Category: Fiction

Hi everyone, 

and the very best of the season to you all. As many of you will know, copies of the hardback of Midland have been mailed out in the last week or two, and so if you pledged for a copy you should have received yours by now. If you haven’t, do check your account to double check your address and follow up with Unbound if there has been a problem.

The books look absolutely fantastic; Unbound has done an exceptional job on the design and production of Midland; I really couldn’t be happier. The cover really captures the atmosphere of the novel, and looks beautiful to boot. It’s an amazing feeling to finally have the story that I started back in January 2006 printed and bound and out in the world.

It’s been an epic gestation – longer even than  The Book of Ash, which I had to put on pause to write  52 Ways to Magic America  – and  Habitus, which took me seven years. I guess it’s about quality, not quantity ;-). Still, I do hope that I get the next book done in less than a decade…

A couple of supporters have already read Midland – big props to Ali M. and Heide D. for being first off the mark. Ali grew up in Warwickshire and Heide still lives there, so they can vouch for the local detail. Heide said she really enjoyed the book and Ali has left a great review on Goodreads, which you can check out  here. If you’re reading Midland at the moment, please do leave a review when you’re done – Goodreads reviews will really help with sales when the paperback comes out in the new year.

The official publication date for that is January 24th, at which point the paperback (and digital edition) should be available in bookshops and via Amazon etc. To celebrate, we’ll be holding the Midland launch party on either Friday 25th January (or possibly Saturday 26th, but most likely the Friday – we’re just finalising the venue at the moment).

Those of you who kindly pledged for tickets to the party, please mark those dates in your calendars; I’ll be back in touch as soon as we’ve got the details confirmed.

Hi everyone, 

just a quick one to let you that the Midland funding drive will formally end at midnight on August 14th. The book is finished, proofed and copy-edited, the cover is designed and finalised, the blurbs are written, and soon the whole package will be sent off to the Unbound mountain to be carved into giant marble tablets for our descendants to ponder and squabble over for aeons to come.

So if you’d like your name to be included in the great list of pledgers that will be memorialised in the back of the book and worshipped down through the ages, now’s your last chance! Pledge now, any pledge will do, and your name will be sent to the man with the chisel. After midnight on the 14th, though, while you’ll still be able to pre-order a book, it won’t count as a pledge, and you will not be included in the roll call of those who helped midwife the great work that is Midland.

(Tip: as well as the marble version, there’s also a paper version that will be printed in October, and which would make a great Christmas present, especially if you buy it on behalf of a loved one and ask for their name to be listed in the back of the book!)

Thanks as ever to all of you for your support to date. 

Soon Midland will be with you, very soon…

x

Jim

Finally, it’s done. Last weekend I sent over the final round of corrections for the page proofs, and so ended a journey I began back in January 2006, in that dreamy era when Facebook was not yet a thing and Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t a multi-billionaire and social media hadn’t resculpted the media world as we know it. Well, Zuck may have made enough money to make a Rothschild blush in the time it’s taken me to craft and publish this story, but which will last longer: Facebook, or Midland? This remains to be seen…

One of the pleasing things about page proofs, in this world of ubiquitous digital gadgetry, is that you have to edit them on paper. This meant that the final leg of the Midland voyage, the arrival into port, as it were, was able to take place not at my desk, but in a hammock, in my garden, in the sunshine, on the first of the May bank holidays. 

The cat was helping, as you can see. 

This means that the book is now really really really done and is being prepared for publication. We decided on the cover too; a slight tweak on one of the ideas I circulated previously. Here it is:

I love it. I hope you do too.

And you’ll get your copy soon. Towards the end of this year, or so I’m told. Thank you so very, very much for your patience. We’re nearly there. Just another few months to go. In Internetland, that’s almost enough time for Facebook to collapse back into the dorm room from whence it sprang (if enough of you close your accounts and switch to Hospify). In Bookland, that’s how long it takes to crank out the pages (we do them one by one, by hand). 

Why do we do that? 

Because a good book, when you read it, knits itself into your brain and stays with you forever. It’s quite literally character-forming, the antithesis of the ephemeral. And it takes time to get it good enough to do that, to get it to cast that particular spell. So if you’re going to try and do it, you have to try and do it well.

However long it takes.

I can’t wait to find out if you think this one was worth the wait.

I came home last night to find a hefty package in the hallway… the page proofs of Midland! It’s always an exciting moment in the life of a book when these arrive, as it’s the last chance the author gets to check over the text. It’s both a hello to the book as it’s actually going to look, and a goodbye to the work – when these pages go back along with any red marks I make on them, that really is the end of the story from my point of view. 

I’ll be reading these over the next week or two and the next reader after that will be you, so get ready. In the meantime, you might like to listen to today’s edition of Radio 4’s In Our Time, which by happy coincidence is about George Eliot’s Middlemarch, one of the inspirations for Midland – the two books share a setting and several key themes.

When the time comes, you won’t be sent an unruly ream of A4 paper to grapple with, of course. You’ll get the whole package bound up in an ingenious new kind of a folder known as a “cover”. If you’ve ever managed to tear yourself away from your phone long enough to walk into of one of the cutting edge new retail environments called “bookstores” that are beginning to spring up in the hipster districts of international cities like London, Tokyo, New York and Berlin, you’ll have seen covers in action. These deceptively simple-looking devices allow books to sit on a shelf and be carried around without falling apart. They require no charging or batteries, and they offer an opportunity for an enticing representation of the book’s themes and content to be displayed on the front in the form of colourful graphics or photographs known as “cover art”.

Cover art is a skill all its own, and Unbound’s excellent designers have been working on some ideas for the artwork for Midland. Here are the current two front runners:

In the first instance I liked the second of these the most – it’s a beautiful image, and one which resonates with the book in all sorts of ways – but when I showed the two options to various friends last week, nearly all of them found it confusing, because it wasn’t immediately apparent what the picture was of. The overwhelming majority found the first image, of the paraglider, more striking and alluring, which is quite pleasing too, as it was always my own best idea for the image that should sit on the front of the book. I’ve passed the comments back to the Unbound team, which is working on some new versions. If you have any thoughts, please fire them over, and I’ll put them in the mix.

A couple of months ago I had the final set of editorial notes on  Midland  from my editor at Unbound, Rachael Kerr, and I’ve spent the relatively distraction-free lull between Christmas and New Year working hard on the final draft. It’s always tricky to know when you’ve finished a book, especially one that’s taken twelve years to write, but I’m pretty sure that it’s now done.

There were quite a few last minute tweaks and tidy-ups, but the major change from the draft I completed last year is (surprise!) a new ending. Yep, that’s right. If any of you happened to read the version I made previously available in PDF form through this blog, then you’ve got a fresh read in store (or at least a fresh final chapter) when the printed book arrives in September 2018 or thereabouts. 

Here’s a picture of a Midlands snow lady, constructed last week in Warwickshire, to celebrate:

The new draft will go to Unbound on January 8th, and then will enter the publishing process: copy draft, typesetting, cover design, marketing plan, print schedule etc etc. This all takes about nine months (and explains a lot about why the world has largely switched to digital media; dead tree distribution takes tiiiiime). As noted above, if all goes according to plan, you should all get your hardbacks (and/or ebook editions) sometime in October, and the paperback version will arrive in the bookstores courtesy of Random House, about six months after that, in Spring 2019. 

In other words, we’re only at the end of the beginning. The real life of Midland doesn’t even start for another nine months, and I’ll be organising the launch party to coincide with that (so those of you who were generous enough to book tickets, expect an invite from me for some time around then). In the meantime I’ll be getting cracking on the other pledge fulfillments, in particular the tour of Warwickshire and the paramotoring trip, both of which will probably take place sometime this summer (and there will be full reports posted on this blog when they’ve happened).

2018 is going to be a Midlands year for me in more ways than one. The novel is in large part a paean to my Midlands childhood, and what’s been peculiar about it is that, as I’ve been finishing it, work has taken me regularly to the Midlands for the first time in my career.  Hospify, the healthcare messaging start-up that I’ve co-founded, has been undergoing extensive trials in the Birmingham area over the past few months, and just before Christmas we had the good news that these trials are set to expand into the new year, so I’m going to be in the area a lot. 

Back in September I found myself with a couple of hours to kill in the city centre while waiting for a train, and I took the opportunity to have a wander around. Things have certainly changed since I was a boy, when my father would occasionally take me to spend a day in the offices of his law firm, then called Duggan Lea & Co, if there was no one else to look after me during the school holidays. 

Duggan Lea’s home was what I still think of as one of the loveliest buildings in Birmingham: the art nouveau Newton Chambers in Cannon Street. The building has been cleaned up and converted since my father worked there, and is now a plush apartment block, but back then it was covered in soot and cascades of pigeon shit, and felt very Dickensian, as did Cannon Street, which is now all fancied up and pedestrianised but back then was quite a dour, traffic-clogged little cut-through. I loved the building though; its wide staircases, corridors and hallways were the perfect assault course for a nine-year-old boy, and I still remember the ozone smell of the photocopier room (yes, the photocopier took up an entire room), where I often spent entire mornings making dozens of copies of terrible pictures I’d drawn, humoured by the legal secretaries who were pleased to have me out from under their feet. I also saw my first word processor there, an item the size and shape of an electric organ, that displayed a single line of text at a time on its tiny LED screen – a universe away from the laptop on which I’m typing this now.

One room that often pops into my mind when I’m thinking about how to design some piece of cloud-based data architecture to perform some online job or other is Duggan Lea’s basement archive, a dusty room filled with cobwebs, mouse nests and rack upon rack of contracts and case notes, all rolled up in buff card folders and bound around with mauve or burgundy ribbon. It was a scene straight out of Bleak House, which I read around that time, and the experience of visiting those impenetrable stacks combined with the overwhelming futility of the proceedings of Jarndyce & Jarndyce to instil in me a Kafkaesque view of the workings of the law, a faith in the potential of computerisation to improve data storage, and a love of good writing, all at the same time. I think these three things have formed a close alliance in my consciousness ever since.

Another building I visited was Rackham’s, now House of Fraser, seen in the righthand background in the picture below. Still a striking piece of modernist architecture, it features in Midland when Margaret agrees to meet Tony there, in the tea room, for a conciliatory post-divorce talk in 1968 (the year of my birth, by non-coincidence). 

Fading now, like so many of the concrete buildings of that era, it’s still worth remembering what a powerful effect that wall of concertina-ed windows had on the city centre in the 1960s, and what a positive contrast it, and the goods on offer within it, presented to the citizens of what was a grimy, industrial town still dealing with bomb damage from the Second World War. It was a view of the future that Margaret bought into, at any rate.

By the time I was visiting Newton Chambers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that dream was already under threat from the slowdown in British manufacturing and the various industrial crises this precipitated. The concrete revolution that had created Rackham’s had also wrapped Birmingham in expressways, of which the famous  Spaghetti Junction  was the zenith (or perhaps the nadir). The city centre began to suffer from most of the urban ills that characterised those decades, and had become a tough place for a boy to be. Going into Newton Chambers as a little kid with my Dad during the school holidays was one thing; travelling in on the train on my own or with a friend on a Saturday as a teenager, to source back copies of 2000AD at Nostalgia & Comics or clothes at Oasis, and braving hostile gangs of skinheads in order to do it, was another. It wasn’t really until the 1990s that Birmingham would start to feel like a vibrant and hopeful place once more, largely thanks to the efforts men and women like my father made to rebuild and improve the institutions that would reknit the town’s civic fabric. 

And in case you’re wondering what I looked like in those days, I went to a school reunion last year and was presented with this:

As you can see, I was already working hard on projecting authorial angst, even at that tender age.

Here’s a selfie I took this morning, roughly four decades later, sporting the new glasses I’ve had to buy recently for driving (I had my eyes lasered in my 30s, and haven’t worn specs for around 15 years).

Plus que ca change plus c’est la meme chose.

And with that thought, I wish you a very new year to you all, and all the very best for 2018.

For the last couple of years, as you all know, I’ve been slowly but steadily raising the funds to publish Midland with Unbound. Thanks to your incredible kindness, patience and support, that day is finally here. It’s been one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do, has taken twice as long as I thought it would, and has shown me what an incredible set of friends I have out there. 

Thank you, all of you. You’re a very special group of people. Every pledge has meant so much. Times are incredibly tough in the publishing industry right now, as I’m sure you’re well aware. Many, many great writers and journalists are facing real crises in their careers. A pledge for an Unbound book is not just a pledge for me, it is a pledge for a new business model that can help writers and artists of all shades adapt to the financial realities of life in the internet age.

And we’ve done it. We’ve raised the money to publish Midland. Save for a final polish, which I’ll be doing sometime within the next couple of months, the book is complete. As I’ve said to most of you individually already, I do hope you like it when it comes. I poured everything I had into it, and I really do think it is my best book to date.

It has been a risky book, too. Previously, I always crafted a careful plan and a plot for my books before sitting down to write them. Midland was different. I wanted to write a novel that flowed from the characters, not from some pre-ordained map of events – a map which always somehow seemed to stifle the characters’ ability to grow as believable people as the story got coloured in. So with this book, I tried a new approach. From beginning to end, during the ten years that I wrote it, my only plan was one single page of A4, pictured at the top of this post: the family tree of the Wolds and the Nolans.

Details were tweaked here and there, names, dates and connections were adjusted and altered, but that was the whole outline, and beyond that the outline never altered. The book you’ll read sometime next year grew out of that one page, which was pinned on the wall above my computer for an entire decade. From this small square patch the whole book sprouted, much like the plants in my mothers’ Warwickshire garden: planted, nurtured, oftentimes pruned, sometimes dying, occasionally giving way to wild plants and weeds, but eventually coming together as a coherent – and I hope resplendent – whole.

Well, of that, you will be the judge. That next stage in the book’s life belongs to you. In the meantime, as some of you will know, I’ll be getting involved in another project. Not a book (though there are more books in the pipeline), but a start-up. Because while I’ve been raising the money for Midland, I’ve also been raising money for  Hospify, a secure messaging platform for healthcare that hopes to revolutionise the way doctors, nurses and patients communicate.

Just this week we’re completing a seed funding round for the company, and next week we start a regional trial in the West Midlands with the Unison public sector union (yes, more Midland connections). All this won’t be formally announced for another week or two yet, but you can visit hosify.com/news if you’d like to find out more about what we’re up to. As for Midland, I’ll be posting more updates here as the book gets prepared for printing, so keep an eye out for those.

Thank you again. 2016 and 2017 have been the years of fundraising for me. 2018 will be the year of results.

Onwards!