Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Books

Stuff I’ve read or helped to write

  • The first rule of Write Club is: you don’t talk about Write Club

    Well hello there. Sorry for the lack of non-work postings recently – I mentioned a while back that there was a reason for it, but I didn’t explain what it was. So here we go.

    For the last five or six months I’ve been killing people.

    I’ve killed so many people I’ve lost track of the total. I’ve pushed people off balconies, sabotaged cars and shot at people with a variety of weapons, and I’ve also attacked a bear with a helicopter.

    Or to put it another way, I’ve been writing a novel.

    Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those blog posts that finishes off by saying that the book is available from all good shops and you should rush out and buy it. It’s a long way from that, if it gets published at all. I’m just explaining why I’ve barely blogged or posted long drunken comments about sod-all. Because I’ve been doing the book in my spare time it’s taken over my life: when I haven’t been working I’ve either been writing, researching, editing, proofreading or thinking about what I’m going to write next. I’ve barely read, played video games or acted like a human being since Christmas.

    Are you wondering what it’s about? It’s about 240 pages. Ho ho. It’s – I hope – a fast, funny thriller, and I think it would get on really well with books by Christopher Brookmyre, Tim Dorsey, Carl Hiassen and Robert Crais, or films such as Shaun of the Dead.

    I didn’t mention it earlier for a number of reasons. First, I’ve tried to write a novel before. I’ve tried lots of times, and my hard disk is littered with drafts that, if I was lucky, ran out of steam at Chapter Four. I didn’t see the point in mentioning this one until I’d finished it (which I have. Six times. Some writers can sit down and bash out the finished article in a single draft. I’m not one of them, and I’ve benefitted greatly from other people’s input. More of that later, maybe).

    Secondly, I know from bitter experience that if editors think you’re busy, they stop offering you work. If anything I’m working longer hours than ever to do the day job, but I didn’t want to take the risk that my wonderful employers might think I’m spending my time dicking about when I should be working.

    Thirdly – and while this is weird, it’s true – I didn’t want to tempt fate. The working title is Live Forever, and when I was starting to believe I might just finish this one I became convinced that the universe would find it pretty funny if I died just before I finished it. “Yeah, he died before he could finish his book.” “What was it called?” “Live Forever! HA HA!” “HA HA!” That sort of thing.

    So anyway, I’ve written this thing, I think it’s pretty good, and I’m going to postpone having a life outside work for a bit longer as I start the expensive, time-consuming and soul-destroying process of trying to get an agent and trying to find a publisher. I’ve thought about self-publishing, electronic publishing and things like that but the truth is I’m a writer, not a marketer, and that means I need the expertise of a proper publisher. Whether it comes to anything I don’t know, but fingers crossed, eh?

    If you’re interested, I’ll blog from time to time about what I’ve learnt so far, what resources I’ve found particularly handy and what progress, if any, I make. And if you’re not, I won’t. And once the letters are written and the manuscripts sent out, I’ll start blogging about bugger-all again.

    One thing I’d like to do just now is to say thanks, though: conversations on this blog (and with some of you by email or on Twitter) gave me the kick up the arse I needed to go from thinking about writing to actually writing. Since then I’ve also had invaluable help from Mupwangle, Squander Two and Paul, all three of whom have spent an awful lot of time wading through multiple drafts and spotting the huge cock-ups I’d made when I wrote scenes after a double brandy too many. Even if the book doesn’t come to anything I’ve really enjoyed doing it, and I’m really grateful for everyone’s help.

  • eBooks won’t have a happy ending

    Publishers are getting ready to embrace eBooks. I think they’re making a big mistake.

    Books aren’t music. You don’t read a book when you’re concentrating on something important, you don’t skip between chapters, books and authors in the space of a few minutes and you don’t need 1,000 different titles to read on the bus.

    Unless you’re constantly hopping on and off planes or lugging around heavy textbooks, the electronic book is the answer to a question you didn’t ask.

    …there isn’t much illegal content to drive hardware sales, which mean that the Kindle is some way away from being the iPod of books. If publishers are smart, they’ll keep it that way.

  • Kindle 2: meh

    Me, on Techradar:

    Leaving aside the fact that the paperback book is pretty much perfect, Amazon’s device doesn’t do colour and you’re not going to use a $359 gadget to kill wasps, there are three big problems with it.

    The first is that despite the redesign, it still looks like something Noddy and Big Ears would use. The second is that Amazon has removed some key features, making it less flexible than before. And the third is that it simply isn’t good enough when you compare it to other gadgets.

    I thought using the full product name as per Amazon’s own listing – “Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)” – throughout the piece would be funny, but it seems I’m the only person who does.

    I’m still really excited about e-books, but I don’t have any gadget lust towards this one at all.

  • Sitepoint books: raising money for Australian fire victims

    Via Heather:

    Sitepoint, the excellent web design publishing house based in Australia, have put their work and their hearts on the line for the victims of the Australian bush fires.  Please take advantage of this opportunity to help those affected while brushing up on your web skills too.

    http://5for1.aws.sitepoint.com/

    “To support the victims of the Australian bushfires we’ve created our
    best book deal ever. For the next 3 days, you can pick any 5 books (in
    PDF format) and pay for only 1. That’s about $150 worth of books for
    just $29.95!

    100% of the proceeds from this sale will be donated to the Australian
    Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal..

    Yes, we’re serious: 100%. If you buy 5 PDFs for $29.95, then $29.95 is
    donated. Our ambitious target is to raise more than $50,000 to help
    the families and communities affected by this tragedy.

    We’re offering our entire range of books – from PHP to Project
    Management – for the sale; designers, developers, freelancers,
    managers, and business owners alike will all be able to choose a
    selection of professional books to enjoy.

    You have just 3 days to treat yourself to this amazing deal, courtesy
    of SitePoint, and know that you’re helping Australian families in
    need. What are you waiting for?”

  • What Jack Handey would say to the Martians

    I’m a huge fan of Jack Handey (bad Flash site alert), whose Deep Thoughts often reduce me to a giggling wreck. If you don’t find the following Deep Thoughts funny, there’s probably not much point in reading the rest of this post.

    One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. “Oh, no,” I said. “Disneyland burned down.” He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.

    I can still recall old Mister Barnslow getting out every morning and nailing a fresh load of tadpoles to the old board of his. Then he’d spin it round and round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he’d yell out, “Tadpoles! Tadpoles is a winner!” We all thought he was crazy. But then we had some growing up to do.

    Even though he was an enemy of mine, I had to admit that what he had accomplished was a brilliant piece of strategy. First, he punched me, then he kicked me, then he punched me again.

    So I was delighted to discover that he had a newish book out, What I’d Say To The Martians. Unlike Deep Thoughts and Fuzzy Memories, which are collections of one- and two-liners, WISTTM collates Handey’s longer pieces, such as the superb This Is No Game (from the New Yorker).

    When Handey’s good he’s very good, and some of the pieces had me in tears. But the book suffers from the same problem as Handey’s deep thoughts: he’s not consistently funny, and misses as often as he hits. When the next idea is a sentence or two away that’s not a problem, but when an unfunny gag is stretched over several pages it’s much more disappointing.

    Worst of all, entire sections of the book are dedicated to reprinting old Deep Thoughts and Fuzzy Memories. If you’ve never read Handey before you’ll probably damage something internal and important, but if you have read his stuff – or seen it in email sigs, or on the hundreds of websites that reproduce various Deep Thoughts – you’ll know these ones off by heart. They’re essentially Handey’s Greatest Hits or, as a publisher might put it, padding to make a pretty thin book look slightly less thin. You’ll read it in one sitting, and not a very long sitting either.

    Please don’t misunderstand me: WISTTM is very, very funny, and the screenplay for Zombies Versus Bees made me laugh so hard I pulled a muscle. But it’s also very, very patchy.

    This isn’t in the book, but it made me laugh: Handey’s letter to Obama, volunteering to be an ambassador.

  • In my head, I’m Ian Rankin

    The rather sarcastic Stuff Journalists Like website (which, incidentally, would be an awful lot better if the writing was better) sometimes gets a little bit too close for comfort:

    Stuff journalists like: writing a book

    Buried under nearly every journalist’s notebooks, papers and clips is an idea for a book.

    …Unfortunately, a good percentage of these ideas for books will stay just that as journalists are usually burnt out on writing after a full day day of writing for their newspaper, blog, Tumblr and Twitter.

    I was looking for something this morning and stumbled across my Book Ideas folder, where I’ve written outlines and in some cases several chapters of four or five different novels. They’re pretty good, I think, largely because only one of them is about a journalist – and he’s only a journalist because it gives me a chance to have him mutilated by gangsters, which is always good. Unless you’re writing a children’s book. But every single one of them has run out of steam, sometimes at the outline stage, sometimes after five or six chapters. The enthusiasm flags and they become Great Big Scary Things That You’ll Never Finish.

    Stuff Journalists Like nails the problem: you get brain-dead when you’ve spent all day working, and when you’ve been stuck in front of a screen all day the last thing you want to do after dinner is sit back down in front of a computer again. There are episodes of The Wire to watch! Partners to talk to! Videogames you still haven’t got round to playing! Exercising to do! Magazines to read!

    You’d think that the natural ebb and flow of freelancing would be ideal for fiction writing, but it isn’t. That’s partly because work expands to fill the time available, so if you’ve got a spare day then the job you’re doing will magically expand to fill that time, and it’s partly because the time you don’t spend working is spent doing admin, hiding from the taxman, pitching for new work or dicking about on the internet and pretending it’s research.

    Which makes me wonder, how do other people do it? Not necessarily writing, but doing anything creative when you’ve got a full time job, a family to feed and a very short block of time before you fall asleep on the sofa? Is it just about determination and willpower, or do you need to manage your “spare” time as ruthlessly as you do your work time? I’d love to hear other people’s experiences.

  • George Saunders: The brain-dead megaphone

    “…the nightly news may soon consist entirely of tirades by men so angry that all they can do is sputter while punching themselves in the face, punctuated by videos of dogs blowing up after eating firecrackers, and dog-explosion experts rating the funniness of the videos…”

    I think I’m going to enjoy this book.

  • New Sony Reader e-book: better, still not perfect

    According to Mobile Tech Review, the new PRS-700 is better than the previous Reader:

    Sony has worked a near miracle with their touch screen and touch-centric user interface. The Reader is simply a joy to use in terms of ergonomics, control and navigation. This is by far the most natural way to manage, navigate and read books we’ve seen so far. Alas, its lesser contrast doesn’t warm our bookish hearts, and for those in love with e-ink’s paper-like look, that’s a tough one to swallow. For those new to eBook readers or those who don’t mind reading from matte notebook displays, the PRS-700 has greater appeal. As always, the Reader is a great way to carry around a huge library of books and avoid the storage issues of traditional books.

    I was actually playing with the current model yesterday, and while it’s a lovely wee gadget it’s still not the right reader for me. What I want is the Reader’s form factor with the iPhone’s wireless and two apps: NetNewsWire and Instapaper. That’d work.

    As Engadget says:

    with no wireless of any sort you’re stuck filling this one via USB, SD, or MS Duo. In other words there’s still no perfect choice in the world of the e-ink reader — but it is awfully hard to ignore the Reader’s sleek exterior when compared to the Kindle’s distinctively sci-fi doorstop look.

  • The lost years and last days of David Foster Wallace

    A superb (and very sad) bit of journalism from Rolling Stone.

    His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California’s Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.

  • Three good things and one bad one

    Good: The new Christopher Brookmyre, James Lee Burke and Ian Rankin novels.

    Bad: The new Girls Aloud single.