The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes

Coming to Manchester

2012-01-20T03:22:00.001-08:00

This Monday I'll be hosting an evening with some of the most sensational writers and spoken word artists around at Three Minute Theatre in Manchester's legendary Afflecks. And it's free. If you're anywhere near, don't miss out! full details here

In Short: Write a Great Synopsis with Nicola Morgan

2012-01-16T01:16:00.000-08:00

I've been hanging out at Nicola Morgan's excellent Help! I Need a Publisher blog like a dissolute Barfly at for two years now. Whilst I most definitely don't want a publisher (whether I need one or not may be another matter altogether, of course, but I am very happy without one), I do find it a fabulous place to meet people, share gossip, and learn from the ever-excellent Crabbit Old Bat, whose advice is always to the point and eminently wise. It is, therefore, an absolute delight to be part of the blog tour for her new and incredibly useful book Write a Great Synopsis - An Expert Guide. And an extra special announcement is that Nicola will be in Oxford tomorrow for a workshop in Blackwell's (details here).

Before I go any further I should explain that there is a fabulous competition going on alongside this. In Nicola's words:

"Win a synopsis critique and advice from the Crabbit Old Bat herself! Surrounding publication on January 20th of Write a Great Synopsis – An Expert Guide, I will be visiting a number of blogs for a guest post, review or interview. If you’d like the chance of winning help with your synopsis, simply leave a relevant comment on any of the guest posts. (This could be a deep and meaningful comment or a plea to the gods of fortune to pick you!) One comment per post – but comment on each post if you wish. On February 15th, each blog host will send me the names of valid commenters and I will do a random selection, using a random number generator.
Prizes: 1st prize – a critique of your synopsis, at a mutually convenient time; plus a signed book of your choice, if available. 2nd prize – a critique of your synopsis. 3rd prize – a signed book of your choice, if available."

So, without further ado, I'll let the interview commence, and say a humungous thank you to Nicola for letting herself be subjected to questioning. I do hope my readers will go and visit the rest of the blogs on this fabulous tour. You'll find them appearing as they happen on the right hand side here. People who are new here, you probably want to avoid looking round carefully or you will be subjected to poetry, videos of poetry and highly iffy opinions about literature and publishing.

For details of how to buy this super book, click here or the cover below. Oh, and there's even a trailer vid at the end put together by Nicola's highly talented daughter. And finally, Nicola will be at Blackwell's tomorrow night!! Don't miss the chance to come along and give her chocolate!

Thank you very much Dan, for letting me come and talk about synopses, one of my favourite topics and not at all the nasty thing that most writers think!

1. So, the fantasy shoe...
I am brand averse. So, I’d never go shoe brand-hunting or choose/reject a shoe based on the name. My fantasy shoes are elegant, pointy toed, stiletto but not high, and a million times more comfortable than they look, because I’m no fool. They also stay firmly on my feet, because there’s nothing worse than them slipping off when I’m on the red carpet. (Well, you did say fantasy.)

2. Seriously, though. If Converse produced a Nicola Morgan special edition, what design would they have?
*checks internet to see what Converse shoes look like* Erm, I’d rather they didn’t. I remember you asking me once whether I was a Converse or something else (eh?) fan and I had to go and look them both up. Didn’t like either! Converse looks to me like an expensive way of dressing up a plimsoll.

3. I often joke that the main reason I decided to self-publish is so I don't have to write a synopsis, but I actually find them rather fun. Maybe it's because I went to a school where English lessons were frequently comprehension and precis. Why do you think the synopsis has such a mythology of dread around it, and what basic skills should writers be working on before they ever get to their own synopses to help them when they do?
I’m with you on the précis. I loved loved loved doing them. Why the dread? Because people mean several different things when they say “synopsis” and writers stress about which* one is being talked about and surmise that it’s all a flux-ridden mystery. It’s not. WAGS unpicks all that and more and removes all reason for fear. It even gives you a method and examples and answers to all the synopsis-related questions I’ve ever been asked. And it explains my patent Crappy Memory Tool. Skills? Verbal agility and a wide vocabulary but if you’re a good enough writer to write a good enough book, you’ve got those.

* And let me emphasise that in the book, as here, I make clear that the one I’m talking about is the one an agent or publisher wants before signing you.

4. My personal intuition is that most people who struggle with a synopsis do so because they don't know what their book is about...
I think they know too much about what their book is about and can’t see the clearing for the forest. They need to find the core and slash and burn the rest.

5. Honestly and, ahem, off the record, what percentage of agents read the synopsis before the manuscript and will go no further if it's awful?
I’m not doing percentages because I’d be making them up but from my enquiries and my intuition, the vast majority read the letter, then the sample chapters and only then the synopsis, and they only read that if the first two items were good enough. But if they did read it before the sample chapters and if it revealed that this was completely not the sort of book the agent would handle, they would probably not read on. But this would be because the book was wrong, not the synopsis. If the synopsis also revealed awful writing ability, they wouldn’t go on but I believe they’d have known that from the covering letter and would never get to the synopsis or the sample. The synopsis is the least important part of the submission, but it does have a function and it’s that function you need to consider..

6. Suppose the first three chapters are great. How likely is a poor synopsis to stop the agent asking for the rest of it, or have they already fired the e-mail off before they get there?
Unlikely. Only if (as above) the synopsis reveals that this is completely the wrong book for this agent. But they would most likely know that from the covering letter or sample. So, unlikely. And again, that’s unlikely to be the poor synopsis but the wrong book. Also, depends how “great” and how “poor”!

7.One of my pet peeves is the "How I sold a million by breaking all the rules" anecdote that every big name author seems to be able to drag out. Can you explain, without using the CAPS lock, why it is more important for writers to read a book like yours, digest it, then do what it says rather than trying to emulate this week's maverick du jour in being "original"?

Easy. I don’t need CAPS lock. I have three thoughts for you. First, it’s possible for someone to cross a motorway blindfolded and not be killed; that does not mean that crossing the motorway blindfolded is an advisable way to live a long life. Second, actually, you are perfectly welcome to ignore everything I say. Just read it first so that you know what you’re ignoring and why. Third, your idea of original could be off the agent’s nutter-scale.

8. If someone asked you how long it took to write a really good synopsis, would the chosen unit in which you responded be: 1. hours, 2. measures of whisky, 3. percentage increase in grey hair coverage, or 4. dairy milk bars?
Minutes. About twenty. Why would you need or want to spend more? You only need more if you’re messing around on Twitter.

9. Finally, and with huge thanks for being such a star, could you say, in summary points as it were, what the difference is between a synopsis and a plot outline?

I’d say read the book, tbh :) But, ok, in very brief: an outline a) is chronological b) is more comprehensive and therefore longer and c) includes such things as POV switches. A synopsis needn’t be chronological; it is shorter and more elegant. But it is still functional and let me leave you with that over-riding thought: a synopsis is not poetry but function. The function of the synopsis is to show its reader that you completed your story successfully and satisfyingly, in a way that suits the genre. It’s not a necessarily beautiful thing. But it can be.

Dan, thanks so much for hosting me! Happy synopsis-writing to all your readers.

Thank you, Nicola!
And here's the video!

Monsters (poem)

2012-01-15T06:29:00.000-08:00

There are monsters on our streets.
I’ve seen their footprints,
Seen hints behind smoked glass,
Seen glints on paths
Like shards of broken condoms in the aftermath.

I’ve seen houses boarded,
Seen hoardings placarded with warnings,
And heard stories whispered on street corners.
I’ve seen the evidence they leave,
The detritus and the dross each morning,
The lonely and the lost,
The whores who count the cost in doorways
Scoring from the boys they babysat
Before their joy was drawn
Through the eye of a rich man’s needle.

There are monsters on these streets.
They roam in groups that loot and vandalise
And look their victims in the eyes
And spit their lies
About society
But the only thing that’s broken
Are the dreams they choked,
Flames of light put out like candles, trailing into smoke.
They took arteries of hope and opened them.
And watched a generation bleed out on the streets
And let its body rot like meat
And fester in the summer heat
While they discretely pocketed its cash
Planted stashes
And then called in the police.

There are monsters on these streets,
High priests of greed
In cashmere robes and tweed,
The seed of Adam Smith
Feeding myths of freedom
And the creed that the future of civilization’s in their gift.

There are monsters on these streets
But I will not be one of them.
When they see my hood
They may see an animal in me
But when I see their suit
I’ll see more than criminality.
I’ll see more than the brutality
Of narrow-mindedness
And I won’t be blinded by banalities
Like The Common Good and Shared Humanity.
There are only a billion individual histories
From the unreported to the unperturbed
From those distorted and disturbed by laziness
To those whose twisted thoughts we’d rather label craziness.
You see, the only monsters on these streets
Are those we choose to see.

Poetry Video - Her Body

2012-01-07T15:55:00.000-08:00

When somoene with a public profile dies, the person often gets lost in the discussion of what their death means.

Her body
Was the canvas where you painted your myths
In come and similes and piss
The focal point of all your bliss
The only part of her you’ll ever miss

Her body
Will be a vanishing point in the desert
A line in the sands of time
Running through your hands
The silken strand
That drags your eyes
To the horizon
Where your future stands
The wandering caravan
That spans
The skeleton road to Samarkand

Her body
Will be a theme park for ideologues
Self-righteous pedagogues
Gender-political demagogues
Who hog the scene
Flogging anarchist zines
Filled with revolutionary schemes
And Utopian memes
While under the clogs of your flag burning screams
Her body slips into the soil unseen

Her body
Will be a garden planted with your fears
A bowl to catch your tears
A reminder of the years you spent
And those that went astray
The hours, minutes, days
You couldn’t bring yourself to say
Because you knew her body stayed
But not that she had slipped away

She is not the sum of all who went before
Her body’s not a metaphor
Her unkissed lips are not a funeral pyre
Her gaping wrists are not the mouths of liars
Her clitoris is not the primal fire
(the truth of it is infinitely higher)

Her body
Was woven from pieces of pain that no longer hurt
Has wounds that will not heal
Indignities she will not feel
Skin peels
Winds wheel
Limbs kneel
To hymns bashed out with soulless zeal
And dust steals back
The only proof that she was ever real

From the sandpit - a world of possibility

2012-01-07T04:08:00.000-08:00

It's week one of my play experiment and I'm finding my feet. It all feels rather frivolous, but that's sort of the point, as I find my way around what I want to devote more energy to. I've been posting random things to my tumblr. One of the things I'm really enjoying is having a camera for the first time in 30 years or so - at the moment I'm photographing food a lot (maybe I'll write the recipe book I've always wanted to), and I'm doing a series of my most prized literary possessions - here's #2, My ARC of Murakami's 1Q84 from the lovely people at Blackwell's.

What I'm really looking forward to is taking pictures of this year's literary exploits, reporting Oxford's literary scene as it were.

Writing-wise, I've written my first short story for ages, but I still haven't decided what to do as my next big project. I'm tempted even at the thought of a really dark thriller - maybe my crime-loving juices are bubbling again. I'm also working on a one-man show that might be ready for next year, and a one-man exhibition for the autumn. But most of all I'm really enjoying focusing on spoken word, and trying to improve my performances and material for poetry readings and am delighted to have been asked to do a couple of longer sets - at FULLFAT next Monday, the 9th, in Brick Lane, then for Ferment Magazine on the 28th.

In that vein, I'm working really hard on my performance so I can put together some fun videos on YouTube - just the one so far, and it's not fabulous, but it's a start - I hope another tomorrow.

Most of all at the moment I'm enjoying putting this year's shows together. I've made a definite choice to do fewer shows this year but put them together even better - last year was fabulous, and I also learned a huge amount. I want to stick to 5 or 6 really top class shows I can give everything to (organising-wise - I'll accept almost any invitations to read). First up is The New Libertines at Manchester's legendary Afflecks on January 23rd. There's been an amazing response to this and I'm so excited. Later in the year the highlights so far are Not the Oxford Literary Festival in March, a Flash Slam in May, and The New Libertines back at Stoke Newington Literary Festival in June.

Most of all I'm having an amazing time, and am looking forward to working with and discovering even more new fabulous writers than ever before as well as many many of my dearest friends and closest colleagues from the past 3 years.

New Year's Message

2012-01-01T03:28:00.000-08:00

I left before Christmas with a poem I hoped would get people writing poetry in the New Year, and more generally getting engaged in the things they cared about through there writing. You can see the words to Alibi here.

I thought I'd start the New Year as I hope to go on, with a video. I hope you enjoy it. I'd obviously love if you shared (the YouTube page is here - if you have a YouTube channel let me know and I'll subscribe), and if you do, please encourage people to leave their own poems in the responses - I hope you'll do that here. If you do, I'll take it you're OK with me putting the poem/prose/penning of whatever kind on my playpit homepage here.

Anyway, here it is. And weighing in at 2 minutes 57 seconds it's a fair bet you'll hear it at a slam near you some time this year!

Alibi

2011-12-21T15:21:00.000-08:00

Alibi

When you fail, you cry
Because you believed the lie
That if you try
With all your might
If you pursue a single line of sight
Looking neither to the left nor right,
Ignoring the distractions and delights
There is no height
You cannot reach
So when you don’t
You’re the failure, right?
Not them.
Your dreams provide their alibi.

But I know there are things I’ll never achieve
And I deceive myself if I believe I will.
My limitations are a bitter pill
Of stillborn expectations
And thrills I had to leave behind
But I was too blinded by stories
Of glory, fame and wealth
To see that I had whored myself
To the lie that I’m alone.
You see the only dream that counts
Is that we all count,
That every voice is heard
Every hope, anxiety, despair
Every tear you shed that no one saw
Because you turned away
And every desperate word
That you were too ashamed to say.
And I can’t do that on my own.
And that’s
OK.

Do not comply
With what they tell you to desire.
Defy the boundaries
They place upon your mind
And start a fire
That will not die
Until your whisper
And that of every brother, sister
Mother, father, lover,
Every angry fist in history
Unclenches and becomes a kiss
And every pair of lips becomes a choir.

Don’t let your dreams provide their alibi.
Make them accountable for every crime,
For every voice that they deny.
Look them in the eye
And let your rhymes and passion fight them.
Unite and let your love and the fact that after every disappointment you still believe in this sorry species indict them.
When you embrace humanity in its broken condition,
When ensuring those who cannot speak are spoken for’s your mission
And you chase the truth till every eye is open,
Every sleeping conscience woken,
Then your vision can incite them
To a revolution.
So take a moment, and your dreams,
And write them.
Go out into the alleys and recite them
And if humanity evolves
Sufficient to resolve
To make a reckoning
Of those who were involved
In lifting us from the mire
And those who just devolved
The choice to someone down the line
You’ll stand absolved,
Your head held high.
Their dreams,
The ones that you made fly,
With a whisper, quiet as a lullaby,
Those dreams will be your alibi.

Play Pit - do you have a tumblr?

2011-12-20T13:15:00.001-08:00

In the light of my previous post, I've made myself a playpit in which to do all that playing. I'll keep it updated as much as I possibly can, full of jottings and scrawled ideas, flashes and photos and manifestos that never get kept and the like.

Anyone out there with a tumblr, do post the URL in a comment so I can follow you. I am
http://lastmanoutofeden.tumblr.com/
for no better reason than that I thought Last Man Out of Eden might look good on a hoodie :)

Play

2011-12-15T03:52:00.000-08:00

(yes, I know that's Porcelain, but it's from the album Play :))

It's that time of year again. The reflective one. Last year I brought you both contemplation and a simple message: live. I've been thinking a lot about what to say this year. So much has happened from the extraordinarily good (Blackwell's favourite Oxford novel! Sell out show at Stoke Newington Literary Festival!) to the almost unbearable (my mother getting diagnosed with cancer, my best friend withdrawing altogether from the literary stage). Maybe there's a place for it all.

But that place isn't here.

Last year brought a simple message that remains as true now as it was then.

And this year's message is equally simple.

Play.

The best, and possibly the only valid, response to a year that might have left me (often did) more jaded than a Chinese art warehouse.

Last month I wrote what I imagined to be a provocative piece where I, um, might have not so inadvertently called pretty much every author on the planet a soulless hack. In fairness, my point wasn't to dismiss what writers spend much of their time doing so much as to encourage them to do something else. This was the core of it:

"Forget keeping your nose in “how I sold a gazillion copies of my ebook”, forget the endless round of commenting on everyone’s evangelical how to be an indie revolutionary blogs, forget the ambition to “get out, get anywhere, get all the way to the FBI” (but if my references seem just weird spare the time for a quick read of The Silence of the Lambs).

Spend a month remembering that nothing matters but the storytelling. And with that in mind, forget the words on the page and go find yourself an open mic or a bookstore near you and Read. Out Loud. To a group of real people. It’s how stories have been told for tens of thousands of years. It’s the most rewarding experience a storyteller can have. And if your kdp reports really mean more to you than following the whites of a person’s eyes as you drag them through hell and back again, for pity’s sake have the decency to call yourself a hack like any of the rest of us working 9 to 5s to make rent and don’t pretend to be a storyteller."

Now that's all pretty limited in scope. A month. Reading out loud. I want to open that up and get you to make a resolution with me:

In 2012 I will not think, not once, about how to make a single penny from my writing. In 2012 I will devote myself to playing.

There, that was easy, wasn't it!

But wait wait wait. Why why why? Well, think of it as a sabbatical. Or a gap year. Or, go on, why not, think of it as just plain fun!! But you need to make a living out of your writing? Wow, you're making a living out of your writing, fabulous! The 0.2 people I know who can do that may be duly excused and head back to the desk job their writing has become. You see, that's one of the problems with setting out to have writing as a career. It may seem so much better than spending 40+ hours a week tied to a whatever and getting home knackered having to do all those other things you do at home and desperately trying to squeeze in a few minutes at the laptop - but the moment you make writing your day job money *has* to be your focus (unless you're lucky enough to have independent means, of course). And whilst that may incidentally involve all sorts of other fun things to make your writing more likely to sell, there's been a fundamental shift. Which is why I'll stick to the poorly paid job that almost covers my bills and not bring my writing into it.

If you're honest with yourselves, I think you'll find that most of you are in the same boat as me. Writing is your passion. You do it because you have to. Because you have a truth you have to express. A story you have to tell. Something you just have to lay before the world. Your aim. Your goal. Your dream. The thing that stopped you sleeping all those yeas and makes you catch your breath when you think about it. That's not "to bank some pounds from my writing in 2012." Is it? Really?

So, what I want you to do is write down what that was. That thing. That made you feel like a lovesick teenager whose hand has just been grasped, sweatily and expectantly for the first time. And devote 2012 to that.

Only make your devotion loose. Experimental. Have a kind of Bloomsbury-ish relationship with your goals. Be willing to consider anything once. Or twice. Out of curiosity that it may be useful. Last year, for example, I stumbled on cell phone novels and slam poetry and had a fabulous time. As well as learning things about editing and rhythm. And little handmade booklets. Whcih taught me about care and craft and space. And were fun.

Play at least once a month. Write something you wouldn't have considered writing. Go to a part of the web you wouldn't have considered visiting and say hello. Go to an event you wouldn't normally go to, or a gallery you wouldn't usually be seen dead at. Try teaching someone something writery (for free). Try volunteering for someting writerly. Try making something. Try leaving cards with a haiku and a URL on tables in bars.

Just try it.

Without expecting anything but fun and that goosebumpy anticipationy what-might-happen-nexty kind of excitement. By all means tell the world what you're doing. And by all means put your work out there on sale. Charge $100 a paragraph on Kindle if you like, but don't try and sell it.

Play not pay. There. Simple. Now, shall we have some fun together?

It's Cold Outside

2011-12-13T08:13:00.000-08:00

About 18 months ago I put on a show at Oxford's OVADA Gallery called Open-Armed and Outcast. Its description was simple:

"Have you ever KNOWN that you’re just a stranger in your life? Not known where your place is except that it’s elsewhere? Then much of the work we’re offering tonight is for you; very different accounts of what it’s like to be an outcast in your life and in the world. And to find your home elsewhere."

Around the same time, I was sitting in the Albion Beatnik bookstore half reading and half eavesdropping on the table next to me (there's always an interesting conversation going on there - it could be the spiritual home of competitive people-watching). They were talking about deserts. Great topic (so good I once held an exhibition called Into the Desert). One of them made the very interesting point that she didn't like using the word "desert" because it implied a space that was "outside" - the desert outside the city walls, the space beyond the fertile land. In other words, calling something a desert, just like calling yourself an outsider, has the effect of defining a space by its relation to the thing it is not.

That got me thinking. I'd always thought of myself as an outsider. I'd always *been* an outsider. I'd always been laughed at, shunned, ignored, excluded from "regular spaces". That made me an outsider, right? Well, sort of. It certainly gave me a name to call myself, and that matters. It's the same feeling as finally being diagnosed with depression - the feeling, "thank goodness for that, there's a reason I feel this way."

On the other hand, I got to thinking more and more that my identity was about what I did, who I was, not what I didn't do, not what I wasn't. And over the spring and summer that thougt began to mature, and found an outlet in a couple of places. I was asked to contribute to a great collection of urban writing called Urban Feel. My piece, "My Feet Are Wet I Must Be At The Beach" (about the way water and associated metaphors are used as mechanisms of control in urban spaces), contains the passage:

"The punchbag lad in the cardboard box; the smackhead’s hollow skin dropped down through the pavement floor; the free-runner jumping the skag-iron rooftops a hundred feet above the mossy park. The young don’t leave our world; they build their own"

I was aware I didn't agree with a lot of the implications of that. Most homeless people are homeless because they are running away from an alternative that's unbearable. Likewise denying the escape that drugs offer would be banal. But I couldn't help thinking the passage should stay. It made a point, however inexpertly articulated, that needed making. Society's outcasts, its outsiders, are not just the detritus from something normative. "Outsiders" are a parallel, a world of our own, with our own codes, our own structures, often our own very rigid rules of engagement and moral codes.

And equally to the point, we are as diverse as any regular office space or suburb if not more so. Maybe we *are* all outside of something, but to make that what defines us is so limiting when we are so much more, and so many different things.

That sense of being more than someone who "doesn't belong" wherever finally found its expression when I started up eight cuts gallery, in particular in this section of the manifesto:

"we are rats

we live in our own space, build our own communities, societies, foundation myths and bodies of work.

we share some of your doorways, and sometimes you will see the traces we leave behind. traces like this. often they are strange, unfamiliar, and consequently seem frightening, but they are doorways onto a whole world that exists, fully formed, in parallel with yours.

for too long we have been expected to push at these doors, and gaze around them in wonder and admiration, dreaming, cap in hand, of one day entering the world beyond them. we think maybe it’s time for us to offer an invitation the other way."

Again and again I find myself being pulled back to the idea of being an outsider. I guess in a way it's romantic. Which is wholly the wrong reason - that's the kind of empty nostalgia and posturing I so dislike in the so-called mainstream. I wonder also if it's an excuse. I've not done abc because I'm not xyz. Which is probably true. But it's not helpful. It won't help me get on and do pqr!

The fact is I'm not an outsider. I'm an insider in a world that not many people inhabit. It may be a world that's unrecognized or unvalued by the paymasters, which means I can't spend all my time there - but who can spend their whole lives "at home"? But I'm not a perpetual traveller, I am not a man in diaspora, or if I am, then it's only because that's the place I always come back to - not because I'm running away from somewhere else, but because it's my haven, the source from whcih I draw my strength, the spring that nurtures my creativity. It is where I can do what really matters, and get on with life.

How do you think of yourself? Do you feel like a stranger in your own life? And if questions of outsiderdom and identity strike a chord with you, you may be interested in my novella Black Heart High, which you can download for free here.

Not the Oxford Literary Festival 2012

2011-12-10T14:36:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow The Oxford Literary Festival announces its 2012 programme. So I thought we should probably get there first for the most exciting literary event in Oxford next year, Not the Oxford Literary Festival

(Lucy Ayrton and Penny Goring at the 2011 Not the Oxford Literary Festival)

Two years ago, a few of us at Year Zero wanted to put on a gig at Oxford's (and the UK's) best bookstore, The Albion Beatnik. We were at the same time rather frustrated by the high admission prices at The Oxford Literary Festival, as well as the lack of representation of the incredible underground and spoken word scene Oxford has. So we decided to put on our own show. The first Not the Oxford Literary Festival, held the week of the festival on March 24 2010, lasted about an hour.

But it was a fun, fabulous hour. And it went down in history as the reason I wear a red glove every time I gig. A Year Zero fan had come over form Germany for the main festival but wanted to see us as well. But he didn't know where the Albion Beatnik was. He spied my glove through the window, came in, and since then the red glove has been my lucky charm.

Last year we decided to do it again and we had an even more fabulous, diverse line-up including slam poetry and electronica.

And people started asking about 2012. So 2012's Not the Oxford Literary Festival is spreading. This time there will be two days, March 27th and 28th, both based at the fabulous Albion Beatnik, and promising some of the very best, diversest literary fabulousness, just like you'd expect from eight cuts gallery. Watch this space - and if you're interested in reading something leave a comment!!

2012 Schedule (with more events TBA - if you have fantastic ideas for events do leave a comment!!)

Tuesday 27 March - Verruca Music (evening)

(Stuart Estell and Haiku Salut perform an extract from Verruca Music at Pow-Wow Literary Festival)

Writer and musician Stuart Estell performs his novel Verruca Music in full for the first time. Music, words, lyricism, tears, humour, and delight as Stuart takes us into teh world of a man who tries to battle depression by picking his feet. Accomplished on half a dozen instruments, Stuart, who has performed with The Fall, is one of the most entertaining spoken word performers around today, and this, we believe, is the best novel of 2011. The performance will last 2 and a half hours in total but you are free to come and go at will.

Wednesday 28 March - Poets vs Proseurs (evening)

some of the best writers of poetry and prose duel it out for your delight to decide which format lends itself best to live performance. Featuring Not the Booker Prize winner Micahel Stewart, Hammer & Tongue's Lucy Ayrton, Anna Hobson and many more - and open mic

And don't forget our all night think-in/drink-in on March 30th

Think-in/Drink-in

2011-12-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

First, apologies for the temporary radio silence. I'm now well and truly back.

Some of you will know that for the past two years I've run Not the Oxford Literary Festival, an alternative to the regular festival showcasing the fabulous, and local, creativity that never usually gets a look in. It's been such a success that in 2012 we're making a whole week of it, and first and foremost this is an invitation to come and enjoy the wonderfulness - even if you're in Oxford for the main festival, come and join us for a night.

Second, it's a call for ideas - we have three nights spoken for at our amazing venue, The Albion Beatnik Bookstore, but if you have something you're burning to put on let me know - the more creative and outlandish the better.

Finally, I want to say a bit about the thing I'm most excited about. Oxford closes too early. As a city, and as a creative venue. For a while now The Albion Beatnik has made a stand against this and helped to remind people in what is supposed to be one of the UK's leading cities of culture that there are, in fact, not 8 or even 16 but 24 hours in a day, and that these are all equally available for creative purposes. And we want the festival to embody that.

Whether your night is just beginning, or you are heading home from the mainstream festival in search of something more stimulating, drop in to our all night festival of wonders, a place where manifestos will be written, thoughts pulled to their breaking point, performances honed, old favourites murdered on the guitar, films screened, and research, er, researched. Highlights include:

Gin Soaked Sheets

join performer and poetry workshopper Lucy Ayrton as she carries out the world's first scientific study on the effects of gin on creative output

zine workshop - by the end of the night something wonderful will be created that you can take away in your hands

improvlog - creative juices flowing? Let them run then upload the results as part of a global online creative think-in

guerrilla poetry - wouldn't you love to walk into work one morning and find that your route was full of poems? Wouldn't it be better still to make that happen for someone else?

This is your part -have a talk you want to give, an idea or poem you want to share, something you want to teach people how to do, or just want to be part of something fabulous: this is where I add your name and links

I have a new book! Ode to Jouissance

2011-10-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

£0.86 in the UK

$0.99 in the US

The cover photo is by the wonderful Veronika von Volkova. The model is inspirational Katelan Foisy. You can learn more about both here.

An ambitious scientist plots alone in her flat in 1930s Berlin. Her experiments, stolen from colleagues she has sent to their deaths in the madhouse and concentration camps, are sure to impress the new Minister of Propaganda. But a lifetime spent learning to control those around her is about to come back to haunt her as for the first time she falls under the spell of a more skilled manipulator than her.

A Spanish civil servant drives through the heart of the country to his mother’s home town where he must build a car factory to stop the town sinking into the desert. His companion on the journey is the Chinese businesswoman sent to finalise the deal. The woman who had been his first lover, decades earlier.

An elderly lady sits among friends in a care home. Together they remember the loves of their distant past. But Catherine has no interest in the past. She is certain a young Polish man is on his way to marry her.

Ode to Jouissance is a collection of three full-length (5000 words) short stories that explore nostalgia and eroticism in the fragments of modern Europe. From the youthful Ilke, through the middle-aged Ignacio to the elderly Catherin, these stories weave together to form a tapestry of desire that grows stronger and more fulfilled with age. With echoes of Kundera and Murakami, a gentle but insistent theme of hope amidst the ruins builds to a heartbreaking but uplifting crescendo.

Mobile Phone Novels

2011-09-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

One of the things that’s surprised me is just how successful Kindle and other e-readers have been. I figured mobile phones made much more sense as the home of electronic reading. I still do. During one such conversation a month or so back on Authors Electric, I happened to mention mobile phone novels, and a couple of people suggested I write a piece about them. As it happens, the time is perfect for me to do so now.

Mobile phone novels (keita shousetsu in Japanese, where they are incredibly popular) are very different from regular novels that you might read on your smartphone with a Kindle app. They’re a completely different genre. I first became aware of them in early 2009 when I was just starting to write The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes as a serial novel on Facebook. The novel is about internet forums, YouTube, modern art, Japanese culture, and I wanted a format that would go with the subject matter. A serial online novel was perfect. And it lent itself to short chapters with not much description and regular cliffhangers. The kind of thing you’d read like a series of blog posts.

It was inevitable that I’d come across the Japanese cultural phenomenon the mobile phone novel. I did so through http://www.textnovel.com a site where you upload novels chapter by chapter and readers subscribe to new chapters by e-mail or text. Many of the novels are “regular” novels, but I was inexorably drawn to the proper hardcore mobile phone novels.

Mobile phone novels aren’t just read on phones, they started off being written on them and uploaded one text at a time. Because there’s a limit on phone text length (or there was in the mid 2000s when the phenomenon took off), chapters are very short – often under 100 words. And often written in text speak.

It’s a genuinely new form, written in a new way. And I know next to no English authors writing them (OK, I know of none, but I’m sure there must be many, though one feature of the mobile phone novel that befits its milieu is the anonymity of authors). So now I’m writing one. It’s called What There Is Instead Of Rainbows (you can subscribe by e-mail or text here ). And each chapter will be a maximum 200 words (probably around 100 chapters, though it’s a story that, if I were to write it as a novel, would be around 70,000 words).

Now this might sound a bit faddy and low culture (though I’m not sure why that would matter), but I must say I’ve never had so much time writing a book, and it’s completely cured a massive case of block with a book I was really looking forward to writing.

And I haven’t learned so much in a long time. I’m not yet writing text speak though I intend to rewrite The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes in the full format after I finish Rainbows. But the 200 word chapters are both liberating and instructive. Gone in one swoop are those awkward linking passages, those extraneous words you put in “because you ought to.” And that thing about making every scene contribute something? OH yes!

You’d think that voice, originality, beauty would suffer. They don’t. It’s no surprise that the format originated in Japan, of course, where there is an aesthetic of sparse elegance and heart-tugging minimalism. And it’s an aesthetic I love, which is one reason I’m so drawn to it. But the seeming restrictions remind me of another of my heroes, Jack White (of White Stripes, Raconteurs, and Dead Weather fame). The White Stripes (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J2QdDbelmY&ob=av2e and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE3-q-aoFZI) is a two piece band – one guitar, one drum kit. And all their merchandise and branding is restricted to white, red, and black. Self-imposed restrictions Jack decided upon that he finds have enabled his creativity to flourish as he works within and pushes at those limits.

It’s the same with voice in a text novel. Chapter 1 of What The Is Instead of Rainbows is below. I can’t remember the last time I wrote something more me.

The world and I have had very little to do with each other in my 19 years, and if I died now I doubt it would remember me. I certainly wouldn’t remember it. That’s what I was thinking as I sat at Simon’s table drinking Simon’s beer.

It wasn’t a maudlin thought, and it certainly wasn’t going to spur me to suicide. It was just an observation.

Have you ever had that thought? Of course you have, only straightaway you realise that old film was right. You know, the one where the black and white guy throws himself off a black and white bridge and an angel shows him how different the world would have turned out if he’d never been born. Different and shittier.

So anyway straight after the self-pity you think of all the tiny ways your life’s touched all these other lives and how the traces are everywhere.

Which is where I was different from you. Because I didn’t feel any self-pity, and my life hadn’t left any traces. And I was fairly sure of that because Alice’s letter was on the table and I’d read it five times since I found it in Simon’s drawer.

And chapter 2 is just 14 words. A suicide note:
Sorry.

Please. Find a way of telling Steph because I can’t.

Sorry. Goodbye.

Alice

No context, no introduction. Every word counting. Forcing myself to get rid of those adornments made me realize how little I ever needed them.

Now, all I need is to find a way of making my blog posts shorter!

The Most Powerful People in Publishing

2011-09-24T02:39:00.000-07:00

(The first of a few articles I'm cross-posting here and on the eight cuts blog as I start to migrate opinion pieces from here to there - I hope you'll come and join me over there)

Yesterday The Guardian published its list of the 100 most powerful people in books. The list was, as lists are, problematic in several ways. But it will do its job in stimulating conversation. I want to have two such conversations here.

First, the list’s remit is confusing. Rather, the way it has been both acted upon and spun is a little slippery. At most points, The guardian tells us this is a list of the most influential (on reading habits) people in the book business. Fine. Nice and narrow and easy to follow. But at another point, the header copy states these are “the people exercising the greatest influence over theUK's reading habits.” So which is it? The two are clearly not co-terminus. The days in which our “reading” was confined to books is over. Only, of course, it never existed. Would anyone actually argue that written news media do not form an important part of our reading habits?

The list clearly embraces non-storytelling – Jamie Oliver is at number 8. Yet newspapers have gone walkies – and the likes of Huffington Post, The Onion, Mashable, and Wired. Well, they’re as absent as Heat and Hello. And the way the list is handled is confusing. The CEO of Google is at number 3 – fine, but in his Google Reader capacity? Really? And if it’s because we use Google to find reading material, where are Facebook and Twitter? Google’s plans may well revolutionise how we read, but this is about what influences how we read now (Google are good at this – spinning a future idea and having us believe it’s more important than it is *now*). And going the other way, Stephen fry as tweeter in chief? This time last year maybe, but things have moved on.

But let’s allow that talk of “reading” is simply the kind of editorial hyperbole newspapers may allow, and look at this as a representation of the books industry. A little aside first. I'm intrigued how different this looks from how it would have done 2 years ago when Seth Godin, Cory Doctorow and Chris Anderson would have been no-brainer choices to sit alongside Malcolm Gladwell, and maybe Richard Nash too. There's a real feel that digital pioneering and experimentation has been subsumed within the existing structures. And seriously, not a single blogger on the list? If you'd said that 2 years ago no one would have believed you.

But what is most obvious are the demographics of this list, in gender, age, and ethnicity. I commented, in accord with others, “if these are not the 99 [in a piece of populism that further confused what the list is for, the Guardian placed ‘us the public’ at 100] most influential then this list is a stinging reproach to its compilers. If these *are* the 99 most influential then this list is a stinging reproach on a way wider scale”

One of the list’s compilers, Lisa Allardice, asked whom I would include instead. Given the narrow remit, I realised that’s actually a very difficult one. Which means that actually, the problem is a very big one. This is an industry that serves the wole of the public (ostensibly) yet is representative of just a tiny fraction. I actually can’t think of anything I would want to change from an article I wrote two years ago, which attracted a little attention (and some comments that completely missed the point – and this worries me most of all, when people just don’t understand the problem let alone start talking answers), called From Pitch to Perpetuation of Privilege. I think I’ve mellowed a little from the position of the last couple of paragraphs. Or maybe I’ve hardened, I don’t know. And I don't any more think the problems will kill the publishing industry - but in a way I think that's a bad thing. I think if the problems persist the publishing industry should die, but it probably won't. But I’ll reproduce it in full here. Most of the points directly address this list.

The pitch is the publishing Industry’s equivalent of the University Entrance exam, a selection system that perpetuates disenfranchisement, and serves to narrow the pool of available applicants to a point where the literary world becomes nothing more than the chattering classes talking among themselves. As was the case for hundreds of years in our universities, no one has really noticed this until now, because the people the literary industry marginalise had been marginalised from other forms of communication. Worst of all, they have gone unnoticed because they have until now had no expectation or belief that literature is their world.

But as wider and wider portions of society become cultural consumers, so their hunger for stories by and about people like them grows. Television, through initiatives like the BBC’s My Story, is beginning to take notice, but the publishing industry is standing back and does not, it is my firm belief, even realise there is a problem.

This is just another example of an introspection that will in the not too distant future kill the industry off if it doesn’t do something. The fact is the internet is making culture by and for previously unrepresented voices (be they inner city teenagers, battered sex workers, refugees fleeing from, and would-be refugees trapped in, the world’s war zones, or the women of the world’s shanty towns) widely available. And it’s great. Millions of voices are being heard that would never have been heard before – hope that “I am not alone” is being offered to millions more who never heard culture spoken in their own voice before.

It’s a WONDERFUL thing.

And it’s a phenomenon that is going to kill publishing dead. Or rather, pass it by on the road whilst publishing kills itself. Unless the industry does something serious and soon.

There are many thins the publishing industry needs to look at if its isolation from the consumers of the majority world is not to prove fatal, and I’ve got time to talk about them all eventually. But today I want to focus on the flagship ridiculosity: the query.

This is NOT a piece about higher education. I am merely referring, in passing, to an allegation levelled at the entrance exam (because it IS true of publishing, and it’s a good analogy). The problem with the university entrance exam, the argument goes, like the problem with the 11+, is that you do better if you’re coached for it. Which means you do better if your parents have the money AND the inclination to pay for a tutor. Which means two children of equal “ability” will finish with very different marks. Which means, finally, that if selection is based on entrance exam performance alone children whose parents lack either the money or the inclination to pay for coaching will be disadvantaged when it comes to getting a university place. And to add to all this, the privilege this perpetuates means that those from marginalised backgrounds expect not to get places, so they don’t apply, furthering the divide.

That may or may not be true of universities, but I’m sure you get the logic. And if you don’t get where I’m going, then frankly, well, I can’t say in polite company.

At the moment (and especially in the US where you don’t submit ANY script with your query), whether you get an agent depends on the quality of your query, and a huge part of that is the synopsis and, even more, the query letter. There are many wonderful websites and books devoted to polishing your pitch, and I have benefited immensely from them (and still do). But the system reinforces the status quo in a way that is both shocking, and seemingly invisible to the industry.

How are those who do not currently read their voice in books, written by people like them, and who have stories to tell, and a talent for telling them, get published? They must submit a query – for which they have no training – not just because they have no access to the great query sites and books out there (they may well HAVE the internet), but because they are not surrounded by people who know about sites like this. They may not even know what the “application” method is. It is a mystery. So what happens? They don’t send off their stories – “people like them don’t write books”. And the divide is reinforced.

So what? Well one, it’s just wrong that people be denied a voice for their story – and the notion that the vast swathes of people underrepresented in publishing are underrepresented because there is no talent is just nonsense. Systemic barriers are wrong. Full stop.

Two, these are groups of society for whom the internet allows, more and more, instant access to the consumption and production of culture by and about “people like them”. Whole groups are realising that culture is for them. But books aren’t – and THAT is the problem for the publishing industry. A vast swathe of ever more powerful cultural consumer is ignoring books because books are irrelevant to them.

So what does publishing need to do? Well, more than anything else, what it needs to do is what the “Russell Group” of universities (the UK’s “old elite”) sort of tries to pay lip-service to doing. It needs to stop talking to itself. It needs to stop telling would be writers about “show not tell”. It needs to stop focusing on how to write a query letter. Stop focusing, mind, not stop doing – there is, and always will be, a very large, commercially and culturally important group who like books done that way. What publishers need to wake up to is the fact that this is a segment of the population – a segment whose share of wealth, purchasing power, and access to culture, is shrinking.

What the publishing industry needs to do is not try and “help” people on the “outside” to get to the “inside”. People don’t need it. They have other ways of telling their stories. IT needs THEM. And that is something I have NEVER heard someone on the “inside” admit. So what SHOULD the industry do? It needs to find ways to convince the new generation of storytellers that books are a good medium through which to tell those stories. It needs to think like an “outsider”.

Sadly, I really don’t think it can. Which is why more and more of us who would, ten years ago, have been part of the “trying to get inside” crowd, are ignoring it, letting it slowly eat itself to death, whilst we get on and enjoy the exciting future.

Half of me thinks it’s a tragedy. The more so because, like an animal walking to the abattoir, or a patient slipping gently from a coma, I really think most of the industry doesn’t recognise it. But half of me thinks that systems which perpetuate divide and exclusion SHOULD perish, and wonders if we shouldn’t offer a helping hand.

[addendum - one good thing about self epublishing is that it will prove markets exist. Publishers are locked into a vicious evidentiary circle - they will publish what has been proven to sell, but that proof can only come from things that have bene published in the past. It's about carving up an existing market not finding a new one. This is something self-epublishing *can* do]

Verruca Music and The Dead Beat in line for major prize: please help

2011-07-31T01:51:00.000-07:00

PLEASE GET READY TO VOTE FOR OUR AMAZING BOOKS

As you know, I run a small press, whcih publishes three amazing books. Its fans did a simply amazing job showing your love for Penny Goring's The Zoom Zoom and getting it called in by the judges for the Guardian's First Book Award (we now have to wait to see what they make of it). Now, if you love one of our other amazing books, Cody James' The Dead Beat and Stuart Estell's Verruca Music, you can help them go all the way in the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize.

YOU CAN START ACTING NOW - HERE'S WHAT TO DO

In order to vote, you need to post a 150 word review of the book (you can do this now), and then link back to that review from your vote WHEN THE VOTING OPENS IN A FORTNIGHT. The Guardian has some problems coping with our ISBN-free books so you will not be able to post on their review site. Nonetheless, they have very kindly agreed that you may POST YOUR REVIEWS ON THE COMMENTS AT EIGHT CUTS (CLICK HERE FOR LINK), and link back to it WHEN VOTING OPENS.

NOTE: Please use the same e-mail when posting your comment as you used/will use to set up your Guardian account. That way, if required, I can take a screenshot from the backroom to verify the review comes from the same address as the vote - please note, therefore: posting a review here, you consent to my taking such a screenshot (only for the purposes, if requested, of sending it - in strictest confidence - to the Guardian judges) I will not give your e-mail addies to anyone else or make them public and will only pass them on on the condition that the Guardian agrees to the same.

Remember, voting will open on Wedneday 3rd August, but to make it as successful and easy as possible, please post your reviews now. Many of you have posted reviews on Amazon or Goodreads already. I think it's perfectly fine to paste those over if that's the case.

And most important - THANK YOU

If you don't yet know our two eligible books, here they are:

The books with the most votes from the next round will go through to the shortlist where they will be read and discussed and reviewed in this widely-read forum. Let's make it three out of three and show the world the amazingness our writers have to offer!

(Go here to see and buy all our books!)

Edited to add: why the best thing about self-publishing is NOT editing your books

2011-07-24T01:43:00.000-07:00

Go on Whisper it. Self-publishing is becoming almost respectable. And it’s hardly surprising. Mark Edwards and Louise Voss’s 6 figure deal with Harper Collins (who, after the pair occupied the number 1 & 2 spots in the Kindle charts, admitted they might be onto something) is only the tip of a growing iceberg (one which I’m lucky enough to be somewhere at the base of, with my thriller The Company of Fellows selling 5000 copies and getting me invited to take part in a Rising Literary Stars panel at Blackwell’s bookstore).

But it’s a very particular (and inevitable) kind of self-publishing. And whilst I welcome it, it also makes me sort of hang my head in despair (the bittersweet ironic smile kind of despair I feel at the honour of being supported by Blackwell’s for my thriller two years after self-publishing my debut, the literary coming of age novel Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, that got stonking reviews wherever it *was* read but didn’t even make half a column inch in the local paper).

The warning signs were there a while back. Self-publishers are a marmite-y kind of bunch. Half of us are belligerent “dead tree books are screwed and legacy publishing’s dead” types. The other half are desperate to show we’re just as good as regular-published books (and half of those say it because they want a regular contract, whilst the other half want to control the process but compete for the same market).

But what almost all seem to have in common is an insistence that their books are just as good as regular-published books. And just as good almost always means edited to the same standard (most aren’t, of course, but their authors are buying into the game that they should be). And they have a point. 99% of books are better if they’re edited professionally. Because 99% of self-published books would like to be like regular books.

Now when it comes to self-publishing statistics matter. Every media essay I’ve seen on the subject of self-publishing has been about a number – copies sold, Kindle chart position, size of advance when the author went mainstream. I’ve yet to see one that talks intelligently and critically about the quality of a self-published book (oh, wait, there was a particularly dumbass piece somewhere sniping at John Locke’s books). But in the world of dumb-ass number crunching (I may need a bigger thesaurus because when it comes to the media’s treatment of self-publishing I find myself wanting to say dumbass a LOT), ignoring that 1% takes the dumbass-ness biscuit.

Because that 1% of books is what self-publishing was made for, and what will, ultimately, once Amazon has squeezed the regular “indie” authors back into the New Model Mainstream, be the ultimate reputation-saver for self-publishing.

Editing is the making of a commercial product and the breaking of art

That’s the simple thesis, and I’m not getting into a “what is art” debate.
Now editing in art can be a whole spectrum of things. At one end you have the watercolour painter who goes into the field behind their home and paints them, then sells or hangs the pictures as is. At the other end you have Phil Spector producing records with the unmistakable wall of sound signature stamp. Editing falls somewhere in the middle. On the one hand there’s copy-editing that’s rather like hiring a studio complete with sound guy so your download sounds polished (I hope even that simple analogy will show the flaw in the assumption that editing is always good – the “in your front room” acoustic or “on a dodgy amp in a grotty pub” plugged-in sound is different from studio production and *some*times people prefer it – depends what they’re looking for). On the other hand a great editor working on your book with you can be like having Mark Ronson produce your record.

The thing about spectrums is that for any given genus, there are usually species at each point on it. And that’s what I want to say about writing. There are works that are right at the watercolour end. Writers who are so distinctive and original that editing their work is like giving it lithium – you knock off all the troughs, but you take away the peaks with them, and it’s impossible to do one without the other.

On the Guardian Books Blog this week, John Self started a fascinating debate that went so viral it spawned a popular twitter hashtag #famousforthewrongbook. The piece, which asked for examples where an author was famous for a piece of work that actually wasn’t their best, confirmed what I’ve been saying for a long while, and what’s very pertinent here: when you get a game-changer of a writer, their best work tends to come later in their career, but their “great” work comes at the start. The numbers of diaries and letters included in the 600+ comments on the post further gets the underlying message across. Editing polishes what’s there, makes it “sing”. But the actual step-change, what *is* there to start with that a person spends their whole life perfecting, that is most visible when the editorial hand is most distant.

And this is where self-publishing can do what regular publishing can’t. Regular publishing is a business and can’t be run other than as a business (don’t even get me started on Arts Council grants for small publishers). It’s not just inevitable that it will dole out large doses of cultural lithium to pull things towards accepted norms, that’s its job. Self-publishing doesn’t have to. It doesn’t have to make money, and can do pretty much what it wants on a zero budget.

So not only is it not obligatory for self-publishers to edit “to professional standards”, I would say we should positively embrace not-editing, and where we find great art in the self-published ranks that’s full of flaws and fragility, rather than seeing what could be done if it was given a good polish (I’ll tell you what will happen – you will discover that inside every great book there’s a very good one waiting to get out), we should celebrate it as it is.

And I can’t help but finishing with a note to the cultural media. I understand why you talk about the numbers with self-publishing. That’s not dumbass. Talking *only* about the numbers *is* dumbass.

And here’s what’s really dumbass. The cultural media portrays itself as wanting to make the distinction between commercial art and art that has no commercial reference. And yet it will only review books from regular publishers. Discussions of merit will range as far as obscure and forgotten *regular published* works and no further. That’s all fine and I’ve heard the arguments about how you *have* to talk about “event” books (I don’t buy the argument for a minute but I hear it and I’ll run with it) – just don’t pretend you’re talking about the fullness of art if you’re going to run that way.

An addendum. I’m going to do something that will shock and disturb. I’m going to say congratulations to the Guardian for opening up the First Book Awards to *all* books, however published. Fantastic. I really hope they follow through by offering reviews of the merits of the books readers suggested.

So please, stop judging self-published books on how well-edited they are, and start judging them on how good they are. The two are not always the same. And in rare instances they can be opposites.

I must be Mad to do this: writing, living, and mental health

2011-07-20T02:54:00.000-07:00

I’ve been planning this post for months, and to be honest I’ve been dragging my heals. There’s an apposite reason – I’m bipolar my own mental health hasn’t been tip top the past few weeks. There are good reasons, as in yippee good – I’ve just finished touring a fabulous words and music show with a host of other great writers that’s played to a set of sell-out crowds.

And there’s the real reason – I don’t really know what to say. Well, that’s not true. I would like to go off on a rant about the ridiculous perception that having mental health issues is glamorous. Or that bipolar people are predisposed to be creative. But I’d just get too angry, and I’ve done it before. Many times.

So I’m not going to hobbyhorse you. Well, I am but not in a down your throat and make you gag kind of way. Hardest and most counterintuitive, I’m not going to talk about me, me, ME. I’m going to talk briefly about three remarkable artists and how mental health relates to their art. Then when I’ve got that out of the way I’ll talk about me! No, really, I won’t.

Cody James, author of The Dead Beat and Babylon, is the best novelist of her generation. She also has schizophrenia. She is also and has been also many many things – meth addict, Satanist, punk, opening act for Marilyn Manson, consumer of ludicrous quantities of noodles, zinester, photographer, my best friend. And just about the funniest person I’ve ever met. She’s taught me two things about mental health and writing. Well, the first is more about writing in general. Back at the start of last year, she made a brilliant video advertising our first big live show, at Rough Trade Records. In it, she read a passage from Babylon in which the central character, Daniel, tries to kill himself, something Cody has done 4 times. The video was deleted from Facebook after being reported and a massive debate followed. Cody’s contribution crystallised everything I feel about writing. She explained how an English teacher told her once she should try and make the world a better place. Her take – “maybe there is no way to leave the world a better place, and all we can do is tell the truth.” Simple, and all-encompassing. The truth doesn’t mean facts or autobiography. Telling the truth in your writing means peeling your skin off and poking down through the layers to reach the innermost part of yourself, then smearing it all over the page.

Which leads to the second thing – life, the truth, everything to do with this glorious and messed-up world, is complex (and mental health is only one very small part of it). It has more than one side. There is always hope in despair and despair in hope, humour in depravity and depravity in humour.

In a wonderful interview she did for me Cody said:
“What upsets me more than anything in novels and movies in this genre (Selby Jr. I’m looking at you) is that they seem hell bent on portraying only the moments of shock and depravity – they rob the reader and the viewer of the full experience. Yes, we were really fucked up and yes, we did bad things, but we were still trying. I still spent some Sunday mornings eating cereal and watching cartoons with a 7ft tranny. And, even though you’re all jacked up and your apartment has no furniture, you still try. Even though the person cooking the turkey has been up for three days and can’t remember how to work a stove, and your guests keep going to the bathroom to shoot up and then keep falling asleep in the mashed potatoes, you’re still there celebrating Thanksgiving. There are still moments of utter joy and there is still so much laughter. If, as an artist, you don’t portray that, you’re nothing but a cheap hack.”
I can’t really add to that.

Katelan Foisy is the author of Blood and Pudding. It’s the book that has influenced my writing and performing more than any other. It tells the story of her bipolar, heroin-addicted best friend Holly. Specifically it is a transcript of tapes Katelan made when one Xanax-fuelled teenage day the pair of them decided to get in a car and see where they ended up (another lesson from Katelan – record everything. You never know when you’ll want it). The transcriptions, full of idealism and energy, form the book’s bones, which Katelan has fleshed out with stories from the years between that trip and Holly’s death from an overdose just a few years later. I have never read such an uplifting celebration of a life. Or of Life. Holly’s was a life cut short, a life shadowed and tarred and tarnished, but it was a Life. Damn, it was a life. Blood and Pudding opens with the wonderful words “Wherever we end up, we end up,” and urges the reader to “go out and live. And live. And go on living, because you never know when it’ll stop.” There are two things to say about that. Mental illness is not a death sentence. Don’t treat it as such. In yourself, or in others. And make sure your writing contributes to Living. Because anything else is as good as being dead.

Dave Griffiths is the former frontman of the band Witches. He’s the writer and musician behind the fabulous Grey Children project. He’s using the project, which combines his considerable musical talents with his equally considerable literary ones, to raise awareness for Pure-O, the form of OCD he has. In a recent interview I did with him one of the things we discussed most was the role music plays in managing his symptoms. Music provides a total immersion that draws his mind away from everything else. I realised how similar what he was saying was to the role writing plays in my life (and listening to music), to the experience of so many people I know with various mental health problems. Sadly, sometimes the things we use to engulf our minds, to drown out the noises in our heads, are things that do us as much harm as the illness itself, if not more – drink, self-harm, drugs. But art is something that can improve both our mental health and our wider lives. Maybe even the lives of others.

There we have it. Three amazing writers. Three amazing people. Three ways mental health and writing intersect. And a single strand running through the whole thing. Life. And the importance of living it. Without apology and without restriction.

SALE!!

2011-07-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

OK, so Lulu, where our eight cuts gallery press books are printed, are having a 20% sale, which means that our three fabulous books (see here for details) are, until the end of tomorrow, July 15th, no longer £8 but £6.40 each - when you get to checkout, just enter the coupon code BIGUK for UK customers, or BIG for overseas and you'll get the discount.

So:

The Dead Beat is £6.40

The Zoom Zoom is £6.40

Verruca Music is £6.40

and if you're interested, my books are also on offer :)

The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes for £4.80

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall for £6.40

(life:) razorblades included for£4

The Company of Fellows for £8

All over the place

2011-07-14T02:02:00.000-07:00

It goes like that sometimes. You're quiet as a church mouse and then all of a sudden you're everywhere. This week I am lucky enough to be appearing at not one, not two or even three fabulous places, but four! And five if Mark Williams decides to put my piece on mental health and the arts up this week. Make that five/six!!

So what am I doing, and where?

Well, it's a right old mix of topics so I hope there'll be somethingf or everyone. Two pieces are already up, which is why I'm posting now, so you can join in whilst the debate's still young.

Over at Nicola Morgan's fabulous Help I Need a Publisher, I get to rant about whether looks matter for new writers in a piece called "You say fat ugly bloke I say channelling Ginsberg" It's a soap box column and as might be exected there's a real bruhaha brewing, and it's led to a fabulous follow-up piece from Catdownunder, reminiscing on meeting Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti.

Today I am guesting at India Drummond's site, talking about how and why I made the switch from experimental fiction to YA paranormal romance with my latest book, Black Heart High.

JUST POSTED! On Friday I am interviewed about life and art at Hannah Warren's Place. It's the most detailed and candid interview I've given.

And stll to come:
On Saturday it's the 16th, which means it's my day at Kindle UK Authors, where I'll be talking about the advantages and disadvantages of writers' critique groups, collectives and collaborations in a companion piece to the post I made here.

And on Sunday, in Crossing the Line, I'll be making my contribution to a month-long series of pieces on the subject "the relevance of sex in literature" over at Suzanne Burke's fab Soooz Says Stuff. I'll be opening many worm cans with a frank discussion of transgressive fiction, whether there are any lines left to cross with sex, and my own personal battles with writing transgressive material that's nothing to do with sex.

So come and join one or more lively debate!

Let's Talk About Sex

2011-07-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

Go on. You know you want to. But wait! Wash your mouth out. This is a nice clean, family friendly place. You know that.

So head over to the fabulous Sooz Says Stuff blog where there's a whole month of debate on the subject of the relevance of sex in literature with guest posts on all and every aspect of the topic from writers of every stripe who do, or don't, write sex in their work. And that includes me - on July 17th.

There's a full schedule here.

Oh, OK. Feel free to talk about it here. Let me start with a simple question. Is there a difference between sensationalism and important questioning of stereotypes? In what does it lie? The content? The intent of the author? The perception of the reader?

If you want something get your thoughts started take a look around the Sensation exhibition from 1997, and google some of the discussion around it.

Fear and Self-Loathing in Writersville

2011-07-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve just written my monthly post for Kindle UK Authors . It’ll be up on the 16th. It’s about writing groups, and I think it’s distilled the double-edge of collaborative working for me. What you’ll get there is a take on the positives and negatives of working creatively with others. What I want to share briefly here is more personal. Very much like Cody’s wonderful (and no longer available) piece about the highs and lows of her time at Year Zero.

I’ve made no secret of my recent problems with the recurrence of my bipolar. It’s probably been clear that these issues with the chemical screwed-upness of my head have fed into some serious creative issues for me, which regular readers of mine will know is nothing new . Self doubt is like an old sparring partner, the perpetual Holmes to my Moriarty.

First the ups. I can’t imagine not collaborating having tasted what it can do. Some of the most extraordinary experiences of my life have come through collaborations with those head and shoulders more talented than me – and they have opened creative doors and pushed ideas around in my head that just couldn’t have happened on my own. From spending the day working intensely with Katelan Foisy on Lilith Burning to producing Penny Goring’s The Zoom Zoom, talking typography with Marc Nash, and performing a candlelit duet with Cody James, working with my betters has raised my awareness of what is possible to places no one has a right to expect.

But there are also downs. They can never cancel the ups, but they can be immensely damaging. To say this year they nearly killed off my creativity is an understatement though, to be fair, the utter dank skull-scraping greyness I’ve felt at times has been more the cause than the effect of creative doubts, however it may have felt at the time.

There’s a quantitative and a qualitative component to it. First there’s the sheer sense of drowning. I know it’s selfish, and that compounds the sense of worthlessness in my head even more – how dare I want the time to write when there are so many people who need my time more? I know that having the time to create is a luxury, and wanting it when I could be working to promote the million projects more valuable than anything I could produce is just plain wrong. But I do want creative time. I haven’t sat down with a straight head (without guilt at not answering the 10-20 important e-mails from wonderful creative people I get a day, or the feeling I should be doing more for everyone at Year Zero, for my writers at eight cuts) to work on one of my projects for over two years now, and I want to so much. But even having those thoughts makes me want to cut them – physically, literally – from the inside of my stupid head.

But worse is knowing you are second best if that. Art isn’t a competition. I know that. But there *is* art that changes people’s lives, and I work daily with people who produce it. That’s a privilege no one has the right to expect and I am ridiculously grateful. But every day it shows me the gaps. It shows me what I know I can never produce. I tell people jokingly that I feel most of the time like Ferlinghetti, only it’s not really a joke. Ferlinghetti was a really good poet. Exceptional even. But who really thinks about his poems when they hear his name? Ferlinghetti will always be the man who published Howl. And quite right too. I know that I am in a uniquely privileged position to work with people every bit as talented as Ginsberg. And one day maybe just maybe people will hear my name and think “yeah, he was the one who published Penny Goring’s first work” or “wasn’t he the ringleader of that group Cody James used to write with.” And that’s more than I have the right to ask for.

Only…

That brings me to the last cause of self-loathing: arrogance. I didn’t start writing to be a Ferlinghetti. I wanted to be a Ginsberg. I still want to be a Ginsberg. It’s something 99.9% of writers must face on a daily basis – how to keep going in the knowledge that you will never be a game changer. Now of course I love writing most of the time – as hobbies go it’s a pretty great one. And it’s taken me to places and introduced me to people who have changed my life infinitely for the better. But still, that dark place remains. That crowded room where you find yourself alone with yourself and the inescapable truth – this is a hobby, at wildest-dream best a career. And yet for the people you work with every day it may well be so much more.

Most of the time it’s a place I can deal with, or at least ignore. But when my brain has decided to swallow a few wappy pills it’s a burning desert of a testing ground, the sun of self-worthlessness roasting me alive, and the realisation of the sheer arrogance, selfishness and stupidity even to consider it a problem provides the extra fat to baste me.

I was going to leave it there, but thankfully just writing it down has helped me to move a little beyond self-pity to trying to get some understanding. A week or so back a friend of mine, the concert pianist James Rhodes, wrote a great article about the 0.2 second rule. It's about how in many areas of endeavour, someone will spend the majority of their career trying to make the almost imperceptibly small progression that takes you from being very very good to being superlative. Is writing the same? I've already said it's not competitive - but then neither's being a concert pianist. I'd always thought that in the creative arts a great work would come right at the start of someone's career, before they had the edge edited off. But if writing is like sport, like being a pianist, maybe that's not so. Maybe greatness waits at the end of the journey not the beginning. But that raises further questions. The time and focus needed to hone your work that extra amount - how do you live with yourself being that selfish? Especially if it may come to nothing? At what stage do you accept that you will only be good at something at which you were desperate to be great? How do you cope with that realisation?

I hope you'll join in the questions at the end, maybe share your experiences of extreme self-doubt, maybe just tell me I'm a dick, but do share. And accept my thanks for allowing me to be so self-indulgent.

Verruca Music

2011-07-01T00:35:00.000-07:00

You've downloaded it from Amazon (.com and UK - just $0.99/£0.70)

Well now here it is in all its glory. The special edition paperback of Verruca Music, just £8 here. The first 30 copies come complete with the score of the wonderful accompanying soundtrack, composed by the remarkable Stuart Estell. AND bundled in is the ebook for free.

Verruca Music is absurdist comedy of the very blackest kind, informed by a love of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Peter Cook and The Goon Show. Featuring the Fibonacci sequence, floors that open up without warning, a powerful laxative, and a duvet that periodically changes colour, Verruca Music charts the narrator’s emergence from a state of fearful near-immobility assisted only by entertainments of his own devising.

Petals

2011-06-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-06-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-06-24T02:04:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-20T01:16:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-16T13:29:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-06-15T02:01:00.000-07:00

(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

2011-06-12T03:58:00.001-07:00

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

2011-06-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-01T04:06:00.000-07:00

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.

30 Day Song Challenge

2011-05-30T10:09:00.000-07:00

I love music stuff and clog up this blog with way too much of it I know, but I've recently enjoyed taking part in the 30 Day Song Challenge on Facebook and twitter so here is another music post - the ultimate musical autobiography as it were.

Day 01 – Your favorite song – Portishead: Machine Gun

Day 02 – Your least favorite song - Noah & Whale: 5 Years' Time

Day 03 – A song that makes you happy – The Libertines: Don’t Look Back into the Sun

Day 04 – A song that makes you sad – Red Hot Chili Peppers: Scar Tissue

Day 05 – A song that reminds you of someone – Wham: Wake Me Up Before You Go Go

Day 06 – A song that reminds of you of somewhere – Dido: Thank You

Day 07 – A song that reminds you of a certain event – Blur: Beetlebum

Day 08 – A song that you know all the words to – Nine Inch Nails: Hurt

Day 09 – A song that you can dance to – The Smiths: How Soon is Now

Day 10 – A song that makes you fall asleep (in a good way) – Suede: Everything Must Flow

Day 11 – A song from your favorite band – The Kills: No Wow

Day 12 – A song from a band you hate – Foals: Cassius

Day 13 – A song that is a guilty pleasure – Spandau Ballet: Through the Barricades

Day 14 – A song that no one would expect you to love – Andreas Johnsson Glorious

Day 15 – A song that describes you - Nirvana: Dumb

Day 16 – A song that you used to love but now hate – Chris De Burgh: Lady in Red

Day 17 – A song that you hear often on the radio - The XX: Intro

Day 18 – A song that you wish you heard on the radio – Jessie Grace: Science Tree

Day 19 – A song from your favorite album – The XX: Blood Red Moon

Day 20 – A song that you listen to when you’re angry – Skunk Anansie: Brazen

Day 21 – A song that you listen to when you’re happy – The Dead Weather: The Difference Between us

Day 22 – A song that you listen to when you’re sad - Melanie Pain: Bruises

Day 23 – A song that you want to play at your wedding - Boellmann: Suite Gothique

Day 24 – A song that you want to play at your funeral – Marilyn Manson: Sweet Dreams

Day 25 – A song that makes you laugh – Monty Python: Eric the Half a Bee

Day 26 – A song that you can play on an instrument – John Cage: 4:33

Day 27 – A song that you wish you could play - The Dead Weather: The Difference Between Us

Day 28 – A song that makes you feel guilty - The Cars: Drive

Day 29 – A song from your childhood – Lena Lovich: Lucky Number

Day 30 – Your favorite song at this time last year – The Velvet Underground: Venus in Furs

Rediscovering Archaic Words (freemium)

2011-05-17T14:04:00.000-07:00

This is a post over here. Please feel free to discuss in either place :)

Looking for free-to-paid and free-to-volume interfaces is a reactive and restrictive strategy. You are limiting yourself to what has worked and what has been shown to work and closing yourself off to things that might turn out to work very well. If you believe in free, look for ways to be free, and see where they lead. Be proactive. Following established models is great. And I wouldn’t advocate making exceptions your primary strategy. But don’t be closed, be open. There are lots of ways to be free. If you think free works, seek them out. Make your proposition not “My books free, how can I tell people and how can I monetize it?” but “How can I give my work away?”

20 months ago I wrote a piece for the fabulous Guy Gonzalez about the freemium debate in the writing world. Freemium was a buzzword in the wake of the publication of Chris Anderson's Free. He and Malcolm Gladwell were at each other's throats. Smashwords was new. Kindle was barely taking its first steps. Everyone wanted to know how FREE would change publishing forever (trawl the early posts of my old blog!).

Now, you rarely hear people talking about Chris Anderson (not even The Long Tail - see my previous post on The Large Middle). Or Kevin Kelly, whose 1000 True Fans is still the single most important article for any would-be self-publisher.

[caption id="attachment_326" align="aligncenter" width="201" caption="download my bestselling The Company of Fellows. It's just 70p"][/caption]

There's a good reason for that. We have genuine success models. We have Amanda Hocking and John Locke (we also have the same white elephants we always had - the likes of Konrath and Leather: as established figures, they as irrelevant as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails). They made their name through Kindle. Not Smashwords. Not even really Scribd. They made their way, in other words, not by being free but by being cheap. AND they made their way not by building a following of 1000 fans each willing to pay a lot, but by selling lots of very cheap books to a gazillion people.

So, are Kelly and Anderson irrelevant now? Does free have a role in a writer's plans?

[caption id="attachment_325" align="aligncenter" width="144" caption="Download my adult full-length poem SKIN BOOK. It's FREE"][/caption]

I want to make some points. Debate can follow later, along with rabble-rousing (I feel the need to get more opinionated again. Endless diplomacy sits ill!), so for now just a few points:

freemium is essentially about this question: how do you monetise free? In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely makes a strong case that there is a qualitative psychological difference between free and cheap. I'm not overly interested in how readers *value* books in a moral sense (that's a red herring that's used to beat people with the guilty stick), but it does mean that monetising free may be considerably harder than monetising cheap - Amanda Hocking's $0.99 intro to a $2.99 range is savvier than using free in the hope of gaining paid.

If freemium is going to work, I think we need to look at both high volume and high price for the ultimate paid product. If there is a qualitative jump between $0 and $0.01 then if there is a place for free, it might as well be for introducing people to a $9.99 product or a $99 one as a $0.99 one. Whilst using low pricing will not work as an introduction to much higher multiples.

At the moment most indie writers who make it are doing so through Kindle. They don't get to offer their books free on Kindle - at least, they can't wake up and say "today my book will be free" as they can on Smashwords. This may be skewing our view of the value of free. Publishers haven't had much luck taking on indies with marketing dollars. They are beginning to leverage free on Kindle. That's a space really worth watching.

People may not read free books, but that may be irrelevant. What free can do is use volume downloads to inject a book into a distributor's search and recommendation algorithms. When they begin to charge that can be worth as much as word of mouth from the free downloaders. It ensures a minimum mass of paid readers who can then seed word of mouth recommendation if the book is up to scratch.

Free is not just about freemium. For some writers (with my performance pieces and some of my other work, me included) being paid is not only not the ultimate goal, it's not any goal. The goal is bringing your work to an audience who otherwise wouldn't have access. Free may not be sufficient to do that. It may still be the best policy to work free as though you were going to monetize - and then not go the final step. So, advertising on the Kindle forums and Kindleboards as well as publishing to Smashwords, targeting Nook, where you can choose to make your work free

loyal fans remain the key to long-term security. If you use freemium or if you use cheamium, the aim is not to sell lots of copies of this one book, it's to sell enough in the long term to make a living. My inkling is there's an algorithm linking fanbase to price and longevity (people who are fans of your work at x price will be y in number and will remain loyal for z years). Finding this balance will vary genre to genre, and is our quest for the philosopher's stone.

Think of free as the first step to more than monetisation or volume. I'm going to bold the next bit because I have a feeling it's key. Looking for free-to-paid and free-to-volume interfaces is a reactive and restrictive strategy. You are limiting yourself to what has worked and what has been shown to work and closing yourself off to things that might turn out to work very well. If you believe in free, look for ways to be free, and see where they lead. Be proactive. Following established models is great. And I wouldn't advocate making exceptions your primary strategy. But don't be closed, be open. There are lots of ways to be free. If you think free works, seek them out. Make your proposition not "My books free, how can I tell people and how can I monetize it?" but "How can I give my work away?"

[caption id="attachment_327" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="If you like my books you'll love this novel. It's just £2.14"][/caption]

At the time of writing my book The Company of Fellows is #125 overall paid for Kindle UK at 70p There is a lot of my work available for free on the web. Try Year Zero Writers and its Dan Holloway tag for almost all my shorts and poems for free.

The Large Middle

2011-04-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

I've been writing a lot for other blogs the last few weeks, so I thought it might be an idea in these cases to act as a sort of aggregation site so people can have a read, but can do so on the actual site, and with any luck discover some amazing new sites as a result.

First off, I wrote a piece called "The Large Middle" for Words With Jam, a fantastic writers' magazine for which I write a column on social media and live reading. The piece argues that the real winners in the epublishing revolution are midlst authors.

Here's a sample:

"There are two reasons why literary midlisters were Kindle pioneers – they have a natural inclination to the new, and they of all groups they had the strongest disaffection with the old industry. So they were the first to head for the new frontier...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Read Words With Jam Magazine here

Stories for Japan update

2011-04-06T13:47:00.001-07:00

There are still a few days to submit to the fabulous anthology so get writing!!

I wanted to update progress after 1 month of The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes being on sale, with all royalties going to the Tsunami Relief Fund. Click the links to buy

Paperbacks: £5.99 1 with £1.90 royalty

Smashwords: $2.99 4 copies giving $5.68

Amazon UK: 13 copies giving £6.07 (10 before and 3 after the price went from 71p to £2.14)

Amazon US: 4 copies giving $1.40

Which gives £7.97 + $7.08 Not a fortune, but the first month of what I hope will be many, and there are no reviews yet - I *hope* people will love the book enough to start reviewing it. And I am utterly delighted to announce asigned copy and the cover art sold for £50 for the authors For Japan auction

Thrilling News

2011-03-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

So some of you already know what, for an underground urban author, has to count as a dirty dark secret. I also write thrillers.

The Company of Fellows is the first in a series. I've set up a website for them that has puzzles, an alternative guide to Oxford, links to the ebooks and paperback, and all sorts about the lifestyle portrayed in the books (loads of stationery, food & wine :)). Oh, and you can buy it for UK Kindle here.

So here's the pitch

Imagine the Hannibal Lecter novels set in Oxford University. The Company of Fellows is a dark psychological thriller set in the heart of England's oldest university.

Tommy West. Brilliant academic, until a breakdown 12 years ago. He has reinvented himself as a successful interior designer. His new life is comfortable, in every way, and safe. But life without the intellectual challenge is slowly suffocating him.

Charles Shaw. Outspoken professor of theology. Sensualist. Unpopular with all his colleagues. Loathed by his ex-wife. And, as of five minutes ago, dead.

As a student, Shaw was Tommy’s mentor. Now Tommy must draw on the professor for inspiration one more time in order to find his killer. But all he has to go on are a handful of papers for the controversial research the professor was working on when he died. And the Professor’s 18 year-old daughter Becky, for whom Tommy is the last hope to get some closure on the troubled relationship with her father.

The police are convinced the Professor’s death was a suicide, which should make Tommy's hunt easier. Only in this case, the police means his ex, Emily Harris, and her sultry sergeant Rosie Lu.

It is soon clear that the truth about the Professor's death lies buried in the past: somewhere between the night his daughter was born - and her twin sister stillborn - and the day Tommy broke down. But for Tommy the past is a dangerous place, a long way from the safety he has so carefully built for himself. Can he find the answers before time, and his sanity, run out.

And here's the STORY

I put the book up for sale on Kindle on February 25th. So it's now been on sale for a month (almost). Which means it's worth looking at some figures. Because they say a lot about Kindle. The book is $0.99/£0.70, the same price as Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, my literary book. Songs went on sale in May 2010. It's now had 6 five star reviews on Kindle, it's had 11 ratings on Goodreads, a whole host of great reviews from places as widely read as Farm Lane Books and Pank, and been featured on leading ebook sites. It has sold a total of 20 copies for Kindle US and 89 copies for Kindle UK in that 9 month period, a total of 109. Highest ranking about 1,040 on Kindle UK

I have done little promotion for The Company of fellows other than hang out briefly at the forums on Kindle, and tweet a little (the website is brand new). I've had 2 Amazon reviews (both 5 star which is great), got my first Goodreads review yesterday (5 star as well which is super), and have had no reviews outside of that. And my figures:

35 sales for US Kindle

243 sales for UK Kindle, 25 for each of the last 2 days

highest ranking 210

Go figure. I think that says a lot about how little Kindle differs from regular publishing in terms of genre v literary fiction's market.

I will be continuing to write both forms, and am rather enjoying working on the next in the Oxford Thrillers series. I hope that one may one day subsidise the other.

278

Authors for Japan

2011-03-17T11:59:00.000-07:00

There have been some incredible reactions from the creative community to disasters in recent years, and the unfolding tragedy in Japan has been no exception. I want to give a particular mention to two fantastic projects.

First is Authors For Japan, brainchild of Keris Stainton. This an incredible collaboration featuring 175 donations and counting from authors, publishers, agents and editors all up for auction (closing Sunday) - please look around - there are some stunning things up for grabs from signed editions to having a character named after you in a bestseller to mentoring from professional agents. And you can even bid for something of mine HERE. I'm offering a signed copy of The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes, the original cover art, hand drawn, AND an eight cuts gallery free entry for life pass.

Second, put together by the wonderful Frankie Sachs and Sessha Batto, is the New Sun Rising Stories for Japan anthology, which is looking for submissions until April 11th - if you write, please consider submitting something.

A lot of wonderful people are giving royalties. I am always nervous about doing that. I would hate anyone to think I was doing it for publicity, or for long-term personal gain. But in this instance, there IS something I can do. The MAn Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes came to life in the open forum of a Facebook group, so the idea of charging for it at all makes me rather nervous - but giving royalties to charity (the British Red Cross Tsunami Relief Fund) feels appropriate. Add to that the setting of one of the threads in Japan, and the fact that the whole thing is influenced heavily by manga, and the works of both Harui and Ryu Murakami, and it feels like the perfect book to use. So, I have raised the price to $2.99 (meaning each sale will gain the fund about $2), and will be donating all royalties for a year (and probably in perpetuity) from sales of the book and paperback.

Download for Kindle UK here

For Kindle US here

in all other eformats here

and order the paperback for £5.99 here

The Man Who Paid Agnieszka's Shoes

2011-03-05T15:41:00.000-08:00

Available for $0.99/£0.70 on
Amazon UK for Kindle
Amazon US for Kindle
Smashwords for other eformats

The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes: 1 day to go

2011-03-04T00:32:00.000-08:00

This is the final voice in the book, that of Shuji, the Japanese schoolboy obsessed with Agnieszka, who hasn't set foot outside his bedroom for years.

Chapter 3

Shuji Nomoto stands with his head pressed against the door. He has been listening for ten minutes as his mother, Junko, and his older brother, Yuichi, argue about something inconsequential downstairs. At last he is satisfied there is no one on this floor, but still his muscles pull against him as he puts his fingers on the handle. His grip falters; the sweat on his palm slides against the metal. He swallows hard and listens to the sound of blood in his ears, the quick, quick, quick beat of his heart, the only fragile thing that separates life from death.
Silently.
Silently – every day he uses oil from his fried tofu lunch to keep the door from making a sound. A crack of strange light appears from the corridor and Shuji winces. Cooler air and the smell of bean curd catch his face and he feels giddy. He closes his eyes, pushes, feels for the tray with his feet, pulls the door, eases the handle back, turns the lock, and leans back against the door, fighting back shameful tears as he waits for his heart to slow.
Eventually he is calm. He sits at his desk, his back rod-straight, and moves his finger in a perfect nautilus spiral on the mouse pad to bringing to life the ageing laptop his mother bought before his confinement began.
One morning, when he was 14, Shuji stepped out of the shower in the corner of his Kobe room and towelled himself dry. He pulled on his underwear, trousers, socks, a vest, and a clean white shirt. He stood in front of the mirror, pulling wax through his short hair, expertly teasing it into spikes between his fingers. Without any warning, he stopped, stared, and saw someone he didn’t recognise staring back at him from the mirror. It was like he was looking at a mannequin in a shop window, a model on a billboard.
There was a stranger in his room, and the stranger was him.
He took off his school uniform, emptied the identikit outfits from their drawer, bundled them into a bag, placed them outside his bedroom, closed the door, and locked it behind him. He washed the gel from his hair, dressed in jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt, sat at his desk, fired up his laptop, and began scouring the internet for every reference he could find to the Byfield Effect (1).
He hasn’t spoken to, seen, or been seen by, another person since.
At first he was fascinated. He devoted every second of his time to understanding the Effect. It felt to him as though knowing it better than he knew anything else in or about the world was all that mattered. He had been given a task of monumental importance, but he had no idea what, or why. All he knew was he had to prepare for it by mastering this theory.
Two years later, Shuji saw the clip of Agnieszka Iwanowa’s death. He played the clip through five times. Each time Agnieszka turned her head to the camera, he pressed his face closer to the screen, trying to decipher her words, to make out what she was saying to him. He knew what he was watching change his life forever, but he had no idea how.
Eventually his eyes hurt so much from the concentration he cradled his head in his hands, massaging his brow with his fingertips. Through the gaps between his fingers, he saw on a piece of paper handwriting he recognised as his own: Nomoto-Byfield Conjecture.

(1) The Byfield Effect, named after the English astrophysicist Professor Sydney Byfield, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the subject, is the phenomenon whereby a cluster of waves – to an observer travelling at close to the speed of light, and in the same direction as the waves – appears to behave like a solid object. It marks the point where the Doppler Effect, whereby waves appear expanded or contracted according to their velocity towards or away from an observer, breaks down. The Byfield Effect notes that as the velocity of the observer approximates the velocity of the waves, a point of turbulence occurs and the waves no longer appear as lengthened or shortened versions of themselves, but begin to appear as particles. Known as the Byfield Point, this is the place where quantum physics and the chaotic mathematics of turbulent systems intersect.

The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes: 2 Days to Go

2011-03-02T13:20:00.000-08:00

I would like to claim credit for originality in writing 1st person plural but I'll acknowledge my debt - as so often - to Murakami. I think the first person plural Eri Asai passages in After Dark are just masterful. They made me want to write in a similar tone. What I have tried to do with that voice, though, is much more like the complicity in the film Man Bites Dog.

Chapter 2

We can see her clearly. She’s sitting with her legs folded underneath her, gripping the phone with both hands. It takes a moment for us to register things are wrong with this image. We have to blink several times, but still our eyes don’t feel right. We look closer, and then we see that although she is sitting on her legs, her legs aren’t on anything.
She’s not floating. Nor is she in a darkened room, lit only by an infinitely precise light. We don’t even have noticeably tunnelled vision. It’s just that we only see her.
Sometimes when we stare at a flecked carpet in summer we sense that something is amiss. Then we notice a movement. A few seconds later we see an ant scurry through the fibres, and suddenly our optic nerve turns on a switch and we see that the whole floor is a teeming sea of ants.
In the same sickening way we see all at once: this is Emma, and she is still 14 years old, the age she was when she disappeared; but the telephone she clutches like a parachute rip-cord is an iPhone; her skin and clothes are blurred. It’s not our eyes. We see the iPhone perfectly well. It’s her.
She is blurred.
She turns. Her eyes make us seasick. Instead of colour there’s a soup of grey strobing and fuzzing. “Where am I?” she asks.
She sounds sad. Or maybe we just imagine that she must be sad, because through the white noise in the pits where her eyes should be it’s impossible to say if she’s crying or not.
“I don’t know,” we reply. “How long have you been there?”
“I don’t know. No, that’s wrong. I’ve been here a day. Only this day seems to happen again and again and again. I don’t know how many times. It feels like someone’s caught it on tape and they keep playing it over and over and over, and the tape’s wearing thin in places. What will happen if they play it too many times and the tape snaps?”
She’s speaking quickly, like she only has one lungful of air and she has to get everything out in that single breath. We daren’t interrupt, even if we could answer her questions, in case she goes silent for ever.
“I’m scared. I don’t understand what’s happening. Would it be better if they stopped the tape and left it in an archive somewhere it could never be played again? Does that make any sense?”
“Tell Dad,” she begins but whatever the connection was, it’s cut. We blink several times. Everything is sharp again. We stare at our computer screens, and Emma exists only in the words we see there.

The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes: 3 days to go

2011-03-01T22:51:00.000-08:00

If you want a little something to keep you going till the release, don't forget you can order my other books through the sidebar links, as well as Cody's and Oli's masterpieces.

The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes is told in three distinct voices. We meet each of them in the first 3 chapters. Here's chapter 1. In it we meet what I guess we could call our protagonist if he could be described with such a word. Dan Griffiths is an everyman and a nobody. A 50-something magazine cover designer. The only thing remarkable about his life is what isn't in his life - his daughter, who went missing without a trace one summer's day ten years ago. But like the thousands of other missing persons she's long since been forgotten by everyone except him. He voweed to himself that he wouldn't get locked in the cycle of endlessly pretending she was still there, trapped in a single moment of grief. But the numb nothing his life has become, reduce to Friday nights at the pub with an old college friend and a once a year ritual phone call with his editor, suggests that in this, as in every other aspect of his life, he has failed.

Chapter One

It’s nearly midnight, and I’ve watched Agnieszka die 103 times since I woke.
In that time, the clip has had 274,392 views.
I click the play arrow for the 104th time.
Agnieszka.
Running on the treadmill like millions of other middle class woman in their twenties. She looks fantastic in her lycra – she has the time and money to do this on a regular basis. Stop here and you’d never have noticed the silver and greens on her feet.
The camera wobbles. Has her friend turned to check out someone on the pec deck? Another tiny wobble, enough to remind you how casual the whole scene is, that she has no idea what she’s about to film – although there’s been speculation about that, of course, just like everything else.
Here it is. Three seconds of footage, the seconds before she stumbles. She turns, and over her shoulder she says something to her friend. It indecipherable. Not one of the people at the gym that day can remember her speaking at all. The best Polish and English lipreaders are clueless.
Everyone in the chatrooms devoted to her has their own theory. She’s calling out to a child she gave away as a teenager in Gdansk; she realises she’s lost her footing and lets out an expletive; she’s begging her friend for help; she’s fluffing up the camera for posterity. The truth is she says something different to everyone who watches the clip. It’s as though, in those final seconds, she’s stepped out of her own body and time and speaks straight to you, the viewer.
Just you.
Just me.
See you, Dad! I’m sure that’s what she says. Every time I watch I’m even more certain. I pause the clip. Play. Pause. Play. Pause. I see her mouth form the shapes.
The gate closes. Her hair moves first, and then her head turns; she looks at me over the burgundy uniform; “See you, Dad!” she shouts. “Take care, love!” I shout back from the kitchen window but she’s already turned away, heading for school.
See you, Dad!
Was that the last thing she ever said? Why say it that morning? Was she worried? Did she know something I didn’t? No matter how many times I go through it, I just don’t know.
“Take care, love,” I whisper at the screen.
Play.
Ten seconds and it’s over. Nothing left of Agnieszka but her silver and green Mercury 500 trainers, logos filling the camera like startled eyebrows. The image of the year; of the decade, probably. The picture on every student’s wall, on T-shirts and placards and newspaper spreads. And the reason my boss will call me tonight – the front cover for Epoch magazine’s Review of the Year.
Give me a different angle on it, Sarah will say. Make it fresh. Sure. Three weeks to find a completely new take on the most reproduced, rehashed, reformatted image of the century.
There’s the phone. The ringtone’s the riff from Smells Like Teen Spirit. Emma had Nevermind in her CD player when she left. I let the second bar finish and press accept.
“Hi!” I get ready for the inevitable banter about calling the wrong side of midnight, and click the mouse out of habit.
105.
It’s not Sarah’s voice. It takes a few seconds to place and by the time I do the line’s dead. The phone’s still against my ear and I hear every word in real time, as though the line’s on a delay.
“Dad? Can you hear me? I’m safe but I don’t know where I am. Dad, I can’t explain it but it feels like I’m fading. Like now; I’m shouting but it feels like nothing’s coming out. And sometimes when I look down at my feet I think I can see through them. Does that make any sense? Dad, you have to come and find me. Please.” The line clicks dead.
Find me. Please. The words synch perfectly with Agnieszka’s lips.
“I’m coming, love.”
But she’s already turned away.
She trips, tangles, and the film ends.

The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes: 4 days and counting

2011-03-01T02:23:00.000-08:00

(please note the links in the sidebar to where you can buy my current books :))

Two years ago, I started a project. I wanted to write a book that was unlike anything that had gone before. That was semi-interactive, with story arcs prompted by readers, a world that moved in and out of focus, gained and lost segments as readers and characters decided, zoomed in on those aspects people really wanted to learn about.

There was a flurry of branding during which I opened my blogger and twitter accounts under the Agnieszka’s Shoes name, and started the Facebook group that became the centre for discussions. A community slowly built, chapters got written, questions got asked, and I learned as much about the story from what was happening in the writing process as I did from the content of the interaction.

And so Dan Griffiths’ dual quest – to reinvent the world’s most copied image; and to find a daughter whose image had been universally ignored – emerged, along with the more important quest behind it – to answer the question why some pictures and stories grab the collective consciousness whilst others are ignored. It’s something we ask ourselves all the time as writers.
I don’t think I’ve answered the question in the book that has emerged. I don’t think that would have been right. I hope I’ve asked lots of the right questions, though. And I hope I’ve created characters and situations that connect in some way with all of us on an emotional as well as an intellectual level.

This isn’t a “story” as such, for all it is structured more conventionally than anything I’ve ever written before – it features not one but two classically constructed quests. Characters enter and leave, some have their own stories that are resolved, others do so leaving traces of questions and no answers. Rather like life. But this isn’t a philosophical book – for all it casts its gaze over the meaning of many of the elements that make up (post)modern life – art, the internet, loss, memory, love, beauty, and most of all numbness. If it is any one thing, it’s an emotional scrapbook, in which some of the cut-out pieces are ripped from our own lives.

My sincerest thanks to everyone who was part of that original group, for your support and your inspiration, and for the directions you sent me in – in particular thank you for the prominence you wanted me to accord Shuji – he’s turned into a character I am very fond of. A special mention has to go to three people. First, the wonderful Penny Goring. It was, if I remember rightly, this rather bonkers idea that first brought me into contact with Penny, and as I prepare to publish her debut collection I can’t begin to say how grateful I am for that. Second, I want to say thank you for her encouragement to the amazing Jessica Brown, one of the most creative people and fertile imaginations I know, whom I met through the group and who has gone on to run the incredible Defiled Curator site. But most of all a huge huge thank you to Tony Malone (whose great Reading List blog you’ll see in my blogroll) for kicking me up the backside consistently for two years every time I thought it would be easier to stop one chapter before the end. The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes is dedicated to him.

Over the next 3 days, I will post the first three chapters from the book, and then, on Saturday, I will post the buy link – it will be $0.99/£0.70 like my other books. I hope you enjoy reading it. I can honestly say of everything I’ve ever written, it’s the thing about which I have most doubts, but the thing of which I’m proudest – which is exactly as it should be for a book like this.

The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes

Why are there some images we just can’t look away from, whilst others fade without us ever noticing they were there?

When mysterious Polish woman Agnieszka Iwanowa's tragi-comic death in a gym accident is uploaded to YouTube, the film's final image of her upturned trainers is rehashed by everyone from right wing extremists to a reclusive installation artist who only speaks through his dominatrix PA.Now Dan Griffiths has to make the image fresh.

The search for Agnieszka's secret slowly overtakes Dan’s search for his own daughter, missing for ten years, ignored by the media, and now sending him - and the reader - glimpses of messages from what seems like another world.Dan’s journey sucks him into the worlds of political extremism; BDSM; a haiku-composing graffiti artist; an online community devoted to the dead girl, and its reclusive Japanese schoolboy moderator who has just paid half a million dollars for the diary of a scientist whose work he believes will enable him to bring Agnieszka back from the dead.

This is a story about a world gone numb, a world in which pain is the only thing that's real

Imagine the Inspector Morse novels had been written by Thomas Harris

2011-02-27T01:52:00.000-08:00

Those of you who know me will know I write fairly obscure literary fiction. Probably only those who've known me a little longer will know I also write thrillers. I began The Company of Fellows four years ago as the first in an Oxford-based series featuring bipolar atheist interior designer and some time academic Tommy West, his devoutly Christian ex-girlfriend Chief Inspector Emily Harris, and her sultry sergeant Rosie Lu. And now, I've re-edited it, cut large chunks that weren't working, and revived what may well turn back into a series.

It's available for Kindle for just 70p here.

Also on smashwords for all other formats for the same price

Imagine the Inspector Morse novels had been written by Thomas Harris. The Company of Fellows is a new thriller set in Oxford.

Tommy West. A brilliant Oxford academic, until a breakdown 12 years ago. Reinvented as a successful interior designer. His new life is comfortable, in every way, and safe. But he misses the challenge of academia.

Charles Shaw. Outspoken professor of theology. Sensualist. Unpopular with all his colleagues. Loathed by his ex-wife. And, as of five minutes ago, dead.

As a student, Shaw was Tommy’s mentor. Now Tommy must draw on the professor for inspiration one more time in order to find his killer. But all he has to go on are a handful of papers for the controversial research the professor was working on when he died. And the Professor’s 18 year-old daughter Becky, for whom Tommy is the last hope to get some closure on the troubled relationship with her father. And a police investigation convinced the Professor’s death was a suicide. An investigation led by Tommy’s ex.

The further Tommy gets inside the twisted lives of Shaw and his colleagues, and the closer he gets to the dark secrets that hide the truth, the further he gets from the safety he has so carefully built for himself, placing not just his life, but his sanity, at risk.

As thrillers go it's literary, more P D James than Colin Dexter, but I also wanted something of the menace and opulence of Thomas Harris. I also wanted to convey both the attraction and the superficiality of Oxford's academic life, and the layers of what I hope are very serious menace and darkness that just might lie beneath some of the seemingly petty and esoteric squabbles, hinting at a sensuality too long repressed by the search for intellectual betterment, a sensuality that ultimately cannot be held in place and begins to ooze toxicly through the pretence of otherworldliness the academics wear.

First and foremost, though, this is about the things all my books are about - the fundamental struggle of living in a world wear the only things that keep you sane are at the same time the things that threaten to destroy you. And how to live in a world that lives by moral codes that make no sense at all.

Here's a passage from one of the early chapters where Rosie first visits the house of the dead professor:

Rosie loved old Oxford houses that seemed to leak books from the cracks in their decaying plaster. She’d never been to university. There had been no need. She’d always known she wanted to be in the police, like her father and grandfather had been in Hong Kong. But the mix of books and solitude made her feel totally at home.

Professor Shaw’s was a typical academic’s study, a cross between a bombsite and a fly tip. It might look like it’s a mess, but I know where everything is, and that’s what matters. That’s what people who lived like this always said. From the number of times she’d watched them foraging for a vital piece of paper with all the desperation of a bear emerging from hibernation and finding its larder still buried under snow, she knew this was a lie.

Somehow she had a feeling that Professor Shaw would be different. It was true that everything looked a mess; but the dinner he’d laid out for himself had been beautifully ordered. She had a feeling he wasn’t the kind of person to leave work half done. All of which meant there had to be some kind of order underlying the chaos. Either that or he was murdered after all.

She stood in the doorway and tried to get a feel for the way he had used the room. There were piles of papers on every surface – the coffee tables, the desk, the sofa, most of the chairs. It was a fair bet most of them had been there for months and were irrelevant. If she could figure out which they were she could save herself hours. She looked at his desk. There was a clearing for his iBook but no more, and a couple of journals had spilled onto the white case. She made a note to herself to take the computer with her.

Rosie tried a technique she often used. She walked out of the door and down the corridor. She imagined herself tired from a day giving lectures, seeing students, straining her eyes in the library. She thought of the iBook, partially covered, and realised that Professor Shaw didn’t use it to take his daily notes. She tried to feel a folder under her arm, with its pages of scribblings.

She headed back to the study, yawning as she got into character. Without thinking she found herself heading across the floor, stepping over some heaps of journals, and sitting herself down in a Windsor chair with arms worn smooth and dark, placing her imaginary folder on the table to her left. The papers on it lay flat. Her folder wouldn’t fall off. They were a little beyond her comfortable reach – perfect for someone five or six inches taller than her, like the Professor.

The chair felt good. God, she needed a drink. Instinctively she moved her hand to the right, felt rounded glass, a bottle of Glengoyne and a tumbler waiting on a mahogany tray. This was where he lived when he was in this room, she thought.
She scanned her immediate surroundings. To her right was an ottoman, complete with the tray of malt. To her left was the table with the flat-topped stack of papers. They weren’t what he was working on. He used them only as a flat surface to put things on. What did he do when he’d finished whatever it was he did? She imagined him sitting down with his whisky. He’d put everything on the table – his notes from the day, his post, printouts of his e-mails. He didn’t keep them on his lap as he looked through them. That’s where he cradled his drink. He took them off the pile one by one, read them over. What did he do with them? There was no sign of a diary or a jotter. I bet you had a notebook, she said to herself.

Carefully she retraced her steps to the door and repeated the routine. As she stepped back inside it struck her. You’ve had enough of this heavy tweed. You want to make yourself comfortable. She took off her make-believe jacket and hung it on the back of his door. Sure enough, there was a tweed jacket on the back of the door, a fat mechanical pencil sticking out of the top pocket. I bet you used that pencil to take notes in the library. And, bingo! On the peg next to it was a fine silk smoking jacket. She put it on and padded the pockets. She reached inside. There was the notebook, a small Mont Blanc Mozart biro clipped over its front cover.

Rosie went back to the chair and opened up the notebook. She was right. The entries were all dated. She started from the most recent, September 3rd, and worked back. Unfortunately it appeared to be nothing but a series of references from books he’d been reading during the day. Strange that he should have bothered taking notes the day before he killed himself. Maybe he hadn’t been intending to kill himself at the time; maybe something sudden happened. She put it on the arm of the chair. It was small enough to balance. She went back to the Professor’s routine. He’d read his papers, taken whatever notes he needed and then put them down one by one. That was it.

She looked underneath the table. There was a sprawl of envelopes and letters a foot or so back. Clearly once he’d dealt with something he didn’t care what happened to it. She sat on the floor and gathered the pile of papers and correspondence, careful to keep things in order. The top few letters were unopened. A bill, some junk mail, one from college that was handwritten – why would he have left that?

She got to the first opened letter – the last Professor Shaw had read. It was a strange size – she recognised it as US paper. There it was. Exactly what she’d been looking for. It was a letter from the Divinity Faculty at Harvard. And there were the words that explained the Professor’s death, his sudden decision – we are sorry but after lengthy deliberation the Faculty has decided to appoint another candidate to the post of Professor of Social Ethics. So he had been planning to go to the States, but his plans had fallen apart.

Why get in touch with Tommy, a student he hadn’t seen in years, and ask him to come round if the Professor was going to kill himself before he got there? Maybe he’d wanted Tommy to get to him just in time. Who knows? she thought. One thing was certain, though. The Professor hadn’t bargained on his messenger dropping dead before he could deliver the message.

I'm on Kindle and I have a new book

2011-02-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

As many of you will know, I'm currently on a break from the internet. After 18 months on the go with Year Zero and eight cuts gallery, I finally burned myself out pretty much completely, as well as losing all sense of my own worth as a writer. Add to that mix not one but two particularly nasty bugs (no doubt caused by an immune system dramatically lowered by stress). I hope to be back and in the swing of things mid March.

But I haven't been totally inactive, and as I claw my way back into things I wanted to share two pieces about my own writing, because as I've had a chance to look through it away from the relentless melting pot of the internet I've realised there is some merit to it. In fact, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is a book I'm rather proud of.

I just wanted to let people know that it's now available for Kindle at just 70p
the link to Songs on Kindle is here!
and of course I would dearly dearly love it if people who thought they would like it bought it. I'd also really really love it if those of you who have enjoyed it were to leave a review - I've had some lovely reviews over the past 18 months, but all of them before it has been available for Kindle. I've decided it's time to relaunch my own writing career as well as the other things I do, so this is sort of an official relaunch for Songs. So if anyone has any space on their blogs for a gentle literary read...

For those of you who don't know anything about it, here's a little something blurbwise:

After her mother walks out and returns to England when she’s just a week old, Szandi grows up on the vineyard in Hungary that has been in her family for 300 years. Now 18, Szandi is part of Budapest’s cosmopolitan art scene, sharing a flat and a bohemian lifestyle with her lover and fellow sculptress, Yang. She has finally found her place in the world. When she discovers that her father has only weeks to live, Szandi must choose once and for all: between the past and the present; between East and West; between her family and her lover.
Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is a coming of age story for all who love Murakami's Norwegian Wood that inhabits anti-capitalist chatrooms and ancient wine cellars, seedy bars and dreaming spires; and takes us on a remarkable journey across Europe and cyberspace in the company of rock stars and dropouts, diaries that appear from nowhere, a telepathic fashion mogul, and the talking statue of a bull.

And here are some reviews:
“captures the rhythms and nuances of how we live now in a way that has rarely been done better” LA Books Examiner (read full review)
“Holloway’s accomplishment is in rendering a world in exquisite detail and still conveying the universal via the personal.” Emprise Review (read full review)
“a lovely book written in that rare thing: beautiful, lyrical prose.” Jane Smith, The Self-Publishing Review (read full review)
“Songs From the Other Side of the Wall is a *very* good book” Erica Friedman, Yurikon publishing (read full review)
“genuine promise”, Scott Pack, Harper Collins Fifth Estate/The Friday Project (read full review)
“In threads that shimmer like the novel’s central image of petrol-colored silk, what could have been weaves itself into every situation.” Pank (read full review)

Which brings me to the other news. The reason my blog has the name it does has to do with a book I began writing 2 years ago. And now, finally, The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes is complete. It will be available on Kindle from March 10th. For those who don't already know, here is the blurb:

When mysterious Polish woman Agnieszka Iwanowa's tragi-comic death in a gym accident is uploaded to YouTube, the film's final image of her upturned trainers is rehashed by everyone from right wing extremists to a reclusive installation artist who only speaks through his dominatrix PA.

Now Dan Griffiths has to make the image fresh.Dan's search for the reasons behind the picture's magnetic pull suck him into the worlds of political extremism; BDSM; a haiku-composing graffiti artist; an online community devoted to the dead girl, and its reclusive Japanese schoolboy moderator who has just paid half a million dollars for the diary of a scientist whose work he believes will enable him to bring Agnieszka back from the dead.

And as the search for Agnieszka's secret slowly overtakes the search for his own daughter, missing for ten years, ignored by the media, and now sending him - and the reader - glimpses of messages from what seems like another world, he is confronted by the question - why are some images impossible to look away from, whilst others fade without ever being seen?

A story about a world gone numb, in which pain is the only thing that's real

Exchange Trip

2011-02-09T13:12:00.000-08:00

10 February 2011, 6-8pm, O3 Gallery

£3/£1.50 students

There’s a Facebook event page here

You’ve probably heard a lot about how tough it is for first time writers of literary fiction to get a deal. Which it is, but tonight we have not one, not two, not three or four but five fantastic writers who managed it, reading the work that got them there. You can even stop and have a drinl and a chat and ask questions.

In the first of a fantastic double-header, five of the most exciting young writers from London are coming to Oxford for one night only for your delectation before inviting Oxford’s, er, finest back to London.

Lee Rourke is the author of the novel The Canal, the short story collection Everyday and A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction (September 2011).

Stuart Evers is the author of ‘Ten Stories About Smoking’ which Picador will publish in March this year. A former bookseller and editor, he now writes about books for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Independent, New Statesman and many other publications. He is currently completing his debut novel, The Carnival’s Tattoo.

Niven Govinden is the author of novels We Are The New Romantics and Graffiti My Soul. His short stories have appeared in numerous publications including Five Dials, Pen Pusher, Time Out, Stimulus Respond, Butt, and on BBC Radio 3.

Nikesh Shukla is a London-based author, filmmaker and poet. His writing has featured on BBC2, BBC Radio 1 and 4, and BBC Asian Network. He has performed at Royal Festival Hall, Book Club Boutique, Soho Theatre, The Big Chill, Rise Festival and Glastonbury. He is currently working on a sitcom for Channel 4.

Gavin James Bower graduated from the University of Sheffield in 2004 and, while interning that summer at Dazed & Confused, was asked to model for an upcoming issue. Joining agencies in London, Paris and Milan, he worked for John Galliano and Hermes. His journalism has appeared in FLUX and the Sunday Telegraph. He lives in London. Dazed and Aroused is his first novel.

Ten covers to make you cry

2011-02-03T04:46:00.000-08:00

Like many I’m sure, after hearing news of their official split, I spent much of last night listening to The White Stripes’ back catalogue. One of the many things I realised is just how perfect a cover their version of Jolene is. Which got me thinking about covers, and I realised all of my favourites have one thing in common – they take the original and somehow wring an extra squeeze of emotion from it, either from the arrangement, the vocal quality, or the story behind the song (I’m sure you can figure which is which).
In some cases they transform a song that was, really, rather crap. In others (Nine Inch Nails) the original is at least as perfect as the cover, but here they are.

Jolene – The White Stripes (Dolly Parton)

Hurt – Johnny Cash (Nine Inch Nails)

The Man Who Sold the World - Nirvana (David Bowie)

Somewhere Over the Rainbow – Eva Cassidy (Judy Garland)

AND Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

Feeling Good – Muse (Nina Simone)

Guns of Brixton – Nouvelle Vague (The Clash)

Killing Me Softly – The Fugees (Roberta Flack)

Mad World – Gary Jules (Tears for Fears)

Where Did You Sleep Last Night – Nirvana (Leadbelly)

And one that is, ahem, “perfect” just as it is, thank you, Susan Boyle et al

Once Upon a Time in a Gallery

2011-02-01T01:05:00.001-08:00

Ginger Rad Cam copyright Emma Dougherty

Once Upon a Time in a Gallery is a new multi-media hyperlink curated show taking a new look at our oldest form of storytelling. Click here to visit

Fairytales are our foundation myths, reflections not just the manifestation of our own Freudian psychosexual neuroses but of the fears and aspirations of our communities. For diasporas everywhere they provide roots that creep back in time and place to a utopian or dystopian ancestral home. As the digital age pulls us increasingly into communities not just geographically dispersed but born in diaspora (and often, ironically, subsequently drawn together physically), fairytales will inevitably be recycled and refreshed to form the foundation myths of these new societies – ones that have no physical homeland, whose communal roots lie lodged in the internal, not the external, lives of their members. What better time to re-examine the way fairytales relate our individual psyches to our social networks, and ask: Have we reached a tipping point in the evolution of collective cultural consciousness, where we can opt freely in and out of communities, picking up and leaving behind their roots as we go? Are there any universal archetypes left?

Once Upon a Time in a Gallery is a two month exhibition featuring words, art, and music by more than twenty international artists. The hyperlinked, flitting, rootless style of curation of this exhibition invites the audience to reflect on this rootlessness, and whether, when they find themselves lost in today’s dark forest, there is any gingerbread trail to lead them to safety.

National Short Story Day

2010-12-20T12:03:00.000-08:00

The shortest day of the year, December 21st, is also National Short Story Day, a wonderful initiative to celebrate this wonderful form of the written word. Sadly the live event we had in store in Oxford has fallen foul of the weather, but over at eight cuts gallery we are celebrating by giving away 10 fantastic stories by Year Zero Writers, as well as our two Year Zero anthologies.

Enjoy them all, and make sure you buy at least one collection of short stories next year. In addition to Robert James Russell's The Mating Habits of College Girls and Penny Goring's NeuroRococo, which I'll be publishing at eight cuts.

So, what short stories would you recommend? All titles and links gratefully received

True Grit

2010-11-29T06:34:00.001-08:00

This is a busy and very exciting week, and I have all my sets of fingers and toes crossed the snow doesn't bugger things about. I'm delighted to say I'll be at two fantastic gigs this week.

This Thursday is Text in the City at Oxford Castle's O3 Gallery ,where I'll be joined by the wonderful Larry Harrison, our musician in residence Christi Warner, Oxford Creative Writers coordinator Anna Hobson, and special guests from the super fab Dissocia Zine.

On Friday, I'm extremely excited to be reading for the first time in Brighton, at Grit Lit, held at Red Roaster. I'm particularly excited about this, not just because I've never read in Brighton before, and I get to be part of a super line-up, but because everyone I speak to tells me how amazing the cakes at Red Roaster are.

Making a Song and Dance About Copyright

2010-11-19T01:25:00.000-08:00

in the wake of a fiasco about purloined recipes that has already sparked enough bile not to be rehashed here, the lovely Jane at How Publishing Really Works has designated today copyright day. A whole host of bloggers will be blogging about copyright so check her blog for links - if you ever need to write on the subject there's bound to be something relevant to nick. That's satire, by the way. Which I believe is one of the legitimate uses for purloinage of portions. I heartily recommend Nicola Morgan's particularly clear and detailed contribution.

I will leave the law to others, and my take on copyright is very simple. Don't pilfer unless the author tells you it's OK. If an author does tell you it's OK, don't take that as an indication that you can extrapolate anything beyond that one instance. At all.

So to avoid this being a silly short post, I will tell you about a fantastic anthology I'm taking part in, put together by Michale Wells, author of the hilarious I Shot Bigfoot and Other Stories.

As "one of those" authors, the kind who hang out on the web rather than behaving decorously and getting a publisher or slinking off to their garret in a fit of pique or melancholy, I get asked to take part in a lot of fun anthologies. Sometimes they involve writing humour, something I find so traumatic I have to decline. Two recent ones I said yes to that have had a moderate amount of attention (largely because they were timed to come out at the same time as the bad sex awards) were about writing sex.

But the one in question, to be released in December, is a collection of stories inspired by songs. Not songs we got to choose ourselves (how many teenage memoirs of Love Will Tear Us Apart can society cope with after all?) . Michael randomly generated some titles from somewhere. I'm not sure where , and given the amount of INXS on there I'm in no hurry to ask. One of the INXS titles, Beautiful Girl, fell to me. I wrote a very peculiar story that none of the contributors could make head or tail of about a guy falling to pieces having killed a kid in a car crash (I say that because most people didn't even figure that out - that was the point. I wrote it like one of those black and white, oddly cut, moody enigmatic 80s pop videos).

What's relevant (and like a bad jokester - told you I couldn't do humour - I know you're there ahead of me) is that we spent a long long time discussing fair use before concluding that we wouldn't quote a single lyric. In the whole thing. Which has about 40 pieces of short and flash fiction in it.

Song lyrics seem to be THE most controversial copyright topic, largely because of the ambiguity over fair use. I can see why there's ambiguity. After all, on one hand you get Patti Smith who writes half the ancient mariner and sets it to music. On the other hand, you get the likes of 2 Unlimited, where if you didn't capitalise "No Limits" to make it clear you were referring to the title, you'd be lifting pretty much the whole song. But with songs being so much a part of popular culture, and so many of us writing about popular culture, it would be great to have SOME kind of rule for those of us who want to do the right thing by fellow artists, yet not have to avoid writing about whole swathes of subject matter or fill the page with allusion - yes, allusion, metaphor, word play are great, but sometimes you just want to quote a lyric and not risk being slapped with a suit you can't pay.

Maybe if we were allowed to quote a set proportion if we could prove due diligence? Let's face it, most managers are just too busy to get back to everyone who wants to quote a line from their band. BUT it's a bit rich if they then take out a suit against someone who tried to get permission but was never answered. So my suggestion - if I can show I asked your permission and you didn't get back to me, don't beef if I quote half a verse or a chorus couplet. And in return, if I can't be bothered to ask I won't quote.

5:am and time for my battered sausage

2010-11-13T03:39:00.001-08:00

A week or so back I wrote a rather angry piece on this blog that both got the tone wrong, and conveyed completely the wrong message as a result. The danger of writing generalistic pieces is that they are, well, generalistic and weak as a consequence. So I put examples in, and as a result came across as snarky, having more chips than Harry Ramsden, and aiming my shots where they weren't intended.

So an unconditional apology for aiming my snarks at Ben and Lee, and Todd and Emma - neither you personally nor Richard, The Canal, Literary Death Match or To Hell With The Lighthouse (now The Book Stops Here) were intended to be in my crosshairs. I also forgot the golden rule (that I finally got into my noodle with respect to "the mainstream" last year) that the best thing to do when you don't like something is to carry on doing what you're doing, only even better.

I did have a gripe, and it was this - the media portrays a literary scene as being new that is not, as being cutting edge that has actually been around long enough that it has donned its pipe and slippers and no longer occupies the front line position in the fight against "the boundaries" whatever they might be, that disproportionately reviews titles by its circle whilst refusing to look at other small releases; and there is also a part of the peripheral literary scene that likes to portray itself as these things in order to appear cool. The losers in all this are the public, who get disappointed, and never get to see the real boundaries until they too have donned pipe and slippers. The answer is for the literary media to spend more time looking around outside of what it already knows either from its friends, or from slick PR or the London circuit; and to be less frightened to champion something that other people don't like or don't get - to stop playing safe all the time. As writers and independent publishers we need to keep putting our message in front of the media to show them there is an alternative - and to do so vigorously and unapologetically - it deserves to be there as much as anything else does. Calling out laziness and prejudice is very much part of what we need to do. Snarking doesn't help our cause, but more than that it's not what I'm about and it's not what great literature's about. And the last thing for me to do is to piss off people who have done great things to bring great literature to the public. Sure, now they're successful I 100% expect them to extend a totally non-insular non-introspective outlook to everything else going on, just like they did when they were smaller. But I'll stick to bruhaha designed to promote the work I really beieve in, not to do down anything else.

So, I manifest myself to promote only manifestos of action not snark - I think at both Year Zero and latterly at eight cuts gallery I've done that - that needs to be done more transferably, and to work with people who want to promote great literature, to give the public the great stuff it deserves.

I could remove the previous piece and have done with it, but I won't, because that would be disingenuous to the people who took time to comment (even those who did so anonymously), and, having had my ass whooped, it would do me well for the ass-qhooping to remain public.

NaNoWrimo: The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes

2010-11-07T05:08:00.000-08:00

I've met an awful lot of people here and on twitter in the last 18 months. And most of them have no idea why my blog is called what it is, why it has the funny little avvie it does, and why my twittername is unspellable. Well, without gong into the long version, The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes is a novel I began in the spring of 2009. And never quite finished. And for all I have other ideas and novels, I keep coming back to it, so I have decided to use NaNoWriMo to edit and finish it for good.

The avvie is the central image from the book, the eyes a pair of trainers - look closely and you'll see the pupils are the 500 logo)

Here's the opening, so you can all see at last why I have the username I do. It's a work of (increasingly - the opening section is harmless enough) transgressive literary fiction, and I'm going to quit the usual self-deprecation and come out and say it. It's the best thing I've ever written, and I need to finish it (I have 56,000 of a projected 65k already but lots of editing to do).

Blurb

Why are some images impossible to ignore, while others disappear without ever being seen?

In 2009 one image became as iconic as the face of Che Guevara.

A story of art, politics, online communities, environmentalism, and the nature of celebrity;

Of the search for the truth behind a seemingly tragic death, that became the most watched YouTube video in history;

Of two personal journeys – a man whose daughter, missing for ten years, is fading from existence in a world he cannot reach; a schoolboy whose quest for beauty in mathematics has kept him locked in his room for three years; and the website that unites them;

Of the world’s most reclusive artist; of a dominatrix who uses other people’s pain to break down the doors to parallel worlds in search of the origin of her own agony; of an astrophysicist determined to preserve the moment of his wife’s death forever; of a vicious vigilante who spends his evenings composing haiku.

Of the relationship between beauty, pain, and reality.

One

It’s nearly midnight, and I’ve watched Agnieszka die 103 times since I woke.

In that time, the clip has had 274,392 views.

I click the play arrow for the 104th time.

Agnieszka.

Running on the treadmill like millions of other middle class woman in their twenties. She looks fantastic in her lycra – she has the time and money to do this on a regular basis. Stop here and you’d never have noticed the silver and greens on her feet.

The camera wobbles. Has her friend turned to check out someone on the pec deck? Another tiny wobble, enough to remind you how casual the whole scene is, that she has no idea what she’s about to film – although there’s been speculation about that, of course, just like everything else.

Here it is. Three seconds of footage, the seconds before she stumbles. She turns, and over her shoulder she says something to her friend. It indecipherable. Not one of the people at the gym that day can remember her speaking at all. The best Polish and English lipreaders are clueless.

Everyone in the chatrooms devoted to her has their own theory. She’s calling out to a child she
gave away as a teenager in Gdansk; she realises she’s lost her footing and lets out an expletive; she’s begging her friend for help; she’s fluffing up the camera for posterity. The truth is she says something different to everyone who watches the clip. It’s as though, in those final seconds, she’s stepped out of her own body and time and speaks straight to you, the viewer.

Just you.

Just me.

See you, Dad! I’m sure that’s what she says. Every time I watch I’m even more certain. I pause the clip. Play. Pause. Play. Pause. I see her mouth form the shapes.

The gate closes. Her hair moves first, and then her head turns; she looks at me over the burgundy uniform; “See you, Dad!” she shouts. “Take care, love!” I shout back from the kitchen window but she’s already turned away, heading for school.

See you, Dad!

Was that the last thing she ever said? Why say it that morning? Was she worried? Did she know something I didn’t? No matter how many times I go through it, I just don’t know.

“Take care, love,” I whisper at the screen.

Play.

Ten seconds and it’s over. Nothing left of Agnieszka but her silver and green Mercury 500 trainers, logos filling the camera like startled eyebrows. The image of the year; of the decade, probably. The picture on every student’s wall, on T-shirts and placards and newspaper spreads.

And the reason my boss will call me tonight – the front cover for Epoch magazine’s Review of the Year.

Give me a different angle on it, Sarah will say. Make it fresh. Sure. Three weeks to find a completely new take on the most reproduced, rehashed, reformatted image of the century.

There’s the phone. The ringtone’s the riff from Smells Like Teen Spirit. Emma had Nevermind in her CD player when she left. I let the second bar finish and press accept.

“Hi!” I get ready for the inevitable banter about calling the wrong side of midnight, and click the mouse out of habit.

105.

It’s not Sarah’s voice. It takes a few seconds to place and by the time I do the line’s dead. The phone’s still against my ear and I hear every word in real time, as though the line’s on a delay.

“Dad? Can you hear me? I’m safe but I don’t know where I am. Dad, I can’t explain it but it feels like I’m fading. Like now; I’m shouting but it feels like nothing’s coming out. And sometimes when I look down at my feet I think I can see through them. Does that make any sense? Dad, you have to come and find me. Please.” The line clicks dead.

Find me. Please. The words synch perfectly with Agnieszka’s lips.

“I’m coming, love.”

But she’s already turned away.

She trips, tangles, and the film ends.

Two

We can see her clearly. She’s sitting with her legs folded underneath her, gripping the phone with both hands. It takes a moment for us to register things are wrong with this image. We have to blink several times, but still our eyes don’t feel right. We look closer, and then we see that although she is sitting on her legs, her legs aren’t on anything.

She’s not floating. Nor is she in a darkened room, lit only by an infinitely precise light. We don’t even have noticeably tunnelled vision. It’s just that we only see her.

Sometimes when we stare at a flecked carpet in summer we sense that something is amiss. Then we notice a movement. A few seconds later we see an ant scurry through the fibres, and suddenly our optic nerve turns on a switch and we see that the whole floor is a teeming sea of ants.

In the same sickening way we see all at once: this is Emma, and she is still 14 years old, the age she was when she disappeared; but the telephone she clutches like a parachute rip-cord is an iPhone; her skin and clothes are blurred. It’s not our eyes. We see the iPhone perfectly well. It’s her.

She is blurred.

She turns. Her eyes make us seasick. Instead of colour there’s a soup of grey strobing and fuzzing. “Where am I?” she asks.

She sounds sad. Or maybe we just imagine that she must be sad, because through the white noise in the pits where her eyes should be it’s impossible to say if she’s crying or not.

“I don’t know,” we reply. “How long have you been there?”

“I don’t know. No, that’s wrong. I’ve been here a day. Only this day seems to happen again and again and again. I don’t know how many times. It feels like someone’s caught it on tape and they keep playing it over and over and over, and the tape’s wearing thin in places. What will happen if they play it too many times and the tape snaps?”

She’s speaking quickly, like she only has one lungful of air and she has to get everything out in that single breath. We daren’t interrupt, even if we could answer her questions, in case she goes silent for ever.

“I’m scared. I don’t understand what’s happening. Would it be better if they stopped the tape and left it in an archive somewhere it could never be played again? Does that make any sense?”

“Tell Dad,” she begins but whatever the connection was, it’s cut. We blink several times.

Everything is sharp again. We stare at our computer screens, and Emma exists only in the words we see there.

Three

Shuji Nomoto stands with his head pressed against the door. He has been listening for ten minutes as his mother, Junko, and his older brother, Yuichi, argue about something inconsequential downstairs. At last he is satisfied there is no one on this floor, but still his muscles pull against him as he puts his fingers on the handle. His grip falters; the sweat on his palm slides against the metal. He swallows hard and listens to the sound of blood in his ears, the quick, quick, quick beat of his heart, the only fragile thing that separates life from death.

Silently.

Silently – every day he uses oil from his fried tofu lunch to keep the door from making a sound. A crack of strange light appears from the corridor and Shuji winces. Cooler air and the smell of bean curd catch his face and he feels giddy. He closes his eyes, pushes, feels for the tray with his feet, pulls the door, eases the handle back, turns the lock, and leans back against the door, fighting back shameful tears as he waits for his heart to slow.

Eventually he is calm. He sits at his desk, his back rod-straight, and moves his finger in a perfect nautilus spiral on the mouse pad to bringing to life the ageing laptop his mother bought before his confinement began.

One morning, when he was 14, Shuji stepped out of the shower in the corner of his Kobe room and towelled himself dry. He pulled on his underwear, trousers, socks, a vest, and a clean white shirt. He stood in front of the mirror, pulling wax through his short hair, expertly teasing it into spikes between his fingers. Without any warning, he stopped, stared, and saw someone he didn’t recognise staring back at him from the mirror. It was like he was looking at a mannequin in a shop window, a model on a billboard.

There was a stranger in his room, and the stranger was him.

He took off his school uniform, emptied the identikit outfits from their drawer, bundled them into a bag, placed them outside his bedroom, closed the door, and locked it behind him. He washed the gel from his hair, dressed in jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt, sat at his desk, fired up his laptop, and began scouring the internet for every reference he could find to the Byfield Effect .

He hasn’t spoken to, seen, or been seen by, another person since.

At first he was fascinated. He devoted every second of his time to understanding the Effect. It felt to him as though knowing it better than he knew anything else in or about the world was all that mattered. He had been given a task of monumental importance, but he had no idea what, or why. All he knew was he had to prepare for it by mastering this theory.

Two years later, Shuji saw the clip of Agnieszka Iwanowa’s death. He played the clip through five times. Each time Agnieszka turned her head to the camera, he pressed his face closer to the screen, trying to decipher her words, to make out what she was saying to him. He knew what he was watching change his life forever, but he had no idea how.

Eventually his eyes hurt so much from the concentration he cradled his head in his hands, massaging his brow with his fingertips. Through the gaps between his fingers, he saw on a piece of paper handwriting he recognised as his own: Nomoto-Byfield Conjecture.

4:am fiction : writing in the slips

2010-11-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

OK, so Brutalism was a stunt. The Book of Fuck was actually The Book of Fuck All Else to Do. But still. Once upon a time (can you see the jokes coming? Can you? Both of them?) we knew where the boundaries were, and we knew who was pushing them (can you now?). Fuck the mainstream said Ben Myers, and Adelle Stripe. And the other one. People oohed and aahed at 3:am and remembered that the klf actually had more to say than the Venga Boys even if everyone else had forgotten it.

In fact, while everyone else was still talking about Amis and McEwan, Barnes and Rushdie and Ishiguro, even though they'd been really quite shit for a good few years; and Zadie Smith was cool even though she went from zero to sellout faster than the Lambo Countach they'd had on their walls as pre-pubescents; and there were whispers about slams and things that had to do with hopping were a little but hip; but actually it was all about the lyric, the sound in your ear the thank-fuck-punk-is-dead return to syncopated sensibilities. While all that was going on there were geeks who got in your face and did stuff that made you nervous you might get glassed or your mum might walk in. But that was kind of the point. And who cares that their influences were Burroughs and Fante and Richard Hell and people old enough to be their dealer's dealer if they'd had a dealer anywhere but their overactive imaginations. Because all we'd really had was three chord shit and Pink Floyd and David Bowie. And all of a sudden we were Where It's At.

We had people who were doing things with language. And saying social stuff. Big social stuff. With odd sentence structures. It was like Brett Easton Ellis and Doug Coupland had had their brains transplanted with a bunch of British nobodies and that's why they seemed so crap all of a sudden. Eventually they got names like The Brutalists. Or The Offbeats. And their CBGB's, their Chelsea Hotel, was 3:am the granddaddy of all literary ezines. And in those early days you sense if they'd had gigs there would have been police raids; and speed-fuelled fights; and taking to the streets to smash the windows of M&S.

And then. Then the boundaries dried up and they found themselves fielding in the slips. They got blogs for The Guardian. and "fuck the mainstream" became Lee Rourke's debut novel The Canal - with an indie publisher (kind of) but a publisher nonetheless. And the granddaddy of anti-culture produced the granddaddy of all sellouts (without even the irony of John Lydon selling butter) and Ben Myerts signed the dotted line with Picador.

And I don't think I've seen a single piece in the papers that stood back and said what the fuck!

WTF is that we have a literary scene - primarily a London literary scene (but the Brutalists were Northern, weren't they? Wasn't that part of the point? - that's as vacucous as Manchester music became in the mid 90s.

Not that this is bad *in itself*. What's bad is how it's being spun (largely by each other). This WAS the *edge*. It's now the flabby middle, but the names are still being spun as edgy. The public is being sold Richard as though it's Book of Fuck. As though IT, the sellout, is at the limits of the written word. Is it any wonder that when they find out it's yet another slightly blank slightly non-linear spin-off of ladlit more via Glamorama than Less Than Zero they think literature is moribund?

And this would be edge (we could call it U3 as much as we could call it 4:am fiction) has attracted around it (hint - edges don't HAVE things around them) a whole world that sells itself as the literary avant garde. But it's not. It's a scenester scam where what matters is playing namedrop bingo with the beautiful people. And that's the problem. People are being sold a pup. I've seen it from the inside, and it's not nice. Not that it's nasty. It's just, well, a shame. Literary Death Match, To Hell With the Lighthouse - high profile events getting the public whipped up about some exciting new things in literature - only to offer them people who may have had something to say (or whose predecessors may have done). Once. But are now part of an inward-looking group who are rather pleased with how cool they are.

And that's where it's harming literature. Today's movers and shakers want to be the first to tell their friends they discovered the new cool. They don't want to stand up and tell their friends they found something no one else likes that they think is the bollox.

Which is no different from the rest of the publishing industry, of course. Fine. But they're selling it like it is, and that's going to be their downfall. The slick, blank, rather shallow Ellis-lite Welsh-liter 4:am fiction they flog is all knob gags and middle class angst and surfaces that are no longer surfaces to expose the shallowness of society, but surfaces that expose the shallowness of the form itself.

There IS a new underground, of course, that has nothing really to do with 3:am (even if some of its practitioners have moved on and stayed fresh) or 4:am or anything else you could name from a clockface. And the irony is, that while cool slowly eats itself, the old industry that's so far behind the scenesters who are behind, might actually be so oblivious they inadvertently pick it up without knowing.

So what is the new underground? Well, it's so underground I probably don't know about it (but unlike the scenester-setters it's my daily quest to look and not be told about it by a style bible). As I've said elsewhere, I think Sean McGahey nailed it in a recent Facebook status update when he talked about those not afraid to stand up and be mocked for being sentimental. As punk gave way to New Romanticism, so I think the age of blank will give way to a new kind of writing that's not ashamed of emotion and adjectives, of scratching the surface and tapping the romance below. It will be unashamed of rather old-fashioned art forms like painting. It will have sweeping palettes, and be somewhat like the Italian horror of the 70s. Modern fairytales, salon culture that's not quite what it seems, burlesque - like the transgressive masterpieces of the 19th century, look here for the really new of the 21st. Look hard and look quick though, because sentimentalism soon becomes dandyism, and the whole thing will have started again before any of it hits the media.

Long Day's Journey Into Print

2010-10-31T07:30:00.000-07:00

It's been a brief but rollercoaster ride since I set up eight cuts gallery press to publish some of the best underground writing on the planet. But this week it all came to fruition when I received my copies of Cody James' The Dead Beat and Oli Johns' Charcoal.

These two amazing books (which you can buy for just 6 pounds by clicking the covers) both seem to deal with the dark downside of life, but both celebrate the glorious uncertainty, the unexpected moments of light in the adventure of being human.

Cody James' The Dead Beat follows the lives of Adam and his neurotic, addicted friends through 1997 San Francisco as theywait for Hale-Bopp comet to come and change lives they are incapable of changing on their own. Oli Johns' Charcoal is the story of an anxierty-ridden man obsessed with the suicide of the model Daul Kim, desperately wrestling with the question if there was anything he could have done to save her, anything he could still do.

If there is a single message to these two tour de forces, it is simply this: there is very little that we can change in life. But that's not the point. The point is that we try, and never give up hope. And that what meaning life has is forged in that struggle and the moments of horror, humour, and humanity it brings.

You can also click

here to buy the ebook of The Dead Beat for $2.99

here to buy the ebook of Charcoal for $2.99

Poetry Competition

2010-10-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

Oxford International Women's Festival Poetry Competition

I am delighted to be involved with this fundraising event for Oxford International Women’s Festival:

Visit www.oxfordwomen.co.uk for more details about the festival, or find them on Facebook.

POEM THEME: Women and Wellbeing.

CLOSING DATE: Friday 5th November.

CATEGORIES: Open Category (all ages can apply), 3 prizes; Under 18s, 1 prize.

PRIZES: Perform your work at a local poetry event; win a creative writing tutorial, books by local authors and other great prizes. NB if you prefer not to perform your work in front of an audience on 17th November, you can nominate someone to do this on your behalf. The best 12 entries, in the opinion of the judges, will be published in an anthology, and will receive a copy. The 4 main prize winners will receive 5 copies each, and will have their work featured here on the eight cuts gallery website. Other featured poets will each get one copy.

ENTRY CRITERIA: The poem must be your own original work, and must be your interpretation of Women and Wellbeing (this can any interpretation as you wish). People may enter as many times as they wish, provided each entry is accompanied by the correct fee. Maximum length: 50 lines. Please do not write your personal details on the poem itself: provide a separate cover letter with your name, age (if entering the Under 18s category), and your preferred contact details. Entries cost £1.

Post your entries to Oxford International Women’s Festival, 25 East Street, Oxford OX2 0AU with payment by cheque or postal order. Cheques payable to Oxford International Women’s Festival, please. Alternatively, you can hand in your poem, cover letter and entry fee at the Albion Beatnik bookshop, Walton Street, Oxford.

Entries will be judged by local writers. Winners will be announced Monday 8th November.

Main event:

Poetry Performances and Prize-giving: Wednesday 17th November, 7pm- 10pm, East Oxford Community Centre. Winners from both categories can perform their poems as part of the event which will showcase poetry based on the theme, Women and Wellbeing.

Special performances from, amongst others,

Joan Barbara Simon, author of Mut@tus

Charlotte Geater

Ellie Tranter of Yak Shack

Christi Warner

+OPEN MIC

TICKETS: £4 per ticket for the event; competition winners get in free.

To sign up as a reader for the main event, please contact Anna Hobson annacreates@yahoo.com (ticket price will still apply, sorry!). Performances should not last more than 10 minutes and must be your own original work. NB please note that due to the under 18s category, all poems performed prior to 9pm must be suitable for this age group. If you require a later slot, please inform Anna.

Judges: Anna Hobson

Dan Holloway, founder, Year Zero Writers; owner, eight cuts gallery press

Ellie Tranter, poet in residence, YakShack

Not an Anthology: Into the Desert

2010-10-03T02:24:00.001-07:00

I have just finished putting together Into the Desert, the first ever collection at my new project, eight cuts gallery. It features work from 19 amazing writers, and I'm incredibly proud of it. But that is, in a way, by the by. Why I'm writing something about it is I think this is a new way of curating and showcasing literature, and I would love to know whether you think it works.

To return to the beginning. The very first point in the eight cuts gallery manifesto states:

■Culture has no boundaries. It has no preconceptions as to what is literature.

So to showcase literature to its best effect, an anthology won't suffice. A website works rather well - I have been able to include not just amazing poetry and prose, but pictures, visual poetry, music, and even a stunning full-length documentary film.

The second thing that holding the exhibition online has been able to do is let me curate it mercilessly. The remit was simply to send in something that responded to the title, Into the Desert. The results were wonderfully diverse, literal, metaphorical, spiritual, and all taking a slightly different slant on what "the desert" might be and what a journey into it, and out of - where? - somewhere else might entail. It would be impossible to do anything with an anthology that wasn't really rather crude.

What I've been able to do online is to create a series of hyperlinks between pages that lead the reader through the exhibition in numerous different ways, placing different works together each time, making them question the meaning of each as they go, as well as giving them pictures of the overall theme that are as shifting as the desert sands themselves. And because the hyperlinks are anchored on words and images, I've been able to play with the audiene's expectations - to give them preconceptions about what comes next - preconceptions I can then either reinforce or upset.

In short, this format has been able to give me two exhibitions - that comprised of the pieces themselves, and that made up of the relations between them. Which, I think, is what good curation should always do. BUT, and here is the second question, does that kind oif curation have a place in literature?

There will also be a tie-in live show at Oxford's O3 gallery featuring readings, music and film, on November 18th. And I hope there will be both other live shows, and dedicated screenings of Cody James' full-length film, a documentary about the Columbine students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that forms a segment of the exhibition (along with Oli Johns' The Things They Let Into the Classroom and Sarah E Melville's French Lesson) that could be called something like "school is hell".

The View From the Shoe: The Indie Handbook

2010-09-13T01:23:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I did one of these, and they are always incredible fun. It's a privilege to welcome to the shoedome Eric Robertson, the guy behind the fabulous The Indie Handbook. Straight over to Eric:

The Indie Handbook started as a joke—a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of commercialised American hipster culture. What I never expected was that people would take it seriously. I aim to provide much-needed press to unsigned and underexposed artists, trying to put as much effort into quality and style of writing as the artists I review put into their songs. I've been told this is stupid since no one wants to pay attention to anyone who sincerely tries, but in my mind, it's the least I can do—a sign of respect for the artists who pour so much of themselves into their work. My ultimate (and most likely unachievable) goal is to write beautiful criticism.

I operate a second blog, The Indie Handbook Annex , where I indulge my love for essay-writing in the myriad other topics that fascinate me—anything from music to linguistics to the poetics of advertising. I am also in the process of working out the logistics of and funding to launch a magazine dedicated to the DIY aesthetic.

Thank you so much for your time. So, Louboutin or Converse?
Well, I'm wearing Converse at the moment, so I suppose I've already made my choice. Though, they're women's Cons, for whatever it's worth.

What do you do?
I sit in the corners of coffee shops pulling odd faces whilst rifling through a unsettlingly extensive mental cache of T.S. Eliot extracts applying Jungian psychoanalysis to 17th century Scottish demonology through a filter of pre-Enlightenment pop culture references, Gilmore Girls quotations, particle physics, and Kierkegaard in search of a new metaphor to describe whatever happens to be pouring through my tartan earbuds. (I also drive around with my windows down, playing Tigermilk or If You're Feeling Sinister—at a slightly-louder-than-normal volume—in hopes that I will pull up beside a cute girl who'll then look at me and say “Oh, I love Belle & Sebastian!” etc., etc.)

Why is there no one in the world who does it quite like you?
I am a hyper-literate, nerdy, INFP loser fanboy with years of formal training, a dead-end job, an inferiority complex, and absolutely no social life. No, seriously, I can afford to spend 20-25 hours a week working on the blog because my only other option is to sit at home watching NCIS reruns. (Did I mention my charming, disarming, self-deprecating sense of humour?)

What do you really, really love about it?
More than anything, I love all the people involved with it. I know it sounds cheesy, but I really just love all aspects of the human condition from the artists and publicists who began as feature stories and became good friends to the writers and bloggers who have become collaborators. I am even weirdly enamored of the handful of people who hate me for being insufficiently cynical and not mean enough. For me, I suppose, it's always and only ever been about art and people. Though, I am also quite fond of the way new music just sort of materialises in my mailbox and inbox.

A bit more time in the day, or a bit more money in the bank?
Unless by “a bit more money”, you mean at least six figures, I would opt for a bit more time. Four hours would be enough, I think. I will gladly adopt this scheme (http://xkcd.com/320/), if I can convince everyone else to allow me to do so. I'd just love to not be angry at the prospect of waking up in the morning.

Imagine you “make it”. You wake up, and imagine the day ahead. Tell us about breakfast.
Another four or five hours of sleep, probably. Or waffles.

What’s your Jimmy Choo? And what’s just cobblers?
Jimmy Choo: Chet Baker singing “Born to be Blue”, one of the original 1000 copies of Belle & Sebastian's Tigermilk, a 1584 copy of Sir Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft, a date with Debo Mitford circa 1938. Just cobblers: Dave Matthews, bands with 1000-word press releases, Paste Magazine.

Tell us about the last time a fan made you feel 100 feet tall.
I literally have almost no immediate contact with anyone who reads the blog. If it weren't for the Wordpress stats page, I wouldn't even know I had fans. I suppose a lot of it is wrapped up in the sort of people who are fans—musicians and writers and radio people. I find it incredibly flattering to know that they (at least occasionally) are reading what I have to say. I was absolutely over the moon when, after an interview, Emilie Simon (my all-time musical idol, number one celebrity crush, and genius behind Végétal which I chose as Album of the Decade) asked me what Brooklyn bands (where she currently lives) I thought she would like. More recently, an artist I wrote about well over a year ago said she continues to read the blog not because she always likes the recommendations, but because she loves the writing.

Independent and poor, or under contract and rich?
Independent. Marry rich.

Do you remember that bit on Play Away where Brian Cant stood behind people and did the actions whilst they spoke? If you could choose anyone to stand behind you and do the actions to your sales pitch, who would it be and why?
Laura Bettinson, a.k.a. Dimbleby & Capper because: A) She's better looking than I and therefore more marketable. B) Gaffer tape.

Frocks or socks?
Well, there was that one time in my History of Fashion class at uni when my friend Dan and I were led to believe we might have the opportunity to try on a corset. When the day came, the amateur costume shop girls opted to wear them themselves—in an entirely historically inaccurate manner, I might add. So disappointing. We had quite been looking forward to that.

Games Perverts Play

2010-08-31T12:26:00.000-07:00

It's my great great privilege to have a piece included in a wonderful new project, put together by the inspirational Elly, aka Quiet Riot Girl.

My piece, Meat, is here. It is a double privilege for it to be illustrated by the amazing Penny Goring

This is what Elly has to say:

http://gamespervertsplay.wordpress.com/

Games Perverts Play : stories and essays from the sidelines of pornography...

Games Perverts Play is a new and unique collaborative writing project, edited by Quiet Riot Girl http://www.quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/

Games Perverts Play uses pornography and essays to explore the less examined sides of our libidos, and to dissect our sexualities. Gender, power, pain and violence are all present in the background when we play. This project brings them to the fore, and enables us to look afresh at what it is we are doing when we write about sex, when we play sex games, and when sex gets serious.

First edition September 2010: OBJECTIFIED

We are told every day that women in particular are objectified in our culture, particularly by pornography. The word is supposed to have negative connotations.

But what happens when a bunch of writers take that word, and roll it round their tongues. What emerges from their pens? Their cunts and their dicks?

Here, writers Dan holloway, Marc Nash, Penny Goring, Mark Simpson, M de Winter, Arjun Basu and the editor, Quiet Riot Girl have objectified ourselves for your pleasure, and maybe your discomfort too.

We hope you enjoy the experience.

Failed Flights of Transcendence

2010-08-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

August 26

6-8pm, Art Jericho, 6 King Street, Oxford

off Walton St, behind Jude the Obscure

“Failed Flights of Transcendence” is how 2010 Booker-Prize nominated author Tom McCarthy described the theme of his last book, Men in Space, and perectly encapsulates the relation between David Dixon’s exhibition and the work of tonight’s writers. Constantly building, constantly striving, constantly looking to break out. Of preconceptions; of limitations; of existing forms; of outdated ideas. Constantly trying; constantly nearly… making it; constantly trying harder. A night of words, music, and art to make you think, hope, despair, laugh, and ultimately shout for joy at the marvellous absurdity of life.
Entry just £3, all of which goes to the excellent cause of Launch Collaborative, the innovative arts collective putting on the event. This can be fully redeemed against copies of (life:)razorblades included, which you can buy for the silly price of £2 (usually £5) from the Albion Beatnik stall that will be with us all night

Year Zero Writers is an international collective of independent writers from 8 countries working in different forms and different fields, united by the desire to bring their work direct to readers, free from all commercial consideration. Acclaimed by sources as diverse as Nylon Mag and former head of Harper Collins, Jane Friedman, Year Zero Writers features new writing on its website most days, and regularly hosts events at venues ranging from Rough Trade East in Brick Lane toOxford’s OVADA Gallery, as well as being regulars at The Albion Beatnik Bookstore.

eight cuts gallery is a space that exists to blur the boundaries between literature and other art forms and to champion the awkward, the difficult, and the brilliant. it is currently seeking submissions for its inaugural show “into the desert” (http://eightcuts.wordpress.com/eight-cuts-gallery/into-the-desert/), and nominations for the chris al-aswad prize for outstanding contribution to breaking down barriers in the arts (http://eightcuts.wordpress.com/eight-cuts-prize/). eight cuts gallery press will release its first novels in November (http://eightcuts.wordpress.com/collaborate/coming-in-2010/)

Penny Goring (http://www.pennygoring.wordpress.com/)
Writer and artist Penny Goring is a voice like no other, at once Beat-inspired and transcendant, punkish and rooted. Her work will feature at the Independents Liverpool Biennial http://www.independentsbiennial.org/2010events/1259-chaosmos2010

Dan Holloway (http://danholloway.wordpress.com/)
Author of the novel Songs from the Other Side if the Wall and the collection of short stories and poems (life:) razorblades included, Dan is the curator of eight cuts gallery. He writes gentle literary fiction about modern Europe, urban poetry, and somewhat bizarre reviews of an eclectic range of music.

Marc Nash (http://sulcicollective.blogspot.com/)
Marc Nash writes experimental fiction that wrings the meaning from words’ necks. His fascination with typesetting, and the physical appearance of words makes his writing look like nothing you’ve ever seen. And that goes of his live performances too. Marc is the author of novel A, B & E.

I Just Started a Publishing House

2010-08-18T07:55:00.000-07:00

Some of you know this from snippets that've been leaking out, but now I'm coming out and clean and saying it how it is. A lot of people have told me for some time I should. Now, finally, I've worked out the way I want to do it, and I have. And I have the first two books coming out in November.

As you might expect, eight cuts gallery press is not like other publishing houses. To start with, we won't make a penny's profit from your book.

As you'd expect for part of my new project eight cuts gallery, the press will focus on a very narrow niche of books, within the contemporary urban fiction area if you had to put a genre to it. I would love to receive submissions, but like I say, this isn't a regular press. I'm only interested in submissions from writers who buy into what I'm doing (metaphorically, it's not a vanity press).

Which is what, exactly?

Well, first and foremost, I want to whip up a storm about the very best stuff that's out there, the kind of stuff I want to read, the kind of stuff that for one reason or another may find it hard to find a home in the mainstream. Our first two offerings, for example, are around 25-30,000 words. I'll also be bringing out poetry and short story combos. I also want to give the very best self-published works a chance to storm the major literary prizes that currently will not accept self-published novels.

eight cuts gallery press is an integral part of the overall eight cuts gallery project, designed to bring great literature to the public's attention regardless the format, the style, the commerciality; regardless anything save the fact it's great literature.

So what are we about?

we will

release an eight cuts gallery press print on demand paperback version of your book, without an ISBN, although you may attach an ISBN to other formats of your book

enter the eight cuts gallery press edition of your book for major literary prizes, in consultation with you

allow you to produce any additional versions you wish in any formats, and provide formatting and editing for those other versions, as well as putting you in touch with top producers in alternative formats

publicise and sell your book in all formats

take no money from sales of the eight cuts gallery press edition of your book (the exception being where your book is short or longlisted for a major literary award, in which case we will take a royalty from sales – yes, you read that the right way round – until the marketing fee the prize requires us to hand over is recouped)

mention your book in all publicity, and ensure that your book appears on the click through page of any online articles by or about us

sell your book online and in selected outlets, and at all events

never associate you with defamatory material, but we may cause a brouhaha

link to your primary website from our homepage

let you retain all rights, whilst being happy to help negotiate the sale of those rights on your behalf should you wish, without taking a commission

give all our writers an equal share of profits from eight cuts gallery press (80% split equally) and eight cuts gallery (20% split equally, with 20% to eight cuts gallery and 60% to participating artists)

let you set the price for your work

target sales, publicity, appearance and alternative format possibilities for you
provide full monthly statements of your sales, and forward all monies to you, by Paypal, on a monthly basis

send out review copies of the eight cuts gallery press edition in consultation with you

we’d like you to

be available for media interviews within reason

be prepared to have a photo and press sheet drawn up for publicity

link to us from your website and mention us in interviews where possible and appropriate

agree to your book and name being used in publicity material for eight cuts gallery events

agree to the title and cover of your book appearing on eight cuts gallery press merchandise

agree to be open to suggestions of possible alternative formats for your book

let us quote up to 200 words from your work for publicity purposes

let us purchase other formats of your work at wholesale price in order to send them for review, to display them at fairs, and to sell at our events at a price to be agreed with you (and we’d like to take 20% of the profits on non eight cuts gallery press editions)

Here's a peek at those first two books. Click the title to read the opening chapter.

The Dead Beat by Cody James (whom you may know as Daisy Anne Gree)

It’s 1997, and the comet of the century is due some time about now, on its 3000 year roundtrip.

“Man, fucking Emeryville,” Lincoln said, pausing in his stride to hock phlegm onto the sidewalk.”
And so, for want of anything better to do, Adam and his meth addict friends end up in San Francisco, wondering where their place in the addict hierarchy might be, why no one has written a good book in over a decade, and what the fuck the comet might mean, when nothing on earth means anything.

And in a zip of light and a snort of meth the comet is gone, taking with it this last snapshot of earth for 3000 years, leaving Adam to wonder if it meant anything at all, or whether it was maybe just a bit cool that the sky looked different. Just for once. For the last time in his life.

Charcoal by Oli Johns

“Apparently there are three popular ways to kill yourself in Hong Kong.
Throw yourself off a building.

Hang yourself.

Burn charcoal in a sealed room.”

Oli can’t stop reading Deleuze, only it doesn’t seem to make any sense. And he can’t stop thinking about suicide. And Camus. And that sort of makes sense. But only sort of. And then he meets a seventeen year-old girl on the internet and they meet regularly for mindless sex. Only it’s not enough to stop the anxiety. And the obsession with suicide, although he knows he’ll never kill himself. And then there was that Korean model, the one who killed herself in Paris. And that writer, the one he met online. The one who said she’d tried to kill herself three times. The one who wrote that book…

Sabina's Wedding Night

2010-08-15T00:26:00.000-07:00

Back in April, I wrote about the amazing writer and filmmaker Sabina England's project Wedding Night. Sabina was looking to raise money to film the 15-minute debut short. She raised the money she needed, and the film was cast and shot, and those of us following Sabina's progress have been having a great time keeping up with it on Facebook. Asbina is now looking for funding to work with some of the best post-production people in the business, and first and foremost for entry fees to festivals.

I almost never get involved in fundraising, but for Sabina I'd make an exception to pretty much every rule - she's one of the most talented people I've ever met, passionate, single-minded, unique, and brilliant. And I have a vested interest in this one, as I'm hoping to arrange some special screenings in Oxford and London.

As before, Sabina has made a video to go with her appeal, which includes on set footage from the shoot and is - as always with her brilliant Velma Sabina channel - worth watching in and of itself.
Do click on the link below, watch the video, offer any support you can - and even if you can't support financially, which I know most of my readers can't, spread the word on.

Thank you

Here's the link!! Click here!

The Chris Al-Aswad Prize

2010-08-13T01:02:00.000-07:00

Some of you will know that I have recently started a new venture. More of that in the next week or so. More important things for today:

it is an honour to announce, as one of the very first things I do with that venture, the inaugural

chris al-aswad prize for outstanding contribution to breaking down barriers in the arts

for the person, organisation, website, community, whatever that has done most to promote brilliance, diversity, and the breaking down of barriers in literature over the preceding twelve months. it is a genuine honour to be able to award this prize in the name of chris al-aswad, one of the most brilliant, farsighted, innovative, generous, and supportive people in the arts. chris, the genius behind escape into life, one of the most wonderful places in cyberspace, died in july 2010 at the age of just 31. his contribution and spirit will be sorely missed, and are irreplaceable. it is a privilege to be able to do something that will in some way perpetuate his name and his values.
the award is intended to recognise outstanding people striving to break down barriers, and to provide practical assistance to its recipients in furthering their work. to that end, it will not be awarded by demonstrable quantitative achievements, or to a job fully done.

we are really keen to hear any and all recommendations – e-mail eightcutsgallery@googlemail.com by september 15

full details here

and the really important bit for you

to make the prize as helpful as possible, i want to make the actual prize both useful and symbolic of what chris believed in so much, the values i completely share with him. so i want as many people in the arts or media in any capacity to think about what they could offer the recipient. something very small, the equivalent of an hour of your time.

if you're in the media, it might be a column on the recipient
if you're onilne it might be giving over a guest post
if you have a venue it might be a brief show
if you have a shop, it might be a prominent place on your shelves for a period

put together, these little pieces can make a huge contribution to the recipient's work and, as a result, to breaking down barriers in the arts in general. offers gladly taken in the comments here as well as at the above e-mail address.

of course, the first thing everyone here can do is blog about it, and send people over to escapeintolife.com

Tight

2010-08-11T12:44:00.000-07:00

Robert James Russell (aka @robhollywood ) is an inspiring writer, and the newest member of Year Zero Writers. He has just finished taking in the submissions for a fascinating project, unambiguously titled "Sex Scene Anthology". Contributors had to submit a sex scene, disconnected from any context, and preferably not lifted from a longer work, but compiled specifically for this anthology. What's so intriguing is how difficult it is to decontextualise in this way (which, in turn, casts some fascinating light on the (dis)integration of sex in human life), so many of us have ended up creating more of a short story than a scen. Me included, I'm afraid. This is it.

Decided content warning (and not just for erotic content - severely transgressive material)!!!

Her skin’s so tight, I think as she leans on the sideboard with a juice. Stretched on her like a canvas.

I’d paint her with my cum.

I thought the same the first time she showed up in that half shirt, slapped The Birth of Tragedy on the table and said, “So, for Nietzsche, you’re the man.”

The man. The fucking ubermensch all uber those tight fucking tits.

“I guess,” I said, and our Wednesday night ritual began. Tammy got Nietzsche 101. Sarah got a babysitter and the comfort of some father time for Alice while she yogalatesed away her pregnancy fat. And I. I got to score the taut contours of Tammy’s skin on my cortex, storing it away till she left and I sat, still stiff, and closed my eyes, and imagined it on my fingers. On my cock.

We talked about the ubermensch and Tammy said the idea of a superMAN is just ridiculous, everyone knows a man’s will is in his willy and I thought she’s got a point but damn those tits are so fucking pert.

We talked aesthetics and the pursuit of pleasure and by our fifth session we got to wine, and how to blend the senses and how to separate the senses, and I said let me show you, and got out a bottle of ’47 Cheval Blanc and rested it in the cradle of my corkscrew, slowly cranked the angle, and lowered the screw into place, cutting with delicacy and precision to disturb nothing, and let the wine rest and brought her two glasses, and made her drink the first with her eyes closed and said, describe the difference between these different wines.

Two weeks later she caught my glance and she looked straight back and now she says wait here, and I wait and I can feel my body going into contractions each one pushing my cock harder against the cloth and the door opens and she says, watch, and I start to touch myself and she says no, later, separation of the senses, and walks across the room, my eyes following the path of her tits tight beneath her top, and she removes my clothes one by one, and stands and takes off her stockings and ties one around each of my arms, holding me cruciform to the sofa.

She repeats, watch, and I watch her fingers, and I watch her clothes, and I watch her skin, and when she removes the final pieces of lace the contractions through my body are so strong they lift my spine right off the sofa, and I watch the tips of her fingers and the deft circles she makes, and only one finger from the other hand sliding in and my whole body echoes the thought, how fucking tight, and when her body shakes in orgasm there’s not a sound and she leaves a finger, slowly swirling on herself and says, OK, separation of senses, and stands and picks up my shirt and twists it into a rope and walks over there’s one last sight of her tits closing in on my face and I open my mouth, and she leans over and I go blind and feel the pressure on my skull, and then something smooth, and firm, and tight.

See, she says, laughing because see is the one thing I don’t do but fuck I can feel it, and I strain upwards.

One more moment, she says, and there’s nothing, and I wonder if I hear the sound of her footsteps but I can’t be sure and my mouth’s open and my body’s spasming, again and again, and finally, I hear her say, OK, and there are her tits again, circling on my face, a nipple stopping and lingering against my outstretched tongue, and she repeats, OK, and says, now

and lowers her cunt onto me and it’s so fucking tight I explode before she’s fully down, and this time I hear her scream as well, and she sits there, massaging me gently with her cunt till the last ripple has subsided.

There, she says, the pursuit of pleasure, then there’s only the sound of our breathing and she raises herself off me, and there’s silence, and maybe the sound of cloth, and slowly the thought creeps in like a toothache.

What have I done.

As if she reads my mind she says “It’s OK, no one will ever know I was here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” she says calmly, and I feel her untie my hands.

“Sarah,” I say.

“I know, she’ll be back any minute.”

I pull my shirt from my face and she’s in the doorway and she smiles, and slowly pulls up her skirt and I see her cunt glistening at me. “Always remember tonight,” she says, holding it there and I set my brain to burn the image in my hard drive, and she flattens her skirt down and smiles again, and I look around and

Oh Jesus fuck.

Alice, I think, seeing the swaddling on the floor, and her small, pale feet. “You let Alice see that?” I say, and she’s motionless.

And then I see the wine cradle, the metal of the screw stained dark. “You’ve been drinking my goddamn wine?”

Guilt. And anger.

I look again. Not just liquid. Deep, coagulated drops, and something. Not cork. Something.

Stickier. Messier.

Alice. Motionless. Alice’s head peeking out from the cloth. A dark, coagulated stain. Something sticky seeping from the top of Alice’s head.

The metal of the wine screw dark.

My balls still aching.

“Like I told you,” says Tammy from the door, “no one will ever know I was ever here.”

The Honesty of Bodies

2010-07-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

My WIP has been a troublesome, tricksy beast. Originally going by the title A Life Drawn Freehand, it started as a tale of a grieving 50-something mother comng to terms with her grief by pursuing the career she put on hold in her 20s. I have struggled and struggled with the voice but I finaly think I have it, in the context of a very different story, but one with the same heart, the relationship of mutual discovery between an older woman and younger man.

This is the new chapter one. The book is now called The Honesty of Bodies, from a line in the beautiful poem of Kirsty Logan's, Ways of Making Love.

It should probably come with a content warning - but you probably all know that by now :)

--

“It’s not like I’m not hungry,” she says. “I just can’t eat. It’s like eating is a memory my body knows it has but can’t ever reach.”

A distant memory, I think, looking at her. She has so little energy her head’s just lolling back in the pillow and she can’t even look at me. Not that it matters, I guess. I shift in front of the sun coming in the window and her eyes are unresponsive. She’s shutting down.

“And I don’t even know if I want to remember. You know?”

“Yeah.”

“No you don’t.”

“I guess not.”

“I keep trying to figure it out.” Her speech is slow now, and she’s not looking at me and she’s not looking at the ceiling and she’s not looking anywhere else, so I find it hard to place the words at all. “This thing. This whatever it is that made me forget how to eat. Where did it come from?”

“Who knows,” I say, but the question’s not for me.

“I just don’t know. Am I killing myself? Or is someone, some thing doing this to me? Or did I just get sick?”

Her breathing’s as loud as her words by now. I look at her chest to see the rise and fall but there’s nothing there.

Eventually she says, “Kiss me.”

I bend over and press my lips to hers, leave them there a second, and pull away, half expecting the room to be silent when I do.

“That was nice,” she says. “I always thought it would be.” She runs the tip of her tongue around her mouth and I think I see a movement in her throat.

“You thought about us kissing?”

But she’s already somewhere else.

Lifting her into the chair is so easy, even though I haven’t worked out in months. I fix the drip like I was shown, and wheel her down the ward.

“Just getting some air,” I say to a nurse, who smiles back at us.

I put her in the front of the car, leaving the drip and the chair, pop a couple of warfarin, and take her back to mine. She’s still alive when I place her in the bath, because it’s been an hour now and she feels as warm as the water I’ve run for her. I wash the smell of hospital from her skin, dry her down, and smooth oil on her and in her, leaving it slick on the surface of her sores.

The silk falls over her and she’s so slippery I make sure I have a good hold of her as I carry her downstairs, and back into the car.

We’re driving for half an hour and I haven’t heard anything from her since she left her bed. I don’t carry her far from the car. The trees are tight and the summer growth is thick.

The silk slides off her as easily as it slid on, and in the sun, Bella’s skin, her whole body, is almost transparent. And cool, even in the heat; my hands warm the oil and its scent merges with that of the leaves. The light tricks me and for a moment I think she’s becoming solid, like she’s drawing the sap into her.

I remove my clothes slowly, and lie on top of her, and even when I come the only sound is the grass underneath us.

I lie beside her, reach out, feel the cloth, and take out the blade. I slide it through the skin on each of her arms, leaving lines of red that seem to rise and then hover, the fluid as still as the summer day.

I draw the same lines on my own arms and watch as the warfarin pushes my blood.

I take Bella’s hand and lay my head on the forest floor, and I wonder if the scent of blood will draw foxes or badgers before the insects come, or maybe someone will follow their dog through the undergrowth, or maybe a gamekeeper tracking his gundog after a kill, or maybe Julie.

Maybe Julie.

Authors on Show

2010-07-28T04:43:00.000-07:00

Lorraine Holloway-White first came to my attention on Harper Collins' site Authonomy for the very silly but very obvious reason that we share a surname (you can read more cool stuff about Lorraine and her really rather good writing at the end of the interview). I soon realised how much more there is to a person than a name, and it was no surprise when, earlier this year, she announced she was setting up the website Authors on Show, a showcase for talented writers seeking representation (there's also a super Facebook Group and a great blog that's constantly full of informative, fresh material). Utterly unpaid, and by sheer force of will, hard work, generosity, and passion for her writers, Lorraine has attracted a super team around her on the website who work tirelessly to expose their writers to the people that matter, and shine teh spotlight each month on a few of their finest.

As I've just started my own press, the site is now even more of interest to me, and I was delighted to speak to her about the site and how it can benefit writers, agents, and publishers. Before you take a closer look at what Lorraine has to say, why not go and look at this month's featured writers on the site:
Margaret Callow
SueAnn Jackson Land
Craig Saunders

1. How and why did Authors on Show come about?
My agents said I needed to be seen and get my name and books known. It made me think about how other authors had to do the same and I thought we could help each other with that by me promoting their book, them promoting mine. The snowball effect if you like.
That isn’t what happened though is it? I don’t think this is what my agents had in mind. My book is rather lost on the way somewhere in all this, but I love what we’re doing for others.

2. What do you offer authors that other sites don't?
Well for one, our authors can’t dump their books and walk away. We expect more off them than that. We offer a quiet, friendly, calm place to visit where everyone supports, promotes and encourages each other.
There is often voting, which readers can take part in
We hope to get agent interest for our authors and have already been working on that for one author in particular.
We are mailing all agents and publishers informing them about the site and hope the fact we have so few books to look at each month means they can spare the time to look at them. The big sites have so many there, that it takes forever going through it all.
By keeping it select, there is more chance someone will be ‘spotted’
We promise to promote those we showcase as much as we can and wherever we can in order that they may be seen further afield. We hope those showcased at any one time will do the same for each other as well. That way, word spreads and more people see them.
We offer editorial advice, competitions, interviews from authors, publishers and agents, help and advice where able and there is more planned for the future.

3. As a writer, you must have an elevator pitch for your book. So what's the elevator pitch for the site?
Authors on Show is THE site for all agents and publishers to find their next big best sellers. Small enough to look through quickly, but big enough to make a huge impact in the literary world. Come to Authors on Show if you want quality not quantity

4. You describe the site as a showcase. To whom are you showcasing, and how do you go about reaching them?
We are showcasing to people around the world, fellow authors, readers and more important agents and publishers. As I already said, we are contacting agents and publishers to ask them to visit and take a look from time to time. We know this has already been done by some, but we want to make it THE place for them to come first when looking for new talent.

5. Could you say a little about the website networking principle you operate? How do you get around the usual problem sites have of being by writers and read mainly by writers?
Mainly because, we aren’t a site where anyone can upload their books and then walk away hoping someone will read it. It is by submission and selection process only and judging is very strict and rigorous.
Also one of the conditions of being showcased, is that our authors use their social networking sites to help promote us as well. Instead of just other authors looking, we reach their friends, family and work colleagues. In other words, people who buy and read books. Even authors do that you know. They in turn tell others and so it goes on. Again, the snowball effect. On our FaceBook page I know there are quite a few following Authors on Show who aren’t authors themselves but are readers. Also we have agents and publishers following us, which is rather good

6. What is the unifying factor for the work on your site? Are there any kinds of book or material that you wouldn't have? And is there a kind of book you're looking for?
We accept all genres and hope to have a good mix each month. We wouldn’t show outright pornographic material or needless violence, but are willing to look at all submissions with an open mind.
Like any agent and publisher, we are looking for books where the quality of writing stands out from all others, but we especially support authors who promote and help themselves. Books we are likely to turn down would be from authors who expect to dump their book, walk away and expect others to do their work for them. That is something Authors on Show won’t accept or tolerate.
Show us you’re serious about yourself and us and we’ll be serious about promoting you.

7. How do you ensure that all your authors get coverage whilst maintaining quality levels to keep people looking?
By keeping the numbers down of those we showcase it is easier to be more selective. Each month we aim to showcase six authors and they are chosen by the three main team members of AOS. We each like different genres, which helps tremendously when it comes to reading. One thing we all agree on though is to only show the books that are well written, edited properly and have an author willing to work hard to achieve success.

8. You would be most happy in one year if...
On the personal side good health is the most important thing to me as mine has been pretty bad for the last 2 years and I’m just coming out of it all. On the writing side, to see my book accepted for publication.
Professionally, I (and the team) would be thrilled beyond belief to have one or two of our authors from Authors on Show get representation or a publishing deal from having been on our site. That would be incredible. Finding a way of getting paid for all our hard work on the site would be nice too.

9. How do you think the publishing world is changing, and how do you see what AOS offers fitting into the new landscape?
Things are changing a lot in the publishing world, but I firmly believe books with pages will never stop being very popular. That said, I think some of the ways forward now are excellent and we, at AOS, will be offering advice and having people from all aspects do articles and give interviews where they can advise our authors on all aspects of publishing..
We are even looking at maybe acting as literary agents ourselves at some point and maybe arranging publication in conjunction with others, such as yourself, for those who want it.

10. Can, and if so how, do people approach you to join?
There is no membership or signing up necessary to be a member of AOS. All you need to do is follow us on Facebook, Twitter, our blog or Authors On Show.com and promote us wherever possible. If anyone wants to be showcased, there are Q&A’s on the main site, which talk about submissions, how to contact any of us and what is required.

11. As a new publisher, how would you suggest I go about using your site to find great writing?
We would be happy to see you there and hope you will be from time to time. If there were specific genres you were looking for, we would be willing to mail you when those were due to be showcased. Likewise, if a publisher/agent contacted us asking if there was anything in particular we thought truly stood out in a field they were looking for, we would be happy to keep an eye out for them and notify them when we found something we thought fitted the bill (as we have already done).

--

Lorraine Holloway-White is an author of two books and is presently working on her third. Becoming well known throughout the world for her mediumistic photographic readings and absent healing, she is also the Founder and main Team Leader of Authors on Show, a writing site showcasing authors from around the world. In only two months, the site is already very popular and is being viewed in over 60 countries. That number is growing steadily each day.

Within a couple of months of placing her first book, A Guide’s Guide to Mediumship and Healing on a well known writing site, she secured a Literary Agent. Her book is presently with a well known publishing house under consideration.

Her third book, and editing of her second, is presently on hold as she works full time now promoting others on Authors On Show. She is joined by permanent team members and fellow authors, Nicole Scheller (editor) and L Anne Carrington (blog and entertainment news). As well as these permanent members, there are also AOS helpers and friends, Robert Dean (Bobby’s Blog), Louise Wise (Interviews) and Sessha Batto (Ongoing Flash Fiction Competition).

It says something about Authors on Show, that these people give their time free of charge and willingly work so hard in order to help promote their peers. It is the combination of this team, which makes Authors on Show such a success. Lorraine hopes that they too in time will achieve success with their own books and hopes by working on the site, it helps their own exposure.

Work by the Team Members can be seen on the AOS Blog

More can be seen about Lorraine and her books on her private blog

Valve Works

2010-07-27T00:22:00.000-07:00

I recently had the pleasure of reviewing Rob Sherman's Valve Works, a collection of illustrated poems published online for free by the really rather excellent Philistine Press. There were one or two things I didn't quite "get" on first reading, so it was a pleasure that Rob was prepared to take the time to talk to me about Valve Works. The illustrations are by the fantastic Sarah Ogilvie.

Rob will next be working on a few plays, including one of King Arthur's bowel movements. He is moving back to London to continue writing music and producing as much material as possible. These are a few of the ways he can be found online.
Twitter - http://twitter.com/robshermanmusic
Tumblr - http://bonfiredog.tumblr.com/
myspace - www.myspace.com/robshermanmusic

1. Why did you choose Philistine Press?
Philistine Press was recommended to me by one of those circular emails that come around and you pay very little attention to; however, I had been reading a lot about Creative Commons, Fair Use Licenses, censorship and ownership in relation to the internet. It was something I was passionate about. And Philistine seems to be somewhere that artists can produce and publish their work without compromise, for the joy of it, for the exposure; when money is removed from the equation it is quite liberating. Obviously money would be lovely, but poetry, as a singular product, makes very little money nowadays anyway. Philistine seemed to share my philosophy, and I was happy to work with them.

2. Can you tell me about the introduction, and how it fits with the rest of the collection? That's something that didn't quite click. It felt very contemporary, yet the collection feels like it has a very 18/19th century sensibility. On the other hand if the electricity reference were tied in to Frankenstein, that would make perfect sense... (um, and what do you say to people who say steampunk to you?)
The introduction, I will admit, is a bit of a strange thing; on its own, it is entitled "A Theory", because that is really all it is; a theory of behavioural constructs and human biology, albeit put much less professionally than that! I can understand the feel of different centuries at work; I guess that the introduction is fulfilling the role of an introduction like in any other form of media. It is the voice of the author, or the editor, in a much different voice than the poems, espousing the philosophy of it all. The body for me is terrifying and wonderful, and its baser elements are not to be ignored; the electricity compels us mentally and physically, to both reproduce and create. I suppose the metaphor was pleasing, rather than a concious choice. I would not go as far to say that it is steampunk, though I am a huge fan of the genre and it certainly informs my work.

3. The chimpanzee - Basement Jaxx?
Haha! Do you mean the drawing or the poem? It didn't come into my head; perhaps it came from Sarah's (the illustrator's) imagination. It does look similar though, doesn't it? Perhaps not as grumpy; I think he's quite cheery, with his gargantuan plug socket.

4. How did the illustration process work - did you simply hand over the collection, and take what you got back, or was there toing and froing?
Well, Sarah is my girlfriend, so it is a close working relationship to say the least! The poems were written a long time before the drawings were produced, and I was really starting to see what she was capable of as an artist. I asked her to do them, and we both benefitted, as they were part of the portfolio that got her a place at Camberwell art school. But yes, I pretty much left her to it, to let her put a mark on it herself. Her drawings are quite nightmarish, quite warped in a beautiful way, and I thought it suited the whole aesthetic of the piece. I also paid her back with fancy meals and flowers, so I think business was done properly!

5. Tell me a bit about the fascination with medical textbooks
I am a huge fan of technical language in poetry; one of my tutors, Andy Brown, is an ecologist and a poet, and the beautifully onomatopoeic technicalities of the various disciplines of science work so well; they should not just be kept for dry lab reports. Though it sounds clichéd, the human body is a fascinating subject for poetry, and the body of knowledge mankind has in relation to it can only aid creativity.

6. The actual poems felt at times as though they were almost like Keatsian odes. Is that fair?
I am not that knowledgeable on Keats, so I will just nod my head slowly... though I know what you mean. There is a grandeur to it, especially in "Hypothalamus"; I particularly enjoyed it there as the hypothalamus is such a vital yet obscure part of human anatomy; it has a hand in almost every bodily process, and yet is hidden under the brain, about the size of a pea. Such a poetic opportunity couldn't go to waste!

7. I see you are also a musician. Could you explain a bit about your approach to combining different arts in your work? Do you see boundaries between arts that you are blurring, or do you see it all as essentially aspects of the same?
To be honest, there is no method to it. Most artforms work very well together, drawing from similar themes, tropes, traditions and ideas. There are definitely boundaries; without the boundaries there would just be a huge mess of unprofessional, amorphous ideas; wonderful, raw stuff, but with no discipline they are of little use or importance. Music is music, and should be its own discipline, as well as writing, or theatre; but when they encroach on each other, whether slightly or massively, interesting things happening. They are aspects of experience, but it is important to me, that they remain distinct, and any blurring remains just that.

Not for (self/vanity/e/un)published writers

2010-07-23T00:54:00.000-07:00

I've just started a small press. All very exciting and more anon but this post isn't about publicising that. Rather I wanted to focus on the primary reason for setting up eight cuts gallery press. I want a pplatform for creating some hoopla about the amazing writingout there that will never be a sure fire enough mass seller to land a mainstream deal without being substantially rewritten. And part of that platform creation is entering amazing books for top literary prizes.

That's a bit extreme, isn't it? Setting up a whole press so books can be entered for prizes? Afetr all, the Booker Prize, for example, is open to the best novel published in the UK, so people can just send their own in?

Well, no. It's awarded to "It will be awarded to the author of the best, eligible full-length novel." And in taht sentence is a whole world of things the literary world frankly needs to get its act together about.

Most writers will have entered a competition at some point, and will know that, in general, they are for previously unpublished work. The Bridport Prize, the acme fo the short story and poetry comp world, defines entries "must never have been published, self-published, published on any website or public online forum, broadcast nor winning or placed in any other competition." OK, no one wants recycled stuff wandering off with top prizes (er, I guess, though as an author who regularly posts my work online and on critiquing sites I find the rule perplexing).

Fine, so if we've put our stuff out there at all, we're published. We no longer have first rights, blah blah, end of. So, whatever we put out there we can enter for a competition for the best book that's been published, right? Wrong. The Booker rules state "Self published books are not eligible where the author is the publisher or where a company has been specifically set up to publish that book."

So published means something different in each case. You can see the Booker Prize's point, though, can't you? They don't want every Jane, John and whoever entering their precious pile of crap. After all, other competitions designed to find the best of the best have similar restrictins. You can't just enter your local football team for the FA Cup. Or pitch up as a golfer and hope to qualify for he Open. Oh no, wait that's wrong. You can.

So what's going on? Well, I'm not going to claim there's some kind of cabalistic conspiracy to keep us alternatives out. There isn't. Aside from anything else that would be to attribute to "the mainstream" a level of organisation it's just not capable of. Rather, it's systematic of an inbuilt prejudice that runs so deep it's barely even noticed.

The fact is it's just assumed in the mainstream that we know what publishing is (and assumptions are illustrative of the worst kind of prejudice). Only then us slippery awkward independent types come along and point out that means we're published, and we can play in the playground too. And each time that happens, a new lock is put on the gate to keep us out.

So we have two choices. We can either simply play in our own playground. Or we can keep breaking the locks and point out that something is amiss. I am greatly greatly in favour of the former. It's what I do at Year Zero, and what I'm doing at eight cuts gallery. But it's not entirely fair on the reading public at large for them not to be aware what's happening, unseen, to keep books away from them (admittedly most of them are awful, but that's not the point, the point is they are not being told they are there at al).

Which is where eight cuts gallery press comes in, a press set up for the express purpose of not hiding exciting alternative books under the carpet, and making our literary elite, our gatekeeping judges, not just ignore but actively reject them. Or, of course, say that after all they might actually have some value. But surely that would never happen...

Charcoal by Oli Johns and The Dead Beat by Daisy Anne Gree will be appearing at major competitions near you in 2011.

Beautiful Photos

2010-07-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

Here are the first pics from last week's amazing gig at The Good Ship. With huge thanks to everyone who took part, especially

Shirley Said

To The Moon

Rabid Gravy

Beautiful Things that Happen Today!

2010-07-06T13:57:00.000-07:00

It's here at last! The biggest Year Zero Live event to date. We have three amazing bands and four fantastic writers, and we have the complete run of one of the fabbest venues in London all night. Sarah was just fantastic last Wednesday, even after 30 sleepless hours after setting off from California, so she's set to be even more awesome tonight.

Here's our running order for the night:
7.30-8 doors open to a set from Rabid Gravy

8-8.15 Beautiful Things - Sarah, Dan, Marc reading pieces chosen by Sarah

8.15-8.50 Rabid Gravy running straight into

8.50 Dan Holloway reading SKIN BOOK

9.10 Becca Fenton

9.25 To The Moon

10.00 Marc Nash

10.15 Sarah E Melville reading her own set

10.25 Shirley Said

11 (or thereabouts) finish

Here is a little something about Becca, whom we're delighted to be welcoming for the night:
Becca Fenton likes words and playing with sounds and likes you too, for coming to listen to hers. She used to run the 'wordPLAY' spoken word night at The Good Ship and is very excited about the current spoken word and new writing scene in the UK. her favourite cheese in Lincolnshire Poacher and her favourite film is Truly Madly Deeply.

Sharing Success!!

2010-06-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

Those of you who've been to a Year Zero gig, or have read about a Year Zero gig, will probably know the name Jessie Grace. Jessie has played a barnstorming 3 gigs with us now (as well as the launch of my first book), including our humungous, fantabulous show at Rough Trade East. You can learn all about her, and her involvement with Year Zero, and see her playnig at some of our gigs on the footage HERE.

Because it's exciting when someone has great news, and because we think Jessie is just about (I only say just about because I was at The Dead Weather last night, and it'll take a lot of time to get Jack and Alison out of my head!) my favourite musician on the planet, I thought I'd take this opportunity to share two pieces of wonderful news. First, Jessie now has her very own band - check out there stuff on her myspace. Second, one of her amazing songs is featured on this hilarious ad - how cool is that!

Oh, and third - Jessie is headlining Friday night at Rugfest this week, which promises to be unmissable.

I hope Jessie will be playing with Year Zero again very soon - because if we don't nab her very soon, she will be off in the stellar stratosphere (to mix metaphors) whilst we're left far behind.

Oh, and BUY HER CD - Asleep on the Good Foot - it's on her myspace.

Andromache: A little Corner of Excellence

2010-06-24T01:03:00.000-07:00

Next month, I will be launching a new project, eight cuts gallery, to break down barriers between the arts, to act as an installation space bringing writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians together online and in the physical world around key questions, and to bring extraordinary writing to the world's attention. A week or so ago I sent out some very preliminary feelers, and I have already discovered some amazing people doing fantastic things. This week, I got to chat with one of them, Grace Andreacchi, author and managing editor at Andromache Books

1. I love the fact that Andromache is a tiny press yet you have music, and you have shorts mixed with poems, and novels and novellas, all in together. I imagine you looking at the work first, and wondering about the medium second. Would that be fair?

Yes, that’s how it is. The whole idea behind Andromache is to put things out there that are extraordinary, that deserve to see the light of day, and have no serious chance in a commercial environment. ‘A little corner of excellence’ – that’s what we strive to be. I became aware that music publishing has gone the same way as that of serious literature, as poetry and I thought – Why not? As a dedicated music lover, I felt a great desire to do something here as well. As a writer, I understand the imperative to write well and damn the consequences. I want to make a place for others who feel as I do, and are as dedicated as I am to their art and to their craft. Which sounds horribly solemn – but we’re not that!

2. I'm intrigued that Andromache's titles (and, indeed, their covers) feel as though they fall into two camps - there's the decidedly classical (in the Latin & Greek sense), as one would expect from the imprint's name; and yet there's also the black and white, Beat-feel of Clearout Sale and Out There. Was that conscious?

I’m very open-minded about genre, style – all of that. I try to match the look of each book as closely to the content as possible. I design all the covers myself, and there have been some headaches, but in the end each one is a thing of beauty, that expresses something simple and straightforward about what’s lurking inside.

3. You say you don't take submissions, but for people to get in touch if they feel their work would be of interest. I love that - it's exactly our policy at Year Zero. Can you explain why, and how you find material?

My first commitment is to write, I’ve very little time for editing and can’t afford to be overwhelmed by random submissions. One must draw the lines rather closely and stick to them. Having said that, I want to leave the door open for the happy few. I haven’t gone looking for material, writers come to me and if I love their work and we get along, then we’ll do a book.

4. Could you explain why you offer your ebooks for free?

This is right at the heart of my whole philosophy – ebooks are the wave of the future and there’s no particular reason to charge for them – they don’t cost us anything to produce. They cost us in time, to be sure, but everybody at Andromache is working for the sheer love of it, nobody gets paid for this. We can’t give away print books, obviously, because we have to pay the printer. But whatever you charge for a book, it is in fact a gift. There is no meaningful correlation between the money you pay for a book and the heart’s blood that went into it. Ebooks allow this equation to be made completely manifest. We are not a business at Andromache, we are a service to writers and to readers. We are giving you a gift. The whole electronic revolution in publishing has made it possible for serious writing to get up on its hind legs and do a dance! Here we are, look at us, how beautiful we are!

5. What's the one thing that drives what you do at Andromache?

I believe in the power of literature to affect us all at the deepest levels. And I believe that art should be uncompromising in its excellence.

6. One doesn't have to scratch the surface of today's literary world very much to find some incredibly exciting things happening. Does it bother you that by and large the public is utterly unaware of most of it?

Oh now, ‘the Public’, you know, that’s a very slippery concept, ‘the Public’. Who is this ‘Public’ whose unconsciousness should afflict us? I have no illusions in the sense, I’ve been round the block a few times, I’ve been published by a couple of very well regarded literary houses, and ‘the Public’ remained, to all intents and purposes, unaware of my existence. I’ve certainly attained a far higher degree of visibility in the two years since I’ve been working with Andromache than in the preceding twenty-five, struggling upstream in the commercial waters. There is a very intelligent, hungry Public out there, and they love what we do, and they read us, and we love them too.

7. Do you think we are in exciting or depressing times for literature?

Oh exciting, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Depressing was ten years ago… I remember how it was very well, having sent out one’s really rather good work to every conceivable and inconceivable destination only to be told the same old same old… ‘wonderful but there is no market for this’. All of a sudden we don’t need a ‘market’ for literature. We can connect directly with readers all over the world. It’s the biggest revolution since the printing press, and the results will be equally astonishing. Already those nay-sayers who were wringing their hands over the rubbish that would result from self-publishing are having to eat their words. Sure, some rubbish gets published, but nobody pays any mind to it. The power is back with the writer, where it should be.

8. In five years' time, Andromache will be...

A little corner of excellence in an ever more beautiful literary world.

Beautiful Things That Happen to Ugly People

2010-06-23T00:35:00.000-07:00

It's several months and considerably different weather ago since we launched the Year Zero Live tour at Rough Trade East. Now, we are coming to the tour's grand finale at another fantastic music venue, The Good Ship in Kilburn.

The event Berautiful Things that Happen to Ugly People brings together readings, music, and art, looking at those oases of beauty that spring up like unkillable weeds in even the most arid of lives. And hoping to be such a moment for everyone there. That stunning poster art is by Sarah E Melville, whose extraordinary moedern illuminated manuscript Beautiful Things that Happen to Ugly People is the centrepiece of the evening. You can also enjoy it forever on a commemorative T-shirt.

There’s also a Facebook event page - sign up and invite everyone you know.

With live music from:
To The Moon
Shirley Said
Rabid Gravy

Spoken word:
Sarah E Melville
Dan Holloway
Marc Nash

and we are delighted to welcome as our very special guest top London poet Becca Fenton

Becca Fenton likes words and playing with sounds and likes you too, for coming to listen to hers. She used to run the 'wordPLAY' spoken word night at The Good Ship and is very excited about the current spoken word and new writing scene in the UK. her favourite cheese in Lincolnshire Poacher and her favourite film is Truly Madly Deeply.

Art by Sarm
Featuring the international launch of the books:
Beautiful Things that Happen to Ugly People by Sarah E Melville
(life:) razorblades included by Dan Holloway

All my books in one picture

2010-06-15T03:18:00.000-07:00

Simon from Stuck in a Book is challenging people to sum up their reading tastes in a single photo. I came across the challenge on the wonderful Farmlane Books. This is fascinating, and wonderful (we are so used to being drawn to covers that there's an inbuilt connection between books and images in all of us, such that we see a picture and can make a choice about the book ofetn without reading a word), but one of the easiest challenges I've ever been set. I'm sure my choice is no surprise. Sarah E Melville's "What's the Point of Living Anyway" is the reason she's my cover artist of choice precisely because it says everything about the things I love in a book - a sense of displacement; fragility; dystopia; deep unease; an oasis of hope; loneliness and longing. Everything is in this one image.

For more of Sarah's art go here. For her amazing blog go here. For details of her upcoming live shows in the UK go here.