Finding My Book

Last week was a strange one, but one that is worth sharing, if only because it was so unexpectedly eventful.

Whilst looking through the bookshelves of a charity shop for something new to read, I found one of my own books on the shelf. The sight threw me completely, as various emotions vied for control of my brain.

"Look!" cried Anger. "Someone has thrown your book out like it was nothing!"

"No, that's not it," said Lookonthebrightside, "someone just wanted others to read it."

"But I keep the books I enjoy!" I said.

"Yes, but some other people don't.”

"Or maybe they didn't enjoy it," said Morose from his perch in the corner (he likes to hide in the shadows).

"That's true," said Anger, jabbing a finger towards his constant companion. "They hated it and they didn't tell you! They could have at least told you."

"Look guys..." I started.

"I fancy a packet of crisps," said Hunger.

"Simmer down," I said, pushing him back. "Guys, this is all a bit much for the moment. Let’s just sit down and have a coffee."

"Buy the book," said Anger.

"Eh?"

"Buy it. Buy it now. BUY THE SHAME."

"Ok..."

So I bought it, along with Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick. It was a 3 for 2 offer. My book was the free one.

So I let the experience stew away in my mind for a while. My main cause of confusion was trying to work out just why I felt hurt. Eventually I realised that it was because I still looked at my books as something personal, something just for me, despite the fact that the Binary Man has been out for almost three years. Selling e-books is a very abstract thing. It's just numbers on a screen, which then becomes a trickle of money into my PC games budget. To actually see one of my books in paperback the first time was a childhood dream come true, and it took three years of writing to come to fruition (the first one is always the toughest, so I’ve been told). Physical books mean the world to me.

The reason I was feeling hurt was because they didn’t see my book as a strange dream-reality combo item of mystical power.

Well, of course they bloody didn’t! It’s a book.

“Wait, there’s more,” said Anger. “What about the fact that they didn’t tell you what they didn’t like about the book?”

Well, this I admit is something I really crave. I am desperate to improve with everything I write, with every word if possible. Criticism of my work is of vital importance to me. Surely someone who disliked my book enough to chuck it would be able to give me something to work with?

“Whoa there,” said Guilt. “What they did do was they BOUGHT it. They paid some of their own money to give your book a read. And now you’re listening to Anger! That’s no way to pay them back. And what if they liked it, but are the sort of person who is able to get rid of books, instead of storing them for decades in the loft? And if they didn’t like it, is that a crime? They bought it. It was theirs to do with as they wished. There are far worse things they could have done with it...”

I bit my lip.

“You git,” said Guilt.

“I know…” I said, shaking my balding head.

Whether they read it or not, liked it or not, it didn’t matter. My books aren’t just mine any more. That one belonged to someone else, someone who believed enough in the blurb to give it a shot.

Whoever you are, I salute you.

I’m keeping the book though.

Dream Themes

The commonly held wisdom is that as someone who wants to make a go of writing, I should blog regularly, weekly if possible. I tried that a while back, but just can't do it, mainly because writing is dull. It's really dull.

An example commentary of my writing method involves 'get a cup of coffee, drink the coffee, write a bit, delete a bit, think, write a bit, judge it, delete or keep it'. I could post other things by other writers or TV programs, films etc. but between my job, my family and my writing I don't have the time, not if I want to sleep, and I do want to sleep, (right now, as it happens).

I'm posting this now because I have something vaguely fresh - a new book cover (see above) for a project that I started roughly a year back before stalling. I have since picked it up again and found it enjoyable (to me). I've gone against my natural instincts to just jump into writing it and have instead finished a plot synopsis first. I think it's pretty decent, so I'm going to try and finish it. It'll be a fantasy (of sorts), dreamlike in its oddness, tragedy and triumph.

Right, that doesn't fill up much of a page, so I'm now going to tell you all about common themes that crop up in my own dreams. Judge my psyche as you will...

• Living alone in decaying houses, often by the sea.
• Visiting the edge of the world (often by the sea too).
• Being in a house where the lights are struggling to stay on,  fading out after a certain amount of time, necessitating me turning on the switch again and again.
• Being in a position of fame (playing guitar for Mastodon, or playing football for the Gooners) and having no skills with which to pay the bills.
• Being in a safe environment, surrounded by monsters that I can control by telling them to stop, and then having them ignore that command and move towards me.
• Having a person or animal drowning nearby and I can't help them.
• Having a friend try to hurt/kill me but refusing to tell me why.
• Fighting in a sword-fight but being unwilling to hit my opponent as I actually don't really want to cut someone with a metal blade. It bloody hurts.

So yeah, my dreams are quite bleak and powerless generally, but that usually means I wake up pretty happy with my lot (beautiful family, no immediate peril) so don't pity me, buy my books! Is that what I'm supposed to say? I don't know. Have a good day, all of you.

The lonely man

Today is mine and my wife’s seventh wedding anniversary.

The time seems to have flown past, though only when I think of her. The rest of my life has been a long slog, day after day. I was thinking about why that was, and I realised that it was because even though we have been together for so long, there is still so much to learn about her. Even if she told me all about her life, every day, there would still be thoughts and feelings and events from her past that I would never know, grain upon grain, building up into the bedrock of her life before we met. She’s a story I want to know, a mystery that I want to unravel.

We don’t have the same tastes, not at all. Her taste in music is the complete opposite to mine. Books? We both read quite a bit, but different genres. Films, the same (though we can agree on comedies more than others). Pass-times… well, let’s just say my nerdiness fills her with a boiling disgust. There are cultural differences (she’s from Japan, I’m from the Black Country. Yep, hers is better). We can’t always communicate everything in as much depth as we’d want (though she is a far better linguist than I). So why am I so happy?

It’s because she accepts all the differences, without a single thought. She simply accepts me, big, clumsy, forgetful, daft Jake. If we disagree, we compromise. She is never jealous. She never spies on me, nor I on her. We trust each other implicitly. We also share the most important aspects of our world views. We both value freedom, family, justice, security… and food. Oh man, the food.

I didn’t have a second thought about proposing after nine months of being together. Being with her was as comfortable as being alone, if that makes sense. Despite the fact that I’m very sociable, it’s a learned trait. I’m actually cripplingly shy. I find it hard to be 100% myself around anyone, except her. I feel myself around her. I don’t hate myself around her.

She doesn’t mind that I’m a soft spongey man who wants hugging more than she does, she will always be there for me. We can be silent together, and not feel the need to fill the room with words. She has taught me what it means to be a husband, and a father, and an adult (without having to lose the edge of creative fun that childhood brings).

She’s in Japan right now, with my two lovely daughters, and the fact only serves to make this anniversary all the more special. I’m now experiencing life without her, and it is cold, depressing, and despite the fact that I am seeing my family and friends more than I ever did when I was single, I’m unbelievably lonely.

She’s my best friend. She’s my love. She’s my little pumpkin seed.

I love you wifey.

(Please come home soon.)

The Bones

I flew back from Japan to the U.K. yesterday, having spent two weeks with my in-laws. My trips to Japan usually involve a lot of writing. Once upon a time I managed to get 40,000 words of The Binary Man done in ten days, but this time was a little different, and not only because we've got the kids now (the 'time machines', due to their ability to drain it in the happiest way possible). My word count was a demure 6,000, give or take. Why? Well, I was looking at the bones.

I've always resisted studying the structure of stories. I did learn a bit about it at University in the most superficial of ways, and found that even this half-hearted approach still sucked all of the potential magic out of reading a book. It broke my immersion. I felt the same when writing. Better to get the story out, as fast and as enthusiastically as possible, because that way it'll be more raw. And it was. But raw is only good in sashimi and wrestling.

I've been throwing out first drafts, and thinking of them as finished. Sure, sometimes I would get a glimpse of something decent, when a few parts fell in the right places, but it was luck rather than judgement, if I'm honest. And then I wonder why my books don't sell. It's like making a baked potato. You can do it in the microwave, and you'll have the same ingredients (pomme de terre, buerre, fromage, lovely jubbly), but there's something missing in the flavour. If you give it an hour in the oven, it develops nuances and textures that weren't there before. It comes together. It melts, rather than flaking.

So I picked up a few books, and read how others did it. You know, successful authors. I looked at exposition, leading to rising action, to climax (oh myyy), to falling action, and then I compared that structure to the books I loved. It worked! It fitted. And I never saw them, I never saw the bones that held the body of work up. 

I laid out a plan. I worked out events, characters, a setting, and left enough room for the story to jiggle about a bit as the characters' personalities begin to assert themselves (always an exciting moment). It's going to be a thriller. It has a different narrative voice to my usual one, even my usual first person voice, which means cutting words that don't fit, and explaining things in a different way so that they work for the character. It's not going to be the most original story out there, but I don't think that matters this time. This story is about me learning how to write, how to build the skeleton, before I hide it in the meat of a (hopefully decent) read. I'm keeping most of the details secret. I've only told a snippet of the plot to one person (my soon to be brother-in-law), and I stopped myself quickly. I'm not getting that hot potato out of the oven until it's done. I'm going to draft, re-draft, cut, and be mercenary. 

It'll be the best damn potato I've ever baked. I hope you enjoy it.

Why I write horror.

Well, I was trying to write a blog post every week, but last week was too filled with life, children and (I’ll be honest) sunshine. I’m feeling very stretched lately (what’s that Tolkien/Bilbo quote? “Like butter over too much bread?”) so I’ve decided to relax on my writing to enable me to get a bit of energy back. Due to starting new jobs, moving jobs, scheduling holiday for when my kids are off etc. I am now in the position where I’ve only had a week and a half of holiday in eight months. I am fried.

So I now watch Hannibal on my commutes, with just a bit of writing thrown in if my mind can take it. Hannibal is a great program, though very grisly. I wouldn’t mind if the violence was more implied, as it’s not the reason I watch it. The characters are the draw (even if the female characters are very two dimensional compared to the male). It’s a wonderful story of a descent into madness, and a chillingly believable one (for all of its mammoth body count. I’m never going to Baltimore. There must only be about three people left).

Annnnnnnnnyway, all of this led me to thinking about why I actually write horror. I never intended to be primarily a horror writer. The majority of the books that I own are science fiction or fantasy, and my first book The Binary Man was a cyberpunk effort. My second book Heal The Sick, Raise The Dead would have a hard time to be classed as anything as horror due to the fact that it features the undead, but I intended it to be more of a mystery than straight up zombie pulp. The corpses are incidental and present a sense of constant threat, rather than being the main story. Then came Cuts of Flesh, a six part novella Lovecraftian series about a detective investigating a murder, which leads to him uncovering the fact that his wife might still be alive after she disappeared seven years ago. Yes, these ones are definitely horror. The Real Thing is not, going back to cyberpunk with an overblown near future romp, which I enjoyed writing, but has never taken off. Then there was Terror Organic, an anthology of my short stories (all pretty macabre), Carnival, another horror novella, and finally Shy, an interactive Japanese horror novel. I’m now in the process of flitting between three novels, one sci fi, one dark fantasy and one thriller/yes, probably horror. The strange thing is, I don’t really think of the word horror when I’m writing the story. Horror to me evokes a revelling in gore. I’ve seen posts by horror fans along the lines of “that is so sick, when the eye gets squished!”, where the violence itself is seen as being a reason to watch. I know horror fans who don’t give a flying limb about narrative, as long as the blood keeps flowing down the screen.

Yes, my stories do sometimes contain gore, but I don’t enjoy writing it. I fear it. Maybe I keep falling back on such dark writing because I’m older, I have a wife who I love dearly and am petrified of losing, and now two daughters. My heart aches with worry, and those worries come out in my stories. I want to push those worries back, but don’t feel strong enough to do it myself, so I write protagonists who can. My ideal life would be farming and sunshine, away from a society that seems hell bent on stripping the world of its life and reducing everything to a commodity to be consumed. Unfortunately, farms are expensive, and I fear my wife wouldn’t do well in the solitude that I crave, so I slog it out in the city, and exorcise my demons with writing.

Living five minutes into the future

For a while now, I've been aware that I'm travelling in time. Well, partially.

My mind is separated into two distinct parts. One is living in the now, reacting and observing events as they happen, and the other part is thinking about what is to come in the next five minutes, five days, five weeks, months, years. I have to force myself to be fully aware of everything around me.

This thought process has been exacerbated by my writing. I'm always looking towards the next project, or the next (small) marketing attempt or offer. I plan novels that are years down the line, before I've even finished the one I'm working on at the moment. I know that this is bad practice for someone who wants to be a writer, but that doesn't make it any easier to stop, it just gives me a feeling of hollow guilt when another hour of free time fizzes past with no progress made. I constantly feel as if I'm starting out, rather than realising that I have two years of focussed writing and indie publishing experience (though not hugely successful). This feeling gives me energy, but it's a dissonant energy, shredded with nerves.

This sense of future nervousness affects my home life too. I think about the future of my daughters, and how our relationship will be when they are older. Will they respect me? Will they be happy? Will they want me around? I hope so. This wondering can also lead me to forget that right now, at the ages of four and two, they do want me around. I know I need to appreciate that fact more, lock out all other thoughts, and simply play.

It's easier said than done. Isolation is hard to achieve now. For many of us, events can be made known moments after happening. We are constantly aware of others' lives through social networking, so much so that it makes us less aware of our own.

I long for the days before I had a mobile phone, when I could go for a walk and not be found. I know I could go for a walk now, and leave my phone off, or at home, but there would always be a tiny part of my mind thinking about it. There was a purity of thought before I had the option. As much as I love writing, I'd give it all up to live in a remote cottage, and get some farming done. Seriously.

And there we go again, living in the future, or possible future, rather than the now. See how easy it is to slip?

This isn't a pontification about how technology is a plague. After all, this is a blog! It's more of a lesson for myself. If writing this helps me to give a few more moments of focus to my wife and children, then it's worth it. And don't worry, they're not here. I'm writing this on the train to work, and thinking of them.

Why I don't think of myself as a writer.

I know this will be a divisive topic, but it’s something that crops up a lot in the world of indie and self-published authors. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times before, but I thought I’d dedicate a blog post to the subject as a way of fully explaining my position.

In the last two years I have written four novels, a series of six novellas, and nine short stories. I have also had a number one in the UK in the cyberpunk category with the first of my novels, The Binary Man.

I don’t consider myself a writer. I consider myself a father who writes.

This is not because I don’t value what I’m doing, day in, day out. I don’t consider writing a hobby. I love writing. I’ve always loved writing. I love crafting a story, honing it, and trying to get my words into the correct order so that they can convey precisely the image that I had in mind. I may not always achieve this, but the action itself is addictive.

It’s also not because I think that only traditionally published authors are bona fide. There are many writers who are self-publishing and have a great standard of prose, and I’ve been lucky enough to read some of their stuff. It’s humbling.

The reason is simply this… if I call myself a writer, then my success (or relative lack of it) is more immediate. If I measure my worth by my income (as many do, though I don’t) and judge it solely on my earnings from my books, I would fail to provide for myself or my kids. If I were to judge myself on the performance of my books and how well I think they should do (I really think Shy could do well, but as yet it hasn’t), I’d give up writing in an instant just to preserve my mental health.

I don’t want to give up writing. I want to carry on practicing, getting in my 10,000 hours so that I can finally get that missing something that will make one of my stories take off. If it means that I have to go a few more years without calling myself a writer, then so be it. At least the writing will still get done.