I Return (Again!) and I'll Probably Vanish for Months (Again!).

Yeah, so been a while.  It's all part of my hobby of intermittently neglecting my blog^*.  Let's do a bit of a catch up, once again.

Okay so in the year or so since I last published a post, I've...not actually done much.  That's astonishingly embarrassing to be honest.

I'll start with an update on my last foray into self-publishing.  Fuckin' disaster.  Absolutely, shamingly, crushingly failed.  I think about eight of them sold, and those were to friends and family.  When Amazon started hassling me for tax information^** I decided to not bother and they took it off sale.  Kind of wish I hadn't bothered with it now.

Pfah to regrets, I say!  PFAH!!

Onto something a bit more positive: I started and finished another novel.  My first sojourn into the world of full-length crime fiction, hopefully with a twist only I could give it^†.  It's a story I've wanted to do for a long time and finally pinned down a plot I liked.  It sits, awaiting a final edit to be submitted to...er...somewhere.  I'm at a loss.  We'll see what happens once I've gone through it.  Suggestions would be gratefully accepted.

This brings me onto something even cooler – I was almost published.  My ridiculous action novel got a bit of interest from a digital-only publisher, and received some good feedback, but they passed.  At least I think they did^‡.  Anyway this feedback was the best and most detailed I've ever had in tightening up a manuscript.  I still don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing when I'm 'editing', but I feel like I have I'm not an inept macaque with broken fingers.  I was working on that manuscript...

...Until the most shameful thing happened.  I got distracted.  Irrevocably so – okay, not irrevocably, that's an exaggeration, fiiiiiiine.  Bloody addictive computer games^§.  So yeah, from about July onwards is a bit neglected.

But now I'm back, for a wee while at least, and I'll have something to say about that in my next post.  Isn't that exciting?

Ah fuck you, blank-eyed shits^§§.

^* One thing I'm clearly very good at.

^** Really should have read the terms and conditions.  Lesson for you there, kids.

^† Or even if it doesn't make you fall asleep and vomit at the same time, would be good.

^‡ Last year, as you might have noticed, was a year of uncertainty in a few key areas.

^§ I'm looking at you, Borderlands 2, you time-sucking bastard.

^§§ Unless, y'know you offer some advice in the comments.  G'wan!  My gratitude is more valuable than...whatever.


Will

A Tottering Pile

Well, look at that, another rejection.  It's the frustrating grind that every writer knows, when you feel like you're putting your best work out there and it's just bouncing off the impervious skins of cynical agents and editors.  I get it, not everything can appeal to everyone and so many people want to be writers, yada yada yada.  There's been screeds and screeds written on that subject and frankly it's mostly padded out with platitudes and helpless shrugs of the shoulders.  It's kind of inevitable, and when you find yourself doing it you feel like a helpless dick.  No one profits from it and everyone walks away in a deeper depression, their faith in writing and publishing bashed a little more.

I've come to the realisation that a couple of the novels I've been trying to get published for while are never going to see the light of day.  It's even more depressing than the tidal wave of rejections, when you realise the book you've written, read over, re-written, re-read again and re-written numerous times just isn't making an impact with anyone.  For me, that's no impact whatsoever.  There are people out there who get encouraging rejections.  Good for them.  I get the standard 'go away' or I get nothing.  I'm going to stop there, because that conversation's a route to fucking suicide.

So what becomes of these sad, unwanted pieces of literary detritus?  They sit and they moulder, in my experience.  All that work and effort only to be chucked in a metaphorical pile to gather dust and dusty cobwebs.  That pile of mine is getting big, padded out by the short stories and comic scripts that just can't find a home.  It's like an animal shelter where no one even looks at the animals, let alone gives any hope they'll be adopted.  I've been writing for a long time, churning out novels and short stories since I was sixteen.  The first few novels I wrote, I knew not long after they were finished wouldn't go anywhere (they were hand written, for a start) so they've made a cosy base for the growing pile of pages I'm building up that no one gives any indication they want to look at.

I understand why no one wants to touch at least one of the books: it's derivative and messy, so really why I tried so hard to get it out there is beyond me.  A whole lot of wasted effort right there.  Maybe it's because I get pulled into the trap of looking at the worst that's out there and thinking, "If that can get published..." before sending off the sample chapters.  This is, of course, tremendous folly and leads to disappointment and the writing of long-winded blog rambles.

The book that prompted this particular ramble is one I wrote a long time ago, and took quite some time to get from my brain and onto the page, thanks to life getting in the way in one way or another (although I did manage to write a Warhammer 40,000 novel in the middle, that will also never, ever be seen by anyone but me) and I feel quite bad that it won't get a chance.  Partly it's because I waited so long to get it out and partly because it's horror of a particular length the outlets for are almost nil.^*

I often think that I was born a decade too late.  If I'd been writing around the early to mid eighties, when horror novels were de rigueur, then I might have had more of a chance, but, since the early nineties, the kind of horror I like to write, and read, has tailed off to a great extent.  I know a lot of people who will tell you this kind of fiction is still going strong, but I don't really see it.  Then I have to wonder if I'm looking closely enough.

I'm thankful to the small group of people who've taken a chance on my writing and given it a wider audience. It's great to see something that was once a raw twitch in the middle of my brain offered the opportunity to fly.  I keep hoping that the accumulation of work will make people sit up and take notice of me and I might actually start to get some money for this crazy path I've put myself on.

So, here I sit, with a pile of unwanted manuscripts, like a terrible execution device of my own creation that's leaning over my head, always ready for that extra few pages that will finally make it topple and have done with me.  And I keep playing the crazy, obsessed hermit, feeding it and creating my own doom.

^* The first person to mention Lulu.com gets a punch in the throat while I fucking weep.


Will

The record skips and goes to the start of another song.

It’s the same dreary song we’ve heard over again from the same album. All the songs sound pretty much the same; artistic integrity isn’t the point of the exercise. We all roll our eyes, sigh, grumble, shake our heads and mutter, but we get up all the same and dance along with the dreary tune because we don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. After all we don’t want people staring at us for sitting there with our arms crossed over our chests because we’re not doing what everyone else is when we neither want nor need to do it. That’s just crazy.

So, over two thirds of the way through January and we’re being thrust headlong into another round of ‘Terrorismania!’. Note the exclamation point. The exclamation point is important. The exclamation point will dance with your mother. The exclamation point will tell you things about what happened that summer in Greece. The exclamation point will stand on the twelve kittens. The exclamation point has Import.

You can call it Terrorismania! or you can call it Threat Level: Severe. It’s really all down to personal taste. One sounds like a musical in the style of ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’ or ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and is probably more apt, while the other sounds like a straight to video action film starring Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren or Steven Seagal, a film that would be really quite good if it were written with any skill or panache, but just comes off as a bunch of pyros going off with people swearing in between – or in the case of Threat Level: Severe standing around waiting for the pyros to go off and not even having the energy to swear anymore until it peters out.

The UK terrorism threat level has been raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. Feel the tension in the air here, people. Or don’t. This American-style scale of, ‘are we going to die in droves today’ seems to hover always around the vague bits. It could happen, but then again it might not. This upping of the heat doesn’t seem to mean anything practical for the day-to-day running of the country.

It’s all a little bit Mystic Meg really. Cold reading the country. There could be terrorists plotting something heinous, somewhere in the world right now and they’re probably right, but in general the people planning them are a combination of mad and incompetent, and we don’t ever see them. Unless they decide to become politicians in which case their careers sky rocket.

Now the general theory – denied by MI6, but used by the media and politicians – is that this is in response to the lone clod who failed to blow himself and a planeload of other travellers up in Detroit on Christmas last year (2009 for you future people).

Wait a second. Because a man who seems to have acted alone didn’t manage to do anything beyond scare the shit out of a plane load of people, the UK is expecting some kind of terrorist attack. There’s an interesting jump of logic. It’s almost like saying that nasty dog down the road bit Mister Robertson, all the dogs in the world must be preparing to overthrow mankind!

Never mind that a renegade group of the IRA have been twitching for the last few months, a man with incendiary underpants didn’t do anything was caught on a plane, we must do something! Let’s see, we’ll do a few token things and try to push through a full-body x-ray machine that wouldn’t have detected anything the Nigerian guy was carrying, but will have the benefit of humiliating anyone wanting to travel out of the country!

I am not reassured. I don’t think many people are. I (along with most of the country again) am not that intimidated either.

If it’s going to be Threat Level: Severe I at least want to wake up in the morning with a man (for some reason with a French accent, I don’t know why, I have no reason to believe that the French, Canadians or Belgians are particularly nasty people) sitting next to my bed pointing a gun at my head saying, “Tomorrow it could be you,” before holstering his weapon and walking out of the room. That would be a severe threat level that’s guaranteed to get my attention. Call it Threat Level: Imminent Death or don’t bother with it at all.

The Detroit thing reminds me of the attempted ‘bombing’ of Glasgow Airport a couple of years ago. Another bungled attack that did nothing more than show that the medical students involved were retarded and best off out of the medical profession and made a ned a celebrity for kicking a man who was on fire. It was inspiring, it really was. Apart from the fact that all that would have happened in the worst case scenario would have been a bit of property damage and the two men would have been, at the most, wounded – you see they were clever (in a vicious way) in wrapping the propane canisters up with ball bearings, but they didn’t realise that those tanks are designed to resist high temperatures and when they do explode they tear instead of shattering. Idiots.

What we got then was Gordon Brown (all nice and shiny from the recent hand-over of power) telling us to be more vigilant, essentially that there was a terrorist on every street corner waiting to blow up. A smart move by someone in power.

So in a time of economic uncertainty and political upheaval, the people in charge of the country have decided, in their infinite wisdom to concentrate on attempting to wind the populace up and be the heroes of the hour by shuffling papers and throwing some new terms at us. Oo, I feel about as protected as a cocktail sausage at a Tory Party Conference.

We’d be much happier if you just did your job and helped people back into work and into some kind of comfort.

So let’s get ready to put the record on the turntable one more time; I feel like a bit of a boogie.


Will