All The Love In The World

Holy fuck. I bought a Gretsch. 

This guitar has been haunting me for the best part of a year, but today, I stopped talking myself out of it, pressed some buttons and this beautiful Gretsch Falcon will be here sometime over the weekend:

I'm excited - and I don't do excited very often. What I wanted was a guitar that could handle what I have to throw at it on the songwriting front. Something that would behave like a partner in crime worthy of the title. Something that looked like it could handle a lot of work even when I wasn't in the room! 

I am in love.

Soon it will be time to begin demoing up the first batch of songs for my DeadBirds project. We'll spend some time getting to know each other better and in those cracks of production known as putting The Family Of Noise out, together we will get in on.

Meanwhile, in the writing world, I found a great post over on LitReactor this morning about the life expectancy of a novel. You can read the whole thing here and if you're in the writing game, you should read it. 

It's one of the things nobody ever tells you about when you talk about being a writer. You can write a novel, spend years on it even, but once it's out there, you have zero control over what happens. You can't vet the people that buy it to make sure they will understand all of the things you were trying to say about the world. Just like in the above linked scenario, you can't guarantee your book will stay alive out in the world, can't guarantee your publisher will stay in business or sometimes, that you will even get paid. 

Conversely, if you have a massively successful book, the mental fatigue can be just as harsh. You write a book. It sells millions of copies. You write another. Nobody likes it because it's not 'the same' as the first one. Maybe you only had one book in you. Who knows.

The writing road is littered with obstacles you need to navigate.

It's tough being a writer - mostly because unless you are one of about 24 people, nobody has heard of you and yet, you still need to find a reason to get up in the morning and write again and again, for no reason other than it's what you do. 

You want to know what's even tougher than being a writer in 2017? Being a horror writer...

Here's a shot of my local Waterstones where 'horror' has been consumed by 'science fiction and fantasy':

I went up close to check too. They're all in there - King, Barker, Koontz, Herbert - all consumed by this new multifaceted heading and I like it. Well, I kind of like it. Perhaps it would be more accurate if those big headings at the top of the rack said 'Other Worlds' or 'Alternate Realities'. I could see that as a huge step forwards for kids looking for kicks in 2017 and future years. It has to be about the kids now. When it comes to these genres, people of a certain age are already sold regardless, but for me, I think the whole genre-fiction 'thing' needs reinventing from the ground up.

And if we're going to kill one genre, let's kill them all because fans of these genres are not dumb. Eight racks with seven shelves to each rack means we're not playing a minority game these days.

Anyway, I take my hat of to The Management for bringing horror into a larger family where it wasn't quite so noticeable that there were only thirty books worthy of the title up for sale. 

I did ask: when people (generally speaking) buy science fiction or fantasy, they are game for new works/authors more than ever - but when people (also generally speaking) buy horror, they fall back on the masters.

What happened out there? Is it easier to get scary thrills from a movie? Did it go down the same path once too often?

I'd love to know the answer.

But I bought a motherfucking Gretsch, so I don't have a care in the world right now. Sorry about that.

The World Is Not Enough

Now here's somewhere a man could kick back and chew over his place in the world and more than likely come to the conclusion that his place in the world was not worth chewing over. 

If he was smart, he would figure out those mountains had been around long before he was even a starseed and will be there for many moons after too. Even those rocks sitting beneath the surface of the water have a longer lifespan than he does and in all likelihood, probably provide a far more useful purpose in the world than he does too. 

But that's not a good reason to not even try.

Still jet-lagged to hell and back here. More time in the air than on the ground in a short four day period is not good for your equilibrium. I wrote a little - not as much as I would like, but enough. I did The Bad Thing and watched an airplane movie which knocked on to another and then another. Worth talking about are 500 Days Of Summer and Our Kind Of Traitor - both are good investments of your (wasted) time. 

I'm not going to tell anything about my trip here. It will make a good extra chapter for the Cities of the Dead collection - it was also the first time I have ever got in an uber car. It's very much the same as being in a regular cab in that you sit in the back while somebody drives you, but the reality is, it's more like being driven somewhere by a friend of a friend in a nice car that somebody gives a damn about. I can see why it works and how it is absolutely the death of the taxi as we know it. Then again, all it takes is one singular uber-murder scandal and the whole world will come crashing down around its ankles. 

I wonder if cab drivers moonlight as uber-drivers during their time off.

I picked up a couple of magazines at the airport too. One of them was the latest edition of Wired. Somewhere in there is an article about a company that hosts residential courses for kids who want to be You-Tubers when they grow up. It really is a thing. It says that five years ago, kids mostly wanted to be app developers but now they want to be You-Tubers making money for simply being themselves. 

Meanwhile, I mailed my friend Wayne Simmons a pic of his book on a Waterstones shelf yesterday - a pic from the period in which he wrote (and made his name with) horror. On one side of his book was Pride, Prejudice and Zombies and on the other side, a classic edition of Frankenstein. In that 'horror' section, there was a whole collection of Stephen King books but hardly anything else to speak of. No Ramsey Campbell, no Clive Barker and no James Herbert. 

Maybe horror fiction is resting. Maybe it's waiting for somebody to come out and lay waste to the world. Maybe Stephen King must die for people to pay attention again... but it didn't make any difference when James Herbert did, so that's a very poor answer to the problem.

Or maybe, horror authors need to become You-Tubers to regain their mojo, though I can't think of anything more boring to watch than a video of somebody staring out of the window before occasionally tapping some keys.

If you took a poll in an average school, I wonder how many kids would say they wanted to be a writer these days and how many of them would say they wanted to be a horror author - and just who would they want to be like? Who are their role models? I wonder exactly how many schools you would have to visit before you found a kid who wanted to be a horror author and said as much without being prompted from a list of previously arranged choices. 

Note to self: never buy Wired again. Wired is Cosmopolitan for the Samsung generation. It suggests the new world is built on algorithms and there is nothing we can do about it. It hosts adverts for apps that will close your blinds for you when you're not at home. It promotes great design discussed over many pages for items such as football boots and lamps.

It tells me the world is more connected than ever but does not even begin to explain why everybody feels so fucking alone.

Welcome to the true face of horror in 2016 in which horror writers now freelance for tech mags.

Here, There, Everywhere and Somewhere.

There's nothing unusual about me buying books but the way I have started to make my choices is becoming odd to say the least. The last five or six books that I've picked up have more or less picked me but it wasn't until yesterday that I realised what was happening.

It's not unusual on any given evening of the week to find me heading towards the coffee shop that lives within the book shop. These are two things that should go together far more frequently than they do. If Waterstones could take a leaf out of the Book of Borders and also sell magazines instead of joke pencils and balls that bounce incredibly high, you would probably find me there a lot more often.

Anyway, I walked into the book shop and stood more or less in the middle of it, turning a full circle on the spot. I see the book. The book sees me. It's not placed out on a table, it's right up on a top shelf and by the door which is not the greatest of places to be for a casual observer. That said, a casual observer, I am not. I walk over to introduce myself to the book and I find that it's not one book at all, but four books in a slip case. I have blown £30 on dumber things and before I know it, it's in my hand and doesn't want to leave.

We are going home together.

The box set/book(s) in question is/are collectively called Elsewhere and looks like this:

Not particularly a cover that I would normally gravitate to, but somebody has tried to get the box out of the cellophane and given up. I finish the job off and tip the books out to take a better look being as I'm going to buy it anyway.  Four beautiful hardbacks fall out of the case. Inside, I find stories laid out with love - this is some great book design. I find stories of such an eclectic nature, how could I possibly ever tire of picking any one of them up and getting lost within? 

I inspect the package a little closer and discover, it's a project from McSweeney's. There's some kind of association going on with Cargo - who also have discounted copies of each individual book right now but are sold out of the box set. 

I have to ask myself though - why? Why this one? Why didn't a crime thriller I could chew up overnight jump from the shelf and bite me on the head. Why not one of the books hand-picked by my friendly local Waterstones staff and placed on a table so that I can't possibly miss it as soon as I walk in? 

Because sometimes, that's just the way things happen.

So... if you might be looking for something to leave around the house and look clever with or perhaps you might even looking for something to read and enjoy - Elsewhere, in any of its variants, is a lovely choice. 

Was that a book review? Not really, but I still meant every word.