Tom Clempson's Blog, page 7
June 10, 2012
On This Day… 1 Year Ago
A few weeks too late for Mental Health Awareness Week, but still worth a read.
Never forget.
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June 4, 2012
Last Week’s Tweets
What does it MEAN????
http://t.co/ERJPQWWb #
My blog has stopped feeding into FB and I don't know how to fix it! #
Thank you for the #ff @WeFancyBooks @Sunflower26 @GoldenAgeofGeek #
Yeah!!!
RT“@cupcakes4clara: @myredwellies @tomclempson Absolutely! He's a complete sweetheart
” #Why won't the baby sleep?! I've tried EVERYTHING! Milk, a car ride, lullabies, putting colanders on our heads… http://t.co/vFBNYjHO #
Rhianna. Please ignore @ZMarriott I #
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June 2, 2012
Book Birthday!
Quick! Before today is over, and since I forgot to celebrate my first blogaversary, and my Twitter birthday, I have to just blow one of those noisy party-horn things and throw a streamer onto my head, because today is my book birthday!
I have officially been a published author for 1 year now, and I still feel just as pretentious every time someone asks ‘what do you do?’ and I reply (in the most pretentious way possible), ’I'm a published author don’t you know!’ But it has been an amazing writery year, which still doesn’t feel quite real to me, but in which I have learnt a lot of stuff and things. Here are a few of those things…
1. The novelty of receiving positive comments on your work NEVER wears thin.
2. The fear of receiving bad reviews is nowhere near as horrible as you’d think.
3. The worry of having your next work rejected is amplified SO MUCH once you’ve been published.
4. I am still very poor.
5. I have no set way in which I go about writing a book. Yet.
6. I am an unreliable blogger.
7. There are people out there who blog about books. And amongst those people are people who blog about Y.A. books. And they do video blogs (vlogs) and reviews and giveaways and interviews and they are dedicated and passionate and entertaining and there are literally THOUSANDS of them and I had no idea any of this existed before!
8. As an author (someone who sits in a room, all alone, without talking to anyone other than the made-up people inside their heads, day after day) you are expected to pretend to be normal and talk in front of hundreds of people at festivals and schools and stuff!
9. My brain is completely incapable of processing the fact that thousands of strangers have read my book. (Yet 99% of my friends and colleagues have not! Arse-faces).
10. Different people will read your book in different ways, and they all pick up on different things, and react differently, and ask about details of your book that you copletely forgot you wrote!
Thank you for reading my book/blog/both and don’t forget to pick up a party bag before you go home. Big hugs! (unless you’re weird and creepy, in which case just have an uncomfortabel handshake and an awkward farewell).
Related posts:Book Birthday Recap
Writing Stuff Part 2: The Plan
The Big Blog Giveaway!
May 30, 2012
When You Don’t Even Know The Title of Your Own Book
Back in January I blogged about One Seriously Messed-Up Week being translated into German – what will the cover look like? What will Gruff-nuggets translate as? And, most intriguingly, what the hell will the title be?!
A couple of kind Twitter folk came up with their best translations in the German language, but I can now reveal the official cover AND the official German title! (We’ll have to wait until the German publication date to find out what the Gruff-nuggets thing is though).
So, here it is…
I’m not too sure what the illustrations are about, but that’s not the issue here. What I want to know is what does ‘Warum diese Woche völlig in die Hose ging’ mean???
I typed it into Google Translate, and according to that it means – ‘Why did this week was totally in my pants’
AWESOME!
But probably not quite correct.
So I typed it into freetranslation.com and got ‘Why this week went totally into the pair of pants’ which seems to make a tiny bit more sense, but still doesn’t sound quite right. My third and final attempt was at webtranslation.com where I got the slightly less weird – ‘Why this week completely went to the trousers’, which almost seems to make sense, (and is pretty close to what I’m thinking of naming my Jack Samsonite sequel!), so I’ll settle for that. Does anyone know if this is correct? Is something ‘going to the pants’ a phrase in Germany? If so, why don’t we have it here?! That’s much better than saying something has ‘gone to the dogs’!
If you’re deperate to know what the German terms for ‘nob-ache’, ‘Gruff-nuggets’ and ‘Chin-tickler’ are, then you can preorder your copy at Amazon.de or The Book Depository, or any other online seller of German trouser literature.
‘Warum diese Woche völlig in die Hose ging’ is available to buy from July 23rd, and is published by Random House, Germany.
Related posts:How Did I Forget???!!!
May 28, 2012
May 25, 2012
Reluctant Readers, Really?
I’ve been a naughty boy. It has been 7 weeks since my last blog post (at least0! I have written some posts in that time, but the gap seemed so large that I scrapped them because I felt I had to come back with something a little bit bigger than my usual crap, so I’ve gone ahead and written something that I’ve wanted to write about for months now.
Reluctant Readers.
When I wrote One Seriously Messed-Up Week… I had no idea I was writing for reluctant readers. I had no idea I was writing for young adults, that I was writing for boys, or that I was even writing a book really (or at least a book that anyone was ever going to read). The term ‘reluctant reader’ was completely new to me, but the sad thing is – I didn’t need it explaining. In a world* where girls continually outshine the boys academically, it seems depressingly obvious that boys should also be the ones who don’t read for fun.
Okay, when I say “boys” I’m obviously talking in a very broad and generalised term. We all know plenty of boys who love reading just as much as (if not more than) their female peers. But unfortunately, in broad and general numbers, teenage boys do read a lot less than teenage girls. I would love to be fully educated on the matter, know all the facts, figures, and statistics, but, me being me, decided that would take ages, so I’ll pick it all up on the way (and we wonder why boys don’t bother with books! Could it be sheer laziness?)
My aim here is to start some kind of discussion (and yes, I am aware that my blogging absence may have lead to a sharp drop in my already limited blog-reader numbers, which may result in me having this discussion with no one else but myself, but I’m okay with that). I come across a lot of people (sometimes teen boys, but more often than not it’s their mums) who congratulate me on writing something that they/their son has actually picked up and read. The mums then go on to explain how they managed to get their son to actually open the book in the first place (usually using some kind of reverse psychology trickery, or just by simply leaving the book lying around until curiosity gets the better of them, they read the first word, then they disappear to their bedroom to giggle about rude things in private). THIS is the part that really interests me.
Are you a reluctant reader? Did you used to be? Do you know one? Or, like me, are you a very eager reader, but rarely get the chance to actually commit to anything (due to either lack of time or crapness of book)? If so, what would/did/does finally get you/them to pick up a book?
It makes sense that people who already read will continue to do so. But how do you draw in the ones who aren’t bothered? And why would they be bothered when there are so many other alternatives to entertain them? Internet, movies, gaming, sports, TV… Don’t books just seem a bit slow and hard work in comparison? What’s the selling point?
I’d love to hear your ideas on this, not because I’m a publicity hungry, money-craving author, desperate to know how to sell more books (if I was then surely I’d drop what I currently do and start writing dark romance/dystopia for girls, NOT that people who do write those genres are! Just… oh, you know what I mean) but because this is a genuine interest to me. It’s a problem that I want to solve, an itch that I need to scratch. It’s almost becoming my hobby, thinking about this.
So, please, how would you suggest we get reluctant readers to pick up a book (and read it)?
*not the whole world, but most of it.
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May 21, 2012
Last Week’s Tweets
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May 14, 2012
Last Week’s Tweets
Things are a bit quiet at work today, so I snuck out to write book four (you know, for kids!) #
Why is it that healthy food just doesn't fill me up?! #
Why is it that whenever I'm worried about offending someone by saying 'bummer' I always choose to say 'bugger' instead? #
Ooh! Ooh! Look where me and @cupcakes4clara are! http://t.co/34fTG6L5 #
I'm not a huge fan of stand-up comedy but we saw Jerry Seinfeld live at Manchester yesterday and laughed until I cried. Lots! #
Related posts:Last Week’s Tweets
Last Week’s Tweets
Last Week’s Tweets
May 7, 2012
Last Week’s Tweets
It would appear that he also activated my @ReadIt_andLaugh account on my phone! (It was supposed to be a @tomclempson tweet) #
I spent MONTHS struggling not to tweet about the horrible weather, and now… my battle is over! #writingundertrees http://t.co/ufUkLJTj #
Just suffered a momentary glitch in my writing-geniusness when I forgot what the letter Q looks like. #
Sent Draft 2 of Jack Samsonite 2 to editor yesterday… 100 pages lighter than draft 1! #
I'm watching a woodpecker pecking wood! I've never seen this in real life before! Strangely exciting. #
"an elephant seahorse" according to my 3yr old http://t.co/X2nkk6ez #
Related posts:Last Week’s Tweets
Last Week’s Tweets
April 30, 2012
Last Week’s Tweets
Related posts:How to be a Genuine Superhero
