Should I move on from Men Behaving Badly?

Okay, so I need your help. If you've read The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil you will have your own opinions of it, hopefully positive. You may even be able to make comparisons between my style and that of other writers. However, those who have not read it won't know what to expect, and this is my problem.

In the past I've tried to give readers an idea what to expect by sharing the comparisons that other people made about the book. At book signings and readings people have pointed out similarities to Robert Rankin and Douglas Adams. I'm a huge fan of both these writers and I'm very flattered by the association. Other people have said it's a bit like Terry Pratchett which, to be honest, is probably a bit too much as he sets the bar so high. Some people have even said that it sounds like the English comic absurdity of Tom Sharpe but I think this is from people who have read about it but not actually read the book. I'm very flattered by that possibility.

Those comparisons are on the comic fiction aspect but other parallels are with fantasy and sorcery writers. I'm now using the term urban fantasy as there is magic in my stories, admittedly much of it implied, but the stories are set in the contemporary world of England in the 21st Century. So the genres here are likened to Harry Potter and Dan Brown, although I don't write children's books and I don't write about the supernatural in the way that Dan Brown does.

Based on this feedback I've pitched my marketing material at fans of these authors mentioning them, hopefully subtly enough, to give a hint of what readers will find. Sometimes I worry that readers won't believe me though, as some of these comparisons are pretty staggering. I would tend not to believe a bloke down the pub who said that his small press published books are a bit like these luminaries.

So the phrase that grew up was that The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil is a bit like Harry Potter meets Men Behaving Badly. Men Behaving Badly because the characters in the book drink far too much dark rum, smoke too many cigarettes and indulge in the occasional Moroccan woodbine, actually more than occasional.

Now I'm in the process of moving all my books to a new publisher, a small press similar to my current publisher but in a position to allow me to concentrate on writing. So it's an opportunity to make some changes in the marketing blurb.

I'm concerned that some of these comparisons are a little too strong, almost unbelievable. Others are a bit out of date or just not very well known. The Harry Potter connection was interesting because that series is now finished and readers might be looking for something new. But there are no broomsticks in my stories and no sparks flying from the ends of wands. In fact the Hidden Masters only contains a couple of events that are clearly supernatural so Harry Potter may not be that appropriate. Also some people don't like Harry Potter because they say it's derivative and unoriginal and stuff like that. However, my point is that Potter is popular and I'm only interested in comparisons that I can use to get my message across to new readers. So if you hate Harry Potter and can't put down your vitriol then I probably don't need your input. At the same time I'm wondering if the Men Behaving Badly connection is now a bit dated so should I stop using that?

So my request is this. If you have read The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil, and you enjoyed it, please tell me how I should be marketing it. What comparisons with other authors can I use to tell new readers what to expect? This naturally has to be from successful, popular, published authors but I can't help that. Of course if you can think of a way to describe the book without comparing it to published works then that would be great. My new publisher is waiting for the marketing text and I can't write it without your help.

If you want to know what all the fuss is about read the publisher's blurb here

If you don't want to wait for the new edition don't bother with Amazon, they are listing it as out of print. It's never out of print as it's print on demand. It's best to buy it from Blackwells here or order it via your local book shop on the ISBN 978-0-9515329-1-1

Hidden Masters' Pocket Book of Tarot

The first edition before resizing

I've just reformatted the Hidden Masters' Pocket Book of Tarot. I'm in the process of moving my books over to a new small press which will allow me to be much more hands off and concentrate on just writing. The current format of the Pocket Book of Tarot is 90 x 140mm.

The blurb describes it thus: "Everything you ever wanted to know about Tarot but couldn't be bothered to ask. Well bother no more as this book gives it to you straight and simple in handy reference form, ideal for the beginner of the forgetful expert alike. Keep it with you when you are impressing your friends, so that when ignorance strikes you can just nip off to the loo or sneak under the table for that elusive definition." I suspect it's the world's only Tarot book with jokes.

However, the new publisher can't do books as small as that so it's going to be 127 x 203mm, about half again as wide and tall and almost twice the area. It was about 80 pages with all the front and back blurb but now it'll be about 50 pages.

So the question is can I still legitimately call it the Hidden Masters' Pocket Book of Tarot? It'll certainly be thin enough to go in a pocket but it'll have to be a bigger pocket than on the back of my jeans. I'm wondering if I should call it the Hidden Masters Little Pamphlet of Tarot and Joke Book. Not so snappy eh?

More about the book here

You can still buy the first edition here - buy it while it's still small enough for your pocket! Just £3.99

Chapter Titles from the Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil

1      The Esbat
2      Elastic
3      Ritual Mechanicians
4      It’s a Beer Thing
5      More Beer
6      The Devil’s Legs
7      Illuminating Experiences
8      Dodgy Characters
9      Chocks Away!
10    The Taste of Dragons
11    Elementals My Dear Wayne
12    Creatures of the Night
13    Vortex
14    Board of Enquiry
15    The Return of The Devil’s Legs
16    Just The One Then
17    Mission Improbable
18    Dubious Infidelity
19    Death By Sword
20    Black
21    Escape to New York
22    How Many Magicians Does It Take?
23    My Number Which is 300
24    Stake
25    Trouser Negotiations
26    Round Table
27    Hit it!
28    Enheavyment
        Epilogue

If you want more click here for an extract from Chapter 2: Jack Barrow on astral travel

And click here for the whole of Chapter 3.

Publisher's blurb here

Don't forget Amazon aren't selling this and list it out of print. It's never out of print as it's print on demand. It's best to buy it from Blackwells here or order it via your local book shop on the ISBN 978-0-9515329-1-1

Save Our Forests - What would be the reason for buying a forest?

The UK government are talking about selling off the publicly own forests. If I had the money to buy a public forest what possible reason could I have for doing so? I have access to such land now and, I suppose, I can use it for whatever purpose I choose so long as it's not destructive. That must therefore mean dog walking, taking the kids out, nature rambling, etc.

So why spend a large amount of my own personal wealth on such a project? The only reason that I can imagine would be to restrict access so that I alone can use it. Anybody who wishes to buy our national forests should not be allowed to do so because of that very possibility.

Sign the petition here

Danger of publisher's offer going down the pan

Back in the autumn I submitted a couple of proposals to publishers that were accepting submissions from unagented writers. I spent weeks writing a suitable proposal with the help of a consultant who knows about these things because it's more of an arcane art than the occult practices that I write about.

Then I waited...

And I'm still waiting.

The afore mentioned publishers said that they don't enter into correspondence. I'm sure they got the text for that disclaimer from the small print of competitions on the back of cereal packets from when I was too small to sit on a chair and touch the floor. You had to read the competitions because there was nothing else to do while eating a bowl of Wheataflakes with milk and enough sugar to give you cancer.

So I find myself wondering what happens if they actually do like a submission and how much trouble they go to when they get back to you? Will they send one email or will they try to find a phone number? Or will they even try to track down your blog or even your book?

My greatest fear is that someone will reply to me and the message will end up in the spam trap only to get deleted amidst all the ads for fake Rolex watches, erectile dysfunction drugs (if you are lucky pellets of chalk that wont kill you) and special offers for septic tanks.

Observations of similarities with Terry Pratchett are to be discouraged

The life of a writer isn’t always full of glamour. I’ve spent the last two months writing a manual for a laboratory machine that incubates water and tests for pathogens. I had the summer free because there weren’t any photocopier manuals to be written. Apparently Terry Pratchett used to be a technical author working for the Central Electricity Generating Board and he used to write press releases about how there hadn’t been a radiation leak. Really, there hadn’t! And I get the impression that he would have been about the same age as I am. So if the similarities don’t end there then perhaps there’s hope for me.

I’m currently rushing home each night in the hope that I’ll have enough energy to edit the next chapter of the first Hidden Masters novel. I’m hoping to tighten it up a bit and put it out as a second edition with a new ISBN. That way hopefully Amazon won’t list it as out of print. It’s not out print even now; if Amazon tells you that the Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil is out of print they are lying to you! Let them have me for defamation or whatever they want. I bet Terry didn’t have this trouble. Apparently he used to rush home to work on the next Discworld novel. This was before he was really famous and he still had a day job. But he didn’t have to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous small press publishing.

What’s the point of all this? Not much really. Blogging about the publishing life means you have to post something and sometimes it’s not all that glamorous. But why should it be any more entertaining for you than me? Well okay you are the reader and I have an obligation to entertain you. So here’s a poem I once wrote about a spoon:

How I wish
I had some tea
for my spoon
so sad to me

Oh God
can’t you see
that my spoon
would wish to be
a greater spoon
a boon to me

If you could grant
just a little tea
but please quite soon
or I might swoon

So please grant
my wish so humble
treat my spoon
and I’ll not grumble

So much happier
I will be
if my spoon
could stir my tea

Inspired by Nick Harrison (who is not a spoon)

Extract from the Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil

From Chapter 2 - The Hidden Masters on Astral Travel

The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil contains many mysteries, mostly relating to how three middle aged pauncy blokes can drink that much and still manage to save the universe. However, occasionally the book contains insights into the world of paganism and the occult. One such pearl of wisdom, from Chapter 2, covers the subject of Astral Travel.

* * *

For some years now The Three Hidden Masters, two from Hemel Hempstead and one from Bricket Wood, had cherished a theory about astral travel which goes a bit like this.

Many people say that it is possible to leave one’s body and travel on the astral plane to visit other places while the practitioner’s body stays put. There is also an idea that there is a silver astral cord which connects the astrally projected presence back to their body. However, there are differing ideas of how this works, and about whether it is possible to visit places that exist in reality. The question is always one of verification.

If you choose to examine the issue, the point is this. Let’s say you travel, or project, onto the astral plane and go around to the chip shop in Queen’s Square, which is a short hop from where two of our heroes live. There you see your friend Pete buying a chicken and mushroom pie and a portion of chips with a can of Coke. Quickly you return to your body and phone Pete up (assuming they haven’t yet invented mobile phones that work on the astral plane). Would it turn out that he had really been at the chip shop buying pie and chips once with a side order of Coke? In other words, do the things you witness while travelling on the astral plane really correspond with what, for the sake of argument, we have to call the real world? Furthermore, if this is the case, can horny single male magicians visit the bedrooms of women they fancy and… well, let’s not get into all that just now. (Try to stop shivering, girls, it’s never worked so far.)

This is a philosophical debate, which is a bit odd in itself because the old pie and chips experiment is probably quite easy to set up, so it ought to have been resolved by now. However, none of our heroes had ever met anyone who had successfully identified someone buying pie and chips once, with or without a side order of Coke. On the few occasions when they had heard of someone who had tried this sort of experiment the results had been less than clear. For example it turned out that the character Pete, who I have just made up for the purposes of this illustration, was in the habit of buying pie and chips on most nights. Thus it would have been a good guess that he was going to be in the chip shop anyway.

Of course, a specialist in the philosophy of science such as the Grumpy Wizard of the West might suggest that this is all nonsense. You see, his perspective would suggest that the fictitious character, Pete, is likely to be so fat, having undoubtedly eaten all the pies, that he is the first person anyone would see when approaching the chip shop from either the astral plane or anywhere else. Actually he wouldn’t say that, but what he might say is far less likely to be amusing.

What is really needed is something so unlikely and easily verifiable that there can be no mistake. So imagine you astrally projected around to Queen’s Square—apparently so named because she opened it in her coronation year of 1952, though I don’t suppose she remembers—and found Fat Pete being arrested for having broken into the Post Office to get some money to buy pie and chips. During your astral vision, there was a reporter photographing the event for the local paper which came out the following Thursday, with Fat Pete the Post Office burglar all over the front page. Then you might say that this was all so unlikely that it had to be verifiable. In this case, you could go up to the Grumpy Wizard of the West and say “Ahhhaaaaaaaa!” But then again, he’s not known as the Grumpy Wizard of the West for nothing, and even then he might try to wriggle out of it. You see, the Grumpy Wizard of the West is one of those magicians who does not actually believe in magic.

Anyway, that’s the sort of argument you will hear in the debate on astral travel when you talk to many magicians, witches, scholars of the mysteries and the like. On the other hand, there will be those who will resist all attempts at debate on such matters, and will never examine an issue in case they discover something they don’t like.

However, our heroes saw the old astral travel debate in a completely different way, for they had come up with another explanation. They had noticed that amongst their magician friends there was often an unbreakable bond to the place where they lived. Usually this bond would go deeper, attaching them to a particular location in their home, namely a favourite chair—often with a good view of the TV—known as the ‘god spot’.

The concept of the god spot, or more pointedly the concept of godhood, comes from the idea that magicians are considered to be the centre of their universe, surrounded by an ever-shifting sea of possibilities. The magus commands the universe and those who inhabit it, in a similar way to that in which the Christian God is said to command us. (Of course, all this talk of magic is okay but I’m sorry, I just can’t bring myself to believe in God!)

Now, The Three Hidden Masters, two from Hemel Hempstead and one from Bricket Wood, had this theory that the bond attaching the magician to his god spot was where the idea of the astral cord had come from, and any idea of astral travel was just a development of that concept. On the occasions when they had observed magicians abroad in the world, such as visiting friends far away, they had noticed that there seemed to be some sort of pull on the magician which tugged him back towards home at the earliest possible opportunity.

After all this philosophising, and the odd bottle of dark rum, our heroes had concluded that the much-debated practice of astral travel, along with the idea of the silver cord, had come from this truth that they had observed. The travelling magician is attached by a length of silver elastic, which connects him to his god spot and, inevitably, returns him there before too much time has passed.

Taken from The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil

Read another extract

Among those recently deified:

Duke of Edinburgh: worshiped in the South Pacific by a cargo cult
Elvis: shrines all over the show for years
Princess Diana: Apparently there are churches to her now
I’ve heard of similar things happening with Michael Jackson

And on Monday morning Claire Rayner: The Patients Association on the BBC Today programme declared themselves as her representatives on Earth.

Halloween

Last weekend was Halloween. Okay, so it wasn’t but for our local pagan community we made it Halloween as certain people couldn’t make it the following weekend. Halloween, or Samhain as it’s known by most modern pagans, is seen as the time of the year when the veil between the worlds is at it’s thinnest. It’s seen as a time for divinations and the like as the spirits that communicate with us at the time find it easiest to get through.

You can see this how you like. As a philosophical rather than a theological pagan I tend to see all forms of divination as being the same. Whether by Tarot cards, astrology or contact with the dead the result is the same, that we manage to gain information or insight that we wouldn’t otherwise have. All these divination systems free up our intuition and seem to enable these insights and the source becomes irrelevant.

The actual date of Halloween is also a bit of a moot point as it’s more a factor of the time of year. We are finally saying goodbye to the summer, autumn is no longer in doubt and to an agrarian dweller the world seem to be dying. So the date, give or take a week is somewhat irrelevant.

However, Halloween isn’t only about Tarot cards and apple bobbing. It’s a time for remembering our dead. Many pagans have a respect for their ancestors, but remembering some amorphous people who’s names we hardly know and certainly never met seems a little distorted when each of us most surely have been to a funeral or two. So when we come to remember our ancestors let’s pay homage to those recently departed, Aunty Jane or Uncle Bob, or even Mum or Dad. It matters not that they may not have shared our path because despite the fact that they may be different to us, may have opposed our pagan perspective or may never have known who we really are, these people are our ancestors. These recent ancestors are our flesh and blood we should remember them for, perhaps, nobody else will. And if we do then, perhaps also, those that come after us will remember us.

I am an arse - well partially at least

It seems publishers are beginning to look to self published authors for their next talent. This is great news for self published authors waiting to be discovered. But look just below the surface of these claims and you discover that publishers are looking for self publishers who have achieved good sales of their self published books. So they seem to be using successful self published authors as a way of reducing their exposure to risk.

Read Alan Rinzler's blog about this here

I’m a pretty incompetent publisher. I’m a fairly incompetent marketer. I’m a completely incompetent publicist. When it comes to being a self publicist I’m a total arse! I am a self publisher.

I can’t phone up a venue to say I’d like to do a book promotion for my own book because I feel like they will think I’m a wannabe, unable to find a publisher because I’m crap. I know that’s not the case but it’s what’s going through my mind. During the brief time when I had a publicist I did readings, signings, all sorts, and I had a great time. Having somebody else to represent you gives you credibility. I can do all the web promotion, social networking, all that’s easy. When I started I chose a pen name so I could pretend to be a second person when I was acting as my publisher. That way I might disguise the fact that I was self published. It didn’t really help much because what I really needed was another team member.

I’m a writer, I’ve been writing for twenty years, mostly corporate or technical content with some copywriting and a bit of journalism thrown in for good measure. Now I’m trying to break into a new field, writing popular mass market comic fiction.

Saying that publishers are going to judge the potential of a self published book on sales seems ludicrous. I know these are businesses but, surely, when a manuscript lands on their desk they judge it on the manuscript. It’s got potential or it hasn’t. Expecting self published books to show fantastic sales is just saying that they only what to publish books by business gurus. I write deeply absurd comic fiction with philosophical themes that make people laugh out loud on the train. I know that’s true, my readers have told me so. But I don’t have tens of thousands of readers out there because I have no way of reaching the mass market. Even blogging and tweeting isn't going to  bring you to the level that the industry are looking for as people follow bloggers when they have whiff of success, rarely before. Plus some of the bigger on-line sellers list print on demand books as unavailable or out of print! The industry is actively blocking the one man bands.

Publishing insiders claim that there isn’t a wall around the industry. Saying that self published writers are welcome, then picking up one or two as an example to show how open the industry is, just means they have extended the wall to block a minor breach. The rest of us are still on the outside.