The Counterfeit Queen is now on sale

 I've had a busy few months since I posted that The Counterfeit Queen was finished. It's now available online at Amazon, in ebook and paperback versions. Here's the blurb:

Humdrum? That barely describes Polly’s life.  

She doesn’t come on stage till the last twenty minutes of the school play, she doesn’t feel at home with her adopted parents, and she knows deep down that her life needs to be more interesting. 

Then a good-looking boy on a skateboard turns up. And explains who she really is. 

Or rather, who she should be. 

Whisked off to a place she’s never heard of, she must compete with the devious Queen Consort for something that is rightfully hers – the Throne of The Ends of the Earth. Her subjects are dwarves, halflings and humans – and a Dragon that perversely never does what it’s told. She’s confronted with fraud, deceit and danger. 

Sure, her life has suddenly become more interesting, but is she going to survive long enough to enjoy it? 

This fourth book in the Grimhilderness series reintroduces us to the heroes of Grimhilda! They’re a few years older, and hopefully wiser. And hopefully able to stand strong in the face of death.

Wamps and crowls

Yesterday my wife, who's from Norfolk in the UK, was talking about words she still uses that are common to people in Norfolk, but not elsewhere. One of these was wamps, another word for feet. (It's pronounced in the same way as lamps.) One might say, Get your great wamps off the table, or You're dirtying my clean floor with your muddy wamps. We tried to find the word on Google, but there was  no sign of it. 

That led to me write to David Crystal, who's produced a number of books on the English language, including at least one on dialect words from around the UK called The Disappearing Dictionary. It has that name because many of the words in the 'dictionary' are beginning to fade out of usage. 

David didn't know the word and said he'd looked it up in Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, which runs to six volumes. A digital version can be found here.  Unfortunately Mr Wright didn't include it in his book either, and now it appears the only ones who know the word are a scattering of Norfolk-born people. 

Never having come across Wright's dictionary, I clicked on the link, and, as you do, put in my name, since it's English in origin. There are two tiny towns in the UK called by that name - though their spelling is Crowle in each case. [Check out this travel blog which I wrote in 2007, and enter Crowle in the search box to find the references to it.]

We as a family had always believed that the meaning of Crowl is a curl in a river - in other words, a bend in a river. Where we picked that up from I no longer remember, but it's been the general view for many years. 

However, Mr Wright has other ideas. He claims its prime meaning is a dwarf; a stunted, deformed person or child. The word has a number of variations in the spelling, of course. 

He also claims it means to crawl, or creep. In the US it seems that a number of people mix the sound of crawl and crowl, and if you put crowl into Google, you'll get all sorts of people using the word crowl when they mean crawl, or crowling when they mean crawling. Check out this blog post on the subject. 

In a third meaning, Wright says that the plural of crowl, that is crowls, means dirt in the wrinkles of your hand. Whoever would have thought there was a word for this? 

Wright goes on to give meanings for words connected to crowl which I won't trouble you with here. You'll find them if you start with crowl in the online dictionary. 

Anyway, none of this side path stuff gives us any help with our original word, wamps. My wife is going to post on the Facebook North Norfolk site, and see if anyone else knows the word. Certainly it's well-known in her own family. 

Dwarf - or Crowl - by BrokenMachine86

Update 27.4.23. David Crystal came back to me this morning in an email saying: According to the Dictionary of British Surnames, there are two contenders for your surname's origin. One is from the Anglo-Norman surname de Crul; the other is a metathesised form of curl, 'curly-haired'. It might refer to a topographical feature, such as a river bend. ((Metathesis is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence.)

Out into the world The Counterfeit Queen goes

 In my last post on this (not-used-as-much-as-it-once-was) blog, I wrote about the long journey of writing The Counterfeit Queen. 

Two or three weeks ago I finished it, in the sense that I'd gone through the entire draft and rewritten and edited and cut and pasted and did all the other things you do to a new-born novel before you send it out into the world. Well, when I say I finished it, I now had before me a draft that was pretty much done. 

A friend had recently read my three earlier fantasies, the first of which, Grimhilda!, gives the background to this latest book. She had enjoyed them, though she thought the third, The Disenchanted Wizard, was the least successful of the three. Which surprised me somewhat, since my co-author and I had regarded it as our best work up to that point. And I still think it's well worth reading, having re-read it again not long ago, just to see how it stood up. 

Anyway, this friend did make some useful comments about that third book, which I took on board in regard to the current one. I asked if she'd be interested in reading the new book, knowing it might put me into deep despair if she didn't like it (!)

In fact, she loved it. I was a bit overwhelmed, to be honest. This book has been in the works for so long I was surprised anyone could love it. Although it has to be said that the book's idea has gone through umpteen transmogrifications and isn't quite the book that I'd written at least three incomplete drafts of. In other words she loved the book that all those other versions eventually became. 

So the child - the book - has been to finishing school and is now almost ready to meet the world. 

I can move forward with some confidence again. There are one or two other people who might read it and give me their feelings on it. After that, out into the world The Counterfeit Queen will go.  

Five years on: Progress

 For something like five years I've been writing the next book in the Grimhilderness series. I've put it away, taken it out again, abandoned it, rescued it, and so on. I've had long stretches when I did nothing at all on it. 

It hasn't helped that my usual collaborator didn't like the basic idea of the book from the start, and consequently I haven't had her ideas and editorial overview for the first time since we worked together on Grimhilda! (the musical version) back in 2010-12. I'm having to do it all on my own. 

This has had its challenges, but has also allowed to me to change my mind about the direction and shape and point of view more than once. And find the best way of telling the story. 

In spite of that I had decided to give up on the project altogether last year. Sheer discouragement with what seemed to be a blank wall, and the lack of support meant I was having to find all the motivation myself. 

And then something made me drag the well and truly unfinished draft out again. It was a kind of annoyance that I'd done so much work on it and it still couldn't be brought to birth. It was a sense that I had to trust my own instincts on this one and do it anyway, even if my usual collaborator didn't like the idea. In the more distant past I'd written a good deal of at least three novels and never completed them for one reason or another, and I felt I didn't want another 'dead' one in my life.

Plus, I now have a stage musical (script and music) and four books under my belt. There was no need to regard myself as a writer who couldn't finish work. I knew I could. So, I re-read through the draft again, made more notes, did a kind of summary of each chapter and who's in it and where it takes place and much more, re-read the various outline notes I'd made to help me see where things were heading, and how I needed to bring those about. I wrote several new chapters. (This is another kids' book, so the chapters aren't long - usually around 1600-1800 words - but this is still an achievement.)

In spite of all this I had to keep on fighting to move forward, and still  have to. I look at these new chapters and think how thin and unexciting they are. But they're merely the first draft in each case. I need to remember  that the first time I tried to write the scene for Grimhilda! (the musical version) in which the toys had discussions about sending Toby off to get his parents, it was pretty awful. But two characters appeared who hadn't turned up before, and with them, and the rest of the material, it was the starting point for what was eventually an excellent scene in the show. 

My habit is to tidy up new chapters as I go along. It's helpful to get me up and running for the next day's writing. These somewhat skeletal chapters will come right in subsequent sortings-out. I've now finished the first draft, and I know how it all comes out. It's now a matter of going back and building these skinny chapters up, not just to make them interesting, but to make them fit the whole scheme of things.  It’s difficult to create much suspense when you’re not yet sure how the next stage of the book, or even the climax, will work. But once you've made your way through once, you can see the lack of tension more easily - and fix it.

Many chapters written for the previous book, The Disenchanted Wizard, got dumped completely. It’s the way I work (and I suspect a lot of writers work in a similar way) and it means that ultimately I get to the right way of telling the story. And to a book that has life. But it isn't speedy...!

I'd love to be able to sit down and write an outline without much previous thought, as some writers claim they do. And then I think of P G Wodehouse and how as he grew older he wrote longer and longer 'outlines' for his books - up to 400 pages in some cases. I can't start a book from nothing -Wodehouse could in his early days, but to keep the quality up he found he had to think the more complex plots through much more thoroughly. 

I have to get to know who the characters are, what sort of things they say and do, where the story takes place and what happens in it. And a lot of that is only discoverable by writing a draft. Just making notes doesn't cut it. Certainly there are an increasing number of notes as time goes on, and the amount of material written for the current book will exceed the final length of the book by thousands of words. Already there are two bunches of chapters that were dumped early on in the process, because they were right when the book was going in one direction, but no use when characters developed and changed and the person whom the story was really about became clear. 

Perseverance and determination. Nick Arvin, the author of Mad Boy, wrote in a tweet late last year: Writing a novel is like mowing a lawn with dull scissors while blindfolded and guided by the whispered promptings of a drunken Keebler* elf.  That's probably close enough to the truth. 

* Keebler is a biscuit (cookie) company in the US. The elves have been a part of their TV advertising for decades.