Guest Blogger: Richard Asplin

So. Scott, like a young Una Stubbs, is on his summer holiday. Presumably as we speak on a rusty red Routemaster singing Cliff Richard Hits and trying not to drip his 99 on his e-reader. We wish him well, natch. For the blogophiles who have surfed their way over here like the cyber-Brian Wilsons you are, expecting the Pack’s usual up-to-the-deadline book-based buffoonery, apologies. You’re stuck with me for the next few hundred words. So get your disappointed yet educated, literary sigh out of the way - (that same one you do when you buy Monday’s Guardian and read the words “Charlie Brooker is away”) – done that? Okay – and we’ll crack on.

But tish, where are my manners? Introductions. My name is Richard Asplin and I’ll be what passes for entertainment for this bit of the screen. Ex-bookseller (back when Hammicks wasn’t Ottakers. Or Waterstones. Or whatever it is now. John Menzies?); Ex-Event manager (back when Books Etc was up and coming and net books had a gentlemen’s agreement); and author of the new comedy thriller Conman (which the Pack-man was nice enough to dish out some stars to on his side-bar). So hello.

Uhm. Now what? Sorry, what I probably should have made clear to S.P. is I have no idea what blogging really is. I’ve never blogged, read a blog, never known anyone with a blog and frankly writing the word repeatedly is beginning to make me feel a little dirty. And not in the good way.

What are these blogs, exactly? Online memoirs..?

“Dear e-diary (diar-e? No, that doesn’t work), am profoundly in love with Pandora.”

P’raps a blog is a way for self-involved Londonites who aspire their own Smeg smug Sunday Supplement column to pretend they have their own Smeg smug Sunday supplement column..?

“Blimey! What a week! Josh and Lottie are off to Montessori and I’ve fallen off my mules into a wheelie bin!”

Is it a place for recommendations and reviews..?

Click here for something hilarious on youtube that 9 million people have already seen and got bored with! LOL etc.

Or ‘praps a blog is a place to share quirky off-beat observations?

Thought: Isn’t it time the twerps at E4 realised that the kitschy boomy-voiced Stuart-Hall-a-like link-man stopped being funny during the 1st series of Shooting Stars?

Thought: Why is Davina McCall on BBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are” trying to find out who her mother is, when she patently calls her nightly to discuss hair-dye?

Thought: I wonder if I set up an online store in Yorkshire supplying Wrigleys and Orbit, it should be called “e-buy-gum”?

I have had small experience of the “blogosphere” about which I will bore you for a paragraph. About 2 months ago I sat in a London pub with my publisher and he laid out his plans for what I can only describe as the “web-marketing” or “e-publicity” for CONMAN (“publicit-e?” No, that doesn’t work either.) We decided that as the book concerns itself with the criminal adventures of a hapless shop-owner, it would be terribly modern and clever to create a fake website for the shop. So being a good author, I promptly did so.

(You can enjoy its faux links and phoney photos here www.heroesincorporated.homestead.com.)

I was moved to recall during that meeting – as I do now – that when my first 2 books were published, silicon-based publicity opportunities simply didn’t exist.

See, when I began, book marketing was entirely inky print. The biggest move a publisher made was a 48-sheet tube ad and a fancy fold-out spot varnished blad. “Web-presence” was what Mary Jane gave Peter Parker for Christmas. Ahh. But how things change, and how we change along with them. One can’t stay still, even if – like me – one would like to. Apparently in order to remain a novelist (a frankly archaic way to earn a living) I need to keep up to date with parts of the world covered in Wired magazine. I know it seems foppishly-fogeyish and punchably poseury, but given the choice dear reader, I would like to remain a writer and also keep my head clear of bandwidths, USB sticks and the letters “http.” I simply don’t care about them.

However. Being me, and wanting to both eat my cake, have it (and put some in the fridge for later), I don’t really wish to be left behind by technology either. I don’t want to wind up a doddery pensioner who locks himself indoors with his vinyl because he’s frightened of jet-packs and flying cars. But I know this is what awaits me. As the much-missed Doug Adams said: “Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things”

I suppose I could build an Anderson shelter out of PG Wodehouse hardbacks and distance my novelist-life from Blu-Rays and e-Readers and Twattering. Leave it to horse-faced popsies in the publicity dept to worry about as I bang out my next story on a battered Underwood. However as a comic writer and performer, I do not have such ludditery luxuries. I have no choice but to keep my conversational allusions, metaphors and observations topical. Something it’s tricky to do while cowering within my Casa Del Jeeves.

Fact is, dear reader, much like my grasp of technology, all my references too are slipping dangerously behind. You say “fat,” I default to a Rik Waller simile. Rik Waller. It takes me 5 minutes of pacing and nail-biting to finally yell “I mean Beth Ditto!” by which time the conversation has moved on. You mention someone acting weird, I pipe up with “Rain Man.” Rain Man? A hit movie TWENTY ONE YEARS AGO! (Calm, Richard. Calm). So it seems I have to not only read Wired and Which PC every week but also Heat, OK, Vanity Fair and Premier. When I’ll have time to write the damned novel, Lord only knows. (See? Did it again. “Lord”? That was 2000 years ago).

Maybe I’ll just remain behind the times. It’s where I feel I belong, as my tailor will concur. Those who have the misfortune to know me have me pegged as a retro, anachronistic SOB anyway what with my brogues, jazz records, Brylcreem and uncanny resemblance to a Greg Proops / Mark Kermode stem cell experiment. (Mark Kermode’s name surely means Mark The Toilet? Why has no-one on The Late Review ever mentioned this?)

Anyhoo, that’s enough for now. Thanks for hanging out with me for a couple of pages. This has been my first wobbling, shaky steps into the web based world of the future. I appreciate you being my stabilisers.

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Richard Asplin's latest novel is, indeed, called Conman.

He doesn't appear to have a blog.

Comments

[Matthew]

Well that was an amusing enough post to make me laugh out loud in the office - on a Thursday! I think I'll go and buy your book at lunchtime.

Matthew

[Michael]

Excellent start, Richard. In fact, I think you should write a blog!

[SeriouslyKooky]

Agreed with Michael - you need to write a blog! I'd follow!

[John Hawes]

Very witty, your wordcraft is as ingenious and entertaining as ever. Have a word with your agent to get you on to "Have I Got News For You".

[Leigh Russell]

May I join you in your Wodehouse-Anderson shelter from the modern world? We can listen to jazz (on vinyl) and bang away (on our typewriters!) and revert to being less than thirty-five. When I was less than thirty-five, no one was blogging or wittering (or is it twittering?) about USBs and http:// . . . And that way, we might, as you say, have time to write. Except that when I was less than thirty-five, I hadn't started writing yet . . . damn. I knew thi Utopia would be flawed somehow.

[Leigh Russell]

and yes, thi should be this. On a more positive note, if you noticed my typo you must have read my comment. (Though having reread my comment, I'm not sure that's so positive...)

[Scott Pack]

Thank you Richard for being the first guest blogger during my spell away. You show a remarkable knowledge of blogging for someone who doesn't do it.

Anyway, your audience has spoken, start a blog immediately.