Auto Rewind is my e-book novelette published in 2016.

What's a novelette, you may conceivably ask? It's a story with a word count higher than a short story, but lower than a novel or a novella.

If I had to nominate one of my short-form fiction works as having been somewhat overlooked (or the more positive spin, my best-kept secret!), it would be Auto Rewind. But then, it's probably odder and harder to categorise than, say, Beast In The Basement (twisty thriller) or A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home (ghost story). 

Auto Rewind is also probably even harder to discuss openly than the notoriously tricky Beast In The Basement, without committing major spoiler sins. 

Suffice to say, Auto Rewind is about a child of the '80s who takes ever more extreme measures to protect his family's lifestyle.

I still really like this book and believe it to be quite emotionally powerful by the end.

It also features Doctor Who VHS, a nail-gun and a man being beaten to death with an Atari 2600 video game console. Pretty retro. 

Cover note: the one on the right above is the finished cover, while the one on the left is an alternate version which was ultimately discounted because I really liked the white purity of the design. Actually, I wonder if it might look too bright and 'un-horror' for some folk? That would certainly be ironic, seeing as it might be my most violent book, second only to The Last Days Of Jack Sparks.  

If you're solely into the scary supernatural elements of my novels The Last Days Of Jack Sparks and Ghoster (thank you!), then the grittier nature of Auto Rewind may not quite be for you. But if you like the sound of a punchy, twisty, freaky and ultimately melancholy tale, then I'd really appreciate you giving this one a shot. In some ways, it might be my most personal book.  Step this way and take a look. 

Have you already experienced Auto Rewind? Let me know how you liked it in comments here. Thanks!

An earlier version of this piece was first read last month by subscribers to my newsletter The Necronoppicon, which brings my readers updates at the end of each month. Oh, and you get a free book when you sign up!

Hello! Here are some things I've learned about how the YouTube algorithm works, during my time as a creator there.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. Creators should approach it accordingly.

The more niche a video, the better the algorithm likes it, so it can show your videos to people likely to be interested. YouTube will like you more if each video is about one thing and one thing only, because this makes searchable keywords easier too.  A title like How To Wrangle Geese is stronger, SEO-wise, than How To Wrangle Geese AND Make Them Sleep. (Do geese sleep? They must, surely.)

An ideal video title has a searchable keyword in its first half, perhaps then followed by an enticing non-searchable phrase if you have the stomach for that. For example: How To Wrangle Geese - EVERYTHING You Need To Know!

The algorithm looks at the title (the first half especially), then at your video description (bonus marks if the main keyword in your title, i.e. How To Wrangle Geese, is repeated here.) Then it looks at your video tags, where the main keyword should be repeated once again, among various other related keywords.

As soon as YouTube feels confident that your video is about something, it shows your video to potentially interested parties. If the click-through rate (the percentage of people who click your video thumbnail - so make it good!), watch time (percentage of video viewed before viewers switch to a cat video instead) and viewer engagement (likes and comments) are decent, it will show the video to a bigger bunch of people, and so on until virality ensues. Hopefully.

So, how are we supposed to know how to optimise our YouTube videos, to maximise views and watch time? I strongly recommend that creators use a desktop browser app called TubeBuddy - and not just because I can offer you a 20% discount.

Using TubeBuddy, you can work out what the best keyword(s) will be for any given video. Using the Keyword Explorer tool (see interface below), you type in a potential keyword phrase and TubeBuddy gives you a score out of 100, based on several factors, such as how many people search YouTube for that keyword and how much competition there is. You can do this in the free version, but a subscription gives you an added advantage, because the result is 'weighted' to your channel, i.e. specific to your own channel's strengths.

There's a free version of TubeBuddy that you can check out and see how you like it. If you choose to join me in subscribing, be sure to use my special coupon code ARNOPPBUDDY for a huge 20 PER CENT off! Furthermore, TubeBuddy offers a special Rising Star discount to YouTubers whose channels have fewer than 1000 subscribers. 

Full disclosure: I'm a TubeBuddy affiliate, and so if you sign up using my link, then decide to subscribe, I receive a commission at absolutely no extra cost to you.

Lastly, look out for my new goose-wrangling channel, coming soon! *

My newsletter subscribers read this article first, getting it straight to their inboxes. Consider joining them.

* Lies, obviously.

Where is my mind?
 
See, I don’t know about you, but I feel like I used to be able to focus on one thing for hours on end, without my thoughts snaking off to other stuff.

Okay, maybe not hours on end, but at least for ten goddamn minutes.

One preoccupation shared by my novels Ghoster and The Last Days Of Jack Sparks is this: what has the internet done to our brains? I love the online world and yet I also fear its power. I fear its ability to warp, reshape or downright damage our puny human grey matter. I fear its potential to make dopamine slaves of us all.

During the mid-to-late Nineties, I was living in London and had a fun Saturday routine. This routine, as you may be able to tell, probably developed when I was ‘in-between girlfriends’.

I would get on the tube to East Ham, then head to the marvellous Who Shop there. I would buy a couple of back issues of Doctor Who Magazine, and possibly some other stuff, usually including a VHS tape, then head off to some café or other for lunch. And over lunch, I would read those magazines from cover to cover, with few or no distractions going on in my head.

Happily, The Who Shop still exists! I must return, for a heady dose of nostalgia. This week, though, I did recreate some of my old routine. It wasn’t a Saturday and I wasn’t in East Ham, but I am ‘between girlfriends’, so at least something remained constant. While visiting Brighton’s wonderful indoor retro market Snooper’s Paradise, I found a whole load of back issues of Doctor Who Magazine for £1 each. And I thought, “Ah, let’s try the whole Who Shop/lunch thing of yesteryear! How many issues will I need for lunch?”

Seeing as DWM was a slimmer mag back then, I bought two, picking issues with Cybermen on the cover, because I love Cybermen. Issues 97 and 98, for the curious. Then I headed a few doors along to the lovely vegetarian café Wai Kika Moo Kau, ordered an all-day breakfast and settled down to read Issue 97.

Here a timeline of how that went:

PAGE 3
This is the Contents page. I actually switch off my phone. Oh yes indeed, that’s how seriously I’m taking this leap back through time. I also manage to resist the ingrained urge to press my forefinger down on the page to click where it says Turn To Page 26. So far, so good.

P4-5
Letters page. One letter, from Jeffrey in North Carolina, is all about the evolution of the Cybermen and mentions their home planets Mondas and Telos. My brain pipes up with, “Hey, those look a bit like Monday and Tuesday, don’t they? Maybe there’s a days-of-the-week joke in that – ooh, maybe one you could tell on Twitter dot com!” So I stop reading and mentally go to work on the gag, while absent-mindedly sipping my tea. And now I’m switching my phone back on. I’m heading over to Twitter to post the joke. Pray for me.

P6-13
Truth be told, these pages aren’t incredibly gripping, but in any case I’d hardly know, because I’m switching back to Twitter to (a) see if anyone found the Hilarious Cybermen Planet Joke hilarious; and (b) adding a second pun-based joke-tweet to the mix, just for good measure. Sweet Jesus. ”BLOCKED AND REPORTED,” my fellow DWM writer Benjamin Cook tweets at me, and he’s almost certainly within his rights.

P14
This is the On Target page, all about the Target Books range. Cor, nice. I’m into this. As I start to read, I realise I should switch my phone off and keep it off. However, my brunch hasn’t arrived yet and I want to take a photo of it. I have no photos of any of the ‘Who Shop lunches’ I ate in the mid-to-late Nineties and yet this photo inexplicably feels important. So the phone stays on.

P16-17
I literally miss an entire piece about the making of Revenge Of The Cybermen, because now I’m thinking about this piece I could write for this newsletter. “Ah yes,” I muse, “I could turn my lack of focus into the main article for this Sunday’s newsletter!” This does, at least, mean that I’m no longer concerned about what to write for the newsletter, but once again it also means I’m not reading this damn magazine properly.

P20-23
A Q&A with Colin Baker. Brunch arrives and so I take the photo for this piece that my brain is now somewhat preoccupied with dreaming up. Suddenly I’m aware that I should try and remember the process of reading the magazine and the distractions that struck me. So instead of simply enjoying my lunch and reading a magazine, I’m now the star of my own documentary. A Tinder notification certainly does nothing to improve my focus.

P26-29
An interview with Who director Michael Briant. I’m annoyed with myself by this point, and so turn the phone off again. Finally, I am eating a nice lunch while reading a magazine. Why does this somehow feel like an achievement? I still find it hard to fully focus, though, because I’ve had quite a testing week on a personal level. Twenty years ago, it’s arguable that I probably had fewer distracting issues to think about and also less work stuff, because I was ‘just’ a rock journalist. Oh, for those simpler days. Still, I do read this Briant interview in full and to the end. It’s a good one, because the man helmed great stories like Robots Of Death.

P35-38
Another relatively in-depth piece about whether Doctor Who is unsuitable for children. Right up my alley! And I do read this… while being slightly distracted by the time, because I need to be back home working in about half an hour.

And that’s the end of the magazine. Turns out I didn’t need two issues after all, thanks to all the online dicking around. So I switch the phone back on, obviously, and cycle through the loop of email, text, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and, yes, Tinder, before paying my bill and heading home.

Yeah, that was pretty far removed from my simple experience of the mid-to-late Nineties, back when I had a phone that may not even have been capable of text messages! Back in those days, the odd phone call might have interrupted my reading, but that would have been about it.

So, here’s the real question. Which version of the ‘Who Shop magazine café’ experience was better? I feel like I enjoyed it more back then… but did I really? As Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner once said, the memory cheats. Perhaps I felt lonely in that café in 1997. Disconnected from the world. While I do have a memory of overall contentment, I can’t remember for sure.

Social media certainly means never having to be alone – and there is a real, undeniable pleasure in being able to share what you’re doing with others, whether in a jokey tweet or an article for a newsletter. But there should also be pleasure in simply doing stuff for yourself, by yourself, only for yourself. If a tree falls in the forest… do you really have to tweet a picture or video of that event, in order to fully appreciate it? Me, I’d probably be happy to have not been crushed by a falling tree… but you can bet I’d probably write about the experience here, or perhaps make a YouTube video about the whole affair on a new channel called Jason Arnopp’s Terrifying Near-Death Experiences.

My novels may come across as damning indictments of social media and the online world in general, but really they’re explorations. Scary question marks. Cries for help, even.

Where are we going with all this hyper-connectivity – and wherever that place may be, will it be better than the place we came from?

Are we happier now? If not, then how exactly do we feel these days?

Where are our minds?

My novel Ghoster, which deals with some of these thoughts in a scary fictional way, is out now. 

My newsletter subscribers had this article sent to their inboxes two weeks ago. Consider joining them for a fortnightly dose of early news and thoughts on writing and creativity. You might also like to take a look at my Patreon, where supporters receive all manner of perks.

​Like so many potentially intimidating things in life, judgement is inevitable. We cast our own nano-second judgements on other people, all day, every day, regardless of whether we’re on Tinder, reading Twitter (oh dear God, the Twitter court room, where people are either Good or Evil) or walking down the street. For better or for worse, it’s what we humans do. Meerkats almost certainly don’t mentally rate the attractiveness or intelligence of other meerkats out of 10 on first sight, or even twenty-seventh sight, but it seems our judgemental nature is simply a cross we have to bear. And obviously, if we’re judging others then it stands to reason that we’re being judged ourselves.

Creative folk are particularly prone to fearing the judgement of others, perhaps because we hand-build our little castles out of thin air. Depending on our levels of self-esteem (usually quite low, but spiking weirdly high at the moment we decide to build this castle that the entire world simply must see!), our castle may feel like it’s constructed from titanium or toilet tissue. If we can even attract visitors in the first place, then they will make their judgements and splurge them onto the internet, often with little consideration for the feelings of us, the architects and builders.

If you’re going to build a castle, then you have to accept that some people are going to hate it. That's just part of the whole castle-building game. Yeah, some people would quite happily swing a wrecking ball at the gaff and reduce it to rubble. They consider their visit to your castle to be a complete waste of their time and money (yes, money. You did remember to set a door price, right?)

It makes no sense at all, however, to open your castle to the viewing public, then allow a handful of disgruntled customers to cancel out all the pride that hundreds of happy customers had hitherto instilled in you. Me? Provided there’s a generally favourable consensus, I am happiness itself. Any number of negative, or even hateful, reviews of my castle are fine by me. My favourite negative review of my 2016 novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks read, quite simply, “Stupid book.” That one was, in fact, very funny, not least because it somehow conjures up an image of a guy in a baseball cap with his brow furrowed and his arms crossed.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why that sort of thing doesn’t bother me, and I think I’ve come up with the answer. It also seems to be the reason why, especially these days, I also find myself less bothered about being the subject of more personal judgements.

We all react well to things with which we have chemistry. And what controls this chemistry? Our preferences, which tend to become increasingly cemented into us as time goes by and we become more set in our ways.

Each person has a complex series of settings in their head. This vast array of dip-switches govern how much they like everything, from a novel to a tweet to someone new on Tinder to a potential life partner.

When you’re flicking through a novel, your preferences dictate your level of chemistry with the imaginary world with which the author wants you to engage.

When you’re flicking through Tinder, people mostly strike you as either attractive or unattractive, based on your preferences. When you meet someone from Tinder for a drink, your preferences, when overlaid on their preferences, dictate whether the two of you have chemistry or end up pretending to have other places you need to be after an hour.

When you’re flicking through Twitter, you’ll hit Like or RT based on… okay, I think you get the picture. All of this is basically quite a coldly scientific and roundabout way of saying that people’s judgement can be more about them than you. Even when they’re judging the most personal aspects of you (your nose, your fragile poem about beauty, or even your frenzied performance in that XHamster video), it’s literally about them and their preferences – the way they view the world and the metrics they apply to that world. Sure, it is about you, but only in an abstract and wholly subjective way.

Accept the following and you may end up a great deal happier: regardless of how many people mistake their opinions for facts, there is no such thing as a concrete, definitive judgement of any aspect of you or your work.

So, then. Where am I going with this, in terms of, say, dealing with bad reviews as a writer? Am I going to tell you that the reader’s opinion doesn’t matter because it’s all just preferences, chemistry and abstract subjectivity?

God no. Not at all. My readers’ opinions matter to me enormously. I want my readers to love my books. This is partly because I’d like them to buy the next one and/or plunder my back catalogue, so that I can continue to build my readership and career. But also, on the level of a simple transaction, they’ve devoted time and money to giving my work a chance. There’s a real sense of responsibility and accountability there that cannot, and in my opinion should not, be denied. To put it in cold, corporate terms, I've created a product for a customer to consume and hopefully enjoy.

While this sense of accountability might seem incompatible with the idea that everything boils down to chemistry and preferences, there’s an important distinction to be drawn between the two. I can feel genuinely sorry that a reader didn’t enjoy my book, without accepting their personal judgement of that book as The Hand Of God. Equally, I can feel pleased that a reader loved my book, without deciding I am now invincible and can do no wrong.

Now, some people advocate the idea of ignoring praise, censure and everything in between. They’re basically saying that creators should ignore any and all reactions and just write to please themselves first and foremost. Now, as much as I’m a big believer in ‘Whatever works, works’, I definitely have thoughts on this. Three of them, in fact.

Thought Number One: If you’re an author who wants to sell lots of books, then you really do have to care what the readers think of your work, even if that’s only broadly speaking. I understand, and somewhat adopt, the approach of writing to please yourself first and foremost, but nine times out of 10, this whole idea of not caring at all what the readers think strikes me as dishonest flannel, perpetrated by authors who are trying to armour-plate themselves against the slings and arrows of criticism. See also: authors who insist they don’t read their reviews. Pah! Yeah, right.

Thought Number Two: I don’t think this method is realistic for most people. Me included. I might seem to be pushing some kind of Zen approach to criticism, but we’re all only human.

Thought Number Three: Even if this method can be put into practice, it will deny you the real pleasure of a complete stranger popping up on Twitter to tell you that they loved your work. Sure, it’s also protecting you from someone popping up to tell you it was unutterable crap, but I don’t believe we can, or should, protect ourselves from feeling things when people vocally react to our work.

Okay, time for a caveat here: some people are more susceptible to taking judgement very badly and/or very personally, often because of hairline cracks installed in their foundations by their upbringing or other life stuff. I'm very aware that I was raised by two supportive parents, something which arguably established the base-level of my self-esteem, especially when compared to someone who was raised to feel inadequate. If that’s true for you, I’d still love to hope that what I’m suggesting over the course of this babble might help you grow more comfortable with people’s judgement, if not entirely so.

Here’s an idea, then. How about we do allow ourselves to feel things when people judge our work, but we dial down the signal and react in a more measured way? We are no more able to control the content of these judgements than we’re able to control the weather, but we have way more control over how we react to them both.

Let’s feel pleased when someone’s personal preferences lead them to like or love our work, rather than feeling ecstatic or believing ourselves to be brilliant and untouchable.

Let’s feel sorry when someone’s personal preferences lead them to dislike or hate our work, rather than deciding we’re now hideous imposters who should jump into a ditch and roll around, eating mud and mewling.

What I’m advocating, I now realise, is a form of mindfulness. Acknowledging each reaction to our work, feeling something in response, then allowing each reaction to drift off on the day’s ever-flowing stream of thoughts, without ever having a chance to supercharge or destroy our ego. The more we accept that reactions are based on chemistry and preferences and are mostly about the person reacting, rather than some kind of cosmic, definitive High Court judgement of us, the easier this breed of mindfulness will become.

Let’s stress-test all this stuff I’ve said with a real-life example, shall we? You’ll like this bit, even if I don’t.

My new novel Ghoster is out next week on October 24 (October 22 in the States) and I really hope the majority of people love it. That’s why I wrote this book: for people to read and hopefully love and tell other people about it. I feel nervous about the response, especially as a fair few people really seemed to like The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, but I also don’t feel as if my whole career or life are hanging by a thread. This, admittedly, is partly because I put a hell of a lot of work into Ghoster and I like it a lot, so I suppose there’s a foundation of confidence there, boosted greatly by the responses so far from awesome authors like Sarah Pinborough, John Higgs, Sarah Lotz and Christopher Brookmyre, and institutions like Publisher’s Weekly and the American Library Association.

Sticking with Ghoster, then, here’s a question that might have been playing on your lips, perhaps accompanied by a frown. I said earlier that I’m happy if the majority of people like my work, but what if most people were to hate it? What if most people hate Ghoster – or even worse, feel indifferent to it? How mindful would Impervious Arnopp feel then, eh?

Well, that would suck. No two ways about it.

See, I might have this whole approach of not assigning too much meaning to any one reaction, combined with the knowledge that it’s all based on chemistry and preferences, but that’s only a system. I mean, I’m not some fucking monk, meditating on a hill-top.

I want one million people to love Ghoster and so I’ll be really disappointed if most people don’t. One of the harsher truths of being a creative person is that sometimes we badly misjudge the likelihood of other people loving our creations. Sometimes we have to own and acknowledge that misjudgement, even if it’s only privately. This doesn’t mean that our creation is now objectively rubbish, but crucially, it has failed to meet our objective, which in the case of Ghoster is to delight an endless stream of readers.

Another major caveat is needed here, because this is fair complex stuff: it is absolutely possible for a novel to stumble on an objective, technical level. The plot might not hang together, for instance, or the character development might have got all messed up. 

Sometimes, a reaction isn’t solely about other people’s preferences. It can be about your shortcomings or even your downright failure. Sometimes our castle simply has a really messed-up moat and we have to own and acknowledge such mistakes, while constantly striving to improve in every single way.

So, if Ghoster were to fail to meet my objective, I would acknowledge my disappointment to myself as fleetingly as humanly possible, while drinking as few gallons of Jack Daniel’s as humanly possible. Then I’d get on with the next thing if I haven’t already: the big comeback novel that’s going to match with lots more people’s preferences, while still feeling like something that also matches my own. Also, something I feel is better.

As Harry Hill has often said, you’ve gotta have a system. When you take a big knock from which no amount of measured mindfulness can insulate you, it’s much better to have a system in place to return to, than to flail around in the chaos of self-doubt. And when you decide that other people’s judgements, good or bad, will no longer rock your boat too far off course in any given direction, and will never ever define you, I reckon you’ll find yourself a far more comfortable and hardy captain.

What do you think? Does any of this makes sense, or are these words simply unrealistic blatherings from the abyss? Tell me in comments below, or on the socialz.

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Ghoster at Amazon UK
Ghoster at Amazon US
My Ghoster page on this site

Sylvester McCoy fans rejoice, at today's news that Season 26 - the final series of classic Doctor Who - will be the next to join the BBC's deluxe Blu-ray series Doctor Who: The Collection, just in time for Christmas on December 23.

Season 26 features the stories Battlefield, Ghost Light, The Curse Of Fenric and Survival.

This seven-disc box set will feature hours of special features previously released on DVD, plus of course lots of new content, as we've come to expect from Doctor Who: The Collection. Here's the list...

Rare Restored Extended Cuts
The Curse of Fenric VHS Extended Version
The Curse of Fenric DVD Special Edition
Battlefield VHS Extended Version
Battlefield DVD Special Edition, plus
 
5.1 surround sound & isolated scores
On all 14 broadcast episodes, plus 5.1 sound on all extended versions of The Curse Of Fenric and Battlefield. 
 
Behind the Sofa
New episodes with Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, plus
companions Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton, Anneke Wills and
Jodie-Whittaker-era writers Pete McTighe & Joy Wilkinson.
 
Showman - the Life of John Nathan-Turner
A feature-length look at the life and career of Doctor Who’s
longest-serving producer, who fought to keep the programme on-air
during the 1980s. Contributors include Peter Davison and Colin Baker.
 
Making ‘The Curse of Fenric’
A brand new documentary featuring Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred,
Tomek Bork, Nicholas Parsons, Cory Pulman, Marek Anton,
Ian Briggs, Andrew Cartmel, Mark Ayres and Ian Collins featuring
unseen behind-the-scenes footage and photographs.
 
In Conversation
Matthew Sweet chats to companion Sophie Aldred.
 
The Writers’ Room
Ben Aaronovitch, Marc Platt, Ian Briggs, Rona Munro
and Andrew Cartmel discuss their work on Season 26.
 
Becoming The Destroyer
Actor Marek Anton and prosthetics designer Stephen Mansfield
recall the creation of one of Doctor Who’s best ever monsters.
 
Blu-Ray trailer
Sophie Aldred back in character as Ace.
 
Brand new Ghost Light extended workprint
Unseen studio footage
Rare archive treats
Convention footage
HD photo galleries
Scripts, costume designs, rare BBC production files
and other gems from our PDF archive
 
And lots more!
 
Pre-order this Doctor Who Season 26 box-set at Amazon UK

Here's the excellent YouTube trailer below...

In other Doctor Who Blu-ray news, the release date of the Season 23 box-set (Trial Of A Time Lord) has gone back a couple of weeks to October 7.

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