My Last Words On 2008

Moving on means that I've been very busy writing content for another of my blogs. It’s a blog that I haven’t yet publicised here or anywhere, and I still have to decide how to launch it into the real world. It needs the right kind of exposure; a nudge not a push. The premise is very funny but it’s not a true blog. It only provides ‘back story’ to something else I have in mind. I’m also somewhat reluctant to move on from Madeley, chastened by Selena Dreamy’s generous words: ‘If you want to drive a man to become a radical destroyer of his proper genius, just give him half a dozen blog.’ Well, let’s just call it half a dozen plus half a blog.

While looking to link this other project into the blogosphere and find it some unsuspecting readership, I came across the following. It’s an article about the collapse of The Friday Project (or TFP as it’s become known in my darkest mutterings).As some of you might know, it’s a story very close to my heart. This is the last time I hope I'll feel motivated to write about the last year but I write this for myself. Just to put it on the record so I don't forget.

The piece awoke some of the bad feelings I had about my dealings with TFP. Yet I should make it clear that I never had bad feelings about the people. Clare Christian was always polite, friendly, helpful, and, much more important for any writer, supportive. After the collapse, she clearly regretted what had happened. I was sorry that she felt so sorry. I felt sorry that her business had collapsed and that she was suffering the fury of other unpublished bloggers who treated her as thought she was the anti-Christ. I might have had reasons to be angry but that's not my way when it's a case of good intentions failing in the real world. Was I too sympathetic? I don’t think so. I don’t believe that people set out to hurt others. The whole business was regrettable. I had to just dust myself down and move one. It was another lesson learned the hard way.

Yet the news that my novel wouldn’t be published was the beginning of a year of hell. I had taken a proof-reading job for two days a week in Manchester. I thought it would only be for the short term. Now it’s a year later and my role has expanded from proof-reader to include IT support, graphic design, designing Powerpoint presentations, reformatting documents. I like the people but the hours are too long in front of a computer screen (8 hours without much of a break). It is slowly destroying me. My eyes have really been suffering lately and my spirits are shot.

The book’s cancellation also marked the beginning of the months when my father collapsed with an aneurism and I was visiting him in hospital, trying to help him recover his speech. There were good moments, bad moments, and then the end. I remember one Thursday in October, standing without an umbrella in the rain on the end of the platform at Manchester’s Oxford Road station. I was sobbing like a child. I’d just been told that there was no hope for my father. Everything about my life came together in that one moment. It was the worst moment I’ve ever known. I’m still not right. I still cry when I come into the house at night. I cry if I’m alone with my thoughts for too long. Everything I feel now is the product of 2008 and I’m happy to put that year behind me.

Yet, before the truly bad things happened to me, there was the novel, which I’ve never really talked about. The article, published months ago when I was too busy to care, sours whatever lingering good feelings I had about The Friday Project. Not because of my own sense of abandonment. I’ve had enough of those in my life. What disappoints me is the talk of excess. There’s money owed and monies paid. Huge amounts of money; debts of over £1 million. I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad. I made nothing from my book and lost only the months it took to write, rewrite, proofread, and prepare for publication. And my debts aren’t in the millions -- yet. But I still think of what I really wanted from the publishing deal. What would have made me happy as a writer? £10,000 a year, perhaps. I could have written one or two very funny novels a year, made my name, living poor but happy. Was it too much to expect? Or weren’t my ambitions big enough?

‘Publishers are wary if you’re too prolific’.

That was the advice of the only literary agent I’ve ever spoken to.

It was around the summer of last year. After the book was cancelled, another blogger (who probably wouldn't want me to name but who was unbelievably kind to reach out to me) asked her agent to talk to me. I had a phone call from Patrick Walsh of Conville and Walsh. Walsh was impressive from the moment he began to speak. He was articulate, interested and interesting, and with the kind of rich melodious voice that made my own Lancashire accent seem like the flooded gurgling of a peat digger stuck in a patch of boggy marsh. This was the man, mentioned in the article, credited with landing the biggest deals for bloggers. And he told me at once that there was ‘no novel in Richard Madeley’. Of course, I thought he was wrong and I still feel that he’s wrong. I also believe he was more concerned about issues of copyright, rather than the idea for a book. I tried to explain how it was satire and quite flattering satire at that. In this postmodern world, I still think that a pseudo-biography could work very well. If Sue Townsend can write two fictional accounts of Queen Camilla’s life, I don’t see why I couldn’t create a book set in a fictionalised world of celebrity, Bill Oddie’s owls, and Jeremy Clarkson’s rocket car. However, that was a book I was thinking of writing. My finished project was still looking for a home. I sent him a copy of the manuscript to ‘What Ho Proles!’, the novel that The Friday Project had abandoned.( Incidentally, I had restated the original title ‘What Ho Proles!’ after TFP had made me change it to something that would clearly not attract readers of Wodehouse. They had managed to slip some bad language into the title, to make it sound ‘funnier’, like their other humorous books such as 'It Is Just You - Everything's Not Shit' and 'My Boyfriend is a Twat'.)

So, my manuscript was in the hands of an agent and, naturally, I’ve heard nothing since.

I suppose my novel is still out there. Forgotten. It’s the way of the world. Or so I tell myself. I’ve wasted three years of my life blogging, waiting for a break. Compliments keep me going but... Well, I’m still confused as to how the publishing world works. I go around Borders and Waterstones at Christmas and notice that they are heavily promoting humorists. Funny writing sells. Or so it seems. Yet where did TFP go wrong? Was it because they assumed that comedy is anything with ‘shit’ in the title? Or was it that they tried to ride the gravy train known as ‘misery memoirs’? The article describes how Rachel North’s book had 'projected sales of more than 30,000' but 'underperformed, selling only 5,000 copies'. And this after she’d been on Richard&Judy talking about her story. I hate to think what the projected sales of my own book would have been? 500? 600? Half a dozen?

My problem with The Friday Project wasn’t that they had the wrong business model. It was that they were selling the wrong books. There was nothing in their catalogue which I, as a regular reader and book buyer, would go out and purchase. They relied on impact sales, not on the slow success of an author publishing a series of books. They were all about one off hits. Perhaps that says something about my own book. In terms of their humour books, they seemed to rely heavily on the Christmas market – the stocking fillers bought as a joke but left unread. Yet my book, even retitled, was never going to become another ‘My Boyfriend is a Twat’. It was sub-standard P.G. Wodehouse with some Tory politics thrown in. Perhaps it was no surprised when it was dropped. Perhaps I should be thankful that it never made it to bookshelves.

In the end, I confess that I don’t understand any of it. I see that the Friday Project intends to begin again as an imprint of HarperCollins. They’re beginning with a book about ME. An uplifting title, I’m sure. They clearly know what they’re doing this time around. But if they want a misery memoir, perhaps I should write extensively about my bad year. I have a tale to tell, which they might find quite close to their hearts.

Titles

Titles to novels are almost harder to write than the novel itself. This isn’t apparent from the point of view of the reader. On my desk, I can see Terry Southern’s ‘Candy’, Philip Roth’s ‘Zuckerman Unbound’, and Graham Greene’s ‘The Heart of the Matter’. Each title exists, in my mind at least, as though they are integral to the novels they represent. When I think of the book. I think of the title.

As a reader, you know the title before you know the book. As a writer, you often come to know the book long before you know its title. I have spent days thinking up a title for a story I’m in the middle of completing. Nothing seems right but then, the book is still a series of problems I have yet to overcome. Finding the title transforms the story (or a series of written pages) into something more imposing. It gives the manuscript an identity. It’s like putting the roof on a house. Until that point, it wasn’t a house but a series of walls, abutments, and foundations. I want to give these pages an identity as a book but perhaps it’s too early. I’m still standing in the foundations wondering if this thing will ever get built.