The Larkspur Mysteries Book Two
I have to admit, this Larkspur Mysteries Two is taking me some time to draft. There are a few reasons for this.
Standing Stones
The book is taking a fair amount of research. It’s one of those stories that I want to make as accurate as possible, yet be able to bend the facts to suit. It’s set in an actual place, Bodmin Moor in England, and includes references to real places, in this case, standing stone circles and other ancient monuments. However, they’re not all in the places I want them to be, so I have ‘fiddled’ with a couple, and invented a couple of my own. Researching where they are, and how they can provide clues to the mystery, is taking time, as is the background reading about such stones and their place in history.
Writing Deaf
Another thing that is causing me to write slowly is getting to grips with the character of Joe Tanner, my deaf leading man. It’s not just a case of being careful not to write, ‘he said,’ but to use ‘he signed’ instead, and there are many other factors to consider from a technical point of view. For example: I have a scene where Joe is out on the moor, the weather is foul, and a thunderstorm is coming in. The scene is from Joe’s point of view, so I cannot describe any sounds. Therefore, we, the reader, have to feel the thunder. I have to create the atmosphere with one sense missing, sound, because Joe doesn’t know what sound is. That’s proving to be interesting to write, and his deafness has a knock-on effect on other characters.
Dalston, his lover, knows how to sign, and Joe can read lips if people speak clearly, but until now, if Joe wanted to communicate with another character, he had to have Dalston there to interpret. He uses the written word, of course, and has improved his writing under Fleet’s guidance, and he can read. Some of the other characters have been having lessons in sign with varying degrees of success, so I have found a way around that issue.
The OS map is permanently open on my desk these days
How does a man deaf since birth read? Joe doesn’t hear the words in his head. He can’t. He’s never heard them out of his head, so, instead, he uses images. He visualises what he’s reading if you like, but as he is currently reading books about ancient standing stones, and he’s never seen half of what he is reading about (long barrows, menhirs, cists etc.), Fleet has been offering him illustrations to assist.
Joe is the MC in this story, a spotlight he shares with Dalston, and I’m really enjoying the challenge. By the way, Neil and I have now both passed our course in basic British Sign Language (BSL), and intend to keep it going between us, for practice, add more words and phrases to our arsenal, and, hopefully, improve.
Complicated Plot
You know me, I like to make my mysteries challenging for the characters and thus, the reader, and yet aim for a satisfying denouement. Well, this one is not only complicated by Joe’s deafness and a shift in his relationship with Dalston, but also by the subject matter.
My very dodgy sketch of the symbols that play a big part in the story
It’s actually a simple challenge. Lord Clearwater wants to know the story of the ancient monoliths that stand within his property boundary. What were they for? Why is there one embedded in the walls of the ruined abbey? And what do the symbols mean? Carved stones are rare in Cornwall, it’s more of a Pictish thing, apparently, and yet, one of the standing stones has carvings on it. Lord Clearwater’s mystery is only one thread, however, there is another far more sinister but also historic, and that, Joe stumbles upon while researching the stone row. I won’t say too much more about that, because I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but suffice to say, there is also a deadline, there will be an ‘action climax’ when I get to it (I am nearly there), and, hopefully, everything will tie up and make sense. Right now, I am reaching the part in the story where clues are coming together and, for the sake of accuracy, I am having to go back and forth between the written chapters to ensure the clues laid down early on, tie-up with the untangling of the plot at the crisis point.
And then there are visitors.
At this time of year, we have many regular visitors returning to the island where we live. Neil works in a bar, and it’s very popular with British visitors who like to come and say hello and catch up on island news. In the winter months, I’m a ‘bed at nine’ kind of person and am often up at three or four in the morning to start work. Right now, though, we are being taken out to dinner, and we’re entertaining at home sometimes, and that means later nights, and thus, later mornings. My writing time is compressed somewhat, as is my energy. Not complaining, it’s a very sociable time of year and makes up for the seven months of winter when we hardly see anyone, but I am more tired than usual, so I am working slower.
Recent early morning view from the balcony
But I am still ploughing through draft one of Larkspur two. I am up to 85,000 words, with probably another 25,000 to go, and I am aiming to have the draft finished in the next two weeks. After that, there will be the second and third draft, the cover to commission, and so on, and of course, the title to find. That’s yet to fall into place, but it will before long. In the meantime, I have commissioned my illustrator to produce a much better version of my sketch of the standing stones, and I am expecting a miraculous drawing or two to come through within the next week or so. I’ll post it on a future blog when it does.
I’ll be back next week with more author chat, but for now, it’s back to the mystery…
Similarly, the title of my first published book just came to me, and because I liked the phrase, I kept it. ‘Other People’s Dreams’ is about a rich man hiring four young, cute gay guys to crew his boat around the Greek islands. The job comes with a generous package of benefits and pay, but there are ‘certain strings attached.’
Then, I thought, I’ll write a second one in the non-related series. (They are similar in theme, older/younger, coming out etc., but not with the same characters.) I knew it had to be The Mentor of… something and realised I had three words to come up with. One describes the atmosphere (wild), the second is a geographical feature (hill), and the third is the location of the story (farm). So, I made a list of suitable adjectives and locations.
I think it started out as ‘Deviant Gaslight’ or something equally bizarre. I wanted to convey the Victorian era, shadows and deviancy, but then I wondered how the light from a gas lamp could be deviant. I sifted through all kinds of ideas as I was writing it because titles often come to me during the first draft. I must have entertained Dark Shadows, and then remembered it was a TV series, and how can shadows be light? I have my notes beside me, and in them, I see I also considered Deviant Lamplight, which was its title at the end of draft one. The word ‘deviant’ was clearly important, and as I went through the second draft, I asked myself what and who was I talking about? Silas was deviant (any gay man then was considered deviant), and he had a desire for sex, later for Clearwater, and their love would have been called a deviant desire, so that made sense. But the villain also had a desire for revenge and a desire to kill, and that, of course, is also deviant. By the end of draft two, I’d settled on ‘Deviant Desire’, and I am pleased to say, it is my best-selling novel to date.
Fallen Splendour came about because I wanted to base the mystery around a poem used as a coded message. One of my favourites is ‘The Splendour Falls’, an insert into a longer poem by Tennyson. He was alive at the time the story is set, so I dragged him into the story too. I liked the word ‘fallen’ because its reference to ‘fallen women’, as they were known then. Silas is a ‘fallen man’, you might say, and if the truth about Clearwater was known, he too would ‘fall’ from grace.
Home From Nowhere came to me during the writing and still gives me the same chill when I read the title as I felt when I wrote a short scene between Jasper and Andrej (Fecker). Fecks asks where Jasper is from, and Jasper tells him his background.
At this point in these reis, I sidestepped to go backwards and explore how Silas and Fecker met. I reckoned a clever title wouldn’t be right, so I went for the simple Banyak & Fecks, their nicknames for each other. The title gave me the structure of the book. The nicknames come about during the story, but they are not the characters’ original names. Thus, the first quarter of the book is titled ‘Andrej’, the second, ‘Silas’, the third, ‘Andrej and Silas’, and it’s not until we come to the last quarter we get them fully-fledged as ‘Banyak & Fecks’. By then, they have become an inseparable pair, forever locked in a bromance, avoiding the Rippe’s knife and unknowingly about to step into Deviant Desire as two of the main characters.
We’ve had drinks at the bar with visiting holidaymakers we know, dinners out with friends, roses, cards and gifts. Neil bought me the rose painted on a stone you can see in the picture. Tbh, it’s all been wonderfully exhausting.
While I was there, I read this short novel by Anthony Burgess. It’s not about the pop group, it’s about the last days of the poet John Keats who died in Rome in 1821, at the young age of 25. It’s a fascinating book with some lovely use of the English language. Recommended.
