Marc Nobbs: Blog

It’s been a full year since I last had a break from work of more than a couple of days. While the Christmas Holiday sees the entire firm shut down, it does so only for a week. And the break provided by this past Christmas was somewhat nullified by what followed when the office reopened. I took a few days off after everything there had settled down, but this past week and this coming week I’m away from the office fully, completely switched off and doing my best to relax.

For me, that means two things. First, time spent with my family. My son is now eighteen and should (as long as he gets the right grades on Thursday) be heading for University in the autumn, so this may be the last family holiday he comes on with us. I hope not, but you never know. So spending time with him is particularly important for me this summer. To that end, we made a two-hour drive down to Le Mans last week to visit the museum dedicated to the 24-hour race, which is filled with some of the cars that have raced there down the years. A great day out for us both.

The second way for me to relax is to write and read. I’ve done a lot of reading, finishing one book and being halfway through another. And I’ve done a fair bit of writing too, working exclusively now on the fourth Paul Robertson book. I’m quite pleased with what I’ve written too.

Up to now, I’ve deliberately not referred to the book by its working title. That’s because I’m not convinced this will be the final book and the working title is very much that of a final book. I’m up over sixty-thousand thousand words now and if I stick to my self-imposed goal of not going over one-hundred and fifty thousand, I don’t think I’m going to get everything in that I want to.

As I keep saying, I guess I just need to write and write and see how it goes. I’ve got a week left of this holiday and I know where I’d like to be in the narrative by the time we leave. How many words that will be, I don’t know.

Anyway, I just wanted to check in and give you all an update rather than leave it for two whole weeks. I’ll try and check in again either later this week.

I've reached the 50,000-word milestone with the fourth Paul Robertson novel and feel it's now time to plan out just what is the next step on the road to Paul's final destination.

Actually, that’s a little white lie—a small exaggeration, if you will. I have a spreadsheet where I keep a track of the word counts of each chapter of my novels and short stories and it’s showing the fourth Paul Robertson book as being 49,806 words long across ten chapters. I have the heading of chapter eleven typed out in my manuscript and once I start typing out the opening I have already written in my head, it’ll go past 50,000 quite quickly.

But that’s not the point.

The point is, I’ve now written what I had planned as the “opening” to the novel and need to work out how to get to the endpoint and if that endpoint is indeed the end of Paul’s story (which I hope it is) or if it’s a stopping off point for a fifth book. That’s something I won’t really know until get there. I posted last year about book lengths and how one that I was reading was, in my opinion, far too long and actually more like two or even three books, not one, so the last thing I want to do is then put out something that’s too long. I’m thinking no more than 150,000 words, so by the time I get to 100,000 I should be able to judge if I can finish Paul’s story in another 50,000 words or if I’ll need a fifth book.

I will admit that I’ve never really been a “planner”. I tend to write linearly from the start of the story to the end. That’s just how my brain works. So I’ve never really had any kind of detailed “plan” or “roadmap” for how a story goes. At least, not one that’s written down. On the one occasion that I did try and do that, the plan went out of the window pretty quickly and the route the story ended up taking was nothing like the original roadmap.

I do tend to have a clear endpoint in mind for a story. And a rough idea of how to get there. But my characters sort of ‘live in my head’ and have their own ideas about how their story pans out.

So, where am I and where do I need to get to?

The ten chapters I’ve written so far cover a two week period in Paul’s life, a number of significant events and one significant new character. Relationships—both business and personal—have evolved a little, moving Paul a bit closer to where he will ultimately end up.

The next step is to continue to develop those business and personal relationships. There are a couple of “events” that I know need to happen, although I haven’t really plotted out at what point in the timeline they happen or how I get there. So I guess, for the first time in a long time, I’m asking myself if I do need to sketch out some sort of roadmap—even if ultimately I don’t stick to it. I suppose it’s a bit like planning a road trip. I know the towns I want to go through on my way to my final destination, but I’m not really interested in planning the route road-by-road so much as making sure I head in the right general direction.

Or, I could just keep writing and see where the characters take me. Which will probably take me longer, throw up a couple of roadblocks that I have to navigate around but will, for me, be more satisfying because that’s just how my brain works.

If I’m honest with myself, it’ll probably be a bit of both.

I thought it was time I issued an update of where I am with things because I’m still getting plenty of messages asking me for the status of the fourth (and hopefully final) Paul Robertson book.

The last time I gave you an update was back in October—that’s nine months ago. As is always the case when I disappear for so long, life—my “real” life—got in the way. I had staffing issues at work which happened at a time of increased workload in the office in general, which is never a good combination. Essentially, I was getting home from work and all I wanted to do was crash in front of the TV, not spend the mental energy required to write fiction.

Writing has always been my “escape”, but as I get older—I’m fifty later this year—I find that mental tiredness is a bigger problem.

But, I’m happy to say that with the staffing issues resolved, I’m getting home with a little more energy and have made some real progress in recent weeks and months.

I’ve got seven projects at various stages of development right now. Some are no more than an idea and a brief description of the basic plot. Some have a few hundred or a few thousand words written.

The two that are furthest along should come as no surprise. I’ve written about 18,000 words of the third Lies Series book and about 45,000 words of the fourth Paul Robertson book.

If you compare that with October’s update, the third Lies book has barely changed but the fourth PR book is now nearly twice as long as it was then—so you can see where all that mental energy has been focused.

I’m quite pleased with what I’ve written so far. If this is to be the final part of Paul’s story, I’ve got a lot of ground to cover, both in his business life and his love life. And I will need to balance the story between those two goals—too much of one and not enough of the other will unbalance the story, which is something I’m very much aware of, particularly given that Paul’s business life is going to be fairly heavy lifting. That’s not to say his love life is going to be smooth sailing either, mind you.

So, in short, I’m making progress and I’m happy with it, but, as always, I’m reluctant to set any deadlines since I never meet them anyway.

So, having made the decision that AWH wouldn’t be the final book in Paul’s story, I expected to be able to bring this volume to a conclusion—I’ll leave it to others to eventually decide if it’s a satisfying conclusion—within a couple of chapters and maybe ten to twenty thousand words.

That was when the manuscript was at 80,000 words. It’s now at 104,000 and I could easily write another ten or twenty thousand words on top of this to get to my “end point” I envisaged.

But I haven’t done that. In fact, I’ve even gone so far as to have Paul acknowledge in his narration that he could describe the events that bring this chapter of his story to a close in a lot of detail (even quite graphic detail) but is choosing not to.

I was initially worried that doing this may make the book’s ending seem rushed, but I think I’ve managed to do it in a way that feels okay. If I had tried to describe the scenes that Paul glosses over in his narration, they could have seemed repetitive and superfluous, since they would have been almost completely sex scenes anyway.

I’ve written before, in 2015 and 2009, about having too much sex in a sex story—in particular in longer novels—and I’ve always tried to make sure that I‘m not writing sex scenes for the sake of having sex scenes. They do, I think, have to have a point—be that either moving the plot along or doing some character development.

I hope that’s what I’ve achieved here.

There was an interesting discussion of this recently in the StoriesOnline Forums.

This book ends at a natural break point in Paul’s story, which is what I intended when I decided not to make this the final book in the series. Paul’s closing narration is reflective and that reflection, I hope, brings the novel together as a single piece, and sets up what’s to come in the future.

Of course, I’m the author, so it’s not really for me to say if what I’ve produced is successfully achieving my aims. It’s for you, the reader, to decide.

So what now? Well, over the Christmas break I’ll re-read what I’ve written—probably on a tablet rather than a laptop or PC—and perhaps make a few notes, correct some obvious errors and see try and work out if it all hangs together or if I need to make some changes.

I’ll also be looking for some volunteers to have a read of this first draft and offer their comments on the plot & characterisation. Then in the New Year, I’ll set about doing a more thorough edit and preparing the book for release. Ideally, I’d like to set a release date in the first quarter of 2023.

And it can’t come soon enough.

The last of my "legacy" works - by which I mean stories written some time ago and originally published elsewhere - is now available on Bookapy and will make its way to SOL in the next week or so.

"Charlotte's Secret" was, like many of my earlier work, originally written for Ruthie's Club. It was later picked up by Phaze, who went out of business a few years ago after which the rights reverted back to me.

It's been available at the rainforest retailer for a couple of years, and is now making its way here.

This will mean all my "legacy" work is now at both Bookapy and/or SOL. (The novels & novellas are at both, the short stories just at SOL).

I'll post again here once "Charlotte's Secret" begins posting.