The story of John Kennedy Toole is a cautionary one. For years he struggled to get his novel ‘A Confederacy Of Dunces’ published. Following his suicide, it took his mother another eleven years to find a publisher. The following year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
If you’re thinking of giving up, then don’t. As Thomas Edison said: “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
Update 2nd March, 2015: Nick Offerman, of ‘Parks and Recreation’ fame, is to take the lead part, playing Ignatius J Reilly in a stage adaptation of ‘A Confederacy Of Dunces’.
Unfortunately, and without exaggerating, my living circumstances are not that dissimilar to the poor poet in Carl Spitzweg’s atmospheric painting. I live in a roof space flat which has sloping walls, above a petrol-station shop and next to the flight path for an airport. It’s the noisiest and most dangerous place that I’ve lived in. To be able to concentrate on my creative writing, I wear earbuds all of the time that pipe music from 750 albums saved to the hard drive of my laptop. Listening to music, where I know what sound is coming next, is preferable to being startled by the bangs and crashes from the garage next door. I’m perverse enough to be able to do this …
I haven’t needed to resort to an umbrella to keep out the rain, but I do wear enough clothing in winter to resemble the Michelin Man, even in bed when the temperature descends to 39F/4C. Rats running in the wall was a low point….
Carl Spizweg was a romanticist painter, who came from a wealthy background. His paintings are charming, and lure the viewer into a moment in time making you wonder what happens next. I’m sure that we all feel for the precarious position of the reader in the painting ‘The Bookworm’ below, who looks to be too engrossed in what he’s reading for his own safety.
While approaching literary agents and publishers in the last couple of months, my memory drifted back to some old Peanuts cartoon strips.
I’m sure that we all recognise the situations below. Snoopy often begins his stories with the phrase ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ This was coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was an influential English novelist of the nineteenth century.
In 2014, the British government tried to ban prisoners receiving books sent to them through the mail. Their declared reason for doing this was to prevent drugs being smuggled in.
After vigorous protests, the ban was overturned in the High Court.
This makes sense, for one only has to look at the illiteracy and numeracy rates of those imprisoned. Half of the male and three-quarters of female prisoners have no qualifications at all, and 67% of them were unemployed at the time of their offending. There has to be a link between their breaking the law and the opportunities that they’re denied through a lack of education.
Poor self-image doesn’t help either, so for those wanting to better themselves and turn their lives around through the education programmes available inside, having access to books is vital. Prison libraries are poorly funded, and wouldn’t necessarily stock the much-needed books that a prisoner needs to transform their thinking.
Restricting access to the latest and most pertinent books would have been petty-minded censorship. As Joseph Brodsky, poet laureate of the United States in the 1990s, said: “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
The short story form is not easy to master. Many accomplished writers who attempt it produce tales that lack resolution. My favourite author of such brief forms of story-telling is Guy de Maupassant, a Frenchman who wrote in the nineteenth century. He says in a few pages what some cannot convey in an entire book.
Most of his stories are only a few pages long, and I prefer them to the six novels that he wrote. The most famous of these is ‘Bel-Ami’, which has been filmed several times. The Franco-Prussian War formed the backdrop for some of his work, showing ordinary citizens caught up in events beyond their control.
He liked writing moral stories about the peasants of Normandy, with their sly, earthy and penny-pinching ways. A good example of this is ‘A Piece of String’, in which a misunderstanding over a miserly action leads into an accusation of theft.
Death stalks the worlds that his characters inhabit, and revenge is always imminent. Maupassant eventually descended into madness, but not before penning several brilliant depictions of psychological horror. Of these, the disembodied and murderous hand in ‘The Hand’ has been stolen several times for films and television horror series.
‘The Horla’ is a haunting description of a man who is joined by a supernatural being, or is he imagining things – or losing his mind?
‘Idyll’ is laden with eroticism, while ‘Regret’ is a cautionary tale about how faint heart never won fair maiden. It should be read by anyone who has a long felt want for a prospective partner.
From my limited dealings so far with Amazon, I know what she means. After publishing on Smashwords, which felt like doing business with a friendly neighbourhood corner shop, putting my books onto Amazon had all of the charm of swimming in a pool full of sharks, while covered in bacon!
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.
