Back in January I made these New Year’s Resolutions. There weren’t many – only three – but as the longest day has been and gone and the mid-point of the year is here today, I think now would be a good time to check in on my progress. Which vows will I need to renew? What midyear resolutions should I be re-resolving?
Now this one is going well.
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The Whitby trilogy by Robin Jarvis is one of the best trilogies… ever. This is a Whitby Witches review of sorts, but one which explores the trilogy’s place in literature instead of trying to rate it against other books.
I first read Robin Jarvis’ The Whitby Witches when I was a child. I can’t have been any older than ten, because by the time I finished the series I had yet to leave primary school. And actually, I didn’t read them – my mum read them to me. It was probably her eyes that first alighted upon that fateful tome, bound with a leering hound front cover that arrested both our attentions in that little library up the road. We devoured it swiftly and ordered the sequels shortly after. After reading and loving those too, I requested the boxset from my Grandma for Christmas. She even lived near Whitby! Finally, I owned those fantastic stories for myself.
I re-read the trilogy a few of times as a child. Yyou can see how well-loved those books were in the picture above. But I hadn’t done so since before my late teens. By the time I took them from the shelf a couple of months ago it must have been ten years since I’d indulged. I thought I’d give them a read for a bit of a nostalgia hit, but even before I’d reached the halfway point of Book One I knew that I was reading something truly special. It wasn’t my childhood love of The Whitby Witches that was informing my enjoyment of it. It was simply that it is a fantastic, gripping and scary book. I finished the trilogy’s finale, The Whitby Child, this very morning – and I can’t wait to laud its brilliance.
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In between writing stories and blog posts I like to drum. It’s a smashing hobby; cathartic as well as creative. I started when I was sixteen, but I’ve improved since my first off-beat battering of Smells Like Teen Spirit. I bought my own drum set, a Mapex Tornado Rock Fusion, back in 2013 after finishing university. But it’s evolved and spread a bit since then, and received a DIY tattoo on the bass drum. Today I pulled it out of its usual corner and gave the whole thing a polish and spruce up. Let me show you around the anatomy of a drum kit…
I actually learned the drums on my dad’s Arbiter Flats Lite set. It’s a great set for a beginner since it’s so much smaller (and quieter) than a full kit, yet still acoustic. I’ve replicated the setup on my Tornado here.
This is called a ‘two-up, one-down’ setup. This means there’s two toms racked above the bass drum, and one floor tom off to the side. Toms, or tom-toms, are the bouncy-sounding drums; the ones that Phil Collins (or that gorilla from the Cadbury’s advert) use for the big fill in In The Air Tonight. Some drummers use a few as two toms (Ghost’s ghoul drummer had just one!) but fancier drummers can have loads. The bigger the drum, the deeper the sound. So drumming on them from left to right produces the descending roll that is featured in loads of songs.
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It’s been about three months since I started work on my novel, Rosetta, and a little over two months since I described my first impressions of writing it. I hit 50,000 words last week. That’s a little over half my forecast completed word count, which means I’m near enough halfway through. At the very least, I’m in the thick of things! And I’ve got some new reflections on the subject of writing a novel to tell you about. Some of them are pretty surprising; at least in light of my first impressions. It’s taught me a lot about how to write a novel.
A quick one this. I’d never have made it this far without a plan, telling me who is where and what they’re doing at any one time. Using a plan means that everything is always facing the right direction, even if I can’t keep track of every plot strand at once. Not everyone writes using the same techniques. But I couldn’t imagine taking on this, or indeed another novel, without a plan. It’s not an especially detailed plan, more just broad strokes of the plot. But I wouldn’t know how to write a novel without it!
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Earlier this week I ambiguously tweeted that I’d written to Ludovico Einaudi. He’s the composer of, among many other beautiful piano pieces, The Waves. I didn’t mean that I’d written a letter to him, though that’s how it came across. I only meant that I’d listened to his Islands album whilst writing. It’s some of the best writing music I have.
I tend to listen to music whilst working on my books, and was overjoyed to find Stephen King does the same, as he notes in his fascinating On Writing. Whilst King prefers ‘loud music – hard rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns ‘N’ Roses and Metallica’, I prefer soft stuff – instrumental, electronic, classical… Music that I wouldn’t usually spin in the car or that I’d learn the drums to. Background music, I suppose, though I don’t want to mislabel any of the excellent albums below as merely sonic wallpaper.
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