How to talk to Writers: Vol.1

So there's things I've learnt as a writer, and things I've learnt as someone who knows a lot of writers. Here's a few of them, collected as a guide for friends and family on the right way to approach these difficult, awkward and sometimes fussy souls..

This list is by no means exhaustive, which is why I've decided to dub it Vol. 1! Your own submissions and ideas would be more than welcome, either in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

Here we go...

IF YOU HAVE TO ASK a writer what they've had published, do your very best not to sound despondent if the answer is "nothing", or a surprisingly short list of things.

DO ask them what they're writing. DON'T tell them what they should write.

DON'T assume they have a schedule or a consistent plan of action.

DON'T assume they have a special writing book, writing pen, writing hat, or any other cute affectation.


DON'T force them to tell you about a project, CONVINCE them that you genuinely want to hear about it.

NEVER agree with them if they say one of their ideas is bad or stupid. 

NEVER disagree with them if they say one of their ideas is their best yet.

ALWAYS ask them where they get their ideas from. NEVER tell them where you think their ideas come from.

DON'T compare their work to other authors without being asked. It isn't "straight out of Guy Ritchie" or "a touch of the David Gemmells"

DO ask them follow up questions on a project they previously told you about.  DON'T be surprised if that project hasn't advanced at all.

DON'T suggest improvements without being asked to. It's their baby, not yours.

NEVER ask "Why?".

I think we can get some good mileage out of these over time, so as I say please feel free to submit in the comments below or over on the Crap Looking Books Facebook page.

Nick
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The immaterial economy, or why I don't (usually) pay for digital content

So... I'm really not a fan of paid digital content. Sure, I've bought indie games on Xbox Live and downloaded paid apps to my phone. I even paid for the Gosford Park soundtrack on mp3 because it was so hard to acquire through less legal means.

Yet to my mind, digital content doesn't "exist" in the same way that physical products do.

When I buy a CD, book, or game from a store, I own it. It's in my hand as an individual object that exists as a single entity in the real and physical world. When I buy an mp3 or program or whatever, it isn't a thing. It's a notion or concept that depends on other things in order to exist. Nobody ever considers a digital edition of their favourite novel to be a treasured possession, unless perhaps it's insanely hard to find or digital-only, and nobody ever fought off garden zombies with a box of mp3.

remember these?

Still, I'm not a Luddite, and I'm not really that concerned about the physical properties of these purchases. I have plenty of free digital content which I am more than happy to use. Hell, this and every blog of mine doesn't count as "real" by my schema, yet I spend a ridiculous amount of time working on and worrying about them.

No, my concerns are more economic.

It takes a certain amount of material and manpower to produce a book or mp3. It takes twice as much material and manpower to produce two identical books, while producing two, six or thirty million identical mp3s costs no more than producing just the one.

When you paying for digital content, you're not paying for a "thing". At least when you pay for a book, a DVD or a cat-scratching post, you're paying for the materials that go into making it. Yes, I know that digital content still goes through a production process that costs money and has to be covered by sales, but every single purchase beyond that point increases the profit margin exponentially. Once a digital album has paid for itself, every sale is profit. Once a book launch has paid for itself, it still needs to make more books to encourage more sales.

well, maybe it's not that bad

If Francis Drake can't pack it in a crate, store it in the hold and ship it round the world, then it isn't "real" goods, and paying for it is only going to take money out of the physical, material economy and put it into the pockets of retailers, driving up the cost of actual physical goods and materials.The value of your purchase isn't being passed down the line to anyone in construction or any aspect of industry- for all intents and purposes it simply vanishes.

Maybe I've missed something, or maybe this doesn't matter as much as I think does, and the economy has some sort of reactionary way of dealing with this that I haven't considered. I'd love to hear what you think over on Crap Looking Books Facebook page or in the comments below.  

Nick
xx


I'll made a shorter, less wordy and more gesticulative video of this blog injected with my usually quirkiness, which you can watch you can watch here.

ANTS!! A 1980s horror fiction parody-pastiche

Horror tropes and cliches came so thick and fast in Shaun Hutson's 1982 cult novella "Slugs" that I found myself wondering if it could be used as a road map for writing similar fiction. I was right.

Everything you read here is inspired by genuine content that I discussed in my original review, and will probably make much more sense if you read that first.

(Trigger Warnings: Intimate body parts, vice, various abuses, gore, telling not showing)

aiiiiiiiiiiiiie!!

 Ants

Information systems analyst Bob Corrigan woke up in a red armchair soaked in his own sweat. He had on a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck and a pair of jeans that his wife had bought him three years previously when they'd been in the city. It had been a hot day and they'd been eating ice creams. She was lactose intolerant but didn't let that always dictate what she ate. They'd walked past a jeans store and remembered he needed new jeans, so had gone inside. When they came to pay he realised he'd left his bank card at home thanks to leaving in a hurry too busy thinking about the service that his car was soon to undergo. The car had been rattling a lot more than it used to, and the red paint had been flaking off to reveal rust underneath, so Bob was concerned that the car was too far gone to repair. Bob's wife had offered to buy the jeans for him, and Bob had never paid her back. Not because he hadn't wanted to or was making a point, it just had never happened.

Bob stood up. The information systems analyst had a hangover and felt the associated pains of a hangover, in his head, his organs, his mouth and his joints. He crossed the living room to the large wooden chest of drawers where he kept a bottle of non-specific-brand painkillers. The chest had six drawers, two small ones and four longer, larger ones. The handles of the bottom drawer were slightly more worn than the handles of the other five drawers.

Corrigan glanced out the window over the chest of drawers. The next door neighbour Claire Francis was bent over picking flowers in her garden, wearing a short skirt, and tight t-shirt. Her firm supple buttocks bounced in the information system analyst's direction, while her nipples brushed against the grass, where her nipples were brushing. Nipples. Nipples. Nipples.

Bob Corrigan pulled the lid off the bottle of painkillers. It was a child safety cap, but that didn't matter to the information systems analyst, because all his children had died in infancy. That was why his wife had killed herself. She had been suffering from breast cancer, ovarian cancer, XX chromosome cancer and wandering womb for several years up to that point, and given the constant sexual abuse that she had received as a a child, the fact that she wasn't pretty, and looked kind of old in certain lights, it had all been to much for her. She had drunk a ton of gin, eaten all her lipsticks, and hung herself with her own knitting.

Bob swallowed a fistful of painkillers. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw something moving, so he turned to look, but there was nothing untoward there. Suddenly he sensed something behind him, and flinched around... but there was nothing there. Deep in the darkness under the sofa there may have been things, but he didn't know what things.

The information systems analyst noticed an ant on his forearm, and another on the back of his hand. Three more were climbing up his leg.

During the last six years the ratio of ants to humans in the local area had shifted drastically without anyone noticing. The ant community was now 5354.33% larger than it was at the start of summer, with a generally even dispersal rate per square foot of soil.

The ant on Bob's arm dug its fingernails into Bob's skin, ripping hard and drawing blood. Bob screamed and stumbled backward, tripping over the thirty cans of premium larger he had drunk last night and the positive AIDS test that he had opened the morning before. When he hit the ground his brittle bone disease caused several of his limbs and ribs to shatter, and he howled in pain again.

The ants swarmed upon him, tearing at his flesh with their fingernails. They were happy although did not like the temperature of the house as much as they liked the temperature in the garden. They also liked sports.

The ants quickly ate Bob's heart, lungs and brain, and he continued to scream and thrash around for thirty minutes after this. The ants ate his penis, and spent a long time chewing the flesh of his anus. Blood ejaculated from his wounds like the spray of vomit from the mouth of a person suffering from swine flu, while his bones crushed like egg shells if someone applied pressure to them. He was not happy.

With a final rasping gurgle the information systems analyst died and the ants quickly disappeared into wherever it was they came from, using a system of spider silk toboggans. Bob's remains lay on the floor, completely devoured yet inexplicably identifiable. Nobody found the body for days, despite the substantial amount of screaming he had done, and how well-populated and quiet the neighbourhood was.

Well there you have it. Personally I think there may even be a market for this sort of thing. I'll get on to the publishers of The Matewix and Bored of The Rings right away...

Nick
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Crap Looking Books #8: Shaun Hutson's Slugs

When you're in the habit of intentionally judging books by their covers, it can be a little hard to find something of questionable content that'll still be entertaining. Sometimes you find yourself looking at the same endless parade of pedestrian covers and nothing really jumps out and yells "READ ME!"

This was not one of those times.

This Garth Marenghi-esque novel as good as leapt (or slithered) into my hands, and not because it's particularly crap looking- it isn't. You've got the uncomfortably fetishised human mouth, a slug causing some rather gross wounding, and the title that lets you know upfront exactly what the book is all about.

At 208 pages you might think Shaun Hutson's  Slugs is a succinct and well paced tale bereft of padding.You'd be wrong. The problem with this kind of horror fiction is that it has only two objectives, to set up the killer monster and to destroy it. Narratives either fit those monsters in alongside a normal, everyday story of love or deceit or whatever, or stuff the pages with irrelevant filler material just to kept the page count high and let the monster be a threat for more than a few pages.

Slugs definitely takes the second approach, treating the reader to a constant procession of unrelated and unlikeable characters who either meet a sticky end at the hands (or proboscises) of the slugs, or blindly never realise how close they came to a squelchy and bloody death.

Unfortunately, when 90% of your chapters follow the same format, they're also going to throw up the same issue and problems. In the case of Slugs, that's the constant and flagrant abuse of "Show, Don't Tell"

convenient source: Carey English

I'm not going to quote every single instance of straight up telling of character traits and appearances, because it happens every single fucking time somebody is introduced. Even when a female character is standing naked in front of a mirror (more on that in a moment) the reader is told what she looks like through the narrative voice, rather than shown what she looks like through her own gaze.

It's often the case in Slugs that all the pieces are there, they just sit unused.

The book tells the reader over and over that Brady is a health inspector, but then extensively shows him inspecting health, making the previously forty or fifty tellings completely unnecessary waffle. (Incidentally both he and his wife are referred to by their surname, because that doesn't confuse things at all, nope!)

We're told at one point that the sky simply "is" glorious, and that Brady "likes" looking at it, when we could have just as easily been shown both these things through him "looking at a sky that he felt was glorious". Readers don't need their hands held, they can draw the dots- if someone finds something "glorious" chances are they're going to "like" it.

Sometimes the novel gets lost in these little tells, and showers the reader with floating information that has no relevance on the story or the events of the chapter. 

"Kim in particular went through a seemingly endless period of depression during which Brady began to fear for her sanity but she got through it in the end and their experience seemed to strengthen their marriage, intensifying their love beyond imagination."

Wow! Thank fuck that was all written out like that. Saving time and skipping relevance is a much more effective strategy than gradually letting the the whole story unfold through memories, conversations and other narrative clues, or finding it out through the subtext of how Kim Brady and Brady Brady behave together.

This constant desire of the book to tell everything extends to gross abuse of omnipotent narration, particularly with regards to the motion of the slugs themselves. The slugs are often described performing such motivated tasks as "burrowing into his ear, seeking the juicy grey meat of the brain" as if the victim of such an attack would comprehend the specific feeding intentions of such a creature.

A mass of unobserved slugs are a cause for concern because "there seemed to be so many of them now", but you can't have seeming without someone there to do the seeming. Without a subjective observer, even an imagined one, all the narration can give you is facts or silence, never opinion.

Also, if "Bob blacked out" I'm never going to bond with him as a character if the book tells me everything that Bob forgets after he wakes up.

Bob's actually lucky that he blacks out. Even the gravedigger, rebellious teen and town drunk (because town drunks are a thing!) are lucky, despite ultimately being eaten alive. No, the real unlucky and suffering characters of Slugs are the women. All of them.

run. run like your XX depends on it

Slugs makes no bones about positing women in supposedly traditional roles. They cook dinner, they look after children, they take showers, enjoy a good natter and are hysterically passionate about housework. They also get beaten by drunk husbands, miscarry in car crashes, turn barren, get cheated on, get used to cheat on others, constantly obsesses about their own nipples and whether or not they're wearing a bra, start the day masturbating naked in front of a full length mirror, and do get eaten alive, but genitalia first.

Remember all this is in just 208 pages, which also have to talk about killer slugs at some point.
 

"She slid further into her denims, allowing the seam to cut into her damp cleft [...] noting how her thin shirt made her hardened nipples even more prominent"

Seriously, why is she doing this? Because it's central to the plot? Because it has something to do with killer slugs? No! It's because her husband left her to raise a "slightly retarded" child all by herself, and since she's unable to exist without a man, she's getting all hot thinking about her neighbour, "a nice bloke...pity he was married."

I appreciate that this book was written for a male dominated genre, 31 years of socio-cultural advancement ago, but it's as if it screams in terror at women as an unfamiliar race... "Women! They suffer! They're mistreated! They have nipples! That's all we know!"

om nom finger gone

When I picked up this book I was looking forward to what the cover boasted, some trashy "mind-shattering horror" punctuated by gore and tension. I suppose that was there, but given all the sexism and poor style choices that surrounded it, it wound up taking a back seat.

However, the mistakes and tropes were so persistent and absurd that reading them became almost like an act of friendly familiarity. It wasn't so much horror and suspense that kept me reading, but the bizarre desire to see just what ludicrous backstory, female-abuse or appalling conventions the book would throw out next.

Every chapter save a few were pretty much the same. Somebody is introduced, their specific and always depressing socioeconomic backstory is explained without any regard for context, and then they're brutally killed. 

What do you do when you've got some great ideas for characters but no idea what to do with them? You feed them to giant mutant killer slugs in quick succession, of course!

Nick
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This book however does win my unofficial award for best/worst simile ever. "Burst forth like diarhoettic excretion." Lovely.