Putting your name into a Google image search can bring up some curious results…

Farmers for Ben Jones? What would I want with farmers?

Blimey

.

At least one of us made it as a novelist, luv.

This one’s just bloody weird.

Ha ha. Yes, it’s very me.

I have my own bridge! It’s in Alaska. The Ben Jones Bridge. True.

Well. That’s sobering.

I was surprised today to discover that Paul Thomas Anderson, one of my favourite directors, has a girlfriend.

I was then perhaps even more surprised to find myself somehow disappointed. And perhaps even a little jealous.

You’d have thought for an habitual egotist it would be easy.

I have to tell someone I’ve never met, and most certainly never will if I don’t get it right, not only why I’m so great but also why I’ve done what I’ve done, why no one else could have done it as well as I have, and who I think should want to know it.

I am of course talking about application letters to Literary Agents.

Having worked for two in my time, I’d been up until now coasting on a conceit that I knew the right path to take. I knew not to be overly familiar (having encountered several agents putting applications in the NO pile simply for greeting them by their first name), whilst not blur into the background through formality, sinking ever more under big words and bland paragraphs. I knew you had, on average, no more than about five seconds to grab someone’s attention. In short, I knew what not to do.

As you might have anticipated, this left the opportunity open yet again in my life for missing the bleeding obvious. Having collected between five and ten points on what not to do, I had entirely neglected finding out what to do.

An example - genre. Every self-help guide out there to getting published tells you to inform your prospective agent immediately in your preliminary letter in what genre your tale takes place. “If you don’t know what your genre is,” one particular guide says, “then you probably shouldn’t be writing full stop.”

Pardon?

Does life really work like this? Can every human lifetime - all its experiences, its pains, its joys, its profound moments of lucid clarity be conveniently shoved into one easily labeled box? Where does this assumption that you can succinctly define what “genre” your novel fits into come from? Any explanation that begins with “Well it’s a little bit of…” earns your letter a star place in the wastepaper bin. Maybe I’m naive, but if fiction doesn’t follow the formula of a detective novel or plod of a Mills & Boon romance then I really don’t think it’s that easy to just pluck onto it whatever badge the industry will want it to wear. How would Virginia Woolf have defined Mrs Dalloway? Or George Orwell 1984? Is there a one word / one bracket genre for novels like that? Art imitating life has just as many shades if it’s well crafted. Surely?

Another example - audience. “Tell the agent who your book is aimed at.” I find this suggestion a fantastic example of how much an industry, and not an art, writing is now. It’s insane. It’s the kind of thing asked by someone who would also ask “what do you write about?” when you tell them what you do. There’s a waspish urge to respond to this point with a comment somewhere between “I would aim this book at anyone with eyes (or just one) capable of reading (or being read to) and not too fussed about the absence of pictures,” and “This book is aimed at middle-aged divorcee paraplegic black Jewish lesbians who can only read between Yoga lessons and whilst whistling the theme tune to Strike It Lucky.” Any such comment is of course another one way ticket to Binville. Never be humourous. God, don’t be humourous.

You only get the one chance to irritate an agent.

So this is me, right now - terrified of putting so much as a cadence in the wrong place and desperately trying to powder my little creation into a lusty looking whore that my masters could not refuse (not that I’m saying agents all sleep with prostitutes… oh no, this is all going wrong now). After several hours work (with a pretty nasty cold I might add) I’ve just about been able to boil down what the story is about into an easily digestible short paragraph.

And boy does it look odd.

In fact it looks totally and utterly loopy.

I know anything reduced to its base often does, but I’ll be lucky if they’re not phoning nut houses rather than publishers when they read my proposal.

If they read my proposal.

Oh, sweet Muses, please let them read my proposal…

…er, and like it too if that’s not too much to ask.

Just around the corner from my office, all this time!

I don’t like green sweets. I don’t like green jelly babies, Opal Fruits (oh, sorry, I meant Starburst), jelly beans, Skittles - anything. But particularly green jelly babies. They’re horrible, they taste like Ajax smells. And the people who make the sweets know they’re horrible. Why else would they put so many in every packet? Fortunately for me however, my boss loves green sweets:

“Dear New Mummy,

I am but a poor jelly girl with very strict religious jelly parents. They musn’t know of my jelly septuplets. Please look after my babies. I can’t be bothered. Bite their heads off if you like. I don’t care.”

As I passed Prowler on my way to Tesco – for those of you who don’t know, this is where the discerning shopper can purchase a select supply of literature, calendars, greetings cards, videos and sexual aids of a, shall we say, left-handed nature - and thought, ‘what the hell, why not?’ So I walked in (and they were all wearing eyepatches), had a very nice chat with the quite civil and intelligent middle aged homosexual behind the counter, looked idly round the shelves at what the sisterhood of today were buying, and left.

The look I got from that old woman as I left the shop.

At first I thought she was going to fall to her feet there and then and pray for my eternal soul. But then I realised it wasn’t disgust in her eyes as she stared, more wonder. It was almost the same expression Linda Hamilton had when she first saw Robert Patrick pacing towards her in Terminator 2. As she gazed at me, mouth agape and eyes wide, it occurred to me that the reason for her quite apparent surprise was perhaps rather because I wasn’t dressed in a tight white T shirt, with tight three quarter length jeans or sporting a bleached blond Tintin quiff. Nor was I flouncing my arms about like a little Miss Mimsy, or waddling down the street like I had a walnut clenched between my buttocks.

And then I knew why. I looked normal. I was, as far as she was concerned, the new insidious line of homosexual, the one that can blend in to any background - into any shop or street. I watched the horror spread across her face, turning slowly into terror, and then into near panic as the thought took firm hold in her brain. ‘They could be anyone!” I could see her thinking. “They might even take the form of someone I know! They might even be in my family!”

I gave her a quick smile and a chirpy nod, and then skipped down the road to Tescos. “And you’ll never guess what,” I imagined her saying to her sober faced friends at over tea the following morning, “he was dressed exactly like a normal person, just like anyone else here!”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4682560.stm

As a friend of mine once commented after graphic footage of the aftermath of a suicide bomb attack in the Gaza strip, no one put it more succinctly than Basil Fawlty when he said “Why do we bother? We should let you all burn.”

Fucking humans. You make me sick.

Not satisfied with simply being the voice of BT’s SMS to landlines service, noted Timelord and famous lunatic Sir Tom Baker (come on, if ape-faced Tom Jones can get a knighthood then anyone can) now seems to while away his hours spamming my guestbook with badly coded adverts for Viagra:

I think what’s most endearing about these ads is that, for whatever reason, they seem to have specifically selected Tom’s face for their avatar. And I’m touched he’s “secretly envious of me’, though Tom Baker with penis envy is just a very strange concept.

Maybe he’s been doing Little Britain for too long. It certainly brings a whole new validity to his Symphony rant of “getting a stalk on.”