Pride Words / Gig

On Monday I’m appearing at Pride Words at Foyles bookshop in London. It’s the first time I’ve been asked to provide next of kin and emergency contact details for a reading so I’m wondering what kind of crowd they’re expecting.


I had some trouble filling in the form as I don’t know what my mum’s or my partner’s addresses are. I toyed with the idea of putting down my own address, thinking that if anything happened to me then everyone would probably gather round there. But then I realised that they wouldn’t know anything had happened to me if I gave out an address for a place where they’re not.


I’m looking forward to the event but nervous as well as I always come away from these events feeling depressed. I believe everyone else is cooler and more intelligent than me. Mind you, I’m the kind of person who can feel inadequate crossing the road.


“Look at him, the way he nipped between the cars, it was brilliant!”


I’m currently reading Simon Armitage’s ‘Gig’. I bought it after watching his BBC4 documentary on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If you don’t know, Armitage is a poet, and he has recently translated Sir Gawain which is a 14th century poem about a knight from Arthurian legend.


Anyway the documentary was brilliant. Armitage followed the journey Gawain would have made in his quest to battle the Green Knight. The poem has beautiful descriptions of place, sex, and a powerful narrative.


The documentary also had a fantastic soundtrack and it was then that I remembered seeing Armitage’s book about music last year when it was out in hardback. I can remember where it was too. It was Sheffield’s Waterstones and I was in there during the break between matches I was watching at the Crucible (the snooker place).


The book is funny (‘It’s amazing how many hermits have websites these days’) and warm and in one point moved me to tears. This was when he got to interview David Gedge from the Wedding Present in the Holmfirth Pictodrome. The whole interview consists of Armitage asking Gedge a series of either or questions:

SA: Hudderfield or Halifax
DG: Er… I don’t know really.. Er…
SA: The right answer’s Huddersfield.
DG: Put me down for that, then.

There was something honest and unassuming about it that touched me. The truth these days is either hard, or slippery, so we spend a lot of time giving poncey responses to poncey questions.


I can remember the first records I ever had. They were bought for me and my brother by our mum and dad. It was on the same day they bought us a stereo. It was one of those that looks like a suitcase and weighed about half a tonne. The records were something by Shawaddywaddy and Ravel’s Bolero. As a musical education it was a start.


My mum moved house a few years ago so me and Will (my partner) were called in to clear out / sort through my old stuff. One of the boxes contained my old music cassettes and I was pleased to see that it contained nothing too embarrassing, Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy, Closer by Joy Division, Boy by U2, Get Close by the Pretenders, Ratus Norvegicus by the Stranglers, Savage by Eurythmics, Bauhaus, New Order and so on.


(I haven’t got that good a memory, I’ve just brought down the box from my spare bedroom. Sad in a way because I don’t have a cassette player to listen to them. My current CD collection represents my musical taste from the last 8 or 9 years during which time I’ve been settled back in the UK.)


Like a lot of people that have older brothers, my older brother was a big influence on me in his music tastes. He was also always a lot cooler than me. He was in a band, various bands in fact, and then worked in a record shop.


Nick, my brother, was the kind of person who could nip out to the local shop for a hairspray and then come back a week later having been to London and Brighton. At 40 he hasn’t changed a great deal although his flights become more precarious and worrying.


That same day in Sheffield at the Crucible he managed to disappear. It was only as he leant forward to speak to the taxi driver, late at night, not recognising the town he was in to ask the question:


“Are we in Derby?” (where he lives)
“No, this is Bradford mate.”


Back then I was more into computers. On a Sunday I was allowed to plug my Sinclair Spectrum into the tele in the lounge. If Nick was around then he would play too and I remember one of our favourite games was Psion Tennis, little black stickmen running around a black and white court.


Nick would be in charge of the music and I can remember while playing that tennis game was the first time I heard The Smiths. Years later Morissey’s lyrics would come to be music that defined my coming out and Hatful of Hollow still seems to me to be an album full of gay angst. I mean just read the song titles, ‘William, It was really nothing’, ‘What Difference Does it Make?’, ‘These Things Take Time’, ‘How Soon is Now?’, ‘Handsome Devil’, ‘Still Ill’, ‘Accept Yourself’ and so on. And to this day my favourite lyric remains, ‘If you ever need self-validation, I’ll meet you in the alley by the railway station’.


I’ve got nearly everything Morissey has recorded since The Smiths but I’m pleased to say, in my humble opinion, that the latest album, Years of Refusal, is the best thing he’s done since his musical youth.


The first gig I went to was Sting at the Royal Albert Hall in 1985 for the Dream of the Blue Turtles Tour. I was 14 and went with my brother on the train to London.


I remember just before we set off I was in my bedroom playing Bomb Jack on the Sinclair Spectrum.


“Come on,” he said, “we’re going to see Sting.”
“Hang on, I’m about to get my high score.”


You see, not cool.


The best gig I’ve ever been to was Elbow last year at Rock City. They came on stage in darkness. The strings were playing the intro to Starlings. Through the smoke the band members all raise the trumpets they are holding and then comes the blast of noise and then, alone, Garvey’s voice. It makes me almost cry just thinking about it.


You see, not cool.


The worst gig I’ve ever seen was two years ago at the Charlotte in Leicester. I can’t remember what the band were now but they were something young and trendy. The place was packed and they made us wait for ages and ages before they came on like they were the fucking Beatles reformed of something and then they played for about fifty minutes before pissing off.


I went and stood at the back and drank wine so it wasn’t a total washout.


The band I’m most pleased I’ve seen is The Cure because I love The Cure. They’ve had a new album this year too and like Morissey it’s probably the best thing they’ve done in years.


The biggest gig I’ve been to was Michael Jackson. He was good. It was in Montpellier in the South of France. That’s when my dad worked on a roller-coaster and it was a good summer all round.


The band I’ve seen the most is Marillion and they are always excellent. I’ve been to their last two conventions in Port Zelande in the Netherlands and that’s just a good time all round. Lovely people, food, place and music.


All of this might explain why I wrote a novel about a band, gay pop duo Down by Law. I don’t know. All of the above though I’m sure are the things I am into, books, music, poetry, travel and that is how I see myself, this passionate, awkward, uncool outsider. How this will translate into me appearing at Pride Words might be interesting to see. I hope my next of kin details will not be needed.

America

When I was 18 I travelled around America on a Greyhound bus. I don’t know where I first heard about the Greyhound bus pass now, but like Santa and Hershey bars it was just something fixed in my consciousness and at $150 dollars it was a bargain. I started out in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, mid-west.


Milwaukee is a fine place. It has long hot summers, and beaches on Lake Michigan, coffee book shops with tables outside where you can sit all day and read and drink. They have festivals too. The year before I was there Depeche Mode headlined. I was lucky enough to catch The Judds, some kind of farewell extravaganza. Fine, I imagine, if you like hours of homely country and western hoopla.


The first place I planned to go was New Orleans, via Chicago.


Two hours out of Milwaukee, my very first trip, the bus broke down. ‘Everybody off,’ the driver said and we stood by the side of the road in the heat and fumes until another bus arrived to pick us up. Us, but not our luggage. That was to stay on the broken down bus despite my protestations.


‘That’s it,’ I thought, ‘I’ll never see it again.’ And I imagined the next month travelling with no change of clothes or anything. This trip I was doing on $20 dollars a day. My backpack I had bought from a charity shop, rigid metal frame and thousands of straps but it was mine.


Greyhound Bus stations are forlorn places at the best of times. Arriving there I sat and wrote a long letter to a friend. This was the days of letters and I wrote them often if posted them rarely.


I’d had high hopes. Talking with a friend we said our travels should have a point. He was going to try and find Bukowski and I thought I’d drop in on David Hockney. I’d seen some photos he’d done, mix and match style, of various people he came across.


Of course he would photograph me, I thought, and I knew he lived near a beach somewhere on the west coast when he wasn’t in Bradford. He wouldn’t be too hard to find. And Hockney would be my connection, however tenuous, with Christopher Isherwood. He’d painted him once.


Just to assuage any narrative tension you may be feeling I’ll tell you now, I didn’t meet Hockney but my bag did turn up, just before the bus to New Orleans left.


I like travelling alone. It’s so much easier not to fall out over petty arguments. But at the same time I have having little dialogues in my head, imagining the conversation I would have had if someone was actually with me.


Like the woman on the bus who bought the man who had BO a bar of soap at one of the rest stops.


I was uncomfortable in New Orleans. It was like a theme park for black people. There was a troop of cute black kids in the street tap dancing for money with lots of white folk around. A white boy started forward after they finished and his mother put a hand on his shoulder, a look of horror on her face. Don’t get too close. Or people gathered around watching the old black men playing chess.


Anyhow, I did the usual things, went on a paddle steamer down the Mississippi, saw a crocodile, went to the voodoo museum and I actually met Huck Finn, I really did. That’s when I was leaving, heading towards Vegas, and another story. If this was one. As is San Diego, Baja California, New York, Washington.


And if this was a story, it was 20 years ago and I don’t know why I am thinking of it now except for a couple of things. Except I don’t know if I want to tell you.


So….


None of the characters in any of my stories are settled down, or have proper jobs. ‘Me’ and Mickie James travel the world and live above stations, ‘Me’ and Troy live in a bedsit and a caravan and get temp jobs as elves, Mark in When the Chips are Down has only a tea-towel and a burnt down house, the character in The Suitcase works as a dishwasher, and so on.


Perhaps this, for me, is an ideal. This not fitting in, life as a road movie. Perhaps this too is why I’m never going to be a success. Only middle-class people read these days, don’t they? And they only want to read about other middle-class people. Or life in India.


For the working-classes these days have Kerry Katona, and Britain’s Got Talent.


I can’t compete with that.


I do have romantic aspirations, but practically, I’m a dead duck.

Amazonfail

I’ve been mad as hell at Amazon all week and then I saw they had this book on Ants half price and I forgave them a little bit. Because where else am I even going to find a book on ants, or know that I want it?


First of all I want to say something good about Amazon, because I like Amazon. First of all, they sell my books. No, no, that’s not first of all. First of all I like Amazon because they sell books, all books / most books.


Go into any bookstore and then spend a couple of hours on Amazon and you’ll find how many books aren’t actually in bookshops, books that I actually rather like. For example in the past two weeks I’ve read The Motel Life and Northline both by Willy Vlautin. Both have been published in the past couple of years, got brilliant reviews, but are they on the shelf of my local Waterstones? No.


This is obvious. Obviously. That Waterstones can’t stock all books because there are millions of the things published all the time.


Obviously it’s true but this isn’t where I was at ten years ago, five years ago. In those days I was a bookshop buyer. These days I buy things from the internet. My tastes have changed, improved I like to think.


Now most of the things I read aren’t on the shelf of your average bookshop. I don’t read obscure things, not by a long shot. I love books. Good books. But where are they and how do you find them?


The second thing I like is that when you buy one thing on Amazon it will tell you a whole list of other books you might like. That’s where that ant book came in.
(Does anyone remember Ant and Bee? They were my favourite books as a kid. They were brightly coloured. They were about an ant and a bee who lived together. Ant was put-upon and Bee was a bit of an arse. Ant was my favourite.)


Anyway, back to my books. When my first one, The Lodger, came out it was classified on Amazon as a ‘Gay and Lesbian’ book. It went to no. 1 in the gay and lesbian Amazon charts. I am rather proud of the fact. I printed off a screen-shot. Come over for a cup of tea and I’ll show you it. Bring a copy of Ant and Bee if you have one. We can read it together, me and you, after I’ve shown you my screen-shot.


So this is where I stood and then it all kicked off, Amazonfail.


On Easter Monday morning I logged onto Facebook before work, 6:30am, (I know, sad aren’t I? When you bring that book, Ant and Bee, you can bring a gun too. Shoot me.) There were stories all over the wall from gay writers talking about how their books had been ‘delisted’.


Delisted – this meant that the books had been stripped of their Amazon sales rank, and now wouldn’t show up in any searches.


I made a quick check. I searched under my name. There was ‘Me and Mickie James’. but no ‘The Lodger’. I was invisible. Partly.


What this meant for me personally was that if a similar thing had happened years ago The Lodger wouldn’t have trundled its way to the top of the gay charts and I wouldn’t have had my screen-shot.


What it meant on a far larger and more important scale was that anyone looking for a large number of gay and lesbian books would not be able to find them.
The rest, as they say, is internet history. A petition was started, Amazonfail became one of the most talked about things on Twitter, boycotts were talked of, Amazon HQ was inundated by emails.


By the end of the week Amazon had apologised, books were reinstated. Including The Lodger. Hooray.


Happy end.


But what is the fallout. What gives?


Was there some meeting at Amazon HQ where delisting books was talked about. There must have at some level, some decision that ‘gay and lesbian’ books would now be deemed to be ‘adult’ books. Although this doesn’t make any sense.


As Gore Vidal said, “What kind of a childish game is this? Why don’t they just burn the books? They’d be better off and it’s very visual on television.”


Amazon themselves described it “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error”.


Putting on my own journalistic head for just a moment I would have to say that it is an almighty fuck up.


So what now? Do we boycott Amazon?


As of today, is my latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ on sale on Amazon? Yes. Is it linked to lots of other nice books? Yes. Does it have some nice reviews? Yes. Is it cheaper there than anywhere else? Yes.


Is this, ultimately, the crunch?


Naomi Klein, who is one clever lady, has written two brilliant books about our capitalist society, ‘No Logo’ and ‘The Shock Doctrine’. In them she describes certain methods of grass-roots activism.


She argues, for example, that it would be almost impossible for you to not buy all your clothes from retailers that don’t use sweatshop labour. They all do it. What you can do is start a campaign to pinpoint one, raise consciousness, start to make a change.


Is this what the Amazonfail phenomenon was? People have raised their voice and Amazon have backed down (if ever they meant truly to back up).


And what of Waterstones, are they super gay friendly? Do Waterstones even have a gay and lesbian section? Does Borders? My local one did but over the years it has got smaller and smaller.


And over at Bookkake they are talking about the bigger issue, what happened in Dubai and all that.


And over across the Atlantic there’s the American Libraries Association’s ‘most challenged books’.


And so on. Etc.


So what do I think? Honestly.


I like that I’m gay. I like that I’m a writer. I like that I’m sold in the biggest store in the world. I don’t want to live in a ghetto. I do want the world to be a more fair and equal place.


I’m frustrated by comments, ‘Oh, so you like football?’ Raised eyebrows. Or, ‘this is Will’s friend’. And so on.


But my attitude is grin and bear it, fight from inside it. Try and make a difference. Like that Harvey Milk bloke did. It’s no good taking yourself off in a huff.


So is this me saying don’t boycott Amazon, that Amazonfail did the trick, that we, as consumers have power?


I don’t know. And…


Oh God, I can’t do this stuff and it’s three minutes to ten and the World Snooker Championship starts at ten so this is me checking out.


But if you get a chance check out Ant & Bee. They were my first gay insect love. Bee has an umbrella and wears a top hat, Ant wears a pinny. They share a bed in a little house.


Such things are sweet dreams made of.

Currently reading – We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek


Currently listening to - Magpie by Stephen Fretwell


Stephen Fretwell – New York

Some things, and some other things

I recently decided to write a novel of ideas. I quickly jotted down some notes, Darwinism, Nietzsche, Freud, the disintegration of modern society. Now all I needed was a story.


What about that bloke who wandered around the planet two thousand odd years ago, dangling his willy in front of all and sundry? What was his name?


Christ!


My memory isn’t what it used to be.


First of all, (after those other first things as per above), apologies that this blog has been absent for a week or so. It’s been a busy time.


I’ve done two readings, one of my story ‘Gus’ at the YMCA in Leicester, and one from ‘Me and Mickie James’ at Polari in London. Both went well, (in positive blog terms rather than what was going on in my head) and at the YMCA my name appeared in big letters and I got to wear my new cardigan both of which are a plus. You can see the picture here.
(‘Gus’ is available in a new short story collection ‘The Global Village’ just published.)


I’ve also been on the Eurostar to Brussels. If you haven’t been on the Eurostar then you should. It’s great. It goes at 270 km an hour and you leave from a city and arrive in a city – it was only ten minutes walk from the train station to our hotel.


We are the only generation that will enjoy cheap air travel. I wonder what will happen to airports in the future. Will they become hubs of duty free shopping as imaginary planes take off and land on video screens?


Idea for a novel….


After one night in Brussels it was another train journey to Rotterdam and from there on a bus to Centreparks Port Zelande for the 2009 Marillion Convention. You can see the pictures for that here.


Me and Will had our own chalet overlooking the sea, there was a big tent in which Marillion played a concert each night for three nights, there were excellent support bands, there was really nice food, and red wine was available to buy.


I have only been to two conventions, both for Marillion, one in 2007, one in 2009 and both at Port Zelande so I have nothing to compare them to. I once imagined a convention of ratchet salesmen for a story I wrote but that’s about it. A convention of ratchet salesmen wasn’t laugh a minute in my head.


I have also seen here and thereabouts that Star Trek have conventions. While I am a fan of Star Trek I don’t know that I would want to go to a convention. What does one do there for a start? Dress up as Spock? Watch repeats of Star Trek in a darkened room? It all seems, well, a bit geeky.


I wonder if that’s what people think of a Marillion convention. But it wasn’t, or didn’t feel like that. There were people there from all over the world. ‘America’ didn’t get as big a boo this time when it was flashed up on one of the screens. No doubt this is the Obama effect.


(And I wonder too who will save British politics? In the news today is Jacqui Smith claiming her husband’s wank movies on parliamentary expenses. This is the same woman who refused to backdate police pay which has alienated the whole police force from the labour party.)


While the thing that had brought the 2500 people there was Marillion it seemed to be much more than a sum of that single part. What I’m really saying is I had a nice time.


Now I’m back home and busy again. I’ve recently been commissioned to be a professional blogger over on the Literature Network, and I’m writing 72 linked short stories, and I’m buying a house. And there’s sill all those books on my shelves to read. And exercise to do.


And I still hoped somewhere, some day, to change the world.

Marillion at Port Zelande

On Tour

Click here to listen to the new podcast of my story Post Traumatic Hokkaido Blues

They say you can tell a lot about a man by the underpants he wears. Mine today are black. This mirrors the dark interior of my soul.


At the end of this month I will be on tour. Well, not exactly, but I have three readings coming up.


1. On March 17th I’ll be headlining at Short Fuse. This is Leicester’s new short story night at the Y theatre. I’ll be reading ‘Gus’, a story set in Leicester and which is in a new collection, ‘The Global Village’, being released at the beginning of April.


2. On March 18th I’ll be reading from ‘Me and Mickie James’ at Polari in London, along with Adam Mars Jones. Details here.


3. On April 2nd I’ll be reading ‘Gus’ again at The Blag Club for the launch of The Global Village.

And between March 18th and April 2nd I’ll be in Belgium and Holland. Not on tour, just on holiday.


I haven’t seen ‘The Global Village’ yet but it looks like it’s going to be a great collection with stories by Adam Thorpe, Matt Thorne, Olive Senior, Keith Jardin, Sophie Walley. ‘The Global Village’ is produced by Tell Tales, a collective dedicated to promoting short stories, much the same as Short Fuse is.


Ian McEwan was talking last week at the Short Fuse launch. He said that he spent the first eight years of his writing career purely writing short stories. He didn’t see them as a springboard to writing a novel, but as a thing in themselves.


He seemed like a lovely bloke, wise and funny and I wondered why writers aren’t revered more in our society. The French and Italians love writers. And they also have fine wine and pasta respectively.


Actually I didn’t need convincing about short stories. I am mostly a short story writer. ‘Me and Mickie James’, my novel, is seven short stories. But I’ve said this before…


Last week I wrote the first draft of a new short. Tentatively it’s called ‘Palestine’ and it’s about a man with two arseholes. I’m going to work on it over the next few weeks and enter it for some competition or another.


I wonder if a story about a man with two arseholes if the sort of thing competition judges would like though. Looking back over previous winners of top competitions it seems that winning stories have featured men (or women) with only one.


Maybe I can buck the trend.


I basically have an absurd view of life, that it is mostly pointless and we drift around a godless universe drinking wine. Yet at the same time I am wildly enthusiastic and passionate about a lot of things.


This is the point Woody Allen makes at the end of Crimes and Misdemeanours, how humans have the capacity to find comfort in the smallest tokens of love and hope. Good job really as a life spent staring death fully in the face would probably be quite miserable.


‘Palestine’ I wrote because I am reading ‘The Great War for Civilisation, The Conquest for the Middle East’. This is reporter Robert Fisk’s history of the last 30 years of conflict in the Middle East. For much of this time he was based in Beirut and the book is filled with first hand accounts of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, dispatches from the front lines of both the Iranian and Iraqi armies during the Iran Iraq war, the ‘liberation’ of Kuwait, meeting Osama Bin Laden and so on.


While I am aware of over-used adjectives in the reviewing world this book is both remarkable and important. It also calls into question what I am doing writing fiction when there are so many more significant things taking place in the world. At the same time I comfort myself that I am not significant anyway so whatever I decide to do will largely go unnoticed.


At the same time again, because I am so immersed in non-fiction, I am missing fiction. It is like an pang. No it is a pang. So for the past few nights I have been rereading some short stories.


I have read – The Nimrod Flipout by Etgar Keret, Keeping Up by David Sedaris, The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami, The Crack by Mikel Jollett and The Wavemaker Falters by George Saunders.


This last story, the George Saunders one, I actually read out loud in bed twice straight through. It is brilliant, sad and funny, and depressing, if you are a writer, because it is so outstanding.


I want to be that good. And I doubt that I ever will. But at least there is no god and when it’s the end it really will be the end and all I need to do is to keep myself constantly entertained, horrified, bemused and questioning until that point.

Currently reading – see above


Currently listening to – Divided Kingdom (audiobook) – Rupert Thomson

Milk

Last night I went to see Milk. For those of you not in the know this is film-maker Gus Van Sant’s biopic of America’s first openly gay politician, Harvey Milk. Milk was assassinated by Dan White, another Californian city supervisor who had recently lost his job.


The cinema was packed, if you could say that 6 people could pack out a cinema. Mind you it was in competition with Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist and Bride Wars.


White, Milk’s killer, says to him, “It’s ok for you, you have a cause, something to believe in.”


This was the 70s, in the Castro, an area of San Francisco which had become home to a huge number of gays. I’d read about this before in Francis Fitzgerald’s excellent Cities on a Hill. I’ve also read her other excellent book, Fire in the Lake, on Vietnam.


The only similar experience I have to what the Castro must have been like back then was the two years I lived in Sydney. Oxford St, a long sprawl heading just out of the heart of the city, is where a lot of the gay bars, restaurants, shops, clubs are situated. But it was more than that. It was that there were gay people everywhere. It sounds a cliché and it probably is, but I felt at home.


70s America was also the time of Anita Bryant. This former Orange juice advert queen started a national campaign from her base in Dade County, Florida for the repeal of laws which stated someone couldn’t be sacked or thrown out of their accommodation because of their sexual orientation.


“It’s not that I’m not a friend of gays,” she said, “I am. And it’s because I am that I can tell them that their way of life is wrong.”


More sinisterly this campaign was then taken up by John Briggs, a conservative state legislator who went on to say that homosexual people should not be allowed to teach in schools. Or indeed anybody that was a friend of a homosexual person. It was this that Milk was fighting against. He won. And then he was killed.


Laws, at their most fundamental level, are formed from a consensus of opinion of what society deems acceptable. You won’t kill, steal, persecute people because of their ethnic background, sexuality and so on.


The laws protecting gay people are still, constitutionally speaking, babies. It was ok for John Briggs, Anita Bryant to publicly and openly conflate homosexuality and paedophilia and to talk of this pervasive threat.


It will take time before such aforementioned throwaway comments become unacceptable. But we are moving in the right direction. It is not so long ago that Thatcher, under whose authority more gay men than in the history of this country were arrested and who introduced the draconian Section 28 of the Local Government act, was nominally in power.


Harvey Milk was 40 before he became involved in any way in politics. Like the Village People song ‘Go West’ he headed from New York, where he was closeted and set up home in San Francisco’s Castro area.


So there is hope for me yet. As I said, I am 38 and I need to do something. It is that question again, what next?


I wonder about my writing. My first novel, The Lodger, I wrote after seeing a newspaper article which stated gay men shouldn’t be allowed to adopt. This is what, under the murder plot, it was about.


My latest novel, Me and Mickie James, has a gay couple at the centre of it but I wanted it to be mainstream. It is not a novel about coming out or gay politics, or dying of aids. It is a story about a pop group. And it was published by a mainstream publisher.


But in my head, that was its politics, that it wasn’t political. It was the kind of book I would want to read.


Like in my life I want my difference to be recognised but to be treated like everybody else.


Harvey Milk had a box and on it he had written ‘SOAP’. He would stand on this box and into a loudhailer say, “I am Harvey Milk. I want to recruit you.”


I want to recruit you.


And yet somewhere along the line I have failed. Perhaps it is because I am just not good enough. I am sure that I am not. But still I want people to ‘vote for me’. This is my what next. I am waiting for my Harvey Milk moment. Maybe it will be around the next corner.


Or maybe it won’t.

****

On Saturday 31st January I am appearing at Derby’s Hello Hubmarine event. It is at the Big Blue Coffee Company, Sadlergate from 20:00 to 23:00. Details on Facebook here.

I am also running another 50 Word Short Story competition. The theme is Love, Love, Love. Write your 50 word love story and post it here on Facebook. Winners will appear on this blog on 14th February.

****

Currently reading – The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk


Currently listening to – Talk Talk

Saramago and 50 Christmas Words Competition

There’s a great interview with Jose Saramago over on the Guardian site this week. If you don’t know, he’s a Nobel Prize winning Portuguese writer. The film of his book, Blindness, is out around about now.


Saramago starts with a big idea and works it through to its logical end. For example, Blindness starts with the someone going blind and then one by one everyone else in the population goes blind.


At the opening of Seeing an election is held; almost no one votes. Another election is held. Even fewer people vote. Democracy crumbles.


This is good advice for writers – write about Something.


What I didn’t know about Saramago was that he didn’t become a writer properly until in his 60s. Before that he worked as a car mechanic.


This is heartening to know. I can spend the next 22 years working on my next book and still be a spring chicken next to Saramago. However, I’d rather not be a car mechanic being no good with small parts.


It’s lucky I didn’t choose to be a pop star. As Louis Walsh said to Eoghan Quigg on X Factor last night.


“You’ve got everything it takes to make it in the music business. You’re young, you’re on a tv show, you’re Irish.”


I’m neither young, Irish, or on a TV show.


There are plenty of other writers who have made it while elderly. Post Office, Bukowski’s first book appeared when he was in his 50s, and Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t become published, like Saramago, until her 60s.


And look at Doris Lessing, dancing the Fandango at her Nobel ceremony, leaping out of taxis. She’s 89.


(There a good Lessing site up at the moment – you can read The Golden Notebook online and there are ongoing discussions by a number of chosen readers jostling for position on the sidelines.)


Lessing, like Saramago, was also a communist. Saramago says he still is. I agree, as we watch capitalism crumble.


The problem we are in is due to cheap lending and over-borrowing. The answer to the problem seems to be to reduce interest rates to encourage more borrowing so people can spend. This will stimulate the economy.


When the economy is stimulated interest rates will go back up and people will be asked to pay back the money they borrowed and never had and we will fall back into recession.

1. Idea for book. America, through its economic dominance, forces laissez-faire economic policies on emerging economies (see Argentina, post-Soviet Poland, post-apartheid South Africa et al). This brings about widespread unemployment, poverty, starvation and hardship.


Interventionist economic policies are not allowed.


When own economy starts to stumble, intervention is suddenly the thing to do. Let’s give lots of money to banks.


It will be a picture book. Louis Walsh will produce a CD to go with it. Westlife will perform a number of songs they haven’t written themselves and sing them without passion but a disenfranchised population will lap them up mistaking it for art.

2. Idea for book. America elects black president and whole world slaps it on back. Its history of slavery and apartheid is forgotten. Africa which has already quite a few black presidents is largely ignored.

Saramago’s website apparently gets a million hits. He not only talks about writing but also gives out advice like recipes and marriage advice.

Therefore in a new column I write:

Marriage advice: A wife is good for warming your shoes by the fire. (This from Charles Darwin.)

I am currently running on my 50 Word Facebook group a 50 Christmas Word story competition. Write any 50 word story with a Christmas theme, post it on the group page and then the best ones will feature on this blog on the 20th December. They will also be a podcast to go with it if I can get my Christmas arse into gear.

And for those of you struggling to think of Christmas presents my book Me and Mickie James is still out and available to buy. Details on my website.

Currently reading: Broken Doll by Neil Campbell


Currently listening: Hurricane by Grace Jones

Bukowski: Poetry and Motion

How I Write

I try and write every day although this is not always possible. On the days when I can’t write I spend a good part of the day thinking, ‘not writing today, but can do tomorrow’, or, ‘Tuesday!’


On the days when I can’t write I tend to be more moody, antsy, anxious, impatient, depressive, pessimistic, gloomy. On those not writing days I feel that that’s it, my life might as well be over. When I’m writing the sun shines.


I write best in the mornings. Some days I could probably start writing at two o’clock in the afternoon but this is unlikely.


As, in my head, I need to be up early in the morning, in my head, I also need to go to bed at a reasonable time; midnight or earlier. This means if you try and keep me up late I will become more moody, antsy, anxious…. See above.


Writing is fun!


I write in my living-room. There is an alcove under the staircase. I face a wall and on my right is a shelving unit holding all my CDs and DVDs. My books are upstairs. I don’t know if this is significant.


I can’t write listening to music. A lot of writing is not writing. I will make lots of cups of tea, sit at the computer starting at the screen, pace up and down the floor, throw myself in anguish on the sofa.


Then there will be a sudden spurt when I write hundreds of words. This is the good part. All that hanging around and throwing myself against sofas is the annoying part and something I’d like to cut out.


I don’t write all day although I feel that I should. I tell myself that a thousand words is a reasonable amount and once I’ve hit that I can stop. This will probably take about three hours although some days I will write longer than this.


‘Telling myself’ and ‘reasonable’ are the key words there. Because what I really feel is a sense of guilt if I’m not writing. I feel that I should be pushing myself harder because writing is an escape and I haven’t escaped yet.


Writing is hard!


There is always something else to do. Sitting at a computer which is connected to the internet offers endless temptation. At a click away there is news, book reviews, newspapers, Amazon, iPlayer, my own website (‘I’ll just have a quick look.’ ‘It’s static you fool! It doesn’t do anything!’), porn, Facebook, MySpace, the weather in Angola, the annual yield of wheat in the Southern American States and so on but not always in that order.


I write on an Apple Mac computer using the iWork word processor. I like that I can move individual letters to any position on the screen although I have never done this. Perhaps I am reassured that post-modern techniques are only a mouse click away.


There are always new markets to explore!


The Mac is also great for doing my website, recording podcasts, looking at unsavoury things on the internet in super sharp quality. See above.


I have often read that writers don’t like to read other writers when they are writing. They feel that it will unduly influence their own style. It’s not a rule I follow. 1) Because I am writing most of the time and would therefore never read. 2) If I happen to start writing like Haruki Murakami, Rupert Thomson, Jose Saramago I really don’t mind.


Bring it on!


I would like to say that my writing is carefully planned and I know exactly where I’m going but this is not the case. I heard another writer at a talk who said she had the plot mapped out on a spreadsheet, so many pages for each scene.


That wouldn’t work for me. I start with the characters and a general idea of where I want the story to go. As I’m writing things happen, new characters appear. In the thing I’m working on at the moment a new character, Dave, sprang up in the very first chapter. If I had it all planned out what would happen to Dave! These are things to consider.


Each writer must work out what’s best for them. And for Dave!


If you asked me why I write then I would have to say I don’t know. I do know that it makes me happier and that is its own reward. The below is nice too though:

Drew Gummerson’s latest novel, Me and Mickie James, was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008.
Reviewed here: Guardian, Time Out, Morning Star, Gaydarnation, Pulp, ABCTales, BookMarks, Chroma, and others that aren’t online.


Read interviews with Drew here: Dazed and Confused, Gaydarnation, Chroma.


Check out his website for forthcoming events and publications.

Currently reading: The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman


Currently listening to: The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (audiobook), Haruki Murakami

Sam Jordison reads from his new book

Writing Tip no 39

Some people ask me, ‘Where do stories come from?’


(Actually they may be asking me, ‘Where do storks come from?’ my hearing not being particularly great these days. For the answer to this question please see my previous blog, ‘Where do babies come from’, storks and babies often being found hand in hand. Rather like the devil and George Bush.)


In respect to the first question let me lay my cards on the table and say that I don’t have any faith or belief, Christianity, for example. If I did, a typical story might be about a patriarchal society that endorsed a history of slavery, torture, war, invasion and destruction all the name of some poor sod who got nailed to a cross.


(Or a story about McCain’s current running mate might be about how her church prays for the successful conversion of gay men to the Christian way (more death warriors for the American crusade?))


Being free from such shackles, rather like a Big Bang theorist, I would say look to the beginning. If you’ve got a beginning the rest will follow.


For example – a farmer’s son spies some towny newcomers parading across his land. The young girl is quite attractive. (Ross Raisin – God’s Own Country.)


They become friends, then lovers, then run away, then…


For example – A former POW suffering from post-traumatic stress goes back to Germany to be an extra in a film about POWs. (Day – AL Kennedy)


Not a good situation for someone with PTSD. He goes a bit wobbly, highlights of the war flash through his head.


For example. Some do-gooder gets born in a stable and starts telling everyone how to live their lives. (The Bible)


See above – (the cross bit).

I’ve been ill for the past week or so and so sorry if I’m not my usual jaunty self. Some good news today has cheered me up. Elbow have won the Mercury music prize. Woo hoo! I’m going to see them again in October.


Marillion have released their new album on the net, for free. Listening to it now. Sounds good so far. I’m going to see them in November. Tickets on sale now.


Tickets are also on sale for Stanza@LaDanza where I am appearing with Clare Summerskill. I have read that she is a ‘hilarious stand up comedienne’. That’s brilliant! But she will be performing next to me. I’m not even a sit down comedian.


Yikes!


Come along if you can. It’s in London. Details on the this link.

Currently reading – Blindness by Jose Saramago


Currently listening to – Happiness is the Road, Marillion.

Also check out this serial on BBC 7 – The Scarifyers.

Trailer for SOMERS TOWN. Go and see it, it’s BRILLIANT!

I’m the head of a matchstick, I’m a number seven, I’m a…

This week I’m just making shapes. I’m the head of a matchstick, I’m a number seven, I’m a box of Cuban cigars on an ageing dictator’s desk.


As the Boosh’s Vince Noir says it’s all about image over content. “Who cares about the music as long as you’ve got nice hair?”


Although my hair is bad at the moment and Will compared me to Robinson Crusoe the other day.


“You look like you’ve been on a desert island.”


If only I had been. The beaches, the blue sea, the Wi-Fi coconut bar. I can see myself sitting there with a Mac writing my next cartoon being served tall cocktails by a Mexican dwarf with angular teeth.


There was a nice review of Me and Mickie James in Time Out this week. Once again my book was compared to a cartoon.

“Me and Mickie James’ unfolds in a flurry of cartoonish adventures, each more extravagant, unlikely and enjoyable than the last.”

(Gaydarnation also compared me to a cartoon.) This is good, I am the thinking person’s Hong Kong Phooey. (He was quite a guy…)


Cartoon was what I was aiming for. Belleville Rendezvous, Wallace and Gromit, Ratatouille are some of my favourite things. (I love the smell of courgettes in the morning.) It’s all fun, fun, fun. Except for this work thing.


I’ve worked out that if I do an hour overtime at the end of each late shift I can get back an extra 12 days annual leave over the course of the year. That’s 12 more days to write. I am itching to write at the moment, making notes, but scared to start because then it takes over your life. Like a Mummy.


Imagine if you had to look after an Egyptian Mummy? That would take all your time, wouldn’t it? The days you would spend hunting down scarab beetles for their nightly feed. The elaborate excuses you would have to make to friends. The unexplained murders that always seem to happen around your house. Mummy’s traditionally kill people don’t they?


Luckily we could enjoy together listening to BBC Radio 7. My favourite things at the moment are the madcap adventures of the zookeepers in The Boosh, and the surreal town of Spent in The League of Gentlemen.


It makes me want to write a radio series.

P.S. I have updated my website this week – you can see it here.

Currently (still) reading – Fiasco, The American Military Adventure in Iraq


Currently listening to – The Boosh


Competition Video for Marillion’s Whatever Is Wrong With You