The Nameless Horror

Some days, my Twitter stream seems to be so full of other authors touting their #kindle #amazon #books that the thing might as well be called BuyMyShitter instead. If that didn’t make it sound like a kind of niche clone of Craigslist for people wishing to sell second-hand toilets.

These are, of course, fine and interesting people - if you check my ‘following’ list here you can be confident that the writers there are all worth tracking in their own right. We all secretly or publicly want people to Buy Our Shit and you can’t not make mention of it when you have New Shit to sell. It’s just that at times there’s a convergence of such announcements and we all sound like yammering ad monkeys.

I’m nervy of what’s traditionally (and somewhat tweely - the term dates from a simpler time of mailing lists and forums, not the constant live streaming flow of today’s social media) referred to as ‘BSP’ - Blatant Self-Promotion. I’ve mentioned whenever I have New Shit For Sale, but basically only the once each time, and I always feel soiled for doing it. Cheap. Tawdry. Like waking up next to Steve Mosby after a drunken night out. Sure, maybe everyone got what they wanted, but you know you can’t respect yourself afterwards. There are people who, and it’s entirely their right to do so (no one’s forced to follow anyone on Twitter, after all), make mention of their books on a regular basis, weekly or more, in case anyone’s forgotten that they’re on #kindle for #pocket #change, or to remind them that they’d been planning on buying the thing and just haven’t gotten round to it yet. And if you’re also mentioning a lot of other things and generally making lots of other contributions to the Great Internet Conversation, all fine and dandy.

There are also those - and I’ve started picking up more and more followers of this type, presumably scouring Twitter for anyone with “writer” in their profile - who do nothing else. Some have what’s obviously a “quote of the day” script that posts, once a day, a quote by some famous person to their Twitter account. Otherwise, all they do is, once a day, post: “Have you bought MY BOOK? Just $some.price on #kindle! #amazon #ebooks #awesome!!!!” They are followed only by bots and others like them. I’m sure I’m not alone in collecting them to me, like moths round a cash-laden flame.

These writers, who I’m sure are lovely people, don’t seem to understand the medium they’re trying to advertise in. Twitter, Facebook and their ilk are like being in a gigantic bar at a convention. A weird convention for lots of entirely disparate people. A bar where you all have magical cybernetic ears and can pick and choose whose conversations you listen in on, and to which you can then try to contribute to yourself. No one has to listen to you. And if you don’t join in, and don’t have your own non-advertising things to say (even if it’s just what you had for lunch that day - not that I know anyone who only shares that, but the point stands), no one will. These people are in that gigantic convention bar, standing alone and isolated by the corners, rocking back and forth and muttering psychotically to themselves: “I have shit for sale. Buy my shit. Buy my shit.” Around them, the world moves on, unaware.

Whatever you think of him, Joe Konrath - and I’ll digress to say that I’m aware that mentioning him, or Hocking, or Eisler, in any discussion touching on ebooks and self publishing has become rather a Godwin. In fact, I now propose “Cregan’s Law”: anyone citing Konrath, Hocking or Eisler in an argument on ebooks has already lost - Joe Konrath holds a conversation. Even way back before the Kindle and the millions of sales and all the rest of it, he’s had a mostly soft-sell online presence. Sure, 99% of his “newbie’s advice to writers” (to paraphrase his blog title) boils down to “you should buy my books”, but at least it’s generally dressed up as something else and you can pull the odd nugget of interesting information from it, and at least Joe is always involved in the backchat afterwards. He understands how to work social media to his advantage.

So if any of those psychotic loners are actually reading this, rather than just auto-posting “Buy my shit”, maybe you should stop muttering. I’m sure you’re interesting people and all, so why not reveal yourselves as such?

Also, did I mention that you might want to buy my shit?

Because I so enjoy seeing the same ‘Easter is pagan lol eggs Eostre rofl’ horseshit bounce around Twitter every year, I bring education:

1. Easter moves around every year because it’s tied to Passover, which is a lunar festival. IIRC, the different Gospels give a slightly different point during Passover (which is a week-long event) for the actual crucifixion, but they all agree that it was somewhere at Passover. As such, it was the only Christian festival allowed under the barkingly moronic sola scriptura jazz put about by the Puritans of Cromwell and the Scottish Kirk. It doesn’t move around because mythical pagan fairy people had their own movable festival taken away.
2. The method of figuring out the date was set at - and I’m doing this from memory, so I may have the exact place and time details wrong, but the time is roughly accurate and the main thing - the Council of Nicea around 300 CE. This was well before the Christianisation of Britain and northern Europe and there was no obvious reason why a bunch of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultists would decide to co-opt festivals occurring hundreds or thousands of miles away and well outside their own cultural milieu.
3. 'Eostre' gets a one-line mention in Bede’s history of These Here Isles, from well before his own time and thus not from his own observation (IIRC) and there is absolutely no evidence from anywhere else to suggest that there was such a festival/deity. Bede’s history wasn’t exactly perfect, and it looks like this was one of the errors in it.
4. Giving eggs is a very, very old and very Christian Easter tradition, and is the flip end of pancake day. Eggs were one of the things people gave up for Lent (along with meat and nice things and fun), but they were also readily available to even the poor (unlike, say, a nice side of bacon) and easy to decorate (unlike, say, a nice side of bacon). Thus they were a pretty little luxury people could give each other to celebrate the fact that they were allowed to eat them again. And they’re conveniently gift-sized. IIRC, one of the late-Saxon Edwards (possibly The Confessor) gave away over a thousand of them to his court one Easter. By Elizabethan times, eggs were a bit old hat, but chocolate had begun to be imported from the New World. The new end-of-Lent luxury gift amongst the rich became choccies, made into the shape of eggs to keep up the old tradition. People don’t give each other eggs because mythical pagan fairy people did it.
5. I’ll give you the Easter Bunny. How that came about I don’t know. But I do know it originated in Germany and was first recorded somewhere in the Renaissance. A very long time after any actual real pagan stuff died out.

Yes, there’s all sorts of fertility symbolism in there and I don’t doubt a pile of old folk tradition has become attached to Easter over the years (which, incidentally, happens to be the normal way round for these things to happen), but anyone prattling on about the wicked Christians and their horrible Egg Festival stealing needs to shut up. I’m an atheist, and there’s plenty of good reasons to despise/take the piss out of various churches around the world, but this particular tittering nonsense every damn year isn’t one. Eat your chocolate egg and be quiet.

I’d also recommend reading The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton to learn more. Fascinating, if somewhat lengthy, book. Did you know that the legend of Robin Hood was first told by, and originated from, the field of Morris dancing? Strange but apparently true.