Ken Preston's Blog, page 12

I Love Writing. I Hate Writing.

I love writing.

I hate writing.

Does that make sense? (If it does, you’re a cleverer person than I am.)

Starting work on a new novel is an exciting time for an author. There is a whole universe of possibilities to play with, an endless array of characters to populate the story with and all sorts of outlandish situations ready to be conjured up with a tickle of the fingers on the computer keys.

Oh yes, I sometimes think this must be how God feels.

But, only a few pages in, and that feeling of crazed omnipotence can quickly begin to fade. In fact there are some days when it disappears like a smile after being slapped across the face. Not that that has ever happened to me you understand. Just in case you were wondering.

So, let’s reduce this to numbers shall we?

The average modern book is 80,000 words long. My Joe Coffin novels are anywhere between 120,000 to 150,000 words.

Now, the average number of words on the average page of an average length novel (I know, I know, far too many averages in that sentence) is between 300 and 500. So you can see that losing the impetus to keep writing when only a few pages into a new novel is kind of terrible and rather tragic.

Because, you know, there’s still a long way to go to the finish line.

And, unlike a marathon, there’s nobody on the sidelines cheering the author on as she works her way through that dreaded word count day after day.

American crime writer Lawrence Block once said, “I love the idea of writing and I love having written, but I hate the actual writing.”

And I don’t think he’s the only one to have voiced this complaint.

So maybe you can see now why I hate writing and yet why I love writing.

Last week I started work on book four, or as I like to call them seasons, Season Four of Joe Coffin.

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And it started well. Because, I’m telling you now, not much compares to the starting of a new book. Looking at that blank screen, hesitantly typing those first few words and then diving full on into the opening scene, knowing that this time, this time, the words will flow like clear, ice cold water down a sheer rock face.

Except they never do.

Still, I have twelve books behind me now and I know that if I keep my head down and just keep on putting one foot in front of the other, or in this case hitting one keyboard key after the other, and do that day after day every day, I will at some point in the near future have a book.

And it might even be a very good book.

Or it might not.

It might be lacking a certain something. A little razzle dazzle. A certain glint in its eyes, or a hint of a smile on its lips.

It’s happened before.

In which case, the dreaded rewrite rears its ugly head and laughs in my face, its terrible halitosis washing over me and making me gag.

Oh yes, the rewrite.

(Puts head in hands and proceeds to sob uncontrollably.)

Lawrence Block, again, compares rewriting to having run a marathon and then walking the whole course again looking for those lost keys you dropped on the way round.

Mr Block is a wise man when it comes to the art of writing books. Mind you, he should be, he’s been doing it for some sixty plus years.

So yes, I love writing and yet I hate writing.

But no matter how much I hate it, even at the worst of times when I am deep into a 150,000 word novel and I am convinced it is so utterly dreadful that I have not one syllable in my manuscript that is worthy of attention, I still somehow keep at it.

Somehow, I keep going.

I suppose that means I’m a writer.

The post I Love Writing. I Hate Writing. appeared first on Ken Preston.

Three Strategies I Have Used to Combat Depression

I haven’t wanted to write a blog post for this Sunday. I’ve been putting it off all week.

A friend of mine died on the 29th September, just over a week ago now.

For the first couple of days I was numb. And then for the next couple of days I grieved, and there were tears. Lots of them.

The grief then acted as a trigger for the depression which lurks in the corners of my life, waiting to spring.

Fortunately I’ve had enough experience of the black dog pouncing upon me that I have strategies in place to deal with him.

Top of the list was calling my GP, who agreed to adjust my medication for a month or two.

I also knew I needed to keep lines of communication open with my friends and family. Not that I need to sit down and talk with them about every bad feeling I am experiencing, but my natural tendency when feeling like this is to withdraw into myself. Much like a tortoise will do if it senses an attack, withdrawing all of its soft tissue and vulnerable places inside its hard shell. This is a remarkable tactic when the attack is approaching from the outside, but a terrible one for the person who is being attacked from the inside.

And the third strategy is exercise. Specifically, for me at least, it is running. Running outside, in daylight, through the countryside. Nodding acknowledgement to and saying hello to other runners, being passed by cyclists, being aware of the sights and sounds of nature, of the air on my skin and in my lungs.

These three strategies are a way of fortifying myself. Of remembering that I am alive still, and that life is worth living.

Another strategy for life is to create, to actively engage in the pursuit of creativity. For me that is writing.

And so this where I am going to finish this week’s post.

Because I have a novel to continue working on.

The post Three Strategies I Have Used to Combat Depression appeared first on Ken Preston.

I Lost a Dear Friend on Friday

On a Thursday morning in late July 1964, the author Harry Crews was sleeping late. He was awoken by the sound of his wife screaming. He scrambled out of bed and found her at the front door, surrounded by a group of kids.

No parent should be orphaned by a child, but that is what happened to Harry Crews and his wife Sally that day.

The odds were against it happening. Their boy was playing in the back yard, in an enclosed space from which he could not go wandering off on his own. The neighbour’s swimming pool in which he drowned was also closed off. The family who owned that swimming pool were away at the time, but they were aware of the dangers of a pool with young children around and always took special care to make sure it was secured.

But other, older children, were out that day. And they peered over the yard fence at the young Crews boy and urged him to come out with them. They helped him climb over the fence so they could get up to whatever young kids got up to back then. One of them decided they should investigate the garden with the swimming pool whilst the family were away, and found a way in.

And the young Crews boy looked at the swimming pool and decided he would go for a paddle in the water.

By the time Harry got to him, his son was floating face down in the water. Harry pulled Patrick out of the water and tried resuscitating him, using techniques he had learnt during his time in the marines, but it was too late. Later the doctors would declare that the young boy, in his panic, had been sick and the vomit had caught in his throat and choked him.

A friend of the family described Harry and his wife Sally as being desolate with grief, that it hurt so much to look at them you felt an urge to turn away.

But within a week Harry was back at the university, teaching his creative writing classes.

Later he would say, when a disaster such as this strikes you need to weep and wail and gnash your teeth, shake your fists at the heavens and rage over it for a few days. And then you need to pick yourself up and put it behind you, and get on with your life.

I lost a friend to cancer a couple of days ago.

I haven’t raged and gnashed my teeth, but I have cried and I have spent time thinking about and remembering my friend.

I expect I will cry some more too, in the coming days and weeks, and there will be more time to remember holidays and days out and evening meals spent together.

But I also recognise the moment has come to pick myself up and get on with life. My friend left a family behind who will need our love and friendship and support. And I have my own family too.

Something like this changes a person forever.

But life goes on.

The post I Lost a Dear Friend on Friday appeared first on Ken Preston.

You say potato

I couldn’t resist it.

I’d like to tell you that I tried, that I really tried hard to have some willpower, to do that thing where I did resist it.

But I would be lying if I did.

Because not only did I do absolutely nothing to resist it, but I positively ran into its arms without a second thought.

Yes, I ventured into town and looked for my book on the bookshelves.

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I know, I know, it’s shameful really, isn’t it?

Thursday the 21st of September was the official publication date for my latest pocket novel for My Weekly – Woman of Mystery. It’s funny really, but they always change the titles of my books.

Twenty Seconds to Free Fall became Fate in Freefall and Christmas in Paris became Danger in Paris.

You’ll never guess what my original title for this latest romance was.

The Mystery Woman.

Well, as Fred Astaire once sang, ‘You say potato, I say potahto, let’s call the whole thing off.’

Except I’d rather not, because I like seeing my books in the shops, and I like the money I get for writing them even more.

But anyway, as usual I digress. So there I was, standing in front of the bookshelf, or more accurately the magazine shelf because that’s where they stock the My Weekly Pocket Novels, but I like to think of them as bookshelves because it sounds grander. Yes, there I was, feeling a little like a giddy kid at Christmas, and I even took a photograph. And then I picked up a copy (only two left, already, and it was only eight-thirty in the morning) and I leafed through it.

Not to check that it really was my book, you understand. I already knew that after checking the complimentary author copies I received.

No, what struck me right then, was the oddness, the utter weirdness of reading back to myself words and sentences I had put together alone in my cellar on Hill Street that were now scattered across the UK and readable by anyone who cared to pick up a copy of the book and leaf through it. And if they wanted to read the entire book, then all they had to do was offer the till assistant £3.49 and the book was theirs.

Yes, it felt weird.

Would all these readers of my words conjure up within their minds the same images I had when I wrote them? Would they catch the nuances and the little jokes, would they feel the same love for these fictional people that I felt for them when I was documenting their adventures?

Well, no. Probably not.

Because, although writing is a form of telepathy (if I describe a box using words on paper to conjure an image of that box in your mind when you read those words on the other side of the world a couple of years later – yep that’s telepathy) it’s a faulty form of telepathy at best. Because what an author does with fiction is attempt to sketch in the images and let the reader’s imagination run free to fill in their own details. If I tried to take a mental photograph of the scenes and the characters in the book, capturing every tiny detail, well that would just kill the story.

So I sketch in the broader picture of the novel’s story and scenes and characters, except sketch is the wrong word because it makes it sound as though writing a novel is easy. There we go, a few pencil marks here, a few brush strokes there, and it’s done.

Oh, if only. Writing a novel is hard work, but at the end of the day when the book is in the reader’s hands, it has to look like anything but hard work. It has to look effortless, like a sketch.

And then everyone who comes to it takes their own interpretation of it away with them.

So there I am in a busy supermarket reading little snippets of a book I wrote all alone in my cellar, knowing that no one, no one at all, is ever going to understand or appreciate that book the way I do.

Every single one of them will read it a little differently.

It’s that whole potato potahto thing again I suppose.

The post You say potato appeared first on Ken Preston.

Growing up is Hard to do

I took Thing One to see a band last Saturday night. Elvana, who are, according to themselves, ‘The World’s Finest Elvis Fronted Nirvana Tribute Band.’ And they were great.

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Thing One is thirteen, and this was his first ‘proper’ gig. Sure, we had all been to see Madness late last year, as Thing Two is obsessed with them. It was an arena type show and we sat up in the balcony. Madness were great, we thoroughly enjoyed their set.

But Elvana was more of a down and dirty gig. We stood at the front, the floor was sticky with beer, Elvana got down amongst the crowd more than once and there was some moshing.

Polite moshing, but still moshing.

It was one of those first time things for us. You know what I mean, when you have kids you tend to get excited about first time experiences with them. First time flying a kite, first time tasting chocolate, first time watching a Ray Harryhausen creature feature together. (Wait, is that last one just me?)

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When he was first born, everyone told us that cliche of how quickly he would grow up, and how we should treasure the moments we had with him.

Turned out the cliche was correct.

You see, I do miss him. I miss the little boy he once was, the toddler who loved Fireman Sam and dressing up as a pirate or a policeman or Spider-Man or a combination of all these and more until he morphed into some unknowable police/superhero/pirate creature that stalked our house uttering pronouncements such as “Yaargghhh!”

Yes, I miss that little boy.

Growing up is hard to do.

Not for him though, he’s having a great time.

No, I’m talking about me.

Wait a minute, you thought this post was all about Thing One, didn’t you? No, no, I’m talking about me. (I know, I know, I’m always talking about me, but it’s my blog so what are you going to do about it?)

I’m the one who finds growing up hard to do. Without actually telling you my age (but it involves a 3 and a 5 and you’d probably be best putting the larger number in front of the smaller one) I’ve got to a certain point in life where I’m thinking I should have got this growing up thing sorted by now. I’ve been around a fair old while, I’ve had my ups and downs, and I’ve seen a fair bit of stuff, some of it good enough that I wish I could take a mental photograph and capture it forever, and some of it bad enough that I wish I could take a mental eraser to my mind and scrub it from my head, but I still don’t feel like I’ve finished growing up yet.

When I was a child I used to look at the adults around me and think, won’t it be great when I’m an adult because adults have everything sorted and it’s all good.

I got that one wrong, didn’t I?

When I was a teenager I’d got to the point where I thought to myself, yeah, adults, they’re messed up for sure, but I’m not going down that same old road, I’m going to be better than that.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I got that one wrong too.

And it’s not like I think I’m the only one, the special little snowflake of screwed-upness amongst all the perfect people. They messed up and I messed up and I bet you haven’t got this growing up thing sorted yet, have you?

It makes me wonder sometimes, do we ever grow up?

I don’t know about you, but I still feel the same inside as I did when I was a kid. Maybe a little wiser, a little more battle hardened. But essentially the same person. Inside I don’t feel any older.

But then I look in the mirror on a morning and I recoil in horror at the aged beast staring back at me, and I think . . . actually, maybe we should just leave that there.

But I still don’t feel like I’ve grown up. Growing up seems like the final destination, or a gateway between two important states of life, between childhood and adulthood. But when I find myself yelling nonsense words with Thing Two as we jump up and down and wave our hands at each other, as I was doing last night, I have to think to myself, when exactly did I cross that line between childhood and adulthood? Has it even happened yet?

Maybe part of having grown up is going out to work and providing for my family?

No. I go out to work because I have to, much like my children go to school because they have to.

Maybe it’s because I have serious conversations about serious matters?

But then I catch my boys doing that too.

Maybe it’s because I can watch 18 certificate films?

But 18 is just a number, isn’t it?

No, I’ve decided, I haven’t grown up yet and I’m not sure I ever will.

Growing up is too hard to do.

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I think I Kind of Love Stan Lee

I think I kind of love Stan Lee.

I think I love him like a father, and a role model, for the inspiration he has always given me to write and to draw.

I think I love him because he’s ninety-four years old now, and that’s just amazing in and of itself, but I love him even more because Stan Lee is ninety-four and he’s still being Stan Lee.

I think I love Stan Lee because of his humour and his permanent good cheer, because of how he radiates positivity at all times.

And I think I love Stan Lee for all the cameo appearances he makes in movies based on characters he created or had a hand in creating. Whenever I watch a Marvel movie with my boys we play the game of looking out for Stan Lee. “There he is!” one of us will shout, and point.

But most of all I probably love Stan because he created Spider-Man.

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Peter Parker, AKA Spider-Man, AKA Spidey, AKA the Wall Crawler, AKA the Web Slinger, (ok, I’ll stop there) was a constant companion for much of my childhood and my teens and, probably, quite a large part of my twenties too.

It wasn’t the proportionate strength of a spider, or his spider sense or spider speed that attracted me to him.

Neither was it the fact that he could stick to walls whilst dressed up in a skin tight red and black costume, or that he could hitch rides across Manhattan by crouching (spider-like, of course) on top of a city bus.

Nor was it the fact that Peter Parker was obviously a science genius, being able to invent a serum that sprayed out either as a broad web to catch thieves (just like flies!) or as a thick rope to swing from between New York’s skyscrapers. He could even deposit a gloop of this spider serum on a wall and stick a bad guy to it, all wrapped up in webbing as a present for the cops.

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Oh, and did I mention this webbing/sticky glue/thick rope to swing from dissolved after an unspecified amount of time? At least that was the answer one perceptive child reader got for his question in the letters pages about why New York City wasn’t littered with webs hanging everywhere. Or maybe it was an adult reader.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes, Spider-Man, my constant companion. Or rather, it was Peter Parker who was my constant companion.

Because Peter was the one I identified with. The nerd, the geek, the outcast. The kid without the girlfriend, but a secret crush on the popular girl. The kid who was bullied. Laughed at. Called names.

Yeah, I identified with Peter Parker.

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But Spider-Man was the one I wished I could be.

This was where Stan was clever. Not for him a superhero who is secretly a squillionaire, (inherited of course) or an alien pretending to be human (by wearing a pair of glasses!). No, Stan made his superheroes human.

The Thing, tortured by his appearance. (When you look like a bunch of rocks piled on top of each other there’s not much chance of romance really, except, of course, if your girlfriend happens to be blind.) The Avengers, the original dysfunctional super group, (boy, could they argue!) Daredevil, blind as a bat. Iron Man, secret billionaire philanthropist and genius inventor trapped within his suit forever as it is the one thing keeping his dodgy ticker…um…ticking.

Stan’s heroes had flaws. That’s what made them great.

And Spider-Man? Well, not only did he have flaws, but he was kid for crying out loud! A teenager!

Orphaned, too.

(The importance of that last sentence just occurred to me as I wrote it. You see, most of the leading men and women in my fiction are orphans of one sort or another. This is a subtext to my fiction that I noticed some years ago, and there’s a reason it’s there, but that’s for another post. But it came to me just now, Peter Parker was an orphan and maybe that was another reason I identified with him.

Not that I was an orphan, you understand.

Not really.

Anyway, back to Stan.)

Stan Lee created characters I could identify with, and isn’t that half the battle when it comes to writing a story? I never did care much for Superman or Batman (except, in the right hands, Batman had a certain dark, Gothic element to him which I enjoyed) and I never read the Beano or the Dandy.

But I couldn’t get enough of Spider-Man, because I was living his life too. Or rather, Peter Parker’s life.

If only I’d had the proportionate strength, speed and agility of a spider.

Except, in my mind I did have those things. In my head I was a superhero, capable of incredible feats of bravery and strength.

And because of that I really think Spider-Man helped me get through my childhood, my teens, and yes, even my twenties.

Thank you Stan.

I think I kind of love you.

The post I think I Kind of Love Stan Lee appeared first on Ken Preston.

What’s the point?

Or, to be a little more specific, what’s the point of life?

All right, I know, it’s Sunday, and you’re already dreading the Monday morning rush hour commute, the inbox stuffed full of work emails and that ‘to do’ list that’s longer than the rush hour commute was.

But bear with me, okay?

I know, it’s a difficult question to answer, isn’t it? And, let’s be honest, one usually asked at the end of a long night of hard drinking when the party has finally died and there’s just you and your best mate left at a table littered with empty glasses and swimming in a pool of alcohol.

No?

Okay, maybe that’s just me then.

But, despite all that , I’m going to ask the question anyway.

What’s the point of life?

Not life in general, you understand, but you’re life.

You, here. Right now. Reading this.

Is it to have fun? Be a responsible parent? Is it your job, perhaps? To give to others?

Maybe your life doesn’t have a point, or a purpose to it?

Hmm, I can sense you’re starting to feel a little uncomfortable at this point. Perhaps you came back to this blog today expecting another ridiculous account of how I accidentally showed my two boys a totally age inappropriate movie. (On a side note here, I showed Matthew The Taking of Pelham 123, the original 1974 film of course, and it was bloody wonderful, just how I remembered it and Matthew loved it too.)

All right, let’s turn this around then.

What’s the point of my life?

That’s not an easy question to answer, and for me, and I suspect most people, the answer is a multi-faceted one. I didn’t want this post to turn into a mission statement, so as I have been writing it I have been thinking about how I could summarise my long, multi-faceted answer into a smart, snappy sentence.

As it turns out I failed. But I do have an answer (or three) for you.

Here we go then:

To be in the moment as much as possible. Whether I am with family, friends, alone writing, speaking at an event, even doing something unpleasant, I intend to be there, immersed in that moment of my life.
To connect with others. Through my presence (so no more scrolling through the newsfeed on my phone whilst talking to someone) and through my writing. Will I leave a legacy of my work behind me after I die? Who knows. But I know I can touch people with my work right now as I write and publish it, and that’s enough for me.
And finally, to create. Sometimes I will hear the comment, ‘Oh, you’re so clever writing all those books. I wish I was creative like you.’ To which I always reply, ‘But you are creative. You should do something. Write, paint, draw, compose music, write poetry, sculpt, anything.’ Because we are all creative beings, every single one of us.

So there it is, my rather inelegant summary of the purpose of my life:

To be in the moment, because the moment is all we really have.

To connect with others, and isn’t that easier to do now than at any other time in the history of the world?

To create, to make physical, to bring to life my imagination.

So, come on then, I’ve done my bit. Now it’s your turn.

What’s the point?

The post What’s the point? appeared first on Ken Preston.

Sex, Drugs and Nudity – It’s a family affair

So, Saturday night we decided as a family to sit down and watch a film together. I decided I would choose the film.

There were two reasons for this, the most important obviously being that, as the resident film obsessive, I was the one most qualified to choose which film we should watch. And secondly, and almost as important, that meant there would be no opportunity for my two boys to argue between themselves over what to watch.

You might think I’m being dictatorial here, and yes you’re right. But if you had been through the horror of my boys arguing over screen entertainment you’d understand. I’ve sat there with them before now and watched them discuss the merits of film A over film B (which mostly consisted of ‘No, I don’t want to watch that’) until it got so late that there was no time to watch a full length film at all.

So, after much scrolling through Amazon Video on Demand I settled on Airplane. Nobody else in the house had seen it, and it was decades since I last saw it, but I was pretty sure it was a safe bet.

Well, turns out I was right and I was wrong.

What I thought was a family friendly comedy turned out to include full frontal female nudity (a close up of a pair of breasts being jiggled at the camera), drug taking, and simulated sex with a blow up doll. To be fair my boys have already seen a sex doll in an episode of Fawlty Towers, but still.

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What was our response as parents to this parade of debauchery flowing past our children’s eyes? We laughed out loud of course, along with the kids.

And it proved to be educational in places too. When Jack asked me what Lloyd Bridges was up to I told him “Sniffing glue. It’s bad, don’t do it.”

To which his response was, “Okay.”

Fair enough.

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The simulated sex act with Otto the inflatable automatic pilot left me speechless though. To be honest, that was because I was laughing too hard to actually speak.

I know what you’re thinking. How could I let my children watch all this?

Here’s the thing, Amazon listed the film as a PG. I’m pretty sure the scene with Otto would lift it to a 12, and the drug taking to a 15.

We had to pause the film about halfway through whilst my wife took a toilet break. The boys demanded I recheck the rating, so I went onto IMDB on my phone and, sure enough, it was rated 15. “Don’t telly Mummy!” the boys hissed as we heard her coming back down the stairs. “We want to watch the rest!”

So yes, we watched the whole thing and we had a good laugh. A really good laugh. And I’m okay with it.

And so is my other half, even after I told her the truth about Airplane’s BBFC rating.

It was silly, it was fun, and the boys haven’t been corrupted in any way.

(By the way, I rechecked the listing on Amazon Video on Demand, and found that my eyes had not deceived me and that they had listed it as a PG. I might actually contact them and point out their mistake. If I can stop laughing first though.)

Anyway, Airplane Two, next?

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Psst! Wannabuy a secondhand book?

Hey! Psst!

Wanna buy a second hand book?

Actually, they’re not second hand, they are first hand still.

But the Joe Coffin books are now sporting a brand new look (see yesterday’s post here) and I still have some stock left of the old covers.

So, if you fancy a bargain, a signed paperback at that, head on over to my shop and bag yourself a cheap read.

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You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover

As Bo Diddley once sang, “You can’t judge a book by the cover,” (and if you don’t believe me, here he is…)

But, to be honest, we all do it. I’m generally persuaded to check out a book further only if I am first intrigued enough by the cover, or the title. Then I might check out the blurb, maybe even take a peek inside to sample the actual writing. And then, when I’m finally persuaded that this bound collection of words, lines, paragraphs and chapters, claiming to tell a story that will hold my attention and entertain me, is something I should invest my hard earned cash in, I usually put it back on the shelf with the intention of coming back another time and checking it out again. Yes, it’s the old adage that your prospect needs to be exposed to your product or service at least seven times before they even think about taking action.

Anyway, back to covers (and the point of this post, if I ever get there). The first Joe Coffin book entered the world in all its gory glory over two years ago, and the second followed a year later. We’re now up to Season Three, and I thought it was about high time they sported a new look. In fact, I’d never been fully happy with the violent, gory covers they sported up until now, fearing that they would put potential book buyers off.

(I still love the meat hook cover though.)

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For this new round of book covers I wanted a specific identity, and a more abstract theme running through the series.

So here we are, Joe Coffin Seasons One to Three, in their brand new, spiffy clothes.

Take a good look, and let me know what you think.

In fact, if you could look at them seven times, that would be great…

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And, as you may have noticed, I’m offering the complete set of the first three seasons for sale through my website shop. So, after you’ve taken those seven looks, you might want to click on the ‘BUY’ button.

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