Marc Nobbs: Blog

This post is an amalgamation of two posts that first appeared on my website at the end of August.
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A couple of interesting things happened recently while I was writing.

First, the character I posted about previously has undergone her second name change in as many weeks. I received a lot of feedback from readers on StoriesOnline, with some really good suggestions for the type of name I was looking for. I settled on one that I’d been considering anyway and made the changes to my manuscript with find/replace.

But I still wasn’t happy with it.

Then, a week later, I happened to be listening to one of my Spotify playlists on the way into work, and a song came on that’s been on “heavy rotation” for me for the past few months. The track is a couple of years old now, but that’s not important. What is important is that the artist’s name resonated with me as fitting the character I’m having difficulty with.

And the name could be used as a short version of a longer name and that longer name has other short versions.

It just worked.

So, the character is on her third name of the process, and I’m 99% confident that this will be her final name.

The other thing that happened was that I found myself softening on this character’s plot arc.

When I conceived of her, I had a very clear plan for her purpose in the story. And had I gone through with it, she’d have been one of the least likeable characters in the series. But as I’ve said before, I’m more of a Pantser than a Planner when it comes to plotting. I write by the seat of my pants. I take the plot where the characters guide me even if, in the end, I get them where I want them to end up.

And that’s what’s happened her. I’ve already said that her original name didn’t suit her. And that’s because, as I’ve been writing her, I’ve sort of grown to love her and her personality. And I can’t make her out to be an unsympathetic character. I just can’t. In this case, she’s not going to end up where I had originally planned. She’s not going to do what I originally planned.

At least, not in the way I planned it.

I’m not particularly worried about that, if I’m honest. The way I’ve set her up and what’s she’s doing in this story will still lead to what I need to happen happening, it will just be in a different way.

And it might even make the story better—if I can execute it well, that is.

Moving on, let's speak about titles. I've always struggled with the titles of my novels and short stories, but I think I may have found the right titles for the next Paul Robertson book.

I recently joined a Discord server aimed at helping independently published authors grow their audience, and as part of the “initiation”, I was required to write a short introduction to myself. I began by mentioning that I’m approaching my fiftieth year on this blue and green globe we call home and the recent realisation that it means I’ve now been writing “smut” for almost thirty years and that it’s nearly twenty years since I sold my first piece for actual money.

And in all that time, the one thing I’ve always struggled with is coming up with titles for my work. In fact, I’m so bad at titles that when I was writing The Lies We Lead, I ran a competition on Facebook asking readers to make suggestions for the book’s title.

When I originally wrote A Good Man back in 2011—thirteen years ago now—I came up with what I thought was a clever title for the series. Tutelam Venit. Which, let’s be honest, is pretentious bollocks. I got to this because Paul’s story was going to be a Coming of Age story, so I put that phrase into Google Translate and asked it for the Latin and used what I got out. That was in 2011 though and it was a crap translation. A better translation now is “He came under protection”, which still sort of fits the story, but not really.

Anyway, I ditched the pretentious series name after A Tortured Soul came out. Now it’s just The Paul Robertson Saga, which is a much better name for it.

The titles for the three books in the series actually follow a definite pattern.

A Good Man
A Tortured Soul
A Wounded Heart

The pattern is clear.

A/an Adjective Noun

All three of these titles were planned from the beginning because the story was planned as a classic trilogy. But, of course, it didn’t turn out that way because as A Wounded Heart approached the same length as A Tortured Soul—already the longest book I’d ever written—I found I had a hell of a lot more story still to tell.

So, as you know, I resolved to write a fourth and possibly fifth book, which meant I had to come up with one or maybe two new titles. And for my own sanity, those titles had to fit the pattern of the other three.

Interestingly, I started a thread about this in a Reddit group for erotica authors and was told that the best titles are some variation of VERBed by the NOUN, which isn’t the pattern I’ve got for the Paul Robertson books, but you live and learn. I was also told that most readers don’t care about clever title patterns in series.

But I do, so I’m going to stick to the pattern, no matter what.

Unless I can’t think of anything. Which, for a long time, I couldn’t.

I did have a title. It was a good title, and it fit the final book in the series.

An Everlasting Love

The problem, of course, is that book four isn’t the final book. At least, it won’t be unless I can somehow shoehorn what’s left of the story I’ve got to tell, which I estimate may be as much as two hundred thousand words worth, into seventy-five thousand words.

Not happening.

So, I’ve had to change the title of this fourth book. I had hoped I could hang on to An Everlasting Love for the fifth book, but I don’t think my desire to stick to the pattern will let me. And that’s because the title of this fourth book is…

Wait for it…

A Healing Love

There you have it. The title of the fourth book in the Paul Robertson Saga. A Healing Love.

The reason it means I can’t keep An Everlasting Love as the final book’s title is that it will feel wrong to me to have two books with the same noun in the title. I’d like to keep the “Everlasting” part, but I’ll need to find something else that lasts forever rather than love.

Unless I can think of something else that is Healing for Paul other than love. Passion? An Affair? I don’t know. There’s no urgency; I need to finish writing the book first.

I'm trying to tell three different stories all at once with the fourth Paul Robertson book and it's proving to be quite a challenge.

I’m now at sixty-seven thousand words in the fourth Paul Robertson book and it’s just a few hundred words away from being my seventh longest manuscript, overtaking The Lies We Lead. I can’t (or rather won’t) say at this stage how long I think this book will end up being, but I’m now fairly certain it will not be the final book in the series. If I want the book to be a similar length to the other three (and I do), then I’ve got about sixty or seventy thousand words left and I’m certain I’ve got more than sixty or seventy thousand words worth of story left to tell.

I’m not actually going to worry about it. I’ll just write the story and if I can find a way to wrap this book up without telling the whole of what remains of Paul’s story, then so be it. But if I find that there isn’t going to be enough of a story left to fill a third book, then this fourth one will just have to be a bit longer than the others.

We’ll see.

In writing this book I’ve got three very distinct, very separate and yet intertwining threads of Paul’s story to tell. Two of which I can’t really write about here because it would give too much away. I will say that both of those threads are to do with Paul finding the Happy Ending that Chloe wants him to find. I dare not say more than that.

The third thread I can talk about and that’s Paul’s business life. We already know from the prologues to books one and three (I need to write about this too at some point, because it’s a change I plan to make) that Paul goes into business with Will Brown and we found out in book three how this starts to come about. In this fourth book (and possibly the fifth) I’m telling more of that story and it’s a story that doesn’t just include Will, David, Bobby and Chris – it involves at least three other characters that we’ve other come to love or at the very least met in the series before.

And trying to weave these three plot threads into the one novel is a challenge. I sort of did it in A Wounded Heart but it’s much more at the forefront of my mind in this book as I write it because it’s so important to the conclusion of the series and the three threads are so different. Obviously, Paul’s business life is very different to his Happy Ending story, but even the two threads that are related to that are different. One of them is a *now* story. It’s happening *now* and it’s the main plot for the time period that I’m currently writing. The other is a *then* story. It’s a slow-burn, long-term story. One is about the white heat of passion, the other is about the slow burn of love.

I’m really enjoying the challenge and I hope that when I’m ready to release this story to the world, you’ll enjoy me efforts to knit these three plots together and weave them into a satisfying read.

(This post first appeared on my website - all blog posts appear there a few days ahead of StoriesOnline. There is no charge for my Website - it's not a "Patreon")

I've always been poor at naming characters and titling books and chapters. Which is a worry when it's crucial to get one particular character's name right.

One of the biggest problems I’ve always had in the twenty-plus years I’ve been writing fiction is naming characters. I’ll frequently change a character’s name halfway through writing a story. And it’s not unusual for me to change it a second time, or even change it back to my original choice.

The problem is that sometimes, once you’ve written a good chunk of a story it becomes clear that a name you’ve given to a character doesn’t really fit that character and how they have developed while writing the story.

Now, this may be nonsense. It could well be that the character name “Greg” is fine for everyone who reads the story, even if for me this character isn’t a “Greg” at all. He was, when I started writing him, but his actions since and the way he talks means he’s not a “Greg” now.

My characters are alive, you see. They live in my head, but they are alive. And as much as I might want them to be this way, or that way, or have this personality trait or that one, they frequently have their own ideas about who they are and how they would behave.

And that means that sometimes the name I originally gave them, isn’t who they really are.

I have a problem like this now with the fourth Paul Robertson book. There’s a new character I’ve introduced. I won’t tell you anything about her, but the name that Paul uses with her is a shortened version of a traditional old name. That’s all fine—nothing wrong with that, happens all the time.

Clarissa, for example, was Clarissa to her mother, ‘Rissa to most of her friends, but ‘Riss to Paul.

Similarly, different characters called Vanessa either Ness or Nessa.

In Lost & Found the female lead, Beth, short for Elizabeth after her Grandmother, made a point of confronting her father over him (and only him) calling her Lizzie.

So I have a character who needs a name that’s short for an old, traditional name, but—and here’s my real problem—could also be short for another, more modern name. I can’t tell you why at this point, but that’s what it needs to do. It’s quite important for a plot point that I would find it hard to change or write around.

Only thing is, right now, I can only this of one combination of these three names and, honestly, I don’t really like it. It doesn’t fit the character I’m writing. So I need to change it. But what to? That’s the problem. What can I change it to?

It’s a dilemma.

It’s been a full year since I last had a break from work of more than a couple of days. While the Christmas Holiday sees the entire firm shut down, it does so only for a week. And the break provided by this past Christmas was somewhat nullified by what followed when the office reopened. I took a few days off after everything there had settled down, but this past week and this coming week I’m away from the office fully, completely switched off and doing my best to relax.

For me, that means two things. First, time spent with my family. My son is now eighteen and should (as long as he gets the right grades on Thursday) be heading for University in the autumn, so this may be the last family holiday he comes on with us. I hope not, but you never know. So spending time with him is particularly important for me this summer. To that end, we made a two-hour drive down to Le Mans last week to visit the museum dedicated to the 24-hour race, which is filled with some of the cars that have raced there down the years. A great day out for us both.

The second way for me to relax is to write and read. I’ve done a lot of reading, finishing one book and being halfway through another. And I’ve done a fair bit of writing too, working exclusively now on the fourth Paul Robertson book. I’m quite pleased with what I’ve written too.

Up to now, I’ve deliberately not referred to the book by its working title. That’s because I’m not convinced this will be the final book and the working title is very much that of a final book. I’m up over sixty-thousand thousand words now and if I stick to my self-imposed goal of not going over one-hundred and fifty thousand, I don’t think I’m going to get everything in that I want to.

As I keep saying, I guess I just need to write and write and see how it goes. I’ve got a week left of this holiday and I know where I’d like to be in the narrative by the time we leave. How many words that will be, I don’t know.

Anyway, I just wanted to check in and give you all an update rather than leave it for two whole weeks. I’ll try and check in again either later this week.

I've reached the 50,000-word milestone with the fourth Paul Robertson novel and feel it's now time to plan out just what is the next step on the road to Paul's final destination.

Actually, that’s a little white lie—a small exaggeration, if you will. I have a spreadsheet where I keep a track of the word counts of each chapter of my novels and short stories and it’s showing the fourth Paul Robertson book as being 49,806 words long across ten chapters. I have the heading of chapter eleven typed out in my manuscript and once I start typing out the opening I have already written in my head, it’ll go past 50,000 quite quickly.

But that’s not the point.

The point is, I’ve now written what I had planned as the “opening” to the novel and need to work out how to get to the endpoint and if that endpoint is indeed the end of Paul’s story (which I hope it is) or if it’s a stopping off point for a fifth book. That’s something I won’t really know until get there. I posted last year about book lengths and how one that I was reading was, in my opinion, far too long and actually more like two or even three books, not one, so the last thing I want to do is then put out something that’s too long. I’m thinking no more than 150,000 words, so by the time I get to 100,000 I should be able to judge if I can finish Paul’s story in another 50,000 words or if I’ll need a fifth book.

I will admit that I’ve never really been a “planner”. I tend to write linearly from the start of the story to the end. That’s just how my brain works. So I’ve never really had any kind of detailed “plan” or “roadmap” for how a story goes. At least, not one that’s written down. On the one occasion that I did try and do that, the plan went out of the window pretty quickly and the route the story ended up taking was nothing like the original roadmap.

I do tend to have a clear endpoint in mind for a story. And a rough idea of how to get there. But my characters sort of ‘live in my head’ and have their own ideas about how their story pans out.

So, where am I and where do I need to get to?

The ten chapters I’ve written so far cover a two week period in Paul’s life, a number of significant events and one significant new character. Relationships—both business and personal—have evolved a little, moving Paul a bit closer to where he will ultimately end up.

The next step is to continue to develop those business and personal relationships. There are a couple of “events” that I know need to happen, although I haven’t really plotted out at what point in the timeline they happen or how I get there. So I guess, for the first time in a long time, I’m asking myself if I do need to sketch out some sort of roadmap—even if ultimately I don’t stick to it. I suppose it’s a bit like planning a road trip. I know the towns I want to go through on my way to my final destination, but I’m not really interested in planning the route road-by-road so much as making sure I head in the right general direction.

Or, I could just keep writing and see where the characters take me. Which will probably take me longer, throw up a couple of roadblocks that I have to navigate around but will, for me, be more satisfying because that’s just how my brain works.

If I’m honest with myself, it’ll probably be a bit of both.