Google side alleys and back corners

Years ago I wrote a piece about the way in which many people spell the word crawl (as in a baby learning to crawl) as crowl, which of course is my surname - it was while I was searching Google that I discovered this fairly common error. For a long time  I couldn't find that article, then it turned up on my Evernote files, and I transferred a tidier copy of it to this blog. 

My search that resulted in discovering the connections between crowl and crawl started because I was looking up my own name on Google. Self-indulgent, you might say, but I'm the sort of person who quite often sits down to check what's turns up on Google when I put my name in. I also like to check out the results when I look up my books. I'm sure there are other things to do in life, but sometimes this turns up some interesting stuff, the sorts of things you'd never otherwise discover.

For instance, I put the words Disenchanted Wizard in the search box today, because that's the name of my latest book, and I wanted to see where it was appearing on the Net. One of the things I discovered is that Kobo has a list of books with the word disenchanted in their titles, and my book is among them. Thanks, Kobo! (I've only just noticed that another book, Reviving Old Scratch, which I read last year, and which I lent to a friend just yesterday, is also on this list, because its subtitle is Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted.)

I also discovered that a writer named Keith Timson, who, coincidentally was born in the same year as me - 1945 - had written a short story called The Disenchanted Wizard that appeared in a magazine called Dark Horizons, in 1991. Nice that he chose to give my book some advertising over 25 years before it was written!

And of course I found that The Disenchanted Wizard turns up on some rather suspect sites, where they're trying to give my book away for free when they don't have any right to do so. When I clocked on on of those sites, the response was 'refusing to answer Google's inquiry.'  LOL

There's also a list of all my books on a site called Medical Books. Okay. Not sure of the connection there, although admittedly the non-fiction title, Diary of a Prostate Wimp, is somewhat medical. Each of the books, which all appear twice in this list, have blio beside them. Presumably blio.com is one of the distributors of the books. But that still doesn't explain the Medical Books aspect of things. Still it's nice to be turning up in all sorts of places!

One of Kobo's Asian sites is advertising TDW. Wow! I'm world famous!!

But perhaps the oddest search result came up as 'PDF Read [Southern Book] - Diary of a Prostate Wimp - Kitchens R Us. When I clicked on the link it said that the page wasn't found but it brought up the Kitchens R Us page anyway, on which there is nothing about either Prostate Wimp or Disenchanted Wizard, rather to my disappointment. I'd love to know how the two were connected, and why my latest book brought them together.

Obsessed by lists?

Long before I started posting on Goodreads I was keeping track of the books I read each year. Unfortunately the earlier lists are a bit thin on some information, but gradually I improved this so that at least I can go back and check out both the title and the author. With the advent of my increasing immersement in the Goodreads world, things improved even further and I now have reviews of all the books I read these days, as well as notes about some of those I read further back. (Isn't 'read' a confusing word on the printed page? It's easy to misunderstand last sentence in print, though if it was spoken it would be perfectly sensible.)

It takes a bit of doing at times, but overall it's useful to me.

On another tack, I've been thinking for the last few weeks that it would be good to keep a better track of the movies and TV series I've watched. It's very easy to forget them - and maybe that doesn't matter - but every so often you think: I wish I could remember what that movie was that made such an impression on me. Thankfully, most of them can be found with a bit of effort on IMDB; occasionally some can't.

IMDB is a wonderful resource. I can remember when it was in its early stages, and a lot of information was missing about individual movies, and a lot of movies were missing completely. Now, of course, as anyone who uses it knows, practically everything ever filmed seems to be on there. Which is an extraordinary achievement. There must be an army of data inputters working on the thing day and night.

If I was to set up a record of the movies and series I've watched, at the end of the year I'd remember that I'd seen Broadchurch mark 3, and I could make a note that I found it more dour than the other two series (I think), that there seemed to be a great deal of emphasis on pornography, and that some of the scenes were brilliantly written, including the one where Miller and Beth Latimer chuckle about the naughty things they used to say as kids, or Beth's impassioned speech to the Vicar in regard to husband having nearly committed suicide. The acting was brilliant throughout, especially Julie Hesmondhalgh as the initial rape victim, an ambiguous character who received a great deal of sympathy, but also had some odd goings-on in her life.

I'd remember that we'd begun to watch 13 Reasons Why, and decided it wasn't for us. And then an Icelandic series called Case which again had an emphasis of pornography that we felt we couldn't cope with any more of it.

I'd quickly be able to find the name of another series we watched in which a young girl was murdered at the beginning and then proved still to be very visible and very real to half a dozen people she knew. It was a series from Belgium. It was Hotel Beau Sejour - thanks, Google. This was a marvellously engrossing series which, even though it didn't explain how the premise could have come about, kept us on tenterhooks for a number of episodes. As did Fauda (Chaos), an Israeli series we watched and which was intense. I did write about this one.

Most of these have been watched on Netflix, which - in New Zealand at least - is a mixed bag: some very good shows, a few very good films, and lots of stuff that is trying to get a second life by being included in the Netflix catalogue. When Netflix first arrived here a year or two ago, you could watch anything from the US catalogue, which was vast. Then, for some reason, Netflix NZ was whittled down to some top quality shows and films and a lot of debris. Sometimes it's hard to decide which is which, though it has to be admitted there are some very good TV series being produced these days, almost none of which (Broadchurch is an exception) appear here on free to air TV.

But you can see how easy it is to forget what you've seen, how many hours you've spent watching True Story, and the other I don't feel at home in this world anymore. The first starred James Franco and Jonah Hill, and was a curious piece based on a (yup!) true story about a man who'd murdered his wife and children and then tried to claim he hadn't. And a reporter who seemed to get sucked in by the murderer's supposed protestations of innocence.
gripping stories. And how easy it is to forget titles, such as the two we watched over the last few days, both movies. One was

The second starred New Zealander Melanie Lynskey, and someone with a considerable connection to NZ, Elijah Wood - although he was so well-disguised, somehow, that it wasn't until near the end that I realised who he was. This was a very quirky, sometimes funny, movie, that became increasingly violent as it went on. There was blood everywhere. Not sure that it was all necessary. But it held together, even though it was quite slow in places, and the ending was satisfying.

So. Plainly I need to make a list, and quickly. Otherwise all these movies are going to drift out of the consciousness. Does anyone besides me care? Maybe...

Nate Wilson

I've only just started reading Nate Wilson's fantasy novels for children (he also writes books for adults), so it was sad to hear - via a tweet from his father, Douglas Wilson (an even more prolific writer of all manner of things) - that, as this page describes it:  'Nate is preparing to undergo extensive brain surgery to remove a “farm egg” sized tumor near his brain stem.'  

Nate and his family, and his father's family, are all Christians, so the perspective on this relatively sudden sideswipe to his life is being handled in a manner that might be different to those without a faith. I say 'might' because no doubt there are people without faith who can face such a trial with humour, bravery, integrity and the like. As Nate seems to be doing. 

Still, if I was in his shoes, even though I'm a Christian too, I'd be struggling with this situation. I don't regard myself as a brave person, and anyone who's read my book Diary of a Prostate Wimp will know that I found even that relatively minor interruption to my otherwise healthy life quite a challenge. (This wasn't intended to be a opportunity to mention my book, by the way. It just came to mind...!)

So those of you out there who are praying people, pray for this fellow-writer, that the operation required will be successful and he will come through it safely. 

Hemmed in by geography

I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment called Prisoners of Geography: ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics, by Tim Marshall. I think the subtitle is slightly overstated. 'Everything' isn't true, because some countries aren't included: Australia gets three brief mentions, and New Zealand one. Plainly our politics aren't global enough.

But what the book does tell you is fascinating. It brings a whole new light to so much world news, and some breadth to just who holds power in the world. And who doesn't.

For instance, Russia, which is a vast nation in terms of real estate, is in reality only a relatively small country, because so much of the area it covers isn't much good for human beings to live in (as anyone sent to Siberia will tell you). The Russia we mostly think of is a smallish area to the West.

Furthermore, there are considerable problems with Russia's location: it's far more landlocked than it would like to be. And that's what Marshall is discussing: countries are bound far more strongly by where they're physically placed on the earth than by many other considerations. If there's no real access to waterways, then that can be extremely inhibiting. A number of countries are completely landlocked. If there are mountain ranges on your borders, then this may be helpful in terms of stopping invaders, but it's also a nuisance when it comes to trying to get over the mountains yourself.

And it helps to have good neighbours. Many countries don't, and spend a great deal of time fighting those next door.

Marshall also points out how the 'countries' we know in the world at present are, in some cases, relatively new on the world map. They didn't exist in this form a couple of hundred years ago. The British are to blame for some of these changes (along with the French and other empire-building nations). For example, the Brits, once they'd done with their Empires, tended to make hasty decisions about who would live where after the Brits themselves had gone. India and Pakistan's problems stem in part from this. Pakistan is one of the youngest 'nations' in the world, because basically it didn't exist less than a hundred years ago. Bangladesh is ever younger.

The Brits also drew lines across vast swathes of the Arab world, causing some of the problems we know today - though not all of them. The Arab tribes have been at war with each other for centuries, in one way or another. But a somewhat laissez-faire approach to map-making has had some huge consequences for those living in the region. You wouldn't expect maps to change the way nations see themselves; maps, after all, are only pieces of paper. (Unless of course they're magic, as the map in my latest children's fantasy is.)

Marshall manages to get to the nub of different countries' problems in succinct ways, and leaves you with a clearer understanding of what's going on around you. While his thesis is that geography itself is partly to blame for much of the world's infighting, he also shows how the movement of peoples around that geography can have beneficial or disastrous effects on other people, ones who were there first, as it were.

Marshall's point about geography, of course, affects us all even at a micro level. I live on a hill, which affects how I get to the city retail areas which are mostly on the flat. But it does mean I have great views of the Harbour and sea. I'm unlikely to be flooded, because water runs off our property easily, unlike some of my fellow citizens in areas that have been reclaimed.

New Zealanders, for the most part, live on two relatively equally-sized islands (imaginatively-named by our forebears as North and South). The gap between these two islands is a nuisance for travellers. Either we have to fly from the South to the North or vice versa, or we have to spend a considerable time going over the Cook Strait, a choppy bit of water that isn't always kind to travellers.

The North Island is warmer, as you'd expect, and has more population in its bigger cities. But in spite of what North Islanders think, the South isn't that cold: Scotland is much colder in the winter; many cities in the USA have snow for months at a time. We here in Dunedin, for instance, are lucky to get it once a year.

So geography and weather make a difference, as Napoleon found to his cost when he lost thousands of his French soldiers to the Russian weather - as Hitler also did with his German troops. For all our sense that we live in a world of vast choice, the reality is that we're hemmed in considerably by geography...

Marshall's book is fairly up to date, but the world keeps changing. He extends his book's range on his website The What and the Why.

Football on the rise for both sexes in NZ

The national game in New Zealand, as you probably know, is rugby. And it's a blokes' game. Or rather it used to be. In fact there are plenty of women throughout the country playing rugby just as fiercely and energetically as their male counterparts.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Saturday morning game one of my grandsons was playing in. His position is hooker, that guy who dangles between two props in the scrum. And this fellow really does dangle because he's small for his age. Some of my friends won't believe this, but I actually played hooker myself way back when I actually played rugby. But unlike my grandson, who's in there boots and all, I wasn't cut out for the game. Half the time the players from the opposite team would wind up covered in blood when we went down in a scrum: my blood, because my nose would bleed at the drop of a hat. Even if my nose hadn't bled, I still preferred indoor sports, with the less physical contact the better.

It was interesting that the visiting team in this particular game had one girl player in it. And she was very good: she had speed, and she was excellent at kicking goals. She could have been easily hurt by some of the bigger boys in either team, but she seemed to manage to keep out of their way - or perhaps they avoided her, because I think even in boys of that age there's an inbuilt sense that girls won't take the impacts a boy might.

Courtesy NZ Football

I said at the beginning that rugby is our national game, but soccer, it appears, is rapidly catching up. And of course there are girls in soccer too, and plenty of them. (The National women's team is called the Football Ferns; the men's is the All Whites, in contrast to the internationally-known men's rugby team, the All Blacks.)

One of my other grandsons used to play in a team when he was younger that had girls as well as boys in it. Now that the boys are bigger I think the sexes are separated off into their own teams. But girls' teams are catching on fast. There was a photo in the sports pages of the newspaper a couple of days ago promoting girls' soccer, in fact.

Which was part of the reason that I decided that the main character in my latest children's fantasy, The Disenchanted Wizard, would be a girl who plays soccer - with a passion. And also idolises Xanadu Whitworth, the top player in the city. At the beginning of the story, Della, the soccer player, is putting up an enormous poster of Xanadu in her bedroom. Her younger cousin Harold thinks Xanadu's smile is probably photoshopped. Della scoffs at the idea, and it turns out, in due course, that she's right to scoff. But she's wrong about some of the other things Harold has to say...

Making your books more discoverable

I've been reading another article on marketing my books, something I do with enthusiasm about every two or three days, and this one basically suggests looking at your books and working out what niche markets different areas of the book(s) might appeal to. I haven't got my teeth into my earlier three books as yet, although I did do something similar with Diary of a Prostate Wimp, a couple of years ago, putting myself on various Facebook and Twitter pages in relation to prostate cancer and such. But to focus on my latest book, The Disenchanted Wizard, the first focus is that the main character is a girl who plays soccer. Okay...there a thousands of girls who play soccer, some in teams with boys, some in all girls teams. The secondary main character is a boy who's intensely nterested in maps. Off the top of my head I can't think of a marketing area that consists of boys who are interested in maps, but no doubt there is one. For instance, I just discovered a whole page of images on Pinterest that looks at ways you can decorate your boy's room with map themes. (Even if the marketing research doesn't open up the doors you're interested in, the things you turn up on the Net in the process are themselves interesting!) It seems to me that a problem with marketing children's books is that it's difficult to market directly to children. Even with print publications, the marketing is almost always via the parents, or the grandparents - or uncles, aunts and sundry cousins. But these adults aren't the first readers of children's books (although many adults, including me, do read children's books - I've just read two books by Nate Wilson, for instance.). It's the children we want to encourage to read the things, but it's finding ways to do that that's not so obvious. It's a whole different ballgame with adult books: it's adults who are online at all the obvious social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and so on. (Carmen Amato, the author of the article I mentioned at the beginning of this post, writes mysteries, for adults.) On the other hand, I always find it curious that TV ads for some children's products play at night, when the children they're aimed at are in bed. The ads in general are cringe-making, and yet there they are, in the middle of some program about some specifically adult interest. Are they actually aimed at the parents? I guess they must be, otherwise they wouldn't be on at such an hour. Yet if that's the case why are the ads so kiddiefied, with goo-goo kids all raving about some new product that looks for all the world like something no adult in their right mind would take to. (And the kids often seem to be too old for the product they're endorsing.) So maybe, to advertise to kids, you do have to advertise to their parents. (Yes, I know there are kids ads during kids programs as well - that's another issue.) The question becomes: How to get the parents' attention about something that doesn't focus on them? Some further thinking required...

High hats

I've quite often written about music and instruments in this blog, but it only struck me today that there's hardly any mention of music in any of the four books I've written. Odd, since I'm a musician as much as a writer. (And so, it turns out, was Robert Louis Stevenson: he wrote over a 100 pieces of music, as well as playing the piano and flageolet - a kind of recorder.)

Anyway, here I am writing about music yet again in this blog. 

High hats, (or hi-hats, or even hihats) are the common names for a couple of cymbals set in opposition to each other on a stand, with a pedal operated by the drummer's foot. Why they're called high hats I haven't been able to find out so far, but no doubt if I left the question open someone would be able to tell me. 

They haven't always been called high hats. Wikipedia explains: Initial versions of the hi-hat were called clangers, which were small cymbals mounted onto a bass drum rim and struck with an arm on the bass drum pedal. Then came shoes, which were two hinged boards with cymbals on the ends that were clashed together. Next was the low-sock, low-boy or low-hat, pedal-activated cymbals employing an ankle-high apparatus similar to a modern hi-hat stand. A standard size was 10", some with heavy bells up to 5" wide.

It doesn't look as though they were ever on the ground, in spite of their being called shoes or low-sock, low-boy, or low-hat. Plainly the drummer wanted to keep them at a reasonable eye-level. But these earlier names are as delightful as high hat (which is another name for a snobbish person, based, presumably on the idea of the snob wearing a top hat). My favourite is low-sock. There's something evocative about this: did drummers wear short, short socks at some point, as a part of their uniform? Perhaps not. Maybe their socks slid down with all the effort of using nearly every limb to play their varied instruments? Who knows. 

The interesting thing is the way the names rise up the scale, as it were, from shoes to low-sock to low-boy (the mind boggles) to low-hat to high-hat. As though these double cymbals were gradually going from being some lower-class symbol (ho, ho) to joining the upper cut. 

Whatever the source of the name you can find more than one high hat at guitarcenter.com.

Catching up on Classics

Just finished reading Treasure Island, for the first time ever. I knew the outline of the story, so I may have seen the Disney movie way back in the fifties (but don't really remember it) and I may have read a Classics Illustrated comic version of it when I was a child, but as for the book, I've never opened it before. The only reason I've read it now is that someone wrote about it in an article I read - an article I can't put my finger on again now - and it struck me that Treasure Island would do nicely as something to read, even more so as there was a free version of it on Kindle.

The book is surprisingly grim and violent. Deaths abound from beginning to end as the various pirates associated with the treasure are disposed of one by one by other pirates intent on being the last man standing, so it seems. It's much worse than one of those TV series in which a bunch of seemingly random people are killed off in order to make it more difficult for the detective to figure out whodunnit.

And even Jim Hawkins, the young hero (Stevenson isn't particular about his age, though he's often called a 'boy') kills at least one of the pirates. Hawkins tells most of the story, and this aspect of the book is very well done...until Stevenson, out of the blue, interrupts his narration with one by Doctor Livesey. Naughty Stevenson, I can hear all those contemporary writing gurus saying. It does come as a bit of a shock, and only lasts for a few chapters before Hawkins takes up the tale again. Was it necessary? I suppose so, since Livesey gives us information Jim can't possibly know.

Stevenson's writing is superbly stylish. There's a great deal of atmosphere, the discussions of ships' tackle is convincing, and the Island is vividly drawn. The characters are nicely delineated, especially the more well-to-do ones such as Squire Trelawney and the Doctor, and Captain Smollett. Long John Silver is of course a character who's larger than the book, almost, and some of the other pirates have their peculiarities both of mannerism and speech.

And the names are great: apart from those mentioned above, the names stick in the mind. In fact, as each one appeared, I thought, Yes, I remember this one. Remember it from what? Classics Illustrated? Blind Pew and Israel Hands and Ben Gun and the like.

Well, this year so far I've managed to catch up on The Three Musketeers as well as Treasure Island. I'm onto Peter Pan next, another one I've never read. Must be a year for classics...not necessarily illustrated.

Slow writers

A longer review of The Disenchanted Wizard - from Lorraine Orman - is now on KidsBooksNZ. She finishes the review by noting: Non-stop action and a strong focus on the child protagonists are combined to create a satisfying fantasy for readers (probably girls) of about 9 to 12. I was pleased to tell her that I know of two very enthusiastic boys who've also read the book, so we can take 'probably girls' with a grain of salt. It didn't seem to bother either of the boys that the main protagonist is a girl; anyway there are plenty of males in the book as well!

I've begun writing a fourth book, but it's in the extremely early stages so far, finding its way with some difficulty. And if the last book is anything to go by, what I've written so far is just as likely to be ditched by the time the book reaches its final form. 

I was pleased to read a long blog post by Anne Allen today called Slow Writers: Are they Doomed to Failure in the Digital Age? Having taken some two years to complete The Disenchanted Wizard, which by any standards is a relatively short book, I think I would call myself a slow writer. And yet two other books that appeared in 2014: Diary of a Prostate Wimp and The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret were each written in a few months. So maybe it depends on the book as to whether slowness is an element or not. 

Still, a book of 30,000 words should, you'd think, take a good deal less time than some of the books running to 600 pages or more that I've been asked to review in the last two or three years. But when a book requires constant rewriting and revision and rethinking, then any book of any length will take time. And a dose of procrastination doesn't go amiss either, when it comes to dragging out the time involved. 

I'm currently reading through an old journal I kept. At the moment I'm in the section written during 1990, when I was really finding my feet as a writer. Again and again I write of the struggles of trying to write with so many other calls on my time (I was working full-time and had five children), but also dealing with procrastination and with the difficulties of revising. So nothing much has changed it seems!



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