Joy of writing: “My conscious mind may be driving the bus, but something else was navigating”
A long-held ambition has been realised for Hove author Martin Davis with the publication of Handmaiden of The Sun: Book One – Realisation. The book has been released by Publish Nation (print on demand); physical book £9.99; Kindle £1.99; available from Lulu. com. It tells the tale of Trixie Treat who is 15 years old and realises she is privileged. She lives in a big house, attends a posh school, has a nice family… and can hear the stars talking. Martin, 71, said: “I started Handmaiden of The Sun (a story in two books) several years ago – as a pastime. I had always wanted to write a novel, but something urgent (the list is too long to even start on) kept getting in the way. However, one Tuesday evening in a dark and rainy December, I sat down with no plan, no structure, no characters, no story and no Great Message for the wider world. Just a desire to write something, for me. Even if nobody else read it – ever. That notion soon changed. The one thing I did have was a girl’s name: Trixie Treat. And I didn’t even know where it had come from. But it was there, in my head. She was 15. So the story would probably be for younger people, amongst which I numbered – mentally at least. I laid hands on the keyboard without a clue as to what would emerge – and the Almost Final Chapter, of what is now Book Two, started to grow. Over the following evenings, characters began to show up (some completely uninvited – but I was taking all comers) in the form of Trixie’s school friends. Something resembling a chapter-long-plot started to appear on screen with lots of holes and inconsistencies, clumsy language, repetition and other things I’d obviously need to fix later, giving rise to a frightening reality: maybe the story needs an opening scene. And possibly a few others in between that scene and the thing I’m currently tapping out. “Still following the havingno-plan philosophy, I wrote isolated episodes as they occurred to me, from parts of the book that had no purpose yet. After several months, things were getting out of hand. So I decided to take control, do a little actual planning, deliberately introduce some rivalries, questions and tensions for the reader, cobble what I had already written into a cohesive narrative structure – all that good stuff. “In the very first chapter, I would give Trixie a new best friend, Suzanna. She’d be a fashion victim, not clever at all and completely reliant on Trixie during whatever adventures they might get into. Within four lines, Suzanna had rewritten herself – was hardly recognisable as the girl I’d envisaged two minutes previously. This one event crystalised everything I’d been thinking over those last months: writing is much more fun than reading. Because the surprises aren’t just there, on the paper, waiting for you. They unfold before your eyes, being created as your fingers are moving on the keys. That was why I had wanted to put a story onto paper. For the joy. Writing was like a Magical Mystery Tour. My conscious mind may be driving the bus, but something else that I didn’t always have instantaccess to was doing the navigating.”