Chris Page

Weed and Shorts have infiltrated the heart of the British establishment: this last weekend I deposited them with the British Library in accordance with the legal obligation imposed on publishers by use of British ISBNs. The books should have been deposited within a month of their publication last November so they are late, which is, like, totally anarchic or what?

Weed is now listed on Barnes & Noble — see here.

No sign of Shorts on that site though. Is it possible that Messrs B&N took exception to the less-than-pristine underpants on the cover and are protecting the sensibilities of the book-buying public? Regardless, Shorts, like Weed remains available through the seemingly endless number of outlets associated with Smashwords.

Plans for paperback editions are again stalled. I am tentatively confident that the paper edition will be out some time this millennium or the next one.

A Dutch McDonald’s employee is fired for adding an unauthorised slice of cheese to a burger. (Read here.) I love stories like this that illustrate the petty mindedness, rule obsession and control freakery of super-sized corporations.

“We have found out … that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them … The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”

(At the end of the linked story, sense was enforced by a court that ruled that McDs were wrong to fire the employee and awarded damages against the company.)

Another abandoned Weed cover design

Weed is a catchy little name but, despite the genesis of the story (see last post) the story is not about dope. No, really.

There was a moment when the writing was done and I was thinking about putting it out there in the big wide world that I had an attack of cynicism in which I thought the name with its puffy associations might be a good marketing gimmick. I slap myself on the wrist for the thought.

Weed is named Weed because that’s the name it needs. It is not for or about pot heads— stoner stuff is just boring. I am bothered that I might be seen to be championing drugs. I am happy to champion drugs, but will do so on another occasion in another way. Possibly the easy associations with the name might put off certain people from reading the thing.

The story is about so much else that is far dearer to me than puff.

Back in the day, a weed was a person who was considered physically weak and who probably had poor social skills (probably as a result of being considered by others to be physically weak — how we love the Aryan!). These days, a weed might be called a nerd. A weed is actually a person who merely has different interests and priorities to the socially fragile and intellectually impaired cool kids and jockstrap brigade. There is no need for the weed-nerd to be like everyone else and it is very often the nerdy kids who go on to create cool stuff like spaceships and the internet. In the garden, a weed is something that does not fit in, that gardeners will pull up and throw away. A weed hasn’t been planted, chosen or cultivated — it is outside the control regime so bin it. However, weeds are tenacious things. You can’t get rid of them: they just grow back and multiply and if you take your eye off them for a minute they take over the whole garden. Weeds are an image of resistance. And then there is the kind of weed that you can smoke, which has its own associations of resistance to order (both mental and social).

Weed (the story) from its inception was more of a gesture or an impulse than a deliberate or reasoned thought. It came to be a free-ranging satire of this environment of manufactured pleasures, mass-produced satisfactions, pre-fabricated jobs, assigned lifestyles, and prescribed thoughts and emotions.

It has always seemed to me that getting on, getting ahead, in this environment requires a massive act of self-abnegation, one that neither Robert D Weed nor I are capable of or willing to make. To survive or progress in this made world, you have to adapt your entire identity. It’s not so much a case of playing the part as being the part. You have to give up your self. And it scares and repels me. We are trained into obedience and banality by school, colleges, the media, our employers (and eventually our own fears of exclusion). So, one of the big themes of Weed is identity. And being is another. I could now go into Marxian notions of species being but we’ll be here till the cows come home if I do. Anyway, the darn thing is a silly little comedic two-fingers at the world, so who wants to hear about Big Ideas?

So there you go. It’s not about pot. I’m off to tend the grow lamps.

Music: Craig Padilla and Zero Ohms

Mood: I wouldn’t mind one, thanks.

Reading: Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque — READ IT IF YOU HAVEN’T!

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.

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.

Or is it the other way round? Both Weed and Shorts are scheduled for distribution through Barnes & Noble on 11/6/2009 and Sony on 12/1/2009 Pass it on

A new blog to promote the novel Weed and short stories of Chris Page. And aren’t you all just sick of hearing about this.