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Sunday, 16 December 2007
How Ayn Rand Cracked My Ribs
She did. Actually, physically.
In the middle of editing DANNY Volume 2 I took a mad turn one night. Mr Scratchmann sends me the Penguin newsletter. I don't know why; I never read them.
On this one ill-fated night I decide to open said newsletter up and there I see "Do you want to blog one of our Penguin Classics?" Mind immediately thinks, "Hmm, exposure. Yes, I'd love to blog a Penguin Classic."
What the hell was I thinking?
Now, you all know that I 'believe' in karma, it's just one of those weird things about the universe – what goes around comes around. It may take fifty years but, believe me, whatever you do, it will revisit you in some way, some time, and usually in the way you least expect.
Now look at this for a story of coincidence, synchronicity and karma.
I had never heard of Ayn Rand. Ever. Not sure why. Suddenly (a while before all this Penguin blogging shit happened), I'm seeing her everywhere. I find her coupled with me on two lists as "favourite authors". I get a community of hers popping up on my MySpace search. I fall over an article about her on a newspaper web site. She comes up on my book recommendations on Amazon (that's the most baffling of the lot – you'll see why in a minute.)
From having never heard of her, I'm seeing her everywhere. So often, in fact, I actually look her books up on Amazon – and find no resemblance between us whatsoever. The only single point of recognition I can find is she was Russian and I grew up with all things Russian. She's female and she wrote. End of similarities.
Still, there she was, suddenly larger than life and in my face.
And now we move forward in time again, back to Chancery irrationally opening the Penguin newsletter (ask yourself why I did it, then, when I'd never done it before).
I go onto the 'blog our books', I fill it in. Two seconds later it comes back and says, "Congratulations, you've been chosen to blog a classic…." Etc, etc.
At first I felt chuffed. When I tell Max he says, "You bastard, how did you manage that? I've been filling them in for months with no luck."
I go back to my eyrie and then realisation sinks in. I'm in the middle of editing DANNY Volume 2 and struggling, why, and how, in God's name, am I going to find time to read a book?
And now we will take another aside to show you just how weird this synchronicity is.
I don't read books.
Ever.
I'm not talking non-fiction here. I read those all the time. I'm talking novels, short stories, anything resembling novels or short stories.
I stopped reading fiction somewhere between 1990 and 1993. It wasn't sudden or overnight, but it just tailed away and stopped. Really I had stopped before that, in my heart, that's how DANNY got written, but I actually realised I'd stopped around then. I did read one more book around 1999 – 2000, on Orkney.
I would say, unfortunately I can't remember what it was, but actually that's probably just as well since I burnt it. I sat up till three in the morning to finish it and was so infuriated by it that I decided it should not be inflicted on another human being. I went outside and got an old wheel rim and ripped the book up and burnt it, using that as a fireplace. I danced round the flames in the pitch-dark of an Orkney night, with a bemused cat and boyfriend looking on, as I continued to curse it and all its author's progeny for five generations.
Ah, I'm not a half-hearted person when it comes to storytelling.
So, that was the fate of the last novel I ever read, so you can imagine the odd (and panicky) feelings my bizarrely out-of-character behaviour had induced in me.
I had a book to review. It would (could be) free publicity to get my name on the Penguin book site. I had to do this. But I was not looking forward to it.
Time went by. I was deep in editing DANNY 2, the monster of sadness, and I forgot all about it. Then one day an ominous package arrived.
I opened it, thinking some irate reader had returned DANNY since it weighed half a ton. But no, there, inside, was nestling Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand – the very book I had seen people list alongside mine, the author I'd been seeing everywhere. I couldn't believe it. It seemed to take coincidence to whole new levels.
After the shock wore off I began to see just what I'd got myself into. Ayn's book was much bigger than mine. Not only was it actually physically longer (oh yes, it is – must be that Russian influence) but she wrote much denser prose. Heavy, expository, metaphorically-significant, politically-leaden prose. Lots of it.
I'm telling you, I wish I'd had that book as an example when I had someone complaining about the length of DANNY. You fly through DANNY. (Can I help it? You do.) There would be nothing on God's earth could fly through Ayn.
Still, I'd promised to read it and read it I would. No skimming.
And I didn't. I read every, single, solitary word, with one exception. Right at the very end, Ayn has a political speech that is something like ten or twelve pages long, no paragraphs, no breaks. When you consider that everything that is in this speech has already been covered over and over and over again, ad nauseam, it's no wonder I just couldn't face it. I cracked. I read about the first two pages and then skipped the rest.
But that was the only time. In fact, I reckon I'm one of the most dedicated readers Ayn ever had.
In the event, it took me forever to read because I only read in the bath. I had no other free time and it was so bloody long-winded. You wouldn't believe how tired you can get reading baby politics – baby because it's like some Goth kid thinking he has the world taped because people bully him at school, so he writes a polemic on it and calls it philosophy.
I seriously doubt if Ayn would get her badge of 'philosopher' if it wasn't for a following of right-wing Americans adopting her ideas wholesale to use as 'arguments' against everything from welfare to immigration. In fact, I'm sure if it wasn't for the Ku Klux Klan and the NRA she'd be all but forgotten by now.
Which is a terrible shame because this woman can seriously write. Underneath all that encrustation of reactionary resentment about shiftless freeloaders (much of which I actually agree with), she has some of the most vivid descriptive prose I've ever read. She takes insane risks sometimes with her descriptions, unintentionally creating grotesqueries and laugh-out-loud absurdities. But I admire her for it immensely, it's very brave. For every one she fucks up, she gets five well beyond right. She is seriously good.
But she is also interminably boring, relentlessly cudgelling you with naïve, out-of-date personal polemics, dressed up as politics and masquerading as great thinking, bogging down a plot line which is really nothing but a Mills & Boon written with far more flair, but still containing the essentials of a little woman romance.
Her heroine is the only heroine, all the other women are written out of existence. All the 'bad' men are seedy and depraved and lazy and drunken. All the good men (all industrialists) are tall and handsome and beautiful and tanned and golden – and they are all, every one, in love with Ayn. Oh, she's called something else (Christ, I've forgotten already… no, Dagny, that's it – and yes, Ayn's name is in there, folks), but they all love her. She's special, different – because she loves trains. I think.
Dear God, my friend Eileen was making a better job of this stuff at thirteen.
I don't know if it's sad or glorious, but Ayn would never get this book into print nowadays. Even if she had a reputation no publisher would touch it, certainly not without editing.
But none of this tells you how Ayn cracked my ribs.
Well, as previously stated, I only read in the bath. I got in one morning and forgot to put the book on the mat. I got up on my knees to reach it on the cabinet where I'd left it, turned round to sit back down, holding the book out the bath so I didn't wet it, and slipped. Because I was holding the book in one hand, and went down quickly, I had no time to protect myself. My body came down, full weight, on the side of the bath, right under my breast. The pain was so bad I blacked out for a second, 'came to' and then it really began to hurt.
I couldn't breathe, had to walk like an old woman, couldn't bend to do up my own shoes, couldn't do any form of lifting, cleaning or housework, couldn't get across roads without imminent death from cars that don't slow down because, of course, you are dawdling for the sake of it, couldn't sleep or even move in bed, couldn't yawn, couldn't sneeze, couldn't cough – the list was endless.
It lasted during the entire edit of Volume 2, adding to toothache (an over-high filling causing inflammation of the tooth socket) and general stress during that time. I have a personal theory that the suicidal misery I experienced during that edit probably helped to make the book bleaker and blacker. Which may well be a good thing. Maybe even what the universe intended.
See? Everything happens for a reason, even if you can't see it at the time – even pain, suffering, and being forced to read Ayn Rand.
Anyway, who's to say it wasn't Ayn getting her own back? Maybe she knows a great author when she sees one and can't stand the competition…
Sublimely ironic. And just delicious.
To read my review of Ayn on Penguin (ruined due to length restrictions, in my opinion) you can find it here Penguin Made Me Shorten My Review – the philistines
To read a longer version, but sadly not the full version, which I did not keep, read it here on Amazon. Ayn Rand – Even Longer Than Me…
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
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Monday, 10 December 2007
Live Journal is Dead, Long Live Blogspirit...
I am closing my Live Journal version of this blog down, folks, along with all other related (LJ) journals, on the 16th December (this coming Sunday)
My blog will continue, of course, as normal, right here on Blogspirit. No worries.
My MySpace blog may go in due course – haven't quite decided yet. I'll keep you posted when I decide.
So, just remember that you will no longer be able to get it at Live Journal after the end of this week.
Do you a blog with more news shortly.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
22:30 Posted in Blog , Books , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (10) | Email this
Tuesday, 04 December 2007
DANNY Makes Guinness Book of Records...
…for World's Smallest Launch Party.
Okay, probably not the smallest… but it must have been damn close.
Six of us showed up last night to launch DANNY 2, and that included me & Max. However, we had lurkers, possibly from the U.S., hidden under proxy servers. There could have been two or 200 – no way of knowing. What I'd like to know though is why? Why, God, WHY? Anonymous commenting allowed, no IP logging – what the hell were they afraid of? I mean, I know I'm scary, but I'm not God. Honest.
Well, it proved one thing for sure, DANNY's hardcore fans are not net people. We always kind of suspected it, but this looks like solid confirmation. Of course, I'm not a net person either – in spite of the hours I'm compelled to log up on it – so that probably figures.
Anyway, last night's party crowd entered into the spirit of the thing (too literally in my case) and it was a completely surreal evening, caused partly by me imbibing too much Amaretto and compounded by none of us being even vaguely sure of what we were doing. You could tell there wasn't a chat room junkie among us, as we spent the entirety of the first session floundering around alternately asking 'Are you there?' and 'Who's speaking please?' – straight out of Asterix, for those familiar.
Unintentionally funny and sometimes downright hilarious, it actually makes quite entertaining reading. If nothing else you can tell we were enjoying ourselves. If you want to see the interesting remains of someone else's fun, it's split into three postings (I started fresh each time LJ hit the 50 comment button, and started compacting threads, so that we wouldn't get even more disjointed than we already were).
Click onto The Drunken Fans of John to find out whether our stalwart fans want to be fucked by, loved by, or simply be John. And, of course, why Jill is known to her friends as Moll Flanders (it involves potatoes & gin, and is quite shameful). You can also see photos of yours truly, on the night, holding up the first two copies of DANNY 2 hot off the press. Click right here to see the drunken host – and the books.
Yes, you heard me right. Books arrived and were (relatively) flawless. Mr Scratchmann put all your orders through last night, during the party. They will be printed and dispatched within 48 hours, we are assured. And they do, indeed seem to get that bit right, because our last order of 101's came to us within schedule.
So… your books are on their way to you. I doubt, with Xmas post and so forth, you will see them before the beginning of next week – but you never know. Please, please, please let me know when you get them. Shall I offer a bag of chocolate coins to the first reader to get theirs? Yes, I will.
Okay, competition, first reader to get their DANNY 2 has to post an "I got it and I'm a smug bastard" posting onto Blogspirit (see link below if you are reading this on LJ or Myspace), and a bag of chocolate coins shall be yours.
Which brings me to another competition.
DANNY 2 has a blooper. I have mentioned this on DANNY-is-God, but I doubt if anyone has taken it in. I could have kept quiet about this, indeed, I probably should have, but fuck it, someone's bound to spot it sooner or later.
I knew about it straight away, as soon as I started editing, "Okay," thinks I, "not a problem, just edit it out." Aha, not so fucking easy. Turned out the whole book was built around it and it would be impossible to change. So what has happened is I've had to leave it in, and the effect of that is to transfer the blooper to Volume 1.
Unfortunately I have a stock of Volume 1 so until it's time to reprint it will have to stay. When we bring out Volume 1 in the States in the new year it will have been fixed, but all those of you owning the first British edition will have the faux blooper intact. Maybe it will make them more valuable some day.
But I thought, 'fess up or not? But given readers like Jodie it only seemed to be a matter of time before someone noticed it – so now I'm setting you the task of noticing it. But I don't want to make it too easy for you. In order to qualify for the prize you also have to spot the different line between the two Volume 2 editions.
Don't know what the prize is yet, but I'll think of something good. Tell me if there's something you'd like and I'll see if I can supply it. Signed copy, original manuscript, me to be your slave for a day and clean your cat litter tray.
Remember if you do spot either blooper or line don't blab it until you have both – don't give the competition an edge.
Okay, now we'll see who is an observant reader.
So, the only 'errors' we've found so far in the new books is Personal Jesus has too many pages and one of the ads has a typo – other than that they're looking good. We're not correcting either mistake till all the orders have been fulfilled so that it doesn't hold your books up. Those of you with Personal Jesus will have several blank pages at the end for you to write interesting notes – say, "My thoughts on my first reading of The Revenant…" which can make a basis for that review I'm going to urge you all to write.
Please, please, please again (this is my begging blog) please write a review and post it somewhere, anywhere, several wheres. Tell your friends, your aunts, your hairdresser (hairdressers are great actually – they spread the word like nobody's business).
DANNY really relies on people spreading the word. If you would like future DANNY volumes to cost less and look even better (and I very much would like to make them look and feel like the most delicious reading experience on earth) then we need more readers. Lots of them. If you think Volume 2 is good/great/shite then tell people. I don't mind if you don't like it as long as you know why you don't like it, and you sound half-way rational about it, so that other people might want to read it to see if they don't like it too.
Just tell someone, often, and loudly as you can bear/remember to do it. If you do love it then great, you shout even louder. I need you people. God, it hurts for me to say that, too many years of self-sufficiency, but I like to think you need me too, or you wouldn't be here. You want more volumes of DANNY, better volumes of DANNY, with gold leaf and velvet slipcases and tissue wraps and embossing and cut-outs and photographs commissioned for the jackets with Danny as I actually envisage him (the two Dannys I have come damn close to that though).
Enough.
Last thoughts. Dog has caught up even closer in sales (don't know current ratio). We're currently getting more new male customers than female (last three new customers were all male). And I was wrong about the puzzle quote/decoration on the last page of the books. It's in Personal Jesus, not the dog – sorry about that. My only excuse is the last few days of getting them ready were all a blur. Might actually change that round again when we do the corrections. God, there's going to be so many versions of this book it will be a collector's minefield.
Right, I need to go write a piece for a cultural website that's requested it (I know, requested – I love that.) Speak to you all again soon.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
18:05 Posted in Blog , Books , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (13) | Email this