Etc Etc Amen

[Gordon Neill]

I just had one of those conicidence things. I was in the middle of reading this thread, when my postman shoved someting through my door. Upon opening the mysterious package, I found it to be a copy of 'Etc Etc Amen'. What are the chances of that? Of all the houses in all the towns in all the world, he walks up to mine. To cap it all, neither of us looks like Ingrid Bergman. I tried to run after him but, by a remarkable coincidence, he turned out to be an even faster runner than me. By coincidence I then remembered that I was still wearing my pyjamas and returned indoors to the exact same house which I had left. I've now read the first word and enjoyed it. 'August' turns out to be the month in which my daughter was born...

In other words, more seriously, our brains are wired to look for patterns, for connections. We're programmed to impose structure on randomness.

Usually this is essential to our survival (we say something stupid, our loved one hits us with a rolling pin.... we eventually learn to avoid saying something stupid and just think it). But it often just picks up random coincidence. We look at the clouds and we see a horsey. We listen to Trout Mask Replica and we could swear we heard a tune. Our lives are full of an infinite number of potential coincidences. Virtually none of them ever happen and we immediately forget what never happened.

We just remember the extremely rare occurrences when 'something' happened and, being us, immediately try to attach some significance to it. 'Gosh', we think, 'maybe we could start a new religion.'

[howard male]

Now, you wouldn't be making fun of KUUism now, would you, Gordon? As the first KUU non-commandment says 'You Can Laugh' - You can laugh with us, at us, or at yourself. All laughter is welcome except for the evil cackle of the mad scientist. I think that makes KUUism fairly unique in the pantheon of philosophies /religions.

Of course I agree completely with every word you have just written, but I also think that rationalism can distort perception just as religious fervour can. It is impossible for us to step outside the way our culture has hardwired our brains, just as it's impossible for us to see any more than the limited spectrum of gaudy colours our eyes are equipped to communicate to our brains. Do hallucinogenic drugs open the doors of perception or do they distort them? I think you will find that 'Etc Etc Amen' leaves the reader to decide on which side their holy bread is buttered.

[Dominic]

On Wednesday, or even the early hours of Thursday, I was telling Howard about Manual by Daren King, which for some reason I had started reading instead of Etc Etc Amen.

The very next evening I was reading Manual on the bus home and a character says "I collect coincidences. I'm writing a book."

[howard male]

Now, this is getting silly - two minutes ago I'd finally gotten round to looking up 'Manuel' on Amazon having opened my notebook and found were Dominic had written the details down on Wednesday evening, then my email inbox bell dinged, and there was a message telling me someone had put something up under this topic.

[howard male]

PS

But now of course I'll have to go back a few internet pages and order the thing!

[howard male]

PPS

Job done! A brand new copy (apparently) for 1p!

[Dominic]

Job done! A brand new copy (apparently) for 1p!

Hope you think it's worth it! Not so much quirky as odd.

[nigel]

delete the zero sales now howard as i bought the book. a page turner and one of those books that leaves an afterthought in your head. watch out for those nudges!

[howard male]

Nigel wrote -

delete the zero sales now howard as i bought the book

Thanks Nigel, and welcome to the forum. But don't worry. Sales have doubled from two copies to four copies in the last couple of weeks, so as long as they continue to keep doubling at the same rate...

But seriously, I should point out to potential buyers (and even anyone who is thinking about selling a book on Lulu.com) that I only get £2.50 from each book sold, and I don't even get that until my sales go above ten copies. And ten copies is a sales figure which is, quite frankly, unimaginable to me at this moment in time.

It's quite a neat little sales trick Lulu have going here, because copies I buy myself for promotional purposes don't count (I have to pay £7.50 per book, all of which goes to Lulu). And if we imagine that most 'publishing' done here is vanity publishing, where the author probably just gives copies to relatives and friends and has no means of publicising their book, it's quite feasible that Lulu.com will get to keep the percentage most authors are owed until the end of time, if they only manage to sell, say, half a dozen books.

It may not seem much, but there are millions of folk trying to shift their books on this website and I'm fairly convinced that it's extremely rare for a book to be sold to someone just browsing the site.

[howard male]

I dropped in on my local bookshop this afternoon, which is owned by the first reader of 'Etc Etc Amen', Jonathan Main. He told me of an increasingly common KUU-incidence he’s been experiencing which involves him deciding to remove old stock from his limited shelf space, only to have someone come in and buy that particular non-selling book just before he gets round to removing it.

The other day he was amused to notice a 2004 supermarket wine guide looking ashamed of itself in the cookery section; was there another bookshop in the land that still had this shoddy item on its shelves? He doubted it. Jonathan was just about to bin it, but got distracted. Half an hour later a woman brought it up to the counter.

‘Are you really sure you want that?" this honest bookseller inquired incredulously. ‘It’s four years old.’

But the woman wouldn’t be dissuaded from her purchase, and went away perfectly happy.

[Dayna]

A couple years ago, I happened to have the TV on when the Grammys were on, which I never watch anymore because they just bore me like crazy. I was listening to music that had nothing to do with what was on TV, but I was feeling very bored with a lot of things. So, that night, I was flipping through the channels, & caught a glimps of a weird-looking green guy playing guitar in his underwear. I just happened to get curious enough to take off my headphones & turn up the sound on the TV.
I still wasn't interested enough to keep listening. That's what kind of mood I was in. I actually turned it off, then flipped to something else. Went back again. I didn't even hear much of the music at all, but somehow it got lodged in my brain just enough that I suddenly got this very powerful urge to find out more about it. I ended up finding out it was Gorillaz, & then Damon Albarn, found out about Charlie, & ended up here, discovering even more things & people than I had ever dreamed of before. What an amazing coincedence this was!

I dream about London non-stop. Today I went to my Mom's house, where my nephew also was staying for the day, & they decided they wanted to watch a movie. I wasn't in a very cheerful mood for something like that, but I just let them do what they wanted. It turned out to be Garfield, which happened to have beautiful pictures of London & the Castle.

[howard male]

To be honest, Dayna, I'd just call that a chain of events rather than a KUU-incidence. For it to be truly remarkable there has to be unusual elements involved. Mr Albarn was no doubt all over the TV at the time, and his cartoon characters were designed to grab peoples' attention. So that the fact that you eventually got drawn to investigate, and then ended up at Charlie's website, is a nice story but not a KUU-incidence.

In my novel KUUists try to remain relatively objective so they are very strict about what they call a KUU-incidence. For example, a favourite 'strange thing that happened' that people often mention involves them thinking about their mother (or anyone close) and then their mother phones them minutes later. "I was just thinking about you!" They exclaim, amazed. "And then you phoned."

But if you think about it, you probably think about your mother hundreds of times a day. But the only time you remember you thought about her, is the time the phone rang. So someone phoning when you've just been thinking about them, is just a banal coincidence rather than a mini-miracle KUU-incidence!

But I did read a (possibly) true story once about a man who was passing a phone box. The phone was ringing and so he answered it. It turned out to be his wife. She had accidentally dialled his bank card number and so the fact she had ended up ringing a phone box he happened to be walking past, defies all laws of probability and would therefore be catagorised as a first-grade KUU-incidence.

[Kirin]

Another factor that I think adds to the lack of nervousness I've felt is that it's not unusual for it to be six months before a form letter arrives saying 'no thank you.' Would you feel nervous if after throwing a hand grenade, you knew it was going to be six months before you heard the explosion (or the dull click of a dud)?

It would depend where I'd thrown it, but probably not. I was thinking of myself when I mentioned the guts. I've written things that are possibly publishable, yet every time I reach the point of actually sending them off I freeze: that's it, the end. So it does take guts, or at least a kind of brain that's open to sending-manuscript-awayity. Great faith in the story, perhaps.

[howard male]

Kirin wrote -

Great faith in the story, perhaps.

Or maybe just habit, Kirin. I've spent most of my post art school life packaging up one sort of artistic endeavour or another to faceless strangers. Whether it's demo cassettes, or demo novels, you just have to acquire rhino-thick skin to keep going. The funny thing is, the two things I've had some small degree of success in - my word game, Definitials, and my dabbling in world music journalism - never figured at all in my list of ambitions. But that's life I suppose.

But I do feel that 'Etc Etc Amen' has to be my last real push at pursuing the life of the creatively independent person. As I said to someone recently - it will either be my first published novel, or my only unpublished one.

But, yes, having said all that, I do think I've ended up, somehow, with a damn fine yarn which I believe is unlike anything else out there. So that does help one find the strength to keep carting off parcels to the post-box.

[Kirin]

Also rhino skin, then, and also fine yarns. Have you tried sending it to Snow Books? Their website seems to be one of the friendlier publishing ones.

http://www.snowbooks.com