writing, page 9 of 12

I always intended to do a write up on the experience of self-publishing Alice at R’lyeh, and as it’s down to its last baker’s dozen or so copies (and as I haven’t blogged for a while), now’s the time. (And if you want to buy a copy, get one while you still can!)

Previously, my only self-publishing experience was with Baleful Head, a zine I brought out in 1997 (with a lot of helpful advice, encouragement and Quark expertise, not to mention articles & artwork, from Garen). It lasted a single issue, then slouched onto the web before breathing its last. Nowadays, its subject — long, critical reviews of fantasy books, films, etc. — is much more suited to a blog. (Which I’d start if I had the time! You can read some of my Baleful Head articles in the misc section of this website.) Alice at R’lyeh, however, was quite a different kind of project, and this time I ended up doing the whole process — including illustrations, design & layout, and getting it printed — myself, which meant a whole batch of firsts for me.

The first first was deciding to publish it — a poem, no less — at all. That sort of crept up on me, as did the writing of the thing. Five minutes before I started Alice at R’lyeh, I had no intention of penning a 35-stanza mini-nonsense-epic about Lewis Carroll’s Alice (or, really, my version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, because mine is slightly older, and slightly less Victorian) ending up in H P Lovecraft’s R’lyeh. It’s only because I happened to be near my computer with nothing to do when the first two lines popped into my head that I wrote it at all. Even then, I just thought, “This might be fun. I might get ten lines out of this.” Little did I know that my available writing time for the next ten days would be spent furiously trying to bend four-line aabb-rhymed nonsense stanzas to my increasingly tested will, while piling my desk with propped-open copies of Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and Others, S T Joshi’s Lovecraft: A Life, and Alice W Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease (which alerted me to Lewis Carroll’s inveterate letter-writing, the first tenuous link between Carroll and Lovecraft I came up with), among other books. (Not to mention a good deal of web-searching. Who would have thought “vigintillion” has a different magnitude to English and American mathematicians? And which would the American Anglophile Lovecraft have meant when he used it to describe Cthulhu’s age?)

The illustrations weren’t planned either. It was only because I thought, “I wonder what my version of Alice would look like”, and tried out a few sketches, and actually came up with something I liked, that I went any further in that direction. (Also when I realised the key to drawing Lovecraft, which had up to then eluded me, is just how stern he looks in his more famous photographs. So much so that when you actually see a photo of him smiling, it sort of takes you aback.) Once I’d come up with an Alice and a Lovecraft, I realised there was nothing for it but to try a few illustrations for my poem. And perhaps a cover. And, once I’d done a cover, there was no excuse for it. The thought that had been niggling around in the back of my mind just had to come out and niggle in the forefront, too: I might as well try and publish the damn thing.

So, I completed the illustrations and coloured them. (Giving up on the idea of trying to represent the “wrong angles” of R’lyeh with a bit of Escher-like visual trickery. I always get ideas much bigger than my abilities.) This was the first time I’d ever worked seriously at drawing, with the aim of producing a real, proper, final product, and so the first time I’ve ever done version after version till I got it right. Once I’d coloured them (in Photoshop — the illos were done using pencil, brush-pen and tracing paper, but coloured entirely on computer), I produced some postcard-sized versions and had them printed out via Moo.com, to get an idea of what they’d look like. (Plus, I have to admit, as a little treat for having finished them.)

My first unnecessary expense! One of many!

Then came the bit I knew I’d have real difficulty with — producing a print-ready PDF. This was something OS X’s print-to-PDF function was going to be wildly inadequate for. What I needed was a program which would give me control over the dpi of images, and the embedding of fonts and so on. (This is about as far as my knowledge of PDF preparations goes — I know enough to know how little I know.) What I needed was a small-scale DTP program, or so I thought. It was only when I started searching the web for a likely candidate that I realised small-scale DTP programs are pretty much a dying breed. Nowadays, it seems, you’ve got either a bunch of very easy-to-use, consumer-oriented lightweights, like Apple’s Pages (or some even worse shareware ones I won’t name), which don’t give you anything like the sort of control you need to produce a print-ready PDF, or you have to stump up for Adobe Acrobat, which in current money is, as Tony Hancock would say, very nearly an armful. An added difficulty was that, looking at printer’s websites, a lot of them were very fussy about what sort of PDFs they’d take — some insisted on only having PDFs generated by Acrobat, or they wouldn’t take responsibility for the results. Others insisted on charging a look-over fee to check your PDF, simply to reject it if it wasn’t right. I didn’t mind paying a bit extra for some guidance, but I was beginning to feel this was one of those situations where the step from amateur to professional was about a mile high, and likely to end in expense and embarrassment for a stumbling dilettante like myself.

But finally, after much searching, I found what I needed: Scribus. Open-source, pro-level PDF preparation (or pro-enough for me), and what was more, exactly in my price range. It was free! It doesn’t have a Mac-consistent interface, but I knew I could put up with its peculiarities considering the price. The best thing was, it meant I’d be able to use what fonts I wanted (I wanted the interior typography to look good, not just the title on the cover), and I’d be able to insert my illustrations without worrying that they’d come out all jpegged when it was finally printed. (I’d previously done some experimenting, for a different project, with images inserted into a PDF produced by a word-processor, and printed via Lulu.com. The results were unpredictable, and not to be relied upon.) (And embedding the fonts properly became even more important once I’d fallen in love with the Novella font, which I’d already bought from MyFonts.com. My second expense!)

So I had the booklet as a PDF. Next step — the big step, as far as I was concerned — was finding a printer. There are a lot of them out there, and I spent a couple of weekends reading every detail on every printer’s site I could find. There was a lot of advice on PDF preparation, and I tried to follow it all. (Basically, it came down to what I was expecting anyway — embed fonts, and ensure artwork is of sufficient dpi. The actual dpi required varied from site to site, so I went with 600dpi, which met or exceeded most printers’ minimum requirement. The one thing I hadn’t accounted for was leaving a bleed around the pages, but fortunately Scribus had an easy way of adding this to the whole document in one go.) The prices varied, but generally were reasonable. I could get 100 16-page booklets for a little over £100, so I knew it was within my price range.

So, I had my PDF, scoured over for every possible error, and I had a list of possible printers. Still I hesitated. Why? Simply because the printer’s websites, however much they said “no job too small”, all looked so professional, so businesslike, that my little artistic soul withered in front of them. Here I was, trying to get, gods!, a poem — and my poem, at that — professionally printed. However I might slant it, it was vanity press stuff. Oh, the shame of it! There was nothing to stop each and every printer, when applied to for a quote, from phoning me up and laughing down the line at my temerity, not to mention my prosody. Or perhaps just telling me I couldn’t distill a PDF for toffee (I’m still not sure what PDF distillation is), and that I should take my pathetic efforts to the nearest corner shop photocopier, which was what they deserved.

All right, maybe an exaggeration, but this was pretty much what I was feeling as I timorously prepared to ask for my first quote.

I (rather stupidly) spent some time in that first quote-request pointing out that this was my first go at preparing a PDF for professional printing, and would of course expect the quote to include whatever fee they charged for checking my PDF for possible errors. I then humbly asked what it would cost for 100 A5 16 page booklets, black & white interior, full colour cover.

That first printer didn’t even deign to reply. Maybe I just came across as too amateur. Still, it was sort of crushing.

So, for my next quote request, I dropped the meekness (and all mention of this being my first PDF — damn it, I’d checked the thing over a hundred times) and was as businesslike as possible. And the next printer I contacted ended up being the one I went with (The Digital Printers.co.uk). They said quite clearly on their website that they didn’t believe in charging merely for a quick look-over of source PDFs. Plus, they were in Reading, the town where I was born — always a point in anyone’s favour, as far as I’m concerned. And from there, it went smoothly. I got the quote, uploaded my PDF, got an email back suggesting a lamination for the covers, okayed that, and then, a week later, I had my box of Alice at R’lyeh booklets.

That moment — receiving your actual finished, physical copies, tangy with the scent of fresh ink and peppered with paper-dust — is the first heaven of self-publishing. Rather unfortunately, the first two copies I took out to examine were duds. There proved to be a couple of faults with the Alice booklet. In some cases, the cover laminate was peeling. (In none of them was it perfect.) In some, the interior ink seemed to have got stuck to that of another page, and had come off, leaving the text ghosted with a reverse image of another page. But fortunately, the first two copies I examined were the exceptions. The printer had printed slightly more than the 100 copies I’d asked for, and though there were still enough faults I deemed unsellable to push the saleable total to just under 100, I nevertheless had close enough to what I’d wanted, and could lapse back into heaven again. (Perhaps if I’d contacted the printer I might have got them to produce a few more, but I was just pleased to have the booklet at last.)

So, I’d done all that work of writing, illustrating, putting together the booklet and getting it printed. What now? Surely it should get easy from now on?

Not by a long chalk! Now, the hard work began. Because now, I had to get people to buy it!

And I was going to write about that part of the whole process here, but there’s enough to say about that for a whole ‘nother entry, so it’ll have to wait till next time.

We’ll start with Exhibit A:

My daddy left home when I was three
And he didn’t leave much to ma and me
Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
Now, I don’t blame him cause he run and hid
But the meanest thing that he ever did
Was before he left, he went and named me “Sue.”
— “A Boy Named Sue”, written by Shel Silverstein, sung by Johnny Cash

And here’s Exhibit B:

Everyone considered him the coward of the county.
He’d never stood one single time to prove the county wrong.
His mama named him Tommy, the folks just called him yellow,
But something always told me they were reading Tommy wrong.
— “Coward of the County”, written by Roger Bowling and Billy Ed Wheeler, performed by Kenny Rogers

Now, what’s going through your mind as you read these lyrics? If you know the songs at all, it’s the stories they go on to tell. The boy Sue is forced to grow up “quick and mean” because of his name, and with a sore-headed grudge against the man who gave it to him; but when he finally meets up with that man… And Tommy, or “Yellow” as everyone calls him (the colourblind fools), promises his dying daddy to always walk away from trouble if he can; but then one day the Gatlin boys catch his girl Becky on her own…

“A Boy Named Sue” came out in 1969, “Coward of the County” in 1979, but both were played pretty frequently on Radio 2 in the early 80s (when I used to listen to it before walking to school). Or at least they seemed to be played pretty frequently. Probably, they were played just as often as any other songs at the time, it’s just these two went on playing in my head. I thought about those songs. Particularly that line from “Coward of the County”:

They took turns at Becky…. n’ there were three of them!

They took turns turns at Becky? God, what did that mean? It didn’t mean — surely — not on Radio 2?!? I would have been about 8 or 9 at the time; I knew what it meant, but I didn’t want to know what it meant. Because of that line, whenever “Coward of the County” came on, I couldn’t help but listen. First I had to hear the line, how awful it was, then hear the story to the end, to try and get rid of the awfulness. I still thought Tommy finally overcoming his pacifist scruples to slug the Gatlin boys was a little late for poor Becky, but at least it was some resolution. It at least seemed a little bit heroic on his part. (If also un-PC. Nowadays, Becky would lay hold of a pitchfork and do those Gatlins in the goolies. And deservedly so.)

But the point is the song had a pretty powerful effect on me. And the reason for its effect is that it was telling a story. Stories just have a primal power, and stories in songs are among the most compressed examples of storytelling. The only types of stories which are more compressed that I can think of are jokes and anecdotes. And, at least as far as jokes and songs are concerned, compressing the story into a shorter space (fewer words) seems to increase its punching power accordingly. (Anecdotes less so. But the very word “anecdote” always reminds me of Steve Martin’s outburst to John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, having listened to him drawling on pointlessly for hours: “You know everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. You’re a miracle! Your stories have NONE of that. … And by the way, you know, when you’re telling these little stories? Here’s a good idea — have a POINT. It makes it SO much more interesting for the listener!” (See imdb for the full quote.) It’s the frustration he feels that proves the power of anecdotes, in this instance through their lack of story.)

There’s something about a song which contains even a hint of a story that compels you to listen. I’ve heard “Coward of the County” countless times, but if I hear it, I still have to listen. Same goes for “A Boy Named Sue”, and the same goes for any number of others. Even ones I don’t particularly like as music. As in, “The Devil went down to Georgia, he was looking for a soul to steal.” Argh! Endless fiddling! But it’s got a story. Or “The bravest animals in the land are Captain Beaky and his band…” Funny the first time, just slightly irritating the tenth — but still, you can’t help but listen.

And that’s the point. Once the story starts, you can’t help being drawn in. You have to listen all the way to the end. Even if you know what’s going to happen. Especially if you know what’s going to happen. There’s some weird combination of the way the music forces the story to progress at a steady, even pace, and how you, as listener, just need to hear those events related one more time, in the same order, in the same manner, with the same outcome.

I suppose it comes down to suspense. Suspense, as Alfred Hitchcock was always fond of pointing out, is not about wondering what’s going to happen next, but knowing what’s going to happen next and being forced to wait to have it confirmed. You see a mad axeman hiding down an alley and the hero’s disposable sidekick walking towards him. You know what’s going to happen, so why watch? But you have to. Every slow-mo step. And it’s the same with songs. You know Johnny’s going to out-fiddle the Devil, but each time you’ve got to listen.

There’s a dark side to all this. Story songs which aren’t proper stories. Those are the worst. They have enough of a story to make you listen, but don’t deliver the goods. All too often the denouement of the story is summed up in one line, and it’s just not clear enough, or it’s too compressed (after all, it’s either fit the end of the story into one line or add a whole extra verse, and we’ve only got three minutes of radio time). This is particularly frustrating if you’re an 8 or 9-year old boy who can’t be sure that what the adults are implying is what he thinks they’re implying. I could never quite be sure why “Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge“; it all sounded rather mysterious and grownup, but also, I suspected, a bit groundless. And ZZ Top’s “Master of Sparks“? I still don’t know what happens in that song! Just what is the “Master of Sparks”? A rocket? A plane? Does the narrator die? Then how come he’s singing? Just play the damn guitar, Billy Gibbons, and I’ll forgive you anything!

Anyway. The power of stories in songs isn’t just something I felt when I was 8 or 9. I still can’t hear the start of Fairport Convention’s “Matty Groves” without stopping to listen to the whole thing. And it’s over eight minutes long! And I already know what happens!

(Fist in mouth.) Argh!

At first, I was a bit puzzled by Philip Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ — puzzled, and a little bit annoyed. This was because I’d been led to expect a quite different book, not just by the title (if it was just the title, it wouldn’t matter, because good titles are often deceptive, or at least gain a new relevance on further reading), but by the summaries people have given of the book in reviews on TV and in the press. For instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury (who gives a favourable review in The Guardian), gives this explanation of the basic idea behind the book:

“Its premise is that Mary gave birth to twins: Jesus, an earthy, generous visionary, radical enough to create panic in conventional religious and political authority; and ‘Christ’ – a nickname for the weaker, self-righteous, fearful brother who shadows Jesus, trying to persuade him to accept a destiny he refuses.”

Yes, Mary gives birth to twins. But the two — Jesus and Christ — are not as Rowan Williams characterises them. To start off with, for instance, the Jesus character is rather withdrawn and distant, in the shadow of his brother, Christ. Later, he comes across as quite resentful, even spiteful, of his brother and his family, even while preaching the message of universal love. Meanwhile the Christ character, though he does at one point try to “persuade [Jesus] to accept a destiny he refuses”, is for most of the book quite passive, self-abnegating, humanly weak as opposed to “fearful”, and entirely accepting of the Jesus character’s view of things. In fact, there’s only one chapter — one short conversation between the two brothers — in which the above characterisation applies; after that, the brothers separate and, learning from the event, the Christ character, at least, changes.

Once I’d got over that slight confusion, I read the bulk of the book thinking Pullman’s title must be ironic — that it is in fact the Jesus character who is the scoundrel, and the Christ character who is the good man, and that worked for a while. But, although there’s an argument to be made, I don’t think that’s entirely true, either. Rather, the Jesus character is an idealist — and idealists can be good, because they offer us visions of good things to strive for, but on the other hand, every idealist is a tyrant in embryo — and the Christ character is a realist — and realists can be scoundrels, because they are always undermining the good we find in ideals, but on the other hand, realists can at least put a plan into action and get things done. In other words, neither character is wholly good nor bad. Things are confused by the roles they find themselves playing: Jesus as the preacher, teacher, and revolutionary proclaimer of the imminent Kingdom of Heaven on Earth (the most potentially damaging idea he or his brother presents in the book), Christ as his chronicler and, later, his betrayer. But the roles are predetermined by the story they are stuck in, and neither character is really responsible for their decision to be in that story. If there is a moral colouring to be applied to anyone in Pullman’s book, it is the the third, never-named character, the angel (or presumed angel), who guides Christ on the way to eventually playing the Judas role. This third character, who at one point explicitly denies that he is Satan, is, I suppose, the embodiment of the story itself, gently prompting characters to play their appointed roles. In fact, I came to think of him as the Philip Pullman character, a sort of shepherd for the potentially unruly three-dimensional characters in a myth, a form that does not comfortably support three-dimensions in its characters.

I finally overcame my ambivalence about the book when I did what I should have done from the start — forgot what other people have said about the book, and decided to understand it in my own terms, in my own way. I realised I wasn’t really interested in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ as a book about religion, or even (as Rowan Williams says) a book about the church (though it is that, too). This is why I’ve been saying “the Jesus character” and “the Christ character”, because I don’t want anyone to happen on this blog and think I’m talking about the religious figure who goes by those names. I’m interested in the book as a story, and the characters as they relate to that story. (Pullman, after all, has “This is a story” emblazoned on the back, but I at first thought this was just him being provocative.)

For me, what The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ was about was writing. Pullman’s innovation is to have two boys born to Mary, one called Jesus and one called Christ. When the Jesus character proves to have a vocation as a somewhat revolutionary wandering preacher (whose teaching — all paraphrased, in more modern diction, from, I assume, the Gospels — is often contradictory, with the Jesus character talking of loving your neighbour at one point, then refusing to help a woman because she is not of his race at another, and also being pointedly rude to his family), the Christ character decides to write his brother’s teachings down, seeking to preserve them as accurately as possible. (Because, far from being a scoundrel, he has a deep love of his brother, and a respect for what he is teaching, even though the Jesus character has no love for him.) For most of the book, then, the Christ character is a writer. He is, in effect, producing the version of “Jesus” that will be preserved after his brother’s death, and indeed after his own: the version that we find in the written books of the Gospels.

What makes this aspect of the story interesting is that the Christ character pretty soon becomes aware of the possibility of improving on what the Jesus character says and does. In fact, he is prompted to do this by that third, unnamed character who guides the story. I don’t know if Pullman is providing subtle characterisations in the ways that Christ’s writings differ from what the Jesus character actually says, but anyway I think that’s beside the point. The real point is that by differing from what the Jesus character says and does, an ideal version — a myth — is created.

In effect the book is asking: which is more important, the literal, historical truth, or the ideal, more meaningful version? In some cases — legal cases, for instance — obviously the literal, historical truth is the most important. But when we’re dealing with ideals, it is the myth that is more important. Because we know that reality never lives up to our ideals, and that human beings, though they strive, often fail, or are divided, or feel impure or less-than-holy feelings even when they succeed, or act on baser motives than we might like. But the ideal can exist nevertheless — and ought to be allowed to. Just because, in all history up to now, there has never been a wholly, truly, perfectly “good” man, does that mean we should give up striving to be good? Just because, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that we will never manage to be fully, truly good, does that mean we should give up trying? No, and no. And really, this is the point about myth. Myth is not, as some definitions would have it, a lie that debases historical truth; rather, it is a truth that has no need to have ever actually occurred in order for it to be true.

So, the Christ character makes the decision, as a writer, to betray the historical Jesus, and write what he feels ought to have been said or done at this or that moment. And this “betrayal” becomes enacted in the story itself, as the Christ character acts out the Judas role that leads to Jesus’s capture and eventual death.

What’s interesting is that the Christ character, who I described above as a realist, acts in order to preserve an ideal. He betrays not just his brother, but himself. This idea of the writer as, necessarily, a betrayer, a traitor, a “scoundrel”, seems somehow fitting, though I can’t quite work out why. Are all writers, necessarily, scoundrels of a sort, in that by creating something — their own version of the truth — they are in fact betraying the truth of the world around them?

(If I can add one reading recommendation, I’d say Ted Chiang’s novelette “Hell is the Absence of God” (collected in Stories of Our Life and Others, a real must-read of an SF collection) is the most powerful exploration of religious themes (also by an atheist, or agnostic, I’m not sure which Chiang is) that I’ve ever read. Pullman’s novella is thought-provoking, but not really on religious themes, though unfortunately this is how everyone’s going to see it, I suppose.)