Yes, thank you to Adam Sifre; Splinker, himself who has interviwed me on his blog here so that I don’t have to write anything. HERE.
Thank you Splinker.
Category Archives: General Wittering
Mini Man Says….
This afternoon, McMini approached me with his doctor’s kit and explained that he was going to ‘make me better’. He sat me down on the sofa with his medical case and protective knight’s helmet beside him and got to work. He selected the special looky-in-the-eary-thing. No idea what its technical name is.
“First I will look in your ear,” he says and proceeded to do so.
“Anything in there?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Do you need to look in the other one?”
“No, I saw right through to the other ear from this side.”
I admit I’m a bit of an airhead but not that much, surely. Then he gets out the reflex testing hammer.
“Now I must put on my hat to protect me if bits fly off your elbows. Please roll up your sleeves, Mummy.” He put on the knight helmet and proceeded to tap my elbows very gently with the hammer.
Then he listened to my tummy with the stethascope.
“Mmm. Your tummy is full of bugs. I will have to kill them.”
“Oh dear,” I said.
“Scissors,” he said holding them up. “Open wide.”
Other gems he has come out with include.
“Rain is like wee falling from the sky.”
“If you’re not careful you will get dirty and have purple skin and the purple won’t go away.”
“Turn the lights off please. Thank you. Look! I can see in the dark. It is because I have been eating lots of carrots. I have eaten so many carrots that soon my eyes will pop out and turn red like a dinosaur.”
He is very into dinosaurs at the moment. Last night, he squatted down, looking, to all intents and purposes, as if he was about to have a pooh and started to bounce slightly, humming as he did so. It looked as if he was doing the Mr-Whippy-having-a-crap-joke.
“What are you doing?” I asked, slightly bemused. He smiled up at me and said,
“I am laying my eggs.”
Later I found him squatting down humming but without moving.
“Hello Mummy. Now I am sitting on my eggs,” he told me.
Today we went to a Dr Who exhibition at my local museum. It was great. I’d like to go again, but I doubt I’ll make it. It’s only on for a week but there was a worksheet and a prize draw and I didn’t get to totally fill it in. Mwah ha hargh, no! Not for ME; for McMini.
At the end we spent a lot of time looking at a life size Dalek, one of the really early ones, pre my era (mine are the 73/74 ones). I came under heavy bombardment to buy one of the souvenir Dr Who action figures – the Daleks were well cool but £15 a pop – so I demurred and promised him one when we got home as I have a few spares in my collection of shame.
When we came home, McMini proudly told McOther about the ‘garlic’ he’d seen while I chortled into my hand. McOther didn’t seem to get it. I went and got a Dalek for McMini which he proudly rushed downstairs to show McOther. It was only then that the dear man realised what a ‘garlic’ was. He thought we’d been to the cook shop. Phnark.
Finally… he’s doing phonetics at the moment so he has a song about the letters c and k which he sings. He whispered it very quietly to me in church.
“Well done, that’s great,” I said when he’d finished.
“K, k, k, kite, kit, kate, can’t, CUNT!” he shouted. It was very innocent, he was just making noises but… hmm.
Never let it be said that having kids is dull!
Stop Press: He has just asked if I could show him some “pictures all about onions” on the computer.
“Onions?” I said. “Do you mean Daleks?”
“Yes! Garlics.”
Latest (20:30): Apparently he went upstairs to find McOther shouting, “Extra-erminate!”
He will kill me for this when he’s grown up… 😉
Filed under General Wittering
The Next Big Thing…
This week, the Next Big Thing blog chain has landed here. If you’re following it round the writing world, welcome. And everyone else, hello too. I have been tagged by Jack Barrow, so feel free to go backwards up the chain and look at his post if you haven’t already.
So, the idea of this is that it gets viral. No, don’t worry, not that kind of viral. Everyone hopes that you guys will get to discover lots of new writing, in all sorts of different genres, by people you’ve never heard of and really enjoy it. Very laudable, eh? At the bottom of these ramblings you will find links to the blogs or websites for five other writers who will be answering these same questions on their blogs, next week. They are a varied bunch – that was the point, so I did try to mix it up – so why not pop over and have a look at them?
Right then, without more ado, here are my answers…
What is the working title of your book?
The one I’m writing at the moment is called One Man – No Plan, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 3 it’s the third in a trilogy, the first two of which are:
Few Are Chosen, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 1
The Wrong Stuff, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 2.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
OK, look, you know the first scene on the oil rig in Cars 2? Well, that’s pretty much what’s going on inside my head all the time. Every now and again, I drag myself away from it to give Real Life some attention but most of the time, that’s where my brain is. So it seemed logical to write all these adventures down.
The idea behind the K’Barthan Trilogy; of another version of earth in a parallel reality, has been there since I was 8 years old. I’ve mixed it up with a bit of religion, a bit of ju-ju and a bit of quantum physics, or at least some of the theories behind it. I love science, it’s brilliant, there is so much interesting stuff about nature and the universe that we have yet to explain and I can’t wait for the answers.
However, for the moment, I’ll content myself with making them up.
What I tend to do is get some of the questions, some of the suggested answers, add a HUGE dash of salt, shake ’em up and, ding dong, you have things like K’Barthan Reality Theory and Random Physics. That said, having happily made Reality Theory up, in order to avoid mistakes with my Chaos Theory, I discovered, a couple of days ago, that its a real science. Which is somewhat disturbing. Then again, it probably only exists in very exclusive, expensive labs in America, or China, staffed by people called Leonard… and Sheldon – and OK let’s face it, the law of probability states that there will be at least one Colin – or their Chinese equivalents.
Obviously many of the ideas in the third book are there because they’ve developed from the other two but I am also looking at telepathy, the idea that you can ionise water molecules so you can use a fish tank like a huge computer memory bank, talking with body pigments, the way squid do, and space junk reclaimation. I’d love to write a book about the bus and coach industry, too, although I’d set in space so that no-one realised it was all true.
What genre does your book fall under?
Humour and the twilight world between sci-fi and fantasy.
There are made up races and creatures but it’s not about space and there are no dragons, orcs, dwarves, vampires or any of that malarky. Actually I’d never dare write about actual established mythical creatures, like those because I can guarantee that if I did, a lot of people, who thought they knew more about these things than me, would bombard me with disgruntled e-mails telling me how WRONG I’d got everything.
That’s why I invent all my own creatures. My species; my rules; no arguments
Basically it is full of jokes, futuristic technology and sarcasm. There’s some romance in it too. .
Hang on! Wit a minute, I know! I’ll call it ‘speculative fiction’ that’s a suitably loose fit, I reckon.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Hmm… that’s tricky, especially the girls because they look like people I know rather than people who are known. And in half the cases, to get the right look you’d have to pluck the actor or actress in question from further back in time. So, I have some very bad drawings of the characters from K’Barthan 1 on Facebook. If I was casting the film, I’d say, get people who look like this.
The gallery is here…. I hope. Gallery
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
When The Pan of Hamgee falls in love he thinks he’ll do anything to get the girl’s attention, but isn’t saving the world going a bit far?
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Self-published.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Pretty much all my life, well, OK, I guess it took 13 years give or take a bit to really crack my first book, Few Are Chosen. I appreciate that some readers my well have felt as if it took me another 13 years to write the second book, The Wrong Stuff, but I promise it was only about 18 months. K’Barthan 3 looks as if it will take a similar amount of time. I was hoping I could do it in a year. Sorry.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Well, I’m not aiming to sound like a particular author but I guess it might appeal to Adams, Pratchett and Red Dwarf fans because people reviewing it have compared it to them. They’ve also compared it to Rankin, Fford and Holt but Adams and Red Dwarf crop up the most often – they’re neck and neck, those two, just edging Pratchett out of the frame into third – the others trail a little behind.
Who or What inspired you to write this book?
Everything! I’ve always wanted to write a book. I wrote my first book when I was five. It was called ‘Charles the Dragon Slayer’. Charles was a man of few words because writing them down was so hard, ah if I could have touch typed back then. K’Barth was born soon after, I reckon I was about eight years old when I drew my first map. It wasn’t called K’Barth then, of course, but that’s what it was. Eventually, aged about 10 I discovered StarWars and James Bond at about the same time and my own particular brand of ‘hi-tech fantasy’ was born.
The stuff that goes in is… well…
1960s Telly: all those programmes like The Avengers that they used to show on BBC2 at 6 o’clock when I was a kid. I watched hundreds of episodes of bad 1960s sci-fi and fantasy. Including StarTrek, of course. EDITED to add and Dr Who! How could I, a pathological whovian, forget to mention that?
Music: I love music, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Stranglers, Blur, The Divine Comedy, Air, Schubert, Mozart, Bach and any number of other bands and composers.
Books: I loved books and as a kid I read the Narnia stories, lots of historical stuff like Rebecca, Children of the New Forest, Moonfleet. I probably read more E Nesbitt than is wise or prudent, Hilaire Belloc cautionary tales – they are brilliant – Goschinny and Uderzo, Viz.
TV Comedy: The Young Ones, Mock The Week, Have I Got News for You, Saturday Night at the Apollo, Bottom, Vic and Bob, Blackadder, The Fast Show and Little Britain – it all goes in.
Amimation: pretty much anything Dreamworks or Pixar ever did.
Then we get to the biggies, StarWars, Bond movies, Pratchett, Adams, Wodehouse and cars.
Oh lord I am an incurable petrol head. The best bit of the K’Barthan Trilogy has been working out what vehicles to base the snurds on. Even now, I’m a little distressed that there was no room at the inn for the Ferrari GTO, the E-Type Jaguar, The Triumph Spitfire or the GT6. And I was going to give Sir Robin (aged 70) one that looked like an Austen Allegro but I couldn’t find a way to jemmy it in. I have never driven a sensible car for long, indeed, in 15 years I think I’ve only owned a car for 6 months that had more than two seats. My current car is very new and very shiny but sadly, despite an extensive search I’ve not found a way of making it take off… well… actually I have, in its predecessor, but I don’t think I’d like to do it again.
This bit seems to be the best place to give a nod (more than a nod) to Sir Terry Pratchett. Writing books took me a long time to learn. The gap between what I wanted to achieve and what I could was very, very large. So one day I e-mailed Sir Terry. He was kind enough to write back to me. I was on my second go at writing a book by that time. So, I asked him for advice on closing that gap, between what I want to achieve and what I can. He sent me a lovely e-mail back, which, I have since lost, to my eternal chagrin. But the gist of what he said was; don’t worry this is quite normal, be patient, keep writing. Write something every day and eventually, you’ll teach yourself. So I followed his advice and here I am.
Thank you, Sir Terry.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Snurds. Seriously, they’re the best bit. Cars which fly, with missiles behind the headlights and machine guns… and laser cannon and pulse weapons… and they look like this…
Snurds! In London! Mwa ha ha hargh!
And I want one. Really badly. So next time you’re stuck behind a caravan just imagine pressing a button on the dash… it slides back, there is a host of other buttons and levers, you select All Purpose Torpedoes, aim, fire and blow it out of your path… Mwa ha ha hahrgh… And my readers tell me my books are funny.
And on that note… I think I’ll stop.
OK, here are the five authors who have kindly agreed to take up the baton next week.
J A Clement
Will Macmillan Jones
Sandra Giles
Mira Kolar Brown
Lyn Horner
Filed under General Wittering, Humorous Fantasy Author
It’s World James Bond Day!
It’s World James Bond Day! And, as somebody who was never the same again after watching The Spy Who Loved Me and You Only Live Twice. I couldn’t let it go unmarked. OK so StarWars played a big part too, or at least the fact I saw The Spy Who Loved Me and the first StarWars film, pretty much back to back.
However, this is World James Bond Day so we won’t complicate things with StarWars, suffice it to say that I would probably write historical novels if I hadn’t witnessed George Lucas’ clever way of getting sword fights, which are, after all, BRILLIANT, into a sci-fi film. OK back to the programme… World James Bond Day.
The Spy Who Loved Me is not the best Bond film but it’s the first grown up film I saw, in a cinema… in Norwich, believe it or not. And it had that big base… with all the stuff… and of course… THE LOTUS.
Yes, THIS Lotus. Thank you instableblogsimages.com for the picture.
Let’s face it, that’s a snurd in submariner mode. Proof positive that I didn’t really invent them. Sorry about that. So for all my policy of only writing about things I’ve made up (so nobody can send me an irate e-mail saying ‘how dare you! You’ve got dwarves COMPLETELY WRONG!’) snurds, or at least the idea of cars that fly, go under water, turn into boats, shoot guns, blow caravans out of our path and other things we wished they do, is pretty much public domain. Snurds are just my version.
So after the StarWars Spy Who Loved Me combo, my dolls were suddenly spies with a space base. Imagine how overjoyed my Mum was when she examined the Pippa space ship I’d been taking to school for a week close up and discovered that in pride of place, as the central control panel, was the used Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-etc blister pack from her contraceptive pill. Suddenly I was gluing wings on my toy cars, buying airfix models of cars and aeroplanes and melding them into… well, yes, even then I called them Snurds.
Every day as I sat, in my Mum and Dad’s classy Peugeot 304 (don’t knock ’em they were brilliant) in the Worthing rush hour traffic (yes, we have rush hour in Worthing) on my way to school, I fantasised that it was Emma-Peel-Lotus-shaped and we were sprouting wings, executing a vertical take off and flying away. I suppose where I differ is that I did expect, at some point, to grow out of fantasising about snurds. But fortunately it never happened.
The year I saw The Spy Who Loved Me was also the point at which I found an old box, wrote “Lotus” on it in biro and started saving up for one. I wanted one of these.
Or do I mean these…?
I finally achieved my dream when I was 33. Sadly, in 11 years, I failed to access the All Purpose Torpedoes and I never found its wings button. I’ve just traded it in for a new one, although I’m afraid, so far, that one doesn’t seem to have a wings button, either.
Lotus Engineering, are you listening? You really need to make a snurd.
If you really like them, you can purchase snurd-related merchandise – and K’Barthan-related but let’s face it, the snurds are the best bit. It includes t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, post cards and the like from www.zazzle.co.uk/drawnbyhand*
Filed under About My Writing, General Wittering, Humorous Fantasy Author
If you thought The Wrong Stuff was the right stuff… and you’re interested. Location photos.
The other day, a fellow forum user on Goodreads, Ignite, said she’d love to know things about my books like, where they’re set, where the ideas came from, a bit about the cover art… that kind of thing. So, taking her words to heart, last time I was down in London I took some pictures of one of the locations.
The RAC Club features in The Wrong Stuff, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 2, so here are some pictures of the bits mentioned – or at least, the bits that exist. A lot of the RAC Club in my book is imaginary.
The RAC Club, the view up the stairs to the atrium as you come in. So this is what The Pan and Ruth would have seen as they came in and where they would have been greeted by Club staff.
The RAC Club, from in the atrium, looking down the stairs towards the street entrance.
.
This is another shot of the atrium from the first floor but trying to show the glass ceiling. I should think there is very little up there apart from the roof, some water tanks, air conditioning/heating outlets and a lot of pigeon pooh. However, I like to pretend there really IS a roof garden.
The atrium, although we’re actually on the first floor by this time, or possibly the second floor because the atrium itself, above the swimming pool, is sort of mezzanine.
Here’s the view of the atrium, looking down at the fabulous carpet and the display of old car(s). This time it was just the one, I think I have seen a pair before. They can be anything from a vintage motor like the one here to rare road cars, rally winners, historic racers or grand prix cars. The only thing they have in common is that they are always interesting. But this is where the display of historic Lotuses in the book would have been.
The stairs at the RAC Club where Lucy answers Ruth’s phone call from the police station and argues with Big Merv about going to Paddington Green alone.
Here’s a picture of the view upwards… somewhere at the stop of the stairs is where Sir Robin/The Architrave’s apartments are hidden. Although I have to confess that I based the corridors and rooms upstairs on a different London club.
Filed under About My Writing, General Wittering
This week, I have mostly been doing interviews!
I’ve been very lazy these last couple of weeks. Partly because I’ve been running around like a headless chicken BUT I have done a couple of interviews which you can read elsewhere if the mood takes you.
The first one is at Mirabooks, fellow author Mira Kolar-Brown’s blog. So, you can find that one here.
The second is at Jonathan Hill: Writer, Reader, Book Lover which is the blog of fellow author Jonathan Hill and you can find that one, here.
Both were great fun to do with interesting questions so feel free to pop over if you have time.
Filed under General Wittering
Nice guys don’t finish last… they just finish slowly.
In the immediate world of the internet, it seems that many writers are getting disheartened when their works fail to go instantly viral. Sure, when a book with as few redeeming features as 50 Shades explodes the way it has, it’s a little galling but is ‘overnight success’ the be all and end all? Be honest with yourself, would you want that pressure? Well actually, if I was EL I’d never bother to write commercialy again but you get my drift, I’m sure.
For those of us who are normal and who have to balance their book marketing time with actual writing time and Real Life there’s no shame in building an audience slowly. Surely, if you get to the point where you’re selling truckloads of books, it doesn’t matter whether it’s taken you two days or ten years. After all, the end result is the same. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
Relentless marketing is all very well – if you have the time and the inclination – but then, while a bit of dynamism is commendable, pushiness and aggression will just turn off your audience. Surely you want readers, right? People who will buy all your books and stick with you through thick and thin. That takes time.
So. I have accepted that success will not come to me overnight and I thought I’d share my er… strategy with you.
It’s difficult to say how it’s panning out because I’m a stay at home Mum and it takes me 18 months (at least) to write each book. However there are 6 things I’ve noticed.
1. Being unashamed to mention your books – where relevant – works well but being aggressive and over saturating your audience with the same or similar plugs does not. Sure, you need to be organised, methodical and forward but most important of all you need to be charming. If your policy is the on-line equivilent of shouting your message in somebody’s face, the chances are they’ll endure the noise and ignore you. If they like you already and you mention your book in passing they might read it. Pushiness and aggression to people you don’t know just alienates them.
2. Soft on-line selling works. For me, participating in threads where I get to give feedback to other authors, or just passing the time of day with readers and authors, alike, makes sales. I enjoy it and there’s no awkward ‘buy my book’ type schpeil involved; win-win.
3. Be sure to remember the Real World. Never leave home without a copy of your book. You never know who you’ll run into. If people ask me, ‘what do you do?’ I tend to produce my book with a flourish and say, ‘I write these.’ Believe it or not, I sell more books doing that than anything else.
4. Social networking is not the golden bullet. If you do it, use it to actually interact. Use your imagination; share ideas, news, articles, your blog posts (and other people’s) or just chat. Posting marketing links; yours or other people’s – is fine every now and again, but your input will become little more than white noise if they are all you post.
5. Aim – or at least, hope – for fans rather than readers. Yeh, you want them to buy one of your books but what you really want is for them to buy all your books and everything you write the minute it comes out. A nice big sales spike at the start is what kicks off a bestseller. Somehow, you need to forge relationships with your readers. I don’t pretend to know how to do this, I just do the best I can. This means being courteous and charming when they contact you, even if it’s a bad time or they’re saying something you’d rather not hear.
Last week I tweeted that I’d finished a book and gave it 5 stars. The author is famous, his book was voted best travel book (or something like that) on Radio 4. It’s a best seller, he has 24,000 followers on Twitter. And he thanked me. And we had a chat. And I will definitely be buying his next book, and recommending the current one. That’s what I mean.
6. Write the best books you can. A quality product always sells in the end. Churning out hundreds of mediocre novels and selling them to people is not my goal. Writing a story that sells because it moves people, makes them laugh and makes them think is.
7. Hang in there. What really works is when your readers enjoy your books enough to sell them for you. Achieving book sales by word of mouth is the most effective but slowest moving form of marketing… It would be nice if my books went viral but in all likelihood, until I’ve finished the trilogy (I’m working on book 3 now) – or ever – the chances are they won’t.
In conclusion, a successful hard sell doesn’t always make for a fan base. A charm offensive is less aggressive but may well be more effective long term. And it’s worth remembering that ‘overnight success’ is usually founded on many years of hard work.
Filed under General Wittering, Good Advice
M T McGuire Authorholic 