Chris Page

A very obvious first draft for the cover of Weed — abandoned. Design by Chris Page

Funnily enough, I was stoned out of my mind when the idea for the Weed story began to inhabit me.

When I say I was stoned, I mean I was quite profoundly stoned. I was nearly as stoned as the character Robert D Weed in the opening scenes of the story. Or I should say Weed is as stoned in the story as I was that night, though he is doing better than me, having consumed some very magic puff.

I have to be careful what I say about where in the world I was on this night because some authorities are a bit funny about people relaxing in ways that are not officially prescribed. Let’s just say this was long time ago in a galaxy that was, like, far, far out, man.

I have never had much physical tolerance for the stuff and this was my first smoke in a few years so the pot really did its job on me. I had been tense and uptight for quite some time and I felt myself relax like I hadn’t I ever relaxed before. See the description of Weed’s deeply comfortable state in the story for just how I felt that night — and just like Weed, I was in a flat, high up in a concrete block overlooking a very modern city with a brutally jagged topography. Just as in the story, there were police sirens and there was an elevated railway and an elevated motorway zoomed by the windows of my flat.

So, I smoked, and let go and sprawled on my living room table. I don’t think I had the rigidity to support myself on my elbows. It was like this that the main images of the story came to me and I wanted to write notes, I wanted to get it down to capture the mood but I was incapable of holding a pen or of making sentences. The next day all I had was a page of notepaper covered in squiggles and zigzags and cartoon faces whose eyes and ears and mouth and nose had all come adrift and were floating off in different directions. But I had achieved one legible phrase and here it is: “My umbrageous little sausage tree.” And that phrase, used twice in the final draft of the story, was enough for me to recapture the feelings of the night before and that was the core of Weed, the novel.

I didn’t sit down to write a novel. I was still waiting for the right idea to come along, one I could really throw myself at and in those days I was writing short stories to fill in time. (The Freebie came about in the same period.) I thought Weed was going to be a facetious throwaway short story, a quick two fingers at the world — perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 words when finished. However, appropriate to its name it went on growing and growing and growing. a few years later when I actually bought a computer and set to typing up what I had so far, I realized that I had 20,000 words and at that point I was about a quarter of the way through the story. It was only then that I realized that I had a novel on my hands and set to finishing it properly. The previous few years of desultory occasional scribbling on the story became a single-minded rush to get it all down.

I was so happy the night I realized Weed was a growing novel, I drank a couple litres of sake and played all my blur albums at full volume right through until about 3 or 4am, and kept the neighbours awake, as I discovered the next day.

From then on, I wrote on the train on the way to work, I scribbled in my lunch breaks, I bashed away at it days off and weekends. There were times I wrote standing on crowded trains just about resting my notebook on the back of the person in front of me. Despite this push, it still took an age to finish. Don’t ask me how long, I really don’t remember (these days, and with this dependence on red wine, time just sort of mooshes up into a homogenized and grey blob). It took a couple more years, I think, and then I continued editing while I was looking for an agent or a publisher. It seemed endless, no matter how much I wrote. But it was fun and the weed eventually flowered. Will it sow seeds?

So I suppose this is a moral tale: don’t muck around with soft drugs because they may lead to harder things, such as completed novels.

This article possibly explains why someone ever thought we needed scientists to come up with the conclusions in this article.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427394.000-alien-planet-could-be-ultimate-water-world.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/dec/16/waterworld-planet-earth-life

With a tachyon drive such as the one Weed is building, we could be there in no time at all.

The Freebie

The Freebie is the first story in the collection Shorts and is my first published-and-paid-for piece of fiction. It is about Billy Freeb, a wannabe musician, getting his shot at his moment of fame.

The story came to me one idle day in the early 1990s while I was washing dishes. I had been reading the NME (or New Musical Express for you non-musical types) and in particular an interview with Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins was on my mind. I don’t remember what it was about Corgan’s interview — perhaps the earnestness and the subtly codified postures and language of ego — but it struck me then that the interviews and the articles in the music press might be the real objective of making music, not the tunes; that you wrote the songs and did the gigs in order to get the interviews, and that was what it was all about.

If I probe this thought it turns out to be a pretty unoriginal comment on celebrity and fame, but happily I didn’t pick at it. So my thinking took the next pretentious step and I sat down to write a dour little story about conceptual art that would have a po-faced and utterly dull interview at its heart, an interview with people who would no doubt be wearing black turtle neck sweaters and who may have been smoking Gitanes.

However, when I got down to it, the first image that came to mind was the hero Billy’s lopsided little squat in Stoke Newington (a diverse but sort of gentrified part of north London for you non-Stokey folk), and of him waiting by the phone for fame to come to him rather than going out to find it — and the story went off on its own way from there, and jolly lucky too, because the original I had in mind would have been unbearably dull.

The London I squatted during the eighties was full of musical wannabes and conceptual dilettantes and I was probably both, so there was plenty of material to draw on. And that was the age of the yuppie and the stock market crash of 1987; Thatcher, Reagan, the creed of Monetarism and I knew plenty of people in the money world too. From popular music it is only a short step to consumerism and facile disposable products, vapid branding, artificial value and stock markets and the rest of it, and from there in my imagination to the non-product, a purely notional commodity that carries whatever value we want to move around at any moment.

Eh? I thought this was a story about musical wannabes. Well, yes it is, but part of the fun for me in writing The Freebie was discovering that with the odd well-placed word or sentence you can make a story look beyond its own world; you can bring in whole extra dimensions of association and meaning with very little effort.

I have always been curious about whether readers have picked up on these associations. No one has ever made any comments. For me, the reader of The Freebie is invited to draw a connection between Billy’s musical compositions through all the real-world products of dubious use or social value (pretty well everything in the shops) right to internationally traded stocks and shares. See the almost off-hand remark about (Billy’s pal) Lucien Savage’s trade: the stocks he traded are “his cathode blips, his abstracts, his non-products; like an air traffic controller trading radar contacts.” Yes, and that little parenthetical remark in the story opens a window on how we produce, trade and consume under advanced capitalism.

I also tried to reinforce this idea with the motif of ‘non-’, which pops up all over. For example, “Billy […] laboriously explained that the cat he did not have had mistaken the big dog-eared memo pad on which he had not written the name and address of the place they were to meet for the big dog-eared Persian that had never lived next door — on which Billy’s cat would have certainly had a crush had they both existed …” (I’m also chuffed that I managed to use the descriptor ‘dog-eared’ twice in a sentence about cats.)

And then there is the name of the story, which gives Billy his family name: something for nothing — like Billy’s musical ambitions, like non-products, like the stock market. Notice that Billy has not acquired anything he has: the journalist calls him, not the other way round; his parents got his squat for him; he looks forward to a free lunch and free booze, and so on.

The Freebie was published in The London Magazine in July 2002, the second issue of its re-launch that year. The London Magazine (TLM) is a great place to first place a story. It goes back to the eighteenth century, has published the work of some very notable names, and the issue that included my story carried some work by Ben Okri.

I had actually forgotten I submitted the story to this magazine. After The Freebie went off in its big brown envelope I discovered that the magazine’s long-time and much respected editor Alan Ross had died and the magazine had ceased publication. This was utterly typical of my luck, I thought with appalling self pity and overlooking the death of a person, and forgot about it. Months later I got home from work to an email from TLM’s new editor Sebastian Barker saying that he very much liked The Freebie and was it OK if he used it? So I said no — OK, I said PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZ. I pounded my feet of the floor and woo hoo-ed and hullaballoo-ed in jubilation and sprinted out the house to buy a celebratory bottle of wine and drank the whole thing without sharing with anyone.

According to Wikipedia, TLM’s notable contributors include: W. H. Auden, Frank Auerbach, Louis de Bernières, Bill Brandt, William S. Burroughs, Roy Campbell, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Cary, Charles Causley, John Clare, Hartley Coleridge, Allan Cunningham, Odysseus Elytis, Gavin Ewart, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Roy Fuller, W. S. Graham, Nadine Gordimer, Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries, Tony Harrison, William Hazlitt, Thomas Hood, Ted Hughes, Leigh Hunt, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Laurie Lee, Jack London, Louis MacNeice, Mary Russell Mitford, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Ben Okri, Harold Pinter, Sylvia Plath, Thomas de Quincey, Ethel Rolt Wheeler, Alan Ross, Richard Savage, John Scott, Iain Sinclair, Derek Walcott, Evelyn Waugh and William Wordsworth.

Yes, I have been included in a mag that published William S Burroughs, who I thought I was channeling when I embarked on the first draft of Weed (but emphatically not the later drafts).

Eventually, I submitted some more work to TLM and Sebastian Barker took the trouble to write by hand a note telling me it was “horrible”. He didn’t use it. And you are not seeing it.

OK. I have written way too much about The Freebie here. You’ll be so sick to death of hearing about it, you won’t want to read it. I’m off to blag a free drink.

It is a very brave retail outlet that expresses its true feelings in conservative Nara, Japan.

Extract from HARPER’S WEEKLY
December 1, 2009

The Swiss banned further construction of minarets; Christians in Jerusalem wanted Jews to stop spitting on them; and ten Florida middle schoolers were suspended for participating in Kick a Jew Day.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8390220.stm

A JG Ballard moment.

Well, it has been about three weeks since Weed and Shorts appeared in the online shops as ebooks to no fanfare at all apart from a bit of parping by me getting over the celebratory hangover.

I have been grinding out the press releases and sprucing up the site in the hope of raising a shadow of interest while fending off this mounting sensation of futility with a bottle. More than one bottle.

It’s gratifying to have Weed out there after so many years of muddle and inactivity but promoting it presents a challenge I had not thought through very well. How to connect with the people who might like it? And who are the people I want to connect with anyway? I mean, who are the Weed readers? Who are they really?

I read up on how to promote your publication online and in short it went:

• have a blog (done that; tick)
• use Facebook (tick)
• use Twitter (tick)
• optimise your web site (yawn tick)
• wave a digital magic wand and watch the punters roll in (waft waft tick)

All this promote-yourself stuff is written by glib nonentities, and the efficacy of their advice is measured by the fact that they are nonentities.

For example, the how-to on marketing yourself on Facebook goes:

1. get a Facebook account
2. friend all your friends who also have Facebook accounts
3. say how much you like your friend’s profiles, individually — it gets you noticed!
4. make friends with total strangers if you feel up to it

A lot of the advice is full of typos and grammatical errors and is sometimes so cursory that I think it is hacked out by freelancers in the Philippines or India at one dollar per essay (I know this happens because I am a member of a freelancer site through which such writers are recruited at exactly those rates).

On Facebook, I can potentially reach perhaps 200 people through my friends, most of whom I would rather gift the book than see them pay. While I cannot speak for the tastes of my friends, even cyber friends, I suspect that Weed would not appeal to most of these people. Twitter reaches about 30 people, some of whom are not actually real.

If any reader (hi!) has any real advice about using Facebook, please let me know. I am a complete Facebook novice and am open to any suggestions.

I notice that unpublished British writer Rebecca Woodhead has thousands of followers on Twitter and is the subject of regular warm and cuddly comments from Steven Fry. How does she do that when she hasn’t published an actual book yet? She is held up to be a model of how online self-promotion for writers can work, but I honestly cannot see what she is doing that I’m not (except in being more prolific in her blogging and Tweeting). Well, she is charming and endearing, doesn’t swear, doesn’t rant about destroying capitalism in general and the publishing industry in particular, and is considerably better looking than me, so perhaps I should find clues there.

Having moaned so emphatically, there are many more things I can be getting on with to push the writing, and more importantly, there are many more stories I am itching to get on with.

If any reader out there has a site and would be prepared to link to www.psipook.com in exchange for a reciprocal link, please let me know and we can mutually raise our profiles in search rankings. If you know of any online communities or e-zines whose readers might like to hear about Weed, please let me know.

And in the meantime, pity me for the style sheet for Trouserpress has gone missing rendering it a visual mess (another contrast to Ms. Woodhead) and fixing it is just one more of a million tasks I need to attend to. (Cue visit to bottle).

And for the sake of search engine visibility, I must add the following sentence: the fab ebooks I am referring to here are of course Weed and Shorts by Chris Page

Mood: indeterminate

Music: Drone Zone from SomaFM

Reading: Cocaine Nights, JG Ballard

My e-books Shorts and Weed are currently available at www.smashwords.com

Mood: Messia-manic
Music: Handel’s Messiah

Reading: blurb

E-books Weed and Shorts have appeared on the Sony ebooks site about 10 days before expected, while they have not yet shown on Kindle, Mobi or Barnes & Noble as I thought they would by now.
http://sony-ebook-samples.com/sample/5714/weed

http://sony-ebook-samples.com/sample/5715/shorts

It didn’t register with me at first but my ebooks Weed and Shorts are available from SmashBooks.com in all the following formats:

• Online Reading (HTML)

• Online Reading (JavaScript)

• Kindle (.mobi)

• Epub (open industry format, good for Stanza reader, others)

• PDF (good for highly formatted books, or for home printing)

• RTF (readable on most word processors)

• LRF (for Sony Reader)

• Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices)

• Plain Text (flexible, but lacks much formatting)

• Plain Text  (viewable as web page)

That’s so many formats, I’m almost embarrassed. And it also means that the books are available in just one place to everyone who has any kind of digital device whatsoever. All possible nice things to Sage Evans and SmashBooks.

Meanwhile, I’m grinding out the press releases but not anticipating an overwhelming response — or any response other than the cat rubbing round my ankles as he is. But then, cats like Weed, don’t they.

And this is still the main outlet for Weed and Shorts:https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/chrispage

By golly. Have you seen the time? I must get some kip.