Caxton
Tempest at the End of the World
Writing a
book is a lonely business, and so I thought it
might be interesting to share some of the
thinking behind the finished words. Here you
will find links to deleted chapters, excerpts
from my journal and bits and bobs of scribbled
notes.
I hope you find them of interest.
Deleted prologue
It
pained me to delete this from the book, but it
just wasn't working. I felt that introducing
Tempest so early demystified him, and that as
the majority of the narrative is seen through
Jim's eyes we had to start with Jim and not
Martha. The prologue still lives on in the
finished novel though, as Tempest's encounter
with the vampires in the church contains
elements of it, and in a separate chapter we see
Tom's (Martha's husband) side of their story.
Tunnels under tunnels
For the life of me I can't remember why I called
this chapter Tunnels under tunnels. I liked
Lanky and Beaky so much I wanted to extend their
stay in the novel, and so I wrote this encounter
with Talos specifically for them. Of course it
didn't work, it felt forced and broke up the
narrative. Talos's uncharacteristic act of mercy
towards the little girl survived the final
rewrite, again in the chapter involving Tom.
Tempest finds Murmur dead
I'm not sure
I entirely knew where the story was going when I
wrote this. In my mind Murmur had suffered
various fates before I wrote this, the least
dramatic of them all. At one point he even went
to Africa with Tempest! It wasn't long after
this point that I began a major rewrite.
Kriger and the crocodile
This excerpt
is taken from the Africa section of the first
draft. Kralik has organised an expedition to the
Congo led by the famous explorer 'Mjasiri'
Speke, who is under the mistaken belief that
they are looking for diamonds. Here they all sit
around a campfire whilst one of Speke's men
recounts a horrifying experience with a
crocodile on a previous trip. I have always been a
big fan of the movie Jaws, and love Quint's
story about the shark attack on the crew of the
U.S.S. Indianapolis. This was my homage to that
scene.
Excerpts from journal
I've included
here some excerpts from a journal I kept during
the writing of the novel. The journal served to
keep my thoughts organised and also served as a
permanent record in case I decided to backtrack
on a creative decision.
The excerpts here have been edited to preserve
some secrecy in case I decide to use some of the
ideas in the next one!
The making of the cover
image
Follow the
evolution of the front cover through to the
finished design. |
