Look after your anoraks

Phil: I’ve been enjoying a bit of catch-up TV recently. I missed out on the BBC show The Detectorists when it first aired, but am nearly at the end of series 1 and looking forward to series 2.

The series revolves around Andy and Lance, two metal detector enthusiasts and their group of friends. What I like most about it is that while the main characters could easily have been figures of fun, they aren’t. In many ways the plots are conventional but built around people’s hobby rather than job. In fact, like most people, their jobs are utterly mundane and merit hardly any attention. Life is lived outside working hours.

Better still, they get to show skill and knowledge, such as Andy knowing exactly how long bones survive in the soil when explaining how a recently discovered skeleton couldn’t be Saxon.

Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times summed it up when he wrote, “Like the ordinary lives it magnifies, Detectorists has the air of seeming to be small and immense at once, to be about hardly anything and almost everything. It is full of space and packed with life.”

Now, you might conclude that I like the show because I’m a bit of an anorak myself. While I have no desire to find bits of metal buried in fields, I do get why this might be interesting to do. There’s nothing wrong with it (OK, archeologists, pipe down) and I’m sure that there is a lot more skill required than waiting for your machine to go ping.

I like the idea that people who it would be easy to turn into the butt of jokes get to be the heroes. Heck, they both have attractive partners and Lance drives a TR7 so living the dream!

Bringing this back to our books, one of my character to look after is Kelvin, our man from IT. He’s a bit of a nerd as befits his role in the firm, but that doesn’t mean he is any sort of joke. Yes, there are a couple of (realistically) embarrassing moments along the way but when you read Kate vs the Navy (out soon!) you’ll find that Kelvin is a bit of a star.

Tracey might say, “Yeah. Kelvin. You know. Bad clothes. Can’t talk to girls. Always there when you need something on your computer fixed.”, but it turns out she was wrong. Very wrong.

 

 

Now for the test readers

Phil: Progress report. The book is ready for our carefully selected* group of test readers.

Over a long evening, I formatted the pages and uploaded them to Lulu.com. Then an order for a couple of copies was placed.

A few days later, the books arrived. Flicking through in the pub, I notced I could do to carry out a little more formatting in a couple of places, there is at least one chapter that starts half way down a page for a start, but it will be fine the task in hand. Having a paper-back looking thing is certainly easier for the our literary guinea pigs than endless A4 pages, and even at 9 quid a copy (including postage), quite a lot cheaper than Prontaprint.

We await results.

*selected because they understand that their job is to read and (hopefully) enjoy the story, not care about the grammar. I don’t care how good we are with prepositions and semi-colons, if the story is rubbish then our time has been wasted. Grammar will be fixed separately as we are also looking for a copy editor.

Listening to music while writing

Phil: When team NolanParker meet up, we like a bit of cake. And quite a lot of chat. Sometimes though, we need to get some words on the screen and then everything changes.

Laptops out. iPods on.

The iPods are an essential piece of kit. For a start that stop us talking to each other. Mostly though, it’s all about blocking the rest of the world out and helping our concentration.

We have both spent years of our lives in noisy offices. Environments where you learn to tune things out. I know that I now can’t work in a silent room. The walls seem to close in on me and the lack of noise become oppressive. I like to use this as an excuse for my poor exam performance rather than admitting I’m just a bit thick.

Is this just a comfort thing though? It appears not. Reading this fascinating blog post by author and expert Nicola Morgan, there does seem to be science to back all of this up.

Most interesting is how the choice of music matters. It must be:

• Familiar
• Music you actually love
• More than one song – an album or playlist
• At a volume that doesn’t intrude on your thoughts

Which probably helps to explain why I get more done with the iPod on than the radio.

Even with over a thousand tracks on shuffle, it’s rare that anything surprises me. My memory for music isn’t bad.

The radio, on the other hand, will play tracks that I don’t know so presumably, part of my limited brain capacity feels the need to pay attention. Part of the historic response to danger we developed as cavemen, although more to avoid being eaten than exposed to something new by Harry Styles!

All done. Now is it any good?

Phil: As my writing pal proclaimed last week, our next book, Kate vs the Navy, is ready for test readers.

I’ve been slogging away sorting out the formatting. Indents for speech and chapter numbers are the main focus so it looks nice on the page. No doubt you, dear reader, will do all this sort of thing as you write but we’re messy in this respect. The creative juices get flowing and the tab key is ignored.

Candice has been through the text and added a load of scene setting phrases to break up long blocks of dialogue. Without this, it’s possible to lose track of exactly who is speaking.

There have also been a few extra sections of text added – which I promptly re-wrote. That’s how we roll. One will add in parts of story and the other will say, “I like that but now want to tweak it”. Generally we manage to do this without falling out over the changes. Quite how we manage is a mystery as we’re both pretty passionate about our writing, but we seem to manage.

Making the best use of some enforced reading time, I gave the text another polish while sorting out the formatting. Tiny little niggles but better dealt with. I’m sure there are many more but you have to stop at some point.

Anyway, the next job is to format the book for A5 pages (it’s wet up for A4 at the moment) and get some print on demand copies made up so we can hand it over to the test readers, one of whom is apparently “gagging” for it.

Then we’ll find out if the story hangs together. Both of us have read it to death and agree that it’s the greatest book written since our last one, but how will the rest of the world feel?