AREN'T ALL NOVELS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL?

Whenever I told friends that I was writing a novel, the most common question they asked was 'is it autobiographical?'.

The simple answer is no. I wasn't brought up as the only son of a sheep farmer in the Yorkshire Dales, I never lived in Hong Kong and I haven't run a dotcom company. That said, there are several passages in the book which draw directly on my experiences.

In chapter 2 Tom almost veers off the road when he sees a dead cow dangling by its hind legs from a fork lift truck in a roadside farmyard. I witnessed that whilst driving to a walk in the Dales and like Tom, it was my first introduction to foot and mouth disease in North Yorkshire. I went on to see many of the sights described in the book over the following months when local farms were in the grip of the disease - the disinfectant precautions, the excavated pits, the funeral pyres and the white-suited 'Angels of Death'.

I travelled to the Far East in 1982 to make a series of documentaries for BBC Radio 4 called 'Something to Declare' and several passages in the book describe events which took place on the trip to Hong Kong, Thailand, China and Malaysia.

Tom talks in chapter 9 about going to the Golden Triangle near the Burmese border and getting caught up in a skirmish between US-funded Thai government troops and opium warlords. That happened to me and Bernard Jackson, the series presenter. We were driving along a jungle track when we heard machine gun fire close by.  Our driver interpreter slewed to a halt and we all jumped from the pick-up truck and dived into a ditch. As the bullets flew disturbingly close, Bernard took out a pack of cigarettes, grinned and offered me one, saying "Last cigarette?". I accepted it, which was a bad move as I had given up several years before.

We later spent the night in the hill tribe village Tom describes and it was there we saw the dead body of the young girl which so affected him in the book.  It affected us deeply as well and Tom's reaction to it was very much what I felt at the time. As an aside, my descent on the slippery slope to smoking again was hastened in the village when our interpreter suggested that it would only be polite to accept the trumpet-shaped cigars which were hand-rolled in our honour at the end of a meal. It was that, and possibly the copious amounts of Thai resin which our interpreter had about his person which had me once again hooked on the evil weed by the time we reached Hong Kong several weeks later - staying in the Mandarin Hotel, as do Tom and Sally in the book.

On the way to Hong Kong we made a programme in Malaysia. Tom's recollection of swapping the names of cricketers in a ramshackle bar with a group of old Tamils in chapter 10 took place when Bernard and I wandered through the back streets of Penang.

In chapter 12 Tom is in the window seat of a bar in New York when several NYPD officers outside pull their guns on a young black man they'd slammed against the window. It happened to me on a trip to New York to record an exclusive interview with Yoko Ono for Radio City in Liverpool on the fifth anniversary of Lennon's death. Like Tom, I was directly in their line of fire.

Perhaps more mundanely, The Swaledale Sheep Breeders' Association does indeed exist. In chapter 14, Tom attends their dinner. I'm a keen musician, playing Hammond organ and keyboards in several bands, and a couple of years ago I played a gig in Hawes at their annual dinner. I faithfully describe the weather on that evening in the book when a sunny August day suddenly turned into a dismal night of drizzle.

In case you haven't yet read the book - and if so, why not! - I won't give away the ending.  But suffice it to say that the world event which scuppers Tom's attempts to save his business also had a serious knock-on effect on my video and conference production business.  A client for whom I'd made a video went into liquidation when their funding was withdrawn as a result of the event, owing me a considerable amount of money. It was that which gave me the idea for using the event as the cause of Tom's failure to retain control of his business.

All in all my book is peppered with personal predilections and prejudices, fantasies and fears, as well as fictionalised experiences. But autobiographical?  Definitely not.

WRITING DALES dotcom

It was over ten years ago that the idea for 'DALES dotcom' was formed. It was thanks to my son James, now a successful TV producer, director and cameraman.

At the time he was at York Sixth Form College and he was given an assignment for his Media Studies 'A' Level course to write the synopsis of a film and create a DVD cover for it.  We talked about it and came up with the idea of juxtaposing two major news stories of the day - the dotcom crash and the foot and mouth outbreak in the UK.

James, with a little help from me, completed his assignment (left) and I started thinking that the story idea might be worth developing.  Soon afterwards we went on holiday to Barbados. Now don't run away with the idea that we're rich.  I run a video and conference production company  - www.production.co.uk - and I had just produced a video and awards ceremony in London for the Florida Tourist Board. They didn't have a large enough budget for the video they wanted but they had been donated two first class tickets to any Virgin Airlines destination in the world. I did a deal for cash plus the tickets and managed to convert them into four business class tickets so that I could take the whole family on holiday.

We rented a tiny apartment on stilts overlooking golden sand (right, with James). Between swimming with giant turtles, playing beach cricket with the locals and drinking copious amounts of free rum cocktails purloined by my young daughter from the all-inclusive hotel next door, I wrote the first two chapters of the book. I returned home with the best intentions of finishing the novel, but paid work took up most of my time and the chapters disappeared into the digital equivalent of a top drawer.

It wasn't until late last year that I retrieved them. Business had slowed down dramatically, a combination of the recession and the loss after 11 years of a major client who had provided a significant amount of my income through twice yearly conferences and numerous training videos.  I'm not used to having time on my hands. My whole adult life has been spent working to deadlines, writing, producing and directing, at BBC radio and television, commercial radio and in my corporate production company.  Finishing the book would keep me busy and I started writing mostly in the evenings and often late into the night.. 

Advice to novelists suggests that books need to be carefully and completely plotted before they are written.  I had decided on major events which would take place and knew how the story would end, but I had only a vague idea of how I would get there. But I found that to be a positive thing. Resolving situations which I had created without knowing how they might be resolved provided a drive for the narrative and led me down  paths which I hadn't foreseen. After all, life's like that. We all end up in situations we hadn't expected or wished to be in and we have to find the best way out of them.  Much of the writing time was spent staring into the middle distance thinking up how the characters would react to their situations and I'd like to think that brings a realism to the book. 

Some way into the writing I realised that I was unintentionally writing what might be called a solipsistic novel.  The whole book is seen through the eyes of the main character, Tom Keardon. Once the style had been been established, nothing could take place which Tom didn't directly experience or was told about.  My next novel, if there is one, will avoid this self-imposed restriction.

A paean of praise to the World Wide Web. Once upon a time writers either had to write about what they knew, or go off and research it, involving time, travel and expense. No longer. While parts of 'DALES dotcom' draw on my experiences (of which much in a forthcoming post), with the exception of several location-finding and idea-inspiring walks in the nearby Yorkshire Dales with my wife Felicity, most of the book was researched online.

For example, I once stayed in the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong which features in the book.  By going to Google Maps I was able to see a street view of the entrance and check what colour uniforms the porters wore.  Wikipedia provided detailed information about the economic and political history of China. Google searches gave me everything I needed to know about subjects as diverse as sheep-dipping, probate law, Chinese weddings, and theological interpretations of bible passages.

Thanks are also due to friends and family who helped along the way: Sue Cook  - suecook.com/writing/ - who read the first draft and provided valuable advice which led me to rewrite part of the ending, to Kat Ferris - http://www.artkat-studios.com/ - who painted the book cover, Cathy Cox who designed the cover text graphics, and of course to James without whom ...

PUBLICATION DAY!

There, it's done.  I've clicked on the publish button.  My first novel has flown the nest and is available on Amazon, a mere snip at £1.99 for the Kindle version and in paperback for £7.99.

Now let's not get too excited about this.  For every 50 Shades of Grey there are countless other eBooks which only ever sell a few copies.  Why should mine be any different, when the literary agents offered the book responded with resounding silence and as the one sex scene in my book probably wouldn't have offended my mother?

Well, first of all I'm proud of having written it.  When Dr. Johnson was told about a woman preacher he commented "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a a dog's walking on this hind legs.  It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." Substitute me actually finishing a 104,000 word novel for the female preacher or the dog and you get the idea.

But I'm vain or disillusioned enough to think that it is done well.  Readers of course, if there are any, will be the judge of that.

And talking of being vain, isn't self-publishing online just vanity publishing, now available to any Tom. Dick or Harry because there are no associated costs?  Probably, but is that necessarily a bad thing?

To quote a man who should know, back in 2006 Rupert Murdoch said "Technology is shifting the power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite.  Now it's the people who are in control."  Traditionally, publishers decided which books were likely to sell and then marketed them through book reviews, publicity and advertising, and often simply through paying the major bookshop chains to promote them.  But publishers are now losing control of the supply and demand of books in the same way that record companies have lost their monopoly of production and access to recorded music. Yes, there's a downside. Quality control is largely out of the window with a haystack of books now available online in which there are few needles, but it's democracy in action.  Word of mouth, or it's contemporary equivalent, a social networking buzz, can now turn a publisher's reject into a people's choice bestseller.  Say what you like about the 'Fifty Shades' phenomenon which started life as a self-published eBook, but 40 million readers can't be wrong.

So now it's up to me to try to create the buzz, of which this blog is a part.  After that "it's the people who are now in control."

Let's see how far this bird will fly.