Windows (the real kind)

This has got nothing to do with books, but if you're interested in windows here's as impressive a collection as I've seen in a long time. It just seems to go on and on and on.

Oh, and there's one of my pics in there somewhere, which is how I found out about it.

More of mine on Flickr. Haven't done anything in that line recently. Fifteen months ago I bought a big iMac specially for photography and, naturally, have done nothing since.

Fifty Shades of Grey? We have been here before...

Here in the UK, sales of Fifty Shades of Grey have begun to tail off. A bit. Two weeks ago, Grey sold 1.4 million. In a week. But last week purchases of the so-called mommy-porn (or mummy-porn) novel were down. Even so, the book still managed to sell 534,000 copies. Next biggest seller was Kathy Reichs, whose Flesh and Bones sold 23,871. (Figures from The Bookseller, as reported by the BBC.)

Well now, let's have a little think about this.

What we have here, apparently, is a novel which features a highly submissive woman and a dominant man. (I say apparently because you'd never know much about it from the Kindle sales page on Amazon.co.uk. The publisher provides absolutely zero info about the content.) However, going by vague bits and pieces that I've picked up over the past few months, the plot is, basically, that our heroine is into being tied up and beaten and stuff. So it's a kinky, pervy, ooh-missis kind of story (think what Frankie Howerd would have made of it); and it's all stretched out over three volumes.

Well, the best of luck to all who sail in her. I don't begrudge anybody connected with Grey a single penny of their profits. And if I sound a little snobby about the E.L. James trilogy, believe me it's not because I am anti-porn. Far from it. I have, in my time, researched widely in the field of Victorian erotica, and I have fond memories of such classics as Lady Bumticklers Revels. Furthermore, I would buy Ms James's three books instantly if I thought they would put lead in my elderly pencil. But it doesn't seem likely that they would. On Amazon.co.uk, the first book in the series has 2593 reviews, and 835 of them give it one star. With such encouraging headings as 'Absolute, unashamed, utter drivel'.

What I really want to draw your attention to, because many of today's readers are far too young to remember, is that we have witnessed (some of us) this kind of event before. And, I would venture, we've seen it done rather better.

In the early 1950s there was a French woman who was having an affair with a married man, Jean Paulhan. M. Paulhan's mistress was christened, it seems, Anne Desclos, but in her early thirties she became known as Dominique Aury. As Aury herself acknowledged about the affair with Paulhan, she was no longer young (47) and she was not pretty, so she had to find some other means of binding him to her. The solution was found when her lover expressed an admiration for the work of the Marquis de Sade, and said that no woman could possibly write like that. So Dominique Aury wrote a novel which would test the truth of that proposition.

In three months she had completed an explicit erotic novel which she called Histoire d'O (Story of O in English). It is an account of how a beautiful Parisian woman is subjected to brutal humiliation by being whipped, chained, branded, pierced, and penetrated violently in all the obvious orifices. She is asked for, and readily gives, her consent to these activities.

Dominique Aury's lover was sufficiently intrigued by this novel to arrange for it to be published in 1954. The author chose the pen-name Pauline Reage, and worked hard to maintain her anonymity.

From the beginning, the novel attracted much attention. Various attempts were made to ban it; it won the Prix des Deux Magots; Susan Sontag (inevitably) had things to say about it, and so on and so forth. Over the years it was translated into more than twenty languages, became a bestseller in several countries, and sold millions of copies.

In real life, Dominique Aury was a respected figure on the French literary scene, and her authorship of the notorious Histoire d'O was known only to a few. She was a member of the Legion d'Honneur, i.e. highly respectable. Her anonymity was maintained largely by the fact that all sorts of respectable Frenchmen and women were quite happy to have it 'known' that actually they had written her novel themselves.

When Paulhan lay dying, aged 83, Dominique Aury/Pauline Reage/Anne Desclos slept in his room for the last three months.

And fifty years after its first publication, the French government announced that Histoire d'O would be included on a list of 'national triumphs' to be celebrated that year.

I once had a copy of Story of O, and tried diligently to read it. But failed.

If you want to know more about this extraordinary author, start with Wikipedia. And there's a good chapter in Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru (2011, HarperCollins).

PS. Tim Worstall reminds me that Tom Sharpe wrote a satirical novel about publishing, The Great Pursuit, in which a dodgy firm of literary agents hires a young man to pretend to be the author of a rather racy novel. Well, I say satirical. All too easy to believe, actually. And of course it happens all the time with celebrity authors.

Bruce Holland Rogers rides again

Bruce Holland Rogers is a short-story writer with formidable talent, and I have written about him on this blog before: principally here and here.

He is now using Kickstarter to try to raise $3000 for a trade paperback version of his latest collection. Seems like a good idea to me. Here's the Kickstarter page.

If you want to read a story that I, at least, found very powerful, try The Dead Boy at Your Window. And there are links to several other freebies on Bruce's own web site.

There's a moral here somewhere...

I'm sitting here, still in jimjams at noon, about one week into a nasty chest infection, and without the energy to do much -- not even look at naughty pictures on the internet, so that shows how bad it is. Anyway, couldn't let this one pass.

This morning I got a notification from Blogger about a comment on an old post, so I went to the post and deleted the comment. But while I was there I noticed that the post mentioned a new man, recently appointed as the boss of Borders bookshops chain in the US.

At that time Borders was in poor shape, shares at a three-year low. But fear not. The boy genius, one George Jones by name, had ideas. Oh yes. But the thing that struck me was that none of the ideas involved an ambition to be a better bookseller. And there was no mention of writers. (Hey, come on now. Be reasonable.)

At which point I scratched my befuddled head and said to myself, how did that massive company (worldwide in 2006: 1200 stores, 35,000 employees) get on in the next six years? Don't I remember that it sort of... collapsed?

Well, yes, turned out I did. By 2011 the company went bankrupt (in effect), couldn't find anyone to buy it, fell over, coughed, and went to a better place. Wikipedia:

 As of October 14, 2011, the Borders.com website has been replaced by a redirection link to the Barnes & Noble website, effectively shutting down Borders.com entirely.

Daphne before She Died

I gave notice a while back that I was going to publish a new Kindle book. Well, now it's out. The title is Daphne before She Died, and if you care to take a look at the details, you can find it, as appropriate, on either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

If you care to compare the two book pages, on .com and .co.uk, you will find that they're different. Why? Go figure. I will shortly write to Amazon and ask, but I am not hopeful of a reply.

Obviously, you're not likely to do such a weird thing as compare two pages for ordering the same book, unless you are, like me, a person wrestling with the task of trying to make your book visible and to boost sales (or indeed, create any sales at all, in the first place). But the .com page allows the author to enter far more detail about reviews, and about the author, than does .co.uk. Perhaps the explanation is that server space on .co.uk is in shorter supply? Odd.

During the past couple of months I have been spending a considerable amount of time studying internet book-marketing techniques. My conclusion, after more reading than I've enjoyed, is that the conventional wisdom is roughly as follows:

Write a really good book; design a terrific cover, and see if you can find someone famous to give you a quote for it; issue press releases; write to a vast number of people and ask them to review your book; start a blog, and post daily; get a Facebook page for yourself and one for the book; start twittering; get yourself interviewed on other blogs; interact with all those readers who review, comment or contact you for any reason; talk to them; find out what they like and don’t like; show them drafts of your next book; assemble a database of all the people you’ve contacted, and keep in touch with them for future books; send them a regular newsletter. Make friends with your readers! It’s all about interaction!

Well, yes. Maybe. But my conclusion, after absorbing a couple of months of this kind of thing, was that, if this is what it takes to be a great success as a writer in the digital age, then I am going to have to settle for being a modest success, or even no success at all. There is simply no way, at age 73, that I am going to take on that kind of workload. I would never have time to do any writing.

Fortunately, within the last week or two, I have stumbled across a different approach. It's embodied in a new book by Michael Alvear: Make a Killing On Kindle. Alvear's subtitle (inside the book) is: Without Blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

Notice that word without. Now this really looks promising. I will let you know how I get on.

Oh, and by the way: if you'd like a free review copy of Daphne, please send me an email. Address in the Blogger profile. This offer holds good till the end of July, but by then the book should be anyway offered free (under Kindle Select procedures) for a period of about three days.

Ross MacDonald

I see that Penguin UK are soon to publish another in their series of books by Ross MacDonald. These are part of the Penguin Modern Classics series, and they deserve the title.

I think I read the whole of the RM oeuvre, about forty years ago, and they were all pretty good stuff. Rather dark, featuring families with strange and twisted histories, and rather Freudian. In terms of genre, they are crime fiction/private eye, and older readers may remember Paul Newman playing the famous Lew Archer in the movie version of The Drowning Pool.

RM has been described by Elmore Leonard as 'America's greatest crime writer', and while the point is arguable it's not far wrong.

His wife was Margaret Millar, absolutely no slouch at writing herself, though I haven't seen any mention of her for a long time.

Doomed, I tell you, doomed...

If memory serves (and it is getting increasingly dodgy), it was that Scottish undertaker in Dad's Army who used to claim, at frequent intervals, that we are all doomed. But actually he was about fifty years ahead of time.

Take, for instance, one of today's headlines. It is reported that the G20 'wishes to express its alarm about the eurozone crisis.'

Well, aren't we lucky. We have political leaders who are so perceptive and supernaturally well informed that they think we should know there is a bit of a problem.

Problem? Is that what you call it? Listen, I just sit here and read the occasional blog, and look at a few newspapers in my local Costa, and I am here to tell you that for the past year I have been quietly wetting myself with panic. It seems that it wasn't enough for the banks to fuck things up big-time in 2008. No, they are filled, it seems, with an overwhelming desire to do it all over again!  While stealing money from you and me in the process.

I can't be arsed to look up the precise figures, because it's all too depressing, but the RBS, which owns the NatWest, with whom all my pathetic little pile of money is stored, seems to have lost 1 billion pounds sterling in the first quarter of this year. Well done boys! A billion in one quarter! Think how much you could lose if you really tried.

I tell you, if in a year from now I still have enough pennies left to buy a cup of coffee which allows me to read newspapers for free, I shall be pleasantly surprised.

Meanwhile.... There is a silver lining to this cloud. Because the book business is booming, right?

Um, well... Sort of.

The Sun tells us that Fifty Shades of Grey, 'about a depraved relationship between a young virgin and her rich older lover', is now the fastest-selling paperback since records began. And it's 'sexually explicit', says The Sun, drooling so much that it makes the newsprint all soggy.

Well, there you are then. If sales of that order can't put lead in the economy's pencil I don't know what will. Salvation comes (heh, heh) in the form of Mommy porn.

Or not, as the case may be.

Meanwhile, if you want to know what happened in 2008, you really have to read Michael Lewis's The Big Short, which is highly entertaining if you have a taste for black humour. If you haven't, it will probably give you a stroke.

Daphne before She Died

Coming soon to an Amazon web site near you: Daphne before She Died, a new novel by Michael Allen.

Well, actually it's newish. I wrote this book about twelve years ago, and published it as a trade paperback. In those days it had a different title, and I used a female pen-name. It sold about as well as you would expect, i.e. about 100 copies, mostly to libraries, and it washed its face financially. I took it out of print a while back because it had stopped selling. Since then I have revised it somewhat, and given it a new title and a new cover. I am using my own name this time.

Here's what Kirkus Reviews had to say about this book, first time around:

This account of two reckless love affairs in the early 1960s is primarily concerned with the emotional fallout of these obsessive relationships and their effect on the people involved in them. Robert Duval, son of a French father and English mother, has been approached by Daphne, his old housemaster's wife. She is dying and wants a record of the momentous year when she became passionately involved with one of the boys in her husband's House.

But hers was not the only torrid affair that year - Robert himself was initiated into the delights of the flesh by a nubile 18-year-old French girl, and Daphne's request stirs up memories of his own youthful infatuation.

Public schools [i.e. boys boarding schools in England] operated according to their own codes of morality - a little discreet homosexuality was acceptable, but striking up a physical relationship with a woman was considered unacceptable. Yet the couples seemed fearless in the pursuit of their desires, almost as if the strength of their feelings rendered them immune to discovery.

 The novel dissects issues of secrecy and truth in sexual relationships. Both Daphne's husband, Ben, and Robert's mother knew about the affairs, yet they kept that knowledge to themselves. Ben knew that Daphne's loyalties would always lie with him, and that the end of the school year would mark the end of the affair. Robert's mother knew that once Suzanne returned to France the passion would burn itself out. Yet years later, even though both affairs are long over, the memories of that obsession are as strong as ever for both Robert and Daphne.

This is a fascinating account of the consuming power of  sexual passion, and a remarkable insight into the claustrophobic world of traditional public-school life.

That's a pretty good review really, isn't it? Perhaps I'm justified in seeing it as one of my better efforts.

Anyway, the new improved version of this novel is coming out again within a week or two. In the meantime, if it sounds like the sort of thing that you might enjoy reading, after which you are encouraged to write a review on Amazon, please drop me a line -- address in profile -- and I will get you a free copy for your Kindle. This offer holds good for the first ten applicants or till the end of July, whichever comes first.

Adam Curtis -- the Medium and the Message

Even today, the majority of books published are non-fiction. And anyone who reads non-fiction is looking for information.

If you want information about the current political situation in many parts of the world, you need to keep an eye on the blog of Adam Curtis. The following description of what he's up to is lifted straight from the blog:

Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker, whose work includes The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora's Box, The Trap, and The Living Dead.

Adam writes: "This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives."

Today Mr Curtis has a detailed account of a strange character who was to be found lurking in the shadows of many military operations in Afghanistan. But along the way we learn a great deal about the thinking of the American military and politicians. Yes, you may, in your black cynicism and deep depression, wonder whether anyone ever does any thinking in those quarters, but it is going on.

Whether you like the results of such thinking is another matter entirely.

If you've ever seen a documentary by Adam Curtis, you will know that he relates them himself. And when you read his prose you can hear his voice. Uncanny.

The BBC gets a lot of stick these days, but an organisation that provides a base for a man like this is definitely doing something right.

Comma Press for short stories

The Comma Press, in the UK, is very active in the field of short stories. It's a not-for-profit organisation, which is just as well, I suspect, because it's mighty hard to get anyone interested in buying short stories -- at least via the traditional routes. Digital may change everything. Anyway, nip over to the Comma Press web site and take a look.

It you're interested in writing short stories, as opposed to reading them, you could do worse than read my book How to Write a Short Story that Works. This is available in ebook form, from the usual Amazon retail sources (US readers go to dot com, and Brits go to dot co dot uk). It's also on Smashwords, and therefore on a variety of other outlets, including Apple. This book has so far attracted 27,000 readers, give or take a few, so there must be a lot of people interested in the short-story form. And why not?

While I was checking the link to the Amazon.com location of my book, I came across a couple of very flattering reviews that I hadn't seen before. Amazon doesn't seem to notify an author of reviews (whereas Blogger sends me a copy of every comment). In view of these reviews I think I may have to put the price up, so hurry, hurry, hurry, buy your copy now.