THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
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
OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF
Sometimes, things can pass you by for no reason at all. This album - Dregen - is five years old (maybe more) and I didn’t know it had even come out but this weekend, I found it and made everything right in the world again. If you’ve ever surveyed the landscape and considered rock n roll as you once loved it to be dead and buried… dream on sucker. What a great record this is for all the right reasons and somehow, digging it out of the earth with my bare hands has made it even better.
Meanwhile, I went wandering in search of wholesome brain food and Daisy Jones and The Six might be a very decent meal. I haven’t started this yet but everything is pointing towards it being a class act for all the right reasons and if my memory serves me well, it’s also heading for Netflix as a series sometime soon. I’m hoping it will shape up to be one of those books I’ll finish and wish I had written:
We appear to be in a great place for books at the moment. Despite - or in spite - of the world proclaiming print is dead, I swear I am finding more things to read than ever… or maybe I’m just open to different kinds of things, but I don’t think so. I’m treading the same path I have always trodden really. For instance, I picked up Gwendy’s Button Box - a novella by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar - and umm… sat until it was finished (bar a couple of breaks for coffee).
King has seriously come back to the table recently. This is a great read and - with a nod to the post I made a couple of posts ago about the Pushkin Vertigo novellas - I’m seeing an awful lot to love about the novella these days. So much so, that as a writer, I’m thinking the format might suit me more than anything else. There’s something immensely satisfying about them that I can really relate too. Stairway to Heaven is a fantastic (perhaps the greatest) piece of music to get involved in but sometimes you simply need that four minutes of Back in Black to plug your spirit into the mains of the universe.
The days are gone when I had the capacity for huge novels like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (maybe not forever but certainly for the foreseeable). Not that I don’t have the attention span for such things - rather that I have other things to do. At least I think that’s the reason.
Maybe I just like reading novellas and that’s reason enough.
Sion Smith: King of the Novella. It has a ring I could get used to… and more importantly, a shape to it that suits my brain.
Now and again, I dig some poetry too. Not every day like some people do, but occasionally my heart demands it. This is pretty cool if you like such things:
Oh… I forgot about this - mostly because I bought it, tossed it in the car and haven’t actually been out in the car since:
Never really paid a lot of attention to John Cooper Clarke’s work but I went into HMV to see why some Canadian thought it still had legs as a brand and for a fiver, I figured I’d give it a whirl. It’s the kind of thing I usually look at and think “I could do that” and then don’t do because when you really listen, find it’s harder to get right than you ever thought it could be.
But hey… the thought is there.
I have a dog to walk and work to do and so should you.
Later Gators…
Origin Of The Species
I happened upon a radio show today that had Brian Eno on talking about his life - or as much as you can in half an hour. There's a point at which he's talking about the first Roxy Music album and how they had been playing and rehearsing those songs every day for two years before they even hit the studio. I like that story because it goes some way to illustrating exactly why that first Roxy Music album stands up today.
There's an earlier part too in which he talks about the first time he ever saw a painting by Mondrian and decided, immediately, that he too - and very adamantly - wanted to do that for the rest of his life.
"That's a good subject for a ploughing up of the field at the back of the head" I thought - so I fired up the hot water machine, made some coffee, sat and ploughed.
Was there somebody out there that made me want to be a writer? There is, but being young, I decided that wanting to be Alice Cooper or Paul Stanley was far more exciting and that took up a lot of time - it's a big chunk of my life to navigate around but I made it.
Books were my constant companion long before music came down the mountain and avalanched me but somewhere out there is the one person that planted this damn seed in my soul - because after all... even when I was in a band, I was writing.
There's plenty of books I could name from when I was in single figures that I still think are fantastic works of literature, but will probably never be named as such. Emil and the Detectives is one. Black Hearts In Battersea is another - both are pretty well known even now. Then there was a book called Terry on the Fence that only a select few seem to recall and that was a great introduction to how realism worked on my psyche.
At first, I thought the answer to this question was Stephen King. He took me to some dark places that I felt very much at home in after all. Then I thought harder and wondered if it were Peter Benchley because aside from Jaws, he also wrote The Island and The Deep (both of which are probably better books than Jaws) and definitely fired up my longing to live by the sea. Higher than both of these people on the list is Ed McBain. His 87th Precinct police series is the best the world has ever seen but I don't think he was the seed planter either.
I must hand the award I just made up to Stanley Morgan who wrote a series of books about a regular guy called Russ Tobin who was content to wander the world and see what adventures might come his way. They were loaded with humour, high on the sexual content (or at least a 'rom-com' version of it) but mostly they were about friendship and saying 'yes' to every opportunity that might come your way to see what might happen because the worst that can happen is that you'll find yourself back in your rented room in Liverpool selling sewing machines.
Man, we got a kick out of those books from the age of about 13 until we were 20 something, hunted down the missing books from the series in mouldy used bookshops the length and breadth of the country, hid them from our parents, loaned them to other people to enjoy (but always asked for them back) and revelled in the excitement that we had found magic nobody else had yet discovered. They are also the only books I have ever read more than once. I learned a lot from Russ Tobin.
Reading back over that, I would be more than happy with that as a legacy. Those are good things for people to say about you decades after your work has gone out of print don't you think?
Do what makes you happy. That's the lesson I ploughed up today.
Pretty Things
Isn't this just the best quote ever:
"I knew that Jaws couldn’t possibly be successful. It was a first novel, and nobody reads first novels. It was a first novel about a fish, so who cares?”
Peter Benchley
This is neat:
Regardless of what people may say about him out there, Stephen King is an icon for a reason.
So... Sunday morning came around and we decided it was time to paint the lounge. A few hours later, the first coat was done and because we had taken all the pictures down and pretty much moved everything into another room to work with a blank canvas, we were left with a choice Put all the things we had just taken down back where they had come from or take the opportunity to replace them with something new... or at least different - and while I was looking for different, I found these:
And then I found these:
All of which are just killer.... aside from the fact that a) they are all sold out and b) I need a set of five things to fill the holes in this way. The Agatha Christie ones would have been perfect but alas... the search continues. I mention it here because the Black Dragon Press store has many, many similar wonders if you like this sort of thing.
If it were up to me, I would unfurl the tube I have sitting in a corner with things like this inside...
...but you know how the compromise thing goes.
And now I need to actually do some work. No. I really do...
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.
OTHER PEOPLE SUNDAY (1)
Looks like it's Other People Sunday. I'll probably forget next Sunday but it seems like a good day to blog about all the things I've seen this week, that I've taken notice of. First up is the soon to be released (September 8th, so not that soon) illustrated edition of Joyland from Hard Case Crime. Joyland is likely the best thing Stephen King has written in twenty years. I loved every moment of it, so much so that I took some time out to review it here.
Any book cover illustrated by Glen Orbik is a good book cover but this one captures the entire Joyland world in a pretty little snow-globe all of its own. All of which leaves me with just one unanswered question...
Where are the Hard Case posters?
•••
Talking of posters, back in this neck of the woods, one of my favourite artists - Richey Beckett - has just released this fine looking piece in his store (from David Robert Mitchell’s new horror movie IT FOLLOWS):
There's another variant of the poster that looks like this:
Maybe that will match your curtains better. Regardless of your taste in decor - go buy something from him. I'm actually running out of room around here but hey, you can always make room for valuable additions to your life, can't you.
•••
Blast From The Past this week comes in the form of something I had forgotten all about. So much so, that the book I meant to buy a very long time ago has since been updated. Take a look at this:
If ever there was a subject matter that sat close to my heart, it's this.
Men dressed in fur and looking peculiar in a field for no apparent reason other than to disturb passers-by?
Maybe. Maybe not.
These images are from a book called Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage by an insanely talented photographer who goes by the name of Charles Ferger (because that's his name). There are more from the series on his webpage for the book here.
I would like to interview this man. Sooner rather than later.
•••
On the record deck this week has been Goon from Tobias Jesso Jr. If you think all the creative male singer/songwriters died somewhere back in 1975, stick your nose in and see what you think.
One man and a piano shouldn't be allowed out into the world unaccompanied. I like it. A lot. There's some fine songs lurking here... and if you do like what you hear, there's a tour on the road right now with some UK dates in the bag.
•••
On the reading front, I'm on a go slow due to writing but still enjoying ploughing my way through Knausgård (if your still unsure about him, there's a great piece in the New York Times which should help you make up your mind one way or another) and somewhere along the way, I picked up a copy of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons which despite a royally mixed bag on the review front, is suiting me just fine.
•••
And here's a playlist if you're a user of rdio.com - because I felt like it.
Le Fin.
Currently Reading This:
...and it's more than great - which is something I didn't think I would be saying. I kind of lost track with Mr King after a while and I'm still not 100% sure a sequel to The Shining is a good idea (especially one with a title that sounds like a Dean Koontz book: 'Doctor Sleep') and I really don't have the time these days to lose myself in something like Under The Dome (hypocritical maybe but I believe that starts on TV this week as a mini series - so I do have time, but it's a different kind of time, right?).
Anyway - Joyland. I've nearly finished it and will review it for guys at The Void but I suspect it's the best novel he's put out in something like twenty years - and you know why? Because he's having fun with it and letting his passion for telling a story come out rather than having to write another book because he's Stephen King.
If you like pulp stories, Hard Case Crime are putting out some really, really good material at the moment.
Get it on...
The Inferno of Dan Brown and his Code
Those of us who have read The Da Vinci Code - which is a fair few of us judging by the sales figures - can be split easily and neatly into two groups. There are those who picked it up and absorbed the story by osmosis over the period of a couple of days because that's what they always do when a new thriller comes out and there are those who read it once the hype had begun and then felt compelled to comment. If I can navigate my thoughts, this is an article about stories and what lies at their heart.
Then again, it's very possible that I might get sidetracked by all manner of rubbish.
In all my years as a reader on the planet, I have either had cause or been made to read the following classics: The Return of the Native, Oliver Twist and Little Women. I consider myself lucky that the list stopped there, but I also think I speak for many when I make the sweeping statement that they are all exceptionally tedious. I didn't enjoy reading them one iota. Conversely, around the same time, I chose to read both Carrie and The Shining. As far as some are concerned, Stephen King is the ultimate in low brow literature experiences, but based on the premise that millions of readers the world over choose to invest their time and money in him, how does that make it low brow? He has a good command of the English language. His stories are about people we care about or can at least identify with on some level and there's always more than a fair share of surprises along the way. All of which really goes to prove nothing except that Stephen King knows how to tell a story. Put back to back with Hardy's Return of the Native - which tells a 60 second story in a very long winded fashion - I'd say that was OK.
In a nutshell, King appeals to the primeval part of us. The part of the soul that's still gathered around a campfire listening to tales from the forest. 'Classic' authors however - I don't get, at least in the way that they have come to be defined. It's the literary equivalent of listening to a couple of very elderly neighbours talking over the garden fence about the way things used to be - about people you've never heard of and have even less desire to know them. At an educated guess, I think this is not because they are awful writers but because they're not dealing with 'my time'. We can't be interested in every era throughout history. Can we?
I can take a certain amount of snobbery when it comes to music and sports, but not books. The DaVinci Code is an outstanding example of the literary snob. Dan Brown never set out to change the world. It's well publicised that the concept itself wasn't new but really, all anybody needed to do was read Angels & Demons to know it was nothing more than the next book in the sequence. Having said that, he might have made an absolute fortune but when the pressure was on to deliver the next, that didn't shape up quite so well. It might have sold in its millions, but did anybody recommend The Lost Symbol to their friends in the same amounts? I don't think so. I suspect Inferno will be much better now that expectation has come back down to a reasonable level.
I've always been a sucker for a for a great story and what we need to remember is that we've been born into an era outside of the classics. There are many writers out there who, almost on a weekly basis, are stating in print that most writers today have a weak command of language. Whilst I tend to agree with that, it doesn't mean they have a weak grasp on how to spin a yarn. Thus, the ultimate goal for us all, is to decide whether we love stories or literature. We can of course love them both, but the clash comes when the literary critic gets a hold of a blockbuster. These people should be careful what they say because despite the ever advancing digital book world, it's sales from authors like Harlan Coben that are single handedly keeping every single branch of high street bookstores open.
See, it strikes me that the business of publishing and book selling are supported by authors who tell stories that people want to read - and while it's nice to think of a starving author as being noble, that pretty much sucks all round for all concerned. Coming in at it from the other angle, neither do I mind if it takes fools buying 'a Kardashian' (a phrase I am now introducing to the English language to depict lower than low-brow) if it means the kickback means another Andrew Kaufman book finds a home.
My first brush with the high brow versus low brow argument came very young as I moved through The Famous Five, Secret Seven, Five Find Outers and umm, "the ones who had no collective name for their gang but one of them called Jack also had a parrot called Dinah" - I think. (Edit: having done some research on that to refresh my memory, Dinah was actually Jack's sister. His parrot was called Kiki. They appear to be called 'The Adventure Series', but I think that's been added post-watershed as I would have been shit out of luck if I'd gone into a store and asked for them by that name. Do not confuse this series with the Five Find Outers who sported the inimitable Fatty and a small dog called Buster. Fatty was my favourite childhood detective because he taught me how to get out of a locked room - so long as the key was left in the door on the other side. I tried it many times and it worked a treat. Not that I used to get myself locked in the cellar as a kid but still, the skill was there if I needed it).
Later, and very swiftly, I moved onto The Hardy Boys, Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators and Willard Price's 'Adventure Series' - which I believe really were called 'The Adventure Series'. The Willard Price series featured Hal and Roger Hunt who were teenage zoologists, which written down sounds like the dullest piece of crap ever created but no - it opened a world of amazingness up to me. A world that up until that moment was quantum locked into nameless British villages and distant relatives that made pies on a Sunday.
As a slight aside - here's some covers I found online that are from the Five Find Outers run being published (I was a Red Dragon reader and proud of it) when I was a kid:
and a selection of the sort of illustrations that were inside:
Now take a look at how they eventually got upgraded at some point in the nineties to include shit such as this:
Seriously? Is that really a man who is somewhat short in the height department pulling a smoke from a packet? Is that supposed to show kids how smoking stunts your growth? Sadly, I think it is.
See. Sidetracked. I've totally forgotten what the point was now... oh yeah - highbrow...
It's not that I wasn't exposed to high culture when I was a kid. Far from it but there was a sensible mix which meant choice. The Water Babies is an incredible book and Kingsley should be mentioned in the same breath as people like Dickens more often. We also had Welsh kids books, the mighty Mabinogion and for some reason, a book of Danish folk tales that had been translated into English that was intriguing to say the least. I had my own comics delivered too. So to paint a very miniature picture of twenty years of history, there was always more than enough to read. Everybody had their own books and nothing was off limits. Not even Lyn Marshall's yoga book, which I mention here simply because it sprang to mind. I never read it, have only recently become interested in yoga, but as a ten year old boy, the idea of women doing yoga in superhero outfits was most attractive. Here's Lyn in her heyday on the front of an album she released. One would assume it had a book with it but then again, when you talk about the seventies you can assume nothing:
I was sad to discover in the process of stealing this picture that Lyn is no longer with us. Shame. My Ma was really into her at the time and is still doing yoga after all these years. That's a legacy for you to hang your hat on.
Way off subject, I know.
Take a look at any book on amazon - absolutely any one at all. Choose your favourite in fact. If you look at the reviews there, there will always be a mixture of shock and awe. For every lover, there will be a hater. People who love excessively want to share with other just how good that book was. People who hate in an equal amount also wish to share their thoughts. My favourites are the people that leave a one star review because it took too long to come in the mail. There really is no hope for some people.
Thus, the whole reviews/commentary process is negated to the point that - as a publisher of my own material - I have figured out that the only way to get a jump start in the world is by word of mouth. How that works in the real world is a subject for another time but basically, people trust people. Book lovers trust other book lovers, but most importantly, great story lovers trust other story lovers. That's how the DaVinci Code sold a galaxy worth of books. That's how Harry Potter took off. Press rewind: that's how Lord of the Rings took off. Fast forward: that's how Jaws went interstellar. It's no great secret. Despite the advances of technology, we're all still human.
Well, apart from the people who leave reviews about the mail service on amazon.
More on this in the next instalment perhaps...
The Birds
The rain came yesterday. I can't remember when it last rained around here - not that it's like the Sahara or anything but it's been dry for weeks now. So when it came, it was largely unexpected - and unexpected means unprepared and now I smell like wet dog. That's OK. It's mostly quite a homely smell that I've gotten used to over the years - but you didn't tune in to hear about that. Last week, some weird shit happened.
I've been planning out my next tattoo session for a while now but being out in the U.S. and among the mighty, I found myself making a small adjustment to the plan. It kind of went like this: I had a few quiet moments to myself so I went outside and took a seat in the corner to gather my thoughts with a coffee. Those thoughts turned to the ravens that already live on me and where I was going to go next with it. I looked up to find the biggest damn raven I have ever seen sitting on a fence post not three feet away from me. Slipping out my camera, I hoped to rattle off a few shots at a reasonably close range before he got tired of me and either a) flew away or b) tried to steal it from me to see if it was edible. Truth be told, it didn't seem to bother him at all. It's a pretty cool moment. I like things like that.
Satisfied with my photographic swag, I head back in to catch up with Noon - which I do, only to find he's started work on his next client but he finds the time to point to the booth next to him and tells me to check out his friends portfolio. I flip the cover and what do I find but the most beautiful tattoos of birds. Big birds. Gene comes back to his booth (for it is he) and we get to talking and before you know it, the deal is struck, the design in motion and the time loosely nailed down for a weekend when we are both free.
You don't have to believe in any Gods or be spiritual in any way, shape or form to see that sometimes, magic just happens because you make space for it to happen. I really believe that. Stop for just a few moments to let the world turn. You'd be surprised what can come out of it.
Here's the beast himself being as we were talking about him:
There's a whole bank of close-ups of this big guy. This particular one I hit with the grunge effect on some new app I'd downloaded, but there's some great source material and I'm really looking forward to getting it on. I can wait though. Let's do this thing right.
That said, some things have waited long enough. Raised on Radio comes under that heading - so, as I have a good deal of time off in November, it's time to start collating and editing (and in some cases, just plain start) what will become the next book. In fact, if I can get my head together enough and plan and work far enough in advance with the day job, I might also to be able to make a good start on Almost Human. Maybe even enough to get a first draft run out to see what it looks like. That would really be something - the three books planned for 2012 actually making it out as planned.
I watched some video clip of Dean Koontz being interviewed on a news show yesterday. He sure has a strange way of writing. From what I can gather here, he writes a page a day and then rewrites that page 20 - 30 times and then the next day, starts all over again. While that might seem to be a long winded way of doing things (and my first reaction was 'how lazy can you get') it sure gets the job done. The man has written a ton of books and when I dug a little deeper, I see that he even outsells Stephen King. That's no mean feat - we're talking something like 450 million books. The last Koontz book I read was Odd Thomas which was pretty good - I might check back in and continue with the series. I'm almost inspired to try and write like that myself - you could certainly have more than one book on the desk at any one time. Maybe I'll give it a trial run for a week or so and see how it pans out.
And talking of Stephen King - he has a new book out in the spring of next year. A little different from normal perhaps as it's a contribution to the Hard Case Crime series. I've always really loved those old pulp style covers (which is one good thing about everything from the past coming back to haunt us) and this one is a peach:
There's some more info about the book here. Count me in. I know King doesn't write in the same way as Koontz but even he suggests the same kind of routine. Maybe I should embrace it - simply some kind of routine in which you chip away at the very large stone. I think I'm going to try out a few different things between now and Christmas and log them here. If you give a damn about such things, the tab will be Mr Smith On Writing. I'll try and make them posts that don't mention anything else so that the trail of clues will eventually lead to something worthwhile...
And to wrap up today? You can check out this movie short from the hands of Mathieu Ratthe called Lovefield.
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,
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.
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.
Censorship on children's books? I don't think so...
In a press release that got forwarded on to me this week - one of my friends was obviously too lazy to write about it himself - it was suggested that books should have a rating system to protect children. Here's the first two paragraphs from the release:
"The film industry has a rating system to prevent underage individuals from watching movies deemed inappropriate, but a recent study from Brigham Young University found that many children’s novels that contain high levels of profanity can be purchased and read by any child. The study set to be published in the May 2012 issue of Mass Communication and Society found that profanity occurred over half of the time in books on the New York Times 40 best-selling adolescent (ages 9-14) novels. Profanity ranged from extremely offensive to mild and then was broken down further into categories such as the Federal Communication Commission’s seven dirty words, sexual words, and words referring to human waste (i.e. crap)."
I'm not sure what to think about this. It's hard enough to get my kids to read anything at all. Will a ratings system make their pool of choices even smaller or will a sexy 18 icon on the cover make it all the more attractive? For somebody who thrives on books, the fact that both of my daughters are pretty lame-ass when it comes to loving books is disappointing to say the least. Daughter No 1 is getting on for 16. I think she has read one whole book in her life and it was an X-Men graphic novel about five years ago. She's coming up to her exam period now and she needs to read something pretty pronto. Over the years I have paraded everything I can think of in front of her ranging from Coraline, Stardust and Sandman at the top end, right across to Twilight but even that didn't hold any stock. Two weeks, ago I took the bull by the horns yet again and bought her a brand new copy of Carrie - my thinking being that maybe she would rise to the occasion and use it as a shock and awe tactic. I found out tonight that she has made it all the way to page 14. I've not looked but I have no doubt that the damn thing probably starts on page seven or nine, like most paperbacks.
We even go book shopping occasionally - on these trips, I tell her she can have whatever she wants and she has even made some pretty decent choices over the years but every single one of them has simply been piled on top of the last one on the shelf.
Conversely, Daughter Number 2 is slightly better. We're currently rolling through the Spiderwick series and are on book four. I know she's eleven but I bought a complete set of them for myself (in one smart volume - you should grab it here) and read it in an evening. We'll get there I guess. Not so concerned about that one. She made a start on Clive Barker's Thief of Always once and we got quite far with that too. I think the lure of Christmas killed that little adventure though.
Looking back, between 11 and 15, I can tell you exactly what I was reading. The list is seriously phenomenal - I'll give you a taster. My own books of choice were things like Stephen King, James Herbert and no doubt some dubious looking Pan short horror story collections. I has a slick collection of all the Holmes books that I had bought myself, a rough as hell second hand collection of Russ Tobin books from Stanley Morgan, read Jaws and The Island by Peter Benchley that I pinched off my mum. Waded through the 007 series, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Alistair Maclean that my old man had read and put on the shelf and then went even further back to chew up classics like The Toff series by John Creasey and The Saint that my uncle would leave at my grandmother's house whenever he flew in from Brussels. You can't beat some good old fashioned airport fodder. He also used to bring back these MAD Magazine paperbacks from his trips to the States which started a whole other type of love affair. At around 14, one of my friends found a pretty hardcore porn paperback called Hotel Orgy on his Dad's shelf and we passed that around too. There must have been at least ten of us that read it before it made it back home again. Rather than lead us on to 'harder' material, we went left of field to Leslie Thomas and discovered a whole other type of literature that seemed to be acceptable to read publicly even in school.
After that, I went back to horror, adventure - sometimes even got clever by tracking down the original text for the seminal Monkey show that was hot on TV back then. As I write this, all kinds of things are coming back to me: Dirty Harry movie tie-ins and spin-offs, Jack London's White Fang. I'll stop now but believe me, this is the very thin tip of the ice-berg. And yeah - we watched TV too. A hell of a lot of it. I also had a job. Two jobs by the time I was 15.
“Some of the books in our sample had extremely high levels of profanity—one book had over 180 instances of the F-word alone. If these were made into movies, then there would be no question that they would be rated R; however, because they are in a book, we are somehow okay with adolescents being exposed to profanity in this degree. This is inconsistent and deserves discussion,” Dr. Sarah Coyne, the article’s author said.
I'm not a bad Dad. Fact is, I'm a pretty great Dad with two really well balanced kids - they might even tell you that if you asked them - but we all live in the real world and all they have to do is come into the kitchen when I'm cooking and they can hear over 180 instances of 'fuck' in about five minutes. They're used to it. I'm a grown-up, I can swear. They are kids, so they can't. The exception to this, which I think is totally reasonable, is they have been taught that if they are ever approached by a stranger, they are to shout at the top of their lungs: "Get the fuck away from me motherfucker" and go for the eyes. We have not trialled this system but it made them laugh and they will remember it well if the need should ever arise. Anyway, here's the rest of the release:
Dr Coyne needs a life - more likely though, he's probably been at university since he 'left' school and simply needs to get out more. Has he been in a school yard lately? Walked down a street? It's out there and I would much rather my kids were reading fucking books loaded with excitement and life affirming adventures than not. Sadly, I can't see that '18 sticker' making a whole lot of difference for me or them. Isn't this what they tried to do with the Comics Code logo?
I read all of these books spoken about above and hundreds more. I am well read. I am not stupid. I got by OK in school but the things that gave me a life, a job, a rapport, a girlfriend, a sense of humour, a reason to get up and a reason to go to bed where my books.
How I lost my kids to the Gods of anti-reading I'll never know but this is not the answer.
You know what, it's not even a problem.
Footnote: For the record, when we were 13 or 14, we went to see movies like Lemon Popsicle, Porky's, The Devil in Miss Jones, Bronx Warriors, Private Lessons - that's an endless list too. The ratings system didn't work then and it won't work now. Although to be fair, introducing multiplex cinemas and kicking the unholy crap out of indie cinema until it was forced to close would have stopped us, so well done everybody involved in that. Sitting in a cinema with your pals, surrounded by old men in big coats smoking unfiltered cigarettes in a movie you clearly shouldn't have been allowed in to see? Heaven. But that's a whole different story...
CRIME OF THE CENTURY
Lovely things are on the horizon. I thought we might have hit a dearth in the 'things to look at' category, but we're doing OK.
Tomorrow night, The Killing 2 begins - half the length of the first series but surely it will be every bit as essential as the first. BBC4 ratings will go through the roof. What's strange about the series is that the BBC have left the sleeper to sleep. The first series kind of took off by word of mouth/accident/design as a few people tuned in to see what the bizarre programme trailered only a few times might hold in store. Then, as the word of mouth kicked in, it spread like the Plague - and it was a long haul too. Whoever heard of a 20 episode crime drama - subtitled - doing serious business?
But the information on when the second series would be screened has been so hard to find out - until this week when the culture shows kicked in with it and Sofie Gråbøl appeared on the front of the Radio Times. Seriously, if you didn't see the first series, you must watch this. Probably the best crime drama on TV since... well... ever.
And if you get hooked on it and are looking for something to fill in the gaps in the days between episodes, Spiral comes a very, very close second.
Killer. Literally.
Talking of crime, I picked myself up a slinky autographed first edition of House of Silk, the 'new' Sherlock Holmes novel. I'm not actually sure if I'll ever read it or not but it's a cool little addition to the collection. What I am reading is 11/22/63 - the new doorstopper from Stephen King - and it's pretty good. Slightly switching tracks to work with time travel instead of the psyche appears to have done him the world of good. If you're a lapsed Kingster, it's a good time to get back on board.
I also picked up a copy of Inhale from James Michael this morning. It was a real bitch to track down but totally worth it. For the cave-dwellers, he is the man who is the voice of Sixx A.M. It's not much like Sixx A.M. but you totally see why it works. As a singer/songwriter he's quite something and should really fill in the Sixx-gaps with more of his own releases.
There's also a new Kate Bush album to be played with.
Oh, and the Nickelback album I mentioned the other day? I wrote about it here at The Void. I think I may write lots of things there. I'm in the mood at the moment.
YOU CAN'T WIN THEM ALL DAN BROWN
Whilst I was doing some research for Turn The Lamp Down Low (which for long-time readers of this blog, I should mention has taken something of a 180 turn in the road), I found this cover art for Angels and Demons. I've never seen it before but if ever a book cover said exactly what was going on inside the pages, it has to be this one.
Why it wasn't used internationally on the hardback or for the movie, I'll never know. Some people just don't know a good thing when they see it. I can't find out much else about it - it's certainly not the first edition cover of any country that I can find.
I also read wherever I found this that Mr Brown had planned another twelve books in the series. Twelve! He'd best get a move on. So far, we've had three Langdon books in about ten years - and I would had thought that this was the easy period, when your enthusiasm is high and your stock is worth something. Maybe he'll take the whole idea somewhere else. Is Dan Brown the one man who could walk away from publishing and do it all for himself?
Imagine the scenario. You're a layout dude making ends meet working on a magazine. Dan Brown calls you up and tells you that he needs a wingman because he's going it alone. Great covers, solid typography, the ability to reposition the books for the kindle etc and the job is yours if you want it.
What would happen? That would be a chain of events I would love to witness. Is it so far away? Not necessarily with Dan Brown obviously. Somebody will break the mould one day up at the top end. Stephen King? Jo Rowling? Anne Rice? It can be done. Preferably by somebody with big steel balls and nothing to lose - even though they might actually have everything to lose.
Talking of Stephen King, I also found this which I have never seen before. What a great cover. Most versions of IT are loosely based around the movie - and when it comes to book covers, that's not always a good thing.