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.

One week back at the chalkface. And how many words have I managed to add to the word count of my current blockbuster-in-progress since I returned from my UK holiday? Zero. Oh well, I knew it was going to be tough. I could always stop blogging, I suppose. Or sleeping.

Like the Ukraine, I’m in a period of transition. Upheaval might not be too strong a word for it. It’s all change and things have got to settle down. I must once again find my rhythm, a routine, into which I can find the opportunity and energy to sit down and write. I’m not crying about things. I’m being pragmatic. (That way I might stay sane.)

So why am I blogging about writing when I’m not – writing that is? The blog’s always been about the trials and tribulations, the journey, of trying to make it as an author of note, so I suppose that anything to do with anything that impacts on that aspect of my secret life should be recorded for posterity.

This week I’ve been on an orientation week with my new employer. This was on the European side of Istanbul. Next week I will be moving to the campus where I’ll be working for this year, which is on the Asian side of the Bosphorus Channel.

My commute (the ‘c’ word in case you still hadn’t twigged) this week has taken an hour and forty-five minutes each way. Gulp! you might be forgiven for thinking. In truth, and much to my surprise, I’ve enjoyed it. Really. I’ve used a right old mixed bag of transport and I’ve rubbed shoulders with the ‘common man’ in these parts. (And one or two of them don’t half pong.

Am I just procrastinating? Sigh.

The new people in my new job seem nice enough, which is good. Only one small hiccough this week. I might as well relate it. Sharing is caring and caring is sharing and all that.

There are quite a few new overseas teachers like me just started. They come from all over the globe to give the school a real multi-cultural feel. I like that. It’s a melting pot of difference.

During the parts of the week where we had no seminars or meetings we were kept busy with various tasks to work on. I was asked to look at the English language curriculum with a view to ‘tightening’ it up a bit. Another colleague – Canadian – was asked to cast their experienced eye over the school’s assessment policy. The school also has a Chinese teacher this year and he was given the job of performing an inventory and organising the office supplies. It all felt like we were being tested in some way.

Senior management checked up on us on Friday. I’d managed to complete my task. Jo, the Canadian, had finished his, but when we entered the office looking for Chen to see how he’d got on, the powers that be were very disappointed to find that nothing had been done and the shelves were still bare. No one knew where Chen was. And then he burst out of the stationery cupboard and shouted, ‘Here I am!’ in perfect English.

After six weeks ‘Internetless in Dymchurch’ (could be a film starring Tom Shanks and Smeg Ryan) I’m back ‘home’ in Istanbul. How do I feel about that? Honestly?

Well, let’s start Britishly. With the weather. I could do with one of these today.

No doubt about it, the temperature in UK was far preferable to how it is here at the moment. Istanbul feels like I’m zipped up fully clothed in an Arctic grade, double-goose down, four season sleeping bag, in a one man nylon tent in the middle of a blistering and breathless Gobi Desert on a summer’s day, and it’s not even noon (or it wasn’t when I started writing this post four hours ago).

Lying in bed last night I was forced to undo the top button of my Winceyette pyjamas as I felt the perspiration puddling around me. The fabric of my night attire had reached saturation point and was unable to retain any more of my body’s vital fluids that were flowing out of my pores quicker than US dollars are flowing out of Russia these days, such was the stifling oppressiveness of the trapped, stale night air. It was like trying to sleep mummified in warm, damp kitchen towel.

We can’t have a window open to encourage a hint of any available night-time breeze because of the ‘enormous infant-obsessed killer mosquitoes’ queuing up on the window sill with their ‘crazy straws’ to gorge themselves on the blood of The Halfling; we can’t have a fan in the bedroom because ‘they are dangerous to leave on unattended through the night in case of electrical fires’; we can’t have air-conditioning because The Halfling might ‘catch pneumonia or Legionnaires disease’ from the ‘impurities being forced into the atmosphere by artificial means’. So let’s all die in our sleep of heatstroke or drown in sweat.

To all intents and purposes (what does that actually mean?) today is the last day of my summer holiday and oddly the first day in the last seven weeks that I’ve been able to spend entirely alone. Christ, how I’ve missed my own company (and you, my best friend: my laptop x). I’m holed up in a coffee shop that has air-conditioning and WiFi and which overlooks the Sea of Marmara (not bad, I suppose). The current-future-ex-Mrs Tidy has dashed away to visit her parents for the weekend. (Naturally, sans enfant terrible.)

The Halfling is at home renewing his bond with his Turkish nanny who he hasn’t seen for six weeks (someone who, from the look on his face this morning when she pitched up, he obviously believed he’d seen the last of in July) while I’ve been ‘instructed’ to make myself scarce so that said bonding can be more easily achieved. Good luck with that. I might not know much about kids but I didn’t need to be Dr Spock (the child doctor so influential in my mother’s thinking regarding child-rearing and not to be confused with the pointy-eared alien who my mum simply resembled) to recognise the sense of betrayal on the angelic features of my son and heir when the nanny’s face loomed around the front door this morning, like something out of a Hammer horror movie, while calling his name in that curiously shrill tone she manages that actually rattles the fillings in my teeth.

My son’s features instantly resembled those of Luke Skywalker on learning that his biological father was in fact his chief enemy.

I could barely bring myself to meet his watery, accusing eye as I did up my laces in preparation to leave them to each other. (Mr Iscariot, I know your pain.) And then he made a bolt for his room before either of us could grab his sweaty little body. It was unfortunate that all that stood between The Halfling and his dash for refuge was the nanny. It was doubly-unfortunate that, owing to the regrettable brush with Rickets she clearly suffered in her youth (the sort that leaves the afflicted unable to stop a pig in an alley, which is exactly the expression that sprang to mind as he ducked under her crutch and scuttled up the narrow hallway to his sanctuary [if only she’d turned up in a long skirt instead of those skin-tight, leopard-print leggings she insists on wearing making her look like some form of bizarre, over-sized wishbone from the hips down], slamming the door behind him and twisting the key. I knew it was a mistake to leave that in the lock but ‘he must have his privacy’. He’s just three for God’s sake!) she was unable to snap her knees together (not without dislocating her pelvis in at least three places) and block his escape. Mind you, I did experience a grudging admiration for him. I wouldn’t like to be cooped up with the Turkish love-child of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the captain of the Swiss women’s Olympic yodelling team all day being force fed his mother’s idea of nutritious meals: a lentil and pulse mush that looks like it could have come straight out of his nappy.

The staff are glaring at me with something akin to unpleasantness. I think that they think I’ve outstayed my welcome. They might have a point. I’ve been here a long time and only drunk two large cups of black coffee. They want the table for six that I’m stubbornly occupying for the family of nine that they want to cram in and make some profit from. Well I’m not moving. It’s hot out and I’m comfortable. And I’ve got Internet.

This summer I went away without any Internet enabled device: no laptop, no ipad, no Kindle fire. How liberating, I thought. How fucking stupid, more like. It wouldn’t have made much difference because the only Internet available to me in the UK would have been through my first son’s iphone, a device that always seemed to have either one bar of shaky Internet access or 3% of battery remaining. (Did I mention my first son before? The young man who is squatting in my English home. The son who should have vacated the property after giving it a thorough cleaning [make that fumigating] so that my Turkish family and I might enjoy the fruit of my pre-Turkish move renovation labours. On arrival the place looked like a scene from A Life of Grime.)

Where was I? Internet access. But still, I could have found somewhere, like the pub in the village that offered free WiFi if you bought a drink. I did that once. In fact I ended up buying quite a few drinks and making a bit of a spectacle of myself as well as a significant dent in the holiday spending budget and a smaller dent in the casing of my current-future-ex-wife’s brand new mini ipad that she’d rented to me for the evening. (We didn’t go to the zoo the following day, as I’d promised everyone. But that was because I was still being violently sick into a saucepan in the spare room. This was doubly-unfortunate because it was one of the three days that it didn’t rain in the six weeks we were there. How was I supposed to know that?)

I read quite a few ‘real’ books, which was lovely to be able to do. I got quite into Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montelbano series and I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was that I enjoyed about them. I read JK Rowling’s A Cuckoo’s Calling and really enjoyed it, despite being determined to hate it. (Call it professional jealousy.) I read an Anne Cleeves, Shetland Islands book that was pretty good and Charles Cummings A Foreign Country that was very good. I also read a book about Ian Fleming, something that I ‘borrowed’ from the school library and took to read on the plane. I found out that Fleming and I share the same birthday. He wrote thrillers and so do I. He was enormously successful and rich…. anyway, spooky.

Talking of birthdays, I received a message from a reader yesterday, Erling Larson, who will have his ninetieth birthday in ten days time. Congratulations to him. I love the idea that a reader of such senior years is reading my books and getting on the Internet to let me know about it. If my dad had lived that long I know he’d of been just like Erling. Happy birthday, sir!

I need to get on with some work. I have emails, Amazon comments and blog comments to catch up on. I have a half-finished Booker & Cash to renew my acquaintance with (I can’t remember much of the forty thousand words I’ve already written. Bugger. I hope it all comes back to me quickly.) Smoke & Mirrors is still under construction.

I just read a blog post by a fellow author and virtual acquaintance http://patriciaismith.wordpress.com/2014/08/15/where-have-all-my-author-mates-gone/comment-page-1/#comment-16).

She says this:

I have come to realise I live two separate lives: a writer’s life which is quiet and solitary,  and a family life which is busy and boisterous at times. I love them both, but the twain never meet, they might bump into each other occasionally but that is all. 

How very true that is. Exactly how I feel. I’ve spent six weeks back in the UK surrounded by family and I could count on the fingers of one foot (in Turkey toes are referred to as ‘foot fingers’. How I laughed first time I heard that.) the number of times someone asked about my writing. It seems strange to me; they are my ‘nearest and dearest’ after all. Mum is always supportive but really no one else (apart from my daughter who has read all of them and my favourite nieces who have also partaken) is the slightest bit interested. It’ll be a different story when that seven figure, three book/film/TV series deal comes in, I’m sure. It used to bother me a bit but now I’m resigned to the truth: I’m living two separate lives.

And on Monday I start a new job, which I’m really looking forward to.

Anyway, back to my original question: how do I honestly feel about being back in Istanbul? Answer: things could be worse.