Inspirations etc

OK, so I'm gonna talk about things I've seen and read too, inspirations etc. Hopefully it won't turn into film reviews too much, but here goes.



So today I saw Angels and Demons at the cinema. While I was a big fan of the book of The Da Vinci Code, the first film kinda disappointed me and I didn't bother reading Angels and Demons. And I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by this film. It's very entertaining. It didn't offer any other surprises however, as it did exactly what it said on the tin: action, excitement, thrills, Catholics. If nothing else, Dan Brown knows how to entertain his audience. I might venture to say it was a tad formulaic, but there's nothing wrong with having a good old twist at the end. And as I was watching, I thought to myself; "In the Da Vinci Code there's a twist. There's a goody who turns out to be a baddy... I wonder if it might happen again..." and sure enough, ten minutes later: Ta dah! But still, it was a great twist, even if I did see it coming. And there was a red herring along the way too.

You see I love a good twist. Some of my favourite films are only so good because of the twist at the end: Sixth Sense, Vanilla Sky, The Usual Suspects, to name but a few. I've employed the same method in one of my books 'The Northern Initiative' but I think I made it a bit too twisty. It wasn't a particularly long novel, so adding twists all over the place was maybe a bit too much. Stick to one twist is my mantra for the future. It was an ambitious project I guess, and I took it too far. It's all written in the first person, but there's more than one narrator. Initially it was supposed to be told by two narrators who told the story from different angles, but it ended up having six narrators. It got so complicated that the only way I could make it make sense was by having people telling the story who KNEW what was going on. Admittedly, some of the narrators only narrated short passages, but maybe it was too much. Plus I had the problem of killing off two of my narrators when no-one else was watching and able to narrate, so the deaths had to occur in the first person. That was a bit of a challenge.

I shall put a couple of sections of that book up at some point; show you some of the characters etc. I enjoyed writing a conspiracy theory thriller like this, but I think it's passed it's time. Maybe a few years ago, when the Da Vinci Code was at it's peak, but not now. Which is hopefully the main reason why I got so many rejections from publishers. Oh well. My current project is hopefully what they want at the moment; I've tried to think from a publisher's point of view. What do people want to read? Fingers crossed!