THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
Other People's Stuff
Let's throw some radio into the world. An hour or so ago, Lauren Laverne had Robert Plant on her show. You can find a link to that here if you happen to be in the country - if you missed it, it's up online for a month or so - but later tonight, at 19.00 (that's seven o'clock if you didn't sign up for the armed forces) you can catch more from Mr Plant on 6 Music and there's details on that, right here.
This is not me. This is Robert Plant. You can tell the difference really easily because this is Robert Plant and I am not. Though, in a thick Victorian fog at night, I suppose you could be forgiven.
Which is all an excellent prelude to the world trying to tell you he has a new album out next Friday 13th called Carry Fire that looks like this:
He's on tour too... officialness can be received in the House of all that is Holy here. Go see.
If you can't wait that long and need some new music in your life, Marilyn Manson has a new album out called Heaven Upside Down and so do Black Country Communion (IV), Black Stone Cherry (Black To Blues) and the always amazing Dan Reed with Confessions.
In the earbuds this week, I've been exploring Southern Gothic country artists. I believe it goes under the rough banner of Cemetery and Western. It's good stuff but I need to spend more time with it... it's seeping into Deadbirds and I kinda like it. It feels very comfortable but more on that some other time.
Not a whole lot of action under the covers with a torch to report on in the book front this week, mainly because I haven't read one single thing. I've still got Whiteout kicking about in the wings for Romania next week (I'll be here if you happen to be close by) and in the holes, I've been dipping in and out of this... which is everything it should be and more:
Meanwhile, out on the movie front, this looks fantastic. There is no other way to describe it. I haven't been as game for a cinema trip (even if it's by myself) for a long time. Release date is mid-January and it looks like one of those movies that won't be hitting the multiplex at convenient times at all. So be it. I hope I don't forget - January is months away!
You can watch the trailer for The Hero here.
Just to balance out the highbrow-ness is this entry, I am also really fucking looking forward to this with Bruce Willis doing what Bruce Willis does:
Yep... there's a lot of white space on this poster. I guess I could have made it a lot smaller really.
So basically, everything cool I have to tell you about this week is in the future.
Sorry about that but it's something to look forward to, right?
More From The Road
I dropped some text up here yesterday that almost sounded like a motivational speech. It wasn't meant that way - I am no motivator. I was just thinking out loud but nothing would make me happier than if you happened to pick up the gauntlet and joined me in my 9:18 goal of throwing some happy shit at the world instead of just shit for the next year.
It's only a year - it will fly by. Trust me. Plus, the place could use a break don't you think?
On a different note, I learned something new today - please allow me to share my cultured find.
Pictured here is a letter from Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac. The caption beneath is the entry in the auction book when it went up for grabs at Christie's:
CASSADY, Neal (1926-1968). Typed letter completed in autograph and with autograph additions, corrections, and deletions in pencil and pen, to JACK KEROUAC (1922-1969), Denver, 17 December 1950. 18 pages, comprising nearly 16,000 words, some pale browning and minor marginal chipping. Estimate: $400,000-600,000
I like Kerouac a lot. Some days we get along better than others. Some of his books have great covers and some of them really suck - for some reason, this is important when walking into Kerouac's house. Anyway, though I had heard of this letter - which was lost, found, failed at auction and is now at the Emory in Atlanta - I never knew how it was written was the inspiration for the style Kerouac used when he wrote On The Road.
I hunted around for a variant of the picture I could actually read - and found one. It's odd. It's like listening to an album of a band you don't rate and finding out that one of your favourite bands copied everything about it and just added a little of their own sugar on the top to push the casual observer off the kerb.
Maybe people who are better versed in The Beats will laugh at my ignorance here but ignorance is a wonderful thing when it means many years later, you can discover new things and have a whole new lease of life injected into something you loved already.
Unless perhaps, twenty years down the line, you happen to find out your lover once killed a school friend with a pencil and a live sea-sponge stolen from the marine tank in the teachers staff-room. That's not so wonderful, but you could write a book about it, so all would not be totally lost.
Maybe I will type a letter on my Olympia and send it to a writer-friend in the vague hope that one day, somebody I don't know and will likely never meet may likewise benefit from me emptying my head of its frustrations onto a piece of paper.
If you're interested, this Olympus is indeed very portable - I don't think she is much heavier than the MacBook Pro I used to have. The case is held together with gaffer tape but that's nothing new, everything I ever owned that's ever hit the road with me has been held together with the stuff. It is 100% possible to write a book on her.
It would be a very slow book to write, but it would be a book all the same and probably a very different type of book than I would write on this MB-Air. Maybe during my December sabbatical from technology (that's a very real thing here) I'll spend some quality time with her and get to know her better than I do at the moment. Maybe I'll learn how to strip her down and rebuild her, get real smooth at dropping sheets of paper in and out of the roller and figure out how hard to tap the keys to get the most out of her.
Most of all, maybe I can just get better at typing on her and actually write that book.
How hard can it be?
#9:18
I love it when people get self referential with each other - it reminds me of the days when Bowie and Bolan would do it, even if it didn’t last very long. My friend Beccy just fired up a new blog where she does what I would term as ‘whatever she likes’ which is the very best way to run a blog. She grabbed hold of my idea of projecting herself forwards 12 months into next September 2018 - see this if you missed it and you can read about her state of affairs here. She has a baby now - which is great! She’s on the road with her man in their van - which is just as it should be. In fact, just like when I roughed up my original '9:18' entry, things look peachy.
Except now, it’s October - only 11 months to go to nail shit to the floor!
Fuck. I lost a month already. See what happens when you’re not paying attention to driving your life car. If I check properly, I think it’s really only two weeks, but you see how these things - namely time - can get behind you until one day, you’re a news item like Tom Petty... except, unlike with Tom Petty, there is nothing to report because you didn’t leave anything worthwhile behind - you didn't do anything that was different to the thing you always did.
You just let the time slip away.
So what did you change in the last two weeks to make 9:18 rock like a hurricane for yourself, the human race and the spinning ball of dirt we call home? Here’s what I have got on the cooker:
- The books will be ready when they’re ready. One is coming soon. On this front, as previously told, I threw my all in with a new kind of publisher so I didn’t have so much work to do behind the scenes. If I’m right, that will be a much better place for me to be in come 9:18.
- You’re never too old to get Blood on the Tracks and Deadbirds continues to grow in the home studio that is my head. I love my Gretsch and we are working on it - things are moving forwards one day at a time.
- I’m stepping up my action on Big Bear Rescue behind the scenes. It’s all moving far too slowly for my liking but it’s moving and I’m looking for some ways to throw petrol on the fire. The bear thing doesn’t seem enough though. I’ve been looking at the oceans (again) and big cats too. I’m thinking that I should find a way to bring them all under one roof. It can be done. Somehow.
- I prepped up five radio shows, with another 3 to go, giving me a total of eight hours... or four x two hour episodes of Black Dye White Noise that will be ready to roll when my buddy presses the button on a radio station he bought. I may not have mentioned any of this previously and none of it may happen but I’ll be ready to go if and when he is regardless. Having a radio show could be handy come the revolution. You can reach a lot of people with a radio show.
- I’ve booked up some trips between now and then - three so far - on which I plan to write… a lot. This makes me a travel writer just like I always wanted to be. Sometimes, you can fulfil a dream even when nobody else is watching you know. Lonely Planet don’t give a damn about how I look upon the world but that’s OK because I have never used one of their guidebooks either. This is a big tick in the Column of Life for me. I don’t need validating with it - I do it therefore I am. I need to bring this thinking into all areas of my life - and in all probability, so do you.
There are other things to add here but they're too small to look at today. If I ask myself the question again though - ‘what do I want my life to look like in 9:18’ - I can at least say I have thrown enough stones in the lake to make some ripples. The trick now is to continue throwing stones in the same lake and building them up until they become waves.
In one single year. You can change your world. I’m certain of this.
In one single year, you might even be able to change The World. All you have to do is begin.
#9:18
This looks like a good place to drop in something smart but I can't think of anything better than this, so I won't bother:
Real Housewives Of Hell, California (Population, 4 Stereotypes)
"Six Feet Of Earth Makes Us All Equal"
Some long forgotten Italian dude
Today, I got up and decided to be somebody else. It wasn't that hard. I just got sick of looking at myself in the mirror and asking why I hadn't been to the gym for five months knowing full well, I didn't have an answer that was acceptable. I don't fully understand the mechanics of the human brain but I do know this - you can think anything you like and it will be true if you choose to believe it.
Sometimes, you can believe this So Much that it doesn't even matter if the rest of the world falls into line behind your belief. You can create your own hyper-reality and live right inside of it - oblivious to the world turning and burning like Rome because you... YOU, GOD OF ALL YOU SURVEY... are looking forwards. No rear-view mirror necessary so wind down the window and throw it out to be crushed under the wheels of the truck doing 120mph just five feet behind you.
I find this quite appealing but I can't quite bring myself to embrace the place where I'm able to say the rest of the world can go to hell and pretend not to see it. Take a show like Real Housewives Of California which appears to contain people who think their shit is important enough for a TV production company to pay them (repeatedly), who made an entire generation of TV viewers tune in (repeatedly) and inspired a whole raft of other people with stupid ideas for TV shows to do the same thing. Repeatedly.
Who am I to pour scorn on being able to make a career out of nothing at all? Hopefully, Stranger Things will show up soon and everything will be just fine in the small hours of the morning...
Anyway, I booked a flight to Bucharest this morning - I'm heading out to a show there that will be good fun. I hear they like books over there and have quite a reading culture. I'm hoping to find something that looks like this as I wander the streets in the morning sun with a coffee in hand...
This would be a great thing to see on the streets over here. One day...
Meanwhile, in my own writing world, there is news:
Sometime during early October, the Bad Hare store here will be closing as I move my wares lock, stock and two smoking barrels over to a different publishing house. I'm still ironing out some of the finer details regarding limited edition hardbacks I want to publish in the future but it's not a difficult ironing out type of thing - just a small matter of admin. It's a fine move as I get to keep designing my own covers but also get to pass on all of the behind the scenes stuff that's dull as hell.
That's about as much as I can say about it right now - so maybe I shouldn't have said anything at all but it's out there now and I can't take it back.
I was thinking yesterday that by the end of the year, I want to leave some of the social media places I appear to have locked myself into. I’m not seeing a lot of mileage in Twitter anymore given that I can type more words over at Instagram but then again, writers don't hang out much on Instagram. Then again, writers are not necessarily readers and I have sold more books (and bear t-shirts) from being active on Instagram than I have on Twitter by quite some measure. Then again, instagram is owned by Facebook - who I despise even though I have trialled some posting there recently and found it to be remarkably 'OK'.
Hmmm.
The best answer is to walk away from all of them and play nowhere but in my own house right here, but then... nobody knows what the hell you’re doing and you can find yourself stuck in the hell of your own quicksand before you know it. Unless of course, you can get yourself on the news, have enough cash to install some posters on the London Underground or... man, I don’t know... What would Henry Rollins do?
Damn... even he plays with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts to keep people clued in. You can’t rely on fucking anything anymore.
Home Is Where The Heart Breaks
I spent the afternoon with Nahko today. Aside from working on something tattoo related for the mag, it was good to get back into the music arena and talk about all kinds of things... in a relatively short amount of time, we dug up the world, hit it with a spade and put it all back together again before we went our separate ways. Check him out here and go listen to his music...
The fruits of that labour, you’ll be able to find in issue 283 but there was a lot of fruit and there's more than enough left over to make jam with. Not sure what I might do with it but I’ll do something...
The location of such fruit gathering was the Sanctum Hotel in Warwick Street. I’ve never been there before, which is quite a feat considering I’ve been to hundreds of hotels across London for one reason or another. I forgot it was even there to be honest - that’s how far I got out of the music loop over the last few years - but as we were wrapping up in the bar, a thought passed through my head. A thought that looked a lot like:
“A man could sit here and write a great novel if he were of a mind.”
And you know what... a man might be very much of that mind. How can you not write a novel in a hotel that has a piece of the original Marquee Club installed as art in the bathroom.
Now all that man needs to do is create some space and he's working on it even as you read his words...
Other People's Stuff
I've been enjoying Ragnar Jónasson's Dark Iceland series a lot over the last few years. They seem to land just at the right time for me to plough through on a road trip - so, either he is early with White Out or I am late getting on a plane. I suspect the latter is true so I might keep this lying around rather than spoil a good travelling companion...
Over in the ear department, the new release from Nothing But Thieves - Broken Machine - is quite something. While all the fuss in the media might be about the new Foo Fighters album (which is a little disappointing if you ask me) this might pass you by... don't let it happen. You'll be missing out on some real class.
Meanwhile, in the curio department, a triple album of T.Rex remixes turned up. Great cover design and a brilliant idea... sadly, only averagely executed. Somebody should have been in charge of the track listing perhaps. Available for streaming if you're a fan - which is your best option. I'd be disappointed in the extreme if I paid for it - nice cover or not...
Imaginary Friends
I came across a book earlier this week by Wayne Dyer called The Power Of Intention. To crunch it down, it discusses how to act with intent: Intend to do something, accept that it's already happened, picture how it looks and fill in the spaces between now and then. So far as I can make out, it's chaos majick for people who don't want to be magicians... though technically speaking, that's exactly what you would be even if you didn't know it.
How brilliant.
It's very 'American' in its delivery but I stuck with it. I figured it might be fun to run a post that zoomed forwards to some indiscriminate point in the future - totally unedited, just as it comes from my fingers to see what I come up with. So, here:
I have a FaceTime call today with my agent to talk about a signing tour of a handful of European cities. I'm really excited about it, 6 cities in 6 days with 6 hotel rooms sounds like it might take it out of you though. I can hear the conversation already... 'well you said you wanted to tour!' Apparently I can't take Hector with me because he's not allowed in some of the hotel rooms, so that's going to pose something of a logistics nightmare. Trying to get anything done with him around is like herding wasps anyway so maybe it's for the best.
A part of me is thinking I might take the Gretsch along and as well as a signing thing, I could also do a few songs to crank it up a bit. It will give people something extra to talk about. What's the worst that can happen? Somebody will film it, drop it online while I'm asleep and I'll wake to a hundred comments telling me not to give up the day job?
Yeah - that would smart a little but what the hell. Actually, I guess the worst that can happen is nobody at all will show up, in which case, I'll definitely take the Gretsch because then I'll have something to amuse myself with.
Aside from that, the page proofs arrived this morning for Misty Mountain Hop - that's my next book if you haven't been paying attention and should be on the shelves in time for Christmas. I had a quick scan through them earlier and it looks good. Bigger - and therefore longer - than I remember but that's no bad thing.
Meanwhile, in the wings: Big Bear Rescue t-shirt number 19 goes on sale today. Looking back at the gallery so far, we've collectively done some very cool things along this journey. Which reminds me: work has begun this week on editing the footage we shot from the sanctuary. I knew it was a good idea to take a mini crew along instead of shooting it on a phone. If we can get the trailers into the right hands, maybe we can get the thumbs up to make a proper documentary and open the gates on this a little further...
None of which sounds totally dumb. At no point does it say: 'Checked my bank account before breakfast on the terrace and am pleased to see I now have over a million pounds...' or similar tragic nonsense. Maybe it should but I know myself well enough to honestly say, a million in the bank would make me happy for a very limited time. I would soon spend it. New car, new house, help some people out and back to square one. I would much prefer to have a life that had things in it I consider to be worth having.
Perhaps I should push the boat a little further out to sea than this. Let's give it another whirl:
I woke up this morning to find Misty Mountain Hop had been nominated for the Booker Prize. Three coffees later, it was still true. I have no idea what being nominated for an award like this means in the grand scheme of things but now maybe my mother will stop wondering when I'm going to get a proper job.
In the very same inbox avalanche was an email from the BBC opening the book on further discussions for both my Doctor Who script and the super secret other TV screenplay I wrote. Today is what we call A Good Day at the Ranch.
So how come the dog still needs to go out and there's a stack of dishes in the sink? How come there's no great albums out this week and I'm still listening to albums whose best days were back in 1978?
Still not absolutely ridiculous. Wishful thinking but not 'get back in your box' dumb. That however, is not the point of the exercise. Give it a try - write yourself a blog post or diary entry for 12 months time. What's that... September 2018 - it will come soon enough. Whip something up for yourself in which life has 'moved on' no matter how whacky it may seem.
The point is that if you look back at last September, what's different in your life these 12 months on? Anything? I know I've dropped balls all over the floor.
It's a weird exercise in whether you've been living your life on purpose (which is the point of the book) or if life has found other things for you to do instead.
Damn I wish I could be happy just floating down the river looking at the scenery as I float my way to a watery grave but somehow it just seems wrong, wrong, wrong...
Anyway, in this future scenario, here's my new car:
It might look like a mid-life crisis but let's face it, it has my name written all over it.
It's also been a while since I threw one of these into the arena:
Places I'd Like To Sit And Write (Number 252)
In Which Mr Smith Is No Longer Confused...
Preamble: I found the following piece in my drafts folder from the September of 2015. I'm not sure why I never hit the publish button on it but I've read it twice and it reads just fine. It's even still relevant which shows that we have all moved on not one inch in all those days...
Hello September. How did that happen? One minute I was wondering how to keep Hector cool throughout the summer months, the next it’s proving impossible to get your clothes dry between one dog walk and the next. This is not a complaint. Give me (us) rain, thunder and dark skies over a baking sun any day. We are able to function much better using these rules of nature, thank you for asking!
One of the odd things about going about making a name for yourself as a writer in 2015, or any other year you care to pick as we edge forwards is, just like every other industry out there, somebody set fire to the rule book. Not only that, but information is so thick and fast that if you keep your ear to the ground, you'll find all the sides of any argument are represented by people who are talking sense.
The end-game of which means if you listen to all of them, you may as well listen to none of them - or vice versa even. There’s so much advice available to you, that none of it is helpful in the slightest.
This week, I read an article by Stephen King in the New York Times in which he talks about how being prolific more or less means your work is not 'literary' in the world and therefore will be ignored by 'the critics'. Who are these critics? Does anybody care? It’s the readers who need to be satisfied not those who make a living out of discussing such things, surely?
It strikes me that this is what it's like being a Kiss fan–or if you wish to point a different gun at yourself, a Star Wars fan, a Marvel fan–there are dozens of examples to choose from when it comes to the love of culture the masses have latched onto. You could be forgiven for thinking there's something wrong with it, but there's not. Loving whatever culture we've latched onto makes us feel good. I don't want to feel educated after hearing Slade on the radio. I want to look in the mirror and see my happy face. Nor do I want to feel mentally elevated above the rest of the human race after watching Rocky for the 60th time. I want to feel emotional–and I do, it gets me every time. This doesn't mean I don't get a kick out of Richard Ford, Lydia Davis or Don DeLillo, I do, but it's just not the same kick. One is a beer buzz, the other is a Jack Daniels kick and it depends what night it is as to who wins.
As an aside here, in that same piece, King also suggests the work of John Creasey should not be taken too seriously–but I read a lot of his books when I was growing up, they were always lying around the place and as I was not in the habit of reading critical appraisals of them, thought they were fine and dandy. Certainly no different to the work of Leslie Charteris or Mickey Spillane that I also chewed up. Surely if he was that bad they would rename/remove this CWA award category that many people are more than happy to receive?
Later that same day, I also read a great interview with Henry Rollins in which he makes the statement (in passing) that he knows exactly who he is, knows exactly how he writes and who his audience most likely is. This is a damn fine thing to know about yourself. I’ve been reading Henry for around twenty years now and I came to the party a little late, so this knowledge of his is no overnight revelation. It's hard won too.
The sum of knowledge from these two pieces with a) somebody who has written and published good/bad books and has a great relationship with his audience and b) somebody who has written and self published good/bad books and has a great relationship with his audience, has become pretty valuable.
I have learned that nobody cares. Nobody cares who publishes King’s books anymore so long as they can get a hold of them when they want them. It may have counted once but most people probably couldn’t even name his publishing company in 2015 let alone be bothered who it is. Exactly the same thing applies to Rollins–except those of us who read his books know exactly the name of his publishing company but still, nobody cares one way or the other so long as we can get hold of his books when we want them.
So here I sit, beating myself about the head with a foam hammer waiting on a bunch of agents to get back to me. It's tough you know because when I'm done waiting on an agent, I'll move on to stage two: Waiting on a Publisher. Then there will no doubt be stage three: Waiting to see if anybody gives a crap about your book in the media, which will then dictate stage four: How many books your publisher will print and where it will be distributed. There is likely b) and c) stages to each of these followed also by stage five, six and seven, etc.
It makes you wonder huh. It makes me wonder why I am sitting here waiting for somebody to say they believe in my writing enough to spend some time shopping it around some other people who have money and might want to do something with it or, I could look to those who have already bought the books I've put out and take their word for it that doing it myself is the right thing and try to grow my audience as best I can–now.
I guess when you sell enough books, have made enough noise and look like you're going somewhere, there will be a knock at the door regardless.
I have come to realise as Hank did, that I don't much care who publishes my work–me or somebody else–so long as they are out there for people to read. So this is a good time to say a genuinely heartfelt thanks to those who talked me into chasing an agent and a deal, it's a grand idea...but that's maybe all it is you know.
I learned today that life can be an awful lot shorter than you think. We should all–every single one of us–be pushing buttons, making things happen now and not when somebody else is ready to take a shot with you.
The cream and/or the popular will rise eventually, and the rest will either float in the middle or sink to the bottom. Where I (or any creator) belongs in the scheme of things, is not for me/any creator to decide, but nobody gets to decide on anything if it all hinges on waiting for somebody else to come back from a shopping trip or a football game and get you out of a drawer.
So you know what, I'm just going to get along and do my thing...
The Great Escape
On my way through the online world yesterday afternoon, I came across a site called Signature which appears to be about reading good stuff - not sure why I have never stumbled across it before though but it certainly bears a good ruffling of its pages over the next few days.
On board today, there's a piece about Kerouac's On The Road... delivered like this:
And like this:
If you've never read On The Road, you should but this is a great piece regardless. There's an integral paragraph in there that goes like this too:
The beat writers celebrated their influences, so learning about Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg meant learning about Thomas Wolfe, Jean Genet, William Blake, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Walt Whitman...
I like that. I don't think people celebrate their influences enough today. It's like they are either a) scared of others knowing they're influenced by people that aren't 'cool' or b) want people to think they came up with all their ideas by themselves.
Brilliant.
You can find out more about the artist Nathan Gelgud here.
While we're on the subject or art and literature, in the big scheme of book covers, this image below is fucking great - and that's all I have to say about it because I haven't read it.
I will, but for now, I'm quite happy to flaunt some pulp in yo'face just because I can.
Family Planning
I like this picture. I don't usually like pictures of myself at all but this one is kinda neat because I don't take up too much space in it. If you're wondering what's going on here, me and Hector are on a research trip for a 'future project'. That's all you need to know for at least a year...
Proof number one of The Family of Noise arrived this morning, so that's the rest of the week pretty much figured out on the writing front. I've sat with it for an hour already with The Unholy Stick (aka: a red pen) to put a few things right and it's looking good. Looking sharp even.
Even the greatest copy editor in the universe cannot concentrate on such a thing for 24 hours a day - not would I want to. Lucky then that in the gaps, I need to work on both the softback and the hardback covers. The softback is more or less wrapped up bar a few nudges but I'm still not sure where to take the hardback cover - if anywhere. There's a part of me that would like to make it different but that might be the part of me that just likes to make things awkward for myself. Why would you want to confuse a product by making it look like two different things...
I probably answered my own question there didn't I.
Anyway, I'm excited that we have come to this point. It will be good to get it out there. Onwards!
Meanwhile, I have two magazines on the table along with a 'moving along' copy of Almost Human - which keeps staring up at me from the corner of the room. To escape, I have unwittingly submerged myself in a TV show. I didn't mean to get quite so consumed by it, but it is after all, excellent, so that's OK.
It's not Super Essential like say, GoT but it's more than good enough to keep me company into the night. Welcome to SALEM. And they sure do have a good line in promotional posters:
I say it's not Super Essential but I appear to be barrelling through it at quite a rate so maybe it's more essential than I thought...
...and so, back to work.
Giant Robots Are Coming
A while back, so long ago in fact that I don't even know how long, I had an idea to work on an album of spoken word material. I tried out some ideas here and there but just couldn't get it the way my ears wanted it to be - which was somewhere in between Jim Morrison on his A game and Dylan Thomas on his last night on earth.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
Yesterday evening, I came back to this place and tried a new way of doing things and it turned out to be pretty good. A little later, I listened back to it and it still sounded good so I will persist and attempt to nail something concrete down in a more complete fashion over the next few days.
It will look something like this when it's finished.
* Later edit: I need to confirm the transfer of rights on this image. Now I've posted it as a final design, I seem to recall some parts were left outstanding... small print, but always worth a mention here because things tend to come and bite your ass.
Small Person is heading to college this week, which makes it the end of the summer holidays in a big way. Never again will the summer hols be the same as it once was... i.e.: six weeks of it being absolutely find to do nothing at all.
I'm pretty sure I've spent most of the last six weeks promising we could do something, so this past Friday afternoon, we did and went to see what we could discover at the British Museum - which as always is excellent. You can spend hours and hours there and never see the same thing twice, but I also had another plan. I thought it would be useful to introduce her to some of the London I know... except a lot that of that has disappeared too.
Still, it's no bad skill to have some street skills. We walked from the train station to the museum with only a general idea of where we were going (well, I knew where we were but there's no harm in keeping such things to yourself) taking in such lesser known London sights as back street travel agents, places where people work that I know (just in case you get in real trouble) and cafe's where you can eat for the day without handing over all the money you have in your pocket - those kinds of things. We even took in a couple of well known hotels along the way - places you can go and sit in the lobby without being questioned when it's raining or when it gets late at night but you still have a long time to wait for your train home.
Are these good skills to teach your daughter? No idea but it's better than not handing such things down the line.
London is changing fast though. As alluded to last week, Soho has almost been scraped off the face of the city and on a visit to Denmark Street (also known as Tin Pan Alley - look it up) because I just wanted to see how the guitar shops were faring, I found that too is being taken apart brick by brick. I took the closing of The Astoria (down the street) on the chin - and I took it well because it had been a long time since any band I was interested in had played there - but to see Denmark Street impaled on a spike, is a soul-crusher.
The NME and Melody Maker began there. I bought my first harmonica in that street. I auditioned for a band there once. I have interviewed people and also hung-out for no reason at all there too. For a street that would take you less then 30 seconds to walk one side to the other, it had soul. There's a great article about it on The Guardian website here - the best quote from it being:
This was a tiny corner of London that retained its personality and escaped the signs of soft corporate power that pervade almost every other high street in the land – no chain stores or branded coffee shops, no Subways or McDonalds, and unlike the traditional “alternative paradise” of Camden High Street, no “I Heart London” keyrings, faux-wooden iPhone covers and badges saying “free the weed”...
So that didn't quite pan out how I thought it would but never mind. People will have progress no matter the cost to the soul.
I guess if things never changed there would be no need for such a thing as the British Museum. Maybe the London I knew needs to die with my generation. This new London - just like this current version of New York and many other cities - will become the London my kids grow up with but I can't help feeling that as things turn over for the next generation, this is a big one.
An extremely sanitised turnover in which all cities will soon look the same, with all the same things in them. Sometimes I hate myself for contributing to the continued longevity of Starbucks
Welcome to The Metropolis.
When 'they' eventually decide to put a big perspex dome over it so it never rains, run.
Run like the fucking wind, but don't ask me where to.
Talking of Denmark Street... Strike is quite excellent. I haven't gotten into a British cop show this much since Life on Mars. So far, so good. That Galbraith chap... sure knows how to write many different things that's for sure, so if you're lagging behind with the novels, get on board - the BBC have played it very faithfully and for that we should all be grateful.
That's right people who made Rebus. I'm talking about you.
Hashtag: Do Something
* If you were hoping for a post on books, rock n roll or some other derivative on a usual theme, feel free to move along. This one is all about plastic...
When I started the Big Bear Rescue project (updates on that front next week) it was always meant to be part of a much bigger plan to make the world a better place - or at least as much as one man can with no resources - but my intentions are good! They are always good.
Big Bear Rescue is pretty niche - I get that not everybody is into a) bears, b) t-shirts, c) illustrative art, or indeed any combination of these three things and yeah, it’s tough trying to make a difference when other people also trying to make a difference in the world annoy the unholy shit out you by a) collecting money in the street, b) having begging envelopes delivered en masse through your letterbox, c) generally opening their mouths, preaching the end of the world and umm… hundreds of other things that can prevent any one of us from helping out an otherwise good cause.
I am not above this mental tarring and feathering of such people - in fact I am probably worse than most, but let me rewind a little and start at the beginning.
My original plan went like this. Every year, I would try to:
1. Do something for the human race.
2. Do something good for the planet.
It couldn’t get any more simple and yet all I have proactively wrapped my head around in almost two years is rescuing bears - and you wouldn’t believe how hard that is to keep afloat behind the scenes!
My original plan was to devote a project to the oceans influenced by this hammerhead shark I adopted, but there are so many organisations, so many voices all saying the same thing about the oceans, that to introduce yet another into the equation without first knowing what the hell I was up against was pointless (and how sad is it that I feel the need to use the phrase “what the hell I was up against” when talking about doing something good).
This ocean-based idea is not dead. Not by any stretch, but oceans aside, Big Bear Rescue has seen me grow some thicker skin for the projects ahead and that's a good thing. You would have thought with my editing a tattoo magazine, that my skin was rhinocerosous-like already huh...
Anyway, what I want to point a finger at today, is this:
Who are they and what do they do? Well, their tagline is this:
Plastic is a substance the earth cannot digest.
and their basic mission statement is this:
Plastic Pollution Coalition is a growing global alliance of organisations, businesses, and thought leaders working toward a world free of plastic pollution and its toxic impact on humans, animals, and the environment.
Why not wander through the site and marvel at the contribution even using a simple straw adds to the decline of this ball of dirt we live on. I have been through it a dozen times and it still makes me sad that I can’t see a way of making a dent in the right direction… but I can fucking try, right?
I’ve started at the beginning My publishing company, Bad Hare - small as it may be, but therefore also nimble - is already 100% friendly to the planet from the ground up. Packages bought from me arrive through your letterbox wrapped in Kraft paper – a natural bio-material; unbleached, biodegradable, recyclable and the product of renewable and actively renewed resources. You can find out more about that here if you wish. I even sourced tape that was zero impact… and if you decide to burn my books after reading, they probably combust to nothing at all with a readiness that’s frightening.
This kind of thing is always best addressed at home first - people in glass houses and all that. But the more I look, the more 'home' appears to include my daughter's future college, the tattooing world I'm involved in... it echoes all around and it's going to take some time but you know what... in for a penny.
I'm not sure how long I have left on the ball of dirt - quite a while with a bit of luck - but I have seen things like this first hand recently:
...and it's not funny at all.
It would be easier and much less time consuming to throw on the shirt that says "fuck it, it was like this when I found it" but sometimes, you just get to a point at which you can't walk away anymore...
* Here’s a scary fact for us guitar-slingers: 1.5 million pounds (in weight) of used strings from guitars and other instruments are sent to landfills every year — enough to recreate the Statue of Liberty two and a half times. In four years, that’s enough waste material in strings to build 10 statues. That, my friends, is just fucking dumb. Why isn’t there simply a bin in every guitar store where we could drop our dead strings?
But there is this which is very cool, so that's a start.
There Will Be Blood
Now the end of the summer is in sight, it's time to make some plans to hit the road again - and as a bi-product Cities of the Dead II is coming together without even having to plan it.
Stop number one is Bucharest in mid-October. I always thought the first time I would hit Romania would be related to the Big Bear Rescue project but apparently not - this one is going to be the City Experience... and it looks like my kind of place:
And then there's this library that I must investigate. If library's looked like this over here, maybe we wouldn't want to shut them all down. Alas, a spot of laminate floor and some white paint is too much to ask...
A few weeks later, I will be making what has become an annual trip to Florence where there will be lots of work to do, but never so much that you can't take some hours to wander in the footsteps of real legends.
Those are quite enough plans for now.
Later today - because a Bank Holiday weekend is a good time to do such things - the final-ish draft of The Family Of Noise is being shipped off to be made into an uncorrected proof. That's what happens to books in the real world and therefore, is what's also happening here. You shouldn't skimp on this part of the equation. If you do, this is the point where bad shit happens and nobody wants to be haunted by that sort of thing when you're building an Empire.
It feels great (read: fucking wonderful) to have things moving again. In fact, 'moving' could be something of an understatement... for the curious, here is the provisional contents listing for Almost Human (a second collection of short stories if you haven't been paying attention):
There may be some others knocking about in errant notebooks too, so there could well be more than this inside when it finally hits the racks. One step at a time...
Once these two books (Cities II won't be this year unless I win some kind of 'around the world in 18 minutes' golden ticket kind of thing) are looking like they are capable of walking home from school by themselves, I'm going to jump tracks and focus on pulling together the songs I've started writing for Deadbirds.
It sure sounds like a good way to spend most of the weeks heading up to and around Christmas anyway.
Rain In The Summertime
My buddy Daryl, who owns Diamond Jacks in Soho, recently posted some pics over on his instagram feed about what's happening to that particular area of London. It's been happening for years. I first noticed it in the early 2000s when I went to interview Dave McKean and had cause to head into part of the city I hadn't been to since the early 90s. It's amazing what can happen when they chip away at small parts of a thing over a long period of time.
And now we have come to a point in time at which it's no longer small parts. Now we are down to the Big Parts. The scaffolding has moved in. Shops that once made Soho into Soho are no longer there and there's very few still holding their own. They call it progress and as much as I adore coffee of the Starbucks variety, even I can walk 50 yards around the corner to get one. There is no need for a handy venue on every street in London... but that's what we're going to get whether we like it or not.
Then one day in the days of future past, people will discover coffee causes an incurable disease and one by one they will all close down leaving a million empty shells across the city-scape. Cities all around the world will collapse into their underground train systems because Starbucks was the only thing holding the damn place together. Then the revolution will arrive (but it will not be televised) of people wanting record shops, book stores and umm... shops that sell ropey magazines to old men normally best avoided in long coats because some motherfucker also turned off the internet.
Anyway, on my travels through Soho, I found this house and I guess when they finally take that sign off the door, Soho will officially be closed and that will be a sad, sad day for individuality.
Or maybe they will just change it:
"This is not a Starbucks. There is no coffee at this address."
Elektra (my new Gretsch) and I are getting on just fine together thanks for asking. I've got one eye on the white 12 string variant still, so that's only a matter of time but while I had one eye on that, the other eye discovered a guy called Israel Nash who I had not heard of before, but there he was on the Gretsch website flaunting one of the family for all the world to see. Here he is in action:
Here's the cover of Rain Plans. I have fallen in love with this so hard that I haven't played anything else this week. In fact, that's something of an understatement. It may not be his latest release but it's gone straight to the top of the list of greatest things I've heard this year... with a bullet:
Inspiring is what this is. Listening to it has given me ideas way above my station to pursue but it's all good. It's also good to feel like somebody else knows where your soul is coming from when you have 'one of those things' draped across your shoulder..
Go listen - most of his work is around on the streaming things.
In another bullet from the heavens this week, one of my favourite writers who likes to loiter around the world in the shape of Michael Marshall Smith has a new book out called Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. I think it may have been out a few weeks now and I just missed it in my busy-ness, but regardless of that, I'm going to drop the needle back to the beginning of Rain Plans, turn on the lamp and get lost in one of his worlds.
As luck would have it, here's a book trailer for it:
It would be irresponsible of me to not mention at least once a week that if you sign up to the thing that appears across the top of all and any pages you look at here, you'll get an email fall into your inbox on a Saturday morning that contains everything I post here across any given week.
Some I cross link to social platforms, some I don't, so it's a good way to catch everything... unless of course you have a desk job and get bored easily, in which case, feel free to check back as often as you like.
The Winchester Mindset
I saw this online a couple of days ago and stole it because it's great. Until we all think like this, we still have a lot of work to do:
Hmmm... maybe I could work with some artists and see if we can come up with some shirts that rock on this concept... something that we can do some good with. It's always worth a shot.
This full blown minimalist mindset I've gotten myself into is wonderful. There's a peculiar chain of events attached to such a thing which is probably a huge lie but one that's working for me on some level of my psyche I won't pretend to understand...
The more things I get out of the house, out of my life and out of sight, the more room there appears to be for me to get along with my work.
Maybe a human being is nothing but a jar to be filled with a certain amount of sand?
I'd like to think that was true but real world examples such as Mr. Trump having more money than Greece vs the guy I once saw die in the street with nothing but a pair of old pants and a brown shirt that all the buttons had fallen off, say otherwise. I guess the truth of the matter is that we all make things up to get us through the night. We will believe anything we tell ourselves. That's the absolute truth of the matter - and when I describe myself as a Dirty Realism writer, that's what I'm really getting at... looking for the truth by throwing words together and hoping one day I'll turn over the stone I was looking for.
(Shoot... I've forgotten what I was going to write about now...)
Oh yeah, the less I have around, the more I seem to be able to achieve. For instance, now I have given away every single book I owned on music writing (aside from No One Here Gets Out Alive) I feel free enough to press on with another music book in the shape of Howl... for some reason, I would sit and look at my shelves and think "I'll never write a book as good as Ziggyology" and some trap door in there would open up and make it so.
Thus, by killing the demons in plain sight, freedom has decided to reveal itself.
I'm not unique in this. It's nothing but my own peculiar prison I made for myself, but don't kid yourself that you don't have one of your own.
Maybe it's also why writers, musicians, film-makers et al, produce their best work when they're young... or rather, when they have nothing. You have to fill the void-jar with something and at that point in your life, the best way to do it is by yourself rather than with somebody else's stuff.
Then again, I could just be full of shit but it seems to be working out for me so I'm taking it as a win and will go to bed convinced there is some kind of valuable wisdom in this.
While I remember - because it's important - one of my favourite writers who comes in the shape of a man called Poe Ballantine, recently posted up a short film called Poe In Hot Springs. Watch it - it's linked up there.
It's very cool and is just the kind of thing writers should be doing with their time to enhance their writing legacy instead of begging for cash like cheap dime-store hoods over at patreon.com.
I don't know if they still have dime-stores over in the U.S. but it's as good a phrase as I can think of right now.
Finally, there's a new album out from Steve Wilson this week. It's called To The Bone and it's an album I needed to hear to reinstate my faith that there were people still out there capable of making that very special thing called an 'album' without running out of ideas towards the end - or even worse, towards the middle.
Whilst mostly being a challenging listen (in all the right ways) as the man behind Porcupine Tree, Wilson is also more than capable of reducing a man to tears in the simplest of ways. Take a look at this:
I think my work here is done for the day. It might be one in the morning but that's no reason not to sit on this suitable chair for an hour or so and kick up some dust with a new toy:
All The Love In The World
Holy fuck. I bought a Gretsch.
This guitar has been haunting me for the best part of a year, but today, I stopped talking myself out of it, pressed some buttons and this beautiful Gretsch Falcon will be here sometime over the weekend:
I'm excited - and I don't do excited very often. What I wanted was a guitar that could handle what I have to throw at it on the songwriting front. Something that would behave like a partner in crime worthy of the title. Something that looked like it could handle a lot of work even when I wasn't in the room!
I am in love.
Soon it will be time to begin demoing up the first batch of songs for my DeadBirds project. We'll spend some time getting to know each other better and in those cracks of production known as putting The Family Of Noise out, together we will get in on.
Meanwhile, in the writing world, I found a great post over on LitReactor this morning about the life expectancy of a novel. You can read the whole thing here and if you're in the writing game, you should read it.
It's one of the things nobody ever tells you about when you talk about being a writer. You can write a novel, spend years on it even, but once it's out there, you have zero control over what happens. You can't vet the people that buy it to make sure they will understand all of the things you were trying to say about the world. Just like in the above linked scenario, you can't guarantee your book will stay alive out in the world, can't guarantee your publisher will stay in business or sometimes, that you will even get paid.
Conversely, if you have a massively successful book, the mental fatigue can be just as harsh. You write a book. It sells millions of copies. You write another. Nobody likes it because it's not 'the same' as the first one. Maybe you only had one book in you. Who knows.
The writing road is littered with obstacles you need to navigate.
It's tough being a writer - mostly because unless you are one of about 24 people, nobody has heard of you and yet, you still need to find a reason to get up in the morning and write again and again, for no reason other than it's what you do.
You want to know what's even tougher than being a writer in 2017? Being a horror writer...
Here's a shot of my local Waterstones where 'horror' has been consumed by 'science fiction and fantasy':
I went up close to check too. They're all in there - King, Barker, Koontz, Herbert - all consumed by this new multifaceted heading and I like it. Well, I kind of like it. Perhaps it would be more accurate if those big headings at the top of the rack said 'Other Worlds' or 'Alternate Realities'. I could see that as a huge step forwards for kids looking for kicks in 2017 and future years. It has to be about the kids now. When it comes to these genres, people of a certain age are already sold regardless, but for me, I think the whole genre-fiction 'thing' needs reinventing from the ground up.
And if we're going to kill one genre, let's kill them all because fans of these genres are not dumb. Eight racks with seven shelves to each rack means we're not playing a minority game these days.
Anyway, I take my hat of to The Management for bringing horror into a larger family where it wasn't quite so noticeable that there were only thirty books worthy of the title up for sale.
I did ask: when people (generally speaking) buy science fiction or fantasy, they are game for new works/authors more than ever - but when people (also generally speaking) buy horror, they fall back on the masters.
What happened out there? Is it easier to get scary thrills from a movie? Did it go down the same path once too often?
I'd love to know the answer.
But I bought a motherfucking Gretsch, so I don't have a care in the world right now. Sorry about that.
Bonehead
Well... that was a good weekend for getting some art books out of the house and into good hands. The car was considerably lighter when I left than it was going, though I don't envy those who thought "It's only a few books, I can easily carry them without a bag". Those kind of thoughts are for people who don't carry art books around very often. Still, my work on that front is done. I'm filing that as a big win and it's left a good sized hole that looks like I've done something useful.
Anyway, when I got back from the show, I figured doing a 12 hour day after an 18 hour day, another 18 hour day the day before that and then driving five and half hours back home was probably a stupid idea. I was pretty tired when I touched down, I messed about with Hector for a little while, filled his water bowl up and then, just to make sure I was home for real, slipped in some of said water and knocked myself out for a little while by smacking the side of my face on the corner of the kitchen cupboard at high speed.
Let me tell you... that hurt like a bitch, but I slept like a dead man.
After taking H to the beach for a little while...
...I spent some time today working on the cover for The Family Of Noise. I'm not going to change the softback edition too much from the original design it had wrapped itself up in... which was this:
I still love this cover - it says everything I want it to with one simple image doing a lot of the hard work.
Today's question is whether I completely redesign the hardback version or not. I suspect not, but while I was chewing it over and playing around, a few things started to take shape that have so far not been thrown into the bin. I'll see how that pans out over the next week or so.
Meantime, tomorrow, I'll be checking over the final manuscript again - which might actually take longer than I think... so let's call it the end of the week and then I'll move into type-setting mode, run like hell and hope I don't fall on the scissors.
Topically, I received an email this week from a German author requesting that I review a free digital copy of her book here and also leave a review on amazon - because obviously, book reviews is something I'm forever posting around here. Then again, the email also said it had already sold over 250,000 copies in its German variant so, perhaps it's me that's missing something.
If I sold quarter of a million copies of a book - with or without having to cut in a middle man - I'm not sure I would be be scrounging for reviews online from a man who was sitting on the edge of forever.
Particularly a man who Doesn't Review Books. Ever.
Go figure.
Finally today - because I still have things to do - quote of the season (so far) from Game of Thrones:
"Nothing will fuck you harder than time."
Jesus. Ain't that the truth.
Pop Life
Work begins on my first 2017 release... shortly. I have the somewhat 'large' event - Tattoo Jam - to attend to from Friday to Monday, so even with the best of intentions, I know I'm not going to get anything done between now and the end of that. It would be foolish to even try, so best forget all about it in the physical world. In the mental/spiritual world however, it will still be going on... what to do, how to do it - those kinds of things.
I’m going to release The Family Of Noise in early October - which is not so far away, six weeks or so in fact, which will give me some time to mock up proofs for checking over as well. Being as it’s finished and has been sitting here for the best part of a year, I figure it needs sending out into the wild to fend for itself. I decided a long time ago that what happens to it then is not up to me. It’s up to those who read it and love it enough to tell others about it to give it life or, if they hate it, to grind it into the dust and kick it into touch.
My job is to send it out to school in the correct uniform with a packed lunch, make sure it has a few friends to prop it up in the early days and have a snack ready for it when it gets home.
It will be released as a numbered limited edition hardback run of 100 (which will only be available directly from Bad Hare right here) as a softback (also available here but also available to order on amazon and from bookstores if you so wish) and then, soon after, across all digital platforms to suit whatever e-device you happen to be wielding. I'll post details and links as soon as I cement them into the floor.
Maybe that hardback variant will also have some bonus material - I’d like that a lot and hopefully, so will anybody who picks it up.
So that's a plan, right? It feels good to get moving again. Meanwhile, in the gaps of all that and the magazine, I've been hitting the guitar hard. It's the best use of my time whenever the pen gets too heavy because no matter how much you improve, there will always be somebody who can whup your ass into a small suitcase.
Meanwhile, out in the world that's not mine, my buddy Sean Herman mailed over some of his zines - which are great - from Serpent's of Bienville out in Mobile, Alabama:
It's kind of hard to explain what they do over at Serpent's - it may be easier to describe what they don't do! The one thing I do know is if ever you're down that way, you should go check out the place. The man even sent me a preserved alligator paw in the mail.
(That's right... if you cast your mind back, I was writing a column for them called Beautiful Creatures. Now look down to the floor and you will see all of the balls I dropped on that front. I must get back on top of that because I'm starting to feel bad about it.)
Burning Time
Despite the purge of a lifetime of accumulated books, I still read as much as I ever did. I have not fallen out of love with it in any way, nor books themselves for that matter.
The publishing world - alongside of the music business, the movie/TV business and more than likely, every other business you can think of - continues to change. It's confusing out there for writers. Hell, you don't even have to be new to the game to find it the business equivalent of the Grimpen Mire.
To bring us up to date with the world of me, a couple of years ago, I released a book called The Family Of Noise. I didn't make a huge deal out of it and pushed it out only to a few friends and people who like to follow me here regularly with a plan for a real PR campaign in the following weeks. I thought it was good... but word came back from many of these people that I should put it out through major channels for it to get the audience it deserved. That's just what you need to hear when you've spent two years smashing yourself in the face with a hammer.
I retracted the book from public eye along with any sales channels and set about pitching it to agents and publishers. Although you can apparently find a used copy on amazon for £120... in French! I don't think this item exists because I sure as hell never got it translated and know exactly where every single copy went. Go figure.
The upshot of which is that it's still sitting here a good year later - maybe it really does suck, but oh, how I wanted that book to be picked up by a huge publishing house and for all my dreams to come true but such a thing is not to be - at least not yet.
All that has happened in that year is a year has passed by in which nothing has happened.
Such is the price you will pay (if you want to view it that way) if you want to be a writer... but this is not quite true.
There are two types of fiction writer and both are very real and proper. For some, validation comes from being picked up for mass publishing and it's a big deal. It means your material was good enough for somebody with something to lose to invest in you - and it is a big deal. It's the traditional way and it makes all of the wheels spin. It's what I've spent my whole life investing in on a weekly basis. I am not pouring scorn on it...
...but I have decided, I don't have that kind of time to squander, hanging around waiting for something to happen with my own work.
This is a really long way around of saying, I am going back to publishing my work through Bad Hare - which is my own imprint. I will likely sell as many copies as I would through any publisher that wasn't one of The Big Four, I like being responsible for my own cover art (which is not something I can bank on anywhere else), I will probably make more money from it but mostly - and this is important, I will be writing and moving forwards instead of waiting for somebody to tell me it's OK to keep writing.
I do not write because I want to be an award winning writer. It would be nice I guess but I do not want it and I sure as hell am not hankering after such a thing. I don't write for money because I have a great job already and the actual odds on me making enough money to live on in such a niche game are slim. I do not write to be part of a group in which we all slap each other on the back and meet for beer once a month, not for kudos, sex, fame or anything else that might spring to mind. I don't even blog to try to convince anybody passing to sign up to a mailing list so that I can 'harness the audience' - to my eyes, that's cheap, desperate and smells of 'me-me-me-marketing' at its very worst - the internet is littered with them.
I write because I like writing and I want to write.
I write because so far, the people who have read what I write, like what I write - hell, some even love it.
I write because I have no idea what else to do with my life.
My only real fly in the ointment without a publisher is finding an audience... then again, here's the cover of Mary Miller's The Last Days Of California, which I thought was incredible for all the right reasons but have you read it?
No. You have never even heard of it, so I rest my case.
But sometimes, there are those little voices in my head that tell me I am Super Wrong and that I should hold out - but they are lying and I know this because this morning two things happened.
1. The voices began their dawn chorus
2. A few minutes later, I saw this in a thing Mr Gaiman did with The Guardian today:
There’s nothing like studying the bestseller lists of bygone years for teaching an author humility. You’ve heard of the ones that got filmed, normally. Mostly you realise that today’s bestsellers are tomorrow’s forgotten things.
I went to have a look at what was hot at the New York Times this week throughout a few random years. Here:
1995: Beach Music by Pat Conroy
2000: Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher
2005: Lifeguard by James Patterson and Paul Kemprecos
2010: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
2015: Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee
The first two I have never heard of - author or book, Lifeguard is unsurprising because J.P. knows how to sell a book no matter what you think of him. Nobody cared about Larsson until Dragon became a film, so that too is understandable and Watchman is a blip on the radar - and also, compared to Mockingbird, garbage - that's nothing but a lawyer, a publisher or an estate cashing in on a legend. For point of reference with that, the week after Friction by Sandra Brown was sitting at the top.
No. Me neither.
What can you deduce from this? I'll tell you... people bought what they were sold. As always, Mr Gaiman is bang on the nose. Some made some money with their books, some still are... and at least two of them are dead.
I just want to write, so I am signing out of using my limited time on the planet firing shots at the publishing world. I am going back to flying solo - which also means I don't need to be concerned with ever looking at such lists again and can content myself with doing what I want as best I can and hopefully, finding an audience who like what I do too.
Le Fin.
Sorry it was a long-ass way around the block and if you got to the end, I salute you. If nothing else it made me feel better about the future.
Footnote: I do think however, that if you are writing a crime/mystery novel or police procedural, a publishing house is unmistakably the way to go. A series - like John Connolly's Charlie Parker series - needs it. I'm not sure I would have discovered it otherwise and that would make me sad. Maybe we should all just know ourselves a little better by being honest.
Show Me How To Live...
The purge continues. Little by little, it continues in the right direction. Yesterday, (not so) small person (anymore) asked me why I was giving all my books away when - aside from my record player, a few albums and my guitars - it was almost all I had left. It was a question that deserved an even better answer.
I sealed her mouth shut by giving her my record player (hey, in for a penny and all that) and a few albums she might actually like. She took to it well, fell in love with the concept and this morning, disappeared to an inner city nightmare in search of her first slab of vinyl she could call her own… and came back with a Michael Jackson album.
It could have been worse and I’m good with that, though it would have been neat if she had discovered Mother Love Bone all by herself.
Anyway, I chewed her question over and I guess the real answer is that many years ago when I left home, I had very little to call my own - but a year or so later, when I left town to head for London, I had even less. A few clothes in a bag, a copy of an Ed McBain novel (See Them Die) I was dipping in and out of, a Walkman and two cassettes. One featured Rick Springfield’s Living In Oz with New Jersey from Bon Jovi on the other side and tape two had The Doors Morrison Hotel and Zodiac Mindwarp’s Tattooed Beat Messiah.
What more could a man possibly need on a shamanic quest to find himself?
I can’t recall ever feeling more like anything was possible than I did back then when I had nothing - and while this isn’t an attempt to reduce myself to the meagre possessions of Gandhi - it is certainly an attempt to get down to what’s either useful or beautiful… and the one thing I’ve discovered already is that very little truly belongs in either category.
Thus, my codex for the future is going to be something like:
Tread softly and leave a big fucking scar in the wind
...which I think is harsh enough not to be called a tree-hugging hippie. Hugging things ain't gonna fix jack. What the world needs is a warrior and warriors don't carry backpacks full of crap around with them.
Ummm... that might be taking it a little too far but the sentiment is there.
The wisdom of samurai is priceless.
As a footnote to this on the subject of music, I've done my time with vinyl. I have no regrets about handing the magic of it down a generation. I've spent more money on vinyl than I ever did on books for years on end. I've tried to resurrect what I felt for it but in the real world, jacking my iPhone into Creature Speakers has more power behind it than any record deck I've ever owned...
...and if MP3 is the worst format in the world, that's OK because my ears are so hammered after all those years, I honestly can't tell the difference any more.