And here’s what the back cover says:

Teenage boys aren’t known for sharing their fears and emotions, so if you’re the father or sister of one, how do you know how he’s coping with his mum’s death?

Fifteen year old Hunter isn’t entirely sure himself, and even if he could put any of it into words, he no longer knows who to say it to.

So if zero pence sounds like a good price to pay for the beautifully-drawn saga of a bereaved teenage goth in Edinburgh, feel free to peruse and comment – part of the reason for doing this is to reach a wider audience; there’s only so many people willing to buy an 80-page graphic novel by relative unknowns and I’d prefer to have more people read it. Particularly those that might not normally think of themselves as graphic novel audience material.

Boys Don’t Cry by Jacqueline Saville, Mark Pexton, Andrew Woods is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Proust and a handful of nineteenth-century Russians aside, in my family the most-read works in translation are undoubtedly detective novels. From Simenon’s Maigret to Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano via Henning Mankell, my dad and I have travelled the world on the back of a crime novelist’s pen. OneMonkey’s dad has been watching French, Swedish, and Danish crime series on TV recently, now dismissing the British adaptation of Wallander as second-rate, and barely stomaching the first episode of an American remake of one of the other Scandinavian series. Would he even be tempted by a subtitled European sitcom? Unlikely.

Crime fiction more than any other genre seems to be rooted in a sense of place, more often than not a real place. Read enough of them and you too can walk the streets of 1990s LA with Robert Crais or 1930s San Francisco with Dashiell Hammett, the deserted canyons of 1940s California with Raymond Chandler or the backstreets of Paris with Georges Simenon. While the settings are often fictionalised versions of a real town, or even a fictional town placed within a real area, some writers do use real locations quite faithfully, which is where the modern miracle of Google maps comes in.

Noting that Saratoga Springs was a real place while reading a Charlie Bradshaw book by Stephen Dobyns, I looked it up on a map. That gave me a sense of where it was, and how far from Albany and other locations sometimes mentioned in the books, and is as far as I would have been able to go in the past. Enter Google and its street views. I can walk down the main street following Charlie from the pool to his mother’s hotel, or see the race track entrance as Victor sees it. I can immerse myself in the town and its make-up. Of course I’m not expecting all the streets that Dobyns mentions to be real, I’m not even expecting him not to take liberties and make the town hall visible from a street where actually all you’d see is the looming library. However, that extra element, beyond his descriptions, of seeing the width of the streets, the trees, the age and style of buildings, the jostling of old and new – it’s certainly more entertaining than any Geography lesson I had at school. I don’t think I’d use a detective novel as a guide book to a foreign city, but they can open up an easy doorway to a different world.

First I’ll point to places I’ve used for reference: the debut dagger advice itself, a page I found a while ago when I was trying to put together a synopsis for the unpublished (and commercially infeasible) serial novel Wasted Years, and a page which is largely directed at romance novelists but has lots of advice that seems transferable.

Writing a synopsis should be so simple. It’s short (1000 words maximum for the debut dagger), you don’t have to know exactly how the cunning twist comes about in all its detail, and all you have to do is say what your novel’s about. I found it very helpful to follow the advice from Marg Gilks and do a short chapter summary. Every week or so I went back and skim-read the chapters I’d written since the last summarising session, and wrote in a document kept purely for this purpose a few sentences outlining main plot points. Since this is a detective novel I made sure I wrote down key facts that had been discovered or relayed, so I could keep up with who knew what. This has been useful during the writing itself, never mind the synopsis – you can’t have a big revelation if you glance down your summary and remind yourself that he knew that 3 chapters ago.

So organisation seems crucial for writing a synopsis. The other main ingredient is of course editing, and the amount you have to do for this might even make you reasonably good at it. Even the brief chapter summaries probably add up to something substantial, and certainly my version with the who knows what when element is far too detailed for a synopsis. This is a good test of how ruthless you can be, you will cut out entire subplots, characters and probably some of your neatest summing-up phrases. Not only are you trying to convey the plot but you’re also supposed to convey something of the flavour or style of the book, which is the bit I found hardest, my early drafts were the right length but more like dry bullet points than a flowing abbreviated tale.

My main breakthrough came when I realised (not just knew that this was said to be so, but really realised) that the person reading the synopsis doesn’t know how accurate you’re being – if you’re cutting corners, using sleight of hand, oversimplifying, it doesn’t matter. As long as the synopsis itself makes sense, which is where OneMonkey (or your personal equivalent) comes in – having someone else read it is invaluable and it’s not like it’s going to take them long. The detached eye will not only pick up on the usual typos etc, but on points at which the ruthless editing has chopped the linking sentence, the first appearance of someone you refer to familiarly later on, or the only other plot point that made what you wrote in paragraph 3 make sense.

In short, then:

Get organised. Get good at editing. Get yourself a friend who’s not afraid to ask why on earth Theodore would be so bothered about dropping his apple pie.

We all know editing’s a necessary part of writing, but it’s not always seen as the fun part, the rewarding part. So much more pleasant to rack up that wordcount (look at the popularity of NaNoWriMo) than make anything properly finished out of it. I was seduced by rising wordcount in 2011; in the second half of the year I wrote over 80,000 words of detective novel and believe me, it felt good. I can point to the wordcount graph (what do you expect from someone who used to read Physics World?) with its steep slopes or steady inclines, or I can point to the pile of first draft pages (or I could if I’d printed them all out) and anyone can see what it is I’ve been doing.

Not so in this phase. I spend hours working and either have the same number of words, or less than I started with. I write copious notes about scenes to be slotted in, conversations to be staged between characters, facts that have been lost. But I can’t point to any concrete achievement. The first chapter may be substantially better than when I sat down half an hour ago (such is the plan, anyway) but at a casual glance it looks no different. The synopsis (of which possibly more later) is growing but only agonisingly slowly, and anyway it’s a synopsis, it doesn’t count as writing.

It’s at this point that I need to remind myself (and may as well also remind any fellow writers reading this – think of it as a bargain from the January sales) that this is the crucial bit, the bit that makes the difference between tens of thousands of coherent words on a related subject, and a novel. As I proved last summer and autumn, it’s not as hard as you think it’s going to be, to sit down regularly and gradually amass enough words to fill a couple of hundred paperback pages. Unless you edit ruthlessly, however, it will never be a novel. There is nothing for it but to knuckle down, with only a cup of tea and the faint hope of future pride to keep you going.

The problem with an exercise like that is, you might write something good. If the glimmer of a decent story emerges from it, you’ll want to use it, and how much can you change (to make it unrecognisable to your nearest and dearest – or worse, colleagues and bare acquaintances) without spoiling it? This is particularly a danger with short stories, where one incident can make up nearly the whole thing, and if it’s recognisably true, some people will of course assume the whole story is. There will then follow one of the following responses:

You didn’t tell me you’d been to the V&A when you went for that job interview.
(I didn’t; I made that bit up. I do remember seeing a poster for it at the time)

So that’s what happened to my gold pen! Return it by tomorrow morning and I won’t call the police.
(Nope, didn’t even know it was missing. Seems I’m not the only one to have noticed you leave it lying around when your office door’s unlocked)

You should be ashamed of yourself.
(Maybe, but only because I have a mind that works that way; I have never actually done that, nor would I wish to)

I can’t believe you could be so awful about Uncle Ken. I’ll never speak to you again.
(No, you see, a character with a similar job to mine said that about another character with a similar history to Uncle Ken. I don’t agree with her – but you’ve already slammed the phone down)

Note that the above examples are themselves fictional: though I have encountered responses along some of these lines, I have never had a job interview in London or an Uncle Ken, nor do I know anyone with a gold pen. But you get the idea.

Most writers probably have at least one pivotal moment, the kind where every time you think of it you shudder, and/or breathe a sigh of relief. If they were already in the writing mindset at the time it happened, even then (or shortly afterwards) they were probably mulling over the ‘what if’ scenarios, and it would almost certainly provide a rich store of material for heartfelt stories – the emotions would be real because they’d still be vivid years later (given the type of event we’re talking about). But if the events had that kind of resonance, would it be a sensitive issue for friends or family? Would they read the resulting tale and, recognising its source, assume that the character’s point of view was that of the author? Dangerous territory, and so far, I’m too much of a coward to wade in.

Postscript: since writing this and putting it aside to use in a few weekends’ time, I’ve read Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman. In the introduction he mentions that one of the stories in that collection (I forget which one, and the book is upstairs) is close enough to the truth that he’s had to explain to a few relatives that it didn’t quite happen that way. Which sort of proves my point, and reinforces my stand.

I’ve been avoiding writing since I’ve been on holiday, too much like hard work. I’ve got the Debut Dagger entry to put together, which is frankly terrifying, and I should tidy up some mostly-finished stories to send off to places. Inevitably of course I’ve been eating mince pies, doing vastly important rearrangements of the newly reinstated bookcase, and generally filling up my days such that I go to bed wondering where the time went.

Thankfully, Neil Gaiman has set me back on track. Not personally, of course, and I haven’t even been reading his usually absorbing journal lately. I have been travelling on trains a lot though, and yesterday I picked up a book almost at random (it had a purple cover, which was enough to catch my eye) from the To Read pile. It was Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of stories and poems by Neil Gaiman, which has a long introduction with notes on each piece.

One of the things I like about Neil Gaiman’s journal is its feeling of honesty (I’m not saying it is honest, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t filtered and buffed up and slanted in particular ways); the illusion that here is this perfectly ordinary Englishman, with the same problems of self-doubt, occasional laziness, lack of inspiration, and looming deadlines as the rest of us. Here, we think, is something I could aspire to, it’s not entirely beyond my reach, no superhuman powers needed. Of course that’s glossing over the ability to write gripping stories well, but that’s not necessarily relevant at this point.

And so to Smoke and Mirrors. I’m about halfway through and though I confess I’ve been more puzzled than anything by the poems (I think I knocked my poetry Off switch a couple of years ago and I can’t seem to accidentally elbow it back into life), almost all of the stories so far have made me berate myself for letting such a book languish on my shelf for six months. Though if I’d read it immediately in the summer, it wouldn’t have been available to provide that much-needed spark of inspiration now. Which it has. The stories themselves have fired me up, but the notes in the introduction have been useful in an Ah, he does that too sort of a way, like a narrowly-focused version of his journal.

Not having a hat with me, I’ll raise my sister’s jaunty Christmas-pudding-shaped hat to Mr Gaiman and wish him a marvellous festive season and all the best for 2012. And that goes for you, too.

Which brings me to my current problem, which isn’t so much a problem as a pang of regret with a lesson attached. Some books have a Read By date.

By this I don’t mean some flavour of the month bestseller that wasn’t very good anyway, so needs to be read during the hype period while all your friends are insisting it’s ironic and subversive – so bad it’s bloody marvellous. What I mean is there are books you grow out of, and not just the ones whose puerile humour appealed at 14 and appalls at 40.

The book I’ve been slowly reading on my daily commute for the last couple of weeks is an abridged (but still hefty) edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I bought it, as far as I can remember, with a Christmas book token 13 or 14 years ago and had I read it then I’m sure I would have enjoyed it a whole lot more. I had more uninterrupted reading time, I could remember a lot more Latin (Gibbon assumes, no doubt perfectly reasonably for the time, that if you’re reading his book you must be educated enough to translate the Latin quotes and inscriptions, so he doesn’t patronise his readers by doing it for them), and I had more of an idea which order the Roman emperors came in and what each was usually remembered for. Even 8 years ago when I did a couple of open learning courses on the early middle ages at my (then) local university, I would have been immersed in the period though my Latin was already patchy.

The lesson to take away from this is: don’t keep shoving things to the back of your To Read cupboard.

Unless it’s: don’t buy more books than you can manage.

I lost track of time a bit towards the end of the month, where I was frantically making up for the lost days. So I never got round to blogging last weekend, and I missed 2 short story deadlines right at the start of December, which I’m really kicking myself for – the story submissions have been almost non-existent while I’ve been concentrating on detective novels.

And now we’re counting down to Christmas; I’m limbering up for full-on bah humbug mode, and in the meantime I’m filling up on mince pies and dry roasted peanuts. And planning the long writing sessions I’m hoping to get in over the Christmas break. We’re due our first snow tomorrow, though it’s already been sleeting, but instead of worrying about the rose trees I haven’t planted yet, I’ll focus on the prospect of getting stuck at home – I have a cupboard full of mince pies and teabags, a laptop and a head-full of ideas. Sounds like heaven.

One last thing: my detective story is now up on the Comets and Criminals website if you’d like to check that out.

As this post goes out, I will actually be at (or on my way to – I haven’t set the time yet) the Thought Bubble comic convention in Leeds. With luck, I will be selling comics, but at the very least I’ll be with friends in interesting surroundings and I should be able to find some new comics to get interested in (these events can get expensive).

Where does this leave my frantic novelling, I hear you ask (look, just pretend you asked). It pretty much wipes out two days, but since one of the aforementioned friends is also in the midst of NaNo frenzy, we may goad each other into amazing literary feats on Saturday evening. My total should be at around 16,000 words by Friday night (Friday night itself being scratched out due to the Damned gig – got to get your priorities right) so fingers crossed for a decent total by the end of the month.

I’m enjoying NaNo – after ScriptFrenzy I thought I probably would. I’m taking it slow and steady, not worrying too much about the final total as long as what I’ve got is usable, and it’s taking me down some interesting avenues. I’ve already uncovered a weird antagonism between two secondary characters that needs exploring further, and I may even have got the wrong murderer (how can the author get it wrong?). Very much an enjoyable Sunday drive rather than a satnav-planned A to B dash.

Best of luck for the second half of the month to all those participating, further apologies to anyone who’s being neglected (more than usual). Back to the fray.

Strange, Weird & Wonderful has published its final issue, just before the one that my story was due in. So while that’s a sale I won’t make (payment on publication, not acceptance), a credit I can’t chalk up on my scoreboard, and a story that’s back to doing the rounds, if I was looking on the bright side I’d say at least I don’t have to produce that audio version after all (though I’d actually started to feel good about the challenge).

NaNoWriMo is going slowly, probably even slower than I’d anticipated, but if you know you’re not going to make it to 50,000 words, any number’s an achievement and you don’t end up feeling stressed and guilty if you do other things for a while during November. Such as a 2-day comic convention.

Thought Bubble is less than a week away which is a bit scary (in an exhilirating way). I also know that I’m not going to get an early night before it, and I’ll probably have had to put up with a late-night long-distance taxi ride. The bright side of that one is positively dazzling though: we’re off to see The Damned on Friday. Excuse me while I touch up my black nail varnish.