Just a quick note. As part of my contribution to the Edinburgh Ebook Festival’s final weekend, I’m making The Figurehead, which was long-listed for this year’s Rubery Award, free on Saturday 25 and Sunday 26. Help yourselves and, if you feel like doing so, you could maybe review it on Amazon. No pressure, though. You’ll find it at: http://amzn.to/R6HvC3 (USA) or http://amzn.to/RJ0SHS (UK). I won’t be here to see how it does because I’m off to perform at the St Clémentin Literary Festival. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back..

My earliest ‘publications’ were parodies, written as school exercises and put into the school magazine by a teacher, so I suppose from the start I was something of a prostitute when it came to style or genre. In other words, I was anybody’s and wrote whatever the style demanded. I still love parody and I think we learn lots from trying to write like others – not all the time, of course, but as occasional writing exercises.

As a teenager, I wrote poetry – truly awful stuff about love, broken hearts, lust and all that time-wasting but so painfully-felt angst. But my first real genre, when I began to realise that writing was what I wanted to do, was drama. I wrote stage plays for adults and children. My first real taste of ‘being a writer’, though, was when the BBC accepted one of my radio plays. They broadcast several more, mostly serious, dramatic stuff, but some comedy too and finally, skits and songs for revues.

Those days, I was praised for my dialogue so when I started to write novels it was a surprise  to find that the characters in them sometimes sounded less natural and realistic than those in my plays. I think writing long prose works sets up different rhythms in your mind as you write and they get carried into the dialogue, so you have to read it aloud and rewrite it to get the proper rhythmic balance.

I’m talking about different forms rather than different genres, but I think it’s relevant, to show that most of us start out just writing, rather than writing ‘crime’ or ‘romance’ or whatever. When we do fall into a particular genre – in my case, crime – that becomes what we’re expected to produce. But if readers are allowed to have short attention spans, so are we. By that I mean that the prospect of churning out book after book, each featuring the same characters in more or less the same places, is challenging in one way but claustrophobic in another. Exploring fresh ground, shifting into different centuries, past and yet to come, bending realities and multiplying dimensions, they’re all ways of releasing and refreshing your writing.

With the need to engage in energetic marketing nowadays, I realise that choosing to write novels which are totally different from one another in terms of genre, might be confusing for readers and make them harder to sell. Those who read The Darkness, a police procedural as dark as its title, which questions ideas of bad and good, will be very surprised if they think “I enjoyed that, so I’ll try The Sparrow Conundrum”, only to find it’s a satirical spoof of the crime/spy genres whose sole aim is to make them laugh. So they say “OK, I’ll give this guy one last try” and they read The Figurehead and find they’re in the company of shipbuilding people in Aberdeen in 1840 and that a novel that starts with a corpse on a beach ends up with the mystery being solved but with a strong romance developing at the same time.

Oh, and if they then decide to read their kids a bedtime story, choose one about a miserable fairy called Stanley who lives under a dripping tap in a bedroom, then find out it’s by the same bloke who wrote the others, they may wonder which asylum I finished up in. More importantly, they probably won’t trust me to satisfy their writing needs because I “lack consistency”.

The point is that, for me, there’s no difference writing any of these books or, for that matter, the dialogue between Joseph and Mary when she tells him she’s been visited by an angel and she’s pregnant. If the subject’s interesting, it absorbs me. The characters dictate the sort of things that happen; they have their own voices, their own ambitions and flaws. So whether they’re in Victorian Scotland, a contemporary police station, a space colony or sitting under a dripping tap; whether they’re murderers, lovers, saints, fairies or Klingons, they force their way into your head and you have to deal with them on their terms.

Writing is like acting – if you want the audience to suspend their disbelief, you have to do the same, you have to commit to the reality of the play you’re performing, the story you’re writing. I feel as intensely in the scene when I’m describing the antics of Stanley as when I’m watching John Grant carve his figurehead or my detective work his way through external clues and internal devils. It makes life very exciting..

Apart from the times when I get angry at people who refuse to acknowledge that access to healthcare should be available to all, whatever their financial circumstances, and that we all belong to the same species (are you reading this Romney, Ryan, Cameron et al? No, of course not), I try to keep these blogs upbeat. Most of the time they try to be funny (although I realise that I sometimes have to excuse the apparent impenetrability of my version of ‘British Humour’). When they’re about writing, they’re basically serious because I think that’s how writers should treat the profession and all its aspects, but when they’re about me and my seeming obsession with the absurdities of life, they’re meant to entertain.

That won’t change but this one will be threaded through with a tiny melancholy. The reason? My publisher Diane Nelson has had to close down her Pfoxmoor company. Diane published most of my books, spent time on them all, tolerated my constant emails pointing out things I’d missed or forgotten or just got wrong. It was thanks to her submitting them that two of them won awards, and she even sent The Sparrow Conundrum to the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair, where it briefly aroused the interest of a German publisher. And she’s been generous to a fault with all her authors, sometimes sacrificing her own precious writing time to accommodate them. She regretted having to close down but it was the obvious thing to do and she can now concentrate on writing and providing editorial services to others. So this is my big public thank you to her for everything she did on my behalf.

And, as millions all over the world read this, I can almost hear their wails of anguish at the thought that my priceless tomes will no longer be available, but cease your weeping, un-gnash your teeth, because (again with Diane’s help) I’ve re-published them myself. At the moment, only the Kindle versions are there but I’ll be publishing them all as paperbacks as soon as I can. European literature needs them and this starving author in his garret, surrounded only by his laptop, desktop and iPad, will still be able to feed off the crumbs from Amazon’s table.

Amen..