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Inside Information: I Want This Novel to Change the World
Posted on January 14, 2013 by Ian
by Ian D Smith
Google
In August 2008, after the subprime mortgage crisis and before the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September that year, I noticed that people around me were losing their livelihoods. I had an idea about a novel that posed the question What if people were free to change in the way they wanted, instead of having change imposed on them? A bit like X-Factor with no judges.
In September 2011, I published an early draft on Authonomy, and in February 2012, it reached number 23 in the editor’s desk rankings, with 100 backers. Authonomy had transformed my basic story about four white males in a backstreet pub, into a wider story about Suki, Macy, Damian and Jules, and their attempt to take an old school 1980s disco, with Two Tons o’ Fun, Viola Wills, Brothers Johnson and Locksmith, on the road.
Doyle, Welsh, Munro, Self, Kelman, Carver, Mills, are all writers I admire, but I was seeing a change in tastes, so I had to change too. After six months working on other projects, I came back to Stop the World, and rewrote it yet again. Jules Jewell took shape, a permanently-bewildered but essentially shrewd survivor.
Stop the World, I Want to Get On is a road novel in the Jack Kerouac tradition, about the new, growing, dead beat generation with no internet connection, no social networking potential, no spending power, and no freedom. It’s about the untapped creative potential in people that’s waiting to be released. I want this novel to change the world.
Here’s the invitation to read it http://tiny.cc/358mqw
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Inside Information: Chapter-by-Chapter Synopsis
Posted on January 11, 2013 by Ian
by Ian D Smith
Google
Dear followers, here is the chapter-by-chapter synopsis of my novel Stop the World, I Want to Get On. Authonomy http://tiny.cc/zdojqw
Chapter 1. Stargazers
Hackney, East London, and Jules Jewell, the landlord of the old Marquis of Queensbury boozer, confronts a man called Sweetnam who’s demanding money.
Chapter 2. Camaraderie
Damian Bones demonstrates a new mobile Marquis and his ancient Shake Your Bones mobile disco to neighbours Suki Chen and Macy May, and Jules Jewell, who’s abandoned the Marquis.
Chapter 3. The Long Audition
They’re all forced to squash into Damian’s beat up Mark II Ford Transit when drug baron Roland Bamber appears behind the controls of a bulldozer. The speeding Ford gets them out of there, and they surface in Southampton docks, sealed inside a container that’s loaded onto a ship called the Jolly Condor. Concerned they might suffocate, Jules is distressed that Suki appears to have little thought for human life.
Chapter 4. Sophisticated Punters
Macy finds crates of model Mount Etnas bound for Sicily. They set up Damian’s mobile bar and the Shake Your Bones disco inside the container and impress Captain Stefano Giorgio, who announces that the newly-named Bar at the End of the Universe will be the SS Jolly Condor’s official on-board entertainment. Giorgio allocates the dining room for rehearsals, and takes a hands-on approach. The new ‘act’ starts to take shape, under the instruction of the increasingly unreasonable captain. They repeat their performance night-after-night, until Etna comes into sight.
Chapter 5. Gladiators
Giorgio confirms they won’t be retained for the return journey. Damian has a gig lined up, but when they leave the ship they’re met by armed La Guardia. The container is searched, and the model Etnas are found to contain heroin. In the ensuing mayhem, they escape into Palermo’s maze of back streets where they ask for directions to a gig from a Mafiosi who tells them to drive to Taormina. But there’s no gig in Taormina, and they’re ambushed by Roland Bamber who shoots at them. They escape back to Palermo in the damaged Ford, and after a struggle they choose to break away from Damian’s deals with Bamber forever.
Chapter 6. Strands of Gold
They join a ferry queue bound for Africa, and Jules start to feel he’s attracted to Suki. He meets an African touring impresario, Abraham Diabate who wants them to perform at his father’s hotel bar Der Spiegel. He gives them tickets for the Oceania, a ferry heading for Tunisia.
Chapter 7. Some Kind of Voodoo
On board the Oceania, they spot their relentless pursuer Roland Bamber. Jules barricades the cabin, but the others occupy all the bunks and Suki takes pity on him. On arrival in Tunis, they make a run for the Ford but it won’t start and has to be pushed into Tunis by crew members.
Chapter 8. Bump Start
Stranded in a Tunisian compound, time is running out for them. However, Abraham Diabate is last to leave the Oceania in a 1950s Duple Roadmaster, and he collects them and their gear.
Chapter 9. Sole Surviving Heartbeat
Diabate takes them on a journey across Africa to Banjul, and describes his recreational use of Khat, but Jules is convinced they’re being followed. Diabate delivers them to Der Spiegel, a male-only nudist colony. Macy and Suki are whisked away by tribeswomen, but inside Der Spiegel, they meet fellow-travellers Monty Blomqvist and Gripper, the Marquis diaspora, and they fill in for the absent women.
Chapter 10. Impresario of Nature
A serious amount of money persuades Damian to perform their ‘act’ naked to Abraham Diabate, his father, and three hundred naked Germans. But their ‘act’ is disrupted by dart frogs, and Monty, Gripper and Damian go on strike.
Chapter 11. Mojitos All Round
An American, Zendrowski, overhears their complaints and lures them into his stretch Humvee, reuniting them with Suki and Macy, traumatised after a bush fire trapped them in a mud hut, and Suki’s close encounter with a real tiger. They arrive at the American’s bar in Amsterdam, the Sleepeasy, but the manager, Dr Eigen, demands they audition. Zendrowski wants to know where the frogs are.
Chapter 12. Roll-Neck Sweaters
There’s been a misunderstanding about the frog content, and they fail the audition. However, Zendrowski is impressed that they evaded the infamous Bamber who is now on the run across Europe. Zendrowski suggests another bar, the Gridiron, in Baghdad.
Chapter 13. Smile and Look Pretty
Zendrowski takes them through high security into Baghdad’s Entertainment Green Zone. In the atmosphere-free US Army bar, Stefano Giorgio resurfaces demanding more, but they conquer their demons and win over the hostile crowd.
Chapter 14. Curtain Call
Against US Army regulations, Gripper serves alcohol to the troops, and a visiting Geordie soccer pro called Nathan Ryan. But Zendrowski discovers the alcohol, and they’re sacked. Zendrowski rushes them out of Baghdad, and a US Army platoon wrecks the Marquis equipment abandoning them in the desert.
Chapter 15. Bad Timing, Nothing More
They’re rescued by Nathan Ryan who is en-route to training for the forthcoming soccer World Cup. He lends them his bright yellow roadster, a time machine that takes them to the player’s bar, Golden Balls in Spain. He also replaces their equipment.
Chapter 16. Wrong Place, Wrong Time
But they arrive on the night of the live screening of the World Cup Final, England v Germany. Nathan Ryan misses the crucial penalty giving Germany victory, and the clientele take it out on the Marquis II. Jules acquires a grey box, the evening’s takings, from the Golden Balls manager, Mark Grand, who’s under attack. Suki displays her martial arts skills and they escape in the roadster, but with no gear. Damian has unfinished business in the UK. He wants custody of his son. On a traveller’s site in Slough, his ex, Molly Madrigali, tries to sell him the boy. Jules, Monty and Gripper watch the boy dumping pallets into a flooded gravel pit. It makes no sense, and despite possessing the Golden Balls takings, Damian reluctantly refuses Molly’s demands. The police descend on the site, and arrest Molly and Damian’s boy. They also recover model mount Etnas containing heroin from the flooded gravel pit. Incriminated, the Marquis team are forced to flee yet again.
Chapter 17. Going Underground
They return to the old Marquis in Hackney which is still standing. Dr Eigen, the former manager of the Sleepeasy, now owns it, and along with Abraham Diabate, they have plans to create a restaurant. Jules is banished to the basement and discovers Bamber’s old counterfeiting equipment. Damian’s boy drops into the basement to collect something, but Jules catches him and appears to strike a deal. Monty becomes more authoritative, and seems to know everything.
Chapter 18. Old Scores
The new Marquis restaurant opens with Gripper, Suki, Macy and Damian as waiters. A transformed Monty plays classical music on a new grand piano, and with all the food journalists and Michelin inspectors seated, Mark Grand and Nathan Ryan appear. They want their money, but Damian charms them into indulging in the Marquis. But Roland Bamber ambushes the place, raking it with automatic machine gun fire. He points the gun at Damian, but Gripper uses a weapon he liberated in Iraq and tasers him.
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Inside Information: Recent Competing and Comparable Books
Posted on January 9, 2013 by Ian
by Ian D Smith
Google
Although my novel Stop the World, I Want to Get On is wildly original, it’s not entirely without its influences.
These are its recent competing and comparable books.
Drew Gummerson’s Me and Mickey James (Cape, 2008)
The musical theme, the journey, and the pop group on the road. Characterisation. Being different.
Jon Courtenay Greenwood’s End of the World Blues (Gollancz, 2006)
Escape from the provincial and the mundane, plus the music.
M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing (Gollancz, 2002)
Escape, music, noir, being different.
Toby Litt’s Exhibitionism (Penguin, 2002)
Cool narrative.
Johnathon Franzen’s The Corrections (Fourth Estate, 2001)
Literary realism, life writing, emotional shifts, financial market mayhem and its social effects.
Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Picador, 2000)
Freedom from patriarchal, omniscient narratives.
Magnus Mills’s The Restraint of Beasts (HarperCollins, 1998)
Micro-economics. The gang against the odds (cf TV’s Boys From the Black Stuff). Odd humour. Characterisation.
James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (Random House, 1994)
Puritanical constraints on narrative. Odd humour.
Read Stop the World, I Want to Get On http://tiny.cc/zdojqw
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Inside Information – What Makes Stop the World, I Want to Get On New and Special?
Posted on January 8, 2013 by Ian
By Ian D Smith
Google
My novel is back on Authonomy @http://tiny.cc/zdojqw after six months rest and a new title. At its peak in 2012, it reached #26 with 100 backers. So what’s making it so popular?
It’s accessible and entertaining - literary fiction in media res.
It offers escapism, optimism and humour. On the road with the new, dead-beat generation. Wild, crazy, funny, and original.
The ingenious plot. Roland Bamber’s demands for money force four friends to flee London in an old Ford Transit. They surface on a container ship, the Jolly Condor, bound for Sicily. Unfortunately, someone has secretly cut them into a deal with Bamber, and unbeknown to them, they’re carrying heroin.
Sense of drama. Something is always going to happen in Stop the World, I Want to Get On. Jules and Damian set up a mobile disco, and impress the ship’s captain, although he jettisons them in Sicily where they’re met by armed La Guardia who discover the heroin.
Action. They escape and head for a bar where Bamber ambushes them. Surviving the ambush, they secure a gig at a naturist camp, where they meet more London escapees, and a CIA agent, Zendrowski, who’s investigating drug trafficking. He loses patience with the lack of evidence and abandons them … in the desert.
Disparate locations. An England international soccer pro, Nathan Ryan, rescues them and signs them up for his sports bar, Golden Balls, in Spain. Their gear is destroyed when England lose to Germany in the World Cup Final, and they return to London, and their old pub, the Marquis of Queensbury, which is being refurbished as a gastro-pub. They discover the basement is full of Bamber’s counterfeiting equipment. On the Marquis opening night, Bamber looms carrying an automatic rifle.
Metaphor. Suki wants to hug the socio-economic ‘tiger’. But tigers bite back, and escape from Hackney kicks off with the megalomaniacal captain of the Jolly Condor, a ship apparently sailing into oblivion. The antidote to Ayn Rand perhaps?
Humanity. It’s a positive novel about the future, friendship and personal revolutions instigated by ourselves. In a fast-moving style, Stop the World, I Want to Get On captures a struggle to make sense of the world, to survive apathy, to make space to think and seize the potential of the future. Confident, positive, uplifting work. It’s also ambitious and funny.
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Social Networking – Fifty Shades of Indifference
Posted on January 7, 2013 by Ian
Guess what? Fifty Shades made whatsername millions. So here we are in 2013, and following last year’s financial success of the novel / blog with a substantial following, agents are predictably digging themselves an even bigger mountain of boy wizardry and consensual indifference.
Here’s one agent demanding that writers have “an engagement with and following on social media such as Twitter.” So much for writing credits, get a load of my wow amazing baby names lol.
The dreary insight into suburban life behind the net curtains that is Fifty Shades, highlights just how unfashionable it will be to have any online presence in future. Remember how Angela Rippon killed scooters when her prim upright pose was mercilessly parodied by comedians.
- Choose the path of most resistance.
- Get noticed for not getting noticed.
- Avoid the stampede.
Social networking is like self-publishing. Anyone can do it, and on a positive note, it is turning people into chatterers.
Filed under: Arts, Facebook, Fiction, Social Networking, Writing | Tagged: agents, fiftyshades, literary, twitter | Leave a Comment »
A Writer’s Year – Part One
Posted on January 2, 2013 by Ian
January and February are taken up by Authonomy, the Harper Collins website for “aspiring authors: “My novel Tiger Hugs rose 600 places in December. Would you like to see what’s making people smile?” It rose 76 places in February. Going strong.
In March I complete a Weekly Artist application at Weirdyear, and submit the novel to ten agencies.
Success at Limbo Quarterly, London, via Arts Hub. They want to publish chapter one of Tiger Hugs / The Marquis.
In the pub I overhear a group of incredulous suburban mums talking about the film We Need to Talk About Kevin: “It’s a true story written like a diary, they made a film of it, about a mother who can’t bond with her son.” It’s not a true story, and I’m surprised they’ve never heard of a novel that’s been shocking people for years and has been serialised on Radio 4. It’s not a mass market novel though. People have only ever heard of mass market novels. Kevin is published by an indie – Serpent’s Tail. To me it’s an old novel. I’m amazed when people have never heard of say, Blake Morrison’s When Did You Last See Your Father when they know all about Da Vinci Code, 50 Shades and so on. Decide I should stop being surprised.
So I start a novel about suburbia and soon get over it.
April 2nd - Tiger Hugs reaches 26 (the highest ranking it ever got) and 95 backers
Some people just don’t get the joke though and I decide to never write another comedy. Where’s that suburban slasher novel I started in March.
I discover agent Simon Trewin’s website: He says, “I have worked with everyone from Boy George to Jimmy Carr” Jesus Christ! I think that’s the agent for me. There’s this bold cap statement: “I AM ALWAYS LOOKING FOR INTERESTING CREATIVE INDIVIDUALS TO COLLABORATE WITH ON ANY LEVEL. PLEASE BE IN TOUCH WITH ANY BOOK IDEAS – FICTION OR NON-FICTION – NO MATTER HOW MUCH IN THEIR INFANCY.”
Why the bold caps? Perhaps he feels drowned out and needs to shout. Anyway, he wasn’t looking.
Friday, April 06
Tiger Hugs achieves its equal highest ranking 26, with 102 backers on the 8th.
Sad day. Bye bye old clapped out Sony laptop with the keys worn off. Hello new Packard Bell.
Having said I’d never write another comedy, I stupidly launch a spoof paranormal novel Blood on the Carpathians on Authonomy. “An Italian ship, the SS Mangrelli, is wrecked off the remote island of Rathmandu in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The surviving Italian sailors make shore, but they’ve been exposed to a leaking poison that was stowed in the ship’s cargo. Sunita Malita, a beautiful dark-haired young woman living in the family castle on Rathmandu, is told by her wicked step-parents that she must never leave the grounds … cue admirer bearing gifts.” Well I thought it was funny.
A Kindle version of Tiger Hugs is released.
Go to see the Damian Hirst exhibition and miss the skull – For the Love of God. It’s outside the main exhibition, in the public space. Walk right past it believing it not to be in the exhibition. Overrated anyway. It reminds me of a day in Rome, in a hurry to get to the airport, and dodging the closed roads and crowds, I take a back street and head out with my suitcase. At the end of every blocked off street, there’s the usual Italian armed cop gesticulating wildly. Thinking I must have trespassed, I hurry on. After passing the tenth madly waving cop, I give in and have a look at the cause of the fuss, and there’s the old Pope John Paul racing past on his popemobile. Easily done, walking right past something you should have looked at. Sadly, no Latin excitement at Tate Modern, just the usual north European cold concrete and miserable reports on Damian’s butterflies, which were, of course, brilliant.
Launch my short story collection on authonomy Jack Kerouac Eats Here. Just the usual, a Christmas tree with the ability to kill, and Dean Moriarty dying in the snow. That sort of thing.
May – Limbo publish chapter one of Tiger Hugs as promised. So pleased to see this little success. I do a lot of abuse reports on Authonomy. Even my Good News thread gets trolled. No effect though. They still do it. It makes me think of quitting Authonomy. So, I think Tiger Hugs should at least be closer to what I set out to do at the start. I change the cover and hack down the opening. Cara Gold’s great review makes me realise I should take it more seriously. I drop the Comedy tag, and reinstate the moderate language. A bit of progress with a new look, but then a man comes to fix the guttering. That’s how it goes.
However, I do eventually change Tiger Hugs to Neutrino Jive with music / dance/ sci-fi / noir. A new cover in black and white, with 80s deco text, and silhouette. That should work. It doesn’t.
End of Part One
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Where is the Light? II
Posted on November 24, 2012 by Ian
This is Dartmoor in very low November light. Lightened and colourized in PSE, clipped in Paint.
A minute later, there was complete darkness.
Here’s the original photo of a patch of sunlight.
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Edge of the Land
Posted on September 17, 2012 by Ian
http://www.saatchionline.com/iandsmith
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