more words make more tales . . . make for short story sales

 

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog with the news that I have a new short story out. It’s partly for want of not trying to get anything in print, and it’s partly for trying and failing to get anything in print. If you’ve read the last blog post here, then you’ll know my physical and mental resources have been deployed elsewhere for quite a while. I hadn’t really written any new fiction for quite a while. And after my dad died, I didn’t feel much of an urge to either.

 

But slowly something began to come back to me, a scribbled piece of flash fiction here, and attempt at a longer effort there. I tried to finish a short story I’d begun before my parents got to the stage where they needed my care, and it ballooned and (at last glance) was up to 57,000 words and no end in sight. Or even the suggestion of an ending. Or where it might lead to get to that ending.

 

I wanted to finish something.

 

So last November, I think it was, I tried my luck at writing short fiction that wasn’t flash fiction again. And came out with a couple of stories a week for a month. They poured out of me, as if they’d been waiting all that time for me to unplug the dam.

 

Well, fair enough. It was a relief to write them. But were they any good? I’d no real confidence in myself to judge them any more. Assuming I’d ever had any skill in judging my own stuff. I sent them off to a couple of friends, who assured me I wasn’t running around with the back of my trousers torn off, showing my nether regions to any who had the misfortune to look up on them.

 

So I subbed a few of the tales, to see what would happen.

 

And got some good news pretty quickly. Two of the tales were accepted for print by Flame Tree Press, a company that makes really handsome books and publishes the novels of Ramsey Campbell, a writer I’ve been reading since I was about twelve years old. And it quickly got better when I saw the contents of one of the collections I’m to be included in - part of their Gothic Fantasy range, a book called WERE-WOLF. My story “When Sleeping Wolves Lie” is going to appear in a book containing one of the great man’s tales. That alone makes me smile and think I’ve done enough to satisfy myself for quite a while.

 

The other tale I have in a Flame Tree book, incidentally, is a piece focusing on the Norse Trickster God, Loki, and will be in their forthcoming LOKI anthology, as part of their Myths, Gods & Immortals range.

I’ll let you know when the books come out. Forgive me, but a boy has to plug his wares now and again.

 

I’ve another couple of pieces that have been taken this year as well, but as the publishers haven’t announced them as yet it’s probably for the best if I employ a measure of caution and don‘t say what they are just yet. But when I can, I’ll be sure to mention them.It’s nice to be back writing. 

 

It’s nice to know I can, sort of, do this again.

 

after that, this

I’d just come off the back of a big book that I was then calling HEARTSTONES TO ALAEDORNIA. It was a fantasy novel, and it was complicated, and it had hurt my head to write. The first draft was just over 200,000 words long and if it was ever going to look like something anyone would want to read – including me – I was going to have to do a lot of work on it. It was a messy first draft, but okay, at least it was something to work on, and something to work on is better than nothing.

Over the next year, as I continued to write new short stories, I did do that work. I found the thread of the narrative and pulled it tight, pared away the excess (including the TO ALAEDORNIA in the title), and got the book down to a leaner 136,000 words. I polished it. Buffed it up. Then I started to send it out.

During the time HEARTSTONES was collecting rejections, I started on a new book. After all, that’s what you do if you write, isn’t it?

(I mention this because I have met a few people who write their first book and then sit on their hands while they send it off to agents and publishers – and they wait, and they wait, and they wait. Uhm . . . No. Don’t do that. Write the next thing you have to write while the first book is going out. After all, if the first people who see it accept it, you’ll be expected to write another one anyway. So why waste your time? Get on with it. Write.)

HEARTSTONES was a pretty serious piece of work. In my mind, at least, it tried to do all the things that I thought a good book that aspires to be more than disposable entertainment should do. It had themes and subtext, a challenging narrative, a complicated set of characters who grew and changed over the course of the book, and a resolution that felt like it had always meant to be that way. It was technically challenging to write, in that it was really only a one-character point-of-view piece but took place over different times in the characters’ lives and in some unusual locations. But it was a pretty satisfying experience for me, and I thought I had done a good thing in making it, even if it wasn’t perfect. Because, after all, no book is perfect, however hard the writer works on it. I was probably as pleased with it as I could be. Somewhere along the way the book had become the book it wanted to be and not the book I had wished it had been, and that is fair enough and something I have learned to accept when it comes to writing books. They often know what they want to be more than the writer knows.

But . . .

There was one thing I kept coming back to, though, when I thought about the book. That fantasy novel, it was pretty serious, I kept thinking. It was quite grim in places and pulled very few punches. There weren’t many moments of levity in it.

For my own sake as much as anyone who might read it, I decided the next book should be a little lighter. The tone should be easier, even if darkness crept in – which, seeing as I was writing it, I suspected it would.

I didn’t have a title or a plot. I had vague ideas about a couple of characters, including one of their names: Rusby Once. The location for the first part of the book would be the country lanes in which I used to play as I’d grown up, and I wanted to use an old folly in the area as the basis for something, some plot development, some important part of the narrative. That’s about all I knew. Apart from one other thing: I knew I wanted the prose to set up the way the book might come across. I like long sentences, and have to fight with myself not to go on and on when I write. So, with that in mind, I decided to do something a little more punchy than usual. Shorter sentences, shorter book, I was probably thinking. And more dialogue to convey ideas. Make it more easily accessible than HEARTSTONES.

I had an opening line, and like most of the lines that I write, I had little idea where it had come from. But I went with it anyway, deciding to follow where it led to. Here’s what I had for the opening:

Weird 24.

That’s all. But it felt right. I carried on from there, trying to keep things sharp like that, while allowing room for the characters to introduce themselves. In relatively quick time they did, and when the characters come alive then some sort of plot inevitably follows. After a few months that stretched to close to a year (with a few months’ break in the middle thanks to pesky old real life interfering in the process) I had a first draft – what I like to call the story draft – of about 90,000 words and I thought it hung together pretty well and had some nice light moments in it, and yes, some dark ones too.

My girlfriend read the book, while I went back to sorting out what was going on with HEARTSTONES (after a few rejections I did yet more work on it to make it a little shinier, a little more polished, so I could submit it to a few other places). Anyway, the good news was she liked it. She made a really good suggestion, too. That I should up the age of the leads. In the first draft they were 11 and 12. She thought that, by beefing things up a little, the book would be better served with them as older teenagers, and the moments of darkness wouldn’t be traumatic to any younger audience that the book might naturally have picked up with protagonists of more tender years. I thought about this and realised she was quite right, so Gideon Sawyer became 16 years old and Rusby Once fast-forwarded through a few summers at the flick of a pen to become 17.

In the meantime, as HEARTSTONES continued to pick up rejections, and on the back of finishing the first draft of the new lighter fantasy, which at this point I was calling “the Rusby Once book”, I had a sudden window of good health and energy and, in a fit of pique at the fantasy novel getting rejected so sorely and surely, I wrote what would become my first published book, HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF. It was written at break-neck speed and first drafted in 10 days, and like the Rusby Once book, had some lighter moments in it. It was about 56,000 words long. It was accepted on first submission, on condition I made some revisions. So I did, and it went through the all the usual steps of being professionally edited and proofed and published without a hiccup. It even picked up a couple of good notices when it came out. If there’s a moral to this, or a life lesson to take in and abide by, then I don’t know what it is.

Baffled but pleased, I went back to sending out the big fantasy, and started on the rewrite of the Rusby Once book, wondering if it and HEARTSTONES would find a publisher as easily as HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF had done. All I was sure of was that I could breathe out now, that I was finally someone who’d had a book professionally published. The rest would happen as it would. Or wouldn’t. But for a working-class kid sending out his own untutored prose, I thought I had done well.

As it happened, HEARTSTONES found a publisher, and then wasn’t published. Because of me. But that’s another story. And I found a better title than “the Rusby Once book” for the Rusby Once book. I decided to call it A CLASH OF ICHOR AND BLOOD and I sent it out to the few agents who’d made nice noises about my earlier books. They made more nice noises but that was about as far as it went. I didn’t have the heart to go through the dreary task of hunting out new agents only to be turned down by them. It felt too depressing and time-consuming. (After all, if you keep repeating the same actions you’re going to get the same results, and I really didn't want the same results.) So I decided to do something different with A CLASH OF ICHOR AND BLOOD.

In future posts we’ll get on to what I’m doing, have a guess at why things have turned out as they have, the good and the bad and the ugly, and what I’m doing about it.

one of these things first

Some things take longer than you expect them to take. Just under three years ago I started work on what I hoped would turn out to be a new book. I knew my time for this project would be limited, and that the book would have to be written in sporadic bursts that might, if I was lucky, amount to a month here and a month there.

By that, I mean time that was wholeheartedly and selfishly mine, during which I could commit to being in the same place, getting up at roughly the same hour, and getting the space – physically and in my head – without too many outside disturbances, to put the work in on the book. Concentration and effort, in other words. Focus.

It hasn’t been easy. And it’s no one’s fault. It’s just the way that things have fallen. You can read as many self-help books as you like, telling you all about visualisation and believing in something enough that it will happen – these same books tend to have a no refund policy and are apt to tell you that if something doesn’t work out then it’s because you haven’t been trying hard enough and didn’t really want it in the first place – but the real truth is what the Ancients called Fate has a hand in our lives. We don’t get to decide if we’re struck by a particular illness (or a car as we walk down the street, for that matter) or if and when our loved ones need our help, or even when the computer you’re writing on is going to explode and you can’t afford a replacement. These things are flung at us by whatever Gods we may or not believe in. What I have found is that these things are not usually conducive to writing a book.

The book I’ve been working on, then, was written in patches, and was a dog to get back into after every time I was forced to break away from it.

But, persistence . . . you know?

I did get back into it, each time, even if it did take colossal reserves to do that, and I found myself enjoying it, getting back into the lives of these people I’d come to know. It was hard work, but fulfilling in many ways.

Today, coming off the back of a particularly nasty bout of the flu, I finally got to the end of the first draft of a book that, really, should not have taken anywhere near this long to write. I’ve written more words in shorter spans of time in the past, that’s for sure. But I’ve also been healthier and had, in some ways, fewer demands on me when I’ve been writing those other words.

Anyway. This is where I stand now. I have a working title – THE CHURCH OF WOLVES – and a fair few words to work with. 201,913 of them if MS Word’s word count is to be believed. And that’s good, because it’s easier to fix 200,000 words that are in the wrong order but on a page than it is to have to start from scratch and put them on a page and then fix them . . .

Right now the book feels disjointed, in need of quite a lot of work. It will – the Fates allowing – get that work from me. But not for a while. I need some distance from it – so I can come back and see it with clearer eyes. I’ve already made a few notes about things I need to fix, include, go back and retrofit into the manuscript. So I’m not without a clue as to what needs to happen. It’s not simply a case of writing an instruction to myself like “make this better”, tempting though that is. And it’s a first draft, and first drafts are allowed to be a bit saggy in places and underdeveloped in others. The characters’ names can change throughout as well. They’re pretty fluid things, first drafts.

I tend to think of my first drafts as “story drafts.” It’s where I sit and put words on the page and find out who the characters are and what happens to them and what happens because of them. And if I’m lucky I also learn why it happens and why they’ve done what they’ve done. Some sort of plot resolves itself.

Thus, a story draft.

I don’t pre-plot. I’m not one of those writers who sits down with a flow chart and copious notes all neatly lined up to tick off as I go. If I’m feeling a little bit professional, I might jot a note down on a stray piece of paper that I inevitably lose somewhere down the line. Otherwise, it’s follow the first sentence and see where it leads. I might have a theme in mind – past themes in my books have been identity and duty and doors – or a certain mood I’m hoping to achieve through the book, say awe or fear. Or a question I want to explore, a sort of grand What If . . . or What Does It All Mean? But aside from that, it’s pretty much all that I have. As far as plots go, I never really seem to come across them; at least, not before I set off on the journey of the first draft.

And it is a journey. To me writing a book is like heading out on an expedition. I’ll set off into what I think is a trackless forest armed with a candle and a couple of characters and beat through the bushes until it looks like we know where we’re going. The first draft is learning what happens in the forest, and how we get to the other end of it. Subsequent drafts are about illuminating the path the characters have taken, enjoying the scenery, and making sure everyone’s feet land where they ought to. By the time I get to the final draft, before the endless rounds of polishing and buffing up take place, then that initial course through the forest should look like it was always going to lead to where it leads, an inevitable track to an almost predetermined destination – despite all the swings and turns it makes along the way.

So. Where am I now? I’ve just got through to the other end of the forest.

I’ll go back. I’ll see more. The characters’ voices won’t be as difficult to hear or their needs and desires as obscure or as distorted as they seemed when they first acted how they did. I know who they are, now. I’ve been on a journey with them.

Next time I come back to this book I get to shine a light on them, to make things as clear as glass. And I’ll know what lies ahead of us as we go in to the dark woods, and what we’ll find there. I know the darkness, and want to make sure you get an idea of it too. In time, we’ll see if I can manage that.

generosity, encouragement, and dreams and those who would have you avoid them

I read something on Twitter the other week that left the proverbial sour taste in my mouth. It wasn’t a tweet from someone I follow. I saw it because it had been retweeted by a writer I’ve normally a lot of time for, presumably because this writer approved of its message. Well, what struck me about this particularly sour missive was that it wasn’t particularly generous, or all that necessary.

(Of course, you could argue that there are very few tweets on Twitter that are necessary, and I couldn’t say you’re wrong.)

This tweet stuck with me because I’d just been reading Shadow Show, a collection of short stories written in honour of and as homage to Ray Bradbury. The collection carries story notes and thoughts about Bradbury by each contributor. What struck me was how generous Bradbury had been to those writers in the collection who had written to him or encountered him at some point in their lives. He was enthusiastic, he encouraged them to follow their dreams and to write, write, write. He warned against the nay-sayers, asking who were they to deny you your dream.

A good number of contributors to that collection say they became writers through Ray Bradbury and his example.

By contrast, the tweet I read was less than encouraging to new writers. I won’t reproduce it here, because I don’t particularly want to bring that tweeter any grief. (And hey, a tweet can be written in a thoughtless moment and regretted later.) But the tweet basically said that people who give their fiction away for free are doing so because it’s not good enough and no one would buy it.

That was the general gist of it.

Doesn’t seem so cruel, put like that, and maybe I was over-reacting when I saw it.

But underlying the tweet was the implication that such people should not be writing in the first place, let alone trying to build a dream from the ground up, in the face of whatever shifting plate tectonics and searing hurricanes make up their world.

There are, alas, plenty of people who believe – or fear – that their success comes at the expense of someone else’s. They’re probably very insecure about their position in one way or another, about their talent and all the rest. They’re quick to pull ladders up behind them, or take an axe to the rungs they’ve just climbed. To discourage others, they’ll come up with things like “They say everyone has a novel in them – and in most cases that’s where it should stay,” and sprout such phrases often and at every opportunity.

By contrast there are people like Ray Bradbury, who says do it, write, give your work to the world. Don’t let others deny you your dream.

I’ve given stories away for the payment of a contributor’s copy of the magazine in which I’ve appeared. Normally such magazines have been small-press publications. It was useful to see my work in print, to examine a tale that has been published and to see what worked and what didn’t. Often, but not always, the stories I gave away received good write-ups and some were cited as notable tales in Year’s Best summaries.

I’ve also been paid for my fiction in the traditional manner, and that certainly feels nicer. But the truth is that often the margin of quality between a piece that’s been bought for a couple hundred dollars and a piece that’s going to result in a contributor copy is negligible, if noticeable at all. Often it’s simply a question of market forces and the commercial viability of the magazine/anthology. If people buy the publication and enough of a market for the kind of fiction it’s publishing exists, then there’ll be money in it.

If not, then you’ll be doing it for the love of it. You could make yourself feel better about that by calling yourself an artist. But I wouldn’t, if I were you. You’ll just sound like an arsehole.

Better to keep writing, keep looking for places that’ll take your work, better to keep dreaming.

And you know, damn it, if when everyone in the world has said no to you about your story or your book, then do as Lee Child suggested in a radio interview with Jon Gaunt some years ago on talkSport radio here in the UK. Print it up yourself, give it away to friends as a Christmas present, put a new shelf up in the living room and fill it with your book, so that everyone who visits can see it. Because it was your dream, and you’ve done the work, and made it real. It’s yours to be proud of.

And all those who said you couldn’t do it, that you shouldn’t be doing it . . . well, you know, fuck em.

Listen to Ray Bradbury instead.

(As an aside, when I made my first sale overseas, I’d wondered how payment would work. This was in the days before the prevalence of PayPal and electronic banking. The answer came by way of a flush of ten dollar bills stuffed in my contributor copies coming through the post. This is, I’ve since learned, not the usual way these things are done, and it hasn’t happened to me since!)

And here’s a little STOP THE PRESSES for you.

The person who retweeted the message that inspired (or negatively inspired) this post is at the moment offering a book for free in a promotional offer.

Funny old world, isn’t it?

experiments in ebooks (ii)

So having embarked upon the self-publishing route via, in this case at least, Amazon Kindle, you’ve come up with something of a reasonable length for people to download onto their eReader.

But it’s too soon to go ahead and throw caution aside and wait expectantly for your sales to shoot up and hit the million mark just yet.

First of all we’ve got to deal with the most important bit of all. Making sure the writing’s as good as it can be.

More than any other aspect of self-publishing, this is the part I’m most concerned about. Before my book HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF was published, it was read by an editor and copy-editor, proofed and screened by eyes other than my own. (Though I did look over it too.) All with a view to catching mistakes and fixing them. There’s a simple rule: the more people there are looking at your book to make it better, the better your book’s going to be. And when the people looking at your book are professionals, that counts twice.

Much as it will be a help to have trusted friends look over your manuscript, the chances are they’re not professionals. They’re almost certainly not getting any money for doing it for you, are they? But it doesn’t make their comments invalid. You may not like what they have to say, but they’ve flagged things for a reason.

Listen to them, take on board what they say. Then be even harder on the work yourself.

Revise and revise it until you’re sick of the sight of it, so that you can’t even open the document file without feeling sick. I want you to think that the gears in your head are grinding to a halt because you’re working so hard on it. I want you to think you're having a seizure.

And then when you’ve done that, here’s what I want you to do.

Do it once more.

Do it line by line. Do it word by word. And don’t forget that you need a good overview of what’s going on, too. Otherwise you can lose sight of the bigger picture and wind up with a bunch of perfectly composed sentences that don’t work when you put them together.

Here’s the opening to the rough first draft of “What I Wouldn’t Give.”

When I first set eyes on Chrissie Rhodes I thought she was the kind of girl who took the weather with her. She had the most gorgeous blue eyes, hair the soft yellow of glorious honey, and a complexion that would make the marble statues in the Vatican look flawed. Standing under a long green awning outside an expensive hotel, she was ducking out of the rain as the pavements stained dark and people vanished into the stores for cover. The kind of shot you’d expect to see of a lonely heroine at the beginning of a romantic movie.

It was raining with a vengeance but for a long gliding sail of sunlight that lit the pavement and the awning around her, and I didn’t think twice about pulling over and stopping, even though I knew I’d pay hell trying to get back into traffic and much more if she were a cop in part of a sting operation. She came out from under her shelter, holding a large purse over her head to stop from getting soaked by the big spattering drops and she carried something long and thin that reminded me of an art folder in a flapping white plastic bag with her other hand.

I’d no idea, other than that it sounded like a Crowded House song, what that first line was about. As the story progressed and I learned more about Chrissie and her relationship to the protagonist – a private hire cab driver with a desperately ill son – I was able to go back and fix the line, give it some resonance with what was to follow. Here's what I changed it to:

When I first set eyes on Chrissie Rhodes, I thought she was the kind of girl who could make the heavens sing.

She was a piece of work, all right, with strong blue eyes, soft yellow hair, straight white teeth, and one of those tanned complexions you see airbrushed to perfection on the covers of supermarket magazines.

Standing under a long, green awning outside an expensive hotel in the middle of the city of York, she’d ducked out of the rain just as the pavements began to stain and people vanished into the stores for cover. Ancient architecture darkened around her and the past whirled about on leathery wings. It was the kind of shot you’d expect to see at the beginning of a romantic movie.

A gliding sail of sunlight lit her amidst the old stonework, and I didn’t think twice about pulling over and stopping, even though I’d pay hell trying to get back into traffic. It was all instinct on my part, even then.

Acting without thinking. Being lured on by some desire I wasn’t prepared to admit to.

As soon as it arrived, the sunlight passed over her, leaving her suddenly small and lost, and the deluge began. Thick heavy rain accompanied by rumblings of thunder.

The rest of the revision is pretty much self-explanatory. It was about making it neater, giving a sense of place and upping the pace. Take out the gruesome clichés and replace them with some prettier ones. (Though of course, ideally, we don’t have clichés at all.) It’s not literature as we know it, Jim, but it’s the best I could do with what I had.

This line here

Acting without thinking. Being lured on by some desire I wasn’t prepared to admit to.

could do with an explanatory note. Purists might argue that it would be better presented as

Acting without thinking; being lured on by some desire to which I wasn’t prepared to admit.

And while that’s as maybe, it’s always worth remembering Elmore Leonard’s Golden Rule. If something reads like writing, rewrite it so that it doesn’t.

Our protagonist is speaking to us in the first person. We’ve got to allow for some grammatical quirks in that, to create that impression. Even though we know that really we’re reading a story.

It doesn’t give you licence to throw in every cliché and stock phrase under the moon, just “because people talk like that”; we are, after all, trying to produce something of beauty here, however grim and squalid it might be. But it means we don’t have to follow every strict rule of usage to the letter.

All of this stuff has to be thought about. Maybe not in first draft form – I certainly didn’t; in the first draft it was about finding out what happened in the story – but in the revisions. And when it comes to revising to self-publish (or, for that matter, to try and sell to a magazine or anthology), it’s equally important. You’ve got to do the work. I can't emphasise that enough. You’ve got to make each line as good as it can be, while being aware of every single line and word in relation to all the other words and lines in your piece.

It’s hard work. But you have to do it. Be aware of repetition. Be aware of trying too hard not to repeat words. Be aware of everything you can be aware of. Otherwise why are you bothering? What was the point?

And finally, once you’ve finished and made it the absolute best it can be, you’ve got to forgive yourself for failing. Because it can never be perfect. Because no matter how good you are you are not a god. As soon as someone else reads it they’ll find flaws. And when that happens, as it will, you can only be honest with yourself and hold your hand up and say I did the best I could.

Anything less is the crime, not that you didn’t make a perfect piece of art.

so i asked and she replied

It’s a funny thing, dialogue attribution. One of the greats, and therefore not to be ignored lightly, Elmore “Dutch” Leonard, suggests there are only two valid ways of writing it: “he said”; “she said”.Stephen King says pretty much the same on this in his book On Writing, and it’s advice well worth following. Like out friend Dutch, he knoweth of what he speak.

But you have to be a bit careful following to the letter what writers tell you is sound advice, the kind of thing that later gets set in stone as rules. You can read Jeffrey Archer’s advice and consider that. Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is worth taking a look at and considering carefully. But sometimes you’ve got to break the rules. Elmore Leonard’s rules are good for Elmore Leonard, and for writing Elmore Leonard books. They might not be good for you. Or me. Or for the books we’re writing.

But, for the most part – and I say most part because rules are meant to be broken now and again – I’m with Messers Leonard and King. He said. She said. Keep it simple. Let the characters talk. Overhear what they’re saying.

When dialogue attribution gets out of hand - all that “he retorted, she returned,” stuff - it turns the page into a sparring ground. Worse, it distracts from what the characters are actually saying. Ink clutter. It’s like static. Remember, you’re reading with your eyes, listening through your eyes. Put too much clutter either side of what’s being said and you can miss what is being said.

Jane Austin hardly used dialogue attribution at all. You’ll find the odd bit here and there in her work, but for the most part, she just lets you listen to the dialogue with your eyes. It’s a nice trick if you can pull it off. Jonathan Carroll, in his earlier, first person books, does it elegantly and without fuss.

Surprisingly, so does Martina Cole, in her East End gangster novels. Which is sort of what I’ve been getting around to. And the main thrust propelling this blog post forward.

Recently people were invited to send Martina some questions via Twitter. She’d answer some of the questions sent on a video on You Tube.

I asked her about her use of dialogue attribution, the s/he said stuff, and the fact she rarely uses it. She replied here.

But she didn’t really answer my question.

Maybe there was static in it somewhere.

But it was nice of her to spare me the time and talk a little about her writing.

no such thing as a free e-book

 

Reading shouldn’t be elitist. And yet so few of us can read. The statistics – variable, of course, because they’re statistics – suggest that only something like 20% of the world’s population can read.

Think about that. Only 20%. And in the 21^st century (by Western calendars, anyway) too, when there should be spaceships to the colonies on Mars and robot butlers catering to our every whim, energy beamed down from solar arrays, tight white one-piece auto-cleaning suits, and oddly retro futuristic electro music in the air.

By reading a single morning newspaper you’ll have devoured more conceptual information in written form than most of the world’s population, since history began, will get or have come across in a lifetime.

For a long time the delivery mechanism for words has been pretty simple.

Paper. Alphabet. Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. Print.

But that’s changing. The payload’s pretty much the same, only the delivery system is different. That’s the part that’s changing. Electronic publications. Words and whispers of words through the e-ther. Computer screens. Pad screens. Tablet screens. Mobile phone screens. E-reader screens.

The stray sheet of newspaper print, blown like tumbleweed down a street to wrap around someone’s shin, is turning into an anachronism. Printed media’s circulation numbers is shrinking all the time. The trees might be happier for this. Forests might heave an oxygenated sigh of relief that the larger presence of Gaia herself might be thankful for. But while something is gained there, something is lost elsewhere.

It makes reading ever more elitist.

Where once there was the chance for the most lowly to trace a finger across a line of a badly bruised second-hand (or loaned from the library) book or newspaper or magazine and work lips to shape words, soon there will be only words behind glass screens, museum pieces that are never quite understood or explained to the poor. Museum curators may have to give explanations as to what everything is behind those screens, because a culturally stricken people who never had the chance to truly learn to read and value books – probably they’re not in the museum either unless it’s to duck out of the rain, because poverty narrows horizons and results in the worst near-sightedness – won’t know, and will be scared by the prepossessing air of entitlement that the higher classes, the educated, possess. Books, fiction and non-fiction, will be treated by some with the wrong kind of reverence.

But this change seems almost inevitable. Even now there are those who think closing libraries is not a disaster. It’s only a percentage of libraries being closed anyway, they argue. And look, who goes to the library but those who already read and have a lot of books in the house? If you can’t afford a book from the shops – assuming there will be any bookstores on the high street – then you can always download a free e-book. There are loads of them. Hundreds. Thousands. All those books that have fallen out of copyright . . .

Except . . .

Except there is no such thing as a free e-book.

You need an e-reader, which costs money. You need broadband internet access, which costs money. You need electricity, to power the e-reader and the internet access, and that costs money. And you need an acceptable credit or debit card to open an account at your online bookstore of choice. And that means you need money, because the banks don’t give away those cards without some money from you to begin with.

And in twelve months you’re probably going to need a new e-reader or tablet or pad or graphenescreen or whatever new tech is out there, because your old reader’s going to be out of date and unable to download the latest bestseller. And that costs money . . .

Whatever it is and whatever it’s going to be in the future – and in many ways it’s welcome, freeing up information, getting pre-existing readers to read more, encouraging others to write more – the e-book isn’t free.

We’re just not sure what the true cost is yet.

publishing and how to avoid it

It’s really not what I thought.

When I was a kid – and a not very smart young adult – I thought all you did was write your book, type it up, and then take it down to the local library.

You’d hand your weighty tome across the counter. Some helpful librarian would regard you with stupefied awe because you’d actually Written A Book. And then said librarian would take your precious manuscript into the bowels of the building (actually, as a kid, my local library was a narrow, mid-row terrace with both its small downstairs rooms knocked into one and shelved with books, no real room for any bowels, though it did possess a legend about its cellar and secret tunnel used by a local highwayman, but that’s a story for another time) and once in those bowels printing presses of mysterious metals and grim inks would be charged up and a book or ten made and put on the lending shelves.

If the book was taken out enough, then maybe the library would go on to print enough of them to sell in WH Smiths, where people went if they wanted to buy a book and not just borrow it.

If you got really lucky, enough people bought it and made you rich and you got one of those jackets with leather elbow-patches and eventually sunk a swimming pool in your back garden.

That was my thinking.

It took me a while to figure out that things didn’t work like that. Slowly the shuttle weaved in and out and my mind began to pick up the thread of how publishing actually worked. Unsolicited submissions. Rejections. Small Press print. Rejections and acceptances. Vanity Presses. Always acceptances – for a fee. Agents. Rejections and acceptances and then despair when the books can’t be sold. Publishers. Rejections. And then an acceptance. Editors. Rewrites. Copy Editors. Arguments. Oh, you know. The whole kit and caboodle.

And somewhere amongst all of that it’s easy to forget that a book has to be written, rewritten, refined and found to be of commercial value. And that last is the real kicker. Commercial value. Meaning it has to fit in. It has to make money, or be thought likely to make money. Just because it’s good enough to be in print doesn’t necessarily mean it will see print. That one in particular was a hard lesson for me to learn when two agents who were interested in my stuff reluctantly came to the conclusion they didn’t think they could sell it. 

So in some ways I prefer my naive version of publishing. It seems nicer, more geared up towards writing and what we might, just now and again, call art.

I suppose the advent of the e-book, in particularly Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing facility, is making my old and naive notion of what publishing is about a reality. For good or ill, regarding the quality of the work. You write your book, type it up, then show it to the world and see what happens.

But there’s a crucial difference. Libraries were open to everyone in my world. You didn’t need to find a hundred notes to buy an e-reader or have to be able to afford broadband internet access... My naive notion of publishing wasn't that elitist. 

Commerce. It gets everywhere.

PS – Did I mention my book’s available to buy here?

it still says bum on the passport

So at the end of July I get to be a published novelist -- if you want to stretch the definition and include Westerns in the classification of novel.

What do you mean “It’s a book, so of course you’re a novelist”?

Ah, sweet, naive you. Sweet naive me, too. But I’ve learned it doesn’t really work that way.

While no one can ever take away the fact that I’ll have written and published a book with a respected publisher, the type of book I’ll have published will certainly weight people’s prejudices.

“A Western? What, cowboys and stuff?”

“Uhm. Yes.”

“Oh dear.”

Some writers will tell you that they’ve enormous admiration and respect for anyone who can trot out the required number of words and make them something like cohesive, throwing in characterisation and plot and maybe even some nice prose every now and again. While others...

Hmm. Putting it politely, as they rarely do: You do it properly and aim for high art or you’re a hack.

There’s long been a clash between mainstream and genre publishing. It’s best summed up with that old nugget regarding the definitions of what’s science fiction and what’s literature. “If it’s science fiction it can’t be good, and if it’s good it can’t be science fiction.” Thus SF pieces like 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale are secreted out of genre and given a spit and polish and promoted as mainstream literature. While some fine SF novels, Dune or The Fountains of Paradise say, are happily left in the ghetto.

There’s not even the single ghetto, either. There are plenty of them. Crime’s a ghetto. Fantasy. Romance. Chick Lit. Sad Git Lit (as I call the writers producing the male equivalent of Chick Lit). Even historical fiction. And you can bet your bottom dollar and all the phlegm in the spittoon that the Western is a ghetto area too. Mainstream is the exalted place, standing high and remote above all others. To some writers at least. Even if mainstream fiction takes so much from genre, sadly to its detriment without its writers even knowing it.

Me, I guess I’ll just keep bumming around. But just in case it offends anyone, I won’t be putting “Writer” down on the passport any time soon.