Free stuff

Don't you just love free stuff? Maybe people who come from wealthy backgrounds don't, but those of us who grew up in modest or poor families love it. It's stuff... that's free. I mean, how can you go wrong?


My latest free thing is the above. A Just Married bumper sticker that is a promotional tool for the latest Chuck Palahniuk book, Rant (which, by the way, I am reading and enjoying and considering a return to form for one of my fave authors). I think it's cool looking. And it dropped through my letterbox just a few days ago, all the way from New York City.

But it got me thinking...

The folks at Doubleday books must know that if they offer this sort of thing to Chuck fans, many many of them will never see the light of day, surely? I mean, this ain't going on no car of mine. This will stay in a hardbacked envelope in a box, probably, along with all the other junk that I consider "collectible".

But what's even more mysterious in this case is the way in which this freebie was offered. I just had to go to the official Rant book website and click on the black widow spider. A message pops up telling you how to enter a competition. Okay... But to get the sticker, all that was required was to e-mail Doubleday and tell them what message came up when I clicked the spider -- i.e., tell them that a message came up informing users of a competition. Um, how odd is that?

Indeed, it's so odd that for a short time users on the forums at Chuck's official website seemed almost to consider it an urban myth. But it's true. And it worked.

So, do you like free stuff? What's your favourite free thing right now? Not gifts, though. That's a different ball game. And is there a weird tale behind it? Come now, don't be shy.

I do like a good rant...

... so let's hope this is one: Chuck Palahniuk's new novel Rant. This is my first-edition, first-printing hardback, which just arrived from the States today. It's crazy, even including shipping charges, it still came out at less than the $25 cover price buying it through Amazon.com

By the way, American blogpals are advised they should try to attend a Palahniuk reading. Click here for US dates. And Canadian dates are here.

And see how I'm keeping it old skool with the Quantum Leap T-shirt? Fuck, yeah! That T is at least 14 years old and still in great shape. My comic-shop boss (at the time) brought it back for me from Baltimore.

That package from Chuck

Just as we were putting Cat in the car to go to the cattery on the morning of 8 January, I espied our postman walking down the terrace. (Cat will have plenty to post about about his spa retreat, too, so keep your eyes peeled for that.)

"Hi there," I said, in my usual cheery way. "Anything I can take off your hands?" He replied in the affirmative, dug deep into his sack (tee hee, I said "sack"!), and pulled out a white box measuring 21 x 14.5 x 8 cm (8.25 x 5.75 x 3 inches).

It was addressed with a large address label to me, and it had a blue Airmail sticker on it. A quick glance at the sender's address revealed it to be from someone named simply "Palahniuk" c/o his agent's New York address.

I was so excited, but I knew I had to contain myself until after the trip to the cattery. Wife was amazed at how cool I was about it, but I had to stay focused on the job at hand! The opening of the box would have to be done methodically, taking the time to appreciate its contents to the full. According to the customs label on the side, the box contained CDs and toys, to a total value of $10 (£5). The label was also signed by Chuck himself on 30 December. Wow, he was even working on this letter-answering task right through the Christmas holidays.

What follows here is some pictures of the contents of the box. Note that the pics were not taken at the time of the initial opening (I didn't have my brain in gear enough to document that), so the craziness of all the purple glitter that flew everywhere with each slight movement is a little lost. In fact, the glitter got so everywhere, that we even found some on the carpet of our hotel room in Seville. I guess it got stuck to something
-- clothes, shoes, whatever -- and travelled there with us. Or it may have been stuck to the small box of the chocolates we took with us from the box, and that Chuck had said I should give to Wife, "as part of her birthday gifts".


The signed customs label...


The top of the letter...


My power cow!...


A peek at the package...


And another peek...


And another...


And here are the CDs. I've removed my name, natch.


Look: he even asked after my holiday. What a guy!


The full list of contents reads like this, and might I point out that I think that's more than $10 worth of stuff, Chuck!

first and foremost, the letter itself
my Power Animal: a cow (although it has horns, so I guess it's a bull)
2 exclusive CDs of Chuck reading short stories, one dedicated, the other signed
self-adhesive "My name is" name badge, à la Fight Club, signed
black-and-white photo of Chuck with chicken, signed
Silly Putty (I used to love this stuff as a kid)
a rubber severed, bloody finger
flick-knife comb (I used to have one as a kid, and I loved it)
box of four chocolates, which Chuck suggested I give to Wife
pen knife (surely that's not legal to send through the mail?!)
glowstick necklace
2 bouncy balls
10 plastic Roman coins
tip of a spear
24 normal birthday candles
8 "relighting" birthday candles
deck of magic cards
12-page pirate colouring book
4 mini crayons
tin of sugar-free mints
rubber spider
mini harmonica
journal
carrot seeds
money-plant seeds
herb seeds
forget-me-not seeds
temporary tattoos
postcard for the book Clown Girl, which has an introduction by Chuck

“And the proverb told that the masked man would return, and return he did”

Back from Seville, and what a blast! It is one of those cities, like Venice, that you really know you're going to miss when it comes time to leave.

Just walking around the streets, which are awash with orange trees, is a joy to behold. Oranges are literally falling into the gutters and left to waste -- or to get picked up by tourists. One lunchtime, we even saw an orange fall from a tree and hit an American tourist on the head. It was bizarre! Look at the orange trees in the pic above and see the wonderful blue sky we had. Amazing!

I will definitely be putting some of my favourite pictures up here later in the week, but there are a lot to wade through (we took more than 1,300 photos in eight days; that's like more than 160 a day, on average!). Some are silly, poor quality, and blurry; others are really quite nice, if I do say so myself.

And of course, we ventured to places other than Seville, checking out the Alhambra in Granada, and visiting Córdoba, too.

Another reason for my hesitation in posting immediately is because it was Wife's birthday holiday, so I want to give her first dibs on the stories to tell and pix to share.

AND... I have my own special post to do too: my package arrived from Chuck Palahniuk in response to my fanmail. I will post about that tomorrow.

Knock knock. Who’s there? Chuck. Chuck who? Chuck me ball back, it’s landed in yer garden.

Well, I sent my letter off to Chuck Palahniuk yesterday. It ran to just over four pages of A4 once printed at a decent legible point size, and I put a lot of stuff in there, including the sort of things I wouldn't even put on my blog. And it got me thinking...

It's funny that, after a few months of blogging, you build up cyber friendships, and before you know it, you're kind of self-censoring. I don't mean that in a heavy censorship kind of way, but there are certain things that I wouldn't say to my close friends, just as now I wouldn't say to my close blogmates.

I'm not the type to regale people with tales of my sexual prowess, for example. And that's not because I'm not great in the sack (although "great" might be stretching it a bit); it's more that I suspect some of my readers would go, "Ewww, too much information, * (asterisk) dude." Because that is not what my blog is. Other people do that stuff and do it well: Alex and Suze obviously spring to mind. But you go to their blog, and you know that there is a good chance you will read something about them having sex. Does that make any sense?

Anyway, lest you're concerned, I didn't tell Chuck anything about my sex life either. I'm sure he, too, will be breathing a sigh of relief about that! I did go into more detail about certain family situations than I have ever done here, though. But that was kind of subconscious, and before I knew it I'd written way more than I'd intended on the subject.

I don't know where I'm going with this really. But... a question: Have you found that there are certain things you don't want to put in your blog entries? Maybe you're having an affair, but you can't mention it because your other half reads your blog. Or you have an ailment that you'd rather not reveal because you don't want people's sympathy vote. I'm not asking you all to do anonymous comments again, but just in a general sense, do you know where I'm coming from?

News for Palahniuk fans

Separated at birth? Jeff Probst and Chuck Palahniuk

Two cool things to know if you're a Chuck Palahniuk fan.

1. Here is Chuck's personal description of his forthcoming novel, Rant.

"For 'Rant' I borrowed the form of an oral biography, wherein dozens of people are interviewed about the same person, then those interviews are cut together. Like a 'talking head' type of documentary film. The only person not present is the subject: Rant Casey, an updated Huckleberry Finn in a messy, crowded near-future. Cars, traffic, and accidents all play parts, with chunks of the through-line action presented as radio traffic reports. Of course there's a romance. And of course it's confronting and occasionally violent. And sickening or sexy. The glory of the 'oral biography' form is how it allows the story to cut instantly from one plot thread to another, or from the 'camera' perspective of one character to another, while both describe the same event. This let me boil each statement down to the minimal plot point so that the action moves blam, blam, blam through the entire twisted life and death of Rant."


2. Chuck Palahniuk is accepting fanmail right now. He is taking six months or so out of his schedule to reply to each and every letter sent to him with an October postmark. There are rules, though, guys -- and he won't even read ones from stalker types or written in blood. I've got mine almost ready to mail. If you want to join in the fun, check out this page. And to hear him talk about it, go here.

Read, or dead?

The best part of ten years ago - about 1997, probably - my boss asked me how much I read. I said not much, a couple of magazines a month, that sort of thing. She said, to be better at your job you should read more. Read books, lots of books, by various authors. Read fiction, non-fiction, history, biography. Just read. And take notice of the punctuation and grammar. Distinguish what is "correct" and what is the author's style, or "voice". (My job, for those who don't know [and you may not even care] is book editor and magazine sub editor. This means I correct authors' text before it gets published. Tidy it up. Make it grammatically correct. That sort of thing.)

Since then, I've started reading again.

I used to read a lot as a kid. Like, A LOT. When I was about six or seven, older kids would ask me how to spell stuff, just to test me. Take my dinosaur book and ask me to spell the name of one of them. Mostly I got it right. I enjoyed reading and learning. I enjoyed fiction and history.

The great British schooling system beat that out of me! We didn't want to read Shakespeare. We didn't want to read Trollope. An Inspector Calls was good, though.

And after school I went straight to work as a shoe repairer on a YTS. No further education for me.

Somewhere down the line I started reading again. I don't really remember when. But, you know, reading for fun. The first book I remember reading for fun as an adult was Shogun. It was 1993. I loved it. Lapped it up. I read a couple more of Clavell's books, but they paled in comparison.

The trouble is, though, between Shogun and the conversation mentioned at the top of this post, I began working as an editor. And pretty soon I was spending my entire working day reading. That's the lion's share of my job. And nothing puts you off reading more than reading all day. At least that's what I thought for a few years. But now I read quite a lot again, and I'm glad about that.

I have a nephew who's 11 and a niece who's 12. They couldn't be more different in terms of reading.

My nephew (in the UK) reads all the time. He's obsessed with dinosaurs and Doctor Who. He's also just started to get into films. He devoured a film guide. At Christmas he asked me who directed some film. I told him and he rattled off a bunch of other films the guy had made. "Is that the same man?" he asked. I was like, "Ummm, yeah."

My niece (in Italy) hates reading. She sees it as a chore. She does it for school because she has to, but she'd rather be out on her bike, riding at the local stables, doing outdoorsy stuff. Reading is like a punishment.

I suppose somewhere between the two lies the ideal. But that is something that comes with age.

At heart, deep down, I'm more like him than her. In part I'm sure that's because we share genes. (My niece is on Wife's side of the family.) Left to my own devices, I'd spend days in front of the telly or a computer, picking at film guides and books on tattoos. Reading the odd novel. I'm not outdoorsy, but I've come to appreciate the value of being outdoors, getting a bit of sun, walking in the woods, feeling the breeze on my face. It's all good stuff.

The trouble with reading is that not everything grabs you. A little exchange with Ranting Dullard the other day revealed that he and I both found Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted more "putdownable" than his other work. When I go on holiday I take one or two books and they are all I have to hand, so I tend to read them even if they're not that great. At home, though, with a mass of books at my disposal, I find it far easier just to stop and turn to another one.

So, these are the books I currently (theoretically) have on the go. I say theoretically because although I have started them all, I may not finish some of them.

In the order I started them:

Stranger Than Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk (Non-fiction shorts; just didn't grab me)
Love All the People, Bill Hicks (Transcripts of gigs; good for dipping into)
The Electric Michelangelo, Sarah Hall (Something to do with tattooing, but slow to get going)
A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away, Christopher Brookmyre (Interesting start; not sure why I stopped...)
Breaking Vegas, Ben Mezrich (Good author, but this is a bit too much like his other books)
Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk (A novel of short stories; good, but putdownable)
New York Sawed in Half, Joel Rose (Account of a great hoax; good, but badly edited)

Palahniuk story

This is worth checking out for anyone with an interest in both Chuck Palahniuk and The Wicker Man, among other things. Enjoy.

I don't think it's from Haunted, but I haven't read my copy yet, so I don't know for sure...