P.J. MacNamara's Blog

Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying to interest various parties in the idea of turning the last 35 pages of my book MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA into a TV series. It's a kind of anthology that ends with the companion pieces in question, namely "The Protected Area" and "Seen But Not Seen". Suddenly it struck me just now that they would also be perfect for adaptation into a series of GRAPHIC NOVELS.


So suddenly I'm not just looking for WRITERS to help me develop the series, I'm looking for ARTISTS too. Of course, I'm still hoping there will be a TV series eventually, but I think graphic novels could open up my work to a whole new audience and pave the way towards that ultimate goal. Whoever the artist is would probably be wanted on the TV show too if their work was as eye-popping as I'm hoping it will be.


What we have in "Seen But Not Seen" is basically a lost civilisation being discovered, an ancient city state you will get to create from scratch, with some larger than life and often bloodthirsty characters. "The Protected Area" concerns the discovery and opening up of the city, with some hair-raising adventures around the Pacific Rim that take place over the last 40 years. Read the 35 pages and if they float your boat get back to me. This could be awesome, right...?

I've just realised that it's actually a year today since my first book came out. It has been, for me, a very strange and challenging year.

Maybe I'm old fashioned or something, but it seems to me that an awful lot of people on here are handing out one-star reviews at the drop of a hat. It's actually impossible to give no stars at all, so one star basically implies a book with no redeeming features. And to my mind at least, it implies a reader who has absolutely no respect or consideration for that book's author and how much time, effort and love he or she has poured into their creation. It's like being slapped in the face by a stranger, and I can't say that I like it.

I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few days, and I don't think I've ever come across a book that had no redeeming features. Not a single one. And I'm almost 55 years old. So I assume that the people who do give one star reviews do so quite a lot and see things from an entirely different perspective to me. Books that - in my opinion, at least! - are worse than mine, have crossed my path, but I didn't think any of them were bad enough to earn less than 2 or 3 stars out of 5. Conversely, I have seen films, TV shows and even [heard] records that would be struggling to earn one star. I remember how sick and angry and cheated I felt when I played those records by Hawkwind, Soft Machine, and Tangerine Dream 2 or 3 times each back in the 80s, and I try to visualise somebody feeling that way after reading my book. It just doesn't add up. In my opinion, either they didn't finish the book, probably giving up before they got to the crucially important 3rd of the 20 extremely diverse pieces it contains, or their expectations of it as a whole were entirely unrealistic. Either way, that has to be at least partly my fault. At the end of the day, to my knowledge, there is nothing else like my KILLING TIME LEGACY SERIES out there. This is only the first in a series of 5 books. I'm laying foundations, creating a new world. It's a shock, a surprise. Maybe, just maybe, it's ahead of its time. And there will always be people who are simply not prepared for it.

I just wanted to let you know I'm feeling a bit peeved with Goodreads right now because they haven't updated the list of people who have shown an interest in reading my book since May 20th, when only 19 people had marked it as "want to read". That figure is now 109 people. On top of that, 140 people* have "added it to a shelf", and NONE of those people are showing up at all! After a full SIX WEEKS of complaining in every way that's possible on here I finally got a reply today, 17th July. I was told that after a certain number of people show on the list it no longer gets updated. This, apparently, is "expected behaviour". It doesn't look that way to me when I look at other author's pages, so now I've finally got somebody's attention I intend to pursue this matter further. As if this isn't hard enough?! The last thing I want is it looking as if nobody has shown any interest in my book for two solid months. I am not happy about this. Can you tell?


*Update, 10th September 2021: On my Seller Dashboard, the latter is now showing as 100 times added to a shelf due to some system glitch I don't think is ever going to right itself, but added by 140 people, which is impossible!

I've pretty much given up on getting any of this fixed now. Life's too short. I will just keep updating the figures on this blog post.

One of my many interests is history, especially ancient history, and over the last day or two I have been exchanging messages with a friend I've made on here on that subject and how it relates to my book MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA. I thought my last message was worthy of sharing with you all. I'm hoping it might clear up some of the mystery and confusion surrounding my work and give you something to bear in mind while you're reading it. I did make an attempt to put this over in the foreword of the book itself, but somehow I think I've done a rather better job of it here. This is a direct cut & paste:

I'm flattered that you think I'm so amazing, but I don't think you've actually read my book, have you? It's not a novel, it's made up of a lot of fragments, mostly fiction. The last two pieces in the book, which are two of the best in my opinion, concern the discovery of a completely fictional lost civilisation, and Jammac, the founding father of that civilisation, or at least the great statue of him, is depicted on the cover.

In the foreword I describe my series of books metaphorically as a series of archaeological digs. You start out knowing nothing. Seemingly unconnected relics are discovered and the reader has to start putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Every book in the series represents a new layer of discovery and brings with it certain revelations, but the whole truth will never be known. There will always be gaps that the archaeologist / reader has to fill with their own suppositions. I don't know if anyone has ever presented a series of books this way before, but it was always my intention to attempt something radically different to what people are used to, and though this Legacy Series is far removed from what I originally had in mind back in the late 1990s, it still ticks that box.

I'm going to post this reply in my blog. I think it might help others to understand my intent. Hope you don't mind.

PJM

I check my author dashboard regularly and I was horrified last night to find that my "added to shelf" figure had dropped from 90 to 81 while I was out at work. This morning it's back to 90. And not only that the total of people who marked it as "to read" has jumped from 59 to 65! These figures are STILL not being represented at the bottom of my profile page as they should be (the site has not updated that list you can see since May 20th,) but right now I am thankful for small mercies.

Not sure what's going on there but I'm ever so grateful. Here's hoping that some of the people who are thinking about reading my book actually read it at some point and actually like it enough to say something encouraging about it to others. I will take this opportunity to remind you all that my book (the first in a series of five,) is arty, experimental and unorthodox, so if you know you don't like that sort of thing don't buy it and complain about that, eh? Just spend your money on something else.

The clue is in the title. I've invited all my friends but I'm only getting about a 10% take up from them. There are supposed to be 45 million active members on Goodreads, so there must be a whole lot more film buffs out there, right?!

Anyone passing through and seeing this blog is welcome to join. I need somebody to contribute something. Right now there are only a dozen members and nobody is saying anything. Don't be shy. Just follow the link:

https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

There are a lot of things about Goodreads that puzzle me, it has to be said, but right now I'm most puzzled by this "want to read" and "added to shelf" thing.

Near the foot of my profile page is a list of people who "want to read" my book that has for some reason not been updated since May 20th. I have queried this twice with Goodreads, and twice I was ignored. I accidentally crossed paths with a Mexican "Librarian" on here a week or so ago, and I asked her about it. She told me I needed to ask Goodreads. Been there, done that. Ho hum.

According to my "author dashboard", which spits a lot of inexplicable stats out at me, 54 people want to read my book, but only the first 19 of them are showing on my profile page for others to see. What's more, I have 86 "added to shelf" and NONE of those are showing on my profile page at all. I assumed they weren't supposed to until I saw them showing on other authors' profiles. This is really not on, is it?

I don't want to come over like an egomaniac chewing sour grapes here, but I have been working very hard at trying to raise awareness of my book for EIGHT MONTHS now in the hopes that people across the English-speaking world might start buying it in large numbers at some point, and I need all the help I can get from sites like this. Book Two in my Killing Time Legacy Series is coming out next year and I want people to be excited about that. Interest generates interest. If people can see other people adding my book they might add it too, am I right?

I can't say I completely understand the point of having shelves devoted to books you want to avoid when there are ONE MILLION new books published EVERY YEAR and you can't possibly read them all, but it looks to me like people do that on here quite a lot. I just hope my book hasn't been put on too many shelves like that. That 27 person gap between the "want to read" figure and the "added to shelf" figure has to be accounted for somehow, though, eh?

Pull your socks up, Goodreads! We need a level playing field here.

In case you didn't notice, I've just added readings of two pieces from the forthcoming second book of my Killing Time Legacy Series. Both pieces were written in 2007. The videos were recorded much more recently, both in a single take. I've really tried to put some life into them, but I'm not an actor, so please forgive my occasional gaffes.

The book will be out in 2022, title TBC.

I have always been a bit of a sucker for quotations. I have several books of them put away somewhere (space is very much at a premium for me and things I'm not using constantly get buried sooner or later). I have spent some time recently looking at the quotes on the applicable Goodreads page and can heartily recommend it. Everyone is on there. Einstein, Gandhi, Shakespeare, JFK, Mae West, Malcolm X....countless thousands of concise and profound observations by names famous and not so famous. I liked a few of the ones I felt most akin to and they have appeared on my page.

How egotistical is it to want to see yourself quoted in such esteemed company? VERY, I should think, but the temptation is there all the same. I don't remember ever pretending not to be at least a little egotistical - arrogant even, on occasion. I'm too honest to deny it completely. But in my own defence, I really do think you need some degree of egotism and arrogance to get anywhere in this world. It's a kind of self-belief or self-confidence if you ask me, and it's a rare kind of an artist who doesn't have any of that in their DNA. Quoting yourself on the dedicated quotes page is very much frowned upon, if not actually against the rules on here. And you need to meet their criteria for being "important" too, which I definitely don't. Ho hum. As the late, great Irving Thalberg once wisely said, "Credit you give yourself is not worth having".

Despite that, I've been trying to think of some things I've committed to paper over what I still laughingly refer to as my "writing career" that I am most proud of. Most of the quotes I would choose are as yet unpublished, intended for books 2-4 of my KT Legacy Series, and I don't want anyone to steal them, so I've had to get MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA out and flick through it. These are, to date, some of my Legacy's finest moments, I think....

1) From "Sweet Surrender", Page 116:

You were a poet of sorts once, somewhere, in another life, and I loved to fathom your poet's soul and wonder why your beautiful gift was so cruelly taken from you when you were still so young and full of promise. You'd muse on me and fantasise then. You'd see something in me you would not dare speak of and you'd weave the prettiest clothes for me from it. You'd dress me in sunshine and sky and oceans and comets and music and the voices of the angels and the others would look on me so wistfully. They all wished they could be me for you. They all wished they could touch you as I did. They all wished they could capture what we had, but oh, how we would guard it, and they saw only my shadows and how they'd fall on you in your lighter moments. You saw a special something walking alongside me. A something only poets could see.

2) From "Meanders And Oxbow Lakes", Page 145:

Back in 1987, my astrological mentor, Hailey, suggested to me that what a writer leaves out can be just as important as what he puts in. It took me about five years to work out what that meant because I was young and foolish and I didn't want to admit that there was anything about the business of creative writing that I didn't understand. My mind simply didn't work in such a way because it hadn't realised that it could. Once I began to see what was so obviously missing from silent film and radio drama, I began to see potential in the world of prose writing that I had never suspected was there (and that's why I started thinking in terms of meanders and oxbow lakes), but at the end of the day, this book's here not only because of all that, but because in this writer's opinion, the principal ingredients of the average novel are patronising and overkill.

3) From "In The Heat Of The Morning", Page 155:

A faraway look came into her eyes for a moment. Then her dog came bounding up, the spell was broken and she turned her back on me.

I think she was crying.

I watched her every step, her every swing of the hips until she became a tiny dot; when that tiny dot disappeared I lost the ability to breathe. I fell to my knees gasping for air, my gown billowing up over my head in the wind as I wept. I put my forehead on the grass till the tears came running out, and when they did, I lay down and wanted to die.

4) From "Killing Time On The Other Side", Page 47-48:

Before I go any further, I must explain to you the Poet's Problem. I didn't invent it, for sure, but I did re-name it after an early B-side by Blondie. It seems to be all but universal, and it goes like this:

A natural born poet has a deep love of his mother tongue and all of the wonderful uses it can be put to. He loves a pun, a witticism, an ambiguity, a clever turn of phrase, and so on. He sees deeply into the written word, he feels it, has a rapport with it, it is a forever friend to be both cherished and protected. The poet sees beauty in brevity. He is concise. Every word is chosen and married to its neighbours with the precision and care of a master craftsman. The poet will agonise on whether the semicolon is really the right punctuation to use at a certain juncture, on whether the capital letters or italics are necessary, on which word is to be used twice for effect. The poet looks through a microscope. He sees the world of the small in great detail. He is less concerned with character or plot than he is with mood or resonance. To the true poet, prose is something of an abomination. It's inferior. It's lowbrow. Careless, it is, ephemeral, formulaic and long-winded. The poet seeks a kind of perfection the world of prose writing simply does not have the time or inclination for.

5) From "Special Occasions", Page 20-21:

In a book, this kind of conversation appears trifling, insignificant, it doesn't look like it's heading anywhere without the benefit of the correct inflexions, pauses, facial expressions, body language; there's no easy way to put across the quantum leap of faith it was all building to without spelling it out. The fact is that it was dawning on me as those verbal nonentities circled that this person I was talking to was not merely a DIY caricature assembled via Simon's rifling through my journals, tapes and photographs; someway, somehow, this was the Real Sophie. No matter what had been programmed into her image by whom, the essence of the originating mould was there, and there was no way anybody, not even the miracle man himself, could have brought that off so well. I found that my entire conception of where we go when we dream - be it a lucid dream or the common or garden variety - was undergoing a degree of stress it was hard to pass off as inconsequential; wherever she was really and whatever she'd been doing, Sophie had been commanded into my dream by Simon Stock, and the engaging vision I'd assumed to be nothing but necessary window-dressing was more than likely a representation of what she herself would prefer to be, the engagement ring - and therefore I must also assume her marital status - included. This was an idealised but conscious projection of the woman that meant more to me than anything else in the world - still - and no matter who or what else might come my way I knew in my heart I'd carry my love for her to the grave, possibly beyond the grave, possibly into eternity. You cannot imagine how beautiful this girl was to me. Yet she was a walking lie.



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Do you have a favourite passage in MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA? Or just a favourite piece, maybe? I'd be very interested to hear what you like best and why.