Dear Sara – call me!

Hello rivendalereview.co.uk Team,

We provide comprehensive digital marketing services that range from web development to ethical SEO. Besides that, we will also suggest some traffic generated keywords as per the SEO packages. All the techniques used by us are ethical and proprietary. In case you require any additional information, it shall be our pleasure to furnish the same. With our web development and mobile app development services, we can take your business to a whole new standard.

Most of your questions should be answered within the proposal, but don’t hesitate to let me know if you need any more information, such as client references.

If you want Audit Report of your website, then we can provide you as per your request.

Best regards,
Sara W@{}s
Project Manager

Note : If you want detailed plan of our proposal, please reply with Yes.

Dear Sara,

Thank you for your email. You ask if you can call me. You seem a little forward, if you don’t mind my saying, though I do wonder, idly, yes, if I should ask you to call, wonder if indeed you could help with my present quandary, but would you really know where to begin with it? I certainly don’t. That you provide comprehensive digital marketing services, ranging from web development to “ethical” SEO, is all very well but, sadly, irrelevant to my actual needs right now. Similarly your suggestions regarding traffic generated keywords, I suspect – whilst I’m sure well intentioned – may not be of much use to me either.

I wonder, have you actually seen my website? It’s rather old, a sort of Gen 2 unpublished writers thing from the late 90’s, one I abandoned in 2011. Why? It’s a question I ask myself from time to time, especially since it costs around £15 per year to maintain it in such a sorry state of obsolecence. I’ve moved on you see, Sara? though it seems at times I am still firmly anchored in the past by these rusting barbs of lethargy and self doubt.

Are you able to help with that at all?

Forgive me, I suspect you’re very young and have yet to encounter self-doubt, at least on the scale of that faced by men of my age. The confidence of youth fades as time passes, you see? the trees, once lush in their greenery, stand bare against a cold sky and the sweet-scented meadows turn into a cloying mud that pulls and slithers at every step, so it’s hard to move in any direction. At such times the best a man can possess is the patience to abide, that and to trust the seasons of the mind will turn once more, though in the greater sense – the metaphorical sense, that is – given the state of world-affairs at present, it’s easy to doubt such things are even possible any more. Such is the fix I’m in, and Search Engine Optimisation does seem rather an inappropriate salve, wouldn’t you say? Or am I missing something important here?

I mean, you have read my stuff, right? You wouldn’t just be – dare I even say it – Spamming me would you? Sara,… tell me it’s not true! That would hardly be ethical would it? Oh, my dear,… what happened? What has brought us to such a fell pass as this?

Call me yes,… you should. Or better still, join us here, we poor scribblers at WordPress. It needn’t be like this!

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The writing life – growing some soul?

The online world remains the easiest outlet for creative expression, at least one that comes with an audience. I’d say it was my “preferred” option but that would be to suggest I have any other choice which, in common with many of my kind – at least those of us who have wised up – I don’t. However, I do actually “prefer” it because there’s a world of difference between writing and publishing and while writing online grants us the freedom to explore stories in a direction of our own choosing, publishing does not. Publishing just wants more of the same. Publishing wants what sells.

This is not to say I don’t still toy now and then with at least the idea of flirting with the printed press again, but the essentials there haven’t changed in forty years which means if long-form fiction’s your thing, you need an insider’s contacts to avoid the slush pile and to deliver your musings with an auspicious whack, directly to a commissioning editor’s desk. Without that advantage, you’re going nowhere my friend.

There’s self-publishing online for money of course, but for all its blather, writers should be wary of its over-hyped promise because this won’t make you rich and famous either. Kurt Vonnegut nailed it when he said the arts were no way to make a living, only to grow some soul. What does that mean? It means we have to buckle down and a get ourselves a proper job first. Anything will do, so long as it leaves us time and energy at the end of the day to write. The trouble is, being an amateur hack, we’re likely to be as unknown in our sixties as we were in our twenties. Is that a failure of ourselves as writers? Well, it depends how much you grow your soul in the mean time, and none of us are best placed to be the judge of that anyway.

I suspect it’s a journey we must all make as individuals, so nothing I say here is going to make sense to anyone just starting out, and they’ll still likely believe against the odds they can change the world with their story, if only the world would wise up and recognise their genius. But trust me, it wont.

It’s a funny old business, growing soul. I mean, if writing or any other form of art were truly integral to that process, one might think thrashing out the most perfect story or poem, then unceremoniously deleting it wouldn’t matter, that if anyone read it or not would be irrelevant, that growing one’s soul is a purely private matter, no audience required. Except to me it does seem important, this exchange from one mind to another, writer to reader, that unless we writers complete that particular end of the bargain, the muse or the genii or the daemons who gave us this stuff in the first place won’t be happy until they’ve goaded us into finding an audience for it. Or this may just be a sign of residual vanity in me, that forty years of writing has left my soul the same button-mushroom size it was when I was ten.

In the bad old days this primeval urge to find an audience would deliver us into the hands of the vanity press. You could tell them apart by the fact they accepted your manuscript in glowing terms, while the other lot simply returned it unread. Yes, the vanity press would butter you up no end, appeal to your – well – vanity, then print your novel and deliver you a crate of the things, leaving the rest to you, which is to say high and dry and probably skint. Beware, vanity is a terrible thing and can lead you into all kinds of trouble.

They’re still around, those shysters, moved mostly online now, offering also their worthless authoring services like reading and editing, all of which still leave the writer out of pocket and no nearer publication than when they started. So don’t be tempted, or at least if you are don’t be surprised when you get shafted.

I look to the online world then as a means of pacifying that particular whim of the muse who seems curiously untroubled by giving the work away. And it has to be said there’s something quietly subversive about it that I enjoy. Yes, you can charge for it on Amazon and Smashwords, but then the downloads shrivel to nothing, because everyone online is after free-stuff and the value of a work is, after all, in its scarcity, and regardless of the fact you spent a year writing it, your novel can be copied and pirated in a nanosecond, rendering it essentially worthless – at least in money terms – anyway.

The downside is that while the Internet has the advantage of a potentially global reach, for readers actually hitting upon one’s work it’s a bit like sitting on a needle in a haystack – an entirely chance and unlikely event. So, building even a humble readership can be rather a slow business. Why bother then?

Well, perhaps the truth is if we were wealthy enough we might spin our musings from the psychiatrist’s couch, whittle down to the nub of things that way, but instead we write for the mysterious “other”. The “other” understands us perfectly; they just never write back to say so, and that’s fine because if they did, we’d know it wasn’t them anyway.

Is that growing some soul? I don’t know, but I’m still writing, always looking for the next story, the next tumble down the wormholes of my dizzy head.

And that has to count for something.

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Marketing your blog – the importance of the vital few!

Photo by Helena Lopes on Pexels.com

Okay, so that title’s a bit tongue in cheek. I’ve no idea how to market a blog, other than by writing one, updating it a couple of times a week and poking around among other blogs and reading and following the ones I like. That’s blogging, and there’s no quick fix. I’ve been at it ten years and it is what it is. I tell myself I’m a misanthropic old curmudgeon who doesn’t give a damn if anyone reads me or not, but that wouldn’t be true. I do like to know if people are reading me.

WordPress says I have 564 followers at the moment, which sounds a lot, but we must bear in mind only about twenty percent of those are really following and reading – the rest are just dumb barnacles stuck to the bottom of my boat, trying to sell me stuff, or people who have no interest in my writing and write “lifestyle” stuff and just want me to follow them back. This has to do with the Pareto principle, also known as the law of the vital few. But that still means I’ve got the ear of a hundred or so, and that sounds pretty good to someone who started writing in the days of typewriters and double lined manuscripts and lots and lots of rejection slips.

You can apply Pareto to all sorts of things, such as for instance how, in any organisation, twenty percent of the people do eighty percent of the work and how twenty percent of the people in the world hold eighty percent of the wealth, and so on. Now that’s all well and good, but when you see your blog hits have been declining over the past five years, you start to wonder if you’re missing a trick in not applying all the whizz-bang tools of the trade at your disposal, so to speak,… namely that odd bird: Twitter.

I’ve had a Twitter account for ages, but never really got the hang of it. Twittering seems to me like uttering a mumbled phrase or two in a room filled with a braying crowd, all of them slightly off their heads. It’s very unlikely anyone’s going to hear you. You’re just going to get drowned out by the noise, unless of course you single someone out and call them a dick-head, as many do of course, and cause a fight, but at the cost of the inevitable loss of your virtue.

Anyway,… by way of experiment I decided to give it another go and I’ve been tweeting all week, five to ten times a day in fact, just shooting out links to the blog and my books on Smashwords and Wattpad. And now, come Friday the results are in, and guess what?

1) Twittering like a canary all week attracts zero genuine visitors.

2) Twittering about your writing all the time takes a lot of effort and stops you from writing.

3) Twittering out links to your blog as a means of self marketing means you get a lot junk-blogs coming back at you trying to sell their marketing services, as no doubt will that marketing tag I’ve attached to this blog.

So, in conclusion, I remind myself, if you like blogging, which I do, then blog. Write your blog however the hell you want, and follow the blogs of others whose writing you like, because there’s a lot of good stuff out there, original, meaningful, soulful,… well, twenty percent of the time anyway, and that’s about the top and bottom of it. If the stats tell you your blog’s in decline or never gained any traction in the first place, live with it, or give it up. If you can’t give up, then don’t.

If you’re reading this, you count as one of my vital few, and you’re very welcome, so pull up a chair.

Fancy a cup of tea?

How’s life been treating you?

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It isn’t all about relationships!

I took a dip into the world of Instagram poetry, fell promptly headlong into the purple prose of a million broken hearts. Clearly I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be young. To be sure it’s a terrible thing, this compulsion we have to seek completion in another human being, and to have them seek a reciprocal completion in us. And like all compulsions it’s such a rich ground for disaster, for rejection, for betrayal, for the object of one’s desire not to return one’s feelings, or even know one exists. Okay,… so I’ve been there, written plenty for that genre in the past. Fortunately though there was no Internet in those days and a Boots’ diary had to suffice.

If I’d had the Internet back than, it would have been tempting of course to lay my heart bare, as many young ‘uns obviously do today, either as a plea for mercy, revenge against the one who did or did not love me, or as a beating of my chest and gnashing of teeth to Aphrodite. But I’d also like to think even my younger self would have recognised the indignity in such a thing. When relationships backfire, for whatever reason, and no matter how mouthy or cutting the other party gets, a gentleman is always better keeping his own counsel.

This is not to say love is not a beautiful thing, for a man in love sees the world differently. He can describe it from a heightened state of consciousness, a world that bears no resemblance to the same one described through shades of depression. But try as I might I could not find poetry like that on Instagram, only the petulant and possibly inebriated jottings of a million midnight Bridget Jones’s, lamenting the ups and downs (mainly downs) of their thing for Mr Darcy. As a forum for my own words then, I feel somewhat out of place, a veritable crustacean tiptoeing through a frightful wail of the fretful and the tenderly aged.

My apologies if one of those bleeding heart poems was yours, but I can assure you, at some point you’ll get hitched, you’ll find “the one” and hopefully have children with them, and then your life will change. You’ll have other things to worry about, to pine about, to cry about, and if you still possess the urge, it’s thus the poetry will change throughout the summer and the autumn and finally the winter of your life.

Like those teens posting their fevered “I love you’s”, it’s still a desire for connection, for completion that drives us in later life. But the love felt by youth is more a cunning deceit of Nature to get us to pair off and make babies. What we seek to connect with, actually, we find only to a small degree in others, and the younger we are the more we are likely to mistake it for the real thing and grow dissatisfied by it. The real thing is the mystery of Nature itself, the mystery of life. The hunt for it is an existential quest, and there are no reliable pathways leading to it from the material world. Instead, we must rely on imagination, conjuring up those parts of ourselves we would perhaps otherwise be afraid to be seen out with in public.

The love poem is of infinite value to its author of course, but unless it opens the reader up to more than the author’s misery, there is little of broader worth in it, only the author’s future embarrassment when things finally pick up and he looks back on the bad times. I’m glad I kept mine private.

For me the poet is someone wandering that great tideline of the world after the ebb. Indeed a beach is the ultimate metaphor for this mysterious liminal zone, the mysterious line between reality and imagination. Now and then we come across a curiosity washed up, say a bit of smooth-worn driftwood. We revel in its shape and its exquisite feel as we turn it in our hands. We cannot describe the forces that have shaped it, yet in the feel of it we intuit the nature of something divinely beautiful, far beyond our understanding. Then we turn to our companion, our imaginary reader, and we say “Wow, what do you think of this?”

Relationships confer a degree of self reflection, but it’s not the essential thing. After all, there’s no point being in love if you’re rendered suddenly blind to everything else that’s going on.

Oh my heart is like a red-red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June,
If I could only say the same for yours,
I’d be humming a different tune.

Bu-Bum.

 

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The gathering storm – Writing, retiring and remoanering.

Full moon and a Spring tide draws me to the coast. The coast for me is Southport, North West England, a place you rarely catch the sea – at least not splashing up against the promenade, even at high tide, so the opportunity is not to be missed. I have in mind an hour’s stroll along the front, and some sea air, but I am an hour late in arriving and the tide is already on its way out, a slow peeling back of muddy foreshore puncturing my boyish optimism.

Instead I am faced with a dilemma. To park on the promenade for just an hour now is over a pound. I fumble for change, but it seems an extravagance given the receding tide and the all pervading mood of “Austerity”. Do I stay, or do I just go home? I split the difference and drive to the Ocean Plaza instead where it’s free to park so long as you intend buying something.

I buy coffee.

Two pounds buys a medium Americano at the Pausa Cafe  in Dunelm Mill. Luck gets you a balcony table overlooking fabrics and curtains. The coffee is really good.  I come here a lot on wet weekends – for the coffee, not the fabrics.

When I sit down I’m thinking about the work in progress, a novel that seems intent, as usual, on self destruction about three quarters of the way in. Such single minded preoccupation is irrational when it doesn’t matter a damn if it’s ever finished or not, and will in any case never make me a bean. It’s just a vast puzzle to be solved, something satisfying only to my convoluted psyche, the end result being something I have made and can post online. And it gets me out of bed.

A couple of overnight pings in response to a sample posted on the blog have revealed potential avenues for exploration, and I’m thinking about those. My thanks to elmonoyd on Wattpad, and Steve on WordPress. I make notes, add them to the mix, let them stew. Then I fall back on the secondary preoccupation: the apparently perilous state of Western Civilisation, its dearth of progressive leadership, its alarmingly retrograde motions this past twelve months, and its lack of answers to the most pressing questions of our times.

What now after the collapse of Capital?

The world is disintegrating on so many levels, and no one knows what to make of it, let alone what to do. The best us Brits can come up with is Brexit, God help us, but that’s like sawing off the branch we’re sitting on. Me? I’m done. All I have in mind now is a little cabin in my back garden, so when retirement comes, soon I hope, I can sit in it and make writing the sole purpose of my life, instead of just a hobby.

My solution to the world’s ills then will be to get up at nine in the morning, instead of six, and never have to commute another fucking mile – a sort of wry three fingered salute. Of course there will be no more purpose in this than there is to my writing now. But I feel too old these days, and too muddled to make a difference to anything more worthy. I see my life’s challenge as simply not to waste any more time moaning about stuff I cannot fix.

But there’s a snag, and it’s to do with the energy of reaction. We’re ten years into a recession, though no one’s actually calling it by that name. In the broader picture it is the sudden acceleration of a decline that’s been steadily ongoing since the seventies – in practical terms by this I mean the availability of well paid work for working men, and free education so the sons of working men can aspire to better paid middle class work. Irt is the struggle of the majority against the minority.

But that’s all over now.

Think about it.

Things are no better, ten years on, employment trends being to divest the employers of all responsibility for employees, while driving wages down to Victorian levels that fall short even of subsistence. In the mean time it overhangs everything, like a chest infection, every breath we take a reminder of its cloying presence, that foul delusion of our times: Austerity.

Is my little cabin still a viable proposition? Sure I can build it, but can I really close the door on a world gone mad, retreat into my fantasies? On the one hand I don’t see why not since I can do nothing about any of this. Putting the world to rights is for the pub, and self indulgent blogging, but on the other hand it seems morally bankrupt to turn my back when the generation I have nurtured in hope and optimism is left with no future and no credible leadership of any colour at all, and there is only the turmoil of populism and layer upon layer of toxic social media to inform opinion.

What the hell?

Suddenly I’m aware the old girl at the table behind me is talking too loudly and has nothing nice to say about anyone. Then there’s a sharp mouthed mother shouting abuse at her child for dolloping something on the table. A baby squeals loud for hunger, for comfort, for sleep. It seems my troubled thoughts are sending waves out into the world, unsettling it. Time to move on before I bring the ceiling down as well.

I look in Pound Stretcher and Matalan while I’m passing, further justifying my free parking, but they are drab and uninspiring this afternoon, and I don’t buy anything. I never do. I cannot help but think big out of town shopping centres like this will all be gone soon – nothing to sustain them with the world and his dog on minimum wage. Then all we’ll have will be our threadbare highstreets with their thrift shops, their pawn shops and  their pay-day loan sharks.

And coffee shops, I hope.

I return to the car the long way via the end of Southport Pier. It adds perspective, and a glimpse of emptiness, of infinity.

It begins to rain.

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Thinking outside the box

The source of our creative energies is a mystery. All I know for sure is it’s not a physical thing. Provided we have sufficient strength at least to draw breath, stay awake and sit down at the work desk, it’s simply a question of opening the valve inside our heads for the creative steam to come gushing out with a vigour untempered even by age and infirmity.

But we can weaken it,…

I’m weakening it now by talking about it. It builds pressure over time and we can either nurture it, then let it out in a sustained, calculated burst and achieve something significant with it – a novel say, or a painting, or an epic poem, or we can be constantly leaking it off in short squeaks until there’s nothing left and we are reduced to a state of creative barrenness.

Bear in mind, once upon a time, words like these would have had no outlet beyond the private diary. In so keeping them within the bounds of a closed personal awareness, they would not deplete the source. Indeed quite the opposite, for maintaining an intimacy with one’s self is both to respect one’s self and also the daemonic forces within us. But now our heads are stuck inside this box and we’re venting words the hyperspatial vacuum, which does nothing but empty us of our creativity.

Listen, we can either do a thing, or we can explain to an imagined audience why we’re doing it – explain it through our blogs, our tweets, our Instagrams. But in explaining it, in chattering about it, and self justifying, we lose the point, the point being the thing itself, rather than the describing of it.

I have talked a lot about Tai Chi on this blog, why I do it, only lately to realise, actually, I don’t do it any more. Meditation – ditto. I talk about it, but I don’t do it. And if I’m talking about writing, I’m not writing. So I guess what I’m thinking about at the moment, what I’m exploring tonight, is the perennial problem of self-justification, of explaining ourselves to the imaginary “other”, when what we’re really doing is comforting our own egos.

We cannot help our insecurities. It’s human nature, this feeling some of us have of being pulled away from the tit too soon, and we assume the other person wasn’t. We assume the other person has no insecurities at all, that they are not the same lost child we feel ourselves to be when we close the door at night and face our selves, alone. Well guess what? They do. The problem then is one of self assurance, of reassurance that what we are is all right, that we need not explain ourselves, nor less try to impress others with how successful, interesting, cool, sexy or even just how extra-specially normal we are. To this end we wear a mask.

Everyone born has ample reason to simply be. It’s just that we aspire to be more than we are. More than what? Well, more than anyone else, perhaps – more cool, more insightful, more intelligent,… and just well,… more! This is what the mask conveys. But if we forget the mask, forget the usual external appearances, the difference between me and you is nothing much. We both arise from the same collective milieu of unconscious potential, like periscopes, each to pierce the surface of this, a somewhat denser and less yielding reality. Our uniqueness lies only in this individual perspective, our singular view of the world.

Knowing what that view is, is one thing, sharing it with others is only useful to point. We are all of us on a personal voyage of discovery, and it’s ultimately our own vision, our own private view that is the essential thing. It is the picture postcard we gift back to the consciousness from which we arise. It’s not important then to capture every thought we’ve ever had, to write it down and self publish it – just because we can do it now, doesn’t mean we should. The importance of the moment has already been captured by the inner eye.

It’s more important then we notice when the sun is shining, important we do not feel the need to take its picture all the time. It’s beautiful, yes, but there’s a limit to the intimacy with which the essence of such beauty can be shared, because beauty is a thing with our unique perception at the centre of it. The urge to share it is the writer’s bane of course, but one should always be mindful that in sharing anything, the essence is always lost, and no matter what our skill with words, no one can ever truly know or see the world the way we do.

So go easy on the media. Take a break from the Blog now and then, don’t feel the need to post on Instagram every day, and don’t you ever go tweeting to the world what you had for breakfast.

Save a little something for yourself. And keep it safe.

Think outside the box from time to time.

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The Sea of Words

Thoughts on writing for the internet age

I write a lot about writing here on the blog. My pieces appear sporadically, usually when my fiction falters and I lose confidence in myself. The purpose of these pieces is not entirely altruistic then. I write about writing – how to keep yourself writing, how to deal with rejection, how writing is changing, how the Internet is the future of writing – be it fiction or journalism – and how there was never any money in writing anyway, that the readership one reaches is more important, and that anyone can now gain a readership by self publishing online.

So, I do this primarily to lecture myself, to remind myself of my own lessons, my own experience. Writing is an exploration of the self, but in self exploration the by-product is an account of experience, and there’s something in human beings that wants to pass that experience on. It might be evolutionary, passing on the knowledge of the mantraps, or the lairs of the sabre toothed tigers to others of one’s clan. It ensures the survival of the clan – more so than if we learn the lessons as individuals, and keep them to ourselves. And my clan is the vast number of creative writers out there, working in isolation, who feel stymied by the opaque business of publishing and at the mercy of one existential crisis after another as the tides of our own soul ebb and flow with the moon.

Not everyone will agree with my approach to writing since it involves abandoning the idea of being paid for one’s work. It’s a myth that there’s a lot of money to be made from writing. Certainly a few high profile authors do make a fortune, but this is the exception to the rule and has distorted our expectations. In fact most can expect to make very little from writing, certainly not enough to be self sufficient, and especially from the more literary type of work I tend to favour. My advice then is to get a proper job to pay the bills and make your peace with it, because you’re going to need that job to support you while you write. This is simply the nature of it, and always has been.

Of course some of my clan are still chasing the dream of a book signing in Waterstones, believing this to be the only worthy goal in writing – that and a Booker Prize and anything else is just defeatist. It’s a worthy ambition of course, but it’s one fraught with danger for the self worth and the general well being of the tens of thousands of other writers, like me, whom no one has ever head of. It’s for us I argue there is another way of viewing ones art, that self publishing is self-enabling, that the miracle of the Internet gives us a voice and a readership when even so little as ten years ago we needed a publisher for that. Now we simply publish ourselves.

So, I’ve been rooting through the blog and gathering up all those “writing about writing” pieces and collecting them under the cover of a “book” called “The Sea of Words”, and I’ve self published it on Wattpad. I did this on the spare of the moment, while trapped during a rainstorm in my little Summer House, one evening – because you can do that with self publishing. It’ll be an ongoing series. I’ll post a few pieces every now and then, because that’s what you do on Wattpad. If the readership peaks at less than 100, I’ll delete it in order to spare myself further embarrassment, and the book will be as if it had never existed, because it works both ways and you can do that too on Wattpad.

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Noise

Goodreads is an online social meeting place for the bookish. You read a book and you tell the world what you thought about it. You score, you rate and pontificate to your heart’s content. You even get to list the books you’ve read, are reading, or intend to read. Thus, like all good social media, it affords one a means of showing off to people who really couldn’t care less.

As for the writers among us, you don’t have to be a proper published author to be listed. Even self published ebooks, hastily cobbled and given away, are on there too, so it’s an inclusive, impartial and non-partisan catalogue, which has to be good.

But before signing up and contributing to the heaps of unsolicited critique already on there, remember Goodreads is an advertising platform aimed at selling you stuff you probably don’t need. It also, crucially, has a business model of which we, the bookish, are an integral part, providing a vast quantity of free content, both the commentary, and (in the case of us self published authors) even the stuff that’s commented upon. In return it allows us occasionally to “share” in the success of selected famous authors by engaging in online Q and A sessions with them, but again, remember, this sharing is a means of advertising the said author’s works, or at the very least maintaining their profile at our own unpaid expense.

In short, Goodreads is pure genius.

But it doesn’t quite work for me, and the main reason is this: I’ve never been comfortable critiquing the work of another author. True, I do have a Goodreads account and have “reviewed” books I’ve enjoyed, but it’s rare I’ll take out the hatchet, because I don’t feel qualified, and would rather not say anything if I cannot say something positive. To say a work is rubbish, as Goodreads’ army of unpaid reviewers often do, tells us more about the reviewer than the book. This is perhaps the reviewer’s intention anyway, though with the reviewer perhaps hoping it will make them appear more intelligent, when actually all it reveals is their ignorance.

There’s something crass about denigrating creativity, be it from the pen of a master, or a teenage amateur just starting out in college romances on Wattpad. We all have it in us to be creative, but it takes courage to expose one’s self to public scrutiny. Many are put off by fear of the snide intellect tearing their work to shreds, pointing out spelling mistakes, poor grasp of grammar, or generally berating them as a shrivelling worthless fraud.

My English teacher used to do it with great panache; but it was his job. His caustic red pen and his tartly encircled “see me’s” were intended (I hope) to raise my game, but we needn’t take criticism from anywhere else at all seriously, especially amateur criticism from the likes of Goodreads or Amazon, or any other public bookish forum where people basically think out loud without a care for who they hurt in the process. This is just noise. People like to moan, and the angrier and the more depressed they are by life, the more they will moan about everything else.

The creative sphere, becoming as it is, increasingly de-monetised, need no longer be a battle of Egos for market share. De-monetised – literally writing for free – it has become more a sea of ideas, reflective of the collective turmoil of human thought in which anyone with a genuine and sincerely felt point of view is of equal worth and quite frankly beyond criticism. What creatives are about is the expression of the deeper human condition, feeding a hunger that comes from so far beyond the usual pedestrian measure of these things as to be almost paranormal. To create is the finest and most satisfying thing a we can do. To sneer at another’s work is not, especially when you’ve not paid for that work, and your opinion has not been asked for.

I have no reason to complain of my ratings on Goodreads since my average is 3.5 out of 5, which I take to be the sunnier side of middling, but I also note my early works score more highly than my later ones – my later ones scoring nothing at all. Is this a question of advancing apathy on the reader’s part regarding the time-line of my bibliography, or is it more an advancing senility on my own? Am I, in short, losing it? I’d begun to wonder about that, especially as I struggle to find my way with the current work in progress, but there is no worthwhile analysis to be had from the noise, and for the writer such a plethora of opinion can only be, at best, distracting, at worst discouraging. And anything discouraging for the writer is best avoided altogether because we’ve got enough to worry about as it is.

Writing for free, we must not allow amateur “ratings” or even the lack of them to guide our hand, and we should remember at all times the only person we need to keep on board is our selves. Trust only that if we have connected deeply enough with a piece of our own work – sufficient at least to finish it – the chances are others will connect with it too – not everyone for sure, indeed probably very few, but enough to make it worth our efforts. By all means chatter away on Goodreads, list the books you’ve read to show your friends how bookish you are, but remember, at the end of the day, like all social media, it’s basically meaningless to those it purports to serve, and of tangible importance only to those who control it.

I have been a creator of things all my life, and in that time have noticed also how non-creatives are quick to assume positions of power over us, finding ways to exploit the creatives for gains they are unwilling to share, treating us as second class citizens, milking us as unpaid cash cows. Goodreads and its ilk are the product of two decades of internetification – an evolution of sorts. This goes for my work too, though we come from opposing ideologies. Goodreads is about making something out of nothing, while I and others like me, in all our nothingess, rise powerfully from something the non-creative critic or self styled amateur marketing copywriter has any concept of.

So remember, dear un(der)paid writer, if you’re still smarting after that last semi-literate review of your heart-felt autobiography, or the novel you were sure would change the world, but which has yet to score anything at all on Goodreads review system, or indeed anywhere else, write on regardless because it’s always been that way. Have faith only in what inspires you and never mind the rest. It’s not much encouragement, but it’s all you’re going to get, and as any writer of experience will tell you, looking for encouragement beyond oneself is to take the world of idle chatter far more seriously than it deserves.

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The writer’s fortune

So, you’ve written a story. It might be a short story or a long story, or even a very long novel length story, and you’re thinking it’s the best of you, that others have only to read it in order to see the world differently, to be transformed, dazzled, blown away by this original idea, by this new talent, the talent that you are. It will be the vindication of everything you’ve ever worked for, it will be a poke in the eye for those who told you you were wasting your time, that you would never be published. But you’re also thinking it’s unfortunate, that after sending it out to magazine editors , agents, and publishers for years and years and years, it looks like the naysayers were right: you can’t get your story published anywhere.

Still on the upside, no one’s actually said you can’t write, that you haven’t the talent, the originality, the sheer imagination or whatever to write a proper story – the type others want to read, the type supermarkets want to sell, the type people pick up at airports to take on their holidays, the type hundreds of years from now people will still want to read while hailing you as a literary genius. No. Nobody’s actually said you’re no good, though at times you’re tempted to infer it from the fact of your lack any of success whatsoever .

I offer no opinions on the trials of conventional publishing at all, other than the fact publishing is, and always has been, the writer’s bane, and is becoming no easier an ordeal either to endure or survive, let alone succeed with. What I try to do instead, is ask the writer in this position what it is they want.

Michael Graeme has never published anything. He’s an online creation, as much of a fiction as the books he writes. His alter ego however, was active as a writer throughout the 80’s and the ’90’s, and by fluke published some short fictions in an Irish Magazine, but he has this to say of them:

If through publication it’s a vindication of your own self worth as a writer you’re seeking, you can forget it. You won’t find it in the first story to be accepted, nor the second nor any after that. There’s a moment of euphoria of course, but after that you’re thinking of the next story, and the next, and the next and each one trying to prove you’ve not lost your edge since the last. And publishers, magazines, whatever, they have a very narrow view of what it is they want, and what they want from you is pretty much what they had last time, so under no circumstances should you offer them anything  different.

So you write to suit the guidelines until there’s nothing left you can say, and you feel like a dried out sponge unable to bear the thought of penning one more damned tale along those same old lines and within the crucifying limits of that same old word-count. But you’ll always have other types of stories you want to tell. You’re a human being, your psyche changes as you grow, you want to move on, but publication pins you down with a label through your heart that reads “successful formula, do not change”. This applies until the publisher’s criterion changes, and then you’re finished.

So you write other stuff, and send it off elsewhere, but this time you’re not so lucky, the market not so broad, it’s more competitive perhaps, and so your self worth is shot through once more and you’ve forgotten those earlier stories you’ve already had the stamp of approval on, because they do not vindicate the you that you are now. And the moral of all this is not to seek the vindication of self worth in publication at all. Publish yes, if you’re lucky, but do not pin your life’s worth upon it, because the odds are too long to be risking such a fortune as that.

Perhaps you already know this. Perhaps deep down you admit to yourself you just want to be read, because you believe in this story you’re writing and you want others to share in what you feel when you’re writing it. And actually, are you that bothered about the money? Apart from a few celebrity authors, the money in writing has never been worth counting on, so much so that non-celebrity authors have always had to get themselves proper jobs as well to pay the bills.

We’ve all forgotten that before the Internet, before Smashwords and Feedbooks and Wattpad, the writer had no choice but to deal with the world of conventional publishing, with the agents and the magazine editors, because they were the gatekeepers to the printing press and the distribution networks. But now you can be read in a heartbeat, provided you’re willing to give your work away. Interesting angle that: give your work away? Of course, you’ll be told it’s rubbish doing it that way, that your work is just as lost, tossed into a sea of semi-literate garbage, and that’s no place for a fine upstanding writer like yourself. But don’t listen. There are readers out there, looking for stuff like yours. They read it on their ‘phones during all those empty times we have to fill, like waiting in line for stuff, or sitting on a train, or surreptitiously at work when we should be shovelling data into spreadsheets.

Put a story on Feedbooks and you’ll have a hundred readers in the first week, maybe a thousand before the month is out. Things will tail off after that, and you may get a half dozen readers a week thereafter, but it’s more than you’d get by persevering with the printed press for years before giving up on it. And these are readers with an international distribution: America, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand to list but a few of the countries the stats indicate Michael Graeme has reached. Some will even get in touch and let you know what they thought; most won’t, but the muse does not expect them to, and neither should we.

The internet opens up a whole new landscape for the writer with the right attitude. And the attitude is this: If writing means that much to you, if it’s coded into your DNA and you’d feel worthless and lost without it, then you cannot afford to pin your self-worth on the whims of conventional publishing – and of ever seeing your book in glossy covers on the shelves at Waterstones. In fact, this is a bit childish. Ask yourself instead if you could bear to give your work away, to expect nothing for it in return except the occasional thank you from a stranger on the other side of the world. It’s not easy, I know, to break the expectation you should be paid for your work, but if you can bring yourself to look beyond it, the rewards are immense. If you believe in your work, the money is always secondary any way.

In writing for nothing online, we still complete the contract with our muse, our genius, our daemon – whatever you want to call it – that we cast the words it gives us on the wind. The rest is up to fate, and always has been. And then it’s from within we are granted our fortune, our rest, our energy and of course our inspiration for the next project.

That’s writing, and it’s rewarding.

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Delete me

I have begun deleting old blog posts, posts that have not been read in years, thinking to eke back a little of my free gigabyte allowance, though at just over 3% used I’m hardly in danger of running out. It’s more the sense that old stuff just doesn’t matter, that the past is of no relevance to the online world at all. Our history, our heritage, ever since the avaricious eighties, is casually disposable at a click. The blog appeals only to the present moment of the written world, as the Instagram stream appeals to the visual, and neither being an accounting to be trawled through very deeply, for there is a sameness to things, and in maintaining the regular drumbeat of one’s online activity, it reveals itself merely as an existential radar ping: that the moment is now, ever persisting, and for a while at least here I am,… persisting in it.

The past has nothing to say, though paradoxically the past at one time was very much the present moment. But we reinvent ourselves with each new dawn, and the selves we were, we do not recognise or trust any more.

One of the posts I deleted was called “The Mowing Season Opens”, this being the mowing season of 2008, yet in all essential details no different to the mowing season of 2016, but what I wrote “then” lacks the indefinable essence of “now”. Like yesterday’s news I discount its relevance. It becomes old and dusty. No matter how true or authentic or sincere I felt it was at the time I wonder if it could really have happened that way anyway. And how can I trust it, now?

On Instagram posted a photograph of my car at the seaside. There was a moody sky, the colours blown by HDR fakery, and though there was undoubtedly a uniqueness to that moment, visually it is not significantly different to a photograph of the same thing I posted a couple of weeks before. Both photographs are of equal value, but we take the more recent to be of greater importance and all because it happened within the nearer reach of memory, and there is still the illusion we are less changed by time and therefore more trustworthy than the person who took the earlier picture, that indeed the earlier person no longer exists.

This is another symptom of the all but universal western paradigm of consumerism. We consume the present in all its recorded forms, digest it down into the bowels of the past, from where we assume there is no longer to be found any nourishment at all. And always there is the want, the craving for something new, freshly minted, something no one else has touched, or seen or heard before.

When I meditate, I possess an awareness of my self as a unique individual, yet I am not lost in the memory of past things, so it is not memory that defines me, more perhaps the mythical hero’s quest for wholeness, and the chance of discovering the secret key that will unlock the harmony I have sought all my life. But this is another symptom, that we are all pitching headlong into death, yet only subliminally aware the fabled harmony, true wisdom, enlightenment and all that wishy washy existential stuff, are only to be found on the other side of the Styx. We try to square this with the fact of our lives and the Egoic imperative to search for meaning in the details. We know it cannot be found in the past, for if it could it would already have been discovered, and since the future does not exist, all we have is the present moment, today’s post, today’s words, today’s fleeting capture of colour and light and shade.

But the significance of life lies not in its material forms, nor in any of its forms of thought, all of which we scurry to record as if in fear of the setting sun. Here, this is me, see me. See how I live, and think and what it is I love. But what we truly seek is not a thing at all. It is more an opening into formlessness, the blinking of an eye in the material world, and so subtle we shall always miss it. Yet it is reflective of eternity, rising sweet like the brush of an erotic love. It’s always there, always open to us, yet we cover it afresh each day with all the dross of what is new. Perhaps we think we have glimpsed it, in a word, in a turn of phrase, in a relationship, or in the picture of an old blue car at sunset, yet each in its turn sinks into the sedimentary layers of discarded experience. And there we let it lie, perhaps because we fear the truth – that we did not find it then, and shall not find it now.

The fact of our persistence is a mystery, the worthlessness of the shape of all our yesterdays an awkward fact that can do nothing but reinforce the need for humility in the face of infinity. This is not lest we should offend the gods by our arrogance, but more that we should not be driven mad by the paradox of our sense of self importance in the face of an overwhelming material irrelevance, that though we live we might so easily be deleted, and none would know we had ever been this way at all.

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