Trolls, Trials and Tomes

I was so exhausted after two weeks with a student who, in fairness, was no trouble, it was me, talking 200% more than average and mentially being on home-duty every morning and evening... that I couldn't even blog.
Now there's a pile up of landlady lore before the next fella moves in. 

Morning holds such promise with freshly brewed coffee, an allegedly low-cal cereal and opening hopeful emails, any day now a publisher will write back. With good news this time.

Europe might be out of the recession but I for one know that it won’t be over in this house until I unsubscribe to emails from jobs.ie, eTenders and GrabOne.  I don’t even know why I bother scanning the list of jobs for IT/foreign language programmers on Google, because any of the ones I could do, like PA with English, they don’t even reply to. Last year was the upskill, interview, CV, recruitment drive. I can either say it was a complete waste of time or it gave me a perspective on a niche sphere. Well, it is a sphere that is a complete waste of time if you’re not in IT/Finance/Marketing/PR/HR, masters level liberal arts and twenty years of business practice counts for nothing these days. Yet I was told my CV was intimidating, my references were outstanding and could overpower a boss, so I should remove my achievements and big-up my typing speed (70wpm in case you’re interested). I even did on-line tests in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and was impressed by what my laptop could achieve as I dithered; now I know what Macros are for.  

As for eTenders, I might as well unsubscribe now. The last time I tendered was at the invitation of a semi-state to be on their conservation panel. I had to take out Professional Indemnity insurance just to submit, at a minimum of 1,000 euro that turned out to be a complete waste of time and money.

That leaves my email inbox with the odd Twitter message, Facebook telling me to say happy birthday to loads of people, sales of sex toys and invitations to galleries and book launches.

It’s a shame our two major galleries are all but closed and there are no blockbuster exhibitions to excite tourists and denizens alike. But emails from the private galleries still show commitment to artists, they're putting on regular shows, there's still money to buy art, just not new money. Green on Red, Kevin Kavanagh, Oliver Sears, Cross Gallery and the Kerlin are all still doing business.

Without email I wouldn’t have got my invite to Roddy Doyle’s The Guts launch or Joe Joyce’s Echoland.  Three Booker winners at one of them, veteran investigative journalists at the other, talent and good will everywhere. I’m glad I went, bought the books, had the chat with friends I haven’t seen in ages and resolved to persevere even more on editing my own novel. 10,000 of my 125,000 words cut in the last two weeks, ouch.

Now that I’m contributing opinion pieces to the Irish Independent, how could I give up Google? They mightn’t want to interview me but they save me all those years I used to spend in libraries. And as for email, I wrote an article in 3 hours last week and was able to verify all my facts by contacting expert friends in high places, without getting out of my pyjamas.

There’s a lot to mistrust about the internet, there’s scary Ask.FM, scary Eric Eoin Marquez, loathsome trolls on Twitter, it’s up to the rest of us to uphold good standards and cut out the crap.

I met a man recently who would have nothing to do with any of it, a much respected literary agent. He doesn’t have a mobile, a web-site, email or use the internet. I contacted him by landline, left a message on his answering machine, he phoned back, we talked, I posted a hard copy of 3 chapters, in an envelope with a stamp.

We got along very well, but he sent me away to ‘do more work’ and I don’t think he meant writing blogs to distract myself from the task in hand, back to the book…

He represents 160 authors. Sure, who knows….