Review of Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton

As abysmal as Sister was readable. For a start, the protagonists are bloody angels or spirits or something, telling the story (too dull to precis here, but it's about who was responsible for burning a public school down - good riddance to it, I say) whilst their corporeal selves lie comatose in hospital, having been injured in the blaze. I thought this madness would resolve itself in something satisfyingly realistic, but no, it appears Ms Lupton was happy for her 'spirits' to communicate with each other, follow the police around, go home, do anything really, without apologising for her feeble conceit.

And then there was the teeth-grinding, middle-class smugness of it all. The protagonist's family were all incredible, clever, wonderful, generous, perfect; their saccharine-sweet love for each other deeper than the the deepest ocean, higher than the highest mountain. Yuck. And for a professional scriptwriter, Ms Lupton's dialogue was unforgivably dismal.

It gets worse. For reasons I have yet to fathom, Ms Lupton sees fit to italicise words, phrases, even whole sentences, lest we, her stupid readers, can't work out where to place the emphasis ourselves. More infuriatingly, most of the italicised words didn't merit emphasising.

Sister good, Afterwards appalling. Second book blues. She's blown it with me."

And which is more - you'll be a writer, my son.

I'm sitting in Starbucks prior to appearing at the rather wonderful Krater Comedy Club at the Komedia here in drizzly Brighton. I wouldn't normally think this blog-worthy - and it probably isn't - but I thought a few words about the rising fear and tension a performer endures before going on stage would be interesting from the perspective of someone actually living through it.

Problem is, I'm not. I mean, I am living through the period directly prior to a gig, but tension? Not really. I love Brighton, but I think getting here at 2.30 for a gig starting at 8 (stage time, around 9.10) was patently absurd. I had a hearty lunch at Bill's (why would anyone go anywhere else?) and then whiled away an hour viewing a house (we're thinking of moving here one day) but really, it's only an hour from London and I could've left at 6.

I've got into the habit of arriving insanely early for things like voiceovers, the rationale being that I usually cycle so need to cool down first over a nice cup of tea. Nothing worse than leaving a foetid patch of sweat on a studio chair, is there? Yet, although I cycled to London Bridge Station to catch the Brighton train today, I think a five and a half hour cooling off period is a bit over the top.

So, here I am just around the corner from the Komedia, knocking out this blog and about to be turfed out at 7. I have a very respectable and weighty bag of sweets from the hip little pick 'n' mix shop in the North Laines which I'm thinking of raiding on a bench somewhere to while away some more dead time, but I'll be scraping damp sugar from the bottom by 7.05 and be feeling bloated, nauseous and only marginally closer to kick off. You need a bit of tension to get up there and do your stuff, but right now I'd be happy if they locked me in and left me here overnight.

Well, there we are. An ill-considered, stream-of-consciousness, unedited blog. Was it all worth it given the paucity of insight and wit? Don't answer that.

Great Book...How Many Have You Sold?

It's a question I've been asked a few times.

Not many's the answer.

Here's a salutary tale. Several years ago, I approached some piddly literary agency with my debut novel, Losing It. They were called...er...Christopher Little, if memory serves. Oh, you mean J K Rowling's billionaire (ex)agents? Yes, that's them. Less than three weeks after receiving my hopeful little package, they were all over me. Loved the book, said it was a potential best-seller, that I'd be great at promoting it given my performing pedigree. Oh, could I just make a few minor changes? Here we go. All right, go on then, if you insist. So I did. They wanted more. Grudgingly, I re-drafted. What, more changes? This time I told them to stuff it lest they destroy my artistic vision.

Idiot.

Absolute, 100%, 24 carat cretin.

If they'd insisted I re-cast my female protagonist as a Taliban warthog with acne, I should have got on with it. They were Christopher bloody Little, J K Rowling's...who cares about artistic effing vision?

But you see, I (the aforementioned cretin) figured, if they loved the book, so would everyone else. But I made no progress with the handful of other agents I approached and, in a fit of pique - tarring all agents with the same brush - I published it myself. That'd show them. I eventually sold 400, which isn't bad, I'm told, but only after nagging libraries, appearing on radio stations so local only God was listening in, chivvying local book shops and wasting a smallish fortune on useless PR. Net financial loss? Let's not go there.

And that's when I gave up writing novels for a few years until inspiration struck and I rattled out A Song For Europe, an edgy romantic comedy more in keeping with my day/night job as a comedian and scriptwriter. I gave it to a few trusted folk to read and received rave reviews. Which is when I approached another handful of agents. This time, one came back on the same day I emailed them a sample, champing at the bit. Not quite in the Christopher Little league, but long established and respected nonetheless. Sadly, they weren't particularly set up to promote an edgy romcom and although there was a ripple of interest from publishers, nothing happened.

But I believed in the book and, rather than suffer the misery and financial flagellation of self-publishing, decided to stick it on Amazon as a digital download. Kindles everywhere would be loaded up with my David Nicholls-stylee novel within days.

Except that didn't happen. The problem is, if no-one knows it's there, it might as well not be. What to do? I've had my head buried in websites claiming to know the secrets of promoting digital books. I've started a Facebook fan page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Simon-Lipson-Author/140280092721031 - 95 fans and counting - none of them have bought the book). I've started tweeting for all I'm worth (@SimonLipson). Still nothing. I'm sure I can do more, but I'm beginning to think I need to commit A Song For Europe to good, old-fashioned paper.Then... ring up libraries, contact local book shops, appear on Radio Sark...you know the rest. Somehow, I have to get the 'word-of'mouth' thing going, but there are only so many hours in the day. And if I shift 400 copies, so what?

I'd love to hear from anyone who's been through the self-publishing maze and/or stuck something on Amazon Kindle. Maybe we can knock heads and work out a strategy for getting our works of genius into the hands of a deserving public. As an avid reader, I know a hell of a lot of inferior crap gets published. There's no rhyme or reason. So - sisters, brothers! Let's do it for ourselves! (ahem - sorry, quite forgot I'm British for a moment).

http://www.amazon.com/A-Song-For-Europe-ebook/dp/B00492CQ2K - as if you're going to buy it.

William Boyd? Surely not.

I recently finished reading William Boyd's latest novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms. It took me forever because I kept abandoning it then picking it up again. I mean, surely it couldn't be that shit all the way through to the final page. Could it? Well, no. Somehow, it actually got shittier before disappearing up its own anus with a grim squelch. I had to check that this was the same William Boyd who wrote Restless and Armadillo. Tragically, it was.

I'm not Boyd's biggest fan, but have generally found him to be fairly readable, in a can't-find-anything-else-in-Luton-Airport-Smiths-and-the-plane's-about-to-leave kind of way. He can handle whimsy and more serious themes reasonably well, and there's a level of intelligence that marks him out as a reliable if not exactly must-read author. So what the fuck happened?

Ordinary Thunderstorms starts off with a ridiculous (and seen-it-all-before) premise - innocent man witnesses murder when he goes somewhere no sensible (or even stupid) human being would even think of venturing. He then - surprise, surprise - pulls the knife out of the victim (the only person in the western world who's never watched CSI or a million other police procedurals) and dithers about informing the police for reasons so inane I can no longer recall them. He then goes into hiding - in a tent on a grassy bank alongside the Thames, mind - and becomes feral, vicious and cunning. The guy's a respected meteorologist or something. Doesn't he have any better ideas than that? The casual murder he carries out is as incongruous and silly as the fey, dopey, facile affair he conducts with an investigating policewoman.

Sorry if I've ruined it for you but, trust me, I've saved you eight quid and days of ploughing through dung wondering whether it can possibly get any stinkier. Trust me, it does. Pathetic, implausible, lazy, idiotic, cretinous, moronic...and I haven't even opened my thesaurus yet.

And, once again, I mutter and curse at the injustice of it all. Maybe Boyd's track record enables (entitles?) him to get away with this travesty of literature, but how comes I can't get a publisher when crap like this (and by people like Erica Spindler - an illiterate - James Patterson (or any one of his minions), Tony Parsons - don't start me off - and thousands of others) gets onto our shelves? I wouldn't mind, but several agents and publishers have told me my stuff is 'great' and 'hilarious' and 'commercial' - but I'm still sitting here, baby.

Spleen vented. Feeling a bit better now. Should last at least 10 minutes.

Twitter - Oh The Pointlessness

I've just joined Twitter. I have no idea why. I haven't got the time, much less the inclination, to read anyone else's dull musings, and can't begin to understand why anyone would read mine. I mean, no-one even reads this fucking blog to which I am at least able to devote some time and thought before committing it to the vacuum that is the blogosphere.

As I've now discovered, grammar, punctuation, vocabulary and everything else I hold sacred is all shot to hell when people have only got 140 characters at their disposal. Obviously, my Tweety vignettes are perfect - I'm talking about everyone else, though I suspect many of them would remain incapable of explaining the purpose of a comma however much time and space they had at their disposal. (I'm in danger of becoming a grumpy old-school sod, I fear, even as I embrace modern technology)

Still, I think it's important, at my age, to try and keep up with current technological fads, irrespective of how pointless and plain idiotic they might be. So, to the zillions of you out there who already don't read this blog, here's something else for you to ignore... my Twitter address: http://twitter.com/simonlipson.

I've already contributed some fatuous crap to the canon and can already see how short a shelf life it's going to have for me. Read it (or don't) while you can.

The Miracle

I've been sicker than many a sick dog over the last week, though on the upside, my previous virus, which lasted a mere nine weeks, had been well and truly out of my system for almost five days before this new thing started, so I've had a really good spell of near-health lasting almost a week. Musn't grumble, eh?

So, here's what I wanted to talk about. One evening last week, just before the icy Armageddon wreaked its chaos - how will we cope, by the way? - I was about to make my ascent up Archway Road on my trusty, middle-of-the-range Pinnacle bicycle. It's a bastard, that hill, a precipitous gradient close to vertical. I'm 51, you know, and asthmatic, and I've got exceptionally dodgy knees, and I've been a little above my fighting weight for a while now (47 years) yet I am forced into daily combat with this demon if I am to make it back to the sanctuary of my Muswell Hill manor.

Now, as any regular cyclist will attest, there is no such thing as a following wind. It doesn't exist. It's a chimera. Cycle round a roundabout, a full 360, and the gale will be in your face all the way round, battering you, pummelling the flesh on your face, ripping your hair from its very roots. All the way round. You hear me? It's nature at its most taunting and vindictive. And if there's a bit of rain in the air - with its spiteful shards and needles which pock and slice, opening little wounds to the flesh and spirit that may never heal - God help you.

So, anyway, there I was, rounding the grim dereliction of Archway Roundabout, bracing myself for the routine double whammy - wind-against plus vertical ascent - when a gust, no more, lifted me, driving me onwards and upwards on gossamer wings towards the brief, free-wheeling relief of Muswell Hill Road, my aching, ageing legs suddenly spared, my bronchial, wheezing lungs in unexpected oxygen-credit. It was like God's arm around my shoulder, forgiving me all my cycling sins (ok, I go on the pavement sometimes and ignore the odd - and even - red light). And, in that brief, epiphanic moment, I questioned my violent atheism for the first time in thirty years.

Course, it only lasted five seconds. A sleet-speckled tornado opened its jaws and pummelled my soul, mocking my natural lack of aerodynamics, my physical decrepitude, my fleeting belief in another way, and forced me to cycle through treacle as I searched for a gear that didn't exist.

Hey, cycling's fun, isn't it? Thinking of creating a blog all about its myriad joys - I've got a million stories. I mean, there are zillions of cycling nerds out there. Maybe someone will actually read the fucker.

From a King to a Klutz

So, there I am, last Thursday, doing my stand-up schtick to a packed and febrile house at the Chambers Courtroom in Jersey (Channel Islands, that is, not Joyzee - as if they actually fuckin' tawk like dat dere) and I'm killing...killing! I could have thrown in my legendary (though sadly underemployed) Ronnie Corbett impression and still been carried shoulder high along the prom in St Helier. Suddenly, it's like the old days - you remember, when I was a contender, Mr Jongleurs, Mr Radio 5 Live...Mr Celebrity Squares (ask my agent - his cretinous idea) - and I thought, so what if I'm a somewhat senior performer with nary a brown hair left on my head? Funny's funny.

So I'm a comedy genius. Except, as it turns out, not every night. My recent comeback to the world of stand-up has been surprisingly encouraging. I'm more relaxed these days, less hidebound by the rigidity of tight routines, more audience-friendly. In the past, I've sold myself as an impressionist, which got me plenty of work but didn't do much for someone who's not in love with the art form. I've worked with the current maestros of mimicry many times and while they fret and agonise and practise like dervishes, I only do impressions if, by some vocal happenstance, I can do them. Or if there are exceptional circumstances ('can you do Russell Grant?' 'pah! wouldn't do him if you fucking paid me' 'five grand?' 'the moon is in Capricorn...don't worry, I'll get him').

Anyway, I'm throwing the impressions away these days rather than making a big matzo pudding out of them and I hope audiences think of me as a comedian who does a few voices. Unless, of course, I'm performing in Nunhead, as I did the following night, where they probably think of me as a cunt who couldn't raise a titter if he tickled a hyena. It was a strange old night. I mean, the venue was in such a remote part of London, my satnav just said, 'fuck it, find it yourself.' It was a mixed bill - magicians, people who just got up and talked for no apparent reason, sketch artistes - and I didn't get on until 11, following a man whose sole raison d'etre was to appear from behind the curtain, wave his penis at the audience and leave. Not your typical comedy night. Not even close. And, in fairness, I raised a few muted laughs, persuaded a few people to smile and even garnered the odd whoop, so it could've been worse, but after the triumph of Jersey, it was a sobering experience

Still, as all comedians know, it's the audience, stupid.