The Intrepid Vegetarian

The travelogue, musings, rantings of writer HJ Hampson

Archive for the tag “e-books”

14 Feb 2013
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Why I like writing about violence against women

Being a writer is a bit of a bitch (but luckily I am a bit of a bitch). By our nature, we have to be sensitive souls because we need to be able to empathise with people in all walks of life in order to create deep and meaningful characters. And yet, we also need to have skin as thick as Kate Middleton’s make-up because when we’ve laboured over creating those deep and meaningful characters any old sod can go forth and judge the characters and what we have destined them to do. In others words, getting one star reviews on Amazon is a bit shit.*

Obviously, we all have different tastes and what one person might think to be a work of unbridled genius, another might not get at all, which is fair enough. But when someone gives you a one star review because your book contains swear words, sex scenes and violence, it is rather annoying.

This happened to me recently. My book, The Vanity Game, is about a premiership footballer and so there is quite a lot of swearing, nasty sex and drugs in it. What else would you expect? Even ‘never been booked’, crisp-advertising Gary Lineker is a love rat, never mind what people like John Terry get up to. Anyway, I digress…

One particular point the review raised was how, as a female author, I could

My own picture of a (suspected) murderer!

bring myself to create such a misogynistic, obnoxious character who commits crimes against women including murder and rape. That’s a legitimate question and one I would like to address.

I do actually consider myself a feminist. I got a first in my module on the subject at university, I shall have you know. It angers me that feminism has become a dirty word, and gender inequality is still such a massive issue today. If you disagree consider that today, I mean specifically this day 14th February 2013, there is a movement happening called One Billion Rising. It aims to raise awareness of violence against women, but what’s dominating the news? Oscar Pistorius (possibly) murdering his girlfriend. Earlier in the week some poor woman killed herself after being aggressively questioned by the defence in a sex abuse case. Every week there’s a story about rape, or a man murdering a women. And it angers me how the advertising, entertainment and fashion industries tell us that if we are not pretty, thin or young enough we are not worthwhile human beings. Feminists try to take action against these things, but the tide of apathy and even hostility to their cause is so strong that it’s hard for the feminist voice to be heard.

Some women, however, seem to willinging parcipate in, and hold up, the

WAGS… the enemy of equality?

‘system’. A key group are certain footballers wives, otherwise known as WAGS. These women don’t mind that they will be defined as so-and-so’s wife, in fact, they seem to relish this, and they seemingly willingly have the boob jobs and hair and fake tans and the hair extensions. Maybe they are just products of the misogynistic system, but what I think is interesting is how men relate to such women, and does the behavior of such women lead men to have lower opinions of women?

Like, for example, on the Guardian’s Secret Footballer, the mystery footballer once described how he’d heard a case of a woman coming home to find her footballer in bed with another women, but walking out of the bedroom, going downstairs and putting his dinner on, so fearful was she of (presumably) losing the financial benefits of dating or marrying a footballer. Well, this surely makes the cheating footballer assume that he can continue to be unfaithful and it will have no repercussions… eventually I would assume, living in such a world where he can do whatever he wants, his moral compass will became so skewed that concepts like fidelity will mean nothing.

The monster that is modern football fascinates and repulses me at the same time, and that is why I was drawn to writing about a very bad, immoral player. I wasn’t expecting people to sympathise with the character, Beaumont, but to empathise with him, to understand what it’s like to live in that strange world of celebrity where actions have no consequences, and inevitably, in a society like ours where sex is used to sell everything, some of those actions will involve doing anything you want to get sexual gratification.

I don’t think women writers should shy away from depicting male acts of violence against women, it is important that we continue to establish a dialogue about male against female violence because, I believe, we need to understand why this happens in order to prevent it.

The swear words I can’t justify, I just fucking love them.

 

*Though the Hollywood screenwriter has it tougher than the common garden fiction writer as William C Martell often demonstrates on his brilliant Sex in A Submarine blog

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23 Jul 2012
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My trip to Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival

Well, I have just about recovered from my first ever trip to Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writers Festival in Harrogate. All in all, it was quite an eye-opening experience. Firstly, I should say that I am still adjusting to the fact that my novel, The Vanity Game, is a crime novel.  I didn’t write it intending it to be one, I saw it more of a black comedy which happened to have a bit of violence and a detective popping up in it.  But my publishers, Blasted Heath, seem to think it is. So off I went to Harrogate to find out what crime writing was all about. Despite being left on occasions with the feeling that my taste in books is horribly pretentious (I fucking love Evelyn Waugh, I can’t help it) overall it was great to meet other people working within the genre and lots of passionate readers, and listen to many interesting panel discussions.

Of these discussions, the most interesting to me were, unsurprising, one on e-books and one on crime fiction and why it doesn’t get nominated for prizes like the Booker.

Firstly, e-books.  This was a panel discussion featuring prolific e-book author and self-publishing entrepreneur Stephen Leather, the MD of Little Brown, author Steve Mosby, literary agent Philip Patterson and a book seller. The debate was fiery, with only Leather really gunning for the advantages of the e-book and everyone else, including most of the audience, being either really skeptical or fearing it like Christians feared Slayer records back in the 80s.  To be honest, it was not long before the debate turned predictable: the same old arguments about piracy fears, quality fears and, I don’t know, the satanic messages that are contained in all e-books if you read them backwards. What really annoyed me, as an e-book author, was that some of the panel and some of those commenting from the audience seemed to think that if a book is only out as an e-book, it is therefore unedited crap. The Vanity Game was edited by my agent, an editor, and a copy editor.  Why, therefore, should it be any less well edited than a traditionally published book? Does no-one remember Jonathan Franzen getting in a mega strop on News Night because there were loads of errors in the first printed copies of Freedom?!

Whilst I do have concerns about very low priced/ free e-books devaluing creativity, I can only commend Mr. Leather for exploiting the opportunities offered by the digital revolution and doing stuff like selling his short stories on Amazon.  Most people think there is no money in short stories, so this is great. But I do think that authors who sell their novels very cheaply or give them away risk making readers think that all fiction should be free, thus making it even harder for writers to make any money from their work.  The NUJ advises against freelance journalists contributing work for free, lest it pushes down freelance fees, and I think that argument is relevant for novelist too.

The panel on crime fiction and literary prizes featured authors Val McDermid, Laura Lippman, Simon Lelic and John Harvey.  I think this panel really needed a full-on literary author on it to defend character-driven stories.  At one point there was a discussion about prose style. Simon Lelic described how he had once written a beautiful sentence, but he hoped his readers would not linger on it thus slowing the pace of the novel down, and there was talk about how crime writers do not tend to develop an individual literary style, which is more the thing of the literary author, and prefer to concentrate on fast, tight plotting.  I found it funny no one mentioned that some authors (yes, you, Larsson, Cole and Patterson) writing within the genre do have a style though: clunky and clichéd ridden. You could never write a character-driven novel about some big philosophical idea in the style of Stieg Larsson really, could you? Maybe it is big-selling authors like this that are letting the side down and giving crime fiction a bit of a bad rep amongst snooty lit types?

I’m not ashamed to admit I like literary fiction because it says something and I like sometimes lingering on sentences. Crime fiction, or romance, or thrillers are great if you want a bit of escapism, but often I want a bit more from a book, no disrespect at all to those who don’t.

I think literary fiction is its own genre and should have prizes and festivals to itself.  Not least because it’s really in the doldrums at the moment and needs a bit of yearly promotion from the Booker. This debate, named ‘A donkey in the Grand National?’ sort of suggested that crime writers should aspire to get to nominated for the Booker prize, like literary fiction is ‘the best’, but someone like Anne Enright would never be considered for a Dagger award or Harrogate’s own Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year Award, so why should crime writers really expect to get nominated for a literary prize, unless they are writing literary fiction featuring crime elements? Within the crime writing community I’m sure a Golden Dagger is as, if not more, prestigious than a Booker prize.

I had a great time anyway, it was fabulous to catch up with old friends like soon-to-be-published Helen Cadbury,  meet other writers such as David Belbin and K.A Laity, and even have a chat with best-selling author Peter Robinson, who is a very nice man indeed . Maybe see you all next year!

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16 Jun 2012
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Being published!

On Monday an event I had dreamed of for years finally happened: I became a published author!! My novel, The Vanity Game, was released as an e-book by Blasted Heath. Being published is kind of strange – something you’ve kept to yourself for years is now out there and can be interpreted by anyone.

When I sat on my bed in an attic room in Sheffield about seven years ago and wrote out a short scene about a vain film star and his girlfriend, I never thought that it would morph into a fully formed novel and would be up there on Amazon.  For years I didn’t even tell anyone I was writing a novel, I was too embarrassed: it was like an unhealthy addiction I was ashamed to admit to having.  I thought people would think it was ridiculous of me to think that I could write a novel.   I, a serial binge drinker with a boring office job with the government, whose most prominent published work thus far had been a review of a Busted gig in the Sheffield Star (and yes, they were actually quite good), how could I be a real writer? Didn’t you have to do English Lit at Oxford and live in Paris or something?

Well, anyway, I kept going with it. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I don’t remember the point where I decided to turn that one scene into a novel. The film star became a footballer, but the scene is still the most crucial part of the story.

I still can’t quite believe that my agent and Blasted Heath deemed the book publishable, and it’s hard to imagine that people are out there reading and, hopefully, being entertained by it.   It was a total relief to get a five star first review. I can’t think how crushing it must be if your first novel gets panned in early reviews.  Whilst an e-book means you don’t get a box of books in the post* and you can’t sign them and give them to all your friends as Christmas presents, seeing the book up there on Amazon is still really, really cool.  It’s a shame neither of my parents were alive to see it, though considering the vast amount of sex and drugs in The Vanity Game, perhaps that is a good thing.

*Despite Blasted Heath being an e-publisher, I will actually be getting a box of books next Friday and you can win one over on their website.  Just two days left to enter!

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20 May 2012
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Win a super-limited, print edition of The Vanity Game!!

Blasted Heath are an e-publisher, right, but they are doing a special print run of just 25 copies of The Vanity Game which they will be giving away to some enthusiastic and savvy people. Yes, an e-publisher doing a print run, it’s like, erm, Apple selling cassettes or something!

But it’s happening and it’s happening now over on Goodreads first where you can win one of three copies and you don’t even have to answer a question to enter.

Oh yes, and each copy will be signed and numbered by myself.

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16 May 2012

A foray into football forums…

With less than a month to go until The Vanity Game’s publication now (!!), myself and Blasted Heath have been upping the marketing activity. A big part of this involves promoting Beaumont’s blog and Twitter feed (Beaumont is the protagonist in The Vanity Game).

We thought we would post a few links to the Twitter feed etc around football and other forums as the novel is about a footballer and football fans might find the blog and Twitter feed funny.

Now, I know no-one likes to be sold stuff but my foray into football forums has ended up with me having my  IP address banned from one football forum (clue: Combine the name of a famous Liverpool FC manager with the last word in a Smiths song about a dreaded sunny day and Keats and Yeats being on your side).  Sure, I’ve been banned from bars in the past, but never an online space.

As a Liverpool fan myself, I hate to diss my own and all that, but…

Perhaps my post suggesting people that they might like to follow Beaumont on Twitter contravened the (extremely well hidden) first-post rules, or rules about selling stuff (is promoting a Twitter feed selling stuff? You don’t have to pay to use Twitter?), but the reaction from a few of the users was slightly over the top. Instantly, I was aggressively accused of being a ‘manc’ (i.e. a Manchester United fan). Do Man U fans often go on this forum to suggest Liverpool fans follow certain Twitter feeds?  Perhaps certain Twitter feeds that are full of vitriol about Scousers or push out tweets that have highly effective subliminal messages that will make Liverpool fans subconsciously convert to the dark side, or accept that their team is in fact shit these days, or accept that Luis Suarez did actually make a racist remark to Patrice Evra?

But the best comment came from this enlightened poster:

‘Books ain’t electronic media dipshit, books are bundles of paper about fantastic things like kids getting killed in a chocolate factory, graphic ‘Nam reportage or drug adventures in Las Vegas. What you’ve done is make a Microsoft Word document, and as we all know reading massive blocks of text off a goddamn monitor is INRAT central’

Oh yes, of course, us e-book authors have it so easy don’t we? Not like in the days when Hunter S. Thompson not only had to write ‘Fear and Loathing’ whilst totally off his face, but also had to copy-edit, typeset, print, do the illustrations, design the cover, bind the books and market them all himself. Isn’t it amazing he managed to get all the spines straight while being whacked on mescaline?

I love the way these people are so adamant in their assumptions. I am now adamant in my assumption that they are a bunch of twats.  My IP address was banned after I posted a smart arse reply to the above comment and complained that one poster had posted a homophobic comment, aimed at another poster who had identified himself as gay.

In hindsight, I should have perhaps chosen an LFC forum that does not actively encourage users to post porn (in a non-search engine-searchable area of the site) and has no policy against homophobic (and likely sexist) comments, but you live and learn.

And what the hell does ‘INRAT’ mean?!

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24 Apr 2012

The Vanity Game wordled

I love this site, Wordle, so I thought I’d run the entire text of The Vanity Game through it and see what it came out like. I’m a bit concerned that ‘fucking’ seems to be one of the most common words in the book, but I guess it gives you a tone of the novel.

Other key words on there are ‘Beaumont’… he is the main character and you can read more about him here. ‘Krystal’ is his girlfriend and ‘Serge’ is his agent.  And if you want to know what the other words are all about you will just have to download it when it’s out on June 11th!

You can click on the picture to see it full size.

 

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11 Mar 2012

Permanence

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks clearing out my parents’ house following the death of my father. It’s depressing but in some ways satisfying.  The tip has become my new favorite place.  I find myself becoming a bit manic as I’m clearing stuff out, thinking ‘what else can I take to the tip?’, ‘what else can I shred?’, ‘what else can I destroy?’.   It’s not like my parents had loads and loads of stuff, but there is a lot of stuff none the less… books, paperwork, old furniture, ornaments, clothing, National Geographic mags, My Little Ponies (and other childhood toys), puzzles, fabric,  photographs, hundreds and hundreds of old school slides, the slide projector, shoes… et cetera et cetera.  A lifetime’s worth of stuff… now being distributed to the charity shop, the recycling bins and the tip. I think I’ve developed an allergy to ‘stuff’. I was walking past a cheap ‘stuff’ shop in the local shopping centre the other day and I shivered at the sight of shelves and shelves of cheapo lamps, cushions and vases. One day, 90% of them will end up a landfill site. How can we go on, just creating more and more stuff that will then be chucked away?

So, it’s made me think about e-publishing in new light. Despite my debut novel, The Vanity Game

A rubbish tip...

, coming out as an e-book via Blasted Heath in June, I have to admit I have until now been a bit iffy about the whole e-book thing. What would I fill my Ikea Expedit bookcase with if I didn’t read ‘real’ books? What would replace the musty smell of a second-hand bookshop? If I ever made it as an author, wouldn’t I be denied book-signing events if I had no ‘real books’ to sign?

Although I still think I’ll miss hard copy books for some reasons, I’m now imminently going to buy a Kindle. Books might look nice, but they are still just ‘stuff’, and if you collect hundreds and hundreds of the things, when you die some poor fucker is going to have to take them all to the charity shop. And books are very heavy.

It was interesting to hear Jonathan Franzen banging on about e-books and ‘permanence’.  He said:

“”a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience”. “Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change,” he continued. “Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that.”

... and a load of russbish

Well the past couple of weeks have made me realise what a stupid thing to say that is. Does Mr. Franzen have nothing in his life other than his processions to give himself a self of permanence? Whilst I’ve been sorting through the house I found a drawer full of all the Christmas cards my parents ever sent to each other, and I sent to them. It was heartbreaking, reading through these, but what could I do with them? I just bagged them up and took them to the paper bank. What was heartbreaking was not throwing away the cards though; it was feeling of love that ran through all those cards, and the realisation that all that love has gone now. I would destroy everything I own to have my parents back. Books cannot recreate that sense of permanence, as great as they are. Certainly, I’m not exactly seeking solace from my grief by flicking through the pages of my copy of ‘Freedom’.

Life is not permanent anyway. As Shakespeare said, ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage’.

So really, does it matter whether you read a story out of a physical book, or electronically, or whether someone reads it to you, or whether you watch it as a play or film? A great story is something you will always remember, and something that changes you in a small way or change the way you see the world.

So I can’t wait for The Vanity Game to come out as an e-book. I hope people will treasure the story just as they would if they consumed it in any other way.

Bring on the Kindle!

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