Some things that have happened.

Elvis Presley has applied for a job as our driver.  I am not kidding.  Unfortunately, he is unlikely to get the position.  Having googled for character references, he is apparently nothing but a hound dog.

The weather here in Delhi has made another sharp change, and is closing fast on a British summertime.  It’s gorgeous today, clear skies and temperatures in the mid-twenties.  By next weekend it should be hovering near thirty, and it’s not yet March.

Next weekend, however, is a holiday weekend, with Monday being Holi.  People throw paint over each other enthusiastically, so I believe.  We will be spending a couple of nights in the city of Jaipur, poking around and generally exploring.  It’s known as the pink city, which I suspect refers to the stonework more than a subculture, and we’re taking a slow train there and back.  Looking forward to seeing some of the India between the cities, even if it’s only in passing.

Various bits of television are being watched at the moment, on iTunes or DVD.  Season one of Babylon 5 is for the most part comically bad, but extremely watchable.  The last season of Lost is so far daring and baffling, with concurrently running parallel universes in which the characters are living different versions of their own lives being one of the most daring ways to run a narrative I’ve seen (yet to confirm whether it’s going to actually work in drawing the series to a close).  24 is as brilliant and unlikely as ever.  The second series of Being Human is lovely, compelling, and beautifully written.  The first season and a bit of The Wire have convinced me that all of the ‘greatest television series ever made’ reviews may not actually be hyperbole.  There’s more, but I shan’t bore you with it just now.

I now have a lovely Rorschach print above my desk in my study.  I see a praying child, Kirsty sees Kenny from South Park lying on his back, Eva sees a monster.  Your mileage may vary.

Hiram Grange continues to pick up excellent reviews.  The third book should be along shortly, and I’m just about to start work with the editor on my own tome.  Exciting times.  Final edits have also been received and returned for the Apex Books anthology Dark Faith, which is going to be quite a book.

And now it is the weekend, and slumping can happen, with some slouching thrown in for good measure.

Finally, after four months of taxis and tuk-tuks around Delhi, we’ve order a new car.  It looks very much like the above, except it doesn’t have fancy script over the licence plate.  We’ve a short period of waiting to undertake, as various forms get filed at various departments, us being furriners and all, and then we can take to the road proper.

Well our driver will, anyway.  We’ll be in the back, taking in the sights.

It’s a big motor, at least bigger than anything we would have considered buying in the UK, but height is a definite bonus on Indian roads, as is power.  Eight seats, 2.5 litre engine, and in ours anyway, tuk-tuk-intimidating front bull bars.  After that, the traffic can come and have a go, if it thinks its hard enough.

Valentine’s Day has largely involved varying degrees of suffering in this house, but only because we went out yesterday instead (no school run to get up for this morning).  There was beer.  There was bollinger.  There was wine.

There was, today, a great deal of lying still and groaning.

The meal was good though, partaken of at a nearby Lebanese place called Mashrabiya.  We were seated in a tent, with various cushions to become recumbent on, and had a comedy waiter who threw beer around, fell over himself while trying to light our cigarettes, and attempted to set fire to our tent with a brazier of hot coals.

Most entertaining, though unfortunately not the sort of regularly scheduled performance you can call up and book.

So, I was in the study, headphones in, enjoying an atmospheric audio play involving Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and friends.  It was a dark and stormy night.  There was thunder crashing and lightning flashing.  I thought the audio mixing was a little off, because I couldn’t really make out what the actors were saying beneath the storm effects.

Except, of course, the audio was enhanced by the actual storm that had sprung up outside.  Crashing, bashing thunder, a brutal downpour, lightning, flooding – even hail, and not measly flecks of it either, but big, bouncing chunks of ice.

As is our way, we stood in it for a bit, and breathed it all in.  We like storms, and we really like being surprised by them.

Here’s the second in a brief series of articles about the creation of the Hiram Grange novellas, currently being released by Shroud Publishing, and due to conclude in April with my own ‘Hiram Grange and the Nymphs of Krakow’.  You can find part one here, in which Tim from Shroud Publishing makes mysterious utterings, and lures five writers to him.

Having summoned us to the online equivalent of a darkened room, quietly locking the door when the last of us was in, Tim unveiled his notion.  Five novellas, each twenty-thousand words long, about Hiram Grange.  A man who fights monsters, but who is also a monster.  A scarred, sneering relic, brutally efficient, more than a little misogynistic.  The stories were to be classic pulp fiction, brought bang up to date.

We stared at him for a little bit, in an online, metaphorical sort of a way.

And then we all started to talk at once.  Loudly, and with some waving of arms.  Ideas flew around, steaming hot.  A lot was nailed down, very quickly.  One of the first contributions I made was that the series be properly serial, with each standalone story containing hints of a bigger picture that would play across the five books, and conclude in the last.  As a reader, I love that sort of double engagement with a story – it rewards investment, and has you drumming your fingers waiting for the next part to arrive – and was delighted when the idea was embraced.

We spent a few days emailing constantly – questions and questions and questions.  Who does Hiram work for?  Who are his friends?  Where does he live?  Is he really a borderline alcoholic and habitual drug user?  Were we telling a story that was essentially static, so that the status quo was retained at the end of book five, or were we prepared to set up Hiram’s world, and then explode it around him, ready for something new if the books did well enough for us to take things further forward?  How heroic a hero is he?  What does he wear?  How did his parents die?  Why is one chamber of his Webley filled with a spent shell?  How do confluences actually work?  Who is his real nemesis, and how much do we unveil about him/her in the series?  We agreed, we argued, we nicked each others ideas, changing them and throwing them back into the pot so that somebody else could do the same thing again.

We slaughtered each others babies mercilessly, leaving room for better ones to be born.  Not the most humane metaphor for the writing process, but better than the usual triteness about nurturing a story like a child and watching it grow, etc.  I always find it more like a cull, followed by the brutal conditioning of and enforced surgery on any survivors, until you’ve one left that you think you can live with.  That’s how it works for me, and definitely how I viewed the creation of Mr Grange.

It was bloody exhausting, but extremely exciting.  By the end, we had something to take forward, a world and a man we thought we could tell thrilling stories about.  That’s when we went away into our own little worlds, to make his stories our own.  In a month or so, I’ll tell you about Poland, and the Beast of the Air, and the horrors of continuity, and how we infected each others stories so that each book has a little bit of all of us in it.

In the meantime, for more Hiram you can check out an interview with him, currently running at Choate Road.  You don’t often see your characters interviewed, so this was interesting.

You can also check out this review of Hiram Grange and the Twelve Little Hitlers, Scott Christian Carr’s brutal and twisted second entry in the series (how can you not love the title?).

And of course, you can go to Amazon and buy the first two books.  Just tap “Hiram Grange” into the search box, and get ready for a ride.

Last year, I embarked on both getting fit, and getting very unfit.  The fitness bit lasted until around about June, and was going quite well.  Alas, it hit the brick wall of packing up, getting married, and emigrating to India, followed by prolonged stress while we worked out whether Eva’s schooling was going to let us stay here.  During this period, I embarked on becoming very unfit indeed.

It was, I’m delighted to tell you, a resounding success.  My grandad is fitter than me, and, not to be too crass about it, he’s been dead longer than I’ve been a grown-up.

However, with Eva in school since Monday, and settling in pretty well all things considered, all that stress has vanished.  Suddenly, I feel quite comfortable here, and ready to get on with the new normality.  This involves getting back on the fitness train.

Having had a couple of practise work-outs this week, running about a bit and doing some light upper body stuff, I can confirm that I’m right back to where I started last year.  Possibly further back, if that’s possible.  Truthfully, I may not even be on the train.  I may in fact be on the fitness donkey, and it’s slow, bumpy, and bloody painful.

I feel like a walking* bruise.

Still, at least I remember from last time that this is a good thing, and means things have started.  It’s even a satisfying sort of pain, while also being incredibly inconvenient in almost all circumstances.  Roll on next month, when I should be working out how far I can ‘push it’, rather than worrying whether I’m going to incapacitate myself even ‘leaning against it’.

* Or possibly a hobbling one.

You may have been wondering what caused my gloom yesterday, and rightly so.  I can tell you, because there’s been an unexpected conclusion to the problem, out of left field.

Since arriving in New Delhi at the start of October, my daughter, aged six, has not been attending school, for a variety of frustrating reasons out of our hands.  It’s been a strain, to say the least, waiting, and waiting, for news of a place to emerge.  The stress, particularly for my wife, has been enormous.  Had we kept Eva out of school that long in the UK, the authorities would have intervened ages ago, and rightly so.

What we were holding out for was the start of the new term, when there’s usually some movement in the ex-pat schools here, as some people move on.  Yesterday, we found out there had been none – worse, Eva had been gazumped by new arrivals, was further from a place than ever, and might well not find herself in school until the next academic year.

Which is when we decided we were probably going to have to go back to the UK.  Living overseas is a fine and splendid opportunity to seize, but not at the cost of a year’s education for your child.

It was a long and unpleasant twenty-four hours.

And today, thanks to a ridiculous string of fortunate and unlikely occurrences, we have a school place.  She starts on Monday.  The relief is almost as shattering as the stress and depression was.

So, that’s what that was all about.  Now we can do things we’ve been avoiding, in case the UK beckoned.  Like, you know, settle in and actually making this place a home.

Midwinter in New Delhi looks like this most mornings (at least, they have since the New Year).

It’s also an accurate visual representation of my current mood.  Like an artist’s impression.  But with a tree.

What most writers who don’t have it really yearn for is somewhere to work, an office or study.  It’s not an imperative – I’ve been writing various things for over a decade without one – but the move to India has finally provided just such a space.  I’ve been slow to make use of it, as the last few months have been more about settling in than anything else, but with the launch of 2010 I’ve cleared the clutter and moved in.

It’s a bit daunting, to be honest.  Now that I’ve moved in and sat down, with no distractions, and nothing to do but write, I’ve had to really push to get going.  I have a little momentum now, and that will hopefully build.

And look, I have somewhere to put post-its!  I can’t over-emphasise how fine a thing a post-it is.  Just big enough to capture a thought, but it can be chained together to others to make a whole brainstorm.  I like post-its.

So, it’s on with the motley.  Two timebound projects were waiting for me when I got back from Thailand.  The first is a pitch involving a synopsis and some writing samples I need to throw together, and I’m pleased with what I’ve come up with so far.  Hopefully, by tomorrow, I’ll have it all together and sent away.  When that’s done, pitch number two awaits me, in the form of  a short story I really want to write. That too, hopefully, will be done by the end of the week, so I can get into some of those older unfinished projects I mentioned going back to at the start of the year.

While I’m doing that, I’ll send you back to Hiram Grange for company.  Hiram Grange and the Twelve Little Hitlers, is now available to UK buyers through Amazon, and picking it up with Super Saver delivery still gives you change of a fiver.  Click the image to do just that, and grab Hiram Grange and the Village of the Damned while you’re there.  For those of you in other territories, you should now be able to find it at your local Amazon too.  You know what you must do….

It turns out, the best thing about living in New Delhi is the opportunity it provides for getting out of New Delhi.  Don’t get me wrong, New Delhi is an experience in itself, a cacophonous maelstrom of life and activity that’s exhilarating in both enlivening and exhausting ways.  A restful haven, however, it most certainly isn’t.  Anybody seeking such should look elsewhere.  This was exactly the point of our break in Thailand.

It worked splendidly, starting with two nights in Bangkok at the Lebua hotel.  Lebua is in the State Tower, which is a Bangkok landmark, probably because it’s extremely tall, with a golden shiny thingy sitting on top (not pictured above).  We were supposed to be somewhere on the fifty-somethingth floor, but due to a double-booking ended up on the twenty-first (upgraded, with an extra bedroom, meaning we had floorspace for a reasonably-sized barn dance, had we been that way inclined).  We didn’t mind at all, because we still had views like this.

Bangkok provided, in no particular order, pink taxis, the Grand Palace (covered in gold and shininess per the opening picture), night shopping at Suan Lum market, mad dashes up Chao Praya river in a long tail narrow boat (and the inadvertent drinking and wearing of same river that such adventurousness entails), and more.  I did not previously have a strong desire to be able to say that I have sipped Long Island Ice Teas in Bangkok, but you know, now that I have, that’s kind of cool.  In many ways, the Thais do everything the Indians do – barter, haggle, tout – but they’re just slightly more civilised and less pushy about it.  A very different experience from what we’ve grown used to.

There followed five nights at the fabulous beach fronted Adamas resort in Phuket.  We liked it, a lot.  The sun was hot, the Andaman sea clear and beautiful, and the forest crowded the edge of the golden beach in ways that made me feel like I was in a version of Lost where the survivors have access to tin shacks selling beautiful pizza in wood-fired ovens (a slightly less dramatic premise, I agree).

Those tiny distant shapes at the base of the forest were our accommodation.  With a beach like this, you obviously walk on it quite a lot, every day if possible, but we also found time for barbecued fish, Thai curries, and lounging in the pool.  We only ventured away from the coast for a single day, though it was well worth doing so, because it had this elephant in it.

Her name is Tang Mo,  and she’s fifty-six years old and beautiful.  She used to work in logging before the work dried up, and now she lets people like me ride her on mountainous forest trails in Phuket.  She’s fabulous, and so was the ride (I even got to feed her afterwards).  I also watched monkeys work, was taught how to tap rubber trees, and sat on a water buffalo (this was not an accident).  The day ended with a quick drive to the harbour, where we boarded a junk, set sail, and drank wine as the sun set on the Andaman.  It was quite a show.

There was more, including big lizards and terror crabs, but I’ve lingered too long.  It all had to end, and we were brought back to reality with a slap when we hit the cold fogs of New Delhi, and got stuck on a runway for nearly two hours while the plane waited for somewhere to park, but it was a hell of a break.

Now, it’s on with the motley.  Two writing pitches need urgently attended to, both of them potentially very exciting, and I’m feeling recharged and ready for the fray.  Onwards!