Tag: empedocles-children

The Time Crackers – progress update #writing

Some time ago (by which I mean years, not weeks or even months), well before I had finished writing the final draft of my children’s adventure story Empedocles’ Children, I had the idea for another children’s book – The Time Crackers. Empedocles’ Children ended up as a fairly weighty tome, coming in at around 110,000 words and (probably) best suiting readers towards the upper end of what is termed ‘middle grade’ (ages 8-12). I hadn’t particularly aimed it at that reading level, it just turned out that way, but for The Time Crackers, I felt that the story would connect best with slightly younger children, and decided that I would make a conscious effort to keep the chapters short and ensure that the story was snappy and moved along at a good pace.

Without giving too much away, the basic premise of The Time Crackers centres around two children who discover a portal through which they shift to the same location but at a specific time at which an important (real) historical event takes place there. They are able to move back and forth between the historic and modern time periods (as long as they keep hold of the ‘key’ of course, which is tricky when they don’t even know that one exists…). Then, while they are in the historical setting, they get caught up in an adventure that requires them to solve a coded puzzle which then leads them to take action to ensure that the history unfolds as it should do.

At the outset I had the basic premise of the story, the location and its associated historical setting and event, and an idea for the initial incident that brings the two children to discover the time-crossing portal (the setting is Plymouth and the historical setting is the late 16th century so you can probably guess the historical event!). I also had the idea for a second location, and an association with a completely different historical period, and so I can quite imagine that by the time I have finished it, The Time Crackers will have become The Time Crackers 1:….., the first story in The Time Crackers series.

I started writing the first chapter of The Time Crackers (‘Flashback’) at least a year ago (probably more) and managed to add two more chapters (‘The New Girl’ and ‘Target Practice’), reaching the point in the story where the two children, Jim and Mols, have been introduced (to the reader and to each other), we have got to know a little bit about Jim, his character and his home set-up, and things were nicely set up ready for the trigger incident that leads Jim and Mols to discover the time portal. But then, as is often the way with me, things ground to a halt as I got busy, diverted my attention towards other creative projects (such as my discovery of painting 14 months ago), or just succumbed to the chronic procrastination that is the bane of my life. Whatever the reason, the ability to sit down and write new words eluded me…

… until yesterday, when, without too much effort, I finally opened and re-read Chapter 3, decided that it was essentially complete and then found that sentences were emerging in my brain and flowing smoothly to my fingers and then onwards onto the screen as I launched myself into Chapter 4 (‘Noises In The Dark’). The result was that after about 30-40 minutes I had harvested the next 800 or so words of the story, and in the process, advanced the story almost to its pivotal moment, the accidental discovery of the time portal. That moment deserves to be the focus of Chapter 5, but before I can find out exactly how events unfold, I need to go back into Chapter 4 and flesh it out with another an additional few hundred words so that it balances the length of the previous chapters a bit better. I had been hoping to do that today, but alas, I managed to divert my attention into other projects instead. I am not sure whether this was a piece of deliberate self-sabotage, my brain opting not to even try to write just in case the well had run dry, or whether it was just the way of things. What I do know is that I really would like to press on with writing this story, because I am excited to see how it unfolds and to discover what thrills and scrapes Jim and Mols get themselves into as they try to solve The Mystery of Drake’s Drum.

Empedocles’ Children – progress update #writing

Some time ago, something like 10 years ago to be more precise, the basic idea for a children’s adventure story popped into my head. It was really just the bare bones of a story – a title (Empedocles’ Children), an underlying basis for the story, a vague idea of the way that it would conclude, and a fairly detailed visual image of the event that would launch the reader into the action. At some point, fairly early on, I wrote out a version of the first chapter, but once those words were out of me, I didn’t do much to make further progress. In the meantime, fragments and ideas for the story would pop into my head at random moments, often resulting in me excitedly exclaiming to whoever was in the vicinity that: “I have just had a great idea for my book when I write it”. I think this must have happened quite a lot and over an extended period (years) because eventually, after one such utterance, my younger daughter (who would have been in her late teens at the time) responded with the rather cutting, but entirely fair, response: “Well that will never happen.”

But, eventually, I did begin to make progress, producing several more chapters in 2021 and then, in a series of bursts of creativity that became gradually longer, more frequent and more reliable, I found myself approaching the end of the story. Along the way I found the process of writing the story an absolutely fascinating one. Whether it is the ‘right’ or ‘best’ way to approach things or not (and it is probably not), I wrote the story without any kind of outline or plan, other than knowing a little about where the main characters in the story (four children called Conlaed, Yara, Tal and Karin) had to end up, and a final climax to the story that became gradually sharper in my mind as it approached. Instead, I simply sat myself down and let the story emerge. When I talk to people about this process I usually use one of two analogies – that story writing is like find a seam of precious ore and then chipping away to follow it through the surrounding rock, or that it is like gently pulling on a thread to tease it from a knotty bundle. I also tended towards thinking that even though I didn’t know how the story would unfold, I could trust my characters to show me. In that sense, I was simply following them on their journey, and describing the events that befell them as I did so. At times, it was hard to escape the feeling that the story (stories in general) are already ‘out there’ and that the task of a writer is to find (not create) one and then reveal it to others.

A couple of months ago I reached the point where I had a full draft of the story, and I then spent some time reading it through to check for errors, omissions and inconsistencies and to make any corrections and revisions that were necessary. I spent quite a lot of time going and back and forth with the dialogue, struggling a bit to work out the best way to format this (which I found difficult because there does not seem to be a standard method for presenting dialogue, something that surprised me a lot). Then, with a final draft version completed I was left wondering what, exactly, I should do next with all of those words. And there were a lot of them, a whopping 110,000 or so in fact, because the final version came at with 48 chapters (plus a prologue, interlude and epilogue).

I’m still not quite sure what I will do next with my manuscript. I know that I can go down a self-publishing route fairly quickly and easily – I have already got the text in a ‘flowable’ format suitable for e-readers. I also know that to try to get a book published by a traditional publisher first requires gaining the interest of a Literary Agent, something that seems to be incredibly difficult – so I know that that route is both difficult and unlikely to be successful. My instinct is that I want to at least try to go down the traditional publishing route and see what happens, and so at the moment I am working my way through various materials that should help me engage with that process. At some point, I might actually get to the stage of having written a synopsis, a query letter, identified comparative titles (‘comps’), drawn-up a long-list of suitable agents to query, and a short list for a first batch of submissions. Then all it will take is a bit of bravery and a willingness to suffer rejection…

In the meantime, I decided that one of the issues with writing (certainly these days when writing on a computer) is that once you have finished your story you have nothing physical to show for your efforts. With this in mind, I spent a week or two putting my text into an attractive, ‘proper’ book format, painted some pictures to use as cover art, and then I sent it off to a printing company to get a few copies of it as a properly printed paperback book. Now, even if I make no further progress towards publishing it at all, I can, at least, glance at my bookshelf and see a nice fat paperback sitting there that I produced. Just that thought is rather satisfying and it allows me to inwardly respond to my daughter’s statement, “that will never happen”, with the words “but look, it did!”

If anyone reading this thinks that they’d like to be a test reader then please do get in touch. The story follows a group of children who are brought together as they travel through a disintegrating island realm, facing all kinds of natural challenges – fire, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and landslides – as they are gradually drawn towards the mountain that sits at the island’s core and, unknowingly to a meeting with a strange philosopher-hermit who must share the wisdom that will allow the fractured peoples of the island to come together to re-build their world. I think that the book would probably be put into the ‘middle grade’ of perhaps ‘9-12 age group’ categories but honestly, it’s a fun adventure with lots of twists and turns that adults should enjoy too – I certainly did!