The Dictionary of Bullshit
This post is a shameless plug.
It is a shameless plug for my Dad.
Now… as you may have gathered from previous posts, I come from, heaven help us, a family of writers. We did not, by the way, set out to be a family of writers! Oh no! When I was 7 years old, in fact, my mother took me to one side and made me promise never, ever to be a writer.
‘It’s a ridiculous job. Unreliable, badly paid, you never get out of the house enough… be a doctor instead,’ quoth Mum.
My Mum, whose professional name is Susan Moore for anyone wondering, has pretty much done it all. Publisher, editor, novelist and ghost writer. As a child, I liked the title ‘ghost writer’ the most – it had an aura of mystery about it, the sense that here was my Mum, secretly making the words of others better behind the scenes. I learnt the secret of editing from her at a swimming pool when I was 10 years old. Climbing out of the pool to get a towel, I found my Mum sitting on the side of the pool with a manuscript she’d been hired to edit and a pencil in her hand. As I approached, she frowned at the page and then, with a single decisive stroke, crossed out the entire thing with a triumphant swish of blue pencil on messy page.
Saying this, my Dad has been the victim of some nasty editing… an entire chapter was struck by an over-enthusiastic editor from his biography of Douglas Adams, to much wailing in the house. I’ve generally been very lucky with my editors, although will always cherish the editorial query I once received to a particularly fantastical bit of writing… ‘Are you sure that would happen?’ My Dad started writing after me, to my great delight. A publisher since time began he’s always been the voice of steady commercial advise since I’ve been a kid. When I was about 12 years old, he left publishing and by the time I was 18 he was writing. What personality changes raced over him! As a publisher, my Dad had always told me that authors are difficult, wingy, moaning gits. As a writer he suddenly came to realise that 35 years of experience lied and in fact, authors were under-rated, misunderstood, underpaid and under-regarded lambkins tossed between the merciless hands of evil editors. As Douglas Adam’s publisher, he was in a good position to write the official biography – feel free to flick through the photos, dear reader, to discover exactly what I mean when I say that as an 8 year old I had that haircut known as ‘mother did my fringe’. He later went on to write the Dictionary of Bullshit and is in the process of publishing its updated version in expectation of the great surge of oily manipulation that will be the 2010 general election. I am proud to report that I am the dedicatee of a dictionary of bullshit… as well as an avid contributor.
Anyway, point of all this is… my Dad is my Dad, and this is a shameless plug for his books, as is frankly, a good daughter’s duty as well as a sensible writer’s pleasure…
My favourite definition (reproduced without permission but in the fervant hope that my Dad won’t sue me)…
Growing as a person: This is Good. Growing as something else would not be so good.
