With Feedbooks though even my stories that have been on there for three years are still nudging up the hit-count, and most importantly, for an independent amateur writer, still being read. If you’ve got a bottom drawer full of stories rejected by mainstream publishers, and you’re wanting to try them out on an unsuspecting world – and you don’t mind giving them away – I can still highly recommend Feedbooks.

I’m actually in the process of revising La Maison – yes, already. I downloaded it from Feedbooks to my iPad, and began to read it as a “reader” instead of a “writer” – that is away from a keyboard – and straight away I began to notice typos, eccentric formatting and spurious commas – even after countless scans through on the word processor. So, it’s been going offline in the evenings (UK time) while I tidy these things up yet again. To the seven hundred and fifty of you who have downloaded those imperfect copies, I apologise. The newly revised version won’t be perfect either – I can almost hear all you teacher-readers out there clicking your red pens – but hopefully it’ll be better than it was.

The free indy scene relies on the presence of visible and vibrant download sites that link writers to readers. Your work has to be available in a range of formats: PDF, EPUB, Mobi (Kindle), for direct download to a reader’s device – whatever that happens to be – iPhone, iPod, iPad, Kindle, Sony, Android,.. whatever. Sites that insist you read stuff online – i.e. onscreen – are seriously out of date now, and if you’re a writer, you can safely avoid them. Books – even the electronic variety – are back where they belong – in your pocket, in your bag, by your bed of an evening, or the garden on a lazy summer’s afternoon, accompanied by birdsong, and a nice cool glass of Chardonnay.

In this respect, Feedbooks ticks all the boxes. It’s currently building up a paid content section as well which will hopefully keep the site afloat and keep it sharp. And maybe the millions of people who poke around in its free section will now and then be persuaded to browse the paid stuff too. It’s a good model – easy for the writer to get going with, and easy for the reader to get at the books.

The only downside to Feedbooks, so far as us indy writers are concerned is it’s on its own at the moment. We need other sites like this with similarly successful models, sites that appear in the ebook catalogues under the heading “Free Ebooks”, which are directly accessible from your reading device and, by virtue of a truly global reach, guarantee every one of us indy hacks reassuringly steady download figures

But why self publish? Well, why not? What have you got to lose? I know, there’s still something of a stigma attached to the subject. “Obviously you’re giving your stuff away because you couldn’t get it published properly, so it must be crap, right?” Well, there’s also a lot of stuff that’s been published the hard way that comes under the heading of crap too. But the same rules apply to self publishing as to the conventional variety, and if your stuff really isn’t that good you’re not going to impress anyone.

The truth is most writers struggle to break into print. They have day-jobs – tedious, unglamorous things – to pay the bills, so they can write at night, pound out their stories, polish them up and send them off hopeful of acceptance by a magazine, or a big name publisher. Some of them make it, but the formula for success isn’t an easy one to work out, and there’s more involved than simply having a decent story.

I have a dark fantasy about all those writers down the ages who never made it, yet who spent their whole lives writing in the hope that someone would like their story. I imagine their spare bedrooms or their garden sheds stacked high with dog-eared manuscripts that their families finally throw out with the rubbish when the author pops his clogs. How many great works were lost like that? The known writers of every age are just the tip of an iceberg, and for every one whose name is known, there are tens or even hundreds who have laboured on in obscurity, never to be celebrated, never even to be read.

We have the potential to change all of that now. So don’t keep those mouldy, dog eared manuscripts in your garden shed, or the spare bedroom. Blow the dust off. Get yourself a Feedbooks account and offer them up for posterity. And you, dear reader, get rummaging among the free stuff. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry – and that’s just at the grammar – my own included – but now and then, you’ll find a book that really touches you. The future of the indy scene’s a bit rough and ready, a bit anarchic, but it’s free and it’s interesting, and it’s on your Kindle.

Nonsense rhymes, the truth about women, and fairy folk at large in the modern world.

As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, oh how I wish he’d go away.

So run the first lines of William Hugh Mearns’ 1899 poem, later published as “Antigonish”. It’s a charming nonsense rhyme, one that’s been rolling around in my head since childhood. I’m not sure how it’s meant to be taken. A bit of nonsense? A bit of fun to get the imagination rolling? Or is there more to it? At the risk of overanalysing – which isn’t like me – the rhyme can provoke some serious thinking if you let it.

It’s reminiscent of a Zen Koan – one of those inscrutable meditative walnuts you can only crack by disengaging your normal, rational thought processes. So, let’s see: you meet this guy who isn’t there; you meet him again at another time, in the same place, but he’s not there again either, and even though he’s definitely not there, you’re so fed up with him hanging around you wish he’d go away.

It doesn’t make sense of course, unless you can accept the existence of an imaginary man.

Imaginary?

Let’s analyse that word for a moment. He’s not really there, not literally. Nor is he a drug, nor a psychotically, induced hallucination. So, you don’t actually see the man with anything other than your inner eye. He’s a mental image, an imaginary man triggered into being by something in your head, but with sufficient force to arouse your emotions. Why else would you want him to go away if his habitual presence wasn’t irritating you? He doesn’t exist but he effects your life, the way you think, and the way you feel.

Now this I understand.

I’ve been seeing my own imaginary person recently. I wasn’t walking up the stair, but across a meadow at dusk. It wasn’t a man either, but a woman, wild haired – a crazy mix of straw and dreadlocks, and bits of ribbon. Her clothing was nineteenth century – country tweeds, but with a ripped and ragged new-age traveller, hippy-chic look about them. All told she was like a tripped-out Beatrix Potter. I wasn’t irritated by her presence – quite the opposite. I was very pleased to see her, and rather than go away, I’m hoping she’ll stick around for a while. I was just surprised, that’s all; I’d begun to think my imagination had fallen asleep.

I’d actually gone out that day to snarl and shake my walking stick at a couple of giant wind turbines that have popped up on my patch in recent weeks. I was lamenting the fact that even the limited potential for romantic enlightenment that my local West Lancashire landscape possesses was now truly blasted with the appearance of these damned whirligigs, sticking like poisoned arrows out of the soft flesh of the earth. The last thing I was expecting in their fickering shadow, with the sound of their grinding gears drowning out even the wind, was a romantic encounter.

Romantic?

Let’s not forget we’re talking about an imaginary entity here, not flesh and blood, nor was it an hallucination, nor even a ghost or a spirit – though perhaps those latter two definitions come the closest to describing it. Michael Graeme is also a happily married man, so we’re obviously talking about a different kind of romance here – one that won’t land him in the divorce courts (hopefully). This woman exists only as an imaginary creation, yet she possesses a life-like autonomy. I can summon her image at will, just as any of us can summon up the image of a real person who is known to us but, like a real person, I cannot summon up her presence. Her actual presence – or the very real sense of it – is goverened by more mysterious processes – a mixture of unconscious psychology, and geography. I have to be in the right place, both physically, and mentally before her psychical existence becomes a part of my personal reality.

Her name’s Squirrel, and the last time I saw her she was sitting atop a solar-powered canal boat called the Mattie Rat – another imaginary creation – in my story “the Magician of Monkton Pier“. This was a couple of years ago. I was never really happy with that story, nor the title, to be honest. The magical parts seemed too fantastic, too farcical to be swallowed – even tongue in cheek. I don’t think Squirrel liked it either, and maybe that’s why she’s haunting me now. The story was useful as a vehicle for introducing her into my consciousness which, in the narrative sense, was personified by the owner and navigator of that boat, a guy called Joshua. I haven’t followed it up though, and I think Squirrel’s giving me a gentle reminder that we have unfinished business.

My personal version of Mearns’ ditty might run as follows then:

As I walked through meadows fair, I met a woman who wasn’t there. She wasn’t there again today. If she could speak, what would she say?

That’s it with Squirrel, you see? She doesn’t speak. She’s either mute, or she’s taken a vow of silence in order to preserve her power. She doesn’t tell,… she shows. There’s something magical about her, something shamanic, something of the earth mother, and that’s a little worrying because we’re talking about the old world Roman deity, Diana here, and I’d thought She was a Goddess who only haunted the minds of adepts of certain sapphically inclined Wiccan covens.

In the three ages of womanhood, according to the new version of the “old religion”, Squirrel’s the sunny side of Crone – perhaps just the sort of creature to arouse a man of mature thoughts and middle years who isn’t still hampered by more maidenly projections. I mean we’re not talking a toothless, bent old hag here – just a woman past normal childbearing age. And we’re not talking about running off and making whoopee either. What we’re about is the meaning of life, and that means plotting a course back to the world soul.

My first thoughts were that Squirrel had come to cast her spells upon the whirligigs and have them catch fire, because practical magic is her thing and she pops up whenever the natural balance is disturbed. I don’t think that’s it, though. The landscape of Western Lancashire has been crafted by man for hundreds of years. You can’t look anywhere without seeing straight lines, be it in the run of a hedgerow, a ploughed furrow or a drainage ditch – man’s linear geometry is everywhere. And with the appearance of these wind turbine’s this evidence of man’s hand has gone three dimensional, even effecting the light, making the sun blink during the evening hours. In short there’s nothing left of original nature worth preserving here, so why worry about it?

Talk to me Squirrel. What does all of this mean? Well,… getting back to plotting my course, I’m hoping it means she’s come to show me at least a part of the way.

For a male writer of a romantic bent, all encounters with the muse are significant, and essentially spiritual. Their courtship and their  metaphorical lovemaking advance him a little further along his inner path, and their resulting offspring: the words, the stories, the paintings, the poems,… these can be picked up by others looking for a spark of something universally recognisable in them. And all stories are, after all, the plagarisation of archaic myths, rising from the soul of the world, and all interested readers know a truth when they see it, even if they can’t explain it. The writer’s contribution to this love-match is his openness to inspiration, and his sincerity, also his ability to hold a pencil, or put his fingers over a keyboard. The rest comes from the muse.

Which brings us to the truth about women. A young man, enamoured of his rational faculties, yet also bursting with an inexpressible Romantic desire, might make the understandable mistake of bestowing such divinity on a mortal woman. Then, like John Ruskin on his wedding night, recoiling at the sight of his darling Effie’s all too human anatomy, he realises the awful truth: that women are human beings, and everything we feel about them is a mixture of instinct and projection. We must take care then not to seek the divine in them, or through our love-lives we will for ever run the risk of Byronic self-immolation – the risk being in direct proportion to the strength of our romantic sensibilities. Can a man successfully love more than one woman at the same time? Well, yes he can, and many do, so long as only one of those women is mortal, and the others divine. Anything else is just emotional suicide.

So, these whirligigs appear on the Plain of Western Lancashire, like arrows shot from Diana’s bow. They form giant markers in the mud and I’m drawn to them. And once I’ve done with all my huffing and puffing and my predictable nimby indignation, I realise that actually they’re quite beautiful. The sky no longer seems so vast it dwarfs the land, and makes you feel insignificant. The whirligigs connect heaven and earth and the landscape here, a place I wasn’t born to and one I’ve often felt alien in, becomes at once more intimate and knowable.

How strange!

Is that what you were trying to tell me, Squirrel? Oh,.. never mind. Just take my arm and walk with me a while.

I’m sure it will come to me eventually.

This woman, who still was not there, runs her fingers through her hair. Gently then, she takes my arm. My bosom swells, my heart is warm.

Who says there’s no such thing as fairies? It’s just a question of knowing how to see them.

Graeme out.

Regarding Diana’s Arrows – my own name for them, and not official in any way. There are two at present on Mawdesley Moss, I believe another one is planned, making three in total. My romantic sensibilities might be shattered if the three were to become twenty three.

]]> http://michaelgraeme.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/dianas-arrows/feed/ 0 Michael Graeme dianas arrows http://michaelgraeme.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/the-last-guests-of-la-maison-du-lac/ http://michaelgraeme.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/the-last-guests-of-la-maison-du-lac/#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:47:09 +0000 Michael Graeme http://michaelgraeme.wordpress.com/?p=1385 ]]> It’s a bit of a mouthful for the title of a story, but it’s stuck with me pretty much from the beginning, so I was reluctant to interfere with it. I’ve been nurturing La Maison since early 2010. I’m not sure how other writer’s work but I go through a period where I’ll have a lot of projects on the go, each of them inching towards something as I hop randomly from one to the next. Eventually though one of them will catch fire and then occupy my time more or less solidly until its completion, at the expense of all other work. That was the case with La Maison. It’s been something of an obsession, yet frustratingly difficult to navigate towards any sort of conclusion. I gave the characters a lot of leeway here, made a muse or a daemon out of each of them and tried to listen to what they were telling me. Needless to say, it’s a strange story, having more in common with the Lavender and the Rose than my more conventional work.

Anyway I put it up on Feedbooks last night and you can download it here.

It’s a full length novel, complete and free to read – not a teaser or a taster. There’s about 11 hours worth of reading.

I briefly considered making it exclusive to the Kindle bookstore and charging a small fee for download, but speaking as a UK hobby writer I’m finding the tax system to be incomprehensible and didn’t want to find myself on the wrong side of it for what might not amount to much in terms of actual income anyway. As usual then I decided to keep it free. As an independent writer, using online media,  I’m in it for the readership and once again the media of choice was Feedbooks. It started getting hits immediately, and after only twelve hours had achieved 30 downloads. On the other hand, my experience of pay for download sites is they just don’t get the hits. I’ve had a copy of “The Man Who Could Not Forget” on iTunes for about a year now (for free) and it’s not been downloaded once, while the Feedbooks version is managing between fifty and sixty downloads a day

I feel a bit lost now, having said my goodbyes to these characters, but if past form is anything to go by, I’ll be leaving it to settle for a few months, then I’ll read it, but this time as a reader, rather than a writer, and then I’ll be making changes to it, even if it’s only sweeping up the typos that have eluded me. I’m my own editor unfortunately, and for the typos that remain, I apologise.

Best wishes to all my readers

Michael Graeme

***Update – never mind the typos, there was a whole chapter missing. Apologies.***

So, if like me you’re stuggling to distance yourself from Linkedin, here’s what to do. Edit out all your information and replace it with junk. Get yourself a free email address from Yahoo or Google, and enter that as your primary email address on Linkedin. Then delete your old email address from the your Linkedin profile – the one the spammers have been targeting. Hopefully that should do it.

Fingers crossed.

Graeme out.

*Update 17 Jan 2012 – yep seems to have worked.

I was just backing out of the driveway, heading over to a local garden centre to finish off a few items of Christmas shopping. “What are you doing?” Asked the good lady Graeme, as I snapped the pic. I didn’t really know, and what I saw in that brief moment certainly doesn’t come across in the photograph. I should know by now you can’t capture ghosts on camera. There was a bit of snow turning to slush in a steady drizzle, and the morning felt a lot colder than those 2.5 degrees. What was it I saw? Emptiness? Despair? I don’t know – just something. I’d been feeling lighter recently – more positive about myself and the world, but something dark was stalking me. Again.

At the garden centre I found myself browsing the books. I’ve noticed a trend for repackaging ancient out of copyright books, dressing them up in nostalgic hardback covers and flogging them to the Christmas “market”, because people will buy any old rubbish at Christmas and there’s not the inconvenience of the publisher having to pay the writer any royalties, because he’s been dead a long time and his stuff’s legally up for grabs. To be fair though I found a lot of the titles interesting and also very telling.

There were a lot of old war books – not the guns and gore type – more the home front type: Dad’s Army, rationing, wartime civilian nostalgia, even some works by Baden Powell on military training, preparing, making ready, battening down the hatches, all in it together stuff – that sort of thing.  Anyone would have thought there was still a war on.   The feeling I got was one of entrenchment, of taking cover, taking shelter, of making do and mend, and what would Grandma have done because our backs are really up against the wall and we could do with some of her wisdom now. If only we’d listened to her tales when we were younger.

After the garden centre it was a trip to the local mini-mart to stock up on a few essentials. While I was there I also stocked up on the headlines from our newspapers – broadsheet and tabloid. I don’t buy newspapers any more. I just take a snapshot of what the current “message” is from the fourth estate. I was never much of a cricketer – could never cope with spin on a ball, always tried to judge it as if the laws of physics were in charge and not the last minute twist of the bowler’s magic fingers. I always failed. Maybe I’d be better at it now. In meditation, we watch the flow of our thoughts and we ask who is the watcher? In reading headlines we ask who is the spinner? What message are we be being spun here?

Our PM says the “UK is a Christian country”, according to one of the headlines. I don’t recall in what context these words were spoken and in a way it doesn’t matter because the media wanted to say something else, but what? That we’re not a Muslim country, not Jewish, not Baha’i or Daoist or Buddhist? Warning shot to you no-good Johnny foreigners? We’re watching you? I felt a shudder run down my spine. They have Christians like that in certain parts of America – but they also carry guns. Another headline said: Children should know their times tables by the age of nine? What’s that saying? Our kids are thick? Our teachers are useless layabouts, who’d rather teach multiculturalism ? Well I’m married to a teacher and I know what goes on in our schools, and layabouts our teachers are not. And our children aren’t stupid either – just increasingly alienated and disenfranchised. Another headline spoke of the deepening rift between the UK and France over this week’s spat about the Euro-zone crisis. Anglo-French relations have been the stuff of legend for centuries, all of it myth and spin. I swing the bat, as the ball bounces. I don’t catch it full square, but I do catch it and it drops safe. I hold the wicket – no thanks, I’m not running with that one, you bastards. As for the  shabby local rags they were, as usual, fixated on sordid local crime, trying to convince us our neighbourhood aren’t safe to live in. Don’t go out. Stay at home. Lock your doors. Evil is afoot.

Anyway, the impression I returned home with was one of a population bludgeoned into thinking the clock had been turned back seventy years, with rationing about to be reinstated and the dreaded Hun about to invade all over again. And the reason? A lapse in our Christian values, a lurch towards lilly livered liberalism, the decline in standards of education, and those bloody Europeans,… And the solution? A return to Christian values, the three R’s, and cast the UK adrift from mainland Europe, because we’re better on our own? Anyone would think we’re in the grip of Eurosceptic Conservatism.

I’m sorry, political commentator I’m not. Cynical Brit who believes nothing he’s told any more and asks at every unsolicited encounter with strangers these days, what’s this guy trying to sell me? Possibly. All I know is our problems are more complicated than anything we’re being sold or told, and the solutions likewise. I do know however that what we’re spun is nothing more than a daemon haunted myth and requires considerable analysis if we’re to make sense of it. At the moment it’s a dark myth, one I hope won’t slide any deeper into the gutter of entrenched nationalism, because the daemons who live down there are a pretty foul smelling lot and have a habit of laying waste to things. They like to find someone to blame, usually the the least culpable in society, and least able to defend themselves. And when things are good? When the myth is boom-time, like the bubbles of the eighties and the mid noughties? Well during that kind of myth-making it’s the wrong kind of people who get rich. And during the ensuing dark times, when the bubble’s burst, it’s the wrong kind of people who get shafted.

I don’t know, I’m just a family guy hoping the world will straighten itself out before his kids have to saddle it up and ride. That’s what I saw in that photograph this morning.

Gotcha!

Later on I watched a film, (getting to the title bit now) saw it on sale in the mini-mart while I was browsing those curve-ball headlines: Wonderful Life – James Stewart and Donna Reed. It’s an all time favourite of mine, and if you can watch it without a tear in your eyes you have no soul my friend. (I blew my nose all the way through it, told my good lady I felt a cold coming on) But that old movie has a message that seems curiously apposite today. I suppose you need to watch it and then ask yourself if you’re a George Bailey, (the endearingly earnest Jimmy Stewart) or a Mr. Potter (the suitably evil Lionel Barrymore).

When the world falls apart, whose side would you be on? Whose boat would you jump into? Would you sell your soul to Potter for the guarantee of life – no matter how miserable and undignified, because that’s where we’re heading. Or would you go with George, even though his boat’s a bit leaky and there’s a 50-50 chance you’re going to drown? Me? I’m a Romantic. I’d rather drown, than live in Potter’s world.

They don’t make films like that any more? Well, I’m not so sure. Among the dark grumbly, fire and brimstone daemons, there are always the other kind who inject the occasional voice of hope, when times are grim. And a bit of research tells me that film began life as a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern who initially couldn’t get it published anywhere. (I know how that one goes) The film itself was also considered a flop at the time because it didn’t break even at the box office. Never mind the message, just count the bucks. How ironic is that, given the premise of the film? But sixty years later, we’re still watching it and saying: Yes, they really nailed it there.

The pursuit of “financial growth”, or even just “financial stability”  without the stabilising effect of a social and moral conscience really is the road to hell. We all know that, so why are we led down it so easily, time after time? Don’t believe what you read in the papers – Mr Potter owns them all, and he’ll pander to what’s darkest in you. It’s really not the end of the world. At times of crisis, the last thing we should be doing is digging ourselves into entrenched nationalism, intent on looking after number one. It’s precisely at times like these we need to be reaching out globally, as well as locally. It wasn’t nationalism that won the war on the home front in the dark days of both world wars. It was being neighbourly, lending a hand, keeping a good heart and trusting it would all work out well in the end. That may also be a myth, but it’s a good one. Come to think of it I hope one of those “home-front” books turns up in my Christmas stocking this year.

It really is a wonderful life, but you have to look at things the right way, and I’m with you George Bailey.

Buffalo Gals, won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight. Buffalo Gals, won’t you come out tonight, and dance by the light of the moooooooon,……

It was the same with Twitter. I had a brief season of microblogging on there and I enjoyed it. I particularly liked its Haiku-like brevity but I’ve not updated in ages. I wasn’t reaching much of an audience with it either. Perhaps you need to be more of an extrovert  - the kind of person who’s glued to Facebook every spare moment of the day and has a gazillion “friends”, “semi-friends” and “acquaintances”, but I just don’t have the time to construct that kind of virtual reality. (My thanks to Jim and Tina anyway, God bless you). There were other “followers” but they were trying to sell me stuff, which was tiresome, so I had to block them.

It was the same with Linkedin, except I couldn’t find a way of blocking, so I tried to resign but that was weeks ago and I’m still getting their damned nuisance spam. I’d get an email saying someone had posted a message – I had one from Deborah Green this week, (Hi Deborah, you shameless tart) My primary personality does know a Deborah Green(not a shameless tart) and he thought how the hell does Deborah Green know me as Michael Graeme? So I clicked the link out of curiosity and was taken to a website selling Viagra (Thank you Deborah – different Deborah, I hope!).

The Twitter spam was less insulting but equally unwelcome, being of a more pornographic nature – emphasis on the “graphic”. Now, I’m not a prude and according to statistics 40% of men admit to viewing more than 2 hours of pornography a week, but there’s a time and a place, gentlemen, and the breakfast table definitely isn’t it.

Curious, this online sexual stuff! I feel a whole can of worms tipping over. Sex sells of course and I’m sure there’s nothing more to the spam than that, but why do we buy? (not that I do) No,…  restrain yourself Michael;  sex is not your natural territory. You’ll only make yourself look ridiculous.

I went to church last Sunday – stay with me, this is relevant – it was a memorial service for a relative, which basically means a regular service but your recently deceased relative gets a passing mention. The church was in a town some distance away, a progressive Anglican affair, and something of an eye-opener for yours truly, one where the vicar looked more like a bank manager than a vicar, and they were talking about sex. Seriously! The sermon was about sex, and pretty unflinching it was too. They tied it all in with Leviticus (mainly 18:24-30 and 20:10-21, so far as I could make out) It was from the vicar I got the 40% of men and pornography bit, which was a surprise to me – both the statistic and the fact I got it from a vicar.  So that bum steer from Twitter burned up at least two seconds of my two hour limit, and put me on the wrong side of God as well, because those ladies definitely had no clothes on your honour, which was sinful – but I didn’t look, honestly!

Anyway, said the vicar, who looked like a bank manager, pornography is bad. It is devil’s spawn. It’ll make you go blind,  like gambling and strong liquor. Don’t look, don’t click that effing link – no, too late ARGGGG!!! It’s in your history file now, dammit. You’ve probably got a lot of tenacious cookies as well and if you’re really unlucky a severe dose of the cyberclap as well.

Serves you right, you godless sucker!

The thing that really intrigues me though is how smart these spam-bots are. How do they know I’m a man? (viagra, pornography?) Or are you lady Twitters and Linkedinners equally sidetracked by links that take you to the smuttier side of the internet? (Are you equally beguiled by promises of sexual stamina and mythical gratification) No don’t answer that – I’m just over analysing again!

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here – just marvelling, I suppose, over the unexpectedly sexual sermon last Sunday, and the subsequent sexual links from supposely bona fide sources on the internet. On the one hand I get the “thou shalt not”, from the “word of God”, then I get the “salacious temptations” in my inbox. I suppose the thing is it’s all well and good speaking out against Internet pornography, but since you’re never going stem the tide, nor legislate against it, you might as well grow up and be more accepting of it. (yes I’m a liberal in my views). People like sex. It’s natural. But tell them it’s dirty or bad or wrong, and you push it deep into the unconscious, you shove it down into the realm of the gods, you poke it in their eye, and shove up their ass, and you really shouldn’t be doing that because the gods are all powerful, easily offended and can find a million way of coming back at you. In short, demonise sex and you’re creating a ticking daemonic time bomb.

Carl Jung had something to say about porn – in its latter day (dis)guise as Eros – but only in that the way we live and suppress what’s natural in us means that sometimes the gods come through in grossly caricatured form as pathological compulsions. In other words your cute Eros with his arrows gets corrupted into a saucy photograph that would once have been passed around in a brown envelope and which now hides in the supposed privacy of  ”special browsers” and the “anonymity” of  proxy servers. We become addicted to images or corrupted metaphors of something that was once a natural facet of our daily, all be it primitive, lives.

I’m definitely over-analysing now – possibly also under the influence of strong liquor – which is a defintite blogging no no.

But I suppose my point is, what’s the point in leaving Linkedin or terminating Twitter? Eros will only find another way of getting through, perhaps even by breaching WordPress’s seemingly impermeable spam proof barriers (I hope not) Anyway, re Linkedin and Twitter, I seem to have talked myself out of it for now.

Two hours of porn? No thanks.  It’s cool, but I’m fifty one, and I have other vices now. Eros, I know you when I see you, so point your pesky arrows somewhere else. Two hours a week? No thanks. I’ve got a novel to finish and there’s sex enough in that for me. Does that sound sad?

Hope not.

Graeme out.

The local news channels, bless them, do try to inject an upbeat tone now and then – you know, those dog saves man from drowning kind of stories – but they always overdo it and end up drowning us instead in saccharine sentiment, which seems only to add to the sheer debilitating weight of things.

I suppose what it is is world events are reported entirely in a way that panders to the shadow within us, rather than the muse. The shadow is the dark side we project everywhere. See someone you don’t know and take an instant irrational dislike to them? That’s your shadow. A whole army of little daemons rush to do his infernal bidding, meanwhile there he sits at the centre of our being, rubbing his hands with glee while our spirits sink and we raise our eyebrows in despair at yet one more depressing headline.

Look, he says, we have entire economies in ruins, and an ever increasing percentage of the world’s population in chains to a financial system that emasculates and enslaves them while simultaneously shrinking their futures to a fraction of what even their grandfathers once aspired to. Then we have the earth convulsing with one natural disaster after another, and if that’s not bad enough we have an ever increasing number of bogey men supposedly stalking every street corner just waiting to rape and kill or simply swindle the innocents out of what little dignity they have left.

But then the muse stirs from her slumber and the shadow looks nervous because they don’t get on, and she always wins when it comes to an argument. She wrinkles her nose in distaste and casts about for someone to pull her out of the mire. Oy! Yea, you with the pen. You’ll do. Hoist me up will you? And then she looks at me and says: Well, is that really the kind of world you want to live in?

Of course it isn’t I tell her, but what choice do we have? I mean you must admit things look pretty bad. But she just shrugs guilelessly and says: Are they really?

Okay, I know where she’s going with this. And she’s right; personally, beyond feeling the pinch in my wallet, and at the petrol pump, I’ve no idea how bad things are because news feeds are just stories after all and, as recent events here in the UK would indicate, they’re not necessarily stories based upon facts either. But believe them or not the news media’s narrative does shape the story of our times, it weaves the contemporary myth and spins the Zeitgeist to which we are all unconsciously exposed and rendered suggestible to. But were the story of our times a novel, I think I might have set it aside with a weary grimace by now, somewhere half way through chapter one, swapped it for a copy of Jeeves and Wooster instead, or turned the telly channel over, away from the shadow-centric news, to find myself a decent laugh-out-loud movie, preferably one with a bit of romance thrown in.

No, says the muse, you want more than that. Laughter isn’t enough. You don’t want to simply lose yourself in a quick, shallow fix, like anaesthetising your rebellious, soul-craving spirit in the bottom of a whiskey glass. You want to feel a rush of pleasure in something. You want to feel yourself lifted off your feet. You want to be in awe of something greater than yourself. You want the earth to move.

So here, she says. Remember this. Remember me?

Of course I remember!

There’s some debate over exactly when this video was shot. As any fan will tell you, the band isn’t Fleetwood Mac. It is however, definitely Stevie Nicks, probably 1981, and her solo “Belladonna” tour.

What I love about this clip – apart from it being my favourite rendition of this song – is 5.6 seconds in. It’s the expression on Stevie’s face as the instrumentals start up and the crowd goes wild. What I see, what I feel in that smile, and in the sudden turning away of her head, is the kind of “lifted off my feet” rush that I’m sure I’ve felt too (though not in front of a crowd of thousands of adoring fans). When I watch this clip, I project something very strongly which seeks to share in that moment, and in some ways reconnect with moments in my life when I simply must have felt like that, when there was a visceral connection with something godlike, and when the earth simply moved, Goddamit!

Okay, so I remember. But what exactly are you getting at here, Sara?

Well, these things are spontaneous, she says. They’re unpredictable, and we cannot find them in the simple pursuit of pleasure, nor can we find them in other people, nor in physical experiences unless we’re open to that feeling in the first place and capable of knowing it for what it is. And if we are, well, we can find it anywhere, even in the middle of a financial crisis, and there’s no need to go looking for it anywhere special.

In ’81, I was both a Fleetwood Mac and a Stevie fan, and the muse definitely went by the name of Sara. I tended to project her onto girls who either looked like Stevie Nicks, or Carrie Fisher (AKA Princess Leia) in that gold Bikini (I know, I know, but I was young). Then she slips back inside my head and morphs into someone else, driven by the times and the shifting tides of my own psyche down the decades but, be she Sara, or Eleanor, or Beatrice, or even George(ina) these days, she’s essentially the same timeless, ageless phenomenon she always been, and she is the poet in my heart.

When words won’t come, or they tumble out in useless messy splats, I know the words are mine. When they work, when they light me up, I know they’re Sara’s, that I’ve managed to get my head out of the way long enough for her to do her stuff. And of course it’s to the muse we must all turn when we need lifting out of ourselves, when we finally see the shadow of ourselves haunting us in the vulgar glare of the daemon haunted news-media. She waits for that shudder of recognition, the vital insight we must each come to in our own way, before she steps up and says, would you like me to help you with that?

So come on Sara, help me. Where are we going with this?

Well, do you remember, she asks me. You were at the tea table the other night, you, the good lady Graeme and numbers one and two sons? Sure I remember. Number two son had been You-Tubing the Mayan Apocalypse, and asked if it was true, that the world was really going to end on December 21^st 2012? The good lady Graeme thought to put his mind at ease by telling him there’d been at least a couple of apocalypses predicted for every decade in living memory, and probably a good few before then, and none of them had ever amounted to anything except a lot of hype and panic among those who subscribe to these things, and then turning to me asked what did I think?

And what did you say, Michael?

All right, all right. Perhaps I’d had a bad day, I don’t remember, but I found myself saying, rather unhelpfully, I hoped it was the real thing this time, then we needn’t worry about all this dark depressing stuff any more. I mean,… this bleating endlessly on about fiscal stability in the Eurozone, private sector pension provision, the crisis in higher education funding, and the abolition of retirement ages, it all sounds a bit weak when the time-wave’s about to collapse, doesn’t it?

The what?

Number two son hadn’t heard about the time wave theory. And if you’ll forgive me a moment’s tangential aside, this is what’s so interesting about the 2012 apocalyptic myth. It’s also what the muse seems at pains to point out to me this evening, unexpected though it is, but here we go anyway: it encapsulates the Zeitgeist very neatly and also gives us a clue as to how we can steer our way around it to better things just by picking and choosing the path we take.

If you’re not well up on theories surrounding the next apocalypse, there are two sides to the 2012 myth. One one side the sense of oppressive gloom some of us are feeling is a kind of premonition that’s supposed to have its denouement in a collision between poor old mother earth and a wayward wandering planet called Nibiru. Failing that there’ll be a reversal of the earth’s magnetic field, or failing that a massive solar flare will fry the pants off us. There are probably many other apocalyptic scenarios I’m unaware of, possibly involving aliens, but archetypally it’s very “Book of Revelations” and “End of Days’ish” and pretty grim stuff, and it all happens on the 21^st of Decbember 2012. So,… we’d better splash out and have ourselves one hell of a party next year.

But wait: there’s another side to the myth, one more positive, and this is where the time wave comes in. I won’t explain it because it’s equally esoteric and bizarre, and possibly also involves aliens, but you can Google Terrance+McKenna+Time+ Wave if you’re interested in further reading. To summarise, this version of events has the dreaded 2012 date seeing a sudden quantum evolution in human consciousness, one in which “time” as a psychological concept collapses and everything happens simultaneously – or something like that – which is going to take some getting used to, but it sounds like fun. I think there’s also a scenario where the galactic centre lines up and shoots a beam of “enlightenment rays” at us – but basically we all go to bed on the 20^th of December 2012 and then we wake up in the morning to a psychotropically enhanced version of reality and go: “WOA!”

I prefer the latter version, obviously, though I must add I don’t think we should bank on either possibility. My personal belief is that some form of shift in conscious awareness is our evolutionary destiny, but it won’t be sudden and it won’t be a quantum leap. It’ll be gradual and incremental, like it always is, and we’ll really have to work at it, generation on generation. But we have to want it too. And if we can’t remember what it is we want or even what it feels like any more, then let the muse remind you. After all, what kind of world do you want? If you don’t mind I think I’m with the muse on this one.

And finally, there’s one more thing, she reminds me, about December 21 next year and why nothing bad is going to happen. It’s my birthday, and she simply won’t allow it.

Thank you, Sara. Don’t you change, and don’t you ever stop.

Graeme out.

 So,…  I’ve been reliving the summer of 1974 today, and one waymark in particular. It’s August, I’m thirteen years old and I’m driving home with my family from a holiday in Benllech bay, on the Isle of Angelsey. We’re travelling north in a pea green MK 1 Cortina, me, my younger sister, Mum and Dad, crossing the infamous Thelwall Viaduct on the M6. The sun’s shining and I’m looking out of the window at the play of light on the dark waters of the Manchester ship canal, hundreds of feet below, and this song is playing on the radio:

Soul was pretty big that year. I also recall Sad Sweet Dreamer and Barry White’s immortal “My Everything” – but “When will I see you again?” stands out. It made it to number one in August and lingered in the charts for the rest of ‘74, to become a bitter-sweet backing track to a lot of dark stuff that was to happen later on.

Unknown to any of us, as we drove home that day my father was ill. By the winter he was in a bad way, and by February he’d gone. I didn’t know as we crossed Thelwall in August ‘74, with that song playing, we were never to share another summer together. My father’s death crushed me. It made me feel atom sized, and it made the world feel suddenly cold and vast and cruel.

I still think of my father most days and wish with all my heart we’d had more time. Driving north over Thelwall even now is a reliable trigger for such feelings, but it’s only in more recent times I’ve realised it was another event, one that happened in the autumn, while that song was still in the charts, and my father was still alive, that probably saved me from drowning in the pit of grief I’d yet to experience.

 I fell in love.

She was a girl at my school. When I look at pictures of her now I wonder how she managed to so completely capture me. There were other girls from that time I remember as being more overtly good looking and blatantly sexual, but Rachel had a style and a class all her own – at least in my imagination – and that made her the real thing for me. I still feel a shiver when I think of her.

Of course, young love rarely makes for happy endings, and,… well,… she never did find out about me.

Grief is an uncompromising emotion and it changes you. I guess on the surface, after my father’s passing, nothing seemed to change at all, at least in the way I went about my life; I went on being a mostly average student, but I managed not to go off the rails and make my mother’s life hell. Indeed my memory of that time is one of trying to swallow down the rage and trying to hang on in there at school because I felt it was what my father would have wanted me to do, not to ruin myself, I suppose. But something had to give, and I dealt with it by falling deep inside of myself, becoming withdrawn and ever more introverted. I think I might have drowned there, except for that other uncompromising emotion, love, which threw me a rope and hauled me out, whether I liked it or not, to a different kind of future.

It seems odd that such a hopeless thing could restore a will to live. Coming out of grief, it was like swapping one emptiness for another but, unlike grief, unrequited love is a thing built on hope and if nothing else it gets you out of bed in the morning, it plants your feet firmly on the ground and sends you into the day full of expectation of your mistress’ favour, even though the humiliation and the shot expectations of yesterday’s hopes are still hanging in tatters around your neck.

To be sure, Rachel was a very powerful projection of something I hadn’t a hope in hell of getting  a handle on. She was a goddess, quite literally so, in the classical sense, and not altogether benign. Later on, my hopeless infatuation was better summed up by the Carpenters and “Goodbye to Love”, but the goddess wanted me to live, and live I did. It was to be thirty years later, when writing “Langholm Avenue”, before I was finally able to look her in the eye and make my peace with her.

As I chase down the decades on You Tube now, I realise there are so many other songs I’d like to share with you, and most of them make “When will I see you” sound a bit corny. It’s a sad reflection but I suspect that trio of gorgeous girls and their lovely song would probably be booed off X Factor now, but they were innocent times, and none the worse for that.

 In conclusion, I raise a glass to the memory of my father. Also to the memory of Rachel.

 When will I see them again? Are you kidding me? I see them every day.

I know I’m sometimes guilty of over-analysing things. It’s my introverted nature, I’m afraid. I worry that it creeps into my writing at times, making it turgid as I travel convoluted lines of reasoning, like trying to prove the existence of unicorns, for example, at the sight of hoof-prints, when the most logical explanation is a horse. I know I’ve done this with Second Life, the open ended role playing game by Linden Labs that I still maintain a presence in. I’ve written thousands upon thousands of words about it, trying to explain to myself its peculiar allure, trying to get to the psychological nub of it as if there were some fantastic insight to be gleaned into the heart of the human condition.

I was trying to explain it to my 14 year old son, shaking my head in wonder yet again at what I thought to be the wider implications of this virtual reality wonderland, but he just rolled his eyes and said: “Look: you’ve got this fantasy world where people can go anonymously and do absolutely anything; you don’t need to explain it any more than that, do you? Come on Dad, you’re over-analysing stuff again.”

Sure, there’s probably nothing more profound about Second Life than that. It’s just taken me five years to realise it, with the benefit of some sage advice from my teenage son. I must be careful therefore not to similarly labour my analysis of Flickr.

I’ve had a Flickr account for a couple of years now, but I’ve only recently begun to make better use of it. Flickr of course is a service that lets you put photographs and digital artwork online in a public forum. You can mark your pictures private and just share them with friends and family, or you can open them up to a worldwide audience. I put a handful of my more arty photographs on there a couple of years ago, and until recently some of them hadn’t been viewed even once, so I was wondering what the point of it all was. I mean why would I want to show my photographs to complete strangers, anyway? Is it not just “showing off”? And why on earth would anyone want to look at them? (which apparently they didn’t). And what if I’m misguided in my enthusiasm for my pictures, and they’re not that great anyway? It would be,… well,… embarrassing.

But still,…

I think for me the problem with Flickr, was the fact that it was uncomfortable sitting hunched up in front of a computer monitor of an evening to look at other people’s photographs – especially when I’d been hunched up in front of a computer all day at work. The computer – even a laptop – just didn’t quite bring out the potential of Flickr, but then I bought an iPad, and suddenly I could sit in an easy chair with it and flick through the Flickr stream like you would through a glossy magazine. Within seconds, you were guaranteed to be gazing in awe at a picture someone had taken, or drawn or painted – not necessarily because it was dramatic or shocking, but because there was just something in the picture that spoke directly to you. This is how art works, after all.

I’ve been using a little app called FlickStackr, which smooths out the browsing process for you and, as a result, diving into Flickr is now like falling down the rabbit hole. It opens up a world of richness and colour and breathtaking artistic talent that is mostly unsung. We are instinctively creative creatures, and Flickr showcases that to good effect.

I dabble a little with digital art myself. In particular I enjoy fingerpainting on my iPad with an app called Sketchbook, and I’ve put a few of my first attempts on Flickr as well. Like my earlier photographs, these didn’t attract much attention at first, but that was before I’d discovered “groups”.

At the top level, Flickr is so unimaginably vast, your little account is like a grain of sand on a beach; it’s unlikely anyone’s going to notice it. So you look for things you might have in common with other Flickrers, like say Sketchbook art, and you discover there’s a “group” for that. You take pictures with an old Canon Powershot A640? Yes there’s a group for that as well. You live in Lancashire UK? Sure, there’s a group for that as well. So you join those groups, start tagging your material to them and suddenly people start dropping by to say things about your stuff, or selecting them as favourites for their own little collections.

But before I embark on a long rambling analysis of why I enjoy doing this, I’m better asking my 14 year old son for his advice because I’m only going to get myself into another existential muddle if I don’t. He says, it’s like when he comes to me with one of his drawings that he’s worked on for ages, and says: wha’d'ya think of this then? It’s not showing off, it just makes you feel good when someone looks at something you’ve done and says, hey: nice picture!

I think writing’s the same. In a way we’re looking for approval, for permission to be as we are and to think the things we do. At the bottom of us we’re saying: I did this, I wrote this, I painted this, I saw this and felt this because I thought it might mean something. Do you think it might mean something too?

Fortunately I’ve only got junk on there, so I’ll not be bothering too much about it. They’re threatening to delete my whole account,… well okay, go on then. See if I care. I used to find it was a good way of ironing out formatting glitches before cut-and-pasting from my word processor into WordPress, but I can live without it. I was overcautious with Google Docs and didn’t get into it in a big way, but I wonder if anyone else has been struggling? The potential for ruination here is huge!