Andrew Chapman An Authors Life

Don’t Sweat the Petty Things, and Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things

laptop-freeze

I have been forced to write in my underpants. I have no choice. It is either that or I sweat all over the keyboard. Which would you prefer? Both things are not particularly pleasing to imagine. But I have been forced to write in my underpants, so you have been forced to imagine it. It’s the heat you see, right now it is 32°C (or 89.6°F if you’re American) and as a British man I am simply not equipped to deal with that sort of thing.

I stood in front of the freezer for a while earlier, which gave some relief, but I had to stop because my laptop was beginning to freeze. I’ve started writing a children’s book called The Wonderbottom Family Animal Rescue Centre for Exotic and Unusual Pets (Book 1 – The Small Door) just because I was bored of reading kids stories with some kind of moral message at the centre of it. I want to write a book that is absurd and wonderful with the intention to make you laugh and nothing more. It is not deep and has no hidden lesson or moral backbone. But it’s hot damn it! (Not the book, the atmosphere). My eyebrows are failing me in their evolutionary role to protect my eyes from my forehead sweat! It is not the best condition to be writing humour!

So instead of marching forth with the odd tale about a curious boy and his pet platypus I have decided to order a kebab and have a glass of whisky and ice instead. I’m not suggesting the kebab will cool me down but if I’m going to be a sweaty mess anyway I might as well make the most of it. Soon I will be squelching on my leather couch with a spicy kebab, a glass of whisky and something exciting to watch on the telly.

God forbid I have unexpected visitors. Their dreams will be hellish for months to come.

Goodbye dear readers, drunken squalor awaits me.

Andrew Chapman An Authors Life, Words and Writers

Orgasmic Proof Reading

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I seem to have forgotten how to blog. It all started so well. Each week, a new post. Do you remember my first post? It was called The Manuscript Thief and was about me drunkenly letting one of my parent’s friends, Steve, take the unedited first draft of a manuscript home with him to read. This is a mistake that all new authors must avoid.

To cut a long story short he said he would go through it with a red pen and highlight any spelling or grammatical mistakes. Now, I learned how important it is to get yourself proof read when I prematurely released Tripping the Night Fantastic without seeking a proof reader. This mistake was reflected in the first few reviews. I then had to take the book off sale, make the necessary changes, and re-release it. So overall I was glad that Steve had offered to go through The Accidental Scoundrel (formally known as A Scoundrel for Love) manuscript with a red pen.

The problem is, he vanished. Months went by with little contact. It turns out he got a job in Scotland and moved without so much as a goodbye, or a, “Here’s your book back, sorry, I haven’t had time to look at it”. No, I wasted months waiting for him to hand it back so I could make the corrections and send it out into the world. Because of this the release date of the book has been delayed by 5 months.

Luckily the time away from the novel has allowed me to look at it with fresh eyes. The errors have revealed themselves to me and I have got the book to a point I am happy with. More importantly I have found myself a new proof reader!

She is the land lady of my local pub, Kerry. And here are four good reasons for why she makes an excellent proof reader –

  1. She keeps me at a satisfactory level of drunkenness and hasn’t banned me from the pub regardless of my frustrating and intolerable behaviour when drunk.
  2. She invited me up to her flat recently and I was surprised to discover a vast collection of books not dissimilar to my own. She reads. A lot.
  3. She’s a bit of a grammar Nazi (one of the less frowned upon branches of Nazism) and has proof read a manuscript before for a writerly relative.
  4. She has a very nice bottom. Now, this point may not have much to do with her abilities as a proof reader but it is very important.

It will be a few weeks before I get it back but I do trust her to actually give it back. (Unlike Steve! Pah to you Steve!). When she does hand it back, and says something like, “Oh Andy! It was marvellous! Funny and witty and charming, oh Andy, it was just fantastic. And there were hardly any mistakes! I do love a man with a good grasp of grammar!” And then she’ll probably swoon. Or have an unprompted orgasm, or something. What was I saying? Oh yes, when I do get it back I will announce the release date and send out review copies to anyone who wants one.

Andrew Chapman An Authors Life

A Hard-Drive to the Scrap Heap

As some of you will know my dear Hard-Drive left this world recently. It was taken to a Computer Repair Hospital and was diligently shot. It had one sole purpose in life and that was to remember. It would sit, nestled under my keyboard at the heart of my laptop, and just remember stuff. Like a monk, quietly concentrating on every word I wrote, remembering in detail every picture taken and video captured, it was a feat of great retention. And do you know what? It had never even occurred to me to ask how my old pal was doing. If he needed a break, or a sandwich, no, I ignored it and assumed it was an easy job for a part designed specifically to do just that.

And then, one day, while I toiled my way through the bland sense orgy that is common working life – the insipid drudge that keeps us from our passions – that trusty Hard-Drive of mine had a senior moment and, for reasons still unclear, forgot everything. It just forgot. It happens to the best of us.

Which is why it was sadly put to rest. I’m not sure how Hard-Drive’s are killed, I suspect they are just flung on one of the many piles of electronics crap that littered the Computer Hospital. But, before it was killed, the Computer Doctor – A man named Dave with no real doctorates as far as I’m aware – plugged it in to a machine and ran a retrieval program. There was no guarantee it would find anything.

It ran for 48 hours.

I was in Tesco browsing through the microwave meals when my phone rang a few days later. I answered it.

“Hullo?”

“Is that Andy?”

“Yes?”

“The bloke with the pitiful hard drive?” (note that he says hard drive with no hyphen or capital letters, this man knows his stuff).

“Ah, yes, that’s me. It’s not good then?”

“Can I recommend that next time you buy a hard drive you avoid Western Global* parts? They are notoriously bad. Where did you get this one?”

“It was inside my laptop.”

“Well, I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news.”

I put down my shopping basket and braced myself. “Let’s start with the worse?”

“It’s fucked.”

“Not a good start.”

“No.”

“And the good news?”

“I have managed to recover all of your files.”

I was so relieved I nearly dropped a microwave lasagne.

In the end it cost me £100 for the 48 hour retrieval and another £40 for a new hard drive, which they installed for free. So all in all not such a bad deal. It’s damn cheaper than buying a new laptop. And, most importantly, all my writing was saved!

*I didn’t actually catch the make he was trying to warn me off (I was momentarily distracted by an upturned microwavable cauliflower cheese that required righting) so this is by no means consumer advice. In fact, I’ve just Googled it and it turns out Western Global is actually an airline.**

** If, by chance, you do find a Western Global Airline inside you laptop please report it to the authorities and then admit yourself into a hospital. Your computer is probably fine, but you are almost certainly having a meltdown.

To read the first part of this post click here – The Solemn Death of a Beloved Hard-drive

Andrew Chapman An Authors Life

The Solemn Death of a Beloved Hard-drive

RIP old friend. You were working, and then you were not. The reason for your demise is a mystery. Is it wrong to speak ill of the dead? Because, dear Hard-drive, although I’m sad you’re gone, you could have given me some notice. A sign maybe? I mean, when you were fine and well you would tell me about all kinds of problems that you knew very well I had no chance of comprehending. Like, “ERROR 501: Header values specify a configuration that is not implemented.” Great! Thanks for letting me know, I’m not sure what to do about it, but thanks for keeping me in the loop. So why not, for once, couldn’t you have said, “Hey, buddy, I think I’m really ill. You better back up all your shit.” That is all I ask. But you’re dead now, so what can you do?

I’ll tell you, Hard-drive, what I did. I ripped you out of the machine that is your life-support, took you to a local computer hospital and asked the scruffy bloke behind the counter if he can restore you. You see, I’m nice like that. He un-did some screws. Removed your housing, and plugged you into a machine. Your vitals came up on a screen and the friendly computer-minded bum gave me the bad news.

“If you look here it says we are still able to run a restore program, but if you look in this box it says there is no information stored on the drive. We can go ahead with treatment but I can’t promise it will find anything.”

I thought about it. I did back up my writing about three weeks ago so I haven’t lost everything. But if I can’t get the information back off your comatose hard-drive I will have lost half of a kids book, a chapter from a thriller, and a folder of photos from my phone.

“How much will it cost?” I said.

“A hundred pounds. It will take forty eight hours and at the end of it I can’t guarantee I will find anything.” He must have seen the look of downtrodden despair on my face because then he said, “I’ll tell you what, if it doesn’t work you don’t have to pay.”

“Thank you, you’re a legend. Do what you can.”

He took my number and wrote my name on your underside. Look at that, Hard-drive, you and me, we’re like Andy and Woody from Toy Story.

If the process works I’m afraid you will not survive the procedure. All the information, all your memories, will be extracted from you and loaded onto a brand new hard-drive and installed into the old life-support that used to be your home and is my laptop. So, whichever way this goes, farewell, you temperamental fucking machine, you have succumbed to your final glitch.

In twenty four hours I will know if the procedure has worked. If I wasn’t superstitious about superstitions I would cross my fingers.

Andrew Chapman An Authors Life

Entertaining the Devil

It’s midnight. The record player is stuck in a loop. Muddy Waters is singing, “I’ve got my mojo work- I’ve got my mojo work- I’ve got my mojo work-“. My head nods in front of the monitor of my laptop. I pick up my whisky glass and twirl it. The ice clatters around the Grouse and water. I look up at the monitor. Late drunkenness brings on the writer’s madness. An old and dangerous fictional character is trying to break free. He wants to live again. Tripping the Night Fantastic is begging for a sequel.

I reach for my packet and remove a cigarette. I am about to head outside and smoke to clear my hazy mind but I’m caught by something on the screen.

Charlie Deavon is staring at me through the monitor. I can see his face in remarkable detail; every hair and every crease and line. He isn’t scowling but the thought is there.

He leans closer and head-butts the screen. My laptop rocks forward and I stop it with my hand. I put my cigarette down and open a word file.

The curser blinks for a moment. I have a sip of whisky. ‘So, what do you want to do, Charlie?’

He smiles, and from that moment I can no longer control his actions.

 

That is how the second book in the Tripping series came into this world. That was its birth. A moment of madness caught in a whisky haze and captured forever in a blog. It will be called Tripping the Urban Guerrilla. It will write itself in a way, just as the last one did. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, just as the last one was not. In the telling of its unusual tale it will capture that feeling of not being sure of your own reality. The kind of book that leaves you with the urge to have a drink and a cigarette. To be less in control of your inhibitions, and to enjoy it. A lesson for actively making your life worse, while simultaneously bringing a satisfying sense of mischief to it.

It won’t be my second book, that one has already been written. A stately manor based comedy called A Scoundrel for Love. But that won’t be released independently until it has been turned down by at least 5 agents. I’ve never sent a book to an agent before so maybe it will be picked up. Who knows?

The Tripping series will always be independent. They are too experimental (not in a hard to read kind of way, there is just a freedom to where the story goes and how it is told that might not suit a traditional publisher). As a writer I think you need the freedom with at least one project to write something that is completely unaffected. Something a bit unhinged. Something you will laugh at personally. A self-indulgent kind of writing. Somewhere to dump all your lunacy so when you come to write the good stuff it is easier to handle.

When I am bored, or in need of a fix of insanity, I turn to Charlie (not a pun) and entertain myself for a while.

The first trip:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tripping-Night-Fantastic-Charlie-Deavon/dp/1481210815/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390225013&sr=8-1&keywords=tripping+the+night+fantastic

Andrew Chapman An Authors Life

The Manuscript Thief

So there I was. It was Christmas Eve. Two days earlier I had finally finished my second book. The first draft had been printed off. The plan was to leave it, to forget about, to not even look at it, for a few months. Then, on one lonesome evening, I would pick up the manuscript and go through it with a red pen. But something dreadful would happen before I got the chance.

It is important that no one sees a freshly finished novel, you see, you get so close to the material that after a while all the mistakes become invisible to you. You know the story so well that it doesn’t matter how much you concentrate your mind fills in the blanks. If I write probable instead of probably I won’t notice it. My brain knows what word to expect and my eyes will pass over it without seeing the mistake. This is why you need a few months after finishing the book before you start proof reading it. And that was my intention with A Scoundrel for Love (the first in a series of humorous books based at the stately Rochdale Manor).

As I was saying, it was Christmas Eve. Some of my parent’s friends were round for drinks. One of them, a man named Steve, asked me how my writing was going.

“It’s going well,” I said, “In fact I’ve just finished a novel.”

“Oh, I would love to have a look at it.”

“Sure, why not.” I said, and scurried off to fetch it. That was my mistake. I blame the booze.

He read the first paragraph aloud (at least this much was error free);

“It’s strange being killed. I never thought I’d say it but it is. It’s annoying. Especially when you have no idea why you are being killed. Here I am, standing at the toilet with my pyjamas around my ankles and in walks a man with the intent to do harm. Perhaps I’m somehow to blame? Who knows? Either way, whether I am to be blamed or not, adjustments to my situation must clearly be made. Being drowned in a toilet is not something I take pleasure in. And it is certainly not the way I wish to uncoil my mortal spring, as they say. In the throes of death the automatic instincts of self-preservation set forth a plan of retaliation. My limbs reacted accordingly on my behalf.”

Everyone chuckled. There were positive murmurs.

“Oh, hold on, there’s a disclaimer before the first chapter,” he said, and then read on;

“As a result of lazy research the descriptions of the Whyte and Mackay distillery are entirely made up and so any attempt to carry out the heist described in these pages would be completely idiotic and utterly fruitless.”

More laughs. Things were going well.

Steve put the manuscript down and said he would have a proper look later. After all, the night was early and this was a Christmas gathering not a reading circle. I snuck away and left them to it.

When I went back to my parents lounge a few hours later (having spent some quality time being drunk with my brother) I discover my parents sitting alone watching TV.

“Have they gone?” I said.

“Yes, they left about ten minutes ago.”

“Oh, is my book in here somewhere?”

They frowned. “No, Steve took it with him to read on the train.”

“What?”

“What?”

“It hasn’t been edited. He’s going to think I’m an illiterate idiot!”

I rushed off and switched on my laptop just to read the first few chapters. And there they were, the glaringly obvious mistakes you become blind to. The word Authorities where it should have said authoritative. And for some reason (unfathomably! A relic from an early change perhaps) the word bucket instead of cave (how can that even be!). I had also written the word to instead of the. And, oh no, at some point, when I was just getting started with this book one of the characters was called Uncle Henry. It soon changed to Uncle Harry. But it looks like I missed a mention of him early on and within a few pages his name suddenly changes from Harry, to Henry, and back again!

For New Year’s Eve my parents met Steve and his wife for dinner. He mentioned it. He asked my dad if he thought I would mind if he went through it with a red pen and pick out the mistakes.

And actually I don’t mind that. I did have a friend of mine who teaches English to proof read it for me anyway. At least now when I do send it to him he will think I’m capable of producing a far more polished piece of writing than I actually am.

Still, it is a lesson learned. And if Steve turns out to be a good proof reader at least I might be able to rely on him for that in the future. All published authors have an editor and a proof reader. It must be accepted that a writer can’t write tens of thousands of words without the occasional error (there may be one or two exceptions out of the millions of published authors but they will be an extreme minority).

I’m glad in a way that my unfinished manuscript was accidently stolen from me. It will mean that when I send it out to agents and publishers it will be the best it can be.

I’ll let you know when I get the manuscript back exactly how bad the damage is.