Until recently, I was looking forward to collecting my State Pension later this year as a great way to gain more disposable income and make the lifestyle a bit more comfortable. As the markets now stand, I’m watching my private pension fund diminish at a disturbing rate; we’re not yet in Truss/Kwarteng territory, but turmoil in the markets mean squeaky-bum time until the markets finally stabilise, whenever that might be. I also have a Civil Service pension and find that this year’s index-linked increase is *less* than our annual Council Tax rise. Anyway, six months to State Pension day and it suddenly looks a lot more like a safety net than a comfort blanket.
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The Butcher Bird has been out for a month now. I am delighted to say that I have sold some copies, but not many copies. So it goes, as Billy Pilgrim said, poo-tee-weet. I don’t write for sales, but it is always nice when I see that a book has sold or someone says something kind on social media. And as I write this I see that someone, somewhere in the UK, has bought a hardback copy; I got quite the endorphin rush.
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One of my TV memories from the early 1970s was watching Clochemerle on BBC2, a satire that revolves around a proposal to erect a public urinal near the church in a small wine-growing town in Beaujolais. I have it on a DVD and should watch it again, not least because the luminous Cyd Hayman is in it, an early crush of mine. A lot later I read the book by Gabriel Chevallier and at least one of its sequels (I have all three of them but I have no memory of reading the third, Clochemerle les Bains.) I also have one of his other novels in an old paperback, TheAffairs of Flavie, but didn’t get along with it. They’re quite old translations and could do with an update. What I didn’t know until recently was that he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, La Peur, based on his experiences in the trenches in WW1, a novel that was effectively suppressed when WW2 came along. It was eventually released in English as Fear in 2011. I’m reading it at present and enjoying it: the modern translation helps.
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A trailer is out for Star trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 is out and I’ve embedded it below. It drove me to watch my three favourite episodes of season two – Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Those Old Scientists and Subspace Rhapsody. Easily the best Star Trek show since Deep Space 9.
I’m delighted to announce that The Butcher Bird will be published 6 March 2025.
The blurb – which will make more sense to those of you who have read Coyote In The Corner, to which this is a sequel – reads:
Humans are all but wiped out, struggling to recover in a changing climate. Margaret, the butcher bird, haunts her domain, craving blood. The key to the future of both species is in the oldest stories of the vampires, hiding in myth and memory.
But myth and memory are unreliable witnesses and the past is as hard to predict as the future.
The concluding stories in the seductive Gaia Cascade sequence that began in Coyote in the Corner.
Kindle pre-orders are available on Amazon now, but physical copies can’t be bought until publication day (Amazon’s rules, not mine). The UK Kindle link is: The Butcher Bird. Outside of the UK, just change the .co.uk of the link to your local Amazon site – .com, .ca for example, and it should work.
If you are a Kindle reader then it would be really helpful if you pre-order.
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If you wonder why writers are keen on pre-orders and reviews, it is because that is how the ubiquitous algorithms select books to promote more often to a broader readership. In essence, if it is selling and if people care enough to leave (positive) reviews, then it is worthy of attention. The current version of the algorithm is trying to discriminate against review farming and also notes how much of the eBook has been read – for example it does not like 5* reviews from people who have only read a few paragraphs of the eBook, assuming that it will not be a credible review.
It can’t do that for physical books, but physical books can’t be pre-ordered and tend to be more expensive. For physical books, ‘verified purchases’ are important as a proxy for reviews not generated on the back of freebies for friends and family.
If you are further wondering why I am publishing through Amazon alone, it is because that is where the market predominantly is, including for Kindle Unlimited readers (for which I get a small royalty for pages actually read). I have previously published on multiple platforms and I always use ISBNs that I have bought in my own name so I can ‘go wide’ again in future if it becomes appropriate, but I do not sell enough books to make it worthwhile as yet.
The manuscript of The Butcher Bird went off to be typeset yesterday, and work should soon begin on a cover. In theory I could do both of those using online tools for free, but I decided long ago that it was worth having a professional job done to produce a professional end result. As I’ve probably said before, writing and revising the book is, for me, the (relatively) easy bit; the hard bits are thinking up a descriptive blurb and a marketing approach. I’ve thought quite deeply about both of these previously, but so far nothing has worked.
Fake Taylor.
I mentioned on Facebook that the only thing almost guaranteed to make sales is to have Taylor Swift photographed reading one of my books, and that led my friend Joe to fake up the inset photo. Yes, of course it is fake and, apart from putting here for amusement value, it cannot ever be used, alas.
Some time ago, I had the idea that there must be an organic way to exploit the network effects of social media for viral marketing. I still think that must be possible, but it is hard to make happen and, probably, getting harder as algorithms shift towards commercialising engagement. While social media has certainly led to some sales for me, it hasn’t led to any great volume of sales and, as I approach publication of my fourth book, my costs far outweigh my revenue. For The Butcher Bird I intend to be more proactive in promoting the book, though there is always something I find inherently distasteful about that. I’m more of a Sgt. Wilson than a Pvt. Walker on this (one for the kids there.)
Also, there is something interesting about the advice available online: it contains an inherent logical fallacy. It is,
commercially successful writers do x, y and z. Therefore
if you do x, y and z you will be a commercially successful writer.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently polishing the next book, The Butcher Bird. Aside from a final read through, I think it is finished and I’m about to kick off the production process. More news here when it is available.
Before New Year, I did a lot of preparatory work on the next book after The Butcher Bird and now need to get back into the world waiting to be created, from which I have so far only received teasing postcards. It looks like 1930s Edinburgh, but not quite. A lot of my preparation has been dumping ideas into notebooks and sifting through them for what works and what doesn’t, trying to mindmap the elements and how they relate to each other. I’ve been through this process once and need to repeat it to get to the essence of the story. At present I’m in the happy position of having too much material but, less happily, it doesn’t entirely cohere. Some may eventually become other stories, but first things first.
More smoke, vicar?
Being the 1930s, there is a lot of tobacco about. I decided some time ago that my protagonist would be a pipe smoker and, in a nod to JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, would likely smoke Three Nuns (“None Nicer”). This led me down an enjoyable rabbit hole of investigating pipes, tobacco and tobacciana, including the differences between the two versions of Three Nuns available in the 1930s. However it also led me into the strange, niche subculture of pipe smokers on YouTube, and this has been a delight, albeit and admittedly an eccentric delight.
The pipe-smoking world of YouTube has many facets. There are men (always men) discussing and reviewing the essentials of their passion in knowing terms, often with the barely-suppressed intensity of the obsessed. There are also lengthy videos on the restoration of old pipes and the making of new ones and a number of people growing and blending their own tobacco. There are discussions of storing and cellaring tobacco to allow it to mature. Very often, though not inevitably, these men are wearing waistcoats (vests to Americans) and I have observed one or two elaborate moustaches.
There is a tendency amongst some of the American YouTubers towards a faux Britishness, an affectation not shared by the British creators who seem often to be in their shed musing on St Bruno (ready rubbed or flake? There’s a question) and the Condor moments of their yesterdays. And there is one to whom I have subscribed, Rev. Dr. Malcolm Guite, a poet and retired clergyman, who often posts videos of himself, rumpled like an unshaken duvet, reading from his own or others’ writing – notably Tolkien – while sipping malt whisky and puffing on one of his impressive collection of Peterson pipes, pausing from time to time to wheeze. I have embedded a link to him reading Tolkien on Ents and Entwives below.
Childhood
Guite triggered a flashback of our house in 1960’s Derby. Dad smoked a pipe then and I remember loads of empty Player’s Whiskey Flake tins around the house along with Benson and Hedges Mellow Virginia. Dad had two bent-stem pipes, one smooth, one rusticated, and I suspect they were Petersons. I have no idea what happened to them, though I do have one of his other pipes in a box in the shed – a small Westgate Standard, made in France, the stem bitten through. I have a notion now to find some old pipes and attempt to restore them, then place them on my desk while writing to put me into the world of my protagonist. I daresay eBay would be the only source now (unless you know differently.)
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One thing that I like to do when preparing to write is to read good writers and good books in the hope that something will rub off on me by some kind of literary osmosis. I have just begun a reread of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I haven’t read since it was published. It beguiled me then and it is working its magic again now. The BBC adaptation is good but barely scratches the surface of the stories told in the novel, including those told in the footnotes that run parallel to the main text. Aside from technical virtuosity, Clarke is very dark and very funny, her mordant, deadpan humour shining through.
It has been, by choice, a quiet family Christmas. I have spent a lot of it reading. I have a draft of my next book out with readers at present and am letting the shape of the next one form in my mind. Raymond Chandler said that stories distil and right now distilling is where the next book is at.
I think the only thing I watched on TV was the Dr Who Christmas Special which passed the time agreeably so long as you didn’t think about it too hard. There is other stuff I’ll catch up on later on iPlayer, notably Wallace and Gromit. I prefer to watch on a laptop with noise-cancelling headphones because it saves messing around with my hearing aids and TV sound.
My reading has partly been non-fiction relating to the next book but mostly fiction, all of which I’ve enjoyed. I read,
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. This has fallen by the wayside somewhat since her children made allegations against her after her death. That shouldn’t detract from the book which is a remarkable retelling of the Arthurian saga from the perspective of the women involved. It is often described as a feminist retelling but I don’t think it is, or it least not in an ideological sense. What struck me was the depth of her commitment to the underlying mythology and the emotional truth of the character perspectives. I thought it was a little over-plotted towards the end, but I read it with a lot of pleasure. I found out about the allegations after I bought the book in a charity shop and have no expectation of reading anything else by her.
The Player of Games by Iain M Banks. An old favourite of mine both of the Culture novels and of his novels in general. My old paperback copy is getting a bit decrepit now from multiple rereads. Lurking beneath this story is a burning anger and disgust that does not diminish over time.
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. This was the only one of Pynchon’s novels I had not read, and it took me a while as I kept putting it down to come back to later (often months would pass.) However, the final 400 pages passed quickly and enjoyably even though I don’t fully understand what was going on. It is a great sprawling thing, exploring lives of the protagonists in real and imagined worlds leading up to WW1. The prose shifts (deliberately I think) from the gloriously sublime to the basest nonsense, keeping the reader wrong-footed. For all its difficulty, I think I’ll revisit it relatively soon, though I may look out for a paperback version since my first edition hardback is something of a brick.
The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, of course. I hadn’t read this in 30 years and it was interesting to revisit. Rather like the films, it’s better if you fast forward through the Frodo and Sam stuff. It is often held up as the progenitor of modern Fantasy and yet it is not Fantasy at all, at least as we would now understand Fantasy. JRRT’s prose varies between the excellent and the prolix and the tendency towards elevated language in the latter sections (all yay, nay, verily and raiments and odd syntax) quickly gets tiresome. Even so, there’s a lot to like and especially the techniques he uses to ground the story in a long mythological history. Just don’t think about trying The Silmarillion next, it is dull beyond belief.
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As I wrote this, the news of Jimmy Carter’s death arrived. RIP.
It’s been an odd few weeks. I hadn’t done much in the way of exercise since early June, first because of the time demands of a family wedding and second because, as soon as the wedding was celebrated, Kirstin and I both came down with colds that lingered. I’ve been around the block enough times to know that exercising before the body has recovered is a bad idea, so it was only last week that I went into the swimming pool a couple of times and, yesterday, into the gym.
The gym was busy so I didn’t do my full routine, but I did enough to find out the hard way that I’ve lost a bit of strength on the free weights. The plus side is that my previous efforts with free weights and upper body work made the return to the pool less difficult than it might have been. Anyway, I took a turn on a treadmill yesterday – set at an incline and a decent walking pace. On a whim, I also did some light jogging, basically the equivalent of 1km, my first attempt at jogging since the knee problem emerged in February. Happily, I had no reaction in my knee when on the treadmill and haven’t had any today.
I am well aware that I am not ready to go back to running, but I am pleased that I appear to be in a better place than I was five months ago.
Plenty of walking today, and a nap this afternoon. My knee may not have reacted, but the rest of me did.
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Recent reading
Two new novels formed my reading this week, both quite different.
Paulo Bacigalupi’s Navola is a dark fantasy, grimdark even, that requires close attention. It’s a mashup of renaissance banking and trade, Rome and The Godfather. I enjoyed it a lot and look forward to the sequel in due course.
Deborah Harkness’s The Black Bird Oracle is nowhere near as deep or subtle, but it is an enjoyable page-turner. It doesn’t have the historical depth of the first two books in the sequence (A Discovery of Witches and The Shadow of Night) but that’s OK. I’m not being slighting – it was an enjoyable read after the more hardcore Navola.
Both books are waystations as I finish the current story collection and the back of my mind turns to the next novel or two. More on that later.
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