There was no way to prove — actually prove, really prove — that that man was me. The story was familiar — I knew I had written it — but that name on the paper still was not me. It was a symbol, a name. It was alien. And then I realised that even if I did become successful at writing, it would never mean a thing to me, because I couldn’t identify myself with that name. It would be soot and ashes. So I didn’t write any more. I was never sure, anyway, that the stories I had in my desk a few days later were mine, though I remembered typing them. There was always that gap of proof. That gap between doing and having done.

– Ray Bradbury: “No Particular Night or Morning” (from The Illustrated Man)

Look: that’s Bradbury nailing what writing’s really about. The doubt you feel; the doubts you share. It’s Bradbury on the middle-point of a novel you started, a short story you sacked off, a poem you thought was going somewhere. For me, it’s that exact reason you stop writing a work in progress. The loathing and the loss of confidence.

But your parents don’t really care that you’re writing. Pay your bills and manufacture some handsome grandchildren — that’s what they care about.

Want to be a writer? All the advice points to writing hard and often. To be a good writer, you have to write hard to get good. Write, write, and write some more.

But you know that.

And your girlfriend, she doesn’t really care how you do it. She wants you to put the laptop down. Wash up and kiss her hair.

So, right, you remember things. You remember how writing’s the practical part — the practiseable part, the verb — then  really what makes the difference between a good writer and a failing one is knowing when you’ve finished.

And me, I don’t ever know. Chances are, you don’t either.

But your friends don’t really care much about your hobby or the sediment it puts in your guts. Their eyes go all glassy, don’t they? Did you notice that? That’s because you’re playing out. You’re having a beer — not telling them about the way your weirdo main character get weirder all the while.

Then there’s the parable about the man who rewrote his novel every year till he died. Never content, he trimmed and pruned and tweaked and shaved. And never, ever, was he happy. He’d send it round Jupiter and back, that bloody manuscript of his, and still he’d hack it to bits. And that’s you, isn’t it? You keep doing that to your novel as well. That’s why you haven’t subbed it for a month or six.

Only your writer friends, well they’re more arsed about their own characters, flailing through their blank pages without a full stop to hang off. They’d sooner their own stuff come out than yours. That’s the beast — you’re the lamb — now clear off. Competition, if you’re going to be honest. Oh give over, you’re thinking now. You love your friends winning book deals.

Well, that’s because you’re lovely. That’s because they’re your friends.

But come on. Writers don’t write books in teams. We’re selfish, us writers. Taking all that time to peck at the keys; to wake up in the night and wake our partners to write in notepads by lamplight. We’re bastards, some of us. We ask the wrong questions to dig out the truths.

Some of us.

(I like friends getting book deals)

And there’s never enough time, is there? Never enough time. In from work, out of clothes, on to the settee. Making time where there is none. Your brain always on it. In the shower, taking a dump. You can’t stop thinking about that scene; that scene and that death; that plot hole and that cliche.

But your employer doesn’t give two figs about the novel you’re writing.

Nobody really does.

So how do you do it? How do you make anybody care?

It took me till this week to realise. To realise that nobody really gives a shit about your writing till they’ve gone to bed to read it. That’s when they care. And their questions come later. Their attention comes later. Their compliments if you’re lucky.

And till then, well. We’ve got all these blog posts we writers write for each other.

So keep trucking.

*Yet.

Well, I’ve got myself 4,000 words for the trouble. Below, I’ve listed what I think I did better. It’s not a methodology. It’s not life-coaching for writers. But it’s something.

Use Microsoft Notepad, not Microsoft Word

Notepad looks like crap, which is the whole point. For one, you’re never distracted by fonts. You can just write. For two, you don’t care about formatting. You can just write. For three, you can get filthy. Disgust yourself with your writing — write as fast as you can, and spell everything wrong — because nobody’s ever going to see what you’re doing in that terrid little .txt file.

Copy and paste your notes in. Make a mess.

And can I promise something else? You’ll never find a better sentence by right-clicking for the thesaurus.

Write in a font you don’t normally write in

Another thing about fonts. Agents and publishers really like reading Times New Roman, but that doesn’t mean you should write in it. Balls to agents and publishers, actually – Times New Roman is a horrible font. It’s angular and pixel-y and dull. It makes you feel like you’re writing essays, which puts a subconscious pressure on you to use words like ‘whilst’ instead of ‘while’. ‘Amongst’ instead of ‘among’. ‘Utilise’ instead of ‘use’. And no, I can’t prove this. But association’s a strong thing.

Me, I used to write everything in Sylfaen. It’s curvy without being unprofessional. Now — mainly because I’ve only just got round to a pirated copy of Word 2007 — I’m writing in Calibri, 11 point, zoomed to 110%. It’s a hot font. If I spoke binary, I would ask to see its knickers.

Start writing when you really can’t (or shouldn’t)

Last week, while I was working, an idea struck me at about 4pm. So I wrote it out into a notepad document, and got paid for doing it. It was twenty minutes – enough to get something down, not enough to get noticed and sacked for the trouble – but it was down all the same. The crucial bit is that I left a sentence unfinished. I emailed it to myself. On the way home, I was properly eager, halfway to running. And when I got home, I picked it up again, and had a paragraph I not only liked, but had started writing on the snide. Have at that, capitalism!

Take walks

Walking is the most boring thing humans do. A genuinely awful habit we’re yet to get around. And sure, you’ve had this advice before. But you’re blocked, so you’ve got to try and confuse yourself into trying something. So how’s about it? Because the fact is, a half-hour walk really can inspire and baffle even the fattest of writers. Really. Get out and pootle. You’ll be busy trying not to get squashed by those tosser estate agents in their Audis, and the first line of your new story will appear in the road, in the shop window, in the tree. On the hills or in your shoelaces.

I won’t lie: walking into and home from work has really helped me clear my head before a big session. And it’s toned my arse besides.

Reward yourself

You know all about Pavlov and his daft bloody dogs. But basic conditioning works. So, if you write a chapter, have a cigarette or a chocolate or another glass of wine. Watch a bit of Eastenders or google your favourite celebrity’s boobs. If you write a smashing line, laugh at yourself — go on — because it’s all right to laugh at how brilliant that line is. And if your partner’s in the room, ignore them completely. It makes snogging better when you’re done.

Remember that it’s all right if you can’t be arsed

Sometimes, watching films and playing games and cooking food seem like the best things your grandparents won the second world war for. It feels good to mong about in your scruffs, shooting terrorists or losing your kecks over vampires. But more than that, more than anything, doing something else gives you a thread to pull. Pull harder, and you’ll find a paragraph.

Last night, I chopped a chilli and fried it off. The fumes caught in my throat. A simile fell from the cooker hood. I wrote it down.

Keep notes

I use my phone. It’s got Bluetooth so it can interface with my netbook. It’s full of sentences and one-liners and plot points. Now they’re down, they’re out. I can’t wait to get to the point where I use them all. They’re the checkpoints – where you can save your game, and know you’ve achieved everything before. Of course, those with pens will prosper. Luddites.

Read everything by the writer you want to be better than

Then learn to hate them. You won’t be. But that’s only because you’ll be different. You’ll be different because you’ll be too self-conscious about using their phrases, their style and their rhythm.

Read everything else in the world

Shampoo bottles are fascinating reads. Really. Look at that frothy copy, then find typos and feel smug. Tell your friends. Read the little labels you get with flowers – they teach you something. Read about the nutritional values of your chocolate bar. Read the paper. Read websites. Read the first sentences of every single book you own.

Then, go in the bathroom, put a mirror on the floor, take aim, and kick yourself up the backside.

It’s overdue, but I can’t get myself into labour. It won’t crown. It’s kicking my belly but it doesn’t want to play. It’s a distraction; I feel it most of the time. It’ll be the third time. The first time it was diarrhea. The second was a textbook delivery — it was fun and flowing and fairly batshit in places, but I wrote it and it nearly made it to adulthood. Only it didn’t, and we already know that story.

I’m pregnant with a story I want to birth but can’t bring myself to.

I’m thinking too much about what people will think of it; whether it’ll stand up; whether it’ll be so good that I go and kill everything else I wrote just to concentrate on rearing it properly. I knew this kid who spoke about a ‘blinking cursor of doom’ over a white document. That’s fine, but it’s also another way to say you’re lazy — and another to say you’ve given up.

That metaphor was disgusting. Sorry.

Writing and reading about so much copy has taught me that if you write ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ — if you talk to your audience on their terms, not yours — you’ll get a warmer, better, response. But that doesn’t work the same in fiction, and I’m not doing that here. Writing copy has also taught me how to use short sentences, too, and that’s half the problem.

I want everything short, clipped. I want big ideas condensed into few words. People to talk like they’ve had an argument with each other the night before. Nobody listening, everybody interrupting. I was in a lift before and a man got out. He said ‘cheers’, like I’d done something worth thanking. I thought, for what? For standing still next to you and not farting? But that’s how people talk. They do these weird, brilliant things. Instead, I’ve started writing psychopaths who mumble and moan in fewer than ten words. That’s not a paragraph — it’s an aborted idea.

I even wrote 10,000 words of my flashy new story, come to that. But then I deleted it, and its back-ups, and played Xbox some more. Emerging patterns over emerging patterns.

Then again, when I don’t write, I feel really anxious — anxious to try, anxious to fail at least. You get it all day, an itch worth scratching, but oftentimes the commute kills it. And, when I do start, I’m only thinking of my first novel — the one I enjoyed, the one I’m still attached to, the one I’m trying to sell — and how free and simple and fun it felt. Ideas came, I wrote them out. (Sort of. I forget it took two years, with breaks for misery.)

Now, I’m always thinking about what a reader would think. It’s a kind of horrible altruism. I’m thinking about how much you’ll hate that sentence. But does a reader want that? Probably they don’t. They want something to read on their trip to work; to fall asleep to.

First time round, with Colin, that is, I didn’t care what anybody thought till my editor bashed the edges till it was something gilded — something bright and better.

I was published in a newspaper at the arse-end of last year. (It’s a secret). It made me feel ill for two weeks. So I’m a pain, too. Want what I don’t get, fret when I do.

I’ve decided to stop using Twitter because it’s always full of the best advice I’ve ever read about writing — and I can’t apply any of it.

Does that mean I’ve stopped enjoying writing? Maybe. Weird, since I’m salaried to write 9-5 as well — a really lucky sod — and because I should be relentlessly bouncy about that. But maybe that’s the sheen rubbing off. Maybe that’s because business writing is limited to a small pool of catchphrases and reassuring lies about strategy and solutions. Maybe, when words make you money, you shape them differently.

Sometimes, you get to thinking that writing about writing is easier, only the best blogs about writing are by people who write all the time.

Anyway: I emailed my Grandad and bleated like this. I said, ‘motivational speeches welcome’. He emailed back today:

Hugh Walpole, of whom you may or may not have heard, was a prolific novel writer in the first half of last century. Every New Year (might have been Christmas) after celebrating the day with family or whoever he retired to somewhere private, took out pen and paper, and solemnly wrote the title of his next novel and “Chapter One.” He then put it away but always finished the whole work before the next New Year came round.

Or, so it is said.

It was the best way of saying shut up and get on with it. So that’s the plan. What’s yours?

It fell from the pre-order listings of a dozen online book shops, was deleted from Nielsen Bookscan. The galley proofs were unbound, de-covered and bleached back to white.

Reps got in their cars after really successful meetings with booksellers — who liked and loved and wanted to see more — and went home, tore up their AI sheets, and forgot the ISBN.

The book cover fell to bits and became Photoshop layers again, deleted in turn, by turns. The final draft sprouted mistakes; my editor grew concerned.

I went back through the third and second and first draft, adding long, clumsy sentences, plot holes, spelling errors, weird syntax and padding. I rewrote the best sentences into poor ones, and added about 20,000 words back in.

I got the contract back in the post and tip-exed my signature from the footer. I forgot the clauses, the royalty values, the way I wanted my name on the cover. I deleted the acceptance email and the voicemails and pictures of me, pissed and celebrating.

I reinstalled the prologue that so many other publishers hated. I retrieved query emails, deleted spreadsheets of research into possibles and not-possibles. I deleted the last ten chapters, then deleted the first thirty-two. I lost my notes. Forgot the ideas. Forgot the title.

Fact is, the pavement towards Published is a long one – and you wind up with a lot of tacks in your feet. I’ve been advised not to publish this in public; not to be so unprofessional. An agent tells me the book in question is tainted; almost impossible to place elsewhere.

The longer buried, he said, the better. The deeper buried, the easier to write something else.

But to me, transparency is better. It’s my policy now. And, since it’s harder than ever to get published — harder still to get noticed — writers are letting themselves get trodden into the carpet because they’re so desperate to achieve their dreams — and I’m hoping maybe this’ll be read by one or two or three who won’t make a similar mistake.

This is how it went:

I submitted my very first novel to a few places in 2007. It wasn’t a very good novel, and it wasn’t finished by any standards. Agents didn’t like it, publishers didn’t want it, and I realised soon enough that I’d written a novel in the way I presumed you were meant to write a novel. In effect, and from all sides, it was really, really balls. But I liked a couple of the ideas, so I shot it in the preface and wrote another one.

I submitted that, the second one, naive about all of the things I’m not now. A few people liked it, but it didn’t fit in lists on account of being quite weird. Others probably hated it. And then a breakthrough — the kind words I’d needed. The prologue was bollocks. There wasn’t a need, and I should lop it off and consider submitting to an independent who liked all that weird stuff. So I did. And, in January 2008, or thereabouts, it was accepted for publication. And my head near as fell off.

A terrid thing about being accepted for publication is you’ll want to tell everyone close-by. There were a few snarky ball-bags taking pops, yet I had a lot of support and a lot more encouragement. Then, over maybe eight months, things looked rosy aside from crippling self-doubt and a bout of abject paranoia that it was all a bit too good to be true.

It kind of was.

The publisher, who I won’t mention or link to (I’d wind up on the first page of Google with their name, probably), was a small firm with outsourced resources and a bunch of loyal acolytes. A good rep. A decent sales and distribution network. A fairly sizeable backlist, and a lot of bright ideas. They said the right things and seemed keen — on me and on my writing, so it was both brilliant and terrifying to get the opportunity.

Anyway. If I were to make a montage of the time between acceptance and editing, it’d be me getting a job, sleeping, and waiting. Nothing extraordinary happened save a contract I signed. I worked over the novel most weekends, battered it really. Somehow getting the contract made me see all the crap bits for what they actually were. Don’t feel sorry for me. I enjoyed it.

The edits happened; a happy accident with a fantastic editor, and the best bit of the whole affair. I was lucky, I found out since — as other people’s weren’t being edited. Or released. Or spoken about. There were alarm bells, and some more grumblings besides. The release was pushed back three times. I didn’t know my arse from my elbow. Nobody did. And we all carried on hoping, because we were authors now, with books to read from in a book shop, coming soon.

It got fairly desperate towards release. Other people were getting pissed about, and getting pissed off. There were rumours and rumours and rumours some more. It was most kinds of childish from more than three sides.

The publisher was very ill, with crap going on beyond my comprehension, and for more than a year my sincerest, genuine sympathy weighed strongly against the frustrations of not being told a thing. Sounds pathetic, or selfish, but like I’ve said, you’re an author; you hope. We’d put a lot into it, and we just wanted somebody to let us know.

It’s not them, it’s you, you’re thinking. Not just for a week, but for months on end. You put a foot wrong someplace; you said the wrong thing. It’s difficult to stay bright every time a friend asks when the launch is — and however self-indulgent any of this sounds, it’s the reality of what many think should be the most exciting time in the world.

I put up with the tension and the apprehension because I was flattered and blindly pursuant of something I wanted so keenly — what anybody who writes a long story, a novel, a book, wants.

And, I was selfish. I thought that whatever happened, if my book came out, it was a first step towards something bigger, sometime, somehow. It was a means to a career; it made me think, maybe, maybe, I can write a couple more. In that time I must’ve sent so many hundreds of emails to people who gave more support than I deserved, and I still feel guilty for that.

It wasn’t going to happen. Really, it wasn’t. So when I pulled it — mostly because the contract was void and always was — I was all up for giving up entirely. The Society of Authors couldn’t help. I didn’t really sleep wondering how I’d tell people who’d pre-ordered. I didn’t know how to delete it all and bury it. I had no plans to submit it again.

Anyway. Always with me, it’s anyway.

I don’t have loads of confidence in my writing. I don’t think m/any writers do. I haven’t read that final draft back because I’d hate it and I’d want to write it all again.

Despite that, I’ve also sent it out twice since. So far it’s got me the nicest rejection I’ve ever had – a rejection from a big publisher, but the kind of rejection that’s as almost close to a yes as a no can be. And, I’ve got a bunch of envelopes; a list of new places to send it.

I’m tentative to balls it up. I’m sometimes still in two minds as to whether I mention what happened with my unpublisher; whether it’ll scuttle my chances. Whether it’s a sales pitch or a nail in the coffin, basically, if we’re doing cliches. But like I said. How can transparency be a bad thing?

There is a point, though. It’s not all me. If you think going to an independent is a safer bet; more tentative, more of a softer route into a savage, savage industry, just be aware that you’re quickly on your own. I was lucky to have the support I did, and continue to have – but others really aren’t.

I don’t mean to sound bitter or cruel or vindictive about the publisher, though some days I’m all three. I simply find it profoundly unfair that the idea of ‘professionalism’ precludes being honest. Unjust that a desperation to escape the slush pile means you’re almost prepared to forgo dignity.

So, if you’re a publisher, and I tell you the partial sub you’re reading has nearly been published, this is why.

It’s taken six months to write this, which also means I’m a coward. Also, I’m a whining fanny. But if there’s a message at all for anybody — if there’s anything that’s worth my putting this on the blog, it’s a simple one:

Get a fucking agent, for heaven’s sakes.

__

Update: I’m not the only one who’s written about this.

Caroline Smailes’ post on why a charity isn’t getting the money it’s owed is here.

DJ Kirkby’s post on much the same topic is here.

If science fiction’s not dead, it’s not quite the same now we’ve bombed the moon. After all, we’ve done space travel and beaten communism. We got to the stars, and went past plopping pulp heroes on Mars when we crashed robots into it. We worried about plugging ourselves into each other before the internet; feared fluid identities before AOL chat rooms, and we’re not worried about black holes now we’ve made a big machine to create little ones. Possibly we got bored of science fiction when reality caught up – and now, given to romance and nostalgia, we’ve got steampunk and a million remakes.

But for all the debate about what SF is and isn’t, the best stuff is still based around big ideas. A big idea; a mirror to our present fears, advances, social structures, institutions and other big words.

With Twitter, and all the web stuff that’s growing with and around it, I reckon there’s a lot for new genre fiction writers looking for new, big, original ideas in science fiction. And that’s because I think Twitter is an excellent parallel for fictional technology – the fictional technology around which the very best SF writers build their worlds.

Mostly I’m writing this on the back of something I read a couple of weeks back. Charles Stross was getting fresh about Star Trek. Hates it, he said. It’s a drama pretending to be science fiction by having a few tech-sounding words lobbed into the script. He said it’s not SF unless you’ve considered what the true extent of a new development is on its culture. And then he brilliantly explained how he plans science fiction novels himself:

I start by trying to draw a cognitive map of a culture, and then establish a handful of characters who are products of (and producers of) that culture. The culture in question differs from our own: there will be knowledge or techniques or tools that we don’t have, and these have social effects and the social effects have second order effects — much as integrated circuits are useful and allow the mobile phone industry to exist and to add cheap camera chips to phones: and cheap camera chips in phones lead to happy slapping or sexting and other forms of behaviour that, thirty years ago, would have sounded science fictional. And then I have to work with characters who arise naturally from this culture and take this stuff for granted, and try and think myself inside their heads. Then I start looking for a source of conflict, and work out what cognitive or technological tools my protagonists will likely turn to to deal with it.

There’s not much value in fictional technologies if their possibilities are not fully explored, is what he’s saying.

He’s saying that if you’re going to invent a brilliant new technology for your story, then that same technology must, through use (or misuse), come with wider implications, or ‘second order effects’.

He’s saying, if you want to write the best science fiction, you make rules to break them. And, along with the rest of his piece, he’s saying there’s sometimes too much of a reliance on the Big Idea carrying the story – and not the human conflict arising BECAUSE of that Big Idea.

Robust, successful science-fictional worlds depend on these details.

So what’s that got to do with Twitter? Well, put Twitter into the Stross argument. It’s still very new, very nascent, always changing – it’s part of a technological shift demonstrating Big Ideas in real-time, in a comparatively short period.

Twitter’s now recognised for much more than people telling other people what they’re doing. It’s a political discussion. It’s a PR tool. It’s a campaign’s mouthpiece. It’s a link resource. It’s a writers’ forum. It’s a demo coordinator. It’s a freelancer’s networking tool. It’s a reactionary funnel. It’s a commentary tool. It’s a dating site. It’s a fan-base manager. It’s a newswire. It’s an eye-witness account. And it’s a place for fans to harass celebrities.

This wasn’t planned.

Filtered through Stross’ argument, if Twitter were only a big idea – the future-tech of some story written in an alternate universe someplace – then all of these uses are Twitter’s wider, second-order effects – and in turn, the things that would actually be worth writing about.

As the Guardian quotes Wired in a piece about the Jan Moir affair, Twitter ‘rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. Its users defined it. It was those users who made Twitter into a throbbing global sensing organism.’

Just as millions of people use (or misuse) Twitter, it’s really important that writers imagine how the inhabitants of their fictional worlds might use or misuse their own technology beyond its primary function.

Course, if you’re doing robo-monsters for Nanowrimo, just have them smash the world, won’t you?

___

Picture credit: Don Solo @ Flickr

And now, everyone’s gibbering on about shifting the way we read onto these faceless tablets which owe more to mobile chess-sets than design degrees; say more about luggage restrictions than an actual market requirement.

With Kindle and e-readers generally, they’re saying that this is how we’ll read books in the future. Reading 2.0, they probably want to say. And, by inference, they’re kind of suggesting that eventually, physical books will be obsolete.

But I don’t think that’s true – and I hope they don’t mean it.

Kindle’s fully hip in the US, and apart from the incident where Amazon deleted already paid-for content from their products without asking first, it’s getting a lot of positive coverage and blurb-y quotes from big-name writers. The international version’s coming, it has competitors, and its iPhone equivalent is also doing well. There’s going to be a lot of press about e-readers in the coming weeks, and a lot of debate too.

But while I get the principle – millions of books bought and sold wirelessly, read on a single tablet – and recognise the potential – literacy could improve where books aren’t readily available; e-readers could house textbooks and centralise a child’s learning resources – I can’t help feeling a twinge for bookshelves. I’ll always prefer a beautifully bound hardback. I can’t imagine a world without book covers.

I guess my argument’s simple, and probably I’ll sound like a traditionalist, a luddite or a tosser. Maybe all three. But it’s only simple because people love books as much for their format as for their content. You might already know that if you read a book on a laptop it’s different – it loses its face, and disconnects you from the writing in a way you can’t properly describe. Maybe it’s because I write myself, but when you read an old book, you read a year’s work at a typewriter. You imagine the frustrations and the temper, the elation of that first draft finished and the proof version arriving – a loose-bound dream filled with red marks and corrections.

You read a new book, and even if it’s been word-processed, you know it’s still been printed. Printed and scanned and proofed and scored with pencil. It’s been posted that way – to most publishers and agents anyway – and even if it’s submitted electronically, you can bet it’ll be printed out if there’s any kind of interest.

It’s a romantic notion, then. But to me, books are. I don’t want to sit on a train reading Alice in Wonderland in a way Carroll wouldn’t even understand. It’s a like a sneer; as if in plopping a novel next to a thousand others, in the same format, in the same jacket, in the same font, we’re somehow dismantling literature – our best achievement. Torn from its spine and squashed flat for scrollbars to browse, a book in an e-reader is the same as another, clinging to its title on a unit that’s basically a homologous hive-pile of words.

Certainly making a book anonymous has benefits for some. Good because if you’re so inclined, you can read a Mills and Boon in public without looking recently divorced, or fully unhinged. Good because nobody can tell you’re a 45-year old man reading Stephanie Meyer. Good because Mein Kampf has a bit of a stigma attached to it.

I’ve also enjoyed reading free extracts and downloads from publishers who understand Creative Commons, and who recognise that it’s good to try-before-you-buy. I’ve bought three books recently on the back of reading their first chapters online, and I’ll do it again – just as I’ve bought CDs after listening to bands on Spotify. But DRM restrictions make for silly hoops, and I’m not given to jumping through them.

I recognise that e-readers have professional benefits too. It’s no coincidence that the many people who champion these things are the ones whose professional lives are genuinely enhanced by them. A commissioning editor can look through twenty emailed manuscripts without lugging half a plantation onto the tube. A publishing MD can click through their latest acquisitions; an agent can read and reject their slush with ease.

So there’s absolutely a place for e-readers as a tool, and not least because publishing is a business that feeds off trends and unexpected successes. There’s also place for them because if you’re not keeping up, you’ll lose out. If publishers don’t pursue digital opportunities, they’ll look backwards, and they’ll risk being frozen out if they haven’t got a strategy for the Next Big Thing – whether that’s publishing their content electronically or not.

It’s just a shame that these aren’t people who read purely for enjoyment, or enrichment. They’re the early adopters, the gatekeepers, and they’re good at the word-of-mouth thing. We follow these people on Twitter because they know what they’re on about and it sounds like we’re moving towards some kind of utopian bookland, where we can get any book, any time. From these people, the future of publishing sounds healthy and good – but sometimes I wonder if that’s only because they’re shaping it around their vision.

We’re told e-readers will democratise publishing. But for every independent publishing company that makes content for e-readers innovatively and with great success, and for every single writer who self-publishes – bypassing editorial and funding meetings and using their online platform to sell their writing without a single physical copy being printed – there will be a bunch of big publishers who corner the market, pump thousands into marketing and dominate. E-readers will only ‘democratise’ publishing till the big boys work out how to undercut small publishers and offer more content for less. In the end, it could all end up like MySpace – once the fertile fields of the unsigned, now the cynical promotional tool.

For me, it’s a myth that through digital advances, publishing is a fairer industry. I learnt that when I worked at a small publishing company without much funding but with a lot of great ideas. But that’s another post entirely. I’d also say the biggest change in recent years is that unscrupulous, vanity-publishing bastards can prey on desperate writers with ease.

Smart, small publishers, with low overheads, and who already use POD to print at low cost, could do well. But I reckon any smaller publishers using the technology to great effect will grow and be bought out anyway. Have their ideas assimilated. That’s why I don’t think e-reading is going to change publishing itself in any big way – not for better, not for worse.

And then there’s DRM, copyright issues and pricing structures besides. Is it right to charge £10 for something you can’t even hold? When the paperback’s the same price? Is it even a sustainable model? And if you’re going to start giving e-books away for free, will we have to e-read George Orwell with adverts in the margins? Publishers are already and admirably putting content on their sites for free, and I’m glad of it. But when it comes to readers paying for this content, the industry needs to set standards early – and soon.

For now, I think if Steve Jobs and Dan Brown made love, they’d birth a Kindle. After all: e-reading is the perfect marketing bastard, born of no particular need and marketed to absolutes, just like iPods, just like the Da Vinci Code. For me, it’s a take-anywhere, use-always product that few people outside the publishing industry actually need – and I think a true, universal leap to Reading 2.0 will only happen when books stop being artefacts. E-readers have a place, but they won’t dominate.

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Photo credit: Erik Vanden @ Flickr

Unlike the time I used a deckchair as a toilet, fully clothed, in front of my then-girlfriend’s parents, I don’t remember where I was when somebody gave me a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy. But I remember reading it.

The thing with Douglas Adams’ writing is that you laugh the first time round, and spend the second and third and fourth reads feeling really mugged off by him — his syntax and phrasing; his set-ups and his pay-offs. By the fifth read, you have to give it away and let someone else enjoy that first time. It’s not just that he’s good – better, even – or that he walks a line halfway between accessible and untenable. It’s because while you sit there, picking your nose, his writing goes and shows you how much fun you can have with words.

Mainly, Douglas Adams says you don’t have to sit and splash your crime novel over a thousand Post-Its before you write it. He’s saying you don’t have to worry about resolution or structure or theme – his stuff reads like he knows, eventually, that these things appear anyway. His writing says, listen, if you’re bored of what you’re writing, you might as well just stop — because no bastard’s going to enjoy reading it. His writing says, why even bother with the boring bits?

Some of this is why I probably won’t read And Another Thing, Eoin Colfer’s installment, and the sixth of the trilogy. Not because I’m a purist, or because I dislike his writing. Not because it’s an insult to Adams, to canon or to even writing like Adams. I probably won’t read it because in the time since I opened The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the way I read has changed. Because now I’m writing myself, I’ll analyse everything, pull it to bits, like always. Because nothing’ll recreate that buzz I had on realising that you could write long stories without boring bits. Because it won’t be new.

Because a few years later, I’m trying to write long stories without boring bits, and it’ll anyway feel like that fourth read-through.

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A wise man said ‘never let a crap blog bleed out’, but after four years-plus on Blogger, I did, and there was that.

So now, I’ve moved, full-term and fully-dilated, to a self-hosted, baffling internet called Wordpress.

I brought some old posts with me. Just a few. The rest’s been archived and deleted, so it can’t trouble me again. Another wise man said you’re best never reading old stuff in search of an ego boost, and on account of how quickly I binned most of it, he was right.

Like half a time machine, the rest of the site’s in flux. I need to tinker with things and smash a few others — give my blogroll a tickle and sort out colours. Otherwise — as Picard would say — engage.

Anyway, he’s full of trivia and smokes a lot of pot, and since the two are mutually exclusive I get told a lot about the world and all the manly things he’s done and all the things I should do and lots of lurid things I probably won’t ever.

He’s the only man I’ve ever met who looks cool with a walking stick, a permatan and lung cancer.

Apparently he wants me to write his life for him but I tell him I’m too busy writing a semi-sequel to Colin, which is also polite code for ‘It makes me anxious’. Only he laughs at that and puts ketchup and mint sauce on his new potatoes.

But he’s got these magazines, my uncle; these detective magazines. He loves them. They’re all over the house.

I can’t tell him they’re creepy and I’m not even sure where he finds them because they’re significantly dated in appearance and look like they’ve been designed with fingerpaints.
The covers always feature these stock photos of 80s women experiencing some kind of TERROR and they’re splashed with the usual pullers about MURDER and TRUE CRIME and one, pointedly, saying, MY MUM’S BODY FELL OUT OF THE CUPBOARD.

I plonked down and had a flick through one earlier and it struck me that I’m no fan of crime writing. I mean I should be, but I’m not. My mum reads them — those anonymous-looking ones Tesco sell by the bucketload that make you jealous because you’ll never sell books by the bucketload from Tesco — and my gran does too, and then my uncle reads these things. And what they do in these detective magazines is they get a gruesome real-life crime and fictionalise the events so the murderers come across as quite polite and gamely till they’re hacking somebody, the victims totally useless, and the police these brazen heroes who’d sooner eat your face than talk to it. I don’t get it.

I don’t get crime fiction altogether.

I also have stark memories of watching Miss Marple with my gran. She seemed much larger then, though I don’t mean fat like pigs. Stark because I didn’t want to watch it; I wanted to play with my Lego. She said, ‘you’re always thinking about the next thing, and never enjoy the thing you’re doing.’ And I haven’t ever forgotten that – mainly on account of nothing’s changed.

She had all the books so essentially she was cheating but we watched this programme and some posh twerp got drowned in a bobbing apple bowl. Riveting.

All the way through I was convinced I knew who the killer was and all the way through she’d sort of smile wanly at me and say, ‘wait and see’. Course, it was the maid, that filthy street urchin, and why didn’t I see it as a socio-political allegory. She must’ve had two scenes. Two fucking scenes in an hour’s drama, and I was supposed to work that out. So I told her, I went, ‘That was unfair, there was no chance,’ and my gran, she shook her head and said, sagely, ‘No, Matthew – that was Agatha Christie.’

The point is maybe I’ll write a crime novel one day. That’ll show them. I’ll make sure everybody knows who the murderer is from page one and the twist will be there’s no twist.