Tag Archives: M T McGuire

31 May 2013 · 2:40 pm

More from McMini

Some recent gems…

“Mummy I have an idea in my leg.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I am full of ideas, I have them in my legs and my hands and my body and my fingers and my neck and my ears and my mouth and even in my eyes.”
“I see.”
“Yes. And this idea is in my leg.”
“Gosh. What sort of idea is it?”
“I think I’m going to go outside and ride my bike.”

A few weeks ago we went to visit a friend who has a son exactly McMini’s age. They live in Surrey, near Pirbright. In the afternoon we went for a walk in Brookwood Cemetary which is near there. McMini and friend stopped in front of this memorial to Polish soldiers in the second world war.

Polish Memorial at Brookwood Military Cemetery.

McMini and his friend stood in front of it lost in silent contemplation.

“What is that Mummy?” asked McMini.
“It’s a memorial.”
“What’s a memorial?”
“Well, some men from Poland came here to fight in the Second World War. They were killed and this statue has been put up to commemorate them, and how brave they were.”
Long pause.
“Oh.”
Another long pause and McMini’s friend sidled up to him.
“What did she say it is?” he whispered.
“It’s a special statue to remember a man who died in the war.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. He was a pterodactyl.”

Oh well, at least some of it went in. Just… the wrong bits.

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11 May 2013 · 7:48 pm

Cynical bollocks, and so’s the latest branding exercise from Abercrombie & Fitch

I enjoy reading Kristen Lamb’s blog and I have just been reading her very interesting post about this.

Oh deary me. I know they do remind us of their marketing strategy every now and again but I really thought the human race had got beyond this.

It’s great to see that one of America’s oldest established businesses is run by people of such depth. Clearly there is not enough crap in the bollocksphere already so numb-nuts there has had to spew out more.

Mwah ha hahargh! Calling all ‘cool, good looking people’. Lord in heaven, is he serious? How many teenagers do you know, even the ones that are, who believe they’re cool and good looking? Yeh… hmm… have you someone in mind? Mmm and what are they like? And when you were at school; did you know anyone who believed they were cool and good looking? Mmm and what were they like? Snortle. Can you remember? I bet you can. That’s right, in two out of three schools I went to, they were a bunch of total gits.

So that’s A&F, then, apparently; made for wankers by plonkers! Oh but only thin wankers under a certain height, because tall people often need larger sizes than a size 10, even a generous American size 10, because… shock horror, they’re bigger.

Apparently some people are hailing this marketing as genius. Just goes to show that the difference between ‘genius’ and ‘bollocks’ is often nothing more than perception.

Seriously though, is that smart marketing? Well… let me just put my brand manager’s hat on for a moment. There. Hmm, give me a moment to think about that.

I’ve thought about it.

No.

It’s not what they’re doing, loads of clothes companies aim at the teen market by keeping the sizes small, it’s just that there’s something really not right about that schpiel. Then again, I don’t fit the demographic. Since I’ve never had a figure like an ironing board, not even when I was a teenager, I’ve never troubled A&F with my custom, the trousers were alright but I’ve never fitted my boobs into a size 10 top… But hang on, do you remember size 16 supermodel Sophie Dahl? Was she not ‘beautiful’ enough for A&F?

Obviously not.

So there we are. Not only is it a wanky theory but it doesn’t even hold water.

Being ‘exclusionary’ is not alright. It’s being a cunt, if you’ll pardon my French.

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3 May 2013 · 11:30 pm

Note to self: Must buy fairy dust.

A slightly dodgy post tonight because my life is officially like pushing a rock up hill. I’m not sure what’s going on but the chaos gremlins won’t leave me alone… and I seem to be waiting… for everything. (sings, ‘the waiting is the hardest part… one more day sees one more yard’)

For example, I decided to put a thing on my bike and McMini’s bike that means the two are attached like a tag along.

In the whole container there was only one screw that was bespoke, that I couldn’t have replaced if I’d lost it. So after I’d put the rest of the contraption onto both bikes, which screw did I discover was missing? That’s right. And to be honest, while I know how to do some fairly comprehensively mechanical stuff to an engine, I couldn’t for the life of me work it out. I gave up. McMini has decided he likes the seat anyway, so we’ll stick with it.

My car. No fascia. No dash, no petrol gauge. The 50 mile journey to the garage down a road bristling with speed cameras… interesting. The solution, discovered by the garage, disconnect the battery. Doh! Why didn’t I think of that? Then again, if I had, I’d have only broken the alarm.

Other areas of life… Flat.

I think it’s book sales that’s getting to me. They look terrible, going backwards, but the demographic is different so I’m clinging to the hope that when I finally come to do the figures, it’ll be the same numbers over a wider selection of platforms. If it is, that’s good, but I have to face the possibility that my books may just be bombing.

Writing the books? Well at the moment, I feel like I’m chasing a mirage, the more I write the further away the end seems to be. I would like to finish the K’Barthan trilogy before I die but I’m really beginning to wonder if it’s going to happen. Rolls eyes. Yes it’s taking that fucking long.

Actually, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a trilogy, I’m about a third into the last book and it’s already as long as the middle one but I think it best to finish it and see if there’s a neat point to halve it.

There are times, when I just have to accept that however ‘real’ writing feels to me I’m not really a ‘real’ author because the only thing I have the capacity to do full time is bring up my boy. Sometimes that’s quite hard, other times I wonder why it might possibly matter. At the moment it’s hard.

Different people have different commitments and also different capabilities – I really can’t write books unless I’m on my own in a quiet room. That does hamper me somewhat. I know other people who can sit to one side at a kid’s party and bash out a couple of chapters. I am in awe, and obviously, seething with professional envy. In any job you’re going to encounter this. There are going to be people who are more productive than you there are going to be people who succeed faster and you have to suck it up.

However, working within your limitations can be quite hard. I always knew my career was going to happen slowly but there are days when I wonder if it’s too slow. Is being an author like escaping the Earth’s gravitational field? Will it be impossible to escape the oceans of dross without rocket boosters? Will writing and producing books in slow motion render me a failure? Unless I achieve escape velocity will I be trapped here in the one sale a month club for eternity?  Only time will tell but very probably yes. Then there’s the really evil one. Am I deluded? Have I, actually, written two shit books? Is that why they are only read after prolonged begging… or at gun point?

OK, so we’ll put the maudlin, self-pity back in the box now and think about what can be learned. What are the lessons here? What have I learned that might be useful to anyone else? Hmm. Well it’s these things:

  1. Something that applies to pretty much any endeavour in life. Avoid looking at other people’s output except to learn positive things, like what works for them that might work for you, that kind of stuff. NEVER compare someone else’s output to yours. That way madness lies. Switch off the internet if you have to but don’t do it. Set your own targets. Make them realistic in the framework of your life and your abilities and then stick to them – if you can. Should you hit them feel glad and when other people produce six times as much stuff in half the time, chill. Yes you may not be achieving the standard norm but you’re achieving something and that’s better than nothing.
  2. Don’t worry about other people’s sales figures – yes I am a fool, I’ve been to kindleboards again and depressed myself reading the threads about how well everyone’s doing. There will always be people doing better than you and for many of us it will be most people. This is the way of the world, if you have less time, people who have more will write more books, faster and achieve success faster. Embarrassingly, people who are way smarter than you will use less time than you have more wisely and write their books faster.  Yes you will feel left behind. This is the harsh reality of life. Deal with it.
  3. Sometimes it will feel as if you are standing still and everyone is running past you and disappearing into the distance. Try not to think about it.
  4. Don’t start your writing career with a trilogy, or at least not unless you’re absolutely lulu. A series of stand alone books, yes, but a trilogy? No. Because a trilogy merely extends the first book angst for three books. That’s OK if you bash out a book every six months but if it takes you two years…? It’s been 16 years and counting. Mmm, I’m sure you get my point.
  5. Hard work begets success but unfortunately, so does luck and no amount of hard work will make up for that 1% of luck on top that puts you onto another level. This applies to anything. I’ve always had to make my own luck and to be honest, I’m piss poor at it! Phnark.
  6. Be patient; with your books and yourself. Yes Tom Petty was right, the waiting IS the hardest part. Aim to enjoy what you do and look upon anything else as gravy because however hard you work, the fairy dust may miss you.

So I reckon that’s some great advice, which I know and understand but seem to be pathologically unable to accept. Especially number 6. I think if I had the smallest modicum of patience, I wouldn’t be feeling quite so pessimistic. Or it could just be that it’s May and it’s sunny and although that’s absolutely lovely it does mean there’s a very high probability that it’s going to sodding tip it down for the rest of the year. If I’m not around so much it’ll be because I’m writing. I have to write because if I don’t finish my magnum opus this year, I fear I really will go crazy. After that it’s going to be short, commercially viable books. Oh yeh. No trilogies. Not ever, ever again.

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8 Apr 2013 · 9:00 pm

Treasure hunting. Naval gazing.

It’s the school holidays so work on my book has stopped for a week or two while McMini and I do stuff.

Today was particularly good. We went round to some friends; mine and his. The weather was lovely, we sat on the leeward side of the house, in the warm, out of the wind, and while the kids played together we had a gossip. Then, as their house is 14th Century I thought I’d have a go with my metal detector.

Despite owning it a while, I seem to be taking a terribly long time to get the hang of actual metal detecting. All the permissions etc required take time and so far, I haven’t got round to it. This has made it tricky, well, illegal actually, for me to practise outside my own garden. And therein lies the problem. The detector does several different tones of beep for different metals. However, in my garden it usually gets all the beeps in a single sweep. It makes it rather tricky to pinpoint any of the beeps individually or work out where to dig. Added to my severe lack of experience and you have a recipe for if not disaster then, very slim pickings. All that had come to light, before this morning, was one old nail and I was cock-a-hoop to find that.

However, today I finally felt I might be getting the hang of it. Just like my garden, it was a case, not so much of failing to find anything, as finding too many signals. Three or four different tones on one swing and no obvious indication as to where to dig. The truth dawned that it is not my garden that’s full of rubbish – well it is, I’ve never dug up so much aluminium foil but I digress. Where was I? Ah yes. The truth hit me that metal detecting isn’t walk, walk walk beep, ah yes, dig here, indeed it is clear that my garden is the norm rather than the exception.

So, clearly, I realised, it might be smart to filter out some of the beeps. I played with the settings and chose ‘coins’ because that cut out about half the spectrum including iron, which, frankly, seems to be in most things. I get signals for iron off everything, even the sodding grass. Thinking that there was bound to be the odd coin lying about and at least I’d start to get the hang, not only of finding things, but also of actually digging them out.

The machine reported some coppers – it’s American so it suggested they were 1c pieces but let’s not split hairs. They were pure signals, no interference, so I was able to pinpoint them fairly quickly and dig. So have I found a gold sovereign? Have I been like the blokes at my club who turned up last week with Edward II coins, coins from the reign of King John, Saxon beads and other amazingly ancient things? Am I like the guy who arrived the month before with an Iceni gold coin?

Well… er… no.

After digging two enormous holes in her lawn I came up with well… yes, two coins. They weren’t old, they were pennies, not even pennies, one pence pieces from 1971 and 1979, respectively.

For some reason this caused both of us an insane amount of mirth. Even so, both of us admitted to feeling a slight frisson of excitement that the machine had beeped, that we’d dug and that we’d managed to get something out. Even if it was only 1p.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? Success is relative. If I’d been using a metal detector for the last twenty years I’d be expecting to turn up some pretty good stuff. But I haven’t. This is the third time. I went there hoping that I might learn how to find a metal thing and successfully dig it up. So while today’s er… can I call it a haul? was laughable in most respects, I think I might actually have gained that knowledge. Job done then, right?

Food for thought.

Where does writing come in you ask? Well, here’s a short list of THINGS about my books:

  1. I’ve written two books and I’m writing another one. That’s something I never thought I’d achieve.
  2. There’s a chance they might be good books.
  3. People who have read them often like them. Some people like them a lot.
  4. People like the covers… and the merchandise.
  5. Are people buying the books? Are they buffalo?

What worries me? What do I dwell on the whole time? Number five. Because the other four, they make it look as if the K’Barthan Trilogy is a quality product that should walk off the shelves. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t. I don’t know if that’s my fault or if I’m deluded or whether it’s just a reflection of the difficulty of the market and if I think about any of that stuff I will be undone. That way madness lies.

What the metal detecting thing has taught me is that, actually, I’ve done quite well and that maybe I should concentrate on being happier with things 1-4 and on what I want to do next. In other words, I want to find something a bit more interesting than a one pence piece with my metal detector, but until I’ve gained the skill to locate one of those with a reasonable level of consistency, I probably won’t.

In short, when it comes to selling books, no-one really seems to know what works. So all an author can do is show people where to find them, or tell them – where permitted – and hope someone, somewhere will pick up on them. Because the only thing that’s really going to sell your book, ever is readers, who love it, telling their friends. So, let me leave you with the seven golden rules of happy authordom;

  1. Write, as much as you can. Write, to pick yourself up. Even if you can’t think of anything to write, write something. Because every authorholic needs authorhol, and when you’ve written it, get it edited, honed and primped until it’s the best you can possibly achieve. You owe yourself a decent product.
  2. Avoid checking your sales figures more than once a week it’ll only depress you.
  3. Avoid any places where authors who sell hundreds of books a month hang out, because you may find them complaining that their sales are piss poor almost as often as you do, that’ll make you want to weep. Also avoid the it-can-happen-to-you-too stories. It might but it probably won’t. Accept that and don’t beat yourself up.
  4. Try not to be disheartened if you discover that the only place you can persuade anyone to buy any of your books from is Amazon.
  5. Avoid going to forums to sell your book except in specifically designated areas. Go there to chat. If people like you and you’re lucky, they might buy your book eventually but nothing’s less appealing to them than a hard sell.
  6. Always remember that behind every overnight success are usually several decades of hard work.
  7. Remember that the only thing that will sell your books, ever, is readers who have loved them, banging on and on about them to their friends.

There you go.

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6 Apr 2013 · 2:39 pm

Awesome Indies award Seal of Approval to Few Are Chosen

Few Are Chosen is not only Awesome Indie listed now, it’s Awesome Indie Seal of Approved… so to speak. I quote…

“Books awarded the Awesome Indies Seal of Approval have been triple checked for quality. The standard of prose required for the seal is higher than that for inclusion on the site, therefore placement on the Awesome Indies list does not guarantee award of the seal.

The seal appears on book covers as a pure gold version of the above. The actual seal is only available from the site administrator. The black and gold version is used for display on websites.”

So Now I get to display this picture on my blog. aiafinal

That’s very cheering.

Here are the links to the three reviews.

  1. Tahlia Newland (reviewed on Awesome Indies)
  2. David Morrese
  3. Kate Policani

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10 Mar 2013 · 10:33 pm

Hello. My name is M T McGuire and I’m an Authorholic

Jeez it’s a pain in the arse this writing thing. Let me explain. Chatting to a mate the other day I ended up having a debate about whether or not you have to be a little bit barking to be a writer… or creative generally.

I said, ‘no.’

Now, I’m not so sure.

There’s no doubt, in my mind that it makes a person a bit different. It’s not an accident that I’ve ended up married to somebody who’s had his ideas patented (yes we can all sleep safer in our beds knowing  that vending machines spit out a few less coins thanks to McOther, and less of certain brand of chocolate come off the production line stuck together, and robot hands can grip without crushing).

Sorry, going back to writing… I suspect a lot depends on why you do it. If you’re doing it to make money you’re on a hiding to nothing, that’s for sure. To be honest, I don’t know why I write, I only know that I can’t not. It’s a compulsion. My Mum was telling me about someone she knew the other day, who married, and then divorced, a compulsive gambler. Some of the things she described rang worryingly true.

Most of the time, I love writing. A big part of me lives in a fantasy world. It always has. I retreat there whenever I need to escape and recharge. I never spoke about it, I just went off on my own somewhere, sat down and daydreamed. It was years before it occurred to me to write any of it down. I am not really one for secrets, even good ones – long term, most secrets are battery acid to the soul – so writing my books has felt extraordinarily liberating in some ways. Suddenly, actual people know about something that has been as real and as necessary to me as air and food. But secret from everyone else. Completely. Utterly. Secret. For my entire life.

Now I am able to talk about Swamp Things, Grongles, Snurds and the like, to people who enjoy them as much as I do, without having to explain what they are. OK, so it’s a very select band of you who know – literally tens of people. But that’s not the point. The point is that, these days, someone, anyone, does.

That’s how it feels when it’s going well. Great. When it’s not… it sucks.

Everyone has a certain amount of ambient angst in their lives. I deal with mine by writing. Usually it works. I can control what I write – up to a point – and if it turns out well, I get a nice warm feeling of achievement. The thing is the basic business of being human involves the lives of others, live as an island and you might write a lot but you’ll experience little. However, if you want to live and love to the full you have to give up writing time to interact and you have to surrender control. You have to moderate your actions because they can affect those around you, people whom you love and don’t want to hurt, so you can’t write until four in the morning. Likewise, things that happen to your loved ones can affect you, whether you want them to or not, because you care for them.The more you love, the more you give; the more fulfilled you are but… the less control you have.

If things are dicey, there comes a point where the ambient angst gets too noisy and my heart too full to write. The quality and quantity of my output drops. More angst. There are times if things are a bit busy or just not going very well when every writer – unless they’re really lucky – has to stop spanking the monkey. If you’re writing a book with a really convoluted plot and things are going less than well, then, if you want things to ‘go’ at all, you may need to switch to a less complicated project, a short maybe, or possibly even stop until you are ready to resume. If your mind can’t even be bothered to wonder, the time has definitely come to call it a day for a while, and do things. Put stuff in.

If you are self-publishing, that should be easy, right? No publisher deadlines, no book-every-six-months anxiety for me. But it isn’t. People are expecting another book, some of them even want it and that makes for pressure.

The truth  is, I’m having a little trouble with the Real World at the moment. It’s encroaching severely on my writing activities. For the most part, it’s a pleasure. But when you’ve got two thirds through a very complicated trilogy it’s not helpful.

It’s a times like these that I don’t really like being a writer. When life gets a bit tricky, it can feel as if you are weathering a great storm in a small boat, rowing like buggery, and singing ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ for your life; and still you’re pathologically unable to remember what verse you’re on, or keep your eye on the ball – either ball – because I can’t even bloody write, either.

You see, I really, really do need my writing fix. If I don’t get it I am cranky, defensive and I lose focus on everything except my desire to set my thoughts in order and write them down. I start resenting every day administrative tasks of life. I ignore them and they build up. At the same time, I see them building up and start to worry or feel guilty, which impairs my ability to write. Sometimes I neglect my personal hygiene, choosing, instead, to spend that precious half hour when I should be having a shower, writing. Yes, if I’m smelly this week, it means I’m inspired and knocking out 2,000 words a day.

That sort of behaviour seems worryingly similar to the addicts of other drugs, who can concentrate on nothing but the next fix. Am I a compulsive writer? Is my addiction hurting people? I fear it might be. Should I try and give it up? Maybe.

For what it’s worth, I do know what’s at the bottom of the compulsion. It’s the feeling of wanting to know what happens to the characters in my head. I want to know so badly that I will stop at little to find out. Writing books is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Trying to strike a balance between writing enough to keep me sane, and yet giving up enough writing time to live convincingly among the normals, without harming them, can really do my head in.

Writing a book like watching a good film, you want to find out what happens, even if you’ve plotted it and planned it. You  want to savour every moment with your characters and yet you also live for the moment when it’s done and you can read it through and follow the plot from beginning to end.

Spare a thought, when you read an un-put-downable book, for the author who had to put it down at the end of every single sodding day, probably a lot sooner than he wanted to, for about six months (15 years and counting in my case) before that golden moment when he could finally know, for sure, how it all turned out. Yes, speaking as an author, I fear I may have been ill advised to start with a trilogy, or at least, to publish any of it before I had finished

While I’m having a good old moan, there’s another thing about being a writer that really gets on my tits. It’s the dichotomy between why I write and the circumstances in which I can. Obviously, I write because I enjoy it, and I’m reasonably proficient at it. As I mentioned earlier, it’s also a release, an escape and a generally wonderful thing. However, the more ambient angst, and therefore, the more I need to write, – the harder it is to do so. My writing Mojo is perverse, I think. No, it’s not perverse. My writing mojo is one of the most finely – or is that badly – tuned, temperamental things on earth. It’s prone to throw tantrums, down tools and get distracted by shiny things. As general bad behaviour goes you’d be hard put to beat my mojo. It’s about as co-operative and open to compromise as a 1970s union leader.

So here I am, a person who takes around two years, maybe a little bit more, to write each book (although it took eight years to write the first one because I had to learn how) and I decide to write a story that it takes three books to complete, which I can only produce any effective work on ‘when I’m in the mood’. Or to put it another way, not very often.

There’s me thinking I could control my desperate need for answers… I thought it would be OK… It’s not. I have never done anything this hard. I would love to go cold turkey, just give up on the bloody thing and walk away, kick the habit. But I am too stubborn, and people are waiting, and I want to know what bloody well happens and all. But if I write another trilogy, I’ll make sure it’s stand-alone books and I won’t publish it until it’s all done.

And don’t get me started on trying to produce any meaningful output with PMT (that’s PMS, my American friends). Gah! Next week I will mostly be writing… a short story. Although it’ll probably be lines and lines of ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ The Shining-style, because frankly, I’m not sure if this is a gift I have here, or whether I’m merely a little bit tapped.

Honey! I’m home.

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1 Mar 2013 · 9:56 am

Barren Island Books

Hello everyone, the peerless A.F.E. Smith has interviewed me, M. T. McGuire on her blog. It’s a bit like that radio show with the records only with books, phnark. So, if you want to have a look see it’s here.

I hope you enjoy it.

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22 Feb 2013 · 1:17 pm

Hello Stranger

Yeh, I know, I’ve been conspicuously absent. There are two reasons; it’s half term which means my time is not my own and I have been setting up another blog/website for a group n of writers I’m part of. I say group, it’s more of an affiliation really but if you want to know more you can find out here.

Let me know what you think.

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5 Feb 2013 · 4:21 pm

Basking…

OK… a good week, a very good week.

Second, I went to two book club meetings for feedback recently. I was worried they wouldn’t like it especially as one group had been fairly forthright with a previous visiting author. I got some fantastic feedback. There was a consensus that older adults find my covers a bit YA but on the other hand, one of them, a Librarian, has said she will recommend it to all the teenage boys who come in.

What interested me, particularly, was getting a different view of the book from people who might not normally read it. Lots of food for thought. One highlight was a lady who openly admitted that she loathed this kind of thing and wouldn’t want to read the sequel but still gave it 7/10 because ‘it was very well written’. Another said that it was hard work reading Few Are Chosen because the chases were so exciting that she was literally out of breath.

And yeh, some of them even bought the book.

So am I chipper? Yes. I am.

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27 Jan 2013 · 8:50 pm

Reasons to be Cheerful

  1. The Sun came out today.
  2. There is no snow.
  3. I’m wearing the boots I love rather than the sensible shoes that don’t slip on ice.
  4. I am only wearing two jumpers.
  5. I am not wearing long johns.
  6. I am warm.
  7. I know what’s wrong with my book.
  8. I can fix it.

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