Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
God, how long have you got. I’ve done just about every job on the planet, working in offices, factories, hotels and bars. For the last 20 years I’ve been working in marketing for a lousy financial company in the UK, writing their advertisements and marketing communications. That barely left enough time to eat, sleep and bring up my son, but I found a few scraps of time left over to write at weekends and during holidays. It took me a decade of writing to put together my first book, a 700-page collection of poems and short stories called Sex on the Brain, which came out in November 2012. I followed that up with a short story called Sticky Pages, about a technophobe with a libido on steroids, in the summer of 2013, and later that year a spoof biography of the sex-life of Henry VIII, called (originality be damned) The Six Wives of Henry VIII later that year. In the spring of 2014 I put out a short novel called Reality TV, more about that below.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My latest book is called Reality TV. It’s a kind of dystopian vision of where I think society is headed, in the best traditions of Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury and others. Television has pretty much taken over our lives. Especially the genre of so-called ‘Reality’ television programmes. Mostly they’re just formulaic copy-cat shows peddling vacuous trash about the minutiae of uninteresting nobodies, or the public’s obsession with celebrity and fame. They drive me nuts when I’m trying to find something decent to watch after a hard day at work, and I scroll down a thousand Sky channels and all I can find is this brainless gunk that’s as interesting to me as watching paint dry. The ‘elimination’ shows which seem more about humiliating the losing contestants than anything else, I find particularly excruciating. That’s what gave me the germ of the idea for Reality TV. The book is based around a top of the ratings TV show called Humili-ATE, where famous celebrities hurl insults at each other across a restaurant table while eating risqué food cooked up by the chefs from a notorious prison for murderers and sex offenders. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, right? Well, I won’t say too much more but when the show’s host Soup Dogg spirits the wife of one of the celebrities into the restaurant toilet and they begin making out, on camera, the show reaches a tipping point, threatening to descend into chaos. I also introduced an element of magic realism to really ram home the point about how controlling our television habits have become, so in Reality TV the television can hold a conversation with you, and if you kicked the screen in and stepped inside it, you enter the world of the television show that was on at the time. Pretty scary stuff. There is violence and sex in there, so it won’t be to everyone’s taste. But it’s not erotica. Nothing against it, but it’s not what I’m interested in writing.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Not really, probably the same ones you’ve read about from other authors. I find it really hard to write anything half decent sitting at a computer. So most of my first drafts are done with pen and pad. Either propped up in bed (early mornings are best), or when I’m out walking. There’s something about doing a physical act that switches off the interfering, worrying left hand side of the brain, and allows the creative juices to flow. So if I’m really stuck I’ll often go for a long walk, or go shopping, or take a bath, just do something. Before you know it the block evaporates and the words start to come. Cycling also works for me, I live in the country so I often go on long bike rides. They’re great for running lines of dialogue through your head, because you don’t write them down in a stilted way, you voice them aloud. I’m sure many of the people I pass when I’m out cycling wonder who the maniac is on the bike who’s always talking to himself. Oh, and I take along a little mini usb mic too, to record it as I go along, since cycling and writing at the same time isn’t a great idea.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
There really are too many to list. In their ways, everyone from Plato onwards. I munched my way through most of the classical canon of western literature in my 20’s and 30’s, so they’re all in there somewhere, influencing my world view. They can pop up at the oddest times when you’re writing about something completely unrelated, and suddenly you remember a quote from Emerson or a snippet of Shakespeare or a scene from Vonnegut that sheds light on whatever you’re wrestling with. It’s like having your own internal Google, except much more random and unreliable. So if you’re asking what books or writers influenced me, I’d say all of them, from the earliest children’s books I read, even the Beano and Dandy comics I devoured as a child, they were all enamouring me of the joy and power of words and stories. But if I rephrased your question slightly to say, which books or authors ‘inspired’ me to write, that’s a lot easier. Martin Amis and Charles Bukowski are my literary gods. Surprisingly I didn’t begin reading either of them until quite late on (Amis in my late 20’s, Bukowski in my late 30’s). They say that reading your favourite authors is like having a conversation with a friend, and that’s certainly been my experience with Hank and Mart. There’s a black humour, a laughter in the face of the worst that the world can throw at us, that I just get from Amis and Bukowski like from no other. Amis seems (to me) to have lost his way a bit in recent years, his canvas has gotten more complex and darker, so it’s not so joyous to read. His 1980’s novel Money was the highpoint. It remains one of the funniest and greatest novels I’ve read. ‘Time’s Arrow’ is also a mini-masterpiece (there aren’t many books that can joke about the holocaust and get away with it). But Hank, well, Hank just kept firing from the hip right to the end. I don’t think I ever read a bad book by him. Women, Ham on Rye, Factotum, The Post Office are but a few of the semi-autobiographical novels he wrote that I’ve re-read over and over. Plus any one of the poetry and short story collections which are too numerous to mention. Pick any one at random and a couple of pages in I defy you not to laugh out loud, or think, god, that’s just what happened to me! He wrote a little gem of a novella right near the end of his life, called Pulp, which was like nothing else he had ever written. Its narrator was a private detective with a voice straight out of Chandler or Hammett. It was the closest Buk got to pure fiction, and to me it signalled a new direction he might have taken. Alas, papa death finally shook him by the hand shortly after it was published. But along with probably the best short story ever written (Bring me your love), I rate Pulp as a masterpiece of short comic fiction. More than anyone else, I think, these two authors inspired me to write. They taught me that you can write about the big serious issues in life, but in a way that can make people smile. God knows the world needs more laughter. That’s something I want to do, I decided. So I did.
What are you working on now?
A short story about a rich football agent in pursuit of a girl, a Western novella about the seven deadly sins, and a bit of a spoof of Fifty Shades of Grey that I’ve been meaning to get done for the last two years, but every time I write another chapter, something pops up in my life that means I have to put it to one side. It’s going to be hilarious though, a real laugh out loud page turner. Bit like the original really.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
Well, excellent sites like this, of course. Plus I promote them on my website, and blog and tweet about them. To be honest, I’m not really sure what works. The main problem seems to be that while self-publishing, and e-publishing in particular, has been liberating for many authors whose work might otherwise have never seen the light of day, it has also led to an outpouring of poorly written, often barely literate books that seem to have tarred all self-published authors with the same brush. If you’re not already a famous author, or a celebrity of some kind, it’s very difficult to build any kind of platform as an emerging writer. You can spend several years writing the best novel of the 21st Century, put it out on Amazon and within minutes it will have disappeared under a tsunami of other books that came out the same hour, let alone day. I liken publishing on Amazon to throwing a big rock into the middle of the ocean. Traditional publishers aren’t much help either. If you’re not already a noted author or a celebrity who are easy to market, they usually dump your manuscript straight on the slush pile without even glancing at it. Of course, if I went out and robbed a bank, or kidnapped someone, they’d be queuing up with their cheque books open to get my story. Funny old world. So no, I have no idea if there’s a best method for an emerging author to promote their self-pubbed books, except to say keep plugging away and try to be as scientific as you can by looking at your Amazon and other sales stats, to see what works best for you.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
See the answer above. Keep at it, and decide what you’re in it for. If you’re in it just for the money, statistically you’ll probably make more flipping burgers. But if you write because you love it, and you’ve a burning compulsion to reach out and connect with others through your story-telling, then if that’s reward enough, enjoy it for its own sake. If success comes along, that will be a bonus. Hard work and talent will get you a long way, but you need the luck too, and that’s a lottery ticket.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Live every day as though it were your last. Make sure the people you love, know it. Give more hugs. And be kind to others.
What are you reading now?
I usually have several books on the go at any one time. At the moment I’m reading Classic Nasty, by Jack Murnighan, World War Z, by Max Brooks (which my son insisted I read!), Girls, by Nic Kelman, Pastoralis by George Saunders, and House of Holes, by Nicholson Baker, which has me in absolute stitches.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Just to keep plugging away. Success is a lottery ticket so it’s best not to count on that, and just enjoy the ride. I think I’d like to get a book out in print though. So I’ll either knuckle down and write a genre novel that some agent or publisher might take a sniff at, or go down the CreateSpace route. Just so that when I’m gone my son might have something tangible to remember what I’d written, rather than it being all in cyber space. A modest ambition perhaps, but I’ve never really been a one to need my name up in lights. If you have the love of your family and children, that’s as rich as you can be, in my book.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Money, by Martin Amis.
Women, by Charles Bukowski.
The Encyclopedia Britannica
Do it Yourself!: The Complete Guide to Masturbation by Stephan Niederwieser
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