Mr Ransom & Mr Smith on the blogging author.

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Interesting huh? To which I responded:

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

You can find Mr Ransom online here.

Twin Earth

Found myself with a lot of time this weekend and smartly threw it all into writing, but along the way I had a couple of ideas about some other things that crept into being. I read a decent article on branding last week and thought it was certainly worth checking over everything here which effectively meant making more work for myself. Cutting a medium length story very short, I worked on something that's been bugging me for a while. At the moment, I've not put a 'publishing company' name on any products and it's been haunting me that maybe I should. So I downed tools on Sunday afternoon, picked up some different tools and came up with a concept for my own publishing brand called Twin Earth. Eventually, I guess it will have to be set up as a business (because right now it's worth nothing at all believe me). Anyway, the logo looks like this at the moment:

and the mono version for internal usage:

I didn't want it to say an awful lot but I did want it to at least be recognisable and unobtrusive. By using a simple two colour scheme, one of which is a variation on the other, I think I should be able to consistently change the colour logo to match whatever cover design it has to go on. I'm going to sit on it for a little while and then, maybe in a week or so, I'll drop it on the cover of Black Dye, White Noise and Thieves and Vagabonds to see how it conducts itself. For the curious, there's no huge story behind it. A while back I wrote a song called Cobalt Rain in which one the lyrics is 'Now my twin earth is pacified' - and that's all there is to it. It's an expression I like a lot and somewhere deep down, I'm sure it means an awful lot more than I'm letting on.

Truth be told, I know it does but that's explanation enough.

With one eye on what I said a few days ago about doing things yourself and doing them properly, this is probably a good idea. If you missed what I said, the point was to make yourself look like a pro - and therefore become a pro. If you can't do it yourself, get somebody who is a pro to do it for you. In a market that's totally flooded and in the public eye every day, it's never been more important to rise above the MS Word brigade and set yourself apart. We've all seen them - a basic font dropped onto an awful picture and then sent out into the world to do some work for you. Sometimes I feel embarrassed for those poor products. 'They might sell well' I hear you say. Indeed they might, but so do a lot of things that are awful. It doesn't bode well in the long run and if I may re-quote myself here - it's like going to work in your pyjamas.

If you're unsure how to go about it, the answer is unbelievably simple. Take some products from a company that you respect, doubtless they'll be lying around on the shelf already - in my case this is Harper Collins because I really like their production values - and replicate what they do. It requires no small amount of thought but better to hold a torch up to Harper Collins than 'Joe Pistachio the self publisher' because essentially, the amount of work is the same whichever road you choose.

As a final word on the subject, if you really need some help, there are many students around on the internet who have redesigned book covers as part of various course projects. Some of the work I've seen out there is even better than the original commission that made it to the 'big shelves'. It's totally worth getting yourself immersed in this world if you want to set yourself apart. If on the other hand you're more than happy to be a one hit wonder... knock yourself out.

The world is watching.

The Fading: A Book Review

A prelude: I've thought of reviewing books here many times but shied away from it lest I feel the need to say something bad. Having said that, there's no harm to be reaped in playing nicely with other authors whose space I wish to share in the future. Perhaps a good way to approach this is by simply saying nothing at all about books that suck. This also appeals to my sense of time - why waste the precious stuff slating something I didn't like in the first place.

Which segues nicely into this. Christopher Ransom's shapely new novel.

It's been a while since I've read a book in a single sitting - or as much as a single sitting gets these days. Long gone are those times when you were 13 and could stash yourself away for hours on end and nobody would miss you. Ransom's previous novels (The Birthing House, The Haunting of James Hastings and The People Next Door) have all been great but read over a period of days and weeks - and that doesn't suit his style. What Ransom needs is for his stories to be chewed up and spat out as fast as you can to get the full benefit of what he's capable of. Interestingly, the inside cover of this UK version (I don't believe it's out anywhere else yet) has a teaser poster kind of thing going on that runs something along the lines of: "First there was King, then came Koontz. Now horror has a new voice..."

Something like that anyway. It's certainly the first time I've not laughed at such a statement. If you were into both of those guys the way they used to be before they got er... how shall we put this? Before they got complacent? Comfortable? Take your pick. Either way, Ransom will be right up your street. While he unintentionally mixes elements of both, Ransom is no copycat killer. He has a unique vision of all his own that I think he's only just starting to see for himself. Maybe four novels is how long it takes to settle into yourself and figure out what you think you're capable of...

The Fading is an easy read, there's nothing taxing here. It's simply a good old fashioned supernatural horror executed brilliantly. A lesser author would have taken me down a different path but Ransom, sure knows what he's doing. The book is lean as a fighting pig - there's no fat to speak of, no filler chapters that go on forever (oh yeah. we've all seen them and skipped over them, wondering why they were there in the first place) and no beating about the bush when it comes to plot. It even has a series of false endings - whether intentional or otherwise, it works great and made me kick back in the sofa and consider Mr Ransom pretty clever. A device certainly worthy of considering as I go forwards...

While I wouldn't consider it 'horror' in the traditional sense, I can see why it's being pushed down that road. It's as close as you'll ever get. Fact of the matter is, it stands alone. Think James Herbert when he pulled Moon out of the hat - or King when he mailed It out into the world. The similarities within the genre are easy to find but the key is that it really doesn't matter. The Fading has a fantastic idea behind it and an even better lead character who is able to pull it off. All supporting cast members are necessary. Honestly, there's no wastage here at all.

So, I guess whether you're hitting the beach soon, need something for a boring train ride or are just another victim of the hard drugs they're embedding into the paper they make books out of these days, The Fading really is worth the hours you'll give up out of your life for...

A Gathering...

Decided this morning to get my ass over to this at the weekend. With one eye on the future, it will be good to see how these things work, maybe shake some hands and drink some coffee.

Then I remembered I'm supposed to be going to some other 'event' of a 'keeping the peace in the house nature' and nothing to do with writing at all.

Decisions, decisions...

Sacked by your own band? You are not alone...

Funny the things that happen in the world when you're not looking. I found out today in this Rolling Stone article that Queensryche had fired Geoff Tate. Huh? How does that work? I asked myself - though, in reality, I know first hand exactly how that works. It was still something of a surprise though. No wait - surprise is not the right phrase. How about commercial suicide? If you're a fan of the band and happen to be passing by, your best port of call is to read it at source. It's full of Guns n Roses type conspiracy and rumour - but what I will say on it is how the hell do you even begin to replace Geoff Tate? That's like replacing Gene Simmons. No Geoff Tate = No Queensryche = No Interest from me and rather a lot of other people. Replacing Geoff Tate with the guy from Crimson Glory though? Well that's our relationship done and dusted for the future.

I'm sure there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that we'll never get to know about here but since Chris DeGarmo left the band in '98 (that's like, 14 years ago - wow), they've been a different band anyway. A band I've always had time for but that's only ever been because of Geoff Tate. I Certainly don't want to hear some other guy (who will no doubt want to bring his own creativity to the band now) delivering material that's been sitting in my heart since the mid-eighties. Read this as well if you want a shot at making your own mind up as to who cares about you, the listener...

But if it ain't working, it ain't working. Is this a good place to pimp Black Dye, White Noise and the interview I did with Tate on the release of Mindcrime 2? I can't think of a better place right now.

The Fading

I just can't help myself. I've got books piled high in some strange places right now - why I bought another, I'm not sure but I was picking up some vegetables last night (oh yeah - look at me knocking up real food from scratch) and I spotted Christopher Ransom's new release - The Fading. His previous: The Birthing House, The People Next Door and The Haunting of James Hastings (which has had it's name changed in the US to rather inferior Killing Ghost), have all been great reads. If you're in the mood for a skin crawler that's pretty much guaranteed to make the grade, The Fading is out on general release now. Ransom has a semi-blog here where he says that he should probably have a blog but nobody can surely be really interested, thus the 'blog' is disguised as 'news'. Looks like a blog to me though! In fact, what he actually said was this:

I really should have a blog or something more frquent to contribute to. You know, so that you will come back here again and again and I will become a fire brand in your brain and you will never, ever forget to buy my books. But then, if my books are earning that loyalty on their own, I'm pretty much sunk, aren't I? And I don't think I have all that much interesting to say that doesn't get fed one way or another into my books. Do any of you really want to read about what cute thing my dog just did today? So you care what my politics are? Where I had lunch today?

Probably not.

Or maybe some of you do, but still. I can't help feeling like such "blog" entries are a waste of my time and yours. There are enough opinions out there for people to gorge themselves on for a couple centuries, most of it about as nutritious as pre-digested celery. You need more opinions shoved down your throat like I need another spam voice mail to my cell phone. Right?

To put it another way, when I was growing up we didn't have blogs, and my favorite authors didn't blog, and I didn't miss hearing more about their personal lives, at least not unless it had to do with how such personal things helped them become a writer or how it influenced their work. My heroes didn't opine on the latest trends, celebrity divorce, or failed legislation. They just quietly went about writing novels, year after year.

When people whose work I like say things like this, I wonder exactly why I blog. What are we now? Four years into it perhaps. Maybe more. There's not much of real-value on here that, if something big happened, anybody could possibly be interested in. Sometimes I feel like I could flick the switch on it tomorrow and it wouldn't make any difference to anything - and it wouldn't.The key phrase in Ransom's statement for me is "I can't help feeling like such "blog" entries are a waste of my time and yours." Ouch. That smarts a bit because it's got more than a few grains of truth in it.

It takes a lot of time and effort to blog consistently - and I will be the first to admit that the subject matter has veered around here more than I would have liked. They - the 'experts', that is - say that a successful blog is 'about something'. Sorry. Can't do that. There's too much life in the world to talk about just one thing. Too many great things to find and discover to confine yourself to one single focus. Experts tend to define 'success' as 'money' anyway and that's not always the purpose of something is it.

That's a really tough decision - shut down blog and spend more time writing proper things - or continue as normal?

After I posted the Lulu comments yesterday, I carried it around with me all day thinking that I had been harsh quite unintentionally - well, anybody who happened to pay attention to it. After all - who the hell am I to be preaching to the world? But I still think it's true. If you're going to do everything yourself with your story, why would you want it to look as though you had only spent five minutes on it? The extension of that for me though was, does it really matter, if thousands and thousands find themselves reading your book? Surely that's the important thing?

Hmm. Somehow it seems like going to work in your pyjamas to me...

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.

What's my point here? What good will censoring books do? It might stop kids buying age inappropriate material, but they will only get it somewhere else if they really want it - much like cigarettes, horror movies, booze, condoms and whatever else you need when you're underage and determined to get on with your life.

Here's the next paragraph from the press release:

“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:

“Hardly any research has examined books. We absolutely need to start focusing on this type of media in all aspects. Furthermore, there is almost no research on profanity in the media, even though the rating system tries to keep it away from younger kids. We don't know much about how prevalent it is, nor whether there are any effects of being exposed to profanity in the media,” Dr. Coyne said. The article titled, “A Helluva Read: Profanity in Adolescent Literature,”was written and researched by Drs. Sarah Coyne and Mark Callister, as well as Laura Ann Stockdale, David Nelson, and Brian Wells, all from Brigham Young University. It appears in Mass Communication and Society, Volume 15, Issue 3, 2012.

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:

Best thing I've seen all week...