Iskander: Blog

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.

I have just reposted Chapter 17 as I realised that the dateline was missing from the top of the chapter.

There have been no other changes.

This week has been strange in a number of ways. Through my Eyes. Again. is assuredly not my first attempt at writing a novel (that was at age ten), but it is the first time I have finished one, which is quite special, whatever the merits or otherwise of the object itself.

Now, you might be thinking that finishing is a function of having vast expanses of time as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown, but that is not the case: in real life, I am in my eleventh year as a senior Maths/Physics teacher, currently grappling with the vicissitudes of remote learning. I have been up to my eyeballs (and beyond) re-jigging learning materials and using the Internet to try and help my students learn the material and provide them with meaningful feedback, whilst we cope with their flaky internet connections, unreliable computers and understandable engagement lapses - all conducted from my 160-year-old family heirloom dining table, whilst fending off two affectionate ginger cats that want to be part of things. (I have introduced them to my students as my teaching assistants.)

So, writing time during these last few weeks has been in short supply. The end of TMEA has been in sight for a couple of months but getting there took me longer than I had expected for a couple of reasons that have nothing to do with the pandemic.

First, there were scenes that I had not expected that demanded to be included - and from that you can understand that my initial planning of TMEA was, to be polite, rudimentary. So as opposed to ending in chapter eighteen, the story ballooned to nineteen chapters. Indeed, at times, it felt that the end was receding as fast as I wrote.

The other problem was which of the three or four … or five … endings was going to make the final cut. I had started TMEA with a beginning scene and an ending scene and a great deal of fog to walk through to get there. As Willi, Col, Lili and Mutti Frida evolved through writing, different potential endings sprouted along the far horizon, weeds trying to smother the ending I was trying to nurture and reach. Ultimately, the ending that has survived is one that is a close genetic descendant of that originally foreseen. But some of the others were … different (I do not want to provide any hints/spoilers).

Interestingly, I have discovered that the final full stop is not the end of the writing process. TMEA exists as nineteen separate Word files and these need to be combined to produce epub and pdf versions and so I started exploring a variety of ways of doing that, which lead me to a realisation that I needed to sweep through those nineteen files, cleaning them up - mostly grammar and spelling stuff, but also imposing a standard way of including the several non-English languages in the story. This also meant deciding which ones required a translation and which ones did not; these are difficult choices that I have probably got wrong in places. Where I have not provided a translation, I think what is being said is obvious from the context, but since I know what is being said, that decision is problematical. Along the way, inevitably, I have made small tweaks in the text - nothing that changes the story, but hopefully these are stylistic improvements.

Whilst doing this, I realised there was a risk of endless tinkering, so I asked my daughter how she decides when a book is 'done' - her response was "When you get sick of looking at it and evict it from your life." I am not at that stage yet, but perhaps soon … I have five more chapters to sweep though and then thread together.

I hope you enjoy Through my Eyes. Again. - if you do, I would love to hear from you why that is so and if you do not, thoughtful criticism is also very welcome - we grow through examining our mistakes not our successes.

You can comment at my Discord or at my Patreon - the links are in my SOL profile.

May the Fourth be with you

A reader pointed out an amusing misspelling - goal instead of gaol - and when I went in to correct that I found a few other minor issues. So here's the corrected version.