Coming Soon to a 'Buy Now' Button Near You - The Pitch!

Well, it’s four days ‘til Wilful Misunderstandings hits publication date and becomes available to anyone who chooses to purchase it.  I suppose if I’m going to do any serious hard sell in this blog, I really ought to get on with it.  That’s what I set it up for, for goodness’ sake.

Regular readers (if there are any of you out there) might have noticed by now that I’m a bit reluctant to take my ‘sales campaign’ all that seriously.  I kind of enjoyed talking about the genesis of the book and its (ahem) consciousness changing properties in the first 6 entries, but since then I have in what I hope is an entertaining way been avoiding heavy promo.

‘Wilful Misunderstandings’ falls somewhere between being a book that has been accepted by a commercial publisher and one that I have self-published.  Jamie Delano, who runs it, describes Lepus Books as a ‘publishing co-operative’.  What that means for me as a writer is that I’ve had to shell out for the print copies I’ll be selling personally and through the Lepus website, while a distribution/print on demand company takes care of e-books, sales through Amazon and any orders that come through bookshops.  Lepus is not set up to promote its publications, it just exists to get them into print and sell them.  Check out the website if you want to know more about that.  Jamie has to concentrate on selling his own books, as do Deborah Delano and Alistair Fruish.

That’s why the selling of ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’ is mainly up to me.  Late last year I started researching how I might go about it.  There is a lot of advice out there, especially on the internet.  After a while, I came to the conclusion that most of it wasn’t worth shit.

The once well-ordered world of publishing has been upended by the media revolutions of our times.  Self-publishing is accessible to anyone, regardless of quality.  Wherever there are opportunities to exploit, there will be those who jump in and exploit them.  And hey, there’s money to be made out of all these self-publishers who aren’t too sure how to sell their product.  You set up a website and present yourself as a successful writer who just wants to offer help to other writers.  You offer a few tit-bits of standard advice, which can just be lifted from any other websites that are doing the same.  You then promise much more info that can be obtained by subscription to your site, or purchase of your series of ‘how to’ books.  Or you offer reviews for a price.  Etc.

Disregarding most of that crap, on the whole, I’ve done what I can.  I’ve sent out copies of the book to newspapers and magazines, without any serious hope of getting a review – but if you don’t try, you don’t know.  There was just the possibility that maybe the somewhat peculiar nature of what I’ve written might strike a chord with someone.  I’ve set up a launch event (Shaftesbury Arts Centre, April 2nd, 2.00-4.30 – be there or be square) and got some local publicity.  That’s about my biggest hope for shifting a few copies.  I’ve put some stuff on Facebook, but don’t want to lay it on too thick.  I’ve buffed up my website and I reckon its worth a look if you haven’t been there - http://richeff.moonfruit.com/. . Twitter holds no appeal for me, so I continue to avoid it.

I’ve created this blog and I am committed to continuing it – but have no idea whether it will result in any sales.  Starting it was the result of a bit of advice I picked up early on.  The only positive effect I can say it’s had so far has been on Google page ratings.  If you Google my name only the ratings are swamped by Richard Foreman, the New York ‘Ontological-Hysteric’ playwright.  I don’t crop up til you’ve clicked through to page 14, by which time you’ll have spotted the 2 other writers who share my name and a fair number of obits for dead Richard Foremans.  But if you Google ‘wilful misunderstandings’, with or without my name, you sure get a lot of me.

So there we are.  Some campaign, huh?

Here’s what I hope.  I reckon I’ve written a pretty decent book of short stories, and there’s enough quality there to make it a more enjoyable and more interesting read than a good many self-published books, probably even some commercially published ones.  I hope that a few people will pick it up – starting with folk who know me and maybe going a little further (the words that Alan Moore and Sally Spedding kindly wrote to endorse the book might help somewhat).  I hope that some of them will enjoy it enough to recommend it and that word-of-mouth will result in more sales.  I hope that maybe some people will give me a good review on Amazon or Goodreads and the like, and that would help too.  I’m aiming to see if I can get myself some public readings of the stories and sell on the back of those.  Beyond that, who knows?

I don’t expect to make back what I’ve invested, but it would be desireable to reduce the number of book boxes currently stacked under a big table in my living room.  Above all it would be nice to think that a few people have enjoyed my stories.  It may not be the most riveting book you’ll read this year, but you’ll find some interesting characters, a few good laughs, some interesting situations, some thought provoking stuff and some strong emotional resonance.  That’s my pitch.  Be one of the discerning few.  Buy now from http://lepusbooks.co.uk/wilful-misunderstandings/

I’d like to think you won’t regret it.

Misperceptions, mistranslations and misinterpretations

Phew!  All this hard sell, I think I need a break from it, this time round.  So here's the result of a bit of fun I had last week.  There's a sort of a connection with Wilful Misunderstandings.  I went to a workshop run by Dorset poet David Caddy and it was about the idea of what you can get as a writer from re-interpreting things, including deliberate misinterpretations.  I'm not going to purloin all David's ideas and re-present them for you here (hey, check him out, he's on the web), but suffice to say that he was presenting the imaginative possibilities of mis-perceptions and mis-translations, translation as re-invention, that sort of thing.

As is the way of these events, those of us attending all had a go at seeing what we could do creatively with this idea.  Some great stuff came out of it and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to everyone's contributions.  As for me, I was looking round for something to 'mistranslate'.  We meet in a very nice pub in a Dorset village, and on the wall across from me was a blackboard with the 'Today's Specials' menu - which I could only partially see.  Unbeknown to either of us, the participant sitting next to me was also using this menu as a start point. She came up with something that could definitely be said to be poetry.  I'm not sure I did - I got a bit carried away with the humorous possibilities, I think.  So, here you go, tidied up and revised for a bit more consistency, this is what I did.

Today’s Specialists:

1. Addled Imperialist
With chips off old blocks, peas in our time and badgered broccoli.

2. Hard Boiled Agent
Set in a succulent garnish of polonium, with treachery tarts and diced disinformation.

3. Sweet and Sour Celebrities
Banter basted in a slick trivia sauce and topped with spicy innuendos.

4. Mackled Minister
Stuffed with a fat wad of dough and civilly served with shredded documents.

5. Braised Pundit
Tossed off in tasteful tautologies and lightly layered in a filigree of fine leaves.

6. Curried Migrants
With single grain rice.



Our Chef Commends:

1. Royal Mint Pie
Quantitatively eased onto a bed of raised salaries, gilt investments and dire warnings.

2. Cod Almighty
Richy coated with an intolerant sauce, vengefully spiced and served by billions.


And don’t go without trying our

Post Nuclear Desserts:

1. Baked Alaska
2. Molten Lava Cake
3. Death By Chocolate
4. Spotted Dick
5. Glazed Madeleines
6. Crumble


But I'm really gonna be pushing my book down your throats next time, for sure.  Well, maybe.

Toodle pip.

23 Darned Good Reasons to Buy ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’

That April 1st publication date is coming up fast.  It's time for me to go (in my quiet and thoughtful way, of course) into 'hard sell' mode.  So here goes...

23 Darned Good Reasons to Buy ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’

1 It has an attractive and colourful front cover that will look good on your coffee table.
2 You cannot resist purchasing the work of anyone who has been described as ‘quirky’.
3 No story in the book is more than 2000 words long, so if you’re not enjoying the one you’re reading, you won’t have a long wait ‘til the next.
4 Ownership of this book will distinguish you as an authentic individual.
5 Ownership of this book will demonstrate irrevocably that you are not a prey to the pernicious marketing techniques that currently dominate the publishing industry and do not restrict your tastes to ‘best sellers’.
6 At 34 stories for £8.95 you are getting incredibly good value for money – how can you go wrong at a mere 26.323529411 pence per story?
7 You ARE too hip for genre, just like it says on the back cover blurb, and you have realised this book was written precisely for the likes of you.
8 Although there is a vanishingly remote chance that this book will be the surprise left field publishing hit of 2016, imagine if it was…  and you had bought it at the time of publication, long before all the hoopla began.  Kudos or what?
9 You are one of the small number of people who saw some of the comics stories I wrote back in the 1990s and you’re curious to know what I’m up to now.
10 You need to satisfy your curiosity as to what value Alan Moore, Sally Spedding, Jamie Delano and a few other people you might have heard of have all seen in this book.
11 You have £8.95 burning a hole in your pocket and you just can’t think what to do with it
12 You need a gift for someone else to whom all or some of these reasons apply.
13 Purchased in bulk, copies of this book would make excellent (if somewhat expensive) loft insulation.
14 There is a gap of approximately 23 millimetres spine width in your book shelf that needs filling.
15 You have read all my previous blogs and decided that you too need to develop the mental flexibility that my book could conceivably confer and that might just help us get through the next few decades without wrecking every ecosystem on the planet.
16 You are a fan of adult colouring books and would get pleasure from colouring in the various line work designs that appear on blank pages between stories in this book (as previewed in this blog).
17 You love the smell of freshly printed books and just can’t get enough of sniffing them.
18 You are one of my few surviving relatives.
19 I owe you money and you think if enough people buy this book, you just might get it back
20 You are looking for 34 enjoyable stories, most of which have beginnings, middles and ends, that will not – on the whole – tax your brain too heavily, but will nevertheless leave you with the feeling that you have read something worth your time, money and effort.
21 You just like the idea of reading a book that isn’t quite like any other book you’ve ever read.
22 Turn it upside down and the back cover will also look nice on your coffee table.
23 You feel sorry for any bugger who wastes his time thinking of 23 reasons why you should buy his book and you reckon he needs to earn enough money to buy himself the counselling and psychiatric support he obviously requires.

This Blog...

toodle pip!

6: Well, What Is the Point?

Having been generated, along the lines I've set out over the last four posts, I return to the question - can Wilful Misunderstandings change the world?  Not overnight, as stated somewhere below, but as a seed that has the potential to grow into significance?

Naturally, I'd like to think so.  I've written the bloody thing.  There must be some sort of use to it, beyond the gratification of my ego by having a book to my name.  Will it entertain?  I reckon so. I've had to read, re-read and re-re-read these stories more than any of you will, and they still hold my interest.  I've read them to audiences who appear to have enjoyed and I've had some positive feedback on the published ones.  That's enough to convince me. If I wasn't convinced, it wouldn't be worth publishing it.

But as I grow older, I find increasingly that entertainment alone fails to satisfy.  Greedy me, I want to be left with something to think about too.  Something that adds at least some little chunk to my understanding of how all the wheels keep turning, why shit happens, and who put the benzedrine in Mrs Murphy's Ovaltine.  I want to be provoked by hitherto un-encountered trains of thought.  I want the rug to be pulled out from under my feet and my view of all that surrounds me shifted out of its habitual perspectives.  I like books that do this.  To pick a couple of randomly selected examples... Brian Catling's 'The Vorrh' showed me how fantasy could be written without falling back on a single one of the genre's standard trappings, how surrealism can be explored with no lack of strong characterisation, emotional engagement or sheer humanity.  Italo Calvino's 'If On a Winter's Night a Traveller...' blew my mind with its self-referential conundrums, its ceaseless exploration and exposure of how literature weaves into our consciousness whilst at the same time being literature that does exactly that.

These are the kind of books that change me.  I am not exactly the same person I was before I read them.  They propel me to try things that I wouldn't have considered trying before I read them.  Calvino's book certainly contributed to my approach in 'Wilful Misunderstandings'.  Catling's came to me too late for that, but will doubtless filter its influence into work I'll do in future.

Okay, but change the world?  What are any of these books going to do about global warming, random bombings and shootings, the pernicious grip of the mega-rich on most of the world's resources, fanaticism, domestic violence etc. etc.?

Let's turn that question round.  What is going to solve those problems?  Politics and politicians?  I don't think so.  Even the few that appear to retain some integrity (and like many of us in the UK I'm pretty sure that applies to Jeremy Corbyn) have little chance of overcoming the impediments that politics itself puts in their way.  People power has potential, I think, but it's a double-edged sword.  Misinformation and manipulation can too easily convert such positive energy into destructiveness and oppression.

To me, the crucial change we need if there's to be any hope for generations to come is a change of consciousness. As a species, we need to re-set our moral compass, and having done so question everything that we ever thought we knew.  Every premise that we build from needs to be examined holistically, and constantly re-examined for its appropriateness in the light of change and flux.

I'm skirting around the biggest issue we humans face, here, and I'll come back to some of this and explore it some more in a later post, but the point I want to make now is that mental flexibility will be crucial here.   We need to be able to drop concepts at a moment's notice if they're not working for the general benefit of us and our world.  And to adopt new ones with equal rapidity, if they show signs of standing up to questioning and proving beneficial.  Politics is too mired in its tribal theatricality to even begin to do this.  There have to be better ways than the ones we've so far tried or we've had it - and, this being the Anthropocene, so have vast swathes of other living species, possibly even the entire biosphere.

So my little games with words could just, if they're worth the paper they're written on, be agents of change.  They could, I'd like to think, change your consciousness - just as mine was changed by the mighty and far superior works I cited a few paragraphs back.  Whatever the scale, it does the job.  You might find my work more accessible than theirs.  You might not.  But if it connects for you as I hope it will, by the time you get to the end, you'll be seeing things just a little bit differently.

And that's a positive step.

Well, where do I go from here?  With still just over a month to go before my publication date, how do I keep this little pot bubbling?  Find out next post.  Til then may the road rise with you, but also descend when you get tired of walking uphill.

                                   

5: Chasing Stories

How did I get from this so far entertaining, if not overly challenging word play pursuit to the point of producing stories - 50 of them?  I described the process somewhere recently (not on this blog, I've just had a look!) as a process that is about equal parts inspiration and desperation.  Once in a while, the invented meaning came with a package of associated ideas.  I said: "Thank you very much," to the tutelary spirits of writing and got on with it.  On a good week, those ideas sustained me through a beginning and a middle, then propelled me to an end.  I did have at least one or two of those.

Mostly, though, I'd get something started and then think: "Where the hell do I take this?"  That would be when desperation began to encroach.  I think the majority of people who have tried to write fiction have probably experienced this.  That feeling that all your thoughts just degenerate into negativity, and you sit there - perhaps chewing the end of a biro until it has become some sort of gnarly, misshapen replica of its former self - thinking: "Whatever made me think I could pull this off?"  You work through all the techniques that have lodged in your brain for dealing with this hiatus of ideas.  Automatic writing.  Word associations.  Random idea generation (Brian Eno's 'Oblique Strategies' came into action more than once).  Et-bloody-cetera.

Sometimes you just have to wait.  Let's take an example. One of the stories that has made it into the book has been published by 'Confingo' magazine and can be read on my website (http://richeff.moonfruit.com/ ).  It's called 'Friendly Smiles and Calm Voices'.  It started with the word 'analgesia', which I'd already decided should be capitalised because it sounded like a country to me.  A country without pain!  So what was I going to do with that?

The answer came to me on a holiday with my then-partner to the Mediterranean island of Gozo.  If you don't know it, it's a relatively small island a short distance from Malta.  To get there you fly to Malta, drive to the relevant port and take a ferry.  By the time we arrived at our booked apartment it was after dark and we were exhausted.  We'd not found a supermarket where we'd intended to get supplies, and had nothing to eat or drink except a few bits we found there on arrival.  It was a pretty rough start.  Things got better, in some ways, but we discovered that the Euro money that has graced countries such as Spain with fine roads had not reached Gozo.  Apart from one slick central stretch, we found that virtually all the roads were pitted with potholes, and more than once became muddy tracks.  And that wasn't all that was buggered up there, but you get the picture.

I'm not complaining.  The place was an experience, it had its wonders and I'm glad I spent time there.  But it got me thinking that Analgesia should in every way be the opposite of what I was experiencing.  It should be the perfect holiday destination, where everything you read about in the brochures and the publicity turns out to be exactly as described.  And with perfectly surfaced roads, of course!  All this would be true to a magical degree.  Analgesia would be a place where it was simply impossible to find anything wrong at all.  And I could start the story as if I were writing the copy for one of those brochures - addressing the reader in the second person and inviting them to picture themselves in this exquisite environment.  "You breathe air scented with honeysuckle and a hint of some exotic spice."  Lay it on thick.

And in the course of a few hundred words, "you" starts to become a character, a character who is unsettled by this constant, undiminished perfection and craves to find a flaw, some hint of human error or failing...

After that, the story wrote itself, smoothly and - I hope - entertainingly.  Like I said, sometimes you just have to wait until the building blocks you need present themselves. Sometimes they never do. There are quite a few unfinished WM stories on my hard drive.  I'm still waiting for those blocks to turn up.

I'm winding toward the end of this little sortie into the process of generating 'Wilful Misunderstandings'.  Next time I'll wrap up these thoughts about the writing process and wind us back to the thoughts with which I opened.  After that there will be more. 'Til then, may your dreams be sweet and your days be fruitful.

4: More twisted words

Finding these words was not always easy.  I wish I could claim, harking back to my opening theme of mental flexibility (to which I shall return as I wind up this account), that I just sat there and thought of them - one after another - in a burst of inspiration.  Oh what fun that would have been.  Actually, what happened after the first handful was that I started to plow through the dictionary, making lists of words that seemed to have potential and then their possible new meanings.  I also looked at that invaluable publication Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which I recommend to all writers everywhere.

Here's a random few I picked out that never made it to storylines, but still amuse me:

escalope - noun for a rapid but dignified getaway
fable - an unreliable item of furniture with a tendency to disappear completely for periods of time
fingerprints - thumbnail sized works of fine art
investigate - help people to find suitable items of clothing to wear
jitters - people who can only be found in alleyways, passages etc.
kindred - a scary clan
poppycock - a rare and colourful condition affecting the male organ
novice - a person capable only of virtue
pillar - a vendor of dubious medicines
qualm - a period of time (often years) in which nothing eventful happens

You get the picture, I'm sure.

There are, I freely admit, one or two precedents for this at least.  One is certainly Douglas Adams' 'The Meaning of Liff' in which he lists place names and attributes often well-funny meanings to them.  Another is to be found in the Radio 4 programme 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' and its 'Uxbridge English Dictionary' feature in which the esteemed panel find new meanings for words, almost invariably using the pun approach.  All good stuff, but - so far as I know - no one has ever used these definitions/re-definitions as a basis for stories.

So I'll get on to that part of the process next time I hit the 'post' button.  'Til then, walk tall, walk straight and look the whole world in the eye (except on bent, wiggly, astigmatic days).