Blurb
Posted 20 days ago by Scott AndrewsWe have blurb for Operation Motherland:
“I celebrated my sixteenth birthday by crashing a plane, fighting for my life, and facing execution. Again. I’d rather have just blown out some candles and got pissed.”
Lee Keegan travels to Iraq on the trail of his missing father, only to find himself caught between desperate rebels and a general who wants to strap him to an electric chair.
In England, Jane Crowther, one-time matron of St Mark’s School For Boys, attracts the wrong kind of attention and has to fight to protect her new school from unlikely enemies.
And in a bunker underneath Washington, a madman issues orders that will tip two devastated countries into total war.
This is the first year of St Mark’s School For Boys And Girls. It’ll be a miracle if it sees a second.
New review
Posted 32 days ago by Scott AndrewsNice new review of School’s Out.
Antagonist
Posted 34 days ago by Scott AndrewsThis quote from Lauren McLaughlin about how she sets up conflict in her books is wise and useful:
“There’s an inherent symmetry between the protagonist and antagonist, or at least there should be. A writer should love their antagonist as much as their protagonist so that both sides are well represented. I don’t believe in good and evil, but in misguided intention. As a writer, I take the main idea, the “good intentions” of the protagonist and develop a fully realized argument for the “bad intentions” of the antagonist. Only when both sides of the story are fully realized does the reader have the ability to make a conscious decision as to their loyalties to the characters.”
That’s what I tried, very consciously, to do in School’s Out. It’s why I gave the antagonist an entire chapter to explain his point of view. It was a risky thing to do – devote 5,000 words to speechifying in a book that is designed to be balls to the wall action – but it seemed to pay off.
It’s far more difficult to do that this time around, as the villains in Operation Motherland aren’t people, they’re organisations and institutional thinking. The trick is to give those institutions a voice through characters, but it doesn’t have to be one character, one villain; it can be a multiplicity of people who exist at different points along the ideological spectrum of the institution itself; from fanatical commanders to compliant foot soldiers. Each person is part of the whole and so conveys an element of the antagonistic institution’s reasoning.
My challenge is to make those different viewpoints cohere into something scary and implacable.
Still plugging away
Posted 36 days ago by Scott AndrewsBack from a long holiday in Winchester, Cornwall and Bournemouth. Where we got rained on. Lots. But we stayed with lots of lovely people, and Kitty had a fabulous time being fussed over by friends and relatives.
We have discovered, however, that when you become parents your criteria for desirable holiday locations change from:
‘somewhere with nice restaurants, maybe a beach, some good book shops, a cinema, nice hotel’
to:
‘somewhere with a slide’
Having sampled the delights of pretty much every one of Cornwall’s indoor play areas – including, I shit ye not, Dairyland Farm World, “Britain’s leading farm attraction!” – I don’t care if I never see another indoor soft play area again as long as I live.
Have resumed the 9-5 grind, although I shall be released from Boris’s demesne at the end of next week, which means I am again shopping myself around various would-be employers. Such is freelance life.
The book is back on track following a long fallow period, and I’m churning out the words on a pretty regular basis now, which means I may just about meet my deadline after all, which is a relief.
Chapter Four of Operation Motherland contains the words ‘snog’, ‘repressed’ and ‘lube’.
Still not had a contract for the book I’m supposed to be writing after that, although I’ve been assured, more than once, that it’s in the post. So who knows if that will happen or not.
And I still await a response on my three pitches for Top Secret sci-fi franchise thingy, although I was told six weeks ago that the editor would read them that the next day.
Again, such is freelance life, these things are par for the course, totally normal and understandable, and should not be taken personally. I have lots of other things to write to help take my mind of the HELL OF WAITING!
Interesting that in Steven Moffat’s interview in the latest DWM he says that sending scripts to Russell T Davies is really nice because, as a writer himself, he knows how teeth grindingly awful it is to wait for feedback, so he always makes a point of getting back to writers within hours of a draft being delivered to him. Which says a lot about the kind of guy Russell is, I think.
On which note: golly, isn’t Doctor Who particularly marvellous at the moment.
Wonderful things
Posted 65 days ago by Scott AndrewsOne
Sunset on Mars is just about the most amazing thing I have ever seen. It almost brings tears to my eyes, it’s so wonderful, breathtaking and strangely moving.
Two
Obama has has pulled it off. Wonderful in so many ways and for so many reasons.
Justin Webb, the BBC’s excellent America correspondent, lists ten reasons why he won. His tenth choice is particularly noteworthy:
“Axelrod wrote the script. David Axelrod was an adviser to The West Wing and helped mould the character (Matt Santos) who succeeded Jed Bartlett. He based him on Obama and now Obama seems based on Santos. But either way, it was written… And it has come to pass…”
Three
According to the inquest “on the day he died, [BBC DJ Kevin Greening] had been in a leather sling attached to scaffolding in the bedroom”.
Greening’s fella no doubt faced a veritable barrage of prurient tutting following this disclosure.
In the face of this he said: “Kevin and I had a very happy and very vigorous sex life. It was not conventional by heterosexual norms perhaps but it was a sex life which was vigorous and imaginative and we enjoyed each other.”
It may strike some people as paradoxical given the nature of the activity he is refusing to apologise for, but something about Griffin’s unapologetic dignity seems very admirable and old school to me.
Four
Paul Cornell has put Gordon Brown in the first issue of his new comic book, Captain Britain and M13.
This has been picked up by the press, and Paul’s been in The Sun, appeared on News 24, and Jon Culshaw read dialogue from the comic in the voice of Gordon Brown on the Today programme.
Gosh, this makes me smile.
Five
Simon Guerrier’s Sara Kingdom audio play. I’ve read the script. Golly, it’s good.
Six
I have finished the second draft of Chapter Three of Operation Motherland. I’ve gone back to writing long hand as a way or reinvigorating it following the deleted first draft. And I think I’ve cracked the tone, theme and feel of the book, which I think is going to be very different to the first. Which is good.
One Horrible thing, for balance
Two things that should never be mentioned in the same sentence: Guy Ritchie / Sherlock Holmes. Oh God, no.
