Writing the next books
What is Wrong with Us and Renaissance
After far too long getting three books converted to epub, finding out about epublishing, selecting suitable sales channels, etc. I can now get back to my first love – writing.
I am writing what might be my final nonfiction book with the working title of What is Wrong with Us before I restart writing fiction. I have already written a full length satire but I am unsure how my readers will accept it as it is full of humor and some of it risqué. I have been told that readers like authors to stick to one genre but I might decide to use a pseudonym. Ian Banks did this with his choice of adding an ‘M’ to his name to satisfy reader and publisher expectations of him but as I am both author and publisher I can please myself.
Does ‘K C Gasgoigne’ have the right flavor? ‘Cuthbert’ was one of my nicknames for many years and it does have a resonance here in northern England. My french name was Kit [ki:t] (sounds like ‘Keet’) mainly because most of the french and the dutch people I knew there could not pronounce the final ‘th’ and I got used to that but it isn’t different enough. I could use ‘Carlin’ which is one from my father’s family names or ‘Wibberley’, which is another early name from my mother’s family but what’s in a name? OK, ‘Shakespeare’ will do but ‘Keith Shakespeare’ doesn’t have the ring of authenticity about it.
I have been collecting material – ideas and quotes - for around 3 years for this What is Wrong with Us project but it is still a daunting task and I am not sure if it will become a full length typescript or remain a half-finished idea. I’ll see.
A problem with writing serious books is that the humor inside me wants to get out. Humor is a necessary antidote to the appalling mess that the politicians and bankers are making of our society. Humor is also a force that many autocratic governments fear.
I have already started gathering ideas, thoughts and doing research for my next fiction book, which has the working title of Renaissance. I think that is an apt title for what I have planned for the characters but characters have a way interacting and changing the plot. I need to do a lot of research because there is no chance of me ever visiting the location for this book which is extremely extreme and can easily be terminal as a group of scientists nearly found out a few years ago.
It will be good to be ‘creative’ rather than having to stick to facts all the time and most people would rather read works of fiction.
A few of the characters (the survivors) will appear in a subsequent book already growing in my mind. In fact, it simply popped into my mind whole early one morning and I leapt out of bed to scribble it down. The working title for that might be The Few but that is just a convenient name for me at the moment. The first part will be somewhat dystopian but I think it might change part-way through or at least show hope for the future. I’ll see.
So my first two fiction books for some years might become a trilogy of sorts. Who knows? (Maybe Şeşat will let me know - when she is ready?)
2015-02-14.
