Jackson Radcliffe's Blog, page 2

You already said that!

One of the things I like about Twitter is that it tells you off if you try to tweet something you’ve tweeted before. So Twitter will allow you to say things that are unbelievably stupid, but only once. That seems like a good rule. Perhaps we should apply it to our politicians.

I often forget really important things, especially words and names, and even my opinions on topics. But that’s not due to old age or early onset dementia. I’ve always had a terrible memory. And that’s one of the reasons I started blogging.

My blog is an extension of my brain. It’s a place where I can record my thoughts as they happen and try to work out what I think about the world. And it’s a resource I can refer back to if I forget what I think about something. If you think that’s stupid, then you’ve obviously got a much better memory than me.

However good our powers of recall, we can all benefit from tools for thinking. The human brain is a powerful machine, but it’s not enough to get by in the modern world. That’s why we need computers, blogs and even Twitter. They’re all useful tools for thinking better.

Einstein once said that Einstein plus a pencil is cleverer than Einstein. In my case, however, a pencil is never going to be enough.

Originally posted at Blog Blogger Bloggest.

My creepy time travel experience

I just got this creepy message from Goodreads in my Facebook feed:

“Goodreads added something in the past to your timeline.”

How sinister is that? How can something have been added just now but in the past?

I love Goodreads (apart from its sometimes unfathomable navigation) but have the Goodreads guys been reading too much bad time-travel fiction? Don’t they understand the dangers of recklessly meddling with the past?

I feel like I’ve been violated in some unfathomable way. My history has been rewritten. I am no longer the person I was, because Goodreads went back into my past and made a change. Admittedly, the change was simply to add a book to the list of books I’ve read. But, hey, a book can transform your life!

It got me thinking about the importance of our virtual lives online. What if someone could change your real life by making a change to your online profile in the past? Could an evil hacker (or a mega corporation) rewrite your online past and thereby change your present self? Google is now allowing people to remove mentions of themselves from the past. But what if people could insert stories, or change their online profile retrospectively? Would that have an impact on their real lives in the present?

In short, is the internet a loophole in the laws of the universe that allows time travel?

It’s all rather weird. I think I might turn off those Goodreads notifications just in case.

[Originally posted on Blog Blogger Bloggest.]

What is the secret of happiness?

In my novel, The Yoga Sutras, my protagonist Dave is searching for the secret of happiness. His yoga teacher, Kali, and his friends Chris and Mike are eager to offer him their recipe for happiness, but none of their advice rings true for Dave.

‘When we practise yoga,’ said Kali. ‘Our body, mind and spirit work together in perfect harmony. As we move, the body releases endorphins, which makes the mind happy and allows the spirit to soar.’

Dave wasn’t entirely convinced by that argument. It was hard for your spirit to soar when you spent half the yoga class upside down or staring at someone else’s bottom. Although admittedly, there were some very nice bottoms in the class. Pert bottoms, brazen bottoms, jaunty bottoms, spirited bottoms. Even bulging bottoms and swollen bottoms; voluptuous bottoms and wanton bottoms. Women really needed to start worrying less about their arses. They needed to wake up and smell the testosterone. It was rare to find a bum that wasn’t a complete man magnet. Men simply weren’t that discerning.

But were endorphins really the secret of happiness?

‘The secret of happiness,’ Chris had once told him, ‘is a cold beer and a big screen TV.’

‘The secret of happiness is WARM BEER and a TRIO OF NAKED GIRLS!’ was Mike’s opinion.

Dave had said nothing. He didn’t know what the secret of happiness really was. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been so unhappy, obviously. But he suspected it was something altogether different, less ephemeral.

It probably didn’t involve beer at all.

Dave’s quest for happiness takes him on a spiritual and philosophical journey and leads him to question his core beliefs and even his sexual identity. His search leads him to an answer, but will it be too late for anti-hero Dave?

And what is the secret of happiness, you’re wondering? You’ll have to read my book!

So you think that’s funny?

Why does comedy so often involve human suffering? People slip on banana skins. They act stupid. Outrageous things happen to them. And we laugh.

Are we monsters? Do we relish the suffering of others?

Or is laughter a self-defence mechanism? Instead of being a sign of depravity, it’s a way of coping with living in a world that is profoundly and shockingly unsympathetic to human existence.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we laugh till we cry; that our laughter comes with tears. If we didn’t laugh at misfortune, we’d have to sob instead.

It seems fitting that my first novel, The Yoga Sutras, was a comedy. It reflects an unconscious inability to treat myself seriously as a writer, even though my writing is terribly serious to me - a matter of life and death.

So by all means laugh at my jokes. But please don’t laugh at my ideas, because I would hate that. It’s probably what a writer fears most, after obscurity. That's the greatest fear. To be ignored would be horrible. So awful I might have to laugh.

How I write

Writing’s not easy. You have to sit in a chair all day and move your fingers around rather quickly while staring at the words that appear magically on a screen in front of you. It’s hard work and really quite exhausting.

So when I’m not sitting indoors at my computer I like to work outside in my garden. In English we call that gardening, but if I understand correctly, Americans call a garden a yard and gardening yardwork. This confuses me, because in Britain a yard is an unpleasant square of concrete surrounded by a high brick wall and yardwork is what men with balls and chains around their ankles were made to do in Victorian times as punishment.

Have you ever heard of the Yard of Eden? Me neither.

Anyway, I have veered off topic. What I want to talk about here is what I do while I am gardening / doing yardwork. What I do is write. Or, more precisely, I think. This is the closest I ever get to multi-tasking. I call it duo-tasking and it doubles my efficiency, which is awesome if you think about it, which I do.

Now, when I say that I think while gardening, that is not strictly true. What I actually do is talk to myself.

Talking to yourself is what mad, crazy nutters do. However, if you write it down afterwards, you can claim that you are a writer and most people are OK with that.

So that’s what I do. You could call it yardwork. You could call it crazy, random mutterings. You could call it writing. Whatever it is, someone’s got to do it.

The Yoga Sutras – Goodreads giveaway and half-price Kindle sale

All good things must come to an end, and my Goodreads giveaway of The Yoga Sutras has now finished. Amazingly, over 800 people signed up for a chance to win the book. Was it the cheeky title that attracted people? The enticing blurb? Or the outrageous front cover image? I don’t know, but what I do know is that sadly only one person was able to win a copy of the book.

So to make the book available to the widest number of readers, I am doing two things this weekend.

Firstly, I am selling the Kindle version of the book at half price. That’s just $1.67 at Amazon.com or 99p at Amazon.co.uk. The price will return to normal on Monday.

Secondly, I have made a free copy available for download in epub format. Just visit my book’s page on Goodreads and click the button that says, ‘download ebook’. It really is that easy. You can read an epub on your iPhone, iPad, Kobo reader or even on an Android or Windows phone if you download the right app.

On Monday the free download will be cruelly snatched away and the book will return to its usual monstrously expensive price. So grab this opportunity before it vanishes forever. Click the link. Click it now!

Is comedy a genre?

When people ask me about my book The Yoga Sutras I tell them it’s a comedy. ‘Yeah, but what’s it about?’ they ask. I tell them it’s about yoga, but they’re still not satisfied.

‘It’s about belief systems, gender identity and the fundamental philosophical questions of existence,’ I say. Then their eyes start to glaze over, so I hurriedly add, ‘But it’s very funny. And it has some strange sex scenes.’

‘Kinky sex?’ they ask hopefully, but I have to tell them, ‘No. Not kinky. Just strange.’

At this point they either agree to read the book or they leave the room.

The problem, I think, is genre. Is comedy a genre? I think it’s more of an attitude, a way of seeing the world.

I don’t really read genre books. I prefer books that don’t fit into any identifiable genre; books that surf the boundaries of classification and laugh in the face of taxonomy. I don’t often read humour as a genre. Romance … mmm. Thrillers … maybe. Paranormal … perhaps. But a vampire lesbian mystery romance with a post-apocalyptic urban setting, based on elements of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and with plenty of dark humour – yeah, I’ll read that, that’s my genre.

No, I am your father

When my eldest son was about six years old, I sat down with him and we watched the Star Wars double trilogies together. This was a key moment in the father-son relationship. My son showed the event the respect it deserved by dressing up in his Darth Vader costume and fiercely clutching his toy light sabre for the duration of the show.

You can think of Star Wars as the ultimate father-son relationship story. I’m talking about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker of course.

Vader: Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.
Luke: He told me enough! He told me you killed him!
Vader: No. I am your father.

Admittedly perhaps this isn’t the best role model to present to a six year old, but it seemed to work out OK for my family. No long-term harm done, I think.

The Star Wars movies work because they’re exactly what both boys and dads are happy to watch. ('I’m just going to watch The Empire Strikes Back with the boys again, honey. Yeah, I know I’m supposed to be cooking the dinner / mowing the grass / collecting your mother from the hospital but the kids really want me to watch it with them.')

There are more thoughtful and tender movies dedicated to exploring the father-son relationship in greater emotional depth. But you know what’s wrong with these movies? Boys don’t want to watch them.

Besides, watching Star Wars is a rite of passage. It’s an essential cultural reference point, up there with Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy. That’s how I explained it to my wife, anyway.

What are you laughing at?

When I started writing, I adopted a humorous tone, even when writing about serious topics. I thought this was because I couldn’t take myself too seriously as a writer, and that’s probably true. But there’s more to it.

Humour punctures holes in big ideas. It undermines conventions and stands the world on its head. It goads us into questioning things that seem self-evident or beyond debate.

Comedians are everyday philosophers, helping us look at our world through fresh eyes. With my writing, I’m exploring my beliefs about the world and trying to articulate a coherent world view. And you can’t do that without having a few laughs along the way.

In fact, the concept of a coherent world view may turn out to be the ultimate cosmic joke. What if, instead, humour turned out to be the universe’s guiding principle?



This article was first published at my personal blog, Blog Blogger Bloggest.

The Yoga Sutras

I’m a keen yoga dude, so a few years ago I decided to read the ultimate yoga book. The Yoga Sutras is the Bible of yoga. It was written two thousand years ago by the sage Patanjali.

I read the book and it confused me. The more I read, the less I understood. It didn’t seem to be about yoga at all. At least, it was nothing like my weekly yoga class. The book was all about the mind, the soul and things beyond. It talked about reincarnation and karma. It talked about gaining the ability to levitate. Whoa!

I finished the book and began to understand it a little. I thought it over and it precipitated an existential crisis.

Because of this I decided to write a book to explain the Yoga Sutras in a way that’s more accessible to modern readers. And a whole lot funnier. And with some gratuitous sex thrown in for good measure.

I created a character, Dave, who would read the Yoga Sutras and have an existential crisis so that you won’t have to. Instead you can laugh at Dave and learn about the Yoga Sutras through his own words. If you read my version of The Yoga Sutras, you won’t have to read Patanjali’s original version, which is just as well, because it’s written in Sanskrit verse. And there are hardly any jokes.

So that’s what my book is for. I hope you enjoy reading it.

PS. I forgot to say that if you read my book you will discover the secret of happiness. Wow! Plus lots of jokes and some hot sex too!

PPS. You don't need any previous experience of yoga to read the book.