REVISITING TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

There are two names connected to MOCKINGBIRD. For me, the author is always going to be Nelle. Perhaps mistakenly, whenever I heard mention of her, I had the impression people called her that. It rhymes with bell, and not belly. Her creation is always going to be Scout Finch. Not Jean Louise.
   I write here of Harper Lee out of politeness to Clarity, who is always listening in. Nelle is buried in Monroeville, Alabama. You can take an internet tour of the gravesite, where you’ll see other members of the Lee family there…with Finch in the name.
   Before I revisited Harper Lee’s book, I thought about how I visited it in the first place. Going back, there was the movie. Then I went in search of the book. For those of you who try that sort of thing, do your best to remember the book is the book and the movie is the movie.
   Maybe you encounter those items the other way around. Someone makes a movie, and then it is turned into a book. In that case, do your best to remember the movie is the movie and the book is the book. Or the movie of the book of the T-shirt of the radio show of the hamburger, and so on.
   (That should be the book of the movie of the breakfast cereal. Pardon me.)
   I went looking for the book after seeing the movie adaptation. It’s possible that a documentary prompted me into action. A documentary in which she was referred to as Nelle. As for the film, Harper Lee kept an eye on the movie production long enough to know they weren’t going to mess it up. She did her best not to mess the book up herself. For, first, there was another version of her story. A messed-up execution of one we never needed to see.
   TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a book from the start of the 1960s, which is to say there’s a bit of a hangover from the 1950s to deal with in reading it. But the setting is very strictly glued to that of Harper Lee’s childhood in the 1930s. By the time the book ends, historically we’re hovering on the edge of the Dustbowl Years and vivid imagery of the Migrant Mother photographed by Dorothea Lange. W. H. Auden puts a bullet to the 1930s in September 1939, in giving his label to a low dishonest decade…
   But that’s all later. We start around 1933. The outside world, fixed in the grand arena of history, seems so very far away from small-town America and its quota of daily small-town Americanisms depicted in the book. (Although, eventually, Hitler does get a mention.) At its core, MOCKINGBIRD concerns racial injustice sieved through the strained community built around it. This is the only way Lee can approach the story.
   It isn’t.
   There was another version. GO SET A WATCHMAN shows how TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD started life. In that earlier manuscript, the character of Scout is grown to adulthood and, as Jean Louise, returns from the big city to view the old home town under a different light. The author is not particularly kind to her people, there. Lee was asked to work on the tale. She transformed a raw idea into a cooked meal by making the story all about Scout’s childhood days.
   Scout is young in both stories. In the rough prototype novel, she’s 26. And in the finished work, she starts the tale at the age of six. The homecoming story of a twenty-something character doesn’t sound as engaging as the tale of the child in the town surrounded by haunting figures.
   TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a ghost story, with plenty of fake ghosts in it. Nothing in the vaguely supernatural background of the book is scary. The scary stuff is left to all those violent adult themes the child struggles to deal with in the foreground. For this is the Deep South in the 1930s; if a black man kisses a white woman, the town’ll hang him as soon as look at him.
   I’ve read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, but I refuse to read GO SET A WATCHMAN. Sometimes, publication history is a bitch and stands in the way. I refer to the exploitation of a dead author’s unpublished works as necrophilia.
   “By necrophilia, or what the Americans quaintly call necro-feel-ya, I mean the unfortunate exploitation of an artist’s work beyond that artist’s lifetime.”
   In this case, the author remained alive when the deal was struck. So this didn’t come across as necrophilia. No bonus points for that. Sharks tasted blood and circled in the water, under a sky packed with vultures biding their time while the hangman sharpened his axe…which he loaded up with buckshot. Or something like that. Unfortunate exploitation of the artist’s work during the artist’s dying days is no less a crime against art.
   Nelle…
   …your honour, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was absolutely of sound body and mind when she gave permission for her prototype manuscript to be published. On the other hand, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was subjected to what can only be described as elder abuse, not even comprehending the rights she granted shortly after her sister’s death and not too long before her own.
   Why mention her sister?
   If you do take an electronic tour of Harper Lee’s grave then you’ll see the name Finch there, just as I said. One of those grave markers notes that Alice Finch Lee was born in 1911 and died in 2014. She’s Nelle’s sister. And, into extreme old age, Alice looked out for Nelle’s interests.
   The chronology runs as follows: Alice dies in 2014, the book comes out in 2015, and Nelle dies in 2016. Alice hadn’t been the guardian of the legacy for the last three years of her life, retiring at the tender age of 100. Nelle’s manuscript existed the whole time, and she never published it. Conspiracy? The weight of time, reputation, and lack of literary output?
   Suppose you do rob a grave. Have the politeness to let the body climb down in there, first.
   You and I were not in the room with the writer and the lawyer, so whether cinder-crusted devilry or tedious publishing talk went on…we’ll never know. It’s much easier to look askance at the publisher for conduct unbecoming. That, we’ll return to.
   I tried as hard as I could. But it is impossible to write of one author without writing of the other. I’ll take a detour into the life and times of Truman Capote, the scamp. Nelle and Truman knew each other as children. He created a tomboyish character based on her in his book, and she created a social oddity of a friend based on him way over in her book.
   Did Truman Capote secretly write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or is that hogwash? I tell ye plain, ’tis hogwash. For the last fucking time, no, Branwell Brontë did not write WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Nelle, with MOCKINGBIRD nesting at the publisher’s, travelled with Truman Capote to Holcomb, Kansas.
   Multiple murder in Kansas interested Truman, and he wanted to write about that. He decided to visit the scene of the crime: to descend upon it. Despite the jaundiced babbling of Gore Vidal, delivering a scabrous view in the opposite direction, Truman Capote had talent. He didn’t use it wisely or well, but he had something before the booze rented him out and threw him to the bayleaf mob of critics. Baying is hardly the word for poseurs.
   The thought of Truman using Harper Lee as a condom to communicate with the local yokels…yes, that would’ve amused Truman. Capote is Italian slang for condom. I sense he knew. Nelle took Monroeville Alabama and turned it into Maycomb. The book was behind her, but only just. Truman lingered there, as the odd little boy. Now she was in Truman’s company, and he was still at heart an odd little boy. Nelle stood on the ground in another place with comb at the end of the name.
   Holcomb. There she assisted Truman in the early construction of IN COLD BLOOD. Breakfast at Tiffany’s lay far behind Truman. He’d dedicated it to his close friend Jack Dunphy. Years in the making, IN COLD BLOOD would be dedicated to Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee in that order.
   Capote once acknowledged her contribution and then scratched it out. He had trouble acknowledging her help. “Friend.” Yes. What else? “Assistant.” Capote, in hindsight, diminishing Lee’s contribution, knew how to publicise Capote. Nelle was there for the first two months. Did Branwell Brontë write WUTHERING HEIGHTS? No. Did Truman Capote write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? No. Did Nelle Lee write IN COLD BLOOD?
   There, things get tricky. No, she did not write the book. But did she make the writing of the book possible? Did she pave the way? Nelle broke the ice, right? Let’s be fucking clear, here. Nelle Lee dynamited the ice so that Truman Capote could have his book and eat it like cake he’d said he made all by himself. From recipe to reception.
   A new type of book. (It wasn’t.)
   Every word of it true. (A lie.)
   George Washington slept here. (He didn’t. But we might as well throw that one in, too.)
   Truman didn’t care about the multiple murders in Holcomb, Kansas. Since time out of mind, murder most foul has fascinated us. So he knew he could write about a morbidly evergreen subject. That had staying power. Truman didn’t care whether or not the murders would be solved.
   He and Nelle arrived in town in time for the funerals of the murdered family. Truman made a lot of friends there, in Kansas. That’s according to Truman. Nelle made those connections on his behalf. She became the long spoon the community relied upon to sup with Truman Capote.
   You can read his fiction in depth. But you’d never want to be in a room with him for anything beyond the span of a breakfast, Tiffany’s included or otherwise. He’d entertain you, and then you’d be a chapter in a book.
   Gore Vidal? Someone should gore Vidal. Fuck you, Gore Vidal. And for that, you’d have to buy me dinner first. I was childhood friends with Harper Lee. You couldn’t be featured in her book, not even as Boo Radley. But I’m in there. Not as Boo Radley, though. Eat your heart out, Gore Vidal. Go back to assaulting Norman Mailer’s fists with your plastic chin, you… (F-slur redacted.)
   I made that last paragraph up. But for someone writing A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, Truman made things up, too. True account. Not exactly. Multiple Murder. Now that bit he got right. Consequences? From a writer who didn’t care. A writer who came to care about all the wrong things, in the end, concerning that case.
   Nelle: Truman’s cultural guide, secretary, catch-all assistant, note-taker, editor, and friend, making it possible for people to relate to her as the acceptable face of Truman Capote’s investigation.
   Truman continued without Nelle’s assistance for years after, as the case led to suspects, arrests, trial, convictions, and executions. Capote didn’t care about the justice of it. The Clutter family, parents and children, were murdered by two men Capote took more interest in.
   Capote wanted to be the invisible narrator of his big book on big themes in an isolated place. But with Truman it’s all about him, all the time, every single time. That’s why here, I’ve only mentioned the murdered family once by name. I want you to know that the star of the show is Truman Capote…first and foremost, and that’s according to him. Not me. The murdered family is sidelined in favour of contact with the criminals.
   I’ve barely scratched the flawed mirror surface of Truman Capote’s life. It hides an ocean of depth, full of nasty vindictive things. My trident has three points to it. One. Truman knew Nelle in childhood, and served as a model for an oddball character in MOCKINGBIRD. Two. Nelle went with Truman to research the book that would become IN COLD BLOOD. She didn’t have MOCKINGBIRD attached to her name, just then. He was known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Three…
   Wait. Detour. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Capote wrote that and lived off the back of it. (He’d dine out far and wide on all of his books, save at the very end, beyond his death. Stick a pin in that one.) The Breakfast movie appeared a year before the movie adaptation of MOCKINGBIRD. Both writers made it big, and made it big at the movies.
   Truman danced with Marilyn Monroe. But she’d not be his character, Holly Golightly. Marilyn was warned off playing a prostitute, and that was that. They should have married, just to give us a disaster-zone as a cautionary tale. But, with Truman, that would be just one more disaster-zone/Tuesday. Let us not dwell on imagined wedlock.
   Capote hated the idea of Audrey Hepburn in the part of Holly. She was too pure, in his mind. No depths of darkness or suffering or want.
   If you know anything of Audrey’s life in the Second World War, you’d know she had more than her share of trouble to help inform playing a character in a movie, thank you very much.
   Capote, at his bitchiest, in resenting someone for not being tough…and simply not knowing or failing to acknowledge what Audrey went through…is about average for the man. Acknowledging others is, for people like Truman, simply a bend in the road that curves round, inevitably, back to people like Truman casting light on themselves.
   Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Truman was not a fan of the adaptation. He’d bend over backwards to point out that Holly Golightly wasn’t really a call girl. She’s not a prostitute at all. Then he goes and says the thing. Girls like that are American geishas. This comment is deeply offensive to the geisha specifically and to Japan in general. Shocking. That would be like casting Mickey Rooney to play a comedy relief Japanese character in Breakfast at…oh.
   Isn’t Mickey Rooney racist in that movie? TRUMAN: Hold my beer. Let me tell you about Holly Golightly and Japanese culture…
   Truman had issues with his movie adaptation. Nelle had no problems with hers. Truman’s book didn’t win a Pulitzer. Nelle’s did. Book and movie combined to make Nell an unlikely star. She shied from that, quite quickly, leaving her sister Alice to handle the messy business of publicity. Or…lack of publicity.
   There’s no such thing as a reclusive author. But there is such a thing as the author who fucks off into a room with a writing machine to do the work alone. To fill the blank page. That writing machine could be as simple as a pencil or as complicated as a manual typewriter; electronic keyboards are idiot-proof, and, therefore, less fussy.
   Nelle didn’t consider success. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death…at the hands of the reviewers. She was spared that. Truman, for his part, entered into gladiatorial combat with them. Both authors reduced their output. Truman envied Nelle’s success. A pointless envy, as she cared not for it. And so, that friendship ended.
   You’ll find them together as Scout and Dill, in MOCKINGBIRD. Truman Capote, at his most amusing, fictionalised by his childhood friend. And Nelle. If I call her a rebel, that has Southern connotations. Should you hunt for criticism of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, it lies in a view that the author looked a little too kindly on her people of the South and let them off the hook. The counter to that is…just plain folks…come across as far more evil in their racism on account of being depicted as just plain folks. To depict their humanity is to reveal their inhumanity.
   Nelle and Truman tasted success. Truman developed an addiction to the fame. Nelle had an allergic reaction to it. Point three of my trident. After big success, MOCKINGBIRD, IN COLD BLOOD, that was pretty much the end for both of them. They also faced this problem of a book resurfacing with grim finality. Nelle still had the manuscript of the prototype novel somewhere. Truman thought he’d destroyed his early book.
   The story goes that he left it behind in a place that was taken up by someone else. A magpie of a tenant, who discovered a Truman manuscript, and preserved it. Are some things worth preserving? I was once told a tale that I reworked into the opening of a novel…
   This is the book I shredded. And I destroyed the physical hard drive and all back-up media, too. But I kept the opening. The only good part was the part I’d been told by someone else. This was a singular lesson in learning to write. And in learning how to vapourise anything you didn’t want to see the light of day.
   After their deaths, the two were united by this connection – material resurfacing from the folds of the swamp. Nelle left some short stories in a place in New York. Truman had an early work bob to the surface. Writers were dead and gone, and books still hit the shops. SUMMER CROSSING. You know. Necrophilia.
   In Nelle’s case, THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER collects a bunch of short pieces. Why are there so many “lost” manuscripts to this history? If she’d wanted to, Nelle could have gone back in and worked up a few short stories to keep the literary beggars away. The hungry crowd of critics, I mean. Nelle gave us one book. Be happy in that.
   Scout Finch is a fictionalised version of Nelle. There are books out there with memorable characters. Some of those characters are memorable through description, action, or speech. The truly memorable characters from classic tales are memorable through all three of those things and one more item: they stay with you.
   Knowing how the friendship frazzled – an inevitability, with Truman – I prefer Scout and Dill to remain where they are, staying with memory. Not for me the publishing problem connected to the later-earlier work GO SET A WATCHMAN. Haven’t read it. Won’t read it. Did enough research on it to make comments here, and that’s that.
   It is an earlier work: the prototype. And it is the later work, published in the last days of Nelle’s life. Touted as a sequel, on the basis that it is about Scout returning to town those many years later, it fired enthusiasm in a great crowd to hear of its existence. Except…there are text passages word by revealing word that are practically the same scenes as they are in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Bit of editing, here, there, marking differences in MOCKINGBIRD. Don’t even pretend for a second that this other book is a sequel. It is not.
   Conduct unbecoming of a publisher includes trying to pass this prototype off as the direct sequel. I will grant you we finally discover something the realm of criticism toyed with, as an absent-minded dog toys with a bone. In the prototype book, the heroic Atticus Finch, Scout’s noble lawyer dad, is anything but. He’s a segregationist: the type to build separate drinking fountains based on skin-colour.
   In the prototype, Nelle is not so kind to her people of the South and she doesn’t let them off the hook. The two books could be resolved with expansion and editing of the prototype to turn that work into a true sequel. But this was not to be. Nelle died. She outlived Truman. He’d outlived his friendship with her. Could he have written more, with his heart, brain, and liver shot through like Swiss cheese from the wild excess of too much wild excess? With those wearying disadvantages, writing soon drops off into typing. And sloppy typing, at that.
   Could Nell have written more? She took a stab at true crime, covering a story that sent her into the writing landscape of IN COLD BLOOD. Familiar territory, for she’d walked that road and gathered many notes on the trail once before. But it was not to be, second time around.
   There’s a wanton, libertine, neediness in the literary critic/pundit who cries why couldn’t you give us more than one perfect book, you bastards to all the writers who only have one perfect book in them. Those poseurs are never fucking happy. You can shit gold for literary types like that, and they’d complain the shit wasn’t diamond-encrusted. Be wanting jam on it, next.
   If you enjoy a book, what more is there to say. We could wax lyrical about what might have been. But we can never truly know. Was Nelle thrown from her horse after riding her first book back to the stable of publication? If you write of the complacent daughter returning to the small town only to discover her lawyer father had feet of smashed and tainted clay…
   And the editorial view is…we can’t go with this book…what, then? Be softer in telling your tale. Focus on the childhood character. So you go away for a time and rewrite the damned thing. Now it’s an Instant Timeless Classic™, and you are set for literary life.
   Except. It must rankle that your initial idea, which is not so soft on your people of the South, it must hurt, that the core story was rejected in favour of your classic. What could you do, then? Take the prototype and rework it so that Scout grows up into Jean Louise Finch, and when she heads home from the Big City, obviously, we see she had a young daughter’s infallible view of the noble lawyer…only to realise this idolatry doesn’t match the man’s constant juggling of life in the Deep South…
   You’d need to gut both narratives to make it work. But once the classic is a classic, you can’t go back and change a single word of the sacred text. So the challenge then would be to rework and rework and rework the prototype until it no longer resembles much of anything.
   Some characters never grow up. And they really shouldn’t. Peter Pan. Tom Sawyer. Even Huck Finn. The Secret Garden is set around the year 1907/08, and features a character – the boy Colin – who cannot walk. Spoiler: he regains the ability. And the children in that story never grow up. They mustn’t. For Colin is ten years old and infirm. The moment he walks again, well, that’s the moment he’s fit enough to serve in the trenches of the Great War.
   Holden Caulfield never grows up. People don’t like it when I say…you know he goes back to the school and shoots everyone at the end, right? Anyone forced to read Salinger’s fuck-awful book in school soon reaches that conclusion. So it isn’t in the text, so what?
   Scout and her brother Jem, even oddball Dill, never grow up. Spoiler: Jem never grows up in the prototype book. There’s plenty of forensic analysis online to show you the word-for-word scenes that are the same or nearly. MOCKINGBIRD has a layer of polish to the work. The other, no.
   I have detoured into talk of a monster: Truman Capote. And I am not the first to express distaste for the promotion of a prototype novel as a sequel to itself. No more of that. What brought me here?
   Revisiting Nelle’s tale.
   I’ll have to revisit the film. For that sort of story, seen through a child’s eyes, you always hope, desperately, when sitting down to watch…please tell me they employed children who could ACT. I’ve revisited the book in another way…and I haven’t written of that at all. How remiss.
   Now remember, if you are going to tackle such things, the book is the book and the movie is the movie and never the twain shall meet. But somewhere between 1960 novel and 1962 movie there’s a place for a visual adaptation that moves at your own pace: the pace at which you turn the comic book pages. In 2018, Fred Fordham adapted TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD into a graphic novel.
   Take a digital tour of Monroeville and stop by the old court house. Fred certainly went there, for the trial scenes. I now have two copies of this story. One a novel, and the other a comic book. Both start off with motifs of a fence. By design, if you know the tale. The novel is a towering work. And the hardback comic book does its damnedest to convey the same story.
   For reasons of compression, the movie gives you a taste of the novel if not the full range of flavours. Otherwise the movie would be a decompressed TV show. The same compression gives you a taste of the novel in the graphic novel. Otherwise the comic book would be a whole volume longer.
   I recommend all three adaptations. The movie may stay with you, as might the art in the graphic novel. But the book is the one that goes into the most detail and lingers, positively, the longest. My copy of the book carries an introduction by Albert French, whose own novels are not kind to the oppressor.

 

HARDBACKS AND PAPERBACKS AND SHELVES, OH MY! A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

An author's library.
   A label attached to many a blog post. These library posts are all the same. What goes on in an author's library? The slow steady march of books. Aye, even into the digital age and beyond.
   The recent influx of 610 books, and the arrival of a big eff-off bookcase to handle the flood, raised a few questions. What to do with the volume of volumes?
   Stack, for now.
   Of the 609 books, a few are gems. One tome is already gone, headed across choppy water to feature as a prop in a photo-shoot for a book cover.
   I took possession of this year's Folio Society crop, and that small collection was in addition to the 610 books mentioned.

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One down, 609 to go. If I read a book a week, that'll take a while. I won't, though. Duplicates are inevitable. I spotted at least a dozen stories I've read.
   Trimming the list already.
   Question. With clones and copies, do I keep the duplicates or the ones I obtained earlier? There's a flip of the coin to that. A few paperback books came in that I'd considered buying. I've headed those purchases off at the pass.
   Hell, if I battered through a book a day, I'd call that three years of poring over tomes rather than two...
   Allowing for days each year when little or no reading is possible. And for books that can't be read at a single day-long night-long sitting.

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I asked questions of my library, paperback and hardback.

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The cheapest books were obtained freely. Gifts in.
   And the most expensive book? Well, I know the price of that, and it was free as well. Special offer, thrown in with a bundle.
   So what was the most expensive book I paid for? I'm pretty sure that was a gift out, and I managed that at half-price.
   There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.
   J.M. Barrie looms large over me. No, really. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, illustrated by the dread pirate Calico Jack Rackham, would fell a giant if that tome jumped from the shelves.
   The lightest book? Then you start arguing over what constitutes a book. Heaviest? Then you start arguing over what constitutes a door.
   Tallest? There are too many books on my shelves. And too many of those are over a foot tall. When the tape measures an awkward 37 cm, you know you are staring at a book it's impossible to curl up with.
   Curl under and die beneath, perhaps.

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Calico Jack was too busy a-pirating to illustrate much, so he handed painterly duties to the ship's cook - young Arthur Rackham.

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What can you tell about the writer, based on the author's library? I've written of that before. A slice of another person's library was recently transfused into my own.
   So you can't tell a damn thing about me based on another person's book choices now in my library.
   Except, perhaps, that the transfused books remain part of my library, and so, are to my taste. If you can tell them apart from the books I bought myself.
   Though I hold books on my shelves that are clearly not to my taste. Again, caution. I hold books on my shelf that I didn't buy at all.

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Oh, there were all sorts of marvels in here. Tall, short, fat, thin, young...
   The youngest books in my library are always born this year, every year. But a solid wedge of old hardbacks toppled in out of the storm...
   Giving me, to my surprise, the oldest new books in my collection. As far as I can tell, the most ancient tome on the stacks is now a volume of Milton, dating to 1881.
   Making it the oldest item in the house.
   I stared at the date in disbelief, as I wouldn't have pegged the book pre-WWII.
   Along with the other ancient hardbacks, these solid volumes carried the whiff of 1955 about them. It's a special ability handed down to most hardbacks - look as though you were produced in or around a repressed decade.
   I jest. All decades contain repression.
   But no, this book was older. I started with a volume that lied to me and said it was from 1921.
   Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? That can't be. I matched titles and publishers to years and then to photos on Google. Exact print-run named and noted. Digging further into the ancient pile, I made my way back to 1881.

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Books down the ages.
   Paperbacks existed then.
   The railway paperback was the airport novel of its day. With the railway creeping everywhere, introduction of widespread compulsory education, and a need to be elsewhere...
   Paperback books gave you something to read on endless steam-powered train journeys.
   No airports or airport novels then. Roads, yes, but only leaky steampunk contraptions, behatted humans, and bridled horses used those.
   The modern rise in paperbacks slid into view during Auden's low dishonest decade. Rain, and war in 1939, stopped play. Post-WWII, paper was everywhere.

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Paper. And now we're in the Digital Age.
   I prefer the durability of hardback. The best-preserved book in my collection? No single tome, for there are many many well-looked-after books here.
   And the worst-preserved? Easily a movie guide by Leonard Maltin. It lies on the floor, just behind me, in three chunks.
   This book is a sorry thing. A thick paperback made of thin paper with no more durable a spine than that of a liquidiser-fresh jellyfish.
   Unsurprisingly, the shattered tome behind me dates to the recent turn of the century. The near-dead book on my carpet replaced one earlier time-shredded volume. I didn't buy again.
   This is 2015, and Leonard sadly announced the final volume in his long-running series.
   The internet does that book's job, nowadays. Maltin's series never had a good format, in terms of survivability. An annual book wasn't meant to last.
   Not at that ever-expanding size, and certainly not in an insufferable paperback format.
   If your paperback stops bullets, it won't halt a broken spine from overuse. Or from plain old regular use.
   Maltin's team put together a great reference work. In a flimsy throwaway format. Anyway, the internet tells me about movies when I ask. Sad but true but sad.

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Solid construction. That's why I like hardbacks. Durability. Yes I'm a digital author, and yes I have a Kindle. And a Kindle app. Maybe even two, last time I checked.
   There wasn't a point to this blog post. I'm just waffling. Thinking about the nature of physical books and the physical nature of books.
   Ethereal digital books are easy to store and retrieve. But what the fuck would I put on all these shelves if I converted every single title to electrons?
   I'd need to start collecting. You can only buy so many Batman figures. I'm sure any gathering palls after the first 1,500. And that lowly figure means paring the collection down to the essentials.

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I don't feel as though I have anything to blog about. Officially, I'm off blogging weekly. If an item comes along, I'll blog. Especially if it's book-related.
   Discovery of a pile of books dating to Victorian times. That qualifies.
   Something I haven't found in more modern hardbacks? In several of these ancient Victorian tomes, I saw a page made of tracing paper near the front of the book.
   That spoke of ancient custom and great age. One day, people will uncover dust-stained Kindle reading devices and declare...
   Look what they used in days of yore, before books downloaded to the brain.
   And they'll smile, as we smile now.

#UNHASHTAGGING.

What do I mean by that title? Perhaps it’s my way of simply cutting loose. Looking back at the first phase of my mad science experiment in self-publishing on Amazon Kindle, and pondering the distance I’ve covered. Did I achieve much? Pardon my bias. The answer is YES.

   I published three books, as planned. That’s 600,000 words of material, stacked on my electronic bookshelf. My approach was simple. Do it. I did. No great secret. I made formatting mistakes down in the lab, so that I wouldn’t make them in the marketplace.

   For the most part, my writing was of the written-and-rejected variety. I added a few thousand words here, and some publishing notes there. Pre-publication blogs were scribbled down, and boosted the word-count. I even made the time to write short stories – unfinished business – over the weekend leading to the launch of my short story collection.

   Yes, I embraced the immediacy of self-publishing on Amazon. Rejected Book One went on sale. I had six weeks to give my short story collection the fiction factory treatment. A second Deployment-Day came and went, and I had six more weeks to give a massive book the eyeball before pushing it out of the aeroplane. There it goes, floating on the breeze.

   I could have written books from scratch within that same timeframe, and published them. A brutal schedule, if I’d aimed for the same word-count at the end of the period. But possible, at the rate of a knee-weakening 15,000 words per day every single day. Rain or shine. Rabid activity.

   Wouldn’t give much for the quality of that material, without editing time thrown in. Or the state of my sanity, come to that – especially given the state of my sanity to start with. Stories must have time to breathe. Some distance is required, to deflect the contempt thrown up by familiarity and over-familiarity with the text.

   Not too much time to breathe. The artist lets the paint dry, and the painting is sold. Apply that rule of business to the publication of fiction. The cake was made, and had to be eaten before it went bad. A poor choice of image – digital stories on the electronic bookshelf have a long life. Still, you seem to be absorbing the general idea.

   So the first phase of the plan is done. Do I resort to burnout, and throw material up for grabs every six weeks from now until I keel over? No. To tackle slim*thriller, I must spend time training. Deciding how I want to handle the visual elements in that story, then learning how to prepare the piece for Kindle.

   Other considerations knock at my door, tug at my elbow, and seek my divided attention. In the closing phase of editing LYGHTNYNG STRYKES, I was plagued by industrial levels of static electricity. I’d have found this ironic, but for the inconvenience. My sense of humour clicked off.

   In my last blog entry, I spoke of traffic. The single greatest consideration in being published was not quantity of material written. Quality of material didn’t come into it either. Style. Editing. Pricing. Availability. No.

   My single greatest consideration, with roadworks all over the place, was traffic. Before publishing LYGHTNYNG STRYKES, I avoided a car that came out of nowhere. My avoidance was massive. After publishing LYGHTNYNG STRYKES, I made a critical error glancing back at an obstructive road sign.

   An optical delusion almost turned me into a pancake. Somehow I paid attention, and avoided being painlessly steamrollered by a van. I recall telling myself, caustically, that throwing my flimsy frame in front of a van just AFTER publication would be as bad a career-move as doing so just BEFORE. Everyone’s a critic.

   Battling streets, I was in a post-publishing daze. I struggled to reconcile my view of reality with actual reality. Through treacle, my brain operated. Pointing out the car. For weeks I’d worried that I’d be hit on my way to publish a book. Foolishly, on that third publication day, I gave less thought to returning from publishing. The van and the car missed me by miles. Well, shorter distances.

   This sort of nonsense is the stuff Twitter seems to have been invented for. The Twitter, the Facebook, the Google+. Not forgetting the E-post. The Blogger. I don’t quite sing about bodies, electric or otherwise. People who can’t sing shouldn’t.

   In thinking over social and anti-social networking, I catch sight of a long-lost pal. Paper. It’s strange that I recycle so much paper, at a time when my use of paper has declined. As an author, why don’t I care about seeing my books on my own shelves?

   I just don’t. E-publishing is the route to market. Not a paper deal. LYGHTNYNG STRYKES doesn’t contain any Nin quotes. The book does contain handy page-references for the quotes I wasn’t granted permission to use. How the hell could I get away with that, through a paper publisher? I’d be informed that this was a jolly bad show. Not par for the course. Underhand. Let me pause to take the matter up with my publisher.

DARTH SINISTER: What is it?

MOFF LARKIN: Lord Sinister, the Nin estate has refused permission to quote breathless prose.

DARTH SINISTER: Set the DEATH STAR on course for Louveciennes.

MOFF LARKIN: Is that…wise?

DARTH SINISTER: Perhaps I could blow something else up.

MOFF LARKIN: You propose another target? A literary target?

DARTH SINISTER: I was more concerned with parking, if I’m honest. Well, we can always skip the quotes and just list the page-numbers. Leave us.

MOFF LARKIN: As you wish, my Lord.

DARTH SINISTER: Moff Larkin…

MOFF LARKIN: Er…

DARTH SINISTER: Check the hull integrity.

MOFF LARKIN: There’s precious little integrity in Hull. And I should bloody know.

   The digital world surrounds us. Social networking is no use to me if it serves to note my collision with a van. Paper is something I scribble notes on. I become a publisher of my own fiction, and take out the rubbish as well. It’s just me, at the keyboard…

   As far as storytelling goes.

   Oh, there are ghosts at my elbow. Literary figures. Influences. Sources of, ahem, inspiration. But I am alone with my thoughts and the sound of my speech as I go into Silly Voice Mode. Writing is not a team-sport.

   Yet the digital world surrounds us. Self-publishing involves a crowd of writerly contacts spread across the globe. People ask for help, receive help, or just float through in a neutral way – observing. In some cases, old-fashioned paper letters are sent out. Then there’s the Twitter, and the Facebook, and the body electric. Walt Whitman was an internet fan. He just died before he could realise that.

   I see a great round wonder rolling through space,

   I see the shaded part on one side where the sleepers are sleeping,

   And the sunlit part on the other side,

   I see the cities of the earth and make myself at random a part of them…

   Hell, I’ve done that from a mobile phone. Cheers, Walt. I’d used belaboured comedy to note that this blog would have no set text. This week’s ramble feels disjointed, but I don’t care. If someone, somewhere, shaded or sunlit, gains the merest scrap from the blog...good.

   Writing is solitary. Self-publishing need not be. The writerly community is all over the text-based internet. It’s a story-thing. A business item. There’s no uphill or downhill online. You are free to learn anything from anyone.

   If you are far ahead, along the road, it’s still possible to look back and learn from those nowhere near as far-travelled, or bloody world-weary, as yourself. Give advice, gain advice in the giving. Ponder, then act. Don’t forget to act.

   The obvious upshot of that image is that there will be people ahead of you, toiling away in the distance. It can be a struggle to reach them, but you can help those writers too. These lonesome roads don’t all have fiends lurking way behind you. There’s no pride to swallow, if someone further back helps you with directions.

   I’m staring at books of poetry. You may want to check these people out. Simon Armitage. W.H. Auden. Ted Hughes. T.S. Eliot. Wendy Cope. Philip Larkin. Sylvia Plath. Seamus Heaney. Siegfried Sassoon. Let’s add Walt Whitman to that list.

   All plucked from bookshelves. Paper. The world that informed my writing, though my writing exists in cyberspace. Paperless. Unyellowing. Scent-free. Perpetually new and old. I type the body electric. Throw images down in a storm of ethereal impulses. I kidnap Philip Larkin and dress him as an Imperial Lackey. Well, if the digital shoe fits…

   I cast off fear – the fear of making obscure references. Google it all, to your heart’s content. Then you’ll know who Darth Bezos is. I’m Darth Sinister, of course. Scouring the universe in my DEATH STAR. With another DEATH STAR in reserve. Well, you never know.

   It seems, looking back over this blog post (itself looking back over my publishing plans), that I felt like waffling nonsense today. That’s how stories start. Everything is a potential plot, setting, character, or an excuse to throw down an unusual turn of phrase.

   Getting my money’s worth out of #unhashtagging may take some doing.

NEXT BLOG: BLEAK, MOODY, DOOM-LADEN THOUGHTS.