Finding a reason to exist.
I have been aware for some time that my blog,
www.underground-railroad.org.uk has been struggling to find an audience.
Firstly, it is ugly.
Secondly, I use too many words.
Internet writing is all sound bites- short paragraphs and short words. It is more like a comic book than a novel because attention spans are shortening all the time.
I write as if I had a captive audience- slabs of words that say great things if only one had the patience to read them all.
This will have to change.
My ego demands an audience of thousands!!!
I will change the layout but first I must find my USP- Unique Selling Point.
What can I do that nobody else is doing?...apart from slabs of text two thousand words long?
Fiction.
I will promote male writers and male friendly writers.
Women have the Orange prize. Only women writers can win the Orange prize but this is never honestly stated. The reader is left with the impression the winner of the Orange prize has written the best book available and not just the best book by a woman.
This is not only fraudulent but cannot be justified. Why should one sex receive help and not the other? Why? No answer is ever given.
We are only men after all.
The invisible people. People without feelings or inner lives.
Half-men in other words. Living yet somehow already dead. We have all heard the song 'only women bleed' and this has become official dogma. Only women hurt. Only women feel sad or lonely or tired. Only women have any right to express their pain because if a man feels pain he is a wimp.
How has this occurred?
One way is by making men invisible in our culture.
Do you see men talking about their lives on daytime TV? No.
Men are busy working.
Do you see the inner lives of men depicted in literature.
No.
You read of men blowing things up or dieing but you learn nothing about the man himself. His fears, his sadness, his hopes.
The man himself has become invisible.
He is the one who works to keep the lights burning. He prints the books, he builds the TV sets, but never appears on them.
Man has lost himself. He labours so that women can be fully human, so that women can feel what he himself cannot. He is a lesser grade of being.
In Medieval Europe only the nobility had feelings, we are told (this is why we talk of noble feelings).
The serfs were too busy to be human beings.
Very little has changed. Where literature was about nobility now it is about women. Men act. Women feel.
We need a new literature that recognises that men do have inner lives. Even ordinary lives have moments of discovery. Men have second rate legal rights but we do not have second rate souls.
If you fancy yourself as a writer then please send your stuff to me. I will publish it under your name on the site. Reserve the copyright by putting the words 'Copyright my name' somewhere on the document and I will market the site to publishing companies.
Perhaps you will gain a contract.
Stranger things have happened.
Start writing your book today. It is easier to write knowing someone is waiting upon the next chapter and wants to know what happens next.
Just make a start.
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