It’s read by the very fine Steven Crossley, who dances over some of the more labyrinthine sentences without any discernible difficulty.

Would you like to hear a sample? You would?

The English Monster: Chapter One

Find out more here. You can also get it on Audible here.

Sometimes, though, attention adheres. A good review might be the spark, or a prize nomination, or a particularly interesting and musing blogpost (as if). And if all goes to plan, you get your first fan. You start experiencing fandom. And fans generate other fans because what fans do is advocate, and then you’re up and you’re running. You’re a writer with fans. Your next book has a guaranteed headstart. You’ve pushed the rock up the hill and now it’s rolling down the other side.

Any writer who doesn’t want fans is clearly mad. But how does the relation between fans and writer evolve? And how does a writer respond to popularity, if it comes? Most importantly, how does the writer maintain a sense of himself and his own voice when there are significant communities of people demanding more of what made them fans in the first place?

Damien Walter wrote a thing for the Guardian Books site yesterday about fandom, and he had this to say (among other things):

Any writer working today who can’t answer the question, “What fandom am I writing for?” may as well pack up their pens and paper and settle into that call centre job.

Now Walter makes great play about being muscular and no-nonsense and in-your-face, but even for him this was a bit strong. It’s one thing to desire fans for the work you’ve done or plan to do. But isn’t it quite another to be writing “for” fans? How is that different to writing “for” a focus group? To what extent should any writer be thinking of the potential audience for what she is writing, when she is writing it? This isn’t so much putting the cart before the horse, as asking the horse to design and build the cart.

Of course, one should be part of the same community as the fans, as Walter says. One should talk to them and listen to them and participate with them and enjoy them. Digital media makes all that very possible and very important. But should one write things according to the demands of one’s fanbase? If, of course, one is lucky enough to have such a thing.

To some extent, all writers are thinking of their audience. Those  who write “genre” fiction have essentially signed up to write for a preselected community: horror fans, SF fans, chicklit fans, even literary fiction fans. But is this really a conscious decision? How many writers start out and say “I know, a lot of people out there like horror stories, I’ll write a horror story”? Or, should I say, how many good writers? Glen Duncan obviously took a conscious decision to jump from literate thrillers and “literary” fiction into genre horror, but did he do that just to sell books, or because he was interested in trying something new? Can somebody really write 120,000 words or more of the quality of The Last Werewolf entirely as a hack job? I think not.

The title for this piece is taken from an interview with Noel Gallagher in which he talks about focus groups and online fandom in regard to music. His point is basically that great art and culture never comes from the pre-packaged demands of fans. It comes from individual passion and talent and creativity.

Does Damien Walter really think Neal Stephenson’s fans wanted The Baroque Trilogy? Or that Stephen King’s fans wanted Misery? Some of the best things I’ve read in the past 12 months have been startlingly original, non-genre titles: things like Girl, Reading or The Raw Shark Texts or Angelmaker. None of these spoke to a packaged group of fans. All of them were products of the author’s individual imagination working within their own interests and creativity. All those authors now have “fans” (lucky devils) and must now wrestle with staying true to themselves and keeping those fans on their side.

So, no, I don’t think any writer working today needs to know “what fandom” they are writing for. The fans will either come if the work deserves it, or they won’t. Books written on demand for an existing fanbase will be formulaic, hackneyed and dull. Fans have the potential to change an author’s career twice: once when they discover they work, and once when they enforce a straitjacket on the author by demanding the same thing, over and over again.

PS: I was on the point of illustrating this piece with a queue of Star Wars fans at a convention. But as the aim of writing it was to stress the need for originality….. So the lovely picture of the fan is courtesy of db0yd13 on Flickr, who reserves some rights.

I hope there are no plot spoilers; if there are, tell me! And I hope to add to this resource over time, maybe putting in some photos and video. I’m also contemplating a more interactive map which will include the contemporary map of early 19th century Wapping. It’s hard to do well without an artist and a coder, but I’m putting together a plan for that now. More soon.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the quick-and-dirty start! And here’s a picture of the plaque on the Thames River Police Office. There’s more pics on my Flickr photostream.

There’s some Big Historical Names on there, and I’m feeling like a bit of an imposter, really. My book The English Monster is set in the past, but it’s got a lot of stuff in it that isn’t as it were historical. I’ve written something that’s sort-of historical fiction, sort-of crime fiction, and sort-of fantasy horror. I’m thus cursed to live a life being the odd-one-out at conventions, and this will be my first.

But it’s a real buzz to get the chance to hang out with some real historical writers and find out how they do their stuff. I’m on a panel called The Georgian Predilection For Murder with Imogen Robertson, Rose Melikan and Hallie Rubenhold, so I’ll expect to be talking about the Ratcliffe Highway murders and the archaic, disastrous and mixed-up investigation they spawned. Hope to see you there.

• What do you do when you can’t think of anything to write?
• Do you write every day?
• How long do you write for?
• When an editor wants you to change something, can you say no?
• How many words are in a novel (they guessed 60,000)?
• Did you read the audiobook yourself?
• If you don’t like the cover, can you make them change it?

I told them editing is as important as writing, when ideas don’t come you have to write anyway, you don’t have to have the whole story in your head before you start but a good idea always makes the writing easier, and I misquoted Chekhov – “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass” – and they didn’t bat an eyelid.

Then I signed their writing books, and they signed my hand.

Thanks kids! Happy storytelling.

The Koch brothers are right-wing creepazoids, but they’re giving right-wing creepazoids. Here’s an example: 68 million fine American dollars to Deerfield Academy. Which is great for Deerfield Academy. But it won’t do squat for cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where food fish are now showing up with black lesions. It won’t pay for stronger regulations to keep BP (or some other bunch of dipshit oil drillers) from doing it again. It won’t repair the levees surrounding New Orleans. It won’t improve education in Mississippi or Alabama. But what the hell—them li’l crackers ain’t never going to go to Deerfield Academy anyway. F–k em if they can’t take a joke.

via Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake! – The Daily Beast.

As we know, there were a lot of women in Marley’s life, from the girl down the street in Trench Town to the daughter of the dictator of Gabon (both of them are interviewed). But time and again there are women in the film who either tear up a little at his memory (like the extraordinary German nurse, now in her 80s, who looks like a little girl again when she recalls his time in the clinic in Bavaria) or who look at the adoring filmmakers (most of whom, I’m guessing, were middle-class Brits with an extensive collection of vinyl) with a raised eyebrow and a knowing smile, not saying what they are thinking: “He’s a God to you, but to us he was a man, and like all men he was on occasion a pratt.”

Rita Marley has a half-smile throughout the film, as if in possession of secret knowledge that makes the whole film a huge joke.

Cindy Breakspeare, the former Miss World who became Marley’s girlfriend, described evenings on 1970s English trains frantically scrubbing off make-up in time to meet Marley in the accepted Rasta fashion, hair covered and no make-up.

Diane Jobson, Marley’s lawyer, is the most sardonic of all of them, still with her hair covered and still without make-up, saying of the assassination attempt on Marley and the subsequent concert and adoration: “What more do Jamaicans love than a man who just survived a gunfight?”

And finally, the achingly beautiful daughter, Cedella Marley, who makes a poignant contrast to her brothers Ziggy and Jacob. They tell male stories of Bob the footballer, Bob the runner, Bob the competitor; she aches of abandonment and resentment, unwilling to understand a father who adopted a world but left family after family behind.

The film has some cheesy but still powerful stuff over the closing credits, showing people from dozens of nations singing Marley songs. As we filed out, I took a look at the audience. Black and white, old and young, male and female. Cedella notwithstanding, you can’t say the guy didn’t make a difference.

So this author does this: every time a bad review hits the bit of code she uses, she contacts one of her friends and asks them to write a five-star review. They do so, and hey, whaddya know? The sales go up again.

This, I must admit, made me feel a bit queasy.

Firstly, it made me wonder why publishers in Britain don’t have similar bits of code to this author, telling them in real time what’s going on; or, if they do, why they don’t seem to use this information particularly aggressively.

Secondly, it made me ask myself if I should be doing something similar to this: watching the reviews, and instantly responding to them by calling in favours.

Thirdly, it made me ask myself why I feel such a colossal reluctance to do anything like that.

Fourthly, it made me wonder at the value of Amazon reviews.

Fifthly, it made me wonder why I’m so horribly naive.

It was a beautiful concert, in a beautiful setting, the Tabernacle old and creaking with the movement of those on the balcony. During one song, which the two lasses sang without a microphone, the place sounded like an old ship making its way through heavy waters. My highlight of the evening was when all five of them sang, without amplification, a rendering of Kipling’s The Heavy Steamers, which got me thinking again about trade and empire and the ordinary people back home, themes which ran through my book The English Monster. Here’s the poem:

“OH, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers,

With England’s own coal, up and down the salt seas? ”

“We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter,

Your beef, pork, and mutton, eggs, apples, and cheese.”

 

“And where will you fetch it from, all you Big Steamers,

And where shall I write you when you are away? ”

“We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec, and Vancouver.

Address us at Hobart, Hong-kong, and Bombay.”

 

“But if anything happened to all you Big Steamers,

And suppose you were wrecked up and down the salt sea?”

“Why, you’d have no coffee or bacon for breakfast,

And you’d have no muffins or toast for your tea.”

 

“Then I’ll pray for fine weather for all you Big Steamers

For little blue billows and breezes so soft.”

“Oh, billows and breezes don’t bother Big Steamers:

We’re iron below and steel-rigging aloft.”

 

“Then I’ll build a new lighthouse for all you Big Steamers,

With plenty wise pilots to pilot you through.”

“Oh, the Channel’s as bright as a ball-room already,

And pilots are thicker than pilchards at Looe.”

 

“Then what can I do for you, all you Big Steamers,

Oh, what can I do for your comfort and good?”

“Send out your big warships to watch your big waters,

That no one may stop us from bringing you food.”

 

For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,

The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,

They are brought to you daily by All Us Big Steamers

And if any one hinders our coming you’ll starve!”

I can’t find an example of The Unthanks doing this online, which is probably as it should be. Go and see them do it in the real flesh. All I’ll say is they replace Kipling’s assertiveness with a real sense of longing and obligation. It’ll stay with me a long, long time.

The Unthanks home page

The Testimony of Patience Kershaw (MySpace)