Preview

 

Although it's a way off yet, I thought you might like to know that Stealing into Winter will be published by Roundfire on 28 September 2012. The paperback ISBN is 978-1-78099-625-7 and the book will be £9.99

There will also be an ebook version (ISBN 978-1-78099-626-4), but as yet I have no further details.

All very sweet. And sweeter still is what you'll find on the rear cover; an endorsement from my all time favourite author:

A first class adventure which moves with a pace and panache rarely seen these days. If you like good future fantasy you'll love this. Reminiscent of M. J. Harrison or China Miéville at their fascinating best. I enjoyed Stealing Into Winter a lot.

Michael Moorcock

You can be sure that closer to the time of publication there will be plenty more of this!

A new censorship?

I was thinking about Soviet censorship of writers in the shower the other day, as one does. Having not long finished reading a couple of books written in Soviet Russia (one that got past the censor and one that didn’t) I was trying to work out why the one that was highly critical of a totalitarian regime that suppressed creative thinking got published, whilst the surreal work that explored the difficulty, even impossibility of successfully putting anything into written words was blue pencilled. I was also wondering whether living under the gaze of a censor (terrible as that is) did not make better writers of those inclined to be subversive. They did, after all continue to be subversive right under the very noses of those they criticised and got away with it. They were forced by circumstance to be inventive.

Notwithstanding the thought that anything that makes one a better writer must have some good in it (from a purely craft point of view) I thanked my stars that I do not live in such circumstances. Advocating a Stalinist state just to get better writing would be stupid and even I am not that daft.

I was at the rinsing down stage by now and another thought did strike me. Two in succession. After I recovered from feeling a bit faint, I developed this second thought. We might not, as writers, live under a formal regime of censorship but our work does face various forms of censorship nonetheless if we follow a mainstream route to publication (self-publishing in the modern age is something else altogether). Some are obvious and to be welcome. I don’t want to pick up a book that is riddled with spelling mistakes, typos, bad grammar, rubbish structure, and so on. It doesn’t mean such books don’t get published, even after going through the mill. Book shops are full of such tat. But for the most part they are properly designed and have the worst of their errors removed.

But capitalism censors just as readily (if in different ways) to any other socio-economic system. Books need to make a profit for the companies that publish them. At least, there must be an expectation that a given book will make a profit. You cannot expect such companies to make a loss. They wouldn’t last. But they have got themselves in a bit of fix recently. Like many other businesses they are staggering under increasing layers of people who want their cut of the money without actually contributing anything to the process that generates the money.

Books now get rejected on the grounds they won’t make enough profit. It is no longer sufficient that they bring in more than they cost. Now the level of profit must be increased to feed all those hardworking shareholders and all the layers of middle men who don’t do very much.

If your book is out of the ordinary, exploratory, ground breaking, has a small audience, then forget it. It will not generate enough profit. It will not appease the free market dogma. It will feed the leeches in the system. Therefore it gets censored. Good writing, stuff that doesn’t fit the stupidly narrow pigeon holes invented by marketing people who really have no conception of how writing works, stuff that is written by a dull looking disabled person who won’t dazzle the camera or be able to get out and do all their own promotion. It gets censored.

Thank goodness then for modern technology. These works rejected by the capitalist censor at least stand a chance of being printed and distributed (even if the average income is just above zero because reaching a market when you are self-published is something that has yet to be cracked).

But whilst this alters the picture, it also throws responsibility onto those who are taking this new route. It may be the future of publishing so I beg of you – don’t foul the path; don’t shove out any old crap because you think it’s a masterpiece. It most likely isn’t, but that doesn’t matter. Only one in a hundred thousand of us are going to produce a work that lasts for generations. The rest of us should aim to produce work of better quality than you find in traditional print. Better designed, better written, better edited. This isn’t difficult. You have friends. Involve them. You probably know a struggling artist. Get them to do the cover. Learn how to spell. Learn how to use your computer. Because if you don’t do these things you will be just as bad as the mainstream that has rejected you and on which you have turned your back.

How narrow is the door?

Do you remember those maths lessons where six men dig a trench forty feet long, how long will it take a train to fill a bath? Or something like that.

The other day, I started a calculation. I had to give up because search as I might, I cannot find anything like an accurate figure for one of the elements. Perhaps, in the end it doesn’t matter.

Anyway, think of all the people in the UK who read science fiction and fantasy. There must be quite a few. Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions.

According to the latest yearbook, there are 22 publishers of science fiction and fantasy, several of those are for women only, and only a couple of the others will accept submissions that have not come via an agent.

So, how many agents are there that... etc etc?

This is more difficult. Most agents won’t touch SF&F with a tractor beam (see what I did there?). There are a handful who specialise. The rest are ambivalent. They don’t say they don’t, but most will sigh and dump anything with a whiff of swords or spaceships that is not some hack piece produced by an already established ‘literary’ writer. Based on my own experience, there are about a dozen agents in the UK who will consider looking at SF&F. And some of those aren’t taking on new clients.

Now. Think about that. Ten people who are deciding what gets into print. And what does their decision making process consist of? Personal taste of course. Quality of material submitted? Well... possibly (although considering some of the stuff that does get into print, one has to wonder). And looking at sales figures. They want to make money; of course they do. Which means they put forward and try to sell things similar to those that have already sold well. Ten people. Giving you more of the same to choose from.

Result? SF&F lists are now like our high streets. Everywhere you look there is more of the same. True innovation has disappeared to the small and struggling independent presses (which very often are overwhelmed and have long since closed their doors to new submissions). What passes for cutting edge these days is as innovative as a disposable razor – all hype, packaging, built in safety, and not worth keeping.

I chose a specific genre to make this point as it is an extreme. Ten people in the UK are deciding what SF&F gets to be considered for print. Other genres (and, yes, ‘literary’ is a genre) have this problem to one degree or another; a small group of people deciding what you get to choose from. And there are other problems we haven’t even considered. For example, who is going through the slush pile and drawing manuscripts to the attention of senior staff? If it is true that this is more and more in the hands of interns, then writers are in deep shit and sinking fast.

Answer? I don’t know. I told you in the last post that I’m an idiot. What would be nice, though, for whatever you write, is a wider door with more gatekeepers whose experience of the literary world goes a bit beyond what they were force fed to pass their A level/BA.

Sorry for the inconvenience...

Sometimes I am not very bright (sometimes? I hear you ask); and today I have realised just how stupid I can be.

I read the book and literary pages of a number of magazines and newspapers. When I say ‘read’, what I mean is that these days is that I flick through in hope of finding something substantial to ponder. Now and then, I get lucky, but most of the time I come across insubstantial dross, fillers that are about the level of ‘what’s your favourite colour’? Whilst it might be mildly diverting to know what people think about the latest hissy fit thrown by a well-established and comfortably off author you have to wonder, given the parlous state of publishing why there is a lack of in-depth investigation into what is going on.

This morning, I was equally mystified by the vast wash of trivia. It’s like all that plastic that gets washed up on beaches. Unsightly, useless, hiding the real beauty of the place, and you know damn well that before it got there it has strangled god knows how many birds and poisoned god knows how many fish. I found myself itching to organise the equivalent of a beach clean-up.

And then it struck me. All this garbage is produced by journalists on comfortable salaries (and don’t start bleating, journos, you get a damn site more in a month than most authors see from their writing in any given year). And who are they writing for? Mostly for people who don’t have the first idea about what writing involves and the conditions under which it is produced.

Indeed, the kind of stuff you see littering papers and magazines these days is, on the whole, mirroring the general malaise in publishing. The only time authors get consideration (yes, I know it’s a generalisation, but I can’t keep qualifying) is when they are fodder for gossip. If they’ve said or written something that is considered controversial (and it rarely is actually controversial, just a bit of tired mouthing off that displays their ignorance), if they’ve landed an absurd book deal, if they are up for yet another prize.

Anyone would think there was little else to report, discuss, or investigate. True we get spates of e-book versus p-book, but nothing new is said. And even in that discussion, the focus is invariably on the reader and what they think/are prepared to pay/etc.

Which leads me to think that, all-in-all, writers are a bit of an inconvenience. It is increasingly the case that people expect writers to work for free. Digital thieves (I won’t call you a ‘pirate’ because no, you’re not an online Johnny Depp; you’re a snivelling little wanker sitting alone in your bedroom ripping off people who work bloody hard). Organisers of events who expect writers to give up a day or more when they could be working to give talks and then expect them to pay for their own travel and keep (how much do you earn as an organiser?). Multi-national book retailers – well, they are doing their best to kill off publishing altogether. Agents can be incredibly sniffy about the ones that aren’t making them money (for ‘sniffy’, read ‘downright bloody rude’). Publishers... well, the way some of them carry on you get the impression they would much rather do without authors altogether; that way they can shed even more spine and give those big retailers an even bigger discount.

See the huge weight of the industry there? All of them supported by the work of writers. And the big players in that industry seem to forget that. There are exceptions, often small, independent publishers who are struggling on a daily basis to keep going because they are forever undercut by the big players whose main concern is profit and dividends for their shareholders (and don’t get me started on those bloodsucking scum).

Now, I’m not trying to make out that all authors are ground under the heel of fascist corporatism. Many make a living of sorts. Some do very well. But the vast majority do not. The vast majority are made to feel like they are in the way. And that is the surest way to bring about the collapse of the industry as it exists today. Because now, as never before, authors can take the process into their own hands.

True, the vast majority of self-published work is garbage. Badly written, ignorant of the basics of grammar, poorly formatted, but what the heck. That never stopped mainstream publisher producing garbage of the same standard. And in amongst all that manure there are good books that will, I hope find an audience and free their authors of the tyranny that currently keeps their words from a readership that is hungry for new work.

Still around...

...and still writing blogs. Just not posting them. Partly because they are repetitive and partly because they are loaded with expletives. And by the time I have drafted them, the therapy has worked (until next time).

They are all the usual variations on a theme - an attempt to understand why, when everyone (including agents and editors) tells me what a good writer I am and other writers are prepared to endorse my work (thanks Mike), I still cannot get either an agent or a publisher to take me on.

I know I am not alone in this, but I despair.

And despair and anger is not something to be spreading about at the moment, when the world seems to have been taken over by heartless, greedy bastards intent on kicking ordinary hardworking folk until they bleed. Action is what is required to bring these people down and cast them out.

Er... the thing that goes here... the importance of it... being snappy and... what’s that word? Memorable

Titles, like covers are exceedingly important to a book, yet often overlooked as a topic for discussion and thought. Having studied the syllabuses of a good number of creative writing courses, for example, and flicked through any number of ‘how to’ books, I cannot recall ever having seen lectures or chapters devoted to this. Yet a title, a handful of words, when put together with an image can be extremely powerful.

With non-fiction, the trick is to be as clear as possible about what the book contains. Cultural references are often a help, as are modern pre-occupations. Thus a book titled ‘Stalingrad’ is unlikely to be about anything other than the siege of Stalingrad during the Second World War.

Fiction is much more difficult. Very often you don’t want to give too much away, yet you want to convey the themes and tone of the book. Having just spent a year or more laying out a hundred thousand words doing this very thing, the problems involved in doing it all again with three or four words can be enormous.

Sometimes a title will slip into place as you are writing and you take a day off to heap offerings at the altar of your muse in thanks for their beneficence. Sometimes. Other times you are left with a notebook full of scribbled attempts. And it’s not just me. Dickens came up with these for David Copperfield: Mag's Diversions, The Copperfield Disclosures, The Copperfield Records, The Copperfield Survey of the World As It Rolled, and Copperfield Complete. Tolstoy mined his Shakespeare and came up with a nicked title: All's Well That Ends Well as the original for War and Peace. Treasure Island was originally called The Sea Cook. Steinbeck clearly had an off day when he came up with: Something That Happened; thank goodness he changed it to: Of Mice and Men.

There are countless other examples and one wonders how far these books would have gone or how different the language would be, had some of these alternative titles been used.

For those who are stuck, there are two great mines that have been used for centuries. The first is the Bible. The King James version is replete with gorgeous sounding phrases that come ready packed with thematic clothing. The other is Shakespeare. A trawl through his plays and poems (and those of his contemporaries) will throw up hundreds of phrases that sit well on the cover of a novel. Of course, these sources have been used so much; they are something of a commonplace – much like certain styles of cover illustration.

The trick is to come up with something all one’s own. Often, a phrase can be pulled from the text, or the story can be summed up with a phrase sufficiently ambiguous to tease and entice. Other times... nothing.

Oh well. Back to the notebook. Dig out the thesaurus. And make a note to add a chapter on titles to my projected ‘how to’ book.

What is it with these people?

You can tell I’m feeling a bit better (always a relative term with me). I’m angry.

I have just listened to another of what is fast becoming the latest trend amongst a certain class of successful writer. That is, a long, whining, truly pathetic moan about how much they hate writing, about how difficult it is, about how it is ruining their life.

The answer is simple you gobshites. Give it up. Stop doing it. Find yourself something you enjoy and do that instead. Basically – fuck off out of it and maybe give all those people who enjoy writing a chance. You’ve had all the breaks. You are privileged enough to be making a living from your scribbling. And all you can do is rub everyone else’s noses in the shit by throwing a tantrum a two year old would be ashamed of.

I know writing is hard work. And for the vast majority of writers the pay is poor (if you are lucky enough to get anything at all after agents and publishers have pissed all their profits in the direction of Ama$on and the supermarkets). And sometimes you work on something that turns you inside out because that just has to be done. By all means talk about the difficulties of the craft and how much it takes out of you. But, please, if you don’t enjoy it, keep it to yourself, especially if you are a successful author, because otherwise it makes you look like a precious twat.

So, yes. If you don’t enjoy it, join the dole queue, or feel free to stack shelves in a supermarket, or sweep the streets, work in a call centre, or sit in a factory for eight hours a day with nothing to occupy your thoughts but how you are going to make your minimum wage stretch to rent and food this week. Anything but your obnoxious grizzling.