THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
The Man Who Was Wednesday
If you've been hibernating for the last few months, you'll have missed the fact that we now have a dog. Time consuming? Hard work? Sure - but totally worth it. I even built him his own blog so that I wouldn't write about him too much here but it's very tempting all the same. There's a lot of things on the proverbial desk this week, let's see if I can make sense of it all. First of all, on the day job front, we have a show this weekend which is always good fun if not rather time consuming. I'm looking forward to this one because my buddy Wayne Simmons is coming up to work on some stuff, but we also have clandestine plans to do a podcast. Wayne figured it would be a fun idea to interview me about my 'career' in magazines (I'm sure he intended the term loosely) and then also about by books and writing - something that I'm really looking forward to because I've never been made to really think about it before. Back in the real world, I know I won't be able to help myself and it will transform itself into a two-way street pretty swiftly, so if you're a fan of his work, stay tuned for the results of that. I'll post them here and Wayne will do his thing with it as well. If the name is damningly unfamiliar to you, Wayne has written a good few books (or a few good books even) - all the info is over at his linked blog there, but the latest is called Plastic Jesus and looks like this...
...and it's totally worth your time. Anyway, if it all goes wrong, the worst that can happen is that we'll have a "hair vs no hair" picture to post. Sometimes, that's as good as it gets. Mr Simmons (everybody should have a friend called Mr Simmons) also puts on his own show - Scardiff - in err, Cardiff (natch). With the wind in the right direction, I'm looking to release Turn The Lamp Down Low in time for it and launch it there, but that's months away (October) but it's a heads up for you all the same.
•••
I've been reading about.. hmm.. how can I put it... "making things happen when you're out on a limb" this week and came across some good wisdom along the way that I think is worth sharing. In Seth Godin's book The Icarus Deception, he puts it like this (and I paraphrase): Oprah (as a show) is dead and buried so you can't go on her show to get noticed, but YouTube actually wants you to host your own show and they will give you the space for free - but neither Oprah or YouTube will call you up. The record company's aren't looking to sign you but iTunes and hundreds of other places will be only too pleased to play host to you. Sadly, they're not likely to call you up and ask either.
The point of this section is that it's in our very nature to wait to be picked. To seek permission and authority for somebody to say you are good enough and that in turn, validates what you're doing - but the world only turns on that axis for a select few and who knows what's gone on behind the scenes in order to get them that far. Sometimes, the very thing going on behind the scenes is the very thing that's being suggested here - getting off your ass and making something because it's there to be made and only you can do it your way.
Later in the book, there's a great section about your audience. How you can read 24 good reviews and one bad one - guess which one you'll hold onto. That's right.. the bad one and exactly why you should never read any reviews - good or bad. Ignore them all. I need to quote this next part:
"After you've created your art, whatever it is, it's done. What the audience does with it is out of your control. If you focus your angst and emotion on the people who don't get it, you've destroyed part of your soul and haven't done a thing to improve your art. Your art, if you made it properly, wasn't for them in the first place. Figure out who your art is for, get better at connecting with that audience, ignore the rest."
There's one final bit that hit home with me: he then describes how a big enough audience will destroy you because some of them will want what you do taller, shorter, wider, thinner, cheaper, more expensive... but (and this is the important part if you're still with me on this) it's only the mass marketers that need everybody. You do not. You only need to matter to a few.
Interesting trains of thought huh. The key is actually believing in it and living by it knowing that it's true no matter how hard it gets.
•••
Meantime, the best thing the web has turned up for me this week is this fine article on How To Make A Bone Chandelier over at Atlas Obscura. Take a look. What in the world could be simpler than this:
Kick Off The Year As You Mean Go On, Smith...
Lists can be pretty handy things. I got up this morning and made one of the things that really needed doing for the day job and then made another of some things that were hanging around in the wings that like to haunt me at night when I'm supposed to be sleeping. Day job aside, I finished typing up my longhand scrawl of The Eternity Ring late this afternoon which means I have a complete first draft. "Good work Mr Smith" he said to himself...
Cleaning up starts tomorrow to make sure I haven't done anything dumb within the timeline but as of about 10 minutes ago, I put out some feelers out for an illustrator to come on board with me. It will stand perfectly solidly by itself (and I might publish a limited edition text only version of it) but I think it's a story that could dance as well as sing with some art alongside of it. Updates to follow. At ten thousand words, I need to decide whether to call it a short story or a novella. Maybe it's just a story and that happens to be how long it is. Yeah, that sounds about right to me.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, there's a real hurricane brewing outside - not quite of biblical proportions but there's stuff blowing down the street, which is one way to get rid of your trash.
•••
OK, so I meant to post that yesterday - maybe even the day before - I'll carry on like nobody really cares anyhow. The illustrator feelers are out of the bag - work continues. Towards the end of January, I'm going to release The Eternity Ring in its story only format - I'm looking for half a dozen casual readers to hit me with some feedback. It doesn't matter if you've got a blog to talk about it. I'm more interested in whether you enjoyed it or not. Drop me an email using that Contact Me thing on the left and when finished fixing it up, I'll mail you a pdf file of it. For your trouble, there will be a tasty limited edition of it in the mail to you once it's ready in hardcopy format and maybe, just maybe if it all works out well, I'll remember you kindly when the illustrated version comes out too.
There are many, many reasons to be capable of dabbling in this sort of thing yourself but this is the best one. I can't imagine being powerless over the way your finished product might look when it finally goes out in public. I don't think I'll change my mind again - the soul seems quite happy with this.
Kick Off The Year As You Mean Go On, Smith...
Lists can be pretty handy things. I got up this morning and made one of the things that really needed doing for the day job and then made another of some things that were hanging around in the wings that like to haunt me at night when I'm supposed to be sleeping. Day job aside, I finished typing up my longhand scrawl of The Eternity Ring late this afternoon which means I have a complete first draft. "Good work Mr Smith" he said to himself...
Cleaning up starts tomorrow to make sure I haven't done anything dumb within the timeline but as of about 10 minutes ago, I put out some feelers out for an illustrator to come on board with me. It will stand perfectly solidly by itself (and I might publish a limited edition text only version of it) but I think it's a story that could dance as well as sing with some art alongside of it. Updates to follow. At ten thousand words, I need to decide whether to call it a short story or a novella. Maybe it's just a story and that happens to be how long it is. Yeah, that sounds about right to me.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, there's a real hurricane brewing outside - not quite of biblical proportions but there's stuff blowing down the street, which is one way to get rid of your trash.
•••
OK, so I meant to post that yesterday - maybe even the day before - I'll carry on like nobody really cares anyhow. The illustrator feelers are out of the bag - work continues. Towards the end of January, I'm going to release The Eternity Ring in its story only format - I'm looking for half a dozen casual readers to hit me with some feedback. It doesn't matter if you've got a blog to talk about it. I'm more interested in whether you enjoyed it or not. Drop me an email using that Contact Me thing on the left and when finished fixing it up, I'll mail you a pdf file of it. For your trouble, there will be a tasty limited edition of it in the mail to you once it's ready in hardcopy format and maybe, just maybe if it all works out well, I'll remember you kindly when the illustrated version comes out too.
To wrap this up - I believe a few weeks back, I posted a likely cover for the book but hindsight being a wonderful thing, I decided it was well below par (i.e.: shit) and threw it in the trash. Here's the final cover:
There are many, many reasons to be capable of dabbling in this sort of thing yourself but this is the best one. I can't imagine being powerless over the way your finished product might look when it finally goes out in public. I don't think I'll change my mind again - the soul seems quite happy with this.
Best Books of 2013 • Around The World In 80 Days (ish)
Before I do anything else, promise me that you'll watch this. If you never watch anything else that I ever post here, that's fine - but please, watch this because it's one of the finest video clips of all time:
You can find more on YouTube by searching for Salad Fingers or follow its creator David Firth by going here. Simply brilliant. I haven't laughed so hard in years.
•••
I've started to fire up some plans to hold a miniature promo/reading event or tour for Family of Noise in Copenhagen in either April or May next year. April is looking good but I'm also kind of keen on May because it was so freaking cold when I went in March last year. There are some very cool bookshops out there, so over the next few weeks I'm going to see if they will have me. I'm inspired by the concept of doing this entirely off my own back. Is it possible? Can you really make it work? Maybe I'll rough up some free samples of various things and simply give them away - then again... not sure. Let's see what happens. First of all I have to convince some nice professional people to take a chance on me.
I'm hoping that I can figure out how to work this properly because Paris, Barcelona and Vienna are also high on the list of places to break into. I guess I should add London to that list with it being pretty close to home but I might see how it goes hundreds of miles away first if you know what I mean. I have to tell you though - finishing a book with no other deadline than the one you have set yourself is really hard. At least I am finding it hard. It's too easy to move it when I fall behind. I'm hoping this will force my hand somewhat. Something has to...
•••
ON READING:
I've just spent ten days offline and aside from going to war with the Destroyer of Worlds, all I've really done is read. No writing as I had planned (that starts tomorrow), just reading. There's been some great ones too. I picked up a copy of Ray Harryhausen's sketchbook which is everything you imagine it to be and also a copy of Diableries which is also a serious piece of work and rather difficult to explain what it actually is, so I'll simply point you here.
Meantime, on the fiction side of things, I ploughed through The Ghost Hunters by Neil Spring in near record time. If you're of a mind to sink your teeth into a ghost story that bites back, that's the very thing for you. Next, I tried a book that's been hanging around for a while called The Eye Collector but it was lacking in far too much after twenty minutes and was unceremoniously dumped. The kids bought me a smooth Edgar Allan Poe collection this year - a good looking volume it is too. I flipped through it but made a promise to sit down and read all of it soon. Clamouring for my attention today though are two really good books. One is The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll and the other is called Mercy from Jussi Adler-Olsen. I had to divert Mercy to an audiobook to chew them both at the same time - though not exactly at the same time...
...and so, onto the best books of the year. Although this list is in order, not all of them were actually released this year. I don't much care that they weren't either - all that's important are that good books get into the right hands:
1. The Year Of The Ladybird - Graham Joyce (Seriously - if you love reading for no other reason than you love a great story - please pick this up)
2. The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith (As great as everybody has been saying it is. Damn you Rowling)
3. The Ocean At The End Of The Lane - Neil Gaiman (This doesn't need any introduction, surely)
4. Stoner - John Williams (Beautiful - a book that's not about anything and everything at the same time)
5. Bellman & Black - Diane Setterfield (A strange and wondrous peek through the curtain)
6. Joyland - Stephen King (King doing what King does best - telling stories)
7. God Clobbers Us All - Poe Ballantine (Everybody will love Ballantine when he's dead - it's that kind of thing)
8. The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien (Now there's a man living on the edge)
9. Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls - David Sedaris (Funny. Very, very funny. No other reason needed)
10. The Blood Detective - Dan Waddell (This one sneaked up on me and took me by the hand into a dark alley. More thrillers like this please)
Disappointing in the extreme were: Dan Brown's Inferno (more so than The Lost Symbol - never mind), Jo Nesbo's Police (Harry Hole usually soars but this drags its heels way too much for me), and Rankin's Saints of the Shadow Bible (did anything actually happen in this book?). These three are from big heavy hitting authors who I expected far more from. Maybe that's the problem. I'm not saying don't read them - I'm just saying I wish I had spent my time reading something else.
There's something else I've noticed this year too. I've checked out maybe six or seven books that have been free on iBooks and without exception, they have all sucked. Let that be a lesson to me. Meanwhile, audiobooks are really kicking ass. The production values keep improving, the list of great material available increases and for me, means that I can still 'read' even when I'm doing something else. You can't get a much better deal than that.
A Fistful Of Culture
It's that time of year again. The time of year when I make a valiant attempt to plough through as many books as I can in the face of an ever mounting drift of festive tomfoolery. Actually, does anybody remember that show? It was the sort of thing they ploughed out on TV during a Sunday afternoon between a bout of Tex Avery and Walter Lantz while adults got on with grown up chores like mowing the lawn or cooking, thinking it would keep us amused - and they were right! Oh, how easily us children of the 70s must have been to keep occupied and out of the way as suburbia revolved on its axis.
Whatever happened to cartoons on TV? I can't remember the last time I saw a Tom & Jerry, a Droopy or a Mister Magoo cartoon. Here's a reminder - and it's a classic:
Lost my train of thought there. Next on the reading list after STONER (which is so damn good, I've already bought another three copies to hand out to people that I think will appreciate them - so much for not buying any more books huh) is this:
I like a good rock n roll story, particularly when it comes from the early years of the band I worshipped on my knees for far too much of my life. The three years that this book covers and maybe a couple more tagged onto the back end up until maybe 1977 are all I need from them. I'll have finished it by tomorrow so luckily, sitting right next to it in the shelf is this:
And if you can't tell what it's about from the cover alone, you came to the wrong place. Sheesh - all you have to do it read that big round sticker type thing and that's it in a nutshell. I don't give that much longer than 24 hours either to be honest.
And then? I'm not sure where to head next, probably back into something hefty and story-like. Maybe a book from somebody who's doing nothing more than wandering around the avenues and alleyways of the world with their teeny-weeny finger curled - and ain't that Thomas O'Malley theme from The Aristocats one of the greatest movie soundtrack songs of all time? Let me see if I can find it...
I wish I had a theme tune like that. Perhaps I should change my name instead?
•••
I've made it sound like I've been doing nothing but reading and watching crap on YouTube but that's not true! No Sir. Wrapping up the first edits of The Eternity Ring here which I'm really pleased with but I now need to throw it in a drawer for a week to get some editing distance 0n it. Also made some serious impact on The Family Of Noise as well but tomorrow I'm in full author mode to see exactly how much of that I can nail down.
There's nothing but a small (though getting bigger) dog standing between me and success on that front.
A Fistful Of Culture
It's that time of year again. The time of year when I make a valiant attempt to plough through as many books as I can in the face of an ever mounting drift of festive tomfoolery. Actually, does anybody remember that show? It was the sort of thing they ploughed out on TV during a Sunday afternoon between a bout of Tex Avery and Walter Lantz while adults got on with grown up chores like mowing the lawn or cooking, thinking it would keep us amused - and they were right! Oh, how easily us children of the 70s must have been to keep occupied and out of the way as suburbia revolved on its axis.
Whatever happened to cartoons on TV? I can't remember the last time I saw a Tom & Jerry, a Droopy or a Mister Magoo cartoon. Here's a reminder - and it's a classic:
Lost my train of thought there. Next on the reading list after STONER (which is so damn good, I've already bought another three copies to hand out to people that I think will appreciate them - so much for not buying any more books huh) is this:
I like a good rock n roll story, particularly when it comes from the early years of the band I worshipped on my knees for far too much of my life. The three years that this book covers and maybe a couple more tagged onto the back end up until maybe 1977 are all I need from them. I'll have finished it by tomorrow so luckily, sitting right next to it in the shelf is this:
And if you can't tell what it's about from the cover alone, you came to the wrong place. Sheesh - all you have to do it read that big round sticker type thing and that's it in a nutshell. I don't give that much longer than 24 hours either to be honest. I might review this one properly.
And then? I'm not sure where to head next, probably back into something hefty and story-like. Maybe a book from somebody who's doing nothing more than wandering around the avenues and alleyways of the world with their teeny-weeny finger curled - and ain't that Thomas O'Malley theme from The Aristocats one of the greatest movie soundtrack songs of all time? Let me see if I can find it...
I wish I had a theme tune like that. Perhaps I should change my name instead?
•••
I've made it sound like I've been doing nothing but reading and watching crap on YouTube but that's not true! No Sir. Wrapping up the first edits of The Eternity Ring here which I'm really pleased with but I now need to throw it in a drawer for a week to get some editing distance 0n it. Also made some serious impact on The Family Of Noise as well but tomorrow I'm in full author mode to see exactly how much of that I can nail down.
There's nothing but a small (though getting bigger) dog standing between me and success on that front.
Short Post. Emptying Head.
I had a good idea last night - a really good idea that would be really good for me as an author and pretty good fun to see through to the end. This morning it didn't seem like such a good idea and I put it to one side but then, when it got dark again, the idea resurfaced.
Is this normal?
•••
Stoner - the lost/rediscovered classic from John Edward Williams - is every bit as good as the press are saying it is. Book of the year? That's a tough call because there are many books that really did come out this year that deserve that accolade (Bellman & Black certainly being one of them if you're lost for some place to lay your hat) but it's certainly "book of the year from a different year" if anybody would like to make up a category that goes down that road.
But what's going on with that cover? It's not exactly drawing you in with... well, with anything at all. This one below however, is pressing all the right buttons for me. Sadly, Catalan is not a language I am overly familiar with. Maybe I'll try and hunt down a poster of it instead.
In this case, don't judge a book by its cover. I usually think it's a great indication of a damn good start, but in this case, that's not so.
To rewind a couple of minutes or so, here's the book trailer for Bellman & Black. I like a good book trailer... one day, somebody will come out swinging a hammer with one and change the face of book marketing forever.
Well that didn't take long for my head to empty - if you're stuck for Christmas presents, you could probably do worse than either or both of those.
Shoot To Kill (II)
I like getting questions. Nobody ever sends me questions. Probably because although I like getting questions doesn't always mean I like answering them - usually because people ask the wrong questions. Yesterday though, my buddy Scott asked me a peach. It looked like this: I've just finished re-reading (sober this time) Shoot To Kill - you interview with Fin Costello in BDWN. I enjoyed that chapter pissed first time around and wanted to return to it to take it in properly.
I may not have worked at the very top with the biggest bands, but there are so many similarities. I spent years shooting bands, (Californian punk mostly, with the Fat Wreck Chords label), travelling with them, hotel rooms, dressing rooms, I can relate to the whole thing. I earned their trust over time and they became good friends - there was nowhere I couldn't go.
I recently got invited to meet up with Bowling For Soup again on their farewell tour too. I didn't bother taking my camera. I'd spent seven years travelling and documenting everything they did in the UK already, so this time it was just to talk about all that we'd done and which photos they'd like for the book. I wandered around to the back of the venue, went inside and walked up to the dressing rooms, without a pass, unchallenged. I've always wondered why no one else did this. After the show I was stood chatting to the tour manager when one of the evening photographers asked me what an 'old guy' like me was doing at a BFS show!
Do you think any of us photographers can ever make our mark like Fin? Everything seems so throw away now and everybody's at it.
Just wanted to say I found it a really interesting chapter. Great work Sir.
Oh yeah... that's a peach of a question alright. For the uninitiated, this is Fin Costello. If you're a music fan, there will be plenty you recognise - and this is Black Dye White Noise. This may be the longest blog post I've written in years. Hopefully, I can make it useful
That interview with Fin is from back in 2003 but I think all of the things he talks about are still relevant - not only that, but they are relevant to more than just the music business now time has moved on. You can also apply the same principles to writing that's for sure. The background of the story is that I interviewed Fin for a magazine I had just launched (Burn) and he gave more than I could ever have asked for. Hours of material. He was a true gent and unintentionally, taught me everything I know about how photographers should be treated - looking back, it might have only been how Fin wanted to be treated (which was with respect) but it all made perfect sense to me and still does. So:
Will any photographers ever make a mark like him?
Sadly, unless things change across the board, it's unlikely in the current climate. First of all, photographers (pro, amateur and everything in between) must stop giving their work away for free - even though they don't mean to. As you know all too well, as soon as a single image hits the web, it's dead meat. It can be around the world so fast that you have no hope of reclaiming it ever again. So the first rule must surely be, keep your work to yourself. Unless you want it to be a genuine free for all, you wouldn't do it with a song, a book or a movie. Assuming photographers think of their work as being in the same arena - why is it more prevalent with images than these other things? Do you all feel guilty that the web will be empty if visual treats without your contributions?
But that's not actually a real world proposition if you're trying to make a name for yourself. You want people to see your work and the web is great for that, but unless you have a client at the other end (an editor, a paid for commission etc) what the hell are you supposed to do with them? It probably seems like you won't get anywhere if you keep them to yourself. So, as far as I can see, a photographer needs to decide which side of the fence they sit on. Do you pull everything in and keep your cards close to your chest until such a time as you get a break or do you throw it to the four corners of the world and see what happens? The correct answer is that you keep them to yourself. Sounds harsh but hey, that's business for you. All the time you give your work away 'for free' and let it loose in the world without your knowledge, you're in no better a position really than a 12 year old with a mobile phone and a wi-fi connection.
Sounds harsh, but that's what I think should happen. That's what would separate the men from the boys but that is an ideal world scenario because it won't work unless other things come into line as well - media editors offering decent money for the work would be a good start. Being a mag editor, I know that money isn't as freely available as it used to be back in Fin's day, so those people are also in a hole. Everybody is in a hole and the root of the problem is that we've all got used to getting stuff for free. It's a good plan as a promotional tool but when promotion turns into "why is there no petrol in the car?" and "why is there nothing to eat today?" maybe you should have thought it through a little better.
There was a time when I would spend good money on a poster of a band - that's how I discovered Fin in the first place. Sometimes you can get lucky and find an editor who appreciates what you do but I think we (I do class myself as one of them) are few and far between. Switch places and you wouldn't find an editor of a mag spending four hours making your work look great for the love of it. You can pretty much guarantee that. That's a bit simplistic but I think it gets the point across. I'm sure most people think you just turn up with a camera hanging off your shoulder, rattle 1000 shots off digitally, send them in and walk away with more cash than you know what to do with.
Do they teach you this at university if these are your plans? They should do.
The other thing that's important here is that nobody seems to have a freaking clue about what's good anymore. Either that or nobody cares because information floods at you now instead of being carefully chosen by you. In music, the CD killed off most artistic cover work and mp3 put the final nail in. Now that we're streaming instead of downloading (or at least I am) - what happens next?
They are not all like this by any means - the shot of Rebecca Ferguson's album cover that I posted yesterday, is a stunning shot. Nice work whoever shot that... and RIGHT THERE is your problem - and even now that I've had a cursory look for who shot it, that info is not easy to come by.
Back in Fin's day, you had the album sleeve. We would sit around for years with those damn sleeves and read them over and over while we listened. You knew who produced stuff, who wrote songs, who shot the cover - and I think (I hope) within the industry, that was out of respect for everybody being a cog in the big machine. You play nice. You get remembered. You turn up, you get let in. You could call up David Lee Roth and he would remember you. You knew the manager and the tour bus driver and you treated them all the same because the clock doesn't work if one of the cogs gets fucked up. Basically, you could get things done. The more you got things done, the more the people with the money would just trust you to work out what the client (the band) wanted and know (for the most part) that what they would get back would work. (If you're interested, that's one of the reasons why I moved the photo credits on the cover of Skin Deep to the cover instead of burying it on the contents page. It's just the way I think things should be done. I don't know if other mags do this or not. I only read Vanity Fair these days but as far as I can see they are still very respectful of photography and still treat it well - but they are quite old school).
As for everything being throwaway. I agree. I hate it. I hate it so much, I've given the world what it asked for and thrown/given all my things away in some desperate stab at regaining control. I own no compact discs anymore, stream all my music via rdio but I do have a record deck for the things I really care about - plus it gives me something to do when travelling. Do you know how hard it is to find old vinyl that's not been to hell and back. I have no DVD's and I'm working on my books to the point that I only want books with effort put into their presentation on the shelf - the rest might as well be an ebook or an audiobook because - if you're not going to package it like you mean it (respect it?) - why the hell should I show everybody in my life your half assed effort?
It's probably a fruitless stand but it's a stand I like to make. It's going to be a long time before people want quality stuff in their lives anymore. It's the Facebook mentality of "live fast, die young and tell everybody about it" because "I want to be important too". Don't get me started on it but I can never resist an opportunity to say again that Facebook is the slug of the internet garden. It's ugly, pointless, will eat everything in sight regardless of what it is and you can't kill it. I tried putting salt on it one day just to make sure but just made a mess on the table.
Finally... the comment you make about being an "old guy" at a show. I suspect we all used to be like that. Then I became an "old guy" - not that old admittedly, same age as you in fact. Time moves on and you get a bit more respectful about it because if you don't, you're just going to end up being that "young guy" who was hot for ten minutes - or at least until the even younger guy came up behind you and kicked your ass into oblivion. Which is more or less the same as the story that Fin tells about being treated like shit when he went to shoot Train - when the guys in charge found out what he had done in his career, the rules changed. And I dare say that if good money hadn't been involved, Fin would have told them all to go fuck themselves.
So - on a positive note, if anybody reading wants to be remembered like Fin, Mick Rock, Bob Gruen, Ross Halfin, Scarlet Page and there are many, many others - you better get your shit together, (not you personally, I'm just speaking generally here). If anybody else is reading - and I don't profess to know everything, this is just how it appears to me - be an decent human being of a cog whilst also getting pretty good at not taking shit from fools. Talk to the waitress like a real person. Talk to the guy who holds the door open at the hotel, he has dreams too. The guy who is serving you coffee hasn't made a career choice there. Don't be a dick because frankly, you're just not that important - play nice and you can make good art (yep - stole that from Gaiman and I don't care) and if you make really good art and aren't a dick, people will ask for you and remember you.
That - I think is how it should and could work but there's one hell of a long way to go. I guess some might say that it's OK for me or that I'm older and don't need to fight the same, but I paid my dues. When I started out, I turned up at 2pm hundreds of miles away from home and waited for a band if I wanted an interview. I've slept on stations, under trees, in photo booths - once even under a car because it was raining (which was stupid) all because I wanted to work for Rolling Stone. That didn't happen - in fact I never worked for any of the music magazines. So I stuck two fingers up at them and decided to do it myself. I'm not a name anybody would throw into the arena when it comes to music writing but that road led me somewhere else that I love just as much.
Finally... I think there are enough tools out there for photographers (or whatever else) to make their own way. Put a book together of your total best. Make it kill. Invest in the best "one copy only" print on demand service you can get. Shop it around. Make yourself hot property - don't throw it away on Facebook for the sake of somebody giving you a big thumbs up. Make ten copies and send it to your favourite bands management companies of nobody will give you the time of day.
Fortune favours the brave and all that. What we need right now is for someone to break the shitty mould that's been left behind by accountants.
Phew. Did I actually answer anything at all here?
As an afterthought/footnote - and I think Fin says this at the close of that interview - if you're busy, you won't know you're 'making it' at all. One day, after many years, you will stop for a moment for some odd reason - maybe you've run out of milk - look back and say 'holy shit - look at all this work I've done'. The train of thought today is that you have to 'make it' but it's not something that's up to you decide even if you're fantastic at what you do. All you can do is The Work and the public will decide the rest...
When you're shooting Aeromsith in 1974, you don't know they are going to be huge. You do your best work - that's all you can do. The rest is nothing more than the world turning in a certain direction - but if you never turned up to take the shot, you're not even in the game.
Shoot To Kill (II)
I like getting questions. Nobody ever sends me questions. Probably because although I like getting questions doesn't always mean I like answering them - usually because people ask the wrong questions. Yesterday though, my buddy Scott asked me a peach. It looked like this: I've just finished re-reading (sober this time) Shoot To Kill - you interview with Fin Costello in BDWN. I enjoyed that chapter pissed first time around and wanted to return to it to take it in properly.
I may not have worked at the very top with the biggest bands, but there are so many similarities. I spent years shooting bands, (Californian punk mostly, with the Fat Wreck Chords label), travelling with them, hotel rooms, dressing rooms, I can relate to the whole thing. I earned their trust over time and they became good friends - there was nowhere I couldn't go.
I recently got invited to meet up with Bowling For Soup again on their farewell tour too. I didn't bother taking my camera. I'd spent seven years travelling and documenting everything they did in the UK already, so this time it was just to talk about all that we'd done and which photos they'd like for the book. I wandered around to the back of the venue, went inside and walked up to the dressing rooms, without a pass, unchallenged. I've always wondered why no one else did this. After the show I was stood chatting to the tour manager when one of the evening photographers asked me what an 'old guy' like me was doing at a BFS show!
Do you think any of us photographers can ever make our mark like Fin? Everything seems so throw away now and everybody's at it.
Just wanted to say I found it a really interesting chapter. Great work Sir.
Oh yeah... that's a peach of a question alright. For the uninitiated, this is Fin Costello. If you're a music fan, there will be plenty you recognise - and this is Black Dye White Noise. This may be the longest blog post I've written in years. Hopefully, I can make it useful
That interview with Fin is from back in 2003 but I think all of the things he talks about are still relevant - not only that, but they are relevant to more than just the music business now time has moved on. You can also apply the same principles to writing that's for sure. The background of the story is that I interviewed Fin for a magazine I had just launched (Burn) and he gave more than I could ever have asked for. Hours of material. He was a true gent and unintentionally, taught me everything I know about how photographers should be treated - looking back, it might have only been how Fin wanted to be treated (which was with respect) but it all made perfect sense to me and still does. So:
Will any photographers ever make a mark like him?
Sadly, unless things change across the board, it's unlikely in the current climate. First of all, photographers (pro, amateur and everything in between) must stop giving their work away for free - even though they don't mean to. As you know all too well, as soon as a single image hits the web, it's dead meat. It can be around the world so fast that you have no hope of reclaiming it ever again. So the first rule must surely be, keep your work to yourself. Unless you want it to be a genuine free for all, you wouldn't do it with a song, a book or a movie. Assuming photographers think of their work as being in the same arena - why is it more prevalent with images than these other things? Do you all feel guilty that the web will be empty if visual treats without your contributions?
But that's not actually a real world proposition if you're trying to make a name for yourself. You want people to see your work and the web is great for that, but unless you have a client at the other end (an editor, a paid for commission etc) what the hell are you supposed to do with them? It probably seems like you won't get anywhere if you keep them to yourself. So, as far as I can see, a photographer needs to decide which side of the fence they sit on. Do you pull everything in and keep your cards close to your chest until such a time as you get a break or do you throw it to the four corners of the world and see what happens? The correct answer is that you keep them to yourself. Sounds harsh but hey, that's business for you. All the time you give your work away 'for free' and let it loose in the world without your knowledge, you're in no better a position really than a 12 year old with a mobile phone and a wi-fi connection.
Sounds harsh, but that's what I think should happen. That's what would separate the men from the boys but that is an ideal world scenario because it won't work unless other things come into line as well - media editors offering decent money for the work would be a good start. Being a mag editor, I know that money isn't as freely available as it used to be back in Fin's day, so those people are also in a hole. Everybody is in a hole and the root of the problem is that we've all got used to getting stuff for free. It's a good plan as a promotional tool but when promotion turns into "why is there no petrol in the car?" and "why is there nothing to eat today?" maybe you should have thought it through a little better.
There was a time when I would spend good money on a poster of a band - that's how I discovered Fin in the first place. Sometimes you can get lucky and find an editor who appreciates what you do but I think we (I do class myself as one of them) are few and far between. Switch places and you wouldn't find an editor of a mag spending four hours making your work look great for the love of it. You can pretty much guarantee that. That's a bit simplistic but I think it gets the point across. I'm sure most people think you just turn up with a camera hanging off your shoulder, rattle 1000 shots off digitally, send them in and walk away with more cash than you know what to do with.
Do they teach you this at university if these are your plans? They should do.
The other thing that's important here is that nobody seems to have a freaking clue about what's good anymore. Either that or nobody cares because information floods at you now instead of being carefully chosen by you. In music, the CD killed off most artistic cover work and mp3 put the final nail in. Now that we're streaming instead of downloading (or at least I am) - what happens next?
They are not all like this by any means - the shot of Rebecca Ferguson's album cover that I posted yesterday, is a stunning shot. Nice work whoever shot that... and RIGHT THERE is your problem - and even now that I've had a cursory look for who shot it, that info is not easy to come by.
Back in Fin's day, you had the album sleeve. We would sit around for years with those damn sleeves and read them over and over while we listened. You knew who produced stuff, who wrote songs, who shot the cover - and I think (I hope) within the industry, that was out of respect for everybody being a cog in the big machine. You play nice. You get remembered. You turn up, you get let in. You could call up David Lee Roth and he would remember you. You knew the manager and the tour bus driver and you treated them all the same because the clock doesn't work if one of the cogs gets fucked up. Basically, you could get things done. The more you got things done, the more the people with the money would just trust you to work out what the client (the band) wanted and know (for the most part) that what they would get back would work. (If you're interested, that's one of the reasons why I moved the photo credits on the cover of Skin Deep to the cover instead of burying it on the contents page. It's just the way I think things should be done. I don't know if other mags do this or not. I only read Vanity Fair these days but as far as I can see they are still very respectful of photography and still treat it well - but they are quite old school).
As for everything being throwaway. I agree. I hate it. I hate it so much, I've given the world what it asked for and thrown/given all my things away in some desperate stab at regaining control. I own no compact discs anymore, stream all my music via rdio but I do have a record deck for the things I really care about - plus it gives me something to do when travelling. Do you know how hard it is to find old vinyl that's not been to hell and back. I have no DVD's and I'm working on my books to the point that I only want books with effort put into their presentation on the shelf - the rest might as well be an ebook or an audiobook because - if you're not going to package it like you mean it (respect it?) - why the hell should I show everybody in my life your half assed effort?
It's probably a fruitless stand but it's a stand I like to make. It's going to be a long time before people want quality stuff in their lives anymore. It's the Facebook mentality of "live fast, die young and tell everybody about it" because "I want to be important too". Don't get me started on it but I can never resist an opportunity to say again that Facebook is the slug of the internet garden. It's ugly, pointless, will eat everything in sight regardless of what it is and you can't kill it. I tried putting salt on it one day just to make sure but just made a mess on the table.
Finally... the comment you make about being an "old guy" at a show. I suspect we all used to be like that. Then I became an "old guy" - not that old admittedly, same age as you in fact. Time moves on and you get a bit more respectful about it because if you don't, you're just going to end up being that "young guy" who was hot for ten minutes - or at least until the even younger guy came up behind you and kicked your ass into oblivion. Which is more or less the same as the story that Fin tells about being treated like shit when he went to shoot Train - when the guys in charge found out what he had done in his career, the rules changed. And I dare say that if good money hadn't been involved, Fin would have told them all to go fuck themselves.
So - on a positive note, if anybody reading wants to be remembered like Fin, Mick Rock, Bob Gruen, Ross Halfin, Scarlet Page and there are many, many others - you better get your shit together, (not you personally, I'm just speaking generally here). If anybody else is reading - and I don't profess to know everything, this is just how it appears to me - be an decent human being of a cog whilst also getting pretty good at not taking shit from fools. Talk to the waitress like a real person. Talk to the guy who holds the door open at the hotel, he has dreams too. The guy who is serving you coffee hasn't made a career choice there. Don't be a dick because frankly, you're just not that important - play nice and you can make good art (yep - stole that from Gaiman and I don't care) and if you make really good art and aren't a dick, people will ask for you and remember you.
That - I think is how it should and could work but there's one hell of a long way to go. I guess some might say that it's OK for me or that I'm older and don't need to fight the same, but I paid my dues. When I started out, I turned up at 2pm hundreds of miles away from home and waited for a band if I wanted an interview. I've slept on stations, under trees, in photo booths - once even under a car because it was raining (which was stupid) all because I wanted to work for Rolling Stone. That didn't happen - in fact I never worked for any of the music magazines. So I stuck two fingers up at them and decided to do it myself. I'm not a name anybody would throw into the arena when it comes to music writing but that road led me somewhere else that I love just as much.
Finally... I think there are enough tools out there for photographers (or whatever else) to make their own way. Put a book together of your total best. Make it kill. Invest in the best "one copy only" print on demand service you can get. Shop it around. Make yourself hot property - don't throw it away on Facebook for the sake of somebody giving you a big thumbs up. Make ten copies and send it to your favourite bands management companies of nobody will give you the time of day.
Fortune favours the brave and all that. What we need right now is for someone to break the shitty mould that's been left behind by accountants.
Phew. Did I actually answer anything at all here?
As an afterthought/footnote - and I think Fin says this at the close of that interview - if you're busy, you won't know you're 'making it' at all. One day, after many years, you will stop for a moment for some odd reason - maybe you've run out of milk - look back and say 'holy shit - look at all this work I've done'. The train of thought today is that you have to 'make it' but it's not something that's up to you decide even if you're fantastic at what you do. All you can do is The Work and the public will decide the rest...
When you're shooting Aeromsith in 1974, you don't know they are going to be huge. You do your best work - that's all you can do. The rest is nothing more than the world turning in a certain direction - but if you never turned up to take the shot, you're not even in the game.
Rebecca Ferguson: Freedom Reigns
This year might possibly have been the flattest year in a long, long time for album releases worth talking about. It's a wasteland out there but I have persisted through the usual suspects, continued to listen to albums released sometime between 1973 to 1978 to keep my faith intact and bided my time in the hope that something might come along and make me feel alive again.
Finally, this week, something did come along and raised my spirits beyond street level. It might have prompted a little scorn from some friends and there will be those who simply don't believe me, but Rebecca Ferguson's Freedom is an insane chopping board of sheer class. Maybe it's just the mood I'm in at the moment but I tell you from the heart as somebody who knows good music when he hears it, this is the finest album to come out of this year by a long shot. Better still, it's not only got killer production values and all that other behind the scenes magic that makes an album great but the quality of the actual songs on here outshines the competition by miles and miles. And then some.
Songs. Remember those? They were the things that used to be important to us before merchandising, posturing and shaking your booty at a video camera took over. They were the things that formed the soundtrack to a whole life before MTV redesigned the industry in exchange for a suitcase full of cash.
Loving this album as much as I do is a strange feeling. A few weeks back, the new Monster Magnet album came out. I love that band. The album was pretty good but I didn't come here for pretty good. I came to be floored in exchange for offering you my time and attention. That's the deal we make when it comes to music.
Others have said it before me, but none have meant it as much as I do right now: that voice drips honey at every twist of the knife.
Her voice does the same thing to me that Stevie Nicks' used to back in the days before it went kinda fuzzy - and it's funny how people respond to marketing. If you put Freedom next to Bella Donna, you'll find a lot of similarities - but the world will have you believe that one is a classic from an international rock star worthy of the status and the other is the result of a talent competition. While that might be true on the surface and on paper, that's not what's actually happening. People need to listen with their ears and not eyes that scan column inches in search of an opinion they can use as their own, normally generated by somebody that got mailed a CD for free and has nothing to lose.
More than this, people should listen with their hearts. It's simply so beautiful in every way imaginable, I don't have any more words than I've already written about it available for description.
How Long Is Forever?
I finally decided on a better title for the previously titled Scarecrow short story - it shall hereafter be known as Eternity Ring, which is something of a shift in suggesting what it might be about but it suits it a lot better. All will become clear. Currently running edits on it and doing layout stuff. The cover might look something like this - file under pending - I'll see how I feel after I've lived with it for a few days:
Estimated time of arrival? Mid December.
•••
Now and then, you can stumble across something so far out there and so jaw-droppingly up there on the scale of ‘thumbs up’ that you want to show/tell everybody you meet. Apologies for the incredibly bad English there but that’s how it came out.
The first port of call is this video clip that Rhiannon pimped at me after school today. She showed it to me because it was freaky but it’s so much more than that. See for yourself.
If you ever thought the world was going to hell in a sea of averageness, that should restore some of your faith. Simply wonderful.
Similarly eye stretching are these pics of frozen light-houses.
Frozen lighthouses? Not something you hear about everyday but here they are - larger than life. If I had shot these, I suspect I would spend the rest of my life wondering exactly what the hell I was going to do next that meant anything.
Nature.
No matter how far out on the edge of life you think you can get, Nature laughs in your face every second of every day. You can find more of this lighthouse magic right here.
All of which leads me to this:
Last week, I bought a book that changed the way I think about many things. It took me so far down to the bottom that I pushed everything that was in front of me to the far side of the table and considered never looking at any of it ever again because there was - quite frankly - no point in even trying.
A few days passed and that very same book took me from the place it had squashed me under a rock and raised me to the far side of the universe from where I could look down on everything and think that maybe it was way too early to be throwing in the towel. Which is a good thing because I rather think that Guillermo Del Toro would be pretty sad if he thought his book had that kind of effect on somebody.
This is the book.
It’s a monster in every way. It’s the Led Zeppelin of books. You look in at what’s going on behind the curtain and you absolutely have to say to yourself “I will never be this good” - and for a while there, I believed it in a bad way. Then I came down from the bad trip and figured, “what the hell, this is something to rise to”. That sounds wrong… what I'm trying to say is it's like you’ve been wandering around the bottom of a mountain for far too long and somebody yells down at you from the top “You wouldn’t believe what I can see from up here” - and the guy is right. You can’t believe what he can see because first you have to climb the mountain and by the time you get to the top, everything will have changed anyway.
Or something like that. It’s good to be put in your place every now and again. I could live without it happening too often though.
On the plus side, all of this is much better than looking at a bunch of stuff that’s nothing more than average and thinking it was a high enough bench-mark to set yourself.
Harsh but fair.
•••
I started compiling my 101 x 1001 list a couple of days ago. I’ve decided to publish ‘most’ of it here aside from a few personal items on it (and that’s things that I want to do with the kids mostly - I haven’t told them about it yet so I guess I might meet some resistance on that front). I was telling somebody about it and he suggested I document it all. Video what was worth videoing, record what’s worth recording, photograph what was… you get the picture.
There’s a part of me that could get excited about the prospect of doing that and another part of me that’s a bit reluctant to start heading down a path that I can’t keep rolling once it’s in motion. On one hand, I like the idea of running something up that might be similar in spirit to The Roth Show - which if you’re not keeping up with regularly, what the hell’s wrong with you? On the other hand, I’ve never been super comfortable in front of a camera - maybe it’s time I started fluffing those pillows to make it comfortable and see what happens. It’s not 1973 anymore. I don’t think being mysterious in a ‘Led Zepp/media blackout’ kind of way is going to help much when you’re trying to make a name for yourself without any outside assistance. Maybe the Diamond Dave approach is the way to go.
Who am I kidding? Without the backing of a big publishing house, of course it’s the way to go.
Big gulp.
•••
To wrap this up today, I thought I might cut all my hair off and buy a Hugo Boss suit - maybe reinvent myself for the new age. Why that would make a difference I have not a clue, but it might be fun for a little while… I think I will wait just a few more months until Hector gets tired of hanging from my trousers though.
Here Be Monsters
I always figured myself to be quite clued up on the monsters of the world but looking at this excellent Lake Monsters of America map - handily provided by Atlas Obscura - I find that I am indeed, wrong. Take a look:
I've never heard of the Horse-Headed Alligator before now. That's a monster I'd really like to see - not that I've seen many of the others, but that one I think would be really something. Not sure about the Monster Fish however - that sounds pretty normal to me. Anyway - nice work on the map everybody. If anybody reading can be bothered rustling something up for the UK - or even better, Europe - bring it.
And on the subject of infographics (is that an infographic or just a map? I can't tell the difference anymore), I've kept this little nugget of gold in a folder for weeks now. I came across it when I was putting the Sci-Fi Tattoos together and then forgot all about it, but being as we're in the house so to speak, this is a good time to deliver it to you. If you've never seen the movies, move along the bus - there will be nothing to see here:
Being as I mentioned it, between now and Christmas, Jazz have bundled together Sci-Fi Tattoos, Comic Book Tattoos and Horror Tattoos together for £20 - £19.99 if you want to be picky about it - which is a pretty good deal. Next day delivery too. You can find it here.
Here Be Monsters
I always figured myself to be quite clued up on the monsters of the world but looking at this excellent Lake Monsters of America map - handily provided by Atlas Obscura - I find that I am indeed, wrong. Take a look:
I've never heard of the Horse-Headed Alligator before now. That's a monster I'd really like to see - not that I've seen many of the others, but that one I think would be really something. Not sure about the Monster Fish however - that sounds pretty normal to me. Anyway - nice work on the map everybody. If anybody reading can be bothered rustling something up for the UK - or even better, Europe - bring it on.
And on the subject of infographics (is this an infographic or just a map? I can't tell the difference anymore), I've kept this little nugget of gold in a folder for weeks now. I came across it when I was putting the Sci-Fi Tattoos together and then forgot all about it, but being as we're in the house so to speak, this is a good time to deliver it to you. If you've never seen the movies, move along the bus - there will be nothing to see here:
Being as I mentioned it, between now and Christmas, Jazz have bundled together Sci-Fi Tattoos, Comic Book Tattoos and Horror Tattoos together for £20 - £19.99 if you want to be picky about it - which is a pretty good deal. Next day delivery too. You can find it here.
Time And Time Again
Holy Cow. It's my birthday in something like 15 days. I must make my annual pilgrimage to the list previously known as 101 things to do in 1001 days (which is now known as 101 things to do in 3001 days due to time not being what it was back when I originally made the list). It obviously needs an update though I guess if I had actually done the 101 things in the 1001 days allotted to it, I wouldn't have lost interest in some of them. Maybe I will press the reset button on the whole damn thing, make the list public and work my way through it. A public list? That sounds dangerous. "45. Spend a week in Copenhagen writing" doesn't sound very interesting to anybody else, but then again, it is to me... so you're going to have to put up with it - at the very least, reading about it when it happens.
Look, I've changed my mind already. This isn't going to be a public list at all. It's going to be a very private list. I think I'll publish the list when I've done them all and then (it's easy to say this three years before you have to) simply start a new list.
The original website that inspired me to start this has gone through some changes since I first found it but it's still here at Day Zero Project. Not quite so organic as it once was but what is any more on the web?
•••
In a totally not related to anything kind of way, I stumbled upon this hotel earlier on today and think I might like to stay there for no other reason than because it exists - maybe do a weeks worth of writing there as well. Perhaps I should add it to the list. Perhaps I should just add lots of places I'd like to go for no reason and say that I'll write when I get there. This one looks like there might not be not much else to do except write actually.
•••
Hector is tapping into any reading time I actually had but I'm making good headway with Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield - it's a damn fine book and will make an end of the year top ten list if I can be bothered to do one. There's a section of it where Bellman is busy cramming as much into his day as he can with all the efficiency of a machine. The paragraph that follows goes like this:
"But what he really felt about the matter was that he had discovered - or been given - the key to chronometry. He could open up the case of time when he chose, apply weight to the pendulum and slow its movement. He could take the hours apart, find the extra minutes that were going to waste in them, make them his own."
Which makes it sound a little like a time travel novel, but it's not - it's about a kid that accidentally kills a rook when he was a kid, a mill and an awful lot of dead people. Check it out here.
I like this idea of chronometry. Does such a thing exist or did she make it up - it does indeed exist but reading about it gives me a headache. Still, I suspect it's worth having a closer look at it. No matter how busy you are, there are always dead minutes in any given hour - if you can find a way to collect them all together and make a new hour... well, that's magic in its purest form.
Time And Time Again
Holy Cow. It's my birthday in something like 15 days. I must make my annual pilgrimage to the list previously known as 101 things to do in 1001 days (which is now known as 101 things to do in 3001 days due to time not being what it was back when I originally made the list). It obviously needs an update though I guess if I had actually done the 101 things in the 1001 days allotted to it, I wouldn't have lost interest in some of them. Maybe I will press the reset button on the whole damn thing, make the list public and work my way through it. A public list? That sounds dangerous. "45. Spend a week in Copenhagen writing" doesn't sound very interesting to anybody else, but then again, it is to me... so you're going to have to put up with it - at the very least, reading about it when it happens.
Look, I've changed my mind already. This isn't going to be a public list at all. It's going to be a very private list. I think I'll publish the list when I've done them all and then (it's easy to say this three years before you have to) simply start a new list.
The original website that inspired me to start this has gone through some changes since I first found it but it's still here at Day Zero Project. Not quite so organic as it once was but what is any more on the web?
•••
In a totally not related to anything kind of way, I stumbled upon this hotel earlier on today and think I might like to stay there for no other reason than because it exists - maybe do a weeks worth of writing there as well. Perhaps I should add it to the list. Perhaps I should just add lots of places I'd like to go for no reason and say that I'll write when I get there. This one looks like there might not be not much else to do except write actually.
•••
Hector is tapping into any reading time I actually had but I'm making good headway with Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield - it's a damn fine book and will make an end of the year top ten list if I can be bothered to do one. There's a section of it where Bellman is busy cramming as much into his day as he can with all the efficiency of a machine. The paragraph that follows goes like this:
"But what he really felt about the matter was that he had discovered - or been given - the key to chronometry. He could open up the case of time when he chose, apply weight to the pendulum and slow its movement. He could take the hours apart, find the extra minutes that were going to waste in them, make them his own."
Which makes it sound a little like a time travel novel, but it's not - it's about a kid that accidentally kills a rook when he was a kid, a mill and an awful lot of dead people. Check it out here.
I like this idea of chronometry. Does such a thing exist or did she make it up - it does indeed exist but reading about it gives me a headache. Still, I suspect it's worth having a closer look at it. No matter how busy you are, there are always dead minutes in any given hour - if you can find a way to collect them all together and make a new hour... well, that's magic in its purest form.
Scarecrows, Dogs, Bears...
Work continues on The Family Of Noise - the end is in sight but it's still not finished. Books take a long time to write because unless you plan them out to within an inch of their life (which I don't), things change as you go along. I have read that some people plan, plan and then plan again but that's writing for money, not writing because it needs to be written. Just a personal opinion of course - but boy, can you tell when you pick a book up. As promised in the last newsletter (which you can sign up to here - it's so low key, you won't even noticed you filled anything in) the really short novella type thing I was working on called Scarecrow is indeed finished... and now it's complete, I don't like the title but that's easily fixed and I'll figure it out over the next day or so. First of all, I need to find an illustrator to bring it to life. I can't get to grips with a cover design for it either but that's because of the naming thing. Anyway, a few days and I'll be looking at doing something in the real world with it - assuming of course that the Secret Police don't go to town on me with a red pen - or even worse, the dreaded green pen. We have a system - it's harsh but it works.
I then need to make a judgement call on whether to release it as a 'regular' text only book or wait until I have the illustration angle figured out.
I think all of this may call for an editorial/publishing meeting on Saturday morning that involves a park, a dog and a bacon sandwich. I don't normally like meetings - they usually mean the person who is supposed to be in charge can't decide on what to do or they know exactly what they want to do and wish to give others the illusion that they have had some say in the matter.
This meeting will be over as soon as the bacon is gone and that's how all meetings should be run.
•••
A week or so ago, Eleanor set up a blog for Hector because she loves this turbo-powered hurricane of a dog more than life itself. Today, I tidied it up a little and gave it a lick of paint. If you're into good looking dogs who are busy growing up fast and laughing at their owners who are struggling to speak the same language, you know what to do.
Doing that has changed my mind about something. I'm still waiting on a response from WSPA about getting involved with freeing Baloo - man, they take a long time to do anything out there. If I've not heard anything by the end of next week, I'm going to walk away from even trying and throw my time and effort into something a little closer to home that might have something to do with much smaller creatures... file under pending.
Tunnel Vision
Posting here has taken a little bit of a back seat this week due to the riotous task of typing up chapter upon chapter from the notebooks. I swear there must be at least 60,000 words of material which is great... and it would be one hell of a lot of easier if I could read my own handwriting sometimes. Determination has set in now to wrap up The Family Of Noise and it shall be done. With a plan to abandon all the usual ports of call to sell a novel these days, which includes iBooks and Amazon, and sell directly from here in all digital formats, a limited edition hardback run alongside a (reasonably) never ending supply of print on demand softbacks (I much prefer that to the term paperback - I don't know why) I should really be thinking about a promotional plan to go along with it. If you want to use a gardening analogy, right now I have a packet of seeds, some good compost and a big garden to dig in. Next stage - readying the earth I think, followed by planting the seeds and letting the roots do their thing.
That's what I should be doing writing, typing or planning - instead (apart from the day job of course) I have been installing baby gates to keep Hector where he should be and out of places he shouldn't be, stripping old silicone sealant from the bath and putting new stuff in... things like that. I read an interview with P.D. James a couple of days ago and she was talking about how she works these days and about "the time the person comes in during the morning to type all of my dictated notes" - and I wondered if I would ever be like that. I can't see it myself. I hear all of the things people say about 'you're a writer - you should just be writing', but there's another part of me that says 'If you're gonna open a restaurant, you better be good at washing up'. That way, you're feet will stay firmly on the ground and nobody can make a mistake that you can't claim as your own.
Sounds nice though... just writing and leaving everybody else to do the dirty work. That would leave me with lots of time for installing baby gates, re-sealing the bath and other household jobs that need attending to.
Hmm.
•••
In the cracks of all of that, I've been trying to catch up with the recent Anglo/French serial The Tunnel, which while I'm quite enjoying it and it's well made, well acted etc... appears to be a plot point for plot point rip-off of The Bridge - the excellent Swedish/Danish thriller that ran a few years back. Maybe they thought that if the viewers only had to read only one set of sub-titles, that would raise the viewing figures?
And they would have been wrong...
Spiral anybody?
•••
I've been making some serious inroads with my "non-buying of stuff" commitment. Sort of. I haven't bought a physical copy of a magazine for the whole of this year choosing instead to do all my mag buying on the iPad. An interesting thing has come of this. Around July, I stopped buying any magazines even digitally apart from Vanity Fair (which as I've said before is excellent on the iPad and one of the very few that bothers to still deliver proper wiring and photography) and found myself buying comics again via Comixology instead.
Funny... the magazine habit was originally fuelled because I love them - or rather I used to love them before they all became inane copies of each other with increasingly low production values in search of getting more return on their pound/dollar/euro/whatever. Conversely, I stopped buying comics simply because they don't really sell them in the places I tend to be and, whenever I go into the local comic store, there's never what I really want despite what I'm absolutely sure are his best efforts. Comixology on the other hand... well I can hit that at three in the morning if I so desire and they deliver a killer product. Yeah, yeah, I kinda miss the old shit too, but I'm buying comics again which I wasn't before and I adore the reading experience of Comixology. Not saying you should do it... not saying you shouldn't. I'm saying that you should try it out and decide for yourself - and you should start with Trillium by Jeff Lemire.
Anyway - pre-kindle/iPad/smartphone boom - somewhere in the years gone by on here, I made a statement (which I didn't tag and can therefore not actually find) that went something along the lines of this: One day, all mass fiction will be delivered digitally because there is no need for it to be delivered otherwise. It's just a story waiting to be read. I still believe that to be true. I then followed it up by stating that the only books that would be published as hard product would be those that delivered something extra... art books, big photography books... those kinds of things. I still believe that too - there has to be some value put back into the things that we love other than this dumb-ass distribution/price war that goes on between bookstores and supermarkets.
And it has happened - not from a place or author that I expected it to though. The book is called "S" and it comes from the minds of JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst (yeah - that JJ Abrams). First of all, watch this:
and then this:
and then go out - to a real bookshop (you're thankfully unlikely to find it elsewhere) - put your money where my mouth is, find this, buy it and love it.
You won't be disappointed. It's beautiful - when you get it home, don't be opening it and dumping the contents all over the table to check them out either. As if that wasn't just peachy all by itself, I just found out that it also comes as an e-book produced for the iBook store and has all of the contents available in that version too.
You can read a full story about it here.
Tunnel Vision
Posting here has taken a little bit of a back seat this week due to the riotous task of typing up chapter upon chapter from the notebooks. I swear there must be at least 60,000 words of material which is great... and it would be one hell of a lot of easier if I could read my own handwriting sometimes. Determination has set in now to wrap up The Family Of Noise and it shall be done. With a plan to abandon all the usual ports of call to sell a novel these days, which includes iBooks and Amazon, and sell directly from here in all digital formats, a limited edition hardback run alongside a (reasonably) never ending supply of print on demand softbacks (I much prefer that to the term paperback - I don't know why) I should really be thinking about a promotional plan to go along with it. If you want to use a gardening analogy, right now I have a packet of seeds, some good compost and a big garden to dig in. Next stage - readying the earth I think, followed by planting the seeds and letting the roots do their thing.
That's what I should be doing writing, typing or planning - instead (apart from the day job of course) I have been installing baby gates to keep Hector where he should be and out of places he shouldn't be, stripping old silicone sealant from the bath and putting new stuff in... things like that. I read an interview with P.D. James a couple of days ago and she was talking about how she works these days and about "the time the person comes in during the morning to type all of my dictated notes" - and I wondered if I would ever be like that. I can't see it myself. I hear all of the things people say about 'you're a writer - you should just be writing', but there's another part of me that says 'If you're gonna open a restaurant, you better be good at washing up'. That way, you're feet will stay firmly on the ground and nobody can make a mistake that you can't claim as your own.
Sounds nice though... just writing and leaving everybody else to do the dirty work. That would leave me with lots of time for installing baby gates, re-sealing the bath and other household jobs that need attending to.
Hmm.
•••
In the cracks of all of that, I've been trying to catch up with the recent Anglo/French serial The Tunnel, which while I'm quite enjoying it and it's well made, well acted etc... appears to be a plot point for plot point rip-off of The Bridge - the excellent Swedish/Danish thriller that ran a few years back. Maybe they thought that if the viewers only had to read only one set of sub-titles, that would raise the viewing figures?
And they would have been wrong...
Spiral anybody?
•••
I've been making some serious inroads with my "non-buying of stuff" commitment. Sort of. I haven't bought a physical copy of a magazine for the whole of this year choosing instead to do all my mag buying on the iPad. An interesting thing has come of this. Around July, I stopped buying any magazines even digitally apart from Vanity Fair (which as I've said before is excellent on the iPad and one of the very few that bothers to still deliver proper wiring and photography) and found myself buying comics again via Comixology instead.
Funny... the magazine habit was originally fuelled because I love them - or rather I used to love them before they all became inane copies of each other with increasingly low production values in search of getting more return on their pound/dollar/euro/whatever. Conversely, I stopped buying comics simply because they don't really sell them in the places I tend to be and, whenever I go into the local comic store, there's never what I really want despite what I'm absolutely sure are his best efforts. Comixology on the other hand... well I can hit that at three in the morning if I so desire and they deliver a killer product. Yeah, yeah, I kinda miss the old shit too, but I'm buying comics again which I wasn't before and I adore the reading experience of Comixology. Not saying you should do it... not saying you shouldn't. I'm saying that you should try it out and decide for yourself - and you should start with Trillium by Jeff Lemire.
Anyway - pre-kindle/iPad/smartphone boom - somewhere in the years gone by on here, I made a statement (which I didn't tag and can therefore not actually find) that went something along the lines of this: One day, all mass fiction will be delivered digitally because there is no need for it to be delivered otherwise. It's just a story waiting to be read. I still believe that to be true. I then followed it up by stating that the only books that would be published as hard product would be those that delivered something extra... art books, big photography books... those kinds of things. I still believe that too - there has to be some value put back into the things that we love other than this dumb-ass distribution/price war that goes on between bookstores and supermarkets.
And it has happened - not from a place or author that I expected it to though. The book is called "S" and it comes from the minds of JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst (yeah - that JJ Abrams). First of all, watch this:
and then this:
and then go out - to a real bookshop (you're thankfully unlikely to find it elsewhere) - put your money where my mouth is, find this, buy it and love it.
You won't be disappointed. It's beautiful - when you get it home, don't be opening it and dumping the contents all over the table to check them out either. As if that wasn't just peachy all by itself, I just found out that it also comes as an e-book produced for the iBook store and has all of the contents available in that version too.
You can read a full story about it here.