Andrew Shanahan's Blog, page 3

Wake Up Hun, New Author Headshots Dropped

If you felt a great disturbance in the force recently, it was because I had a photo session to take new author headshots. These were done by the divine Jenny Lynn Photography who had previously had the great pleasure of photographing my objectively more-attractive wife. Clearly, Jenn had to work harder to craft the raw clay of my face into something non-crab like. I was going to shoot a behind-the-scenes doc of the day, but it went mostly like this:

It’s something of a shame that authors - people who choose to meet the world through the printed word - have to have headshots. Can’t we just vividly describe ourselves? Do we force models to send out a short story every time they want to promote themselves? No. And that’s because we live in an hotocracy. Pretty privilege exists and if you look at the best-sellers over time you’ll notice that now more than ever, authors seem to be getting hotter. Gone are the days when authors with faces like a nuzzled pork scratching such as Dostoevsky, Kafka, Woolf and King could ride high in the sales charts.

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As visual mediums like social media (hey! Follow me!) become the default way to market books, it’s imperative that authors not only know how to smile for the camera, but that they don’t break the lens when they do so. Consequently, less facially-blessed authors are having to work harder and we’re left lamenting how deeply unfair it is that authors like Mandel, Whitehead, Williams and Maas get a headstart on this sort of stuff. I mean look at them - CALL YOURSELF A WRITER?

Anyway, enough griping. Here’s what Jenn came up with:

Yikes, you’ll be pleased to know that I don’t rock a headshot on any of my books.

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Read the first chapter of B of the Bang

B of the Bang is available to buy as an ebook, paperback or hardback from 1/11/24 (11/1/24) - Amazon link. This is the first chapter. If you enjoy it please do consider sharing this post on social media as that makes a huge difference to how many people get to read it. Thank you.

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PROLOGUE – NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS!

Angelina Bird was fucked if she was going to let Etienne Lemoine fuck her like this. Some botoxed Frog who couldn’t even finish half his shoe of absinthe at Davos? She was supposed to let that plastic-grinned croissant explode a dirty bomb in her fucking London? Her family was London. Her Dad. Her Nan. They owned the jewellery shops. The office buildings. The flimsy little flats. The Birds had been at it for centuries; they were more than…the thought exploded unfinished in a froth of rage.

What did he think this would do to rents? Who wanted to live in Chernobyl-by-Thames?

She had to take a second to let the fury pass through her.

She breathed deeply in the drizzly air of the grey, moist London morning. It all felt very Monday. The damp spattered against her face as she bent over and the water coalesced on the tip of her nose. She blew the droplets away with purpose and clamped the leg brace around her right thigh and clicked the buckle into place. This was going to mash these tights right up, but that was just more motivation for kicking Lemoine in his head until her Gucci was ankle-deep in the pulp. But she had to escape first. She clamped the left leg brace on, straightened up, and toggled the engine’s jets. She felt the thrust immediately as a band of vibration across her back and down her arms. Woah, Daddy!

“Madam! Please! There’s no access to the roof up here, you need to come down!”

Bird was vaguely aware of a security guard walking towards her, past the pipes and vents that punctuated the roof of the building.

“Piss off,” she replied, while checking the monitors on her wrist display. Fuel wasn’t optimal, but it would be enough to get her to the outskirts of London in the little time she had been given, and that was really all that mattered. She should have let her Nan know, but there wasn’t really time. Lots of things wouldn’t matter after today.

“Madam, now we don’t want there to be any trouble here, do we?”

Bird remembered the guard and finally looked at the man, who was now five metres away. White polyester shirt. Black polyester trousers. Shiny patent leather shoes. Give him a run up and the right carpet and he could power the building single-handedly. There were weird epaulettes on his shoulder with two thin stripes of gold braid, like he’d been promoted. From what to what? A turd with one gold stripe to a turd with two gold stripes? Had his family gone out to dinner when he’d got the second gold braid? Bird recoiled; the man’s teeth could have had their own documentary series. Non-playing characters like this infested her flats.

Lots of things wouldn’t matter after today.

She raised one of her arms towards the man, who stopped approaching and took a moment to take in the weird exoskeleton that the woman was encased in. It looked like something out of Transformers. As he gawped, Bird levelled both her arms at the guard and briefly cycled the engine, causing the air at the end of her arms to shimmer. A concussive blast of power struck the security guard and shoved him back against the safety rail. He struggled to right himself, but the jets were relentless. He felt himself scrambling for purchase on the wet roof; his shiny shoes failed to get any traction against the blast. He felt the railing fall away. Then all he could see was a constantly revolving view of the top of the building and, increasingly, the ground. A bus. A tree. A surprised dog. He thought about the sausage bap cooling on his desk. Then there was just the ground.

“Blame Lemoine,” Bird said over the railing.

She picked up the flight helmet at her feet and strapped it tight under her chin. She slung the hardshell briefcase across her front and felt a shiver of excitement about the value of what she was holding. Not just the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket that the case represented, but all of the diamonds nestled in the foam. Her Nan had always insisted that they had a stash of wealth “just in case” and everyone had nodded and gone along with it, but she’d been proven right. Bird couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after the fallout settled, but she knew that five billion in diamonds would still be a good start. Maybe she would hire a hitman to bring her Lemoine’s toes.

The head-up display on the helmet’s visor relayed the power and fuel levels of the engines and gave her an overlay of her GPS position. There was a warning symbol flashing at the bottom, cautioning her that she was in a built-up urban area and that all jetpack flights had to be approved with the relevant authorities. Bird looked at the London that prostrated itself at the feet of the building. She felt confident that the ‘relevant authorities’ would have more pressing concerns than someone using a jetpack. She looked at London again. What had possessed Lemoine? It would mean war. None of it made sense.

Bird crouched slightly, braced her core and thighs as she angled the engines towards the roof and gradually let the power from the jets build. Her feet rose onto tiptoes and then with more power squeezed from the triggers in her hands, just the toenails of her tiptoes were touching the building. Then she took to the sky - one metre, ten metres, one hundred metres. She rose beyond the communication aerials and cooling vents. She felt her body being buffeted by the gusts of cold, misty wind. She blinked repeatedly behind the visor and shook the droplets of water that gathered on her chin.

She’d flown across London in a helicopter countless times, but to fly under her own power was a novel experience. Even the section of the Thames that she could see through the low clouds looked less caustic from up here. As she glanced down, she could practically hear the Eastenders theme tune as the city itself dissolved and the satellite view of the capital took its place. She picked out the various districts and zones of London. She saw the tourist spots, the dangerous places, the centres of power, the places she owned.

It wasn’t beautiful exactly, but it was hers.

Yet somewhere down there, right now, radioactive material was billowing through the streets. She wondered where the bomb had gone off – she could see a few columns of smoke rising across the city and if she squinted, she thought she could see flashing lights, but that could be for anything. Bird tensed her core, repositioned the jets and watched the display showing her point towards the South, towards the promise of deliverance. As she spun through 180 degrees, she had a fraction of a second to see the giant black circle that burst through the cover of the clouds.

Her brain was just beginning to trace that the black circle was connected to a wing, and the wing to a fuselage, but by then she was at least two metres inside the engine, and in a flash her brain and body were ejected from the rear of the engine as a red, aerosolised mist. Angelina Bird was now only detectable as a faint metallic taste on the wind. Her hardshell case ricocheted around the blades of the engine, smashing it to pieces. The case’s contents were spun around and blasted out, following her remnants into the sky. There was a slamming noise and long streaks of fire and a guff of dark black smoke emerged from the jet. It briefly let out another mechanical shriek, and then the only noise was a descending whine.

Enjoy that? Go buy the book and find out what happens next!

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B of the Bang - now out 1/11/2024 (or 11/1/2024 if you're American).

Yeah, this one’s on me. I didn’t anticipate how long it takes to put all those letters in the right place and make sure the digital Gods haven’t switched all the Ls to %s. It’s a dark art typesetting and I wouldn’t want to rush it.

Full disclaimer, I’m pretty scared of Michelle who is typesetting the document, so when she gave me the option of putting the pub date back 3 days or she’d set my shed on fire*, I did as she told me. Thanks, Michelle!

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*She didn’t do that.**

** Please don’t set my shed on fire.

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B of the Bang Cover Reveal

Morning all, coming to you live from Tesco cafe in Oldham, I can exclusively bring you the final(ish) cover for B of the Bang. Scroll below and see what you think.

I'm particularly proud of the lobster as I coloured it in myself. This cover has had a long journey as we tried lots of things and nothing felt quite right. In the end it was only by upping the madness and levels of punk that it started to feel settled. It'll all make sense when you read the book, promise. And yes the Shutterstock watermark is intentional 😂

B of the Bang - new book out in October

I have a new book coming out in October. It's called B of the Bang, which is taken from the Linford Christie quotation, "I don't start the race on the bang of the starter's pistol, I start the race on the B of the Bang." He was talking about running fast, I'm talking about nuclear war and lobsters.

When B of the Bang is out it will be two years and three months since my last full novel, Flesh & Blood, was published. In that time I've mostly been writing B of the Bang, but I've also enjoyed putting out some short stories like I Want You To Write A Letter (which you can currently read for free on my Substack).

I can't wait for you to read it. It's funnier than my previous books I think and I hope it says something of value. If nothing else, I hope it will teach you all something about London sewers and the tensile limits of human skin.

You can pre-order the Kindle version of the book now by clicking here. Don't worry - that's a temporary cover for the pre-sale, I'm not crazy.

B of the Bang

It has a name! My new book, that is. It’s called B of the Bang and I’m cock-a-hoop about it. You should go and pre-order it now! As far as titles go I think it knocks Before and After and Flesh and Blood into a cocked hat. Sorry for all the cocks in this opening para by the way, I’m tired and my mind is straying. Perhaps I need a cocktail.

I knocked up a bad graphic to alert people to the arrival of both the name and the pre-order page (ebook only, Amazon doesn’t let you do paperback pre-orders, why? I know not). Anyway, the designer of the book was not amused. I think she’s worried that people will mistake my cock-ups for her art. She did give me 10/10 for the concept though, although interestingly she refused to mark the execution.

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And if she thought that was bad, take a look at the absolute horror show of a cover I mocked up for a pre-sale placeholder image. Honestly, I might try and find how to hide this behind a spoiler blur, because I think you should have to opt into this shite:

MY EYES!

Good Lord I hope that doesn’t get archived and I have it following me around until the day I die. Anyway. B of the Bang: it lives. It’s such a relief to have it out of my head and starting to seep out into the world like, well, like the evil little fart that it is.

If you can take one more piece of exciting news, my dog won prettiest bitch in our local dog show this afternoon. Then she one-upped herself by winning Best in Show, despite breaking out in stress dandruff when she entered the show ring. She’s the cock of the walk. Good girl!

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My New Book Is Out In Two Months

It’s happening people. This is not a drill. I have a new book out in two months. As you might expect at this point, I swing daily between delirious giddy expectation and bleak dog-kicking* depression. I sometimes wonder how people feel who do jobs where they don’t get this shit-merry-go-round experience from their 9-5. I suspect it’s probably pretty wonderful.

The new book is with a very small ARC reader team and they’ve (mostly) delivered their verdicts. I’m astoundingly grateful to these people because they help me to see the obvious flaws in what I’m doing and also, happily, point out the things that they think are working. That means I can write the third draft and get it out there. In two months.

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So, what can I tell you about the book? Well, let’s list some facts:

Ben and Brown are not in it. Sorry. Maybe we’ll find out what they’re up to down the road/river.

It is about the end of the world. Sort of.

It’s more purposefully comedic than anything I’ve done before. That means it should make you laugh, or at least snort a few huhhhs out of your nose, depending on how you laugh when reading. I’m a silent wry smile and head nod type of guy.

This book has ALL the content warnings. I mean, WTF, ewww, no - type shit. Seriously, there were a few times whilst writing this where I got that whole pre-barf super drool thing going on. I have no idea why I think and write about these things.

I have the first meeting with Yo tomorrow where we’ll discuss what elements of the book are going to make it onto the front cover. This is incredibly exciting because I’m a massive fan of Yo’s work - which is lucky really as we’ve been working together for decades now. I’m also excited because it’s one of those books that has a really obvious visual aspect to it. I’m also potentially going to fulfil my dream of having one of my books with a map in the front of it. Love a map in a book, who doesn’t?

As the patented and much-admired Shanahan Marketing Machine swings into action, spewing dust, cobwebs and health and safety warnings from its cogs and gears, you’ll be hearing from me a little bit more. Sorry about that. I might even ask you to do things, such as buy, read and review the book. Sorry about that too. Let’s just all agree to make the best of a bad bunch and it should all be over soon.

Final titbit** from the new book. Lots of you are in it - if you filled in I Will Literarily Kill You. Also, it’s set all over London - and I’ve been paying close attention to The Boys’ William Butcher’s School of Speaking Londonish, so everyone says FAAAAAKIN ‘ELLLL every other word.***

Speak soon.

*Of course I never kick my dog. But sometimes if I’m feeling really bleak I’ll stroke her against the fur grain. Then she bites me and balance is restored.

** Titbit is the British spelling, tidbit is the US. For clarity - the term comes from a Gloucestershire phrase “tyd bit” - meaning the tastiest morsel, reserved to be eaten and enjoyed last.

*** They don’t, that’s a lie. Incidentally - in Season 2, Episode 5 of The Boys, they showed someone making tea in a tea pot but they used a sound effect of a whistling old-timey kettle. That made me say FAAAAAAAKIN ‘ELLLLL and no mistake.

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I Want You To Write A Letter

Marla’s office is the small one at the end of the corridor. Just a room with a green oriental rug, two grey armchairs facing each other and a small desk off behind, near the window. On the same corridor there’s a charity that stopped trading years ago, but somehow inexplicably still keeps an office here, they’re never in of course. Then there’s the man with the folding bikes. He did a Kickstarter or something and the only thing you ever really see of him is when he goes to the kitchenette to fill the large pot he uses to brew the strong coffee. Then five or six times a day he’ll scurry to the toilet and return to his lair. Then there’s the office with the ceiling tiles that all fell in, which I think is waiting for the day that the landlord has enough money to fix it up. Then, at the end, there’s Marla.

Marla likes her office because if you’re really charitable, or an estate agent, you can say that it has a river view. It doesn’t matter to Marla that you can only see the river if you actually physically press your face to the windows (which don’t open), or that if you even do this then all you’ll see is a sorry, brown excuse for a river trudging by. That doesn’t matter to Marla. She says she can hear it and that running water is very important for a therapist because it carries the negative energy downstream. Don’t worry – Marla’s not a flake, she’s a good therapist, but she’s fully invested in this idea about energy. But she’s not a flake.

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Just outside Marla’s office are four plastic chairs grouped around a small coffee table, which has held the same copy of Elle since she started here. The magazine is picked up rarely but the quiz at the back has been filled in. Marla times her appointments so that there’s a good window between clients, you’d really have to be dawdling or keen to bump into another client. Marla knows that when it comes to therapists, people prefer anonymity, not just of her room, but of the building itself – it feels like it’s one of those liminal spaces that people only really remember when they think really hard about it. For a therapist that’s good. If they needed to her clients can tell people they bump into outside the building that they were calling in on the charity, or buying a folding bike. Oh, is there a therapist up there too? Huh, I never knew.

Marla tries to treat the people she sees as individuals, she really does. But it would be wrong not to accept the truth that there are patterns. As a therapist, you have to try and fight that instinct to see the patterns and make judgements accordingly. Marla’s phrase to herself is that she needs to leave room to be surprised. One truth about therapy though is that people never really come when they’re well. “I’d like to pre-emptively protect my mental health,” is not a sentence that Marla hears much in her working life. Her clients tend to come around when the shit is already working its way deep into the mechanisms of the fan. “I need to deal with my mental health,” is more the shape and size of things. “I’ve not been feeling very positive.” So, the first part of the pattern is that you can see that there is an inciting incident. He lost his job and it all went downhill from there. She had a baby and it’s never been the same since. They haven’t been the same since the accident/divorce/issue with the fence. There’s usually a spark.

The other thing that’s apparent if you sat where Marla does and saw the things she sees, is that the people tend to fit into a type. They have their inciting point and they have their shared characteristics. For lots of people it’s simply that they refuse to see the obvious problem. “But, of course, you’re gay,” Marla has nearly said on a number of occasions. “You are clinically depressed,” is another thing that remarkably few people realise about themselves. “You should kill your mother,” Marla would like to say that more too, but she doesn’t.

“My mother said that she thought my new job was adequate for my sort of person, what do you think that means?”

“Your mother is a narcissist and you could enter into an ill-fated series of therapy sessions and conversations with her, but ultimately it would be simpler, cheaper and probably better all round if you killed her.”

Marla didn’t say that, but she’d like to sometimes.

Then there are the treatment options. Often just listening is the majority of what Marla does. She hears the people and for the hour that she is with them she breathes and is calm and she really listens. She listens professionally. She notes things. She rarely makes notes these days because she’s perfected the art of listening and remembering – but sometimes she does. She remembers these things so that she can point out things to her clients.

“And of course Devon would be important to you because of the link with your father.”

“My father?”

“Didn’t you say you spread his ashes there?”

“Oh yeah, we did. Do you think that’s important here?”

People are not good listeners by nature and it’s getting worse. Try listening to someone while you’re also trying to complete that day’s Wordle – it looks like it ends -TIC? Sorry did you say something about hitting someone with the car?

Marla likes her job. She’s good at her job. In-between sessions she presses the side of her face to the window and looks at the sliver of river she has access to. She blows out three good breaths and mists up the glass. The energy from that session goes downstream. She never really thinks about what is being delivered to her from upstream.

What Marla doesn’t like about her job can be summed up in seven words.

“I want you to write a letter…”

She hates this part of her job because it always feels cheap. Like she’s pretending to be a therapist in a film. The writing a letter schtick is infuriating. It infuriates Marla, not because it doesn’t work, but because it does. With about 95% of her clients it proves to be one of the most effective interventions that she can do, other than being there, listening, remembering and using her brain.

“A letter about what?”

“I want you to write a letter to your father/mother/uncle/abuser/teacher and I want you to be honest in that letter. I want you to bring it to our next session. During that session we can read through it together, or we can talk about the process of writing the letter, that’s up to you – but I want you to write the letter.”

“I’m no good at writing.”

“It doesn’t matter – this is a letter that’s for you. It’s more important for you to get the feelings down on paper and to build some distance and objectivity from those feelings. Does that make sense?”

Of course, it always makes sense because people have seen this schtick in movies before. Marla hates that it works.

When they come to the next session, they usually seem brighter. Their shoulders are less slumped, the wattage of their smile has increased slightly, their eyes shine a little more. In their hand, or pocket, or bag they have a letter. Some of them are already in the envelope. Some of them are scrawled on line paper. Some are the work of amazing penmanship on blue, fragrant paper. Most are typed. Then they read the letter to Marla and talk about how it felt. They often cry and their voices catch as they do it. Marla gives them time. Gives them space to say these things. It’s rare that people fail in the task and if they do it then it’s rarer still that it doesn’t help. There’s just something primal about the power of trapping these feelings that have been sticking in their ribs, gumming up their lips for so long. It hslps to put these things into words and stick them to a page. Even reading and participating in the process makes Marla feel better – curse it.

At the end of the session Marla gives the client an envelope and a stamp. Together they write down the address of the person who its direct at and they put a stamp in the corner. Marla then opens up an old mail sack that she took from the charity’s room and asks the client to imagine that they were going to the post box and they were going to actually deliver this letter. How would they feel if that was the case? Some of them shake. Others are happy, sometimes deliriously so. They cram that letter into the sack and stand up with pep in their step and glide in their stride. Damn it, Marla thinks – it’s worked again. When the client has gone, she drags the sack into the corner of her room and folds over the mouth. In many ways that sack represents her legacy – hundreds of clients that she has worked things through with – not all of them were successes, but the letters nearly always helped.

Sometimes, like now, a client will cancel their session and Marla will walk over to the gym, or sometimes she’ll drag the sack over to her desk and she’ll lucky dip her hand into the sack and pluck out a letter. She can always remember the client, often she can remember the writing. The looped, cartoonish letters of Malcolm telling his long-dead mother that he was not gay, despite her being convinced that he was and disappointed that he wouldn’t live a fabulous and gay life. Sintha wracked with guilt at the loss of her baby, and laser-like fury with her husband for making her have the abortion. Marla holds them to her chest and then puts the letters back into the sack. She sometimes thinks that in the pantheon of great therapists her name might not be etched on a marble statue, but she is proud of what she has achieved at the end of her long corridor with its sliver of river and bag of letters.

Marla has very little notice that she’s dying. There’s a thump in her chest, which she thinks might be because she’s recently switched to almond milk in her tea and it gives her indigestion. She taps her breastbone to try and burp, but nothing comes up. There is a wash of heat that passes from one side of her chest to another. She coughs slightly and feels some discomfort. She thinks - maybe I pulled a muscle when I went to the gym earlier? And that’s it. Marla’s heart stops beating and she pants and her face strains and goes red and then she breathes out for the final time. It looks like we’ve come to the end of our session.

The next client knocks on the door an hour later. Marla has never been late for a session before. She always opens the door dead on the minute of their session. So, it’s a surprise when there’s no welcome. Jess taps at the door and gingerly opens it a crack.

“Hello Marla? It’s Jess,” she calls, suddenly getting a pre-sentiment that all is not as it should be.

“Marla?”

Jess sees Marla slumped over in her chair and she utters, “Oh God, Marla!” and then routine swings into action. The ambulance is called. Jess tries CPR but it’s academic at this point, Marla is far, far away at this point. The paramedics don’t even bother when they arrive, just note the time of death. Her body is lifted onto a gurney and wheeled with care and some difficulty down the stairs. She is loaded into the ambulance and transported to hospital, where she is housed in the morgue, with five other people – mostly older people, all dead. The police attend Marla’s office and liaise with the shocked landlord to make sure her room is locked up.

“Wasn’t she only in her fifties?”

“Forty-eight,” the policeman replies.

“God, that’s no age is it?”

“No.”

The landlord to his credit takes at least an hour before he starts to think about clearing out her room and advertising the office. It’s bound to be in demand because it has a river view. Just need to make sure that it’s not known that she died in the actual office. That’s fine, there’s nothing that can’t be glossed over, or given a little spin to make it more palatable. It’s sad, she was a good therapist by all accounts. There’s no justice in this life is there?

To make himself feel better he takes the sack of mail that she had to the post box himself. He wonders why she has all these letters, but only in passing. Not enough to wonder if she wanted them posting. He reaches into the sack, over and over and brings out handfuls of letters and crams them through the slot. Then it’s done. He lights a cigarette and takes himself for a pint. It’s important to seize the day isn’t it? He says to the bar woman. Carpe diem, because you never know what’s in store for you and when your entire life might get flipped on its head.

**********

Thanks for reading.

I don’t know about you but I cannot wait to see this as a Netflix series. Each week it’s one of Marla’s letters dropping onto the doormat of another person whose life is about to change irrevocably. If you know anyone at Netflix then maybe give them a nudge.

I have to give thanks to my own therapist who I recently went through this process with. She wasn’t even annoyed when I told her that I killed her (literarily), which I think is a healthy state of affairs.

I hope you’re well.

Shan x

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The Pros and Cons of Doing A Kickstarter

In my last post, I put out a poll to try and help me decide on something I’ve been hemming and hawing on since it first occurred to me. Namely, should I consider doing a Kickstarter for the next book (FYI I’m still on track for my predicted July deadline). The response was emphatic:

Mind you, I say it was emphatic, but being a doomy, gloomy type, I look at that result and start thinking - how many people is 3% of 37? (EDIT: of course I had to Google it, it turns out that it’s 1.11 people. For reference, if you are that 0.11 of a person, please get to a medical facility as a matter of extreme urgency).

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So, that’s interesting. 35.89ish people would back a Kickstarter for my next book. Huh.

Kickwhat?

By the way, for anyone new to the word of Kickstarters, the craic is that it’s a platform where creators can pitch a project and it lives or dies on the basis of whether enough normal folk actually put their money behind it. So, let’s say I was looking for supporters to rally behind the next book. I might put together a campaign page for “SHAN NEW BOOK”**, I’d do a pitch video of me awkwardly staring just off-centre of the camera and explain what this new book is about.

Here’s a good example of a campaign for a book.

A pro pitching Me looking natural on camera

You then add in loads of info about the book, the background, etc and then decide on a series of Rewards/Perks. Basically, this is what supporters can opt to buy in order to “back” the campaign. Here are the ones from the La Vie de Guinevere campaign (holy shit, hardcovers in America are expensive).

In some regards, it seems like a Kickstarter mostly functions as a way of getting some PR for pre-sales, but I’m sure there’s more to it than that. Plus it would be cool to create some of this merch for the new book, which already has a strong visual identity.

So, as to my previous hemming and hawing - what are the hems and what are the haws?

Hems and Haws***

Good stuff:

Money for me! I sell books for a living, so I think this would be sensible.

Give early adopter types (that’s you if you’re signed up to this Substack) a chance to get some one-off swag that wouldn’t ever be available again. That’s pretty cool, right?

Get organised. I’d need to have sorted the print options/covers/book pitch before I did a Kickstarter, so I quite like the idea that it would mean I’ve got a lot of things figured out before the book goes live.

Community. This is the biggest one for me. If I could get 35.89 people on board and excited about the book before it launched, then that really helps to give the book a headstart and early momentum. Book marketing is generally like Conan turning the Wheel of Pain in that it’s pretty tough to get going and eventually a ginger lad with a sword comes and buys you. So, if we could form a gang around the book, all wearing our cool branded Denim Jackets*, then that would be a good thing. At least until the ginger bloke comes and buys us.

Virality! If the book hits its funding target, then you get to say cool things like, “Yeah, the book just hit 344% of its funding goal”. If you play it right that can pique interest.

Bad stuff:

It’s a lot of work. The corollary to the earlier point about it being good that you have to get yourself organised is that you have to get yourself organised. So I’d need to get organised with what sort of artwork, etc I needed.

Fucking things up. We must never discount this as a possibility, for while I’m widely acknowledged to be one of the most brilliant people on earth, I do occasionally kick the heel off my shoe just as I’m walking into Parliament to make a speech and have to limp/try and get people with guns to fix my shoe. i.e. I sometimes fuck things up. I really wouldn’t want to start off this new book by pissing off 35.89 people.

Blahblahism - is Kickstarting a book a bit old hat? Is there a new cooler thing that I might not yet have heard about? Would it be cool to just sell the swag without the rigmarole of doing a Kickstarter?

Going to the post office. I’d need to do that a lot and ours is run by vicious folk who scare me. I’m not sure that counts though as the awfulness of the Post Office is offset by its proximity to an excellent cake shop.

Thinking of great rewards - but maybe you can help with that? [INSERT IDEA STEALING POLL HERE.]

Any other ideas for rewards throw them in the comments!

So, there you have it. A whistle-stop tour of my brain when it comes to this issue. I’m relatively sure I’m going to do it, but I thought it was important to think the thing through.

Thanks for listening/reading.

** Working title

*I’m not really thinking of doing branded Denim Jackets. Unless…?

*** Don’t ask me why the footnotes in this post are so out of whack. Anyway - hemming and hawing comes from hemis - which is an imitative of throat clearing and haw-haw, an impression of what upper-class English folks sound like when they laugh. Apparently.

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To Plot or to Pants? How Do You Write?

Full disclosure, I’m not entirely sure this post’s title is a rhetorical question - on any given day of the week, most writers I know aren’t entirely sure how they do what they do, regardless of whether they’re a plotter or a pantser.

After writing as a job for my entire adult life, the only firm conclusion that I’ve reached is that how you write is a question of sitting still for long enough so that the circulation stops below the L1 vertebra of the spine. My guess is that the resultant constriction sends blood and stuff (Goo? Juice? Chi?) to your creative brain and the rest follows semi-naturally. I will offer a caveat here, that despite what I say when I meet someone at a party, I’m not a doctor.

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The main reason for this post is because I’m inordinately proud of having done this:

What is this blurry monstrosity, you might well ask. Well, it’s my next book and it’s possibly also the reason why I won’t get my security deposit back from the office I’m renting. But the more important thing is that it’s a visual representation of what I’m doing. It’s a map for the mind. A mind map, if you will (TM). And, gloriously, as I finish a chapter I get to strike down that piece of paper with the swipe of a red felt-tip pen and shudder with joy. This is how I write, by plotting it all out in great detail and then (mostly) following through with that plan, aside from the occasions when I realise that it would all be much better if my main character was a woman instead of a man, and even better still if they were a crab instead of a man.*

I frequently discuss the plotter vs pantser pathway with my 10-year-old niece, Sophie. She is a writer too and a die-hard pantser, so she can’t quite understand why I go to all the bother of figuring out what happens at every level of the book. For her, the enjoyment is the discovery as she creates. Her strategy is to draw the cover of the book and then decide whether she likes it enough to warrant writing the story. Sometimes that means that she might only get a few pages into a story (annoyingly, because I then want to read what happened next!) But other times it means she enjoys the ride of figuring things out as they happen. Just the thought of doing that without a mind map, in-depth character profiles and an entire wall of reference photos makes me sweat.

That said, check out some of her covers and tell me you wouldn’t read them!

Amazing, huh? Anyway, despite the fact that her covers are outrageously good, she’s wrong. Plotting is the only way to keep things sane and it’s how I write.

My other point to today’s rather rambling post, was that I’m pondering about the idea of doing a Kickstarter for the next book. I’ve been inspired by other indie authors who have run really inventive campaigns. As I see it, the real advantage is that it gives my existing readers an exclusive opportunity to get the book and some one-off merchandise before it goes live on Amazon, which despite its reach is a really drab platform. I don’t know, I thought I’d throw it out to you, if I ran a Kickstarter would you back it?

Feel free to add a comment below if you’ve seen any great Kickstarter campaigns, or if you’ve got any ideas for the sort of perks that readers actually want to get (aside from the book, I think that’s a given).

Write soon.

*I was recently introduced to the concept of carcinisation. Namely, the fact that evolution seems to want to turn everything into a crab. TL,DR we’re going to need to take a long hard look at the design of the laptop keyboard.

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