The PODler is changing his/her review system after a ding dong with “Distant Cousin” author Al Past. Two thoughts arise from this.

Although I respect the agenda behind the change of policy I think there is an element of cowardice to it. I do reviews of books I don’t like for either one or both of two reasons 1) because I was asked to review them and 2) because I need to show people what my critical faculty is composed of which is a lot easier when you’re criticising dross than when you’re praising the wonderful.

To give a parallel example I have listened to the film reviews of Mark Kermode for years now because I understand his critical faculty. I liked “Pirates of the Carribean” and no amount of his whining that the series is creatively bankrupt will change that. However, listening to his reasons for not liking PotC gave me a much better idea of why his opinion was worth listening to than his opinion of why “Hard Candy” was a great movie.

I think the reason for this is that things can be wrong in lots of different ways but they can only be right in a limited number of ways. In the end I stopped bothering to read POD-dy mouth reviews because good reviews always end up very samey. Just the mention of a book on that blog meant that she liked it. Examination as to why was never very enlightening.

The best reviews tend to be of the disappointments or the things that nearly made the grade. I cannot express my disappointment at how Bruce Bethke’s “Cyberpunk” didn’t connect with me the way his novel “Headcrash” did but my review says why.

People have asked me to review things and my respect to them is that I tell them exactly what I thought. Even if what I thought was not great. I have had people whinge at me about the fact that I didn’t call their book the second coming of Tolstoy. I have even had people tell me not to read anything else they wrote because I was lukewarm towards one thing they wrote (even though I said “actually this shows scope for improvement”).

If someone whinges because your not willing to kiss ass then screw ‘em. What are you supposed to do? Devalue every rapturous review you ever give because you don’t want to upset someone who didn’t do it for you? JA Konrath better believe that “Origin” is one of my favourite reads ever because if he scrolls through my review category he can see the evidence of what I do to things that aren’t.

I have already become bored by attempting critique of things that are just hideous. I will only review them if they’re of particular grotesque interest. The real work comes when you see something that shows that all important potential but fails to deliver entirely on its promise. The more promise it has and the less delivery it gives the trickier the task of the reviewer. You want to encourage something better but condemn what has so far been weak. That’s the real litmus test of a reviewer. I would say that my trickiest review so far would have to have been Derek M. Koch’s Memories of Home a task made only slightly easier by the fact that no charge is made for the pdf of the volume. The book’s not good, it barely scrapes ‘OK’ but it’s a splurge of first draft that shows a lot of potential. I hope my review reflects this.

So, I will continue to review anything people ask me to, or anything else that catches my fancy. Because people who have got as far as asking people to pay for their work without receiving the kickings I’ve had to put up with over my lengthy apprenticeship deserve whatever they damn well get.

Which leads me to my second point.

If you are an author, and someone gives you a bad review, bite your tongue. I will and have mercilessly savaged reviews that missed the point of what they were reviewing.

When you review something you have a duty to review it within a context. If I were to review “The Phantom Tollbooth” or “Bearing An Hourglass” as if they were literary fiction then they might seem shallow and silly. This totally discounts the fact that neither Norton Juster’s nor Piers Anthony’s agendas when writing those two volumes was pure literature. They were stories of specific genres that were to be viewed as part of the genre’s canon; a story for children that is amusing and educational; a story for fantasy fans that talks about archetypes and metaphysical philosophy. If you view the works as what they are supposed to be then the question stops being “are they good” and becomes “are they successful”, because who is really to say whether something is “good” or “bad”? All I can say is “if the author’s agenda was x then they did well” or, indeed, badly.

The very worst stuff I’ve read is where you could say “if the author’s agenda was to write a story then they failed”. The very best stuff where I’ve said “the author wanted to tell a story that hit these buttons and boy did they succeed”. The interesting part is when you say “I can see the author wanted to hit these buttons and in my opinion they failed because…”

Now it could be that as the author you had a different agenda. Or it could be that as a reviewer you haven’t quite put your finger on what was wrong. These are things an intelligent reader should be able to subtract out of the opinion but as NLP reminds us:

The meaning of a communication is the response you receive to it.

If you thought you were saying A and a third party heard B then you need to work on your ability to say A. Don’t ever blame someone else for mishearing you unless what you said and what they heard are so wildly different you have to question whether they were listening in the first place.

All I know is that Mr. Past’s response to the PODlers review colours my view of “Distant Cousin” before I’ve even had time to start reading it. The review itself merely made me wonder if I’d agree more with PODler or more with iUniverse Reviews.

When you put something out for review you have to be prepared for the fact that some people will not like it, others will not understand it and some will not like it because they don’t understand it. Your job as an author at that point is to drink a big cup of shut the hell up and take it on the chin. Otherwise you’re just a moaner.

Oh and yes, on occasion I am a moaner. But I’ve learned not to moan when people give me a fair crack of the whip, if they still don’t like it even though they tried to that’s my issue to remedy not theirs. People who only came to give me a kicking deserve every thing they get back.

Another one to add to the short stack of invaluable writing tips comes by way of Stephen King’s entertaining “On Writing”.

This is actually a two parter. The first part goes like this:

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

King breaks this down for us. Essentially what his old boss was saying was that the first time you set a story down, when you write it, you are telling that story to yourself. You should finish it in that way, with the door closed. When you come to edit, however, you are making the story ready for an audience. So you need to pay particular mind to what in the story needs explaining and in what order. So you need to have your door wide open for criticism etc.

The second part is firmly attached to this business of editing. To edit, the wise old boss told Mr. King you need to look at the story and cut away everything that isn’t the story.

These two pieces of advice have stuck with me for years and will stick with me for years to come.

UKers enjoy the bank holiday weekend. Everyone else. Just enjoy!

Hi all.

Still thinking things over about the journal and so on. Also have to contend with the news that I am to be made redundant, which sounds awful but the employment market, like the weather in the UK is unseasonbly warm so am having a whale of a time riding the CV to interview wave.

Back with something more substantial very soon.

There’s no real good in this situation.

It used to be that invasion of privacy was the problem of the rich and famous but in the modern world anyone can have a slice of the pie. Let’s follow the trail of breadcrumbs here and see if we can make some sense out of it.

I’m not Stephen King. Even with the best will in the world I will probably never be Stephen King or anywhere near as successful. My agenda is not that kind of success anyway. I come from a place where writing was a reserved activity and publication only for those who were deemed worthy. Now publication is the domain of anyone with a word processor that can output .rtf or .pdf, an internet connection and the will to do something about it.

By and large I am for this and it’s happened so it wouldn’t make much difference if I were against. Still, people will bitch and people will moan, and the aforementioned deniers and annihilators will attempt to deny and belittle and annihilate. So I thought, why not make my agenda to say “It’s okay to write and self-publish if you’re decent”. (It’s still not okay if you suck, no, really.)

And if I am published I figured it would probably be best under my own name. I am not really afraid of people seeing me under my own name.

Or rather I wasn’t.

What really bothers me about recent events is that now I am concerned.

Here’s a precis for those who are wondering what the hell I’m talking about.

As you may have gathered Mrs Monkey and myself decided to start a blog together because I wanted to talk about other things and we often have discussions about topics that we thought would translate well to an online format for the interested parties in our lives. As it happens Mrs Monkey is not the world’s greatest typist because, frankly, she has no need to be and besides the concepts would translate. We wanted the people in our lives like my mum and her mum and my stepkids and her kids could come by see what we were thinking about and leave stupid comments.

My mum in fact already gamely commented upon several occasions and all was going well.

Then there was a comment that linked to a less than family-oriented site and we decided that it wasn’t really a good thing to have on the site due tot he intended audience. I was all for just deleting it but Mrs. Monkey was more upset about it and wanted to make a point of saying that she was upset. I wasn’t about to prescribe what was going on the blog so it stood because its her blog too and that’s the end of it.

Only it wasn’t. Back came an insulting comment which was a little upsetting but to the casual observer it might have looked fairly mild.

The casual observer is not seeing the bigger picture.

The point is that it doesn’t take a minute to come onto a website and jot down some mean-spirited attack on someone else under an anonymous name. When that person is using their given name for whatever reason however I think the attack carries more emotional freight than it would if both parties were anonymous.

Two anonymous nobodies bickering on an obscure chatboard is one thing. Some one using Leo Stableford’s family-oriented journal to attack people he knows is quite another.

It makes me question whether the end of this journal is a lot nearer than I first supposed. Maybe I shouldn’t be using my given name to write under if all that’s going to do is let people who wish me ill find me and attack me and/or people that I love.

I don’t want that.

It’s part of the reason this journal largely concentrates on my “professional” agenda such as it is. I want to talk about self-publishing and publishing and writing and encouraging others to write and I don’t want to talk about anything else online, at least not here. And if I do what I want to talk about is stuff that isn’t really that personal but is, rather, just silly.

I am a writer. I will always be a writer. And writers like their privacy because unlike other types of famous person they get a certain measure of it as standard.

The point is, if they don’t, and someone has a grudge of some sort against them then where does it stop?

Will my children one day have to delete comments criticising their ability to type from the comments of their first websites? Are people I know going to find themselves attacked because someone knows me and doesn’t like me?

Should I really have to think about this?

Apparently the answer is yes.

So I’m going to see how it goes. And see if Mrs Monkey and myself can set up elsewhere in the digital domain under a further cloak of anonymity… and I’m going to have to have a good think about whether I want to continue writing under my own name or whether it’s time for Leo Stableford to give up writing and start producing work under another name altogether.

Thoughts below… ta.

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

First off it’s time to say goodbye to a couple of links. Gareth Young’s stopped posting and POD-lings has closed its doors for evermore. I want to keep my link list fresh and manageable so I have to reluctantly say goodbye to those links.

For those of you who may feel, as I do, a little sad when a blogging author or reviewer leaves the arena either through inactivity or by actually picking up their ball and going home there are a couple of responses. In response to anyone who thinks that they can leave their journal for months on end and still ever rely on it to maintain a kind of background buzz currency, you’re dreaming. Life moves pretty fast and it forgets you’re there if you don’t stop to look around once in a while, to paraphrase Mr. Bueller.

If, on the other hand, you are one of those tenacious wee bastards that just won’t be told to drop it then every time someone else gives up it should make you more determined to carry on. Sure POD-dy Mouth is no more and now the POD-lings are extinct, Betterment Worker disappeared in a puff of sudden hiatus. One day this journal’s going to drop dead too, sure as eggs is eggs. What you’re looking for is not eternity but rather, a good innings. You have to prepare yourself for survival. There has to continue to be a reason for you to do this if you’re a journal writer.

I have a fascination with the evolution of hidden systems. The evolution of things which seem perfectly obvious and are, in the end, irresistible but which many people have a vested interest in denying or annihilating. The evolution of digital technologies such as the Espresso Book Printing machine are inevitably going to change the mechanics of book production. There’s no way they can’t.

What’s fascinating to me is the way the deniers/annihilators actually hasten their own demise with reactive behaviour. All the integrators have to do is wait for the tipping point and the paradigm shifts.

For example, recently there has been a disturbance in the Force, to extend a metaphor originally used by Agent Kristin regarding Simon & Schuster’s laughable Canute-esque gesture of attempting to gain utter actual and digital control over manuscripts they buy. Suddenly everyone’s concerned about wedges with thin ends, not least The International Herald Tribune, Dear Author, Agent Kristin of course and The Author’s Guild. The latter seem to be in a state best described as “incandescent with rage” (I don’t know where I got that from but it does seem appropriate dontcha think?) over the whole thing and with good reason I believe. Best commentary evar award on the matter has to go to the consistently amusing Nathan Bransford because anyone who can find the most appropriate place to use the phrase “Oh, it’s just been broughten” has to win that award.

Most amusing for those of us on the self-publishing side of the fence (or those on both who are looking to integrate) is the fact that this is old-school publishing doing itself up the behind big style. The financial burden of distributing through Amazon etc. or even buying a simple ISBN number (unless you’ve got 10 un-ISBNed products to buy for at once, of course) are the old-school telling the little guy that they’re not invited to the party.

I’m waiting eagerly for the day a self-published volume with no ISBN garners universal praise in the POD world. It’s only a matter of time because we’re already unearthing stuff that any self-respecting publisher should be proud to be delivering but aren’t.

On that day questions will be asked and the paradigm will shift. What is needed from the ranks of the self-published is less focus on personal success and personal marketing and more on the idea that a community effort will bring about change far more radical, far more quickly than any individual effort ever will. It’s because I believe in this concept that I split my time between writing novels and updating this journal. The writing is the practise, this journal is the message.

Write, publish, deny the deniers, annihilate the annihilators. If you’re writing good stuff no one should be able to tell you it’s not valid because it wasn’t published by this dude, or it doesn’t have a 13-digit number issued by that dude. Maintain your own control and show people who want to own the publication rights to your work in perpetuity because they are insecure control freaks that none of us really need them as much as they need us.

I think the last word has to go to continued mensch, stand-up guy and soldier Jack Saunders who encourages us thus:

Disintermediate now. Don’t wait for permission. Start from where you are. Get better by doing it. By and by, a cult will form around you. You’ll be respected by your peers. You’ll be known in the narrow world of what you do as a mensch. A stand-up guy. A soldier.

Quote by way of the always relevant posts of the Grumpy Old Bookman.

Sorry folks, real life has put a great deal on my plate without checking to see the size of the portion I already had again. Am reading “When An Angel Falls” review to follow shortly.

Have fun!

It’s so rare that I come across a tip on writing that is concise enough to share in a single post and comes from a third party. There are books I would recommend but it is rare that someone puts their finger right on the button. Strunk & White hit the nail on the head with “Omit needless words” which would still be my number one piece of writing advice ever especially as it pretty much sums up what any writer could do to improve any manuscript in purely systematic way.

But we’re not here for that today, oh no.

From author Linnea Sinclair by way of Agent Kristin’s Pub Rants we get the 411 on the difference between “conflict” and “complication”.

To quickly precis for those too lazy to click a link the two concepts are often confused to the detriment of the fiction. For example, if renowned explorer Omaha Smith wishes to escape from a crumbling temple and finds a tiger barring the path to the exit that’s a complication. The tiger just happened to be hanging out and found some explorer shaped meat. Nothing personal. If, on the other hand, having despatched the tiger Omaha finds his arch rival Jerome Paunceau waiting outside with a coterie of armed goons to steal Omaha’s important archaeological finds that’s conflict. Jerome and Omaha have issues, which require settling, and a history. Jerome could even shorthand this by saying: “Once again Meester Smith we see that there is nothing you can own that I cannot take from you.” Or some such.

And this is a simple and crucial difference in the writing of fiction I’ve hitherto been unable to put my finger on. I have many times read a piece of fiction… or watched a movie or TV programme where everything could have been sorted out if only people had just sat down and had a good old chat. No one hated anyone, no one wished ill on anyone, no one was even really upset at anyone else, all the “conflict” was generated by mishearings, misunderstandings, poor communication.

That’s not a drama it’s just an irritating set up.

And other people get it too. I’ve lost count of the number of reviews I’ve read which concluded that something was lame because all the characters had to do was talk to one another.

So thank you Ms. Sinclair (via Agent Kristin) for adding this to the small heap of truly useful and thoroughly worthwhile story writing tips.

As of today I have implemented a brand new spam guard called Gatekeeper. It basically asks you a dumb question, a really dumb question, such as: What grows from the top of your head? (Answer: Hair) and unless you answer correctly it denies the comment. This stops non-self aware spam monsters (or should) but allows anonymous posting. I still require you to leave a name and e-mail address but neither have to exist.

Happy anonymous commenting!

One of the limitations placed upon me by running this journal the way I run it is that I can’t allow myself to wander too far into the topic known as “off”. Everything’s about my philosophy of writing and storytelling and publishing. Which is the way it should be here. The kind of people I want to be regular readers of this site are the kind of people who aren’t too concerned about my thoughts regarding the relative tastiness of various types of locally available fried chicken.

Out of a desire to provide these meanderings an outlet and also as a fun project between myself and the most wonderful Mrs. Monkey we proudly present: Monkey Stuff (link deceased) where in we debate the nature of life, the universe, prion style virus infections and who may or may not be a cylon at our local grocery store.

So if this is all a little too structured for you pop by the other blog and enjoy the worlds of randomness exposed beyond.