How One Image Can Suggest An Alternate Reality

The other day I came across an image that I had not seen for thirty years:

It is a cover from the US version of 'Vogue' magazine of April 1918.  When I saw it last it was printed on a mirror, in a 'cloakroom' of a large house in a Surrey suburb.  I think this one from the 1970s as I remember more pink in it than the image above:

The thing is, I was very conscious that it had been produced in April 1918, at a time when the USA had been in the First World War for 12 months.  It seemed so wrong that something so decadent could have been produced when such carnage was being witnessed.  Aside from that, the portrayal of peacocks so large that they could be ridden on, was clearly fantasy.  Thus, the way my brain processed it was to envisage that somehow it had arrived from an alternate reality in which there had been no First World War; the USA or anyway, somewhere using cents, had a decadent society and rideable peacocks did exist.  

Then it reminded me of the 'Dancers at the End of Time' series of novels by Michael Moorcock that I read in the 1980s in an omnibus edition; I had a copy of the one shown below, so you can see where that idea might have come from:

The books were 'An Alien Heat' (1972), 'The Hollow Lands' (1974) 'The End of All Songs' (1976) and then as is typical with Moorcock the setting and characters featured in other books, notably 'Legends from the End of Time' (1976) a collection of short stories; 'The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming' (1977) and 'Elric at the End of Time' (1981) two short stories featuring Moorcock's most famous fantasy anti-hero turning up in the End of Time milieu.  The stories feature a range of bizarre though largely sympathetic decadent characters in a kind of soap opera of various activities.  They live a very baroque life with the ability to change any matter at the touch of one of their rings, drawing on the immense power of cities built millenia before.  The cover reminds me of the song 'Ride a White Swan' by T.Rex (1970).

No-one writes this kind of fiction any more and even, as I noted with Hal Duncan's 'Vellum' while publishers may permit Moorcockian style work to come out, its time is passed and anyway even in homage these days it is laboured when Moorcock was epigrammatic.  I have no idea if George Wolfe Plank (1883-1965), the artist who produced the cover ever had any thoughts of alternate realities or whether he simply wanted to produce elegant, fantastical imagery.  A 1923 cover of a woman with a household dragon and another one of a woman on a zebra-unicorn suggests certainly a love of the fantastic.

Anyway, my simple idea with this posting was to recall an image which though I imagine it never had that intention, triggered off many thoughts of very different worlds and also in terms of writing, how a single image can generate ideas for a short story if not an entire novel.

The Loneliness Of A Long Distance Author - the Complaints of Anakana Schofield

I was very irritated by an article I read in 'The Guardian' of 27th July 2013.  It was entitled 'How to publicise a novel' and was written by Anakana Schofield.  She has had first novel, 'Malarky' published and received Can$1000 (£625) and then a further £6500 for it, from the publishers; not a share of sales.  In her article she whines about the burdens of publicising her novel.  She compares her travelling around the country being interviewed about her book and meeting with the public to compelling a train driver to go to Scotland to show people the train he drives.  The analogy is very poor; perhaps someone who designed or built the train showing it off would be more accurate; if she was equivalent to the train driver she would work in a bookshop being compelled to sell 'Malarky'.

Schofield misses entirely that she is an artist.  Painters, sculptors, even actors (and certainly directors), have to go around publicising their work, often at their own expense. Think of how many bands and singers have to tour around the country trying to get people to listen to them and buy their music off i-tunes or even a CD that they have paid to have made.  This can be a long and soul-destroying job with no guarantee of success.  Schofield needs to realise she is in the same category.  Sports people often travel far and wide and stay in appalling conditions just to carry out the sport, sometimes they have to pay for the pleasure of doing so.  I used to know a national level badminton player who, because badminton does not have the prize money of tennis, had to hold down an ordinary job and spend her weekends driving herself to events and putting herself up.  I have known black belt Aikido instructors with international reputations sleeping in dojos when training away from home.  These are the equivalent to an author.  If you choose this life you have to put up with what comes with it.  She should speak to painters who have to lug all their paintings from event to event in the hope of selling one.

This is nothing new for authors.  Even the most successful have had to get on the road to publicise their work and do innumerable book signings.  The author and journalist, Richard Meredith whose ‘One Way Or Another' which I read and reviewed in June, self-published in the period before e-books made this so much easier.  He did not even have a publisher to distribute his book and would drive around with boxes of them in his car, trying to persuade local bookshop managers to take a few to sell and going back to collect the money later.  Schofield does not have that problem, with online sales dominating, people can get her book even if the author on tour comes nowhere near them.  Despite her whining publicising her book has actually got a lot easier than it was a decade or two ago.

Schofield complains about writing 'endless unpaid blogs', clearly unaware that any sensible author does that before they have even begun writing the book.  I know some people earn money from their blog, but who really expects to get an income from spouting their own views of the world, bar a handful of lucky columnists and they are far more constrained than a blogger.  She complains about having to write responses to newspapers and 'random people creating things in basements'.  This amounts to snobbery as she was no different when writing the novel.  Schofield seems to categorise society and feels that she as an author should receive different considerations.  Again, she seems to be living in the past, perhaps the 1950s, not even the 1970s.  Where did she get the idea that publishing houses did all the publicity for their authors?

While she sees herself as a person who deserves privileges, she also sickeningly tries to draw parallels between her 'predicament' and that of ordinary people: the 'security guard who is not allowed to tweet, but must also do the cleaning.  Or the hospital cleaner who is forced to reapply for his own job but on lower pay'.  She does not see she is nothing like these people, she is getting paid to do what she loves, talk about what she loves to all and sundry and even get a newspaper to cover her whining about how hard this is.

Schofield also highlight the personal questions she gets asked and especially about her own sexuality given the sexual content of the novel.  Again, I am surprised that she is surprised by this.  Has she not read reviews of books or other works of art before?  Has she not seen how reviewers probe motivations that may stem from the artist's personal life?  Schofield seems amazingly cut off from how contemporary society behaves.  She has clearly never read a tabloid newspaper or indeed even watched some of the output from more respectable news broadcasters like the BBC.  People are obsessed with other people in their own right, not necessarily for what they do but simply for who they are.  Schofield clearly needed lessons in this and the easiest way was to review some of the many thousands perhaps millions of words written about J.K. Rowling, or possibly given Schofield's own writing, E.L. James.

Schofield ends by complaining about the fact that there has been a shift from a culture in which people read to one in which they write.  This is probably not as great a shift as she believes, it is simply that whereas in the past people's writing would be confined to something they typed, shared with friends and sent to be rejected by publishers, now it is visible to all via blogs and through self-publication of e-books.  I am a classic example.  I was doing this thirty years ago, but the technology then was missing to allow me to expose my work to the entire planet.  Again her view of this apparent shift suggests Schofield is pretty much out of touch with contemporary society.  In fact with the availability of online writing and of the explosion of book clubs, there is probably more reading going on than back in the 1980s, especially among people over 30.  It is the equivalent to the numerous talent shows on television.  There have always been millions of people who have assumed they can perform on stage, but only with such thorough access, as in fact was the case back in the 1970s, does the general population, as opposed to friends and neighbours, become aware of simply how many people believe this way.  The pool of people going into these things has not changed; the visibility of them has, however, increased substantially.

It seems ironic that Schofield attacks courses on how to write so strongly, given that 'The Guardian' probably runs more such courses than any other body at the moment.  In many ways they have become a kind of qualification that writers need to pass in order to move to the next stage.  If you look at winners of the Bridport Prize, an annual competition I have entered a couple of times, almost every single winner has taken a degree in creative writing.  Similarly many authors these days, such as those who get contracts from HarperCollins for appearing on Authonomy, have to have sold their e-book before the publisher considers taking them on.  Schofield has been spared these stages of advancing her career so feels free to disparage them.

Schofield seems to want to reduce the competition and increase the potential market for her book.  If she truly believes that '[i]t's a great deal more fulfilling to read and think about a fine book than to attempt to write one'.  If that is the case, then why did she even bother becoming an author?  It is good to read and of course the bulk of writers are also very active readers too, the two are very compatible, not exclusive as Schofield portrays them.  Overall, this article proves to be a rant from a woman who wants it all.  She is very fortunate to have had her novel published, but needs to realise that that privilege comes at a cost and she has now to support her book vigorously, no-one else is going to do it for her.  She clearly wants to pull up the ladder after her and encourage people not to enter into competition with her.  This is simply selfish.  Writing has always been a leading hobby in Britain, it is one, like cycling and running, which is now far more visible than ever before.  What Schofield needs to do is actually stop and look around her about how society works in the 2010s.  This is not 1973 or 1953.  None of us are surprised at what she has apparently only recently 'discovered' and it is of concern that an author of a contemporary set novel is so disconnected from society in the here and now.  What is sickening is how she tries to equate her position, privileged as it is, with the challenges facing ordinary working people.

Fight Back Against Trolls – Become a Goat

I recognise that almost inadvertently, since I was encouraged into writing e-books, this blog has mutated into being a bit of a writer’s blog.  Rather naively, I thought producing e-books would not be easy, but certainly did not anticipate having them stamped on by people whose hobby is simply dismissing books.  Clearly I should have read more of the writers’ discussion boards on Amazon before embarking on involving myself in the self-publishing e-book world.

It was not as if I did not know about ‘trolls’, i.e. people who go around the internet usually anonymously making offensive remarks about anyone they choose.  Quite often these are well-known people.  Recently I have read some of the horrific stuff sent to Classical historian, Professor Mary Beard, OBE and the pro-rape ‘communities’ that FaceBook refuses to remove though it does take down pictures of a woman breastfeeding her child.  Ordinary people also suffer trolling and often lack the range of supporters to fight back.  It is a form of bullying that clearly allows some people to get a buzz about pushing down others.  It is clear that there a individuals who subscribe to an unacceptable view of what society should be, largely violent, racist and anti-women, to shout out their views wherever they chose.  Their view of society is so distorted that they get angry at people who seek to instil any sense of humanity into the debate.  The ground is fertile, when publications like ‘The Guardian’ and even specialist journals like the ‘Times Higher Education’, as one regular reader of this blog pointed out, have discussions in which commentators just attack the abilities and knowledge of each other in offensive terms, you almost appear to be half-way to the really outrageous stuff from the outset.

In some, perhaps many, cases trolling appears to stem from a sense of inadequacy.  As the person cannot run an interesting blog or write a novel, they feel no-one else should be allowed to enjoy the success of doing so.  In many cases, like the specific one I discuss below, they seek to assert their superiority by being a better ‘train spotter’ than others and insisting that their spotting of minutiae is important.  In the past such people were confined to their clubs of like-minded people.  At worst you would encounter them like the Harry Enfield character telling you ‘you don’t want to be doing that’.  They were tiresome but avoidable.  On the internet they are less easily avoidable and when ratings and sales are important and these days are not allowed to be independent of ‘feedback’ they have a destructive edge.  It is the revenge of the geek, they now hold the power online and they are not satisfied even with smearing your reputation, they want you to suffer and to be seen to suffer.  It is like a drug that they have to keep coming back to.

In this posting, I am not going to take on the whole trolling community, but am going to focus on those who impinge most on what I do.  As a blogger I have been very fortunate that I have not received the kind of attacks so many do, especially women blogging.  Running the blog we have the control to delete comments that offend us and can respond immediately.  Such facility tends to be lacking when you move on to selling e-books, in my case, via Amazon.  I have commented on previous postings about the negative comments I have received so will not revisit those.  I have removed almost all the alternate history books which attracted this attention.  However, looking around other writers’ books I have seen a common pattern.  The one that was sent to me by the regular was ‘The Nanking War’ (2009) by Ryan McCall.  This book has been available as a paperback and now as an e-book on Amazon.com the generic and US version of the company.  The book considers a war breaking out between the USA and Japan over the Rape of Nanking [Nanjing] in 1937.  As readers know, I like alternate history fiction and essays, so this attracted my attention, especially as it neither started from ‘what if Hitler had won the Second World War?’ nor ‘what if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War?’ the basis nowadays of a large number of books.

The review on Amazon.com gave it a 1-star.  What was interesting was that the structure of the review was almost identical to one I had received for ‘His Majesty’s Dictator’.  This is unsurprising given that these troll-reviewers are pretty small in number and unimaginative.  It started by saying the ‘I found Mr. McCall's writing to be technically correct and the story is well edited.’  They usually put in a positive, though editing, something the trolls can wheedle out small errors from is often a target.  The reviewer then complains that the story fails because even though it is alternate history ‘that history must be grounded in some sort of reality for the reader to suspend disbelief.’  Fine.  Now, personally I would challenge this book on the fact that the USA did very little in response to the Rape of Nanjing and in fact did very little in response to the sinking of the USS ‘Patay’ by the Japanese or their invasion of central China.  Even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than four years later, it was not clear that the USA would enter the war.

What grounds does the troll-reviewer condemn this book?  I quote:

‘Mr. McCall chooses 1937 as the time frame for his story therefore he needs to ground the reality of his story to that year. For example, McCall arms the U.S. Marines in Nanking War with magazine-fed Winchester rifles. In 1937, U.S. Marines assigned to China were issued Springfield 1903, bolt action rifles. McCall's lack of understanding of military rank structure also hurts the story. He claims the Marine Lieutenant was a squad leader. Marine Lieutenants were and are platoon leaders not squad leaders.’

It is on this basis that the reviewer gives the book 1-star.  This means it will not be recommended to people searching for alternate history and given that sales end once you have a 2-star review, he might as well take the book off sale.  As my correspondent highlights, these minor details would be overlooked by most readers anyway.  In addition, given that it is alternate history, what is to say that the USA would not have issued different rifles?  The US Marines in China were a garrison force not one going to war.  In addition, many officers who have gone into combat have ended up taking different roles as a result of local circumstances.  A further point is, if the reviewer felt these small issues utterly undermined the book, then s/he could have written to the author.  You can amend and republish a book written in English in under 12 hours on Amazon, sometimes far quicker than this.

Of course, the objective of the reviewer is not to alert readers to minor errors or show that the book is no good.  Ironically these trolls often laud the good aspects of a book and then make judgements on minor points as if any spelling or grammar mistake or any technical detail which does not fit their memory is enough to damn an entire book.  On this basis, Ian Fleming’s James Bond series with their erroneous technical details about guns and geographical locations should not be in print.  The same goes for work by Henning Mankel and Philip Kerr.  Even Robert Conroy and Harry Turtledove that the reviewer recommends instead, have made such minor ‘mistakes’ in their work.  There is no capacity for the author to diverge from what is perceived to be the ‘truth’ despite writing fiction.  It goes for genres as a whole too.  I had ‘His Majesty’s Dictator’ rated 1-star not for the quality of the book, but simply because the troll-reviewer felt that there was no demand for a 1940s pastiche.  He had made a judgement for the entire reading population about what they might like to read and sought to censor a whole genre.

I accept that books may be poorly written and this should be highlighted to readers.  However, the utter condemnation of a novel simply because of minor, easily altered aspects or the type of novel it happens to be, is unproductive.  It utterly crushes innovation.  Authors of the 1960s and 1970s could not have moved on contemporary writing if they had been open to the kind of attacks writers of nowadays face.  It seems that there are particular approaches, with nerdy attention to passing details that are the only acceptable books.  I guess this is why there are no many novels dealing with Islamist terrorist attacks as these appeal to the mindset of the trolls.

I wondered if there was a way to deal with troll-reviewers.  I have no desire to write the kind of books they insist upon and yet do want to get my work out there.  Ultimately, I think once I have got my career back on track, assuming that ever happens and I do not slide even further, then I will make my work free once more.  For now, however, I welcome the little bits of income and what they can buy for me and the ones I love.  ‘The Guardian’ provided some anti-troll guidance: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jun/12/how-to-deal-with-trolls

However, what was suggested to me was that more of us need to become ‘goats’.  The term might not be an attractive one, but apparently comes from the fairy tale, ‘The Billy Goats Gruff’ about a trio of goats who trick and then butt off a troll that lives under a bridge they have to cross.  You have to have a strong stomach as I guess the trolls will turn on you if you goat.  I have seen people who have challenged such reviews patronised as naïve and ignorant.  However, you have to believe that you are right and remember that some poor author has spent months, perhaps years, writing a piece of work.  While some writers may need to enhance their skills, no-one intentionally puts up a shoddy, rushed book.  However, all of this effort can be destroyed by someone bored for ten minutes or less, over their lunch break, who wants to boost their own ego by kicking someone else.

Yes, if the book is bad, then a critical review is fine.  However, it needs to be constructive and not simply bury a book because it does not cover some niggly detail or is a different kind of book to what the reviewer wants.  I have heard that writers of gay fiction get this all the time.  Despite labelling it as ‘gay fiction’ which you can do on Amazon and having covers which suggest the content, they get virulent complaints from male readers who feel they have been ‘tricked into reading this filth’.

Challenge reviewers. It seems easier for people in general to comment on reviews on Amazon than it is for the writer to respond to them.  If the book has some minor errors, then it probably deserves a 3- or a 4-star rating, not to be condemned forever on the basis of these.  Challenge reviewers who argue that no-one will want that genre.  That is not a question of quality, that is a question of consumer choice.  If it gets a 1-star, then of course, no-one will go near it.  However, a writer can quickly tell which genres do not sell, they need no reviewer to tell them that.  Challenge reviewers who make patronising judgements especially on the age, gender or nationality of the writer.  A lot of great fiction would not have come about if writers had faced these prejudices so extensively in the past century.  There was prejudice, but there is no place for it now.  The internet is supposed to be free to speak and express ideas and self-publishing is an element of that now.  However, if trolls are free to shut down innovation and a range of authors, we are effectively seeing amateur censorship, intolerable in large parts of the world.

I am going to be using my own goats in an attempt to get back at troll-reviewers.  Thus, I would encourage you to get out there goating for other writers, starting with poor Ryan McCall if you can spot no-one else just yet.  Be proud, be a goat!

Demanding Readers

I am often told that we live in a consumer-driven society and that customer power is stronger than ever.  I would contest this by pointing to how often companies now feel no obligation to even to respond to queries or complaints and state that your questions are 'inappropriate' or clash with data protection, or some other pseudo-legal excuse that they make up to not bother to address your legitimate concerns.  Complain about anything at an airport and you are likely to be threatened with anti-terrorist legislation.  If you do not believe me, simply try it.  There are articles enough online, one from 'The Guardian' that I remember featured a pregnant woman trying to get a trolley at an airport and being treated as if she was a threat to national security.

I would agree that customers do feel empowered these days.  Tutored by 'reality' programmes showing us how to get angry to get attention, a point I know I have made before, we have all been encouraged to be indignant and take very personal offence at even minor irregularities.  Given the corporate attitudes this almost creates an unstoppable force crashing against an immovable object, which does nothing for the health of the population, let alone good business.

Now, most of us are not large corporations, but increasingly we are businesses.  Selling on eBay, advertising a room to rent, even like me, putting up e-books for people to buy, we have become a business.  Yet, we are one without much power.  These days you cannot even put negative comments up about troublesome buyers and even saying that you had sent a replacement for something they did not receive, can lead to you being insulted with very colourful language.  The customer is not only right, even when getting a free replacment for something they say they have not received, but that their online image has to be pristine.  This is one reason why I sell nothing on auction sites, but of course, now I am selling e-books and that opens me up to such treatment.

When people buy books these days, they seem to expect that the book will be free or of a nominal fee.  The 99c book appears to be the accepted norm and anything above that, no matter how long it might be or how well written, is deemed to be too expensive.  No wonder bookshops where these days in the UK it is rare to see anything below £8.99 (€10.69; US$13.93) are struggling.  The major problem, however, is that the reader expects the book to be tailored to their specific tastes.  I write in British English and for most readers that is not a big issue.   This is a topic which I have discussed with other writers and I feature some of the examples they have told me about here. 

The problems for British (and some Commonwealth writers, depending on the brand of English they use) do come from US readers, not because we have spelt 'color' as 'colour', but because of reference to British society and business.  I have now learnt that apparently in the USA 'liaison' is a job title, whereas in Britain it is an activity; in the USA a manager cannot be a liaison, but in the UK, a manager often carries out liaison.  I have learnt that readers will count how many paragraphs start with the name of a character even when they are alone in the story at that stage.  Too many mentions mean the book is not worth reading.  Personally I am told I 'over write' and have readers sending me edited versions of my work, to show me how much better it could be, whilst reducing clarity.  People do not like me referring to characters by their surnames, though that is a traditional convention in detective novels.

One factor which I know has applied to movies as far back as 'Pretty in Pink' (1986), readers/viewers cannot tolerate any unresolved issues for the characters.  Famously, the end of that movie was re-shot so that a secondary character, 'Duckie' played by John Cryer ends up with a girlfriend after the heroine with whom he has been friends with for years, goes with another boy.  It appears that readers expect the same treatment.  I get emails asking me about the fate of minor characters and I feel as if I should have a coda like one of the sequences running up over the credits in movies, 'X went on to be ...', the one which comes most to mind is 'Three Kings' (1999) but I am sure there are tens more that I could quote.  The other thing these days, is that you should never leave a cliff hanger or an unresolved issue, even if you are writing a triology or a longer sequence.  It appears that readers demand that even those epic fantasy novels part of a 14-part sequence be self-contained in each novel.  I have people really upset that I have not tied down every single element before the end of a particular novel.  There is no sense of an arc being permitted.  Not only do such constraints inhibit the writing process, but I feel they are patronising to the reader, suggesting that they have no imagination of their own.

The woman in my house, having enjoyed the 'True Blood' television series has begun reading the novels on which the series is (loosely) based.  To some degree it suggests that they are produced for very different audiences.  I know HBO which produces the series is seen as 'high quality' and a serious production company.  The novels reflect their central character, Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress from a backwater village in Louisiana, not only in what happens to her, but how the text is written.  I accept that this may appeal to readers whose level of literacy is not high, but it seems very much at odds with what you see on the screen.  In addition, the drivers for the stories are different.  In the books, Lafayette, the homosexual diner chef is murdered at the end of the first book; in the television series he is one of the most popular characters and continues to have lots of adventures, certainly in the first four series so far shown in the UK.  Each series and many episodes end with a cliff hanger and what Sookie is (she can read people's minds) and the intentions of the vampires and werewolves she encounters, remain elusive.  Why is it that people will tolerate this in a television series and yet not in a book?  Maybe it reflects the different ways in which we consume these different media; perhaps the audiences are different.  I certainly feel that people will tolerate more left unanswered in a series which they expect will continue (though unfortunately many series in the USA are cut short abruptly, simply in the vampire field look at 'Moonlight' and 'Blade') whereas they tend not to expect that in a movie.  Even in the 'Twilight' and 'Harry Potter' franchises, bar the last two movies, there has always been resolution at the end of each individual movie.

This fact of doing everything for the reader is an interesting one.  I suppose in a world where we primarily consume fast food or the home equivalent of it, we do not expect to have to get out the knife and fork or even chew, we just need to consume, in fiction as in food.  I guess this is why 28-page e-books for 99c are the most popular on Amazon.  Yet, on the other hand we have a vast quantity of fan fiction, i.e. stories written by members of the public which continue or extend movies, novels and series, which explore minor characters or put the major ones into very different circumstances.  Apparently, http://www.fanfiction.net/ has over 150,000 stories and out of one of these came the best-selling e-book, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' which began life as a fan fiction story featuring characters from the 'Twilight' movies/novels.  An element of these stories is that sometimes, though not always, they involve sexual aspects that would not be acceptable in the original.  Given the emphasis on 'Twilight' on chastity and marriage, it is pretty ironic that a novel about sexual domination should have been spawned by it.

These days if a reader feels my novel has turned out 'wrong' or has too much unresolved I suggest they write their own version and I have some friends who are writers who do the same.  I must say that this is rarely taken up.  I suppose as yet, we do not have the standing of Stephanie Meyer or Charlaine Harris that people would feel that creating fan fiction was appropriate.  I guess fan fiction is like doing an impersonation or a spoof, others need to know the original sufficiently well to see what you have been doing.  Obscurity of my books closes off that for people.  Yet it does not douse their indignation that I did not get into their heads and saw how the story 'must' be and I have not provided a detailed biography of every single character who appears or is mentioned.  I get that too, even characters who do not 'appear' in the story but are referred to, such as relatives or employers, people want to know about them.  I guess, ultimately you end up with readers insisting that every novel comes with an accompanying volume like the 'The Dune Encyclopedia' (1984) which details every single scrap of everything that appears in the 'Dune' novels of Frank Herbert almost as if they were real.

I wonder how to respond to readers who are increasingly demanding.  I guess I do not need the money desperately enough to simply write to address what they want.  I have even found it hard writing stuff for an American publisher because it soon became apparent simply how many terms and how much grammar is different to British English.  If I missed even a single word such as putting 'film' instead of 'movie' or leaving in 'cinema' rather than 'picture house' it jarred and made the book seem invalid.  Maybe we are more tolerant in Britain; reading things I can adapt to US, Australian and even Indian English.  However, I do have a British friend who now will not read anything written by an American as he finds the differences too extreme that it does not permit him to enjoy the novel.  Maybe rather than having a 'global' language, local differences are becoming greater and less tolerable for readers. 

It is also time fixed.  I have found that readers expect historical novels to feature people speaking and behaving in a way that they would nowadays.  People often believe spoke in a more mannered way and did not know the swear words of the present world, for them I suggest reading the works of Chaucer produced in the 15th century in which 'shiten' , i.e. 'covered in shit' features in the opening passages and used to describe what it does today, though in 500 years it has evolved into 'shitty', I guess.  Certainly in movies, it is painful to me to see people in previous centuries behaving as if they have just walked in from a street in California in the 21st century, which of course they have, but theatre and movies are supposed to be about suspending disbelief rather than not even trying.   It is ironic that now we are able to conjure up accurate representations of medieval cities, the actors often lack the skills or direction to produce such an engaging portrayal as the famous scene in the television series 'The Six Wives of Henry VIII' (1970) in which a scene in a studio feels as if it is outside simply through the use of a small branch of blossom and the skill of the acting. 

I would encourage readers to be more adventurous, to take out the mental knife-and-fork even the chopsticks and engage with books which are not necessarily hard to read but which need some 'chewing', which do not treat you as if you are in Year 3 (3rd grade for American readers) of school.  Bear in mind, many of the Harry Potter books were written for a pre-pubescent audience, and whilst flawed, do challenge the reader much more than what so many readers demand from me and other writers publishing online.  Finally I would say, if you are dissatisfied with a book but like its concept and its characters, do what I used to do and what tens of thousands of people do and write your own version.  After all you might end as successful as EL James, fastest selling e-book author ever with work coming out of fan fiction.

Are Authors Vampires of Others' Lives?

A couple of months back in 'The Guardian' newspaper and elsewhere there was commentary on how authors take revenge on people.  The latest in a long list (and foolishly I have lost the articles which have named historic examples), is Jonathan Franzen who in 'Freedom' passes a harsh comment on fellow author Ian McEwan's novel 'Atonement'.  I have found an article from 'The Independent' listing some others: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/poison-pens-the-art-of-literary-revenge-2107142.html  These include Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century ridiculing a love-rival and more recently novelist Jilly Cooper featuring a goat named after a critic of hers from twenty years earlier in her recent novel 'Jump' (2010).  Melvyn Bragg included a caricature of interviewer Lynn Barber in his 1992 novel 'Crystal Rooms' following an awkward interview between them two years earlier; Sebastian Faulks apparently caricatured reviewer D.J Taylor in his novel 'A Week in December' (2009) and Taylor did the same in return in his 'At the Chime of the City Clock' published this year.  There has been commentary that now rather than be subtle in doing it, especially to reviewers, authors simply send a harsh tweet such as Alison Flood and Alain de Botton last year.

As regular readers of this blog know, I am often frustrated that people are able to do bad things to me, especially to impugn me with impunity.  Though it is a painless form of revenge, I have got some recompense from treating versions of these people in bad ways in my writing, though I have kept those stories off this blog.  It can be unhealthy to focus your stories in this way if you let the revenge taking dominate, but it other ways it is useful.  The behaviour of these people is never unique to them and you can be sure that many of your readers will have met people who behave in the same foolish or nasty ways.  It also allows you to have a believable element to your 'villains' and for personal experience I know it can be very satisfying to feel that at least in one context, you have some revenge. 

I think the concept of Karma and of 'vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord' come about because most of us get no chance to get any come-back against those who treat us badly so our only compensation is that sometime in the future, probably when we are not around to witness those who do us bad will have to pay.  In fact, they probably never will, but that is hard for us to accept.  This world, especially UK society today is unfair.  We live in the time that the rich and privileged benefit at the expense of the rest of us.  The bad are winning out with little chance for the good people to regain anything; just look how badly nurses and the elderly who have given their all, suffer. These days so many people are self-centred, and even worse, self-righteous with it, meaning that not only can they not see the perspective of anyone else they also feel that you are wrong not to totally accept their personal viewpoint of how the world should be.  In particular they love you to 'recant' outlining in detail and length how wrong you have been.  In such circumstances, to retain any self-respect, we either need faith in divine or natural justice or to find a safe way to take revenge.

Taking revenge in the fiction you write is an explicit way of drawing real people into your writing, often the one that people look out for.  However, it is not that uncommon a process, it happens constantly in all fiction.  Whilst we may conjure up exotic and alien characters, the bulk of how we portray them is based on the accumulation of what the author has seen of real people or read about them in others' books whether fiction or non-fiction or seen in other media, notably these days, movies.  All of these sources give us a sense of how people behave.  A friend of mine, himself a non-fiction writer, accused me of stealing people's lives to use in my writing.  His accusation was that he was more honest in his use of the lives of others often for legal reasons, compelled to gain his subjects' approval before writing about them.  He felt I was exploitative and devious in using people, often many more than he did, without seeking their approval first.

Given that I am not a prolific author, nor a successful one, I seem to get more than my fair share of people telling me how I should write and criticising me for now doing it the way they feel is not only advisable but necessary.  Back in 2008 I commented on the other friend who complained if I wrote about anything I had not directly experienced and certainly from the perspective of any character who was of a different age, gender or ethnicity than myself.  See: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/06/authors-writing-and-internet.html  I know there were critiques in the 1970s of writing the history of a culture that was not your own leading to the development of what came to be known as 'subaltern history', i.e. the history of peoples ruled over by others written by descendants just of those people.  Personally I welcome histories from every perspective.  I would also be careful in drawing such lines and saying that particular perspectives are somehow 'better'.  I am a descendant of my grandfather, one among many, but who is to say that I understand his life or could write his history any better than say an anthropologist from India who had made a particular study of white, skilled working class men living in North London in the mid-20th century?  I see legitimacy not only in anyone's story but in anyone's telling of anyone else's story.  This may be controversial, but I fear that unless we have a broad view on what is 'permissible' in writing and other media, we will choke off so much good (and bad) art.  Should Ang Lee have been barred from directing 'Sense and Sensibility' (1995), David Cronenberg from directing 'Eastern Promises' (2007); should Sebastian Faulks have been blocked from writing many of his novels, because he is not French; should Nicole Jordan be barred from writing historical romance because she lives in the 21st century not the 18th; should Anne Rice be blocked from writing about vampires because she is not one?  We certainly would have no 'Watership Down' (1972) until a rabbit could operate a wordprocessor and 'Star Wars' could never had been legitimately produced in this galaxy under such regulations.

Authors draw on everything that interests them, everything they see, hear, touch, taste and smell.  They draw on other writers' stories, but above all they draw on human life.  Authors are human, they are flawed.  They fill their books with assumptions and prejudices as everyone else does.  Of course, we would spurn those fuelling hatred in what they write, but it is important to understand why they write it not simply say everything should be censored.  Humans are constant story tellers, diarists even lie to their diaries, but everything that is written, in particular for novels, draws on an author's take on the world and the people they meet in it.  There is exploitation, but fiction authors do not somehow drain away the souls of the people they feature in their stories.  As it is, most often, even when historical or contemporary characters appear under their own names, they are presented as the author sees them, not as they or their loved ones might see them.  However, saying that, how different do people appear in different biographies of them?  Even those trying to adhere to non-fiction, cannot but help putting elements of themselves and their perspectives into their books, if simply by choosing what to include.

Perhaps I have been more challenged about the intellectual basis of my fiction writing than the average amateur author is.  I imagine that the many tens of thousands of people writing fiction in their homes possibly at their very moment have to justify how they go about conjuring up the tens, the hundreds of fictional characters they create in the way that I have done.  Perhaps I have been apologetic for too long and should be more assertive that like every other author, I will take fragments, some large, some small from dozens of people I meet and will then blend them together into my characters.  Sometimes, yes, like the authors seeking revenge, I will bring almost an entire person into my writing, but I trust that my humanity means I only do it in retribution and my use of them will be minor compared to the distress they have inflicted on me.  In particular, I am no bestseller, no Booker prize winner, so my revenges (and there have been very few) will have a very limited audience.  However, even if the audience is simply me, it helps my state of mind to get a little bit back from being treated unjustly.  Perhaps authors are vampires, but like vampires, in most cases we only tend to take a little from each person and it is what sustains us in what we do.

Blogging the Blog 8: Characters Come To Life

I advise anyone who is running a blog to do a search for your blog's name once in a while. Often I find references to this blog on other sites that I was oblivious to. Recently I was using someone else's computer and not wanting to connect my Rooksmoor identity to my real identity, rather than simply type in the URL which would then be left in their 'History', knowing that they use a different search engine to me so were unlikely to stumble over my searches, I simply searched it and then linked through. It was interesting to see who had referred to me. There were the references to my posting on 'It Happened Here' which I have mentioned. I was particularly pleased to see a reference from a Liverpool community discussion board to the section of my article on the Great Unrest of 1910-11 and I joined in providing a book reference and filling out some facts for one commentator who seemed to have mixed up some pre- and post-First World War events.

Of course it is not simply humans who reference your blog. There seem to be a whole slew of engines that go around listing links to topics that they think might be of interest. MattFind.com references this blog for my comments on Catherine of Aragon back in October 2007 and on counter-factuals in June 2008. Another such engine, Technocrati, has picked out a more recent posting, from last month, on restraining Wilhelm I whereas the Yahoo! Glue system seems interested in my posting this January about the assassination of King Edward VII. What is interesting is that my counter-factual speculations are listed alongside true historical content.

There is another set of engines, it seems, particular to Germany, though I imagine they have appeared elsewhere too, that goes in search of specific named individuals. The first one I came across was produced by PeopleMe.org about Ingrid Langen. It describes itself as 'a people directory made by users'. Though I have not had any particular interest in the topic, I have been made aware now that I am looking for a job, that it is important to be able to be found on the internet. This can work for you in two ways, graduates are warned about having nude or drunken pictures of themselves spread across their FaceBook and MySpace pages which will embarrass them when potential employers search from them online. Conversely applicants complain that companies that have none of their current employees on a site such as Linkedin, have no credibility and are clearly not worthwhile attempting to work for (though given the economic climate they may have to be less choosy). You are supposed to produce a blog. However, my given the atmosphere of closed minds and bullying I have revealed about my company it could be really detrimental to my career hence me speaking my mind but keeping my identity out of it.

Anyway, clearly PeopleMe (it is actually peopleme but that is difficult to make out in text like this) has Ingrid Langen as a member or perhaps wants her as a member and so asks any passing surfers if she has a blog, MySpace/Bebo/FaceBook/Xing, etc. spaces and if you have any photos of this woman. So how does that link to my blog? Well, it lists all references to Ingrid Langen and importantly references to parts of her name. This means it picks up a ragtag of stuff: the blog of Ingrid Glomp; a man called Gregor from London who writes in German on MySpace and has 'langen', the word for 'long' in one sentence and talks about an Ingrid in the next sentence; the Facebook site of Sigurd Langen, and then the (presumably) relevant LinkedIn spaces of an Ingrid Langen and a Dutch woman called Ingrid Langen de Kanter. You may ask why my blog appears in this very odd list and this is simply because I referred back June 2007 to Eugen Langen the man who constructed the Wuppertal monorail system, the Schwebebahn at the end of the 19th century. I do wonder if more internet systems are actually reading my blog than human beings are!

Looking through the search results for this blog, however, it became even more fascinating and suggested that the desire by society and in particular business to have everyone present on the internet and their details made available (presumably to sell to marketing companies) is leading them down uncertain paths. I found three names that were associated with my blog picked up by the People123 website, another German one. Again it is seeking details, telephone numbers, email addresses and photos of these people across social websites and other locations on the internet. The three people it picked up from this blog are: Werner Meinders, Patrizia Emmerich and Claude Goethals (to be accurate that should be Andre-Leon-Claude Goethals). Now, aside from many other real men in France, this Claude Goethals was a character, a French journalist, in my Beckmann story, 'The Ruthene'; Werner Meinders was another character, this time a 44-year old civil servant for the Bavarian Landesfinanzamt, in my story 'Reliable Witnesses' and finally, Patrizia Emmerich, a young woman living with her mother and grandmother in a block of flats in 'The Dead Landlord'. I try to avoid affectations in my writing because they can really hamstring a decent story. I did allow myself a small one with 'The Dead Landlord' and all the surnames of the characters are of movie directors or actors, many from Hollywood of the past 50 years.

The reason why these characters have been picked out from all the ones that appear in my story is because there are real individuals who have a place on the internet with these names or similar ones. However, what fascinates me, is that my fiction is adding elements to the accretion of data around identities on the internet. Does this mean that I might mislead people, if they do a quick search and find me having written a fictional character who is a civil servant or lives with her mother and they lazily associate it with the real person they are encountering. I trust that would not be the case. It does rather put a great deal of burden on online authors. I always try to get names for my characters appropriate not just to the country but also the time period. Names go through fashions very quickly and it is very jarring to read a novel in which historical characters have modern sounding names. Before the age of internet search engines, I used to read through the indexes of history books about the country I was writing the story about at the time and simply copied down the names of the people listed there. Thus, hopefully the names in the Beckmann series are appropriate for Germany of 1923 rather than Germany of 1973 or 2009. You have to be subtle as when you feature characters who are middle aged or elderly, you need to be looking for natural names of people when they were born 40-80 years, earlier, so for the Beckmann stories, names not only of the 1920s but also the 1840s-80s were needed.

In future I probably need to be more careful when I select names for stories that I am going to post online. Given how much fiction is made available this way whether on blogs, websites or as e-books, I imagine I am not the only one who has encountered this issue. Next time I write someone as a murderer, especially if they are a German character, I will make sure that I check the internet first so as to avoid tarring someone with such an accusation, at least in the eyes of these numerous searching engines. In reality there are some people who end up with names that become famous. In my career I have worked with an Alan Parker, a Diana Ross and a Michael Foot and many of us have probably known a Michael Jackson, none of whom are the celebrities who share their names which must make it a nightmare when trying to find that ordinary person's MySpace page. I suppose I worry a little that I will become like Emma Thompson's character in the movie, 'Stranger than Fiction' (2006) which did not get much attention but is well worth watching for the central idea. In it Thompson's character, Karen Eifel, finds out that the novel she is writing is shaping the life of a real man, Harold Crick and as the man is to die in the novel this puts her in a moral dilemma. So I hope that the reputation of no-one sharing a name of one of my characters ends up being tarred with what their fictional counterpart does. In our world where everything has to be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed and numbered by internet tools if not by humans, then I can only hope that authors will not be held responsible for happening to select a particular name for a particular character who behaves in a particular way. Folks, it's fiction, no matter what your search tool might think.

P.P. - 11/02/2009: I was interested to find that my views on the dangers faced cycling on British roads was picked up, ironically by 'The Guardian' news blog last July: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2008/jul/09/dangerouscycling
My research on the Great Unrest has formed the basis of the best response to an Answers@Yahoo.com question on this period, with a decent quote from my writing. I find some of the responses to these questions, even the ones picked as the best by the asker, often to be weird or inaccurate, but I can hardly complain in this case!
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090112100700AAftLEj

Disappointment is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

When I was a child I was always heartened when adults would say to me 'I am very disappointed in you; I expected you to do better'. I always thought that was much greater praise than them saying that you had done excellently. When you are praised, especially as a child, you are uncertain whether it comes from genuine motives or whether the adult is trying to get you to feel good or even to make themselves look good. When they said they were disappointed it was more of a personal emotion and it indicated they thought highly of you in a way that could never be disproved; 'the sweetest tune is an unheard melody'. The adult might have expected you to come first in a race, in reality you probably would have come third or eighth but if you stomped out in a tantrum, it could never be proven that you would have not come first and the adult by saying they were disappointed in you would always hold on to that 'if only he had run, then he would have come first'.

Things obviously change when you get older. People rarely have high expectations for fellow adults. In the UK in fact most adults seem to have very low expectations of others and if people do something good or worthwhile they are irritated or somehow expect some cheating or that it was done with some ulterior motive. The sense of disappointment is not there. Rather it comes from oneself. I have quoted that saying 'after his child, the person a man first disappoints is himself'. Many of us fall into that trap, that, if only I had worked harder or gone for that job or talked to that man/woman or pushed my ideas more firmly, I would have been a success. By being disappointed in yourself you similarly flatter yourself. Of course only a very small percentage of people are ever going to be successful and if you had worked harder it is unlikely that you would have progressed and better and that woman/man is likely to have ignored you or been insulted that you were interested in them. Yet, by never trying those things we keep ourselves safe. If you test out every possibility you will soon be suicidal as you will discover quickly that this society lets very few people succeed. This is one thing I admire about British society compared to the USA. US society is still addicted to the sense that everything is possible of you try hard enough. In the UK we know that is a lie and to some extent most us avoid the bitterness which hits so many Americans so hard as they get older or are made redundant. If you expect to achieve nothing, everything you get is a real bonus, but if you expect the world, to be denied even a small element of that is frustrating.

What provoked this was coming across a woman I had attended school with many decades ago. She has two books out and is online being interviewed about what she has written. She even has a wikipedia entry about how she lives by a lake with her partner and two children. In the past you could always reassure yourself that even if you were doing badly the bulk of your classmates were probably faring no better. These days though with social spaces like MySpace, Facebook, Friends Reunited, etc., etc., you cannot continue with that fantasy, their success is thrust back in your face. I avoid these sorts of things but it is sometimes inescapable as when I was walking down a street in London and the face of someone I had gone to school with (and I went to ordinary comprehensive schools not Eton or Charterhouse) was plastered five metres high on the side of a double-decker bus publicising something they were presenting. The think about seeing people you know in such a context is that you might think, well I never had millionaire parents or went to Oxford University like so many successful people, but when it is someone from the same background as yourself, you may begin thinking, well why could I have not done so well?

I think much of this stuff comes from ageing. I am now middle-aged and probably will have a mid-life crisis where I think I should be buying a Harley Davidson motorbike and driving around the world on it. I have written four novels in my life, half written two more (lethargy has plagued me now for almost eight years and put an end to any chance I had at success - and there it is: I think I actually had a chance if only I have been able to muster enough energy, whereas, in fact, my novels would have simply been consigned to the recycling bin with the thousands agents and publishers receive each year). So here is to disappointment, disappointment of a particular kind that of not reaching the standards that you or others probably unrealistically set, yet in that non-attainment being left with crumbs which keep us from suicide - not 'what if?' but 'if only'. 'If only' can keep you sane and help you get through the times that make most people wonder why they bother keeping up the effort of remaining alive.