Archive for January 2012

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Webster's Golden Social-Media Rules for Authors

Rule No.1 (there is only one):

THERE ARE NO FUCKING RULES

It's social, right? You don't have to sing karaoke every time you go to the pub, or play strip poker every time you're invited to a dinner party.

It's the same with social media. If you want to sit quietly in a corner listening to others, that's fine. If you want to strike up conversation with strangers, that's OK too. If you want to talk when you feel like it and then disappear for a few days or weeks, that's great. In fact, as a serious writer, that's not a bad idea at all. It's in those moments of slower quiet, removed from the noise of the world, that real ideas can come, as many others have commented, most recently Pico Iyer in the New York Times.

So ignore the articles out there promising to give you instant publishing success by following a few guidelines for Twitter, Facebook and the rest. Who cares how many followers Neil Gaiman has? So you've only got a few dozen. Let's hope they actually read your tweets. If you generally say something interesting, the chances are that they are.

What's important is authenticity. And you're either being yourself or you aren't. People can generally tell over social media as much as when meeting in a bar.

The thing is, there aren't any rules to be passed on about authenticity.

That's the beauty of it.

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Quality, not quantity

I've finally worked out why I loathe the dominant 'safety culture' of our society so much. It's not just that it limits and restricts, curtailing our need for adventure. Or that it manipulates and conditions (as opposed to educating) us into certain patterns of behaviour. Or that it just makes life dull, giving far too much power to headmistressy busy-body types to tell us what is or isn't acceptable behaviour. Or that it reduces a sense of self responsibility, based instead on the laughable idea that someone else is always to blame (and thereby sue-able) for our misadventures. Or that it infantilises an entire society. No. What really gets me about the 'safety' obsession of today is that it assumes that the objective of life is to live as long as possible. That's it. Nothing more. In other words, that quantity overrides quality entirely. In a society where people live relatively short lives (say an average of only 30 or 40 years) you would be forgiven for thinking that longevity was something desirable in itself, and that anyone who made it to 60+ was probably doing something right at least. Make it to 80+ and you would be considered semi-divine. The Anti-Pope Benedict XIII was almost 90 before he finally gave up the ghost. In the XIV century it was taken as a sign by his supporters that he had been right all along in his stance against Rome. But in a world where life expectancy has risen so much, dying in your 90s or even later is no longer note-worthy: it is becoming the norm (at least in the developed world). So you would think that in such circumstances we would focus less on simply staying alive and more on giving our lives some sort of meaning, or real quality. Yet the reverse is the case. Hence all the laws brought in 'for our own safety', trying to smooth out all the rough edges of life, to help us slither unhindered towards an ever more distant end. All this does, as I think we sense, is to kill us at some level. We may be physically alive, but what kind of life are we actually permitted to forge for ourselves? What is the point of living so long if you never really have a chance to live at all? As a society we have been blinded by greed, perhaps - a greed for more life. Like a kid in a sweet shop, we have a taste of something we like (longevity) and we want more of it, ever fearful that it might be taken away from us. But sweets in themselves are not food. And life should be measured in more than simply years. How awful, we cry, when a talented artist dies young. What a waste. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

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New cover for the next Max Cámara novel

UK publication is due in June 2012.

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Or the Bull Kills You interview

A new, short video has gone up on YouTube, where I talk a little more about the first in the Max Cámara series of detective novels, Or the Bull Kills You. You can see it by clicking here. The interview was shot by Catherine Tosko, a film-maker currently working on a documentary on bullfighting, called The Bull and the Ban.