The Heroes Journey by Mark Chisnell

I’ve been a fan of the thriller in all its forms since my Dad took me to see Diamonds are Forever at the local Odeon cinema. I subsequently inhaled the collected works of Ian Fleming, Alistair MacLean, John le Carre and many others as I was growing up. And more often than not, I would see the movies as well as reading the book.

I suspect that this is the reason that I tend to lean on films just as heavily as books when it comes to inspiration for my writing – flick through the reviews on my Amazon pages and you’ll find ‘filmic’ and ‘visual’ more often than ‘literary’. I’m fine with that, and I wanted to make the link even more explicit in this blog by talking about a fantastic tool for screenwriting that I use when plotting my books.

If you haven’t come across it before, then the Heroes Journey is probably the single most useful aid a writer can have when it comes to plot. Whenever I’m stuck, unsure about what might happen, or where the story should go next, I flick through the stages of the Heroes Journey and then go for a walk or do some washing up (my wife is a big fan of writer’s block). I can pretty much guarantee that the plotting problem will have been solved by the time I’m done with the exercise or the chore.

The Heroes Journey stems from the work of the American mythologist, Joseph Campbell whose essential notion was that many of the world’s great stories and myths share important patterns and structures. He pared these down into what he called a ‘monomyth’ and in 1949 published the idea in a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The elevator pitch for the Heroes Journey is that an ordinary person ventures from ordinary life into a more dangerous world, where many threats and obstacles are overcome before a decisive victory is won. The ordinary person returns home a hero, changed in ways that benefit the society she originally left.

The book was already an influential work when a gentleman by the name of George Lucas used it to inject plot and structure into a sci-fi movie called Star Wars – and from then on the Heroes Journey has never looked back as an inspiration for Hollywood screenwriters.

Its place in the pantheon was probably sealed by Christopher Vogler who, while working for Disney, wrote a seven page memo called ‘A Practical Guide to the Hero with a Thousand Faces’. It distilled Campbell’s work into a twelve-stage structure. The memo was such hot property that Vogler subsequently turned it into a book – The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers and more recently a website.

If you want to see how deeply the Heroes Journey is embedded in our modern movie culture, then check out this fantastic video in which Vogler explains the ‘monomyth’ with the help of some of the many films that have been inspired by it.

And next time you watch a film - or read a thriller, mystery or action adventure story (especially one of mine) - see how many elements of the Heroes Journey that you can spot. An easy one to start on is the Christopher Nolan reboot, Batman Begins... watch out for that Call to Adventure!

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How I Became An E-Book Writer - Part II: Winning Smarties Gold With 'Midnight Blue', by Pauline Fisk

Last month I wrote about the sweet success of having a first book published.  This time I’m moving on the story by fifteen years.  During those years, as befit a child of the sixties, I did the hippie thing, moved to the countryside from the city, grew vegetables [not very well], baked bread in a solid fuel stove, collected cats and dogs – and five children.  I also taught myself to weave, and made cloth, wall-hangings and rugs.

Then suddenly I found myself heading for my forties, the mother of five children under the age of eleven, including a new baby. And despite all my busyness, an overwhelming sense of emptiness settled like fog upon my life.  Who was I really?  Was I the person I seemed to be, or someone else? Where was I going?  Where was the person I used to be? That little girl once called Pauline Fisk who had so longed to be a writer when she grew up – where was she?

For more than a decade, Dave and I had lived in a cottage in a village on the Shropshire flank of the Long Mountain.  Our house overlooked the Norman tower of its parish church. We had a huge, rambling and often unkempt garden and good sized rooms, but there weren’t many of them, our windows were tiny, our ceilings low and it was easy to feel cramped.  Bringing up three children in that cottage felt like a crush.  Four and I was panicking.  Five, and we had children sleeping on window-sills.  I kid you not.  When you’re married to an architect, you have to prepare yourself for lateral thinking. Architects don’t solve problems the same way as anybody else.     

At the front of our house was a tiny study with a huge open fireplace, which we’d pile into on winter nights because it was so warm.  Dave came up with the idea of a swing-bed on the wall, which we could sleep in, freeing up a bedroom for a couple of the kids. He built it out of a massive old door, with a mattress tucked behind it, hinged up against the wall by daytime and pulled down by night.  It didn’t look particularly inviting, and was hard to climb up into, but it turned out to be a bit of a nest.  In fact I learned to love that bed. The only time I didn’t use it was when Idris was born. 

Even so, he was born in that room – the fourth of my children and the first to come into the world by acupuncture home delivery. And my fifth child, Grace, was in that room as well, sleeping in a moses basket when it suddenly hit me that I had to start writing again.

This is one of the strangest episodes in my life. I was seated in my favourite armchair by the fire, with an empty armchair opposite me and Baby Grace in the moses basket on the floor. Suddenly a strange man appeared before my eyes.  He literally came into existence in the armchair opposite me. I can’t remember his face, but I remember that he wore a white shirt, and that blood was pouring down it from a gaping wound.  Before I could say or do anything, he fell out of the chair, collapsing onto the floor - and died.  Before giving up the ghost, his last words were, ‘If you don’t write my story, nobody will ever know who killed me, or why.’

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I have an imagination.   Sometimes that imagination is a problem, sometimes it’s my friend.  On this occasion it was my conscience, pricking me to life.  Ever since my first book of short stories had been published, I’d been burying myself in other things.  Something had been wrong with that book, but I’d been too young and inexperienced to know what it was. The result of this was that a crushing fear of failure stood in the way of my writing any more. For one glorious moment I’d been on the verge of a literary career, but then I’d got cold feet. It was so much easier to say you know I could have been a writer if I wanted than to take the plunge and really go for it, only to find that I didn’t have what it took.

What was wrong with that first book, I now realize, was its lofty, highly-unnatural tone, pitched half way between Tolkien and the King James Bible - this being what I reckoned a book had to sound like if its author was to be accepted as a ‘proper writer’. I had yet to learn to trust in me, in my own voice.  The most important lesson an author can learn. And yet even all these years later, when I did start writing again, shocked into action by the man with the bloody shirt, I still wasn’t using my own voice.

For the next few years, I wrote articles, radio plays, short stories and poems, all in the house style of who ever I was trying to pitch to.  That, I was told, was the way to make money as a writer.  And sometimes I did, but more often than not I didn’t.  And then, in a sudden, completely unexpected ‘what the hell’ moment, I gave up on trying to do it that way, and started doing it my own.  I made a conscious decision to write in my own voice, and only write what I wanted, never mind the money, or the pitching or anything else.  I didn’t have to sound like Tolkien to be a proper writer, or Ray Bradbury or Raymond Chandler or anybody else whose books I liked.  I had – note that word had - to sound like me.

Finally I had got it.  The penny had dropped.  Why then I’ve no idea, but life’s like that sometimes.  Things just come. And that’s when I started writing ‘Midnight Blue’.   What did I want to write above everything else?  Novels for children and young adults [though they weren’t called young adults back then].  What did I want to write about?  Magic hot air balloons.

Years before, back in the Brick Barns days, which I wrote about last month, I’d written a story, ‘Ben the Balloon Man’, about a magic hot air balloon piloted by a sky gypsy. Now I read a book called ‘The Flight of Condor I’, by adventurer Jim Woodman , who along with the English balloonist Julian Nott, had attempted to prove, out in the deserts of Nazca, that the Inca had the technology and skill to fly balloons a thousand years ago.

Jim Woodman is now dead, but Julian Nott has gone on to greater things.  He’s the balloonist who’s broken all the records and been the one to do new things first. Nowadays he’s to be found working for NASA, putting balloons around Saturn. However, he says the Condor I flight was the stand-out ballooning event in his life. I’m proud to say that he has the artwork for the new ebook version of ‘Midnight Blue hanging in his office in California.  If you visit his website, you can find the Nazca link, and see that ‘Midnight Blue’ gets a mention.

But having ideas is one thing, executing them another – especially if you have five children.  With a toddler still not old enough for school, and four other fairly young children in a variety of different schools, it was a hard time to start on a novel. Every day I’d get up at 5.00am and write for two hours before the children awoke.  This has since become a life’s habit [I’m writing this at a quarter to five]. I’ve talked about this before, I know, but there’s something special about that first hour between sleep and wakefulness.  The writing I do then is like the cream on top of the milk. There may not be much of it, but little and often is still how I like to work.  That way the writing never goes cold on me.  The ideas keep coming and I keep getting them down.   

‘Midnight Blue’ was a huge success.  Nothing prepared me for this.  After the book was published, I went down to London for some reception – I can’t remember what. Everybody at my publishers seemed to think my being invited was a big deal, but a big deal for me was the fact that I had a novel in print.  When I arrived at the reception, I was completely unprepared for what happened next.  People kept coming up and wanting to meet me, and congratulating me. I didn’t know that I was on the Whitbread Children’s shortlist, because it had only just come out.  Then it turned out I was on the Smarties shortlist too. Nobody had ever heard of me, and I was up against big names for these prizes, and everybody wanted to give this unknown author from nowhere a bit of a once-over.

The award ceremony for the Smarties was at the Barbican in London.  I took Dave and two of my daughters along for moral support.  Nobody else had children with them - though, as this was a children’s award, I couldn’t see why not.  The place was packed with publishing people who obviously all knew each other [everybody seemed to know everybody else, except me].  The big names stood in the midst of their entourages.  Roald Dahl wasn’t there because he was in hospital, but I remember Andrew Davies of Pride and Prejudice fame, and his shock of white hair, and Gene Kemp was there, and lots of other authors too but, looking back, they’re all become a bit of a blur.    

I do remember Susan Hill though, who as head of the judges came to tell me how much she loved my book.  Someone else said it was the book that everyone was talking about. Someone else mentioned the words annus mirabilis.  Even so, it seemed to me that my chances of winning were fairly remote.  As an unknown author from a fairly unknown publishing house, I hadn’t even given an acceptance speech a moment’s thought. I was just happy to be included in the event. 

When ‘Midnight Blue’ was called out, the words seemed to come from a million miles away.  I remember stepping forward to receive congratulations for winning my category award and it being a struggle to get my head round beating Roald Dahl. But then, after all the other congratulations for other categories, the name ‘Midnight Blue’ was called again. There were gasps all round the Barbican. I stood there feeling sick.  I had won the Smarties Gold Award.

I don’t remember what I said, except that it ended with a Bob Dylan quote and somewhere in the middle of it all I said something about my children and Dave never having matching socks. Afterwards I was interviewed, filmed and photographed.  Then there was lunch with my agent and publishers, my daughters going on about the cost of it all and who was going to pay  [a common theme in our house].  Then it was off to Liberty’s - a triumphal trip that saw me sitting atop a pile of Persian rugs in my posh [charity shop] frock, pulling them back one by one deciding which to spend my prize money on.

It was a big cash prize.  I have that Persian carpet to this day.  I also have the Parker Centennial fountain pen, all £250 pounds worth of it, that I bought the following day. I remember reading somewhere about JK Rowling’s first indulgent purchase being an aquamarine ring.  Well, my indulgence was a fountain pen. For years I’d been eyeing it - and now it was mine. And I’m telling you, writing with it feels as good now as it ever did.

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So there you have it, Part II of how I became an e-book writer - Me and ‘Midnight Blue’.  This photo was taken in the basement cafe at Liberty's, me the cat with the cream savouring my win. I don't think I ever felt happier than I did at that moment. The birth of my children were the highlights of my life, but they came with pain.  And there was no pain here.  Believe me.

I didn’t win the Whitbread, but it was still an amazing year.  Jenny Nimmo, who lived nearby, said from her experience of winning Smarties Gold too, that nothing in my life would ever be the same. And she was right.

So what did I do next?  By this time, ‘Midnight Blue’ was being translated and read around the world. My publishers thought a sequel would be a great idea, but I had ideas of my own. So many authors who succeed with a first book discover they have nothing else in them.  I was determined to prove that I wasn’t one of those.  I knew I was still an apprentice writer and had a long way to go. And I wasn’t going to learn anything, I reckoned, by regurgitating ‘Midnight Blue’.

In one month’s time, I’ll tell you about the long apprenticeship that has been my writing life since, and that lasts to this day. Part III of my writing life – What Else I Wrote and How I Ended Up in E-publishing. In the meantime, in celebration of the 21^st anniversary of its Smarties win, ‘Midnight Blue’ has been published for Kindle.  If you’d like to read it, the link is below. 

PS. I still don't know who killed that man, or why.

Buy Midnight Blue for Kindle

Pauline Fisk's website

Pauline Fisk's blogsite - My Tonight From Shrewsbury 

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My Top Three Writing Quotes (part one) - Joint Post

Karen Bush - visit website

I make no apology for offering all three of my top writing quotes from a single source: Terry Pratchett, who is, quite simply, a genius.

“To be a writer you’re going to have to read a lot – shitloads in fact. So many books that you’re going to overflow. You’ve got to keep your mind open to all sorts of influences. You’ve got to sit down for hours at a time in front of a computer. And you must make grammar, punctuation and spelling a part of your life.”

“There is one thing that I get asked all the time by aspiring writers who contact me. They say ‘I keep starting things; I don’t know how to finish them. I don’t seem to be able to find the time to write. I don’t seem to be able to get my ideas down on paper.’ What I always say is ‘Consider, just consider for a moment, that although you want to be a writer, being a writer may not be where your particular genius lies.”

“I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.”

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Lynne Garner - visit website

I use quotes in my creative writing teaching all the time. I've discovered someone else has already said what I want to say, so why try to reinvent the wheel. Here are my three of my most used quotes:     

"Write the book you want to read"
From the book 'Steal Like An Artist' by Austin Kleon

"When writing about war, write about one man's war; when writing about peace, write about one man's war."

Anon

"The pleasure is the rewriting: The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don't mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it's simply true. The The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning"

Joyce Carol Oates 

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Dennis Hamley - visit website

"How do I know what I think till I see what I say?" 

(EM Forster) 

"Writing is a struggle against silence." 

(Carlos Fuentes)

"Art is never finished, only abandoned."

(Leonardo Da Vinci)

Or, if you prefer:

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

 (Paul Valery)

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Susan Price - visit website  

I love Terry Pratchett! - But I'm also a huge admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, and was always

struck by how accurately he nailed his descriptions, his characters' reactions, everything. And then I came across this quote by him, which I always try to remember:

And for a last word: in all narration there is only one way to be clever, and that is to be exact. To be vivid is a secondary quality which must presuppose the first; for vividly to convey a wrong impression is only to make failure conspicuous.

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Do You Want an Agent and Publisher? – Chris Longmuir

You’ve finished writing your book. It has an original plot with plenty of twists and turns. It’s well written. It’s a page turner. You’ve put your heart and soul into it, and it’s as good as it’s possible to be. Plus you’ve had it professionally edited, and critiqued.

          After climbing down from cloud nine, you start the hunt for an agent and/or a publisher. You consult the Artists and Writers Year Book, and make a list of editors and publishers who handle your type of book. Then you send your baby off with a professional covering letter. In fact you’ve done everything by the book, followed all the advice, so you’re bound to be successful sooner or later. Yes?

          Well, I’m afraid in most cases, unless you are exceptionally lucky, the rejections will start to bounce back. If your book is as good as you think it is, these will most likely be what are known as rave rejections. You know the kind of thing – “We love your book but I’m afraid . . .”, “Loved it but not what we’re looking for”. I’ve even had, “Loved it, but not 101%”. It’s that last 1% that’s impossible to achieve.

          So, what’s going on? Well, it’s simple really. Publishers are businesses, and the accountants are probably the most influential people in these businesses. So, what they do is look at the potential of your book to make money. If you’ve published before they look at your sales figures, and I’m afraid in these hard economic times, unless you’ve sold trillions, you’re on a loser. If you are a new author, they look to see if you are a public figure, someone with a name famous enough to sell books. That’s why there are so many celebrity biographies and cookbooks. After all, everyone’s heard of Jamie Oliver, and Katie Price AKA Jordan. And of course the agents follow suit. They know that no matter how good a book you’ve written, the publishers aren’t going to offer for it, for the reasons I’ve stated above. Besides, they’re all overloaded with submissions from the hopeful writers out there, who seem to be increasing year by year.

          So what hope do the Joe Bloggs, writing their first magnus opus, have in the profit seeking business of publishing. The publishers and agents know that a first book, no matter how good, is unlikely to sell many copies. Someone in the publishing industry told me that the majority of first books don’t sell more than 300 copies. That’s not a money spinner for the publishers, nor the agents, so invariably the result of the submission is either a common or garden rejection, or one of the rave variety. If you get the rave one, don’t fall into a pit of despair (sorry for the cliché), look on it as validation that your book is good and worth reading.

          Luckily, over the past couple of years, authors have had another avenue for publication, the ebook. So take your courage into your hands, invest in a professional edit, and cover, and leap into this brave new world of epublishing. I know I did it, and I’ve never been sorry.

Chris Longmuir

http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk/

Amazon UK

Amazon.com

Falling In Love (All Over) Again by Catherine Czerkawska

San Sebastian, La Gomera

I'm working on a new version of an old back-list novel. I began by thinking it would involve typing up the manuscript, revising as I went along, but it soon became obvious that it needed more than that. Major changes were in order. The book was originally bought by The Bodley Head and published by Random House a long time ago. I think the central story is fine, but I’ve matured as a writer. Just as well, really. When I reread it before starting work on it, my chief emotion was a sort of horrified embarrassment and NOT, I might add, embarrassment at the significantly erotic content. It was more a question of writing technique and not the other sort. What, I kept wondering, was I thinking about? More to the point, what was my editor thinking about?

Happy days on board Simba

When I look at the novel now, I can see so many elements of it which need work, not least a confused and confusing perception of point of view. It began as a tale told from a limited third person point of view.

It’s a story about Margaret Sinclair, in her thirties, newly divorced, shy, rather innocent and a little depressed. Desperate to get away from Scotland, she secures a job in property sales on the Canarian island of Tenerife. My editor at the time suggested that we also needed to see things from the perspective of the other main character, a Canarian called Luis. She may have been right about that (I'm still thinking about it) because (a) this is a story about a cross cultural relationship and we need to know what is going on in the head of the other half and (b) musician Luis comes from the small island of La Gomera which is central to the story, so his background is both interesting and important to the plot.

Back then, and although feedback after publication was good, I don’t think I did it very well. To be fair, it isn’t easy. It’s the kind of thing I wrestled with in The Amber Heart where sometimes we needed to be with Maryanna and sometimes with Piotro, but not both at the same time. I think, eventually, I got it right in that novel, moving between the two without too many clunky changes, but learning how to handle it was a steep and very long learning curve. Now I need to go back to my Canary Isles novel with all the benefit of experience.

I reckon I also didn’t do it very well because we were in something of a hurry. If the novel had been published by the (old, distinguished) Bodley Head, there might well have been a modicum of nurturing. But because the publisher was immediately bought over by Random House, it was published differently and with a garish cover. The novel was and will remain a sexy read. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but it was a bit OTT, a bit too ‘80s’ – like the cover - in no good way. And why did I spend so much of it telling the reader what people said instead of having them actually say it? Beats me!

A close friend, a whole generation older than I am, has said to me that the central story is still good and vividly filmic. I hope she’s right. But I knew immediately I started working on it that it needed to be retold. There’s another thing about it: I can remember a phone call from the girl who was involved with publicity when it was first published. ‘I fell in love with Luis,’ she confided. ‘I mean really fell in love with Luis. I’ve never ever felt like that about a fictional hero before.’ Clearly I’d got something right then.

So what am I doing now?

Apart from listening to/watching this, on a loop (yes, Roz, it's definitely part of my Undercover Soundtrack) I’m wrestling with point of view, and making it work, making it better.
I'm writing a lot more dialogue.
I’m working on the sexy bits, making them better. (This is fun, have to admit.)

Above all, I’m turning the basic story into three new and different novels, which involves a lot of extra writing, as well as drastic changes: The Golden Apple, (which was my old title because the one thing I really like about it is the title), Orange Blossom Love and a third novel called Hera’s Orchard. I’m planning to publish the first one in June, the second in the autumn some time and the third at Christmas, if I apply myself.

I’m also falling in love with my hero all over again. It’s a strange thing this writing love stories. You have to be a little bit in love with your characters, warts and all, to be able write about them. It doesn’t just apply to love stories either. When I was writing The Physic Garden, I had to crawl inside William Lang’s head and stay there for a very long time. I was passionate about William, emotional about him, even though The Physic Garden is a story about friendship and betrayal and by no means a romance. I felt for him in my heart as well as my head. But Luis was a dimly remembered affair and I had to rediscover him, find out what it was I liked about him all those years ago, find out what it was about him that made that young publicist fall in love with him so comprehensively.

It has been a surprisingly slow process. There's a part of me still hankering after Joe and Helen from Ice Dancing, to the extent that I know there’s a sequel to that novel kicking around somewhere in my imagination. And some part of my head is still back there with William Lang in 1800s Glasgow, in the physic garden of the old college of Glasgow University.

But I’m getting there. Luis is undeniably attractive. That's why Margaret falls for him against all her cautious instincts. He plays the guitar and sings. He’s impulsive, sensuous, fiercely proud and when all’s said and done, a wee bit too tempestuous for poor Margaret’s comfort. You know what? When I went back to this story, I felt the same way. Like when you meet an old boyfriend and wonder what you ever saw in him.

Sitting on board in the sun, writing. 

When I first drafted the story – like Kathleen Turner in The Jewel of the Nile - I was sitting on board a boat in the sun, writing, and I was madly in love with the Canary Isles myself. It’s a story full of life and sunshine and music and that’s kind of what I need right now. I always liked Margaret, quiet, sweet, sensible, put upon Margaret, with her hidden depths. Now I’m getting to know Luis all over again. Falling a little bit in love again. I think. I hope. Or as one of the traditional Canary Island poems which run through the novel would have it: 
‘I love you because I love you.
Nobody tells me what to do with my love.
I love you because I feel it
deep in my heart.'

When a promising setting doesn’t provide inspiration – Elizabeth Kay

The book that really captured my imagination as a child was The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It mentions blank spaces on maps – imagine! There actually was a time when the word Unexplored was commonplace. The Romans and mediaeval cartographers used to write Hic sunt leones (here be lions), for unknown territories. There’s one instance of Hic sunt dracones (here be dragons) on The Hunt-Lenox Globe, which dates from about 1510. So what was that about – Komodo dragons, or fossilised dinosaur bones?

Hunted by Elizabeth Kay

I was into dinosaurs long before they became popular – in fact, I don’t think my mother even knew what they were. Someone had given me a book called Animal Life of the World, a 1930s compilation full of wonderful chapter headings such as Death Dealers of the Deep, Queer Servants of Man and Hunters of the Air. And there, amongst them, Big Game of Other Days. Clay models, photographed in black and white and resembling over-endowed rhinoceroses, placed in realistic dioramas. I thought they really existed, probably somewhere in Africa.

            Once I learned about evolution I realised the error of my ways, but brontosaurs and allosaurs had already found a place in my heart and Conan Doyle’s book was the adventure story of my dreams. I did think the premise a bit unlikely – a sheer-sided plateau, isolated, unexplored, full of extraordinary creatures? Where could that possibly be, in this overly accessible world of the recent past?

And then I went to Venezuela.

These table-topped mountains really do exist, and they’re called tepuis. They were the ones that inspired Conan Doyle, and there are still some that haven’t been climbed.  You can see why. The Angel Falls tumble from one of them, and we climbed to the foot to swim in the pool at the bottom. It was a treacherous journey, over tangled tree-roots and ankle-turning stones, and that was the easy bit. The sheer face would have been another matter altogether. Landing someone on the top would have been very risky, due to the dense vegetation. You wouldn’t even be able to lower someone from a helicopter, as they’d probably fetch up in the canopy with no way down. But what a gift for a writer. The sort of place where anything might exist, and anything could happen. And despite the gung-ho imperialist anthropocentric storyline, I don’t think anyone’s exploited that environment any better than Conan Doyle.

            I’ve frequently used a setting I’ve experienced in my travels as a starting point for a story, as you remember all the smells and the tastes as well as what you see and hear and touch. So when I went to Galapagos I was armed with a camera and notebooks, fully expecting to come back with a story I couldn’t wait to write. And what happened? Nothing. I still haven’t written anything about Galapagos, even though I went there almost three years ago. I incorporated my Costa Rican impressions into the beginning of The Divide, and amalgamated all my African experiences into Hunted. But the place I thought would be the most magical of all has resulted in zilch.

            I’ve wondered a lot about this, and these are my conclusions.

            Galapagos is now a huge tourist destination. It’s strictly controlled, and with good reason; the flora and fauna are unique, and invasions from other places could be devastating. Sniffer dogs patrol the arrival area at the little airport, searching for seeds of alien species. Even boat trips between the different islands involve rigorous checks. You are limited as to where you can go, and wherever you do go there are going to be other people. Although the scenery is remarkable – particularly on South Plaza Island – you couldn’t get lost on it. And on the bigger islands, such as Isabela or Santa Cruz, you’d never meet an animal that hasn’t been photographed a thousand times. Even underwater the sea lions that buzz you, the turtles that swim lazily alongside you, the iguanas that feed on the sea bed – they’ve all starred in numerous documentaries, and you might well believe they had really good agents.

       

I can’t help thinking that the creature bursting forth from John Hurt’s body in Alien was inspired by something gruesome like the ichneumon fly. Nature had all the best horror ideas first.
          In other words it’s all beautiful, exotic, and different – but the unexpected is in short supply, and it’s the unexpected that is meat and drink to a storyline. Your back garden and a stereoscope are more likely to reveal something that hasn’t been seen before, as long as you don’t have an aversion to invertebrates.

            Technology has a lot to answer for, I reckon. It may have given us excellent tools like the stereoscope, but no sooner has someone arrived in some obscure part of the world than they’re posting their photos on Facebook, and uploading their videos onto YouTube. Television has turned the depths of the ocean and the tops of mountains into familiar territory. The private lives of dangerous beasts are common knowledge. No longer can you lose your hero unless you have an elephant trample his mobile phone, or a serial killer trash her SatNav. And if you want something new in the world of natural history, you need to look small. Insects maybe, or diatoms and protozoans.Or spiders.We live on an overpopulated planet, and things can only get worse. As we eat up all our resources, our imaginations become victims too.

Perhaps this is why so many writers opt for fantasy, science fiction or historical scenarios. Even the fifties is a better place to be than the 21^st century.

            I’m going to have to find somewhere less publicised than the Galapagos, I think. It’s no accident that Mongolia provided the best material, as it’s not a holiday destination that occurs to many people. Any suggestions? Apart from North Korea, that is.

NOTHING TO SAY by Dan Holloway

One of the things I've heard said most often is that modern literature has nothing to say. I guess that's the thing every generation hears most. And if you were to take a look at so-called cultural indicators like the Granta 20 under 40 list, you would be excused for concurring (no, I won't link to it because my use of the conditional "if you were" is not intended as an exhortation). When I asked Rebecca Wait, author of the really very good The View on the Way Down, just out from Picador, what she thought was the greatest 21st century novel not yet written, she gave the excellent answer "I think sometimes the greatest novels are the ones that seem incredibly weird and surprising when they’re first published." Obviously, having just written a novel comprising wholly of numbers

(click that pic there to download it for FREE) I was mightily encouraged to hear that.

But,to be honest, I think she has explained in a nutshell why every generation has critics telling them they are ideologically bankfrupt. And she has also explained in a nutshell why it is imperative for people to keep publishing the "incredibly weird and surprising". I think as self-publishers we so often forget that applies not just to a mainstream we so often dismiss for not doing it but also, in our endless quest for 5 star reviews and qualification for websites that allegedly sort out the best of self-published books by using star ratings as a mark of quality (if I can guarantee you one thing it is that in 40 years' time, when the game-changingly great self-published books of the early 21st century are discussed in cultural history classes, it is that not one of the books on those lists will be able to be found on websites that do readers' the favour [I can almost hear a Dickensian "doff me cap, thank 'e kindly sir, I'm only a humble reader" when I say that] of seeking out the best for them).

Anyway, that brings me to the pluggy bit (don't worry, I hope the controversy levels stay resaonably high but I am so excited about the next bit - and my own book - download it. It's FREE. It's WHOLLY WRITTEN IN NUMBERS - that I shall save my swingeing assault on self-publishing gatekeeper sites for next month). What I love even more than writingis the chance to show the world the amazing talents that *are* currently bubbling away under the literary surface, and one of the ways I like to do this best is by publishing and holding installations and events.

And I am delighted to say my new project, NOTHING TO SAY, is now being launched. My intention is to create a literary equivalentof the legendary Freeze exhibition, a snapshot of a literary moment in time, a moment that captures a wave that is about to crest as it prepares to rear up on the shore of our collective consciousness. There will be a series of very exciting events culminating in a week-long exhibition in the basement of The Albion Beatnik (now officially the internet's favourite bookshop - see this!!). Do check out the project's website for full details.

But what I really want to talk about are the books. I am publishing 6 startlingly fabulous limited edition collections and they are available for pre-order now. There are just 25 copies of each collection in the limited edition print run. Make sure you don't miss out on yours. To pre-order your copy of any (or indeed all) of these titles, simply Paypal £6 per title to songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com and add £1 each title for UK postage or £3 for postage anywhere in the world outside the UK, and stating which collection(s) you would like and your address by 17 May. At today's exchange rate that's US$13.82 incluiding postage and shipping to the US, CA$14.02 to Canada, AU$13.86 to Australia and 10.66 Euros to Europe.

These books are proof that something marvellous  is happening in contemporary literature. They are as distinct as could be imagined - the fractured artwork of Andy Harrod, the filthy surrealism of Jared Joseph, the unsettlingly classic Kiran Millwood Hargrave - and yet all of them have a common sensibility. A disquiet with the status quo. A need to say more, to utter a sentiment not yet spoken, and a burning ambition to place themselves at the centre of a conversation that is about to happen. These are 6 of the most remarkable voices you will hear. As a generation we may have NOTHING TO SAY,  but I would urge you to listen hard, because like the universe-void in the moment before the Big Bang it is about to explode into something marvellous. Oh, and anyone looking for a cover - the image I have used is by the extraordinary Eleanor Leone Bennett. She has just been named Young Environmental Photographer of the Year, to add to an absurdly long roll-call of credits for someone not yet approaching the end of their teens. She has also done a lot of work for the superb Nine Arches Press, and many other cutting edge literary publications. I would urge anyone to speak to her.

 

Paul Askew's Animal Magnetism is a beautifully surreal journey through love and loneliness in the company of Wthnailesque narrators and a delicious assortment of poetic animals. His work has the fragility and lightness of a paper lantern but it also has a glorious sense of the absurd, and comes in equal parts T S Eliot, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and internet poetry.  

Orange Was the Colour of Her Dress, Then Silk Blue
I ordered a date
and was given the future.

I don’t know why, but I’m imagining you
listening to Charles Mingus and smoking a Gauloises.
Everything changes with the dusk;
your dress, your hair, your lipstick, the way you move.
In deeper light, you become the evening,
just as you had been the day.

The song’s still playing as you undress,
turning into night. You click your fingers
and I come.
And now it’s November.
We’re huddled in coats, drinking whisky;

the fireworks are done. We have a clear sky
and a fire that neither of us will let die.

wide-shining is a collection of retellings of classical myths constructed with filigree precision. Like a Dali painting, each poem is a thing of beauty and yet each leaves you with the disconcerting sense that something you can't quite pinpoint is ever so slightly wrong. What makes these poems so startlingly fresh is the precision of that ever so slight imbalance that lifts these poems from the classical to the absolutely contemporary. 

Persephone

Most mornings I can barely stand to look at this
something-like-happiness misting our periphery,
an epiphany spat out like pips from our tongues,
all our half-sung songs stringing along behind us,
and you, dark god, perfect weight above me, telling me
you love me and me drop dropping droplets through your hand,
my stolid body turning liquid as sand and running our fierce current
fast as silver-quick fish, my flick-flecking lips biting like teeth
as I shoal beneath you, held so tight I can barely breathe.

The shift of the seasons sinks us,
and at my brink I tip through
summer autumn winter spring
– all the fast-spin of cold and heat –
fells me as I fall back replete,
my heart beating pomegranate red,
jawing my mouthful of seeds.

  

Dirty White Everything is what happens when the poetic blank generation gets dressed up for a goth night out. The ultra-modern post-consumerist sweats of Brett Easton Ellis are delicately fused with the lace and velvet of fin de siecle Montmartre to deliver an unforgettable journey into a dark night of emptiness and exquisite pain. 

Catching Flies

Train drags itself back to Swindon,
back legs a burden, wounded animal.
Sitting backwards, wrenched
all fingernails and heels and
Fay Wray King Kong scream,
spitting lipstick saliva at authority.
I am dragged home back to
awkward adolescence,
the floor is sticky
with discarded lollipop stick.
Dragged towards
Job Centre Tuesdays,
orphaned shopping trolleys,
trees blooming Tesco plastic,
garish carpet and
knick-knacks that only ever remind you
of buying them.
I look out the window
see a dead seagull on the tracks,
look back and notice
a spelling mistake
on the safety card.
The man sat beside me
looks like my dad
sleeping with his mouth open.

  

Andy Harrod fuses media more perfectly than any other writer in the UK today. Blending art, photography, conceptual typography, poetry and prose with a musical sensibility that earworms its way inside you as you read, spending time with this collection is like watching in horror and amazement a skilled surgeon take the top off your head and lay every part of your mind out in front of you. It is impossible to read this book without coming away with a profoundly changed sense of yourself

.

 

mammal is unlike anything else. Structurally it is, well, a mammal, a living creature constructed from limbs and a head and a torso of poems that are not quite separate but not quite parts of the same whole, bleeding into one another but separated by silk-thin membranes. Its content is surreal, transgressive, humorous, disturbing, rhythmic, complex, like watching the slow dissection of a living creature unfold before your eyes. 

Now i am a jaybird.

i live among the copies
behind my life is violets
the violets copy in the brushgrass behind
the violents copulate & scrub behind the brush
we fuck & fall away like brushstroke
Cheryl & i

brushgrass like an oil painting
brushfire we fly away the waitress
the waitress with child
the waitress scatters us away with glasses
vermouth glasses & ghosts.
pink lady stains from a pure clear mouth
a strain mouth pretty pure
Our beaks are black.
dark our beaks at our backs
are our black tails hedged & angled
we wrestle with the angles
math across the door & lambsblood
we spill the oil & the bread
we get us wet
we fill us with what
with what

fill us with what we want.
lord give us strength to copy
fill us with what we want
we want
to copulate in love
to violate to blank
to violet.
to violet
to copy in loveto xerox the deity
xerox the deity
Where’s Cheryl.
she blisses at the slightest provocation
she’s blissing on the ground with others like us
like us, i am on the bough with others
others like me
brothers mothers
nothing the others
as we utter with pleasure & ruse
repetitive herds of blackbirds rue
as we utter with dainty want
it’s us we want
we want us.
we want our daily want
us we utter with deity want
give us our daily bread
give us our olive oil
pus the violets
boil the violets

 

 Imagine an earthquake destroyed Manchester and buried everyone and everything in it. And imagine in 700 years' time an archaeologist uncovers a box and in it are unanswered love letters from someone no one knows to someone no one knows. That's the closest I can get to describing the sense of voyeuristic heartbreak experienced as you read this beautifully, painfully intimate and needle-sharp collection. 

Designs Charged Wearable

You don’t know it yet but one day I’ll seem very important to you.
One day I will mean nothing to you at all.

When you forget about me, your mind will
Congeal in cool, wax clumps
Like a switched-off lava lamp

You don’t know it yet but one day I will seem very familiar to you.
One day you won’t recognise me at all.

You’ll be like a man-trap in the un-walked woods
I’ll be the leaves that disguise your entrance
Nobody will ever fall in
And together we’ll be the world’s worst kept secret

One day I’ll make a lot more sense to you.
One day you’ll wonder how you ever understood me, but
You don’t know that yet.

If I ever get scared of the dark again
I’ll ask you to walk me upstairs
Shadow puppet plays at midnight
Might make me feel better.
I’d make a great stay-at-home-widow.
“The dark is so dumb” you will tell me
“And the dead are so ignorant”

You don’t know it yet but one day I’ll be your phone wallpaper background
One day you’ll delete my phone number.

You may one day find yourself taking my
Poetry books to the cancer shop
Along with two of my dresses
After tiring of explaining the logistics of
Any given Pixar film to me

One day I’ll get around to subscribing to your feel.
Would it be wrong or would it be hilarious
To make a snow-cock today?
I tried to work an allusion to GK Chesterton into this poem

But I soon lost interest,
But
You don’t know that yet.