Ris Business!

Monday 10:25 p.m.
I’m gonna give you some free advice
Never cross a picket line
Don't put anything smaller than an elbow in your ear
Play the long game
Study the odds
Read the form

I hope this hasn't been unduly upsetting, but I really liked this wee poem at Ion's dad's memorial thingy.


At the book launch at Newton Mearns, the secret agent handed me back the copy of the novel and I've just finished doing the re-edits, answering the little problems, the typos and whatnot.


Before the MaDMax kicked in, I was being asked by this person about writing at a party last weekend, as in how to be a writer, what should I do, etc. Having just spent some of my last twenty quid on King Ludwig Weissbier and having no money and no prospects as usual, well, perhaps I'm the last person anybody should ask about how to be a successful anything.


If any of the Masai Warriors, Alien Creatures from Outer Space, or anyone in the Australian Ladies Volleyball Team want to know how to become J. K. Rowling, maybe they should go and ask J. K. Rowling.


My advice was terrific. First of all, you should be able to write, but that's not all that unusual, despite the best efforts of the school teachering basturns. You can teach yourself to spell and punctuate and everything. Of course, you can't teach yourself to be bright ... you have to be a bit bright. Then, get a jobbie as a school librarian and read all the books. Write three books and expect every one of them to be crap. That should take you a couple of years. By this time you should have found out something about markets, etc. Like, what sells? What kind of things sell? This is the short training to be famous and rich.


Then you write the book that is going to work, or at least, the first three chapters. No, you should write the book again and expect it still to be crap. Don't do the first three chapters thing yet because that's cynical.


Then you write your best letter to Julia Churchill at Darley Anderson (find it on the web or the Writers and Artists, etc) and say you are coming to London to do some research on how to be a famous novelist, and could you meet her for ten minutes, please. It's these people's job to meet people. Someone good will give you the ten minutes.


At this meeting, you should imagine that you are gambling against someone at cards, for instance. There is a pile of money before you and you are going to move that money in your direction, but the josephine has a better grip on that money at that time than you have. You have to start moving the money towards your end of the table.


I can't be arsed. I don't care. I never really could.


But then there's the kiddo. She's just like her old dear apart from the hair colouring and the bad temper. Then, I'm thinking she wants to do something really stupid, like make glass objects and paint them. This is just like moi! You should be from the evil bourgeois to have ambitions such as this. So I'm supposed to find the money for this. So I am. This is where the failure is not allowed. I should really make some money so I can give it to her, so she can choose to make glass objects and paint them, or not.


I need some motivation here, Jack. I'd really like to be taken to a closed psychiatric ward, or any jail besides where there was some solitary confinement.


They don't need the money, Hotboy. If the money arrives, which it shouldn't, buy her a kiln. If it doesn't, which it won't, ask yourself how much your forefathers and mother s came to these shores ready to toady up to these evil bourgeois basturns. The main thing is to understand non-self and emptiness, and yet don't bend the knee!