Thankfully we didn’t encounter any more RUC
roadblocks on our way home from Glenarm.
I returned the hire car and wandered around Warrenpoint saying hello to
those I knew and even those I didn’t. My
mother took Charles on lots of little shopping trips showing him off to her
friends. I managed to get a hold of Brendan
and we took the ferry over to Omeath where we had a few pints of the black stuff. Brendan still refused to talk about any of
his experiences and claimed that he had no idea that his father blamed me for
not just his membership of the IRA but also his imprisonment. I did however give him the name of the fellow
who had attacked me and asked if he would look in to it for me. I didn’t explain why I needed to know if this
fellow was in the IRA, I just asked him to find out for me as a favour. I wouldn’t have wanted to be responsible for
what would happen to him if he had only been pretending to be in the IRA.
For the return journey Charles and I took the
Belfast to Liverpool boat. We travelled
up to Belfast with Pat, who worked there, and caught the morning sailing. It was a pretty uneventful journey and nice
to get back home to Irene and the rest of the children but so sad to leave
Ireland. In fact the trip probably made
me more determined to get back home, so I sat myself down again and tried to
work out how to achieve it. At the time
in the Republic if any of your income came from the arts, then you were allowed
to take it tax free, so the Republic was quiet an attractive proposition for
me. I was able to earn a decent wage but
it was not a steady income flow, there were bits and pieces from here there and
everywhere and nothing was guaranteed.
It would have been nice to have one secure source of income.
At the time people like Joan Collins and
Jeffrey Archer were receiving multi million pound advances for their books. I think one of them got an eight million pound
advance while the other was twelve million.
I can’t remember who got what but I do remember Joan Collins saying that
she got up every morning and, remaining in her dressing gown, would sit herself
down and begin to write. I had to laugh
when the publisher told her that her book was rubbish and asked for their
advance back. I suppose every writer in
the world, not just the UK, secretly wished that they would one day be lucky
enough to get such huge advances. I know
I did, which I know is strange, as I often comment that artists don’t really
care about money, but in this day and age a huge, publicised, advance of the
filthy lucre is a very public way of showing that you have made it. Plus it wouldn’t half piss off the golf club
crowd.
I was watching the Russell Harty show, a chat
show where celebrities tried to promote and sell their wares. Russell was interviewing the supermodel Naomi
Campbell and she was promoting her new novel.
Most people are aware that stick thin supermodels are quite thick and I
was wondering how on earth the woman had produced a book when she said, in
answer to a question Russell had asked her.
“I might not have written the book, but it is my story.” As you may imagine my ears pricked up and I
began to pay some serious attention. I
had no interest in Naomi Campbell, I didn’t even rate her as a woman, never
mind a novelist, but I now found her to be very interesting. It took a bit of digging in my local library
but I eventually discovered the realm of the ghost writer.
Suddenly a new world opened up before me, I had
stumbled on the dark art of ghost writers who produced the books that the
celebrities pretended to write. So thank
you very much Naomi Campbell I knew that I was about to become a ghost writer. In America it is an accepted business but in
the UK it was still quite secretive and normally a celebrity’s agent would
contact a literary agent and arrange the deal.
With me still not having a literary agent I knew I would have to approach
this mission from a completely different angle.
What I now had to do was work out who I could write for and what could I
write. Up until now my writing had been
all over the place, not focusing on one genre.
And how would I contact anyone, I was certainly starting at the very
bottom of this particular market, not knowing anyone or anything really.
I began to watch television but in a completely
different way to normal people, I suppose that will come as no surprise to you
all. I began to focus on a handful of celebrities;
in fact I bought myself a video recording machine that allowed me to transfer material
from one video tape to another, so that I would build up my own bank of reference
material. One person that caught my eye
was an up and coming comedian, Paul O Grady. O Grady was a drag queen who performed as a character
known as Lily Savage. Lily Savage was
quite funny and becoming more and more popular, but he wasn’t yet at the top of
the pile. Every time that he appeared on
the television I would record him and I ended up with a three hour tape of just
Lily Savage, this was apart from the shows that he had produced on video. I didn’t find his material exceptionally funny,
or want to watch it time and time again, I just wanted to be able to fine tune
myself to his voice and mannerisms.
I had been writing some Mills and Boon novels
before this. Mills and Boon are a great
little money earner but they don’t really allow any creativity. Each manuscript has to be exactly fifty five thousand
words long and written to their precise formula. So I came up with an idea. I thought Lily Savage could produce her own
Mills and Boon type novels. Savage could
promote the books by saying that they were real love stories, for real women,
written by a real woman. The books would
be exactly fifty five thousand words long and would look and feel like Mills
and Boon novels. I wasn’t sure if I
could get away with that, I’m sure Mills and Boon might have objected, but you
never know, they say all publicity is good publicity. On the television Savage was very fast, in a
live situation, and quite acerbic. I
have to say he was quite good, but the one thing that I did notice was that he
had a limited amount of material.
He was very good with off the cuff remarks and
put downs but after studying him for some time I realised that he really wasn’t
able to come up with new material, which was a golden opportunity for me. As a live act he was foul mouthed, lewd and
disgusting, so I decided that the books I would write for him would contain no
bad language and no sex. I wasn’t being a
prude but believed that I was maximising my potential market. He had already created a fictional family
around his character so I could include them in my book all I had to do was
come up with a story. I didn’t want to
approach him until I was completely sure that I had a decent story for his character. At the same time I had to find out how to make
contact with him. He was regularly
appearing on a day time television show in Liverpool called This Morning. I knew I could wait outside the television studio
and try to talk to him but I felt that I should adopt a more professional approach
so began to find out who his agent was.
I was amazed at how helpful people can be. I telephoned the television studios and asked
to speak to the person who booked the acts.
I simply asked for the contact details for Lily Savage and the person
was only too happy to give me all the details, in fact they gave me much more
than I asked for as they also gave me the whole background to the company that managed
Savage. The company was Well Bred Productions;
it had one manager and one client. The client was Paul O Grady, otherwise known
as Lily Savage, and the agent or manager was Brendan Murphy, O Grady’s boyfriend. I got a large sheet of paper and drew a grid
with twenty spaces on it. Each space
would be one chapter in the book I would write for Lily Savage.
The book would have to be set in Liverpool, which
was lucky, as I knew certain parts of Liverpool. It would have to be funny, there would have
to be a complete story, one of those with a beginning, a middle and an end. One morning I sat down and completed all twenty
boxes. I don’t know where the story came
from but there it was on my grid, every square with a tiny plot, all I had to
do now was write the book. I still wanted
to try to be as professional as possible so knew that I should have written at
least half of the book before I approached O Grady and Murphy. All the days where I had forced myself into
writing my daily word count of seven hundred and fifty words now began to pay
off. I was now producing about three thousand
words a day, one chapter a day. And not
only that, but it was wickedly funny. Once again I wanted to be as professional as
I possibly could so I took my telephone to pieces and, thanks to my electronics
training in the air force, wired it up to a tape recorder so that I could
listen to my telephone calls and learn from any
mistakes I might make. All I had
to do now was telephone Well Bred Productions, press record and know that I might
have made it to the big time.
No comments:
Post a Comment