All Things Hollywood: Shakedown, that is.

Hollywood Shakedown was my first book. 

Well, that's not true. My first novel was a horror novel I wrote based on the Black Sabbath album cover when I was twenty, er, a few years ago. 

A friend read it, slated it and said I should stick to studying Psychology. 

I didn't write a single word again until about twenty three years later when my friend Paul Vani, from Houston, Texas, set me a challenge. 

I've written about this elsewhere so I won't go on, but Hollywood Shakedown was the result. 

The Radio Interview

Hollywood is all over this blog, so instead of internal links, I'll point you in the direction of a radio interview I carried out with the brilliant Phil Naessens of the eponymous Radio Show. 

https://phillipnaessens.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/the-phil-naessens-show-november-23-2012-hollywood-shakedown/

Phil is a top sports DJ who is syndicated around the US. A genuine Indie success story, when Phil first started, he dabbled in Indielit and interviewed me (and my good friends Mary Ann Bernal, K-Trina Meador and Brenda Perlin, who featured on GWP a month ago) on his radio show.  That's me on November 23rd 2012, some six months after Hollywood Shakedown was published.

Latest Reviews

Two of my favourite people - and blogs - reviewed the book lately. This is from Sheffield's finest E Lindley, author of many well received thrillers and romances and member of Rosie Amber's Review Site.

http://lindleyreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/hollywood-shakedown-by-mark-barry.html

She runs a terrific review blog too with some eclectic choices from Trad and Indie publications - she really does do a book justice - getting inside the head of the writer, often picking up stuff most reviewers miss (and I don't mean full stops etc). I recommend following her stuff.

...and this came from Georgia Rose, author of the Grayson Trilogy (including soon, the long awaited third part of the trilogy) and all round top author and massive Indie supporter. Georgia has read all my stuff and I strongly recommend following her well written and upbeat blog. There is some terrific travel writing in there at the moment.

http://www.georgiarosebooks.com/bookreview-for-hollywood-shakedown-by-mark-barry-greenwizard62/

The Amazon Review Crackdown

I'm going to write my opinions on the Amazon crackdown on review protocols. They may prove controversial.  Coming soon.

Here's what Indie commentator, faction writer and supporter Brenda Perlin had to say on the subject on Indie support magazine, Indies Unlimited. 

The comments are excellent, for the most part, and they are well worth a read.

http://www.indiesunlimited.com/2015/07/07/amazon-steps-in-as-big-brother/

The Original Hollywood Cover

I still like that cover, the best of all of the first wave - except for the sunny cover of Kid Atomic, which I may re-release next year for history's sake (if I ever actually do any writing again). The above is still featured as the face of HS on Amazon.com, but it's no longer on my publishing bookshelf.

Thanks for reading,

Mark

*The Goldfinch, for me, only takes off when the action takes place in Las Vegas. The characters in those chapters are working class, hustlers, bums, addicts and losers - pretty much like normal folks. When the action switches to the rarified world of the rich and famous (a common problem, I find, with many "name" US writers), it grinds to a crashing halt. See, for example - Paul Auster, Invisible and James Frey, My Friend Leonard.

For EL Lindley :-)

Stop Press:

The Literacy Project Phil Pidluznyj and me deliver called Brilliant Books is now featured (unexpectedly) on A Woman's Wisdom Blog today. 

https://awomanswisdom.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/guest-blog-brilliant-books-how-did-it-go-by-author-mark-barry/

Happy Third Birthday, Carla. Here's Bodicia's review and some notes on the novel...

My fourth novel "Carla"is (just about) three years old next week. Happy Birthday.

A while back,  the novel was reviewed on the influential A Woman's Wisdom blog, run with discreet professionalism by Bodicia. 

If you're a reader and you are not following this indie blog, you should be - along with Rosie Amber's review blog, EL Lindley's short story and review blog, and Terry Tyler's occasionally caustic and satirical look at matters indie - AWW is critical reading.  

Here's the review. I'll let Bodicia introduce the book for you.

https://awomanswisdom.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/carla-by-mark-barry/

And here's the terrific Bodicia herself, live from the Manor.

Carla is my second best selling book after Ultra Violence. Both sell a few copies every week, though it is the only book I have written which sells in the US (UV is about football hooligans,so I would probably not have bothered if Amazon gave me the option).  

It is set in Southwell, UK, and as I said to the Creative Writing group Phil and me work with last week, you can actually visit the places in the book, including the pub where "Carla" herself works.

I used to drink there but had a fall out with the landlord. I was on my laptop minding my own business and he asked me to move as I was getting in the way. He has the social skills of a house brick. As the pub was empty, it was just personal. I left and never went back. That was three years ago this week.

Guess what book I was writing? You won't even need a second.

Catalogue: I am compiling a catalogue at the moment of the Green Wizard work and this entails collating the pick of my reviews for inclusion. 

Three things come up about Carla time after time. One, women find it a difficult read (subject matter, not writing, which is universally praised), but most finish it. Its about mental health and its about love (Or obsession, though personally, I find the two conditions very similar). 

Two, everyone likes the protagonist, John Dexter, a 42 year old released inmate from a psychiatric hospital (and they, perhaps, weren't supposed to), and three, everyone comments on its grasp of the condition known as Borderline Personality Disorder, a condition of which I have some personal experience.

Fame: Personally, I thought this was the novel that was going to get me in the papers etc, but it never happened - and when you see the fizz and froth that sells in Indie, it is perhaps understandable, but I was naive at the time.

Like Hollywood Shakedown, I would probably not be able to write like this again and I wish - I fervently wish - I could go back, slap myself around the chops and speed it up in the middle, but I think it passes muster still.

Covers: Here's the first cover I designed staying in Kent with my then Beta and (still) great friend Kelly Wainwright.

The first five covers (for the five books which started GW) I designed on Publisher were so amateurish (including a stolen photograph of a beautiful girl from Tumbler - its no wonder I get into trouble!), Kelly contacted me and told me she was getting complaints and it was affecting sales, so, like the embarrassed gent in the Yellow Pages advert...

...I realised I needed a cover designer. So I found Dark Dawn Creations on, of all places, the Amazon Forum and we worked on some covers until we came up with this one, starring a good friend of mine (with express permission, honest guv!) from my local gym. 

The original photograph  for this second edition in the graveyard at the bottom of Southwell Memorial Gardens before being tarted up by Dawn. This is my favourite cover of the lot.

Stepmum: My stepmum described it as the most depressing book she has ever read - and she has a voracious appetite for  books, a four book a week habit. But she read it and that's all a writer can EVER ask, isnt it, for a reader to complete his or her work.

On the other hand, in an interview on the Wizard's Cauldron, top light-erotic romance writer Lelani Black described it as one of her desert island three. That was one of the proudest moments of my time in Indie. Before she said that, I was on the point of packing the game in, but after, I realised that it was probably worth continuing.  Another reviewer, someone I don't know, who suffers from BPD, said it was one of the best books she has ever read so that was also praise indeed.

http://greenwizard62.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/lelani-black-from-hawaii-to-colorado.html

If you are a paperback reader, its a beautiful looking paperback, worthy of a gift, especially with the new Matte covers Createspace are punting at the moment.

Best Chapter: Carla contains my single favourite chapter as a writer - Smash Box, where John goes on a bender in Nottingham City Centre. You can follow his route to some extent, except one of  the pubs he visits is based on the much missed (and maligned) Redback bar, which was closed at the turn of the Millennium by the Police.

Here is the pub he started in, the desperate, end-of-the-world Joseph Else.

It also contains the single saddest chapter I have written so far. I still can't read it. If you know which one it is, then you've read it and know what I am talking about. If not, and you like sad songs and sad stories, you might like this chapter in Carla.

Origin: Here's the origin of the novel Carla - quite a few people may not know the story. This from July 2012. Originally seen just 57 times (boy, was I starting to worry!).

http://greenwizardpublishing.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/green-wizard-5-carla-reprise-i-wrote.html

Trilogy: Carla is the first of three books which deal with this older madman/young (ostensibly) innocent girl dyad. 

The second is Once Upon A Time In The City Of Criminals, which attempts to do what didn't succeed the first time - make the male character a bad bad man. 

This isn't going to work either, judging by several comments made by readers so far, who actually like the new bloke, Terry Valentine. 

The third and concluding part will be out next March and will be written from the perspective of the young girl. Obvious move, really. I've already written this in my head, but I believe there are way too many books out there for reader comfort and one book a year is plenty.

Reviews: There are tons of reviews of Carla both on the Amazon website and also essays on Rosie Amber's Review Blog and on back posts of this one. 

It's  cheap to download too, but consider the paperback - it is a beautiful little thing to give as a gift for people interested in psychology etc and it's just over a fiver.

More later. Happy Birthday, Carla!!

Some Notes On Hollywood Shakedown

Author and blogger EL Lindley read my debut novel "Hollywood Shakedown" just recently and reviewed it, at the link below.  
E really enjoyed it. 

"One of my favourite themes in novels is when cultures collide and this is played out to great effect in Hollywood Shakedown. Barry takes great delight in setting Buddy, a life-long Los Angeleno, loose in a world that couldn’t be more different to his own. I laughed out loud several times as Buddy navigates pubs and has to endure a football game complete with Bovril. During his travels, Buddy encounters a myriad of characters and, one of Barry’s strengths is that there are no ‘throwaway’ characters, no matter how small or insignificant their function within the novel may be."





http://lindleyreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/hollywood-shakedown-by-mark-barry.html?spref=fb

Some history: I wrote this in 2009/2010. It is my debut novel. I hadn't written as much as a short story since 1984, though I had  recently written a (very, very bad, truly terrible gah!) online novel in a group of which I was a big player and had been writing (silly) short sketches for same. 

But even after that group was eaten up by Facebook, I went a further three years without writing a creative word. I'm not one of those writers who are apparently compelled to write (in fact, most of the time I find writing something of a burden). 

Then, one night, one of my oldest friends, Paul Vani, from Houston, himself a decent scribbler, contacted me with a challenge - for what reason, he still won't enlighten me! 

He ordered:

Give me 1000 words which includes the following elements.

Los Angeles
Mrs Dalloway.
Goats Head Soup.

I think I still have the original e-mail somewhere. Anyway, I did this quite easily, but on the story's conclusion, something happened.

Like Forrest Gump and his epic run, I just kept on writing. And writing. And writing.  Half way through, I enlisted the help of a good friend of mine, Kelly Wainwright, to whom the novel is dedicated, who helped me to edit chapter by chapter as it began to spin out of control.

To this day, she is still the novel's biggest supporter, metaphorically speaking.

"Bazza, I don't understand why people don't buy Shakedown? It's f**king brilliant!" (KW, Private Correspondence, May 2014)

It's theoretically my third novel. I wrote one when I was twenty, a student, on a typewriter, in the bay window of a freezing Plymouth bedsit, a horror story based on the Black Sabbath Black Sabbath album cover. 

A friend of mine read it and concluded that it was shit and I should concentrate on my degree, so I didn't write for twenty years afterwards, having a glass jaw to end all glass jaws when it comes to rejection. No JK trials and tribulations for me! 

Then, in my late thirties, I was treated with such spectacularly cinematic ferocity by a sufferer of Borderline Personality Disorder that I couldn't stop myself writing it down in the aftermath of the heartbreak.  

The original Sabbath novel (which I cannot recall at all), was thrown away by my dad during an attic clearout some years ago and the heartbreak journal was lost when my old tower blew up quite out of the blue, (all sparks and crackles and molten hard drive), so these two formative influences are lost to history, but Hollywood Shakedown (theoretically my third long piece of piece of work) is still around. 

Many readers who have read me believe it is my best work. 

I am incapable of writing two books the same, a huge commercial weakness, I'm told, so I can never judge my own work. Blame the ADHD I suffered at school. 

I read it the other day and it seems perfectly competent, a lot more commercial than, say, Carla and definitely the dark and earthy Once Upon A Time In The City Of Criminals  and in parts, it really steams along, but it suffers from my main problem as a writer; that I am a "finisher" - the second parts of my books are much faster than the opening half and many modern, time-pressed readers don't make it that far (I have heard the latest trend is for thriller novels to start with a chase scene, for example, or giant explosions in order to grab the attention of the reader. I read the opening of a vaunted erotica novel the other day. It actually starts mid-coitus without any annoying characterisation acting as foreplay and getting in the way of the meat, so to speak). 

Hollywood takes a bloody eon to get going so if you do buy it - and it's, like, 99p or something - take this into account. I like endings in a book. I can seldom remember beginnings of novels but I never forget a wonderful ending.

I'll write some more about the characters another time.

Incidentally, the protagonist in Shakedown, Buddy Chinn,was originally called Buddy Chinaski - who, as sharp readers may guess, is the son of Henry Chinaski, the nihilistic alter-ego of beat poet and common man writer, Charles Bukowski, one of my all time literary heroes. I was advised to change his name for legal reasons - and followers of the Wizard will know what happened in March, so it was probably a good idea.

Mark

(Incidentally, EL Lindley writes a superb blog full of short stories and impish, mercurial views on life from the perspective of a - very - reluctant older woman and is well worth a follow, one of my three favourite blogs. Here's her latest post). 

http://ellindley.weebly.com/blog/lust-for-life

Buy here - come on now, there's no queue - you'll get straight in!! :-D

99p/$2.27


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hollywood-Shakedown-Mark-Barry-ebook/dp/B00J1OR234/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

http://www.amazon.com/Hollywood-Shakedown-Mark-Barry-ebook/dp/B007XTYLVA/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

________________________________________________________________________________

Stop Press: 

This review of Once Upon A Time In The City Of Criminals just in from popular author, new age surfer and tribal dancer Wendy "The Standing Stone" Steele. 

"Great title! Terry is an ex con, football hooligan in his youth, who has served his time and, though he doesn't want to go back, he hovers on the edge or blatantly crosses the line of lawfulness. Offered a job as a driver by Chloe, who lives in a neighbouring flat, Terry agrees to help her.

Barry describes the City in graphic prose, giving the novel dark, earthy undertones. His characters are well conceived, opening up the realities of an unpleasant world but in all the characters, readers get a glimpse of themselves, showing we are all damaged to some degree.

Terry and Chloe have choices throughout the book, tempting the reader as to which way they will go. We see inside Terry's head and feel the confusion he feels towards Chloe; part of him wants to protect her like a father while another part wants to take her like a lover.

This is a compelling read, though not a comfortable one. For me, I would have preferred a little more pace in the first half of the book and a little less detail of the effects of drugs but maybe an uncomfortable read makes one reassess and questions ones own choices.

I'm happy to forgive a few editing glitches as so much of the descriptive prose was fabulous...some was so delicious that I went back and reread, then pondered before reading on.

This is a great read but not relaxing, bedtime reading!"


:-D Thank you, Wendy x

Wendy's City Of Criminals Review