Tag Archives: writing

My topsy-turvy world.

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A couple of things today: a revised view of the ‘slush-pile’ and a remarkable download statistic. Excited? Me neither.

Before I decided to self-publish I tried to get a literary agent interested in my books. Actually, I tried to get about two hundred literary agents interested in my books. The only good thing that came out of that woeful and demoralising chapter of my miserable history as a writer was that, because of the high number of rejection letters I received, I didn’t need to buy toilet paper for a month.

I grew to hate literary agents. I wanted to meet one, provoke a fist-fight and beat her up really badly. I was suffering a good deal of angst and I had no outlet. Then I discovered Jesus…not really. More enlightening than Our Saviour in this case was the discovery of the Smashwords synopsis submission page. Don’t get me wrong. I like Smashwords. I love Smashwords. They might yet end up being instrumental in salvaging the rudderless ghost-ship that is my writing career. No, what their synopsis submissions page did for me (apart from making me think that I wasn’t such a bad writer after all) was create some empathy for literary agents. (I’m having a hard time believing that I just wrote that, let alone thought it. It’s testimony to how far I’ve come as a human being on this self-publishing journey.)

Let me explain. When one submits one’s submission to a literary agent for their condescension one is advised, ne warned, on each and every literary agent’s website that they typically receive up to three hundred (300) submissions a week and that from this number they ‘might’ take on three or four new authors a year. Yes, a year. Three hundred multiplied by fifty-two is over fifteen thousand. Over fifteen thousand submissions a year to sift through. In the trade I understand this to be referred to as the ‘slush-pile’. In my ignorance I found this to be a rather negative, derogatory and insulting term for the creative output of the masses when I first came across it. I damned literary agents for their arrogance. Now, having been a regular reader of the Smashwords synopsis submissions page (I really need to get a life) I think that ‘slush-pile’ is rather an elegant euphemism.

If the stuff that the postman brings everyday to dump on the desks of the publishing-deal-gate-keepers is anything like the torrent of utter crap that flows unfiltered over the Smashwords’ site like some broken raw sewage outlet then literary agents should receive our pity.

‘What about your crap?’ I hear some anonymous voice call from cyber-space. (Delete. Those dissenting voices are so easy to police and silence in the modern technologically enabled world. No one even saw it because I get to vet and approve everything. Blogging is so brilliant for control freaks.)

Is this really what people really want to read these days? ‘Erotic’ tales of bestiality and incest spanning three generations of inbred locals who then go on to slaughter each other with rusty tools from the shed at the bottom of the garden? I sure hope so because that’s basically what my latest book is all about. It’s called ‘Joint Enterprise’ and it’ll be on Smashwords within the month.

Now then, that interesting download statistic that I promised you.

I love WordPress as much as I love Smashwords. WordPress has the facility for bloggers to view a world map that is helpfully highlighted with incidents of other web users who have looked at one’s blog. Amazing and cool. This week I had someone from Outer Mongolia view my blog. Amazing and cool, again.

That kind of knowledge generates all kinds of questions for me as a writer and a thinker (the two don’t necessarily always go together. If you don’t believe me check out that Smashwords synopsis submissions page that I was banging on about earlier.) Questions like: Why? Who? Where exactly? As a writer I can envisage a Mongolian Yak farmer in a mountain hut whiling away a quiet night in some remote outpost of the country on his cutting-edge, top of the range, internet-enabled smart-phone. Maybe he thought he was safe from prying eyes up there on top of the world and so he typed in some disgusting search term into Mongle, or whatever search engine controls the back of beyond, and got a link to my blog – I’m proud to say that typing in ‘bestiality’ and ‘incest’ will do that. I tried it.

So now I have a new reader, a new follower of my blog. It doesn’t bother me that he might be whacking off to my writing. Live and let live. It doesn’t bother me that he might be downloading my books for free. I’m having a hard-time giving them away, anyway. What bothers me is that he might not get in touch.

Trashwords, anyone?

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Warning: the following has content of a highly disturbing nature.

‘A girl is urged by her mother to let her brother take her virginity and become sexually active. She is ready to become sexually active but doesn’t want to give in to her mother. Her mother decides to demonstrate how good her brother is in bed and lets him take her in her daughter’s bed while her daughter watches every day for weeks causing the girl to have dreams of having sex with her brother.’  *

Well, what do you think of that as a synopsis for a novel? Me, I laughed until I stopped. And that isn’t as easy as it sounds. I think that whoever could conceive of such a ‘plot’ is quite simply unhinged or in layman’s terms seriously fucked-up. And I am no prude by any stretch of the imagination. Look at some of my blog posts if you doubt me and I just used the ‘f’ word didn’t I?

I was confronted with the above when I logged on to the Smashwords homepage for the twenty-fifth time today to check my download figures (still a healthy four. No new ones since Saturday. Maybe the Smashwords server is down.). The book to which this refers had obviously recently been uploaded because it was sitting there staring back at me (oh, so their server must be working then. Bugger.). I’m not going to name the book title that it refers to. I wouldn’t want to give the man any free publicity on my blog. I’d rather remove my own eyeballs with hot spoons, or vote Conservative.

The book has been listed under ‘erotica’ (no I wasn’t perving my way through the genre’s latest entries. Every new upload shows up on Smashwords home page) Perhaps it should have been listed under ‘sick and twisted’ or ‘in need of therapy’. (My nan used to say, ‘being a bit judgemental is better than being just mental’.)

I believe in free speech. I don’t like censorship. I know that some people want to read this stuff. I just think that perhaps Smashwords should start a partner site called Trashwords and that they should have a team of synopsis readers sifting through the influx of new material to single out the raw sewage from writing that is not written by and pandering to freaks of morality. I, for one, would be a regular subscriber to Trashwords because I haven’t laughed so much for ages. It’s not just prurient, puerile rubbish. Some of them are just plain rubbish.

It got me thinking about the brief outline – the synopsis – that one is obliged to submit with one’s offering. They are very important. They shouldn’t be underestimated as a means of encouraging readers to give writers a closer look. They should be worked on and refined (not necessarily in a moralistic way). I hope that mine works for browsers. I’ve copied and pasted a couple of others that I have selected for my own reasons and posterity. Would they ensure that you paid good money to download them to your reading device? None of these books were free to download.

‘A ballsy couple’s cozy lives are upended when the zombie apocalypse strikes Glasgow, and every day becomes a battle for survival as they team up with a band of misfits in hopes of starting civilization anew.’  That’s a no from me. Sorry.

‘The year is 2795 and after their ship was commissioned early and uncompleted to rescue a lost Confederate vessel 14,000 light years from home, the crew of the GCV Winchester have only just escaped with their lives with the dreaded Dimion. Their only hope now to return home is with help from a local race. However it is only a matter of time before the Dimion strike again. Will the crew survive.’  I’ll pass thanks.

‘Dark dreams, love, betrayal and a battle to save the world. ‘xxx’ tells the story of Cassie as she sets out, across the medieval and magical lands of Tarraneia, to prevent the terrible future she has foreseen. Is the future already set? Or can it be changed?’ A bit confusing.

‘Some are happy. Some aren’t. Yet everyday I go on with a face that is as plastic as the smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.’ Could you rephrase that, please?

‘Ronald didn’t expect his experiment to have quite the effect that it did. When it turned him into Ronnie, she didn’t expect to be changed quite that long, but mad-science timelines have a way of changing a person’s mind. “xxx” is erotica sci-fi that is unsuitable for those under the age of 18.’ Or those with a brain.

‘Born between the sexes, Jamie must leave behind a young girl’s dreams to become the man her family expects.’  Again, please?

‘The devil in us all set loose to do wickedness at the expense of all that is pure in our hearts. Four stories where the ending is bitter sweet painful, but the sex is erotic enough to turn wood to rock hard, sweaty horny stone. Broken, teased and used as nothing more than a toy for the amusement of the evil in all of us. xxx is for the firm of heart and soul. xxx is for you.’ Actually, it really isn’t. Sorry.

I could go on all night, but a) I’ve just seen the time b) it’s all getting a little depressing c) why am I doing this anyway?

* Copyright 2011 – 2012, John Edgar Jay

The following is lifted from John’s author page and I fully acknowledge his ownership of the material. (I wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole, mate.)

John has edited stories for other authors and offers his services to anyone who needs help. (That made me laugh a lot) Many writers have very good story lines but their work is diminished by poor sentence construction, misused words, extraneous words, missing words, lack of subject verb agreement, incorrect use of contractions–in particular confusing the possessive pronoun “your” with the contraction of you are “you’re”, confusing the possessive pronoun “its” with the contraction for it is “it’s” misuse of the verb “to lie” and other such problems. (OK, so maybe he has an understanding of the finer points of grammar, semantics and syntax; he’s just missing his morality gene and a dash of common decency. Maybe he’s writing from memory of his home-life. Maybe he’s from the deep-south of the US of A or Dungeness where that kind of thing is perfectly normal. As a school friend of mine who travelled in daily on the RHDR from Dungeness used to say, ‘At least I know who my mum is. She’s my sister.’)

Still, John’s mum must be so proud. I wonder if John has children. Does he ask friends and family to proof-read his output for him? Now I’m laughing again. Cheers, John. Thanks for brightening my day. Get some help.

On the curve of learning.

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My first self-published novel has been out in cyber space for three days now – Amazon UK and Smashwords. My euphoria (relief) at finally getting it out there has now been replaced with a sense of ominous foreboding. More on that later.

Smashwords allow an author to list their book as free. Amazon do not. I have had an encouraging seventy-seven downloads on Smashwords and, as far as I can tell, zero downloads on Amazon. You do the math.

Now I will. My belief that, as an unknown, giving one’s book away for free is the only way to get people to take a chance on downloading it seems to be a fact. After all, why should people be expected to pay for a book from a total unknown when there are so many out there from good recognised writers for free, or dirt cheap? One could argue that with all the work, time and effort that has gone into one’s creation one should be entitled to ask something in return for giving someone the prospect of a read, but that, sadly, isn’t the way the world works. Not the world of self-publishing, anyway. Face up to that reality.

I’m trying a ruse with Amazon that another author claimed worked for him. It isn’t paying off for me yet, but I’ll keep going with it. Amazon have a link on the listing of any book that they are offering that gives a reader the opportunity to let them know if the book in question is available elsewhere cheaper. They say that they might try to match the price if they learn of it. I’ve told them three times already that my book is free elsewhere in the hope that they will adjust my price to match. I’m still waiting. I really hope that they let it go for free.

So, seventy-seven downloads. At least the cover art is doing its job. I wonder how many of those people are reading it. I wonder what they think of it. Did some give up after a paragraph, a page, a chapter? I wonder if any of them will review it for me. I wonder if any of them will follow the link to this blog that I provided in the book and say something – anything – on the page that I have made available. I live in hope. You see, I just want to know what people think of it. I feel like I’ve prepared a great feast (haha that’s not intended to be a metaphor for my writing) sent out the invitations and now I’m standing at my open front door in my best shirt and trousers waiting to see if anyone will turn up to my party. I have a knot of anxiety in the pit of my stomach because I’m afraid of being overlooked.

I started off wanting to get rich and famous through my writing (no laughing at the back) but I realise now that all I want is feedback on it. Comment. Constructive criticism. Advice. Thought. It’s worth me repeating that I am currently living as an ex-pat in a country where English is not the native language. I have no circle of close friends or work colleagues that I can burden with reading my drafts, edits and final versions. I have had to rely solely on myself for everything and I’m not so arrogant and confident that I think that my writing is without fault. (Please, God, let there be no plot inconsistencies.) I’ve done my best. I can’t see things anymore. And it must be really bad practise to do it this way, but I’ve had no choice. I’ve had to let it go.

I went out with a few people last night. I mentioned that I’d self-published this week. They all said that they’d download it and read it. I thought, great. Now I’m thinking, shit. What if it stinks? Will they be honest with me? Will they feel that they have to damn it with that faint praise? Will I catch them exchanging looks when they talk about it? I wish that I’d kept my mouth shut and left it to people who I will never know.

If you are one of those people who I’ll never know and you have downloaded and read my book (any of it), once again, I would be most grateful for all and any comments, corrections and suggestions on the page provided – link in the menu bar.

Don’t be a can’t.

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My very first blog post used this image, so I thought that it might be fitting to use it here. I’ve done it. I’m climbing the ladder to success. I have self-published my first novel. How does it feel? Anti-climactic, actually, if I’m honest. It wasn’t exactly a publisher’s launch party in a major Waterstones with the national press kicking each other for an interview with me. It was more of a, right-the-baby-has-finally-gone-to-sleep-I-might-as-well-make-a-cup-of-tea-and-upload-that-book-tonight-instead-of-waiting-for-the-weekend type thing. Still, it’s done. Done and dusted. That’s the main thing. One down, four to go. I feel a bit relieved because I can move on. It’s a bit like a divorce.

Actually self-publishing something, getting it out there as a product is what this blog has been all about (nearly) – the process. It’s been fascinating and tedious; frustrating and rewarding; costly and cheap; tiring and exciting. It’s all been a lot more intense and involving than I expected it to be when I first decided to take the self-publishing path.

Let me just remind myself of why I did it? Why I self-published? I did it because I had no realistic hope, or expectation of being able to get a literary agent interested in my books (see blog posts). I did it because I wanted people to read my books in order that I might get some feedback on them. I did it in the vain hope that I might get downloaded enough and favourably reviewed enough to maybe garner some attention – not me, the books (I have absolute faith in my writing). I also did it because otherwise I was just writing books to go in the drawer of my desk. No one else reads them. And if I got knocked down and killed by a bus tomorrow they would end up in a rubbish sack, then the dustbin and then the landfill site and all of my creative output would have been wasted and lost. (I’m not even going to try to make some crummy self-deprecating joke about that.)

I feel a little bit proud of myself and I think that I’m entitled to that.

It’s not going to make me rich. How can I be so sure? Because I made it free to download. That’s one part of my original plan that hasn’t changed. I firmly believe that if it’s free it will get downloaded. If I charge for it, it won’t. And if it gets downloaded there is more of a chance that it will get read (no guarantee, of course) and then maybe reviewed (even less of a guarantee).

The hardest part of it all has been the proof reading. I must have read the book five times in the last two weeks and every time I’ve found typos, or words to change. In the end I’ve had to stop. One has to say enough is enough and move on to the next project (why does everything remind me of divorce tonight?) which I have. I’ve already started on the second proof-reading of the third draft of the fourth edition of Making a Killing (the second Romney and Marsh File). I must be improving technically as a writer because there is a lot less red ink in the margins of this book, so far.

One other thing that I want to tell myself here: I’ve only ever mentioned and thought about self-publishing through Amazon’s Kindle page. Then the other day I discovered Smashwords and, after researching them and reading some of their blog posts and some of the things that they had to say about Amazon, was won over by them. So, I’ve put the book on Smashwords and Kindle. That way, I have the opportunity to get the title in front of a lot more people and that’s my primary aim. And if all that doesn’t work at least the cover looks pretty good. If I was looking for a detective novel to download for free and saw my cover I’d have it.

Talking of which, I might as well include a link to Smashwords here in case I want to download my book as a surprise for myself later. It might also boost my download figures, which will really please me.

Oliver Tidy’s Smashwords Author Profile: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/olivertidy
Book page to sample or purchase Rope Enough – The First Romney and Marsh File:http://smashwords.com/b/262313

This has taken me twenty minutes to write. I started it just after I’d finished uploading Rope Enough. I just looked at my Smashwords page. It’s been downloaded six times already (only four of them were me). That’s encouraging. Be a can. Don’t be a can’t.

Living the dream (bastard).

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This post is dedicated to a self-publisher who made it work for him. He is an example to us all and I hate him already. That’s him, the sworn enemy of shaving on the left.

I want to share this. It’s something that all aspiring self-publishers should have a look at. It’s proof that it can be done. I know he’s not the first, but I have a tenuous personal interest in this guy’s achievements. Check out the link below first then come back to me and read the rest of this post. Or don’t. I couldn’t care less.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity-interviews/scots-farmer-became-internet-sensation-1414034

When I was deciding to go down the self-publishing route a couple of months ago I started doing some research. Part of that research was to download a few free books from Amazon’s Kindle website. I wanted to see what I would be up against. I wanted to find out more about how to go about it all and what I should do and include. What was involved?

I actually downloaded this guy’s first Inspector Mclean book, Natural Causes. It was doing rather well in the free download chart at the time. I even read it. Then I stalked him for a bit. I was able to do this primarily because within the covers of his e-book he provided his blog and web addresses. He wanted people to track him down and see what else he was responsible for. That way, if they enjoyed his first book they might be encouraged to part with some money and buy one of his others (I didn’t). At least they would have known that he had others to buy.

I learned that he narrowly missed out on getting a publishing deal and so had thrown his lot in with self-publishing. And it worked for him spectacularly as you can see. Hats off to the man. (Grinding of teeth.)

Out of unsolicited interest I just happened to check up on his blog yesterday (I have him on my blog’s blogroll, even though he hasn’t condescended to reciprocate, despite my repeated begging emails. If he doesn’t add me soon he’ll end up on my bogroll, although with the money he’s probably now wiping his arse with for fun he has no need of us ‘little people’ anymore) and saw the article and learned something else from his experience.

One thing that I hadn’t been able to make my mind up about with my own impending self-publishing venture was how to price my books when I put them out there. Initially, I thought of putting them on for free, or at least the first one and then having a sliding (upwards) scale of purchase price for the others. People will want them. (Oh, God, please, let the people want them!) Then I thought, bugger it. I sweated blood on these. If people want to read them they can sodding well pay for the privilege.

But people won’t. People – like me – want their books for free like they don’t want to pay for anything. Read the article in the link and see Oswald’s experience. He says that when he had the book on the web for 99p he sold about 15 copies. When he made them free that download figure went up to about 50,000 copies. It’s just become a no-brainer for me. One has to appeal to the cheapskate masses. Why do you think that The Sun and The Mirror are so popular? All right, maybe it’s because they have big pictures of women with their breasts out. But maybe it’s because they are cheap! (Yes, in every sense of the word.)

Anyway, back to the hero of the hour. Those numbers ensured that he got seen and noticed and famous; on a list (the good kind) and with publishers fist-fighting each other in the street for the rights to his books. International rights. He must be rolling it. Bastard. The book wasn’t even that good. (Anyone else smelling sour grapes?)

If he can do it we can all do it. Let them eat cake. Give it all away. I’m going to. The greedy grabbing public will gobble up my free output. I’m going to make all three in my Romney and Marsh series downloadable without charge. I’ll get famous and hunted by the suits with their fountain pens.

I shall be dreaming about Bodrum nights again tonight.

If you haven’t got anything nice to say…

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Here’s a word or two of sobering warning regarding the whole self-publishing malarkey.

One can write a terrific book (in one’s own opinion); get some wonderful cover art done; work out all the ins and outs of formatting one’s novel for the e-book market; get it all together and offer it to the world, then sit back and watch some arsehole torpedo you.

When one looks at downloading a particular title from the Amazon Kindle ebook catalogue one has the opportunity to view some of the reviews given it by those who have read it and taken the time and trouble to pen their opinion for others to peruse and be influenced by. RJ Ellroy – a now infamous as well as popular, award winning and best-seller writer – has recently been exposed and vilified for assuming identities and ‘bigging-up’ some of his own books with five-star reviews while simultaneously panning the writing of some of his peers (allegedly). I’m not the first to say shame on him. I now use his books for bog paper, if I can get them for free.

In the name of research and because I am more than a little interested to see what others have made of some of the books that I’ve read and formed a strong opinion of I checked out some of the reviews of a couple of titles…and I learned something else. People can be arseholes. Actually, I knew that already. I’m a teacher after all.

The personal opinion of readers is as wide-ranging, baffling and difficult to understand as religious faith. Take a favourite author of mine, CJ Sansom. I think that his Shardlake series is outstandingly researched and written. I love them all. And it’s not just me. He is critically acclaimed and an award winner. And yet, there are people giving his books one-star reviews on Amazon!!! And they are idiots (you can tell from the way they write) with idiotic opinions and stupid world views. Read some of them if you don’t believe me. Some of his critics can barely string a sentence together.

Another example is Hilary Mantel the double Booker prize winner. She has must have some talent to win that twice (or some bloody good connections or some bloody good photos of the judges involved in practices that they’d rather not have plastered all over the www and would do anything to make that not happen like award her the Booker – twice) but she gets lots of negative reviews alongside her scores of five-star ones.

Mind you, it’s not just Joe Public who are guilty of this. Even judges in literary competitions are prone to bouts of literary blindness (or blackmail/corruption). A couple of years back one of the Shardlake books was beaten in the CWA historical thriller (I think) competition by a book by Rory Clements in his John Shakespeare series. I’ve read the first two in Clements’ series and if you ask me he isn’t fit to sharpen Sansom’s pencils. I only read the second because I couldn’t believe that it would be as bad as the first. It was worse. They lack the qualities that the Shardlakes have in spades: substance and depth. They are shallow and obvious in comparison. The characters are just too stereo-typical and the dialogue isn’t in the same league as Sansom. If I had them on my kindle they would be in my ‘shite’ folder. But they’re not free to download – yet.

The point I’m labouring to make is that these negative reviews that any Tom, Dick and Harry can post on the internet can hurt an author’s reputation and sales immensely. They go up on the website forever and for all to see. Alan Cambell the fantasy writer says on his blog that one of his books was doing quite well on Amazon’s Kindle until he got a one star review. And that, he bemoaned the fact quite justifiably, was from someone complaining about something that was nothing to do with his writing. People are arseholes. Did I mention that?

I’m also reminded of another berk who gave an author a one star review because when he was reading his book on his Kindle he dropped the device and broke it. Cock. What was the author’s fault there?

Why am I concerning myself with all this? Well, when I’m in my deepest of sleeps I dream of people downloading and reading and then reviewing my books on the Amazon Kindle page and I’m afraid that idiots will pan me for nothing to do with my writing, which I’m quite sure is excellent and in so doing will scupper my literary ambitions to get rich and famous and quit work and live in the sun off movie deal options.

As a bibliophile the acid test for me is how the book collecting world judge a book. That’s not by its cover but by its price in the second-hand market. Actually, the cover is very important, but not in the way that you might think. Fine condition Sansoms command good prices and in my opinion represent a sound investment for the future. Signed copies can double the price at least. Copies of Rory Clements John Shakespeare series can be picked up relatively cheaply, even signed and lined.

Just saying, this is my blog where I can speak my mind, but I wouldn’t dream of writing so candidly about another author’s work where people will see it (I’ve already established that no one reads this). It would be very unfair and churlish. After all, who am I? Who are you? Who are any of us to piss on dreams and creativity? As my dear old nan used to say, if you haven’t got anything nice to say button it.

Is it just me?

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Is it just me or do other/all writers find that after they’ve gone through the drawn-out process/slog/torture/life-altering experience of writing a novel and then editing/correcting/proof-reading it over and over again they develop a nose for (shouldn’t that be an eye for?) and heightened intolerance of shite writing?

I’ve got a Kindle. I think that I should have, really. Last week, in preparation for a flight and a week away, I downloaded some free books (I expect people to buy mine when the time comes, but I’m not spending my money on other people’s plop). In the past I’d have stuck with some of them and hoped that they might buck up. In the past I wouldn’t have been so critical. In the past I probably wouldn’t have paid so much attention to grammar, syntax, semantics, punctuation, plot development and layout. Now I do. And it’s refining my reading experience to the point of ruining it.

I tried three books put up on Kindle by wanna-bes like me and after a couple of chapters all three ended up being filed away in my Kindle shite folder. And then I unwittingly found that I’d done the same with an author who had a real publisher and hard-copies of his books out there. All the time that I was reading these I was thinking, ‘my books are better than this rubbish’. They were appalling; painful and depressing (owing to the quality or rather the lack of it). The guy with the publisher had a plot development that made no sense and saved his hero from drowning. I went back and read the build up four times and was still none the wiser. He just copped out and waved a magic wand and up to then it hadn’t been that bad, actually.

But that’s not good enough. The book has got to be very good in every respect and without flaws in the plot or it’s sunk.

I suppose that I’ve been learning from all this too, but, man, it’s sure sullying my reading for pleasure. One of my few.

So, what to do to get over it? What’s the antidote? Download a free classic. Enter The Thirty-Nine Steps. I’m two chapters in and finally I can relax and immerse myself in the reading experience. It might be dated, but, like Conan-Doyle for example, Mr Buchan’s writing has a timeless quality. No complaints here. Sometimes it’s true that the old’ns are the best. That’s him up the top by the way.

Mind you, now that’s reminded me of that awful BBC adaptation of the book a few years ago starring Rupert Penry-Jones, who I rather fancy for the lead in my Patrick Sansom books when they are optioned by Hollywood. Alas, so much to do.

Learning by doing.

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I could never look at Charlton in the same way after watching this scene. I still think that he made a big mistake. I mean, Dude! It’s a monkey. I don’t care how long it’s been!

Walking home after work today, I felt like I’d achieved something. I’m coming to realise that this self-publishing lark is a bloody time-consuming and involved process. A veritable labour of love. It is so much more than jotting down what’s in your head and uploading it to Amazon. It’s all about little steps and they need to be celebrated – if one wants to remain sane – hence I put an extra sugar in my hot chocolate tonight.

I’ve just finished my final, final proof-reading-then-computer-version-updating-emailing-the-document-to-Amazon-to-have-them-ping-it-back-to-me thing of my second Romney and Marsh book. So I now have the first two in the series on my Kindle awaiting my attention. For the record I will be reading them on the device with a hard copy next to me and any alterations or corrections that I feel I need to make I can record them on the hard copy with a highlighter and then do the whole process once more with feeling.

I have mentioned here previously the value of proof-reading using various and varied outlets. It helps to bring a new and novel perspective, something that one needs when one is reading a book for maybe the fifth time or more for errors that one missed in previous readings.

I’m still learning about writing as well. I mean the physical presentation and arrangement of my output as much as anything. All I’ve done in the last few weeks is ride the merry-go-round of edit and proof-read and update and do it again. (The only ‘new’ writing I’ve done is this blog.) And the whole revision process, while at times I would have to admit has been pretty tedious, has also been really educational. This might sound less than encouraging to any would-be readers of my books (I don’t know about anyone else, but I want to read the work of people who have some mastery of their craft before they write a novel and expect me to read it) but even with the final drafts of the books ‘finished’ (inverted commas because they are never, ever finished) I still was not sure about/comfortable with the way that I had chosen to layout the text. I need to clarify that for myself.

My biggest issue, specifically, was paragraphing where speech was concerned. I think that I’d been educated to conform to the model whereby one writes a bit of something and when a character then speaks a new line is started. When the character stops speaking a new paragraph is started. But I’ve realised something over my reading years that jars when I’m reading; that interrupts the flow of the reading experience for me and I don’t like it, so I have changed my layout so that I don’t do it. When I re-read my stuff it now flows better, I think.  Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

The Old Way

‘What do you reckon? Holiday snaps?’ said Romney.

Marsh was disappointed not to have stirred something more in the DI. She had amends to make.

‘Might not even be Emerson’s. Could be his son’s. If he ever stayed over here, this probably would have been the room that he slept in. Better check it out, anyway.’

He wrapped it in the little plastic sack, handed it to Marsh and checked his watch.

‘There doesn’t seem to be anything here. Come on. They do a very nice bacon sandwich and proper coffee at the De Bradlei centre in the next street. We’ve just got time before we meet the girlfriend, if we get a move on.’

The New Way

‘What do you reckon? Holiday snaps?’ said Romney. Marsh was disappointed not to have stirred something more in the DI. She had amends to make. ‘Might not even be Emerson’s. Could be his son’s. If he ever stayed over here, this probably would have been the room that he slept in. Better check it out, anyway.’ He wrapped it in the little plastic sack, handed it to Marsh and checked his watch. ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything here. Come on. They do a very nice bacon sandwich and proper coffee at the De Bradlei centre in the next street. We’ve just got time before we meet the girlfriend, if we get a move on.’

It’s a personal thing, I suppose. I could be breaking writing conventions (just to clarify, I don’t ever have two people speaking in the same paragraph. I’m not that reckless.) But I don’t care. Plenty of authors create their own writing style. They must have their reasons. Some don’t even put inverted commas around speech, choosing to indicate that someone is speaking by italicising the font. By the way, I’m not saying that I’m a pioneer in this. Others write like it. Better authors than me.

Something else that this ‘style’ allows me to do is to dump dozens of ‘saids’ and the like. If I were splitting up those paragraphs into the old way I would definitely need more ‘saids’, but keeping it all together I don’t.

In a previous post I also mentioned that I was changing all my qualifying adverbs into ‘saids’. I’m not going to explain it again here. It’s just down the page a bit if you’re interested. But I’ve also gone further. I had a lot of ‘saids’ following the speech. Example,

‘What is that stink?’ said Romney, sniffing loudly.

Too many. It was boring me to read them all. I’ve changed a lot of that sort of thing to something like below.

Romney sniffed loudly. ‘What is that stink?’

Again, I prefer this. It is a personal preference. I think that it makes the reading more interesting. Looking over the texts I would say that the reader has got to concentrate more, work harder at understanding who is speaking (or still speaking); who is performing what action. Is that a bad thing?

I wonder – am I making any sense today?

I’m also in a good mood because I stayed late at work under the pretence of sorting out some fresh straw for the monkey enclosure tomorrow, but really I printed off the first hard-copy of the third title in the series. I’ve not read it all the way through yet and, like shagging someone for the first time, I’m really looking forward to it. (Didn’t think that I was actually going to write a whole post with nothing rude in it did you? I don’t like to disappoint myself.)

 

Embarassing/embarrasing/embarrassing.

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Eons ago, I received a comment from another blogger. It felt a bit like first contact from outer-space (and incidentally it was the last). The gentleman concerned was commenting in response to my post that I was engaged in the final, final proof-read of my book. He described proof-reading as a humbling experience. Astonished and excited to receive a comment I then commented on his comment. My comment (that’s a lot of comments) was rather flippant and, as is my bad-habit, I tried to be funny. I said that proof-reading the book was more embarrassing than humbling. The implication being that I had found a number of school-boy errors. If memory serves, I think that I even spelt embarrassing three different ways just to make my point and demonstrate how funny I am. How that has come back to haunt me. Talk about self-fulfilling prophesy. Talk about foot in mouth. Talk about dumbass.

My last blog post detailed contact made by me with an artist who is going to design some e-book covers for me.  Among other things (like money) he asked me for a sample of each of the three books that I was commissioning covers for. I duly sent them off. I did add the note that the latter two samples were still in the stages of editing and proof-reading (I was trying to cover myself for typos and the like that he would see) but that the first was ‘Kindle-ready’. I believed it was.

I had read the book in both computerised form and hard-copy. The book had gone through several drafts and edits. I had proof-read it at least five times (yes really. I would look at it again and see something that I wanted to change; an errant speech-mark, or lack of; two speakers in the same paragraph (HOW THE HELL DID THAT HAPPEN?). In the end I had to leave it or it would have consumed me. One has to say enough is enough at some point, doesn’t one? I should add here that I live in a place where I do not have the luxury of being able to call on (plague/annoy) other native English speakers to read my books for me to help me out with things that I just can no longer see because I’ve become blind to the text.

I’m so familiar with this book I could probably recite it off-by-heart. And therein lies my problem regarding proof-reading. I can’t concentrate. I can’t focus on the writing like I should and I must. I was so sure that it was ‘perfect’ and typo free that I had formatted it for Kindle and sent it off so that it could be dinged back to me and I could read it on my Kindle to check how the layout had survived the changes before pressing the publish button.

Now, picture me in bed. Sorry, let’s try that again. I’ve learned another lesson for future self-publishing: when proof-reading the book use as many formats as you can because each one can give you a different and valuable perspective not to mention the novelty value that just might see you more engaged in your task.

I didn’t see my humiliating error on the numerous read-throughs of the computerised version; I didn’t see it on the three hard-copy drafts that I printed out and went through with a fine red pen and I obviously didn’t twig when I first penned the sentence. I only saw it when I was lying in bed with my Kindle, propped up on several pillows, shawl draped around my shoulders, hot-chocolate cooling down on the bedside cabinet and looking forward to the novelty of reading my ‘finished’ book on the device (even if it was just the result of me emailing it to myself).

Enter the first chapter of the ‘Kindle-ready’ edition of the book that I sent to the cover artist. In fact make that the first effing page (talk about first impressions – excuse me while I hang my head in shame for a moment).

Can the horror and the disgrace be imagined? Can the hot flush of embarrassment that I experienced when I got to the bottom of page one and read the following be felt?

Marsh came to meet him as he stepped out of the vehicle. ‘Evening, sir.’

‘Sergeant.’ Detective Inspector Romney busied himself with his overcoat, trying to hide his disappointment. ‘Where’s Sergeant Wilkie?’ As a casual enquiry it failed.

Marsh’s features hardened a little at the implication. ‘As of this evening, sir, Sergeant Wilkie’s on maternity leave. His wife had the baby an hour ago. Also he’s a man.’

Do I have to explain it?

It took all of a nano second for my thinking and imagination to explore the probable scenario that played out in the home of the cover-designer. It probably involved lots of laughter and the summoning of friends, family and neighbours to ‘come and read this hahahah…’

I turned off the Kindle, then the bedside lamp. The hot-chocolate was left untouched. In the darkness I huddled myself down under the duvet and assumed the foetal position. I think that I might have wept before finally succumbing to sleep.

At the weekend I’m going to find some peace and quiet, some space and time.  I’m going to get myself comfortable with another hard-copy of the book, power up the Kindle again, take a deep breath. Then I’m going to read the Kindle version and annotate the hard-copy and then I’ll have to correct the computerised version and send it to myself again.

As Jesus probably said at least once, when is enough enough? So another lesson learned to pass on to myself. Thanks me. I’m welcome.

Coming soon. I’m going to enter a competition……

Every cloud has a silver lining.

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Actually, I have the silver linings of two clouds to report to myself and celebrate and neither is the result of detonations of atomic weapons.

Cloud One:

Four days ago I posted on here severely criticizing the writing of Clive Cussler. I was a good hundred pages into one of his books and not impressed would put it mildly. I wondered whether I should persevere. In the end I decided not to. I like reading too much and don’t seem to have enough time for it to waste cherished hours on books where the prose regularly grates and irritates with its banality.

Serendipitously, I stumbled across a copy of a book by Gerald Seymour called ‘Field of Blood’. I was waiting for a meeting to start and to kill a few minutes snatched it off the members’ lending shelf in the staffroom of Istanbul City Zoo, where I work part-time in the monkey house.  The book is about the troubles in Northern Ireland and dates from the eighties. Within a couple of pages I was gripped and hooked and it was all because of the quality of the man’s writing.

One of the big differences that I noticed – or perhaps I should qualify that by saying the difference that had the greatest impact on me as a writer – between Cussler’s and Seymour’s writing is how they report the dialogue. Reading Seymour reminded me of one of the ten rules of writing from one of the masters of writing dialogue: Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard. Leonard says that one should never use anything other than ‘said’ to qualify what a character has spoken. And only use ‘said’ if you have to use something. (I don’t know if he added that last bit or that’s me, but it sounds like him.) Seymour hardly uses any words to qualify the speech in this book. It’s just raw dialogue and he doesn’t inflict himself on the reading, or insult the reader’s intelligence, by dictating to the reader how every utterance must be interpreted and making it painfully obvious who it is speaking (see Cussler). In consequence the writing – and reading – flows so much better, as it bloody well should.

The silver lining of cloud one that was the Cussler reading experience is that I had the lesson about qualifying speech repeated and reinforced, paradoxically, by an example of how not to write. We all need refreshers, reminders of what to do and what not to do, no matter how sorted we think we are in whatever we are turning our creative hands to.

Cloud Two:

As I know because I’ve been following my blog closely I recently claimed to have completed my final, final proof-reading of the first Romney and Marsh File that I intend to launch my literary career with (eyebrows raised, as SN1 would say). Well, I effing well effing hadn’t.

Because of the logistics of my writing I work on three different computers when I write my books (it’s a long story about work and home). What I do is email myself the latest version/work that I’ve managed to spend an hour or two on wherever it happens to be. The plan is that, so long as I have internet access, I always have the latest version at my fingertips wherever I’m being forced to write.

When I get to finishing the first draft of the book I print it off, get it fitted with spiral thingy up the spine and plastic covers at the local stationers for a couple of Turkish lira and then I go to work with red pen on creating the next draft. I might do this three or four times until I’m happy with it. Now, because I’m going to go the e-book self-publishing route I now have to return to the computerised form of the book to update it with the editing that I did on the latest and final hard-copy. With me?

Well I did this with Enough Rope the first Romney and Marsh File and then discovered that the computerised copy that I had spent two days updating from the hard-copy revisions was not the latest computerised copy of the book that I thought it was. It was not the computerised copy of the hard-copy that I’d printed off and been working on. If I haven’t lost myself here that means that I understand that I swore a fucking lot when I twigged. And then I fucking swore a-fucking-gain. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! (Elmore also says don’t use exclamation marks. He doesn’t mind profanity.)

So, I had to go back to the latest updated-computerised-edited-version and edit that again by reading the whole effing book again thoroughly and with full effing attention on the effing computer. Not my favourite effing thing to read on. I was so effing cross with myself.

But now I’m not. I’m not cross now because it gave me another run through on the final, final, final, draft that I’m glad to have had the opportunity of despite the anguish that the realisation of it cost me. This is because of the lesson that I got from Cussler and Seymour. I had neglected to adhere strictly to Elmore’s writing rule – something that I believe strongly in – and I had let myself get involved in the reader’s interpretation of my writing.

The silver lining from cloud two is that this extra work that I gave myself has made me much, much happier with the finished article in which I found myself editing out phrases like …said Romney, enigmatically, and …answered Sergeant Marsh and …replied Romney and … questioned Marsh. All unnecessary because it was so obvious from the writing that they were replying, answering, questioning and being enigmatic.

I also learnt a really good lesson about dialogue writing and something that I am going to stick to religiously. In future drafts and writings I will only use ‘said’ to establish at the beginning of a stream of dialogue who is speaking and then, providing it’s obvious that those speakers carry on, don’t use any qualifying words at all. They get in the way and they are unnecessary. Thank you Mr Seymour.

This is how my final draft of Enough Rope is now and it’s so much better for it. It’s made such a difference. I was dreading that unnecessary extra draft that I’d created for myself with my mistake but I so enjoyed the paring down of the writing and getting myself out of the reader’s face. I enjoyed it because every single word that I ditched made me happy and the book better. I’ll say it again because I want to and it’s my blog – the book is so much better for it.

So two clouds, but valuable lessons learned, as they always seem to say after another terrible and costly tragedy – not that I’m considering the forthcoming e-publishing of my book ‘another terrible and costly tragedy’.

As for the Seymour book, I tucked it under my jumper when the meeting was over – I don’t have a library card – I’m half-way through and I think Mr Seymour is bloody good. So, I have more good news for myself: I now have another fine writer to ferret around for the output of. Bonus.