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Wordbits Journal |
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Sunday 2nd August I’m writing some new fiction at the moment so I won’t be updating the website or contributing to any of the column pages for the foreseeable future. Tuesday 10th March The Cow is Dead I read in a magazine the other day about an author whose first book was rejected more than 100 times. This is an extraordinary figure. It made my eyes pop even more than when my friend Mark told me about the time he had sex four times in a row. I was secretly thinking that the last time I had sex four times in a row was January, February, March and April 1996. This was a first novel of course, but it wasn’t like it was one of those untouchable titles like, say, You Can Be Your Own Dentist! This was just a run of the mill novel. Or not, obviously. Well not obviously. One person’s opinion is simply that. Although, the ninety-nine that followed must have had a point too, I guess. The really incredible thing is that this particular author’s second book sold over a 100,000 copies. That’s quite a lot of enchiladas. You’ve got to ask yourself what happened between books one and two. My money is on some kind of deal with the devil. Or an affair with a top footballer or something. It was probably neither though, which still leaves me wondering how a first book can be so unsaleable – and again I ask you to remember that it wasn’t merely passed around between a handful of disinterested publishers, it was rejected one hundred times – and the following book so popular. Presumably there wasn’t a gap of many years between the two. Who can know with these things? I mention it because I’ve spent the last three weeks killing the cow. I’m talking about my book Freeze! Armed Farm Animals! of course. The most recent available version differed greatly from the one that I released over a year ago. I had re-written it a number of times, and each revision produced a much better book. In fact it was so different from the initial release that they were effectively two different books. I was pleased with the last version, and yet it never felt quite right. It always felt like there was a missing element. Even though I had fused many of the topics together to make longer sections, it still felt more like a collections of unrelated anecdotes and observations. The vague connection between them all was travel, with Yorkshire and walking being the two main themes. However the strong common denominator in all of them was the narrator – me! – and the small supporting cast around him. It was only when I looked closely at this intriguing little collision of lives that I began to see a whole new way of structuring the book. I’ve often thought that the writing is only about sixty five percent of a successful story. The rest is about making connections. It’s no use having all the pieces if you can’t make them fit together in a way that pleases. What I began to see when I looked at the book with a fresh eye was how I could make a bridge of stones from the first page to the last. In other words, I saw how I could make a series of individual stories into a plot. The temptation to simply novelise the last two years of my life never took a hold. It would have been fatal. None of this was ever intended as fiction (though lots of it was intended to read like fiction. I may write about the ordinary things that happen in a mundane existence, but to borrow a phrase from Andy MacNab, nobody said I had to be crap at it), and to try and make it so would have been like colouring a classic black and white film and expecting it to look modern and new. Fiction is fiction, and for the past two years I have written funny tales about travel, life and love, all of which to a greater degree happened the way I told them. Which left me with a conundrum, namely, how do you get a collection of non-fiction travel tales to read like a good romantic comedy without completely messing up both? Don’t look at me, I’m making this up as I go along! I call the new book Small Steps (I nearly called it How to Change Your Life in Just 789,654 Easy Steps! But I figured if it becomes a success, and Simon Pegg plays me in the film, they’d never get the title to fit onto the side of a bus. Maybe on a bendy bus…). Is there even a market for a reads-like-fiction-but-its-not travel book? I’m not sure. I’m not even sure that I’m that bothered. I think Small Steps is really quite good, and that’s all that matters really. Sunday
26th January I have taken the decision not to continue with the commercial release of Cajun Nights. The book will still be available through the publisher Lulu, and for considerably less than it would have cost from Amazon and Borders. I have done this because the process of getting a commercial title listed and available on an even footing with those represented by larger publishing companies is proving too slow and difficult. Amazon and the distributor Ingrams don’t make it easy for small fry like myself, and frankly all the effort is taking my focus away from writing. The novel still has an international ISBN, as does my non-fiction book Freeze! Armed Farm Animals! and I plan to continue with my project to have copies of both books stocked in some libraries. I’ll keep you updated on that. In the meantime you can order the novel here. On a related note, I’m seeing a steadily increasing number of visitors to the website, especially from Canada and the USA, where I believe Freeze! Armed Farm Animals! is in stock and available at a more reasonable price than here in the UK. However my quarterly royalty statement proves you are all as tight-fisted as your British cousins, but of course I don’t hold that against you, and you are welcome here anytime. For my part I shall continue to provide quality literature until they come to disconnect the electricity supply for non-payment of the bill, which will be any day now. If I don’t freeze to death first of course, seeing as how I don’t have enough money for heating. Or that operation I need. But hey, don’t let that worry you all the way over there in Privileged, Rhode Island. You just keep reading. Saturday 20th December
My first fiction title is
almost ready for its commercial release. Cajun Nights will be out
in January or February. It would have been out by now by someone made a
mistake and forgot to include the ISBN number after the inside title page,
an offence that’s hardly up there with the Brinks-Mat robbery, but
apparently it’s a standard requirement in the industry. Well so is
having a train that goes faster than a milkman’s horse but tell that to
the people who run the Bangkok to Udon Thani overnight express. It does
get there overnight, just not always over one night. If you like the idea of owning Cajun Nights but would like to part with as little money as possible, you can always visit my Lulu page and order a discount copy. That version is available right now. It is very attractively priced in Euros at the moment. And dollars. Thai baht, Vietnamese Dong, Lakko Island Coconut Chips, and most other currencies, including some livestock.
Thursday 4th December 2008 So the final draught of Freeze! Armed Farm Animals! is done. It’s been a long and difficult process to put a whole book together from what was a surprisingly productive eighteen-months of writing. At times it felt a bit like trying to do a giant jigsaw puzzle from which half the pieces had been removed and hidden in sock drawers and breadbins and other unlikely places, whilst wearing boxing gloves and someone else’s spectacles. Jolly difficult in other words. On the whole I’m pleased with the outcome, though it’s not an experience I’m likely to repeat in the near future. If I ever do another non-fiction book it will be planned well in advance and written from an outline similar to the way I write fiction. I won’t do this again, which was essentially to write a book by accident. I can’t see myself doing another retrospective at all – not just because I’m taking a break from diary-based short-form (and not having done anything like that for a year would make another retrospective something of an immaculate conception), but rather because the whole process is, frankly, a fucking nightmare. I don’t want to overdo the metaphors here, but putting this kind of book together is like trying to organise a primary school nativity play. There’s always someone missing, someone wetting themselves, someone being moody and uncooperative and someone else who just wants to spoil the whole thing for everyone. In the middle of it all is you – me! – feeling like a cross between Simon Cowell and a man herding turkeys to market. So anyway, I made a show of it in the end. Whether it works or not is for others to decide. Personally I think it does. I wouldn’t have released it otherwise. I didn’t want to write a book about walking, a book about being on your own, or a book about being the only man you know who has no idea how to bleed a radiator, but I did want to write something about all of that. Instead I wanted Freeze! Armed Farm Animals! to be a simple celebration of ordinary life, and not exclusively my own, either. I wanted to capture all those everyday disasters and small-time, lower-league triumphs that characterise an average existence. Things that go to make up a life, as that old Genesis song says. I wanted to celebrate the wonderfully unfathomable nature of walking long distances in foul weather, and the awfulness of blind dates, and spiralling helplessly out of your 30s, or 20’s or 40’s, or whatever decade you happen to be clinging to the crumbling edges of. I wanted to write about that terrifying white space after your long-term relationship has ended, when everything that was comfortable and familiar appears to have been blown away overnight, and suddenly you’re alone and older and without any idea of your collar size or how to get gravy to thicken. I wanted to write about changes, because changes are what define us really. Changes scare me in real life, but from the safety of my penthouse office – penthouse, Portakabin, whatever! – I can make fun of them, and stay sane another day. That’s not such a bad way to stumble through life if you ask me. * Although the book is currently listed on Amazon and other retail sites it is, for the time being, showing an 'out of stock' status. Apparently the book sold so many copies on its first day of release that someone had to help me carry them all home...I'm joking of course. Alas this is nothing to do with a frenzied rush of pre-publication orders. It's more to do with the way that Amazon gets its information from publishers, namely in stages. My apologies. I have absolutely no input into the process whatsoever. Ditto the retail price, which is far too high in my opinion. The mysteries of Amazon et al. continues to baffle me. If you are really desperate to jump in the bath or curl under the covers with me, you can (for a limited time) always purchase the proof copy from Lulu here * If you want to read a brief section of the book online, there's one here.
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