Jeff Bridges, also known as ‘The Dude’ is not only, in my opinion, one of the greatest North American character actors of his generation, but also an accomplished photographer.
He uses a Widelux camera, for panoramic images. Here is what Jeff Bridges has to say about the camera, and why he uses it:
The Wide-Lux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder isn’t accurate, and there’s no manual focus, so it has an arbitrariness to it, a capricious quality. I like that. It’s something I aspire to in all my work — a lack of preciousness that makes things more human and honest, a willingness to receive what’s there in the moment, and to let go of the result. Getting out of the way seems to be one of the main tasks for me as an artist.
There’s a standing joke amongst my family, that I simply cannot walk past a bookshop without going in for a browse. Once in there, nine times out of ten, I can’t walk out of the bookshop without having bought a book.
It’s true. I love books. Sometimes I wonder if it is a compulsion, this need to buy books. I like looking at them, lining my bookshelves at home, and sometimes I pull them off the shelves to rearrange them so that they look nice, or to categorize them by author, or genre. Or even publisher.
So, over the years, I’ve collected a fair few books. I’ve also borrowed a quite a number of books from the library and, since buying a Kindle, I’ve amassed a ton of ebooks as well.
I’ve read most of them, too. Some of them I have read more than once, and there are a few that I have started, but abandoned. Of the ones that I have not got round to finishing, I usually keep them, meaning to give them another go at some point. It has to be a pretty shocking book for me to abandon and then dispose of, never intending to give it one more chance to captivate me. By now you may well be thinking, so what’s that big pile of books on the floor for, in that photograph?
Well, I’ll tell you. Those are the books that I have bought over the last few years, and not got round to reading yet. I bought them with every intention of reading them, but somehow they got missed amongst all the other books I wanted to read. There is probably a similar sized pile of books on my Kindle waiting to be read, too.
So, one day, just the other week, I pulled all those books off my various bookshelves, piled them up on the floor, and said to myself, “I’m not going to buy another book until I have read all of those books lying in that pile there.”
I average about a novel a week, (it used to be more, but I’m a little busier these days). So, maybe a year to get through those books, and then onto the Kindle, and maybe another year to get through those.
And I started off with good intentions. The first book I picked up was Sunset and Sawdust by Joe R Lansdale. Wow, what a fantastic story. If you haven’t read Sunset and Sawdust, I suggest you go and buy a copy right this minute, and read it immediately. I loved it.
Encouraged by this, I picked Prayers for Rain, by Dennis Lehane, next. Great, another good book, highly enjoyable, highly recommended.
Unfortunately, by this point, I had broken my promise. I had bought another book. Well, actually, I’d bought more than one. Three novels and two graphic novels.
Hmm, two books down, but another five bought. So that was three more on the pile than I originally started with. Not doing too good here, am I?
Still, it was a promise I knew in my heart of hearts I was never going to keep. I mean, a year (or two) without buying a book? Not possible for me, I’m afraid.
But at least I’m making some progress. If I can just keep my book buying to less than one a week, then that big pile of books will keep on getting smaller.
Wait, hold on a minute there!
What am I trying to say here?
Can it be true?
Ken Preston, author of cowboy/zombie mashup Population:DEAD! and the supernatural pirate novel The Devil and Edward Teach has written a My Weekly Pocket Novel?
Seriously?
Well, yes, I have actually. And I’m rather proud of it, too.
In fact, when it came right down to it, writing a romantic thriller for My Weekly, held similar challenges and pleasures to writing anything else I have written over the years.
But there is one big similarity between my Pocket Novel, Twenty Seconds to Freefall, and much of my previous work. I do love writing a strong female character.
If you read the reviews on Amazon you will see that Denver McCade steals the show from the supposed lead, male character of Caxton Tempest, in Caxton Tempest at the End of the World. Then there is Dallas Hogan who fights off a horde of zombies in order to exact a terrible revenge on her abusive father in Population:DEAD!
In fact, I sometimes think those two are sisters, or cousins maybe.
Next up, is Abigail Rose, the English rose from The Devil and Edward Teach, who starts the novel as a rebellious young girl, and finishes it a battle scarred woman, along the way meeting Blackbeard and the Devil himself.
And, of course, there is the mysterious Karen, from Drive Fast! She Said, who has a pastime so dangerous it may well kill her and those who ride with her.
So yes, I like writing feisty female lead characters, and Katrina Maslow is one of my feistiest yet. In fact, at the exciting, climactic events of Twenty Seconds to Freefall, Katrina does something so bonkers, so unbelievably brave and thrilling, that… well, you’ll have to read the book and find out for yourself.
Twenty Seconds to Freefall is out on June 20th, available in WH Smiths, major supermarkets, and newsagents everywhere, for two weeks only, at the bargain price of £1.99
I read the The Rats when I was about thirteen or fourteen.
I was on holiday with my parents, somewhere along the South English coast. We were in the local fishing town and, for some reason, my parents had popped into a shop. Maybe it was WH Smiths, I can’t remember, but I do remember they sold books.
Like most people who write, whenever I see shelves of books for sale, I am drawn to them like a filings to a magnet. This is how I am now, and this is exactly how I was thirty-some years ago. Two books immediately caught my eye. I don’t know what possessed my parents to allow me to buy them, but they did, and so started my teenage obsession with James Herbert.
I quickly devoured The Rats in a couple of days, and then moved onto The Crabs (In the tradition of The Rats, the front cover screamed). Unlike James Herbert, Guy N Smith made me cry, so horrific were his descriptions of dismemberment by giant, mutated crabs. Thinking about it, we were by the sea, which maybe added an extra element of terror to the story.
But despite this, it seemed to me that The Crabs was lacking something, and, although I went on to read the sequel (Moon of the Crabs, or some such nonsense) I never read any more Guy N Smith books after that.
But James Herbert? I could hardly wait to get my hands on his next one. In true lad fashion I had to read them in the order he had written them, so next up was The Fog.
Herbert ramped up the kinky sex and sadomasochism in this book. The scene in the school gym, with the headmaster stripped naked and tied to the wall bars, whilst an aggrieved pupil approaches him with a pair of garden shears, is forever seared into my brain.
After that I read The Survivor, probably for me one of his creepiest books, and then Fluke.
Wow. Fluke was a complete revelation. A fantasy drama, with much in the way of comedy, about a man reincarnated as a dog. Had James Herbert given up on writing horror? No, it seemed he was simply stretching his writing muscles. I don’t know about sales figures, how well Fluke did, compared to his earlier books, but as far as I know, he never wrote outside of the horror genre again.
A shame. I enjoyed Fluke.
By now I had read everything the English Master of Horror had written. I was heavily into Stephen King by this point, having scared myself witless with The Shining in particular, but still, I needed another fix of my favourite horror writer.
And he delivered, with The Spear. Again, there are moments in that book I will never forget. I’ve never been able to look at hairdryers in the same way since.
I read a few more after that, but the end was in sight. As it turned out, James Herbert was a teenage obsession, and once I moved away from home, and hit my twenties, I quickly grew tired of reading his dark, warped stories of horror and mutilation.
Thought I’d left him behind forever.
But today, reading the sad news that he has passed away, I have a strangely insistent itch to revisit one of those books. Maybe The Rats, or Fluke. Or maybe The Survivor.
And maybe when I’ve finished reading it, I’ll sit in bed with the light on just a bit longer than normal.
And I’ll try not to think about garden shears and hairdryers.
Written in 1949, The Screaming Mimi is probably Fredric Brown’s most popular book. It is certainly one of my favourites. I first discovered it in my early twenties, back in the days when I used to browse the bookshelves in real bookshops, rather than virtual ones. Remember those times? It was also around about that time I also discovered Raymond Chandler, and his tough, cynical, knight in shining armour, Philip Marlow.
Brown’s protagonist, William Sweeney, a reporter for the Chicago Blade shares much with Marlow. He is a tough guy, mixes with some pretty disreputable characters, has a soft spot for the ladies, and is quick with a sarcastic comeback.
The Screaming Mimi is set in the 1940s, during an oppressively hot Chicago summer, as a knife wielding serial killer, dubbed The Ripper by the newspapers, is terrorising the city..
Coming down from one hell of an acloholic bender one night, Sweeney is drawn by a crowd to a hotel doorway. On the other side of the glass door a beautiful blonde woman is lying face down on the floor, a large dog (It must be a dog, here in Chicago; if you’d seen it out in the woods you’d have taken it for a wolf) crouching over her. The police arrive, intending to shoot the dog, but then the woman slowly climbs to her feet, a knife wound visible in her abdomen. The astonishing scene that follows next sets Sweeney on his path to sobriety, and a date with a killer.
The blonde woman, Sweeney later learns, is stripper Yolanda Lang, and The Ripper’s intended fourth victim. The dog is called Devil, and performs as part of her act. Yolanda only received a shallow stab wound to her stomach, the ferocious, loyal dog having protected her from further harm.
The book’s opening hook is irresistible, and the language remains a constant throughout the story.
You can never tell what a drunken Irishman will do. You can make a flying guess, you can make a lot of flying guesses.
You can list them in their order of probability. The likely ones are easy: He might go after another drink, start a fight, make a speech, take a train…You can work down the list of possibilities; he might buy some green paint, chop down a maple tree, do a fan dance, sing “God Save The King”, steal an oboe…You can work on down to things that get less and less likely, and eventually you might hit the rock bottom of improbability: he might make a resolution and stick to it.
I know that’s incredible, but it happened. A guy named Sweeney did it once, in Chicago. He made a resolution and he had to wade through blood and black coffee to keep it, but he kept it.
Sweeney’s resolution, after seeing the beautiful Yolanda Lang, is to spend a night with her. He quickly determines the best way to do this would be to catch her attacker.
Sweeney soon makes a connection between the killer and a ten inch high statuette sold to him by his first victim in a gift shop. The statuette is called The Screaming Mimi. This is not only a play on the phrase to have the screaming meamies, but here also a mnemonic for the clerk working at the company that produced the statuette, its catalogue number being SM 1.
Here is Sweeney’s first encounter with The Screaming Mimi – He saw what Reynarde had meant. Definitely there was a virginal quality about the slim nude figure, but that you saw afterward. “Fear, horror, loathing,” Reynarde had said, and all that was there, not only in the face, but in the twisted rigidity of the body. The mouth was wide open in a soundless scream. The arms were thrust out, palms forward, to hold off some approaching horror.
Sweeney buys the statuette, believing the serial killer to have kept the other copy sold to him by his first victim.
To reveal more of the plot would ruin it. The narrative is propelled along at a fast clip, mainly by the smart, wisecracking dialogue –
“Stella Gaylord was a B-girl on West Madison Street. The Lee girl was a private secretary.”
“How private? The kind that has to watch her periods as well as her commas?”
– and the swift exchanges between the characters, many of whom mistrust each other.
Sweeney took another sip of his drink. “You know, Doc, I hate you so damn much I’m beginning to like you.”
“Thank you,” said Greene. “I feel the same about you.”
Throughout much of the story, Sweeney is suffering from a hellish hangover. He has to work hard to keep on top of his game, especially when he discovers his straight edged razor has been stolen from his apartment. Does the killer know Sweeney is on to him? And can Sweeney discover his identity before he kills again?
The Screaming Mimi is a product of its time, the characters’ dialogues littered with casual racist remarks, homophobia and misogynism.
When looking at the statuette’s contorted, fearful figure,, a bartender remarks to Sweeney, “No dame is that afraid of being raped or something.”
Is this a reflection of the author’s own beliefs, or more a reflection of the time and culture the novel’s characters live in? Whichever, it certainly adds authenticity to the narrative and atmosphere.
Sweeney finally achieves what he set out to do, and finds The Ripper, but there’s a twist, propelling Sweeney back to the bottle, where we found him in the first place.
I’ll leave you with one more excerpt, where Sweeney and Captain Bline, in charge of The Ripper investigation, with one of his cops, have gone to see Yolanda Lang’s act in a scuzzy, downtown night club.
Still half-crouched, the dog took a stiff-legged step toward the woman. He snarled again and crouched to spring.
There was a sudden, quick movement across the table from him that pulled Sweeney’s eyes from the tense drama on the stage. And at the same instant that Sweeney saw the movement, Bline’s big hand reached across the table and grabbed Guerney’s arm.
There was a gun in Guerney’s hand.
Bline whispered hoarsely, “You Goddamn fool, it’s part of the act. He’s trained to do that; he’s not going to hurt her.”
Guerney whispered back. “Just in case. In case he does jump her. I could get him before he got her throat.”
“Put back that gun, you Goddamn sap, or I’ll break you.”
The gun went slowly back into the shoulder holster, but Sweeney saw, out of the corner of his eye, that Guerney’s hand stayed on the butt of his gun.
Bline said, “Don’t get trigger-happy. The dog jumps her; it’s part of the act, Goddamn it.” Guerney’s hand came out from under his coat, but stayed near his lapel. Sweeney’s eyes jerked back to the stage as a sudden intake of breath from the audience backgrounded a yip from a woman at a table near the stage, a yip like a suddenly stopped scream.
The dog was leaping.
The novel was also made into a film of the same name, and inspired Dario Argento’s giallo classic, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
My two boys, aged 9 and 6, had an inset day in January, and I was going to be looking after them. We decided we were going to make a Lego movie. In the weekend leading up to our day at home, we storyboarded it, painted a backdrop, and gathered all our Lego props.
The photography took us rather more than the single day we had set aside, but we got it finished. I do hope you enjoy it, as we are rather proud of it.
It’s not a big deal. I haven’t suddenly decided that self-publishing is the devil’s work, or that ‘indie authors’ are self-deluded losers, who need a swift kick up the rear end and a hard life lesson. (Although, looking at the incredible amount of swill floating to the top of the Amazon kindle pond, all of the above statements may be true of many self-published authors.)
Nor am I never going to self-publish again. As we all know, the rules are still changing, the big publishing houses are still playing catch up, and NOW is still the right time to be getting your work out there on an e-reading device.
And I have enjoyed my self-publishing adventure so far. My first indie published novel, Caxton Tempest at the End of the World, was foisted upon the unsuspecting public in paperback way back in 2007, before the Kindle changed how we read books. Now out of print, you can still find a couple of copies hanging around, one of them going for £177 on Amazon!
I’ve done a book signing, been interviewed for the newspaper, set up two websites, taught myself e-book formatting, discovered Twitter, blogging, writers’ forums, made some friends, and got myself two (yes, count ’em, TWO!) stalkers. I might tell you about those stalkers another day, but not in this post.
I haven’t actually made any money yet, but I went into this with my eyes open and the words ‘Only spend what you can afford to lose,’ as my mantra for not riddling myself with crippling debt. But that, too, is a post for another day.
To get back to the title of my post, though: I have decided to stop self-publishing, for at least a year, I would think.
Why? Because I want to learn how to write better. I want to further my craft, hone my writing skills, focus on the way in which I use words to tell a story. I want to avoid clichés. Not just the clichéd phrases, but the clichéd settings, characters, tactics and every other form of cliché that turn up, unbidden, on that blank page I am attempting to wrestle into a compelling story.
And self-publishing is distracting me from that goal. After spending time with my family, going to work (they tend not to pay me unless I turn up on a regular basis) and having a…you know…life, then sitting down to format an e-book, or check on my Amazon sales, and dealing with all the other distractions that go with being an indie author, is taking me away from what I love to do: Write.
So that’s my absolute, number one priority for the next year.
What about you? Do you find the process of self-publishing a distraction? Do you feel you write enough, or would you like more time to be able to sit down and just ‘make things up?’
Ordinarily I’m not in the habit of taking photographs of other people’s pets. Especially without asking their permission first. I mean, I guess it’s nowhere near as bad as snapping a quick shot of somebody stranger’s kids, (in fact, that would be just downright weird,) but still, it’s not something I do.
Until this little fella appeared.
I was on holiday in Cornwall at the time, (which partly explains the absence of any blog posts for the last few weeks, I know you’ve all been bereft without them). I was on the beach with my family and our friends, a tiny little cove surrounded by rocks, when I happened to glance up and saw this guy standing on the top of the cliff.
I couldn’t resist. He looked so strong and heroic and determined up there, and he also appeared to realise how cool he looked, as he held that position for long enough that I was able to take a rubbish photo of him first, and then change my position and depth of field to get the shot above.
Yeah, he knew he had an admirer. He knew he was having his photograph taken.
And he loved it.
But you know, I have a sneaking suspicion I do know who this dog belongs to. He just looks so damn familiar…
So, are you a ‘seat of the pants’ writer, or a ‘snowflaker’?
In other words, when you sit down to write that first draft of your novel, do you start with little more than a notion of what it is about, and maybe a couple of character sketches in your head, or do you outline the whole plot beforehand?
Stephen King is a ‘seat of the pants’ writer. Here he is from ‘On Writing’ – I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story. Some of the ideas which have produced those books are more complex than others, but the majority start out with the stark simplicity of a department store window display or a waxwork tableau. I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety – those are the jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot – but to watch what happens and then write it down. (Emphasis mine.)
King is not a big fan of outlining. He feels that plot is mechanical and false, and that it is far better to let the novel grow organically, through the characters’ choices and the situations they find themselves in, than through the mechanics of authorial involvement.
But then King also believes that stories are found things, like fossils, and that the writer has to go digging for them like an archaeologist. You know what? I’m not going to argue with him, as he has written a couple of my all-time favourite books.
Richard S Prather, on the other hand, is an outliner. Quoted here from Lawrence Block’s ‘Writing the novel’ he says – I spend considerable time on plot development, typing roughly 100,000 words or more of scene fragments, gimmicks ‘what if?’ possibilities, alternative actions or solutions, until the overall story line satisfies me. I boil all of this down to a couple of pages, then from these prepare a detailed, chapter by chapter synopsis, using a separate page, or more, for each of, say, twenty chapters, and expanding in those pages on characters, motivations, scenes, action, whenever such expansion seems a natural development. When the synopsis is done, I start the first draft of the book and bang away as speedily as possible until the end.
Phew! That sounds like hard work.
I’ll get back to Lawrence Block’s verdict on outlining versus writing cold at the end, as I feel he sums it up perfectly.
But first I want to clarify the reasons why you might want to outline your book. (I’m not going to do the same for ‘seat of the pants’ writing, as I think the quote above from King does that more than eloquently enough.)
Have you heard of the Snowflake Method? Developed by Randy Ingermanson, the Snowflake Method is a way of developing your novel from a single sentence to a full outline, from which you then write the first draft. Ingermanson claims that working this way will vastly increase the speed of your writing, and that a relatively clean first draft can be banged out much faster, and need less revision, as most of the work will have been done in the outline.
I’ll direct you to his website for a fuller explanation of the Snowflake Method, as I don’t want to steal his thunder, and he can explain it better than I can, anyway.
So, which are you? ‘Seat of the pants’, or ‘Snowflake’? Or maybe a combination of the two?
I have always been a combination of the two, although perhaps leaning more towards ‘seat of the pants’ writing. For my two published novels I wrote a basic outline, and then began writing, allowing the characters to deviate from their outlined plot paths if they so wished, and take me into uncharted territories. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. Certainly ‘Caxton Tempest’ is a bit of a mishmash in places, and I didn’t always know the answer to the mysteries I was creating on the page, and still don’t, if I’m honest!
But, having said that, my villain Murmur arrived completely formed from a ‘seat of the pants’ writing session, and he became a fabulous character, loved by my readers more than the hero. (That’s not a good thing, by the way, having your hero upstaged by a secondary villain.)
For my current WIP I am outlining. Actually, I have one abandoned first draft of 40,000 words, another false start, and a completed second draft, but none of them really work, so this time I have decided to outline before I go for another, vastly different, draft. I’ll let you know how I get on.
And Lawrence Block’s verdict on these two methods of working?
As you go along, you’ll learn what works best for the particular writer you turn out to be. And that’s all that matters. No one ever bought a book because it was written with an outline, or because it wasn’t.
So what are your thoughts on all of this? Have you used one or other method, or a combination of both? Do you believe one way is best, or that each writer is different? And would you be prepared to change from one to the other, to see if it improved your writing?
As Speilberg and Lucas seem to be taking their sweet time in making another Indiana Jones film, my son and I thought we would help them out.
My son was seven when we made this, and we spent a sunny afternoon, first in the kitchen making the dinosaur out of plasticine, and then in the garden, filming. It took us most of a day to make this 27 seconds long film, and about ten seconds of that is taken up by the credits. You’ll notice that my other boy, Jack, is credited too, but to be honest he spent most of his time playing on the trampoline. He was only five, though.
Pleasant memories from last summer. It’s days like that when I go to bed thinking, yeah, life is good.
It’s not exactly Citizen Kane (or even Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) but I hope you enjoy it.
