Way back a long time ago, back in the mid-nineteen-eighties, I had a job that took me on frequent trips downriver to look at residential property developments. I would board the riverboat near Parliament, along with my regular band of specialist-property and sometimes-writes-about-property and please-come-to-make-up-the-numbers journalists, PRs and assorted hangers-on (including the day’s property developers), and we would chug down the Thames towards what would eventually become Canary Wharf (in today’s sense), drinking champagne as we went.
 
There would be canapes, and as the finale, a lunch. A gift, usually a paperweight but sometimes a pen, with the name of the day’s development printed (indelibly) on the side, and a glossy press pack bulging with press releases that could be copied out and pictures that could be used to illustrate articles. When we got to the day’s show flat, we would troop around the rooms and out onto the balcony, taking it in turns to ask the regular questions about projected rental income, outgoings, membership fees for the leisure club downstairs, travel connections to airports and the City.
 
Technicolour yawn. Then we would go and have lunch. After lunch, the PRs managing the trip would make very sure that we had hold of our press packs before sending us away to wherever we felt it safest to go – straight home, or back for a comatose half-hour at the office. Return riverboat trips tended to be quiet, if they happened at all – my memories are vague, oddly enough. There were cars, taxis, bright lights…
 
This was in the days before everything fell apart for that kind of – what shall we call it? – blatant capitalism? Unashamed capitalism? Journalism? The miners’ strike (1984-1985) was on the news; the Murdoch Group was about to move production to Wapping (1986), and since we’re talking about the river, the Marchioness disaster (1989) hadn’t happened yet. Mrs Thatcher was in the ascendant. There were yuppies, and many of them had big swinging – but I never liked that one. How language, and popular jargon in particular, just disappears.
 
Shock horror pose. I remember that the imaginary owners of all those show flats invariably had the same taste in furniture and interior design. They all possessed bowls of lemons in the kitchen and tonic in the fridge, but never any gin. They all read freebie property magazines that they kept stacked neatly on their coffee tables. None of them owned slippers, but they were all content to step out of bed onto cold marble floors. They owned coffee cups and saucers, sometimes shiny coffee machines, but no coffee.
 
Occasionally, back then, I would walk home past Harvey Nichols (a long way past Harvey Nichols), and wonder what had just happened to make the mannequins stand like that. What narrative drama had been passing through the window dresser’s mind as she – he – worked them into place? And occasionally, the invitation would be to fly out and view a property development on the Marbella coast. This would be a slightly different regular group of journalists – I was in the intersecting bit of the Venn Diagram – and the questions would be asked round the pool, not on the balcony. The drinks would carry umbrellas.
 
Tour zone. There would often be a titled European person to host the whole thing, and we would drive from the airport past half-completed, failed property developments just like the one we had come to see. Without comment; that would have been rude. There was always a golf course, and always this amazing little local restaurant where we’re going tonight. I remember one trip, the woman from [name of newspaper redacted] got up half-way through the opening drinks and left with the pianist. She did phone the PR to say that she was okay, but the rest of us didn’t see her again until the trip back to the airport.
 
Yes, she took home a copy of the press pack. And I remember the older photojournalist, along for the ride, who turned to me once, in a pointless little space of benches and tables and trellises between one block of a development and another, somewhere on the coast south of Marbella, and said to me, “This is just like Saigon before the fall.” I think he might have been old enough to know, but … sometimes wondering is better than knowing. It’s a bit too easy to pick up on that “before the fall” as a segue into whatever I’m going to say next, but never mind.
 
Reality. That was a world of press packs and printed photographs and hangovers and galley proofs and Tippex and typewriters and ribbons and trips to the printers to okay the bromides, and it’s all gone down into the bottle with the genie: keep on moving the cursor and tapping the keys, and this will reach whoever reads it in Peru* (a young person has shown me Google Analytics, although I’m trying to forget it) without me tipping over a single ink bottle. Everything is one thing these days. I don’t exactly miss the clatter of my old typewriter, but boy, you knew I was writing.
 
This blog post would have been about something, but last night I sat down and watched A Ghost Story (2017), and now I’m drifting around in an imaginary sheet looking at the past. And I suppose – spoiler – if I go by the film, the future will come into view as well. Never thought I could spend – well, the amount of time they give the scene – watching Rooney Mara eat, just eat, sitting against a kitchen unit, and be so moved. But it’s the kind of film where you kind of know that they want you to come away with questions and reflections, et cetera, and I’m not sure I…
 
It does have music in the plot, in common with Three Colours Blue (1993), which I haven’t quite been able to take back to the library (I’ve extended the loan), but – I don’t know. Enough. It’s foggy outside, appropriately enough; thick fog, pinkish with the dawn, and I can see the tree but not the harbour. The lamp post is done with a very light pencil today. Time to come back from the real world and check my email.
 
*Hello!

Just had the great pleasure of rejecting the advances of a company that wanted to exploit my data. I was looking up the meaning of a word, and – ta da! – there was the pop-up to block my view of the screen. To find out what [I can’t remember what it was] meant, I would have to accept cookies.
 
On impulse, I clicked “manage preferences” instead of “accept”. Up came quite a lengthy explanation – in fairness, written by somebody who seemed genuinely to want to explain. Short version: if I wanted to know the meaning of the word, I would have to give them access to the meaning of me.
 
Aged in oak barrels? Once they had access to my innermost data, they would use it to send me ads – ah, but not just any old ads. These would be ads distilled from the essence of whatever they’d worked out about me; ads carefully blended from the finest ingredients to match exactly the devices and desires of my heart; ads that would speak to my soul about unique opportunities to find enlightenment by signing up for the latest smartphone.
 
Sometimes, this thought runs through my head: I wasn’t, but were you born yesterday? Turned out that “manage preferences” didn’t mean: specify the products that you might buy if ads for them blocked your view of the screen at precisely the annoying moment. No, the company didn’t want to know what I wanted; it wanted to analyse my data to give it the answer it wanted about what I wanted.
 
Funny thing, but with all the data analysis in the world, all the sophisticated thinking machinery at its disposal, this company will never arrive at the answer: he doesn’t want any of the ads you have available to put in his way. Equally funny thing: since the invention of the news media, there has never been a day on which nothing happened. [In passing, I think we should get rid of the word “submit”. Words have a subliminal power, and we don’t “submit” to companies when we complete their online forms. We shouldn’t give them ideas.]
 
My name isn’t ‘User’, AI. Do they – yes, I know, “they” in the sense of “They”* – analyse data to discover something new, or do they do it to arrive at what they want to know? Companies think they’re analysing our data to find out what we want; actually, they’re analysing our data to find out how to fit us into their own little worlds – and the answer is never, accept these potential customers for who they are and give them what they want.
 
I thought of setting up as a recruitment consultant and walking into that company’s HR department: give me all your corporate data, and I will send you a new employee as and when I decide you need one.
 
It happens this way because nobody wants ads at all, right? There’s a desperation about it. Facebook relentlessly says good morning. Every time I open a document on my laptop a little pop-up says “Welcome back!” and no doubt some bright spark will get a pay rise soon for suggesting that it would be “Welcome back William!” I think the currently favoured technologies are slipping and know they’re slipping.
 
Those “preferences” that I was “managing”? Turned out my options were: either accept cookies, or go on managing preferences. They’d built in a loop – I could manage preferences for as long as I liked, but the only way out was to say yes to cookies. Any preference you like, so long as it’s cookies. That made me so happy. I clicked the box in the top corner and went elsewhere to look up my word.
 
In (other) film news this week, I watched the recent Jumanji remake – Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017). Yeah. Wasn’t there a horror film recently, in which the usual bunch of American teenagers couldn’t get out of playing a game? Yes – Truth or Dare (2018). Must be about time they remade Godzilla again, don’t you think?
 
*Not exactly what I’m getting at here, but Jon Ronson once write a book called Them (Picador, 2001), which is worth reading – or so They say. I agree with Them on this one.

Oh, and imagine the reality of self-driving cars. You turn the thing on, and a voice asks you where you want to go. You tell it the destination. The voice repeats the destination and asks you to confirm that it's got the destination correct. You say yes, and it asks you whether you want the quickest route or the most economical route or the scenic route. You say the quickest route and it asks you whether you want the commentary. You say no, and it plays you a little video about fastening your seat belt. This ends with a disclaimer: the car company isn't responsible for your safety. The thing starts to roll forward, and as you pass the bakery on the corner, it plays the bakery's jingle. Then the bank's. Then the coffee shop's. You look for the "manage preferences" option, but it's disappeared from the screen in front of you. Then the car pulls in and stops. This isn't your destination. The voice thanks you for your patience while it downloads an important upgrade about traffic conditions, roadworks, et cetera. You hit the button to turn on some music, and the voice tells you that excessive volume can damage your hearing. You get out and walk.
​

What sold me on Blade Runner 2049 (2017) was a line on the back cover of the DVD box. I’d avoided the film in the cinema because, well, Blade Runner (1982). Seen that, loved it, don’t let’s spoil it. So no. [Note: multiple spoilers in this blog post.] But there it was, the box, on the library shelf, Ryan Gosling looking back over his shoulder, Harrison Ford looking out over my shoulder, two other people, two cityscapes and the big yellow sticker Please Collect The Discs For This Item From The Counter.
 
I picked up the box. Turned it over. “As bold as the original Blade Runner.” (Empire). Uh huh. Got that at home somewhere. Maybe I’ll watch it again. Read further. New blade runner unearths a secret, yeah, yeah, plunge society into chaos, yeah, right – oh, hey – “a quest to find Rick Deckard [Harrison Ford]”. Who has been missing for 30 years. Didn’t he go on the run with – yeah, I remember. “Too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?” Oh. Spoiler there. Sorry. Wasn’t Deckard also – no! Don’t say it!
 
Sean Young. That last line spoken by Edward James Olmos, playing Gaff. Mr Olmos (I discover by the simple expedient of looking him up on IMdb) is an activist as well as an actor, with a particular interest in the needs and rights of children. “We all have a choice,” he says, and “If I can do it, so can you.” Unlike most people, Edward James Olmos is older than I am. I like him already, although I suppose I’ll never meet him. [Jumping ahead – there he is! Gaff, anyway, putting in an appearance.]
 
I put the DVD of Blade Runner 2049 back on the shelf. Thought: maybe I will go on a quest to find Harrison Ford. Maybe in Blade Runner, maybe in the original Star Wars. Maybe in something else for a change? There was that film with Anne Heche, wasn’t there? They’re stuck on an island because their light plane crashed and she gets something stuck down her trousers that he – oh, why do I have to remember that scene? I suppose back then it would have been the “money shot”* – and there it is, front and centre of the “images of”. Search Six Days, Seven Nights (1998). How times change.
 
 But wait a minute, didn’t we go on a quest to find Mark Hamill in that recent episode? Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)? We did. And we found him, didn’t we? We found Spock in The Search For Spock (1984), come to think of it, and Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1978) – not to mention Joseph Conrad’s short book Heart of Darkness (1899), on which that film was very loosely based. So far as I can remember, going all the way back now to sleepy afternoons in primary school, they went on a quest to find Cloudberry in The Little Grey Men by “BB” – a name that always puzzled me. Pseudonyms weren’t on the syllabus for the reception class, back in the day.** [I remember the world map on the wall, coloured mostly red. Something about the sun not setting.]
 
Cloudberry. They probably found him, too. “On a quest to find” is one of those plots, isn’t it? A road movie with a person at the end – and for it to work, you need the person. You need the golden fleece, or whatever. I went back and picked up Blade Runner 2049 again, ready to be enjoyably indignant about all the Star Wars echoes. And I took it home. And I watched it. And it went on for two hours and thirty-seven minutes (“approx.”, says the box). I think I understand the term “easter egg” now, although I didn’t realise entire sub-plots could be replicants. I’d like that car, although if the sun roof has to fly away and film stuff every time I get out, I’d like to live somewhere less rainy. A child is born, anyway.
 
It started very well, with the land outside Los Angeles gone back to subsistence farming, and Ryan Gosling dozing at his absent steering wheel, and the fog, and the soundtrack – I must get some earphones and move slowly through life picking up and gazing at the minutiae. I have a horse like that, a cow actually, with a(n in)significant date scratched on it (in blue ink: I’ve just done it) so we can go back to the future again and find our easter eggs. Very original. There was a “rise of the machines” theme, and right at the end, a scene so pregnant with a line spoken by Darth Vader to a very close relative in a distant galaxy some while ago – that I wasn’t surprised the screen went black. Deliberate, no doubt. But … how can you re-create/clone an individual from the original DNA, but get the eye colour wrong?
 
Were we thinking through the right details here? I don’t know. I think I enjoyed it, although it’s the kind of film where you know what they want you to be discussing as you emerge from the cinema. [Dead tree? Live flower?] So much these days happens in a kind of stereo, a double-vision effect, as if we’re all simultaneously concerned with being seen to be, and being. Seen to do, and doing. The truck delivering the groceries has “Delivering the groceries” painted on the side. The bus travelling between villages has “Connecting communities” on the side. An overlay to life. “Making a film like Blade Runner.” We carry our present participles with us, don’t we, static as they are?***
 
Reading the subtitles. Happily, I took the precaution of also borrowing Three Colours Blue (1993, Krzysztof Kieslowski), which has “Stunning… astonishing… profoundly moving” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out) written on the back. 97 mins approx., although it’s still playing in my head. I’ve just noticed on the box that there are extras, which takes care of my next visit to the screen in the corner. A film just powerfully content to be itself. “What about the ending?” Julie (Juliette Binoche) asks at one point. She’s talking about the music, but. Oh, the music. Oh, the film. Fantastic ending.
 
*Even after all the dinosaurs that escaped from the successive Jurassic Parks, I still best remember that shot of the water’s surface trembling as the Tyrannosaurus Rex set off around Seattle. That was described at the time – somewhere – as the film’s “money shot”.
**Denis Watkins-Pitchford. The book was first published by Eyre and Spottiswoode in 1942.
***If I ever design a T-shirt, it will bear the words, “Wearing this T-shirt”.
​

While we’re on the subject of films – and no, we’re not staying on it – I just want to add that my favourite piece of dialogue, ever, comes in Taken 2 (2012). Not to overdo the spoiler here, but Liam Neeson is adrift in an unfamiliar foreign city, and he needs to find his way back to his hotel. Something like that. So he rings his daughter, played by Maggie Grace, who’s in the hotel room. He tells her to go to the closet and open his suitcase, which she’ll find inside. Pick up one of the grenades he’s packed, remove the pin, and drop it out of the window. [Onto the flat roof outside – thus, safely.]
 
I love that moment. If ever I’m in a foreign city, and lost, I hope I have the presence of mind, and the packing skills, and the somebody back in the room, to extricate myself from the difficulty with the minimum of map-reading and the maximum of noise. I love imagining how that scene would play out in real life – assuming some other means of going to the window and making a lot of noise. “Darling, could you go to the window and play my trumpet loudly until I get there?” “Yes, dad.” Not.
 
Hard as barnacles. What I really want to say is, changing the subject, I have no interest in your data. Surprise! It’s going to be a blog post about that. [If you’re a utility company or a robot, I have no interest in “keeping in touch” either.] I haven’t collected any of your data (knowingly), I don’t hold any of your data (knowingly), and the couple of address books I have in the house only record defunct telephone numbers. That word “knowingly”. How difficult it is to write a simple sentence these days.
 
There may be data crusted around my online activity, like barnacles on a rock, but if there is, I don’t know where it is, I’m not interested in it and you can have it back. If you or I can find it. Actually – very much not like barnacles on a rock. More … something vaporous and unreliable. It’s also hard to come up with a good metaphor these days*. I remember when we used to talk about Big Data; about how we generated data all the time. Popcorn exploding? Shaving foam expanding as you spray it into your hand? Never mind.
 
I know that if I scroll down on my “dashboard”, I can see where you came from, to get to this website, but the (unfashionable, I know) method for this blog is not to know who’s reading it, so no, I’ve never done that.  Yes, I suppose I might have your email address, might even be related to you (no, darling, I know I don’t play the trumpet, I was just saying for example), but that doesn’t mean I want to influence your vote in the next US election. If you have one. Let me know, and I’ll delete it. Yes, by email, I suppose. I’ll delete that too. Infinite regress.
 
Protection. Remember that Icelandic volcano that closed down air traffic over Europe for a while? Eyjafjallajökull, was that it? [Yes, of course I just pasted that in.] A similar quiet has fallen over my inbox. Oh, a few companies have sent me emails telling me that by reading their email I’m confirming that I want them to go on sending me emails, but mostly, I think GDPR (the Global – oh, you know by now) marks the end of the chatty emails about sport and television from that company that once – only once – cleared out my drains.
 
Always, the opportunity to start again is welcome. Yes, this new euro-legislation hits the chatty-email industry hard, but that kind of copy-writing isn’t included in the standard measures of economic performance, so never mind. They’ll be back. And while I’m on the subject, how much of the way we live now would be improved if we just, simply, started again? Perhaps we need a Global Politicians…, or Global Corporates…, or Global Media…, or some other Protection Regulation.
 
If [insert your example here] could be taken down to its component objective(s) and reconstructed from the ground up, would the result be an improvement? Or – what was I thinking when I started this? – an interminable argument with cost over-runs and no realistic prospect of completion? Or at worst, something resembling what we have now? With people to tell us that lessons will be learned?
 
Love you too, human nature.
 
*Like a present participle on the side of a van?

What if handedness was an issue? What if, instead of wasting time on boringly obvious signs of otherness, like ethnicity and gender, we discriminated against people who are really different? People who look like you and me, who move among us undetected, but who secretly belong on the other side of the mirror, in the reversed world where everything’s the other way round?
 
I am, of course, talking about left-handed people. Some 10 per cent of the world’s population are left-handed. Is left handed. Are. Is. Around. Pfleugh. That’s 0.73 billion. Fewer than a billion. That’s a big enough minority to be portrayed as a threat without quite being a significant constituency. We could move against left-handed people and there wouldn’t be enough of them to mount a campaign for justice. [If you’ve come here from Facebook, where irony is famously not recognised, you may need me to tell you that I’m not serious. The, ah, subtext here reads: the author is caricaturing a cynical form of political calculation.]
 
Big side-head, little paragraph. But wait.
 
Shouldn’t we find out more about these people? Why can’t they be like us? Surely, if we reasoned with them, they could be made to see sense and use their right – right, correct, geddit? – hands? [Yes, I know. Those were the days, eh?] No, sadly not. If you search the question “Why are people left-handed?” the little box at the top of the results concludes, “Left-handers are born that way.” You see? There’s no reasoning with these people.
 
If you then search the question “Why are people right-handed?” the little box at the top amends that to “most people” and tells you, “Left-handed people are more skilled with their left hands when performing tasks.” So we might infer a clear bias towards talking about left-handed people even if the question’s about right-handed people. They’re even taking over the questions. Although that does makes up for all those years of struggling with the moulded grips of other people’s kitchen scissors. Not that I make a habit, you understand, but. Oops. Have I given myself away?
 
Take the trip. If you then – sorry, just one more question –  if you then take up the suggestion for a “related search”, and put in, “Are more people left or right handed?” the little box tells you, “Right-handed people are more skilled with their right hands when performing tasks.” Which is the kind of in-depth factual analysis that makes the internet so useful. The little box then goes on to impart some statistics before concluding with a statement about left-handed people that I won’t repeat. It includes the words “skilled” and “tasks”. Thank you for joining me for this trip along what Al Gore (at least) once referred to as the “information superhighway”.
 
Left-handed people aren’t obviously different – you have to watch their hands, duh – but they are deserving of whatever special attention we give to minorities. They’re not discriminated against, but they do operate in what we could call a post-discrimination environment. We have the word “sinister” from the Latin for left*. Despite globalisation, there are still cultures – guidebooks, at least – in which it’s apparently bad to eat with your left hand. We could go into the explanations for that, but let’s not. You’re an honoured guest if you sit on your host’s right. Among other “related searches” on my screen are “Why do left-handed people die earlier?” and “Why are left-handed people classed as witches?” Why ARE**? Not that I was distracted by that, you understand, but…
 
…today’s randomly discovered internet-fact is that around 5 per cent of people have at least one extra nipple. There are celebrities with extra nipples (and copious pics online). Although extra nipples are (were?) traditionally associated with witches – for feeding familiars, and yes, left-handedness was (is) also traditionally, et cetera – most people with an extra nipple are male. 98 per cent of them, apparently. End of digression. Left-handed people die earlier because of all those scissors, I think.
 
Cleverer. There’s the discrimination that bothers us – racism, sexism – and the discrimination that happens every day but goes unacknowledged. Spend long enough online*** and you’ll tire of the relentless drivel written by people debunking (sic) myths (sic) about left-handed people. There’s an industry devoted to asserting, with what passes for evidence these days, that for example left-handed people aren’t more creative, and it’s just a coincidence that a lot of creative people are left-handed. That for example left-handed people aren’t cleverer, and it’s just a coincidence that five of the last seven US presidents are left-handed. Obama’s left-handed, Trump’s right-handed, and I’ve just found a website suggesting that Michelle Obama is ambidextrous.
 
Maybe “good enough at working the US political system to get to the top” isn’t the same as “cleverer”, but never mind. If the point has to be rammed home that left-handed people aren’t special, although they are in a minority, maybe we should go for some affirmative action. We could go for all-left-handed shortlists, or quotas, or (if we accept the line that left-handed people think differently) we could campaign for more left-handed people on company boards. “A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research [a US entity] floated the idea that left-handers favour ‘divergent’ thinking, a form of creativity in which the brain moves ‘from conventional knowledge into unexplored association’,” says the website lefthandersday.com.
 
Don’t apologise. Oh. Wait. Bill Gates is left-handed. Oprah Winfrey too. James Cameron’s left-handed. I like Avatar (2009); is that ex-marine left-handed? Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) is, and get this. Must watch it again. Ridley Scott as well. Alien (1979); the creature? The film I actually watched this week was Divergent (2014), appropriately enough, which was more enjoyable than I expected, and then up came five minutes of The Fault In Our Stars (2014), with the same actress, Shailene Woodley, who is not listed as left-handed, nor are the directors of those two films, Neil Burger and Josh Boone – not anywhere that I found, at least. But I’m getting off the point. Angelina Jolie is left-handed. Whoopi Goldberg and Sarah Jessica Parker. Scarlett Johansson.
 
Winston Churchill. Prince William. Okay, hold the affirmative action. No need to apologise for the scissors. Nor indeed for that witchcraft question. To misquote the last-but-one line of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – we’re here already.
 
*The word “dexterity” comes from the Greek word for right-handed, although note: online sources disagree as to whether sinister/dexterity come from Latin or Greek; Old French and Middle English also get a mention. Maybe I could leave that question with you?
**Find that question on Yahoo Answers. Best answer in my opinion: “I’m a witch and I’m right-handed.”
***It takes about thirty seconds.

This is one I hadn’t come across before. Between the second and third seasons of a soon-to-be box set that I might eventually impulse-buy, there was an actor change. I found this out when I went to YouTube to check a clip from the first season. Same scene, dialogue, action, everything. Except that one of the actors was different. Again: absolutely everything was the same except for that actor. His face, at least, was changed. I remember when Kremlin-watchers used to work out who was in and who was out of the Soviet Politburo by who lined up to wave (and in what order) for the military parades. I’ve seen and compared photographs in which Stalin does and then doesn’t have a particular person standing behind him.
 
But this really took me by surprise. Yes, I’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the novel by George Orwell first published by Secker and Warburg, and yes, I could probably say something about Big Brother here. But … I suppose it makes sense. I’m guessing that the scene was originally shot with the actors standing in front of cameras and delivering their lines, with make-up and lights and trailers and people holding big boom microphones – and that the scene was “reshot” on a computer using digital widgetry. It makes sense to have a main character’s face consistent throughout, if you’re putting the whole thing in a box. But how strange to be the original actor and find that not only have you left; you were never there. So to speak.
 
Father? You there? I’m talking about the TV series Lucifer (2017-), which has now gone at least a season beyond the point where I stopped watching. Enjoyable, but I’ll wait until it’s complete and probably go back. I was checking that clip in hot pursuit of a thought process around heroes and anti-heroes, villains and good-bad guys, and there’s a brief scene in the first season where the policewoman seems to be starting to research this odd new partner that the plot has given her. It’s just a moment, and not unlike the similarly brief scene in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) where Gandalf peruses ancient documents in search of more about the One Ring. Research gets a scene in these dramas, but just as an acknowledgement – not like forensic examination, for example, which often lapses into musical montage.
 
Anyway. Police officer. Research. That would have been an interesting route for the plot to take – I mean, what would you do? – but instead, spoilers, we head towards psychotherapy sessions for Lucifer’s father issues, dysfunctional family, et cetera, while meeting along the way a series of bad guys who deserve to be punished* – and who better to do that?
 
Psychotherapy trumps religion here, as does outside-the-box policework. Lucifer the TV character derives from Lucifer the graphic-novel character, and he embodies something for us here in the way that “the rebellion” calls out for our allegiance in Star Wars (1977 and beyond). Colin Wilson caught the wave of the fifties with a book called The Outsider (1956, Victor Gollancz), not The Insider – sorry, this sentence leaked in from a version of this blog post written in a parallel universe.
 
Holding onto scary old nanny. Once upon a time, the popular bad guy was Hannibal Lecter. Now, we have a contender for the role who joins us from a darker corner of our collective mythology – but trailing clouds of rationality and psychotherapy rather than any whiff of burning. For me, that’s the significant detail: the absolute denial that – how do I put this? – there could be anything under the bed. Myths aren’t allowed to speak to us these days.
 
Science has excluded the unknown (I smile at that statement even as I write it) so that even reason can sleep easily. Oh, and I think I’m right in remembering that Lucifer describes himself more than once in the series as a “celestial being” – rather than “infernal”, for example. Dad’s upstairs, I suppose, and this is a domestic drama focused on the paternal home. He’s a mixed-up kid, and “father issues” is a safe, tame, above all containable explanation. No wonder so many “indie” novels by young Americans bring back magic.
 
What scares us? Not terrifies us in that sense of a flat-out denial that there’s anything represented back to us by the mythology that we can’t psycho-analyse back under control, but what fears do we like to have around? The psychotherapist eating his patients? The celestial/infernal being who’s a good boy at heart? The Empire repeatedly building hidden weaknesses into its Death Stars? I wonder. They say something about us, yes, and we could get into that, but maybe also they stand between us and – no, look away. Don’t go there. They’re a tool for denial. Everything is under control and we can explain everything and let’s be afraid of this because, gosh, isn’t it scary, children? Those are our fallibilities, over there, lined up neatly, and – no, don’t look that way…
 
But if we can’t even rely on the faces in the stories staying the same…
 
Surely that tells us something too. As does the insistence that left-handedness (see up top) is just a matter of hand-skill. My library card took me to the graphic-novel section this week, where I failed to find Lucifer, decided against anybody else from DC or Marvel, but then thought: I can’t come away with nothing. So I reached out and took something at random from the non-Marvel/DC shelf. And that’s why I have on my desk Volume Two of Stitched (2013, Avatar Press), which is oddly difficult to find online (cue spooky music; remember the box in Hellraiser, 1987?). Story by Mike Wolfer, pictures by Fernando Heinz Furukawa.
 
I won’t be searching out Volume One any time soon, to be honest, but if you can tolerate – enjoy, I should say – a well-told story in which pretty much every character dies a horrible death (“true horror doesn’t stay buried in the sands of time – it transcends them,” says the back cover), then you might find it reassuring to know that there are still some bad guys, in this case lurking on a library shelf, who are unambiguously, without equivocation or rationalisation, splattered with red ink.
​
*Strictly speaking, they punish themselves, as is regularly emphasised at the ends of episodes.

It’s probably not worth launching an entire new career as a time-management guru on the strength of this, but I’ve found that the most effective aid to getting stuff done under pressure is a very short list headed “What am I doing now?”
 
It’s not that I don’t have lots to do. I have lots to do. It’s just that getting myself organised – drawing up to-do lists, deciding what to do first – is an activity in its own right. One more moderately time-consuming thing to do. And the challenge isn’t getting organised; it’s not getting distracted. My desk is a heap of paper. My laptop is – I don’t know how you would explode out a laptop into an analogue representation of all the work it contains, but – my laptop is a heap of paper.
 
Meta-narrative. Rene Magritte, where are you now? I’ve found that if I follow the dictum “If you’re not doing anything, do something,” I can generally navigate my way through a busy day. I may err on the side of checking Facebook again, but if I have my “What am I doing now?” list to hand, I can almost always find my way back again. If you want to put a label on it, I suppose I’m talking about mindfulness, or being in the moment, or perhaps even some form of modern real-world meditation that doesn’t involve washing up. I’m writing this – here we go; Facebook again – with a reporter’s pad next to me. What am I doing now? Oh – I’m writing a blog post.
 
I suppose I could do it all on my phone, and I suppose I could ask my digital assistant what I’m doing, but no. It’s there in black and white. I’m writing a blog post. Now, if I wanted to play around with a soupҫon* of post-modern referential thingummy, I could tell you what the pad says this blog post is about, but then I’d have to get into the whole “what the artist is trying to do” thing (artist – huh!) and it’s a sunny day and let’s just keep going. The artist (huh!) is trying to get outside. Sunny day. Beach. The meta-narrative**, in which the unreliable narrator inadvertently reveals his true motivation, is all present and correct.
 
Captains. I was sitting on a bench the other say, on Prince of Wales Pier, in the sunshine, eating a chicken’n’mayo tiger bap and thinking about the collapse of Western Civilisation (it’s okay, I know; I embarrass myself sometimes), and it struck me that organisation isn’t just my problem. It’s everybody’s. So I pulled out my journal (see above re: there in black and white) and wrote these words. “There are several reasons why Western Civilisation never quite rights itself. One is the interplay between human nature and regulation.”
 
You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and scribble down something profound that you really must remember in the morning? And then next day you wake up and what you’ve scribbled down is something like “remember the captains” (which is a true example from my past)? It also happens to me with chicken’n’mayo tiger baps, except that I solve the world’s problems instead of scribbling down gnomic reminders to myself. Turning the page of my journal, I find: “Regulation of money, penalties for wrong advice, therefore follow the herd.”
 
It’s pleasant, sitting in the sun on Prince of Wales Pier. There are families with small children, fishermen, ferry passengers embarking and disembarking. And one solitary man scribbling notes for a possible blog post about the tendency of financial advisers and others to follow the prevailing wisdom. If they’re wrong, I think my point was, they can at least point to everybody else being wrong too. Oh dear – there’s even something here about herds of wild animals and predators. Embarrassing.
 
Bureaucrats. Then I go on to scribble notes about “the interplay between human nature and interesting things to do”. My idea was, I think, that creative expression is invariably swamped: say something new, or invent something new, and a competition ensues not to build on whatever it was, but to say it again, or build it again. Copycat books, films, even news stories. The winners of those competitions are invariably people who are good at winning competitions, but rarely people good at saying/inventing something new; the two sets of qualities are mutually exclusive. Wow, I was in a mood that day.
 
As for organisation, I think the danger is that it becomes descriptive of a preconception of how a thing should be done, thus an exercise in building a box to think inside, rather than a first step to making a thing happen. [Do I really write this way?] If I add the words “Write a blog post” to a list, I end up with a sense of myself as an organised writer of blog posts. With a list. But no blog post.
 
I see that I wrote a note to myself to track down that remark about the BBC starting out as bohemians pretending to be bureaucrats, and then turning into bureaucrats pretending to be bohemians – which I have since failed to do (anybody?). I have also written, “Technology takes the form of bureaucracy.” Oh dear. Perhaps if I asked them to hold the mayo next time?
 
Anyway – it says here that I’m in the back garden planting out seedlings, so I’ve obviously finished the blog post. Let’s hope my list says “Beach” later.
 
*That’s not a cedilla and I don’t think that’s even a c. I was down in the Cyrillic section of the character map – for my piece on being distracted.
**Actually, the term means something completely different, but I like it. Look it up, but, hey, sunny day.​

This isn’t going to be another post about online marketing, but I do have one last thing to say on that subject. Nobody knows what works. There are the moves that everybody makes – the sudden and unavoidably self-conscious launch into blogging; the solemnly planned Investment Of Time In Building Up A Following, et cetera – and then there are the odd, quirky ideas that are almost embarrassing to have.
 
We’re not talking about money, but if we were, I’d say: there’s putting your savings into a boringly safe bank account, and there’s buying a lottery ticket. And no, that analogy doesn’t work, except to say that boringly safe bank accounts never get you rich quick, and lottery tickets don’t cost much. And I’d rather listen to the story-telling of a lottery-ticket buyer, frankly. Yes, I know that the odds, blah, and the security of a bank account, blah blah, but think of those happy little moments in the run-up to the draw. You don’t get those from your online-banking app.
 
All blog posts lead to an argument for originality these days, if they’re written by me. Leave space for not following the prescribed method. If the software wants to divide your work into chapters, but you’re doing it as one long stream of consciousness – either adapt the software, or junk it. Some people can remember where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news that [insert momentous historical event here]. I can remember hearing the term “work-around” for the first time, as in: the technology’s stubbornly wrong, but the work-around to get it to do what you want is … et cetera.
 
Fool the technology with some combination of moves that it’s not expecting. Don’t even think about trying to make it see sense. Yes, I did enjoy the film Passengers (2016) last week, and in particular, I came over all happy at [spoiler!] the technology’s first assertion that it was “failsafe!” so that Chris Pratt couldn’t have woken up early. There should be an award for the flicker in Michael Sheen’s – the robot barman’s - expression when Pratt points out that, nevertheless, he is awake. [Nicely done, those bar conversations. “Written by John Spaihts” is the credit on the box; Spaihts is the “go-to guy for space thrillers,” says Wikipedia*.]
 
To the limited extent that this blog is turning into a cumulative self-portrait in words, I suppose I’m obliged to disclose that I had to turn the film off at the point where Pratt starts talking about reviving Jennifer Lawrence. Didn’t want him to do that, and perhaps I’ll spend some time wondering why it bothered me. I turned to IMdb to check that there would be a happy ending, and yes, I could return to the film. That was a Garden of Eden they built, wasn’t it?
 
Surrounded by technology, and what do they do? Spoiler again. They plant greenery and – I think I’ve got this right – build themselves a little house. So much for the luxury automated hotel rooms. [For readers who have just joined us, I have rediscovered my old library card, and there’s a rack of fairly recent DVDs. Seem to turn to the films first these days, not so much the books, which probably tells me something – but I did also borrow William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984 again, Victor Gollancz) last week as well. Paperback edition, with The Matrix (1999) represented on the cover.]
 
Where was I? Oh yes – rabbiting on about marketing again. Originality. Breaking out of the box as well as thinking outside it. Not to bring politics into this, but I think I was “inspired” (ha ha) this time by a news report on The President Formerly Known As The Donald’s decision to pull out of the Iraq nuclear deal. Not by the decision itself, nor the speech, but by the absolute certainty with which one of the follow-up talking heads described what was going to happen next. As I say – not to bring politics into this, but we all know that the Titanic is unsinkable. We can all state with absolute certainly that the ship won’t sink – or in this metaphorical present case, that it will sink.
 
I’ve no idea. But the world’s moved on – in a good way – from certainty. We don’t know what’s going to happen, just as we don’t know what’s going to work. We are surrounded by definitive statements of how repudiations of nuclear deals, et cetera, are going to turn out. We are surrounded by instructions on how to do stuff – literal “how to” guides and lists of steps to whatever. None of which change the fact that we don’t know. Let’s get out of the TV studios and talk to the Iranians, if that’s our line of business; let’s follow our own best ideas, if we’re in an ideas-based line of work.
 
*Not surprised to find that Jon Spaihts also co-wrote Prometheus (2012). I think I’d prefer to have Michael Sheen’s robot cleaning the glasses in my kitchen.
​

Marketing’s one-dimensional. Just a tick-box list of things to do. Or is it? If we’re going to stretch this to a third (and final) instalment of my guide to the online marketing of fiction for authors who dislike the word ‘marketing’, we’re going to have to get one thing straight first. There’s no “should” in this. Marketing for authors can be – and you’ll have to trust me on this for at least a couple more paragraphs – an interesting, absorbing, entirely optional but possibly even enjoyable add-on to writing fiction. Although you won’t hear that from the professionals.
 
Spend even a short time looking for guidance on marketing, and you’ll start to hear people using the word “should”. Occasionally, “must”. A friend was told recently that she really should set up a landing page for her forthcoming novel (more on that in a moment). Another, that she should look for opportunities for guest-blogging, and another, that she should think about launching a podcast. In a city, as I said last week, you’re never more than three metres away from somebody who thinks that collecting email addresses by offering an email newsletter is an absolute must.
 
Let’s have some bold side-heads. Behind every Should is a Could. These are activities you could take on, if they came naturally. But a person telling you that newsletters work is actually telling you that newsletters have worked in the past. History doesn’t subscribe to the podcasts that fizzle out after a few weeks. Yes, having a landing page is a good idea, but if you don’t know the term and you look it up (and you’re an author who dislikes, et cetera), I think you’ll come away confused. Even Wikipedia rabbits on about “lead capture” and “directed sales copy”. All of which is fine if you like that kind of thing, but not much use for the rest of us.
 
So let’s take the term “landing page” as our digression for today. Suppose that you’ve researched marketing exhaustively (as, let’s say, you research the technical background of your novels). As a result of all this research, you’ve turned yourself from somebody who writes words, into a one-person multimedia empire, pumping out blogs, podcasts, video series and commentaries – and The Cloud above your head is full of other people’s willingly given email addresses. [You’re now too busy to write novels – we’ll come to that.]
 
They liven up the text, apparently. At some point in all this frantic activity, a social-media-consuming potential reader is going to think: “I have developed such a set of positive associations with this person that I would like to know more and possibly even buy the book.” Your name gets clicked*. And that click takes your potential reader to – ta-daaa! – your landing page. Or to a great long list of your social-media connections if you don’t have one. Now, it’s common sense to have a landing page, and it’s not difficult to work out what the term means. But my intelligent and creative friend was flummoxed. Her problem was, approximately: if there’s a term for it, surely there must me more to it than that? Am I missing something?
 
No, it’s just a page. On a website. People click on your name, they see it. You’ve got one already, actually. The term did need to be invented, because telling people to set themselves up with a landing page is quicker than running through that rigmarole of an explanation every time. But it’s descriptive. It doesn’t hint at depths of insight and expertise and secret wisdom known only to marketing folk**. They can tell you what’s worked for authors in the past, and they can tell you what’s working for authors now. They can’t tell you what will work specifically for you in the future. I’m not saying: ignore them. But I am saying: don’t be flummoxed.
 
Break it up in a good way. And do run the occasional reality check. Not so long ago, you could go to seminars for small-businesses and self-employed eccentrics (me and a couple of others who regularly turned up) and count on being told that Content was key. That’s right. There were graphs and charts to prove that the Content – they meant the words and pictures – mattered. But that never quite meant that we (the writers present) could go home and write our own stuff. SEO, you know. Hire us to write words that search engines will find. Most marketing people aren’t trying to impress you with faux-science. Most.
 
Like I said. Run the occasional reality check. Yes, I have been told, more than once, by marketing people, to leave the writing to them. In the specific context of marketing, to be fair, in circumstances where I knew what they meant – with one exception (an idiot), the point at issue was Search Engine Optimisation. I’ve also been to one recent seminar given by a marketing professional that featured a PowerPoint presentation of SEO done badly by professionals. And I’ve also been told (I don’t know if this is true) that if you don’t do your own SEO, Google will do it for you.
 
They can be quite useful. But I don’t care about any of that. Let the professionals do their job. This is a blog post about what authors can do. As I said: do your job. So here goes. We’ll continue to use the word “marketing” to refer to “the online marketing of fiction for authors who dislike the word ‘marketing’”, but this is our word now. It means what we need it to mean.
 
Marketing is making people feel good about you. Feel good in a particular way. They’re interested by you, and they like what you write. They want to get to the point of sale, and when they get there, they’ll be interested enough, positive enough, to buy your book. A potential reader (buyer) who finds you online will be given everything she needs to work up an enthusiasm for you and your work – given all that by whatever marketing you do. Even before she gets to your landing page, she will have a strong impression that you’re the author for her. [If you’re followed by a lot of people with those feelings, marketing people will want to back you, but that’s another subject.]
 
To foreshadow what comes next, for example. What this means for you is: be yourself, but more so. Be yourself across social media. I pretty much said that last week, but here’s this week’s angle on it. Being yourself is not a distinct activity from your writing. You write in, say, Word and/or Scrivener, and now you also write in Facebook and Twitter. You’re an author – show it. Use social media in whatever creative way you feel might work for you. [Now you do have time to write your novels because the marketing is a kind of extension of that – at least to the extent that you don’t switch off the writing part of your brain and switch on the marketing half; it all comes from the same place now.] Let the writing overflow.
 
Note the “connect” here. If you write fantasy, post about fantasy. Don’t post views on the Venezuelan economy, or Jeremy Corbyn, or the Trump presidency, and expect the people who click on your name to buy your children’s books. Get rid of any lingering fear that what you’re doing is “marketing” as defined by somebody else, and make it up as you go along. Finally, be nice. Be generous. Pay it forward, backward, sideways; be known for your generosity and deserving nature. Thank people. Compliment people. Market them, even. If you’re a truly unpleasant person and you know it, work on your “brand image”, which is to say, pretend to be nice. Common sense, right? And don’t forget to be original***. Below the picture, I’ll give you an example of originality.
 
Mongolian Death Worm. Turned on Freeview the other night to find that I’d just missed a film called Mongolian Death Worm (2010). A truly magnificent title, deserving of further research. It’s a TV film, scoring 3.3/10 on IMdb. I’ve now watched the trailer on YouTube – the blonde woman’s truck has broken down in the middle of nowhere, and back at the drilling site people are starting to disappear – and something that came after it called Mongolian Death Worm: Kill Count, which lives up to its title. The Death Worms reminded me of Predator (1987) somehow, and perhaps there’s a little Dune (1984 again; yes, there’s fresh talk of a remake) influence in there too. Remember the bad guy’s jaws at the end of Blade: Trinity (2004)? Neither do I; I’m far too highbrow to admit to watching anything like that.
 
No, I haven’t seen Avengers: Infinity War yet. Yes, I suppose I will. Remember what I said about originality?
 
*Or your book’s name. People talk about having a landing page for a book. Not un-adjacent to your author website. And/or Facebook page. All closely connected together, in fact.
**I was talking about this once, saying something about Facebook posts I think, and a friend in the marketing business interrupted me. “That’s not social media!” he said. “That’s social-media marketing!” Apparently, there’s a difference. Do feel free to go ahead and work out what it is. I’ll wait here.
***I’m glad you’re doing all the conventional stuff, but here’s the thing: so’s everybody else. Doing all that gets you into the game. What gives you a winning hand is your originality.

Above the picture, we talked a bit about originality. There is a first-time novelist in the US by the name of Noelle Nichols. I don't know her; I only became aware of her because she was added to a Facebook group that I launched recently, with my friend the photographer and writer Claire Wilson (and that I’m just casually dropping into the conversation here), called Falmouth Storytellers. The idea is, briefly: every post begins a story; every comment continues the story. No, you don’t have to live in Falmouth. Just give your storytelling skills a work-out. Am I being subtle enough for you?
 
Anyway, Noelle Nichols contributed to a couple of stories at Falmouth Storytellers, and I read her contributions, and I thought: I could do with something to read. So I clicked on her name. Her first novel, coming out in June this year, is Shadow’s Hand, and it’s the first in the projected Shadow’s Creed Saga. Fantasy. Okay. If it’s well-written. Pre-ordering already live on Kindle, paperback edition coming shortly … and I like the front cover. I made a mental note to find Shadow’s Hand on Kindle when it comes out and download the free sample. Buy it if I like it.
 
Then Noelle Nichols really got my attention. She posted on Facebook a short video clip of her computer screen, on which she was doing some not-quite-final edits to the first couple of pages of Shadow’s Hand. Editing, live on camera. I think that counts as original. She read the story out loud as she edited it, and there was a (to me, anyway) nail-biting section in which she dealt with a repetitive passage on the second page. Two dogs and a cat intervened towards the end, and there was a cut-away to the room. You know that thing with author photographs? You try to read the titles of the books of the shelf behind? A bit like that.
 
My first point in writing about Noelle Nichols’ Facebook post, obviously, is that it fits so well into an argument for originality in the marketing of fiction by authors who don’t like the word ‘marketing’. I have no idea what this particular author thinks about the word ‘marketing’, but she seems to know how to do it with a pleasing degree of originality. And my second point is even simpler. In the opening pages of Shadow’s Hand, a woman with a stick (a staff) attacks a man with a sword. Now that I’ve seen that Facebook post, and thus read the opening pages, I want to know what happens next.
 
I’ll let you know. I realise that I don't represent the precise target demographic for a book written by a young woman that starts with a young woman attacking an older man with a stick, but I’ve pre-ordered the book, and it arrives on 30th June. Watch this space.