Three Things Not to Do Before Going on Holiday

1)    Covid and Flu vaccinations boost your immunity - but don’t get both jabs on the same day, just before you go away. We had to do this and quickly developed very sore arms and fatigue. T needed to spend the day in bed.

2)    Don’t have hospital treatment just before going away. Seeking to avoid this, I gave the Cancer Centre my holiday dates. They called me in the day before we travelled. I had to drag my sore body to Belfast and came home stressed and exhausted.

3)    Don’t set the car on fire. I was putting the bin out after coming back from the Cancer Centre when I noticed smoke pouring out of my car. I opened the bonnet. Thick smoke was coming from somewhere underneath the engine. I got an old towel and tried in vain to smother the fire. T rang the fire brigade. We stood on the lawn and watched the car smouldering, expecting it to burst into flames at any moment.

Siren blaring, the fire engine screamed up our lane and screeched to a halt. The fire crew rushed out and attached a hose. They heaved the bonnet open. The acrid smell of burnt wiring emerged. But the fire appeared to have gone out. The fire crew stood around the car looking disappointed. One of them disconnected the battery and began removing parts from the car to find the source of the fire. Another surveyed the engine with a heat sensor. The fire had come from a sealed unit low down on the right side of the engine. The plastic covering was all melted but luckily the fire inside had been contained. ‘That’s an important relay’, said one. ‘Going to be expensive’, said another, shaking their head. ‘You mustn’t drive this car until you’ve had it thoroughly checked by an expert’, said the fire chief. ’But', I said. 'It’s supposed to be taking us to the airport tomorrow'.

The Editor's Report

I’ve been quiet on here for a few weeks. You see, I’ve been working with a professional editor on my novel. Louise Walters has edited some 250 novels in a range of genres. For six years she was editor-in-chief of an independent publisher, and she has published five novels of her own. She undertook to read my novel and give me feedback on its structure, plot, pacing and characterisation. In particular I asked her to tell me what was working well in the novel and what were its main flaws and limitations. I sent my manuscript off to Louise thinking that she would come back to me with a pretty long list of defects.

Ten days later I got her report. I opened it with trepidation. Louise said she “enjoyed my writing very much”. She thought that my “central characters were really well drawn and sympathetic. The growing bond between them was well written and their relationship was affecting. The era was well evoked, with good period details, and my description of the natural world was very nicely crafted. The plot was good, pace and tension were fine.” I was glowing with pride. Surely I would soon be on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Then came the defects. Louise told me there was one main problem. I had “too many named characters. My novel was a bit like an over-grown garden, it needed thinning out.” She recommended that I cut my character list. She also recommended that I cut the six chapters written from the antagonist’s point of view. Focus and readability would both be improved if my novel were only narrated from the protagonist’s point of view.

My initial reaction was no, I’m not going to do that. I sweated long and hard over those six chapters. Then I thought, what was the point of paying for professional advice and not listening to it? After all, I could easily lose all the named characters that didn’t have speaking parts. But lose the antagonist’s six chapters as well? That was a good idea I’d nicked from John Banville. I pondered her advice further. The six chapters were short, only 4000 words in total. It wouldn’t hurt to take them out, just as a trial. So I did. And Louise was right. The focus of the novel was improved, as was the pacing and tension.

I’d highly recommend Louise Walters. She’s very professional, insightful and easy to work with. You can read more about her here. https://www.louisewaltersbooks.co.uk/editorialservices

Journey Into Norn Iron

I’m back in the saddle again, after months out of action. Yesterday I cycled up the canal towpath beside Moneypenny’s Lock. The sun was shining, it was warm and I didn’t know what a colourful journey was ahead of me. Entering Portadown, a group of men were blocking the towpath. They had large bottles of strong cider in Tesco carrier bags. Just my luck, I thought, alkies causing trouble again. I rang my bell to warn them of my approach. One of them turned and sang. “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley. Ding, ding, ding went the bell.”  And laughing, they let me pass. Blimey, serenaded by alcoholics, with a tune made famous by Judy Garland in ‘Meet Me in St Louis’.

The end of the towpath is at Town Quay, where a paddle steamer once took passengers across Lough Neagh. Here I joined the Garvaghy Road, the most politicised street in NI and a reputed hotbed of Irish nationalism. But today the houses and the people were bedecked in orange. The colour of the other side. What was going on? Ironic performance art on a grand scale? No. They were supporting the Armagh Gaelic Football team, playing today in the All Ireland Final. I turned onto Ashgrove Road and headed out into open country. On top of the first hill stood the tall pointed spire of the Church of Ireland, Drumcree. The site of large-scale riots 30 years ago over the route of an Orange Order parade. In the oppositional logic of NI, surely this should today be bedecked in maroon and white. The colours of Galway, the opponents of Armagh in the final. But no, the Orange Order had instead applied to march down the Garvaghy Road today. To avoid another riot, permission was refused.

I carried on past dairy farms around the margins of Lough Neagh. The slurry that is spread on these fields is the source of the blue-green algae that blights the water of the UK’s largest lake. Given that it is also the source of 40 % of the drinking water of NI, you’d think people would take more care. Or at least the NI Environment Agency would enforce the rules on slurry spreading and runoff. At Maghery there is a footbridge over the mouth of the River Blackwater that takes you into Tyrone. In the middle of the bridge is a sign. ‘Danger. Do Not Jump From Bridge.’ Beside it stood a group of lads in swimming trunks, daring one another to leap the twenty feet into the dark water below.

Selected for the Top 100

I have some great news. Out of 2452 entries from 78 countries, my novel ‘The Cut’ has reached the top 100 in the competition for the Bath Novel Award 2024. In football parlance, I am truly over the moon. The Bath Novel Award is a major international competition for emerging authors with a first prize of £5,000. I submitted the opening 10,000 words of the novel and a one page synopsis. All entries were read blind and the judges voted for the stories they most wanted to read more of. I shouted, jumped up and ran around the house with a huge grin on my face when I got the news. Despite a series of rejections from agents in London, this is proof positive that my novel is good enough.

Novel writing is a solitary pursuit with little opportunity for unbiased feedback on the quality of one’s work. Even attending a writers’ group, novelists only get feedback on around 500 words due to time constraints. But this feedback concerns just a tiny part of one scene, and a novel is made up of dozens of scenes which are interrelated in time and space. Like sculpture, good novels are supposed to emerge through the editing. As readers of this blog know, I’ve been grafting away for a couple of years on my manuscript, trying my best to improve it bit by bit. It has been a long and lonely process, with only rejection for company. But this accolade undoubtedly proves that I am finally getting somewhere. And it gives me renewed energy for the long and tortuous journey towards publication.

Waiting for the Doctor

I’ve been down with sinusitis for some months now. The problem flares up and then recedes. Every time I think I’m finally on the road to recovery, the problem flares up again. I’ve seen the GP several times and have tried all the steroid nasal sprays. I’ve also rinsed my nose with saline solution and breathed in steam with my head under a towel. But none of these have done the trick. In desperation, I returned to the GP. He said I’d have to see a specialist. There was just one problem. Seeing an ENT consultant on the NHS would mean a wait of several years. Did I want to be referred privately, he asked?  In a cleft stick, I agreed. He wrote me the referral. It was only one sentence, appended to a list of major events in my medical history. Because of my years of cancer treatment these highlights spread onto two pages. Then I began to research the ENT consultants who work privately and who specialize in sinusitis. The first thing I noted is that there are more private hospitals and clinics than there used to be. Hardly surprising, I suppose, with Northern Ireland having the longest NHS waiting lists in the UK. So I found a specialist at a private hospital in Belfast and sought an initial appointment. Even going private, you still have to wait. But only a matter of weeks, not years. My appointment arrived today.

The specialist asked me about my medical history, symptoms and the treatments I’d tried. Then he looked up my nose with a little light on the end of a thin metal cable. It looked rather like the light that an anglerfish holds in front of its jaws to attract its prey. At the other end of the cable was a little box. This was a screen. He said he could see no problems in the upper chamber of my nose. So I would need a CT scan of my sinuses. Then I’d come back and see him in a couple of weeks.

As I was about to leave, I asked him which NHS hospital he normally worked at. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve jumped ship.’ He explained that he’d got so frustrated working in the NHS. His theatre slots were regularly being cancelled because ENT surgery was not seen as important in the face of resource pressures. He said that in the private sector he could treat his patients more effectively and he got much better job satisfaction. As I listened to him I remembered a recent news item. A report has just been published into waiting times for surgery in the NHS in Northern Ireland. The longest waits are in ENT and Urology. Tragically, these are six years!

Recipe for Opening a Novel

It seems I’m a glutton for punishment. After a series of rejections, I’m submitting my novel to agents again. Yes, I’m sorry to say that none of the submissions I made in December 2023 bore any fruit. So in February I turned to a writing consultancy and paid for my submission package to be reviewed. The reviewer, an experienced agent, said my covering letter and my synopsis were fine, but my first chapter wasn’t a good starting point for the book. In fact, she recommended that my second chapter become the opening of the book. This feedback was both helpful and confusing. My second chapter had in fact been the opening of the book until a year ago. My full manuscript was then reviewed by a published novelist who recommended inserting a new action-oriented opening chapter to spice up the story. So I reflected on these two bits of contradictory advice and began editing again.

I did some reading on what an opening chapter has to achieve. In short it needs to introduce the protagonist, their narrative style, the setting and the nature of the story. But most of all, it needs to keep the reader reading. This is usually done by introducing some sort of challenge that the protagonist has to respond to. In other words, it sets up the question – what happens next?

My action-oriented first chapter was very good on challenge, narrative style and setting, but much less so on introducing the protagonist. Then I had an insight. Why should the reader care about what’s happening to the protagonist when they don’t know who they are? So I decided to make my second chapter the opening of the book. It was much better at introducing the protagonist and their world. I also tightened up the story so that the first challenge arrives sooner (on page 2) and is then followed up by another challenge. I think these revisions have improved the opening of the novel a great deal. But, I suppose the proof of the pudding is in the responses I now get from agents.

 

The Perils of Spring Cleaning

The room where I write is small. It was a child’s bedroom. Along one wall is my large oak desk, on which sits my computer. I bought the desk from a second-hand shop in Manchester when I was a PhD student. There is a date-stamp on the underside: 1953. My 71 year old desk is very sturdy and can be dissembled into three pieces; it has lived at ten different addresses with me. Around the rest of the room are four bookcases and two filing cabinets. Over the 22 years I’ve lived in this house, my writing room has accumulated masses of books, folders and papers. Indeed, these became so completely piled up that I could hardly turn around without knocking something over. So there had to be a sort out, and I embarked on it enthusiastically. But when you delve into piles of stuff that have been there for years, you find all sorts of things that you’ve forgotten about.

One of the first things I discovered were my notes from the first session of the Queen’s Writers’ Group that Ciaran Carson ever took. It was 7th October 2009, and Ciaran gave us a talk about Haiku. The next thing I found were notebooks from my first period in hospital as a cancer patient in April-June 2011. These notes were sparse and poignant, they took me back to the City Hospital at a time when I thought my life was at an end. In those dark days I mainly communicated with friends and family by email. I sent out bulletins from my hospital bed and got lots of replies from far and wide, as people were circulating the bulletins. But where were those emails now? Anxiously, I went to my computer and looked back. Yes, the emails were still there. There were hundreds. I read through them. It was emotional and humbling. I was thrust back into those terrible times, where I was the focus of so much care and support.

To be honest, I don’t remember seeing some of the messages before: well wishers from Australia and New Zealand, people trying to find out how the big operation had gone, people who went to Intensive Care and spoke to me... In fact I recall next to nothing of the aftermath of that operation. I was sedated for several days and then I was gripped by severe pain and distanced by morphine. And when I did come out of it, I found myself in a world where everything seemed to have changed. In truth, it had. But in the long run, it wasn’t for the worse.

I’m writing this at my desk. It’s still surrounded by books and papers. Happily there are many fewer piles than there were before, but there’s still plenty to do. So a note of warning about a sort out – you will get waylaid by the past. Spring cleaning is not a short process. Perhaps there is a need to go back, in order to go securely forward.