“You seem to be of the opinion,” said Grimmon, “that thinking too hard sprains the brain.”
He really does talk like that. Goblins can be just as pompous as the rest of us.
“Actually,” I said. “I am thinking. I’m connecting with my muse.”
I’d been writing all morning and was taking a break outside, leaning on the battlement at the top of the castle wall overlooking the moat, gazing at the world beyond.
The tips of Grimmon’s ears wobbled. “Your muse? Don’t make me laugh. You’re not thinking, you’re procrastinating.”
“I’ll have you know, the words have been flowing onto the page lately.” I waved my hand like I was conducting an orchestra. “And I’m pleased with what I’ve written.”
“Yeah, right.” Grimmon sniffed and scuffed the sole of his shoe on a flagstone. “Anyway, I’m not here to talk about that. What I wanted-”
At that moment there was a loud bang.
As one, we turned our heads to the building housing Castle Silverhill’s laboratory. A column of smoke billowed from a window, staining the clear blue sky a delicate shade of mauve.
“Trewla!” I yelled, and ran down the steps to the courtyard below. A minute later, I was wading through the debris littering the laboratory’s floor, coughing as my lungs filled with smoke.
“Trewla! Where are you?”
“Over here,” she said, raising her head above a stained workbench and standing up. She was holding a dustpan and brush. Her hair was a wild, tangled mess, and her face and clothes were covered in soot. “What on earth’s the matter?”
“The explosion. I thought…” I clamped my mouth shut and shook my head.
“Oh, that. I was just a little too heavy handed with the fairy dust. Nothing to worry about.” She patted down her hair.
“Well, be careful next time.” If I sounded gruff it was due to the dust coating my throat.
I felt a tugging at my sleeve, and looked down to see Grimmon gazing up at me.
“Not now, Grimmon,” I said.
“It’s important. I’ve got a painting for you.”
And here it is: a scene from Daphne Mayne and the Goblin Quest where Daphne is crossing a magically created bridge over a chasm and the bridge’s guardian begins to materialise.
There’s a bone-aching chill in the air as I stare at the landscape over the battlements of Castle Silverhill. It isn’t a pleasant sight, what with a blood moon coating the surrounding dunes in crimson and burnishing the still surface of the moat gently eroding the castle’s foundations.
I don’t like the look of the desert, and I haven’t been outside during the day since the castle materialised here. The heat makes the stones groan worse than usual.
The section of moat I can see when I lean over the wall looks like it might clot at any moment. Even the swirling wavelets caused by a tentacle breaking the surface roll away like they’re thicker than water.
Only a handful of stars glitter in the velvet sky. I turn away and brush my fingers over the mortar, loosening a fist-sized chunk which falls on my foot.
I hadn’t meant to do that. I know the ancient masonry is slowly crumbling, but that doesn’t make the pain in my injured toe any less acute.
I yelp, and with a low rumble, a chimney stack in the distant east wing topples onto a rooftop.
It wasn’t always like this.
When my great-great-great-great-grandfather built the place, the castle used to stay in one spot, as large, fortified buildings tend to do.
According to legend, a century after the castle was built, the lord of the castle at the time, Geoffrey, stole a book of spells from a wizard named Wenzel who had stayed overnight while on his way to Tintagel.
Geoffrey wasn’t known for his caution, and despite his less-than-firm grasp of thaumaturgic principles, couldn’t wait to try out one of the many spells between the book’s covers. While leafing through his ill-gotten prize to choose a spell he liked the look of, a word or two from each page caught his eye. Not being the most literate of readers, he mumbled them out loud.
Forty pages in, he’d said enough to inadvertently cast a spell.
One that had never been cast before because it hadn’t existed until Geoffrey accidentally created it.
And what a spell it turned out to be.
It cursed the entire castle to an endless existence of world hopping. Every fortnight, more or less, the castle – and everyone in it – moves to another world.
As you can imagine, the nomadic nature of Castle Silverhill has its drawbacks. For example, it makes catching a bus home rather awkward. Well, that’s if we’re in a world where there are buses.
And don’t get me started on postal services… To my boundless annoyance, the only letters that get pushed through my letterbox are tax demands, invoices, and bills. Some clearly have been in the postal system for hundreds of years, written as they are by hand on folded parchment sealed by large blobs of red wax imprinted with coats of arms.
But, I suppose, the biggest issue is that not all worlds are friendly. Some are downright hostile. You never know what the next world is going to be like, so it’s not like you can prepare.
Apart from being too hot, the desert world we’re in at the moment hasn’t come up with any nasty surprises.
Yet.
We’ve only been here two days, after all.
I sigh and trudge down the spiral stairs to my studio.
Grimmon’s there, waiting for me. His pointy ears quiver when I walk in and make my way to my desk, pretending I haven’t seen him. Goblins hate to be ignored, Grimmon more than most.
“I’ve finished changing the book covers,” he says. I suppress a smile at the testy note in his voice.
“What?” I say, raising my eyebrows as though seeing him for the first time.
His cheeks flush a dark shade of green. He slaps a leather folder on my desk and stalks out of the room, scuffing his boots on the rug as he goes. He knows that gets under my skin.
I wait until he’s left before I eagerly grab the folder and view his handiwork.
And here they are. New covers for the books so far in my Hollow series:
A cold wind gusts out of the night and whistles along the battlements of Castle Silverhill. It spatters icy raindrops against the leaded windows and sets them rattling in their casements. Tentacles of grey mist ooze from the moat and drift around the keep, probing the ancient stones for cracks and crevices, openings it can slink through to chill the hearts of those inside.
A movement catches my eye and I turn my attention to the painting I acquired decades ago, a work crafted in oils depicting the entrance to the dungeons.
The brushstrokes move, showing the heavy door to the cells opening and a person of a rather unsavoury nature emerging. Down there, along with the rats and a peculiar luminous fungus, a goblin called Grimmon has made his home.
You know how it is: you pop out to the shops for a loaf of bread and come home to find a goblin has moved into your cellar. Only, in my case, my cellar is less a single, dank room and more a warren of underground chambers, which I like to refer to as the dungeons. A vein on Grimmon’s temple throbs and he clenches his jaw whenever I call them that. He says it makes him sound like a criminal. Well, he might be for all I know.
The view in the painting moves as Grimmon, a great leather-bound volume tucked under his arm, walks to the steps. He wipes the slime from his feet on a mat, not because I asked him to – he’s quick to tell me – but because he doesn’t want to expose the sentient slime to my unwholesome personage. With clean feet he trudges up the seven flights of stone steps to the floor where a dim corridor, ill lit by guttering torches, leads to the studio where I toil. I’m hunched over a board embossed with letters of the alphabet. A glowing flat rectangle of crystal, filled with words, floats before me.
The goblin enters and brushes the wispy hairs of his forelock out of his eyes.
“It is done,” he says. His gaze strays to the painting. But he’s too late. It reverted to a still life of a dead mouse and a wedge of mouldy cheese the moment he entered my studio.
“All of it? The curly bits in the corners too?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
Grimmon frowns. “Yes, I’m finished.”
“No.” I wag a finger at him. “I thought I told you to address me as Your Magnificence.”
“I didn’t think you were being serious. I mean, what kind of conceited idiot calls himself that?”
He’s nettled me, but I conceal it with a huff which I hope he’ll interpret as me brushing his insult aside because he’s not important enough for me to be concerned about what he thinks.
It’s stalemate and for the space of half a dozen heartbeats we stare at one another.
“Look, do you want to see it or not?” he says at last.
“Oh… um, yes. Please.”
He thumps the book down on my desk and opens it at the page he’s been working on.
And here it is:
Map of Wydoria
This map of Wydoria is designed to be printed on A4 paper, or to be viewed on a screen.
It shows the Land of Wydoria, shut off from the rest of the world by an enchanted Hedge, along with its major towns and cities, and the location of the home of each of the evil rulers of the country, together known as the Consistorium.
Also lookout for the Elvish city of Luillan to the north of the Hedge, and the route Aleihra’s travel-spell took when it started carrying Daphne and the elf from Daphne’s village of Feybridge to Luillan.
I’m lying awake in bed, unable to get to sleep. It’s those graveyard hours, the wee hours after midnight when the veil between worlds grows thin. Sharp, blood-encrusted claws of demons are scratching at the window and a long, pale arm, bony fingers tipped with cracked, yellow nails, reaches out from under my bed.
Cold sweat beads my brow. Why I didn’t pick an easier world to build than Hollow?
A hollow world sounds great, right? It’s unusual, interesting and fits nicely with being a world nobody can ever leave.
In my head, it’s almost complete. The inside surface, on which everyone lives, is a little bigger than Earth’s surface, and it has seas, continents, islands, mountains, plains and… well, you know, everything that will make a great backdrop to set my stories in: things like deserts, plains, jungles, forests, tundra, glaciers and all that icy stuff we have at the poles. All Hollow needs is a tiny sun located in the dead-centre of the hollow globe, and there you are: all the light and warmth a world needs.
But by then, the demons have opened a window, and they’re in the room. One, slightly bigger than the others, says, “How will night happen in your hollow world? The sun would be hanging there in the centre shining all hours.”
I think a bit and answer, “It could switch off at night. You know, like a light bulb.”
“Then… it would be night all over the world at the same time?”
“Yes.”
The demon smiles in triumph. The other demons behind him chortle. They wink, and their glowing yellow eyes are like tiny suns switching on and off.
“Ha! Your world would freeze every night.” He shakes his head, and his necklace of finger-bones rattles like a hundred death-knells. “And even though the sun switches on again the next morning, by the time your world thaws, it will be night again. Doomed to eternal ice.” A ball of smoke puffs from his mouth and fades into nothingness. “So much for your ideas.”
“But… What if…?” My voice trails to a halt.
He was right. Half the world needed to be day while the other half was night. But how?
The pale arm reaching up from under the bed is groping over the covers towards me. I slap it and it stops moving. I get the feeling it’s watching me.
“Ah!” I smack my fist into my palm. “Only half the sun will turn off at a time.”
“Don’t be stupid.” The demon rolled his eyes. “You can’t turn off half a sun.”
“Oh yes, I can. Technically, the sun won’t actually turn off. There’s a shield curved around half of it. The shield rotates slowly so that darkness – nighttime – moves around the world. One rotation every twenty-four hours. Half the world will be in light and warmth while the other half is in darkness.”
I hold my breath while I watch the demon. His pupils narrow to slits, like a cat’s.
His lips peel back from his fangs. “I thought you wanted glaciers and frozen north and south poles. The sun will pour the same amount of heat across every inch of whichever part is in daylight.”
“Well, obviously there’s magic,” I mumble. “Magic that sucks the heat out of some areas… Freezes them. That sort of thing.”
“You poor fool.” The demon makes no effort to hide his glee. “Your readers aren’t going to trust you if you merely throw magic at every problem to solve it. Admit it. You’ve failed.”
Pale under-the-bed-fingers wrap around my wrist. I yank away my arm.
A random spark of inspiration from the cosmos pings into my brain.
“The sun won’t be round. It will be rod-shaped… like one of those tubes from a fluorescent light, but shorter. The regions directly under the sun will get the full light and warmth of the sun. A person standing there looking at the sun will see it fully, but if they travel to the side, the further they go, the shorter the sun will appear to them, and the less light and heat they’ll experience. It’s like if you look at a baseball bat from the side, you see the whole thing, but if you hold it up with one of its ends towards you, all you see is a tiny part of it, a disc.”
The demon looks flummoxed for a second, then his eyebrows lift.
Before he can speak, I say, “Don’t ask about seasons. The rod-sun solves that problem too. If it tilts a few degrees one way, then the other way over the course of a year, it will bring different amounts of warmth to each hemisphere in turn. So when it’s winter in one hemisphere, it will be summer in the other!”
When I was planning Flight of the Gazebo, the first book in the Hollow series, I wondered how the villagers of Amblesby would react when their entire village was magically relocated to a strange hollow world. Surely everyone would pull together, join forces to overcome the terrible situation in which they found themselves? I pondered this point for a long time and came to the conclusion that most people would look out for one another, support those in need. But I couldn’t help thinking there would be a few individuals who’d try to take advantage, try to make a profit or grab power.
Was I being cynical to think anyone would do that?
The Hollow series is humorous, and therefore extreme behaviour is the order of the day, so I had no qualms creating a few self-serving characters who couldn’t give a damn about their fellow villagers. But even I was surprised when a few years later the coronavirus pandemic struck and I saw how low some people will stoop to make a quick buck.
Take the case of Matt and Noah Colvin of Chattanooga, Tennessee for example. Seeking to cash in on the panic buying sweeping the world in the early days of the pandemic, they went on a road trip and bought 17,700 bottles of hand sanitiser. Then they tried to sell them on Amazon for up to $70 a bottle. Before long, Amazon closed their online shop, and the Tennessee attorney general, keen to stop this sort of behaviour, released a statement saying “This is a time where we have to focus on helping our neighbors, not profiting from them.”
I’m sure though, that Jeremy Wainscott or Gerald Montgomery-Jones would admire the Colvin brothers. I’m sure others do too, but the backlash against the brothers’ behaviour shows there’s hope for us humans yet.
Or is there?
This is a topic I’ll continue to explore in future books of the Hollow series. Mwahahaha…
When I worked in London, I lived miles outside the UK’s capital city and spent many long hours commuting.
I spent four hours on trains each working day. Two hours each way. What was I to do with that time? Read a book or a newspaper? Watch a movie on my phone or laptop? Stare out the window?
I’d always wanted to write, so that’s what I did.
An overcrowded train carriage may not seem the best place for words to flow from the fingertips, but I got on with it and the result was that I’ve learned to write anywhere. I can pop open the lid of my trusty laptop and continue where I left off within seconds.
Writers often say they need to be in a certain environment or in the right mood; some develop rituals or habits which they have to stick to in order to put words down, and I respect that. (I’m the same when it comes to DIY – I counter unkind remarks that I’m dithering by stoutly maintaining that I’m “getting in the zone”).
Here are some of my favourite examples of the wonderful and weird habits of famous authors:
Friedrich Schiller found inspiration in the odour of rotting apples. He kept apples in his desk drawer and let them spoil on purpose.
Lewis Carroll also wrote standing, but only in purple ink.
Dan Brown cures writer’s block by hanging upside down.
George Orwell, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust and Woody Allen all wrote while lying down, either in bed or on a sofa. Truman Capote went as far as saying he was a “completely horizontal author”.
To limit distraction, Francine Prose writes facing a wall.
I should add that I don’t have to be on a train in order to write. Nowadays I sit at a desk, writing to the sound of waves rolling into the beautiful coastline of the Cape’s Atlantic Seaboard a hundred yards from the front door. Okay, so I have to mentally shut out the traffic noise from the main road, but hey, you can’t have everything!
What about you? Do you have a favourite place or ritual to get your creative juices flowing?
I’ve been a fan of Derek Murphy for a few years now. He offers sound advice for writers and gives a huge amount to the writing community, much of it for free.
Recently he’s been running a free online writing course yet still found time to create a template for plotting and writing novels. He’s made the template available for free in various formats including Scrivener.
Derek’s original Scrivener template is fantastic resource and a wonderful aid to writers as it stands. All I’ve done is make a few modifications and added some extra bits to it, which I hope will make it even easier to use.
Please note my version will only work in Scrivener version 3 which, at the time of writing, is the latest version.
The download is a zip archive which contains two files:
The 24 Chapter Scrivener template (24 Chapter Outline by Derek Murphy.scrivtemplate)
An ebook3 format file (ebook3-with-extra-formatting.scrformat) This is an extra – you don’t need it to use the template. If you choose to use it (see instructions later in this post) it can help you compile a nicely formatted epub3 file.
How to import and use the Scrivener template
To import the template into Scrivener, select File=>New Project… from the menu.
A “Project Templates” dialog pops up. Whenever you create a new project, this is where you choose a template for your project. What we’re going to do is import the template you downloaded.
You can do this even if you don’t plan to start a new book just yet. Just follow the instructions to import the template, then cancel the “Project Templates” dialog.
Click the “Options” button at the bottom left of the dialog and select “Import Templates…”
Navigate to the folder where you downloaded the template 24 Chapter Outline by Derek Murphy.scrivtemplate and click the “Import” button.
Now in the Project Templates dialog box, when you scroll down the list of templates you’ll find one called “24 Chapter Outline by Derek Murphy”.
If you’re not ready to start a new project, click the cancel button. Later, when you want to create a new project, select File=>New Project… from Scrivener’s menu and this template will still be there.
To create a new project from this template, select it then click the “Choose…” button.
Scrivener will ask you to name your new project. Once that’s done, you’ll have a new project you can tinker with to your heart’s content.
How my template differs from Derek’s original
What follows is a list of changes and additions I made to the template. As I said earlier, there is nothing wrong with Derek’s original template so please use that if you prefer. All I’ve done is make it fit the way I like to work.
I moved the “One Page Novel Outline | 25 Chapters | Derek” and “CheatSheet” documents out of the Drafts folder. These are now at the top of the binder and won’t be included in the final document when you compile.
I changed the icons on the Act I, Act IIa, Act IIb and Act III folders and unticked the “Include in Compile” checkbox. These folders won’t appear in your compiled file (epub, docx or whatever). If you do want them to appear then tick the “Include in Compile” checkbox in the inspector.
I changed the chapter documents into folders and created a scene document in each chapter folder. Rather than type a whole chapter into one long document, I like to break my chapters into scenes with a separator between scenes. Different authors favour different scene separators, e.g. an empty line, three (or more) asterisks or a graphic.
I unticked the “Include in Compile” checkbox on Derek’s explanatory documents (i.e. the ones whose names start and end with asterisks – e.g. * Ordinary World *). This means you can leave these documents where they are and they won’t appear in your compiled document (epub, pdf, docx etc).
I added Prologue and Epilogue documents in the appropriate places, just in case your book has them. If you don’t require these then move them to the Trash folder.
I added Front matter and Back matter folders. The Front Matter folder contain a dummy cover image and a title page. You should replace the cover image with your book cover image and edit the Title page to suit yourself. The Back Matter folder contains Derek’s original “Author’s Note” and “About the Author” documents. I added “Did you enjoy this book?” (to ask readers to leave a review) and “Copyright” documents. You need to edit all of these to suit your requirements. Note: The Copyright document has placeholders which will be replaced by actual words in your compiled document. e.g. <$projecttitle> will be replaced by the title of your book. Scrivener gets this from the metadata section of the compile dialog box (click the second icon at the top of the right-hand column of the compile dialog to view or edit the metadata).
I added a Template Sheets folder. This contains a “Character Sheet” which I put together from Derek’s slides and video. (Any mistakes or exclusions in the Character Sheet are mine). To use the Character Sheet template for your own characters, right-click the Characters folder in the Research folder and select Add=>New from Template=>Character Sheet.
I added a Section dividers etc folder which contains an example image you can use to separate scenes when you compile. If you choose to use the ebook3-with-extra-formatting.scrformat file (see the download button at the beginning of this page) it will use the “section-divider” image in this folder to separate the scenes. You can replace this image with your own (make sure you rename your image to “section-divider” once you’ve dragged it into the Section dividers etc folder, or edit the “Scene” section layout in the compile dialog and change name in the “separator between sections” field).
I also added my own “Section type”, “Label” and “Status” stuff. You can modify these to suit yourself. Note: the ebook3-with-extra-formatting.scrformat file (see the download button at the beginning of this page) uses the Section Types in this template. If you add or delete any Section Types then you’ll have to assign section layouts in the compile dialog.
Lastly, I changed the icons on Derek’s Act folders and the explanatory documents to make them stand out. This gives a visual indicator about which documents should not be included in the compile. It should help with navigating the project.
That’s it for the template. You don’t have to use it as is, of course. Change it so that it works for your style of writing.
How to import and use the epub3 format file
When I started using Scrivener the biggest headache was compiling. Over the years I’ve learned how it works and I can now compile epub, mobi, PDF, and Word docs relatively easily. If you struggle with compiling, the ebook format file I’ve included in the download (i.e. ebook3-with-extra-formatting.scrformat) can help. What follows are brief instructions for importing and using the format file. I’ll do a more comprehensive post about how to use Scrivener’s compile feature in another blog post.
To import a format you have to open the compile dialog:
Select File=>Compile (or click the “compile” button on the menu bar)
Click the little cog icon at the bottom left of the compile dialog and select “Import Formats”. Navigate to where you saved the ebook3-with-extra-formatting.scrformat file and click the “Open” button.
When Scrivener asks “Where would you like to import the selected formats?”, choose My Formats.
If you choose “Project Formats” you’ll only be able to use the format in the project that’s currently open in Scrivener. Choosing “My formats” means you’ll be able to use the format in any project, even ones you’ve created previously.
To use the format, select “ePub 3 Ebook (.epub)” at the top of the compile dialog, then select “Ebook3 01” under My Formats in the Formats column. (If you want, you can rename this by right-clicking “Ebook3 01” and selecting “Edit format…”)
If you use this format on a project you have created using the 24 Chapter Outline by Derek Murphy template (from the download at the top of this page), then all the Section Layouts in the middle column of the compile should be correctly assigned. All you need to do is move your mouse over to the third column and edit the metadata by clicking the little “tag” icon (second icon from the left).
It’s important to enter data in at least the top section (title and authors) but you should add as much data as you can. The metadata is stored in epub files and is used by epub readers and other systems to catalogue and organise books in a sensible way.
As an example of how the metadata can be used in your project, if you created the project from the above template then then the copyright document in the project has placeholders (<$projecttitle> for example) which will automatically be filled in with the corresponding metadata when you compile.
Example of how your epub3 will look
Once you click the “compile” the epub Scrivener produces will be formatted similar to the one below:
Sample epub viewed in Calibre’s ebook viewer
What extras are added by the ebook3-with-extra-formatting.scrformat format file?
The section layouts are already assigned which removes the pain of you having to do so. Feel free, of course, if you want to change or edit any of them.
At the top of the page, the chapter number (which is the “Chapter Heading” section layout in the Scrivener project), has a line above and below it.
The scenes are separated by a graphic. This graphic is the image called “section-divider” in the “Section dividers etc” folder. You can replace this graphic with your own. All you have to do is delete the existing “section-divider” image, then drag a suitable image from your Mac or PC into the “Section dividers etc” folder, and rename your new image “section-divider”. If you don’t want an image between scenes then just delete “section-divider” from the “Section dividers etc” folder. When you compile, Scrivener will just put a blank line between the scenes.
Note for Windows users
I don’t have Scrivener 3 for Windows, so I am unable to test this format file in the Scrivener 3 for Windows release version. When I wrote this article, the final release wasn’t available and I could only test on the Scrivener for Windows beta version 3.
On the Windows beta version the results weren’t satisfactory. It put the lower horizontal line – which should have gone under the chapter heading – at the end of the chapter (you can’t see that in the screen grab below because I’ve only grabbed the first page of the chapter).
Sample Windows epub viewed in Calibre’s ebook viewer
The Windows beta version also made the “section-divider” image too large, and rendered the first paragraph in each scene with the setting that should have only applied to the first scene of the chapter, ie:
Uppercase the first three words of a chapter’s opening paragraph and don’t indent it.
Don’t indent the first line of subsequent scenes’ opening paragraphs.
Hopefully, the above issues with the Scrivener for Windows beta 3 have been addressed in the final release. If you’ve tried out my format file in Windows let me know in the comments how you got on.
I hope you find this useful. I know a lot of writers don’t like using Scrivener to compile their books and many turn to other apps to create their final manuscripts. In a future blog post I’ll go deeper into Scrivener’s compile feature with the aim of demystifying it.
This means you can use the ebook3-with-extra-formatting.scrformat file for formatting your own books as much as you like. You can also remix, adapt, and build upon it and give it to others as long as you license your new creation under the identical terms.
At last we’re on the air! I’m excited to say the first two books in the Hollow Books series are available on Amazon. I published the first book Flight of the Gazebo in August and the second book Dangerous Ideals a few days ago.
It was a nail biting time between the two books. Although I’d already written Dangerous Ideals, the cover wasn’t complete and the final editing was under way at the same time. Fans of the first book were nagging me to get a move on and that certainly motivated me!
For those who want more, rest assured. Work has begun on the third book. The keyboard hardly gets a break.
