King Adz: Why flying and small talk do not mix
Mostly my life is sweet, but sometimes it’s just fucking weird.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’ve worked my ass off for years to get where I am right now and I wouldn’t swap it for the world. But however you look at it, the life of a writer does not run like the average day-to-day. Sometimes I’m sat here in my office in deepest, darkest Batley doing exactly this (typing) all day and sometimes I’m schlepping around the world looking for the goods. But somewhere in the middle are the little gems of down-time, like this:
So I’ve been away in some foreign city working my tokhes off and I’m sat on the plane (exit row seats – extra leg room) coming back to England, and some 30-something person sits down in the seat next to me and we start chatting. After a while they’re gonna ask what I do and I will kinda go quiet, as the first thing that goes through my mind is that people like to talk shit on planes, and that I don’t want this peep to think that I’m one of those motherfuckers. So after a beat I’ll blurt out what I do, and then wait for the follow-on questions. Whenever you tell people you are a writer, the first thing they ask is, “Published?”. And when you tell them you’re just finishing your fourth book and have already begun the fifth, they will ask another question: “How did it sell?”
To me this is just weird: people know too much these days. They think they know about how every-fucking-thing works, or that they have the right to know. They think they are media savvy, but generally speaking they are not and, this is not necessarily always a good thing anyway (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing). What does it matter how many books I have sold? Surely what matters is what the book is about and did I step up and write the best thing I could? But no, fuck that, it’s all about how many units I shifted and if my work is connected to anyone famous, or been ‘authenticated’ by someone famous. After all, people like Jeffrey Archer and Jeremy Clarkson have sold a ton of books and – in my humble opinion – they are a couple of complete cocks, with nothing to say, no message to give (apart from reiterating that they’re cocks) and making no contribution whatsoever to literature. End of story.
My back-story is that I spent years upon fucking years in the ’90s writing books that never saw the light of day. I amassed a folder of rejection letters from agents and publishers. My third novel sat on the Faber & Faber publishing list for a year before being dropped like a bad habit, and this meant I had to turn my back on writing as I had two small children to feed. I had made a pact with myself that if the book (The Eternal Duppy) didn’t get published I would go back to being an art director, which is what I had learnt to do at St. Martin’s (for my sins) before being expelled. But deep, deep down all I’ve ever really wanted to do was to write. The first book I wrote was The Computer Adventurer’s Handbook (ZX Spectrum) in 1983. I was 12 at the time and I have recently been re-united with the manuscript. Typed in green and hand-illustrated in pencil, it was a work of genius at the time, but 28 years later it is just another book ‘written’ by an enthusiastic kid.
But it was my first attempt at a book and I am still very happy to skim through it. No it wasn’t published and there are only two copies in the world but it is a fucking masterpiece, all right?
Peace+Love to you all (except people bugging me on planes…)
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