Heroes

You ever have a hero? One you could rely on deep into the grave? In the last ten years or so, the term ‘hero’ has been taken away from people we idolise and handed back to people who do things like spread themselves across live grenades so as a bus load of school kids don’t have early funerals… and rightly so, but for the purposes of this piece, I’m rolling with the former because choosing something else doesn’t come close for me.

I’ve had a few and as the years have gone by, they’ve never let me down. Some are so obvious, they’re hardly worth mentioning if you know me. Paul Stanley from Kiss and Alice Cooper are the big guns. Their philosophy is not so different despite their (seeming) rivalry.

There’s also been a few that were a sign of the times - that I picked up and put down as I needed them - which might actually be the whole point of even having a hero.

I was obsessive about Bjorn Borg for a while simply because he was the ‘whole game’. I’m not sure what I got out of it but there it is. Boris Karloff was another… again, because when it came to monster movies, he was also ‘the whole game’. Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart - the whole game. There are a few others like this. Short life-spans with no other purpose but to dam the river when needed

But when it comes to books, it’s not so simple for me. Neil Gaiman came close, not least because I once picked up The Doll’s House Sandman graphic novel on a whim one Saturday afternoon back in something like ‘90/’91 (whenever it came out) when I was headed to a weekend-long party and was early for the train. (Of note here is that the money I spent on the book was supposed be money set aside for booze… go figure).

It had all the makings of the kind of party everybody talked about for years but I wouldn’t know. I spent the entire two days with my head in that book, drinking tea and eating whatever food my then (very understanding) girlfriend chose to put in front of me. Having presumably finished the book, I vaguely recall something about being chased by a horse in the dark and going home alone (natch). It was a long time ago but Gaiman has been pretty consistent and I’m still with him… but so is the rest of the world and that makes him a lot less attractive these days as a name to bandy about. These days I’m more likely to waft Michael Chabon’s name in front of your face as a name of somebody you should be reading. Mr Gaiman needs no more assistance from me at the moment.

Stephen King came close to a lifelong thing but wobbled too much and got replaced by Clive Barker… who also wobbled, but when I went back to King he was still too unstable for me. I keep up with them both still but it’s probably unreasonable to expect either to still be on their respective mountain tops, standing on one leg and juggling a very singular crown - particularly when John Connolly came along and whitewashed both of them for me.

Anyway, as the years have trickled by, those I didn’t recognise as heroes for the longest time have risen to the surface. Most of them were dead by the time I figured this out which gives it a certain kind of closure. It’s unlikely that they will become zeroes anymore - the work is complete. Raymond Carver, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Orwell and Dylan Thomas have weathered that storm with a certain grace I can only dream of but then, there’s this man:

One of the really big deals for me out in the world is J.D. Salinger. Aside from his books being some kind of misinterpreted influential template for my own work, I liked the way he went to his grave with two fingers in the air over never having his books made into films and how digital books could kiss his ass. It’s not how he wanted things to be and credit where it’s due, his estate continued to pipe cement into that wall since he died.

Until a year or so back:

His son, Matt, the very man who been mixing that cement since 2010, was interviewed by the New York Times and the article brought up some important things - namely, this:

‘…during a trip to China earlier this year, he realized that many young people overseas read exclusively on phones and digital devices, and that e-books were the only way to get his father’s writing in front of them.’

and from the horses mouth:

“He wouldn’t want people to not be able to read his stuff.”

And while we can sit here all day and argue that both Catcher In The Rye (55 million copies in 30 languages!) and Franny and Zooey are both still widely available in paperback (show me a bookshop without either and I’ll show you a bookshop without clue), the world has changed - and continues to change - bringing into sharp perspective my own observation that a book isn’t a book unless it’s actually being read. If somebody is not devouring the story, it’s just some paper with some thicker paper on the outside that lives on a shelf to show other people what sort of person you’d like them to think you are.

It brings up all kinds of horrible questions I never want to have to answer about what constitutes as ‘reading’.

But in the end, he’s right and if that’s the opinion of the last bastion of something I hold so dear, I need to swallow a plateful of humble pie topped with pride and also get to work on making things available digitally. It’s not so long ago that I seem to recall saying “Once you can read a book on your phone, the game will be over” and I would have been at least partially right.

There will always be those who love a physical book, how it feels in their hands, what it means to them and how they remember where they bought it from. Those are my kind of people but I’m damn sure that whole Gaiman episode I described above would never have happened if I had downloaded The Doll’s House to a portable reading device. Things change and time moves with it eventually crushing everything in its path that doesn’t want to ‘flow’.

It’s sad, but I guess it’s not sad at all if you’re under thirty. If you’re under thirty, it’s just the way things are and the way they’ve always been.

Out there in the world somewhere, there are most likely people for whom eight track was the Bees Knees too.

Time, huh. Can’t live with it…

---

Footnote: Salinger also had a good line in quotes, so here’s a few of my favourites - all of which sound a lot like things that come out of my own mouth…

I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to

There are still a few men who love desperately

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don’t watch it, you start showing off. And then you’re not as good anymore

Burning Time

Despite the purge of a lifetime of accumulated books, I still read as much as I ever did. I have not fallen out of love with it in any way, nor books themselves for that matter. 

The publishing world - alongside of the music business, the movie/TV business and more than likely, every other business you can think of - continues to change. It's confusing out there for writers. Hell, you don't even have to be new to the game to find it the business equivalent of the Grimpen Mire. 

To bring us up to date with the world of me, a couple of years ago, I released a book called The Family Of Noise. I didn't make a huge deal out of it and pushed it out only to a few friends and people who like to follow me here regularly with a plan for a real PR campaign in the following weeks. I thought it was good... but word came back from many of these people that I should put it out through major channels for it to get the audience it deserved. That's just what you need to hear when you've spent two years smashing yourself in the face with a hammer.

I retracted the book from public eye along with any sales channels and set about pitching it to agents and publishers. Although you can apparently find a used copy on amazon for £120... in French! I don't think this item exists because I sure as hell never got it translated and know exactly where every single copy went. Go figure.

The upshot of which is that it's still sitting here a good year later - maybe it really does suck, but oh, how I wanted that book to be picked up by a huge publishing house and for all my dreams to come true but such a thing is not to be - at least not yet.

All that has happened in that year is a year has passed by in which nothing has happened.

Such is the price you will pay (if you want to view it that way) if you want to be a writer... but this is not quite true. 

There are two types of fiction writer and both are very real and proper. For some, validation comes from being picked up for mass publishing and it's a big deal. It means your material was good enough for somebody with something to lose to invest in you - and it is a big deal. It's the traditional way and it makes all of the wheels spin. It's what I've spent my whole life investing in on a weekly basis. I am not pouring scorn on it...

...but I have decided, I don't have that kind of time to squander, hanging around waiting for something to happen with my own work.

This is a really long way around of saying, I am going back to publishing my work through Bad Hare - which is my own imprint. I will likely sell as many copies as I would through any publisher that wasn't one of The Big Four, I like being responsible for my own cover art (which is not something I can bank on anywhere else), I will probably make more money from it but mostly - and this is important, I will be writing and moving forwards instead of waiting for somebody to tell me it's OK to keep writing. 

I do not write because I want to be an award winning writer. It would be nice I guess but I do not want it and I sure as hell am not hankering after such a thing. I don't write for money because I have a great job already and the actual odds on me making enough money to live on in such a niche game are slim. I do not write to be part of a group in which we all slap each other on the back and meet for beer once a month, not for kudos, sex, fame or anything else that might spring to mind. I don't even blog to try to convince anybody passing to sign up to a mailing list so that I can 'harness the audience' - to my eyes, that's cheap, desperate and smells of 'me-me-me-marketing' at its very worst - the internet is littered with them.

I write because I like writing and I want to write.

I write because so far, the people who have read what I write, like what I write - hell, some even love it.

I write because I have no idea what else to do with my life.

My only real fly in the ointment without a publisher is finding an audience... then again, here's the cover of Mary Miller's The Last Days Of California, which I thought was incredible for all the right reasons but have you read it?

No. You have never even heard of it, so I rest my case.

But sometimes, there are those little voices in my head that tell me I am Super Wrong and that I should hold out - but they are lying and I know this because this morning two things happened.

1. The voices began their dawn chorus

2. A few minutes later, I saw this in a thing Mr Gaiman did with The Guardian today:

There’s nothing like studying the bestseller lists of bygone years for teaching an author humility. You’ve heard of the ones that got filmed, normally. Mostly you realise that today’s bestsellers are tomorrow’s forgotten things.

I went to have a look at what was hot at the New York Times this week throughout a few random years. Here:

1995: Beach Music by Pat Conroy

2000: Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher

2005: Lifeguard by James Patterson and Paul Kemprecos

2010: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

2015: Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee 

The first two I have never heard of - author or book, Lifeguard is unsurprising because J.P. knows how to sell a book no matter what you think of him. Nobody cared about Larsson until Dragon became a film, so that too is understandable and Watchman is a blip on the radar - and also, compared to Mockingbird, garbage - that's nothing but a lawyer, a publisher or an estate cashing in on a legend. For point of reference with that, the week after Friction by Sandra Brown was sitting at the top.

No. Me neither.

What can you deduce from this? I'll tell you... people bought what they were sold. As always, Mr Gaiman is bang on the nose. Some made some money with their books, some still are... and at least two of them are dead.

I just want to write, so I am signing out of using my limited time on the planet firing shots at the publishing world. I am going back to flying solo - which also means I don't need to be concerned with ever looking at such lists again and can content myself with doing what I want as best I can and hopefully, finding an audience who like what I do too.

Le Fin.

Sorry it was a long-ass way around the block and if you got to the end, I salute you. If nothing else it made me feel better about the future.

---

Footnote: I do think however, that if you are writing a crime/mystery novel or police procedural, a publishing house is unmistakably the way to go. A series - like John Connolly's Charlie Parker series - needs it. I'm not sure I would have discovered it otherwise and that would make me sad. Maybe we should all just know ourselves a little better by being honest. 

Interlude: Something About Gods...

One of the finest books ever written surely? And if you happen to have mislaid your signed first edition of American Gods from back in the day... well, I guess this looks very much like a worthy replacement:

There's going to be a lot of press about this as a TV show when it lands but even if it's the finest TV ever made, it still won't eclipse the novel. If you're in the market for such a thing of beauty you can get yourself a copy right here.

Everything Neil Gaiman touches may turn to gold but everything Dave McKean works on was gold before it even left his head.

THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE PIER

Yesterday morning, the guys at the office needed to send me a package via TNT, but TNT dropped it onto the wrong van and it went AWOL. In the time that we were trying to figure out where it had gone, one of the guys asked me if I lived anywhere 'weird'.  Somewhere so weird that even Tom Hanks couldn't find it. What he actually said was this:

"Do you live anywhere weird like at the end of a pier? I can see you living at the end of a pier - it would suit you. People would say things like 'don't go down to the end of the pier, that's where the guy with crazy hair lives. Best stay away from there'."

This is one of the nicest things anybody has ever said about me and got the day off to a good start. 

My brain made some tentative connections at the mention of the phrase 'crazy hair' and I sent him a link to the book Crazy Hair and then because they live side by side on a shelf here, I also sent a link to The Day I Swapped My Dad For A Goldfish - and my pier quoting friend at the other end, promptly ordered them both.

Package still MIA with no sign of Mr Hanks anywhere, I went back to work and wondered how, out of a stupid conversation I had managed to sell two Neil Gaiman/Dave McKean books without even trying but none of my own.

Note to self: fix this.

Mr Ransom & Mr Smith on the blogging author.

A couple of weeks ago, I got in touch with Christopher Ransom (see review of his new novel The Fading here) about something so small, I can't even remember what it was but it propelled us into an email exchange on the pros and cons of blogging - on which subject he gave me the thumbs up to repost the contents of here. So in the interest of er... research on how important a blog is for a writer these days, here's the not so contrasting views between a published author (him) and  a 'not-published in the strictest sense of the word' author (me), here's that very conversation - unedited: Hey Sion,

First off, my apologies for being delayed in getting back to you.  I had a good friend in town for 5 days, during which we attended an author event for Tom Piccirilli, hit a Wilco concert at Red Rocks, hosted a bbq for my family, capping it off with one of my own author events in Boulder to promote the US release of my second novel, The Haunting of James Hastings, aka Killing Ghost (US).  Needless to say, after 5 days of work and play, all of which involved copious amounts of beer, I was flat exhausted and needed a day or two to get back on top of my correspondence ... well, enough of the excuse making.

 

I had originally intended to get back to you personally as I was intrigued by your blog response to my almost-blog about blogging.  I thought you displayed quite a bit of good humor and made the discussion interesting, especially considering I came off as a bit of jerk with respect to blogging.  The truth is, when I posted that "news" item on my site, I was lamenting my own crumbling will-power in the face of today's publishing needs and, I suppose, sending myself a bit of a reminder not to slack off on the book writing.  One of the main reasons I have held off on blogging is my fear of losing (wasting) valuable writing time.  I am, by nature, a procrastinator and time-waster when it comes to staring at my computer monitor.  And, in all honesty, I've seen too many would-be writers spend the lot of their time blogging or writing smaller pieces daily when they could have been writing 3, 5 or 10 pages of prose each day.  In other words, in addition to longing for the days when an author could afford to sit back and limit himself to writing novels and sending them off to his editor, with no further promotional responsibilities, I was talking to myself.  My post was something of a last gasp.

 

However, the reality is, that just-write-a-good-book publishing climate is gone.  If one is fortunate enough to have a publisher that promotes one's books (as opposed to simple binding and printing the thing and dropping it off at a few stores), one is EXPECTED to do one's part in flogging the book online, be that in one's blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, through email campaigns, etc.  As any writer or would-be writer knows by now, we are living in frightening times.  The book market is changing, book stores are vanishing, e-books are flourishing, revenue models are changing, self-published authors are riding a wave, mid-list authors are seeing their print deals go up in smoke, publishers are panicking about how to keep abreast of everything, and readers... well, readers are more discriminating than ever.  All this change is inevitable with the current advent of technology, but it does send author and publisher alike scrambling for a foothold.

 

Another reality I hadn't thought of, but which your post called to mind for me, is that we can't really know how the authors of yore, or those favorite authors of mine that I alluded to in my post, would have responded to the current technology and communication channels back in the day - because they simply didn't exist.  Would Stephen King, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Dean Koontz, and so many other horror, mainstream, or even literary authors have taken to blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking with their fans and the online community (whatever that is) in their day, had they possessed the tools?  I guess we can't know.  Except to observe that many of them are doing it now that they DO have the tools. All of them have formidable online presences, some of them staffed and well-funded.  So much for my notion of the old school, yes?

 

Which brings us back to the point I almost but didn't really make at all: I am in the process of ramping up my own online marketing efforts.  This will include a stronger and more professional Facebook presence, a Twitter feed run by my invisible friend Noel Shaker to help promote The Fading, and more updates on my author site.  I'm doing this for a few reasons.  One, I have realized that I spend too much time dallying online, contributing to other sites, when I could be building something of my own.  Another is, I am grateful for my readership and want to nourish that lest it go up in smoke.  And lastly but not in the least, my publisher has, ahem, 'encouraged me' to boost my efforts at online marketing and offered to boost their own in my service.  So, it's really a matter of playing the game the way the game is played nowadays.  It's making the most of the tools at hand, building a readership the way one builds a business, and meeting our publisher's commitment with deeper commitments of our own.  

 

Time will tell if my readers and new readers really are interested in hearing more from me than what I have been able to publish in novel form, once annually, but I admit I am curious to see where it leads.  I am in constant conversation about books, writing, publishing, movies, random events, ugly trends, and terrifying world developments -- all with my friends, in person and on other authors' forums.  The only real shift for me, then, will be to direct all that time and energy at my own channels.

 

Still, even as I type this, a little red light is blinking in the back of my skull.  Don't forget to write some new pages for the new novel today, that warning light is telling me.  Whore yourself out in all the best possible ways, it says, but don't forget the books.  The books are everything.  To siphon energy and commitment away from them, from their daily creation, is, after all, the first sin of any would-be professional author.

 

See how easy that was?  I think I just wrote my first new blog entry.  Thank you for continuing the conversation, and inspiring me to do so.

 

Feel free to post this on your site.  I plan to put this -- along with your very generous review of The Fading -- on my site, my Facebook page, and then plug it through Noel's Twitter feed @TheFadedMan.  

 

It's what we do now, isn't it?

 

Interesting huh? To which I responded:

These are certainly weird times we live in. Some of my most liked authors are successfully avoiding any sort of online presence at all (Chuck Klosterman, Bret Easton Ellis off the top of my head) and appear to be quite happy letting their publishers run the game for them. But to come full circle with it and to put it in some kind of perspective, I am unpublished with fiction (day job is another thing entirely) and I figured the odds were stacked against me anyway, so I began my journey planning to do absolutely everything myself. I'm kind of OK with this but I needed a great model to base it on - and I did just one thing. I copied Neil Gaiman. I really like his presence and how he deals with his audience, I like the insights into his life (even if it does seem more interesting than mine). So I decided that if Gaiman had a blog, I would too, Gaiman had a twitter account, so would I. It's advanced from this somewhat over the last 12 months but the foundation was there and  - despite still not having finished the book - feel like it's a good place to start if people do happen along to my online space. The one key thing that I think is critical in this is to NOT have a facebook page. I know so many people who are locked into the time-sucking satanism of it, it's frightening. Interestingly, none of them are particularly successful apart from on their own facebook page - which is bad self hype to believe in.

 

And it's weird too because I, like you, am a loyal reader. I will always check out Clive Barker etc... it's just how I am. James Herbert has almost nothing online, King is more info-driven, Koontz makes an effort now and again, but up against Gaiman, nobody is really knocking it out of the park. I don't think anything less of those guys because of it but like you say, that's not the game anymore... what about the readers who are in their twenties? You're going to be their Stephen King/Dean Koontz - what do they expect? I can't quite figure it out but luckily, I really like blogging. Without a publisher breathing down my neck I can blog about Queesryche if it want to or a sandwich and pretend to be on the level of Gaiman (er - that's my big plan - fake it til you make it) - do you think your publisher would expect rather more exact pimping of your own product? It's a tough call.

 

Writing is never what those who aren't writers think it is huh. For what it's worth, here's my overall thought on it. If 'you' (not you personally, obviously) want to interact with me and like what I do, I have a site and you can contact me there. I will answer (so long as you're not being an idiot). If I have something to say, that's where I'll say it. Nobody serious about what they are doing has time to go and knock on each individual 'fans' door to work like that. I am not Santa. If I've said something particularly great, other people can do the networking thing for me.

 

And that sits really well with me. Here are you and I - interacting, with purpose about something important, from an email. I'd check in or add you to my news feed and see what you had to say because I like what you do. That's enough. As a grown up, I don't expect you to drop everything to tell me what you had on your toast this morning... 

 

Man, we all griped when there were rules and gatekeepers. Now they have taken all those things away, we don't know what to do with ourselves.

 

I guess you just need to put one sentence after another and keep going... 

More came after this, but after that, it peters out into 'we have work to do' much shorter paragraphs and a promise to keep in touch and bandy around some more ideas. I guess the point of me republishing it here is this: just because you got somebody to 'print and distribute' your work (known in the trade as 'publishing'), doesn't mean you won't find yourself thinking about these things. Nobody is going to come and take it off your hands. There is no holy grail at the end of the line anymore - I'm not sure there ever was. We may live in frightening times but they can be exciting frightening times too if you care to keep hold of the umbrella when the hurricane comes knocking...

You can find Mr Ransom online here.

The World All At Once (2)

Took the day to see what was going on in the real world and found myself at a record fair. Despite a hunt for very specific things which I didn't find, I didn't come home empty handed. The plan was to pick up some wax that I did want and at least one thing that I had never heard before (or, at the outside, was very unfamiliar with). On the 'found' list was Ian Hunter's Schizophrenic album and Mott the Hoople's Mott. I also came across a T.Rex album called Billy Super Duper which I'd forgotten was even supposed to exist. Back in '84, this would have been a real coup for me, so that got bagged too. It's well off the beaten track and if you're interested in some 'under the counter' Bolan, there appears to be a copy here that's free to download - though I can't vouch for its validity. I however shall content myself with the original. I have to admit, I'm really loving this vinyl lark. Bringing up the rear in the 'explore something new' column, are The Who. I never really got into them when I should have - too busy with other stuff I guess and when I was at school, they were tagged with the 'mod' brush. A few quid for a copy of Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy seems more than reasonable. I don't normally do compilations of any kind, but they didn't have any other Who albums so I let myself off the hook. Not listened to any of them yet - that's a job for being alone in the house which will come tomorrow morning. Later, I also picked up a couple of graphic novels that I've been meaning to play with for some time. Ben Templesmith's Choker V1 and Fell V1. Throw the double finale of The Bridge on TV tonight and it's been quite a relaxing day. Can't remember the last time I did no work at all. Christmas Day probably.

So overall, those were good things to buy because as far as I can see, nobody released anything new worth a damn this week. What is it with people? All this freaking technology and still bands are stuck in a pointless rut of one album a year - two years sometimes. Nobody needs to hear the 'we were busy touring' excuse because thirty years ago, bands were banging out two albums a year plus material you'd never heard before as b-sides for all their singles. So don't come crying to me when you reach the end of the line and find no legacy to fall back on - or is everybody tied into deals that are so locked down, there's nowhere to move. Take a look at YouTube this week and how everybody has been lapping up the Coheed & Cambria cover of Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know. See previous post for the clip but that's what we want in between albums - unexpected surprises of substance.

So that's a whole week in the win column for the past and a resounding suckerpunch in the mouth for the present. Yeah, I know it's not fair to compare but too bad. That's the way it went down...

To wrap up, I leave you with this speech from Mr Gaiman which is - without doubt - the single most inspiring speech in the history of inspring speeches. Anybody involved in the arts, no matter how long you've been hammering away at it, needs to absorb it pretty much immediately. It will make a difference:

DUST IN THE WIND

Cleaning up one of my old Macs today as a hand-me-down, I was sweeping out the web history and came across a story I had bookmarked on Neil Gaiman's blog about his 'Sandman Papers' (the post goes back about 10 years or so) and how he was in something of a quandry about where to 'file' them apart from his attic. Last week, I also posted a picture of Gaiman's library which is very cool - as one would naturally expect. Which got me to thinking. If I can break out as a decent supernatural writer, what the hell have I got to leave behind of interest? I have nothing and I don't appear to work like everybody else. I thought it might be interesting to take a snapshot of it - feel free to leave comments for future discussion. I think that would be pretty cool.

I have at my disposal a MacBook Pro loaded with necessary and unnecessary tools. I have an iPad that substitutes for the Pro when it's needed and I also have an iPhone. Granted, the Pro and the phone are work tools supplied by HQ but they are here and I use them hard. I also have maybe 12 notebooks (not that kind) that vary from the pocket Moleskine to huge blank page art pads - oh, and one pen. A Harley Davidson branded Waterman that I found in an antique shop for £4. There is no rhyme or reason to what I choose to write in. There are parts of books and stories scattered from notebook to notebook, digital post-it notes, Evernote, emails to self and so on. When a notebook gets full or too messy to use anymore, I start a collating process of ripping pages out and typing them into whichever digital 'thing' has the most work done. Only then is it transferred to a place of safety and has the right to be called a 'first-draft'.

As these collations are made, anything on paper, I set fire to in the garden. I'm not even sure why I do this. I think I just like the seeds of my thoughts and stories becoming inanimate smoke and disappearing back into the "whole". The digital scraps get thrown into the trash and deleted. Not quite so dramatic, granted but it all keeps me moving in the right direction. Whatever happens, I will be leaving nothing behind that's for sure - and I'm not sure how I truly feel about that. I would quite like my papers to be filed somewhere important for people to look at in the future.

But a bigger part of me thinks, why? What for? Why do people need to pore over all the things that I threw away? The important thing surely is the story itself - and maybe some cool collectible editions if such a thing ever surfaces.

I don't think I will be changing my habits anytime soon either. I like it this way and since we had that house fire a couple of years back in which Eleanor lost everything that had been saved by her folks up until the time she left school, I'm even more set on this train of thought.

Everybody should be acutely aware of the transience of life.