Dylan Malik Orchard's Blog, page 32

Laikanist Times

And there, on the hill, stood a shoddy figure. Oddly resplendent in the tattered remains of a dog costume they pointed nervously to the sky and let out an almighty roar. Their words echoed across the barren landscape and they were ‘LAIKANIST TIMES, THEY COME!’ And the world did tremble… - First book of Laika.

An acid test, unfortunately without the acid. An experiment with no fixed goal or purpose. A novella released just to see what would happen.

I’ve decided to unleash Laikanist Times, my new novella on Amazon. Crashed America is still on its way but as a precursor I wanted to test the online waters and see how things go. Somehow that’s easier to do with 35,000 words and talking animals than something full length.

To mark the occasion I’ve made it available for free until midnight this Sunday (16th of March) so grab it while you can because after that it’ll be back to the low low low price of £1.53. Which is a bit of an odd number but that’s VAT for you.

The biggest issue with releasing anything, from music to novels to art is getting the word out there. Very bad things can flourish because the people behind them are excellent at marketing and very good things can fail because they’re not so I’ll throw out a universal plea for you to share it, if you like it. Or even if you don’t. Every new reader is a blessing and sends me into raptures of joy – at some point I’ll probably even start talking in tongues if it gets around enough.

I’ll be spamming the hell out of the internet for the next few weeks to try and get the word out so expect to hear a lot more but for now here’s the link – have at it…

LAIKANIST TIMES

Laikanist Times is the story of one planet divided by a few million years and a fistful of species divides. While the Bald Chimps are seeing apparitions and finding God (or possibly Dog) the dogs are indulging in some quantum meddling and the humans? Well, they had their time.

Rex the Bulldog sets out to change the world, for better or worse, Gdunk the Chimp aims for the stars, Yessa aims to be left alone and Raeget and Kaisabosen aim for, well, something probably. All alongside a host of characters including the good, the bad and the ugly with Jinx and the Four-Leggers, the Laikanists, the Whippet Brotherhood and the Great Salmonists each doing their best to ignore what they need to and find what they want. And all the while Laika the Space Dog is doing something, or not, depending on your point of view.

Laikanist Times is a strange and surrealist parable on the wonders and woes of religion, science, belief and talking animals. As the first novella from Dylan Malik Orchard it’s less a declaration of intent and more a declaration of confusion. With the answers to none of your questions and a slew of doubts to introduce. Humour, farce, satire, sloths and Sci-Fi are mixed together in a heady literary brew*.

*’heady literary brew’ may or may not actually mean anything.

Ukraine and Venezuela, a political twofer

Inbetween bouts of furious scribbling for my next novella I wandered out to find a few hundred Venezualan protestors shouting about Maduro and pushing my Spanish beyond it’s meagre limits. Which in true procrastinating style send me off on a flurry of Googling in search of some truth on what’s happening in Chavez’s old haunt but also in the Ukraine, where the media seems to be spinning out a similarly questionable narrative. Anyway, a few thoughts and some links I found interesting for those who’re trying to get themselves some learnin’ on both situations.

……………….

Ironic really for a self avowed supporter of revolutionary activity but the enthusiasm for any and all protests from some people is getting to me. Maduro in Venezuela may be ineffectual (or not, I know too little to judge) but he is democratically elected for what that’s worth and the protestors are largely the same middle class conservatives who were against Chavez. They’re supported by the same external interests and their disdain for Socialism is the same. Just because they happen to be opposing the state it doesn’t grant them any inherent value or mandate to demand change. Nor is their use of violence any less objectionable than the state’s, especially given that from what I can see their motives are largely self serving and centred on the protection of their own interests. They have no plan or desire to deal with crime in poor areas or to alleviate the economic suffering of the Venezuelan working class, which are the core issues Maduro can be called out on.

Same with the Ukraine, EU and US cheer leading protestors whose dominant block is made up of far right nutters, such as Svoboda and declaring it a victory for democracy whilst ignoring the fact that the both the EU and US are solely in it to dick around with gas supplies and subordinate the Ukraine to their interests. Also conveniently forgotten is the fact that a huge swathe of the country is ethnically Russian and that whilst Putin is a bastard his desire to rule the Ukraine by proxy (for reasons of defence and gas pipelines) is more or less identical to the West’s. Feels all too similar to Syria with foreign interests making proxy power plays with blithely simplistic liberal rhetoric declaring that when ten or more people gather together to attack a regime they don’t like it must be the will of the people speaking. Protest stripped of complexity and reduced to a black and white narrative where choosing sides is as easy as picking the one Russia doesn’t like. And all the while Western protest movements, like Occupy prior to it’s bizarre descent into a monetized consultancy, are still advertised as reckless anarchists out to destroy civilization.

I still can’t say much about either situation internally (although I’m slowly reaching some small conclusions) but from the outside world’s response I think it’s fair enough to say there’s something deeply fucked up going on. We’re being dragged into conflicts which aren’t being adequately or honestly reported with propaganda which only the most hypocritical of states can use without feeling ashamed of itself and to ends which there are no reason to view as desirable. Genius of it is that there’s not even a firm position to protest from here, beyond shouting ‘shut up and let’s talk about what the hell’s going on’, which doesn’t really flow well on a banner.

Links of interest:

On Venezuela (sorry for the paucity, Ukraine took over my searching):

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_V...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisf...

On Ukraine:

Anarchists could benefit from reading something printed after 1920 but interesting nonetheless, in a bombastic sort of way. http://libcom.org/news/statement-situ...

http://www.ibtimes.com/euromaidan-dar...

Mostly from the East I think, with it’s large ethnic Russian population. http://m.thomhartmann.com/forum/2014/...

Somewhat simplistic in it’s assumptions about the left but… http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.co....

‘Glory to Heroes’ seems to have been accepted fairly unquestioningly as a slogan by portions of the mainstream media but it’s not a new one… http://www.nst.com.my/world/upa-contr...

Russia Today, so be skeptical. Worth noting Hague tweeting about IMF packages though, the death knell for any notion of ‘independence’ coming from EU allignment… http://rt.com/news/ukraine-opposition...

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/wap...

More on potential IMF bailouts. Suggests that Ukraine can be owned by Russia or the IMF. Rock and a hard place, never mind the rise of the right or the undoubted politicking the EU, US and Russia will indulge in when/if it comes to anything approaching a real election  http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/...

She was heckled during her first speech, hardly the face of freedom despite what certain front pages may be saying. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europ...

http://pando.com/2014/02/24/everythin...

And as I’m writing this there’s stuff coming out about Tymoshenko telling protestors not to leave the barricades and generally inciting them to keep on trucking. Which given the nationalist language that a fair few are using is sure to fill those more alligned with Russia, ethnically and economically, with a strong sense of unease given the history at play here. It’s hard to see any of this ending well, it’s also hard to see the Ukraine ending up in the EU but it’s relatively easy to see things escalating into something considerably worse. And even if they do end up joining it’ll only be the beginning given how reliant the East of the country especially is on Russian money, which you can guarantee would disappear overnight. Unless of course the talk of secession comes to something, in which case fuck knows how far things will go.

e2a: Will be updating this with new articles as and when they appear.

Mr Loop – Things from the Other Place

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr Loop – Things from the Other Place 

Ever since I first heard Music From the Tannhauser Gate I’ve been something of a Mr Loop fan boy. As a producer he’s very good, with a knack for picking out the right sample and the right beat for the right moment. So far so good. But even better, as a collaborator he’s absolutely f’kin brilliant. Consistently working with the best guys from subculture of UK Hip Hop which defines itself not quite by being ‘conscious’, with all the frequent claims to pretension and smugness that has, but by being smart, honest and witty. With the end result being a body of work which mixes easy honesty, occasionally malevolent humour and smart rhymes which work on their own terms without desperately trying to impress.

On Things from the Other Place I’d hold up ‘Barfly’ as the stand out track, with Mark from the Zoo renewing his relationship from ZooLoop with Mr Loop. Albeit with a slightly more light-hearted approach to the trials and tribulations of solo drinking than that album possessed with it’s inclination towards the dark side. Although there’s no difference in the depth of the feeling related from one to the other. And even in it’s more meandering moments there’s an abundance of quality lyrics here. It’s just very well made, which is what you’d expect from something with the Loop name on it really.

You can download Things from the Other Place over at BandCamp on a pick your price sort of deal – so for anything from free to a fortune. As with all such releases though showing some love boosts the odds of more appearing in the future and of keeping the flame of good music alive in times to come.

The End of Earth

“Well, someone had to say it.”

Those were the last words spoken as the last few remnants of the human race passed into the silent oblivion of death as the non-corporeal yet strangely expansionist alien force surged into their bunker beneath the ancient stronghold of London. London, of all cities, had survived that far less because of its strategic importance or financial wealth and more because a man in Peckham had, some 50 years earlier, started ‘digging for victory’ in his allotment. Creating, single handed, a vast system of tunnels deep enough beneath the earth to keep the then ageing digger and his nearest, dearest and most pressing neighbours. Their survival had been short lived though, the aliens having wiped out the entire human population of the planet in somewhat less than ten minutes. The chimps, however, survived – as did a great many of Terra’s native beings who appeared to enjoy either greater grace or greater use in the sensual faculties of the invaders. Indeed the only non-human extinction experienced during the few minutes of the annihilation wasn’t at the hands of the strangers from space but at the hands of a student from Delaware, USA, who managed to tread on the last specimen of a very, very rare insect species. It’s to be noted, however that the student, a young man of 20 years, felt genuinely bad for the minute and a half that remained to his life, beating himself up for an act of immediate, inevitable and yet wholly intentional violence that made no sense even fractions of a second after it occurred. The aliens noticed that, using certain mind reading tools available to them, but the man’s remorse was deemed irrelevant, their reasons for genocide being rather more to do with their accidentally spreading a virus that they attracted, an impressively unfortunate coincidence which seemed unlikely enough to be ignored by all parties involved.

The last humans were wiped out and their history and culture generously recorded by the non-corporeal beings, who were if nothing else sympathetic to the fate of their matter-bound brethren, they also recorded the most recently extinct insects culture and history, although they conceded that was marginally duller than the humans copy but no where near as intriguing as the vast back catalog of creative, political and cultural concepts and ideas explained to them by the Sloths who, apparently, had been thinking very deeply up in their trees.

A few billion years passed before anything recognisable to the long gone humans as civilization appeared on earth. Left to their own devices, free of overt alien influences, the dogs had done the largest chunk of evolving – first blossoming into consciously associating tribes before going on to form global empires and wondrous space faring parties of adventurers, the first of whom was shocked and impressed to find Laika, the Soviet space dog floating around in an eternal and untouchable orbit trapped in her steel tomb. They concluded, not unreasonably, that any ancient civilization on their home planet was surely founded by their doggy ancestors, primitive though they seemed to the scientists surveying their remains. It was a belief which pushed the canine masses around the globe to ever greater conquests and colonisations around the galaxy, although they came to a final sticky end as, once again, those non-corporeal aliens passed through carrying yet another improbable virus, this time wiping out pretty much all matter based life in the region, whose histories and cultures were then suitably recorded. The few survivors that there were moved to another galaxy, cursing the name of those formless bastards who’d killed everybody and ultimately founded a whole religious system based on the denial of the abstract and a fervent hatred of anything that threatened to be non-corporeal. They got wiped out by a load of fundamentalist Philosophers who held no truck with denials of higher realities.

Why you lie?

Before I left on this trek across these here United States of America I was full of excitable hype for the release of Crashed America. And then it didn’t happen, because I’m an unreliable bastard. Well, partially because I’m an unreliable bastard at least.

In the few days before I left I was putting a lot of hours into making the final edits, trying to get things as right as I could get them and as the clock counted down I felt that gnawing lack of certainty rising up inside me. I won’t say there was anything objective to it, the novel as it stands is what it is and from most who’ve read it, my much messed around editor included, I’ve heard some pretty good things. But the closer you get to a thing the harder it gets to recognise. Paranoia and self-doubt set in and I found myself struggling to finish off something which I was half-convinced was terrible. A belief which, with a few thousand miles between me and my desk, I can see for the self-created crisis of faith that it was. Not that a hefty dose of hindsight makes the failure to make decisions at the time any better of course.

Anyway, now I’ve had some time away from it, completely away from it that is, haven’t looked at Crashed America in at least a month, and my sanity has slowly started to return to me. When I get back I’ll read it through with as much objective distance as I can muster, decide on its value and go from there. Hopefully I’ll be able to regain that love that I once had and follow through on my plans to release it, because while I’m the worst person to judge it others who I’ve got plenty of time for have a very different view of things from mine.

And on the plus side my travels have actually proven quite productive, albeit not in the way I first thought they would be. I’ve finished the first draft of a novella, which after editing will definitely be released. I’ve written a huge amount of poetry, which is a bit of a guilty habit of mine but that too will be making an appearance around the place and I’ve generally enjoyed the wandering life. Lots of good people, some bad, some adventures and some misadventures and all the perspective that life lived on Greyhound buses can give you. Which is quite a lot when compared to the daily routine of life in one place.

So when I get back at the start of March big things are due and it’s about damn time too.

Always Judge a Book by it’s Cover

Front cover

Back Cover (pending sleeve notes)

Courtesy of Dave ‘The Artist’ Vigor here are the front and back covers for the upcoming Crashed America, due for a – er- ‘soft’ release on the 13th of January (Monday!).

In a triumph of poor planning, disorganisation and good, old fashioned, fuck-up-covering ‘artistic temprament’ I’m still making the final changes to the book and frenziedly trying to deal with formatting and getting it on-line – all before I follow the lead character and board a plane for the USA myself on Monday morning.

I’ll be posting here as regularly as I can from the road as well as promoting the book at every opportunity, which I’ll appreciate any and all help with (so share everything!)

For now though it’s time to get back to going cross eyed staring at the screen.

A Machine

The sign might have been meaningless, she thought. She’d spent two days wandering this time – her furiously focused marching leading her miles away from the machine before fear, or guilt or something had forced her to turn back. Now, as she made her way across the last few hundred metres of gravelly wasteland that separated her from home, or rather from the machine, she could almost feel herself shaking with relief.

It was in exactly the same state as she had left it. Exactly the same state she’d first found it in in fact. There was, she dimly realised, no reason why it shouldn’t be but as the only responsible there was a definite comfort in re-asserting that certainty.

The machine stood about twenty-foot tall, the one feature in an expanse of flatness so vast that even glancing towards the horizon brought on bouts of confused dizziness. She knew there were hills and mountains somewhere out there. Once upon a time she’d crossed them in fact, before finding the machine.

She struggled to remember why she’d come so far. The fact of her journey had long since been detached from the feelings of it. She must have had her reasons, the journey wasn’t one anyone would try without a purpose, and that was enough to know. If nothing else the thought of going back was locked behind an impenetrable mental wall, she had come here and she would stay here.

The first grave, the one she’d dug herself, was about fifty metres from the industrial bulk of the machine. She’d piled rocks on top of it as a shaky marker in the absence of anything more fitting. It’s inhabitant had no name that she knew, he’d been dead and half decayed when she’d arrived. Slumped against the machine, his back resting on one of the few flat panels amongst the great bulk of whirring cogs, flywheels, valves and unnamed contraptions which made up the greater whole.

He hadn’t been there by chance, or if chance had bought him to the machine intent had kept him there. Set off to the side of the iron and steel box a small shed contained signs of a settled life, if not a comfortable one. A battered white shirt was lain out in a corner, in only marginally better condition than the blue jeans and t-shirt he’d died in but evidently placed there as an almost reverent concession to neatness. A hand full of stones, culled from the infinite supply outside for no reason that she could comprehend, had been arrayed in neat rows alongside a couple of wooden boards upon which he and now she slept. And finally a chipped ceramic cup lined with a patina of filth. Not much of a haul for a life but living by the machine she’d learnt that you didn’t need much.

The stones she’d buried with him, the cup she’d used, letting the drops of frosty dew which gathered on parts of the machine sustain her in a state always short of satisfaction. The shirt, too large to be comfortably worn, still lay in state. His life, any life, merited more than a pile of rocks.

She passed two more graves before she came to the machine. One was marked with a stick, the other with stones, none of them bearing names. Her predecessors she assumed, although the notion that she would or even could die there seemed almost absurd. Even as she’d buried him the idea that he had ever lived as she did seemed absurd. A corpse never could be human, life was unmistakable and she’d decided the second she saw him that it had never been held in that desiccated form.

Finally there was the machine. As she drew closer the eternal orchestra of mechanised existence started to vibrate through her. She dipped her head to the sign, almost unwittingly.

‘DO NOT LEAVE UNATTENDED’

She’d taken it as a command. Understandably so to her thinking. She had no way of knowing what the machine did, or why it did it but if the graves were anything to go by it must have been important. How important was the real question. The idea of walking away had for some reason never dawned on her, not for more than a few days at least. From time to time a bout of curiosity would send her wandering. Never to anywhere or for any purpose beyond seeing what, if anything, the machine would do in her absence. Some small part of her courted disaster, seeing how unattended the machine could be left before the unknown worst happened. But it was an act which left her riddled with guilt. Had the others ever walked away? Had they been so selfish? Perhaps they did, perhaps they knew the true nature of the risks that she so negligently took. As much time as she had to think about it the point always came where the mountain of unanswered questions threatened an avalanche and with paranoid deference she shied away, carefully extricating herself from the self-imposed obligation of understanding.

More than that though her occasional forays into the wasteland came about because she wanted a reason to come back. The machine went on, seemingly inevitably, it needed nothing, asked nothing and despite her early obsessive pouring over every inch of it’s intricate frame seemed neither to take anything in or turn anything out. How something so timeless, so seemingly free of need could demand such obsessive observation was beyond her and she longed to know why. If only had broken, if only it had ever changed. Each pointless expedition was fuelled by the fervent hope that she might return to find that something had occurred to validate her presence. It never did.

In her search for something more than her oblique duties she’d tried anything she could think of. She’d tried writing messages in the grit and dirt and she’d tried naming the various parts of the machine. Anything which might offer more than the simple demand of existing alongside the ever indifferent machine. If her predecessors had found something in the fabric of the landscape, in the pebbles and detritus then it was lost on her.

The messages she’d scratched in had faded with the first wind and her attempts at arraying stones into cryptic declarations had left only a nagging sense of discomfort. If others came after her what would her missives mean to them? They meant little enough to her, at least after the instant of creation. Mostly they amounted to little more than random words, created out of the desire to exist and destroyed when the onus of that existence became too great.

It wasn’t long after these abortive attempts at distraction that they appeared.

At first she’d suspected that they were hallucinations. The days with the machine had long since reached the point where numbering them was more of a grim routine than a useful measure of life. Was that not caring a sign of looming insanity? That seemed plausible enough and from there why would delirious visions not be a manifestation?

They first came as insects. Not beautiful or impressive but still minute sparks of life amidst mechanical anonymity. A movement amidst the metal which for once followed no inevitable pattern. Her first thought had been fear. In part for her sanity but mostly for the machine. The former, she thought, she could afford to lose.

She should have killed them at the start. The machine mattered, they did not, to anyone but her at least. But such small things, eclectic in form but uniform in their insignificance, seemed like an acceptable element of chaos amidst the grinding machinery. They could, or in her mind would, no more damage the machine than she would – even as they traced their intricate paths across it’s exterior. And if she had gone mad then would it not be a worse form of madness to destroy her own illusions than to simply accept them? So she lived with them and they with her.

It was perhaps months later before she ventured off again. Leaving the creatures was no wretch, they weren’t like the machine, they demanded nothing beyond, perhaps, her own detachment from reality. She may miss them but the task of testing the machine had once again built up to a weight too unavoidable to be borne.

It was vanity that made her leave but there was no reason for her going over the edge, none she could find anyway. That shift came after three more days of wandering.

There was no adventure when she went away, she walked, ate and slept to the same rhythms of life which led her when she was with the machine. But perhaps it was on her return that she snapped. It was done without drama or excitement, without even awareness, she simply returned and sat down before the machine. And while she never had the time for hindsight a dim part of her knew even then that an ending of sorts was approaching.

The creatures were almost completely coating large swathes of the machine now. Their forms expanded and made more elaborate by her absence. There was no harm in that that she could see. Their lives of scuttling interaction seemed wholly seperate from the machine lived them on. A superimposition on a wholly alien entity.

The thrumming, grinding and thumbing of the machine rang out their usual apathetic beat. She stood and listened for a moment, settled in the certainty of mechanical security. It was a comfort of sorts, tinted by the usual sadness of the uncertainty which defined her life with the machine.

Her eyes though were fixed on the creatures, their translucent shells glittering in the sun as they dashed across the stolid grey metal. They had almost become beautiful, mere black dots transformed into seemingly unique and chaotically designed entities. Each one a new being almost as complex as the artificial bulk they’d chosen for their home. They drew her in with an almost hypnotic effect, the chaos of life at last giving her something to wonder at beyond the unanswerable questions which surrounded the purpose she’d accepted the day she’d buried her predecessor and taken his place.

For a few days she simply gave herself over to the creatures, awaking each day eager to see what new changes had taken place in their ever increasing society. Some began to fly, others died away only to be consumed and reformed into new life by the others. They had no purpose in their actions, no meaning in their existence but with a fervour which she could almost confuse for joy they didn’t pause in their constant movement and antenna twitched interaction.

The machine started to become an afterthought, a glint of steel beneath the growing organic mass which once caught only prompted an instant of recrimination on her part. She hadn’t left the machine and her duties were fulfilled even as she submerged herself ever deeper into the lives of the strange lifeforms that increasingly surrounded her.

She stopped sleeping, she stopped eating, such things seemed more and more like the obligations of a previous, artificial life. Instead she simply stared and took in each new pattern of movement, each new being to appear on the machine, each death.

—

When he came he found her lying dead in the shade of the machine, her chin still resting on hands frozen in place by rigor mortis and her now cold eyes still fixed on the machine. What she’d been looking at he couldn’t say, one patch of metal seemed much the same as any other from what he could see. But he buried her with all the ceremony he could muster and marked her grave with stones. Then he sat down and stared up at the sign.

One by one we’re thick as shit.

Never have found Russell Brand particularly interesting or funny but then I don’t recall ever watching or reading anything he’s done, so largely a non entity from my point of view. Watched the bulk of the Paxman interview though and fair play to him, his objections and broad goals are valid enough. Just ridiculous that he was being asked to play the role of political scientist though, he’s a comedian and not much more. Even more ridiculous that the internet seems to have been punctuated by people heaping praise on him and seeking to deify him as some sort of political authority for the disillusioned. Misses the point a bit. As most people know in tedious depth I believe in revolution myself and I have my own notions of what a new system would look like but the trick is to segregate my beliefs from the objections. No one figure is here to offer the great answers to the world’s ills. Once those ills are acknowledged the field is wide open on how we deal with them, of course I’ll defend my views but the debate around all of us forming our own opinions is the distillation for a final product which may actually work. If anyone claims to have the absolute and undeniable truth to give you then kick ‘em in the balls and walk away, they don’t, not Russell Brand, not me (alas) and certainly not a political class defined by shared interests.

Also, never talk about paradigms outside of academia, makes you sound like a prick.

Why Indie?

Well, I figure a good first post on my new site would be one which answers a question which I’ve barely even asked myself so far, why Indie publishing?

Now over the months to come there’s going to be more and more said about my novel (well, by me at least) which is currently being edited by someone who takes a less chaotic approach to punctuation, spelling and common sense than I do. As well as having some fine cover art crafted by Dave the Excellent Artist, who, if you ever get the chance to see his David Bowie, will make you think the real thing is a bit shit really. Until all that’s done though I thought I’d use this space to cover some of the questions which a lot of writers are asking themselves these days to see if my own random dribblings might offer up some clarity for others.

When I started coming to the end of the first vaguely presentable draft of Crashed America my mind, as is natural, started to turn towards idle day dreams of fame, fortune and the sort of decadent lifestyle that would make Scarface reach for a calming cup of tea. Then I realised that writers very rarely, if ever, make any money from what they do. Undetered though my mind shifted to ways to make at least some meagre living from what I love doing, even if making stuff up and writing it down can never really count as a real job to anyone who’s actually done a real job.

Tradition dictates that publishers and agents are the route to literary fame and immortality. Like a holy commandment a path has long been laid out for new writers of endless mail outs, endless rejections and little hope all on the off chance that something, one day, will make it out of the slush pile. And for all the media hype and chatter about the self (or, more fittingly, Indie) publishing scene the traditional path still remains the first port of call for most writers trying to find a way to share their work.

The weight of history and established wisdom snowballs when combined with the routine self-doubt of anyone who’s spent a few hundred hours honing their craft in isolation with a distant eye on the validation of success. Publishers are the arbiters of quality, their seal of approval means you’ve made it and, until you fuck up the second novel at least, their acceptance places you where I’d imagine every writer ever has wanted to be – comfortable in the certainty that somebody out there likes your work. It’s a respect build on practicality. The media, insofar as they care about books these days, have always dealt exclusively with their publishing establishment counter parts. Ditto for bookshops and readers in fact – although the ties of tradition to all three are rapidly being eroded at the moment. And that seemingly all consuming certainty which surrounds the writer really can seem like a self evident truth, at least until you step back a little.

As I mentioned the traditional literary niche which locked publishers, writers, distributors and the media into a sealed circle is being increasingly challenged. Indie writers are NY Times best sellers, an increasing number are making a (minimal) living from work they themselves are managing and access to the tools of distribution has become ever more democratic. More importantly though the traditional sense of establishment approval is becoming less and less prominent. The slush pile and the handful of readers working within the industry, which once held all the allure and glamour of a Hollywood casting couch, now seem slightly meaningless, to me at least. Major publishers have gone a long way to invalidate their own position, both by picking up self-published writers and by placing ever more attention on absolute crap. It is, after all, hard to have faith in the esteemed wisdom of a company whose output includes work by Katie Price (as nice a person as I’m sure she is), Dan Brown and whichever celebrity feels like having a ghost writer hammer the self indulgent excess of their lives into a Christmas best seller.

I hope there’s not too much arrogance in that sentiment. With the hangover of having actually (nearly) finished something sitting on my back like the proverbial monkey I would always hesitate to tout myself as one of the greats. But I do want to be good, that’s my drive and aspiration and when I look for a measure of what I can do it’s no longer the slightly paternal pat on the head of the old industry that I look for. For me it’s the audience that I want to give my work to and the audience whose approval I want because as terrible as their/our taste may sometimes be they’re still very definitely the ones who actually matter.

Financially too the game has become a very different one. First time writers have always made pretty much no money, whether they sign up with the biggest publishers around or desperately try to flog eBooks on Amazon. The industry used to balance out that initial poverty with promises of promotion and support, as well as the hope that a second effort would offer a proper pay day – not that I write for anything but the love of course. Now though they take fewer and fewer risks and offer less and less to the first timer as profit margins shrink ever more and the allure of a safe, if unimaginative, bet becomes more and more dominant in their collective mind. Sure the path of Indie promotion remains the far harder one as writers are obliged to master the dark arts of marketing for themselves but it’s been proven that with commitment and luck there’s more of a reward to be had, both financially and emotionally, from doing it yourself.

If it works then the lion’s share goes to the author, including the audience that they’ve directly built around themselves. They retain absolute control over their work and to a large degree get the chance to circumvent the slush pile by being able to tell prospective agents and publishers that the audience they already have is all the credentials they need.

Of course it’s not easy to get it right, as any number of poorly written, poorly edited and unpromoted efforts will attest but that’s a risk worth facing and one which the writer themselves can control. More importantly it’s one which I myself believe I can overcome and that challenge and it’s rewards are infinitely more appealing than the purgatory of those endless mail outs and the ever unpredictable whims of unknown readers buried in a pile of slush.