Everyone else seems to pop blog posts like battery hens laying to order.  Me, I struggle.  If I’m not feeling it, my blog languishes waiting for a Banksy to come to the rescue. 

Which gave me an idea…

Banksy – I’m not going to pretend I know a lot about him/her (wouldn’t surprise me), aside from the fact his/her subversive epigrams make me laugh– anarchy, protest and the inappropriate usually do—but his mode of communication got me thinking. 
 
Maybe books are obsolete.   (Yup, just been deafened by your wails and howls of protest—I recommend valium.)

But think about it. In a society where time is a fast depleting resource (I certainly don’t have enough of it), and where young people think in short sound bites (if my kids are anything to go by), I think graffiti might be the way forward. 
 
Graffiti isn’t new; it’s been around since man could scratch.  Those cave paintings are as much an act of vandalism as a decorative art form, and I should know because I once lost a week of break-times for scratching an ‘almost’ anatomically correct stick-man onto my school desk.

Graffiti has also given me enormous pleasure over the years. I’m sure I’m not the only person to have sneaked into a public loo, not through any biological need, but just to read and share the musings others have scrawled on the wall. (No holier than thou protests about quality please, I’ve read a good few novels which were little better in quality than the phrase ‘Dick hearts Fanny’.)

The point I guess I’m trying to make, even if it means wielding the knife to a sacred cow, is that maybe, just maybe, the short, sharp, succinct and visual can provoke an emotional response just as deep as any 120,000 word book. And dare I say, probably more effectively, given current literacy levels.

Certainly, the god-awful Mucha posters my parents insisted adorn my bedroom walls rather than pictures of rock icons who might sully my mind, did bugger all for me in terms of emotional growth. But the war protest poster (over which said parents had an apoplectic fit) touched my adolescent mind in a way Catcher in the Rye and my dark foray into Herman Hess, failed.

So to Banksy and his like, I raise a glass.  You are the commentators of the future.  Your art form will never diminish my love of reading but I thank you for the provocation, the smiles, the bursts of laughter.  I hand to you the future of my children, their children and their children’s children. Stimulate their hearts and minds well.  

PS    I, and others like me, in the meantime will be scribbling our tomes, just in case you fuck up!

Buy Tempted by Trouble
Amazon UK 
 http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00BQMQGMW
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 https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/tempted-by-trouble/id616370198?mt=11&uo=4

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As the lovely and talented Incy has given me carte blanch to do whatever I like on her blog today, I thought I would do what no one else has yet had the chance to do – review my book.

In the interests of impartiality, I will, of course, review this book in the objective fashion all good readers would expect.

Tempted by Trouble has future Pulitzer Prize winner written all over it. Alice Walker, John Updike, Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy can all move over – there’s a new literary genius on the scene. And, unlike those often bleak books with endings full of despair (yes, McCarthy, I’m looking at you), this book has a GUARANTEED happy ending (sorry, spoiler).

Where 2012 was the year of Hilary Mantel and the marvellous Bring Up the Bodies, 2013 will be the year of Michelle Smart and Tempted by Trouble. Where Mantel’s book charted the role of Thomas Cromwell in the downfall of Anne Boleyn, Tempted by Trouble charts the havoc that troubled socialite Pippa Rowantree causes for the reclusive billionaire, Marco Capello. Even better, where Bring Up the Bodies is set in the dreary Middle-Ages, Tempted by Trouble is set in the Caribbean! Yes, this book is full of sun, sea and emotional conflict aplenty. What more could you ask for?

Yes, Tempted by Trouble is that good. Honest. So good in fact, I’m going to give it a maximum 10/10, five gold stars and an A+.

See. I told you I would be impartial.