The First Review of Silent Lips – 5 stars!

Amazing how nice the feeling is when you read your first Amazon review of  your book!

I've just checked the review. Silent Lips, my thriller about a genetically modified virus that spreads in New York, leading to a frantic search for a cure, was awarded 5 stars.

Here's the review:

Reading Silent Lips by Glenn Ashton is like getting on a train heading up a long mountain. The suspense builds and builds until you reach the top and then swoops down into a very surprising ending. The level of detail involved in describing the battle against a plague-like virus attacking New York City is amazing and it feels like you are there in the laboratories and treatment rooms as well as in the highest offices in the land.

Beware that this book can keep you up well past your bedtime. The complexity almost demands a consistent dedication to finishing the book. Then you want to start over to make sure you understand the underlying science, but it's not really a necessity that you do, as it is just a very fine read.

It is definitely an amazing first book and I look forward to other books by this author.

I hope the reviewer buys Obelisk Seven, and Littletown Combo One!

Going on vacation to Europe? How to add zest with an obelisk hunt

Ever since we wrote Obelisk Seven, we have been surprised by the number of people who have raved about their first encounters with an obelisk while holidaying in Europe.

We tell them of our first encounters with these ancient pillars of red granite, and they tell us of the ones they've seen, and the ones they've missed.

Our website and blogs just for you!

When we finished our thriller, and started our quest for a publisher (check our Obelisk Seven website for more details), we also started a blog to use some of the material we had but which did not fit into the 84,000 novel.

Our novel started with an interesting tour guide from Trafalgar Tours. He was a Dutchman who left the pursuit of law to become a tour guide of major European cities. He and his wife enjoyed travelling, and he was an artist as well: whenever he had some time off from guiding tourists through London or Paris or Rome or Venice or other cities, he would sneak off and sketch street scenes and buildings.

Nefertiti - Take her a rose in Berlin

And did he know a lot about the history of these old cities, and the buildings and statues in them! He was fascinated by the past, both the politics and the people, and able to convey to us interesting snippets which made our visits to the tour sites so much more intriguing.

Creating your Adams and Eves: Our Big 3

Writing a novel gives you the chance to create your own little world, fashion your own people to inhabit it, weave events to move your plotline forward, and set up obstacles to challenge your people.

Heady stuff, but where to begin?

You could do worse than browse through a book with a title you will never forget once your read it, and take some hints from the author on what exactly a viewer of a movie (or reader of a novel) wants from the characters you are going to create for your little world.

Blake Snyder, who made millions in Hollywood selling screenplays, wrote a book every writer should read. He modestly named it Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need. It's well worth dipping into Save the Cat every now and then for inspiration.

Blake had some advice for writers on the types of heroes who populate movies. He presents several archetypes, that he calls Snyderian archetypes, and dares you to put the hero of any movie you can think of into one of these categories.

Here are a few of his archetypes:

• the young man on the rise,
  
• the good girl tempted,
  
• the clever and resourceful child,
  
• the sex goddess,
  
• the hunk,
  
• the wounded soldier going back for a last redemptive mission,
  
• the troubled sexpot,
  
• the court jester,
  
• the wise grandfather,
  
• talking animals,
  
• sidekicks and misers.

According to Blake:

A Room with a View of Pyramids: Mena House Hotel in Giza

I asked Loraine to dance with me,  in the garden where Charlton Heston rode his horse while filming The Ten Commandments and in the shade of the hotel where Roosevelt met Churchill to plan the invasion of Europe during World War II.

Our Dance Pact – entered into before we married – means that we will dance with each other in any place, at any time, and to any music, if one of us asks the other to dance.

I took her hand and asked the waiter in the restaurant next to the pool of the Mena House Hotel to turn up the music on the small radio he had hidden behind the counter, and we danced, with the ancient pyramids of Giza as our company.

A royal lodge for the Khedive Ismail, the Mena House Hotel has a fascinating history, and an illustrious guest list. In the 1880's the lodge was converted into a hotel and named after Mena, the first king to unify Egypt.

As we danced, I wondered whether we might see the ghosts of past visitors.

Mena House Hotel - Giza, Egypt

Would Heston come riding into the garden each day after his filming was done?

Would Churchill come wandering past, cigar jutting from his bulldoggish mouth, pondering where exactly to invade France and throw back the armies of Nazi Germany. In 1943 Churchill met President Roosevelt at the Hotel – an R.A.F. observation post was mouned on top of Cheop's Pyramid to give warning of any attack by German forces.

From our hotel room we could see the pyramids, barely 700 meters away and mysterious in the quiet Egyptian night.

Arthur Conan Doyle, having killed of his character Sherlock Holmes, stayed here for the winter of 1895-1896, with his wife, who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Churchill at the Mena House Hotel

And in 1979 Jimmy Carter spent time here, in the Churchill Suite, during the peace negotiations between President Sadat (who stayed in the Montgomery Suite) and Menachem Beghin (in suite 908).

We never did meet the ghost of Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, Robert Taylor, Omar Sharif, Barbara Hutton, Mia Farrow, David Niven or Peter Ustinov, nor were we able to sit down for a chat about the life of authors with Agatha Christie.

But the next day we were off to the Pharoah's tomb deep below the pyramid ...

Tracking down Nefertiti in Berlin

Nein! Nein! Nein! Three times we were told during our visit to Berlin in 2009 that we could not see the famous bust of Nefertiti.

Alone - Nefertiti in the Old Museum, Berlin

She was not open to the public, said our tour guide.

She was being prepared for a move to the New Museum, said the concierge of our hotel.

She could not be seen  by tourists right now, said the museum official our hotel concierge phoned, at our insistence.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, we thought, so we made our way to the Museum Island to see if we were definitely banned from seeing the famous Queen.

Museum Island is the northern half of an island in the Spree River in central Berlin.

It houses five museums, the Old Museum or Altes Museum built in 1830, and the New Museum or Neues Museum built in 1859.

The New Museum was bombed by Allied forces during the Second World War, and was rebuilt and re-opened in 2009, after our visit there.

We wandered into the Old Museum and voila! 

There she was.

Museum Island, Berlin - aerial view

There was a display of busts of Cleopatra and Nefertiti, and THE bust was there.

As were dozens of people, thronging around this remarkable sculpture, which shortly thereafter was moved to the "palace" prepared for her in the New Museum.

Caesar bust in the Old Museum, Berlin

A little further down the hall we came across a bust of a brooding Caesar, with startling white eyes, seemingly pondering the fate of his empire and the queen of the pharaohs, Cleopatra, who had caused such disruption in it.

The Altes (Old) Museum, Berlin - Nefertiti's prison in 2009

We could not believe our luck, and snapped away, from all angles. 

To actually see the bust of this queen, who played a minor role in our novel, Obelisk Seven, was truly a gift from the gods – from the Egyptian gods, of course!

They did not answer Nein! to our question: Can we see the queen.

Save the Cat: Blake Snyder on the role of The Board

In Save the Cat! Blake Snyder talks about a writer needing the beating ability –he describes it as a battle cry of Let's beat it out!

What's with the beat?

It's about structure, Blake says: something he learned only after writing screenplays for years:

It's a skill you must know... The craftmanship it akes, the patient work, the magic of storytelling on film, all come together in how you execute and realize structure.

He tells  how he came across Syd Field's Screenplay and found something that saved his career:

Oh! Three acts! Imagine  that? And yet, it was not enough. Like a swimner in a vast ocean, there was a lot of open water in between those two Act breaks. And a lot of empty script space in which to get lost, panic, and drown. I needed more islands, shorter swims.

His solution was to develop the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet – click here to see the actual beat sheet. As the number of pages in the average script runs at 110, there are 110 beats (pages) in the Beat Sheet, divided into 15 parts.

The Blake Snyder Board

How do you get to the beat sheet? You use The Board.

Our Adams & Eves: We needed you – the Venetian

Gondola in Venice

Our man in Venice ended up taking on a life of his own, and we found ourselves simply having to follow him as he lead us through the canals of his home city.

Our Venetian character in our thriller Obelisk Seven is one of the minor characters, but the role he plays supporting the Big Three (Nick, Kate and Gliffy) is an important one. 

As soon as we decided that we wanted our novel to climax in Venice, we realized that we needed someone there to act as the conduit for the information dumps we had to add to the novel to move it along.

Our visit to Venice had been a real highlight of our train tour.

Neither of us had appreciated the powerful position that Venice had occupied for so many centuries, and the unique nature of her democracy.

As soon as we set foot for the first time in St. Mark's square we lost our hearts to this wonderful city.

And then we lost them again when we glided beneath the bridges on our gondola, and walked beside the canals, admiring the ancient palaces that still exist, despite Venice's periodic floods.

So Lorenzo made his entrance, and came with a five hundred-year history, his own palace, and his very own Mouth of Truth.

And he arrived early on in our novel, and stayed until almost the very end.

A very welcome character.

St. Mark's Square, Venice

Venice from the sky

Venice Carnival Mask

Mouth of Truth in the Doge's Palace - reformatted

Glassblower's Art from Venice

A hint - Dan Brown's Seven Points for Writers

In 2005 Liza Rogak published The Man Behind The Da Vinci Code – An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown.

She describes the outline for Seven Powerful Tips used by Dan Brown on his website (but since scrubbed from that site).

She writes that the outline provides a revealing look at how Brown "plans and crafts the flow of his own novels."

Here, briefly, are his Seven Powerful Tips:

Setting – reveal new worlds to your readers.

In and out scene building – keep things moving.

A sole dramatic question – use a single brick for your foundation.

Tension – create it with the clock (fast passage of time to speed the novel); the crucible (apply your heat to your constrained characters); and the contract (make promises to your reader and keep them).

Research – learn the specifics you will need for your novel.

Weaving of information - dole it out in small bites.

Revision – go back and play with your first draft.

.

Look who else was rejected! Some lessons for Writers from The Drunkard's Walk

Can a drunkard give you hope? The answer is Yes!

Scratch the surface of any writer and you'll uncover a deep fear of rejection.

Your lot as a writer seems to depend on others, and every single day you think of the high odds against you, and of the next rejection – by an agent or a publisher.

But there is some good news for you, if you are prepared to learn some lessons from The Drunkard's Walk,  Leonard Mlodninow's magnificent book on how randomness rules our lives.

Leonard makes the point that we "habitually underestimate the effects of randomness". And his dissection of the impact of random events on our lives should give every writer who wants to break into the Big Time hope.

Take this obeservation from his book:

Suppose four publishers have rejected the manuscript for your thriller about love, war, and global warming. Your intuition and the bad feeling in the pit of your stomach might say that the rejections by all those publishing experts mean your manuscript is no good. But is your intuition correct? Is your novel unsellable?

Loraine and I just love his reference to a manuscript about global warming – that man is psychic, make no bones about it!

Leonard goes on – and writers the world over should memorize these words and recite them as a mantra every time they wake up, look in the mirror, and fear rejection:

Could it be that publishing success is so unpredictable that even if our nevel is destined for the best-seller list, numerous publishers could miss the point and send those letters that say thanks but no thanks?

J.K. Rowlands

He goes on to give a list of published authors who were rejected, with some quotes from the thank you but no thanks letters.

Sylvia Plath was rejected for lack of enough genuine talent.

George Orwell was rejected because animal stories would not sell in the U.S.

Tony Hillerman was rejected by an agent and advised to get rid of all that Indian stuff in his manuscripts.

John Grisham had one manuscript rejected by 26 publishers, and 27 publishers rejected the first book of Dr. Seuss.

Even J.K. Rowland had her first Harry Potter manuscript rejected by 9 publishers before she got that all-important Yes.

And now for the kicker – Leonard's conclusion on your chances of getting published and winning fame and fortune.

His good news? You do stand a chance:

There exists a vast gulf of randomness and uncertainty between the creation of a great novel ... and the presence of huge stacks of that novel ... at the front of thousands of retail outlets. That's why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set – the set of people who don't give up. A lot of what happens to us – success in our careers, in our investments, and in our life decisions, both major and minor – is as much the result of random factors as the result of skill, preparedness, and hard work.

As a writer clutching a just-finished manuscript in your hot hand, you probably need to learn how to become a Happy Loser, as Clotaire Rapille, the noted archetype psychoanalyst and ethnographer, calls successful sales people:

Salespeople sometimes say to me, "I don't like that you call me a loser." But that's not what I mean. Happy losers are people who see rejection as a challenge. If 95 percent of the time you are rejected, you have to ask yourself, "Why did I choose this kind of life?" The happy loser likes it because 5 percent of the time, he wins. And all those times he loses, he sees as getting to the win.

 

Thelma Toole

This lesson from The Drunkard's Walk came too late for author John Kennedy Toole, who lost hope and committed suicide at the age of 31 on an isolated road outside Biloxi, Mississippi, by connecting a garden hose from his idling car to his cabin; his mother kept seeking a publisher for his manuscript and eleven years later A Confederacy of Dunces was published – testimony to a mother's unwillingness to give up.

Your Adams & Eves: Of Villains & Villas

James Bond

Do you have a worthy villain? Is your Bad Guy bad enough?

How do you measure his 'badness'?

It's no good just to people your novel with good heroes; you also need villains of substance.

Blake Snyder puts it well in Save the Cat! – he has a title Make the Bad Guy Badder.

He writes that we don't want to see nobodies onscreen, we want to see heroes.

And he argues persuasively that there is a win-win correlation between your Hero and your Bad Guy:

And making the bad guy badder automatically makes the hero bigger. It's one of the Immutable Laws of Screenwwriting. Think about James Bond. What makes him James Bond is Goldfinger, Blofeld, and Dr. No... He needs someone bigger to play with to make his own heroism bigger. He needs an antagonist whose powers match his own ... The point is that the hero and the bad guy are a matched set and should be of  equal skill and strength, with the bad guy being just slightly more powerful than the hero because he is willing to go to any lengths to win... So if your hero and your bad guy are not of equal strength, make them so, but give the edge to the bad guy.

 

For our novel Obelisk Seven, we ended up with three themes (global warming, the obelisk quest, and the Tough Bug); we also ended up with two sets of Bad Guys, one for the Tough Bug theme, and one for the other two themes.

One of the Bad Guys we located in a palace on the Grand Canal of Venice.

The Bad Guy family we modelled on a real family that had been a powerful force in Venice for many generations:  the Cornaro family. For centuries this wealthy family dominated the city state of Venice, commissioning palaces, theaters and other buildings, and contributing members to the political elite.

We saw many palaces as our gondolier sculled us past them, and one in particular popped up when we needed a place for some climactic skullduggery – a five storey building with a curving exterior staircase.

The 'Gitti' Palace in Venice

This gave us our setting: a dark night during the famous Carnival of Venice, a gondola moving soundlessly through the waters of a canal, and the voices of late-night revellers drifting over the lapping water ...

Three Themes for our Foundation

There is no Planet B

Do you think it easy to lay a foundation for a novel?

Think again! Every novel needs a storyline, but it also needs a theme  – a basic, bedrock, underlying foundation. 

We struggled for a while because we had two themes, but really needed one foundation for Obelisk Seven. 

Our two themes were the obelisks, which came first when we decided to write our thriller, and global warming, our controversial topic.

But try as we might we could not link these two themes into one unified whole.

So we spent many days doing some brainstorming.

Tardigrade or Water Bear

And then one day we stumbled across an article about designer microbes, and we had our third theme, which linked the first two: an engineered microbe that could create mayhem in the little world we had designed, and enable us to bring the three themes together in the climax.

And, naturally, with three themes, we found that we could not work with only two lead characters – we ended up with one for each theme: Nick for the global warming challenge; Gliffy for the singing obelisk quest; and Kate for the search for the new microbe that was eating carbon in oil and coal deposits.

Three themes, three characters, and one story.

The Goddess in the Darkness

Where do you get your ideas? We are often asked that, as are most writers.

And sometimes it's a difficult question to answer.

How we get the ideas is easier: we look for them; we put ourselves in places and situations where ideas might suddenly spontaneously appear.

Michael Slade(pen name of Jay Clarke), prolific author of police novels, gave a lecture entitled Where do you get your ideas? for the Surrey International Writers Conference and listed 40 topics covered in his many novels, including voodoo, headhunting, the London sewer system, Hitler's bunker, the history of hanging and plastic surgery.

Michael Slade

Sometimes you experience a place or an event, and later, when you're sitting down to write a scene or plan the plotline of a novel, that experience or scene manifests itself and demands to be heard.

We had one such experience when we visited the Karnak Temple in Egypt.

Our energetic guide took us off to the left side of the temple, through an empty field, until we came to some old buildings. Inside them, he told us that there was a statue of the goddess Sekhmet inside, alone in the darkness, and that we could commune with her, alone or in small groups.

Loraine did so, spending several minutes alone with the goddess in the darkness, and when we came to write Obelisk Seven, we included this scene in the novel.

Sekhmet

The reality kick: A Bride, 28 carloads of Bones & the Pantheon Obelisk

Sometimes reality sneaks up behind you and gives you a kick in the pants when you are writing.

You sit waiting for your Muse to gift you a scene, or a character, and nothing happens. Then suddenly a thought swirls in the back of your mind – perhaps a dredged up memory of a vacation or a cup of coffee with someone – and keeps coming back until you just have to deal with it.

And you find that you have the scene or character you were looking for. Thanks, Muse!

A photograph we took of a buggy with a horse in front, waiting patiently while a bride and groom were being married inside the massive Pantheon in Rome, gave us our opening scene for Obelisk Seven. Plus, we felt a little kindred spirit with the bride and groom, because we were married on a beach ... another unusual setting.

Wedding buggy at Pantheon, Rome

This huge temple was built in 27 BC by Agrippa, the son-in-law of Emperor Augustus, whose name is on the facade of the building, and dedicated by him to all the gods (hence the name Pantheon). It was rebuilt in 123 AD by Emperor Hadrian, and much later was converted into a church, because its vault and round shape lent itself to this purpose, by Pope Boniface IV.

To consecrate the church, the Pope brought twenty eight carloads of bones of martyrs from the catacombs and placed them beneath the altar.

With a history like that, and an obelisk before it, plus a bride and buggy, we just had to use it to open our book. And so our lead character, Nick, sits in the rain along with the patient  horse, and meets our heroine, Kate.

Audrey Hepburn

Throw in Audrey Hepburn (she starred in Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck in 1953, and ordered champagne at a trattoria close to the one we were sitting at in the Pantheon square during our vacation), and we had the unsual setting we wanted for our first meeting of our heroes.

The Dissection of Silent Lips by Anne Perry at the Surrey International Writers Conference

The doorway is guarded by two SiWC volunteers, and you need to show them your "passport to pitching" to get into the large hall.

Inside, agents and publishers are seated at small tables on the left and right sides, waiting for hopeful writers to make their pitches.

The writers sit at the front of the hall, in two lines, waiting for their ten minutes.

Anne Perry

At the back of the hall are the Blue Pencillers. These writers and agents are there to give you advice on the structure of whatever you have brought – a few pages of a novel, a handful of poems.

Anne Perry waved me to a seat and held up her hand to stop me passing her the few pages I had selected from an old novel, stuck in a dusty drawer for a little over a decade.

I don't read segments in these sessions, she explains. Talk to me about what your novel is about.

I launch into a discussion of The Silent Lips. Title taken from the famous poem by Emma Lazarus on the plaque of the Statue of Liberty. Before being shipped to New York in 1885, parts of the statue were exhibited in Paris.

The words that gave me the title for this old novel of mine are stirring:

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

 

Statue of Liberty head 1885

The story in my thriller Silent Lips is set in a New York which has had a ring of steel thrown around it to stop the spread of a disease that sprang from one man's experiments to save his friend from sickle cell (using himself as a test tube, and crossing the species line by using chimpanzees).

Frantic experiments take place in the ParkLab as scientists – flying in on one-way tickets to help the stricken city – try to find a cure.

They overstep boundaries in their desperation,  lead by the military commander of the ParkLap, while B52 bombers trace lazy contrails in the sky above, waiting for the order by the President to solve the problem.

What causes you concern about your story structure, Anne asks.

The flow, I answer.

She leans forward, and talks for several minutes. Your risk is that your novel might sound like a documentary. You might want to personalize it more.

Take your lead character and see if you can make the story more about him/her, and drop any details you do not need.

I sit back, thinking.

Ten minutes with a highly skilled professional, and an uncanny insight given to me which solves a niggling problem I had – a problem which lead to The Silent Lips being thrust into the back of a drawer and hidden out of sight for so many years.

Time well spent.

I leave, and another hopeful author takes my seat at the small table. Anne Perry leans forward, waving aside the proffered pages.

Speak to me, she says ..

A Plotting Primer – Creating One for your Novel

You've decided to write your thriller. Now, out of the whirling mass of nothingness you have to create the lifeline for the book, the skeleton along which you will be packing the flesh of events, of characters, of description.

You need a plot.

No plot, no book.

How do you go about it?

Let's find out from a few different sources.

The Save the Cat! Man
 

First we turn to Blake Snyder, the Save the Cat! man.

Snyder says he has a Turn-rule for plots for screenplays, and its basis is:

The plot doesn't just move ahead, it spins and intensifies as it goes ... And the rule is: It's not enough for the plot to go forward, it must move forward faster, and with more complexity, to the climax ... More must be revealed along every step of the plot about your characters and what all this action means.

That's helpful – we know we will re-read his suggestion once we have worked out the plot. But his suggestion is about the speed of the plot, the plot's complexity. What about the other elements of a plot?

Help from a Snowflake

Perhaps you might wish to turn to the science of fractals for inspiration. Fractals are those wonderful pictures we get when mathematicians reduce their calculations to images. It seems that the closer you look at things, the more you spot the patterns of fractals that go to make them up.

Your Novel & Your Elevator Speech

As soon as you put pen to paper to write your book – perhaps even sooner – you will run slap into a major problem.

How do you describe what your novel  is about when someone asks you?

You will suddenly realize that you desperately need what some of us call your "elevator speech", and others your "logline".

Let's talk about you in an elevator, then move on to Star Trek and how you can use the availability bias to make your elevator speech memorable.

Now imagine that you are in an elevator on the tenth floor when a heavy hitter of a publisher steps into the elevator. The door closes. She notices your manuscript tucked under your arm.

"Your book?" she asks, and you nod, tongue-tied. Beads of sweat spring out on your forehead, and you swallow, trying to lubricate your dry mouth so that you can say something interesting, something arresting, something memorable.

This is your big chance ...

"What is it?" she asks.

You are now one floor further down, and your brain freezes. Your mind goes blank. Bits of static dance where once your neurons danced and made intelligent patterns resulting in interesting things to say.

This is when you really, really need your elevator speech.

The one that pitches your novel to the big-time publisher in the time it takes for the elevator to drop from the tenth floor to the ground level, and she rushes out to her next meeting.

The one that makes her stop, give you her card, and ask you to call her.

On her private number.

And soon. Like that night.

What must your elevator speech contain for you to get  her card when the doors open?

Saved by the Cat?

Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat!, comes to our rescue:

"What is it?" is the name of the game. "What is it?" is the movie. A good "What is it?" is the coin of the realm.

So let's start with two of Blake's definitions and then explore the two concepts. His definition of the hook is short and sweet:

Save the Cat!

"It is a simple mental picture that promises fun and gives you enough of a peek into the storyline that you can see the potential."

And he defines the logline this way:

"A logline is a one- or two-sentence description of your movie that tells us what it is."

Another advantage of a good logline is the discipline it exerts on the author, as Blake observes:

"And concentrate on writing one sentence. One line. Because if you can learn how to tell me "What is it?" better, faster, and with more creativity, you'll keep me interested. And incidentally, by doing so before you start writing your script, you'll make the story better, too.