Well. The shop is ready visit it here! Which means that Figure of the Sorcechanic is out take a look here.

I have a monster headache and feel ill so more when I feel less like dying…

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 on Friday the 29th there was this huge, huge, huge lightning storm over Rugby. The net effect on the life of yours truly was that a lightning strike took out some piece of telecoms kit (something mysteriously named a “connector” by the engineer who fixed it) and with it my broadband. I could still watch “Deal or No Deal” and phone the help line but no book editing.

So I have now finally published Sorcechanic, once more I have to check a proof copy but then it will be going up to buy. Within the next couple of weeks I want to set up my royalty bank account and I am settling on three charities between which to divide 90% of the profits (30% each). I have two, Scope I believe it’s called and I’m going to also find a dyslexia charity. As for a third I’m really not sure. I’m going to have to think on it. Any suggestions comment below.

I’ve read about half of the book Mayhem At Grant-Williams High and a review is to follow. I have also bought two more Fantasy/Sci Fi books to read and review. I’m left in the position of wondering how these guys will feel that some random has bought their books because a book being on lulu is the equivalent of it not really being published. Maybe they’ll mail me and ask what I thought or some such, I don’t know.

There’s quite a bit of stuff up on Lulu even if the authors were only buying each other’s stuff then people might have enough to buy a pint or something to celebrate the achievement. I guess that lulu authors mostly want others to buy their stuff but are not so keen on buying where they sell… hmmm. Maybe I’m wrong.

The shop will be coming in time for this year’s National Novel Writing Month and maybe I’ll make some sales there. It’s quite ridiculous I think I’d have to sell about 5 copies of each book just to be in the zone where I could have even a pound to give to my nominated charities. This book business is costly. See the royalty I receive is something like about 18% of the manufacturing costs (you set your own). Which roughly equates to £1.25 per copy or something. I could boost the price to be making a 50% royalty or some nonsense but obviously this might be a disincentive to buyers.

Well now I have only new projects to worry about, except for a couple of minor changes that the beautiful Suzie suggested I might make to the ever delayed BB1.0:Pleasure’s Daughter. Of course this year’s NaNoWriMo will be all done by the close of Nov and I have promised once I finished that to crack on with a sequel to Figure of the Sorcechanic (which of course won’t be published for another 10 days anyway so I don’t know why I’m panicking).

Anyhow, that’s where I’m at. Expect me to be somewhat more communicative in upcoming weeks as I’ve done the grindwork of publishing the old and now I can devote myself wholly to the production of the new.