On the Dominance of Filthy Lucre

On the Dominance of Filthy Lucre

You’ve undoubtedly heard the phrases, “Money makes the world go round,” and “The love of money is the root of all evil”. In recent months, it’s become apparent to me that both these aphorisms are becoming more and more the reality, and not only does it annoy me, it scares me.

I’m not sure when I first noticed that the suggested products on the mighty ‘Zon were being steadily replaced by sponsored ads, but I really noticed it when my new book got its own page. Most authors have a look at what their books are paired with, and since I’d chosen (possibly naively) to list Méchant Loup: Modern Fables for Sensible Grown-ups https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1091667012/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0

under the genre fairy tales, I saw that beneath the listing were literally dozens and dozens of sponsored ads, supposedly for products related to my book. When it first came out, the sponsored ads beneath my book seemed to be retold fairy tales by only a couple of authors; books that had either just been released or were on pre-order. I glanced at them out of curiosity but none appealed to me. Méchant Loup isn’t a collection of retold fairy tales or even reimagined ones (with one exception of the title story), and given it’s intended for “sensible grown ups”, some of the sponsored ads were way off mark. Most of them if truth be told. I’d hoped that I might gain some traction in this category but I’d have been better listing in literary fiction. Or perhaps not.

The trouble is not just as an author. As a reader, I do glance at the suggested books under the listings of books I have enjoyed. But now it seems that the complex mathematical equations needed to predict what someone might like have gone terribly awry, directly as a result of the proliferation of paid ads. I suspect that few authors don’t now use paid advertising; from what I have heard through the jungle drums, it’s with diminishing returns. Some authors do not recoup from sales what they spent on advertising. I’ve yet to do a poll, but my gut feeling is that the general trend is spending more and more on advertising and get less and less back.

Being a writer is becoming ever more a mug’s game. The ones (like me) who are creating the content (what a hideous phrase) are not the ones garnering any real monetary rewards for the work. Worse still, it’s becoming horrifyingly common to discover that author mills are churning out books, often scraped illegally from the works of others, altered enough to pass the checks needed to be published, and published en masse, with paid reviews convincing enough to lure in more buyers.

Can you hear me sighing heavily?

It might have been the collective sighs of all of us demoralised writers that created Storm Ciara.

Everyone who can grab a piece of us is doing so. Every day I read of other writers who are being forced to give up doing what they love because they can no longer afford to do it. Don’t get me started on the continuing phenomenon of pirating books. One friend has done something I admire immensely, and has backed away from commercial publishing, and is producing limited edition, hand-bound books, available from her directly.

https://kathysharp2013.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/adventures-in-bookbinding-the-herbarium/

It satisfies the soul, and evades the risk of having your work scraped, pirated or plagiarised. I lack the skills to do so, but hats off to her.

The new book has been out a month and has now 7 fabulous reviews, but the initial burst of sales is dwindling, and I fear that before too long it will, along with all my other books that I cannot pay to advertise and will not even had I the money (because it’s clear authors are the cash cow of various industries), languish with only occasional readers.

I don’t have any answers. I try to pass on news about the books of others when I can, and appreciate those who have done that for me. We live in a world where filthy lucre is the only thing that seems to matter to the vast majority of the population; it makes me more and more want to retreat from it all, and not participate in this orgy of capitalistic nihilism.

Brand new year – same old me

Brand new year – same old me

I’ve never quite understood the hype of New Year. The changing of the calender is, in modern times, quite arbitrary. It pays no heed to celestial events like solstices, or to celebrations of saints’ days or gods or goddesses. Yet every year there’s big parties and declarations of intent for the coming year.

I was glad to see the back of 2019. It contained more trouble and trauma than it did joy and gladness. Yet despite the arbitrary nature of when we start a new year, I found myself looking forward to the change of year. It’s good to start a new daily journal, for example. I’ve gone for a larger sized journal, A5 instead of A6, and have used a Moleskine I’ve had in my stash for a few years; my dad gave me a John Lewis voucher a couple of years ago, and one of the things I got was this journal. It seems fitting that something my father (indirectly) gave me be used for the first year that no longer contains his living presence. I’ve done a daily journal since 2014, and it’s a good discipline for me to have to write a few lines at least before I go to sleep each night. It helps put the day to bed as well as give me a chance to record my impressions of the day. Choosing a significantly larger size means I have greater scope for those impressions. I began also a new bullet journal for recording things done and things planned. Last year’s got abandoned around August when events and health crises conspired to make sure I had insufficient energy to keep it up. I stopped writing down the books I read along with a short review and rating, because of the same reason, and because I stopped caring about keeping going with such things. They seemed futile. I considered starting a new notebook for my book records but as the old one was only a little over half way, I decided to draw a firm metaphorical line under last year and start afresh. The first book completed this year was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s collection of Professor Challenger stories (three novels including “The Lost World”, and several short stories of dubious merit, and copious notes on spiritualism)

Last year’s reading and favourite books I may come back to another time, as I am aware I read some superb books that deserve a shout-out as well as a proper review in the appropriate places. In my haul of Christmas presents were two books by authors who both deserve greater fame. “Meeting Amalek” by Gev Sweeney, and “The Immortality Clock” by Richard Pierce are sitting on my bedside table, waiting for me to finish reading “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”. I read it years ago, not long after it came out, and only had a library copy. I’ve enjoyed it far more this time, for some reason.

Shortly before New Year, I did the final set of edits on “Méchant Loup – Modern Fables for Sensible Grown-ups”. I need to do a last read through to ensure it’s all as perfect as I can make it. Then I need to dredge up the courage and resolve to do the upload and publishing parts of the process. I’m so afraid of it sinking into the void unnoticed. I’m also fighting a terrible sense of futility and of uselessness. The year has begun with terrible fires in Australia and the USA doing more than rattling sabres. I’m being deliberating cautious about what I say about that. I’m also doing my level best to try and focus on good news stories and not be sucked into the mire of bad news. I spend some time each day in contemplation, one might even say prayer. Even if there is no one listening (I wonder this more and more as I get older) it does me some good. I am baffled by the unkindness, hatred, stupidity, intolerance, bigotry and so on that goes on daily, unremarked. I feel unwanted in my own country, one I can trace ancestors back a good four hundred years.

Oops. Almost went down a very dark rabbit hole there. Anyway, it’s a new decade too. Not that it means very much either. Not in the grand scheme of things. Whatever it may bring, may it bring for those of us who need it, hope, and better times ahead. I am reminded of lines in Luke’s Gospel, https://biblehub.com/luke/1-53.htm . The rich have already had their reward.

Fragments and Inertia (musings and mutterings)

Fragments and Inertia (musings and mutterings)

In the ten or so years since I began blogging I’ve seen a lot written about SEO (search engine optimisation), detailing how to gain greater prominence among the various search engines. I’ve concluded that for the most part, what gives greater prominence is paying for it, whether by using a paying platform, or by plug-ins that you also pay for, or by choosing a blogging platform closely allied to the companies that run search engines. So for years I tried to use titles that might spark interest or somehow be picked up by the search engines (I’m not naming any…). But these days, finding a title for a blog post mostly involves finding something, anything, by which I might find it again amid the thousand or so articles filed away. Hence the fairly uninspiring title of THIS post.

I wanted to write a post that gives some sense of what I’ve been doing and what I have managed to do and what I have not managed to do. Oh, and why.

Good news is that I am quite close to publishing a new book.

An Epiphany, of sorts

An Epiphany, of sorts

Today marks Epiphany, the festival that for most marks the end of all things Christmas. It commemorates the arrival of the Magi, coming to pay their respects to the infant Jesus, though much of what people think they know about the Magi is a much later medieval addition. The bible does not give names to the visitors, nor does it state that there were three. That aside, it’s a charming addition; it personalises these shadowy visitors and gives them flesh and human attributes, as well as the gifts they brought, which were largely symbolic ones. I am sure that the holy family valued the gold; it probably got them through lean and difficult times. Frankincense was at one time worth the same ounce for ounce as gold and myrrh not far behind. I burn both during the Christmas period and I usually burn some beautiful incense called Three Kings after I take down the Christmas decorations (though the crib scenes remain until Candlemas).

But that’s not the epiphany I am talking about. The word has come to mean a sudden, dramatic and powerful revelation. During a recent episode of extra-nasty depression (that general base line for me is just fairly nasty and the extra-specially nasty was paralysing and unbelievably destructive) I had an insight I have had to sit with to see if it may be true, and that insight is the epiphany I’d like to explain. 

O Christmas Tree!

O Christmas Tree!

(a slightly cynical short tale)

“What am I bid for this lovely set of vintage, nay, antique, Christmas tree ornaments? Who’ll start the bidding at £10?”

She was never sure why she chose to bid that day; perhaps it was disappointment that the items she had been after had gone beyond her limit. Perhaps it was the chill outside and the few lonely flakes of snow drifting down; maybe the holly and the ivy dotted around the auction house put her in a festive mood. It may even have been the softly twinkling bauble that the auctioneer held up, twirling on a wisp of thread. Whatever it was, she found herself determined to buy something that day, and though she spent more than she intended, once she’d looked at the ornaments, she realised she’d got a bargain.

An Unmerry Christmas Book.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

Actually, for many, it absolutely ISN’T. I’m not a fan of Christmas; I don’t get starry-eyed and enthusiastic about getting the tree up. I get quite morose about it all. And if life is distinctly unwonderful anyway, the whole Christmas thing is often a way to just rub it in.

Anyway, if you feel anything like I do, you may need an antidote to the sugary, sentimental side to the festive season. I’ve dropped a quid off the price of my own favourite novel, The Bet. Here’s a nicely gloomy extract to whet your appetite.

“In the days after the funerals, Greville worried endlessly about his assistant. The Christmas season seemed indecent with its tinselly colour and insincerity, and the old man’s heart contracted with pity watching the boy decorating the foyer, and to see him arrive every morning on time and go through each day like a man sleepwalking. He watched him working with school children on educational visits, wanted to applaud him for sheer determination when he saw him speaking with a shadow of his old energy. He found him asleep in the midst of the basement chaos, or head pillowed on arms on his desk, or once, sitting on the stairs, resting his head on his knees. Greville touched his shoulder to wake him.

“Sorry,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “I just sat down for a moment because I couldn’t remember what I was going downstairs for.” He stopped a few steps down. “I still can’t.”

“Doesn’t matter, whatever it was. Go and make us some coffee, boy.”

Ashurst turned on the stairs and headed back up to the tiny kitchen, Greville following. He stood behind him while he filled the kettle, washed out the cafetière and mugs.

“Not sleeping, eh?”

“Not much, no. I usually get to sleep around three, if I’m lucky.” He didn’t sound as if he were complaining. “I’m sorry I’ve been dropping off here. I do try not to.”

“Couldn’t sleep for weeks and weeks after my wife died,” Greville said awkwardly. “It does stop in the end, the insomnia.”

The boy didn’t say anything; he’d been very economical with his speech lately, none of the impertinence that Greville had been used to and had grown to enjoy. He made the coffee with almost exaggerated care; Greville had noticed his hands shaking any time he’d actually got him to talk, even a bit. He was stirring the coffee now, slowly, as if he were counting how many times the spoon went round.

“I keep remembering,” he said softly.

“That’s good. That’s important. We all need to remember,” Greville said, putting an awkward arm around him briefly.

“You don’t know what I’m remembering,” Ashurst said, and walked out.

The vital importance of beauty, truth and hope in books

The vital importance of beauty, truth and hope in books

As a card-carrying depressive, I’m not someone known for being an optimist. I’m sometimes like the love child of Marvin the Paranoid Android and Eeyore. It’s hard to not feel that the world is currently going to hell in a very large hand basket. I take breaks from the internet on a regular basis, hoping that the world beyond my small bubble will have improved by the time I go back; I retreat into the world of books and seek what solace I can find there.

I’ve recently finished reading a biography of Elizabeth Goudge. Beyond the Snow  by Christine Rawlins  is an exhaustive, and inspiring account of the life and faith of this most beloved of authors, and I didn’t want it to end. She had an interesting and sometimes very difficult life, though cushioned somewhat by her privileges of birth. Though she does not write much about it, it is known that she experienced severe mental distress and even breakdowns; this is reflected very much in certain books (such as The Scent of Water that I have blogged about here) and echoes in many others. There is compassion and bravery in her decision to write happy books.

Critics sometimes dismissed her books as “pretty pretty” and as light romances (they’re not) but the public bought them in their millions. She does not shy away from the difficult things, like death or loss of faith or suffering, but she offers a vision of hope, of redemption and of atonement too. The books are full of havens: places where people go to be healed, to rest and recover their strength and to go out again to continue their work in the world. There is faith, but it is built into the woodwork and rarely centre stage. There is kindness and care and hope, even in dark times. People make tough decisions, ones that reflect a code of ethics that is now rare.

In these dark times, I know that I am avoiding fiction that seems to revel in darkness and hatred. I’m trying to find books that are trying to be beacons in the dark, to be rallying calls to resist the lure of what Hopkins calls Carrion Comfort. I’ve read a few recently. I reread Sir Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, my favourite of his Discworld novels; though it looks evil squarely in the face, it fights back. I have recently read a couple of novels by Jane Davis too. My Counterfeit Self https://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Counterfeit-Self-Jane-Davis-ebook/dp/B01KTY22R0/  is an excellent and immersive tale of a woman who stayed true to her own beliefs and who fought for justice and social changes. The fact that the main character is a poet just adds to the charm for me. Smash All The Windows https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smash-all-Windows-Jane-Davis-ebook/dp/B079MBP3WD/ is a powerful (and sometimes very disturbing) account of a major disaster on the London Underground; the survivors and the families of those lost face huge difficulties in getting at the truth of what happened, and even greater challenges of transforming the grief into something that shines beyond all the pain and sorrow and loss.

In non-fiction, I recently read another book by Robert McFarlane, The Old Ways. It’s about walking and about the power of paths. I’d highly recommend it if you are someone who loved walking but whose health does not allow longer distances or more difficult conditions. There is great beauty and evocation of all the senses in McFarlane’s writing, taking you out of yourself and into another world of experience.

All of these books offer beauty and hope and truth without ever scuttling into whimsy and unrealistic withdrawal from the world. They’re books that strengthen your soul; they put shining steel into your limbs and the gold of optimism into your soul.

As for my own writing… Well, I’ve been limping along with several projects and having read Beyond the Snow, I have become convinced that to keep going as a writer, I must commit myself to writing books that are filled with beauty, truth and hope, however unfashionable, however bourgeois and some might say, naff, such a concept might be. My existing novels, all available from Amazon, are already books that I believe offer a haven and a support to battered souls. Despite the fact that it feels like the world has become so focused on capitalism that unless you pay for advertising, I do believe that people will find my books even if Amazon is steadily erasing all the opportunities that once existed for unknown independent authors to become known. I’m not sure how, though. I have less than three thousand followers on my Twitter, less than five hundred likes on my official Facebook page and around five hundred subscribers to this blog.

But that, perhaps, is not my business. My business is to find that beauty, hope and truth and let the stories weave themselves. That’s all I can do right now.

Grief. Art. Writing

I was honoured to be a guest on Jane Davis’ blog yesterday. You can read it here:

https://jane-davis.co.uk/2018/06/20/an-exploration-of-art-in-fiction-part-3-grief-art-and-writing-by-vivienne-tufnell/

I’ll be writing later this summer about the various books I’d recommend for a non-beach read, and Jane’s recent book Smash All The Windows will be among those I’ll be suggesting for immersing yourself in excellent fiction rather than sand, sea and suncream.

The Insidious Perversion

The insidious perversion

You know how sometimes a sentence or a few words or an event can set of a train of thought that goes into some sort of underground tunnel, rumbling away unseen until it pops up into the light with revelations?

This week there’s been three ingredients that have set in motion a sort of Salmagundi of thought. The first was a tweet from an old friend:

“The objectification of self. Everyone is a brand. The biggest and most complete and insidious perversion of capitalism” from Monica https://twitter.com/EquanimityNow_

I read it and got the shivers.

The second (catalytic) event was the revelation that a romance writer has trademarked a common word and has been sending out cease and desist notices to any author using that word in book titles. I’m not going into this in detail because it’s been written about a lot since it came up, but because it focuses on a very heavy-handed protection of the concept of “BRAND” it also chimed very much.

I have written before about my objection to the notion of author-branding, being told on occasions that I wasn’t understanding it and that in essence it was simple: I am my brand. My books epitomise the brand, and each book is recognisable as mine. I have always felt deeply uncomfortable with this notion, not because there isn’t a strong element of truth to it (see Hopkins’ poem As kingfishers catch fire: “What I do is me: for that I came”) but because it aims to both petrify a moment or a period in my soul’s journey and also to set a price on it.

There was a third ingredient but it was a quote from James Hillman and while I can recall it was about mining the soul for various processes, including raising our consciousness and of the problems of capitalism, I cannot find the quote to save my life. The nearest I can find to it is this:“What we hold close in our imaginal world are not just images and ideas but living bits of soul; when they are spoken, a bit of soul is carried with them. When we tell our tales, we give away our souls. The shame we feel is less about the content of the fantasy than it is that there is fantasy at all, because the revelation of imagination is the revelation of the uncontrollable, spontaneous spirit, an immortal, divine part of the soul, the Memoria Dei. Thus, the shame we feel refers to a sacrilege: the revelation of fantasies expose the divine, which implies that our fantasies are alien because they are not ours” James Hillman (The Myth of Analysis, p. 182). https://aras.org/sites/default/files/docs/00051Wojtkowski.pdf 

“When we tell our tales, we give away our souls.” Or in the case of authors, we sell them. I’ve struggled with not being able to write, with having lost the connection to the stories I knew (and still know) were inside me. I have felt hollowed out, empty and bereft. In some of my journeying I have followed many trails, from daydreams and night dreams, stories and songs and poems, and found scraps of clues. Here is one:

“For a nun.

Like your Hopi pottery bowl,
hollowed out, open, beautiful,
you’re being hollowed out by God
not to be filled but to embrace
the sculpted space itself, empty,
yet filled with what you almost see;
intimate poverty’s body.”

Murray Bodo OFM, from the book “Song of the Sparrow- new poems and meditations.”

 

Am I empty? Or am I simply open, filled with things not seen (and therefore perhaps not valued). I have told many stories. I have others still inside me but I cannot bring them to birth like I once did, naturally but not without great pain and cost to myself. I have become acutely sensitive to the great and terrible turmoil of the world around me, insulated though I am by privilege and accidents of birth. I am caught in a paradox: a need for action and an equal need for withdrawal for self-protection. A need to write my stories (and share them) and a repulsion for the mining of my own soul with those stories. One might say, write them and burn them (as I know one friend, fellow poet Deborah Gregory, has done http://theliberatedsheep.com/food-soul-animus-diet/ ) or write them and keep them hidden. Yet just as one would not bear a child and keep it hidden for its whole existence, I cannot write and keep it all locked away in darkness. Yet to publish becomes a connection to the worst of capitalism, the worst of a pervasive, perverted system wherein a writer can lay claim to a common word, seize it and trademark it AND GET AWAY WITH IT (it’s being fought and perhaps will be overturned)

 

In my scouring of the internet for those words that were the third ingredient, I found the following, part of the essay I shared a bit of further back in this post. It brings me some comfort, but not answers (as you will read). Perhaps I have not become completely lost.

“Kenosis seems now the only political way to be—emptied out of certainty…Kenosis is a form of action—not masochistic action, vicitimized, crucified…[but] empty protest: I don’t know how to do the right thing. I don’t even know what’s right. I have no answer. But I sure smell something wrong with the government…‘empty protest’ is a via negativa, a non-positivist way of entering political arena. You take your outrage seriously, but you don’t force yourself to have answers. Trust your nose. You know what stinks. Don’t try to replace the hopeless frustration you feel, the powerless vicitimization, by working out a rational answer. The answers will come, if they come, when they come, to you, to others, but do not fill in the emptiness of the protest with positive suggestions before their time. First, protest!…[An empty protest] doesn’t have an end goal…Empty protest is protest for the sake of the emotions that fuel it and is rooted not in the conscious fullness of improvement, but in the radical negativity…Not only will you be seen as stupid because empty, but you will be also alone,…So empty protest for me is really a kenosis–giving up both the vanity of being admired and the surety of a sound position, and doing it in public” James Hillman (ibid., pp. 103-107).

https://aras.org/sites/default/files/docs/00051Wojtkowski.pdf

Post scriptum: this article is very much worth reading. It’s Hillman’s exploration of How the Soul is Sold.

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/23/magazine/how-the-soul-is-sold.html

Psst…wanna escape from the world and into a book?

I’ve not done a Countdown offer for some years; this works by starting low (99p usually) and rising in installments. I’d opted out of the Kindle select programme that allows such promotions (for a lot of good reasons) but have tentatively enrolled Away With The Fairies again just to see what happens. It can also be borrowed if you are with the Kindle Unlimited programme; I get paid by pages read rather than by purchase if the book is borrowed.

So, here it is: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Away-Fairies-Vivienne-Tuffnell-ebook/dp/B005RDS02A/

From today it’s 99p, and goes to £1.99 in three days, before returning to its original price three days after that.

Needless to say, shares, tweets, Facebook shares and so on would be greatly appreciated, especially if you have read it already and would recommend it to others. It’s got a few new reviews recently but because of the mysterious ways Amazon works, they give greater prominence to new reviews. If you have read it and enjoyed it, more reviews can keep the book fresh and current in the weird algorithms Amazon uses. Thank you to all who have reviewed it; the overall rating is 4.6 which is pretty damn good. It’s been a Kindle bestseller several times, in a number of categories, especially in the metaphysical and visionary category.

Here’s the blurb:

Irrepressible artist Isobel has survived most things. She’s coped with everything from a sequence of miscarriages, her husband’s ordination, the birth of two small and demanding children, and finally the recent death of both her parents in a bizarre suicide pact. She’s managed to bounce back from everything so far. A sequence of domestic disasters finally signals to Isobel that perhaps things aren’t quite as rosy as she’d like. With her half of the inheritance, Isobel buys an isolated holiday cottage where she hopes to be able to catch up with some painting, as well as have the occasional holiday.
The cottage is idyllic, beautiful and inspiring, but odd things keep happening. Doors won’t stay shut, objects go missing and reappear in the wrong places and footsteps are heard when there’s no one there. One of Isobel’s new neighbours suggests that it is the fairies who are responsible, but Isobel is more than a tad sceptical: there’s not a hint of glitter or tinselly wings or magic wands.
Isobel’s inner turmoil begins to spill over into her daily life when she hits a deer while driving back from the cottage. Her family hold crisis talks, deciding that she needs to have time alone in the cottage to get over long repressed grief and to paint it out of her system. As she works at a frenetic pace, the odd happenings begin to increase until even Isobel’s rational, sceptical mind has to sit up and take notice. And that’s when she gets really scared. Up until now, her motto has been that there’s nothing in life that can’t be made better by a cup of tea and some Hob Nobs. This time it’s beginning to look like it’ll take more than even chocolate biscuits to make things better.

(I’m hoping that this offer, going on for a week, may give a boost to this book, help it reach new readers and may also boost the other novels too.)