Lies, damn lies and Facebook

I was thinking of advertising somewhere. Sorry, I meant leveraging my cross-platform modalities. And where better than Facebook. Well as it turns out, practically anywhere. I think my ad would have done better in the newsagent’s window in Aldeburgh, frankly. It would certainly have been more cost-effective.

I had an ad there for a month. On Facebook, obviously. The results were memorable. Two click-throughs. Two. In a month. I certainly remember that. Then Facebook phoned: “Would I like to buy an ad?”

Well no, Facebook, I bought one and nothing happened so I won’t be buying another. “We’ll look into it,” said Facebook. And by an AMAZING coincidence there were 50 click-throughs in the next 24 hours. I must be born lucky that way.

Over the next week my little old Facebook ad, the one that garnered no clicks at all for a month, managed 150 click-throughs to the Amazon page I’d specified. The results, or ‘insights’ as Facebook’s newspeak has it, were impressive, or they would be if my stats-inclusive BSc put most of its emphasis on BS.

Facebook Insights

In the new amazing world of business school MBA Advanced Know Nothingness, ‘insights’ just means ‘some numbers.’ You can tell the quality of them by the way they record website hits (a search engine crawled across it) instead of visits (someone actually went to the site). This is the upside down-world of insights, Search Engine Optimisation and ‘creative’ content. In the modern Alice Through the LCD the medium isn’t just the message, it’s actually more important.

So here are some insights anyone on The Apprentice would be proud to trot out.

150 clicks. £60. 9 new Facebook likes. Net sales – er one.

The ad was straightforward. Buy Not Your Heart Away, now, in paperback and Kindle. Click here.

That was it. There could only be one reason to click on it, to go straight to the Amazon page. It’s not exactly ambiguous. I never saw the ad. No-one I know has ever seen the ad, but then, considering a friend’s house-to-rent is on there most days and she’s never even considered using Facebook let alone paid for it maybe that’s not too surprising.

That house is advertised on another website, one that’s nothing to do with Facebook. Nice-looking house.

Nice of someone to run an ad for it without the owner knowing.

There’s one difference between those two ads, of course. Mine was paid for, my friend’s wasn’t. But they both have at least one thing in common. They don’t produce any results.

Whatever you do, don’t buy a Facebook ad. It’s a total waste of time and money. But it’s the transparency of the con-trick that’s the most insulting part of all.

The past is another country

Google Earth is a strange thing. It gives the idea you’re looking at the here and now, but like any photo, it’s just a snapshot of the past, however many colours there are, whatever angle you look at the picture. The wondrous thing is once you have an address practically anywhere in the world you can see what someone’s house looks like, see the rake or the plastic broom they left outside, see the things they see when they walk down the street. But when? You don’t know exactly when.

For all the redacted car number plates, the weird Germans getting out of the boot of a car naked (yes, Google Earth snapped that picture one particularly German day) and the occasional man wearing a horse’s head it’s not now. It’s then. One of the most vivid ways of imagining it, checking out other people’s lives as well as places, but still then, not now.

I think that’s the attraction for me, of the past. You know how it ends. It’s one of the themes, maybe the main theme of Not Your Heart Away. It’s preoccupying me now I ‘m trying to start the sequel, not the past, but the idea of the past. And that’s the thing about it – you know how it turned out. When you look at the house you stayed in, when you follow your drive to work that summer, down the hill, over the railway crossing, down into the old town, you know what happened next. You know what became of you. You know who you were, as well as who you became. You know how that part ended.

A Voice Of Their Own

“The characters just had a life of their own. They wrote the book, not me. I don’t know where they came from. I had one idea in my head for where the story was going, but they changed it. It’s as if – as if they were somehow speaking through me.”

Ever read this? I have. It’s rubbish.

Statutory plug for Not Your Heart Away

When I was writing Not Your Heart Away I wanted to make sure the three main female characters, above everything else, were not just believable but equally importantly, different from each other. It’s one of the hallmarks of rubbish fiction that however many people appear in the book they have just two voices, one male and the other female. Often that means those two say pretty much the same things too, except one of them twists her ankle when she’s being chased by a lion and has to be rescued. Hey, this is MY story, ok? Write your own if you don’t like mine.

I was paid an odd compliment yesterday: ‘If I didn’t know you I’d have said whoever wrote it was gay, because he knows what women think.’ Odd in two ways, I thought. First a sad comment on my fellow Suffolk metrosexuals, or as this is a predominantly rural area maybe retrosexuals would be more appropriate. Maybe that’s what she meant.

Secondly though, I can’t remember ever writing a single word about what any other character except the narrator ever thought about anything. It’s a first-person narrator story – Ben can’t think about anything anyone else thinks because he has to be told it or see it. Aside from the format of the form, he’s supposed to be 18 or 19. Of course he can’t think what anyone else thinks. Especially girls. He can barely articulate what he thinks himself, for heaven’s sake. But flattering anyway. And almost as odd as the person who told me she admired the book as a treatise about the way women face choices in their lives and reach crossroads that decide who they are going to be. Er yeah, that’s what I hoped it would be. Allow me to pour you some wine?

But rubbish as the idea that the characters had to tell their own story is (ok, let’s see them do it. Come on. I’m waiting), I know what the idea means, that they decide what’s going to happen. Except they don’t. It’s the way they speak.

The Uses of English

Somebody wrote that an Englishman and by extension woman, only has to open his mouth to make another Englishman despise him. I think despising is too strong a word for it and quite un-English in itself. Making another Englishman say ‘really?’ is quite damning enough. Even better these days, you can get them to repeat their nonsense on Twitter if you put your mind to it, so everyone can see. Only one of the characters in NYHA speaks with anything much approaching an actual accent, although another one is afraid they might do. Mostly they speak like totally normal young people, not very rich, not very poor. Where words are used as weapons in the book it’s mostly as a defensive mechanism rather than an indicator, conscious or otherwise, of social class.

But they all had to have individual voices. That’s where ‘they took it over’ comes from. Whatever the story, in a dialogue-lead novel where the things that are said are much more indicative than the things that are done, there being very few helicopter gunship shoot-outs in the book now, it has to be the words that matter. The phrasing. And once you’ve got a character’s phrasing in your head that’s the only way they can speak. That’s what leads the story down a track you maybe hadn’t thought of. A character can’t say something except in their own voice and unless you want to go down the Raymond Chandler route you just have to trot after them and nudge them round to where you wanted them to be, but not so hard you make them speak like someone else.

What ‘they took over and their words just flowed out of me’ means is simple: it took me three days to get that character back to where I’d planned they were going to be, because I couldn’t be arsed to rip-up what I’d done and start again. And they were speaking in character and real life isn’t linear very often. Not as often as we’d all like to pretend, anyway.

Raymond Chandler had the advantage of writing about violent murderous drunks, after all. Whenever he got stuck down a dead-end in the text he just had someone kick the door open, holding a gun. Maybe I should try that, next time.

Learn to play the saxophone

Back in Wisconsin – it’s not a bad start, is it?

Actually it’s not a brilliant start if you know Wisconsin. Nothing much happens there. It’s a land of lakes, America’s dairyland, full of pine trees, water and mosquitos, empty roads and rain clouds a lot more of the time than I expected that summer. A place of big old wooden barns on farms that looked like something out of a child’s picture book, or the American picture books I grew up on, anyway. Hexmarks cut into the lintels told an older story, one the Scandinavian settlers brought with them in the 1800s when they came to clear this land.

Like any country place, there wasn’t much there. The local people were either desperate to get away or sometimes just desperate, trapped and often as not contemplating a lifetime of temporary jobs and drunkenness, pretty much the two options available when some of the lakes had eight feet of snow of them four months of the year.

I saw an elk there, splashing through the shallows near an island I’d sailed too, so impossibly huge it was like a dinosaur up close. On land I wouldn’t have got so close. Writing this is bringing a lot of memories back, so much I nearly wrote gotten.

I was on summer camp. I went there to teach children to shoot because I couldn’t find a job in England that summer. I didn’t want to join the Army or be an accountant or a solicitor and where I lived there didn’t seem to be much else to do as the factories shut and the ordered world my parents talked about seemed to be as credible and real as anything else parents ever say, which in my house wasn’t much. For eight weeks six days a week I drilled the basics of not shooting yourself or anyone else by accident or design into groups of five children, aged between eight and sixteen. I bought a twelve year-old Chevrolet and tooled around the backroads like a Springsteen refugee, sometimes with one of the counsellors from one of the other summer-camps nearby. Where I grew up we sometimes had Max Boyce singing how the pit-head baths were a supermarket now; if I drove around Eagle River today I could reflect on how Nancy-Jean was a professor of performance art now and won awards for her story-telling children’s books. The difference seemed significant to me, then and now.

The time and place for Nancy-Jean’s story and how I drove down to Indiana and cleaned up a sawmill the wrong side of the railroad tracks isn’t now; now was when I started to learn to play the saxophone. I had a friend on camp called Mel Taylor. I still can’t find-out what happened to him. He came from Kentucky where every boy learns to shoot and fish the same way you learn to tie your shoelaces anywhere else. His uncle made speedboats and played the saxophone. He’d loaned Mel his old one to take to camp, see if he wanted to learn to play it. He did a little, I did more, so a few afternoons a week I’d borrow this old tenor sax and take it out to the shooting range after we’d closed, or out into the woods beyond if I was feeling more uncertain about the sound than usual. Mel was able to show me how to put my lips on the mouthpiece, just about and the rest was up to me. I had a load of Glenn Miller songs in my head, along with Dexy’s Midnight Runners and the Motel’s Total Control. It was a long time before I could even think about having that over anything I played.

I wanted to come back to London and join a band, maybe stay with a friend in Camden while I worked the pub-band circuit, drinking Scotch whisky all night long and playing just what I feel. A foggy wet winter on Eversholt Street was a lot different to anything Steely Dan had in mind though, as I knew already.

That’s how it started. It’s still going on. There isn’t anything much about saxophones in Not Your Heart Away, except I kept playing Kate Bush’s Saxophone Song while I was writing it. I kept hearing that sound in my head for pretty much always. You’ll find me in a Berlin bar, in a corner brooding. You know that I go very quiet when I’m listening to you summed-up a lot of that book, listening to my memories, listening to ghosts of the past and the future. That’s just what I feel. I’m still learning to play it. These days it’s a 1924 Martin Low Tone.

The smell of freedom

Patchouli used to be the smell of the tribe. It’s a dark, earthy smell that’s hard to describe because it meant so many things. There’s a coldness to it too, along with the warm, fuzzy buzz it puts in your head, the feeling it puts in your heart that for once, just this once, we could have a revolution without blood on the streets.

Well we had a revolution. It was called Thatcherism. It wasn’t much to do with patchouli and there was blood.

I tried to get some patchouli in Bath two weekends ago, to fly the flag when I went to a university reunion. Bath didn’t have any which was odd where they may as well have crop-dusted the whole city with the stuff once upon a time. I got some patchouli massage oil in Body Shop a few years ago but that’s another story. It’s not the same.

That smell was how you recognised the tribe, a not-very-secret code. The police and Drugs Squad and Customs officers always assumed it meant you were in possession of a controlled substance. I got made to turn my bag and pockets out on the street in Bath when I was stopped by two plain clothes officers whose hep-to-the-jive antennae told them ‘if you’ve got patchouli then you’ve got dope,’ as Poppy said in Not Your Heart Away. Like any assumption, a lot of the time it was wrong. They’d have been better-off targeting people who drank milk. Some did, some didn’t. In itself, patchouli was nothing to do with it.

Head Shops

After ten days of being more oddly disturbed than usual after that weekend, remembering someone’s incredulity when I said I’d only used two aftershaves in the past ten years, I decided to fly the flag again. I went to buy some patchouli.

There aren’t those little head shops where I live in rural Suffolk, nowhere the whole shop stinks of the goatskin-soled knitted slippers that might keep your feet alternatively warm or might equally give you anthrax. Nowhere with brass bells on strings and a wall full of dried beans and joss sticks and Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics and tiny Chinese porcelain bowls. There probably aren’t any shops like that anywhere now. I remember when there were.

jugual — One of the all-time great albums. Click it and see.

There was a gallery and gift shop in Woodbridge that had a suspicious number of dangly things that might be mistaken for mobiles hanging from the ceiling when I went in yesterday. The blond woman who ran the shop was about my age. I hung back a bit while she was trying to sell some tourists a painting of the quay. After they’d decided they were really nice pictures but not quite nice enough today I asked if she might know anywhere that sold patchouli, for the first time in decades. She was out around the counter in seconds, eyes darting from side to side. Old habits. I might as well have asked if she had any king-size strawberry Rizlas and a lighter.

“This shop used to be a chemist. People sometimes think – But no. We have some joss sticks. I might have some patchouli ones. Cinnamon. Amber. No. No patchouli. Nobody’s asked for that for years. That used to be how you knew, when I was a teenager!’

It was. What it was we knew we didn’t really know. But we knew. We didn’t know where to find any, either of us. Maybe The Purple Shop in Ipswich, she said, but it sounded exactly like the mythical Purple Shop in both our heads, too good to be true and guaranteed if it actually did exist to be closed when you got there. Not worth the drive to find out. It won’t be there anyway. Maybe it’s our age.

You can still get that smell, now and then, if you try. It’s called an essential oil now, but it always was. I eventually got some in Holland & Barrett’s aromatherapy section. They said it would help me relax. When I got home I unscrewed the top and held it under my nose and was about as relaxed as if I was caught in an avalanche that hurled me straight back to the Walcot Nation in my mind, before the picture framers and bathroom galleries moved in. Somewhere very precious where we can all go only for a little while, with the right kind of nose and one sniff of patchouli.

How Do You Write It?

I see this topic a lot on writing forums (fora? forii??) and I’ve been asked it a few times too. And I don’t know. I tried to write Not Your Heart Away a lot, but I didn’t know that was what I was trying to write. It wasn’t ready.

I wrote a shadow of it when I was eighteen, just after I finished A Levels and couldn’t stop working. If I’d started working earlier it might have helped. It took about a month and it was just under 50,000 words. It’s on Amazon as A Day For Pyjamas and one of these days I have to get down to doing something with it.

For an eighteen year old it was ok. I tried to get it published but I hadn’t a clue where to start. I walked up and down the Grays Inn Road with it one day knocking on doors and entirely surprisingly to me, got nowhere at all. I went to Smiths and got another publisher’s address out of the first book I saw. Pan liked it, took it home and read it one weekend or so they said, but pointed out quite reasonably that they were actually more into publishing stuff other publishers had already published, so they knew there was a market for them. This was also the time it might have become obvious to anyone a bit more self-aware that one of the steps in my cognitive process wasn’t fixed that securely. A Day For Pyjamas was a love story about a teenage boy who can’t steel himself to get the girl of his dreams, for reasons he can’t work out. From here, I can – I think he wanted to play safe and did it the worst way possible, because your heart doesn’t know what it means. But not the point. This is the book I took the publisher’s name from, in WH Smiths in Trowbridge, a long time ago, when I was looking for someone to help me bring this tender, angsty, teenage love story to paper:

There’s something not right in that thinking, isn’t there? So hard at the time to see quite what, though. Oddly, Pan thought it wasn’t quite their thing, not without more Panzerfaust rocket launchers in the text than I thought the sensitive, calf-eyed poet narrator could reasonably carry to school. Back in Walcot Nation, Bath Arts Workshop had a look at it and decided they’d publish it. Then their funding was axed. Then their building burned down when someone decided to get really into his roots and light a cooking fire. On a 250 year-old hardwood Georgian floor. No, not in the same room as. On.

After that I took it as a sign that A Day For Pyjamas was supposed to do what it did, go back in the drawer for years to be taken out and shown to a select audience as conclusive proof that I really was sensitive and artistic and you know, if they turned the lights down and sat on the sofa, no, over here with me, we could maybe read it together. That didn’t work out most of the time either. But the story was still smouldering at the back of my head. I’d get glimpses of it, the same kind of feeling you have when you go into a room looking for something and as soon as you’re there you can’t remember what it was you were looking for.

I could never put my finger on what it was the story was looking for. Maybe love. Or the past, but really none of those and more than them, both. Certainly both of those things got it written. Last August I drove down to see an old friend, someone I knew from the days the book was set. We sat up nearly all night, far too old to do this, far too old not to now, talking about old times and all the “whatever happened to” stories. When I came home I stopped outside the house of someone I used to know. It’s in the book. It felt like thirty years before, even though I couldn’t get into the grounds and had forgotten or never really knew that this house actually had grounds. No-one ever talked about it. Not the girl who used to live there, certainly. I stood in the lane and a wave of I don’t know what seemed to flow down the lane towards me. Warmth. Happiness. Nervousness. The other word Ben in the book couldn’t bring himself to use, the one he couldn’t trust himself with. I spoke someone’s name from long ago.

I got in my car and drove away. When I sat down to write that week it didn’t stop. 111,000 words later it became Not Your Heart Away. It’s a memorial to the times when there was something you were just about to find, before you never quite found it, before it slipped out of your fingers into the shadows again.

So that’s how I wrote it. You have to feel it. But more than that, you have to sit down and do it. And the sitting down, facing up to having to do it, that’s the really hard part. Write the story in your heart. Everyone’s got one. All you have to do is listen to it.

Golden Cap

I wrote this as one of many false starts that went before Not Your Heart Away last year. Not wanting to waste it I put this in for the Flash Fiction competition in the Bridport Literary Festival. I thought flash fiction was 500 words. That was tight. Once I’d written it I found out they only wanted 250. I’ll try a haiku next time.

Golden Cap

‘I was not acting alone and I’m not being scapegoated,’ she said firmly into her iPhone.

‘It’s the wind. No, I can’t hear you properly either. Dorset. Satnav. A35 and turn left. No. I’m not there. Don’t know. Is this some sort of interrogation, Gideon? Because so far as I’m aware I’m not actually employed by you, am I?’

On this beach against this grey sliver of tarmac the low car was next to invisible this late in the day. The driver’s door opened like lips parting and she got out and stretched the road out of her long legs.

Four o’clock this afternoon and the pub at the end of this track looked as if it would never open again. She could hear the wind humming against the flanks of the car as she stood looking back along the beach towards Weymouth.

‘Next to a big yellow cliff, a stream and a pub. Yes. Like every other bloody thing right now it’s closed for business. Oh funny. Yes. Ha ha. Well take that as a definite, so far as you’re concerned. No sweeting. I don’t ever threaten. I do. As you know. It’s quicker.’

A long line of grey cloud coming in from the sea brought the taste of salt cold on her lips as the late winter sun caught the top of the sandy cliff.

‘So to cut through all your crap, despite my being the most productive dealer on what you choose to call your trading floor, one little sniff of how our syndicate shorted sterling in the paper your Mummy reads and my secure door pass doesn’t work any more. And I haven’t got a desk as of now. Really.’

She slowly recognised this place. Grandpy fished off the beach here. Dad left here. She knew just a few bucket and spade and ice-lolly summers here but here after all she was, like a bad penny and just four hundred thousand good pounds in the account and this ludicrously beautiful car that would attract every screwdriver-blade and sharp object within a half-mile. The car would have to go. Along with everything else.

‘No, really that is too kind, Gideon.’ She bit the words out of the air as she walked along the track away from the car and the main road.

The last of the sun flared along the cliff like bullion, once, twice and then the cloud came.

‘That’s my own Dorset Golden Cap, is it? Too funny. One point two million. And you’re asking me if that’s ok?’

She stood still and took the mobile from her ear. Folded her arms around her in the sudden deeper chill. She began to walk again down the little road, out across the grey sand towards the flat sea.

‘No.’ She spoke the word out loud. ‘No. It isn’t my golden cap. And it isn’t ok. It never, never was.’

Askimet Spam

Woke up early today and got the hammock out, slung between two apple trees in my sunny part of Suffolk while the hens pretended they weren’t interested in what I was doing. They’re wild, living in a tree and while you can’t touch them or pick them up without a net and preferably a supply of hard-to-come-by tranquiliser darts, they want to know what’s going on. Thinking about it, that’s probably how all wild animals survive.

I came back inside for a cup of tea at ten o’clock because I’m English and my tea levels were dropping perilously low. As any anthropologist knows, if an Englishman doesn’t maintain his tea balance then he’s in grave danger of becoming European, or worse. It isn’t a risk I can face lightly. Certainly not without tea.

Naturally, depressingly obviously, I checked my email and Facebook and this weeny website to see who thought my life would be better if I carried their advertising for red shoes and fake handbags free of charge. The good news – no comments to ‘moderate.’ The bad – the biggest haul of spam ever. 57 fake messages after installing Askimet compared to about sic per day beforehand. It can’t be anything to do with Askimet and I haven’t installed anything else, so obviously I’ve got onto some spam list somewhere.

But where? And still, as always, why? Does anyone ever respond to this badly spelled Russian translated through the Senegalese into school English? Ever?

Still, at least I don’t have to look at it. I’m reading a book John Fowles compared to HG Wells’s writing, A Dream Of Wessex. The first couple of pages didn’t engage me at all but I carried on because, well because that’s where I almost grew up and its a special place. John Fowles wrote The Collector, his breakthrough book about a man too sanctimoniously horrible to even think about. He’d probably be a UKIP candidate today. It’s about a government research facility where scientists dream themselves into a parallel West Country, a little like the way Claire tried to chant herself into a better place by reciting AE Houseman in Not Your Heart Away. It didn’t work for her, or only for a little while. I’ve yet to see whether the scientists are going to have better luck.

So I think I’ll go back to reading my book now. With tea.

Spotify

I just discovered Spotify. OK, maybe I’m not the first to discover it but I thought I’d like to share, because that’s what I’m like.

I put together a playlist, just in case Not Your Heart Away gets on screen, or if you’d just like to listen to the music in the book while you read it. There’s some later stuff too, Kate Bush’s “And So Is Love” and some new David Bowie tracks which just seemed to fit the mood. Click on the link, kick back and enjoy. And remember, if you’re singing along with headphones on it sounds absolutely awful, whoever you are.

Click here.

More spam!?!?!

I wasted some time putting a little note up yesterday, saying that hey spammers, I check the comments before they’re posted up. Did it make any difference? No.

More spam today. How many cheap bags from China can there be? Or Michael Kors stuff. Whoever he is, he’s got a lot of it.

Some of the spam is pathetic, badly spelled, bad English, bad everything about it. The ones that intrigue me most almost but not quite look like they were written by a human.

“Could you improve your writing?”

Well yes, in theory, with time and practice. But should I, when you just want to put red bottom shoes on my website?

“On a clear day you can smell forever.” I liked that one. Still spam though, when I looked at the address. But who sends this stuff out? Most of the addresses are obvious fakes, spoofed computers enslaved by remote bots or whatever theft enabled by IT is called now. It was all made illegal, at least in the US, years and years ago. Ever hear of anyone going to jail? Being prosecuted, even? I never have. And it’s not that it can’t be done. When someone threatened the US President via email his door was hoofed off its hinges within 48 hours. Like anything governments say can’t be done, it can be and is done whenever they feel like it.