P.J. MacNamara's Blog, page 3

My Musical Heroes, and How They Influenced My Books

Over the last week I have endeavoured to contact all the people on my book's lengthy dedication page, via Facebook, to let them know they got a mention. Actually a select few of them got more than just a mention on that page, but no spoilers, okay?

I said "endeavoured" because I have met with varying degrees of success. Where there is an option to "message" I have tried that, in some cases several times, always attaching the photo I'm showing you again for convenience here. Sometimes it all goes perfectly first time. Other times the text goes but the photo seems to get stuck in some kind of limbo. My apologies to those of you I've hassled several times on two separate days with this. I just didn't want you to think I'd forgotten you. Where there is no option to "message" but there IS an option to "post" (and I'm allowed to actually use it!) I have done that.

By one means or the other I have at least TRIED to get a message through to everyone on the list that's still alive. Unfortunately some people clearly do not wish to be contacted, and I can understand that, but I wanted you all to know that I did my best. Those I have been unable to make any headway with (in no particular order) are as follows: BOB DYLAN, ELTON JOHN, GARY NUMAN, ABBA (altogether and one at a time), DIANA ROSS and ANDY PARTRIDGE. I had trouble also with both JONI MITCHELL and GRACE SLICK, and I'm not sure what degree of success I achieved. I'm hoping that covers everyone.

Obviously I would be over the moon if any of you luminaries bought my book and enjoyed it and told your friends how great it was, but I'm not so mercenary or so cynical as to make that my prime concern. I simply wanted you all to know that I love you. As you can see from lower down the page, so many of the people I love are no longer with us, and it saddens me to think that I never got the chance to tell them so, or to give anything back to them in return. I would not have been able to rest easy if I had not taken this golden opportunity to express my deep appreciation now.

I'm not a musician, but I did flirt with the idea for a while. Between 1985 and 1987 I taught myself some guitar chords and took some piano lessons and did some singing, and I ultimately managed to knock out about 30 songs which I recorded onto cassette tapes; many years later I copied all the best ones onto a CD I still have somewhere.

By the end of 1985 I had been through the works of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes, ELO, the Small Faces and some other greats already, and I'd developed a passion for The Who and The Kinks and Bob Dylan and Jefferson Airplane. So it was that a lot of my best songs sounded like I was trying to be Pete Townshend or Ray Davies or Stevie Marriott, or even Paul Kantner, on occasion. It wasn't intentional. I just seemed to have received something from them by osmosis and I couldn't shake it off.

Anyway, circumstances conspired against my fledgling musical career. I left home and got a flat with a couple of friends in the May of 1986, and from that point on it got more and more difficult to make any kind of noise without the professional baby-makers downstairs complaining that I'd woken one of their children up. I wrote my last song in February 1987, I think.

I did some further flirting with the guitar at a more advanced level in around 1999 but I realised at that point that the problems I'd caused to my hands by doing some stupid things as a schoolboy were preventing me from pulling off all but the most elementary bar chords. I successfully worked my way through SIX tutor books before I came to a hurdle I just couldn't get over. I was trying to learn the same piece for about two months and in the end I had to call it quits. Slowly, over the next year or so, I lost interest, and although I still have that nice guitar (and the amp), and I still have the old acoustic I wrote all those early songs on too, they just sit around gathering dust year on year.

I don't think I was cut out to be a musician. Fate has made me a great music lover, and a writer that doesn't really read much. I'm not entirely sure where my ideas come from more often than not. Stuff just pops into my head as if from nowhere. It always has. But I am frequently inspired by music. And I don't mean just by lyrics. Sometimes it's instrumental music. It's long, spellbinding passages from "Wish You Were Here" (Pink Floyd), "Close To The Edge" (Yes), or "Five Miles Out" (Mike Oldfield). Sometimes it's Debussy, Ravel. Or even Buddy Guy.

I think that just about covers what I came for. Please don't forget that I have TWO Facebook pages Facebook page. The "MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA" page is principally devoted to my book and topics related to it. My other, MAIN page, is a lot more diverse it its remit. When I've something to say about music or films or TV or Dr Who or astrology or card collecting or whatever else captures my imagination in the moment I'll probably be saying it on that other page. I hope to see you on there soon.

I spent a lot of my day today on YOUTUBE, revisiting some of those songs that have inspired my work over the last 30 years or so. As so many pieces in "MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA" were directly inspired by music, (they were gathered together in the series' first book deliberately,) I thought you may just be interested to see for yourselves the wide variety of music that can get my creative juices flowing. Clicking this "PJ MacNamara" link will enable you to share in some of the musical revelations that brought a whole series of books into being:

https://www.facebook.com/pj.macnamara.1/

The links to get your copy of PJ MacNamara's "MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA" remain the same.

Out 10th December.

UK
https://www.austinmacauley.com/author...

USA / Rest Of The World https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08...

Introducing The Seven Sisters Of Landmark Tower, Et Al

My "KILLING TIME Legacy Series" books have a truly international flavour, and the first book in the series, MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA, is no exception. The so-called Seven Sisters are not sisters at all, they are wives. The wives of a mysterious, wealthy dictator, a puppet-master, an obsessive. A man who hides behind a proxy. They came from all over the world, from all walks of life to be with him and do his work. Galina is from Ukraine. Ying Li is from China. Dagmar is from Switzerland. Sumitra is from India. Margaret is from Great Britain. Rhiannon is from Australia. And my leading lady, Maria, is from Brazil. They do secret work. Dangerous work. They have gathered together for their own safety on the top three floors of Landmark Tower, Yokohama, under the protection of their husband, a man known only as Fuji, the wondrous child born of the mountain. They don't get out much. But you may have seen them in your dreams.

There are many strong women in this internationally flavoured series. We have the Americans, Helen Curtis and Roxanne Crossley. We have the Lebanese twins Faridah and Nahwal. And of course we have Mary Rose Travers. She starts out as Maria's pen name, but she doesn't stay that way. She's an Irish poet. She lives in a quaint cottage on the coast of County Clare. Or at least she used to. She's completely out of control. The last time I saw her she was a dancer of sorts. A dabbler in all things sinister. An African-American from New Orleans.

Of course we have men too. There is Ralf, from Germany. Pablo from Argentina. Dido from Columbia. Mustafa from Turkey. Mohammad Aslam from Pakistan. Lars from Norway. Kurt from Zimbabwe. Johnny Cats Eyes from Canada. Rashid from India. Brad and Mitch and Leroy and Jake and Jesus . . . well, you can probably guess where they're all from (it's a big country). Also we have three Chinese men. And a Russian sailor. But they prefer to remain anonymous. As for Jammac, the Warrior-King of the Sea . . . that's him on the front of the book . . . well he's just a statue of a great man now, but the silver he's made of was proven to have been mined in Mexico. And how could I forget Rankashaar, the Tiger Man of Indonesia. My leading man, and my namesake, Peter, like me, hails from the northwest of England, and so does his friend Simon. You'll meet them first. In "Special Occasions". At the Brookhouse Hotel. Fallowfield. Manchester. On Christmas Eve 1973. In a dream . . .


Out 10th December 2020

PJ MacNamara's "MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA" is available to pre-order RIGHT NOW from quality booksellers throughout the English-speaking world

UK
https://www.austinmacauley.com/author...

USA / Rest Of The World https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08...

Ars Gratia Artis

I don't want to frighten away any potential readers, but one of the many things I have tried to do with my writing is challenge the writer's mindset and the prose market's status quo, get beyond tired old concepts of story, setting and character, blur the boundaries, take on the taboos, bring what I find out on the outer limits back into the mainstream. To me, writing is an art, and just like any other artform it needs to grow and evolve. I think we have been stuck in our repetitive ruts too long and we need new ideas and new directions to elevate our art to new levels. Dickens was truly great, but the Victorian Age is over. Not everything has to make perfect sense. Not everything needs to be explained because the reader has an imagination that can fill in the gaps. The past, the present and the future don't always have to be in the right order. Not all loose ends need to be tied up. We are doing too much dumbing down. We are getting too desperate to sell books, and that desperation gives us tunnel vision, deprives us of our potential, stifles our originality. I don't want to be in a world where one book is much the same as another. We are not sausage factory workers. We are artists. We are the voices of our time.

Illiteracy Among Authors

As is the case with many, many thousands of other authors, it occurred to me recently to search for other authors on Facebook. Not anybody in particular, just other bottom feeders, newly published, about to be published or still desperately hoping they might get published at some point. I found a number of groups on there that you had to be a writer to join. I applied and four of them accepted me. I don't like to be cruel or judgemental but I very soon realised they were little more than support groups for (mostly) published authors who were telling sob stories and desperately seeking any kind of exposure or assistance in publicising the books they have published that refuse to catch the public's eye. These people simply cannot sell any books and they are all on there basically either consoling each other or trying to shout louder than the next guy about how great their own book is and why theirs ought to be the one you should buy. But the sad fact is that everyone is on there for the same reason. Everyone wants to sell more books, and they all join those groups with that objective in mind, but nobody seems to be achieving that objective because all the members are writers that are competing against each other for the attention of readers who are simply not there.

I've only been in those groups for a few days. I have responded to other people's posts when I thought I could help or had an interesting point to make, but all but one of my own posts have simply vanished into a bottomless pit without even being noticed. There are several posts (from all over the world) every minute, and it's easy for an individual voice to be lost in the cacophony. I will probably resign from those groups soon because I don't think I will ever get anything out of them beyond what I already have, which is an acute awareness of just how hard it is to sell books, how desperate authors can get to be noticed, and yet again, how very different I seem to be from my contemporaries.

I don't mean to either brag or show anybody up, and I know that a lot of people posting on those sites are not natives of the UK. We all have different standards, I suppose. But the general standard of English used by authors in those groups is absolutely APPALLING! Maybe it's just me, but the one thing you need to have to be a writer if you ask me is a good command of The Queen's English as we would probably call it here in the UK. You are in those groups representing yourself, your work as an author, and even your art itself. Do you want to look like a buffoon? An imbecile? A wannabee? If you think the (mostly mythical) potential readers you are exposing your work to will be impressed by your woeful punctuation, misspelling, and poor grammar, your textspeak, lol-ing, gr8s, and so on, you are very much mistaken. As soon as I see that sort of thing from somebody purporting to be a published author I know I am not going to want to read any of their books EVER. Believe it!

There is a lot of talk on those groups about how "ESSENTIAL!" it is to have a professional editor go over your work before you submit it to a publisher or an agent. HOGWASH! I did all my own editing. ALL OF IT! I would pit my knowledge of correct English usage against anybody's. On the rare occasion there was something I wasn't quite sure about I asked my production coordinator at the publishers, my go-to guy, and he was a positive mine of information on such matters. At the end of the day, if you paid any attention at school when they were trying to teach you how to read and write in your own language, you DON'T need to pay an editor. What you do need to do if you want to make a success of this writing business is NOT make an embarrassing public spectacle of yourself on social media and prove to potential readers that you're not a pathetic nincompoop. I rest my case.

What's that COVER BLURB all about?!

It's very hard to know what to put on the back of your book (or even the front of it, for that matter). As soon as I was asked for something to put on the back (in a publisher questionnaire shortly after my MS was accepted in April 2019), something flashed into my head and I just went with it out of gut instinct. It seemed perfect at the time. It said exactly what I wanted to say. It was intriguing, it set a particular tone, and it gave very little away, which was exactly what I was looking for on the day. With hindsight now I'm not entirely sure what I put is going to attract people in sufficient numbers. I didn't want to mention reincarnation or karma. I didn't want to mention fate, destiny or free will. I didn't want to mention astrology, new age or esoteric sciences. I didn't want to mention love or romance. I didn't want to mention Doctor Who or card collecting (which really have nothing to do with it anyway apart from being two of my other interests). I certainly didn't want to mention the fact that some of the book's contents were thirty years old. I didn't want to mention any of those things in case it might put off potential readers. And then I realised that what I DID end up putting on the back of the book might put a lot of people off too, because they may infer the book is arty and highbrow, inaccessible, and possibly even beyond their comprehension. It's really very entertaining and understandable by almost everybody that can read and at some point I realised that I really needed to get that across, so when I hit upon the idea of running an (expensive) ad campaign on Facebook I came up with a punchy headline and I deliberately avoided everything I'd said on the cover. It's a great ad, I think. But back to that cover blurb...

The headline, "Egotist Circumvents Time-Traveller Principle!" is the title of a piece I wrote in around 2003 that is not actually included in the first book. I think at the moment it's scheduled for inclusion in book three of the series, but don't quote me on that. It wasn't a mistake or anything. I think this is made quite clear on Page 56 of MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA, but just in case it slips by anyone unnoticed I thought it wise to mention it here as well.

In A Category Of My Own

I'm just realising what I can actually do here on Goodreads. It's really quite refreshing in its options, much more so than the other sites I'm on. Just now I discovered I had to turn on the "ask the author" facility, which is part of the reason I registered on here. Instantly, the Goodreads robot fired a series of unanswerable questions at me. I'm assuming these must be among the most frequently asked. Well I'm sorry, but in my case you guys are going to have to be a whole lot more inventive. My answers to all those questions were something like "No", "I don't", "Not applicable", "Who cares about that?", "Hey, that's private!", or "Who am I to tell other people what they should do?!"

It was once said by a fairly well known author I'm afraid I can't remember, that writers are generally pretty weird folk in one way or another, and that the weirdest kind of writers are poets. Even other writers think poets are weird. Instead of being two steps away from the stereotypical "ordinary person", as most writers are, they are about five steps away. Please excuse my dreadful paraphrasing, but that's where I'm coming from. I started out as a poet, and for the first five years (1983-88) I was writing I wrote nothing at all apart from poems and songs (which for me at least were a whole different ballgame,) with but one exception. I only moved beyond that field briefly because I rediscovered my childhood love of Doctor Who through another fan who had written a (rejected) script for the show. I read it and I thought "That's a good idea", so in the summer of 1986 I wrote my own, "The Eye Of The Storm". That was my introduction to the idea of the "Full Length MS" as the Demigods in their ivory towers refer to large scale projects. It was mid-1989 before I attempted anything so lengthy again (on that occasion a surreal and occasionally horrific short novel I called "Remember Helen Latham...?" which was in fact heavily inspired by some of my own poetry).

More than three decades later I still think of myself as a poet even though I haven't written a poem since 1988. I have always had my own unique way of approaching the "work" of writing, and at the moment I'm not really writing anything. I don't think of myself as a writer anymore. I have always had many interests and pastimes, and writing is currently on the backburner. I feel like the custodian of a great legacy with the work on my plate right now. Because most of what I'm working with is drawn from my huge unpublished back catalogue and a lot of it is very old, I don't even feel like the same person that wrote a lot of it. It's often hard for me to remember how I felt or what I was driving at all those years ago. The person who might have been able to answer a lot of your more run of the mill questions just isn't around anymore. I'm a different person at 54 to the person I was when I was 25 or 40 or any other age. I have evolved. But the work of those other people I used to be remains the same. Some of it I actually find quite embarrassing now, though at the time I wrote it I thought it was awesome, so I'm sincerely hoping that somebody who hasn't been around it forever and grown disenchanted with it like I have might think that too.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that if you're going to ask me a question you need to be creative with it. It needs to be tailor-made for the situation I find myself in if you're expecting an answer of more than four words. When you've actually read my book it will be very plain to you what kind of questions I will be willing and able to answer.

If I were you I wouldn't ask any questions that begin with "What did you mean when you said...." because for me, part of the art of writing is leaving the right things open to interpretation and invoking the audience's imagination. Don't ask me to fill in the gaps. You're supposed to be doing that yourselves.

Social Media Presence(s)

Hello there. If you're reading this you must have read my book, or you're at least thinking about reading it. This is a unique snippet of text you won't find anywhere else (I rarely duplicate anything).

When my book was originally accepted for publication it was called "Enigma Variations", and I only changed it to avoid confusion because another author had put out a book under that title a couple of years earlier. That's all explained at length in the Foreword, but those of you keen to find out exactly what the book is ABOUT before purchasing might find it useful to know it now. In text and on video I have discussed the book's themes and objectives and history and its layout and what categories it ought to be filed under but I suppose I might be accused of being enigmatic, perhaps even evasive as to the actual content. The fact is, the book is Hellish difficult to pigeonhole and highly resistant to rational explanation. In the sense that the journey itself is the goal, what the book is actually ABOUT isn't really that important and you're going to have to trust me on that. It's not a novel or a collection of short stories. Some of it is non-fiction. It's also non-linear, and form is favoured over content. It's entertaining, but it's kind of artistic too. Perhaps when you've read it YOU will be able to tell ME what you think it's about, but my guess is that you'll love it so much you won't care about that anymore.

I probably won't be contributing to this site very much, but I will be checking in here regularly to look at your comments and respond to any questions. You can also find me at AMAZON AUTHOR CENTRAL doing pretty much the same thing. I already have a sizeable presence on YOUTUBE which I am growing on a daily basis, and my general HQ is to be found on FACEBOOK. I have had a rather neglected personal BLOG I've pretty much abandoned too, and that can be found at the link below. Direct links to all my "Social Media Presences" can be found on my FACEBOOK page, but I'm fairly easy to search for anyway and you shouldn't have any difficulty. I really hope you enjoy the book because I have four more in the series pretty much ready to go if and when there is a real demand for them. My best wishes to you and yours for Christmas and the New Year. PJM.

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