Petals

Pieces of broken bodies fall around me

Like funeral petals

Fallout from friendships

Faced with the nuclear option of my madness

I gouge through gobs of flesh

That were once lips dribbling easy promises

Scouring for something so solid

As a splinter of bone to support my soul

I laughed and you loved it

And then I laughed too much and in the wrong places

And I could not stop

I cried and you loved it

And then I cried too much and in the wrong places

And I could not stop

Down I dig through gristle hair and teeth

Scratching at sinew for a single fingerhold of empathy

There is a solid something

Somewhere

There is a neon dawn a strobing sunrise

Somewhere

There is a noise that is not the scraping of my skull

Somewhere

But not here

Write to Reply?

This post has been brewing for a while. How appropriate that today I woke to find not one but two um, less than shimmery shiny reviews on Amazon.

For several months now, as you’ll have noticed from posts like this one on the Self-publishing Review , I’ve been equal measures delighted and disillusioned by the increasing mainstreaming of indie writers through Kindle sales success. Now there’s no way I’m going to kick off about how terrible it is that indie writers are being taken seriously, how awful it is that the bestselling indie books on Amazon are indistinguishable in genre from the bestselling mainstream books anywhere. After all, I put a thriller out, I’ve got bonkers-lucky and sold 5000 copies of it, and it’s opened doors for me. I have a love-hate relationship with The Company of Fellows and the response to it but that’s my problem, and moaning about being forced into the mainstream would be disingenuous. Besides, I have far more problems being sucked centrewards with my live shows and eight cuts gallery projects.

BUT. The thing’s this. There are things about the mainstream publishing world that really really suck. And one of the reasons I self-publish is because I want no part of it. But a lot of what I see from self-styled indie writers (with whom I get lumped whether I like it or not and whatever the definition of indie may be) is exactly what I went “indie” to get away from. And as is always the case, it always makes you crosser when your peers do something stupid than those to whom you have no connection at all.

And nowhere is this more the case than in responding to reviews (I won’t even go there when it comes to eliciting reviews). It’s been a hot topic in the blogosphere ever since *that* review of Greek Seaman on Big Al’s site. The best take I’ve seen on the subject, by far, was this from the fabulous Susanne O’Leary. Says it all, and in the best way.

I don’t really know what the best protocol is. I think it depends on who you are and all sorts of contextual details, but the basic principle I operate by is if you do nothing the reviewer looks like a dick. Say something back and you look like a dick. Only it’s not just responding in or out of kind to negative reviews. I can understand that in a way. We all get cross. Most of us write out the response in Word and then delete it. Or shout it in the shower. But I can understand if someone accidentally hits submit. It’s the calculation that bothers me. The gaming. The systematic downvoting of negative reviews and upvoting of positive ones, the pointed pointing out that really bad reviews are by reviewers who’ve not posted anything else (that’s a good thing if it *is* a conspiracy, right? It means you’ve got people worried) whilst, in the wake of the bad review one or more heavily upvoted 5-star reviews will appear by – you’ve got it – someone who hasn’t posted a review before.

Yes, it might get more readers who fall for the gaming. It might even have a positive effect in the long run. But that doesn’t make it OK, and it doesn’t make it cool. OK? Think of it like this. Two years ago we "indies" were callingb out for a less patronising system of gatekeeping. Out One. Big. Beef. with the status quo was that readers were being patronised and told what was Good For Them. We wanted to give readers the freedom to make up their own minds what they wanted. To bastardise the immortal Rolf Harris, can you see what the irony is yet?

You said "Pitch", right?

So, pitch can mean many things, but one of the many is musical. As I love music as much as if not more than books, and as it's an open secret that I would have been Jack White if it weren't for the fact I can't string two notes together and someone else got there first, here's the thing. I won't tell you what my books are about. You can read that elsewhere.

Anyway, because it's Glasto time and when I look at the shops full of festival wellies I really really wish I was there, and then I realise they're wellies and I'm quite glad I'm watching on TV, but anyway, this is my own personal literary pyramid stage.

These are pitches with a difference. Three songs per book that taken together pretty much give the feel of the book exactly. Like that feel and I almost guarantee you'll like the book. Don't like the music and that's no guarantee you won't love the book, of course. Links are to Kindle editions - remember, you don't need a Kindle to read Kindle books - simply download the free Kindle aopp on the book's page and in about 30 seconds you can read Kindle books on your iphone, Android, Mac orPC

Black Heart High
Kindle .com
Kindle UK




The Company of Fellows
Kindle .com
Kindle UK






Songs from the Other Side of the Wall
Kindle .com
Kindle UK






The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes
Kindle .com
Kindle UK





(life:) razorblades included
Kindle .com
Kindle UK

Head Health and Hard Choices

By now most of you will be aware I'm bipolar. If not, I clearly haven't been banging the campaign drum hard enough for a while. Something I'll try to rectify this summer. I had a minor but rather debilitating low episode this March, and have begun to recognise some of the oncoming symptoms in recent weeks: the disjunction between headspace and reality, that rushing feeling that the world is moving too slowly, an increasing inward-looking slience as intrusive negative thoughts start to gnaw away and need time to be dealt with one by one, the slow tunneling of one's vision on the one hand and tuning up of other senses on the other.

So, at a ridiculously busy time, the only thing to do is pare back. But what do you cut? Work is always the last thing to go, because it's what pays the bills.

Following Amazon's so-called Sunshine Deal whatever (see this post on the effect), sales of my books have absolutely tanked. So, at a time when money is desperate, the last thing to go should be something that gives me the chance to perk up sales, right? OK, before I talk about my decision, I'll do the beggy buy my booky thing:

The Company of Fellows is still just 70p for Kindle here, and has spent over 3 months in the top 100 thrillers on Amazon, as well as being voted "favourite Oxford novel" in a Blackwell's poll. You can get the paperback at Blackwell's, or here. And remember, to read Kindle books you don't need a Kindle - just download the free app for your phone, Mac or PC.


Black Heart High is just 69p to download. It's the first in a 7-part series designed to be the literary equivalent of a classy HBO series. It's genre fiction (dark paranormal romance) but I think it's the best thing I've ever written.

So, what to cut back? The obvious choice would be for the one thing that could make me serious money to be the one thing that stays. I was recently asked to take part in the Kindle Summer Book Club. It's a super collaboration between some of the bestselling independent authors out there - the likes of HP Mallory, J Carson Black, Victorine Lieske, Saffina Desforges and the Mark Williams/Louise Voss combo behind not one but two books in the current top 5 on UK Kindle. It's an extraordinary honour, and an extraordinary opportunity.

And it's the thing I've cut. The main reason is simple. It's a venture in which 10 other people would be relying on me, and pulling out half way through if my health deteriorated would cause all kinds of chaos and be really unfair on everyone. Also, those things in which other people are relying on you are always the ones most likely to cause dangerous amounts of anxiety - most people I know care more about not letting other people down than they do about letting themselves down. It's one reason I get so stressed about my work at eight cuts gallery. Especially the publishing - there are people relying on me to come through for them. Not just people but dear friends whose work I consider the best to have graced the 21st Century. And sometimes I don't have the mental resources to do what I'd like for them. And that hurts me deeply.

But there's something else I've learned from years of experience, and from many many hours of advice from GPs and shrinks - mine, my wife's, and friends'. Sometimes for the sake of your long-term mental health you have to say no things that would be financially beneficial in favour of those that, for the want of a non-naff phrase I can't quite find, make your heart sing. And anyone who knows me at all knows that selling books doesn't make my heart sing. If it happens as an accidental by-product it's a godsend in keeping a roof over ur heads. But I went indie so I didn't have to think about selling books. I did it so I could write what I want to write and put it out there how and where and when was best, and sod whether anyone would pay.



It might feel some times as though the agonies of organisation are driving me nuts, but The New Libertines tour is a large part (not as large as an understanding and equally fruitcakish wife, of course) of how I've stayed sane these past few months. Creatively, I live to perform. If I quit a summer and Autumn that promises gigs in Covent Garden, Blackwell's, Birmingham and the Albion Beatnik as well as preparation for a now-definite run on Edinburgh next summer, then something would die. And to write whatever needs to be scraped from my head, be it sentimental or plain sick. At the moment that's a 7-part series of books about a teenage ghost who lives to take revenge on the people who took the love of her life away.

One of the particular aspects of my own bespoke customisation of bipolar is an extremely strong (we're talking scotch bonnet) side order of anxiety, which means letting people down in any way seems a way worse sin than protecting your own mental health (OK, there's a cayenne dish of self-loathing there to boot). But sometimes it's not possible to avoid letting people down. You can't please everyone all the time. And when you're in that position and every sound in your head is screaming to a crescendo telling you just to ignore the situation and hope it'll go away, actually the only thing that will make it go away is taking the hard decision knowing it'll leave people mad at you.

Which (and this is the banging the campaign drum bit) leads to the very reasonable question (which, thankfully, because they're great people as well as great writers - go on, go and support them - I don't think any of the Summer Book Club authors will put) - knowing I'm bipolar and susceptible to the vicissitudes of an unstable mind, shouldn't I just have declined when I was first invited? And by transference, shouldn't I avoid things I may need to pull out of later? I want to present a rational answer to that question based on taking equality seriously, based on valuing people, based on seeing what someone can do and not what they can't, based on the kind of society we want to claim to be part of. But that's not really how I feel about it. If people really think that, then my honest response is a request to please leave before I give them an even more honest response.

Ghosts from the Future

Sometimes you read something that gets you thinking, and you feel you have to write something straight off the cuff. Andrew Gallix’s piece in today’s Guardian did just that. He wasn’t (as he clarified on twitter) really making a point one way or another, merely musing on Hauntology, and whether it’s still, er, haunting us. Like Gallix, I’m not really making a point about Hauntology. It’s a rather good way of looking at our obsession with the past. But I do want to take issue with that obsession.

From what I understand, according to Hauntology being in the present is like being made of really runny metal in a world of magnets. Sure, you have the power of self-motion. But as a being subject to the inevitability of bodily deterioration you get exhausted and so bits of you get sucked into a myriad magnets. Not exactly like that, but kind of like that. The present is a dialogue with the past where one party isn’t listening very closely to the other but keep shouting over it. Yeah, that works better. I’ve been in rooms like that. I give my utterance, and someone catches a word of it and they’re off, riffing on that word. Someone else catches another word and they’re off. A late guest walks into the room and sees me talking to these two guys, but the guys are so loud the late guest only hears what they say and has to figure out who or what the hell I am from what they say.

I don’t have an issue with ghosts. Life without ghosts is death. That much is obvious. Ghosts give direction, motion, pulls and pushes and nudges in the dark. Life is motion – never being fully self-contained, fully defined, fully sufficient. And without ghosts there is no motion. There may be a motive force but without those tantalising fuckers teasing and dashing and cherry-knocking us, making our head switch this way and that and our feet follow, that manifests itself as nothing more than anxiety – the eternal foot-tapping of a restive soul with nowhere to go.

My issue is with the past. Put simply, the past is death. Any penumbra it casts on our present is not cultural breath blowing through the art of now but a noxious mix of aftergases from its decay. And that matters. Because art is life. It is living. It is not going. And going, and never stopping. Orpheus and Lot’s wife have no place. When art looks over its shoulder it dies. It becomes nostalgia. Whimsy. Not even kitsch. Kitsch is whimsy that’s given what if a blow job and swallowed.

The past doesn’t branch out from the present, pulling at it and playing with it, shaping it and colouring it. The present truncates the past, crystallises it, stops it in its tracks, cutting off all possible outcomes but the outcome of the present. The past is death – it’s a place of possibility made impossible by our living in relation to it – it has no relation to us. It is not the ego, the author, the narrator who is slain by the past. It is I who turn round, face it down and kick the fucker to ribbons.

The future is what branches out from the moment – the past kind of hovers over the future present making a Diablo shape but the moment the present comes the past strings out behind you like a metroplis of junkie with the clucks.

The future is the noisy fuckers in the room, the ones toying with me. It’s the future that picks up what I say selectively and plays around with it. It takes a word, wonders what will become of it. Who might one day latch onto it. It is not Wagner who haunts Goering’s camp nostalgia but the fat Air Marshall who toys with Wagner’s pen as he hovers ready to score the Tristan chord.

Life is motion through possibility. It is played out in relation to the future, taking *those* ghosts and turning them into pasts. What we see when we live are all our futures taunting us from beyond our reach. It’s the sight of them that incites us to chase, it’s the possibilities of our present’s future morphology that layer what we see when we live, and if we turn round and watch the rolled-up and withered branches of its past in their death throes, we stop moving, become observers of fading patterns not navigators of would-be woven paths. Our presents make us the walking dead. We turn to salt.

So maybe there is a critical edge to these future ghosts. Gallix quotes Freud's "voice of the dead father". We might talk fruitfully of the voices of the unborn maybes. Not children, but possibilities. Art/life is wondering, doing without knowing, dipping your toe in the water of what if, a wilful forgetting of the lessons of previous pains. As such we could cut swathes through the hesitant stodge of a culture caught in the moment of constant pre-uttering stutter, struck dumb by fear of its legacy. But why would we? We're too busy living.

(Dan Holloway is the author of the paper The Ghost at My Shoulder, presented at the conference Ghosts of the Past, and appearing as an appendix in the paperback of his novel Songs from the Other Side of the Wall)

Kindle Authors UK

It's one of those ridiculously busy summers, but it's all fabulous fun. I'm utterly delighted to be part of Kindle Authors UK, a group of traditional and indie published writers with work on Kindle, and, er, me.

There's a fabulous line-up of Emma Barnes, Debbie Bennett, Karen Bush, Ann Evans, Lynne Garner, Karen King, Joan Lennon, Susan Price, Enid Richemnot and Katherine Roberts.

It's a great chance to know them and their books and to listen to us all burble on once a month. I'll be posting every 16th. I'll be causing general mayhem as usual, probably babbling about live readings, and almost certainly unable to avoid posting some free poems for people, and talking about amazing writers. My first post, "Let's Talk About It" is, unsurprisingly about how much I love live shows.

Do pop over and say hello - and discover some amazing writers.

Has Amazon declared war on the indies?

(And could that be the best thing that ever happened to us?)

So – hands up who calls themselves an indie? Hands up if you’ve enjoyed selling on Kindle? And hands up if you think you’ve got less lazy since you started selling on Kindle? I don’t mean time lazy, I mean idea lazy.

Still with me?

OK, I’ll start. Today sees the end of Amazon’s Sunshine Deals summer reading extravaganza, and for many indie authors it can’t come a day too soon. The effect on those of us tenuously in the top 100 has been devastating. Sales have tanked (from around 120 a day to 40 a day in my case) as ultra-cheap books by established authors have demonstrated that readers’ love of all things indie actually referred to price not content. And they’ll be with us for a while to come now they’ve worked into the recommendation algorithm.

But that’s not the most worrying development. The US forum moderators kicked all promotion threads into a “Meet Our Authors” forum, and today it seems at least two global changes have kicked in. The “insert product link” button no longer lists books, so you have to manually type in/paste a live link to a book, and the brackets many of us used after our book titles have all disappeared.

Those were two of the indies’ biggest marketing tools – the former offering readers simplicity, the latter being an attention grabber. These changes affect everyone in theory, but in practice impact the indies most.

So this is war on the indies, right? Well, quite possibly. Almost certainly Amazon is clearing the way for its own publishing programme.

But so what? I’m an indie. I’ve been saying for a while I think we’ve seen a change in what that means as more and more people with mainstream genre books have “gone indie”, meaning they’ve self-published, usually through Kindle. Heck, I’ve had a genre book in the top 100 bestsellers for almost 3 weeks. But for me whilst that’s great, and it’s been a financial lifeline at an incredibly difficult time on a personal level, it has nothing to do with REALLY being indie. I argued in April that the real winners on Kindle would be prolific midlisters who built a fanbase and didn’t rely on market vagaries – they would successfully replace the modest-income-addition they’d lost as publishers dropped their modest-income-addition-generating midlist.

For me being an indie is about freedom. It’s about writing the books you want, no, the books you *have* to write, and then being free to put them out in the world. They can be genre books or the most obscure experimentation, but the point is you didn’t put them there to make money, you did it because it mattered to do it your way, and to find your own readers, and get to know them and interact, and be less faceless than a regular author. Being indie is about individuality and community all rolled into one.

Which brings me back to my initial questions. It’s been too easy to make sales as an “indie” on Kindle. Lots of people spent lots of time on Amazon forums (yeah, me too) posting links to their books. They spent more time marketing than ever before, and with real success, and thought that was the key. Sound familiar, not just on a personal level but in terms of Business Studies 101? Yeah, of course it does. It’s the blinkered behaviour that’s characterised every bubble since time began – find a surefire way that works and stop looking for an alternative. Then wail and rend clothes when that surefire way vanishes.

Of course not everyone who Kindled their books was like that. The forums are filled with people who’ve used them to build a genuine relationship, Kevin Kelly style (I’ve said time and again the past two years how weird it is people stopped talking 1000 true fans – the reason’s simple: 1000 true fans isn’t easy. It seemed ersatz. It wasn’t). And people who do other stuff as well. They’ll be the ones who ride out the storm, because the readers will follow them.

And what of people like me, and the rag tag bunch of us at Year Zero and eight cuts gallery for whom indie is an ethos not a business strategy? Well, I’ll carry on doing live shows, weird online exhibitions, sharing recipes, and looking for weird and wonderful ways to bring what I write to people who don’t know about it. I’ll thank Amazon for the kick up the backside and warning not to get complacent (as well as for the sales whilst they were there of course). I’ll remind myself every day of what matters about writing, and culture as a whole. And I have to say I’ll rather enjoy the fact that very soon it’ll stop being cool to be indie. It’s made me a bit hot under the collar flyingthat close to the mainstream sun.

And at teh risk of sounding like a "take your medicine" parent, it'll do indie writers in general a power of good. The real indie writers. Those who've succeeded on Kindle because they engaged with readers will carry on succeeding. For everyone else the end of a cash cow may eb what's needed to get them doing it right and non-lazily before they learn bad habits.

Oh, and here are my books :)

Black Heart High
The Company of Fellows
The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes
Songs from the Other Side of the Wall
(life:) razorblades included

Kindle Summer Book Club

I'm delighted that Black Heart High is part of the Kindle Summer Book Club, a really rather super reading and discussion group to take away the summer blues (well I get summer blues, anyway - I like dark and dank myself :)), featuring books by some of the bestselling independent authors on Kindle.



Coming very soon will be an anthology featuring all the writers, but the hub of the group is the FRABJOUS FACEBOOK PAGE. CLICK HERE TO LIKE IT. Each week we'll be discussing a new book - there's a list below. It'll be like Richard and Judy/Oprah (delete as approporiate - for those in the US, Richard and Judy are like Oprah but without the love-hate relationship with James Frey; for those in the UK, Oprah is like Richard and Judy only without the shoplifting beef).

So here's the books! Links are to UK Kindle but they're all available everywhere.

THE SHOP, JCarsonBlack. The murder of a celebrity inAspensets the table for an orgy of death, destruction and infamy, involving a shadowy conspiracy that goes to the heart of Government, in the heart-poundingUSbestseller .

SUGAR AND SPICE (USEDITION), Saffina Desforges (US link). Would you trust a convicted sex offender to help you find your daughter's killer? The groundbreaking debutUKcrime novel that dares to tackle the last taboo - now recreated for theUS.

CATCH YOUR DEATH, Mark Edwards & Louise Voss. Imagine if Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson got together to write a conspiracy thriller set in the English countryside, featuring a killer virus, psychopathic killers and a race to save the world...

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, Sibel Hodge. Armed with cool sarcasm and uncontrollable hair, feisty insurance investigator Amber Fox is back in a new mystery combining murder and mayhem with romance and chicklit…

BLACK HEART HIGH, Dan Holloway. 3 years ago Kayla and Spark promised to keep each other safe. Whatever. When Spark is left for dead in a brutal attack, Kayla knows she's about to find out what 'whatever' means. First of a dark paranormal romance series to be released one book every two months for a year.

THE OVERTAKING, Victorine Lieske. First in an exciting new young adult series from the NYT bestselling author. Shayne Bartlet has been kidnapped, his telepathic powers disabled and his memory altered. He’s not having a good day...

DISINTEGRATION, Scott Nicholson. When a fire destroys his home and kills his daughter, Jacob Wells enters a downward spiral that draws him ever closer to the past he thought was dead and buried. A shocking psychological thriller from the author of Liquid Fear.

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM, Cheryl Shireman. A story about the power of love, the devastating consequences of depression, and the strength of the human spirit. A woman goes alone to a secluded cabin to rethink her life in the stunning debut novel from a talented new writer.

A week is a long time in literature

There isn't a message to this post, nor is there a nice, easy take-away lesson. Hmm, maybe there is. And if there is it's this. Sometimes more seems to happen in a week than you ever imagined you'd pack into a year. Some weeks make it feel like your goals have shifted. No longer do you crave sales or accolades or recognition or whatever it is you thought you craved. Your one goal is one day, maybe, if you work hard enough and really earn it and have a lifetime's worth of luck all concentrated into one moment, you may once again achieve a full night's sleep.

It was always going to be a busy week. But I had no idea just how busy. Or how much fun it would be

Just before the start of the week, The Company of Fellows (download here) reached the top 100 of the UK Kindle charts, and on Friday this week it hit the top 50. But I thought this was going to be a week where nothing really happened with this book. That was before Blackwell's held a readers' poll to find their favourite Oxford novel and I put a note about it on Facebook. And bam! People started voting, and voting. And despite the fact I wasn't in the original 15 choices, the book came out top.

Blackwell's were fantastic. Rather than chuck out this random upstart, they embraced the book, and have given it a place front of house in their world famous Oxford store. Which meant going and handing over copies.



And doing an interview and photoshoot for The Oxford Times.

So, to what I knew I would be doing this week. On Wednesday eight cuts gallery published Penny Goring's The Zoom Zoom, bringing to a head a remarkable journey with Penny's work that began over 2 years ago, and in which she has developed into the most startlingly original and brilliant writer of her generation. The Zoom Zoom is a masterpiece, and as of Wednesday available for Kindle and in paperback. Getting the book absolutely perfect has taken up a huge amount of head space the past few months because the project is so important to me.

On the same day, I published my new book Black Heart High (available for Kindle for 70p), which marks the start of a new year-long project - a paranormal dark romance series of 25-30,000 word books that I'll be publishing once every two months for the next year.

And then there were the gigs. On Friday I got to read in Oxford at the launch of issue 6 of Structo Magazine, a wonderful broadsheet literary publication. It was a fantastic evening where I got to meet some amazing writers, and discovered a new star, the remarkable Conan McMurtrie.

And then there was yesterday. Yesterday was *the day*. The New Libertines at Stoke Newington Literary Festival. And what a day it was always going to be. 12 writers. One band. Meeting the wonderful Jane Alexander and Stella Deleuze for the first time. A two hour gig at the fantastic, gothic and decked-in=purple-and-pineapple Baby Bath House. Only at the start of the week I had no idea just what that would involve. The panic over PA, the tube nightmare, the tacky floor and seating chaos. The end result was a sell-out performance to a wonderfully receptive crowd and some absolutely remarkable performances, including Penny's Bone Dust Disco officially launching the paperback of The Zoom Zoom.

Then it was across London by any means to catch up with my best friend and inspiration behind the New Libertines show, Cody James.

And this morning, to round out the week, I had the wonderful news that my piece In Paris and London has been accepted for "Defining Jane", a fantastic project by Stacey Yates, piecing together a life in words and photographs based on police reports of anonymous deaths.

A VERY big thank you

Buy the Company of Fellows for 70p for Kindle in the UK

To everyone who voted and made The Company of Fellows the Favourite Oxford Novel in the Blackwell's Bookshop readers' poll. And equally to Blackwell's for not only running the poll but for graciously saying they would display The Company of Fellows despite the fact it was not on their original list of contenders. That's above and beyond. I'l be taking copies round this week. I would utterly recommend everyone who voted to open themselves an account at Blackwell's online and consider them as an alternative to Amazon.



And also, whilst I'm thanking, a massive thank you to the 1776 people who bought The Company of Fellows for UK Kindle in May alone and propelled it into the overall top 100 charts not only on Kindle but Amazon UK's overall fiction chart. The book is now on the cusp of the top 50, which is beyond my wildest whatnots. I look forward to celebrating with an event in the near future.

Meanwhile, any and all purchases are hugely welcome - don't forget you don't need a Kindle - the Kindle app is free for your phone, Mac or PC. The book's still just 70p here.

And anyone who comes to see me at The New Libertines show at Stoke Newington Literary Festival this weekend will be able to buy the paperback for the knockdown price of £8. The last few tickets can be bought from the box office here.