A Milestone Passed - 1,000 downloads

Well I checked just now and it looks like 1,000 people have taken the plunge and downloaded Scholarship and some have even brought the paperbook version.  Thanks!  I hope it was worth the read!

Publishing Update

I have climbed the various hurdles placed in one's way at Smashwords and Lulu so now both have accepted the revised version mentioned below.

The published book will appear on Amazon in due course, it takes about six to eight weeks.

With this version, short of a 'real' publisher coming along (I am open to offers...) this is intended to be the final version.

Thanks to all those of you who have downloaded or purchased Scholarship to date, there are nearly 1,000 of you!

New Version of Scholarship

With the kind help of N Fourbois acting as editor, there is now a revised version of Scholarship.  It has been uploaded to lulu.com and will appear at Amazon.com in due course.

Editing is more than just correcting a few typos and (my weakness) overly complex sentence structures (sorted by exchanging some commas for full stops), it is also about being asked occasionally why you wrote what you did.

The best example of the latter is my comment about Michaelmas being an odd name for the autumn term.  This is a classic error rooted in my childhood (I have a habit of mistaking one word for another), I always mistook Michealmas for Christmas.  I have now been educated as to the difference (Michaelmas is actually totally separate for Christmas and occurs around the 29th of September).

Some interesting discussions also ensued on the names of positions in a rugby team (my editor is fortunately someone who knows the game well) and the change from holding around the waist to Sacha's hold on me which was up between the legs holding on to my waist.

A couple of sentences have changed as a result, I hope for the better!

New Year News and Sh*t

And suddenly we are in the teens with 2013.  Most of us can remember reaching the teenage years if only because generally by this age sex is rearing its sometimes ugly (and sometimes pretty) head.

The other part of the new year was far less welcome, an old friend of 35 years standing passed away after a short illness, he was two weeks younger than me.  In an era when one can hope to live to 80+ so long as you do not over abuse your body or get hit by one of life's still fatal illnesses to die as my friend did in his early 50s seems somehow unfair, it is always the good guys who go first.  I now know four people who have died, all roughly my age.  A depressing thought.

Handling Sex

Yes it is a tricky subject, the most rewritten parts of Scholarship were the parts where 'things happen'.

The question is what to include and what to omit?  Am I trying for the bad sex award or something more subtle?  There was also another overriding motive that led me to spend so much time on these parts was the desire not to produce an erotic novel but one that went deeper into what was going on in a relationship between two boys, part of which concerned their physical relationship.

It took numerous drafts before I felt I had the balance right between what was happening and what I wanted to say.  That meant editing out a lot of other encounters as I felt things were getting repetitive.  Whilst the other encounters were based on real life events, they did not take the story forward, in fact they waylaid the story and I felt gave the wrong impression about what the book was about.

I was reminded of this when re-watching one of my favourite films, Thomas Paul Anderson's 'Boogie Nights', which presumably had the same problem, how to make a mainstream film about the adult porn scene in California.  Director Anderson used dialogue taken from real porn movies to make it real and on screen it sounds so stilted it is very funny as Amber says to our hero Dirk:

"Let me check on something"

She pulls down Dirk's pants,

"This is a giant cock."

That dialogue took some writing, totally banal yet it tells you what is happening so for most of the film, you know you are in the world of the adult entertainment industry without having to digest endless sex scenes.

The Game British Bulldog

British Bulldog forms part of one of the key scenes in Scholarship.  Originally it was a small scene but I was encouraged to enlarge it by Buck Theorem in his editorial role.

British Bulldog is a violent game of 'it' with a somewhat complex set of rules.  See the Wikipedia entry.  We used to play it in the gym when it was too wet to play outside.  Two boys were chosen as the 'bulldogs' and their role was to capture boys as they tried to run past from one end of the gym to the other (to stay in the game you had to go from one end of the gym to the other each round).  The bulldogs territory was a line of mats lined across the middle of the gym, which you had to run over or climb past, hanging from the climbing frames each side of the gym.

If you were captured you became a bulldog, so as the game progressed, there were more and more bulldogs. The game was over when there were only two boys free.  At that point a new round would start with the bulldogs coming from the winners of the previous round.  Okay?  Follow that?

The result was a lot of noise as boys ran from one side to another and a lot of violence.  Violence was the reason why most schools banned the game so it is rarel played these days.

British Bulldog is played in the UK and in the old 'White Commonwealth'. However, very similar games are played in Germany and elsewhere in Europe with the name giving a clue to its origins. Wer hat Angst vorm Schwarzen Mann is the German name of the game, which losely translates as Who's afraid of the bogeyman? The origins of the game appear to be related to the Black Death, with the Black Death being 'it' and gradually building up in strength as the game goes on.

The picture is allegedly of British Bulldog but looks more like the more common game 'It'.  What may make it British Bulldog is that the two boys in the centre appear to be playing the role of bulldogs but as it is outside and informal, no territory is marked out for either side.

Who was Sacha?

No, I am not going to name names but rather respond to a question from a correspondent about who Sacha was in real life.

Sacha was the son of two parents who met at Oxford University.  Oxford was something that ran in the family as one of Sacha’s uncles was a senior academic at the University.

Sacha’s parents started their married life in Oxford. All three children (Sam, Peter and Sacha) were born in Oxford.  But when Sacha was a small boy the family moved and his mother stopped working to look after her expanding family with the aid of an au pair who looked after Sacha and Peter.

I never found out much about Sacha’s home life other than the family had a dog and that Sacha had the smallest bedroom in the house.  The one story Sacha told me about his home life was when he was left home alone one evening when his parents went out socialising.  Bored, Sacha decided to try the whisky in the drinks cabinet and then proceeded to drink himself senseless, passing out on the dining room floor.  Fortunately, this rare example of Sacha's more adventurous side was not discovered as he managed to creep back up stairs to his bedroom unnoticed.

Sacha and Peter were in constant rivalry throughout their childhood.  The stories of fights over football came from Sacha. Their rivalry came about as Sacha was the brighter of the two.  Peter was more artistic and used to paint and play the guitar and I suspect was destined to join the family business unless he escaped.  Peter left school at 16 and went to college as he was not cut out for academia.  

Post 'The Rocks' Sacha did well at his O levels with 4As amongst nine in total.  He went on to do four A levels in maths and the sciences.  Sacha told me that he was expected to go to Oxford, he probably did.  His parents were very keen for him to go to university and do well.  That was part of the reason why he was quite driven as his parents put a lot of pressure on him.

Beyond that I do not know what happened, but Sacha always struck me as a conformist so I imagine him out there, married with kids in a respectable job.  But sometimes life is not like that!