RLLauthor@outlook.com and @RLL_author GO TO AMAZON KINDLE STORE AND TYPE RLL. YOU WILL FIND MY BOOKS.

Sunday 26 January 2014

HAMLET OR NOT HAMLET. THAT IS THE QUESTION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

When I was generating a final copy of my annual archive, I spent time on the Twitter describing that process. I invented new words for slow.
   Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh wasn't one of those words.
   I sailed into the night, back and forth, between two computers. One machine, at least, had the internet. So I whiled away some of the time in random searching.
   The name of an actress came up.
   I thought I'd check out the internet's opinion of this actress. She gave excellent performances in a few movies I'd seen. I'd long-ago decided she'd serve as the model for a character in one of my books.

*

Which one? That character is in my Hamlet adaptation. To avoid confusion, the story's called not hamlet. And that's perfectly true...
   Better to say that it's not just Hamlet. Another story intrudes. One of the features of Hamlet that always interested me was the notion of a play within the play.
   Strolling players visit the castle. Hamlet manipulates them into putting on a particular play. He does this to drop heavy hints about his father's murder.
   Hamlet has no concrete proof - he's playing a hunch based on a chat with a ghost...
   But the play's the thing. Hamlet wants to see the murderer's reaction to the play.

*

I thought, suppose the strolling players have their own plot going on. A tale following the murderous trail of the clown, Pagliaccio. Anyway, in my mash-up, Pagliacci works with Hamlet.
   Deep into the night, my archive takes an age to sort out, and, internetting, I stumble on this actress. She's the one I think of when I imagine the character Columbina.
   I fix files. And I copy files. I use the Twitter to reveal the slowness of file-movery. At some point, it's 2.00 in the morning and I'm reading the blog of an actress.
   She has a blog? Worth checking out?
   As events showed, yes. There were insightful gems on that blog.
   The night before, I was writing until 1.00 in the morning. Odd hours? I don't think so. Normally I wouldn't go far beyond 1.00 if writing.
   Background archiving was looking after itself, but I had to look after that too. I owned that paranoid feeling. Must do this now. If I switch the computer off and wait until morning, the whole system might fritz.
   Of course, that paranoia stems from an actual event. HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT.
   This is why I stayed up until 2.00. Archiving wasn't allowed to stop for mere sleep.

*

My Hamlet adaptation stalled after six chapters when no one wanted to publish it. After writing just six chapters, I decided I'd shop a story around unfinished.
   Confidence in the finished article, nestled in some futuristic world we'd reach one day.
   The future, though, was floating on the mighty Amazon. I published the first chapter of not hamlet in my INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS.
   Kindle's there to be used.
   I've been looking at that excerpt. And I'll let it stand as it is, in the collection. But for release into the wild as a full novel, I think my early attempt at Kindle formatting must go.
   Hamlet's adventures deserve shorter paragraphs. They'll be the same paragraphs - just chopped in half for ease of digital reading.
   Midnight descends. I'll finish this post another time. Sleep is considered essential by some. But only if you wish to function. No staying awake until 2.00 this time around.

*

Where were we? This is not a tale of evil kidney transplantation. (With regard to a non-functioning external hard drive, we're in the realms of dodgy transfusion.)
   Hamlet. I stayed up late, fixing the archive. And I read a blog. That actress was on my mind. Obviously, I thought of Columbina. In my tale, she's Pagliacci's second wife. She serves as inspiration for Pagliacci's move into Hamlet's world...

*

But this blog post isn't about any of that stuff. At 2.00 in the morning I'd read the woman's blog, archived my fiction, and had enough.
   Come morning, even though I was thinking of Shakespeare and Leoncavallo, my main thought was of the archive. I bring things forward each year, so my freshest vault contains the latest copies and updates of Kindle PRC files.
   That's in case I iron out a glitch or alter some blurb.
   Projects in progress as one year ends are archived within that year. Then they are copied to a new year for further work. The old archive is then left lying around on the off-chance that something catastrophic happens.
   Though for something catastrophic to happen to fresher chunks of files and NOT to me too, I'd have to be out of the building when that plane hits.

*

My thoughts went to Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords and all its sequels and offshoots. I knew I had to weed out that sub-archive. So that's what I've been doing. Weeding.
   The books that follow the first volume don't exactly follow the first volume. They exist at the same time. Same setting. A few scenes overlap.
   Old ground. Different viewpoints.
   It's a nightmare, juggling those characters. She's here, and hears that news. So she can't be there when that event happens, as she's come from yonder to be here.
   Like that. Multiplied.
   I can't let things fester beyond all rational and irrational control. With this in mind, I started destroying duplicate files. Devious ones.
   Files with different names containing duplicated text. I had to cap a lid on that bullshit.
   And I created a massive table, showing the first book's timeline, with the out-of-sequence flashbacks set down in chronological order.
   Yes. The fun part of writing. Continuity is important to some people. Maybe it's a phase readers are going through.
   So far, only part of the plot of book four felt the strain. Sorting out the action in books two and three should smooth the running for books four and five.
   Especially as she's here when she hears that news.

*

Lots of ideas. Plenty of books on the unwritten pile, waiting to go. Where does that leave Shakespeare, if I turn my attention to a sprawling series instead?
   I'll get to those assorted tales. Without rushing. Every year, my ambition is to write a whole bunch of books. And this year is no different.
   Every year I take interesting detours into reading, or experiencing stuff, or damn-well thinking through ideas that are no good and must be worked on. Sometimes, worked over. As in...
   Tied to a chair. Blowtorches are waved.
   Anyway. I published. And I'll go on publishing. Every detour into another project creates another project.
   I must away, to see to more archiving. There's a file (with chapter titles in it) that flies in the face of the plot of at least two books...







  
  



  

Sunday 19 January 2014

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARCHIVE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

My archive isn't lost. It's sleeping.
   For READ TUESDAY 2013, Misha Burnett asked how often I backed up my work. I gave this answer...

*

An autosave kicks in periodically. I’ll save a file if I must leave the keyboard, even for the briefest stretch. Typically, I won’t get through a paragraph without saving. I’ll save much sooner than that if I type something vital, complex, or an item that is vital and complex.
    Microsoft Word is set to back up a copy of each file. When the world was younger, I had fiction archives. Now I have fiction folders inside annual archives.
    But that’s basic management of files, and not backing stuff up. Generally, files are copied to a mirror archive on an external hard drive once a file is created or added to.

   Come the half-way point of the year, I used to create a DVD of the year-thus-far – that was before I had an external hard drive. The archive is copied to DVD come year’s end, and the DVD is lodged in a fireproof safe.
    That’s all changing now – I moved to the internet. I follow my own blog via e-mail so that an archived copy exists in an e-mail folder. Just in case Blogger decides to chew up a few pages. Now I have the option of cloud storage to mull over.
    Electricity let me down once – by adding data to a file. I was chopping the hell out of a chunk of writing and the power went. So all the stuff I cut – without saving – was back again when electricity resumed.
    The other form of backing stuff up is publication. I thoroughly recommend that to writers. Don’t store your tales in a digital drawer. Publish them. My early blog entries were written for collection and publication. That’s the ultimate version of backing something up – putting it out there.
    Placing your work on file at a Library of Record, to fulfil legal obligations, is another way of backing things up. You can walk into the British Library – between Euston and St. Pancras, and request access to a digital copy of Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords, for example.
    If you are hard-pressed and all other methods fail, you must rely on recreating material from memory. This is a poor solution, but if it’s all you have then make use of what marbles time has left ye.


*

What to report? Life is much the same. Except for the part about the extra layer of backing something up. The external hard drive. It doesn't want to come out to play.
   The 2013 fiction archive was roasted onto disc and locked in the fireproof safe. I amused myself, and one or two others, by Twittering about this as it slowly slowly happened.
   Look, you can see data turn to fossils. Woo.
   As for the external hard drive, it's so external that it might as well be sitting on the dark side of the moon. I'll work something out.

*

This blog post is not about that. No. This blog post is about archiving. What to keep and what to ditch. Over the course of a year, you...
   Forget that bit. Try again.
   Over the course of ten minutes, you can accidentally, deliberately, or dacciliberately create duplicate files of duplicate files of duplicate files.
   At the distance of a year, a reserve copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a file might just no longer be relevant. (Went out on a limb there.) I save periodically. And I duplicate stuff.
   Duplicated material is ALSO saved periodically.
   After a year, there's a hefty slice of detecting. What is this? Do I need that file? Here's a folder of files copied over from, from, from, er, somewhere south of Mordor. Best guess.
   Tolkien looks askance at me.
   Weeding files is a problem. That's done regularly, but duplicates still creep in on soft shoes chosen for the purpose.
   In weeding out a year's supply of files, the worst offender stinking up the place was an older copy of a published work. MURDER BOX. How the hell did that clone survive? Easily. I was at the end of the year.
   MURDER BOX was published on the 27th of December. Except that it wasn't. Oh, but it WAS.
   First, we'd best scramble over the Amazon time travel bullshit. Even if I publish on Amazon late in the day, next to midnight, Amazon still deducts one day from the publication date.
   That's neither here nor there.
   I went to publish MURDER BOX on the 27th and had to stop at the last hurdle to fix an item in the PRC file. This is the finished file that you'll read on Kindle.
   So I fixed the problem and returned to battle. The story was published that day.
   I run a laptop as a storytelling computer. And I run this PC as an internet computer.
   Stories are written in the office. They are transferred by USB to my library, where the internet resides. I have various USB devices kicking around.
   Updating the book, I went out of my way to ensure that I wasn't noodling around with the same file from earlier. So I used a different USB. (No messing about with deleting every single contradictory file, in case I made a mistake on that front.)
   Year's end. I am archiving. Checking duplicates. I decide to lay all the cards on all the tables, and I strip all the USB devices of their files on the off-chance that certain files are ONLY stored on USB.
   Everything stripped is dumped to the annual archive. There are folders everywhere. The desktop is cluttered. I start weeding out duplicates. And I also start preserving rare birds - files that did only exist on a memory stick.
   This thing with rare birds - it happens to copies of important e-mail messages, not to copies of my novels.

*

Upshot. An earlier version of MURDER BOX surfaced off the USB stick. One of those quirks. The incident happened on the 27th of December, and I started putting the archive to bed on the 1st of January. I killed the right file.
   There weren't any other incidents like that. I'm extra-careful when it comes to those finished PRC files for Kindle. The entire archive is geared to their production, after all.

*

I feel like continuing this archival theme in another post. Filing is normally straightforward. Blogging about this just brought back a lot of non-engrossing moments for me. So I'll try to veer off at a tangent next time.




Sunday 12 January 2014

VERY BASIC BLOGGING FOR AUTHORS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Canadian author K. Woodward once sold me magic beans in exchange for a cow. She doesn't live on a farm, though her lakeside property contains a whole crop of buried bodies waiting to sprout up at the first signs of law-enforcement.
   Anyway, I planted magic blogging beans. After a few hours, a scrawny leaf appeared. That was then. This is not an S.E. Hinton reference.
   My blog changes. I review. Consider. Tinker. Alter. Adjust. The blog grows. Not in the same way as a carnivorous plant.
   This blog is a steam-powered clockwork constraption with pipes leading into the darkness. A sparking darkness.
   You are a writer. Published. Unpublished. Certain. Unsure. Tall. Short. You want to blog. And you have no clue. What to do? Give it a go. That's the advice.
   Anything else I say amounts to little more than electronic waffle. But bear a few points in mind, based on all that tinkering I did.

*

If you want to be published, start that blog. You can always redecorate later. Unless you have extreme technical difficulties, nothing bad on your blog stays there.
   Indelible stains do not feature. Simple mistakes, complicated errors, can all be fixed. Almost always. I use Blogger. There are other ways of spelling that.

*

What to blog? Blog about your fiction. If you want to be a writer, put a short story on the blog. Non-fictioneers should concoct articles they'll come to hate later.
   When to blog? At some point in human history. Blogging at some point in duck history may not serve you well.
   How often should you blog? That's up to me. No it isn't! It's your choice. This blog is usually a weekly blog. Occasionally something comes up and I throw an extra blog on the fire.
   When the blogging bean first sprouted, I blogged weekly. I wrote a minimum of 1,500 words per blog and decided those posts would be collected for publication on Amazon Kindle.
   Monday was the day of release, week in, week out, week up, week down.
   The first blog batch was released with my INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS. After that, I set up a series of books called REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE - for blogs bundled with fiction on a 30,000/75,000 split.
   Then the blog loosened up. Mainly as I had the internet installed at home. Until then, I blogged out of a (VERY) public library. Once or twice I blogged from my phone.
   I no longer use the phone for publishing or blogging. But I still blog weekly, over the weekend - usually on a Sunday.

*

What's important when creating a blog on writing? Your name might be your blog name too. Or you could run with a title.
   My banner image is made up of three book covers. I don't expect to change that concept - though I may shift the book covers around as the blog unfurls.
   Right now, the blog banner promotes WEREWOLVES, INSANITY, and VAMPIRES. You know what to expect in my fiction, based on that selection.
   No cookery books here.
   You'll have a priority if you aren't published - getting published. I have books out on Amazon Kindle. So I'm advertising my fiction as you land on the banner.
   If you feel you have nothing to throw onto a blog, ditch that feeling.

*

Posting a photo of a cat on your blog is the last refuge of the desperate.

*

Every author blog should have a contact point. I decided that wasn't enough for people who lack patience. So the contact e-mail appears at the top of the page, under the banner.
   What effect does this have? It makes me immediately contactable. As soon as I added the e-mail, there was a slight rise in spam over at the e-mail account. That spam was filtered into the junk section.
   I was surprised to be thought useful in the quest to liberate untold millions from Sani Abacha's secret Swiss accounts. No, I didn't open the junk messages - I could tell what was up, just by reading the subject lines.

*

Salutations! I need your honesty. Rolex! Female Viagra. Confidential money matters. Money involved - tell no one. Regarding. (Never regarding anything.) Your account might be permanently suspended. I await your urgent communication. Here is the database. Confirm concert tickets. Hello from Princess...
   HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT.

*

This blog has a carousel. The Amazon gadget features a minimum of six items - I had three products on sale when I discovered the carousel. Instead of plugging random items (kibble, DEATH STARS), I decided I'd write another three stories and get that carousel up and running on my blog.
   The blog spurred an easily-attainable writing goal. Don't sit down to write a smash-hit. Write to achieve attainable goals.

*

The post you are reading now? It starts public life on the blog's home page, and, after that, it's shunted down the archive.
   I have non-blogs out there. HERE'S AN EXAMPLE. Those blogs are landing pages. If you find your way to one, you are redirected to this blog or to Amazon. There's no archive on a landing page, shuffling down the blog.

*

You might post fiction on your blog, and let it slide out of sight into the archives. This blog has a set-up for...checks setting while cursing and mumbling about Blogger...seven posts on the page at any given time in human history.
   Nothing for duck history.
   Decide what's worth archiving and what's worth giving a dedicated page to. I've altered the regular pages many times. Now, the first few page entries mention free fiction on my blog.

*

At one time, I ran the free DOCTOR WHO story across four pages. I had a lot of dedicated pages running - this blog can take twenty. My blog looked too busy heading for a dozen, so I merged or altered pages.
   That story still runs across four pages. One page is here, on this blog. There's a link to the rest of the story at the end of part one, and that link carries through to pages on another blog.
   The other blog has the same background - books on shelves - so you don't really feel that you've strayed too far. That was a way of reducing the number of pages on my main blog.
   Let's have a count. Aside from the HOME page, I'm running eight pages. MY BOOKS/FUTURE PROJECTS and ABOUT ME/CONTACT ME take up two pages. They used to loll around on four.
   I don't let my archive do all the talking. Dedicated pages take care of business too. Right now I don't see the need for twenty pages.

*

There's a gadget in the layout showing labels. You gain an idea of the waffle you'll find in the archives. There's a gadget for showing archives. From that, you'll see how long I've been blogging.
   Yes, there's a gadget showing books on goodreads. I didn't like all the books featured. If I had some way of featuring books I liked, culled from that user-friendly site, I'd bottle it and sell the formula far and wide.
   My employment of the term user-friendly in the preceding paragraph was a lie.

*

Okay. There are things to read on my blog. And there are things to stare at. On the free audio page, there's stuff to listen to. How do you add all these gadgets and widgets and shiny baubles?
   You don't have to. What was on my blog at the start? A banner. Fiction. A contact page. The slimmest of archives. Basics. Don't cram everything into one session.
   There's a blogging rule - adding the simplest thing will take a session lasting hours.
   Build in stages, phases, stops and starts. Review your stuff behind the scenes in unpublished posts and pages.
   Check out your blogging platform's gadgets. Set a few up. See how they go. Or don't go. (Still working on that great slideshow widget. Sigh.)
   Stare in bewilderment at those HELP files. Try stuff.

*

I'll say a few words about the unforgiving. Blogging involves the use of type. That's a technical thing. I employ black type on an off-white background. People will tell you that staring at a screen is easier with that sort of combination.
   Here's what's not cool.
   Lime green writing on a yellow page. Just don't go there. Lime green on black doesn't cut it either.
   Taking a poll of the blogs I've seen, so far I've never truly forgiven writers for blogging in white type on a black background.
   The closest I've come to accepting that was on seeing a few blogs by authors whose posts were short enough to read without fritzing eyeballs, despite the unusual combination.
   Somehow, it works for those people. Let's call them exceptions.

*

Another point worth noting concerns the realm of non-fiction. This relates to political blogging. I just came off a political blog, after checking something.
   Comments.
   Page Up and Page Down are handy buttons on my keyboard.
   Try scrolling up and down now. See how long that takes you. If you've clicked on the isolated copy of this post, it won't take long.
   Even if you are in the main HOME page, with a string of posts, it won't take you long.
   I was amazed at the number of comments a political blogger received. So I hit Page Down and kept an eye on my watch. Scrolling down through the comments took exactly half a minute.
   That's a long time scrolling.
   If you want to write non-fiction, aiming at the political, you'll be scribbling articles that blend fact and opinion. Be prepared for comments from everywhere in the universe.
   Some bloggers leave comments off for that reason. Shouldn't affect you in the fictional world. I write fiction, but must be mindful that those looking for writing advice may end up writing non-fiction.

*

No, this wasn't a technical post about blogging. You may not use the same blogging platform - I didn't want Wordpressers to turn away into the snowstorm.
   I just wanted would-be bloggers to consider atmosphere. You needn't wow your audience with animation, whistles, bells, a rampaging dinosaur...
   This blog is a mechanical beanstalk. Puffs of steam escape. The boiler is in no danger of exploding. Well, there's a one per cent chance. I wonder what K. Woodward did with that moo-cow. She probably sold it on, in exchange for a lamp.

  

Sunday 5 January 2014

SELF-HARM WARNING: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

After some mucking around with HTML, I've added a very short warning of a self-harm scene to the Amazon product description for MIRA E. That's the novel featured in my first volume of blog collections, REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
   Yes, books are named after this blog.
   Amazon's LOOK INSIDE! feature allows potential purchasers to browse e-books. Quite right, too. Readers should be able to do to e-books most of the things they can do to paper books.
   Browse them. Buy them. Read them. Spilling coffee on e-books has a slightly different outcome. Throwing e-books across a room in outrage - likewise.
   My blog report features collected posts at the start of the book. Inside the first ten per cent of volume one, the free sample ends with Darth Biozarre's complaint that painting the DEATH STAR black was, cough, a total giveaway, revealing Darth Sinister's true identity.
   (Cough, splutter. Pardon me while I store this black cloak in a dark cupboard. Cough, cough. Ahem.)
   My point, Young Jedi...
   MIRA E. is the novel bundled with those blog posts. The story starts long after the free sample ends. My blurb mentions the blog posts and then goes into an extended description of the novel.
   An experiment, in product description.
   Knowing the book itself wasn't sampled at the start of the Amazon product-viewing experience, I decided I'd take full advantage of the space available.
   I showcased the novel. A mad experiment. You can tell.
   The other products I sell on Amazon feature blurb sections that run around two to three hundred words. Those descriptions include welcoming phrases that point out roughly what you'll be reading.
   I also list the word-count. And I end with an invocation to use the LOOK INSIDE! feature.
   Dash in, do the job, and rush out. Job done.
   In the MIRA E. blurb, I spend 600 words giving you slices of the book - solely because you can't click LOOK INSIDE! to read any of that text.
   The format runs...TEN PER CENT OF BLOG POSTS FREE, MORE BLOG POSTS, NOVEL.
   I don't believe in using 600 words for every single piece of book blurb.
   Where's the problem? In the first chapter of the novel, I feature a scene involving discussion of self-harm. Okay, I put a lot of nasty stuff in my stories...
   I am not in the habit of warning people about the nasty things. For, in my world, my world is not your world. You may have a problem dealing with clowns.
   #CLOWNS.
   #INSENSITIVE.
   Open spaces. Enclosed spaces. Outer space. The upper reaches of the atmosphere. Foggy days. Dogs. Cats. Lava. I don't know what's going to scare you.
   There's a scene in MIRA E. in which a paedophile faces a peculiar form of revenge. I'm guessing you'd cheer.
   Self-harm is a difficult topic to deal with. I don't want to ambush my readers with it. You know I am going to talk about HTML. I opened this blog post with the term.
   Ambush. I added HTML to my Amazon blurb. HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT.
   With HTML, blurb has the power to become blurb. Or blurb. The HTML coding absorbs some of the available space in the Amazon text box. In exchange, bold type appears.
   Normally that's not a problem.
   With 600 words of blurb, it became a problem. I edited the hell out of that description to make it fit. And that wasn't a problem. Until I realised I'd be ambushing readers with description of a self-harm scene.
   Then I knew I had to put in a warning. The longer warning exists on this blog - see the dedicated page for the first chapter of MIRA E. There's your free sample. Just click to read inside. ;)
   The novel itself contains an extended warning in the introductory text. I fought a major battle with HTML to include the briefest warning in the Amazon blurb.
   Gremlin. I was told by the display that I had dozens of characters left. A lie was told there, surely.
   Looked okay when I hit the button to publish. The gremlin choked a sentence off at birth, on publication. No matter. I went back in with a flamethrower.
   That is how I ended up publishing 72 times in 2013. Updating blurb. Adding HTML. Fine-tuning product description - for the products you see in my Amazon carousel.
   Experimenting, as all mad scientists must. They think me mad. For I have exchanged a black cloak for a white coat.


*

Review your work. Look afresh at covers and blurbs and prices, oh my! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Follow the digital road.


*

Update. I scrapped the collected blog posts. The blogs exist on the internet, but not as collected volumes. HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT.