THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
A Dog Post
So... it looks as though Badger the dog is a bit of a problem child and also a little far away which I'm actually a lot sadder about than I imagined, but yesterday we went to see this fellah:
He's called Kevin (who the hell calls a dog Kevin?) and he's only a pup really - I think we might go back tomorrow and take him out for a walk, see what we make of him. Give him another six months and he might even have grown into his ears. He looked a bit down in his cell at the shelter - that dog needs some countryside, some biscuits and new name...
Let's do this thing.
Two Books and a Dog
14th June huh. I am going underground until the end of the month to finish these two projects on the desk. One is the novel, the other one is the comic book project. Not that they're out of control or anything but it would be a good feeling to get them out of my hair, send them out into the world and kick-start some of these other things I have planned for the year. I may blog, I may not - depends if I feel the need to talk to somebody at exactly the moment that I want to do it. Blogs are good for that sort of thing.
•••
As alluded to in the last post, we're looking at moving house soon - that can mean only one thing. Time for a dog! Eleanor is pretty relentless with this and she shows me about 100 a day that need a good home. I'm trying to keep a lid on it myself but there's one that's got me by the heart-strings. This is Badger - and he has my name all over him...
I'll keep you clued in because as we all know - whatever it is you do in life, no matter how great or humble - people are always more interested in your dog than they are in you.
Fact.
•••
Currently reading: The Third Policeman (Flann O'Brien), If you're curious, there's a much better and more intriguing write up on it here at BookSlut
Currently listening to: Queens of the Stone Age: Like Clockwork • Tori Amos: Little Earthquakes • The Violet Burning: Drop Dead
Intrigued by the prospect of but not blown away by the prospect of: Man of Steel. Bitching cast though...
Massively looking forward to seeing this Big Star movie and Now You See Me is a very exciting prospect indeed!
Moving Things Around
I believe it's traditional at this time of year to think about "going outside" - not that I've been inside since last year but it feels like it sometimes. I don't think anything in a 300 mile radius counts towards going away - or maybe it does. Anyway, Florence is firmly on the radar for me now. Being as I've never been there before, that will be a good one but I'm probably going to have to toss up between Copenhagen and Paris to round the year off. I could possibly do both but not as 'nicely' as I'd like to. That might come down to the toss of a coin and I don't much care which side it lands on. I could quite happily live in either place if pushed. More than anything, it will be cool to bring in some other influences other than the four walls that exist inside my head to mess things up a little.
We're gearing up for a house move soon which has played nicely into my "we all own too much stuff" thesis. This last weekend, I went through The Books and split them into piles of "love it or lose it". I'm getting there - honest - and it's a lot easier once they're loaded into iBooks on the Pad to let them go than it used to be. This sort of behaviour is reserved in the main only for general fiction. Books that I've picked up, read and moved on but there's a whole other stack of books that I think will be around for a long time because there's been love and attention paid to them - and a reasonably large stack of books that are unlikely to ever see the inside of any digital reader. They must also stay - which kind of answers a lot of questions people may have. If it's not available as a digital book, people will still buy it - and keep it. Other people will see it on a shelf whereas they are unlikely to ever see your travelling library of data.
I still have mixed feelings about all of this but that's OK. We're in the middle of some change. Hell, when aren't we.
A lot of recycling was done as was a lot of throwing away. I still think I can get myself down to six objects and I hardly ever buy anything, so I'm totally unsure where all this 'stuff' comes from. Some of it is from boxes that have remained unpacked since we moved here in the first place and if you had been here, sometimes the contents would have surprised me as much as you. Anyway, whatever's left, I could probably live without in the event of an emergency but one thing is haunting me - and that's a very large stack of photographs that my Ma gave me. Family stuff - some of which goes way back before I was born but is relevant that nobody will ever care about other than me and her. What the hell do you do with photographs? I have half a mind to scan them and load them up somewhere and get rid of them. It's not the kind of thing you look at unless you happen to open the box they're currently in. I'm thinking that with a good scanning session, at least the two of us would know where they are and would almost certainly come across them a lot more often than we would open a box that's more than likely headed for loft storage.
And yet, there's something 'real' about them being in a box and being able to rummage. They're aged. Some are torn. Some have writing on the back that can't simply be replaced with a caption. I don't know if that's just me being sentimental. Maybe I'll scan them and put the box into storage as well.
Travelling light in the world is not as easy as it sounds, believe me.
•••
Right now, I have an appointment with the last episode of Game of Thrones. Let's do this... so while I entertain myself with dragons and crows, you could maybe check in on this - which is most peculiar but very, very cool:
Badgers Writing Music and the Death of a Giant
You can put your own commas in the post title - think of it as interactive (or not) if you wish to play that way. •••
At home, Rhiannon has taken great offence at the news that there is to be a badger cull around these parts and written a letter to David Cameron about it. It's a good letter too... she even took a photo of a dead badger she found in a graveyard (don't ask) to enforce her disgust. Said badger was of course not part of the cull (at least I hope not) it looked pretty old to me. Actually, it looks like it fell out of a tree but that can't be right. The letter then goes on to give the government a royal hammering about testing products on animals as well. Be interesting to see if - and how - they respond to her logic. I hope I'm not creating a monster...
•••
Meanwhile, back in the real world, works continues on 'the novel' - I can see the end from here, so I've begun to type it up. A process I like very much. It feels very real and productive to simply get on with it making some edits along the way. It's got me wondering though if technology has changed the way writers write. When the best thing you have to hand is a typewriter, do you type knowing if you don't get it down great the first time, you will have to type huge amounts of pages all over again? Or is that just the way it was? Maybe that's only a question that can exist in hindsight.
I might pick up a typewriter and see what I make of it. It can sit next to the record player in what shall become known as 'The Past' - or something.
•••
On the music front, I've never really paid extremely close attention to Tori Amos and I'm trying to put that right because I think I've been remiss. A while back though, I got sent an advance copy of the new Goo Goo Dolls album - now it's available to the world, I guess I had better say something about it.
Having spent the best part of the weekend with the album for the second time - which is called Magnetic - it's good and bad news if you were excited about it. The good news is that there is much of it that sounds like the Goo Goo Dolls should. The bad news is that they sound like they're only pretending to be the Goo Goo Dolls. I don't think the Dolls were built for this sort of success. It's all very 'Bon Jovi' in that the songs/stories of the high times and the tales of the low times all sound exactly the same. Once you've fallen into a formula, it's apparently very hard to get out of it. I feel mean and dirty by being critical of them but with every pass I have taken at this record, I forget it's playing and can't remember anything that happened on it - my ears are only pricking up at the last track on the album 'Keep The Car Running' which is a direct repeat of what I thought about Let Love In as well.
Go figure.
I thought it might be me that was changing but I've also been listening to Queens of the Stone Age (... Like Clockwork) and that's exciting right from the first few seconds. I'm not going to say anything about ...Like Clockwork. You should go listen to it because it speaks for itself and certainly doesn't need me to chip in on the conversation.
•••
...and goodnight Mr Banks. The world will be a smaller place without you. I didn't like all of your work, but the ones I did, I loved and were life-changing. The sort of books that one might write a short essay about on how it changed how you saw yourself as a writer.
Neil Gaiman wrote this yesterday:
We were never good friends, mostly because we were never in the right places long enough. We were pleased to see each other. We ate together. We talked. We liked each other's work. We always figured we'd have more time.
"We always figured we'd have more time."
... "more time". Shut down your machine, turn off the TV and go say hi to the people you share your life with and be interested in what they're doing. Then, in a little while, do it again. Repeat for the rest of your life, not least because we always figure we have more time.
But we don't.
Horror Tattoos
“DO YOU HAVE TO OPEN GRAVES TO FIND GIRLS TO FALL IN LOVE WITH?”
This was a great project - I had so much fun with it and made a few friends along the way too. It doesn't get much better than that really, particularly when the end product is as great as you hoped it would be. It's probably a good idea if I let the book speak for itself. Here's the blurb from the back cover:
When it comes to popular themes within tattooing, there is no doubt that horror themed tattoos are always lurking in the shadows.
It's also available at all good newsagents and bookstores - internationally.
DETAILS:
Softback • Full colour • 164 Pages • £7.99 • ISBN: 9780956530783
"THAT. BOOK. IS. AMAZING. I have never been more impressed with an article, a magazine, or even a book that I've been a part of EVER! I'm so fucking stoked on that thing I can't even tell you.
Really though, I can't say it enough! It blew my mind cover to cover. So well laid out, so well made... fuck it was simply perfect... and I mean that whole heartedly. If you ever need anything again, please just ask and I'll be on it like white on rice/fat kids on cake/shit on a blanket."
Mike Moses (Who you can find here)
FOR THE FINAL TIME: CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON:
It's also available at all good newsagents and bookstores - internationally.
DETAILS:
Softback • Full colour • 164 Pages • £7.99 • ISBN: 9780956530783
A Catch-Up With Myself
So, as has been pointed out to me, this 'not blogging' thing has not been going so good. It wasn't a lot of blogging but I did indeed post here. Sometimes it helps me clear my head and hey.... it was relevant. If you have eagle eyes - but not necessarily realistic hair or gripping hands - you'll have noticed that I've carved up the site a little - built a new store, threw away the new store - things like that. The tab up there titled The Priory pretty much does it all now. If you click on something, you can either read it or it will take you to a page where you can read about it and buy from there. It's hard work making things simple sometimes.
•••
Aside from rummaging out work that should be on here but for reasons best know to myself, I have kept off, this week has seen some more chapters written of 'the book' - I'm determined to finish it by the end of the month. It's getting big now too and is starting to look like it might continue into something else. Then again, I could always bring it to a juddering halt which is a much preferred option. I have learned something about myself this year and that is I don't much like things that are set up for continuation. It's OK to decide to continue them later but to leave something unfinished is just a royal pain for everybody. You only need to look at how much grief Clive Barker gets about the next instalment of um... well, all of his series that he's promised more of, to know that it's not a smart game to play. I bet he wishes he had never said anything about it.
•••
I know I don't post much about the day job here, but sometimes, you see something that's so damn good it's worth sharing. This is a piece from Otto who currently works at Kings Cross Tattoo:
Beautiful. I have nothing else to say about that... you can find him here along with many other cool people I might add.
•••
Back to work...
THE GREATEST SONG IN THE WORLD
From the humble office desk to the most raunch-infested tour bus, the eternal question has been posed more times than that of the existence of Santa. “What is the greatest song of all time?”
I can answer this - but you’ll have to put up with a few hundred words before I do, otherwise it would be a pointless exercise (not that it isn’t anyway, but that’s half the point isn’t it?).
As time has meddled with my plan for immortality and whittled down my options, I find I must have posed the question to myself many times and I believe that until very recently, my response was based on the song that happened to be my favourite at that particular time - which is a mistake many people make - you need to dig far deeper than this.
Part of the solution can be found in the names of the songs that repeatedly turn up on such a list, but first, let me give you some examples of making grievous and shallow errors in judgment using this criteria:
1. At some point in 1987, I would have sworn on my life and yours that the Poison cover of Rock n Roll All Nite from the Less Than Zero soundtrack was it. Reasons? a) Kiss cover b) party song c) the neat addition of the words "Mr Rocket" at the beginning. I see now that this is foolish in the extreme - particularly after listening to it again as I write this just to be sure. Idiot.
2. The first song that ever made me cry was Red Army Blues from the Waterboys - this was a strong contender for many years but if it had been that good, surely more than seven people would know what I’m talking about…
I could carry on like this for a long time. I could make a list of 1000 songs that have explanations attached, but I’ll save you (and myself) from the inanity of it all. The other mistake people make is listening to others opinions.
The two stalwarts of this list that are the easy way out for all radical non-free-thinkers of the world - Stairway to Heaven and Bohemian Rhapsody - are misnomers. They are two of the greatest rock songs ever recorded but they don’t sweep the board of all the pieces. Respectively, one is captivating and brilliant in its execution, the other is captivating and brilliant in its execution of attracting people that simply don’t get the first choice. No, we must cast our nets much wider than this. We must avoid ABBA due to their appeal to only clubbing homosexuals and housewives who never go out of the house (OK, and me - my love for ABBA pre-1979 is no secret). We must avoid the catalogues of the Gods also. The Beatles, the Stones, The Who, The Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis and Roxx Gang are not allowed to play. This slot is reserved for that one special moment alone.
The choices are too obvious and whichever song you choose, a like-minded fan is able to come along and say things like “but what about….” and you will respond “Hmm - that’s a good point” and then out-think yourself.
Is there any mileage in including anything from the last decade? I think we can all agree that would be a waste of time. How about two decades? Let’s make it three! That’s a little bit harder but nothing is springing out of the trap-door that can wipeout my pitch.
Which basically leaves us with approximately thirty years of music to dive into - 1950 to 1979 and that’s a mighty big playing field. One really doesn’t have to look too hard through those years though. There are many mighty songs from all three decades but I’m talking about the ones that stay with you forever. The ones that make you reach for the volume control when it makes an appearance on the radio.
The song must transcend gender, generations and genre-fication. The damn thing has to make you want to stand naked out in the street and cry because you wish you had written it. The tournament was not however won without a fight.
There were some strong contenders: Charlie Rich - The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, Carly Simon (and Toni Stern) - It’s Too Late, Don McLean’s materpiece American Pie - they all fought hard for the title, but it was a no contest before they even got in the ring.
Without question, the best song ever written in the entire history of songwriting comes from the magical pen of Tom Evans and Pete Ham. I can hear what you’re saying… who the hell are they? These guys are from BadFinger - the track in question lay buried - and with good reason, still does - at the tail end of their 1970 album No Dice. There it would have stayed forever were it not for the keen ear of one Harry Nilsson who took it, gave it a good shake and delivered the most brutal song the world will ever witness. That song of course is Without You.
Most people think Nilsson, as one of the most prolific and talented writers of the era, wrote it himself - a fact that I’m sure he wasn’t overly vocal about correcting. Anybody who knows anything about songs and their structure, either from an educated level of having done it themselves across to those who are simply able to appreciate the art-form, will find nothing is missing from Without You.
There is not a lyric out of place or a chord that doesn’t seamlessly melt into the next. Many have tried to ride the coat-tails of Nilsson and all have failed. Even Mariah Carey didn’t have the balls to pull it off. This is because Without You is a man’s song. It doesn’t sound right coming from the lips of a woman. When Nilsson delivers it, you see a man on his knees, a man about to cut his heart out with a rusty spoon. A man who above all else, has lost his single reason for being. Carey delivers it like the incredible vocalist she is but that’s just not good enough to cut through the ethereal ribcage that protects the soul from harm.
Women may be the only ones who bleed but it takes the emotional train wreck of a damaged man to truly show the high price of being human.
An Interview With Andrew Kaufman
People are strange. People are not only strange when you’re a stranger but they are also strange when they see fit to put their name – their actual given name, the only thing which holds any weight in the outside world – against something they have been smarmed into believing is magical and wise.
I’m not sure ‘smarmed’ is a real word, but roll with it.
During the run up to the second interview in my life that actually means something to me personally, my friend Mike shows me a link to a book he – and there is no other word for it – got smarmed into buying for his Kindle. There are more than a hundred reviews saying how great it is and maybe three of them are honest. Mike declares it to be the worst book he’s ever read in his life. As do three other honest people. I check out the author’s blog – his wife runs a book club in some ghost town in Texas which has almost a trillion members. Maybe there’s nothing else to do in town that day because the gun club is closed for redecorating. Or something.
We like to illustrate our points around these parts, thus, completely independent of each other (this conversation is taking place over our favourite chat client while we are both supposed to be doing something else) Mike looks at how many reviews there are for Andrew Kaufman’s The Tiny Wife while I drill into All My Friends Are Superheroes.
Neither of us is seeing many reviews for Kaufman’s books and yet Mike declares the first of these incredible beyond belief, I declare the second to be so. We decide that ‘people’ are indeed strange and sometimes, incredibly stupid as well, but that’s OK. It’s good to be the keeper of a great secret. It’s not our fault that people don’t read books that are good for the soul.
Anyway, there’s magic happening in the world right now. Read any Andrew Kaufman – he will immediately and completely become your favourite author of all time and that comes with a cast iron guarantee. Over the course of the next few years, you will tell smart, sexy folk whom you respect, all about him and share thoughts you have generated yourself from reading his books in dimly lit passageways around the world. Sometimes – as I have four times so far – you will give his books to people you meet and insist they read them. To tell them about the book (and you can pick any of them) is not enough. You must physicallyhand it over to ensure the job is done properly.
I digress. A lot. Mr Kaufman picks up the phone. He is either running or putting out the trash.
“I’m outside right now. Could you call me back in like, 30 seconds?”
On a particularly childish level, that’s enough for me. Or maybe it’s spectacularly grown up. It’s not for me to decide. There is a train of thought that says you should never meet your heroes in case they turn out to be dicks. I call Mr K back anyway because, frankly, this one is safe. Andrew Kaufman may be a lot of things but a dick isn’t one of them.
“Hey, where’s your accent from?” This is he to me… thus follows a story from me to Mr K which feels odd to say the least. I tell him some stories of my own travels and a small part of me hopes the wind that blew the seeds into his head will blow them out again but nevertheless, this leads us to a place that I hoped we would reach very quickly. I give full disclosure that I am not about to the cover the same ground that was dug up on his recent UK tour in support of Born Weird, but instead will take it for granted that those interested will find these places for themselves.
The place I wanted to get to quickly was the common ground of both of us having children. It makes a difference.
“Once you have kids, you realise that you’re no longer indestructible. Until I had kids, I never had to risk,” he says. “It’s easy to take huge risks and leave things to chance when you don’t have them but once you do, there’s just so much more on the line. Everything is so much bigger.” You see. Wise is seeping through pores.
I offer Mr Kaufman my twin towers of a question – and that is, Michael Chabon once said that when his wife became pregnant, he found that he suffered from ‘provider syndrome’. That is: ‘Holy shit, how am I going to provide for my family?’ and the other – possibly Neil Gaiman (but I may be mistaken, so don’t quote me on that) – once admitted he suffered from ‘imposter syndrome’ – are these identifiable demons?
“One hundred per cent. The good part about having kids is that you no longer have to wallow or over-think things. Once the kids arrived, my productivity went way up because I didn’t have time to second guess myself. I didn’t have time to ponder decisions. I found with my writing that I had like, 45 minutes to work on a piece. So it’s not about being precious and agonising over decisions, it’s about making them and moving on. That was really effective for my writing because I can really over-edit. I enjoy the editing process, I really want to get everything super-tight and I don’t want there to be an extra or unnecessary word anywhere and sometimes that process is achieved and you don’t even notice. You keep going on and on and on and on – until you stop because you’ve simply run out of time. But when you have kids, you don’t have any time so… I would say that was a huge deal for me.”
“The other thing – imposter syndrome – it’s er.. yeah, I’m feeling that right now. Somewhere in my head, a voice is asking me why you’re wasting your time speaking to me. Aren’t there real writers out there who you could be talking to at this point?”
Touché. That same person is in my head wondering if there isn’t a real interviewer out there that he should be talking to? We are the same age, so this is excellent common ground to occupy.
Falling between genres
I have always been curious as to how an author finds a way to slip himself between the cracks of something I thought rarely possible. In this crazy place we call the 21st century, everything has a genre – a pigeon hole in order for lazy people to find things – thus, my train of thought is, how has he escaped this? Using Clive Barker as an example of a ‘fantasy’ writer, when he is evidently so much more than that, how does the genre thing sit with him?
“I do feel like I’m in a little bit of a lack of genre – let me answer that in two ways. I think that literary fiction is a genre. I say this to people and those same people say that I’m wrong but to say the phrase ‘literary fiction’ is to denote and suggest some sort of quality worthy of attention and that may be, but I don’t think Clive Barker is saying that he doesn’t pour his heart out when he’s writing his stuff, so I think that genres are really based on conventions. One of the conventions of the literary genre is that it’s realistic, it’s certainly 300-plus pages, it’s usually a coming of age story or a couple in crisis story. I mean, there are really hardcore conventions within the literary genre even though people don’t necessarily think of it as a genre, so that’s my first answer.
“My second answer is that I feel like I fall between genres. One of those being literary and the other being fantasy or perhaps science fiction. So, I’m not against genre, I’m not against structure. Genre is just a way of structuring a story right? People really enjoy structure and people really enjoy having a story told to them in a way they can easily comprehend and consume. People tend to like one certain kind of story – they most often like the same story being told to them over and over again, like detective fiction or horror stories. There are innovations inside each of the genres but it’s like a sonnet – there’s a structure that denotes what you’re going to get and then the talent of the author is to breathe life into that.
“So, that being said, I think because I incorporate aspects of two different genres, sometimes people don’t know exactly what to do with me!”
For my part, I think people simply don’t get Mr Kaufman yet. Born Weird (his new novel and available at all good book shops now – so when you’re done here, go find it immediately) is likely to be the most successful stab at people understanding what it is he’s trying to do, but then, each of his books is like being parachuted blindfolded into a new city every time you pick one up. I recount the tale of how I have so far been through four copies of The Tiny Wife (as previously discussed) to give to others. Born Weird however seems to have picked up momentum off its own back. A step forward in his mind?
“Well, some people might say it’s a step backwards too! Even though it has strange things happening within it and magical realism and all that stuff that is ‘me’, Born Weird is a much more conventional book than The Tiny Wife or Superheroes – and certainly a lot more so than The Waterproof Bible, so… it’s a three generational family saga, which is a convention…”
I am far too good at interrupting for which I apologise, stating that All My Friends Are Superheroes is beyond convention – it doesn’t fit in anywhere, it’s a simple work of genius that looks like it came fully formed, with utter clarity and ready to roll. It may have taken five years to write or ten minutes. It stands alone…
“That was so not the process. That was my first book, right, so if you’re writing your first book, you’ve got two things going for you…”
That you’ve got nothing to lose?
“OK – you’ve got three things going for you! First of all, you’ve got a bunch of material that you’ve had hanging around for a long time. You have this war chest of stories but the important thing is that – well, the metaphor I always use is that I was simply a guy who had a TransAm in his garage and every night after work, I’d go out and tinker around with it. I’d spray paint something on the side or try to get the transmission going and I was totally just doing it for fun because I wanted to see if I could get it on the road.
“When I got it on the road, it operated way better than I anticipated and people seemed to like it. And then it was time to write the second book and all of a sudden, I’m walking around calling myself a mechanic! There’s now an expectation that I know how to fix cars, so the professional aspect of it… well, it’s a weird loop when… well anytime you get what you want, it comes with some weird sort of kickback. It’s a monkey’s ball.”
A monkey’s ball? That phrase hasn’t made it into my sphere of influence yet though I think I know what he means.
“That’s why that story is so resonant. Any time you get what you want, there’s always something that’s going to come along and present itself as the shadow of that deal.”
Was Superheroes tough to take from birth to toddlerhood or did it wander out into the world relatively easily?
“I lucked out with that really well. I finished it, I looked around and I found a company here in Canada called Coach House who had published a couple of books that seemed to be similar in tone from that pop culture side of things. I sent it in and my editor picked it out of the slush pile and they went for it. So I got super lucky with that, but then Telegram picked it up in the UK and from there it started spreading all over the place. That came out in 2003 in Canada – in fact Coach House is pushing a 10th anniversary edition right now which is cool. I don’t think it hit the UK until like 2005, something like that.
“But anyway, it’s been out for a long time. When I wrote that book I was single and I lived in a one bedroom bachelor apartment and now I have a house, I’m married and my kids are six and four. The arc of the last 10 years has been crazy – but then everybody experiences that as they go along in life – don’t they?”
“You know what I’m talking about with us both being the same age, right? From 34 to 44 were crazy years, but when I think back to 14 to 24, those were pretty crazy too. Twenty-four to 34 though… not quite so crazy actually. Not a lot changed in those ones, just discovering a lot of dead ends really.”
Figuring out life
For my money, I like getting older. I like having money, being dignified, being able to stay win a hotel without wanting to throw shit out of the window, having a car that starts in the morning…
“Knowing how to cook, wearing clean clothes – I hear you! It’s all about responsibility right? The more you’re willing to accept, as you get through your responsibilities successfully, that gives you the confidence to do more, it’s a vicious circle. But you’ve just got to keep climbing because the view gets better.”
“I’ve already started on writing something new. I have to. It’s what I do. I can’t stop – for me writing is just… well, there’s that theory that your dreams are your brain’s way of processing everything that happened to you in a day. To me, it feels like that’s what I’m doing with my writing. I really don’t know how to keep everything together and keep my brain clean and running well without writing a story – because when I’m writing a story, I’m trying to figure out something that I’m trying to figure out about myself. Every single book that I’ve written is… well, I can track all of them.
“All My Friends Are Superheroes is about me being afraid to commit to get married. The Waterproof Bible was a really sad story about loss and that came from dealing with the reality of when my wife and I had a bunch of miscarriages. The Tiny Wife was about getting out of the tunnel of having two kids and dealing with all the diaper stuff and trying to find the love for your wife again. Actually, Born Weird is really the only one I don’t really know exactly what the hell I was working on.”
So – here we are at the crux of why Mr Kaufman is the greatest writer on earth. Within The Tiny Wife (which is my favourite of his books and it may be for this reason) there’s a paragraph that looks exactly like this:
“Perhaps one of the hardest things about having kids is realizing that you love someone more than your wife. That it’s possible to love someone more than you love your wife. What’s even worse is that it’s a love you don’t have to work at. It’s just there. It just sits there, indestructible, getting stronger and stronger. While the love for your wife, the one you do have to work at, and work so very hard at, gets nothing. Gets neglected, left to fend for itself. Like a houseplant forgotten on a windowsill.”
If that isn’t the most eloquent and honest paragraph in the history of literature, I don’t want to read what is. Maybe you also have to be male and have kids for it to really ring true. I put The Tiny Wife down at that point and went outside to look at the sky and think about it. It’s officially the biggest paragraph ever created. I reveal that I have quoted it numerous times to many male friends but it is never something that I will show to any females I know because to know this will be both devastating and heartbreaking.
“Ah dude – that’s beautiful. It’s really nice to hear that… I feel like I really accomplished something with that book. When you have those kids, it’s hard proof, man. You don’t anticipate how different a dynamic it’s going to put into your relationship. It’s so much work. You can’t believe your partner is doing as much as you are because God knows you seem to be doing so much of it – it’s a recipe for resentment and you don’t have the time to do the passionate, loving thing. It’s a hard time.”
With one eye on the introduction to this piece regarding what shall hereafter be known as the Crappy Book of Many Reviews, I wonder if any of the dirt that the media is kicking up about the publishing world ever concerns him. Is going it alone something he would ever consider?
“Well, we’ll see how well Born Weird sells! But no – I don’t think I could do it on my own. I’m a writer that needs an editor. I need an editor to read my stuff and say what’s working and what’s not. I need to work with someone who can make me focus the story, make it sharp and show me where it’s not working. My stuff wouldn’t be nearly as good without my editors. These people made me a better writer. Fact.
“So, that’s point A. Point B is that I suck at promotion. I can barely get my invoices in. I already feel like I don’t have enough time to write just by being alive and having kids – so what, now I’m going to run a publishing company? Design the covers, get people to spell check? There’s just so much maintenance and from where I’m standing that looks like… well, why the hell would I want to do that? They do that for me. They take a cut, but that’s fair man. Distribution? I mean come on – does anybody know how hard that really is?”
“I remember in the mid-90s, when I lived in a town called Halifax, for a while there it was the ‘new’ Seattle. There were all these bands who were popular and were getting a lot of attention and they all decided to form independent labels but it didn’t work for any of them. Even though they got an 80 per cent cut on the royalty, instead of 15 or 20, they still didn’t end up making any money… you know what I’m saying here. The people in publishing are professionals, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it and I totally trust them. I’m really happy with my deal – the Friday Project in the UK particularly. They understand that the nature of the kind of books I write depends on word of mouth.”
“I was just over in the UK for a week and it was so much fun to work it. When I’m in Canada, the fact that my books are actually in stores is so abstract to me, so to come over there and see them on shelves was a real blast! I have to say it’s been fun.”
I need to wrap up here, otherwise we could be at it all night. Seriously. Hmm…how to wrap up something like this? Unintentionally and out loud, I wonder if he’s able to dump his previous ‘children’ having given birth to a new one, and I ask this specifically because I have heard Mr K say, on more than one occasion, that you ‘have to keep moving forward’. As we’ve seen, there is no small amount of personal trial in those previous works. I’m not sure every writer could keep from pointing that out to interested parties.
“Totally. I can totally let it go. Absolutely. As soon as they’re published… well here’s the deal. I hand in my book, my editor will say I need to do one more draft and inevitably they are right. By the time I have done that and handed it back, I am so through with it, hate it so much and never want to see it again. That’s when I know that it’s really finished and we are done.
“When I finish a book, it then takes me some time to recoup from the process because it’s so emotionally draining – I get a little depressed and my emotions are a little out of whack but I am definitely not mourning the book itself. That sliver is out and it’s not emotionally causing me any problems any more.
“That’s healthy right? That’s how writing should be?”
We are done here. Andrew Kaufman: Not a dick. Official. I knew that before I started but it looks good written down all the same. What I do know is this and you must remember it well: Andrew Kaufman writes extraordinary books – for those who take the time to read and listen to what he has to say, the world will seem a better place by the time you get to the end of any one of them.
And when you’re Andrew Kaufman, that’s about as good as it gets.
The Next Project: Comics!
There are many good reasons why I shouldn't do this, but I'm going to anyway. Work has begun on this:
I've seen the cover art in development and it looks great - as soon as we have something that we know will happen, I'll post it. We mocked up a page today to make sure it was going to work in the same format as the horror book. It does and it looks something like this:
That, my friends is all I can give you until a few more weeks have gone by. It goes on sale 2nd August but as we get a little bit closer, I'll have a pre-order date when they will arrive in big boxes and start to be shipped out. I know I said it before when I did the horror book, but working on a project coming from a magazine publishers (as opposed to a book publisher) is insane. Instead of months and months of waiting, the two of us who are working on this (that's right - two of us) agree when it's complete, then it gets shipped to print and is back in a week to be pushed out to the world. It's hard and a little bit fraught, especially towards the end but more than worth it. If you're being a smart-ass and spot any mistakes in the page above, calm yourself. It's a rough and may change. I was illustrating a point.
Anyway, according to my calendar, there are three more to come after this in 2013. Be careful what you wish for - somebody just might give you licence to do it.
•••
I got nothing else for you today except to tell you I've been busy revamping the store here - I've brought it all back in house and it works great even though there are still a few tweaks to be done - as usual, the more I consider how it works, the more work there is to do. Insert smiley face with a slight grimace here if you wish.
An Interlude
A brief catch-up on myself as some of this will lose its momentum time-wise if I don't post it. My horror tattoos book continues its journey across the globe this week with copies shipped out to places with oceans between here and there. Some individual copies have arrived already - this one for instance with the mighty Brian Ewing:
I did have that moment that everybody has once a project is finished in which I wondered if it was as good as I thought it was - or even as good as I wanted it to be - but it looks like I hit all the right buttons. It officially launches tomorrow but I see a few have already made it to the shelves. I heard a story earlier this week in which one of the stores put them out because they had been delivered and they sold them all on the same day. Pinch of salt but even if it's close to the truth, I'll put that as a tick in the win column.
•••
Meanwhile, work continues on "The Book". So much work in fact that I now know that it won't be called A Murder Of One. She is telling me that she wants to be known as something very different now. I'll see how that pans out over the next few days.
•••
And now, I must return to not blogging.
A Short Break In Proceedings
This will be my last post here for a little while - maybe a month or so. I have projects to finish - projects that you might even like to see, dammit. So, in an attempt to point myself in the right direction, I'm going to see how I cope with shutting down a large percentage of my online activity for a little while. It will be hard and I'll definitely be around (the day job will see to that) but for all intents and purposes, I need to clear my head and step away from as many distractions as I can - and boy, am I easily distracted. I also need to revamp the site a little behind the scenes but that's no big deal, just some tweaks.
I might even change the way I post here too - I haven't quite worked it out yet. File under pending...
Birds, Books and The Young Blood Chronicles
The guy who lives next door to me has put up this metal bird feeder thing. You know the kind - it's got hooks on it and from the hooks dangle cages that have bread or nuts in them. The smaller birds (right up to the starlings and thrushes) are quite adept at sitting on the little perches and hacking away at the goodies inside the cages. The wood pigeons however are not so agile. I've seen them try for the gold but they've figured out that all they need to do is hang out on the wall and eventually, food falls on the ground - at which point, they simply fly down for it. It struck me that this is pretty much how publishing (and many other things in life) works. The methods are different but the end result is that everybody eats. The key ingredient however is that you need to be gathered around the bird feeder to stand a chance.
We also have a Barn Owl that lives somewhere around here. I don't see it very often at all but last night, it flew down from a tree and pulled the whole bird feeder over. It didn't even seem that interested in the food that spilled out. It was as if it had pulled it down to prove it could eat everything if it wanted to but the owl only looked around it and then flew off - probably looking for mice, frogs and other tasty morsels.
The moral of the story is, if you're going to be a bird, be an owl.
•••
I'm finding it hard to switch gears this week. Moving from horror to comic books for project number two is not as easy as it sounds. There's a stack of books still sitting on the table here full of monsters and people of interest... out of the whole stack, if you're really into that kind of thing (and if you're here, I'm guessing you have at least a vague interest), the biography of Boris Karloff is more than worth a damn but I think I'll spend the coming week in the company of comics and see what flies out of the pages. Any excuse will do to sit around reading comics in the sun (while it's here)... not that I needed one.
•••
Talking of the coming week, following on from my post of a few days ago, my short story The Magic Of 1978 (working title) will be finished up by Monday/Tuesday. Thinking about what I previously posted, I'm going to pitch it out at some top end websites (one at a time) that it wouldn't look out of place on. Having chewed it over for a couple of days, to go for a printed magazine is the wrong thing to do at the moment. I need to gain some traction. Plus - the only place I have to tell you all about it is online right here (and twitter maybe) but here's what I figure:
If I posted: "My story, The Magic of 1978 has just been published in Killer Stories Magazine" - the odds on anybody ordering it are probably quite low. Some might but I think most wouldn't. Not yet. Hell, I don't order some magazines in which there are things I totally adore.
But, if I posted: "My story, The Magic of 1978 has just been published online at killerstories.com" - the odds on fingers clicking the link (because, duh, it would link) to at least take a look, is actually pretty high. Really high in fact and that's a good thing. Job done for everybody pretty instantly - no losers in that scenario.
It's not saying that print is dead and is not for me, because it is for me and very much so - but it's rather like trying to score a job when you've got nothing for people to base an opinion on. For any of you doing anything in the world today, whether you want to be an artist or a comic book writer - name your poison here - unless you're hunted down or are very good at playing the game, you really need some kind of track record for something.
Those are my immediate thoughts at least - it's what the internet is great at, so to push forwards, using the web as a tool for such things is not taking a digital or traditional stance at all. It's simply using a tool because there will be another story along soon enough and that will need a different thought process behind it.
•••
A huge box of books arrived this morning of my horror tattoos book - if anybody is passing by and would like a review copy, drop me an email with details of your magazine or website and I can get that organised pretty sharpish - like today/tomorrow. Once I've mailed copies to all the important people in it, there will be a reasonable amount left for publicity purposes - on which note: first come first served seems like a good rule to dish them out to.
That said, being as I'm so damn happy with it, I'll also give away three copies from my own box - not for any reason other than to share some horror love. I'm not big on buttons and banners on here saying what a swell guy I am for doing so, so we'll just leave it here as a textual afterthought. Again, drop me a mail telling me why you want one and I'll pluck some good ones from the millions and millions of entires that will come in from around the world...
Thats enough for today. Time for some rock n roll and new stuff from Fall Out Boy. The album is Fall Out Boy/Saves Rock n Roll. Man, if ever the world needed FOB, it's now - good job guys. These are all in order from top to bottom and form what I think is collectively known as The Young Blood Chronicles. Lap it up:
Footnote To Previous Post:
And sometimes, I think it would be much easier not to think about it and revel in irrelevant but cool stuff like this:
The Modern Author Has Too Many Choices
I've been left to my own devices for the next three days. Three days in which I only have to look after myself and feed some animals. You'd think that I'd be bolting out of bed in the morning and chewing the day up like a day-chewer (great monster up for grabs there) but it actually takes some acclimatising to. I feel like there's something I should be doing, like I've lost something or left something behind. I'll figure it out for sure - it will probably take me three days though... Today, I have in mind to finish up a short story - that's my very singular goal. Actually it's quite a long short story. It's currently running at 14,000 words, so if you printed and bound it on thick paper, I guess it could fall into the realm of being a novella. Assuming that my synapses will start connecting again soon and that becomes a reality, what then?
I have a few choices I guess. I can 1: Try to sell it to a magazine, 2: publish it here or 3: wrap it up as a digital short and possibly also 4. smile secretively to myself and never do anything with it - in the big scheme of things, I don't think option 4 is much good to anybody so we'll throw that idea in the trash.
I'm thinking out loud here. If anybody is passing by who would care to comment, it would be interesting to see what others thinks of the idea.
So: 1. Sell it to a magazine. That means working up a shortlist of magazines that I think it would sit well within and would welcome it. If they pay, that's cool too but not for the money - more for the process of selling a story that was perceived to be worth something. I guess this will take a few weeks or maybe even months. I wouldn't like to speculate on how other magazine editors like to work despite my close proximity to the role.
With point 2, I could simply finish typing it up and post it here. That would take maybe 20 seconds and the whole world could read it. The downside of that are things like a) is that really perceived as publishing it? b) it depends who passes by to read it and c) can I quantify the extra audience gained?
Looking at point 3, that also has variables. I could a) wrap it up as a pdf here for free download or b) do a) and attach some kind of payment mechanism to it, c) launch it to the various number of e-reader stores out there and see who bites or d) taking it one step further, I could record it as an audio download and make it available as a short audiobook download only. That last option would be interesting that's for sure.
All of which suggests that any or all of those things are possible to do in a relatively short amount of time and all I need to is decide. I guess if you take the digital side of things away, you're left with what writers of the last however many pre-digital years have always been faced with, which is also interesting if you want to play things old school.
Looking at these choices, I think it all rather depends what I want the story to do for me, for itself and for me and the story as 'partners'. Here's what I'm talking about:
Would I like to be able to say I've been published in (for example) Weird Tales or McSweeneys? Sure I would. That would be something people would pay attention to in the future. It lends a lot more authenticity than dropping it on here - but then again, dropping it on here means people can read it immediately and I'm in control. If I write fast enough, I can potentially broadcast enough material here in a month that would take me over a year through other avenues.
A little part of me thinks that writers shouldn't have to think about this stuff too often… but then, those are the things that signify the difference between what the world will term a professional author and somebody who simply owns a website - no matter how professional.
And that perhaps, is what it all comes down to. How do you want to be seen? What's important to you and what do you see as professional and 'going somewhere'. I believe in commercial circles, this sort of thing is called having a 'business plan'.
Maybe it's like having children - you may attach hopes and dreams to them but what happens in the real world is they have their own ideas about things and how people interact with them is not for you to decide. All you can do is point them in the right direction. I might be closer to the truth there than I think.
I've read dozens of story compilations this year already and it's only the super elite whose names I can recall. What good did getting published in a collection do for those forgotten people?
The peculiar thing in all of this is that the story will be the same wherever it goes.
A Murder of One
Amendment to post from a couple of days ago - I think it was a couple of days ago, they're all blurring together at the moment - the one in which I said something like I had time to get a move on with Raised on Radio. Well, I have, but not quite as much as I thought. This afternoon, after signing off on Horror Tattoos, I opened the dreaded 'schedule'. Once upon a time, it even looked like a schedule but now it just looks like a list of titles with some numbers next to them that I presume are dates. By itself, that might be fine - it's the added notes that scare me to the point of squirrelling myself away with the first season on Mad Men for longer than is healthy. The 'schedule' says that I need to deliver the next book in the sequence in about eight weeks for an early August launch. This is the one that I have the choice with of science fiction or comic books as a subject matter - of which I'm going to head for comic books based on nothing other than I need a change of pace from 'those kind of outlandish worlds' and instead will choose 'a different outlandish world'. Regardless of the work itself, I find myself looking forward to getting stuck into this one too. It will be interesting to see what turns up along the way - I already have some really fine interview subjects lined up but right now, I'm quite content to let the dust settle in my brain before I go searching for junk again.
Or at least part of me is - I've also got this overwhelming need to finish something else. I've started many books, more than 80% have fallen by the wayside, waiting to be turned into something that can carry a story for the full length of the journey. Turn The Lamp Down Low is big and needs time because it... well, it kind of does its own thing and it's written under certain circumstances so I can handle that one taking a while. No... it's this other book - A Murder Of One - that's poking me in the ribs on a daily basis. The damn thing wants to be finished more than anything. Eleven chapters down - not quite sure how many left to go but it's telling me it's past the halfway point for sure. One thing I do know is this - this one needs to go out to the 'big shops' (ie: will be seeking agency representation) but I still couldn't help myself from messing about with a cover design just to see how it might pan out in the real world. Plus, I always like to proof my work in a 'real book' situation and get them run off at lulu for that single purpose - don't ask me why but inconsistencies jump off the page when you're looking at it as a finished product.
I digress. I have an appointment with Defiance...
If you do not have a similar appointment, you may look at this instead because it had me scowling at it for quite some time:
Yeah. That's what I thought too...
A Murder of One
Amendment to post from a couple of days ago - I think it was a couple of days ago, they're all blurring together at the moment - the one in which I said something like I had time to get a move on with Raised on Radio. Well, I have, but not quite as much as I thought. This afternoon, after signing off on Horror Tattoos, I opened the dreaded 'schedule'. Once upon a time, it even looked like a schedule but now it just looks like a list of titles with some numbers next to them that I presume are dates. By itself, that might be fine - it's the added notes that scare me to the point of squirrelling myself away with the first season on Mad Men for longer than is healthy. The 'schedule' says that I need to deliver the next book in the sequence in about eight weeks for an early August launch. This is the one that I have the choice with of science fiction or comic books as a subject matter - of which I'm going to head for comic books based on nothing other than I need a change of pace from 'those kind of outlandish worlds' and instead will choose 'a different outlandish world'. Regardless of the work itself, I find myself looking forward to getting stuck into this one too. It will be interesting to see what turns up along the way - I already have some really fine interview subjects lined up but right now, I'm quite content to let the dust settle in my brain before I go searching for junk again.
Or at least part of me is - I've also got this overwhelming need to finish something else. I've started many books, more than 80% have fallen by the wayside, waiting to be turned into something that can carry a story for the full length of the journey. Turn The Lamp Down Low is big and needs time because it... well, it kind of does its own thing and it's written under certain circumstances so I can handle that one taking a while. No... it's this other book - A Murder Of One - that's poking me in the ribs on a daily basis. The damn thing wants to be finished more than anything. Eleven chapters down - not quite sure how many left to go but it's telling me it's past the halfway point.
One thing I do know is this - this one needs to go out to the 'big shops'.
Lords Of Salem: A Review
The killing joke about a Rob Zombie film is the unpredictability of what's about to happen. Thus far, his movies have been increasingly confident - a term I wholly dislike because it sounds like I know what I'm talking about as a film-maker but in this case, I mean nothing other than how obvious it is that Rob is getting pretty damn good at this sideline of his. Is it a sideline? Perhaps not.
In Lords of Salem, Rob has created a rare beast. It's a movie that embraces everything that was great about seventies horror - it pulls and tears at Don't Look Now, Rosemary's Baby, Altered States, The Devil Rides Out, acts like it was made for $8000, looks like it cost more than it probably did and will either leave you with a bad taste in your mouth or feeling like you got clipped by the wing mirror of a passing car.
More arthouse than multiplex, its success lies in how unsettling it is. The plot is solid (if not well trodden) and simple enough to allow RZ to do what he's done to it. If it were any more complex, it would have lost an awful lot of its visual appeal that's for sure. It's certainly not a movie to rip to shreds in the search for a reason why either - more something to live through and experience - and that's what makes it far superior to the dirge normally dished out in the name of shock and awe.
Worthy and of note here - which makes a change as this usually comes as an afterthought - is the casting and the soundtrack. Both are pretty damn flawless. Sheri Moon puts in the best performance of her career but she is far from the only one - both Bruce Davison and Judy Geeson form solid lynchpins within the movie, Geeson particularly so with her superb performance as a landlady.
The soundtrack on the other hand, is absolutely not something you'd listen to at home - spellbindingly crafted by John 5 (no surprises there), it sits in the movie like a member of the cast. It must have been thirty years since that much thought was put into a soundtrack. So strong is it that the aural experience of the movie is just as important as what's going on visually. I swear, if the man could have found a way to drop taste and smell into the movie, he would have - it's that kind of sensory overload.
When they come to write the history books, Roman Polanski and Ken Russell are unlikely to be alone when mentioned. There will be somebody else lurking in the darkness. He probably doesn't believe he belongs there, but that would be a lie.
I have nothing bad to say about Lords of Salem. I loved it from one side of hell to the other. If you get a chance, you should do this. here's the trailer if you have absolutely no idea what I've been talking about:
Vdio Killed The Rdio Star
Something like six months ago, I subscribed to rdio - if you don't know what it is, you should check it out. It's by far the best music subscription service out there - there's very little that they haven't got. Honestly speaking though, it might not be the best - I don't know because I've never looked at the others. I have plenty of friends who moan a lot about their services but with rdio, I haven't had much cause for complaint at all. There's a few things I'd like to see done differently in the interface but it's early days and they'll figure it out. If you're already a member, you can find me here - for £10 a month, I seriously hammer it but it's without doubt the best £10 a month I have ever spent on music since the digital revolution. A few weeks back as a bi-product of this, I found myself with a free trial subscription to their new movie streaming service called vdio (natch) - along with a £20 sweetener so that I could test the beta out. Again, I have to tell you - it's pretty freaking solid. Absolutely zero glitches in the streaming. Excellent quality. There's an awful lot of material there that netflix don't have (I watched Marathon Man a couple of days ago - superb as ever) and even though I think it's a little on the expensive side, it's certainly a far superior experience to going to a rental store. All they need to figure out is how to let me buy the damn film on my iPad (as opposed to buying it on the Big Machine and then it appearing on my iPad) and we just might be in long term business.
Tonight though, all is forgiven because I've just seen that they have Rob Zombie's new movie Lords of Salem available for advanced viewing. So for the next couple of hours - that's me all figured out...
Salem and Other Stories
There's nothing quite so satisfying as the following things in life: 1. Knowing you were right about who the killer was.
2. Seeing the girl who owns the dragons outwit the 'big man' using her brain and not the dragons - well, for a couple of minutes at least.
Beginning to clear my machine down of the shrapnel that has been the horror book today. So much unused material (mostly because it was slightly off subject) deserves a much wider audience for all kinds of reasons. Like this from Chris Kutcha who I never even got around to emailing about anything, but it's still a great piece of pop art:
Moving nicely onto the desk next, I had better wrap up Raised On Radio which is sitting on the corner here looking at me with sad eyes because in little less than two months I also need to deliver the next book in the series of pop-culture tattoo books. I have a choice (I think). I can either go for sci-fi & fantasy or comic books & animation. I'm not sure it matters which, they're both as vast as each other. There's a little voice inside telling me to do both together and see what builds momentum the fastest - which is kind of sensible.
•••
So, my head is still full of monster 'stuff' right now, and I have learned things from putting it together. Some of it is pretty intriguing if you look at it from a - how can I put this? A spiritual perspective perhaps?
Let's assume (correctly) that here we all are sitting on planet earth and from this moment forward, none of us has a clue as to what the future will bring. Not really. We have dreams, goals and things we think we should be doing if we could be bothered but I think we can all agree that life has other plans for us much of the time. Those other plans probably consist of a reasonably even 50/50 split of good/bad events. The pessimistic will focus on one side, the optimistic on the other.
Here's what I found - Bela Lugosi turned down the part of Frankenstein's creature because he thought he would be unrecognisable beneath the make-up. Thus the part was offered to Boris Karloff - who chewed it up and spat it out the other side. The key thing here is that nobody actually gives a damn about what happened behind the scenes - even though I find it a neat curio now - only what actually happened.
So it occurs to me that really, if you're looking to get on in the world, it doesn't matter what your plans are, what your intentions were or even if you're talented (and 'everybody says so', not just your mum) but can't seem to get a break with whatever it is you're doing. All that counts is what you did. And I think that's as it should be because every single one of us probably had a million good ideas today that we did nothing with.
So how do you crack the code? How do you break through to the other side?
I may have figured it out after all these years. You're not the one who gets to decide - I have a feeling I read this phrase somewhere recently, but I'll claim it as my own for the next thirty seconds. You can want and want all you like, but you don't get to decide. Not even if you own your own business. Everybody else gets to decide - and that's not something you can control. You simply have to be there doing your thing when the opportunity to advance yourself arises. If you're good at what you do, you stand a chance of moving your chess piece in the right direction... or perhaps not. But what is absolutely certain is that if you're not doing your thing, you don't stand any chance at all.
Here's my new friend Boris on the subject:
"You could heave a brick out of the window and hit ten actors who could play my parts. I just happened to be on the right corner at the right time."
And that my friends, is quite likely to be the wisest thing anybody has ever said...
I Can See My House From Here...
The horror book is on my desk for another 24 hours. This is the scary part. Did I catch all the erros? Did I make any huge mistakes? I don't think so but you never know. The Gods of Print like to shield things from even the keenest of eyes as they like to reveal them only when the book comes back in its finished format. There's a great blog post about this over at Adam Rex's place - he's the guy that illustrated Gaiman's Chu's Day story. This is what he says and he took the words right out of my mouth: "When I turn in the art I'm worried that it's totally inadequate. When the book arrives in stores a year later I only see mistakes. A few months later I love it."
It's something I've talked to a lot of people about lately, big and small people too - which means it's simply 'there'. It doesn't go away with perceived success or talent. It's just one of those things you have to live with but knowing that everybody experiences it is comforting to say the least.
I did however find an ever more frightening prospect on the horizon and that would be how close the deadline for the next book in the sequence is.
Bring it...
•••
During a particularly late night session, Mr Gamble (book designer) and I got a little stir crazy and he sent me this pic with the story that some guy leaned his bike against a tree, got called away to war and never came back. Whether it's a true story or not, it's still a great picture:
I think I prefer this though which makes me laugh every time I see it. I have officially been in the house too long..
