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The Blake Friedmann Agency is pleased to announce that a deal has been signed between David Hewson and Bavaria Media Italia for all eleven of Hewson’s contemporary crime novels based in Italy.

Bavaria Media Italia optioned screen rights in order to develop and produce a major international series of six television movies. The series is planned to be shot in English by Bavaria which will work in conjunction with co-production partners from several European territories. Bavaria’s Philipp Kreuzer will Executive Produce the series; Bavaria Media TV will handle international sales. The concept for the series is currently being written in Rome.

The deal was negotiated for Hewson by Conrad Williams of Blake Friedmann’s Film/TV department and for Bavaria by Philipp Kreuzer and legal counsel Georg Hoess.

Said David Hewson: “It is enormously flattering to have eleven of your books snapped up for option in one swoop and with such high ambitions for English language, feature length TV dramas.  There is a lot of work to be done on a project of this magnitude. I am happy that it has already started.”

Bavaria plans to develop and partner this series in 2011 with production slated for 2012. It will be shot on location in and around central Rome.

I’m very grateful to Conrad Williams of Blake Friedmann for concluding this very wide-ranging agreement. Bavaria are one of the biggest media groups in Europe and have optioned all current ten books in the series, including two yet to be published titles, The Fallen Angel and next year’s The Plague Doctor. They have also optioned the standalone The Cemetery of Secrets (US Lucifer’s Shadow) which ties in with the fourth Costa book, The Lizard’s Bite. It’s particularly gratifying that, while these are destined to be English language productions, the initial interest came from Rome where, as the release says, the project will be based.

And quick answers to two questions I’m being asked already…

• Will you write the scripts? No. I’m a novelist, not a scriptwriter, but I will be there to offer my thoughts if needed.
• Who will play Costa, Teresa, Peroni… Sorry… far too early to say.

When there is more news I’ll happily pass it on.

How things have changed. Scrivener 2′s approach to revisions and change tracking is different to Word’s, and markedly superior in some ways. It’s also less than obvious to find. But worth it, trust me. Here’s how to get there…

Here’s the problem. We want to carry out a major revise on an invididual scene. One so radical we may not be sure it’s a great idea, so we’re reluctant to lose the first version we have.

OK. Choose the document you want to work on then hit Command 5 or choose this option from the menu.

Scrivener will now take a snapshot of the entire scene and store it separately in an inspector window.

As you can see you can give your snapshots titles and take multiple ones of the same scene. You can rollback to the original at the click of a button. Or look at what’s changed between that and your revision too, just by clicking Compare.

Deletions appear in red, additions in blue (sorry but this is a work in progress so I can’t really show you the actual text).

I like change tracking in the latest versions of Word. And as always I have to emphasise: Word is how a final book will normally be delivered. But this is probably a more subtle and powerful way to keep track of changes on a heavily-edited book. So congratulations to Keith for coming up with such a clever solution.

It is currently Version 2, Mac only, by the way.

It’s funny how cameras change these days too. Ricoh recently released a firmware update for this model which added some features, including a grainy black and white mode designed to look like old-fashioned film photography.

Had to try it of course.

Here’s one example…

This being Florence I couldn’t stay in monochrome all the time, of course. It would be a crime to photograph the roof of the baptistery in black and white. Click on either photograph to go to the Flickr gallery with the originals.

By rights a GPS should be clueless about this since all of the journey is indoors and frankly I didn’t know which way I was pointing most of the time. Since cameras were banned except for pointing out the occasional window I couldn’t take photos either.

Here’s the actual route of the corridor which is roughly one kilometre in length (I’m a bit hazy about the bit in the Boboli Gardens so don’t quote me on that by the way).

And here’s what the camera made of it…

Not bad. It does dump me in the Arno at some stage and it didn’t get a large section of the corridor running along the river and across the bridge. But it picked up the outdoor locations very quickly and accurately.

When it loses the satellite signal the camera tries to guess your position by monitoring your movements using an internal sensor. The corridor involves a lot of up and down and roundabout walking. I can’t complain it fooled the Casio a bit. It was rather like a touch of potholing in some ways.

Still an impressive camera when it comes to the GPS though. But I have a few things to learn about picture quality. Some of the features offering ‘super’ and ‘premium’ quality do result in photos that seem overprocessed to me. I think I’ll turn them off for the duration of the trip.

Here’s the corridor as it crosses the Ponte Vecchio.

Rick says the Vasari Corridor is hard to get into and probably not worth it. Boy is he wrong.

Some facts first. The Vasari Corridor is an extraordinary private passageway originally built for the Medici. It runs from Florence’s first town hall in the Palazzo Vecchio, through the Uffizi Gallery, along the Arno river, over the top of the Ponte Vecchio shops, through the church of Santa Felicita and then winds up in the Pitti Palace,  the final home of the Medici family who were Florence’s royal family in all but name. It meant they could walk to the centre of the city without mixing with the hoi-polloi and just to make it nicer they filled it with works of art.

It’s still there today, though the bit from the Palazzo Vecchio is closed because it’s used for storage. You can walk down the Vasari Corridor but you need to book and it costs — 85 euros in my case. And you won’t be able to do it for a while either. From next October, on the present schedule, it will close for three years for renovation work (though this being Italy dates are, as always, vague).

Our tour began with a one-hour trip round the key parts of the Uffizi. Then we went into the corridor itself down a set of stairs, with two Uffizi guard ladies following on behind out charming American guide to make sure we only took pictures out of the few windows, not of the corridor itself.

After that we descended into the first floor of the Uffizi and what was once private apartments, all razed for the Medici’s designs. It’s quite something to move out of the Uffizi’s hustle and bustle into this cold, quiet private area. There’s no heating, no air conditioning for the paintings, which is one reason why the place is about to close for work.

The corridor is quite narrow — here’s the bridge that takes it from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Uffizi.

Once you’re inside you get some interesting views too. Here’s the Ponte Vecchio from the Uffizi part. You see that tiled narrow bit leading to the bridge? That’s the corridor we’re about to walk down.

The entire corridor is lined with paintings. Some — most, let’s be honest — passable. But once you get into the bit over the bridge you get a collection of self portraits by some well-known artists and some of them are pretty astonishing. Among them, I was amazed to see, was Carlo Levi, author of the wonderful Christ Stopped at Eboli which he wrote in Florence as a Jew in hiding from the Nazis. This isn’t just ancient history, you see.

There are views from the occasional windows (which you can photograph). Here’s one, part way across the Ponte Vecchio.

Halfway across the bridge you meet a set of windows which seem quite modern. They are. Mussolini had them installed for a meeting with Hitler. There is a local story that Hitler so enjoyed the view that he ordered the Ponte Vecchio be saved from destruction when Italy was falling to the Allies and all the other Florentine bridges were being destroyed. I find this a little hard to believe. Would a man who could murder millions really be bothered about a bridge?

But the window’s still there and this is a view from it…

After that the corridor wanders through the church and then on to the Pitti Palace, where we emerge in the Boboli Gardens, next to the famous grotto. The corridor does wind into the palace itself but visitors are kept out of that bit.

This seems a very short account of something that lasted three hours. It really was an extraordinary experience, one greatly enhanced by the knowledge and enthusiasm of our guide. And there has to be a guide of course, since you can’t do this without one. I normally shun tourist arrangements but frankly this one was so well organised, and with such genuine knowledge, I may be more accommodating in future.

If you want to do the Vasari Corridor yourself you have until October to get in there. My visit was organised through Florence Town. It was excellent and I certainly recommend them.

How did my clever GPS camera fare on this trip? I’ll tell you tomorrow when I’ve looked at the files.

But there’s a problem with all these photos. It’s called filing. I am the world’s worst filer. I have photos that look lovely and potentially useful were it not for the fact I don’t actually know where they were taken. Wouldn’t it be good if the camera did that geographic filing for me?

I think so. A couple of years ago, while writing The Fallen Angel, I bought a Nikon camera with GPS. It took lovely pictures. The GPS capabilities were appalling. It took ages to get a location fix and frequently lost it. It soon became a present for the son (he gets most of my old cameras).

But time moves on. Now I’m in Florence with another GPS-equipped camera. A hybrid GPS camera if you will. It’s brand new, called the Casio EX-H20G and cost me £249.99 tax free at Gatwick, £100 less than some places sell it for on the High Street. It’s a modest looking, slightly chunky upmarket 14 megapixel point and shoot and looks like this…

The GPS is a bit out of the ordinary. It does the standard thing of picking up location from satellites. But then, as far as I understand it, the thing also has an internal motion sensor. So once you lose sight of the satellite, by going indoors for example, the camera works out where you are itself (don’t ask for details — I don’t know either). It also comes with a built-in map system covering the whole world. This means you can view where your pictures were taken on the camera itself using a map (and find out your present position too). And it has a database of popular cities and destinations such as Florence, which allow it to tag well-known places automatically and suggest places for you to visit (if you want that).

Unlike the Nikon it seems to have an incredibly long battery life too. Does the geotagging work? Oh yes. Here’s a photo I took of the basilica of Santacroce at night (without flash I should say, the slight blurring is probably hand-held camera movement). Click on the image to see the full size picture unretouched.

I’m not going to talk image quality here. I wouldn’t expect the Casio to be as good as the more expensive Ricoh cameras I used last year in Venice for The Plague Doctor. It’s much more an everyday point and shoot model than they are. And frankly quality is not that important to me. I photograph all kinds of things that most people wouldn’t bother with — street detail, rubbish, signs, nameplates. This is for research not a photo album.

No, it’s the location information that interests me. If I pull those photos into any common photo app, be it Picasa or iPhoto (here it’s Aperture) I see this…

Pinpoints for all the places I’ve taken pictures and an easy way to see how many are at each location. The naming of the photos as Santa Croce was done by the camera by the way, not me. It has the main Florence sights listed in its database of locations. All I did was point and shoot. This is good.

Another remarkable thing the camera does (if you apply a new update from Casio and make sure you format your SD card too) is keep recording GPS data when it’s turned off. Even when it’s in a pocket. I mooched around Florence yesterday seeing a variety of interesting things. When I got home I saved my GPS information as a kml file, the kind used by Google Earth. When I pulled in there I saw where I walked. Unfortunately Earth seems to stick a distracting label on every one of the many waypoints. So it’s easy to see this by uploading that same file to the free GPS Visualiser service. Here were yesterday’s peregrinations when I was out with the camera, which was mostly turned off and inside a jacket pocket.

That snail trail of marks is pretty accurate, though I didn’t actually wander into the river Arno at any stage. As a research tool this is, I have to say, incredibly useful. I can fire away and have an automatic record of the photo location.

The big test for the internal motion sensor comes later today though when I walk through the Vasari Corridor. This is a private passageway built for the Medicis which runs all the way from the Uffizi on the north bank of the Arno, across the top of the Ponte Vecchio and comes out in the gardens of the Pitti Palace on the south bank. All of it indoors.

Will my clever little camera be able to handle that? We’ll see. And as to picture quality… I will put up a single Florence gallery on Flickr at the end of this week so you can all judge. I think it takes very nice if unremarkable photos though. Here’s a close up with lots of zoom of the Adam and Eve panel from the Gates of Paradise on the Baptistery.

Not an easy subject given the people around these doors, and the zoom copes very well. More later when I’ve taken this thing through the Medici’s corridor…

I tried to do that on the iPad but gave up and resorted to printing out the pages. It really is the easiest solution. You see more, you’re reading the book away from the computer screen, you can flick backwards and forwards easily.

Trouble is time constraints meant I had to finish that process here in Florence, in a rented apartment. I no longer have a printer. How do I do the final final revise? The iPad of course…

What am I trying to do with this last pass of the book? Simple: revise the changes. I have to take it on faith that I can’t do any more to the unchanged bits. That’s going to have to go through the line editor: I’m blind to the old stuff by this stage. But I do need to look at the new text I’ve written in, since that’s raw and unrevised too.

The simple way to do this within Word (or Apple Pages) is to turn on change tracking. Then you get the usual coloured text for additions, moves and deletions. You can print these out from Word. The trouble is you then get the large revisions sidebar added to the page which, for me, makes them unreadable on the iPad. Either you zoom into to lose the sidebar or you zoom out for the full page and the main text is unreadable.

I couldn’t find a way to print out a Word document the way I wanted to see it: with the changed text in the main document but without any sidebar. If someone out there knows how do please let me know. But there’s always Pages…

With that you can choose to hide the side pane while still seeing your changes.  I also want to make sure my additions are underlined and my excisions crossed out.

If you don’t do this you just get coloured text for what’s changed and delete. The same colour out of the box, which is confusing.

With these selections I then export to pdf and transfer to the iPad using Dropbox. Inside PDF Expert (here with the annotation tools showing, though they are usually out of the way for reading) it now looks like this. Changed text in blue with a helpful black line in the side to show.

I still find this a bit too much information frankly. I think it’s easier to look at the new text only, not the excisions, which I saw anyway on paper. And, of course, I can go back to those easily on the machine. So I choose the ‘view without delete’ option which you can see in the first screenshot above and get this.

I then scribble on bits that need changing and when I’m finished go yto PDF Expert’s bookmark menu which keeps a list of where the annotations are.

And that’s it really. Hope that was useful — and you have a few paragraphs from next year’s book there too.

I tried when I first got my iPad a few months ago and failed miserably. But time, and software, moves on. I have another MS to read. So I thought I’d give it another go. And the answer this time has to be… perhaps. If you accept the limitations and you choose the right software.

Let’s deal with a simple issue first: can you import a Word document and edit it in a safe way? Not in any way I’d trust. Pages on the iPad will open Word. But you have no change tracking or comments, as you have on the Mac version of Pages. All you can do is change the text. Using a very unsatisfactory keyboard. With no revision history. You’d be mad to try frankly.

So however you look at it the only way to deal with this is by reading and annotating a pdf. Fine, but let’s think of the practical limitations. I always print out a manuscript and go through it line by line, page by page, with a red pen in hand. Nothing will cure me of that habit. But I read and reread a MS and I’m open to the idea that at least one or two of those passes could be handled digitally.

The problem is we think marking up a paper MS with a red pen is a simple exercise. It isn’t. Think of it this way: you can hold that pen and turn the page, scratch your nose, answer the phone, drink a cup of coffee. Computers aren’t that smart. No tablet I’ve seen yet has come with the obvious mechanical tool to turn pages — up and down buttons. You have to swipe or tap the screen somehow. Oh, but that’s how you use the pen too. So you have to do something to choose between these actions and tell that dumb piece of plastic, ‘No, I’ve stopped scribbling now. Take me to the next page’.

This was what drove me nuts with the first iPad pdf app I tried, iAnnotate. You can flick through pages easily but when you want to annotate it looks like this…

Click for a bigger view. Someone has been taking the icon pills for this app. Everything seems to come with whacking great pictures and text boxes. All I want to do is circle a word or scribble a note. But to do that I have to flick the pen icon, see that hideously big lump of stuff appear on the screen — which I find deeply distracting — make my scribble then click the gigantic red close button to make it go away.

That was money wasted (you have to buy iPad apps before you can try them, a neat trick I must say). I experimented with a few other pdf apps after that and none of them seemed particularly convincing. But there’ve been some updates of late and here, I think, are two that are worth a look, Goodreader ($2.99) and PDF Expert ($9.99).

These are both powerful pieces of software that do a lot of things I don’t need or frankly understand. All I want is to be able to flick through a long pdf manuscript and make notes and bookmarks.

The cheaper one first. Goodreader doesn’t get in your way when you’re reading a manuscript. You just place your finger on the spot where you want to make your annotation. The word may be selected (I’m not quite sure how this works) and you get this menu.

As you can see in the preceding paragraph I’ve crossed out the word ‘dish’. I did this by choosing markup and delete. You can write a note, highlight the text or draw — in other words scribble some words. Do that and it looks like this…

I used an inexpensive stylus to write that. But you could just use your finger. It all worked fine but you do have to flick through a lot of menus to get to freehand drawing in Goodreader. If you want to scribble on your manuscript a lot this could get tedious.

PDF Expert has very much the same idea. Click on a word or line and you get this.

Click on Note and you get a rather nattier looking note feature than Goodreader (though in practice they do the same thing).

I did like this pop-up note feature on both programs, by the way, especially PDF Expert. It seemed easy and logical. PDF Expert also puts a little icon on the side of the page which is rather more obvious than the small mark you get with Goodreader. Agents and publishers, who will approach manuscript revisions in a different way to authors, might find these particularly useful. They’re good for general observations, not the individual word criticism an author might make at revision stage.

Writing freehand is much easier with this app than in Goodreader. You just tap at the top of the screen and get this menu which hides normally when you’re reading. The first pen is a freehand drawing tool (the second is for signatures, the third for help, the fourth searches, the fifth bookmarks, and the plus sign will set a bookmark).

The help function is excellent too.

Here’s a little video showing you PDF Expert in action on next year’s book, The Plague Doctor.

You get what you pay for I guess. Goodreader’s excellent value but if I were to use the iPad for revision a lot I think the $9.99 (£5.99 when I bought it in the UK) is worthwhile. PDF Expert is very simple to use and very logically designed. Both these apps will work with a Dropbox account for sending and receiving files which is a real blessing given how hard it can be to get stuff on and off the iPad (I had to email those screenshots to myself for pity’s sake). A decent stylus would be useful for anyone wanting to scribble a lot. I bought a Boxwave stylus because the reviews said it was the best. Don’t much like it. If there’s nothing better than that I guess it’s back to trying to write with a fingertip, which isn’t wonderful.

Can this completely replace pen and paper? Not for me. Not for a while anyway. But it’s getting closer. And here’s the most intriguing thing that occurred to me. Stupidly I kept thinking I’d transfer the annotated pdf back to the computer and read it there against the uncorrected manuscript, dealing with the changes along the way.

But why? Pop the iPad into a stand, set it next to your main screen and use it like an old-fashioned copy holder, checking revision notes there against the original on your Mac or PC. This I like.

I hope that long-winded ramble answers some of your questions, David. We are getting there but, given that iPad 2 is just round the corner, along with a lot of Android and Windows tablets, my inclination right now would be to wait for the next generation of machines before making the leap.

There are easy ways to monitor time, though. Any word processor that handles comments can do it. Go to the beginning of a scene and put in a time, date, location or anything else. Here’s an uncorrected draft of a scene from The Fallen Angel in Apple Pages using that (yes, I know about the typo, I did say ‘uncorrected’). Dead simple.

To be honest this is as much as I need when it comes to monitoring time. It tells me when and where a scene starts. So when I look at other comments (or notes in the Scrivener inspector) I can see if things don’t add up. ‘Accuracy’ is a movable feast in fiction but time needs to feel right. You can’t have people going from Rome to Florence in forty five minutes. Notes such as these are good anchors to make sure your narrative is grounded in physical reality.

When people talk about fiction timelines though they’re usually thinking of something visual. The Mac fiction app Storymill has this feature. It looks like this.

Storymill’s a great piece of software and well worth giving a trial if you’re a Mac user. I struggled with the timeline side of it though. The current method has its limitations, though they may well soon be fixed. Timelines are difficult notions, I suspect. They may sound simple but in reality they’re complicated, and different for everyone.

Even if they did work the way I do I’m still not convinced I’d use them. Tagging each scene with a date and location seems to work fine for me. Adding a visual narrative also subjects me to yet another layer of information, one that the reader, remember, will ever see. The more complex we make a book project in terms of its production, the more we may distance ourselves from that all-important manuscript. I want the greater part of my limited brain power to go on the words, since that’s all readers will use to follow the story. Introducing timelines and brainstorming and other ‘inspirational’ devices may make my life easier — and I emphasise may — but run the risk of getting between writer and reader unless you’re very competent at handling them (and I’m not sure I would be).

There’s a broader point to be made about time in fiction too: writers agonise over it in ways that readers rarely do. Yes, obvious time mishaps — ridiculous journeys, people who never sleep — need to be avoided because they will be spotted. But minor disjoints — an hour here or there, a lost day — probably don’t matter much. Readers understand this is fiction. They want a good story that feels real. Not the dead hand of actual reality.

An example: DNA. You can’t write a modern crime story without considering this. In actual forensic work DNA tests can take absolute ages. Weeks, months even. If crime stories followed strict and ‘real’ DNA procedures stories would become extended and have long gaps between meaningful events. Who wants to read that?

So most of us will cheat. Lie. Make it up. We’ll have DNA tests coming back to match the required rhythm of the narrative.

Is this ‘wrong’? No. We get filed under ‘fiction’ remember.

Would a visual timeline help? Not for me. To be honest I don’t agonise over this subject too much. There are bigger worries to deal with, and they always, always come back to characterisation and events, not dates and times.

But you, of course, may be different.