Lookalikee! Peter Andre and Antony Worrall Thompson…eh?
Posted by Jacko | Filed under Lookalikees
Another lookalikee sent in! This one is from an artist buddy of mine, Jeremy Lewis Cope, and was one that when he told me, I seriously couldn’t see. It was only when he morphed a picture, like he did for Supernanny and Ron Jeremy, that I saw how similar the two are. I don’t think that these pictures are something that Jed wants to be remembered for, but he’s bloody brilliant at them!
Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you Peter Andre and Antony Worral Thompson!
Brilliant, isn’t it? Fantastic lookalike! If you have any lookalikes, then drop me a mail at jackhammer@mark-jackman.com and I’ll stick ‘em on me blog.
Tags: antony worral thompson, jeremy lewis cope, jordan, lookalike, Lookalikees, morph, peter andre
Review: “Pit Stop” by Ben Larken
Posted by Jacko | Filed under Jacko's Reviews
I was hoping to have reviewed more books by now, but, alas, no. I’ve been caught up writing A Fistful of Rubbers. Now that is done, or at least, a draft has been handed into my publisher, I am free once more to roam, to play, and to frolic.
To begin my season of frolicking, I am going to review an award winner. Pit Stop is Ben Larken’s debut novel, and it won best horror in the Eppie Awards, 2009. The Eppies recognise outstanding achievement in the world of electronic publishing (Pit Stop is available both electronically and as a paperback), and to win one with your first novel is something special indeed. So, I am going to read it and I am going to review this “award winner.” And let me warn you, Ben Larken, I am one jealous bitch…
…who was very impressed, very entertained and ultimately enthralled by your work.
Pit Stop follows the journey of ten individuals…actually, no, first line in and already I’ve misguided you. Pit Stop is not about a journey, at all. It’s a story of waiting; ten people, waiting for their last voyage, a one-way ticket to Hell. Impressively, everyone is dead from page one. It’s good to start on a high.
Ten souls wait in purgatory, and they’re waiting, strangely, in a service station. The Pit Stop, on Route 66 in Arizona, is somewhere I really wouldn’t fancy a coffee. The trip to Hell is not a pleasant thought, and if I was to use my deepest and darkest grey matter to concoct an image of the being that would guide me to the only place worse than Great Yarmouth, I’d be thinking spikes, tentacles, mucus, blood and possibly a little faeces. Bearing in mind the horrible nature of Larken’s warped mind, I was expecting a monstrosity from the very bowels of Hell…oh yeah, that’s sort of obvious, as it technically is something from the bowels of Hell. Still, I was expecting something a little scarier than a bus. However, as I got to know the bus and its psychopathic, ultra-powerful driver, Ramsey, I hoped that the bus would stop being so damned nasty. The bus and its driver are desperate to take the ten occupants of the diner straight to Lucifer and Pit Stop is the tale of their bid for freedom.
Pit Stop is unquestionably horror. It is gruesome, vile and disturbing in its imagery and Larken makes sure the reader not just sees the horrific violence, they feel it too. On top of that, with a set of characters lined up to be royally buggered in Hell, you know you are going to be in the same company as some rather unsavoury beasts. Paedophiles, murderers and prostitutes are the order of the day, but we have some heroes to make this a wonderfully eclectic mix of the damned. Scott Alders and Dustin Calloway are the boys you’ll be rooting for. Dustin’s a bad man with a talent for avoiding any heat that’s coming down on him (death not included). However, his heart is questionably in the right place. Scott Alders is the interesting one. He’s a straight down the line cop who puts his job first. From the start, you’ll be wondering what Office Alders did to earn a trip to Hell, possibly my only point of contention in the story.
Is Pit Stop scary? Pit Stop is a slasher tale with a beautifully evil stalker, Ramsey, who is roguely charismatic for someone who doesn’t really say much, and whose main role is to maim, torment and torture. Personally, I don’t find slashers particularly scary, even though I love them, and I get my kicks from the inventiveness of the violence and my affinity to the characters. Pit Stop had me routing for Scott and Dustin who are wonderfully linked. The book also appealed to my carnal instincts and my desire for bloodlust was well and truly satisfied. I desperately wanted to see some of the characters torn into a thousand gory pieces and Mr. Larken gave the mob what they wanted. To answer my initial question, I didn’t find Pit Stop particularly scary, but that wasn’t in the slightest bit detrimental to my enjoyment of the book (incidentally, I’ve just picked up his latest book, The Hollows, and read the first chapter and that scared the bejesus out of me. I’m hooked already).
Is Pit Stop worth reading? Oh yes, undoubtedly so. It’s an exceptionally good read from start to finish and Ben Larken should be extremely proud of what he has achieved. If you read this, Ben, not many fictional bad guys have quite grabbed my attention as much as Ramsey, the bus driver, and if you ever base a book solely on him, I’ll camp outside the bookstore, the night before, to get hold of it.
Listen out for Ben Larken. I won’t be the least bit surprised if you hear the name in the future.
Pit Stop is available direct from the publisher, LL-Publications, and is also available from Amazon (UK and USA
Find out more about Ben Larken on his website.
Tags: Ben Larken, e-book, Epic, Eppie, horror, Jacko, Jacko: Author, LL-Publications, mark jackman, paperback, Pit Stop, Ramsey, review
Getting Published
Posted by Jacko | Filed under Jacko: Author
This is the follow-up to my article Writing’s Brilliant. The title of my last piece wasn’t devilishly clever or witty like this one, and that was the intention. Writing is simply fun, and if you write for the pure enjoyment of creativity, you will find it a fulfilling venture. I also alluded to the business of authoring and how making a living is a tough ol’ game, hence why I have a day job where I use not a single cell of my creative grey matter.
However, you can’t go from writing to authoring in one fell swoop. There’s quite a big hurdle in the way, and one that is probably the most frustrating of all: getting published. I’m hoping that this article doesn’t come across as “Oh, I’ve been published, don’t you know, and this is how you might be able to do it.” If it is, I’m a shitter writer than I thought. I’ve had one fiction book published, The Great Right Hope. Book 2 in the trilogy should be out next year, and the final part is being written when I’m not doing stuff like this or working, so I’m hardly an expert on the matter. I’ll just tell you what I think is the best course of action and how I managed it.
Make sure your story’s good.
“Of course it’s good, my mum thought it was mint!” I’m sure she did. You need an honest viewpoint from someone who is not afraid to kick you in the nuts and watch as you collapse to the ground waiting for Hell to swallow you up. That’s why I gave my first ever draft of my first ever story to the missus to read.
You must have seen the auditions on X-Factor or American Idol when tone deaf, scabby horrible scrotes scream the house down with bastardisations of Britney, Robbie, Madge, Whitney, etc, and, then, when the judges slate them, these delusional idiots are genuinely, and I mean genuinely, shocked.
The mother of the scrote usually kicks off and security is forced to interject. Every time I see it, and it happens at least ten times a series, I can never quite believe it. Surely they know they stink? Surely their parents’ rose-tinted glasses aren’t that rosy? My old man sees it as his God-given right to tell me that I am shit at everything, and he does this with gusto and twenty-nine years of practise (although, for some reason, he’s got it into his head that I excel at swimming????). I wouldn’t have it any other way.
But that’s human nature isn’t it? “Everyone is a hypocrite except for me.” It is hard to see your own flaws, and that’s why you need people who will read your work from a completely independent viewpoint. People as in plural, as opinions are like arseholes, and they’re often dirty (I think that’s the saying). It is vital that someone tells you if your novel needs more work, or there are flaws, holes or rubbish characters. Hopefully, they’ll give you some positive feedback, too. You need to give the manuscript the best chance possible when you submit it.
Do you remember the first time?
The art of writing is a little bit like sex. Remember the first time you had sex? The first draft of your first story is going to be similar, and unless your story is half a page long and the hero wakes up and it is all a dream, it probably isn’t what you were hoping for. Even though the thirty second roll in the sack was technically rubbish, you still enjoyed yourself and were immensely proud, but you knew that you needed to practise before trying something real freaky. It’s the same with writing. You have to practise and learn grammar, tenses, building atmosphere, etc, and anything outside your comfort zone before you take on the publishers. To put it another way, anyone can do the pretty ones.
If you can do that you can do anything!
What I’m trying to say is that you should hone your skills as a writer, so that when you eventually submit your novel you want the guy or gal reading your first chapter thinking you’re technically sound. Then, they can concentrate on the story. If the reviewer turns to page one and notices basic mistakes, they are going to assume that you can’t write, or tell a story…even if you can.
As you get better at your art, you’ll constantly see ways to improve what you have written. Sometimes it’s good to finish the draft and forget about it for a month, before having a look at it fresh. You’ll pick out mistakes that you skimmed over, a habit that is unavoidable. Finding mistakes in books from big publishing houses is not uncommon and those would have been edited and proofed countless times, certainly more times and more expertly done than my attempts, sitting at my computer with The Best Rock Album Ever volume XXII blasting in my ears.
First impressions are everything
So you’ve got a great story and you’ve got a well-written manuscript. Job done. Sadly not. You ain’t the only one.
When sending out a manuscript, there’s no point sending it somewhere where it’s doomed before it arrives through the post. I wrote a novel full of gratuitous violence, torturous vampires and a lots of attempted sex (yes - attempted sex), so it wasn’t worth me sending it to Christian publishers or publishers specialising in biographies, evem though my own history is chequered with impressive quantities of attempted sex. Contact publishers who deal with your sort of thang. Don’t take a scattergun approach. You’ll know what they publish from their website. Opposites don’t usually attract in the publishing world.
Sometimes they do. I’m conscious that my last two articles on writing have included pictures of weird animal sex.
You need to send the right submission. What do I mean by this? Each publisher will have a submission criteria on their website and it’s there for a reason. It shows them that we can follow instructions and are at least half-intelligent. It also presents our work in a way they want to review it, making it easier for them. The first way to get bypassed is to not follow these, usually simple, instructions. It can be a pain in the arse to write slightly different submissions every time, but that’s the way it is. Publishers are really good at supplying information about what they want. It’s in both parties’ best interest that you send a good submission as you don’t want to waste your own time and publishers have a pile of manuscripts that can be seen from space.
The covering letter is an important part of the submission and this needs to be as exciting as your opening chapter. The reviewer has to want to read the story, otherwise they probably won’t ever bother looking at it. Be confident, but not cocky.
Get knocked down, and then get up again
Was something Chumbawamba unfortunately told us in the 90s. You will have read the stories of J.K. Rowling being turned down eight hundred times, etc, and, most people can expect a number of disappointing emails and letters. Keep at it, making sure you’re sending it to the right places and just try, try again. The first place I ever submitted a manuscript to was MacMillan New Writing. They take on unsolicited manuscripts and is an instant ticket to the big time, so I thought I’d give it a go. My rejection letter, which was swiftly deleted in a raging keyboard battering, said that my work was not accepted because…it then listed every single possible reason under the sun, from my “manuscript may have been rejected because we aren’t taking submissions” to “it was shit.” I have no idea why it got rejected, and that’s often the way. It’s frustrating, but if you want it, you have to be persistent. Don’t take it personally.
How did I do it?
I’m only speaking from my own experiences, and it’s worth trawling the web for guidance from as many authors around the world as you can find. There are a hell of a lot of people out there who know a lot more than me…but they’re not as hunky. Other writers have got lucky first time with massive publishing houses; some have taken the e-book route (my publisher issued The Great Right Hope as an e-book, six months before releasing it as a paperback); some authors self-publish; some have signed up with agents, first; some, unfortunately, never get published, but remember, if you love writing, is that necessarily a bad thing? I love playing golf, but I’m not planning to win any Majors soon.
I tried about twenty-ish agents and publishers before I got lucky with LL-Publications. “Lucky”? Yes. You need a certain amount of luck. I can’t think of many occupations where success isn’t partially determined by being in the right place at the right time. Jim Brown at LL-Publications saw the potential in the story and the humour was all there, even if not all the correct punctuation was, so he gave me some advice on how to improve my manuscript. This turned out to be a complete re-write and a huge amount of work, but I got there, in the end. I wrote in Writing’s Brilliant that it doesn’t matter about the grammar and spelling and shit, and that is true when you start as I believe the important thing is to create. If you get held up with every other sentence, writing and re-writing, you are going to get sick of it, dead quickly. It would have been less work in the long run if I had learnt a bit more about commas and things, before starting, but it would have quelled my creative juices.
I built my blog and website after I was published, but this is something that is good to do before you try your luck. It gives publishers or agents a chance to find out about you and your style. You’ll need the content, such as the biography, for the covering letter, so you may as well stick it on a webpage.
I hope this was helpful. Best of bloody British getting published, and if you do, remember to plug my work if you make it big. Hope you do…but if you and I are competing for a Christmas number one spot, then let me tell you this, I will cut you. I will cut you up real bad.
Any questions or comments drop them on the bottom of the blog, or mail me at jackhammer@mark-jackman.com
Tags: advice, american idol, anyone can do the pretty ones, author, Britney, cats, dogs, fiction, Jacko, Jim Brown, LL-Publications, macmillan, Madge, manuscript, mark jackman, novel, published, Robbie, sarah jessica parker, submission, The Great Right Hope, virgin, Whitney, writer, x factor
Win a Sony E-Book Reader!
Posted by Jacko | Filed under Competition Time
Winning stuff is bloody fantastic.
I’ll tell you something else which is bloody fantastic, and that’s The Great Right Hope. Yeah, OK, so I wrote it, and I’m biased, but there really is no other book like it. It’s about a drunk Northerner who punches vampires in the face. How good is that?
If you haven’t read it then
a) You should have but b) I forgive you.
Actually, it’s for the best that you didn’t as now you can win a £180 quid ebook reader, and all you have to do to enter is buy the paperback or ebook between the 12th December and the 12th January.
LL-Publications are running the competition and you can buy any one of their titles to enter, and you can enter as many times as you like.
Competition details are here: http://www.ll-publications.com/win_a_sony_reader.html
You can buy The Great Right Hope from Amazon. Links to both .com and .co.uk are at the bottom of my webpage dedicated to TGRH: http://www.mark-jackman.com/GRH/GRH_main.php
or buy direct from LL- Publications: http://www.ll-publications.com/greatrighthope.html
Even if you don’t win, you still get to read one of the funniest books in fiction. It’s certainly one of the funniest books I’ve written.
Everyone likes winning stuff.
Picture depicts what Usain Bolt might look like if he won a Sony ebook reader after buying The Great Right Hope.
Tags: Competition, e, ebook, in it to win it, Jacko: Author, Jim Bowen's sciatica, Jim Brown, LL-Publications, mark jackman, paperback, PRS-300, sony, the fastest man on the planet, The Great Right Hope, Usain Bolt, win
Writing’s Brilliant
Posted by Jacko | Filed under Jacko: Author
Writing’s brilliant. I mean that with every ounce of sincerity that I can muster. I love it. I love creating things, and with a notepad and a pen, I can do just that. I can create anything. I can be anything.
How powerful is that? To really enjoy writing, you need to be the characters. You have to put yourself in the situation and act it out, imagining what would happen to you. This is how you make characters real, even when it is quite obvious that they could never exist in society. Adding that little bit of the real human element gives the ridiculous: substance. It’s fun too, like make-believe for grown-ups (downside is that last night I had a dream that the Predator smashed my head in with a blunt instrument - and that was a normal dream for me).
The technicalities of writing are something that you have to learn, or rather, “one has to learn.” I’m writing for enjoyment, right now. I don’t have to pander to technicalities. I am writing for my own pleasure whilst getting my opinion across in a, hopefully, friendly and amusing manner, and that gives me total and utter freedom. I can write what I want.
Necrophiliac homosexual ducks.
See.
I think the duck watching it all is the real sicko. This really happens, by the way. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/mar/08/highereducation.research
Back to my topic. Writing is complete freedom and, with a little imagination, a writer can live the life of anything and anyone, blah-di-blah.
Now, here’s the thing, I wasn’t a writer, although I do have a GCSE in English language and English Literature. So what did the fifteen-year-old tit version of myself learn from English classes?
1) Jane Eyre is really boring and really, really long.
2) The bird on the Roman Polanski version of Romeo and Juliet had wazza jugs (a forbidden fruit for gentlemen over 16 years of age - she was only 15 when she appeared nude in the film!).
3) Roman Polanksi is a diddler.
4) Girls in my class didn’t find Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts very sexy.
I picked up a pen and paper again, at twenty-four, for no other reason than to give writing a go. Why not? And, if I can do it, you can do it.
Out of all the arts, writing is the most accessible. Even though I am a master at drawing an ejaculating penis, I wouldn’t consider myself an artist. I’m in a band, but I’d hardly call myself a musician. I can invent extravagant lies and hide the hideous truth behind a complex web of smoke and mirrors when lying to my missus about the reason I smell of horse urine, but I’d hardly call myself an actor. You may argue that to write, you need to hone the skills of sentence construction, and so on; and so forf;.! And, I guess that is true to a certain extent, but only to do it well. Consider the title of this piece “Writing’s Brilliant.” Many people would have considered using a witty pun or something to catch your eye, but that’s not what I’m trying to get at. You don’t need flashy crap to enjoy writing. In fact, you can write badly and still create wonder and amazement and ANYONE can do it.
I’ll show you. Here’s some of that writing stuff.
“Gary can smash planets.”
In four words I have created a shit sentence and a being of gargantuan and monstrous proportions. This…Gary…has the ability to break planets. What is this being? Can he break them with his bare hands? Has he invented a doomsday device that can end the world? Whatever it is, one thing is certain, and should be heeded at all costs: Do not mess with Gary.
It doesn’t matter that the sentence is shit. Who cares? What matters is that I have written four words and I have already started my adventure and I can take it anywhere. Gary’s mate, Neil, is a Lightning God, whilst his cousin, Denzel, sells insurance. What a story that would make.
Creative thinking is for anyone and everyone, and writing is the easiest way to exercise it. Someone once sat down and came up with this concept
Things, honestly, don’t get much better than that. Admit it, before Dinoriders hit your television, you fantasised about sitting on top of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which had laser cannons attached, blasting your enemies into a million pieces. See, you can do it!
Now, authoring is a different game, altogether. I consider a fiction author to be someone who makes a living from writing (my definition is questionable). I’ve had one book published, with the two sequels of The Great Right Hope trilogy on the way, but, on a night out, when I am asked by curious, curvy, eighteen-year-old sex kittens what I do for a living I always say “I’m a scientist, but I also write.” Science is a cool profession, by the way. Ghostbusters is awesome!
If you write simply because you wish to become the next J.K Rowling or Dan Brown then you’re probably going to be disappointed. Say you get lucky and get a deal with a big publisher who decides to release your book as a hardcover; you get extra lucky and they print 5000 copies (first Harry Potter run for Philosopher’s Stone was 500 copies), and then you get extra, extra lucky and sell all the books in the first year. If the hardback retails at £15, you can expect a 10% royalty. Go Go Gadget-G.C.S.E-maths! 5000 x 1.50 = £7500. If that took a year to research, write, edit and proof then, based on a 35 hour week, four weeks holiday = £4.46 an hour. Minimum wage is £5.80. Not saying it’s impossible, but you ain’t getting rich writing one book.
That’s authoring. That’s different. That’s bloody hard. Looking back through this little ditty, I realise that I have started the construction of a “shit sandwich.” It’s a non-corporate expression based on the ultimate in corporation man management. The shit sandwich is something for the yearly review: start with something good and positive, then hit the employee with the reason they are getting a paycut, but finish on a high, so they go out of the meeting happy. “You kept your desk very tidy this year. Keep it up.”
I’ve just done the same thing. I’ve told you how great writing is, but then the shit in the sandwich was the “Authoring Ain’t Easy, Baby” bit, and now I have to finish on a high.
You’ve kept your desk tidy this year.
I need to do better.
Here goes.
YOU HAVE THE POOOOOWWWEERRRR!
Or rather,
USTED TIENE EL PODER! That’s even better in Spanish?
How ridiculous is the whole concept of He-Man? Someone created it. Someone let the mind run riot and their grey matter exploded in an orgy of homoerotic strangeness. You can do that to, and before you give me that rubbish about not being able to do anything creative, answer this: how do you know? Have you ever tried? Just let go and see where that brain of yours takes you?
Just try it. Your personality will come out and things will flow. It doesn’t matter if it’s any good. It doesn’t matter if you don’t use punctuation. You can stick that all in at the end. Actually, don’t just put all the full stops and commas at the end of the story, that’s not what I mean. I mean you can learn the art later, but first, you need to enjoy what it is to write and rediscover the imagination of your childhood and just give it a go. What’s the worst that can happen?
Oh yeah.
Tags: author, battecat, creative, doomsday, duck, fiction, George Lucas, ghostbusters, he-man, homoerotic, homosexual, Howard The Duck, inspector gadget, Lighning god, man-at-arms has a small one, mark jackman, necrophilia, orco, predator, spain, The Great Right Hope, Tyrannosaurus rex, write
