I have a short story coming out!
Apologies, it's been a while. In the months since I shared my whimsical thoughts on finding a Death to the Daleks poster in a Hammersmith discount bookshop, I have been horrendously busy across my four main areas of activity. I have been busy working on my day job producing the monthly magazine and related publications for a certain membership organisation. I have of course been busy sampling the finest wines and ales available to humanity. I have been busy treading the boards as Simple Simon in Jack and the Beanstalk. And last, but never least, I have been busy writing.
I've been writing a few things, but the news I must share regards a short story I pitched to an anthology for Fringe Works, as part of their Grimm and Grimmer series. My science-fictionfied fairytale has been accepted for publication later this year in one of these collections.
The confirmed writers I've seen so far for this series are a joyous mix of seasoned pros and aspiring amateurs, and I'm thrilled to be involved. The only downside, if you can call it that, is that I'm now focusing a lot of time and energy on new short stories for their other anthology projects, and a follow-up to Something Nice has become much less of a priority. That book is continuing to rack up decent reviews, should you wish to peruse it.
The first volume in the Grimm and Grimmer series is due to be published on Monday 4 February. I'll update with further news about my own story as the big day draws nearer.
Amazon Associate
Saturday, 2 February 2013
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Death to the Daleks - Kicking it Old School
"Doctor Who fans have it easy these days." It's a familiar refrain from those of us who were obsessed with Jagaroth spaceships in the dark days of the 90s, but it's true. There's a ton of new Doctor Who being produced every year on TV, in print and on audio. Every supermarket, newsagent, bookshop and DVDish place will have a rack full of stuff for your perusal, and that's before you get on to the toys and other merchandise.
From the late 80s through to 2005 (the McGann blip notwithstanding), it was all very different. Unless you had UK Gold, you had to wait years to see Doctor Who on TV, and when you did it was almost always Genesis of the Daleks. WHSmith would usually have a selection of VHS episodes for £9.99 a pop, but it was almost always limited to the rubbish 'feature length' edited versions of Ark in Space and Terror of the Zygons. Woolworths would just have one of the Peter Cushing Dalek films if you were lucky. The mere appearance of a Martin Clunes Snakedance clip on Before They Were Famous was the sort of thing that could dominate fan discussion for weeks (generally along the lines that they should have featured a Martin Jarvis clip instead).
So when you wandered past a shop that had some Doctor Who merchandise, it was incredibly exciting, and it became more exciting the more unlikely the shop. In no particular order, I remember finding the novelisation of The Space Museum in Barbrook Post Office, a model Police Box in a pottery shop in Stratford on Avon, and the graphic novel Mark of Mandragora in the Science Museum's bookshop.
I got a sense of that fannish thrill at the weekend, walking down Hammersmith's King Street in a not particularly purposeful fashion. Discount Warehouse had various posters on the door as always, but among the carefully retro advertising prints, there was an A3 poster of the cover of the Death to the Daleks novelisation. The proper cover, you know, consisting entirely of a Dalek's dome exploding. An image so striking that its photographic reference takes up the focus of the DVD cover to this day.
I ducked into the shop to find, in an environment otherwise completely unadorned with Doctor Who merchandise, several copies of the poster. I felt like that bloke in Amelie who finds his little toy bike in a tin.
It was like a time capsule from an age where shops weren't festooned with Matt Smith's forehead, and we all had to roam around the back streets pursuing a rumour of a 1974 Annual without the price cut out.
My purchase was made all the more special because the cover in question was once one of The Five. At the back of innumerable 80s Target paperbacks, there was a mail order advert for five posters. There was a shot of Peter Davison brandishing a gun in a shot from Earthshock, against a backdrop of a Dalek and Target novelisation covers. There was an apparently random photo of Jon Pertwee wrestling with Linx from The Time Warrior. There was one that looked, thrillingly, like a cutaway painting of a Dalek, complete with grisly Kaled mutant (these images were barely even thumbnails, so correct me if I'm wrong), and the covers of The Cybermen and Death to the Daleks.
Trouble was, these were the days before t'internet. While you'd stick a cheque or postal order in the post quite happily in reply to an advert in a magazine, the Target offer seemed a bit vague. The books were still on general release years later - had the offer expired? Had they run out of stock? If they had run out, would they return your money, or send a substitute? You'd hate to shell out for that Dalek Cutaway just to get Pertwee hugging a Sontaran, or Davison apparently guarding his bookcase while a Dalek gave him covering fire. We agonised, we pocket money fans, and many of us kept our cash in our piggy banks, just in case.
Years later, I acquired the Cyberman poster from Longleat, but those five images have always stayed with me. My new Death to the Daleks poster has been treated in that faintly irritating trendy way to look like a creased paperback cover, but other than that it's a slice of history from a more innocent age.
We're so used to the 'new series' stuff crowding shops now that it still gives me that same old frisson to find a 70s Dalek image in a totally unlikely place.
On a similar note, Lee Sullivan has put his original cover art for Love And War up on eBay, coinciding with Bernice Summerfield's 20th birthday!
From the late 80s through to 2005 (the McGann blip notwithstanding), it was all very different. Unless you had UK Gold, you had to wait years to see Doctor Who on TV, and when you did it was almost always Genesis of the Daleks. WHSmith would usually have a selection of VHS episodes for £9.99 a pop, but it was almost always limited to the rubbish 'feature length' edited versions of Ark in Space and Terror of the Zygons. Woolworths would just have one of the Peter Cushing Dalek films if you were lucky. The mere appearance of a Martin Clunes Snakedance clip on Before They Were Famous was the sort of thing that could dominate fan discussion for weeks (generally along the lines that they should have featured a Martin Jarvis clip instead).
So when you wandered past a shop that had some Doctor Who merchandise, it was incredibly exciting, and it became more exciting the more unlikely the shop. In no particular order, I remember finding the novelisation of The Space Museum in Barbrook Post Office, a model Police Box in a pottery shop in Stratford on Avon, and the graphic novel Mark of Mandragora in the Science Museum's bookshop.
I got a sense of that fannish thrill at the weekend, walking down Hammersmith's King Street in a not particularly purposeful fashion. Discount Warehouse had various posters on the door as always, but among the carefully retro advertising prints, there was an A3 poster of the cover of the Death to the Daleks novelisation. The proper cover, you know, consisting entirely of a Dalek's dome exploding. An image so striking that its photographic reference takes up the focus of the DVD cover to this day.
I ducked into the shop to find, in an environment otherwise completely unadorned with Doctor Who merchandise, several copies of the poster. I felt like that bloke in Amelie who finds his little toy bike in a tin.
It was like a time capsule from an age where shops weren't festooned with Matt Smith's forehead, and we all had to roam around the back streets pursuing a rumour of a 1974 Annual without the price cut out.
My purchase was made all the more special because the cover in question was once one of The Five. At the back of innumerable 80s Target paperbacks, there was a mail order advert for five posters. There was a shot of Peter Davison brandishing a gun in a shot from Earthshock, against a backdrop of a Dalek and Target novelisation covers. There was an apparently random photo of Jon Pertwee wrestling with Linx from The Time Warrior. There was one that looked, thrillingly, like a cutaway painting of a Dalek, complete with grisly Kaled mutant (these images were barely even thumbnails, so correct me if I'm wrong), and the covers of The Cybermen and Death to the Daleks.
Trouble was, these were the days before t'internet. While you'd stick a cheque or postal order in the post quite happily in reply to an advert in a magazine, the Target offer seemed a bit vague. The books were still on general release years later - had the offer expired? Had they run out of stock? If they had run out, would they return your money, or send a substitute? You'd hate to shell out for that Dalek Cutaway just to get Pertwee hugging a Sontaran, or Davison apparently guarding his bookcase while a Dalek gave him covering fire. We agonised, we pocket money fans, and many of us kept our cash in our piggy banks, just in case.
Years later, I acquired the Cyberman poster from Longleat, but those five images have always stayed with me. My new Death to the Daleks poster has been treated in that faintly irritating trendy way to look like a creased paperback cover, but other than that it's a slice of history from a more innocent age.
We're so used to the 'new series' stuff crowding shops now that it still gives me that same old frisson to find a 70s Dalek image in a totally unlikely place.
On a similar note, Lee Sullivan has put his original cover art for Love And War up on eBay, coinciding with Bernice Summerfield's 20th birthday!
Tuesday, 9 October 2012
A Splendid Salmagundi
I've got a new short story coming out very soon now. The UK Amazon Kindle Forum on Goodreads has put together an anthology, and accepted one of my stories. The tale in question was written just weeks too late to be included in Something Nice, and so given that my first collection of short stories took eleven years to publish, I was chuffed to bits when this opportunity came along.
Embarrassingly, I've forgotten the title under which I submitted the story, and a full selection of my working titles would give away too much. It was written in The Bridge in Barnes, apart from the bits that were written in The Sun Inn. It's about 2,500 words long and is a bit of a departure for my work in that it features:
"While I prepared to poison my girlfriend, I sorted through the previous day's post, tutting at the number of takeaway menus they were still sticking through the letterbox in spite of our polite sign asking them not to."
Embarrassingly, I've forgotten the title under which I submitted the story, and a full selection of my working titles would give away too much. It was written in The Bridge in Barnes, apart from the bits that were written in The Sun Inn. It's about 2,500 words long and is a bit of a departure for my work in that it features:
- an entirely non-white cast
- a bit of (non-explicit to the point of being non-existent) bonking
"While I prepared to poison my girlfriend, I sorted through the previous day's post, tutting at the number of takeaway menus they were still sticking through the letterbox in spite of our polite sign asking them not to."
Thursday, 27 September 2012
The hardest word to say...
I've been vexed this week. Let me know if I'm over-reacting. I'm afraid it's a long one.
On Sunday, I went to the local with my girlfriend for a quick drink before we headed to the local am dram awards ceremony (Someone Who'll Watch Over Me netted a special award for our director, Keith Perry. Validation!). I ordered two glasses of prosecco and paid by debit card.
By pure chance, I happened to look at my receipt, to see a tip that I very definitely didn't authorise. I asked the barmaid what was going on and she half-smiled and told me that I must have entered it myself on the chip and PIN machine. Bit of a basic error to lie right to someone's face about something that happened less than two minutes ago.
The duty manager was lurking, and they refunded my original payment in full, and then made me enter my PIN again to pay for the drinks, sans tip. I was handed back a bundle of receipts and my card and I must have paused a bit, taken aback at the complete lack of reaction, because the manager looked at me and said: "All right?"
Well, no, I wasn't all right, really. That was sort of fraud, I think. And I said, fairly quietly and without swearing for once, that I really wasn't happy that this had happened, observed that I came into the pub a lot, with a lot of friends, bought a lot of beers, almost always paid by card, almost never checked my receipt and how was I now to know that this wasn't a regular thing?
He gave me quite a long rambling lecture about how the chip and PIN machines are set up, and I eventually cut him off with a 'whatever, I'm going to have my drink', or words to that effect. I think this might have been the very first point at which the word 'sorry' or anything like it was used. Maybe.
"Is it just me?" I said as I sat down with my girlfriend and one other friend, "Or should his reaction have been a bit more 'Oh goodness me, I'm so sorry, how could that ever have happened, let me correct that at once, my apologies?' with possibly an offer of a free beer?"
It was felt I'd have been pushing my luck for the free beer, but that the first bit was pretty much on the nose. It was also felt, however, that after I'd left so visibly unhappy, the free drink (or, you know, something) might have been in order.
We'd nearly finished our drinks, and it was almost time to meet our friend who was driving us to the venue. Duty manager looms at my elbow wanting a word. To 'sort things out'. Typical, I thought, cast iron certainty of a free beer and I won't have time to drink it.
But no. His idea of sorting out the fact that I was now a very angry regular customer was to stand over me and tell me about how much he trusted all his staff and how I could request itemised receipts if I was ever worried in future and how he knew I came in there a lot and he wanted to be sure it was sorted out.
To be fair, I think it was genuinely his idea of an apology, but delivered with him standing over me in a fairly intimidating fashion and, you know, not actually containing an apology, it lacked a certain something.
So, off we toddled to celebrate Richmond borough's thriving am dram scene. And when I got home, a bit buzzed but mostly sober, I tweeted on the subject. As one does in this day and age.
The landlord tweeted back. "I think you'll find it was all done in error, my asst. manager has told me all about it. Please feel free to pop in & we'll talk"
Note the continuing absence of the s-word.
By this point, the original £1.10 or something that I was overcharged had become completely irrelevant. I slept on it (ie sobered up) before replying that I was more annoyed with the offensive way it had been handled.
"Apologies for any unintended offence caused, please pop in for a chat so we can resolve everything."
Which at first I thought was OK. Finally some actual apologetic words. But... do I want to pop in for a chat to resolve everything? Not really, to be honest. I tried for two apologies from the duty manager and instead got a series of insights into their payments technology. And even assuming the landlord's going to be a bit less of a pillock (which I frankly doubt from his first tweet on the subject: "I think you'll find" indeed! How patronising is that?), do I want to continue going to a pub where I know I'll now have a reputation for being 'difficult'? It's instantly become a less than relaxing prospect for an evening's drinking, just because I complained about being ripped off.
So, what I'm thinking now, is STUFF. YOU. You had your chance to resolve everything on the spot, and you blew it. You don't get to take time out of my schedule so you can go through the motions of appeasing me so that I'll stop being snippy about you on Twitter. You don't get to choose how I react to your shoddy service, I do, and I choose... indifference. We're done.
So this is what's happened. After Tuesday's panto rehearsal, one friend and I decided to go for a drink, and I tested the water and asked if we could go to the pub at the other end of the road, because I'd had 'a bit of nonsense at the usual place'. We were joined by my brother, sister-in-law, and a few actors, and we had such a good time that we went straight back the next evening for the pub quiz (we failed the quiz miserably, but I won a bottle of wine in a bonus round!). And one of our friends works behind the bar so we're definitely going back after Friday's rehearsal...
See where this is going? I wasn't kidding or blustering when I did the whole "I come in here all the time and buy a lot of drinks" thing. It was our regular post-rehearsal venue and my closest friends and I have easily spent a non-trivial four figure sum in that pub in the last year alone (if that figure seems shocking, consider that my favourite beer there is £4.80 a pint and that I really do write all my first drafts in pubs. It adds up quickly.).
Now, I'm not stupid enough or arrogant enough to think that my very vague boycott is going to have much impact on anyone's bottom line. We're talking about a celeb-frequented boozer next to a major London tourist attraction and a rugby club. With a beer garden. And we might have drunk a lot, but we hardly ever ate there, which is where they probably make most of their money. But word is spreading about this incident, even before I thought to write a rambling blog post on the subject.
TL;DR: You can get further with a kind word and a free bag of crisps than you can with just a kind word. But without either, you're kind of screwed.
On Sunday, I went to the local with my girlfriend for a quick drink before we headed to the local am dram awards ceremony (Someone Who'll Watch Over Me netted a special award for our director, Keith Perry. Validation!). I ordered two glasses of prosecco and paid by debit card.
By pure chance, I happened to look at my receipt, to see a tip that I very definitely didn't authorise. I asked the barmaid what was going on and she half-smiled and told me that I must have entered it myself on the chip and PIN machine. Bit of a basic error to lie right to someone's face about something that happened less than two minutes ago.
The duty manager was lurking, and they refunded my original payment in full, and then made me enter my PIN again to pay for the drinks, sans tip. I was handed back a bundle of receipts and my card and I must have paused a bit, taken aback at the complete lack of reaction, because the manager looked at me and said: "All right?"
Well, no, I wasn't all right, really. That was sort of fraud, I think. And I said, fairly quietly and without swearing for once, that I really wasn't happy that this had happened, observed that I came into the pub a lot, with a lot of friends, bought a lot of beers, almost always paid by card, almost never checked my receipt and how was I now to know that this wasn't a regular thing?
He gave me quite a long rambling lecture about how the chip and PIN machines are set up, and I eventually cut him off with a 'whatever, I'm going to have my drink', or words to that effect. I think this might have been the very first point at which the word 'sorry' or anything like it was used. Maybe.
"Is it just me?" I said as I sat down with my girlfriend and one other friend, "Or should his reaction have been a bit more 'Oh goodness me, I'm so sorry, how could that ever have happened, let me correct that at once, my apologies?' with possibly an offer of a free beer?"
It was felt I'd have been pushing my luck for the free beer, but that the first bit was pretty much on the nose. It was also felt, however, that after I'd left so visibly unhappy, the free drink (or, you know, something) might have been in order.
We'd nearly finished our drinks, and it was almost time to meet our friend who was driving us to the venue. Duty manager looms at my elbow wanting a word. To 'sort things out'. Typical, I thought, cast iron certainty of a free beer and I won't have time to drink it.
But no. His idea of sorting out the fact that I was now a very angry regular customer was to stand over me and tell me about how much he trusted all his staff and how I could request itemised receipts if I was ever worried in future and how he knew I came in there a lot and he wanted to be sure it was sorted out.
To be fair, I think it was genuinely his idea of an apology, but delivered with him standing over me in a fairly intimidating fashion and, you know, not actually containing an apology, it lacked a certain something.
So, off we toddled to celebrate Richmond borough's thriving am dram scene. And when I got home, a bit buzzed but mostly sober, I tweeted on the subject. As one does in this day and age.
The landlord tweeted back. "I think you'll find it was all done in error, my asst. manager has told me all about it. Please feel free to pop in & we'll talk"
Note the continuing absence of the s-word.
By this point, the original £1.10 or something that I was overcharged had become completely irrelevant. I slept on it (ie sobered up) before replying that I was more annoyed with the offensive way it had been handled.
"Apologies for any unintended offence caused, please pop in for a chat so we can resolve everything."
Which at first I thought was OK. Finally some actual apologetic words. But... do I want to pop in for a chat to resolve everything? Not really, to be honest. I tried for two apologies from the duty manager and instead got a series of insights into their payments technology. And even assuming the landlord's going to be a bit less of a pillock (which I frankly doubt from his first tweet on the subject: "I think you'll find" indeed! How patronising is that?), do I want to continue going to a pub where I know I'll now have a reputation for being 'difficult'? It's instantly become a less than relaxing prospect for an evening's drinking, just because I complained about being ripped off.
So, what I'm thinking now, is STUFF. YOU. You had your chance to resolve everything on the spot, and you blew it. You don't get to take time out of my schedule so you can go through the motions of appeasing me so that I'll stop being snippy about you on Twitter. You don't get to choose how I react to your shoddy service, I do, and I choose... indifference. We're done.
So this is what's happened. After Tuesday's panto rehearsal, one friend and I decided to go for a drink, and I tested the water and asked if we could go to the pub at the other end of the road, because I'd had 'a bit of nonsense at the usual place'. We were joined by my brother, sister-in-law, and a few actors, and we had such a good time that we went straight back the next evening for the pub quiz (we failed the quiz miserably, but I won a bottle of wine in a bonus round!). And one of our friends works behind the bar so we're definitely going back after Friday's rehearsal...
See where this is going? I wasn't kidding or blustering when I did the whole "I come in here all the time and buy a lot of drinks" thing. It was our regular post-rehearsal venue and my closest friends and I have easily spent a non-trivial four figure sum in that pub in the last year alone (if that figure seems shocking, consider that my favourite beer there is £4.80 a pint and that I really do write all my first drafts in pubs. It adds up quickly.).
Now, I'm not stupid enough or arrogant enough to think that my very vague boycott is going to have much impact on anyone's bottom line. We're talking about a celeb-frequented boozer next to a major London tourist attraction and a rugby club. With a beer garden. And we might have drunk a lot, but we hardly ever ate there, which is where they probably make most of their money. But word is spreading about this incident, even before I thought to write a rambling blog post on the subject.
TL;DR: You can get further with a kind word and a free bag of crisps than you can with just a kind word. But without either, you're kind of screwed.
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
Why some authors have no friends
The role of friendship in self-publishing is a thorny issue. If you put out a book, then the first people who are likely to read it are blatantly your friends and family. And however much you might huff about whether the reviews of a writer's friends and family are appropriate*, it's worth remembering one thing:
If your friends and family can't be bothered to support a book you've written, then what chance have you got with anyone else?
This becomes complicated, however, when the author in question begins to expect their friends to buy their book. Some of your friends who've been lucky enough to avoid knowing a self-published author up to this point might reasonably expect to get a free copy of some sort. Some, while being totally supportive of your creative endeavour, might just not read much - which really isn't a crime, however many motivational quotes you might have read which suggest otherwise (can you imagine actually dating that 'girl who reads'? It sounds like spending a lifetime in pure hell with a delusional flake). Some might prefer a different genre and, however much they like you, they just won't enjoy your vampire time travel urban fantasy epic. Others might buy it, but in their own good time, rather than in the compressed hour of activity you're hoping will manipulate your Amazon sales rank.
A few 'authors' need to bear in mind that just because someone's your friend, that doesn't oblige them to buy your book. Or to enjoy it even if they do buy it. A social circle develops because its members enjoy each other's company, not to provide one person with a subservient marketing network.
Quite apart from anything else, have you seen the rate at which some 'authors' are spanking out 'books' these days? Quite apart from the fact that some of these prolific chaps are writing utter drivel, buying everything your mate puts out in the course of a year could really start to add up far above the cost of the couple of pints you might buy for them on their birthday.
In other words, while a good number of your first readers will almost certainly be your friends and family, try and insist that they buy your book as some kind of 'friendship tax', and you're probably going to end up with fewer friends and a rubbish book.
* I'm still of the opinion that friends' reviews are mostly harmless. They're transparently obvious, quickly drowned out by more objective voices, and no one really makes purchasing decisions based on what some anonymous keyboard ninja says on Amazon anyway. Are they ideal? Well, no. Are they dishonest? They certainly can be. But is it as bad as the author writing their own reviews through sock puppet accounts? Of course not. Well-intentioned people trying to help out a mate are really no different to well-intentioned fans trying to boost their favourite author.
If your friends and family can't be bothered to support a book you've written, then what chance have you got with anyone else?
This becomes complicated, however, when the author in question begins to expect their friends to buy their book. Some of your friends who've been lucky enough to avoid knowing a self-published author up to this point might reasonably expect to get a free copy of some sort. Some, while being totally supportive of your creative endeavour, might just not read much - which really isn't a crime, however many motivational quotes you might have read which suggest otherwise (can you imagine actually dating that 'girl who reads'? It sounds like spending a lifetime in pure hell with a delusional flake). Some might prefer a different genre and, however much they like you, they just won't enjoy your vampire time travel urban fantasy epic. Others might buy it, but in their own good time, rather than in the compressed hour of activity you're hoping will manipulate your Amazon sales rank.
A few 'authors' need to bear in mind that just because someone's your friend, that doesn't oblige them to buy your book. Or to enjoy it even if they do buy it. A social circle develops because its members enjoy each other's company, not to provide one person with a subservient marketing network.
Quite apart from anything else, have you seen the rate at which some 'authors' are spanking out 'books' these days? Quite apart from the fact that some of these prolific chaps are writing utter drivel, buying everything your mate puts out in the course of a year could really start to add up far above the cost of the couple of pints you might buy for them on their birthday.
In other words, while a good number of your first readers will almost certainly be your friends and family, try and insist that they buy your book as some kind of 'friendship tax', and you're probably going to end up with fewer friends and a rubbish book.
* I'm still of the opinion that friends' reviews are mostly harmless. They're transparently obvious, quickly drowned out by more objective voices, and no one really makes purchasing decisions based on what some anonymous keyboard ninja says on Amazon anyway. Are they ideal? Well, no. Are they dishonest? They certainly can be. But is it as bad as the author writing their own reviews through sock puppet accounts? Of course not. Well-intentioned people trying to help out a mate are really no different to well-intentioned fans trying to boost their favourite author.
Monday, 13 August 2012
That awkward moment when that guy brings out a film that's a bit like something in your story.
Pessimism is a double-edged sword for writers. On the one hand, that inner conviction that your work is rubbish and won't find an audience keeps many writers plugging away at editing and redrafting and honing their craft.
On the other hand, in extreme cases it stops writers from ever actually signing off on a piece of work, and the moment an external factor comes along which corroborates their gloomy Eeyore thoughts, they're strongly tempted to down tools. And nothing casts a longer shadow over a work-in-progress than someone having massive success with a broadly similar idea.
I've fallen victim to this myself. Fresh from my glittering teaching career, in the days when I'd still sometimes write sober, I was about halfway through a YA novel which featured a school, and monsters. For those of you who were fooled by my use of the word 'glittering', my self-confidence was not high at this point.
So when Doctor Who ran the episode School Reunion, which also featured a school (and monsters), I instantly formed the conclusion that my work would look derivative and hackneyed. I hit a creative wall with it. Not blocked, but... disinterested.
To an extent, I was right, of course. Being a lifelong Doctor Who fan, my story was already cribbing from my TV upbringing by including a hefty number of scenes with characters running down corridors chased by monsters. But in another, more accurate sense, I was just clutching at an opportunity to avoid disappointment.
There were of course wider problems with the novel in question. Most obviously, the fact that a child dies in excruciating agony on the second page, which bafflingly I now understand to be something of a faux pas in children's literature. So I continue to work on it in fits and starts. Again, I think I was going for the Doctor Who excuse as an effort to avoid engaging with flaws in my work.
Flash forward to yesterday and a few people warned me that Seth MacFarlane's film Ted may share some broadly similar themes with a short story I'm writing. If I was releasing said story this week, or even in the next couple of months (it's in severe danger of expanding into a novella), I suppose they're similar enough to prompt some 'compare and contrast' questions.
But really, so what? If I was a romance writer (god, can you imagine?) would I delay publication every time a derivative romcom was released? Should I panic about my zombie apocalypse story simply because World War Z is in post-production?
Writers are understandably keen for their plots to be fresh and unique, but that's not really an option in genre writing. "A fresh twist on an old theme" is about as close to original as you can get. At the moment, Guillermo del Toro, perpetrator of the Hellboy films and the guy who procrastinated his way out of helming The Hobbit, is reportedly sulking that Prometheus's plot and visual style have rendered him unable to adapt At the Mountains of Madness.
Probably taking a look at the mixed reviews Ridley Scott garnered for Prometheus has contributed more to this attitude than he's likely to admit (and for the record, I think it's a film whose stature will grow when people see it again on DVD, shorn of expectations. We were all told it wasn't an Alien film, but everyone seemed to ignore this, and got riled up when they discovered that, no, it really wasn't an Alien film). While I think the world could use fewer Lovecraft obsessives, it would be sad to think that an artist felt they couldn't make a film on the grounds that another artist had made a film with a broadly similar theme within the last decade.
I'll carry on with my story, just as I should have done in 2006 with School Reunion. To do anything else would just be giving in to my gloomy fatalism. I've come up with a fresh twist on an old theme. That it touches on a couple of aspects of some Mila Kunis vehicle is really none of my concern.
I might have to change the title though.
On the other hand, in extreme cases it stops writers from ever actually signing off on a piece of work, and the moment an external factor comes along which corroborates their gloomy Eeyore thoughts, they're strongly tempted to down tools. And nothing casts a longer shadow over a work-in-progress than someone having massive success with a broadly similar idea.
I've fallen victim to this myself. Fresh from my glittering teaching career, in the days when I'd still sometimes write sober, I was about halfway through a YA novel which featured a school, and monsters. For those of you who were fooled by my use of the word 'glittering', my self-confidence was not high at this point.
So when Doctor Who ran the episode School Reunion, which also featured a school (and monsters), I instantly formed the conclusion that my work would look derivative and hackneyed. I hit a creative wall with it. Not blocked, but... disinterested.
To an extent, I was right, of course. Being a lifelong Doctor Who fan, my story was already cribbing from my TV upbringing by including a hefty number of scenes with characters running down corridors chased by monsters. But in another, more accurate sense, I was just clutching at an opportunity to avoid disappointment.
There were of course wider problems with the novel in question. Most obviously, the fact that a child dies in excruciating agony on the second page, which bafflingly I now understand to be something of a faux pas in children's literature. So I continue to work on it in fits and starts. Again, I think I was going for the Doctor Who excuse as an effort to avoid engaging with flaws in my work.
Flash forward to yesterday and a few people warned me that Seth MacFarlane's film Ted may share some broadly similar themes with a short story I'm writing. If I was releasing said story this week, or even in the next couple of months (it's in severe danger of expanding into a novella), I suppose they're similar enough to prompt some 'compare and contrast' questions.
But really, so what? If I was a romance writer (god, can you imagine?) would I delay publication every time a derivative romcom was released? Should I panic about my zombie apocalypse story simply because World War Z is in post-production?
Writers are understandably keen for their plots to be fresh and unique, but that's not really an option in genre writing. "A fresh twist on an old theme" is about as close to original as you can get. At the moment, Guillermo del Toro, perpetrator of the Hellboy films and the guy who procrastinated his way out of helming The Hobbit, is reportedly sulking that Prometheus's plot and visual style have rendered him unable to adapt At the Mountains of Madness.
Probably taking a look at the mixed reviews Ridley Scott garnered for Prometheus has contributed more to this attitude than he's likely to admit (and for the record, I think it's a film whose stature will grow when people see it again on DVD, shorn of expectations. We were all told it wasn't an Alien film, but everyone seemed to ignore this, and got riled up when they discovered that, no, it really wasn't an Alien film). While I think the world could use fewer Lovecraft obsessives, it would be sad to think that an artist felt they couldn't make a film on the grounds that another artist had made a film with a broadly similar theme within the last decade.
I'll carry on with my story, just as I should have done in 2006 with School Reunion. To do anything else would just be giving in to my gloomy fatalism. I've come up with a fresh twist on an old theme. That it touches on a couple of aspects of some Mila Kunis vehicle is really none of my concern.
I might have to change the title though.
Tuesday, 24 July 2012
Why I hate e-book evangelists
"Print is dead."
"Everything's going digital, man, it's the future."
"Have you considered an app?"
Last time I ranted a bit about self-publishing, and how it's still as rubbish as ever, in spite of your mate Gaz who's written a well-good book with hardly none of them so-called spelling mistakes. And that annoyed a few people, so let's press on with annoying everyone else by looking at e-books and people who should just go and marry e-books, if they love them that much.
(As a digression on the self-publishing thing, though, I do wonder whether one positive outcome of the changes afoot will be smaller slush piles at the offices of publishers, as the truly talent-bereft pile over to Amazon in their legions. I feel a bit like the physician in Bells, the opening episode of the superlative Blackadder II. "It just leaves more rampant totty around for us real men." Where rampant totty = publishing opportunities, and real men = writers with a slightly higher commitment to literary standards than that provided by Office's spellcheck.)
The whole "print is dead" argument annoys me on several levels: personal, professional, and semi-professional. On a personal level, the sort of people who will tell you that in the future we'll all be reading what they choose to call "books" on electronic devices, well, they are soulless little squits. They talk about "dead tree books" as though a reading system based entirely on scarce and finite mineral resources is somehow an ecological masterstroke compared to printing on recycleable and sustainable compressed vegetable matter. They are moronic magpies, who'll lap up just about any shiny crud as long as it has a suitably international corporate logo on the case. And they show off about downloading classics they'll never read, while filling their latest gadget with offensively poor writing. Insert your defence/resentment of the 50 Shades phenomenon here if you must.
On a professional level, well, I came into publishing as a classified media sales guy in 2004. Round about the time people stopped taking out expensive classified ads in magazines due to Google Adwords, as it happens. It wasn't the easiest job, but it still beat teaching. I once spoke to a mail order specialist who told me he wasn't doing any more print advertising as he'd just "bought a Googer-lee-ay". The conversation loses a bit in transcription, but I've often wondered since how he's got on with his "Googer-lee-ay".
Anyway. I've spent the last eight years hearing snake oil salesmen punting various online portals, platforms and solutions (perhaps including Googer-lee-ays), and they always couple their pitches with the hilarious implied threat that you'll be out of business within two years if you don't buy their product and embrace the digital revolution fully. Print should have been dead for at least five years according to these specimens, but, well, there are still quite a few magazines around, aren't there? And the vast majority of those who do migrate online fully never recapture the lost advertising revenue.
I'm not here to talk about magazines, so let's talk about why it annoys me on a semi-professional level, as a chap who likes to spend his spare time trying to write books.
I love books, and I have done for about 30 years, from Mr Men and Winnie the Pooh to Balzac, Flaubert and a whole other bunch of French writers from them days. If there is anything in the modern world that needed less modernising in a world of dwindling natural resources, it's the book. Be just a little bit cannier about sustainable trees and avoid certain sealants on the covers and they're pretty green things. They're tactile, beautiful and smell great. You can find rare books, with hilariously bad cover art. You can collect them. You can choose between expensively bound hardbacks and yellowing, tatty dog-eared paperbacks from the back of a charity shop.
Or you can buy a Kindle, and be virtually unable to even see the cover art that takes up most of the downloaded file.
E-books are fine, a totally pragmatic option for someone needing reading matter for a long holiday who wants to keep their luggage light for the duty-free shop. They're brilliant for commuters, and a godsend to the visually impaired. Don't get me wrong, I get e-books. What I don't understand is why people seem to think they must inevitably supplant printed copies. Particularly given that printed newspapers have managed to withstand:
It's not just a factor as a writer. I want to buy other people's books, and meet authors. I want to go to launches and spill red wine over my freshly signed copy of 666 Charing Cross Road, while actually talking to Paul Magrs (nothing like a splash of claret to add a certain je ne sais quoi to a vampire novel). I want to eat chocolate cake and drink prosecco in Covent Garden Waterstone's while toasting Ben Aaronovitch's Whispers Under Ground. I've never actually been very keen on reading in the bath, but if I ever do try it, I want to think that the worst that can happen is a soggy book drying on the radiator for a couple of hours. I want to be able to share the books I love with the people I love. With a printed copy, that's called lending and is a gesture of friendship. With a digital copy, it's called piracy, and my ISP might send my details to the publisher so they can come to my house and break my reading fingers.
Fundamentally, I don't want to just read, that's easy. I want to value the act of reading.
And that's where these sanctimonious little technophiles fall into the age-old trap of knowing the price of everything, and the value of nothing. Free books? So what? You've been able to get free books for years, guys, they're called libraries, and you don't have to shell out £89 for a library card.
E-books have their place. They're an efficient format supported by some clever technology, but they should never replace printed books entirely. Writers don't want them to, publishers don't want them to, printers certainly don't want them to, and most readers don't want them to.
If you think differently, well, you and e-books just need to go and get a room, OK?
"Everything's going digital, man, it's the future."
"Have you considered an app?"
Last time I ranted a bit about self-publishing, and how it's still as rubbish as ever, in spite of your mate Gaz who's written a well-good book with hardly none of them so-called spelling mistakes. And that annoyed a few people, so let's press on with annoying everyone else by looking at e-books and people who should just go and marry e-books, if they love them that much.
(As a digression on the self-publishing thing, though, I do wonder whether one positive outcome of the changes afoot will be smaller slush piles at the offices of publishers, as the truly talent-bereft pile over to Amazon in their legions. I feel a bit like the physician in Bells, the opening episode of the superlative Blackadder II. "It just leaves more rampant totty around for us real men." Where rampant totty = publishing opportunities, and real men = writers with a slightly higher commitment to literary standards than that provided by Office's spellcheck.)
The whole "print is dead" argument annoys me on several levels: personal, professional, and semi-professional. On a personal level, the sort of people who will tell you that in the future we'll all be reading what they choose to call "books" on electronic devices, well, they are soulless little squits. They talk about "dead tree books" as though a reading system based entirely on scarce and finite mineral resources is somehow an ecological masterstroke compared to printing on recycleable and sustainable compressed vegetable matter. They are moronic magpies, who'll lap up just about any shiny crud as long as it has a suitably international corporate logo on the case. And they show off about downloading classics they'll never read, while filling their latest gadget with offensively poor writing. Insert your defence/resentment of the 50 Shades phenomenon here if you must.
On a professional level, well, I came into publishing as a classified media sales guy in 2004. Round about the time people stopped taking out expensive classified ads in magazines due to Google Adwords, as it happens. It wasn't the easiest job, but it still beat teaching. I once spoke to a mail order specialist who told me he wasn't doing any more print advertising as he'd just "bought a Googer-lee-ay". The conversation loses a bit in transcription, but I've often wondered since how he's got on with his "Googer-lee-ay".
Anyway. I've spent the last eight years hearing snake oil salesmen punting various online portals, platforms and solutions (perhaps including Googer-lee-ays), and they always couple their pitches with the hilarious implied threat that you'll be out of business within two years if you don't buy their product and embrace the digital revolution fully. Print should have been dead for at least five years according to these specimens, but, well, there are still quite a few magazines around, aren't there? And the vast majority of those who do migrate online fully never recapture the lost advertising revenue.
I'm not here to talk about magazines, so let's talk about why it annoys me on a semi-professional level, as a chap who likes to spend his spare time trying to write books.
I love books, and I have done for about 30 years, from Mr Men and Winnie the Pooh to Balzac, Flaubert and a whole other bunch of French writers from them days. If there is anything in the modern world that needed less modernising in a world of dwindling natural resources, it's the book. Be just a little bit cannier about sustainable trees and avoid certain sealants on the covers and they're pretty green things. They're tactile, beautiful and smell great. You can find rare books, with hilariously bad cover art. You can collect them. You can choose between expensively bound hardbacks and yellowing, tatty dog-eared paperbacks from the back of a charity shop.
Or you can buy a Kindle, and be virtually unable to even see the cover art that takes up most of the downloaded file.
E-books are fine, a totally pragmatic option for someone needing reading matter for a long holiday who wants to keep their luggage light for the duty-free shop. They're brilliant for commuters, and a godsend to the visually impaired. Don't get me wrong, I get e-books. What I don't understand is why people seem to think they must inevitably supplant printed copies. Particularly given that printed newspapers have managed to withstand:
- radio
- cinema (ie, newsreel)
- television
- t'internet
- apps
It's not just a factor as a writer. I want to buy other people's books, and meet authors. I want to go to launches and spill red wine over my freshly signed copy of 666 Charing Cross Road, while actually talking to Paul Magrs (nothing like a splash of claret to add a certain je ne sais quoi to a vampire novel). I want to eat chocolate cake and drink prosecco in Covent Garden Waterstone's while toasting Ben Aaronovitch's Whispers Under Ground. I've never actually been very keen on reading in the bath, but if I ever do try it, I want to think that the worst that can happen is a soggy book drying on the radiator for a couple of hours. I want to be able to share the books I love with the people I love. With a printed copy, that's called lending and is a gesture of friendship. With a digital copy, it's called piracy, and my ISP might send my details to the publisher so they can come to my house and break my reading fingers.
Fundamentally, I don't want to just read, that's easy. I want to value the act of reading.
And that's where these sanctimonious little technophiles fall into the age-old trap of knowing the price of everything, and the value of nothing. Free books? So what? You've been able to get free books for years, guys, they're called libraries, and you don't have to shell out £89 for a library card.
E-books have their place. They're an efficient format supported by some clever technology, but they should never replace printed books entirely. Writers don't want them to, publishers don't want them to, printers certainly don't want them to, and most readers don't want them to.
If you think differently, well, you and e-books just need to go and get a room, OK?
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