www.mark-wernham.com

Daughter in sunglasses

2011-12-05T12:02:00.001Z

I'm just experimenting and so is Emma. Good look, starlet!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The novel is finished

2011-10-18T18:03:00.002+01:00

My 'new' novel, on my iPhone, just now

Well, I say it's finished. What I mean is that I have reached what I think might be an acceptable first draft to send to my agent. Using Scrivener, I collated the 142,000 words into a PDF document and emailed it to myself. Here it is, on my iPhone. I can now download it onto my iPad, with which I will attempt to read the thing as quickly as possible, like an excited reader (I know. I know. Look this is theoretical exercise, OK?) to see if it hangs together. And, barring any glaring problems that require a last minute slog of re-writing, I will send it to my agent. He will then read it on his iPad and at some point in the future ring me to tell me what he thinks of it. And then I will either pretend I haven't spent several years of my life writing it (if he reacts in that non-committal, have-you-got-anything-else-? kind of way), or I will spend another three months doing the 'tweaks' he suggests before it is submitted and I anxiously wait to see whether Jonathan Cape want to publish it. Hmm, I've just made myself feel slightly unwell.

Occupy Norwich!

2011-10-15T20:40:00.000+01:00

Today I went into the city to witness, and be a small part of, the Occupy Norwich campaign. It is a part of the movement that started with the #occupywallstreet campaign which today went global with people gathering in cities large and small to protest what they feel is a system that is skewed towards big business and banks at the expense of ordinary people.

It was a modest turnout in Norwich, but at least there was a turnout. They had signs and everything. People played guitars and sang old protest songs and a few people spoke. It was interesting see democratic discourse in the streets, with some impassioned people demanding that the protest be relocated to City Hall, where they reckoned the enemy cold be found, while others made the argument it was better to be in the city centre, where more people would see the protest.

I was taking photos, of course. I was asked by one protester whether I was from the media. I told him I wasn't, but that I am a writer, and I'd blog about it. He shrugged. Better than nothing, he supposed. But where, he wondered, were the media?

Good question.

We have a daily evening newspaper in Norwich, and this fine city is the where the BBC for the region is based. The BBC building is about a forty second walk from the location of the protest (Haymarket, if you're passing), and the Evening News offices are no more than ten minutes away by leisurely dawdle. I just looked at the Evening News website and their Twitter feed. Their last tweet was yesterday, and there is nothing about the protest on the website. From a news gathering point of view, it's pitiful. But is it worse than that? One of the issues much discussed around the occupy Wall Street Campaign is how little media coverage it has been garnering. You have to go to Twitter or Facebook or YouTube to see it. But if you want to know what's going on in, say, a tea-time television programme about singing and dancing, everything you need to know is there.

Now, I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but one of the functions of the media is salience transfer - the process by which the media set out to influence the public and political agenda with their own agenda. The more a topic is reported in the media, the more important it is perceived to be by people. And the less they report a topic… you get the idea. Is this is what is happening, even here in sleepy Norwich?

The protesters report on Twitter that there will be people in Haymarket all night, and that there will be a get-together tomorrow to discuss where they go from here. If you want to know about it, follow them on https://twitter.com/#!/OccupyNorwich. But don't bother with traditional media,

Reality Insurgents

2011-09-04T21:24:00.001+01:00

Is it really September?

I've been distracted by a) school holidays - two children needing entertaininment and not getting it, and b) another very exciting music project called …of Diamonds. But this isn't about that, this is about the novel.

I am now writing two chapters simultaneously; the first and the last. These two chunks of writing place the rest of the novel into a context which I wonder whether will be picked up by readers. In my minds, they explicitly set out one of the most important themes, namely that the human mind is prone to confusion, that reality is a slippery concept, and that death stalks us like a serial killer with a fuck-off big gun.

Today I read this http://steelweaver.tumblr.com/post/8175553314/reality-as-failed-state-tl-dr-version-i-like-doing which I found very stimulating. He employs a metaphor of a failed state for reality, which is really interesting, and notes how our grasp on reality has been fractured by the distinction we have in our own minds between our everyday reality and the 'magic fantasy world' as supplied by the 'media realm'. The problem we have in dealing with global warming (the apparent theme of my current novel and his interest in writing about reality) is that people 'no longer inhabit a single reality', and the arguments made in favour of taking action over global warming are rejected the global warming deniers because they come from a different reality and therefore make no sense to them. He also differentiates between the 'sclerotic bureaucracy of institutionalised reality' and the dynamic media memes spreading over on the deniers' side. He calls the deniers, the Tea Partiers et al, 'reality insurgents', which neatly brings in the apparently loopy insurgencies of terror cells acting against America and pals.

All of which uncannily tackles the same sorts of ideas Jefferson Greenspan Saves The World? is trying to deal with.

Scrivener - Where Have You Been All My Life?

2011-06-06T16:00:00.001+01:00

A screen shot of Scrivener with my novel in it. Colours! Pictures! A cork board!

Meanwhile, meaning while I'm not delaying writing the novel by writing articles and papers about writing the novel, I have been working on the novel with a new piece of software.

Many people know Scrivener, I feel like a latecomer. I found it via a tweet and I am so grateful. I thought I was pretty clever by having ditched Word years ago (a bloated overblown piece of software if ever there was one) in favour of the excellent and efficient Nisus Writer Express. But I still had a folder filled with sub-folders, stuffed to the gills with versions and scraps and research and pictures and all kinds of guff that one day will all magically transform themselves into a novel. The thing gave me nightmares. Once, I accidentally started editing an older version of the novel.

Within five minutes of downloading the trial version of Scrivener, I knew I was going to buy it. It felt like the answer to every gripe I've had about my lack of ability to marshall the sheer volume of data that writing a novel generates.

Scrivener allows non-linear scatterbrains like me to organise everything I've ever done into a labelled, colour-coded order. I can add photographs (very useful for me, given that I've now created two art projects of photographs based on this novel-in-progress), I can make notes in the text, add comments, auto-create chapter synopses, and I can see them on a cork-board layout, and move them around on there, too. You can split the viewing screen into two (horizontally or vertically), so you can compare, drafts, or have the last chapter up to refer to when you start the next. The programme interacts with the web beautifully too. Just drag a link into it, and the website displays inside the programme, next to your page.

It might just be the best software in the world ever…

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

Semantic Web Technologies for Libraries and Readers

2011-05-09T14:34:00.001+01:00

The University of Ottowa, on a map

I was asked to submit something to the 1st Workshop on Semantic Web Technologies for Libraires and Readers at the University of Ottowa. I wrote something incoherent and strange without any contextualisation or references. I hope they use it.

Does digging up the garden in preparation for new top soil and turf, and taking down the old rotting fence count as working hard on the novel? They do? Great! I've been working really hard on the novel, then.

Open Loop Press reviews Machine #69

2011-02-15T13:13:00.000Z

Pop over to Open Loop Press to see their take on the Machine #69 iPhone app. The second thing I did when they contacted me was click on their address in the email. With an iPhone, addresses often come underlined ready for clicking. It opened the Maps app and I was able to see that their building is not too far from where Jefferson Greenspan walks when he makes daily visits to Central Park. It was a beautiful sunny day when the Google van drove the streets around there. Makes you want to move there.

http://www.openlooppress.org/musings/code-meets-storytelling-in-iphone-app-machine-69/

Convergent evolutions

2011-02-11T10:24:00.000Z

I was reading a Tweet about how some clever bit-torrent creating people were archiving BBC webpages because the BBC announced they were about to take them down. Given the BBC's record of hanging on to important historical documents, these bit-torrenty types decided to grab the lot, archive them and then make them available via aforementioned bit torrenting. (Can you tell I'm not entirely up on the world of bit torrents?)

The writer of the article then went on to say how he kept thinking of new ideas, only to find some geniuses had already had the same idea. This is a phenomenon I've noticed in the past. I've also tried to think about why it is that for thousands of years, humans were technologically simple, but over the last two hundred have gone techno-bonkers. Imagine my surprise etc when in the comments of the BBC bit torrent article was a post about this very idea. And then I discover that its author, Ben King, lives within a few yards of me. He thinks a lot about convergent evolution and global capitalism while working a low-paid job in retail. What's not to like? I liked his post so much, I wanted to post it here and let my masses of reader know about his theory of convergent evolutions. I'll come back to this at some point, but if you want to explore for yourself, he's here.

His post comes 'after the jump'…

It's not coincidence that these convergent evolutions happen. They happen because there is an attractor within cultural evolution: Reality. We come to our conclusions based upon what seems rational. That doesn't mean True, as you of all people know only too well. Rational in this case merely means the most plausible explanation based upon current understandings *of the individual in question*. Fortunately, we all inhabit the same reality and so share this attractor, accelerated via its formalisation as the scientific method. These 'coincidences' only get more rapid the more 'flat' our cultural network is, since more people see more input. This is equivilent to saying that more experimentors have far larger, shared data-sets from which to draw conclusions, conclusions that will only get more accurate, and therefore more conducive for memetic replication. This is powering an exponential evolutionary force since it also applies to communication technology (moores law) which is itself the infrastructure for the network. This feedback loop is why we have come so far these past few centuries. So, in summary, I have to conclude that not only are these cultural convergences becoming more frequent due to the flattening of societal communication networks and the attractor of reality, but that also about a thousand people at the very least are having similar thoughts right now. Afterall, I just work in retail on £10,000 a year with a 2/1 in History. P.S Just think what that means. Previously, philosophers and the like were special because only a very few were lucky enough to have the time and patronage/wealth to actually read a lot and talk to people from far away/travel. Today, we have hundreds of millions of people with internet access in their homes. By my reckoning we probably have alive today at least thousands of largely unheard voices comparable to those 'great' philosophers of the past. I n case one thinks, "well, they *great*, think of the context of their times, they were head and shoulders above the rest!" Well, yes, but that's not hard when the vast majority are in the gutter. As for being ahead of their time, that may be so. But I rather think that in 100 years time history will say that 10's of thousands of bloggers, activists and ordinary folk were ahead of *their* time in recognising the archaic social nature of global capitalism.

Podcast

2011-01-19T10:27:00.006Z

Scratch Magazine from 1990, the first time I interviewed
Mark E Smith. See below for the story…

Here is the podcast of the radio interview I did at Future Radio last week.
http://www.futureradio.co.uk/audio/by/title/7_ages_of_man_-_mark_wernham
It's about an hour long, but there's lots of good music to listen to, including the Fall's A Past Gone Mad, which was produced by an old friend of mine, Rex Sargeant. Rex died in December, but he'll not be forgotten.

Listening to A Past Gone Mad just now reminded me yet again why I love the Fall so much. This album was released in 1993. I bought it in 1993. I've listened to it many times over the years. But it's only now, 18 years later that I finally caught the lyrics. Of course, the internet helps. I think the lyrics to this song are worth sharing:

Serial killers were always a bore in my book,
Along with Spangles and soccer books.
Rid us of old fogeys
Scuttling and swerving over the roads
Comma,
Kids in pubs.
Passable

Why is Pete Gabriel always following us?
And before the grub comes a moralist,
Dissonance of infotainment

A past gone mad!
Alive and well, he is on all channels
[Kiki Dee]
Dwelling in craven environment

If I ever end up like Ian McShane slit my throat with a kitchen tool
And if I ever end up like U2 slit my throat with a garden vegetable

The picture above is of my desk, just now, featuring a copy of Scratch magazine, the first magazine I edited back in 1989 with my pal James Clayton. It was the first time I interviewed Mark E Smith, and with me was Simon Couzens, who took the cover picture. We met him in a pub in west London where I got hammered trying to keep up with MES. I drank Guinness. I'm hoping one day Simon digs out the negs of this session that are currently in his loft, I'm sure there are some corking shots in there.

Russell Davies mentions my iPhone app

2011-01-13T19:21:00.000Z

Russell Davies, thinker, organiser of the Interesting events and Head of Planning at Olgivy has mentioned my iPhone app, right here. Yikes!

Article on the Vintage Books blog

2011-01-11T14:17:00.000Z

Here is an article I wrote about why I made the app. May cause you interest.

http://www.vintage-books.co.uk/blog/Machine69/

Oh, and Happy New Year, isn't it?

Review of Machine #69

2010-12-20T15:55:00.003Z

Brooklyn-based writer Jesse Sposato (there she is, in her car) reviews the app here, and seems to enjoy the experience, which I'm pleased about.

An article for The Literary Platform

2010-12-14T09:49:00.002Z

I was asked to write a piece for the Literary Platform, a wesbsite that deals exclusively with how the book world is dealing with the challenges of new technology, specifically the game-changing nature of the iPhone/iPad. Not sure when it's going to go up over there, but I thought I'd put it here in the meantime.

Read it after the jump, as us bloggers like to say…

Machine #69 - A 'Fractured Digital Entertainent Experience'™

When I bought an iPhone a year ago, my first novel, Martin Martin’s On The Other Side, had just been published by Jonathan Cape, and then it was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. My life had suddenly turned ineffably sci-fi; the iPhone delivered the kind of high-tech future I had been promised by Arthur C Clarke and his exciting film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and here was Arthur himself was considering giving me an award (OK, so he died in March, 2008, but let’s not get hung up on dates and facts).

One of the first things I did with my palm-sized glossy black pebble of the future was to download loads of free books using the app Stanza. I read The Island of Dr Moreau on a flight to Japan. I started reading War And Peace. Again. Then I downloaded an app which was a book by a writer who hadn’t been published conventionally. On his website, he revealed he’d had 14,000 downloads in three months. My eyes nearly fell out. It was the final prod I needed. I was going to make an app. It’s what Arthur would have wanted.

My idea was to expand on a photography exhibition I’d put together in 2009 called Stills From The Unmade Film of a Half-Written Novel. The title says it all. I’d taken 20 short extracts of the novel I was writing, and still am writing, which is about time-travelling air conditioning salesmen trying to save the world in the 1960s, and made 20 images based on them as if they were production stills from a film. It was installed in Norwich Arts Centre for a month.

I knew I’d need a coder. Line after line of utterly baffling computer instructions that makes an iPhone do what you want it to? Witchcraft. I couldn’t even start thinking about an app without having someone on board to do all that for me. I was lucky that a friend happened to know Matthew C Applegate. He is a musician and an artist, recording as pixelh8. He’s worked with Imogen Heap and Damon Albarn and he lectures in advanced computer cleverness. He saw the exhibition online and the idea interested him.

We planned to get together over a plate of noodles in Wagamama (Positive Eating + Positive Living!). We hadn’t met before, he said people tell him he looks like Obi-Wan Kenobi out of Star Wars. I was expecting Sir Alec Guinness, I got Ewan McGregor, beard and all. We sketched out the app on the back of an envelope. I wanted the app’s homepage populated with TV screens; touch a screen and up pops more content. I wanted photography, narration, music, and I definitely wanted a vintage tape machine with turning spools that played music by the band, La Grupo, that appears in the novel. Matthew suggested that when the phone is tilted the screens could roll around like one-armed bandit reels. I agreed enthusiastically. He spent the next three months thinking about how to make that happen, and then put the whole thing together in a frantic week of 14-hour days.

While Matthew was thinking in code, I had to create the content. I used 19 of the 20 images from the photography exhibition, and I shot some more, mostly of the fictional band. The band and its music, its press coverage, its look, the myth surrounding it, became an important added dimension for the app. I think it’s my background in music journalism that’s responsible for this interest in the myths of rock. La Grupo’s music itself came from electronic music pioneer Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto. Jack lives in San Francisco, so I emailed him an extract from the novel which describes La Grupo’s music (improvised psychedelic rock with synthesiser at its core) and begged him to do something. Jack was interested in the collaborative nature of the project and got to work. I wanted to place guitar textures in the music, so I asked Balaclava Kid & Dad, a psyche rock duo from Norwich, to be involved. Not only did they work on some original music for me, but they also posed as La Grupo for the shots of the band in the app. Balaclava Kid & Dad and Jack Dangers became La Grupo and I heard their music come together and watched them come to life in front of my camera. It made my head spin.

I then asked Mark Mothersabugh of Devo, these days making most of his income from scoring movies for Hollywood, if I could use a piece of his music. I had curated an art exhibition of his work a few years ago, and have been an avid Devo fan since their first record came out. He came back within a few days of me asking and gave me his blessing. I was ecstatic for days. I knew that having Mark Mothersbaugh and Jack Dangers on board would generate interest in the app beyond literary circles, which was exactly what I wanted to achieve.

The other main contribution came from Dan Russell, an absurdly talented voiceover artist. He does a great deal of cartoon and advertising voiceovers. He agreed to do the narration for the app for a fraction of his normal fee, and then put so much work into it that I felt really quite guilty. But again, the project interested him and he was keen to be involved. He ftp’ed me his files as he finished them, and I had the strange sensation of hearing my characters have a real voice, instead of the mysterious one that forms in my head while I write, but could never vocalise. I could feel the novel becoming something outside of myself, taking on its own existence, independent from me, and making the app started to feed new ideas into it.

This hall-of-mirrors relationship between the two pieces of the work, the app and the novel, was one the experiences I was interested in; how one would feed into the other and vice-versa, each being advanced simultaneously. The novel is partly about the construction of reality from snippets of information, all emanating from a faulty machine, and how that reality can be twisted into different shapes, depending on how you regard it. It’s an idea inspired by contemporary modes of communication, using Facebook updates and Tweets and the like to build up a version of ourselves for others to understand. Using the app itself is a technological and literary praxis based on that theme; you get these disparate slices of story and imagery, and you have to snake your way through to make sense of it.

The app was downloaded 100 times in the first 24 hours, without any marketing or effort on my part whatsoever. If it carries on at that rate, in three months more people will have interacted with the app than have bought my novel in the last two years. Maybe I should have finished the novel and had it ready for publication the day the app went live. That way perhaps I would have increased sales of the book. But this really was an experiment, an art for art’s sake exercise.

The Novel (capital T, capital N) is not under threat from this technology, people will always love to read, nothing beats it – we all know that. But there is a generation for whom the novel will be just a part of their expectation from their favourite author, or a new author. They will want to know more, to be friends on Facebook, to follow them on Twitter, and they will expect interesting, updating content on their mobile devices which lifts the novel and its creator off the page and into the full-colour, multi-media real world. It’s a medium which suits a new kind of writer; multi-taskers, collaborators, technology enthusiasts, the connected.

The way the publishing world is embracing this new platform is in stark contrast to how the music industry reacted to new technology changing its business model, and I think that where they failed and lost their way, publishing will adapt and strengthen and will play a defining role in this technology’s development. Just don’t ask me to deliver it in 3D.

The App is up

2010-12-05T20:50:00.012Z

Technology and poetry in schools

2010-12-01T14:47:00.004Z

I am about to go to talk to a classroom of teachers about the application of technology in the teaching of poetry in schools. They're about to launch into a central government-backed pilot project where they will be teamed up with a poet in order to investigate new ways of engaging kids with poetry, and technology is one of the routes the project is exploring. I'm really looking forward to sharing some ideas with them, and seeing what they think about creative writing in schools.

I was taught poetry in school via a blue book with line-by-line dissection of the correct meaning of the poem as delivered by our English master. And you can tell by the fact that we called our teachers masters exactly what kind of school I went to. I remember I liked Sylvia Plath and hated John Betjeman, which was about the polar opposite of what the teacher and everyone else thought. And we didn't have no computers, neither.

By the way, the picture is the recently auctioned Apple I computer, one of 200 made in a garage by Steves Jobs and Wozniakin 1976. Back then it sold for a fairly eye-watering $666.66 (oh those guys and their devilish humour!). The model above sold for £133,250 a few weeks ago.

2010-11-30T20:48:00.003Z

One element of the app that really was left to the last minute was the furniture. I knew the app would need arrows to negotiate around, play and pause buttons. So a while ago, I started playing around with the arrow in the street sign. Then I forgot all about it, until Matthew asked for the arrows to actually code into the app. So then I called Steve Appleton and asked him to do them for me. And so he did.

Astonishing last minute news

2010-11-26T15:45:00.008Z

In the scramble to get all the resources ready for the app, I almost forgot that I had asked Mark Mothersbaugh (there he is in the picture above, backstage at Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown back in 2007, with your author) of Devo to let me use some of his music. I left it so late to ask, that I assumed I wouldn't be able to use it. And then late one night I got an email from Michael Pilmer, Mothersbaugh's archivist, assistant and general Devo Obssesso, with the news that Mark Mothersbaugh had given me permission to use the tune Stop Barking You Twit in the app. The track appears on the enormously limited edition six-disc set of home organ improvisations The Most Powerful Healing Muzik In The World, which was only available for purchase at Mark's art shows. It just so happens that I curated a show in 2006, and so I snagged a set back then. While I was working on the app, this tune popped up while the iPod was on shuffle, and I thought it be just right for the credit pages. So I dropped a line to Mr Pilmer, and the answer came back a few days later. To say I am happy about it is an understatement. Devo are perhaps the most important influence on my thinking and aesthetic. I first heard them in 1978, before their first album was released, and I went to see them at the Hammersmith Odeon in December of that year. I was very young, but somehow I assimilated their meaning, and became utterly obsessed by them. I would point the casually interested towards their cover version of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction as a fair start point. For the more 2010 orientated, I would check out their new album (their first new album in 20 years) Something For Everybody, and its very funny marketing films that accompanied its release.

The App

2010-11-25T11:30:00.003Z

I'm aware I haven't updated for far too long. The reason is, hmm, well, the reason is… (enter your own reason for not updating a blog here, if it has something to do with children, time, work and laziness, you'll be in the right ballpark)

Yesterday I went to Ipswich to see Matthew C Applegate, aka pixelh8, the man who is coding my app. He's finished. we 'debugged' it (did we, is that what we did?) and then he uploaded it into Apple's approval process. They have to check that it works and isn't another fart app, and once approved (if they approve it) it will be available for download. Holding the thing in my palm, on an iPhone was a very exciting moment, a sort of future glimpse. It looks fantastic, and it is so snappy - never a dull moment. Matthew's coding is really sharp. You can see why he does stuff for Apple from time to time. He had a prototype iPad onstage with him back in 2008!

Soon I will post some images and possibly video. And within 10 days, fingers crossed, you'll be able to download it, for free!

App update

2010-10-18T13:32:00.002+01:00

I am listening to the iPod on shuffle. The Experimental Pop Group is playing right now.

The iPhone app deadline is coming up, and I think everything is in place. I now have all the voiceover files, thanks to the absurdly capable Dan Russell. He has recorded a great deal of voiceover work for British and American television. Also, the music is all but done and is fabulous, thanks to Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto and Balaclava Kid & Dad. Tomorrow night, I will shoot the last of the photography, the 'live' shots of La Grupo. Then it will be image processing, some last bits of design for the furniture (arrows, buttons, that kind of thing), and then it will be about ready for the coding. And after that, maybe I will finish the novel itself. Could happen.

iPod: Lie Dream of a Casino Soul (Peel Session version)

The internet is big

2010-10-08T16:22:00.003+01:00

I'm listening to Chemin De Fer by Brian Eno and having a Myth of Sysyphus moment because of this:

Powers of 10 film

2010-09-26T20:54:00.004+01:00

Expansive stuff all round…

Plugged in

2010-08-19T09:11:00.002+01:00

This new novel I'm writing, the one that's spawning an app before it's finished, is about several things. One of them is how we are understanding reality in new ways thanks to technology. I'm interested in the way we gather our version of reality from a multitude of sources in tiny snippets, a YouTube video here, a Facebook link there, a tweet, some TV. This fractured narrative certainly makes up my daily life. It was a theme lurking in Martin Martin's On The Other Side, and I was considering calling that novel Interference for a while, the idea being that Jensen Interceptor is a kind of unwilling receiver of random signals and implanted signals from various sources, all of which crowd his own consciousness into the limited and crass personality he exhibits.

So I was very interested in today's story on the BBC about how much time we spend using media devices every day. Imagine my delight when I went to the the BBC website (after hearing the story on Radio 4) and found there's a graph. It's this I want to share. It's art, if you ask me.

Stephen Fry's reading list

2010-08-16T13:06:00.002+01:00

With immaculate timing, an old college friend of mine is having a book published any day now. Football-related trivia facts and figures? My advice is send a copy to Delia and Stephen Fry and ask the latter to tweet about it. Fry is the ambassador board member of NCFC as of a few days ago, it's a no-brainer!

I just hope this book mentions the rather excellent 12-inch single entitled 'Wonderful' by the 'BSP' (the Basti Soccer Posse, an outcrop from the Norwich band Basti)) which featured various members of the 1992 NCFC squad on the eve of their cup run that took them to a 1-0 defeat to Sunderland in the semi-final at Hillsborough.

Order your copy of the book here! You know you want to.

Ideas I Wish I'd Had…

2010-08-10T00:07:00.002+01:00

Peter Funch is the photographer. Douglas Coupland turned me onto his work. Yeah, that's right, me and Douglas Coupland, shooting the breeze about astonishing photography. Well, OK, if you must know, me reading one of Douglas Coupland's tweets about astonishing photography.

There's a whole series of these images over at his dot com. I even like his commercial work for 02, which is the sort of thing that usually makes me retch.

After much analysis, I have decided that the key to great photography might just be:

1) Have a good idea

2) Do it

The second part assumes all the skills needed have been acquired, and that's no mean feat. The first part, well…

Library gets copy of my novel shocker…

2010-07-26T23:32:00.004+01:00

Finally dropped off a copy of Martin Martin's On The Other Side at the library here in the Norwich today. It's surely among the best libraries in the country. I did the last edits there and thought they should have a copy, and as they didn't bother buying one I agreed to donate one. I gave them two copies last year and they were stocked in libraries elsewhere in the county (Thetford and Gorleston, you lucky people).

The experience reminds me of the efforts I made when the novel was published to 'make relationships' with the two larger bookshops in the city. Waterstones were very receptive, and asked me to sign a dozen copies, dedicated a window to the book for a week and put a little 'staff recommended' sign on the shelf where the book was stocked. In Borders, the assistant I approached rang the store manager who didn't talk to me directly but clearly thought I was a crackpot who'd self-published a book about local history. Borders went down a short while later, while Waterstones has expanded into what was Ottakars and now occupies two city centre sites.

The moral? Stock my book or be punished by the marketplace.

Random House eBook of my first novel

2010-07-25T11:07:00.005+01:00

I just noticed that the Random House website is selling the eBook version of Martin Martin's On The Other Side. I should have twigged it when I saw a line I didn't understand on my last royalty statement ('royalty statement': indecipherable close-typed document filled with numbers and arcane references to various territories and pricing spat out by an AccountBot 3000 twice a year that reminds me the novel is indeed literary fiction and not popular fiction).

Why not buy one, just to see what it looks like? You can see it here, and you can even preview the first 20 pages.

Elsewhere, I have very nearly completed the final paperwork hoop-jumping I needed to go through for the Arts Council grant to create the app, and I am contacting the various people who I hope will be involved. yesterday, I cast Juan, the singer of La Grupo. I ordered him not have a haircut, which he took in good stead, assuring me that it wouldn't be happening anyway.

iPhone/iPad app

2010-07-10T22:43:00.002+01:00

On the day that the newspapers told us that our hilarious new government is telling the art world that it should look at the US model for funding because they're about to cut the arts budget by 40%, I receive confirmation that the Arts Council are going to fund the development of my app, based on Jefferson Greenspan Saves The World?.

I am pleased beyond measure, not least because the novel itself has been coming along nicely over the last few weeks.

And that US model for arts funding? That's the one where all arts funding comes from corporations and wealthy philanthropists, the one where the wealthy decide what art should be, the one where artists either make money and so don't need funding, or where they somehow manage to get a few crumbs from an oil company's tax dodge scheme.

Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, once filed an expenses claim for one penny to cover the cost of a 12-second mobile phone call. His personal wealth is estimated at £4.1 million.

John Cooper Clarke

2010-06-21T13:55:00.003+01:00

I've started a new series of images. It doesn't have a title yet, but it's going to be collection of portraits of writers. I started with John Cooper Clarke. He was, of course, hilarious and regaled us with impersonations of Mark E Smith. He explains away 'all the weight I've put on' by saying he's packed in the drugs. I gave him a copy of my novel and he seemed genuinely grateful, because he'd forgotten to take a book on tour with him. 'I can't get off to sleep without reading a few paragraphs…' he said. Maybe it'll take less than a few paragraphs with my book.

Images from Japan II

2010-06-17T17:15:00.007+01:00

This shot I planned for weeks, maybe even months, before I got there. This is the famous crossing in Shibuya. Every four minutes around three or four thousand people scuttle across under the neon glare and the sound of the adverts blasting out from speakers. It's an astonishing sight. It was one of the first things I encountered when I first visited Japan in the 1990s, the full Bladerunner experience, and it's only got more intense since. I shot with a wide lens, and set my flash to manual, maybe half power, with a narrow beam (105mm), aperture at f/8 with a shutter speed of 1/30 - that was what I needed to get the neon and the TV screens burned in. The idea was to throw a pool of light into this scene, and pick out a small crowd within the mass. It was such fun. I'd like to try it again, but this time with a tight grid spot or snoot on the flash, and see if I can pick out a smaller selection, maybe even one face. But it's a random process, you just have to fire and hope for the best. One thing about shooting with a wide lens (it's a Sigma 10-20) is distortion. You can correct it afterwards, and I worked up a corrected version, but I like the hallucinogenic quality the wonky angles give the image. That lens is a real favourite.

As for the location, I went there earlier in the day to get the rhythm of the place and to scope out suitable vantage points, and I came back after dark to get the full neon/huge telly into the shot. I had to clamber up onto a junction box to get the height, and a lot of people were staring at me. It's not the kind of thing one does in this famously law-abiding society, but westerners seem to get away with it because it's expected we'll behave badly. After I'd been up there a few minutes, I looked down and saw that small crowd of snappers had gathered around my feet, maybe waiting their turn to get up on the box, maybe just thinking that I looked like I knew what I was doing (!) and so it must be good place to shoot from.

Anyway, I was really pleased with the results. I could have chosen any number of shots to print, but in the end this one had the most elements I liked, including the hands holding a camera in the bottom right of the frame.

Images from Japan

2010-06-17T16:51:00.003+01:00

My recent trip to Japan was a photographic joy. Everywhere you point a camera, there's something fresh to capture. The black and white shot is in Yoyogi Park, Tokyo. It was the first warm day of spring, and thousands of young people gathered to play games. I bumped into another English guy who was as transfixed by the sight of dozens of kids doing synchronised dance routines and playing elaborate games of what we used to call 'What's The Time Mr Wolf?' in the woods. He was a photographer, too, and said it reminded him of Hyde Park in the late Sixties, the summer of love, when kids would get together and have their 'Be-ins'. It was a magical experience. I shot this one with a really wide lens, and then processed it into low-contrast black and white to give it a sense of magic and of time having passed. I've got this one printed and mounted at this ratio, too. It looks great and reminds me of the affecting experience I had watching these kids have such a great and innocent time.

Writing the, uh, novel

2010-06-11T12:15:00.002+01:00

Can you sense the fear in the nation? The Con-Dem lookers are patting us on the back and afterwards it feels wet. Touch it, that's blood from the Stanley blade they just smilingly drew across you. Keep your feet dry, buy a stout pair of boots. This hi-tech age of austerity is going to hurt.

*sigh*

I can't get into Twitter. I follow a handful of people, and it takes me most of the spare time I have to read their contributions. As for making my own, the effort of reducing my thoughts to 140 characters eludes me. The effort of having anything to say to my six followers - one of whom is Nick Clegg, another is a photography company - is also beyond me.

This morning, I wrote.

On/Off/On

2010-05-18T16:32:00.003+01:00

The application for funding from the Arts Council was narrowly rejected, but I have been advised to re-apply. I am re-jigging the application, including the recommendations the very helpful Arts Council contact gave me, and will be sending off the application at the beginning of next week.

More iPhone App news

2010-03-25T16:29:00.002Z

Good news continues with this project. People seem to like it and want to help. The Writers Centre Norwich have agreed to support the application for Arts Council funding and have given me some good advice. And I have just received an email from Matthew C. Applegate that he is happy to do the app design should the funding come through, which is great. I amoff to Japan next week, so I am trying to tie all this up before I leave.

My colossal editor

2010-03-15T22:56:00.002Z

An interview here with Dan Franklin, my editor at Jonathan Cape, the man who bought my first novel. I'm glad to say he took me to lunch, but it was pretty sober. Next time I'll try to drink my own bodyweight in Rioja and see what happens. He regaled me with tales of meeting John Lennon and his days as one of the first students the UEA. During lunch, it gradually dawned on me that he edited most of the writers that I admire.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone (edited later with my MacBook)

iPhone advancement

2010-03-14T21:08:00.003Z

On Friday I heard from one of the musicians that he is interested in contributing and collaborating on the music for the app. I was in a very good mood for the rest of the day. I also had some support from my publishers, which was also very reassuring. I am currently filling in the Arts Council's new online grant application form, which is a great deal easier to cope with than the old system.

Where we at?

2010-02-20T18:16:00.005Z

A lot of thinking about the potential for the iPhone app. I have been putting energy into the idea of putting together some musicians to collaborate as La Grupa, the group that Jefferson encounters in a big way in the novel. I am approaching several key people. If any one of them says yes, I will be thrilled beyond reason.

Melody Maker

2010-01-21T14:01:00.004Z

I learned today that Melody Maker, the UK music paper and one-time cultural icon that I used to work for, is to live again. Here's the story.

The Maker started life in 1926 and was finally shut down during the great magazine massacre of 2000 (it felt like one went every other week). I started there in the early 1990s and left in 1999. After I left, it became a small A4 format glossy in a last throw of the dice to try to revive its sales. The bullet in the head came courtesy of its IPC overlords and it had the ignominious fate of being 'incorporated' into the NME. The NME (they hated you calling it 'the NME', insisting that it's just 'NME') were on the 25th floor of King's Reach Tower, we were on the 26th. Never mind this geographical proximity, we were rivals.

Anyway, I seem to remember around 1998 there was much digruntlement among freelance writers and photographers (most positions were freelance) when IPC insisted we all sign new contracts which gave them 100 per cent rights over whatever we wrote or photographed, a move which overturned decades of established copyright ownership for freelancers. The deal had always been that IPC bought the rights to publish your words or pictures just the once, in the magazine that had commissioned it. So, if you happened to interview, say, Kurt Cobain, a few days before he killed himself, you may find that magazines all over the world would want to re-reprint said interview, and pay you. Same deal for photographers. Indeed, photographers have always seen their back catalogue of shots as a kind of de facto pension scheme, most of them being too feckless and drunk to actually have a proper pension scheme.

I caved and signed this draconian Big Brother contract, of course, but I have no idea whether the deal gave them the right to make everything I wrote for them after signing available online without giving me money. And a good deal of what I wrote came before the new contract.

Nothing has been revealed as to whether IPC intend to recompense freelancers for using their material in this way. If they think they can do it without paying us, hear this IPC: I am considering agitating my fellow former IPC-ites for some kind of class action.

Fuck yeah!

EDIT: If you want to see some of the cover stories I wrote for MM, have a look at the Martin Martin's On The Other Side film, it's just to the right of this post on the blog.

2010

2010-01-15T10:03:00.002Z

This time last year I embarked on a short satirical novel, inspired by the shattering of the global money illusion. The writing ran into a sandbank after a few months, at about 50,000 words. Over Christmas, I thought about finishing it and giving it away as an iPhone app. Instead (after a conversation with my agent about this idea), I am developing last year's photo and words piece, Stills From The Unmade Film of a Half-Written Novel, into a kind of director's cut app. I have coerced the excellent software training guru Steve Appleton into learning how to code iPhone apps in order to fulfil the plan. The Money Spinner remains unfinished.

JG continues, its plot resolving itself, won't be too long now. I hope not, because another novel is demanding to be written, a family saga called, tentatively, Three.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Have a Vintage Xmas

2009-12-23T08:39:00.001Z

I received a package from my publishers, Vintage, yesterday. Inside, wrapped in festive paper, were two AS Byatt novels, Possession and The Children's Book. I wonder whether this some kind of Secret Santa ruse, and if AS is at this very moment curled up on her sofa devouring a copy of Martin Martin's On The Other Side.

Life-changing technology?

2009-12-22T22:39:00.001Z

This post is being made with my new iPhone. I am predicting a profound impact on my blogging, if not my actual writing...

Surgery

2009-11-29T20:38:00.002Z

Since a change of narrator, I've been writing a new segment which recasts everything so far and I knew would see me going through everything I have written so far and re-arranging it. The new segment trolled along quite happily, but always with me knowing that sooner or later I would arrive at the point where I would need to attach it to what I have already written, like a surgeon finally arriving at the bit where he or she sews the tendon back and says 'There, it's done.' That moment arrived last week, so I motor on now, nudging chunks of the novel around in a frenzy, much like when I decide it's time to see if the television would be better on the other side of the room, and I have to disconnect and reconnect all the stupid cabling, which knocks the internet out, and then realise it was fine as it was. The novel will not be having its TV put back where it was.

By the way, when I say I'm doing this 'in a frenzy', that's hyperbole. It's not happening in any kind of frenzy, it happens in fits and starts, like a Ford Focus with dual controls being lurched around by a novice driver.

It's growing another skin…

2009-11-03T09:51:00.003Z

A wrap-around narrative is now occupying my writing time, inside which nestles the other stories. Lewis narrates from start to finish. It's a twist similar to the writing of Martin Martin's On The Other Side (where Jensen Interceptor, who narrates throughout, was a secondary character in an early draft of the novel). This is interesting because this time it has happened relatively late in the construction of the novel, although it is far from the radical re-write that happened with Martin Martin. The fluidity of a novel at this stage is fascinating. Film, of course, remains fluid beyond the shooting stage, beyond editing, right through to first screenings, where the thing can be altered again and quite profoundly.

Deadline? End of the year?

Re-cast

2009-09-28T21:13:00.002+01:00

Trying to speed through the first draft, to get it into shape. New titles are popping up as possibilities as the re-jigging process takes place. I won't be making my end of September deadline, but nonetheless, I will continue setting myself deadlines, because I seem to be trained by years of magazine work to respond to them, no matter that I miss them. Without any deadline at all, I would tinker and tweak far too leisurely. I need some anxiety to get things done.

3 x A4

2009-09-13T14:05:00.002+01:00

There are now three sheets of A4 taped to the wall in front of me, and it's September 13th…

Mono

2009-09-11T21:00:00.002+01:00

The Money Spinner working daft

2009-09-01T22:41:00.003+01:00

Used lulu.com for the working draft of The Money Spinner and it was a happier experience in that its text handling seems to be better than blurb.com. Trying to flow large amounts of text with blurb was a hideous experience which actually made me angry. Shame, though, because lulu doesn't offer the 5"x8" format, which is much the same as the mass paperback format used by Vintage (my publishers), but the format I used with lulu is the same as the trade paperback, which was used by Jonathan Cape for the 1st edition of Martin Martin. Swings and witches hats. Print and paper quality is good with both.

By the way, the cover image is taken from an illustration by Steve Appleton.

As for Jefferson Greenspan, I'm looking at two pieces of A4, taped to the wall in front of me, with the title: NOTES FOR SEPTEMBER PUSH TO FINISH 1ST DRAFT. So yes, let's see where we are in 30 days time, but I'm hoping to be close to having a 1st draft ready to send to my agent. About time. Am also considering a title change to An American Solution.

My second daughter, Emma, was born on August 11th.

Future Radio interview

2009-08-07T08:55:00.003+01:00

If you would like to hear me talk about supermarkets, photography and Melody Maker, among other things, and listen to Devo and The Fall, you could head over to the Future Radio website and stream the interview I did a couple of weeks ago. Click here…

Jefferson Greenspan, working draft

2009-08-04T14:38:00.002+01:00

After much messing around with the website blurb.com and their poor text handling software, I finally took delivery of one box-fresh copy of the working draft of Jefferson Greenspan Saves The World? For some time, I have thought that instead of printing out reams of double spaced A4, I should get a proper bound book printed. I find editing on screen and bits of paper is fine, except it gets very messy very quickly, and 300 pages of A4 weigh a ton. Pages fall out of order, and it lacks the reading experience that you get from having a book in your hands. Equally, scrolling through text, highlighting bits and making notes can be frustrating. What I wanted was to be able to carry the thing around, read it in bed, or wherever I happen to be, make notes in pencil, and also just to read what I've written in a manner that is close to how the reader will encounter the work. I believe the medium (in this case, a physical book) has a large impact on how people react to the contents, myself included. Now it is in book form, I find I am reading it like a book, and it's giving me a clearer picture of how the novel holds together (or not), and will make the next stage (finishing the first draft in order to send to my agent) a more controlled process.

New Word of the Day: Recuse!

2009-08-03T17:23:00.003+01:00

Recuse. Now there's a word I've never heard before, and in that, and in its overall look and feel, it reminds of my last word of the day, which was redact.

Today it was announced that Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, has resigned from the Apple board of directors. Why? Because Google are now in the business of making web browsers (Chrome) and operating systems (Chrome OS), and that represents an incursion into territory that Apple have a stake in, and for Eric, that means a conflict of interest. The net result was, until Eric quit, he had to recuse himself from lots of meetings. Recuse - to disqualify (oneself) as judge in a particular case ; broadly : to remove (oneself) from participation to avoid a conflict of interest. Nice!

Here's the full quote:

"Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's Board."

Recuse. Recuse. Recuse. Why not try to shoehorn it into a conversation near you soon?

Future Radio

2009-07-29T23:32:00.005+01:00

Today I appeared on Future Radio, Norwich's very good community radio station (seriously, you should check it out wherever you are in the world, www.futureradio.co.uk, it's consistently interesting). I was interviewed by Kate Roma and was invited to imagine a world that I ruled. I made Devo's Jocko Homo my national anthem, and Mark E Smith, David Hockney and David 'Strobist' Hobby were given honours. We discussed my allergy to supermarkets and also had interesting chats about photography and Martin Martin's On The Other Side. If the podcast goes online, I'll link to it.

Buy it here!

2009-07-13T23:02:00.004+01:00

Available now through the wonders of the internet, the last few first editions of my first novel, Martin Martin's On The Other Side. Be assured that your purchase will be supporting further writing. I can sign and personalise copies should you want. Click on the button in this post or over to the right and we will be joined in the virtual world of cash and literature. It will be yours for a minute £5.99 plus P&P. Why wait? Do it…

Martin Martin's On The Other Side

2009-07-13T17:11:00.002+01:00

Jonathan Cape just sent the last box of the first printing of Martin Martin's On The Other Side. The novel is now being taken care of by Vintage in its swizzy new format.

If you'd like a copy of the first edition, drop me a line and when I can work out how to sort out a Paypal kind of deal going on, I can send you one. I'll put a perma-link over to the right side where you can buy them, too.

New word of the day: Redact

2009-06-18T23:12:00.002+01:00

Redact, redaction, redacted. It's what MPs have done to their expenses claim forms from the last four years, before they were made available online (here, if you care). Watching Newsnight just now, you would have thought that to redact means to censor, to obliterate embarrassing revelations with black ink. It doesn't. It means to prepare for publication, or, indeed, to edit. At least that's what my Penguin Concise English Dictionary says. Wikipedia goes a bit deeper: redaction is a form of editing in which multiple source texts are combined (redacted) and subjected to minor alteration to make them into a single work. Often this is a method of collecting a series of writings on a similar theme and creating a definitive and coherent work.

So there you have it. Redact. One cool word none of us knew this morning.

io9.com picks up on the exhibition

2009-06-09T17:07:00.003+01:00

Smart cookies io9.com, who put together a pretty cogent review of Martin Martin's On The Other Side recently, have also picked up on the exhibition. Check it out here…

An interview

2009-06-08T23:07:00.006+01:00

For the interested, here is an interview I gave to the website SFCrowsNest following the shortlisting of Martin Martin's On The Other Side. I'll perma-link over at the Martin Martin press tent to the right, too.

Exhibition catalogue available for purchase

2009-06-05T17:18:00.004+01:00

If you would like a copy of the exhibition catalogue, you can click on the link in this post and buy online. You can preview pages from the catalogue there, too.

The catalogue features all the images from the exhibition, along with contact sheets and captures of work in progress, as well as the original sketches I made when planning the images. All the text is in there, too, which may or may not make it to the completed novel.

Stills From th...

By Mark Wernham

Book Preview

Private View

2009-06-04T21:15:00.003+01:00

Just got home after the private view of the exhibition. Thanks to everyone who came along, it was great to see you all there. The exhibition catalogues arrived at about 3.30pm this afternoon, via UPS, which was cutting it fine. I did say somehwere that it would all come together at the last moment.

For people who can't make it to the Arts Centre this month, follow the link to the right by clicking on the picture of Rizzo, or click here if you prefer.

I will also be posting links tomorrow for purchasing the catalogue, and for buying a signed edtion of my first novel, Martin Martin's On The Other Side.

Hanging

2009-06-02T13:29:00.003+01:00

We are in the middle of hanging the images. The reprints were mostly better, except for one which looked worse. it was always the most problematic image of the bunch, actually, and gave me much trouble in post-processing.

J-Pod

2009-06-01T12:09:00.003+01:00

I discovered this morning that Douglas Coupland's superb novel J-Pod has been turned into a TV series - which Coupland co-wrote - in Canada, and has already been cancelled because of poor viewing figures. There is a fan-based movement to have the show re-commissioned (much like Family Guy, which was cancelled twice before becoming the hugely popular better-than-the-Simpsons phenomenon it is now). Virgin are showing it as part of their TV Choice package, which I don't have. I also don't have any time to watch TV. But that's not the point. I want to see it.

Has anybody else seen it? Is it good? Let me know.

Saturday

2009-05-30T19:15:00.002+01:00

And it turns out the printers are open until 12.30pm, so they now have four prints to re-do for Tuesday morning. I was much relieved, because otherwise it would have meant a weekend fretting about it.

Also today was visited by my very oldest friend Owen, who is one of two apostate Muslims I know. I thought he had moved to Singapore, but he hadn't. He is going to though.

Nice weather, isn't it?

One other thing: I'm as filled with rage as anyone else that my life doesn't provide large vats of free money to pay for life's more dull expenditure necessities like a duck house and moat cleaning and another house that's a bit nearer where I work (actually, I couldn't get a house any nearer to where I work than the one I live in, that would mean another house inside the house I already live in, and that wouldn't be a wise move). That's it really. I'm terribly livid.

Prints

2009-05-29T20:30:00.002+01:00

I picked up the prints for the exhibition this afternoon - 20 A2s mounted on 3mm foamex and sealed. One of them has had a major glitch somewhere and has come out as a smear of pixels. Also, I have some doubts about the red on one or two of the prints. I'll go back on Monday and get the bad print done again, and have them look at the reds in the others. Otherwise, it all looks good. We're hanging from Tuesday, so getting replacements in time is going to be tight.

New layout

2009-05-27T21:06:00.002+01:00

I have changed the look of the site. Gone is the olden days html homepage based site, and now it's all happening from the blog. It's more modern. Check on the links to the right for more information, and anything you might be missing.

Photography

2009-05-27T11:00:00.004+01:00

At last, yesterday I took a USB stick with all the images for the exhibition to the printers. The private view is June 4th, 5-7pm, Norwich Arts Centre. I am looking forward to seeing the large prints and hanging them. Also on the way is the catalogue for the exhibition, which will be made available here should anyone want to buy it.

Releasing excerpts from a novel that is nowhere near finished, along with photographs, is an interesting process. The snippets do not reveal much in the way of narrative in themselves, and yet I have the feeling that people will experience something more solid in their minds. We experience life and a great deal of creative entertainment through snippets and clips. There is no way anyone can read every interesting book published, or watch every film, or listen to every new album and watch every gig. And so filtered clips increasingly stand in for those experiences. By attending this exhibition, people will be able to retain the retina image of having actually seen the film, or read the novel, neither of which exist yet.

For me, the process has revealed more about the narrative of the novel and in particular the characters. I have made them real and watched them move and told them what to do in real life. And while the people in the images are my friends - people I see in every day life quite regularly for the most part - they now also co-exist as characters in the novel I am writing.

I also learned a lot about photography, something I've been interested in for a very long time since studying it at college back in the early 1980s. Photography has always been present in most things I've done. When I was a music journalist and a magazine editor, the whole deal was about creating a mix of words and pictures that gave an impression of what was actually happening, what it was like to be there. When I was at school – and I was trapped in a boarding school in Surrey, England, within spitting distance of London but it may as well have been a different planet – reading the NME and Melody Maker was a weekly immersive experience that ran like virtual reality in my head. When I read reports of David Bowie in Berlin, or about Sex Pistols gigs, or Kraftwerk in Dusseldorf, or Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath punching the Melody Maker's Allan Jones, I lived it, too.

That was 30 years ago. There's more of everything now. More music, more photographs, more words. too much to consume even just one per cent of it. My exhibition addresses time-poor culture seekers and also gives them something to look at while drinking the excellent coffee at the Arts Centre. If you can't make it to Norwich during June for some reason, the entire thing will be online soon.

Oh, and I didn't win the Arthur C Clarke Award.

Arthur C Clarke

2009-04-29T14:12:00.002+01:00

Just about to leave for London for the ceremony for the Arthur C Clarke award. At the moment, all realities co-exist. When the envelope opens, one reality will be revealed, and that's the one we'll all get on with.

March deadline

2009-04-03T22:39:00.002+01:00

The March deadline I set myself for finishing The Money Spinner came and went. My agent is mulling over what he thinks I ought to bear in mind before continuing but at least he claims to be enjoying it. He says it feels like a series of set pieces, lacking in some kind of overarching structure. I can quite believe it. It is partly intentional, it is a kind of short attention span work, reflecting the narrator's internet-based reality. Did you know, for example, that capital letters are being used less in corporate copy writing for websites because it slows readers down?

Got a letter today from Cape saying that they are emptying their warehouse of the B format of the novel. Me and Murakami and Bill Bryson. Publishing is weird.

Arthur C Clarke Award

2009-03-26T16:36:00.002Z

And so the life of a writer becomes increasingly isolated and nothingy. You write every day, you avoid book shops, and you don't ever Google yourself (I made that mistake once, and I didn't sleep for a week). After a while, you start to wonder if the 'writer' part of your life is really just a hallucination. And then an email comes from my editor, Dan Franklin, at Jonathan Cape. It says: 'Congratulations, I hope you win it.' I scroll down to work out what he's talking about, and discover that Martin Martin's On The Other Side has been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. I am still stunned.

Meanwhile, the fast novel stalled at 50K, after sending it to my agent. I think I'm waiting for approval from him before continuing, but I also realised that I had been working too hard and was very tired and stressed, so I decided to take a break for a few weeks, especially since I am working in a school in North Walsham at the moment, which involves being up very early and spending the day with excitable 8-12 year olds. Interestingly, one of the other people working there with me (on a Creative Partnerships project) is John Osbourne, whose book Radiohead (which is about radio, and not Thom Yorke's neo-prog outfit), has just been selected as Radio 4's Book of the Week. Aren't we the high-profile writer guys?

Day job work grinds to a halt throughout April, which is just as well, because I need to shoot the rest of the images for the exhibition and finish the fast novel.

Day 47 of the fast novel…

2009-02-17T00:34:00.002Z

Quick entry to state progress. I have been busy writing, so doing this writing has been sidelined. After all, no one is reading. If a novelist writes a novel and no one reads it, does it exist? etc.

The fast novel is about half done now. I have been managing around a thousand words a day somehow. Steve has done some drawings for the Well to Hell segment. The novel, although it's plotted out and I know what's going to happen, is still surprising me. I have a large loose framework, and then the detail can explode in all sorts of ways before coming back to the central plot. And the details are, indeed, exploding.

Must finish this by end of March, and Jefferson Greenspan Saves The World by August.

Also started shooting the exhibition. Here is the first shot. 'Rizzo Smokes Golden Bat from Japan'.

Here's a surprise

2009-01-12T11:32:00.002Z

And so it's 2009. On January 1st, I started writing a new novel. Why? I'm not sure, but it felt like it was struggling to get out, and fast. The plan is to write it very quickly. I want it finished and with my agent by the end of March. Then I'll finish jG Saves The World. It's not that JG is stuck, or that I don't like it anymore, it's just that this other novel is demanding to be written, and I have to obey. It's been cranking out at around 1500 words a day. Working title? The Money Spinner. It suddenly struck me that we are living through something fairly major in the near-collapse of the banking system, and that I needed to respond to it in the heat of the panic. Reference material: Radio 4's news and comment shows Today and PM, Voltaire's Candide, the people around me.

More ill

2008-12-18T16:59:00.002Z

And so I read the blog, and see that I wrote that I had a non-ill day after weeks of illness. And now I write to say that I have just recovered from quite worst flu I've had for years. I even had to not go to work for two days. Before you scoff, let me say this: when I don't go to work I DON'T GET PAID. Yes, I can put all kinds of things down as expenses like camera gear and computers and cool software, but I don't get no sick pay, no pension, no nothing.

A quick catch up then. I went to the Strobist day and it was very good. I have since taken delivery of umbrellas, light stands, clamps, another flash (or 'strobe' as us strobists call them), and about a grand's worth of new lens (oh yes). I still need to work out a ton of logistics for the exhibition, and it does worry me a bit. I've yet to cast every character. But I guess I'll leave it to the last minute and knock it allout in a few weeks. Usually works with novels, I find.

Oh yeah, novel. That's right. Unsurprisingly, I haven't got that much written lately. But I did just embark on a climactic scene which takes place at a concert in San Francisco in 1968. I've been listening to Can albums all the way through, to keep in the right frame of mind for an revolutionary impro-rock outfit experience. I am conflating much 1960s reality at the moment. It seems the right way to deal with 1960s reality.

Christmas in a week. Never have got the hang of it.

Vintage Edition

2008-11-17T12:12:00.002Z

Today, a large brown box containing 20 copies of the Vintage edition of Martin Martin's On The Side was delivered here. They look good with their blue sci-fi writing and the plug from The Guardian on the cover.

Today is, I think, the first day that have not been ill for about three weeks. I should be able to get on with the novel. I am at the final push to the summit now. The next part I will be writing is the live television assassination...

Exhalation of the ghost

2008-11-08T19:41:00.002Z

Started this past few days on the exhalation of the ghost segment of the novel.

Strobist comes to London

2008-11-02T19:56:00.002Z

I am almost supernaturally excited by the news I have just read at strobist.com that David Hobby, Mr Strobist himself, is coming to London to deliver his two-day lighting seminar. It couldn't have come at a better time for me, just as I am preparing to spend the money the Arts Council are going to grant me to make the exhibition happen.

And this just two days after I hear that Devo are coming back to the UK in 2009.

In the words of Jensen Interceptor, it's all kicking off royal.

The novel has slowed this week, despite no work, partly because of house-wide illness (nasty colds all round) and loft insulation/kitchen painting. Is that too domestic? Does it devalue the author brand?

Schrödinger's Cat Lives!

2008-10-29T15:20:00.004Z

There was letter today from the Arts Council. There was a nice quantum physics mind experiment moment before I opened it. In those few seconds, two realities co-existed: that the letter was saying I'd been successful in my application for Arts Council money to make my exhibition, that the letter was saying I'd been unsuccessful. I'm glad to report it was the former. Schrödinger's cat lives!

And so, planning the shots, purchasing equipment, hiring models, location scouting and all the rest of it will now begin in earnest. It is very interesting how one of the art outcomes of the idea is already making itself heard: that is how will the photography project inform the writing of the novel, and vice versa. The green light from the Arts Council has spurred me on to write, given me an injection of confidence. And that in turn is giving me fresh ideas for the photographs. The upward positive spiral is a terrific experience.

Word count: 85,000

Photoshop, Iceland's banking system collapse etc

2008-10-10T11:35:00.002+01:00

I mentioned before that I like new software. I have recently loaded Adobe's terrifying CS3 suite into my iMac, after stuffing some new RAM into the machine. Photoshop is excellent now, and CS4 looks even more exciting, but I don't suppose I'll get to play with that for a while.

While we're talking about photography, I took delivery this week of my new battery grip and the wireless remote shutter release gizmo. It all works, so I will be experimenting with remote imaging soon. I also purchase Tim Daly's excellent book 'Creating Exhibition-Quality Digital Prints'. It's Tim Daly's third book about using digital imaging technique, all of which are great. Along with David Hobby at strobist.com, Tim Daly is my guru. I learned so much from him. I think it's because he relates Photoshop practice to darkroom technique, which I understand.

Meanwhile, the world's economy has broken. Pleasure is to be had seeing CEOs of failed financial institutions getting roasted for their profligate lifestyles in US hearings. Watching Iceland's banks all fail was pretty alarming, taking £8bn of UK savings with them, and kick-starting a new era of Icelandic/UK hostilities. I remember the cod war. I think this is more serious. Fish-related war can never really be taken too seriously. But then, I can't imagine people actually getting physically attacked in the high seas of failing finance. It reminds me of Terry Gilliam's film, The Crimson Permanent Assurance. The man is a visionary and a genius.

Oh, so, uh, the novel...

It creaks along in between everything else that occupies my time. We are flipping between New York and the journey from Kansas to Montana that Jefferson is making with Lewis, and Jefferson is filling Lewis in about Operation Shift. Once I have finished this part, the end-game of the San Francisco period will be next, followed by the final section.

Photography

2008-09-24T14:20:00.002+01:00

And so the applications for funding for the exhibition are now in. I should hear within six weeks whether tax payers' money will be put behind the idea or not. It will still happen if I'm unsuccessful, it will just be a lot more difficult and the quality of framing and the choice of lenses will be much reduced, and in all likelihood I'll have to abandon the idea of the book, which would be a real shame. I'm thinking of adding into the book a couple of short stories, just to make it more of an eclectic product, rather than just a record of an exhibition.

There are a few photos now up on the website under the Photographs link, some processes I'm working on.

The novel comes along, now cutting between the Alma/Central Park incident and the Lewis thread. Getting on for 70,000 words, with more sketches etc waiting to be buffed up and inserted.

iTunes 8

2008-09-10T10:55:00.002+01:00

I like new software, and today I downloaded iTunes 8. The reason I mention this is because it's typical of the delaying tactics I engage in before actually writing the, uh, y'know, novel. I am very disappointed that Google Chrome, the new browser designed by Google (the clue's in the title) is only available for PCs. I use a Mac. Writing a blog, that's another delayer.

While we're on the subject of, uh, writing the novel, most recently, I have made a quick guide to each chapter in the form of a mini-book. Six chapters to a page of A4, the main plot points outlined for each chapter, so I can look at them all at once. I used this process when writing Martin Martin, and it was quite an important part of getting the novel into shape and finishing it. I could plug gaps, look for flow and logic. Among the many challenges in writing a novel is simply coralling the large amount of information that you produce. People with brains more efficient than mine may be able to do this without the use of these aids, but I can't.

Plot-wise, Jefferson and Alma's relationship is deepening on a bench in Central Park.

The exhibition plan continues: I have drafted an application to the Arts Council and I am meeting with Stuart at NAC tomorrow to go through the budget and make it work.

Edinburgh

2008-08-25T19:38:00.002+01:00

Three weeks without a post. This is partly because of my attendance at the Edinburgh Book Festival. It was an interesting event which seemed very author-centric. The event I was part of included Daniel Clay and Ross Raisin, whose books I read in the week before leaving for Scotland. We each read for about ten minutes and then took part in a chaired discussion about the themes in our books. Afterwards, I went to the London Review of Books party where a speech was made that ended with laughter at the announcement of a forthcoming LRB debate (in London) about the future of Scotland. Shame, it damp-squibbed the rest of the speech, which was about no one knowing what the future of the novel is, but that literary 'events' are becoming more and more popular. Does this mean that authors will have to do more performing monkey tricks? And if people are less interested in novels, why will they be more interested in literary gigging? I hope the future of the novel is safe. I've just got started. I hate it when I arrive at a party and people start leaving, know what I mean? 'Oh, you should have been here earlier, it was great…'

Other news: I have a pencilled timeframe of March/April for the exhibition at the NAC. Have painted windows. It took two days and that's just the undercoat.

Thoughts about novel: Simplification.

New York and Alma Mahler

2008-08-04T20:28:00.004+01:00

Finally, after a longer delay than I would have liked, I am writing again. I had been bothered for some time about a hole in the narrative that I knew would need filling, but I wasn't sure how to approach it; the gap between Jefferson and Rizzo's parting and Jefferson's arrival in San Francisco.

After reading about Mahler's widow, Alma, and the fact that she died in New York in 1964, the same year that Jefferson arrives in New York, inspiration came and Jefferson is visiting Central Park daily, where he will encounter an Alma-like character.

I am very interested in what is called 'The Alma Problem' in studying Mahler. This is that she edited her diaries and his letters in order to change her role in history. In doing so, she spread misinformation about Mahler and herself which has become 'fact' via the work of Mahler biographers who took Alma Mahler's diaries at face value. This retrospective re-organisation of reality chimes nicely with the main theme my novel.

I was using Google Earth as part of my research, checking distances between Central Park and other New York locations when my wife alerted me that the infamous Google Earth photography car was parked in the next street. This is the vehicle which has a tree of cameras sprouting out of it and is snapping away all our front gardens to make Google Earth even more wondrous and frightening. I rushed out to photograph it, but it had gone. Later, Google Earth crashed on me. Co-incidence..?

Elsewhere, photography thinking continues, and I have nailed the three processes for the three eras of the images I want to make for my proposed exhibition. I talked to Stuart at the Arts Cenre today, and I have a meeting on Wednesday to discuss the exhibition.

Latitude report

2008-07-19T22:06:00.005+01:00

Last night I read at Latitude. Seeing Hanif Kureshi and A.L. Kennedy reading earlier (actually, A.L. Kennedy did a stand-up routine about her uselessness at taking drugs and drinking in order to have more fun because her Dundee-bred calvinism won't allow it, it was very funny) was slightly intimidating. Just before I went on stage, it started raining, so the tent was packed. I was told this afterwards, but I didn't have a clue how many people were in because I couldn't see a thing. It was like looking out into great swathe of black, light-consuming velvet, which suited me just fine. The only evidence I had during the reading was when I mentioned that I had once interviewed Busta Rhymes when I wrote for Melody Maker (or was it Ministry magazine, I can't remember…) and someone whooped and shouted, 'He's cool!' I think I reacted like Woody Allen having an anxiety attack. I Was certainly glad I actually rehearsed before I did the reading, because if I'd have winged it, it would have been a disaster.

The evening was also notable for meeting Hannah, the Jonathan Cape press officer, for the first time. She was very nice, and told me that she won't be at Edinburgh when I am reading (August 15th) because she's going up earlier with Chuck Palahniuk. I managed to extract a promise a signed copy of his latest novel, which I will hold her to.

Other interesting tidbits: We bumped into Neil Innes at the Performers registration cabin. Kaoru (my wife) translated some lyrics for a Japanese issue of an album of his a couple of years ago, so we've met him once or twice before. He passed us today, too, when I was on my knees trying to fix the wheel of our daughter's pushchair which had fallen off due to difficult terrain. He chatted with Kaoru but I didn't notice. I was swearing and getting greasy and harassed.

We saw just one band, Brighton's The Go! Team, who were great. We discovered that their new (-ish) guitarist is Kaori Tsuchida, who used to be one half of a very favourite band of ours called Yumi Yumi.

Not much writing has been done these past few days. This dizzying brush with glamour is over now, so normal service will be resumed shortly.

Latitude preparation

2008-07-18T11:16:00.002+01:00

Today I go to Latitude Festival to read in the Literature Tent. I have selected a few passages from Martin Martin's On The Other Side; the second part of the prologue, Jensen's first words and the night where Jensen and his friend Fyodor go to a Bammer Rhymes concert. The latter seemed appropriate.

Jefferson Greenspan Saves The World continues. Jefferson is now synthesiser player in La Grupo and is trying to extricate himself from the boring grip of a record company A&R man in the dressing room of the Fillmore after a performance. He is about to meet Ruby again.

Society of Authors

2008-07-11T21:42:00.004+01:00

This morning, I was revisiting a section which connects the former occupiers of a house in which Jefferson, Krug and Johnson find themselves, with the assassination of the Panamanian president, José Rémon, in 1955. I also had a look at the opening page of the novel, and inserted a paragraph about what I called the machinery of human life on Earth.

It was going well, but I had only about two hours writing time before I had to leave the house. On my way out, I noticed a letter on the doormat. The logo of the Society of Authors was on the envelope. 'Oho,' I said out loud, to myself, 'this will be my rejection…' I had applied for a writing bursary back in April and had forgotten all about it. I haven't had much (any) luck with these pots of money that get dished out to writers from time to time by the likes of the Arts Council. But this time there was a letter of congratulation and, astonishingly, a cheque. I stood dumbfounded with the letter in one hand and the cheque in the other for several minutes. So, I would like to thank Lady Antonia Fraser, Wendy Cope, Jim Crace, Susannah Herbert and David Profumo (they were the assessors of the award this year) for the award, which will be put to good use.

Photography still distracts, of course, as I am now using Lightroom to process images and watching tutorial videos on YouTube. Which reminds me, I haven't heard back from the NAC director about my exhibition idea. I will nudge him next week.

Above is an example of a image I made using strobist techniques (a Canon 580 EXII, a Vivitar 285H, Cactus trigger/receivers, the handmade softbox) and some processing with Lightroom.

Latitude invitation

2008-07-08T20:18:00.005+01:00

So, it turns out that the title of the Russian translation of Martin Martin's On The Other Side is The Dead Are Never Silent. It isn't exactly cricket to go re-naming a chap's novel without asking him first, but Moscow is far away. It's a good title, anyway, and I am enjoying the way ownership of a novel seems to slip away almost as soon as it is published.

More news comes that I am to appear at the Latitude Festival on July 18th, at 10.20pm. I'm sure a great many people will be eager to hear me read rather than watch Franz Ferdinand or a host of other equally exciting headline acts with lights and special effects:

'Oh, darling, Franz Ferdinand are about to play that song we liked with the funny time signature change, let us go along and watch…'

'No, sweetheart, Mark Wernham is about to read from his debut novel in the literature tent, a far more edifying experience, methinks…'

As far as writing goes, I have been constructing Foster Lake's sermon/Powerpoint presentation scene.

And I am still being distracted daily by strobist.com. I built a softbox the other day out of a cardboard box, silver foil and net curtain, and used it to do some underlit product shots. It was very exciting, but one of my Cactus triggers keeps popping the 580 EXII at random, which is annoying. I'll be springing for Pocket Wizards as soon as I have any spare cash. Click the link below for a translation:

Lewis in Iraq

2008-07-03T20:40:00.004+01:00

A sudden evening spurt has seen the JG Chaperone character of Lewis expand by some thousand words. He is revealing some deeply unpleasant deeds committed in Iraq. Several strands seem to be moving along at the same time, it's like plate spinning, or watching the progress bars of multiple downloads all creeping along, catching up with one another, overtaking, falling back, stalling. One day they will all reach the finish line.

TKO Chaos, Russian translation

2008-07-03T14:09:00.002+01:00

Advancing argument between wife and husband during broadcast by TKO Chaos. I am thinking I may cut the TKO Chaos broadcast into very small chunks and sprinkle them throughout the book, allowing the argument to emerge at the very end to finish the novel.

Today, I received four copies of the Russian translation of Martin Martin's On The Other Side. Two surprises here: 1) It is hardback and 2) It looks like a hard-boiled crime novel.

It is so remarkable I think it is worth posting a picture of it. They seem to have re-titled the novel, but I don't know what the title is. I have a Russian friend, I will ask her.

Hells Angels, NAC

2008-06-27T20:01:00.001+01:00

Linear progression for the time being in San Francisco. The diner scene is now written. The characters of both Krug and Johnson are clear to me now, and I am enjoying writing each of them. The strand with Lewis as JG's chaperone was the last non-linear development and will be good to come back to when the time is right. Similarly, scenes featuring Emerson, Anderson and Lake have substance and are available for work when a change of writing scenery is required. I am aware at this stage that there are now several important strands under way, and I anticipate returning to them with relish.

Today I have advanced the idea of the 'Stills…' exhibition, a plan to make a photographic exhibition of scenes from this novel in progress. Yesterday, I even cast both JG (Tom Nelson) and Rizzo (Paul Thompson). I need to shoot several set-ups over the summer for the San Francisco scenes.

Here follows the bulk of the email I sent to the director of Arts Centre:

You may remember me mentioning an idea I am developing for an exhibition. You seemed interested and talked about the possibility of the NAC staging it and maybe even producing a catalogue. I said I'd drop you a line about it when I had some sort of plan for it. This is that line.

I'm not sure about the title, but the concept of exhibition is 'Stills from an unmade film of a novel in progress…' I quite like the idea of calling it 'Stills', but we'll see.

The idea is crystallised in that title; I am casting people to 'play' characters from my second novel which I plan to have written by the end of 2008. I propose to make still images inspired by key scenes from the book and exhibit them alongside drawings (storyboard) and possibly to include other text and images that are generated along the way (excerpts of correspondence between me and an airline concerning the use of an aeroplane to use as a location, for example).

I am interested in how the process of making these images and visualising them impacts on the process of writing the novel, and vice-versa. I am also very interested in the idea of there existing a kind companion piece to the novel in the shape of the catalogue, which I see as having a narrative of its own and being a work of fiction in itself. My writing partly concerns itself with people's perceptions of reality, and how it can be manipulated by outside agents, or adapted individually in order to suit circumstance, or as a mass hallucination experienced spontaneously by an entire population, and the process I'm proposing mirrors these ideas; creating a reality from a fiction (making real things happen as a result of ideas in a novel), creating another fiction from an existing fiction (the idea of a film being made, a catalogue with its own narrative), and then presenting to the public in a forum like an exhibition where the images and ideas are let loose, so to speak. Is it a film? Or isn't it? Is it a novel? Is this the story on the walls here? Is the catalogue the novel? And so on.

Let me know your thoughts

Mark

Word count: 49,590 (doesn't include other segments written in new files)

Party scene

2008-06-13T19:57:00.001+01:00

I am now deep into the central scene of the novel, a party in an apartment in Haight-Ashbury. It is a substantial chunk that takes place over one night, after which Jefferson will never be the same. Jefferson, Krug and Michael Johnson will bond fast at this party. Writing is fast when I get to it, flowing quite well. Themes are conflating with satisfying ease.

Word count: 42,325.

Demo in SF

2008-06-03T09:16:00.002+01:00

Scene now progressing in San Francisco which gave me the excuse to watch some nice time-lapse footage of fog coming in and sail boats darting around the bay. Jefferson's new friend, Krug, is developing nicely. Currently, Krug and Jefferson are caught up in an anti-Vietnam protest in Haight-Ashbury.

I haven't given much more thought to the idea of Ruby narrating. I am now focussing on Jefferson's thread and will come back to the other threads when I have substantially more of Jefferson's story written.

Ruby?

2008-05-22T19:46:00.002+01:00

Considering a change of perspective, allowing Ruby to narrate.

Car death, cannibal/zombie

2008-05-20T16:39:00.002+01:00

Posting just to be sure that there's at least one post in May. Distractions to blame: More building work, car dying, having to buy new one.

Find myself thinking about the cannibal/zombie thread of the new novel. It started as sideways meander, but is taking on more significance.

Builders, flash photography

2008-04-30T15:00:00.001+01:00

Still slow. Builders in the house for weeks, dust everywhere, the pong of fresh plaster and early morning visits from the boom-voiced site manager asking me difficult questions when I'm still in my pajamas and reeling from my last dream are not helping me get much writing done. Also, an interest in off-camera flash techniques as outlined on the excellent website www.strobist.com is distracting me. I am planning a photography exhibition to go along with the writing of this novel, so it is relevant. Sort of.

KLM 777

2008-04-23T21:33:00.001+01:00

I read about three pages of the novel on the aeroplane (a KLM 777 staffed by slightly surly Dutch women) before falling asleep, and didn't get an opportunity for any serious reading while I was in Japan. Now back at home, I've re-read a few sections and I'm relatively happy with them. I am finding the prospect of writing diary entries of a girl of 10 the most daunting prospect at the moment.

First print-out

2008-04-09T16:32:00.000+01:00

Today I printed out 150 pages of my second novel, Jefferson Greenspan Saves The World. I find printing pages en masse is always a significant act. I am flying to Japan tomorrow, so I hope I might be able to work on it on the journey. It's always easier to make sense of the different strands with printed pages rather than scrolling through pages on a computer screen.