I am not a niche...sorry and all that...

pic by the beautiful and talented Solange Noir

We are what we are.  We may run away from ourselves; we may try to hide; we may put up a good façade; we may shelter behind an image – but ultimately, is there any point?  You look around and there you are.

My dear friend Sarah Dening used to say that we all need the persona, the outward ‘mask’ to function in society and she was right. In as far as our society is the way it is.  And today, on the loo, I read a piece about Joan Collins in Red magazine – about how she was in court as her normal self and was getting trodden all over and then someone said to her: ‘Be Alexis’ (if you are young, you won’t know, but this was her ‘mean as a rattler kickass bitch’ character in the TV show Dynasty) and she did and she won. 

I can still put on the mask if I need to.  I can (I think) still play at ‘professional journalist’ or ‘sensible author’ when I need to; but increasingly, and particularly outside work, I can’t be arsed with the masks.  And, above all, I can’t be arsed with masks when it comes to this blog. 

I keep reading stuff about ‘positioning your blog’; about ‘becoming a brand’; about ‘owning your niche’.  Shit, in the time it’s taken me to write this, I’ve had someone follow me on Twitter offering to help build my status, to make me an authority. Feck off, mate. Not interested.

Because, see, this blog is where I don’t have to worry about editors, about writing to a specific brief, in a certain style, to a demographic.  I have struggled for years over this question of Who I Am When I Blog (or when I do anything really).  And I have slowly come to the realisation that, actually, it is perfectly okay to be a weird contradiction, that’s it’s fine not to be ‘on message’ all the time, that – truly – one doesn’t have to be ‘niche’…if one doesn’t want to be. 

You don’t have to be a brand. 

For sure, if you’re courting a particular audience or want to blog for a particular market, then fine, brand yourself to kingdom come, find that  niche. It may feel nice and warm and cosy, in which case - great. It may feel a little uncomfortable, you might need to squish yourself into it - in which case, maybe have a ponder.  But for me (and, I suspect) a lot of people – it’s just about thinking out loud.  And, sorry, I don’t just think in one particular way.

So I can blog about being a mother, about that weird concept that is parenting.  And I can blog about ridiculous things like sexualising kitchen implements and trying out ludicrous control garments because, hey, sometimes stupid things amuse me.  And I can blog about books and gaming; about fitness and food; about shoes and breakfast cereals and nice aromatherapy oils.  I can blog about spirituality and religion and mysticism and weirdy beardy stuff.  All of it.  Any of it.  Cos, hey, it’s my blog.  And if you don’t like that, that’s fine – you don’t have to read it.  I won’t be offended.  And yeah, I know that means I won't get sponsorship deals or get sent on fancy trips (except...hmmm ) but hey, that's not why I do it.  

I know I lose people sometimes. Okay, a lot. J Some people like the funny stuff and wander off, twirling a finger around their heads, when I go mystical.  Or they love the spiritual stuff and freak out when I swear or talk about sex. But, hey, I happen to feel they’re all mixed up, muddled up, tangled up like cosmic spaghetti and to separate the sex from the spirituality, the humour from the hagiography (okay, struggling with my alliteration there) is to miss something rather important about God/Goddess/Whatever the Fuck you want to call It.  If you want a slightly more coherent take on this, you could add a few pennies to the coffers of the Bonkers House and buy my book, The Energy Secret, now available on wondrous Kindle, thanks to the stern goddess who is Kim Jewell.

Anyhow…that’s it really. 

Forgive me if I’m not quite coherent.  I’ve been off visiting strange places again and am still not quite fully back here in the normal world.  Normal service will be resumed, I promise…there will be breakfast cereal, and dog kibble and doubtless more general weirdness and hopefully some more sexy innuendo-laden kitchen appliances (dear gods of PR send me a toaster before I burn another bagel).  If you’re very good, there may even be a bed of nails…

Oh, and in the middle of my mad three days, I was sent an email which said: "Watch this…" and I did…and it’s really rather wonderful… and fits in rather delightfully with all this business of who we are and who we’re supposed to be…and what is important, and what isn’t… It's a film, btw...so you'll need some time... 

My love affair with Autumn and, er, my book

I’d forgotten how much I love autumn.  The SP and I took our walk along the river today as even I am not quite feckless enough to wander through the woods when bits of tree are whizzing past my nose.  The wind was wild and crazy and the SP went crazy too, leaping like an impala over the long grass, spooking at things that weren’t there (or at least not visible to the eye) and leaping up at me as if to say, ‘Isn’t this the best fun in the entire world ever?’ I had to agree it wasn't half-bad and, with The Black-Eyed Peas blaring in my ears, we danced our way round the big field.

The hedgerows were stuffed with berries and hips – blackberries, rowanberries, hawthorn, rosehips, big fat sloes – and the scent of wild honeysuckle drifted on the breeze. And it all reminded me that the wondrous Kim Jewell had gone a bit nuclear on me the other day.  See, many many years ago (so many years in fact that, as was kindly pointed out on Facebook, most of the original readers are probably dead!) I wrote a book called The Natural Year, all about living in tune with the seasons.  

Anyhow.  I'd been thinking for quite some time that I really ought to get my old books out there as e-books.  But, to be honest, every time I started looking into how to do it, I felt a bit queasy.  So, I was whinging in an unattractively pathetic way on Twitter about all the things that were stopping me self-publishing, like lack of a cover, not being able to format etc, and Kim said simply, ‘I’ll do it for you.’ 

And she did.  Just like that.  24 hours later The Natural Year was up on Amazon and available for sale. I tell ya, that woman is scarily awesome.  You wouldn’t want to meet her down a dark alley, that’s for sure. 

Anyhow, here it is and here you go.  It seems I have self-pubbed my first ebook (or rather, Kim has).  You can find it here. if you're in the US and here if you're in the UK.  If you're in Germany, you will have to find it for yourself as it seems a direct link is verboten.  And if you're anywhere else you are entirely free to buy it from wheresoever you so desire.  Kim interviewed me for her blog and you can read that here. Incidentally you can also find links there to her own wonderful YA titles (James is a huge fan of the Justice series).

Sooo.  What did I say, way back then in the mists of time, about Autumm?  Let's see....an abridged snippet (love the word snippet). 

Autumn – Season of the Mind

"Autumn shouts ‘wake-up’ to the psyche - it's time to dust yourself off after the languor of summer and take life head on once again.  In spring you started to ask yourself lots of questions about your life, your path and your desires.  Now is the time to get them going, to take action, to shift your external world.  Autumn is the season of the mind but it also concerns our relationship with the environment, with the world outside, the bigger picture. 

Autumn is a perfect time to decide what you want to make of your life; what you want to achieve; where you want to be; how you want to work.  It is the key time for deciding on your life path or making moves towards it.  That may sound frightening, even off-putting, but it needn't be.  Often we automatically find ourselves making changes, shifts, in the autumn.  We may not be totally instinctual beings any more but deep within we are still moved by the rhythms of the year. Our hearts and souls still beat to the ancient drum.  It is no real surprise that schools and colleges use the beginning of autumn as their starting point for the academic year.  What better time to make a fresh intellectual start? 

This is the perfect time to get your life in order.  It's the time to start looking for answers to the questions you posed yourself back in spring.  If you need to shake your life around a bit, this is the time to do it.  Don't feel you have to change for the sake of it - it's more a case that if you have been looking for a change, this is a good time to think about putting things into motion.  As always, if the time doesn't feel right, don't do anything.  I'm certainly not suggesting that everyone should go out and get a new job or a new relationship or move house or emigrate on September 1st!  Simply that if you feel there are changes in your life (however small) you might want to make, the energy at this time of year will help you make those changes.  It's like a car being given a dose of high-octane fuel or a horse being given a feed of oats - you should be feeling frisky and full of energy."

Hellfire, did I really write that???  Shit.  Think I need to read the book.  :-)

Oh, and while I’m here, keep an eye on those rosehips…. A couple of recipes from later in the book...

Wild rose hips abound during the autumn and early days of winter - pick them (best after the second frost but before the birds get a chance to eat them all) and use them as a cold-banishing tonic, jam-packed with vitamin C.  If you have an abundance of rose hips you could make rosehip syrup as did all wisewomen and good housekeepers of old.  If not, try a simple tonic drink.  The famous herbalist Culpeper said that rosehips are ‘grateful to the taste and a considerable restorative, fitly given to the consumptive person, the conserve being proper in all distempers of the breast and in coughs and tickling rheums.  It has a binding effect and helps digestion.’  In all a wonderful free tonic. 

ROSEHIP SYRUP

Crush around 450g of rose hips and put them into a pan containing 900ml of boiling water.  Bring them back to the boil and then turn off the heat and allow them to stand for around twenty minutes.  Strain (preferably through muslin), and then put the fruit which will now be pappy and mashed, into around 300ml of fresh boiling water.  Once again allow to stand for a further twenty minutes and then strain again. 

Mix the two sets of strained juices together and return to the pan.  Boil on a low but steady heat until the juice has reduced down to around 600ml.  It will be syrupy by now.  Allow to cool, sweeten to taste with wild honey and bottle in sterilized bottles as you would with any preserve. 

ROSEHIP TONIC DRINK

Simply chop up two teaspoons of rose hips and add them to around 300ml of boiling water.  Allow to steep for fifteen minutes and then strain and sweeten with honey to taste.  You can make larger quantities and keep in the fridge for up to three days.  It tastes lovely too.

X-rated Kindle? Should e-books come with warning stickers?

Should e-books come with warning stickers?  Well, should they? 

I bought two books on Amazon for my Kindle the other day.  One was The Power of Six by Pittacus Lore. The other was Django Zoon: The Straightener by Jobo Pooks.  One was for James; one was for me.  Because, see, James has sort of purloined my Kindle, having consumed Kim Jewell’s YA books, Invisible Justice and BruteJustice.  And I tell you, if you have a recalcitrant reader, try him or her with an e-reader…while adults may baulk at the lack of a ‘real’ book, children seem to feel quite the opposite.

Now then.  Here’s the thing.  Zoon is huge fun – I read the first few chapters on Authonomy and it’s a wild roller-coaster ride, totally crazy and, in places, laugh-out-loud funny. Incorrect in every which way but that’s part of the charm. However  it also has a high filth level and some pretty fruity language.  Is it the kind of thing even a feckless liberal parent like me would want their twelve-year old to read?  Umm, no, not really. 

It kinda crossed my mind at the time whether I should say anything about it to James but I figured that doing so would only draw his attention to it, thus making it quite quite irresistible. So I kept schtum.  But I joked to Jobo, on Twitter, that my son was enjoying it – and he didn’t think it was remotely funny; in fact he was pretty perturbed.  And we batted it back and forth a bit – this question of books being available to buy online.  I really hadn’t given it any thought and, okay, I thought he was overreacting a bit.

I just don’t think children will be out there buying books for their Kindles in the first place by and large – they’d be getting their parents to spend the dosh, won’t they?  But, stop right there – James did order himself a copy of the Stig’s biography the other day.  Hmm.  Then again, even if a child did buy x-rated porn, the parents are going to get the email bill, right?  They’re going to see what little Bob or Kylie has downloaded and, unless Bob or Kylie is a speed reader, could nab it off them and lock them in their room to think about it before you could say ‘wildly inappropriate tits and arses’.  Anyhow, how is it an e-book any different from a paper book?  A lot of ‘normal’ adult books (I’m not talking erotica here) have scenes of sex and violence. Some have pretty ripe language.  If you have anything other than Barbara Cartland on your shelves (in which case we have a whole other conversation to have), surely your children could get a dose of adult material if they really wanted?

But then I thought again. It’s  not so much what they can buy but what’s already on there. And it is different because, with a paper book, you’re going to spot ‘em, aren’t you?  If James wanted, he could climb up on a chair and grab any number of explicit sex tomes (left over from my sex columnist days, of course). But I’d notice him thumbing through Extreme Tantra, wouldn't I?  Whereas Kindles are secretive little things.  Someone I know (I won't out her) says she loves her Kindle because she can be cruising the web, chatting on Twitter or Facebook while everyone thinks she is quietly reading Jane Austen.  Sneaky little baggage. 

Cos, think about it, there’s no cover to act as a giveaway, is there?  There’s no physical presence, no hard evidence. 

And I got to wondering.  Has James looked through the contents of my Kindle?  My tastes are pretty tame on the whole but a few of the authors I know from Authonomy write saucy stuff and I’ve got a couple of Poppet’s raunchy tales stashed away there.  And some of Jake Barton's crime stuff is pretty graphic in a blood and guts way. Not to mention Sessha Batto's intense homo-erotica!  We get so worried about children not reading that maybe we've lost sight that perhaps there are books they shouldn't read. Not yet anyway. 

Hmm, I said to Jobo.  Maybe books should have stickers – like they put on rap records – warning that they have adult content.  Absolutely, he replied, and went off to get Zoon reclassified.  ‘Amazon should categorise stuff,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t want children reading it full stop.’ 

But that’s just looking at it from one end and I still don’t think it’s actually the major problem.  However, if you share a Kindle with your child, have you thought about what they could read?  Would it worry you?  Should it worry you? Ought e-readers come with some kind of parental lock that you could put on certain books?

Bottom line: do you know what your children are reading? 




btw, going back briefly to Jobo and Zoon - it's an interactive project and the music is pretty cool too (and, as far as I can hear, there's no filth there)... check it out here.  You can download tracks for a donation to charity- or see/hear the audio/visual on YouTube. 
  


PS: I'd like to point out that I do also know plenty of people who write nice books which aren't full of filth... :)

Free-e-day

I'm a bad blogger, an AWOL blogger - if my blog were my house it would be thigh-deep in dust. Hey, wait a minute, my house IS thigh-deep in dust. Art imitates life or what?

Why the absence? Well, I've been trying to concentrate on writing. As many of you know I wrote a children's/YA book called Walker - which languished in a bottom drawer for some considerable time (adding to the dust factor). A few months back I posted it up on Authonomy and now it's riding high at #7 in the charts. I've had amazing feedback and have rewritten it several times (and have a few more rewrites left to go I fear) so the experience has been fabulous.

While on the site, I have met some marvellous people. One, Dan Holloway, has a dream of spreading words and art and music through the Internet for free. So he has set up an initiative called Free-e-day - going live for December 1st - and you can find out more by visiting the blog...here....

I've offered up the first chunk of Walker (and will happily send the rest to anyone who is interested - once it's edited!).... check it out here....

Also, check out the downloads from two superb authors, Traci York and Kim Jewell.

If you fancy getting involved in any way do have a look at the blog......and please spread the word by any means you fancy.... Something for nothing? Can't be bad.