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

 

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…

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!)

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.

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/ )

For crime writers and readers who missed the first episode of BBC1’s new drama, The Escape Artist, I would urge you to seek it out this weekend on BBCi-player ahead of the next episode on tuesday. It really is a masterpiece of TV crime writing, with leviathan-esque performances courtesy of a talented cast.

Much of the credit for the success of this new drama has been attributed to David Tenant, whom I agree is an actor with impressive skills, but I would like to give a mention here to another David: David Wolstencroft. Wolstencroft is the writer behind this latest drama and the reason for me blogging about him is because his latest offering raises important questions for writers everywhere. Those questions boil down to two fundamentals: (a) How fast does your story move? and (b) How do you deal with the obvious predictability of what you have written?

The first point, pace, is of increasing importance these days. My last brush with a literary agent, (the wonderful and extremely superb Camilla Wray at Darley Anderson), taught me a fantastic lesson about the importance of pace which essentially made my novel, The Scarlet Tessera, what it is. (Frustratingly, I remain unrepresented as a writer and eventually self-published the novel via the Indie route, but that is a different story for a different day…). Pace is very much a commercial demand these days in crime writing, and you ignore it at your peril. The Escape Artist is an unbeatable example of story pace, even though it is a visual drama as opposed to a book based experience.

The second point, about dealing with the reader’s ever-increasing skill at predicting story-lines, (and therefore desperately wanting to be proven wrong and surprised), is the true mark of a talented writer. To be able to present a compelling opening, to set up questions that the reader urgently wants answered, and then to either answer them in a surprisingly and satisfying way, or, more effectively, to deliver those answers so quickly that the reader’s mind is overrun and they are dragged into a space where they cannot foresee what comes next… well, this is the Holy Grail for all writers. David Wolstencroft has given a masterclass in that with his latest TV work.

So how does he do it? What can we, as writers, learn from this? Well, the answer is as simple as it is difficult: He writes himself into a corner and then lets his main character get him out of it. Easy, right?

Well, in reality, no, because what stitches great writing together is character, and what generates a compelling and believable plot is a set of actions that spring naturally from those characters. You will know you have a great story under your pen when you find that you are not writing it all - but your characters are by their sheer individual and unique competing interests and desires.

If you do nothing else this weekend as a writer I would urge you to (a) watch episode 1 if you haven’t already, and (b) have a quick read through this interview with David Wolstencroft http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/escapeartist/wolstencroft.html

Lastly, the single most impressive skill that sets writers apart is the ability to set the bar high with a dramatic work whilst still ensuring that the end is satisfying. On that particular point, the jury is still out…. until the next two episodes, obviously!!

I do not often blog about writing because there are thousands of others out there merrily teaching the world how (or how not) to write. The other  reason I do not blog about writing very often is because the late, great James Herbert once famously said “I’ve never read anything on how to write books; if you have got to do that then you can’t write“ and he was RIGHT. The other great writing success of our time, Stephen King, put the learning process in even simpler terms: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut”.

So why am I breaking my own rule and blogging this week about writing? Well, I happened across a great You Tube video, the link for which I set out below, and it really does highlight a very important aspect of writing which every writer has to be aware of: Feeding your characters.

Feeding your characters is not an easy process, because they need  information. If there is no information then there is no plot, and if there is no plot then there is no point. They get that information by interacting with each other. Once you have given life to the little darlings and let them find their voice, and their quest, they then have to discover sufficient snippets of information in their theatrical world to solve the conundrum that has been dropped on them from the great author in the sky.

And this is where it often goes pear-shaped. Good writers and bad writers are differentiated by how they handle this skill. If I want my detective to discover that the killer likes hot-dogs, and the reason he is collecting the blood of his victims is to adorn his hot-dogs with his own blend of tomato sauce, (ridiculous example I know, but indulge me), how do I engineer the detective discovering this? I could do it in a gradual way – ie at the scene of every crime there seems to be breadcrumbs which are collected but never really given credence – until some bright spark thinks it is odd that amongst the crime scene debris there is always breadcrumbs, so they have them analysed and discover they are all the same type of bread, same brand, same everything. They are not a fluke appearance at the scene – so they run DNA tests and Hey Presto! Saliva, etc etc. Or I could do it in a non-subtle way –ie the killer leaves every victim with a hot-dog shoved in their lifeless mouth and the words “I Love Hot-Dogs” carved into their chest. Either way, as a writer, when looking at plot, I have to think about how characters glean information from themselves, the scene, each other, and even the overall pattern of information release.

So, back to my initial comments. Why am I breaking my own rule and blogging about this? Well, it is because, in my humble opinion, it is  information release/handling/discovery which either makes the novel great, or  makes it a let-down.

Why else would fans of Law & Order compile a list such as those in the link below? It is because over-use of one technique, (in this  instance websites/Internet), is soon exposed, and when something becomes routine it becomes ineffective and unbelievable.

So writers must work very hard to keep it fresh, believable and surprising. And so it should be. That is our job, and those who are good at it stand out a mile, in the same way as those who skimp on it deserve short thrift from their readers. Being a writer is a privilege bestowed upon us by our readers. Abuse that at your peril.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG-2zZfLm-U&feature=youtu.be