This time last year there were long gaps between my blog posts but I had an excuse – I was having a piece of pig put in my heart. This year, the reason is busy-ness, a busy-ness that’s prevented me settling down to a ‘normal’ blog entry and produced this instead.

My spurious justification for it is that I’ve been asked to adjudicate the general article competition at next year’s conference of the Scottish Association of Writers. It’s a real honour and it’s been interesting thinking about what constitutes a ‘good’ article. And ‘thinking about’ writing, rather than just doing it, is always fruitful. When I first became a Writing Fellow at Dundee University, again it was an honour but, in order to do the job properly, I had, for the first time really, to step back from writing and think about how I did it, what sort of ‘rules’ I followed, if any, how I structured things, chose and manipulated words and so on. It was all very instructive and one thing I realised was that, as a writer, I tend to be more reactive than proactive (horrible word). Give me a theme, a title, a specific stimulus and I can usually produce a few hundred words on it.

All of which is a prelude to something which may make you question my sanity because it’s an example of my reactive writing which I found in a box of stuff this week. I won’t give you the whole background to it but, basically, I remember it arose from a conversation I had years ago with one of my grandchildren who lives in Brighton and what triggered it was the word ‘centipede’.  Where the rest came from I have no idea. This is it.

A centipede was wandering through the centre of Brighton, looking at the names on the shopfronts as he passed them. Lots of people, when they saw him coming, crossed over to the other side because this was no ordinary centipede. He was enormous. 7 metres long with thighs fat enough to squash a double decker bus. His name was Gerald.
None of the names on the shop fronts had what he was looking for so, in the end, he went up to a policeman who was standing in the doorway of M&S eating a cheeseburger.
‘Scuse me,’ he said.
‘Yeah, what d’you want, Fatty?’ said the policeman.
Gerald looked at him, saw the grease running down his chin and dripping onto his uniform and thought he was a fine one to talk about being fat. But Gerald’s mother had taught him to be polite so he just said, ‘Can you help me please? I’m looking for a counsellor.’
‘What sort of counsellor?’ said the policeman.
Bits of cheese sprayed over Gerald as he spoke.
‘One that gives advice, helps people,’ said Gerald.
The policeman pointed down the street. ‘First left, three doors along. Dr Zang,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ said Gerald, and he began to walk away.
‘Oi, Fatty,’ shouted the policeman.
Gerald stopped and turned.
‘You a caterpillar?’ asked the policeman.
‘No, a centipede,’ said Gerald.
‘Thought so,’ said the policeman.
Gerald turned left at the corner and walked along until he saw a brass plaque beside a posh-looking doorway. It said ‘Dr X Zang, Psychiatrist, Counsellor and Baby-sitter. Lowest prices in Brighton. Special deals available on Lego sets.’
Gerald rang the doorbell and  went in. A receptionist was sitting at a desk. A label on her lapel told Gerald her name was Diaphanous.
‘What d’you want?’ she said.
‘I was wondering if I could see Dr Zang,’ said Gerald.
‘No,’ said Diaphanous. ‘Go away.’
Gerald was just turning to go when he heard a squeaky voice calling.
‘Who’s that, Diaphanous?’ it said.
‘Some fat centipede,’ said Diaphanous. ‘Wants an appointment.’
‘OK, send him in,’ squeaked the voice.
‘Through there, Fatty,’ said Diaphanous, pointing to a door. ‘And wipe your feet first.’
With fifty pairs of legs, that took Gerald quite a while but at last he walked through into the room and saw a tall thin man wearing an enormous pair of glasses.
‘Good morning. Have a seat. What can I do for you?’ he said.
Gerald sat down on a couch.
‘I need help,’ he said.
‘What sort of help?’ said Dr Zang.
‘Well, don’t laugh but … ‘
He stopped, uncertain of how to explain it all.
‘Don’t be shy,’ said Dr Zang. ‘You can trust me. I sell Lego.’
‘Well,’ said Gerald, ‘every so often,  I get this terrible hunger and … well, it makes me want to eat the sun.’

The story continues for another couple of hundred words but its resolution centres on flatulence and the punch line is a prescription for baked beans. It does, though, provoke a question. Would you invite the person who wrote this to adjudicate a competition on articles?

For a change, following the lead of my friend, Catherine Czerkawska, I’m trying  to be promotionally aware. This time I’m making Shadow Selves one of Kindle’s Countdown Deals. What that means is that at 8 a.m. this Thursday, November 14^th, the price drops from $3.50 to just $0.99, then on Saturday at 3 a.m. it increases to $1.99. This lasts until 11 p.m. on Sunday, when it reverts to its normal price of $3.50.

If you knew the time it took me to set this up (even though the process really is very simple), you’d buy the book out of pity. But for the heartless few, I need to give more positive reasons, which means bigging up the book (or, as The Simpsons would have it, ‘embigging’ it). In keeping with my habitual idleness, however, I’ll simply recycle a blog I wrote about it when it was first published.

The story was triggered by a visit to an operating theatre while an operation was in progress. It was arranged by Donnie Ross (Dr Dx to his online friends) and I’ve reproduced some details of the experience in the scene where Jack Carston, my DCI, visits the hospital to check their procedures. More interestingly, though, the whole book is set in and around the fictitious University of West Grampian. And why is that ‘more interesting’? Because I used to teach at a university and the assumption (among some people) may well be that the people and things I describe may also be based on personal experiences. They’re not, except insofar as I know the general academic atmosphere, the demands and privileges of working in such an institution and the small p politics in which some teachers and researchers delight.

The people are certainly fictitious. Books always carry the careful ‘any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is coincidental’ disclaimer but I have to say that, even though you’ll find it in my books, it isn’t really needed. I may borrow how someone looks, or copy what he/she wears, but using a real person as a model just doesn’t work for me. I only tried it once, and I found that my awareness and knowledge of the actual person prevented my character from growing and being himself. Presumably (and it was certainly true in my case), a writer ‘uses’ a real model because there’s something special or unique about that person – he/she is wonderful or despicable. The real person I chose was the latter but he wasn’t my character. In the end, I had to free the character and let his nastiness develop in the way he wanted to express and live it. The result was that he turned out to be more charismatic (in a horrible way) than the real guy. But I wouldn’t want to spend too much time with either of them.

So anyone reading Shadow Selves and expecting to recognise x, y or z will be disappointed. What I hope they will get, though, is a sense of the strange world of academia – a rarefied place where high culture and low cunning co-exist and some individuals continue to be blissfully unaware of how privileged they are to be safe in their ivory tower. Oh, and they’ll get a couple of deaths, a stalker and a case of sexual harassment.

And, as a PS which has nothing whatsoever to do with the above, I recently came across a fascinating and rather chilling site that gives statistics relating to the prison population in the USA.  It’s run by Viviana Shafrin and you’ll find it here.

Just click on it and, on the first page, you get ‘greetings from the country that holds ¼ of the world’s prisoners’ and food for lots and lots of thought.

At last, another very welcome contribution from my brother Ron.  His slant on the link between writer and reader is perceptive although, in the final two paragraphs, disturbingly lubricious . (By the way, if I did, as he claims, use the expression ‘inferential perception’, I should be (and am) ashamed of myself. I shall, however, use it frequently in the future .) All yours, Ron.

Here’s Bill, at the family dinner table, some fifty odd years ago. Out from the usual competitive banter, which centres on topics as diverse as the colour of Manchester United’s away strip or weighing up the desire for the last roast potato against winning the race to finish eating first, comes this:

“What it’s really all about is inferential perception.”

He might have gone on to unpack the concept and quote his sources…I don’t recall but, evidently, I remember those words. They stayed with me because they had an allure, promising access to something that might feed my empty teenage mind.

I’m still just as impressionable, a sucker for a well-turned phrase. For instance, I’m washing the dishes and wondering if I’ll remember to reload the bird feeder I can see when, out of the thousands of words on the radio news, an interviewer says to some middle eastern diplomat,

“So, you condemn this act unreservedly,” and the diplomat answers, “I’m going to have to give you an answer of constructive ambiguity.”

And the birds are going to have to go hungry because I go straight for my pen and note that answer down, firstly so I can relish it as a seductive piece of avoidance and secondly to commit it to memory in the hope of being stopped in the street one day and asked to comment on some major issue:
“Excuse me sir, what do you think of the colour of Manchester United’s away strip?”
“I’m going to have to give you an answer of constructive ambiguity, innit.”

My admiration for this diplomat shrank when I later learned he hadn’t plucked those words from his creative intellect to meet the context but had stolen them from Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who was describing the ‘art’ of appearing to say something about the financial markets but in such a way that traders would not over-react and set prices rising or falling in response. Never mind, the words still carry a lot of power.

And here’s Will Self on the radio recently, being asked what Psycho Geography is and, seemingly without taking a breath or consulting his notes, answering:
“Psycho Geography is the idea of purposeless transits across the urban context in order to deconstruct the commercial and political imperatives of contemporary space.”

Another emaciated sparrow drops from the bird table as I reach for the pad again. Of course Self’s words are pretentious and sound like one of Bill’s examples of jargon intended to screen the ignorance of the speaker but I don’t care: I want to talk like that. (Incidentally, I suspect it’s that word, ‘purposeless’ which really attracts me. After a career in education, with its aims and objectives and targets and goals, I am drawn to the notion of aimless meandering).

For different reasons, I was struck by these words, written to an online chat room, in response to Google’s new sorting system in its Gmail service.
‘You fulfilled my desire which I am feeling for the last few months and gave immense joy when I saw it after opening my inbox.’
These words don’t promise the illumination of Will Self or Alan Greenspan but they are so inappropriately gushing that I find myself admiring the intention of the writer, whilst at the same time wondering if he might benefit from getting out a bit more.

What you writers and readers need to know is that there are people like me out here who are susceptible to the bon mot or the mot juste and who will swoon and buckle if you can find those combinations of words that press our buttons. I wonder if it might be useful or even inspiring to sit at your desks in the knowledge that your audience is gagging for it.