The laptop has finally died. I knew it was on its way out. I was hoping to keep it going with sheer will of thought. But no. It has loaded it’s last Word doc and joined the great mother board in the sky.
So that’s the end of writing on the road. I’m open to donations for a new laptop. Or if you happen to have a laptop you don’t want or use I will be happy to adopt it.
Someone told me once about a strange technology called “paper and pen” I think I’ll give that a go đź‘Ś
In Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker says that swearing is a sign of a civilized society. You’re not going to be hung for comparing a member of the royal family to the back end of a donkey. We have progressed beyond that. There is no doubt that there is an offensive side to the English language but you are free to use it as you please. The question is; when should it be used, and when should it be avoided?
If you are writing a picture book for three year-olds it’s probably best that the talking squirrel doesn’t have speech bubbles filled with expletives. But that’s obvious to anyone so let’s focus on fiction aimed at adults. The reason this subject is on my mind is that I’m reaching the end of writing a horror/thriller novel and as the first rewrite looms I start to think about these things.
There is swearing in my book. It is occasional and mostly in the dialogue. I only paused for thought when I came to edit the moments where the fourteen year-old children in the book swear. To justify this I’m going to drag out two very important words; realism and context.
Fourteen year-olds swear. You might not hear them doing it, and not all of them do, but most, when amongst their peers, use “bad” language all of the time (in fact I’ve questioned my twelve year-old daughter on this and she has confirmed that many of her friends do indeed have potty mouths. She of course is an angel, or so she tells me). You can avoid it in your writing but sometimes avoiding it takes away from the realism of what you are writing. As I’m currently writing horror I’ll use horror as an example. Let’s say we have a fourteen year-old boy named Billy, and Billy has just witnessed the violent death of a parent. Is he more likely to mutter the word, “Gosh.” under his breath, or something more visceral? The word gosh would immediately destroy the believability of the scene. However, if you are writing a scene where Billy is enjoying a particularly good ice cream it would be unnecessary for him to comment on how f***ing delicious it was.
Here’s my dilemma, and the one that got me onto thinking about this in the first place; when is it okay to swear in prose, outside of dialogue? My thoughts on this are straight forward (but I have gone against my own advice a few times as I’ve looked at each individual case). If you take the swear word out no one is going to notice that it isn’t there, and so all should be eliminated. Whether or not swearing is okay in a civilised society there is no doubt that some people find it abhorrent. So take it out. People will happily read the murder scenes in your book and not flinch but as soon as they come across an F-word in the middle of a descriptive passage a big bell will ring in their head. Even if that ringing stops pretty quickly it is still jarring enough to drag you out of the scene.
So why have I left a few in? Sometimes your descriptive prose will reflect the thoughts of whichever character is in that scene, and that’s okay. It helps to clarify the mood your character is in. So you have a scene that goes – Terry stood on the side of the road looking at his smashed up car. The other driver, some drunk moron, was still sat in his driver’s seat, bleeding from the ears. Terry had two options, call a taxi and make it to the wedding on time, or help this stupid fucking drunk.
Alright, so that’s not a great example, but hopefully it illustrates my point well enough. Sometimes your prose reflects the thoughts, or the mood, of the main character in the scene.
It’s interesting to me that there are no age guidelines with books, as there are with film and television. It is up to the responsibility of the author. But we’re not talking about sex and violence, we’re talking about language. You might lose some readers because they think your use of language is vulgar, but remember, that just makes you more civilised than them. Don’t swear for the sake of it though, the novelty wears off pretty quickly for the reader. So long as your portrayal of life is true then you won’t need to think too hard about whether or not that particular word is necessary.
Let’s all get sick at Christmas. That’s the best way to celebrate. Curl up on the couch and cough into a tissue. Still, we’ll make up for it on New Year’s Eve. Board games with the kid and the missus, quizzes, cheesy snacks, we’ll stay up late laughing and joking and we’ll do all the things we were too ill to enjoy on Christmas.
And then on to the conversation everyone has on New Year’s Eve, “Got any new year’s resolutions?”
Actually, I do. I’m 50,000 words into my next novel. I’m going to finish it. It’s a good resolution because it’s an easy one to accomplish. Another resolution; never get sick again. That’s a bad resolution because it’s impossible. What is the point of a cold though? Who does it benefit? The germs? If the germs found a way to procreate and eat without pissing off their host they would do a lot better. We wouldn’t try and kill them with Beechams for a start.
That reminds me, the cold medicine I was taking went out of date in September. That probably means nothing but maybe the decaying molecule that is meant to help me will some how make things worse. Or maybe I’ll get superpowers. Fevered Snot Man to the rescue! I bought them in a supermarket three months after they went bad. I’m still a bit ill so this post is going to jump around a lot. I’m not in the frame of mind to think straight. I’m in the mind to think wonky.
The common cold is scientifically known as the rhinovirus. I feel like more people should call it that.
“Hi boss, I can’t come in to work today, I have rhinovirus.”
“Oh my god, where did you catch that? Africa? Are you going to die?”
“Nothing some Lemsip won’t fix.”
Actually it won’t fix it. Nothing will. If you take Zinc early enough you might knock a day off the disease but you might also get a metallic taste in your mouth, become nauseous, and lose your sense of smell. So you’re not really gaining much. Vitamin C might knock a day off too but studies have proven uncertain. The problem is, you’re not fighting the virus. All the bad symptoms are created by your immune system going into battle mode. You have to take on yourself to get better. Take an antihistamine for your nose, an anti-inflammatory for your throat (or sinuses, or something), a paracetamol for the fever, and ibuprofen for the pain. You’ll be dehydrated and unable to sleep but at least your nose will stop running.*
Your best bet is to take some LSD and spend the next few days laughing and crying while being harassed by huge cackling multi-coloured Christmas ornaments.
The thing I don’t like about being ill is that I can’t write very well, or think too well either. I don’t want to take a week long pause from the novel but I have no choice. I sit and stare at the first quarter of the chapter I’m currently on and can’t make any sense of it. I know something isn’t working but can’t figure out what. It seems sloppy somehow. Bu today, today I feel almost okay again. I opened up that document and saw the problem. Away went the fingers and the prose straightened itself out.
That’s what I should be doing instead of writing nonsense for my website. Why am I doing this? It feels like the site goes stale if I don’t add something at least once a month. Even if it is just the ramblings of a sick man.
The next blog post I write will be much more coherent and interesting.
There is a kid in the book I’m writing called Dirk. He’s in bed right now. I have to go and ruin his sleep. God I love writing horror.
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* Unless you actually have Influenza in which case your nose won’t be running anyway. But you might die soon, so don’t worry too much about the Lemsip. Also, don’t take anything I’ve said here as scientific fact. It’s probably accurate enough but I have things to do and Wikipedia is a rabbit hole that I don’t have time to fall down right now.
I couldn’t afford the next yearly payment for the andychapwriter.com domain name so I haven’t had access to my own site for a while. Finally things have reverted to andychapwriter.wordpress.com and I’m back in. In the new year I will pay for the domain again but for now we are slumming it.
So what’s been happening, I hear you ask? But of course you’re not asking that because you’ve probably never been here before. I’m going to tell you anyway. Much has changed. I won’t tell you about the awesome life changes that have happened. The woman who has changed everything. A move into the home of my dreams (if you are imagining a mansion you are on the wrong path. If you are imaging bookshelves stuffed with books, a globe bar, brown leather seats, a writing desk, then you are on the right track).
This is a website about my writing, so let’s talk about that instead. This woman I mentioned earlier, she’s the catalyst. She’s a writer too. We sit there, both of us, at night, she has a coffee, I have a glass of wine, and we write. Side by side. When we are done with our evening’s writing we read it to each other. And then we high-five and dance around laughing and shouting things like, “We are so fucking great!” and “This is going to change literature forever!” and then we cry because we are afraid that we might be just a bit too great. Genius s a burden, dear reader.
There has been a big change in my writing. My first two books were 40,000 word novellas. They were comedies. That’s what came out naturally. The books were well received and praised for their effortless humour (I’m in a bragging mood), and so I did what any good author would do when he’s on to something, I completely turned my back on it and started writing horror.
It’s my first attempt at writing a full length novel and it is flying out of me. I’ve never had so much fun writing. Those previous two books took well over a year to complete, in fact it was closer to two years. I started my current novel in September and am already at 35,000 words. And, if I can credit myself with some objectivity, they’re pretty good words too. The characters are strong, the story is good, the fear is working. I discovered that making someone laugh, and making someone afraid, are very closely related.
I haven’t just opened a word file and thought, what can I write that will really scare someone? I had an idea. It was to do with an old game’s console. I won’t go into what the story is about, not yet, but it is set in 2002 and is connected to events that happened in 1992. It has given me a chance to play with my own nostalgia in the writing. The characters took over the book completely. I barely have to write them, they are real and alive.
I know how the book ends but I don’t know exactly what’s happening from here to there. I’m halfway through. The story seems to know where it’s going. The characters seem to know for sure. It’s not like making something up. It’s more like excavating a story that’s already there. It’s like an archaeological dig. It is revealing itself one careful brush stroke at a time.
This post is getting a bit long. I will write more, the more I write. I’ll tell you about my partner and her book. I will reveal more about my own. Until then, farewell!
I love audiobooks. I love them. There are so many books I wouldn’t have read if it wasn’t for all those strange audiobook producers who sit endlessly in front of a microphone reading. War and Peace was over 60 hours of audio. Some poor bastard had to read the whole thing. But thank god they did. Because of them (and especially the late Frank Muller, who was a legend among audiobook fans until his untimely passing due to a motorcycle accident). Great Expectations, Moby Dick, all of those really big ones we always hope to one day read, I have read because, like a child, I had them read to me.
It’s frowned upon, or at least it was, the listening to of an audiobook. But the impression of these things is changing thanks to Audible. But still a bit of, “Well, you didn’t really read it did you?” goes on. It doesn’t matter by what method the words get into your head, it only matters that they do. I read with my eyes too, my bookcase is overflowing, sometimes I also read with my ears, that’s all. Blind people read with their fingers. You’re not going to accuse them of being lazy are you? I knew a guy who read with his elbows, but he was probably functioning on a different plain of sanity altogether.
Audio is my favourite medium for entertainment. I love podcasts, I love music, and I love audiobooks. It is for this reason that I am as excited as a very excitable person doing a very exciting thing (god I’m great at synonyms. It must be the writer in me…) to announce that Tripping the Night Fantastic, my first novel (and a very strange one at that) has just completed the recording process!
The files have been sent to ACX for review and soon the book will be available to all through Audible and Amazon. When the big day comes I will write another blog post with links and a cheeky little trick that means you can get the book for free and I and the producer/voice-artist (Alan Gron) will still get paid.
More soon! Hip hip hurrah!
What do you think of the cover for the audiobook?
I have some exciting news… The Accidental Scoundrel is being turned into an audiobook!
I will go into this in more detail in a later blog post, this is just a quicky to share my excitement. I love audiobooks. I have listened to hundreds of them over the years so the chance to hear my own book performed has me on the edge of elation.
As I said, I will go into this in more depth later in the week, but briefly, a sports commentator/producer/actor/broadcaster named Jake Sanson auditioned and was brilliant. The book went into production this week and the first 15 minutes is due in tomorrow for tweaks and notes.
That is all for now.
Can I say yippee and jump in the air like an excited child? I think I should allow myself the indulgence.
YIIIPPEEEEEEE!!
I have a YouTube channel. Well, my daughter (Kassidy) and I have a YouTube channel.
For the past two years we’ve been writing a kids book together called Tommy, God of the Island of Wonder, which we finally completed a few weeks ago. It’s a comedy about a boy called Tommy who, having just blown out his birthday candles, opens his eyes to find himself stranded on an island. This is The Island of Wonder; a testing ground for wishes. There he meets The Disco Voodoo King who teaches Tommy how to make wishes and tries to guide him to his perfect wish. Things get out of hand, The Disco Voodoo King is driven to despair, and Tommy learns nothing.
It has been sent out to two agents so far but I will be sending the manuscript out in earnest this week. Fingers crossed. I look forward to collecting a mountain of rejection slips! We just need one to say yes! Just one.
Back to YouTube. What better way to introduce you to Kassidy than a video of her being forced to eat disgusting food?
I was on the phone to my brother, David.
“How are there enough chickens?” says David, quite unexpectedly following immediately after a deep and difficult conversation about a psychopath’s attempt to kill him by un-bolting the suspension on his truck (but that’s a story for another day).
“What do you mean?” I say, looking at my phone like it’s mental.
“Think about it. Think of all the chickens in all the supermarkets. Think of all the KFCs and late night takeaways. And the chicken farms are still full of chickens. They are not empty. Where are they getting all the chickens from?”
I sit down and pick up my glass of whisky. “You’re right. And pigs too. Think of all the bacon we eat. How can there be enough pigs?”
“There should be a shortage. There’s not enough chickens.”
“Fuck. I need to think about this, man.”
“How many people live in England?”
“Loads. I mean, I know at least 30 people.”
“There’s way more than that.”
“I have to go. I need look into this.”
I couldn’t let the idea go. I had to find out what the fuck was going on with the chicken shortage that should be happening but for some reason is not.
Here’s what I discovered –
Approximately 875,000,000 chickens are produced in the UK each year. If all those chickens were alive at the same time and had 1 square foot of land each they would take up an area of 31 miles, which is about the size of Slough.
There are 65,000,000 people in the UK so we get about 13.4 chickens each per year. Damn. The math adds up. I text my brother with the news.
He replies, “That’s still a lot of chicken!! But it still makes no sense, I eat more than 13.4 chickens a year!!!”
“Then you are eating somebody else’s chickens, buddy!” I reply.
So that’s my exciting mystery / possible conspiracy solved. Damn, I was looking forward to uncovering some kind of cloning base. Maybe a whole island that’s been kept secret from us and is entirely populated with chickens.
It did get me thinking though. It reminded me, as everything does, of that fucking prick called Donald Tramp and our own anti-evidence government in the UK. This whole anti-fact anti-expert thing. It’s frustrating.
It’s more fun, and much easier, to believe the person shouting the mad bullshit. Shocking soundbites spread around with great ease and become common knowledge, regardless of accuracy. Sadly the same is not true for the more long-winded and slightly boring nerd saying, “Actually, I think you’ll find…”
This wasn’t meant to get political. I’m not sure what the point was going to be. Lot of chickens though isn’t it?
On a side note, I have just discovered there is a real place called Chicken Island in Krabi in Thailand. So named for its rock formation. Sadly there are no chickens on Chicken Island.
*The heading isn’t technically click-bait as it is true as per the definition of the word incredible:
Incredible adjective – 1. Impossible to believe. 2. Difficult to believe; extraordinary.
I’m recovering from a terrible hangover.
When looking back over the events of 2016 I came across the news of Toblerone shrinking by ten percent. I went out to buy one to find out if the rumours were true, thinking it was surely a sick hoax.
I got back home and sat at my dining room table. I opened the packet slowly. Every second triangle was gone. This news by itself wasn’t particularly shocking but what it represented was. It was a glimpse into our future and the first casualty of our choices. It sent me into an alcoholic vortex that would leave me with a hangover the likes of which humanity had yet to experience.
When the boozing finally ended I found myself standing in my kitchen with a hangover made of hammers and remorse. I was wearing only jeans, a blue dressing gown, and a Jeremy Corbyn mask which I wore pulled back atop my head. Its vacant socialist eyes stared emptily at the ceiling. I woke up wearing it but have no recollection of why, or where it came it from.
I cracked an egg into a glass of warm whiskey and drank it in one gulp. I shuddered.
The floor swung sideways from under me but I managed to catch it with my right foot and steadied myself on the kitchen side. I shook my head and flicked the switch on the kettle.
It was quite possible that the kettle had already boiled for the third time by now without being poured. Short term memory was a distant one for now.
I tipped the coffee jar into a cup and spilt granules on the floor and onto my feet. I took a step back and leaned on the counter. My eyes were like a million butterflies trying to fly in the same direction. I picked up the kettle and filled the cup and shovelled in two sugars with a spoon.
Milk.
Where was the milk?
This puzzle was a stretch too far. I poured some coffee into the sink and topped it up with cold tap water and downed the coffee.
My head hung for a moment. With great effort I lifted a cigarette from the packet in my pocket. I lit it and inhaled. I smoked the whole thing without touching it. When the cigarette was done I let it fall out of my mouth into the sink.
The floor swung away again but this time I wasn’t able to steady myself and I slipped through a gap in reality. Time bellowed through my dressing gown as it evaporated into oblivion. Memories of life as I knew it took on a strange hue and rang around me like a bell full of shit. Donald Trump was there, in the darkness of nothingness, laughing and trying to grab my pussy. A pussy I don’t possess, but a pussy nonetheless.
When I came to I was in the same kitchen but there was a calendar on the wall that wasn’t mine. There was a picture of a flag on it. At first I thought it was the Union Flag but something looked wrong. There was a blue square in the corner full of stars. The year on the calendar was 2019. Somehow I had drunk myself into the future.
What had happened to me? I couldn’t know. This was probably just another terrible hallucination but things felt too real. I could feel the cold of the floor.
I tried to climb to my feet, reaching out for the fridge handle for purchase. The door swung open and I fell back. Out of the fridge fell a Peperami. It landed next to me, perfectly sealed. It offered sustenance that promised to lift me back to some kind of sensible state of being. I reached for it and tore it open but all that I found inside was that hideous thin sausage condom and the faint smell of meat. The sausage was missing entirely. I wondered if it faced the same weight-saving cut that Toblerone had, but taken to its absurd end.
Maybe all snacks had gone this way. All products now must be just empty packaging. Maybe manufacturers have given up entirely on their product and only sell packaging to a public that only have nostalgia left. I had to find out more about this future world I had travelled to.
I found a newspaper on the floor next to a bin overflowing with garbage. I leafed through it briefly and learned a lot. Much had changed. I rummaged through the bin and found two more from previous weeks. I absorbed every article with great interest and growing horror.
I found my way to the front door and wandered out into a vaguely familiar street. I figured the supermarket would be in the same direction as it used to be and headed for it.
Every front garden on the way had been turned into a vegetable patch and neighbours were sharing food over their fences. So it’s not all bad news. Poverty can bring people together.
There were thin people everywhere just standing around doing nothing. Some of them stared at me. Most were busy holding their trousers up and trying their best to stay upright in the calm breeze.
Now all the foreigners are gone all of the interesting takeaways have shut down and obesity is no longer a problem. Obesity is a privilege obtainable only by the 0.01%, according to the papers.
Without competition from foreign labour British men were able to charge what they liked for their services and so people can no longer afford to get taxis or make repairs to their homes. As a result nothing works and industry has come to a standstill. Most people are out of work and their toilets won’t flush and their homes are cold. Most people sit in their cars for heat. Petrol is cheap and bountiful now thanks to the relentless attack on nature instigated by Emperor Trump. The cars don’t move because no one has anywhere to go and many species have died along the new pipe routes.
I made it to the supermarket. Things were not good. Most of the food carried the “Trump Seal of Approval” which was privately viewed as an avoidance warning. You’d find a fresh chicken with a sticker of Trumps face on it with “TRUMP” in gold letters and the word “approved by Governor May” at the bottom. The meat had a faintly grey and damp texture.
Governor May. That’s right. You heard it here first. England is the 51st State. It’s too much to take in isn’t it?
The biggest shock came in the wine aisle. All foreign wines had been removed and all that was left was a small selection of Californian wine. I grabbed a passing shop assistant by the collar and shook her wildly. “How could you let this happen?!” I shouted, but she got the better of me and pushed me into a pile of loose pork scratchings, the only British snack food still readily available in England.
She started crying and slapped me in the face. “What’s the meaning of this!?” I shouted, trying to hit her back and missing by a yard. God damn these malnourished thin women!
“And that was the Shipping Forecast,” she said.
I looked at her like she was mad. I noticed a tattoo on her forehead that read Property of Wallmart and felt immediately sorry for her. If she wanted to hit me I was willing to be there for her. She could let her anger out on me. I’m ok with that. “Later on Radio Four a cow has a difficult pregnancy in The Archers,” she said, and struck me hard with a direct blow to my left eye.
“Lady, I feel your pain, but at least be coherent.”
“But first we are joined by Graham Guest. So Graham, you started a petition to prevent President Trump from making a State Visit to the UK-” she said.
Now, I have to be honest, as I lay there in the pork scratchings of a desolate supermarket in the future being slapped by an emaciated shop assistant, I couldn’t quite put the words she was saying into any kind of sensible context. It didn’t add up.
She hit me again and I fell sideways. Which was odd, considering I was lying on the floor. The supermarket, and the woman, shimmered and then stammered like a tape caught in an old cinema projector. The edges of reality crept forward. The girl burst into tears and then the whole scene was gone.
I was back in my kitchen. The kettle clicked off as it finished boiling. The radio was on. It was Radio Four talking to a man about a petition.
I stood there for a while. Not knowing what to do. After a few more coffees I got my shit together and got dressed for work. It was some kind of mad dream. It could never happen. The people wouldn’t let it. They have the ability to fight back. To not let the mad ones thrive. Surely kindness and intelligence will get the better of greed and ignorance.
I pulled on my boots and did up my jacket. I left the house and was murdered by a deranged seagull.
They said it would never happen. But nobody knows who They are and so it happened anyway. The Accidental Scoundrel is finally coming out. And everybody screamed with delight.
Mark it in your diary, send postcards to your family, rethink your will, giggle in front of your friends, and high five yourself. In the face.
On the 3rd of November a book, that has sold under a million copies worldwide already, needs your help. A few weeks ago I saw it crying in a gutter and I said, “What’s wrong book?” and the book said, “I think everyone should buy me,” and I cried too. So I’m sure you can understand how important this is to me. No one wants to see a funny book cry. Charities are there for a reason.
My best advice for anyone who has been moved by this story is to buy The Accidental Scoundrel and then review it with many many stars so that it doesn’t have to be sad again.
Now, I realise that I may come across as bias in this case but I should reassure you that it is only because I am trying to sell as many copies as possible. And that’s ok because I want to sell books.
What you are reading now is a few paragraphs that people in the business call “promotional material.” In this promotional material I should be telling you about the book. About the story. But the plot is not important. It is only important that you laugh. It has a horse in it. And a street urchin. There’s some old conniving aristocrats. They steal whiskey together. It’s all really very riveting.
You know what you need to do. Pre-order it now from Amazon (it’s already out in paperback, but you can pre-order the kindle book now) – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accidental-Scoundrel-Andrew-Chapman-ebook/dp/B01M23R7F1/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1477769188&sr=8-1
Invite your friends to this event, share it on Facebook, Reblog it, tweet about it, grafiti the streets, whisper secretivly about it to your pets. There is a facebook group for the launch here – https://www.facebook.com/events/203455376731775/
Or if you scan this QR code it will take you straight to the page.
Andrew Chapman / Author and Screenwriter 