The Books Of My Life: Alexander Rooksmoor

As I have noted before, I am regular reader of various features in 'The Guardian' newspaper. I know I am never going to be famous so they would not ask me to respond to these features for real. Still that does not stop me from thinking how I would respond and it is nice to be able to get these thoughts out of my system. Back in 2010, I did this for their 'Tell Us About Yourself' feature: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/12/tell-us-about-yourself.html Looking back on that now I would not disagree with many of the responses I gave then, even 15 years on. My fears of that time were well placed as we did lose our house in 2012 and our family was broken up living with wider family members, in rented rooms or B&Bs. We did manage to live back together again in 2015 after I managed to get a job which in total lasted 7 years, the longest one I have ever held.

Today I am going to have a go at the 'The Books Of My Life' feature in 'The Guardian': https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/the-books-of-my-life I accept it is arrogance to think that anyone might consider me a 'leading author'. Back in 2010, though I had written novels over the preceding 22 years, I had none on sale. Self-publishing and then being taken up by Sea Lion Press https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/ enabled me to get my books out there and in turn it really fuelled my writing. I have now written 70 books, most of which are now on sale in e-book format. I might not be a best seller, 2014 was my peak year of sales and as with the marketplace in general there has been a decline since then. It is often said that everybody has at least one book in them, but clearly I have had a lot more than that and I have no idea how many more I will produce before I die. Thus, while I may not be renowned author and certainly am not 'leading', I feel it is reasonably legitimate for me to respond to the sort of questions that might be asked of such people.

Alexander Rooksmoor: 'Some Saturdays I would go through them all before I got out of bed'

My earliest reading memory

I did not learn to read before going to school aged 4 years and 11 months. We had lots of books at home, but I tended to treat them in a visual way, looking at the images rather than the words. I understood the power of the printed word because my parents read so much. Apparently, aged 3, loath to attend playschool picked up a magazine (probably a Sunday supplement) and waved it at my parents insisting that it said that parents should not send their sons to play school. Thus, it was almost like a magic talisman rather than something to engage with myself. In terms of books, like most children of my generation in England, we started with the Peter & Jane books published by Ladybird. I remember the images of the book '1a. Play with Us' (1964 edition) better than I remember the words. I was a very slow reader and like many children of my generation sub-vocalised everything because we read aloud so much.

My favourite book growing up

The first fiction book I remember actually expressing a like for was 'The Grey Apple Tree' (1965) by Vera Cumberlege. However, the books I came back to most regularly was the series by R.J. Unstead about British history. These were published in the early 1970s and I remember us working to collect them all (in the age before online book ordering!). They ran from 'Invaded Island' (1971) from Stone Age to 1066; 'Kings, Barons and Serfs' (1971), 1066-1300; 'Years of the Sword' (1972), 1300-1485; 'Struggle for Power' (1972), 1485-1689; 'Emerging Empire' (1972), 1689-1763; 'Freedom and Revolution' (1972), 1763-1815; 'Age of Machines', (1974), 1815-1901 to the 'Incredible Century' (1974), 1901-1970. Some Saturdays I would go through them all before I got out of bed. They were highly illustrated A4-sized hardbacks which could be found in most school and public libraries but as a history fan, I had my own set. I note that their subtitle is 'A Pictorial History' and I realise now, I did simply look at the pictures rather than read the text.

The book that changed me as a teenager

I remember that in the larger library in the nearest town, they had a children's section and then around the other side of a row of shelves was a single set of shelves for 'older children'. It actually was at the start of the 'adult' bit of the library and I think the librarians had designed it to tempt teenagers to move from the picture and project books and indeed the 'Doctor Who' novelisations, on to something a bit more mature. A lot of the books there were kind of 'kitchen sink' books for teenagers. I first cycled alone to this library (2.5 miles away) aged 11, which these days would probably terrify parents. I was very conscious of not going into age inappropriate areas (I was never someone who would sneak into movies older than for myself or try to drink alcohol underage). I remember one day hesitantly going round the corner to this section and borrowing the novelisation of 'Bugsy Malone' (1976?) not the script or graphic novel that are dominant now. I was struck by the fact it had one chapter that lasted less than a single page. I also remember a book of eyewitness accounts of various events, including the sinking of the 'Titanic'. 

It was the next step which came quicker than I had long realised which really changed me. I discovered the science fiction and fantasy fiction section of the library. I borrowed both 'The Colour of Magic' (1983) and 'The Final Programme' (1968). While I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Colour of Magic', 'The Final Programme' was the first book I had sat up through the night to complete. I had probably been attracted to it by the pop art/graphic novel book cover, but went on to read a lot of Michael Moorcock books in my life (and indeed all of Pratchett's work). For some reason my sixth form college library had the complete works of Moorcock as they were in the mid-1980s. I do not think the current librarian had ever explored the themes, i.e. lots of drugs and sex, that featured in many. I remember, aged 14 checking with my mother whether I should even be reading 'The Final Programme' given it mentioned sex on the cover, but she felt I was mature enough and ultimately it was more about needle guns and hallucinogenic security systems. What I think I learnt from Moorcock was that science fiction need not be all about big spaceships and robots. Furthermore, I went from 'The Final Programme' to 'The Warlord of the Air' (1971) which really sparked my interest in alternate history. My third novel, 'His Majesty's Dictator', which I completed in 1991, was heavily influenced by it.

The book that changed my mind

I have never really read a book that has altered my opinion on big issues. Maybe that reflects a dogmatism on my part. Friends use to often recommend me books that I 'must' read though it later turned out one was just getting rid of books he thought were terrible and wanted disposed of had misunderstood what lending a book to someone usually entailed. A couple of friends insisted I read 'The Bridge Across Forever: A Love Story' (1984) by Richard Bach which I found tedious and fatuous. It was very arrogant in believing his story needed that kind of output. I see now that it was along these lines of annoyance that in 2009 I came to 'Chimera' (1972) by John Barth. I had bought it assuming it was a straightforward fantasy novel. However, it became clear it was simply a vanity project to show off how much cleverer than the reader Barth knows he is. He even says openly that some readers will not 'get' what he is writing as if that is our problem rather than his.

While I had realised that 'in jokes' rarely work and had sought to remove anything that people might not get because it was too personal to me or my culture, Barth made me realise that any author who does not work with the reader is actually failing. We should both not pander to them but also we should not treat them with disdain simply because they cannot crack our own personal code. It also made clear to me that the books that get published are not necessarily 'good' books, they can simply be out one sale because the author has been fortunate and/or has contacts. I was alert from then on of books which were primarily the author parading their 'greatness' when in fact what they tend to produce in such circumstances is the literary equivalent of the Emperor's new clothes. I would put 'Auto da Fé' (1935) by Elias Canetti which I read in 2000, in this category too.

The book that made me want to be a writer

There was no book which did this. Creative writing was an assessed part of the English curriculum from age 5-16, though I got 'let off' early as I sat my English Language 'O' Level a year early, aged 15. Thus, creative writing was something we did almost weekly. We were all writers. As a consequence I was not conscious of being 'a writer' probably until about 2012, some 24 years after I had completed writing my first novel. I guess I had never really registered that other people did not write in their spare time too.

I knew I got good marks for my creative writing and recall two of my stories being put up on the wall when I was in 3rd Year of primary school. One of them was called 'Wings for a Day' and apparently the teacher noted my knowledge (aged 7) of world events as I featured the fall of the Colonels junta in Greece writing 'in Greece there was a war' and mention of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (the Yom Kippur War had been the preceding year and my parents had an illustrated book about it), though unaware of the politics, rather than the simple news coverage of violence. As the 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' team were shown in one of their spin-off books, as children we were obsessed by Moshe Dayan's eyepatch.

While I got good grades for my creative writing, this actually misled me because teachers would focus in their feedback (not called that back then) on my imagination and not the fact that I was screwing up a lot of the punctuation. This seems to have stemmed largely from my 3rd Year Middle School (nowadays Year 6) teacher, Mrs. Simmons, who had a real aversion to pupils using direct speech and would insist we stuck to reported speech. It was only as an adult that I realised I had been punctuating direct speech wrongly. If I had been a poorer writer, I would have been alerted to this sooner. If I had actually looked at what I had been reading then maybe I would have noticed I was not doing it the same way, though, of course, we tended to see what was done in books was not what we were doing in English at school. Many/most of us believed all poetry had to rhyme.

The book I came back to

In fact there are two, though both on a similar theme. 'Great Escape Stories' (1977) by Eric Williams and 'Colditz' (1974), the anthology version combining 'The Colditz Story' (1952) and 'The Latter Days' (1953) by P.R. Reid. I abandoned the Williams book as from daring stories of Second World War escapes by PoWs, it moved into civilians and then the Korean War. While I found the early stories, of the twelve, 'cosy' if it is legitimate to say that - and was especially impressed by the account of Airey Neave escaping Colditz dressed as a German officer - the later ones were much more unsettling. In the 1970s there were lots of people still around who had been adults during the Second World War. There were a lot of books like 'I am David' (1963) by Anne Holm which was read to us and a copy of 'The Diary of Anne Frank' (1947) was in our classroom when in what is now Year 6, not just the school library. You could watch 'Carrie's War' (the 1974 series of the 1973 book by Nina Bawden) after school and 'The World at War' (first broadcast in 1973) on Sunday afternoons so the Second World War was pretty much 'currency' for us much more than the 1950s or 1960s. The headmaster of my school later chided me for abandoning the book but even then, fearful of nightmares, I did not return to until I was an adult, still very certain about my aversion to torture, but having seen and read a lot more.

It is difficult now to remember why I felt so drawn to escape stories at the time, it is not something that seems to have continued after I went to secondary school. I abandoned 'Colditz' because I foolishly looked ahead while reading it on holiday in 1978 and finding that Lieutenant Albert Michael Sinclair (1918-1944) nicknamed the 'Red Fox' was killed on his final escape attempt in 1944. His repeated escapes made him a hero of mine and I had been using the codename 'Red Fox' in various secret clubs we tended to form as adolescents. It was chilling to read he had been killed and not, like Neave, got clear away. I lost all heart in reading the book and only came back to it and also read 'Colditz: The German Story' (1961) by Reinhold Eggers, as an adult in the late 1990s.

The book I could never read again

Aside from 'Chimera' and 'Auto da Fé' I have already mentioned I would add 'The Quincunx' (1989) by Charles Palliser. I had come across the term 'quincunx' when studying Latin (at a non-selective, comprehensive school - it did happen back then and I did want to be a professional historian) at school, meaning a pattern of five-twelfths (though to me it looked like five-ninths) and a design for the layout of trees in a garden (I was later into garden history), so I thought it would be a story about a sort of code perhaps concealed in a garden and to some extent the synopsis sustained that misapprehension. What it is instead is an unrelenting account of a boy and his mother who are tricked out of their relatively meagre middle class wealth in early 19th Century England. They then proceed to be subjected to all the worst privations of the era. The mother, Mary, having lost her house and all her savings due to a scam, after living as a squatter in an abandoned East London building ends up as a prostitute tied to a brothel. The boy, John, in turn is abused at a horrendous school where he has to literally fight for his food, in a mental asylum and as a scavenger in London sewers. Yes, we know that life was bleak and people were abused but the contorted path the two protagonists are taken along so that they can suffer as many different kinds of abuse as possible is perverse, almost ridiculous.

In second place in this category I would add, 'The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 7. From James to Eliot' (1988 edition) ed. by Boris Ford. Why they bothered to assemble 23 writers to comment on an era of writing that all of them appear to believe was much lesser in so many ways to what preceded, I have no idea. It was a real waste of time for them as well as the reader.

The book I discovered later in life

I am now 57 and am constantly discovering books. I imagine this question is about one which I may have read earlier in my life but only came to far later than that. I would point to 'Renaissance Europe 1480-1520' (1971) by J.R. Hale. I have read a lot of 'survey' books of European history but among them Hale's book really stands out. See my review here: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/09/books-i-read-in-september.html Hale really is command of the information he has and writes in such an engaging way for a non-fiction historical book. A lot of historians could learn from his approach. I bought this book in the late 1980s but it was over 30 years before I got round to reading it and I wished I had turned to it much sooner rather than leaving it in storage.

The book I am currently reading

'The Sussex Downs Murder' (1936) by John Bude [Ernest Elmore], the third of his novels I have read in the British Library Crime Classics series republication of his books.

My comfort read

While, as back in 2010, I still have a lot of affection for 'The Book of Heroic Failures' (1979) by Stephen Pile, the default book I turn to these days is the 'The Penguin Atlas of World History. Volume 2: From the French Revolution to the Present' (1964/2004). Doing this exercise has rather revealed that I am not really a reader at heart, I am more a looker at books so I guess this is why a book of lots of colourful maps is comforting to me.

Omelette Exploration 6: The Masala Omelette

As regular readers will know, I am always interested in seeing and trying out new approaches to omelette making.  Being a regular reader of 'The Guardian' newspaper which has scores of recipes, sometimes every day of the week, but particularly on Saturdays, it is unsurprising that I have drawn inspiration from it.  Today's recipe comes from Vivek Singh and featured in the newspaper in October 2015:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/01/20-best-breakfast-recipes-part-4-nigel-slater-pancakes-omelettes

This was the final part of a four-part series in which celebrity chef Nigel Slater gathered various breakfast recipes.  I will leave you to read the original article; fortunately the masala omelette is the first recipe in that list.  Naturally I put it to the test.  While this was put forward as a breakfast menu as Singh points out, it can be a dish for any time of the day and as with the bliny omelettes considered last month, it can be eaten cold.

The method of cooking is in line with the basics that I have outlined throughout.  What I would caution is keeping the quantity of spice under control and using fresh rather than dried ingredients as much as possible.  I have made this dish and ended up with a rather 'arid' omelette, almost too strong in flavour to eat comfortably.  That may be because I have a British palate and as noted before and not keen on tasting salt in my dishes.

I do think this is not really an omelette to be eaten on its own or unfilled and I would certainly encourage you to present it with a vegetable filling or indeed as an accompaniment outside the omelette.  Singh advises 'asparagus, olives, spinach or artichokes' in this role - are all favourite vegetables of mine and have a moistness which can temper the rather arid nature of this particular omelette.  I think I will come back to this approach to omelettes but in future will scale down the spices and will make sure that I have a lot more greens either to put in the omelette or alongside it.

Omelette Exploration 1: What I See As The Basics

This is a topic I have considered blogging on for quite a while.  I was prompted to finally do it by an article in the 'Cook' section of yesterday's edition of the 'The Guardian' newspaper in which Stephen Bush outlined how he had tried out Delia Smith's approach to omelettes from her book 'Delia's Complete How To Cook' (2009).

See: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/22/delia-smith-how-to-cook-an-omelette-the-delia-project-stephen-bush

It is not an approach I have tried but hope to have a go at in the coming months as this facet of my blog continues.  In the meantime I have various other approaches that I have tried, which I will outline here.

Your first question might be why I am focusing on omelettes.  The easy answer is that I am very good at making them.  I have lived with a qualified chef who disliked the bulk of dishes I am able to cook.  I have lived in the same house as a boy, now aged 14, who is a wizard at making pancakes.  Both of these despite their own abilities, has been delighted to eat my omelettes.  As a result I have played from my strengths and have gone on to explore different ways of making them.

My starting point was back in the mid-1990s.  I was working in a low-paid job where most of my colleagues had a second or even a third job to bring in enough income.  One of these was a colleague known as 'Juggo' who was a qualified chef himself and would work in a local pub at the weekends doing basic pub food.  With a family he did not like the hours of catering full time, but this brought in a bit of cash and just impacted on two days of the week. His omelettes were so good that people would go to the pub specially to order them.  I asked him what his secret was.  He gave me a basic set of principles which I have stuck to ever since and I believe allow me to make omelettes that people enjoy.

The principles were:
1) No Milk
2) Just Butter to cook
3) Let the Omelette rise through any filling

I immediately stopped putting milk into my omelette mixture and consequently the taste improved instantly.  There is no need for milk in an omelette at all and nowadays I cannot understand how it ever entered the recipe.

Like a lot of people aware of cholesterol, at the time I had no butter in the house.  However, as Juggo pointed out, there is too much water in margarine so you are effectively boiling the omelette mixture and the transfer of heat is worse.  Oil provides too great a divide between the omelette and the pan and it tends to float around and again not cook properly.  You are looking for a golden brown colour to your omelette not a pale yellow and certainly not something that looks shallow fried.  I do break this rule slightly in that I put a small splash of olive oil on the melting butter, now this is probably hazardous due to the different flashpoints of the two, but it does give a nice flavour to the outside of your omelette.

The major mistake people make with fillings for omelettes is putting in too much and not chopping the pieces down small enough.  Keep the filling light and not too complicated otherwise you can easily verge into a Frittata or even a Tortilla de Patatas (Spanish omelette) if you get onions or potatoes in there.  I put a layer of omelette mixture on the pan rather than exactly following the Juggo approach as fillings can break up the outer layer of your omelette and also burn, so again making it look unattractive.  The only exception to the filling rules is grated cheese.  You can add this to the omelette mixture because it will melt.  The only challenge with a lot of cheese especially if it is yellow or orange that when it is melted you might mistake it for uncooked omelette mixture.

I will talk about the eggs to use and cooking methods for different plain omelettes in following emails.  For now the one final basic point I will include is beating the omelette mixture.  I favour a fork in a small ceramic bowl, one I actually bought in 1988.  I think it is best to 'fold' rather than beat the omelette mixture.  What is essential is to remove any translucent pieces.  With the best eggs you will end up with an orange mixture with light bubbles across the surface; with poor quality eggs it will beat much more easily but leave you with an almost watery, pale yellow mixture.

Biscuit Blog: Flavour Test of Chocolate Digestives

It is clear that this blog is leading the trend among liberal-minded commentators online as now even 'The Guardian' newspaper is reviewing biscuits.  See their comments on a range of chocolate digestives, a biscuit I have not yet reached:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/24/chocolate-digestives-best-worst-taste-test-mcvities-supermarket-brands

An Atlas Of Imaginary Worlds 17: Rooksmoor's Guide To Creation Of A Fantasy World - An Easy Example

This posting is a sequel to my brief 'how to' guide about the easy creation of fantasy kingdoms which I posted in January 2013.  I cannot believe it was that long ago: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/an-atlas-of-imaginary-worlds-16.html  This latest iteration was prompted by a couple of things.  One was an article in 'The Guardian' about how the status of fantasy literature has been rising, especially as a result of the success of George R.R. Martin's 'A Song of Fire & Ice' series and the 'Game of Thrones' television series that came from those books, now in its 5th season.  You can read it here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/03/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-and-the-triumph-of-fantasy-fiction  The article has a small quiz about different lands created for various fantasy series.  The other prompt was stumbling across a map of the 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet that the ESA probe landed on in August 2014. It seems made perfectly for a fantasy map especially as the regions have been name after Ancient Egyptian mythological characters.

As it is a solid, you get some repeated as we are looking at different faces of the irregular comet.  However, these could easily represent colonies of one country on another of the three continents.  Ash might be a colonial power like Britain, France or Spain, perhaps even the Netherlands or Portugal, from our history.  Nut seems to be a narrow coastal country pinned in by high mountains like Chile.  The dominant powers seem to be Imhotep on the south-western continent, Ma'at, Babi and Seth on the eastern continent.  Perhaps the people of Serqet are like the Tamils of our world split between northern Sri Lanka and southern India.  On the north-western continent maybe they were force inland by the arrival of Maftet.  

We could look at the global picture in two ways.  Perhaps the north-western continent is crowded with a range of powers fighting for territory with people looking for colonies in the much larger eastern continent.  Conversely the eastern continent might be the dominant one with countries having enclaves; the Ma'at lands on the western continent certainly seems something like Hong Kong or the German control of the Shandong peninsula in China in our history.  What is it that the people of Apis have that has allowed them to survive and not be engulfed by Ash or Imhotep?  The same could go for Hapi, perhaps important traders on what looks like comparative low-lying ground at the end of the long gulf.  Do they play off one against the other?  What is the history of Anubis?  It lacks colonies.  Is it actually a break-away from Atum which still surrounds it on three sides and itself lacks colonies.  Has there been a civil war or an ethnic one.  Could Atum be the Biafra to Anubis's Nigeria?

What about the Khepry, seemingly pushed to the periphery of two continents?  Down on these extreme southern coasts, what is the climate like - bitterly cold or very hot and humid or desert like?  What about the people of Aten in long valleys.  If these continents are on a sphere, is there travel between their two regions?  Perhaps they are undeveloped tribes left in the inaccessible regions of these continents.  Have I mistaken Maftet are the aggressors and it is they being pushed into the remote regions of their rugged land?

Starting with this map, I have adopted a very geo-political basis.  However, maybe the different regions represent different religions, with Ash as a religion of fisher people along the northern coasts and the religion of Ma'at only becoming established in a port on the north-western continent.  Perhaps Hapi is a religion only found in the most urban areas of the world.  Khepry seems ostracised no matter how you look at it.  However, perhaps controlling the trade across the Wide Sea or the Black Ocean they are far better off than they might look.

Do each of the colours represent an ethnicity, even a species?  Is there common ground between the Aten, Apis, Nut and Hatmehit or between the Ma'at and the Ash or the Aken, Bastet, Anuket and their southern cousins, the Imhotep?

The image though a scientific one can easily trigger off lots of ideas for a fantasy story.  The nature of the continents, the topography and the regions marked on them generate lots of prompts for plots.  As I have noted before, there is always a danger that you might simply transfer the British or the Chileans or the Biafrans into your fantasy world.  However, with changes and crafting you can move them away from that start point.  One you develop your story the different kingdoms or religions are likely to take on a life of their own and so will soon be unidentifiable as their Earth equivalents.

You might not want to use Egyptian names; Imhotep is well known.  However, you can use them as a start point as I noted in my previous posting on creating worlds.  Move them forward one vowel or consonant and immediately Ash becomes 'Etj' (though I might break the rule on that one and stick with Eti) or Urg, if you go back one.  Ma'at becomes 'Ne'ev' or 'Lu'us' both pronounceable.  Imhotep, perhaps the one needing most immediate change becomes 'Onjuviq' or 'Elgisan' the latter one much better than the former.  Nut probably needs to go too, 'Pav' or 'Mos' both are feasible.  Khepry sounds like it is the result of this process but could become 'Ljiqsz' or 'Jganqx' both very hard.  The system might need modification so 'h' goes on to 'i' rather than j; and r back to 'p' rather than q and p on to 'r'.  It is probably worthwhile treating y as a vowel. Thus Liirsa or Jganru are a little better.

Of course, sorting out your world is just the first stage of your fantasy novel.  While less picturesque, far more vital are the characters and you will have to turn to someone else for advice on them.  Unlike George R.R. Martin I find it hard to have amoral characters or see through the eyes of evil ones.  Like a lot of people I also hold back from killing off the nicest ones, so there would be no 'red' wedding in mine.  Perhaps you have more courage and skill than me and can succeed like George.  Remember it has taken him over twenty years to get there.

From Conception To Retail In 3 Days: My Fastest e-Book

As regular readers have known, around two years ago I got into producing e-books. Not only did I self-publish the novels I had been writing over the past thirty years but I also made use of blog postings to create essay collections on alternate history.  These latter were very popular, especially those concerning the Second World War.  However, as time passed they began to be criticised, as is typical for many e-books, on the basis of minute points and people simply disagreeing with the content or the style and labelling it with a one-star review.  The worst being a review that complained that a 1940s pastiche novel was a 1940s pastiche novel and as the review said 'no-one wants that', so the critic felt it was down to him to remove it from circulation.  A one-star review means the book is no longer picked up by search engines and basically sales cease.  I have kept the book on sale for want of knowing what else to do with it.

Self-published e-books have brought other trends beyond the absolute power of a single reviewer to destroy a book.  One that is discussed in 'The Guardian' newspaper last weekend by Philip Hensher: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/01/philip-hensher-why-short-is-sweet  as if it had suddenly just appeared, is that such an approach allows the publication and sale of short stories in a way that has probably not been feasible for a century, maybe even longer.  I think Hensher would be pushed to sell a short story at £2.29 on Amazon as he suggests, but maybe someone like Zadie Smith who he focuses on, has sufficient standing to achieve that price.

Hensher seems to be oblivious to the fact that this trend has been going on for five years or so.  I guess he still reads books he buys in WH Smiths rather than traipsing through the online Kindle listings on Amazon on a Friday afternoon or clicking through from a blog to an author's stories sold on Smashwords.  Certainly he should have been aware of 'Shetl Days' by Harry Turtledove, an established if no literary author, published only online as a short e-book for 99p back in April 2011.  Hensher is write to praise the ability to produce and get out to the public books of very varied lengths.  Ironically, or perhaps logically, on Amazon the best-selling genre of short-story seem to be 4,000-word erotic e-books; I guess because people are not looking for much character or plot development in such stories!

This year with my books being torn apart for representing Finland in the 1940s in a way which people disapproved of, apparently using too many online as opposed to paper sources and having 'too much history' in my alternate history e-books, I took many of them down.  They were not making any money and it was soul-destroying just to be sitting there being slagged off in a whole host of ways.  These days, one minor typographical error is enough to have the entire book condemned as useless.  I guess that is a characteristic of our indignant societies; people are angry that their authors can actually be human and cannot afford to employ editors, even though most publishing houses do not bother with them these days anyway.  Conversely, people I meet want to see my books, but if they even read them, they never bother to include a review, leading me to think I indeed must be so bad and they are simply too embarrassed to say.

Some constructive criticism is what all authors need, such as suggestions on style or level of detail.  In this world it is all or nothing, either the reviewer condemns your work as needing to be removed for causing offence due to minor errors or the person is too embarrassed to say anything about what they did not like in the book.  The former simply want you gone out of the way of the 'proper' authors they admire so much more.  The latter, well, I do not know what they want, perhaps simply proof that when you say you are an author you actually are, maybe they hope to catch you out in confessing you are lying and the evidence simply ruins that game so they have nothing else to say.

Anyway, you get the picture.  However, these set-backs have not doused the ideas that I have bubbling away in my head.  Sometimes I have to simply write a story to get it out of my head otherwise it bubbles around in there getting in the way of other thoughts and indeed preventing me from sleeping.  One reason why the 10th-12th of the Braucher stories were written so fast was that they had been planned some years before but never written and reflecting on them kept me awake, I simply had to get them out and finished to get enough sleep and maintain my health.  This brings me to 'Against the Devil's Men' which is an e-book just under 9,000 words in length that I started writing on the evening of Saturday, 2nd November 2013, as a result of the weather meaning the wireless reception where I am staying was too poor to allow me to continue my game of  'Rome II Total War'.  I wrote the remaining 7,300 words of the book throughout 3rd November.  I edited it after work on 4th November, having created most of the front cover and the synopsis over my lunch break.  I put it up for sale that evening and by the morning of 4th November, had sold one copy. 

Of course, the ideas had been around for a long time.  The book is set in western Normandy in 1272 in an alternate world in which rather than retreating from Europe in the 1240s the Mongols have remained to continue their conquests and destruction.  The ideas go back to me reading 'The Devil's Horsemen' by James Chambers (1979) in 2007, playing 'Medieval II Total War' and subsequently producing a chapter on this blog and then in my e-book of alternate histories of the Middle Ages 'On Other Fields' (2012).  The story is told from the perspective of a cardinal charged with inspecting the frontline in the bocage country of Normandy.  I worry that it is too dense because the cardinal engages in religious thoughts and controversies.  I was also conscious of avoiding anachronisms, so he refers to the Mongols as 'Tartars' a mix up with the Tatars another steppe people; for centuries 'Mongol' meant a group of nomads rather than their ethnicity.  In addition, being seen as coming from the Devil, this was a reference to Tartarus, a hellish region of the underworld in Ancient Greek mythology.  He also refers to the Folban, the German term at the time for the people we now call the Cumans, another nomadic steppe tribe but one which fled in front of the Mongols and converted to Christianity in the 1220s.

My short stories have never sold as well as my longer books.  However, I have enjoyed being able to produce and sell a book within three days.  In the 1930s books on political events were often overtaken by a change in the global situation before they had been published.  In these days not only can you blog about such events but you can get a book out while events are still running; indeed with an e-book you can update as they change.  Perhaps Philip Hensher should catch up with the rest of the world and reflect on that new slant on writing and publishing.

P.P. 01/01/2016
I realised that I should have updated this posting in June 2014.  That month I stopped selling 'Against the Devil's Men' in large part because it was criticised as juvenile for taking the French rather than the Mongol perspective on the Mongol invasion of Europe.  Given how inhumane and brutal the Mongol invaders were to Christians and Muslims alike, destroying many aspects of civilisation where they attacked and killing people in particularly cruel ways, I would be very worried if I could write from the Mongol perspective on these things.  I did include the story in 'Déviation: What If? Stories of the French' (2014) where it seems to have attracted less attention.

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.

Roosevelt and Contesting the Plutocrats

This one is going to start by sounding rather obscure but in fact goes to the way in which we properly respond to the financiers who have plunged us into the economic chaos that we are now facing simply for their own greed. Last week I was reading an article by Jonathan Raban in 'The Guardian' (24th January edition) analysing the inaugural speech by Barack Obama and comparing it with such speeches in the past. As he showed the US Presidential inaugural speeches have rather become fossilised in form and actually despite being so restrained, Obama and his primary speechwriter Jon Favreau used the speech to attack the regime of George W. Bush and try to outline a more accepting liberal USA for the future. This element of Raban's article was interesting and I have no complaint about it. Where I had more issue was with his comments on the first inaugural speech of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.

Roosevelt was elected president four times, dying in 1945 shortly into his fourth term; these days US presidents are only permitted to serve two four-year terms, unless they come to office through the removal of the sitting president; Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson became president in 1963, was elected in his own right in 1964 and could have been re-elected in 1968 if he had chosen. The importance of Roosevelt's 1933 speech is that the world was in a similar position to today. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had helped precipitate the widespread economic collapse (though it had begun as early as 1927) especially in 1931 (when the Austrian Creditanstalt Bank collapsed and the British Labour Government also collapsed after only 2 years in office) and by 1933 was leading to the highest levels of unemployment that the world had seen. US unemployment reached 13 million people, 24.9% of the workforce in 1933; in Germany, 1933 being the year the Nazis came to power it was over 6 million unemployed, 34% of the workforce.

Thus, Roosevelt came to power as a liberal president following the conservative Herbert Hoover, at a time when the economic crisis was well underway. Thus, 1933 was not directly equivalent to 2009; we are probably in something more like 1930 now. However, both Roosevelt and Obama had to make a clear lead in terms of what they were going to do to tackle the economic problems. Obama had a lot less room for manoeuvre in what he could include in his speech though was challenging a wider range of issues that Roosevelt (for example, recent US foreign and human rights policy, as well as the economic crisis). Raban is right that Roosevelt's speech was more ground-breaking and memorable, but interestingly he also feels that it was anti-Semitic. I think Raban's analysis is lazy (something which seems rather too prevalent in 'The Guardian' newspaper recently, note my critique of John Cartwright's piece on the 20th July plot last month) and to some degree by labelling Roosevelt as having anti-Semitic tendencies (even if these inadvertent) in his speech, he undermines what attacks we might make on the plutocrats of today using Roosevelt's language.

The element of the 1933 speech which attracts Raban's criticism is the following passage. I quote more of it than Raban did/was able to:

"... Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. ..."

Now Raban feels that reference to moneychangers in the temple, taking from the incident in the Bible (Gospel of St. Matthew 21:12; Gospel of St. Mark 11:15) in which Jesus goes into the 'Temple of God' and threw out 'all that bought and sold in the temple', particularly the moneychangers and those selling doves/pigeons. The assumption of course is that the traders in the temple were Jews but neither writer suggests that this is the case. It is quite possible that a mix of people were trading in the temple, ironically in a way medieval churches in the western world were often used centuries later. Added to this, of course, at the time Jesus was breaking up this trade he was not a Christian, but a Jew. No-one was a Christian as we would define it, while Jesus was alive because what we define as Christianity was only established as a result of Jesus's death.

The central element of Christianity is Jesus's death and resurrection, so without that having happened, you could not have Christians. Thus, Jesus's actions were not someone of a different faith acting against Jews, they were the actions of a Jew acting against other people, some or many of whom were also Jews. You have to also contextualise this action in terms of 'Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s' (words from Gospel of St. Mark) which is not long after the temple incident being covered in Gospel of St. Matthew 22:21; St. Mark 12:13-17 and St. Luke 20-26. Though there is clearly discussion about what Jesus is advocating, it does seem to suggest that the holy and the profane renderings should be kept in different contexts. Jesus has not objection to their being money changers, he just does not want them (or dove/pigeon sellers) in a place which is supposed to be about the spiritual not the mundane. Like Jesus, Roosevelt argues he is seeking to 'restore the temple to its ancient truths', how can this be anti-Semitic, as it is advocating the status quo ante rather than destruction of that setting.

Raban also feels that the reference to the Book of Proverbs in Roosevelt's statement '[t]hey have no vision' (in the Hebrew text it is 29:18) is an additional element of anti-Semitism. I accept that the Book of Proverbs unlike many elements of the Old Testament does not have a perspective on things which is Jewish-centred unlike many of the other books, but the acceptance of it in the Old Testament does not suggest that there is Jewish hostility to this book nor that it is anti-Semitic in nature; it is simply that it draws on a wider range of perspectives and traditions from the Middle East of the era and as scholars note demonstrates the interaction between the Jews and other peoples notably the Greeks and the inter-change of ideas rather than any attempt to suppress them. The Book of Proverbs is not out of step with other late and Wisdom books of the Old Testament.

Thus, I find it difficult to accept Raban's assertion that Roosevelt's speech was even nodding towards anti-Semitism, because the source material was not anti-Semitic. I know presidents are sometimes misguided by their speechwriters, but even Raban has to admit, that Roosevelt's speechwriter was Raymond Moley not a noted anti-Semite and the closest Raban can find is Father Coughlin, a supporter of Roosevelt in 1932 who soon stopped supporting him when the New Deal was introduced. There is no evidence that Coughlin had any input into any of Roosevelt's speeches. Raban seems surprised that Roosevelt was seemingly spouting anti-Semitic statements and says that '[i]t's a puzzle' especially given the fact that he had Jewish friends and appointed Jews to his Cabinet and the Surpreme Court, noting names such as Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, Abe Fortas and Louis Brandels. 

The only other explanation he can find for Roosevelt's seeming abberation in this speech is that 'genteel antisemitism was so routine that it passed unnoticed'. This could only be stated by someone with no idea of the world of 1933. Roosevelt was a far from stupid, short-sighted or naive man, he was clearly aware of the global tensions. The Nazis attitudes to anti-Semitism were well known; refugees from anti-Semitism in Germany as from Russia thirty years earlier, were already coming to the USA. In a speech as important as his first inaugural, Roosevelt did nothing without great care. Speeches in the 1930s when rallies and oration were still a core part of the political process were more examined than even today in our sound bite world. Raban confuses himself by seeing anti-Semitism in Biblical texts when it is not there. He undermines his own argument so much that it seems pointless even making it. Both he and his editor needed to think through what was being suggested before sending it to print. Such feeble analysis wastes time in what was otherwise a useful article.

Roosevelt and Moley were clever in using these references and this is an important element to note. Roosevelt used the rhetoric that would be familiar to millions of Americans. Importantly he charged the bankers not with incompetence but with immorality and that is a vital aspect that we must revive now. Roosevelt is right that the bankers had 'no vision' because they looked no wider than their personal bank balances and consequently 'the people perish'. The importance of this for what Roosevelt set out to do in the next few years was that he was arguing that these steps were not necessary simply from an economic or political ground but from a moral ground. In this way he is trying to be as bipartisan as possible as whilst Republicans might baulk at what they saw as Socialist or proto-Keynesian economics, it was harder to turn their backs on something which was a moral campaign in the interests of those who were not the 'self-seekers' but cared for 'civilization'. Roosevelt notes even among the capitalists it is the 'unscrupulous' and those with 'stubbornness' and 'incompetence' who he is taking to task, rather than seeking to overthrow capitalism as a whole. Raban has conjured up a fantasy of Roosevelt spouting 'a lightly coded message about a conspiracy of Jewish bankers' when it is nothing of the kind. It is an attack on all 'unscrupulous' bankers whichever faith they followed.

I acknowledge that some of those seeking the end or modification of capitalism in the late 19th century and early 20th century could fall into the danger of anti-Semitism, the so-called 'Socialism of Fools'. However, partly this was because genuine right-wing anti-Semites, who generally supported the reign of the rich, used 'plutocrat' as short-hand for Jew. However, the term is far broader than that and in fact in any country of the western world, the percentage of plutocrats who were also Jewish was always a small minority; Christian plutocrats always heavily out-numbered them. Thus, when we attack plutocrats today, no-one should accuse us of being anti-Islamic because the largest shareholder of Woolworths in the UK was Iranian or anti-Hindu because the owners of Corus and Jaguar Cars are Indian. 

Plutocrats come in all shapes, sizes, ethnicities and religions. They are wrong and as in 1929 they, financiers rather than manufacturers in particular, have plunged the world into economic chaos because they worship no god except greed. Roosevelt was right to draw attention to the fact that when greed is unfettered and crushes so many ordinary people for the sake of piling wealth on wealth for a limited number of already wealthy people, then it is evil. It needs to be challenged in the way Jesus challenged it and to have a better society we need in Jesus's view spiritual values; in Roosevelt's view 'social values more noble than mere monetary profit'. More of us need to come forward and say the world has suffered because immoral greed was not checked. This is not anti-Jewish/Christian/Hindu/Islamic it is anti-evil.

The List For 2011 Which Interested Me The Most

For some reason many in the media seem an urge at the end of the year to compile lists usually related to things that have occurred in the preceding year.  I suppose it is a very easy way to fill up newspaper and webspace without really having to put much effort into composing something.  'The Guardian' which along with the BBC news website, is my media source of choice was not immune to this tendency.  However, rather than the 'Five Things We've Learned About Fashion' (despite it being penned by the very sexy Jess Cartner-Morley) or 'Five Things We've Learned About Television/Art/Food/Science' and definitely skirting Grace Dent's 'Five Things We've Learned About Celebrity' I was ironically drawn to the more eclectic almost surreal 'Famous List Words': lists produced by a range of 'celebrities' including former Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling and teleivsion presenter Lorraine Kelly to the puppet character Sooty.  The items listed included Scottish anthems, top people called Jones and favourite past shapes (with spaghetti, penne and fusili rounding out the top three).  The one that attracted my attention most and I felt was worthy of comment was '8 Movie Characters You Wouldn't Want To Fuck With' as selected by current pop star Jordan Stephens (born 1992) of Rizzle Kicks, a hip hop group from Brighton, southern England.

Of the movies listed I have only seen six but hope that I know enough of the work of the actors featured to comment on the list as a whole and I may come back to this posting if I see the remaining two movies.  I replicate the list here for reference with some additional information for ease of subsequent discussion:

1) Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills in 'Taken' (2008) - Literally slaps up most of Paris in 96 hours.
2) Brad Pitt as Mickey O'Neil in 'Snatch' (2000) - One-hit wonder.
3) Gary Oldman as Stansfield  in 'Leon' (1994) - No one plays gun-toting villains like Gary Oldman
4) Vincent Cassel as Jacques in 'Mesrine' (2 parts; 2008) - He holds up a judge at gunpoint. Enough said.
5) Keanu Reeves as Neo in 'The Matrix' (1999; but presumably too in the sequels both 2003 in which the character becomes stronger) - Can literally do ANYTHING.
6) Denzel Washington as Eli in 'The Book of Eli' (2010) - Can batter people while wearing a backpack.
7) Samuel L. Jackson as Jules in 'Pulp Fiction' (1994) - Just wants to be the shepherd.
8) Sir Ben Kingsley as Don Logan in 'Sexy Beast' (2000) - Doesn't take no for an answer.

This is the kind of list you would expect men in their thirties sitting slumped in front of the television, perhaps portrayed by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in the movie version.  It is notable that all the characters are male and what is interesting is that what seems to have got them into the list is not simply that they can be physically violent but also that they have an attitude.  The nature of each is very different, but you could argue that all are self-righteous, and in a couple of cases righteous too.  I suppose that is something that is very scary about such an opponent that they have blind faith in what they are doing and believe that to challenge that is utterly unacceptable even if, on an objective moral judgement their own behaviour would be condemned.  This is particularly the case with Stansfield and Logan, both of whom are evil men and yet it is their indignation that anyone would challenge their world view that gives them real nastiness.  Jules is a little like this but his indignation really stems less from his world view which in the course of the movie seems to be moving towards some kind of Christian religious revelation but rather irritations to his day-to-day life; he is most angered not by immoral behaviour but by people disturbing his coffee drinking.  That mundanity of violence is another aspect of evil and shows a complex character who seems to feel that he is moving towards good whilst at the same time behaving in an evil way without thought.

Eli and Neo are different, both being at least prophets if no messiahs.  I have not seen 'The Book of Eli' but it is about a blind traveller carrying a braille copy of the Bible across the USA thirty years after a nuclear apocalypse.  In many ways it panders to the US view that much of the population of North America could survive a nuclear war and in some ways the world would be a better place if American society could start from scratch, in this way the premise is very similar to 'The Postman' (novel 1985; movie 1997).  Having Washington play a blind character also references martial arts movies with blind action heroes. In parts of the movie Eli seems able to dodge bullets as if protected.  Thus his violence fighting against Carnegie played by Gary Oldman, is righteous as he is seemingly on a mission from God.  Washington's action characters tend to be rather stoic almost relaxed in many of his movies such as 'Devil in the Blue Dress' (1995), 'Fallen' (1998), 'The Siege' (1998), 'Man on Fire' (2004) and especially 'Deja Vu' (2004).  Keanu Reeves struggles as an actor and whilst Washington can show a wider range of emotions Reeves is a one-note actor.  'The Matrix' is engaging due to its premise, but Reeves is so emotionless that he might as well have played a construct of the computer system.  Yes, Neo can do everything, but in many ways that is what makes him unappealing.  There are times when we feel Neo is in jeopardy, not through Reeves's portrayal but because it is explained to us, yet ultimately we know he has the power to overcome everything and an invulnerable hero is no hero at all.  Even Stansfield and Logan have a vulnerability if their plans do no go right.  They suffer the double hit of things not working out and them becoming apoplectic that other people have derailed what they felt was the thing that had to be done.

Gary Oldman seems to be coming down to two settings.  One is a quirky almost pleasantly, camply sinister bad guy as he has portrayed not only in 'Leon' but also almost taking off that role in 'The Fifth Element' (1997) and producing something similar in 'Airforce One' (1997), 'Lost in Space' (1998) and more recently voicing Lord Shen in 'Kung Fu Panda 2' (2011) and funnily I always see him in mind's eye rather than Tim Roth, playing Archibald Cunningham in 'Rob Roy' (1995) - perhaps since they were in 'Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead' (1990) together.  The other is a warmer, usually bearded character, notably in the Harry Potter series (movies feauring Oldman 2004-11) and perhaps 'Red Riding Hood' (2011) though I have yet to see that.  To some degree he seems to have lost the range of his early work notably 'Sid and Nancy' (1986) and 'Prick Up Your Ears' (1987) which may explain his movie hiatus 2001-4.  I find Oldman's warmer characters far more credible than his evil ones which he tends to ham up.  This was no doubt intentional in 'The Fifth Element' which was a light-hearted movie, but I feel weakens his portrayal in 'Leon'.  His best bad character is probably the title role in 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (1992).  The elements of the mundanity and self-righteousness that makes the others listed here often so sharp is lost in Oldman's ostentatious portrayals.

Brad Pitt plays against type in 'Snatch' which is a gritty movie.  It has elements of humour but having lived in East London, I also felt it managed to catch the everyday harshness and easy criminality of the area.  Pitt plays an Irishman rather than an American (something he also did in 'The Devil's Own' (1997)) whose dialogue is deliberately inaccessible.  He is a traveller who also bareknuckle boxes, an illegal sport in the UK.  The part draws on the muscular build Pitt gained for 'Fight Club' (1999) through boxing and other martial arts.  O'Neil is a violent man for his living but that fits the context in which he lives.  Ultimately what he does is for his family especially when their caravans are torched by gangsters.  Thus, while not showing the indignation of Stansfield or Logan, O'Neill still adheres to a rule, one which I think would be more broadly accepted in UK society and probably even more so in the USA or looking out for your family and  taking revenge on anyone who harmed them.  I think people like his character because people underestimate O'Neil and yet he bides his time until he can have the situation to his greatest advantage.  The character in 'Snatch' that I despise is Brick Top portrayed by Alan Ford, who like Logan and Stansfield creates his own selfish rules and viciously punishes anyone who steps over the line of his self-imposed laws.  These people believe they are in the 'right' because they have created their own 'moral' universe simply based on their base desires.

I think the reason why Mills is at the top of the list is for much the same reason that O'Neill is favoured.  Mills is a retired CIA operative (as with war veterans, the USA seems to be full of such men) who goes after the slavers who snatch his daughter while on holiday in France.  He is the manifestation of millions of fathers sitting in the audience imagining what they would do if their own daughter was taken.  Mills shows a lot of paranoia in the early part of the movie, which actually turns out to be well placed.  'Taken' taps right into the fear that parents especially in the UK and USA have about even letting their 18 year old children out of their sight and into the dangerous place called 'Europe' (most British people do not see the UK as part of Europe).  Mills has both to fight authority in the typical way of many cop and spy movies as well as beating up and shooting the bad guys who turn out to be the 'acceptable' racial stereotyped enemy of the past two decades: Arabs.  Mills does appear vulnerable and he appears human too; he seems motivated by the best of intentions, which for the average cinema goer is defence of family well above religious or other moral motives.  It seems no surprise that Neeson is starring in 'Taken 2' (2012) set in Istanbul and featuring Mills and his wife taken prisoner by the father of the man he killed in the first movie.

Finally I turn to Jacques Mesrine.  Unlike the other characters the two movies featuring Cassell are biographies of a renowned French gangster from the 1960s and 1970s who carried out the acts featured in the movies for real even if these have been dramatised.  I have not seen these movies by Cassell is an accomplished actor.  His bady guys can be rather camp like Oldman's, for example in 'Dobermann' (1997) [Tcheky Karyo as Inspecteur Sauver Cristini is actually more terrifying in that movie], 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' (2000), 'Ocean's Twelve' (2004) and 'Ocean's Thirteen' (2006) and I hope has been able to channel more of the edginess which was apparent in 'La Haine' (1995).

Even though Stephens is only 20, he has produced an interesting list that certainly provoked thoughts for me.  I think what it shows is that a 'hard nut' character in movies is not necessarily the most violent character, there has to be something more.  Perhaps it is the righteouness of the character that makes them appear unstoppable that adds that edge to what they do and means that you would not want to cross their paths as you would know that they would never let up.  In some cases, notably Mills and O'Neil this gives heart to the audience.  In reality we know that if our child is snatched there is very little that we can do and the authorities have very little more power, so being shown even a fictional case of someone getting something back, some revenge at least for their family heartens us as viewers and it also allows us to watch the violence without feeling uneased by it.

Student Inflow/Outflow

This is something I guess been aware of since when I first moved to southern England in 2005, but has come home more to me now that for much of my time I am living in West London.  For some reason around where I am living are lots of educational institutions from primary school right up to universities and so simply travelling to work I see a cross-section of our being-educated public of all ages.  Of course, for the moment all of them, even the university students are on their summer holidays (though universities seem to be all Americanised now with semesters rather than terms and they have always had vacations rather than holidays).  However, I noticed that this did not seem to make the university campuses any quieter, in their place are literally thousands of young people who seem to range from about 12-16 years old.  Saying that I have seen some Chinese students who look about 9-10 years old.  That might be the case, I imagine a British mother would be loath to send their child 8,000 Km for the summer, but I might be wrong.  Anyway, the bulk of them seem to be teenagers.  The nationalities I can make out have included French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and some East Europeans, I am unfamiliar with East European languages so could not tell you whether they were Poles, Czechs or Russians, perhaps from the Baltic States.  It is heartening that the immigration policies that threatened to kill the language school trade in the UK have been bent sufficiently not to choke off this important industry.

Anyway, each university seems to have been colonised by a one or more language schools run by energetic young staff in bright teeshirts for the summer.  I guess this works well for all concerned.  The school gets a purpose built teaching space and accommodation with a convenience store and cafes that all universities seem to have and the university presumably gets lots of fees at a time when the campus would normally be empty.  It also seems to employ lots of young graduates as organisers and language teachers at a time when any jobs that can be created especially for people under 24, are desperately needed.  Though I did not really notice it at the time, I now realise I have witnessed the same occurrence in Hampshire and Devon too.  Madly I had forgotten the two students who lodged in my house last year, I somehow put them in a different box, perhaps because I was only seeing one of them rather than large clusters and generally I am not in areas where students or tourists go.  I guess that it is simply the draw of London and the scale of the operations in the capital that make it more apparent, maybe simply my route to work.  One point to note is how uniformly dressed so many of these students are, fitting in very much with what Niall Ferguson was saying in his series earlier in the year, that a teenager from Beijing now is a replica of one from Madrid in the clothing and electronic equipment that they have.

I have no idea how much it costs for a 14-year old to be sent from Beijing or Madrid to London for a number of weeks, I guess they come for a fortnight, perhaps it is more.  From what I can ascertain and referencing the other examples I now recognise I have witnessed, they seem to get teaching in English all morning and then trips out to the standards of British tourism, everything from Bath and Stonehenge to Windsor Castle and the London Eye.  Shepherded around I guess they never really encounter the London beyond the campus bounds.  It is probably a good thing.  Students are never particularly popular even with 42% of British 18-year olds attending university and these groups are certainly noisy as any cluster of teenagers is.  What is apparent is their wealth.  Sending anyone from China to the UK costs money and these students all seem to have the latest smartphones and fashions.  I guess it is something that only the rich middle class parents of various European countries could afford and that is rather alarming, because it shows that even the UK's middle class is lagging behind its neighbours and the Chinese in what is affordable to do.  This is of course no surprise given that the real incomes of 90% of the UK population have slid in the last 40 years.  Perhaps it would have been affordable in 1975 but not now.

I would like to think that in western Paris or western Madrid there are hundreds of British teenagers there for a fortnight or a month and being drilled in French or Spanish (let alone western Beijing learning Mandarin) mixed in with some sports and some sight-seeing, but know it is not happening.  How do I know?  Well simply because I read 'The Guardian' newspaper.  It is not the font of all knowledge but if you want to get inside the heads of what the Europeanised (and this is what marks 'The Guardian' out from 'The Times' and 'The Daily Telegraph' which are pretty Little England in attitude) middle class aspires to be doing you read 'The Guardian'.  I can see no features on packing your 14-year old, let alone 10-year old off to Paris for the summer (unless it is to relatives) to learn a foreign language. 

Partly, as I have intimated above, it is the cost: the fact that the British middle class is falling in terms of disposable incomes because very few in Britain are willing to insist on a greater share of the prosperity that heads of companies are clearly benefiting from and did not even before the credit crunch was allowed to happen.  I know that these days the middle class holiday is camping in the UK, something once left to the unimaginative and those with no money to go abroad.  The other factor seems to be the 'parent fear' that has taken parents by the throat and sends them into hysterics the moment they lose eyeline with their child let alone mobile phone contact.  More examples of this were revealed to me this week with accounts of a colleague at a child's birthday party with mothers running around frantically the moment one of their children was lost in the crowd (given there were 50 children in attendance, that was no doubt easy).  The middle class has never relished packing their children off to holiday camp the way that their US equivalents have always done, they have never trusted anyone to look after their children and even their trust in teachers has slumped, hence the terminal state of even term-time school trips.  The upper class, of course, have been happy to bundle their children off into the care of others almost from the moment they are born and certainly once they turn 8.  Even if somehow, middle class real incomes rose, you would never see the equivalent of what I witness with French children (France is nearer to where I am living now than Yorkshire) happening with their British counterparts.  The woman in my house worries over the 5-minute walk it would take her 9-year old son to reach school and has already ruled out him going on any trips which involve him sleeping away from home, not that she or I could afford to pay for him to go.

Does it really matter if there is an imbalance in the flow of teenaged language students?  Is it not better for the British economy that more are coming into the UK, spending money here, rather than it being balanced up by an outflow.  The cost in my view is human.  If we go back to Ian Duncan Smith's speech earlier in which he encouraged British employers to take on more British young people, the retort from the CBI was to ask why would any UK company want to do this when it could employ better qualified East Europeans with a real work ethic compared to ill-qualified British people with an attitude of looking out for what they can get from a company.  I have no desire for British young people to be compelled to forelock-tugging lackeys, but it does seem that there are skills that they are not getting to compete with people from other parts of Europe.  It is not only people from Eastern Europe, apparently around 300,000 French people live in London alone, more than the entire population of Southampton; 123,000 Poles over the age of 16 live in London with 398,000 in other parts of the UK. 

Now, I know many people from other parts of the EU returned to their home countries when the recession kicked in and we have not returned to the figures of 2007, but it does suggest there is something that enables such migrants to get work in the UK.  It may be that they are cheap labour, but even then 16 year olds have always tended to be cheaper to employ.  One clear thing is that the migrants have the confidence to get up and come into the UK and find work in a language which is not their own.  How many British 18-year olds or even 21-year olds with a degree in their backpack do that?  A key challenge is that they do not speak the language, another is that often they have not ever been in another country, these days, not even on holiday let alone to study.  It seems ironic that the Conservatives (and New Labour who are/were minimally different to them) with their occasional forays into attempts at discrimination, are in fact further reinforcing the conditions that hamstring British young people.  They have pandered to the tabloid media which have hyped up the fear that a child out of your sight is being abused by a paedophile.  They have allowed companies to distort the distribution of profits so whilst bosses' salaries have rocketed the real incomes of 90% of employees have continued to slump unabated.  Thus, they have engineered and are sustaining a situation in which a 14-year old from France or Spain or even China is getting the intellectual and personal skills to find work across the world and yet their British counterpart is closeted at home learning nothing beyond the distance between their home and the park.  Thus, when I see another coach disgorging a fifty or so teenagers ready for some weeks of language school, I do feel depressed knowing that if I was in one of the other capitals of Europe I would not be witnessing the equivalent with British students.

Published Writing: Rise in Quantity; Fall in Quality?

As I have commented before, like many people I tend to get the bulk of my news from the internet and rolling news channels.  In the UK I am aware that we have fewer news stories being broadcast at any one time than, say in France and Belgium, where news broadcasts seem to have twice as many main stories as their UK counterparts.  Consequently, I soon know all that is available about a particular story at any given time.  So that I have something more to engage with, I buy one newspaper per week.  This has long been 'The Guardian' on Saturday.  I tend to read it in the order of magazine, TV guide, news section, money section, jobs section and review.  The money and jobs sections obviously depress me, but sometimes have useful tips on what to avoid in terms of companies and errors in interviews.  The review section does cover music and art but is predominantly about books and writers.  At one time I thought I would one day be among that set; especially when, back in the early 2000s, a friend of mine became a member of the Royal Society of Literature, but now it is like an insight into an alien world.  To some degree it has got more distant because being unemployed my reading (and writing) always falls away sharply.  This is the longest period I have ever been unemployed, in fact, longer than all the previous occasions put together, stretching back over a career which is now 20 years long.  The other thing is that, certainties of publishing of writing and publishing seem to have disappeared, and the writing world and its literary sub-set, in this respect, is a very different place.  It is one, I guess, I feel disconnected from; I imagine those who work in the industry are probably feeling pretty lost too.

People have long spoken of the death of the book and there have been reports of young people from teenages onwards seeing no point in reading books.  To some degree, what a book actually is, has changed a great deal.  Not everyone has a Kindle, but there is a sense that those who read the most before are those most likely to adopt electronic versions of books.  Back in the mid-1990s, when the internet was coming into so much of society, I remember attending a talk by a university lecturer, speaking in East London, about the opportunities which the internet offered.  In the questions session at the end, there was a striking moment when someone in the audience pointed out that internet access was not free.  The speaker, presumably at that time using the internet for free at her university had assumed that was the case for everyone.  Her whole premise that the internet allowed democratic access to information was utterly undermined when it turned out that only a handful of people in the audience could access the internet. 

At the time I knew no-one who had it at home; I used to go to a local takeaway Indian restaurant and pay a fee to use their terminal for 30 minutes.  Of course, the growth of cyber-cafes appeared in the next few years, and I could go to an Easy outlet in a quite salubrious setting compared to the corner of a takeaway, but, still, it was apparent that I was paying.  As the speaker totally missed, the actual future of electronic media, is segregation.  This is not only on the basis of access and even then 27% of the UK population does not have internet access, varying between 17% in London and 41% of the population of the North-East.  In addition the quality of service varies across the country as the reporting of the difficulty of getting internet connections in Cornwall, certainly outside Newquay. Anyway, the speaker believed the internet provided a democratic access to resources, and, I guess if you consider you can use it in libraries (though usually at a fee) and centres assoicated with job centres, this is the case.  However, high quality, home access tends to be for the wealthier. 

Publishing in electronic formats takes this segregation a further stage in segregating those who can access material or not.  When will the day come when certain books, rather than as at present coming in print and electronic format, will just be in the latter, as that is the kind of affluent audience that publishers want to address?  With the news that Britain's last bookshop chain, Waterstones, maybe closing at that online retailer Amazon already has 80% of the book market in the UK, will it be possible to even buy a printed book if you do not have internet access, and importantly, a credit or debit card.  Even in affluent houses, unlike when I was a boy, when I could go to a bookshop and buy any book I wanted, nowadays I would have to engage a parent to pay for it using one of their cards.  The past decade certainly has seen increasing attempts to shut off the less wealthy from accessing more and more of what is being produced.

Aside from the increasing segregation of potential readers, on the basis of wealth and the related access, there is two other developments in publishing which are noticeable.  One aspect is something I have commented upon and of which I am a perpetrator.  The amount of writing, fiction and non-fiction, simply being pumped out into the media-sphere.  This is done in different levels.  Naturally there are thousands, perhaps millions of blogs and websites on which people post their writing.  As I have noted before, there is something like 42-49,000 finished novels in the UK which are entered into national competitions, and I imagine there are many tens of thousands more that are not put forward for competition.  These does not even begin to touch on the short stories that are produced or the poems.

There are also websites run so that people can simply put up their writing, some are genre based, some are simply general.  If you are bored at your desk you can spend hours simply reading stories, for example, on vampires and a whole sub-genre of 'fan fiction' stories written about characters appearing in movies or particularly television series.  I know that people from other European countries often access such free resources as an easy way to improve their vocabulary and their knowledge of contemporary English.  I suppose that this is a true democratic approach to writing, that so many voices can now be heard.  Writing, especially fiction, must be one of the largest hobbies in the UK at the moment.  For some people, like me, for whom it has been a hobby as long as I can remember, there is a feeling of 'why should I bother?', any more.  I read a comment in 'The Guardian' a few weeks back from a reader responding to an article about creative writing courses.  Like many other commentators he noted the difference between skill and talent, most of us can gain creative writing skills, but most of us lack the talent to write well.  He had qualifications in creative writing, but had come to the conclusion that the world did not need any more creative writing which was below the standard of the great novelists and so he had ceased writing, in theory making room for better writers to shine.  I have found myself being tempted to follow that path too. 

Perhaps it is vanity, that I would rather not be a writer at all than be a poor quality writer.  However, perhaps it is not the correct approach, and I should just write for the enjoyment in brings me; recognising that the only reason why I feel uneasy, is because there is a sense that if you write you must publish: 'everyone can be a millionaire/so everyone has to try' as The The satirised back in 1986.  In addition, I certainly know there are writers who are far worse than me pumping out content, so, to some degree, it is not simply vanity, but pride too, that: why should they be putting their stuff into the world, when I could be putting out better?  I recognise that neither vanity nor pride are acceptable motivators, hence I remain conflicted over whether to even bother writing.

The other development in writing, is a decline in quality, mainly around the lack of editing.  This is unsurprising.  I take a lot of time editing my postings and especially my fiction, before I put them online, but even then, months later I got back and see loads of errors that I have missed.  Regular readers of this blog, going back to an older posting may have found it has changed a great deal from what they might remember.  That is because I have gone back to it and have been startled by errors I missed at the time.  No author can spot everything even with the passage of time.  You are too close to your writing to be able to do it.  Automatically your mind makes the connections and understands the message in a way that any reader could not do, thus you miss weaknesses.

Self-publishing comes in a number of forms these days.  Here I have already mentioned posting on blogs and fiction websites, but, of course, you can self-publish or publish on demand into print form as well.  I discussed issues around this approach back in 2009: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/01/publishing-on-demand-sales-only-quality.html   In the old days this was called 'vanity publishing', you paid a company to publish what you wrote with little quality checking and certainly no analysis of any market demand for the book.  These days, authors have both run towards this approach but have also been driven towards it too.  Publishing houses have been struggling for at least twenty years and the online environment has not helped. Despite the fall in production costs other things like publicity and the risk of backing an author who does not succeed are so great that they have sought other approaches; even a great author can fade, think of how many books aside from 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' (1994), that Louis de Bernières has written, which you cannot name.  He has, in fact, written seven others and some short fiction too. Similarly, another author who wrote a 'must read' book in the 1990s was Joanne Harris, author of 'Chocolat' (1999). She has produced 14 other novels 1989-2010, including 12 since 'Chocolat' but I imagine, like me, you could not name a single one. Thus, publishers put more of the work on to the author, that in the past they would have done themselves.

I have known there published first-time authors who have been compelled to handle their own publicity.  Unlike self-published authors they do not have to buy the books from their publisher in order to sell them on, but they do have to organise trips around the country to signings.  I do wonder, with so many bookshops disappearing in the 2000s where such events will now take place.  If you want to do a signing for free at the bookshop in Whitby during the Gothic Weekend, you have to join a very long queue and show your previous sales figures before they will even consider you.  Everyone wants a sign of success before investing anything in a new author.  In fact self-publishing is becoming a route into being published by a publisher. 

Authonomy is run by HarperCollins publishers.  Authors put their material up there for comment and a few are picked up by the company.  A couple of years back one of the three novels they selected had already been self-published and had been selling, before they took it on.  The website explicitly mentions self-published authors as well as unpublished, and in fact, if you look at the list of novels for users to comment on, they all have front covers already, suggesting that in fact they have already been printed.  I suppose self-publishing has now become what community colleges are to universities in the USA, they prove the quality of the applicant before you let them go any further.  I do not know how many hundreds of novels go on Authonomy, but the number picked up is in single figures each year.

We live in an age when audience participation is seen as the sure way to get what the public wants.  Television programmes that allow you to telephone in to determine the fate of the contestants are among the most viewed ones broadcast.  The same goes for fiction.  I have commented on the Amazon competition for new novels a few years back.  I began participating as reader when they reached the 5000 novels on the 'short list'.  Amazon naturally elicited my comments and I contributed as the numbers were whittled down.  However, by the time that they reached the list of 10 novels, I backed out.  I realised that a kind of homeopathic process had been going on and that the 10 novels left completely lacked originality or spark, they clearly ticked genre boxes and were least offensive to the most number of readers.  None of them engaged me in the way the tens of others I had looked at previous had done. 

This is the challenge to the issue of the author giving up writing, that the pathways to publishing that are in place, increasingly do not bring forward great literature, in fact, the reverse.  This may be why there is such a popularity for novels from languages other than English.  Of course, the cultural differences are of interest, but there might also be an issue that the process in which books come to be published, mean that different types of books succeed say in Brazil or Sweden, than would be the case in the UK.

The other element which publishers are economising on, is editing.  As I noted earlier in this posting, editing is a challenging activity.  Traditionally editors were very knowledgeable and intelligent people, not only able to spot inaccuracies and non-sequiturs, but also to contribute to the very fibre of the story, in terms of how characters developed and their actions.  This is a very challenging role and one that needs a high level of literary knowledge as well as 'people skills' in communicating it to the author; skills, which I discuss below, the average reader lacks.  The cost of editing is increasingly being seen as one that can be avoided: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/lost-art-editing-books-publishing but the consequences in terms of the quality of the books we buy seems to already be biting hard.  Note the review of all the errors in Henning Mankell's final Wallender novel, 'The Troubled Man' (2011): http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/26/troubled-man-wallander-henning-mankell-review clues disappear and Wallender's character alters, from a morning person to an evening person in the course of some tens of pages.  The reader is left seeing the novel as disjointed.  Now, Mankell is a good, successful author, but he, like all authors needs an editor, something it once was the publishing house's job to provide.  A notable case was 'The Corrections' (2010) by Michael Franzen, published by HarperCollins, for which it was noted that an unedited version actually was printed, despite a corrected one being produced.  This shows you that even with a big publishing house, the skimping on editing aspects is having an impact.

I suppose there must be an industry in being a freelance editor.  Whereas in the past when the publishing house would do this, it is given back to the author for them to be responsible for.  I know that some websites offer this service, but my engagement with such editors has been very unpleasant mainly because they forget that any author invests a lot of themselves into a novel and it is hard when it is torn apart.  Alright, if it is not good enough for others to read, say so, but instead you get 'death by a thousand cuts' lots of picking of very minor things, which generally, in the age of the wordprocessor can be rectified very quickly, yet you have to be harangues about every mistake made.


In my experience editing certainly cannot be left to amateurs who seem to lack even the awareness of the relationship between writer and their work that proper editors have.  I am aware that a lot of my writing has flaws.  There are issues like character development, behaviour and feasibility of actions.  However, I am never challenged on these.  The feedback I receive falls into two categories.  The largest feedback is picking up on individual words or names that I have used.  I have even have had people whose names I have inadvertently used in the story, complaining.  I take a lot of effort to get the detail correct.  However, clearly not as much as the seemingly hundreds of people who scour the internet looking for minor errors or even the frequency that certain words are used in a piece of fiction.  I like to get things correct, but am now fearful that too many readers have an entire novel ruined by a single word. 

Famously, in his James Bond novels, written in an age when publishers' editing was at its height, Ian Fleming made technical errors, such as which pistol fitted which holster, but I doubt that has stopped many people enjoying his novels even fifty years later.  However, anything I put up is liable to be heavily criticised because I feature the character's name more than a certain number of times, or do not use the contraction that is in common use today, or something of that nature. 

I think one issue is the severity of the language used in the feedback I receive.  Yes, I make mistakes, but a single wrong word does not seem to be the grounds for me being a total idiot or unfit to write as I am all too frequently told.  It is hard to take criticism of any kind, but to be harangued by editors or the public does nothing to improve the quality of the work, it just encourages the author to abandon it entirely as a waste of time.  This is ironic given that it takes months or years to write a novel, and five minutes to drive an author away from ever touching it again. 

To some degree you understand why people adopt self-publishing, they by-pass at least some of the criticism.  However, as I have noted before, this does not lead to better books.  Some compromise between not receiving editorial feedback at all and being harangued so harshly that you give up hope must be found.  While I doubt it would succeed, you almost need websites to train readers on how to be effective editors rather than simple hecklers.

One key problem is the difference between the popular view of something and the actuality.  Novels often face this, whether they need to be altered to fit into what the readership expects or stick to their guns and put down what the author knows to be true, or wants to be true in the fictional world they are creating.   The woman in my house was reading the poem 'The Hollow Men' (1925) by T.S. Eliot the other day, online.  The site she accessed it on allowed readers to make comments.    An interesting discussion had developed about the significance of the poem, especially its relationship to the First World War.  Many of the commentators seemed to be school children, and I liked the fact that these days when assigned to 'do' a poem pupils can discuss it with others around the world.  I have a feeling many of the people going to the particular site were Americans and there was a lot of parallels drawn to the experience for US society in the wake of the US intervention in the Vietnam War (1965-73/5).  However, such interesting parallels and an engaging discussion was constantly knocked aside by what I call the 'nitpickers' coming on to remind commentators that the First World War was not in the 1920s (though the impact Eliot was talking about continued through the 1920s and 1930s in the way the impact of the Vietnam war went on long after the 1970s) and that the First World War was fought in Europe (neglecting the fighting in Asia and Africa and the oceans) and Vietnam is in Asia.  The sense was, as you find on so many sites commenting on writing whether produced by professionals or amateurs, is that the text and comment on it too, must simply refer directly to facts; no parallels or comparisons are permitted. 

Another common difficulty is that commentators assume that the author has to be like their characters.  Do not dare feature a homosexual character or show a story from a criminal's perspective or have someone with psychological differences or comes from a non-Western culture.  The assumption, too often, is that, you are not clever in writing from a different perspective than your own as would have once been the case, but that you must simply be drawing on personal experiences and so must be as 'sick' as the characters you portray.  As I have noted before, if we only wrote about what we knew personally fiction would be incredibly dull and nothing from a historial period would ever feature.

I guess a lot of feedback is about power play, whether writing to the author directly (of course, far more easier than ever in the age of email; authors are now not distant characters but often pretty accessible)  or dismissing people's comments as irrelevant because they are more imaginative than a standard recounting of what the text contains.  Such a recounting of the text is in itself a kind of assertion of power, effectively telling readers that they are too stupid to understand it without someone's help (though, perhaps, all of us who review things are guilty of that; maybe it comes down to an issue of tone).  The power play comes to the fore in the second type of feedback I receive, people telling me that the outcome of the story was entirely wrong.  Often this is on the basis that the direction the narrative took was not the one that they expected (which personally I feel is a positive attribute, but given what I noted above, perhaps writers are obliged to adhere to set story patterns rather than be surprising) or was simply not a topic that was of interest.  You begin to ask why did they bother continue reading if that was the case.

Most websites that carry fiction categorise it; they often have a profile of the author.  Consequently, it is very easy to find out what kind of story you are likely to be reading and even the author's take on particular issue that are likely to appear.  Even more than before we are not compelled to 'judge a book by its cover'.  Yet it is clear that people slog through the novel just so they can tell the author how wrong they have got it.  I guess in an age of consumer choice and viewer power, there is an expectation that novels should also permit this.  I know some even allow readers to pick the next step in the writing, but even then the path the majority selects is not going to please everyone.  I encourage commentators who do not like how my stories unfold to write their own version.  However, it seems that those who are capable of making stinging criticisms lack the ability to commit to something longer, even if it would be more to their taste.


As we head on into the 2010s, what do I see as the future for writing and publishing?  I think the amount of writing will probably not decrease, but the number of printed books will.  There are going to be even clearer spheres of writing that people access: electronic books that the privileged will access through some device (and publishing houses are battling to keep the price high, hence the EU challenge on monopoly grounds) and free comment put up by people on blogs and websites.  What it is apparent is that whilst the quantity will be greater than ever, the quality will be poor.  There are good writers on the internet and good writers in print, but we are going to have to stomach far more errors and anomalies in what we write than we would have expected, especially in printed boooks, even just a decade ago.

Internet fiction is not unpoliced, but the 'editors' and 'critics' adopt a very combative style, which does nothing to help authors develop.  Those who will listen to the criticism will be turned off writing anything more by the aggressive, dismissive tone of the commentators and those who do not give a damn about such comments, will keep publishing with no editorial input.  We probably live in an age with more being written and more accessibly than ever before, but the question remains, that, when there is no effective way to bring objective views to bear on what is produced and popular opinion squeezes the life from novels coming forward: is any of it any good?