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.