Tag Archives: Other Creatives

5 Oct 2014 · 3:33 pm

Metal detecting, and its relation to my hopes as an #indie #writer

This week, I’m unsure how to go about my blog post. TI have several things to say so bear with me as I try to work out a way to jemmy them all in at once.

Ever in pursuit of the elusive hammered coin or interesting… thing, I went out metal detecting yesterday. I learned three things.

  • First that no matter how many smashing Saxon artifacts other people are digging up you have to walk over one to find it.
  • Second, I learned that my waterproofs are not waterproof any more. This lesson delivered as I was the wrong end of a field, about half a mile from the car, in a deluge. More waterproofs required, I think. The manner of my learning this rather sums up my day.
  • Third, on returning home, after steeping in a hot bath, I learned that basically, I’m doing setting the detector up right, choosing sensible places to detect and doing the right thing. I am finding tiny things as well as big things, I am finding things made out of metals and alloys that mirror the good stuff but unfortunately, they are bits of tractor and modern stuff rather than interesting finds. I’m finding miniscule things the size of a quartered silver coin, but they’re tiny pieces of metal. All are things which, in happier circumstances, could be good stuff. My point is that, for the most part, I’m doing it right, it’s just that the artifact gods are not smiling as benignly upon me as sometimes.

In a sop to my efforts, they (the Small Gods of Lost Things) did throw me this fantastic fossil of half a sea urchin. It holds a level of detail I’ve not seen outside the real thing so my day wasn’t wasted.

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That white discolouration on the flat side means it broke in half several million years ago.

Onwards and upwards. There’s another dig next week.

Which kind of brings me onto the second thing. As you know, I’ve been a bit worried about my book sales recently. This is because I’ve been doing that fatal thing, comparing myself to other people. Really I should know better.

In order to feel some semblance of control, and in pursuit of social media savviness, I bought and read two Rayne Hall books: Twitter for Authors, and Why Does My Book Not Sell? 20 Simple Fixes (Writer’s Craft).

OK, if I can go off at a bit of a tangent here… I cannot recommend these books highly enough. I’ve always wondered how to interact with people on Twitter, Rayne Hall gives the answer. If the worst comes to the worst just go to her feed, eavesdrop on some conversations and have a chat. Her advice has definitely worked really well for me. Even in a week I’m having conversations and enjoying Twitter the way I wanted to but hadn’t. She also has what I consider to be an excellent attitude to social media, ie that it is social and that the more social and less of a book seller you are, the more likely you are to achieve book sales. This advice has been borne out by my own experience.

Likewise, while I’d got more of my book production performance in line with Rayne Hall’s there are still plenty of things in Why Does My Book Not Sell? 20 Simple Fixes (Writer’s Craft) that I can apply to my own books.

However, what I have learned from these two books, above all, is that for the most part, and barring a few tweaks, I’m doing the right thing.

My book sales are not lighting up the sky, though. Perhaps, like my efforts at metal detecting, the small percentage of fairy dust required is just absent from that part of my life at present. Perhaps. But if I’ve learned anything from metal detecting, it’s that perseverance pays off. If you keep believing and keep digging you will find interesting things. The law of averages demands it. You can’t find nothing but crap. Sure a big part of your detector finds may be but they can’t all be. And they aren’t. Not even for me.

Which begs a question.

Am I simply lacking fairy dust. Or are my book sales better than I think?

Comparatively I mean.

You see, it may be that for someone who has written a book that is, as a friend who works in magazine publishing put it, “Absolutely wonderful, but a very hard sell. I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole if it was submitted to me,” I’m actually doing better than I think.

Usually, a handful of people download my free book each day. Since it went free, in February, I’ve seen a sudden increase in sales of the second book after which, in June and July, I definitely saw an increase in sales of books 3 and 4. From selling a couple of books a month if I’m lucky and shifting a couple of my, admittedly, dodgy free shorts a month, there are now only a couple of days each month when nobody downloads anything.

Don’t get too excited. I’m not ready to make one of those gushing, “I can’t believe that my book is number one on Amazon!” posts on Kindleboards. I’m not even ready to make one of those “my sales have plummeted! I’m only selling 500 books a month” posts either. Mwah hahahargh! I dream of selling 500 books a month.

However, it’s all relative. This time last year I’d failed to sell a single book in three months straight. This year, to my eternal delight, even Kobo users are buying them. The Amazon stats are showing international sales. For the first time, people in France, Italy, Canada and Australia are buying them. For the first time since 2010 I am achieving monthly book sales that go into double figures.

The free book, Few Are Chosen, K’Barthan Series: Part 1 is even being downloaded from Google books – although I’m not sure what’s happening there because nobody has bought the others, I’m not even sure if Google is selling them or just pointing people to the vendors links on my website, but it’s a start.

And it brings me back to a piece of advice that has probably kept me sane in periods of recovery from my various knee injuries. Nevertheless, despite the fact I’ve been happily doling it out left right and centre this month it’s one I’d forgotten to apply to myself until now. It’s this:

Forget about how far you have to go, instead see how far you’ve come. Trust me. The answer to that question is always going to be, a lot further than you think. Which is kind of where I am about now.

So, am I earning much? No. The people around me, the authors I chat to from day to day, are earning far more.

Am I successful? No. My literary mates are, for the most part, several orders of magnitude more successful then me.

Am I doing better than last year? You bet your arse I am!

See how it works?

Yes, sure, as flat figures, my book sales are risible. But as a percentage increase on previous efforts they are flying. It’s all a question of how you view it. Sure, in the order of publishing species I’m so low on the scale that I’m aspiring to be a molecule – BUT, and here’s the rub, things might be different next year.

Onwards and upwards.

Coming next week… news of my latest story, out November 1st.

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13 Sep 2014 · 1:59 pm

What makes a good bad guy?

Recently, as my thoughts turn to planning a new book, I’ve been wondering what makes a good baddie? If you see what I mean.

In my current w.i.p. the baddie is a politician, and I suspect, he will be not so much evil as morally bankrupt. To make things right, our hero will have to manipulate things so that the politician, in getting what he wants, will unwittingly deliver justice for the goodies of the book. In so far as there are any. A bit more like real life then, even if it’s set in space.

But I do want my villain to be bad. And while you can fiddle with the circumstances and the dynamics; on their own, they don’t always make the actual being evil. So I’m trying to work out if I want my latest bad guy to be greedy and selfish and incidentally evil or whether I want to go for a full on supervillian: a being who is intelligent, pointy-brained, and who plans (and revels in) his malevolence. The first is more real, the second an absolute gas to write and great fun to hate.

To get my head around concepts and ideas of ‘evil’ versus ‘bad’ or just ‘greedy’ I have turned to current affairs. I find current affairs intensely distressing if I look them directly in the face. Even so, they seem to be even worse than usual right now. There’s nothing like a bit of economic trouble to bring out the hatred in all of us it seems.

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Here we are in a modern and supposedly enlightened world and the various peoples of The Book are still trying to kill one another with gusto – and anything else that comes to hand.

We have an organisation of people pretending to be Muslims who believe half the population is shameful and valueless. It’s better to be a goat than a woman under the Taliban. After all, even their livestock can roam freely to find food. But if the male folk in a woman’s family die, the honourable thing for her to do is stay at home and starve to death rather than go out into the world unchaperoned to buy supplies. Yes that’s how much a woman is worth to them. Nothing. Because having kids and periods makes us unclean – Lord above if ever there was a bit of biblical health and safety advice that went big time wrong it’s that bit – oh and we don’t have a cock to think with, which makes us bad. And heaven help us, the Taliban seem quite moderate compared to ISIL, the Islamic State.

And then you get Israel which has had it’s foot on Palestine’s neck for years and just. Won’t. Lift. Off.  I wouldn’t pretend to be able to fathom Middle Eastern politics, there is no knowing Who Started It because the fighting there began at the dawn of time. I’ve read enough of the The Book – Old Testament/Torah/Koran – to appreciate that. But historically, countries like Britain, America and Russia have exacerbated the problems in an already volatile area for their own gain; fanning the flames of enmity, promising everyone what they wanted and delivering it to no-one: for years. And in return we get ISIL, the Islamic State. I guess it kind of serves us right.

Then… enter the ‘Christian Right’ and holy smoke, there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one – who vilify women and single mothers, not to mention the poor. They justify the hatred-filled crap they spew as the word of God when all it’s about is power and more money for them. I thought god was supposed to be a loving father – you know, ‘love they neighbour as thyself’ and all that – not a psychopathic, vengeful shit-head. Maybe I’m wrong. It would be funny if there wasn’t an actual, realistic chance of these people gaining power in America, a country which looks, from the outside, as if the political choice is between rabidly conservative and a few steps to the right of Atilla the Hun.

And when I turn on the news and see the latest venom-filled cleric screaming spittle-flecked hatred in the name of whichever version of God they purport to believe in, I confess I feel contempt. Contempt for someone who uses their intelligence, or presence, or social standing to persuade others to maltreat people in the name of a supposedly loving god. And contempt for the brainwashed sheep who follow them.

Which is where it all starts, of course.

The minute we stop seeing extremists as human beings, we become like them. Because that’s what they’re doing to us. That’s how they can justify massacring whole towns, that’s how they can justify institutional peadophelia – selling 12 year old girls into sexual slavery because they dare to get an education: learn to read, learn to think, is peadophelia in my book. No wonder extremism is so attractive to every tinpot fuckwit with a Kalishnikov. What better excuse for violence, bullying and sexual depravity than ‘god told me to do it’? Even if it’s patently, bollocks. I really feel for the world’s quiet, moderate people of faith, who have to put up with people thinking that nutters like the Islamic State and the Christian ‘Right’ represent religion.

What the angry rationalists fail to realise is that using religion to manipulate people is a completely different from having an actual faith. I suppose that’s what a lot of the K’Barthan Series is about: that just because the extremists are in power, it doesn’t mean everyone is one. Even so, it seems that nothing is more guaranteed to make you despise and kill your neighbour than a jolly good argument as to whose philosophy you should employ to go about loving him. Weird isn’t it?

You know, I wanted to make my villain female in this next book – think Servalan out of Blake’s 7 – but, in light of the state of world affairs, I really don’t think I can. There’s enough hatred directed at us women without my making one of us a love-to-hate baddie. The saddest thing is that every time I make stuff up, on the grounds that it’s chillingly evil, I find someone, somewhere, is already doing it.

Servalan: Scary baddie from Blake’s 7 Image: from http://jasonnahrung.wordpress.com

Stepping off the soap box and dragging this back to the point, apart from depressing me profoundly what does the state of world affairs have to do with writing credible bad guys?

In a nutshell, because what current affairs show us is that contempt is the key. A good look at history is an excellent place to start if you want to analyse the subtleties of evil. All you need to do then is give your baddie a healthy dose of idealism at the expense of any practical consideration whatsoever. He doesn’t have to be all-other-beings-are-inferior-my-pawns-to-be-used-and-discarded, supervillain bad. All he has to do is believe, passionately that the ends justifies the means and forget that the populations of the nations he is playing with are actual real humans. There are many faces of evil and often one begets another. So you can have some seriously bad karma starting off with deeds done with good intent.

Hmm… for all his supercilious air I think I prefer the supervillain like Lord Vernon. At least he’s honest.

So, what are your thoughts folks? Who’s the baddest of the bad? Love-to-hate superbaddie or vainglorious politician. More to the point, which one do you most like to see in books?

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3 Sep 2014 · 1:38 pm

I am now, officially hybrid… I think.

That’s right I run on oil AND gas. Sorry, no. What I mean is that the good folks at a small publisher have accepted a short story from me for an anthology. In the process of this they have sent me a publishing contract to sign and there is talk of a small remuneration, depending on sales volume. I think that does officially make me, in the proper sense of the word; with publication pending.

Which brings me neatly onto the other thing. I was looking at Chuck Wendig’s excellent blog today and he was talking about keeping your writing true. Writing who you are rather than what you think people will want. It’s a fantastic post, link to come. The gist is that you can only write for yourself, from your heart because if you write to please anyone else or to follow a trend your writing can lose its conviction. I particularly liked his take on that. Writing a book about something because everyone else has achieved success with it is like being a dog chasing a car.

‘Don’t be the dog, be the car.’

But that made me think because the biggest reason I’m self published is because I write stuff that isn’t really mainstream. I believe it has mainstream appeal but only on an incremental basis with lots of time for people to get used to the idea. And I don’t believe any publisher will take a punt on it until it’s already successful.

That’s not to say I don’t experiment with writing different stuff. My accepted story at Awesome Indies Publishing is one such. And this writing what you, yourself, would like thing, I really have no choice.

Any M T attempt at erotica would be the literary equivalent of this. Thank you http://2makeyoulaugh.blogspot.co.uk

Can I just go off on a tangent here for a minute? Do you ever wonder what writing is like for authors in other genres? I mean, say you write erotica. If you write decent erotica, presumably it turns you on – I mean, that’s what erotica is supposed to do, right? So what do you do about being in a permanent state of arousal, I mean, does it cloud your judgement? Do you end up needing a cold shower to view your work objectively. Or, when you’ve finished a scene do you just have a quick wank, while the cat looks on disapprovingly, and then move onto the next one? It’s not a question that’ll be troubling me. I quite like reading good erotica from time to time, so I did try writing it once. It was one of the funniest things I have ever written but, unfortunately, in absolutely the wrong way.

So for the moment, I’ll carry on writing Bond meets Adams (but without the spies) and see what happens.

Right now, I see what I’m doing as positioning12052012068.

It’s as if I’m leaving my stuff, with artful, care on the bank of the mainstream. To start with there’s just one corner in the water. I imagine the paper waving about in the passing current but each papery wave represents a minuscule tug towards the water. Slowly but surely (I hope) the current pulls it down the bank, tiny, tiny nth of an inch at a time. There’ll be more of it floating in the water now, semi submerged, gently slipping further out into the stream as the current draws it in. Then, it’ll be hanging there for a few seconds, with nothing more than a fraction of the corner stuck to the side until… oops yes it’s floating away and everyone’s a bit surprised because although it’s waterlogged and moving a bit slowly, and shouldn’t really be there, it hasn’t sunk.

Er yeh… That’s the way I see my books inveigling themselves into popular culture. But no-one is going to risk picking up my work and chucking it in until at least some of it has been proved to float on its own. So getting the mini-est publishing deal feels as if well… it’s probably not sliding down the bank yet but maybe a couple more pages have gone in.

Sure, one answer to this question might be to write something that has broader appeal. Perhaps one day I’ll manage it. But if I want to write with conviction I have to write what I write. I know there are many multi-genre authors who would regard that as unprofessional of me, so it is a huge relief to find the particular approach I use endorsed by Mr Wendig. You can find his post, which really puts it very well, here.

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16 Jun 2014 · 12:39 pm

Oh no, the M word! Yes. Marketing.

I’ve travelled to another blog to write today’s post… So if you want to discover the connection between inter-galactic church travel and marketing books, I’m afraid you’ll have to click again and visit my excellent friend Seumas Gallacher, here. In fact, please do.

Seumas is a bit of a success story having sold 70,000 copies of his books – which is about 69,900 more than I have so obviously, I’m in awe. Since I’m not usually invited anywhere – except back to apologise – I’m also feeling pretty honoured to be guesting on his blog.

Seumas writes a very good blog, btw. He talks an awful lot of sense with a Scottish accent – he’s from Govern – think Billy Connolly and you have it about right. I can thoroughly recommend his blog and one of his books – I haven’t read the others yet. So yeh, do pop over there. I can recommend it.

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16 Jan 2014 · 11:30 am

Hybrid. Not just for cars.

This post, on Chuck Wendig’s blog, got me thinking today. (BTW I can thoroughly recommend Chuck Wendig’s blog, unless you’re sensitive to swearing but then, if you’re sensitive to swearing I doubt you’ll be here either).

He was talking about hybrid authors. That is, those of us who self publish their work and also have a trad deal. Apparently, these folk earn more.

You know what. I’m not surprised at that.

Frankly, I would kill for a trad deal, so I could do both. Unfortunately it’s never going to happen. I used to have a reasonably high end business job, and I know how business works. I’m a really crap proposition. It won’t always be that way, but right now it is. A stay at home mum who takes two years to write each book. Even if I managed to pen a query letter covered with just the right amount of fairy dust and unicorn pooh to score that magic read (yes even with an ‘in’ I failed to the point where they sent me a letter back with comments that showed, quite clearly that one of the readers hadn’t even read the book). Even if an agent or a publisher, absolutely loved my stuff, there would be somebody who could churn out a book every 6 months, whose work they loved just as much, who’d get the deal. Geesh! I mean seriously, I wouldn’t touch me with a barge pole, so I don’t expect them to.

If I want trad, I’ve got to have a ‘proven track record’ – ugh I loathe and detest that phrase – and to get one of those, I’ve got to make it the hard way; as a self published author.

However, at least with self publishing, I do have the option to get my books out there and, possibly, succeed. It will be much harder – although not as hard as getting someone to read my query letter – and if I do succeed it will happen in slow motion. But the opportunity IS there.

This is what I love about self publishing.

What I hate is that anyone would bung their first attempt at a novel out there unedited, unrested, without thought. It absolutely amazes me – and gets me into a bit of a frothy mouthed rage, to be honest – because they’ve turned the only route to market for many of us into a slush pile that no-one will touch.

Thanks you bunch of complete and utter bastards.

The K’Barthan Trilogy (actually it’s four books so I’ll have to call it something else, ideas on a post card please) took me 25 years to write.  That’s if I count them from the first attempt. Although I admit I’ve done the donkey work in the last few, between 2008 and now. A lot of people, who would probably enjoy it will never will never find out about it, and others will never touch it because I’ve committed the terrible sin of publishing it myself.

Whatever people say, the prejudice has not gone away, with good reason (cf the complete and utter bastards mentioned above).

That is pretty galling.

Which brings me neatly onto hybrids and why I think they do better.

They’ve sidestepped the prejudice.

Those who ‘don’t read self published books’ will read the self published work of a traditional published author. They’ll pick up that author’s work in the first place. Those book shops who ‘don’t stock self published books’ will stock the self published work of someone with a trad record. It really is all about the brand. It’s the same road; getting to the point where there are enough people out there who trust you to write a good book, who will be confident giving them to their friends to read.

Hybrid is win-win. Hybrid authors have the endorsement of the establishment, they have fans from the normal off line world and they bring them with them. Those fans give the author the momentum to get their books up the listing past the glass ceiling of other authors, amazon book police and jaded, indie author loathing forumites, into the light where the ‘normals’ who are just looking for a book to read, see them. Their trad pub background gives them the golden key onto the review sites and into magazines that ‘won’t accept self published work’ but will from someone with a trad pub background. It’s definitely where I want to be.

In short, the way I see it is this.

If you’re a hybrid, you get to keep the cash and sell without the prejudice.
If you’re trad published you get to sell without the prejudice but there’s less cash to keep.
If you self publish you get to keep the cash but you earn less because until you’re seriously established, everyone you approach will assume that your work is sub standard, poorly edited crap.

It’s a conundrum. Hmm… would knowing what I look like help?

Well, you asked...
See how trustworthy I am.

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3 Nov 2013 · 6:11 pm

Yes, you can polish a turd… if you light it well.

— Caveat, the whole point to the less is more bit of this post was that the prop under discussion was the one used in the actual series of Dr Who. It wasn’t. It was built by a fan. Looking at the equipment available to the BBC props department and a chap in a shed, the whole perspective suddenly changes. Basically, a 19 year old lad has made something, himself, that I thought was an actual BBC prop. So it’s more on the freaking awesome level than what I call it. So what I say about attention to detail still stands but actually, the example might just as well be made up. So there you are. Check your facts. All of them. Even the ones you don’t even realise need checking. —

This week has been half term so all meaningful work on K’Barthan things has dropped in favour of doing stuff with the ankle biter. We went to a sci-fi exhibition at the local museum, great fun, and opened with a host of look a likes, Dr Who, Darth Vader, a rather handsome jedi knight, a cyberman, Boba Fett and McMini was pictured with all of them.

Inside the exibition they had the actual control console from the Tardis. There have been several, anyone with kids who remembers the beebatron on CBeebies, or who has subsequently seen Cari and David’s Pop Shop will know what happened to the one out of the 5th Doctor’s Tardis. The one in the exhibition was the current one. Here it is. So what do you notice?

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That’s right. It’s really shit. And close up, it looks like this?

Dodgy Tardis

and this….?

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So this is what amazed me; the difference between the way it appears on film and the way it looks close up.

On film: slick, sparkly and kind of steam punk with all that shiny brass and bits of 1960s telephones. Of solid, robust and more to the point cool.

Close up: shit.

And here’s the magic.

It doesn’t matter how hit looks close up because, it’s designed to be seen on film and the minute I take a picture it ceases to become a load of old tut and turns into to something else.

And what does this have to do with writing?

Well, my point is this. It’s easy to get hung up on world building and character back story when you write spec-fic. But what this teaches me, at any rate, is that the trick is not so much what you put in as what you leave out.

Yes, the Tardis Control Console looks terrible to the naked eye but on TV it looks bloody brilliant. Sometimes, less, or a hint, is more and the reader – or viewer’s – imagination does the rest. The secret is selecting the trigger details, the odd snippet here and there which people reading it will embellish for themselves. The real Gods are the writers who do that in a way that will have every reader seeing the same picture.

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10 Sep 2013 · 10:06 am

Why Slow is Good for E-Publishing

As the length of time between releases deepens I always begin to get twitchy. As I face the fact that K’Barthan 3 will not be out for Christmas, indeed, is unlikely to be out by Christmas NEXT year, I am close to a major freak.

Reading this and the reblogged post it contained made me feel better. Hats off to Mr Vernon for sharing some heartening stats and some sage advice. I may put the brakes on and start writing other stuff alongside my big stuff. Because I’m not really a one trick pony, which is one of the things that is making it so hard.

Why Slow is Good for E-Publishing.

And on the back of that, this one, too…. Bottom-Dwelling E-book Authors RISE UP!!!.  Oh how I aspire to sales like Frank’s.

So at last I’ve got the message. And the message is: chill. Quite easy that, today, here. It’s brass monkey’s.*

Sorry everyone, but One Man: No Plan is not going to happen in a hurry. But that’s because I want it to be good. And I’m sure both of you (and the dog) would rather wait and read something that’s the best thing I can write, rather than the quickest.

Yeh, I’ve just binned an entire plotline: 50,000 words, which is what I mean about it taking a while. Phnark.

Onwards and upwards.

 

* Yeh, I know, it looks odd but that apostrophe is right because the full phrase is cold enough to freeze a brass monkey’s balls off.

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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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30 Nov 2012 · 10:49 pm

When real life treads on your hands…

I’ve gone and depressed myself again by looking at one of those ‘uplifting’ posts on Kindleboards about people who’ve had an e-book out for half as long as I have and are making a gazillion times more money. Sod it, just making any money. Maybe you just have to be American to earn a living selling e-books. I dunno. Or maybe you just have to have time. Lots of time. And maybe it’s something that you just can’t do in tiny slices of time, slowly, over years, like I’d hoped.

You know I am basically a happy bunny, I am surrounded by sweet people, I’m happy, I’m cherished, I cherish  others… I’m blessed with a very happy family. I also live in a lovely house and drive a car that, as an incurable petrol head, I still can’t quite believe I own. There’s really nothing wrong with my life except that not everyone in that cherished, loved support group around me is as they should be. I’m not one to spill my guts over the internet but let’s just say this. There’s something they don’t tell you about heart disease. A lot of it gives you brain damage. Because a lot of heart disease causes a lack of blood to the head. Over time, this gives similar symptoms similar to those of exposure only they come on very, very slowly. Every day you get a little more fuzzy. Every day another little piece of you, the essence of you, is carried away. Slowly but surely, inevitably, you lose your mind. Add a succession of really hard winters, because heaven forfend that fucking sod might pull any punches and you’re in the poop. Big time.

So, one of my cherished people is in the doo doo and those years and years of bitty, incremental damage are beginning to show. And I can’t do a fucking thing.  And I’m miles away from them when I should be there. When the simplest thing becomes a marathon slog for them, I’m not there to help or reassure when all my life, I believed I would be. I’m not there to fix the computer when it freaks, or go through the paperwork or deal with the admin that escapes; things like tax returns or driving license applications. I’m trapped here at the end of the phone and all I can do is listen. And it feels shit. Because to watch the people I love suffer from a long way away and not help; people who have given me everything and made me who I am, people I look up to. That makes me feel like a special kind of bastard.

So the wheels have fallen off my writing a bit. I can’t stop, I’m addicted, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be hitting any deadlines, and I probably won’t be very professional about it either. In short, if K’Barthan 3 is ready by next Christmas I’ll be surprised. But in my defence, although I can’t name names and be straight about it here, there is a good reason. Real life has painfully, comprehensively, trodden on my hands.

I feel a bit like this. As Arnold the Prophet says in K’Barthan Three.
“Life is a gift, reach out and take it with both hands.”
And The Pan of Hamgee says.
“That’s all all very well for you to say but the gift I’m being offered looks suspiciously like a dog turd in a paper bag, to me.”
It isn’t all pants and it’s a lot worse for them than me but there’s a very, very sad bit and I have to accept that I can’t fix it. And that rankles. Big time.

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1 Nov 2012 · 11:08 am

Few Are Chosen Officially Declared Awesome.

A quick post today: Awesome Indies have already been kind enough to list Few Are Chosen but here is the site’s review. I am pretty damn chuffed about this one, I must admit. So, if anyone’s interested, here it isReview: Few are Chosen by M T McGuire – fantasy.

Thanks to Tahlia Newland for taking the time to review Few Are Chosen!

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