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Shouts from the box...

8/18/2018

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Question: What does Industry cite as an essential ingredient to success? Or sports persons laud when it appears in competition? What do artists both celebrate the presence of and yet lament the absence of in equal measure? What do trendy free-thinkers monopolise, life-coaches claim to be experts in, and politicians revert to as “the answer” when no-one really has any idea what to do about any given problem?

Answer: Creativity.

Creativity is hard to define, and yet it is a word banded around with frequency and enthusiasm. Some brave (or arrogant) souls claim to be able to teach it. Some less-steely souls say they have never had it and can’t “do” it, and most fall into the wider middle ground of naming it “inspiration”, thereby allowing it the option to hit, or not hit, as if it were some higher power that chooses when, and whom, to bless.

Whatever it is, my own experience with it, and my experience of working with others seeking to use it, tells me without doubt that the one thing which kills creativity dead is our own inner voice.

This is not always the case, however. You only have to look back down the centuries to find a plethora of light-bulb moments from both high-powered brainiacs and early-humans experimenting, to understand that most creative solutions or pastimes were born out of necessity. Necessity has a habit of silencing inner-critic-voices because necessity usually arrives when the solution needed is a do-or-die one. When faced with a serious problem that threatens life as we know it, creativity becomes all powerful as inner-critics are silenced in favour of the greater good.

Herein lies the rub: Writing a song, plotting a novel, painting a picture, solving an everyday problem, looking at something from a different perspective… all of the supposedly “creative” activities we undertake during our lives generally do not come with a do-or-die requirement. They are not life threatening. They are not wreaking destruction at our door. They are not hugely pressing issues.

And so into that non-vital gap creeps the inner voice. The inner critic. The monkey on your back. Le Judgement. His Master’s Voice. Call it what you will, we all have it, and it is immensely dominant when not silenced by adversity. You know the sort of thing: “You can’t do that, it looks stupid”; “No-one is going to go for that – are you nuts?!”; “Seriously? That’s the best you can come up with? You are nowhere near good enough for this job… and people will find out pretty soon, I bet”.

This voice starts in childhood, and arrives in our brain when we become cognitively aware enough to understand that other people have a point of view. We start to hear that point of view. We consider it. We start to believe it.

How terrible is that? We start to believe the external voices that say “no”. We start to believe the external voices that dismiss what we have created. We start to believe the external voices that do not like the work we have done. Eventually, those external voices become internal ones at a very young age. There is a raft of educational research available that supports the positive and negative effect that language has on children. The adults in a child’s life literally dictate how creative that child will be in the future and, more importantly, how they will feel about their creativity and what they create.

Regrettably, for many of us, that means we never really create much again after leaving primary school, and, if we do, we judge ourselves for it or describe creativity as a tortuous process.

The key thing is that this is not your fault, and neither is it real. True creativity is not giving a shit about the inner voice. True creativity is using your instinct as a guide. Using the impetus, however small, to lead you. In fact, your job is to continuously punch that inner voice in the face whilst your creativity gets on with creating. The real bar to creativity is that inner voice, planted by some pointless, non-descript, and now largely irrelevant people who were too ignorant to understand what damage they were doing; (or, worse, did it on purpose). Once you divorce yourself from those voices, and realise that these voices are NOT you, then your creativity starts to come out from behind the sofa.

The harsh reality is that these voices will never go away. However, the good news is that you can, by realising that they are NOT you, be boxed up and negated as a force against your own creativity. Fighting them becomes simply another part of the creative process, like finding a pen, staring out of the window, or turning the kitchen upside down in search of biscuits.

So, get yourself a shoebox and cover it with your favourite wrapping paper. Whenever you sit down to do something creative, mentally fill it with all of the negative thoughts you have. In fact, why not write them down and enjoy the criticism – marvel at how spiteful and downright nasty that inner voice can be before you have even started! Then, put them in the box, and every time one occurs to you as you are working, write it down and add it to the box. After a while, you will find the inner voice becomes repetitive, unoriginal, and runs out of steam. At that point, your creativity will thank you… not with a voice, but with a thing. A result. A product. An idea. Something you can use.

​Something well worth the time spent kick-boxing with your inner critic.
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Virgin Trains, Media Power, and the rest of us...

1/14/2018

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Sexual and religious minorities, and stories relating to them,  are given the greatest amount of media space because editorial decision making has become blinkered, not to mention dangerous. A statement of opinion rather than fact. I wonder what you think?
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Earlier this week, a story appeared in the media stating that Richard Branson’s company Virgin had removed the Daily Mail from sale on their trains. Reaction was mixed, (as you would expect – not everyone is a Daily Mail fan but, equally, it does have its supporters), so no surprises there.
However, the media coverage I saw was keen to wheel out the “censorship” card. “You cannot and must not censor the media” was the general message, sprinkled with vague references to the legalities and constitutional principles of free speech, democracy, and the media’s power to say what it likes in poking its nose into everyone’s business and holding everyone accountable but itself.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a media basher. I believe wholeheartedly that a strong democracy relies on an independent press and an independent judiciary. I admire greatly the journalists who keep people honest, and I do agree that censoring the press is a slippery road that any nation needs to be careful when seeking to walk it.
It was that juxtaposition that got me thinking: If I am all for free speech, why am I smiling at the Daily Mail getting a slap?
The answer soon came: It is because “serious” media and “entertaining” media are starting to blur, and I worry that the editorial decision making that differentiates between it is not fit for purpose. The way a piece of news is presented is incredibly important. Not only that, but what is chosen to be presented in the first place is vitally important too. The criticism of the Daily Mail was against its “editorial content” – ie the things it chose to fill its pages with and how it chose to present them.
This seems to me to be quite a problem across the media these days. I am not one for long blog posts, so I shall simply make one point below and leave you to think on it for yourself.
Take TV and society. If ever there was a case for “editorial content” being important it’s the TV studios. Bono from U2 once referred to TV as “the drug of a nation” and he was right. We turn it on, and generally swallow whatever we are fed.
But a brief look at TV in the UK shows that it does not reflect the society to which it broadcasts.
This is dangerous territory now, because minority interests neither expect nor deserve to be ignored. And I have absolutely no issue with any minority interests whether it be the LGBT community, a religious community of any denomination, a racial community or, indeed, any other peaceful group. I am a liberal and always have been…. and I have often been impressed by the simple Wiccan creed that states “If it harm none, do what you will” – meaning that provided being you doesn’t cause untold harm to others then, by all means, please feel free to be you. Whilst you cannot count on my support in circumstances where expressing yourself is hurting others, you certainly can where being you is part of a wider, tolerant society where love and social justice prevails.
So, in what I am about to say don’t get carried away with any ideas that I am a bigot. I am not. All I am saying is that the baulk against “editorial content” that triggered the action taken by Virgin Trains may well be part of a wider baulk against “editorial content” in other media organisations. There could be more to follow. Most of us are fed up with being given information about society dependent on what a few editors believe we need to know or should know. We are not talking about whether the press is censored or not. We are talking about how the media uses and handles the incredible responsibility that is in its hands for shaping public perception and public opinion. It is that which seems to be outside any accountability.
There are lots of gay and lesbian characters and storylines on TV. I have no issue with that. But the lesbian and gay community only make up somewhere between 2% and 4% of the UK population. There are lots of minority religious characters and storylines on TV. I have no issue with that. But, even collectively, all minority religions in the UK do not make up more than 7% of the population. Muslims, for example, make up 2% of the UK population. And yet, somehow, mainstream TV has contributed to the bigoted argument that we are “over-run” with gays and immigrants. By its editorial judgement, it has painted a society that is quite out of kilter with the actual reality, and that has no doubt skewed the view of many, producing quite the opposite result with regard to general tolerance than was probably initially intended. It could be argued, (but this is opinion only so no editor needs to reach for their High Court Writ just yet), that it actually fuels intolerance.
Consider this: Around 11% of people in the UK are physically disabled, living lives and striving to meet personal ambitions in the same way as the wider society, and yet we do not see this on TV to the same degree as other categories, (save perhaps for the elite athlete group). 7% of people in the UK have had a sexual relationship with a physically disabled person but that is not reflected either. Around 0.62% of children in the UK are in care, whereas around 20% are living below the poverty line within family units, be they one parent, two parent, carer or whichever. That is not reflected. The BBC programme “The Dumping Ground” focuses on the 0.62%, not the bigger majority of struggling children aforementioned. 6% of people in the UK live with Diabetes Type 1. 11% of people in the UK have visited a prostitute and 62% of the population think it should be made legal. I could go on – with sections of society and their individual challenges / behaviours / lives all of which are as important as the sexual and religious minority percentages but which, despite the percentage difference, are rarely, if at all, shown.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not advocating the removal of minority sexual and religious storylines from TV. I am simply pointing out that in the editorial decision making of mainstream TV, the “society” portrayed on the screen on a daily basis is not the society in which we all live. And that is dangerous, because TV portrays itself as our window on the world.
And it is too easy for those in charge of editorial content to push the responsibility onto the viewers. Individually, we do not have the power to inform. It is the media that has the power to inform. The action taken by Virgin Trains was just one example of someone pointing out that WHAT and HOW something is portrayed is paramount. It was the first influential action taken that reminded the media of its powerful position and that how it handles itself is important.
And that’s not censorship. That’s sensible, social responsibility. It is that, and nothing less, that we should expect from our media.

​The question is: Are we getting it? And if we are not, what should we do about it?


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Undercover Humans

2/28/2015

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Crime news around the world has thrown up some oddities over recent months, but the most interesting from a crime writer’s perspective is the decision of the UK courts that there was nothing “criminal” about the behaviour of certain undercover police officers in sleeping with women whom they were gathering information on.

Like a dodgy James Bond imitation, the search for intelligence information led some officers into the realm of seduction, relationship building and family life. It is a deep and hurtful tragedy for all of those concerned because, despite the legalities of it, human emotions of love and attachment were evoked on all sides and these attachments were broken, or made false, by the presence of the legal motivation behind the actions.

In short, it is perceived as betrayal, and yet I wonder if that is equalled by the sadness that the emotions, despite their shaky initial basis, nevertheless grew into real and valid feelings between all of those involved and these do not simply vanish once the “truth” is revealed.

From a fiction writer’s perspective, there is a sizeable human element that opens up many opportunities for stories in this area. My recent short story (“The Cabin”), which is available free from my website, dealt with one aspect of those emotions, but there are many more. I think it is a good area for crime writers to explore and if any of my professional peers are reading this I would urge them to look at it as an area for story development.

The problem in this area is the gap between the regulations and the interpretation of those regulations. A decision always has to be made as to what actions are proportionate to the information/crime that is under investigation.

For example, the officers in the above case where gathering information on environmental protest groups who might be seeking to use violence in demonstrations. Was it proportional, then, for officers to spend years building families with those under investigation? What was the real threat?

Would it be different if the officers were infiltrating child-trafficking groups?

How do we give weight to one over the other?

Indeed, how do we, as society, view levels of criminality?

Well, we reflect these things in the sentencing of those found guilty… so should the same tier-tariff be used to judge the actions of undercover officers?

What if you are an officer gathering information on violent international drug-traffickers, and the gang ask you to shoot a dealer to make a point? To refuse reveals your cover, to agree makes you a killer.

Police officers argue strongly that there should be no “black and white” guidelines laid down lest it be made easy for criminals to “test” those within their ranks and identify potential undercover officers. It is an absolute minefield, and therefore one ripe for crime-fiction writers.

Current writing projects preclude me from pursuing these ideas in a fictional setting at present, which is why I am passing it on. Hopefully, someone will make a cracking moral-dilemma crime novel out of it! If you do, let me know! I would love to read it!
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Walter, BBC1

8/8/2014

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 Character, Competence & New Writers

8/8/2014

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Hell's Slaves Unearthed By Silence

5/10/2014

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Those familiar with the Tarot will know that card number XV, The Devil, is not always indicative of the presence of evil. It is, rather, a warning about enslavement. A message that life has reached a dead end for you, and you face nothing now other than perpetually serving a master that will have you in chains. For some, that can indicate addiction, or a toxic relationship, or a pattern of behaviour that will lead to nothing but destruction and misery. You get the idea.

I watched a TV programme recently about the internet, and it was the usual self-serving trash about how it has de-sensitised us and allowed faceless abuse to become routine, simultaneously reducing the level of human respect in the process… and I have some sympathy with that view.. but, ironically, being perhaps already de-sensitised to these arguments, (after all, what exactly are we going to do about it because we certainly can’t get the internet genie back into its bottle), I simply turned the sound off, leaving the pictures on the screen whilst I unashamedly turned to my lap-top and logged on to relax amid the good people of Goodreads and any other sources of attraction the internet might offer.

And then it struck me. Each time I looked up from my lap-top screen to the TV screen I saw people on the TV screen looking at their lap-top screens… and it just looked like we were all enslaved. Keep in mind there was no sound. I wasn’t listening to anything. I was lost in my own thoughts, as were the other people I was watching, and there it was: Absolutely no human interaction whatsoever – just a collection of human faces staring, detached and ignorant of their surroundings, into an hypnotic abyss. It doesn’t matter whether it’s gaming, pornography, social media, unseen TV programmes, or whatever – there is a silent mass of billions who are unable to go a single day without first placating their master, sometimes for hours on end. I don’t care how you want to dress it up, that is nothing but enslavement. Simple, unblemished and perfectly executed enslavement.

If the definition of Hell is enslavement, and the Devil’s work hides inside the constriction and restriction of human love and kinship…. well, Hell on Earth is already here, working quietly and lethally in the fabric of our lives. I, for one, will still not turn off or avoid my internet connection this weekend despite this blog entry, such is the strength of the enslavement. It will be the same for you. The only way to break it is if we all did it – and that means that the Slaves of Hell would need to rise in revolt together. Based on what I have seen this week, they are all too busy, lost in their own tiny world locked inside a cage without bars, the irony being, of course, that if they were all to rise up they would have to use their master himself to co-ordinate them, and even if they achieved this they would need to use their master again to check that the mass revolt had worked thereby ensuring that, in reality, it never would. Clever. Certainly worthy of the Devil himself.

No more bets, ladies and gentlemen. The Devil is now at the table…

For a chance at redemption I would recommend you use your internet connection to check out a link sent to me this week by a very good friend of mine, a friend who embodies the qualities which keep us human. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

 


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Reader Respect...

4/29/2014

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At the risk of professional suicide there is something I need to get off my chest: Writers on Twitter.

I am a writer (outside of the day job that actually pays the bills) and I am on Twitter, so I appreciate that I am in a glass house. However, what I don’t do is endlessly tweet “extracts” from my novels with purchase links attached, or endlessly tweet and re-tweet ego-laden review quotes that I am sure the reading public view with suspicion anyway.

Twitter is considered by many as a marketing tool, and that is the problem. I joined Twitter because I wanted to interact with some truly creative people. I was lucky enough to do so. I have met artists, musicians, film-makers, writers, photographers, poets and creative free-spirits who are not shy in being who they are or in sharing their views on life, art and all that goes with the creative mind-set. What they don’t do is endlessly bombard the twitter-feed with pointless and repetitive self-promotion.

But wait, I have the right to “unfollow”, surely? This I have done over the course of this week, losing hundreds of “followers” in the process. I am left with a small (in comparison to others’ accounts) following but everyone I now follow is an artist in their own right in their own way doing their own thing quietly and self-assuredly without the need to ram their product down the open-twitter throats every five minutes. Where I find that not to be the case I will continue to unfollow, and if I end up with zero then so be it. But the point is this: Shrinking in such a dramatic manner reinforced how valueless I (and presumably others) are/were in the great Twitter machine. To many it is a numbers game – the purpose being to peddle a product to the widest possible reach regardless of who may be in that “reach” and, worse, regardless or not of whether they might be interested. What bigger an insult can a writer give to readers?

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I just don’t get Twitter. I do not think this is the case because I genuinely enjoy the output and the feed from my new streamlined existence and all I have lost is a raft of intense self-promoters. To me, such activity is an abuse of Twitter, salvaged only by the right to unfollow.

I do not need to self-promote. I write good books and readers find them all by themselves and that is how I like it. The sadness here is that many writers are treating their readers like mere sales-opportunities and self-publishing is largely to blame for that. I just wish people would follow the advice in my Twitter profile: “Do your own thing in your own way in your own time. The rest will follow”. We don’t need things rammed down our throats. Force-fed people have a tendency to throw up, and never go back to that restaurant again...

On to Facebook. My followers,  a collassal 33 in number, would surely horrify most writers seeking at least “likes” in three figures… but that following is precious to me. The facebook following is born out of genuinely like-minded people, mostly from Goodreads, who have enjoyed my work and are agreeable to following it as it develops. That is fantastic to me – but it is a private thing between reader and writer, as are the reviews that my novels have attracted. I have no need or desire to trumpet my five-star reviews. Those reviews humble me and I am embarrassed to receive them, but they validate my writing in a way that nothing else can and I am honoured by them.

So why am I ranting on? Well, I was late to Twitter and to Facebook and to Goodreads. All I did was self-publish my writing on Kindle in order to see if it stood up to the barrage of public scrutiny. What came out of it was a series of reviews and sales and when I received an email from a reader commenting that they couldn’t find me on social media I quickly sorted myself out. The fact that there were reviews and support already there completed the circle. My work stood up to scrutiny. A small group of people remained interested despite the daily tsunami of new self-published novels. I do not tweet, re-tweet and constantly peddle small successes. I do not take initial compliments as some unassailable mandate to teach the world how to write. That is arrogance. I do not seek falsely high numbers to justify my writing existence. The reader writer relationship is a gentle one of trust and I would rather interact with my 33 facebook followers and my deeply creative Twitter friends and the respected people of Goodreads who started the support in the first place, than I would trumpet my own vanity from the center of a numbers game in the hope that another faceless wallet opens.

AND FINALLY, (yes, I know I have gone on a bit), to me Goodreads is a READER site. I interact with it as a reader and that is how it should be. I am only listed as an author because it would be odd for my books to be listed without a corresponding author entry. I received a disappointing email recently asking me how to “leverage” social media as a writer. I replied that I would not know, as I have no interest in doing so. The faceless aspect of the internet has done the self-publishing industry no favours whatsoever. You wouldn’t walk into a party and say to the first person you met “Read this 5-star review immediately and then buy my book. I’ll come back in five minutes to say that again regardless of whether or not you’ve done it”.

Just because the system is faceless doesn’t mean it should be devoid of the usual human respect.

There; Rant over. Back to your books, everyone. There is nothing to see here. This is not the author you are looking for…

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Devil In The Room

4/16/2014

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I’ll be honest: The short film I am about to provide the link for scared me. For me, the worst part of being a writer of scary stories is that scary doesn’t always mean scary. The genre has, in many ways, been done to death (excuse the pun) and in the search for a new fright authors can often disappear down unrewarding or misguided channels. It is the nature of the job.

However, one thing you will always hear horror writers speak of is the annoyingly loose concept that real horror is a product of the mind. Nothing scares you like you can scare yourself, that sort of thing. The difficulty with this is that it relies upon imagination. The depth and form of individual imaginations vary greatly, and this is why some films (and books) contain similar motifs or tricks as commercial entities seek to find a common denominator to at least get a baseline platform of fear in place amongst the audience from which to work.

But we are a species of development. Collectively, we are not the same as we were 100 years ago, or even 10 years ago. We have become hardened and desensitised as we adapt to the genre and the wider horrors of life via the internet.  We do not like to be made fools of, and so we baulk at horror techniques that once worked. In meeting this, horror has become more gory, and that misses completely the idea of horror being in the mind, relying instead on basic instincts of revulsion, like a Victorian freak show would.

So what is my point? Well, this short film is not made by any horror producer. It is not a new in-road in visual or written horror. It is a product of the human mind in the real sense. It is a horror that we do indeed create in ourselves, inadvertently and randomly. Indeed, one of the reasons it is frightening is that it could happen to anyone and they have no way of controlling it. And yet it happens in the place that many have grown accustomed to considering the safest: Tucked up in bed. And the final selling point is that it is bespoke – tailored to you by you based on all the things you are scared of.

In many ways, the science-fiction of having a fear-microchip, that you turn on or off according to whether or not you fancy a self-generated shockfest, is already here - Only it doesn’t have a control button, and once it’s on and you are lost in the game then you are truly lost with no way out save for time itself.

So here it is: http://www.thesleepparalysisproject.org/
(Please note that the link is accessible via my facebook page and not direct from this blog post. For some reason that is the only way it worked!)


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Opposite ends...

4/10/2014

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What a weird weekend. Jermain Jackman, the winner of the UK’s current national singing competition, (“The Voice UK”), declared to the millions watching that he was effectively living proof that never giving up on your dream was the key to achieving it. “I want you guys to know – work hard for your dream and you will achieve it”. I wonder what the other contestants thought.

The next day, in Louis Theroux’s “LA Stories” programme I saw a convicted rapist break down in tears as he declared how tired he was of making decisions about whether or not a “slap” meant affection. “I had a dad that was a piece of shit and a mom that was an angel. You’re getting hit on this side of the face and you’re getting stroked on this side of your face and sooner or later you can’t tell which one is which…. Sooner or later you don’t care which one is which”.

It wasn’t until later that I understood why these two separate TV incidents stayed with me. In a nutshell, they are examples of how we cannot control our lives. Some people believe in luck. Some people don’t; but what was interesting was that neither of the two people mentioned above made reference to either good luck or bad luck as having played a part in their respective journeys to opposite ends of life’s spectrum. The competition winner will make several million dollars and enjoy a reverence once reserved only for religious leaders. The latter said on TV that all he wanted to do was to die because he was so tired of having to constantly make decisions between the devil and the angel.

So what? Well,the guy from Louis Theroux’s programme had come to understand himself later in life, and had come to understand what he was and why he was like that, and he understood the “bad”. He didn’t blame anyone. He accepted the effect of the external factors of his upbringing and how they had shaped him and he lived accordingly – fighting himself and his past each day, seeking the end. This is how life is. We all have an upbringing we cannot change. We all have random experiences and events in our past that have informed us not only about ourselves but about how we choose to live, and often that choice is a daily one that is hard to make for complex chemical-socio reasons and we do not always get it right. This is how life is.

The competition winner, however, declared his win as evidence that someday in the future each of us will have our dream fulfilled before we die. This is a fallacy peddled by the entertainment industry. It fuels the frustrated millions who queue for auditions. It feeds the commercial drive for the next gadget, the next diet, the next “look”. It skews the vision that people have about the random effect of time and chance. Ultimately, it does nothing at all for the millions who have to live without opportunity, and for whom the declaration that their dream coming true is an inevitability simply robs them of the chance to make the best of themselves and what they have, whilst simultaneously stripping them of any enjoyment of life by dangling the unobtainable comparison in front of them.

Winning a competition is not defeating adversity. Living life in the right way, despite everything, is.

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Queue Here For Review...

11/9/2013

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I was on the hunt this week for some Horror Bloggers. You’d think that would have been an easy kill: Scoot through a few websites, do a quick search on Twitter etc… but I wasn’t looking for the tired and repetitive. I was looking for something more. I am afraid that yawning is my primary response to subjects such as apocalyptic zombies, or YA tales of demons in love, or gore-fests where the horror is purely visual and has no cerebral element. Horror, to me at least, is only partly about the visuals. In the main, good horror is a sort of mental anguish within the reader, born of anticipation, psychological manipulation and, ultimately, a sense of the book being real.

However, back to the hunt for horror bloggers.

My search threw up an oddity: A blogger who had retired from blogging. Worse, the retirement seemed to be due to the sheer weight of the reviewing process. I have to admit, I am terrible at marketing my own work and I can count on one hand the number of people I have approached over my writing career asking if they might review a novel of mine, but I am in the minority on that. Most self-published writers are always pushing their work, and certainly the marketing machines of the mainstream publishers are paid to do nothing else… so why should my interest have been drawn to a reviewer who quit reviewing? After all, like water in the bomb craters of World War One, a hole, when made, is quickly filled in this business.

Well, the blogger in question ran the site known as “The Hat Rack”, and the reason I was surprised was because of this comment he made in his farewell entry of August this year:

“I have lost much of my faith in fiction. The idea of finding some sort of Truth between the pages of a fantasy has been receding farther and farther from my reach…. For months, perhaps even longer, I have been trying to ignore this, assuming that my old love would snap back into place if I just kept trudging on. Instead, the act of reviewing has grown to seem like a chore, and perpetually forcing myself to analyze what I read in the hope that profundity will be reborn has just strangled the enjoyment I used to get from stories”.

What an awful thing. Reading is meant to be an escape. It is a distinctly private and personal pastime, shrouded in intimacy and imagimotion (the combined effect of imagination and emotion). If a person subsequently seeks to share that experience with others by placing a review then it is us, as potential readers of that particular work, who owe a debt of gratitude to the reviewer… but if the review process ever over-shadows the joy of reading – or we find ourselves reading with a review in mind as opposed to reading for the sheer enjoyment of it…. well, it is then that nature twists out of balance, planets grind out of alignment, and we miss our morning bus to Normalville.

If a review doesn’t come from the heart it is meaningless. For it to come from the heart it has to have been the very last thing in the reader’s mind during the reading process. I fear that too many are losing their balance on this, and the drive to eat through large numbers of books and comment as they go sometimes has the side effect of morphing them into a living example of the Hungry Caterpillar. Always hungry. Never satisfied.

So my message this week is embodied in the last words of The Hat Rack blogger: 

“I plan to try and read without the pressure, to rediscover what it means to read for the pure joy of the tale and the prose”.

Amen to you, brother. I take my hat off to you.

(the archives of The Hat Rack blog can be found
at: http://evilhat.blogspot.co.uk/

I would also be obliged if horror fans might consider visiting the following blog: http://littleblogofhorror.wordpress.com/ )

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