The Folly

German Covers: Aren’t They Lovely

Ben — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:46:58 +0000

Galaxy National Book Awards

Ben — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:49:55 +0000

I have been nominated as a Best New Writer for the National Book Awards 2011. The award ceremony will take place on Friday the 4th of November and will be televised on one of the Channel Fours, probably in bite sized chunks with additional celebrities thrown in to maintain interest. I don’t care because Dara O’Briain will be the compere and he’s one of favourite stand ups so I’m looking on this and free gig. More information as I get it.

Moon Over Soho Audio

Ben — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:25:29 +0000

Just received word that the unabridged audio version Moon Over Soho will be available for download from the 21st of July. It will be read, as was Rivers of London, by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith who not only does a much better Nigerian accent than me but also a better Scottish, Manchester, Essex and, if truth be told, Cockney wide boy.

He’s been in Little Britain and done time at the National and the Globe – which makes him a proper actor. He certainly does a good job with Peter.

Writing a Novel and Getting Published

Ben — Mon, 30 May 2011 08:00:26 +0000

Now that I’ve moved from an almost successful writer to a somewhat successful writer I am still asked how one traverses that tricky hinterland between the gloomy forest of obscurity to the sunlit uplands of actually getting paid to write. I cannot speak to the journey that others may take but I can certainly describe my own rock and cowpat strewn path to occasional success.

I’ve covered much of this ground before but I thought I’d consolidated in one easy to find blog.

Part 1: Prior to Writing the Novel

1. To paraphrase Yoda ‘Write or do not write there is no fucking endlessly telling people you’re going to write a novel if you don’t write it and BTW you fucked up badly in that cave you’re worse than fricking Obi Wan I swear this is why I gave up teaching…’

Part 2: Writing the Novel

1. Go out and buy ‘How Not To Write A Novel’ by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman.
2. Read this book at least twice.
3. Write your novel following its advice.
4. Do not rewrite earlier chapters until the book is finished.
5. Do not show your work to more than 1-2 people until it’s finished.
6. Do not ask professional writers to look at work unless you are a) sleeping with them, b) related to them, c) prepared to give them more than £2,000 in cash or d) all of the above.
7. I don’t need to defend these rules to anyone since they worked for me but you can ignore them as much as you like – I’m easy.

Part 3: Selling Your Novel

I did the conventional get an agent and let them sell the book route so if you want to sell direct to publishers or self publish I can’t help you and my speculation is just uninformed as anyone else. Also all of this applies to the UK – I have no idea how you’d do this in a different country.
1. Buy the latest copy of the Writers and Artists Yearbook.
2. Turn to the pages that list Literary Agents and pick 10 agents by whatever criteria suits you, I started with the biggest London based agencies but you could do it by reverse alphabetical order because it actually makes very little difference.
3. Follow the following procedure with exactitude…
a) Check the agency website to ensure that they are open to submissions, that they are looking for the genre you are writing in and what their submission guidelines are. If they don’t have a website then make a quick phone call to determine these things. Be friendly and do not overstay your welcome or pitch over the phone (unless you are explicitly invited to).
b) prepare a submission package following the exact guidelines you were given in a). You do not win points for innovating your submission or trying to explain why you should be an exception.
c) Repeat the process for the other nine agencies.
d) Post or email your submissions.
4. Pick another 10 agencies and repeat until you have submitted your material to every single agency in the book that is willing to look at a submission. I did about ten submissions a week I can’t see any reason to do it slower unless you really like to string out the agony.
5. Once you have an agent selling the book becomes their problem.
6. I can’t really help you if this doesn’t work since I got an agent.

Part 4: Some Statistics

I submitted my work to 45 agencies…
Of which 10 subsequently asked for a full manuscript…
4 asked for meetings of which…
Only 2 made offers of representation.
The fastest rejection took 6 days and the longest 6 months.
The average time before a manuscript request was 4 weeks.
Meetings, when they happened, were requested within 7 days of submitting a full manuscript.
To this day 13 agencies have failed to do so much as reject me by email.

That’s the sum total of knowledge of how to get your work published – I hope it’s useful.

Mein Name ist Peter Grant.

Ben — Sat, 07 May 2011 19:27:50 +0000

Rivers of London is being published in Germany by DTV, here is their cover and here is their blurb…

»Können Sie beweisen, dass Sie tot sind?«

Peter Grant ist Police Constable in London mit einer ausgeprägten Begabung fürs Magische. Was seinen Vorgesetzten nicht entgeht. Auftritt Thomas Nightingale, Polizeiinspektor und außerdem der letzte Zauberer Englands. Er wird Peter in den Grundlagen der Magie ausbilden. Ein Mord in Covent Garden führt den frischgebackenen Zauberlehrling Peter auf die Spur eines Schauspielers, der vor 200 Jahren an dieser Stelle den Tod fand.

»Mein Name ist Peter Grant. Ich bin seit Neuestem Police Constable und Zauberlehrling, der erste seit fünfzig Jahren. Mein Leben ist dadurch um einiges komplizierter geworden. Jetzt muss ich mich mit einem Nest von Vampiren in Purley herumschlagen, einen Waffenstillstand zwischen Themsegott und Themsegöttin herbeiführen, Leichen in Covent Garden ausgraben. Ziemlich anstrengend, kann ich Ihnen sagen – und der Papierkram!«

The strapline at the top translates as, I think, “Can your prove that you are dead?” which is not bad at all and very funny. I also like the cry of ‘…and the paperwork’ »…und der Papierkram!«

I Don’t Want To Boast…

Ben — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 11:17:43 +0000

But I’m in the top ten again….

…admittedly I’m right at the bottom of the top ten but, hey, any sales figure you can walk away from as they say. This is the Guardian Top 10 Hardback chart, apparently the Sunday Times won’t have a weekly chart tomorrow so I’m going to do all my serious gloating today.

Moon Over Soho – Out Now in the UK

Ben — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 04:49:23 +0000

Moon Over Soho is out today: 373 sizzling hardback pages of murder, magic, mystery, hot sex, cool jazz and cream cakes. A book that the critics are already calling ‘…a novel with words in it!‘

‘Some of the characters are the same as the last book.’

Pedant’s Weekly

‘No really I just can’t patronise this book enough…’

Sue Perkins

‘The humor, the world-building, the action, the magic, the mystery, the procedural—all are top-notch.‘

Ranting Dragon

‘Moon Over Soho is a ton of fun.‘

My Bookish Ways

‘Moon over Soho is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in a long time.’

Fantasy Literature

…the climax is both exhilarating and emotionally affecting…‘

SFReviews.net

‘…a tale full of magic, mystery and humor, set in a city that lives and breathes with its own living history.‘

Owlcat Mountain

‘…highly readable and hugely enjoyable. Definitely a book not to miss!’

Love Vampires

Signing at Romford Waterstone next Saturday

Ben — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 12:47:19 +0000

I will be signing copies of, well anything that gets shoved in front of me but hopefully, copies of the newly released ‘Moon Over Soho’ on the Saturday the 23rd of April. It will kick off at 13:00 PM so that we can get it out of the way before rushing off to watch Doctor Who.

Waterstone’s Romford

Address:
Lockwood Walk
Town Centre
Romford
RM1 3RJ
+44 (0)170 874 7482

Writing Below Your Pay Grade

Ben — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 15:18:17 +0000

Bonekickers
Now you can criticise Bonekickers for many things and indeed it’s actually quite hard to see where one would stop criticising Bonekickers but most of those things arose out of positive decisions on the part of the production team. In other words they did it to themselves. Like many TV professionals before them they chose to ignore real history, politics or archaeology so in order to tell a better story. That the series proved a turgid disappointing muddle is down to their, surprising given their track record, short comings as writers and is beyond the scope of this blog.

What was most disappointing was the fact that the scripts were so slackly written and nothing illustrates this point better than the scene in Episode 2 when a document from the late 18th Century is discovered which refers to a group of black revolutionary war soldiers as ‘political prisoners’.

Now I’m not an expert in the historical use of language but that stood out like a bum note. I’m pretty certain that any writer with a historical sense that stretched back beyond their old copies of the Beano would hear that bum note too. The trouble was that it used to be very hard to know for sure.

Until now and this is where the blog really starts….

Because those nice people at Google have provided lazy writers with the Ngram Viewer which allows you to check the frequency of the use of a word or phrase against book contents going back all the way back to the dawn-ish of publishing. So let us enter the phrase ‘political prisoner’ into the magic engine so…

As you can see the phrase doesn’t really occur with any frequency before the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Even so there is one occurrence of the term listed in a book dated 1798 so I think I’m going to give Ashley Pharoah the benefit of the doubt in this case(1). Which proves how useful this thing is for the jobbing writer.

Bonekickers, wretched waste of budget that it may have been, is not the reason for this blog which was actually prompted when a script for the TV pilot of “Poe” fell into my hands(3).

Poe
The premise for this series is strong – Edgar Allen Poe a fine mystery writer pursues a crime fighting career in Boston in the early 1840s complete with spunky female sidekick and traditional antagonistic relationship with the Boston P.D.(4). Jumping out of page 4 comes the term “boogie man” not used for the supernatural killer before the 20th century or was “out of the box” in anything but it’s literal meaning.

Now it can be fun to throw in anachronisms, to have our hero be ‘ahead of the curve’ and invent idioms a century or so early – but this approach only works well if everybody else routinely speaks in the appropriate historical idiom – which they don’t. For example the police commissioner[sic] refers to “crime scenes” not in use before the 20th Century. And spunky female side kick refuses – to reinforce some “fairer sex” stereotype… Until the 1920s stereotype was strictly a printing term.

But the point where my willing suspension of disbelief, a quite sturdy edifice I assure you, collapsed was when Poe suggested that a particularly dim police officer should return to the academy[sic] for a refresher course (not in widespread use until the 20th century again). Anachronism piled on anachronism.

Can I point out that it took me all of a minute and a half to look up these words and check when the Boston P.D. was established. So the argument that writers don’t have time to do this basic research is total bollocks. These leads us onto…

Like Who Cares Dude?
Good question. Does it matter that some piece of fluff TV show has any historical accuracy, or even a close approximation? I would forgive Poe if I thought that the producers had taken a decision to be interestingly anachronistic in the manner of ‘A Knights Tale’ but the truth is I believe it’s down to either basic incompetence or because they just don’t care enough to do the work properly. I think it matters on a purely professional level as a writer that if you’re going to be paid to do work you should at least do it to a certain minimum standard.

I think this represents a failure of historical imagination so that all periods of history collapse down to a sort of dog’s dinner that’s essentially indistinguishable from how the present is represented. When this happens the past becomes mute, it teaches us nothing through allegory or contrast it exists only as another flavour of processed mechanically recovered meat. Fit only for dogs.

So yeah – I think it matters. I think as writers we should strive to work above our pay grade(5) not below it.

(1) I still think it’s really unlikely that the British authorities would refer to freed slaves that had fought for the Continental Army(2) as ‘political prisoners’ in an official document.
(2) In exact reversal of what actually happened but given that none of the rest of the script made any sense I suppose that’s a moot point.
(3) I really will do just about anything rather than work
(4) Founded 1854!
(5) ‘Above your pay grade’ comes into use in the 1960s and “pay grade” itself after 1900.

Gibbon Wrangling for Beginners: Part 1

Ben — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:18:41 +0000

Dealing with the Patronage Delusion

It is an unfortunate fact of life that if you embark upon a career in writing that sooner or later you will find yourself dealing with a gibbon(1), sometimes a whole troop of gibbons. This can be a very disorientating experience so I’d thought I’d offer some advice for budding writers.

Because Gibbons are insanely status conscious they frequently see all professional relationships in terms of patronage. Because in the eyes of a gibbon a writer will always have roughly the same status as the cleaning lady this can lead to exhibit strange behaviour which may cause alarm to the uninitiated.

Gibbons find it very difficult to deal with the fact that they are dependent on lowly writers for their livelihood. The fact that they must rely on talent to develop, produce and finally sell the product causes them a sort of constant low grade psychic pain. Like many people suffering from chronic pain the constant discomfort can lead to irritability, loss of temper and bouts of irrationality. To compensate gibbons frequently seek to recast straightforward professional arrangements as acts of patronage.

In this scenario they see themselves not as, admittedly high paid, media professionals contracting with a fellow professional but as Medici or Saatchi like patrons who have deigned to scatter their largesse on the mendicant writer who perforce must genuflect and kiss the feet of his betters.

Now - when you think you’ve got an agreement amongst equals and they believe that they’ve allowed the beneficent light of their countenance fall upon your unworthy form – it can lead to certain amount of cognitive dissonance. For example:

A SCRIPT DEVELOPING MEETING

YOU: I’ve knocked up a few sample scenes to test the concept I think it would be useful if you had a look to see if you thought I was on the right track.

GIBBON: No! I must not for it is written that in the beginning there shall be the pitch and the pitch shall beget the summery and from the loins of the summery shall come the outline which shall beget the scene breakdown and only then, when each every one of these has been discussed yea unto the nth degree shall the script be written. So it is written, so shall it be. So say we all.

YOU: Wouldn’t it just be quicker if…

GIBBON: You dare question the wisdom of the ages, down upon your belly worm and beg forgiveness of the almighty commissioning editor before whom you are but a lowly dung beetle.

I think you’ll agree that such an exchange is not conducive to a good working relationship.

Remedy: unfortunately like most the problems associated with a gibbon infestation there is almost certainly no cure(3) but there are strategies that can help ameliorate the most unpleasant symptoms.

Firstly: don’t be an enabler. It’s always tempting to ‘go with the flow’ in the hope of having a quiet life but this would be a mistake. Enabling this kind of delusional behaviour is counterproductive in the long run and not good for the gibbons themselves.

Secondly: be firm. Always be firm and explain you’re position in clear measured tones. If you see signs that the gibbon has misinterpreted your position remain calm and restate your position again.

Thirdly: never lose your temper. Gibbons are hypersensitive to status and react very negatively to any suggestion that they may have offended or overstepped the bounds. The males in particular are prone to excessive territoriality which can manifest in chest beating, insults and feces hurling. It’s best to just to wait for these episodes to subside and then to continue as if nothing has happened.

Fourthly: do not be afraid to walk away. Ultimately you can do without them but they can’t do without you.

(1) Not real gibbons(2), see previous posts.

(2) Although that would be kind of cool.

(3) Many writers are pushing for a cull(4) but animal rights groups have objected.

(4) Can I reiterate that I’m not talking about real gibbons here.