Not number 41.

I had a very interesting response from an agent today on a book. Now, agents are notorious for form rejection letters and a wall of silence to enquiries, but this one was different and very much a breath of fresh air. I had to prod him via emails a couple of times (one assumes he is a busy man) but he responded, and did at least seem to have read the stuff, which is more than what a lot of other agents appear to do.

It seems the book didn't grab him. However, as he has only taken on 40 out of the last 4,000 or so submissions, I guess it was always going to be a Himalayan climbing expedition to be #41, and I never was good with heights. He provided quite a detailed response, and a lot of what he said got me thinking. Today in the publishing World it isn't what the agents really think about a book. It isn't even what the publishers' editors think. Actually, its the marketting people. Their say is the final one and is all based on whether a debut novel can, in their opinion, be shovelled through outlets such as WH Smiths, who I expect are quite picky about what they stock. Let's face it, if I want a wide choice of books, I go to Waterstones or - increasingly these days - Amazon. WH Smiths is much more select.

Of course, the cynic in me asks "What the hell do marketting people know?" Well, what do they know? It is their job after all. They base their projections on what other books did, and I suspect like all other marketing people, they are fairly narrow minded and short sighted. Risks are left to the smaller publishing houses and sometimes even POD, where at times they can do quite well. But marketing, or at least enough money in an advertising campaign, can sell many things. Just look at all the Z-list 'celebrity' biographies about. Who buys these? I've never seen one being bought at the till or on the shelf in some-one's home. It is a mystery. Of course, many do not sell well - take that woman from that gardening show for example. But she got her telephone number sized advance so she wasn't all that bothered.

In a boom you can sell sand to the Arabs and sunbeds to the Africans. In a recession though, I suspect things might change a little. After all, it was the marketing people at Woolworths not too many years ago that said "get rid of the cheap toys and the habadashery. No-one wants that; they want bling and clothes". Er, actually they wanted the habadashery and cheap toys if the comments I keep hearing on the radio and reading in print are true. The marketing people messed up.

The agent, in fairness, was brutally honest in this respect - it wasn't really his choice; he had to be submitting the sort of stuff he knew the marketing people would give the okay to. Aparently cyberbunk is considered old hat, so I shouldn't be mentioning that. That's what the marketing people would say though, ignoring the record popularity that Philip K. Dick's books are experiencing, not to mention many of the other Cyberpunk books on the successful SF Masterworks list and others like Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Of course, many of those authors made it successful when publishing was different, so in the eyes of the marketeers they're not "hip and fresh and on the cutting edge" despite them being what people are paying money for. Strangely (or not) Philip K. Dick's entire back catalogue is available in every branch of Waterstones I've looked in, and I'm well travelled around the UK.

For a while I have thought that Print on Demand (POD) was going to be the way of the future, much as downloads changed radically the way much music was bought for the record industry. I've already seen a few POD books snapped up by mainstream publishers who had once rejected them, because the sales showed otherwise. My books aren't mega sellers, but considering they have zero advertising or promotion behind them other than what I do between holding down a real day job, the royalties are keeping me in tins of baked beans. Supermarket ownbrand rather than Heinz, maybe, but beans nonetheless. In time, I suspect that publishing will change again, as POD threatens to dominate the market with successful titles the marketing people said "no" to.

Some of his other points were interesting. He brought up the fact I have a habit of multiple personal viewpoints within a chapter, rather than sticking with one person's view. If that's the way to convince the marketing people, I'll adapt my style. I think also I'll have to look again critically at my openings. The first few pages must really grab a reader by the short and curlies these days and not let go it seems. To be honest, I can only think of one book which really managed this for me - Michael Moorcock's 'Behold the Man' (Incidentally, this is #22 in the SF Masterworks list mentioned above). Most other 'classic' sci-fi novels (and others for that matter) aren't so addictive you find yourself reading on and on without realising. I never got into 'Lord of the Rings' because I found it quite boring and rambly. Aparently it's a classic; I like the films but I couldn't watch them over and over again. Similarly, I find many of Terry Pratchett's early books quite boring and unremarkable. I've read them, because you tend to do that after reading the later ones, but I wouldn't read, say, 'Colour of magic' or 'Strata' again.

So it's back to what I was so familiar with through school with my English essays. I wasn't very good at English, regularly scoring a paltry 40% in my work. "There's a good imagination at work, but must try harder". My spelling was dire and my grammer was like pin the tail on the donkey, largely due to being taught to write and spell phonetically in a 1984/5 trendy teaching pilot that didn't work. I grew to hate the colour red as a result as it became synonimous with the circles and squiggles all over my homework when returned. Can you tell yet that I cannot spell very well? I use a spellchecker on my word processor, but laziness means I cannot be bothered installing one into my internet browser. I'm better than I was, honest.

I have one more attempt at the big time publishing contract to make (I still get annoyed at the one in 2002 that evaporated like pixie dust). 'Bringing home the stars' is the short story I have been toying with expanding on for a while. Indeed, 'The stars came home' which is part two has been started though I wasn't totally happy with it. It may yet grow into a short book in much the way that Michael Moorcock expanded 'Behold the man' into a short book from the original novella in 1969. Fingers crossed.

Pie, peas and pictures.

I met Santa at the weekend. Well, not quite, though Zoë did insist on a picture.



It also appears that I scrub up well, and don't look too much like a minger when I get caught off-guard by a cameraphone. The venue, incidentally, is the Abercrave Inn up the Swansea valley near Ystradgynlais.

Finally, NaNoWriMo has been completed today with a word count of over 54,000. Not bad going, and five days to spare. Not bad going considering I've been so busy with many fingers in many pies.

Hmmmmmm. Pies....

Car sickiness, of Nobmouse and some photos for a magazine.

Time marches by. I've been in South Wales in Ystradgynlais for the weekend. It's a long time since I've been down to that part of the World, and I'm guessing at least six years may have passed since I was last there. The occasion was visiting my Granparents who were celebrating their Diamond (60th) wedding anniversary. That's a long time!

Because we hitched a lift with my parents in their car, it meant that for the first time in longer than I can remember, I ended up able to sleep on a car journey. This was just as well, as I quickly became aware that when I am not driving and sat in the back of a car for any length of time, I get car sick just as I did as a child. On the way down I bought a magazine from Frankley services on the M5, and lo and behold there was a letter on the letters page quoting me from an article I wrote that appeared in a previous issue. Isn't that grand?

I've been busy on NaNoWriMo and The life of Nob T. Mouse this last week. I've been helping Zoë develop the Nobmouse scripts and throwing ideas at her which she seems to have liked a lot. Consequently she has a few weeks' ideas in hand for the strip. Don't forget to vote using the links on the left hand side half way down when you visit the strip!

NaNoWriMo also goes well with the wordcount reaching the 'nearly there' region of 45,000 or so words. Just a little bit more and I'm past the target and I've got just slightly more than a week to go. Not bad. However, as usual, there are lots of things vying for my time at the moment. One of these is doing the 'Bringing Home the Stars' for the radio. Hopefully that will go well.

Finally, I've been asked about doing some more lingerie/uniform modelling. I tend to make this more of a hobby than a fulltime job due to lack of time with my other commitments, but have done a number of more recent cover shoots for books. It makes an unusual change, and everyone has to have something a little bit interesting to do (as if writing books wasn't enough).

Bridesmaids and babies.

It's amazing how time flies by without being noticed. I've just cleaned my car and watched it change colour under my sponge. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while now. Actually, when I put my mind to it, it is something that I've been meaning to do for over eight months even.

Gosh, how the time flies. Consequently, my car was no longer silver and had lost its shine. The paintwork was grey, with black and green in places. It was amazing just how dirty it was. As I cleaned, so the dirt turned the sponge greeny-black, and the water running off was dark and filthy. Still, it's done now.

I've been working on a project for radio at the moment. The plan is to record Bringing home the Stars as a radio drama to be broadcast over the airwaves. I have to admit that I'm pretty pleased about the versatility of this piece of work; I'd go as far as to say it may be becoming one of my most successful. There's no date set for recording and transmission, but it should be in the next couple of weeks.

NaNoWriMo goes well. I'm about at 40,000 words and still climbing with a week to go. I'm actually ahead of target, which is nice. I've got a few more short story ideas, and there's one in particular I was thinking about last night that I'm going to work on. Fingers crossed that this should be a good anthology when I'm done.

And finally, the bridesmaid dresses for the civil partnership have arrived. They look really nice, and now they're all paid for. I suppose that's a little more done off the total of the big wedding spend, but it was unexpected this month (I was expecting them to be ready in January) so that's put a little squeeze on finances. The final fittings should be at the end of January/beginning of February, because at the moment one bridesmaid is expecting a baby, and the other has just had one. What was the chances of that? Two women who have been trying without success for years to get pregnant actually both managing literally weeks after being asked to be our bridesmaids?

On the radio - for real

This morning I was on the radio. Now, I've been interviewed since I left broadcasting about some of the work I do on local and national radio, but its been a long time since I actually did a programme with me as a presenter. Today, however, that long break was ended when IO took over the controls at a radio station outside of Preston.

I did two hours, and coped quite well. We did a programme themed to music that has appeared in computer games. No, not the tetris music! Stuff like the music used in the Guitar Hero series of games and that gets played on the radio within the games of the series Grand Theft Auto.

Unlike most radio stations these days, they have retained non-computer playback facilities, and I was able to ignore their computer playout system (one of the reasons I left broadcasting in the first place) and play music mined from my own record collection off CD and vinyl.

I took Zoë along with me. It was the first time that she had been in a proper radio studio, even though she was a presenter for a while on an internet radio station (which she did from home on her own computer). She seemed impressed, though I think I may have unnerved her by placing her in front of a second microphone and occasionally talking to her live on air!

It's always a sign that things are going well when before you know it the time is at an end and it is time to go. The hours just flash on by! Hopefully this isn't a one off, but will be repeated more often. Well, they've given me swipe cards and ID tags so I can get through the doors (even though I forgot to take them today and had to borrow the spare key from reception to get through the doors - the shame!) so they must be expecting me back.

Update at last!

The portfolio section is finally updated, and two pieces have gone up to make up for nothing being updated in October. The pieces are an extract from Bringing home the stars and The long summer of war. Both full-length versions will be appearing in the forthcoming anthology Bringing home the stars and other stories.

The economic downturn is really starting to pinch. I have found that this quarter's book figures are disappointing to say the least. Still, can I really expect people to be spending as much money as they did on books when the economy has been trashed so thoroughly by greed, mismanagement and incompitance?

A good way to write in the morning.

The last post kind of got ahead of itself. What started out as a bit of filler in the blog ended up as a short piece that I rather like. So I've taken the unusual move of cutting and pasting it out into a *.doc file and have run it through the spelling and grammer checker. It makes quite a nice short story. Indeed, there was a competition recently in a magazine that I read to do just that and write a story about the view from the window where your computer sits.

Sometimes it is strange how inspiration strikes. Normally I just don't write stuff that isn't sci-fi or fantasy, but I have noticed that writing in a blog can be different. It frees your mind a little from the constraints that might otherwise be there when you are sat in front of a word processing programme and in a novel writing frame of mind.

It makes a good point that maybe a good method to writing short stories is to write them as blog entries and edit them later? How many of my blog posts of headed off at a tangent into the realms of fiction?