Week 4 - Names

I Was Busy Last Week...

Which is why there was no post - for which I apologise, I was at a silent film festival (that's how I roll). I did still manage to get some work done and a couple of thousand words today, so The Werewolf of Priory Grange is still moving forward! Slowly. The good news is that I finished my ghostwriting assignment, so I have a bit of free time until the next one starts on the 1st of February. But I knew that this would be a difficult task that I would have to fit in around all my other work so; bring it on.

I've just finished chapter 3, a chapter in which a number of minor characters (mostly schoolchildren) are introduced whom I didn't plan when I wrote the outline and so who all needed naming. Naming characters is my one of the chores of writing I dislike the most (it's almost as bad coming up with titles) and I usually sit down with the TV listings and scan cast lists until I find a name I like. But, with the Universal Library I decided to take character names from the films that inspired the books - principally the Universal Horrors, then onto the Hammer ones if I'm struggling. It's still a question of finding the right names for the characters but at least I have a list to work from. I then chop the names up as suits me so I'm not stealing names from a series whose copyright I may already be tiptoeing close to. So, for example, in The Mummy's Quest, the character of Arthur Banning takes his name from Arthur Byron (who played Frank Whemple in 1932's The Mummy) and Steve Banning (the lead character in 1940's The Mummy's Hand). Likewise in The Werewolf of Priory Grange, one of the main characters is named Lisa Hobson after Valerie Hobson and the character she played in Werewolf of London (1935), Lisa Glendon. The name Glendon I gave given to another character. Today I was naming a bunch of school girls, which means that if I encounter more female characters as I continue through the book I may struggle, as I have practically exhausted Werewolf of London, The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945) and Hammer Horror's The Curse of the Werewolf (1961). The exceptions to this rule were the Egyptian characters in The Mummy's Quest; the modern ones' names were taken from a list of popular Egyptian names, and the period ones taken from a list of ancient Egyptian names in which I tried to find names that were both appropriate (in terms of level in society) and which suited the character. The more significant exception is Amelia in The Mummy's Quest. Her name was a carry over from an abandoned project about a paranormal detective called Amelia Hammer (a nod to the horror studio and detective Mike Hammer). I changed her surname to Evans (taken from The Mummy's Tomb - 1942) and always intended to change Amelia as well. But it suited her so well, and I'm not such a slave to my rules as to piss away a good character name on the rare occasions I blunder into one.

My favourite character name this time round is the head of the Universal Library and organisation, whom we have not met before, and is named Carl, or Uncle Carl. And if you're a classic film fan, then you'll know why I was quite pleased with this.

Week 2 - The Trouble With Freelance Writing

Making Time...

...is difficult. When I wrote the first book in The Universal Library series (the name is growing on me), I was aiming for it to coincide with the release of the Tom Cruise film The Mummy. It did not. That's partly because I was moving house (and city) at the time so there were other things I had to do. But it's mostly because when I wasn't doing house moving stuff I had other writing to do. Paid work has to take precedence, stuff with a hard deadline (as in a deadline with actual consequences) needs to come first. Personal projects, and especially those that are more for fun than a labour of love, are bound to slip by the wayside. The Mummy's Quest (available here as hard copy or download) came out four months later than planned and I'm happy enough that it came out at all.

The reason I'm bringing this up now is that since I wrote the first of these blogs a weeks ago I have had two free hours to work on The Werewolf of Priory Grange and have managed a grand total of two thousand words this week. On the bright side, I'm happy with the words, I'm into chapter 3 (the first two chapters are very short) and getting to know the lead character. This is the part of writing a book I enjoy the most, the first half where you get to build atmosphere and develop characters via interesting interactions - the actual action I find quite boring to write. The down side is of course that at a rate of two thousand words a week I will barely be finished by April 2019, let alone 2018, and I want to get the second book out as promptly as possible before people forget about the first. The first draft is the quick bit where I allow myself to make mistakes and write poorly so this should be doable.

The problem is, none of the other stuff is going away. Ghostwriting is my 'day job' so I can't let that slide assuming I want to eat, and I write about one book per month which is relatively labour intensive. My web series Dark Corners goes out weekly and is really where the idea for the books came from, as well as giving me a ready made audience for it, so even if I wanted to cut back on that it wouldn't help the books. Then I have a couple of other bigger projects which may help me to find a writing career beyond ghosting trash romance. All of this needs doing, most of it needs doing now.

What's the answer? There isn't one. There are a finite number of hours in the day and there are no shortcuts to writing what I need to write. The only real 'solution' is to manage my time better, make sure I'm working on the right thing at the right time and that I'm not taking too much frivolous time off for things like writing blogs...

At this point, I still believe I can get The Werewolf of Priory Grange out in April. It will be a struggle and a small thing could throw it off the rails, but having this blog helps, if only because it makes me believe - however erroneously - that there is an audience out there waiting for this who I should not let down.

Week 1 - The Werewolf of Priory Grange

Book 2 Starts Today...

...as does this blog, which is designed to chart the progress of the second book in my Universal Library series (and hopefully to promote the titles as well). Probably most people who read this will have read the first book The Mummy's Quest, but for those who haven't and don't know anything about the series, here's a the brief primer;
The Universal Library (which by the way, is a title I've only just given the series and which might yet change) was inspired by Universal Studios decision to reboot their classic horror films as the Dark Universe Franchise, starting with 2017's The Mummy. (They'd actually intended to start with Dracula Untold but it was so poorly received they decided to reboot the reboot.) I had no problem with the idea of a horror franchise that put all those classic characters in the same world, my problem was an innate certainty that they would screw it up by trying to be Marvel (monsters aren't superheroes) and by trying to create a franchise rather than creating good films and letting a franchise develop from that. So I decided to write my own Dark Universe, integrating the classic monsters into a single world but doing it my way not theirs - which doesn't necessarily mean mine would be better. The books would be horror comedy, because everything I write seems to end up as comedy on some level so why fight it? My plan was to release novels to coincide with Universal's release schedule. But of course The Mummy was derided, then disagreements between studio and directors added a final nail to the coffin of the Dark Universe. Which hasn't changed my plans, it just means that I just have a more flexible release schedule for my books.
The first story, The Mummy's Quest was released in October 2017 and the plan is to write about one every six months, meaning the next is due out in April, and it is the writing of that book that this blog is predominantly about.

I have a list of Universal monsters with story ideas jotted against them, and three of those were in contention to be the subject of the second book, but the werewolf won out and I spent a few months planning the story on paper till I had a rough chapter by chapter break down of the book that will be called The Werewolf of Priory Grange (for those who have read The Mummy's Quest; yes, the Sherlock Holmes references continue). Actual writing started today and I wrote a couple of thousand words this afternoon. Different people write in different ways, personally I like to get through the first draft as quickly as I can, no matter how bad the writing is, with the knowledge that I will go back and fix it later. That said, I have a lot of other work on at the moment (including ghost-writing books for other people) so I can typically just do an afternoon or a morning here and there.

Like I said, I think one of the mistakes the Universal made was trying to create a fully formed franchise - I just don't think that often works. So, although I knew that I wanted The Mummy's Quest to be the first of a series, I didn't and still don't have any over-arching storyline, and I didn't know which characters, if any, would be returning in the next book or those beyond it. Certainly during these early days in the series I'd like the books to be pretty stand-alone so anyone can dip in without worrying about backstory. I had two series in mind as inspirations, the first is probably pretty obvious; Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, which are the high water mark of comic genre writing and a series where you can start with practically any book. The other, less obviously, is the books of P. G. Wodehouse, which are of course some of the best written comic novels of all time, but also exist in their own world - characters from the Blandings series pop up in Jeeves and Wooster and minor characters from Jeeves and Wooster have whole books of their own. The point is, it's not a world in which everyone has to be in every book, it's a world in which characters appear when it is natural for them to do so - which feels like a far more fully realised world.

That seems like enough for a first post. I will try to get one of these out a week as I work, creating an artificial sense of anticipation for the April release.