Gavin Cameron

If You Like This, You’ll Love That

A couple of weeks ago, I received two copies of Is There a Book in You? by Alison Baverstock through the post. However, I have no memory or record of ordering them. They were professionally packaged in a grey polythene envelope with a printed address, but had no other identifying features.

Did you send me these books, or do you know who did? None of my friends have claimed responsibility, even the ones who are liable to such jolly japes.

There is one possible explanation. I’m a subscriber to Writing Magazine, and I ordered two extra copies of the September edition because it featured my release The Purple Spotlights EP. Perhaps whoever put the order through accidentally marked it as a new subscription and it triggered off a welcome gift. If it is, they’re not getting them back, because it’s a lovely surprise, and when I’m ready to edit my novel again, I’ll be sure to dip in.

This year alone, I’ve really enjoyed books I’ve been lent by friends. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro was a prime example, and the similar The Girl with All the Gifts by M R Carey. I would group these two books thematically with the P D James classic The Children of Men, although I bought that one for myself and didn’t find it quite as entertaining as the other two.

The Girl with All the Gifts has now been turned into a film, and I’m curious to see how well it’s been done. Ditto the Paula Hawkins novel The Girl on the Train.

Poetry-wise, it’s been a strong year of lending as well. I was given Tonguit by Harry Giles and What They Say About You by Eddie Gibbons. The former collection gave me lots to chew upon, especially in the poems Piercings and Your Strengths; the latter volume had me laughing right past the poems to the endnotes.

Word-of-mouth is always a strong marketing tool. The people who recommended all these books are good friends, and by extension, I trust what they recommend. By and large, this trust is well placed.

In fact, there has been only one recommended book where I didn’t enjoy it: The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. The main character is Don Tillman, a professor with autism, and that’s shown extremely well through the narrative. However, he’s at the peak of his career with a packed schedule that’s timed to the minute, so I felt he lacked a strong motivation for wanting to find a partner. There was a time I would have persisted with a disappointing book, but I stopped reading at page 41.

That said, I’m a strong believer that people should make up their own minds about which books they like and don’t like. Plenty of people love the novel, but it’s not for me. By the way, that referral came from my boss, so you can’t tell anyone I’ve admitted all this.

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Publishing an Entire City

I’m pleased to report I’ll have two poems published in the forthcoming Seagate III anthology. The title is a reference to the oldest street in Dundee, Scotland, as each poet in the book has a connection with the city.

And what a line-up. I feel privileged to appear in the same volume as local poets that I know and admire. But what happened to Seagate I and Seagate II? The former was published in 1975 and the latter in 1985, so the trilogy has taken more than 40 years to complete. Yet in some ways, its timing couldn’t be better.

The Dundee waterfront is undergoing a major redevelopment that has brought in investment such as a new railway station, a five-star Malmaison, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. This sense of willingness has also seeped into other areas, including the literary scene.

2016 marks the tenth year of the Dundee Literary Festival, featuring poet Liz Lochhead, and X-Men actor Alan Cumming. But I believe you can have a richer experience at any festival by taking time to support less well-known authors and even taking a gamble on something you might not like. I can think of only two disappointments out of the dozens of events I attend each year, and neither of them were unknowns.

Most of the Dundee events take place in the Bonar Hall. No laughing at the back – it’s pronounced bonner. But an appropriate location can really bring out the flavour of the topic.

Yesterday, for instance, I was up a hill with a fantastic view of the city hearing poetry about the places we could see. And on Wednesday, Sandra Ireland went to Stockbridge in Edinburgh to launch her debut novel Beneath the Skin since that’s where it’s set.

's in the Antarctic — The RRS Discovery in the Antarctic (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And on Friday, I attended the launch of The Voyage Out, containing narratives of journeys, and featuring some of the Seagate III poets. The event was held on board the RRS Discovery, the ship which took Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton to the Antarctic.

But the most unusual event I’ve heard of is Wendy H Jones who signed her latest crime novel in a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Here’s where you can pre-order Seagate III, and here’s the Dundee Literary Festival programme.

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An Empty Tank

In preparing this week’s entry, I struggled to choose a topic: the singular ‘they’, ‘because’ as a position, past neologisms we now take for granted, the work-life balance, even the events of 11 September 2001.

I managed to start writing a couple of these topics, and I couldn’t even begin on the others. Either I ran out of material or lost my enthusiasm halfway through. I hesitate to use the term ‘writer’s block’, because I didn’t have trouble beginning these entries, only carrying on to form them into the shape of a coherent blog post.

In my experience, there are two main strategies for overcoming this difficulty. Strategy 1 is for when a deadline isn’t looming: I’ll leave it aside and go for a walk or do something else while the idea sorts itself out in my head.

However, I’m writing this on Sunday with the time fast approaching 3pm. Although it’s more than 24 hours until I publish, eight of these will be spent in bed, another eight will be spent at the office, and I would like to leave some time to proofread the text before it goes live. So Strategy 2 involves writing and writing until something usable appears on the screen. Just as you’re more likely to win a raffle prize if you buy more tickets – although it’s never guaranteed – you also have more chance of finding the right words when you write more of them.

As for the topics listed in the first paragraph, I’ll leave them aside for the moment and I might come back to them for a future entry.

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A Long Stretch

Exactly 39 years ago today, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched; its twin, Voyager 2, had a 16-day head start. Each craft was built to last five years and return data only about Jupiter and Saturn. But incredibly, both of them continue to send useful data back to Earth.

Similarly, our words as authors will likely hang around long after they were written.

Most of The Pilgrim’s Progress was written in Bedford county jail; the author John Bunyan having been arrested for his beliefs during the Great Persecution. Although published in 1678, it’s still in print more than 330 years later, longer than anyone of the time could have imagined. The language has changed in this time, of course, but I find 17th-Century English quite accessible with the aid of a few footnotes. That’s if you have time to read the 108,000 words.

Yet there is never a guarantee of longevity. George W M Reynolds was a contemporary of Charles Dickens who outsold Dickens during his lifetime, but whose readership disappeared after his death. We simply don’t know why, or indeed why some authors capture the public’s imagination at all, or why some never do.

Probably the closest modern equivalent we have to either of these writers is Jeffrey Archer.

Like Bunyan, Jeffrey Archer wrote a lot of material while serving a four-year prison sentence for perjury. Like Reynolds, he sells a lot of books but is not generally regarded as a top author. My feeling is that the coin could land on either side for Archer: revered or forgotten.

In light of this, I used to wonder whether to make a particular story timeless, or set it in a definite year or decade. While a contemporary reference can make a piece seem dated, I also feel the reader will often take into account the era in which the story was written: the killer that’s caught by a fingerprint rather than a DNA sample, or the science-fiction prediction that’s now yesterday’s news.

On balance, I reckon it’s not worth worrying too much about whether or not a particular piece needs to be accessible to people of the future; after all, your audience is alive right now. If your words remain in print when you’re no longer around, that’s a bonus.

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Readjusting My Reading Ratio

Over the last few weeks, I’ve devoted a lot of time to writing my MLitt dissertation. I’m pleased to report I submitted it on Wednesday, two days before the deadline. Yet I’ve also found I’ve been reading more than I have for months.

The dissertation totalled more than 17,000 words, so rather than edit on a screen, I printed the full document for analysis. I like to leave some time between making one set of corrections and the next, and since I’d cleared my writing diary to work on the piece, I would read a book to fill the gap. This was especially true when I spent a couple of days in rural Aberfeldy with patchy Internet access. I tackled the following works:



Embed from Getty Images

Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Morning Breaks in the Elevator by Lemn Sissay
Tonguit by Harry Giles

I can recommend all these books. When I’m writing my blog posts, Zemanta generates a list of related articles, and it seems Barack Obama has also been reading The Girl on the Train.

Reading is, of course, a vital part of becoming a better writer, and as I begin the next on my list – Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse – I wonder about the optimum ratio of writing to reading that an author should achieve. Is 75% writing to 25% reading an ideal proportion? Perhaps half-and-half would be better? Could an argument be made for reading more than you write?

Let’s factor in other forms of storytelling. Yesternight, for instance, I watched In Time, set in a future where time has become currency. The film benefits from some terrific writing that shows most of the workings of the fictional universe through dialogue and camerawork without a narrator having to explain the rules. So could some of my reading time be devoted to looking at screenplays?

I know I haven’t answered these questions for myself; whenever I do something else, I feel as though I need to be productive. And yet without outside experiences and influences, a writer is at risk of covering the same topics from the same perspective time and again.

One of my aims on the MLitt course was to create a diverse portfolio of work. I succeeded, but in the creative part of the dissertation, this diversity caused difficulty in making the pieces flow by theme. Jennifer Goldman’s Electric Scream is in a diary format, and was a way of bringing together my different styles of work.

I’ve also spent much of August at the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe. One place I went was The Janice Forsyth Show, recorded as-live in front of an audience for later transmission on BBC Radio Scotland. While I was there, I realised it might be possible to adapt my dissertation piece for the stage, so I’ve acted on the impulse, and I have a meeting with a playwright tomorrow to discuss the possibilities.

If I hadn’t taken that time out of my writing to visit Edinburgh, I might still be questioning what to do next with the piece. And should I come up with a definitive answer about the optimum writing-to-reading ratio, you’ll be the first to know.

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Together in Electric Screams

This is the last Monday of working on my MLitt Dissertation, freeing me to give you more in-depth entries from next week onwards. But I’ve one more filler photo for you, and it’s the cover of said dissertation.

There is a creative part of up to 15,000 words, which can include prose and/or poetry, and 3,000-word part to discuss it further. Jennifer Goldman’s Electric Scream is set in 2027 and is written from the perspective of a 29-year-old poet who finds and transcribes a video diary she kept as a student in 2016.
You might notice the dissertation is ‘written by Gavin Cruickshank’, and that’s because I have to use my legal name. I would otherwise use my middle name Cameron.

Last week, I was speaking to a poet and I accidentally used this individual’s last name, which can also work as a first name. The poet accepted my apologies but described such mistakes as a ‘pet hate’.

I was furious with myself not only for doing it to someone whose work I admire, but because I feel the same way when someone spells Cruickshank incorrectly, especially when I’ve spelt it out or the other party has made an assumption. J K Rowling didn’t help by giving Hermione Granger a cat called Crookshanks.

I therefore use my middle name to avoid the spelling issue. Of course, this sometimes causes as much confusion as it saves. At a reading a couple of weeks ago, the organiser thought Gavin Cameron and Gavin Cruickshank were two different people and wasn’t sure which of us had agreed to participate.

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The Purple Spotlights EP – Another Plug

I’m so far behind with my reading that a friend actually pointed this out to me before I saw it. The Purple Spotlights EP, self-released in April, has been featured in Writing Magazine. It’s available from Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, plus many other outlets.

More information: www.purplespotlights.com

Cover art: www.lemon-drop.co.uk

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Tempus Fugit

Alas, I have had little time to compose a proper entry again. To that end, here’s a triolet I composed a few weeks ago.

I’ll catch you next week.

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Cameron’s Rule

Last week, I was called a perfectionist, not as an insult but as a statement of fact. It is true I like to siphon out as many errors as possible – all of them, ideally – before the public ever see it. But what’s the best way to make sure mistakes are picked up?

Read a printed copy

Many authors are in the habit of writing their work directly into a PC. In many ways, this is ideal because the words are in digital form and can be corrected without fuss, or sent to a third party. But it is more difficult to pick up errors: Scientific American has a detailed article on the subject.

So consider printing out your work to give yourself the best chance. Some people also like to change the font. I accept that printing is not good for the environment, so I keep a folder of used paper and print on the back where possible.

Read it out loud

When many people read, they like to ‘hear’ each word in their heads as if it’s being read aloud by someone else. So reading out loud as an author enables you to imagine how the reader will interpret your words, and can highlight any overlong sentences or incorrect punctuation use.

If you’re unable to find the privacy to read out loud, the next best solution is to use text-to-speech software, plenty of which is available on the Web. You can then listen to it spoken through headphones. The voice tends to be a monotone – although still miles ahead of Stephen Hawking’s antiquated synthesiser – allowing you to concentrate more on the words themselves.

Ask a friend or a professional

Be careful who you pick for this: family members or friends might gloss over the bad bits. Make sure you pick someone who’ll tell you honestly what’s wrong with it, but will also pick out what you’ve done right. Asking a professional proofreader is a more expensive option, yet it can be vital in a novel-length work.

Pocket watch, savonette-type. Italiano: Orolog... — Pocket watch, savonette-type. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Give it time

When you’ve finished a draft, one of the best moves you can make is to leave it alone for a while. If you go back too quickly, it’s possible to read what you want to see rather than what’s actually on the page because your mind’s still thinking about the words that have just been written.

But how long should you leave it for? That’s a question I’ve been wrestling with. After much thought, I’ve come up with my personal method, which I’d like to name, in an egotistical manner…

Cameron’s Rule

As a bare minimum, for work of:

1500 words or fewer, leave it 24 hours;
1501 words and above, allow one minute per word.

By this method, flash fiction and some short stories would be left a day, while an 80,000-word novel would be left for nearly two months. Bear in mind these are merely minimum times. There’s no harm in putting away work – especially shorter pieces – for a longer time.

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Why Monday at 5pm?

I have a friend who used to tell me, “You’re so predictable.” I hated it when he said that. I didn’t want to be someone who took the same action time and time again; I wanted to push the boundaries and surprise people. But I’ve come to realise that a little predictability for an author is no bad thing. I emphasise the words a little.

I first started blogging around 2003. At that time, LiveJournal was the major player in the field, but it was a rather basic platform. Even today, its premium features are equivalent to the basic package on WordPress.

Fun fact: LiveJournal was taken down by DDOS in 2006. (Photo credit: Wikipedia

But these restrictions forced serious bloggers to think carefully about their audience. With no access to stats, I figured out from the comments that my page would have more visitors on a Monday, fewer from Tuesday to Friday, and it would tail off at the weekend.

The time of day and entry is posted is also a factor in how many people will stop by. When I started using Facebook, I noticed that status updates posted on weekday evenings attracted noticeably more comments than those published at any other time. This has held generally true despite the rise in mobile Internet usage.

LiveJournal is actually one up on this front because it now has a postdating function, whereas Facebook users still need to use a third-party program to schedule their posts.

In October 2013, I decided to make the leap from general blogging to writing about literary matters. I decided to come to WordPress because its features were ideal for my needs, many people I like also use the platform, and I have opportunity to build up a new audience rather than potentially alienating my existing readers.

I started it as an experiment, not knowing whether anyone would read it or react to it. The first few entries were therefore at rather erratic times. Once satisfied that there was a literary-minded audience out there, I used my LiveJournal and Facebook guesswork to figure out the best time to make a regular appearance. It also allows me time at the weekend to write each entry.

And once I’d established this pattern, I found new readers would then view my entries on the strength of this regularity. It’s much like knowing the trading hours of a shop: you’ll go there when you know it’s open. And it’s that little piece of predictability that can help a writer.

But ‘predictable’ isn’t a great word as it can also have negative connotations; for instance, when you know someone will make a tired innuendo out of everything you say. Let’s use ‘dependable’ instead.

A dependable writer is one who doesn’t promise more than can be delivered, one who sticks to deadlines and word counts, and so forth. None of us are perfect, however. There have been a few times I’ve completed work with less than an hour to spare. In fact, I remember missing a deadline a couple of years ago when I entered the NYC Midnight writing competition and forgot to check the website for my story prompt.

I’m sure you can depend on me to post my next entry on Monday next week at 5pm.

	Gavin Cameron on Hotchpotch Moves to Groucho…
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	Gavin Cameron on The Abridged Pecha Kucha
	Katy on The Abridged Pecha Kucha