Starter for Ten w/c 2-3-2020

Starter for Ten is a daily writing exercise where the aim is simply to write for a full 10 minutes. No editing or revision is allowed after the 10 minutes is up and blank pages are not allowed – if all else fails type out song lyrics. The aim is to try new things, experiment with voices and styles and be bold!

Suckage often occurs. Tuesday’s is pretty weird this week…

**********

MONDAY

The lift trundles downwards. It has been descending for nearly ten minutes now and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of it stopping. Inside the lift the usual social etiquette that restricts conversations between all of those inside has thawed as the occupants realise that this isn’t a normal lift ride. Three of the occupants are sat cross-legged on the floor and the rest laze against the walls. One has lifted himself up onto the section of the drill bit that is sharing their descent and seems to be trying to sleep.

The lift passes harsh lights at roughly twenty metre intervals and Gabbon’s mind reels at the thought of being asked to wire in those lights. Did they stop the lift and work from inside, or were the electricians lowered in a cage? The thought of opening the doors and looking into a bottomless shaft fills Gabbon with horror and a wash of bile makes it to the top of his throat before he manages to collect himself.

“How much lo-“ one of the men sitting on the floor starts to ask but is cut off as the lift quietly and efficiently stops and the doors roll open smoothly revealing the largest space that Gabbon has ever seen. He thinks briefly of the Grand Canyon which he visited in his teenage years, but this is bigger. The fact that it is so far under ground provokes a mix of emotions: surprise, excitement, fear.

The team step out of the lift, working their way around the drill section and look up and around trying to make out the cavern’s roof. With a start Gabbon notices a truck is driving towards them. At this distance it makes the truck seem comically small but as it approaches it becomes apparent that this is a normal-sized truck.

A woman wearing a hard hat and safety goggles opens the passenger door and swings her legs across the threshold and climbs down the truck’s four steps.

“Gentlemen, welcome to my mine. Anyone who isn’t already wearing their hard hat and goggles put them on now. This will be the only time I ask you to do this. If I see you without them from now on then you will be escorted back to the lift and removed without pay.”

A flurry as the men all guiltily don their safety equipment.

“Very soon, you will all feel the effects of dehydration. You are in a salt mine and the salt is greedier for the moisture in the air than you are, so the air you are breathing will have typically less than 0.0004% moisture. On the surface, this can be up to 3%. Use your camelbaks or your lips will crack, your vision will fail and before a day has gone you will look like a Californian Raisin. But a very dead raisin.”

TUESDAY

We play a game at home called “BIRD!” and I’m going to explain how you can play it too. “BIRD!” is suitable for any number of players, of nearly any age. All you need is a window that is transparent and some people who can talk. The aim of the game is to look out of the window and when you see a bird then you shout, “BIRD!” No one else can claim the same bird, but it’s never really made explicit which bird you’ve seen as you don’t have to point at it. If the view from the window is relatively far, then you will end up with situations where the players cheat and just shout “BIRD!” almost constantly.

The shelf-life of this game – as in the time that you can play it for before you want to find a very heavy set of book-shelves and pull them down onto your body – is around three minutes. Despite this fact I find myself playing it with a greater degree of regularity, than I might have expected. Even now as I write this I am glancing out of the window and playing “BIRD!” with myself and extracting about as much joy out of it as I usually do.

“BIRD!” resists all attempts at strategy. It cannot be leveled-up. There is no sell-on merchandise or expansion pack. It doesn’t even have a box that we can put the majority of the pieces in and return it to a shelf, and then, in time, to the loft, and then, in time, to the charity shop. I created the game “BIRD!” and I am sorry for it.  

WEDNESDAY

At the assembly the head teacher read Jessica’s name out and she stood up from the school hall floor, with its weird glossy varnish and picked her way through the ranks of children sitting cross-legged on the floor. The head teacher had a strange habit of announcing children’s names with an ominous booming sound and making them come to the front of the hall before she declared whether it was good or bad. It was invariably good, but it didn’t stop Jessica from trembling slightly as she stood at the front. Her right foot rolled over her ankle repeatedly as she fidgeted in place.

“How do you spell locate, Jessica?” the head boomed. Jessica’s face fell. A hall full of children looked on eagerly, awaiting Jessica’s inevitable weeping.

“L-O-C-A-T-E?” she replied in barely more than a whisper.

“Correct!” said the head and another teacher moved from the plastic chairs at the side of the hall with a large box of Maltesers, which the head took from her and passed with a smile onto Jessica. “And that was just one of the words that you spelled correctly in the recent whole school spelling test and it’s why you won the prize!”

Jessica looked at the Maltesers that seemed to have materialised in her hands. The box was massive and as she held it you could hear the little chocolate globes rolling about inside. To our ears it sounded like there must have been thousands of them. Jessica blinked. The children clapped and the head moved on. Jessica and the large red box of sweets returned into the crowd of children. The box’s presence so unusual – a child, an actual child, allowed to roam freely with more chocolate than most of us saw outside of ten Halloweens.

At break time Jessica attracted a crowd on the playground. Well, Jessica was to some extent an irrelevance. Sure, she could spell, but it was what her spelling had unlocked that us children were interested in. Her right leg rolled over her ankle again as the crowd around her built until it was easily four deep.

“Show us the box.”

“Yeah, hold it up.”

Jessica knew nothing of crowd control, so she blithely did as the loud voices requested.

“Give us one.”

“Yeah, can I have one?”

Jessica could have said no. They were her chocolates. But the sheer number of them. You could hear it from the trundling sound that they made inside that there must have been easily a hundred Maltesers per child in a box of that magnitude.

“Well, I suppose-“ Jessica began and inserted her finger into the perfect circle of the box and pulled back the perforated cardboard tab that kept them all in.

The hands.

All the hands.

Jessica could do nothing more than hold the box aloft. The hands pushed past her. My own hand among them. The hands of the crowd reaching and grabbing and dispersing.

The hands were gone.

Jessica held the slightly crumpled red box without a single Malteser in it. It seemed smaller now, like a magic trick when you figure out how it’s done. Jessica held onto the box. 

THURSDAY

Barry hated the word Barista. In part this was because it opened up too many jokes about his name. “You can’t spell Barista without Barry!” his shift manager was fond of saying. It wasn’t just inane it was inaccurate. You could clearly say Barista without Barry. The joke felt too close to the truth to Barry, like some sort of nominative determinism that he couldn’t escape. He kept thinking of the card game Happy Families and wondering if he was just another in a line of Mr Bun the Baker people. It reinforced the power of branding. If only his parents had thought to christen him Billionaire instead. Barry chuckled to himself as he realised that there probably was some poor chump called Billy O’Nare, who had even more of a reason to hate his parents.

Such was his attention to this particular day dream that Barry didn’t realise that his hand was directly under the hot water spigot as he span the handle and steam gouted out of the grubby silver opening. The pain was instant and all-consuming. He dropped the cup as he reflexively pulled his damaged hand to his chest. He span on his heel and barged his way past Erin as he made for the sink. A searing belt of pain reached his senses and he risked a look at the back of his hand. It was a sweaty, red colour and there was blood leaching out from under what looked like a cut. Bubbles of yellow were raising on the skin and Barry could feel the drool of repulsion gathering in his mouth.

Erin had finally understood what was going on and was shouting for Tom. Barry heard the customer asking if he could get his drink as he ran the tap on full power and forced his hand into the stream.  

FRIDAY

I studied the blade for several years. The katana, shuriken, bo-staff, those over-sized pasta fork things. They do have a name but I can’t remember it. I was actually going to go to Japan to study at one of the temples they have but there were quite a lot of entry requirements and between one thing and another I didn’t get in.

So most of my martial arts these days are tai-chi. It’s actually pronounced TAY-CHWEE but lots of people don’t get what you’re talking about if you invite them to come to a TAY-CHWEE taster session. There was a bit of awkwardness where an older lady thought it was a sort of afternoon tea thing and then she started shouting about having a voucher from Groupon and in the end I just made her a sandwich and a brew and she calmed down.

People often mistake tai-chi for an exercise for geriatrics. Not so. It’s by far the most deadly martial art out there. It shits all over krav maga and your BJJ. There’s this story that Bruce Lee would fight anyone and all sorts of people would turn up at his dojo – wrestlers, karate men, boxers and he wiped the floor with all of them – one inch punched them out of the ring. But one day this guy turns up asking to fight and Lee asks him what he studied. This guy goes “tai-chi” and Lee turns as white as a sheet and gives him a thousand dollars to go away. This guy says I want ten thousand and Lee goes straight to the bank and gets it for him.

That’s a true story.

You see tai-chi only looks slow because that’s how it was smuggled out. There was this ancient master and he created tai-chi but it was full speed tai-chi, with punching and kicking. And the ruling emporer at the time said, “This is the best martial art in the world, a lot better than krav maga, we need to keep this secret” and they used tanks and bombs to try and kill everyone who knew tai-chi. But this ancient master escaped and started to teach it as a slower exercise. It was the same moves, he just slowed them right down to about a thousandth of the speed. The emporer never realises that’s what’s happened and tai-chi sneaks under the radar – this emporer even ends up taking lessons himself!

Oh look, seems like we’ve been cleared for take-off. I’m Martin by the way.

Starter for Ten – w/c 24-2-20

Starter for Ten is a daily writing exercise where the aim is simply to write for a full 10 minutes. No editing or revision is allowed after the 10 minutes is up and blank pages are not allowed – if all else fails type out song lyrics. The aim is to try new things, experiment with voices and styles and be bold!

Suckage often occurs. Wednesday’s is best this week…

**********

MONDAY

W: What is your problem?

M: I was waiting to pull into that space. You already had a space, so move back.

W: Why should I? There was no one in the space so I pulled into it. I can see now you were looking at moving into that space, but I did first.

M: It was mine.

W: If it was yours then I would have crashed into you, you arsehole.

M: Lovely attitude you’ve got. Do you talk to your husband like that?

W: Did you talk to your ex-wife like that?

M: Jokes on you, I’m not divorced.

W: Good things come to those who wait.

M: Listen, just give me that space back.

W: Why?

M: Because it’s the one that I was waiting to pull into!

W: There’s loads of space.

M: Yeah, but I want to go there.

W: As we’ve already established, you clearly didn’t have the space in the first place, otherwise I’d currently be parked on top of your head – which is an attractive thought right at the moment.

M: Oh so you’re threatening me now? Did you hear that mate?

S: What’s that?

M: Did you hear what she said about driving into my face?

W: I didn’t say that – I pointed out that it wasn’t “your space” because I was in it first.

M: That’s not the point!

B: Mum! Dad! Why can’t you just enjoy the dodgems like any other normal people?

TUESDAY

There’s a bad energy in the room. Jokes that would usually land are falling flat. He’s hoping that it’s something to do with this fucking mouth ulcer. Every time his tongue probes a certain point on his inside lip it stings and his attention is momentarily distracted. He’s changed his delivery ever-so minutely and it’s enough to screw his timing.

But he’s experienced, he’s been doing stand-up a long time and he knows enough to sell the lines with physical movements. His arm movements become bigger and his hands start to push the punchlines; after twenty minutes his face muscles are exhausted because he’s pantomiming the fuck out of the evening.

“I’m not one of those self-hating Jews,” he says and he realises that the word “Jews” is the perfect storm for this ulcer – the pursing of the lips for the J and the little thrust of the tongue for the S antagonise it perfectly and he winces. He notices a lady react to the wince and pushes quickly on. “My mother does that for me.”

A small laugh – maybe a 5. That line is usually a solid 7 out of 10 laugh and it allows him to build from it, this section is going to be tough. Mentally he computes how well this section would deliver if he had to prune the word Jews out of it. Somehow even thinking the word makes his lip wince – he bails.

“But enough about Je-ow the adherents of the Hebrew faith, let’s talk about…”

WEDNESDAY

The mouse crashed through a pile of leaf mould, scattering fragments in the air and skittered on the wet gravel. He turned hard right and ploughed again through the deep piles of oak leaves that sat on the road. The cat sprang and landed on the pile, padding at the various movements with his claws, thrusting into where he hoped the mouse would be. A noise over on the right alerted the cat that he had miscalculated and he tore through the leaves, swiping clusters of them to one side in the hope of revealing the small, damp creature. It would make no more than a mouthful, but this was about more than hunger now – it was about humiliation. The cat felt it and longed to inflict it.

The cat approached the trunk of the tree and swished at the remaining leaves. The mouse scuttled quickly around the edge of the trunk, a fraction too slow to stop the cat from driving the claws of its right paw through the bed of its tail. It peeped with anxiety and pain and the cat reveled in the moment. The chase was beautiful but the kill was art – first a wound to ensure that any subsequent chase would be very one-sided. Then a parody of the morning’s back and forth, to rehearse for the next and to celebrate the kill. Then a small meal – it’s body and innards, leaving the spine and skull for the birds.

He drove his claw in further and the mouse peeped again and shook. It shivered and looked up just in time to see the bulldog tiptoeing up behind the cat, with the largest metal skillet the mouse had ever seen, raised over its head.  

THURSDAY

There’s something really satisfying about pouring sugar into a container. Opening the folds of a large packet of sugar and tipping it into the caddy that will be its home. In part this is because the sugar is, at this stage, pristine white and is yet to accumulate the mysterious brown flecks that characterise the look of latter-stage sugar caddy sugar. You can kid yourself that this time you’ll keep to the rules, it will be dry teaspoons only that will be used. But really, who can be bothered to get a spoon to fish out the tea bag from the cup and another spoon to get the sugar. That’s where the brown flecks come from, crystallised drops of tea.

The other thing that’s nice about tipping the sugar into the caddy is the aesthetic of it. It whooshes out and builds into a peak in the centre which a quick nudge on the caddy will flatten. The grains of sugar behave according to some laws of fluids, in the same way that you get waves in banks of sand. Enough atoms of sugar are pushed into the atmosphere to sweeten the very air. The echoing caddy soon takes on a deeper sound as the weight of material builds. The entire bag fits in and means that you won’t have to fold the bag over and keep yet another scrag end of a bag in the cupboard with the odds and sods of flours and powders.

The lid sits snug on the container, a rubber seal keeping the contents pristine – a new hope that this time it will be better and that the area around the kettle will not attract chaos. This time it will all work out.

FRIDAY

Afternoon tea? A four tier platter of sandwiches, cakes, petits fours, a glass of champagne, a vole and a pot of perfectly-brewed tea. All served by a waiter who is so smart he could be off to a wedding and he’s wearing white gloves.

Yes that sounds lovely. I’m wondering though if you’d accept some feedback?

It’s the vole, isn’t it.

It is the vole, yes.

It’s an outlier, isn’t it.

I’m not sure I’d even describe it as an outlier, I’d simply say it’s an irrelevance. You’ve done really well with the rest of the offer – the good, the drinks, the service. I’m just not sure what a woodland creature adds to the ensemble.

On the first week you said that we needed a USP. I looked it up when I got home and it means Unique. A Unique Selling Point.

That’s right.

None of the other hotels do a vole with their afternoon tea.

Right.

It’s unique.

Right.

I googled it, there is no other hotel anywhere in the world that offers voles. The niche is entirely empty.

Right. Let’s for the moment establish that the vole provides the U in this situation.

It’s Unique.

Right. What I think you might want to ponder on is whether this same element brings the S.

The Selling.

Yes.

Oh.

That’s right. If I compared offerings between your hotel and the one next door would the vole raise an eyebrow? Certainly. Would it get me through the doors? No.

Oh.

How far have you gone with the marketing?

Not far. Barely anywhere.

That’s good.

Just a banner.

OK, well that can be removed.

And a thing in the paper.

Which paper?

All of them.

Anythi-

A skywriter. I’ve renamed the business to The Voletel.

Anyt-

And I’ve ordered fifteen thousand voles. And employed a vole handler.

Why?

I thought people might want to choose their vole from a bucket of live ones. Like lobsters.

Book Readings Over The Phone: The Verdict

As you might remember, I recently posted an offer that I was going to invite readers to register for a free book reading over the phone. Don’t worry, it’s not finished – you can still book in for me to read to you here. I posted that on the 17th January and it’s been something of a surprise success, with about 60 readings taking place since then. On one day I did six readings and read to people from New Jersey and Australia.

Valuable lesson: always check that your mobile phone contract covers overseas calls. Mine didn’t…

In part the popularity of the experiment has been because I got some coverage from The Telegraph and from Popbitch, who featured it in their newsletter, which goes out to about 250,000 people every week. Frustrating to see that once again I get second billing to Donald Trump’s badger obssession.

The aim of this post is really just to outline what I’ve learned about the process, so that if other writers were thinking of doing it they might learn from some of the pot-holes I hit and, hopefully, avoid them. I’m also keen if anyone has any suggestions and feedback on the idea, then fire your thoughts at me in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter – this whole thing is very much a work-in-progress.

First thing I would say to anyone considering doing this is absolutely go for it. Do it. Don’t think about it. Don’t worry about getting it wrong. Just put yourself out there. You might get NO ONE taking you up on the offer, but so what – it’s just a fun project. Do it. Do it now. Set it up and do it. Stop thinking.

Absolutely, I’ve been nervous about how a reading would go sometimes, but I can honestly say that I’ve got something positive out of every single experience. I also estimate that about 90% of the listeners went on to buy the book. This isn’t primarily a marketing exercise, but it’s nice to know that it does work on that level. The best thing for me about the process is that there’s something so exciting about connecting directly with a reader through your story. It’s fascinating to hear them listening and then ask about what happens next – it validates a very real need to ensure that readers are actually excited by the book.

On a practical basis it’s really important to prepare for every reading. That sounds obvious, but it’s not just a case of getting organised. There’s a couple of angles that need thought and effort.

Technology: does your phone have enough battery? Are you in a space where you will get good signal and have a quiet background (and not sitting in the car like I was for one reading). Do you have a copy of the book?! I found it helped to have a reading copy which I could mark up with any notes or exclamations, to ensure I hit the right emphasis. I usually put my phone on speaker and sit it on a pint glass, which means that when I’m sitting at my desk, I can lean in really close and maximise the volume. It also frees up both hands, so I can hold the book and make any notes as I go.

Research: I ask people when they book in to tell me three things about themselves and I’ve been really surprised by how revealing people have been in these answers. It’s perhaps a sign that they recognise that I’m exposing something of myself to them (don’t worry, it’s not a video call) and they feel comfortable doing that too. Maybe it’s just a truth that when you ask people directly about themselves they often answer without much artifice. Those bits of information are useful for us to establish a rapport when we chat. I have to remind myself as I do more of these readings, that although this is becoming more normal to me, it’s potentially a pretty weird thing for them to be on the receiving end of. Therefore I like to make sure they’re relaxed and happy.

As part of this research, there are various questions that I ask before I begin a reading, such as “what do you know about the book?” More than I thought have actually read it and some have a specific section they want me to read, in which case I do that – this is their experience and they should get what they want out of it. Or if they’ve never heard of it before I give a very simple explanation of the book in a few sentences and then read them the first chapter. I want the book to stand on its own, rather than me issuing lengthy explanations and disclaimers. In theory, that should pull them into the book and hopefully make them want to know more.

I also ask if they’re ok with profanity – I learned the importance of that the hard way after I received the telephonic equivalent of a Hard Stare from one listener, after I casually started effing and jeffing. I also like to ask what sort of things they usually read, just because it’s interesting and I’ve got some good tips about books that I might like to read from the discussions! Finally, I ask them if they’re sitting comfortably, and tell them that if they want to interrupt me at any point then just shout and don’t feel bad about it. There have been a few guest appearances from Amazon delivery drivers and I wouldn’t want listeners thinking they can’t interrupt or tell me to shut up if they need a wee.

Finally, and perhaps the most unexpected part of the experience for me, there’s an emotional aspect to reading to people. As mentioned above – reading my book to people does put me out there and it takes some mental preparation to be ok with that. They might laugh in odd places, or they might be effected emotionally by what I’ve read them. They might hate it, or worse still, feel ambivalent towards it. I feel like it’s important to take a few minutes to make sure both reader and listener have got something out of the experience and offer them the opportunity to ask questions, or talk about what they heard. They might not want to, or I might have a question for them.

I will say that overall reading to people leaves me with a sense of calm and happiness. The love of telling people a story is what authors get involved in this business for, and reading it straight into a willing earhole is about as direct a hit of that experience as you can get. Often I’m left wanting to read them more, but I appreciate that people have their own lives and the world can’t just stop because I’ve written a book. Sadly.

From a practical point of view I’ve used YouCanBookMe to organise bookings and readings, which is about as straight-forward a platform as you could hope to get. I just use their free plan which does everything I need it to. Vitally, it cross-checks with your Google Calendar and ensures that you aren’t double-booking yourself. I was going to walk through the settings, but mostly it’s just a case of following the set-up wizard and deciding how many appointments you want to set per day and what duration they should be. You can then set up notifications before it starts. I’ve also set it so that it sends them an SMS after the reading to give them a link to the book (a small charge applies to each SMS sent) and where they can sign up for more info about me.

If you want to give this a go for yourself then give me a shout if you get stuck and I’ll gladly help set it up for you. And of course – if you’d like to book in a reading then give it a go, it’s not nearly as weird as you might think – unless you want me to make it weird?

Starter for Ten – w/c 17-02-20

Starter for Ten is a daily writing exercise where the aim is simply to write for a full 10 minutes. No editing or revision is allowed after the 10 minutes is up and blank pages are not allowed – if all else fails type out song lyrics. The aim is to try new things, experiment with voices and styles and be bold!

Suckage often occurs.

I took a break from Starter for Ten while I was busy marketing Before and After, but as I start to focus on writing a new book, the plan is to do them daily again but publish them weekly, or possibly weakly. Hopefully that way it gives you a bundle to read or ignore as you see fit, in one handy package.

**********

MONDAY

There’s a little scratch on the wall and it bothers him. The walls were only painted a few months ago and to see this scratch where flecks of paint have been scraped off, reveals the colours underneath – that awful green that the landing had been painted ever since they arrived. He runs his thumb across the scratch and a minute fleck of the paint chips clings to his nail. It’s fine. He moves on with his day.

Later, he finds himself on the landing with a fine grade of sandpaper. He’s not entirely sure where he got the sandpaper from, but he dimly recalls a shop and a joke about DIY. Now here he is and he eases a sheet of the paper out and folds it carefully around a small block of wood, about the size of a chalk-board eraser. This gives him a pad which he can use to gently push at the edges of the gouge. He’s decided it’s a gouge and not a scratch – almost like it was a nail that pulled through the surface. He brushes and wipes and vacuums and soon he has a flat surface – the gouge is less prominent but underneath there’s that green colour that his wife insisted on. It reminds him of pea and ham soup. It’s a colour from another era.

The next morning he lays out a small cloth on the floor which is covered with spatters of colours. He’s mesmerised briefly and half composes a thought about Jackson Pollock, which dissipates as he returns his focus to the wall. He has a small tester pot in a colour which very, very closely matches the colour he chose for the landing when he was redecorating. He unscrews the pot and feels his tongue protrude through his lips as he daubs the paint in a neat line across the length of the seven inch fissure. In a macro he can picture the little valley of the gorge. The trauma that there must have been to create it. He pushes his face up close to watch the brush deposit the paint. As the paint hits the wall it fills the valley. It blots out any trauma and once again pushes the green walls back out of existence. It calms him to look at the now smooth walls. The paint is a good match. You’d hardly ever notice. He hopes it won’t dry darker, he’ll check again in the morning.

TUESDAY

There was a small black cat on the table. It could only have been a few months old. Its body was growing but it’s head was still kittenish and her paws still seemed a little large for her body. The children had named the cats, so this one was Bing. The other ginger kitten was Mr Tumble, which had been shortened to Tum. She pushed at a pen on the table until half of it was over the edge. All right gents, I’ve got an idea. The pen fell and skittered across the floor. The noise scared the cat and it bolted from the table, which wobbled under the sudden movement and the vial tipped on one side and rolled with intent towards the edge of the table. Just as it approached the edge, the man reached out and calmly put a finger on top of the vial stopping it a centimetre from the edge.

He was a big man, but the word fat wouldn’t have done him justice. He was just large. His head was large. His chest full. His frame was double-sized. Even the finger that now held the vial was large, the nail as big as a fifty pence piece. He wore a double-breasted white suit and his head was wet shaved so that the lights glinted off his dome. Bing circled around his foot, feeling the safety of his presence and scenting his feet. He carefully lifted the vial and placed it back in the rack, where it should have been but it was an object that called to him and demanded to be lifted and rolled between his fingers. The outright horror of what lay behind the simple rubber bung never failed to bring him a thrill. To own death and to keep it trapped in such a feeble prison amused him.

He lifted Bing onto his lap and the cat brushed its face against his hands. It circled several times and sat on one of his thighs, its entire body easily fitting. He lightly curled a finger around the cat’s ear and it lifted its chin to glory at this attention. He reached over and pulled the vial from the rack and ran it across the cat’s jawline. The cat enjoyed the game and feinted to bite at the vial. The man smiled and pulled it out of reach and secured it once more. How thin the lines were between chaos and normality. 

“Not today Bing.”

WEDNESDAY

“’…Slapped the fish on the table and said cook it yourself’ – that’s not good,” Pops looked up from the laptop. He raised his eyebrows – inviting comment. When nothing came he carried on.

“’Our party was then told that the table had been double-booked and the waitress told us we had to leave, even though some of us had already been served our starters.’ That’s not good. Marcy? What can you say?”

Marcy lifted her eyes and took an exaggerated breath. She twiddled the control stick of her wheelchair which made her fidget on the spot.

“Trip Advisor is a really important source of customers for us – if we get reviews like this then it hurts us as a business. And if we’re hurt then it hurts our staff – including you – as well.”

Pops made an awkward face at Marcy, his expression like he was witnessing a five car pile up on the freeway. “If you can’t tell me why you did it, I think we have to let you go.”

Marcy twirled the pommel of the control stick in her hand and found that it was a bit loose, so she pinched harder and screwed it back into place. Pops was still looking at her, the grotesque pantomime of awkwardness playing across his face.

“Marcy?”

The silence stretched until Pops could bear it no longer.

“Marcy – was it because of the wheel-, because of your…did it happen…”

“Oh fuck off Pops. I kicked them out because I was bored. It didn’t have anything to do with my wheelchair. It didn’t have anything to do with my leg. It didn’t have anything to do with anything, other than the fact that I was bored of looking at another table of shit-munching customers who expected me to bring them food.”

“But you’re a waitress.”

“I was a waitress until ten seconds ago. Now I’m a gin-seeking missile.”

THURSDAY

The line is nearly out of the door. It’s not even straight, it sort of circles around a display tables that has books about crochet on it. The audience is mixed, good balance of male and female, good ethnic mix and, best of all, they’re young – maybe averaging at around mid-20s. That’s all the more unusual when you consider that the city is mostly older and affluent. To attract an audience like this is surely the sort of thing his handler will take back to the publisher.

The handler was suggested by his editor. “She’ll help you make all the arrangements; it’ll free you up so you can focus on getting pages down.” That was the most appalling horseshit. The handler was there to take the temperature. Sales weren’t good on his last two books and although it still made all of the usual lists, that was now a given rather than a bonus. He briefly thought back to that magical Summer evening when he hit the best-seller lists for the first time. There had been whooping and wine and sex. The last time he hit the best-seller list his editor sent him an email asking if he had corrected the proofs for the German version.

He was saying a few words before the signing started. Generous, self-deprecating comments pushing his brilliance to one side and blaming the excellent crowd on the weather. Inside he thought about his pages. There were none. It was the book’s central idea that was the problem – there wasn’t one. He’d declared a breakthrough on this book so many times that it was becoming a bit of a cliché. Every time he thought he’d pinned the idea down it slithered from under his grasp like a squid. Fucking analogies.

“With no further ado then let me open the signing and thank you in advance for your patience.”

The table was set, a comical number of his favourite marker pens, a drink – lightly alcoholic – and, of course, his handler. The first reader came forward and smiled.

“Please could you sign this,” she asked and he took the book from her hands, opened it and fired his standard greeting into the inside cover.

“Thanks. Do we get the twenty pounds from you as well?” she asked.

The handler’s head snapped up.

FRIDAY

It felt tickly, that was a warning. It felt a bit like a cough, but also like a bit of the food had got stuck in her throat. The difference was that coughing really didn’t do anything to remove the sensation. She started to cough anyway, a light, high-throated Hrrrem noise that she repeated two or three times.

“Are you all right, Shirley?”

“Bit of a frog,” she managed to croak in-between hrrrems.

But she knew. It had only happened two times before and those were in very different circumstances. Very different.

Shirley started to panic. If previous occasions were anything to go by then within a few minutes her throat would be closing up and her breathing would sound like a punctured bagpipe.

“Ladies and gentlemen, will you please rise for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.”

There was a sound of chairs being politely scraped back and a hundred cake forks hitting plates as the star of the garden party arrived. Even given her situation Shirley found the power of royal obedience compelling her legs to stand. She tried to hrrrem even harder in the hope that it would dislodge something.

But she knew. The real horror was how had it been triggered? She knew it was absurd, but she searched her mind for any way in which she could have forgotten a meeting of that sort in the last few hours. But there was nothing! Of course, there was nothing! She and Katya had been in the hotel, they had dressed and as the invitation had promised carriages had arrived – albeit a hackney carriage, where it had deposited them here and they had joined the queues of ladies, all looking so stately and perfect.

It had to be something she had eaten then. She breathed hard through her nose and looked at her plate. Two fairy cakes – which were exquisite – and three long-fingered sandwiches. A cup of tea with milk. Shirley was peripherally aware that the Queen was circulating closer to their table. She was shaking hands with a chosen few. She had beautiful, long white gloves. It was true what they said too – she was smaller than you expected. She exuded a force though.

HRRREM – another effort to dislodge the blockage. Katya was now shifting between beaming with joy at the nearby royal and looking with a dark concern at Shirley. Shirley looked at the Queen and wondered why she was so bendy. Why would the Queen have black splodges on her? The roof of the tent was beautiful. Why didn’t everyone lie on their back and look at it, like Shirley did.   

Before and After is Officially a Best-Seller – But What Does That Mean?

After approximately 10 days of Before and After hovering around the Top Ten list in two different categories (more on that later), some mysterious salesforce bumped the book not just into the top ten, but actually to the hallowed top slot. I genuinely felt a bit dizzy when I saw what it had pushed back.

Oh, it’s just Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Who?

Before this post starts to sound like a vomit-inducing, overly-premature victory lap I thought it might be interesting to go into what hitting the best-seller means and how you go about getting that much-coveted orange ribbon.

The short and predictable answer is sales. There’s no getting around it, people need to buy your book. A slightly longer answer would be that it’s sales in a condensed period of time. If you take a look just underneath where it says Amazon Best Sellers then you’ll see that it says “Updated Hourly”. So the simple answer is that during that hour, as Amazon measured it, Before and After sold more copies than Good Omens.

Now, I’m not attempting to downplay this, I’m thrilled that anyone buys my books, but it’s fair to say that Good Omens has been on the shelves for some time – it was released in 1990. So, even despite the fact that it’s had renewed attention because of the (nice and accurate) TV series, that’s pretty amazing that a thirty year old book can still hold the number one and two slot on a best-selling chart. Come back to me in 30 years and let’s see how Before and After is doing. More amazing still is that it’s pretty expensive as Kindle books go.

The other thing that’s worth noting when it comes to the best-seller charts is that authors get to choose a number of categories for Amazon to list their book in. My main categories you can see here:

Notice too that it’s dropped to #94 in “post-apocalyptic” now – I’m sure Gaiman and Pratchett are working on their boastful blog posts right now. When you first upload your book Amazon allows you to have two main categories, you can actually email the very helpful customer support team at Kindle Direct Publishing and ask them to list you in as many as eight other categories.

Clearly, this helps a lot because some of those categories are fairly niche and will require far fewer sales to hit the best-seller chart than others. Perhaps unsurprisingly the most competitive category is Contemporary Romance. My chosen battleground of science fiction> post apocalyptic is slap bang in the middle at #54 (of around 100). So it seems that if you’re looking to harvest as many of those orange tags as possible then according to this chart you should write a book about something that fits the following categories.

Romance -> Historical Romance -> Scottish
Literature & Fiction -> Literary Fiction -> Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Nonfiction -> Religion & Spirituality -> Christianity -> Christian Living -> Spiritual Growth

Which rather neatly brings me onto my new book series: The Detective Morag Mysteries. The year is 1915 and Curtly Morag is one of the first to ever make the rank of detective in the fiercely misogynistic Scottish police force, she’s certainly the first atheist…

How about I read you my book over the phone?

I love reading to people. Love it. When my wife and I first got together I’d read to her all the time (mostly Pratchett, cos you can’t go wrong with Pratchett) and I’ve read to all of my children until the point where they don’t really want me to. There’s something so warm and human about telling a story straight into someone’s ear that hits me right where I live.

So let me read my book to you.

https://beforeandafter.youcanbook.me

Huh? What? Well, just that really. I’m doing a little experiment for the next two weeks where you can book a slot in my working week for me to read to you. It’s totally free and I’ll call at a time you designate and read about 10 minutes of Before and After to you. You could think of it as an audio sampler. We can chat and if you’ve got any questions then I’ll do my best to answer them, unless it’s maths related in which case I’ll get one of my children to help.

It’s kind of a weird idea, but I know that as my readers you’re looking for weird kind of ideas and I dig you for that. So why not give it a try?

Additionally, a few people have also asked if I’d read at their book club meeting and the answer is hell yes. If you’re doing Before and After at your book club just drop me an email and I’ll gladly come and read to you. I’ll also send you a list of the book club discussion points which I’m putting together for a later blog post. Depending on where you are I might need you to cover petrol, or bike wheel rubber, but it won’t be much. I’m also happy to talk about the career path of becoming an indie author and share what I’ve learned thus far. Primarily, never use the word thus.

Also as an aside Before and After is now a best-seller…no biggie.

Before and After The Book Trailer

Simply everyone is doing book trailers darlink! So I’ve done one too.

Actually, that’s a bald-faced lie – Iven Gilmore made it and I just chipped in with ideas and suggestions, then corrections to the suggestions, then alterations to the corrections, then…Iven punched me in the face and we finished it. Thank you Iven, I love you.

You’ll have to read the book to get an idea of quite wtf is going on here, but I love the little crescendo of chaos as the film builds. Given the size of my hero in the book, it felt appropriate to go with Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s version of What A Wonderful World, rather than Louis Armstrong’s. Plus, who doesn’t love a uke?

Let me know what you think! If you like it, would you be a poppet and stick it on your socials?

Before and After: The Cover Story

Hello, I’m Yo, one half of design consultancy VS+YO. I created the cover for Before and After and Shan asked me to tell you the story of how we made it.

Before we get started, a warning, this blog post contains spoilers! If you don’t want to know what happens in the book, go get it from the kindle store before you read this, go!

Shan and I have worked together for over 18 years and I think we have only met in real life four times. I love working with him for multiple reasons [Chief among these being that we only meet in person once every 4.5 years – Shan].

Firstly, he gives me compliments like this:

But more importantly we share the same values when it comes to design and creating.

We also understand that we are both focused on making things better, which is why when we share ideas we are completely honest with each other. And why, when Shan told me that the cover was the most important thing to the success of any book and if his failed to sell it would be all my fault, I laughed. No pressure then!

The process I followed for creating the book cover was the same as I would follow for any design project. At each stage Shan had the opportunity to input and feedback which meant that the project is collaborative and that he thinks that all of the design was his idea.

Step 1 – The brief

We kicked off project with a call where I asked lots of questions to get a clear understanding of what Shan was looking for. Here are my notes of what he told me:

I then asked for a draft of the blurb that would feature with the book so that I could get an idea of what Shan was going to reveal up front and what he wanted to be a surprise. You can read the blurb here.

I had an idea I wanted to put something on the cover that represented one thing when you first saw it and then had another meaning after you have read the book.

Shan had lots of ideas for the cover, including making a hybrid illustration, creating an optical illusion where some people might see a fat man other would see a dog and a design with a fat superhero wearing a cape.

Emma, Shan’s wife, also had an idea which Shan send in a video. This made my day:

I had lots to go on, but before started any design I wanted to experience the book and understand the key themes. I also wanted to see the competition to learn who we were competing with and how they approached standing out in a crowded market place.


Step 2 – Research

I read the book, every word.

Shan asked if I would send feedback, I sent him notes after I had read each chapter. Reading the book really helped me to understand the key themes and get ideas for visuals that would work on the cover. It also gave me an understanding of the experience of the book. I loved it! It made me laugh out loud on multiple occasions and cry once too.

Next, I researched the marketplace and the competition. Looking at the sci fi and post apocalyptic section of the amazon kindle store was overwhelming. There are so many titles! Our cover would definitely need to stand out and the design would have to work at multiple sizes and in greyscale as well as in full colour.

I had a call with Shan to discuss what I had learned. We looked at examples and discussed typography, colours and tone, what he liked and what he didn’t. This helped us to realise that a traditional cover design was not what we were going to create. A lone figure in front of burning buildings was out. Simple illustration was a possibility. We agreed the goal of the design would be to make it stand out and to get a reader curious enough to read the blurb.


Step 3 – Concept

Now I had all of the information I needed to get started, it was time to focus on ideas.

My ideas always start as words. They allow me to get ideas out quickly and not get caught up in how it will look.

To get started, I do a brain dump of everything I can think of in five minutes. From this quick, simple exercise I get a feeling for what excites me and what sparks visual ideas. I pay attention to words that can be connected and try combinations of words for ideas, with the aim of creating something unique and unexpected.

Then I move on to moodboards with photography and type. As a book cover is quite a straightforward design, I also mocked up some covers so that Shan could see the cover name in action and get a feel for how it could work. I showed the covers both large and as small versions in both colour greyscale to replicate how they could be viewed in the kindle store. Check out of the concepts we explored in this gif:

This stage is quick and the moodboards are designed to explore ideas, not necessarily a finished style. That comes after a direction has been agreed.

All concepts were presented to Shan on a video call where I explained the thinking behind each. We discussed each one taking into account how we could create a design that he could completely own without having to pay royalties on images. The presentation was then emailed so that he could think over the options.

The design that we were both really excited about and agreed represented the key themes was the biscuit concept. It nailed it on many levels. It was simple. It stood out. It would appeal to a mass audience. It made you curious, what was this biscuit book about? We both felt this was the right direction, it just needed more development.

We also agreed the book needed a shorter name, something more memorable, and that the biscuit should have a message on it.

Boom! The design became instantly more memorable. And it satisfied my need to create a design that was timeless and that would stand out in the kindle store.
Shan and I were very excited, this was the one to develop to design.


Step 4 – Design

We wanted an original photo to work with so that we owned the rights and wouldn’t have to pay for a licence or royalties to use it. I’m not a photographer but as the book was digital and we were working to a budget I took the photos myself with my smartphone. I went on a search for the perfect bourbon (Waitrose essentials turned out to look the most like a bourbon and work the best. Fox’s bourbons in comparison looked like dog biscuits which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for this book).

My hubby, Tom, helped with the photography (and eating the bisuits). He noticed that one was broken and said it could be cool even though he had no idea why we were taking photos of biscuits.

I loved it! The idea of the biscuit being imperfect was like the main character Ben with his flaws, as if he had nibbled a little bit off hoping no-one would notice. The piece missing could also represent the part of his leg he has to remove. This was the one!
[I never mentioned this before but one of the things I got from that is that there’s an old joke about the fact that broken biscuits have no calories, so it’s even smarter than you thought! – Shan]

As the cover image was going to appear as if it was out of context in the kindle store I felt it needed a line to explain what the book was about. I wrote one and added to the top. Then I experimented with the layout, see some of the versions in this gif:

Shan loved the big biscuit with the book title on it and the additional line. He is feeling confident and decided to ask a small trusted group to feedback on the cover.

Usually when working on a project, I ask that all decision makers are present for the first stages. It helps to get everyone on the same page.

When new people are brought into the process cold and haven’t seen the work behind a design there can be a tendency for things to get off track and this can add time and cost to the project.

We shared the design process to date and we had a winner! The feedback was to tweak to the type and I needed to have the title properly photoshopped on to the biscuit and we would be good to go.

Until Shan posted the cover in a facebook group and asked over 9.1k people for their feedback. [Sorry. – Shan]

There was a lot feedback!
A lot of positives and some negatives too.

  • It didn’t look like fiction.
  • American’s didn’t recognise the biscuit.
  • It didn’t look like it fitted in the post-apocalyptic genre.

When dealing with feedback from with multiple individuals I aim to focus on the problem we are solving and keep bringing it back to what is important. Shan is very good at filtering out the noise and focusing on what is important.

Shan and I discussed the feedback in detail. Did these things matter? What was most important to us and to the viewer? What emotional reaction were we looking for?

We decided to give the cover design one final push to see if adding a post apocalyptic element to our biscuit cover would work.

I created some quick mock-ups, I tried adding biscuit crumbs coloured red so that at a glance it looked like blood splatter.
I added a target to communicate weight loss but that would also look like a scope, which also features in the book. At the request of Shan, I experimented with adding a mad sci-fi colour even though we knew the cover would often appear in greyscale.
I even tried adding a background of burning buildings, the cliche we originally agreed to avoid.

Sometimes, you have to try things to see them to confirm they don’t work.

These quick mock-ups proved that combining an extra element with the biscuit concept would require a lot more time and budget to get it right. And we would likely need to pay for photography or involve an illustrator.

We had two options, either to stick to our gut and go for the biscuit or continue to develop.

We realised something important.
We didn’t care that it didn’t look like traditional fiction.
We didn’t want it to look like it fitted in the post-apocalyptic genre.

We both loved the cover as it was.

We went back to the original with some final typographic tweaks to make the cover line and author name bigger as per the facebook feedback.

The cover now ticked all of the boxes we set out to:

  • It stands out
  • It is memorable
  • It makes you feel something
    • curious, what’s a book like that doing here?
    • hungry, mmm… biscuits
    • nostalgic, I haven’t had a bourbon in ages
  • And it motivates you to click to find out more.

Whether you love or hate the cover, the book is awesome. It’s not just for those who love end of the world, sci-fi. It’s for people who love an adventure, root for the underdog and like biscuits.


Go to the kindle store and download the book to discover why the bourbon biscuit is on the cover.

OK, Sminsel – a story about a story that I wrote for you as a Christmas gift

You know when they say that it’s the thought that counts? Yeah, well, I had a thought about writing y’all a short story to wish you Happy Christmas. I discussed it with one of my story advisors (Frank, aged 9) and he liked it well enough, so yesterday I powered through it and churned that sucker out. 2,400 words.

OH. HOLY. NIGHT. IT. SUCKED.

In nearly the first paragraph the concept fell apart. The characters were loathsome. It became ideologically perilous. The sentences themselves were fraught with rusty jagged edges that caught your jumper as you walked past them.

It stank.

I’m currently in the phase of processing this that therapists call “dangerously raw”. I splurged out the details on Twitter, so I’m going to link the tweets in here. This is solely so I don’t have to write the suckiness out again. Anyway, Happy Christmas readers.

https://twitter.com/nervouscrying/status/1206811316612206593

A footnote because these things gnaw at me. I thought reticulated meant when a creature is segmented like a worm or snake and it can move through a wave like process of shuffling each segment. I was wrong, I’m not sure that has a name – please let me know if I’m wrong here too. Reticulated is the name of a pattern where a network is created by lines. Think of a python or squinting at the motorway network map. As you were.

Three Weeks To Publication. Emphasis on eeks.

In my journey towards publishing Before and After, I’ve been learning a lot about the self-publishing process, with the help of the rather impressive guys over at a company called Socciones. They support Indie Authors to get their books onto Amazon. Indie Authors is the sexy, preferred term rather than self-published authors, because that has too much baggage and suggests a Chartered Accountant wondering why no one will publish his memoirs about spreadsheets.

I’m sure they wouldn’t object to my saying that it’s not actually impossible to do the work yourself, but there was quite a lot to do in a short space of time so I thought I’d recruit some help. They were friendly and helpful to me on Twitter and so I thought I’d go with them. So far, so excellent.

The stuff that they’re doing is mostly around the admin of the book. There’s typesetting the manuscript. This is where you take the Word document and change it into a file that Kindle readers know how it should be displayed. There are some basic formatting choices but this is more for the print-on-demand paperback than for the Kindle version, as readers can obviously change font size and line spacing themselves. I tend to have my Kindle on settings so large that you could read over my shoulder from a different county, so as ever with design stuff I will defer to the opinions of others.

They are also setting up an Amazon ads page so that I can play with that and see if I can get a reasonable return on putting out little ads on Amazon.

The idea is that if I can figure out what sort of keywords my readers would be typing in then I can pay X pence per click and have my book appear at the top of their search results. I’ve been researching and it seems to me that possible keywords are:

  • Type 2 Diabetes
  • Morbid obesity
  • Dog ownership
  • Living like a hermit
  • Rage
  • Drones
  • Violent post-apocalyptic hellscape

Best-seller charts here we come!

I’m also working with my good friend Iven Gilmore to make a short book trailer for Before and After. I made the cardinal sin of briefing quite a complex and involved trailer, which Iven then dutifully went and started to make only for me to realise that it wouldn’t work, thus undoing all of his good work. Bad Shanahan, sorry Iven.

Other than that the book has now gone out to the ARC team. This handy little initialism stands for Advanced Reader Copy. This is where you hone, buff and polish your manuscript and send it out to very kind people who agree to read it and give you feedback on it. Their role isn’t to spot typos and spelling errors, although depressingly it seems they often do that too. Ideally, when the book comes out they’ll be in a position to review it, so that people wondering if they should buy the book will have an idea of what people think.

It’s three weeks today that the book is launched. That seems surreal. I’m in a weird space with it now. I feel sickened by it, but also there’s a deep connection of love to it. It’s like those awful marriages that end up with husband and wife stepping pointedly around each other in the kitchen, one waiting to get to the cutlery drawer, while the other waits for their toast to pop up. No, carry on. No, I’ll move. It’s fine. For clarity, our toaster is next to the cutlery drawer but Em would just push me out of the way in the above scenario.

I’m not saying I hate the book – I really don’t. I think it’s just part of this weird relationship you have with an idea, where it first blows your socks off and unrolls the turn-ups from your trousers. Over time, that novelty necessarily wears off because you spend so long shaping the idea and working with the characters. By the end you’re not best-placed to have any sense of the thing’s innate value because it seems old and all you spot are the scratches. Man, that’s depressing, no wonder arty types drink so much. Does make you wonder if Donatello spent a few hours after knocking David out thinking, “I reckon I could have done his knob better. Oh well, fuck it.”

The pre-sale page of the book on Amazon should go up hopefully by Wednesday and I’ve got some PR going out this week too. Not sure what will come of it but it’s nice to be working on something concrete. Well, that and starting to wonder what the next book will be…

Three weeks. Cripes.