A personal favourite — the singer and song.

Well it seems my highly entertaining and remarkably astute Antipodean friend, Archie, has chosen me to be a recipient of the Golden Primate Award For Blog Excellence. Apparently, in my hands words are lethal weapons — one of the best compliments I’ve ever been given. It rates up there with the time someone told me I had really nice teeth. That’s how good it is. It makes me want to brush all the more rigorously, so that I can be even more shiny, golden and generally excellent

Cheers, Archie!

The award was created by Dorid — who I’ve only just discovered, thanks to Archie, and who is actually rather cool. Upon receiving the award, it is apparently customary to link back to its creator and choose more people to receive the award. The criteria are:

“It’s issued by bloggers to bloggers who show excellence and thoughtfulness in blogging, especially those who are not afraid to be related to a monkey.”

With this in mind, I’d like to share this privilege with…

Mike — a keen mind, a genuine guy and someone who even occasionally laughs at my jokes!

Will — okay, so he’s abandoned Yorkshire for the Canadian wilderness. That doesn’t make him a bad political commentator.

kallioppe — a fellow Idiosyncratican and a great writer on… well, what it’s like to be a writer trying to get a foothold!

Lottie — she’s a huge George Carlin fan. Do I really need to say more?

Today has generally been a very good day. I got three very nice shirts from Marks & Spencer (those lovely linen and cotton mix, soft-touch jobs) and, this morning, I heard from the assistant to the agent I’d approached regarding Children of the Resolution. She — the agent — was “very interested” in reading the full manuscript. She’s read a couple of my novels in the past, so I was quite pleased by her reaction to my enquiry. She clearly seems to enjoy what I do enough to keep reading my new work. Always encouraging.

So everything was trundling along quite nicely. I tried on the shirts and was rather pleased with the result (not to blow my own trumpet, or anything, but I looked bloody gorgeous ), I emailed the full manuscript to the aforementioned agent’s assistant, receiving a prompt and courteous reply to let me know that they had received it, the outlines for my new novel are progressing quite nicely — and then the wheels came off. Something had to come along to utterly ruin my mood.

Yes, all right, I’m exaggerating a wee bit. My mood wasn’t utterly ruined. Far from it. But I did swear a bit when, tucking into my tea, Katie Price (a.k.a. Jordan) popped up on the television screen — looking like a reject from Barbie school and publicising her latest novel.

Now, I’ve never had much time for this particular glamour model turned Uber-self-promoter. She epitomises many of the things I dislike most about the whole celebrity culture thing. More than anything, though, I’m constantly appalled by the fact that she successfully publishes and sells books off the back of a career that is built around who she is and not what she does (what the hell does she do, anyway?) These books — the novels, in particular — she freely admits to not writing herself. She doesn’t sit down and write. She thinks up storylines etc, hands them over and then reads through the chapters once the ghostwriter has done his/her job.

All this is bad enough. Having done the hard work myself (with no reward, as yet) and seen many others, most of them extremely talented, do the same, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But I can live with it. It’s the way the publishing business works today and it will probably run its course and turn around once people tire of Katie Price and her kind and start wanting quality fiction again.

But what really galls, as it did today, is having to listen to Ms Price accuse some in the industry of literary snobbery. This comment was made in an interview at a book award ceremony, to which she had been invited because — horror of horrors — she’d been nominated! Firstly, I’d like to state very clearly that, in my opinion, Katie Price should never have been nominated for a book award. Where her novels are concerned (and her children’s fiction, I believe), she doesn’t write them. I’m not a literary snob, but selling a certain number of units is not what literature or literary awards are about, for me. They are about rewarding literary excellence, and however you might define that it surely requires that the author in question did actually author the work. Clearly not the case here.

Okay, now to this little issue of the people in the industry who didn’t think she should receive an award being literary snobs. It’s rather more complicated than that, Ms Price, I’m afraid. I’m perfectly happy to have someone who can’t even speak properly (”fink” instead of “think”, for example) consider me a snob. In fact, I probably am in this instance. I certainly believe that I’m a better writer than you are. I mean, I actually write every word of my books myself and I think I do a bloody good job of it.

But that is to miss the point. Why are people like me really annoyed about this? Put simply, we work hard for years at what we do, investing hour upon hour, decade after decade in our work — making sacrifices and dealing with rejection after rejection. I’ve been doing this twenty years and I still haven’t achieved publication. That isn’t because I’m not talented. Check out my samples if you don’t believe me. It’s because it’s a tough industry, made tougher by its current focus on ghostwritten trash that conveniently has a celebrity name attached to it. It isn’t snobbery. It isn’t even jealousy, because if being published meant that I had to be like you, I’d give it up tomorrow. It’s about pride in the work. It about a love of the written word and the power it has to communicate intense feelings and complex ideas. It’s about all that and more — but most of all, it’s about those writers we all know and love and admire who are being neglected because you and your ghostwritten nonsense is too much the focus of the marketing department’s attention. I don’t really blame you for this, of course. You’re taking care of you and yours. I can’t really condemn you for that. But just think again before you trot out the literary snob dig.

Real writers have every reason to consider themselves better than you — at least where writing is concerned. But the bottom line is, they simply want the chance to do what they do best. A chance that people like you — who gets someone else to do it for them — make much, much harder.

This is partly in support of my friend Lottie, who’s been getting quite a bit of flak recently for addressing very genuine and much-needed points in a debate from a position of experienced authority. I won’t go into the details here, and nor will I link to the website where all of this occurred (it’ll send them a pingback, if I do, and I really don’t need them bringing their shit over here!), but if you want to read more about it, all the relevant information can be found on Lottie’s blog.

Let it suffice to say, Lottie addressed one of the difficult questions/subjects — and some found certain comments offensive because they inferred that they meant/could mean that a particular victim was somehow, partially or otherwise, to blame for what happened to them.

Although I was reluctant to get into the debate — because, admittedly, it was not an area that I have any real experience in — it brought to mind something that I had to write about in Children of the Resolution. Heavily autobiographical, I had to deal with my experience of the bullying of disabled children in integrated education during the 1970s and 1980s. Carl, my protagonist and, in effect, the me-guy, stated very emphatically that he’d never been bullied and that, in his experience, the bullying he had seen had had very little to do with actual disability. He was very quick to say that he’d never bought the victim explanation, that some people just naturally attract bullies. It is too simplistic for him. But he did stipulate in no uncertain terms that the reaction of the person being bullied decided whether the bullying continued. Carl was lucky. He acknowledges this and the complexity of the issue and its various scenarios. He’d always been able, even though he’s in a wheelchair, to stand up for himself (pun intended.) He’d never been bullied, but they had tried.

It was a difficult piece to write, not least because I knew that a very good (able-bodied) friend who was reading it at the time had had a pretty unrelenting bullying experience. I was afraid of what reactions I might get but she at least understood the point and agreed with it.

Nobody could ever seriously blame a victim. And I for one would never want it to be thought that I was. But if we are to ever understand the complex dynamics at work in these kinds of relationships, we have to be prepared to ask and be asked the difficult questions. Questions of this kind are not (at least from intelligent, caring human beings) about apportioning blame, they are about finding a way to empower the victim. If we understand, we can fix (possibly.) Gagging people, holding personal offence up as a reason for not addressing serious points that taken objectively aren’t offensive, solves nothing.

So let’s keep asking the difficult questions, even if some people might not want to hear them. Maybe we’ll find the answers, maybe we won’t. I don’t know. But at least we’ll have tried.

 My favourite Charlie Brown  (unofficial) cartoon:

A new Idiosyncratica topic has just been announced! Enquiries from those wishing to join always welcome.

Well, you knew it wouldn’t be long, didn’t you? Today I officially started working on the chapter outlines for We Are Watching. Far earlier than I had intended, but what can you do? Addicted I may well be, but at least I have something positive to show for it!

So, what progress have I made? Well, I have my beginning. Three single spaced pages of notes for chapter one (Times New Roman 20 point)… so far! It begins in a completely different place than I had originally anticipated and — wouldn’t you know? — my protagonist Austin Wright has been renamed Charles Rigg! When I saw him… well, he just looked like a Charles, you know? Not a Charlie, mind. No, he definitely isn’t a Charlie — proper or otherwise. Charles fits him, funnily enough, even when he has his hand around his best friend’s throat, pinning him to the kitchen table (which is where we find him at the beginning of the novel.)

Details apart, however, my overwhelming feeling upon starting to get everything discovered, shaped and outlined was one of excitement at doing something so different to my last project. As much as I enjoyed writing Children of the Resolution, it was by its very nature restrictive. When you’re writing about a bunch of disabled kids experiencing the dawn of integrated education in the 1970s/1980s, there’s only so much that you can allow yourself to do. Electric wheelchairs aren’t quite speedy enough for convincing “car chases” and Johnny and Carl’s fight in chapter four was never about to become Kill Bill volume 1 or volume 2. We Are Watching… okay, so I probably won’t take it to those extremes. But I will at least be able to build some action packed scenes — something with fluidity, tension, a sense of threat, all the good stuff. The stuff that I hadn’t realised I’d missed so much!

Incidentally, does anyone know what police missing persons procedure (in the UK) is? Charles’s wife “disappears”. He gets it into his head that she has been abducted (he’s unclear about who by), but all of her clothes and possessions have been taken, too. How seriously would such an incident — given that there is no history of domestic violence, or anything else, for that matter — be taken? I tend to think, not very. Formalities followed, but little else?

[EDIT: For further details on police missing persons procedure in the UK, click here.]

I’m never very good at working out time differences, but I believe that by now Pope Benedict XVI should have landed in Australia. And guess where his plane lands for refuelling… yup, Darwin airport!

Nice.

Anyway, to the real point of this post. The trip is, in effect, a belated apology/damage limitation exercise concerning sexual abuse committed by Australian Catholic priests, and during his flight, he reeled off the usual, by now well practised spiel to reporters about how the Catholic Church has to prevent, heal and reconcile, and then went on to add:

“It must be clear … that being a real priest is incompatible with this (sexual abuse) because priests are in the service of our Lord.”

Ah, so that’s what makes sexual abuse such a bad thing. It isn’t the horrific effect that it has on the abused individual — it’s because it doesn’t fit a priest’s job description and, one assumes, is an offence to the Lord.

It seems to me that these apologies have very little to do with helping the abused. The healing that concerns him most is not that of the victims but of the Catholic Church itself.

Insult piled upon insult. Atrocity upon atrocity. Nothing ever really changes, however much they might like to pretend that it does.

Okay, I’m the first to admit that I’m not very good at doing nothing. The in-between-novels stage is never a period that I find particularly satisfying, no matter how much other stuff I try to cram into it. The need to create is fundamental to who I am, I suppose, and even though it is less than a week since I finished the edit on Children of the Resolution, I’m already getting “twitchy”.

So I’ve started researching proper We Are Watching — watching endless YouTube videos on remote viewing and visiting fascinating sites like this on RAF Fylingdales. Regarding the latter, I’m actually quite surprised by just how much information on the base is available. Granted, the Cold War is well and truly over, but looking at it from the road as we drove by last Wednesday, it looks peculiarly vulnerable sitting out there on Snod Hill.

I know, however, that Fylingdales is going to feature heavily in one of the principal scenes, at least, of We Are Watching. It’s a simple scene involving a group of friends, much alcohol and, as I have hinted elsewhere, a remote viewing exercise — which they attempt in much the same way as many of us have probably messed about with Ouija boards at one time or another. It’s not a serious exercise. It’s just a bit of fun.

Or that’s what they think!

Well, it’s a thoroughly miserable day here in my little corner of Paradise. The mist is down over the hills, very rainforest-esque, it’s drizzling constantly, the temperature is well below the average for the time of year — but I’m trying to be philosophical about it.

Because, apparently, according to The Times Online “moral DNA” test I’ve just done, I am Philosopher. I believe that the moral principle is the most ethical perspective. I ask what would be the honest or courageous thing to do, and then consider the consequences for others. Finally, with much reluctance, I’ll consider rules, laws and regulations. I hate being told what to do or what is right. I’m a maverick and a rebel — but I’m really good to have around when there are difficult decisions to be made (I think I agree with that, but…)

Roughly 15% of adults are Philosophers.

I’m just glad I didn’t come out as an Enforcer.

It’s a pretty quick test, so if you have a minute or two give it a go. I’d be interested to hear what your results were and whether or not you agree with them. For myself, I found it fairly accurate — apart from the bit where the said that I might sometimes lack empathy for others.