About the author
John Purcell is a book industry professional with over twenty years experience and the author of five published works of fiction. The Secret Lives of Emma trilogy published by Penguin Random House and The Lessons and The Girl on the Page published by 4th Estate. ​

About the author
John Purcell is a book industry professional with over twenty years experience and the author of five published works of fiction. The Secret Lives of Emma trilogy published by Penguin Random House and The Lessons and The Girl on the Page published by 4th Estate. ​

Rainier
by John Purcell (5000 words. A 15-30min read)

There was at that time a man who many people knew by sight, but few knew by name. That year he was a frequent visitor to the bars and cafés we found ourselves in after the cinemas had closed. We’d see him once or twice a week. He was almost always accompanied by a woman. Sometimes the same woman for weeks at a time. One woman was on his arm for some months. She was known to us. A lecturer at the university. Some of us were students and made up stories about her. She was very attractive. Dark hair and skin. Lean. But more than that. Fiercely intelligent. She frightened many of us. But it did not stop us making up stories about her and telling them to each other as if they were true. We were young and penniless and too slow to keep the attention of a woman like that. So, we told stories to make her more like us. But she too went the way of so many other women who accompanied this man. 

Rainier. I overheard a woman calling him Rainier, so that’s what I called him.

I never saw him alone. 

Before what happened. 

Which is what I am beginning to tell you. Before what happened, Rainier was only to be seen with a woman on his arm. Not always as beautiful or as desirable to us as the lecturer, we did not make up stories about them, but they all held him the same way. And they talked together with an intensity that drew our eyes to the couple often throughout the night. They would leave abruptly, most often an hour or so before the town revived itself under a breaking dawn. We stayed on. We were young and had no reason to leave before the workmen arrived for their morning coffee. But it was always dark when Rainier left, arm in arm with a woman. ​

​After writing four novels between 2020-22, only one of which finding a publisher, I stopped. I have not written any fiction for over two years. The short story below is my first attempt at finding a path back to writing. If you find it interesting please let me know in the comments below. If you think others would like to read it, please share it on your socials. (If you hate it, fight me.)

​The Collaborators
by John Purcell (5000 words. A 15-30min read)

Oh, shit. I can’t afford this room.
These were his first rational thoughts on waking. His dreams had been especially fraught. The reality of his situation played itself out in ridiculous scenarios, keeping his anxiety on the boil while he slept.

The room was very dark. He wasn’t sure if it was the result of blackout blinds or whether he was awake before dawn. He could just about hear traffic noises from the street below. Was London stirring?

He remembered layout of the room. He would never forget the room. He would never forget the night. Or the past six weeks in the studio. Or the three months communicating by letter. 

But last night it had all gone to his head. 

Without moving he scanned what he could see of the room. His clothes were the darker lumps scattered across the lighter carpet between the bed and the ensuite. His phone was not on the bedside table which meant it was in the pocket of his trousers. Out of reach. He shifted slightly to see if he could reach but he was too afraid to wake her, so gave up. 

They had been drunk. But not on booze. They had been caught up in their own genius. They had consummated their collaboration, something that was clearly forbidden. And he was ashamed and afraid. 

There was no hiding it, either. It had all happened out in the open. He had been obsessed with her from the moment he received her first handwritten letter. Obsessed, but not like this. He hadn’t been interested in her sexually. Someone famous, someone undeniably cool had noticed him, was interested in him. He had shared all her letters with his wife. They had both been excited by her attention.

Is there a way to change the system in Australia so more published authors make a comfortable living from their writing? 

Keeping in mind the odds against them:

The huge number of books already available to readers - in libraries, on the shelves at home, borrowed from friends etc, and that book sales in 2020, a good year in sales, hit 67 million books, which is only 2.6 books for each Australian (and the vast proportion of those are old titles).

The competition. Hundreds (thousands?) of authors get published every year in Australia, most sell below a thousand copies each (at best a few thousand dollars for six months to X number of year's work) and these authors must fight each other for the marketing dollar and the ever shrinking book coverage in the shrinking traditional media. 

The drift to online bookshops. Before the internet the range of books available to the reader was finite, because bookshops were finite. So at any given moment there might be between 10,000 & 100,000 titles available to buy. Since the advent of online shops, there are millions.

The influence of social media. Recent trends have been drawing readers to backlist titles (titles published more than a year ago) which is great for the chosen few but has played havoc with new book sales drivers like the bestseller lists. 

And then there is the media obsession with the debut. A debut is a story. Rags to riches, overcoming adversity etc. Plus, a debut is new. Shiny. It's an understandable obsession. And publishers have to feed this need, dragging marketing spend (thus potential sales) from mid career authors to do so. 

The publishing model itself. Jackie French once told me an author's viability is in their backlist. The same goes for publishers. The more they publish the greater chance of striking publishing gold - a perennial bestseller. The more of these they have the better for their bottom line. 

So publishing is a numbers game, and the more they publish the greater their chance of winning. Most authors just make up the numbers. On occasion, a book secured for a paltry advance becomes a bestseller. These outliers are like crack cocaine for publishers. 

Publishers can't count on the outliers though, so they try to manufacture bestsellers. They might throw a quarter of a million dollars at a couple of celebrities and a sportsperson, or an retiring politician - blowing their yearly budget - ensuring their other authors get greatly reduced advances. 

Back to Jackie French's point. Backlist being the revenue engine for an author. But how do you develop a backlist in an industry obsessed with the new? Getting your second or third or fourth book published is just as difficult as the first, if your first didn't break sales records. 

Having kept all of this in mind, is there a way to change the system in Australia so more published authors make a comfortable living from their writing? 

I can’t say I’ve ever been described as an optimist. Curmudgeon, yes, but optimist, no. Which surprises me as I have always harboured a faith in human progress. Living to eighty is better than living to forty. Surfing the internet is better than sitting through a Latin mass. Flying around the globe is better than trying to walk it. Democracy is better than all other forms of government. I suppose this made me some kind of humanist. Things always appeared to be getting better in the greatest happiness for the greatest number kind of way. Until Trump, whose ascendency seriously shook and weakened the foundations of my poorly built edifice. I’m not entirely sure when it collapsed but I can tell you about the day I noticed my faith in humanity was gone.

March 2020. I was in my parents-in-laws’ house in Kent staring out a window at sheep scattered across green hills when I concluded the most likely place I’d find a gun was in the cluster of farm buildings down the lane. Farmers were always shooting something, I told myself. The hills were alive with the sound of slaughter. A gun would mean we’d be safe. That was the same day I googled - How do you butcher a sheep? How do you preserve meat? And later found myself browsing machetes online. Guns run out of ammunition, I recalled from some movie, but a blade is forever. I even wondered if my tennis strokes might make me quite a proficient killer if ‘worst comes to worst’. Not realising if I was thinking such thoughts, they already had. 

I moved to the UK from Australia at the end of 2019. Partly because my English wife Tamsin wanted to move home, partly because Escape to the Country’s Jules and Alistair had seduced me with their promises of a thatched cottage in a gorgeous garden settled amidst green rolling hills only a short walk from the friendliest pub in the kingdom. However, those charming fellows neglected to mention that Britain was quickly becoming a basket case. Buyer beware I suppose.

Over the years everything everybody said couldn’t happen in Britain had happened culminating in Boris Johnson winning a thumping majority soon after I arrived, quickly followed by the signing of a Brexit deal. I might as well have moved to Trump’s America. 

When a virus some said was like the flu and others said was like the plague jumped from far away China to nearby Italy. I took it personally. I’d been had. 

The Chinese government was nailing people into their apartments and Italy was running out of coffins and The World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic, and what were the leaders of my adopted country doing to prepare? They were celebrating the return of a blue passport. I felt as confused as those who had voted for Brexit only to discover they had scuppered their dreams of retiring in Spain. Then, as if to cut off my escape route home, Australia appeared to implode. My compatriots were filmed punching each other in supermarket aisles over packets of toilet paper. The world chuckled one last time as I lost my mind.

I am sure I would have acted more reasonably if the world’s leaders had been more inspiring. It is hard to have faith in humanity when people in democracies willingly elect the kind of leaders those with no vote have forced upon them. From Trump to Modi, from Morrison to Bolsonaro, from Putin to Xi to Johnson, we were being led by men who were more like Bond villains than statesmen, skilled at dividing people not uniting them.

Then, as predicted by the government who signed the deal no less, Brexit began disrupting supply chains. Those fights over toilet paper everyone had been laughing at only a few days before, were suddenly happening in supermarkets in Britain. Was it because of Brexit or Covid? Didn’t matter. Empty supermarket shelves had fools like me panic buying non-perishable food and carrying out rice by the sack. 

A sense of impending doom spread through the UK faster than the virus. I don’t think it was fear of the virus though, I think it was fear of other people. Those idiots will empty the supermarket shelves if I don’t empty them first. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in my reasoning. It wasn’t a time for critical thinking. If all those zombie films had taught me anything it was that zombies are the least of your worries. Other people are the real danger.

In those early days of the pandemic everything was so obviously wrong, but Boris Johnson kept assuring the public that it was business as usual. I think my near hysteria had something to do with living in the incredibly beautiful and serene English countryside. I was living in a cosy crime novel. It was all so pleasantly sinister.

No that’s wrong, it was more like living in the opening chapters of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds after the Martians have arrived and the hero has witnessed them incinerate forty people but still goes back home for supper as he would on any other day. Some of his neighbours have heard about the arrival of the Martians and some haven’t, some laugh at him when he brings it up. The following day he tells us, ‘I saw my neighbour gardening, chatted with him for a time, and then strolled in to breakfast. It was a most unexceptional morning.’

I was living one long unexceptional morning, and in the circumstances it seemed rude to harp on and on about the end of the world. So I prepped in silence, noting the comings and goings on the farm, Googled tips for salting meat and drew up plans for my bunker convinced I would end up saving my wife and her parents, and anyone else who sought refuge with us.

But I was a fool listening to fools. Governments and filmmakers around the world had convinced many of us that other people were the problem. That we should fear ourselves and each other. That an unprecedented event like a global pandemic would end in riots, anarchy and martial law. 

But they were wrong. I was wrong. People weren’t the problem. In fact, here in the UK many people had already been wearing masks and had placed themselves under lockdown long before the government got around to doing so. 
​
The pandemic tested governments and the people in ways that revealed the character of both. On the whole, the people did a damn fine job. More often than not it was governments who let us down. 

Navigating the pandemic seems to have given people the confidence to demand better leaders. The US turfed out Trump, Australia has just given Morrison the boot and Johnson teeters on the brink. Could this new found confidence herald a new age? I’m optimistic.