I’m quite bad at blogging, at Twittering, even at updating Facebook. I’m a man with too little time on my hands and when I do have some, I work.
My new novel is currently untitled but my best guess is that it will be called ‘Hawk-Eye.’ I’m lucky enough to have a partner in crime, a close friend who beta tests everything for me and he assures me it’s coming on well.
This was a novel I didn’t think I’d ever write. It’s a silly, terrible, stupid idea for a book. It could so easily be an utter disaster, like trying to tell the news through a series of funny cartoons or making people laugh with puppets made from dead kittens. It’s just a horrible, horrible idea and one that should have been strangled at birth.
Many people have said the same about me, of course so I figured I’d give it a go.
I was lucky enough to grow up in the 80s, before the world was a complete and utter disaster. It was certainly getting there but there was still room to breath, optimism in the future and the naive belief that we still had one. Like all kids my age, I watched TV, probably too much of it. Some things stuck with me.
I loved the super-vehicle TV shows. The king of them all was Knight Rider, the story of a talking car that could drive itself but that wasn’t my favourite. I liked Airwolf, the tale of a heavily armed helicopter but that show was ultimately very flawed. The first series worked quite well, using the helicopter as the centre of the show but it increasingly drifted into a weird episodic formula where nothing had anything to do with the helicopter until 5 minutes before the end where a stock villain would just for no reason happen to have a flying machine of his own that just happened to need shooting down by the super-vehicle that completely outclassed it. It just didn’t work and became laughably bad by the end.
My favourite was Streethawk. Streethawk was a brilliant idea from a budgetary standpoint. One of the biggest problems the other shows had was the sheer expense of running a large and costly piece of equipment. A motorcycle is a cheap, small machine so the stunt-work was affordable. Also, and best of all, it was about a motorcycle!
Motorcycles are cool.
Sadly the show wasn’t actually that good. It only lasted for 12 episodes for some reason. The stories were terrible, they were stock scripts which usually didn’t have anything to do with the bike, it was just tacked on. Ultimately it just made the whole thing seem a bit silly, but then the 80s were a bit silly, they just were and they were just meant to be.
As a keen (obsessive) motorcycle nut, the idea of the super-motorcycle always stayed with me. Some elements of the show seemed utterly ridiculous. The bike was capable of hyper-thrust which meant that it could ride at 300mph, too fast for the rider to control it so the computer controlled it instead. But that just made no sense. It made no less sense than the fact that it was armed with a particle beam, a machine gun and a set of rockets, however.
I wondered if a story could have been written that actually made sense of all that and an idea took hold. It would also need to shake up the format, making the whole thing more interesting, more nuanced, more modern but without sacrificing what was good about it.
I wouldn’t write a book that didn’t have a point. I like to write stories that have a purpose of some kind, that have themes, layers and metaphors.
I like complex stories, things that keep you guessing, my goal is to write books that you want to read twice, that you can read again and see how everything fits together, that’s more than just an obvious narrative, that has things you never spotted the first time around.
But could this work? Could I really tell a subtle, nuanced and layered story about a very fast motorcycle that solved crimes? It sounds like a challenge to me.
As I finished up my last book, the idea took form. There was no escaping it, it was in my head and it was writing itself. I had several other books in mind but for some reason, this was the one that wanted to get out first.
I spoke to my friend and discussed the idea with him. He told me that maybe, just maybe it wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. I had a theme, one that surpassed a crime-solving super-bike. I had a new way to shuffle characters around, ways I could tell the story in a new and interesting way so that fans of the original show would understand it but anyone not familiar with it would still keep up.
I wanted the story to have a tongue in cheek 80s feel to it as well as being a modern sci-fi. It somehow had to walk the path between the two and I thought I had a way to do it.
The ideas became characters, they wrote their own dialogue, they started coming to life on the page. I found a way to make the whole thing interesting, peeling back layers of mystery as the story progressed and built a complex narrative, a twisted story that took the audience on a ride of their own.
I wanted the book to feel like a ride on a motorcycle, it’s dangerous, it’s exciting, it’s fun. I wanted the book to take you on that kind of wild ride, to know it’s silly but want to do it anyway.
It’s now hit the 50k word mark and I’ve made the first big reveal. I would think it will run to about 70k words but I hope to finish it to first draft this week.
I’ve been passing chapters back to my friend for feedback and opinions. I keep pestering him with questions such as, ‘is this really working,’ and ‘is this just a stupid idea?’ So far, he assures me it is working and the stupidity of it actually works in its favour. In fact, he’s enjoying it and won’t let me discuss future plot points, he’s keen to see how the story develops himself.
That’s a good sign, and frankly, I’m keen to see what happens as well.
I know how it ends, that’s all planned but I wasn’t sure how to reveal it to the audience. I had a dream that separated the ending into two big reveals, one final one that wraps everything up and will leave the audience (hopefully) satisfied.
The biggest surprise to me is just how dark this has become. Considering it’s based on a kids TV show from the 80s, this has quite an ugly edge to it. I wanted the audience to appreciate just what was at stake so the villainy behind the story is very grim indeed.
So far, it’s incredibly gratifying to write. I’m enjoying it immensely. It’s like going back to this other world to play with these characters I’ve created, that are alive and existing in a perfectly formed universe of their own that just happens to exist inside my head. It feels like watching it all happen and then just writing down what I’ve seen.
Obviously it needs finishing and testing but I think I’d enjoy writing sequels to this. I love the characters, I enjoy the word they live in. We’ll see what the future holds, I guess.