A Literary Revolution is Announced

I am fed up. I am fed up with starting Blogs about the Literary Revolution and not posting them. I am fed up with feeling that my creative efforts are not interesting to you and that people will find it all very boring and self-obsessed.

I am not sure that in the course of my life I have had much encouragement for being creative. I went to a school that disliked creativity and I think that I currently have a job that tries to stop people (or rather, those of us on the lower rungs of the ladder) having ideas. I have always played music, written songs, written stories ... but I have not had people around to praise me in these things. Those who were at my housewarming will probably remember just how surprised I was by the reaction of people to my musical performance. That was not faked, that was genuine shock. I had started the impromptu concert about ten minutes before I knew that people had to leave to catch the train back to Cardiff - it was deliberate and then a huge surprise when people were happy to postpone leaving for another hour.

I am fed up with this though, so I am going to announce the Literary Revolution and if you dislike it then move on. Just be warned that knowing a man who is good with words like what I is comes at a price and it is probably £3.99 for a Kindle copy of £5 for a paperback edition.

Last November I was lucky enough to stay with international author Simon James. He had published online and I had always dismissed that as not proper publishing. However, not only could he show how it could lead to the much-valued book deal with a publisher but he had all the systems worked out for hard copy publishing and charging people for your work. I agree with paying for creative work and would go with Caitlin Moran’s inelegant but simple explanation as to why she supports The Times’s pay wall - ‘bitch gotta make rent’.

I still viewed e-publishing as second class at the time, so I decided not to use it for any novels but put together some compilations of writing instead. After a brief discussion, I realised that I had to split my efforts between political writing and humorous writing. My first task was to draw together all the necessary writing.

I did some new writing and also consulted my archives for inspiration. By Christmas, I had two compilation books to put together and wrote about 80,000 words to bulk this out. I love the look on people’s faces when I say that I wrote 80,000 words. To me it really is nothing very special but to other people it seems to be something significant.

It was good fun. The political one was quite easy, but I still wrote two new essays for it so that no-one could say that they had read it all before. The humorous one was a little bit more of a challenge. However, once I was in a writing mood it was easier. Here is an example -

I was on the train to Llandudno for the work AGM and I went through Crewe. I remembered Rob once saying ‘that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back’ and me joking ‘What, aren’t you claiming those back? You can you know - it’s the same office at Crewe station where you claim refunds for delayed trains’. What if this was real? I thought about a news report or an internet story about it, but I have always found that weirdness sits best in a story with characters. Slowly I pieced together the idea of a man going to visit a friend in Sheffield and finding her house full of in-laws and children and finding a place to sleep in the conservatory. I like households with small children, the children drive everything that happens. It intrigued me to think that this woman could work for the government agency involved in claims for wasted hours of life but that her explanations of it were always interrupted by a child crying or stepping on a piece of lego, so that the reader would never quite find out the full explanation.

In case you are wondering, a few weeks before this I had been to stay with the lovely Kerry in Sheffield (I think it’s Stockport in the final story version) and although none of the people in the story are the same as those I met, it worked well to take the circumstances and use them as a basis for the story. I had written most of it by the time the train reached Llandudno (as I once said to someone who loved driving, how many books have you written while driving your car?) but there was something missing from it. The small children really only appeared as interruptions in the story, I wanted to say something about them.

The next morning I was visiting Bangor Gymnastics Club. It rained very heavily and I got completely soaked on the walk from the station to the Sports Hall. They took such pity on me when I arrived that they let me use the disabled toilet to try to dry off. The meeting went well but the Head Coach would not let me walk back out in the rain and offered to drive me. As we went to her car, she apologised for the mess in it. I explained that I had friends with children so I knew what to expect. As she drove to the station, she explained to me that children are just so creatively messy and how her daughter had lined up all her shoes and put dolls in them - when her mother tried to reclaim her shoes, she was told that they were all racing cars and that she would mess-up the race if she moved them. Sitting on the train, I knew that I had my anecdote about the children and I also added in a girlfriend to meet the main character when he arrived back at the station ... well, my life has lacked girlfriends willing to meet me at stations, so that is just fantasy (and an excuse for a last twist in the story).

Look up the story ‘Do Not Ask For A Refund’ when you buy the book.

There were a few others that you will have read on here before, but there is a lot of new and revived stuff. It is all linked by a warped sense of humour and a desire to take extraordinary ideas and put them in mundane situations for humorous effect.

Before Easter I started on the process of converting the two books for Kindle. BLOODY HELL it is a difficult process. The lovely Simon James (buy his book Ghost Note, by the way) had set out guidelines on how to do this but it still took an age. You are given options for formatting for different Kindles but what works for one does not work for others. It is very frustrating. I have also had four attempts to get a cover within the official guidelines ... anyway, that is the technical side that you do not need to know.

The political one is done at any rate, both in Kindle and paperback form. This weekend I am going to do the same for the humorous one and I have bought ISBN numbers for that. An ISBM number means that the details of the book are held in the British Library. How cool is that! I am going to try to donate one to the National Library of Wales and see what happens!

Once both are done in both formats, I will let you know as only then will I start on the marketing drive.

The funny thing is that all this creativity has got me motivated again. I wrote a novel in 2010-12 while on train journeys to see my father. It has the names of all the train stations on the Cardiff to Portsmouth line hidden in the text ... though possible Sue Filton-Abbeywood is a character name too far. Anyway, it has been rejected by about ten publishers now though the lovely Seren Books were positive about its saleability if I could find the right agent (they also compared me to Jasper Fforde, which I take as a great compliment). It is a bit on hold now though because it is a story with a slighty uncertain middle. I write great beginnings and great endings but I often lose confidence in the middle and although people I asked to read it gave me some good feedback and it did not include ‘what’s going on in the middle’, I need to do a rewrite.

However, I have done a lot of train journeys over the years and I have a netbook filled with stories and books. In 2014, I had a holiday in Ireland with Dr C. We were introduced to the idea of bathing in seaweed in a speciality seaweed hotel and it set off a conversation about whether we could set up a business doing the same back in Wales. The conclusion of this conversation was me saying ‘you know what’s going to happen, don’t you? We won’t ever do it, but I will write about it’. It was the time of the Scottish referendum and I wanted to write a manifesto for Welsh independence but did not know how to do that either. The illogical combination of the ideas seemed ideal and I am now about 25,000 words into the tale of people trying to run a seaweed-bathing hotel who accidentally get pulled into the Welsh referendum on independence. During my lunchbreak today I finished a chapter in which a Plaid Cymru Assembly Member interviews one of the hotel owners, she thinking that they are talking about separation between Wales and England, he thinking that she is asking about him separating from his on-off girlfriend. It is quite a similar principle to the one mentioned earlier - the politics of nationalism is buried somewhere beneath seaweed, business and relationships.

When I have finished that one, I am going to take up the suggestion of a friend of mine and get it translated into Welsh before offering it for publication. It is a minority publishing empire, but it might well be an interesting addition to it. The English language version may be available on Kindle and in paperback though. I have Simon James’s very own self-published Ghost Note and there is something about seeing a book in hard copy that is special.

So there we go, I have bored you silly with the Literary Revolution. It will be a little while until I unleash the first part of it on an unsuspecting world, though if anyone would like to follow my literary self on twitter I am @DewiHeald1 - David Heald was taken, he is a Professor at Aberdeen University who writes about economics, politics and devolution. His ‘Accounting for the Severn Bridge’ is a classic of its kind (its kind being books about accountancy and bridges that I have not read).

Watch this space. Of all the things that happened to me today, wearing my new socks and the chapter I wrote at lunchtime were the highlights. In its own way, my work is highly creative I suppose in that I value the time away from it for fantasy.

Final topical note - when you register with Amazon to sell books via Kindle, they remind you that if you are in the UK then you have to pay tax on sales. Sadly there is no button to respond, ‘Okay, I will if you will’.