You're No Good

"Thank you for your submission. It has been read but unfortunately it isn't what we are looking for at this time."

Early this week I received five letters. They were all very similar to the above and all from the same magazine, a well known publication that I've been trying to get my work into for over a year. I was naturally disappointed but I knew that I had more stories still out for consideration by this particular market. They might have rejected five but they had kept the other two. Maybe that meant that they intended to publish those.

Wrong. The missing pair of manuscripts arrived back on my door mat the next day complete with their own copies of the same thanks-but-no-thanks letter. Again, that was very disappointing. Very. But what am I to conclude from this wholesale  discarding of my writing? Am I doing a bad job of it? Am I simply a poor writer? Or had the editor recently published several other pieces in the same vein as those I'd sent in? Maybe they'd had a glut of stories and had been swamped by the sheer numbers? Or perhaps one or more of my stories was pretty close to what they wanted to print and with just a few minor tweaks would have been perfect.

That's the problem with such a generic response. "It isn't what we are looking for at this time." There's nothing that I can take from that apart from abject disappointment. It's not exactly constructive criticism but then again why should I expect an editor to provide a more detailed critique? Their job is to pick the best submissions that they think will please their readership, not to help me improve my writing skills. My job is to anticipate their requirements and follow the magazine's guidelines to the letter. Sometimes it might feel like I need ESP abilities to produce the work that they require but it has to be possible. Some people are able to do it - they get their writing published issue after issue.

So it's time for me to recommit to this work and produce the stories that they actually want to print, which is not necessarily the same as a story that I think is really good. I have to start with an original beginning though. Let's see…

'It was a dark and stormy night.'

© Shaun Finnie 2014

The Printer Must Die

I hate printers. I try not to hate too many things in life but for printers, I'll make an exception. I hate them with a passion, which is a bit of a blow as they're a necessary evil in my job like dealing with my tax return or non-paying editors. I've despised printers most of my adult life; certainly long before I got my tie stuck in one as an office junior.

It was way back in a year beginning with 19 and I was trying to change the dreaded toner cartridge on a huge old Hewlett Packard lazerjet. Anyone who had the misfortune to work with these behemoths back then will remember that this task was about as easy as performing dental surgery on a wide-awake and very hungry mountain lion, and twice as dangerous. It was also a filthy job so I, obviously, was wearing my best white work shirt.

As soon as I touched it the toner cart belched out a cloud of black dust, turning my shirt and any exposed areas of skin a dark grey colour. To make matters worse, as I leant in closer to dislodge the cartridge my tie got caught in the mechanism. The printer didn't try to pull me into its filthy depths (which even I could see would have been even funnier) but it refused to let go of my gaudy tie, surely the most useless piece of clothing known to man. What use are ties really, apart from for choking people with? The printer obviously agreed, as it kept a firm hold as I tried to pull myself out from its innards. So not only was my tie hideously miscoloured (even more than when I'd bought it), it was also mangled and, worst of all, the printer was trying to throttle me with it.

There's only so much of this kind of treatment that a man can take. I removed the tie from my neck and left it dangling like a severed line of entrails from the guts of the machine. It had clearly attacked me and I had an office full of witnesses, probably attracted by my vitriolic verbal outbursts. I quickly came to the obvious conclusion. There was nothing else for it.

The printer must die.

I know that the following will be a little difficult for some of you to believe but I swear that every word of it is true.

I picked the printer up. It was a hefty old lazerjet, about the size of a large microwave oven but several times heavier. And it was covered with disgusting toner dust. And it was still trying to digest my tie. It was more bulky than heavy but I managed to lift it to chest height and with a mighty roar hurled it, shot putt fashion, across the room.

At least, that was my intention. Unfortunately it was still cabled up and the cables were, even more unfortunately, securely fastened under the desk on which it stood. It didn't so much fly as plummet, hitting the table top with a dull thud. I'd hoped for it to shatter on the floor several metres away, spraying lethal dusty shards in all directions. Sadly all that happened was that there was a small and entirely non-serious crack in one of its paper trays. That's it. Apart from that, and having a tie mulched in its workings, the printer was entirely unscathed. I'd completely failed in my first task as a printer assassin.

So you'll understand that I was somewhat miffed this week when my own home office printer completely failed to print a manuscript that I sent to it. I have to concede that it made an effort, pulling in the paper and moving the print head backwards and forwards with the required chugging sound, but it made no attempt whatsoever to darken the sheet with its presence. The paper cane out as clean and white as it had gone in, totally unsullied by my words and ideas.

Seeing as my office is in the attic I knew that I could do a lot more damage to my own printer than I had with my employers' all those years ago. Sadly I also knew that it would be me who would have to clean the resulting carnage from my path if I flung it out of the window so instead I did the sensible thing.

I emailed the document to my Beloved. She printed it on our second in-house printer.

Safer. Cheaper. Less dangerous.

But I still hate printers.

© Shaun Finnie 2014

Home Away From Home

Like I've said regularly in recent blogs, I write because I have to. I write for my income, yes, but I'd do it even if I didn't get paid. For many years that's precisely what I did. My work wasn't read much back then either but it didn't matter because I had to write. I write because it's part of me and it has to come out.

This week I've been on holiday up in the Lake District. More accurately, I've been to Center Parcs near Penrith. To some it's a place where you can get access to nature while still retaining central heating and other home comforts. To others it's little more than Butlins for eco-warriors. Whatever, I love it there. It's calming for me, a place to slow down and reflect. And it's also a brilliant place to write.

What's not to love? Log (style) cabins, no cars, clean air. And lots of trees, birds an furry creatures to lower the heart rate and increase the word count. Bliss. I find that this kind of atmosphere is excellent for writing, for freeing my mind from the cares and worries of 'normal' life and allowing my muse to take me where it will. But probably more importantly, it's the best place that I've found for editing my work (and sometimes that of others too). The calmness of it all somehow frees me to improve a manuscript and make every word count.

It's the process of cleaning, correcting and tightening the work until it's the very best that I can make it, like polishing a newly-completed piece of furniture, that I find much easier in this kind of atmosphere. I can write almost anywhere if I have to and don't mind telling people to give me a minute on my own to scribble an elusive thought into my notebook but editing and rewriting are entirely different beasts, needing much more concentration. I think that's why the proverbial cabin in the woods is such a good location for it.

So that's what I'm doing - tidying the first draft of my next novel in preparation for more serious rewrites later. As holidays go, I've had worse.

A Money and Numbers Game

I love being my own boss.

I hate doing my own accounts.

All the time that I'm reading long-forgotten receipts and entering numbers in books and spreadsheets I'm imagining the ghost of a tax in-spectre looming over my shoulder, whispering little threats as to why I'm wrong and how he's going to punish me for claiming that fourth Americano while working in Starbucks. As if it isn't bad enough having the coffee shakes too.

But, like driving and studying the literary style of D*n Br*wn to see why he's so popular, it's a necessary evil. So I gathered everything up, spread it all out on my dining room table and started scribbling. In pencil, obviously. I know better than to get too confident.

It's strange, I spent several years working as a bookkeeper for a small business, a job that involved doing the personal accounts and tax returns of the directors of the company. But somehow that was different. Even though the numbers involved were bigger (much bigger), the implications didn't seem as real. That was for someone else. This time it's personal. It's my business, my tax return. Every number that I enter has a personal story behind it. That receipt for Australian sales? They were as a direct result of an afternoon spent spamming direct target advertising to a select number of Australian readers and reviewers. The invoice regarding that huge hardback book? Research for a quiz book that has yet to see the light of day. There was never this level of personal involvement when I was doing exactly the same job for someone else. And I was getting paid to do theirs. The time I spend doing my own is time that I could be writing more saleable product.

I'd love to pay someone to do my accounts for me but the truth is that I don't earn enough to make it worthwhile. Unless they were so wonderfully creative that they could get me a refund large enough to cover their own expense of course. Which, however much me and the accountant might want it, is unlikely. My account books simply don't have enough entries to be that creative.

So after weeks (months) of procrastination I finally sat down and made the effort. I wrote up all my invoices and receipts, numbered them and filed them away tidily. I ticked all the transactions off against statements and other documents. Current account? Check, all ticked off and balanced. Credit card? Yep, everything agrees with the statements and receipts. Petty cash?

Petty cash? Not quite so successful. After balancing all the big accounts the one with the little tiddly amounts was the one that caused me the most trouble. Things like a couple of quid for stamps and envelopes or a new printer cartridge. I don't think that there was a single entry for more than a tenner yet there was a piffling small amount difference between what I had in my cash box and what the figures said that I should have. There must have been a receipt missing.

I looked in my files in case I'd clipped it to something else. No joy. Maybe it was in that-drawer-where-you-stuff-things-to-look-at-later? (Tell me it's not just me?)  No, it wasn't in there. Maybe I'd confused it with my own personal receipts? But I hadn't, it wasn't with them either.

I eventually found it. It had slipped in between some blank pages of the book I do my accounts in. Turns out that the missing invoice was for that very same accounts book.

Irony. You've got to love it.

Eight Days a Week

What does your normal working week consist of? Is it the clichéd Monday to Friday, forty hours or so? Or perhaps it's more flexible that than? Maybe you might even do shift work? Chances are though, whatever your working pattern, your employer gives you two days a week off, probably Saturday and Sunday.

As a self-employed writer I have the freedom to work whatever hours I want. That's fantastic, but it has a downside; the fewer hours that I put in then the lower wordcount I produce. I try to work five days and take two days off but unless I have something special planned those two rest days are unlikely to be at the traditional weekend. I prefer to take my two days free time when most people are at work, meaning that anywhere I go will be quieter and possibly cheaper.

But a full day off? Twenty-four hours without any writing whatsoever? That very rarely happens. I know that many people will see my work as an easy option - sitting around thinking and occasionally tippy-tapping at a keyboard - but the truth is that I'm practically always working. In this line of work there's no time off at all. Even when I'm away from the office my mind's still working out plot points, considering how my characters would react in certain situations, soaking up my surroundings or making notes about people and places I see for further reference.

On a night out with friends or a day shopping with the Beloved I'll always have a notebook and pen with me. I've been known to dictate messages into my phone for later transcription and even sent text messages to myself if a have a sudden thought that just needs a quick note. I have notebooks in just about every room in the house including a waterproof one in the bathroom for if I have a flash of inspiration while soaking my aches and pains away. And naturally there's a pad in my bedside cabinet so that I can document those most unfathomable of thoughts - dreams - before they disappear back into whatever ether they came from.

My point is that, though I may not actually clock as many official working hours as most employees, I can honestly say that I'm always on call, ready for that moment when something triggers a thought that has to be recorded before it evaporates like early morning mist over a summer lake. I'm never unavailable, the muse can strike at any moment and if I miss it then, with the state of my memory, it's gone forever. You could say that I'm at work 24/7, 365 days a year.

It's a tough life, but it's so much more enjoyable than my old job in the steelworks.

© Shaun Finnie 2014

Silence is Golden

It's good to get away from the office and the keyboard sometimes, to sit peacefully with just a notepad and a pen. Somehow in a different environment the ideas flow in a different way. It seems more organic, like I'm creating stories in the same way that people have done for centuries.

I sat in my local library, a lovely new building that laughs in the face of all the local council cuts that have fallen on similar facilities up and down the country recently. It's more of a community centre really but the library section is excellent, well stocked with books and incredibly peaceful. It's almost like a church for those of us who worship the written word. I settled into a comfortable wing-backed armchair, paused a moment to soak in the calming atmosphere and then took up the tools of my trade.

In this perfect workplace I churned out page after page of useful prose and nodes, the ideas flowing directly from brain to arm to pen to page. It was effortless, almost like automatic writing, if you believe in such things. I was, as athletes say, in the zone and all was well in my ultra-productive world.

Remember that I said the library is a kind of community centre? I should have become suspicious when the librarians began to erect a set of brightly coloured barriers around the children's book area, just beside my little oasis of calm. I should have noticed that the little cluster of push chairs and buggies in the doorway had multiplied in the last few moments but I was so engrossed in my work that my peripheral vision had sort of shut down. I was pretty much oblivious to everything except my blurring hand and the scribbled squiggles that it left on the page.

Jean-Paul Sartre said that 'Hell is other people'. If I may, for the purposes of this blog I'll amend that to 'Hell is other people's children.' Now, I'm sire that all the little darlings are perfect angels, at least as far as their parents are concerned, but an entire pack of them did nothing for the library's ambience or my concentration. Fingernails down a blackboard sound like nothing compared to a shrieking two year old. The repeated and unheeded maternal calls for Tilly and Kayden to stop running around weren't really conducive to my channelling of the muse but I grit my teeth and pushed my pen with a renewed purpose. I'm a professional. I could work through this. And I did. I plodded on and tried to block out the sounds of carnage. I have to be a bit smug here and say that it worked. For a bit. Right up until the singing started.

I'm quite willing to believe that, at some point in his fictional furry life, Little Peter Rabbit did indeed have a fly upon his noes but let's be honest: his tale doesn't really make for great song lyrics. He's never going to win an Ivor Novello with lines about his floppy ears and curly whiskers. But the thirty or so members of the mother and toddler group didn't seem to care, with the elder half of their contingent singing along with gusto in four different keys at the same time, while the younger attendees either stared at their parents in bemused incomprehension or completely ignored them and continued slapping their play partners with the hardest hardback they could wield.

I momentarily considered joining with the song but suspected that my vibrant tenor might stand out among so many wobbly altos and sopranos. And anyway, I know a somewhat different set of lyrics to the tune that they were attempting. I'm all for education at an early age but I think that there are some things that these toddlers were a little too young to find out about.

I tried to carry on with my work but the moment had passed. My creative juices had dried up like a week-old Lidl Satsuma. It was no good. I packed up my stuff in my manly man-bag and headed for the coffee shop around the corner. Perhaps a slice of Victoria sponge would clear my ears.

But just before I left the library lady nearby asked if she could have a piece of paper to scribble some notes on and naturally I shared a page from my notebook with her. There was never any question as to whether I would. Share with people, it's just the right thing to do.  Remember: there's no I in Pad.

Read or Dead

I'm not a great fan of literary sequels. But at least they're so much better than the sequel penned by a different writer after the original author's death. That really is a ghastly idea.

Here's a challenge: can you think of any book that's a follow-up to a dead author's work which compares favourably with the original novel. I bet you'll struggle.

There are a whole host of 'Sherlock Holmes' and 'James Bond' books written long after their original author had passed and while many are readable and some highly enjoyable they don't hold a candle to the brilliance of the original creations. The same with the many authors who have tried to follow in H.P. Lovecraft's sick and twisted footsteps.

I might make an exception for Andrew Neiderman writing as "The New Virginia Andrews" but again, nothing that he's produced is of the level of her classic 'Flowers in the Attic'. And Eoin Colfer is an excellent writer. I love his Artemis Fowl series and his later, more adult-oriented works, 'Screwed' and 'Plugged', but can anyone really offer an argument in support of 'And Another Thing', his addition to the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' series? If ever there was a redundant addition to a classic series surely this was it?

This blog and it's predecessor from last week can really be summed up as a plea to writers young and old to strive for original ideas, to shy away from the lure of an already-established readership in favour of pushing new boundaries and mining for new storylines and characters.

Of course there are no new ideas in the universe but is it too much for obviously talented writers to hang the old ideas onto new frameworks with new characters and new situations to flesh them out? Are there no new sleuths in the world? Is it really more important to write more 'Sherlock' stories? And P.D. James is supremely talented, so why on Earth did she have to create the Jane Austen pastiche, 'Death Comes to Pemberley'?

I better quit before I descend into Full Rant Mode. So it's time to wrap up, for time is something I have little of at the moment. I have a huge writing project that I'm in the middle of.

It's a sequel to my novel, 'The Happiest Workplace On Earth'. Well I have to pay the bills like everyone else.

© Shaun Finnie 2014