David Bowie - Where Are We Now - Beautiful...

The new Bowie cut - worth the ten year wait? Pretty much, yeah.

Coffee: An Introduction

Scenes From The Coffee House is a series of essays with no common thread bar they were all written in coffee shops around the world. Maybe that's the thread. When I'm done collecting them together, I shall call it 'Scenes From The Coffee House'. To see what it's all about, read this again.

The Inferno of Dan Brown and his Code

Those of us who have read The Da Vinci Code - which is a fair few of us judging by the sales figures - can be split easily and neatly into two groups. There are those who picked it up and absorbed the story by osmosis over the period of a couple of days because that's what they always do when a new thriller comes out and there are those who read it once the hype had begun and then felt compelled to comment. If I can navigate my thoughts, this is an article about stories and what lies at their heart. Then again, it's very possible that I might get sidetracked by all manner of rubbish.

In all my years as a reader on the planet, I have either had cause or been made to read the following classics: The Return of the Native, Oliver Twist and Little Women. I consider myself lucky that the list stopped there, but I also think I speak for many when I make the sweeping statement that they are all exceptionally tedious. I didn't enjoy reading them one iota. Conversely, around the same time, I chose to read both Carrie and The Shining. As far as some are concerned, Stephen King is the ultimate in low brow literature experiences, but based on the premise that millions of readers the world over choose to invest their time and money in him, how does that make it low brow?  He has a good command of the English language. His stories are about people we care about or can at least identify with on some level and there's always more than a fair share of surprises along the way. All of which really goes to prove nothing except that Stephen King knows how to tell a story. Put back to back with Hardy's Return of the Native - which tells a 60 second story in a very long winded fashion - I'd say that was OK.

In a nutshell, King appeals to the primeval part of us. The part of the soul that's still gathered around a campfire listening to tales from the forest. 'Classic' authors however - I don't get, at least in the way that they have come to be defined. It's the literary equivalent of listening to a couple of very elderly neighbours talking over the garden fence about the way things used to be - about people you've never heard of and have even less desire to know them. At an educated guess, I think this is not because they are awful writers but because they're not dealing with 'my time'. We can't be interested in every era throughout history. Can we?

I can take a certain amount of snobbery when it comes to music and sports, but not books. The DaVinci Code is an outstanding example of the literary snob. Dan Brown never set out to change the world. It's well publicised that the concept itself wasn't new but really, all anybody needed to do was read Angels & Demons to know it was nothing more than the next book in the sequence. Having said that, he might have made an absolute fortune but when the pressure was on to deliver the next, that didn't shape up quite so well. It might have sold in its millions, but did anybody recommend The Lost Symbol to their friends in the same amounts? I don't think so. I suspect Inferno will be much better now that expectation has come back down to a reasonable level.

I've always been a sucker for a for a great story and what we need to remember is that we've been born into an era outside of the classics. There are many writers out there who, almost on a weekly basis, are stating in print that most writers today have a weak command of language. Whilst I tend to agree with that, it doesn't mean they have a weak grasp on how to spin a yarn. Thus, the ultimate goal for us all, is to decide whether we love stories or literature. We can of course love them both, but the clash comes when the literary critic gets a hold of a blockbuster. These people should be careful what they say because despite the ever advancing digital book world, it's sales from authors like Harlan Coben that are single handedly keeping every single branch of high street bookstores open.

See, it strikes me that the business of publishing and book selling are supported by authors who tell stories that people want to read - and while it's nice to think of a starving author as being noble, that pretty much sucks all round for all concerned. Coming in at it from the other angle, neither do I mind if it takes fools buying 'a Kardashian' (a phrase I am now introducing to the English language to depict lower than low-brow) if it means the kickback means another Andrew Kaufman book finds a home.

My first brush with the high brow versus low brow argument came very young as I moved through The Famous Five, Secret Seven, Five Find Outers and umm, "the ones who had no collective name for their gang but one of them called Jack also had a parrot called Dinah" - I think. (Edit: having done some research on that to refresh my memory, Dinah was actually Jack's sister. His parrot was called Kiki. They appear to be called 'The Adventure Series', but I think that's been added post-watershed as I would have been shit out of luck if I'd gone into a store and asked for them by that name. Do not confuse this series with the Five Find Outers who sported the inimitable Fatty and a small dog called Buster. Fatty was my favourite childhood detective because he taught me how to get out of a locked room - so long as the key was left in the door on the other side. I tried it many times and it worked a treat. Not that I used to get myself locked in the cellar as a kid but still, the skill was there if I needed it).

Later, and very swiftly, I moved onto The Hardy Boys, Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators and Willard Price's 'Adventure Series' - which I believe really were called 'The Adventure Series'. The Willard Price series featured Hal and Roger Hunt who were teenage zoologists, which written down sounds like the dullest piece of crap ever created but no - it opened a world of amazingness up to me. A world that up until that moment was quantum locked into nameless British villages and distant relatives that made pies on a Sunday.

As a slight aside - here's some covers I found online that are from the Five Find Outers run being published (I was a Red Dragon reader and proud of it) when I was a kid:

and a selection of the sort of illustrations that were inside:

 

 Now take a look at how they eventually got upgraded at some point in the nineties to include shit such as this:

Seriously? Is that really a man who is somewhat short in the height department pulling a smoke from a packet? Is that supposed to show kids how smoking stunts your growth? Sadly, I think it is.

See. Sidetracked. I've totally forgotten what the point was now... oh yeah - highbrow...

It's not that I wasn't exposed to high culture when I was a kid. Far from it but there was a sensible mix which meant choice. The Water Babies is an incredible book and Kingsley should be mentioned in the same breath as people like Dickens more often. We also had Welsh kids books, the mighty Mabinogion and for some reason, a book of Danish folk tales that had been translated into English that was intriguing to say the least. I had my own comics delivered too. So to paint a very miniature picture of twenty years of history, there was always more than enough to read. Everybody had their own books and nothing was off limits. Not even Lyn Marshall's yoga book, which I mention here simply because it sprang to mind. I never read it, have only recently become interested in yoga, but as a ten year old boy, the idea of women doing yoga in superhero outfits was most attractive. Here's Lyn in her heyday on the front of an album she released. One would assume it had a book with it but then again, when you talk about the seventies you can assume nothing:

I was sad to discover in the process of stealing this picture that Lyn is no longer with us. Shame. My Ma was really into her at the time and is still doing yoga after all these years. That's a legacy for you to hang your hat on.

Way off subject, I know.

Take a look at any book on amazon - absolutely any one at all. Choose your favourite in fact. If you look at the reviews there, there will always be a mixture of shock and awe. For every lover, there will be a hater. People who love excessively want to share with other just how good that book was. People who hate in an equal amount also wish to share their thoughts. My favourites are the people that leave a one star review because it took too long to come in the mail. There really is no hope for some people.

Thus, the whole reviews/commentary process is negated to the point that - as a publisher of my own material - I have figured out that the only way to get a jump start in the world is by word of mouth. How that works in the real world is a subject for another time but basically, people trust people. Book lovers trust other book lovers, but most importantly, great story lovers trust other story lovers. That's how the DaVinci Code sold a galaxy worth of books. That's how Harry Potter took off. Press rewind: that's how Lord of the Rings took off. Fast forward: that's how Jaws went interstellar. It's no great secret. Despite the advances of technology, we're all still human.

Well, apart from the people who leave reviews about the mail service on amazon.

More on this in the next instalment perhaps...

Bradbury Rediscovered

In memory of one of the greatest writers of our time (or any other time for that matter). There’s not much that readers and writers can agree upon, but if there’s one thing we should, it’s that Ray Bradbury gave more than he took…

These covers by Adam Johnson. Good work Sir..

Which concludes importing my tumblr blogs... more cool book design on the horizon shortly...

Scenes From A Coffee House

A word about writing - and this might be pretty important whatever it is you're planning to do - now I've decided to go it alone (see post from day before yesterday), a lot of pressure has disappeared. The pressure was self inflicted for sure but I've always worked that way. I've stopped thinking about 'might be' and 'what if' and a dozen other things and have probably written more in the last few days than I have in a long time. The icing and the cherry on the cake for me was that I just read Seth Godin's new book The Icarus Deception which (as I'm sure is the point of the book) snapped everything into a very fine focus. Allow me to drill into it if you will. The general gist of the book is everything as you know it is broken. Some of us know this, some of us don't, but regardless of which tribe you fall into doesn't change the truth of the matter. It's 2013 and everything is different, everything is changing and if you think you've got a handle on it, then you've missed the point because it will all have changed again by tomorrow anyway.

Keeping focussed on the 'being an author' train of thought, I think it's important to chew that over. The only way you can be an author is by finishing your book. Then writing another and another until you don't want to do it anymore or die. It has nothing to with a publisher giving you permission to be one. Or an agent. Or whether the public buys your book or anything else. The money I'm sure is very nice, but if that's truly your prime motivation, you'd be better off becoming an investment banker or a drug dealer.

The story is all there is - and I suspect in my own spiritual way - that the universe will find you an audience when you've done good work - providing you don't just leave it sitting on a hard drive or in a notebook under your pillow.

Anyway, back to Seth Godin (and you should read it, not just listen to my lousy paraphrasing of it): it's time for new 'stuff' to happen. It is a new world out there. A new world in which anything is possible. I realise now (and how could I have been so stupid) that while I was 'waiting' (that might be the wrong word) for somebody to step up to the plate and say "I don't give a fuck what the publishing industry thinks - here's my book", what I should have been doing was to be that person.

Visibly. Not just in my head.

In the back of my mind, in an alternative world, I have sat here many times and said Stephen King should do this... or Gaiman should do this. 'This' being to go it alone - not for the money but to prove it can be done, but why should they? They paid their dues once. Why pay them again? And somewhere inside I think I wanted them to do this because I perceived them as 'safe'. If it didn't work out, they would be OK. That was wrong of me. It may be safe but really, what would it actually prove? Maybe I was looking for some kind of role model. A Dirty Harry style lone gunman of the publishing world... but I have no idea why I thought I needed that. Insert smilie face icon of choice at this juncture if you wish. This searching for answers thing is hard work. I should learn to quieten my mind and stop asking so many damn questions. I'm a big boy now.

The real world answer is that I need to do it for myself and maybe I can help some others out along the way. If it all falls apart and the world thinks my books suck/are incredible, that's fine too.

My job is simply to keep going.

Yep. That was me thinking out loud in public. Thanks for listening...

•••

That's enough of that. Let's get back to inane-ness. Californication starts again next week. Here's a cool interview with David Duchovny for Rolling Stone.

And to raise the mood before you go, I heard this on the radio earlier on. Great song. Great band. Stupid hat.

A Little Stephen King Magic...

These are far too beautiful a find to let them slip through the fingers of my memory - then again, that’s what blogs are for. So that you don’t forget great stuff. These sets of Stephen King covers comes from the mind and hands of Stuart Bache. Click around his site for close-ups and backstories. Good work dude...

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Here Come The Beats...

Groovy set of jacket designs for some of the Beat greats. These from Lucy Stephens. I might have to get in touch and ask her to do some work on Almost Human for me… I fucking love these.

(Just two more posts to go before I've pulled all of the tumblr blog in...)

Time To Walk The Walk and Talk The Talk...

I pretty much started this blog 12 months ago and announced right up front that much of 2012 was going to be spent getting the right things in the right place - and for the most part, I think I achieved that. There's still some work to be done but most of it is of a personal nature and simple upgrades - figuring that some things might work better if played a different way, but right now that's besides the point. As part of that year of building the site - or 'author house' to give it it's proper name - I thought that 12 months would be more than long enough to make a decision on whether to seek out an agent and therefore a publishing house to call home or to press on alone and publish my own material. In the first of these scenarios, the benefit for me was not actually in the publishing and the 'hey look everybody - xxxx publisher thinks I could be a contender' approval that I carried around with me for a long time, but in the distribution. To put it simply, to get a book published by a decent publisher means that all the hard work (and it is hard work) of getting your product in front of reader's faces, would be done behind the scenes without having to care too much about it. When your books appear on the shelves of Waterstones and all of the high street supermarkets overnight, it's a big deal - I would imagine. That's your product out in the world all over the country, all at the same time. I'm sure that's a great feeling. Maybe we'll come back to that one day.

In the financial stakes in this scenario, here's an extract from the 2006 edition of Self Publishing for Dummies - which whilst a little old now (and I didn't actually buy but instead took a photograph of this page in the bookstore), still has some nuggets of wisdom that are worth a damn:

Major publishers typically pay authors a recoupable advance, plus a pre-determined royalty on book sales as compensation. Writers who self-publish their books, however, must cover all their project's development, printing, distribution, and marketing costs out-of-pocket. The profit potential, however, can be significantly greater. Instead of receiving a 25-cent, 50-cent, or even a dollar royalty for each copy of your book sold, a self-published author can earn 40 to 60 percent of the book's cover price and sometimes even more. So, if your book sells for $15 per copy and you sell just 1,000 copies, the profit is between $6,000 and $9,000.

Conversely, if you're an author whose book is published by a major publishing house, you earn only a 25-cent royalty per book. If that book only sells 1,000 copies, your earnings are a mere $250. As initial sales are generated from your book, you potentially have to repay your outstanding advance to the publisher. (If the book doesn't sell, however, the advance doesn't need to be repaid.) Even if that's been done, your literary agent often takes between 15 and 20 percent of your earnings as his commission. If the major publishing house sells tens of thousands of copies of your book, as the author, you stand to earn a decent income. This, however, doesn't always happen.

Another benefit to self-publishing is that you don't have to wait three to six months to receive royalty checks from the publisher. Authors who have their book published by a major publishing house often have to wait for the money they've earned, but self-published authors tend to be paid a lot faster, especially on copies of the book they sell directly to customers. Self-published authors also aren't subject to a withholding of royalties as a reserve against returns for up to six additional months. As a self-publisher you stand to earn more money per copy of your book sold, but it's also considerably harder, but not impossible, for self-publishers to get distribution in major bookstores.

On this last sentence, at the rate tablets have been selling this year (24.7 million of them were activated on Christmas Day this year - which I look upon as 24.7 million bookshops that have just opened in households across the land) I find that last point somewhat irrelevant now - although make no mistake, it's even harder to get your easily published digital book seen on the pages of amazon and ibooks, but at least you can do something about it instead of sitting at home seething about what a clandestine bunch of motherfuckers WHSmiths are.

Anyway - the point of all this was that I would call myself out on whether to go traditional and seek an agent and a publisher (both of whom are probably more than well aware of how shitty the distribution chain can be already) or do it myself, because not deciding at all meant that I couldn't really say what I thought about either one with 100% conviction. So here goes:

I'm going to do it myself.

There are more than financial reasons behind this - there would have to be. It's sure as hell not a fast track to riches. Assuming I can do the work (the writing) I can feasibly publish a good six books a year about anything I like. Working with a publisher I am likely to release just one and get dropped into a genre I will find it hard to get out of in the future. I don't like that concept. This last year I've spoken to over a dozen authors who, while I might not be able to call them friends yet, are certainly acquaintances, and not one of them has ever said "I am over-the-freaking-moon happy with my publishing deal". Not one. Some are doing OK, some are taking it as it's handed out and rolling with the punches, others are wriggling and wanting out, some are even considering going it alone. In this last example, I think it's a great idea - especially when you've already had some success in the big wide world and don't have to start from absolute zero.

I have to be honest. It's a scary thought - doing it all yourself. I mean, there are probably good reasons why publishers like to pigeonhole their authors. It probably helps a lot in the selling stakes and assists the lazy with where to find you in stores, but looking at it another way, the percentage of authors who make it to the shelves with any promotion worth speaking of are in a teeny tiny percentage. I've read a lot of them. Some are worthy, some are not. Some are still even being pushed off the back of The DaVinci Code - can you believe that? In fact, not even the book itself but more that the cover design is slightly similar to Brown's masterwork. So, in the long term, what the hell huh? How much less of a snowball's chance in hell can I get?

Not very many of these guys ever hit the road to do signings either. Shit, with a reasonable advance, that would be the first thing I'd do with the money. What a great investment in yourself, surely?

So, like I said, time to walk the walk and talk the talk - and there are many things I (or any author) can do for themselves. The 'trick' is to treat yourself how you would want PanMacmillan or Penguin to treat you in an ideal world. Over the next few months, I'm going to post my accumulated knowledge here and be proud to be doing it myself. I'll let the public decide if I fall into the 'holy shit, this is great' or the 'as I suspected, just another self published author of averageness' category. It doesn't really matter - take a look at any product reviews on amazon for the best authors in the world and you'll still find a split in opinion. That's what you buy into when you play the internet game - everyone's a critic.

To wrap up, I'm looking to build a writing career. Period. I don't want to put my trust in bean counters who may one day need to cull or recoup. I don't want to put my trust in a project manager whose idea of a great cover is not the same as mine. I've read constantly for over forty years now - I think I know a good cover when I see one. Neither do I want to believe in a promise that I'll be a priority when I'm not - nobody can promise me that except myself (and sometimes even I just want to kick back and watch cheap TV for five minutes).  The bigger question in the scheme of things for me has always been - if you get dropped from your publishing house (much as a band can get dropped from their record label), what other big publisher is going to look at you twice knowing a competitor couldn't make it work?

So let's see what happens.

Footnote: the only big change I'm going to make here (if you've been following progress so far) is that I don't like my self created 'publisher brand' of Twin Earth that I created. So I'll be changing that soon. Not that it matters to you. Just dotting the i's and crossing the t's...

Footnote 2: It's now 4.22 am. Have laid in bed listening to Bill Bryson touring this Small Island for over an hour, so have decided to not sleep but instead get back up and work on said 'publisher brand'. Is this how it's going to be?

The Social Butterfly

I should know better than to 'do nothing' in what amounts to the last seven days of the year. Doing nothing allows errant thoughts to enter through the inner ear resulting in (sometimes) action being taken. Today has been a purging kind of day. Having evicted most of the physical clutter from the house since we moved in here nearly eighteen months ago, today I started work on the digital clutter. Oh yeah - that shit mounts up faster than supermarket carrier bags in the second drawer down. I repeat the exercise here simply because I figure you might get some use out of it. Actually, some of the de-cluttering was so long overdue that I've already forgotten what the hell it was:

Twitter: Been seriously thinking about shutting down that account for a couple of months now, which would leave me with only pinterest. I never really got on with twitter in a big way. I occasionally drop some 'funny as hell' statement on there and half a dozen people think I'm great for four seconds but that's about the long and the short of it. 1: I can't do anything in 140 characters. 2. I'm not really interested in what anybody else has to say in less than 140 characters. 3. Anybody pimping their wares of interest across twitter  can't be that serious about their shit, right? 4. My kids think it sucks - that means everybody still on it is at least five years behind the times. My kids like to... get this... talk to each other. Sadly, I still have some day job still invested in the old network so I need to see whether I would be missed or not. Somehow I doubt it. If you found yourself un-followed today, don't take it personally. I still love you but either a) I am testing the leaving waters or b) I still love you but your tweets bore me to death and you should probably think about leaving too...

Pinterest: I kind of like this one, so for now it can stay. I like dumping shit on there that I see across the web and not having to administer it in any way. Time will tell... it's not important right now. There's been enough carnage for one day.

Email: This was a big job. Somehow, I have ended up on a lot of mailing lists ranging from publishing companies letting me know their latest releases across the board to people and things I might have once thought were a good idea. All fixed now. An empty inbox is a sexy inbox - unless of course it contains something you actually want to see - which was always kind of the point anyway, wasn't it? This tactic now also has some rules to go along with it. Time not spent dealing with nothing at all, leaves a hell of a lot more time available for creating.

AddShit: Yeah, I know it wasn't called that, but you'll notice (or maybe you won't) that I've removed the AddThis 'thing' from the bottom of each blog post. I'm sure everybody that stops by here is smart enough to paste a link into something else of their own choosing if they want to share a post. Mostly though, it occurred to me that for every post I wrote, it ended with the promotion of somebody else's brand. So I write 800 words and the last thing you see is a twitter icon... or a google icon... or an icon icon. That's about as smart and as useful as sticking my thumb in my eye after each post. So, fuck that shit.

It took me about an hour to sort all of this out but it's probably cut down what I lovingly call 'cocking about time' by a good few hours a week. The cause of this frenetic culling? I started flipping through a book called AntiFragile by Nassim Taleb which hammered home the message that as someone that wants to write books for a living, I should be writing books for a living and not getting sidetracked by emails, what other people are doing etc... I want to spend any time I do free up for myself, doing the things I love for myself - hanging out with the kids, travelling, raising ancient woodland God's from their slumber... those sorts of things. That's a very brief generalisation of it but you get the drift - and though many people have said this to me  previously, maybe it was the way he said and what he was talking about at the time that clicked it into place. Good book. Go find it.

I Remember Now...

Back in 1992/93, when the 'band' was rolling at its finest, I went through a period of songwriting in which I blanked everything. I didn't buy any records, I didn't go and see any tours (and even though I missed some great bands, I still don't regret it) and I tried as much as possible to not be influenced by anything. It's really hard to do when everyone around you is doing the exact opposite but it was during that period that I came up with some of my best material - yeah, I know, that's a matter of perspective but in the big scheme of all the songs I wrote, those were definitely the best no matter what. I'm thinking that it might be time for such an event to happen again - with a few bolt-ons. Internet blackout as much as I can (given the day job), no news, papers, magazines, no radio talk shows (that means music only - something I can more than cope with) - those kinds of things. I'm tempted to blackout the books too and I'm pretty sure I can do it. Downtime will be fed with a few picked off TV shows and some trips to the movies.

The point of all this? Finishing work off and finding my own voice again. I'm giving way too much attention to others when I need to be occupying that space for myself. Does that sound dumb-ass? It's not supposed to but I need to take control. It's a good plan. I've also been reading about how Winston Churchill threw the rule book out when it came to 24 hours in a day. He recreated his day to be eight hours long, then slept for four and ran it in a cyclical fashion for the rest of his life. I don't know if this is true or not but it sounds great. Eight hours on/four off sounds like you could jam a mega-ton more into a day than normal people. How would that work out? Let's see what happens if we start this on a Monday:

Wake at 9am.

Sleep at 5pm.

Wake at 9pm.

Sleep at 5am

Wake at 9am

Sleep at 5pm

Wake at 9pm and so on...

I guess what you'd benefit from this is a whole working day and then a whole other eight hours during the night when you can do a ton of stuff that you didn't expect to for another eight hours - but you'd still be ready to roll at nine the next day without missing a beat. The initial start time might need adjusting otherwise there could well be starving children not too happy about that at all, but I think we could get around it with some proper thought attached.

Actually, it needs a lot more thought...

Anyway, the point of that was to get closer to my own voice. It's surprising how much the things you let in influence you without you really knowing about it. Not that I think I'm drifting away from myself - I prefer to call it sharpening the saw - but when you see a blunt edge coming... best do something about it.

Free Short Stories - Crime, Monsters, Wrestling And A Missing Eyeball

It's been a day of cleaning up here. Notebooks out, trying to collate all of the digital notes into some semblance of order - that kind of thing. I re-read some of the story work I did across the Spring and Summer and although I posted them here previously, chose to take them down and then, today, chose to put them back up again. So excuse me if I commit that most horrendous of sins and engineer this post to conform to some kind of SEO results (cue a ton of junk mail from people I don't know who will try and tell me they didn't notice me in the top three google results and for eight trillion dollars they can fix that for me and zintuple my income) for it to get picked up. One of the downsides of not playing the fb game I guess - so here goes (regular check-iners, just sweep across the next paragraph - it pains me too): Today I reposted some short stories. I was going to rough them up and make them free short stories for kindle but then I figured my time was better spent writing some new material, so chose instead to post them here instead. You can click that if you like - or hit the short stories tab up above. The first resurrection is the ongoing supernatural crime serial in the shape of short stories featuring Inspector Kang. I kind of like how that's panning out but I have no idea where it's headed. I may rework it when I get to around part six or seven but there's something about 'growing up in public' that appeals to me. The same goes for the August Moon serial - dear SEO spider, that's a free supernatural story kind of thing with monsters in it - which will head off in a very different direction. Somewhere in my head, the worlds of Kang and Moon collide but it certainly won't be for a little while yet. There are things that happen in free supernatural monster and pulp crime short stories that need to be written about first. (See what I did there?)

If anybody passing by really would like them for the kindle, drop me a note and I'll get it done. They're all here, ready to go but I need to re-design the covers on the master files - if you're curious as to what they look like, scroll down (or up if my SEO didn't work and you turned up here late) and you'll fine them. On which subject, I've decided to kill off all the third party material that used to appear in that column. I deleted my instagram account yesterday. Aside from the 'media furore' about them being able to sell your stuff and then retracting the statement, I found that to be like your girlfriend saying she wanted an open relationship and then changing her mind when you got the suitcase out from under the bed for her. But rather simply put, I'm not a photographer and have nothing of value to share in my instagrams anyway.

That's why the God's invented blogs... isn't it? "Come on world, let's micro-blog with our micro-minds." No thanks (Will that count as a good SEO keyword?)

COMMERCIAL BREAK:

New Harry Bosch is always good news right? I'm listening to this in the car right now (well, not right this second obviously) but with all that muscle behind them, is that really the best book trailer they could come up with? Sounds to me like every police procedural novel I've ever read. Get your act together guys...

The Global Village

It's the day after my birthday and I officially start the first day of my 2012 holidays. I took a few days in the summer but not since this time last year have I had an extended period of being able to not have to pay constant attention to the day job. I need it, Eleanor and the kids need it - even the house needs it. On one hand, it seems like a mighty long time to wait, on the other, what better time than Christmas to be able to kick back and chew things over. After dropping the kids off at school this morning, on the drive home I decided that I would change a few things - the biggest one being to spend less time online. It crossed my mind that I probably spend far too much time attached to wifi. I might even be a hotspot for others I spend so much of my time there. It strikes me that I need to rejoin the human race at least for a little while but the real reason is that I need to write more without distractions. Sure - there's tools you can use to cock-block the web while you're working on your machine but I am not to be trusted. There's iTunes to mess with and all kinds of garbage that I can be distracted by on here... I'm going to see how it pans out without kicking myself in the head if I fail. It is, at least, a plan.

Slightly related to that subject, but not really, yesterday I ran through the blog of Neil Strauss. It's good fun but somehow I found myself clicking through to a site where some dude had detailed his 'digital nomad' gear kit. A digital nomad is, apparently, somebody who works out in the world without a permanent base. This can be a traveller of the world or even somebody that works from home or a cafe etc. I fall somewhere in between these two things. If you check in here often, you'll know that I hate travelling heavy. The lighter I can travel, the better I feel about a trip, so I did the pointy clicky thing and went to see what the kit lit looked like. And here it is with an update of the older list for this year here.

And while that was all very interesting, I thought to myself that aside from my books and vinyl collection, that's actually more stuff than I own. So I thought I might make a better list - along with some thoughts. I guess if you're going on an extended trip, you might need to add some bits, but for short break - even for periods up to a month, I think my list is far superior. Here we go.

When I went to Colorado a little while back - which is something like 7000 miles and therefore classed as 'far away', here's what I had on my original list:

And that was pretty much it apart from the clothes I was wearing. I considered taking the iPad but what does it do that this doesn't. Sure it's a bit smaller but I've trained myself to work small for a long time now for these very reasons. Is watching episodes of Grimm going to be less enjoyable on a small screen? Nope. Hell, at one time, I used to watch movies on my iPod - the one that looks like an After Eight mint (was that the original nano?) and that's tiny. I can read a book perfectly happily on the phone too - with iBooks and the kindle app on there, I sure didn't need anything else. I pre-loaded with a few audiobooks just to make sure. Loaded a couple of thousand songs and well, that was me pretty ready to roll out of the door.

I set the phone up to sweep photos and video into dropbox when I hit wifi spots, that was pretty flawless. The camera and video utilities are more than good enough for what I use them for and anything I really needed could be pulled down from there or any of the other spaces I have online for digital storage. I have an external hard drive, but that's for disaster recovery not playing with and at no point did it ever cross my mind to take the MacBook. Those things are heavy. Before I went, I also tested out the voice memo facility for interviews - and again, flawless. What the hell is that kit list from hell about? I dropped it in my jacket pocket and I was ready to roll - and yeah, in the other pocket was the charger. I've also got one of these that negates the need for a wallet too:

Now, my plan was to go in the clothes I was wearing and buy things like socks, pants, toothpaste, shampoo - you know all that stuff that's essential - when I got there because something that a lot of people seem to forget is that... wait for it... there are stores all over the world where the people that live there shop! It's amazing. The idea then is to dump it all before you come home so you don't have to carry it back. Wasteful? Not really. Not if you shop smartly and it's not like there are no people not in need of this stuff everywhere around the world.

This great plan was thrown into turmoil however when more than one person suggested that it might look suspicious getting on a plane to the States with no luggage. I'm not sure how true this is but I ended up taking a bag. This bag from Scaramanga. I put some shirts in, some underwear, a book (but only because I was taking a damn bag) and that was about it. The good thing about a bag like that is that you don't need to check it in and therefore don't have to wait for the luggage carousel - well, technically. My travel partner James had a case, so I ended up waiting for him waiting for his case, but the theory is solid.

If you think hard about what it is you'll be doing when you get there, how you want to entertain yourself and what kind of business you need to do (if any), you too will probably find that any old smartphone will be enough. Just don't lose your phone!

As part of an ongoing purge of garbage in my life, I've also thrown out at least 30 apps from the phone that seemed like a good idea at the time. There were maybe only 40 on there anyway. I've tried every kind of 'word processor' out there on the phone and the pad from Pages right down to well, you name it, I've tried it. Nothing comes close to Evernote. Nothing. Do yourself a favour and sign up to a premium account with them. If you need to work on the road, this is all you'll ever need. Then do yourself another favour and believe that you really can write a novel using only an iPhone.

•••

..and now, I am going to find a coffee shop with no wifi. Me and my notebook have things to do. I'll leave you with Dave:

The Global Village

It's the day after my birthday and I officially start the first day of my 2012 holidays. I took a few days in the summer but not since this time last year have I had an extended period of being able to not have to pay constant attention to the day job. I need it, Eleanor and the kids need it - even the house needs it. On one hand, it seems like a mighty long time to wait, on the other, what better time than Christmas to be able to kick back and chew things over. After dropping the kids off at school this morning, on the drive home I decided that I would change a few things - the biggest one being to spend less time online. It crossed my mind that I probably spend far too much time attached to wifi. I might even be a hotspot for others I spend so much of my time there. It strikes me that I need to rejoin the human race at least for a little while but the real reason is that I need to write more without distractions. Sure - there's tools you can use to cock-block the web while you're working on your machine but I am not to be trusted. There's iTunes to mess with and all kinds of garbage that I can be distracted by on here... I'm going to see how it pans out without kicking myself in the head if I fail. It is, at least, a plan.

Slightly related to that subject, but not really, yesterday I ran through the blog of Neil Strauss. It's good fun but somehow I found myself clicking through to a site where some dude had detailed his 'digital nomad' gear kit. A digital nomad is, apparently, somebody who works out in the world without a permanent base. This can be a traveller of the world or even somebody that works from home or a cafe etc. I fall somewhere in between these two things. If you check in here often, you'll know that I hate travelling heavy. The lighter I can travel, the better I feel about a trip, so I did the pointy clicky thing and went to see what the kit lit looked like. And here it is with an update of the older list for this year here.

And while that was all very interesting, I thought to myself that aside from my books and vinyl collection, that's actually more stuff than I own. So I thought I might make a better list - along with some thoughts. I guess if you're going on an extended trip, you might need to add some bits, but for short break - even for periods up to a month, I think my list is far superior. Here we go.

When I went to Colorado a little while back - which is something like 7000 miles and therefore classed as 'far away', here's what I had on my original list:

 

And that was pretty much it apart from the clothes I was wearing. I considered taking the iPad but what does it do that this doesn't. Sure it's a bit smaller but I've trained myself to work small for a long time now for these very reasons. Is watching episodes of Grimm going to be less enjoyable on a small screen? Nope. Hell, at one time, I used to watch movies on my iPod - the one that looks like an After Eight mint (was that the original nano?) and that's tiny. I can read a book perfectly happily on the phone too - with iBooks and the kindle app on there, I sure didn't need anything else. I pre-loaded with a few audiobooks just to make sure. Loaded a couple of thousand songs and well, that was me pretty ready to roll out of the door.

I set the phone up to sweep photos and video into dropbox when I hit wifi spots, that was pretty flawless. The camera and video utilities are more than good enough for what I use them for and anything I really needed could be pulled down from there or any of the other spaces I have online for digital storage. I have an external hard drive, but that's for disaster recovery not playing with and at no point did it ever cross my mind to take the MacBook. Those things are heavy. Before I went, I also tested out the voice memo facility for interviews - and again, flawless. What the hell is that kit list from hell about? I dropped it in my jacket pocket and I was ready to roll - and yeah, in the other pocket was the charger. I've also got one of these that negates the need for a wallet too:

Now, my plan was to go in the clothes I was wearing and buy things like socks, pants, toothpaste, shampoo - you know all that stuff that's essential - when I got there because something that a lot of people seem to forget is that... wait for it... there are stores all over the world where the people that live there shop! It's amazing. The idea then is to dump it all before you come home so you don't have to carry it back. Wasteful? Not really. Not if you shop smartly and it's not like there are no people not in need of this stuff everywhere around the world.

This great plan was thrown into turmoil however when more than one person suggested that it might look suspicious getting on a plane to the States with no luggage. I'm not sure how true this is but I ended up taking a bag. This bag from Scaramanga. I put some shirts in, some underwear, a book (but only because I was taking a damn bag) and that was about it. The good thing about a bag like that is that you don't need to check it in and therefore don't have to wait for the luggage carousel - well, technically. My travel partner James had a case, so I ended up waiting for him waiting for his case, but the theory is solid.

If you think hard about what it is you'll be doing when you get there, how you want to entertain yourself and what kind of business you need to do (if any), you too will probably find that any old smartphone will be enough. Just don't lose your phone!

As part of an ongoing purge of garbage in my life, I've also thrown out at least 30 apps from the phone that seemed like a good idea at the time. There were maybe only 40 on there anyway. I've tried every kind of 'word processor' out there on the phone and the pad from Pages right down to well, you name it, I've tried it. Nothing comes close to Evernote. Nothing. Do yourself a favour and sign up to a premium account with them. If you need to work on the road, this is all you'll ever need. Then do yourself another favour and believe that you really can write a novel using only an iPhone.

•••

..and now, I am going to find a coffee shop with no wifi. Me and my notebook have things to do. I'll leave you with Dave:

Welcome to the Freakshow

I've got an interview scheduled for tonight with Austin from Hinder. I like Hinder a lot - they fulfil the needs that I have for what the lazy people call 'stadium rock' (amongst other things). Alongside of Nickelback, these two bands more than cover the bases required by my soul. What's odd about the situation is that both of these bands are easy to knock by critics and regularly are, but I like what I like and that's pretty much the end of the story. Or is it?

Let me see, it's Wednesday. This week I've listened to this new Hinder album (called Welcome to the Freakshow if you hadn't made the connection) but I've also listened to the first three albums from Kate Bush, spent a few hours on some jazz station trying to understand the damn thing, reverted to type with Soundgarden's King Animal, revelled in the nostalgia of Japan's Adolescent Sex, tried on the revamp of War of the Worlds (which is pretty hot) and nodded my head at James Arthur's victory on X-Factor this year - because despite what you may think of the show, that guy is gonna make something of the shot he's got. That's an off the cuff list too - I use rdio as my main fix these days, so for good or bad, this shit gets data-logged. Realising this means that I need full disclosure that out of curiosity, I tried to listen to the Little Mix album but only got about three tracks in before it had to go -  you can't win 'em all.

There's a big difference between being a critic and just some dude who loves music and happens to write. There seems to be a 'point' to being a critic, like you're trying to build yourself up into something - and while that might have been valid back in the seventies and eighties when there were only a fistful of magazines worth a damn, as we approach 2013, it's not and that's because I can find you over 100 review sites at the flick of a wrist. Each has an opinion, some are better written than others but my point is that if you disagree with a review - be that music, movies or even a watch you bought yourself -  you're just going to head off to find a review site that you do have something in common with to prove your point. Worst still, there is no differentiation between the two. People will take what they need and ignore the rest.

These days, being a critic means very little - so much so that I have backed out of doing them anymore. It's a pointless exercise, I think I would rather say my piece here where it's a part of something else. Part of a bigger story to be had because to do the other thing, is to not love music. It's to love yourself and think your opinion matters.

Anyway, over on rdio, there was a 'critic's review' of Freakshow that seemed to serve nobody but the writer himself. I hope he felt good about himself afterwards. I can picture the scenario because I've been there. Lots of things to do, give the album a listen on radio because it's free and requires no effort. Dip your hand into the pit of dirty adjectives that are in your head and presto! A review that makes you feel as though you pointed out something valuable. I know, I know - everybody is entitled to their opinion.

But I just couldn't keep my mouth shut (click it to make it bigger if you need to):

The original is not even that objective. It reads as though it was on the hate pile before the first track had even finished. Sometimes, I suspect I take this stuff too personally for my own good. It's only rock n roll.

Just keep telling yourself, it's only rock n roll...

INTERLUDE:

Being as that's what we're talking about (no video releases yet from the new album):

•••

I bought a new book yesterday - Everyone Loves You When You're Dead by Neil Strauss. I finished it yesterday too. I lost a lot of the evening, all of the night and closed the book when the temperature hit -3 and it was very, very dark. Sometimes, you need to read a book like this. Sleep can be had any day of the week but when you're into the drag of a good read, it shouldn't be pushed off the road by something that will come around again tomorrow. If you're in the market for a neat Christmas present for the music lover in your life, it's really good and a no-brainer. It's also part of the two for a tenner deal in HMV at the moment, so you could double it up with a copy of Mick Wall's Lep Zep book maybe, which is what I did.

•••

More later. Promise. Things to do right now...

Music

Writing. Watch this. Supercool.

Understand Music from finally. on Vimeo.

A Whole Lot Of Rosie

I find myself staring down the barrel of having to take care of some things hanging off the business end of the stick here. That sounds worse than it is actually - it amounts to tuning the DAB radio into Hairband FM and riffling through blog posts of those who are much further ahead in the writing game than I am (or at least when it comes to bodies of work). Disappointingly, I find that Nick Hornby has fallen right off the blog radar. As he points out himself, he is possibly the world's worst blogger (he's not, I know way slacker people with far more than a two year gap since the last post). Mr Hornby is however a great example of something I would pay good money to get behind the paywall of. I wouldn't expect the world from him and he could always divert any funds he made to his Treehouse project if it made him feel better. It will happen one day with somebody that's for sure - the world will go to war over being expected to pay for such things but as a daily blog surfer, I'd be behind such a thing and you can't argue with the Treehouse idea. It's not like you'd be giving things away for free when you haven't posted for two years? Is it?

Mostly, I think that one day, someone with balls of steel will figure out that to make things 'special' again in the world, we're not going to be able to give stuff away for free forever.

Mr H/Penguin - you can have that idea if you like and count me in.

Talking of which - and I hope I don't get bullets flying into my inbox - here's one of Nick's posts from a really long time ago that made me laugh hard and long:

In Borders… I watch with fascination as a local author rearranges the shop in order to optimise his chances of sales. He is not happy with the container that has been clipped to the section of the bookshelf displaying his book; the container holds flyers advertising a related product but it partially obscures the book’s cover, so while nobody is looking (apart from me) the author unclips it and sticks it somewhere else, where it will partially obscure the cover of somebody else’s work. He then spots someone picking up and leafing through a competing hardback, so he grabs his own and thrusts it into the bewildered shopper’s hands. I suppose this is what we have to do during a depression, but I’m not sure I have the stomach for it. 

These kind of things really happen. I've seen them with my own eyes and pray to the gods of pride on a daily basis that I never feel a need to act this desperately. Good story though. This all came to the surface because I was researching my books of the year list mentioned a while back. I read both A Long Way Down and Juliet Naked this year (remiss, I know. I learned all I know about falling behind from Hornby himself) and forgot how good they were - or even that I had read them at all because I read them both in a day (separate days - I'm not that fast) and then handed them on to be loved elsewhere as I tend to do with great books.

If you're looking for something short to fill a train ride - you might love Everyone's Reading Bastard. If you don't, all hope may be lost.

COMMERCIAL BREAK:

•••

I found out today that the greatest book ever written by  human being - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is headed to TV. This is either the nest news ever or... well, it is the best news ever but how I feel about it afterwards all depends on how it pans out. Part of me says that I should steer well away from anything to do with it but an equal part of me knows I'll be right there, phone off the hook. I picked this golden nugget up from here - who are definitely some people who should know better than to call it a 'fantasy epic'. That's a cheap shot for search engines if ever I saw one. That's like calling Wuthering Heights, Chick Lit.

Sigh.

•••

Something else potentially full of excitement is the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who - which might hold this in store for us. Interesting. I'm going to stay away from trailers if I can and hope the BBC give them about £8 to make it with so that the whole project hinges on a story rather than the 'digital smartness' that it seems to be geared at. One raised eyebrow to throw in the ring here is that for a long time, Moffat has continually stated that villain X, villain Y etc, from years gone by have not much of a place in modern Who. But given that very same audience won't give a damn about eight of these Doctors, what then? Hell, the older audience only give a crap about seven of them (you can even insert your own number here - there are some pretty dire years to chew on). It will be interesting that's for sure - and I hope with all my heart that they knock it out of the ballpark.

No pressure then...

•••

Finally, in the continuing import of stuff I had gathered on tumblr, this:

"Jim Tierney - designer par excellence and just starting out by the looks of things. If these and the other samples on his site are anything to go by, I predict very, very excellent things. Check out this pull tab on From The Earth To The Moon. To see the die-cuts on all the titles, click into the site.

•••

Let's wrap this puppy up and put it to bed with the assistance of some of the mighty Blind Melon...

pen

Soundgarden - Live on Letterman

Not perhaps as exclusive as I would have liked but all the same, I missed this which means you might have too... Soundgarden live on Letterman. Watch it right here - make yourself comfortable, it's nearly an hour long:

YouTube can truly be magical sometimes. Back soon...

•••

Edit: Added bonus feature. Soundgarden on Jools Holland with Chris Cornell interview:

The Vindicators.

I found this today from the mind of Brandon Riesgo:

It's part of a very cool monster giveaway of alternative movie posters over at shortlist. They're all really something. Check out the brilliant Spiderman poster there from Dave Will. I love the feel of that but on investigating his place, I also found this that made me smile wider:

 I love good design. A little enhancement to all the things you find great in life is no bad thing at all. On which very subject, Tom Gauld posted this (below) earlier which (spookily) fits in far too nicely with what I said about spreading yourself too thinly online.

Vindicated in the extreme. Not that anybody asked, but still...

Short today - apologies. Am writing big words for big project.