Celebrity Book Tokens

I think it is about time for a New Year rant. There’s one question that haunts me every time Christmas or one of my children’s birthdays comes around and that is: why do people give book tokens to very young children? I can remember as a child myself suffering from that terrible sinking feeling whenever a book token hoved into view. Money, yes: book tokens, no. Book tokens were for swots like Carole Morgan whose bedroom was probably bursting with all sorts of improving volumes but you can’t buy records with book tokens...or Airfix kits or Man from Uncle bubblegum cards or anything…except books.


And so it came to pass that yet more book tokens arrived this Christmas and I was obliged, like some Bureau de Bookchange, to exchange them for cash so that the kids could buy what they really wanted. This has two consequences. First it involves a bit of creative writing when it comes to thank you notes and second it involves me in a search of WH Smith or Waterstones for something worth exchanging them for.

And this is where I start to get really depressed because WH Smiths has on a sale of 125 hardbacks and of them I counted 12, yes 12, that were fiction and 113 that were either by or about so-called celebrities or spin offs from TV programmes. Worse, the fiction titles were by authors that have already sold enough copies to fill the Albert Hall, twice. In fact I checked Smith’s website and discovered that of their top 30 best selling hardbacks, 7 are by fiction authors and the rest are celebrity trash. So where does that leave the rest of us authors (and I count myself here even though my measly self published opus is hardly a work of literary genius) when it comes to making a living? Where is the motivation to write a book and sweat blood to get it published only to find that you are outsold by millions to one by that one off the travel show or some faded comedian who can’t write a proper sentence?

Predictably, Waterstones was no better. The books that I would really like to buy are no longer sold by bookshops who are so in thrall to the celebrity culture that they probably wouldn’t know a fiction book if it fell off the shelf and knocked them unconscious. Instead, I am forced to Amazon who do sell them, and much cheaper, but WHO DON’T ACCEPT BOOK TOKENS.

There, I’ve got that off my chest. And speaking of which, where did I put that Katie Price volume?

‘In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There’

I've just had another non-birthday (29th) so am feeling extra grumpy! I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Disney for what it has done to Winnie The Pooh. The Pooh stories were those that I read and re-read when I was a child whilst poring over those wonderful black and white drawings. Some years ago, not having read them since childhood, I set out to buy copies of ‘Winnie The Pooh’ and ‘The House At Pooh Corner’. My only requirements were that they contained the original uncut stories, as written by A A Milne and the original E H Shepard drawings (NOT the colourised versions)...oh, and the must-have map of the 100 acre wood on the inside cover. It took me some time but eventually I found them and have now read them again after decades of neglect.

It is always interesting to read childhood books with the eyes and mind of an (almost)adult as the stories take on a different hue in the harsher light of experience and this was no different. Many classic children’s books have been written by highly original minds (some may say, bonkers e.g. Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame – does anybody understand ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’?) and Milne falls squarely in this group, weaving off-beat humour with an undercurrent of gentle anarchy. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the crashing wave of realisation that awaited me in Chapter 10 of ‘The House At Pooh Corner’. This is the final story in the book and is entitled:
‘In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There’

As a child, the import of this story had gone way over my head, but on reading it again the obvious inference that Christopher Robin must give up his playtime with his favourite toys to be packed off to Boarding School leaped off the page at me with the force of a sledge-hammer. This was bad enough but it was CR’s final conversation with Pooh that really got to me:
‘I’m not going to do Nothing anymore.’
‘Never again?’
‘Well, not so much. They don’t let you.’
And it was the ‘They don’t let you’ that really set an icy grip around my heart. It just feels so menacing and secret-police-ish and is utterly heart-breaking. That small phrase stands for everyone who has been wrenched out of childhood and forced to confront the real world before they are ready. Some of us are never ready.

We’re still doing it today, prematurely stripping our children’s innocence by inappropriate education, propaganda, commercialisation of minors and intrusion into private lives by the state. This story was published in 1928 but the sentiment applies as much today as it did then, if not more so.

You don’t find the dark underbelly of childhood in Disneyland and this is why the Disneyisation of the Pooh books has ruined them – they have removed the idiosyncrasies of Milne’s brilliant writing and blanded them out like so much pap. Buy the originals and accept no substitute.

What's in a Name?

Sometimes I sit here wondering what the hell I’m going to write about next and then, usually after a long walk, I have a Mr Micawber moment and something turns up. Actually, this time around, it was Mr Micawber himself who turned up.

It was whilst I was listening to ‘American Thighs’ by 90s grunge merchants, Veruca Salt that it occurred to me that various bands have stolen, sorry, borrowed their names from fictional characters, Veruca Salt being the spoilt brat in Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’. So once this train of thought was chugging along nicely, fuelled by a few chocolate biscuits, several others revealed themselves. The obvious one following the Micawber principle is Dickens’ Uriah Heep from ‘David Copperfield’ (an acquaintance of Mr Micawber himself, I understand) who became the moniker for a bunch of 1970s heavy metallers who were well known to my peers at school if the preponderance of their album covers about the place was any guide.

At the other end of the musical scale sits the acoustic based band, Belle and Sebastian, 1990s indie favourites whose name is an Anglicised version of a children’s book by French author, Cécile Aubry. It seems that not only books have been plundered but also films and musicals. New romanticists, Duran Duran based their name on the mad scientist from the fantasy film, Barbarella (hmm...wonder why I remember that one) and recent indie-kid turned presenter, Lauren Laverne once fronted an outfit called Kenickie, pinched from a character in the musical ‘Grease’.

A far madder and convoluted idea is to call yourself after a cartoon character from a fantasy film based around real people, but what possessed Robert Smith (Cure) and Steve Severin (Banshees) to team up under the badge of The Glove from the Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’ is perhaps open to much debate at the next psychologists convention.

Filching names from fiction is all very well, but it doesn’t stop there. Step forward prog-rockers Jethro Tull who have assumed the identity of a real live agriculturalist and seed-drill inventor, er...Jethro Tull (1674 – 1741). Perhaps more subtly, ex-banana Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit teamed up under the (presumably) assumed identity of ‘Shakespears Sister’ thus side-stepping any identity theft of the Bard himself, but using his proximity.

Aren’t names fascinating? Pass the chocolate biscuits and I’ll see if I can come up with any more.

Authors Promoting Authors

Take it from me as an impoverished author, trying to sell a self-published book is akin to pulling teeth so when I chanced upon a comment from ‘Authors Promoting Authors’ whilst perusing one of my favourite blogs, A Novice Novelist, I was intrigued.

Further investigation revealed that APA is Tina-Sue Ducross, an author promoting her first book, ‘No Shadows Left Behind’ and her blog has been set up to publicise books from self-published and independently published authors. To cut to the chase, she agreed to post my book details and in return, I am promoting her site with this post.

So if you fancy reading a selection of up and coming new authors, check out ‘Authors Promoting Authors’ and have a browse. To get you in the mood, here are details of Tina-Sue’s book and the most recent post on her APA blog:

NO SHADOWS LEFT BEHIND by Tina-Sue Ducross

'Broken lives can be mended; joy can be found.Terrorizing dreams, panic attacks, and everyday interactions bring back a past this teacher thought was dead and gone. And now, Melissa sees signs that one of her eighth-grade students, Christy Kade, may be in an all-too-familiar situation... of incest.
Christy lives in silent fear, dreading her father's "secret, special games."As she gains a desperately-needed friendship, Christy begins to believe in herself and to find the courage to reach out for help. The school year progresses and both Christy and Melissa make attempts at trust, each of them drawing on inner strength to navigate their lives. As our heroines open themselves up to the lessons taught to them by their loved ones, they grow in ways they’d never thought possible.
Ugly things do happen behind closed doors, but help—and hope—exist.'

Buy 'No Shadows Left Behind'

DAYDREAMS IN MERMAID GRASS by Natalie Williams

'Daydreams in Mermaid Grass began in its conception in a dream. What happens when we sleep, before we fall into those deep moments that we cannot wake from, where we have no recollection of what has taken place but awake with a heightened sense of something, something that cannot be defined? This uniquely transcendent collection of poetry offers a peak into an imaginary world where the wildest dreams and nightmares culminate into a whirlwind ride where all else is forgotten.The title is metaphorical for a dream state; when all time stops and you enter before sleep unimagined things reach from another world to take you and you slip, floating, softly into the unknown.The fantastical world of Bracken written in poetic verse spells a hypnotizing read for all. The world, populated by fantastical creatures mesmerizes the reader from beginning to end. Serpent dragons with mirror hides that reflect all wrongdoing journeying on quests, princesses clothed in darkness and only lit by the creature known only as Speaker are only some of the treasures that await you inside. Hold my hand and let this magical sleep take you into the world of Daydreams in Mermaid Grass'

Buy 'Daydreams in Mermaid Grass'

Visit Natalie Williams' website

Happy Reading!

Independents Day

When it comes to selling your book to the public at large, any sort of success tends to sit at the end of a long and largely unproductive road so I say hurrah for independent bookshops!

After what seems like an eternity of traipsing around numerous branches of national chain store bookshops and trying to communicate with dead-eyed staff that are set on directing you to their call centre somewhere near the upper reaches of the Ganges rather than actually talking to you, I have struck gold.

My local independent bookshop ‘The Chorleywood Bookshop’ is going to stock my book, ‘Memoirs of a Music Obsessive’ and sell it to an unsuspecting public – I hope. The shop itself is one of those places that you only find once in a while. It is small and neat and displays its books in a way that, as a book reader and ultimately a book buyer, makes you want to browse. By comparison, modern chain store sellers have that slight ‘pushing product’ feel which never sits easily with me.

Morag, the shop’s affable owner, obviously takes a pride in her enterprise and I hope my book will be happy in her capable hands and on her capable shelves – but not too happy that it won’t want to leave.

It’s all very well selling through internet sites like Amazon but there is nothing quite like seeing your book in a proper bookshop. This development has the beneficial consequence that some of my potential readers who have hidden behind their ‘I never buy anything on the Internet’ excuse, now have nowhere to run – except to 4 New Parade, Chorleywood where the Chorleywood Bookshop will be more than happy to sell them a copy.

So if you are in the vicinity of the Hertfordshire/Buckinghamshire border, do drop in and have a browse around, you never know what you may come away with.

On the same subject, I see that over on the west coast of Canada on Allison Crowe’s blog, Adrian has posted a short review of ‘Memoirs’. This is the first time that anyone has, to my knowledge, referred to it on a blog, so a big thank you to Adrian for his kind words. Incidentally, I understand that Allison may possibly be coming to the UK in the foreseeable future to entertain us with her amazing piano playing and power pack vocal chords, so look out for her at a venue near you!

Criminally Amusing

‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man’ so sayeth the Jesuits but in my case it was more a case of ten or eleven. It was at that age that I mentioned casually to my mother that there was a hard-backed copy of the Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories occupying a huge chunk of shelf space in my primary school library and she immediately instructed me to borrow it for her to read.

My mother was a great devourer of detective fiction – Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret was her favourite - and a chance to read all the Sherlock Holmes stories at a stroke was too good to miss. So it was that I ended up struggling home with the massive tome one fateful afternoon. The book took up residence in our home for so long that, out of curiosity, I started to read it myself and having finished it I, too, became hooked on crime fiction.

In my teens I read all 80-odd Agatha Christie novels and then graduated on to writers such as Dorothy L Sayers, Ruth Rendell, P D James and a host of others. It had become my favourite genre and to a large degree, still is.

My other preferred reading style can be traced to the school book club, operated by my English master at secondary school. This was designed to allow pupils to purchase books at low prices and thus benefit from our rich cultural heritage. Unfortunately, not all the books on the monthly lists were of what the school would consider an improving nature. My first purchases included ‘The Art of Coarse Rugby’ by humorist Michael Green who wrote a whole series of ‘Art of Coarse...’ books in the 1950s and ‘How to be Topp’ by another humorist, Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle (of St Trianians fame). Willans was an ex-school master himself and his books are about life at a fictional post war boarding school, St Custards, written through the world-weary eyes of pupil Nigel Molesworth (the gorilla of 3b...as any fule kno!)

His Molesworth books were a riot of poor spelling and uncannily adept insight into the schoolboy mind and I loved them...and still do. These two writers led me to humorist novels and pretty soon the likes of P G Wodehouse, Keith Waterhouse and Spike Milligan followed.

And thus were born from an early age my duel reading preferences which have remained largely unchanged all my life. Funnily enough, I now find myself reading many of the American crime writers like Sue Grafton and particularly, Janet Evanovich, who combine the traditional crime mystery with a degree of either wry or madcap humour. For me, the perfect combination.

One Today!!

Hurrah! My Book is officially one year old today (‘Happy Birthday to you…etc’). Actually, it was formally published on 13th December but it was available prior to the official date so as to catch the Christmas market (Ha!), but today is its real Birthday!

I still have no clue from the publishers as to how many I’ve sold (something to do with long sale-or-return delays) so I am undecided as to whether I should be celebrating or not (probably ‘not’) but I think I shall anyway.

A BIG THANK YOU to all of you who have bought it, even if you have since given it away or lost it down the back of the sofa. I hope you were entertained but even if you weren’t at least it will look very colourful on your shelf and will act as a good conversation piece. I have to say that my first inkling of the proposed cover design was when my wife rang me at work to say that the proof had arrived in the post and when I asked her what it looked like there was a horrible silence at the other end of the phone for what seemed like an eternity followed by a blurted, ‘It’s YELLOW…!’

Happily, I have learned to live with it so I hope you have too.

PS If you have read it and liked it, a review on Amazon.co.uk would be nice!!
PPS It is still available if you need a last minute Christmas present!