A novella named after this blog

I wrote a novella that fits in one’s pocket. You could be sitting on a ski lift, preparing to slope down snowy tufts, and read page 28 of this novella that begins with the words “reason for making this trip”. You could be attending a cousin’s daughter’s clavichord recital, and in a break from the bumbled baroque boredom, read page 48 that begins with the words “my mother was pregnant at the time”. You could be erecting a supporting partition from drywall with seven other muscular builders, and in a lull, read page 12 that begins with the words “Paul was too vague to cause irritation”. You could be interviewing Sean Lennon about his latest album, and after making a barbed remark about his solo efforts never eclipsing the worst of his father’s avant-garde indulgences, read page 2 that begins with the words “of custard powder in a supermarket”. You could be in a chemistry lesson, feverishly trying to make the lime water turn cloudy with your carbon dioxide output, and read page 40 that begins with the words “in the lucrative trade of smuggling drugs”. There are 56 pages of text in this “sagging short”, so another 51 examples of moments in which this novella can be removed from a pocket for the purposes of reading can be provided on request. Otherwise, purchase here.

Recentish Pubs

This year has been a barren barrel for my short fiction due to various changes in my attitude to short fiction—i.e. a complete lack of interest and a slavish devotion to longer-form pieces, known as novellas and novels. Earlier this year, I was included in New Writing Scotland 31, an annual annual of Scots writing and a step forward for me in terms of being published in more well-known (and local) anthologies and not esoteric lit mags. The piece printed was the last in a series of four ‘disquisitions,’ titled ‘A Disquisition on Inadequacy Among the Salaried Classes’ and is purchasable at the above link. I also forgot about a little pub from last year, ‘The Third Person,’ pubbed in Ink Monkey Magazine 5, which is an all right little comedic fou, but the stage play version last year rocked. Another story, ‘A Florescence of Gerhards’ was published in Bellow Literary Journal 2.1. All available at those links from the Devil’s Bum.

Beeswax Magazine

My contributor copy of Beeswax Magazine Issue 7-8 arrived today (along with, charmingly coincidentally, my copy of Adam Thirlwell’s typographically berserk Kapow!). I have been looking forward to this publication, where my alphabetical lipogram From A to Z appears, for almost two years. Thanks to the very friendly editors for putting my extremely risky story into their magazine. Some images:

My Year in Stories

The first quarter of the year was devoted to completing Arlene’s Atoms, my fingers-crossed-first-official-novel-with-a-proper-publisher-with-a-proper-desk-and-everything. The submission process was slow but steady—after sending the novel to agents and picking up the rejections from the sorting office, I sent sample chapters to promising smaller-but-more-suitable publishers. I spent the mid-part of the year working on an experimental novella, The State I Am In, a form of fictional autobiography that takes its title from the Belle & Sebastian song. More recently, I’ve been working on a second novella called My Body of Work which uses the collage technique I deployed in three extremely pleasurable-to-write pieces (one below) published in delicious venues. Busy? Yes. But not enough. “I could always have written more!” cries the dying writer.

My short fiction output this year is naturally shorter than 2011, and most of these stories were written that year and published in this one. I lost track of when each story was published.

The longest story of the year, at 7000 words, was Maybe Tomorrow at the online zine Blue Lake Review. The story was an attempt to grapple on a somewhat serious level with social alienation, loneliness and depression while using various playful techniques to lift the story from the doldrums. Four socially alienated characters attend a bogus therapy group where they are asked to draw up new routines for each other and made to abide by them. The story pays a slight homage to Gilbert Sorrentino and BS Johnson with the typographical fancies and close third-person narration while trying to break away from those postmodern influences to touch upon something more genuinely melancholy. The zine was unable to reproduce the tables I had in the story, making the fourth part harder to navigate.

A Disquisition on the Erogenous Impulse in Prose Narratives was published in April at Martian Lit. One of three collage pieces, these stories were an attempt to cope with my spiralling distraction levels while writing and the audience’s limited attention spans with short fiction from unknowns on the internet. (I’m still convinced no one reads short fiction from unknowns on the internet apart from friends of the unknowns—I have no friends, hence no readers). I felt my disaffection with character, plotline and story could be resolved by choosing an unusual theme and constructing mini-stories, self-commenting attention-seeking bits, snatches of dialogue, satire and other areas of strength for me. Time will tell as I complete my current project which exhausts this technique.

The Four Seasons of Michael Michael at Laptop Lit is written in a series of internal monologues. It was an attempt to tell the story of one man, Michael Michael, a toff going insane in his country estate, entirely from the perspectives of his afflicted family. The Wonderfully Fecund World of the Hendersons at Piker Press was inspired by the protagonist in Harry Mathews’s The Journalist who becomes obsessed with composing every miniscule detail of his day in his journal at the expense of his sanity. The story has novel potential as there can be an unlimited number of narrators and contradicting plotlines.

New Zealand magazine OneTitle, now defunct, published Writing For Carol. This story addresses my crisis about writing for an unknown, unseen and (in the case of obscure writers) nonexistent audience. For whom are we writing? People like us? Just us? Does our work reach the sort of people we want? My protagonist in this story tries tailoring all his fiction to meet one person’s needs, finding more pleasure in the act of writing when his work leads him to actually connect with this one person for real, in the flesh. Imagine such a thing!

My only print publications in 2011 were The Little Book of Nothing—a story from last year republished in the Writings on the Wall anthology, and an edited version of The Drunk & the Godly in Octavius Magazine. (Now an e-book only—grr! Full text sans edits, here). My favourite publication, which I’ve yet to see, is the Oulipo homage From A to Z published in Beeswax Magazine. The first section is an alphabetical lipogram and the second an alphabet-shaped backwards lipogram (the text takes the shape of the alphabet, omitting each letter being described). My faith in pointless constraints and innovative batshittery remains unbroken!

As an experiment this year, I self-published my first polished and, uh, serious novel A Postmodern Belch. I wasn’t doing it properly, tirelessly virally promoting my novel on the social networks and so on, because I don’t have any influential friends (except Horst). I did inform my chums on Goodreads, and some of them kindly bought copies, others reviewed the book in return for a pdf edition. The book’s page is full of splendid parody reviews written in the spirit of the book, which was more delightful than making money, in a way. A small way. If by any chance you are criminally insane and want to buy a copy—here! (Seriously, I had more fun writing the book than anything else, I hope that shows).

Here’s to 2013!

A Postmodern Belch Released

My first fully furbished novel, A Postmodern Belch, was slated for publication in 2010 at Goldfish Press. Due to an overwhelming outcry of despair from interns and meddling writers wanting their own books published, unforeseen car accidents and traitorous editors, the book never got printed by this small Californian boutique press. Years later, my enthusiasm for this super-silly, overindulgent work of youthful exuberance has not diminished, so I have decided to self-publish the novel via Lulu. It’s available via that fine crankshaft for the pocket-scorching fee of £7.06 + P&P. Here is an interview with myself, pertaining to:

Interview with The Author

MJ: You are The Author of this undergraduate folly, correct?
MJ: I am.
MJ: What did you hope to gain by self-publishing a no-holds-barred tricksy embarrassment like this?
MJ: Love and acclaim.
MJ: Ha!
MJ: Just kidding. I hoped to free myself from the self-conscious novel. From the tiresome limitations of self-reference.
MJ: Did you succeed?
MJ: Once you let doubt and awareness creep in you’re never free.
MJ: Tell us about the novel.
MJ: Three characters, Harold (based on me), Lydia (based on the woman I would like to be), and Greg (based on boring normals) wrestle for control of the novel, A Postmodern Belch.
MJ: Is that it? For 367pp?
MJ: Yep.
MJ: Uh . . . .
MJ: There are different fonts! Larger fonts! Footnotes! Sometimes fonts fluctuate in size mid-sentence.
MJ: God, you are so crazy. Such a fucking innovator.
MJ: This is turning into self-abuse now.
MJ: So?
MJ: A Postmodern Belch is all about self-abuse. It’s about being locked in a mind so paralysed by the reality of the self (don’t snigger) that it cannot tame its characters, cannot escape the solipsistic hells of the hyper self-aware long enough to create a decent story.
MJ: Who needs a decent story?
MJ: Exactly.
MJ: Who needs characters, plots, emotional sustenance, depth and intelligent discourse?
MJ: Exactly.
MJ: When you can have three unpleasant bastards shouting at each other for 367pp about how much they hate being products of the M.J. Nicholls imagination and fonts that expand mid-clause and crazy kerning and childish swear words every four lines in place of actual substance, thought, creativity, excitement, humour, energy or meaning?
MJ: Exactly.
MJ: You have written the least readable book in the galaxy.
MJ: I hope so.
MJ: Who will read it?
MJ: The self-loathing. People who hate me.
MJ: That’s your audience?
MJ: Works for Martin Amis.
MJ: Thank me for my time.
MJ: Thank you. Me.

One can acquire A Postmodern Belch here.

If no one reads me, do I exist?

If no one reads me, do I exist?

Could this be the buggiest of the bugbears? I am widely published online and reasonably well-published in small periodicals, right? So who the heck reads my stuff and why is it published? Why have the publications who have published me . . . published me? Why don’t they tell me what they liked about my stories? Why don’t I ask them? Would that seem strange? Why isn’t the new Magnetic Fields album Love at the Bottom of the Sea very good? How do I develop a short story form that fits the über-distractedness of the modern online user, and helps me write more than 1K a week, if lucky? Are people reading my stories in these widely unread periodicals or skipping them for their unappealing and downright repulsive content? Is this blog post coming to end? Is it? Yes?

P.S. My story Writing For Carol was recently published in OneTitle Summer 2012 issue, on p112. You can read me, and I will exist! Maybe . . .

The Most Lucrative Pub Yet

My story, co-written with Christopher Allen (and so ‘our story’—sorry Herr A), Maggie’s Setlist, impressed the editors of Furrow Magazine so much (bursting out their khaki slacks with glee, they was!), they published our 5K-and-counting story in the twelfth issue of their undergraduate literary review, also called Furrow Magazine. Coincidence or what!? Now, here’s the problem. Furrow don’t list their magazine online to buyers. So to acquire a copy of this fine publication you have to contact their editor Corey Klinzing and ask nicely. You can do this by emailing him at furrowmag[AT]gmail[DOT]com. Now I’m not deluded enough to think any of my no readers would email an editor in order to (maybe) acquire an esoteric campus-based publication. But you should. I also need somewhere to put this pub on my wall of stories, so this post has two reasons to exist. If you happen to be a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, you can collect a copy from the third floor of the union, office number 388.

Luka on the Second Floor

Dear Luka,

You live on the second floor. You live upstairs from me. Yes, I think you’ve seen me before. I am Charles Harold Ottridge, I live on the first floor. Frankly Ms. Luka, I am fed up with the noise coming from your apartment. I have tried repeatedly to contact you in the evenings, but when I knock on your door, you or your husband refuse to answer. It is not my concern whether you choose to participate in domestic violence, but I would appreciate if you would do it with less volume, as some of us like to relax in the evenings after a hard day’s work.

Yours,

Charles

*

Dear Charles

I received your letter with concern this morning. I am sorry about the noise coming from our apartment, but I assure you it is not domestic violence. I am a very clumsy person and I often trip on stairs and bash my face on walls on so on. This often happens in the evenings and so the noises you hear are me having my accidents. Please don’t report these noises to the landlord, we are quiet people really and do not want to cause a fuss.

Yours,

Luka

*

Dear Luka,

Thank you for your rather clumsy reply to my original letter. As I said, what goes on in your apartment is not my concern but I would ask that you keep these “accidents” to a minimum in the evenings or I will be forced to speak to the landlord about the noise.

Yours,

Charles

*

Dear Charles

I received your letter and I wanted to know why you are so unhappy that you have to make threats to me. I told you I will try to keep my accidents to a minimum so why do you have to threaten me? I want to know why you are such an unhappy man that you would write these things.

Yours,

Luka

*

Dear Luka,

I can assure you I am perfectly content, providing the volume of noise decreases in your apartment.

Charles

*

Dear Charles,

Men like you make good graves.

Luka

P.S. My very long and very miserable and squirmily playful story Maybe Tomorrow is up at Blue Lake Review.

My Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor

OK, here’s the skinny. I submitted my story ‘A Florescence of Gerhards’ to you last year. You respond several months later with heavy edits, expressing a promising interest to bring the story to publication. I rewrite various sections of the story based on vague impressions of the sort of end you have in mind, enjoying the healthy and rare dialogue between writer/editor. Communication is shaky from then on as I send you my latest edits and suggestions, and you refer me to a co-editor. Said co-editor speaks to me once, claiming to have read my edits, and will return with her own edits soon, once she unpacks her luggage or such and such in her NYC basement loft or somewhere. Silence reigns for a long time. I assume the journal has bitten the dust. Eventually, you reply explaining all sorts of internal conflict, and profess you have lost the ability to be neutral on my story, the subtext being ‘I am thoroughly fed up of this piece and would like to move on.’ Being a reasonable sort of fellow, you extend an olive branch and ask me to submit another story for your latest issue, ‘Maggie’s Setlist,’ which I summarily send, having a matching story available. I take this gesture as genuine, being a naive sort of chap. You promise me a response ‘within the week,’ and I send an enquiring email, asking for that response two weeks later. I then send another email asking for a response to the non-response a month later, to which I have still to receive a response. So here we are. One disgruntled writer seeks mumbling apologies from unresponsive editor. Is this how one runs an effective, healthy, writer-loving literary journal of cutting-edge prose? Or is this another example of the excruciating dead-air snub that writers have come to hold so dear in their professional lives? I have published quite a few stories now in my (young) writing career, so it’s not as if I’m desperate to see my piece in print, and hey, chances are my piece won't "meet your needs" at this specific time. But when you open up a dialogue with someone in a friendly way, you enter into a social contract with the person that requires courtesy, courtesy, and, uh, a response. Any response. This year.

If this email receives no response I will come to the Bellow offices and put moonshine in your gravy.

Love and kisses,

MJ Nicholls

Writing Through Stress

I suffer from a nervous anxiety disorder, an unspecified one, which naturally manifests itself at stressful times. Lately I’ve been overwhelmed with anxiety trying to sort out my financial situation while remaining reasonably sane. It hasn’t been easy, since I spend many days fretting about meeting rent payments, waiting for money to come into my account, licking and stamping correspondence, and so on. Over the last few months I have also had problems finding a place in the world outside writing words, to the extent I am scared to do anything else, i.e. in the world of work, and I now find it impossible to picture myself in any paid employment. This problem has lead to ongoing counselling sessions to try to reduce my fear at confronting the world of money-earning.

But this isn’t a woe-is-me post, this is a post about writing through difficult times. When I have a problem that is wrenching me up inside, I tend to fixate on the problem until it goes away (temporarily), and then I can either move on immediately, or slowly over a day or so. I fear this disturbs my writing life, much in the same way it interrupts my attempts at being normal—i.e. trying to look for work or engage in the outside world. I sit down to write something but feel overwhelmed at the thought of making another piece of work come together—I think this partly stems from my MA where I had to think very deeply about the purpose for writing a story in the first place.

I feel sometimes all I have to say, generally, is that life is mostly quite hard but with occasional good bits. Where are the complexities in my work? Do I need to be employed in a range of badly paid jobs before I can gather the necessary experience to write stories with meaning and significance? When I had badly paid jobs in the past, I never wrote about them at all. Literary realism is not my bag. I only want to write about people like myself who are terrified of living. To understand why people participate in world. How, beyond having to make money, do people find the urge to get up and work all day? Is all human endeavour motivated solely by money and fucking?

At the moment I can feel my anxiety eating into my writing confidence, which is not a source of any pleasure. On a happier note, my story A Disquisition on the Erogenous Impulse in Prose Narratives was recently published at the excellent Martian Lit. And another piece written for the tenth anniversary of Piker Press, The Wonderfully Fecund World of the Hendersons was published there today.

My Theatre Debut

My first playlet was performed as part of the debut 10 Minuters evenings on March 22-24 at the Counting House, Edinburgh. The playlet was originally a short story written in the second person for an anthology, but I never heard back from the anthologisers so I converted the dialogue-heavy piece into a play, milking the final line for necessary laughs. I think the cast, organisers and writers were largely Edinburgh Uni students, the humour being collegiate and largely student-centric, but I was delighted when my play, ‘The Third Person,’ produced audible chuckles and the preceding nine minutes had a pay off.

The only snag was that my name was omitted from the program, leaving me an anonymous contributor to the audience. Oops. Still, I was worried the playlet would meet blinks of incomprehension. The actors performed my spoof Sherlockian sheep-theft mystery sketch brilliantly, especially Jack Robbins who had basically all the lines and aced his dippy Norfolk farmer accent. Criticisms? I had no communication with the director, so I was at the mercy of his (or her?) editing skills, but the script was unchanged except switching sexes of the second person. The organiser Alex Clark might have been more responsive to some of my emails, perhaps. But I’m quibbling now.

The experience has left me hungry to write more playlets—not necessarily comedic sketches, but playlets with comedic elements. Equally good was this enthusiastic review, where my play was applauded. Contrasted with this lukewarm review where I got a slight spanking. As for the other plays, they tended towards the comedic, and my own seemed to act as a chuckle-starter for the last few numbers, which played like extended comedy sketches. Good ones. ‘Crunch! And the world went down’ had the strangest title of the night but created an intriguing internet-paved inverted world. ‘Occupied’ was a tender transgender piece, nicely realised. The best of the comedic plays, for me, was closer ‘Modern Art,’ which could have come straight from Peep Show.

My Year in Stories

It’s been a pleasing year for larding stories into esoteric but beautiful literary magazines. It can feel fruitless being published in these venues since you never know who, if anyone, is reading you. But that’s something even well-known authors and geniuses face, so shut up me. I got stories published. I should be grateful, and I am, even when I’m not.

First stories published this year were How to Wreck a Human at The Literary Burlesque and The Manifesto For Exploding Televisions at Metazen. The former is a homage to Gilbert Sorrentino where I blatantly aped the voice he uses in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Fortunately, the Literary Burlesque closed their website and my story no longer has any online presence, so this rip-off is no longer open to your scorn. Hurrah!

Next was my first ever audio publication Fingers in Our Ears at Liquid Imagination, read by the husky-voiced former movie announcer Robert Eccles. This story, once again, takes up the Sorrentino influence but attempts to use cynicism as a more wrenching emotional spanner.

Becoming a Bandit was published in Feb 2011 in the enormous collection Winter Canons. It’s a coming-of-age tale of bandits-in-training and assorted incompetence in the Wild West. The book itself is accessible to Americans only, since the cost to ship the tome Brit-side is frankly ludicrous. The Easily Persuaded Killer is a crime story of some description, in the satirical mould, as that’s what tends to happen with me. It takes potshots at Ian Rankin Denise Mina types, and it’s in the collection Ransom (scroll down lots).

The strangest story of the year goes to man/woman in a collection of “apocalyptic erotica” called This is the Way the World Ends. The piece is actually a split-page formal experiment which happens to involve one scene of simulated sex between a homosexual man and woman. The story was improperly formatted in the book, which ruined the design somewhat, but Freaky Fountain Press have some quirky books in their staple, so I forgive them. The story itself slightly embarrasses me now, but hey ho hum.

In April, my first creative non-fiction piece Instruction Manual For ‘Burntisland Beach Disaster’ was live at Shaking Like a Mountain. Then in June, The Ante Review published it again with an incorrect title and no response to my emails asking them to fix it. Thanks!

More authorial angst was published in Glint Literary Journal with The Little Book of Nothing where I aped Lucy Ellmann’s style with mixed results. The story features the sexual abuse of trees . . . and dribbling. My favourite publication of the year, Prime Mincer, published my story Downfall of the Dans: A Comic Opera. I used the form of an operatic aria to structure the story, and I seem to still be happy with the results, so all is well.

In September I had another short in Metazen, Ffion at the Fjord. I used a ‘reader key’ to give the reader three reading options, short, shorter, shortest. There’s also a little flash piece in the online Edinburgh mag Broken Doll Collective, Ffion at the Funfair. It was a good month for story success, as Frankie & Johnny, the piece I adapted for a class exercise, was printed in Duality 5: Style. The editor misspelled my name, which took the pleasure off somewhat. But I got published so shut up shut up. I’m such an ingrate.

I also love Barge Journal, who published the first in a cycle of pieces using a fragmented narrative approach. The technique involves a series of thematically linked mini-stories, digressions and stylistic quirks to create a “disquisition” of sorts—something that raises a number of interesting ideas and discussion points on an off-kilter topic, a caffeine rush of ideas and anecdotes. The first, A Disquisition on the Importance of Scottish Heather was published there. The second, A Disquisition on the Centrality of Sandwiches in Corporate Britain went up this month at Eyeshot.

So thank you to all these fine venues, a special thank you to my indispensible proofreading bitch Christopher Allen, and a special thank you to me for writing so much pap. My current stack of unpublished material, by the way, totals ten freaking stories, so I have a strenuous year ahead. Good luck me, and good luck to you with your writing endeavours!

Denise Mina, Fragmented Narratives & Packaged Sandwiches

Denise Mina

I saw Denise Mina lecturing in the Anatomy Theatre on Glasgow campus last Thursday. OK, not lecturing. Talking. I saw Denise talking in the Anatomy Theatre. It’s a marvellous shrine to the body, with dismembered limbs lit up like art exhibits, femurs in formaldehyde, the whole caboodle. Denise was talking about her crime fiction and how the best material is found in the newspapers, gossip and buying coppers a dram or two.

I couldn’t quite link her writing process to my own . . . she writes tightly plotted genre novels, I go in for more inscrutable narrative stuntpilotry that never takes off into the stratosphere. It was interesting to hear how much she improvises to give the prose a freshness and inner tension, to generate the unexpected twists that keep her novels entertaining. Apart from that, mostly gas about her TV adaptation and strong female characters.

Fragmented Narratives

It’s official. I love fragmentation. I love narratives cobbled together from little flash paragraphs, weaving three or four stories together to create a striking overall product. Like David Markson. It’s this approach I’m taking for the second half of my novel. And, coincidentally, it’s this approach I’ve taken for my latest published story, A Disquisition on the Centrality of Sandwiches in Corporate Britain, up now at Eyeshot. Er . . . goodnight!

Death of a Blogger

Last week, hanging out at the Canongate offices, I spoke to the editors about my new book proposal. In this novel, Death of a Blogger, the protagonist murders himself in cold blood then blogs about the experience of being a dead person. His posts set the blogosphere alight. Twitter goes into meltdown with links. No one can take their eyes off these insightful but badly spelled posts about what it’s like to be a dead man blogging.

The editors raised a few logical questions, as they always do. How would readers know the blogger was truly dead? He’d post pictures of his decomposing corpse on Twitter, silly. Set up a special Flickr account with daily shots of his body as it wastes away. The uglier each picture became, the higher his fame would rise. What would make the posts so special? They would chart the physical and emotional sensations of being a dead person. How it feels in the skin and bones and, most importantly, in the heart.

Canongate love a book with movie tie-in potential. They want truckles of money in buckets, and they want it now, baby! So we struck a deal. Four million bottles of Evian for the first two hundred words. Deal! The book would be written in the first-person then switch to the disembodied third upon the protagonist’s death, because that sounds clever. In practice, it would make the narration rather odd, having a dead man talk about his former self in the third person, but these are tough times. If it ain’t fresh, it ain’t shit.

To research this novel, I have cut my throat. As I write this, blood is dribbling onto the keyboard, making it rather difficult to press down keys with all the gummed blood. The protagonist should shoot himself in the heart. Something with metaphor potential. I have started a separate blog for my posts and so far, no one has commented despite a viral marketing campaign: milking my death on FB, Twitter and YouTube. I might have to record a song or perform a public stunt to increase my heat. Perhaps I could suck the blood of small children while singing a Mariah Carey number. Whatever works.

Other problems have arisen: people I live with have gone insane at seeing a corpse walking around and conversing like a normal human being. The world of science and reason have collapsed to their knees at the discovery someone might slit their throat and carry on as normal, despite losing all his blood and severing his windpipe to prevent oxygen intake. This will all have to go in the book. I see an epic novel and film franchise on the horizon!

It’s not too bad being dead, really. It’s actually quite liberating. I don’t have to worry about council tax or anything. Hey . . . I now have three opening lines for the book! Some things just write themselves.

P.S. My story "A Disquisition of the Importance of Scottish Heather" is here in Barge Journal #1. Not free.

P.P.S. My story "Frankie & Johnny" is here in Duality 5. Also not free.

Glasgow & Other Twonkery

OK, so this blog is not exactly fizzling with activity. I have an excuse, however. I was, last Tuesday, given the Most Concise Hermit Award in the Hermitage. Apparently, all those years giving uninteresting two-word responses to people have paid off, and I am now the proud owner of one shiny quartz mantelpiece filler. Little do they know, I am merely the last in a long line of Scottish men who really don’t have much to say for themselves.

We acknowledge the general limitedness of small talk among all subsets of society, and choose not to participate in the vocal inevitabilities. Among co-students, phrases were parsed pertaining to essays, along with hilarious asides about a frazzled mental state derived from writing so damn hard and fast one’s nerve endings were shot to buggery. In truth, I don’t find writing too hard, it’s the sitting down every day that really smarts. My following contributions to the MA banter were: “Ha ha. Right.” And the classic: “That’s good.”

But enough of this silliness. Did you know that I’ve moved cities? Yes, I am now in Glasgow, looking down upon the burly Glasgow folk with a critical eye, as if to say: “Oh, you silly peasants!” The move felt right: Edinburgh was fine for a certain period in my life, a period we’ll call “education” for ease, but Glasgow is more about living like an actual human being. Not some amorphous brain vacuuming up facts and knowledge. But. My flat is, oddly, about two minutes away from the Glasgow campus. Ahem.

I like Glasgow already. It’s not as cramped. I can swing four cats without killing a tramp. And the tramps are more spaced out. No more strategic triangulation outside the train station. Simple swerves around postboxes or pretend gazes off into the distance. And the air! Well, it might smell like sewage and blubber in a cheese and onion crisp packet, but it’s better than the perfumed oil slick stench from Auld Reekie. Fact.

Edinburgh retains a sense of haunting desolation from when it was the murder capital of the UK, and although this might please those insufferable twonks who think ‘death’ and ‘blood’ are cool (why isn’t the hospital the coolest place in town, then? tell me that, brothers!), for those like me prone to genuine moments of loneliness and despair, Glasgow has more scope for genuine violent interaction. There’s nothing like a good kick the nuts to bring you screaming back into life, in all its giddy pointlessness.

P.S. New short at Metazen.

Duotrope

Duotrope is the easiest go-to spot for writing markets, and although a fair pelt of places don’t list on the site, it’s still an invaluable resource for people seeking a hassle-free way to publish their work. As a resource for novel-length work it’s not so useful but for short stories, well . . . it’s a simple and effective tool and it’s free for now, so hurrah.

There is an emphasis on genre writing and markets, though it is easy to use for literary or experimental work too, if “general” is chosen as a genre and no subgenre is stipulated. It’s also worth considering whether a piece might fit into unexpected places. I wrote a somewhat experimental story with split-page narrative that ended up in an ‘apocalyptic erotica’ anthology, so it’s always worth pushing the limits of what magazines might accept, if they seem flexible and open to different types of storytelling.

There’s always a veil of secrecy over where a writer has submitted their work—or perhaps I’m not nosy enough—but I don’t mind sharing markets with others and don’t have the kind of first-come first-served mindset that makes the submitting process a lonely business. Aww. I think we touched on something personal there. Better pull back before I get the Kleenex out. So if you write stories like mine, which I loosely describe as playful, humorous and miserable, you might like the following colourful online publications:

Glint Literary Journal

The Ante Review

Liquid Imagination

Rose & Thorn Journal

Metazen

N.B. I have a story in the new issue of Prime Mincer, available here on Amazon. I can’t make people buy it, but better to give it a mention than meekly ignore the fact.

Challenging Anneka

Last night I went outside and collected all the bottle caps lying on the pavement. Total number: 230,000. I sent half of them to Anneka Rice in over ten padded envelopes and got this LOVELY response:

Dear Jeremy,

Thank you for your sweet gift of 230,000 bottle caps. I will treasure them dearly and add them to my collection of barnacles, condoms and pigeon beaks. When all this is over, all this madness and strife, perhaps we can meet up for a panettone by the fountain? I know I’m a romantic fool Jeremy, but why can’t we go crazy once in a while, why can’t we unleash the love beasts from time to time, toss them a soggy biscuit?

Regards,

Anny

Well! What a charming response. Sadly, I had to decline her offer of a panettone, because I believe in the principle that panettone eating will lead to sense of alienation and despair, and I need some cheeriness in my life right now, having lost a KP nut down the sofa last week. Hard times, but the love of a good woman and a rousing speech from Chuck D got me through.

This is normally the point a reader’s interest drops off in surreal writing. See, they know nothing logical is coming. They’ve already absorbed the bottle caps, the letter to Anneka Rice, they know the whole post is riddled with stupidities. Good blog posts should be about here’s what I did on Monday in a bank with a rubber duck and a wrench. Here’s the fungal cream I’m using. It works wonders. People are very fickle, we don’t need them.

Speaking of fungal cream, there’s a new brand on the market (lie), it helps dissolve bacteria (lie) and cures those nasty verrucas (lie) and makes you generally feel better (lie.) Order now from wherever.

Here’s Anneka’s response:

Dear Joseph,

I’ve very disappointed in you! For weeks I have knitted and knitted clothing for you, lovely sweaters and trousers and cardigans, and then I discover you do not want to munch my panettones? Well, I certainly won’t be receiving anymore bottle caps from you! And if you try to send them, I will block them with my Anneka Power, and you will cry so hard your eyes will fall out and I won’t nurse you when you’re a blind man, oh no!

Yours,

Angela

Oh well. She seemed so friendly on Challenge Anneka.

P.S. My story The Little Book of Nothing (pdf link) is accessible in Glint Literary Journal #2.

And for some reason my last published story has been republished here, in The Ante Review.

Subliminal Advertising

The trouble with advertising these days is its stubborn omnipresence. No one is interested. No one gives a blithering hoot about anything they see on TV or the interwebs. In the 50s, men with RP accents lectured housewives about detergents and soap powders and they sat there, transfixed, thinking how much more efficient the new Suds Off formula would be at eliminating those stains. Men would drool over Dodge Chargers and aspire to drive fast and wear tweed coats and be the hippest dandy at the ball.

Now, advertising is crammed into any available corner of a webpage, and we’re trained to ignore it. None of it makes much sense. It doesn’t even try, it stands there like a man with a GOLF SALE sign dying of heat exhaustion in a pissy shop doorway. In Rupert Thomson’s novel Soft a subliminal ad campaign is conceived by implanting the product name into a person’s mind while sleeping. The people become mindless doilies, muttering the product name again and again before topping themselves.

Even successful adverts have little effect. We remember the advert for its artistic qualities, not for the dreadful product its hawking. Internet advertising is corrupt and underhand. Flashing cursors take us to instant payment pages where we are charged $1000 for a bun. People don’t trust advertising links as they all go straight to child porn sites and download snuff films straight to your hard drive. So how does anyone sell anything?

They don’t. Subliminal advertising is back in vogue. The theory is simple. People who read online tend to skim articles or blogs for their key quotes or points. So what companies need to do is implant their product names at opportune moments in the text where the reader’s brain will pass over the words. Here’s an example from an article by Hélène Mulholland in today’s Guardian:

The Royal College of Nursing has overwhelmingly backed a motion of no confidence in Andrew Lansley’s handling of the NHS reforms. Delegates at the RCN conference in Liverpool voted 99% in favour of the Pepsi motion as the beleaguered health secretary struggles to persuade the public of the Toffee Crisp merits of his health reforms.

Nurses are angry that Lansley refused to Tesco deliver a keynote speech to the conference, opting Foster’s instead to meet a group of around 60 nurses in Liverpool as part of RBS the government's "listening exercise" on the controversial reforms. However, the health secretary appeared unmoved by Cadbury’s the almost unanimous dissent from a union traditionally seen as being more conservative in character than Sony some.

Now you have an overwhelming urge to eat chocolates, drink pop and change banks. As soon as this subliminal advertising is in place, websites and McVities blogs can stop the endless trafficking and Pepsi get on with providing useful and interesting content. The sooner the Sainsbury’s better.

P.S. First creative non-fiction piece of mine is up at Shaking Like a Mountain.