Christmas Number One

When my best friend Simon told me that his band, The Woe Betides, had a plan this year to try and become Christmas number one, I really liked the sound of it.  For the past couple of years in this country, the coveted number one spot has immediately gone to whatever awful single the winner of the X-Factor puts out the day after their cynically timed final the last weekend before the charts are counted for Christmas.  I agreed that a well thought-out, well publicized, campaign from a genuinely independent band – no label, no PR company, no nothing – could be a really cool rallying cry for any true music fans out there sick of hearing Simon Cowell’s manipulated pop crap at Christmas, and wished them the best of luck.

Unfortunately, it seems, everybody has had the same idea this Christmas.  Assumedly, ever since the success of last year’s Facebook campaign to usurp the garish X-Factor rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah with the far better Jeff Buckley version, the cogs have been turning throughout the music world: now that downloaded songs are counted equally against the physical sale of new-release singles in the UK, technically any song, released at any time, has a chance of hitting the charts provided enough people simultaneously download them.  This is why, following the death of Michael Jackson, his music dominated the charts once again earlier this year, and why, last Christmas, the long-dead Jeff Buckley hit number two in the UK charts in outraged collective protest of the saccharine X-Factor version of Hallelujah put out by Alexandra Burke.  With the power of iTunes, Amazon, Napster and assorted other online retailers of ephemeral MP3s behind them, independent chancers like the Woe Betides can release their non-X-Factor offerings on December 14th and do equal battle with the marketing might of the supermarket-friendly X-Factor single, maybe even forcing some real music onto the number one slot this Christmas time.

Amongst the various indie bands vying to knock Simon Cowell off his stolen Christmas throne (and a smattering of worthy charity singles, such as Fucked Up’s rowdy cover of the Band Aid classic Do They Know It’s Christmas, and HUNKS and Friends’ awesome The Magic of Christmas) there has, however, come a rival Facebook campaign: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NUMBER ONE.

Now when I first saw this I felt bad for the Woe Betides.  Rage, being a hugely popular band once upon a time, like Jeff Buckley before them, would surely swamp an unknown band like Simon’s in terms of sales and scale of fan-base, and the Woe Betides’ slim chances of becoming Christmas number one had surely just become even slimmer?  Indeed, these thoughts were clearly shared by the band themselves, and their launch for the Christmas single, Natwest Tower, was promptly renamed from the original “Get Natwest Tower to Christmas Number One” show, to the suitably tounge-in-cheek: “Help the Woe Betides Fail to Get to Number One”.

A shame, but by this point even I, a loyal fan who loves the song, Natwest Tower, was being swayed by the Rage Against the Machine argument. 

You see, when Simon first told me about the band’s idea to go for the number one spot my one reservation was this: what makes Natwest Tower a specifically Christmassy song?

When the idea was first pitched to me, there were two songs in contention for release: Natwest Tower and a song called Little Beliefs.  Although I much preferred Natwest Tower, there was a line in the second song – I can’t recall it exactly, but it was something to do with God being unnecessary or irrelevant or something – that I thought was really appropriate for Christmas time.  As an atheist, I told him, it would be nice to hear a secular, rationalist song in the charts this Christmas.  Indeed, following the recent success of things like The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, and Robin Ince’s Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, there was, I told him, a genuine growing market out there of people who, like me, love celebrating Christmas, but don’t believe in Christ.  With the right amount of publicity, and a small effort at making some connections with the people putting together this stuff (Robin Ince, Ariane Sherine, Skeptics In The Pub groups around the country, etc) I thought they could probably gather a lot of support for the song that would turn their simple publicity stunt into something much more than a fun gimmick to gain the band some recognition: it would actually be for a good cause too!

Sadly though, the band weren’t happy with the finished recording of Little Beliefs, so went ahead with Natwest Tower as the single they would release.  It’s a great song – the better song of the two – and as a loyal friend and fan of the band, I dutifully bought it on December 14th. 

But was it right for Christmas number one? 

Did it have anything festive about it at all? 

Were the lyrics in any way relevant to Christmas? 

Not really, no.

And this is where Rage Against the Machine came in, and why, come December 14th, I bought a copy of their single too.

Although the Rage song itself is even less Christmassy than Natwest Tower (the song Killing in the Name has been chosen), it possesses something that the Woe Betides song does not: a cause greater than mere exposure.  With it’s rousing closing chant of: “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!”, Killing in the Name was chosen as a direct fuck you to the X-Factor.  Instead of the vapid and meaningless pop dross of 2009 winner, Joe McElderry, churning out over the radio this Christmas, the brilliantly conceived plan is to replace McElderry’s manufactured rubbish with this guttural snapshot of ‘90’s rap/metal defiance.

At least, that’s what I told myself as I followed the masses and “stuck it to the man” with my 99p purchase of a song I already own (a whole 20p more expensive than the better song by the Woe Betides).  But then I realized something that seems to have been strangely glossed over in all this hype and hoopla: Rage Against the Machine’s supposedly seditious “bombtrack”, Killing in the Name, is actually owned by the exact same record label, Sony BMG, who are releasing the X-Factor atrocity.

Indeed, it is interesting to note too, that Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah, last year’s protest record of choice, is also a Sony BMG song, as Columbia Records – who released Grace, the album on which the single was found (and also, incidentally, Various Positions, the Leonard Cohen album on which the original recording of Hallelujah was released) – is a Sony BMG company too.

So instead of just having one song assuredly reaching the top of the charts this Christmas, thanks to the supposedly spontaneous grassroots phenomenon of RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NUMBER ONE, Sony BMG will have two.  They get the mainstream X-Factor money, and they get the money of those ostensibly anti-corporate “true music” fans who oppose it. 

Genius.

Suddenly the idea of “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” seems hollow: we have done exactly what they’ve told us, forsaking truly independent artists like the Woe Betides, or good-cause charity singles, to put even more money into the pockets of the same people who we foolishly believed we were trying to screw.

Indeed, the worse thing about this whole ridiculous episode is that it gets people like me, and all the other X-Factor hating music fans out there who wouldn’t normally give two damns about the UK Top 40 chart, actually caring about something as meaningless as who gets to number one on December 20th.

I mean, who actually cares who gets to number one?

Sure, it’s sometimes nice when a glut of new Christmas-themed songs come out in December and there’s an interesting little race between them all for which one will get the top slot (as in 1973, for example, when Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody beat Wizzard’s I Wish it Could Be Christmas Everyday), or when Christmas happens to coincide with the long-running chart dominance of a particular song, as it did in 1993 with Meat Loaf’s I Would Do Anything For Love, and the question becomes whether or not it will hold onto that success all the way until Christmas (it didn’t; it was usurped by the dreadful Mr. Blobby), but, other than those few minor intrigues, the last chart list before Christmas is as irrelevant to real music fans as any other chart countdown of the year.

Of course, that was the whole point of the Woe Betides’ venture: at this odd time of the year when the entire country randomly turns its collective attention to the usually ignored charts for seven weird and wonderful days, it is possible to make a bit of a splash and get your name out there in a way not normally possible the other fifty-one weeks of the year.  Indeed, it is a chance for a band like the Woe Betides, who have paid for the recording and release of their music out of their own pockets, without the funding of a record label, to truly show the corporate world that with a bit of passion and publicity, real music – music not played for profit, or demographically targeted to the most lucrative audiences, but music played from the heart, out of the indomitable need to create – could maybe even oust the stranglehold of big business’ cloying grip on the UK charts and give us something different for a change instead of the usual bland and empty syrup of the X-Factor.

But the world never fails to let you down.

Instead of making a real statement to the Simon Cowells of the universe and forsaking corporate-owned music this Christmas for something independent and real, we have all been suckered into buying the same corporate crap in a slightly different flavour: Rage Against the Machine instead of Joe McElderry; Sony BMG’s profitable rebels instead of Sony BMG’s latest TV idol.

It might feel good shouting “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” at the radio this Christmas and feeling like you’ve “taken something back” when the DJ announces Killing in the Name as our new Christmas number one….But now we all know Joe McElderry’s name, even if we haven’t been watching the X-Factor, and we all just made a couple hundred-thousand pounds more for the same company that created him, and who will continue to create a whole generation of new Joe McElderrys until we finally realize what we’re doing, invest in real, independent music for a change, and say no to corporate drivel for good.

Yes, it might feel good hearing “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” blare out of the radio this Christmas time, but it’ll feel even better when we actually take that message to heart and do it instead of singing along like obedient and well-trained sheep to yet another chosen song from our shepherd.

Natwest Tower is available at Amazon, on iTunes, and at Napster right now.  It’s not very Christmassy, and it hasn’t got a hope in hell of becoming Christmas number one, but it’s real music created by real people and well worth checking out.   

Technorati Tags: Christmas,Christmas Number One,The Woe Betides,Natwest Tower,Rage Against the Machine,X-Factor,Joe McElderry,Sony BMG,Facebook,Music,Music Industry,UK

WDCFK?: Rejections #41-43

Well – the bad news is that the one agent interested enough to read the full manuscript has now got back to me: thus rejection #41.

It was tough to hear – basically, I’ve sent fifty of these things out into the world and pretty much the uniform response has been “thanks, but no thanks.”  Having one agent actually intrigued enough to read on really meant a lot after spending a year of my life working on this thing, and I couldn’t help but hope she would be won over by the story despite her initial heads up that it would be “unlikely” the agency would be able to take me on.  It was disappointing for reality to be so depressingly predictable.

“There were definitely bits I liked about your novel” she told me; “I very rarely ask to see the full MS so that can only be a good thing”.  At the same time though, she felt that the “violence starts to seem overwhelming in its intensity” after a while and made her “tempted not to read on”.  She also told me that she “preferred the story of Gregory Cross (there was something horribly believable about it) to the one of Charlie Faber”. 

Now, there’s no reason you would know what this means if you haven’t read the book, but without spoiling anything – it’s revealed in the very first pages – Gregory Cross is Charlie Faber’s father.  Although on the one hand this criticism is nice, because she applauds the story of Gregory Cross that I have created, on the other it is essentially a complete rejection of the fundamental premise of the entire novel (the story is about Charlie Faber’s coming to terms with the ramifications of having a father like Gregory Cross). 

The book is not called “Why Did Gregory Cross Kill?” it is called “Why Did Charlie Faber Kill?”, and the reason for this is that it is specifically the story of Charlie Faber.  The story of Gregory Cross is a fairly generic one (though I made it as interesting as possible): the story of a horrific serial killer who fooled his family and murdered the innocent – add in a loveable detective character and you’d have a bestselling crime novel on your hands!  The story of Charlie Faber, however, has always been – to my mind – the much more fascinating one (and the reason I wrote the novel in the first place): how can the child of a serial killer ever grow up normally, knowing that such madness might lie in their own genes?

Whilst I felt pretty good that one half of this double-headed story was so praised, it was a slight kick in the teeth that such praise kind of came at the expense of the entire basis for the rest of the novel (sort of like saying of Stephen King’s The Stand: “I liked the bit about the plague, but then all that aftermath stuff was a real bore).

She also told me that “I don’t think the title is a good one- it deserves something much more arresting and original”. 

Although when I first read this it added extra deflation to an already miserable moment, after considering the line for a little longer than is strictly healthy, I realized two things: 1) I have never actually been married to the name Why Did Charlie Faber Kill?, I just thought it was unique and weird enough that it might look good on a poster at the train station and stand out a bit from the crowd.  Also, 2) the phrase “it deserves something much more arresting and original” is actually saying quite a nice thing when you think about it: the novel is good enough to deserve a better title.  If the book were no good, it wouldn’t matter what it was called. 

This, and the standard “I must stress that you should explore other avenues as others may well feel differently” at least tells me that my writing is good enough that she didn’t laugh the manuscript out of her house when she read it: it might not have been right for her list or her tastes, but it wasn’t unrecognizable as literature.  Believe me – at this stage, with no publications under my belt, that really is a comfort to hear!

Once again though, this entire process has made me very aware that the interesting novel I aspired to write – the one I believed, from the start would be highly commercial – is actually incredibly difficult to place.  It has an unlikeable protagonist (because we know from page one – and from the title – that he is a murderer), incredibly intense passages of highly visceral violence that make spending time in the company of this first-person narrator a fairly bleak endeavour, and a dark and depressing climax.  Somewhere in the writing of it I forgot that my own tastes might not be everyone’s – that most people like to read happy stories about happy things; that spending time in the company of serial killers is only “entertaining” when that serial killer gets his comeuppance or is fiendishly intelligent and almost cartoonish in his deviousness.  Most people don’t like reading books that expect you to feel sympathy for a psychotic killer; they certainly don’t like reading about violence towards animals either.

I’ve never been one to read books for simple escapism – I like novels to make me think, and for every happy-go-lucky Janet Evanovich book I read there’s always a depressing-as-hell Margaret Atwood tome to make my smiles go away.  I’m not a fan of “Hollywood endings” when they don’t make sense, and have always believed in servicing the story, not targeting the story towards the summer beach-reading crowds.  When I wrote Charlie Faber, therefore, I wrote a novel based on an idea, and took the story wherever that idea led me, regardless of its commercial ramifications. 

That possibly wasn’t the best thing to do.

Although I don’t regret it artistically, I am coming to terms with the fact now – especially after this latest rejection from the most hopeful prospect of the bunch – that perhaps Charlie Faber is not going to be my first published novel.  It is a novel that maybe you need to already know and trust in an author to want to pick up.

As annoying a realization as that is to make at this late stage in the game, it is incredibly useful information to take on board for my next novel, which has already subconsciously learned from the arguable mistakes of the first.

The new novel has a likeable and sane central protagonist; it has a much less violent story, with plenty to keep you intrigued; it is written in the third person, so you are not stuck in the head of one lone lunatic throughout; and it has a happy, morally clear, ending. 

It is also going to be short, about half the size of Charlie Faber.

100,000 words is the goal I’m setting myself, and I envision it as a story of two halves with a sixty/forty split.  I have been working on it properly since October 8th, and am nearly 40,000 words in (thus nearly halfway through) in just two months.  I keep up like this, and I should be finished by April!   

All of this is stuff I would never have thought about had I not had the experience of writing – and trying to sell – Charlie Faber first, so I am thankful of the failure to get it published as much as I am frustrated by it. 

Hopefully, book #2 will be much more successfully placed, and, once I am a published author, it’ll then perhaps be easier to sell something as dark and fucked up as Charlie Faber.  Until then, I simply keep persevering. 

Following the big rejection from this one particular agent, I then received two more form rejections.  Once all the rejections are in, I shall then start sending the manuscripts straight to the publishers, where they will sit on the slush-piles for god-knows how long. 

In the meantime though, novel #2 is coming along really well, and I look forward to starting the whole process again in 2010, hopefully with much better results.  It may be a heart-breaking hell-ride, but it’s a hell-ride I am growing to love.

Technorati Tags: Why Did Charlie Faber Kill?,Literary Agents,Writing,Publishing

Paranormal Activity

So I saw Paranormal Activity yesterday and enjoyed it very much.

It wasn’t quite Ghostwatch or Blair Witch, but it was a helluva decent scare, and had Ghostwatch and Blair Witch never existed, it would have been light-years ahead of its other recent competition (the excellent [REC] excluded, of course).

The most blissful thing about it – besides it simplicity and believability – was that the whole hand-held “real life” camera style was so wonderfully steady throughout.  Previous movies that have utilized this contrivance (Blair Witch and Cloverfield especially) have employed nauseatingly bad camera-work to give their films that edgy sense of reality, but in the world of Paranormal Activity, thank god, the haunted couple were considerate enough to have gone out and bought themselves a tripod!

My favourite take-home from the whole experience though, were the Generation-Youtube idiots leaving the cinema afterwards: “The last fifteen minutes were really scary, but the rest of the film was shit”.  That was the refrain repeated all around me by the same teenagers and university students who had been screaming out loud, just minutes before, when the movie came to its incredibly effective end.  Clearly these people have no understanding of the basic role of build-up and tension in horror films.  Yes, the last fifteen minutes were the scariest, but they only worked so well BECAUSE the rest of the film had been, as they called it, "shit".  What “shit” actually meant in this case was the slow build up of gradual tension into an expert crescendo – without which, the last fifteen minutes would have been nothing.

Anyway, it was a fun film, but here are some things in my life that, had they been different, could have made my last night's sleep gone a little better after watching Paranormal Activity:

1)There not being a creepy attic crawl-space over the desk in my office - exactly like the one in the film - which has bothered me since we moved in.

2)Lucy not randomly doing weird things in her sleep earlier in the week; sitting up, talking, basically sleepwalking from a seated position in the bed.  It was creepy enough BEFORE thinking that a demon might be involved.

3)The fact that I usually sleep with one foot sticking out of the bed - just like the woman in the film does just before something invisible grabs it.

4) Past, unresolved, experience with alleged "demonic possession". 

5)Having watched enough horror films in my life to know that my staunch atheism and disbelief in ghosts and demons is exactly the kind of thing which seems to piss off the spirit world (in which I don't believe) and makes me an obvious target for their wrath.

6)The many years (post-Ghostwatch and Blair Witch) spent wondering: if I'm wrong about the whole no-such-thing-as-ghosts thing, wouldn't it be scary if... and then developing a fairly long list of things that would scare the shit out of me; many of which were featured in Paranormal Activity and thus were sitting fresh in my mind last night.

7)The decision to eat nightmare-inducing chocolate before bed, and drinking so much water that I woke up at 3.30am needing the toilet, convinced that I'd been woken up by other, more malignant, means and finding points 1) through 6) racing through my head with alarming insistency as I lay there sweating in the dark like an overgrown child.

To me though, that’s all par for the course of a good horror film.  If it doesn’t keep you up for at least one night afterwards, then they’re just not making them right – and I haven’t felt like that after a movie for quite a while!

 

Technorati Tags: Journal,Paranormal Activity,Movies,Insomnia,Horror,Ghostwatch,Blair Witch

WDCFK?: Rejection #40

Just so you know… someone else out there thinks my work “isn’t quite the right fit for our list”.

Technorati Tags: Why Did Charlie Faber Kill?,Literary Agents,Publishing,Writing,Journal

What Royal Mail Giveth With One Hand…

After writing a lot of stuff in support of the postal strikers over on The Tone of Our Oppression, I was delighted earlier this week to have my own personal experience of why a full-time staff of human postal workers is a much more desirable prospect than the largely automated/casual worker style system that Royal Mail’s controversial “modernization” programme demands.

Some idiot whom I had bought something from via Pay Pal, had written my address down wrongly on a Christmas present I had ordered for my wife.  The package – which had no sender’s information on the envelope – had been rejected by the people at the erroneous address and a big “RETURN TO SENDER – NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS” had been scribbled onto it.  Yet, thankfully, our local Postie clearly recognized my name, knew my real address, and thus posted me the fuck-up with no problem.

If that had been left to computers and temporary staff, a small but significant portion of my wife’s Christmas giftage would now be lost somewhere in a sorting office’s Dead Mail room – no known sender to return it to, and a recipient’s address that was one simple digit out.

However, the flipside of this story – and in no way a retraction of my support of the striking Posties – is that, rather annoyingly, an expensive and rare Smashing Pumpkins box-set I finally sold on Amazon Marketplace a month ago, appears to have gone missing in the mail, screwing me out of £45.

The box-set – a Christmas present I was given many moons ago, listened to once, and then left to collect dust as my musical tastes turned to other things – was something I knew was pretty valuable, and that I had kept in good nick (despite never playing it) for over thirteen years.  An annoyingly large package that – due to it’s ill-placed carrying handle – didn’t fit comfortably in any standard CD shelving; I kept the item anyway, because I knew that one day I could sell it and make a little bit of money for the hassle.

When Luce and I had a clearout earlier this year, not being currently employed, I thought it might be a nice idea to join up with Amazon Marketplace and get a few bits and pieces sold as a means to some much needed cash.  Finally, after all this time of it taking up space on our shelves, it was time to sell the Smashing Pumpkins, and I was quite delighted to see that it was going these days for between fifty to one hundred quid!

Knowing that my copy of the box-set had been a bit unloved for over a decade – a little dusty, a little worn – I figured I’d try and guarantee a sale by undercutting every other dealer and listing it at only £45.  It was in pretty good condition, and, considering that it was originally a gift, a guaranteed forty-five pounds in my pocket out of an original investment of nothing, seemed like a pretty fair deal to me.

Sadly, despite my low, low, prices, whilst lots of other old DVDs and stuff of mine sold well, the Pumpkins box-set didn’t.  In these tough economic times, even forty-five pounds is a lot of money to spend on an old collectors box-set from 1996.  Many months passed, and I wrote the whole thing off as a bust.  I’d keep the box-set myself and sell it again later, at a time when there were more people interested – after Billy Corgan’s death, perhaps, or when hell had frozen over?

But then – lo and behold – about a month ago I got an email: the box-set had finally been sold!

Annoyingly, this was slap bang in the middle of the first wave of postal strikes, and knowing the possible problems the strikes might cause for my delivery, I tried to be as canny as possible in sending out my item.  Waiting for the first wave of strikes to be over, I posted it on the Monday, with no more strikes planned until Thursday, and was told that, with First Class delivery, it should get to my buyer in plenty of time before Thursday’s action.

Yet here we are, over four weeks later, and the box-set has still not arrived.

At least that’s what this guy tells me.  To be honest, I don’t think he’s lying; it’s supposed to be a Christmas present for his wife and he seems really gutted not to have received it…but one of the shitty things about Amazon Marketplace (I am learning) is that there’s really nothing you can do to prove a buyer’s claims like this, so you just have to take it on trust.  I do trust my buyer – but if he is lying, then he’s just got a free £45 box-set, while I, meanwhile, am out about £49.50 (once you include the costs of P&P).

Even though I don’t think my buyer was lying, it seems pretty easy for a guy like that to rip a guy like me off, and although I’m pissed about this situation, it’s been a pretty good lesson in Amazon Marketplace shittery; I’m glad that the Pumpkins discs were the only big-money item I tried selling in that way because it’s clearly just too risky to trust.

The reason I bring the strike into all this is because it is the existence of the strike that makes the missing package story both plausible and questionable.  With so much mail stalled and piled up – it is both easy to believe that the box-set got lost, and to believe that my buyer saw the perfect opportunity to spin me a convincing yarn.  Without the strikes, I’m pretty sure that my package, sent First Class on a Monday, would have got to its destination by the end of the week unscathed.  With them – all bets were off.

That said, I’m not blaming the strikers – I’m blaming the idiots in management and government who made the strikers need to go on strike.  It is their fault – not the postmen.

Either way though, I had to refund my guy £46.21 (including his costs for postage and packaging), and without either the money for selling the thing, or the box-set itself (from which I could recoup these losses by selling it again one day) I feel majorly pissed off, and have applied to Royal Mail for a compensation claim.

I have absolutely no reason to believe that my buyer was lying to me, and I have absolutely no reason to believe that a well packed, first class package should not have arrived at its destination on time unless the Royal Mail lost it.  Hopefully, the Royal Mail will see things that way too, and I’ll get my compensation.  But what they giveth me with one hand they seem to take away with the other…so there’s my two postal related stories on this stormy Thursday night.

Technorati Tags: Personal,Journal,Royal Mail,Amazon Marketplace,Postal Strikes,Smashing Pumpkins,The Aeroplane Flies High,Christmas

Autumn Half Term…

I think it’s finally time to admit what I’ve secretly known for a while now: the people who live in the area we now live in have terrible reading habits, and a forty minute round-trip walk up to the second-hand book shops of Cotteridge, simply isn’t worth it.

Also, Pershore Road, post recession, is just about the most depressing place on earth.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I thought I’d get the blog up to date on the events of the last two weeks. Namely, Lucy’s autumn half-term, a time of year which always means the nice hard-working routine that we somehow manage to re-establish after the lengthy summer holidays, being completely destroyed again, and reduced to a fortnight of pure, unadulterated laziness and fun!

As it happens, having spent the week before half-term finally seeing the elusive through-line of my new novel emerge out of the subconscious wilderness, and knowing now exactly where the story is going and what I am trying to do with it, it was great to have a two-week break from writing to let the new ideas percolate and grow. Monday this week marked the return to writing after the vacation, and I am incredibly happy with where this new novel is now heading…

But back to half-term. Beginning with a nice visit from Lucy’s parents, the theme of this holiday – although we didn’t know it yet – was clearly established with a lovely trip to Birmingham’s Botanical Gardens. Even in the rain, and with very little in flower, this is a really great place to visit if you like taking nice long leisurely walks through some very pretty surroundings. We not only got to explore the gardens for the first time – having only previously been, very briefly, for a friend’s wedding reception that served drinks out on the patio before going inside to a function room – but we also got to use some of our leftover wedding umbrellas too, to protect us from the drizzle!

Following the gardens, not yet ready to go home, we decided to check out the little nature reserve we always pass on the Pershore Road, to and from the city centre. Again, we had never been there before, and neither Lucy, nor I, had any idea whether it would be any good…but it was something to do with her parents, and it was local, so we thought: what the hell?

This was a good decision, because, it turns out, this nature reserve, a mere ten minutes or so away from our house, has a fantastic array of animals, and despite it’s small-scale appearance from the outside of the road, actually has quite an expansive grounds, and features wallabies, otters, meerkats, snakes, lizards, lemurs, and even a couple of big cats! We spent several hours enjoying the animals, before finally returning home for an evening of take-out pizza and the movie, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which I really enjoyed.

The next day we went on a little walk around the local areas, and then, after a lunch of scrambled eggs, the in-laws returned to Ipswich, and Lucy and I raced off to the cinema to indulge in our now annual Halloween tradition of watching the new Saw film.

This year, it was Saw VI. And though I was dismayed to hear that both a Saw VII and Saw VIII have already been announced (the original plans had been to end the franchise with number six), the film was really enjoyable. Due to the horrifically violent nature of much of the Saw premise (people put in terrifying torture-traps that usually involve some form of limb-removal or blood-loss to escape), the films often get a bad rap as being the sort of “torture porn” movies one associates with dross like Hostel, or BTK. In reality, the Saw films are much cleverer than the simple sadisms of the many copy-cat thrillers that they have spawned. Mainly, because they actually feature a compelling plot, and twisted rationale for why “Jigsaw” puts his victims through the tortures that he does – they are tests meant to make their few survivors grow a new appreciation for their lives. Furthermore, the reason Lucy and I keep going back to them year after year after year, is because they are actually cleverly written, with an ongoing narrative arc stretched across each of the movies, that unravels each year like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Thus, some events in the third film, are not explained until film five, and things revealed in Saw IV, did not find their conclusion until Saw VI. Although I kind of hoped that it would all be over this year, as soon as I saw John Kramer’s wife deliver an unexplained envelope to an undisclosed location, I knew there had to be another film on the way, because, in Saw, things like that don’t just happen without a reason.

For all it’s gore and gristle, the Saw franchise is actually one of the most intelligently written episodic horror stories I have ever seen, so I guess I’ll keep watching until the story gets too ridiculous. As I hear Saw VII is going to be in 3D, that’ll probably be next Halloween…

The first weekend successfully conquered, we foolishly decided to try and do what we normally do during holidays backwards this time, and get all the marking and lesson planning that Luce has to do (and which she usually does, in a stressful rush, on the last few days of her break) at the start of the holiday, so that our second week would be unburdened by the looming pile of work still “to do”.

This did not work, however. Because, it turns out, holidays are there for a reason: after the first half of the longest term of the year, Lucy was understandably knackered, and just wanted to relax and unwind instead of confront piles and piles of marking.

We soldiered through anyway, because the lure of an unfettered second week was great, but will not do it this way again. While she worked, I caught up on various housework that needed to be done, and also on some reading, finishing a few magazines I’d not yet completed and, eventually, finishing John Irving’s excellent new novel, Last Night at Twisted River.

After a hard day’s unwilling marking, luckily we still had some fun to do in the evenings, with a Jeremy Warmsley gig in Kings Heath on the Tuesday night, and Green Day at the LG Arena on the Wednesday.

As you may have read elsewhere, in my review for Scanner Webzine, Green Day were amazing.

Lucy finally threw in the towel on work somewhere around 3pm on Thursday afternoon, and conceded to her time off with gusto. We enjoyed the comfort of a warm sofa and a good book as the newly changed winter clocks let darkness steal the daylight early, then on Friday, we went into town for our first “shopping” trip in forever, and when we got home I made us a romantic Tuscan dinner, after receiving a box full of Italian culinary delights as a belated wedding present from my Aunt and Uncle in America.

Unfortunately, the weird blockage I’d felt in my throat all day began to swell and hurt as the night went on, and as we watched a shitty movie on DVD – Grand Canyon; I absolutely don’t recommend it, despite it once being one of my favourite films growing up, for apparently no reason – I realised, with dismay, that I was getting a fully-blown cold.

Of course, I should have been expecting such a thing, as not a first week in November has gone by in my life without me contracting some sort of disease or virus…but I refused to let it put a dampener on our newly wrested holiday, and simply ignored the scratchy-throat and stuffed nose I was developing, telling myself over and over: it’s not swine flue, it’s not swine flu...

For Halloween this year, we didn’t really do anything. We had a nice Saturday, watched a few scary movies and some Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD, and we made sure there were some sweets around for any trick-or-treaters that managed to get our attention with our non-functioning doorbell. Sadly for our teeth and waistlines, no such trick-or-treaters did turn up, and so, by ten o’clock, we were devouring the bucket of sweets for ourselves. Oops.

The reason our halloween was a non-event, was because our original plan of having Simon come round for a night ‘o’ horror on the Friday before fell through due to a conflict with gig and band practice schedules for the Woe Betides. We re-arranged the visit for Sunday November 1st instead, but though we had a good time, and watched 30 Days of Night and Repo: The Genetic Opera, we all knew that the vibe of the day was no longer scary enough to make the horror-a-thon feel right. It was “all-saints” day now, not Halloween; all the evil spirits and zombie vampires had gone back into their caves for another year and the damn world was now filled with angels!

Seeing Si was cool though. The new Woebies stuff is sounding really good, and the band’s plan to vie for Christmas number one seems like a fairly good gimmick to get them noticed (though I’m not sure if they picked the right song for the job. Whilst “Natwest Tower” is certainly my favourite out of the originally proposed double A side, I think “Little Beliefs” had a more “Christmassy” feel and seasonal relevance; it also could have tied in nicely with the variety of atheist Christmas campaigns and celebrations that are going on in December, and got them a ready-made market… They missed a trick there, but time will tell.) Unfortunately, we weren’t able to go to the West Midlands Safari Park with him the following day, due to an early dentist’s appointment and unreliable Tesco home delivery appointment (in the 12pm to 2pm slot, if they came at the earliest, twelve noon, we could still get to the park in good time; if they came late, at two pm, due to the clocks going back, it’d be dark pretty soon after we got there and not worth the trip).

As it happens, although Simon had already left, Tesco came early – 11:45am – and we could have made it pretty easily. But I’m pretty sure if we had taken the gamble, we would have still been waiting impatiently for them at gone two o’clock.

Sadly, the dentists was much less lucky than the early Tesco drop-off: after years of defying all medical logic – neglecting my teeth for years, not seeing the dentist, and then, after several years of little brushing and no check-ups, being told that my teeth were alright, time and time again – this time (after looking after my teeth better than I have in a decade) I was told I needed a filling!

Quite frankly, I’m pretty sure my completely non-scientific and purely born out of laziness theories of dentistry are correct, and the entire business is a scam. My belief has long been that, by not brushing your teeth with ridiculous dental products as often as we are told to, your teeth develop a natural layer of protection against decay and bacteria (as opposed to an artificial and aesthetically pleasant one, reliant on buying expensive dentistry products), and ever since my dental hygienist gave me my first “professional” clean in about fifteen years six months ago – removing that natural layer – my teeth have felt weaker and more vulnerable.

Still, I decided to ignore my gut instinct and follow proper dental advice regardless, and so, after six months of brushing my teeth two times a day and swilling mouthwash, here I am with a filling needed for the first time since I was sixteen (the last time I took “proper” care of my teeth).

The worse thing, was being told afterwards that it was probably due to my using mouthwash alongside my toothpaste.

“Oh, if you brush your teeth first and then use mouthwash,” the dentist told me, “the two products often cancel each other out and leave your teeth unprotected. What you need to do is brush your teeth, without mouthwash, in the morning and at night, and then use mouthwash on its own after lunch and after dinner, so you’re cleaning your teeth four times a day.”

Well…I don’t believe a word of it, but since last Monday, that’s what I’ve been doing. I had the filling on Monday morning – my straightedge resistance to drugs causing him to have to give me two doses of the anaesthetic because I could heroically still feel through the numbness of the first (he seemed concerned; I wasn’t. I didn’t tell him that, when I was sixteen, I had my last filling completely without anaesthetic, by choice) – and I plan on continuing this ridiculous regime of proper dental care until my next appointment. But, if six months from now there is another cavity, after so many years – often drinking four or five cans of fizzy Coke a day during that neglectful time – of very little brushing and absolutely no dental problems, I think it’s time to quit this dental hygiene lark and return to the McKee Method of apathy and laziness.

Anyway, with Tesco coming and going in plenty of time, and the whole afternoon now ahead of us, we decided to continue the theme of exploring our local area and went for a drive into Harborne, to see what was on offer, because Lucy had never been there, and I had only been there once in my life: to see my French teacher, Mr. Horton, in a play many moons ago. (Simon and I had asked him what the deal was with his moustache that often came and went…he revealed that he grew it – and shaved it – for various roles in an amateur dramatics group he was a part of, and we decided to go see him in The Odd Couple).

What was on offer, in turned out, was a really cool collection of second hand bookshops and a Caffe Nero, that led to a really nice (and vaguely expensive) afternoon of second-hand book-shopping and drinking coffee, which we decided to culminate in a spontaneous trip to Solihull, to see the Michael Jackson documentary This Is It at the cinema.

The film was pretty good, for what it was: a concert rehearsal documentary clearly rushed out by AEG to show that the performer who died on them, and left a lot of ticket-buying fans feeling cheated, really was fit enough to do the tour he had promised to do shortly before his death.

Having seen the movie now, there is no denying that, had he of lived, the Michael Jackson live show would have been amazing, and it was great to see not only how well the old guy could still sing and dance, but also to see him at work creatively, collaborating with his band and fellow musicians and working out bits of the show on stage.

I know that there’s a group out there – This Is Not It – who claim that the film is a disgraceful lie because it doesn’t show how much of a drug-dependant wreck Michael Jackson was in those last months of his life. They claim that Sony and AEG are only putting out the film to make money (which is clearly true) and that it was this desire to make money which ultimately killed Michael Jackson as they pushed him to extend his original ten date tour into a fifty-date impossibility. Personally though, I think they kind of just missed the point of what this film is. It was never meant to be an investigative piece of journalism into the death of Michael Jackson, it was meant to be a celebration of his talents, put out by his management, that would show the fans who felt ripped off after buying tickets for a show that never happened, that MJ would have been able to do it had he not died. And yes, though it – and the 50 date tour – has – and would have – made Sony and AEG lots of money, it was also going to make Michael Jackson a lot of money before he died too. Money that he needed, because he was completely bankrupt.

It is true when they say that moments when Jackson was whacked out on drugs and physically unable to walk without assistance are not in the documentary, but I think they fail to see Michael Jackson’s own culpability in the lifestyle that he chose, and commitment made to do a fifty date tour. The hugely rich pop performer could have called it quits years ago, or curbed his excessive spending and lived a “normal” life somewhere that wasn’t a ludicrous fairground/mansion/lunatic’s dream…but he didn’t. He wanted to be the “king of pop”, and he lived his media image and took the drugs, etc, that were needed to keep his talents up with his body. Sure, Sony and AEG profited off that…but Jackson could have pulled the plug anytime he wanted and retired gracefully decades ago.

Regardless, the film was fun, and after watching it there is no doubt in my mind that Michael Jackson was 100% bat-shit crazy. It was so clear as he danced and sang around his hand-selected entourage of sycophants and enablers that he lived in a crazy little bubble of his own mad creation, and a part of me couldn’t help but wonder if the real reason his heart gave out that fateful day, was because he had suddenly realized the massive contradictions between his impassioned and sensible pleas to save the planet during the newly re-staged version of “Earthsong”, and his own unjustifiable carbon footprint for such an over-the-top and energy-heavy live show?

Anyway, it was a fun almost-concert film. Even if it rather creepily never quite mentioned that he died!

Tuesday we saw the film An Education, which was really rather fantastic. Peter Sarsgaard was amazing in it (though I can never hear his name without thinking of the SNL sketch for the “Peter Sarsgaard, SARS Guard”), Emma Thompson provided an almost perfect audition for the future role of Mrs. Thatcher with her portrayal of the world-weary headmistress, and Carey Mulligan is someone I want to see a lot more of!

On Wednesday we continued our explorations of Birmingham by driving – via the Jewellery Quarter – to Moseley and Kings Heath. Not exactly Harborne, Moseley was a huge disappointment, as I’d remembered from growing up in the area – and occasionally helping out with Badger Promotions, who were based there – that Moseley was a really cool town. This memory was wrong: Moseley was one Oxfam shop, a Sainsburys, and a Wetherspoon’s pub lunch.

Kings Heath faired a little better in our estimation (a couple more second hand book-stops at the various charity shops, and, of course, the Kitchen Garden Cafe, where we used to watch the Improlympians before they – apparently – disappeared off the face of the earth after Edinburgh) but still, nothing to write home about, and we were both extremely glad that we chose to live where we did: it isn’t perfect, but at least it isn’t Moseley!

Our explorations of Birmingham were still not finished, however, as, on Thursday, we decided to finally take a walk along the canal.

We’d been meaning to do this for ages, as the train journey into the city centre runs parallel with the canal, and we’ve always thought it looked like a nice walk. The plan, therefore, was simple: walk to the canal, walk a couple of train stops down the canal until we got the the “University” area, then leave the canal and walk home via Edgbaston, and then Cannon Hill parks.

This did not happen.

Oh, we walked along the canal up to University (which was lovely, and has possibly inspired my first oil-painting with the set of oils Lucy got me for Christmas last year), but when we got to the Uni, we couldn’t quite seem to find our way into Edgbaston Park. Instead, we walked up the “Vale Village” area of the university’s halls of residences and walked around the lake area they have there. Then, kind of lost, we walked the wrong way at a roundabout and found ourselves coming out at the top end of the Bristol Road, about a ten minute walk away from the city centre, and a million miles away from our house!

Somehow, we had walked all the way into Birmingham!

So we figured fuck it, and walked the rest of the way into town, grabbed a sandwich and a coffee (my first Starbucks Christmas Eggnog Latte of the season!) and then took the train home instead.

Our legs destroyed by the unintended hike, we hung out on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon, but decided to brave a trip to the cinema in Solihull that evening to see the dreadful animated film, 9.

Of course, we didn’t know it would be dreadful before we left the house. If we had, we would have stayed in and watched Question Time. But alas, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and though the plot of 9 was dreadful, it did have possibly some of the most fucked up sequences of animation I have ever seen in a mainstream Hollywood cartoon – real nightmare stuff!

It thought it was much smarter than it was, but, undeniably, it was, visually, almost like a horror film in its use of imagery and tension.

Friday, we recovered from Thursday. Much reading and watching of TV. But Saturday we regained our will to walk and ventured out to Cannon Hill Park by car this time, to ensure we didn’t wind up in the city by mistake!

The park is lovely, lots of water and greenery. It’s a shame it’s not closer…though it’s still easy enough to walk to, the long walk to and from the park will always overshadow any time actually spent in the park. Still, we had a great time there, and will walk there occasionally in future, when we don’t mind the time it’ll take to get there and back.

Finally, on Sunday, we reintroduced ourselves slowly into society, by having a lovely long lunch with Rob at the aforementioned Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath, and then an equally lovely cuppa and cake with my father back in Balsall Common.

All in all, a pretty fantastic holiday – our first without having either a wedding to plan, or a wedding to recover from – but the fun didn’t all end on Monday with Lucy going back to school and me having needles and drills in my teeth…Tuesday night we went to the NIA and saw an astounding live show from Muse.

With a laser and light show unmatched by anybody, and a heaviness that was largely missing from their (still fantastic) new album, the show was as good, if not better, than the last time we saw them live, in Cardiff. The new songs were sounding amazing, and the three-riser stage was a brilliant spectacle (with the creepiest intro to any live gig I have ever seen, as faceless lines of people climb ever up these three tower blocks before they, and the buildings, come tumbling down in an eerie nod to 9/11). Truly astounding theatre rock!

And there you have it – much joy and happiness!

Now I’d better get back to work…

Technorati Tags: Journal,Half Term,Muse,Dentist,Birmingham,Movies,Books,Vacation,Personal

WDCFK?: Rejections #35 - #39

Lest you be worried that the few days of postal striking over the past couple of weeks might have prevented some important rejection letters from arriving at my door, fear not!  Despite industrial action by the CWU, I still managed to find my novel rejected from not one, not two, but five different agents, all in the space of two weeks!

After all the various different ways of telling me that my work was “not quite right for our list” (which I, quite frankly, think is a fair enough reason not to represent me, and don’t begrudge at all), my favourite blow came when I was told that the novel was “an interesting idea”, only to see that encouraging phrase followed immediately, without even a comma or ellipsis to prepare me, by the rejoinder: “but I’m afraid we’re not going to offer to take things further.”

Personally, I’m not sure what they’re so afraid of?  After all, if they wanted to take things further, they could.  It is, after all, entirely their decision not to do so. 

In other Charlie Faber news, I still haven’t heard back from the agent who is actually reading the full manuscript, so my fingers remain crossed on that one.  In my mind, of course, this person has now read the full novel, fallen in love with it, and is currently convincing the higher-ups at the agency that I am worth taking a risk on.  They are not only singing my praises to their entire company and writing me up my contract, but they are even making preliminary enquiries with various publishing houses so that I will one day soon receive a phone-call which tells me: “we not only want to represent you, Dr. McKee, but we can already offer you a publishing deal too…”

Of course, the most likely reality is that the manuscript remains unread and unopened in the original email in which it was sent.  Or, worse, has been read, rejected, and binned; my form letter of dismissal simply lost in the postal strike backlog…

Whatever happens though, as always, you will hear about it here.  But I remain stupidly optimistic.  And hell, if Why Did Charlie Faber Kill? remains unpublished and without representation, my second novel is already well underway – and it’s a doozy!  After finally plotting out a fantastic ending for an idea that has been percolating in my head for a very long time now, I feel quietly confident that if book number one doesn’t grab the attention of the agents I am seeking, book number two certainly will.

And if it doesn’t?

Well…I also have novels three and four bubbling quietly there on the stove, just waiting to be written.  This may turn out to be more of a marathon than the quick sprint I was expecting, but it seems clear to me now that it is a race I am sure I shall one day win, and am in no danger yet of quitting…

Technorati Tags: Why Did Charlie Faber Kill?,Literary Agents,Writing,Publishing