Look where I'm heading!

Actually I'm having a total techno-strop as it has taken me about 40 minutes to work out how to get that banner to show up. So please admire it and consider attending the event, which is going to be brilliant.
I've posted before about how much writers benefit from hanging out with other writers, whether that's to weep on each other's shoulders when publishers are being tiresome, pick up tips on improving our work and better marketing strategies, or just for shitz'n'giggles. It's all true. Come along, you will love it.

When a public figure dies...

It's often time to get off the Interweb for a bit. Even if the deceased was someone you admired or respected, or who died young and tragically, the deluge of awful poetry and wonky Photoshopping of candles, flowers, halos etc is likely to trigger some digestive discomfort after a while. (You end up getting The Life Of Christ In Cats stuck in your brain.) And if the public figure was in any way contentious, it's pretty much guaranteed that both your FB and Twitter feeds will soon turn into a basket full of squawking, flapping, pecking chickens (unless you are the sort of saddo who can only cope with having friends who agree with you and each other about everything) because, hey, the best way to pay tribute to someone who spent a large part of his/her adult life doing good stuff is naturally to have a fucking fight... You know that's just what the bereaved family and friends would want: total strangers calling each other arseholes online.

It's also probably a good idea to sit quiet if you are enraged by being Joplinned, too. So I'm going to bugger off and get on with some work.

Feeding the ever-hungry monsters and not letting them bite you.

I first heard the phrase at the London Bloggers Meetup in April, and while it was being discussed with regard to musicians, it applies equally well to writers (and artists, and photographers and jewellers, and probably people who make balloon animals as well). Maybe if you're under 21 and have grown up with social media as part of your landscape, it comes more easily to you - or maybe it's a question of how much of your self you are offering up with your work.

I got a little fright, and then I got a little surprise, last week. I'm not a total newcomer to the public eye - back in the 90s I did quite a bit of TV but (again) it was all a bit different. I could go and make a total willy of myself on some live-broadcast regional chatshow feeling quite comfortably secure that my mum wouldn't see it and that those of my mates who lived in the relevant area would be in the pub when it was on. These days, if you get pissed and depart from the official line on even some obscure late night satellite channel filler show, some bastard will have it up on YouTube before you've recovered from your hangover. So I was Googling myself, as you do, and to my horror found a link offering Pictures. Of me. Once I'd finished shrieking, I found that it wasn't actually that bad - it consisted of a couple of perfectly reasonable headshots and portraits that I had given someone permission to use when I was interviewed for their website a few years ago. Along with the current profile pic from my Facebook profile, which I hadn't given anyone any permissions about - or so I thought - as it was a gurny unflattering photo I'd chucked up there to show off a drastic hair restyle and not bothered to change.

No it wasn't this one

I still wouldn't have bothered, if not for a cheery, chatty email from someone organising an event I'm going to be involved in, which had attached a poster for that event. Which featured the gurny, unflattering Facebook photo that some clever little sod had merrily downloaded. I used to think that people who kept their Facebook profile photo as a cartoon character or a picture of a piece of cheese were being a bit twee - well, consider that a lesson learned. Naturally I immediately changed mine to a shot of the old badge tray, and then emailed the organiser a quickly-shot selfie which is probably only slightly less horrible than the one that was originally used but at least doesn't have my actual road where I live in the background.

random picture of public transport...

But the monsters still need feeding. I set up a Facebook page for the book, thinking oh well, OK, that's my book, hello adoring public, and then found that my own Facebook page, which had been a merry melting pot of old pals, former work colleagues and new acquaintances, was getting horribly unbalanced. I'm still totally defeated by Twitter, which remains in my mind the equivalent of shouting at passing cars. And now I'm thinking that my 'other identity' probably needs Facebook and Twitter accounts as well given that 'her' books are a bit different to a lot of 'mine' and therefore published under another name. For a while, I had another blog about my day job, a clean cute fluffy one, which ended up being more of a general rant thing so I started this one for More Rants as well as More Smut and meant to make the other one more cute and fluffy.

And then I remain amazed that I don't get a lot of sleep.

Male arsepigeons - do it all you like but don't joke about it...

Seems to me that's what we're being told here. Think about it: Matthew Wood, a clearly rather knobbish teenager, makes some jokes on Facebook and gets sent to prison for three months. Justin Lee Collins, a clearly rather knobbish television presenter of some description, abuses, terrorizes and attacks his girlfriend. And gets 140 hours community service.

(pic cribbed from the BBC news website, because it let me without blowing up my laptop...)

No, those of you who haven't been keeping up with the news, I haven't got those sentences the wrong way round. Crap jokes = into the nick with you. Sustained bullying of a woman = less than a month picking up litter or painting over graffiti.

I suppose some might say that this sort of thing is down to the judiciary's cluelessness about social media (remember Paul Chambers, who tweeted an obvious-to-anyone-with-any-sense joke about blowing up an airport, and whose initial conviction was eventually overturned) but I think it's something more depressing than that. I think it's another manifestation of the sort of fuckwitted, malevolent sentimentality that Rupert Murdoch was always so keen to foster, as if you can get people to use their emotions as a guide rather than their intelligence, you can make them do whatever you want. Matthew Wood was arrested for his own safety, apparently. His 'crime' has been described as 'abhorrent'. 

He made some tasteless jokes about missing children. There is no suggestion whatsoever that he had anything to do with the disappearance of April Jones - or of Madeleine McCann, and no mention of him having committed any other crimes of any kind, yet he's been sent to prison and it's been implied that had any Right Thinking People given him a kicking, it would have been understandable. 
Funnily enough, the sort of men that are the most likely to get both teary-eyed and violent over 'offensive' jokes about dead kiddies are often the type who are quite happy to give their own wives - and kiddies - a slap now and again. Coverage of the Collins case featured plenty of handy hints that Anna Larke had some mental health problems, drank too much, self harmed... That she was a bit of a handful, a bit of a mad cow, and that a slap or two was probably no more than she deserved. It very often seems that victims of abuse or violence are more likely to get justice if they can be portrayed as innocent or at least lovable to the general public.

Perhaps the best thing to hope for is that the smug, arrogant Collins is cocky enough to post a few 'amusing' tweets about the whole endlessly hilarious business of controlling women by humiliating and scaring them. eh?