The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 400 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people.
Excuse me if these words look wobbly. I am taking a short break from NaNoWriMo 2015.
National Novel Writing Month means just that – writing a novel in a month. 50,000 words minimum, 70,000+ if you want to hit a more mainstream word count.
That’s a lot of words passing through your mind day and night. A lot of time spent inside your head. It was 2.58 this morning when I stopped nanowrimo-ing and jotted down the notes for this post.
So if these words look wobbly it’s because I’m tired or you’re tired or the screen’s tired, and not because they’re actually… well, let’s not go there. Muriel Spark’s experience with Dexedrine leaps to mind.
Question: do you see words?
I don’t mean when they’re written down, I mean when you say a word do you see it pass through your mind, fleetingly, as a written word?
I think I do. I think that knowing how a word is spelt helps me to say it, which seems to be the wrong way round when you think about it. And putting things the wrong way round is the subject of this post.
When I was younger, school age, I used to enjoy playing with the patterns in words and numbers. In seeing my spoken words as written words, I found I could say them in different ways – backwards, for example.
‘Pick a word, any word,’ I’d say, ‘and I’ll say it backwards’.
I became quite adept at this, and like most hobbyists, I was meticulous in the accuracy of my output – which in my case was reversed pronunciation. After a while I could take on whole sentences, even paragraphs.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? No problem.
This wholly useless habit gave me an oddity value at school – much as if I’d brought in a talking parrot or a dancing dog. When my house tutor met my parents at a parent-teacher evening, his comment to them might have been: ‘Jamie is doing quite well; he can say words backwards’.
Tougher children than me would demand to hear swearing backwards, presumably hoping they could curse a teacher with impunity; the more studious would challenge me with onomatopoeia and the formidable, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
My friends treated it as an annoying tic that was best ignored – and thank goodness they did, because the downside of this mental exercise was that I was conditioning my brain to do it automatically. I realised this when I began processing the wrong numbers in maths exams, and dialling the wrong telephone numbers. It was becoming a habit. It was becoming embarrassing.
The turning point came when I considered signing my name, James 51773.
It had to stop. And so over a term or two I completely weaned myself from that pointless habit – much to my friend’s relief. And now like most writers – known and unknown – when I test words and phrases by saying them out loud, I do so with them in the correct order and the right way round. Which is very useful if you want to write things that people can understand.
Which reminds me, break time is over. It’s time to get back to oMirWoNaN… I mean…
Oh well – I’m almost almost completely weaned.
For more information on NaNoWriMo 2015, follow this link: http://nanowrimo.org/
It’s more than two weeks since we moved from South London to South Bath; eighteen days since we swapped the bars, restaurants and sirens for the stillness and silence that surround our new home when darkness falls.
It feels like a lifetime, or another world at least. We lived the communal life on the fifth-floor of an art-deco block of flats with views north and south over shops, streets and houses; now we live in a cottage with walls twice as thick as my head on a hill I can barely walk up.
The transition from one to the other is a blurred memory, a series of fevered images punctuated by desperate resolves …
… never again will we stay up until 5am saying goodbye to friends, especially if they are the same friends who will be helping to carry stuff the following day …
… never again will I assume it will be fun to carry a 13-inch thick double mattress that doesn’t bend, down ten-flights of stairs and then, at the other end of the move, into a tiny cottage with a narrow, sharply-turning staircase. (Note to mattress manufacturers: please put carrying handle on all four sides.) …
… never again will I hire a van that’s too small to take all our possessions …
… never again will I select a route to the new house through West London on a day when a home nation is playing at Twickenham in an international rugby tournament …
There were some positive resolves too, such as: always stop for an XL double bacon cheeseburger when you are at your lowest ebb (thank you, Joe), and when finally it’s all over and the back-door of the ludicrously small removal van has been slammed shut for the last time, always eat pizza and drink prosecco.
Cigar optional.
We still have things to collect: books, films, photographs – all the knick-knacks and miscellany that make a house a home. Such as the microwave. How could we leave that behind? And how can I make my morning porridge (porage, porrige, parritch) without it? Don’t talk to me about saucepans and hobs. It’s simply not possible. I create concrete.
And we are still unpacking, still sitting on camping chairs, still hunting through boxes, still learning that our cottage laughs in the face of level floors and right-angle corners, still appreciating that to live in and around Bath is to embrace hills, still remembering to step up from one room and down from another, still sitting up at night and listening to the utter quietness outside, and still staring at the jaw-droppingly beautiful views that make living here like being on holiday every day.
But we’ve begun to put down tenuous roots. We’ve met the neighbours (and even swapped bumper paint as we master parallel parking), been to a local wine tasting, drunk in the local pub, been to the local cinema, cycled along the canal and established a broadband connection. We know in which bins to put our rubbish, where the post-box is, and when the trains run to London.
Perhaps the thing I like most about our new life is the physical effort that’s needed to move around. My car has broken down (again) and so now I must walk or cycle to get anywhere, and because anywhere is a hill, it’s like being on a permanent resistance machine in the gym, or being in one of those dreams where your legs become leaden and useless.
Even moving from room to room in our new home requires a level of athleticism I don’t have. The garden is level with the first floor and the front door is six-feet above the pavement. But I am adapting, and I’ve learned that the best way to carry anything up any of these narrow winding steps and staircases (other than a 13-inch thick double mattress) is to walk like Groucho Marx – knees bent, back horizontal, head up.
Cigar optional.
I live with acrophobia, a psychological nuisance more commonly known as a fear of heights, and which loosely translated means being scared of peaks, summits or edges. In other words, when I am in high places I am frequently and irrationally frightened.
I can’t define how ‘high’ high is, sometimes it’s very high, sometimes it’s not so high. I have no fear of flying, for example, or of cleaning the gutters or of looking out of a fifth-floor window. But when it comes to crossing bridges, standing on balconies, dining on rooftop restaurants, walking along cliff-top pathways, or hiking through mountainous terrain, then it’s a different matter.
Instead of being pleasant and enjoyable, these activities usually trigger an over-developed sense of survival in which my mind and my imagination become out of kilter. I become aware of myself, of my position in relation to the ground, and of the edge – particularly the edge.
An image of me falling takes on the trappings of a bona fide probability and my body reacts as if I were in genuine danger – which, of course, I am, but no more so than if I were about to cross a road, or if I were standing on a platform awaiting a train.
At these times I realise that the only thing between me and death is an electrical connection in my brain. A decision, a notion, an idea. None of which seem as substantial as ropes and harnesses. I am left wondering: can a thought be stronger than physical movement? If my body receives an impulse is to jump then can my mind stop it? Can I rebel against myself; start a civil war; launch a synaptic coup? I’m frightened that if I imagine it, it might happen.
Sudden and genuine fear is an ugly experience. I’m not used to it and I don’t know how to deal with it. When adrenalin floods my system and freezes my brain, my thoughts become lumpy, less to do with thinking and more to do with thinking about thinking, of simulating thinking, as if each thought is a single, shaky snapshot rather than part of a smooth, continuous film. The first touch of panic, as gentle as a cobweb, soon paralyses and suffocates my reason.
But it’s not the act of being in a high place that’s the problem. If there is no possibility of me falling, then no matter how high I am, I’m fine. The tallest building with glass floors holds no terror for me if it’s sealed, or caged, or otherwise locked down.
The fear arises when there is the possibility of me falling and there is no way of getting down quickly and safely. It’s the fear of panicking. It’s the fear of being trapped and doing something stupid; of doing something impulsive; of behaving like hunted prey which, rather than evading danger, gives itself up to it, embraces it; and gets it over with.
If I’m about to walk across a bridge then the fear increases because I am walking away from safety. If I’m halfway across then the fear subsides because I am walking towards safety. These height-related imaginings are irrational and inconvenient and, excuse the pun, they get me down.
I console myself with the words of GK Chesterton who, to paraphrase, would rather live in the valleys from where everything looks grand and majestic, than live in the mountains from where everything appears small and insignificant.
It would be nice, however, once in a while, to look down rather than up.
Last week I spent four days in the company of Flanneurs, Mylesians, academics, authors, onlookers and whiskey-drinkers. All drawn together by a fascination with the works of… well, it depends. For some he’s Brother Barnabas of Comhthrom Féinne fame; to the Cruiskeen Lawn aficionados he’s Myles na gCopaleen; a few refer to him as George Knowall or John Doe; the strictly accurate call him by his real name, Brian O’Nolan (or even more accurately, Brian Ó Nualláin); but to me, he is and will always be, Flann O’Brien, the author of a perfect novel.
We had gathered together in Prague, at Charles University, for ‘Metamorphoses: The III International Flann O’Brien Conference’. I was there to present my paper titled: Parallel Explorations of the Boundaries between Fiction and Real-Life.
I felt on the boundary myself. At least two of the authors I was citing were also at the conference and the range of papers being presented was so wide it genuinely made my head spin (although there is some speculation that the Kozel beer was a greater cause of my giddiness). There were over 40 papers to be read, and the panels within which they were framed had themes as diverse as modernist poetics, politics, philosophy, humour, sport, metafiction, translation, transliteration, alcohol and alchemy.
What would the great man have made of it all? Why, he would have loved it, of course: the debates, the detailed academic analysis, the occasional tenuous leaps of interpretation, the frankly wild flights of fancy, the social side – oh yes, especially the social side. This was a conference that looked after its attendees. Take a look at this programme of social events:
It was no coincidence that the theme of the conference was metamorphosis and the venue was Prague – Kafka’s neck of the woods. Nor was it a coincidence that so many of the speakers felt that through books such as An Béal Bocht, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman they could point to their own process of transformation. Certainly my attitude to bicycle saddles underwent a profound change after reading The Third Policeman.
Next year, on April the 1st, it will be fifty years to the day since Flann O’Brien died. He was only 54. It doesn’t matter how you know him – Myles, Flann, Brian – it’s his work that matters. It matters to me and it matters to all the people at the conference who made it such an enjoyable, informative and inclusive experience.
And it should matter to you because he was a genuinely great writer, and such creatures are few and far between.
Thanks to the conference organisers: Ondřej Pilný, Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan; to the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University; and to the International Flann O’Brien Society. Also to Val O’Donnell, John Wyse Jackson and Rachel Darling – hope to see you all again soon.
I like to go swimming two or three times a week, and I like to swim a length for every year I’ve been alive. Up and down I go, counting the lengths, thinking about how old I’m getting and keeping an eye out for natural hazards. There are a lot of natural hazards in swimming pools.
You see that object face-down in the water? That’s the Drifter. He’s actually doing the breast-stroke but, like driftwood, he needs the ripples and currents caused by other swimmers to move him. It will take him twenty minutes to complete the length.
The large creature that’s just launched itself at the water and landed like a plank is the Bone-Digger. He thinks he’s a shark but he swims like a dog digging up a bone. He is a localised commotion; a splashing and thrashing of arms and legs; a tangle of movement unconnected with swimming. Sometimes I think I can hear him shouting. He manages two lengths and then clings to the side, head down, shuddering, sucking in air.
The pale woman with the chapped legs and the blotchy face is the Weaver. She sets off near-right and arrives far-left, crossing lanes at random, nodding and waving apologetically, peering anxiously through the choppy waters that lie ahead. She knows that soon, inevitably, a preternatural force will draw her into the path of the Swan Ladies.
The Swan Ladies move in a pack, three abreast, an expensive fragrance lingering in their wake. Length after length they glide up and down, heads clear of the water; talking, laughing, drinking tea. They can go on like this for ever, as poised as carousel horses. Despite her efforts, the Weaver bobs helplessly into their path. She disappears and then reappears behind them, bewildered but unharmed. They give no sign of having noticed her.
The tall elderly man standing up to his waist in water at the far end of the pool is the Wader. This veteran hoists his trunks up to his chest and gazes fiercely at his own feet before falling forwards. Below the surface he hovers a few inches above the floor, propelling himself forward with tiny hand movements until half-way along the length he stands up and strides slowly back to the starting point. He’ll do that for the next hour – amassing a vast distance in tiny segments.
The Club Swimmer arrives. She is magnificent. She wears goggles, earplugs, a nose-clip and a rubber swimming-cap. She brings with her fins, bricks and weights. She ties herself up in complicated knots and undulates through the water like a dolphin. We all fear her.
All, that is, except West Coast Boy. He arrives in his brightly patterned board-shorts, slips silently into the water, completes thirty lazy lengths (tumble-turning at each end), and then vaults lightly onto the side, leaving scarcely a ripple. He shakes his floppy hair and ambles off.
There are other hazards – Bubbles Man, The Floater, the Love-Birds and of course, the horrifying Tiny Speedo. I’ve grown accustomed to them. They have been my watery companions for a long, long time; my fellow swimmers, gamely pursuing a means of locomotion for which none of us are designed – and I suppose, as I plow up and down the lengths counting out the years, I should spare a thought for what they might call me.
UNKNOWN WRITER: It is almost sixty years since the publication of Muriel Spark’s debut novel The Comforters (1957) and for me, it remains one of the finest metafictional novels of all time – all because of one simple, almost casual, feat of literary genius.
SCEPTICAL READER (yawning): Not the G-word again.
UW: Yes, the G-word again. Have you read the book?
SR: Maybe.
UW: Well, just in case, The Comforters tells the story of Caroline who has the apparent delusion that she is hearing her thoughts and actions being typed on an unseen typewriter by an entity she comes to call the Typing Ghost. After some resistance Caroline accepts her status as a fictional character but calls into question the competence of her author. She decides to take control of her own destiny by making notes of the narrative she overhears in order to write her story herself.
SR: So what? I’ve seen that conceit lots of times: an author’s intention to write a novel that is obviously fictional because the art of telling a story that they seek is exactly that – to tell a story and to be seen to be telling a story. End of.
UW: True, but look what Spark does (and barely breaks sweat as she does so): she… hang on, I’m going to have to shout… SPOILER ALERT – I’M GOING TO MENTION THE END OF THE NOVEL. I RECOMMEND YOU READ IT YOURSELF AND THEN REJOIN THIS POST.
SR: That was loud.
UW: Sorry. Anyway, what Spark does is this: she takes her fictional protagonist, Caroline, out of the novel and makes her the author of the book that we, the readers, hold in our hands.
SR: What do you mean?
UW: You have to bear in mind that The Comforters is written in the past tense, so all that happens has happened, even though it is an unfolding story for the characters.
SR: This is going to get complicated, isn’t it?
UW: Yes. So, as I said, Caroline can hear the words of the omniscient narrator. Her boyfriend, Laurence Manders, discovers the notes she’s been taking and writes to her saying that he resents the prospect of being a character in her novel.
SR: I don’t blame him.
UW: Me neither, but you see, we, the readers, see the words he writes but he destroys his letter before Caroline can see it.
SR: Right…
UW: And the novels ends (SPOILER ALERT AGAIN): “and he did not then foresee his later wonder, with a curious rejoicing, how the letter had got into the book” (The Comforters 188).
SR: I see…
UW: One sentence of sublime genius. A fabulous literary sleight of hand.
SR: I don’t get it.
UW: The implication is that Manders later reads a book that Caroline has written in which his letter appears even though he destroyed it before she could read it. That book is The Comforters. Caroline is a paradox. She is both a character in, and the author of, the unfolding events in The Comforters. She is the Typing Ghost that she can hear, and she is the author of the narrative that we are reading.
SR: Uhhh…
UW: To quote: “She was aware that the book in which she was involved was still in progress … and now she was impatient for the story to come to an end, knowing that the narrative could never become coherent to her until she was at last outside it, and at the same time consummately inside it” (The Comforters 165-166). How good is that? That’s why I love The Comforters.
SR: Ah.
A year has passed since I submitted the first 25,000 words of my novel as part of a creative writing MSt. Since then I have written, re-written, abandoned, restructured and despaired of, the remaining 60,000 words. Writing a novel takes time. Writing a novel is like grappling with a 100-foot long bean bag.
But I’m almost there and like many unknown writers who sense the final full-stop, I’ve started to think about how I’m going to ‘get it out there’.
Despite blogging in praise of literary agents I’ve found myself toying with the phrase ‘self-publishing’, and peering with an almost guilty fascination at the success of Nick Spalding, Hugh Howie, Amanda Hocking et al. Self-publishing seems to be so empowering; so liberating; and, I believe, sometimes so necessary.
Take Flann O’Brien, for instance.
This great writer has been on my mind a lot lately. Not least because there is an International Flann O’Brien Society and I’m presenting a paper at their annual conference in Prague, and his debut novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), is one of my primary sources. It’s a wonderful story: clever, satirical, exuberant, metafictional and very, very funny. Graham Greene liked it, so did Dylan Thomas and so did James Joyce.
I like his second novel, The Third Policeman, even more. In fact, I think it’s perfect. But when he submitted it to his publisher in 1940 it was rejected. O’Brien took this badly and told everyone he had lost the manuscript. But the story goes that really he placed it on his sideboard and then ignored it every day for the next 26 years. It was published posthumously and so he never saw it reviewed and lauded as a masterpiece.
I wonder how much impact that rejection had on his later writing, and whether as a result, other masterpieces were never written. That furrows my brow so much that I’ve taken to imagining Flann O’Brien receiving the rejection and logging on to the internet shouting, ‘It’s time for the Plain People of Writing to stand up for themselves’. I’ve started to imagine him self-publishing The Third Policeman on a 1940’s equivalent of a Kindle.
(In my defence, my paper for the conference is titled Parallel Explorations of the Boundaries Between Fiction & Real-Life. So perhaps I’m a bit out of kilter.)
Anyway, when I return from Prague it will be time to get back to my 100-foot long bean bag which I think is arranged as neatly as it can be – or at least as neatly as I can arrange it. And now that all the writing, re-writing, abandoning, restructuring and despairing is nearly done, it will be time for other people to grapple with all those words I’ve written. All I have to do is to find a way to make that happen.
In fact, all I have to do is take it off the sideboard and get it out there.
For more information on the International Flann O’Brien Society, follow this link: http://www.univie.ac.at/flannobrien2011/IFOBS.html
For most of us writing is about trying to keep the dream alive. An hour every morning, two hours every night, weekends lost to pounding the keyboard. Sometimes we wonder if there is anybody else out there.
But there is. There’s an entire industry: writers writing; editors editing; publishers publishing; booksellers book-selling, readers reading; literary agents… agenting? In this age of print-on-demand and digital self-publishing what exactly does that mean?
Not so long ago I spent a week as a submissions reader in a boutique literary agency that specialises in commercial, literary fiction.
My first impression when I arrived was one of books: books on shelves, books in piles, books in boxes, books on desks – books everywhere. This was a place steeped in the written word, and nowhere more so than my desk which seemed to bow beneath an enormous pile of unsolicited manuscripts – the legendary slush pile, which these days is more kindly referred to as general submissions.
Thousands arrive every year; hundreds every week. But given the supreme importance of this moment, the moment an author’s hopes and dreams might rest on, I was surprised at how careless many submitters seemed to have been.
I saw letters where the name of the agent was misspelled; where the target address was for another agent; where there was a coffee stain that obliterated part of the text. I saw hand-written manuscripts. I saw one submission that had been typewritten in a tiny point-size, faded and single-spaced and scarcely visible.
It seemed that after months and perhaps years of effort, these noble authors had simply stuffed their work in an envelope and thrown it out the window hoping it would arrive on someone’s desk.
TIP ONE: send a simple, direct letter which gives an immediate sense of what your manuscript is about, along with a clear, one-page summary and the first three chapters. Don’t play around with fonts and colours or add photographs or graphics. Yes, you will stand out but for all the wrong reasons. These guys have seen it all so don’t make them groan. 12pt, black, double-spaced, Ariel or Times, A4, one-inch margins. Perfect.
However, working that pile was a humbling experience. Many of the writers had completed a novel of over a hundred thousand words, which in itself a huge accomplishment and respect is due to them all. Many were good stories too, and competently and well-written.
Unfortunately ‘competently and well-written’ is not good enough. It has to be exceptionally good. The hard fact is that of the thousands of unsolicited submissions received each year, possibly two will progress to publication.
TIP TWO: edit, edit, edit; simplify, simplify, simplify. Find beta-readers, get friends and family to comment, read it out loud – polish it as much as you can. It is easier to dismiss a manuscript than to accept it. And once it’s been bounced by an agent, it’s extremely unlikely they’ll look at it again.
Of course, work rejected by one agency may well be accepted by another. And there are other routes to an agent’s in-box – creative writing courses, recommendations, referrals from other agents, and the always-welcome happy coincidence and plain good luck.
There is a reason why agents are so picky. These are demanding times. As publishers merge and consolidate there is less choice for agents and writers, and as the number of high street outlets lessen and online shops drive down prices, there are less channels through which the publishers can get the scale of sales volume they need to recover their costs. The effect this squeeze has on literary fiction is exacerbated when the main outlets concentrate on big novels and big debut novelists with only one or two major releases each season (January to June and July to December).
A novel’s success is usually measured in terms of sales, and all publishers have access to the sales volumes of published books. If a debut novel fails then it is difficult (but not unheard of) for an author to get a good second deal. Prizes, word-of-mouth, positioning in outlets, and good reader reviews across social media all help.
TIP THREE: blog, tweet, post, self-promote, network, attend readings – unashamedly push your work. It might have been okay for JD Salinger to lock himself away in the woods but it probably won’t work for you.
The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook lists about 150 literary agencies in the United Kingdom and they vary in size from one person to large organisations. It’s a risky business. Agents tend to work on a commission-only basis, and the percentage of commission they take (typically 10-15% in the UK; 20% abroad) must cover all of their overheads.
But if they like your work then a good agent will work closely with you and often suggest three or four drafts before they take the decision to send the manuscript to the publishers. Much of an agency’s power is based on the authors on its list, along with the integrity of the agency and its company culture. If a publisher believes in and respects the agency, then they will probably feel the same about you as an author.
TIP FOUR – choose your agent carefully. The temptation to go with the first agent who wants you is enormous. But this could be a life-long relationship. They should be as enthusiastic about your work as you are. Your agent should be an advocate of your work as well as your friend. If you have options, talk to as many as possible before you decide.
Agents are not the only way to get your work read, nor are they the only route to becoming a published novelist. It is entirely possible to find a publisher without having an agent (and many authors do), or to self-publish, and to be very successful.
But sometimes an agent can open doors that might remain closed to an author on their own. And while we are pounding away on our keyboards they can be out there uniting our interests with those of a publisher’s; negotiating a sustainable advance and maximising the sale of our UK publishing rights, magazine rights, overseas publishing rights, and television and film rights.
In short, they can be out there helping to keep the dream alive.
James Ellis in words 