Cover Story

It’s okay, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, it’s a new cover.

Not a whole new book. They take time and while I do have a new book on the way, this isn’t it. Just a new cover, that’s all:

The old cover for my novel A Run Of Bad Luck wasn’t that bad, but people who’d read the book kept telling me how exciting it was and it occurred to me that the cover didn’t really reflect that much.

I hope this new image is more in keeping with the danger and thrilling adventure in the story, without giving too much away.

How Fans Are Made

I’ve had month of unprecedented sales of my books in February. I’ve no idea what triggered it, but I’m delighted. It got me wondering about fans and where they come from.

Fan

Noun

1. An apparatus with rotating blades that creates a current of air for cooling or ventilation.
2. A person who has a strong interest in or admiration for a particular sport, art or entertainment form, or famous person.

(Obviously I’m not writing a blog post about the machine that keeps me cool while I’m riding on the turbo trainer.)

I’m a fan of Train. We went to watch them in concert recently as they toured the UK. I’ve been trying to remember what it was that triggered my enjoyment of their music. I’m pretty sure it was just prior to a trip to my favourite city when I was compiling a playlist of songs about San Francisco and I came across Save Me, San Francisco. I bought the album, and realised they were the band that sang Drops of Jupiter, a song I always liked but had no idea who sang it.

I’ve now got three of their albums and was thrilled to be going to a concert. Quite a big fan. In the queue we met a family from Luton who said this would be their fourth time seeing Train play live. Wow. I guess they’re bigger fans than us. Then we met their friends, a family from Peterborough who had also seen Train play several times before. In fact they’d been at the concert in the Hammersmith Apollo the night before. Two Train concerts in two days. And I don’t even own all of Train’s albums. I felt as though calling myself a fan was a bit presumptuous.

Train in concert in Wolverhampton

All this pales when you find out that there was, at the front of the queue, a small group of fans who had been queuing since 10am (the doors opened at 7pm). Not only that, but they had queued at the door that early for every single concert that Train did on that UK tour. That is a really serious fan. Even the guys from Peterborough who’d seen two gigs in a row thought these fans were hard-core. As a writer I aspire to inducing this much enthusiasm in my readers. Well, maybe not quite that much.

Maybe at this stage in my writing career I should be watching more closely what happened to the support act. I’d not heard of her before the tickets arrived (a week before the concert) and I looked her up on the internet. The clips I heard sounded promising, so I bought the album. It’s superb, I love it and I’d played it so much that I knew the words and was singing along.

Most of the audience, while we were waiting for the gig to start, were asking ‘Who’s Gin Wigmore? Have you ever heard of her before? Is she any good?’ It was instructive to watch how their initial uncertainty turned to delight once they’d heard her sing a song or two. They were all disappointed when her set ended, and she was welcomed back on stage with a huge cheer when she came on later during Train’s set to sing a duet with Pat. They might not have followed her to every concert or bought a single one of her records, but they were all fans. I’ll bet that quite a few went home and bought the album.

I must remember that there are more fans out there than I think, they’ve just not read my book or heard you sing yet. But when they do, they’ll be camped outside, anxious for the next one. I’d better get on with writing it.
In the meantime, while you wait in the cold, wrapped in a space-blanket, you can listen to the same soundtrack I’m hearing while I write:

Are You Reasonably Good At Everything?

Proof that I’m Reasonably Good At Everything

This weekend I picked up a trophy at my cycling club’s awards dinner. I have won the B.A.R. trophy (Best All-Rounder – a prize for the fastest average speed over a selection of time-trial distances.*) It’s fantastic to win something, and I feel more part of the club know that I have my name engraved on one of their trophies!

It an interesting category of prize because it doesn’t favour a specialist time-trialler at any particular distance, just someone who’s reasonably good at everything. And that brought to mind this little scrap of paper that I found the other day while clearing out my office:

Would you answer a job advert like this?

It’s the cunningly worded job advertisement that I answered nearly twenty years ago. What I have always loved about this advert is the focus, not on existing skills, but on outlook, attitude and aptitude. It takes a certain type of individual to see that advert and to think “Yes, I am.”

Back then I was young enough and arrogant enough to think I was what they were looking for. I think, in the end, I must have been, because I still remember that job fondly as the best job I’ve ever had.

That advert and its clever language helped recruit some of the cleverest, nicest and most interesting people I’ve ever worked with, many of whom I still count as friends. The work was mostly fun too. I learned enough doing that job to tide me over for the rest of my career. Sadly all good things come to an end and that job no longer exists, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted.

I’m not sure whether an advert like that would jump off the page at me now like it did back then. I wasn’t even actively looking for a job at the time when those words snared me in. Then again, maybe I would be interested, after all, now I have a trophy that proves I really am Reasonably Good At Everything!

* I should probably point out, since some of my cycling friends will probably read this, that I won the B.A.R., not by being incredibly fast, but by virtue of being one of only two riders who completed all the required distances. The other guy is 71.

Western Weekend

It snowed here last weekend and so I found myself without plans and with a little pile of unwatched DVDs: time for an indulgent weekend of watching Westerns. Here is a little review of the seven(!) movies I watched:

A Fistful of Dollars

Clint Eastwood playing the classic western trope of a stranger in town. It an interesting movie in that it is, at least among the main characters, completely devoid of good guys. There are not even good guys that have bad sides to them. They’re all bad, even Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. The Rojos and Baxters are the Bad Guys battling it out for the town, but the Man With No Name is a Bad Guy who’s just so much more deviously bad than the other Bad Guys that he’s cool.

The Tall T

I didn’t want the whole weekend to be Spaghetti Westerns so I picked a couple of old Hollywood Westerns to mix it up. This one from 1957 is based on an Elmore Leonard story and has every cliché in the book. We meet a friendly family family in the opening sequence with a cute kid who asks the Good Guy to get him some candy from town. We know he’ll never get to eat that candy. The Good Guy is so good that he lets the Bad Guy get away rather than shoot him in the back. And of course he gets the girl.

Sabata

This was a great antidote to the saccharine Hollywood Western. Lee Van Cleef plays a cowboy so exaggerated in his ability that he is able to shoot huge distances with pinpoint accuracy with a tiny derringer. Tongue-in-cheek, it has a lot in common with its contemporary Bond movies. In fact the Bad Guy, Stengel, really wouldn’t have been out of place as a Bond villain. It’s comic-book superhero stuff as Sabata and his little gang of misfits fight off a never-ending supply of henchmen. Great theme music too.

For A Few Dollars More

Oh, look, it’s Lee Van Cleef again. This time he’s a bounty hunter, teaming up with Clint Eastwood who is donning the same dirty poncho he wore in a Fistful Of Dollars (but not, apparently, playing the same character). A bit cleverer than the mayhem of Fistful Of Dollars, it’s a more entertaining movie because of it. The final scene as Clint Eastwood’s character struggles with his adding up is delightful.

The Bravados

Hollywood again. Joan Collins and Gregory Peck play the Good Guys in this one. Hang on, who’s that about to be hanged? Why, if it isn’t a young Lee Van Cleef. He gets everywhere. A dogged and deadly chase of the Bad Guys by the Good Guy is a bit too much for a 1958 Hollywood movie to handle so it ends in remorse and self-loathing and some incongruous church scenes. It feels like a good movie butchered into having a certain type of ending. It’s easy to see why Sergio Leone and Co. got frustrated by this rose-tinted view of the cowboy and wanted to make a more honest and brutal kind of film about the West.

Duck, You Sucker

The contrast with The Bravados is a bit stark. The opening sequence is Rod Steiger’s character taking a piss. Not exactly Hollywood! But then this 1971 Sergio Leone film isn’t really a Western in the normal form. It is set in Mexico in 1913 so we have a few trucks and motorcycles as well as the usual horses and pistols. And there’s lots of dynamite, which probably explains why it was renamed A Fistful of Dynamite. Personally I love the original title, it’s more in keeping with the spirit of the film which is something like Mad Max meets the Mexican Revolution.

It comes as no surprise, watching this film, to know that Quentin Tarrantino is a great fan of the Spaghetti Western. This film could easy be mistaken for an early Tarrantino, especially the way that it juxtaposes a crazy caper storyline with some jaw-dropping brutality. This was probably my favourite film of the weekend.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Saving the best until last. Lee Van Cleef again. And that dirty poncho again. Another level of cleverness over For a Few Dollars More and the music and direction make it a classic. It’s the best movie of the set, but as I’ve seen it before I wasn’t able to come at it with the freshness of the others. I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever seen it once before, but so many of the scenes are etched in my memory – testament to what a great piece of cinema that it is.

Still unwatched (because they didn’t arrive in time through the snow) I have The Mercenary and A Bullet For The General and The Great Silence in my stack of Spaghetti Western DVDs. That’s not quite enough for a another full weekend of being snowed in. Any suggestions of what else I might watch?

Inspiration from Story Cubes

Writers often get fed up with being asked where they get their inspiration from, but now I have an answer: Rory’s Story Cubes.

Rory’s Story Cubes (iPhone App)

It’s an amazingly simple toy that consists of nine dice, each with a set of six images. The game is to roll the dice and then find a way to tell a story using the pictures on the dice. The pictures can be used literally or as metaphors or, well, anything goes. It’s just a toy.

This is the point where I have to admit that writing fiction is an awful lot more like playing than working. Essentially, when I’m writing, I’m just making up stories, just like kids when they’re playing. Of course there’s more to it than that. There’s words and rhythm and themes and imagery, but for me, at the start of it all, there’s the story.

It’s my birthday this week, so I bought myself some of these dice as a present to myself, and they’re great. The range of images is wide enough to produce a broad range of ideas. The pictures are clearly drawn, but cleverly ambiguous enough to lend themselves to several interpretations. As a toy, they’re fun, but they really come into their own as a seed for ideas in that first draft stage.

There will be several sections in my new novel inspired initially by these story cubes. Of course, by the time the process of writing and rewriting and revision is over, they may well be unrecognisable from the original idea, but I leave it as a challenge to the reader to try to spot them!

New Year, New Start

I was working on a new novel last year, a western, but I’m deciding to let that story go. It keeps wriggling out of shape, no matter how hard I try to corral it. I’m reluctant to completely give up on it because I had some really good chapters already done. I imagine I’ll come back to it in the future with a fresh approach and maybe find the key something that was missing or else I’ll cannibalise the best ideas for a newer project.

That seems to be theme for me at the moment, making clean starts. The hard disk on the television recorder crashed over Christmas, deleting all the programmes we’d recorded but never watched. I’ve taken the opportunity of a few days off work to spring clean my study. And I’m starting a new novel.

The office spring clean is getting rid of a lot of rubbish and turning up a lot of interesting historical documents that I hadn’t realised I’d kept, not to mention generating an enormous amount of dust. It’s going to take me at least a week to get the room straight again. In the ongoing upheaval, I also seem to have lost the notebook with all the notes about the new novel in it. I’m sure it’ll turn up, but if it doesn’t, I’ll be having to start over with that too.

Losing all that recorded television and, oddly, all my novel notes, seems rather liberating. I was going to write something about how exciting it was to start afresh every now and again, but then I thought what my computer might be like if it too had a fresh start and had a little panic. Now, where did I put that backup disk?

Learning New Emotions

I have a piece of writing that I was working on nearly two weeks ago that I paused mid-sentence to answer the telephone. I haven’t written anything since.

I’ve been lucky enough in my life, until now, never to lose someone close to me. I learned from that phone call that a family member had died. The emotions I felt were all new to me.

I’ve been using my writing as a coping mechanism. Not that I’ve written anything at all, but I can try to distance myself a little from what I’m feeling and watch the progress of my own grief the same way I would watch anything else that I might want to use in a novel one day. I couldn’t say whether that has helped me or not, I’ve no other experience like this to compare it with.

As a whole, it will make me think hard about what I’m writing in future. I have been writing novels where guns are brandished often, where guns kill people and where policemen die. I don’t know how easy I’ll find it to write that kind of thing when I’ll remember so painfully the trauma of a family when a policeman is shot dead. And if I do kill a character, I really don’t think I’ll be writing a realistic description of their bereaved family and friends. Watching the people I most care about suffer irreparable heartbreak has been the most awful part of the whole experience. No reader wants to experience that claustrophobic intensity of tears and irrational anger.

I’ve learned some things this last fortnight, about myself and my emotions, about anger and forgiveness, and about remembering. I wish there had been a less painful way to learn them.