The Nameless Horror

I keep seeing repostings of stories in the Bookseller and elsewhere reporting on the National Literacy Trust report on book ownership and reading enjoyment.

"3 in 10 households don’t own a single book!" scream either the headlines or the people retweeting/refacebooking this.

None of whom, I assume, have read the report, because this is balls and I wish you’d all shut up about it.

3 in 10 children/teenagers (the range is 8-17) in the survey say they do not have books of their own. The percentage is actually 66.8% saying they do, almost spot on two thirds, but since everyone bounces the … in 10 figure, let’s stick with that.

(Despite this, nearly 50% of those who don’t own books of their own still read a book at least once a week, only ~15% lower than those who do.)

The actual household figures? 0.6% of “we have books of our own” kids say there were no books at all in their home (suggesting that 0.6% of them were just making up any old toss), compared to 9.4% of those in the “we don’t have” category. 9.4% of that 33.2% category is close to 3% of the overall.

3% of households have no books in them. Or, to put it in headline language, 3 in 100.

This is still sad, but everyone can now please put a big fucking sock in your outrage at the non-existently poor state of book ownership in the UK. Thank you.

Edit to add: Oh, and ~9% of homes overall apparently have more than 500 books in them. I leave it for you to decide if there may have been any reporting issues when participants were giving data for this study.

The charming, sexy Jon Harrell reviews ALL YOU LEAVE BEHIND thusly:

I just read a new novella by this fella named Sean Cregan. I have to admit, I really enjoyed it. The Levels is an excellent set piece. Having not yet read the novel by the same name, I found this very easy to get into. I’ll be posting a review on Amazon forthwith.

What I really enjoyed about it, though, is the writing. The author’s previous novels (the Alex Rourke stories) were good, yes. The plot was fast-paced and the third act was always thrilling (and fun) in each of those novels, but reading this latest work shows just how far the author has come in writing both dialogue and action. For starters, I believe Cregan is English, but I didn’t notice a single extraneous “u” in the entire piece. But to be a Brit, it must be damned difficult to conceive of American conversational tones, and Cregan does an admirable job. The action sequences were tight and sharp, avoiding that trap of over-analyzing every angle-of-fire blast and feint-parry-thrust. I didn’t have to wade through the character’s plan of “how the fight would go down” and then have to watch it as well. The action was really more reaction; I saw instinct instead of rote script.

Overall, a very enjoyable read. The afterword was great as well; I was really interested in hearing his take on why he chose the same set piece for this one.

Oh, and it comes with the first three chapters of Murder Park, the next Cregan novel (slated for release in January 2012, if I’m not mistaken).

In the interests of disclosure, I should point out that Jon, as well as being charming and sexy, is one of the two friends who provided the main character’s name, so he’s not an unknown reader, and he’s one of those who responded with a “Yes please!” when I did a shout out on Twitter to see who’d want a freebie reviewy copy of AYLB. However, it’s a genuine review, and he liked it enough to then buy a copy, bless him.

Of particular interest to me is how the story stands up when you’ve not read THE LEVELS, since it shares the setting (apparently, perfectly well), and how good my Americanisation is these days since I made the effort to spell the whole thing in US English (unlike “Americanisation”) as well as, obviously, getting the turns of phrase used right (apparently, perfectly well too. Hooray!).

(Talk of extraneous “u”s, incidentally, is a long-running in-joke about us Brits on the gaming board where he posted this, where I know him from; the Amazoun variant misses that ouut.)

I’m not going to habitually post everything everyone says about AYLB, but this is the opening bout of feedback and it seemed worth mentioning. And, y’know, shout out from a mate, all that.

Once again, for what feels like the hundredth time this year, I am plotting out a book. Notebooks have been sullied with hideous, cryptic scrawl. Post-it notes have been assembled and plastered to the dining room wall like so much neon pink bat guano.

(Not that I’m suggesting you normally plaster your dining room walls with bat guano. I certainly don’t and I’ll hurl anyone who claims otherwise to the flock of specially trained housebats I definitely don’t have.)

I can’t plot for shit. Relatively speaking, it’s a weak point of mine. I get halfway through writing a book and only then realise I’ve actually missed the whole point of the damn story and I can’t remember what it was I was intending to do with most of what I have got.

I do it in speech, too.

In my later years, I’ve tended to plan more, because this means I make all my stupid plotting errors early on, before I’ve actually gotten 50,000 words into a novel. It saves a lot of time, but it does involve building up massive layers of post-it notes all over the walls. My record for a single book is a shade under 100, starting from the initial who/where notes, to the answers to the string of “why” and “how” and “what would be awesome here?” questions I ask myself as I go along.

Anyway, so it begins.

The time is upon us, the green moon of Galan is eclipsed*, and the first, brand spankingly new Cregan novella, ALL YOU LEAVE BEHIND, is out and available at Amazon (linkage below). Not only that, it’s also available, along with the rest, directly from me at the new store/bibliography page as a read-on-anything bundle for all devices short of an abacus.

So what’s the book? Let’s quote myself, because damn if I don’t just love the sound of my own voice.

Chase is a runner, a courier working the lawless housing project known as the Levels. Part smuggler, part delivery guy, he’s never failed to deliver a package in the five years he’s been working. Good thing too: he’s got a wife, two young kids, and his job is the closest you can get to regular, steady work in a place like this. It’s a lot to lose.

And that’s exactly what he risks when one of his packages starts to ring. Forced to open it or continue drawing attention to himself, he finds a cell phone, a gun, and the remains of a bomb inside. The stranger on the other end of the line tells him it was going to go off when he delivered it. He’d have been killed, his family left to fend for themselves, just to take out the recipient.

But now, the stranger says, he’s been saved, and he’s got a weapon, and he can set everything to rights. If he wants to.

Who’s the stranger? Who was willing to kill Chase and why? And how does he know any of what he’s been told is true? All questions Chase will need to answer, and fast, if he’s not to lose everything he holds dear.

ALL YOU LEAVE BEHIND is just over 20,000 words long and as well as one of my terribly classy afterword ramblings, also includes an exclusive rough cut three-chapter preview of MURDER PARK. Because I’m a cock-end, I’m planning on running three-chapter previews of MP in each novella as and when they’re completed, but with the next three chapters each time. Oh ho ho.

Edit to add: It’s also not a ‘series’ book, either. Come to that, THE LEVELS and THE RAZOR GATE don’t follow one another as such; they just happen to be set in the same city. There’s no need to have read any of them before reading any of the others. Ever.

You can buy ALL YOU LEAVE BEHIND direct from me as the aforementioned read-on-anything bundle of Kindle, ePub and PDF if you want to avoid the ‘Big A’ and its evils, or from Amazon UK/Amazon US if you want to go all corporate. Both cases, $2.99 or your local equivalent thereof. If you’ve read my witterings on the subject then you’ll know I hope it’s worth it, and dread that it’s not.

You can read the first quarter for free if you want a taste.

I’m aware that Kindle releases mean that the author in question may have a tendency to repeatedly spam their Twitter feed and every other goddamn place on an hourly or daily basis. I won’t be doing this. If anything that actually seems newsworthy - “Holy shit! 1,000 copies in the first hour??” - happens, well, that’s one thing. But you won’t, I promise, be seeing endless “Hey! Buy my book!” shit coming from me over the next couple of weeks. By all means RT this announcement, send all your friends here, do whatever, because you’re lovely and no doubt highly attractive people, but I’m not going to be filling the Twitternet with desperate pleas for attention.

Not book-related ones, anyway.

*Bonus points if you know the movie that quote comes from. Along with “RAMMING speed!”

Steve Mosby says some things about what I posted yesterday. (It’s also worth chasing in his/my Twitter feed for the multi-way conversation we had with Al Guthrie and Simon Logan.) His point that the attractiveness of the 99c price (Al cites his own hoofing great (and as anyone who’s read any of Al’s stuff knows, richly deserved) sales figures to give you an illustration of how well it works when it works) only exists because it’s in comparison to more expensive books. As soon as everyone’s at 99c, there is no advantage.

The ebook market is a gold rush at the moment, and like any gold rush, most of us will chase it and come away with nothing while a few will become very successful indeed. Those of us who chase it too late will get nothing because the territory has been prospected out.

As I said while chatting (well, tweeting) to Al, I suspect that like any bubble phenomenon where you’re not certain you’ll be one of the lucky few, the only way to win is not to play. In chasing the hope of glittering sales and a slot in the top 100 of whatever, it’s easy to forget that what we do should have some inherent value.

It doesn’t matter if I could sell 500,000 copies if I only priced them at 10 cents a throw; my work, I hope, is worth more than that. I’ll happily give stuff away for nothing, knowing that’s what I’m doing, and knowing that everyone else knows that. But deliberately devaluing the only thing I create, that I put massive amounts of effort into creating, and tacitly admitting that it’s basically worthless? I’d be risking shitting on my future - and no one I’ve heard expects the magic 99c boom to last forever - for immediate gain in the present. I understand the lure of Big Numbers, and I know the arguments for future readership and visibility, but I still pretty much don’t get it.

tl;dr version (from memory, details and exact tale sketchy):

Old story about a woman talking to Pablo Picasso over lunch and asking him to sketch something on a napkin. He whizzes something off and she asks to keep it. “That’ll be $20,000,” he says.

"But it only took you thirty seconds!" she says.

"Ah yes, but it took me twenty years to only take thirty seconds."