TANDEM - new novel - first post about it...

TANDEM 

a G3 whistleblower novel 

 the new novel (and it really is much more than a long short story, I hope) went through about three different changes of direction, and title, during the four frantic weeks it took to write it 'in long-hand' i.e. in notebooks using a pack of leaking biros, while I was away with the family in foreign climes topping up my tan and attempting to keep fit.

It wasn't even the novel I'd expected to work on, this vacation. I say this time, because I remember a time when I took my family to Japan for ten days with the intention of hammering out the guts of a novel. Got a brand new expensive pen. Got a brand new leather notepad to fill.

NOTHING, no dream project spilled forth.

This time, I was see-sawing between writing book two of the Free Planet series, code-named LIBERATOR and writing another novel altogether about a stalker-cum-serial killer who turns into a saviour of the innocents. I had pages and pages of notes for either.

On the spur of the moment and because I really didn't wanna lug loads of documents around in hard copy format on piles of A4, the day before setting out for our family month away in the south of France, I decided to print out a two-page treatment of a real sketchy idea that might have been about a War World where everybody knows but you or might have been about a Rampant Sex Slaughterer, in the end it turned out to be a whole lot weirder, scarier, nastier and inventive than both those ideas slammed together. It just went off on its own, like it was having 'such fun'.

My last three books, since 2008, have been heavily political intrigue-inspired and this new book is a return to why I got writing in the first place. In my 1989 novel Red Hedz, a man and a woman are brought together by bizarre circumstance and have to work their way out of an insane problem. Same thing here, but with less psycho-erotic porn moments. More revelation though, more drama, more of everything I've been practising over the last twenty years as a writer who refuses to go mainstream.

THREE NOTE BOOKS of novelistic content seemed to shit themselves out of their own volition - I even ended up incorporating two short story ideas from like ten years back: one called The Woman Who Dated Suicide Bombers and an unfinished interstellar slaughter story called something like Nuclear Man. Right at the end of the writing session, I realised there was something missing. A kingpin. Just before heading home, I added The Blackmailer - his 11th hour inclusion would finish the project perfectly.

What is a G3 whistleblower? The basic idea is G3 is one of the super secret branches of MI5 that even MI5 don't know about - very surreal stuff happens later on in the novel. If you like your fiction proper hardcore and fucked up, you'll like this one.

I had no contact with the modern world for the entire time I was away: no phones, no internet, no posts or forums - absolutely no distractions, and maybe this is why the creativity just spewed forth in such a frothy manner. I think I might really love this novel.

The hard work of putting this thing back together from pages of cross-referenced and still-to-fill-out ideas that are a-hustling and a-bustling to get put onto disc. More news as it unfolds...