Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
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Thought of the Day: Tuesday 21st January
Thought of the Day: Monday 20th January
If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
Money for Free
Mystery has surrounded who has been leaving packages of money in the village of Blackhall Colliery, in County Durham since 2014.
The cash was left in places where it would be quickly found and close to residents who would benefit from financial assistance.
Now, two benefactors have identified themselves:
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/mystery-cash-wads-left-pit-125554611.html
Their good deed resembles the plot of a novel written by Niall Williams:
https://www.amazon.com/As-Heaven-Niall-Williams/dp/0446676012
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.
The world needs more do-gooders like them!
Republishing Out of Print Books
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:
https://legalbeagle.com/4829861-republish-book-that-out-print.html
https://www.booksandsuch.com/blog/getting-your-rights-back-from-the-publisher/
Some books have never been out of print, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula:
https://www.malrogersisoutofoffice.com/dracula-and-bram-stoker (Warning: alarming images!)
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’s An 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.
Travellers visit Neal’s island on pilgrimage:
http://www.riverbendnelligen.com/books.html
Another favourite read that’s no longer available new, is Twistgrip: a motorcycling anthology compiled 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.
Which titles would you like to see revived?
How Different Are Your Stories?
Fashion designer Coco Chanel stated:
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski
Who Do You Love?
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:
https://www.dailydot.com/society/how-to-delete-secure-email/
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:
Warts
Warts are a cursed nuisance.
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
https://skinbibles.com/wart-removal/surgery-excision.html
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.
https://codlinsandcream.blogspot.com/2008/03/wart-charmers-and-other-folklore.html
A handyman way of killing warts is to cover them with gaffer/duct tape, which has been shown to be more successful than freezing them off:
https://www.webmd.com/men/news/20021015/duct-tape-gets-rid-of-warts
What has been your experience of warts?
ADDENDUM: A new way of removing warts has been found—ultra-short electrical pulses.
https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/nano-pulse-stimulation-skin-lesions
I Don’t Know What I’m Doing!
I’ve long stated that “I don’t know what I’m doing” when it comes to writing. I’ve said this, while still believing in my ability to pen stories that have the power to entertain and maybe make readers think differently about a situation.
The act of creating a story is joyful to me. Whatever its fate, that a new story exists is vastly better than having it rattling around inside my head! But, the joy is shrouded in doubt. It’s the nature of creation that I wonder how effective my hard work has been…and that requires the judgement of readers—who may never learn of my book unless I’m nifty at marketing and self-promotion.
Having just self-published the first four stories of my Cornish Detective series on Amazon KDP Select, I’m facing just that challenge.
I don’t know what I’m doing about how best to use social media and attract subscribers to my two blogs/websites Paul Pens and The Cornish Detective,
http://paulpens.cloudaccess.host/
http://thecornishdetective.cloudaccess.host/
but I’m going to embrace that uncertainty. It feels like gathering fog into my arms.
I was pondering my confusion when a newsletter from Austin Kleon arrived.
Titled Teach your tongue to say I don’t know...Austin Kleon describes how doubt is crucial to make progress.
I like this advice from Mike Monteiro:
“The secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.”
As one year dribbles down Time’s plughole and a new year bubbles forth, I’m as confused as I’ve ever been about writing and the convoluted world of publishing.
But, what does it matter?
The work’s the thing!
Don’t you agree?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Br%C3%A2ncu%C8%99i
Brâncuşi is best known for his sculpture The Kiss:
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Was Dracula Gay?
The BBC is showing a dramatised version of the Dracula story this Christmas, which suggests that the Count was gay!
New BBC horror suggests Dracula did more than bite his male victims
The co-writer of the drama Mark Gatiss is gay. He makes a good point by saying that horror should be transgressive:
“Horror over time becomes quite cosy. I think horror should not be cosy.”
That Dracula creator Bram Stoker was probably a closeted homosexual adds weight to the tone of this adaptation.
Of course, there has been previous tinkering with the Dracula character. Hammer Horror films made female versions in such films as Lust For A Vampire, The Vampire Lovers and Twins Of Evil.
Yutte Stensgaard in Lust For A Vampire
At the time of the blaxploitation movies in the 1970s black actor William Marshall starred as Blacula (‘Dracula’s Soul Brother’!)
As a callow 18-year-old librarian, I watched it at the King’s Cross cinema in London uncertain whether to laugh or feel scared.
What do you make of such adjustments of famous fictional characters?