Gert has long considered writing a book called "My Horrible Father". It is a venerable genre stretching back at least to the Old Testament God. Then there are many horrible fathers in fairy tales who lock their children up, abandon them or sell them. Shakespeare did a nice line in the horrible father, King Lear being one who combines many of the prototypical characteristics of vanity, solipsism, emotional vampirism, and that worst of all failings in a father, what Gert's mother used to call "making a show" of his children in public. Dickens specialised in the weak and/or treacherous father with a noble daughter who loves him in spite of it. We have had fathers who abuse their children sexually, drunk fathers, shiftless fathers, childish fathers, religious fathers, hypercritical fathers, and Gert's favourite, charismatic lying fathers.
Gert's book would not, of course, be autobiographical, her own father being perfectly decent and well-meaning. Nor does she want to do what has been done before. So, perhaps an enormously fat and gluttonous father, a modern-day monster Oblomov?
Friday 28 June 2013
Tuesday 4 June 2013
Gert resurgens
Gert fell into a bit of a slump after completing the first draft of her last book. The problem was that our main character, Freddie Todd, bored us. We plodded on and completed the book, but the fine careless rapture just wasn't there. It is quite possible that others who find our other books rather outre may find Freddie more to their liking than the megalomaniacs, liars and dreamers who populate the other books. But we prefer our reality a bit larger than life.
And so we have decided to go digital and put out an ebook of our second novel Writing is Easy, a story set in a dysfunctional writing workshop and peopled by as fine a collection of egotists as you'll ever meet, in real life or outside it. It gave Gert the opportunity to try her hand at crime writing, erotic fiction, historical memoir and scifi as she impersonated the various students in the workshop, not to mention the lurid popular outpourings of our antihero Marcus Goddard and the impenetrable Steinisms of his sworn enemy Lilian Bracegirdle.
Maybe Writing is Easy will languish in the modern slushpile that is the world of ebooks. Maybe a handful of people who never would have read it, will. If they have half as much fun as we did writing it, that'll do.
And so we have decided to go digital and put out an ebook of our second novel Writing is Easy, a story set in a dysfunctional writing workshop and peopled by as fine a collection of egotists as you'll ever meet, in real life or outside it. It gave Gert the opportunity to try her hand at crime writing, erotic fiction, historical memoir and scifi as she impersonated the various students in the workshop, not to mention the lurid popular outpourings of our antihero Marcus Goddard and the impenetrable Steinisms of his sworn enemy Lilian Bracegirdle.
Maybe Writing is Easy will languish in the modern slushpile that is the world of ebooks. Maybe a handful of people who never would have read it, will. If they have half as much fun as we did writing it, that'll do.
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