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Copy, right? Wrong. Cover Yourself (geddit!!??)

1/8/2012

2 Comments

 
As many of you know, I have a thing about copyright.  So many new writers ignore it at their peril.  I just wrote this exchange into my latest story:
‘Thank you so much, Mr. Beasley,’ she said to him.  I hope you got what you wanted.’
‘We seldom get what we want,’ he told her. ‘But I think, as a friend of mine once said, we may have got what we need.’
This is, of course, a reference to a song by the Rolling Stones.  Now, Keith and Mick have not survived in the music industry by being free and easy with their lyrics.  Being "The Greatest Rock Band in the World", it is not unreasonable to expect The Rolling Stones to employ, if not the greatest, then certainly some of the most effective lawyers in the world. Anyone who is foolish enough to think they can get away with wholesale quotations from popular songs is deluding themselves into a very very damaging lawsuit.  As my usage is not a direct quote, I think I should get away with it but don't be surprised if when you read my wonderful new, exciting and darkly comic spy caper, "The Rothko Room", you do not come across even the above passing reference to "You Can't Always Get What You Want' (Copyright Jagger/Richards. 1969. All rights reserved).
The same goes for covers. The covers of both my published books comprise nothing but images created by my own fair hand. If anyone's interested, this is how I did it.  
Picture
This is the cover as it now appears (click to enlarge if need be) but since I possess only limited charm and modest funds, It was unlikely that I would be able to persuade someone to stand on the side of a mountain in the middle of the night whilst, a mile away, another willing volunteer skis away, leaving neat tracks in the pristine slopes.So how was it done? Well, the first thing to do was to raid my holiday snaps.


I took this photograph (1) about four years ago on the slopes of Diavolezza in Switzerland.  Since this is where part of the novel is set, I thought it apposite.  I snapped it just as a party of cross-country skiers had crested a high ridge. You will notice a distinct lack of a) the moon and b) a figure.  The sharp-eyed amongst you will notice that it appears to have been taken in daylight.  Well done. 
The first thing to do was to colorize it on PhotoShop(Copyright Adobe Systems 1989-2011) (2)
.  This is embarrassingly easy and creates instant night scenes.

Then I fished out another photo I'd taken high on the Julier Pass, again in Switzerland, of the full moon
This required rather more jiggery pokery to get the effect I wanted.(3) I had to enhance the moon enormously, cut it out and then insert it in a suitable place on my master sheet.(4) It still needed a bit more finessing since the altered moon had too much of an unreal appearnce.  I settled for somewhere between the two.

The next thing it needed was a figure.  In the story, the hero, David Benedict searches the mountains for his lost love (yes, I know; it's very moving) and so I needed a picture of him.  The main problem in getting him to pose for me was that he is merely a figment of my fevered imagination.  So I needed a stand-in. Again, my holiday snaps were enlisted.  I found a shot of a frozen lake in Silvaplana, south-west of St. Moritz which had been spoiled (not the lake, the picture) by a skier gliding into shot at just the wrong time. (5)  Of such serendipitous strands are our little lives fashioned.  With a bit of help from PhotoShop (Copyright, Adobe Systems 1989 - 2011) I was able to make a passable David Benedict, who I then inserted into the picture.  I added a suitable shadow and there it was. (6) All that was then needed was to crop the picture to a suitable paperback aspect ratio, add the text and that was it.
Now whether or not it's a good cover is debatable.  I happen to like it but that doesn't make it good.  I was told by someone in the business that it was too individual - ie:  in order to have impact, your cover should look as much like the cover of a book with a similar story as possible. 
I'm certain they are right.  If I was do it again, I might aim for an Ian Rankin/Val McDermid kind of feel, although "Head Count" is a more humourous work than that of either of those two authors.  I need to get my hands on a couple of good, darkly comic whodunnits and see what their publishers come up with.  





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(1) Mountain ridge on Diavolezza
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(2) Colorized
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(3) Fiddling with the moon (Original on left)
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(4) Moonrise on the mountain.
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(5) Skier gets into shot
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(6) Skier gets plopped onto mountainside.
2 Comments

Olympic Values? About £100,000,000 per Sponsorhip Deal.

21/7/2012

1 Comment

 
You have to laugh.  No, really; it’s the only possible response, for outrage would only lend the legislation a dignity it doesn’t deserve.  Of course I’m talking about the proscribing of certain English words throughout the period of the Olympic Games  - that nightmare of disruption that will, during the summer, make London an even more hideous place to be than it already is.

In fact I may already have broken the law by using the words Olympic, Games, London and Summer in the same sentence.  Someone has actually sat down and decided that any two of the words: Games, Twenty-Twelve, Two Thousand and Twelve, even 2012, used together is an infringement of the law.  Plus any word in the list above with one or more of the following words: London, medals, sponsors, summer, gold, silver or bronze.

Now, were you to associate my use of those words with the advertisements on other pages of this site (you know the ones for excellent works such as “Head Count”, a novel in which gold and the Olympic sport of skiing feature prominently and “The Circling Song”, a novella in which the Olympic sport of shooting is much in evidence and some of it is set in London… and in Summer), then I might bring down upon myself the full majesty of the law.

I realise the association is tangential but were I perhaps to suggest that if you are planning a trip to the summer games, you might wish to while away the hours of queuing in various places throughout the capital by reading my books, then I should not be surprised if the Home Secretary herself fetches up on my doorstep accompanied by the weary Plod, in order to deliver me my just desserts.

For it to be illegal for a pub to suggest that its punters might want to watch the Olympic Games on a TV in the bar, takes a mentality that has only a passing acquaintance with common sense.  And to suggest that anyone might mistake the Olympic Café – run by a Greek chap in Stratford for a McDonalds beggars belief.  For a start, the Olympic Café serves a very nice breakfast.  And is staffed by people over fourteen.

I hear that the backlash is well under way and that LOCOG is coming under pressure not to throw its weight around too much.  Nevertheless, a number of fines have already been levied.

Looking on the bright side, perhaps it will set a precedent.  There are a number of words and associations I’d like to see subject to fines for misuse.  “Ferment” for “foment being a favourite at the moment; “refute” for “rebut” being another; “less” for “fewer”, of course and “disinterested” for “uninterested”.

My current bugbear is “…once in a lifetime…” pertaining to anything to do with the Olympic Games.

Having foolishly trusted my Satellite Navigation device (other Tom-Toms are available) to get me home, I found myself caught up in the so called “Torch Relay” – another misnomer, since the torches themselves are not “relayed” they are held onto by their carriers (provided they can stump up 200 quid) and then presumably sold on e-bay.  I floundered around for a while, unable to extricate myself from the melee and was finally led to safety by a police car through Tunbridge Wells, cheered on by thousands of people lining the streets, and was assured by the nice copper that although it was inconvenient, I couldn’t blame people because it was a “…once in a lifetime experience…” to witness such an event.

Well, it wasn’t.  Had I been so inclined, I could have followed the wretched thing through a number of nearby locations throughout the next two days, making it a “several times in a lifetime” experience, at least.  In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that those for whom it was a “…once in a lifetime experience…’ were simply not trying.

Shame on them for their apathy.

1 Comment

Breakdown? Me?

15/7/2012

1 Comment

 
Don’t get me wrong; I have all this in perspective.  I know full well that there are far worse things than having your car break down but when it happens in driving rain on the roundabout at the junction of the A259 and the A21, you might be forgiven for thinking that God might have been distracted by (I don’t know) some piddling natural disaster or other and has left you to your fate.  And when you phone your breakdown company and discover that your cover (for which you have been paying for about twenty-five years without a break) has lapsed the week before and that if you want to be towed out of that maw of death it’s going to cost you £120 before they’ll even take a look at the engine, you might conclude that Beelzebub may well have had a hand in the action somewhere.

Then, when you sit in the absolute PISSING rain for two hours awaiting the privilege of handing over a hundred and twenty smackers to some licensed bandit with a tow-rope and having throughout, nothing to listen to on the radio but the right-wing nut-case historian Niall Ferguson giving the benefit of his years of study, which have led him to the conclusion that every other academic in the world is utterly wrong about practically everything and that he alone can save our society from the terror of the State; and when you finally get the bloody car home and discover that the cam belt has gone, taking several rods and valves with it and the car has gone to the great garage in the sky, and that sound you hear is yourself laughing hysterically, well the idea that you are utterly alone in a Godless universe begins to insinuate itself into your fried consciousness. 

All this and more has happened to me in the last week: but am I disheartened?  Well, yes as a matter of fact, I am.  Still, I can always sit down at my computer and undergo the great catharsis that is writing.  What could be better?

Well, don’t get me started...
1 Comment

Seriously?

22/6/2012

2 Comments

 
How do you know if you’re a “serious” writer?  I think if you answer “yes” to any of these questions, you probably are.
  • 1 You “need” to write.  Stories are just filling you up, demanding to be released.
    2 You can’t sleep because the stories won’t let you
    3 Your eyes fill with tears as you write the sad bits
    4 There are no happy bits.
    5 There are definitely no funny bits.
    6 You have something that you think the world needs to hear.
    7 That something is totally unique.
    8 No, really; it just sort of came to you, like out of nowhere.
    9 You have a pen name that has an initial in it.
    10You can read beyond the next paragraph without saying “what a dick” and going back to Facebook.
  • It seems to me that unless you’re a “serious” writer, writing is really not that difficult.  You have a story; you write it down.  If you know your chosen language well enough, you can do the second bit fairly effectively and some people will be kind enough to notice and say things like, “My goodness, that was rather well put!  Bravo!” but for the most part, a story and the ability to form sentences are about all you need.  So why won’t people shut up about it?

    It’s like actors.  Everyone knows full well that  in order to honour a clause in an expensively engineered and lucrative contract, they have to parade themselves in front of microphones and feeble TV presenters and pretend that a) it was all great fun but “real hard work”  (Substituting “real” for “really” is one of those Americanisms I find particularly hard to take, since it changes the meaning of the sentence.  Another one, whilst I’m at it, is the substitution of “alternate” for “alternative” as in “universe” or “dimension”.  It always seems such a pity that those who visit “alternate” universes” are missing out on fifty percent of the universes available to everyone else.  However, I digress…)

    Where was I…?  Ah yes:  b) what an enormous privilege it was to work with such a tremendously talented group of people.  They couldn’t believe they were getting to play opposite someone who had been such a major influence on their career; their whole life, for Godssakes!… c) that their role demanded them to dig real deep into their reserves to truly find what was motivating this character and how playing her/him took so much out of them and has really changed their lives…

    I remember James Cagney being interviewed by Michael Parkinson many years ago.  To every question his reply was, often in so many words, “…well, it was just a job.  They told me what to do; I did it; they shot it.”

    Now that’s my kind of artist.  (And so is Jackson Pollock who, when asked by the great art critic, Clement Greenberg about what motivated him replied that he“…figured it was a good way to get girls.”)

    It flatters us to believe that what we do is challenging and it justifies the inordinate amount of time we spend doing it and I might go so far as to suggest that if anyone uses writing as a form of catharsis, that’s fine so long as they keep it locked away and don’t expect anyone to pay £8:99 for the paperback.

    The only thing I invest in writing is time and bit of electricity.  Oh and possibly a bit of bile when it’s not going the way I want it to.  If you read my stuff, you’ll find nothing about my repressed sexuality, my hatred of my father, the manic depression that has blighted my life since college, the abuse that I suffered at the hands of a satanic cult to which I was introduced by a family friend who, it turns out was sleeping with my mother… and my father.

    For that, you’ll have to wait for my autobiography and even then, I wouldn’t believe a word of it if I were you.

    2 Comments

    Clinging to The Grid

    5/5/2012

    0 Comments

     
    Mark Twain said, “…reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated…”  Witty and concise but lacking the unforced simplicity and euphoria  of  Pearl Jam’s “ Oh I, oh, I'm still alive, Hey, I, I, oh, I'm still alive, Hey I, oh, I'm still alive, Hey...oh...”

    Why do I urge this comparison?  No reason.  I’m just looking for ways of confirming to my adoring public that I have not, as the kids say, dropped off the grid.

    Admittedly, I cling onto the grid by torn and bloody fingertips, occasionally reading (although never replying to) e-mail, refusing to answer the phone and not talking to anyone but the grid and I remain in tenuous contact.

    The reason for this diminished grid life is what we writers call “writing” and what everyone else calls “wasting every hour God sends in front of the fucking computer”.

    You’d think I’d have finished “The Rothko Room” by now and rights, I should have but once again, hubris has cracked me across the knuckles with a bloody big stick.  I’ll explain.

    You see I spent too much time listening to advice.  I know, I know, but there it is.  I listened to the advice that said, “no-one likes an omnipotent narrator” and so decided that no action in the story could take place without either of the two main characters being there to witness it.

    Now, to most people that would appear to be a silly rule to set oneself and an even sillier one to stick to for a complex, comedic spy caper and why I haven’t thrown in the towel and decided that it’s my story and I’ll do what I want, Lord alone knows but it’s now this simple technical tyranny that is keeping the tale from barrelling towards its breathtakingly surprising, yet wonderfully satisfying conclusion.

    ‘Come on, Russell’, I hear you ask, ‘Just jack this nonsense in and tell your main characters what’s going on.’  To which I answer, ‘Get thee behind me, ratbags!  I got myself into this mess and I’m going to get myself out.’  Curiously, these are also the last words that Captain Scott entered in his diary, right before the others ate him.

    It does not augur well.

    0 Comments

    An Old Fashioned Plug

    19/4/2012

    1 Comment

     
    That we have no idea what great minds were snuffed out between 1914 and 1918 at a time when physics and mathematics were flourishing as never before, has long troubled me.  What kind of world might this be had that young German physicist or that Italian chemist not been picked off by a bored sniper one afternoon?

    It would, of course, have taken only the odd stray bullet to have robbed the world of Ernest Rutherford, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Jean Cocteau, Winston Churchill, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves and, of course, JRR Tolkien.  I’m sure there are many more.

    The Circling Song started life as a meditation on the lost potential of the generation of young men who fought on both sides in the Great War.  It began with me wandering around a battlefield site (as I do every year in early summer) and thinking that only a small alteration in his circumstances could have found Albert Einstein on the killing fields of that conflict and that had he been killed, the world may never have encountered general relativity.  In addition, Arthur Eddington was a Quaker and therefore a pacifist.  Had Eddington not been around in 1919 to provide measurable proof of general relativity it is entirely possible that even a living Einstein would have remained in obscurity for all but a few abstract mathematicians.

    I came up with my own extraordinary savant, Henry Lawrence, a Private in the British Army, who by chance finds himself in possession of extraordinary knowledge concerning the nature of matter.  He realises that the entire universe consists of nothing but equations and moreover, he is beginning to learn how to solve them.

    The story is told through the letters and journals of those who knew him and is, I think, really rather good.

    Which is why I’m promoting it in this appalling manner.  Give it a go.  Click on the image.
    Picture
    1 Comment

    Will You Still Respect Me In The Morning?

    25/3/2012

    3 Comments

     
    If you are reading this, then the chances are that I've done something that I find extremely difficult almost to the point of anathema. I'm talking about self promotion.  You see, my problem is that I never read the small print.  And before you get smug, neither do you.  Think of the times when a dialog box pops up and asks whether or not you agree to abide by the terms and conditions before you download or activate something.  Do you read it before you click?  Of course you don’t.  And who can blame you?  I understand that some of the things that we all agree to and click upon with gay abandon regularly run to over 20,000 words.  One even weighed in at over 70,000.  My own opinion is that should push come to shove, there isn’t a court in the land that would accept that having to read the equivalent of a short novel before being allowed to proceed with a download, is reasonable but it does provide one with an insight into the mind of the corporate lawyer.
    Recently, I agreed to one of my books going onto Amazon’s KDP select.  I had been told that this was an excellent way of promoting it.  All I had to do was to allow the sole downloading rights to Kindle for one month and in return, I would receive a promotional package.  After about three weeks, during which absolutely nothing happened, I checked up.  No increase in sales, no evidence of promotion.  The bastards!  It had all been a lie.
    Except it hadn’t.  For whilst I was scouring the small print, I realised that in order for the “promotional event” to take place, I had to offer my book for free for five days.  This seemed utterly unreasonable but I decided to bite the bullet.  I only had about ten days left so I let it go on the free list for five of them.
    Then a strange thing happened.  People began downloading it.  By the end of the five days, I had notched up over 500 downloads.  I happened to mention this to my family who instead of being happy for me, duly set about me with some vigour.  Their comments were all  variations on the theme of:  ‘You put your book into a free promotion for five days and you didn’t tell anyone?  Are you mental?’
    Well, sadly, when it comes to promoting myself, I think I probably am.  They reminded me of a friend of ours, a successful writer, who at his annual New Year Party, actually had his latest book on sale.  Next to the drinks table. I remembered telling him that he was a tart and ought to be ashamed.  I also remembered that he waved a wad of tenners at me and said 'Yes, the burden of shame is intolerable.'
     

    3 Comments

    Return of a Feckless Bastard

    29/2/2012

    0 Comments

     
    There is no excuse.  Christmas just came and went and then work started piling up.  In February, I went skiing and now I realise that I’ve not posted anything for ages.  Actually, that’s not true.  I realised some time ago that I hadn’t posted but in that curious way that people deal with issues, I sort of ignored the fact, despite having made a vow that I would post at least every week.  I fooled myself that I instead of posting my usual modest thought for the week, I would astound my readers with something truly earth-shattering for my “comeback piece” that would cause instant waves of forgiveness and, yes, relief to extend in my direction and wash away the stain of my lethargy.  But as each day passed, so I needed to come up with something even better as a sop for my fecklessness.  Quite soon, nothing seemed important enough to qualify.  It even crossed my mind to make up something to account for my absence but nothing short of abduction by aliens who turn out to be on the payroll of News International seemed to be enough.  So I have been reduced to this.

    I have been working hard, though.  I mean, anyone who frequents any of the writers’ sites will testify - I haven’t been hanging around those places, either and that really is the only real time-waster to which I’m prepared to admit.  No, every hour at the computer has been taken up with my new story, The Rothko Room. It’s going quite well – much in the same way that an aircraft plummeting from the sky can be said to be approaching the ground quite well: tolerably quickly but with no evident appearance of anyone being in control. 

    And there: I just made the excuse.  Only it’s not an excuse.  It’s a reason, certainly but the reason for the act does not, of necessity, excuse it.

    So there is a reason why I haven’t posted.  Whether or not it’s a sufficient reason to excuse the fact, only my readers can decide.  If I still have any.

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    The Infamous Info Dump

    19/1/2012

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    Lots of folks – writers, mostly – seem to have a huge downer on what they term “Info Dumps”.  Those not in the know might require a definition:  the act of giving a lot of information out in a short space of time.  It could be plot points; it could be character portraits; it could be descriptions of places or events; whatever.  Fact is, it’s not thought to be a good idea.  However, despite fully twelve minutes of cursory research, I’ve been unable to determine what it is that annoys people so much. 

    I have encountered info dumps (or, as some might call it “exposition”) in a number of great works and they cause me no problems whatsoever. In fact, I rather like them, particularly if they are funny or interesting and certainly, if they are well-written.  It really doesn’t matter whether or not they move the story along as long as they are an enjoyable aside.

    But some people are so hung up on structure and form and convention that they seem to let style get in the way of a good story and, unfortunately for me, they have the literary hegemony and run all the publishing houses in the cosmos.

    But never mind.  All things must pass, even modernism (which has died out in practically every other field of endeavour except, it seems, literature).  Who knows; just as post-modernism breathes its last in the rest of the cultural world, literature may finally notice its existence and the narrator will come into his own, once more.  I’m not holding my breath.  No doubt I'll be bombarded with salient examples of post-modern literature but I shall stand my ground, however weighty the odds or indeed, the evidence.  I will go down screaming that never are so many old-fashioned ideas so fashionable as they in the realms of modern literature.

    Anyway, if you want to see an example of my very own info dump, I’ve posted it on this moth’s update of the Rothko Room page.  Let me know what you think.

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    It's All About Me, Isn't It?

    7/1/2012

    0 Comments

     
    One of the cardinal rules of Weblog is that one shouldn't simply write about oneself.  Oh, it's OK to use an incident in your personal life to detonate an observation of greater strength but to tell everyone about your day...?  I can't even do that on facebook.  However, This week's entry comes close, in my view, to, if not breaking the cardinal rule, then at least chipping the glaze a little.
    In a desperate bid to sell books without actually doing any hard work,  I recently responded to a number of requests for "interviews".  These are a curious device which some webloggers have introduced into literary weblogs,, which involves them giving over some server space to people who want to get noticed.  It's a useful thing to do and I'm always grateful if people deign to include me.
    However, I'm not at all comfortable with either writing about myself or trying to sell my books.  (I squirm with embarrasment that I allowed my wife to take The Circling Song into a local bookstore and ask the manager to read it.  The manager said she would and would be in touch.  I do not hold my breath.)  And so, I usually trot out the sort of thing that I reprint here.  The "original can be found at: www.margaretmillmore.com

    "Of the myriad things that they tell us the World can be divided into, the one that is exercising me as I write, is the one that would run something along the lines of it (the World) being divided into those people who talk about themselves and those who don’t.  Firmly in the latter camp, I marvel at the facility with which some people are able to blather on about themselves, seemingly confident in their belief that this is just what the benighted public has been pining for all along.  Sadly, for those on my side of the fence, the neighbours on the other side appear to reproducing and are clearly in need of some lebensraum.  To paraphrase the tagline from George A Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead”, “When Hell is full of interesting and accomplished people, then utter nobodies will stalk prime-time T.V.”  Fifteen minutes of fame?  If only.  If only.
    You’ll have gathered by now that I am reluctant to reveal anything at all about myself.  There was a time when such reticence was accepted at face value or even, in some circles, deemed admirable.  Nowadays, the more usual response is likely to be, “What does he have to hide?”  To which the answer is,  “As much as I can possibly get away with.” 
    So what am I doing here?
    In simple terms, I’m trying to garner some interest in my latest endeavour.  This was of course, the raison d’être for the original American “Talk Shows” back, as they say, in the day.  I like that the British term for these little bouts of vacuousness is “Chat Shows”, the word, “chat” deriving from the activity beloved of the British Tommy in the trenches, which involved a small group sitting companionably whilst they went through their clothing in search of lice.  When the little buggers were squished, they apparently made a rather pleasing cracking sound, which was rendered by soldiers great and small as, “chat!”.  There is something rather clever to be done there with chat shows, vermin and dirty laundry but my muse tells me it would be pretty laboured.
    So enough about me.  Why do I write?  Well, it’s something to do, isn’t it?  Better than sitting around not writing.   Truth is, I began to write because I so seldom came across stories that I wanted to read. I would occasionally begin a novel, recommended by someone whose opinion I valued and find that after a few sittings, what should have been an anticipatory quiver, as I looked forward to the next opportunity to read it had become a sigh of resignation, as I realised the hour was upon me.  Gradually, like most men, it turns out, found that I was spending much of my time reading non-fiction.   
    Occasionally, though, there would be the story that I simply could not let go.  The spine of the book shattered into 300-odd striations as I folded it back on itself to within an inch of its life;  its corners bent into a grubby ruch, as it was, in turns thrust into and hauled out of jacket pockets; its pages torn and stained from encounters with various household implements and foodstuffs and bodily fluids.  Loved, almost literally to death.  These stories I would read again and again and, each time wonder what it was that gave them their magic.
    Now, writers argue incessantly about whether it is the story that counts or the manner in which it is told and, you will be relieved to learn, I have no intention of rehearsing the debate here.  What I will say, however, is that when either of these things is missing, it simply doesn’t work for me.  A ripping yarn told in the breathless voice of an adolescent of either species may well turn out to be an entertaining film but to have to read it, would fill me with dismay.  The last time I did that was with “The Da Vinci Code”  and that turned out to be both the literary and cinematic equivalent of being forced to watch a school nativity play in which even your own child has refused to perform for artistic reasons.
    Likewise, the latest from the pen of the greatest literary genius since the last one, in which it takes them 130,000 words to say, ‘I loved him/her but then he/she found someone else and I was sad.’ doesn’t do a great deal for me, either. Genre is, if the work is good, irrelevant.  (Although I have a particular dislike of high fantasy.  Anything where the characters have made up names, where there are warriors, wizards and talismans can stay on the shelf.)  
    And that, in a nutshell, is what motivates me to read and write the way I do.  Good stories to keep the reader guessing and interested, written in a manner that refuses to accept that people need their language liquidised and served up by the spoonful".

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