Chris Page's Blog, page 13

Going completely plotty

Plotting for the next story. Thousands of words of notes on the computer. Putting important plot points on scraps of paper and arranging them by hand to get the story arc right. What I have here represents about two-thirds of the likely story. More pieces of the jigsaw to find and put into place yet, but so far so good.

Hatching fiendish plots.

Rather more ideas coming up than I can easily manage, hence the copious notes.

No, this is not the promised third volume of underpants, this is something a bit different.

I’ll not say what because talking the details of a project before it’s finished often kills it.

When I conceived this story, I was intending a quick fun write/read, possibly as short as 50,000 words. However, like many tall tales, it seems to be growing in the telling.

Have been plotting for a couple of months but real life events have thrown me off time and again. Wrote the first chapter while on holiday in the UK in order to get the tone and find out more about the main character. This was an enormous help. Wrote it in more or less one sitting, late at night with a bottle of wine as my muse.

Much more work to do in finding the characters and sorting out the gaps in the plot. However, as you go along, one thing leads to another and you find what you are looking for eventually (though occasionally the find can be a last-gasp reach of constructive desperation).

The current story seems to be the most involved bit of plotting I have attempted so far.

For many years I sneered at planning stories and wrote by the seat of my pants. Weed and everything in Un-Tall Tales came about that way. Eventually, I began to wonder whether planning and plotting might speed up the process. That was, very specifically, 2012 when I came out of the magazine and was looking for an early score in the fiction writing department, looking for a story that I could produce quickly and use to build up some momentum. I began plotting and then writing a particular novel. That story is not finished. It is a good one, but very ambitious, and will take years to write, so I’ve put it aside for the sake of some less ambitious projects.

The next story was King of the Undies World. I think I created the plot outline in about 20 minutes on a lunch break. Perhaps that’s not literally true, but that’s the way it feels. It was a sketchy outline, as it turned out, and I had to fill in the details as I went along, so the world planned might only apply tangentially.

The story arc of The Underpants Tree came to me in one go as soon as I started thinking about it. I then worked up a synopsis on that curve and did that badly. I had to change it as I went along, so like KOTUW there was a lot of improvisation as I worked at it.

Simplicity is my muddle name.

The current project: keep it simple, I thought. Simple, direct, with a linear uncomplicated plot. Make it something you can write in three months.

Well. I’m still working on the plot, having started in July, but that’s fine because for all this browbeating, the arc is looking good and some very silly plot points are coming out.

I still have no idea of the ending. I just know it can’t be a happy one.

Oops! Was that a plot spoiler?

Not a burning question, a merely lukewarm query

A question to the many millions of people who know a lot more about Facebook and promoting stuff online than I do.

Conventional wisdom has it that as a person who writes and tries to flog books, I ought to have a Facebook page.

I already have four Twitter accounts, two blogs and a static site and can’t keep up with all that as it is. If I were diligent about updating my digital online empire, I would simply have no time to write the stories I am supposed to be promoting.

So, do I really need a Facebook page too? And what would I put on it different to the content of the other bits and pieces?

Is an FB page helpful?

Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

I thank you in advance for doing my thinking for me.

Literary stars

From time to time people say nice things online about my stories.

No, really! Here are some examples.

Chris, Thank-you for making my days funnier and reminding me that laughter really is the best medicine. Loved the book! – Anna Yamato on King of the Undies World

Weed is a brilliantly written comedic novel while at the same time a harsh criticism of modern consumerist society.

The lyrically attractive writing style spoke to me and does a good job of creating a vision of this fictitious yet very real world and company. It reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil! from 1985. If you, like the protagonist, sometimes find yourself drowning in the rat race for conformity and mediocrity, this book is for you. I immediately bought a second copy to give to a friend! – BAE Pronk on Weed

Apparently this is the first in a trilogy, great news if that’s true because I thoroughly enjoyed this one and could easily go another two books.

Underpants, millionaires, North Koreans, rats, kidnapping and sticky buns, this book has everything a true comedy book should have. – Damon Mckinlay on King of the Undies World

No one has said anything mean about my stories, (people are so polite) so I can’t make a list of mean things, though I suspect it would be more entertaining than a list of nice things.

And while I have your attention and you are all warm and glowing from reading the nice things people have said, I’d like to say if you’ve read and enjoyed any of my stories, would you consider giving it a star rating on Amazon and/or Goodreads? These ratings really do help. They raise the title in the rankings and reassure potential readers that the story is not actually toxic or liable to cause injury other than the odd the laughing-related hernia.

I thank you in advance.

You can’t keep a good pair of undies down

Here’s the latest tweet-vert for King of the Undies World and The Underpants Tree.

What do you think?

More Amazon — not out of stock, four smokin’ books

Amazon Japan has flagged my books as ‘temporarily out of stock’. This is very unhelpful and very misleading.

This applies to Weed, King of the Undies World, The Underpants Tree and Un-Tall Tales.

All the books are in fact very much available through Amazon Japan — however, they are dispatched from the printer when someone makes an order specifically so that retailers don’t have to stack their shelves with bushels of Weed and underpants to meet demand. A very literal-minded Amazonian computer somewhere has decided that this means there is no book available.

Duh!

It seems that the ‘out of stock’ label is putting Japan-based people off buying the books, which is very bothersome for me and completely self-defeating for Amazon.

No, really, you can order any of these books. They won’t arrive the next day because they have to be shipped from the US or the UK, but are available.

On top of this, Amazon Japan have declined to fix the price, which is still set too high.

The printer/distributor has listed the price as I set it, and when I contacted them, they referred me to Amazon Japan. I contacted Amazon Japan who disputed the price was wrong and referred me back to the printer.

We don’t seem to be making a lot of progress.

I am ordering a pile of copies of The Underpants Tree to sell without the intervention of Amazon at a more humane price. It will take some time to get this sorted.

The Kindle version is of course available to Japan readers, he said hintingly.

Meanwhile, the ‘Amazon are lying bastards’ post I put up here last week mysteriously failed to appear on my blog feed on my Amazon author page.

Funny that.

Whoever control underpants, controls the world — The Underpants Tree is out

The Underpants Tree is the second installment of the Underpants of Fire trilogy, sequel to King of the Undies World, and it’s out now in paperback from Amazon and in Kindle.

Actually, it was out yesterday, but in a moment of quaint surrealism, I forgot to mention it on this site.

According to the blurb on the back:

“Whoever controls underwear controls the world.

Sir Hades Gousset — underwear magnate, king of the undies world, the biggest man in pants — has only ever seen underwear as a force for good.

That is, until the mysterious Dr Hieronymus Mangler appears with a fiendish new technology that threatens Hades’ monopoly and his grip on the world of nether-wear.

Mangler’s technology has more sinister purposes than business competition and his ambitions go beyond mere financial profit.

The battle between Hades and Mangler for control of this vital undergarment becomes a titanic struggle for the soul of humanity itself, and leads to not just one, but two apocalypses, in a conflict that rocks civilisation to its foundation wear.”

So there you have it. The blurb on the back of a book can’t be wrong, can it.

Available in Kindle and as a paperback from Amazon — oops, I mentioned that already, didn’t I.

Amazon are lying bastards, and an apology to my Japan readers

First of all, an apology to Japan-based potential readers of The Underpants Tree: I’m sorry. I apologise.

Second, I have to call Amazon Japan a bunch of lying bastards. You’re a bunch of lying bastards, Amazon Japan!

I apologise to everyone because Amazon Japan has set the retail price of The Underpants Tree way too high — ¥1,587.

Bonkers, I know.

This does not reflect the price I recommended or the price of the same book in North America or Europe. I have complained to Amazon US about this but they say that Amazon japan can set any price they want and don’t seem interested in discussing the matter.

Bastards!

Anyway, I’m still working on finding someone who can lower the price.

Amazon.jp — purveyors of porky pies

And here’s why Amazon Japan deserve to be called lying bastards. Not only have they chosen a silly price, they are pretending they’ve discounted the book. One thousand five hundred and eighty-seven yen discounted from ¥1,627, they say.

Bollocks, I say.

They’ve plucked both prices from their bottom, simple as. This is an imaginary, arbitrary discount based on an imaginary discount price.

That’s capitalism for you.

And as a discount of ¥40 would be hardly worth the disingenuous pixels it’s written in even if it were real.

The same book is $11 in the US and £7 in Britain. The Japan price makes no sense at all.

So I apologise for that.

Of course, Amazon are exploitative, evil, tax-avoiding bastards, and it would be nice not to deal with them at all, but that’s not an option for me at the moment, and this is the subject of an entirely different post I’ve been intending to write for a long time. More on that later.

Japan readers: I am going to get a stock of the book in and offer it at a more humane price direct from my jacket pocket. This will take a few weeks to arrange. Watch this space as they say, and let me know if you would like a copy.

The Underpants Tree — chapter one

The underpants festoon the branches of the trees like bright pennants, all fluttering in the fresh, promise-laden morning breeze. There are thousands of trees, in neat, orderly rows, stretching in all directions as far as the eye can see: trees and underpants, trees and underpants, trees and underpants. The orchard seems to be endless — ‘vast’ is a term that might spring to mind, ‘mind-boggling’ is another.

There are all kinds of pants. Men’s pants, ladies’ pants, pants for kids of all ages and shapes, and apparently pants for dogs and cats too. There are big pants, small pants, tiny pants and voluminous pants. There are sensible pants and sexy pants of all descriptions. There are frivolous and fatuous pants and stern ones to disapprove of them. There are sturdy pants and gossamer pants and all thicknesses in between. There are thermals and coolers. There are more colours and patterns and designs than even the fevered brain of the perviest underpants fetishist could imagine. No one tree has the same kind of pants; each tree carries a diversity, and no two pairs of pants are alike. The one thing they have in common — other than being on a tree — is that the fabrics are vibrant in hue and texture and seem to shimmer with a curious life of their own.

An observer of average attention to detail would note that the underpants do not merely festoon the trees, they grow from them, they hang by delicate green stems. The underpants have sprouted from the boughs like flappy and gaily-coloured fruit.

The observer should at this point start feeling considerable curiosity. What are underpants doing sprouting from trees? Or better, what are trees doing sprouting underpants? This does not seem a conventional act of nature.

Among the trees walks a man: by his bearing a gentleman. He has short, immaculate, black hair, with an absolutely straight side parting, at a mathematically precise point halfway between the crown of his head and his left ear. He wears a suit of a striking sobriety that wouldn’t be out of place at a funeral, which nevertheless shimmers with the same odd sheen as the underpants on the trees. Everything about him is neat and pressed and clipped. He is evidently a man who appreciates order.

His face wears a faint and beatific glow.

The gentleman stops and surveys his trees — for they are his; he put them there — and he smiles broadly because he sees that they are good.

In the distance, despite the bright and cloudless sky, there is a rumble of thunder.

And then the man goes on his way like someone who has much to do, which, indeed, he is.

This is chapter one of The Underpants Tree, the second novel in the Underpants of Fire trilogy by Chris Page. In Kindle and in paperback from Amazon.

Lock up your underpants: July 14 is the day

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, Chris Page’s new novel The Underpants Tree will be out on July 14, 2015.

In an unprecedented froth of speculation, the world’s readers and literary pundits have made a wild guess that it may be another underpants-themed comedy designed to provoke chuckles.

July 14, then. Paperback. Kindle.

Watch this site for excerpts and general blah.

Man killed by wedgie (public service announcement)

King of the Undies World is an entire novel of unremitting underwear-related skullduggery and dirty deeds. It’s therefore inevitable that before the end of the story someone has pulled a nick-of-time and mercilessly executed wedgie on her captor in a daring escape bid. There may even be an interesting wedgie-Glasgow kiss combo somewhere in there.

That is fiction, but now there is a salutary warning from real life: wedgies can actually kill.

In the news last week (May 2015) we heard how Brad Lee Davis, 34, from Oklahoma killed his stepfather, 58-year-old Denver Lee St. Clair by pulling his underpants over his head and suffocating him in a manoeuvre the media has titled an ‘atomic wedgie’.

Davis pleaded guilty to the wedgie but insists that he did not intend the death of St. Clair and sentencing on a charge of first degree manslaughter will take place in July.

‘I’d never seen this before,’ Pottawatomie County Sheriff Mike Booth told the Oklahoman newspaper.

The assailant, Davis, is reported in the same newspaper as saying, ‘Man, I did a horrible thing when I gave him that wedgie.’

Just as the vicarious thrills of movie guns and bombs don’t translate happily to real life, so it is with wedgies: one person’s book-bound chortle is another’s real-world untimely and undignified demise.

In other words, don’t try this at home.