Only The Good Die Young

Posted on April 8, 2013 by literarylad

So Margaret Thatcher has finally popped her clogs. I know of people who have had champagne on ice in preparation for this moment. I wouldn’t go that far, but I won’t be mourning. I heard the news whilst I was driving earlier today. Caught unawares, I cheered. Loudly.

I lived through the Thatcher era, and I still remember how bad things were. When she became Prime Minister in 1979, unemployment was under one million. Within a few years it was over three, and still rising. When she finally realised that something needed to be done about it, her solution was to change the way the figures were calculated.

She destroyed the manufacturing sector in the UK and put most of our state assets into the hands of profiteers (for the most part, her peers). She created the lost generation, provoked countless suicides, and used market forces to drive down wages and conditions for ordinary working people. As a satirical comedy show put it at the time: ‘Never before, in the field of human con-tricks, has so much been taken from so many by so few’. She oversaw the beginning of a process of transference of wealth from those at the bottom of society to those at the top – a process that has been perpetuated by successive governments since.

Her legacy is the creation of the Selfish Society.

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Sub-conscious publicity

Posted on April 4, 2013 by literarylad

I’ve added a new page, called downloads, to the blog, and put in a Word doc containing the first chapter of the novel. Is this a way of showing people what my writing is like – ‘try before you buy’ – or just a shameless attempt to reel people in (or perhaps a bit of both)?  Watch out for some short stories appearing on the page soon – at least you’ll get to read the ending without having to pay!

I’ve been thinking of how best to explain what the book is all about – to describe it in a straight-forward way rather than sounding like a publicity synopsis. It follows a character called Alex, a Graphic Designer living just outside Manchester (Manchester, England, to quote Dave Haslam) over around six months of his life. Six months during which he’s having a bit of a crisis, at work and in his marriage. There is a fair amount of plot, and (I hope) some surprises, but mostly I tried to concentrate not so much on the events themselves, but on how the characters are affected by them – Alex in particular. Behind this there is a theme – an exploration of the conscious mind versus the sub-conscious; how what we think we want may not always accord with what’s going on in our sub-conscious minds. And how our mistaken ideas of what we want can cause us to act in ways that take us further away from what we actually want.

A writer’s own life and personality is bound to influence what they write about, and I was very aware that this can be particularly true for a first novel. With this in mind, I went out of my way to make sure it didn’t become auto-biographical.

Anyway, I hope some of you will have a read (Chapter One is just under 10,000 words) and let me know what you think.

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I’d rather be writing…

Posted on March 26, 2013 by literarylad

…literary fiction than spending time struggling to work out how to format a blog site. Never mind; it’ll be worth it when it’s done. To think I used to work in IT! It seems that switching it off and on again doesn’t magically put everything right after all, so I’ve resorted to working my way through the WordPress tutorials. Bear with me, as one naturist said to the other (sorry; that one doesn’t really work in print).

I was hoping to have some examples of my writing on the site by now (other than posts, that is) but I haven’t quite worked out how to do it yet. I will, and very soon – watch this (cyber)space.

I have at least managed to put in some links to my novel on Amazon. I’ve eased off from writing a little whilst getting in some reading –  ‘The Children’s Book’ by A. S. Byatt, one of my favourite authors. There are a lot of characters and the narrative moves from one to another in a way that can be a little dis-jointed, but it’s still superb. It’s also a very good history lesson – she’s certainly done a lot of research. The only disappointment is that I’ve found quite a few typos and continuity errors, which suggests it was proof-read in a hurry. I have managed to do some work on the new book, and I hope to share my progress with you soon.

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First post – the past

Posted on March 11, 2013 by literarylad

The book – my first – has been finished for some time now. It’s a work of fiction, a novel. I would describe it as ‘literary fiction’, not because I want to be elitist, but because my aim was to make it a work of quality; well written, in language that flows. I hate categorising artwork, whether it’s music, painting, writing, or whatever else, but it seems we live in a world where this is required. This novel, in common with all novels, is both literature and fiction. It doesn’t fit into any of the so-called ‘genre’ categories – it’s not a thriller (crime or otherwise) a romantic novel or a detective story. It’s not sci-fi or fantasy, there are no teenage vampires or boy wizards involved. It’s not written in ‘street’ language. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of these (except, perhaps, that it seems as though very few writers are producing anything but ‘genre’). So ‘literary fiction’ it is!

I intend to use this blog to tell people about the book (which is called ‘Single Point Perspective’ by the way). I’ll introduce the main characters, talk about the writing process and how the story developed. I intend to include some sample passages or chapters that can be downloaded for free (once I’ve worked out how to do this!) I’ll probably include some of my short stories too. I might well write about other topics, mostly literature-based, but I could stray into other areas now and again. Bear with me, because this is my first blog, and it’s a work in progress.  I’ve just started my second book, and this time I will share my progress, dilemmas, problems, solutions, etc. more or less as they are happening. I expect to write a post weekly, but the frequency might vary somewhat, depending on how much I’ve got to say.

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