The Life of Writing

The Twitocratic Oath

2012-02-13T20:50:00.000Z

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about marketing. This is what I have come up with:

The only way to sell your product—be it a book, a software program or crocheted condoms—is to tell people about it. (Incidentally, I made up “crocheted condoms” as a joke, then Googled it on a whim. Yup. http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/condom Heaven help us!)

The best way to get people to know about your product is to get other people to talk about it, spontaneously, for free and, hopefully (but not altogether necessary), in a good way. That is something I consider achievable, if unlikely, but it harkens back to the Prime Directive of introducing people to your product in the first place.

You can do this by spending money or for free: no real choice to make there, then.

Fortunately, these days, there are numerous way to advertise for free: blogging, twitter, Facebook, YouTube…etc. Due to my lack of specialized talents, however, I am limiting myself to blogging and Twitter. (I really want to give YouTube a go, but I am not keen on embarrassing myself in front of 7 billion people, even though it would probably shift a lot of books.)

Blogging is my strong suit, but that gets you nowhere unless people are made aware of the blog, which leads back to Twitter. (Guest blogging is another great publicity source but I have decided not to do that this time. For my other books, people have kindly allowed me to do this but I feel I am incurring karma debt by not yet being in a position to reciprocate. I am willing to help anyone who asks, but no one wants to guest post on my blog or solicit advice from me so, until that happens, I’m trying to keep my Karma Credit Card in my wallet.)

So, Twitter and commenting on other people’s blogs: both great ways to let people know you are out there. However, I see a lot of people Twitting and commenting in ways that make me cringe; I want people to be aware of me, not think I’m a dick, so I came up with a list of rules for me to follow and I’m calling it my Twitocratic Oath because calling it my “Don’t Be a Dick” list sounded too snarky.

The original oath; oddly, it was not published

in eBook format.

The Twitocratic Oath

I swear by Twitter, Wordpress, Blogspot and all other social networks, and I take to witness all the Cyber-gods and Cyber-goddesses, to keep according to my ability and my judgement, the following Oath and agreement:

I will not blast hundreds of tweets at a time so that my followers will see only page after page of my tweets when they log on.
I will make every effort to be sociable and accessible on Twitter and to interact with others.
I will limit publicity Tweets to announcements about book releases, notifications of price changes, special offers or to draw attention to a review or other media appearance.
I will post Tweets about my blog updates (or special announcements as noted in Item 3) no more than six times to Twitter (to cover all time zones) and only once to Facebook.
I will post Tweets about past blog posts no more than twice a week. (I have never done this, but it sounds a great idea and I want to leave the option open.)
In reference to Item 4, my blog posts will be not be overt advertisements for my books (except in the case of announcements, as listed in Item 3) and will continue to provide the same, quality entertainment they always have. In short, I want people to visit my blog because I can do something for them (i.e. entertain them) and if they like what they see and want to buy my books, all the better.
I will comment appropriately on other people’s blogs and if I ever post a comment along the lines of, “Hey, great post! Reminds me of my book, Best Book Ever Written, available at (link), (link) and (link), where I mention something very similar…” I will go immediately to the nearest pig farm and dunk my head in the biggest pile of manure I can find because that is what I will deserve.

If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all humanity and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my life.

Hippocrates: "Do no harm."

Do I expect to sell a lot of books following this oath? Not really, but I do expect to be able to sleep soundly at night.

(Update: I have just been reminded--by a visit to Nicola Morgan's site Help I Need a Publisher--about DMs, or Direct Messages in Twitter. I didn't mention them because I have never used them and don't intend to. I think that's a good plan.)

Moving On

2011-06-10T14:10:00.000+01:00

This blog has moved to:

www.LifeOfWriting.com

Come and follow me there, both of you.

A Review, a Revelation and a Resolution - II

2011-06-08T19:53:00.000+01:00

You’ve had the review, time for the revelation.

I have twice made the decision to self-publish, and both times I made it for the right reason.

With the first Postcards manuscript, I continued to receive good reviews from agents and publishers, but the consensus was that, being such a niche book, it would not be economically viable to publish it. It wasn’t that Postcards was a bad book, it was just that, for them, publishing it would be a bad business decision.

By that time, POD technology had advanced to the point where publishing it myself was a viable alternative. So I did. And I did many things (accidentally) right, and some other things (typically) wrong.

Even so, the book gained enough attention that Lean Market Press offered to publish it. They did this because—for a micro-publisher without the overhead of author advances, print runs, storage, etc.—it was a good business decision, and I was glad to have them. For me, the status of having a ‘properly’ published book was well worth their cut. I learned a bit about publishing, marketing and professionalism, and the ‘published by’ inside the front cover gave me a credibility I had not previously enjoyed.

The book sold a few copies, they made a couple of quid for their efforts, and I didn’t make much. But, in my view, it remained a win-win situation. However, when the second book came around, I thought I could do it just as well myself and maybe make a few dollars (or pounds) this time out.

With the further advances in technological over the past few years, self-publishing had become even more viable, so I gritted my teeth for the onslaught of “Oh, you mean it’s self-published,” comments and dove in. What I found disturbed me.

I couldn’t put my finger on it; the bloggers and champions of self-publishing were all dedicated, earnest and full of success stories, but there was something about it all that smacked of zealotry, and I’ve had quite enough of that, thank you. It made me nervous and left me wondering if I was expected to join their ranks and wear my self-publishing mantle as a badge of honor while publicly declaration my insurgency against traditional publishing.

Then I read Self-Printed and realized what it was all about: they were angry, and I wasn’t angry, nor did I desire to become angry. I decided to self-publish based on a rational and realistic business assessment, not because I wanted to pick up the lance and tilt at “The Big 6” Publishers.

Catherine Ryan Howard (author of Self-Printed) seemed the voice of reason (and copious amounts of information) and I suddenly felt better about my book. She calmly and rationally explained the process, the realities and complications of self-publishing, all without exhibiting even a hint of zealotry. And having studied her example, I have given myself permission to do the same for my book, because it’s worth it.

It’s a good book, really; I’m pleased with the way it turned out, staggered by the early reviews* and looking forward to seeing how far I can take it. But it already has enough to overcome by being, as it is, self-published, without having to carry all that anger around.

* I was just contacted by a woman who told me she laughed so hard while reading my book she wet herself. Is that an endorsement, or what?

---------------------------------------------------------

As part of my image makeover, I am moving to new digs. And I have decided that this blog will have a larger presence in the new order, which I am calling my blog Empire. Please come and join me; I'd love to have you along. The next time you come here, there will be a link to the new blog. See you there.

Last one to leave, turn off the lights.

Self-Printed: a Review, a Revelation, a Resolution

2011-06-02T07:35:00.001+01:00

I am just about finished reading Catherine Ryan Howard’s book, Self-Printed. This is the book I should have read before I self-published More Postcards From Across the Pond. Turns out, not having read it was not due to any oversight on my part; it wasn’t out at that time—this is a brand new book. And lucky you, if you are thinking of self-publishing, have the opportunity to read it first. And I highly recommend that you do.

Even my belated reading did a world of good: the book was so thorough and so inspiring that I had a revelation while reading the early chapters, and made a resolution while reading the bits on cover design, but writing about them will take up too much space in a single post, so I will leave them for later and just write the review for now.

This is a one-stop shop for all your DIY publishing needs, covering everything from formatting text and getting accounts on all of those different web sites to how to navigate the often intimidating world of social media. Originally, I was disappointed at not having had the opportunity to read the book before mine was published, but despite coming at it after the fact, there was still a wealth of critical information to be gleaned. Because the book is so comprehensive, it filled the void left after reading half a dozen “Twitter For Dummies” type books and did so with simple, concise and easy to understand directions.

In addition to this, the book is almost frighteningly readable. Catherine’s writing style, which I was first introduced to in her self-published travel memoir, Mousetrapped, is so captivating and comical I literally had a hard time putting the book down.

The other unique appeal of this book, making it—to my mind—the quintessential self-publishing guide, is that all this information is served with a heaping portion of delusion-busting, real-world common sense. “…[Amanda Hocking’s] success has been truly amazing...but there's only one Amanda hocking, and if there's ever another one, the odds are you won't be it.”

Catherine does, however, point out that, while dreams of millions should remain dreams, the idea of earning a respectable amount is clearly within your reach—if you do it right. And ‘right’ is not what she purports to teach you; she is merely showing you how—and just as importantly, why—she self-published Mousetrapped and sold over 4,000 copies in the first year.

If you are thinking of self-publishing, you must read this book. If you are as confused about social media as I was, you could do worse than read this book. And if you are tired of the “How to Make Millions Publishing Your Own Books While Sticking It To the Big 6 Publishers” manuals, and are ready for some real-world, real-life advice that will leave you chuckling, you definitely should read this book.

Catherine’s books are available as both print and ebooks. Visit her website for more information, and a few more chuckles.

Catherine Ryan Howard's blog: http://catherineryanhoward.com/

Self-Printed website: http://selfprintedbook.com/

POSTSCRIPT: I uploaded a condensed version of this review to Amazon just now and had another revelation. I do not consider myself a good book reviewer; I never think about reviewing a book unless it really makes an impact on me--a good impact. Therefore, all of my reviews are 5-star, which makes me a rubbish reviewer--the suspect type who appears to be reviewing books for his friends.

Rest assured Ms Ryan Howard is not a friend, nor an acquaintance, even; we have never so much as exchanged e-mails. I simply, and honestly, think she is a good writer and that Self-Published is a great book.

But, in order to build up some credibility, it seems I'm going to have to find some books I don't like and post a few "this book is crap" type reviews on Amazon.

Deep Breaths

2011-05-25T20:42:00.000+01:00

Better now. I spent the day brooding but eventually got to the root of the problem. I blame The Book.

I should have seen this coming; when I held the finished product in my hand and realized that, yeah, it looked good and the content was well formatted and, overall, it was a satisfying and professional-looking job, I allowed myself a mental pat on the back.

In a normal person, this might incentivize them to move forward with the same cautious determination and thoroughness that had brought them to that point; in me, however, it inspires the unrealistic notion that I can do anything. So I’m immediately off in six different directions trying to get everything done at once and annoyed with myself when I don’t see results within 24 hours.

Focus: that’s my problem. I was trying to become an Uber-Twitter, and a Facebook whizz and while working on my next book and handling marketing for the current book all at the same time.

So I burned myself out, spent a day sulking and now I’m back in the saddle.

Twitter and Facebook still elude me, however, and I am savagely disappointed by this. I’ve been working with computers for over thirty years. This stuff should be easy for me. I was on the cutting edge back when it was slick with the blood of unfortunates clinging to their IBM Selectrics, but lately I feel like an aging gunfighter haunted by the ghosts of the men he’s left dead. (BTW, that’s me quoting my own book. Good stuff, eh?)

But I’ve stopped trying to cram my overcrowded brain with the esoteric workings of Twitter and Facebook; I’ll just keep using them and, according to the rule of 10,000, eventually I will catch on.

The Rule of 10,000 has been going around the internet for a while now, and basically says you need to put 10,000 hours into something to become an expert at it. I can buy that: a musical instrument, learning a craft, studying astronomy—to do it right, these all require an astonishing amount of devotion. Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, perhaps not so much, but the theory is the same: focus, be consistent, work on getting better and eventually you will become, if not an expert, at least someone who knows their way around.

It think, with the rapidly changing nature of the web, things like Twitter and Facebook should have a Rule of 10,000 – seconds. That’s nearly three hours and, frankly, I think that’s enough.

A Twit Too Far

2011-05-23T08:25:00.000+01:00

I give up!

I’ve been banding my head against the wall for a week now trying to come up with some inspirational marketing plans (beyond the usual giveaways and begging people to review my book on their sites, etc; you know, all the stuff that didn’t work last time). It should be simple: I have a product, a good one, one I believe in and truly think people will enjoy; I simply need to let the maximum number of people know about this and encourage them to make the right decision.

Piece of cake, really.

So I think, “Twitter! That’s where all the young, hip and trendy people hang out these days.” Trouble is, I know nothing about it. All I know is that my book needs a Twitter account. So I set one up and realized that was the extent of my knowledge.

So I read a book about how to be a twit, or some such thing. I do have my own account, so I know how to tweet, but that’s as far as it goes; the idea of re-tweets, mentions, #FF (whatever that is about) and such is well beyond me. So I read Tweeting For Morons (or whatever) and found out, not only have I been doing it all wrong, but that I cannot understand the way to do it correctly.

Retweets, I am told, are very important. There is a retweet button in Twitter that does it automatically but only novices and morons use it; to be effective, you need to manually retweet and add a bit of your own commentary, as well.

Fair enough, but nowhere in the book does it say how to manually retweet. I guess that knowledge is so basic it needs no explanation. Which tells me I am clearly out of my depth.

And just as I was getting the hang of replies (so I thought) I found out that replying does not show the tweet to your list but only the person you replied to (but isn’t that a direct message?) To show the reply to all your followers, you need to put a dot in front of the reply. I had never heard of such a thing, so I Googled , “Put a Dot in Front of the @” and got back, “How to Make a Chinese Doll from Clothespins.”

To make matters worse, according to an actually marketing guy I happened to get into a conversation with yesterday, the bottom third of the demographic now uses youTube as their primary source of information. So here I am slipping down the learning curve of a technology that is already yesterday’s news.

So, yeah, I give up.

Maybe I’ll see if I can figure out how to make a Facebook page, instead.

Only in America

2011-05-20T11:36:00.000+01:00

So, the book went live. But only on Amazon US.

Now I'm grappling with the question of whether I should begin the promotion in earnest now or wait until it appears on Amazon UK. From the reading I have been doing, it could be weeks before it is activated on the UK side, so it seems foolish to wait.

On the other hand, many of my customers in the UK will be unable to buy the book (or be required to pay over-the-odds for shipping) and may decide to look again later. And we all know what that means--out of sight, out of mind, no sale.

Still, I feel like I ought to get something moving, start the juggernaut rolling.

Maybe I can encourage everyone in the UK to buy a Kindle.

On the Move

2011-05-16T13:29:00.000+01:00

My, that was fast.

I received my proof copy of More Postcards From Across the Pond today, having only ordered it on Friday. It looks great, and the few issues I have with it are of my own making.

First, the margins are a bit tight, but that was me trying to mimic the formatting, and page count, of the original book. It’s not bad, but it could be a little wider. Also, despite CreateSpace’s warning not to try this, I made the cover image so that it wrapped around the spine and ended on the crease with the back cover. The original book had this, so with the idea that the same sized cover for the same sized book with the same number of pages would be the same, I went ahead with it. It nearly worked. The cover image wraps nicely around the spine but runs over onto the back just a bit. Still, not bad for a wild guess.

Pretty slick, even if I say so myself

The book is already available in the CreateSpace store but I am not going to announce it until it is on Amazon proper. Part of this is in hopes the shipping price will be better when offered for sale by third party vendors. Shipping to the UK from CreateSpace is shockingly high. For the one proof copy I was required to buy, the shipping was nearly thirty dollars! You can order a copy for $6.38 shipping, but it won’t arrive until July. For the US, $3.95 will get it to you in a week.

Just a bit of bleed over the crease,
but nothing to scream about

But all that will work itself out soon enough. For now, the book is here, it looks great and I am terrified to look inside it because I just know the first thing I will see is a huge, glaring error.

See any errors?

Let the Games Begin

2011-05-11T06:10:00.001+01:00

It’s done.

More Postcards from across the Pond is now available as an ebook:

The paperback is almost ready for production and should be out in a few weeks. Then I can oil up the Marketing Machine and put it in gear.

These are my goals for this book:
1. Sell more copies than the first books did (this is putting the bar fairly low, I might point out).
2. Make more money than the last book did (ditto).

I realize that having no control over the these events makes them wishful thinking rather than real goals, but I’m sticking with them anyway.

If you are interested, you can buy the book at:

Amazon UK or Amazon US (both subject to tax/VAT)

Smashwords where it is tax-free, cheaper and comes with a variety of download options.

If you have not yet been assimilated and,, like myself, remain Kindle-free, you can download a Kindle for PC app here.

You only other option is to wait for the book.

Onward.

Embracing My Shame

2011-05-08T17:24:00.000+01:00

The Book is churning in the conversion engines of Smashwords and Kindle now. The announcement will follow soon.

While I am beginning to come to grips with the idea of self publishing—I mean, being an Indie Author—I still find myself almost apologizing when people ask about its publication. The thing is, self publishing was the territory of sub-standard authors—the timid, the talentless and those lacking in tenacity—that admitting to self publishing remains akin to admitting you are a loser.

The paradigm is shifting, however, and I am coming to accept the view that it hardly makes sense to go with the traditional route these days, but legacy of the loser hangs on.

A lot will depend on how this book does. If it outsells the professionally published book, that will be quite a victory, and maybe then I can stop feeling like I should apologize for having self published it and instead project the idea that it was the smart decision.

I do feel good about this book. The cover is professional looking, the manuscript is as refined and error-free as I can get it and, because I know humor (I’ve had several columns and wrote for radio in addition to having my first book published by a real publisher), I am comfortable that the text is up to professional standards. So this was a good book to launch my experiment with; a novel—if it comes to that—will see me back on unfamiliar territory.

But until the paradigm shifts further in the favor of indie writer, claiming you are a published author when you had to do it yourself will continue to be sound as if you are claiming to have an active sex life because you stay at home on Saturday nights to slap Mr. Johnson around. And although I can point out the fact that a publisher wanted to acquire this manuscript but I chose to publish it myself, that merely sounds like I had a bona fide date but turned it down just so I could stay at home on Saturday night to slap Mr. Johnson around.

VCR as Metaphor

2011-05-07T05:56:00.000+01:00

That thing I am coming to think of as The Manuscript has been coddled and soothed, slipped into its PJ’s and put to bed to rest up for the final round of polishing. God willing and the creek don’t rise, it should be e-published over the weekend.

I have, therefore, been thinking a lot about this Indie Adventure I am embarking on. They say one definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, so I must be crazy, right? The only real change in the self-publishing arena since my last adventure has been the explosion of e-books, and I am counting on that, alone, to make the difference. So I really must be crazy.

I do wonder (and I’m shortly to find out) just how much of a difference being able to buy something that doesn’t really exist as opposed to an actual hold-in-you-hand-and-flip-the-pages book is going to make, but if our experience with the VCR is any indication, it is bound to have at least some impact.

A VCR. What a marvel of technology. We could set it to record shows while we were out and then watch them later. What could be more convenient? Well, like a lot of people, what we ended up doing is recording shows, forgetting what tape they were on, having to hunt for shows on tapes containing multiple programs, taping shows over other shows we had taped but not watched yet and, in the end, just gave up and used the VCR as a clock.

You can think of this as a POD book. It’s cheap, dead easy and ever so convenient for the writer and the customer, who merely has to click on the BUY button, enter their card details, confirm the sale and wait a week for the book to show up.

What could be simpler? And if it is so simple, how come so few people bother with it? Could it possibly be made any easier?

Well, after our VCR collected dust for a year or so, we went out and bought a digital recorder. It is brilliant. Without having to get up off of the sofa, we can scan the on-screen program guide and simply press a button to schedule recordings of a single show or an entire series. We can also scroll through lists of what we have already recorded or what we have scheduled to record. We use it constantly.

Think of this as an e-book. You click on the image and...there it is. The book automatically downloads and, if you have an account set up, the money is automatically deducted from your bank account. A single click and you can start reading.

Add to that the fact that, as an Indie author, I have control over the price (you can make it as convenient as you want but few people are going to pay £13.50 for an e-book) and there is a chance, just a chance, that people will be more willing to buy it.

People want convenience and a fair price and, for the first time in publishing history, e-books can offer this. We will soon see if that is enough.

Editing and Art

2011-05-01T13:38:00.000+01:00

Remember those services I spoke of last time, the ones traditional publishers provide but you can contract out for? I advise you to do so.

I just spent the better part of four days coming up with a book cover and these past weeks have been filled with the reading and re-reading of the manuscript until I (and my wife and her mother) are nearly blind. If you want a polished product, hire people who are good at these things to do them—-it may cost a few bob but the peace of mind will be worth it.

I, however, am not contracting out these services for one very good reason: I’m an idiot (no, that’s a second reason) it is all part of the experiment to see if my efforts can match and surpass the published book.

If I were to do this again I would at certainly consider getting someone else to do this part of the job. The cover art isn’t as difficult as the editing-—all I need to do is mimic the first cover and re-learn how to use my twenty-year old software and then spend a long weekend sitting at my laptop sweating and swearing. But editing is a heart-breaker.

The problem is, it is the single most important thing, that bit of the book that separates the "Indie" publisher from the six guys. It has to be perfect, or as near as possible, but getting it right is so, so tedious. Reading over and over and finding different mistakes each time. With my first self-published book, I did hire a professional proof reader. And I proofread it myself, several times. But when it finally ended up with a publisher, they found more errors. And when we sent out review copies, a reviewer found some more. And now that I am talking up this new book (More Postcards from across the Pond, coming out in early May, tell your friends) a fan of the that first book told me she had found errors in it, as well. So I sent her the manuscript for this one to proofread.

That will teach her.

The Great Experiment

2011-04-27T21:14:00.000+01:00

Oh my, look at the time. Sorry, I nipped out for a pint and before I knew it, well,… I’m back now. Are you upset? Did you miss me? Oh, I see. You think I suddenly came back because I want something, right? Okay, I do; sorry if that impinges on your self-esteem.

I have been busy while I was away, honest. I wrote two books, and one is due out in a few weeks, and I am conducting an experiment with it that I want to record here as it unfolds (or falls flat, whatever the case may be): I’m going to publish it myself.

Yes, I know I have advised against this, even though I did it myself (actually, it was because I had done it myself), and my reasons were valid. At the time. Things have changed since then and I am keen to see how much, or how little, difference the new paradigm will make.

After my first foray into self-publishing, followed by my acceptance into the world of professional publishers, I swore I would never even consider a DIY book again, but times and technologies changed, and with the coming of the eBook and POD revolution, self publishing is starting to become a viable option. It is still a difficult and hazardous option, however, and not for the faint of heart, so I stood on the sidelines watching others play for a while, thinking I would never have the gumption to join in. This is the argument that swayed me:

Traditional publishers offer 3 things:
1. Editing
2. Artwork
3. Marketing
4. Validation (okay, four)

The first two are services that can be contracted out if you cannot do them yourself. A couple hundred quid should do it, as opposed to 85% of the net profits from your book from now until the end of time. Granted, the profits from you book may not equal a couple hundred quid, but that’s a different issue.

Marketing: small publishers routinely expect their authors to handle their own marketing, and now the big boys are pushing marketing off on their authors as well. So what are they doing to earn their 85%? And, if you are desperately bad at marketing (which I am) and have a few hundred additional quid lying around (which I don’t) you can also contract this out.

Validation: this is the biggie, because a lot of writer’s look to the publishing industry to tell us if we are good enough. When a real publisher takes our work and produces a book, it’s like a great weight has lifted; we have arrived. But that book can--as many do--just lay there, unsold and unread. If, on the other hand, you self-publish and have people buying and enjoying the book and exchanging glowing reviews on Amazon, isn’t that better validation than having a “proper” book published but ignored? The big publishers want us to believe they put the stamp of validity on our writing, but in truth, it is the reads who do that.

Of course, in truth, what is most likely to happen--self-published or traditionally produced--is that you will sell a few copies to family and friends and then your book will sink into the morass of words spewed daily, like an open sewer pipe, into the river of an increasingly word-weary public. So here’s what I’m going to do:

I am going to self-publish the sequel to my runaway (not quite so) best seller, Postcards from across the Pond, to see if, by using the new technologies and a different business strategy, I can outsell it. I realize this is setting the bar pretty low, but one thing my limited experience with professional publishing has taught me is that it is impossible to underestimate sales.

Accordingly, my new book, imaginatively titled, More Postcards from across the Pond, is coming out as an eBook soon, with the paper version to follow a few weeks later. I’m going to do this right here, out in the open, so everyone (well, the three of us) can see the results.

Should be fun.

Then I’ll likely disappear again.

Focus

2010-07-17T20:32:00.000+01:00

I recently undertook a study of blogging and how to do it better (i.e. I accidentally surfed onto a "How To Blog Better" blog). Much of it was common sense—though it never hurts to remind oneself of the obvious—but there were a few new tidbits in the list that I could benefit from.

The primary, and most glaringly ignored, rule was: "Don't have more than one blog." Um, guilty, but with mitigating circumstances, Your Honor.

This blog, which I used to consider my back-up blog, was started as an auxiliary to my erstwhile website that, against my will, morphed into a blog. This blog was also largely ignored and I never expected it to amount to much. In fact, I fully anticipated it would be so universally ignored that I would be free to cavort naked here (metaphorically speaking) without fear of being seen. I guess this supports the theory that, if you write it, they will read.

But I digress, which goes against the grain of another rule, and the subject of this post: “Focus.”

This may fall into the category of common sense, but a blog needs to be about something, or, more precisely, some "thing." And it should be the same thing every time.

This is a writing blog, and every post should, in some way, reflect some aspect of writing. I like to think I've followed this rule; even the rare "twofer" posts that I put up here and on my other blog, are so treated because they fit the criteria for both locations, not simply because I'm lazy.

Surprisingly, I find it easier to maintain focus here than there. Here, I'm a writer, there I'm an expat, and while I actually do wake up every morning with the thought, "I am a writer" going through my head (it's what prompted me to set my alarm for 5AM, after all) I can often go through an entire day without thinking, "I am an expat."

The other consideration is, not only am I an expat on my other blog, I am a funny expat, so I need to write about being an expat while avoiding weighty subjects and controversial issues. Maintaining this sort of focus is limiting but crucial to retaining and expanding my readership. It also keeps me out of trouble: much as I might like to be a serious journalist, I know I am woefully under-informed and allow knee-jerk reactions to dictate my politics. In short, my views on weighty subjects are about as deeply researched and valid as those found in The Daily Mail, and airing them will not give my readers what they came for. I forget this at my peril.

(Incidentally, I am not writing this post because of anything I recently wrote over there, so don't go looking for an ill-advised post on abortion or immigration where I make a pillock out of myself. I'm just acknowledging that I am occasionally tempted to.)

So the point of this post is simply to remind myself, and anyone else who cares to come along, to "dance with the one that brung ya." If you pause here, expect to read my views on publishing, technology, train travel, sheep farming, income tax or the best way to arrange your sock drawer, but all of it will, in some small way, be related to writing. Visit my other blog, and expect to be mirthfully reminded that I am an American, out of my depth in a strange land. And if you find me doing anything else, post a comment reminding me to focus.

One last rule of note that the article mentioned: “Don't expect to make money with your blog.”

Well, no problem there, at least.

Interview With Meg Gardiner

2010-07-08T19:34:00.000+01:00

A week or two back, I managed to snag an interview with Edgar award winning author Meg Gardiner, for my other blog (no, not that one, this one). This came about because Ms Gardiner, in addition to being an internationally famous writer, also happens to be an expat.

But she is primarily a writer, so she kindly gave me permission to reprint the interview on my writing blog for the benefit of my half-dozen readers.

Writing, as Meg points out on her blog – Lying for a Living – is her third career. Born in Oklahoma and raised in Santa Barbara, CA, she practiced law in Los Angeles and taught writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Several years ago, after living in California most of her life, she and her family moved to the UK where she began writing suspense novels. She now writes full time and says it is a job she feels immensely lucky to have.

Meg has recently released her eighth novel, Liar’s Lullaby. I have not yet read that one, but if China Lake and Mission Canyon are anything to go by, it is bound to be a cracker.

1. How did you come to live in Britain and how long have you lived here?

My husband was offered a job at his company’s London office. And I was an avid anglophile, thanks to Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, and the English pub I frequented on Santa Monica beach. I couldn’t wait to move. Plus I’m a James Bond fan, and wanted a jet pack.

We came for a two-year assignment. That was in 1994. When the jet packs are delivered, we’ll load them up and head back to California, like the Beverly Hillbillies.

2. Was your transition to British life easier or more difficult than you had imagined?

It featured some surprises. For instance, my new British friends constantly said, “Brilliant!” to me. It took a while to understand that they didn’t, in fact, consider me an earth-shattering genius. They were simply using the local equivalent of “Cool.” This ego-deflating insight came when a friend said, “Pop-Tarts for breakfast? Brilliant!”

And, like most Americans, I presumed that British television would be all high culture, all the time. The first evening I turned on the TV (“after the watershed,” whatever that meant) eager to expose my daughter to E.M. Forster and the Tudors. We sat down and – Breasts! Big and bare and onscreen. And butts. More than one, and in bed, and… where the hell is the remote?

Transition? What transition?

Actually, the kids are now fluent in both Yank and Brit. One’s a cheerleader and two are Eagle Scouts. They drive a Mini, love ham, egg and chips, play rugby, and can’t live without Top Gear.

3. What preconceptions about Britain and the British were shattered or confirmed after your arrival?

I assumed that in Britain, I would stroll to the quaint neighborhood market to do the family’s grocery shopping. Instead, I walked into a Tesco the size of Heathrow airport. It was apocalyptic.

And I assumed that Sundays in Britain would be like something out of Mrs. Miniver: pews packed with devout Anglicans singing “Nearer My God to Thee.”

And that my fridge would be larger than a shoebox.

However, the coach and footman, and the ladies in waiting, make up for all of that.

4. Having spent most of your early life in the American south and southern California; do you consider the British climate a trade up, or are you thinking you got the short end of the weather-stick by moving to the UK?

As I tell my children when they face a challenge: It builds character.

5. What, in your opinion, is better about living in the UK as opposed to the US?

Pubs. Stonehenge. Prime Minister’s Questions. Long, lingering summer evenings in the garden. BBC reporters who don’t shout and whose careers clearly, endearingly, don’t depend on big hair and shiny teeth. “Jerusalem” – Give me my bow of burning gold; bring me my arrows of desire… I’m tearing up just thinking about that hymn.

6. What do you miss about life in the US?

My family. Good Mexican food. Customer service. College football games on crisp autumn afternoons. Marching bands. Midnight mass at the Old Mission in Santa Barbara. Wild thunderstorms over the New Mexico desert. Hitting the road and driving out where even radio stations can’t reach you.

7. Your books are set in the US; while writing, do you have to remind yourself that America has no zebra crossings and they don't queue, or are you fluently bilingual?

Books can be edited before publication, so I don’t worry about dodgy, or sketchy, language goofs. But when I travel between Britain and the U.S., I have to remember which side of the car has the steering wheel, so when I climb in I don’t look like an idiot.

8. How do you stay connected with friends, family and novel locations in the US?

An extensive network of miniature spy cameras.

9. When you visit the States and people realize you live in Britain, how many of them ask, "Have you met the Queen?" (BTW, have you?)

None, fortunately. Unfortunately, many ask: Why don’t you have an accent?

But I do have an accent, I insist. A California accent, dude.

10. I understand you used to be a mime and, while this has nothing to be with being an expat or an internationally acclaimed writer, I have to ask: are you better now?

I can’t speak as a mime.

I hope you enjoyed Meg’s interview. Now go out and buy her books.

Seeking Its Own Level

2010-05-28T18:38:00.000+01:00

They say if you release pedigree dogs—great dane, bulldog, rat on a string, whatever—they will, in a few generation, revert to your bog-standard mutt; that animal most of us think of when someone says the word, “dog.”

It seems to be that way with the Internet, as well.

(Oh no, he’s going off on one of his, “I’ve been around this Internet thing a long time, so gather ‘round, kids, while grandpa tells you a story” binges again.)

In the beginning, before there were web pages, there were bulletin boards. In this text world (Yes, kids, text; you only saw writing on the screen, and there was no such thing as a mouse!) people logged on and sought out like-minded people to exchange porn, I mean, ideas with. This was the forerunner of the newsgroups, chat rooms and fourms.

Then web pages arrived. The early days saw some interesting evolutionary branches, but eventually an accepted pattern emerged: a main page with changing text on it and a collection of relatively static pages containing other information, such as About Me, Other Writing, Buy my Shit, etc.

Your average website

Then came blogs.

We HTMLers hated them. They were crass, vulgar and, well, really really easy, so one by one we sold our souls. But some of us, like myself, would not compromise. My main blog is graphed into my old web site so the static pages co-exist with the ever-changing main page. This took no small effort and is not for the faint of heart so most people contented themselves with a link to their real web site.

But so strong, so natural, is the pattern of main page linked to static pages that blogs have now evolved into, well, web sites. Wordpress has had this feature for some time, but if any of you lived through my ill-fated foray into the world of Wordpress with me you’ll know this was a painful time.

And nowBlogger—the slag of blog software—has jumped on the bandwagon. Pages are, once again, a standard feature, only now they are as easy to set up and maintain as a blog.

The new look of Blogs

I expect I’ll make full use of them, at least on my other blog (though this one might serve as a guinea pig). At least I see an innovation that doesn’t make me go into “Grumpy Old Man” mode, but only because this isn’t really an innovation, it’s a return to the way things were meant to be.

Review - Take II

2010-05-23T18:31:00.001+01:00

Now that I am a little further in the book I mentioned in the previous post, I thought I should provide an update.

Before I do that, however, I wish to remind you that the observation was about the book starting off slowly, whereas my boss said it grabbed him from the first page. I still hold to that; I was nearly a third of the way through the book before it really got a grip on me.

It came about slowly. As I mentioned, I was determined to stick with the book because I was confident it would pick up eventually. I doggedly read through chapter after chapter, then one day found myself wondering about the characters, and the plot and speculating on what might happen next.

Eventually, I began to look forward to my next opportunity to read on. And today I gave the book the highest possible compliment: I missed my bus stop because I was so engrossed in reading it.

This has happened only once before, when I looked up from my reading of “Postcards From No Man’s Land” by Aidan Chambers (I bet you thought I was going to say, “Postcards From Across the Pond”) to find I was at St. James Park and had to get off the Circle line and double back to Victoria Station.

So “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” now has my full endorsement. You could do worse than to go out and buy a copy.

But if you find that it starts off a little slow, stick with it; it will pick up eventually.

The Girl With . . .

2010-05-14T05:58:00.002+01:00

This isn’t so much a review as it is a cautionary tale about recommending books to your friends and colleges.

Because I don’t live under a rock at the bottom of the ocean, I have been aware of the series of books titled, “The Girl …” followed by a variety of phrases: “…With the Dragon Tattoo,” “…Who Played With Fire,” “…Who Kicked the Badger,” “…Who Swam with Dolphins,” “…Who Played Canasta on Saturday Nights With a Bunch of Her Old College Friends.” Okay, I made some of those up, but I anticipated seeing them in the near future if the speed with which the first three books came out was any indication.

Despite their wild popularity, I avoided them for this reason: they had appeared nearly simultaneously and I must (no, I really, really must) read books in the order that they were written. When I discovered Minette Walters and Meg Gardiner, I had to look on their web pages to find out what order their books were written in so I could start with the first and move forward. When I found myself reading a Val McDermid book out of sequence, I immediately put the book aside, bought and read the previous one and then went back to the one I had started with.

But “The Girl…” series was like the sequels to “The Matrix,” all out at once and stepping over each other. I wasn’t having it. So strong was my fear of getting them out of order that I didn’t even get close enough to them to notice they are clearly marked as volumes 1 to 3, but that’s beside the point. The point is I had no intention of reading them, not until my boss started effusing about them, that is.

My boss is a calm, steady and almost irritatingly unflappable person. He never swears, or shouts at his PC, or pound on the keyboard, and he never raises an eyebrow when I do. He is composed; never angry, never excited, simply in a chronic state of Zen. So when he began to unabashedly gush over this book he was reading, I paid attention, especially when he went on to gush several days in a row. It was marvellous, it gripped him from the first page and just never let go, an incredible read. Praise like this was amazing coming from him (he’d read my book, after all, and had hardly said a thing) so I proposed to buy the book, but only after I confirmed, from two independent sources, which was the first in the series.

I has not gone well.

As is my habit, before settling into the story, I read all the reviews and the “about the author” section, where I learned why, after popping up from obscurity with three obscenely profitable novels, there have been no follow-up books from the author, Stieg Larsson: the poor man is dead.

Seems he handed over the manuscripts to his agent, and then unexpectedly checked into the big slush pile in the sky. As a writer who is looking forward to, not only being published, but basking in the glow of the adulation and money that will surely follow that happy event, news of Mr. Larsson’s inconvenient demise depressed me beyond words.

It was some time before I felt mentally fit enough to tackle the story. At which time I found out it was originally written in Swedish and translated into English. Please don’t think I have anything against translations—I don’t think I lost anything by reading the first three Harry Potter books in American instead of in their original British English (yes, they actually do translate British books into American English)—but I am always vaguely uneasy with the text of a translation, as I can never truly get to grips with the style of the author; was it a good book that was badly translated, or a rubbish book that was brilliantly translated. To my mind, a translated book tells me more about the translator than the author.

Despite these setbacks, I began to read. I am three chapters in and I can sum up my opinion of the book in two words: BORE-RING!

Not only has no one died yet, I have learned more about industrial finance in post Soviet Era Eastern Europe than I even wanted to. And having the information dump stuffed into an animated conversation between two friends drinking on a boat did nothing to make it any more scintillating than it sounds. I cannot imagine this book gripping anyone on the first page unless they are a closet accountant.

I am, however, not giving up; I am convinced the book will get better. All those people raving about it can’t all be wrong and, sooner or later, I hope the story will begin to grip me as it has obviously gripped so many others.

I just hope it’s sooner rather than later.

Package From America

2010-05-07T06:30:00.000+01:00

When I arrived home from work today, this was sitting on my door step:

I’d been waiting for it since last month, it having made a rather circuitous route to my home. First, I’d spent several days tracking it down on the Internet. Then, because about an eighth of the world doesn’t know the other seven eights exist, I had to have it shipped to my son in the US so he could send it on to me.

And this is what I was waiting so expectantly for:

Yes, they’re paper pads.

But not just any paper pads, these are number 30-721 Ampad memo books. Aren’t they beauties?

I’ve been using them for as long as I can remember. They have 50 lined sheets and are small enough to fit neatly in a shirt pocket or the back pocket of my jeans. For size and convenience, I have never found anything to rival them. I call them my Perfect Paper Pocket Pads.

Back in the States, I could buy them at Wal Mart, and whenever I found them I always bought out the lot. When I came to the UK, I brought enough over with me last, well, about eight years. And so, eight years later, I began my Internet search, only to discover Ampad no longer makes them. The Ampad representative, however, was able to put me onto the company that had bought out their stock.

So now I’m flush with PPP Pads, just as I found another (I’m such a paper pad slut).

This new pad won’t take the place of my cherished PPP Pads; it isn’t like I’ve found a new love that I’m abandoning a long-time partner for. It’s more like a mistress, one I acquired by accident.

This is how it happened: Last weekend, I was short-sighted enough to leave the flat with nothing to write on. I’m sure you’ve been there, and know the gnawing panic that comes from being unable to jot notes on the run. So I slipped into the local book shop, grabbed a pad from the display, paid and left.

It wasn’t until later that I began to realize how much I enjoyed taking notes with it. I usually hate to write in longhand, but here I was writing outlines, plot sketches and even short articles. The book was small but held ample, sturdy pages that begged to be written on. In the back was a pocket for holding odds and ends, a serial number on a sticker and a leaflet telling the history of the pad.

It was a Moleskine product, and the story behind the notebook was every bit as inspiring as the price was breathtaking. Having come to understand that they are considered the fillet mignon (with a side of broiled potatoes and French-cut green bean) of notebooks, I belatedly checked the receipt; it had cost ten quid. (About $15)

I didn’t let that put me off, I just considered it a nice gift to myself.

So now I carry two notebooks; my PPP Pad for writing messages and organizing my ToDo lists, and my Moleskine notebook, for jotting ideas and letting my imagination wander into places where a word processor can’t fit. They seem to work together well. But I haven’t introduced them yet; I’m not sure how well they would get along.

One Of The Girls

2010-05-02T20:42:00.001+01:00

I had a different post ready to go up, but I was diverted by some arresting statistics. This worked out nicely because I was going to post a secondary item in the sidebar but that item lends credence to what these statistics pointed out so, thanks to being so alert (or easily distracted, take your pick), I can post now everything in a single article, the premise of which is:

Over the course of my life, I have spent an inordinate amount of time in the company of women.

I don't mean to say I am a modern incarnation of Don Juan, wooing women on two continents (having recently and successfully stormed Europe). No, I mean I just always seem to be around women, through no fault (or complaint, for that matter) of my own.

As a young lad, I had an older sister, a doting mother and an absent father. Dad was around—he often stopped in between shifts at the mill and sessions at the bar—but he didn't leave much of an impression. Mostly it was me, mom, my sister and about 6,000 cows.

I was, however, a Boy Scout, so I managed to do my share of male bonding during my teenage years, but just as it looked as if I was on my way toward a wall-balanced life, I joined a charismatic Christian cult. While I did make some male friends there, these organisations tend to draw more females than males, but not the sort who would do you any good, if you get my meaning.

After checking back into hotel reality, I got a job as a keypunch operator. To say this field has a disproportionate number of women would be like saying the ocean is damp; I was the only male in the entire department.

When my children were growing up, I was working nights while my wife worked days, so me and the other moms all got together at day care and, later, for school meetings and such.

As a born-again bachelor, I took up scuba diving, a truly manly sport. But then, ignoring the advice of a good friend (a woman, I might add) I went scuba diving in the Caribbean and, as it had for her, the experience spoiled me. I could no longer face the dark, cold lakes of the Adirondacks, so I sold my gear and became an Irish dancer. I mean, what choice did I have?

I was actually surprised by the predominance of women there, what with Michael Flatley being all the rage, but there was only one other man in the entire class.

So I went to Ireland, met my current wife and settled in Britain. And started a blog. Or three. And, without meaning to, I began to acquire followers. But is what I discovered about them while doing routine blog maintenance this afternoon:

Of my followers, 82.2784810126582% on my Postcards blog, 91.4285714285714% on the Pond Parleys blog and 88.4615384615385% on my writing blog are women. Now, this isn't a complaint, simply an observation, but my intent was to promote myself as an expatriate writer a la Bill Bryson and, instead, I seem to have become an honorary member of the mummy-blogging circuit

So what's a guy to do when he find himself, once again, surrounded by women? Go out and do something that puts him in contact with other people, of course. And that's what I'm going to do.

I have volunteered to assist my wife in her latest endeavour—a sponsored walk. She's doing the walking; I'm just helping out by being a steward. And you can help out by sponsoring her.

Click this link: http://www.justgiving.com/sleep-walking to donate money toward the cause. The walk is to raise funds for St. Catherine's Hospice, a worthy charity. It's only a half-marathon, and they are only walking, but they are doing it between midnight and six in the morning, so she deserves a bit of support.

Oh, and did I mention this is the Midnight Walk for Women? Twelve hundred women, two thousand flashlights (torches), eighteen hundred bottles of water and me. I expect there will be a few more men there, but here I go again.

Don't worry; I'll bring my camera. Updates to follow.

And thank you for your support.

The Perfect Writing Day

2010-04-18T16:13:00.005+01:00

Look! No Jet Trails.

Saturday turned into one of those rarest of days—a nice day with nothing to do; the perfect opportunity to catch up on my writing.

And I needed to catch up. After rearranging my character sheets for the third time, I realized I needed to get back to the actual writing. So last Monday I set up a plan to track the re-write. I acknowledge a need for tracking and meeting targets in my work because I am an expert at frittering away time. The initial draft was easy; hit a word count ever day and watch the manuscript grow like mould in a warm jam jar.

But this wouldn’t work for the re-write, so I settled on a page count. Four pages a day seemed about right to me, and if that turned out to be too easy, I could always raise the bar later.

I set to work on Tuesday; by Friday afternoon I was on page three.

So I looked forward to Saturday to do some serious catch up, hoping that, once I broke through the minefield of the first few pages (just enough suspense, not too much back ground, plausible plot, characters that make the reader turn to page four) I would begin to move forward faster and with more confidence.

With my wife up in London attending a quilting exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I was left without adult supervision and made ready to seize the day.

First, however, there were the errands. I had suffered an eyeglass emergency during the week and this required me to devote part of the morning visiting the optician. This is because, outside of 24-Hour London (Hi, Marsha) England pretty much shuts itself in with a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit to sit in front of the telly after about 5:00 PM. Therefore, I spent half the morning at the opticians. The other half of the morning I stood in a queue at the post office because the Royal Mail branch that used to be down the road from my office was shut last year and the Royal Mail on-line postal purchasing site suddenly stopped working last month, leaving me no option but to queue up at the one open post office in the Horsham district along with everyone else in town.

I returned to my flat in time for lunch, and then retired to the balcony with a beverage (non-alcoholic, naturally; I like to keep my mind sharp when I’m writing) and a cigar to contemplate my next move. I know this sounds like an avoidance technique, but I actually find it useful to gather my thoughts and ponder plot problems. Besides, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to study the vaguely unsettling sight of a pristine blue sky—unmarred by clouds or criss-crossed with jet trails—stretching over Sussex.

This is what it usually looks like.

Once finished, I returned to the computer refreshed and ready to tackle the recalcitrant manuscript. I logged on, checked my e-mail, deleted all the ones promising to enhance my maleness and offering cheap Viagra, saw I had none left and popped over to Meg Gardiner’s blog for a quick look. This is where things went, as they say here, pear shaped.

On Meg’s blog was a humorous bit pointing to an article saying a certain type of female character, specifically written by men, should be drummed out of literature. And the character was of the same type my lead character is.

Writers, as you may know, have delicate egos. Mine is no different, and this second-hand chide deflated it good and proper.

So I returned to the balcony with another cigar and beverage—alcoholic this time.

Was I really writing a cliché? Have I invested all of this time, effort and agony only to produce a literary joke, the equivalent of a “Dogs Playing Poker” painting? I don’t mind making a good try and finding I haven’t quite made the mark—there is something admirable in that, and you can always try harder next time—but I don’t want be ridiculed.

I pondered this for quite a while, eventually coming to the conclusion that my book is different. I would have to, now, wouldn’t I? The alternative is to admit you are a hack worthy only of scorn. But the fact is, my book is different. My main character might be that sort of character, but it is a funny book, not a straight-up thriller. She’s trying to be that sort of woman, and for the same, derisive reason given in the article, but she’s making a bit of a hash out of it, in part to show the folly of that certain type of female character.

That soothed my wounded pride and after another drink and cigar I felt ready to face the pages once more.

Then my wife came home unexpectedly early (I thought those quilters would be out partying all night but I guess they all had a date with a quilting hoop and the evening news) and I wisely opted to spend the evening with her.

I felt better about the book this morning, but still haven’t made any progress on it; yesterday was the perfect day for writing, today was the perfect day for housework.

Writing in a Different Language

2010-04-04T17:37:00.002+01:00

Nothing drives home the fact of how much you don't know about your host culture than writing a book set there featuring characters who grew up there.

My current project takes place in England and is populated with native Brits. For the most part, people are people, and I've been here long enough to know how they talk and how they go about their daily business, so I shouldn't fall into obvious traps, like having a character talk about when she was in "high school" or making reference to a "senior prom." There are, however, numerous opportunities for gaffs.

After finishing the first draft, I reread it and took pages of notes highlighting details I needed to research. Such as: you can't go visit someone in the hospital (actually, the person would be "in hospital") here and expect the receptionist to give you a room number. Patients are on wards, there are nurses, but no candy stripers and some nurses, depending upon their duties, are called "Sister" or "Matron."

Registering a car, getting insurance, all different from my American experiences. They don't have appointment books, they have "Diaries" and they don't write things like, "Nathan said 'Hi' to me outside of math class today and I have a great big pimple in the middle of my forehead! I wanted to die!" in them.

What gets me is not the amount of research I have to do to make my prose not sound like it was written by an American (for one thing, in the above dialogue, I'd have to change Math to Maths and Pimple to Spot); I'm more concerned about the things I can't know:

What is it like to go through the British school system? What TV shows would they have watched, what pastimes would they have enjoyed, how would they and their friends have behaved?

But, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, those are things I know I don't know, and I expect a combination of creative prose and research will get me over those hurdles; it's the things I don't know I don't know that are more likely to trip me up. (By the by, that famously amusing "Things we know" quote makes perfect sense if you read it carefully.)

My biggest fear is that I will spend a lot of time on this manuscript only to send it off laced with unintentional hilarity like having a Memorial Day celebration and totally ignoring Whitsun, or having a character asking for a "round trip" ticket.

At least I know enough to not have a cop pull a gun.

Time’s Up

2010-03-21T20:21:00.000Z

The six-week cooling off period between ending the rough draft of my novel and beginning the rewriting process ended last week. I chose that length of time because it was the minimum recommended by people who should know. I was going to extend it, but I was itching to get back to the project and was running out of ways to avoid writing all the things I was supposed to be writing during the down time.

So I spent this past week re-reading the manuscript and making notes. A lot of notes. I know I was obnoxiously self-congratulatory when I finished the rough draft in 10 weeks, but you can now rest assured I no longer consider it such a momentous feat. Anyone could have done it, honestly. All it amounts to is typing random words every day until you hit 75,000. And that’s what the rough draft looks like, a big pile of random words.

My task now, is to try to make something out of this mountain of rubbish. This is by far the harder task, and it is one I have little experience in. Fortunately, I have a clear idea where I want to go and a road map on how to get there. I’m not saying it won’t lead me down a dead end, but at least, for now, I’m moving forward.

What I’m not going to do is gleefully describe my process and progress. Despite this being a supposed writing blog, I think that would be pointless.

Some time ago I aired my view about blogs being Level I, II or III. I even stopped writing the blog for a while until I arrived at Level II (and then only to announce it) and took it back up with I hit Level III—as a bona fide, published author.

Now, I’m not so sure about the levels, or about me being an author. I’m still thrilled to have a book out, but in my mind, it doesn’t count. And it won’t until I publish a novel. So I am back to thinking of myself as a beginner (which, in this arena, I am) and refraining from giving advice or sharing my methods because, well, who am I? I might be doing this all wrong and that would be doing you a disservice. When I publish a novel, then I can dispense wisdom from my lofty height. ;)

Until then, the best thing I can do is recommend “How Not to Write a Novel” by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark. It is funny, informative and a very good read. I learned a lot from it, between cringing at the mistakes I found out I am making. But it was also inspiring to note that I could generally remember a novel I enjoyed reading that had broken the rule I was reading about.

In writing, the only rule is, there are no rules. But until you become good enough to understand how to bend them to your advantage, it’s best to keep within the guidelines.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have a big pile of words I have to get back to.

Cross-Dressing Blogs

2010-03-14T15:56:00.000Z

In casting about so something new to write about, it came to my attention that the "Sucking Face" post on my Life of Writing blog had as much to do with writing as the post on my Postcards From Across the Pond blog had to do about being an expat. So, in the interest of buying myself more time (and perhaps gaining a few crossover fans) I have simply swapped them around.

I hope this doesn’t break some sort of blogshere code of honor or anything. I’m not trying to pull a fast one; I’m just too tired to write anything new (in the blog arena) at the moment.

And the best part it, the Sucking Face post, when it goes on my Postcards blog, will automatically be posted to Facebook.

Without further ado, here is the reposted post from Postcards:

ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

I received the following e-mail the other day. The header is heavily edited for obvious reasons, but the body of the letter is word-for-word:

From: Bert Mckinnon: AssholeWithTooMuchTime@OnHis.Hands
To: NotMyEmailAddress@ButIGotItAnyway.Dammit
Subject: Hello
Attachments: (Brunette.jpg) – the sort of photo that comes in a new wallet
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello!!!
How your mood? I very much would like to know you better... I would like to write to you a little about myself... To me of 28 years. I the brunette, very cheerful and beautiful woman... If you wanted me the nobility better can write only to my personal Email.
I hope you to me will write about myself.

Aside from the obvious (this person is tragically in love with ellipses) I’m guessing English is not the native language of the sender. And I have to wonder at the point of such a letter.

How lonely and desperate do you have to be for “If you wanted me the nobility better…” to sweep you off your feet?

And “Bert McKinnon”? What sort of name is that for an Internet temptress? I don’t know about you, but Bert screams “I’m a man” in my world, unless you are a Roberta. But anyone out for a cyber-snog with the name of Roberta McKinnon would do well to adopt a more appropriate nom de plume, such a Sally Cyberslut or Julie I-want-To-Send-You-Naked-Photos-Of-Myself-To-Gain-Your-Trust-So-I-Can-Empty-Your-Bank-Account Smith.

At least she didn’t mention the size of my penis (how do they know?) like many of the mystery women who write to me do. You know, things like “Make your man-tree hard grow so women laughing at you will stop.” I made that up, but it isn’t far off of the mark.

Unfortunately, these are the types of communications that make up the bulk of my e-mail these days. I can’t complain; it’s my own fault.

A few years ago I naïvely thought I could defeat spammers by changing my e-mail address on a regular basis. So I changed my spam-ridden e-mail address to a new one and told all my friends. Many switched to the new address. Some did not. The spammers used both. Not one to give up on a bad idea, I tried this about five times before I admitted defeat. By then I had thoroughly confused my friends and provided a huge target for the spambots.

My supposed saviour, Yahoo Spam Filter, didn’t help. There is a button you can click to notify Yahoo that the letter is spam and the filter will “learn” what is and is not spam and filter out all the bad stuff. In my experience, all the button does is alert the spammers as to where I am because whenever I undertake a campaign to eradicate spam, I generally end up with ten times more.

Worse yet, the Yahoo Spam Filter also sends all my blog comments, which are specifically tagged to go into my IN box, into my spam folder. So I currently enjoy the irony of having to go to my spam folder because, if there is any mail for me, that’s where I’ll find it.

So I am reading a lot of letters from Bert and his buddies these days. It’s a bit of a nuisance, but on the bright side it is often a revelation to discover the extraordinary and starling ways desperate third-worlders with an internet connection and a penchant for larceny can torture the English language in their attempts to woo the gullible and, one has to suppose, functionally illiterate into revealing their bank details in exchange for virtual titillation.

So until Bert and his ilk discover they can make more money robbing liquor stores, or I become wealthy enough to develop my own, effective spam filter (or at least have enough money to hire people to read my mail for me) I’m afraid finding relevant communications will continue to be a scavenger hunt through spam hell.

But those days may be over sooner than you think: I just received a notification from The National Lottery Board informing me that I have won $87,674,287.37 in the National Lottery. I can’t wait until they deposit the money in my bank account!

Sucking Face

2010-03-01T21:15:00.002Z

I suppose it’s time to stop bitching about Facebook; it doesn’t show signs of going away any time soon and, I have to admit, I’m beginning to find it useful.

Before you think I’m jumping too enthusiastically on the technology bandwagon, let me assure you I still eschew e-books and think Twitter is a waste of bandwidth. Twitter offers only a tiny part of Facebook’s most used and useful feature, but without any of the bells and whistles. It is a redundancy. It should slink away. Now.

But Facebook, despite still being beyond my understanding, is carving out a cozy corner in my heretofore cold heart. It is actually a time saver, allowing me to hit one page and find out what all my virtual acquaintances are up to in one go. That, to me, is the selling point, and why it is the page I usually hit after my Yahoo mail homepage. It doesn’t take as much time or effort as reading though blog after blog and it lets me catch up on everyone. That said, it is a lot more superficial, but these days, that is probably a bonus.

Logging on to Facebook is like wandering into the school cafeteria at lunchtime. You can see groups of people clustered around different tables, some you know, some you don’t. You can overhear snatches of conversation between your friends and friends of friends. You might even sit down and have a word with one or two of them. Then you leave, content knowing everyone is all right and having a good time and that they know that you are as well.

If, however, you’re looking to sit down over a buttered scone and a cup of tea with one of your closer friends, well then, you need to go somewhere else.

A blog, for instance, where you can ramble on for more than 140 characters, make a point, paint a scene, talk about something important to you in a meaningful way and not be forced to reduce it to, “Got dumped on Saturday. Really sucks. :(“

I was a long time coming to blogs, being happy in my Luddite world of HTML, but once I crossed over, I was hooked. Problem is, now that I am firmly settled in the blogshpere, I find they are, like, so 2008. I thought I was being hip, but I find myself, once again, sitting on the trailing edge of technology.

I just read an article claiming that e-mail will be extinct in another ten years. Seems it is being regarded as too old fashioned. The focus, the article claims, is shifting away from instantly sending a significant chunk of information directly to the person you want it delivered to and more toward broadcasting snippets of news to a wide group of people.

Texting, Facebook, Twitter—that’s what the hip young people are using these days. E-mail is, well, so, 2008.

It makes me want to crawl back to my HTML and hide,

F*&%$@G Facebook.

Now For My Next Trick

2010-01-31T21:29:00.000Z

Well, I finished the manuscript. 75,000 words in 77 days, and only 988 words off target. I don’t know about you, but I’m well impressed.

The method I used dragged me through the mid-novel slump and even the bit where, when I saw the end looming ahead of me, my fear of what I was going to do once I finished tried to sabotage me by insisting I drag my feet. It didn’t remove those feelings, it was just that I still had to produce until I hit my target. Every single day.

When the last day arrived, I got up at my usual time (5 AM) and just hit the page running, so to speak. It was Saturday, so I didn’t have to stop to go off to work, I just got up, sat down and started writing. About 1,500 words later I found myself typing THE END, and at that exact moment (I’m not making this up) the sun broke over the horizon and lit up the living room.

Not that this was in any way meaningful of portentous, it was just really cool.

And the problem of what to do next has been solved, as well. I always planned to put the manuscript away for a few weeks after finishing it. Despite being eager to get on with it, this step has come highly recommended by many professional writers, so I thought I’d give it a go. The problem was what to do in the mean time. I toyed with the idea of trying a few short stories, but then a new project landed in my lap that is going to take a few weeks. Perfect.

This next phase—-the new project included—-is more about revision and editing than getting words on paper, so I am still wondering how I am going to plot my progress, but I’m sure something will occur to me as get further into it (I’m all about plotting progress).

So I’m off on a new adventure, which is probably going to continue taking much of the time I usually spent surfing the Internet and updating my blogs. I’m not abandoning my on-line presence, just putting it into perspective: do I want to be an Internet personality, or a writer?

Someday, I’d like to be in a position to do both, but as long as I have to make a choice, I know which one I’m going to choose.

The Doldrums

2010-01-10T19:25:00.000Z

Imagine that! A post about writing on a blog that purports to be a writing blog where I write about writing. That’s what I started out to do, at any rate. I guess I got in the way, or, perhaps, I wasn’t doing enough writing.

Currently, I’m enjoying feeling like a writer. Being in the deep throes of a first draft does that to me, especially when I’m pushing through that saggy, middle bit where even successful, bestselling authors claim to grapple with the notion that the manuscript is crap and despair of ever finishing it or, if they do, of making anything coherent out of it. I’m at that phase now, the horse latitudes of the first draft, what marathon runners call The Wall. The good news is, because of The Method, I am not flagging.

Noting again that everyone is different and that what is working for me may be a hindrance to you, I am encouraged by my progress. Forcing myself to reach a specific word limit every day means that, even during these dark days when I would usually do anything to avoid working on the novel, it is still moving forward at the same pace.

The advantages are numerous. The disadvantages are:

- Writing every day means just that. Writing. Every. Day. I don’t get to sleep in and tell myself I don’t have to do anything that day. I must get up. I must face the key board. I must not leave it until X number of words have been produced.

- What I am turning out is not a first draft, but more of a rough draft. I may be giddy with reckless optimism now, but at some point I am going to have to face that pile of words and try to make something out of it. I am trying to trust the process, but I have to admit that occasionally, late at night when I think about what I am proposing to do, my blood runs cold.

- Even though I generally finish my allotted number of words within an hour and a half to two hours, it leaves me drained, and I don’t feel like writing much else the rest of the day. This means my blogs are being neglected and needlessly obligates me to produce forced-sounding posts (like this one) periodically to keep them from feeling abandoned, like a parent who is too busy to get to junior’s oboe recital on time and takes him out for ice cream afterwards as a means of assuaging guilt.

But despite all of the disadvantages, they are mitigated by the fact that they are temporary; I expect to finish the rough draft soon, probably sooner than I had planned. After that, there are many more obstacles to come, but they are for other posts.

Who knows, maybe this writing blog will start to be about writing after all.

Because Even I Can’t Believe It

2010-01-03T17:41:00.000Z

I’m still enjoying my new toy and, except for a ‘minor hiccup,’ we’re getting on just fine. That minor hiccup, however, was nearly the end of things, and I offer it here as a cautionary tale to benefit us all:

When I got the laptop, I immediately copied my novel directory onto it. Since I no longer had to work on multiple computers, there was no need to constantly copy my novel to a USB drive. (The astute among you already see where this is heading; but wait, it gets worse.)

I spent four days installing software, copying files, tweaking and happily working on my novel. Then, because I had too much time on my hands, I managed to uninstall the video drivers.

There are mitigating circumstances surrounding this, but listing them here would take too much time and would not negate the inescapable fact that it was a boneheaded thing to do. Especially since, as a computer professional, I should know better.

At any rate, I found myself with a perfectly functioning, brand new laptop that would show me nothing but a black screen. It seemed almost amusing at first, until it dawned on me that four days worth of my unbacked up novel were hiding in the dark on the laptop’s hard drive. At my current rate, that’s about 5,000 words gone. Or, more maddeningly, sitting there in front of me but, like a treasure sitting in plain sight in a pitch black storage room, totally inaccessible.

I was sick. I tried everything—safe mode, plugging into an auxiliary monitor, even tinkering with the BIOS. Nothing worked. Not only had I destroyed a two-hundred pound piece of kit, I had lost four days of work, and the worse thing was, I couldn’t blame anyone but myself. I was so frustrated I went to bed at eight o’clock because reality was too harsh to face. Naturally, I didn’t sleep much, but over the course of that sleepless night, I underwent the seven stages of grief and woke to my 5 AM alarm with fresh resolve.

I recalled the last sentence I had written the day before, so I fired up my desktop PC, opened the most up to date novel file, spaced down a few lines and picked up where I had left off, proposing to fill in the gap when time permitted. After a few paragraphs, however, a thought occurred to me: opening my novel involved a series of keystrokes, and I thought I could go through them even with my eyes closed, so to speak.

Not wanting to waste my writing time, but unable to get the absurd notion out of my mind, I opened up the laptop, started at the blank screen and started pressing buttons:

Enter to log on, open a desktop explorer, down, down, right, down, copy, up, up, left, down, down, down, down, paste. My USB port blinked. Something was being copied to it. I put it in the desktop PC and was so incredulous when I saw my novel fold there I thought I must have actually backed it up and just forgot about it. But the timestamp confirmed, I had done it; I had miraculously reached into the black abyss and come out with my novel. I opened it—all the words were there—said a quick prayer of thanks to the writing gods, and got to work.

Later that day I pulled out the laptop’s documentation and there, at the bottom of the last page, was The Command, bracketed with warnings in bold capital letters to never, ever use it except in a dire emergency, as it would restore to laptop to its original state and destroy everything else on the hard drive. This looked like an emergency to me, and my novel was the only thing I had needed to save, so I invoked The Command. Fifteen minutes later, after many “Are you sure?” warnings, my laptop was, literally, good as new.

The subsequent set up, having just recently been done, was repeated in about two hours. Problem solved.

I realize I was luckier than I deserved to be, but the lesson was not lost. I always back up my work to a USB drive after every session now, and I never, ever tinker with the video drivers.

Now if I can just get that mouse driver updated...

Your Cheatin’ Heart

2009-12-30T14:23:00.000Z

Since I haven’t posted in a while, that must mean The Novel is going well. I’m happy to say that is the case. And that’s all I’m going to say. Watch this space.

What is helping the process along, and what I have put aside The Novel to blog about, is my latest gadget. As some of you may know, I have been on a life-long quest for the perfect writing gadget. I’ve had many successes over the years, but none as versatile, user friendly and fit for purpose as the AlphaSmart Neo. I have sung the praises of the Neo in several articles, so I won’t reprise them here, except to say the Neo, with its lightweight, rugged design, long battery life and low price tag still fills a significant writing niche, but that gap, I am afraid, is rapidly shrinking. Advances in technology have recently seen my old nemesis, the laptop, regain its position at the top of the heap.

In the not-too-distant past, laptops were too expensive, too fiddly, too heavy and had too short a battery life to be seriously considered as a solution for writing on the go (as I do). But now a line of mini-laptops has arrived that are lightweight and boast a battery life of up to 10 hours.

Now, that may seem paltry next to Neo’s 700 hours, but you can clearly get through a typical writing day on that, and the other advantages make up for the inconvenience of having to be near an electrical outlet for two hours a day.

The biggest innovation, however, is not the weight or the battery life, but the price. Many of these mini-laptops are as cheap as (or cheaper than) the Neo, which raises the question, “Why restrict yourself to the limitations of a Neo when you can get the functionality of a full-featured computer for the same price?”

Why, indeed? So, fickle thing that I am, I have forsaken my Neo for another pretty face. I am such a gadget slut.

The little Acer I received for my birthday (my birthday is actually two weeks away, but my wife wanted to buy this before the VAT rose back to 17%) is every bit as light as the Neo and actually smaller. It has more speed and twice the disk space of my desktop and it is rapidly becoming by “base” PC. I can even access the Internet with it; in fact, I wrote and uploaded this blog post on it—no composing on the Neo and downloading to the desk top PC for the subsequent editing and uploading.

Unfortunately, no gadget is without its weak points, and the Acer, as well as most of the mini-laptop range, suffers in the keyboard department. I am fortunate in that I have dainty fingers, but most normal people would find themselves frustrated by these diminutive keyboards. This is the most noticeable drawback, as the Neo had the type of keyboard writers dream of—quiet, smooth as silk, responsive. But as I said, I can live with this; you may not be able to.

Other drawbacks: even though it is small and light and has adequate battery life, you still need to carry the electrical cables with you just in case you run low on juice, or if you want to keep it topped up. This adds to the weight overhead, and the general portability of the device. Also, preliminary test show it is also not as comfortable to use and I can’t actually open it fully on the bus, which was the whole purpose for buying it in the first place. I can open it enough to work with it, but it isn’t as convenient as the Neo. But I fully anticipate it will be easier to use on the train, where I often could not even take out my other laptop due to its size, and in the pubs, where lugging my huge Dell around was a real inconvenience.

Despite those drawbacks, and the touchpad (which I hate) and the small screen (which is big enough, but pales next to the wide screen of my Dell) I am happy with the Acer, and plan to make it my gadget of choice for 2010.

Now, let’s see what 2011 brings!

OF NOTE: a year ago, when my desktop PC began slowing down, I did an on-line search for tools to check it and fix it. I came across PC Tools and purchased a trial version which was worthless, and moved on. Over the year, this company has continued to SPAM me and this past week they billed my credit card £29.95 for a year’s extension on their software license. A quick web search revealed this is their business model, scamming people into testing their product and then getting a grip on their credit cards and not letting go. People reported going through a lot of time and effort getting them to return the money, only to find they were charged yet again. The only solution offered was to “lose” your card and have your bank issue a new one.

I personally don’t have the time to chase these charlatans down, so I am eating the £29.95 and chalking it up as a lesson learned. My credit card is up for renewal soon, anyway, so they will not be able to charge me again. But I wanted to let people know about PC Tools and their business practices so you can avoid being taken.

Speed Writing

2009-12-06T20:21:00.002Z

Gosh, 47 days without a post! Bet you thought I gave up writing or something. Quite the opposite.

After months (many months, years actually, but "months" doesn't make me sound like so much of a slacker) of dithering and procrastination and trying to come up with a formula that would motivate me to write, I seem to have accidentally stumbled upon something that works, so if I don't post here as often as I used to, it's because I'm being more productive in a 'real' writing sense.

I won't go into details, because what is working for me is not likely to work for you, but to satisfy your curiosity—and to give you a peek into my method on the off chance you might find motivation in it as well—I’ll tell you this much:

I shifted my focus away from a set amount of time each day to a set amount of words. Over the past years, I have proven time and again that I can easily fritter away the hour or two I put aside for writing, but now that I know I can't stop until I finish a set number of words, those words come, and they come quickly.

Also, it's gratifying hitting targets every day as it provides a sense of accomplishment throughout a process that traditionally has been a slog.

The quick writing has other advantages, as well. In the past, I used to agonize over every paragraph and finish the book having rewritten lots of it along the way. So when I read it over, I think, “Well, that’s not too bad,” and I tinker with a few bits of it, pronounce it done and send it out. My purpose now is to get to the end of the story with nothing but the skeleton of a plot and a heap of words that screams for a re-write. Yeah, I’m actually trying to write something what, when I get to the end, will be obviously shit.

And I have to say, I’m doing a darn good job of it.

24 Hours: Horsham

2009-10-20T21:42:00.002+01:00

My Friend Marsha wrote a book. (Okay, she’s not really my friend, but as a fellow expat from the Americas – when I say it that way I can include Canadians – and fellow writer, I feel like we’ve connected on a deeper than “exchanged-a-few-emails” level.) It’s called “24 Hours: London” and it goes through a diurnal cycle, listing what you can do, where you can go and how you can entertain yourself during that particular hour (e.g. naked disco dancing at 22:00 -- www.starkersclub.co.uk ).

To help her launch it, I thought I do a tribute post, in the best, “I know a good idea when I steal one” tradition:

24 Hours: Horsham – the Baby Boomer Edition

05:00: What are you doing up? Nothing is open. Go back to bed!

06:00: There’s still nothing open, but the kettle is on. Make yourself some toast and oatmeal.

07:00: Costa Coffee will be open in a while if you want a frothy coffee and a breakfast muffin. McDonalds and Starbucks will be open, too, but don’t go there, not unless you’re happy to feed the American corporate giants.

08:00: A nice morning stroll along the Causeway to St. Mary’s churchyard. Nothing stirs a bit of joie de vivre like spending half an hour or so communing with dead people.

09:00: Time to queue up outside the Royal Mail office with the pensioners. Or you can queue up outside of Waterstones and vie for a seat at the Santa Fe café.

10:00: Swan Walk Mall is in full swing now; time to do your bit to help Britain out of the recession.

11:00: Elevenses at the Black Olive. Try their bacon butty, it is to die for.

12:00: Have a walk around the Forum and admire the sundial, dedicated by her Majesty the Queen. While standing next to it, ask passers-by if they have the time and tell them that the sundial is broken and is stuck on 6:37 PM.

13:00: Wander through picturesque Horsham park; you can linger by the bandstand and have a light lunch at the Café in the Park or sit on a bench to watch the children in the playground.

14:00: Uh oh! Here comes PCSO Davenport. Someone has complained about a pervert sitting on a park bench leering at the children; time to move on.

15:00: There is still time to pick up a bale of toilet paper and a sack of crisps at Poundland. Bring lots of change.

16:00: Have a browse through Beales and stop off at Café Nova on the first floor, just to admire the look of exquisite boredom on the faces of the waitresses and marvel at how long it can take a coffee shop to produce a cup of coffee.

17:00: Five o’clock; time to roll up the sidewalks. If you haven’t bought it yet, it’s too late now.

18:00: You have your pick of restaurants on East Street—Horsham’s own Restaurant Row; from the plain to the posh, it’s there. And if you’re really feeling the pinch, you can find a bargain dinner at the chippie, Panda House Chinese Take-away or the KFC on the Bishopric. Dine early and you’ll beat the rush.

19:00: Just enough time for a quiet pint at the Stout House.

20:00: Thanks to the Nanny State, it’s back home for a Bolivar and brandy on the balcony.

21:00: If you have Freeview you can get channel Fiver and watch CSI, CSI, CSI, …

22:00: …and CSI…

23:00: A nice cup of tea and a good book in bed.

24:00: A comfy pillow and a warm duvet.

01:00: You may find you’ll need to get up for a wee about now.

02:00 – 04:00: What do you care? You should be asleep like a normal person!

The Tour; a Reminiscence

2009-10-14T08:03:00.002+01:00

The Tour is over, so now it’s time to sit back, relax, pour myself a big glass of Pinot Noir and reminisce about those halcyon days of travelling the world.

I have to say, The Tour was one of the best ideas I stole from people who are smarter and better at marketing than I am; it’s cheap, simple and has the potential to introduce you to a much wider audience. And it might have actually worked if I had kept in mind that it was supposed to be a promotional tour. As it happened, I met so many great people and began having such a good time that I became caught up in the adventure and usually forgot to mention the book.

Still, it was very worthwhile, and as I sit here sipping my noir, I can look back on some memorable moments and interesting tour statistics:

- Visits: 26
- Furthest: this was a tie between Suzer and Vicki Gray, both in Australia
- Closest: Marsha, from London
- Most Memorable: sitting on Wendy’s porch drinking mint juleps
- Most Fun: going on an outing with Jen and her Girl Guides
- Most Relaxing: this is a tie between Andy Mont in Tenerife, Paul Allen in Catalunya and Debs in Murcia; I love sitting in the sun drinking beer
- Most Exotic: being hosted by an Azeri (Scary Azeri) in London
- Most Hectic: visiting Kat and her family on the USAF Base in Suffolk
- Most Ironic: posting a virtual tour post while actually being in the place I claimed to be (Brainard, NY)
- Second Most Ironic: visiting Northumberland, then going home and posting from Bizzywig’s blog as if I were in Northumberland
- Most Amazing Coincidence: posting about an unsung fingerprint expert on Brit Fancy’s blog and finding out she was the great-great-granddaughter of the man I wrote about
- Biggest Shock: showing up at Mickey’s place in Massachusetts, prepared for a bloke weekend of drinking beer and catching some American football on the tube, only to discover Mickey is not a guy but an attractive woman

It is also worthy of note that, of the 26 people who hosted me, 23 one of them were woman. I don’t know quite what to make of that, but it sure was nice.

And one final Tour statistic:
- Books sold: 3

C’mon people, you’re not keeping your end up!

Seriously, thanks again to everyone involved for making this a success. Now I’ll have to look around for another good idea to steal.

Thanks and Good-bye from
The 2009 KINDNESS of STRANGERS TOUR

Michael Harling is the author of
“Postcards From Across the Pond – dispatches from an accidental expat”
“Laugh out loud funny regardless of which side of the pond you call home. Bill Bryson move over, there’s a new American expat in town with a keen sense of humor.”
-- Jeff Yeager, author of “The Ultimate Cheapskate”

Buy the Book: http://www.lindenwald.com/booksale.htm
Follow the Tour: http://www.lindenwald.com/thetour.htm
Visit the Home Page: http://postcardsfromacrossthepond.blogspot.com/

Of Two Minds

2009-10-07T21:09:00.000+01:00

As some of you know, and the rest of you are about to find out, I smoke cigars. Oddly, it was an ex-girlfriend (now known only as She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) who put me onto the habit. It’s not one I am looking to give up—I find it relaxing and enjoyable and an indispensable benefit to the planning phase of my writing—but lately I have been of two minds about it.

My current schedule seems to be: get up later than I should, spend a few minutes thinking about what I want to write, write for an hour on the bus on the way to work, write for half an hour on the bus on the way home from work, then take a nap and tell myself I’ll finish up after dinner. Get home, have dinner and then spend the better part of the evening relaxing on the balcony with a beverage and a cigar.

It’s not a bad routine, but it has not increased my productivity and I am starting to wonder if I am going to become known as Michael the great writer or Michael the great cigar smoker.

So I proposed to cut down. This is when the two minds came about. Morning Michael was tired of starting his day fretting over the work that didn’t get done the night before. Accordingly, Morning Michael decides that, this time, Evening Michael will write, not have another cigar. Morning Michael is very certain of this.

Then Mid-afternoon Michael starts thinking that it has been a long day and maybe Evening Michael deserves a bit of relaxation. After all, he’s not being paid to write. Evening Michael agrees, and, after dinner, heads out to the balcony.

This week, however, all of us went on another business trip to Devon. The daily routine for these days is somewhat similar to my normal days, except the bulk of all the writing time is used to smoke cigars and a huge writing opportunity is wasted. So this time, after Evening Michael laid out all the cigars and associated paraphernalia for Morning Michael to pack, Morning Michael put it all back and said we would all be better off if we spent a few days away from cigars.

We all agreed with that, at the time, but right now Evening Michael is pretty mad at Morning Michael because it’s a beautiful autumn afternoon and a cigar and a beer in the hotel’s outdoor seating area would be very, very nice.

On the other hand, I’ve finished up a review I promised a month ago, and caught up on my columns for the week, so maybe sitting in front of the keyboard has turned out to be a better idea than sitting with a cigar after all.

Morning Michael is saying, “I told you so,” but we still think he’s a sanctimonious wanker.

Writing in a Glass Box

2009-10-03T08:23:00.000+01:00

Writing isn't the solitary activity it used to be. The same technology that has turned much of the human race into square-eyed troglydites huddled in their darkened lairs staring at moving images on their Playstation, Wii or PC screens and eschewing actual human contact, has, paradoxically, paved the way for 24/7 virtual contact. And increasingly, this contact comes bundled with feedback, whether we want it or not.

Our blogs, our Facebook pages, our Flickr photos, even our Tweets are subject to commentary by the virtual critics who hide behind screen names and are, quite likely, simply taking a momentary break from blogging, Facebooking, Flickring or Tweeting themselves. The proliferation of blog-to-book deals means that some of us--myself included--are writing books while several billion people look over our shoulders and, more often than not, offer helpful suggestions.

But is this a good thing? Shouldn't art be developed in isolation and left to percolate and evolve and discover itself before a cybersphere of self-appointed critics take a swipe at it? How would the great works of the past faired if subject to this sort of hyper-scrutiny?

GlobeMaster: Bill, sweetheart, I'm a big fan of your blog but methinks the latest entry is as cheery as a plague-pit. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time only to watch a play where everyone dies? Have Romeo run off with the Priest; you know they were made for each other.

TudorMan: Doth wenches snigger at thy codpiece? Click here for help.

NatH: Herman, A white whale? Hell-o! They don't exist! Check your Google-Analytics; I bet they're taking a huge dive. Your followers are not going to buy this, or your book.

GoodnessAndMercy: My Dear Miss Hill, I stumbled across your Facebook page quite by accident and I have to say I find the accounts of your "adventures" highly disturbing. I see you are friended with Madam Bovery, and I am hardly surprised. People like you need to be rooted out and exterminated; I have a stake and dried faggots ready for you, and I'll find out where you live eventually.

PratchettFan: JK, You will never create a fantasy world to rival Mr. Pratchett's. Your latest entry sounds like it was written for children. Why don't you try writing for some woman's magazines, instead?

CivilReenactor: Mr. Crane, I have studied with devotion your photologue of Private Henry Fleming and his experiences with the Union Army. However, your latest installment included a battle scene wherein a sergeant in the 1st Regiment Provisional Militia is clearly wearing the uniform of the 2nd Battalion St. Louis City Guard Infantry. Historical inaccuracies of this magnitude are unconscionable. In the future, I will limit myself to the exploits of Buck, as posted by J London; so far, he has never mislabeled a breed of dog.

ConnecticutYankee: Mark, your podcasts about the boy on the raft are great! You need to limit the dialects, however; I can hardly understand what some of the characters are saying.

@Schopenhauer: Leo, I appreciate your dedication and devotion to your work. I am also a big fan of your tweets, but don't you think it might be better to

@Schopenhauer: start a blog rather than trying to write a whole novel using nothing but Twitter posts? War And Peace has been going on for more than a yea

@Schopenhauer: r and a half now and, although I love following you, it is getting tiresome. Please, get a blog!

A Dog Dancing

2009-09-27T14:39:00.002+01:00

Lately I’ve been struggling with a vague, undefined feeling of discontent, but then Natasha did a post about it and gave it a name: The Gap.

This began when I determined to start sending my thriller novel out again, but ultimately decided not to after reading the first chapter over and discovering it was, well, not very good. There was a time when I thought it was good, and there was a time when it was as good as I could do, but that time has passed.

What I began to ponder was the talent that people like Ian Rankin and Stephen King have, which allows them to write such sterling prose, while people like me sorta suck. How did they get it? Where does it come from? What do I need to do to develop it? Can I, in fact, develop it?

Then I saw a movie called 31 North, 62 East. This movie was made in Sussex and Horsham (and a bit in Lebanon) on a budget of about a quarter million pounds and was shot in a matter of weeks. Also, it was the production company’s first attempt at a major motion picture, or a motion picture or any kind, for that matter.

Filming in Sussex. They managed to find enough cash to hire a chopper for the day.
On a purely artistic level, it was rubbish, but when you take into account all the mitigating facts from the previous paragraph, you cannot but admire them for pulling it off, and pulling it off rather well. (Again, all things considered.)

The acting was wooden, the plot contrived, the set unnatural and obviously staged; in all it was like watching an amateur theatre group doing a movie, which in a large part it was. But there was a story there, and the clever devices they used to suggest climatic battle scenes without actually having to spend the money on them won my grudging admiration. (It also showed that people like Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep may demand huge fees, but they have that “something” that makes them worth the price.)

So what do we do, us people writing sub-stunning prose and producing movies that are so bad reviewers go out of their way to find good things to say them because anything less would be like tripping a crippled child? How do we bridge this gap? How do we go from thinking, “Okay, I wanted to produce something great, but this is crap,” to “this is what I had in mind, and I’ve pulled it off”?

These people actually got their moving into some prestigious cinemas. They are making no secret of the fact that this was a stepping stone to the next movie; the one they really want to make. So even if watching this movie was like watching a dog dancing—the amazing thing isn’t that they are doing it well, but that they are doing it at all—they may be closer to the mark in their next effort.

So, taking my cue from them, should I continue to try to publish my thriller novel, even though I know I have outgrown it already? Would it do me any good to get it published and have reviewers trash it? Or should I just call it a stepping stone and, by standing atop it, reach higher next time.

It’s sort of galling that these folks got their “throw away” project some major attention while my book, which took me longer to write than it did for them to conceive, script, film, edit, produce and release their movie, is consigned to the dead file. But if publishing it at any cost would mean people might start comparing me to a dancing dog, I think it might be best kept there.

Unplugged

2009-09-20T15:11:00.001+01:00

I’m in Craster, Northumberland with no phone signal or Internet connection. Without warning, I’ve found myself plunged into 1979. It was awkward at first, and I went through the usual stages of denial, anger, bargaining, etc. before arriving at acceptance. The thing was, I had plans to keep up on my e-mails and do some posting to my blogs in real-time while I was here, and instead I’m going to disappear without a trace. How is everyone going to get along without me? I soon realized, however, they would do just fine, and that my anxiety stemmed merely from an exaggerated sense of my own self-importance.

So I learned to embrace my solitude, and came to understand just how ephemeral the Internet is, which leads into what I wanted to talk about in the first place: E-Books.

Craster Castle: no toilets, no Internet Café.
There is a lot of talk about e-books being the wave of the future and taking off in a big way. I have my doubts--I think they will become more popular, but I do not believe they are the future of literature--and my conclusion is based on the very argument people have in favor of e-books.

VHS, they say, took off only after a format (i.e. not beta) was settled on. DVDs followed, and MP3 players. So the current reticence in adopting e-books is only temporary until a format is settled upon. But people who watch TV like to be able to choose when they see a show, and listening to an MP3 player is a lot more convenient then carrying around a phonograph. People who like to read, however, also tend to like books.

I know; I'm one of them. I like the texture, the feel, the weight of a book in my hands. I like to be able to write in the margins if it pleases me, and to throw a £7.99 paperback into my rucksack and take it camping with me, something I would be hesitant to do with a £400 Kindle.

I like browsing books, collecting books, and seeing them on my bookshelves. I like lending books to others or leaving them behind for others to find. I like the fact that there are no batteries required or technology that can fail. An e-book is not better than a book, it is a poor, ephemeral substitute.

I've heard it said that if you publish something on the Internet it is there forever. Define forever. We have clay tablets from the Babylonians, manuscripts from the middle ages--that is the closest we are going to come to permanent. The Internet is there only until, as my plight at the moment demonstrates, the plug is pulled.

The Internet is the most laissez faire, unpredictable, temporary thing every invented; and it is made up of a loose collection of privately owned servers all over the world that will be there only as long as the owners decide they want to keep them. If everyone suddenly got tired of it, it would disappear in an instant.

Also, and this is my own prejudice but I don't think I'm alone, once material is put into an electronic format, its value depreciates.

If someone "publishes" an e-book, it is not regarded as a real book. If someone writes for the web, they are paid (if at all) a fraction of what they would get if they were published in a printed magazine. Electronic words do not, in a literal sense, exist, and are therefore not as highly valued.

If you want something dependable, you get a real book, because technology can fail. And as I’m sitting here with no Internet connection and no way to contact anybody or download anything to read, I think I’ve proved my point.

So I think I’ll spend my time enjoying the solitude and appreciating the lessons this week of non-connectivity is teaching.

My Day. Thanks for Asking.

2009-09-09T17:43:00.000+01:00

My Day Job

I work with computers, and while I make it a point to not talk about my office life, I feel it is my duty to try to illustrate to you non-computer people what working with computers is like; it may keep you from making a serious career move error.

To keep it simple, let’s equate any of the myriad of simple tasks I have to perform during the course of my work day to something that you can readily relate to: your task is to come home, hang your coat on the hook in the hallway and eat dinner before going out with your friends to the pub. That’s it; a sequence of two simple tasks followed by a reward.

So you enter your home and hang your coat on the hook.

It falls on the floor.

You pick the coat up and check it. There is nothing wrong with it. You hang it on the hook again.

It falls on the floor.

You check the hook; there is nothing wrong with it. You hang your coat on the hook again.

It falls on the floor.

You try to hang your coat on the second hook, instead.

It falls on the floor.

You take a scarf off of the third hook and hang it on the second hook.

It stays in place.

You hang your jacket on the second hook.

It falls on the floor.

You hang the scarf on the first hook.

It falls on the floor.

You put the scarf back where you got it on the third hook.

It falls on the floor.

You now methodically try hanging your jacket and the scarf on each of the three hooks and watch as they each fall to the floor every time.

You mumble to yourself for a while, then do a Google search on the specific style, brand and version of the hooks.

You find there is a “known Issue” with this type of hook which causes anything hung on the first hook to be ever after unusable on any hook.

After an hour of perusing help forums and technical blogs, you come to understand there is nothing you can do about this. You are advised to not try removing the hooks and replacing them in a different order because it won’t help.

You remove the hooks and replace them in a different order.

It doesn’t help.

You remove the hooks, throw them away and go to the nearest hardware store.

It’s closed.

You go to the next one.

It’s closed.

You find an open one in an industrial estate 20 miles away. The man says you should have kept the hooks; he knows a way they can be fixed.

You buy three different hooks and return home.

The new hooks are not compatible with the base board the original hooks were installed on.

You return to the hardware store and buy a multi-functional baseboard.

The new baseboard needs modification before going onto the wall. This causes the hooks, which now fit, to be fastened upside down. They work fine, but you can’t hang anything on any of them.

You pick up your coat and scarf, fold them up and put them in the linen cupboard.

You try, but fail, to convince yourself that this is a better solution than the hooks anyway.

By now your friends are having a great time at the pub and you have not actually completed your first task. Still, you might just be able to make last call if you cook and eat your dinner quickly.

You head to the kitchen, take a ready-meal out of the fridge and put it in the oven.

The oven won’t light . . .

Posted by Mike
Somewhere in South Wales

PS: Just as I attempted to post this, the train went into the longest tunnel I have ever seen. We're still going through it; I think it must come up near Swindon.

PPS: We finally came out of the tunnel and, after I got my signal back and attempted to log on again, we entered another one.

Not. My. Day.

The Wealthy Writer

2009-09-02T21:16:00.003+01:00

My publisher recently sent me a copy of “The Wealthy Writer.” Not because they thought I needed a prod to assist me in making more money, but to review. It’s their book; they wrote it. You could do worse than read this book-—the marketing tips alone are worth the cover price—-but if you have aspirations akin to mine, you may come away more disheartened than before.

The book is part pep-talk, part practical advice from a duo who have been successful on both sides of the publishing game—-being publishers and self-publishers. This puts them in a unique position and makes their guidance worth heeding. The most impressive thing about the book is, even though they are publishers, they advise self-publication as the best way to make money with your writing. And they have real-life examples to back that up.

As they point out, if you self-publish your book, you stand to make a profit of £7 to £10 per book instead of £0.45. If you flog your book unmercifully and sell 3,000 copies, you make £30,000. If that sounds too good to be true, it isn’t. There are hard truths to back that up, but there are also mitigating factors.

The Hard Truths:
     - Even if you go with a major publisher, you are still going to be responsible for most of your book’s marketing, so you save little here and give up a lot.
     - If you go with a major publisher, you would have to sell over 66,000 books to give you the same amount of money you could make selling just 3,000.

Mitigating Factors:
     - You are not not going to sell 3,000 books.

The other, oft-visited issues I have with self publication are:
     - No matter how hard you try, your amateur product won’t be as good as what a professional would produce. I can personally attest to this.
     - You still have to face that "self-published" stigma.

All that said, self-publication is clearly a better option than it was just a few years ago. The advent of POD and computer graphics means you really can put out a (nearly) professional looking product, and get it printed, for a nominal fee. No more stacking boxes of unwanted books in the garage or laying out thousands of dollars for a print run. And as the option becomes more and more viable, the stigma appears to be shrinking. Even in its self-published form, I was able to get “Postcards” into a few books stores.

After reading this book, I am convinced you can make a decent living writing and publishing and flogging your own books, just as I became convinced you can make a decent living writing service articles after I read “How to Become Embarrassingly Rich by Writing Service Articles,” or something like that. In each case, however, it presupposes you are doing this full-time. Now I have nothing but admiration for people with the courage, conviction and drive necessary to quit their job and devote themselves to full-time self-employment, but the vast majority of us simply are not in the position of being able to walk away from a steady pay check. And take it from me, there comes a time when you simply cannot devote more of your non-work life to marketing.

But all of this is academic; self-publishing is not for me, and neither is it—-if you have writing ambitions similar to mine—-for you. This book, as well as “Aiming at Amazon” both state plainly that this model works only for non-fiction. Novelists, short story writers and humorists need not apply. Now, you are certainly welcome to publish your book yourself, but they practically guarantee you won’t sell many. A non-fiction book provides something tangible that people want: “How to Live on £0.37 a Day,” “Three Steps to a Better Orgasm,” “Eat All You Want and Still Stay Thin—-a Bulimic’s Guide to a Beautiful Body,” . . . really, I could do this all day, but you get the point. With non-fiction you have a built-in customer base; with fiction you have a story.

This isn’t a gripe, I’m simply pointing out the facts. And, personally, I’d rather have the stories; I just wish there was a way to make some money with them.

Decisions, Indecisions

2009-08-25T21:25:00.003+01:00

The results of my recent check up are in, and it's official: there is nothing wrong with me, I'm simply a lazy slacker.

That's disappointing; I was so looking forward to skiving off of work for a few months with Epstein Bar or something. But just because I've been pronounced healthily, don't think I've turned into a bundle of energy. I'm still sleeping too much, and still looking at the long lists of things I need to do and thinking, "Sod it" and going off to have a drink and a cigar. One thing if I enjoyed it, but I keep feeling guilty that I'm not being productive.

My slackerliness (is that a word?) and state of distraction has been highlighted by something uncharacteristically useful I just read in my September issue of Writer's Digest. It was an interview with Cory Doctorow, and in it he said, if you're going to write, then 1) write, 2) finish what you write, and 3) submit what you finish. As he pointed out, if you do those things, you may still never succeed, but if you are not doing all three of them, then you are not a writer, just a person who occasionally does writerly type things.

Write, finish what your write, submit it to an editor; everything else is gravy.

So I guess, at present time, I am not a writer, which is the most likely reason for my malaise. I need to shake off the distractions and get back to basics, which is producing stuff I can submit. Oddly, everything was fine until the book came out, then all of a sudden I'm writing web-posts and marketing material and taking on columns and not producing anything I can submit to a publisher.

So I had to make a choice: unfortunately, at this time in my life, I do not have room for both ventures plus a full-time job, so am I going to continue to attempt to become the Bill Bryson of the South, or take what little writing time I have and dedicate it to stories, novels and articles I can at least submit, if not publish? The answer was obvious. It's not as if I'm making any headway in my bid for fame, so cutting back on the expat shtick in order to get back to producing some serious writing was a no-brainer.

Then BBC calls. Would I like to do an interview on BBC Oxford? So now I'm back doing the "accidental expat" shtick and trying to think of ways to capitalize on this small success.

Here's one: Have a listen – set the time line to 32.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00437cj

It's only good for a week, so check it out soon.

Distractions

2009-08-17T08:24:00.001+01:00

I've been a bit distracted lately. Not that it's difficult to derail my attention span (oh, that's quite shiny!)

Now where was I? Sorry, I was distracted.

A few weeks ago, lot of things happened all at once and each got me thinking in a different direction. It all came out well the end, but it's been a tangential month.

First, I started getting offers for advertising on my blogs, which made me realize that:
     1) you don't have to be good or popular for people to want you to prostitute yourself, you just have to have been around a while, and
     2) I'm not in this for the money.

That second conclusion took a lot of thought, because it wouldn't have been a much work to pimp out my site and watch the money (pennies, I suspect) roll in, but that's not what I'm about (unless, of course, the price is right—I have principles, but I'm not stupid).

But this led me to thinking about what I was in it for, and I looked around at all the writing I was doing and thought, "Bugger this!" So I consolidated and pulled back and took a breather, hoping the idle time would recharge my batteries and leave me itching to write.

While I was waiting, a few incidents drew my attention to the fact that, although my ramblings are posted to a number of places on the web, I really do not write for the web, or, more specifically, what I do is not “web writing.”

Due to my years of writing for newspapers, my web posts generally run about 800 words, have a beginning, a middle and an end that ties back to the beginning; they are, in short, essays. So I began looking into the art of writing for the web, which means:

     - Short sentences

     - Bullet points

     - Lot's of white space

It’s USA Today style, but leaner. For people with even shorter attention spans. The ultimate expression of this, so far, is Twitter. I don’t want to go down that road. Consequently, I decided writing in “web speak” wasn’t for me.

So I continued waiting for my muse to return from holiday and thought, if I couldn’t write actual web-style prose, maybe I shouldn’t be doing all this web writing in the first place—I got into it mainly to promote my book but it’s getting a little out of hand lately—so maybe it's time to think about getting back to my novel and writing the type of prose I’m actually good at but then my writing magazine arrived in the post and I found yet another distraction: Googling the publishers of those people listed as having "published" a book to see if they had, in fact, self-published it.

This is something I started doing by accident and kept up after it became apparent that fully half of the people receiving congratulations on "publishing their first novel" had paid for it themselves. Congratulating someone for self-publishing a book is like congratulating someone for purchasing a new laptop; you're merely giving yourself an expensive gift.

I was gratified to find that, in this issue at least, each “published” author was, in fact, published.

However, I also found out that a new publishing company, Red Phone Publishing, is holding a contest wherein the winner gets a publishing contract. How exciting! The entry fee is £10 and you send in a description of your book, along with the first 50 pages of the manuscript and they let you know if they can publish it or not. They deserve a huge amount of credit for discovering how to charge unsuspecting writers for sending in a query package. Let’s hope other publishers don’t jump on this bandwagon.

I shouldn’t think they’d have to, as there are many other ways to bilking writers out of their money. UKUnpublished.com comes at the hopeful author with a barrage of “you’re getting a raw deal” hysteria, then tells them there is hope, then tells them how much they’ll have to pay them for it. Basically, they self-publish your book for you; you’re better off doing it yourself. It’s cheaper.

So did my examination of my writing magazine leave me depressed? No, not at all. It proved I could easily see through the machinations of people out to separate me from my money—these were not ads, they were articles about supposed “great deals” for writers—and the absence of self-published “new writers” meant there actually was hope.

But most of all, searching out these newly published authors accidentally provided me with a list of small to medium publishers, most of whom take unagented submissions and who, obviously, are willing to take a chance on an unpublished author.

Now that’s the sort of distraction I like.

Word Count: 800

When Worlds Collide – The Last Tripod Page

2009-07-01T12:55:00.001+01:00

This post represents something new, not just for my website, but in the annals of the Internet and, perhaps, of recorded history itself:

A post for a virtual blog-world tour is simultaneously a post for a real-life tour. Additionally, a post on my Postcards website about my life in England, is also a post about my book, and therefore intersects my “Life of Writing” blog, as well. And you few, you lucky few, are here to witness it.

The downside is, three distinct virtual and real-time events all taking place simultaneously may create a rift in the space-time continuum and generate a spectral loop, causing us all to relive this day over and over again, like Bill Murray in “Groundhogs Day” or the crew of the Enterprise (TNG) when they had to live a terminal event over and over again until they managed to save the series from premature cancellation.

So do something fun and interesting today; you don’t want to chance re-living your tax audit or a trip to the proctologist over and over until the end of time. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Where I am in the virtual world is on my friend Glenn’s Tripod website. I hope you visit; he must be the last person in the world (real or otherwise) with a page on Tripod. I gave mine up during the Nixon administration. In the real world, I’m in Glenn’s back yard, sitting at the picnic table with a glass of whiskey, a cigar and an internet connection. Where I am on the New York Times Bestseller List is anybody’s guess.

The life of an author isn’t all glitz and glamour, you know; I’m rarely chased by paparazzi and I have yet to be besieged by groupies flinging their knickers at me while I’m giving a talk about “How to be a Popular Writer” at NYU. (I’ll be speaking to my agent about this, believe you me, as soon as I get an agent.) Mostly authors spend a lot of time doing what I’m doing: travelling from town to town trying to meet as many people as possible and win them over so they will go out and buy the book.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the travel, but it does get tiring. And I love meeting new people. So much so that all I want to do is talk with them and hear about their lives and get to know the area they live in. And then I move on to the next stop and realize I never mentioned my book. Not that it matters; I wrote “Postcards From Across the Pond” because I was having so much fun with my own life that I wanted to share it with others, and I see this tour as a way of allowing others to share bits of their lives with me without having to go through all the bother of writing and publishing a book. So forgive me if I forget to include the Hard Sell in my posts.

Aside from the struggle to escape obscurity, I’m having a blast. The blog-world tour has bounced me back and forth across the pond and taken me to Spain and Tenerife as well. And soon, I’ll be heading to other surprising destinations.

In the real world, my wife and I have travelled to Montreal, breezed through Albany, stayed in Syracuse, popped down to Cazenovia for my son’s wedding, and then settled in Brainard to try to fit in a few relaxing days before heading to Rouses Point and making the crossing back into Canada for the flight home. It’s been a tiring trip, but it’s our own fault: we took The Boy and his girlfriend to Paris when they visited us and the romance of the city overcame him and her proposed to her. After they became engaged, you just knew something like this was bound to happen.

It’s all been lovely but half the time I don’t know where I am or what day it is, and it has been a challenge keeping The Tour going while on the road.

But mostly it has been great getting re-acquainted with America—the real America. We got to meet my new daughter-in-law’s family and after an hour with them it was as if we had known them all our lives. They were, without exception, gracious and accommodating. Likewise other distant relatives I had not seen in years made us feel very welcomed and we were able to spend a wonderful, relaxing afternoon with my aunt, her children and their respective partners chatting around their backyard picnic table over pizza and Pespsi.

Living in the UK for so long, I only get to see America as the rest of the world sees it, and it’s easy to forget that they are some of the friendliest, charitable and welcoming people on the planet. This trip has reaffirmed my conviction that America is a great nation, and what makes it great are the people who live here.

I’m looking forward to spending a few more days among them, and today’s schedule involves meeting up with my cousin and maybe taking a trip down the Hudson Valley to visit the Vanderbilt mansion and, of course, spending time in the back yard with some beverages and fine cigars.

I want it to be a perfect day; I’m not taking any chances.

Would you like to participate in the
2009 KINDNESS of STRANGERS TOUR?
Visit the Tour Page to sign up or to view the latest Tour updates.

Road Trip

2009-06-07T06:46:00.008+01:00

Would you like to participate in the
2009 KINDNESS of STRANGERS TOUR?
Visit the Tour Page to sign up or check progress.

Latest: 08 Jun 2009 - Cornwall - Wright Story

Me and my book, "Postcards From Across the Pond," are going on tour. Virtually.

With a limited marketing budget, I've decided to travel the world using the blogs of people I don't know. I'm calling it "The Kindness of Strangers Tour" and the idea is to visit as many places as I can. Just to see where it leads me.

Now that I'm actually starting out on this journey, it's difficult to remember how the original idea came about, but it has culminated in this:

I am asking anyone who follows me, or knows of me, or my book to allow me to guest post on their blog. Wherever they happen to live, I will count as having visited and will update The Tour Page with links to their blog. Never mind that actual, earthly locations mean nothing in the blog-world; that's sort of the point.

The reason I'm relying on people to volunteer is because I briefly flirted with the idea of actually seeking out blogs and approaching likely ones with my proposal. After surfing through approximately 87,283,834 blogs, however, I discovered that most are:
A. Abandoned
B. About knitting
C. Filled with photos of the above, so many that it's a wonder the World Wide Web has not collapsed under its own weight.

So, given that, and the fact the most of the remaining blogs are, in a word, dire, and the authors of the few actual good ones (like yours, dear reader) probably don't want some stranger poking his head in and asking if he can camp there for a while, I decided it might be better to rely on spontaneous benevolence. At the very least it won't take up as much time.

My first port of call is in Cornwall; my next one could be anywhere. I'm looking forward to travelling through cyber space, meeting new people, exploring new locations—-in a virtual sense—-and posting about my adventures.

It should be fun, and I'm hoping people will catch the spirit of the adventure and join in so I don't have to quietly take down a bunch of empty pages in two months time.

Oh, and most importantly, I will continue my regular posts here. That's also the good thing about the blog-world; you can travel, and still stay home.

Hope to see you in Cornwall soon, and back here for my next post, and wherever I happen to end up after that.

Thanks for your support.

Breaking the Rules For Fun

2009-06-05T06:45:00.002+01:00

I’m still having fun playing with my new toy, but mostly that involves reading the book and admiring the pretty colors. I’m hoping to make some progress soon but I just started yet another project (more on that in a future post) and it’s taking longer than I thought to get it off the ground. Once that’s out of the way, well, something else will come along.

I am enjoying the book, however. James V. Smith’s “You Can Write a Novel” has a different approach than any other how-to-write book I’ve seen. He doesn’t advise you, or say, “well, there are many ways X could be done, and some people like to do this, others like to do that, but you need to find what works best for you.” No, he say: “Do it this way.” Granted, that may not work for everyone, but I like the concept.

Many of the rules he puts down deserve to be set in stone like that, such as don’t litter your prose with adjectives and adverbs, don’t use three good words when one excellent word will do, don’t use obscure language; rules like that—the rules I break every day.

Despite having delusions of genre, I mostly write humor, and a lot of that humor is in creative or unorthodox use of the language. When I write, I’m not aiming for a short, pity sentence with a strong verb; that certainly would add intensity and drama to my humorous anecdote about falling down the escalator at Reading Station, but it wouldn’t make it very funny. Revision, to me, often involves hunting up the most sublimely obscure adjectives I can find (there, I did it again) so the sentence doesn’t read smoothly.

This isn’t a problem, it’s just an observation. Despite my sporadic fiction output these days, when I do write a short story of work on a novel, I don’t find it difficult at all to change gears. I just find it interesting how the carefully crafted language of the humorous personal essay would ruin something like The Hunt for Red October or The Da Vinci Code.

It’s also interesting that you can improve almost any piece of dramatic fiction (especially from a beginner) by simply going through and taking out the adverbs, but you can’t punch up a humor piece by randomly sprinkling it with modifiers. Humor doesn’t really follow a set of rules, which, if followed, will produce hilarious results. The only rule in humor writing is it has to be funny.

So I’ll keep on breaking the rules when I write my essays, but when I finally get to the novel, I’ll have to start behaving myself.

Writing a Mystery

2009-05-24T06:23:00.002+01:00

My lack of communication lately is due to the continued mulling over of my writing life and what I want to do with it while avoiding arriving at a decision. Then last week I received a package.

It came in a plain, heavy-duty mailing envelope. There was nothing with it--no letter, no invoice, no advertisements and no indication of where it originated except for the clue in my own address: it ended with the designation "UK" so I know it came from abroad.

The package contained a novel writing kit, which consisted of a handsome set of multi-colored novel-component forms and a book. I was amused and intrigued. Did it come as some promotional package, a bonus for re-upping my magazine subscription, or had a won it in a contest? If so, there would be some indication of where it came from and why I had it, but there was none. And the only magazine I have re-subscribed to recently is "The Writer," and since the "You Can Write a Novel Kit" is put out by Writer's Digest Books, I find that idea highly suspect. Had someone gotten tired of hearing me whining on the web and sent it to me to shut me up? Who knows? If someone did send it to me, thank you.

I wasn't sure what to do with it at first. I figured I could use the pads for scrap paper (they were too small for the copious character sketch notes I compile, anyway) and maybe have a look through the book just for fun; I mean, what more do I have to learn about writing a novel? So a few days later I picked up the book and read the first few pages. I'm still reading it, and the note pads are back in the pack ready to be used for their intended purpose.

This little book has more of the nuts and bolts of writing a novel than any I have ever read. And I find myself buying into the minimalist theory of the author, James V. Smith, Jr, especially since I recognize over-planning and never getting to the actual work as one of my major pitfalls. The theory is, all the prep work you do is, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, locks you into a set pattern, causing you to expend a lot of energy fitting all your preconceived notions into the story, leaving little room for creativity and surprising turns.

It's something I can relate to from the experience of my last novel. All the work I did up front rarely made a difference, and along the way, as the story took shape, I came up with a lot more and better ideas. By sketching out the really important points, you can just get on with the process of writing and flesh everything out along the way. Writing a novel should be a process of discovery, not a paint-by-numbers exercise.

So I think I'm going to give it a try. I'm convinced writing the novel is the best thing to do; all I have to do is find the time.

The mystery of where this came from, however, remains.

It Figures

2009-05-02T08:36:00.001+01:00

After last week’s post, I thought I’d give the boys in the Marketing Department a leg up by buying them a copy of, “Six-Figure Freelancing,” by Kelly James-Engar. I harbour no illusions that I could hope to make that much—hell, I’d be happy if I were a four-figure writer, even if two of those figures were after the decimal point—but I did hope there would be a few pointers in the book that might prove useful to a part-time writer who is crap at marketing.

There were none.

This is not the fault of the book. The book, after all, purports to tell you how to make gobs of money by putting words on paper, and it really does deliver; it’s just not relevant to what I do. First of all, it requires you to be a full-time writer, and I can understand that. If you’re going to put in the kind of time it requires to make that kind of money, you need to be at it full-time from the get-go. And, while it is possible to make a good living as a freelancer, Ms James-Engar’s outline for success seems to be arranged like this:

How to make $100,000 a year writing:
Step 1: move in with your boyfriend
Step 2: quit your job
Step 3: find markets that will pay you tons of dosh in exchange for your writing

Equally illuminating was the advice on how to break this onerous task into simple, easy to manage bits. You shouldn’t worry about making $100,000 a year, she advises, just concentrate on making $400 a day. Wow, why didn’t I think of that! Let’s see, Day One, made…uh…zero. Darn! Failed already.

Before I take the piss out of Ms J-E too much (if you’re reading this, Kelly, ‘taking the piss’ is a British term and it is not a derogatory term) let me say that it really is a fine book and delivers as promised; it’s just not for people like me.

This book is for entrepreneurs who, trapped in a day job, dream of starting their own business. But what to do? Coat-hangar manufacturer? No, the start-up costs are too high. Sheep farmer? No, that might mean moving to Scotland. Writer? Now there’s an idea—low start-up costs, no office required. That’s the ticket!

And it really is almost that easy. There are, as Ms J-E points out, a lot of highly lucrative markets out there and, once you find them and cultivate a relationship with them, you will find your yearly income growing to heights you never thought possible. But you won’t be doing what I call writing. You’ll be working on corporate annual reports, or business brochures, or keynote speeches. Only an entrepreneur could be pleased about working on an annual report that he has spent a lot of time and effort finding and negotiating for. For someone like that, it’s the thrill of being your own boss, for someone like me, an annual report is drudgery, and I’m certainly not going to go out and ask other people to give them to me.

The sort of writing I do (as, I suspect, do most of you) is mentioned in the book. Ms J-E calls it “creative writing” and it is very definitively put on a back shelf. It’s not profitable and, therefore, not worth spending time on. There’s a bottom line to consider, you know.

I don’t mean to be derisive of this book—I have the greatest respect for anyone who can make a living on their own—but it is to writing what a house painter is to still-life oil painting. Granted, the house painter is going to end the week a lot richer than the guy huddled in his garret trying to bring some apples, oranges and a pear to life on canvas. But I’m not really talking about a “higher calling” or anything like that, I’m talking about abilities and, frankly, I’m simply not talented enough to do what Ms J-E has done.

It’s like when I was playing music. Back in the day, I had a guitar, I knew a lot of songs and had a better than average voice and, incredibly, I convinced people to pay me to play for them. Because of that, people began mistaking me for a musician and expected me to be able to jam with them, or diversify by joining a band. But I couldn’t; I didn’t have the talent. I was just a guy with a guitar doing the only thing he knew how to do.

The same with writing; I do what I do because that’s all I can do, not because I have purposely limited myself to humorous essays and maudlin novels.

So the guys in marketing are still limiting their computer use to solitaire and checking their e-mail, and playing trashcan basketball to fill the rest of the time. But the year’s not over, so maybe they’ll pull up their socks and we’ll hit the target yet. Only $99,983 to go.

I Need a New Business Partner

2009-04-25T17:46:00.001+01:00

The problem with running a freelance writing "business" is that you are pretty much a one-man band. Not only do you need to manufacture the product, you have to be the salesman, the marketing division, the legal staff and the guy responsible for the coffee and donuts.

Production I don't have a problem with. Since proposing to start treating my writing as a business some six years ago, I am writing better and more consistently than ever. It's the joker in charge of marketing and sales that I have a problem with. In truth, that comes as no surprise; my lack of business acumen is long documented—I still have a copy of a memo I sent to my boss many years ago assuring him there was no future in Microsoft Windows, and I bought a Beta Max; 'nuff said—but as I enter the seventh year of my "business" I would have thought that, even by accident, I might have made more progress.

It so happens that I track my hours and finances meticulously (yeah, I'm a bit OCD) so I can reveal that last year, my writing salary was £0.21 an hour. Not exactly enough to make you consider giving up the day job, especially when you take into consideration that, during the same periods, I spent £1.48 an hour.

To exacerbate my dilemma, I am currently in a position where I need to make a choice about which direction to steer my business in. Though I am chuffed to bits about having a book out, this presents a new problem: do I continue to write humorous books on being an expat, or return to mainstream novels? I can't do both—there simply are not enough hours in the day—and the only thing I can be certain of is, if there is a business decision to make, I will make the wrong one (refer to earlier mention of memo and Beta purchase).

Another irritating fact is, any chance I have of publishing a second book hinges on the first one. "Postcards From Across the Pond" doesn't have to be a best seller, but I can't really see myself writing to a publisher with my one and only credential being a book that sold 12 copies.

So the guy in charge of marketing and sales had better start pulling his weight or he's going to find himself out of a job.

Art Imitating Life, Imitating Art

2009-04-15T21:23:00.002+01:00

I finally finished the post on Writer’s Block, but the story about the post so clearly illustrates my point, that I thought I’d frame my little essay on Writer’s Block with my essay about writing the essay on Writer’s Block.

When the idea for the essay hit, I dove into it as I generally do, but after a paragraph or so, I started to think it would make a pretty good filler article for Writer’s Digest and decided to submit it when I finished. (I’ve sold to them in the past, so it wasn’t quite as off the wall as it sounds.)

And I continued writing, but now I was conscious of what I was writing. The weight of an unseen audience began to crush me and the idea—so big and grand when I started—grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared altogether. Then the words stopped coming.

Fortunately, I have no shortage of things to write these days, so I simply moved on. I continued to visit the languishing essay, but however hard I tried, I could not bring it back to life. At length, I gave up on the idea of sending it to WD and decided to just attack it and post whatever crap appeared.

So I wrote:

The Case for Writer’s Block

Popular opinion among writers these days has it that Writer’s Block does not exist. “Plumbers don’t get Plumber’s Block,” they tell us. “Therefore writers do not get Writer’s Block.” It’s an interesting hypothesis, but they are comparing apples and oranges, or more to the point, writers and plumbers.

A plumber may be a craftsman but his skill relies on manual, not mental dexterity. He has likely received training in his trade, he has probably taken tests and, at some point, someone has pronounced him a plumber. Doubts are not a part of his day. He doesn’t lie awake thinking, “Who am I kidding; I’m not a plumber. Everyone must know I’m a fake. I’m probably the worse plumber there ever was. Maybe I should try being a bricklayer, instead.” If they did, I expect they would take more time off from work, and they would put it down to Plumber’s Block.

But writers whose synapses have seized up—and more than a few successful writers claim to suffer still—are expected to face the blank page every day and dredge something up from the echoing, empty depths of their minds. And not just anything; it needs to be worthy, yet marketable; new enough to keep their readers surprised, yet and similar enough to keep them comfortable. Is it any wonder many writers are frozen by stark terror at the thought of hitting the first key? The writer’s mind is where their work comes from, it is the part of their being that must be functioning properly in order for them to do their work, and if it is blocked by fear or self-doubt, then they are unable to perform. This is Writer’s Block.

Besides, plumbers actually do get Plumbers Block; it’s called the flu. If they have it, the part of their being required to carry out their tasks won’t function, blocking them from doing their work as thoroughly as if they were a writer shackled by insecurity. (For the record, I’d rather wrestle with stifling emotions; writer’s block doesn’t stop me from going down to the pub.)

The only problem with writer’s block is, unlike the flu, you can’t really use it as an excuse to bunk off if you want to be a professional, and that’s where we get the notion that it doesn’t exist. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t real; it just means you can’t give in to it.

And I don’t think that’s fair; after all, no one expects a plumber to show up for work when he has the flu.

END

I looked over what I wrote and felt rather pleased with myself. I’d broken my writer’s block and produced something that was probably good enough to submit to Writer’s Digest after all, and I proposed to do just that as soon as I got home. To celebrate, I packed away my laptop, pulled out my new edition of Writer’s Digest and settled in for a good read. And there, on page 62, was a filler article on Writer’s Block.

At least they saved me the angst of composing a cover letter.

Adult Supervision

2009-04-11T13:42:00.002+01:00

It's a lazy Saturday afternoon; day two of a four-day weekend. My wife is out with friends and I have nothing planned. I am, however, in possession of a credit card and reside within a seven-minute walk of three different bookstores (four, if you count The Works). That is, I have discovered, a dangerous combination, especially when I am left without adult supervision.

I actually went out to buy Sarah Lyall's book, The Anglo Files, because it keeps getting such bad reviews and I want to see how she is slagging off the British and what she's said to piss them off. I was not surprised to discover the book was not in any of the stores. (I was also both gratified and disappointed to find my book on the shelves of Waterstones—it's always nice to see your book on the bookstore shelves, but why hasn't it sold out yet?)

So, I came back home with Tom Bale's Skin and Bones, Alexander McCall's Tears of the Giraffe, a steak and Stilton pasty, an Easter card and some chocolate as a surprise for my wife and a bunch of flowers, bought on a whim. But the one item I went out for, I still don't have.

Luckily, there's Amazon UK.

(NOTE: I realize this hardly constitutes a post, but nearly two weeks have passed and I wanted to stick something up here to keep you from thinking I had abandoned the site. I actually have several posts planned. The one is progress is about Writer's Block but I'm having a lot of trouble with it. How ironic is that?)

How to Get Books Cheap

2009-03-31T16:42:00.001+01:00

An interesting experience came out of my recent book signing: I was allowed to shoplift my own books.

While the signing went off without a hitch, there was a problem with the distributor and the books the bookstore had ordered did not arrive in time, so I brought my own stock with me. As mentioned in my earlier post, they sold out (yesss!). But the shipment to the bookstore still did not arrive.

I ordered more books to replenish my own supply and they arrived the next day, so I gave some additional books to the bookstore so they could fill the back orders and put some on the shelves. This kept them going until their order finally arrived.

On Saturday morning, I went to the bookstore, confirmed that they had received their shipment and accepted a pile of books from the manger as repayment for the ones I had loaned her. When I got home, however, I saw that she had only given me the amount I had used during the signing, not the extras I had supplied.

So I went back to the store (it’s a five-minute walk—a double-edged sword if ever there was one) and found her scurrying about doing bookstore manager type things. She acknowledged her error but, as customers were pressing for her attention, she told me to just take them off the shelves.

Up until that point, I hadn’t even bothered to seek out the book, just so I could see myself on the bookstore shelves, but now that I did look, I found she had done me well. My book was in the travel section, the local section and set up on several display stands strategically scattered throughout the store. I was, to say the least, delighted. What I did not want to do, however, was take all of them from one place, as this would lessen the impact. The result of this decision saw me wandering through the store, apparently at random, lifting books from the shelves and stuffing them in my rucksack.

And nobody stopped me.

Only once did another customer look askance at me as I grabbed a few books from the Travel section and deposited them in my pack.

“Don’t mind me,” I told her, “I’m just shoplifting.”

She smiled, and continued her browsing.

When I had my quota, I shouldered my backpack and walked out of the store without anyone saying a word.

Now I’m not advocating stealing books because that would be wrong (and bad for my royalty statement) but it certainly was fun having permission to nick my own books. I only hope some people noticed I was stealing the same book over and over and thought, “Wow, that must be some good book! I’d better buy a copy.”

WordPress; the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

2009-03-31T16:39:00.001+01:00

I genuinely hate doing this to you again, but I promise this is the final Wordpress rant, so please don’t abandon me and run off with some other, less obsessive blogger.

And, to be exact, I’m not doing this to you, I’m doing this for me (so I can achieve closure) and in the vain hope that some Wordpress love-slave will stumble across this post in the coming months and write to me out of a desire to help (or in a fit of pique; I’ll take assistance whatever the motive) and explain that all of these shortcomings can be fixed by locating the secret page with the “Use Rubbish WordPress” tick-box option set to TRUE and changing it to FALSE.

This post will be followed immediately by an actual, non-ranting post about writing so you don’t actually have to read this, and then we can all take a deep breath and move on.

WordPress – The Good:

Contrary to all this carping, Wordpress has delivered. The basic goal I set out for has been accomplished—I have an integrated web site that combines the advantages of a blog (RSS enabled, networking capabilities) with the properties of a web site (ability to add non-blog pages, situated in my own domain)—it is the cost of that goal I have issues with.

But I like the look and feel of the template I downloaded (and there were thousands to chose from) and the way the page management works, which saves me a lot of maintenance work. The Dashboard, while daunting, is an all-encompassing portal for anything you need to do with your site.

WordPress – the Bad

Their easy installation is anything but.

I still have no way to actually contact them about any of these issues because my URL does not contain the word “wordpress.” (Why do you think I’m resorting this method?)

Their SPAM filtering does not work. Even with reCaptcha and Akismet I am still getting spam. It is now only a fraction of what it was, but if I understand reCaptcha correctly, the only way to comment is to type in the offered words, which stops a machine from spamming you. Does this mean that someone is actually manually spamming me? If so, I admire their dedication. In addition to this, much of the spam I am now getting is coming from the same IP address. So I entered that IP address in the “blocked” list, but their spam still gets through. This is basic stuff, and they can’t seem to get it right. There is no excuse for this.

While I like the “Categories” function and am using it to segregate my posts into, well, categories (Chronicles, Travelogues, Photologues, etc) I find that, if you click on a category, only the first paragraph of the post appears; you have to click the title to make that whole thing show and there is no way to configure this. When I click on the Photologue category, the post comes up without the photos, which sort of defeats the purpose.

Widgets. The few that are there are absolute rubbish and can’t be configured to suit your needs. The Links widget, once set up with my initial links, now seems to be denied to me. When I click it to add more links, it just says, “This widget cannot be configured.” What sort of bullocks is that? I have searched the web for third-party widgets but have found none. This has required me to configure my own pages to handle things like an archive or contact form, which takes up a lot of time and, again, defeats the purpose.

For the record, I have been to their help pages, but they were no help. First of all, I have a blog to save me time, not so I can spend countless hours sifting through on-line help forums. Secondly, what help I did find was so elementary even an idiot could figure it out on his own (and I did).

The only good thing to come out of their help was the confirmation that their Archive widget is, indeed, limited to listing the months with an optional number next to it representing how many posts went up during said month. That’s not an archive; that’s a tally, and a pretty basic one at that. Who thought that would be useful?

The time it takes me to post a chronicle went from about 20 minutes on my webs site, to 20 seconds on Blogger, to about an hour on Wordpress. The reason for this? See The Ugly.

WordPress – the Ugly

The idea of a blog is to enable a quick update. Open the portal, copy and paste, click UPDATE and Bob’s your uncle. It worked like this in Blogger but Wordpress falls somewhat short of this dream.

Copy and paste from MS Word causes all sorts of havoc, but pasting into Notepad first and then coping and pasting into Wordpress solves this. However, importing a photo requires a lot more finesse. The photo import program allows you to set the position of the picture (left, right, center) then absolutely ignores it. My work around is to add HTML code to the post, which is allowed. However, Wordpress thinks it knows better than I do and helpfully changes my code. The results are often quite startling.

This requires me to fiddle with the code, update, check the actual web pages, fiddle some more, update, check, fiddle, update, check, etc. Not exactly the simple and easy updating they promise.

Add to this the fact that I have to manually update the additional pages I have to maintain because their widgets are so rubbish and you’ll see why it take an hour to update.

Wordpress – the Conclusion

Wordpress, unfortunately, wins this round. Even though I have serious issues with their software I currently see them—like a low self-esteem sufferer with a cruel girlfriend—as better than nothing. So I’m clinging on in the hopes that, one day, they will finally get their act together.

And, no, that never worked with any of my girlfriends, either.

Gone Fishin'

2009-03-21T08:38:00.004Z

During the intense research I conducted this morning (i.e. web surfing) I discovered that yet another major newspaper has gone bust. As an empathetic sort, it saddens me to think of all those people suddenly out of work. As a writer, it disturbs me because the chances of seeing my words in print have been marginally trimmed (ask not for whom the Bankruptcy tolls; it tolls for thee). And as a person interested in history, I find it frightening.

I realize we are living in a time of change. The Internet, once the plaything of nerds, is now a major force. A lot of people are spending a lot of time on it so that is where a lot of the advertising dollars are going, instead of newspapers or magazines. Hence to rapid decline of printed media.

And the web is a wonderful place, bringing with it a thousand fold increase in writing opportunities. Photos, movies, pop-ups and other web wizardry can now adorn our words, making them more accessible and attractive to our readers than ever before. I've already discussed how, in the 1980's, if you wanted to start a newsletter or a small magazine, you could expect to spend hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars and put in some incredibly long hours, but just ten years later you could do the same for a much smaller fee on a web site, and now you can do it for free with a blog.

This has boosted interpersonal communication to a level never before imagined and, as a writer, has increased my potential audience from subscribers to my hometown newspaper to practically everyone on the planet.

So why the niggling unease?

First of all, while it has raised my profile among people who normally would not have heard of me, and has enabled me to publish a real book (the kind made of paper, with a cover, and my name on it) it has not raised my writing income at all. Perhaps I'm speaking too soon, because once the book takes off and starts earning me thousands of dollars in royalties I may change my tune, but right now, I am not making anywhere near as much as I made back in the 70s and 80s writing humorous articles and selling them to local newspapers. The web might offer writers the opportunity to write, but it doesn't pay very well.

There's also the esteem issue. When communication was expensive, more thought went into what was said. Back then, words were precious; today they are free. And, like it or not, people equate free with worthless. Even among paying markets, a person writing an on-line column does not get paid as much as a person writing a column for the print version; it just isn't regarded as important.

As a writer whose words are primarily on the web, that's something I have to consider. But this is all mostly down to change, and major changes like these have always brought with them a variety of peripheral issues, all of which eventually resolve themselves despite the hand-wringing of old curmudgeons like me. So none of the above bothers me as much as my final point: None of it is real.

The family history articles you wrote, the photos you took of your cousins wedding, your household accounts, all the bits and pieces necessary for future generations to assemble an understanding of what life was like at the turn of the century do not actually exist.

A rogue electro-magnetic eruption from the sun could wipe out all those electronic bits stored on hard drives, memory sticks and floating through the ether of cyber-space (note to the literally-minded: I made up that electro-magnetic thingy, but you get my point.)

The Internet might be ushering in an era as revolutionary to written communication as Gutenberg's printing press, but books produced in the 1600s can still be read while I've had an untold number of data files rendered useless because the software or hardware required to access them has already become obsolete.

Without newspapers and magazine to capture what we, as citizens of the new millennium, considered important enough to write down, this whole era, from about 1995 until we finally sort ourselves out, might be represented on historical charts by a big blank spot with a sign reading "Gone Fishin'" in the middle of it.

Wordpress 2

2009-03-14T06:16:00.004Z

Okay, I've sorted out my spamming issues, but not with the help of Wordpress. Once again, it was Jonathan of Anglotpia who came to my aid. Here's the story:

As you know, I was left with the problem of how to activate my spam filter. I needed an API Key, but to get one, I needed to sign up for a Wordpress account, and then I would magically see it at the top of my Dashboard page. But I already had a Wordpress account, and I couldn't see an API Key anywhere. What's up with that?

I couldn't send Wordpress' contact form to Wordpress because, even though I have a Wordpress account, my URL doesn't have the word "wordpress" in it. And I couldn't contact Wordpress to find out what to do about it. So I was out in the proverbial cold.

In desperation, I wrote to the company who published the spamming software. They answered within a couple of hours. The entire e-mail is below:

HELP REPLY - no help at all:

To retrieve your API key:
1. Log in at http://wordpress.com/ - please sign up for a username if you haven't already.
2. Visit http://wordpress.com/profile/ - your API key is shown on this page.

Kind regards,

Needless to say, this did nothing to lower my blood pressure. Then Jonathan stepped in before I blew a gasket and explained the whole thing.

I do indeed, have a Wordpress account, but to activate the spam filter, I needed a Wordpress account. The company, it seems, is sort of like the Olsen Twins, and one caters to the www.wordpress bloggers while the other takes on people like me (and Jonathan) who have their own domain but use the Wordpress software. I had to sign up for a Wordpress account to get the software and set my website up, but to get the spam filter, I needed to sign up with the other Wordpress.

Wordpress

To Wordpress, this apparently seems so logical that nowhere is there an explanation that A) ther are two of them, and B) that there are differences between a Wordpress account and a Wordpress account.

Wordpress - I don't know why this confused me.

They also fail to offer an explanation as to why, in this day and age, a major blogging software system that is supposed to be the best thing since bottle beer doesn't come with any built-in spam filters; this is 2009, a spam filter is not a luxury.

In fact, they don't eve hint that any are available. I only found the spam filter, and the verification software (both available if you have Wordpress, which is not to be confused with Wordpress) because Jonathan told me about it, just as he told me how to set up the software and how to sign up for a Wordpress account even though I already had one.

Furthermore, I don't understand why, if they are twin companies, having access to one doesn't automatically grant you access to the other, but maybe one of the Olsen Twins could explain that part a bit better.

The Written Word(Press)

2009-03-10T14:29:00.002Z

For those of you (both of you?) who have been following my adventures with Wordpress, here is another update:*

The background: I wanted to integrate a blog into my actual website with my other articles and such. Blogger does not have the flexibility for this; Wordpress does, so I took the leap.

Just in case you aren’t sure which side I came down on, let me state it plainly here:

Wordpress is shite.

And for you playing the American version, here’s a translation:

Wordpress is shit.

The first sign of trouble was their “Famous Five-Minute install,” which started off, “Set up an SQL database on your ISP and add a Wordpress user with Admin rights.” I’m a computer professional, and it took me over a week to get through Step One; now I know why it’s so famous.

The days that followed were filled with the frustrations inherent in trying to overcome their limitations. To describe their widget menu as “a little light” would be like saying Karen Carpenter was “a bit underweight” toward the end of her career. And their Comment Control is simplicity at its best—basically it’s an allow comments/don’t allow comments tick box. The only nod toward spam is a “Blocked List” and an option to hold posts with a suspicious number of links in them, which doesn’t appear to work.

Consequently, I arose early this AM because I had a lot of things to get done before leaving for work, only to find my IN box stuffed with notifications of posting on my Wordpress site. I allotted some of my limited time toward getting rid of it all, and as I tried to set about doing my important tasks, my IN box filled up again.

This required me to shut off comments to my blog, which sort of defeats the purpose.

So I set about trying to find out what to do about it. Apparently, there is no native spam control in Wordpress (have I mentioned that it’s shite?) and you have to download, unzip, upload, install, activate and configure a third-party spam blocker if you actually want to use your Wordpress website for what you intended to use it for. The instructions, they said, were simple. Imagine my scepticism.

However, the downloading, unzipping and uploading went fairly quickly, though I was very conscious of the time ticking away and me not yet at the real work I needed to do. After I finished those tasks, I had to log into my Wordpress Dashboard and activate the spam filter. Again, not a problem. Then it asked for my API Code.

This involved another unwelcomed diversion to discover what an API Code is as, apparently, it is required for a variety of Admin-related tasks in Wordpress. A good joke would be, “there is no API Code.” But Wordpress is more sophisticated than that, their joke is, “You were assigned an API code when you first signed up, but we won’t tell you what it is.”

That’s right. The simple instructions for finding your API Code take you to a location that does not exist. A scavenger hunt through the Support Forums revealed that in the New, Improved Wordpress v7.something, you are no longer privy to your own API code; you need to contact Wordpress directly to get it.

My time was now almost up, so I abandoned any hope of actually getting anything done and sought out a way to contact Wordpress. Their Help Form was another example of their interpretation of Simplicity. It had numerous fields, all of which were required and none of which were relevant to my problem. In the end, I had to spread my question throughout the various fields just so each of them would have something in it. Then I clicked SEND and it returned an error saying they only support Wordpress websites and, as my URL is www.Lindenwald.com, it doesn’t qualify.

Now, considering that their selling point is you can integrate their software into your personal website (i.e. NOT www.wordpress.myblog) you’d think they might account for that. I was not able to contact them as I had no idea what to put in the URL field that would satisfy them and I was already running late for the bus.

So I got up extra early this morning but still have not done any of the pressing work I needed to do, no one can comment on my blog now unless I personally approve it (i.e. more work for me), and I still have no idea how to contact Wordpress to beg them to share my API code with me.

Thank you Wordpress, you’ve made my life hell.

*Sorry to do this to you, but I’m a bit cranky at the moment; plus I have a website and I’m not afraid to use it.

What It All Means

2009-02-27T21:00:00.001Z

There's a video going around the Internet about the proliferation of technology and Asian people. I usually don't even watch these things; they're generally naff and/or a waste of band width (with the exception of the one of an American teenager sticking a fireworks rocket up his butt and having his friend light it), but this one was really quite thought provoking, almost frightening. I’ve seen it in several places, but this is the only one I can remember. At the end, they pose the question: What does it all mean?

They didn't answer it, so I will.

Partly, it means, in a relatively short time, we're due to be overrun with Chinese and Indian people. But at least they will all speak English. It also means that, as the 5th most populous “country” on the planet, MySpace better start pulling its weight in terms of foreign aid and UN military support.

But mostly it means we are all getting stupider at an exponential rate.

Think about it; if the most intelligent man in the world, back in 1800, knew, let's say, 10% of all there was to know, he would know only about .01% percent of all there is to know now, and in 5 years time, only about 0.0003473%. We are all, therefore, becoming less intelligent at an alarmingly increasing rate.

As writers, this means we are under pressure to churn out more and more information, while at the same time, facing the burden of having to absorb more data at a faster rate. Even with the advantage of having 5 times as many English words at our disposal than Shakespeare did, this is still a daunting task.

To put this into some sort of perspective: back in the 1980's, I became interested in the history of fingerprinting. Yes, I'm as very sad person, but that's not my point. The thing was, I studied this field over the course of a few years, finding esoteric texts, private correspondence and first-hand histories from sources I worked hard to locate and traveled far to find.

I then had the luxury of reading, absorbing, analyzing, cross-referencing and extrapolating my own findings and ideas from this information. From this, I published several articles in trade journals and newspapers and soon became a sought after speaker at conventions and universities.

All the materials that went into this effort now reside in a single, albeit fat, folder in my file cabinet.

Presently, with 4 Exabytes (that’s 4.0x10^19, and I won’t pretend to know what that means) of unique information churned out this year, it is not unusual for me to acquire just as much data—in the form of e-mails, reports, memos, specifications and project proposals—over the course of a single work day. How is a person supposed to absorb all of that? The answer is, they can't. The best anyone can hope to do is scan the most important bits and attempt to formulate an intelligent decision based on their sketchy understanding of the facts.

This, I believe, leads to stupid decisions.

The video claims that one weeks’ worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in their lifetime in the 18th century (which may be true; how many peasant farmers needed to know their BMI or remember their PIN number?). In order to feed this insatiable appetite for knowledge, useless or otherwise, writers today are left to scan and gulp down great hunks of indigestible data so they can spew it back out as, what they hope are, reasonable articles. These articles then go into that gigantic jumble of disarray that "QI" likes to call "general ignorance."

The next person to write on similar subjects might scan those articles and pull out a few facts. But these facts were probably drawn from other articles whose authors gleaned them from yet other articles that were based on quick searches of Wikipedia entries compiled from FaceBook postings. So the irony is, the more information we produce, the less we know, and what little we think we know was probably made up by an eleven year old delinquent pretending to be a 17 year old girl.

In all probability, in the time it took me to write these words, another sixty seven million gigabytes of data have been spun out, making me (and you) just that much more proportionally ignorant of everything around us.

One can only hope that this constant spinning of information will slow down enough for us to catch up. If not, we will all be doomed to watch our relative intelligence quotas spiral downward into statistical insignificance.

But I hope, no matter how bad it gets, that none of us will become stupid enough to shove a lit fireworks rocket up our butts.

The Celebrity Life

2009-02-23T20:51:00.003Z

This past weekend I did my first book signing. As I completely sold out my stock in under three hours, I guess you could call it an unqualified success, but it wasn’t all down to my careful planning and/or foresight.

Mainly, I was lucky in about three different ways. It was a lovely spring morning, and that brought a lot of people out. The bookstore manager, after a few trial and error attempts, put me in a location to die for (right at the top of the stairs so no one coming up to the top floor could possibly miss me, and right next to the very, very popular—just try to get a table—coffee shop). And there was another signing going on downstairs at the same time, which brought in additional people (I know for a fact that got me at least one additional sale).

So I’m trying not to let this go to my head; if I do another signing, it could just as well be on a miserable day in a deserted book store with me sitting at a table in the back by the Graphic Novels section. But at least I know a successful signing is possible.

The things I did right:

I went to the local paper about three weeks prior to the event and offered them the opportunity of interviewing me. They were very good about it and held off publishing the article until the day before the signing. Nearly half of the people who bought a book said they had heard about me in the newspaper.

I made a poster with my name, book name, photos of both and the large title “Local Author” on it. I printed out one but, after the bookstore manager saw it, she made another copy, put them both in A4 display frames and set one on either side of me on the table. She also took my books off of the display rack (about 15 feet away) and put them on the table as well. This proved the winning combination: anyone going to the second floor to browse for a book or get a cup of tea could not avoid seeing me; the colourful posters and pile of books told them right away who I was and why I was there; if they sat in the café for any length of time, many of them became interested in what I was doing and stopped by as they were leaving.

So I got good press and good location, but I still could have blown it. The final key is to smile, make eye contact and chat to people even if they just stop by for a quick look (only one person who stopped at my table did not buy a book, and I gave her a business card with my web site address on it; you never know, she might become interested later). If you’re friendly, people will generally be friendly back; it was a bookstore, not a back street pub, the people were predisposed to buy books and were, overall, pleasant, so there was no need to be shy.

Other items that were not make-or-break but were nonetheless important included bringing a bottle of water, two pens and some mints. My business cards, while not necessary, also came in handy and I gave out almost all of them. I also wore my “Postcards From Across the Pond” tee shirt (what, you don’t have one?) but I don’t think anyone noticed.

The last item, but one I think really helped in a number of ways, was my AlphaSmart Neo. Sitting at a table with people milling around you can make you feel awkward, but if you have something to do, it helps you relax. I found typing into the Neo also reinforced the notion that I was, actually, a writer. While no one came over to ask what the cunning little device was (I get that a lot in pubs) I think it aroused some curiosity, and at the very least, it acted as an electronic security blanket.

If I had it to do over again, what would I do different? Not much. I might print off more than one poster, and bring my camera (I had to call my wife and ask her to come down and take a photo of me) but otherwise, I think I came across as a real, professional writer doing a real, professional writerly-type thing.

And only one lady came to my table to ask me where the toilets were.

Whitter On

2009-02-13T13:14:00.001Z

You have the right to remain silent

In the event that you live in a cave somewhere and communicate by carving messages on stone tables, or use the Internet exclusively for downloading porn, you may not be aware of the Times On Line article that has the blogshpere and its resident bloglodites in a tizzy.

Here is my USA Today-esque bullet-point summary:

     - The Ignition: The Times on Line wrote an article
     - The Bad Thing: Said article lifted quotes out of context and without permission or link-credit to the author, Miss Diva
     - The Aggrieved: Miss Diva is upset, and rightly so
     - The Irony: The Times on Line is staffed by professional journalists, who reportedly look down upon bloggers as unprofessional, yet they engaged in egregiously unprofessional and unethical behavior themselves.
     - The Action: Link to the Times on Line article, link to Miss Diva and write a post to “tell the world that you and your writing and your blog deserve respect." (credit: Miss Diva: "Write on! Respect the blog"
     - The Point: To start a revolution demanding respect for bloggers
     - The Result: High profile for a shoddy Times on Line article (and Miss Diva) and a great subject for bloggers to get their knickers in a knot over.

I realize the above sounds rather flippant, but that's just what I do. For the record, I do believe Miss Diva has every right to feel aggrieved and her response is admirable. I do believe the Times on Line behaved unprofessionally and unscrupulously. And I do believe that bloggers are entitled to the respect they deserve. But I do not believe that bloggers necessarily deserve respect.

That’s a subtle difference, but an important one, so pay attention.

The first responses I saw to this brouhaha had me convinced they were coming confiscate our keyboards and legislate away our bandwidth. Curious, I followed the links.

The offending article, which I will not compliment with a link, is simply a lengthy, rambling advertisement for a book (which one might suspect is equally long and rambling) and deserved little attention. Instead, by behaving unprofessionally and unethically, they got a lot. So what are we to learn from this except that pissing people off is a good marketing strategy?

The article, in case you’re interested, simply poses the controversial notion that maybe too much blogging and/or revealing too much in your blog might not be good for you. Whoa! Stop the presses! On the ground-breaking revelation scale, they might as well have said that having unprotected sex with random strangers probably isn’t the best use of your leisure time. Blogging doesn't require you to buy drinks, and is less likely to result in a worrying rash, or late night, drunken phone calls demanding to know why you never return their messages followed by unnerving accounts of weeing on a stick and what it revealed.

I think everyone who has the notion ought to blog. It's free, it’s easy and, unless you live in a country run by a despot, it’s legal. It will also give you satisfaction in ways you never expected. Sure you run the risk of blog-addition but, as addictions go, you’re better off with that than, say, a three hundred dollar a day cocaine habit. I don’t know of anyone who has come to after a night of enthusiastic blogging to find they’ve traded their living room furniture for an eight-ball.

So have at it, just don’t anticipate automatic respect; it doesn’t come as part of the package like all those annoying Blogger widgets.

Miss Diva, herself, appears to agree with me. What she says is bloggers “…should demand the respect that their traffic, their influence and their talent commands.” I read this as: good blogs deserve respect. The attention of the billions of people surfing through cyberspace needs to be earned. This happens through good writing. Good writing takes practice. And practice is best conducted in private.

Just because you can post every word you write doesn’t mean you ought to. There are many fine blogs out there, but some (not yours, surely) make me long for the days when people used to write their innermost thoughts in notebooks and hide them in their sock drawer. If professional journalist do not respect bloggers, it is quite likely because the vast majority of bloggers do not deserve respect.

Miss Diva says if you put "Blogs Ruin Journalism" into Google you’ll receive 3,900,000 hits. I tried that and got exactly ten, and most were from blogs linked to Miss Diva. When I tried it without the quotes, I got 614,000. On the other hand, I got 32,500,000 hits by entering “Big tits are bad” and 121,600,000 for “See me naked.” So what are we to learn from this? Nothing, really, except that “Big Tits are Bad” would make a wicked title for a blog post.

But back to the professional journalist; even if they really do believe blogging is ruining journalism, can you blame them for feeling that way? Suppose you were a professional housepainter. That’s what you trained for and take pride in and it’s how you earn the money to support you and your family. Now suddenly, everyone on earth has taken such an interest in house painting they are all going around painting each other’s houses for free. Wouldn’t you circle the wagons? Wouldn’t you point out the ones who, given the results of their passion, should maybe take up a different hobby?

So I can’t really blame the journalists for feeling that way, but I don’t want to hand them any more ammunition, either.

Let’s use me as an example (because I’m all I have and I’m not likely to file a lawsuit against myself). I have been keeping a written diary since I was 13 years old. This was back when long distance communication was limited to smoke signals. As soon as the Internet came along, I started a web journal. I now have a published book, two blogs, a web site and I guest blog on about half a dozen other sites. But I also continue to keep a private journal. This is because I understand that many of my inner thought do not deserve an audience (you should thank me for this, really). In my private journal, I don't have to think about content, form or my audience; I am free to experiment without worrying about criticism. My private journal is batting practice, and I did a lot of it before I inflicted my writing on the wider world.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t blog; I’m just saying that, if you’re looking for respect, you might want to put off the public blog for a bit and start by keeping a written journal that you hide in your sock drawer where the kids won't find it. Then, after you’ve put in some meaningful batting practice, the World Wide Web will be much more grateful when you do appear, and in the meantime it will remain less cluttered and the Internet can go about doing what it was meant for: downloading porn.

It's Official

2009-01-30T19:09:00.001Z

My little book, while not yet grabbing the literary world by the throat, has certainly wrestled my world to the mat. The amount of effort involved in promoting oneself in an effort to get a book noticed is remarkable. So remarkable, in fact, that I find I have precious little time for writing.

How ironic. All my life I have wanted to be a real writer (you know, those guys in the corduroy jackets with the leather patches on the elbows who sit around smoking pipes and looking thoughtful), and now that I have a book out and can call myself an author, I don't have time to write. Or, more exactly, time to write what I started out to write, which is fiction.

Work on my novel has ground to a complete halt, and this annoyed me so much I plotted out all of the writing tasks I had to do along with those I wanted to do with an eye toward organizing my time so I could fit them all in. The inescapable conclusion I came to, however, was this: there are, officially, not enough hours in the day to do both.

I mulled this over for a while, thinking about what would have to go onto the back burner, until the answer became screamingly obvious. I have a book out; my main responsibility, both to my publisher and to myself, is to push it for all it is worth. Leaving your first book to fend for itself, which assures that it will sell like bacon cheeseburgers at a vegan convention, is about as helpful, career-wise, as crash-landing on your first day as a commercial airline pilot. So, right now, promotion is my main job. Oddly, however, that involves a lot of writing, just not the sort of writing I envisioned myself doing. (Think: guys with pipes.)

Currently, I have two blogs, and I just started another with Toni Hargis, which will be a continuation of the debate about life in the UK verses life in the US we started on BBC 5 Live last week. (We were guests on a panel discussion with Richard Madeley. For my US readers, he and his wife Judy are to books in the UK what Oprah is to books in the US. Toni was in a studio in Chicago and I was at BBC Central with Richard. Did I give him a copy of my book? You betcha!). I also guest blog on three different expat sites and am a regular columnist on another. But all of this involves writing humor and none of it involves corduroy jackets, with or without the patches.

So am I to infer from this that, no matter what my original intentions were, I am a humorist? I think I tend to downplay my humor writing because it comes so naturally to me, but does that make it any less valid? I am a writer, and I am--though quite by accident--an author. Should I ignore that?

Maybe it is time to start thinking of humor as my main gig and admit to what I am. At least for now.

While there may come a day when I can devote time to both my serious writing and my humor writing, it won't be while I am also holding down a full time job. There are, as I have already proven, not enough hours in the day.

I’m going to miss wearing that jacket, though.

Beginnings

2009-01-23T09:05:00.000Z

I've read that there are four ways you should never begin a novel:

1. With the character sitting around ruminating
2. With a flashback
3. With a dream
4. With a scene pulled from the middle of the book to compensate for starting with 1, 2 or 3.

I read that just as I was finishing my previous novel, which is still making the rounds. That novel originally began with the character sitting around ruminating. So I rethought the plot but could not come up with a way to start the book closer to the action. It's a mystery/thriller, where the heroine is drawn in gradually, so nothing astonishing (meaning scenes involving the spilling of blood) happens until later in the story. Starting off with some killing would mean 80% of the book would be a flashback.

So, having already broken rule number 1, I committed a number 4 and pulled a scene from later in the book that was, incredibly, both a dream and a flashback. This means, in a single novel, I managed to make every single mistake you can in regards to the first chapter.

Does that mean it's a crap book? In my view, no.

The Rules are all fine and good, but take a look at a few current or past bestsellers and you will find these rules broken on a routine basis. So breaking them does not, in and of itself, result in a crap book. A crap story and poor craftsmanship results in a crap book.

For example, “The First Casualty” by Ben Elton, starts off with a scene so obviously ripped from the later portions of the book, and which really had no bearing on the story, that I felt cheated by it. But I don't blame him, I can only envision his publisher saying, "Look, Ben, no one is going to buy this book unless someone dies on page one."

The book itself is a murder mystery, but it requires a bit of set up before the killing begins. Apparently publishers regard readers as ADD sufferers who cannot stretch their attention span for ten pages, even if the story is interesting, which that one was.

Right now, I'm reading "The Mermaids Singing" by Val McDermid, which begins with at least three of the principle characters sitting around ruminating. There may be more, I haven't gotten to the action yet. This book, too, contains a preface that hints at future action and looks as out of place as Ben Elton's preface and probably for the same reason.

I have tried, but I simply can't fit a murder into the first chapter of my book. Without an entire reworking of the plot, which would essentially make it a different book, it just is not possible to have anyone killed any earlier.

But should I? Does a story really need to revolve around the perceived shortcomings of the reading public? These previous examples seem to suggest that authors don't think so, but publishers do. That said, starting out with some action is very likely a good idea, but not all stories require it and, as a reader, I find the notion that I can't be intrigued by nuances insulting.

So I have to accept the idea that my novel may never be published, as it appears my only options are to break Rule Number 1 or Rules 2, 3 and 4. Despite this recklessness, I believe it is a good book, so I have no plans to change it at this time.

My current novel, however, starts off with a bang.

When They Don't Want You to Write

2009-01-16T08:19:00.000Z

In keeping with my censorship theme (this is the last one, I promise) I thought I'd explore another area where writers are stifled, often to the point of abandoning their dream. This type of censorship is the most insidious as it tends to creep in slowly and take over without the victim even realizing it. Sometimes, the writers themselves come to believe it was their own idea to give up writing.

And what could possibly land a writer in such dire circumstances? A relationship.

As Garrison Keillor once noted, "As soon as man cares what a woman thinks about him, he starts looking for a safe place to stand. 'If only I can keep her from getting mad at me,' he thinks, 'everything will be all right.'" And that may be so, but if the partner in question decides they don't really fancy you spending all that time writing, things can get ugly. (I have no experience to back me up, but my feeling is this is even more prevalent in the male non-writer verses female writer arena.)

Writing was such a part of who I was that the idea of someone having a problem with it never entered my mind. The cult, yes, they had a big problem with it, but they had an agenda. My beloved, however, the woman who had promised to spend the rest of her life with me, she couldn't want me to stop doing something she knew full well was central to my nature. Could she?

This manifested itself initially as a "You don't trust me," ploy. Her thinking was I must be writing nasty stuff about her if I didn't want her reading my journal. This resulted in some amazing fights, both when I wouldn't let her read it, and then when I did. She was not, it turned out, a fan of my innermost thoughts.

Then one night we were returning from a dinner date and I mentioned my latest writing project. Her response was, "That's okay for now, but once we're married you're giving up this writing thing; I'll be damned if I'm going to share you with a book!"

No fight ensued. I just kept driving and didn't say a word. But in my mind I saw the path the two of us were on suddenly split and veer widely apart. We broke up some weeks later.

The woman I eventually married didn't care what I did, as long as it didn't involve her. That worked well enough for a season. After we divorced, I spent eight years with a woman who introduced me to Olympic-quality mind control. She put the cult to shame when it came to facilitating guilt trips and getting you to agree that, yes, there must certainly be something wrong with you if that is how you choose to spend your time.

I won't go into detail, but only because it would fill a book if I did.

At first glance, this sort of censorship seems different from the other two as it is more personality based. This one stems, apparently, from insecurity, jealousy or general misunderstanding, but make no mistake, it all comes from the same place my last two examples did: the desire to control.

Be it in the work place, a relationship, daily life or national politics, one person telling another that they cannot do something, not because it is wrong or in any way dangerous to anyone, but simply because they don't want them to do it, is simply a method of exploiting their power.

I know it sounds like I'm up on a soap box about this, but really I'm not; I'm just recounting curious events from my past life and what I learned from them.

Currently, I'm in a good place. I escaped my previous relationship with only minor injuries and my new wife is supportive of my writing. She even lends a hand (or, more appropriately, an eye) now and again, though I try not to take advantage of her willing nature. So life is calm and orderly and, because of that, I find I can produce consistently. And at this point, there is little more I could wish for, aside from a book contract and a spot on Richard and Judy.

Next: back to our regularly scheduled programming

Of Cabbage Heads and Cults

2009-01-14T06:47:00.000Z

I didn't mean to follow up my censorship post with another example of censorship, but I just read an article in this month's Writer's News magazine telling of a Mr. J. Lewis from Birmingham (Alabama, naturally) who faced being forcibly evicted from his church unless he disavowed his vampire novel. The church Deacons or Elders or Grand Wizards refused to believe a person could write about a sin without committing it in their hearts. So they chucked him out (you didn't think he caved, did you?).

This brought to mind another censorship incident from my own past. (And after working so hard all these years to repress the memories; I guess it's back to waking up at night screaming.)

Anyway, during my late teenage years, when I was looking for a group of people to tell me what to think, I fell in with a local cult. Now, these people would certainly take exception at being referred to as such--they considered themselves simply a group of Bible-believing, fundamentalists--but when you find your group in an earnest discussion about the righteousness of killing someone's body in order to secure his soul a place in heaven, then you, my friend, are in a cult.

We never committed the ultimate act of censorship, but routine censorship was simply a way of life. As with the aforementioned novelist, the thinking went: if lying is a sin, and fiction is a lie, then writing fiction is a sin. So there went my first eight years worth of journals, short stories, plays, and a whole bale of teenage angst-ridden poems; burned, all of it, along with anything else I owned (e.g. my modest album collection featuring the songs of those well known Satanist Simon and Garfunkle) that they deemed "not of God".

Forget, for the moment, that they did the world a huge favor by ridding it of some truly awful poetry, and try to imagine the medieval mindset these people must possess. They're words, for pity's sake, they're not going to jump off the page and bite you, so why are you so afraid of them?

I give Mr. Lewis credit for not backing down; when thoughts are stifled, when creativity is held in check, when ideas are considered dangerous, then civilization takes a backward step.

I was seven years in that cult, for no other reason than they filled my empty head up with the notion that there were no other options and I believed them. Gradually, however, stray ambitions crept in--which put me at odds with the leadership--and the desire to write never really left me. After a time, they decided I wasn't fit for their group any more and, like Mr. Lewis, I got the old heave-ho. (There was also this incident involving the minister's daughter, but we're not going there.)

For a while I felt like a shunned Amishite, but gradually I began to write again. I've had no truck with religion since then, and even less regard for people who think they have the right to run my life for my own good.

I guess, if there's anything to be taken from this rambling stroll down amnesia lane, it's that there is no shortage of narrow-minded people out there who like nothing better than the thrill they get from telling other people what they cannot do.

Avoid them; they are assholes. And keep writing, no matter what.

Next: Stupid Things Ex-Girlfriends Have Said to Me.

Sticks and Stones

2009-01-08T17:44:00.002Z

I have really been smoldering with indignation since reading this post. (Go on, I'll wait.) All I can think is how angry and violated I would feel if someone did that to me. Perhaps it has touched such a raw nerve because, in a way, someone did do something like that to me, and it left me feeling angry and violated. So let me tell you about it.

Now grab yourself a beverage, sit back and listen to my tale:

This may surprise many of you, but there was a time when the Internet did not exist. During those days, if you wanted a lot of people to read what you wrote (this is assuming you weren't Jane Austin or Charles Dickens) you had to write, revise, type the words into little columns, paste them onto a sheet of paper so they looked roughly like a newsletter and then run a few dozen copies off on the office copier when no one was looking. Believe me, signing up for Blogger is a lot less hassle.

Accordingly, people who wanted to be annoying in a literary sort of way on a regular basis required more than your average amount of dedication. Unfortunately, I was dedicated.

I produced a newsletter spoofing our official Agency newsletter, which turned out to be a lot more popular than the official newsletter. The Agency stopped putting out their newsletter after a single issue. I didn't. My monthly offering grew in popularity until I was finally called into the Director's office and told to cut it out. This was Civil Service, which means they couldn't fire me, but they could make me wish they had, so I stopped.

There was no way they could make me delete everything I had ever written, so they settled for banning my words from the agency building, instead. This was quite a feat considering I was often publishing in newspapers by that time.

As it transpired, I continued to write newsletters as an out-of-work hobby but was careful not to bring them to the office. I was not above standing outside the building handing them to people, however. One such recipient was a young lady who was a fan of my work. I told her, as I told everyone, not to take it out in the office but to read it at home, and she dutifully put it in her handbag. But not before someone saw her with it.

A few hours later, this girl looked up from her keypunch machine to find her supervisor, the shift supervisor and the shift manager surrounding her desk like hoods moving in on a potential mugging victim who has strayed onto their turf.

"Michael handed you something and you put it in your purse," the Shift Manager said. "Give it to me!"

I have no problem with the fact that the girl swiftly complied, but can someone tell me how many laws were broken in that little episode?

The three managers then took the newsletter to their lair, poured over it until they found something vaguely offensive (it was humor, they didn't need to look very far) and then filed harassment charges against me.

Yeah, it got ugly; I ended up consulting a lawyer. Suffice it to say that I eventually moved to another agency and was promoted beyond their levels and now live the life of an international jet-setter, so I feel like I've, if not won, at least moved beyond it.

But it leaves me in awe of the power of words, how the pusillanimous are petrified of them, how the despot despises them, how the politicians pervert them and how people are sacked, or worse, because of them.

As writers, we need to be careful with words: use them wisely, use them bravely, but use them with care.

And just in case you're ever in a position where you're forced to delete them, always keep them backed up.

Copping Out

2009-01-02T08:39:00.000Z

I watched Jonathan Creek last night; it was a bad night for TV, so don’t judge me.

Actually, as light entertainment goes, I like the show, and not only because Jonathan’s ‘home’ – the windmill out in the middle of nowhere – is just down the road from me in Shipley. The show, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is about a magician who gets drawn into solving crimes. It’s not meant to be taken seriously, which is a good thing as magicians do not generally interrogate witnesses or perform ad hoc forensic testing on crime scenes where the police are only conspicuous by their absence.

As light entertainment, this is to be expected, but even the ‘serious’ shows (CSI, NCIS, and their ilk) swing unapologetically wide of reality. I used to be an Identification Specialist, but no one ever issued me with a firearm, and I never got to take part in shoot-outs or rough up suspects either. (Is it any wonder I moved to a different job?)

The point is, these TV shows can get away with it because they are TV shows; you cannot do this with fiction. Ready for the paradox? Fiction has to be real.

This is one of the issues keeping me from taking The Big Step off of the Diving Platform of Preparation into the Olympic pool of Just Getting On With It. (This is a blog; don’t expect me to spend a lot of time fretting over my metaphors.) I’ve been here before, and taking The Big Step is generally prefaced by a protracted period of faffing about, but this time I’ve been here so long I’ve had the place carpeted, put in air conditioning and I’m thinking about refurbishing the kitchen.

Mainly this stems from my fear of Getting It Wrong, and that is largely fuelled by the fact there are cops involved in this book, with all their esoteric rituals and volumes of regulations and uniform do-dads just waiting to trip me up. With no track record behind me, I don’t enjoy the privileges afforded to famous writers like Ian Rankin and found myself limited to an hour-long interview with a local Community Support Officer. She was very accommodating, but it was no substitute for riding around in a squad car for a week or two.

I don’t know how other writers handle it, but my method is to get whatever information I can and sprinkle the factual details throughout the text to give the maximum amount of verisimilitude. It certainly seems like a good plan, but I can’t know if it will work unless I sell the book. (So stay tuned.)

So, yeah, details are a killer, and it is now occurring to me that my main character, while not a police officer, works in a field that is just as mysterious to me; she’s a travel agent. What, exactly, do travel agents do? How am I supposed to write about the character if I know nothing about her main job? And how did I not think of this before? (No, really, I am, at this very moment, realizing I know nothing at all about my main character.)

This is actually lifting my spirits. Now I have a valid excuse for more faffing about as I arrange for an interview with one of the many travel agents who work on the High Street. I hope they will be at least as approachable as the police and just as willing to talk about the finer points of their job.

I wonder if they ever get to rough up suspects.

The Economics of Hobbies

2008-12-19T06:15:00.002Z

Writing, I have always maintained, is a great hobby for unambitious skinflints. It's idiot-simple and dirt cheap; pick up a notepad at the £1 store, 'borrow' a pen from someone, and Bob's your uncle. Even if you're a bit more technically motivated, a PC, or even a laptop, is not going to set you back too much. And once kitted out, you can practice your hobby most anywhere you like: on the bus, in the coffee shop, during your gemological exam, etc.

Compare this with other hobbies, even something as innocuous as arts and crafts; talk about a constant money drain, and you really can't whip out an easel and pastels on the 451 Flight from Heathrow to Newark. And when you consider how much SCUBA diving, parasailing, wine collecting or joining a Dungeons and Dragons Cult can cost, writing, as a pastime, begins to look very attractive.

If you decide to go pro, your expenses will surely rise, but that will only include postage, office supplies and the occasional fee for a short story contest. Again, not a huge drain on your budget and, unless you become irrationally obsessed, your partner will appreciate that you're not funneling money into the local pub, or traipsing around the countryside dressed as Gildor the Green searching for Prince Bartog and his army of Gnomes.

The main problem with going pro is that you are unlikely to make much, if any, money. Never mind the success stories you hear about on the news; they are news because they so rarely happen; I hear about people winning the Lottery all the time, but it doesn't make me want to go out and buy a ticket.

Even so, after a lifetime of happily dabbling in writing, I decided to go 'pro' six years ago. This brought about many changes. If you're going to treat something seriously, you need to start tracking production, output, markets and all that boring stuff. Plus, if you're a geek like me, you set up a spreadsheet charting how much time you spend on each individual project.

I didn't mind watching the hourly totals rise (in fact, that was the point) or the budget deficit grow (that's just to be expected) but after a time, I felt I should be bringing something to the "Income" column. My goal was to make some money by the end of year four, which was purely an arbitrary decision based on an article that said if you haven't made any money after four years of trying, you probably should take up another hobby.

So year four arrived, but not any money. On New Year's Eve of that year I received an E-Mail from a webzine accepting one of my articles. For $5. With just hours to go on my self-imposed deadline, I became a professional writer. Since then, I've made a bit more. But not much.

It is because of my obsession with record keeping that I can reveal these numbers. They are not pretty, but I suspect they are remarkable only because they are so optimistic; I'm sure many others have fared worse.

Since I resolved to "take my writing seriously" back in 2003, I have clocked a total of 1,713 hours. My expenses have been just over £2,400 (that may sound high, but it's a lot less than other hobbies cost – just £300 a year – and it includes my ill-fated foray into self-publishing; without that expense, my outlay comes down to a more reasonable £230 a year). In all that time, however, I have earned just over £300, making my hourly rate somewhere in the neighborhood of £019 an hour. Not exactly something you want to give up the day job for.

Still, in terms of pure job satisfaction, you can't beat it, and it certainly makes improving one's performance an easy task.

My goal for next year is to make £0.25 an hour.

Luck

2008-12-12T06:27:00.002Z

I like reading about how other writer's made it, and I'm not alone; in every writing magazine I subscribe to (four, if you must know) there is a section devoted to writers telling about their first sale.

I think that's marvelous. First of all, it keeps alive the idea that it really is possible, and it demonstrates that there is no 'right' way to go about it. Even JA Konrath's story: on the surface it seems to be a standard "write book, send to agent, sign three-book contract" fairytale, but the saga of the nine unpublished novels, and what he learned from the experience that led to his tenth being picked up, serves as an inspiration and a reminder to never give up.

My story is no different, meaning it is different than anyone else's. It didn't follow a traditional route, it is not a path I recommend but, as this is my blog, I'm going to tell you all about it. I'll try to be brief (and after this I promise to stop banging on about it and find something else to write about):

After four years of consistently posting humorous articles on my website, my friends began telling me I ought to write a book. After a while, I believed them.

I gathered together what I considered to be the best of the articles into a manuscript and began sending it to publishers and agents. The response, oddly enough, was positive but the rejections all contained the same theme, which ran along the lines of, "very funny, but who are you and why should anyone buy your book?"

After a while I believed them and self-published the book on Lulu with predictable results. Still, it was a fun and rewarding exercise and provided me with a pile of, what I liked to call, "really expensive business cards."

About a year later, I made the cyber-acquaintance of Toni Hargis.

==== begin shameless plug of new best friend Toni Hargis ====

Toni Hargis, aka Expat Mum and author of "Rules, Britannia," a funny and informative book, and a must read for anyone planning a trip to the UK.

==== end shameless plug of new best friend Toni Hargis ====

I sent Toni a copy of my book and she loved it. She was so effusive with her praise I thought she must have mistaken me for someone who could do something for her, like get her on Oprah or Richard and Judy, or something. But eventually I believed her and re-read the book.

It was (and here comes the part where I twist my arm patting myself on the back) a surprisingly good read. And that inspired me to package it up again and send it back out into the world, with predictable results.

So I set it aside once more.

Then Toni contacted me with this news: a small publisher specializing in expat books was looking to start their 2009 list. They contacted Toni, Toni sent their e-mail to me and encouraged me to send them my manuscript.

And that was that.

So the ingredients that made up this sale include:
- My website and my unwavering devotion to it lo these many years
- My friends, especially Cindy, harping on me to write a book
- Toni getting in touch with me to promo her book, but staying in contact because (I like to believe this, anyway) see sees me as a kindred spirit, or at least a funny guy
- My self-published effort that I could send to Toni
- A growing belief in myself
- A small publisher coming around at just the right time
- Toni being willing to help out a fellow writer

If any of those ingredients were missing, the book would not exist.

I don't know if there is anything to be learned from this, other than the fact that you never know where luck is going to strike, so it's a good idea to be in as many places as possible to increase your chances of getting hit.

What We Do

2008-12-05T21:53:00.001Z

I just had an interesting conversation with the young lady who lives next door.

First, a bit of background: the flats I live in have balconies (or what passes for balconies in Britain—in the States my balcony measured 5 by 22 feet, here I can fit a chair out there with just enough room left over for me to sit in it) and while it is not expressly forbidden to smoke in these flats (well, in mine it is) most people seem to regard the balconies as al fresco smoking rooms.

This is how I met the young lady from next door; she and her partner are both smokers and, while I'm out there with a cigar and a beverage enjoying the English climate, they occasionally pop out for a fag. So I knew she was in her final year at uni and I knew she was working on some essays, which are due before they break up for the holidays.

When I asked about them, at 8 o'clock in the evening, she said she was working on both of them at once and needed to have them completed by the following morning. Not an enviable task.

So I told her about the writing I was doing and about how, as it was not due anywhere at any time, I couldn't be arsed to work on it so I was having a cigar instead. She was curious as to why, if no one was forcing me, I was bothering to write anything at all.

"Well, it's for my web page."

"Is anyone waiting for it?"

"No, not really. I just sort of post things there."

"But you don't have to."

"No, it's just, well, it's what I do."

I might have told her that some people putter in the garden or build scale models of Buckingham Palace out of toothpicks or stand on train platforms writing down numbers, and what I'm doing is basically the same except it doesn't cost as much and I get to do it from the comfort of my living room. I might have told her that, to give her an insight into the psyche of the writer, but I didn't. So, instead of an understanding nod, she gave me one of those skeptical smiles you give to people who show you their scale model of Buckingham Palace made entirely out of toothpicks, stubbed out her cigarette and returned to her work. Because she had to.

And I finished my cigar, went back inside and went back to my writing. Not because I had to, but because I'm a writer, and that's what we do.

The Revenge of Lulu

2008-11-30T17:42:00.002Z

After blogging about how luluing your book is an invitation for grammar and spelling errors, I managed to post an entry with two glaring spelling mistakes. Let that be a lesson.

Poor proof-reading skills are something that have plagued me all my life, which is strange considering both my vocation and avocation demand I communicate effectively and accurately in writing. It hasn't always been easy.

As a young man, my writing habit led to a number of unfortunate forays into self-produced pamphlets and magazines, all of them comically replete with errors.

Then I started a printing service as a side business to help fund my deepening writing addiction. Even now I can't explain what caused me to think I might be good at this. One of my biggest accounts was a local restaurant owner who asked me to produce his menu. I set all the type (and, to be fair to myself, had the customer approve it) and the next thing I knew I received an anonymous letter containing nothing but the printed menu with all of the errors (rest assured, there were many) circled in red. I closed the printing business down shortly after out of terminal embarrassment.

By this time, computers were arriving on the scene. I couldn't get one soon enough. Not only did they make it easier to correct errors, they also opened the way for spelling checkers. My first one was a separate program that had to be run after the article was complete. The program would go through all the words in the piece and print out a list--in alphabetical order--of all the words its internal dictionary did not recognize. Then it was up to me to go through the document, find the words and fix them. It cost me $50; I thought it was brilliant.

Spelling checkers have improved vastly since that time, but my proof reading ability has, sadly, not. This, coupled with the richness of the English language, has lead two awl sorts of interesting linguistical mishaps. Sentences lick tees our jest a simple of the may ham eye am cape elbow of.

The upshot is, I just know when The Book arrives in its finished form and I pick it up in excited glee, the very first page it opens to will reveal a glaring, horrific error.

And there won't be a thing I can dew abut tit.

Tangled Up In Blue

2008-11-25T21:03:00.009Z

My cover art arrived today. Color me pleased.

It's a lot bolder and in-your-face than I would have done, but then that's what's needed these days to grab people, and that's why I'm not in marketing.

This arrived right on time. I had just finished the line edits of the final proof and was well sick of the book. Now this has peaked my interest again: this is going to be a really good book.

I certainly hope so, because I don't have much else to show for 45 years of writing (I was not quite nine when I started; do the math). Granted I've had my share of funny articles in various newspapers, magazines, websites, fanzines, etc. But I have never had anything as concrete as a book.

And it has not escaped my notice that, after nearly half a century of wanting to be a novelist, I have not yet published a single word of fiction.

I suppose that will be my next goal (aside for selling more than 12 copies of this book). But that will have to wait; right now I'm too busy dealing with reality to make stuff up.

Old Dog, New Tricks

2008-11-18T22:03:00.000Z

I'm at a point in the writing process that I have to assume takes many writer's by surprise: marketing.

No writer who I have ever talked to--aspiring or professional--has ever indicated to me that they decided to become a writer simply for the marketing opportunities it would afford them. Most writers (I'm generalizing but stay with me) are introverted, if not misanthropic, and would gladly leave anything involving interacting with other people to other people.

That, I am told, is no longer possible, at least if you want to sell some books.

Up to this point, for me, it hasn't been much of a problem. In fact, there has not yet been a hint of social interaction during this entire process. The publishers and I communicate solely by e-mail, I have done all the blurb-begging via e-mail and much of my embryonic marketing campaign is focused around the Internet. The only physical item to come out of all this is the hard copy of the contract the publisher mailed me.

But still, what I've been doing over the past weeks is not writing, so even though I've not had to approach strangers directly, I'm still out of my comfort zone. Add to that the fact that I haven't a clue as to what I'm doing or supposed to be doing and I can see I am in for a rough ride.

I thought I was well positioned for marketing: I had a long-running web site and a solid fan base as well as a presence on many UK-US forums. Not enough, I was told. So I started a blog to go along with my website, only to read that blogs are passé and anyone who is anyone should be on Facebook.

Like everyone else on the planet, I have a Facebook account. I opening it some time ago just to see what it was about and, not able to comprehend it, I left it alone. Now that it has become the (alleged, and likely self-proclaimed) newest, cutting edge tool for marketers (if you don't count Twitter) I figured I ought to generate a Facebook presence. So I logged back in, and I still can't figure it out. Invitations to virtual Scrabble Tournaments and other, less savory activities keep popping up and people I've never met keep telling me that they are looking forward to getting drunk, are drunk, or are hung over from having been drunk, but I can't find any way to tell them what I am doing (i.e. trying to sell a book) or load any meaningful content.

So I signed up for Twitter; sure it's pointless, but at least it's easier to understand.

Why You Shouldn't Lulu

2008-11-14T18:25:00.000Z

I wasn't planning on this, but I think I'll start using the word "lulu" to mean self-published; I think it might stick.

What I meant to start out with was this: "You should not self-publish your book." I can say that, having self-published (excuse me, having lulued) my own book, and here's why:

The decision to self-publish, um, lulu was made for all the right reasons. My manuscript was good--several agents and publishers told me so--but as a humorist without a national platform, it was doomed to financial failure. Undaunted, I continued to send it out and received similar responses. Finally I thought, "well, if a publisher is going to loose money on it, then they are right not to publish it, but there is nothing stopping me from producing a copy to sell to my friends, family and fans."

As I said, a viable reason to lulu, so I set out to make the best manuscript I could. I culled my best and funniest essays, put them in a logical order, proof read them, proof read them again, proof read them again, had my wife proof read them, sent them to a professional proof reader, proof read them again and, you guessed it, proof read them again.

Then, with the help of my wife, I made a very professional looking cover, copied formatting from other books for copyright and title pages and all that extra stuff no one reads but would look out of place if I got it wrong. Then I proofread it all again and ran it through Lulu.

In all I sold 30 copies and gave away about as many; it was, on the surface, an enjoyable and rewarding experience, but here is why I think it should not have been done. When I read it over in book form, I found so many errors I cringed.

Nothing beats the editorial services of a professional publishing house.

And here's another reason not to lulu; the book was eventually picked up by a publisher and they found even more errors. Also, under their guidance, the chapters were rearranged and added to in a way the substantially improved the overall quality of the book, after I thought I had made it the best it could be.

Bottom line: lulued books are substandard. They might be well written, they might have even had all the spelling errors corrected, but trust me, if a publisher had worked on them, they would be better.

As I've said, I believe luluing has its place, but the prevalence of POD printers juxtaposed with the hard work and persistence required to produce a polished manuscript, synopsis and query letters and keep them circulating to agents and publishers makes luluing an dangerously attractive option.

Want to lulu your book? Fine. But keep these two things in mind. First, don't jump too soon; have you really made the manuscript the best it can be, and have you really, properly presented it to every place that might traditionally publish it?

And finally, don't expect too much; no one wants to buy a self-published book.

Level III

2008-11-07T21:34:00.000Z

I said I'd be back.

I've been staring at that line for half an hour now, trying to think of a clever way to follow it up, but I can't come up with a thing. My book is being published, that's the bottom line--a real (though admittedly small) publisher took it on because they like my work and see a sales potential in it.

The e-mail came during flurry of retrenching, reflecting, regrouping and reinventing. My day job was not going well, I had recently realized that I have been dreaming of being a novelist since I was 10 years old but had yet to sell a single word of fiction and had just, out of a desperate desire to feel as if I was doing something constructive, signed up for NaNoWriMo.

I had finally put my unprofitable and distracting habit of writing humorous essays behind me and managed to send a few short stories off. Then, in the midst of all this, I got the e-mail: "We like your work; we'll send you a contract." I looked at it, thought, "Oh?" and went back to whatever it was I was doing. I didn't even tell anyone.

It wasn't my novel they wanted--I think I might have gotten excited about that--they wanted my book, "Postcards From Across the Pond," a manuscript I had given up on long ago and self-published through Lulu. The publisher didn't know about that, however; they had looked at my website, liked what they saw and offered a contract. The fact that I already had a finished manuscript and was able to add another 23,000 words to it over the next few days only meant the process could move ahead faster.

The book is currently going through the editing/processing phase; it is due out before Christmas, in case you're stuck on what to get aunt Mildred.

I suppose, by my own definition, I now have a Level III blog; I am now in The Club. But I don't really feel like it.

It's as if, after all this time of knocking on the front door begging to be let in (and even having an agent mingling with the insiders on my behalf over canapés in the back garden) I was never actually let in. Instead, someone opened a side door and allowed me slip through, not into the main part of the house, but a neglected utility room off of the main hallway.

Still, here I am. And if I'm just another schmuck with a publishing contract--nestled among the growing number of blog-to-book writers--and one of countless thousands who have had a book published (instead of the countless millions who only wish they had a book published) I suppose it's up to me to take this opportunity, no matter how slim it is, and ride it for all it is worth.

Level II

2007-09-23T17:21:00.000+01:00

I have arrived.

An agent has offered a contract for The Brighton Virgins. Now comes to long, unpredictable slog toward publication. Actually, I can't think of that right now, I'm still too pleased at knowing an actual professional within the publishing industry thinks my manuscript is publishable and is willing to try to make that happen.

As with most things, this did not come quickly, or easily, and when it finally happened, it was almost anticlimactic.

I had polished up the manuscript and sent out two batches of 20 - 20 to the UK, 20 ti the US. I received a fair number of requests for more material and even a few requests for the manuscript. then, one agent wrote to say she was enjoying it, and I would hear from her in a few weeks.

This, of course, had me sitting on tenterhooks for an interminably long time, but the e-mail finally arrived and she said, as her first e-mail indicated she would, that she wanted to offer me a contract.

So now, by my own definition, I'm a Level II blog. I still have a long way to go to get to Level I, but I can at least sit here and look back over how far I have come.

It may be a while before I post again. Milestones don't arrive every day.

Ahead of the Curve

2007-04-21T17:04:00.000+01:00

I've been suspecting this for some time, and even pondered posting about it a few months ago. The fact that I never got around to it only supports my opinion:

Blogs, especially writer's blogs, are a waste of time.

The point of writing is to write. If you get too caught up in the 'on-line community' you end up spending far too much of your limited time and resources writing your blog, reading other people's blogs and posting to various forums.

Some time ago I proposed to develop a circuit--a group of blogs and forums I could surf around, reading and posting to--as a means of promoting my own blog and web site. And do you know what? I stopped after a few weeks because there was just too little time for it.

I used to faithfully start posts for this blog, only to have them turn into articles; articles I could potentially sell (and I have actually sold a few). Why should I give it all away for free?

I have just had a look at some of the blogs I used to check--many run by professional writers--and some of them have signed off, having realized what I did some time ago: there just aren't enough hours in a day to produce good, saleable work and still connect with all the people out there worth connecting with. The fact that they are worth it is irrelevant; there are simply too many of them.

I'm not signing off. I don't need to; I hardly ever post anyway. I still expect to post my milestones (have I mentioned I sold a piece to Writer's Digest?) but in the mean time I think I'll take a break from the Internet and write an article about how blogging interferes with writing.

Milestones

2007-02-17T18:22:00.000Z

I haven't been paying much attention to this blog because I have been busy doing other things. The big news is, I have managed to achieve my major goal for this writing year: I have earned some money.

I've already been published but, no matter what you say, it really doesn't count unless you get paid. On New Year's Eve of 2006, I received word that an article I submitted to AbsoluteWrite.com was accepted. The pay: $5. This was good news indeed, even if it didn't allow me to quit my day job.

On my birthday, a little while after that, I received word that a filler article I sent to Writer's Digest (yes, Writer's Digest!!!) had been accepted. The pay for that was a bit more than $5, but I'm still keeping the day job.

I finally finished the first draft of my novel--which should not be confused with the rough draft, which was finished some time ago. I sent off a copy to a buddy of mine to read (and the initial reports are good) and made a hard copy for my wife. Neither of these people are editors, but they are readers and know a good story when they read one and will, hopefully, be able to spot one that is full of holes and/or inconsistencies.

My non-fiction humor book, Postcards From Across the Pond, never landed a publisher. The field is simply too crowded with authors with more name recognition so it was unlikely to make any money for a publisher. Therefore, I decided to publish it myself. I was willing to shell out a few bob for the project, but found LuLu.com where I was able to produce it as a Print On Demand (POD) book for a very reasonable sum. I can order as many/few books as I want and offer it for sale on the web through LuLu, Amazon and other major book store web sites. I can even place it in actual book stores if I feel like it, but I doubt I will. My fan base is through my web site; I think a link from there to LuLu or Amazon may be about it. But then, at least, everyone who has been waiting for a copy can buy one if they want to.

I'm not a big fan of self-publishing, and I would never go that route with my novel, but I think Postcards is the right type of project for POD publishing. Remains to be seen. At least it didn't cost much, and I can always keep a few copies on my bookshelf to make me look like a real writer.

Beyond that, I'm editing and submitting more articles (it has not escaped my notice that articles are the only things making me any money right now) and working on the plot for my next novel.

It's a busy time. I'll check back in when something else shakes loose.

Down Time

2006-12-21T06:22:00.000Z

No matter how much momentum I build up, no matter how much I resolve not to, my writing output always seems to grind to a halt around the Holidays.

There are several reasons for this (aside from my usual laziness, that is):

- It's dark. I do a lot of my writing on the bus, and around the solstice, good light is hard to come by.

- It's cold. True, the bus has lights, but they are not very bright on these dark mornings, and it is so cold right now my fingers would freeze up on the keyboard even if I did try.

- I'm tired. I don't just mean my usual laziness or procrastination; this time of year brings with it a bone-weariness that I find hard to work through.

You could helpfully point out that this is why I am an amateur and will never be published yadda, yadda, yadda, but as a Level I player, I might as well take advantage of the one perk I possess, which is, I'm not working against the clock. If I had a paid assignment I needed to finish, believe me, I'd find a way.

But for now, I think I'll just wait for Boxing Day.

Writing for Dollars

2006-12-15T06:05:00.000Z

I've come to the conclusion I don't write for money, I only wish I did.

I've used the painter/artist analogy before but I'd like to alter it a little as I don't want to compare artists--meaning those people who operate on a different plain--with us normal people.

A person who can make a living at painting (or anything else for that matter) works at his craft and, when he's good enough, goes out and finds people willing to pay him to do it. In my scenario, the painter would canvass potential customers asking, "Do you have anything you want painted?" If they did, he could do it and they would pay him.

Only a stupid person would stay locked in their house, to paint a chair and then, when it was finished, go out and try to sell it. A stupid person, and one who isn't going to make any money.

To bring this analogy into my world, it is unquestionably easier to write an article for an existing market than it is to find a market for a completed article. Yet that seems to be what I am destined to do. I can't help it, really, that's the way I'm wired.

I have tried to learn this skill, but have never been successful. I put my failure down to laziness, a complete lack of market savvy and the fact that I make too much money.

I can see now how a freelance career, in the grand scheme of things, wouldn't really be that difficult to achieve with some dedication and hard work. But at this point in my life, I am not about to quit a well-paying job while I'm struggling to save for retirement and living in one of the most expensive countries on the planet simply for the chance of selling a 2,000 word travelogue for $25. It is simply not feasible.

On the other hand, I have the advantage that a journeyman writer does not have; I can write whatever I damn well please. No one is going to go without shoes or a hot meal because i couldn't sell my latest creation.

I'm not sure how I would want things to be in a perfect world, and I guess it's moot, at any rate. Things are what they are, I do what I do and nothing is going to change that.

With the possible exception of a juicy book deal.

Writer's Groups

2006-12-13T06:30:00.000Z

Lately, mostly because I'm a bit lazy and these days, I've been hanging around Writer's Sites when I should be writing.

I've always harbored a desire to belong to a writing group, but I wanted to belong to a good one, which is why I am still on my own.

The actual, real-life writer's group I tried here in Sussex was a bit sad. It was little more than a group of people who periodically came together to applaud each other's efforts and self-publish their own books. I never went back.

On-line, there are lots of places for writer's to hang out, but in digging just a bit under the surface I am finding that many of the forum members who claim to be professional writer's with published books are actually self-published as well.

Self-publishing has it's place, but a writer is not (in my opinion) a published, professional author until he is paid for his efforts. Professional means payment, end of story. If you are paying other people to publish your stuff, or if you are still trying to get other people to pay you for your stuff, then you are, my friend, engaged in a hobby.

I guess I need to stop hanging around these non-author writing sites and get back to writing.

Short and Sweet

2006-11-22T21:12:00.000Z

Been doing a lot of writing lately, which is a good thing. Over at Joe Konrath's blog they're talking about what keeps a writer on track, but of course that is a Level III writing blog and they are talking about published authors who do this for a living. Us poor schleps have to try to inspire ourselves with no real hope of gain. Or, at best, the faint hope of some small remuneration down the line.

Still, I managed to find some markets for my humorous essays and sent three out this morning. In addition to that, I sent out six queries for 'Postcards...' (two 'No thank you' replies and counting). In preparation for someone eventually asking to see the manuscript, I revamped the entire book and put the chapters in a more logical order. I think it's better for it; now I just need someone to have a look at it.

Preparing the essays for submission was interesting. These were lean pieces that, to meet the submission guidelines, had to be cut by 150 words. It wasn't easy, but the final products were more polished and, if anything, funnier than before. I have to wonder when the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Take my essay about battling a spider. How many words can that be cut down to? "Saw spider. Scary!" Or just, "Spider!"

Maybe that's taking things too far?

Hell-o . . . hell-o . . .?

2006-11-12T16:05:00.000Z

Now that I can be absolutely certain no one ever bothers checking on this blog any longer, I can start updating again.

That was not my intention, honest.

Actually, I've been writing post all along, but never getting around to posting them. I suppose I could post them all in this edition, but to what end? I don't even remember what I wrote. Or why.

So the last week, I upgraded my blog to the new, improved Google Beta version which required creating a Google account (with yet another login and password to remember) and transforming the site into the new, improved version for—as near as I can tell—absolutely no advantage, except that I lost all my fancy fonts.

Bugger.

I thought, having a snazzy new blog might encourage me to update occasionally but I still managed to ignore it long enough to forget the passwords and new login names. Fortunately, I keep all my passwords and logins and account names in a database. These days, you need to. At last count I have 108 accounts to various sites and a corresponding number of passwords.

Which brings me to my topic: I think the web is beginning to become just a little bit too complicated. Every time I need to access a site—to book train tickets, buy a bottle of whiskey, check on listing for a specific BBC program—I am required to create an account. And then you're expected to remember them all.

It's a lot like store cards. Every store, it seems, has a loyalty card and if you want to avoid the extortion charge or earn valuable points, you need to bring it with you when you shop. I have enough trouble remembering to put a credit card in my wallet, let alone 50 random store cards for businesses I am not likely to ever visit again.

Lately, I've been checking out writing sites and forums. And every one requires an account, user name and password. The good (and bad) thing about most of them is they have the option to 'remember' you. This allows me to simply browse to the site and be automatically logged in. On the other hand, occasionally the sites 'forget' and then I have to hope I remembered to record the user name and password in my database.

But if you want to be a writer, you need to keep up with what's happening, and that means more logins and passwords. Lots of them.

So, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll pop over to Media Bistro to see if anything interesting is happening. If, that is, I can remember my login.

The Real Vs the Imaginary

2006-08-26T17:15:00.000+01:00

I've been taking this writing class for three weeks now. It has taught me some valuable lessons about idea generating, how to look for markets for those ideas and and how to target the proper editors at those markets. I hope, in the coming weeks, to learn about researching article ideas and slanting query letters appropriately for each market. The process follows a single article idea from inception (this was lesson #1) to querying. The thing I find curious is, I have done hours worth of work on my article so far, but have not written one single word of it.

I suppose there is a good lesson in that, as well. Writing professionally isn't all about writing. It's about marketing and promotion and contracts and all the rest of that boring business stuff.

Being an aspiring novelist is, in contrast, easy--you just write, every day, and keep writing until you make the manuscript into the best book it can be. This takes enough time to keep the business end of things at bay for, well, in my case, 40 years.

Back to work.

Class

2006-08-10T06:55:00.000+01:00

My internet class started this week. So far, it hasn't made me that much more busy but I have had to think about the lesson, which took time away from other things I am trying to get done.

I thought it would be a good idea to try to encourage more traffic to my web site, so I started going back to some ExPat boards I used to lurk at when I first moved to England, and I'm surfing some ExPat blogs to see if I can find any worth linking to and posting comments on. It's incredible how much time this takes! I have to wonder about those freelance writers who juggle all those blog-pals and seem to post comments everywhere, then I have to remind myself that they have NINE EXTRA HOURS in the day that I don't have.

Of note: while posting to these blog/forums and linking to my web site in my profiles, I happened to notice that the huge, front page banner on my website has had 'Britain' misspelled since I first put it up in November of 2003. I'm not surprised I didn't notice, but you'd think someone else would have written in to complain.

YouWriteOn Turns me Write Off

2006-07-29T16:08:00.000+01:00

I've been checking out a new web service over the past few days. It's called YouWriteOn and is a sort of peer review exchange.

The idea is, you log in, review a chapter of a book someone else has uploaded, and receive one credit. Then you request another book to review. Review it, get another credit. You get the idea.

With your credits, you upload your chapters and make them available for the system to assign them to other members to review.

So far, so good. But . . .

The 'chapters' are a minimum of 6,000 to 10,000 words. That's a lot of reading. And let's face it, most of what you're required to read isn't very good.

The draw is the promise that the most popular chapter is shown to some high-powered publisher. And if you don't get your book excerpt sent to these high-powered publishers, there is always their self-publishing service.

The site smacks of hitting the lottery, wannabees desperate for publication uploading their work in the hopes they can short-circuit the traditional publishing process. This site has been advertised in Writer's Digest--they must have hundreds of thousands of members by now, do you really think you're going to become their 'favorite'? Personally, I think it's a front for their self-publishing business.

And think about it, here you are, a wannabee writer, passing your questionable efforts out to other wannabee writer's who are, like you, struggling to create passable prose, for them to evaluate. It's either going to turn into a group hug or a chance to vent pent-up anger at faceless peers.

I did one review, for research purposes. The story couldn't even hold my interest for the 10,000 words. I was kind in the review. I did not ask for another chapter to review nor did I upload any of my stuff. It just seems pointless.

Basically, it's just another web site designed to divert writer's energy from what they should be doing--writing.

That said, I'm going to have a beer and cigar on the balcony.

Stormy Weather

2006-07-27T06:30:00.000+01:00

Anthony Horowitz stole my plot! Incredible as it sound, he came forward in time, found my as-yet-unpublished book on the bestseller shelf at Barnes and Nobel and based his wildly popular Alex Rider series on it. The first book, Stormbreaker (now a major motion picture), sets up the situation. The similarities are just too many to miss:

(By the way, I don't make a habit of talking about my works-in-process—as is only right—but I think this calls for an exception.)

Stormbreaker: Alex Rider's uncle, an MI6 agent, was recently killed in the line of duty. The dead agent's MI6 minders ask Alex to assist them in an unofficial capacity—Alex's uncle has been training Alex in spycraft since he was little so he is well qualified for the job. Alex does not want to do it. They use the expired visa of his American friend and housekeeper, Jack Starbright, to blackmail him into it.

My book: Alex's husband, an MI6 agent, was recently killed in the line of duty. The dead agent's MI6 minders ask Alex to assist them in an unofficial capacity—Alex is an ex-CIA agent, so she is well qualified for the job. Alex does not want to do it. They use Alex's expired visa (she is an American) to blackmail her into it.

Uncanny, huh? I'm still trying to figure out how he did it.

With Friends Like That . . .

2006-07-13T06:29:00.000+01:00

I was going to do a regular post this morning but got waylaid by Joe Konrath's blog. Again.

MJ Rose is doing her own version of the Rusty Nail 500 but in a manner not quite as insane. She's doing it on the virtual highway of the Internet, trying to get 500 blogs to link to her site and her new book's site, The Venus Fix at myspace.

She's donating $5 to charity for every link, so it's for a worthy cause (although that's only £2.50 in REAL money).

Unfortunately, the rules say, "Please send permalink to venusfix@gmail.com to be counted"

Permalink? WTF???? I'll have to do a bit more research on this, but right now I have to run for the bus.

Also, she may be safe at home instead of out in the wilds of America, like Joe, but she still better watch her back. When I visited the site, her "MySpace friends" consisted of a young lady dressed in black draped over a sofa who wanted to be naughty AND nice, a guy from Oregon who apparently likes to pose naked in front of his webcam and a few other ladies with humongous boobs.

MySpace, virtual trailer trash.

Expanding

2006-06-30T05:57:00.000+01:00

I decided to quit writing yesterday.

As the precious little time I have for writing drew to a close yesterday, all I had to show for it were three sentences. I must have written better than a thousand words over the course of the day, but I kept deleting them because they were crap.

As the realization that I has sweated blood all day only to make no real progress sank in, I thought, "This is ridiculous. I'm going to quit."

I held onto that thought for a while; it gave me a bit of comfort, but only for a while.

My wife and I had dinner and then took a stroll to the park where we sat, she with her book and me with my cigar, enjoying the day. As I contemplated my recalcitrant novel, I realized the reason I was making no progress was that the scene was all wrong. I needed to go back and bring it forward in a new direction. After that, everything fell into place and I began stinging an article together in my mind about how I had planned to quit writing.

Writing about not writing; that's got to be a sure sign that you are an incurable writer.

On other fronts, I'm planning to take a course in article writing and marketing. It all keeps going around in one, big circle:

I started out writing articles, but couldn't sell any because I'm crap at marketing; I wasn't getting rejection letters, I wasn't even able to find markets to send anything to so I could get rejection letters. So I decided to write a book, based on the idea that at least I would have places to send it. Now that I am shopping my humor book around, I am finding I don't have any credentials. I'm not convinced that is the kiss of death, but I can't believe it would hurt. Nor would learning some marketing skills.

So I'm checking out an on-line article 'how-to' course to make sure it is legit and all that. If I don't grow cold on this idea, I'll be starting school with the kids this autumn. I wonder if I'll need a school uniform.

Note To Self

2006-06-28T06:40:00.000+01:00

Never stop writing at the end of a chapter.

I managed to put a cap on the chapter I have been struggling with for the past few days, and am now staring at a blank page with 'Chapter Seven' written across the top. Because of the way I restructured and broke up Chapter Six, this will be entirely new; no editing of what is already there.

I'm finding the short (one hour each) bits of time I have not adequate for such a daunting undertaking and would love a chance to sit for about four hours working this out.

Just a few months ago I was struggling to fill 5 hours a week, and now I'm finding that 15 isn't enough.

It Can Be Done

2006-06-25T20:59:00.001+01:00

I just happened upon JT's blog.

She has gone from Level I to Level III in just three postings over 17 months. Her first post was a moan about how difficult writing was, in her second she had an agent but the agent couldn't sell her book so she wrote a second one, and in her last post, she had sold a three book series to a major publishing house.

See, it does happen, and when it does, it happens quick.

Joining the Club

2006-06-25T20:59:00.000+01:00

To state the obvious, there are countless communities within the overall blogsphere. There are blog communities about Irish step dancing, cigar smoking, miniature airplane enthusiasts and nudists (I checked). The one I'm concerned with, naturally, is writing.

More specifically, I'm concerned with blogs by writers who are still struggling to finish and sell their first novel. I was hoping to find a bit of camaraderie, inspiration or, at least, commiseration. Oddly enough, there aren't very many.

Upon reflection, this shouldn't have surprised me. Who wants to hang out, even in cyberspace, with a bunch of losers who haven't even sold anything yet?

I call these Level I writing blogs, and no one pays any attention to them (like this one). And why should they? Are you going to glean any nuggets of wisdom from a blog like that? The person may be very talented, and may break upon the publishing scene like a bright comet, or they may be a dedicated person who just doesn't have it and should be taking a night course in gardening instead. But you will never know until and unless they sell a novel.

This is a Level II blog--dedicated writers who have finished a book and found an agent to represent them. If the agent eventually sells a book and they become published, their blog makes it to Level III, the blogs whose authors have sold one or more books and are now mostly concerned with promotion and longevity.

These are the blogs I lurk at. I used to try to join in by commenting on posts occasionally, but no one really took notice, I'm not published, I'm not in their club. And I wouldn't want it any other way.

What good is a club if there isn't an entrance requirement? When I was an Irish dancer and hung out with Irish dancers, we didn't include anyone in our 'club' unless they were, oddly enough, Irish dancers. And just coming to a class didn't get you in, you had to prove your dedication and commitment, join in a few recitals and win a medal or three at an official competition.

The writer's aren't any different. I can say I'm a writer and sit myself down in a circle of published authors, but until I actually have a contract and a book on the shelves at the local Borders, I'm just another wannabe with a dream.

So, I'll keep my Level I blog, looking forward to the day when I can move to Level II and, hopefully, Level III.

Then I'll revisit those blogs and post some more comments.

Man Without a Country

2006-06-25T20:58:00.000+01:00

I visited a bookstore yesterday and found it simultaneously inspiring and depressing.

There were so many books; people everywhere, it seems, are publishing books, so it must be possible, there must be a way to achieve this seemingly impossible dream as people do it every day.

There are so many books; many of them good books that I want to read, but they keep coming out faster than I can buy them let along read them. Will you people stop it for crying out loud, and let me catch up?

I suffer from the additional burden of being an American living in England. Many of the great books I want to read are by American authors and I have to buy them on-line. But then there are dozens of books by British authors that I want to read as well. If I was anchored in just one country, I wouldn't have that problem.

And my writing has the same difficulties; is it for an American audience, or a British audience? Where should I try to market it? My Postcards.. book I'm sending to American agents, but the novel, I think, might have a better chance in England. And my articles don't seem to have a market at all. Who wants to read about an American talking about what it's like to live in Britain? The Americans don't care, and the British already know. Even the Bill Bryson-type slant and humor I inject into the pieces doesn't seem to help: he was a long-time resident and had worked on many British newspapers; I'm simply an interloper without the credentials for commenting on the British way of life.

I've tried to overcome the national ambiguity problem in my novel by having it set in Britain with an American heroine. Maybe it wall work, or maybe I'll be trying again with another novel set totally in one country or another.

Blog? What Blog?

2006-06-25T20:57:00.000+01:00

Oh yeah, I have a blog.

I seem to have forgotten that for a while; I was too busy writing, and updating my REAL website, and reminding myself that no one reads this anyway so it doesn't really matter. But here I am again, sneaking in a few updates at once.

You might ask yourself (or, more to the point, I might ask myself) "Why does a guy with a private journal, continually updated website and a novel on the go need a blog anyway?" The answer, of course, is: he doesn't. This blog has been little more than an afterthought since I started it, something I have to remind myself to update, and a place I found I had nothing to say (can you believe that?). This was supposed to be about my journey toward publication but I didn't feel that journey was worth talking about much.

That seems to be changing now as writing is beginning to take up more and more of my life. I've managed to increase my daily productivity by over 100% and, more and more, my day revolves around writing. I even started jogging in the mornings, not because I'm out of shape and need to get fit (which I do, but that's another story) but because I felt it would help get my brain working and make me less tired. And it has.

Now I get up at 5 AM instead of lying there for 20 minutes thinking about getting. My 'run' only last 15 minutes, just enough time to get out and get the blood pumping, then I get ready for work and sit down at my computer with a cup of coffee by 5:45, or at least 6:00 ready to get on with it.

Where I really make up time, however, is on the bus ride home. I am no long so tired I can't do something productive. Even if I don't feel up to writing, I can always read my writing books.

So things are moving now and, even though I can't see any progress in the shape of a published book, progress is being made, and each day is one step closer instead of one more day of marking time.

And that's exciting, and worth writing about (besides, this helps me keep the momentum going).

I just wish blogger would allowed me to back-date some of these posts so it would look like I've been consistent with my updates instead of doing it all at once, but I can see why they don't; otherwise, people could post predictions after the event and pass themselves off as the new Yuri Geller.

Over the Hump

2006-05-10T05:56:00.000+01:00

I'm finally making progress on chapter four.

The problem, as I always suspected, was the inability to edit effectively on the AlphaSmart Dana. Even with the bigger screen it was difficult to (no, impossible) to view large sections of text and scan up and down through the pages.

The eventual solution, which I had discarded out of hand early on because I had decided it was impossible (even though I had never actually attempted it), was to use my laptop.

While I'm not enamored of laptops--they are fiddly, difficult to see, unwieldy and have abysmal battery life--I have to admit this works well enough. I just have to keep the laptop charged up (which isn't difficult, it's plugged in all day) and leave it on 'sleep' mode. I also started carrying it in the document pouch instead of strapped into its rightful place. That way, I can just take it out, open it up and start typing. Well, almost. But close enough to actually get some work done, and that's all that really matters.

The Lower Rungs

2006-04-27T06:10:00.000+01:00

These days, I spend more time than I'd like to reading other writer's blogs. For those of you keeping track, that's about 45 minutes a day. I know that may not seem like a large investment, but it's time, I could argue, that is better spent writing.

On the other hand, if I want to be part of this business, I need to get to know this business and keep up with what is going on inside it, and writer's blogs are a very good (and, as a bonus, often entertaining) way of going about this. Unfortunately, I see a trend developing--much of the discussion now is centered around marketing and self promotion. Not a bad topic, but I'd like a little variety.

Of the 'reasons for not self-promoting' that Joe Konrath puts forward, the one that resonates with me most is, I simply don't like being a salesman. I hate it, actually. But then, I'm thinking of sales in the traditional sense, and promoting your book isn't (or shouldn't be) thought of in the same way.

If you have a good book, and you believe in it, there should be nothing standing in your way of telling people you have a good book. Or a great one. I'm sure I could do this. When I was dabbling in stand-up comedy and bringing in a second income as a folk-singer, I did a fair bit of self-promotion. You have to, or you go no where. Joe is right on this.

So, if I had a great book, I don't think I would have trouble with the marketing quite so much. I think I would have no problem e-mailing, writing or looking an agent in the eye and saying, "I have a great book, you should publish this." The problem is, I don't have a great book.

I have a book. It isn't great. It is even good. And while I'm pleased that I have learned enough to know that, all the marketing in the world won't help me turn a poor book into a good book or a good book into a great book.

I'm not struggling with marketing concepts right now, I'm struggling to rewrite my novel and, I'm afraid to say, making quite a hash of it.

My goal (my initial one, anyway) is to publish a book. I'm still way down the ladder from that, however. The rung I'm trying to reach is labeled, 'Write a good book.'

Back to Basics

2006-04-19T06:37:00.000+01:00

It's time to admit that things are not going very well.

True, I have a completed novel and my non-fiction manuscript is out looking for an agent but the novel is seriously stalled and I have no confidence in my agent querying method. Plus, I'm suddenly and inexplicably negative about the whole writing thing. I can't seem to figure out how to rework my novel, I don't know what, if anything, is wrong with my query letters, I have no enthusiasm for writing new, humorous articles and I can't even seem to get around to updating this blog.

My writing target for this fiscal year is six hours a week. That's out of a possible fifteen I have set aside (I get up at 5AM and supposedly write for an hour, then I have an hour on the bus going in to work and another hour coming home). I managed five hours and forty-five minutes last week and that was mostly by working on my web site and writing in my journal. This week is about shot and I've only managed three hours, and that includes updating the blog.

I don't know what's wrong other than I feel washed out and fatigued both mentally and physically. For the past week, in the evening, when I'm supposed to be writing, I end up surfing the web and then, realizing I'm bored with it, I sit and watch TV, which leaves me feeling guilty. The idea of quitting writing has even occurred to me; after all, I'm imposing all of this on myself, no one is making me do it, I don't need the money, so why am I torturing myself? The problem with that is, if I do stop writing, I know I'll feel even worse.

My web-surfing this morning at least had a purpose. I managed to find a few useful writing web sites that I hadn't stumbled upon before. There were some interesting articles and links to books on writing. I printed out the articles, book marked the site and ordered six books. They cover a variety of subjects--query letters, novel plotting, agent advice--and will, hopefully, enable me to re-lay the foundation of my writing 'business.'

At the vary least, reading them will give me something to do with that spare fifteen hours a weeks.

A New Year

2006-04-13T20:06:00.000+01:00

I'm entering the fourth year of my efforts to treat writing as a job; I'm glad it's not an actual job or I would have been fired long ago.

My decision to start in April had more to do with the time of year that the idea occurred to me than with the fact that my real job's fiscal year starts at that time (hence my lack of postings over the past few weeks--this is a very busy time for me).

I'm not concerned that I haven't made any money yet--most businesses don't make any money in their first years--but I am approaching that 7-year break-even mark and I'm currently about £1,000 in the red. It has not escaped my notice that I made more money when I was operating in a more haphazard way (even writing sporadically I managed to sell articles to some local and regional publications) but having a focus has helped shaped my business plan, so to speak.

What prompted the decision in the first place was the fact that I used to sell the odd article when I was living in the US but couldn't seem to duplicate that success in the UK. So in Year One, I continued to write humorous articles on British life and attempted to find markets for them.

By the start of Year Two, I had learned that no one in the US gives a shit about life in Britain and the people in the UK already know about it. The discouragement came, not from the number of rejections, but from the lack of them, due to an absolute dearth of markets for the type of articles I write. So I decided to try novels again, on the assumption that I could at least find agents and publishers to send them to once they were finished.

At the start of Year Three I had the first draft of a novel completed and had amassed enough humorous essays to make into a book.

Now, as Year Four begins, the book of essays has been compiled, re-worked, polished, re-worked, polished again and is currently making the rounds. Five rejections so far; a good start. The novel is undergoing a long-overdue re-write and I'm striving to up my word-count and 'time on the job.'

Thanks to Joe's recent challenge to submit a story within the week, I have had it driven home to me yet again that there are no markets for my articles, essays or stories, which is why I switched to novels in the first place.

So I am starting year four with one manuscript (that I am rather pleased with) in search of an agent, and another (that I am not) undergoing major surgery to see if I can salvage anything from it, even if it's just the opportunity of learning from my mistakes.

What about you? Did you ever 'decide' to be a writer or has it just crept up on you? Do you have a business plan or do you just write and hope?

Persistence; How Much is Too Much?

2006-03-25T17:51:00.000Z

If we're trying to publish, persistence is the key. But how much is too much?

I once read an article by a published author (I don't recall his name) who said that during the writing of his first book, his wife left him. He shrugged it off by saying that, "at some point, the novel takes you over, and everything else has to go."

I used to be an entertainer—singing, stand-up, all strictly low-key—and almost all of us in the group I associated with eventually wound up divorced, including myself. It's nice to have ambition and believe you are destined for great things, but how much are you willing to sacrifice for it?

Like all of us, I need to carve time out of my day to satisfy my writing fix. But should I allow my paying job to suffer, risk getting fired, lose my house and my current wife? I like to think I'm doing as much as I can yet still maintain a balance, but I could get my novel finished quicker if I worked in the evenings as well as the mornings, and if I devoted my weekends to studying the markets and writing queries. And, no doubt, I'd find myself alone before too long.

Understanding spouses, partners and friends are essential to the writer, and I suppose you could say that if they don't understand your devotion to writing then you are better off without them. But would you expect the same devotion if you were spending as much time fishing or bowling?

I'm not questioning the need for devotion and persistence, or hinting that my marriage is in trouble (believe me, it is not) I'm just pondering the need for balance. After all, a healthy family/social life is necessary for a writer, unless you want to be the type of writer who writes about writers because they don't know anything else.

Lawrence Block once told a story about a friend of his who thought he might give this writing thing a try. He started a novel and, about three weeks into it, decided it was going pretty well, so he quit his job. Not long after, and not surprisingly, his girlfriend left him. He persisted and turned out a totally horrible book. The second one was awful, too, but the third one was better and the fourth one sold. In the end, he became a successful writer, but at what cost?

These thoughts were prompted by a discussion going on over at Joe's blog about persistence. I think it's certainly a requirement, but I also believe balance is just as important. Otherwise, your success may be hollow, and you may find yourself on top of the mountain all by yourself.

How you do feel about your writing life? Are you willing to take the chance of losing your family, friends or mental health over it?

Time

2006-03-22T06:13:00.000Z

Trying to write and hold down a full time job isn't easy. But if what I'm reading in these blogs is an accurate reflection of the profession, that's what most writer's do (not unlike actors). According to the advice I read as well, as common sense, carving out a portion of your day to dedicate to writing is a basic and necessary step in being a writer.

I've said before that my day automatically includes up to three hours of writing time, but during busy periods (i.e. the end of the fiscal year) I am on site more often than I am in the office. This involves getting up at 5AM and leaving immediately (I am allowed a shower and a change of clothes, however) for my client's offices. I often don't return home until 6 PM and then have more work to do to prep for the next day. Last weekend, I was up at 5:30 on Saturday and worked straight through until 10 PM. I worked Sunday afternoon as well and, these days, breakfast at the Little Chef en route to the client site (where I used to be able to pull out my AlphaSmart for about 45 minutes) is taken up working on reports and documents for the project.

This is, thankfully, a temporary situation, but it still means two or three weeks where I literally do not have a free minute to do any real writing.

Right now, I'm looking forward to Saturday when, fingers crossed, I shouldn't have to work and can spend the day catching up on my novel instead.

What do other full-time job/write when you can authors do to carve out writing time when life conspires to take it all away?

Gotta run, now. It's 6:30 and I'm late for the office.

The Query Phase

2006-03-09T06:11:00.000Z

Interesting to be out of the re-writing and polishing stage and into the query phase.

Writing the query and synopsis was a grind but now, at least, I can send it out without wondering if it could be better (although I have already thought of some tweaks for future mailings).

Postcards... is in good shape, so I don't have to worry about that, either. If (when) an agent agrees to see it, I won't have to worry about that, either. It's a good, polished manuscript; it just needs a chance.

I'm still in the early stages, sending out queries to those agents who accept them via e-mail. The advantage of that is I can be rejected on the same day that the query goes out. Modern technology; you gotta love it.

The overall best thing about this is I am no longer divided. My novel is now the only thing on the front burner and the time spent polishing Postcards... helped put Chapter Four into perspective. Time to get back to work.

Into the Unknown

2006-03-02T06:00:00.000Z

I was just over at Joe's blog and he was equating writing while not knowing what you are doing (i.e. not having an outline) to being shoved into the outfield while having no knowledge of baseball.

Boy, can I relate to that. Not because I don't use outlines (I do) but because I spent a lot of time in high school standing in the outfield with borrowed glove on my hand wondering what the heck I was going to do if the ball came my way. The bad part of that story is, I never got any better at baseball; I hope that doesn't hold true for my current activities.

With the writing and polishing and tweaking of Postcards . . . suddenly behind me I find myself in the awkward position of having to market it and I really, really suck at that. No, really, I do.

I did manage to find about 50 agents I can send it to, but I want to send a good query/proposal/synopsis/manuscript and not come off like the amateur I am. (I'm not sure how to pull that off when I can't point to other books I have published; it's like not being able to get a job because you don't have any experience but you can't get any experience until someone hires you.)

The secret, I suppose, is not worrying about the areas you can't do anything about (i.e. not having a list of previously published books) and concentrate on those areas you have control over (e.g. query letters, presentation, manuscript).

And there is no secret to that; there are dozens of books in the stores and lots of helpful advice in the blogsphere. It's mostly a matter of studying up on what you need to do until you know how to do it. Easy as snagging a fly ball.

I'm doomed.

Fear of Success

2006-02-27T07:35:00.000Z

My new PC is finally up and running and ready for 'work' (it only took about 16 hours). I managed to polish up the Postcards manuscript and print it out for a final re-read last night. I already have a list of agents to send it to, gathered during the last round of submissions. I never sent the mss to them because it was coming back from the ones I did send it out to with alarming speed.

This prompted a re-read followed by the painful admission that the manuscript just wasn't good enough. It was funny, but it wasn't hilarious. It's probably still not piss-your-pants funny, but it is better.

So now I hesitate? Why? Fear of failure? No, I'm used to people telling me my work is shit. What I think I'm afraid of is someone actually liking it and taking it on and perhaps, gulp, selling it. I really don't know how I would deal with that.

It's supposed to be the dream, the ultimate goal, and it is that, but it also means a lot of work and more deadlines. All things I'm ready for, I think, but it will mean a change.

I've been a pre-published writer for so long I've become comfortable with the idea. My writing schedule is established and is, frankly, not very strenuous. If I do 'break in' I will have to devote a LOT more hours to writing than I do now, and the free and easy way in which I write will be replaced with deadlines and contract obligations.

Again, I believe I am ready for that but, if and when it does happen, my life is going to be a lot different than it is now.

Fortunately, I don't think I have a lot to worry about right now.

Now What?

2006-02-23T05:55:00.000Z

I finished the rewrite of Postcards From Across the Pond yesterday. I didn't mean to. I was happily editing along, comfortable with my routine of getting on the bus, pulling out the AlphaSmart Dana and trying to make one or two of my humorous out-of-my-element articles funny, or at least more humorous. There was a vague notion that, once this process finished it would be back to searching for agents and writing queries but I didn't really believe it would happen.

Then the words 'The End' came in sight. They didn't need editing, so I turned off the Dana and thought, "Now What?"

I guess it's time to start gathering agent addresses again. This task was supposed to be done in parallel with the editing but, as I said, I really didn't expect to finish, at least not so soon. And what about the bus? What do I do there? Maybe I can actually work on the novel. I tried that on the bus and it didn't work out very well but perhaps after all that practice with Postcards . . . it will work out.

But for now, a polish for Postcards . . . and it's back into the wild.

Writing Tools

2006-02-18T21:29:00.000Z

I just bought a new computer. My current PC is five years old and slower than Jade Goodie trying to think of, well, anything. But I digress. What struck me was the difference in buying this new computer as opposed to PC purchases of the past.

The machine I eventually bought was a cheap, low-end Dell with as few bells and whistles as I could manage. In the past I always bought high-end computers to handle systems programming and heavy graphics. These days, however, I'm only interested in writing and wanted a computer that could handle word processing. Anything more would not only be a waste of money but a potential distraction.

In fact, I really don't do any writing on my computer. I use that for editing and managing my web site (and, of course, downloading porn). For putting one word next to another, I use an AlphaSmart. I first bought one when I was living in the States. They are brilliant, dead easy to use and practically indestructible. Don't let the fact that I managed to ruin mine put you off (it involved a sticky key, a can of WD-40 and the fact that I am still in need of adult supervision), you can throw them in a back pack and take them camping or to the sea shore or mountain climbing in Peru. They get 700 hours on three AA batteries and hold about 100 pages of text without having to off-load.

When I decided to begin taking my writing seriously, I ordered another AlphaSmart. Over the next two years I wrote my novel, dozens of articles and the Postcards . . . manuscript, all during the morning commute to my office.

Now that I am in rewrite mode, I bought a Dana, the next step up from the AlphaSmart. It's a bit more fiddly and gets about a tenth of the battery life (only 70 hours, compared to 7 minutes on a laptop) but it's still rugged and easy to use.

Both the AS and the Dana are instant on, and I like that. Press a button and it blinks on, not only to the document you were working on but to the very same place you left off. I consider them indispensable for my writing, as I rarely have the luxury of writing at home and I much prefer to write when and where the opportunity arises.

I didn't mean to turn this into an ad for AlphaSmart, it was supposed to be a discussion about writing tools and how, for a writer, less is usually more. So, I guess my point is, if you're thinking of buying a computer for writing, buy a cheap one, and use the money you save to buy an AlphaSmart.