I watched the Australia and Ghana game with Cas, who is not, by any stretch, a football fan. Still, he had a scarf, probably purchased for another sport he follows (he has many). Since Australia played pretty poorly against Germany, I was not feeling overly optimistic about the game against Ghana, but they scored early, and then ten minutes later had their front man sent off in an iffy red card on the penalty line. There’s been a lot of talk about it, and while people suggest Australia could have won easily with Kewell still on the field, who is to say. The horns blew. The apocalypse hinted at looked to be particularly Australian. Cas said, “See, this is exactly what I was talking about. The refs are against us. We’re what Fifa refers to as a developing nation, and they don’t like our brand of football, man. We’re too rough.”

I wondered if the Australian fans would riot. That would be pretty cool. “I think you’re making this shit up, man. Why would anyone bother to be against Australia? I mean, seriously, we’re the holiday destination of the world.”

“It’s fucking true. Did you see that trip Ghana did? That was a clear red card, but what the dude get? Nothing, man, nothing.”

I couldn’t really argue with that, but mostly, I didn’t bother because he was in full spin. A conspiracy for every sport, a theory for every occasion. I was starting to think that Cas ought to write a book called The Conspiracies in Sport, All of Them True.

For the most part, I was willing to overlook such conspiracy talk, and to be honest, I don’t really give it any thought. However, I must admit, I was surprised to be flipping channels the next night, and coming across Santo, Sam and Ed’s Cup Fever having a conversation with an ex Australian football star about the very same conspiracy. And I was like, seriously? Seriously? But maybe it’s just me. I’ve just never really had any time for conspiracies, though I do like to hear a particularly good one–the Moon Landing Was Fake is a particular favourite of mine, but just as I find that one particularly funny, there are others that bore me, such as George Bush Organised 9/11 and JFK Was Not Killed By the US Government. My mind just wanders once people begin going on about them.

See, right now, I think that The Moon Landing Was Fake would make a great band name, or even a short story.

I should write that down.

I’m starting to think that they ought to just say to Australia, “Look, we’re only going to let you have ten men on the field for the match. Choose wisely.”

After yesterday’s post, I was asked why I don’t try self publishing.

It’s a fair enough question, since I am, at the heart of it, a supporter of self publication. In long term prospects, I would like to be in control of everything that I publish–from design, to editing, to distribution, and so forth. It’s a lot of work, but if I was in the position where I could get my work into distribution chains and the like, then yeah, I would own it from top to bottom. I don’t really give it much thought beyond that, since the day for that is a long time away, and indeed, may never happen. But I’m the kind of guy who likes to have a lot of ideas twisting around, directions to move in, and ideas. They may never happen, but they keep me warm at night.

So, with that said, why not self publish right now?

Well, mostly, it’s the cost. The pitfall of self publication is that it’s often done poorly. No money is laid out for a professional editor, either in term of content, or line editing, and it shows. I am the last person in the world who will tell you that my manuscripts are the most clean, error free pieces you have ever seen. No matter how much time I spend going over it, there’s always things that slip through–in part it’s because there are more important things I’m looking for, and in part it’s because I spend so much time staring at it that I just go blind to the errors. The idea of putting a book straight out there based off my final draft would be, frankly, a horrible move. Someone would have to be hired, paid, thanked. Likewise, I would want to hire an editor to go through it as a book, to give their opinions, to hear ways in which the flaws can be made better. It’s important to be done, a step in taking a book to publication, and you don’t want to cheap out and just find someone on the web who is an ‘editor’–you’d want to find someone who is actually part of the industry, and employ them in a freelance editor on the basis of a company.

Secondly, there’s the cost involved in producing the book. It’s true that you could cut corners by using a publisher such as Lulu, but unless the books from there have changed since I last purchase one a few years back, the printing and binding isn’t something that I would want to associate my business with. In addition to that, there’s the issue of being tied to another platform, which funds another company’s pockets, and may or may not limit the places that you can get your book. Lulu isn’t bad, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re going to approach the DIY mentality, you have to work to a standard that you set, and if I was flush with cash to begin such a prospect, Lulu, or any other print on demand service out there would have to be producing very different looking books for me to do it. One of the things that is often over looked by people who self publish–though not all, I admit, just that ragged edge–is that people buy books not just to read, but as objects. They’re displayed, shown to people, talismans to be worn, to represent a part of you that is quite often without a visual representation. This is, of course, why so many people cringe at the sight of being seen with a sf book. You want to sell books, you got to respect that.

Of course, that would also mean paying an artist to come up with a cover. More costs. More and more as you go into it and think about it. Did I mention that I’m broke and the last time I went out for a night that cost me more than twenty bucks is so long ago I can only hope it isn’t a dream I once had?

The other part of it is, at least to my mind, that I don’t think I have the reputation to do it. There are success stories of self publishing by nobodies out there (Nicholas’ Evans The Horse Whisperer, if I remember right, was first self published), but by and large, if you want to have your book read, you need to have a profile that is more than the crazies and the loons out there who self publish their books and offer prizes for reading it. Being a writer offers you nothing in the way of exposure that being a musician does, to use an example, and it seems to me that if you wanted to be in control of your work from top to bottom, then you would at least need to establish yourself before, possibly through publication with established presses. There would be other ways, of course, but still–you need that audience before.

At any rate, I’m sure a lot of people would disagree with me over this, but they’re the reasons why I don’t do it. Added to that, and lest yesterday’s post didn’t make it clear, there’s still a lot of avenues to go down to publish a book. Sometimes, it just takes a while.

In the last month, I’ve been stuck debating myself.

It’s not something that I like to do, but I turned in Below, and I told myself after that I would begin working on a new novel. Unfortunately, I don’t approach the idea clean, free, and feeling as if I can do anything that I want, and that in itself creates a problem. I’ve blogged a couple of of times about the experience of trying to sell Under the Red Sun, the last time being the Angry Robot experience, which is of no real importance now. I’m still knocking on doors, but the truth is, it’s time to start creating something new, in the hope that I can sell that, too–but the last year I’ve spent trying to find a new agent with the Red Sun novel, with and without the ‘almost’ sold tag on it, have left their mark on me. Through friends and just plain cold calling (so to say–I never actually call anyone) I’ve gone through a fair chunk of agents. Most have been nice enough–though there’s been the ones who never replied, and the ones who took months (one took a year) to get back to me, but like I said, most have been very positive. A lot of agents have read the whole book and I have been called a wonderful writer, a genius, and other such useless complimentary terms that pale next to the oft repeated line, ‘not commercial’.

That line, I’ve found, has gotten to be a little. I have half a dozen ideas running round in my head at any given time, and as I’ve moved on to the self imposed deadline of starting a new novel, that tag of poor commercial appeal has been hard to shake. I don’t honestly believe it–I think all my ideas and everything I write has mass appeal, who doesn’t?–but the truth of it is, I’m a single guy who lives by himself, runs his own part time business, has very little savings, and last week, my TV, my stove, and my heater broke, resulting in a system of ‘what can I fix first’ world. That’s no different to a lot of other people in the world, but I’d rather not live the way that I do forever. I couldn’t live that way if I shared my life with anyone (I hate being unable to pay my own way, as it is) and I’d also not like to spend another year writing a novel only to be told, again and again, what a fine writer I am, and if only I had written something commercial, just as I’d like not to have to leech off my friends for introductions, or some advice, you know? I guess what I’m saying is, I’m finding that the last year has left its mark on what I want to do, and I’m not entirely pleased by it.

I’d like to say, nah, fuck it, I’ll do what I want, but it’s not happening. In the planning stages I find myself saying, a little of this, coupled with that–take out that, have an ending that works on this level, and so on and so forth. It’s not a dilution or the original idea because there’s lots of ideas, but it feels as if I am second guessing myself, and not letting what I want to do naturally come out, and I have to work against that. Good writing, I believe, comes from your natural instincts, your passions, and your beliefs. It’s one of the reasons why a lot of work is bland, and passionless, I find, because the author is trying to hit a note that he or she doesn’t feel, or understand.

Myself, I find that making sure I am writing to what I find natural, and my instincts, is a challenge after the last year. It feels as if it’s a weakness to acknowledge it, a sense of failure, somehow, but there’s not point in denying it.

Ah well.

As challenges go, it’s just another part of selling creativity.

Alan Moore has a magazine, Dodgem Logic.

It’s up to issue four, so maybe a lot of you had heard of it, but I hadn’t. I found out about it because, apparently, Moore was writing an Opera for the guys out of Gorillaz, and they had promised to do a three page thing in his magazine, which they spaced on. Since they didn’t have time for him, Moore said he was busy too, and moved on, which is cool. Moore’s work ethic is a little on the notorious side, in that once he makes his mind up over a situation, he doesn’t appear to go back on it. He refuses to take money for anything that Hollywood takes of his to make a film (and if he did not have other collaborators, one suspects he wouldn’t sell the rights to begin with) after he was accused of plagiarism for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I like the attitude, personally. Too often–especially in writing–authors put on false fronts, pretend to like people and situations that they don’t, or are so low on the totem pole that they fear saying anything negative, for the backlash that they’ll get.

Of course, I might just like cantankerous fucks, but the point still stands.

The World Cup is well in swing now, with every match accompanied by the sound of locusts. It’s my belief that Jesus himself will appear on the final day the present the trophy. If the Australian team is lucky, he’ll arrive earlier, as that’s about all that they can rely upon now.

…

You think I’d have more to say on this topic, but that pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?

The other day, Steph Campisi and I turned in Above & Below to Alisa Krasnostein.

It was interesting, writing this, in that both Steph and I went off, wrote out part, tossed emails back and forth, and let each other do their own thing before reading the two together. There were tiny little similarities that would pop up which were funny, and which, at other times, allowed for a nice resonance between the two. Our hope is that when people read the two novellas, they fold into each other well, and create a small novel–and the resonances of the two will add to that, I believe.

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me, was how the BP spill and the resulting environmental debate seeped into my head as I was pulling thoughts and ideas together. It was nothing big–I don’t want anyone to think that the spill was in any way an inspiration, but it was hard to ignore it, given the nature of the two separate worlds we were writing about. Below, especially, is about the people who live on a ground that has been heavily mined and used for toxic dumping, and the inhabitants, living in that from day to day, have to deal with that. It’s not hard to make the leap from that idea to the spill, and see how bits of it, and the surrounding debate, were pieces I could draw from.

On that note, indeed, there is a big article at Rolling Stone (of all places) about the spill:

Admiral Thad Allen, the U.S. commander overseeing the cleanup, framed the spill explicitly as an invasion: “The enemy is coming ashore,” he said. Louisiana beaches were assaulted by blobs of oil that began to seep beneath the sand; acres of marshland at the “Bird’s Foot,” where the Mississippi meets the Gulf, were befouled by shit-brown crude – a death sentence for wetlands that serve as the cradle for much of the region’s vital marine life. By the time Obama spoke, it was increasingly evident that this was not merely an ecological disaster. It was the most devastating assault on American soil since 9/11.

Link.

My TV is dying.

It’s not a big deal, since I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I like having it around. As anyone who has crashed at my place can tell you, my TV operates on a dodgy internal antenna that I bought for ten bucks, and which, if I take my glasses off, has a perfect picture. I like zoning to TV with my glasses off. If I watch a movie, or something else, I use glasses. But it’s dying. You hit it to bring the screen on. I don’t know about you, but whenever I need to hit something, I feel that the communication process has broken down, and something is wrong. So, I pulled out that old TV my mother had dumped on me, plugged it in, saw something spark immediately, and knew this was also a bad sign. That TV now has a thumb print on it that allows you to watch anything as colourised TV. I chuckled, and put the old one back.

I guess if I hit it just a little longer, I’ll tell myself it’s okay, and call it love.

Last night, I surfed round the web, looking for new authors and books I had not heard of before. There’s nothing direct in what I do in that search–I jump genres, publishers, interests, wherever it takes me.

Mostly, it’s just a way to find things I’ve not heard of for a while. Other times, it’s just an excuse to sample something I’d heard of a long time ago. For example, I read most of Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon during the week, which isn’t so bad, though the structuring of it is flawed, especially at the start. It’s messy, in short, and the edition of the book has this long introduction from Erikson about how he doesn’t info dump, and then proceeds to do just that. I’m fairly sure that at one stage one of the characters says, “As you know,” when discussing the magical system that is floating around in his world. But, it’s not so bad. It’s literary junk food, basically, with nothing to hugely recommend it, but every now and then I’ll find myself eating McDonalds and digging it. Erikson’s book was that.

Later, I stumbled across Lucia Perillo, whose latest collection of poetry is called Inseminating the Elephant. Her website says that it was nominated for a pulitzer prize this year, but I was mainly drawn to the fact that she’s a wheelchair bound zoologist, and these are reflected in her unsentimental poetry. Well, that’s what they called her poetry. I’m not sure if I would say that it was unsentimental, or even that I liked it as much as I liked the title to her work, but this piece, ‘The Body Mutinies’ as something that I found upon the web, and it’s not so bad–though I don’t think I quite loved it:

When the doctor runs out of words and still
I won’t leave, he latches my shoulder and
steers me out doors. Where I see his blurred hand,
through the milk glass, flapping good-bye like a sail
(& me not griefstruck yet but still amazed: how
words and names–medicine’s blunt instruments–
undid me. And the seconds, the half seconds,
it took for him to say those words). For now,
I’ll just stand in the courtyard watching bodies
struggle in then out of one lean shadow
a tall fir lays across the wet flagstones.
Before the sun clears the valance of gray trees
and finds the surgical-supply-shop window
and makes the dusty bedpans glint like coins.

Drift, drift, drift.

I ended up reading some of Ron Hansen’s first novel, Desperadoes. Hansen is probably more well known for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Mariette in Ecstast, but for a first novel, it had a nice command of language in it, at least at the start. I was quite taken with the idea of an old Emmett Dalton in Hollywood, making a fortune of selling his stories of the Dalton gang there for films. It had a terrific opening about how the bodies of his brothers were treated differently to that of the marshal, Frank Dalton, who was shipped to Kansas in a coffin filled with ice. It’s a nice little detail, the ice, something that draws me in.

Lastly, towards the end of the night, I ended up the DVD collection of season one of Steven Seagal Lawman. I’d never actually buy such a thing, but I drifted down to the Amazon reviews, and this made me laugh:

I’m not sure what I was doing to set off his Zen psychic powers, but I got pulled over by Officer Seagal once. I was coming back from Hong Kong market on the westbank with several small Banh-Mi sandwiches and groceries and some Asian sweets. Running toward the car with what appeared to be a severe purpose, he started yelling “Yo! Yo! Yo! Yo! STEP OUT OF THE CAR, YO?!” and things like that. So I get out, and before my heel can even touch the ground I find myself in an ankle lock with him screaming at me about compliance. Several excruciating moments later, he gets this thousand yard stare looking at my car and sniffing the car uncontrollably as he pat me down. He put his hands together and bowed the way Japanese do in more formal moments, and said “Yo, Im’ gonna hafta search the car, yo?” I had six Peking ducks in the backseat, and he said I was “way over the limit” as he started chowing down on my chicken liver Banh-mi. He gave one of the ducks to Colonel Fortunato who proceeded to swallow it whole, feet first. For the next half hour they just kept eating all my food and high fiving each other, right there on Gen. Degaulle Dr! Then he turned to me, jiggling his cheeks as he shook his head and said “mmmpph well das enoughmpph you kin gompph” I went home with a car full of crumbs but I swear to God, I’m lucky to be alive!

I clicked that yes, it was helpful.

At some stage, you have to ask yourself: do you really know what you’re doing when you throw Usher, Optimus Prime, Jesus, Kobe Bryant, Angelyne and Tove Jansson into the same story? The answer first appears to be yes, but what does Kobe Byrant really bring but paedophilia jokes?

Either way, this morning I can report that I now only have one box of cigarette flyers left to dispose of now.