This is how you don't get a job in the film industry:
"It's beyond fabulous, Nick. It's so vibrant, so new. We love it."
"That's great!"
"Yeah, it's a really spectacular piece of writing."
"I'm so glad you like it. So… where do we go from here?"
"Well, honestly, the thing is that we're not really looking for a swashbuckler right now. We're going to have to pass. But on a personal level, we really hope you get this one away. I'd love to see this on the big screen."
In autumn 2005, I never wanted anyone to love one of my film scripts again. I just wanted someone to make one. It didn't look as if that was going to happen.
Fortunately for my sanity, I had something more important going on. At the end of October, I asked my girlfriend Clare to marry me. She did not tell me the idea was original or vibrant. She just said "yes".
I needed a break from film anyway, and I didn't want to get a call like this on my honeymoon:
"Nick, hi, Paul. Hi. Yeah. How's the water? Great, great. Listen, we need a new draft. Yeah. Yeah, we love the script, but we think there should be more depth in the characters. Yeah. Maybe if one of them had a bad relationship with his mother, they could talk about that. I think we need to get under their skins a bit. Maybe he's got a drug problem. Yeah, I know it's a kid's movie about dancing bears, but I think it would help if it was a bit relevant to real people's issues."
I am not even slightly kidding.
So I started writing a book. I started exactly the way you aren't supposed to, with a few random pages and a vague idea about two guys in a truck. By April I had two hundred pages which didn't suck and I was starting to feel good. I was supposed to put it on hold for a while so I could work on the wedding, but I didn't really want to and Clare was coming home every day and demanding more pages to read. I pressed on.
The end result was The Gone-Away World. It is everything I wasn't able to get away in film. It's a story about friendship and love (and ninjas). It features battles, alarms, terrible upheavals, and disasters. In case that sounds distressing, you should know that it also contains digressions and disquisitions; romances, showdowns and throwdowns; monsters, marvels and miracles. More than anything, I wanted this book to be fun. I wanted it to be more fun than the other things you could usefully be doing with your time. I wanted it to be a book which would keep you up late and make you call in sick because you wanted to finish it. I wanted this book to steal your day.
So here we all are. Crunch time. Is the book any fun? The only way to tell is to see what happens on 5th June. It's over to you, and all I can do is hide away in my secret undersea base and prepare to launch my arsenal of terrible destruction if someone in the Dorset Post-Mercury says they didn't like page 304. Not that I'm nervous. No, no, no.
Yes.
But in the mean time, what am I doing? Writing the next one, of course. Hoping it's as good, hoping it's better. Hoping I can make you care again about people you've never met in situations you've never considered. That's the job, and I love it.
Enjoy The Gone-Away World. I hope it does steal your day.