Do Some Damage

I'm all too aware that I've been neglecting this place of late. It happens, sadly. Especially when I've got a novel on the boil. The Hangman's Song, number three in the DI McLean series, is pretty much ready to be sent off to my editor now, so I ought to have a bit more time.

I say 'ought to'. The truth is I'm busier than ever. Lambing and calving are looming, meaning livestock has to be checked and fed every day. There's also the small matter of Natural Causes being published on May 9th and all the hoopla that goes with it. I am equal parts little-boy-at-Christmas excited and little-boy-in-the-dark terrified at the prospect. Michael Joseph are putting a lot of effort into promoting the book, which means high profile for shy and retiring me. Backing reluctantly into the spotlight I go.

But I've not been completely unproductive of late. My good friend Russel D McLean, asked if I'd fill in for him over at Do Some Damage last week, whilst he was away in Paris on holiday, eating Wild Boar and going to Jazz Clubs. I of course leapt at the opportunity, and wrote something all about me. Well, it's the only subject I'm the world's expert on, after all.

You can read it here, and I recommend you visit DSD frequently for updates and insights into the world of crime fiction writing.

End of an Era

16-04-1998 to 12-02-2013

Yesterday evening, around about feeding time, I noticed that Machrihanish, the SausageDog was in some distress. He was having a lot of difficulty standing, his back legs really not wanting to work. Eventually he made it outside and had his tea, but there was no way he was going to get back inside without being carried.

He was unable to move at all come dog-outs and bedtime. I carried him out to the grass, but he didn't seem to want to do anything. Usually he sleeps outside in the kennel with all the other dogs, but I brought him in to the warm so he could sleep by the fire.

He woke me pretty much every hour, on the hour. Not yelping in pain so much as quietly moaning - not really wanting to make a fuss. He could only lie on his side, and couldn't get up to turn around. I did my best to make him comfortable each time.

This morning, I took him to see Claire, our vet. She confirmed what I'd suspected - he'd lost the use of his back legs completely, along with most of the sensation at his back end. We could spend a lot of time and money on expensive examinations to try and find out why, or we could accept that his time had come. It was a desperately sad decision, but in the end not difficult. He slipped away peacefully, munching on a handful of biscuits.

A year ago, Mac was still coming for walks, albeit following on at his own slow pace a long way behind. He developed a heart murmur when he was about seven, and has been a bit of a poddler ever since. Recently, the arthritis had started to get him in the front legs, much like it did Mort. He was still happy enough to potter around the caravan, and I built a ramp so he could get in - stairs were something that defeated him long ago. I'd been steeling myself to the inevitable, and swearing I wouldn't delay making the decision for my own selfish reasons, like I did with Chiswick and Mort. In the end, the nature of Mac's condition made it much easier (which is not to say in any way easy). Dachshunds are notorious for back problems, and he was a very large Dachshund - almost twenty kilos and not really all that fat. Mort and Chiswick both degenerated slowly, always leaving the forlorn hope that they might get better. I knew with Mac that this would never be the case.

Mac came to us from an old schoolfriend of my mother, Caroline Woodall, back in the spring of 1998. Caroline was universally known as Dassie Dubb, and the Dachshunds she bred were all Dassiewood Dogs. Mac's official name was Dassiewood Easter Day, as that was when he was born. We couldn't make the journey all the way down to Oxfordshire to pick him up, so a friend of Dassie's, who was going to the Kelso Dog Show, brought him with her, and we travelled down from Edinburgh for the collection. 

Whilst at the show, and before Dassie's friend had arrived, we bought a collapsible wire cage which we were assured by the salesman was the right size for a standard Dachshund. These cages are brilliant for house-training puppies, but when we first saw Mac we realised we were going to need a bigger one. By the time he'd finished growing, he was just over nineteen kilos, all muscle with not an ounce of fat on him (keeping up with two terriers will do that to you). 

Throughout his life, Mac's size was a subject of comment and amazement. Often people would rudely accuse him of being some kind of cross-breed, despite the fact that he has a pedigree as long as your arm. He just shrugged it off as one of those things, and got on with enjoying life.

It was my father who first called him the puddlehound, and the name was very apt. Mac loved water, though he was rubbish at swimming. Anything shallow enough for him to keep his back legs on the bottom was fair game, though, which given his size meant he could cross surprisingly deep streams. He preferred muddy puddles, of course. He was long-haired, which meant that his undercarriage picked up muck and sticks and anything else it came into contact with. You could always tell where he'd been lying after coming back from a stroll, as there would be a Dachshund-shaped pile of very fine silt where his fur had dried out and broken the mud down.

With his thick coat, the Dachshund really didn't like the heat of summer. He relished the cold though, and particularly liked the snow. Unfortunately it liked him rather too much as well, sticking to his fur and forming great balls under his oxters. He'd still carry on until he couldn't move his legs at all, then wait patiently for someone to break off big chunks until he could start all over again. Later, he'd lie in front of the boiler in the kitchen, a large puddle of water oozing out around him onto the tiles as he thawed out.

Mac was one of the original three DevilDogs, as immortalised in logo form by Stuart MacBride. We were still living in Roslin, the Horse Doctor and I, when we got him, and I was trying to make a living as a writer of Science Fiction and comics. My study was a lean-to on the end of the house, with its one window looking out onto the main street. The wall was about three feet thick, as many old buildings around there are, and the dogs liked to sit on the windowsill and watch the world go by as I was typing. This was easy enough with Chiswick and Mort, who could both leap up onto the chair and then the window. Mac had to be lifted, but at least once he was there he was a source of warmth for the others. Typing away at my keyboard I'd often find people staring in the window, pointing at the dogs and occasionally knocking on the glass. I don't think they ever saw me, lurking there in the shadows.

I have to go and dig a large hole now, somewhere close to where I buried Chiswick and Mort. I have a personal rule that I don't drink alcohol when I'm on my own. But tonight I think I'll break it and raise a dram to Machrihanish the SausageDog. A constant companion for almost fifteen years. I miss him already.

Photographs make for an easy blog post

I realised today that it's almost the end of November and I've not posted anything all month. OK, so I didn't post much last month either, but at least I posted something.

The reason for my lack of online activity is a simple one: I am writing. To be specific, I am writing book three in the DI McLean series, The Hangman's Song. It's going OK, since you ask. Not brilliant - I've had to take a bit of time off to sort it all out in my head before hitting the home straight, but I'm almost 60k done of a target of 100k by Christmas. I have a scene list that should take me to the end, although I know that it's too early to really nail anything down.

More importantly I've finally figured out what a major sub-plot is all about, which is nice given the amount of time I've put into the characters and their scenes so far. This book is unlike any I've written before, but then I could say that about all the others, except perhaps the first one.

And so a photograph, since I promised you one. Or maybe two. In a little over a week I shall be taking delivery of a pair of kittens. And since this is the internet, there must be pictures.

One is grey and stripey

The other is green and stripey

Neither have names as yet. Feel free to suggest some, just as I will feel free to ignore your suggestions. It remains to be seen how the dogs cope with this new invasion, let alone me.

How it goes

Two and a half years ago, I posted this little piece on the oddness of life. That was the first time I met Juliet Mushens, agent extraordinaire at PFD. Despite what I wrote in that post, she wasn't an agent then, just an agent's assistant. And she hadn't been an editor at Harper Collins but something in marketing. These are just details though, and really unimportant.

As predicted, the manuscript I sent her came back with a polite 'it wasn't quite right for us' reply, but also a request to see another manuscript I'd mentioned - one that I was working on at the time. Perverse fellow that I am, I never sent the manuscript, even though I eventually finished it.

I missed Harrogate in 2011 because of the sad death of my uncle. By then I was deep in the mire of taking over the farm, fighting with the worse-than-useless solicitors who had been dealing with my late parents' estate and trying to persuade the Inland Revenue that they didn't really deserve an extra £100k of my father's money.* So I didn't get to meet up with Juliet again until this year. She immediately asked why I hadn't sent her the manuscript, to which I replied I'd lost all confidence in it, thought it was a crock of shit, and had put it in a drawer somewhere to be forgotten.

In the meantime, of course, Natural Causes, which her boss had turned down, had done rather well as an ebook, and The Book of Souls was beginning to earn me some serious money. Juliet was now a fully-fledged agent in her own right, and building something of a reputation for being a hard negotiator.

If I was being cruel, I might suggest that any agent would be interested in representing an author who'd managed to shift over 100,000 copies of his first self-published novel in a couple of months, even if they were free. I'm not cruel though, and Juliet still wanted to see the novel I'd not sent her two years earlier, so I sent it to her and waited.

In the meantime I was approached by another agent, a friend of a friend. This put me in something of a quandary, as he came highly recommended and has a very good reputation. It's considered bad form to query two agents simultaneously, or at least I consider it bad form. I explained to the new agent, let's call him Stan because that's what everyone calls him even though it's not actually his name, and he was OK with the idea I might not sign with him, still wanted a chance to make his pitch. I also let Juliet know other agents were circling like sharks, so not to keep me waiting too long.

I met Stan at Bloody Scotland, after a bit of faffing about trying to find each other. We had a long chat and he seemed a really nice bloke, someone I could work with and very much on top of his game. He'd read Natural Causes and even spent money buying a copy of The Book of Souls. Liked them both. He even liked the book I'd lost all faith in, let's call it One Good Deed, since that's its title.

Of course, when I got home from Bloody Scotland, there was an email from Juliet, apologising profusely for not getting back sooner and praising my books to the skies.

It's a bit like buses, I suspect. You wait years for an agent to come along, and suddenly there's two desperate to represent you (and a couple of others dropping heavy hints). 

So I did what any self-respecting person would do in the circumstances. I dithered. I am a world-class ditherer. I can make even the simplest decision making process into a tortured round of arguments, counter-arguments and self-loathing. This one really had me stumped. Both agents were good. I'd met them and got on well with them. They both had excellent plans about how to go about marketing me and my books. If I could have had both of them, I would have done. 

In the end, a well-timed email prod from Juliet clinched it, and I went with PFD just in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair. If this had been intentional, you'd say my timing was impeccable. As it is, I can only put it down to dumb luck, on my part at least.

She didn't waste any time, and the rest, as they say, is history. The UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights for three McLean books went to Penguin after a five-way auction, Goldmann-Verlag picked up the German translation rights for a very nice sum indeed. Italian rights are being auctioned, Brazil has offered, I've even sold Serbian translation rights, which is just mad. There doesn't seem to be a day goes past without an email from the foreign rights team at PFD telling me about another offer. My ghast is truly flabbered.

A year ago, I was ready to give up on DI McLean, pretty much ready to give up on writing altogether. I'm really quite glad I didn't.




*it wasn't just me doing this, I hasten to add. Nor was I doing the bulk of it - that fell to my sister and cousin as executors. It still weighed heavily and made a sad and stressful situation even worse than it had to be.

Publicity

It's been a busy few weeks for me in the media recently. Things kicked off with an article in The Scottish Farmer.

This was quickly followed up by a piece in the Farmer's Weekly.

Last week the Dundee Courier and Advertiser picked up the baton, putting me on the front cover in a memorable pose.

Inside, the article focussed rather more on my parents' deaths than I was perhaps comfortable with. When interviewed, I'd mentioned this as how I came to inherit the farm. It was very much a minor part of the whole thing, though. Of course the journalist writing the piece was looking for an angle, so he's done a bit of digging and then polished it with a bit of journalistic licence. It could have been worse, so I'm not complaining, really. I just hope no-one thinks I'm trying to cash in on something that was a tragedy for a lot more people than just me.

On the back of the Courier article, I was interviewed by two Fife radio stations - Kingdom FM and Tay FM for their local news bulletins. Not being a habitual radio listener, I missed both, but a bloke who comes and hunts over the land here with his hawk heard me on Tay FM and was impressed. Not half as much as I am by his hawk, I suspect.

Then a nice lady by the name of Elspeth Badger came out with a big camera and did this:

This Friday it's been the turn of the Farmer's Guardian, a paper that is sold UK-wide.

But the prize for the best headline pun has to go to my local rag, the Fife Herald.

Apparently I'm in the Scottish Field too, but I've not managed to pick up a copy yet.

All of these stories have a common theme. The press are fascinated by the story of the farmer who has turned his hand to an unusual diversification - to whit writing crime fiction. Those of you who know me, and those hardy souls who've been coming here for any length of time, will no doubt snigger quietly to themselves about that one. Far from being a farmer who has turned to writing, I am more of a writer thrust into farming by my own idiot ideas and unfortunate circumstance.

So how, I hear you ask, have I managed to attract the attention of the press? Well, the answer is quite simple: I hired a publicist.

This isn't something I'd ever have considered myself, but Kenneth Stephen, of Heartland Media and PR, has done sterling work for my brother's company, Ecodyn, getting them high-profile media coverage of some of their more successful environmental projects. They only used him because he happened to be neighbour to one of the company directors - the idea of hiring a publicist is not something that would have occurred to them either. But when it worked so well for them, they suggested it might be worthwhile for me too. 

So I contacted Kenny, discussed what he might do for me, discovered that his rates were the cheap side of reasonable and decided to give it a go. The above results would suggest that it was money well spent.

Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and so far it's a bit early to say whether media exposure has lead to increased sales. What it has undoubtedly done has been to raise my profile.

Well, in Fife.

Antisocial media

Two loosely connected thoughts in one today. Aren't you a lucky bunch...

It's been three months now since I published The Book of Souls, and to say that I'm pleased with the results would be a bit like saying a kid was pleased with being given the keys to the sweet shop and told to help himself. I've sold over 20,000 copies - and gave away another 14,000 or so in a single weekend. Things are starting to quieten down a little, but it was in the Amazon UK top 100 titles for over seventy days. 

I know this because Amazon gives a self-published author unprecedented access to sales information. It's not perfect, but hourly updates, running totals of earnings, graphs of your book's progress through the sales charts, all these are very compelling. And addictive.

I try to ration myself to checking the stats just once a day, but there are times when I find myself clicking the link just to see what's happened in the last half hour. When your sales are chugging along steadily, or better yet increasing minute by minute, it's awesome. But the downside comes when things start to tail off.

All of which set me to thinking. I don't in any way condone the kind of sockpuppetry and underhand manipulation of social media that several authors have been caught indulging in of late. It's cheating, and devalues the system. It paints all authors in an undeserved murky light. But I think I can begin to understand why people do it. There's a buzz to the success that's as potent as any drug, and when that goes you'll do pretty much anything for another fix. 

The most effective way of boosting sales again is to publish another book. That takes time though. So much easier to set up a couple of fake accounts on Amazon and start writing yourself five star reviews. It's only a small step from there to rubbishing other authors - petty revenge for any imagined slight or simple jealousy at their success.

And then there's the manipulation of forums, building up fake twitter and facebook conversations, all designed to create a buzz. To me it seems an awful lot of effort that could much better be put into writing another book.

I'm not convinced that "social media" is a very good way to sell products anyway. To me, twitter and facebook can only sell the author, not the book. They are the digital-age equivalent of sending a stamped addressed envelope off to the Bay City Rollers and getting a cheaply-printed magazine, a badge and a signed photograph back.*

Several of my twitter friends seem only ever to tweet about their own latest book or that of someone else. I skim over these, and have even stopped following some altogether. It's boring. I'd rather know what their dog had for breakfast or what that strange fellow at the other side of the pub is doing. 

There's an idea being touted around - the rule that 90% of your social media output should have nothing to do with what you're selling. To me that fundamentally misses the point. If you need a rule, if you're counting the tweets and every tenth one is the money shot, then you've got it all wrong. Those other nine won't hack it if you're only doing it for the shill.

I tend to post lots of photographs of cows and the views here on the farm. I'll occasionally rant about something political that's narked me, or meander off on a thought tangent. Only very, very occasionally will I mention that I've got a book out, or that it's on special offer. I'd far rather people liked me for the stuff I said. Found out that I was a writer with a book out only because they were interested enough to dig deeper themselves.

So if you're planning a media campaign for your magnificent octopus and reckon twitter and facebook (or Google+, Diaspora?, lord only knows what else) are the way to go, then stop. Think. Don't sell the book, sell yourself. Let the world know what an interesting person you are.

There's a reason it's called social media, not commercial media. 


*That was my sister, OK? Not me.

What's in a Name?

I posted this over at jamesoswald.co.uk and then realised not everyone knows about that place.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a certain baby-faced Detective Constable Stuart MacBride pops up in Natural Causes and is firmly part of the team for The Book of Souls. Fans of gritty and darkly humorous crime fiction may also be aware that there is an author writing Aberdeen-based books who has a very similar name. Could they, I am frequently asked, be related?

Well, yes. Sort of. Stuart and I first met in Aberdeen sometime in an earlier millennium. We had both been lured in by a flier pinned up in the local comic shop, promising fame and fortune to any who would contribute to a new publication that was being put together. It was called From the Sublime... (and that ellipsis was very important - never miss it off no matter how complicated it makes your punctuation.) It was a fanzine, let's not be too precious about it. Based on comics, Manga, SF, Fantasy and Role-playing Games. Pretty much anything, really. To give you some idea of how long ago this was, it never made it to the internet. Such a thing existed then, but in an embryonic form. Blogs were nothing more than the fevered imaginings of the drug-addled, social media a misspelling of the left-wing press.

But I digress. I was trying to make it in the world as a writer of comics. The problem was I knew no artists, and Aberdeen was far removed from the creative centre of things, wherever that might have been. So the arrival of From the Sublime... was a godsend. Mike McLean, co-founder and editor, who now runs the splendid Asylum Books and Games, introduced me to a young, talented and beardy artist, and we collaborated on what was meant to be the best comic ever. Alas, the rest of the world didn't understand the genius of As if by Magic, which wasn't a piss take of Mr Benn at all. Honest.

Stuart had dreams of being a writer, and concentrated more on that. As decisions go it was probably a good one, even though he is a very talented artist too - annoying fellow. From the Sublime... didn't last long - the cost of producing it on borrowed photocopiers and the sadly limited Aberdeen readership meant it only lasted a couple of years. Several later-moderately-famous people cut their writing/artistic teeth on it, though. Who knows, maybe one day the BBC will do one of those family tree things about it. Or maybe not.

But nevertheless, that is how I met Stuart MacBride, and we've been good friends ever since. I even ushed at his wedding - something that involved a rubber chicken, if memory serves.

For many years we were both unpublished authors, seeking the attention of agents and editors and giving each other mutual support and feedback. He'd show me his and I'd show him mine, as it were. He's dropped me into a couple of his books - you might even spot me striding out in a natty suit in one frame of As if by Magic. It seemed only fair when I started writing the Inspector McLean books that I return the favour. That DS MacBride is baby-faced, his chin bereft of beard, is simply intended to confuse the Russians, as my mother would say.

And then we get to The Book of Souls. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that in this book there is middle-aged psychologist and criminal profiler who goes by the name of Matt Hilton. Some of you may have read thrillers by a writer with a remarkably similar name. Could they, perhaps, be related?

Well, the answer to that one is no. It's purely coincidental. I wrote the first draft of The Book of Souls in 2007, before Mr Hilton hit the headlines and the bestseller lists. Like many of my characters where the name is not particularly important, I came up with it by taking the first name of a friend (Matthew Power, as it happened in this case), and then choosing something at random for the surname. Thus Matt Hilton was born.

I met the real Mr Hilton at the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate in 2008. He didn't seem particularly upset at having his name used, so I didn't bother changing it. There's every chance he'll pop up again from time to time as a psychological thorn in McLean's side.

Tony McLean himself was originally a John, until I realised that the Bruce Willis character in the Die Hard movies is John McClane - which is almost as bad a way of misspelling it as MacClean's toothpaste, and that's a pun. The McLean part of his name comes from my partner, Barbara, who has put up with my nonsense for far longer than I deserve.

Some writers put a great deal of thought into the naming of characters, and it's important not to be too flippant about it. Jonathan Okolo from Natural Causes spent several drafts as Mr Makeupaname, which given that he was meant to be African (for reasons that were lost in the final draft), almost worked. I was advised not to call him that in the end, and spent a happy afternoon searching the internet for common surnames from West Africa instead.

Mostly I think the names of characters are important but not crucial. It's what the other characters call them that matters, and the interactions between them. So Grumpy Bob is Robert Laird, but no-one calls him that. He's 'Grumpy' Bob because it has a pleasing rhythm to it, and he's generally speaking the least grumpy fellow you're likely to meet. People would even refer to him as Grumpy Bob whilst he was in earshot, and he's well aware of the nickname, revels in it even.

John Needham inevitably became 'Needy' and that largely wrote his character for me. Perhaps this was a case of my subconscious doing the work my conscious should have been doing, but the dependence on his father, the resentment at being sidelined from a promising career as a detective because of an injury in the line of duty, the stress of being the last of his line, all fed into his obsession with Donald Anderson. His whole character developed from that nickname.

At least in the UK, very few people below a certain age will ever have heard of Dagwood Bumstead from the US comic strip Blondie, but the name is suitably derogatory in its sound - that initial 'Dag' - that the contempt behind it is obvious. It's also a play on the common mispronunciation of Duguid, which should be said as 'Do good' but often comes out as 'Dug weed' or something similar. The nickname leaves us in no doubt as to the general contempt for Charled Duguid.

I'm currently working on the next McLean book, The Hangman's Song. Or at least I should be, rather than wasting time writing inane posts here. A few new characters crop up in this one, and as yet I haven't really given any thought to their names at all. Perhaps I'd better start thinking a bit harder about that. Or maybe I'll just go and do a mash-up of names from all my facebook friends.