THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
Publishing a book with Lulu.com
Self-published? Indie-author? There's much written about which one of these you are if you put a book out yourself on the internet right now. One has connotations - and so does the other. Personally, I don't pay any attention. I don't class myself as either - and should a publishing deal come along, neither would I class myself as a 'published author'. I'm just a writer and it makes no difference to me. I've read great books by people who have done it themselves and awful books by people who a company has put money into, so think about that. Exactly what is the difference? It probably comes down to the justification of being able to call yourself a writer, but here we are… writing. Anyway, somebody asked me a few days ago what I thought of Lulu as a supplier/provider of products. I use them exclusively for hard copy materials for many reasons and though they're not perfect, I think they're just about the best out there. Yesterday, I received a survey from them to fill in too but I thought I'd go one better and give a proper insight into what I get out of them - and I guess, if you're new to the game - what you can get out of them.
It's worth bearing in mind, that I've got twenty years in magazine publishing behind me, so I know my way around InDesign and other useful tools when it comes to this game. Regardless, Lulu is still your best bet if you're going down this road.
Firstly, I've road-tested all of their options as hardback and softback books in many sizes. As final products, the average Joe would be hard pushed to tell the difference between Lulu and 95% of publishing companies you could pull off the shelf at the bookstore. The other 5% is pretty much reserved for the big guns who know their products well and spend accordingly. To the untrained eye however, it's not even as issue. Softbacks have always been top quality and my only gripe with the dust-jackets on the hardcovers is that more often than not, once the book is in use, the jacket flaps tend to curl. Paper too thin or not laminated enough? I'm not sure but the last couple I bought are of much better quality. I put together some 400 page dust jacket hardback blank proofs of Turn The Lamp Down Low to see how it would compare actually sitting on the bookshelf once I had finished the cover art and there's not a curl in sight. They are great. I even took one to Waterstone's to see if it would stack up on a regular shelf with some competition and it's totally fine.
Don't be afraid of testing your books out like this - what are they going to do? Throw you out?
Price-wise - it works for me. You can easily match what a bookstore sells them for and mark down your book too if you're in the mood. It depends how business-like (or greedy) you happen to feel and what your business model is. What Lulu does exceptionally well right now is handle the nightmare of getting your book on iBooks. It does take a while but that's Apple for you and not Lulu - once it's done though, I figure the percentage they take off me is more than worth it for the service they provide. I might be capable of doing a lot of this process myself but I don't really want to spend all my time in the back-room. Maybe soon, Apple will adopt the kindle method (which is "live or die by your own devices") but I doubt it - and I hope not. The iBooks method is keeping the quality of the end product at a premium. The kindle way is great too but it does mean there's no gatekeeper - and you know what, I kind of like the gatekeeper. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. I digress. I do that a lot.
Here's where the rough stuff comes in. If you've designed your book in Word or Pages - or anything but InDesign or Quark (do people still use Quark?), you'll have an inferior end product simply because word processing applications aren't built for that sort of thing. Kind of like like thrashing an MG Midget from London to Glasgow. In theory, it can do it, but we'd all like to get there in one piece and alive. I'm not trying to sell you my services here either. Totally not interested thanks - just telling it the way it is. Here's how I have always looked at it - if Harper Collins use InDesign, so will I. If they do their book covers in Photoshop or Illustrator, that's what I'm going to use.
Which begs the question of yourself - digressing again - what are you doing? Getting your book out there to tell a story - in which case, why not just paste it online and let people read it? If however, you want a great product to drive your story and your name as a brand, there is no other way but this way. If you can't afford the software, find a way. It's not hard to learn. Seriously. There should be advice about this sort of thing but I didn't think I would be the one saying it.
With regards to the cover, Lulu offer a) an upload option for your professionally produced file or b) a rubbish option that will will make your end product look like you chose the rubbish option when you were deciding. Or the "I can't be bothered getting it done properly" option as I prefer to call it. Seriously, your book will look like a school project - or maybe even just like 90% of the ebooks available in the world. We're quite far into this ebooks game now. It's not impressing anybody.
Then again, maybe that's OK. If that's really what you want, go for it. Back on subject, Lulu will cater to either option and it really is easy.
I'll end with the two things that really rattle my cage me about Lulu - and I'm pretty sure they would be easy to fix if they thought about it. The first is, in my book Black Dye, White Noise, I placed some pictures. Full page pictures that bled off the page. Now Lulu doesn't allow you to upload artwork with bleed but by making them bleed in my file, I made sure they would be guaranteed to fill the page. On the softback versions, I have an 'inconvenient' blank white strip of about 5mm on those picture pages on the top edge of some and the bottom edge of others. For some reason, they are perfect on the hardback versions. Basically, this means that whoever is making their softback versions is not guillotining them properly.
Yeah - it annoys me a lot because there's no need for it. It means I'm not getting the true dimensions I have ordered in my book. Right now, it's acceptable 'collateral damage' for doing it this way but long-term, not so sure. A little quality control wouldn't go amiss.
The second annoyance is that when making a hardback, if you take you dust jacket off, down the spine you'll find the filename of your book in a crappy font, that looks just terrible. I'd actually prefer it if there was nothing at all on there than have this. Especially as the process means this text isn't centred and has no quality control about it.
In the big scheme of things, I can take these two knocks on the head. Lulu is still, by a long, long shot, the best way to publish a book on your own terms. They also offer some fine discounts nearly every month on your own products or postage so that you can afford to stock up on your titles every now and then and eeek a little more money out of the system without passing it on to your readers.
Let's not forget, when all is said and done, your readers are everything - that's why I would encourage you to find a way to do the best job you can on your product. If it doesn't look and feel like the real thing, that will be how you are viewed. End of story.
Finally - always, without a moments hesitation, buy yourself a copy before you make it available to anybody. There's nothing like having a real copy of the book in your hands to make any mistakes jump off the page and make you feel like a fool, but better to be a fool in front of yourself than a fool in front of thousands. (That goes for blogging as well - I don't want to knock somebody who cracked the holy code but I read Amanda Hocking's blog one day - dozens and dozens of posts one after the other - and it's riddled with typing errors. Not a good thing to let slip in my mind, but apparently gazillions of people don't mind. Go figure.)
Any questions? Only too pleased to answer them...
Rock n (Bacon) Roll Over
I meant to post this earlier - I knew there was something I'd forgotten to do - maybe it deserves a home of its own anyway.
Yesterday, I took the monkeys shopping to grab some new jeans and other kid paraphernalia and we dropped into Costa Coffee for a snack - small person went for the bacon roll and her face dropped when she opened it up to find this (pictured) on her plate.
Now I'm a pretty easy going kind of guy. I hardly ever complain about anything - but when it comes to the kids, I can be a little bit of a Fuhrer. Only because I don't want them to grow up thinking that getting or giving crap is acceptable. It's a slippery slope and it ain't happening on my watch.
Anyway, the last time I was shaken enough to bother complaining about something was a couple of years ago and I went off the rails a bit at how a company like that could still function in a high street these days. Maybe I'll post a copy of the letter I wrote one day, but it wasn't very nice.
Back to the bacon sandwich: I am ashamed that I actually spent some time writing this letter to them but I keep on looking at that picture and immediately feel vindicated:
Hi. I'm a frequent visitor - at least once a week - to your store in Westwood Cross and various other venues on my travels. Yesterday evening, I had my kids with me and one of them chose a bacon roll to eat. I have to be honest here, the disappointment on her face when she opened the heated roll to find the meanest single slice of wafer thin bacon in the roll was something to see and prompted the comment "Is that it?".
I took a picture of the roll if you would like to see it. I figured there was no point in complaining to the staff as these rolls probably aren't made on site, but that was basically your shot at customer satisfaction you know and you blew it.
That roll will stay with her for a long time - and with me too - as being a really mean fisted, crappy sub standard product that you provided. It's not like it was cheap either. I like Costa a lot, always have but (struggling for ways to describe this without using bad language) that bacon roll was simply shit. Could any less effort actually have been made with something so simple?
Times might be hard out there and competition fierce but screwing over long term customers - unintentionally perhaps - by providing shoddy end products isn't going to make things much better is it.
A £20 outing ruined by a single bacon roll. Is it really worth it? I can't believe I am even complaining about a bacon roll - I might even be more angry that I actually feel the need to bring myself down to this level, but at some point, you have to stand up and be counted - even if it is over a bacon roll.
According to their website, they will get back to me within seven days. Personally, if I had a complaints department, I would insist that seven minutes is pushing the level of customer service - and if you get so many complaints that seven minutes isn't long enough to deal with everything, you're getting too many complaints and you should get back in the kitchen and remember what it's like to wash dishes for a living.
The Longest Day
Greetings Pagan friends on this longest day of the year. Greetings to non-pagan friends for that matter. I don't care much these days. Each to their own. Chris Evans has got me off to a good humoured start by playing great long songs on his radio show this morning. Stairway to Heaven, American Pie, Won't Get Fooled Again, Hotel California... man, the hits just keep on coming. Why do songs that you've heard millions of times before still sound great when you hear them on the radio? It's odd listening to all of these huge seventies monsters back to back. I would comment on it but I don't want to come over like one of those 'people used to write proper songs back then'. But let's face it - people used to write proper songs back then. Music for music sake rather than music for fame sake. I'm here to tell you, you can't listen to fame on your ipod. We should be hanging our heads in shame that we let it get so freaking lame - but you get what you pay for.
Work continues on The Ballad of the Goat Faced Boy. Biggest of my troubles is deciding whether Goat Faced should be hyphenated or not, so as my mother would say, if that's all you've got to worry about, life must be pretty good. Still, it's a valid concern that I'll probably be chewing at all day at the back of my mind. I guess I had better create a page for it somewhere on the site here. That's the problem with not stuffing yourself into a genre hole in your work - you need a lot of tabs on your site for people to find what they're after - but again, as my mother would say...
My mother also used to say "shouldn't you be doing something else right now?" At this moment in time, she would be bang on the money...
Currently listening to: DAD - Help Yourselfish & Smashing Pumpkins - Oceania.
Words, Pictures and a Bad, Bad Wabbit
I got asked on this very day to write a book for somebody. Not in ghost writing way - I don't know if I could do that even if offered all the money in the world. Well, OK maybe for all the money in the world I could but you know what I mean. This book is a bit special, I'm totally knocked out to be doing it. I'll (obviously) be blowing it from the rooftops once it's completed and I have a copy of it in my hands.
'What's so special about it?', I hear you ask. Well, on one hand, the guys that are putting it out have got the production values of NASA and on the other hand, it's something that I'm really into. That's enough said about it for now. Suffice to say, the final product could knock out an adult cow if you so desired and that's good enough for me.
Work on Turn The Lamp Down Low is coming on quickly now. I think that from here until Sunday will be a good chance to get a whole lot of it done before I'm going to have to stop again and come up for air - and that's OK. Plot is settling in. A new sharper synopsis has been written for the cover and promo stuff - I think it might even be the final version, but I'll sit on it a little while longer before I post anything on it.
I also hooked up again with my buddy Mark Poole and between us we resurrected the fallen giant that was to be The Ballad of the Goat-Faced Boy. I just need to make a few more tweaks at my side of things and then we'll reboot the whole damn thing and see what we can come up with. And this time, I'm not putting it down until the damn thing is finished. I'm sure I've posted previously about how long illustrated projects take to get off the ground but it's worth saying again. Illustrated projects take a long time to get off the ground and see the light of day - and if you're working with an artist of some value, you'll soon find out why.
Somehow, it's gotten to be quite late again - and for once in my life, I'm actually tired to go along with it. Our new-ish giant rabbit, who Eleanor calls Berry and I call much worse things, has taken to thumping her feet on the base of her house at night. Like at 4am. So far as we can tell, there's no particular reason for this but on the shortlist so far are:
1. Cat on the fence
2. Being an arse for the sake of it
3. The birds are annoying her (I'm reluctant to go with this one because she's also done it earlier in the night when there are no birds)
4. A full moon. I quite fancied this one as my favourite simply because it sounds cool but it wasn't a full moon last night. It was however a new moon. Maybe I'll make a note of it somewhere and try and figure out if there's any pattern to it.
As glamorous as number 4 sounds, it will probably come down to it being number 2, because sometimes, that's just how life is with animals.
Was It Something I Said?
Over the last three weeks, I've had three requests from authors - in not that much of a dissimilar position to me so far as I can see - to review their books and maybe hook up on their 'blog tour'. They all seem like great people and I'd really like to do this with them... and I will. Trying to figure out where to drop it into the run of things though is another matter entirely. The most obvious place to drop it is as a big feature within the regular blog posts but there's something at the back of my mind (as usual) that says if it's going to become a regular thing, it should have a space of its own here. So - three great people who are probably reading - I will get back to you shortly (later tonight) to figure out just where it's all going to live. On which subject, I picked up a copy of a new little magazine out here in the UK at the moment called How To Publish Your Own eBook. I bought it to double check on some of the more correct options for the formats I'm not so familiar with - but my problem with it is that it includes material such as "what should I write about". Big trashy filler stuff that's really not necessary. Before you know it, the next book will be "How To Release An Album On The Internet", the first chapter of which will be called "Learning to Play the Guitar". Come on guys... I know it's kind of hip right now but seriously? I don't know if it's badly approached but there's some advice in there about structuring. ie: Structuring your book to fit what the eReader can do. It's practically saying 'fuck the story - make it look good'.
No. Story first, then make it look good. The End. Although I of all people should know why it's been written like that.
Anyway, ten years ago, pdf was going to be the format to end all formats for the sort of future we have now and it still could be in my opinion, but somebody took their eye off the development ball, didn't they adobe...
The Nightmare Returns
One more time on the ride?
Just for the hell of it?
Bournemouth sounds nice...
October 27th?
Let's do this thing...
You too can do this thing - it doesn't even have to be Bournemouth. There's other places you can go...
I think this will be something like the fifteenth time on the ride, but that's OK. I've had about 30 years to fit them all in. Never fails to be anything less than a wonderful experience either...
Crossing The Frame
I've changed a writing habit ever so slightly and it appears to be working out pretty well, though it's possibly a little early to tell. A few days ago, Holly Black (new internet best friend although she doesn't know it yet because she liked my tumblr on her revamped Spiderwick covers) wrote about Rachel Aaron - who in turn had written an article on upping her word count from 2,000 words a day to 10,000 words a day. Coincidentally, that was something I'd been chewing over since I a) read what Stephen Leather said in an interview about knocking out 30,000 a day at a news-desk - or at least I think that's what he said, I can't find the interview again now and b) I stacked what I was producing towards my first proper fiction piece (Turn The Lamp Down Low) against what I was producing at the magazine. It's not unusual to turn out 5,000 words a day at the mag for something or other - under pressure too.
And so it was that I realised I was being a bit of a slacker. So this past Sunday, I shut the laptop and took up with a notebook and my beloved Waterman and simply wrote. I wrote until I had quite honestly run out of plot and my wrist hurt but found that I had turned out around 4,500 words. Doing some quick mental maths (not my best subject), I figured that if I did that everyday for a week, that would be 30,000 words (ish) - and if I committed to doing that every day for a month, that would be 120,000 words - which is pretty big novel that would need about 40,000 words editing out of it to make it a good size and well edited. The important thing here though would be a first draft. Something to work from. The intricacies of the plot itself are easy because I've been thinking about writing this for about two years in the real world and about ten years in la-la land. That's a long time to figure out knowing what's going to happen - and should a publisher happen to be passing by, I'd like to point out it's not the only one I've been planning for that long, just the one I like the title of the most and as good a place to start as any.
Anyway, this filled me with a bolt of enthusiasm to get the hell on with it - and then when I got up on Monday, I remembered the magazine was going to print and it was all hands on deck for a couple of days which stalled me in my tracks like I'd fallen into a hole in the ground.
Which brings me to today. With the magazine finished for another few weeks (but still a ton of work to do for the next issue and a book that's looming for October), it's time to get back on the wagon with the 4,500 words a day average. Possible to keep it up? I think so. The most important thing here is what I have learned - it might help you out too - and it's this:
Accept the word count. Accept that it's possible and do it. If you need to write, write. You only have to make it sound feasible in your head and you're away. My kids think 500 words is a lot and are constantly amazed, but that's just a blog post to me. Shrink the monster in your head and you'll be fine.
It sounds like a plan and right now, that's good enough for me.
From Russia With Love: Redux
I've been thinking for a while now that I need to do something with the free time that I do have that doesn't have anything to do with a keyboard and a screen. For the longest time, I've been pretty envious of people like Rob Ryan who do incredible things with little more than some paper and a very sharp knife. So yesterday, I went out to the art shop and bought myself a scalpel, a rubber mat and then trawled a few stores for cheap/damaged but cool books. Here's the result:
I'm hoping my hands will get steadier as I go along but it was a lot of fun. You start learning pretty quickly about some aspects of an art when you simply jump in. My discovery was that this Penguin/James Bond reissue from a few years back has a very thick laminate applied. Which is probably why, when I've looked at similar art in paper-cutting books, they tend to use dime store westerns. The cheapest of the cheap covers that you can slice through like butter.
Now I've started though, I want to finish the whole set. Donations of the remainder of the set along with ideas about how to display the damn things gratefully received.
Ham On Rye
Making headway with some good stuff here at the moment. Rather a lot of work continues on Turn The Lamp Down Low which is looking good right now - I'm not sure whether to start some pre-release promo five months early though. I've been thinking about making the hardback available for those who pre-order and then kill the whole hardback run after that to make it worth something to supporters - with some tickets thrown in to some of the signing sessions I have planned for it (though these won't be at bookshops) it could turn out to be quite a nice package. Let's file this under pending while I figure out what exactly such a thing would entail to get off the ground outside of kickstarter or any of those other crowd-funding sites. Can it be done totally independently? Who knows for sure, but I think so... Working at doing all of this yourself is interesting that's for sure. I was looking at the work the guys over at unbound are doing where (in a kick-startery kind of way) you put details of your project up, people who like the idea of it throw in some pledges and then, when you reach critical mass the button is presses and everybody who pledged gets a copy and maybe some other stuff. But let me throw in a question here - is it really that simple for the 'non-name' person? There's no two ways about it, Amanda Palmer changed the rules for musicians taking control of their own careers but as she herself states in no uncertain terms, she worked very long and very hard to put herself in a position whereby it worked out how it has for her. That's kind of how I see myself here - only er, several rungs down the ladder. The concept of being an author a la John Locke and making a stack of cash from the kindle model is fine, but it's not changing anything for the better in the big scheme of things. It's just proving it can be done and if that's what you want, that's fine. It's not really leaving anything behind though is it? Apart from thousands of other people also trying to repeat the formula which will obviously instigate the 'law of diminishing returns' at some point...
Anyway, the next work going live online will be a short story called The Undoing of Charles Walker. That should be published on Saturday at some point - which this morning got me wondering how many stories is a good number to have in a published collection? As many as you've written I guess, but somewhere around the 24 mark sounds like a good collection to me. I'll more than likely make a start on designing some covers for that over the coming months. Knowing myself as I do, I'll get through at least half a dozen 'finished' versions before I'm happy with the result... and then, there's what to call it. I love this part of the process. I love being creative with my own material.
Finally, I've revamped the tumblr blog over the last few days. Take a look. It's pretty neat if you love book design. Not so neat if you don't but it still looks great regardless.
Children of the Revolution (VII)
I've taken a week off. My first days off since Christmas - and even then I appeared to be up against some deadline or other. I am determined to do no work at all in order to get a good view from above as to what's going on and where I should go next. Which I suppose is actually work, but not work in front of a keyboard, so it's not quite the same. I also decided that this week, I would spend at least one single day sorting out all the things that I hadn't sorted out for all the reasons stated above. Things like finding the kids passports and being surprised at when they ran out, how much they cost and how much they've changed and not changed at the same time in the last five years. Things like looking at the extremely long list of things they need for school when they go back and wondering why they need all this stuff when they never seem to do anything with it. Then there's the thing that I wanted to do which came slightly behind all this once I got going and that was opening proper bank accounts for them both. Did you know that from the age of 11 you can have a debit card? That's great. If I'd had one, I might not be so ill equipped (still) to deal with money as I am now. That's at HSBC. Fill in a form, provide some id and you get a current account with a debit card, a savings account to along with it and you can even manage your account online. If it all works out how I would like it to, at least they will have a decent grounding in how money can be your friend and not your enemy. I blame my old man. I didn't know it at the time, but tossing the coin for "double or quits" on your pocket money every week is not normal.
Anyway, I did a ton of 'life-admin' type things as well this morning and as usual - so I don't know why I always put these things off for so long - I felt much better about life. The only thing left to do now is to drop the car into the garage in the morning. I have a feeling I've lost an exhaust clamp somewhere along the line. What was once a smooth and quiet ride has turned into something a bit clunky underneath...
What else can I tell you - I picked up a copy of Maroon 5: Songs About Jane today. 10th Anniversary edition? Where the hell did 1o years go? If you'd pushed me on it, I would have put at around six at the most. Time can do weird things to a man. Still, if you're a fan, it's worth getting your hands on for the 17 demo tracks included with the original album. Intriguing, very cool and a big signpost for any band who thinks they don't need an external pair of ears to polish their sound.
I've also been tidying things up on the blog here and over at tumblr. It makes me feel better even if nobody notices, but things are moving forward at a reasonable pace and I hate the thought of being backed into a corner. It will only come at an inconvenient time. I never really looked over the import that I did from blogger to here properly before now and man, is it a mess. It needs going back over if it's to stay and have each posts picture put back in - either that or some posts deleting forever.
I went back to the very first post I made in February 2008. I thought it went back much further than this - I'm sure I made a backup somewhere so I'll check one day, but the first line of this particular post reads:
"I got up this morning and decided not to be broke anymore. I think that’s a mighty big step. I’m so used to either just about making it to the next pay day or hatching a skin of the teeth escape plan, that it’s become the norm."
Four years on, did I make it? Well, I guess I turned a big corner at some point. I actually earn less now than I did in 2008. I find that quite amusing - is amusing the right word to use here? - but my quality of life is inherently better for it. Some might find that to be living my life in rewind, but I've never been all about making money so it makes no difference to me so long as I am happy and the kids are OK. That's not to say, I don't like the stuff - not at all. It's just not my every reason to get up in the morning. Without trawling through hundreds of posts on here to find it, if there was one decision I made when I decided not to be broke anymore - and this might help you out if you're sick of it too - it was to no longer be a consumer. Simple equation. Not buying what 'they' try and sell you every minute of every passing day leaves a lot more money in your pocket for the things you do want. Honestly - analyse what you do with your money for just one week and you'll see what I mean.
Wow. How did I get onto that train of thought?
The World All At Once (3)
I read Dee Snider's Shut Up And GIve Me The Mic this week - in a single sitting to be exact. Everybody interested in the man and the band should read it, that much is obvious, but what makes it go above and beyond that is anybody interested in being a great positive thinker, a great father and a great human being should read it too. Not that Dee was always those things, but that's kind of the point of the book. If you're smart, you can probably lay your own life right on top of it and see exactly the same patterns, even if you don't front one of the greatest bands of all time. I digress. It might only be May (OK, let's call it June because that's half way through the year), but without question, the best autobiography to come out this year... and maybe last year too. Saturday night, we went to check out Men In Black 3. I can't believe my kids haven't seen the first two movies. What was I thinking! It's pretty good. It's not quite Men in Black by numbers - which is what I was expecting - but what I got was just as good in a different kind of way. It's more self contained than previously and so loses some of the great set pieces that made the others work so well, but it's still a treat of a movie for all the right reasons. I don't think there will be any disappointment. Four thumbs in the air from four people here... it doesn't get much better than that.
On the music front, I picked up a couple of new slabs that are worth talking about too (as opposed to not worth talking about which makes a change). The Slash album - Apocalyptic Love and The Cult's Choice of Weapon. The Slash album is still settling in with me. It's a very moody piece and very, very good but much like the two Tommy Bolin albums that I love so dearly (Teaser and Private Eyes), I have to be in a certain frame of mind to appreciate them properly. If you're expecting anything like GnR or Velvet Revolver, you'll be shit out of luck. If however, you like great rock and particularly Myles Kennedy, you've come to the right place - and this is the problem I have with the concept. I really like Slash's material, but I'm not particularly overboard on Myles. He's a fantastic vocalist but I can't take him out of Alter Bridge. I much preferred the guest appearances on previous albums that worked so well but hey... it will be what it will be to you. Maybe I'm too entrenched in the past for this sort of thing.
Choice of Weapon on the other hand. How can I best describe it to you? It's like they went into the studio and decided to make every album they've made before, all at once. Including every spin-off project Billy and Ian have ever been involved in. Is this good or bad? I think the best way to view it is if you're a Cult fan - and by that I mean you're well aware the band can take you anywhere they feel like going - there will be no losers. If however, you liked a certain album by them, it will largely depend on which album that was. For me, I think it's very clever, very smart and I can take as much of this as you would care to throw at me.
Meantime, to wrap up almost whole year of imported TV from my good friends in the States - and I probably should have done this last week - nearly everything has come to an end. Supernatural was quite possibly the best season we've had in five years. Somebody needs to get their shit together and organise a simultaneous release schedule for that. Grimm had a great first season - providing much dinner time entertainment for all of us and I have high hopes for it as it continues. I've not read anywhere that it's been renewed yet but I don't see how it can fail to be. Meanwhile, on a similar subject, Once Upon A Time was a big family favourite too - after a slow start, it soon ramped itself up to be quite essential viewing throughout the weeks. Aside from Doctor Who, what the hell is the UK playing at? Don't tell me we can't do these sorts of things because we can. I'd really like to see a new golden age of TV coming out of this place but thus far, only the Who material is making any waves. As good as stand-alone shows like The Syndicate are, where are shows like Marchlands on prime-time?
Small gripe really. It's been a good week on the coal face 0f 'stuff'. I even bought myself a Frankenstein model kit so that I could do something that didn't chain me to the laptop. It looks simple enough but the last time I made anything out of bits of plastic and glue, I was about eight.
Building it seems like a piece of cake to be honest - the painting on the other hand looks like it might require no small amount of concentration. I'm half tempted to hit his face with some Kiss make-up and see just how bad I can make it look. The other half of me wants to do it properly though. Maybe I'll do it properly and then get imaginative on its ass in a few months when it's been sitting in the kitchen doing nothing for a few months.
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...
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:
The World All At Once (1)
I figured that I had better get my act together and start writing some long pieces for my blog here and spent some time last night racking the grey matter as to how to do it properly. The World All At Once will, more or less, crush my week of pop-culture consumption into a slick view on the week that just went by. I'll aim for Saturday or Sunday for posting it, but let's see how it settles in... Yesterday, I got the word that Black Dye, White Noise and The Language of Thieves and Vagabonds had both been release on itunes/ibooks and at Barnes & Noble for the nook. Thus began an afternoon of downloading and checking - and as a bi-product of this cocking about, came across a couple of really good books for ibooks (and probably the kindle too but I couldn't be bothered looking). They're both by the same person, both self-published and both really freaking good. Honest. Take it from somebody who throws books out of the car window if they suck before the end of the second chapter.
The author in question is Saffina Desforges - the books are called Snow White and Sugar & Spice - and if I'm not very much mistaken, she lives somewhere not so far away from me either. I thought I might get in touch, but then I read her blog and was put off by the fact that she seems angry and self-righteous about everything. All the time. Been there, done that and it will come and bite you on the ass no matter how good your book is. Then again, like one of my old bosses said to me: 'you're not here to be liked - you're here to get the job done.' Maybe I'll just read her books and leave it at that - though it's worth pointing you also to a page on her site where she details nefarious tactics by agents who really should know better.
Nice cover for Snow White - I really like both that and the forthcoming Rapunzel.
There's some other interesting books on there too that look like they might be worth the time of day - one thing at a time though. I already have a stack of books that I'm not getting through very quickly at all. That means Skin Deep is being shipped to print in the middle of the week so there's not going to be much going on except burying my head in that - on which subject, I interviewed Jovanka Vuckovic last night. What a fantastic lady - one I am now pleased to call a friend. We have much in common. More on that some other time. I might publish the full interview here later in the month as we spoke of many, many things - not all of it relevant to the mag.
Not strictly something from this week, but rather from last month. I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair magazine a few weeks back. I always thought it was a 'mag for women' but as it turns out - if you can see past the top-end advertising and the lure of celebrity for its own sake - it's a great read. The writing is top-notch and the variety of material in there is quite inspiring. Their ipad app is beautiful as well - better than the print copy I think. It didn't take long to win me over on it either, so we'll drop that name in the 'win' column for the foreseeable future. Nice work.
The new Marilyn Manson album is kind of strange. I wanted to love it like I loved Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals. Love it for all of its wanton destruction and no small amount of effort put into the minutiae of the project. What I got however was an album of songs that sound like Marilyn Manson might sound when everything had got a little grey around the edges. An album he might make when he knows he's on the rocks. Maybe one in which the headlines are slipping away but he needs to put a product out all the same so that it doesn't appear to be too long between albums when you look in the history books.
He can do better than this. You know what he should have done? He should have sat on a beach for a couple of weeks (or perhaps a dank cave - either will do) and fleshed himself out a plan like Amanda Palmer did. A plan that would redefine Manson to the world forever. If anybody could have pulled this off, he could. I don't know anymore. Maybe it's just too much work once you don't have to worry if there will be breakfast on the table tomorrow. There's a lot to be said for staying hungry.
Thus, disappointed with the thing that should have been a supernova this week, I reverted to type and dug into itunes to find something of value, only the truth is that I couldn't be bothered looking that hard, so I let it ramble on shuffle like I do most days - then I remembered that earlier in the week, I'd found a nugget of vinyl on ebay that I'd bought but not paid for - which would explain why it hadn't arrived yet. I must have been through at least half a dozen copies of In The Dynamite Jet Saloon (Dogs D'Amour) over the years - this should be the last time I ever buy it again. It's getting hard to find great vinyl on ebay - everybody thinks their shit is worth a lot more than it is - or at least to somebody who wants to listen to it rather than collect the damn stuff. There's a record fair on next Saturday so we'll see what gives out there. The last one I went to, I picked up about seven albums for under £20, which is really how it should be...
The Devil Inside.
For those of you perhaps who are not so eagle-eyed, I've posted a couple of new stories up in the last week. You'll find a tab in the navigation bar titled Pulp Fiction which has a drop down menu where you'll find Swarm and The Angel Who Overslept. Now that they're alive in the world and I can see them from the outside in, there are perhaps a couple of little changes I might make, but for all intents and purposes, knock yourselves out... The odds on you chancing by here as opposed to Neil Gaiman's pages (which is the only thing on the entire web that I check on every single day) are slim. Slim still means an opportunity in my mind, thus, today, I relink to his story about Maurice Sendak, Art Spiegelman and the New Yorker - simply because everybody who is interested in life, being a parent and being a human, should read it and soak up its knowledge.
A chance sequence of events last night, forced my hand to be curious about a writer who goes by the name of Donald Ray Pollock (probably because that really is his name). I predict rather great things ahead for Mister Donald - and am more than impressed/encouraged that he appears to have started writing a little later in life than most. Not that he should give a damn what I actually think though - he's doing just fine by himself.
The world is full of PR and marketing people who like to bandy about phrases such as "...great book and he is only 24". I had absolutely nothing of interest to say to the world at 24. 34 too if I'm really honest with myself, but a few years on, I'd like to think it's finally coming together.
With my curiosity piqued by reviews, respected comments and a great looking cover for The Devil All The Time, I bought in. For the first time ever, I bought the ebooks for my pad/kindle and also ordered hard copies too. The first bit because I couldn't wait and the second because er... I'm not entirely sure why I did that but it feels right and the sort of thing I would pick up in a bookstore off the cuff. Anyway, this is good stuff if you like that American 'road' style. There's an excerpt here at Scribd that will tell you at least what you're getting yourself into.
Whenever I find a good published author with the weight of a big company behind them, it's always great to see them do a nice job on the guys site. Donald's is certainly one of the much better ones out there - which pretty annoyingly makes me look at this one all over again. One day, I'll be happy with it for more than a few weeks at a time.
It's kind of heart-warming to see an author who you can point at and say "they do this sort of thing."
I tried and I failed. I simply don't just do "one sort of thing".
Is that so wrong?
Hulk Smash Loki: Job Done.
If you've not seen Avengers Assemble yet, don't go anywhere near the play button. On the other hand - if you have, you might well appreciate this little 'reworked' set piece. If the clip disappears, don't blame me - I can't believe it's even still up there.
Soundgarden: Avengers Assemble Video Pimp
After the little preview post from a few days back, here's the beast in all its glory...
My work here is done. Go see it.
Pictures for Pleasure.
This morning, the postman arrived with no bills - I repeat - no bills, and a copy of Charlie Sexton's Pictures for Pleasure. I had actually ordered it - he didn't just drop it off out of the goodness of his heart, but wouldn't the world be a totally brilliant place if that sort of thing happened.
I love this album. Always have and I hope I always will (no reason why I shouldn't). Check out the video clip at the bottom of the post if you're curious. I often wondered why he didn't explode in the sky off the back of this (and I can't quite accept the fact that it goes all the way back to 1985) but he seems to have followed a path that worked for him at heart. That's always more important than doing what the record company tell you to do - which I think was much the case here.
This buying vinyl lark has had much scorn poured on it by my friends (I use the plural loosely), but seriously, if you have even the slightest motivation to go down that road, the experience is so totally different from clicking a few buttons in itunes, particularly if you're old enough to remember what it was like originally. For the rest of you, maybe not so much. My kids think I have lost the plot totally, but they will learn...
Here's this weeks reading list - and next week as well probably. A little bit different from normal. Not sure I'll get through it all but the heart is willing. Whenever I talk about books with people, I normally get met with lame ass responses like "I don't have time to read anymore". Which rather begs the question, "What do you do?" I have two kids, a full on day-job, an awful TV addiction and a ton of other stuff that needs constant attention. I rather think that right here, right now, in 2012, people sleep far too much for their own good.
Rubbish in, rubbish out. Nothing in, nothing out. There's an equation for the rest of your life.
I sort of got invited to the Train show in London tomorrow night via an interview I was going to do with their support act Matt Nathanson (previously mentioned here) who is supporting. Turns out Matt got sick today - which is a big pain in the ass but if he hadn't caught it today, I would have given it to him tomorrow - I feel freaking awful. I don't think cancelling the show is on the cards (Matt not me), so don't go around saying that's what you read here. I will however say this out loud in case anybody important is listening. Despite my best attempts to get 'a somebody' to agree to Matt and myself doing a decent interview over a coffee during the day, until about three hours ago, they were still angling for me to do it in the dressing room of the Hammersmith Apollo sometime in the evening. Frankly, that's a shitty idea and a crappy way to treat somebody who actually wants to help promote your artist long term and will get behind him in every way possible. Besides which, I've been in that dressing room before to do important stuff. It's not big and it's not clever in there...
Towards the end of the Fin Costello interview in Black Dye, White Noise, there's a passage where Fin talks about exactly the same thing when he was on assignment to shoot Train back when Drops of Jupiter came out. Maybe it comes with the territory. Is nobody wanting to take a stand in the music business out there and take things back to being done the right way for all concerned? It's no wonder everybody is running scared.
The new Train album - California 37 - is excellent by the way. To wrap up, here's that Charlie Sexton video I was talking about which sums up pretty much everything I'm thinking and feeling today:
Published and Damned.
What a crazy week. This past weekend we hosted the Great British Tattoo Show at the Kensington Olympia where lots of people got tattooed (self included), lots of people got their photo taken with other people and a good time was had by all. There'll be a ton of material kicking about from that over the next few days - we're just collecting all the photo shoots together, but some bright spark forgot we were moving offices this week as well, so that kind of threw a bit of a spanner in the works. File under pending for a little while longer.
The good news on that front was that earlier this week I had the opportunity to get on top of some of my own things. I took delivery of a big stack of limited edition hardback and softcover editions of Black Dye, White Noise which look brilliant. I'm pretty damn pleased with that all round - so much so that I even stayed up all of Tuesday night figuring out how to format correctly load up for the kindle, ibooks and Barnes & Noble. The kindle version went live this morning - the other two will apparently take a little longer. How much longer I'm not sure but I've heard it can be a few weeks. Once I know, I'll rustle up a post because it's pretty stupid for one route to take about 10 hours and the other to take hundreds of hours.
That leaves me free to get on with Raised On Radio next and figure out what the rest of the year has in store. I'm also working on two freaking huge monster book projects. If I can pull it off, they will be quite something to have in the arsenal. One of them has a publisher attached already, the other is a personal project that's going to take some real hard work to pull together but it will be more than worth it.
Sometimes I think that sleeping might be a good idea but that never got anybody anywhere in the twenty first century.
Anyway, while I was running up e-reader docs for Black Dye, I remembered that the red-headed step-child that is The Language of Thieves & Vagabonds had never really been pushed, so I did that too. Here's the link for it on the kindle - same thing applies for ibooks and the nook as above. I'll let you know. If anybody out there is clued in the ebook front, perhaps you could drop me a line over whether it's even worth bothering with the kobo thing?
I've said my piece on smashwords already. Using that as a shop front for your material is a joke. It might be easy and it might be free, but taking something I've worked my ass off on for months on end and handing it over to a store that's happy looking like a junk shop is not for me.
Oddly, I've just realised that nobody on the face of the planet is talking about the Sony Reader anymore. I think we need to consider that product dead and buried.