Richard Wright

Good lord. I appear to have finished writing the first draft of Craven Place. That makes it my third completed novel, and you’ll forgive me for indulging a little further in the drinking of vino this evening.

Damn me though, it’s short. Three quarters the length of Cuckoo, my only published novel to date, itself no monster. Next to my second novel Thy Fearful Symmetry, currently in the wilds trying to hunt down a publisher, it’s a dwarf, only a little more than half the length. As my friend Jackie C says though, it’s about quality, not quantity.

I think she was talking about the novel. I shall continue to charitably assume so.

There have been some surprises along the way, particularly in the way the supernatural elements surged to the fore, so much more than in the screenplay on which the book is based. Oh, and then there was the cameo from Dexter Lomax, in the final pages. That came out of left field. Some of you have met Dexter before, in the novella The Flesh Remembers, and the short story The Loch. You might even be waiting for his further adventures, which I long ago promised to write, and plan this year to make good on. His appearance is appropriate, because he was born in Craven Place.

Oh yes, before those other stories, Dexter was created for Craven Place. In the screenplay, he was one of the central characters, and I liked him so much I used him again later on. By the time of those later tales however, he had evolved some, to better suit their overtly fantastical elements. He’s no longer the same man he was in the screenplay, and trying to make him fit his former role in Craven Place has proven impossible, at least if I’m to keep him consistent with his previous published appearances. As such, his role in this book is now taken by one Max Fletcher, who has proven a worthy replacement. With Max centre stage, I thought that Dexter was no longer required for the novel.

Dexter disagrees, and when I was seeking an epilogue today, he sort of took over, and did it for me. Good to see him again, and a nice warm up for next month’s major project…

Of course, when I say the book is ‘done’, I’m only talking about the first draft. I’ll be printing it off tomorrow, and putting it aside for a month while I work on other things. Then I’ll be back into it with fresh eyes, for the second edit. Still, while it needs fine tuned, it’s a novel, on my hard drive, with a beginning, middle, and end.

Wow. Third novel, done. It’s an incredible feeling. Raise a glass with me, and toast to Craven Place.

Cheers.

Okay, another five and a half thousand words done on Craven Place, and into Chapter 32. I’ve broken the 60,000 word mark, which at the start of the week I would have said put me with another quarter of the book to go. As you can see above, I’ve reassessed. When I left off earlier this evening, I was into the final pages of the screenplay that forms my guide and synopsis. The mysteries are explained, the villain unmasked, and there’s a single confrontation to be had. Not a lot else to be done, and I’m sure now that I’ll definitely finish by Friday (erm, possibly even tomorrow). I’ve amended the countometer thingy above to 70,000 from my previous guesstimate of 80,000 words, but even that is generous. I’ll be amazed if it hits 65,000, which surprised me when I worked it out this afternoon. I spent so much time this month working over what I’d already written, I haven’t really sized what’s still to come.

This will make it damn short for a full novel (the usual estimated word count for a novel would be about 80,000 – 120,000 words for a ‘normal’ sized book, whatever that means…). That in turn, may make it a tough sell, when I get it to that stage. I have a few things I want to add in to earlier sections of the manuscript, standalone interjections from various characters which add a different flavour to the action, and that will bump it up a little. At the same time, the first good edit will probably take 6000 words back off, so it’s likely to balance out. We’ll see. You never know where a bit of writing’s going to go before the final full stop, and saleability isn’t really forefront of my mind at the moment. Finishing the damned thing is rather more important.

But the story is entertaining me, which is the most important thing, and I’m glad I made it major project two of twelve for 2009.

Now there is wine. See you on Day 3.

Okay, coffee is to hand, I’ve started the day’s work, and Hopkins is about to pull the second big reveal. I’m playing around with multiple first person narrators in this book, and Hopkins is the most difficult of all. Where I know a lot about Tanith, who tells most of the story, and Nicholas and Max, who chip in occasionally, Hopkins is a deliberate enigma. He’s not a man of words, which should make this next bit something of a challenge.

Since starting work yesterday, I’ve pushed the book from 63% complete up to 70%, according to the little graphical thingy at the top there. It’s a satisfying thing to see, suggesting I’m cresting the final hurdles. In reality, that’s chapters 26 through 29 in the bag, and I’m making a start on chapter 30 now. I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m closer to the end than I think – it no longer feels as though I need another 25000 words to finish the story, so it might end up shorter than 80000. We’ll see. It will be as long as it needs to, and no more.

One great pleasure to writing this book is the personal flashbacks to making the movie (which I also acted in, playing the mysterious Hopkins). Man, that was a good two weeks…

Oh, and I found an alternative to Braveheart. Harry Gregson-Williams’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe came on after Gladiator while I was writing yesterday, and I couldn’t break away to turn it off and find something else. Turns out, it works very well indeed.

Which is nice.

Onwards!

Nearly 4000 new words on Craven Place today, which isn’t bad at all given this morning was mostly finishing off the editing of what had gone before. I’m not quite done for the day, so there may be more to come, but my brain is caffeine-fried, and there are televisual distractions to be had. I’ll tap little bits through the evening, and see what happens.

Although the screenplay forms a loose outline for the novel, the emphasis is on ‘loose’. The novel is evolving quite significantly from the movie that never-quite-was, with the supernatural aspects in particular becoming more pronounced. The conclusion is also going to be rather different, I think, though I’ve yet to decide. There’s a way to go yet, and not much time. March happens on Sunday, after all.

The prep work I’ve done re-reading and editing the first half of the book has helped me to skip easily into the groove today, so it’s been time well spent. My biggest worry about taking this book back on was that I was going to be bored by what I’d previously written, or unable to get into the mindset I had ten years ago, when the book really began. So far, it’s been an easy journey. The only regret I have is my writing music of choice. I had wanted to write it to the soundtrack of Horner’s Braveheart (my writing music is always, without exception, wordless mood stuff, usually movie scores), because that’s what I wrote the screenplay to all those years ago. Alas, my CD must have been scratched when I burned it in iTunes. I’m using Zimmer’s Gladiator as a reliable standby, but it doesn’t quite fit, especially when it gets bombastic. Still, it’s a small complaint, from a good day.

It counterbalances any gloom from a short story rejection that popped into my inbox this afternoon. There are some interesting notes from the editor – the story contains so much detail that, despite nice turns of phrase, they lost the thread of the tale – that I might come back to some day. This particular story is quite personal to me, and I freely confess that I have real problems standing objectively back and looking at it, so there might be some mileage in the crit. However, it may be that this falls into the spectrum of a particular editor’s taste, and the next person to read it may respond quite differently. I’ve sent the story to a new market, and I’ll see how it goes. Normally, I’m quite good at judging how important it is to change a story from a particular editor’s note, or whether it should be left alone, but not with this tale. Time will tell.

Right, time to take plonk my fried brain in front of something that isn’t this computer screen, I think.

Okay, this week I’ve a break from the day job, and nothing difficult scheduled for my days, which gives me time to attend to the major writing project of the month (last month’s was finishing off the draft of Hiram Grange and the Nymphs of Krakow for Shroud Publishing). That project is to finally complete the novel Craven Place.

There’s quite a history to this piece. The original story was co-devised by myself and my then partner-in-crime Mitchell Morgan, director and screenwriter, and at the time also a producer with Splendid Films ltd. Having successfully written, directed, and released (to video in the States) his first feature length movie Only Darkness, Mitch was looking for a second project. For reasons to complicated to explain, he already had a location, an old farmhouse in North Wales, sitting next to the Menai Straits, but he didn’t have a story.

We got together. Beer happened. There was an inspiration involving cows that we could never quite remember the day after (fortunately), and the supernatural murder mystery Craven Place was born. Having plotted it out together, I took the outline away and spent a caffeine and nicotine fuelled 72 hours turning the idea into a full script (those were the days). Scarcely a week later, we were on location, filming with a small cast and crew on 16mm. We were there for a splendid couple of weeks, and Mitch and Jon, the co-director, got the thing in the can.

I’m not entirely sure what happened next. I’ve seen a rough cut of the movie, which looked dandy for what it was, though the sound quality, especially the exteriors, was awful. As far as I’m aware, the project ran out of what limited budget it had before it completed post-production, and it was never released. The company moved on, producing at least two more films, the bonkers crime / zombie flick Jack of Diamonds, and the genuinely intriguing Requiem with Jason Connery, and no more was ever heard of regarding Craven Place itself.

Which is where the story would stop, except that I own the rights to turn the thing into a novel. While Mitch had carte blanche to film the script as he saw fit, making changes and asking for on the spot rewrites while we were in Wales, and profiting from the movie however he saw best, I asked for, and happily received, all rights to adapt the story into a novel. In 1999, I began that process with a couple of chapters, until another project forced me to put it aside. Later, in 2006, I went back to the story, hoping to finish it off, and brought the whole thing up to the 50,000 words mark before getting pulled away again.

Now, I’d like to finish it. I like Matthew, Tanith, Nicholas, and the crowd. I like their story. I think it deserves another shot at being aired, between pages rather than on screen. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been quietly going through the first 50,000 words, amending, tweaking, reminding myself of what had transpired, and what is still to come. This week, I’m hoping to get it most of the way to a full draft, and you’re welcome to watch.

Of course, there’s no publisher awaiting this manuscript. When it’s complete, it will be submitted to slush piles the world over, and you’re welcome to follow that process too. We’ve a way to go before then though. As I sit down today, there are 50,936 words to the manuscript. I think there’s at least 30,000 words to go, at a rough estimate (who knows – it could yet be longer or shorter). I can’t promise I’ll get it done before March lands on us, but if I can even progress it, I’ll be happy enough. Craven Place is unfinished business, and I need to clear it before I can move on to other things.

So, I’m sitting down and going back to that old cottage in Wales. Some people have died. Some have fled. Some have stood their ground, and are waiting to confront the thing that haunts the stones of Craven Place…

Time to go and see how they’re getting on.