Book Review : One City by Alexander McCall Smith, Ian Rankin and Irvine Welsh

This book is a collection of three short stories, one each by three "Edinburgh" authors : Alexandar McCall Smith, Ian Rankin and Irvine Welsh. All the stories are set in that city. They all also, in one way or another, revolve around tigers – although quite why is never explained.

There has been much written, of late, about the resurgence of the short story form and it’s possible to see books like this (which was published in 2005) as a part of that trend. In truth, the stories are all quite long for “short stories” at 8-10,000 words each. You would struggle to find many markets that would normally accept realist short stories of this length, for example. It’s relevant that these are stories written by authors who made their names as novelists first.

The first two stories in the triptych are excellent. McCall Smith’s “The Unfortunate Fate of Kitty da Silva” is a gentle tale of an Indian doctor in Edinburgh. It’s as sweet as a nut. Rankin’s story, “Showtime”, concerns a homeless man drawn into the world of magicians. It’s the best of the three, intriguing and delicious, good enough to make me want to read some of his novels. Only Welsh’s story disappoints. Even some impressive swearing and ultraviolence can’t rescue it from mundanity. The tiger in this story, I suppose, is a metaphor for something, but the story is charmless and flat. Welsh seems to have become bored with it, too, as it peters out and we are left only with a sketch of what occurs. Disappointing.

Still, a highly recommended little book because of the first two stories.

Writers and Publishers

I've had a response from Interzone about A, C, G and T. It was along the lines of "if you didn't hear anything back then the story must have been rejected". This is disappointing on several levels.

Firstly, of course, all rejections hurt. A, C, G and T is a pretty good story, I think. It's a level above others that have been rejected by Interzone as "near misses" in the past. So I had high hopes for it. As it happens, the email from them arrived on my birthday too ...

More importantly, the response was unsatisfactory because I now don't know whether they even received my story in the first place. Something has got lost somewhere : either my original submission, or, if there actually was one, their rejection of it. How can I tell? I can't - only the magazine could tell me that. Now, most likely the marvellous UK postal system has failed here, not the magazine. But it highlights what you might term the imbalance of power between writers and publishers. All struggling writers will be familiar with this. I've had many submissions over the years that have, apparently, just been ignored. And, yes, I do of course follow all the guidelines carefully. I've had magazines hang onto stories for years, promising to publish them, and ultimately failing to. I've even had magazines who did publish a story of mine but didn't bother to tell me they'd done so. Sometimes, to put it bluntly, writers are treated like shit by magazines and publishers.

Now, not all publishers are like this. Some of them are the complete opposite - responsive, informative, professional. You submit by email, for example, and get an immediate response back to say that the submission has been received. And I'm certainly not singling out Interzone. In my few dealings with them in the past they've been utterly helpful and polite. And I'm sure a publisher could give a very different perspective on these issues. Doubtless they work very hard for little reward and have to put up with ungrateful or rude writers into the bargain. But still, it is the publisher that holds all the aces. If they lose one submission or upset one writer, it's no big deal. There will be plenty of others. It was the work of a few minutes for Interzone to tell me that my story "must" have been rejected. For me it meant the denial of many hours of writing effort and many weeks of anticipation. Yes, there are other outlets for the writer to pursue, but still, I'm willing to bet it is much harder for a writer - at least until they make their name - to find a good publisher than it is for a publisher to find a good writer.

So what would be a better system? No doubt frustrations like these have led a lot of writers in the past to either give up completely, resort to self-publishing or maybe even start their own magazine to try and do things differently. I've certainly decided to forget the whole ridiculous exercise lots of times in the past. But still, I think the system we have now is pretty much as good as it could be. I mean, there obviously should be more magazines. The number of outlets for, say, realist short stories is vanishingly small. The answer, though, is to make the system we have work better. It's incumbent upon writers and publishers to behave professionally and courteously as far as possible. If a magazine doesn't have the resource to do that then it shouldn't be trying. And if a writer can't then they don't deserve to get very far.

One thing that would help, I think, would be to have better information about the various publishers and magazines available. Then writers can see what each potential market is like, how they behave, how prompt they are etc. Some of this information is already available, e.g. via Duotrope. But there could be so much more. One of the things I want to do with Subtract - if I ever get on to developing it - is to allow writers to rate and comment upon the publishers they submit to. So, something like the ranking system used by Amazon. There is always the danger of inaccurate reviews from bonkers people, of course, but hopefully an accurate picture would always emerge given enough feedback. I think this would be good for everyone - writers, publishers and, ultimately, readers.

Meanwhile, their rejection of my story is Interzone's loss. The story has gone elsewhere ...

Setting up a Writer's Web Site

I've been working some more on my main web site - simonkewin.co.uk. The new site looks pretty similar to the old one but it has, in fact, been completely rewritten. If you're thinking of creating a writer's site for yourself, my experiences and some of the techie details that follow might be of interest.

The main problem with the original site was that it was written using HTML frames, which is pretty much the cardinal sin of web page design. In my defence, the site was lashed together in a few hours, and that was the easiest way to get the layout right. But frames cause lots of problems, not the least of which is that you don't end up with proper addresses for your sub-pages. You generally end up with URLs that take you to the page you want but without all the surrounding headers, menus etc. Which also messes up search engines. Essentially, frames are very, very wrong.

Now, the layout is completely done in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) - which is basically how it should be done. I can now provide a link to, say, my reviews page and it will work properly. In fact, all styling is now done in CSS, to properly separate content from form. I no longer use tables for layout but, again, CSS. It's all so much better. Although, as an aside, if you're thinking of adopting the same approach to creating a site of your own, CSS does have flaws. There are some basic things it just doesn't do and you inevitably end up making design compromises.

Setting everything up using CSS is a bit more work than using old-school tables etc. But it is worth it in the long-run. You can make global changes to a particular style used throughout your site very easily once it's all in place. At the same time, I wouldn't get too obsessive about it. I have used a very few bits of non-CSS layout just because it was easier. You can always clean it up later. The main thing is to get the site up and working.

However you go about things you will inevitably end up bashing your head against the lunacy that is web-browser incompatibility. You get something looking good in Firefox, for example, and Internet Explorer mangles it. This nonsense has been going on for years. It really is time it stopped. I'd recommend getting your site working acceptably in Firefox (which tends to be more compliant to the standards) and Internet Explorer (which most people use) and leave it at that.

For reference, the new site cost absolutely nothing to create. I used nothing more fancy than Notepad to write the HTML, CSS and JavaScript (there's very little JavaScript - really just a small routine to stop robots from skimming off my email address.) I used the free (and excellent) FileZilla program to FTP everything up to my ISP. The simonkewin.co.uk domain was free as part of my ISP's bundle. The photograph on the front page was taken for me by a friend, the artist Stephen Rippington. I also use a free hit counter from StatCounter to monitor how many people are accessing my site. You probably already get something similar from your ISP but using a third party counter means you can move the site between hosts, should you need to, and keep all the statistical history. I also set up a free monitor via BasicState to keep an eye on the site and alert me if it becomes unavailable for some reason - e.g. if there is a problem with the host.

I used some SSI (server-side includes) in the site so that standard chunks of HTML like the menu can be created once and used in many places - but again, this is all part of a standard ISP bundle. The site is completely static HTML, but it wouldn't have been too much work to generate some pages dynamically from a database (e.g. the Bibliography.) Again, this would generally cost nothing as resources like MySQL and PHP are generally included by ISPs too.

The site will do for now, I think. It's certainly a lot better than many I've seen. It could be improved - it probably will be as time goes by - but for now it does a job. If you are thinking of giving yourself a web presence, feel free to copy what I've done as a template. Then improve it and tell me about it! There are, of course, other approaches you could take. A page on Facebook, say, or a Blog. But there's nothing to stop you doing all these things and, for me, a proper web site, implemented as professionally as possible, is an essential part of setting out your stall as a professional writer.

It is, I suppose, debatable just how much such a site actually achieves. When you set one up you fondly imagine that readers and publishers will flock to it and inundate you with requests for more work. In practice, that doesn't happen, unless you are already well-established. You still have to get out there and submit work to agents and publishers, of course. At the same time, I can see from my logs that people are looking at my site, which means I am getting more exposure than I would have done otherwise. A web site certainly doesn't replace the conventional ways of getting your work seen, but it does complement them.

Writing Update

I haven't posted on progress with my writing for a while, so here goes!

The full manuscript of Hedge Witch is still being considered by an agent. It's an agonizing wait. I can't decide if hearing nothing each day is good news or bad news. Perhaps soon ...

A, C, G and T has been with Interzone since mid-January. I've heard nothing back from my original submission or from a couple of polite requests for an update. I'm not sure what's going on there - they are usually very polite and typically respond within a couple of months. I'm choosing to treat no news as good news but, inevitably, you start to wonder whether they even received the manuscript in the first place. One of the advantages of an electronic system that sends a positive response!

Work is ongoing on Engn - the next novel. It's still very early days. I have about 20,000 words of it so far, at about the draft 3 or 4 stage.

No luck so far with The One Thousand, One Hundred and Eleven Gates to Faerie, although I did have a very polite and helpful rejection about it from Shimmer. Here's what they said :

Your writing is beautiful--you've captured your main character well, but overall, there was little surprising in this story; what seems to be a twist, that your main character was fooled, isn't really. It didn't come as enough of a surprise.

Which was one of those situations where you realise that what they say is perfectly obvious. I've changed the ending to the story now, adding a whole new episode that really brings the story to life (I feel). The revision has gone off to another magazine ...


Finally I've been working on a new short story too. This one is provisionally entitled As a Whisper in the Air. I hope to have it finished very soon.

Book Review : Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd

This is an enjoyable book - engrossing even - but there are some problems with it.

It weaves together three story lines - or, in fact, three episodes from the same story : the life of one Hope Clearwater. We are shown her fresh out of university, when she marries mathematician John Clearwater and works as a landscape ecologist in England. Simultaneously, and taking up the bulk of the story, we have an older Hope, now no longer with John, working as a chimpanzee anthropologist in Africa. Finally we have the oldest Hope, the one that directly speaks to the reader, living alone on the African beach of the title, looking back at the events of her life.

The book is certainly well-written. The plots draw you in. Characters are believable and three-dimensional. Four-dimensional, even, as they certainly change over time too. The book is full of interesting details and asides, mainly about mathematics and anthropology. It is interesting, as a writer, to note how effective it is to interweave three stories like this. How the reader is able to easily cope with - enjoy even - what might appear to be a confusing stratagem. The texture of the story is greatly enriched by the approach. Tense and person are used skillfully to differentiate between the different Hopes. The youngest Hope, for example, is presented almost as a different person, a stranger, so these episodes are written in the third-person, past tense. The "chimpanzee" Hope, however, is written in the first person as she is effectively the "current" one. It's an effective approach.

At the same time there is a certain hollowness to the book, a sense of nothing really being illuminated or achieved. Boyd uses both mathematics and anthropology to reflect, comment upon, the events in Hope’s life. John, for example, becomes engrossed in studying the mathematics of turbulence as his relationship with Hope, and his state of mind become, yes, more turbulent. The mathematical detail is frequently interesting but its literary effect is less clear. It often comes across as over-clever and not particularly illuminating. Similarly, we are presumably supposed to see parallels between the chimpanzees Hope studies and her own life. The apes split into two groups, who then engage in a brutal war with each other. This reflects, again, the conflict in Hope's life : the tensions among the anthropologists and a war taking place within the African country. Still, quite what point is being made isn't always clear. The allusions don't go anywhere much.

For all that, it's an enjoyable read, and a recommended one.