The daily Muse

As those who’ve read my various books will have noticed, each is a totally separate animal from the other. I’d hate to be a writer who churned out more or less the same kind of work over and over. That road would lead to tedium. To me, writing is like eying a big lump of stone, armed with a hammer and chisel. I get tapping and cutting, and while doing this, I contemplate what shape the beast is within the stone that I want to see emerge. I have no idea what it will be while I’m working on it – but I know that eventually something strange and interesting will be revealed in all its glory (hopefully).

I’ve noticed there are motifs in my work. The Moon seems to feature, night skies, stars. Characters pause to inhale and notice their surroundings. Tunnels also occasionally feature – why? No idea. I do know its not to ‘fill space’ with redundancies.

Speaking of which, I was reading an extract from someone’s work on the the ‘Meet the Author’ forum on Amazon, and was amazed with how much ‘time’ was taken up in describing a character running, falling, catching themselves, biting their lip in anguish, then rising and running some more. I think its a fair call to say that the writer in question wasn’t trying for a Proust-like effect. The narrative, what little there was, had disappeared behind a shoddy flurry of description. The writer was asking for comments, and I thought about dissecting the extract and showing them why it didn’t work, but then thought better of it. Life is too short, I’m no teacher, and I get no thrills at seeing substandard work, or for that matter, pointing it out. Others might differ. I’m too selfish and very self-absorbed in getting my own prose as tight as possible.

Its all quite contradictory. I regard blogging as little more than scribbling on a wall in a cyber-back alley somewhere. My prose, my ‘real’ work is not represented by anything I write here. I spend little thought crafting these sentences. I’m well aware that many see blogging as a great PR exercise for their work. I’m less convinced of this. Besides, given how I create my work, I’m the last person who should be trying to sell it under the guise of a regular blog. My blog will reveal that I’m more concerned with the state of my orgasm than I am with the so-called democratic process underway in the political sphere. My work, my ‘actual’ writing, on the other hand, takes itself deadly seriously.

But ‘me’ – the ‘me’ that is simply having a smoke and a break from the formal writing and scribbling these words here for a purpose I have yet to properly determine, comes from a much more lighthearted place. I work with hindsight. I create stuff – and then make up great intellectual justifications about what I’m doing and why I do it. In essence, I lie, almost all the time when discussing my work. Its nothing I can help. I can point to words like ‘intuitive’ to try convey the truth of my process – but then the Prankster in me goes ‘why on earth would anyone be bothering to read my meanderings on a blog?’ I’ve written some fairly good books. Those are what count, not this nonsense.

Perhaps I see ‘blogging’ as more of a Diary concept than as a marketing tool. I’d much rather discuss the mundane elements of my day, idle thoughts – and restrain myself from getting too graphic. (As Constant Readers will have noticed, I don’t filter my words. When things irk me, I tend to talk about them.)

So that’s my Diary entry for now. Currently, I have characters waiting for me out in the Nevada desert. Naturally its night time, a big full moon in the sky…
Time to tell some story.

The Gibbering of the self-proclaimed ‘Indie’ writers

Been noticing a surplus of blogs written by self proclaimed ‘indie’ writers, all hailing the imminent death of the formal publishing industry. There’s an edge of gleeful hysteria to most of the writing, akin to watching a fat boy on the ground encircled by bullies taking turns at kicking him. Being me, I refuse to join a mob that would have someone like me as a member – so when anyone writes something and turns to me for what is essentially approval for their misguided point of view, my instinctive response is ‘f*ck off.’

I find it hard to take much of the self published books seriously. I think its something to do with the absence of good grammar, the typos, the exuberant zeal of marketing that’s reminiscent of pimply girl scouts and cookies, and worst of all, that constant sensation of faces in the mob turning to me for approval as the hordes scream themselves hoarse over ‘how they’d never take a formal publishing deal.’ Right. I’m sure Random House wants a turgid wankfest of romance novels filled with lip-biting, sighs, historical inaccuracies, redundancies on every page and plot lines so thin the author probably worked them out on a napkin at a fast food place.

I have to keep reminding myself of the basic statistics. The average US person watches 150 hours of television a month. There’s only 19% of the population who operate at a high literacy rate. Over 50% of the population ‘don’t believe in Evolution,’ preferring to pin their hopes on an old book they believe to be imbued with magic powers, written by a gargantuan Sky Fairy with an obsessive interest in everything they do. No, don’t laugh – this is what the majority believe. Forget science, technology, modernity. Its a zealous belief in magic, incantations (called ‘prayers’) and a woeful incomprehension of the difference between ‘theory’ and ‘scientific theory.’

That’s the majority reading audience encapsulated. You have to wonder if Ernest Hemingway saw it coming and decided to suck the barrel of that shotgun rather than stick around to wander in the literary wasteland of the illiterate, who think a firm grasp of politics is conveyed by parroting ‘they envy us our freedoms.’

I’ve seen ducks with a firmer grasp of reality.

Nonetheless, the blogs continue being scribbled by the self published, each doing their version of trying to rally the mob to the barricades. The enemy, naturally, are the so-called gatekeepers of formal publishing – who (according to the ‘indies’) lack the ability to spot the raw talent of books about sparkly vampires, killers, sci-fi soap operas, secret agents going after terrorists, and of course, the ever-nauseating Christian ‘thrillers.’ I have to admit that at times I feel like a character from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, looking around bemusedly at the group of inmates as Nurse Ratshit conducts a therapy session. Kill me if I ever use a LOL, please. And especially if I offer strangers virtual hugs.

In other news, I’m 100 pages into a new work, my Agent is sitting with a twin-novella, and editing is, at long last, continuing on the monstrous 1200 page saga I wrote last year.

Time to get to work. I’m not sure why you’re reading this. The only insight you’ll get from me is that I’m sophisticated-yet-cranky, and brutally unforgiving of the mediocre. If you’re a reader, then rest assured, I’m probably on your side – as I’m trying hard not to write anything approaching the shit I see around me.

Until the next time…

In the wilderness

As those of you who read this very irregular blog will know, I don’t plan what I write. I put my fingers on the keyboard and out comes a whole heap of stuff, some of which is hopefully interesting – although I’m prepared to concede there’s just as likely to be a certain percentage of shit that makes its way onto the page. I love to waffle (as in ‘talk a lot.’)

My grim humorless Russian editor has taught me that precision is everything. Say what needs to be said and not one jot more. If there’s fault with a lot of the self published authors (and boy is there ever), it is this absence of perspective on their own work. I can remember a time when I was dumb enough to think my every sentence dripped perfection, my words glistened like diamonds, and who dared spoil the riches of my paragraphs? Now I know better, primarily thanks to my editor. Most self published scribblers don’t appear to have picked up this simple lesson, because they don’t have anyone in their lives willing and able to tell them how dire their writing is.

But this is not the focus of this blog post. Its headed ‘In the Wilderness.’ And before you think its a euphemism for depression, it actually serves a two-fold purpose: to describe my stumbling into strange new territory as I write, as well as hint at some of the narrative I’m concocting.

So, yes, I’ve started something new. I have a form letter that I’ll be firing off to my agent soon, seeing as normal office hours have returned, inquiring about various completed projects I’ve passed him. But now I’m 50 or more pages into something else, which has the feeling of a ‘book’ to it. My editor is tied up in a teaching project, which means the 1200 page saga I’ve been sitting on, isn’t going to get edited anytime soon. Perfect time to strike out blindly in a direction and see what kind of story emerges from me.

I started selling work on Amazon in March last year and have seen a gradual growth in sales. Nothing stupendous, but definitely enough to keep me in the basic necessities. Of course this requires cutting and pasting adverts in Amazon’s ‘meet the authors’ forum on a regular basis. It must be pleasant to be able to just concentrate on writing and not pay attention to online threads (as I determine whether my last ad was too recent to post another one.) Forum life is interesting: it reveals the best and worst of people, or specifically ‘writers.’ (Readers, too) I’m sure a sociologist would have a field day with how people present themselves to others. My favorite are seeing adverts for books where the writer hasn’t bothered to proofread their own ad, or, in the heat of discussion, mixes up ‘their’ and ‘there.’ The proverbial kiss of death waits on many fronts, along with the usual embittered and desperate folk that also happen to make up the mob on the internet. Whenever it gets too much for me, I focus on getting work to my agent, in hopes of that day when something I write will be picked up by a traditional publisher.

We’ve allegedly just come through some sort of ‘holiday’ season called Christmas by some. Thankfully, I’ve been too busy working on the new book to pay any attention to it. From the glimpses I’ve caught of the concept, it appears to be about conspicuous consumption and false bonhomie; a blur of purchasing gifts and handing over money to corporations in exchange for ‘presents’ to buy the temporary good will of friends and family. I’ve never been a consumer so the whole period has passed me by, mostly untouched. I’m more concerned with watching my characters move about on the page as I wonder what’s going to happen to them next.
After all, there are only so many heartbeats in a life. Do I want to waste time craving then playing with some shiny gadget made in Chinese sweatshops for pennies, or focus on writing a good story? Its not a tough choice, believe me.

Depending on the response I get from my agent on the twin-novellas I’ve sent his way, either they’ll start getting pitched at editors – or else Amazon will have to endure yet another upload from me, and there’ll be one more product to sell to readers.

And the beat goes on…

Turning Japanese

I briefly turned on the TV and saw the President of America standing beside a ‘Santa Claus’ singing something. I lost remaining faith (sorry to use that word), in him the day he used his Nobel Peace Prize speech to explain why war was necessary. Orwell would have grinned. Obama’s family were beside him on the stage, a million camera phones were lit up recording the moment the glorious leader of the free world took time out from illegal wars and genocide, to sing songs celebrating Christmas.

Outside it is a blur of consumerist bullshit, people buying things they don’t need, pretending a cheer they don’t feel, and celebrating the imagery created by the Cocoa Cola company. The only remedy is to leave the TV off, and repeat to oneself: ‘I am sane. I am sane.’ The situation is dire. Like those times you’ve taken too much of a psychedelic substance, to the point where its pushed you into that Confucian endless-hell loop of forgetting who you are, and then having to apply your mind and remind yourself every few seconds. Its one of those things Hunter Thompson, beloved of people who’ve rarely taken drugs, didn’t talk about much.

So its Christmas and the only thing I can find of note is that its nine days and counting to the next ‘punishment game’ (batsu game) on my favorite Japanese TV show ‘Gaki no Tsukai.’ They’re seeing in the New Year with a game set in an airport, by all accounts. I love batsu games. The object is simple: don’t laugh. If you laugh, you get whipped hard. The games themselves last at least 24 hours, and its nonstop and relentless. Sounds simple: don’t laugh. It isn’t easy. There’s the cream of the crop of Japan’s comedians lined up to try make the contestants laugh and get punished. Each batsu has a different ‘theme’ and setting. Some were hospitals, police, school, hotel, newspapers, spies. So the upcoming one is ‘airport’ – which should be interesting. The West has yet to steal the concept, but I think the flabby egoist souls that make up Western ‘reality TV’ contestants will balk at the idea of being beaten repeatedly over an entire day.

A fan forum page for Gaki No Tsukai (and episode downloads) can be found here: Scroll down to the Batsu games to discover the delights of all the Batsu games (with subtitles) that have come previously. You’ll probably have to register to see the content. If you like the idea of watching four or five people facing the sneaky might of an entire TV station trying to get them to laugh so that a whipping can occur (usually administered by faceless people in leather ‘gimp’ suits) then dip into the forum.

A number of US standard TV shows have been taken from Japanese TV, ranging from ‘Fear Factor’ (which emerged as a soft version of ‘Endurance,’) through to the traditional ‘Americas Funniest Home Video’ – each of these were developed by Japan and then appropriated. One can argue that ‘Survivor’ has its roots in the classic ‘Endurance’ show – which was about putting contestants under severe pressure, pain, and food deprivation, and then watching gleefully as the situation disintegrated. Now I think of it, ‘Silent Library’ is one of the things to have re-emerged in the West from Gaki no Tsukai, although its a very dumbed-down version. To their credit, the Japanese take their games deadly seriously. As you’ll see if you watch any of the batsu games. No laughing. Laughing causes an immediate beating. Therefore, the TV station moves heaven and earth to find ways to break the composure of the contestants (themselves part of the long running Gaki series).

From a Western perspective, its beyond surreal – and strangely addictive. One learns a great deal about Japanese culture and the nuances of casual and formal interaction. Conversation and trap-ridden situations abound, interspersed with a loud klaxon horn and the announcement of whoever has been caught smiling, as a rush of gimps enter the room to beat the guilty ones.

If only there was something similar in US politics.

If you read this blog, you might probably do something equally weird like, I don’t know, buy my fiction book. The Depths of Deception has fifteen 5 star reviews on Amazon.

Raindrops on Roses

I have always been fascinated by the spaces between rain drops. The mundane rituals of human behavior have a particular attraction to me. Like the character in ‘Three Men in a Boat’ – work interests me, I can sit and watch it for hours. I mention these things because there’s a new dual-novella work that’s just been sent to my Agent. It contains two tales that focus on different aspects of the above subjects. One does it in a kind of sweeping epic way, the other approaches matters from much closer, a more intimate narrative. It tickles my funny bone to join these two works so diametrically opposed to each other. I can only hope my agent sees the twinning of two opposing stories in the same light.

If not, then there will be a new work for the Kindle. I still consider writing for the Kindle to be a second choice. In years to come if I am asked whether I’d like to be a collection of ones and zero’s on a handheld device, or a paper book resting on a shelf, my answer would always be: first the book, please. I like a format that does not require electricity to communicate itself. To quote from Caesar ‘how many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be re-enacted?’ The answer, if all human art is relegated to the vagaries of modern electrical devices, is ‘not long,’ I think.

So I err toward traditional publishing as a first choice, purely because I have read books by candlelight in adverse circumstances when there’s been no power. I have experienced how all the glorious shiny, nice-to-hold gadgets become useless lumps of metal and plastic. But the whir of the pages of a real book by candlelight, now that continues regardless. Books can be read in caves by firelight.

I am slowly clearing the decks of completed work, and facing the joys of seeing a blank page and even emptier days stretching out ahead of me. I have full trust in my mind’s abilities to squeeze out an interesting narrative to keep myself amused. After all, that’s one of the primary goals of writing: to amuse myself. I enjoy creating things which have never been before.

I am constantly bemused by the self-proclaimed ‘indie writers’ on various forums who seem to be all about creating work for ‘the market’ and displaying a certain greed as they count their sales.

I make worlds that have never existed, and people them with characters whose motives are murky at best – and then enjoy ‘zooming in’ and describing humdrum activity. Often this appears to have nothing to do with the narrative, its only once the piece is completed that I can see I have made something unique.

During the process of writing, I’m the last person to know why this or that is happening, or how come those characters are performing that activity. As my body of work grows, I can see threads of similarity forming: the Moon often features, characters will have tea, be haunted by dreams or regrets, to name but a few things. There are down sides to never knowing what I’m writing about. I’m sure psychologists would have a field day with my work, given how much of it comes from my unconscious mind.

It is strange being in a country ostensibly predicated on ‘difference’ – to see so much conformity of thought. The forums of the self-published echo with ‘how many did you sell today?’ ‘what new marketing methods have you discovered?’ and my favorite ‘why I can’t afford an editor.’

Few of these forums contain discussion about how to achieve good writing, how to engage the emotions of the reader, or how to craft sentences. Instead, there is a clamoring hungry envious buzz as those who happen to have sold thousands or millions of copies, are held up as Gods to be aspired to. At times it feels like one is among the Israelites melting their gold and fashioning graven images to worship while a Moses is somewhere up the mountain, communing with an unseen deity.

The trick, I think, is to simply keep on writing; avoid being suckered into the herd mindset of obsessive concern over sales figures, the rampant envy, or for that matter, the false largesse of the desperate. Little children bounce up and down on diving boards at swimming pools, calling to their parents to look at them. I see the same ‘notice me!’ head space in a lot of posts on forums. The trivial is seized upon as an excuse to make a post and display ones signature file showing book covers.

I was reading a pungently bad review of someone’s book on a blog site. The author responded by saying the copy wasn’t the final draft, and signed off by citing the fact that he had two glorious grandchildren. I shuddered, picturing, for some reason, bloody-fingered desperate would-be writers hauling out family pictures as they scrabble on a slippery slope. Don’t look or judge my writing, they seemed to say, here, listen to me as I describe my babies. Pity me. Buy my book because you feel sorry for my glorious grandchildren. Make allowances for bad writing because…

There truly is no dignity in consumerism.

And all I can do is write the best I can. The circumstances of my own life, my personal life, my own private demons, remain between me and my subconscious. Some bits and pieces have been formalized in print (in the Penguin-published autobiography) and even that massive overshare is not even half the story. It is not the sum total of my experience, and it certainly should never be perceived as an advert for my writing.

It is a rainy day. I suppose the drizzle and gloom is affecting me, bringing out my interior Poe. Consider this blog post a mere stream of murmuring thoughts. I do not ‘blog’ to advertise – I know this much. I blog to share some of my thoughts, ideas and passing fancies that aren’t assuaged by writing fiction. So in some ways, I guess I am a voyeur’s paradise.

New work sent off. Old work still being edited. A brand new piece currently emerging. There, for those who want blogs containing ‘facts’ and no more.

Time to do some ‘proper’ writing.

Until the next time…

Victims in Writing

The biggest gorilla in the room in my writing are ‘the circumstances’ in which the narrator finds themselves. It obviously isn’t true for everyone, but I’ve noticed that in my work, it is usually Fate that has put the main character in a situation of one sort or another.

I’m not overly linear in my story-structure. If anything, I like to come into a story three-quarters of the way through, and then back up – allow the character to speak, provide information about their early existence. I pepper these anecdotes with glimpses of the present reality, without nailing it down too deeply. (Mainly because, often, I don’t know exactly what the circumstances are – as I never plan anything when I write.)

So the reader is swept up, coming into this ongoing story, learning about it almost at the same rate the character is discovering and coming to terms with whatever has trapped them in place.

In much of my work there are pre-existing intolerable situations, into which characters have blithely walked, or are sitting stewing over their predicament. The only way out is ‘through.’ The characters are forced into flashbacks as they true to make sense of their surroundings – the Talking Head’s line about ‘and you may ask – how did I get here?’ runs under most of my work. My characters honestly don’t always understand how, in fact, they got there, or rather, they do, ‘sort of’ – but it fails to bring them any relief.

I leave psychobabble gobbledegook phrases like ‘empowerment’ back at the door when I write. ‘Empowerment’ is mostly just successful self-delusion, in my view. The things my creations learn are often deeply complicated. Sometimes, they don’t learn anything at all – while imagining they’ve achieved a happy ending. Think of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ – with the happy ending peeling away to reveal the truth that the main character has been tortured into insanity. He’s free at last, Thank God almighty, free at last.

Just as in cinema, when directors have characters decide to ‘investigate that strange noise outside’ or stupidly ‘go up those stairs in the house’ – when they shouldn’t, I also enjoy setting up the self-discovery of the characters in a similar flawed fashion. My characters often achieve enlightenment, but it is often delusion, and readers can see it as such. There’s no feel good happy resolution to ease the tension of the narrative.

In ‘Depths of Deception’ – without giving away the climactic moments – there appears to be a happy ending for the narrator, and to him it is. But we the reader are aware that its grotesque and impossible, and even if its true, its against a backdrop of horrifying proportions. Yet the hero is left happy in the icy wilderness, and it is we who are discomfited. Our expectations have been deliberately fucked with. Up is down, and black is white, and we’re through the looking glass – we stepped through it from page one without noticing that this happened.

In ‘From Hell’ we move from a cheerful pop-culture savvy slick version of a stylized Hell, into an all-too-real world above, following the trail of someone whose ideas of good and bad, pleasure and pain are all mixed up and back to front. Yet this state is normal to them. The story remains ‘sort of’ funny, up until the main character experiences real pain, rape, physical damage. The inner journey of the character is mirrored by the outer geography of the Land they’re passing through. The character begins to change, mature, gain an education – but there’s always the inner conflict of how they were raised compared to how human society behaves. The ‘Hell’ in the book is more than just an excuse for jokes, it is examining the idea of what exactly is ‘decent’ and what is ‘perverse.’ The character is a victim on multiple fronts, slowly coming to terms with issues of mortality, conscience, as well as fighting nature and nurture as new relationships are formed.

I mention all this because I’ve finished a new work, and happened to notice that structurally I’ve again done what I detailed above: brought the reader into a situation where they have to play ‘catchup’ as the character tries to make sense of why they are, where they are. Part of it comes from not planning anything when I write – but I suspect, a larger part comes from beyond the weird event horizon that is my subconscious. I’d hate to start writing something where I knew what was going to happen at every step of the process. Sheer tedium would envelope me.

The new work isn’t that long, perhaps 110 pages. I think it will be an interesting counterpoint to another, as yet unpublished work of mine of similar length. I like the idea of a slim book containing two violently opposite stories, each setting off into distinctly different territory. Both deal with victims of their circumstances, communicating with the reader and fleshing out the world in which each protagonist finds themselves. Each main character naturally comes up with solutions for what they see as their problems. The twinned stories will hopefully make a delicious example of the Grotesque in action: the oscillation between the monstrous and the ridiculous.

And no, I don’t think of any of these things while writing. This is all pseudo-intellectual thumbsuck after the event. In truth, when I write, I just simply try to amuse myself and create interesting menageries of words on the page. Its only afterwards, if pushed, that I can perceive patterns or threads in what I’ve made, and concoct suitably erudite explanations for them.

Enough of the thumbsuck, I have to continue editing the new work and get it into a fit state to pass through the filter of firstly my Editor, and then my Agent.

So, until the next time, if carpal tunnel syndrome doesn’t get me

An Update

Hello. Yes, there’s finally a new blog post here. What’s happened in the interim? I hear you wonder. Well, my usual mixture of rather a lot, and not very much at all. It should be said that I’m a naturally contrary person. It isn’t anything I can help. But if there are two states that I could be in, the odds are good that I’m careening back and forth between them, and trying to make sense and find stability during the experience. Therefore, to me, it makes perfect sense that a) I’ve not being doing that much and b) Been rather busy.

I’m now fifty-some pages into a new work. Its pleasing me, although its hard going at times. It seems to be a novella-sized work, but anything’s possible – given that I write without planning. So if extra story decides to come and visit, then the piece will expand. As it is, I can sense an ending some way up ahead. What’s it about? Well, its a shaggy dog story, I suppose. (He says with tongue firmly in cheek – given that the main character is a cat).

My viciously brutal ‘noir’ thriller-mystery ‘No Man’s Land’ is up online at Amazon. Still trying to work out how to sell it without either giving away vital plot points, or, for that matter, causing horror from squeamish readers by pasting excerpts from some of the milder sections. I didn’t entirely realize just how ‘hard-boiled’ the story is until I put it up online and quietly compared it to other ‘private investigator’ type works. No Man’s Land definitely runs the gamut of mystery/thriller/horror. Curse that genre blurring I tend to do. I tell myself that at least I didn’t write a vampire novel

Editing is starting on the gigantic completed work – all 1200 pages of it. This latter tome is bound for my agent and traditional publishers to sniff over. Partly because I think its good enough for traditional publishing, but also to show my agent I haven’t entirely cut him out of the loop of my productivity. I reckon a lot of writers who have formal literary agents are facing these choices as each new work emerges: to put it online and have it read within days by readers, or to sit on ones hands and wait out the months for the traditional publishers to weigh in with their thoughts. Its a tough call.

I’ll have one more book for online by Christmas, all things going well. Its a novella collection, featuring a story I’m probably the most proud of – a strange WWII-and-beyond tale called ‘Heavy Poodles.’ Quite possibly the current work-in-progress will join that, in which case it’ll be a nice decent-sized book for readers to get their teeth into. The upcoming book’s title will be ‘Heavy Poodles and Other Stories.’

What have I been doing, apart from writing? Well, as a geeky retro-gamer, I’ve been equipping an old XP laptop with tons of my favorite old-school adventure games, the ‘point-and-click’ variety. It keeps me happy to tinker for hours, trying to get ancient but deliciously interesting games working. I’ve had to face the facts that most of the modern games are eye candy and fluff – great programming and coding, but content-wise, they leave less and less to the user. I was lucky enough to professionally review games during the early 90′s, when ‘adventure gaming’ was at its height. Nowadays, an alarming number of games are all militaristic nonsense, featuring story lines that can be compressed to: ‘run and shoot at things.’
Not my thing, at all. I worry about where the future of gaming is headed, given the amount of high quality eye candy crud that’s on the market. There again, I’ve always been a sucker for a good narrative – and that’s where adventure games come in. One can spend days quietly solving puzzles or examining areas to find clues and advance the plot. Some might find it tedious – I find it nicely soothing.

Anyway. So I’ve been equipping an old laptop with games. I can also be found playing host on an oddly-named thread on the Amazon ‘Meet Our Authors’ forum, titled ‘Something of a Hatefest?’ Look me up if you’re in the neighborhood.

Right now, the coffee’s begun working, I see comments are beginning to spill into the above-named thread – and I have a work in progress to continue with – so until the next time. *salutes*
-Ian

What Kind of Writer Am I?

On a forum, someone asked about one of my books, wanting to know if it fell into either a sci-fi or a fantasy category, and for once, I gave a straightforward answer in all its complexity.
Here’s what I wrote.

“The ‘From Hell’ book is technically a ‘Satiric Grotesque’ work, using fantasy, sci-fi, and occasional steampunk elements as it oscillates between ‘the monstrous’ and ‘the ridiculous.’ (As all Grotesque material does). Its difficult to slot it into a single category. Its probably a distant cousin of Mervyn Peake’s ‘Gormenghast’ meets Terry Pratchett via Tolkien.”

In truth, all my work is Grotesque in nature. On the surface, each title may appear to be one or another category, but underneath, if one pops the hood, lurks a philosophy that I seem to be aligned to. This isn’t something conscious that I do. Its just ‘there.’

To start with, let’s just define ‘the Grotesque.’

‘In fiction, a character is usually considered a grotesque if he induces both empathy and disgust. (A character who inspires disgust alone is simply a villain or a monster.) Obvious examples would include the physically deformed and the mentally deficient, but people with cringe-worthy social traits are also included. The reader becomes piqued by the grotesque’s positive side, and continues reading to see if the character can conquer his darker side. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the figure of Caliban has inspired more nuanced reactions than simple scorn and disgust.

Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the most celebrated grotesques in literature. Dr. Frankenstein’s monster can also be considered a grotesque, as well as The Phantom of the Opera. Other instances of the romantic grotesque are also to be found in E. A. Poe, Hoffmann, the Sturm and Drang movement or Sterne. Romantic grotesque is far more terrible and somber than medieval grotesque, which celebrated laughter and fertility.

The grotesque received a new shape with Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, when a girl meets fantastic grotesque figures in her fantasy world. Carroll manages to make the figures seem less frightful and fit for children’s literature, but still utterly strange.’

Here’s a quote from something I wrote to my Agent a while ago, discussing the ‘From Hell’ book. (We were talking back and forth at length, me having to explain the ‘why’ of many aspects of the narrative.

“The storyline thrives on, for want of a better way of putting it, a kind of ‘systematic disharmony.’ There’s a fight between the narrative and the plot, drawing us continually into contrasting areas: beauty and brutality, the indifferent and tragicomic, the monstrous and the ridiculous. The clash of the fundamentally incompatible is everywhere; the ironic narrative text conveying the plot, the subversion of the (audience’s) expectations so that the ambivalently abnormal becomes mundane, through to the character’s flawed perception of reality and their responses to the plot developments.

The sustained absurdity of the plot is a Buster Keaton-like dead-pan parody of various genres, including the traditional world and elements of Fantasy, and the classic old-school Adventure novel, overlaid with the geeky pop-culture-obsessed sensibilities of science-fiction.

The story-world is a distorted one – set at some time in our future – and it’s satiric grotesque, so the reflection we’re seeing at times contain fragments of the familiar. The characters are almost uniformly flawed, and despite going through ‘heroic’ adventures, their innate weaknesses mean that what they evolve into might not be pleasant. Each character does – or will – pull the (audience) back and forth through the empathy and disgust that is part of the grotesque.”

Still with me? Good. That see-sawing effect, moving the reader from one extreme to another; empathy and disgust, or the monstrous and the ludicrous – all these things lie at the heart of the stories I create. This is a fairly recent discovery. I tend to ‘just write stories’ without planning, and without intending a message – but the more I read about the Grotesque in literature, the more I realized that this was the field I write in. Whether its strange little novellas about God or fairies, or longer novels about apparent assassins intent on revenge, my writing fits sweetly into a Grotesque niche.

Knowing this fact isn’t important or necessary to any of my books impact or its success or failure on you as a reader. But I felt like ‘sharing’ this one time, where my stories come from.

Here’s an excerpt from something discussing Salmon Rushdie’s work.

“Rushdie utilizes what we may term the “fantastic” grotesque. His powerful images border on the macabre; he relies largely upon frightful monsters to express an emotionally charged demonic world. Other writers utilize the grotesque in more subtle yet not necessarily less effective ways. Often coined the “satiric” grotesque, these writers reach the grotesque by way of satiric, caricatural, and cynical distortions.

Unlike pure satire, however, which aims to separate laughter and anger in our reaction to a scene and unlike caricature, which distorts to produce a ridiculous or amusing reaction, the grotesque aims to produce a confusing tragicomic reaction to one particular scene.”

All of my stories have this inherent desire to produce a tragicomic effect in the reader. At the same time, I’m acutely conscious of the fact that I have just one formal year of high school under my belt. I don’t always know what I don’t know. But I follow my instinct when writing. I try to please myself, first and foremost.

Its intensely gratifying that minds sharper and more educated than mine have found value in my work. I operate in an unconscious way. I plan nothing, intend no messages, aim for no markets – and merely try to weave a Tale as best I can.

Given that my ‘From Hell’ book is ostensibly about a Demon’s Progress through their own identity, during the course of an epic journey, it made delicious sense to run across a thesis on the Grotesque worldview, titled ‘The Ludicrous Demon.’ And indeed, the following could be used to describe any of the worlds in my work.

“The familiar structure of existence is undermined and chaos seems imminent. This aspect is intensified when concrete manifestations of decay appear and a feeling of hopelessness and corruption is developed. The ludicrous aspect, in turn, arises from the farcical quality inherent in such scenes of absurdity and approaching chaos” –Lee Byron Jennings The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose.

There. Either I’ve given you food for thought, or I’ve hopelessly confused you. I hope its the former. I just wanted to use the blog to talk for once about the engine of my specific kind of writing. Every writer has a different ‘engine,’ just as they have different methodologies, motives, and desires.

*closes the hood of the car*

Now you know a little something about my work. It has a philosophy. I don’t know where it came from. But it is mine. I have to assume that the new material about to get unleashed, as well as the work I’m busy creating, falls into the same genre of writing. I generally keep my mouth shut about my work’s origins, knowing that stories have to stand on their own two legs. Stories either work or they don’t, irrespective of whatever fancy, high-falutin’ ideas the writer may have That’s roughly how I see it.

And now back to the regular programming
Until the next time.
Ian
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If you read this blog, you might probably do something equally weird like, I don’t know, buy my fiction books. The Depths of Deception has eleven 5 star reviews on Amazon.

The ‘From Hell’ book has a generous sample (given its 687 pages) of a few chapters. It can be found on Amazon here

What Happens When No One Tells You Your Work Sucks.

Maybe its because I didn’t finish school, but I wouldn’t know a gerund or a split-infinitive if it fisted me. When conversations get into the esoteric strata of ‘Elements of Style,’ I tend to shut up, primarily because I simply don’t know the right words to describe things. Hold that thought. That said, on various forums there’s a constant babble amongst the self-publishing crowd about how to get successful and ‘stand out from the crowd.’

There’s a hysteria amongst the would-be writers about success. Its kind of funny, in a ‘lets watch a flipper child being given birth to in a dumpster’ sort of way. After all, the literate – and literature itself are real low on the totem pole in modern America. One has a population content to sit and stare at nonsense on TV, night after night. The one good sign about the slowly-unfolding ebook revolution is the fact that people (bless ‘em) are reading. As to what they’re reading is another matter, but the main thing is they’re not sitting like Homer Simpson staring vacantly at TV sets. They have their gadgets and they’re reading. that’s pretty damn cool.

On multiple ebook forums, the would-be writers clamor to be noticed and to be heard. Almost everyone says pretty much the same thing. I wouldn’t want to be in the position of the reader, trying to sort the wheat from the chaff at this point. Its snake-oil territory. Each writer promises that their book is THE book the reader has been hunting for. As it always does, the truth lies elsewhere. And on the forums, the interest is high in any and every topic that purports to explain how to achieve better sales, improve rankings, find the success that eludes so many.

I have a simple solution. Actually, its two solutions. Follow them and you’ll sell books. Ignore them, and I’d guess you’ll crash and burn. The crash may be slow or it may be catastrophic and abrupt. Either way you’ll end up screwed. That’s not to say should you have a lousy book you won’t find sales. But the first duty of a writer is to accept the rules of writing and operate like any other craftsman approaching their art. Diligence, patience, care.

I’ve seen excerpts from people who mix up ‘their’ and ‘there,’ ‘which’ and ‘witch,’ ‘your’ and ‘you’re.’

Some folks are real lucky I’m not in charge of deciding who gets burned in the village square.

Here’s the first solution for writers: find a good editor who’ll cut away the excess shit you’re writing. I don’t mean to be insulting. I have what I consider to be a good editor. They refuse to listen to me trying to justify bad sentences or vague descriptions. Shit is shit, in the view of my editor. Luckily I have a tendency to overwrite, so most of the multiple-layers of editing are akin to a surgeon’s knife on an unconscious and very morbidly obese person. There’s plenty of blubber to be removed. Once enough is sliced away, there’s something sparse, lean, and precise lurking beneath. Precision is king. To reiterate, rule one is to find a good editor. Good editors tell you what you don’t want to hear. And no, your mother doesn’t count.

The second solution follows on from the first. Write a good book. Tell a good story. You want to step into the real world where people part with hard-earned cash for something you wrote? You BETTER not be supplying them with something that reads like a fifth grade essay paper. Its fine to have delusions of being a writer. Speaking as one who’s managed to make it pay for a couple of decades, the public are unforgiving if you present them with your crappy misspelled laundry list. Every word in your book needs to be considered, every sentence needs to be working hard to convey precisely what you mean. Not what you ‘think it means,’ but exactly what you intend it to mean.

I was watching local community TV the other night. It was a train crash of epic proportions. A variety show from a local school. A succession of smug-faced, awkward children appeared, singing off-key to pop-songs. Rapturous applause at the end of each number. It occurred to me that no one had ever grabbed any of these untalented kids and yelled ‘YOU SUCK.LEARN BREATH CONTROL, STAGE PRESENCE, AND MUSICAL SCALES!’ And this life-long absence of criticism had almost entirely crippled them all. Every one of them thought they were God’s gift to the world – as they screeched along to their favorite pop songs, red-faced with pride – as if this was somehow an example of talent. In every field there are people who believe they sound incredibly good while singing in their shower. Usually, and thankfully, these folks aren’t able to get on television or in any other way, disturb the psychic calm of the larger universe.

The ebook explosion means a lot of this strata of folks are now let loose on an unsuspecting populace. All that’s needed, the pundits on forums say, is an AMAZING cover – and a GREAT blurb. And then promote promote promote. I’m thankful that I am not a reader trying to find decent books to read amongst the so-called ‘indies,’ I lack the patience. Additionally, if I pay for something, and I don’t care if I paid $15 or merely 99 cents, if I spend money and find that I’m looking at childlike, conceptually dumb writing, I am acutely aware you’ve just screwed me. And I mean ‘screwed’ me in a bad way. You’ve ripped me off. I will never forgive you, but worse, I will not forgive myself for getting suckered in by your deluded bullshit about having written something of worth.

So write a GOOD book. If you can.

Now and again, I’ve seen signs of really good writing amidst excerpts that the ‘self published’ put online. But the quality work is swamped by those red-faced yet smug caterwauling children who have no business trying to pass themselves off as artists. Unfortunately, there’s no good solution to stop the flood of shit. The only way to swat aside these muppets is to write a really good book. Word of mouth seems to sell good work. Let me repeat that snippet: WRITE A REALLY GOOD BOOK.

I’ve been lucky (or perhaps that should be unlucky) enough to read entrants in a number of national essay and short story competitions. The ratio is about 99% garbage, .5% interesting and .5% pretty good. This seems to be being duplicated in a monetized form on Amazon and a zillion other places where ebook writers are hawking their wares. Complicating matters is the fact that readers themselves aren’t always the best oracles of freshly-found wisdom and great literature. You can hope that they are. But they might not be.

There are times when I’m happy being ‘just’ a writer. I’m not part of the horde trying to make sense of a million adverts for books. As for my own work? Its selling at a moderate and steady rate. I’m assuming its due to the word of mouth thing, combined with occasionally blitzes of my adverts on forums – usually when I’m paused in writing new work, and want some time out to let my subconscious think.

I’m content with knowing I may not get rich with prose. But I’m confident as to the quality of my work, and for me, that’s the important thing. There again, I come from the field of professional play writing, where words HAVE to stand on their own two feet with a resonance and immediacy that rings true to an audience. So I’ve worked through those various stages that the new would-be writers are staggering in: the putting into books of excess profanity, or sex, or layers of ‘authors messages.’

I simply tell the story I’ve created. And my usefully-vicious editor keeps things on course and beautiful, even if I do say so myself

Yes, all right, ‘luck’ plays a part in the process as well. But Lady Luck will not smile if you haven’t had a damn fine editor to be brutal with your reasonably well-written book.

I see that I’m rambling. If you’ve read this far, good for you. I hope some of it made sense. This was me venting

I still couldn’t define a gerund if my life depended on it. But if we were beside a campfire, maybe sipping wine beneath a full moon, I’d probably be able to tell you a tale or two, to hold your attention.

And perhaps, in the final analysis, that’s all that really counts.

Until the next time.
Ian
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If you read this blog, you might probably do something equally weird like, I don’t know, buy my fiction book. The Depths of Deception has fifteen 5 star reviews on Amazon.

Between Books

I’ve put what I think are the finishing touches to a new ‘mystery’ novel. I put the word ‘mystery’ in something of ironic quotes because I hate mysteries. I find the genre irritating, like that piece of snot that refuses to flick off one’s finger. Ah, I hear you say, but then why write a novel in said genre? I wish I knew. I’m the last to know what my books are ‘about,’ let alone be conscious of their genre ahead of starting.

I deal in stories. Some are long. Some are short. Many have death in them, as well as layers of surprises. This isn’t from any calculation on my part – its merely me writing what seems to ‘fit’ in the narrative at the time. Like the Tom Stoppard quote, I make elephants fall out of cupboards. I do this not because I have any great affection for pachyderms, but because it feels right at the time. All right, I hear the capitalists say, but what about the market? Surely you write so that you can exploit whatever the current meme the market is enjoying, whether it be sparkly vampires or black maids in the Deep South?

The short answer is: no.

Down here amongst the dreams of characters and states as yet unborn, half-formed thoughts and horrific stories, there’s something of the nature of ‘automatic writing’ going on. I’m the last to know what I intend writing. I simply place fingers on keyboard and the most energetic of ideas pushes forward from the internal mob and slowly, painfully, begins to be illustrated. I’m just the medium. Or should that be ‘a channel’? Don’t worry, no ectoplasm here. I don’t hide behind spirit mediums and esoteric mumbo jumbo. One of my writing heroes is Proust. I like his attempts to define the indefinable.

I recently saw Kevin Smith’s most excellent film ‘Red State.’ He’d mentioned that it was something of a horror film – a teaser both accurate, and yet deliberately untrue. My point in raising this is to say that my latest novel is ‘a detective mystery.’ In this description, I’m both lying and yet being quite precise.

Additional editing and rewriting is still being done on the new work, yet I can tell its very close to being unleashed on the public. For better or worse. Yum.

But I still hate mysteries. There are things that are ‘supposed’ to happen in the narrative to throw off the discerning reader: the ever-popular red herrings. These requirements drive me batshit crazy at times, especially given that I’m a writer who likes the sensation of a story pouring out of me thoughtlessly. So to have to revisit the (ahem) ‘scene of the crime’ repeatedly to ensure this or that literary artifice is properly in place, comes over as drudgery at times. I’m more akin to the Dr.Frankenstein school, yelling ‘Give my creation life!’ Awaiting the lightning strike to animate my monster. It beats plodding back and forth over writing, ensuring the foreground action meshes neatly with the background ‘under story.’

I’ve already given myself a severe talking-to, demanding that I never write another ‘mystery’ novel. I’m hoping my subconscious is listening. There are good reasons I never enjoyed Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie: I hated being that reader who misses all the clues and who goes ‘Oh, I see!’ at the end of the novel. Someone who thinks like that has no business writing the exact same sort of book. But here it is – almost ready for public consumption.

The other book that is gradually being edited, is, thankfully, a more normal kind of story. (Although what constitutes normal for me, might seem a little deranged to others.) The ‘Arabella Abides’ book presently clocks in at roughly a thousand pages; dual narratives interwoven to tell a larger story. I’m reasonably pleased with the state of it, and especially chuffed that its not a bloody mystery. I can feel the need to write something new, surging within me. For now, I’m deliberately resisting the impulse. I feel its important to get these two well-iterated beasts out off the ‘being edited’ shelf before I get lost in some new adventure.

Today’s special writing lesson is: be precise, and succinct.

A minor gossip point: Without naming names, I noticed a certain self-published author did a cut and paste of three lines of his work on the Amazon forums. I counted eight uses of the word ‘had’ in those three lines. *shudder* I’m sure the writer thinks his work is fabulous and well-edited. I would disagree. Eight usages of ‘had’ in three lines suggests a muddy army of other sludgy, ill-formed writing examples await the unwary reader.
Or am I being a bitch? I don’t think so. If I’m being bolshie enough to want (or expect) the public to read my words – I make bloody sure that the words are as best they can be, before putting the work out there.

This reminds me, I’ve put a new version of my ‘Fairyland and the Revolution’ up online – this contains the new ending as demanded by my literary agent when I first submitted the work to him. Naturally, I thought I knew better, so when the time came to Kindle the book, I reverted to my original version. Since then, I’ve had doubts over what ending is more suitable. Matters came to a head when a reader whose perception I trust stated they preferred the agent-prompted ending. So the epic ‘Fairyland’ now has a much better ending. Next under my microscope is the title itself, as ‘Fairyland’ might be fine for an EU market, but perhaps not quite right for the US readership. Ah, the joys of self-publishing on Amazon: it means the tweaking and improvements are never done.

I have begun to ramble – therefore it’s time to stop.

For those two or three Constant Readers, might I direct you to my usual adverts below?

Until the next time.
Ian
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If you read this blog, you might probably do something equally weird like, I don’t know, buy my fiction books. The Depths of Deception has eleven 5 star reviews on Amazon.

There’s also a very trippy fantasy satire that has a generous sample online to read. Fairyland and the Revolution.