Back again..

Hello again! Long time no write!

I've not added anything to this screed for months, partly because I've been too busy with writing and other things ('life', you know…), and partly because I realise that most people have better things to do than read about how I've been too busy to update my blog.

Is it possible to check whether anybody actually reads your blog, do you think? I have this picture of billions and billions of words drifting off into cyberspace, and eventually shoaling up in a fourth dimensional equivalent of the Dogger Bank, or the Van Allen belt, where they form a sort of digital smog… unread, unloved…just clogging up a useful channel, and diverting virtual asteroids into quite the wrong direction.
If anyone ever reads this, please tell me so!


Actually, I do know that one person has read the original blog. Last month I got a very nice note from a certain 'Daz', who had enjoyed Scenes I, and wanted to take up my plea for someone to read a bit of 'Your Dog'. I mailed him the first 10k words or so, and waited with bated breath. (I once dated a girl who had 'baited breath'. Very fond of fish. It didn't last).
Daz came back with some useful comments. On the downside, I use too many long words like 'episcopal' and 'Gotterdammerung in spades', and I also use too many '…' and '—' to indicate thought patterns, rather than using the semi-connected prose of speech. OK, fair points, but it's actually impossible for any writer to know what counts as a 'long word'. One man's 'mako' is another man's 'big pointy fish'. Any writer has to make judgements and hopes to hit a happy medium. I guess one's agent is the guy who guides one in this.
Overall, Daz 'really enjoyed' Your Dog, and compared it favourably with Ben Elton's work. Excellent. Thanks, Daz.
Daz and I then went on to exchange notes on the points I put forward in The Tale of the Kale (the last chapter of Scenes I). This chapter is to be extended and included in something I've been planning for years, which will aim to show how religion and science can be reconciled, despite everyone's apparent belief that this is impossible. Actually, it's easy (in principle).
On the other hand, it's incredibly difficult (in practice), as witnessed by the exchanges between Daz and myself. After a couple of back and forths, we found ourselves looking at each other in a sort of a bafflement.. how could the other guy simply not see the blatantly obvious points the other other guy was making? Daz is convinced that my ignorance of biochemistry is the problem; I'm convinced that Daz isn't distinguishing between 'mechanism' and 'principle'.
There's the difficult part: getting someone to re-consider a fixed position.
All good fun, whatever. Thanks, Daz, for the stimulation!

I had a similar exchange with my old friend John (of whom more below). He read Kale diligently and finally agreed that no, he could not find any fault with my logic. 'OK' I replied, 'then, as you can find no fault with the logic, you must accept the conclusion I come to, which is that Life must come from outside the material world of Energy/Matter.' But this was a step too far for a life-long atheist. John still couldn't fault my logic, but decided that he'd rather 'sit on the fence' a bit longer. In vain did I point out that in this case there simply was no fence to sit on. Never mind, he was going to sit on it all the same!
A new idea is in for a tough tough ride…!!

But that's OK. Everything remotely new has always been ignored and derided by the 'experts' of the day. If I remember rightly, the Astronomer Royal called the possibility of space flight 'bilge', approximately six months before the Russians launched the first satellite. (Please correct me on this if I've got it wrong. And, if you have any more well-attested examples of 'experts'' duff predictions, I'd be delighted to hear of them. 'Iron ships will never fly', sort of thing…)

Your Dog, meanwhile, has been pottering around, collecting an opinion or two en route. As I explained above, it's not a 'normal' book, and I knew it was going to collect mixed comments. The problem is that it tries to meld two styles that are simply unmeldable according to current prejudice. 'Farce' and 'Thinking' simply can not go together. Well, who says so? is my response.
M*A*S*H had a bash, and so have many other offerings. It can be done. Perhaps it's just that my own attempt simply isn't good enough. On the other hand Daz enjoyed it and compared it with Ben E. Another reader, admittedly a friend, thought it was 'brilliant'. A second friend, however (John, above), whose judgement I have relied upon in the past, thought it was awful. This may have been because he simply couldn't get on with the style of humour (as he admitted), but whatever….

In the end, a writer must rely on his agent. After all, what's the point of an 'awful yet brilliant Ben Elton style farcical-philosophical sort-of novel' that nobody will publish? That's the key. Who will publish it?
No writer is actually writing for the public. He's writing for his agent, who will trim the work until he thinks it is suitable for a publisher to consider, who will then require changes that he thinks will make it suitable to be offered to the public with a decent chance of making a profit. Judgements.. judgements… The literary world is full of stories about books being turned down by dozens of publishers, and then finally turning out to be a best-seller. JK Rowling had this experience. And Decca famously turned down The Beatles. Judgements.. judgements…

The state of play at the moment is that Stan the Agent is quite clear that he could not 'place' it in its current form. No publisher would want it, not least because they don't seem to be buying any sort of novels at the moment. So he's suggested that I drop the story altogether, and re-write it as a sort of philosophy book. Same title; same style: watching your dog for a week and seeing what you can learn from him. Keep the humour, of course, just drop the storyline. Oh, and change the 'hero' from 'Dave' to 'I'. Another first person job, like the Scenes books.
Obviously, I could not do this to match Stan's brief without a lot more detail. He knew what he meant, so it was his job to do the first draft. That's where we are at the moment. Once I have received back from him the bare bones or the tattered remnants or whatever, I can make a start on trying to stitch it altogether again, so that nobody, apart from you, dear reader, will ever know that it's a cut-and-shut job.
I must say, I'm looking forward to it. A fresh challenge!
And I must also say that I'm quite astonished that Stan thinks a philosophical offering has a better chance of engaging the attention of a publisher than a funny story has. One lives and learns. Possibly.

Meanwhile… the friend who thought Your Dog was 'brilliant' asked her friends at the Flintham Book Club to take a look at it. They very kindly did, and agreed with Daz that the punctuation is confusing. They did like the bits about the dog getting drunk and disgraceful, and Dave's vomit-streaked jacket gradually decomposing in the bath, but overall, they thought Your Dog might be best re-written as a short story.

I guess you can't please all of the people all of the time. At least Stan and the ladies of Flintham agree on one thing: Your Dog should be shorter. Something I can hang on to.

I'll try to write some more on this blog a bit sooner than last time. But it all depends on having something remotely worth saying doesn't it? I'm ever conscious of that virtual Dogger Bank.