Once again I've taken matters into my own hands and gone via Kindle Direct Publishing to publish my horror novel Dark Eve. It's £2.17 in the UK and $3.50 in the US. You can find it here: Dark Eve
After my disastrous foray into Lulu, I'm hoping that the more reasonable price-point for this novel will encourage more people to buy it.
Will
Monday 29 October 2012
Monday 1 October 2012
Stuff's happening.
My blogging has slowed down even more of late, as you three people who read it may notice.
This is because I've been doing stuff for The Gamer's Challenge at the moment. It's taking a bit of my time. I will be back with more nonsense, though. Will
This is because I've been doing stuff for The Gamer's Challenge at the moment. It's taking a bit of my time. I will be back with more nonsense, though. Will
Thursday 6 September 2012
Swirly-whirly.
Oh shit, look out. They're moving around – reshuffling as they like to call it. Another chapter in the current cycle of Torygeddon started up again this week with MPs coming back from the summer recess and David Cameron shouting, "Change places!" showing, again that his medication isn't at all up to snuff.
The reshuffle itself is pretty much inconsequential, we've still got the same collection of dead-eyed mutant entitled arse shavings that we had before MPs were moved into different seats. Yes, some of the people put in place will allow the PM to do what he wants that little bit more easily. Like, for example, strapping on his Edward Scissorhands gloves and flailing at the NHS and the welfare state, because poor people shouldn't be allowed the security and health that he's never had to worry about. The two institutions are, in England at least*, already bloody and torn messes. That's okay because, idealogue ole Davey-wavey-scumbag doesn't see anything wrong with damaging the people who actually do the grunt work in the country.
Gideon Osborne still resides on his throne as Chancellor of the Exchequer, replete with giant butt plug, sans lube, to make sure he maintains the look of a man who's thirty seconds away from shitting himself with glee or dismissing peasants to go and work in the mines. He doesn't care what mines, any mines, arsenic mines that have been closed for decades, just as long as their in mines, that's where the poor (read non-millionaires) belong.
It amused me to hear about Osborne being booed at the Paralympics the other day. Look at that gommy motherfucker, he doesn't even have the decency to look ashamed of himself for the mess he and the rest of the government have left people with disabilities in. The man's clearly had some kind of shame bypass, which isn't a huge shock, how else can you account for him going out of the house with a face like that for all these years.
Cameron's not even pretending the Lib Dems have got any kind of sway any more. He's just moved more Tory ghouls from one place to another. Lots of nasty pieces of work like Jeremy Hunt as health secretary, who was under investigation for his handling of News Corp's dodgy bid to buy BSkyB and is known to be against the NHS, stem cell research and anti-abortion. Wonder what he'll be doing then. Whatever it is, I bet it won't involve any lube and will end up with lots of people with worse or no health care.
Then there's this cunt, Chris Grayling who cheated the system for £127,000 of expenses and has now been put in charge of the Department of Work and Pensions. Just the person to look after the benefits of the most vulnerable in our society. Let me reiterate that for those who nodded off: another very rich man who will happily fuck the system to get even more money and will shit on people will virtually nothing, from a great height. I think that sums it up nicely.
And let's not forget the nice, tolerant Maria Miller, who's been made minister of equality. A woman who's so into her equality that she's voted against gay rights issues on numerous occasions. She's minister for EQUALITY. Do we see a problem here? David Cameron clearly doesn't as he's happy to have this intolerant dolt in the position. He might as well just set the Catholic church up in an equality council.
That's only a small selection of the horrible bastards the Prime Minister has put in place to screw the country over that little bit more. And old Nick Clegg and the rest of his party look on with happy grins, letting all this happen. Thanks, Nick you spineless scrap of junk sperm.
So here we are, in the early part of the twenty-first century, governed by a regressive bunch of over privileged shits** pulling bits from the country's infrastructure like the highest-stakes game of Jenga in the world. Fucking cunts.
* I will reiterate that I'm Scottish, but it doesn't mean I'm happy about this shit going down.
** Or partially in my case. Scotland's devolved government gives us a buffer against the fuckers.
Will
The reshuffle itself is pretty much inconsequential, we've still got the same collection of dead-eyed mutant entitled arse shavings that we had before MPs were moved into different seats. Yes, some of the people put in place will allow the PM to do what he wants that little bit more easily. Like, for example, strapping on his Edward Scissorhands gloves and flailing at the NHS and the welfare state, because poor people shouldn't be allowed the security and health that he's never had to worry about. The two institutions are, in England at least*, already bloody and torn messes. That's okay because, idealogue ole Davey-wavey-scumbag doesn't see anything wrong with damaging the people who actually do the grunt work in the country.
Gideon Osborne still resides on his throne as Chancellor of the Exchequer, replete with giant butt plug, sans lube, to make sure he maintains the look of a man who's thirty seconds away from shitting himself with glee or dismissing peasants to go and work in the mines. He doesn't care what mines, any mines, arsenic mines that have been closed for decades, just as long as their in mines, that's where the poor (read non-millionaires) belong.
It amused me to hear about Osborne being booed at the Paralympics the other day. Look at that gommy motherfucker, he doesn't even have the decency to look ashamed of himself for the mess he and the rest of the government have left people with disabilities in. The man's clearly had some kind of shame bypass, which isn't a huge shock, how else can you account for him going out of the house with a face like that for all these years.
Cameron's not even pretending the Lib Dems have got any kind of sway any more. He's just moved more Tory ghouls from one place to another. Lots of nasty pieces of work like Jeremy Hunt as health secretary, who was under investigation for his handling of News Corp's dodgy bid to buy BSkyB and is known to be against the NHS, stem cell research and anti-abortion. Wonder what he'll be doing then. Whatever it is, I bet it won't involve any lube and will end up with lots of people with worse or no health care.
Then there's this cunt, Chris Grayling who cheated the system for £127,000 of expenses and has now been put in charge of the Department of Work and Pensions. Just the person to look after the benefits of the most vulnerable in our society. Let me reiterate that for those who nodded off: another very rich man who will happily fuck the system to get even more money and will shit on people will virtually nothing, from a great height. I think that sums it up nicely.
And let's not forget the nice, tolerant Maria Miller, who's been made minister of equality. A woman who's so into her equality that she's voted against gay rights issues on numerous occasions. She's minister for EQUALITY. Do we see a problem here? David Cameron clearly doesn't as he's happy to have this intolerant dolt in the position. He might as well just set the Catholic church up in an equality council.
That's only a small selection of the horrible bastards the Prime Minister has put in place to screw the country over that little bit more. And old Nick Clegg and the rest of his party look on with happy grins, letting all this happen. Thanks, Nick you spineless scrap of junk sperm.
So here we are, in the early part of the twenty-first century, governed by a regressive bunch of over privileged shits** pulling bits from the country's infrastructure like the highest-stakes game of Jenga in the world. Fucking cunts.
* I will reiterate that I'm Scottish, but it doesn't mean I'm happy about this shit going down.
** Or partially in my case. Scotland's devolved government gives us a buffer against the fuckers.
Will
Monday 27 August 2012
Riffling some brain folds.
On the off chance it's escaped your attention, I like films. I like all kinds of films. Horror, action, comedy, fantasy, thrillers, dramas and on rare instances even a western. I have a curious relationship with the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Yes, that's a brave statement to make, I know, I'm a hero. You can sit down from your ovation now and let me speak so that you, too, may understand.
I'm also going to nonchalantly spoil the film here. In further addition I'm going to repeat some things that dozens of other people have gone over in the past, live with this, get through; I think you'll find it's worth it. If not the doors over there, you whiny cunt.
When I first saw the film, in my mid-teens, I thought it was a fantastic film about a teenager bucking the system and skipping school with his friends to live large in Chicago for one day. The ease with which he outsmarted anyone who dared get in his way (this wording is important) I found comedically and narratively satisfying. When it seems he's about to get busted by his jealous, uptight sister that satisfaction when she softens and realises he's not quite so bad after all (you, know after she hooked up with a grotty-looking drug dealer* in a police station) is a moment of dramatic tension that settles you in for the climax. I enjoyed the film, is what I'm getting at.
Now, fast forward the better part of twenty years. There I am, sitting in front of the television looking for something to watch and I stumble on the film in question. Now everything that I loved from my adolescent viewings is still there: the teen rebellion, the hapless determination of the teacher, the parking attendants fucking the trio over, the faint hope that one of Sloane's boobs will pop out in that hot tub bit. However something else started to edge its way into my adult brain, something that set the hackles of my grown up sensibilities quivering. I was still enjoying this film, but I couldn't shake the feeling of nebulous outrage that took me until the end of the film to pin down.
Ferris Bueller is a horribly entitled and over-privileged shitweed! The revelation was like being slapped in the face with the week old corpse of a dog. Almost everything he does in the film is hideously reprehensible in some way. The way he emotionally blackmails his best friend into going with him. Hacking the school's computer. He commits several kinds of fraud** including impersonating a police officer. Grand larceny and makes Sloane and poor, poor Cameron accessories. And he does it all with a cocksure smile on his face that says, "Yeah, man, I should be allowed to do this. Why should the law apply to me, I'm fucking awesome!" and lo, he gets away with every criminal act and every instance of horrendous psychological torture he inflicts on Cameron†.
My sense of outrage was only stoked further when I realised I still liked the fucking film! How can this be? My new viewing revealed to me that Ferris Bueller was a reprehensible slime ball who would happily destroy the lives of people around him as long as he got a laugh out of it. He's an avatar of the '80s yuppie culture and everything I hate about the modern world. I put it down to the charming storytelling of John Hughes (RIP) and the supporting cast of flawed and likeable characters. You know, with the obvious exception of Ferris Bueller and the need to tell us everyone likes him when there's really nothing redeeming about him.
As an aside, I was witness to one of the worst Freddie Mercury impersonators (or impersonator of any kind) ever this weekend. It got me wondering if the guy was taking some kind of bizarre revenge out on the late singer because of some kind of trauma. For some reason it got me thinking about this next bit.
In case no one's noticed, I consider myself something of a writer, these rambling, incoherent blog blabbings notwithstanding. I started thinking about Ferris Bueller's Day Off and what could be done with a sequel. I'd had the same thoughts for another John Hughes classic: Weird Science‡. I've even gone in a similar direction.
For this little bit of speculation, we begin with Ferris Bueller, twenty-six years later. He's been to college, got a degree and gone into the same line of work as his father (whatever that was – vague business man?), got married to Sloane, had a couple of kids, got divorced from Sloane and is now living with his girlfriend who is still in college and looks almost identical to Sloane. He's got a good life.
One day he comes back from work to find his teenage son waiting for him in the flat. Ferris's son, let's call him Tom after Ferris's father, is a lot like Ferris, in that he's confident, successful and has wanted for nothing in life. Ferris knows something's up and his suspicion is horribly realised when he finds the raped and strangled corpse of his wife on the floor. Tom says she reminded him of his mother.
Ferris begins to help his son dispose of the body, but as he goes about this he learns more and more about his son's secret life of sneaking around without Sloane's knowledge and murdering hobos, as well as possibly Ferris's parents and dealing drugs. Ferris realises Tom's even more of a sociopath than he ever was and has to make the decision whether to put an end to Tom's murderous ways or cover up for his son. Then he realises he'll go to jail too and decides to cover up the murder and help young Tom in the future. Cos he'll be fucked if he goes down for someone else's murder.
There you have it a Ferris Bueller sequel fitting for the character. I didn't say it was going to be comedy, did I?
* Bonus! Played by Charlie Sheen!
** Admittedly one of the instances of fraud is down to the mass gullibility of his school-age contemporaries in what must have been the worst school of all time, but it still all stems from him being a dicky wad of manipulative shit.
† I can't really count poor Sloane, because, while she shows every sign that she should be very intelligent, for most of the film she wanders around with an empty-eyed grin, passively going along with whatever Ferris suggests.
‡ This one actually stands up to my recent viewings, probably because it's fucking bonkers and the Ferris Bueller-type characters are the utter bastards they should be.
Will
I'm also going to nonchalantly spoil the film here. In further addition I'm going to repeat some things that dozens of other people have gone over in the past, live with this, get through; I think you'll find it's worth it. If not the doors over there, you whiny cunt.
When I first saw the film, in my mid-teens, I thought it was a fantastic film about a teenager bucking the system and skipping school with his friends to live large in Chicago for one day. The ease with which he outsmarted anyone who dared get in his way (this wording is important) I found comedically and narratively satisfying. When it seems he's about to get busted by his jealous, uptight sister that satisfaction when she softens and realises he's not quite so bad after all (you, know after she hooked up with a grotty-looking drug dealer* in a police station) is a moment of dramatic tension that settles you in for the climax. I enjoyed the film, is what I'm getting at.
Now, fast forward the better part of twenty years. There I am, sitting in front of the television looking for something to watch and I stumble on the film in question. Now everything that I loved from my adolescent viewings is still there: the teen rebellion, the hapless determination of the teacher, the parking attendants fucking the trio over, the faint hope that one of Sloane's boobs will pop out in that hot tub bit. However something else started to edge its way into my adult brain, something that set the hackles of my grown up sensibilities quivering. I was still enjoying this film, but I couldn't shake the feeling of nebulous outrage that took me until the end of the film to pin down.
Ferris Bueller is a horribly entitled and over-privileged shitweed! The revelation was like being slapped in the face with the week old corpse of a dog. Almost everything he does in the film is hideously reprehensible in some way. The way he emotionally blackmails his best friend into going with him. Hacking the school's computer. He commits several kinds of fraud** including impersonating a police officer. Grand larceny and makes Sloane and poor, poor Cameron accessories. And he does it all with a cocksure smile on his face that says, "Yeah, man, I should be allowed to do this. Why should the law apply to me, I'm fucking awesome!" and lo, he gets away with every criminal act and every instance of horrendous psychological torture he inflicts on Cameron†.
My sense of outrage was only stoked further when I realised I still liked the fucking film! How can this be? My new viewing revealed to me that Ferris Bueller was a reprehensible slime ball who would happily destroy the lives of people around him as long as he got a laugh out of it. He's an avatar of the '80s yuppie culture and everything I hate about the modern world. I put it down to the charming storytelling of John Hughes (RIP) and the supporting cast of flawed and likeable characters. You know, with the obvious exception of Ferris Bueller and the need to tell us everyone likes him when there's really nothing redeeming about him.
As an aside, I was witness to one of the worst Freddie Mercury impersonators (or impersonator of any kind) ever this weekend. It got me wondering if the guy was taking some kind of bizarre revenge out on the late singer because of some kind of trauma. For some reason it got me thinking about this next bit.
In case no one's noticed, I consider myself something of a writer, these rambling, incoherent blog blabbings notwithstanding. I started thinking about Ferris Bueller's Day Off and what could be done with a sequel. I'd had the same thoughts for another John Hughes classic: Weird Science‡. I've even gone in a similar direction.
For this little bit of speculation, we begin with Ferris Bueller, twenty-six years later. He's been to college, got a degree and gone into the same line of work as his father (whatever that was – vague business man?), got married to Sloane, had a couple of kids, got divorced from Sloane and is now living with his girlfriend who is still in college and looks almost identical to Sloane. He's got a good life.
One day he comes back from work to find his teenage son waiting for him in the flat. Ferris's son, let's call him Tom after Ferris's father, is a lot like Ferris, in that he's confident, successful and has wanted for nothing in life. Ferris knows something's up and his suspicion is horribly realised when he finds the raped and strangled corpse of his wife on the floor. Tom says she reminded him of his mother.
Ferris begins to help his son dispose of the body, but as he goes about this he learns more and more about his son's secret life of sneaking around without Sloane's knowledge and murdering hobos, as well as possibly Ferris's parents and dealing drugs. Ferris realises Tom's even more of a sociopath than he ever was and has to make the decision whether to put an end to Tom's murderous ways or cover up for his son. Then he realises he'll go to jail too and decides to cover up the murder and help young Tom in the future. Cos he'll be fucked if he goes down for someone else's murder.
There you have it a Ferris Bueller sequel fitting for the character. I didn't say it was going to be comedy, did I?
* Bonus! Played by Charlie Sheen!
** Admittedly one of the instances of fraud is down to the mass gullibility of his school-age contemporaries in what must have been the worst school of all time, but it still all stems from him being a dicky wad of manipulative shit.
† I can't really count poor Sloane, because, while she shows every sign that she should be very intelligent, for most of the film she wanders around with an empty-eyed grin, passively going along with whatever Ferris suggests.
‡ This one actually stands up to my recent viewings, probably because it's fucking bonkers and the Ferris Bueller-type characters are the utter bastards they should be.
Will
Friday 17 August 2012
Go Slower Squiggles
Hello, friends! It is I, Fabrizio Giullare, your favourite author. Since I last spoke to you there has been a major development in my career: I've gone into writing movie scripts. Yes, you read that right, and I'm so pleased about it. Though, I'm not surprised; it was only a matter of time before someone recognised the genius of pieces such as Little Plants and Fluff and Corkscrew Bandana Dancers. It did take them longer than I'd anticipated, mind you.
What did take me by surprise was the direction that the production company wanted me to go in: horror. Now, I've never shied away from any genre, but I've never found myself dipping my toes in the same waters as Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft or anyone else with three names. The man from Broad Tedium Films is a very persuasive person and convinced both myself and my agent that my personal style fits and this would be a fantastic idea.
So this left me with something of a dilemma. I've never watched any horror films either. So I got down to my local rental place and picked up a few movies that sounded good. I didn't go for anything that had been given a theatrical release, as I thought that would just be vulgar, instead going for offerings that had gone straight to DVD. I watched several of them over the course of a most educational week and gleaned what I could from them.
I had the tools required to create a fantastic horror tale. Granted, some of the tools were already in my possession.
For example I'm a firm believer in 'Why have drama when you can have turgid sequences of nothing happening?' and it looks like most of these horror film makers have that same wonderful philosophy – Dread and The Broken being fine examples of this. My own fifteen hundred page novel Clogged Pores in Pall Mall is about one man staring at a drop of water going down a wall. It's something of a masterpiece and a personal triumph for me. Seeing that I could bring that kind of unrelenting lack of event to the screen filled me with a giant, quivering sense of excitement.
Then there's the greatly overrated trait of internal story logic. Why have a character do something that makes any kind of sense in favour of having them jump in random directions? I love to set up characters who, for example, clearly hate and fear cows to then have them go and purchase one as a pet, without one word of explanation. That jarring sense of confusion is just what the reader or, in this case, the watcher needs to make sure they stick around. It's one of my favourite writer's tools.
Of course I have had to wade out into the deep waters of brevity for this project, but then you can't have everything. I've just had to make sure the film seems like it's twelve hours long.
All in all I think I've done a damned fine job on it. I can't wait for Windmilling Arms to appear on the shelves of rental shops and music store chains.
Happy writing!
What did take me by surprise was the direction that the production company wanted me to go in: horror. Now, I've never shied away from any genre, but I've never found myself dipping my toes in the same waters as Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft or anyone else with three names. The man from Broad Tedium Films is a very persuasive person and convinced both myself and my agent that my personal style fits and this would be a fantastic idea.
So this left me with something of a dilemma. I've never watched any horror films either. So I got down to my local rental place and picked up a few movies that sounded good. I didn't go for anything that had been given a theatrical release, as I thought that would just be vulgar, instead going for offerings that had gone straight to DVD. I watched several of them over the course of a most educational week and gleaned what I could from them.
I had the tools required to create a fantastic horror tale. Granted, some of the tools were already in my possession.
For example I'm a firm believer in 'Why have drama when you can have turgid sequences of nothing happening?' and it looks like most of these horror film makers have that same wonderful philosophy – Dread and The Broken being fine examples of this. My own fifteen hundred page novel Clogged Pores in Pall Mall is about one man staring at a drop of water going down a wall. It's something of a masterpiece and a personal triumph for me. Seeing that I could bring that kind of unrelenting lack of event to the screen filled me with a giant, quivering sense of excitement.
Then there's the greatly overrated trait of internal story logic. Why have a character do something that makes any kind of sense in favour of having them jump in random directions? I love to set up characters who, for example, clearly hate and fear cows to then have them go and purchase one as a pet, without one word of explanation. That jarring sense of confusion is just what the reader or, in this case, the watcher needs to make sure they stick around. It's one of my favourite writer's tools.
Of course I have had to wade out into the deep waters of brevity for this project, but then you can't have everything. I've just had to make sure the film seems like it's twelve hours long.
All in all I think I've done a damned fine job on it. I can't wait for Windmilling Arms to appear on the shelves of rental shops and music store chains.
Happy writing!
Wednesday 1 August 2012
Process tardiness
And I'm back from my huff. Wasn't all that depression fun? It certainly gets things done.
A couple of the above sentences are false in some way. I bet you can't tell which ones.
The last week I've been busy doing things. Quite a bit of it is an attempt to fill my sad, echoing coffers with some money. I don't know if I want to go into that, though, as it's something that could be seen as cripplingly embarrassing – the way of making money, not being skint. Maybe one day I'll enlighten those who don't read my Twitter about that.*
In between the task of trying to scrape money from an unexpected source, I've been writing. At the moment I'm not writing full stories. I have a few ideas for novels and I want to hash out the plots first, kind of like thinking out loud, only on paper. I've also been pinning down ideas for a short story and a short comic script, at least one of which I hope will be allowed out into the world, as long as it's muzzled and neutered.
The rant from last week did have a result, though (thanks to everyone who showed some support, it was much appreciated). Someone mentioned that I should try to self e-publish at least one of the novels. Self-publishing is something I've done before and what I said about Lulu.com being a fucking disaster still stands, but e-publishing might be a little less painful.**
So, I looked through a couple of e-publishers and after a bit of deliberation, and a false start, I chose to try Kindle Direct Publishing.
Now, now, quiet down, your abuse is making my monitor vibrate. Let me explain.
It's all a matter of practicality. I dismissed Lulu out of hand because they are a bit shitty. I looked at Smash Words, and would have gone with them, but there was a major problem: fucking around with U.S. tax laws. I'd had similar problems when I attempted to publish the Crown Wearer novella through CreateSpace. You need to send forms to the IRS in order to get any money from U.S. companies and this seems to involve sending away a passport for ID.
Now, I'm dubious about this when it's my own country, but sending this stuff away, across the Atlantic, to vanish into foreign monolithic bureaucracy is even riskier in my mind†. Just thinking about it now makes my bowels quake. There's also the rather more practical problem that my passport's run out this year. So, while Smash Words was ideal for me in every other way, that knocked it out of contention, leaving me with Kindle Direct Publishing.
And this is going slowly. My money woes make it difficult for me to get front cover art, since (rightly), the artists I know who are willing to help me out are going to do their paying gigs before getting round to me. Which means waiting. I'm going to make myself wait anyway, because once it's all ready I'm going hold off and unleash it on a Monday. I don't know if that will help my chances, but it's got to be better than going, "Ah-ha! I've finished, now let's get it out into the world at three on a Sunday morning!"
All this is a really long way of saying, I'm going to publish a novel, as an experiment, through Kindle and if I get any success with that I'll put another novel that's failed to hook agents and publishers.
* Comment if you read my Twitter, go on, I fucking dare you.
** Or it could deepen my mortification and cement me as that writer you know who just can't quite make it. Either way you'll get a laugh, and that's really what's important, right, you sadist?
† If anyone knows of a an easier way to do it, I'd love to hear it.
Will
A couple of the above sentences are false in some way. I bet you can't tell which ones.
The last week I've been busy doing things. Quite a bit of it is an attempt to fill my sad, echoing coffers with some money. I don't know if I want to go into that, though, as it's something that could be seen as cripplingly embarrassing – the way of making money, not being skint. Maybe one day I'll enlighten those who don't read my Twitter about that.*
In between the task of trying to scrape money from an unexpected source, I've been writing. At the moment I'm not writing full stories. I have a few ideas for novels and I want to hash out the plots first, kind of like thinking out loud, only on paper. I've also been pinning down ideas for a short story and a short comic script, at least one of which I hope will be allowed out into the world, as long as it's muzzled and neutered.
The rant from last week did have a result, though (thanks to everyone who showed some support, it was much appreciated). Someone mentioned that I should try to self e-publish at least one of the novels. Self-publishing is something I've done before and what I said about Lulu.com being a fucking disaster still stands, but e-publishing might be a little less painful.**
So, I looked through a couple of e-publishers and after a bit of deliberation, and a false start, I chose to try Kindle Direct Publishing.
Now, now, quiet down, your abuse is making my monitor vibrate. Let me explain.
It's all a matter of practicality. I dismissed Lulu out of hand because they are a bit shitty. I looked at Smash Words, and would have gone with them, but there was a major problem: fucking around with U.S. tax laws. I'd had similar problems when I attempted to publish the Crown Wearer novella through CreateSpace. You need to send forms to the IRS in order to get any money from U.S. companies and this seems to involve sending away a passport for ID.
Now, I'm dubious about this when it's my own country, but sending this stuff away, across the Atlantic, to vanish into foreign monolithic bureaucracy is even riskier in my mind†. Just thinking about it now makes my bowels quake. There's also the rather more practical problem that my passport's run out this year. So, while Smash Words was ideal for me in every other way, that knocked it out of contention, leaving me with Kindle Direct Publishing.
And this is going slowly. My money woes make it difficult for me to get front cover art, since (rightly), the artists I know who are willing to help me out are going to do their paying gigs before getting round to me. Which means waiting. I'm going to make myself wait anyway, because once it's all ready I'm going hold off and unleash it on a Monday. I don't know if that will help my chances, but it's got to be better than going, "Ah-ha! I've finished, now let's get it out into the world at three on a Sunday morning!"
All this is a really long way of saying, I'm going to publish a novel, as an experiment, through Kindle and if I get any success with that I'll put another novel that's failed to hook agents and publishers.
* Comment if you read my Twitter, go on, I fucking dare you.
** Or it could deepen my mortification and cement me as that writer you know who just can't quite make it. Either way you'll get a laugh, and that's really what's important, right, you sadist?
† If anyone knows of a an easier way to do it, I'd love to hear it.
Will
Tuesday 24 July 2012
A Tottering Pile
Well, look at that, another rejection. It's the frustrating grind that every writer knows, when you feel like you're putting your best work out there and it's just bouncing off the impervious skins of cynical agents and editors. I get it, not everything can appeal to everyone and so many people want to be writers, yada yada yada. There's been screeds and screeds written on that subject and frankly it's mostly padded out with platitudes and helpless shrugs of the shoulders. It's kind of inevitable, and when you find yourself doing it you feel like a helpless dick. No one profits from it and everyone walks away in a deeper depression, their faith in writing and publishing bashed a little more.
I've come to the realisation that a couple of the novels I've been trying to get published for while are never going to see the light of day. It's even more depressing than the tidal wave of rejections, when you realise the book you've written, read over, re-written, re-read again and re-written numerous times just isn't making an impact with anyone. For me, that's no impact whatsoever. There are people out there who get encouraging rejections. Good for them. I get the standard 'go away' or I get nothing. I'm going to stop there, because that conversation's a route to fucking suicide.
So what becomes of these sad, unwanted pieces of literary detritus? They sit and they moulder, in my experience. All that work and effort only to be chucked in a metaphorical pile to gather dust and dusty cobwebs. That pile of mine is getting big, padded out by the short stories and comic scripts that just can't find a home. It's like an animal shelter where no one even looks at the animals, let alone gives any hope they'll be adopted. I've been writing for a long time, churning out novels and short stories since I was sixteen. The first few novels I wrote, I knew not long after they were finished wouldn't go anywhere (they were hand written, for a start) so they've made a cosy base for the growing pile of pages I'm building up that no one gives any indication they want to look at.
I understand why no one wants to touch at least one of the books: it's derivative and messy, so really why I tried so hard to get it out there is beyond me. A whole lot of wasted effort right there. Maybe it's because I get pulled into the trap of looking at the worst that's out there and thinking, "If that can get published..." before sending off the sample chapters. This is, of course, tremendous folly and leads to disappointment and the writing of long-winded blog rambles.
The book that prompted this particular ramble is one I wrote a long time ago, and took quite some time to get from my brain and onto the page, thanks to life getting in the way in one way or another (although I did manage to write a Warhammer 40,000 novel in the middle, that will also never, ever be seen by anyone but me) and I feel quite bad that it won't get a chance. Partly it's because I waited so long to get it out and partly because it's horror of a particular length the outlets for are almost nil.*
I often think that I was born a decade too late. If I'd been writing around the early to mid eighties, when horror novels were de rigueur, then I might have had more of a chance, but, since the early nineties, the kind of horror I like to write, and read, has tailed off to a great extent. I know a lot of people who will tell you this kind of fiction is still going strong, but I don't really see it. Then I have to wonder if I'm looking closely enough.
I'm thankful to the small group of people who've taken a chance on my writing and given it a wider audience. It's great to see something that was once a raw twitch in the middle of my brain offered the opportunity to fly. I keep hoping that the accumulation of work will make people sit up and take notice of me and I might actually start to get some money for this crazy path I've put myself on.
So, here I sit, with a pile of unwanted manuscripts, like a terrible execution device of my own creation that's leaning over my head, always ready for that extra few pages that will finally make it topple and have done with me. And I keep playing the crazy, obsessed hermit, feeding it and creating my own doom.
* The first person to mention Lulu.com gets a punch in the throat while I fucking weep.
Will
I've come to the realisation that a couple of the novels I've been trying to get published for while are never going to see the light of day. It's even more depressing than the tidal wave of rejections, when you realise the book you've written, read over, re-written, re-read again and re-written numerous times just isn't making an impact with anyone. For me, that's no impact whatsoever. There are people out there who get encouraging rejections. Good for them. I get the standard 'go away' or I get nothing. I'm going to stop there, because that conversation's a route to fucking suicide.
So what becomes of these sad, unwanted pieces of literary detritus? They sit and they moulder, in my experience. All that work and effort only to be chucked in a metaphorical pile to gather dust and dusty cobwebs. That pile of mine is getting big, padded out by the short stories and comic scripts that just can't find a home. It's like an animal shelter where no one even looks at the animals, let alone gives any hope they'll be adopted. I've been writing for a long time, churning out novels and short stories since I was sixteen. The first few novels I wrote, I knew not long after they were finished wouldn't go anywhere (they were hand written, for a start) so they've made a cosy base for the growing pile of pages I'm building up that no one gives any indication they want to look at.
I understand why no one wants to touch at least one of the books: it's derivative and messy, so really why I tried so hard to get it out there is beyond me. A whole lot of wasted effort right there. Maybe it's because I get pulled into the trap of looking at the worst that's out there and thinking, "If that can get published..." before sending off the sample chapters. This is, of course, tremendous folly and leads to disappointment and the writing of long-winded blog rambles.
The book that prompted this particular ramble is one I wrote a long time ago, and took quite some time to get from my brain and onto the page, thanks to life getting in the way in one way or another (although I did manage to write a Warhammer 40,000 novel in the middle, that will also never, ever be seen by anyone but me) and I feel quite bad that it won't get a chance. Partly it's because I waited so long to get it out and partly because it's horror of a particular length the outlets for are almost nil.*
I often think that I was born a decade too late. If I'd been writing around the early to mid eighties, when horror novels were de rigueur, then I might have had more of a chance, but, since the early nineties, the kind of horror I like to write, and read, has tailed off to a great extent. I know a lot of people who will tell you this kind of fiction is still going strong, but I don't really see it. Then I have to wonder if I'm looking closely enough.
I'm thankful to the small group of people who've taken a chance on my writing and given it a wider audience. It's great to see something that was once a raw twitch in the middle of my brain offered the opportunity to fly. I keep hoping that the accumulation of work will make people sit up and take notice of me and I might actually start to get some money for this crazy path I've put myself on.
So, here I sit, with a pile of unwanted manuscripts, like a terrible execution device of my own creation that's leaning over my head, always ready for that extra few pages that will finally make it topple and have done with me. And I keep playing the crazy, obsessed hermit, feeding it and creating my own doom.
* The first person to mention Lulu.com gets a punch in the throat while I fucking weep.
Will
Monday 16 July 2012
Gaaaaasssssp!
And finally I re-emerge. Criminy, that was some hard writing. I've been crowing about this a bit elsewhere, but once more isn't going to hurt anyone:
250,000 words, motherfuckers! Ha!
I don't even know who that's aimed at. Maybe at the last person, other than me, who looks at this blog.*
The novel version of Crown Wearer has had a long, tough journey. It took me forever to get up off my arse to start the thing in the first place and then another aeon passed before I got organised enough to make a proper go of it. And that only happened once I stopped being intimidated by the length I initially thought it was going to be – a length it exceeded by about 70,000 words.
Now, to some people, all this talk of word counts is meaningless. I sympathise with you, I really do. Actually, I envy you. Not knowing the significance of word count would make my life a whole lot easier as a writer. I imagine being able to sit down at the computer, grinning from ear to ear, with my mug with the rainbow on the side, filled with more rainbows and clack out a couple of thousand words, no worries. There are some days like that, y'know, without that weird rainbow business, but a lot of days are wrangling and subduing words that end up not being right anyway. And, yes, that does involve a lot of staring off into the middle distance, it's an intellectual pursuit.**
So now I'm left with this manuscript, damp from brain juice and imagination placenta. What am I going to do with it? Who could possibly want this smelly, sticky brick of a manuscript from a writer who's never had a book published outside of a couple of disastrous Lulu attempts? Not my priority at the moment, is the answer (I bet you thought I was going to go on a rant, faithless bastards). For now what I'm going to do is follow the advice of every writer out there and leave it the fuck alone. That's right, it's going to sit on my various storage devices for a couple of months while I do other things and get a little distance between myself and it.
Unlike a good cheese, when I cut through the rind of the novel I won't be rewarded with the sweet nutty taste of aged milk, I'll be confronted by the horror of what I've actually written. Something riddled with spelling and grammar errors. Something that doesn't make a lick of sense because of a network of glaringly embarrassing plot holes. Hey, look at that, another cheese analogy.†
And I'll be lost again. Knee deep in the toxic porridge I've crusted the page with in hopes that some kind person will take pity on this mangled wretch and publish this monster of a book‡
For now, I'm back, ready to spew my neurotic semi-psychotic ramblings at your brain craters. We're going to have fun, dammit!
* The person who came back and thought this time it would be different. Sucker.
** Only geniuses and idiots claim they can bang out stories without thinking about it. If anyone you know says this and unless you know for certain otherwise slap that fucking idiot.
† I really want some Norwegian brown cheese. The stuff sounds amazing.
‡ It's only a partial monster. My research tells me it's at the lower end in length of one of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books. And less than half the length of things like War and Peace, The Stand and Atlas Shrugged, so there you go.
Will
250,000 words, motherfuckers! Ha!
I don't even know who that's aimed at. Maybe at the last person, other than me, who looks at this blog.*
The novel version of Crown Wearer has had a long, tough journey. It took me forever to get up off my arse to start the thing in the first place and then another aeon passed before I got organised enough to make a proper go of it. And that only happened once I stopped being intimidated by the length I initially thought it was going to be – a length it exceeded by about 70,000 words.
Now, to some people, all this talk of word counts is meaningless. I sympathise with you, I really do. Actually, I envy you. Not knowing the significance of word count would make my life a whole lot easier as a writer. I imagine being able to sit down at the computer, grinning from ear to ear, with my mug with the rainbow on the side, filled with more rainbows and clack out a couple of thousand words, no worries. There are some days like that, y'know, without that weird rainbow business, but a lot of days are wrangling and subduing words that end up not being right anyway. And, yes, that does involve a lot of staring off into the middle distance, it's an intellectual pursuit.**
So now I'm left with this manuscript, damp from brain juice and imagination placenta. What am I going to do with it? Who could possibly want this smelly, sticky brick of a manuscript from a writer who's never had a book published outside of a couple of disastrous Lulu attempts? Not my priority at the moment, is the answer (I bet you thought I was going to go on a rant, faithless bastards). For now what I'm going to do is follow the advice of every writer out there and leave it the fuck alone. That's right, it's going to sit on my various storage devices for a couple of months while I do other things and get a little distance between myself and it.
Unlike a good cheese, when I cut through the rind of the novel I won't be rewarded with the sweet nutty taste of aged milk, I'll be confronted by the horror of what I've actually written. Something riddled with spelling and grammar errors. Something that doesn't make a lick of sense because of a network of glaringly embarrassing plot holes. Hey, look at that, another cheese analogy.†
And I'll be lost again. Knee deep in the toxic porridge I've crusted the page with in hopes that some kind person will take pity on this mangled wretch and publish this monster of a book‡
For now, I'm back, ready to spew my neurotic semi-psychotic ramblings at your brain craters. We're going to have fun, dammit!
* The person who came back and thought this time it would be different. Sucker.
** Only geniuses and idiots claim they can bang out stories without thinking about it. If anyone you know says this and unless you know for certain otherwise slap that fucking idiot.
† I really want some Norwegian brown cheese. The stuff sounds amazing.
‡ It's only a partial monster. My research tells me it's at the lower end in length of one of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books. And less than half the length of things like War and Peace, The Stand and Atlas Shrugged, so there you go.
Will
Thursday 14 June 2012
There's actual sunlight?
My, but I like my films. I enjoy sitting and letting myself be taken away by a story. Or failing that, I enjoy mocking the cack-fisted attempts at story thrown together, recorded and called a film.
In the last month or so I've been watching a lot of films. I've gone through more new (for me) films in the last few weeks than I've seen in the previous two years. It's left my head crammed with all sorts of silliness, so I thought I'd spray you with some nonsense about my film-viewing.
You won't be surprised to learn that a lot of this will be negative, with Viewing Joe that I am pointing and laughing at the pitiful abortions plastered on the screen in hopes of eking money from me. And they might want to entertain, too, but it's harder to prove that.
Micmacs is a prime example of a jolly good film. It has 'we are crazy French film makers' plastered all over it, but that's fine, because it's charming and you actually like this odd collection of characters and you can't help but applaud what they're doing.
Not something that can be said for Dread. I should have been on my guard the moment one of the half dozen or so producers was Clive Barker. Pushing aside my misgivings I watched and an age passed, humanity went extinct around me and a new civilisation of floating amphibious celeriac came to power. Then I look at the time: I'd been sitting for ten minutes. Arrrgh! What the fuck, man? Did you people set out to make the most boring, boneheaded film ever? You probably failed, but you weren't that far off. You didn't add any interest by tagging on a torture porn third act. Dead-eyed, humourless and boring are not how horror films should be. That's something you should've learned in primary school.
At least Rec. and Rec. 2 had a bit of life about them. They were still bunk, but they managed to make the 'found footage' film interesting to me. No mean feat after seeing the snooze-and-whine-fest The Blair Witch Project in the cinema (although, in fairness, it's a better experience on television, just). The films start off silly and just keep getting dafter as they go on. But they pull the case zero apocalypse thing that I find overdone and dull too.
Still, better than Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. A whinging, creepy main character surrounded by annoying caricatures isn't an inviting premise. The saving grace of this film are the fight scenes, but you have to wade through dreary navel-gazing scenes of unfunny dialogue to get to them. If I wanted to do that I'd watch The Ultimate Fighter on TV. I wouldn't be quite so annoyed by this if there hadn't been months a couple of years ago of people dribbling about how fucking awesome it was. You were wrong, you bastards.
The same applies to Super 8. This is another film that commits the supreme sin of being fucking tedious. I had the curious feeling when it was being advertised with the desperation of a failed writer trying to get you to buy his wares (what the fuck are you looking at, shit clomp, go about your business). And yes. it was terrible, stupid and dull, just like a Tory MP. The best part of it was the intentionally shit film they showed over the credits.
Weeks before I sat down to churn my way through Super 8 I'd decided to give Salt a go. I was presented with the world's longest pilot for an '80s television pilot, right down to setting up a baddie of the week structure. Clearly this was both fantastic and horrifying to watch in equal measure.
I've watched a lot more than that, but I'm not Rotten fucking Tomatoes, you want recommendations, go there.you bastards, stop expecting me to do WORK!
Will
In the last month or so I've been watching a lot of films. I've gone through more new (for me) films in the last few weeks than I've seen in the previous two years. It's left my head crammed with all sorts of silliness, so I thought I'd spray you with some nonsense about my film-viewing.
You won't be surprised to learn that a lot of this will be negative, with Viewing Joe that I am pointing and laughing at the pitiful abortions plastered on the screen in hopes of eking money from me. And they might want to entertain, too, but it's harder to prove that.
Micmacs is a prime example of a jolly good film. It has 'we are crazy French film makers' plastered all over it, but that's fine, because it's charming and you actually like this odd collection of characters and you can't help but applaud what they're doing.
Not something that can be said for Dread. I should have been on my guard the moment one of the half dozen or so producers was Clive Barker. Pushing aside my misgivings I watched and an age passed, humanity went extinct around me and a new civilisation of floating amphibious celeriac came to power. Then I look at the time: I'd been sitting for ten minutes. Arrrgh! What the fuck, man? Did you people set out to make the most boring, boneheaded film ever? You probably failed, but you weren't that far off. You didn't add any interest by tagging on a torture porn third act. Dead-eyed, humourless and boring are not how horror films should be. That's something you should've learned in primary school.
At least Rec. and Rec. 2 had a bit of life about them. They were still bunk, but they managed to make the 'found footage' film interesting to me. No mean feat after seeing the snooze-and-whine-fest The Blair Witch Project in the cinema (although, in fairness, it's a better experience on television, just). The films start off silly and just keep getting dafter as they go on. But they pull the case zero apocalypse thing that I find overdone and dull too.
Still, better than Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. A whinging, creepy main character surrounded by annoying caricatures isn't an inviting premise. The saving grace of this film are the fight scenes, but you have to wade through dreary navel-gazing scenes of unfunny dialogue to get to them. If I wanted to do that I'd watch The Ultimate Fighter on TV. I wouldn't be quite so annoyed by this if there hadn't been months a couple of years ago of people dribbling about how fucking awesome it was. You were wrong, you bastards.
The same applies to Super 8. This is another film that commits the supreme sin of being fucking tedious. I had the curious feeling when it was being advertised with the desperation of a failed writer trying to get you to buy his wares (what the fuck are you looking at, shit clomp, go about your business). And yes. it was terrible, stupid and dull, just like a Tory MP. The best part of it was the intentionally shit film they showed over the credits.
Weeks before I sat down to churn my way through Super 8 I'd decided to give Salt a go. I was presented with the world's longest pilot for an '80s television pilot, right down to setting up a baddie of the week structure. Clearly this was both fantastic and horrifying to watch in equal measure.
I've watched a lot more than that, but I'm not Rotten fucking Tomatoes, you want recommendations, go there.you bastards, stop expecting me to do WORK!
Will
Wednesday 23 May 2012
Sore wrists, swollen thumbs.
Yep, I'm back for a ramble, deal with it.
I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry. Let's throw that one out there. I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot. As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.
What I do have is a long history with computer games. I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted*. I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer. Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play **.
Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time. Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other. It was a golden, very pale time.
The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC. All dependent on money and my interest. Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life. At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend. Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!
My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games. After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.
It happens. Although I've felt it more with modern games. Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in. These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off." These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game. And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).
I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three. It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure. This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years. And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game. Pretty cool.
And I want in on that, man.
Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game. A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game. One can always hope, though.
* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers. Screw that shit. The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.
** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was. Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded. And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too. I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised". Gaaaah!
Will
I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry. Let's throw that one out there. I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot. As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.
What I do have is a long history with computer games. I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted*. I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer. Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play **.
Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time. Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other. It was a golden, very pale time.
The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC. All dependent on money and my interest. Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life. At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend. Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!
My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games. After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.
It happens. Although I've felt it more with modern games. Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in. These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off." These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game. And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).
I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three. It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure. This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years. And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game. Pretty cool.
And I want in on that, man.
Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game. A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game. One can always hope, though.
* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers. Screw that shit. The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.
** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was. Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded. And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too. I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised". Gaaaah!
Will
Friday 11 May 2012
Will someone shut those crickets up?
It's been a bit of a quiet week really. The most interesting thing I've done is go and vote. That's what you call living wild, right? Right?
Seriously, I don't know. I was bumped on the head as a kid and I think my wild centre was knocked out of whack.
One of these days I'm going to fulfil the aim I didn't tell anyone about and use this blog to occasionally educate my three readers. It's an admirable aim. Certainly far better than navel-gazing or doing the circular let's-talk-about writing thing that'll come up.
This week I'd had it in my head to talk about the sad situation of the FHM sexiest woman of the year list and how dull the number one was. Then I realised it would only lead to a depressing discussion of how the media is turning entertainment into a mediocrity contest. And who wants to read that trotted out again? Not me. If I wanted to really depress you I'd dig up the sales figures for 'Fifty Shades of Grey' – although I might have dragged some controversy my way from the people who like the badly written fan-fic of badly written fiction*.
Yes, I know the truth, and unusually, I've exposed myself to a tiny bit of it, taking one for whatever team you care to name. The writing manages to make Dan Brown seem witty and poetic. And that takes some going, I can tell you. I can't imagine reading a whole book of such awkward prose. Take a look here and get something of an insight into its terribleness, or you can go look at Amazon if you don't mind the books popping up as part of your recommendations (can you stand the stigma?). There were excerpts that I now can't find, bugger. You get the gist.
And I've gone and digressed. I went and talked about bad erotica. Are you happy now?
I'm going back out onto the porch, stare up at the sky and whittle me some words.
* Which actually sounds like the start of something. Fan-fic replicating like facing mirrors so long that it breaks through into the real world and WE CAN'T FUCKING ESCAPE IT! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! Hold me, I'm scared.
Will
And I've gone and digressed. I went and talked about bad erotica. Are you happy now?
I'm going back out onto the porch, stare up at the sky and whittle me some words.
* Which actually sounds like the start of something. Fan-fic replicating like facing mirrors so long that it breaks through into the real world and WE CAN'T FUCKING ESCAPE IT! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! Hold me, I'm scared.
Will
Monday 30 April 2012
A quick lookit.
I remember the first time I was really made aware of Weaponizer when I was accused of keeping the site to myself. I'm embarrassed to say that I'd been following the Weaponizer Twitter for a while without paying much attention. My silence was more to do with being dim than selfishly hogging a place for people to have their writing shown off.
When I went to the site I was pleasantly surprised at how welcoming, yet packed it was. At the time I was doing my own fiction blog on my late MySpace page (RIP, a wee bit), but I put together an original bit of flash fiction and sent it along. The editor was enthusiastic about this little horror tale and soon 'The Torch Skull' was sitting on the site. Since then I've had a few other pieces, including a comic, accepted by the site.
In the just over four years since that first story appeared on the site I've got to know Bram, the editor, mastermind and driving force behind Weaponizer.
This brings me to the big news. Bram is bringing Weaponizer to the print world. There's a plethora of writers and fantastic artists on display within it's pages (and me, but you make up your own mind there). I'm looking forward to the final product juggling in my grimy mitts.
On top of all that the Weaponizer site (www.weaponizer.co.uk for those who don't trust embedded links) is coming back up to speed, along with a new line up of editors taking the pressure off Bram. It looks like a bright future for Weaponizer and I'm glad to be part of it.
Will
When I went to the site I was pleasantly surprised at how welcoming, yet packed it was. At the time I was doing my own fiction blog on my late MySpace page (RIP, a wee bit), but I put together an original bit of flash fiction and sent it along. The editor was enthusiastic about this little horror tale and soon 'The Torch Skull' was sitting on the site. Since then I've had a few other pieces, including a comic, accepted by the site.
In the just over four years since that first story appeared on the site I've got to know Bram, the editor, mastermind and driving force behind Weaponizer.
This brings me to the big news. Bram is bringing Weaponizer to the print world. There's a plethora of writers and fantastic artists on display within it's pages (and me, but you make up your own mind there). I'm looking forward to the final product juggling in my grimy mitts.
On top of all that the Weaponizer site (www.weaponizer.co.uk for those who don't trust embedded links) is coming back up to speed, along with a new line up of editors taking the pressure off Bram. It looks like a bright future for Weaponizer and I'm glad to be part of it.
Will
Tuesday 24 April 2012
Fans don't care about ticket prices.
Do any of you remember the days when going to a concert was affordable, even cheap? You could go into a shop and pay six or eight quid to go see a band you liked. Some bigger bands, playing bigger venues, would ask for twenty, maybe thirty quid.
(For the real crusties out there, I'm sure you could get a ticket for ha' penny and a bacon sandwich in your day; it all ties in with what I'm saying, really.)
Today, in my meanderings through my usual internet haunts I came across the news that Motörhead are touring and will be hitting the O2 Academy in Glasgow later this year. Having seen something of a trend in recent years, I decided, perhaps counter to my heart health to take wee look at the prices for the gig. Now, the O2 Academy is a middle-sized venue, which for better or worse will always inform my view of the ticket prices. Once I'd followed the links from the official site and got nowhere, I found somewhere that gave them. When these tickets go on sale in the next couple of days they'll be looking for a whopping thirty-one quid. Twenty-seven pounds plus a four quid booking fee, the rise of booking fees has been a point of contention for me for a long time too.
What the cunting fuck?
That's a disgusting price for a gig in a medium-sized venue. And, as I feared it tied in with other gig pricings. Chris Cornell playing the same venue are a staggering forty-odd quid! What's he going to do? Paint the stage in twenty-four carat gold and sit in a paddling pool of caviare? If I paid that I'd expect at least to have a butler waiting on me all night.
I won't even go into the price tag Iron Maiden tickets had, it just makes me angry, after Bruce Dickinson's protestations that the band just want people to have an affordable good time. A bit difficult when fans are being charged fifty quid a ticket in this economic climate (yes, I said it, I'm adult, no need to be embarrassed).
The thing is, I'm not sure who to blame for the price-setting. How much control do the bands have? How much is driven by the venues themselves? There's no question that anyone who can ask for that kind of money with a straight face is a cunt. It's just too murky to point the finger at any one entity (I did it with the Iron Maiden thing, out of anger and frustration). I know that everyone's been hit by the economic downturn, but if you're that desperate to tour you might consider being a bit more conservative with your pricing.
One thing we should be doing is maybe telling them to fuck off. That's right, a wholesome boycott. Don't go to gigs by big bands and back it up with an email or (gasp!) snail-mail campaign. They'll get the message and you'll see the prices drop.
But then that hits the wall when you come to fans. Fans of things are great, the more fans of something there are, the longer it (whatever you want to replace 'it' with) hangs around (or it might end up horrible, depending on what the 'it' is). The downside is that fans are often uncritical of those things that they like, so you end up in a situation where a band charges fifty or sixty quid and the tickets vanish like vapour in a few minutes. And then these same fans will smugly say when you offer your legitimate concerns over pricing, "You're not a real fan, are you?"
To which I have to answer 'no'. I've discovered that I'm not a real fan of anything. I can't deal with things uncritically any more. From comics, to books, to music, to films. I look at things and weigh them up. Of course I want to enjoy things, but I'm not going to ignore dreadful things or things just not to my taste. I love the writing of Alan Moore, but I'm just not interested in 'Promethea' and found 'America's Best Comics' patchy. I think Iron Maiden are a fantastic band, but I still can't listen to most of 'Piece of Mind'. So any attempt to gouge money is going to be met with a very stern expression.
There's my little call for activism, I'll be over here, trying to be invisible.
Will
(For the real crusties out there, I'm sure you could get a ticket for ha' penny and a bacon sandwich in your day; it all ties in with what I'm saying, really.)
Today, in my meanderings through my usual internet haunts I came across the news that Motörhead are touring and will be hitting the O2 Academy in Glasgow later this year. Having seen something of a trend in recent years, I decided, perhaps counter to my heart health to take wee look at the prices for the gig. Now, the O2 Academy is a middle-sized venue, which for better or worse will always inform my view of the ticket prices. Once I'd followed the links from the official site and got nowhere, I found somewhere that gave them. When these tickets go on sale in the next couple of days they'll be looking for a whopping thirty-one quid. Twenty-seven pounds plus a four quid booking fee, the rise of booking fees has been a point of contention for me for a long time too.
What the cunting fuck?
That's a disgusting price for a gig in a medium-sized venue. And, as I feared it tied in with other gig pricings. Chris Cornell playing the same venue are a staggering forty-odd quid! What's he going to do? Paint the stage in twenty-four carat gold and sit in a paddling pool of caviare? If I paid that I'd expect at least to have a butler waiting on me all night.
I won't even go into the price tag Iron Maiden tickets had, it just makes me angry, after Bruce Dickinson's protestations that the band just want people to have an affordable good time. A bit difficult when fans are being charged fifty quid a ticket in this economic climate (yes, I said it, I'm adult, no need to be embarrassed).
The thing is, I'm not sure who to blame for the price-setting. How much control do the bands have? How much is driven by the venues themselves? There's no question that anyone who can ask for that kind of money with a straight face is a cunt. It's just too murky to point the finger at any one entity (I did it with the Iron Maiden thing, out of anger and frustration). I know that everyone's been hit by the economic downturn, but if you're that desperate to tour you might consider being a bit more conservative with your pricing.
One thing we should be doing is maybe telling them to fuck off. That's right, a wholesome boycott. Don't go to gigs by big bands and back it up with an email or (gasp!) snail-mail campaign. They'll get the message and you'll see the prices drop.
But then that hits the wall when you come to fans. Fans of things are great, the more fans of something there are, the longer it (whatever you want to replace 'it' with) hangs around (or it might end up horrible, depending on what the 'it' is). The downside is that fans are often uncritical of those things that they like, so you end up in a situation where a band charges fifty or sixty quid and the tickets vanish like vapour in a few minutes. And then these same fans will smugly say when you offer your legitimate concerns over pricing, "You're not a real fan, are you?"
To which I have to answer 'no'. I've discovered that I'm not a real fan of anything. I can't deal with things uncritically any more. From comics, to books, to music, to films. I look at things and weigh them up. Of course I want to enjoy things, but I'm not going to ignore dreadful things or things just not to my taste. I love the writing of Alan Moore, but I'm just not interested in 'Promethea' and found 'America's Best Comics' patchy. I think Iron Maiden are a fantastic band, but I still can't listen to most of 'Piece of Mind'. So any attempt to gouge money is going to be met with a very stern expression.
There's my little call for activism, I'll be over here, trying to be invisible.
Will
Monday 16 April 2012
Got Any Spare Paragraphs, Mate?
Hello, I'm Fabrizio Giullare, and this is another of my long-running series on writing dos and don'ts.
Just for those who need a little bit of a catch-up, and can't be arsed looking back over the rest of my posts. I'm the writer of a number of novels and comics. My biggest novel has been Shepherd With Some Straw, that's currently in the process of being turned into a movie. While my most recent novel is Claiming Benefits from the Wrong Window. Both of which are available on Amazon.
My highly acclaimed comic work includes Little Dots, my collaboration with famed Japanese artist Yuudi Maeda and my work at Marvel on the Drooling Slugs crossover event.
Now that we've got the re-introductions out of the way, lets get down to what you're here for. In the past I've talked about the importance of having too many paragraphs on the page, it's an annoying habit that lots of writers have that puts readers off. I know my editor gets quite ratty when I hand her a manuscript with more than four paragraphs on a page.
"Fab," she says to me. "Why do you need to clutter up the page with so many different paragraphs. I've come to terms with your overuse of sentences, but this is almost too much for me."
And I have to agree with her and I find myself putting the offending clumps of words together into that glorious pattern of monolithic blocks of text that I know people love so much. Bear in mind, this only happens three or four times in a nine hundred page manuscript – my editor is an exacting woman, and she hates to see a page with too much white space. That's free space in which you can be telling the reader about the character's favourite hat. It all adds up to that wonderful power of narrative that you're building.
"But, Fab, surely it doesn't entirely matter! Surely you need to let the work flow as freely it obviously needs to!" I hear you cry. And I answer by saying, "Watch the adverbs, buddy, there are ladies present."
I know it may seem like it's a completely arbitrary thing to fixate on, but you need to wake up and smell the bergamot, my friend, this matters. It's on a par with naming characters Beryl or Angela – who the fuck does that any more? It brings people out of the story that you're creating and makes them think about old ladies who smell of lavender and pee. The same goes for too many paragraphs, except without the lavender and pee, it makes your reader start to wonder if you know what you're talking about. A good, confident writer knows that a strong block of text on the page tells the reader this guy knows what he's talking about and makes them more eager to read what you give them. Heavy slabs of text give your reader something to hold onto and strengthens your narrative.
I've come to terms with my editor's hatred of the full stop and she's come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to stop using it. We both agree that plants should never be involved in a story, for any reason whatever. This is just lazy writing and your readers will forget what their names are and probably start selling their bodies for Victoria sponge. That's how serious getting the writing correct is, you'll ruin human civilisation. I know you don't want to do that, you're a nice guy, so behave.
Until next time, I'm Fab Giullare, saying write well!
Just for those who need a little bit of a catch-up, and can't be arsed looking back over the rest of my posts. I'm the writer of a number of novels and comics. My biggest novel has been Shepherd With Some Straw, that's currently in the process of being turned into a movie. While my most recent novel is Claiming Benefits from the Wrong Window. Both of which are available on Amazon.
My highly acclaimed comic work includes Little Dots, my collaboration with famed Japanese artist Yuudi Maeda and my work at Marvel on the Drooling Slugs crossover event.
Now that we've got the re-introductions out of the way, lets get down to what you're here for. In the past I've talked about the importance of having too many paragraphs on the page, it's an annoying habit that lots of writers have that puts readers off. I know my editor gets quite ratty when I hand her a manuscript with more than four paragraphs on a page.
"Fab," she says to me. "Why do you need to clutter up the page with so many different paragraphs. I've come to terms with your overuse of sentences, but this is almost too much for me."
And I have to agree with her and I find myself putting the offending clumps of words together into that glorious pattern of monolithic blocks of text that I know people love so much. Bear in mind, this only happens three or four times in a nine hundred page manuscript – my editor is an exacting woman, and she hates to see a page with too much white space. That's free space in which you can be telling the reader about the character's favourite hat. It all adds up to that wonderful power of narrative that you're building.
"But, Fab, surely it doesn't entirely matter! Surely you need to let the work flow as freely it obviously needs to!" I hear you cry. And I answer by saying, "Watch the adverbs, buddy, there are ladies present."
I know it may seem like it's a completely arbitrary thing to fixate on, but you need to wake up and smell the bergamot, my friend, this matters. It's on a par with naming characters Beryl or Angela – who the fuck does that any more? It brings people out of the story that you're creating and makes them think about old ladies who smell of lavender and pee. The same goes for too many paragraphs, except without the lavender and pee, it makes your reader start to wonder if you know what you're talking about. A good, confident writer knows that a strong block of text on the page tells the reader this guy knows what he's talking about and makes them more eager to read what you give them. Heavy slabs of text give your reader something to hold onto and strengthens your narrative.
I've come to terms with my editor's hatred of the full stop and she's come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to stop using it. We both agree that plants should never be involved in a story, for any reason whatever. This is just lazy writing and your readers will forget what their names are and probably start selling their bodies for Victoria sponge. That's how serious getting the writing correct is, you'll ruin human civilisation. I know you don't want to do that, you're a nice guy, so behave.
Until next time, I'm Fab Giullare, saying write well!
Tuesday 10 April 2012
Flicky-clicky! The Art of Intolerance.
The last couple of posts have been very writer-centric. I may have already alienated folks. Now I reckon I'll alienate a couple more. Now, how can I do that?
It's a love/hate relationship I've had since I was young. Like most people of my generation, I suppose, but being the introverted antisocial troll that I was, I took it a bit further. I won't go into just how insular I was, you might cry and I don't want anyone getting their keyboard all soggy on my account.
As I've got older though, I haven't watched quite as much television. Other diversions have vied for my attention: computer games, writing, reading, going out to (hey look at that, finally!) socialise and, of course, women. But I always go back, quite often to disappointment and repeats.
My current deep disappointment is aimed at programmes like Jersey Shore and The Only Way is Essex. These are programmes that I'm put off of the moment I see trailers for them, as they look like the most vapidly lazy programming. They all centre around the worst that humanity has to offer, which wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the feeling that the characters (because let's all be honest here, that's what they are, there aren't any real people, just actors looking for an easy break) are being held up as role models. Now, I can't say for certain (and I'm not some big city lawyer), but I'm sure that the original intent was to mock these orange caricatures. Instead what we have is a world in which Snooki (urg, can't people see the producers are taking the piss?) has a lucrative book deal. Yes, a woman who is supposed to look and act like she has trouble reciting the alphabet has a book deal, and I can't get la- er, published*.
Yeah. It annoys me. They clog up the airwaves with as much mediocrity as soap operas. We all know the reason for it, smart arse. I know why I don't like having my toe crushed by a mallet, doesn't change my opinion on it.
Another kind of 'reality' television that I have less intolerance for are cookery programmes (take a look at this for more on my cookery programme fascination). I can hear you smirking, fucko. Nothing wrong with enjoying cooking and eating. It's life enriching. You should think about that the next time you're choking down a sausage supper with enough cholesterol to clog the London Underground Central Line.
But, in this, dear reader I have my prejudices. Let us take the sainted (or at least ordained) Nigella Lawson. I used to quite like Nigella as a programme host, outside of the weird, fetishy sexualisation (and that her father is a Tory and she followed suit, boo! Hiss!) of food she seemed quite personable. Then I started noticing something, something that made me blink in slight confusion and now it makes me want to attack the TV with a fucking tenderising mallet: snobbishness. There's always room for a bit of snobbishness in life, but not if it's presented as THE ONE TRUE PATH. Ingredients that seem innocuous to the layman become a benighted spectre to Nigella Lawson. Use the wrong (read: least expensive) kind of capers and pal you better have a good fuckin' excuse. It's infuriating and quite often it's utterly arbitrary. Use what you can use and fuck what some rich woman on the TV says.
Speaking of crazy women cooks. My wife and I have been watching the The Little Paris Kitchen which involves woman-child eternastudent Rachel Khoo proving that she's almost mental enough to start throwing buckets of molten butter over her balcony onto any heathen who deviates a tenth of an iota from TRUE FRENCH PATISSERIE. Seriously, this woman is bonkers. She lives in a Paris flat that's barely large enough for an adult and runs a restaurant from her optimistically named front room. A lot of her cooking looks rather nice, but her style gives an over-romanticised view of France and Paris in particular that doesn't quite match up to the living quarters she has. Perhaps she's deluded or perhaps she really is happy there; all I know is I'd be gnawing my arms off because of the claustrophobia.
Or maybe I'm deluded and should step away from the remote, verrry slowly...
*(Yes, yes, I understand that there's a demand for it. I'm not ignorant of these things. I'm still allowed to rail and have the opinion that it's peddling mediocrity and general human shittiness.)
Will
Television!
As I've got older though, I haven't watched quite as much television. Other diversions have vied for my attention: computer games, writing, reading, going out to (hey look at that, finally!) socialise and, of course, women. But I always go back, quite often to disappointment and repeats.
My current deep disappointment is aimed at programmes like Jersey Shore and The Only Way is Essex. These are programmes that I'm put off of the moment I see trailers for them, as they look like the most vapidly lazy programming. They all centre around the worst that humanity has to offer, which wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the feeling that the characters (because let's all be honest here, that's what they are, there aren't any real people, just actors looking for an easy break) are being held up as role models. Now, I can't say for certain (and I'm not some big city lawyer), but I'm sure that the original intent was to mock these orange caricatures. Instead what we have is a world in which Snooki (urg, can't people see the producers are taking the piss?) has a lucrative book deal. Yes, a woman who is supposed to look and act like she has trouble reciting the alphabet has a book deal, and I can't get la- er, published*.
Yeah. It annoys me. They clog up the airwaves with as much mediocrity as soap operas. We all know the reason for it, smart arse. I know why I don't like having my toe crushed by a mallet, doesn't change my opinion on it.
Another kind of 'reality' television that I have less intolerance for are cookery programmes (take a look at this for more on my cookery programme fascination). I can hear you smirking, fucko. Nothing wrong with enjoying cooking and eating. It's life enriching. You should think about that the next time you're choking down a sausage supper with enough cholesterol to clog the London Underground Central Line.
But, in this, dear reader I have my prejudices. Let us take the sainted (or at least ordained) Nigella Lawson. I used to quite like Nigella as a programme host, outside of the weird, fetishy sexualisation (and that her father is a Tory and she followed suit, boo! Hiss!) of food she seemed quite personable. Then I started noticing something, something that made me blink in slight confusion and now it makes me want to attack the TV with a fucking tenderising mallet: snobbishness. There's always room for a bit of snobbishness in life, but not if it's presented as THE ONE TRUE PATH. Ingredients that seem innocuous to the layman become a benighted spectre to Nigella Lawson. Use the wrong (read: least expensive) kind of capers and pal you better have a good fuckin' excuse. It's infuriating and quite often it's utterly arbitrary. Use what you can use and fuck what some rich woman on the TV says.
Speaking of crazy women cooks. My wife and I have been watching the The Little Paris Kitchen which involves woman-child eternastudent Rachel Khoo proving that she's almost mental enough to start throwing buckets of molten butter over her balcony onto any heathen who deviates a tenth of an iota from TRUE FRENCH PATISSERIE. Seriously, this woman is bonkers. She lives in a Paris flat that's barely large enough for an adult and runs a restaurant from her optimistically named front room. A lot of her cooking looks rather nice, but her style gives an over-romanticised view of France and Paris in particular that doesn't quite match up to the living quarters she has. Perhaps she's deluded or perhaps she really is happy there; all I know is I'd be gnawing my arms off because of the claustrophobia.
Or maybe I'm deluded and should step away from the remote, verrry slowly...
*(Yes, yes, I understand that there's a demand for it. I'm not ignorant of these things. I'm still allowed to rail and have the opinion that it's peddling mediocrity and general human shittiness.)
Will
Friday 6 April 2012
My god, it's full of words!
Hey, how are you doing? I wasn't expecting you. Really I wasn't expecting to be here myself, just popped my head in to do a few things and then go back to the ole novel.
But since we're both here, pull up a pew and I'll sputter more nonsense at you. No, really, it's the least I can do after you went to the trouble of looking in on me.
I've always been in awe of writey-type folks who have a way with word count. There I've said it and it feels so good to get it out there. Yes, I am that shallow to see word count as a major part of writing, I can't help it, it's just the way my mind works. People like Gary Gibson, Dean Koontz (sorry, I'm not going to send you to his website, it's too much selling and quite frankly his output in the last decade has been appalling), China Mieville and yes, even though I'm not a fan at all, Stephen King, among others. Folk who can throw out four, five, six, seven, eight or more hundred page books with distressing regularity and, often quality (with the noted exceptions, of course).
It's not something I'm proud of and I hide the fact like a chronic masturbater who's hoping not be noticed cranking one out in a public toilet stall for the seventh time that day.
Word count isn't anything like a mark of quality in a work, yet from the time I started using a word processor and was given a way of tracking my word count, it became a compulsion to get higher and higher. You can't believe the sense of accomplishment the first time I broke the 100,000 word mark. What I'd written was a colossal piece of shit, but I'd made it. Then I saw that other authors regularly managed 160,000 words and more (and Stephen King has the crazy notion that 180,000 is 'goodish', like more is better...hang on a sec...DAMN YOU, KING , YOU BROKE ME!) and I looked at my paltry sum of words and I despaired.
There's no basis for this to be the case (except for that formative experience from On Writing, the best thing King has written, bar none and a recommended read despite what it's done to me) as some very good, classic books just squeak into novel-hood; the one that springs to mind is A Clockwork Orange, a great book that still has a pertinent message to this day. That couldn't be more than 60,000 words, it puts my desperation to stack up them thar words as high as I can into perspective.
For a while there I didn't worry about it, since the books I was writing were hovering around that 100,000 word mark, and I was happy with that, I thought it was the best that I could do. I still watched the word counts go up, but I didn't sweat it – if I got to it, great; if I didn't that was good too. I'd hit a little bit of Zen in my writing.
Now I'm up to my hips in a new novel-writing project. And going by what I've written so far and the detailed synopsis I've made (this is thanks to Gary Gibson, and I recommend doing this, it's a great way of seeing problems and mining new aspects of a story) it's going to be a fucking monster. My estimates suggest it's going to be at least 180,000 words and probably more - if it ever sees print it will be a six hundred plus page doorstop.
And you'd think I'd be pleased with this, not a damn bit of it. It's not huge just for the hell of it; the length is dictated by the story I want to tell. Instead I'm intimidated in a way I haven't been by writing for a very long time. There's the fear that I'll fall short and make an arse of myself (to who? I dunno, that weird wee guy who's always looking over my shoulder when I'm writing...the one that's only in my head) or that I'll get to the heady heights of 200,000 words and discover I've written an unreadable slab of compressed shit. Normal, understandable fears, right? Right?
Still the procession of words continues and the other fear I have rears its head. It's another fear that I've had from even before I started writing novels when I was fifteen - the terror that I'll run out of words, that the well of things to say will offer nothing more to me than a proverbial word bucket full of watery rat poo and kidney beans. It's something that hasn't happened to me so far, but it's there in my mind like a blank-faced imp, saying, "This is what you've got to look forward to, Couper! Ha ha ha! Look at my impish wang and snivel!"
Or worse, it will cause me t snap one day and I'll spend the next few months adding 'u's to the giant 'duh' I've decided to put onto page after page in my brain-crippled state.
And that's where I am right now, fighting the ball-retracting fears that I'm going to tumble into dementia or that I'm continuing an exercise in self-deceptive incompetence.
Welcome to my happy writery world! Aren't you glad you stopped by? Why not have a custard cream?
Will
But since we're both here, pull up a pew and I'll sputter more nonsense at you. No, really, it's the least I can do after you went to the trouble of looking in on me.
I've always been in awe of writey-type folks who have a way with word count. There I've said it and it feels so good to get it out there. Yes, I am that shallow to see word count as a major part of writing, I can't help it, it's just the way my mind works. People like Gary Gibson, Dean Koontz (sorry, I'm not going to send you to his website, it's too much selling and quite frankly his output in the last decade has been appalling), China Mieville and yes, even though I'm not a fan at all, Stephen King, among others. Folk who can throw out four, five, six, seven, eight or more hundred page books with distressing regularity and, often quality (with the noted exceptions, of course).
It's not something I'm proud of and I hide the fact like a chronic masturbater who's hoping not be noticed cranking one out in a public toilet stall for the seventh time that day.
Word count isn't anything like a mark of quality in a work, yet from the time I started using a word processor and was given a way of tracking my word count, it became a compulsion to get higher and higher. You can't believe the sense of accomplishment the first time I broke the 100,000 word mark. What I'd written was a colossal piece of shit, but I'd made it. Then I saw that other authors regularly managed 160,000 words and more (and Stephen King has the crazy notion that 180,000 is 'goodish', like more is better...hang on a sec...DAMN YOU, KING , YOU BROKE ME!) and I looked at my paltry sum of words and I despaired.
There's no basis for this to be the case (except for that formative experience from On Writing, the best thing King has written, bar none and a recommended read despite what it's done to me) as some very good, classic books just squeak into novel-hood; the one that springs to mind is A Clockwork Orange, a great book that still has a pertinent message to this day. That couldn't be more than 60,000 words, it puts my desperation to stack up them thar words as high as I can into perspective.
For a while there I didn't worry about it, since the books I was writing were hovering around that 100,000 word mark, and I was happy with that, I thought it was the best that I could do. I still watched the word counts go up, but I didn't sweat it – if I got to it, great; if I didn't that was good too. I'd hit a little bit of Zen in my writing.
Now I'm up to my hips in a new novel-writing project. And going by what I've written so far and the detailed synopsis I've made (this is thanks to Gary Gibson, and I recommend doing this, it's a great way of seeing problems and mining new aspects of a story) it's going to be a fucking monster. My estimates suggest it's going to be at least 180,000 words and probably more - if it ever sees print it will be a six hundred plus page doorstop.
And you'd think I'd be pleased with this, not a damn bit of it. It's not huge just for the hell of it; the length is dictated by the story I want to tell. Instead I'm intimidated in a way I haven't been by writing for a very long time. There's the fear that I'll fall short and make an arse of myself (to who? I dunno, that weird wee guy who's always looking over my shoulder when I'm writing...the one that's only in my head) or that I'll get to the heady heights of 200,000 words and discover I've written an unreadable slab of compressed shit. Normal, understandable fears, right? Right?
Still the procession of words continues and the other fear I have rears its head. It's another fear that I've had from even before I started writing novels when I was fifteen - the terror that I'll run out of words, that the well of things to say will offer nothing more to me than a proverbial word bucket full of watery rat poo and kidney beans. It's something that hasn't happened to me so far, but it's there in my mind like a blank-faced imp, saying, "This is what you've got to look forward to, Couper! Ha ha ha! Look at my impish wang and snivel!"
Or worse, it will cause me t snap one day and I'll spend the next few months adding 'u's to the giant 'duh' I've decided to put onto page after page in my brain-crippled state.
And that's where I am right now, fighting the ball-retracting fears that I'm going to tumble into dementia or that I'm continuing an exercise in self-deceptive incompetence.
Welcome to my happy writery world! Aren't you glad you stopped by? Why not have a custard cream?
Will
Tuesday 3 April 2012
Hellooooo, Mister Whitescreen!
It's a common complaint amongst writers about that moment when they sit in front of the computer (or if you're archaic or doing some weird back-to-basics exercise, in front of the typewriter*) and they're faced with the blank white screen (or page, to the troglodytes).
They talk in hushed whispers, from behind the pint they're nursing, about the way it just stares at them, taunting them, sapping the very marrow from their souls. They feel terror and apprehension as they try to urge words onto the glaring whiteness before them. It breaks them, just this part of the process, you can see the hollowness in the eyes where a bright intelligence used to be. Even when they manage to splatter their creative cum onto the screen (page, goddamn Luddite) some fundamental part of them lies in bloody tatters around their feet, whimpering its last pitiful breath.
And it shouldn't need to be this way. For all that every writer's process is different to one degree or another, this grisly, demeaning part of writing shouldn't even feature. You should look at that screen and shake its shake its fuckin' hand and say, "Hey, man! Nice to meet you, we're going to do cool shit together, you and I, so lets get down to it." And you whack a word on that damn whiteness; could be anything, could be what you had for breakfast or how hard you want to punch a member of your most hated political party, hell you might even want to go out on a crazy limb and write the first word of the story or novel or script you're planning to do.
Writing has enough hardships as it is (and yes it has some astoundingly easy things, but that's not what we're discussing here, concentrate) without adding the prospect of the opening salvo of sticky, sticky creative goo to the list. That right there, in case you missed my subtle suggestions, should be one of a series of wonderful orgasmic releases, and not the shameful ham shank while no one's looking. Remember, this is likely to be a first draft, you can always go back and change it – no biggie, it's part of the writing process.
For me, starting isn't a problem, my greatest bugbear is word count: am I doing enough? Am I just vomiting description onto the page just to change another digit in the thousands column? Should I just hit delete and consign the whole mess to the thing to the attic of my mind where it will be fed nothing but cat litter and Rizlas? At the moment this is hitting me harder than ever; I'm in the middle of a book that, by my calculations is going to be – forgive the technical term – fucking huge and those are just the worries that plague me every time I open up the file to add more of my mad or mediocre ravings. That's perhaps a discussion for another day.
* I don't get the freakish romanticism associated with typewriters, particularly the monstrosities people like Hunter S Thompson did his work on. These aren't mystical machines that will help you channel the ghosts of literary greats past, all they'll do is channel your inner pretentious twat. I used a type writer once, in the misty past, it was an electronic thing and I can tell you this, since using a word processor, it adds more complexity and frustration to the process than is needed. So fuck that jive, man.
Will
They talk in hushed whispers, from behind the pint they're nursing, about the way it just stares at them, taunting them, sapping the very marrow from their souls. They feel terror and apprehension as they try to urge words onto the glaring whiteness before them. It breaks them, just this part of the process, you can see the hollowness in the eyes where a bright intelligence used to be. Even when they manage to splatter their creative cum onto the screen (page, goddamn Luddite) some fundamental part of them lies in bloody tatters around their feet, whimpering its last pitiful breath.
And it shouldn't need to be this way. For all that every writer's process is different to one degree or another, this grisly, demeaning part of writing shouldn't even feature. You should look at that screen and shake its shake its fuckin' hand and say, "Hey, man! Nice to meet you, we're going to do cool shit together, you and I, so lets get down to it." And you whack a word on that damn whiteness; could be anything, could be what you had for breakfast or how hard you want to punch a member of your most hated political party, hell you might even want to go out on a crazy limb and write the first word of the story or novel or script you're planning to do.
Writing has enough hardships as it is (and yes it has some astoundingly easy things, but that's not what we're discussing here, concentrate) without adding the prospect of the opening salvo of sticky, sticky creative goo to the list. That right there, in case you missed my subtle suggestions, should be one of a series of wonderful orgasmic releases, and not the shameful ham shank while no one's looking. Remember, this is likely to be a first draft, you can always go back and change it – no biggie, it's part of the writing process.
For me, starting isn't a problem, my greatest bugbear is word count: am I doing enough? Am I just vomiting description onto the page just to change another digit in the thousands column? Should I just hit delete and consign the whole mess to the thing to the attic of my mind where it will be fed nothing but cat litter and Rizlas? At the moment this is hitting me harder than ever; I'm in the middle of a book that, by my calculations is going to be – forgive the technical term – fucking huge and those are just the worries that plague me every time I open up the file to add more of my mad or mediocre ravings. That's perhaps a discussion for another day.
* I don't get the freakish romanticism associated with typewriters, particularly the monstrosities people like Hunter S Thompson did his work on. These aren't mystical machines that will help you channel the ghosts of literary greats past, all they'll do is channel your inner pretentious twat. I used a type writer once, in the misty past, it was an electronic thing and I can tell you this, since using a word processor, it adds more complexity and frustration to the process than is needed. So fuck that jive, man.
Will
Tuesday 27 March 2012
It's been a while, innit?
Days upon days have passed. I was made to look like a twat when the Lid Dems hopped into bed and started gang raping the country with the Tories. I got married. Went to London. Gained weight, panicked and had a whining meltdown. Knuckled under and started exercising. Neglected my writing after finishing a novel. Started another novel. Been rejected by a raft of presses and agents. Realised that the current novel is going to be a monster. Through it all I gibbered positively and negatively on Twitter. Got on with my life.
I think that brings us up to date. Not a lot is it? Then, that's what life is: a series of long stretches of existing between interludes of activity. Nothing wrong with that unless you're some kind of adrenaline junkie who needs stimulation at all times or fucking hell I'll die! But for those of us who burn out a little easier this is fine.
But, I shall pledge to provide my own contributions to the ongoing cultural dialogue that is the internet. It is against my nature as an introvert, but it has been pointed out to me by the lovely Moira McPartlin as I writer I need to put myself out there more. So here is a beginning of probably an intermittent discourse on whatever the hell I feel like.
For anyone who finds this gem and it's gone quiet for a while you can find me on Twitter drooling and being ANGRY. I'm aiming for at least a post once a week if you're desperate for a schedule, ya fuckin' slave-drivers.
Will
I think that brings us up to date. Not a lot is it? Then, that's what life is: a series of long stretches of existing between interludes of activity. Nothing wrong with that unless you're some kind of adrenaline junkie who needs stimulation at all times or fucking hell I'll die! But for those of us who burn out a little easier this is fine.
But, I shall pledge to provide my own contributions to the ongoing cultural dialogue that is the internet. It is against my nature as an introvert, but it has been pointed out to me by the lovely Moira McPartlin as I writer I need to put myself out there more. So here is a beginning of probably an intermittent discourse on whatever the hell I feel like.
For anyone who finds this gem and it's gone quiet for a while you can find me on Twitter drooling and being ANGRY. I'm aiming for at least a post once a week if you're desperate for a schedule, ya fuckin' slave-drivers.
Will
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