Me and my novel: part one
[When people say “and the rest is history,” this is the exact opposite of what they have in mind. Here, first, should you be interested, is the history.]
I had the idea when I was about 25 to write a novel called The Green Altar. The title was an allusion to the Grecian urn that Keats described:
“Who are these coming to the sacrifice? / To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies?”
This contemporary story would include sacrifices (metaphorical ones), priests (mostly but not entirely not the ordained kind), and other timeless themes. I knew I had a good title. I wrote it in an exercise book and underlined it twice. Then I put it away and got on with my life, to the extent that I ever do.
About four years ago, a colleague who shares some of my tastes in literature recommended a book to me. To give him his due, he did say it wasn’t as good as the vaguely-comparable novel we’d just been discussing. I read it, noting the quote on the front from Famous Author, “This is a great book!”.
It wasn’t a great book. It wasn’t even remotely great. I found it particularly galling to have to wade through all the stylistic faults that I’ve learned to eradicate from my own writing: such as long strings of clauses separated by colons and semi-colons (which should be shorter sentences); paragraphs that contained multiple topics or (occasionally) none; excessive use of brackets and other parenthetical devices; and that’s without considering the characters, who all spoke in exactly the same voice as the author’s third-person narration. [Please can I stop writing like that now? Thank you]
At some point before the end, I formed the view that I could do better myself. After reaching the end, with its unconvincing and icky denouement, I was certain that I could (that feeling of teenager-style certainty? It’s great!). I needed a MacGuffin to hang my own story on, and Hey presto! one appeared, at exactly the right time. And so the concept of The Green Altar was resurrected.
Most of it got written over the next two years, during bouts of un- and under-employment. I knew almost immediately that I’d need a different title — this wasn’t the story I’d planned and forgotten years ago, and trying to make my new story fit the old title just wasn’t going to work. But being quite fond of neologisms myself, I wrote a character who neologises all the time, and towards the end, of the book and of its writing, she made up the word engravitation. So that’s what the novel is called.
And the rest is geography.
… because its front cover would look something like this:
And the first question, assembled Playbillers, is: if you saw that in a bookshop, would you be sufficiently intrigued to pick it up and look at the back cover?
…which would look a lot like this:
Would you like to look inside?
Here’s the inscription (? the last bit before the story starts. There’s probably another name for it):
Would you like to read more?
Edit: occasionally I have a story idea that fits into the Engravitation universe at roughly the same timeline, and doesn’t belong anywhere else. The list so far is:
