I was reminded of it by a brilliant cartoon in today’s newsletter from Hyperallergic.
I smiled at the punchline in the final box.
Once again, I’m feeling like an impostor, as I stumble around learning how to use Twitter and Instagram. I keep wondering: “What am I doing here? Will anything I post make a difference to anything?”
But, that’s part and parcel of being a writer. The world of writing and publishing thrives on creating doubt. Subscribe to one hundred newsletters from writing gurus and soon you’ll be inundated with advice on what you’re doing wrong…and, if you simply pay £450 for a weekend residential course, all of your errors will be chased away.
What a writer desires is some form of validation. Things get so uncertain, that we analyse the language used in rejection letters for solace!
I come alive when I write more of my WIP, which is how I know I’m real and not an impostor. Tweeting and posting on social media is restrictive and repetitive, as I tailor my words to have an effect—which makes me feel like a con man—get the punters’ confidence and maybe they’ll buy my books!
Recently, I’ve been exploring Twitter, seeking out Colony members and Crime genre authors and literary agents who like crime novels. I intended to use this personal account to make contacts and to promote myself and my Cornish Detective series in a non-pushy way.
My Twitter presence morphed from a Facebook Author page called Paul Pens, which is based on threads I started on The Colony. Last autumn, I started a Facebook business page devoted to my Cornish Detective series. Why not give my fictional hero a Twitter account too?
I searched for advice online, finding this dated article:
There are a lot of Marvel and DC superheroes and fictional heroes tweeting away, as are Homer J. Simpson, Charlie Brown and Lord Voldermort, so I may join in with Detective Chief Inspector Neil Kettle.
It made me remember a similar story from when I was living in the USA in 2002. An elderly couple won the Mega Millions lottery, an absurd amount, a couple of hundred million dollars. They gave their house to their daughter, along with several million, and hit the road in a new RV joining the ‘snowbirds’ who migrate south to warmer states.
They didn’t tell anyone of their good fortune but kept their ears open for stories of people down on their luck. Thus, if someone had run up medical bills, they paid them off anonymously. If a mobile hairdresser needed a new vehicle to run her business, then they’d buy her one, seeing to it that it was delivered without mentioning who’d paid for it.
I’ve read of several cases where an author bought back the rights to their book(s) after a publisher allowed them to go out of print. Most self-published them, doing a better job of promoting their titles than the traditional publisher. Other authors approach book companies trying to sell their work for a second time.
These short articles explain the ramifications of those two options:
It’s easy to see why some classic novels have endured, but I’m occasionally surprised to find books that have languished—or which spawn a cult, driving up second-hand prices.
Two good examples of the latter are Tom Neale’sAn Island To Oneself, which I’ve praised several times on Paul Pens.
His story is as timeless as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, so I’m amazed An Island To Oneself is out of print. Second-hand, it reaches eye-watering prices; there’s currently a copy on eBay for £105.
Another favourite read that’s no longer available new, is Twistgrip: a motorcycling anthologycompiled by esteemed motoring journalist and author L.J.K. Setright. There are two copies on eBay priced £75 and £59.99.
Had I the money, I’d purchase the rights to these two books and reprint them.
Stories need to stand out in some way to be marketed. Even if you accept that there are only seven types of plot, you can still write unique characters who do unusual things.
A modern way of describing this is having a Unique Selling Point (USP) which can also be an elevator pitch, a term used to describe selling an idea for a movie to a film producer you’ve trapped for a few seconds in an elevator. An extreme example of this is Snakes On A Plane whose title alone summed up the plot.
I write in the crime genre because I like it, and, as it’s the second-highest selling genre I stand more chance of success; also, crime stories allow me to tackle anything in society. I deliberately chose to conform to the conventions of a crime series—a set location, reoccurring characters and compelling antagonists who commit dreadful crimes. Cornwall and its landscape become a character. I explore the lives of my main character and his detectives to encourage the reader to bond with them.
Where my books differ from the mainstream, is that the Cornish Detective Chief Inspector Neil Kettle is the opposite of typical sleuths who drink, womanise, gamble, smoke and bend regulations. He’s a Green/Liberal lover of nature and the arts, who rides a 10’ long black chopper and is clean-living and faithful to his woman; I didn’t give him a love life until the fifth book. In these ways, he’s a weirdo.
Will this make him stand out enough to be successful? I’ve yet to find out. Do readers want to find a main character who’s unique, as marketers suggest?
How different is your protagonist? What idiosyncrasies do they have?
Are your stories predictable or surprising in their twists and turns? They should always be plausible.
A recent report from the sometimes murky book world shows how fascinated journalists and researchers are about the love lives of writers.
The poet T. S. Eliot had an unhappy first marriage, which he credited with having inspired him to write The Waste Land.
His second marriage was happier, but this hasn’t stopped speculation about his love life. Princeton University Library has made a collection of 1,000 of Eliot’s letters available to researchers. Some were sent to a woman he declared to be his muse, but who he denied was ever his lover.
This made me wonder about what researchers would make of my love life, should I ever achieve any fame from my books. With emails, one’s outpourings are permanently available…they’re never truly deleted:
There are no clues to my love affairs in the dedications of my five completed Cornish Detective novels, which are to six female friends and one male friend. All were supportive to me while writing.
Who do you love?
Will researchers be able to tell?
C. S. Lewis wrote a charming dedication to his goddaughter, Lucy in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe:
Caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV), it’s an infection that affects most people at some time in their lives, so it’s not something to be ashamed of.
There are different types of wart, including common (hands & feet), plantar (feet), periungual (under fingernail) and flat (arms and face). Such warts are not easily passed on from person to person, but anogenital warts transmit readily and are reckoned to be the most common sexually transmitted infection worldwide, with 1% of the population infected.
Of warts likely to be encountered in everyday life, as writers, we should be cautious about those on our fingers, especially if using a shared computer. They may be hard to pass on, but it does happen. I currently have a common wart on the palm of my right hand. It’s flat in profile, and not painful. That part of my hand barely touches the keys, but all the same, I regularly clean the keyboard with isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol.
My caution comes from seeing preventative swabbing of commonly touched items, such as door handles and electrical switches in homeless shelters. I once knew a young man who taught himself to play acoustic guitar. He had one small wart on his little finger when he began, which soon became fifty warts on both hands, painful enough to affect his work life as a librarian (he was made to wear vinyl gloves), not to mention his love life, as his girlfriend swiftly departed the scene. Friction from the guitar strings caused cracking in his skin letting the virus in. He resorted to surgery, which removed most of them, but some stuck around forever
I’ll refrain from posting images of giant warts and their surgical excision, but stomach-churning photographs are available online. I once cut a wart out of my left index finger (I’m a tough guy!) which required persistence and tolerance of pain, as well as a steady hand. I used a pointed surgical scalpel blade to dig around the head occasionally tugging on it with tweezers. It was deeply planted and when it came free, it had a surprisingly long root, which looked like it could have passed through to the other side of my finger! I looked to see if there was a hole. I burnt the wart in the stove, imagining it screaming! The wound bled like a tap for a couple of hours afterwards. It hasn’t returned.
I’ve been treating my current warty visitor with Tea Tree Oil which is more sensible.
Traditional ways of removing warts include rubbing them with green tea, garlic, apple cider vinegar and the white latex-like juice obtained by cutting the stem of a dandelion. It’s said that rubbing a potato on a wart, then burying the potato will work…probably not, but you might get a crop of potatoes out of it.
Wart charmers have been around for centuries. Usually, they’re aged females and they use various plants rubbed on the warts or even bacon fat, which like the potato is buried. I knew a wart charmer when I lived in the Cornish village of Saint Cleer, who had success at blitzing warts with bacon fat while uttering incantations. She charged a fiver. A surprising number of burly men used her service. I wondered how much the placebo effect was part of the reason it worked: if you believed it was the solution it would be.
