After contemplating becoming a transvestite in another posting today ‘Self-Publishing And The Sexes’, I’m also pondering the advice given by Fay Weldon.
She reckons that we should write two different versions of our book – one for traditional publishing, which is literary in tone, and another dumbed-down racy version for readers who use Kindles and other e-reading devices. This means “abandoning one’s dignity.”
After five years of trying to sell my books, I’m not sure that I’ve got any dignity left – and if I have, it’s probably slipped down the back of the sofa and is beyond retrieval. Fay Weldon has a history of making tongue-in-cheek provocative statements, but I think that she may have a point.
I’ve mentioned in other blog postings that I’ve been giving my ebooks on Smashwords away for free. I started this at Christmas, 2014, as a promotional tactic to help launch my novel. It’s also a basic form of market research, to see what draws readers. I’ve tried changing tags and book covers, to see if this increased the downloads of a title that was being ignored.
The only conclusions that I’ve made, are that people like sad titles, rather than happy (who’d have guessed that?), as well as titles with a name in or that’s in the form of a question. Unsurprisingly, any mention of sex or erotica helps to shift copies – so bear that in mind when choosing your descriptive tags and book title.
This is proved by the success of my first volume of erotic verse, which is called ‘What Do You Like ?’, with the subtitle ‘9 Erotic Poems’. This has been downloaded 2,250 times, as of today, which makes it the most popular of my forty-four free titles.
Fay Weldon’s advice may impel me towards a career writing torrid romances featuring villainous lovers with smouldering eyes, heroines with heaving bosoms + of course, the obligatory randy vampire and a horny werewolf!
Seamus Heaney was a much-loved poet, and rightly so – he was a real sweetheart and so skilled. His death in 2013 was one of those which made me go “oh no” when I heard of it. His text message to his wife, shortly before he died is moving. His son Michael revealed at the funeral mass that his father texted his final words, “Noli timere” (Latin: “Do not be afraid”), to his wife, Marie, minutes before he died.
I always think of his poem ‘Rite of Spring’ at this time of year, when the temperature dips below freezing in Cornwall. Having lived on a remote sheep farm on a high part of Bodmin Moor, I know what it’s like to be at the mercy of the weather. My water supply pipe once froze for several days, so this poem resonates with me, and its suggestive sensuality seems to be saying more than just a struggle to restore the pump to working order:
Rite of Spring
So winter closed its fist
And got it stuck in the pump.
The plunger froze up a lump
In its throat, ice founding itself
Upon iron. The handle
Paralysed at an angle.
Then the twisting of wheat straw
into ropes, lapping them tight
Round stem and snout, then a light
That sent the pump up in a flame
It cooled, we lifted her latch,
Her entrance was wet, and she came.
Seamus Heaney
He wrote evocatively about ageing and continuity, including this poem ‘Digging’ from his first published collection of work ‘Death of a Naturalist’:
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By god, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it. He fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The colds smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Seamus Heaney
Heaney’s powers of observation were acute, as shown in this two-line verse which perfectly captures a moment in time :
The riverbed, dried-up,hall-full of leaves.
Us, listening to a river in the trees.
The term ‘psycho’ is often used to describe murderers who behave in an irrational and bloodthirsty way. Alfred Hitchcock’s film helped the word to enter the public consciousness. People use the term when someone loses their temper, but true psychopathy isn’t widely understood.
I wrote a novel called ‘The Perfect Murderer’ in 2014, in which one of the lead characters is a psychopath. He’s a respected member of the establishment but has killed a victim a year for four decades. I toyed with the sympathies of the reader, as he killed only villains, usually nasty criminals who society was better off without. Most people would secretly approve of his activities.
The genesis for the novel was partly inspired by reading Jon Ronson’s ‘The Psychopath Test’, a couple of years ago. He’s best known as the author of ‘Men Who Stare At Goats’, that was made into a movie.
Much of his book on psychopaths deals with the invidious DSM manual put together by the American Psychiatric Association, and which is used to ‘diagnose’ a bewildering range of mental disorders – most of them are phoney. For instance, anyone who spends more than a few hours a day online could be labelled as having Internet Addiction Disorder. The whole enterprise is tied to the activities of drug companies, who market medication to treat the ‘condition’, adding to their vast profits.
Ronson also writes about the Hare test for psychopathy, a well-respected diagnostic checklist which is much-used to identify those with this disorder.
It’s worth doing, though as with any questionnaire there’s always a certain amount of ambiguity when it comes to interpreting what the question actually means. I scored 4 when I last did it.
In fact, psychopaths only make up 1% of the general population. They are often very successful, at least in terms of money, fame and power, becoming film stars, singers, captains of industry, politicians, bankers, lawyers, doctors and sportsmen. But when things go wrong, look at the disaster that befalls the rest of us!
Just think of the collapse of the world economy, the recent sex scandals in the U.K. and such stories as cyclist Lance Armstrong cheating by using performance-enhancing drugs. He still doesn’t see that he did anything wrong, lacking the empathy to appreciate the damage that he did to people’s faith in who they thought he was. His latest lies about drink-driving only confirm his lack of character. He has no shame because he can’t understand the concept.
The recently convicted paedophiles are apparently the same way, with Rolf Harris trying to get the length of his sentence reduced. It’s a chilling thought to realise that many of the people we admire, who are seen as role models, praised for their achievements, focus and determination are actually rather repulsive as human-beings.
Although they walk among us largely without causing disruption, psychopaths represent about 20% of the population in prisons. They’re also responsible for causing more disruptive incidents while inside, and the likelihood of their re-offending is a depressing 85%.
I should point out that simply being a psychopath is not illegal, any more than being depressed, schizophrenic or bipolar is against the law. Mind you, the old expression ‘the lunatics are running the asylum’ might be more accurate than it first appears.
Fay Weldon recently asserted that a writer should produce two versions of their book. One for those capable of concentrating enough to understand a literary paper book, and another lightweight Kindle text to entertain those with limited attention spans.
Although she was being provocative, garnering press attention in the process, she has raised some thought-provoking issues. There’s been research that shows how those who use e-reading devices are less able to recall details about what they’ve read, compared to those who have just taken in the same story on a hard copy.
Author D.J. Taylor launched a riposte in the Independent newspaper.
He makes some valid points, but has chosen to ignore the one saving grace about the whole situation – people are reading. As a wise aphorism goes ‘A non-reader holds no advantage over someone who cannot read at all.’
When I worked as a librarian, I sometimes wondered at the choices that people made when borrowing books – but at least they were reading. If they started with something that wasn’t very challenging, then they might move onto a novel that made them think.
Mind you, some readers take their devotion to an author to extremes. I once knew a man who read only Stephen King stories, and he collected them in all of their different editions, books covers and foreign language versions. He had a room devoted to them, with thousands of books lining the walls. It was like being in a sinister temple.
It reminded me of a joke: A man goes into a pub and orders a stiff drink from the barman. He looks depressed, so the barman asks him what the problem is. The man replies: “My wife left me, and all because I like cheese sandwiches.” The barman is puzzled, replying “But there’s nothing wrong with cheese sandwiches. I quite like them myself – cheese and onion, cheese and tomato, cheese and pickle – lovely.” The drinker’s face lights up: “Wonderful – you understand – would you like to come back to my place, and see my collection? I’ve got hundreds!”
There are various ways of assessing personality, but one of the more accurate tests is the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator.
I’ve introduced friends to the test, and they agreed with the results – as did I, knowing them well. This version of it is quick and easy to do. It took me about twelve minutes.
I’m of the ENFJ group, which doesn’t surprise me given my sensitive and artistic personality (honest!)
Some employers use disguised adaptations of the test when interviewing job candidates, to help find people with the behavioural characteristics they’re after. This is rather more reassuring than firms that use graphology to analyse job applicants’ handwriting. This supposed science has been repeatedly shown to be spurious, but amazingly 30% of human resources officers still use it in the U.K. and U.S.A. It’s even more widely used in France, where a bewildering 80% of employers regularly checking their staff’s handwriting.
If you’d like to know more about Myers-Briggs, have a look at the Wikipedia page for them :
I grew up in a market town called Stevenage. It’s in the county of Hertfordshire, about 30 miles north of London. The New Towns Act of 1946 designated several towns to become so-called ‘New Towns’ and Stevenage was one of them. These were to take the overflow of population from London, whose housing stock was dilapidated and which had been decimated by German bombing in the Blitz.
When I was born, in 1954, the population of Stevenage was about 7,000. Today it stands at 85,000. The old town is an ancient settlement, situated on a long straight Roman road known as The Great North Road. It has the widest high street in Hertfordshire, with a medieval row of shops called Middle Row.
I attended Alleyne’s Grammar School, one of the oldest in the country as it was founded in 1558. I walked the fields with my dog, feeling myself to be more of a country lad than a town dweller. I was a young naturalist, so seeing wide open spaces turned into housing estates broke my heart. A pasture that we called ‘Skylark Field’, where I once counted a dozen larks in the sky at one time, became a sterile development of 400 little boxy houses.
I knew that people needed somewhere to live, but I also felt, even at that young age, that there were way too many people. A distaste for the incomers saw them labelled as ‘New Towners’, with the older inhabitants clinging to their ‘Old Towner’ status. A modern pedestrianised shopping centre harmed the old-fashioned shops in the high street, with many closing and being taken over by fast-food chains.
Seeing all of this desecration coloured by attitude to modern housing and shopping developments. I left home as soon as I could, rarely returning. I last visited twenty-four years ago, and got lost – in my own home town!
I’d done some minor disruption of the stakes and lines laid out by a surveyor, for houses to be built on an old orchard which was my childhood refuge, so it was easy to take to the writing of Edward Abbey. His best-known novel is ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang’, a title that comes from ‘throwing a spanner in the works’ – that is, deliberately sabotaging machinery being used to destroy wild places.
Edward Abbey
Cover of the first edition
His work spawned the term ‘monkeywrenching’, and his disparate gang of malcontents take on industrialists who are despoiling the landscape. Abbey worked as a park ranger for the United States National Park Service and was passionate about protecting the environment. A prickly character, he riled many people and was considered sufficient a threat to warrant the attention of the F.B.I.
The work that he did, along with his writing proved inspirational for those who tired of the wishy-washy, compromised campaigns of early environmental protection groups. He was deliberately outspoken in his views, mainly to keep people aware of the threat posed by those who would rape the land for profit.
Abbey’s early death at only 62 was probably a relief to some. Awkward to the end, he ensured that he was buried in the way that he wanted and where he chose. His friends put him in the ground of the Cabeza Pieta Desert in Arizona so that he could rejoin the circle of life by becoming fertiliser for cactus.
He remained true to his beliefs, and I think that he would have got on well with some of the other outsider, rebellious writers that I’ve written postings about on this blog. It’s easy to imagine him sitting around a campfire and sharing some beers with Charles Bukowski, Richard Brautigan, John Kennedy Toole and Tomi Ungerer.
I made a surprising discovery about my eyes today. I recently acquired a bicycle, and then a helmet – not so easy for me, as I have a huge skull, leaving my paltry brain to rattle around a bit. I thought that I’d increase my safety by attaching a mirror to the helmet. I already have one on the end of the handlebar, but another could be useful.
As always, I research things and discovered that one is supposed to attach such mirrors to the side of the helmet for your dominant eye. This is because it will pick up on any movement in the mirror without effort. I’m right-handed and right-footed, though I try to be as ambidextrous as possible by using my left hand to do many things – the better to stimulate dormant parts of my brain.
I naturally assumed that I was right-eyed too, as I’ve favoured that for doing things such as aiming when playing pool, throwing darts or firing a catapult or gun. I did the test below, and was astonished to find that I’m left-eyed! I wonder how many people know their dominant eye? About a third of folk are left-eyed, but it would feel weird for me to have a mirror on the left-hand side of a helmet – but the handlebar mirror is on the right, so perhaps it would make my view of what’s behind me more complete.
The only way this would affect me in a strange way is if I fire a rifle, which I’d have to hold in a left-handed stance to get the best aim. In any other aiming activity, I could just shift which eye I use.
Extend both hands forward of your body and place the hands together making a small triangle (approximately 1/2 to 3/4 inch per side) between your thumbs and the first knuckle like this :
With both eyes open, look through the triangle and centre something such as a doorknob in the triangle.
Close your left eye. If the object remains in view, you are right eye dominant. If closing your right eye keeps the object in view, you are left eye dominant.
I worried about this anomaly and what it could mean. Other than one eye leading the other, in the same way, that feet and hands do, it’s of no great significance.
The difference is, one isn’t so aware of how one eye dominates the other. It seems to be of particular interest to sports people and the military where aiming and control are of paramount importance.
Those spooky night sights that soldiers wear would presumably be more effective if worn over the stronger eye. Or perhaps the weaker, as it would leave the dominant eye to pick up movement around the combatant.
I think that combat pilots would need to know which their dominant eye was, as they have the distraction of a heads-up-display which shines information onto their helmet visor.
I’m wondering what else I’m going to find out about my ageing body before it conks out…
One of the best sites to subscribe to, if you’re interested in words is Wordsmith.org
They have a service called A.Word.A.Day, which sends out a daily email containing just that.
The service comes from Anu Garg, who founded Wordsmith in 2002. Remarkably, his first language is not English, but his fascination with words led to him quitting the corporate world to spread his love of etymology.
He has a quarter of a million subscribers in 170 countries. Each week he chooses words that fit a particular theme, such as English words derived from a foreign language or words with a military connection. Feedback is encouraged, and there’s an enjoyable discussion of the week’s words delivered to your inbox at the weekend.
Each daily word email also has a pithy quote at the bottom of the page, which is a bonus.
I was clearing my Hotmail Inbox this morning, and came across a bulletin from the site ‘The Art Of Manliness’.
I’ve subscribed to their postings for several years. The site tackles some interesting subjects, giving useful advice – though it’s unintentionally humorous at times. The old advertising photos that it uses to illustrate articles have a certain whimsy. It’s free to sign-up to – see the subscription box at the side of their page.
After writing a novel in 2014, I particularly agreed with what he has to say about how hard it is to get your work known :
“But I’d also say to be prepared for a heavy dose of reality. Commercial publishing is a mercenary business, and works of fiction are harder to get published than non-fiction books. Publishing fiction is a longshot at best, and there are no fail-safe solutions anyone can prescribe to guarantee you success.
So, I offer a paradoxical sort of encouragement. For anyone contemplating writing a novel, I’d give two messages: both “you can do it” and “beware,” at the same time. The caution means that almost anyone can write and publish a novel, true, but there’s a high price to pay to do it, for which you need to be prepared. I’d be doing you a disservice if I told you otherwise.
One of the main problems is that people tend to think that the actual writing of the book is the only battle they will face in the process. But the writing is only about a quarter of what’s needed. The second quarter is the fight to get your manuscript published. The next quarter is relentlessly marketing your book once it comes out, which publishers expect you to do these days.
Then the final quarter is going to primal scream therapy after your book sales fail miserably because by then you’re depressed and broke and visionless, and insanely jealous of John Grisham, James Patterson, Ken Follett, and Lee Child—pretty much the only four male scribblers who actually make money at this game.”
People who haven’t done it, think that the actual writing of a story is the difficult part, but it’s the business side of it that takes time, effort and patience.
By 2015, I’d been self-publishing online for about eighteen months, initially on Smashwords, then on Amazon. I write novels, short stories, novellas, poetry and song lyrics. Although I’m confident in the worth of my writing, the actual marketing of it has been both intriguing and frustrating.
Sales were poor, so as a ploy to raise my profile I decided to give all of my books away for free. I hoped that this might help to launch my novel ‘The Perfect Murderer’, that I laboured so hard at in 2014. Downloads of my books picked up and were encouraging, for after all the price was right.
I decided to compile a couple more collections of my poetry, including some erotic verse. I published ‘What Do You Like ?’ on Smashwords, and to my astonishment, over the last four years, it’s been downloaded 2,000 times! Had I been charging my usual $2.99 for poetry, and if they’d been prepared to pay, I’d have earned $6,000!
I began to understand why there are so many stories about sex on Smashwords. I’d been looking down my nose at them all a bit, thinking they were just jumping on the 50 Shades bandwaggon. But if it’s sex that sells, then that’s what writers will write. I expect that many of them are like me, writers who were exasperated at their best literary efforts being ignored, so wrote something naughtier and were amazed at the results.
The next time that you see someone using a Kindle in public, to read a book, I bet that they’ll be secretly getting turned-on by something erotic! The very anonymity of these e-reading devices has led to a boom in erotic writing.
I’m a long way from being a prude, but some of the titles that I see published appear to cross over the fine boundary between erotica and pornography. As the old adage goes – ‘Being erotic is when you make love to someone using a feather. Pornographic is when you use the whole chicken!’
Writing fiction, one has to get into the mindset of whoever you’re describing. This can have quite an effect, as I found when researching the first crime novel I wrote, ‘The Perfect Murderer’ where I had violent nightmares about shady figures stalking me. I can’t say that writing erotica was particularly arousing though, but I’ve got enough happy memories to draw upon to make it sound realistic.
I’m really not sure what to tackle next, and whether I should ditch any literary aspirations, to write in a shallow, steamy and titillating way, promoting my book with sexual tags – erotic, sex scenes, kinky, insatiable etc, etc.
To add to my confusion, I put together a second collection of erotic verse, which I published in 2016. I already had five poems about sex that were unpublished, so wrote four more. These were more overtly sexual than the others, to make the collection steamier. The irony is, that I felt about as erotic as a cold used tea-bag, as I sat here in 50 degrees wearing fifteen garments, including woolly gloves, and with my feet resting on a hot-water bottle.
I expected the new book ‘Chasing Big ‘O’ ‘ to be noticed and downloaded lots, for, after all, I’d used the alluring tags of ‘erotica’, ‘sex’ and ‘orgasm’ to describe it. To my surprise, only 200 people downloaded it over the next three years. The reason that they haven’t may simply be down to the new book not having nakedflesh on the cover. Instead, it shows a fragmenting female statue. This means that readers aren’t even bothering to use the tags to search – simply looking for something that might be rude.
This amateur market research has only produced one firm conclusion – readers like erotic verse and stories.
I’m not the first writer to be confronted with this trap. One of my favourite crime authors is Lawrence Block, whose recovering alcoholic detective hero was partly instrumental in helping me to quit booze twenty-three years ago. Like the famed writer Donald Westlake, Block started off his career writing porn paperbacks under a series of pen-names. Those were the days when such a trade was seen as shameful, rather than a reason for instant celebrity and admiration.
