Such stuff that dreams are made on

My subconscious is a strange place.  I don't know if everyone does this, or it's just me, but I dream in narrative.  Several times I've woken in the night lunging for a pen before I lose whatever gem of a plot has just spooled before my mind's eye.  Occasionally it still holds up the next morning.  Once I got a half-decent opening scene for a thriller and on another maddening occasion I awoke knowing I'd just imagined an entire episode of Spooks.  It had been rather exciting (which perhaps should have alerted me to the fact that I was dreaming) but I couldn't remember anything else about it.

Now it seems the shadowy (and probably very dusty) recesses of what passes for my mind are dwelling on the world of e-books.  When I woke at half past three this morning I had been dreaming of reading an article on e-books.  There were two points that struck me:

1. Any woman seen with an e-reader in public at the moment will be assumed to be reading porn.
2. What are the long-term implications for charity shops?  Second-hand bookshops, too, although those seem to be like hen's teeth round my way.  If e-books come to dominate the market, donations to charity shops will dwindle.  I still haven't got an e-reader (hypocrite! I hear you cry) but I imagine that once you've read a book you don't want to read again it's just deleted.  If it was a paper book (I was going to write 'proper book', but that's surely opening up a can of worms best left undisturbed by an indie author) it would, I hope, end up being passed on rather than binned.  I don't have any statistics, but I should think books bring in a steady revenue for charities.  Even people who actively avoid manically over-familiar persons in aggressively bright tabards may end up handing over a fair bit of cash to charity in their thirst for reading matter.  What happens when they no longer have a reason to cross the threshold for a browse?

I was so struck by these points that, in my dream, I began to read the article aloud to my mother.  As is the way of dreams, at this point the article became one about market gardening, written phonetically in an obscure Scottish dialect, and as such became irrelevant to this post.

I'm still worried about what reading a Kindle on the train would do for my street cred, though.

Keeping reality at bay

One of the joys of fiction is that it can transport you utterly to another place, another time, even inside the mind of another person.  However, the alchemy is a fragile process and it doesn't take much to shatter it.  Sometimes all it takes is a tiny reminder of the outside world.

The means of communication used by the characters in Looking for Buttons may strike some readers as a little behind the times: they text and e-mail and sometimes (heaven forfend!) actually talk to each other.  No-one tweets or posts status updates to Facebook.  This was deliberate.  It is not just that I am a dinosaur (an eleanorbrontesaurus, perhaps).  As I wrote, I was aware that techonology moves on apace and using the wrong gadget would date it far more than the actions of the characters.  (One of my guinea pigs was quick to point out that at one point Kate Harper, the narrator, was watching a video rather than a DVD.  I didn't even consider bringing Blu-Ray into it.)  Even so, I'd far rather that someone thought I was a little old-fashioned than be jolted out of the book completely by something being so odd that it made them question the workings of the world within the book.

And what prompted this post?  It wasn't even a book I've read.  No, it's the behemoth that is Fifty Shade of Grey (again).  And the thought that is going to prevent me ever being able to buy into the story, should I read it, is this:

What does Christian Grey's cleaner think of it all?  Or does he dust his dungeon himself?

It never does to have a practical nature when dealing with escapist fiction.

Just something I lashed up

Today I'm going to write about Fifty Shades of Grey.  I haven't read it, but everyone else seems to have an opinion so I'd better jump onto the bandwagon while it's in town.

So here's my take on the female population's sudden desire to read about being tied down while a capable man does all manner of things to them:

For the past however many years, women have been trying to Have It All.  They're knackered.  It's no wonder their ultimate fantasy is to lie down while someone else does all the work.