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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