The Afterparty. Or Publicity. Or 'The Interactive Novel'

Yes, that one. Anyway, at the request of the author (how good does it feel to write that!) I am expanding on my comment to him - about how I felt cheated by his subtle marketing campaign. Let me explain...


I actually won a copy of this book, and when I did so I was excited! I never win anything you see. But now I see that this was only the beginning of my journey with The Afterparty. From here on, I had already been sucked in to it's subtle 'publicity' campaign and I had technically already entered the novel. This made the fact that I had won the book both better and worse. Don't get me wrong, I understand that winning the book is a normal publicity tactic, but this time it was different.


This novel should be described as an interactive novel for many reasons. Firstly, having won the book and having read somewhere online that it would be out in Spring, I got a little confused when I skipped to the back of the book (I can never help it) and found the section on the back page devoted to telling readers about how they could cameo in the book, get their tweet on the cover, and even review it! Exciting prospects! But I was confused, how could these things make it into a book that was already published and in my hands? Was this book I was holding just a promotional copy? Or would there always be a constant stream of new editions? I'm still not sure on this, but I like it anyway. And you can see how it was beginning to make me think.


As I continued reading, I then began to question everything that cropped up in the novel. Even the e-mails - were these real? Well of course not, but see how these clever clever plans draw you into the novel on another level? On hindsight it was a brilliant trickery, but whilst reading I can see now that I had fallen into it hook, line and sinker, and continued to as I interacted with the novel some more.


Now I hope that this is not coming across as a dislike for the novel. This is quite the opposite in fact, I did really enjoy it. I found that it was so cleverly written that it could send some readers into a schizophrenic episode, and that can never be a bad thing. I have been rightfully and correctly conned of my ability to be a passive consumer, and I have been willfully dragged straight into the world of The Afterparty whether I would have liked to have been or not.



Although it should probably be re-named - "(Free) Publicity"

Letter to my 10 Years Older Self

So we've all read the Letters To My 16 Year Old Self, but writing to them is a little late don't you think? What would you say to yourself if you could see you in 10 years time? What are all your hopes and dreams for the future, that you'd not want yourself to forget? What little piece of yourself would you want to keep with you throughout the next ten years, and what piece would you want to change? Give it a go - I bet it'll be tougher than you first thought!


Dearest Amy,


I hope that this letter finds you well, and that you have aged gracefully. I know that you're only 30 right now, but I'm only 20 and so to me 30 still seems a little bit old. I hope you don't feel old though, because if you feel old in your mind, then you really will become it. Just remember how much fun we had when we were my age, because 30 isn't too old to still have fun!


Anyway, I hope you finally learn what it means to be beautiful. I hope you've realised that beauty isn't just on the outside, and you don't need people to tell you you're beautiful in order to be it. Please know that beauty comes from within, and that if you work hard at being a good person, the results will last much longer than anything you could get done at a beauty salon.


I wonder whether you have had children yet. I wonder if you are married. I hope that you've fallen in love at least once, and if more than that I hope your heart hasn't been broken too hard. I wish you could tell me all about it, love, and explain to me how fantastic it is. I'm sure it is.


I hope by now you've set out on our correct path and found something we both love to do for a living. I don't care what it is, so long as we enjoy it, and preferably make a bit of money out of it! I bet you've ended up doing something really messy. Like being a farmer or something. And I bet you adore it. Anyway, if you don't you've still got plenty of time to find something new. Don't forget that - nothing is ever set in stone.


Anyway, you're probably busy feeding pigs or children or husbands or something. I hope you're still baking things, and with a little more skill than you do now!


All my love, and good luck.
Your 10 years younger self
xx
 

One Day I'll be able to bake cupcakes without feeling guilty...

This post is going to skilfully sidetrack any mention of David Nicholl's bestselling novel - One Day. Oops, I just mentioned it. Anyway, the point is that I don't really think I'll be able to do it justice with what I have to say about it, so I'm going to subtly reference to it through some cupcake metaphors.

Cupcakes are both tasty and delicious, as well as being the opposite of guilt free. And I’m sorry, but those 'healthy', 'skinny' cupcakes just taste like crap. And porridge oats. And this is really what I thought of One Day. Yes it was delicious to imagine these characters as being potentially realistic, and yet it still had that element of bad feeling when you realised that all the good bits you were imagining and picturing in your head were in fact imaginary. Don't get me wrong, this book was a good read and it didn't really bore me in the slightest, but as usually happens with 'best sellers', it was a little bit of an anti-climax. Good, but not 'ohmygoshthisisfreakingamazing'. And perhaps this is also the bit that relates to home-made cupcakes. Good, but not as good as in the shops.

As for the guilt factor? Well this must inevitably come from reading the book in public, and hence hopping onto the One Day bandwagon. This may just be me, but somehow I lose a bit of the love for a book if I know it's sharing itself out with every other Tom, Dick and Harry. I like a bit of book monogamy. Or if nothing else a touch of discretion.

I will be realistic however, and agree that yes this book was a nice little summer read. It was an interesting study of people and the characters had a wonderful, if not slightly predictable, amount of depth. But let's all be honest here, I don't think there's a single person who didn't see the twist coming. I mean, it was pretty obvious she was going to die right?

Oops. 
 

 

Can you even book a campsite?

Well the answer to this is actually a big fat YES! And I shall tell you right here, about my experiences a week or so ago at a delightful little campsite in North Wales, whether you like it or not.

But what is this, you say!? I thought this was about books, you say?! Well I suppose it is how it started, granted, but I have decided that the title may serve a dual purpose and also do a rather good job of being able to provide space in which to document my travels. 

So as the first in the hopefully long line of travel pieces, I shall start modestly with my buzz worded 'staycation' in Abersoch...

Firstly let me commend the perseverance of my lovely little red Ford Ka who managed to drive the 500 mile round trip without even a hint of a struggle. This is impressive, firstly due to the car being a Ka in the first place, but also because my companion and I did manage to fit an awful lot of camping gear into its modest interior.

Over the course of the weekend however, this little Ka did us well and, music blaring, carried us nicely to the little camp site I had booked the week before. Nestled in the Llyn Peninsular countryside, Rhos Y Foel was, lets just say, not what we were expecting... (although in hindsight, what is there to expect other than some grass and 'facilities' for £12 a night?!)  It was delightfully placed with beautiful views surrounding us and not a noise to be heard for miles, other than the young cows giving us a good Moo every now and again. For its beauty, it could not be faulted. For its appropriateness for two 20 year old girls on a road trip/surfing attempt however, it appeared we were a little out of place.

Nevertheless it had been I, afterall, who had chosen said campsite, and so it was I who had to make sure my companion did not tell me I was an idiot for doing so. Surprisingly, it was not difficult to do so! Once settled it provided a gorgeous location for Pimms and bacon sandwich on our little camping stove, and everybody was lovely! There weren't many people, granted, but the ones that were there did not actually mind us laughing hysterically at the situtation we had found ourselves in, and so we liked them for it...

The next morning we had booked a 2 hour surfing lesson with the West Coast Surf School in Abersoch. We were terribly excited the night before, but due to our ever worsening hangovers getting up at 8.30am to mess around in the cold cold sea was seeming less and less appealing...! But plough on we did, and off to Abersoch we drove.

The surf lesson was really fun, but this was probably down to the fact that we were able to just get on with it, as the staff, friendly as I'm sure they were, left a little to be desired by way of enthusiasm. However for £30 you can't really go far wrong. Indeed, we definitely would have gone back and hired a wetsuit and board for £18 a day, if they would have also loaned us a soft-rack in order to transport the boards to the beach! I'm sure they'd get a lot of extra business if they did this, as the beach is actually a short drive from the shop...!

For our 'cheaper than going abroad' attempt at a holiday, it was everything we could have hoped for - mildly comfortable, occassional activities, a day's sunbathing on the beach, and a lot of chuckling at the situation itself. And it was definitely cheaper!

Lap it up, Pray it will end, Grows on you a bit...

I have been moaning about this book for a while now - Eat. Pray. Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I was quite excited to get stuck into this one, but it has taken me a while to finish it because I just wasn't all that into it. Unfortunately I have this policy whereby I cannot leave a book unfinished, which means that I have ended up ploughing through a fair bit of rubbish and regretting even starting the thing, let alone paying money for it. This was somewhat one of those bits of rubbish...

So I started fairly optimistically until I realised that the 'pray' part was actually quite a lot about praying and God and stuff. I'm not really into all that, but if she is then that's fine. No, the thing I disliked the most about this book was just how American it was. Think about it. One of the biggest stereotypes of American women is their ability to MOAN. And man can this woman moan! Yes, it's not nice getting a divorce I'd imagine, and hers didn't exactly sounds pleasant, but did the book really need to be a 347 page rant about her thoughts and feelings and 'spirituality'? What a load of garbage.

Fair enough, the Pasta sounded delish. I quite liked that bit, minus the parts where she mistakenly thought that everyone was dying to know about her psychiatric wellbeing. I also quite liked the lovey bit at the end - Bali sounded fun! But I really did have to put some effort in with the middle part. It could have been cut down by at least half - I think we got the jist that she needed to 'find herself' in about a million different ways, but we only needed the general outline.

Perhaps I am just insensitive and spiritually damned and incompetant, but that's the way I feeeeeel about this book and I'd just love you all to know about it because my feeeeeelings are so terribly important.

Maybe the film is better...

Roll on the next one! Perhaps some Alan Bennett will do the job a bit better!

Flat hair is about as good as a flat book - ie. not good...

Yesterday I went to the hairdressers. I usually hate going to the hairdressers, not only because of the fear of them getting a bit too scissor happy, but also because of the awkward conversation that seems to ebb and flow with the awkward silences. Yesterday however was a somewhat pleasant experience resulting in a somewhat acceptable haircut, and it wasn't because she didn't talk about where I was planning on going on my holidays...

No, yesterday I met perhaps for the first time, a hairdresser who had a passion for literature. She was a 'mature student' about to embark upon a degree in English Literature and Language at Warwick University. Pretty impressive huh? Especially considering how I'd just sat there and told her about my getting into Nottingham through clearing, just to bring myself down to a level I thought she could relate to...

But there we sat (or I did anyway) discussing everything from George Orwell to Elizabeth Gilbert, and in surprising detail too. I mean, I don't even get this type of conversation usually with my friends at university - even ones that actually do study English! It was fantastic to be back talking about all of these minute details that we'd found in books and poetry, and not feel like a complete twerp for reading into even the slightest thing.

We'd both read pretty similar types of things, including Richard Yate's Revolutionary Road and surprisingly we also both agreed on our opinions of it. And I'm sorry to say what I'm about to say, but for the first time ever I actually preferred the film to the book. I know, shoot me if you want to, but I don't think I'll be the only one who thinks this.

We both agreed, whilst she was washing my hair, that for all of Yate's good efforts, the book was a little, well, flat. Now I'm not sure whether that was the whole point...whether it was supposed to be flat to represent how dull and flat the Wheeler's lives had become (or always were?). But either way, there was not enough volume in the parts that were perhaps supposed to lift the overall body of the book. I get that they were supposed to be on the edge of the typical suburban life, and I get that the whole thing is ironic in that they were perhaps never actually all that different to everyone else, but I do think that that could have been conveyed in a different way - perhaps without making the reader themselves feel like they had also been sucked in to boring suburban life.

Maybe I've got this all wrong, or maybe it was a little more voluptuous at the time, but both my hairdresser friend and I agreed that the film managed to convey a little more of the underlying subtexts that we both felt we found in the book. And it's pretty tricky for a film to convey a 'between the lines' reading of any text, let alone one of Richard Yate's infamous writings, but somehow I felt that it did more for me than this beautifully bound hardback copy sat on my desk.

So without wanting to overdo it on the flat hair metaphors, I shall leave it at that and perhaps we shall agree to disagree. Alternatively, perhaps you may see some sense in my madness and drag me out from the dark side where I shall sit casually and rightfully with my new hairdresser friend.

Perhaps we may even start a book club, and lord knows that will not be flat!

Ciao

Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then we'll begin...

(I won't begin to say welcome until I can know for sure that someone has read this, and if they do they will probably get some kind of a medal...)

So... in an attempt to follow suit in the global trend that is blogging, I shall endeavour to give a decent enough round up of some of the books that everyone is talking about or has spoken about at some point or other. But of course, I’ll mention it in a different way otherwise there's probably not much point in me talking about it at all...

Let's just bear in mind though, that I am a student, which means that I barely have time to read a textbook, let alone a novel for fun. But as I work my way into my 3rd and final year, the workload will inevitably begin to pile up and so I shall need more and more distractions. I aim to distract myself constructively this year however and so will shall read for your amusement.

In the meantime though, I'm sure I can think of a few things to say about a couple of books here and there. I shall refresh my literary mind and fill your screens with waffle and jargon. Hell, I might even buy another Moleskine to make a few notes in! I knew there would be an added bonus somewhere along the line...

I hope you can contain your excitement...