Iskander: Blog

As promised, I have started posting the final version of Through my Eyes. Again. - two chapters at a time every week. This has, I hope, eliminated the errors in English and German - and I'd like to thank the readers who have helped find and correct them.

There have been some minor changes to the early chapters, but the story remains unchanged throughout. However, what was the final chapter (19) has now blossomed into two chapters, providing much more detail about Will's life after Col and Mutti Frida disappeared.

Within the next ten days or so, I will be posting the final ebook version of TMEA to my Patreon - watch out for an announcement here, on my Patreon and Discord server.

Once again, than you for reading my writing - and particular thanks to those of you who have provided feedback and critiques: it's great to hear what people liked but it's also important to hear what people did not like. I have attempted to reply to every message I've received, but if I missed a couple in the flurry, my apologies.

Finally, there is going to be a sequel - in fact it is already underway. I will be posting beta versions of the chapters to my Patreon when thry are ready for the light of day. If you are interested, please keep an eye on my Patreon and Discord server.

Next weekend, I will be posting the revised version of Through my Eyes. Again. in multi-chapter segments (2 or more chapters a week).

Also a beta version of the revised final chapter (now two chapters) is available to patrons on my Patreon. See my home page for the link.

Iskander

I have received quite a few interesting and insightful comments about Through my Eyes. Again. since posting the final chapter. As I have already revealed, this is my first 'public' attempt at a novel (and the first novel I have ever finished) and there are very clearly some rough edges and dangling threads that require rectification. I have also had several lengthy discussions with a couple of authors whose opinion I greatly value. The upshot of this is that I am embarking on a larger and more detailed review of TMEA than just 'tidying things up'.

I am considerably rewriting the final chapter to provide more detail of what happened to Will after Col and Mutti Frida disappeared in late April 1964. This is already underway and that final chapter is probably going to end up as two chapters.

At the same time, I have two versions of chapter 1 of the sequel under way as I try to work out the best way for the story to unfold. As with TMEA, I have a beginning (well, two - a different one for each version of chapter 1) and a glimmer of an ending through the fog.

And this is a problem I will have to watch carefully, because some of the faults on TMEA are due to the story growing organically - there was almost no planning of any kind. The characters lived in my head and practically wrote the story themselves. For example, whilst Col was German from the beginning and I had a picture of him in my head, it was only during that first conversation with Will in the cedar tree that Col's true nature was revealed. Similarly, Mutti Frida's childhood in various Nazi prisons and then in Ravensbrück concentration camp was only revealed when Col told Will he also feared his father.

One of the criticisms I have received is for that final sentence - but I do not apologise for ending the book there. The more I thought about how to end, that ending was the most appropriate. At the time, I had no sequel planned and yet clearly that ending just about demands one.

And one is now growing.

I clearly have quite a lot to learn about storytelling and for this I apologise to you, my readers: you have been (are being) a tremendous help and for this I freely give thanks to all of you.

So, please keep an eye on my blog, Patreon and discord server for more news as the revision and sequel progress. I do not expect to re-post the revised version for several months, though.

Yesterday I posted the final chapter of Through my Eyes. Again. to my Patreon. I am now busy on a final (I hope) pass through all nineteen chapters, checking spelling, grammar, imposing uniform formatting on book titles and foreign languages words and sentences (and deciding which ones require translations and which ones do not)…in other words the vital but boring 'paperwork' part of writing. Somewhat inevitably, re-reading what I have written for the umpteenth time leads to inevitable fiddling around the edges: a more apposite word choice here, a slight reordering of words there. Interestingly, some sections attract more fiddling than others - which suggests to me that some parts of my writing 'flowed' more fluently than most of the rest, which required some - or a lot of - wrangling.

And whilst this is going on, I have a helpful reader pointing out to me that MI5 would not have been the UK security organisation dealing with Col and Mutti Frida, but MI6. MI5 is concerned with domestic security issues as opposed to MI6 handling international issues. When Mutti Frida and Col arrived in the British sector of West Germany, they would have ended up talking to MI6 and Mr Watling, Mutti Frida's contact, and his trilby hat would have worked for MI6. So now I must go back over the chapters to find that problem and fix every occurrence … which leads to more temptation to tinker with the text.

I asked an author who has given her time to me quite generously at what point she decided that a book was 'done'. She, perhaps with some tongue in cheek, replied that it is finished when 'you get sick of looking at it and evict it from your life'. TMEA is perhaps approaching that point, but there is still work to do, such as the ebook version of TMEA, for which I am using Scrivener. This is a huge program for authors and I am slowly getting to grips with its incredibly wide feature set. For this, there is some cover art in production and the ebook will have to wait for that to complete.

All this is happening underneath 'real life' - with all its Covid-19 complications, difficulties and anxiety as we Australians (state by state) become guinea pigs in the experiment that is our release from lockdown. Given the behaviour being reported this weekend, I am not optimistic that we will avoid a second wave and a return to lockdown in our capital cities.

But, in the depths, there are new story ideas bubbling away at a low simmer.

A reader has suggested to me that there was something not quite right with Will's character - and this, as you might imagine, is a difficult thing for an author to hear about any character, let alone the protagonist of a story. But it is important to recognise that, from their perspective, they are right: that is the way this reader understands Will. Fortunately, in conversation last year with an author I respect deeply, I was reminded that every reader brings themselves to a story: in effect, everyone reads a different version of Through my Eyes. Again. and an author has no control over those versions. To my friend, this is one of the delights of writing although to a novice writer like myself, that feels, well, a bit unsettling. It is as if I drop a pebble in the water, creating a specific set of ripples, but they then interact in unexpected ways with the objects the ripples encounter. I understand the Physics of waves well but there is a strange metaphysics occurring when those ripples are a story and the objects it interacts with are people and their imaginations.

This 'everybody has their own version' is an issue I am slowly coming to terms with as readers send me their comments. There is an instinctive desire to write back "Yes, but…" and, so far, this has been constrained.

In addition to having a weird composite protagonist, Through my Eyes. Again. also plays with history. Its world starts out close to the one we live in, but there are differences. Small ones that Will recognises quite quickly but then larger ones. Will knows almost immediately that the world he has arrived in is different but he has no idea if those differences are small and insignificant or, perhaps, they have a domino effect cascading into big and possibly dangerous changes. Some of the differences Will recognises - but there are others he does not. Playing with alternate history is fun but quite dangerous as history is a complex of intertwining threads and readers bring their own interpretation of the specific 'what ifs' involved. By the end of Through my Eyes. Again. the world Will has fallen into is very different to the one he previously lived through.

It is my hope that this different world is believable - in the sense of the 'willing suspension of disbelief' necessary for all stories.

See my Author Information for my Patreon site and Discord channel.