THE HOUSE OF WRITERS AVAILABLE TO ORDER

Advance Praise Bought comments on The House of Writers:

“Hey, man! Thanks for transferring the £50. You want me to ramble on about your novel’s kickassitude? Sure. It’s sitting on the bookcase, man. I have priorities, like Franzen’s and DeLillo’s latest. I like you, man, but I ain’t bumping those two LEGENDS for your little scribbling. Anyway, use this: MJ ROCKS AND THIS IS MUCH BETTER THAN THAT JUVENILE EFFORT WITH BELCH IN THE TITLE. PEACE.” — @davey46

“Mr. Nicholls, I have read this latest novel submission with interest. Thank you for sending the other manuscripts, Publish This You Cretins, Your Publishing Firm is a Tide of Effluent, Everything You Publish I Ignore on Principal. I will assign those to our intern readers. I would like to make a personal comment: why the bitterness? This novel is simply a brutal outpouring of personal grievances, score-settling resentments, and misanthropic moans about the world’s refusal to crown you a genius. I am afraid we cannot publish this.” — A Man at Penguin Books

“Dear Mark, I have had a look at some of your book now. I’m afraid that it isn’t my thing. Good luck with it. […] Just to send you a few more words … there were some things I liked in your MS, it’s just that a blurb needs to be a real affirmation and I feel uneasy offering that here I’m afraid. Please don’t be too disheartened and make sure you keep writing.” — Alex Kovacs

“Mark. I’m sorry, but I had to skip that nine-page list. It went on far too long. Why didn’t you make it easier for the reader? I’m sorry, but I couldn’t really understand what the book was about. Your father is reading the Jack Reecher novels, why don’t you write something like that?” — Mrs Nicholls

“This is a pleasant, amusing, moving, and engaging novel written by a talented person.” — CheapBlurbs4U

“A ho-hum gallimaufry of stop-start narratives, banal tangents, and boorish satirical pokes.” — Harold Sorrentino

“The nadir of attempted comedy.” — Lydia Theroux

““This novel is a crisp, buttery concoction that tantalises the mind . . . a soft and mouthwatering crunch of pleasure tingling on the cortices and yumming up the imagination.” — Gregg’s Bakers

“Labyrinthine satiric masterpiece . . . destined for a place in the pantheon of eternal pleasures” — M.J. Nicholls

Page 219:

I am the author of this novel and I have lied to you, and taken unhealthy pleasure in lying to you, and I will continue to lie to you until you beg for more. I have lied about everything in my real life (which does not exist—even as the “author” I am a construct invented to represent aspects of the “real” author—however, let’s not tangle ourselves in semantic or metaphysical notions. I have lied my way through life, relishing in the saltiest untruths. When people have asked me, “Is that soup made of string?”, I have replied, “No. That soup is made of soup.” I have told many dirty, unfair lies, and I have delighted in every one. The truth is a pointless concept, invented by non-writers to keep the masses logical and docile, to eliminate the pleasures of fiction-making. Punch the truth hard.

Only a Crohn in Her Game

I have known my sister Kathleen now for nearly three decades, and I have to say, I think the broad is growing on me. I first met her in 1986, when she had the audacity to emerge from the matriarch three years earlier, basking in the limelight of being the second child to appear after a startling hiatus of eighteen years. This effrontery aside, I finally deigned to speak to the wise and witty chick, and I found our colloquies stimulating and fruitful, and the childhood larks we spent of a high calibre. Last week I attended the launch of her non-fiction book Go Your Crohn Way: A Gutsy Guide to Living with Crohn’s Disease, and I was impressed to see that she has lived up to that early promise I heard when she first whispered her literary plans into my amniotic ears in the hospital room two minutes after my birth.

                                   (a colloquy on the early works of Will Self)

 

The book launch was hosted at the Edinburgh Royal Society, where a splendidly organised knees-up awaited the invited guests. But first, a portrait of the “diseased dame” herself as a young artist. As a small individual, K. was a bright and artistic being: busying herself with painting, designing, drawing, and writing in various forms, most notably as a prolific diarist on a par with Samuel Pepys: an epic tome I am informed is still kept to this date. We collaborated on various works, mostly short-lived magazines that now reside in private collections, until aging and the teenage fog separated us as collaborators. It had piqued me for years that K. was not exploiting her artistic talents to the degree I deemed satisfactory, and I would often nudge her into pursuing a reckless life of art-making and to hell with the consequences, but a horrible invader arrived and put the kibosh on these larks: Crohn’s Disease.

This violent disease, written about with eloquence, passion (against), and hilarity in Go Your Crohn Way, reached a critical stage in the mid-to-late twenties of this loquacious lass, and at the time I recall the angst and helplessness at seeing my sensational sibling have to encounter this hurricane of horror, and to a large extent, I withdrew, offering whatever crumbs of support I could. I suggested (along with her partner—more on this colossus of a man in a mo) she write a blog as a form of therapy, and this became Crohnological Order (award-winning), and the terrific book crohnicling the experience. The book is a thorough and compassionate no-folds-barred peek into the life of a sassy Scottish woman with a big brain who has insightful and sensible things to say, who has a clear-sighted (loo)handle on her condition, and who is willing to share her ordeals to help the afraid with their fraught futures. Enough said. Order the book via this link.

The launch was a splendid evening: prepared with panache and compèred by K.’s male man, James, who also acted as interviewer for the brief Q+A, and attended by friends, family, followers, and fun-lovers. I sat content in the knowledge that this broad had found her métier and flourished into the sort of creative dynamo I had been pining for, the one I had imagined packing in the paycheck for a life of unrealistic art-making for no salary. Yes, this “diseased dame” has arrived, I thought, and she has gone about it her crohn way: rest assured, this book is only a crohn in her game. Show some respect, and order the book here.

Penny for Them?

Penny for them?: An Homage in Imitation of Hervé Le Tellier

I was thinking how the rise of atheism will only help to serve capitalist bastardry.

I was thinking I cannot understand the logic of wanting to sire children.

I was thinking I have never been seriously impacted by a change of government.

I was thinking the more I read the harder it becomes to appreciate truly adequate craftsmanship.

I was thinking how my ineptness at living seriously impaired your thirst for living.

I was thinking whether Christine Brooke-Rose might have had fun in the Oulipo, and whether her refusal to participate was a rather English and arch decision.

I was thinking how the malleability of the future should be embraced, provided one has reliable support beams.

I was thinking whether my attempts to become an intellectual will bring me as much happiness as perpetually clowning around.

I was thinking how I never wanted our relationship to evolve beyond the nostalgia of our first two years together.

I was thinking how killable sexual fantasies might be if their attendant smells were introduced.

I was thinking the more you write, the more the right words materialise, and how ironic it was that I changed the last word of this thought when transferring from notepad to laptop.

I was thinking that Will Self resembles Gogol’s remark from ‘The Nose’ of Ivan Ivanovich’s head as “a radish with the tail pointing down”.

I was thinking how other writers save pertinent quotes on their hard drives in the event they may one day need a fitting epigraph.

I was thinking how my working class upbringing will always leave me feeling a charlatan around literary people.

I was thinking how my girlfriend may be pretending to sleep as I write these pearls in bed beside her.

I was thinking when I told you I had published a story, your first enquiry was about the fee, not the content.

I was thinking how unapt it was my girlfriend said in her sleep: “no books for you today.”

I was thinking how depressing it is that my writing friends continue to produce prose in conventional forms, and how I must pretend to find their success pleasing, and how much more envious I would be if they published a formally inventive novel to acclaim.

I was thinking I will never have an agent.

I was thinking I will never make enough from writing to pay even two months rent.

I was thinking I could never render you or our time together unsentimentally in prose.

I was thinking how non-writers patronise writers struggling to support themselves with their work and how much pleasure is taken in their failing to do so.

I was thinking how an unwritten rule in social conversation is never to speak in sentences over 30 seconds long.

I was thinking I am unsure if I find Courtney Bartnett’s music irritating or infectious.

I was thinking how pathetic it is when I resent attractive female writers for being both attractive and talented.

I was thinking how almost everyone resents brazenly displayed intelligence.

I was thinking a friend of mine’s well-polished anecdotes might be rehearsed beforehand in the mirror.

I was thinking how important it is we can read together for hours in bed.

I was thinking I love my own company too much to sustain a long-term relationship.

I was thinking how fucking banal these thoughts might read to an outsider.

I was thinking how I have never met an unboring drunk.

I was thinking how little people care about social graces.

I was thinking I wasted £50 to watch, from a balcony a mile from the stage, a teensy Morrissey performing an uninspired set.

I was thinking how passionate love often struggles to transcend a fondness for shit novels and corny music.

I was thinking I will always be poor, and whether this should particularly bother me.

I was thinking only writers would have the arrogance to believe people might want to read a stream of their semi-varnished thoughts.

I was thinking I have 1325 Goodreads followers and hardly any of them wish to discuss books with me.

I was thinking to maintain most of my friendships, I have to engineer 90% of our meetings, and whether this reflects more on my desirability as friend then on my friends’ laziness for planning.

I was thinking of you, whoever you may be.

A “Special” Blog

A special blog is needed since for once I am elsewhere than in Glasgow moping along at a snail’s pace on the various writings I am pummelling onto the page with these fists of fury. I am in Reit im Winkl with my co-editor at Verbivoracious Press, editing the Gilbert Adair festschrift, weeding the shaggier fronds of my story collection and working pell-mell on the more OCD aspects of my novel-in-progress, being intermittently besieged by flies, and rather crankily enduring the heat and absence of solitude. Reit im Winkl is a small village on the Austrian border walled in by modest forests and numerous ski lifts, popular among the snow-inclined in winter, and that is all I have to say on the matter.

This being a writer’s blog about what the writer (me) is writing—let me amuse you (me) with a précis in equal parts boring and factual. The Gilbert Adair festschrift is a selection of fiction and essays dedicated to the Scots-English-French novelist, critic, translator, and film aficionado. One of the greatest all-rounders of the last three decades, Adair died in 2011 without having earned a place in the hearts and hearths of the masses and the chattering classes, so this festschrift aims to correct that error in an entertaining and informative manner. I have been obsessed with writing about writers for as long as I have been a writer and the latest strain of this obsession has fed into the novel, The House of Writers, about which more info in the previous posts, and the collection, The Writer’s Writer and Other Writers. Keen-peepered readers will note the word ‘writer’ in both titles hinting at this obsession.

This brings us to an impasse, since I neither like talking about the banal details of what happens in my real life (these details will be reworked and re-imagined in the fictions), nor about travels and photos of nice scenes (the proliferation of images on the net has rendered one’s presence at the nice view unnecessary), nor about what I am working on in ponderous detail (since the finished work is what matters and one’s thought processes are not something that should be rendered on the page unless one is constructing a neat parcel of bullshit about their creative process). So, once again, futility has prevented this blog update from igniting. I will disclose, however, that the novel is progressing to a pleasing point, having escaped an earlier abandonment and attempt to chisel the thing into an ill-fitting novella. The story collection is nearing completion and only a last-minute paranoia about repeated forms or half-baked prose will prevent this thing from limping into the publish-me queue.

Failure of the Small Presses

When I first started writing for publication I favoured the small plucky presses manned by a team of enthusiastic oddballs over the (Royal)-We-are-Overworked-and-Too-Popular-For-You intimidation of larger presses. It made sense to start with the underdogs and move towards venues with larger readerships, as I wanted to have stories published without the wait and slog of resending to motivate me as a writer. As I acquired a decent roster of small plucky press credits, the time came for me to try my work in more popular magazines, and the frustration of having to wait a long time to be turned down was less prominent—I was able to let stories vanish into inboxes and work on novels without the need to be validated by frequent publication. Over that period, I noticed the wait for responses became longer, and the likelihood of no peep of a response became stronger—even among small presses.

I have an innate craving for the underdog. I love the rabid underdoggery of small presses. I prefer reading esoteric literature ignored by the masses. I find difficulty in books more stimulating than flowable prose and conventions. My own writing refuses to make itself accessible or find a snug niche to help publishers sell. If the large presses represent a willingness to adapt one’s writing for a mass audience, to be understood by thousands, the small presses are meant to represent the tendency in literature to be cryptic, stubborn, unpigeonholable. I have an ideal view that the small press world should be one integrated community, where underdogs bark and bray to publish innovative, daring and original literature, and to be “accessible” in a way that large presses are “stubborn” when it comes to communicating with authors.

Alas, doggie’s lost his bone. There is a distinct failure among small presses (I am leaning more towards those that publish novels over short fiction here) to offer an alternative to the large-press wall-of-silence that comes when a manuscript is posted into oblivion. Small presses manned by a staff of two, in full-time employ, with full-time families, cannot possibly offer feedback to writers who submit manuscripts, and one has to wonder—why are these people running presses, if they aren’t kicking against the frustrations that tussling with large presses bring? Why do small press owners never seek to prioritise offering (brief) feedback to manuscripts or to speak to authors about improvements? If small presses can’t take the time to fart out a small paragraph of encouragement or advice to authors, can they ever expect to receive work of the standard they desire?

The problem is, small presses, like large ones, want masterpieces in their inboxes ready to publish with a minimum of editing (although large presses do have editors and want to work with authors to improve manuscripts). They aren’t willing to waste their skill as editors or teachers on work that has definite promise, or could become a masterpiece—why waste time when a masterpiece may turn up on their doorstep from one of the thousand or so MA programs?—and even if a masterpiece shows up, there’s nothing they can do if it won’t sell. The small press is even more helpless in the marketplace, and innovation is the first thing to die when it comes to finding a selling hook—money being the natural slaughterer of all things beautiful. These things aside, I still feel the small presses have an obligation to communicate more with authors. If the supposed guerilla DIY presses are simply as silent and unwelcoming of manuscripts as the big presses—the author continues to be the one getting stiffed.

One press I submitted to boasted “we are the future of publishing.” After sending my manuscript for consideration, I received no confirmation response, and over four months has passed without a reply. Some future.

54 Marriages in One Year! – The Foolproof Guide to Dating Without Dating, Sex Without Sex, and Marriage Without Marriage

Guest post by Dr. Chad Fortnight

Are you like me in that you simply don’t have time to follow through on long-term relationships due to a pell-mell non-stop no-time-to-breathe whirlwind helter-skelter schedule of 24-hour stuff that never seems to end? Do you regret the hours spent wasted in bars chatting to interesting and attractive people who it would take an absolute age to become closer to on date after date after date after time-eating date? Are you cynical about the prospect of keeping one partner for life, knowing full well the limited lifespan most marriages have in the modern world and the complications with kids that can cause? You need the ‘potential’ dating plan. A foolproof system that allows you to experience lifelong relationships over seven days, through a simple process of honing mind over matter.

Step 1. Choose a man or woman who appeals to you, and ask them out on a date. (If they refuse, you can attempt the following steps by merely observing the person from afar, but for now, it is advisable to start with a mutually agreed date). One the date has been scheduled, make a list of the aspects of their appearance that both appeal to and annoy you, and a provisional list of the traits that frustrate and delight you.

Step 2. Go on the date. Make sure the date is person-centred, not an activity. A quiet drink a restaurant or bar is fine. Ask the person about their past relationships, their family, their current occupation, their dreams, hopes, goals, and opinions on as many topics as possible. Make mental notes. (Taking actual notes is not advised, as it might ruin the prospect of the essential second date). Be sure to come across as interested in the person and make an effort conversationally yourself, to secure the second date.

Step 3. During the gap between dates, write down all the facts about this person and begin constructing scenarios that might arise in a long-term relationship—the fun activities together, sources of argument, incompatibilities, shared pleasures. Lie back on your bed and imagine as many of these scenarios as possible. To conduct a full ‘potential’ relationship, take each of these scenarios (or character traits) to an endpoint where the relationship will terminate. Squeeze as much pleasure as possible from the traits that appeal to you and take them towards the realm of frustration and departure. Here is an example:

a. Both like tennis. Scene: on tennis court where you banter and smile and laugh and have healthy fun. You don’t mind his or her competitive nature, until later he or she becomes determined to win and is less kind to you about your flaws. Arguments about balls being ‘in’ or ‘out’ spring up until the tennis stops completely.

b. Dislike of housework. Scene: when you are both married and have children and you are forced into doing more of the dishes and housework due to his or her domineering nature, and laziness in matters of domesticity. You may then decide to break up on the basis of this inequality and arrange visiting rights for the child.

c. Fondness for musicals. Scene: you indulge your partner’s fondness for this entertainment until it becomes clear they are completely shut off to other musical forms, and other forms of entertainment like books or cinema, and what you thought was a harmless trait has become an intolerable narrowness they refused to change.

Step 4. Second date. At this point, all the traits you dislike about the person should be amplified enough for this date to be the last—and good riddance. If you find you discover new traits of the person during the date that appeal to you, try to devise quick scenarios where these traits may cause frustration and unhappiness using the practice you have put in over the week. Remember to remain aloof on the date so the person doesn’t like you.

Sorry, Claire

Claire Turnbull is an ex-girlfriend whose life I ruined. We dated for a spell (relax—no sex) at university, she reading the Classics, me bog-standard Scottish Literature. One afternoon as we were discussing the anti-epic properties of Ovid’s epic The Metamorphoses over two fruit smoothies in a popular national chain she blurted out that she had written a novel that she wanted me to read. I was surprised because I had assumed Claire was from a bourgeois Devonshire background and therefore untalented. She produced a novel entitled The Corruption of the Enfeebled Elf-Children and told me I had a month to read before she wanted the manuscript back to send to Canongate, who at the time were a brave publisher of innovative new fiction. I read the novel to page twelve before concluding it had no artistic merit whatsoever and that Claire should stop writing or at least attend classes on how to produce a coherent cliché-free sentence. I was too scared to tell her that truth and so ignored her texts and emails for a week until she tracked me down in my flat. I told her that the manuscript was appalling and that it had little merit and she would need to sweat like a sun-stricken sow to stir up something semi-fine. She broke down and ran away, I was too tired to chase her. Later she texted me to wish me a swift and painful death and that I had ruined her life for the rest of her life (redundancy sic).

Blogging the Done

My latest pizza longish writing The House of Writers has been completed after up to five months of larks and slog. Originally conceived as a book-length comedic novel with unapologetic OTT humour and satirical touches, the idea fell flat as I hit the seventh chapter. In a stroke of desperate drunk-thinking I rearranged the existing material into the form of a corporate recruitment prospectus and trimmed half the fat. It feels exhilarating to take the shears to over 25,000 words of a novel but at the same time, like a machete being driven into my bowels. Contrasting emotions. Perhaps this is a final warning. If I ever attempt to write commercial fiction again the souls of the Great Unread will rise to smother me in the sack where I slumber. Back to exploring forms and structures. Back to forms as generators of content. Back to miscellaneous collages fragments interlinked digressive constraint-based whatnots. Back to doomed attempts at originality in an age where straight character-driven narrative is king and so-called exploratory literature (of which I am a slight practitioner) is binned. Onwards.

Five Personal Paragraphs on Beardy Deities

My religious life slowly evaporated after repeated Saturday night visits to mass as a child. There is no “right time” to drag an angsty teen to listen to sermons, singing and highlights from Ezekiel—Sunday mornings would be twice as heinous as a Saturday night after a week spent slogging through school and its time-bending boredoms. So when I left to make my fortune in the Big Town university, I wasn’t prepared for how fast and fatally I would fall into godless despair and need something kind and beardy to cling to. Blaming my brutal shyness on an unforgiving universe absent of kind beardy deities, I turned instead to Dostoevsky (successfully), Camus (less successfully), and Nietzsche (pointlessly).  

Dostoevsky’s tormented narrators and characters were a perfect fit for my own bleeding soul, especially the Underground Man, whose melodramatic rants and lacerating self-hacking laments chimed with my own outlook on the world. To cope, I adopted the aloof attitude of Mersault from Camus’s The Outsider, and wrote screeds of brutal prose by night, including a whole novel of howling woe called Don’t Tread on Me (I still have the tear-soaked MS in a folder whenever I want a chuckle). I had phased out Our Lord entirely until my final year, when hiccups of hope began hopping up my throat.

What I sought was not the worship and belief (I simply have no faith at all in God or Jesus), but for the transcendent love and kindness to other humans to work its way into my system of undying cynicism and loathing for human stupidity. I was after a form of “drive-by” belief, as if by rubbing myself up against church walls I could absorb some of that celestial essence and find myself less poisoned by bitterness and snarky detachment. Eventually I read the novels of Dickens, and was struck by the holy transcendence of his characters, and his attitude towards them, and the perfectly beautiful religious ecosystem in evidence. My own flickering spark of religious whatevs returned with attendant warmth.

But how does belief impact on one’s writing? Nowadaze, the standard position from young authors is smug detachment and a know-and-above-it-all attitude towards religious matters, and an assumption the reader starts out from a position of atheistical superiority (or, at least, this is one of the prevailing positions). So I if were to toddle back into the arms of a kind and beardy being and sat down to write my characters, would my writing take on a fresh new compassion, or would it lapse into sermonising banality? The point being: a positive move for the writer is not necessarily the best move for the art. My opinion is that it doesn’t matter: skilled writers won’t lapse into the same religiosity that plagued Tolstoy in his final years, they will find a way for their beliefs and work to cohabitate.

So there isn’t an actual point to this post as such, except to doff my yarmulke to God-lovers everywhere and say keep it up, on the QT, and watch this face for conversion experiences.

Turning Misery Into Art

One of the most disappointing realisations I have faced as a writer is that living through unpleasant or dark times does not automatically bestow me with an instinctive talent for writing about these dark or unpleasant times, nor does it give me instant access to the necessary emotional tools to create powerful and haunting prose wrought from the blackest caverns of my suffering. A prose style has to be sculpted to accommodate one’s flair for language, stylistic quirks, eye for detail or character insight, around the sympathetic or natural part of one’s personality responsible for the more arresting emotional peaks in a piece of work.
 

If anything the more suffering a person endures, the less likely they will be able to express themselves in lyrical streams of moving prose. Too much suffering creates psychological barriers between you and the work (writing opens old traumatic wounds), or leaves you too depressed or damaged to stare down the page (because drinking before the TV is nicer). I am not in the business of composing lyrical and emotional prose, but I do write about past miseries in the hope of connecting with the reader for a sort of shared-nod experience in between making them titter or entertaining with the language and pace and dialogue and characters in my stories.
 

This leads into the problem of trying to capture the intensity of the “minor emotions” that make up our lives. Say I was sitting alone, as all writers do, one evening and wanted to capture the slight melancholy of this loneliness in the story I was writing—not to ring tears from the reader, but make them feel a pang of semi-sympathy by way of recognition. To say James was sitting all alone in his room suggests the character’s own self-pity, and rather than feeling for him we laugh or smile at his sadness, because the very fact of someone’s loneliness suggests a personal failure that could have been avoided through being a less hopeless human specimen. We expect better of our characters. Why couldn’t he go out and make friends? Why should we feel sorry for someone who has only brought this feeling on himself? Our own experiences harden us against the experiences of people in books. Or even worse, our own feelings written on the page seem simply trivial and pathetic without sufficient artistic heft to turn them into valid literary emotions worthy of book-to-human responses.

In my own fiction, I am only interested in “minor emotions”— lonely sighs and self-pitying reflexes: failures of people to pull their socks up and solve their problems and arrive at the moments that precipitate “sweeping emotions.” People who can’t find a partner let alone lose them in a car crash. People who never find themselves involved enough to care if the whole team gets cholera. I want my stories to pirouette between these minor moments: I want my narratives to be largely comic, frosted with moments of pathos and sadness that create a coherent emotional tone behind the comedy. If I can achieve this I hope to represent the pervading sadness behind most human life and aim for a fairer depiction of the stoic emotional tapestry that makes up reality over the more manipulative focus on the “sweeping” that dogs mass-market prose.

Swallowing the Dictionary

Why has the English-language novel ended up in the hands of ventripotent thumb-twiddlers and feckless gaberlunzies? Remember when Charles Dickens wrote those compendious novels rich in voluminous word-spinnery (The Circumlocution Office in Little Dorritt, or the legal satire in Bleak House?) Remember when James Joyce blasted the ultracrepidarians with his beautiful masterwork Ulysses, and dis- and re-assembled the language for the craic in Finnegans Wake? As the novel continues to exhaust and normalise taboos, one taboo forever shunned is the unmarketable and temerarious practice of engaging with the dictionary. Why do all these spoffokins with their stercoricolous “lit-fic” offerings refuse to colour their prose with geflugelte Worte? Their ramfeezled dribblings hardly deserve a second glance beside thegalumptious masterworks by writers like Alex Theroux and co. That’s all.

A Tadpolish Memoir

When I was teenager I was ludicrously shy. I was the son and heir of a shyness that was criminally vulgar. My all-conquering shyness kept Morrissey in gold-plated ormolu swans for eight years. Any contact with human beings made me mumble in horror and scuttle off to lurk in dark corners. But I developed this automatic writing technique in school to ease my mounting stress whenever teachers were poaching victims to answer questions, perform presentations or generally humiliate. I would start out composing a piece of surrealist free-association prose, usually violently satirical. As the teachers (or pupils or other humans) closed in around me, my prose would lapse into soothing gibberish. Sometimes I wrote a stream of pretty sounding words (I was a rabid sesquipedalian in my teens)—zeugmatic, antediluvian, milquetoast, mugwump. Luscious lovely words! Sometimes language broke down into neologisms or gibberish—boobleplop, artycary, frumpalerp, etc. Nervy, throbbing syllables. I came to associate collapsed language with an inner space where I went to hide from the imagined humiliations of interacting with others. Once I escaped the imprisonment of my inner conscious (over a four-year period known as The Torture Years), I always used nonsense writing as a means of getting through difficult situations—where others might doodle, for example, I would write Joycean Jabberwocky. Still do, usually on the phone. So this book, to me, is The Little Book of Calm. Except it isn’t little, and it makes people shit themselves. Me? I love this magnificent beast. Unless you suffer from similar deep-seated psychological wounds that threaten to gradually consume your entire adult life, don’t read this monstrous thing.

A Sodding Update

Since graduating from the Napier MA (over a year ago now and STILL banging on about it!) I haven’t felt the need to maintain much of an online blog presence. Most of my online activities take place on Goodreads where I discuss what matters most to me—literature. Or, if you like, books. Discuss might not be the word. I write brief capsule reviews of the books I read and ten or so people ‘like’ my reviews without comment. If I feel like it, I leave inane comments on other people’s reviews. Still, I like it there.

My book group still meets on weekends, and the Ulysses meetup was extremely useful and laid-back. I sometimes feel inadequate as to how I dissect a text. I have strong urges to write extremely analytical closely-read essays on the books I read, but that would take up too much of my time, and who would care? I could spend over a fortnight writing one of those, all for the satisfaction of having autopsied the book so I briefly have “complete mastery” over it, only to forget the drivel I wrote in a few weeks. I did this for a spell between 2004-2007 with albums and made £300 on a reviewing site. Goodreads pays nada.

The best-friends-for-life writing-network-of-Napier-alumni thing hasn’t happened. Perhaps I was too naïve to assume people would want to start a collective for sharing and editing each other’s work with frequent meet-ups and so on . . . people do things, so I am told, in their lives, that make these things impossible. I did set up a semi-useful FB group which has already been forgotten about. My suspicion is people find publishers for their own work and forget to share, or think fuck it—I want to have the edge and don’t share on purpose. Does that sound embittered and envious of me? Possibly. I’m one of the few people who truffles for publishers and anthologies and then shares. I think people, especially writers, are inherently selfish and perhaps need to be to survive in this fucking horrible world. I don’t like it, but how many writers, upon winning a contest, will punch the air and say, in your face suckers! All of them? Writing is as predatory as any other business.

At the moment, I’m not writing with a commercial eye, I’m focusing on writing what I want to write. Arlene’s Atoms is, possibly, the closest to a mainstream thing I will produce. I recently sent the book, fatalistically, to a slew of small presses, skipping the big hitters. Realistically, if I have a small-press book, or maybe two or three in time, behind me, I will have more chance of being glanced at by the big fellas. So my hope is that one of the many fine small presses will pick it up. If they don’t, I will need to take up mainlining heroin into my knees. I think we were taught to be too ambitious at the Napier MA. Although the crushing futility of the endeavour of writing was repeatedly emphasised by David Bishop, I think I shouldn’t have been advised to sub to agents. It was a waste of time—I’m an unknown with no prizes under my belt. But what does that matter now?

I have a new novella on the go at the moment: the form and structure and content are cohering nicely. I write fairly quickly once these things are in place, so hopefully this will be finished early next year.

Distraction or, Look at that Shiny Thing

I have come to accept constant distraction as a part of the writing process. Having written with permanent internet access for most of my life, I can’t switch it off and concentrate fully on the open text. Because so many things swirl around in my head from sentence to sentence, I need to be able to click away, to check emails and Goodreads notifications and Facebook every four minutes. Things like: is this sentence as good as the preceding sentence? is this the best word choice here, what about these seven different words instead, is this working in the piece overall, what’s missing from this scene, is this the sort of thing I should be writing, what do I want to say here, do I want to say anything etc, etc, etc.

By keeping the internet on I am distracting all the wagging tongues in my head constantly questioning every word I write, trying to undermine my progress. But recently, I’ve found myself even more restless when writing short stories. Either I am coming around to the usefulness of the short form, or looking to evolve a long-ish short story form for the perpetually distracted reader of these times. I wrote two collage-like pieces called Digressiana that consist of complete microfictions, stories that break off halfway, little weird doodles, self-commenting snarks and bits that run throughout the piece as a whole.

The effect—which I tried last year in a story that simulated channel-hopping—is to create a form that responds to the contemporary attention span—esp. the online attention span (where these pieces may be published, if anyone publishes them at all), where the outcome of (or details pertaining to) one story is not necessarily all the reader cares about. Having many, many stories running at the same time, stories that are dropped or resumed, interrupted, replaced with better or worse ones, might be an interesting response to the distracted reader (and writer) dilemma. Or it might make it worse, by simply encouraging the problem. Who knows. Time will tell as I explore the form. Oh look—a shiny thing!

The Past is Tense

I often have moments where, thinking about the past and what could have been, I get pangs of melancholy. More recently, I have found myself aware of these moments and can easily dismiss them with the logic that, being the person I am with the upbringing I had, events would have turned out more or less similar regardless of minor alterations made to specific events in the distant yonder. Large differences in my personality and genetic makeup would need to take place for a more well-rounded person to have emerged to the one that exists now.

What I find strange is that when I was a depressed teenager, aged seventeen or so, I had the notion that I would look back on these moments of depression, of being lost and alone, for the rest of my life, since I knew the significance that one’s late teenhood has on the rest of your life—the teenage period as a nostalgia nerve-centre, where a person reflects on how their life turned out the way it did, all the decisions they made in early youth. I was right in that I do dwell on that period often, almost ten years on now, as being a pivotal moment in my life—an unhappy one, which I knew I would never reclaim. I knew I was missing out on the experiences people of my age group were having due to my shyness and fear, and I would never be able to relive this period.

I don’t find myself feeling down for very long—I have moved on in so many ways. In many ways, I am still the same, but I am happy and contended in my life at the moment, touch wood. But I do find myself more interested in exploring this unhappy period in my fiction: it seems so significant in terms of who I am and what I want to communicate to the world. Perhaps I’ll figure out why. In the meantime, let’s lament for nostalgia: it isn’t what it used to be.

Writers, Cornered

As 2012 cluck-skips along like a limp chicken on a treadmill, four million writers ponder the inevitable question: Why bother attempting to publish? Should we, whose novels remain unpublished and unloved, rise up and seize control of the means of production ourselves, abolish all agents, publishers and booksellers? The brief answer: no, we shouldn’t. Writers can’t be trusted to play nicely, we’d only publish ourselves and our friends. The answer to our current dilemma is simple—three and a half million of us need to fall on our swords. 

We need to cull more writers. The more writers in existence, the more page-turning mediocrities clogging up the marketplace. As writers, we have only one task—to innovate, to present old ideas in all-new makeup and backless ballgowns, to fool critics into thinking we can “steer the novel in exciting new directions” in an age where the novel has undergone such feats of contortion it’ll probably never walk again.

I would fall on my sword happily, if I weren’t part of the small mass of shipwrecked Crusoes, signalling desperate, never-seen-before signs from my desert island in attempts to escape my prison of isolation. I may be twice as redundant as the well-trained prose-makers who assemble novels like IKEA cabinets—the populace would rather have a thumping good read over a detailed analysis of the songs of Kathleen Hanna set in a postapocalyptic ski resort, written in Danish iambs—but at least on my deathbed I can look back on a lifetime raging against the mediocre. Epitaph: AT LEAST HE WASN’T FUCKING BORING.

Book Bites Man

My latest book, working title The State I Am In (a fake book in the same-titled Belle & Sebastian song), is a fictional autobiography with three narrative strands: one representing my spurious past, one a fantasy present, the other an imagined future. I arrived at a point in my writing where all attempts to write about issues meaningful to me via fictional constructs (i.e. characters), were leading back to me—me wanting to write directly about me. But, because I still wanted to write fiction with characters and plots and everything, I decided to make myself the subject, the source material. The hairy nub of the matter. So inside each (mostly fictitious) narrative are morsels of truth from my own life, smuggled indecorously, or hideously obvious. The reader’s task (if they wish) is to piece together a portrait of the author (me) from the information imparted. The three narratives can also be read for their own merits if the reader is spectacularly disinterested in me. Here’s some logic.

By putting all my neuroses into the novel, by remorselessly parodying myself so no aspect of my personality goes unmocked, I exhaust all self-criticism until I am completely purged of all indulgent solipsistic nonsense, freed at last into a world of happiness and self-love. The tragedy of the novel is that this doesn’t happen. Or something like that. This is an ex post facto spin I have put on the idea but makes sense to me as the sort of berserk subconscious motive I might have for writing this book. I simply want to mess around with the notion of the autobiographical novel—how a writer’s best work is based on personal experience, how readers attempt to relate certain details to the writer’s own personal history, how we can never completely disappear ourselves, Barthes-like, from the text and must be culpable for every ruddy word.  So far, I have completed two thirds of the first draft between May and August.

Arlene’s Atoms, my completely complete novel, my heartiest attempt at a mildly ambitious, mildly mainstream breakout novel, has been sent to six potential agents: had turn-downs from one (Conville & Walsh), waiting for the others. Once the MS is turned down from all six (one won’t correspond, I have to assume a no), I’ll scope out other possible UK agents, then will send the MS directly to big-publisher slush piles (i.e. into the vast blackness of space), then small-press slush piles (at least the suggestion of a response!), then I’ll give up. Not writing. But shopping the novel for the foreseeable future. If this book doesn’t get published I don’t hold much hope for getting another one out there.