Glasgow with Geddy Lee

My lovely wife, Helen, is a massive Rush fan and has been since she was young. Many of the bands that Helen likes to listen to were influenced by her older brother’s taste. However, neither her brother or sister particularly liked Rush, making the band her own.

When Helen found out that Geddy Lee, the singer and bass player from the band, had written a book and was performing a book reading tour, she immediately bought tickets. Rush were one of those bands that passed me by, and I remember that all I owned was the single Tom Sawyer. Admittedly, it is a very good song. Anyway, we were off to Glasgow a week after we’d been to Edinburgh to see The Darkness. (Read about it here).

We arrived in the city with plenty of time for a walk around. It was very busy with Christmas just around the corner. There was a big wheel, exactly the same as one that was in Lancaster. We didn’t go on as we weren’t sure how much time we had. Pizza and a beer was devoured in a busy restaurant, and then it was time to amble to the venue.

The Geddy Lee event was at the Royal Concert Hall, next to our hotel. We grabbed a beer and found our seats, which wasn’t easy as the tickets seemed to be numbered differently to how the venue was set out. We were in the stalls with a great view of the stage.

The event was in two parts, with a mock interview in the first half and an audience Q & A in the secind half, with each half bookended with Geddy reading a couple of passages from his book. Each event had a different interviewee. Glasgow was fortunate enough to have Phil Jupitus as the host, who was engaging and funny, putting Geddy at ease.

The Q & A was conducted by Phil Wilding, who used to be the producer on the 6 Music breakfast show hosted by the other Phil. There were some very good questions.

I have to say that the whole show was fantastic. Despite not being a fan, I really enjoyed it. The tickets also included a copy of the book, which I haven’t started to read yet, but I definitely will.

The following day we had a short walk around the city before jumping on a train home. Although I changed trains at Carlisle as I had a work Christmas party in Leeds, which is a whole other story.

RR Haywood

RR Haywood is an interesting British author. He started out self publishing e-books, with his first book being The Undead Day 1. In his own words, no one bought it. He didn’t care as he continued to write the series. It wasn’t until he published the week one anthology that word of mouth began. He is now one of Britain’s most successful indie writers, who has been able to give up his day job as a policeman and write full time. The Undead series is now up to 25 books, with another three stand alone extras. The series is also a long way from finished.

He has a website which naturally promotes all of his books, but there are also a few Q & A paragraphs and a blog. Some of his earliest books are riddled with typos, grammar mistakes and formatting issues, but as he said, proof readers and editors cost money, and good ones cost a lot of money, which he couldn’t afford. The books are also fairly raw, in that there are some long sections where you can’t help thinking that an editor would have scrapped, or parred down to the bone. RR Haywood does like to write long, convoluted pages filled with “banter”.

What is also interesting is that RR Haywood looked at becoming an author of physical books. The split between digital books and physical books is 70:30, with Amazon taking the largest share of the e-book market. I would fully recommend his article describing his lack of progress in this respect.

https://www.rrhaywood.com/post/getting-a-book-into-a-bookstore-an-indie-author-s-experience

Mr Haywood also shared his thoughts on rules. One comments he often received was that if you write a book in first person, you need to explain who the story is being recounted. For example, is the first person writing a diary? Mr Haywood disagrees. He also disagrees with the rule that you should stick to first person and not switch between different points of view. There are no rules. If you want to write, just write.

Anyhow, RR Haywood has become one of my favourite authors, partly because of the topics he writes about; zombies and manipulating time, and partly because he did it on his own.

Could I Write a Book?

I read a lot. I get through at least one book most weeks, and at the back of my mind there is this thought: Could I write a book?

Could I write 80,000-100,000 words, with an interesting beginning, twists and turns throughout, building towards a crescendo? Can I make the characters interesting, with some kind of defining back story? Would the main protagonist be believable, exciting, moral? Would they be some kind of a super human, like Jack Reacher, or would they be thrown into situations completely out of their depth, like Rincewind, the cowardly wizzard from the Discworld series? (On Rincewind’s hat he has written Wizzard, with two z’s.) Would the book be set in the present day, the past, the future, or all three? Would it be a romance, sci-fi, historical, comedy or fantasy? Would it be written in the first person or the third person; I did this, or he did that?

Sometimes I read a book that is so good I know that I could never write anything of that quality, for example, Fahrenheit 451 or The Name of the Wind. How can someone write a book that is able to draw you in so completely?

How can someone write a series of books with so many competing characters, giving them all space to develop, and still make you want to read every page, for example, Game of Thrones or The Traitor Son Cycle? How are some authors able to be so prolific, Brandon Sanderson, while for others it can appear to be like pulling teeth, Patrick Rothfuss?

On the other side, sometimes I read a perfectly good book and think to myself, I could write something as good as that. I enjoy reading Richard Laymon’s style of trashy horror/splatterpunk novels, they are a guilty pleasure, but deep down, I’m sure that I could write something equally as good, possibly with deeper characters and less contrived situations.

Authors are often asked where they get their ideas from. I have ideas. They come to me when I’m out running or walking on my own, or with our dog, although her input is very minimal with the ever present theme of unlimited bones. One very unoriginal idea I have, is what if the Covid vaccines contained nano-microchips, and that when a tipping point is reached, the microchips become activated and act like a hive mind, turning every person in the world who has received the vaccine into psychopathic cannibals.

Can I flesh out that basic premise into a full blown novel? Would anyone want to read it? Would anyone want to publish it? I’m not naïve enough to expect Penguin or Gollancz to publish it, with a huge five book advance and film studios entering into a bidding war over the rights? It would definitely be self published as an e-book, but how long would it take to write. If I could steal an hour every other day, and manage 500 words, then it would take nine or ten months, plus another couple of months refining and re-writing. Maybe a little extra, just in case.

I’m going to write in my diary, Publish Book, 1st September 2023.