Change of direction

It seems that this site, which I closed some 4 years ago, is still getting visitors. Lots of things have changed since I posted stuff here so, if it's really me you're looking for, you'll find me at: 

http://www.billkirton.com.

And thanks for visiting anyway.

The last post (probably)

According to my stats, this is blog 188, according to Blogspot’s it’s 185. Doesn’t matter, though, because it’s (probably) the last one here. For the record, I think blogspot's a great place to have a blog - very quick and easy to use and demanding nothing in the way of expertise with codes, programming or any of those other terrifying skills which seem accessible to 7 year olds but not to me. In case you didn’t know, my reason for moving is that I’ve got a new website and I’ve attached my blog to it. It seemed to make sense at the time. So, if you’d like to see more of the living, writing and other stuff I muse over and you haven’t yet visited the new place, it’s here. Thanks for all the comments. I hope you'll keep on making them.

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Surprise! Aliens that aren’t humanoid.

A welcome visit from another guest blogger, my friend and fellow Pfoxmoor author, Greta van der Rol. I first came across her through her historical novel, Die a Dry Death. It’s a reimagining of an actual historical event and I found it completely absorbing. Since then, she’s produced many fine books, in a totally different genre. She says she loves writing ‘science fiction with a large dollop of good old, healthy romance’. Mind you, with a degree in history and a background in building information systems, perhaps her straddling of the genres isn’t so surprising. She lives not far from the coast in Queensland, Australia, where she takes great photographs and she’s apparently an excellent cook. This is part of her blog tour to celebrate the release of Starheart and, as part of it, she’ll be giving a $25 Amazon gift voucher to one person who leaves a comment on any of the blogs she’s visiting until 10^th March. So leave her a note and that could be you.

It’s all yours, Greta.

Thanks for hosting me, Bill. I’m very grateful.

I’m here to talk about my new novel, Starheart, which is science fiction with a slurp of romance. Don’t let that put you off, though. You’ll find a slurp of romance in Doctor Zhivago, War and Peace and Gone with the Wind and some people quite enjoyed those.

During this blog tour, I’ve mentioned the story is set in the same universe as my two ‘Iron Admiral’ books but I’m given to understand that not everybody has read those, so I’d better introduce you to the aliens in the novels – the ptorix.

When I first dreamed up the ptorix, I was determined that my aliens were NOT going to be humanoid. To me, the probability of encountering another sentient species that looks like us is so far off the scale it’s come around the other side. On the other hand, I believe that if we are ever to be in conflict with another species, it has to be for a reason, such as we live on the same type of planet. I mean, why on Earth (pun intended) would some blob that lives in a gas giant want to come here? We’ll leave out how. Moreover, the species in my story would have to be not just intelligent but technologically advanced in order to build space ships. Whales and dolphins are intelligent but apart from anything else, they don’t have the physiology to manipulate building materials even if they wanted to. My aliens therefore have manual dexterity, even if they don’t have ‘fingers’. Enough of the theory – meet the ptorix.

Ptorix are essentially conical in shape, something they exaggerate with their clothing. They have no neck and the head ends in a dome. The body is covered in short blue fur. Their four arms end in a number of tentacles which can be deployed in a variety of ways. Think of a sea anemone and you’ve about got it right. They have four short legs but these are usually hidden beneath their robes. Three eyes which change colour according to mood are located almost equidistant around the top of the head, enabling a ptorix to see almost the whole way around its body without moving. They have two ‘mouths’, one – resembling a proboscis – for eating, the other for breathing and speaking. So from a human viewpoint, they’re pretty weird.

Now let’s go and talk to Professor Xanthor, who holds the chair of human-ptorix studies at  Shernish University on Carnessa. He plays a small, but important role in the Iron Admiral books. He has agreed to tell us a little about the background of the ptorix.

I found him in his study, resting on a platform at his desk (the ptorix don’t sit down). Eyes swirling orange, tentacles moving gently, he welcomed me in and directed me to a human chair. Note: the eye colour depends on the frequency of the radiation they emit – so red, being a longer frequency, is total calm, whereas violet indicates anger.

Good morning, Professor. Thanks so much for your time.

My pleasure, Greta. It is always nice to communicate peacefully with humans.

I appreciate that the ptorix have spread from their Galactic arm throughout much of the Galaxy. But do you know which world they originally came from?

Well now. The original home of the ptorix is lost in time. It has taken the Khophirate, what you call an Empire, many thousands of years to expand to its greatest extent – and, as you know, to contract to its current size.  But there is speculation, of course. For your audience, suffice to say it was a planet like this one – suitable for you humans as well as ptorix, with water, similar air and gravity and so on.

What can you tell me about your very early ancestors?

Oh, I think just looking at us will give some answers. The ptorix were originally prey animals. This is why we have such wonderful eyesight. We can see anything around us unless it is directly behind us and we see much more of the light spectrum than you do.

So what changed?

How did we become dominant? (His tentacles lashed a little and his eyes swirled through yellow and green – thoughtful) We had the advantage of a large brain, which we needed to process the image from our eyes. And we had our tentacles. We could make weapons at first to defend ourselves from the predators and later to kill other animals for food. We found, too, that living in cooperative family groups made us more powerful, even against the largest predator.

We had always been scavengers, living on the remains of flesh killed by others. (He rubbed at his proboscis) We ptorix find it strange that humans eat solid flesh. Please forgive me. We find it disgusting and so inefficient. We wait until the flesh has softened enough for us to suck up the nutrients. Of course, this is done with chemical additives, now. Only the best restaurants let the flesh putrefy of its own accord.

However, we were nothing if not adaptable. We learned to find other foods, modify our diet for different environments and eventually, different worlds.

But back to our ancestors on their first world. Soon enough, they ran out of natural caves to live in and were forced to build new dwellings. Even now, after all these centuries, we build homes that look like caves. (He waved an arm, taking in the curved walls of his office, the eye-watering decorations and the stalactite-like embellishments in the ceiling which emitted soft light).

I thanked Professor Xanthor for his time and went home to write this. So there you have it. Aliens need not be humanoid.

You can find out more about Starheart on Amazon here. 

I’ll be at another friend's blog on 5th March to tell you about the sparks that fly between Jess and the Admiral, the main characters in the book.

My own links are:
http://gretavanderrol.net/
http://twitter.com/GretavdR
http://www.facebook.com/Author.Greta.vanderRol

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Farewell to Blogspot – well, nearly

OK, this is almost the last blogspot blog. Not because I’m stopping, but because, thanks to Anneke, I have a new website and I’ll be blogging there from now on. But there’ll be a grand finale here too because, on March 1^st, I’m hosting my friend, the versatile Greta van der Rol, on one of her blog tour stops. It’ll also stay open because the 180-odd postings here may still be of interest to forensic psychiatrists and/or students of the absurd.

It started on March 18th 2009 and, despite calling the first entry ‘Dipping a toe into the existential water’ (and thereby alienating trillions of potential readers), I did get some followers. Which is more than can be said for the new one where, at the moment, sitting forlornly at the top of the page is a nearly empty box which should be filled with all your grinning countenances and/or avatars.

So this admirably short posting is here for just one reason, to beg, beseech, implore, cajole and entreat you to visit the new site and, even if you’re only pretending, join me (and the badger) there.

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A miscellaneous medley of patchwork pot-pourris

The title is merely following the modern political and commercial impulse to generate words which imply but simultaneously evacuate meaning. So …

Four excuses for the gap since the last post:

• Family visits.
• I’m doing another ‘Brilliant’ book for Pearson Education. This time it’s Academic Writing, so it’ll simply be borrowings from a couple of the other books and writing new introduction, conclusion and linking materials.
• Under the usual, generous direction of Anneke Klein, I’m making a new website, partly to use the header above instead of having the current looming head at the top of each page, but also to make it easier for me to add and delete stuff when I want without having to impose on Anneke every time. It'll also mean migrating this blog to the new site and (doubtless), losing both my followers in the process.
• My perennial laziness (and, speaking of laziness, whatever happened to my brother Ron?).

Of course, there’s also the fact that I have nothing much to say. I’ve just done a highly enjoyable, very interesting interview with Sara Bain. You can see it here. Sara is a journalist who gives so much time to others that she doesn’t leave enough for her own writing. She also has a way of framing questions that produces answers which take you into areas you hadn’t anticipated. If you want to learn about your characters (and yourself) a Sara Bain interview is the route to take.

What else? Well, the interview was timed to coincide with the release of the fifth Jack Carston novel, Unsafe Acts, and Sara’s questions about how I ‘met’ Carston and how he’d developed made me focus on something I already knew – he’s changed quite a lot. Or maybe he’s allowed more aspects of his personality to appear. I spoke about this in the interview so I won’t go over the ground again here, but my suspicion is that the next in the series will be the last and I’m toying with the idea of it being narrated by Carston himself.

And one final thing to confirm forever my bafflement at the whole world of publishing (as if such confirmation were needed). This is for those of you who seek value in books. You’ll remember that The Sparrow Conundrum won an award, but maybe there are two versions of it in circulation because I notice that, while the paperback still costs $10.99 on Amazon USA, you can actually buy – from the same site, 12 new copies priced from $9.15 to $39.17.

The same division between cheap crap and quality literature is evident on the Amazon UK site too, where The Figurehead, new from Amazon, will set you back £8.88 but its obviously far superior used doppelganger will cost you £39.92.

Best of all, though, are the two versions of The Darkness. Now I think it’s pretty good – but then I wrote it, so I would, wouldn’t I? But I obviously didn’t realise just how good it was. Amazon seems to have been priced out of the market because, on its site, used copies are available at prices ranging from $98.53 (yes, almost the magic $100) to (and I swear this is true because I checked it again and again) $250.80.

So if anyone reading this was thinking of buying the $250.80 copy, I have few here I’d happily let you have for just $250 each, with free postage.

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SALE!!!! Everything (i.e. 1 item) must go!!!

A few years back, I joined Second Life™ (known to residents as SL), to do some research on a short story I was writing. It’s a fascinating, addictive place and I made friends there whom I’d never have met under normal circumstances. It’s a place where you can indulge all sorts of fantasies and, indeed, there are stories of people who have more or less opted out of their Real Life, which is the term used there, and prefer to live, interact, and even worship in the virtual world. In times of austerity, the ability to build yourself a vast home in a fantastical location of your choosing, fly through the air and be perpetually young and attractive (or be a dragon, unicorn or mouse if you prefer) has obvious appeal. It’s very liberating but the loosening of inhibitions can also be dangerous.

In the end, I left because it was taking up too much of my time. But while I was there, I was involved in various writing groups which were very stimulating and which caused me to write some stories which would never have occurred to me if I hadn’t experienced that mingling of the real and the virtual. A few months ago, I put some of them together and it was clear that the real/virtual theme was strong in nearly all of them. There was also the fact that the coexistence of 2 ‘realities’ is the perfect situation for humour, since laughter depends a lot on the unexpected.

So?

Well, it didn’t take much to write a narrative strand that let me put them into a sequence which offered a sort of development to a conclusion. I’m not claiming great things of it – some of the stories are sad, some funny, some satirical, some absurd, some just rude –  but the one thread running through them all is that strange virtual/real dynamic. And they make up a novella. I wouldn’t want to risk offending the people at Second Life ™, whose creation really is remarkable, so the stories take place in a game called Alternative Dimension – a game which does the same sort of things but is by no means a replica of SL.

And the reason I’m telling you this is because, for this weekend only on Amazon, it’s free. Naturally enough, the title is Alternative Dimension and it’s written by my avatar, Jack Lefebre. (Actually my avatar had a ‘v’ in his name, too, but there are already writers called Jack Lefebvre and I didn’t want to offend them.)

It won’t take a minute to log on, ‘buy’ it and, if you’re like me, store it with all the other freebies you’ve downloaded and forgotten about. It’s at http://amzn.to/zvutuc for the USA and http://amzn.to/yt6Mno for the UK

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A scientific interlude

Away from the usual self-advertising and PR plugs for a change. Two items I read recently – one on a website, the other in The Observer – set up some scientific musings. Science to me usually means fascinating things which I don’t understand, but it often leads to trains of thought I wouldn’t otherwise have.

The first item was about chromosomes. I know, of course, that they’re made of DNA and proteins and carry our genes. When I checked Wikipedia, there was stuff about regulatory elements, nucleotide sequences, eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells as well, but (as they keep saying in the film Airplane), that’s not important right now. What is important is that we (humans) have 46 of them. But – and this is the interesting bit – it’s also possible that we have 48. And why is that interesting? Well, we all know that chimpanzees also have 48, but – and this time it really is the interesting bit – so do potatoes.

In the evolutionary ladder, therefore, we are on a par with potatoes. (The temptation at this point is to digress into the class structure implicit in varieties such as King Edward, Belle de Fontenay, Duke of York and Saxon. Instead, I’ll just point you to the admirable website http://www.lovepotatoes.co.uk/.)

The second piece of science, however, offers hope that such parity will soon change because stem cell researchers in Edinburgh have succeeded in cultivating new brain cells. Not by sucking out real brain cells and prodding them, or from the practice of using bits of embryos, which upsets so many people who think only God should do that. No, instead they've done stuff with skin cells. (‘Prodding’ and ‘done stuff with’ are scientific terms.) Thus, we can look forward to a future in which our descendants are clothed not in skin but in brains, which will give us a clear edge over our potato cousins who, even if they did manage to follow our evolutionary lead, would still get peeled and thereby lose their powers of ratiocination.

To some of you, this may seem a frivolous misuse and indeed misappropriation of important scientific advances, but I take my lead from one of the greats of British comedy, Tommy Cooper, whose use of statistics was exemplary. He once revealed the following:

“Apparently, one in five people in the world are Chinese. There are five people in my family, so it must be one of them. It’s either my mum or my dad, my older brother Colin, or my younger brother Ho-Cha-Chu.

...

I think it’s Colin.”

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Unsafe Acts

One of my claims to fame (he says, as if there were several) is that I earned an acknowledgement in Ian Rankin’s dagger prize winning novel Black and Blue. Members of the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association are asked to list any areas of ‘special expertise’ so that fellow members can contact them if they need information on different topics. I’ve written countless videos and DVDs  about offshore safety as well as actual safety induction programmes, so that was one of my ‘specialisations’. In Black and Blue, Rebus had to make a trip to an offshore platform and Ian wrote to ask what sort of thing that involved for a ‘visitor’. I wrote back and thereby got myself a mention.

So, apart from name-dropping, why am I writing this? Because, on the 15^th of next month, Unsafe Acts, the 5^th novel in my Jack Carston series, will be published and, as the cover image and the title suggest, it involves an offshore platform and safety. It also involves some reflections on homophobia and how, even in the 21^st century, that’s still a problem.

It’s been through several drafts and, as I was reading the proofs, I again got the strange feeling that, while I knew I’d written it and my name’s on the cover, it was hard to remember how it happened. When something’s out there as a self-contained thing – whether in tangible form as a paperback or in the same completeness as an ebook – it somehow seems instantaneous. The book has become a fact. When you’re writing, you’re always poised on the edge of wondering what the characters are going to do, where they’re going to go. The process is one of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. So for me the writer, Unsafe Acts was a succession of instants which eventually stopped. But for me the reader, it’s a complete, set thing with its own internal logic and a journey which has only one path. I suppose for readers coming fresh to it, the uncertainties are still there because they don’t know where the characters will take them until they’ve arrived.

The other question you sometimes ask yourself, when you’re reading a novel you’ve written, is the one that most writers hate: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ And again, it’s often difficult to answer. With Unsafe Acts, I know that the seed was sown in a casual remark from a friend, Mike Lloyd-Wiggins, who said one day ‘You ought to write about an offshore platform. There’s plenty of stuff going on out there.’ (This was the same friend who also said, a few years ago ‘You ought to write a story about a figurehead carver’. So thanks, Mike.) But that’s just the seed. When you see the dense vegetation that’s grown from it (I know, crap metaphor, but I’m lazy) you really do wonder where all these people were hiding, what made them appear. Where did they get their attitudes?

One other interesting thing about this book (for me anyway) is that it’s a different Jack Carston from the one I first met when I wrote Material Evidence. Of course, I’m different now from the person I was then but I don’t think that means we’ve followed the same path. He now seems so fed up with the hoops he has to jump through to satisfy his superiors and tick the right administrative boxes (what a field day these crap – and now mixed, too – metaphors are getting), that I really wonder whether the next book will find him leaving the job altogether.

Anyway, forget the Jubilee (definitely) and the London Olympics, the date for your diary is the day after Valentine’s Day.

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A mish mash and hodge podge of titbits.

I’ve just got the go-ahead for another book in Pearson’s ‘Brilliant’ series, this time on Academic Writing. Also, Helen Anderson, John Grant and others are pestering me to get started on the sequel to The Figurehead, so blogging has been shoved aside. But, since I know millions of people all over the world are waiting for the pearls of wisdom I dispense here, I really must write something.

If you want the thoughtful me, try Richard Sutton’s blog, Saille Tales. He invited me to say something about writing first drafts and, as is usual whenever I have to write and/or talk about writing, I had to step back from it and try to work out what I do.

I’m not an advocate of rigid writing techniques but producing anything worth reading calls for control, discipline and a respect for the medium. Nonetheless, writing for me is instinctive. With non-fiction, I have headings and specific areas which I know I have to cover, but with fiction, I dive into it and just let it carry me along.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Ah yes, pearls of wisdom. Well, for a start there are all the usual political and cultural axes I grind:

• the total lack of any leadership or credibility in any of our politicians, their undisguised scorn/contempt for us, the continuing expansion of the gap between rich and poor, the dismantling of the health service and education system;
• the very existence of reality TV, celebrity culture and the seeming refusal to require any talent of those involved in and/or aspiring to it;
• the abject acceptance that royalty confirms that some people are ‘higher’ than others;
• the fact that football is about money;
• Simon Cowell.

But that’s tedious, pontificating stuff that will bore and/or alienate some of the handful of visitors. (My earlier claim to serve millions was merely a hilarious joke.) So I’ll opt for a potpourri (which, given that the ‘pourri’ bit literally means rotten, is highly appropriate).

And that segues neatly into an aside on words and their meanings. If you sign up for the newsletter on the site wordsmith.org, they send you a word a day and some of them are fascinating. I now have, for example, three new words to use in descriptions of characters: callipygous, mammose and lissotrichous, the first being of particular interest to both male and female lexicographers and perverts.

Then there’s the word noosphere, which is pronounced No-us-fear, and either sounds the opposite of what it means, i.e. the sum of human knowledge, or is an accurate description of where we’ve reached on the evolutionary scale.

And if you have a tabby cat, you’re referencing a certain Price Attab who gave his name to al-Attabiya, a suburb of Baghdad. Silk was made there and tabbies got their name because their coats were similar to the cloth. (I know, you're now asking yourself how you've managed all these years without knowing that.)

What next? Ah yes, The Sparrow Conundrum was featured on the site addictedtoebooks and I contributed a guest post to Past Times. And the illustration at the top is for Unsafe Acts, the fifth in my Jack Carston series. It’ll probably be appearing towards the end of next month.

And, to end this ramble, two apocryphal items of news, both relating to last year’s (grits teeth, suppresses anger) royal wedding. It seems that Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline is one of William Windsor’s favourite songs and Mr Diamond would have been quite happy to amend it to Sweet Catherine for the occasion. Now, try singing the chorus using that substitution. See? It doesn’t work. The last syllable isn’t strong enough to sustain the note. But they’re the Windsors, our favourite German family, so it didn’t matter that, at Diana’s funeral, Elton John sang the praises of ‘England’s rose’, i.e. the princess of Wales.

It seems, too, that the lyrics of Ubi Caritas were doctored to remove some reference or other that was deemed too risqué for the occasion. I can’t confirm this because my Latin is non-existent. It does seem absurd, but that’s what’s being claimed. The only glimmer of light it offers is that the couple may want to avoid the couplings so cherished by ordinary mortals and therefore will produce no offspring for us to support.

And 2012 is the year of the diamond bloody jubilee. I want to spend it in Jamaica, where the new Prime Minister will be declaring a republic. But, wherever you are, I hope 2012 is healthy, happy, productive and successful for you all. Happy New Year.

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Christmas in College

DR MCBRIDE: Can’t it wait until later? I really need to finish this critical analysis of that late Beethoven quartet which…

PROFESSOR DEELEY: We don’t have time, McBride. You know the date, I take it?

DM: Of course. it’s the 4th. Why?

PD: Yes, the 4th of December. They’ll be here in a couple of weeks.

DM: But this Beethoven score – I’m so close to finalising it. That b minor viola shift…

PD: I know the feeling only too well, McBride. I felt exactly the same about what was to be my definitive article on Tolstoy’s debt to Victor Hugo. But there are other considerations. We must be realistic. We need to get ready.

DM: Damn. Every year it’s the same. Every year I vow I’ll move to some respectable provincial university. But I never do.

PD: And why would you? There’s Oxbridge, us, and the rest are nowhere.

DM: I know that. But every Christmas, with all the damned tourists, the carols, that absurd charity pantomime. It’s so demeaning.

PD: Tradition, McBride. And, of course, economics. They bring the dollars, we deck the halls with holly, ivy, mistletoe and dress up like munchkins. It’s a small price to pay for 11 months of academic freedom.

DM: Professor Deeley, I have a PhD. I’ve published monographs on atonal shifts in Bartok.

PD: And your point is? Remember that you’re speaking to the editor of two volumes of Dostoevsky’s correspondence.

DM: I know. I remember the reviews of it. An outstanding piece of work.

PD: Thank you.

DM: But also, in and of itself, a confirmation that we should not need to do this … these Christmas things. They’re demeaning.

PD: It’s what people expect. Who are you this year?

DM: I’m sorry?

PD: In the … performance.

DM: Oh. Er ... Father John.

PD: Ah, showering reprobation from the pulpit.

DM: That’s the cross I bear this year. What about you?

PD: Well…

DM: You’re not driving the sleigh again, are you?

PD: No, I…

DM: You’re Joseph.

PD: No.

DM: Not Mary, surely?

PD: Er…

DM: Professor Deeley, you seem reluctant to divulge it. Is it something shameful?

PD: Not exactly. I’m … I’m the beau.

DM: The beau?

PD: Yes. Under the mistletoe.

DM: I know where the bloody beau goes.

PD: Please, McBride.

DM: And who’s the belle this year?

PD: Holly Devere.

DM: Holly Devere? The 4^th year medic? The one who does lap-dancing in the Union?

PD: I believe so.

DM: You bastard. I’ve been after her for a month.

PD: Don’t you think I know that? Everybody does. It’s damned embarrassing. Bad enough having to canoodle with a student without knowing she’s … well, not mine. I didn’t choose her.

DM: Maybe not, but you’ll be doing the canoodling with her. You bastard. That should’ve been me.

PD: Has it occurred to you that perhaps they wanted a beau who wouldn’t be a laughing stock?

DM: A laughing stock?

PD: Oh come, McBride, you may not be a linguist but… Beau? Beautiful?

DM: What’s your point?

PD: Nothing of any consequence. Hugo’s theory of the grotesque. Inner beauty is what counts. You may resemble Quasimodo but I don’t doubt that, inside, you also have his capacity for love, compassion ...

DM: You patronising bastard.

At which point, we leave the Professor of European Literature and his colleague from the music department to settle their academic differences with a mixture of vitriolic abstractions and playground taunts, but with no danger of any physical contact. Their Holly-induced enmity will, in due course, lead to McBride penning a stinging refutation of Deeley’s interpretation of Beowulf. Deeley, in turn, will use his influence to ensure that McBride never gets to be the beau. And the tourists will be beguiled by a pantomime which affirms the old enduring values.

So happy Christmas to you all and…

God bless us, every one!

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Welcome to the Benighted Kingdom

A while ago, I asked for comments on a satirical piece I was including in a series of short stories. It was about the clichés that attach to various nationalities. Joe, the creator of an online role-playing game, went visiting the various geographical locations in the game and here’s what the bit about the USA became:

"Joe found this herd mentality interesting and spent some time acclimatising in various places. His frequent trips to the Americas made him wonder whether it had been wise to give residents so much freedom to adapt the in-world environment to suit their own preferences. Each state he visited proclaimed its pride in being part of the USA and yet the differences between them were so extreme that he began to wonder what ‘United’ meant. The south thought the north was populated by effete homosexuals while the north failed to understand the semantic lapses that led their southern counterparts to confuse the words ‘bride’, ‘groom’ and ‘first cousin’. The western states claimed to be the true representatives of American history, those in the east celebrated a long European ancestry. The only thing that united them was a general agreement that God was American. And, except for a few individuals in Kentucky and Tennessee, every single resident had wonderful teeth."

The reason I quote it here is that, despite my (supposedly) funny insistence on the differences between states, in the international arena they really are UNITED, and all the stronger for it. Americans from all over are proud to chant their allegiance to ‘USA, USA’.

So what? Well, it’s because here in the UK, a tiny minority of our elected ‘leaders’ are braying their triumph at the fact that our Prime Minister (Prime Minister! God help us.) has told the other 26 countries in the EU to eff off. So here we are again, the Britain that seems to think it still has an Empire, that now ‘rules the waves’ with aircraft carriers which have no planes on them, in a position of tremendous power as a minority of one. The rest of Europe will carry on doing the thing Cameron ‘vetoed’ (look the word up, Prime Minister), they’ll at least try to look beyond their own self-interests and their borders and, with luck, they’ll save the Euro, re-emerge as a relevant force in world affairs, and maybe, in some idyllic future, become the USE.

So much for democracy. We didn’t elect a coalition government and we certainly didn’t give a mandate to just 10% of our elected ‘leaders’ to dictate foreign policy. But that’s what we’ve got. Their views on Europe and, more importantly, on Britain, are outdated, irrelevant and harmful. The ‘bulldog’ whose spirit they claim to represent was replaced ages ago by the poodle that George Bush dragged into his adventures like Tintin and Snowy. Don’t get me wrong – Britain still has inner strengths and pride, a history and a present of greatness, but that’s not the Britain that Cameron and his beasts belong to.

It’s all about power, isn’t it? Cameron caved in to please his party’s hard-liners, Clegg, the supposedly pro-European Deputy Prime Minister (Deputy Prime Minister! God help us.) let him get away with it because it’s the only way he can hang on to a cabinet post. Meanwhile, any vestigial power we had as a nation has evaporated. Brilliant, Cameron.

As they put on their earnest, serious faces and tell us it’s for our own good, every single UK citizen is diminished by their insulting, patronising attitudes to diplomacy and to us.

Wait, though. We may not be part of a United States of Europe, but at least we’re a United Kingdom. Oh yeah? Not for much longer. Another consequence of Cameron’s folly may well be that, up here in Scotland, we vote for independence.

Great job, Prime Minister.

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The Pulse in Poetry

Ladies and Gentlemen, the man who needs no introduction, my gifted, laid-back little brother, with a contribution illustrated by his son Joe.

Just for a change from our early morning competition over who has had the worst night’s sleep, or from repeating the clichéd, “Well, this won’t buy the baby a new bonnet,” and because it was later than usual, I tried some Yeats as I woke yesterday: “I shall arise and go now……”

My wife beat me to the bathroom and – to prove I was not the only literate partner – took up and almost sang the first stanza:

            “I shall arise and go now, and go to Innisfree

            And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

            Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee;

            And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

And then, moments later, through the cleanest of teeth, her tone had changed from singing sylph to whip-cracking critic:

“Nine bean rows? Nine rows of beans? What does he want with nine rows of beans? It’s not like he’s got a freezer or anything. He’ll never get through nine bean rows. We have a job eating our two rows before we get fed up and start making piccalilli –and there’s no evidence he was keen on that.”

And, unwittingly, alongside a brief search for a rhyme for piccalilli, I found myself not only agreeing that – unless he was drying and storing the beans – three rows would be plenty, but also resolving to do a little more research to discover if the beans needed to be salted, like pork, to last the winter, although, being – presumably – a freshwater lake, he might have trouble keeping his salt pot filled.

“And he’s only got honey to accompany them: ‘….a hive for the honey bee…’ Mind you, one hive is a bit more realistic, but that one ‘honey bee’ isn’t going to make life very sweet.”

I chiefly blame (and thank) Monty Python for these journeys into the absurd. Before you know it, you’re miles away from the content, not to mention the writer’s intention. You can end up feeling like the spoiler in the seminar, who won’t let the group get past “April is the cruellest month” by telling you how it can be quite nasty in early June if the jet stream doesn’t behave itself. Thank goodness the rest of Innisfree doesn’t invite any more culinary speculation.

The same, over-rational spoiling is at work in a short story by Salley Vickers, where a character is posing the old riddle which goes,

            “As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives,

            Seven wives had seven cats, seven cats had seven kits,

            Kits, cats, men, wives, how many were going to St Ives?”

Her companion isn’t satisfied to be ‘tricked’ by the correct answer (one; it’s only the writer who is going to St Ives) and says,

“Why shouldn’t he meet them on the way? He might be overtaking the guy if he had all those blessed creatures to drag along with him.”

But what has this to do with the heady life and times of award-winning writer and top brother Bill Kirton?

Well, it feels like it links to previous posts about the balance between the writer’s intention and the freedom and right of the reader to make what they will of the text, even if that construct is as remote and prosaic as the examples above. However, those reader-rights ought to be supplemented by the need to, at least, suspend disbelief and allow some poetic licence, if they are to have access to the deeper structures in the text.

What this entry needs now is a meatier selection of examples where the literal has blocked off the literature. That’s where you guys come in.

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My brother is my keeper

I should have known better than to post the previous offering, in which I was boasting about winning awards. Hubris is always punished and yesterday came retribution via that man you all (unaccountably) seem to like - my brother Ron. And what better way to convey the experience than by simply pasting the email I sent to him when it happened. The relevant part of my note to him went like this:

This morning, to put off getting started on anything, I looked at an analytical thing that counts blog visits, pageloads, and other stuff which I don’t understand. As a result of checking to see whether I’m wasting my time writing the bloody thing, I found details of each blog’s popularity and as I scanned down the figures, I was quite pleased to see that some of my efforts attracted well over a hundred (although the vast majority were in double figures – and mostly low ones at that). Then – oh frabjous day etc. – the wonderful figure of 586 leapt off the page – but it was bugger-all to do with me. It was your second contribution. Fair enough, I thought, so I looked for your first one and, for the months of January/February 2010, I found the following sequence:

3 - 5 - 0 - 2 - 3 - 1 - 1 - 2428 - 3 - 1 - 1

That’s not a joke or a misprint. I’m therefore the blogging equivalent of the singer of Pinball Wizard and I owe a duty to ‘my’ readers to cajole you into raising my profile once more, you lazy, popular bastard.

To his credit, he didn’t gloat but he did recognise the need to restore some of my credibility again simply by associating me vicariously with himself and he promised that he’d give it some thought. Actually, it’s just occurred to me that those elevated numbers were probably achieved by him visiting the blog to look at his own contribution again and again and again. But I can’t afford to take chances and so, rather than sign off as ‘Award-winning author Bill Kirton’, I’m happy to acknowledge that the above was written by ‘The brother of Ron Kirton’.

What identity crisis?

Cliché alert – ‘No two writers are the same’. OK, good to get that out of my system, but there’s more because I also think that ‘No ONE writer is the same’. Here’s what I mean.

We all know the publishing business has changed significantly and increasingly quickly over the past five years or so. When I started writing novels as opposed to plays, you polished your MS, printed out a copy (not cheap if it ran to 300-odd pages) and sent it out to agents and/or publishers. Postage wasn’t cheap either, (you also had to cover the costs for its return if they didn’t like it). Then, through the (sometimes) months you waited for them to reply, you got on with the next novel. Meantime, you also had your day job and you were a husband, wife, lover, significant other, hermit, father, mother, son, daughter, outcast, or whatever other roles your social situation imposed on you. See what I mean? There were (and are) several people inhabiting your body. But, back then, the writer bit was just that – you wrote, sent your stuff away, waited patiently but eagerly for a reply, got rejected and did it all again.

Today, though, even that writing bit has fragmented. Being a writer doesn’t just involve the one role. There’s still the writing (the best bit), but there’s also:

• the PR person, desperately trying to create and project a cuddly profile;
• the fish out of water, trying to learn and apply marketing techniques;
• the social networker, scrolling through tweets and Facebook comments with all the other writers;
• the blogger, trying to sell books;
• the prostitute, willing to do just about anything to be published or shoved up the sales lists;
• the reviewer;
• and, mostly, the unrecognised genius, whose blockbuster novel will change the course of humanity but lies misunderstood in the depths of a computer.

I exaggerate, of course, but only on the basis of fairly common experiences shared by many.

But why am I saying stuff you all know anyway? Because what I’m really doing (with very little subtlety) is boast. I’ve already sent out a few tweets and FB comments saying how wonderful I am, and this is another because yet another ‘self’ has been added to my list. I am now … (discreet but still quite loud fanfare) … an ‘award-winning author’. My publisher, Diane Nelson of Pfoxmoor Publishing, submitted two of my books to the 2011 Forward National Literature Awards. The Sparrow Conundrum was the winner in the ‘Humor’ category, and The Darkness came second in the ‘Mystery’ category. OK, trumpet blown, so what?

First, the news turned me into a six year old on Christmas Eve. And yet, objectively, I’m not comfortable with the idea of ‘competitive literature’. Even though I know there are terrible novels out there as well as terrific ones, I applaud anyone who’s had the stamina and the commitment to actually write one and see it through to the end. But if I deny that we’re all in competition, where do sales figures fit in? In the end, being able to add that little ‘award-winning’ tag to me and two of my books theoretically gives me a wee marketing edge. I say ‘theoretically’ because I don’t yet know whether that’ll be the case and, anyway, it’ll be up to me (the sloth) to make it happen.

Perhaps more importantly, though, it opens up another tricky area when it comes to the various ‘selves’ I was speaking of. My two awards were for very different books. The Sparrow Conundrum is a spoof, The Darkness is a stark revenge/vigilante story with a pretty chilling resolution. So what does that make me? A funny man or a scary man? And what about the other stuff, the police procedurals, the historical, the non-fiction and, most of all, Stanley’s Boswell? Multiplying your ‘selves’ can be counter-productive.

Readers, naturally enough, like to know what to expect when they buy a book. If they’ve enjoyed your gore-saturated slasher mystery, they’ll probably feel cheated if your follow-up is a light-hearted romantic romp through the tulips. In a way, then, they impose an identity on you – and they have every right to do so. But what happens if it’s not you but the characters in the follow-up who decide that they’ve gone off the idea of being serial killers and instead want to fall in love and skip through a field outside Amsterdam?

As I keep saying, ‘Hell is other people’ but it’s also readers and our characters.

On the other hand, to end on another cliché, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

(The above was written by award-winning author Bill Kirton.)

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Amazon is my shepherd. I shall not want.

Those nice people at Amazon emailed me this morning to say there was a book they were sure would be of great interest to me. And they were right. The only problem was that I’d not only read it, I’d written it. The book in question was the fourth in the series I’d written for Pearson, Brilliant Workplace Skills, and, to try to penetrate and benefit from their marketing strategy, I asked myself why they decided that that was the book for me.

First, why Workplace Skills rather than the others? I’m well past retirement age and, in fact, I took early retirement to concentrate on my writing, so I only share my office with me. Which means I have little need for the book’s insights into topics such as promotion prospects and how to enhance them, interpersonal relationships, office politics and protocols, and (God forbid) romance in the workplace. So they couldn’t have thought the content would be of interest.

Which leaves style. Maybe they thought ‘Ah, he’s a writer. He’ll appreciate the finely rounded phrases here, the prose rhythms and cadences, the immaculate structuring of arguments, the inspired organisation of the material and the impeccable choice of words’. But no, style and content can’t be separated so arbitrarily. And anyway, all of you, the sophisticated literates who read these blogs, will already have curled a scornful lip at the heavy-handed irony of those stylistic claims and judged that this paragraph is merely a filler, a spurious pretence that this posting has a theme, a direction, a purpose.

So what else? Maybe they’ve looked at my novels and decided that the fiction writer in me needs to be mentored by his non-fiction counterpart. After all, I’m clearly rubbish at writing crime novels. My detective makes jokes, doesn’t have a drink or drug problem, isn’t particularly scruffy and lives with a funny, attractive woman to whom he’s happily married. He cares about people, too, and he’s more interested in truth than in justice, so he’s obviously not cut out to be between the covers of a modern crime novel. And even when I try history, the crime bit gets overtaken or at least muddied up by romance. As for The Sparrow Conundrum, what self-respecting auteur would admit to committing such rubbish to paper (or screen)?

Or maybe there’s something else, something unthinkable really. Maybe, in their desire to dominate the world and take the place of oxygen, Amazon has lost the plot. Could it be that they … I hesitate to articulate it, but … do they perhaps not know much about books? Surely they don’t think Brilliant Workplace Skills is a … a product, something electronic maybe, an executive toy, an object you put on your desk and … well, play with until it’s time to go home. No, that can’t be it. Amazon is the pinnacle of evolution, the ne plus ultra of refinement and civilisation. Amazon is the reason the Big Bang happened. No, the fault must lie in me (and, no doubt, many other writers). Amazon can’t have made a mistake.

(The car, by the way, is a 1956 Volvo Amazon. I got the picture from Phil Seed’s Virtual Car Museum http://www.philseed.com/volvo-121.html.)


P.S. OMG, as some people say, as if to demonstrate the truth of Amazon's omnipotence, as I was posting this, news came through that The Sparrow Conundrum, whose quality I so cheaply dismissed above, had been awarded first place for 'Humor' in the 2011 Forward National Literature Awards. I don't know what it means, but I'm bloody impressed.

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Random musing, Wimbledon, stuff like that

Just some random thoughts provoked by recent events. No, not Greece or the Eurozone crisis, or the fact that there are 7 billion of us now (although the concept of ‘us’ is laughable in the context of the generally accepted 99-1 wealth split). And it’s not the absurd fact that Berlusconi was ever allowed to hold any sort of political office (or any other office than that of a brothel concierge). And so on, and so on. No, we all have our convictions and hopes in these matters of global concern; they don’t always coincide and no amount of preaching or arguing changes things. Maybe if I had the occasional chat with Jesus, he’d make my putts drop, but I don’t, so He helps my playing partners to beat me. Serves me right.

So these random thoughts are on things of no significance to anyone. They serve the Beckettian purpose of helping me pass the time. ‘We always find something to give us the impression we exist’ says Estragon in Godot. So the more entertaining and stress-free that ‘something’ is, the better.

Such as the recent academic research that found that people born in August are:

a)      less likely to get to the ‘better’ universities in the UK, and

b)      less comfortable in social situations.

The argument is that they’re the youngest in their particular academic year and therefore 12 months behind their classmates. What it adds up to is that you’re wasting your time reading this and, if you’re a ‘follower’, you shouldn’t be. Because I was born in August, which means that I’m congenitally thick, I don’t know words such as ‘congenitally’, and I’m hopeless when it comes to engaging others in social interactions. (On the other hand, I’m still 15 days more intelligent and sociable than my daughter, who was born even later in August than I was. Except in a different year.) (You see? That last remark was either a post-modern witticism on the nature of time and progeniture, or clear proof of my disjunction from coherent thought.) (It also gave me the chance to indulge my obvious predilection for parentheses.) (But I’ll stop that now.)

The only conclusion to be drawn from this which might have some positive value is that, if any of you are planning to have a baby, wait until January to make sure it’s born in September. I’m sure you’ll be able to find other things to do between now and then.

Random thought 2 was provoked by a FaceBook posting by my other daughter (who was born in April and is therefore much cleverer than I am – in fact, so clever that she managed to be born just 12 hours before the end of the tax year, which at the time earned me an income tax rebate). Anyway, she wrote that, the moment she hears a politician say ‘Let’s be clear about this’, she stops listening. Whereupon daughter 1 added that she has the same reaction when they begin sentences with ‘Look’. My own contribution was that, when they say ‘The fact is’ or, even worse ‘The fact of the matter is’, it’s a clear signal that what follows will be fiction. So, even given the huge intellectual distances separating us, it seems that we’re bound by quite close family traits

Speaking of family, here’s another aside which is an unashamed boast. One of my granddaughters has been chosen to have free tennis tuition at the All England Club (i.e. Wimbledon) every weekend. She's the red dot in the picture. She’s 5 years old so I anticipate a seat in the Royal Box in, say, 2026 to see her lift the trophy. I shall, of course, encourage her parents to be ruthless in forcing her to practise, give up school, pleasures, TV, boyfriends. She’ll be made to eat healthy food which tastes like cardboard, rise at 5 am to get her conditioning right and run several miles before breakfast and after dinner each day. And I’m looking forward with great eagerness to the day when she’ll be sponsored by manufacturers of tennis shoes who pay workers in the Far East 25 cents a month so that they have the necessary millions to spare on stars. Quite right, too.

Enough randomness. I was going to go on about those incomprehensible souls who think ‘Second Place is just the first loser’ (Dale Earnhart) or commentators like the British guy describing a race in the world rowing championships who, when a British crew won, went all orgasmic, screaming ‘They don’t do bronze, they don’t do silver, they only do gold’. I’m not sure what he said when he had to call home British crews who did ‘do’ silver or bronze. Still, as Beckett (again) said ‘You're on Earth. There's no cure for that’.

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Vladimir Poignard - the interview

To celebrate a couple of milestones for the Booksquawk site to which I contribute reviews, I wrote what we called a spooftacular. And, since it seems that everyone grabs the excuse of Halloween to do a 'special', I thought I'd slavishly follow the fashion, join the flock, and share it here. Before this recording, all that was known of the person behind the wildly popular writer of such horror classics as I Recognise The Neck But Who Does The Razor Belong To? and The Night Of The Haggis was that he lived somewhere in the north of England and had resolutely refused to be photographed or give interviews. I have no idea why his representatives agreed to allow me to meet him, and what follows is a rare aural document and a genuine scoop for the blog. Only three people were present at the recording: Vladimir, myself, and my wife, Carolyn.

Audio track - Vladimir Poignard, the interview by Bill Kirton

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