Over the weekend, whilst recuperating in bed from a rather nasty brush with outdoor exercise (see previous blog-post), I was surfing the Internet, checking out the competition among other things. I like to read about other authors who write in my genre, especially those whose writing I have enjoyed. I learned a couple of things that have had something of an effect on me as a writer, a reader and a human being.

First guy I checked out was John A.A. Logan. I’d just finished his rather excellent book The Survival of Thomas Ford. It was a free download for a few days (why I got it of course) and one of the best I’ve read in a long time. I tracked him down on the web and found this blog-post, which is really worth reading for any aspiring author. It’s interesting and saddening.

http://authorselectric.blogspot.com.tr/2013/12/every-dog-has-its-day-by-john-a-logan.html?spref=tw

Later, I found myself looking at the website of Damien Boyd who has been having a rich roll of the dice in the past year if his Amazon placings and feedback are anything to go by. The following blog entry, naturally, inspired a potent cocktail of emotions in me. For the record good luck to him. (There, that wasn’t so hard was it? My anger-management therapist would be so thrilled with that response…if I hadn’t killed her in a fit of rage when James Oswald got sorted from the chaff and she told me to simply get over it.) I urge you to read Mr Boyd’s blog-post now. (If you’re an aspiring self-publisher it might be best not to have any cats in the vicinity when you do this.)

http://www.damienboyd.com/blog/

Another one who’s made it over the fence. I’d dearly love to know what the Amazon UK deal entailed. Imagine being approached by not one but two literary agents and a tv producer and then Amazon trump them all with a deal. (Deep breath, Oliver.)

John Logan has all that great stuff said about his book by people that count – the gatekeepers – and it is very good in my opinion, but he can’t get a publishing deal and Damien Boyd knocks out a few police procedurals (I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with them. I’ve only read one) and gets courted by the same people who have just ushered Mr Logan out of the back door.

I don’t want to make comparisons on the quality of the writing of these guys. I’ll leave that to others. But it does show you that even if you write a bloody brilliant book, if the people who judge these things don’t see publishing it as economically viable then it won’t get published. Market forces, I think they call it. What a travesty, I call it. But I must admit to understanding it. It should not be forgotten that publishing is just a business to these people, a money-making merry-go-round and if your prose don’t fit, you’re screwed.

I do feel for Mr Logan. It must be particularly frustrating to be told by the people that one needs to impress that you’ve impressed them in spades but it doesn’t matter because the bean counters don’t have a good feeling in their water about it and so they aren’t going to publish you anyway. How many books and authors a year suffer the same fate, I wonder. How many fantastic lumps of writing get rejected simply because of the bottom line, trends or fashion or whatever you want to call it? It must be devastating to hear, ‘Sorry, it’s brilliant but that’s not what matters.’ I mean, where do you go from there as a writer? Thankfully, I haven’t had to deal with that kind of rejection. (Yeah, I know what I’m saying there. Very funny.)

If anyone is looking for arguments as to why the ebook revolution and the self-publishing of ebooks are good things or not, you should look no further than the examples of both of these authors. Mr Boyd might not have made it if he hadn’t had such a terrific response to his self-publishing venture, and without the option to self-publish, readers would have been denied the opportunity to read Mr Logan’s excellent writing.

I hope Mr Logan’s writing gets the recognition it deserves from readers and that one day soon he finds himself in the position of having those same publishers who wouldn’t take him on standing on his doorstep with their hats off, looking a bit sheepish. (Cue boiling oil from the battlements.)

I should be writing this week’s blog post but to be honest, I’m whacked: all in. Had a bit of a mishap after work yesterday and it’s catching up with me. It all went wrong again. Story of my life. I failed to prepare and we all know how that ends. I might turn in early. Tomorrow’s another day and all that. I just need to sleep this one off. Chalk it up to experience. Live and learn.

Had a great idea for getting a bit of exercise. You remember that commute I’ve been banging on about? Course you do. Well, I had this idea I could use it to my advantage. I thought it’d be a bit clever on the trip home after work to get dropped off a couple of miles earlier than normal. And then jog the rest of the way home. With the chronic traffic jams at that time of evening there was a chance I might even get back before the bus would have dropped me off. That would’ve been brilliant. See. It’s a good idea, eh?

So I took my shorts and trainers and a T-shirt to school in the morning in a plastic bag and after work got changed, left my school stuff in my locker and went out to the bus. I was really up for it, even though the others took the piss. There were lots of jokes about my legs. Chicken drumsticks after the cat’s finished with them. That sort of thing. I didn’t mind. I was in good spirits. And I’m English. Laughing at ourselves is a national pastime. I need to get back into running and this is a way I could kill two birds with one stone – run and commute. My run would be part of my commute. Clever, no?

I knew roughly where I wanted the driver to drop me off, although I couldn’t pronounce it very well. On the way in in the morning I double checked the area. My geographical knowledge of the city outside a mile radius of where I live is something that would fit on the back of a postage stamp. Still, all I had to do was follow the main road and if all else failed I could take my bearings from the sun.

It was late afternoon before I remembered the clocks had gone back, or was it forwards? And it was going to be dark at home time. So much for the sun: my compass. No matter. A minor detail. About four o’clock it started raining. By five it was coming down in stair rods. I was in the bus by then. In shorts and T-shirt feeling like a berk. But being British and male I couldn’t really bottle it, could I? I’d never hear the last of it from the co-workers.

In the dark and pissing rain I managed to make the driver understand I wanted him to stop the bus and let me out. In shorts and T-shirt. He looked at me like I’d a screw come loose. He didn’t want to do it. Maybe he thought he’d get in trouble if I got ill or died of pneumonia or something. But I made him. We were nearly shouting at each other in the end. It was a bit embarrassing if I’m honest.

Apparently, he couldn’t just stop where I wanted him to on the main highway and so he had to leave it by a slip road and drop me at the roundabout and then rejoin. Maybe that’s why he was cross with me.

So he let me out by the side of the road. As I stood there doing a couple of stretches, watching the nice, dry, warm minibus get swallowed up in the traffic a lorry went past a bit close, through a puddle and drenched me with filthy, gritty water. Some of it went in my mouth, which wasn’t very nice.

I started running in the dark and the rain. It was a bit cold too without the sun up, and windy. I was in shorts and a T-shirt and quickly wet through.

It was about twenty minutes later that I realised I was lost. I should have been recognising my surroundings, but I saw nothing familiar. The main road had felt dangerous. I was exposed. I’d tried to find my way on the side roads. But they’d meandered a bit and maybe I should have gone left one time when I went right.

I didn’t have my phone on me or money because I was just wearing shorts and a T-shirt and I wasn’t supposed to be long. I hadn’t even thought to bring a bottle of water. After those twenty minutes I was further away from home than when the bus dropped me off. I know this because I checked on Google maps today.

I got home eventually, of course. It took me just under four hours. But I made it. My legs are hurting a lot today even though obviously I didn’t run for four hours. That would have been like doing a marathon or something. I think I probably walked for over three of them. Maybe that’s why it took so long. God I’m knackered. Should have seen me walking today: John Wayne trying out a couple of new hip replacements. Got some stick for it. Said I pulled a muscle. That’s all.

I think I’m safe sharing this here. No one from work knows anything about me. They don’t know I blog and write. I prefer it that way.

There’s a book on Amazon.com with 2,149 1* comments. (At the time of writing.) On Amazon.co.uk it has only 437 1* comments. Only! Ha! Can we just take a minute to imagine how the author feels about those stats. I’ve had a few 1*comments and they used to hurt me, like hammer blows to bare feet. But if I had that much scorn poured on one of my writing projects would I wonder about giving up writing? Before we get too carried away in a tidal wave of sympathy for the ‘poor’ author, please, read on to give the stats their proper context.

The title in question is also #1 bestseller on both sides of the pond. On Amazon.com it has over 26,000 comments (5,000+ on AmazonUK). That is a lot of feedback. It also signifies a hell of a lot of downloads, if normal ratios of comments to downloads of my books is anything to go by. I check the charts fairly often when I’m procrastinating and I’ve never seen another book with so many comments. I wonder if anyone else has. I’d be interested to know. This author’s publishers must wake up and pinch themselves every morning with those sorts of figures. Can you guess what the book is? (Clue one: The title of this blog-post is an anagram of the title of the book. Clue two: the photo (a bit cryptic). If you can’t work it out or can’t be bothered to try, the answer is at the bottom of the page.)

In one of my less serious bouts of contemplation I thought about trying to write a book with the sole purpose of garnering as many 1* comments as possible; I wanted to write a book that has a consistent Amazon average rating of 1*. I thought it would be such fun to put something out there masquerading as something serious and inspiring a frenzy of negativity and vitriol. Every 1* comment would make me laugh at my little joke. I thought about the ‘ingredients’ I would need to include to give the book the best chance of disappointing readers. How about this for a speculative list?

• Price it high.
• Don’t have it proofread. (In fact go out of my way to make clumsy mistakes that would have even the most benign readers reaching for their keyboards.)
• List it under the wrong genre. (Contemporary romantic fiction? See next.)
• Include a great deal of swearing. (See previous.)
• Make the plot deliberately confusing.
• End the book halfway through the story (maybe include a hundred blank pages) and invite readers to purchase part two separately. (Price it even higher.)
• Include lots of bad and unnecessary sex. (Maybe with animals or the dead, for starters.)
• Shockingly bad formatting.
• Make the dialogue really clunky and long winded.

(Before any smart arse out there comes back with, ‘But you’ve already written a book that meets these criteria. It’s called insert book title of mine here, I like to think that because I’ve beaten you to it you won’t be so funny.)

Why would I want to do something like this? Well, apart from being my idea of fun, I would also be testing a theory. I believe that prospective downloaders of ebooks are drawn to books that have low ratings. I’m not saying that we buy them, but if I see a book with an overall rating of three stars and it’s had dozens of reviews, I’m usually going to check out some of those comments. I want to know why this book is regarded as so substandardly shite. Done cleverly this could turn into a hook to get readers to part with a bit of cash. (It would need to be done very cleverly, obviously, to get people to pay for something that everyone condemns.) The old adage, there’s no such thing as bad publicity springs to mind.

My latest writing project is going fairly well. I’m 30,000 words in. From its inception I found the story difficult to pigeonhole genre-wise. (What should I list it under when the time comes to self-publish?) And if I was mildly confused then I’m positively bewildered now. It’s part utopian, part dystopian, part love story, part western, part political, part contemporary fiction. And I’m only on chapter five. What it isn’t and doesn’t look like being is part crime, part mystery, part thriller, which is my usual line of writing country. Still, I’m enjoying myself. I might try to fit an alien invasion in there somewhere for a full house. In for a penny and all that. Hey, maybe I’m writing that really substandardly shite book I was thinking of. The subconscious works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.

I just learned something. My WordPress stats tell me that someone from Lesotho viewed my blog today. Lewhereo? I’d never heard of it. Now I know it’s a landlocked country in Africa that gained independence from the UK in 1966. (If whoever you are reads this, please get in touch. I’m totally intrigued to know who you are and what you are doing there.)

(Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Did you get the picture clue for an extra point?)

Last week WordPress told me we’ve been in a relationship for two years now. That’s longer than some of my marriages have lasted. But then WordPress doesn’t insist on me declaring my undying love to it on a daily basis; WordPress doesn’t get jealous when I spend hours with other Internet sites; WordPress doesn’t complain if I don’t talk to it for a few days; WordPress doesn’t get mad if I spell its name wrongly; WordPress is always ready to do what I want; WordPress doesn’t wake me up in the night to ask if it shut down would I take up with another blogging site and WordPress didn’t call me a pervert when I gave it some sexy add ons.

What a curse it is to be a writer. Being a writer ruins everything. Really. There’s this romantic idea, I think, that being a writer must be so…what’s the word? I don’t know so I’m going to say cool. That’s bollocks. Being a writer is a burden. A cross to bear. Sometimes I feel like I’m being punished by a higher authority. Writing is an obsession and like all obsessive habits it’s nigh on impossible to stop. Five years in and I’m only just beginning to realise that.

Being a writer is something of a cruel mistress because it doesn’t matter whatever else you’re doing, whatever wonderful treat life has in store for you, if you’ve got a writing project on the go you would rather be sitting at the computer getting on with it. Sometimes even eating a meal irritates me so that I want to punch something because I feel like I’m wasting my valuable time. (I went through a phase of eating my dinner sitting in front of the laptop until I spilt gruel in the keypad, and then the b,n & m keys didn’t work properly.)

As a writer it’s so hard to be entirely satisfied with what you produce. If you can be easily satisfied with your writing you’re not a ‘real’ writer, you’re just playing at it (or maybe you’re just crap or deluded). Real writers are obsessed with finding the next level of their ability, even if they have to change themselves to do so. The need to improve, to write better stuff is all consuming. And so bloody irritating when you can’t find a way to punch through the paper ceiling. And there’s nothing that brings that home to me more clearly than reading great writing.

To be a writer you must be a reader, but being a writer can ruin you as a reader. Gone are the days of reading only for pleasure because everything you read you’re comparing the quality of your own writing to it. It’s not easy to relax. You read for inspiration as much as entertainment and when you read something great it is like a double-edged sword. You love the writing for its sublime invention, for its originality of phrase, for its clever plotting, the best words in the best order. But you hate the writing (and the writer) because the quality of it seems beyond you as a writer, and what’s worse you feel that it always will be. It’s so frustrating. Being a writer undermines my enjoyment of reading for these reasons.

In the last week I’ve read ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.’ by John Le Carre, which I absolutely loved. But which also made me want to start punching things and Le Carre. It’s really, really good. I hated it.

I’m also listening to an audio book on the commute: ‘Heart of Darkness’, which everyone must surely know. It’s read by Kenneth Brannagh. How I hate that book and his reading of it. Because they are both so bloody fantastic.

Just to cheer myself up after that, when I look back on this diary entry in years to come I might wish to remember a couple of school incidents from this week. In one lesson I was asking the kids what they had for breakfast and one girl answered ‘crap’, which I thought was remarkably honest and knowledgeable for a five year old. (It never occurred to me where she picked up that kind of language.) She didn’t seem too bothered by it though. I abandoned the lesson on possessive pronouns so that we might have a class discussion regarding how important it is to eat the right foods for health, especially with the most important meal of the day. It was only at the end of the lesson that I discovered the girl meant ‘crepe’, which is a type of pancake. It’s something in the vowel pronunciation.

In grade two we had something of an incident that despite my pleading had to go into the the school accident book. There had to be a first, I suppose. We were making headgear for decorating and wearing. We used coloured card, coloured pens, cotton wool and glue and stuff. When it came to securing the finished article around the children’s heads the instructions said use glue sticks. Well that was a waste of time. They kept falling open and then off under the attentions of their fiddling before the glue was dry. So, out of frustration and desperation I decided to staple the ends of the card together to hold them in place. The best way to do this was with the card wrapped around the individual’s head. At least I thought it was until I managed to put a staple right through one little sod’s ear. Looking back on it now, it serves him right for not keeping still. I didn’t realise the skin at the top of the ear held so much blood.

Update on my writing. Acer #3 is still in post-production. B&C #2 has now had a couple of read throughs and some alterations that make me fairly happy with it. I’m ready for my daughter (my greatest critic) to read it.

The new project is where all my energy is going now. I have a title and twenty thousand words. I think this could be my magnum opus. I really think this could be the one that takes me to the next level. I also think I’m going to have to change my habit of making stuff up as I go along and set about some planning. It’s a bit complex for my limited brain capacity.

(Warning: this post contains some fucking bad language.)

Clearly, I’m looking like shit these days. Or at least (oh God I can hardly bear to think it let alone write it…old). Apart from the mirror, how do I know this? Because at work this week the on-site nurse, in her starched white uniform with matching jackboots made from the hide of some unfortunate albino creature, visited the staffroom clutching clipboard and forms to her ample bosom. She was offering flu jabs to teachers of a certain age. Surely, I blustered, there must be some mistake – in England flu jabs are only offered to the sick and elderly. I was told that this is the case in Turkey also. I was asked if I wanted one. There was some sniggering from the young bloods in the corner. I declined, maintaining a degree of composure and dignity, although inside I was crushed. (Male vanity). Besides, I wouldn’t trust this lot not to inject me with a fatal dose of something that wouldn’t show up in a post-mortem, so they could get rid of me without a fuss. (I think everyone has had enough of me throwing up on  the commute. There are only two of us left on the long journey now – me and the driver. And he’s stopped trying to make conversation. I can see that before long I’ll be driving the school bus myself.)

As part of last week’s blog-post I wrote and included the first line for my new writing project. (A bit gimmicky, ne desperate, even for me.) For those of you who missed it it went like this: ‘Will someone please tell me exactly how the fuck that happened?’ (I’m not even sure whether it should have a question mark at the end. And I’m an English teacher.) I’ve now written the first chapter and the opening line hasn’t changed.

I had a comment on the blog-post on this use of the ‘f’ word in the opening line of a book, which made me think about how opening lines of other landmark novels (other?) might have been affected for better or worse if the author had shown some mettle and spiced them up a bit by dropping an ‘f’ bomb or two.

Because the Internet is amazing I was able to punch a few buttons and within seconds I was presented with a website that contains the first lines of one hundred famous books. I was then intrigued to see whether inserting the ‘f’ word into any of them would make me want to read them. I wonder what you think, dear reader. Here is a selection.

‘1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my fucking landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.’ Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a fuck.’ Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

‘Lolita, fuck of my life, fire of my loins.’ Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

‘It was a fucking cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ 1984 by George Orwell.

‘He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fucking fish.’ The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway.

‘It was a fucking pleasure to burn.’ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

‘This is the saddest fucking story I have ever heard.’ The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

‘I am a fucking invisible man.’ The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

‘The fucking sun shone, having no fucking alternative, on the nothing fucking new.’ Murphy by Samuel Beckett.

‘It was another fucking beautiful morning on the Island of Sodor.’ Thomas the Tank Engine: Thomas Saves the Day by Rev. W. Audry

‘Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. Fuck!’ (OK, so I broke the rule there by putting the ‘f’ word after the first sentence but it just seemed to be crying out for it.) Double or Nothing by Raymond Federman. (I think the gentleman who does my proofreading and editing might have something to say if I opened a book like that. And I bet he’d use the ‘f’ word in his first sentence.)

Before I go, I just have to relate a totally surreal reading experience I had on the mini-bus home today. (This is a true story.) I’ve just started reading Animal Farm by George Orwell. So there I am reading the story on my Kindle in the front seat of the bus and I’ve got the window down because the weather is still pretty good here. We’re in the centre of Istanbul which is just cars and concrete as far as the eye can see. And I’m about four chapters in and at a place where the animals are in the barn being spoken to by Napoleon. And I can actually smell the farm animals. (The scent of livestock is unmistakeable for me because I was born and raised in the country, with a farm down the road from home. I’d know it anywhere, blindfolded.)

My first thought was, holy crap what a writer – I can actually smell the scene. How can he do that with words? Can you imagine? I’m not exaggerating anything. I think my mouth was hanging open. And I looked up, and in the parking area of whatever-the-place-was the other side of the fence from where we were stuck in traffic there were cows and pigs and a big pile of soiled straw. In the middle of Istanbul! I’d have been less surprised to have seen Elvis. This will now be my prime example when I have conversations about coincidence.