Soap Box
Added on 29 February 2008
Enough, enough with tv adverts proclaiming their product's environmental friendliness! It's bad enough that most manufacturers feel obliged to inform their readily receptive audience how wonderful a product is for them personally. (It's good that Nutella just got caught out for bare-faced fibbery, but the punishment should be more interesting. Rather than just being banned from running the ad, all executives involved in the campaign should be made to eat nothing but Nutella for a month. See how healthy it makes them feel.) Nowadays, if an ad's not informing you of how good it is for you, it's wearing its environmental credentials on its sleeve.Don't you just hate it when a petrochemical company tells you how wonderful they are for the planet? No they're not! If they want to make money, that's fine; if they want to proclaim they produce the best chemicals, fine. That's what they do, we live in a capitalist society, this is how it works. But don't bloody pretend that you give a flying bag of crap about the environment!
Apparently if you use concentrated clothes conditioner, you'll need fewer bottles, which will mean fewer trucks trundling through the countryside.... Oh, for God's sake! What are they saying? That it's not their responsibility that they deliver by a means that spews carbon into the atmosphere, it's the customer's?
These people couldn't give a stuff. If they did, they would run adverts which said, Don't buy our product at all as you don't really need it... or Really, this is crap, don't even bother.
Any advert which uses the environment to try to sell its product, should be automatically banned.
Ok, got that off my chest. Getting on with Lost in Juarez (release date, August 2008, published by Long Midnight Publishing on recycled paper, and with a smaller font size to make the book thinner and therefore more environmentally friendly...). Into the final third of the book, still behind the curve.
I used to write these short compositions at school and would wonder at how anyone wrote a book, how anyone managed to spin a story out to a couple of hundred pages. Now, when I write - in sharp contrast to when I speak - I can't shut up. I did imagine that Lost in Juarez would be this snappy, jaunty, thin little book (which would use less paper, and therefore help save the Amazonian rainforest). It's getting longer by the day - which I suppose is inevitable since I write it every day and I haven't finished it yet - but my original plan for a zippy, short novel is getting more distant. I can always cut out the boring bits, and hope that that leaves enough to fill a book.
Civil liberties and freedom of speech in a time of war and terrorism are emotive issues, and while I charge on with the story, I'm not sure if the final product will do my original ideas justice. Have insecure moments of thinking that it just won't be good enough. Still, if that happens, I can always fall back on the New Advertising Bible.
Lost in Juarez - Sure, it's crap, but since no one's buying it, the print run is low, low, low, meaning that it is helping to reduce the world's temperature by half a degree over the next ten years, saving Manhattan, the Maldives, the Netherlands and most of Bangladesh. Lost in Juarez, helping save the planet today, for the children of tomorrow. And for the children of the children of tomorrow...