Life, it seems to me anyway, routinely defies any sensible attempts to predict or shape it. If the fact that the favourite of any given horse race loses often enough to make a bet on the favourite a risk more often than a safe win should tell people this, but it seems not to.

Perhaps I spend so much time dredging around the sea of disappointment and hope-in-vain that is the world of the self-published because then the people worth knowing are the ones who know there are no truly deserving winners or safe bets. Once you get into the arena of what should be more certain, when it turns out not to be so certain, it can be downright terrifying.

One of the true tests of human character is not just how a person behaves in the face of adversity but how they act in the face of an adversity that is not only not expected but also, on paper, unlikely.

On paper my life shouldn’t be where it is. When I first started looking for new work I all but walked into a position within a week. It was only at the very last hurdle that the employer reneged and in the end like a house sale where the contract exchnge day goes by without an exchange all you can do is cry tears of rage and frustration at the bad luck. I didn’t at the time. I had some stopgap survival plans (which barring the physical assault it got me may have worked out, but I don’t think I really need to be beaten at work unless it’s a position with more long term security - not a joke), I had many more interviews lined up, tot his day I can routinely expect seven calls in a day from agencies all with surefire employment opportunities I should be happy to have served up in front of me. And indeed I was.

The only problem is this. Employers, by and large, rarely have an idea of what it is their IT/IS manager is going on about when they come with a “need to recruit”, they only have the haziest idea of what an IT/IS strategy actually entails. In the end they have to trust “the eggheads” to have the final final say on whether a member of the team gets accepted or not.

I’ve always found, with the greatest respect, that IT/IS people have the EQs of 8 year old boys, generally speaking. This is why they often come across as intolerant, petty, short-tempered, alien weirdoes with only the vaguest relationship to the real world. Am I claiming any greater skills in this respect? Well, frankly, yes.

For a start I’ve had to be a peer professional in a non-related field for a law firm. Lawyers only measure themselves and others by how senior a lawyer they are. Everyone who’s not a lawyer or a client usually occupies a space below any given legal professional. That makes it very difficult for them to work with people who know as much as them about some other topic. I’ve heard lawyers talking to doctor’s receptionists and the anger, petulance, sarcasm, mockery and vitriol hurled in their direction must surely be intended for the doctor, after all the receptionist is a mere underling. The thing is a doctor’s vast array of non-legal knowledge is an unknown quantity to a lawyer and lawyers are not very good at dealing with people who could, in theory, be “better” than them in some way they are paid large amounts of money not to understand.

To write IS systems for lawyers is the first hard lesson in customer service. You have to be nice to their ego and get the work done and juggling the two is not so easy.

There are other lessons I have learned about how to deal with people in the years since I worked for the law firm and they have been in many cases much harder. In short I have learned about people. I know people. I know a bit about how people work. And I know that knowing these things is scary to a lot of others. Particularly people who work in my industry sector.

I don’t know why. Knowing people, and knowing myself, means that I know exactly what kind of work I would be best suited to doing at this point in my career. I need a solid two years or so in doing some day to day C# development at a mid-junior level, e.g. not a beginner but not a guru either. I have outside interests and long term plans incompatible with serious ambition but I am serious minded about my work.

On paper I am the perfect candidate for an intermediate developer both professionally and politically. I just want to do my time and move on. I am begging to be told what do by whom and when for money.

So what stands in my way? Stupidly constructed unfair tests (in my professional opinion as a qualified secondary ICT Teacher) written in five minutes by petulant spoiled 8 year old lads in the bodies of men in their mid thirties. Unreasonable demands that pay no heed to the vagaries of life, issued by people who use the unfair way life has treated them to indulge their own megalomaniacal narcissism and vindictive need to control those they perceive as having kept them down so long. And people who have dealt with business scenarios so often they have forgotten that all activity carried out in our civilisation involves the participations of human beings, with lives, to whom they owe a responsibility to be ultimately and scrupulously fair-minded and thorough.

In business, we are told, there is not always time to be scrupulous, fair-minded and thorough.

Well, forget scrupulous. Forget fair-minded. Forget thorough. What if a smart guy who is acceptably knowledgable, nicely witty, reassuringly a little arrogant (so not sickeningly perfect), has all the right pieces of paper and a wealth of experience walks through one interview at your organisation and waits to sit the technical exam. Do you not owe him the chance to prove his worth? After all in the standard two interview setup you’ve kept the guy hanging around for a fortnight waiting for an answer. If you were paying him a wage that would be a couple of grand’s worth of time. Given that you have both invested so much of your time and effort in trying to get this thing working don’t you owe that candidate something more than some arbitrary, unfair and contrary dismissal?

Apparently not.

There is no reason on earth that a man with two university degrees and four and a half year’s commercial experience in the latest technologies should be incapable of getting a job. And there’s certainly no reason for employers to keep not only being dismissive of that person but actually seeming to go out of their way to shit all over him.

It runs contrary to everything that we teach our children. If going to university, paying our fees, working hard, using our talents and climbing up to prove ourselves is worth nothing then what’s the point of any of it? If you were to ask me now where a child should go for the brightest future I would point to an ex-student of my very own. George.

George was a great lad, very emotionally intelligent and fully aware that he was a fifteen year old lad in secondary school in a system where 6th form prevented him earning proper dosh, university would cost him proper dosh and the entire economy seemed pretty brittle and liable to collapse in strong breeze. He was aware of these things through intuition, not from empirical knowledge.

As a consequence George spent a lot of his time at school not working above the bare minimum and spent much of his time talking to his ICT teacher about what was good on the PlayStation at the moment. Not that he was closed minded. Quite the reverse. One day he actually came to me and asked me to explain this ICT coursework business to him properly and then he promised he would do his best to understand it. He listened, I explained. Being a rational human being and not a teacher he didn’t really understand what relevance any of it had to reality at all.

Now you’d think that this disaffected young man would get into binge drinking, become a hopeless dropout and be on the scrap heap by 19.

I saw George when he was 19, he was assistant manager at a sports clothing retail chain. Relatively unscarred by the schooling process. Not in debt and if he’s kept at it probably doing reasonably well by now.

And you know what? People are probably stupid enough to be telling him he’d have made something of himself by now if he’d gone to university.

I’ve gone to university twice and worked my bollocks of for half a decade. What have I made of myself? An unemployed debtor.

This society can take that piece of information and shove it up its condescending attitude. There are no sure things. No safe bets. Unless you get a guarantee of a return on your investment you should think twice about spending money you haven’t got chasing something you’ll probably never get.

At this point my faith in humanity has never been lower. I read that 50ish universities in the UK are in danger of closing because they don’t make enough money. Good. The qualifications they issue are less useful than toilet paper due to their low absorbency rate. This country is bunch of arseholes pissing on the weak and the unfortunate in order to satisfy their own egos. The dreams you are sold are made of crap and acid and will kill you faster than swallowing a bottle of paracetamol with a quart of vodka. No one can be trusted. No one should be liked. Everyone will crush your face into the mud if they think it will make things better for them. People are quite happy to play headgames with you for their own amusement.

And my job is just to point that out.

So, as regular listeners will know, myself and Mrs Monkey decided it would be a cute and practical way of updating all and sundry of what was going on in our lives if we opened a blog of our own. So that we could mostly moan about stuff that was happening in our everyday lives as opposed to this place where it’s just me moaning about publishing.

Mrs Monkey has always told me that I was once a stupid man and this is by and large true. I have not always made the best choices in life and I didn’t really expect them to come back and haunt us on what was mostly a site for our mums to see what we were doing at home (mostly eating cakes). Unfortunately some other people or person that I used to know decided that the internet was fair game for personal attacks on Mrs Monkey, and therefore by association on me, and that our family oriented blog was the place to do it.

Because places where we want our full families and children to go and have a read are just the places for snidey comments and adult-oriented material, of course. So now the great blog experiment comes to a shuddering halt a mere fortnight after its inception and something nice that I wanted to share with my partner has become ugly and upsetting. I’m not going to pretend I’m not partially responsible after all these are people I used to call appropriate company.

Still, it would have been nice to both have a say about Eurovision and films and biscuits and so on and so forth without people deciding to infect it with inappropriate nastiness.

Overall it might have been better to keep the site private. As we all know, though, older net users, or those without great technical proficiency might then have found it difficult to read and comment. So overall we’ve decided it would be better to pack it in.

Thanks to the internet and particular thanks to Anonymous Coward for reminding us that there isn’t anything nice people can have that can’t be spoiled.

Cheers all, sincerely,

Upset Monkey

I wasn’t going to write about this on the basis that once I’ve got started I may not actually be able to stop. And I was willing to leave it be except that 85% of reviewers aggregated by rottentomatoes think that the new movie “Bridge of Terabithia” is just the kind of thing you want to take your kids along to see, buy it afterwards and cherish forever.

Both myself and Mrs Monkey would like to disagree.

To illustrate how this works I shall relate a short anecdote about our visit to the coffee shop prior to viewing this pile of cinematic ordure. Mrs Monkey is not that keen on coffee. Even the mildest latte laced with caramel syrup prompts a grimace and complaints of bitterness. So I did what I always do in these circumstances. I ordered her an ice chocolate drink to sip delicately through a straw while I swill milky coffee down my throat.

Something went wrong this day at the coffee shop for the mixture laid before Mrs Monkey was not brown, as chocolate should be, but kind of tan, and bitty. Not only that but it tasted very strongly of cinnamon, enough to trigger a whisper of the gag reflex in my palette.

There followed an intense discussion about whether I had ordered the right thing and whether we should complain or whether we had just misordered and should take it on the nose.

In the end common sense beat British reserve and up to the counter I toddled to ask just how much cinnamon syrup they’d put in the bloody thing and how much there was supposed to be.

“Cinammon?” asked the counter man, taken aback. “We don’t have any cinnamon syrup.”

Upon viewing Mrs Monkey’s beverage the look on his face told us that we had been right to think that something was up. He made us a new one. It tasted of chocolate.

I recount this story because the experience of expecting one taste and receiving another (for example of thinking you have sprinkled sugar on your cornflakes when it was salt) is perhaps one of the most viscerally repulsive things that happen to people in their lifetime. Everything seems wrong, it can even make you feel giddy, sick and ultimately betrayed.

The experience of being sold a film only to be given a completely different one can produce the same effect on a lesser scale. Overall the lingering pall of violation evaporates quicker but at the time it’s a real dirty sucker punch.

And so it was with “Bridge of Terabithia”.

Let’s be frank. This is not a children’s movie. Children will almost certainly not enjoy it. Especially not if they have been duped into seeing it by the intriguing trailer which leans heavily upon the Narnia card.

Let’s be plain. You see almost all the CG fluffiness in this film in the trailer. This film is not about a couple of kids who jjourney to a magical kingdom… it’s not. Yes. Yes. I know that’s what it’s sold as. But it’s not.

It’s actually a much grimmer tale, swingeing in its moralising, heavy handed in its sermonising. The CG is not a representation of a fantastic alternate reality but rather a representation of a child’s imagination, depicted here as the only escape from a grim and uncompromising real world of parents with no time and schools populated by bullies.

It’s a movie that an adult would have some difficulty swallowing and when the promise of mild escapism is switched for a delivery of unpleasant reality it’s not just the film’s protagonist who finds himself reeling from events which alter the way one sees the world.

I can see exactly how this story worked in print, and for kids. Books are intimate. This is a book where a single person, the author, can take a single reader and intimately tell them that yes, life sucks, but it sucks for everybody and your imagination can help you look at the world in new ways and come to terms with difficult realities upon your own terms. That’s because reading is a private and personal experience.

Movies, particularly as seen in a cinema, are not private or personal. Private, intimate communications look crass and sentimental when shared with an audience. The fact is you put a bunch of kids (bunch = more than one) in front of a screen and what they want to see is not moral instruction.

Besides, I have to say that I’d think twice about taking life lessons from someone who thinks that using superior intelligence to manipulate a bully into a potentially breakdown inducing embarassment is a fair response to that bully being a bit of a dumb mean brute. The incident in question was not out of character but I think when a victim manages to turn the tables in such a cold and cruel way on someone who’s crime was far more crude and less psychically damaging might give that victim a pause to think about their own capacity for bullying behaviour. For the story to take an attitude that it’s okay, nay, laudable for that to have happened was a bit of a false notion to me.

In fact the story’s major plot point is a similar kind of set up and is one of the few examples I have ever come across of a female writer not being able to quite get in tune with a male mind. The point in question revolves around a young boy, not quite an adolescent being taken for a (rather inappropriate) solo field trip to a museum by a music teacher he has a crush on.

Not saying that some young boys wouldn’t be dumb enough to agree to such a no-win situation filled with foolish hopes and dreams. To any halfway sensible lad, however (and our protagonist seems as such) the prospect of trying to “keep up” with a woman who is, to understate the case grossly, out of his league, attendant inappropriateness notwithstanding, the prospect would be too terrifying. Maybe the book explains it well. As an action seen by a third person in a movie it just struck a terrible bum note. That’s all.

Essentially, Mrs Monkey and I walked into the cinema unsuspecting, wanting a little light Sunday afternoon entertainment and we walked out with heads far too full of ideas and morbid thoughts.

Not that there’s anything wrong with difficult issues per se, Dean Matheson in “Figure of the Sorcechanic” has a very obvious dead brother and issues to deal with associated with that dead brother. No, overall depth is to be lauded.

My complaint is that I bought into one thing, lets call it chocolate, and I got another, lets call it cinnamon. I think it was irresponsible of the marketing department that labelled up the cinammon as chocolate to do so. If the film proves popular with people who like Narnia and don’t read reviews then it can only harm the reputation of the producers. All I know is that next time I see them playing the Narnia card I will be thinking of the shock of the unexpected and being more circumspect in my viewing choice.

Of course the marketing department in question had an impossible task. If they made it quite plain what the film was then they could run the risk of people not being in the mood in droves. It could even induce the reverse of pester power: “Mum, Dad, on no account buy me tickets for that sucky movie”.

As a final irony Mrs Monkey and myself also took in “Next” on the same day and found it to be every inch as fun, frothy and juvenile as we had hoped for. In fact the only film I’ve seen this far for adults that wasn’t a confection was “Catch A Fire” and that was hard enough to find a screening of.

Society seems to want to make kids smarter and adults dumber. So maybe it’s not a surprise that these dumb adults end up serving pseudo-deep sentimental rubbish that would insult the sensibilities of any self-respecting smart kid.

I’ve been watching a number of movies recently that I’ve really enjoyed but had somehow escaped my attention for years. This is part of a move for myself and Mrs. Monkey to find stuff to watch that we can both enjoy. It also is part of my attempt to refocus my mind on sadly neglected performers.

The first, Jim Carrey, is not neglected so much as largely reviled as a serious performer. The fact is that he’s about three “serious” roles away from being a flat 50-50 great actor and great comic performer. On the latter particularly, I hear a lot of people saying they can’t stand him, I used to be one of them. When you’ve seen Carrey in The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine… and last night’s viewing choice The Majestic Carrey’s goofy is a lot easier to take. Not saying that watching Eternal Sunshine… will make Bruce Almighty seem like a good movie, but hey, you can’t have everything, right?

Similarly I watched the excellent Gods and Monsters where Ian McKellen pre-Gandalf, pre-Magneto is typically excellent. The surprise for many is that Brendan Fraser, my second neglected performer choice, keeps up with him. Again I think the reason many people think Fraser is “dumb” is because of picking movies like Monkey Bone and that hideous Bedazzled remake. It’s often forgotten that he’s not always being stupid and he can turn in a serious performance with gravitas somewhat beyond his years.

Versatility is not really admired in film entertainment or in the actors who act in them. It seems to have become synonymous with “confusing” or “hard to market”. The fact is you can’t sell George of the Jungle and Gods and Monsters to the same people. So the versatile actor never makes a deep impression. Selling Dumb and Dumber and Eternal Sunshine… to the same people is equally hard.

Not only are these performers not given the admiration I think they deserve but the two featured movies I saw are, in fact, unjustly neglected. The Majestic is a huge Capra-esque, gentle drama which unashamedly plunders corny plot devices to great emotional effect. This was a movie for performers who were really going to sell it and sell it they do. It’s a great film because as an audience member you can choose how involved to be in it. Either it’s a moving piece dealing with the impact of the McCarthy witch hunts and the loss of identity or its a piece of fluff about a man who loses his memory to find his convictions. I haven’t seen a movie that worked like that made in a long time.

Gods and Monsters is more demanding. Is it about an unusual relationship? Is it about self-destruction? Is it about the onset of madness? Is it about the director best remembered for his Universal monster movies? All of the above but you can find layers of meaning in every scene and intelligent commentary about all of the above in a movie that on the surface appears to be about an old gay man who wants something from his young, fit gardener. A movie which attempts to be artistic in matters of writing where the director takes an understated position are rare these days. Usually indie films of the past view years have been visual bludgeons, or afraid not to make characters and situations absurd or quirky.

Basically, it occurred to me that I’d kind of forgotten why I liked movies to start with watching these. Because I haven’t walked out of a cinema in years feeling like I felt after watching those movies.

That’s a sad state of affairs.

Writer’s Digest join the troupe of writing competition runners who appear to be smoking crack. They’re offering a big prize to a self-published author who produces a great book. They want a copy of the book to read at the self-publisher’s expense, which is fair enough. I am glad to see that for those who do decide it’s worth the pinch that presentation of finished material will be a criterion.

The bit that leads us to surmise the presence of crack pipes is that they’re charging entrants $100 just to submit.

So this will either be like the Sobol debacle recounted ad nauseam elsewhere or it will attract so many punters that WD will find the entry fee costing them money because they underestimated the demand.

From my perspective a self-publisher self-publishes because they don’t have the time or money to plough into crap like this. If I had to send them a copy of my book that they’d read the first couple of chapters of and then make a decision that’s one thing. For me to have to stump up £60 odd just to enter seems like a bad gamble to me. Especially seeing as part of the prize is to be brought to the attention of precisely those people I self-published to avoid in the first place.

This is the problem with people who run with the herd. They just can’t get out of the herd mentality. If I am ever in a position to do so I will run a literary contest for self-published works and the glory will be all that of the self-published community. I’m not giving your name to a bunch of literary reviewers no one you’re trying to reach is interested in. I’m also not sending you to the table of any major publishing houses to be turned down as uncommercial.

If I had the means I would run a competition that gave the self-publisher a grant of not less than $100,000 for the author to spend as they saw fit. I’d use that money to take a year off to write and actually spend some time and money marketing myself. That’s what any good self-publisher should aspire to surely…

So, sorry WD, you suck.

Courtesy of The Rejecter

If your writing is good, it doesn’t matter at all if you have no past experience in publication.

With the following caveats:

1) “Good” is not a standardised and empirical metric.
2) What may be considered good will change on a day to day basis based on arbitrary and unfair criteria such as mood, length of queue at coffee stall, no. of arguments participated in and anything else that is bugging the reader on the day of submission.
3) Could be great writing actually but there are only so many hours in the day and on the off chance that your great writing cannot be confidently placed in one of those available hours it will still be rejected.
4) By the way did I mention that as an agent even if I do agree to represent you that doesn’t mean your book is sold.

I’m tired of everyone pretending that quality has all that much to do with acceptance.

As Susan Kelly once pointed out people sometimes use the apparent quality of your prose to give you the old heave ho.

Thanks to Gareth for that one.

Now could we call a moratorium on that particular unhelpful and crappy piece of writer’s mythology.

Please.

Actually these things have not transpired because I took my eye off the blogging ball but it makes a nice article header. First, though, health news. The hypertension continues but the side effects of my medication have mutated. No longer am I cursed to live half my life in slumber instead I have a slight wheeze and occasional head spin from standing up too fast. I see a doctor tomorrow, the prospect does not thrill me.

So what’s causing a dangerous elevation in my BP today, we ask ourselves?

Well, a colleague started the snowball by sending me a link to a blog run by yet another colleague, this was an inoffensive enough action. It got me thinking however about how I should really increase the peace (so to speak) by looking through associated blogs and linking to them here. After all, that’s how these things work. So by a careful process of spidering my way through various blogrolls I turned up some less helpful interweb artifacts. One, in fact snarked at by the Betterment Blog at the foot of this post and snarked at less classily by me later on in this post.

But let’s not start there shall we. Let’s start with this post by agent’s lackey The Rejecter. This post does a real good job of summing up every non-ridiculous although not entirely accurate cliche in existence referring to us self-published types.

All the stuff about e-books amounts to waffle. What I will say is this. e-magazines and e-books on technical or academic subjects are ok because who wants to store tomorrow’s fish wrapping or work related bunkum in space reserved for precious fiction? Not I. But if your fiction is only in e-book then I’m not going to even think about reading it and if I’m not going to then you’re in trouble.

Then there’s that assumption again. You see, traditional publishers have a no-longer economic business model that encourages anodyne blandness and tries to force as much of its product down everyone’s throat as possible. The reason for the blandness - safety, traditional publishing is a gamble and despite the fact that breakthroughs in fiction tend to be mould breakers it’s still safer to back the horse with the little “favourite” icon by it than take a risk on a showy but unproven outsider. The reason for cramming stuff down people’s throats is that it’s the only way to keep the business alive.

The assumption, therefore, is that all self-published authors want to do the same thing. That’s bollocks for a start. Rejecter, to be fair, does say that if you merely want your product available for “interested parties” then that was fair enough. Then has to suffix that with the thought that if you wait for some one to give a crap then you’ll be selling under 100 copies guaranteed.

Waitagoddamnminute! Hold up! Under 100 implies, at the very least generous end of the scale “over 50″ or else why not just say “under 50″? If I sold 50 copies of my current catalogue (each, 150 sales in all) I would be ecstatic. To me, job done. It will have been worthwhile. If I was in a small conference room with 50 people the room would be crowded. That’s all the audience I want or need. I mean I used to do open mic stand up comedy for badger’s sake.

And because my publishing is “on demand” it means that only necessary copies were ever printed and I don’t end up with a garage full of unsold product. Marvellous. A sane and rational view. As someone who has had an audience of “one if I’m lucky” for about 15 years the fact I now have an audience of “2 or 3″ may not excite HarperCollins but it sure the blue f*@£$ beats waiting for the aforementioned publishing behemoth to pay me mind it may never pay me.

For a writer to be read at all should be the highest compliment that can be paid.

Rejecter ends with a patronising (and as someone who does patronising without even thinking about it most of the time I can sure as hell spot it even written down) recommendation that people who had been courted by rejection to ponder why.

Oh yeah. Hadn’t thought of that. Of course, so simple. Hadn’t thought of wondering why. Just assumed that the mind of the publishing world was unknowable. Thank you, Rejecter, for your prescient invokation of enlightened Buddha nature to spill this petal of wisdom from the lotus of your uninterrupted diamond consciousness.

You tool.

Rejected people the world over wonder why it is they didn’t come up to scratch. Any victim of unrequited love has the option of spending hours wondering why it is they weren’t good enough and if you knew one then the standard advice regarding this obsession is: “Screw them, they didn’t know a good thing when they saw it.”

Not to say that all POD manuscripts have any hope in them. From bitter experience I know they don’t but some day I know I will discover something that is good and non-commercial. Because the big mistake publishing industry people make is that commercial=quality. IT DOESN’T! It does mean there is a basic quality but that basic quality must, must, must be wedded to some basic commercial viability and then there must be some mysterious “X” Factor that pushes it past all the other manuscripts vying for attention.

In case you were wondering how bad that competition was here is a chilling little post from a working agent telling us that on average it seems that around 1 in 2500 (being generous) submitting authors to an agency even get an agent at all. That’s not “sell a book” that’s “get an agent”.

And what are we tired of remembering has to be an agent’s primary concern when reading a manuscript seeking representation? Is it “do I like it”? Not if that agent wishes to continue eating. No. The question is “can I sell this”?

To give an example of the difference between these two questions I should point out that to me my Nintendo GameCube is worth the same, or possibly more than, it was worth on the day I bought it. I have several really brilliant games for it that I love to play. Some of them I specifically prefer to play using a GameCube controller, despite those titles being available for other consoles. I like my Nintendo GameCube.

If I wished to sell my Nintendo GameCube I could expect at the very most £35ish (average eBay Buy It Now for the unadorned console is about £25). To me this is an insult. I cannot sell my GameCube for what I think it is worth.

So if we are to return temporarily to the mysterious “X” Factor can we really presume this is some measure of spiritual aesthetic quality or is it more akin to a gambler deciding, after all which of three very similar horses to back?

I do not want an agent or a publisher because I detected in myself a trend towards trying to churn out something an agent might be able to sell and trying to fit what I wanted to write around it. Because when I have a 2500-1 chance of even impressing a single agent (and that’s in the US I dread to think what the statistic looks like from the UK) I should be a good little author and try to impress that agent. I, of course, am cursed by knowing the numbers. Were I more naive I might try and compete on my own merits as a writer.

Oh yeah, it’s not really supposed to be a competition.

So Rejecter, take your condescending little diatribe and your work ethic and your belief that you are doing right by a writer by handing out this advice and stick it up your arse. I know the numbers and 50 readers is plenty for me. I don’t need to ram my books down people’s throats until they vomit my prose back up upon merely seeing one of my books.

Of course such high minded response will do nothing to quell the acid wit of this f*&@tard. Now, I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that this has to be at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I hope. After all anyone who could make the statement:

…sobering statistics from Pub Rants. Extrapolated data: 80 query letters per day, 0.25% of which result in requests for full manuscripts. This is an exact measure of quality.

with a straight face (referring to the stats linked to above) has to either be trolling or smoking crack.

So suffice to say: Aesthetic quality cannot be measured by a commercial yardstick.

A quick demo. Chick lit seems, from conversations with the other half (important announcement to follow) to fall into two categories:

1) Fiction regarding impossibly beautiful career women slightly upset by some relatively insignificant past event who sometimes have children or sometimes just cash whose “lives are turned upside down” by some happenstance.

and

2) Fiction that is about a woman’s life being “turned upside down” by some happenstance often to do with relationships/children/both but without the cash as the author is at least somewhat ashamed just to churn out Mary Sue style fiction and take money for it.

The major problem with all the fiction being sorted into these two boxes is that it leaves out just about every book submitted to a chick lit agent/publisher that is not about these things. It could be a great novel and the agent could like it a lot and it could get down to the final 10 of whom 1 can go forward. In the end that manuscript will only ever be an also ran. It is defeated in its originality by the lure to the gambler of the safer bet.

The fact is sometimes this means crappier stuff is published merely because publishers find it easier to cram that crap down people’s throats.

I know it’s an unpalatable truth but it is a truth. Am I convinced that my stuff is not commercial but is brilliant nonetheless? I honestly don’t have a clue. I think it’s better than it seems to be given credit for but I am no arbiter of my own work. I just know that some day I’m going to find the book that proves Mr. Stop Writing is talking out of his arse. I’m waiting for the day. Eagerly.

Look folks. Publishing people, and people who suck up to publishing people and every other person who is involved in publishing’s commercial end has forgotten, or never knew, that to a certain extent writing is an artistic expression. Everyone has a right to do it and, if they feel so moved, they are also free to persuade others to read it.

The fact is that others may not want to, or may not like it, or may not bother. If that makes you, as an author, want to give up then you were never really an author. If it just encourages you to keep your unreadable literary sileage to yourself then that’s as good as it gets.

But don’t let anyone tell you not to do it if you want just because they want to look cool in front of people who really don’t understand what you were trying to do in the first place.

Here’s the deal folks:

There are far more talented authors on this planet than there are ways to support those authors to write.

I have resigned myself to the fact that I could waste my life chasing the fulfillment of my best seller potential in today’s world. I could die never having sold the movie rights to any of my books because no movie producer ever read any of them. I could be overlooked and ignored so easily that my life could read in retrospect like some great tragedy.

And so could any other half decent author.

When I reviewed The Shade I didn’t know I could be uncovering a tragedy such as the one this article (PDF) describes from the archive of history. You have ot read between the lines of course. Cool Publications no longer has a website. It doesn’t exist. In two and a bit short years it has gone from a going concern to nothing. In this light I found the story so heartbreaking to read that I thought everyone who comes here should read it too. And maybe take note of a few things:

1) Cool Publications does not seem to have been a scam.

I mean, it would be easy to characterise it as such, I cannot imagine that the company’s final days were pleasant for anyone concerned. I can imagine the reason that The Shade’s author Thomas M. Hunt has disappeared without trace is because his Cool Publications experience was so distressing he never wants to write again.

That’s a terrible thing. That business should be allowed to ruin someone’s soul that way and it makes me angry and it reminds me why I do this.

2) Cool Publications seemed to be a dreamer’s organisation and many authors are dreamers.

It seems obvious now. I mean, who’s really going to buy a PDA just to read e-books? I tried my hand at producing a PDA version of one of my old books and it was a disaster. PDAs just don’t lend themselves to this kind of thing and if you spend the time to configure them you’re one of a handful of users who will. PDAs are for contact management and diarising, reading is a luxury function and Acrobat is not a PDAs killer app.

David Amerland, the man in charge, was not a shyster, he was an enthusiastic businessman who never had anyone deflate his vision by pointing out its limitations. No businessman could. He was unlucky in a situation where being unlucky was more likely than being lucky.

Actually I have no proof that it wasn’t a scam and that Mr. Amerland wasn’t a con artist but I have no proof to the contrary either and the article above reads more like the sound of dreams shattering than a snake oil salesman’s patter.

3) Of 200-300 submissions even a shaky e-publication venture only published 5-10 in a year.

Here’s the skinny, no wonder The Shade was a good book, it had been quality controlled just like the books of a “legitimate” publisher. Cool Publications only printed in e-format and that killed it. The net result of this was that the author was put through exactly the same process as a “real” author at a “proper” publishing house and their work got tanked by prevailing marketing conditions.

The Shade over it’s four years of digital existence may have done roundabout as well as any of mine will in the same period i.e. hardly making enough to pay for a good night out at the pub, or even a rubbish night out at the pub. The author believed that, in some modest way, his dream had come true. Okay maybe it wasn’t the top of HarperCollins most promising list but it was a real publication. It was a step on the way. It was…

It was a dream waiting to be urinated upon from a great height, stabbed with knives and then set on fire. That’s what the world is like.

4) The dreamers wouldn’t allow reality to interfere with their dream

Cool Publications said in 2004 that they wouldn’t publish on paper because it was too expensive. POD sites would have given them the economic model that they needed and would have increased the chances of good luck befalling them not bad luck. When Mr. Amerland tells us: “We’ve thought about [print publishing], but decided not to… because the publishing world is quite entrenched and it is very hard to break into. Instead, we can tap into the more open digital market.” I just wanted to scream and throw things. This is reality. If you can sell a product in a particular way for a low overhead then do it.

I bought an ISBN for “Hidden Predators, Dangerous Prey” because at the time it cost little enough for me to indulge in such prideful activity. Then the price went up too high. Now my books are referenced by the lulu ID because it’s a unique identifier that costs nothing.

If someone wants to buy a copy of my book, on paper, they will always be able to. They can preview it generously first and I will always cut my royalty back to keep the price as low as I can.

Still nobody’s buying my stuff and I have maximised my chances of selling. If Mr. Amerland had seen my efforts compared with the results of those efforts he may well have thought again about everything he was doing. Maybe.

The point is, if you are an author out there, you have to face the facts. It doesn’t matter how much better than Dan Brown you are - or Clive Barker, or Dean Koontz, or whoever - the likelihood is you will never sell anything or even gain representation for it. That’s not me being mean, that’s the way things are. If you are cruising for the midlist and hoping to get bigger from there that’s hard work with the same guarantees of success (e.g. none) and with infinitely less reward. And sometimes even when you sell yourself to a reasonably hard market, like Thomas M. Hunt did, that market could float away and evaporate in moments, leaving you with nothing but heartache.

I am hoping that one day the traditional midlist will no longer exist. I am hoping that places like Lulu will replace the midlist and that the access to proper publishing deals will rest upon a more meritocratic system of POD sales. While people still think that chasing rainbows is going to work that’s not going to happen.

Not to say POD will guarantee any sales or interest. Actually, I’ll be straight, you’re probably looking at less sales than any conventionally sold midlist title. The difference is YOU are in charge of your no sales. YOU control all the rights to your book. YOU stand or fall on your own merits. YOU will probably know every one of your readers personally, I do.

Most importantly, YOU will never be so traumatised with the process of publication that you are moved to give up writing forever. Unless you publish utter dross that I later savage which wounds your ego so much you put us all out of your misery and never boot up yWriter again.

If you are Thomas M. Hunt I would urge you not to give up. Write something new. Publish it on Lulu. Tell me you’ve done it. I want to read your work and I don’t think you should be beaten by an explosion in the dream factory.

And that goes for everyone else as well. Hell, you may not sell any books but the least you could ask is that you have fun creating them. Right?

Visiting a commercial bookshop that is…

Things I noticed while wandering round the gigantic book/media/coffee emporium just outside Coventry yesterday:

1) Bookstores don’t mind doing offers on books which come in series format but for which they have key volumes missing. There were two heinous examples of this intensely irritating habit on display. Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” saga was on 3 for 2 (although this is of limited benefit when the series has 7 volumes but hey ho) in paperback. Available volumes were 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. That’s right folks, no vol 2 anywhere to be seen. This is irritating for reasons beyond the obvious, who wants to buy 6 books - even getting 2 free - knowing that five of the six are pretty much unreadable until you find book 2 somwhere else thus rendering the majority of your purchase a chore rather than a pleasure.

I read the back of volume 7 to see if by the end the saga looked like it was reaching a suitably epic conclusion. Maybe it does, I mean King has his moments, but the back of the book didn’t do any kind of job at convincing me of this. It looked like your usual Stephen King kind of stuff and consequently made me feel tired just looking at it.

Suzie and I watched Wolf Creek at the weekend and the DVD menu starts with the jarring sight of a cute kangaroo. It is our running joke that Stephen King is so freaked out by absolutely everything that he often tries to make incongruously non-frightening things frightening. This, of course, can work when applied deftly but King batters people like a scatter gun with the technique regardless of it’s appropriateness. So therefore all the way through the intensely dull Wolf Creek we lay there filling in the frequent tedious bits between anything actually happening with a running commentary:

“And then they were found by… the Kangaroo!”
“The Evil Kangaroo”
“Satan’s Kangaroo with a BLUE HANDKERCHIEF stuffed into it’s pouch.”
“Satan’s blue hankerchief!”

Etc.

So to be fair the only person who really lost out in the 3 for 2 but not Volume 2 fiasco was El King himself as I was probably spared buyer’s remorse for picking up yet another King epic which resembles very closely all of King’s epics. His novels become, to me, more and more like a joke I’ve heard the more that come out. I used to love them but I’ve since become immune because I know what to expect just because of who the writer is. Basically King has become, for me, dramatically slack.

The other and far more distressing omission was the absence of a copy of Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman from the shop. Both the second in the trilogy, Checkmate, and the the third, Knife Edge, were present but of the one that starts the story there was no sign.

I presume this is because Malorie Blackman is not J.K. R*wl*ng and therefore because there’s no one called P*tt*r in this book it wasn’t deemed necessary to have the full series on the shelves. This despite the fact that it meant that precisely no one was likely to buy volumes 2 & 3 of the trilogy because they wouldn’t be able to read them until they’d read volume 1 which was nowhere to be seen.

The problem I have with that, completely separate to the minor irritation occasioned as a consumer by the King incident, is that Blackman is not Rowling and Blackman is not King. Rowling and King don’t need the mega book/media/coffee emporia to support them to make sales. They are on the ‘A’ List, they are household names, if I were to want a copy of Vol 2 of the Dark Tower then I am in with a fighting chance of finding one wherever. But will I ever source a copy of Nought & Crosses anywhere except Amazon? I don’t think so. I could be wrong, and I intend to keep my eyes open but I suspect not.

2) But why, I hear you ask, would you care either way? After all M. Blackman is part of the evil publishing empire that you are railing against. She has been tainted by the corrupting influence of the world of traditional print publishing. And, also, you may remember, I decided to only read Lulu product for a while.

Well, I have two more books coming from Lulu at this time. I have read over half of my first purchase. But in the meanwhile I have noticed something very important.

The reason I decided not to read any more publishing house produced fiction for a bit is because I was thoroughly sick of it. I find the whole lot tedious, uninvolving, pretentious, uncommunicative, more concerned with style than substance etc. etc.

Then I went to see Stormbreaker.

For those of you that don’t know Stormbreaker was the movie about teenage spy Alex Rider based on the series of Alex Rider novels penned by Anthony Horowitz. What I noticed about that film was that it was a simple and unpretentious spy thriller which clearly out Bonded all the Bonds since maybe Licence To Kill (which I was alone in rather enjoying, apparently). It occurred to me at that time, having written what is possibly my favourite of all the books I have written a children’s fantasy in a steampunk world called The Figure of the Sorcechanic (available soon to buy kids!), and also having been singularly unimpressed by all the “adult” Bonds for about a decade that maybe my fictional malaise was not with fiction as a whole but with what passes these days for “grown up” fiction. This was only further confirmed when Monster House became my favourite movie of this year managing to work on a dizzying number of levels and having, quite literally, something for everyone.

The last couple of times that I’ve been to the mega book/media/coffee emporium I have found my interest piqued more by the “Teen” fiction section than by anything else at all. When I was a child I was a voracious reader and now, not so much. It felt to me like the world of books had left me behind and left me cold. Like I had grown up and now there was no more reading to be done. Then I go and look at the synopsis of Noughts & Crosses or of Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve and I feel like I want to read again. I feel like these are going to be just stories, and maybe they have content that makes us want to think, or to talk, or whatever but they are less concerned with some weighty literary/aesthetic gravitas than they are about telling the reader an entertaining story.

This is why last time I picked up a “grown up” book and enjoyed it it was a thriller. Because thriller writers have few illusions about the purpose of a good thriller. I think that science fiction, fantasy and horror writers have too long been trying to break into some spurious aesthetic high realm where they are serious and literary yet generic. Fun is not part of the equation. And I think, further, that genre spoofs like Hitchhiker’s Guide or The Colour of Magic are indicative of authors ready to criticise but still out of touch with the fun of a good yarn. You only have to pick up a copy of “Truckers” or “Only You Can Save Mankind” or “Johnny and the Dead” to see that Pratchett totally doesn’t get the idea of story for story’s sake. This is why I find him as wearing as King these days.

If there was one adult writer I could point to who understood a little more of writing a story because it’s a story it’s Neil Gaiman. I think he’s too focused on being adult and that’s why he’s less prolific than we’d like but I know that American Gods was never a chore the way that most grown up books are.

So once I have finished my current Lulu phase of three reads I think I will be catching up with my children’s literature because that’s where the fun is. Then Lulu children’s? Maybe. Maybe I could run the two concurrently…

And this is why it’s always a bad idea to take me to the book/media/coffee emporium. You have ot feel sorry for Suzie really, don’t you?

So I’m just waiting for my copy of The Confessor’s Tale plus another Lulu publication for review to wing its way here. I was disheartened but not entirely surprised to discover that Lulu have discontinued it’s “Basic Distribution” deal where, for 20 quid, you got an ISBN and an entry in some obscure librarians reference catalogue.

The cynic in me says that this is due to changes in ISBN laws (you can buy the ISBN separately but it costs a bunch, if you want to buy in bulk it’s more reasonably priced). I assume lulu used to buy loads and sell them on at a profit which is fine because it’s still cheaper than buying them direct. But the ISBN people apparently didn’t approve. Now you could say that lulu was scamming us by selling bulk bought ISBNs at a profit but you could also say that lulu are doing a great thing by allowing anyone to publish anything and buy an ISBN for it and provide a place for people to buy it so if we have to shove them a few beans to help with that so be it.

In fact one could further say that this bullshit from the ISBN people is the typical arsewittery you’d expect from a publishing community that’s outstayed it’s welcome and is starting to feel the encroachment of a new wave. Of course I have no proof as yet that there is anything worthwhile in this new wave except my stuff which is, of course, excellent. Er. Yes.

But when I get my new lulu books I can start having a look at what’s out there and reporting back. This is the way it’s going to be in the future. And it is better. But I’m just frustrated that I’m at the wrong end of a very long process here.

But as far as the ISBN people go if they want to pick up their ball and go home, fine. I’ll identfy my publication by it’s unique lulu id. The ISBN people can go and insert something long and blunt somewhere very uncomfortable.

Now it’s just a bit of a wait until the books show…