Grey or God - no contest - by an atheist

Ohhh I can't resist this one. Radio Cumbria says a local hotel is replacing its Gideon Bibles with copies of Mr Grey's 50 Shades (or 150 shades, depending on how strong your stomach is). Seems good publicity for a book that is already getting far more than its fair share. Well phooey to you, Ms James.

Considering that Grey insists, "Thou shalt do this, thou shalt not do that, I'll get angry if thou dost anything (like speak or look at me) without my command, thou shalt have no other friend than me, oh yes and sign on the dotted line please!" there's not a lot of difference between him and JahWeh (Jehovah), is there? Except that JahWeh doesn't also want to screw you.

I'm not keen on characters who are abusive and controlling. If Mr Grey came within my reach I'd probably want to smack his nose backwards to a midpoint between his ears.

That may sound like I don't like sex or sexy books. I do, but that's beside the point. And whether the Bible is "the word of God" or only the word of a committee translated by another committee - which I'm more inclined to - is also beside the point.

The English is so much more beautiful in the Bible. The advice is better in the Bible. The idea of living by being brave and true to your own internal rules is much better exemplified in the Bible. There is no insistence on one spirit being dominant or submissive to another in the Bible. It contains many instances of comfort and care which don't insist on dragging in sex and a distorted view of BDSM as the only solace.

On balance, if I HAVE to have a book chosen for me by a hotel - I'd rather they offered the Bible.

Of course, neither God nor Mr Grey exist.

New Balls please.

review: The Young Demon Keeper by Bob Simms

This is a witty romp through the possibilities of demonology. Fictional, I hasten to add, though I'm sure Bob did his homework before setting off. I know this because I read the book in draft form on a writers' forum 18 months or more ago, and I thought then that it was funny and had a really original story. Now that it's available on Kindle I decided to download it to see how it had progressed. Polished and assured, it's now very good indeed.

The characters are richly different from each other and yet all have aspects that I recognise and enjoy. Paul, the main character, has attempted to summon a personal demon to assist him in his ineffectual life. Characteristically, he's managed only to botch the job. His invocation spell, which we later find is a cut and shut effort, has lumbered him with Scarth - a hybrid "chimera" who is not only useless and stupid but inclined to eat anything, from gravel to ice-cream to people. Hell being un-educated about "fitness for purpose" in purchases, Paul finds that both the chimera and his superiors resist all efforts to return Scarth to The Pit.

Throughout, the main characters felt like people I might know or have known - Ess the bright Earth Mother Wiccan, Paul the nerdy IT support technician, Dumpster the pub hard-man (dominated by his tiny wife), the large and ebullient Professor "Oz" who pretends to be a sexual predator and is actually an expert on several subjects. Being myself an agnostic, I found Paul's encounter with the "provisional wing" of the Christian church amusing, but I daresay a churchgoer might be offended, so don't buy this book for your mother if she pours the tea for Bring and Buy Sales at St Jehosophat's.

The actual demons have interesting - and surely satirical - qualities, such as utter seriousness, lack of creative imagination, and a selfish dedication to career oneupmanship. I wonder who they reminded me of? I couldn't POSSIBLY comment. Naturally, in a work of fiction, these qualities are the ones that let them down and allow Paul to free himself from his impulse buy of the spiritual companion from Hell. By the end of the book, I'd got involved enough to worry, as Ess does, about what will become of Scarth - and even the howling, Hell-filled misery of his scream - when his tie to Paul is finally cut.

The writing is witty, without being overdone, and the tone is light despite the dark possibilities of the story. You're never in doubt that Paul and Ess and Oz WILL succeed against the forces of the Pit, but wanting to know exactly how is what makes this a page turner. (Or screen flicker. Whatever.)

The Young Demon Keeper is available from Amazon
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Young-Demon-Keeper-ebook/dp/B004HFS4NO

PS I wouldn't have bought this for the cover, but the inside is worth twice its price of £1.92.

Turning into Mrs Brown

I believe I'm turning into Mrs Brown. I have spent yesterday and today in the Show Case gallery-cum-soup-shop (great idea!) in Penrith's Devonshire Arcade. I've sat with laptop and huge TV screen, playing photos and music and poetry for three hours non stop each day, and I've come to the conclusion we'd all have been better off with Radio Cumbria. I could have stopped at home and the patrons would have been none the wiser.

In those two sessions I had one enquiry for the pop-up cinema down the arcade (now closed since the projector carked it, and Eden Arts use this space instead); one question as to what I was doing - heavens, a live adult dared to speak to me! astonishing! - two grins from small children, and one question as to the identity of the wool craftswomen whose work adorned the walls - said enquirers having walked past a six foot by three foot poster in the doorway saying "The Wool Clip, Caldbeck".

I didn't sell a book, a pamphlet, or a single page of poems. I didn't even take a single donation to Walking for Wishes (for the Geoff Brown Charitable Trust).

Hence the Brendan O'Carroll urge to say things like #waste-a-feckin-time and #totallyfeckin-useless.

What I did do, to stave off utter insanity, was to read three books; I finished two, and have mentally chucked the third in the waste skip as another #waste-a-feckin-time and #totallyfeckin-useless item. Reviews, handwritten since the laptop was driving the TV, will be posted here shortly.

What I did notice is that of three published full length novels, there wasn't one without a spelling error, a typo, or a punctuation/printing/layout error.

Inattention to detail is poor workmanship - and in two cases, the story itself was very, very good and didn't deserve such silly mistakes. By far the poorest of the three storywise was also the poorest produced item, both in terms of quality of paper/cover and in terms of layout/typographic errors. So bad, in fact, that I might not review it. It was just awful!

If these had been self-publications, these books would be rightly ticked off for writer ignorance, but all three were "published" by other people making it their business. Has the digital revolution in publishing dragged down standards in proofing? Or have we got so used to missing errors on screen that they are not seen any more when the final product goes out?

You'll say, well, if you can do better, go and do it... So, Dragon Bait is out on Kindle... I'm #puttin-me-book-where-me-feckin-mouth-is. Go and have a look.

Jackdaw E Books

Time to stand up as an Indie - not, not politics, you know I don't have that kind of head. Independent publishing. Jackdaw E Books is now up and running. Pop in and see me tomorrow in Penrith :)

New Writing Cumbria tells all!

Now it must be time to eat... I don't seem to have stopped today.

Only I suppose I'd better feed and stable the wild horse before the midgies start nibbling her. More after tomorrow's excitement.

A good day!

Yesterday was rather a good day writing-wise. I had an article accepted by Best of British Magazine in record quick time (4 hours). I received my copies of "In Memoriam" (and a cheque - don't forget the cheque) from Candlestick Press. See details here: In Memoriam You know how you worry whether an anthology will turn out tacky - well this isn't - it's brilliant.

I am proud to see "Pink" in the company of works by:
Christina Rossetti
Goethe (tr Longfellow)
Michael Rosen
Billy Collins
Anna Wigley
Carol Ann Duffy
Peter POrter
Dylan Thomas
Paul Durcan
Derek Mahon
Wendy Cope
W H Auden
Adrian Mitchell
Jackie Kay
Penelope Shuttle
Robert Burns
Catullus
Laurence Binyon
John McCrae
Shakespeare
Tennyson
Emily Dickinson
Thomas Gray
Mark Twain.

An' ME!
Quite a day, really!

Royal Hoorah

I admit it: I admire HM The Queen. The fact that my own mother is only a year older and has always looked very like Her Majesty is a complication I acknowledge and – I hope – set aside. It isn’t just the longevity that I admire, since I have other relatives who are older than either The Queen or Prince Philip, and some I like and some I don’t.

But… There has never been a breath of extramarital scandal about this couple throughout their exceptionally long and public marriage. This can’t be attributed to Royal pressure on the media, since there has been plenty of gossip about their children over the years, so I have to assume that there’s no gossip because there’s nothing to gossip about. The couple are clearly each other’s rock. That in itself is a remarkable and admirable thing.

I really don’t mind the fact that HM inherited a lot of land, and a lot of goods and property. It’s not as though HM goes out and personally grinds the faces of the poor in order to take money from them. Since 1993 The Queen pays tax on her personal wealth and income like everybody else, some £190 million a year, exceeding the amount paid to her by the Civil List, the Privy Purse, and the Grants-in-Aid for upkeep of Royal Palaces and for Royal travel.

I admire HM’s ability to manage a punishing daily, weekly and yearly round of travelling, meetings and public appearances. She’s done it for sixty years, she stays in touch with everything that is happening politically and she shows no sign of retiring. And she does it all with so much more poise and serenity than Murdoch or Sugar or their ilk.

I haven’t gone out of my way to watch the Jubilee celebrations, and truthfully I had forgotten that today was the 60th time HM The Queen has presided on Horseguards Parade. However, I happened to catch Trooping the Colour at a friend’s house this morning, and I was stirred by the sight of the fabulous costumes and uniforms, the men and music and horses and carriages. I know people moan about the expense of “all that military showing-off,” but if these amazing ceremonials didn’t happen, would the complainers be a ha’penny better off? Unlikely. Would foreign visitors spend so much money in England if the only displays were of grey-suited politicians riding in bullet-proof limos? I know I wouldn’t. So I admired the organization that must go into the pomp and pageantry, I appreciated it all as the splendid theatre it was meant to be, and I was glad I didn’t have to polish all that brass and leatherwork.

I know there are things to criticize about monarchy, but I’m deliberately not going to touch on them here. On this miserable wet windy Saturday I want to make a statement: I enjoy the bright side of it. It makes far better viewing than most “celebrities” do. So, to celebrate her astonishingly long reign, three cheers for Her Majesty.

What I did in the Holidays

OK, so strictly the holidays have been and gone, with all the flag waving, but there was a local arts exhibition yesterday. I took part. Ostensibly it was related to the "Cultural Olympiad" (search and it comes up first on Google) but it was resolutely NOT about either London or the Olympics, but about Shap.

I trialled some of my "Galloway Gate" poetry sequence on Great Writing before recording the poems, which were spoken by myself and Janni Howker. I added images to support the various narratives that thread through the sequence. I would rather have run it purely as video-stills, but the laptop tended to drop frames or drop sound, so clearly I was pushing it too hard! I had to go back to PowerPoint, running the narrative as one continuous sound file under the changing slides. I had tried running each sound file (individual poem) under shorter slide sequences, but PowerPoint randomly cut off the sound in more than half the instances, so that was not at all satisfactory!

PowerPoint was cowed into obedience by the full soundtrack running under 111 slides, but editing so that the slides fitted accurately was extremely tedious. There is no way to dip in and out of the sequence as you can with a video editor, so an adjustment at the end of the sequence meant listening from the beginning to almost the whole 30 minutes - and a further adjustment needed another 30 minutes - etc. Very, very boring.

The presentation ran all yesterday, and it went all right because I had taken everything I needed to the venue, and had not relied on anyone else providing cabling or speakers or even Blu-Tack for posters pointing the way to the room. I did have a whole room to myself though! It was bad in one way because people had to be directed to find me, but also good because it was a nice light, quiet room with lots of space for people to sit down, or read the pages of poems I had put out, and there were few other noises interfering with the spoken poetic narrative. Donations to the Walking for Wishes charity (raising money to send sick children like Naomi on their dream holiday or whatever) were small, but better than nothing.

The main point is that the people who came in and sat down stayed through the whole 30 minutes, and some who came in at the middle then stayed to see the beginning of the loop which they had missed.

Having listened to the sequence endlessly for several days, though, I'm glad I was needed at a meeting elsewhere during the middle of the afternoon!

My next move is to contact the local arts organisation and book a date to use their space in Penrith. It's a nice live space with a soup shop which will bring people in! They can offer a large screen TV on which to run the sequence, which will be more attractive, if less intimate, than viewing on the laptop.

And next time I will definitely take some books to sell!