In the mood

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financial crime, paperback, plotting, police, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, Susan Grossey, writing

One of my concerns when I was anticipating coming away for this writing retreat was that I might not be “in the mood” for writing, that I might sit up here in solitary splendour on the top of a mountain, and wait in vain for the muse.  But I have discovered something very useful.

When you set off for work every day, do you say to yourself, “Well, I’m not really in the mood for this teaching/accountancy/bus-driving/whatever today, so I don’t think I’ll bother”?  No, of course not – few people have that luxury.  And being on a writing retreat, it turns out, is like having writing as a job.  Every morning I wake up and get on with writing because that’s what I am here to do – my current job is to write the first draft of a novel, and it just has to be done, regardless of “mood”.

But when I am at home, fitting my writing in between my real life, I do ask myself whether I am actually in the mood – and if I’m not, I don’t start.  On reflection, I think this is a mistake.  From now on, when I put a writing day in my diary, that’s what it will be: my mood will be immaterial, because I won’t even ask myself about it.  I’ll just start writing – because if I can do it every day for a month, I can certainly do it for a single day, afternoon or even hour.

Out for the count

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author, editing, financial crime, fraud, plotting, police, self-publishing, word count

When I started telling people that I was coming away on this writing retreat, what everyone wanted to know was how I was planning to measure my progress.  To be honest, I think they imagined me sitting on a sunny balcony, nibbling a Toblerone, and only pretending to write, so it was a fair question.  My overall aim was to go home with a complete first draft – having arrived with about a third of it already written – and to achieve that I calculated that I would need to write an average of 2,000 words a day.

So how have I done?  I have been keeping a daily tally, and looking at that I can see that I have actually achieved an average of 1,946 words a day.  Of course, I haven’t just been adding words to my tally; alongside the actual writing, I have been plotting (and re-plotting – quite a few things have changed in the past week) and researching.  I did intend to do all of my research before I retreated, and indeed I managed to do quite a bit, but of course with plot changes comes more research.  For instance, only today I decided to include a snippet about smallpox, so had to read a bit about that – although perhaps it wasn’t wise to do it just before lunch…  Pox ain’t pretty, it turns out.

I now have only three full writing days left, including today – Wednesday will be taken up with washing, cleaning the flat for the next visitors and other admin, and then my husband arrives on Thursday to take me home.  Will I do it – will I get that first draft finished?  Well, I have three major chapters to go, so as long as I knuckle down and stay away from the balcony and Toblerone, it should be possible.

Secrets and suspense

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author, financial crime, fraud, plotting, police, Regency, research, Samuel Plank, writing

Last night I asked my husband whether he wanted to know about a particular plot point that I had worked out in “Plank 2”, and he said no, that he wanted to wait and read the full first draft.  I know it’s not a particularly revelatory comment, but it’s jolly lonely being a writer.  And actually quite difficult, because you need to split your mind in two: you need to be both writer and reader.

Let me try and make more sense.  I am writing a crime novel – set in 1825, granted, and focussing on financial crime, but a crime novel at its heart.  And such a novel demands secrets and suspense.  The trouble is, I know all the secrets, and the suspense is self-generated – a bit like trying to jump out on yourself, which isn’t scary at all.  So I have to look at what I have written, and try to imagine reading it for the first time – I have to try and forget what I know, and pretend that the story is being revealed to me piecemeal.  And that’s surprisingly hard to do.  (And it means that I will be relying heavily on my lovely test readers – Roy, I’m looking at you with big, pleading eyes, if you can bear it again…)

Possessed by Plank

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author, editing, financial crime, fraud, paperback, plotting, police, research, Samuel Plank, Susan Grossey, writing

So here I am, halfway through my month-long retreat in the company of another man.  Did I ever tell you how I named my police constable?  To begin with, when I first started writing “Fatal Forgery” (which itself started life as “A Fraudster and a Gentleman”), he was called George Rayner.  I know: not good.  But in the 1780s, when he was born, people chose their children’s names from quite a limited selection – none of your Duwaynes and Will.i.ams back then.  And then one day I was reading through the records of the Old Bailey (utterly fascinating, and now all online – just a fabulous resource) when I came across a trial where one of the witnesses was a police constable called Sam Plank.  “That’s him!” I cried – my husband remembers me doing it.  And I just knew that Constable Samuel Plank was the man for me.

We’ve been through a lot together already, and now – hiding away together in Switzerland – we are getting to know each other even better.  He’s told me about his childhood, and today he revealed to me what made him become a police officer in the first place.  I won’t spoil the surprise for you, just in case you decide to read his next adventure, but it was very moving, and certainly explains a great deal about how he became the man he is.  And just to confirm your no doubt nagging suspicions that I have gone completely batty stuck up here alone at the top of a mountain, I genuinely had no idea about this anecdote until I sat down and wrote it: I didn’t plan it, and it just appeared.  He’s good company, Sam Plank.

This writer’s routine

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author, Fatal Forgery, fraud, plotting, police, Regency, research, Samuel Plank, writing

I am married, and like most married people, I have a home life that is something of a compromise.  I have removed all cushions from our bed, and in return my husband tolerates four on the sofa.  Generally he confines his bike maintenance activities to the garage and garden, but on big match days (Cup Final day, Wimbledon men’s singles final, last day of the Tour de France) he is permitted to bring a bike indoors to be polished in the lounge, as long as there is a thick protective sheet on the floor.  And our daily timetable is a compromise too: we generally go to bed later than I would like and earlier than he would – that’s what happens when a lark falls in love with an owl.

However, I am now a fortnight into my month-long solo writing retreat, and my own preferred natural timetable has reasserted itself.  I wake early – usually by about 6am – and start work almost immediately.  At about 8am I break for, well, breakfast, and then work for another hour.  By then I am a bit written out, so I spend the final hours of the morning doing less intensive but still writerly activities – proofreading, or research.  After lunch I have a walk to stretch all the muscles that have tightened after a morning at the keyboard, then it’s writing again from 2pm to 5pm.  Then I’m done: by 5pm my brain is mush, and the most I can manage in the evening is reading a knitting pattern.  I often plan to watch a movie, but by 9.30pm I’m nodding off, and it’s bed at 10pm, a bit of reading, and lights out by 10.30.

I knew that a writing retreat would give me more time for writing, but I hadn’t anticipated that another benefit would be that the quality of that time would be better because – selfishly and wonderfully – I can write exactly when it suits me.  Perhaps that is the real luxury of the writing retreat: not just more time, but better time.  Having realised that, I shall make the very best of my remaining eleven days of utter selfishness.

A laptop with a view

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author, financial crime, plotting, police, research, Samuel Plank, Susan Grossey, writing

I am always impressed with – and slightly envious of – those people who say that they can write anywhere.  You know the sort: “Yes, I do have four children and a full-time job as a heart surgeon, but I just used my twenty-minute tube journey to do the plotting and then wrote the chapters with my pad propped on the kitchen counter while I cooked dinner.”  I’ve never been able to do that.  Sure, I carry a notebook everywhere with me so that I can jot down thoughts and ideas as they occur, but when it comes to actual sentence construction, I need somewhere calm and quiet and comfortable.

At home, that’s my back bedroom, which we now call the study.  I have a little antique desk facing the window, overlooking our garden and the roofs of the houses nearby, and I write on a different computer and indeed operating system to the one I use for my day job: Windows for work, Apple for writing.  My husband suggested it, as a way to make sure that I couldn’t switch between the two without significant effort, and now it’s just the way I do it.

But away as I am “on retreat”, I thought you might like to see my current writing environment.  My computer is set up on the dining table, looking out of the French window and over the balcony:

And yes, I do sometimes move to the balcony table when it’s just too sunny and warm to stay indoors.

Every afternoon – unless it’s raining or we’re “in the cloud” (that’s nothing to do with wireless storage – this is a mountain resort, and often we are literally higher than the cloud cover) I walk up here to clear my mind:

And this is where I sit when I want to have Big Thoughts about plotting – waiting for divine inspiration, you might say:

Hamstrung by history

Tags

Fatal Forgery, financial crime, marketing, police, research, Samuel Plank, writing

My second novel, like “Fatal Forgery” before it, is in the genre of historical crime fiction.  (I sometimes wish it wasn’t, as that seems to be a tricky genre for publishers to grasp and for bookshops to shelve – but that will have to be another blog post: should we write books that fit the current marketing priorities, or books that we want to write?  Answers on a large postcard, please.)  And to my mind, writing historical fiction brings with it very particular responsibilities.

I wasn’t absolutely clear on my take on those responsibilities before I started “Fatal Forgery”, but as I was writing it they crystallised, and I now adhere to them as rigidly as I can.  And here they are:

1. If I feature a person (e.g. the magistrate John Conant, who appears in both novels), I make every effort to learn as much as possible about that person, and then to ensure that whatever they say or do in my novel is in keeping with what we actually know about them.
2. When my characters walk around London (both novels being set there) I have always done that walk myself, to make sure that I get the timings right.  Needless to say, Sam does not hop onto a Boris bike to chase criminals.
3. Any references to specific events are historically accurate.  For instance, I had initially intended the events in “Plank 2” to take place in spring 1825, but then I really wanted to include a fair that happened in August – so I have moved everything by about four months to accommodate that.

I don’t want to sound smug – I am sure I will make some mistakes along the way – but I want readers to feel that I have done my very best to make my books as reliable as possible.  And, to be honest, I really enjoy the intellectual puzzle of weaving historical fact and my own imaginings into a coherent whole.

The writer as scavenger

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Fatal Forgery, plotting, police, research, self-publishing, writing

For various reasons I have been thinking quite a lot about Sam Plank recently (for new readers, he’s the policeman hero of my historical novel “Fatal Forgery”).  It’s not that long to go until he and I shack up together for a whole month (on my self-declared writer’s retreat) and then he will tell me all about his new adventure (due for publication in mid-October).  It’s not completely out of the blue, of course: he has told me some of it already, and together we have plotted its outline, but it’s the details that need to be filled in.  And I have noticed something strange happening.

I suppose it means that Sam is at the back of my mind all the time now.  But whatever I am watching or reading or seeing, I am looking for the Sam angle.  Last night, for instance, I watched a documentary about a year in the life of York Minster.  And all the time I was thinking, “Could Sam have gone to York?  Would he have known anything about it?”.  In the end, I decided that a proud Londoner like Sam probably wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of a grand excursion to York – but he would almost certainly have gone into a grand church or two in his home town.  So now there is a little note stuck on the fridge saying, “Take Sam to church – Martha?”.  The other day, as another example, I was walking into town (I live in Cambridge) and I passed underneath the most delicious smelling tree – a lime, I think.  It was such a strong smell of spring – so there is another note saying, “Sam encounters spring on his beat – check lime trees in London”.  (For the researchers among you, I know that a policeman in 1824 didn’t have a beat – it’s my shorthand for “his little walks around Marylebone”.)  And today I am going to Luxembourg for two days, on a work trip (talking about money laundering to Luxembourg financial people).  There is no way on earth that I could get Sam to Luxembourg in 1825 – well, he could have made the journey, but there is no reason why he would have – so I will have to look for inspiration in other ways.  Perhaps I could make him a fan of patisserie – I hear they are marvellous at it, and I would have to do plenty of sampling to get my description just right.  Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Mine, all mine

Tags

Fatal Forgery, financial crime, fraud, plotting, police, Regency, self-publishing, writing

As you may know, I am taking a writing retreat month in the middle of this year, which has (rightly or wrongly) taken the pressure off me with regard to actual writing at the moment.  But it turns out that when you invent someone – as I have done, with my scrummy policeman Sam Plank – he never goes away.  I find myself thinking about him every day, and wondering how he is.

This (let’s be honest) mild obsession takes its most obvious form in my reaction to certain things.  When I am working in London for the day, I will often try to slip into a museum or gallery for 30 minutes, just as a respite.  And once in there, I make a beeline for anything Regency.  In the Rijksmuseum last year, my husband tells me that I wandered around various rooms muttering, “Too late – too early – collar too high – hat-brim too wide…” as I compared depictions of gentlemen with my lovely Sam.  (Husband made sure to keep a distance from me, as frankly I looked a bit doolally, he says.)  If I hear the word Regency on the radio, my little ears prick up – and I’m thinking of starting a campaign to have Regent Street in London renamed so that it does not clog up all of my Google searches.

So Sam and I may not be communing through words at the moment, but he is always with me, and I am always looking out for ways to make him more real to people other than me.  I’m off to an exhibition at the Royal Society of British Artists the week after next, and woe betide those artists if they haven’t seen fit to paint a Regency chap or two.

Sign up, sign up!

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author, Fatal Forgery, financial crime, marketing, plotting, police, publicity, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, Susan Grossey

I have just spent the morning learning more about self-promotion for the self-published – I swear it takes longer to sell a book than it does to write one!  But it is all good fun, as I love learning new skills.  And my Skill of the Day is MailChimp, which is a service for sending email “campaigns” to lists of subscribers.  I like the idea of producing regular updates for those who might be interested – although I am a little uncertain as to the difference between that and a blog.  Anyway, I have decided that it is worth a bash, and MailChimp seems a reputable system; they have very advanced anti-spam controls, and insist on all sorts of undertakings from me that I will abide by their rules.  And it will be a good way for me to gauge genuine levels of interest in my books, as well as enabling me to send out targeted information and offers.  So I have set it up from my end, and if you would like to take part and receive occasional email updates from me, please click on the quill pen in the left margin and sign up on the MailChimp form that will appear as if by magic.

In case the demand is overwhelming and it turns out that people are desperate for information, I have already started on my first update, which deals with Plank’s London and will show you some of the locations from “Fatal Forgery” and from the new Plank adventure that I am currently writing.