things that might require collaboration with others.
• Actively promoting content/writing, and asserting myself as author, without unnecessarily heavy self-promotion
• Maintaining an approach that is based on puzzling, wondering, being curious for its own sake … as well as aiming to produce stuff that could be of value/use to others.
• Covering costs without being a money-driven set of activities … with most things being freely available to anyone … things done voluntarily.

That’s it: I have my list of commitments already signed-up to, and this sense of next-step directions to follow. Time to get on with it all.

 

New Year, New Starts: Or the same old things?

January is traditionally a time for making Resolutions. I prefer to think in terms of Intentions. Resolutions are often specific things that have a pass/fail feel about them. Intentions, on the other hand, are looser things – one can try to get there but if (for all good reasons) things are not fully attained then that is not the end of the world, more a chance to rethink and retry.

So what do I intend, as a writer, for 2013? Does the old logic of last year still hold or is there scope for some change of emphasis? I think that 2013 will still, for me as a writer, be characterised as:

Still ebooks. Still Amazon:

Why would I not want to stay with this route? The same logic still holds for me for as long as I see editing, checking, publishing and promotion as things that I want to do as part of the overall writing activity. There may come a time when the world is swamped with ebooks and the publishing/ promoting/selling part of the enterprise ceases to enjoyable or worthwhile. There may also come a time when there are so many other providers of ebooks that the kindle site of Amazon ceases to be worth thinking of as my sole outlet. At the moment though, 2013 will still be ebooks and still be Amazon – alongside my couple of blogs and any other writing I choose to do.

Still variety:

2012 saw four books up on the Kindle site. These were all very different: one light mystery, one collection of Tales, one exploratory story based on a young man in a box, one collection of poems. I have no intention of doing lots of sequels or follow-ups. The freedom to write in the way that I do gives me variety and that is something that I value. 2013 has work in progress on: a story about men in a 1950s Manchester hospital – in which I am testing out heavy use of the present tense; a story (which may have a ‘diary’ feel to it) set in 2097 – so future, but based on extrapolations from today – where the central character is a 12 year old girl; a piece based on research via Twitter, which results in a longer article on Place/Cities; two blogs (this one and a wordpress one titled ‘Man from the Box’ which is a follow-on from the ‘Another Glorious Day’ story of the man in the box ie is a blog written by that character); as well as maintaining my on-going website www.thewordsthething.org.uk which is designed to hold a somewhat wide-ranging/eclectic set of writings. There are other things that occasionally need to be revisited to check that I still want to do them; and some mulling over of how to do promotion that isn’t simply insistent shouting about myself. All of which will keep me busy throughout the first 2-3 months of 2013.

Still planned. Still developmental. Still being persistent and determined, whilst keeping it all at the enjoyable level (even having a sense of fun). Still scheduled:

So I have my daily list of things that I intend to get done through January and February 2013. I am disciplined enough to try to keep up momentum on these but sensible enough not to beat myself up if things start to knowingly drift off-schedule. I am, after all, my own line-manager and want to be an exemplary boss to myself.

The variety of potential writings in the programme for this year will mean that my interests continue to have scope for developing. There will need to be some extra creativity if I am going to write up the fictionalised tour of the Stans (see earlier postings or, better, the relevant bits on my web site); there will be space for a wide exploration of thinkings around contemporary art; there are further ideas about cities that might get worked on; there is the linking of parts of the already-published Tales with approaches in sociology under a working title of Sides and Edges (which may, or may not, see the light of day during 2013) ….. Enough there to keep my mind flowing for now….

Revisiting the costing:

I had set an internal price-line in my head based on a sense of ‘value’. This was that the reasonable length books (and my style of writing would mean that these usually turned out at around 45,000-60,000 words) would be costed at somewhere close to £3. Shorter booklets, or things put together from other sources, might come in at a lower cost. Kindle publishers also have free-loan options. During 2012 I tried out a variety of costings on the Kindle site and produced a graph of ‘sales’ versus ‘cost’. Thinking about that reinforced the notion that £2-£4 would be an optimum normal price range to go with for the first six months of 2013.

Revisiting the use of social media

I have this blog; I have a section of Facebook that is reserved for Friends and Family as well as a section that is me as Writer; I have an active use of Twitter, based on wanting to learn from others fractionally more than I want to push out my own thoughts; and I have a fairly passive presence on LinkedIn. The way others use each of these will, to an extent, guide how I use them. They are all part of my thinking about letting people know that I write stuff which may be of interest to them, but none of them are seen purely as channels of self-promotion. There is a balance to be struck between seeing each of the different media as a form of writing in its own right, as a way of maintaining interesting contact with others, and as a way of guiding people to what I am doing with my life these days. This is a theme I am sure to revisit a number of times during 2013.

50,000 words in 30 days?

Three years ago I was alerted to the challenge, via National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), of writing at least 50,000 words within the thirty days of November. This works out at just under 1700 words a day, which felt like a very cleverly chosen goal: high enough to feel a real challenge yet low enough to seem just about possible. I decided to go for it. I have attempted to meet this challenge each year since.

In that first year my theme was a man, on his own, in a box – maybe not the best choice for getting a wide enough plot and a sufficient range of characters to generate lots of words. Whilst I was writing I tried to give quite a bit of consideration to the quality of what I was writing rather than bashing out rubbish. I lightly edited as I went along. At the end of that November I had my 50,000+ words, in more or less the right order, with virtually no repetition or inconsistencies. It still needing some deletion of weak parts. I had read that some writers sit and type large amounts of text one day and, in editing later, chop out around 25% of what they had written. I was quite pleased only to lose a couple of thousand words of weak parts during my December final editing. Continuing the writing in a more leisurely way during early 2011 got the word count back up to more than 56,000. With further editing and a final polishing this text was then ready for converting to an ebook format and uploading onto the Amazon Kindle site. It is up there under the title ‘Another Glorious Day’. Details of this (and my other ebooks) can be found at http://thewordsthething.org.uk/?p=181

Last year I was kinder to myself and worked with five characters in a more open setting. Four men from different backgrounds ended up together in a small hospital ward in a late 1950s Manchester hospital. Each brought their own personality and their own history. Each man looked back at their lives; they interacted in the present; and each had their own future to think about. (The fifth character was someone who had died in the past). I found getting to 50,000 words just as much of a challenge as before but again achieved it with not too much heavy editing to do. Because of all the looking back/being in the present structure the editing that needed to be done after the end-November deadline was mostly one of checking tenses. This text is still in the process of being edited slowly, in between other writings. One part of my ‘delivery plan’ is to have this completed and up on Amazon Kindle before the end of March 2013.

November 2012: NaNoWriMo time again. I had already decided to test myself by going for a different genre, or a different kind of character. Just as November 1^st was almost upon me I set aside an hour in my usual coffee shop and thought out what this might mean. I settled on an overall style that might be nearer to ‘young adult fiction’ than I normally wrote, with a thirteen year old girl as narrator, set in 2097.

I wasn’t sure about whether I would be able to manage, and maintain, thinking like an average female teenager in the future. Nor was I sure that I could write in a language and style that matched any ideas of young adult readability (if such a things exists). Setting it 85 years in the future was a deliberate choice. Life would be different from how it is now but would still contain much that was the same. This wasn’t some Science Fiction; it was Future Fiction. Since developments tend to speed up as time goes on, 85 years in the future would probably be as different from today as maybe 140 years ago was from now. Thinking of the changes over the period from the 1870s to today, we might expect at least the same degree of social and technological change by 2097.

Whilst writing it, during November, I drew on what I already knew of various trends in society and projected each one forward to try to get a sense of what that future might be like. Each day brought the same challenge: Remembering that I was in the year 2097 and not inadvertently assuming that I was still in 2012. Some of the things in the story may seem a bit far-fetched but each has its roots in things that are already being developed or invented today.

November started and the writing set off a a fair pace but very soon the daily volume of writing became erratic. The realities of life kept intruding in ways that couldn’t be ignored so the neat 1800 words a day became much more ragged with times when I was quite a way behind schedule and needing, in the later parts of the month, to write more like 5,000 words each day. The start of the last day of November saw me needing 10,000 more words to reach the target for the month. At the end of that day I dragged myself, a bit bleary eyed, over the 50,000 word finishing line.

I have to say that I enjoyed writing this particular challenge. The storyline worked out fairly well. It reached the word total without rushing out lots of gibberish just to get there. Yes, it will need fairly substantial editing but it is in my plan to get it polished sufficiently to put it up as an ebook by the end of March 2013. At the moment, though, I am happy to have got there and plead ‘Can I have my life back now please? – Well, at least until next November’.

What did I learn this time round? There were several things:

• No matter how important the writing seems, and no matter how far off schedule it drifts, there are some things that are more important.
• At the end of the day, sheer determination can be enough to carry you through to the deadline.
• A target is only a target. There is no value in hitting a numerical figure by devious means or by compromising on values; better to be happy with quality/authentic content and fall short of the target.
• Going into new territory can be daunting yet stimulating.
• Internal consistencies matter a great deal. In the enthusiasm of writing inconsistencies may not be spotted but they are sure to jump out at readers later on.
• It is possible to have an editing perspective whilst writing, but it will exert a control. Too much control and the creative drives of the writing will not be able to carry it along; too little control and there could be the inefficiency of writing whole paragraphs that simply get deleted later.
• Having got the main body of text in place, time then spent editing is as important as the time spent writing – and can be just as challenging and just as much fun.
• An annual challenge like this is a good way to get writing started.
• 50,000 words is a challenge to write but produces something of a size appropriate to many readers.

More things may occur to me as I reflect further on this November’s experience – but meanwhile I have a good body body of text that needs some reshaping and minor editing to get it into a final form that is likely to be around 55,000-60,000 words. This is substantial enough to carry several ideas and, hopefully, be of interest to a variety of readers.