An Explanation of Jewel

Ok, so some of you might have read, or at the very least downloaded my novel, JEWEL. I have no way of telling whether any of the two hundred and something people who downloaded the free copy when it was available have actually read it or whether they all think it’s a pile of crap. Whatever your opinion though, the book is now going to become a series – because I, as the self-published author responsible for its creation, have decided so.

So I thought that perhaps I should explain a little bit about this world that I’ve created, for anyone who hasn’t read it and for anyone who has and was thoroughly confused (I hope there aren’t too many of these!)

First let me go into the etymology and development of the story. I started writing it 9 years ago and it has gone through many drafts and many fallow periods, and has even had me tearing up whole handfuls of pages because it was “never going to amount to anything” and was “obviously rubbish”. I actually scrapped the whole novel about 6 years ago, I think – and threw out all the original bits that I’d written – which means that no one will ever get to know just how diabolically awful it was in the beginning. (This I am thankful for because it was pretty dreadful, I have to say.)

When I wrote the initial scenes I had just started an English Lit degree at university where I was, like most English Lit students, encouraged to think about creative writing. Part of the course was to keep a journal in which we would write every day and thus have an outlet for whatever we wanted to create. There was no form or logic to this and we were not marked on it, per se, but it was supposed to help us develop ideas and get us into good writing habits so that, if we wanted to produce anything, we’d have the discipline in place to do it.

Now, I’ve never been good at keeping journals. I always get bored after the first few diligent days of writing all about my life and what’s in my head at that moment. Because my life, in itself, just isn’t full enough of interesting things for me to be able to sustain a proper dialogue with my diary. I’m just not that type.

So, that was out for a start. Writing about real life, I mean. I just couldn’t do that. But I did embrace the idea of creativity and, at the suggestion of my university Professor, I dutifully went out and bought a beautiful hardback book in which to write. I decorated it, I wrote quotes in it, I told it all about myself and then, eventually, inevitably, I started making things up in it.

I had to, like I said, after a few days there’s nothing else to do. It’s either that or sit staring out of the window trying to get inspiration from the sky and the trees. (Incidentally I have done this several times before when all other possibilities have deserted me and let me tell you it is not worth the trouble. Trees, in their ordinary sense, are really quite dull and William Wordsworth I ain’t.) So, anyway, I had to start making up stories in order to fill up the pages and one day I was so desperate that I just sat down and thought “Right, what’s the stupidest, most fantastical thing that you can think of? Never mind if it’s no good or if it will never be readable by any sensible person. Never mind if your characters are likable, because you won’t ever have to do anything with it. Just write it.”

And I put the pen on the paper and I started to write the stupidest and most fantastical thing I could think of:

A lady in a ballgown, standing on a balcony with her lover – confessing their undying love to each other – and then committing suicide.

. . .

Yeah.

It was a total rip-off of Romeo and Juliet at that time, and written in the most awful, saccharine prose you can imagine. Thank God I junked it.

But, anyway, this is not the point, the point is that after I had written that scene – which would eventually morph into a far more complicated relationship between two of my characters, Lady Jade Worthington and Lord Lorenzo de Chapelle – I then continued for several more days to produce similar scenes; scenes about fairy-tale princesses and noble lords, battling knights or some such nonsense. And it occurred to me that, since I was doing so well with this I could perhaps combine all of these scenes and make them all part of the same world. Fashioning, in the process, an entire fantasy world that might become a great epic novel. (At that time I was still desperately searching for the perfect story for my debut novel – the great literary masterpiece that I hadn’t begun yet but, I was adamant, I would write – I knew it was there in my head somewhere I just had to find it: *Delusions of grandeur*.)

So, that’s how it started. I wrote crap in a diary and then strung it all together. And, at the time, I thought that would be the hard work done.

Boy was I wrong. Aside from the fact that you never write a book just once, when you create a fantasy world, you have to be really detailed. You have to think of everything – or if you can’t think of everything you have to be really clever at disguising all the holes – promising yourself, as you do so, that you will fill these holes in if you write a sequel. There are definitely many things about this world of mine that I did not consider in the first book and that I am now going to have to address in the second, third and fourth (Yes people, I’m up to four now, and I may add more!)

But I’m getting ahead of myself again. It’s hard to cram 9 years worth of writing hell into one blog post. Maybe I should write a book about it? . . . *Groans* No, maybe not.

Right, so I had the idea. I started to write. I even produced quite a lot of story, which started to take shape over a number of months. I had an idea that it would be a sort of detailed gothic fantasy thing, like Gormenghast – with a full complement of idiosyncratic characters, all of whom lived in a kind of harmony with each other in the same palace and all of whom had a key part to play. The thing I always liked about Gormenghast was that you got to see the social hierarchy and interaction between characters. It starts in the bowels of the place and takes you all the way to the turrets, introducing you to newer and weirder people on the way. That’s what I wanted to do originally. It didn’t, of course, come out quite like that in the end and, if it had, I think it would only have been an obvious and cheesy rip-off of Peake’s much greater genius. No one would have loved me for doing it.

And then what happened next was that, somewhere in the initial writing phase, I gave up on it. As usually happened when I was younger and lazier and more easily distracted by other things, I got bored; I lost the thread of what I was doing, life got in the way, maybe something interesting came on TV. I don’t know, but, whatever happened, it got shelved for a while and the most I would do was pick it up and look at it every now and again and then put it back.

Finally, as I’ve mentioned above, I scrapped it, because it was terrible and because – here was the clincher – it was going to take a lot of WORK to put it all together into something that could actually be described as finished.

I don’t want you to think that I’m afraid of hard work. Because I’m not. I did a PhD for four and half years and, if nothing else, that was good grounding in the hardest of all hard work. But when I was in my early twenties I was something of a lay-about. I didn’t like being put out of my comfort zone or being forced to take great big strides forward into my future. I was also very depressed and I mostly just wanted to sleep and eat all day. So, it was only later, when I was being forced to take great big strides forward into my future with my PhD, that the story resurfaced in my head.

I remembered my characters and their stories long after I had junked the original pages, and they kept coming back to me, over and over again, like old friends revisiting me after an absence. And I would think about them and remember the story of their lives – but, this is the thing, I would remember it as if it was real, not as if it was just some silly story that I, in my infinite boredom, had made up. These were real people to me. Queen Ruby and Princess Crystal and the grouchy King Julius in their make-believe palace – the location of which, incidentally, I still had not fixed upon at that stage. The kingdom of Sapphiria only materialized when I re-wrote the story.

It was make-believe, and it had been badly constructed to begin with, but the story was still there in my head and it had enough dimension so that I could think of it as real – so I knew that there was something to it.

I have always told myself stories in my head. I’ll make up any number of scenarios in my imagination and slip away into them whenever real life bores me. It’s just how I cope. But it never occurred to me before that any of these real fantasy lands that I used for my own private holidays could really be stories, or that anyone else might one day be able to share in them. When I wrote stories before – when I was younger and trying earnestly to be a writer, I would always look for something outside of my own fantasy-addled mind and write something serious about the world. I would think: “Well, what do writers write about when they write?” I didn’t ask myself what I knew or what I liked, or what I was actually capable of describing – which would have been far more helpful.

And I’ll always remember the day it hit me that this story, about a fantasy palace inhabited by a dysfunctional royal family, was the one I should write down. I was driving in my car and I think I’d heard something on the radio, although I can’t remember what now. But it was something that reminded me of one of my characters. And I started, without even really thinking about it, to replay the scene that I’d written, bringing it to life in my head.

But, like I said, it wasn’t remembering words on a page. Instead it was more like a flashback. The real scene was playing out in my head and I was saying to myself: “Oh yeah, remember when Ruby had that affair with the Archbishop, and whatever happened with Persephone? Did she find out? And remember the evil Lord Mortimer? Yeah, he was great!” And suddenly it was real again. And I had a real fondness for it. And I knew that I had to write it.

I’m not saying I thought it would be any good. Although, of course, I had hopes and aspirations about getting it published. And, as time went on, I even allowed myself to believe, in a delusional kind of a way, that it would be an instant success and I would be hailed as the next J.K. Rowling (a comparison that I would, then, try to rebuff in the most worthy and modest way possible – because I am so humble. HA!) Of course this hasn’t happened, and probably never will. But, as I was re-constructing and editing my story, I did begin to think that I should just have fun with this and see where it went and that, even if I didn’t make shed loads of money off it, that would be enough.

Editing is hard though and what you see in the final work, which you can find on Amazon if you’re so inclined, is by no means what I just rattled off first, second, or even third time around. (Cheeky plug there, you might have noticed. But, let’s face it, you must know by now that the whole point of this blog post is to tell you all about my book. Really I should just have named it “Book Plug” and had done with it.)

I should also say that I re-wrote it with the intention of entering a competition that Terry Pratchett was running a couple of years ago, which is why the finished book is the way it is, I think. I did the bulk of the writing with Terry Pratchett somewhere in mind.

I’m not saying that I copied the Discworld – my world is not flat, and does not rest on the back of a giant turtle. And there are no wizards. Sorry to disappoint you, but there aren’t – I didn’t want to get that far into the realms of fantasy. What I did instead was to think, as the brief for the competition specified that I should, about what the world would be like if things had gone a different way – if something in history had happened to create an entirely new civilization so that the world was ours, but not quite ours; Terry Pratchett described it in the competition description as the world going down the wrong trouser leg of history, or something very like that. So, knowing that I still had to place my palace and royal family in a world that was not our own, I used this competition to ground what I already had and surround it with this wrong trouser legged history and I cast my mind back right back at the dawn of humanity, and thought about how prehistoric people discovered the world.

I then decided that, since early man took everything he needed from the environment in order to build the foundations of the world, it stood to reason that they would eventually start digging things out of the ground.

“So,” I thought. “If they’re digging stuff out of the ground, it stands to reason that they would eventually find rock, and in the rock, they could find precious stones.”

“And what do human beings with a propensity to greed and a passion for shiny things do when they see such precious stones?” said the cynical and far more prevalent part of my psyche. “They snatch at them. They horde them. And, if our own history is anything to go by, they attempt to hurt or kill anyone who tries to take their greedily horded wealth from them.”

We all know that money makes the world go round and whoever has the most money has the power. So that became the basis of my world.

In my world, the royal dynasties that ruled the main kingdom, and had power and influence in all corners of the world, took their power from the jewels that they owned and controlled. The Diamond dynasty came first, I decided, because diamonds are, more usually, the highest prized. And, due to this fact, that dynasty lasted for the first 1000 years. Then they were overthrown by the Emerald dynasty, when it was decided, finally, that emeralds could be worth more than diamonds, if enough people agreed and could force everybody else to agree at sword-point. Then other dynasties followed, usually taking over by the same means, until the Sapphirian royal line came into being. And this is the line that I describe most closely in the first book. King Julius is the last of the Sapphire kings, who have ruled for a century (our twentieth century) and he has a dilemma, because he has to organize an heir to his throne.

(I’ll leave you to read the book to find out what happens there.)

But, the problem with creating all this back story, re-writing history and jiggling about the world’s geography in the process, was that it needed to be explained properly. Thinking more seriously about how to explain my world to others, I constructed maps, designed family trees, and produced illustrations and cover designs for the book that were in keeping with all elements that had gone into creating the story.
I became something of a control freak about this and I was adamant that, since I had done all of this work, it should all go into the book, because what’s the point of having it all otherwise?

This was one of the many decisions that went into the production of the book. And I do remember the most important issue of all – which came towards the end of the process – was how the hell I was ever going to get it published. When I eventually had the final book, I wrote a proposal and sent it and a couple of sample chapters out to a publishing house. Unsurprisingly this had little effect. I knew very little about getting published at that point, but I have since discovered that it is a painful, arduous and usually unprofitable process, and it was one that I just didn’t want to waste time on.

The more I thought about it, the more self-publishing seemed appropriate – I knew other people who had done it and it seemed easy. Certainly, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that I could make a mark on the world just by being original and that this might even be quite fun.

The pictures were not very good in the first instance, but they got better over time, and the more I did, the more helpful I found them. In the beginning I wasn’t going to include them. I did them, initially, because I was trying to get a handle on my characters, thinking that it would be much easier to describe them if I drew them out first. But I enjoyed constructing them too. I liked the process of taking a few oval shapes on the paint-box on my computer and fashioning them into recognizable faces. It’s fun to see them emerge from the nothingness and the thing I love best is tweaking at the details of them until they look almost exactly like what I’ve got in my head.

My skill at this has certainly developed over the last couple of years and I think the inclusion has leant something to the overall work.

But getting it out there was not the end. I finished the book and I’m now writing the second, but I guess it’ll take some time before anyone really picks up on it – if they do at all. That’s more or less it, anyway: how I wrote the book, what it’s all meant to be about, and why the hell it took me so long. And I hope that a few of you will at least go and look at the novel, even if it is only a free extract on Amazon, and tell me what you think of it. I’m still going to write this stuff even if you all hate it, but it would be nice to know that someone’s reading it.

Thanks for sticking with me. Until the next time folks . . .