Thanks to years of Tory government cuts and hopeless Labour council mismanagement, Birmingham City Council, the second biggest in the country, declared itself bankrupt last year. Of course, part of their plan to get themselves out of the mire is to shut most of the local libraries.

I grew up in Birmingham, and I always say that Sutton Coldfield Library was my real school. I went there with my parents and grandparents from a young age. By the time I was 11 and allowed out on my own, the library was one of my favourite places to go. By the time I left school, I was going there at least twice a week, and at one point in my early twenties, I think I went there pretty much every day.

For years, the main thing I went for was music. For about 50p, you could borrow a CD or cassette for a fortnight (in the mid-Nineties, they still had a decent selection of vinyl too). This was in the pre-streaming, even pre-Napster, world where CD albums cost anything up to £16 in HMV or Virgin. It’s thanks to Sutton Library that I first heard Sgt Pepper, Abbey Road, Ziggy Stardust, A Love Supreme, Bitches Brew, Forever Changes, Unknown Pleasures, The Holy Bible, and more. Some, such as Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi literally changed my life. I was able to immerse myself in all kinds of rock, reggae, jazz (the guy who ran the music library at the time was a big jazz freak, so the selection was very comprehensive), soul, classical, psychedelia, and African music. Things that I would have had no access to otherwise.

As time went by and I started learning to play guitar, I started hiring out sheet music and chord books by the armful too. It was from a Kinks songbook borrowed from Sutton Library that I learned my first two or three chords. I taught myself piano and the rudiments of harmony using books from there too.

And of course there were the other books: fiction, non-fiction, autobiographies, poems, plays, literary criticism. It was all there, free to discover on the most random of whims. Most of my random whims were related to my hero at the time, Paul Weller. I freely admit I would practically run to the library to investigate any author or poet he referenced, however fleetingly. When I saw a snippet of Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Roads Also’ on the cover of Stanley Road, I went and borrowed Owen’s works from the library (the start of a love affair with his poetry that continues over 25 years later). I also found the same edition of Shelley’s poetry as the one seen on the cover of The Style Council’s Our Favourite Shop; I read a hardback copy of Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners (a huge influence on Weller in the early Eighties); I borrowed battered Methuen copies of Joe Orton’s plays when I was 13 and couldn’t make head nor tail of them.

But the library wasn’t just somewhere for me to access things my influences liked; it was an influence itself: the spinning racks of cool-looking Penguin Classics with the pale green spines, written by foreign authors I’d never heard of; the old hardback editions of Shakespeare; the shelves of music biographies; the small but significant local history section, from which I borrowed Douglas V. Jones’ books on Sutton Coldfield’s history and began seeing the town in a whole new light as a result.

So many life-shaping books and records, and all either free or very, very cheap. No one rushing or jostling you to buy. No in-store radio or blaring music. Absolute bliss.

Yes, we live in a very different world now. There is the internet. You can stream as much music as you want now—way more than any physical library could hold. You can learn about almost anything through YouTube documentaries. I’m not saying that libraries do not have to change to keep up; they do and they have. Nowadays, when I go into any library, there are more computers than ever so that those without internet access at home can get it. There are more and more community events: knit-and-natters, board game afternoons, craft clubs, local history groups, etc. You can rent digital audiobooks as well as physical ones.

And of course, there’s still access to physical literature, whether its large-print crime and romance novels, new writers, classics, or history books. In my late-twenties, I went through a phase of working in a job I hated for barely enough money to pay the bills. The nearby library, although much smaller than Sutton, became a haven, somewhere I could escape for ten minutes and browse the shelves, knowing that I could actually have whatever I wanted without thinking about money. I could then get further mental respite by losing myself in the books I borrowed (I vividly remember borrowing Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer).

Since becoming a dad, I’ve regularly taken my daughter to the library, and she loves looking through and choosing a load of books to bring home and read, free to discover the kinds of authors and books she likes and doesn’t like, loving taking part in the reading challenges that our local library sets during the school holidays.

Libraries are still relevant. They function as free and open community spaces for ALL. For kids, parents, senior citizens, the poor, the rich. None of it matters in a library. The space and its contents are yours to freely use if you want. In a world where everything is becoming so controlled, so expensive, so loud, and so fast, libraries are as necessary as ever. They should not be taken away from anyone because councils can’t add up properly. If anything, a trip to the library would probably help them.

One of the difficult things about writing a book is knowing when it’s finished—or at least when it’s ready to be edited by someone else.

Never submit your first draft!

The first thing to say is that you should never submit your first draft of anything to anyone. Not university assignments, not books, not poems, not cover letters. Nothing. Heck, even give your emails, WhatsApp messages, and social media posts the once over. We seem to have reached a point where spelling mistakes are accepted as okay in messages and on social media, and while you don’t need to be the kind of patronising sod who corrects people’s spelling in obscure comments sections, checking your own writing for typos is still a great habit for a writer to develop.

If you’re working on a book and you’ve reached the end of your first draft, then the best thing to do is to leave it for at least a couple of days (which I know is very frustrating if you’re anything like me and just want to get your ideas finished and out there rightnowthisinstant), and then start going back through it again. I promise you, you will instantly spot typos, omissions, repetition, ideas that don’t quite work, things that could be worded better, all sorts.

I must have gone through my latest novel at least 10 times over the course of almost two years. The first few edits required a lot of changes. Passages were overlong, sentences were too rambling, the plot contradicted itself, jokes weren’t funny, and so on. By the end, I was still finding errors (usually where I’d edited something but forgotten to fully delete the original wording), but it was far more a case of tightening up sentences and images here and there. Was it boring? Yes it was. But it was necessary, and some of the best parts of the book came right at the end of that process when, after much revision, everything sounded as tight and effortless as I could make it.

​Some writers, such as Jack Kerouac, rarely edited their work, believing that the first thought was the “highest”, purest thought. I tend to disagree. The spirit of what you want to say might come with the first draft, and of course there will be those magical flashes where the words arrive from nowhere, perfect and fully formed, but often, as many writers will tell you, working to refine and improve your words is where a lot of the gold is found. 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, as someone once said.

Know when to stop

The flipside of this is knowing when you’ve done all you can. It’s theoretically possible to tweak a book forever. There’s always a different adjective that could be used, or a different simile you could employ. You can reach paralysis through analysis and never get anywhere (you might also be avoiding the potential rejection and judgement that come with finishing a book and showing it to others). I remember a Zadie Smith quote about how part of being an author was being disappointed with your work (or words to that effect), and it’s very true. Even when your work is done, in print, 100% typo-free and grammatically correct, there will always be something, however trivial, that you wish you’d done differently. At some point, you have to know when to let go and say, “This is done.”

When to call an editor in

So you reach the stage where you’ve written something from beginning to end, and you’ve been back over it a few times. It has a shape and a structure, and you’re done with tweaking it. Is it finished and ready to be published or submitted to agents? Not yet. Sorry. When you reach that stage, the point where everything seems to be present and correct, there are still a couple of potential pitfalls lurking that it’s wise to be wary of (and which even the most writerly of writers can fall into):

1. Mistake blindness. You know the feeling when you’ve spent so long working on something, looking at it and going through it over and over again that you’re almost not seeing it anymore? That lack of objectivity is where mistakes can creep in. Your mind either starts inserting the missing word, correcting the misspelt one, or just doesn’t spot them because the majority of the words are correct.
2. Boredom. You’ve been working on your book for ages, maybe even years. You’re so close to the finish line, but you’re still going over and over it. It’s getting boring and tedious now. You just want the thing finished with and out of your life so that you never have to think about it again.

Both of these reasons are why investing in a professional editor or proofreader is worth it. When I published my first book, I didn’t do that. I was convinced that Word’s spelling and grammar check and my own talents would see me through. The result was that I spent over £1,000 on books riddled with typos, none of which I could alter. I sold all the books, and it was well received, but I knew that it wasn’t the best reflection of my writing because of the mistakes. Had I spent an extra few hundred pounds on getting someone to proofread it, I would be much prouder of it than I am. It was only when I put out a revised second edition five years later that I was able to correct those mistakes, but those original 1,000 books are still out there, in circulation, with my name on them.

Once your book has been properly proofread and/or edited by a second pair of eyes (if you’re unsure of the difference between proofreading and editing, you can find out here), then yes, theoretically, your book is finished and good to go.
I write these blogs on a timer to stop me from spending all day on them, so sorry, there’s no big, clever finish. But if you’re open to getting your writing proofread, then please get in touch by phone or email.

Until next week!

History is bunk. That’s one of the slogans put forward by the ruler of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Nothing of the past, at least not before the coming of Henry Ford and his motorcars, has any value.

In a very roundabout way, I was reminded of this quote through my current reading, the (so far) brilliant, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young. It’s a wonderfully researched, thought-provoking journey through British folk and folk-inspired music from the late 19th century onwards, from Vaughan William and Gustav Holst to Donovan, Vashti Bunyan, and beyond—and I’m barely a third of the way through it.

Electric Eden was first published in 2010 and has sat on my bookshelf, practically untouched, since not long after. But like a meme doing the rounds at the moment says, bookshelves are better thought of as wine cellars than guilt-ridden to-read piles—you pick out the right book for the right moment, even if it means leaving it to mature for a few years. And with my current work-in-progress (a book on the history of Birmingham’s music) starting with early folk music and industrial ballads, I’ve got far more from coming to Electric Eden now than I could have done at any time in the 12 or so years it has waited patiently on bookshelves in various rooms of various flats and houses.

A key theme I’ve taken from it so far is that Britain does have its own indigenous music. It stretches back centuries and links us, however obscurely, to our pre-Christian pagan past. It’s haunting and unusual, and it sounds like almost nothing in contemporary music. It’s also very, very uncool.

One of the reasons for this is that, post-2020, we—the British—are in the process of re-examining the Empire. This clearly needs to be done, but like any kind of reaction in the social-media age, the more extreme, least nuanced voices have become the most amplified. In this specific instance, this can make it feel on the one hand like Britain/England has nothing to apologise for and anyone who thinks we do is a hateful leftie wokemonger. On the other hand, though, it can make it feel like everything that happened during the Empire’s existence (and before) is tainted by it. Nothing good happened back then. Nothing was invented, only stolen. British history is bunk and every white British person should be thoroughly ashamed of their murderous, culture-less nation.

In this context, trying to make a case for British folk music, the stuff that existed before blues and rock’n’roll were imported from America, has to be done very carefully, with lots of acknowledgement of the harm the British Empire caused during its 400-plus year existence. Also, because we live in a culture where the absolute majority of popular music can be traced, however obscurely, back to the black American jazz and blues music of the late 19th and early 20th century, the idea that not only did Britain have a musical tradition before that but that said tradition also still has value, that it can connect us to the roots/history/culture of this island, and that learning about it and celebrating it would be beneficial in finding a pre-20th century British culture that we can all freely share in without self-flagellation, seems bizarre, if not downright unhinged.

I disagree with the band Sea Power (formerly British Sea Power), who dropped the ‘British’ because they felt the very word had become tainted with post-Brexit racism. My argument is that by shying away from being British (which is what you are if you’re born here), you let the racists and the xenophobes win. You cede the ground, the stuff that really matters, for the sake of clambering up onto some Twitter-fuelled moral high ground (I refuse to call it X). In other words, Britain, and yes, even England, has a fascinating folk culture that may well involve maypoles and may well have happened at the same time as some appalling crimes overseas. But nevertheless, it deserves to be venerated as much as the enriching parts of other cultures that have become more recently been woven into the British fabric. Not all of this island’s history is innately evil, or bunk.

One of the most interesting things I’ve gained from Electric Eden so far is that when, in the 1950s, the likes of Marxist singer Ewan MacColl tried to keep British folk music pure by encouraging artists to perform only songs from the area they were from or were familiar with (i.e. not sing songs from other cultures because it would be what we’d now call appropriation), it ultimately backfired because it came across as regressive and exclusive—exactly the kind of attitude that MacColl et al had been rebelling against in the first place (folk music having become a largely middle-class preserve during the early 20th century). For folk music to remain relevant and to progress, it had to merge with other things that emerging artists were interested in. I see a vague parallel with the militant approach to cultural appropriation today. Yes, there have been and still are times when things are unacceptably stolen without the correct credit, but art will always tend towards cross-pollination. That doesn’t mean that everything should become one dull mass; there can still be purist examples, but you cannot keep everything separate in the quest for cultural or ideological purity. That, I would argue, is a far more dangerous path.

​This all sounds a bit vague, but my allotted blog-writing time for this week is over. I hope I’ve got across the tightrope of making a very quick introductory case for British/English folk history. See you next week for more crazy escapades!