I’d picked this book up and put it down several times. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild was nearer Lost than Found. I got it was some kind of travel journal. Cheryl Strayed had walked part of the Pacific Crest Trail that stretches from the Mexican border in California to the Canadian border and goes through a lot of places I’ve little or no knowledge but might be vaguely interested in because of the naturalist John Muir (a fellow Scot and honorary American). That doesn’t sound interesting enough for a book.
But I was wrong. Strayed nails it, while walking most of the way and loosing six of her toenails in boots that are too small for her and carrying a backpack far too big for her called Monster.
She segues in and out of the life she had been living. Her mother had married her father when she was nineteen. He beat her and was a violent presence in their little lives, but they didn’t know that because they were children. Three children. How her mum found the courage to leave and find the cheapest apartments and worked as a waitress to live and somehow survive. They gained a stepfather along the way, Eddie, who broke his back. Then her mum got cancer and died, when she was 42.
Cheryl was 22. She was carrying a lot of grief on the trail. Grief for her marriage to a good man she’d fucked up, because she wasn’t mature enough yet to settle down. How her new man got her into smoking heroin. Then injecting. But she wasn’t a junkie. Not really. She was just trying to live. Trying new things. Joe went one way. She went another.
Her determination to walk the 1100 miles of the trail is dented on the first day. She can’t lift her pack. She needs to cross the ice and snow of the Sierra Madre. Where Humphrey Bogart cheated and got cheated by another fusty old prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And she had to cross deserts and avoid stepping on rattlesnakes. But first she had to get the Monster on her back. She couldn’t do it. It was too heavy and cumbersome. Hiking hurt, even before it started to hurt.
‘I didn’t know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life, but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.’
Strayed brings what it feels like to be alone in the world, but figuring out the costs of not being alone, of being someone she was not. She had to bury her mother, not in the ground but in remembering her as she was. Fully human. Fully alive. Read on.
Blue Bag Life won the audience award at the 2022 London International Film Festival. As any artist or writer knows, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” can mean different things. We are all different people. Lisa Selby’s passion is filmmaking. She turned the camera on herself and documented her fractured life. Not everything made the cut, but there’s a raw honesty that’s appealing.
‘Disconnection is the only mothering I’ve ever known.’
‘At Primary School my nicknames were “Disease” and “Witch”. I was sure Helen gave me up because of some disease I had…I thought maybe she didn’t want to be called ‘Mum’ cause I was too dirty.’
Helen is Lisa’s mother. She left her when she was ten. Ran away with her lover and her dad brought Lisa up, a single parent. Usually, that’s the kind of thing men are good at.
Helen had six months to live when Lisa tracked her down to a filthy council house in London, where she stayed with her current—and much younger lover—her mother was unrepentant. In her fake furs, including a natty hat, with a can of Special Brew in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she explained it wasn’t really her fault. After Lisa’s birth, she had been sectioned in a psychiatric ward, which made her incapable of being a proper person, never mind a mother. Her love for drugs was stronger than her maternal instinct. She favoured opiates with a smattering of hallucinogenics.
There was always a fag in her mouth, as there was in Lisa’s. Lisa met Elliot, her boyfriend, after attending an AA meeting. A self-proclaimed alcoholic, Elliot had also been addicted to heroin, like her mum.
‘Heroin was Helen’s favourite. Heroin was Elliot’s favourite.’
We know where this is going. ‘I was drawn to the dark things in life. But this was a different kind of dark,’ admits Lisa.
‘I’ve just found out that my mum is in a hospice. She has cancer. They won’t give her chemotherapy because she’s a heroin addict. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m filming this. It just makes me feel less alone.’
Who are you? What are you? You decide. If life was only that simple, it could be scripted and the chaos of fucked-up lives reigned in?
If you’re like me, you’ll associate Muriel Spark with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I don’t think I’ve read the book. I’ve seen two television versions. Miss Jean Brodie really is a gift to any actress with our Dames playing the lead roles. Muriel Spark reminds us teachers in the James Gillespie’s Girls’ School in 1930s Edinburgh were also actors that had to instruct their audience: ‘the creme de la creme’. Not just by teaching, but charismatically added that certain something that fuelled youthful imagination. Miss Jean Brodie, or real life Miss Christina Kay, did just that. The irony here was the fascist leaning, Mussolini loving, Miss Brodie, who worshipped at the altar of the leader who made the trains run on time, would have seen Muriel Spark whipped off to the death camps. Muriel Spark (nee) Muriel Camberg, her brother Philip and her father, Bernard, were Jewish. Many people who denounced others were spared, so if her mother, a woman who was Christian enough, had done the same, she might have been spared such malign fictions (which have become reborn).
Muriel Spark made that long journey to becoming a Roman Catholic. This is in the last third of the book. By this time, the award-winning poet had married a man who was unhinged, jealous and insane. Moved to Southern Rhodesia. An apartheid regime based on the South African model. She tells the story of a man who shot and killed a ‘pickaninny’ boy because he’d looked at his wife breastfeeding. And of a settler, who killed a black cyclist, drove over him, because he wouldn’t give way on the narrow strip of tarmac. Among the group of white wives, this was considered acceptable behaviour in polite society. No surprise that Hitler admired the British Empire’s ability to subjugate such a large group with so few men. She contacted blood poisoning and with no penicillin, it was touch and go whether she’d live. Her husband’s insanity meant she knew she’d have to get home with her son, even though there was a war on.
She settled her son in Edinburgh and went to work in London for MI6. They helped fabricate false accounts of the German war effort. Her middle-class background meant that she found accommodating, but she was also writing poetry and got jobs with some literary magazines.
It gets boring here. A settling of accounts of who said what, which for the general reader (me) is time wasted. We know, of course, Muriel Spark would become a literary giant. She won an Observer short-story writing competition. That gave her access to publishers and commissions for books as yet unwritten and articles published in literary magazines.
Her debut novel was largely, write-what-you know, based on her experience of taking Dexedrine (amphetamines) which kept her appetite down. During 1951-52 rationing was still in place. Skipped meals the norm for many mothers so their children could benefit.
‘I didn’t feel like a novelist,’ she wrote. The Comforters, published in 1957 was also based on her hallucinatory experiences. She compares it to the dialogue Job had in The Book of Job with his Comforters.
By coincidence, Evelyn Waugh also wrote a book the same year about his reaction to different pills which mirrored Spark’s. His endorsement helped legitimise her book. And more important, by association, it got reviews in the right kind of papers. Spark’s trajectory was upwards. But she admitted often debut novels (a testing ground for publishers) were often followed by literary flops. Not in her case, of course. She had plans to write a second part of her biography, which would cover her more successful years. I’m not sure if she wrote it. I’ll give it a miss. Read on.
I’d an online meeting yesterday with The Psychic Fairy Queen, Jan Murphy. We share the same publishers. I suppose in a world in which there are synchronicities, Spellbound would publish The Psychic Fairy Queen. I’m just the smelly mate that tagged alone by coincidence, even though there is no such thing as coincidences. If by coincidence you’re reading this then you’ve probably read my book Beastie.
That’s a gently nudge. Yes, I’ve read a little about nudge theory too. I’d read The Psychic Fairy Queen when it was first published on 19th December 2024. My book Beastie hit the shelves almost a month later (and if you’ve forgotten to leave a review, I won’t mention nudging anymore and will show up at your doorstep).
Jan and I or Jack and Jan, which has a nice ring to it, were talking about marketing. Before we got down to book business, I did what everybody else does—and I apologised, because I just had to do it, like a kid asking for a sweetie—I asked her to read me. Tell me something fabulous. Enlighten me with something that I didn’t even know. Tell me something that would have Jesus turning to God the Father and saying, ‘I didnae know that either. Where’s the Holy Ghost when we need him and I’ll ask him?’
She did tell me something fabulous. Something that will change your life. But I can only share it if you offer up—in my writer friend Sooz’s language, proof of purchase and an a Amazon review.
Jan had the same symbol, sacred geometry that is on the cover of her book, hanging on her wall behind her head. I could describe it, but it would be easier if you haven’t already bought her book to do so.
For the Weathergirls the street was the place to go. Instead of men, it’s raining books. Every five seconds a book is published by Amazon. In Scandinavian countries such as Norway, every second person has published at least one book. Those unpublished are regarded as illiterate or worse, English or American. This was before COVID, when they had more time and even more books were published, and just after the election of the moron’s moron Trump, for the first and last time, so Scandinavian attitudes may have hardened since then.
Jan did chastise me a bit for not fully believing that my book would get taken up into the ether and land the coveted Number one, New York Times’ Bestseller List. In her world, if you don’t believe, you don’t get. In my world, our parallel worlds, you don’t get, and you get kicked for not getting. But I’m always happy to split the difference. I’ll kick anybody to sell another book.
What Jan has done is pay for advertising on Amazon for her book. Algorithms rule the world. That is one way in which she can get bounce on her local sales (which have been good). What it means is paying homage, economic rent, to the handful of richest men in the world.
I, of course, would do the same. It would allow me to tell the story of how Jeff Bezos once followed me on Twitter. How I’d both Hillary and Bill Clinton in my feed. Before I was found out as a charlatan and not even a billionaire. Of course, I was unTwittered (that was before it was the mighty falling and failing into X).
Jan had tens of thousands of likes and hits on her book in India. India is the most populous region in the world. A Hindu culture. She might well be onto something here. But neither of us were sure how that translated into sales.
I’m pretty unfussed about the graph on my Amazon page when it jerks up and down like the Dow Jones Index, which, in general terms, means I’ve sold a book, or perhaps two. I’m looking for trends. When it starts plummeting usually, it’s the death star.
I know also that TikTok (which is for those much younger than Jan or me) can still nudge book sales in the way Twitter used to. I joined TikTok yesterday and watched all the videos and listened to the bumf, so I know how #BookTok works. I’ll start posting and mess about and see if it influences sales.
I’ll get back to Jan and ask her how Amazon is working for her book. If it works for her, I’ll jump in and start giving one of the richest men in the world economic rent. Nothing comes from nothing, Shakespeare, King Lear and all those crazy Trumpian right-wingers keep reminding us.
If #BookTok works for me, I’ll show her how to do it. Invite her to jump right in. We’re collaborators on a small planet that keeps spinning and will continue doing so, even when we step off it. I’ve got another couple of novel-sized stories I should be working on. One I should be starting. Marketing is such a joyless trudge. We’re not looking for recognition, just movement in the right direction. We’ve split the world in half. She gets Amazon. I get the Chinese whispers of TikTok. We’ve brought two worlds together. Game on. Read on.
Poetry frightens me a bit. It’s just so complicated. But when you get it right, as Bex Hainsworth had done in Walrussey, it sounds simple. Like many of the writers of poetry on ABCtales—where her pseudonym was Mistaken Magic—she got ‘cherried’. A poem being especially worthy of attention. She followed the usual route of Poem of the week. Nobody really cares about that stuff, but it’s nice at the time. A little fill-up before going back to normal life.
Her collection of 28 published poems makes her very special because the paradox for poets—more than prose writers—is nobody publishes poetry and even if they do, they don’t publish your poetry. ‘An Octopus Picks Litter at the End of the World’ has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by her publisher, The Black Cat Poetry Press is Unmistaken Magic indeed.
Ghosting
An iceberg of green netting floats
in the open ocean. Unmelting, its ropes
sway like a jellyfish tendrils, a forest
of hardened kelp. A swell lifts
the decaying veil, then drops it again,
a terrible shroud
A spinner dolphin hangs
in suspended animation,
eye black as mussels’ shells,
fins holding up knotted chain,
Marley’s ghost, snared harbinger
The web reaches sandwards
to where it is anchored by lobster cages
piled like sunken aviaries, their yellow lichen
glinting with the hidden light of fool’s gold.
Abandoned crab traps are still making a catch,
set by long-dead fishermen whose boats rust in the bay.
Summoned by curiosity, they crawl over the coins of shells,
the burial grounds of their brothers. A chorus of ghostly-clacking
goes unheeded. They do not turn back.
A sea swirls through the blue murk,
considers an easy snack, but can sense death
it does not bring, fears the noose, the macbre collage:
A turtle shell weighing down the gauze like a cannon ball,
a hammerhead who came to scavenge, but spring the trap.
They are caught, collateral, an afterthought.
I don’t have any great difficulty reviewing novels or films or things I’ve seen but when it comes to poetry I’m often wordsmacked. A necessary caution. Because I may suggest Mistaken Magic said and meant this or that, only to be ejected from meaning like the wrong cartridge on a film you never watched, but thought you had. But I’ll plunge in.
Oceans and Welsh Sea are ephemeral and eternal. Even in the bath, ‘Considering the Selkie’ there’s a baptism. The awful truth washes up, tasting of seawater. That man is the planet killer. Even the long-dead fishermen play their part.
‘Marley’s ghost’ and nature’s. Ekphrasis, derived from the Greek words ‘ek,’ meaning out, and ‘phrasis,’ meaning speak, is a literary form that vividly describes visual art, transcending the boundaries between the written and visual realms. Earth and Water. Fire and Air. An ekphratick picture of an ecological disaster, exploring the metamorphosis of man-made objects into organic forms. Nets transform into an ‘iceberg,’ and hardened kelp becomes a ‘forest,’ highlighting the impact of human activity on the natural world.
Free-verse. Lines vary in length. There’s no lack as in water. Non- rigid rhyme or meter allows for a natural flow. It allows watery language space to be. A sense of organic movement. The tidal ebb and flow. The enjambment, or the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, is clear in several places. For example, ‘sway like a jellyfish tendrils’ carries meaning seamlessly into the next line, creating a sense of time on hold but moving like our thoughts.
Her poetry adopts a free verse structure, and its lines vary in length. This lack of a rigid rhyme or meter allows for a natural flow, giving the language a sense of organic movement, akin to the ebb and flow of the ocean. The enjambment, or the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, is evident in several places. For example, ‘sway like a jellyfish tendrils’ carries the thought seamlessly into the next line, creating a heightened sense of continuity and meaning.
While Mistaken Magic’s poetry lacks a regular meter, it does possess a rhythmic quality derived from the repetition of sounds and the choice of words. The ‘s’ sounds in ‘sway,’ ‘jellyfish,’ and ‘tendrils’ create a soft, flowing rhythm, evoking the gentle movement of the underwater scene. The rhythmic pattern also shifts with the introduction of harsher sounds like ‘clacking,’ contributing to a tonal contrast.
Her poetry juxtaposes contrasting elements to deepen its meaning:
The imagery of the ‘iceberg of green netting’ juxtaposed with the natural elements of the ocean creates a powerful contrast. This interplay suggests the impact of human intervention on the marine environment, with the synthetic ‘netting’ disrupting the organic beauty of the sea.
The juxtaposition of the ‘spinner dolphin’ in ‘suspended animation’ with the description of a ‘terrible shroud’ creates viscerally a theme in her poetry, a contrast between life and decay. The image of the dolphin, typically associated with vitality is juxtaposed with the decay of the underwater world, drawing attention to man’s environmental murder of our water and seas.
The poem weaves a tapestry of movement and stillness. The jellyfish ‘sway’of tendrils and the ‘lifts’ and ‘drops’ of the ocean’s swell create poetic motion. Contrasting the ‘suspended animation’ of the spinner dolphin and the description of abandoned objects evokes a stillness, highlights the fragility of our underwater ecosystem, and how we’re destroying them.
A nuanced line structure adds rhythmic qualities and creates the net of deliberate juxtaposition of contrasting elements. ‘An iceberg of green netting floats…’ encapsulates the delicate balance and intricate complexities of the underwater world. The wordplay of language, imagery, and contrast serves to deepen our engagement with the environmental themes explored in the poem. The absence of a rigid structure allows for a more fluid and immersive experience, echoing the ever-changing nature of the marine environment the poem in her collection seeks to portray. Read on.
I read all of Carl MacDougall’s books apart from his short-story collection Elvis is Dead. Reading is what I do. But I had ulterior motives. I was sponsored by Scottish Book Trust and mentored by Carl MacDougall for an unpublished novel The Cruelty Man 2018, which belatedly is being published by Spellbound Books as Beastie in 2024. I wanted to meet the man on the page before meeting the actual man.
I knew far more about him than he knew about me. I’d joked with him that all he would have to do was die and his book sales would take off. Now is the testing time, but gone is the man. His best book, ironically, was one he didn’t write, but edited, The Devil and the Giro: Two Centuries of Scottish Stories. A must read for any Scottish writer. A classic showcase of Scottish literature when he was at his peak. He also appeared on-screen. Two series, on BBC, discussing Scottish literature, high and low. Already, Too Late, is too late for acclaim, but this is perhaps the pick of his books.
Carl was a war baby. The book begins at Kettle Station in Fife and reads like a novel. The old man that was the boy lives to recreate the scene and put words on the page in people’s mouths. Not the words they spoke, but what they said are the words of memory and distortion, which is much the same thing.
‘I jumped two puddles and run up the brae.’
My mother shouted, You be careful. And stay there. Don’t you go wandering off somewhere else where I’ll no be able to see you.
The Ladies Waiting Room was damp. There was fire in the grate and condensation on the windows. The LNER poster frame were clouded. Edinburgh Castle was almost completely obliterated and the big, rectangle of the Scottish Highlands above the grate had curled at the edges. There was the faint smell of dust.’
We know it’s a wee boy, because he was doing that thing wee boys do and jumping in puddles. His mother was watching and waiting. The reader waits with them. For what we’re not really sure, but that question makes us turn the page, which is what drama is.
In terms of style, you’ve probably noticed, Carl doesn’t use quotation marks to separate speech. Speech is part of life.
Kettle Station marks the boundaries of life. Women have got a separate Waiting Room from Men. And it’s laid out like a front parlour with a fire in the grate. This isn’t the type of Waiting Room a working-class woman would feel comfortable in. So it’s a big occasion. Scottish landmarks are laid out for the reader. Edinburgh Castle was obliterated. The Scottish Highlands have their own rectangle of poster. But they are living in the age of coal. The LNER poster frames the power of the Flying Scotsman to connect British cities.
Carl’s grandparents on his father’s side were German. His father was in the British Navy and miraculously survived the sinking of several ships by U-Boats. But Carl and his mother were suspect. Treated as enemy aliens and checked up on by the local bobby.
Another miracle was the NHS which began shortly before Carl went to school. Carl cocked his head, when listening. He was deaf in one ear. He’d have been deaf in both ears, but for the NHS.
His dad returned from the war and went back to his job as a railwayman. He was killed by a train due in Burntisland Station at 5.31pm, 26th September 1947. A different kind of life emerged for Carl from the wreckage.
A primary school teach sets the children from the Glasgow tenements the task of writing about their family. The annual what did you do in the summer holiday?
Please miss, I don’t know what to write? Carl said.
This was unusual because Carl could read before he went to school aged five and was equally precocious in writing and comprehension. He was set against the stopwatch in puzzles and tests in this new thing the authorities were measuring called IQ. His IQ didn’t match what should have been his supposed performance in the classroom.
‘We’ll write to you, my mother said.
Carl, said Grandad. This is for your own good. You are going to get better, and get on with your studies.
I nodded, at first unable to speak. Everyone was on the verge of tears, so I couldn’t cry.’
When I was writing about children in tenements terrorised and sent into exile in a Children’s Home I was writing fiction. Carl was living it. Read on.
This is Erin Brokovitch in the undertaking industry. Black and white. Good versus bad. A story of triumph we expect when the little guy fights corporate corruption that so rarely happens in real life (as this is purported to be) it becomes memorable.
The Set up.
Calvary of Love Baptist Church, Indiantown, Florida 1995. Will Gary (Jammie Lee Foxx) is bringing the Lord down. At first we think he’s a preacher. And he is in a way. A lawyer, some would call an ambulance chaser. He sticks it to the big man, the white man and makes him pay for the grief of the poor black man.
Kissimee, Florida (court). Clovis Tubbs v Finch & Co. Food Services. $75 million damages. No good Clovis might have been drunk, might have been depressed. He might have been all of these things. But he had himself a green light against Corporate America. Without Will Gary there would be no justice for the poor oppressed blacks of this world. Will Gary takes a cut of the damages. And he never loses. He makes enough to fly his own plane and give himself the kind of life he thinks he and his family deserve. He’s living proof of the American Dream.
Kurt Vonnegut of Slaughterhouse-Five reminds us:
‘Every other nations has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.’
Jeremiah O’Keefe, aged 75, is rich in years and wisdom (he is Tommy Lee Jones after all) and his wife Annete O’Keefe (Pamela Reed) are having a little party at their grand home in Biloxi, Mississippi. He’s a funeral director, but has hit a bit of financial difficulties and has to sell off three of his funeral homes.
It’s worth quoting Jessica Mitford’s (1963) essay here on The American Way of Death.
Jessica Mitford was, of course, one of the Mitford girls. Privileged daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale. Unity joined Hitler’s inner circle in Germany. Diana Mitford married British fascist leader Oswald Mosley. Jessica couldn’t therefore be taken as a Red. She’d know more about price and other kinds of gouching better than most.
She quotes from the a handbook used by funeral directors and successful businessmen such as Jeremiah O’Keefe.
[my italics]
A funeral is not an occasion for a display of cheapness. It is, in fact, an opportunity for a display of status symbols, which by bolstering family pride does much to assuage grief. A funeral is also an occasion when feelings of guilt and remorse are satisfied to a large extent by a fine funeral.
In other words a funeral is not a once in a lifetime opportunity. As the bad guy, Raymond Lowen, (of the Lowen Group) explains to Jeremiah O’Keefe and to the viewer, this was the Golden Era of death. When Baby Boomers meet their demise. 51 million Americans over the age of 65 were on their way out. Boom time for funeral directors.
Joseph O’Keefe is forced to sell parts of his business to meet financial demands by the Mississippi State Insurance Commission. He makes a contract with Raymond Loewen of The Loewen Group. But they do not follows through on their oral agreement to buy three funeral homes at the 1995 market rate. In other words, they behave like a big company with leverage. Like Trump that doesn’t pay for his lawyers until they sue his corporation.
The bridge between black and white is a young black lawyer, Hal Dockins (Mamoudou Athie). He suggests to O’Keefe, Loewen is intentionally trying to run O‘Keefe into bankruptcy. A common tactic used by Agrifeed industries to snatch farms from farmers. To snatch up bankrupt businesses at rock-bottom prices. A tactic used by estate agents globally. Capitalism in its usual form.
Hal Dockin represents the better self. American morality that rights all wrongs while whistling The Star Spangled Banner. Selling bullshit that doesn’t stink. But like all stories of injustice. All morality plays. We want the good guys to win. For once the black guy does, even though he’s white.
I write stuff nobody much reads. Think of a number below ten
and don’t multiply it. There’s a large hole in my idea of normality. I imagine someday,
someone, somewhere will pay for my writing and I’ll be in the promised land of
earning a living from writing. There’s no evidence to support this assumption.
Meanwhile, I just putter along, doing no real harm and getting on with it. Writing helps me figure out what I think and
the odd time gives me joy. Endorphins kick in and I’m on a writer high,
conquering the world, word by word.
Anyone that’s being paying attention to the rise and rise of artificial intelligence (AI) knows how the world is going to change. Has already morphed into an existential threat (although the case for that may be overstated). We know that it is going to do the boring jobs. Then it’s going to do the less boring jobs. AI or pattern-recognition software will be our doctors and nurses our servants and masters a tax on humanity with profits going to the off-shored wealthy.
For us dreamers and scribblers AI seemed a jump too far. I was
aware that AI was already performing simple tasks such as writing obituaries
and sport columns for mainstream media. Deep Blue pattern-recognition software
filtered down to games that challenge novice chess players at different levels.
‘Go’ the board game that seemed to rely on intuition rather than logic seemed a
step to far, but the best players in the world were swatted aside by machine
learning. I could go on, but I guess you see the pattern emerging.
Write every day, that’s the way, is the kind of crappy mantra I
more, or less, adhere to. What John
Naughton is saying here is AI can mimic the way you write. Just the same way
that SIRI can listen to what you say and reproduce speech. AI can be you. A
different but a better you, with an authentic voice that is yours, but not you.
The myth of the writer in the attic (although I do sit in a cupboard) pondering and pouring out hard copy is hard cheese. AI can do that quicker and better. Just the same as it can play chess better than you, all the way up to Grand Master level.
We all know how the story of writerly success is promoted. The fairy tale being written in an Edinburgh café by a writer down on her luck. Outliers brought into the mainstream by fate. A fluke of luck, a billion pound industry, resting on the back of a tortoise. Buy a lottery ticket, write that book. You might win.
Lies. Lies. Lies. I sometimes even believe them.
The economics of the creative industries (around 14% of GDP) rely on elasticity of supply. AI has changed that algorithm. Why do we need screenwriters when AI can do it faster and better? Why wait for the next great novel when we can just download something very similar?
The slog of writing remain much the same, but the chances of being published and making a writing from living are pretty much gubbed. Oh, well, back to the old-fashioned keyboard. Read on.
odonnellgrunting 