Blowing my own trumpet

According to those who know far more about the writing game than I do, the modern author’s workload should consist of four parts writing and one part promotion. One day of every week should be spent attempting to convince people to buy my books, be that by using social media, a blog such as this one, cunningly placed advertisements or whatever. In what is a saturated marketplace, I need to draw attention to my output in an effort to get the general populace to transfer their hard earned from their own bank accounts to mine.

It’s a somewhat daunting proposition. I’m finding it hard enough even admitting out loud that I’m a writer, as it sounds so entirely pretentious. In the world I inhabit we’re supposed to work for our living, not go around pretending to be some la-de-da artisan. Such behaviour is reserved for idealistic teenagers who aren’t yet old or experienced enough to have had their dreams kicked out of them. By my age I’m suppose to know better.

So here I am looking forward to the release of two novels this year, yet still a little reluctant to tell anyone about it as it sounds so much like boasting. I told a few close friends, but for the most part I’ve insisted on this new adventure being kept strictly as some kind of guilty secret. I guess that has to end if I’m to make any kind of serious go of this; getting published is only the first part - selling books is the difficult bit. It’s time to start blowing my own trumpet.

My first novel is entitled Leisure, although due to a technical screw up it may well end up being my second novel. Its submission coincided with the publishers getting a new email system and so the manuscript lay unseen at the bottom of some digital abyss for six months. It is about the staff of a decrepit and forgotten leisure centre, who have long since given up on providing any kind of customer service and instead run amok in the endless corridors, entertaining themselves and living out their perverse ideals, sheltered entirely from any form of consequence. Leisure is an erotic farce, a ridiculous, nonsensical adventure set outside of society’s rules. It is due for release this autumn.

My second – or first – novel is called Peeper; it marked my first attempt to write something a little more serious and not hide behind sarcasm and stupidity, and instead try to create believable characters that the reader may actually care about. It is the story of a small town private investigator getting involved in a case that drags him way out of his depth into a seedy and dangerous relationship with a woman named Veronica. I’m hugely proud of it, and I can’t wait for people to meet Veronica, as she really is something else. While I was writing the book I got almost as obsessed with her as the main protagonist in the story does, and one night I actually dreamt I met her. That was odd.

Leisure is scheduled to be released this autumn through MuseitHot;

https://museithotpublishing.com/index.php/our-authors/69-our-authors/authors-s/389-sj-smith

Peeper is also scheduled to be released this autumn through Sinful Press, and you can read some very kind words about the book on the homepage of their website;

http://sinfulpress.co.uk/

So there you have it; I am a writer, and these are my books. Please buy my wares, that I may earn my living. I promise not to spend it all on drugs.

Priorities

The whole purpose of my starting this blog was supposed to be a way of me pedaling my smutty books to the marketplace. I must not, I told myself, get sidetracked by ranting tangentially about politics or Welsh rugby, and should concentrate entirely on the side of this being a writer malarkey that I entirely suck at - the self promotion and marketing aspects which are so vital for success. So far I have failed entirely in these aspirations, which is why I am now sitting here dashing off a piece about priorities, in a bid to remind myself of where I ought to be going.

I’ve managed to keep rugby out of it so far, which is something of an achievement I suppose. I must bear in mind that I contribute my share of vitriol on that particular subject matter to a different blog entirely, and judging by some of the colourful hate mail we receive, that webpage is doing the job it was created for rather well. As for that other thing I was not supposed to be talking about – politics – I’ve sadly succumbed to temptation and vented my spleen, earning myself a black mark and a must try harder. Fortunately I think I’ve now found a way of curing myself of this annoying habit of bending people’s ears with my unwanted opinions - I’ve stopped watching the news.

Life is hard enough these days without having a billion extra worries beamed into your head on a daily basis. I turned on the TV the other morning and discovered that a dog had died after being poisoned, and that was the point at which I decided I’d had a gutful; I don’t need to know about dog murderers, or some bunch of maniacs kicking the shit out of each other on the other side of the world. None of it has any bearing on my life, whatsoever. The more you stop and think about it, the more you realise that all the television does is control you; it tells you about all the things you should be scared of, and then it parades a bunch of stuff in front of you that you can’t afford to buy. Don’t go outside, it is saying. There are muggers and terrorists lurking around every corner wanting to blow you up and kill your dog. Stay here instead, and listen to me while I tell you about new mobile phones and fancy clothes and sleek sports cars. Feast your eyes on how the rich and famous live, and wallow in your misery as you compare your own cruddy existence to how wonderful everything could be if only life were fair. Now go get a payday loan and buy yourself some PRODUCTS.

Fuck it all. The idea of dropping out of society and refusing to play by the rules any more has never been so appealing. I’m not a consumer, I’m a human being.

Last year my wife and I bought a narrowboat. We booked time off work and had a fortnight to move it from its old mooring in Yorkshire down to Cheshire so it would be close to our home. This hundred and fifty mile journey took a couple of hours in the car, but when you’re travelling by canal, zig-zagging back and forth across the countryside at two MPH, everything takes a whole lot longer, and in the end it took us the full two weeks to complete our voyage. During this time we didn’t have a working TV, as the boat’s batteries were too old and worn out to power anything more than the 12v lights, and so we lived in a cocoon, entirely free of knowledge of what was going on in the outside world. I have to say – it was bliss.

Your priorities change in such circumstances. I was no longer worried about whether or not the actions of some group of fundamentalist loonies might impact on my life; I was more concerned with finding a place to empty the chemical toilet. Our needs became simple; food, drink, warmth; find a place to buy coal for the fire, or a supermarket to stock up on groceries. Take things one day at a time.

And when we returned to civilisation and turned on the television, we found out nothing had changed. The world hadn’t ended, the country hadn’t been invaded, the economy hadn’t collapsed. None of those dire circumstances they constantly warn us are just around the corner had transpired. Life went on regardless.

So what was I supposed to be talking about? Ah yes, priorities.

The priority of this blog from now on will centre on the function it was created for. I am a writer and I have just signed the contract for a novel to be published, meaning I have two books coming out this year.

No more bullshit. No more ranting about crap I have no control over and has no meaning to my life. No more news; no more results of studies that mildly contradict the results of yesterday’s study which said we’re definitely all going to die of cancer if we don’t eat three tonnes of fruit every day.

No more distractions. From here on in it’s smut all the way.

Woe is me

I haven’t done much writing of late, haven’t had the inclination to sit here and attack the keyboard and vent my spleen, and the reason for this is that the depression that has plagued a third of my life has made an unwelcome return. I’ve felt it creeping around the edges of my mind, trying to worm its way back in, and for a goodly while I was able to hold it at bay – life was good, I didn’t want to go back down that road again. But then when my best friend in the world died from cancer a month ago it proved to be the final straw, and I stopped fighting and allowed the blackness back.

It’s hard to tell people you’re ill when – at face value – there’s nothing apparently wrong with you; you aren’t limping, bleeding or struggling to catch your breath. You feel like the world’s biggest fraud sitting in the doctor’s waiting room and seeing people come hobbling in with their genuine ailments. But, in a way, that’s all part of the illness; you’re a fraud, there’s nothing wrong with you, everyone knows you’re faking it and they’re all disgusted. These are the thoughts that are going through your mind, and you can’t make them stop. Your brain has turned against you. Welcome to the world of the big D.

A couple of weeks back I could barely bring myself to turn on the TV. I’d sit watching the news and would look at the journalist thinking that person has made a success of their life, and I’m a total failure. I’m pathetic and my life is pointless. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just go to sleep and never wake up again? They call these ‘intrusive thoughts’, these blasts of self hate that rampage through your brain. But at the time they don’t feel in any way intrusive; for something to be intrusive it has by it’s very definition to have come from outside. These thoughts haven’t come from anywhere or anyone else; they are your own voice, and they are entirely rational. There’s no point arguing, because the case that you’re worthless scum is entirely watertight and beyond argument. It makes perfect, unimpeachable sense. In the same way that cancer turns your body’s own cells against you, the big D turns your own thought patterns against you.

I have a phrase I use to describe my blackest, bleakest moments; an epithet I picked up from a Stephen King book many years ago (I think it may have been ‘It’); The Deadlights. When I’ve sunk so low I can barely think, move or focus my eyes I know that the Deadlights are on; I sit and stare blank at the wall, lost in a sea of darkness and unable to find my way back to the light. These times mark the very rock bottom, the depths of despair, and it was when the Deadlights came on for the first time in a decade a fortnight ago that I knew I had to get some help. I went to see the doctor and she issued me a prescription for Prozac, and now the gloom and despondency is starting to lift. And only now, now that my mind is starting to come back under my own control, do I see this as a good thing; one of the surprising things about the big D is that in no way do you ever see it as a threat; the big D is your friend; it puts a blanket around your shoulders and keeps you warm, protecting you from all those awful people on the outside who despise you. There’s no point making an effort to get better, because you’d only be wasting your time; stay here in the murk where it’s safe, for the big D is the only friend you’ll ever need.

Unfortunately the big D is a liar; it isn’t your friend at all, and is dragging you blindly on towards the cliff edge, where ultimately you will topple over and plunge to your death. If you never had suicidal thoughts then you probably cannot begin to comprehend how someone could be so crazy or selfish as to take their own life and inflict so much pain and misery on those they’re leaving behind. What you aren’t seeing is that it was the big D that made them do it; that the big D had them convinced that no one cared, no one would even be sad at their passing, and that all possible avenues forward were blocked. In the same way that cancer ravages your body and leaves you dead, the big D will keep on whispering in your ear that it’s entirely rational to swallow that bottle of pills, or that the only sensible option left is to throw yourself in front of that train.

The big D took hold of me when I was fourteen and, despite bucketfuls of antidepressants and counselling, never left me alone until I was nearly thirty. I had a ten year break, but now it’s back and telling me it wants a second bite of the cherry. But not this time; I will not allow the big D to destroy any more of my life, for I know its tricks and methods all too well. The Prozac is helping, and admitting to my friends and family that I have a problem is helping too. The big D didn’t want me to tell anyone, it wanted the gloom that was seeping back into my life to be our little secret, all over again.

We Can’t Manage

I caught the tail end of a piece on the news at the weekend; some guy doing the round up of the stories from the papers, and I really wish I’d been paying more attention to who he was and what he said, because I swear I heard him utter the most appalling blasphemy it is possible to say out loud in this country: He suggested that British management wasn’t very good.

Burn the heretic! He must have been a foreigner and not accustomed to our ways, because no right minded Briton would ever dare so much as think that our bosses are anything less than one hundred percent perfect. We are a nation of snobs; we doff our caps to those we perceive as being above us and look down our nose at those below. Even the lowliest tramp, lying in the gutter in his own faeces, will find someone to feel superior to.

Blame must always be attributed in a downward direction in this nation of ours. When our car industry collapsed in on itself and died a death it wasn’t the management that were said to be at fault, it was the workers. It was those damned pesky unions what done it. Similarly in the modern age, when the government doubled our national debt overnight by bailing out the incompetent bank managers to the tune of eight hundred billion quid, who did we blame for our country’s poverty? Why it’s poor people of course. Those Goddamn fucking benefit scroungers are ruining Great Britain. String ‘em up!

I’ve had many jobs in my life, and therefore many bosses, and I struggle to think of even a handful of managers who I would describe as good at their role or even vaguely competent. They all seem to fall into the same trap of thinking that a promotion to the rank of manager means they’ve moved up an entire social class, and are now looking down on the world as some kind of God. In other, more forward thinking countries than our own, I’ve heard tell that the role of manager is seen as being only one cog within a team; it is the manager’s job to manage, just as it is the welder’s job to weld and the driver’s job to drive; they are no more or no less important than anyone else.

But if a British person climbs to the heady heights of manager then it’s time to crack open the champagne, for they have truly arrived among the jetsetters. Being a manager gives you licence to look down your nose at the plebs, and is a perfect opportunity for you to wreak your revenge on the world for every wrong that was ever done to you. You hold the power now - you can do whatever you want.

But that initial euphoria soon wears off, as you begin to find that it’s lonely in your ivory tower. None of your friends want to know you any more; they stop talking as you enter the room and swivel their eyes in the other direction as they pretend they’re hard at work. So what do you do? Why it’s obvious; you promote your chums to come work as managers alongside you; you fill up your ivory tower with all your bestest friends, so you can all be together again. You put fake job adverts in the newspaper and hold fake interviews, just to comply with the regulation that states it’s illegal to simply hand out promotions to your clique, and then you promote them anyway. What a hoot.

Once upon a time there were more workers than managers, and things actually got done. But in the eighties they got rid of all the jobs and created a new style of economy based on venture capitalism. You don’t need an industry to manufacture things when your entire set up is geared towards a bunch of guys in stripy shirts playing with money that doesn’t exist.

The downside to this was the newspaper headlines that talked of mass unemployment, which made the government look bad, so they decided that everyone should go into education to get them off the unemployment figures. Education Education Education was the mantra. They made it easier to gain qualifications, and suddenly everyone was going to university, and for a while it worked.

But five years later they found they suddenly had a whole bunch of people with groovy qualifications but no job. Something had to be done. Thus they created more management roles – a whole tidal wave of new managers to run our lives. Who needs one manager when you can have five, or even ten? We’ll have an HR manager, a Health and Safety manager, a recruitment manager, and so on; lots of people wearing suits, going to meetings and collating information which they pass up the chain to their manager. Presumably up at the top of the pyramid there’s some kind of uber-manager, who receives all the meaningless reports written by the fleet of managers below, and files them away somewhere, never to be seen again.

Is it my imagination, or are we drowning in a sea of bullshit that’s getting deeper by the year? This epidemic of managers is self perpetuating, because it’s a manager’s job to think up new rules, and every new rule will need a new manager to oversee its application. Pretty soon there’ll be nothing but managers, a whole multitude of people in suits standing around scratching their heads and wondering why the toilet doesn’t work any more.

Refuse the Mark

On the news this morning was a story about how some genius has invented an electronic chip that can be implanted under our skin and used as a replacement for company ID badges that we have to carry at work. I was immediately reminded of an old conspiracy theory that a friend of mine used to bang on about.

This fellow used to be a heroin addict, but after kicking the smack he found he had a big hole in his life, and so turned to Jesus to fill it. As anyone who has ever known a junkie will testify, these people’s entire lives are dedicated to their drug of choice; the acquirement and ingestion of narcotic is all they think about from one minute to the next. So it follows that to fill the void left by drug addiction, he was going to need a lot of Jesus. A little Jesus on a Sunday morning wasn’t nearly enough - this man needed total Jesus, twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week. Thus he became one of those people who put the mental in religious fundamentalism – he stood on street corners berating passers by for their sins, and never missed a chance to lecture us – his supposed friends – about the word of God.

He knew every single conspiracy theory that was floating about, and believed each one of them with the zeal and fervour of someone on an extended break from reality. His particular favourite was the old barcode theory, which I’ll now attempt to describe for those not in the know.

Go and find something with a barcode on; it shouldn’t be difficult, they’re on pretty much everything these days. Now, take a close look and you’ll see the series of vertical stripes is subdivided into two sections by three pairs of thin lines. Next, look along the row of numbers across the bottom and find a number six; immediately above that six will be the corresponding set of lines that signifies that number in barcode language. That’s right – the number six is represented by the same pair of thin lines that subdivide the whole shebang, or in other words every single barcode is essentially a great big 666.

Somewhere in the book of revelation there’s a passage about how the devil will take over the world, and he will put his mark upon humanity, and the mark is 666. According to crackpots like my friend, that moment is already here, as everyone is carrying around Satan’s mark in the guise of the barcode that’s on the label of their underpants, or the price-tag of their sausage sandwich, or whatever.

I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s an interesting theory, but is ultimately the ravings of a paranoid mind.

Or is it? I’ve never been big on religion, and I don’t share the view that the Antichrist is on his way to throw us into a thousand years of darkness. I believe human beings are more than capable of achieving that particular feat without any outside assistance. But this idea of us all eventually going around with little electronic chips implanted under our skin does sort of remind me of my friend’s rantings. I wonder how long it will be before businesses insist you have to get chipped if you want to work for them?

Perhaps the devil is real. Perhaps he’s the head of some huge corporation, and wants to rule the world and force us all to carry his mark. Stranger things have happened.

Drugs in Sport

On the news this morning, Lance Armstrong told the BBC in an exclusive interview how, if given his time over again, he’d probably do exactly the same thing. His justification for turning to performance enhancing drugs was essentially that ‘cycling is really hard work.'

He has a point. All sport is hard work, which is why I gave up on it years ago. Who wants to spend their lives pushing their body to the limits when they could be lying on the sofa drinking beer and browsing online pornography? The government are forever telling us how we should all get involved in sport and lead active, healthy lifestyles, but frankly they can go fuck themselves.

I personally think the taking of drugs should be embraced in sport. We all saw how fast Ben Johnson ran after he’d pumped himself full of steroids, imagine how the world records would tumble if athletes were given free reign to cheat. We’d see supersonic performances in every event; miles run in seconds, javelins hurled clean out the stadium. In what is supposed to be an entertainment industry, do we not want to be entertained?

I therefore propose the world should stage an alternative games for people who like to imbibe, sort of like the Olympics, only with drugs. And not just performance enhancing drugs either; my games would involve special events for people taking performance ruining drugs. Imagine the fun we could have.

The Junkie Triathlon

Heroin users are not known for being the most energetic of people. But starve them of smack for a couple of days, then tell them there’s a guy giving away free skag at the other end of this torturous fifty mile endurance race. Give them a bike and a pair of swimming trunks and just watch the fuckers go.

The Drunken Grand Prix

Let’s be honest, the vast majority of people only watch motor racing for the crashes. If all the drivers had downed a bottle of scotch before the race, imagine the carnage as they were let loose in high powered racing cars.

The 400m Hurdles for People on Acid

There’d be no need for actual hurdles; we’d simply line up a bunch of guys and gals who were tripping the light fantastic and watch as they staggered around the track fending off attacks from hallucinatory dragons, goblins and Nazi warplanes.

The Viagra Marathon

Twenty-six miles with an erection is no easy feat. We’d line the route with glamorous, naked spectators and watch the poor bastards suffer as they staggered along behind their throbbing rods, desperate to bone every single person they saw.

The Angel Dust 4^th Storey Window Long Jump

Think you can fly? Then prove it to us.

Amphetamines Chess

All games would be over in seconds, and would probably end up in a fist fight.

You see, the possibilities are endless. Who wants to watch boring, goodie two-shoes athletes competing honestly in sports, when they could be watching cheats, freaks and psychotics? The various governing bodies of world sports should be seriously looking into this as a possibility. 

Greece it up

So Greece has elected a socialist government. Oh lordy. That’ll put the cat among the pigeons.

The news tomorrow will no doubt consist of a bunch of rich white guys in ties talking about how a lack of confidence has caused the stock market to crash, because other rich guys in ties are panicking about the Greek election result. The value of the Euro will fall, a company will go out of business, and a bunch of ordinary people will lose their jobs.

It sounds to me as if we need tougher people to work in the stock markets. If the slack jawed hooray Henries that currently run our financial institutions are liable to turn into quivering jellies and shit themselves just because they saw something on the news they didn’t like the sound of, then frankly they aren’t up to the job. Maybe we should get someone who knows no fear on the case; someone like Rambo; someone who doesn’t suffer from lack of confidence and would be perfectly happy to kick everybody’s ass. He’d protect our money.

All jokes aside, I think people ought to do as I do when they watch the news, and filter every word they hear through a Bullshit Translator to see what comes out the other end. The phrase ‘lack of confidence in the market’, when translated into English, simply means ‘a bunch of rich powerful people aren’t happy’. Of course they aren’t happy; ordinary people in Greece have decided to stick up for themselves; they’ve decided they don’t like poverty and would like it if the system was a bit fairer. And rich people don’t like it when ordinary people stick up for themselves. It means they might not be able to steal our money quite so easily. That’s why they smashed the unions and left our education system to rot; they were taking out the competition, reducing us all to drooling morons so we wouldn’t put up a fight.

The whole economic system is geared towards siphoning cash from the lower orders and placing it in the pocket of the super-rich. This isn’t some whacked out conspiracy theory; it’s the obvious truth and if you don’t see it then you’re blind. I foresee a future where there is no more need for countries or continents. Instead of a flag to represent their nationality, people will live under the logo of a corporate brand. The land you walk upon will be owned by a multinational conglomerate, and you will be entirely beholden to them. They will own the hospital you are born in, the school you are educated in, the chapel you marry in, and the coffin you are buried in. The lives of 99.99% of the human race will be controlled by the 0.01% who managed to steal all the money.

Of course, there is something we can do to stop them before it’s too late; something that will not require rioting in the street or bloody revolution. We can go out and vote, like Greece did yesterday. This is still a democracy after all - even if for seventy percent of the country the act of voting is, like, just too much hassle.