Exposing defeatist memes – a letter to George Swift

Dear George,

In answer to your query, when we write long-form fiction, interesting things emerge. Whether the story ever sees the light of day or not, it is an exploration of ideas, of events salient to our attention, and to our sense of being, at least at the time of writing. It clarifies what it is we think, also what we think we think, but in fact do not. Thus, it points the finger at our bullshit, and our vulnerability to the subversion of our thinking by invasive memes.

Memes sweep the culture, inculcate it, shape it. They cling to our coat-tails like briars, and we must be careful of them. Are these the things we really think? Or are they infections we have picked up and would be better seeking a cure for them? And is there really any difference?

In our current work in progress we have picked up a few threads familiar from previous writings: the secret state, neo-pagan spirituality, depth psychology, the politics of inequality. This is normal, a kind of narrative continuity. But you are right to point out a meme I have missed, and which might be harmful to us both.

As near as I can tell, it is the meme that says the man’s too big – the man being any authority we labour under, or against. The man deploys his authoritarian tool-box to crush dissent, he twists every instrument of the law to protect himself, he is made of Teflon, nothing sticks, and no lie is too big. Indeed, lies are no longer lies in contemporary political parlance; they have become tactical deceits. As for that most urgent issue of global warming, it’s too late to alter the course of it, and since we’re all doomed anyway, why bother even talking about it?

My last hero, Rick, turned his back on climate activism and politics, and went to live with a magical woman in the equivalent of a walled, Edenic garden. I wasn’t happy with him for doing that, but given the nature of the woman, I couldn’t entirely blame him. But it was also a return to the womb, which is hardly a healthy state of affairs. The world is where we live, not the womb. That we are born at all means we have a responsibility to shape the Zeitgeist. Heaven or Hell? The choice, as you say George, is ours.

In my defence, I might argue I wanted others to be angry with Rick as well, for who else can we rely upon to put the world to rights if not our heroes? And when the heroes quit the field in despair at our apathy, it should be a wake-up call for the rest of us that something is seriously wrong. It was, then, a small gesture, rooted in reverse psychology, and probably futile. But, you ask, is there not also a danger I have fallen for my own meme, and begun to believe in it? The man’s too big, the man’s too strong. Go contemplate your navel.

In “a lone tree falls” Rick is reborn as you, George. You are a former intelligence officer, a man of middling rank, intimate with international affairs, familiar with facts that are kept from the rest of us for reasons both fair and foul, familiar too with facts that have been spun to the inverse of their original meaning. But now you too find yourself in the path of the bulldozer, and the big man bearing down. Like Rick, the solution I am suggesting for you is defeatist. You’re knocking on in years, you see the future of the UK as a kleptocratic failed state, buffeted by an increasingly violent climate, spiralling levels of poverty, and an infrastructure always on the verge of collapse. But since – forgive me George – you’ll be dead before the worst of it hits, why worry? Keep your head down. Pour yourself another G+T and salute the sunset.

However, I note your objection, and agree all of this is convenient for the kleptocrats. One wonders if such “resistance is futile” memes can be seeded in the mire of social media to purposely sprout invasive blooms of defeatist nihilism. I also note that to be accepting of what we cannot change is also touted, in the emerging self-help literature, as being psychologically mature – this particular meme coming out of the man’s misappropriation of Buddhist mindfulness techniques. We are taught now to move on from contentious issues as a form of self-preservation. We should not interfere to change the madness, says the man, but employ age-old psycho-technologies to merely cope with it, and therefore remain obligingly docile and economically productive, as we spiral down the vortex of heat-death.

Why do I suggest that you, dear George, escape your responsibilities by making off with a muse half your age, disappear on a canal boat into the sub-cultural wonderland of England’s inland waterways? Is this not another metaphor of the womb, like Rick’s Edenic garden? Have I not worked out yet that the man holds the plug, and can drain any medium of true flight? There is no escaping responsibility.

But what, exactly, are our responsibilities to the world, and to the species? To whom, or to what are we held responsible, and to what standard? I hear your complaint, George, that, though we men of senior years feel no longer capable of action ourselves, we should at the very least take care we do not infect the young, for there is nothing worse for a young person’s confidence than seeing a defeated old man preaching the nihilist memes he learned at the knee of his masters and economic betters. Who then can blame the young for retreating into the virtual worlds of their computer games, drawing their curtains against the light, and subverting intelligent activism into vile shouting matches on Twitter?

Do not be defeatist, be determined? Do not be bitter, be better? Do not resign, be resilient? I hear you, George. My powers are limited, but I’ll see what I can do to preserve your honour and dignity.

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The writing life – creativity and how to handle it.

We write a piece for our blog, or we post a photograph to Instagram. Then we watch the stats, the likes, the comments, for a reaction. We notice certain things get more attention, so the temptation is to do more of those things, at the expense of others. At this point, so the argument goes, our creativity is hitched to whatever algorithm the hosting medium uses to drive traffic. We’re no longer being broadly creative. Our ego is jumping for the jelly beans, chasing the little dopamine hits those “likes” bestow. We’ve fallen into the machine, become a part of it. And, by their nature, machines cannot be creative.

But while we do have to be careful using the Internet as our medium, creativity also requires an audience, a sense of connection. It’s as if what the universe sees fit to manifest in one mind, it requires also that manifestation be communicated, even if the creator is never to know who the receiver is, or what their reaction will be or, least of all, if the creator is ever to be paid for their troubles. And for most creatives working today, the Internet is the only source of an audience – both real and imagined. So whilst it’s a dangerous piece of machinery, it also comes with blessings, but only if we approach it in the right frame of mind.

There are many more creative individuals than is generally appreciated. Indeed, it’s a fair bet there were always more writers equally as talented as those whose names history has recorded. They simply never rose to notice, nor even modest professional status, due to the paucity of paid outlets and publicity machines to give their work wings. The Internet has at least provided a platform for those formerly unknown artists, but just because we can now publish anything, it doesn’t mean we should. We should always ask ourselves first, is this a piece of genuine self-expression, or am I merely jumping for the jelly beans?

For the creator, finding their way with such a challenging and dangerous medium, we must be accepting that the road to widespread dissemination and financial independence is as tenuous as it always was. But the machinery will at the very least find us an audience, however small. If that irks us, our Ego has already tipped us into the machine, and we’re done for. It will eat our creativity and leave us hollow. But if we can be a little more accepting, if we can say that today we may be writing solely for a lone man on a train, passing through a far away city, scrolling his phone for connection and company, and whom we will likely never hear from, then we have achieved the right balance. We are not posting for “likes”. We are not merely gaming the machine. We have made peace with our craft, and can use it effectively as an uncontaminated channel for the Creative Imperative.

Creative people have no choice in what they do. They are searching for something, but don’t know what it looks like, and no one else can tell them. That makes creativity a very strange thing indeed. There is no tool, no computer algorithm to explain the shape of it. To even approach any understanding we have to entertain ideas from philosophy, psychology, and from spirituality. We have to summon up the ghost of metaphysics.

My own beliefs on this have circled ever closer to the perennial philosophy. This tells us the universe is essentially a mental phenomenon, something akin to a dream. Everything is imagined into being, and there is no material world as such. This is an oversimplification of course, and no doubt unintelligible to most rational beings. It’s possibly also wrong, but it’s the nearest I can come to making sense of things, and I’m happy with it, at least for now, as a working hypothesis.

There is nothing beyond the universe, because the universe is nothing and, in a curious paradoxical twist, that nothing exists in the first place is the only way anything can be brought into being at all. It’s just that we misinterpret the nature of “being”. Another way of looking at it is through the idealist lens of the philosophers who tell us we can never know the universe as it is in itself, only indirectly by its manifestations. And what that teaches us is the prime imperative of the Universe is to create, albeit through the medium of the idea of the world.

As self conscious beings we find ourselves at the pinnacle of the evolution of this creativity. We are the universe becoming aware of itself, seeking to explain itself. Our minds being in the image of the maker, as its various alters, we too are possessed by the imperative to create. The universe does not create us for popular approval. More, it seeks connection and beauty of expression, which it defines by degrees of emotional feedback, by “feeling”. It knows when it has hit upon something good, because it feels it in our hearts.

Of course, my more speculative forays into the world of fiction may be very wide of the mark. Who can say? All I have to go on is the journey of my own art, which seems to be leading me down the same metaphysical path as many who have gone before. We begin with the sense there is something bigger than ourselves, something “other”, something mysterious at the root of the world. We may have had a vision of it in our dreams and waking reveries and, through our art, we seek closer companionship with it. That’s the nature of the journey, and it can be a long journey. The destination, I’m told is the realization that after all, there is no “other”, that we and “it” are the same. What we have been seeking – through our art, our writing, our paintings, our photographs – we possessed all along because we were it. All of us.

If you’re feeling discouraged over your art, if you’re asking yourself why you bother, remember you are not the first. Even those who make a name for themselves circle back this way more times than they would care to admit. So don’t be afraid to make your mark. If you’re creatively inclined, it’s what you were made to do anyway, and it’s important to learn how to handle it. And we begin by not doing it for the jelly beans. We do it for that lone man on the train, passing through a far away city at night, scrolling his phone for connection, for company. You’ll never know who he is, or what it is that draws him to your words. It was just fated that way. So be there for him, and for no more reason than because he is you, and you are also him.

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Pattern and disorder

WordPress persuaded me to sign up to a “Personal” package for a couple of quid a month. They managed it by showing me the kinds of adverts they impose upon my readers. So, yes, I pay to spare you the pile cream, and the athletes’ foot stuff. You’re welcome. But now they’re trying to sell me a domain name because they say that’s the “professional” thing to have. It’s free for the first year of course, but a bit pricey thereafter. And then there’s the “pro package”, which is even more pricey, which enables me to charge money for,… well, something.

 

Surely they know I know they’re just trying to rinse us creative types, because,… well,… let’s face it, we have no other means of expression, do we? So thanks, WordPress, no thanks. I’m grateful to a degree, but I don’t write for the reasons you’re thinking. I do not aspire to be, or even to appear to be a “pro”.

 

I wrote a novel in 2019 called “the Inn at the edge of light”. It was my tenth, or eleventh or something. It was an intimate part of my life as I wrote it, a world I carved out of nothing, and to which I returned each night with pleasure and anticipation. The characters taught me things about my self and about the world I didn’t know I knew. I decided, out of bloody mindedness, to charge $0.99 for it on Smashwords, but it sold only four copies. Clearly it was meant to mean more to me than it was ever meant to mean to others.

 

The novel before that, Saving Grace, I gave away and it’s been downloaded nearly 2500 times. The moral? If you want to make money from your writing, it’s up to you, but don’t be surprised if you never make a bean and you end up looking back with nothing but regret at the wasted years. I don’t. My novels have calmed me, centred me, kept my sails to the wind. It’s something else then, the writing I mean,… whether you pretend to be a pro or not. Indeed, the reason we write at all is a mystery, given the path to A-List celebrity is so littered with apparent failure.

 

Much of life is chaotic, meaningless and cruel. I state the obvious, of course. Enlightenment accepts the world as such, then moves on. The way I see it, human beings became conscious of themselves for a reason. Ours is the task of balancing the chaos by carving out some sort of order from the melee, also, to the degree it’s possible – as small and fragile as we are – we were meant to find ways of transcending the violent cycle of dog-eat-dog nature. We can do this because above all we are exquisitely imaginative creatures.

 

In 1925, the psychologist Carl Jung went to Taos in New Mexico. There, the native Indians told him about their religion, and their belief that if they didn’t practice it, the sun would cease to rise. This makes no sense to a modern people dosed on rationalism. We tell ourselves a spiritual ritual can have no bearing on the real world. But I think it can, and it does, if not to the world as it is in itself, then to the way we see and touch, and feel it.

 

Writing’s like that too. It’s like walking along a beach and coming across bits of ideas washed up among the detritus on the shoreline. Individually they don’t make sense, but something about them attracts us – the shape of them, or the way they catch the light of imagination. We recognize them as pieces of something greater that once belonged together. They were a story, now broken apart by the chaos of the universe as it unfolded, and it’s our job to puzzle out a way of putting it back together, of restoring order and meaning. We don’t do this by thinking how much we can sell that idea for. We do it by joining it all back up and releasing it into the world for its own sake – even if it’s only us and our God who knows about it.

 

Of course, it’s hard to evade the side of one’s ego, the bit of us that craves reward or recognition, for such is an easy, if shallow, means of validating one’s presence in the world. I must exist, we say, and I must be right in what I think or say, because I’m known among men, and they pay me well. But this leaves little room for error. The literary life, the thinking life is an adventure. And all adventurers have wasted time following the trails that lead nowhere but right back to the beginning, or which have petered out in the waste of decades.

 

That way you go from hero to zero in a heartbeat. And, as your acolytes abandon you, and the critics sneer at the passing of yet another smart-arse, with it goes your fragile sense of meaning. But for the likes of the unknown scribbler it doesn’t matter if we get it wrong. It doesn’t matter if, now and then, we stick the tail on the donkey’s head. We have no reputation to risk, no grace from which to fall. And therefore, perhaps crucially, we do not fear to fail. Ego knows this, has learned its lesson over long years, and generally leaves me alone.

 

My stories are a trail of ideas. They have led me to places I could not have conceived of without the vehicle of imagination. Some have led me round in circles. Some have seduced me with their delights, but taught me nothing. Others have opened doors to places I have feared to go. The sun won’t cease to rise if I neglect to worship it in ritual prose. But in my own small way, and like everyone else, I face daily the chaos of the universe, and I pattern it with some semblance of order. We can do this in practical ways, like building a house to keep out the cold and the rain. Or, as writers and thinkers, we do it by beach-combing the shores of imagination and teasing back the threads of chaos into some sort of ordered meaning.

 

Thus, this little piece of pattern comes to you free of charge, free of adverts, but not I hope entirely free of purpose. Let it therefore raise some sparks in you, and set you off along the shoreline of your own imagination. And let’s see then what the tide brings in.

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If we lie enough

As I continue to work my way through “Winter on the Hill“, the same questions arise as with all my novels: for whom do I write?

I know I have a small readership, because you have written to me and said so, and I am indeed grateful for your company. But in the main, I am writing for myself, and since you’ve not paid any money for that novel, you must forgive my self-centred priorities as I filter what is essentially a personal reality, through the art of my fiction.

Since I began the novel, in December, all our lives have changed, yet many of the themes I thought I was exploring – things like freedom and it’s curtailment by powerful forces, also the nature and importance of “truth”, have all come into sharper focus in recent months, though for none of the reasons I originally imagined.

Our isolation, the mothballing of work, the closure of shops, pubs, restaurants, the mere fact we could no longer travel to the countryside, indeed everything Western materialist culture is based upon – all these things have been called into question, and with them the very meaning of our lives. This has had me turning to philosophy, to the great gabblers of “meaning”, at least from a secular perspective. Also, since philosophers speak a difficult language, I have turned to those who can best translate them into English for the rest of us.

My characters enable me to explore my actual life, through their fictional existence. The storm of my thoughts is filtered back to a calmer essence through their thoughts and their dialogues. Thus, their stories explain my self back to me. This is a long way from “writing for the market”, like the glib writing coaches used to tell us. But since I never could grasp “the market”, and no longer have a use for it, it matters not.

It’s a strange way of going about things, I know. My first novels, written when I was a lad, were of the usual kind. They were a hundred thousand words penned in the naive belief a publisher would fall over themselves to publish me. Then I would be able to show my mum my books on the shelves at WH Smith. That would have been a very fine thing indeed! But, but alas, not to be.

Publishing’s not the game I thought it was, which is difficult for a writer to come to terms with, especially one that can’t stop writing. Needless to say, there’s been a lot of growing up since then.

A novel is a big undertaking. The shorter ones are a year in the writing, the longer ones two or three. To inhabit the world of the story for so long is a very pleasurable and transformative thing. It is meaningful, but not in the same sense as the work can ever mean to anyone else. Others must take from my stories what they can, which is the by-product of fiction. The author is always king of his own domain.

Blogging is another important voice for a writer. Again, I know some of you do read me here because you write to tell me so, and again I am grateful for that. I note however that, although my number of “followers” is inching its way up, the actual reach of the blog – the hits – is declining in line with the general decline of blogging anyway. I calculate I am back now to where I was in 2012, which highlights the essentially personal nature of blogging. You don’t do it to become rich, or famous. You do it because not to do it leaves you bloated with words unspoken.

Writers then are merely channels for thought. We open ourselves, and our thoughts pour through us onto the page. Some of us have millions hanging on our words, others a few dozen, some none at all. It doesn’t really matter. “Reach”, “penetration”, these are words for the sellers of things, not writers.

But back to “Winter on the Hill”. It seems to have led me on a journey through the mass-trespasses and the working class movements of the 1930s, to the songs of Ewan McColl, to the apparent rout of resurgent leftist, collectivist politics in more recent times, to say nothing of that most startling of neo-con inventions: the post-truth world.

For explanations and solutions the novel has led me to the existentialist philosophers. I’m not enamoured of them ordinarily, but it’s hard to avoid their conclusions, and for which I quote Jordan Peterson, speaking towards the close of a lecture, delivered at the university of Toronto in 2016:

“If you lie you corrupt the system. If you lie enough, the system becomes so corrupt, it turns on you and becomes murderous. So, the price of freedom, as far as the existentialists are concerned – and this is buttressed by historical knowledge that they garnered during the 20th century – was that you have a moral obligation to speak the truth, to maintain the integrity of the state, as well as fostering your own psychological integration.”

So that’s what we do when we write; we tell the truth, at least in so far as we see it, as well as define the truth to our own satisfaction, as best we can. Others may not agree with our version of the truth, but if we can avoid deliberately lying, to ourselves and to others, it provides at least an honest starting point for debate. And if we are sincere in what we say, it contrasts sharply with the blizzard of deceit that now underpins the world of contemporary affairs that would deliberately deceive us as to the way things really are. As an individual voice it might not make much difference to the corruption of our futures. But such as the effort goes, and in my own small way, I lend my voice to it. If you write, and you’re sincere in what you say, you do the same.

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Just the way I write them.

Winter on the the Hill – Twenty Three

I know, the title Winter on the Hill is looking less appropriate as we head into early summer, but it’s metaphorical, right?

So:

The earth is rusty-red and dusty here, the sky a deep sepia tint, fading to the colour of straw where the sun has just gone behind the hills. There’s a pleasant warmth to the air, and a dryness. It’s coming out of the earth, quaking up from the rocks themselves as they give back to the heavens what the sun has poured into them all day. I’m sitting on the porch of a pioneer’s wooden cabin, out in the wilderness of Western Australia. We’re somewhere on the frontier, as it was I suppose towards the later nineteen twenties, and as near as I’ve imagined it at various points in my life.

News from home isn’t good. The vacuum of peace following the war to end all wars has been filled with the decimation of traditional industries and civil unrest on account of poverty. In America there’s been a market crash and stock brokers are leaping from the windows on Wall Street, though all this was as nothing compared with the hundred million worldwide who had already died from the H1N1 contagion, the so-called Spanish Flu.

I’m with Annie, the pair of us gazing at the afterglow of the sun. She came out on the SS Balranald in ’23, left her child with family in Ulverston, and she misses him deeply. He’ll come out when he’s older, just in time to get swept up in that second war, and sent out east – or rather west from here – to fight.

Charlie’s been dead since ’18 of course, but she still thinks of him, though by now she’s married anew, and carrying another man’s child – always something pragmatic, adventurous and uniquely admirable about Annie. And I suppose, though again I’m imagining all of this, what I admire in her, what marks her out for me is that she set the frontier of my matrilineal blood furthest from home, travelled as far as she could around the globe, planted her shovel in the dirt and said, this is where I’ll start again.

The world has seen such unimaginable upheaval, and no more so than in the first half of the twentieth century. Europe at least saw relative peace and prosperity after that, a period that coloured the aspirations of all, like me, who were born into the second half of that century. We never knew a world like Annie knew, and it’s hoodwinked us into thinking it’s impossible things could ever be like that again. I suppose ours being also the nuclear age, it gave us a certain bleakly arrogant confidence, that should such upheaval ever be visited upon our generation it would result in the earth being turned into a cinder, and would anybody really be so stupid?

Don’t answer that.

“I guess I’m dreaming all of this then, Annie?”

She nods, smiles tenderly. Her hair is dusty from a day tending the stock, which she describes as a sea of sheep, and her face, her cheeks, are different to my imagining, with their more natural pale Lancashire pallor burned red.

“I suppose so, Richard. But it’s lovely to see you, anyway.”

I’m not in the habit of dreaming of Annie, not like this, not so,… vividly. I know I tend to conjure her up in waking reveries, but that’s different. This is coming from the deeps, and there’s an easy pleasure in it, something comforting. I’m not saying this is anything more than it is, that I’m just dreaming, right? The thing is, I don’t know where I’m dreaming from, from what part of my life I have slept. Indeed, I can barely remember any of my life, yet still feel perfectly myself here, and complete, for all the lack of memory.

“I think I know what you’re trying to say to me,” I tell her. “But you were barely thirty when you came out here. I’m at the wrong end of my life, and anyway there’s nowhere like this now for ruined Brits to go to any more. All our bridges are burned. Our horizons have narrowed. Soon there won’t even be a Britain any more, just an England. And sixty million of us cooped up and screaming at each other.”

“Well, you don’t need to come all the way out here and tend sheep, Richard. All you need’s a bit of money to be comfortable. And you’ve got that. Do you think I would have made that decision if I’d your money?”

“But do I want to be comfortable? Is that all I’m good for now? Am I just another last man standing?”

“Well, no fun in prison either,” she says. “Or with your head bust open by a policeman’s billy-bat. Those are the times I remember too, and the times you’re running up against all over again, or so it seems to me, and God help you. But you’re in a position to ride it out.”

“True. And I’m too old for all that protesting anyway. I’m scared by it. And I don’t like being on a watch-list, same as any bloody murdering terrorist psychopath.”

“So what is it you want?”

“Just company, Annie. I want to be with someone who wants to be with me. Someone I can take care of. Protect.”

“Why protect?”

“I don’t know. Because in a way I was trying to protect others by my politics and my protests. By sticking it to the man on behalf of others.”

“And because you enjoyed it?”

“Yes, I’ll admit that. I did enjoy it.”

“So you led them to vote, and they voted for you to shove it up your arse. Fair enough. So maybe now you’re looking for something smaller and more docile to protect, like a hamster maybe? But have you thought what you need more than all of that Richard is someone who wants to protect you? Also, maybe you’re looking at things the wrong way. Sure events being what they are, it’s easy to say the world’s done for, but what about you? Are you done for? Inside I mean? Or after all the ups and downs of your life, could it be, do you think, that in spite of the way your thoughts are most naturally inclined these days, you’re actually on the cusp of a greatness of spirit like you’ve never known before?”

“Cusp of greatness? Doesn’t feel like that to me. Were you ever, do you think, on the cusp? Coming out here I mean?”

“Sure, why not? Can you imagine Blackburn in the nineteen twenties?”

“Seen pictures. Knew it best myself in the seventies. Time’s not improved it much.”

“Coming out here, Rick. I found myself, I think, or as near as a body could. You can do it too. You’ve got to see beyond events though. Events,… they’re just noise, like the clatter of a loom, it’s all incidental to the weave of the cloth. You see that, don’t you?”

“The cloth?”

“You, Richard. The warp and the weave of you.”

“You’re way ahead of me, Annie. You’re wasting your time looking over my shoulder. Me and my times, we’ve nothing to teach you.”

“Well, like I’m sure I’ve said before, you don’t get to my age and not pick up a thing or two. Nearly made it to ninety, I did. Outlived two husbands. Plus the times were, shall we say ‘interesting’. You tend to grow up fast when there’s a lot going on.”

“But you said the times, the details, they’re just noise.”

“Sure they are, which means in quiet times you can learn as much from the small things if you know how to look and how to read them. Me, I learned some lessons those six weeks crossing the world from Blackburn to Freemantle, say nothing of the next fifty out here. You’ll maybe learn as much just crossing over the threshold of a woman’s house. That can take you to a different continent, too, you know? All depends on what you do with it.”

__________________________________________________

This is going up on Wattpad, a chapter at a time. We’ll be done by Christmas, when it’s winter again. I’ve no idea how it will turn out, but I’m finding the ideas fascinating, also the fact that Coronavirus hijacked the story half-way through, without derailing it one bit. It’s just the way I write them.

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The writing life,… Smashwords, Amazon Free Ebooks and Wattpad

Some notes on my experience of the self-publishing scene.

There may be other distribution networks for independent authors out there, but so far as I can tell the above listed are the mainstays of the self-publishing world at the moment. Amazon and Smashwords allow authors to charge money for their books. Free e-books, obviously, doesn’t.

I never discuss Amazon much as a platform, other than to warn writers you’ll probably find your stories (like my Sea View Café) appearing on there as pirated versions. Yes Ethelyn Purvines, I mean you, you shameless little bastard! All independent authors are vulnerable in this regard and, though galling, there’s little point making a fuss about it. But neither do I wish to spend time promoting a platform where it’s hard for a reader to tell the difference if they’re paying money to a genuine author or a dubious doppelgänger. They seem to operate a strictly hands off policy at Amazon, so anyone can publish anything and get away with it, thus e-book piracy thrives. Use Amazon if you like, but I don’t and never will. If you find a book on there that looks like mine, it’s pirated. I also find it near impossible to get stuff like this taken down.

Smashwords on the other hand perform some basic checks on your uploaded work. Their formatting requirements can seem fussy at first but are not unreasonable, and the fact the author has to put some effort in does tend to discourage the pirates who’d rather not do any work beyond cut and paste. Unlike Amazon the Smashwords team also do random searches on snippets of text from your uploaded manuscripts to check you’re not merely ripping off someone else’s work. This level of diligence enables them to court distribution arrangements with other “premium” e-book sites like Apple’s iStore, Barnes and Noble and WH Smith. That said, although those big names do carry my books, I’ve never had a download from any of them, so they’re not worth bragging about.

Smashwords also allows a writer the flexibility to set their work as free, or to experiment with a range of price-points. If you make your books free, you can expect on average three or four downloads per day – more when a work is new. If you set a price, you won’t download as many. “The Inn at the Edge of Light” went up in December 2019, priced $0.99, and as of now has been downloaded four times, which is hardly a living, so don’t kid yourself, but all in all I do recommend Smashwords for its integrity and its service to self-publishing.

If you’re happy to give your books away, Free Ebooks have a much higher download rate, but sadly I note those titles I put up on Free Ebooks started appearing on Amazon in pirate versions. Ethelyn Purvines pirate version of my Sea View Café was lifted directly from Free Ebooks. I’ve now closed my account with them and had them pull all my books from their circulation lists. If you’re sensitive about the possibility of your work being stolen, I really can’t recommend them.

There is another distribution network called Wattpad but that’s a bit of a wilderness and I can’t recommend that either, not if you’re ambitious to find readers. I do post on there when drafting a new work, but for reasons that are more to do with setting the pace of writing a story, than for self-publishing it. For example, my current work in progress “Winter on the Hill” I’m posting on Wattpad at a rate of roughly one chapter per week. I find this deadline, though imaginary, adds a little energy to things. When the story’s complete, it’ll disappear and go to Smashwords.

Writers write for many reasons. For some it’s vanity, but they tend to last only so long as it takes for reality to kick in. Others write for their friends, others for themselves, others because it’s in their blood, and they have no choice. For critical acclaim and money you still need to find your way into conventional publishing with its distribution and marketing machinery. Without that, if the Booker prize is still your aim, you’re dead in the water.

Until someone comes up with a coveted prize for self-published e-book fiction, the literary talent willing to sit on a judging panel for free, and a sponsor willing to stump up some serious prize money, self-publishing’s always going to be for the outsiders who can’t get a look in any other way, and that means writing mostly for nothing.

Is writing for nothing worth it? Well, “Saving Grace” went up on Smashwords for free about a year ago and to date it’s been downloaded 2166 times, so plenty of people have read it and some have written back to tell me they enjoyed it. Am I pleased by that, even though it’s not made me a dime? Yes I am. By contrast just four people have downloaded “The Inn at the Edge of Light” for which I’m charging $0.99. Am I as pleased by that? Well, grateful as I am to those readers who took a punt, the money gained from self-publishing is clearly never going be sufficient incentive to write your next book is it?

But then writers write. If it doesn’t suit you, or it makes you unhappy, then don’t.

Be well.

Graeme out.

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How to write fiction

Well, that’s a bit arrogant, isn’t it? There’s a lot of fiction out there, good stuff too, by writers with big names, genius writers who’ve lived big lives and have something to say – had their work published by Penguin for heaven’s sake! So what advice do I think I can offer, me a denizen of this poor-man’s parallel medium, without embarrassing myself? Well, since it was a little voice inside me asking, I see no harm in having a go, and I suppose we start with the uniqueness of one’s own life and experience, one’s own nature, and one’s own view of the world as we encounter it. That’s got to be worth something right?

Sure, that’s worth the telling, because no matter who you meet along the way, and what you do or see, everyone and everything, every situation has something to teach you, if you’re prepared to listen, to observe. And I suppose that’s what writers do. They take the lived experience, and they distil it into its essence, something potent, something that says, yes, this means that and, though we aim at attaining sufficient impact to pull a reader up and make them think about their own lives, their own experience, the important thing for the writer is the “Aha” moment – that’s the landslide in the brain when, after hours pecking at the keyboard, the way opens and all becomes clear. Everything else – publishers, editors, readers – it’s all of piddling insignificance compared with that. And what that is is the development of writer’s own self.

Still sounds a bit arrogant? I suppose so, except arrogance is for youth, while old age has the excuse of its own experience.

The other important thing about writing fiction is the audience you’re aiming at. Here’s where I part company with those who want to know how to get published quick, how to get editors to like their stuff, because it beats me. You can spend a lifetime studying the market, reading every book ever written and trying to write just like that, and still not crack it – success, I mean. But though it can indeed be a long journey, the secret of your own success is when you finally tell yourself you don’t care. And you mean it.

I’ve written a lot of novels now and, except for a couple of the early ones I’ve not written them with an editor, a market, or indeed any kind of audience in mind. That said, they are written to an exacting standard, one essentially aimed only at pleasing my self, and by that I do literally mean my “self” in the Jungian sense of the word, and I’ve discovered he’s a pernickety old curmudgeon who won’t be sated by bluff and bluster. He wants to see the real deal, or as near as I can manage it, the unexpurgated vibe of life. It’s not that he doesn’t know what that is of course. What he wants is for me to recognize it, to reflect it back at me and so, through writing, I pick up a piece of myself from the mud of life’s lived disarray, shine it up a little and pop it back into place on the puzzle-board of my allotted time on earth.

No matter what your background – privileged or humble – life is big, complex, filled with paradox, love, hate, triumph and tragedy and then there’s the question: does it mean anything or not? And however you choose to answer, that question leads on to other questions, equally profound, paradoxical though I suppose, ultimately unknowable. Yet life, in all its wonder and absurdity, and possibly even its pointlessness, raises a tingle in the bones, and for a certain type of personality, it’s important to give creative expression to that tingle in some form, be it visual or written.

In writing fiction we get to be someone else, born into someone else’s shoes, and we get to ask: if this happened, then what would I do? In this situation, in this company of people, if so-and-so said this, what would I say? What would be the right thing? The wrong thing. What would be merely expedient, and what would that say about me, about life?

This kind of writing, internal, self-referential, is a high wire act, maintaining a balance between self-indulgence and a more sincere existential exploration. If we get the balance right, we achieve a mythic resonance in our work, and others are drawn by it, sufficient to follow us at least some distance. Get it wrong and, well,… we just make a fool of ourselves. But even there all art has to be allowed its freedom to fail. No sense staring at the blank page afraid to make a mark lest we do not achieve a masterpiece at the first go and everyone laughs at us. Indeed, I suppose that’s the most valuable of all the lessons about how to write fiction, or anything else for that matter,…

And I mean, to hell with it:

Just do it.

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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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Shameless Self Promotion

It was a cold, rainy morning in town this morning – the sort of day that seems to stall around dawn and gets no lighter. Traffic was jittery, the carparks twitchy with panicky shoppers anxious to get that last space so they could go buy their Christmas tat. I only wanted breakfast, almost fell foul of the season of good-will, but managed to find a slot on the edge of town, then shouldered the rain and headed back in to the greasy spoon.

The town is impoverished, has been since the crash, and getting steadily worse – always looks worse at this time of year though, the people poor and mainly elderly, the doorways camped by homeless looking wretched. I don’t suppose it’ll get any better than this now, but on the upside there was a guy in a giraffe suit dancing for charity. It was pouring rain, and he was a big yellow smile, the brightest light by far and a gesture of jolly defiance. What a star!

I bought a 0.7 mm Staedtler propelling pencil for £6.99 to replace the one I keep losing – a good piece of kit. Same price on Ebay so nothing to be gained there, plus it’s good to get out, even on a bad day, look around, even if it’s only to see what the latest storm of economy and season has done to my town. And yes, I know, shopping on Ebay doesn’t help matters. Greenwoods is the latest casualty – there since 1880-something, now abandoned and looking almost derelict. The landlords are crippling these businesses. I wonder where they do their shopping?

The Charity bookshop that inspired my latest novel was also closed – insufficient volunteers to man it on Saturdays now. I was going to put my name forward when I retired – quite fancied it actually, sitting there in tweed jacket and brogues, an ageing hipster, preserving for my town that last flicker of bookish vibe. Looks like I’m too late though. Damn.

And speaking of that novel, brings me to the shameless self promotion bit. Home from town I shut the weather out,  cosied up with coffee and hit the laptop. Saving Grace, as it’s now calling itself, went up on Smashwords and Free Ebooks this afternoon. I’ve enjoyed the ride, like I always do, and this last bit always leaves me with mixed feelings. It’s like putting it in a bottle and tossing it into the sea. You never know where the currents will take it.

I’ve been serialising it on Wattpad for a while now, but it’s not had much of a following. Those of you who have read and commented and queried my errors, (you know who you are) I thank you. Time to take a break from the long form now though while the next one gestates.

In the pecking order of Austerity, otherwise known in older parlance as “class war” I’m still in the fortunate position of relative security and money to spend on fripperies and without killing myself working three jobs. Those this morning though, staring out at a thousand yards of misery from those derelict shop doorways, are still bearing the brunt of it.

They give me pause – that it’s so commonplace even in the smaller market towns these days is telling me there’s worse to come, and no one to do anything about it. And that quid you toss into the begging bowl, or that pasty and a brew you press into shivering, mittened hands might get the poor bastard through until tomorrow. But what then?

And what’s that got to do with Saving Grace you ask? Well, pretty much everything, but you’ll need to read it to find out. Just click the book cover in the margin on the right. Best if you’re reading this on your smartphone – you’ll need an ebook reader app like Aldiko or Moonreader too.

All my stuff is free.

 

 

 

 

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Old Hat

Writing stories is old hat. They’re like a wind-up Swiss Watch; beautiful, intricate and hard to make, and no one wants them any more. Sure, you can still get them, but most mass market tickers are of the quartz variety. Technology has moved on. Like cut-throat razors, there’s no need for them any more and anyone still using them is seriously retro. In the same way, written stories died with the age of Television, about the time I was born, which makes it somewhat ironic I should have spent so much time writing them. I collect wind-up watches too. Speaks volumes.

Seems like I was born too late.

In the UK it died early. America hung on for a bit. Indeed, over there, it was still possible to sell fiction, even really poor fiction, well into the seventies. But now, like us, they don’t read stuff any more. It’s all visual drama, and most of it’s so up itself the only thing it teaches us is the art of celebrity.

In the UK you had a few women’s magazines and you had the People’s Friend. They’re still around but they weren’t an easy genre to figure out. I did try, but they get thousands of stories a week showered on them and they have to pick just one or two. Even if you’ve got what it takes it’s still a lottery. No room for also-rans. There were some London literary rags as well, I recall, still are, but you’ve only to read one to see they’re seriously off the strangeness scale, that only very clever people could fathom, so I never wasted stamps on them.

For Science Fiction and Speculative you had Interzone and The Third Alternative. They supported a lot of big names back in the day and were great magazines to read, with engaging and intelligent fiction, but I guess like the rest, it was just too competitive, again no room for second best with those boys. And if you don’t know your cyberpunk from your whatsamacallit, then seriously, don’t bother, you’ll just look like a fool.

I know I did.

I had some luck with Ireland’s Own, a Wexford based publication, quite old fashioned really, like something out of the fifties. I wrote traditional Irish tales for them, which was weird because I’ve never been to Ireland, and they say you should always write what you know, but they didn’t seem to mind that. They had about twenty stories off me, the sum total of my published opus, in fact, and all of them lost to obscurity now. I’ve published nothing there in ages because the market dried me up completely. And what I really wanted anyway was to publish longer stories – novels and such – the pursuit of which finally wised me up to the whole damned publishing business altogether.

I’m reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut at the moment – most recently a book called Timequake, published in ’97, part weird, zany fiction, also part autobiography, in which he was already lamenting the end of the era of pop fiction, the one he grew up in, the one that enabled him to quit his job at General Electric to write full time and make a decent living at it, just like I wanted to do. But Vonnegut was a generation ahead of me and had already concluded it was over at the same time I was still trying to doggedly break in. He was a real writer’s writer, Kurt Vonnegut, God rest him.

When I say writing stories is old hat, I don’t mean they’re no longer relevant or enjoyable, it’s just that fewer people bother with them, that’s all. Stories used to pass the time at a time when we all seemed to have more time, when the evenings after work seemed longer and there was time to just – I don’t know – just be. Nowadays by the time we’ve finished commuting and had our tea, it’s time for bed and work again. So it’s all too easy to pick up your phone in the bits of time that are left and play Candy Crush than it is to immerse yourself in a work of fiction.

Me? Guilty as charged your honour. I can lose myself for hours in Survivalcraft instead of reading or writing. See pic – that’s me! But it doesn’t exactly teach you anything of use outside the game. I’ve built an entire world in it. There are farms and mines and homesteads, and remote islands, all interlinked by tunnels, so I can get about without running the gauntlet of hungry wild animals. Years and years it’s taken me, just tunnelling away, piling up the earth to build more farmsteads, plant more crops, round-up cows. I’ve only to drop my phone and it’s all gone. But it doesn’t matter. It’s just an escape, like doing Soduku.

Stories are an escape too, yes, but they are so much more than that. In the main they present an experience as if it were shared. The writer beckons you in, and says come along with me for a bit. And along you go, finding yourself on a journey peopled by characters as real as any you’re likely to meet in real life. And they talk to you, show you things. They ask you: what do you think of this? You always come away from a story, a good story, with your soul changed in some way – a little deeper, a little wiser.

That’s the way I see it anyway.

For a time, some time post 2008, when our devices became portable and powerful, they seemed the perfect medium for written stories to migrate to, and that’s pretty much where I’ve been as an amateur hack since then, basically giving stuff away, and why not? given that most publications don’t even pay for it now anyway, what’s there to lose? But I’m not so sure about this any more. All I seem to be doing is creating reams of content for others to pepper with their advertising, or to content scrape, or simply bare-faced pirate, all of them like parasites picking at my brains. And then we’ve had the scandals of election meddling through nefarious psychological means, served out of our devices and pretty soon you come to realise our devices are not so much full of wonder any more, as full of shit. Apologies for the “S” word – Vonnegut is a bad influence, but you’ve got to love him.

So is it time we set our devices aside? Sure, if you go searching online you might find some decent stories, like flowers growing on a dung hill, but you’re not going to manage it without getting a lot of muck on your wellies too. We’d all be better going for a walk, a real walk, in the sunshine because it cheers you up, you know? Or go for a coffee and spot how many people still have their heads stuck in their phones and up their asses. Best of all buy a paper book from a charity shop, then sit down somewhere comfy and read, like we did in the old days.

I’m coming up on retirement soon, thinking to duck out early while I’ve still got breath in me for climbing a few more hills. I’ll have all the time in the world to read and to write then, but I’ll probably just sitting flicking listlessly on my phone like everybody else, or ordering tat off Ebay, or playing Survivalcraft. Then I’ll finally have become one more zombie, good as gold, incapable of stringing two coherent thoughts, or words, together.

I hope that isn’t true, but fiction is definitely niche these days, reading it and, I suppose, writing it too. Like Dandelion and Burdock pop, it conjures up memories of long ago. But, like those childhood summers, golden age of the written word isn’t coming back and, like climate-change and Neo-con economics, it’s probably too late to do anything about it. But that’s fine, because it’s still possible to find pleasure in really small things. And it’s just as well, because small things is all we’ve ever really had, or needed in the first place.

So,.. sun’s coming up. Let’s saddle up.

And ride!

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