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Writing for the Stars – motivation and rewards for the fiction writer.

raincoast — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 20:51:26 +0000

Do you write for its own sake, or for wealth & stars against your name?
I started writing fiction from an academic background. I was taking a kind of sabbatical and toying with the dream of being a novelist, only to find that fiction writing is arguably harder than academic work, at least in the sense that there is only your own imagination to rely on, and you have invent everything yourself.
Like every other writer here I wrote until something like a novel emerged, and then I sent it out with great expectations. Alas the story from here on has many familiar elements, including endless waiting to here back from an agent or publisher, and then the rejections without even a single word of any manuscript being read.
Not easily distracted or discouraged I carried on until after three books were rejected (though bypassed might be a better term) I wrote Spaceship over Vancouver as more of a hobby than a serious intention to get a life-changing publishing contract. In fact I hardly sent it out to anyone, and when I did it was half-hearted enough to beg to be overlooked. This wasn’t out of defeatism, but because I’d got to enjoy writing for its own sake, and now enjoy writing more than reading. It’s an adventure. Slowly working out the answers to a tricky interplay between characters, or digging myself out of a looming dead end or false trail in the plot. This more than a computer game or crossword.
I think if I hadn’t stumbled upon Amazon I probably wouldn’t have published anything, nor even tried to find anyone interested. My writing had, in a sense, become a kind of craft rather than a career choice. And nothing persuades me more that this is largely true than “Spaceship”. I’ve sold some books, and even had what might have been growing sales before Christmas, if I hadn’t brought that to an end with a KDP Select free promo.
Looking closely at the book I can see why it’s not flying of the self. The title first comes to mind. No doubt it appears trivial, insubstantial; more of a child’s story than anything to interest an adult. The problem is, that’s the point. The title is a part of the satire. A trivial, almost comic situation beneath which is chaos, death and the end of the world as we know it. A bit like a happily smiling logo with warm rosy cheeked children eating fast food while hastening themselves towards obesity and type 2 diabetes, except that advertising junk food is never intentionally satirical.
Even the opening paragraphs could almost dissuade a prospective reader from going further. After all, a cute alien banging her nose as a result of a childish prank by a spaceship might not be seen as the best way to begin a political satire. Only if they got to the end (or at least half way through) could a reader perhaps realize that the central theme is human self-obsession counterposed with the guileless indifference of the natural world. By the end of the novel, human aspirations simply don’t count for anything; compared to our sophisticated choices and excuses, nature is childlike, and as Lord of the Flies has shown, this isn’t always cuddly. Scarily, life behind our conceits is more arbitrary than we might dare consider.
So, why not make it more accessible, change the title and get rid of the cute but inept alien? The answer is obvious, because then it would be another book. The book is “art” (good or bad) and only secondarily a potential product in the marketplace. If I have any aspirations for this particular book it’s that some people will read it and it might bring a smile or two along the way. It is but one step along the road. A forever incomplete reflection of something important captured imperfectly in one long but fleeting moment of reflection.
With this in mind, stars don’t really count, do they?

Magical Transitions with Fictional Characters

raincoast — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 17:02:52 +0000

One of the challenges that confront all writers is how to bring about a fundamental change in a character. As very many writers will know, at times a character takes on a life of their own; that the presence of an agent in a story can become so robust that it is hard to get them to cooperate with the inevitable twist and turns the writer’s imagination weaves in the telling of a tale.
Perhaps the most common example is when a previously secret part of a characters life is revealed. Suddenly the pleasant vicar becomes a murderer, or the honest civil servant a spy. Or maybe the change is even deeper, and we find that the mild bookseller turns out to be a war criminal escaped from a distant galaxy, or a mythological being slowly woken to fulfil some terrible purpose!
This kind of situation should be easy, we simply write it that way; but, alas, often when we do, problems of continuity hover on the edge, testing the credulity of the reader. We have all come across characters that suddenly appear to have a personality transplant, examples where it appears that a wholly new person has taken the place of the one we have grown used to as the story has developed. These kinds of sudden, dislocated shifts can destroy the structure of a story very rapidly. In fiction, qualified believability is the centre stone of a reader’s seamless immersion into the worlds we create. Mistime the flow of ideas through a misstep in the fluidity of a characters presence in the narrative, and you risk unpicking the symmetry that had bound your readers and made your tale believable.
So, how do we do this in practice? The starting point must be staying true to your creation’s main traits. If one of your central characters has always been generous, say, then even if they turn out to be a serial killer they must still have within them a certain level of generosity. This would need to be qualified, but must still be recognisable. The only exceptions to this could be emerging mental health problems, conscious manipulation on part of the character (but the more this comes as a surprise, the more often it will be seen to be nothing more than a “rabbit out of a hat”), or suggestions of shifts in reality. That is, that the fundamental structure of the narrative is changing. This is where you begin to draw on magical constructions, magic realism or surrealism. Such transitions can liberate the writer from concrete explanations and the limitations of realism, and open up a whole new universe of ideas; the only limitations being the writer’s ability to spin poetic webs of the imagination.
I use the approach a great deal in my writing, not least because our minds are as magical as they are rational. We do not construct our everyday lives and relationships as a series of logical propositions, but instead we enjoy a daily voyage of discovery through flights of fancy and speculation every bit as wild as the most adventurous science fiction and fantasy. To not include this in our writing seems wasteful!
So, here is an example for my own work. The character has been introduced as an academic archaeologist, but later it transpires that she is anything but ordinary. As part of this transition, she has a “dream” that begins to change the deepest parts of her being. It all begins with a turtle:
“The turtle crawled out of the mud fully formed and with a smile on its face that Nitu would recall for the rest of her life. The recollection had more to do with the fact that she was aware that it wasn’t actually a real smile but an artefact of the way its mouth had formed to best scoop food from the bottom of the ocean. But the truth made no difference because whenever she recalled the image in the future it was always thought by others that it was the smile that had caught her attention and not the fact that a turtle had been born unusually out of the mud. She let their misinterpretations pass. She knew that human imagination could only cope with something it has already thought through and filled with misinformation, and, anyway, at that time no one was prepared to believe that everything already known about turtles had been wrong.
At the moment the turtle appeared Nitu knew nothing about what hermeneutical mischief would later play havoc with her vision, and so she acted purely with the curiosity of the innocent and reached out and held onto its quickly accelerating shell as it swam swiftly and deeply on its unknown path through the dark, warm water of her dream and left the mud of its birth far behind.
The turtle swam with astonishing swiftness and the power of its strokes almost washed her from its shell; but still, despite the speed, everything passed by them as though in slow motion and so she managed to glimpse the lives of the strange inhabitants of the coral worlds and lost cities of imagination from the moment they were born until they died in obscure old age. She revelled in the vivid tales and amorous adventures she witnessed as the denizens searched for meaning in lives that were so short yet so full of potential. She cried frequently when a soul able to fill the world with endless light and wisdom blinked out in the darkest wretched misery. She mourned these unguarded souls who once conjured hope but were abandoned to rotting flesh by eyes that couldn’t see.
She met mermaids so beautiful she dared not look at them for more than a second in case she drowned in despair at the bottom of the endless depths that lurked beneath every unseen moment of trickery the human mind was capable of encoding.
Her voyage was peopled with great shining beasts whose heads were so far from their tails that she was never sure if it was a series of great monsters circling her or was instead the single mythical creature of legend whose length was so great that its body circled the Earth and would one day grow so long it would merge with itself into a single massive ring so large it would stop the ocean currents and squeeze life from even the deepest hidden cause of all the new days the sun had brought.
She saw that all life was short and precarious and even the most hidden secrets of the universe depended on a chance flicker in a lover’s eye and the miraculous bringing into being of hope to dwell close by in opposition to the gigantic voids of nameless extinction that pressed in moment by moment to second guess the turtles passage and blind her to some passing life that should be recorded but never would.
Her journey was a song for others to hear and grant immortality to moments beyond them. She bore witness to events brought into the light by powers that drove her onwards as they turned and twisted with disregard for everything except the current that carried her and the purpose that had no aim other than to fulfil intentions lost even before time began.
She gathered tales that will ever be told except to the oldest mind in patterns too large to grasp as all that has been before lightens and time never ends.
Nitu saw all of this and understood what Illiaeth had never told her and never would. She embraced the truth as she twisted naked in the unknown seas of her imagination and grasped a reality that had never been revealed except in the quiet moments of the solitary death of all life as it dreams extinction along paths so hard to bear that until their moment of relief, when all knowledge is removed and they survive only in forgotten realms where a single day is beyond counting, a year but a pause for thought, and peace beyond its grasp.
In this singular dream-song the tide drove her from the beginning of time to the end of the LIIyviian in a place and set of circumstances that would make everything that had gone before emerge as nothing more than the turning of a page.
She awoke with a passion that would never be satisfied and which would therefore grant her an ageless hunger for everything that would ensure she would never die. The day brought no fear and the sun made her smile like a turtle, and as quickly as it had begun the dream was forgotten and she was left with nothing more than the image of the turtle’s face emerging from the mud.”
Engage with magic, and there are no limits to where you can take your readers.

Writing About Evil

raincoast — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 21:13:53 +0000

The title writing about evil is somewhat misleading because I’m not sure that it can be achieved, at least not directly, in a meaningful way. I’m not even sure it exists as a category that is separate from any other description of the things we do as human beings. Cruelty is everywhere, either through neglect, disregard or intentionally as a source of dubious pleasure. And we might not be alone, it has been said that chimpanzees occasionally enjoy killing and maiming in the way that some people apparently do. Violence can become intoxicating, either as a participant or to watch. We can kid ourselves that boxing or cage fighting is a supreme form of athleticism, but if no one got hurt, it wouldn’t be the same.

Some people, men especially, enjoy violent action. Films and novels are full to the brim of victims being hacked to pieces, raped, beaten, enslaved, tortured, degraded, ritualistically abused and murdered. It is ordinary, accepted, a routine part of the way very many of us find excitement. It is so unexceptional that you can see people being brutally killed on television at any time of day or night throughout the week. Seeing someone fictitiously but graphically having their brains blown out is even more acceptable than seeing a naked person. Nudity is taboo on primetime TV, but not sadism.

It’s not surprising really. Physical abuse has a long history of public performance, from hangings in the village square to the kind of torture featured in the opening of Foucault’s “Discipline and Punishment”. It makes sense, therefore, that we perpetuate this for our continued entertainment. Or maybe, as others have claimed, this use of violence is artistic, a way of exploring human nature through film, literature and many other media? No matter that the content is disturbing, but at the same time gratifying for some, it is held to be legitimate in that it explores the dark side of human nature, and thus reveals us to ourselves.

Well, I’m not convinced it serves this last purpose. Almost always what we get is some or other depiction of acts rather than intentions and drives. In other words, we are shown behaviour, and we are told that this is heroism, revenge, suffering or evil. In fact, if we consider the difference between showing and telling, it’s more the case that we are told these actions we are confronted with are this, that or the other. In the absence of any means of portraying the deep dark id that spawns these acts, we are left instead with its consequences; a dismembered arm or the broken body of an invariable beautiful teenager. Signifiers abound, but nowhere is evil, disease or the simple truth of our nature revealed in its essential character.

I met a gang leader once, a person who had, face-to-face, hacked other people to death. He kept me waiting at first, and then sat down and we had coffee and talked about this and that, things of no real consequence. I’d looked forward to the meeting, I had wanted to get some sense of what such a person would be like in the flesh. I got what I wanted, and he needn’t have said a word. I’ve been around, and like lots of other people I have by chance or misguided design been in places it was propably wiser to avoid. I’ve climbed high, remote mountains and sailed in big seas. I’m not generally nor especially intimidated by physical threats, but this man was something else. He chatted pleasantly and respectfully and offered no intentional threats whatsoever, but he was full of unspoken menace. His eyes harboured no empathy, there was a “lack” that I cannot describe. Whereas everyone else I have ever met predominately conveys emotions of some description, he had instead an overarching presence that was somehow spun from a deep source of unspoken power.

I had a friend with me. A highly confident, physically strong person I’ve never seen afraid of anything. When we came out of the meeting we just looked at each other. We tried to describe what we had felt, but there were no words. The only thing we could share was the judgement that you would never, ever cross this man. Looking into his eyes was like staring at a giant, grey wave about to break over you in the middle of a storm. The ocean has no regard for souls, it just is. I discovered that there are people like that too.

Later I got into doing research on drugs, and I’ve met drug dealing gang leaders behind the iron doors of their apartment, had a drink bought for me in a illegal club by a guy who had just carried out an armed robbery, I’ve chatted on the street with a contact who had a shotgun under his coat because people were trying to kill him, I’ve interviewed a murderer in prison, sex workers, dealers, junkies and a few with dark secrets they were unwilling to reveal. I’ve worked with the young members of a gang, one of whom through uncontrollable rage killed someone for not buying them a pack of cigarettes, but I’ve never again met anyone who personifies physical menace so casually, in such a natural, unaware manner.

You see, I cannot describe the experience. You still do not know what I mean. We simply do not have tools to capture the deep, unspoken dark heart of another human being. We cannot portray evil, only the recipients of its attention will grasp its true nature.

So, then, what can we do as writers to mitigate this problem? I think the first rule has to be that we should be uncompromising, not in the sense of moving on to yet more graphic depictions of physical violence, but instead with respect to the characters we create. We should never redeem the source of violence or exploitation. John Fowles understood this when writing “The Collector”, but in every other example I can recall, the writer or director allows some of their own humanity to drift into the picture and offer some olive branch to other interpretations of human nature. The killer will love cats, or their mother, or will let someone go when they could have killed them. They might be a loyal gang member, a good son to an impoverished parent, it will be due to their past, or some other humanitarian device will be used. The list is endless, but in each and every case the truth is lost to the folk myth of some ultimate redemption.

In the satire “Spaceship over Vancouver” there is played out a dark portrayal of politics and politicians in a crisis. A reader emailed me a critique of the book that had at its centre a dislike of the relentlessness of the approach. He wanted some relief from what he described as the “white heat” of the narrative and the venomous nature of the treatment of politicians. He wanted the fictional Prime Minister to be allowed salvation, instead of being killed in an offhand, trivial manner. And he also wanted there to be an element of love between some of the central characters. I wrote back and explained that there can be no softening of the heart when we write about crimes against nature, democracy and humanity. We don’t live in a fairy tale, there is menace out there and although this is revealed in barbarous acts against each other, the environment and other species, it actually lies elsewhere in the hearts of minds gone awry. As writers we need to explore how we can portray this effectively, to show the irresistible power of the mind that moves the hand that strikes the blow or signs away our rights. We need to look more deeply and offer no sanctuary, because only then will we be able to uncover the heart of darkness that reaches out from so many of us to wreck lives and destroy our ways of life over and over again in the fulfilment of a shadowed, unspoken secret.

Making Video Book Trailers: Part 2

raincoast — Wed, 30 May 2012 19:05:23 +0000

Having completed my second video book promotion, I’ve gained a few more insights various issues surrounding key parts of the production process. With the Spaceship over Vancouver video, the narrative was fairly straightforward from the beginning. Despite the twists and turns of the plot, the basic plot was easily defined; this was a book about the impact of an alien visitation to Earth. The message the video needed to impart was clear from the outset.

Things were not so easy with the urban fantasy Sangian: Returning, in that there was more than one focus to the story. The key characters interacted in ways that were not always directly linked to the central storyline, but were instead a part of a broader social and political context. Thus the first issue to be addressed with planning the video, was deciding on its central theme. With only 30 seconds to a minute and a half to play with, there was no time to switch focus half way through.

This type of issue will be a common problem, and some books will present more hurdles of this type than others. So, if you have a novel that contains complex, inter-meshed themes and relationships were do you start?

With Sangian I looked at the ‘surface’ of the novel. That is, the most transparent level, the one that carries the most immediate impact. This is the dimension of the novel that you would focus on if you needed to summarize it in one sentence. Or, put another way, this is what your tagline would centre on. For Sangian this would be something like: ‘Struggling artists faces deadly peril from a stranger’. This, then, becomes the organising theme for the video.

With the primary tagline in mind, the next stage is to create a storyboard. This could be visual, such as a series of sketches, or a flow diagram of ideas and written phrases. Either way, you need to develop a structure for the video.

Next comes the selection of video clips or still images. So far, with the two video promos I’ve put together, I’ve gone for still images. The main reason being that it is possible to switch focus very quickly between one image and the next, whereas with video clips more time is needed for each segment. Visually, it is harder to string three or more video clips each of 3 seconds duration together, than it is three or more still images. It can be done, of course, but remember that the final promo video should be no more than around 90 seconds, and so your message needs to be visually clear and easy to grasp.

Once you’ve decided on movie clips or still images, the next stage is selecting which ones you want to use. This is one of the most difficult stages. Unless you already have a suitable collection to hand, you could spend a great deal of time finding the perfect expression, sunset, lake, mountain or whatever else it is you need. Do not underestimate this phase. For a book cover I designed recently, I looked at over 30,000 images and never found the one I wanted, and had to redesign. If this happens to you, it might be better to come up with a plan B than make do with something that falls short of your original vision.

Once you’ve got your images or clips organised, you can then begin to piece them together into your visual message. At this stage you will probably want to add text as titles attached to your various clips. You’ll find you will be able to use various transition effects to move from clip to clip, and text to text. This way you will end up with what is essential an animated tagline, though this simple expression does not do justice to the kinds if things you’ll produce once you get the hand of playing around with all your options.

Lastly, you’ll need one or more audio tracks. This might be music, sound effects or spoken commentary. Again, the options are endless, but whatever you do it must serve to add to the visual content, rather than distract the viewer from your main message. The best audio will often not be noticed consciously, but will ride along in the background, helping to create the right atmosphere. Finding the right audio track(s) can be as time consuming as with visual content, but once again, shortcuts won’t help in finished product.

Although some of these comments might seem like concrete advice, you should take them only as broad ideas. As with any creative process, there are more ways to astound your audience than could ever be described. Take these comments as merely one way to get started. If you begin in a structured way with a clear idea of the what you want to say, once you find your feet you’ll soon be stretching your imagination every bit as much as you do when writing.

Book Trailer – Sangian: Returning

Visions in Words and Images – using video for book trailers

raincoast — Mon, 21 May 2012 22:21:20 +0000

Although as writers we spin tales with words, we still rely to some extent on the power of images. Not least in the case of book covers, but also with illustrated books, children’s nursery rhymes, poetry and graphic novels. Matching words and images produces a powerful medium, and I suspect many writers would relish the idea of working closely with a artist on such a project. It might not be suitable for all literary work, but anything that conjures powerful visual images within the imagination would gain a lot from an illustrated edition. It would be great to be able to afford to have both Sangian and Spaceship over Vancouver illustrated.

If I could, the books would then match, my imagination. When I’m writing two kinds of processes take place. With dialogue, there’s an imaginary conversation taking place, but with descriptive passages a storyboard runs through my mind, almost as though I’m working on a film rather than a novel. Sometimes it’s a single image, a moment frozen in time, and at others there’s a mini QuickTime movie whirling away somewhere. It’s a very visual process, as reading is too, in many ways. In many ways I prefer radio plays to television or film, simply because so much more is left to the imagination. And this is the attraction of books, too. Nevertheless, images can help to set context and inspire different kinds of visualization.

As much as it would often be perfect to include artwork within a book, for a variety of reasons this won’t take place. The closest we will get is with our cover art. Well, at least that used to be the case, but now video production is achievable at relatively low cost. It is now within scope of very many writers to add a video book trailer to their marketing portfolio. These need to be short, say 30 seconds to around a minute, so the costs can be kept low. Professional produced trailers will start for around a few hundreds of dollars. However, anyone imaginative enough to write a novel, and able to learn to handle some basic editing software, could easily put one together themselves in a few hours to maybe a couple of days of trial and error.

Software is easy to come by. Basic, but still powerful movie editing software is available for both the Mac and Windows. The best known starter programs are Adobe Premiere Elements at around $99.00 and the Apple iMovie at only $14.99. Both of these provide enough high quality features to produce professional level promo videos. The trailer below was made with iMovie 11 and features the novel Spaceship over Vancouver. It uses only still photos, few transition effects and a few different types of title frame and a sound track.

The video is a simple visual story, and so setting making it was approached in the same way as with a passage in a book. Before I started I mentally worked out a simple narrative, much in the same way we do when writing, and then found images that expressed the underlying idea. Once a first version was mocked up, it was then a case of fine-tuning both the content and the timing and duration of each element. Although to some people it might as a finished product seem complex, it really is no more difficult than writing a short description of your book, using pictures and sounds instead of words. Why not try, you might surprise yourself, and, who knows, gain a lot of new readers!

The Key to Success is Finding a Halo and Avoiding the Devil

raincoast — Sun, 13 May 2012 01:46:36 +0000

Have you ever noticed how some people can never do anything wrong, while others don’t ever seem to put a foot right? You can see examples on any social media group, forum and in life outside the internet. For some reason one person can write a very ordinary book, or post a very average painting or photograph and get dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of accolades, while another can produce distinguished work and get ignored. It seems strange, but this trend can be seen everywhere, and mostly it relates to what is known as the “halo effect”, and its opposite, the “devil effect”.
The term “halo effect” was coined by the psychologist Edward Thorndike, who found that the way soldiers were evaluated was highly correlated across different categories. For example, someone evaluated highly for physical qualities would also be ranked highly for leadership and personality traits. Other research has shown that the more attractive a person is, the more highly they are rated on a diverse range of activities. In general, it seems that if a person is good at one thing, even so far as being physically attractive, then everything else they do is ranked more highly. If we like someone we automatically judge everything they do in a favourable light.
The devil effect works in the opposite way. Some people are demonized, and almost nothing they do can change the negative view held of them. No matter the quality of their work, they will never be judged fairly.
Clearly, then, if you want to build a loyal readership you need somehow to find a halo and polish it so brightly that fans will flock to admire your work, or at least give it a fair hearing. This is about managing your public image. Everything from the photo in your facebook bio, the posts you make on twitter, the way you support your online community or, say, what you think about the environment will influence how people see you. In terms of social media, the big winners are those who help form opinion, or who share personal parts of themselves. For artists, posting pictures of dogs is way more popular and “likeable” than posting a photograph of a snake. Photographs of attractive people or cute flurry critters gain many more admiring comments than a photograph of a forest. Accessible writing about romance, elves, spaceships doing battle somewhere or tough, gritty soldiers or police officers will appeal to far more readers than an obscure surrealist tract.
If you “win” in any of these areas then remember, the halo effect tells us that you will gain in every other aspect of your public life, even so far as pushing your image and reputation into the viral stage, and from then on everything you do will be applauded and sales might even grow beyond your expectations!
For writers, the current advice on increasing sales is to become known, to get good reviews and, most of all, find a way to be talked about. Everyone starting out as a writer of fiction knows that whether you are published traditionally or self-publishing, you can’t sell books unless people know who you are; that they have heard about you and seen your work somewhere. Well, to do that these days, you need a public profile, so facebook, twitter, a personal website and a blog are essential. But this is not enough; there are thousands of them out there already. You need something else, and quickly you’ll find out about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is how you get your efforts found by search engines such as Google et al. However, a search engine only works if you have content that enough people are looking for, otherwise you can have a perfect site but no one will care enough to go there, and those who do will probably never return. You absolutely need great content, you do have to take care of SEO, but you also need halo. There has to be something that draws people towards you, as a person. So, work on your image. Add content that makes people feel good about you, but also about themselves. Work on being the good guy, which means finding your specific halo and polishing it so brightly that it illuminates everything you do. If you want success, you have to find a way to bring smiles to people’s faces, and once they really do love you, the rest will fall into place.

Reflections on Designing Cover Art for Books

raincoast — Sun, 06 May 2012 23:30:31 +0000

As soon as you get into book publishing, whether with a major corporation, a small independent company or self-publishing, you will learn about the importance of book cover art. Writers like words, but almost everyone you talk to, each blog you read, and any guides to writing and publishing you come across, they will all tell you that the world does, after all, judge a book by its cover. And so, at some point you are going to have to start thinking about how you can attract readers even before they’ve opened a single page of your book.
In many ways, this should come as no surprise. Although most of us have been told almost since birth that you shouldn’t ever judge a book by its cover, we all know that that’s exactly what we do all the time; looks count, they always have and they always will. Next to fame, wealth and power, physical appeal opens more doors than simply being clever (well, at least a lot of the time). This is not only true about people, but also objects (cars, for example), films, breakfast cereal, toothbrushes, books and almost everything else in the human world. This is hardly surprising. Our minds instinctively search for pleasing patterns and balanced symmetry. Psychologists tell us that it’s our way of selecting the best breeding mate, and maybe everything else follows on from this; our creations are a reflection of nature itself.
All of this suggests that people make decisions about what they find attractive very, very quickly. That’s not to say we can’t consider things in detail and make other kinds of choices, but physical attractiveness can bind us instantaneously, and in a world of millions books, advertisements, trailers, promotions, banners and so much more, what you need is something that catches the eye in a millisecond.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Global corporations spend millions daily trying to conjure the perfect image for more kinds of products than any of us could count. They employ hugely expensive teams of artists, designers, writers and directors whose sole function is to come up with the next great promotion. They should be guaranteed success, but I suspect that more campaigns fail than succeed, and the reason is that no one really knows what will work. Despite the hype, at the end of the day winning an audience or customers is a process of trial and error. Even focus groups, questionnaires and a host of other research techniques cannot guarantee success.
So, what can you, the humble writer, do about all this visual stuff? Well, there are three options for those of you who are not already accomplished artists or designers:
1)   Plunge yourself into art and slowly learn how to do it yourself
2)   Employ a professional
3)   Fly in the face of convention and let the words speak for themselves (if you are famous and/or brilliant, this might work).
Which of these you choose will depend on your level of confidence and skill. So far, I’ve chosen the first, mainly because I’m also a photographer, I like fiddling around with new software and I seriously enjoy playing around with artwork.
Doing it yourself is definitely an option for anyone who is willing to spend a little time learning a few new skills and has some appreciation for the aesthetics of colour and balance. It can seem daunting at the beginning, and calculating “bleed areas”, working out how many inches you need for the spine, choosing fonts and images can at times feel a tad overwhelming, but practice takes you a long way.
At first it is easy to underestimate how conventional are most people when it comes to design. I don’t mean over long periods of time, but that fashion plays as big a part here as anywhere else. So, before you begin, take a look at what others are producing. This can be more useful than you think. Many guides suggest keeping the design simple, and yet there are vast numbers of covers out there on successful books that are complex, not only visually, but also in terms of the amount of text on the cover.
Also keep in mind that a lot of books sell online, and the beautiful cover you’ve designed will also have to look good as a tiny “thumbnail” image. All too often something that works well at 6ins x 9ins will look a lot different as a small image on a computer screen.
Study what other people do, but don’t copy it too closely. There are a lot of derivative covers out there, especially in the areas of fantasy and science fiction. And think also about the age of your prospective readership. What will work for a 12-year-old boy might not do so well for an older audience.
Whatever you do, if you are publishing paperbacks, do not let a book go out without getting a proof. I’m used to printing photographs and having others print them for me, and between the two there is a world of difference. I calibrate my computer monitor, use sophisticated software to proof my work, and print out samples to help me chose the best version possible, but even so they very often come back from the printer looking anywhere nearly as good as they were originally. Book printers mass produce tens of thousands of books, and so they do not check each one in terms of the original digital image or PDF file.
As a rule of thumb, I’ve got to the stage that, when it comes to colour, I keep it simple. Subtleties in colour do not come out well at all. Also, be sure to use the best fonts (for the technically minded, you want to use vector and not bitmap fonts).
With the book “Spaceship over Vancouver” I’m now on my fourth version of the cover. It has at times been a steep learning curve, and by getting it wrong at the beginning, there’s a very good chance I’ve lost sales. First of all I used the wrong type of font (from using recreational software for typescript), secondly my layout was far too simplistic for current readers, thirdly I was too ambitious with using a very subtle colour palette, and so now I’m on my fourth version, which you can see via the “Spaceship over Vancouver” tab above, or in the right sidebar. This one has more text and a small number of deep colours.
I guess the question is, was I right to go it alone at the beginning? Well, this is a personal choice. It certainly would be a lot simpler to employ someone else to do the work, but in doing so there are other risks, or disadvantages. Cost is the first thing to consider. Good art does not come cheaply. I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that most designers would charge around $150 per hour. If you are selling lots of books, this won’t matter, nor will it if you are publishing conventionally through an established publisher. Secondly, there is also the factor of being involved with all parts of the book production process. You have spent a long time writing a book, and, as we now know, the cover is an essential, integral part of what you’re your producing. The more you input, the greater the chance of making sure that the final cover image matches your vision, the one which inspired you to write the book in the first place. The cover is the icing on the cake, and you might find that being closely involved is as satisfying as any other aspect of being a writer.

Interview with an Alien

raincoast — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 18:30:48 +0000

On June 21st 2029 a large golden sphere appeared in the sky over Vancouver, Canada. The occupants remained silent for several days until, unknown to everyone else on the planet, an intrepid reporter from the CBB managed to make contact. A few days later an alien agreed to meet and be interviewed. The interview content was, for those times, so unexpectedly strange that the interviewer decided he would be better off never showing the transcript to another living soul. Now, one thousand years later, his video notes have finally been found, transcribed, and for the first time the Emissary’s opening words to humankind can be enjoyed by every inhabitant of this wondrous planet.

CBB Interviewer: It’s hard to know where to begin. So let me first ask you why you decided to visit this rich and beautiful planet of ours.

Chepi: The Sphere brought me here. I had no idea your planet even existed until there it was, sprawled out in front of me like some chaotic ant hill.

Interviewer: So you didn’t have any plan prior to coming here, some specific objectives in mind?

Chepi: It isn’t possible to plan for the unknown.

Interviewer: No, of course not, but it’s just that the odds of you arriving here by chance are very long, so we have assumed that there was some purpose behind you being here.

Chepi: Yes, that’s exactly what I thought.

Interviewer: I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying that you think there might be some kind of divine purpose behind your arrival?

Chepi: If the Sphere has some marvellously delightful reason for bringing me here then it has kept it too itself. To me, the whole thing is more inconvenient than anything else.

Interviewer: The Sphere?

[Chepi raised her eyebrows and looked sceptically at the interviewer.]

Chepi: You don’t expect me to believe that you haven’t noticed it?

Interviewer: By “Sphere”, you mean the spherical spacecraft that brought you here?

Chepi: Yes, the golden thing hanging around in your sky as though there’s nothing better to do than waste time watching all you humans scurrying around as if stopping every now and then to achieve something important hadn’t ever occurred to you.

Interviewer: Is that a hint that you think maybe there is something we should, collectively, be doing? Something important we’ve overlooked? Are you here to give us some kind of warning?

Chepi: You’d have to ask the Sphere, though getting any kind of answer from it is very unlikely. It tends to enjoy being obscure, it thinks it is part of my education to be kept in the dark and expected to work everything out for myself.

[It was the interviewers turn to look skeptical.]

Interviewer: I realise that for strategic reasons you might be unwilling to answer this, but can I ask how many of you are there on the spacecraft?

[Chepi frowned.]

Chepi: That’s a complex ontological question, and one I really don’t want to get into right now.

Interviewer: I’m sorry, I don’t understand. How can a question about a number be construed as in any way ontological?

[Chepi frowned even more deeply than before]

Chepi: Is that a joke? Maybe I should warn you that I haven’t quite yet been able yet to work out your humour. I’m having particular trouble with sarcasm, and irony to be honest. But, maybe you’re being facetious, or flippant?

Interviewer: No, sorry, I’m asking an honest question. I just wanted to know how many people there are on your spacecraft.

Chepi: By people you mean independent, sentient entities?

Interviewer: Yes, if that’s the way you want to define it.

Chepi: I don’t want to define it in any particular way. It doesn’t interest me; I’m just trying to help you out.

[The interviewer shifted uncomfortably.]

Interviewer: Then yes, how many sentient beings are there?

Chepi: How many are there on the “spacecraft”?

Interviewer: Yes.

[Chepi shrugged.]

Chepi: None at all.

Interviewer: You mean it’s fully automated.

Chepi: It likes to think it is.

Interviewer: I guess that’s some kind of joke?

Chepi: I don’t joke. To be honest, in this situation I think it would be disrespectful.

Interviewer: Why, what situation? Are you hinting at some kind of warning?

Chepi: Why would I do that?

Interviewer: Well, to help us avoid making some terrible mistake?

Chepi: How would I be able to judge?

Interviewer: Some things are obvious, surely?

Chepi: Such as?

Interviewer: It could be something like the environment. Many people say we are heading for the second great global, environmental disaster. Maybe you could see if that’s true or not, and advise us what to do.

Chepi: If there’s danger, why don’t you listen to those of you who are already telling you about it?

Interviewer: Not everyone believes them?

Chepi: You have science, don’t you?

Interviewer: Yes, but unfortunately, not everyone believes what it is telling us.

Chepi: You mean your scientists don’t agree?

Interviewer: Some of them don’t, but most do. What I really mean is that too many politicians and business leaders don’t believe them.

Chepi: Why?

Interviewer: I guess because dealing with the problem, if it really does exist, is too difficult.

Chepi: So you don’t really believe your scientists either?

Interviewer: I do, but I don’t count.

Chepi: But you think I might be able to do something?

[The interviewer took a long look at the slender, elf-like being that looked more like a child on Halloween than anything weighty and serious.]

Interviewer: Well, maybe not, but perhaps someone else who has travelled with you might want to help?

Chepi: I just told you that there’s no one up there.

Interviewer: You are completely on your own?

Chepi: There’s the Sphere.

Interviewer: The ship is sentient?

Chepi: I’m not sure exactly, but it thinks and acts as though it is.

Interviewer: And that somehow makes a difference?

Chepi: I don’t know for certain, and as it’s never likely to stop functioning, or die, as you call it, I’ll never know if it does have a soul or not.

Interviewer: They are the same thing? I mean, a soul is needed for something to be sentient?

Chepi: Yes, well, it’s the other way round; more that if you are sentient you do have a soul.

Interviewer: How do you know?

Chepi: Because that’s what happens.

Interviewer: Is there evidence?

Chepi: Yes.

Interviewer: And can you tell me what it is?

Chepi: No.

Interviewer: Why not.

Chepi: I’m told that it’s something you have to find out for yourself.

Interviewer: Why?

[Chepi looked puzzled.]

Chepi: Because every soul is different.

Interviewer: That doesn’t really explain it.

Chepi: No, because it’s not possible to explain it, you’ll find out when the time comes.

Interviewer: When we die?

Chepi: That’s one way.

Interviewer: So there’s life after death?

Chepi: Maybe.

Interviewer: But you said …

Chepi: There are lots of alternatives.

Interviewer: Alternatives to death?

Chepi: Causes and effects, but I can’t list all of them. This isn’t what you call a kindergarten class.

Interviewer: That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?

Chepi: Don’t be childish.

Interviewer: Childish because we value your knowledge, your wisdom?

Chepi: Because you want your cake and to eat it. Isn’t that what you say? If you didn’t rush around all the time trying to be sexually attractive to each other by constantly making things bright, shiny things, buying them and showing off to anyone to looks in your direction for even a second or two, then you might have some time to learn more about yourselves and how you fit into this world of yours. And who knows, you might even one day be able to grasp what the universe is all about.

Interviewer: But you can help with that, surely.

Chepi: How did you learn about your world?

Interviewer: From my parents, friends, school and then college, but mostly experience. We tend to learn most by actually doing …

Chepi: Exactly. You don’t listen too well, but instead go off blustering around until your options become fewer and fewer over time, and then one day, there you are locked into something you started when you were only a child. You do know that nearly all of you live extremely juvenile lives?

Interviewer: Maybe some of us, but are you saying we are like that as a species too, collectively?

Chepi: Even more so. A few of you know that you are still basically stone-aged about everything, but most of you still can’t see the wood for the trees.

Interviewer: We can learn. Look how far we’ve come.

Chepi: You make things. That’s all you’ve done, and it seems to me that’s all you will ever do.

Interviewer: But what else is there? You make things too. Look at the Sphere, sentient or not, it was made by someone or some thing, it didn’t grow organically, did it.

Chepi: Not all evolution is organic. All kinds of chanced things get chosen all the time.

Interviewer: I don’t understand.

Chepi: Is anything impossible?

Interviewer: Some things are so improbable it is likely that they will never happen during the life of the universe.

Chepi: And how long is that?

Interviewer: However many billions of years it is, it is finite. One day it will end and that will be long before everything that could happen does actually take place.

[He felt pleased with himself. It was an argument that was unassailable.]

Chepi: Nothing is what it seems to be.

Interviewer: Meaning?

Chepi: Your species already knows about the multiverse, so you can work it out for yourself.

Interviewer: You mean that maybe we’re only one part of a perpetual process?

Chepi: Yes, except for the process part.

Interviewer: I’m not sure that … You mean the universe – the multiverse is fixed and unchanging?

Chepi: Is a book fixed and unchanging?

Interviewer: Well, yes, and no.

[Chepi didn’t reply]

Interviewer: Is that it? Is that why you are here?

Chepi: To be honest, I’m not finding this very interesting. Why don’t you go off and study physics and philosophy instead of wasting your time asking people tirelessly repetitive questions? The only hope for your species is for you to get over your self-absorption and start thinking about other things but yourselves.

Interviewer: You are here to teach us. Okay you might be blunt and a little simplistic, but there is a message here for us, isn’t there?

Chepi: See what I mean? With you it’s all me, me, me.

Interviewer: But why else would you be here? Why would your Sphere bring you here if it wasn’t that you needed to do something?

[For some reason, his question made him feel distinctly uneasy.]

Chepi: I told you that I don’t know.

Interviewer: But if you had to guess?

Chepi: I think the planet is important, but you’re not, especially. But I’ve no idea why. On the face of it, it’s just another planet. There are thousands of millions of them out there you know, and all the others I’ve seen are paradise compared to this one. To be honest, you are making a pig’s ear of things. I’d guess that I’m here to stop you, but why, what’s the point? There are billions of other places that work perfectly. Everywhere else I’ve been has been so beautiful, but you primates somehow prefer plastic toys more than you do beautiful oceans and, er, old, wise forests. You are such a sad case, and I can only think that the Sphere brought me here to teach me some kind of obscure lesson, or two show me the folly of giving apes a bit more intelligence than is usual.

[The interviewer felt affronted.]

Interviewer: We’re just a lesson for an odd character out of a storybook who supposedly travels the universe for no reasons other than to see things?

Chepi: What storybook?

Interviewer: Tolkien comes to mind.

Chepi: The Sphere said something similar.

Interviewer: That you look like you came out of a storybook?

Chepi: That I look like one of your mythological creatures.

Interviewer: Do you think that’s important?

Chepi: Probably.

Interviewer: And?

Chepi: And nothing, if it means anything, it means something to you, not me. I’m just like this, always have been.

Interviewer: You’re not going to tell us anything meaningful, are you?

Chepi: Maybe I already have, and you just can’t see it.

Interviewer: D’you really think that is the case?

Chepi: I don’t care to be honest. I just thought it might be interesting to talk to one of you, but it isn’t. So, I think I’ll find something else to do.

[The interviewer was about to ask another question, but she vanished.]

What is the elf-like alien really up to? For the full story and the dramatic, unexpected outcome, read Spaceship over Vancouver.

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Writing fictional characters – working with blood, vampires and relationships.

raincoast — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 19:38:54 +0000

Before I typed the first word of the novel Sangian, I’d first written two other novels and then spent around two years writing poetry and posting it to two literary forums. I started the first novel with great optimism, thinking that the transition to fiction from the rigours of academic publications would be a breeze. I soon had these crazy delusions squeezed out of me as, after the first two pages, I began to stumble around hopelessly trying to put some life into my characters and paint with words far richer pictures than before. I went back to favourite authors and reread passages that showed me how they had been able to describe crying, a living room, an empty desert and endless other things with such vividness and texture. Slowly I began to piece something together and eventually got to 70,000 words and called it a novel.

Along the way I learned many things, one of the most important being that characters gain a life of their own. You might have decided 10,000 words previously that someone was going to have a nasty accident, but by the time you get there, you find that they have chosen to do something completely different. I discovered too that men are not the same as women, even when they are fictional!

As much as I often tried to break through these boundaries, I found that I was every bit as bound to the wider collective consciousness as I am when interacting in the workplace, the grocery store or anywhere else. We live our daily lives within endless tendrils of influence, and I discovered that these extend to imaginary worlds as well. In fact the worlds I was creating weren’t so fanciful after all, and this is what makes fiction writing so challenging. The writer has to create something new, engaging, convincing and yet never stray from making it plausible. Our characters have to be changed in some way, and yet stay inside what the reader will see as being plausible.

The first book was followed on by a sequel, and bolstered by the success of having written one volume of 70,000, I made the next one more challenging, and set it around 125,000 years in a fictional past. It was then that I turned to poetry. The BBC had set up a new web site called “Get Writing”, in the hope of finding new writing talent. They ask contributors to submit a short story that could be read out on the radio. I entered but never heard back from them! This might have been the end of my involvement, but I got involved with their poetry section. At first just for fun, but then I found that writing poetry helped me with other kinds of fiction writing. It helped develop skills with capturing the moods and emotions that earlier writing had lacked.

After this poetic hiatus I finished the second novel and added this to the pile of work I’d created trying to interest the publishing world in the first novel. Luckily I never managed to attract any interest in either book (I now know that they should never reach the outside world). So far as I could tell, only two people ever read them. I sent off very many query letters and sample pages, and only ever received standard letters with bland comments such as the book not fitting their list “at this time”.

So, by the time I got to Sangian, with poetry and a few rewrites of the first two books I’d written around 350,000 words of fiction. I thought this was a lot at the time, but really it is only scratching the surface. I would guess that around one million words would be a better starting point for a novel you hope would be successful. (I’m guessing that there are exceptions, but in general, for most writers, a “first novel” is no such thing. A novel is merely just one signpost in a career that will have started much earlier.)

Nevertheless, I felt ready to write a book that would be published. First, though, I took stock of what I’d learned, and the first thing was that the story has to come first. I’d originally thought that everyone was secretly like me; that they were looking for deeply interesting characters whose often almost arbitrary actions would alone enchant and engage them. Basically, from the outset I’d set out to write poetry not prose fiction. I fact, one of the only two people to comment on either novel wrote back to me and fairly harshly suggested that I would be better off writing poetry. He was a publisher and I should have listened more closely.

With the third novel I decide to give way to public tastes and literary conventions and write a story with some excitement, suspense and, importantly I thought at the time, blood. So I set about to write an alternative perspective on “vampires”, one that I’d half-heartedly started with the first novel, continued with the second, and hopefully would finally realise with the third.

I decided from the outset that it would have to be sensual. There are so many “vampire” stories out there, and of those I’ve come across, they have one thing in common, they position drinking blood as violent and exploitative. That is, with the exception of the Underworld series, where Kate Beckinsale introduces a whole new way of thinking about blood as a main course.

This was the first element that had to be confronted head-on. There would be no simple metaphors, allegories or whimsical allusions to make it real, there had to be blood and everyone had to be totally into for pleaasure rather than exploitation. There had to be realism; the texture of skin against lips, the taste of salt, mouths filled with something that is beyond exquisite … for an instant, the reader had to want it for themselves.

Role-playing this in the imagination as a writer was easy. I don’t and never would personally be into drinking blood, but it’s easy to imagine something else that gives the same kind of pleasure that’s needed. Even a cold beer on a hot day will do.

Dealing with the cultural context was less simple. A violent vampire with destructive tendencies is fairly straightforward, but a nurturing relationship founded on sharing blood as food is a different matter, especially in terms of making it sensual rather than sexual.

Originally, the two main characters were male and female, but quite soon I got into a whole lot of trouble trying to contain them. As any fiction writer knows, characters take on a life of their own, and very soon after being created all we can do is nudge them slightly in the directions we want. Mostly, though, we just write down what unfolds mystically of its own accord. So, with a male and female character drinking each other’s blood you can guess what the tensions were. They wanted to consummate their relationship, and I wanted an urban fantasy, suspense and mystery rather than a bodice-ripping, erotic adventure in some alternative culture.

There was no easy alternative to this dilemma. Both male/male and female/female situations presented problems, not the least being avoiding gay or lesbian issues, as these too would lead me to write a novel different from the one I felt I could work with. In the end I went for two lead female characters, and brought up and dealt with the issue of lesbian attraction early, in a way I hope readers will find convincing. But why two female characters, what did this offer and wasn’t possible with two male characters? Well, I hadn’t intended that this book would be targeted at a niche audience. I wanted it to have broad appeal, be the kind of thing that anyone aged 16 upwards could pick up, read and enjoy. This being the case, even though drinking blood was going to be put forward as something pleasurable, it needed to be contained within a relationship that the average person would be able to relate to in a day-to-day sense. Although there are very many exceptions, in general I think it could be argued that women have a greater tendency to develop intimate, nurturing friendships with each other than do most men. Not least, they tell each other way more than men do (well, this is what they tell us).

I decided to use this context because I felt it would open up a wider range of possibilities within the relationship than the alternatives, not least in terms of the development of deep emotional intimacy without a sexual context.

The other difficulty I had was with the main male character, a police detective. I didn’t want a masculine, down-beaten cliché taken straight from a routine crime novel (or at least the one I’d write if I ever made the mistake of trying), but someone with a specific kind of torment brought on by the events depicted in the novel. In the end I thought it reasonable to suppose that their involvement would lead to stress and some kind of breakdown. Like any other writer, I read around a lot before I found a way to described a type of emotional disorder that would be in some way debilitating, but which the character could eventually transcend. In this way I felt better able to convincingly develop a character that could transition realistically through vulnerability to the personal strength his role needed.

Hopefully, these two examples will throw some light on why I constructed the novel in the way I did. I think it might be safe to say that every other writer confronts the same kinds of issues. We want to reach out and create new worlds, but at the same time we are constrained by our own skills and perceptions, and also those of our prospective readers. We somehow have to find a balance, and before we begin to play with striking imagery and breathtaking vistas, we need first to consider our characters and choose them carefully, because once born they will have a life that will in many ways forge its own destiny. Our characters have many freedoms, but to be accepted, they also have to follow the same deeply laid, cultural paths as the rest of us.

Sangian: Returning

Holly’s life is like that of thousands of others in the city trying to make their way outside the mainstream. She’s an artist striving to survive, and then she meets someone who changes everything. Beth slides seamlessly into Holly’s life and inducts her into ancient rituals that challenge the core of Holly’s beliefs and ultimately drive her towards insanity. Only her sister and a worn out police officer teetering on the brink of a breakdown can help, but even they struggle to prevent an outcome that has been ordained for millennia.

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Can a Book be Bad?

raincoast — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 15:06:02 +0000

It’s not too uncommon to find comments everywhere suggesting that literacy is on the decline, that acceptable use of grammar is fast disappearing, or that there are too many bad books making way too much money. Rather than hoping that these fears go away, it seems certain that the recent dramatic rise in independent publishing and self-publishing will ensure that such feelings will be with us until some improbable cultural revolution takes place. There’s even a new cliché, the idea that the only response to upstarts who publish but can’t use a semicolon is to declare almost hysterically that the only resort is to throw the book repeatedly against some wall!

All this rising anxiety got me to wonder what we mean when we refer to bad writing. Do we commonly assume it means work that is grammatically bad, or neatly, conventionally written books that are no more than cardboard drivel with characters no more convincing than those in a breakfast advert?

There’s a ridiculously short, self-published story on Kindle that is only 1800 words long which is grammatically poor yet very well liked by readers who happen to have found it somehow. The story is about the Devil’s daughter and it contains many interesting, quirky ideas, so much so that the grammar matters far less than the appealing content. If this short story is compared to the polished but formulaic “Da Vinci Code”, then there simply is no contest from a story-telling point of view.

What comes to mind is that in Shakespeare’s day there were no rules of spelling at all and English was far more flexible than now. Perhaps our obsession with writing having to be ‘correct’ sometimes gets in the way of enjoying a good story, and is nothing more than a reflection of a still-present authoritarian culture within literature (one which other forms of art of often struggle successfully to counter and undermine). The same force, maybe, that seems to fail to grasp the significance of the rise of self/independent publishing and the right of everyone to own language in a personal sense? Just as regional accents are now “permissible”, so too should variations in the way we write words down. Surely it’s the content that matters?

Success from poor writing in the cardboard, cliché-ridden sense is, though, a bit more baffling. But, then again, look, for example, at television, journalism, the cinema, Damien Hurst and the whole Young British Artists movement that came into being in the 1990’s. There’s plenty of questionable content out there keeping many people happy and earning some small fortunes.

Maybe what we need to do as readers and writers is to work out what we want to produce or consume and leave others to explore the worlds they enjoy creating or stepping into solely for pleasure rather than as an intellectual game? After all, there are many models out there we could copy, perhaps, if all we want as writers is vast amounts of money. I could suggest starting off with an alpha male and a ‘princess’ in jeopardy, and then add one or more of the following: a conspiracy, a unicorn, some elves, blood (esp. if for drinking), a hidden secret, the end of the world, impending, probable, tortuous death … And why not? People have liked the same kinds of stories for millennia simply because they somehow reflect otherwise hidden hopes, dreams and fantasies.

If we want a useful literary change, I’d start with a global, compulsory rewriting of nursery rhymes. If you look closely, very many have appalling content from liberal perspective – my toddler daughter has not yet heard the official version of “Three Men in a Tub” (knaves, really?) or “There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” (who whipped her children soundly and put them to bed). Otherwise, I really don’t think we have anything to worry about. There’s something for everyone, and now with eBooks the range is even greater and, best of all for many, a lot of it is, as the Brits would say, as cheap as chips!