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Born in the 1900s

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I just heard this expression last night. In exchange for telling a guy of the old “never mind the quality, feel the width” line that you don’t even remember, he told me that the new insult is to refer to someone has having been born in the 1900s.

Of course, if you were born in 1999 then you would be 23 now but you also wouldn’t be insulted by the phrase, wouldn’t take it as a dig at your age, and quite possibly wouldn’t be reading this. The unstated cut is that you’re not actually aged between 23 and a maximum 121, it’s that you are indeed 121 and that you look every pixel of your age.

There is so much I wish I’d done sooner, been able, been capable of doing sooner. And there are a handful of things I’d rather I hadn’t done yet or, indeed, at all. On balance, I should’ve done more of both.

But otherwise I’m okay with my age, okay with where I am, quite a bit more than okay, sometimes, with what I’m doing. I can cope with 2022.

I just don’t seem to be able to cope with January.

This time I’m somehow still in a fuzzy cloud post-Christmas and at exactly the same time I estimate that we are already coming up on six million days into the year.

This week, I had a Zoom chat with a friend who, when pressed, admitted that she’d had to get up early to talk to me. I am profoundly flattered that anyone would, but in that moment the idea of being able to lie in on a morning was damn appealing. I’m just not sure how I can square that with how the fact that all month I’ve been struggling to get up before 7am.

I’ve had to today, fortunately. When I send this to you, I have to drive off to a school and spend the day there as a visiting author. I did a journalism day in a school last October, but otherwise it’s been over two years since I did this and the only real surprise so far is that I’m exactly as nervous as I was last time and the time before and the time before.

There is a difference. Schools often offer me a lunch but then most of the time I forget that they have, spend the entire lunch hour gassing away with pupils and teachers, and then wonder why I’m so exceptionally hungry.

Not today. Today I’ve learned a lesson and have made sandwiches.

And then there’s also that I took a lateral flow test last night and while it was negative, while it was fine, I learned in that pregnancy-test-style wait just how there is something that makes me more nervous than going into a school. It’s the prospect of not going in when you’ve promised to.

I’m nervous enough that as much as I know I’ll enjoy it, as much as I think it’s a privilege to be asked into a school, right now I would rather make you a mug of tea and ask how you’re doing.

Let me put the kettle on.

No question

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An editor told me this week to not write questions in a feature and I overreacted. Not at all because I disagree, but because I was appalled at the idea I would ever do this dreadful thing. I explained that questions in feature articles were a pet peeve of mine and then decided no, that’s not strong enough, it’s a pet peeve, a hobby horse and a religious tract.

I feel so strongly about this that it is honestly difficult for me to write you an example. Honestly. But here goes.

So what is a question in a feature?

God, the willpower required to not delete that before you saw it.

A question like that in an article comes loaded with a lot of information and all of it is bad. When you read a question, you know the feature is moving on to a new point, which is fine –– but you also know the writer didn’t know how to do the move. You can suspect that the writer is lazy and you can know for a fact that the writer isn’t very good.

If an article isn’t one of those bullet-point lists, a listicle in which number 6 will blow your mind, then it’s known as a read-through. You’re meant to read it through from the start to the end. That means the text starts somewhere and the writer takes you through to the end.

Each point has to follow on from the one before. The piece has a whole has a lot to say and the job is to say it all in such a way that the article flows, that it carries the reader along without any bumps in the stream. The job is finding the right sequence of points and making it seem inevitable, obvious, easy that they go in this order.

You also have to write well enough that someone bothers to read on, but that’s another story. The reason poor writers include questions in their text is because they can’t take you to the next point in a way that feels inevitable, obvious, easy.

When I read a question, it feels to me as if the article has stopped in a panic. I can see the writer, I can feel the writer, realising they don’t know how to keep the text going. I can feel the weight of the word count on their backs, the pressure of the deadline. I can feel that they don’t read much. And I can sense that they don’t give very much of a damn, either.

A question in an article is a brick wall and if I ever read on after one, it’s because I have to for some reason. I then resent having to, because I already know the writer isn’t any good and so the chance I’ll find what I need is suddenly dramatically lower.

Don’t get me started on questions in headlines, either. Actually, no, do get me started on that because it’s quick. So quick that there’s even Betteridge’s law which states that any headline that’s a question will be followed by an article that answers no.

“Can you declutter in one hour?”

“Is Elvis really teaching PE in Cardiff?”

It’s possible, just about barely possible, that you’ve picked up on how questions in articles and headlines make me a teeny bit unhappy. I told you I overreacted. But I can’t help it: when I see a question in a feature, I am affronted that I’ve been wasting my time reading this crap. So to be told not to do it, and by implication have it suggested that I ever do, it was pet peeve hobby horse religious effigy burning time. And then some.

Reading and writing

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I can remember my sister trying to teach me to read. I can see her, I can see the room, I can feel my anxiousness to get away, I can hear my mom saying okay, well, maybe that’s enough for today. I was slow to start and while I’m fuzzy now on the details of how it went at school, I know I was in a remedial reading class for a least a while. I know that because I can equally clearly see the room and the teacher.

Again, I’m shaky on details but I think it was that several of us who were below average reading ability were regularly taken off out of classes and into some other room to read. I’m sure of it, actually, because the thing I can see, the moment I can completely visualise is when the teacher thought I was pretending to read.

Whatever it was, however it happened, there was just one moment when suddenly I could read very well. I’m not certain I even realised it: I picture her asking me to read something aloud and instead of struggling as I presumably did up to then, I read it flawlessly. I read that flawlessly, I read the next piece she shoved under my nose and the next. I read and read and never went back to that remedial class again.

I don’t often tell people that but chiefly because I don’t often remember it. Reading is just part of everything I do, it’s part of everything I am. Only, I wanted to tell you this today because something happened this week. It’s something that I am having difficulty processing, I am struggling to get it into my skull. But then equally, I can’t seem to get it out of my head either.

I’m a best-selling author.

Seriously.

You’ve got to let me qualify that, you’ve got to let me try to whittle it down a bit. I’m a best-selling author of a non-fiction book, actually solely an ebook, and I’m a best-selling author only in its very, very specific niche. I’ll tell you: the book is called <a href=”http://amzn.to/1OdOCJx”>MacNN Pointers: Get More from Your Apple Software</a> and I co-wrote it with Charles Martin. We are best-selling authors of this collection of tutorials on how to use the software that comes with your iPhone, iPad, Mac and so on. We co-wrote it, I edited it and the book was proposed by Mike Wuerthele. He’s managing editor of MacNN.com, Chas is editor.

Within a few hours, certainly no more than a day of it being available, the book went to number 1 in its category on Apple’s iBooks Store in both the US and the UK. On Kindle, it was number 2 in the US and nowhere near as high in the UK – but high enough that Amazon listed it has a Hot Seller. Then at some point it became number 10 on Amazon for books in its category. That’s books, not ebooks. Number 10 in its category across both ebooks and physical books.

That speed isn’t just exciting, for me, it’s directly responsible for the best-selling status. For publishing has changed and not just in the fact that there are now ebooks. It’s changed in how I believe it used to be that the book that sold the most number of copies was the best-selling number 1. I don’t know that was the case but it sounds pretty reasonable. Today that is a factor but so is the speed of sales: something selling a dozen copies a minute will chart higher than something selling a dozen a week, even if the former only lasts for one minute.

So the fact that, for whatever reason, the book was immediately popular, that’s what took it into this status. I can tell you we’ve sold a couple of hundred copies so it’s not like we’re shirking.

I’m not thinking of numbers though. I’m certainly not thinking of the money: this is not something that will change my week let alone my life. I’m thinking instead of how this is like the time a proof copy of my first-ever book arrived. I held that book in my hand and I realised no one can ever take it away from me. Good or bad, I’d created that book and long after my death if any other writer wants to cover the same ground, their proposal will have to explain how my book can be bettered.

In much the same way, then, you can argue that best-seller status doesn’t mean what it used to, you can very well argue that it’s a bit different being a best-selling author in a non-fiction technology category than it is being a novelist on the New York Times charts. But you can’t take it away. No one can. I actually am a best-selling author.

I’m a little red-faced with excitement yet also pale: a slow-starting reader, a remedial-class reader, what one pixel changed in my life or my head that turned me into a writer? I am unemployable in any other job: I think a lot about what would’ve happened if I’d not found this in me.

I’m also uncomfortable being proud of this. I’m only telling you, right? And any publisher I ever pitch to, naturally. I’m modest but I’m not stupid.

No, sorry, modesty is wrong. I am British, that is how I feel about it, but I’m also proud and so I should be. I didn’t particularly aim to be a best-selling author, the lifetime ambition has been just to write and keep writing, but now it’s here I am and I should be proud.

I got to this the long way around, I got to it through stubborn persistence. So yes, I’ve been pig-headed for a long time and maybe now I can spend a minute or two being big-headed instead.

Back to school

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I left school certain that I would never go back and not at all certain that I could ever be a writer. It took a lot of work to pull off writing and while I was concentrating on that, I accidentally went back to many, many schools. From last weekend to the start of next week alone, I’ll have spent three full days in schools as a visiting author and I ran one short workshop for school-age writers.

I’ve also done one workshop for adult writers which doesn’t sound relevant except one of the attendees was a teacher from my old school. In the Venn diagram of things I remember about my school and teachers I liked, she’s in the tiny smidgeon of an overlap. She walked in that door and the only thing faster than her asking if I were the William Gallagher she taught was me asking her if she’d been my chemistry teacher.

I didn’t like my school but she and I had a great natter after the workshop and I’m astonished how much she got me to remember. Good and bad: I told her of the teacher who, heading for a nervous breakdown which he later succeeded at, had worked hard to get me expelled for no reason. That sounds bad and it was but the fight to keep me in there later proved useful in the politics you get in journalism.

I told her of the other chemistry teacher we had who’d spent a lesson having us mark the homework of the previous group. I know I was irritated, I wish I had been older and objected, Mind you, I really wish I’d just turned to the back of the exercise book and given this pupil a 10/10 well done, see me. Just to find out what happened.

There’s no 10/10 anymore. I don’t know how marking is done and from what I gather, I am unlikely to comprehend how teachers are supposed to mark or really do anything. The sobering and distressing part of going into schools is seeing this sliver of how controlled and inflexible things are forced to be.

But the good thing is that I can go in to them, cause a right ruckus and then get out. Usually get out and go right back to writing. I don’t usually do this many schools so close together, I’m a writer who does the odd school visit. I could never be clever enough to be a teacher nor have the resilience they do to go in again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

These three school visits all came via a company I’m just getting to know called Authors Abroad. But I can trace the lot back further to one conversation with Jonathan Davidson of Writing West Midlands, the company currently running the Birmingham Literature Festival as well as around 300 events for young writers – three hundred, every year.

I’d just moved back to Birmingham, I don’t know how I’d found Writing West Midlands. But I met Jonathan for a coffee. This is three years ago and I can tell you every detail of the conversation including the moment when he mused over whether I might be good in schools and I pretended that would be great, every single ferociously bad memory of mine coming back into my head and flooding down to make my stomach twinge too.

I can tell you every detail and I can picture every inch but I can never go back to the same place because we met at New Street Station. I was there yesterday, coming back from a Manchester school, and I tried figuring out where the coffee place had been. New Street is transformed and, okay, maybe I am too.

But those Manchester kids. There’s at least one who I’m sure will become a writer, who I think actually already is. And there’s another who told me that this had been the best day they’d ever had there. I melted them, I’m still melted now.