last man out of eden

Now, Tell Me…

If you have a book and a blog called The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes, you’re bound to attract a certain amount of cobblers. So to speak. I made the decision very early on that this was a good thing. Largely because I like shoes.

So I decided to run a column called The View from the Shoe. Every week I’d ask the same questions to a different creative type I’d met on twitter. Questions like “Converse or Louboutin?” It was where I learned just how fun it could be doing interviews. And even better doing slightly kooky interviews.

I started interviewing bands, asking things like “It’s 3am and you’ve been in the studio all day. Who cracks and orders take out first, and what?” I wrote tongue in cheek columns for music websites. And I was writing more and more columns about everything from publishing to literary theory. I was getting the kind of buzz I’d got whilst writing my travelogue.

But proper writers write fiction. Don’t they?

The Man who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes

During 2009, whilst Year Zero was in its heyday, I’d been building what I guess people would be called a social media platform in order to get the word out for the collective. And also to tell people about my new book.

That book, The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes, was responsible for many of my online usernames, and the fact that on twitter I’m being followed by well over 100 online shoe stores!

I wanted Aggie, as the book became known, to be different. I wanted to show that literary fiction could engage the reader. So I decided to write interactively on a Facebook group. I created fake news reports, a whole world of characters and scenarios around the central idea – a YouTube clip of the mysterious but comical death of a Polish woman in a gym accident, the final frame of which was her upturned, titular shoes, an endlessly reproduced image that would become as famous as “that” picture of Che Guevara. Group members would choose favourite characters, themes, actions, even design the image itself. And I would post chapters twice a week until I was through.

 

I failed at almost everything with Aggie. But I failed in interesting ways as the saying goes. I never really got the interaction going. People were much more interested in reading than participating. But I made some great new friends. And I started to get taken seriously as someone at least trying, if not succeeding, to innovate. That even got me listed in social media bible Mashable’s top 100 writers on twitter.

It was Aggie that launched my social media life.

In The Middle With You

I wasn’t the only person I knew writing literary fiction of a decidedly uncommercial persuasion who’d had positive but just tweak it a bit responses from the mainstream, and on January 1^st 2009, 22 of us joined forces to form Year Zero Writers, a collective of self-publishers who wanted a space where the only concerns were art and not commerciality.

 

It all started rather paradisally. We were committed to promoting each others’ work and to rigorously debating our art – the articles and discussions we had every Saturday are still among the most stimulating I’ve ever been part of.

 

And those of us who lived near each other (we drew our members from 8 countries so this was by no means everyone) started gigging together, kicking off with a fabulous show at the legendary Rough Trade East. Our shows soon got a reputation for their warm audiences, slightly chaotic (the more realistic term for what we’d have liked to think of as anarchic) schedules and blending of words and some great live indie music.

 

And we got attention. We were one of the most prominent collectives out there, and had become much-cited, much sought-after, even called “cool” by indie style bible Nylon Mag.

 

And it was with Year Zero I discovered just how rewarding it is to promote other amazing writers, and the absolute joy of seeing the success of those you’ve worked with and admire.

 

But collectives are strange beasts with so many pitfalls. It’s very hard to have a real sense of direction whilst maintaining consensus – and it’s always those who want least to do with the consensual process who are quickest to say if the results of that process aren’t to their liking.

 

Inevitably when cracks appeared, it was in the context of money. Whilst some of us were enjoying spending more and more time on the “art”, giving everything away for free and steering clear of anything that smacked of the corporate or the mainstream, others wanted us to be more of a marketing cooperative for self-publishers, to use Amazon, even to become a publisher. They wanted sales.

 

Eventually it became clear that this was one of those intractables that consensus could never solve, and when the argument became public, I had to choose whether to stick with something I wouldn’t be happy with or to walk away, and if the latter how to explain it without doing the dirty on people I greatly admired.

All By Myself

With Songs from the Other Side of the Wall I may have found my voice, but I was still only writing it because I’d been told there was a market for it, and I was consciously changing it to appeal more and more to that market. More like Murakami. More like Kundera.

 

I was getting some lovely responses from agents, full of excitement and compliments. But the book wasn’t…what was the phrase? It wasn’t enough of a “big splash for a debut.”

 

I harrumphed. Harumphed again. And then, at the start of 2009 my naturally obstinately alternative roots pulled me in the right direction and I decided I’d rather self-publish a book that I was happy with than look for a regular publisher for one I wasn’t.

 

And I decided I was going to do it right. And show that you could produce something high quality that people would take notice of. I became a self-styled self-publishing publicist. Got my articles on the self-publishing revolution all over the interweb. Became, rather bizarrely, one of the go-to people for anyone wanting an opinion on self-publishing. And a champion of “freemium” – giving things away for free (in this case an ebook) so as to get people to buy something else (the paperback with extra content).

 

Fabulous. I was a guru! And I was getting downloads. And great reviews. I was seeking out and finding the book’s niche. I was showing you could self-publish and get critical acclaim. And sales. And that was exactly the problem. I was doing this wonderful, independent, alternative thing. For all the absolutely wrong reasons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crit Lit

At the start of 2008, with a completed manuscript of The Company of Fellows in hand (well, on a memory stick), I was rootling through the Writers and Artists’ Yearbook when I found a note about a writers’ critiquing site called Youwriteon. And thus began one of my most extraordinary adventures.

 

Critiquing sites are basically just that – writers giving feedback to writers. In the case of Youwriteon and later in 2008 Authonomy, there is the added carrot of critiques for the most popular books from professional editors.

 

It was on the forums and critiques of these sites that I made my first real writing friends. I’ve gone on to meet well over a hundred people from the sites, and the Harper Collins employees behind Authonomy even came to the first ever live show I put on at Rough Trade. And it was there I met the people who would become the Year Zero collective.

 

It was a professional critique through Youwriteon, from a Random House editor, of one of my short that made me take up writing literary fiction for good. In an e-mail correspondence about how I felt I was shoehorning myself into the thriller writing role when I wanted to write more uncommercial stuff the editor said worry not, there is a market for the more literary things I wanted to write.

 

And so I started to write Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, a story about a teenage girl growing up in Hungary after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And for the first time I felt like I had found my voice.

Cheap Thrills

My first full-on dive into the world of fiction was The Company of Fellows, a thriller set in Oxford about a bipolar ex Theology student (write what you know, eh!). I’ve always loved thrillers, and whilst I adore Morse, your average Oxford-set murder tends to be a somewhat comfortable affair. I wanted to write something a little more along the lines of Val McDermid or Hannibal Lecter, something that probes the darkness. Oxford’s such a great backdrop for the depths the human soul can plunge.

 

It was my first shot at getting an agent, too. After much researching the art of the synopsis, I plundered the Writers and Artists Yearbook for possibles. And it went OK for a first manuscript, getting the odd bite, if nothing landed.

 

The Company of Fellows languished in a drawer whilst I went on to literary fiction, until this year, when – long after I’d stopped looking for an agent – I decided I might as well put it out there. So I did. I made it available on Kindle, and as a paperback. And somehow it sold. More than 7000 copies to date. And got voted Blackwell’s “favourite Oxford novel.”

 

And suddenly I found myself best known as a thriller writer. And on the verge of the mainstream. I was invited to join all kinds of groups with bestselling writers. People were suddenly interested in me. Me the thriller-writing self-publishing bestseller. I found myself in a world that talked about marketing, promotions, how-to-sell, and pricing. Lots of doors were opened that would never have been opened without The Company of Fellows. That in itself makes me anxious. One of them – getting to know the wonderful team at Blackwell’s – has been amazing. And I’ve met many super people. Many of the other doors I’ve been rather glad to close and find myself still on the outside.

Up in the Air

My first adventure into writing was a humorous, heartfelt travelogue charting my wife’s and my madcap adventures during the budget travel boom. At one point, comforting ourselves form childlessness and slowly succumbing to symbiotic bouts of bipolar, we ended up visiting 23 countries in a year on a shoestring. As things spiralled, it became more heavy duty jute than shoestring and we ended up with five figures of debt we’re still servicing.

 

I still think Fine Food, Farragoes, and Flights of Fancy is some of my best writing. And it was Going Places. We were on the cover of Woman’s Own with our exploits. I wrote travel advice for The Observer. I was even screen-tested for a Channel 4 documentary that would have been called Around the World in Eighty Pounds.

 

It was all set for literary megastardom. Or at least Tony Hawks-lite. And then with a series of high profile security screw-ups the budget airline boom busted.

A Year Of Play

That’s me. A regular guy with a book. There are lots of us around. Writers. People with books.

I’ve spent the past 5 years trying to be a regular writer. Which has felt strange for someone as irregular as the verb “to be” (have you ever wondered that “to be”, the verb that gives us the words “essence” and Being, that represents life itself is the most irregular verb of all? As though the first linguists knew what we’ve forgotten – that there are as many ways of living as there are people?).

You see, no matter what I was doing, I’ve spent my writing life either trying to break in or break out. Get a publisher, make some money, be accepted, be invited to do stuff. Be different, be the first, explore new ground, be a rebel. It’s all the same. It’s all about there being me on the one hand. And on the other there being something else. And it’s always been about how to position myself in relation to that something else. Or those many something elses.

And the odder thing is I’ve spent much of that time writing articles about confessional art. About the theoretical impossibility of any two people and any two artists being the same. Exhorting people to go out and *do* and not worry about money or mainstream.

So, finally, I’m devoting a year to fun. Play. Exploring. Doing what takes my fancy. And not a single sales pitch. That’s the only rule. Like a writers’ gap year. Only I can’t help thinking that in art it’s those years we spend selling ourselves that are the gap years. And too many of us wait too long to take up our proper roles.

I’m not “trying to fail to sell anything” or going for “glorious obscurity.” My books will still be for sale – e-books on Amazon, paperbacks on Lulu. There’ll still be links on my site. But I won’t plug them. Not once. And there’ll be plenty for free.

I’ll spend the next few days spinning some anecdotes about what I’ve spent the past five years doing. And why it wasn’t right. Whilst acknowledging I’ve made more and better friends and learned more and had more exciting moments than in any other period of my life.

So that’s the project. I’ve called it Last Man Out Of Eden. Like my eight cuts gallery project I could pretend there’s a reason for that. There isn’t. I liked the sound of it. And thought it might look OK on a hoodie.