Fried Fiction

The Boy That Played Chequers was inspired by a lucid dream. Almost wet. Earth (that's the name of the chequered boy) reaches nirvana during a game of chequers and disappears from his American homestay to form a religious cult in the Thai jungle. I went wild with it. Joe Dylan from Bangkok Express and Fun City investigates. He finds a community of naked utiopians in the Thai jungle. It's like The Beach on acid. And white whiskey. I wrote the first few chapters and posted an excerpt on the excellent Writers Beat website. Readers at that site kindly nominated it for the writer's choice quartly award. It came second. My second nomination to come, ahem, second.

David Wallace, writer, kindly offered these words.

"Excellent! probably the best piece I've read on the forum, don't hang about posting this get to it man I really think you've got something here. Get it finished, send me a copy and get it submitted."


Hmmm, ego not in check; I decided to, as he suggested, keep writing. The book wrote itself. I was sharp at the time. Off the sauce. Wrote a milllion words in 2010. Most of it published, for better or worse. Mostly worse. Submitted the piece to Silkworm press in Thailand who politely reclined. Thais are very polite about rejection. Cloaks and daggars. Mostly daggars. Never the one to feel the sting of rejection. Much. I sent the first thousand words to Fried Fiction. They accepted the first chapter and paid twenty-five dollars to publish it as a seralization. I'll spend that money on nuts for my squirrel. Not so needy now, am I Mr Acorn tree?

Thanks to David at Fried Fiction for his support. I really believe in this book. You can find the first part of the story by logging onto fried fiction.com.

Cheers.

Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules for writing fiction

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1.Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2.Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3.Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4.Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5.Start as close to the end as possible.

6.Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7.Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8.Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I'll add my own one - If you have an internet conncection where you write, your output will suffer

Currently Reading.... James Hadley Chase.

James Hadley Chase was one of the more successful -- and notorious -- writers of crime fiction in England during the 1930s and 1940s. He was born Rene Brabazon Raymond in London in 1906, the son of Colonel Francis Raymond, of the Indian Army. In accordance with his father's wishes, Raymond was supposed to pursue a career in science. But after a considerable amount of education, he abandoned the family home at age 18, striking out on his own. Over the next few years, across the 1920s, he earned a living working in bookstores and selling encyclopedias, among other activities. A marriage in 1933 gave him a wife and son to provide for, and may have spurred him to try his hand in the potentially more lucrative field of writing. He read the 1934 James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice and decided that crime fiction offered some real possiblities. It wasn't long after this that he seized upon the story of American criminal Ma Barker and her gang, which had captivated journalists every bit as much as tales of John Dillinger, Bonnie Parker, and Clyde Barrow. With an American slang dictionary to assist him, Chase turned these sources of inspiration into No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), credited to Rene Raymond and authored over a period of six weekends. The book also owed a considerable amount to William Faulkner's notorious novel Sanctuary, the first of several instances in which he would be accused of deriving his work from better-established works of fiction.

The novel took the London literary establishment by storm, with its vivid accounts of violent crime and lustful sexuality, especially the attraction between the kidnap victim and her captor. Most establishment critics -- author/critic Graham Greene was a notable exception -- were appalled at the book, but it did become a best-seller. No Orchids for Miss Blandish (which was also published as The Virgin and The Villain) might have been even more controversial had it not been for the fact that Raymond published two further crime novels that year, which only further enflamed critical opinion, and the outbreak of the Second World War, which created a new set of crises and priorities for British society. Raymond joined the Royal Air Force as a commissioned officer, rising to the rank of squadron leader (equivalent of a major in the U.S. Army Air Forces) and serving in an administrative capacity. Among his other activities, he edited the RAF Journal.

The Second World War slackened Raymond's fiction output, but despite the relative handful of works he issued, he remained a popular figure, and No Orchids for Miss Blandish became one of the biggest selling novels in England during this period. It took on a further life of its own as a play on London's West End, which starred Robert Newton as Slim Grisson and became an equally controversial motion picture, produced by Renowned Films.