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.  

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.