Got a weird thing to show you, so tell all the boys and girls

A friend of mine works in an office where all the systems keep crashing. Email doesn't work, applications are losing data and user log ins fail. IT suspects the problems stem from their recent upgrade to the new version of Word.

Putting out my short stories on Kindle (here, ici et voila) required coding HTML and graphics, zipping and uploading it to Amazon, checking in two different applications and adapting to the quirks of same. Publishing on Smashwords would have required updating manscript(s) in Word. At which point I thought fuck that, and returned to my (new) writing. I don't have time for that shit.

I wrote my first novel in Word 4. On a Mac Plus with an external 30 megabyte hard drive. Word 4 was brilliant. Word 5 we were told to avoid. 5.1 was tolerable: more features than you needed but the keystroke to capture and move a paragraph up or down was useful. I think Word 6 was not Mac native code – Apple was a dying company, and Microsoft ruled the world. I lost track of the next versions. I became so frustrated I briefly attempted working in Claris Works. (A benchmark of desperation.) Then I discovered Final Draft and started working in that.

Final Draft is not perfect either but it is simple. One font, thank you; one page layout, automatic page numbering (top r/h corner), para and linespacing preset (1.5, with a line break after each para), and that's it. You write in scenes (or chapters) which can be viewed as index cards and, most wonderfully, moved around in chunks. Prints one way, too; saves to easy to locate back up folder. There are some production planning features for real screenwriters which I don't require. I block out a treatment in FD (automatic scene numbering) and then write in the app or in Text Wrangler and drop them in. Just like typing.

Word could do all that, of course: the problem is getting it to do just that and no more. 'You can configure it,' as my friend Paul Reynolds loved to goad – we would bang on about Word the way other men talk about sports – but no matter what macros I deleted or features I switched off, something else would pop up: an auto address complete, a custom ellipsis, a line that demanded to be Helvetica bold italic underline, the pod bay doors that wouldn't open. That's why I started working on laptops: they're easier to throw across the room.

I still have a copy of Word on my computer and flinch when I have to open it. I don't know anyone who enjoys using the application. It puzzles me that after decades of computers and software becoming better, faster, sleeker, simpler that Word only gets harder, more tangled, more complicated, less reliable.

Recently played (iPod)

1. Private Life - Grace Jones
2. Mohawk - Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie
3. Hotel California - Eagles
4. Carry That Weight - Beatles
5. Quinn the Eskimo - Bob Dylan
6. Get Some - Lykke Li
7. The Night I Fell in Love - Luther Vandross
8. Steppin' Out - Joe Jackson
9. Harder Better Faster Stronger - Daft Punk
10. Golden Birdies - Captain Beefheart
11. Forever - Minuit
12. Graham Greene - John Cale
13. Kiss Them For Me - Siouxsie and the Banshees
14. Bones - The Killers
15. Nothinginsomethingparticular - The Associates
16. New York State of Mind - Alicia Keys
17. Reckless - Crystal Castles
18. Band of Gold - Diana Ross & The Supremes
19. The Blower's Daughter - Damien Rice
20. Truck Sweat - Tobacco

Working

When you sit down to write, is that what you do? Just say, "Okay, I'm starting a book" and then sit down and keep writing until it's done? Do you take breaks? Do you ever get writer's block?

No. No writer's block. Never had it. Don't believe in it. Doesn't exist. I don't buy that one.

Ernest Hemingway said it... If you've got writer's block, write one sentence. And if you can write one, you can write two. If you can write two, you can write three. If you've written three, you have a paragraph. There's just no such thing as writer's block.

I work all the time. I write all the time. No days off, not for any reason. I get up in the morning and I start at it, get into the afternoon, I work out. I work at it at night. I work on it until I go to bed at eleven. I keep a notebook by my table and I write in the middle of the night sometimes. Sometimes I'll write from maybe 4AM to 6AM and go back to bed, but I write all the time. And I always have. That's the way I've always done it.

James Lee Burke. Full interview here.

Matryoshki

International trailer for the new version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is here. I don't know if anyone can top Bernard Hepton as Toby Esterhase but Gary Oldman looks (and sounds) good enough to become a new generation's George Smiley.

What is the formula for determining when a character has become an archetype? How many iterations does it take, and over what period of time? So many writers hit it straight out of the box: Rebecca de Winter, Walter Mitty, Marlowe, Lolita, Lisbeth Salander (nee Longstocking), Hannibal Lecter, Tom Ripley. But a certain type survives to accrue layers of interpretation: Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, 007. Batman's archetypal; Superman isn't. Emma Peel ought to be, although she lives on in other characters. Likewise Number 6.

Actually maybe not Bond. I think we broke that. (He hasn't transmuted into Bourne, either. The Bourne movie trilogy is the Frankenstein myth – the post-modern Prometheus.)

Disclaimer: this is not a Joseph Campbell reference (sic). Time to close that book.

New (old) short stories on Kindle

Rusty Blades is a collection of five short stories from 1988-90 now available on Kindle: 'The Man at the Door', 'Two Friends', 'Geisha', 'Girl from Mars' and 'Rusty Blades.' This is part of an ongoing project to make my early and hard-to-find short fiction available in digital formats, as much as an archive as anything. (Special thanks:Rob O'Neill.) I have thoughts about this which I'll post later – I'm working on new stuff – but if you're interested Rusty Blades is available on Amazon here.

It feels good to be able to finally make these stories available again. Looking back over them I wanted to make some changes but resisted the temptation, apart from cleaning up some unintentional repetition here and there and, okay, changing three words. I can see what I got wrong with the stories as well as what I got right. And I feel a lot older now. 1988 – man...

Self-publishing is a chore so I look forward to going back to the other kind. But I do still have the Huxley stories which will come out as little one-off ebooks for 99 cents, like the pulp paperbacks I used to enjoy when I was a kid. (Do magazines and newspapers still do winter / summer fiction? Must ask someone about that.)

I'm still in two minds about ebooks. I'd be more excited if the platform was set up to supplement or alter reading behaviour, rather than replace the reading I already do. Ebooks are ideally suited for shorter fiction (i.e. novellas) and collected short stories, especially stories which are intended to be enjoyed as a series. The idea of readers subscribing to a character or series of narratives which are then pushed to their devices, like podcasts, actually sounds like fun. Tapping through Ulysses with an index finger does not.

We're all going on a Billie Holiday

No, no, no. Said Bill Bailey on Twitter:

what a terrible shame about Winehouse - she was great on Buzzcocks, even though there was Malibu in her mug.

I can't watch the video. Pete Doherty can fall over and it doesn't matter but Amy was great for music.

Farmville

William Gaddis interviewed by Zoltán Abádi-Nagy for The Art of Fiction:

INTERVIEWER

What moved you to write JR?

GADDIS

Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I'd always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a "people's capitalism" where you "owned a part of the company" and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you're not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don't know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic.

Full interview here.