Typing up the past

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Back in 1989 I began to keep a journal on my computer. It wasn't the first journal or diary I'd kept, by any means - another (handwritten) one was produced alongside it most days, but that was more focused on my spiritual life, and how it was going.

But this 1989 journal was different in the sense that not only was it being written on the computer, I was printing it out as I went. Which was just as well, as the computer I was using, an Amiga 500, didn't keep much information itself; you had to back-up everything onto disks. A tedious process, but essential; a story I wrote, and thought had potential, got lost when it wasn't backed-up. (In every other respect, the Amiga was great.)

The back-up disks survived long after the Amiga had been sold on when we got a new computer, but of course they were no good without the Amiga system. Fortunately, as I said, I'd printed the journal out, regularly, and by the time it came to an end (I went onto a different system on a computer that backed up stuff of its own accord) there were seven volumes of it, the first alone amounting to 120 pages printed out on an old dot-matrix printer, with about 700 words per page.

Feeling some concern at only having one printed copy of the journal, I spent some of my hard-earned cash one day and got the whole thing copied by a local printer I knew through my work. Now I had two copies, but what to do with the second one? Where to store it for safety? I considered a safebox of some sort, but didn't have the finances at that point to keep on paying for the storage. I asked our friendly family lawyer, but that didn't work out either; it wasn't the sort of thing they did. (At least not without payment.) In the end I gave the second copy to my son, so that at least both copies weren't in the same house.

Now, having recently finished the book I've been writing over the last couple of years - The Disenchanted Wizard - I decided it was time to do something I've been intending to do for some time: type up the printed copy of the journal onto my current computer, where it'll automatically be backed-up onto the Cloud. And that's what I've been doing for the last two or three weeks: I'm currently up to page 70 of the first volume, making pretty good progress, and discovering all sorts of stories and events within the family that I'd forgotten about.

There's a lot about writing in there, too. In 1988 I began a writing course by correspondence, and when the journal opened I was coming towards the end of the course and making some progress with the writing: getting articles published, a short story read on the radio, and another short story for kids printed by the School Journal. 

I had a thought a couple of nights ago that I could use the writing sections of the journal in another book, and started some preparatory work towards that. Time will tell whether that eventuates. After all, who needs another book on writing?

Overweight

Is there some new fad that requires books to be massive? I've been given two titles to review this week, both of them running to some 600 pages. The one I'm now halfway through could easily have told its story in half the space; there is a ton of surplus - interesting writing in its way, but not essential to the story, and only occasionally to the characters. One chapter I've just finished spends several pages on an inane conversation which quickly ceases to be funny because it becomes so laboured.

What are the editors thinking, I ask? Do they see large chunky books as the way to publish at present? I can tell you from experience that the weight of them is annoying (you can't take them in the bath, or read them in bed) and trying to keep them open even on a table is difficult. Because they're so tightly bound, they have to be forced back, with the possibility of breaking the spine.

Some of the best books I've read in the last few years have been around the 200 page, maybe 300 page mark. They don't waste time on inessentials, things that the author thinks are interesting but which annoy the reader. They get on with the story and are focused. 

Think of me...I've got another 900 pages still to go, and I'll have only finished two books...!

Progress on the next book

Making good progress on my prostate book, and hopefully will get it off to a friend who has an editorial eye some time this week. Hopefully, too, this time it'll get published initially without mistakes. Grimhilda! went out thoroughly proof-read, we thought, and with all the typos sorted out. Nope. The same friend, when he read it, discovered a bunch more - lots of them minor and mostly unnoticeable - but there all the same. It takes a fresh eye to see them sometimes.

Anyway, one of the things I've still got to sort out is a cover for the book. I saw a great photo that's doing the rounds of the Internet (see at the right) which, with a few alterations of the words and a couple of additions (such as the name of the author) would have been ideal. But I couldn't find the owner of it, and those who'd used it seemed to think it was available for anyone to use. I'd like to be sure of that first.

Apparently it's been used as a political poster by the US Tea Party, amongst other things, although now that I go to find a version used by them I can't see it anymore!

Uploading to Smashwords

I'm just about to upload my book, Grimhilda!, to Smashwords. Or rather, I was going to, except that I needed to ask them one question, and now have to wait until they get back to me. Which hopefully won't be more than 24 hours.

It's been an interesting process. The original document I used for uploading to Kindle wasn't able to be used for the Smashwords site, not even as an epub version. I had to strip the Word doc right down to the bare bones and start again, which was a bit of a pain, as it meant putting in italics and bolds and such all over again, and reformatting the headings and taking out colour. This version is the super simplified one, but at least it should be of a quality that it will adapt to any e-reader going, pretty much. That's the Smashword promise.

I spent Friday reading through the enormous Smashwords instruction page - I'd already worked my way through the e-book, Smashwords Style Guide, while reformatting the book, so I was familiar with a lot of what was in the instructions page, but there seemed to be considerably more detail, and repetition. Anyway, I went through it and marked it and made notes and updated some things on my file, and so on. All in all, I'm hoping that the document I now have should be ready to be uploaded without any hitch. But we'll see. Both the book and the instructions page warn that it's normal for the first upload to produce a few Autovettor 'errors' which have to be repaired before you can proceed.

Patience is required. At least I'm not waiting around for months before the book appears. That's one of the great wonders of the digital age that we can produce books (of varying kinds) in such a short time. Such services as Eoncode web to print solutions make the process remarkably speedy. Of course, you still have to have something ready for the printer that will pass muster, but that's all part of the learning process. This year has been full of learning curves, and I don't suppose they're over yet.

You have to wonder...

I get Google ads alongside my Gmail, something that doesn't bother me in the slightest, because most of the time I barely notice them. (I can read a newspaper and miss most of the advertising.)

But I have to wonder at the the appropriateness of the some of the ads that do turn up. Alongside a poem in an email today were the ads listed below. The poem was about seeing dance in every movement of life, and it's a nice piece by Mitch Roberson called Every Day We Are Dancers. The bit about the two men carrying a huge mirror across the road is particularly neat. 

So let's look at these ads, and see if Google has lost the plot or not in its ad placement. 

Building Report

Leak and Building Inspections. Free Treated Timber Testing Service

leakdetective.co.nz

Okay, there's a mention of a building in the poem, so perhaps this is apt - there's another building ad further down, but nowhere is there any mention of leakage. Unless the fact that the poem starts off in a shower is the connection. 

Publish Your First Book

Get Matched With A Publishing Professional. Get Started Now!

www.newwriterpublisher.com

There are two ads relating to books, but the poem doesn't have time for anything but for itself to be read. 

Bad Credit Car Loans NZ

Instant Approval - Guaranteed! Apply Online Now.

www.aquacars.co.nz

The only mention of a car is in the middle of the word, macarena.  Bit of a long shot, that one. 

Windows 7 Driver Download

Windows 7 Drivers Latest Download. Microsoft Certified. (Recommended)

www.windows-7.driverupdate.net

No windows, drivers, or downloads in the poem. Not even someone driving down the street. 

Leaky Building/Reclad

Specialist construction services helping people with leaky buildings

www.formedevelopments.co.nz

"Is Your Computer Slow?"

In 2 min,Restore your Speed. Fix error messages! - [ Free Download ]

speedycomputer.com

Slow computers are completely missing from Mr Roberson's poem. 

Read Free eBooks

Download From Our Free eReader & Get Six Great Classics for Free!

www.thereadingroom.com

Manage your own cafe/bar?

Learn Cafe Admin, Barista Skills, Wine Lists, 10 Weekends

foodandwine.co.nz

As are cares and bars. 

Hmm, it looks as if Google bummed out almost completely on this one. Maybe it's Have a random Google ad Day. 

Self-publishing in its various forms

According to Seth Godin, the following authors were all self-published.   In the light of the current chaos swirling around the world of publishing, and with self-publishing in a variety of forms becoming all too common, it's interesting to see who's on the list.  

Ben Franklin

Ezra Pound

Emily Dickinson

Marcel Proust

Dave Eggers

Thomas Paine

Jane Austen

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Walt Whitman

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Stephen Crane

Nikki Giovanni

Virginia Woolf

Of course, self-publishing isn't just confined to the world of books...what we're doing with my musical, Grimhilda!, is a form of self-publishing.  Someone said to me the other day, 'You're lucky to be getting it on at all'.   But in fact, it's because we've done it ourselves, to a great extent, that it's going on.  It would never have got off the ground if I'd waited for an impresario.   Although an impresario might have come in handy, given some of the difficulties we've faced!

An open letter to CT at the Movies

You note in the latest CT at the Movies:
"Christianity Today International has been slammed too. In the last few years, we've lost more than a few key magazines—Ignite Your Faith (formerly Campus Life), Today's Christian Woman, Christian Parenting Today, Marriage Partnership, Christian History, and Today's Christian. And we've lost a lot of good people to layoffs—including 25 percent of our company just a couple of weeks ago."

You say these were key magazines....but the magazine world is full of this kind of thing: niche upon niche until the magazine stands are overflowing with 'something for everyone' and nothing for all. It seems crazy to me, in these days of increasing use of the Internet, that magazine proprietors should be going all out to promote endless magazine reading when this isn't what a huge number of people are reading. Worse, the content between the advertising, even in 'Christian' magazines, is often trivial and banal, mere filler.

I remember an editor I worked with years ago saying that the text was only there to fill up the spaces between the ads, and I think many magazine owners still think this is what magazines are about. But as the internet proves again and again: content is king, not advertising. Content first, advertising a very distant second.

Yet what (to take one example) are newspaper publishers doing? Here in my (relatively small) city, we now have two free papers coming out each week. The content is almost nil in one, and while the other has upped its game, it's still half full of advertising disguised as reporting.

I understand your regret at losing so many colleagues, and I sympathise with you in this. Work relationships are often very precious. But magazines in my country, both national ones and imported ones, have become very expensive to buy week after week, and anyway most of the content turns up on the websites not long after. And while I prefer to read from print, my pocket just doesn't allow me to. And here's the good news: on the Net I don't have to turn over page after page of advertising just to read something worthwhile.

This is a time of huge change in the publishing industry. Print is by no means dead - and I don't think is likely to become dead - but we're all having to get used to a different way of reading stuff that has a degree of the ephemeral about it: newspapers, magazines, bulletins, pamphlets.

Just a few thoughts on a rainy Saturday morning.

A mystery search

I’ve just finished reading the 2006 book, Naked Conversations, which is all about blogging (though more for businesses than individuals) and one of the blogs they mention is Joe Wikert’s Publishing Blog. He now calls it the 2020 Blog, but according to the book it used to have the phrase ‘Average Joe’ in the title.

On HitTail yesterday, someone put ‘average joe blogspot mvoc’ in the search and, surprisingly, Google put my blog at the top of the list, beating Joe Wikert by about four places. That’s a bit of a puzzle, because what Google’s done is take the archived page for March 2007, which contains all three of the words, but not at all together. ('Average Joe' appears as a phrase.) There are around thirty posts on the page, in fact. Can’t have been a very satisfying search result for the searcher.

It was in this post that I mentioned some firm that stated they were using dogs to track down mould: ‘Since 2003 we have been using specially-trained dogs, trained just like bomb dogs or drug dogs, to detect and locate the source of mould growth by detecting the gasses (MVOC’s) mould growth gives off.’

Why would someone go searching for ‘average joe blogspot mvoc’? It doesn’t seem a likely group of words to lump together. Maybe some reader can give me a clue.