am writing

Fresh fish

This entry was posted in Desire Humour and tagged advertising am writing humour marketing sexual attraction on by

Fresh fish

 

Fish and chips are right up there among the great British institutions, going back to, shit, probably Anglo Saxon times. Legend has it that Raedwald, the East Anglian ruler who claimed Bretwalda (Kingship of all England) opened the first Norfolk chippie in 623AD, before going off to fight some Celts. There’s no finer smell on a Friday night than a British fish and chip shop in full fry. Tucking into a nice juicy cod and chips with lashings of salt and vinegar, eaten out of the paper, is one of the great pleasures of life, the gastronomic equivalent of a week-long BJ from Paris Hilton. I’m guessing. She hasn’t actually called yet. But hey, it can only be a matter of time.

For anyone living outside the UK let me begin by explaining just what a big deal this is. We Brits are a nation of chip connoisseurs. Some of us like them golden and chunky with a crispy outer edge. Others prefer them tender and succulent, perfectly chip-shaped wedges of potato that droop over like floppy penises when you hold them upright, then melt in your mouth. There are as many varieties of chip as there are months in the year, and when you discover a chippie that fries them just as you like, it’s like falling in love.

Until two months ago my local chippie had always been The Golden Cod Piece on Long Stratton High Street. It’s right there on my route home, and the chips are so good the queues often stretch onto the pavement. There is another chippie in Long Stratton, less than a hundred yards away, just around the corner on Swan Lane, called Tony’s Plaice, but in twenty years it’s never occurred to me to get my chips there, any more than I’d consider supporting a different football team, or swapping my parents for someone else’s. It’s something you just don’t do.

It was about two months ago, I’d had a mouldy day in the office at UK Cash Cowboys. Our asshole of a CEO, Cleopatra LeGrande, had been giving my asshole of a boss, Dick Holder, a hard time, and he’d been passing it down the line. ‘Shit rolls downhill, Bukowski,’ he’s always telling me, when he breaks the news that I have to work late again to save his ass. When Legrande fucks up Dick’s day he fucks up mine. LeGrande was having a shit-fit over our falling market share. She’d instructed Dick to rush out a new personal loan for fiscally challenged lesbian dwarves with a two thousand percent interest rate. Dick was charging round the office like a dog with two dicks threatening to line us up and anally hump us over the boardroom table if we didn’t get the national marketing campaign signed off and out the fucking door like yesterday.

Brain frazzled, it was already 8pm by the time I got away from the office and began my thirty-minute drive home down the A140. As I headed south the stress slowly melted from my body. My shoulders freed up for the first time that day. I loosened my tie and let out a whoopee cushion of a sigh. Shit, well hello weekend. That first glass of wine was going to taste like Nicole Scherzinger’s bathwater. I hit Talksport on the radio and everything was well with the world.

Twenty minutes later I’m rolling down the hill into Long Stratton High Street, drawn toward the welcoming glow from The Golden Cod Piece’s windows. As I near the chippie I’m like, shit, no, that so fucking sucks. The queue is the longest I’ve ever seen. It must stretch along the pavement at least thirty yards, right up to the estate agent near The Swan pub. After the kind of day I’ve had I so don’t need this.  All the way home I’ve been anticipating those hot succulent taste bombs exploding on my tongue. Now this. I slow down for the car park, double checking the length of the queue. The closer I get, the longer it looks. I estimate a forty minute wait at least. I just don’t need this shit. By the time I park up and join the end of the queue it stretches right up to the door of The Swan, so I’m standing in the middle of a crowd of suicide-pact smokers huddled on the pavement cradling their pints of flat lager. What a fucking break. I can feel the stress from earlier in the day flooding back into my bloodstream, flexing its muscles to fuck up my evening. Big time. Times like these I wish I was a smoker. The queue shuffles along like an arthritic caterpillar, barely moving a yard in five minutes. This is the only downside to Friday nights. The day the whole fucking nation buys fish and chips for tea. And they all seem to be standing in my queue. No doubt each ordering four large cod and chips, one small hake and chips, two plaice, one scampi, three roast chicken, four battered sausages, a fried pineapple fritter and eight portions of mushy peas, and on second thoughts make the small hake a large one.

I check my watch. It’s twenty to nine and I’m still thirty minutes from the chip shop door. I really really don’t need this shit. Finally, after standing in the same spot for eight minutes without moving an inch, I throw in the towel. I have a bag of oven fries in the freezer at home and a fresh loaf in the car. It won’t be the same but I need that glass of Rioja soon or I might spontaneously combust into a puff of smoke. Walking back to my car I pass the other Long Stratton chippie, Tony’s Plaice. Most nights it’s like the Marie Celeste after a redundancy round. Long Stratton may be a two-chippie town, but for over a decade The Golden Cod Piece has been handing Tony’s Plaice its ass on a plate, with batter bits and a portion of mushy peas on the side. Tony’s Plaice cowers in a dark corner of the shopping precinct trying to pick up passing trade like a down-at-heel hooker in the car park of a Vegas hotel. Except for tonight. As I approach I notice to my surprise that the queue actually stretches outside. Not much, but its two-guy tail is definitely on the pavement. This is a real first. A twenty year event. Nearing the door my nostrils twitch at the aroma billowing out on a cloud of steam, a punch in the guts to a hungry man. I have no idea what their shit tastes like but it smells good to me. What the hell, I join the queue. Standing there I glance through the steamy windows. I notice they’ve hired a couple of girls to work the counter. Hot young girls. Even from ten yards away through the misted up glass, you can feel their heat.

For as long as I can remember they’ve had an old Greek-looking guy working the till, who I took to be the eponymous Tony. He has two swarthy lads working the fryers, presumably his sons. Their hangdog expressions don’t exactly yank you off the pavement when you walk past. But these girls, they are something else. As my place in the queue nears the open doorway I get a better view. They look about eighteen or nineteen, like something off of Geordie Shore, in their spray on blue and green tee-shirts and thigh-filled jeans. Both have long brown hair. The one in the blue tee-shirt has her hair gathered up at the back, with a little ringlet hanging down in front of each ear. The other’s hangs in two long platted ropes, which drape over her shoulders and come to rest on the shelf of her pushed-up titties. These girls belong in a nightclub, not behind the counter of a village chippie. Already I can feel my first chubby of the evening coming on. The babes have made up faces, perfect lippy and wide mouthfuls of broad white teeth which they flash at all the punters while engaging in flirty smalltalk. They seem on first name terms with several of the customers. The little name badges pinned to their tee-shirts at nipple height, like targets for the eyes, introduce them as Charmel and Tiffany. You couldn’t make it up.

Here’s the best bit. Charmel and Tiffany are good. Damn good. Working the fryers, the scoops, the salt and vinegar shakers, the crisp white paper and brown bags, they dazzle us with a blur of movement, a cheeky grin, a bit of banter, a pout, a saucy wink. What they’re doing – as they shovel and scoop, as they bundle and wrap with Dickensian workhouse industriousness – is working us punters too. All of us. It’s genius. In the face of such hotness and sure-handed proficiency, the old Greek guy has been relegated to joining his sons behind the fryers. There the three of them sweat away, struggling to keep up with the speed of the chip babes as they race through our orders at boob-jiggling speed. Soon it’s my turn. As I approach the counter the blue-wrapped Charmel greets me with the kind of smile you see on toothpaste ads, or porn DVDs. So I’ve heard. Her sparkling eyes radiate friendliness, youth and fecundity.

‘C-cod and chips please,’ I stammer.

‘Small or large?’ Charmel asks, singeing my hair with a blazing smile. I feel blessed, kissed by the gods that this sweet vision of hotness has spoken to me.

‘Large, please,’ I say. Normally I order small but this is no time to seem less than a man. If this girl had asked me to eat a bucketful of her deep-fried battered tampons I’d have ordered three portions, super-size.

‘Salt and vinegar?’

‘Er, no thanks.’

In a blur of movement Tiffany slides open the glass door and reaches in for a shimmering slab of golden cod with her silver tongs, then shovels three hardcore scuttles of chips into the waiting paper, which Charmel folds and wraps at warp speed. The whole thing has been accomplished in twenty seconds. As they swivel and dip, shovel and wrap, their agile limbs move easily under their shrink-wrapped tees. Their breasts and smiles send out girl messages. Woman messages. Which each man in the queue decodes in their own secret way.

‘Would you like a bag?’ asks Charmel, which I almost hear as ‘would you like a blow job?’ She widens her eyes momentarily.

‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ I say, ‘that would be brill’. Charmel’s twinkly smile doubles in intensity as she cracks open a brown paper bag and slides my wrapped cod and chips inside.

‘Enjoy… and have a nice evening!’ she grins, handing over the bag.

‘See you next week!’ adds Tiffany, flashing those big doe eyes over the top of the hot steel and glass cabinet. It isn’t so much a question, as an instruction. A command that goes in my ears, down my spine and straight into my boxer shorts. See you next week.

‘Yeah, you too guys, thanks,’ I say, doing my best not to trip over the step on my way out.

Hungry as I am, when I get home the first thing I do is knock one out over their faces while my chips keep warm on the radiator. One has to have priorities in life.

What do you know. All these years I’ve been shunning Tony’s Plaice as if it were a clapped out whore who’d give me an STD just by looking at me. As it turns out, his cod and chips are actually not bad. It’s true to say Charmel and Tiffany may have enhanced my appetite a little. The Golden Cod Piece is now history as far as I’m concerned. They’ve had their chance and they blew it. Now I look forward to my drive home on a Friday night even more than before. Did I tell you I’m now on first name terms with Tiff and Charmel? They have this special smile they reserve just for me. We have the crack about football and the weather. They’re big Canaries fans, so I’ve memorised all the players’ names so I can shoot the shit as they flirt with me over the counter as they speed-wrap my Friday Night Special. They know I go home and jerk off over their faces, just like every other guy who now queues up outside Tony’s Plaice through rain and snow. It’s called marketing. And here’s the thing. Over the last two months I’ve noticed the queue growing noticeably longer outside Tony’s Plaice, as word gets out about the eye-candy. Whereas the queue outside The Golden Cod Piece is definitely shrinking. That old Greek guy is onto something. I’ve come to the conclusion Tony’s a marketing genius. His product might be shit but he knows how to advertise. He knows how to sell. My boss at UK Cash Cowboys, Dick Holder, could learn a thing or two from him. Sex sells, as I’m always telling him. We need more skin in our ads, I say. More hotness, more leg. More hot young lips and eyes with tight denimed asses and pushed up titties. Don’t be an idiot, Dick says, it’s not right for our brand. We’re in the respectability segment. Thirty somethings, young aspirers and empty nesters. Brand positioning is key. As he draws a phone number salary and rides the sales figures over a cliff. Fucking schmuck.

Facebooktwitterpinterestmailby feather

I sold an ebook today 2

This entry was posted in Book stuff and tagged am writing books e publishing ebooks kindle writing on by

I sold an ebook today

I sold an ebook today. Just the one. For seventy-nine pee. Woo… ahhm, hoo.

Okay, hear me out. I spent eight years chiselling that mother from a lump of granite called my life. When I released it in November 2012 it was the culmination of a lifetime’s ambition. Ever since I first learned to read I’ve been a devourer of books. In my day job I’ve been writing marketing copy for the best part of twenty years. I have an MA in Creative Writing. I was proud to have finally nailed a proper book, a collection of fine poetry and short stories. A book that if I achieve nothing else in life my son might one day look back and say hey, you know what, my dad did that.

Like most writers who’ve published an ebook, I’m learning fast. The first thing I’ve learned is this. Writing a book is the easy part. Unlike their printed brethren which bask in a publisher’s marketing and have a tangible, browsable life on the shelves, an ebook is a stone thrown into a vast and fathomless ocean. Within seconds it sinks out of sight, submerged beneath the millions of other ebooks gushing out every day. And there it will stay for all of time, at the bottom of the sea. The Titanic of books. If nobody knows it’s there, nobody is going to search for it. If nobody searches for it, nobody will ever know it’s there. Basically, unless you’re already a famous author, actress, sports star, or reformed murderer, you’re screwed. You could say it was a real eureka moment I had. Ohhhhhhhhhhh shit.

It was at this point that the words of all the epublishing experts I’d read started beeping and flashing somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind. All that stuff about how crucial social media was going to be, that I’d need to ‘build a platform’ first, ‘gain some traction’, ‘grow my profile’, ‘write a sequel’, ‘leverage the virality of the internet’, and all those other buzz phrases. I’d set up my blog and Twitter page, but so had everyone else. There seemed to be a million author blogs and Twitter accounts, all shouting louder than me, posting and tweeting a billion times an hour, 24/7, 365. Somehow I’d hoped I’d just put my book out there and the whole world would magically know it was there and flock to buy it. Nothing had prepared me for the booming silences, the zero sum of interest, the utter invisibility of half my life’s work, in the days and weeks that followed.

As I sat there over Christmas watching my Amazon and Smashwords stats flat-lining, I realised this was going to be much harder than I thought. As one does in times of crisis, I began doubting everything about the book. The quality of the writing. The choice of subject matter. I especially worried that the title (Sex on the Brain: Poems and Stories for Men), and the cover image (of a woman’s midriff in sexy lingerie) might have shot me in the metatarsal. Had I in fact alienated the very readers I hoped would buy it?

The cover image had been chosen not without a little irony.To a casual browser I have to admit it did shout erotica. And there’s a lot of that about. Dreadful, vacuous erotica, so formulaic it depresses the hell out of me. Let me say straight out that my book is not erotica. I have nothing against erotica. There are some really good erotic authors out there, writing some inventive and thought-provoking stuff, but they are in the minority. The majority are bandwagon-jumpers, pumping out salacious garbage to make a fast buck. When E. L. James wrote Fifty Shades of Grey it may not have been a contender for the Booker Prize but it was competently written, had a semblance of a story and characters who weren’t just a collection of body parts. When you compare Fifty Shades to the oceans, the waterfalls, the torrents of cheap trashy imitations it seems to have spawned, it’s practically a candidate for the Nobel.

One of my main goals as a writer is to try and make people laugh. I’m not saying that’s the only goal of fiction, or even the most important one. But god knows the world is a grim enough place. There are worse things a person can do than put a smile on someone’s face. Good fiction should stimulate the mind and the laughter gene, not just the genitals.

But here I am, three months in, still struggling to raise the book from the depths of the ocean floor. Finally I’ve had to swallow my pencil and start tweeting. Hesitantly, haltingly, and posting blog posts like this one. It all seems so painfully slow. What I’m learning, in baby steps, is that to be a writer in the 21st Century is like at no other time in history. The internet has changed the publishing landscape forever. No longer is it sufficient to be a great writer. Nowadays one must be a great self-publicist too, a great marketer, tweeter, blogger, poster. An egotistical attention seeker.  Many of these attributes don’t sit comfortably with the writer. In previous centuries all we had to care about was our craft. We let our books do the talking. But the rules have changed. And anyone just starting out had better get used to it. Multi-tasking is the new writing.

I know it’s going to be a long haul but look, my book’s out there. That’s a start. I wrote it, I published it. And I think it’s good. Nobody’s found it yet, but that’s okay, they will. In time. Hopefully posts like this will help, if only a tiny bit. Each small step gets you closer to your destination, right?

Wanna know something else? Today when I logged onto my Amazon account, instead of the big blank rows and empty columns I normally see, there was a big fat ONE in the sales column for this month.

I’d sold a book.

For seventy nine pee.

Someone had taken the time to have a peek inside, then bought it, with their own hard-earned. I didn’t know how they’d found me, who they were, or where they’d come from, but it felt as though someone had reached out and given me a big hug.

I tried to picture them with a conspiratorial smile on their face, lying on a sofa with a kindle propped on their knees, occasionally laughing aloud at the stories and poems I’d written. They might have been in Brazil for all I knew, Finland, Australia or the other side of the moon, I didn’t care. Young or old, male or female, it didn’t matter. All I knew was some blessed soul had liked my book enough to want their own copy, and that made me feel a foot taller for a whole day. That single moment epitomised for me the magic of why writers write, baring our innermost soul to millions of strangers, hoping our thought-seeds one day land on fertile soil and bear fruit, from where friends will spring up.

I sold an ebook today. Just the one. For seventy nine pee. In case you hadn’t realised, it was never about the money. My joy would have been the same had it been seventy nine million sales. That one tiny act of companionship probably meant more to me than the thousands of dollars every best-selling author made today. Would I swap places? I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t one day like to be a famous writer. A million adoring readers is better than one, right? But that doesn’t mean I feel any the less richer in the pleasure my one reader has given me, on this leaden-skied February day.

Right now I feel as if I will feast on this feeling all week. For months if necessary, knowing that my readers are out there. They just haven’t found me yet. But they will. And for every one of them that does, I’ll feel blessed, as though I have made a new friend. As Joe Konrath said in a recent inspirational blog post, “Good books will find their audience. Ebooks are forever, and that’s a long time. Keep at it.”

Now, I’d better get back to being a bad-ass writer, all this waxing lyrical is ruining my image.

Facebooktwitterpinterestmailby feather

The sexiest blog on planet earth

This entry was posted in Frank's books and tagged am writing Frank Bukowski poems poetry Sex on the Brain sexual desire sexual fantasy short stories on by

Sex on the Brain cover - Low Res Welcome to the first ever day of my blog, dudes. A day that will live in infamy, as Roosevelt once said about another bad thing. Okay, let’s cut the stuff. The last thing the world needs is another blog. You’re here because of Sex on the Brain, right? You’re a sex fiend. Well that’s cool. So am I. It’s a kind of hobby of mine. A lifelong obsession that began the day my strawberries dropped, more years ago than I care to remember. Since then hardly a day has passed when I haven’t had, wanted, or thought about sex practically 24/7. Even my dreams are mostly about it. In a roundabout way, that’s how Sex on the Brain came about. Humour me peeps, while I explain. Way back in 2004 when I first got the idea for S.O.B., I was holding down a bum marketing job, helping raise my son and trying to work out how to break through as a writer. Cue violins. I’d had a near miss with a genre novel in 1997 which the publisher pulled the plug on at the last minute, flushing two years of my life down the toilet. The experience kind of poleaxed me for a while. For several years I wrote the square root of jack shit. Just thinking about another novel made me tired. Did I really want to spend another three years of my life coming home from work to hunch over a keyboard all night, and all weekend, and all my holidays, at the end of which I might not get a word published or a sou in return? Well no, duh. But yes. Life’s treadmill may almost have snuffed me out as a writer, but not quite. Sure I’d become Mr 9 to 5, yet somewhere inside me a small flame still flickered. Guttering, virtually extinguished, practically a smouldering taper with a dying glow. But it never went out completely. No sir. Then in 2004 it happened. One of those WTF Damascus deals. A.k.a. a mid-life crisis. When you get to middle age you look in the mirror one day and think oh shit. This is only going one way. It’s not a fucking rehearsal dude. This is your life, it’s half over, and you only get one shot. That’s the day the tumbler finally clicks into place in your brain. The fog clears. And you decide it’s now or never. Really. You either get off your ass and give your dreams a shot, or roll over and fade away. Hell, writing another novel was still off the radar at the time. There just weren’t enough hours left over after my day job had bitten a twelve hour chunk out of my ass. I needed something I could work up in bite-sized sessions, whenever I could carve out an hour, half an hour, ten minutes. I needed a subject I wouldn’t have to research. Something I was already interested in. Something we were ALL interested in, so reading and writing it might be a pleasure. That’s when the penny dropped. Sex, duh. The result, eight years later, is Sex on the Brain. A several hundred page collection of poems and stories about the pleasures of the flesh, imagined and real. A carnal copia that will have you roaring with laughter one minute then slipping a cheeky gun into your pocket the next. I hope. This book cost me eight years of my life dude, a shedload of eating sushi off a barbershop floor, and more dodgy one-night stands than I could count on the hands of twenty six-fingered men from Mars. I’m still in the bullshit marketing job but hey, if enough of you like my shit, who knows, one day I might be able to tell them to jam their lousy job up their ass. I’m counting on you guys. If you’ve checked out Sex on the Brain and think it’s cool, tell your friends. If you haven’t read it yet, WAYWF! Don’t let me down guys. I’ll be back soon when I’ve got some really sexy stuff to post on here.

Facebooktwitterpinterestmailby feather