Tag Archives: Mary Fails at Modern Life

14 Feb 2021 · 3:42 pm

Well! There’s a thing …

OK, on the downside – let’s get it out of the way before we begin – I have not written anything new, although I’ve been working on some edits for the sweeping, complicated epic K’Barthan sff book which I pick up and prod at from time to time. We have just finished introducing the main characters and setting up what they want to achieve and who is stopping them. I’m about 120k in. Oops.

That said, there’s a reason for the lack of writing. I do most of my writing in Scriviner on my iPad because the mousepad on my computer is really irritating. It used to be excellent but then one of Windows’ many updates borked it. Now it picks up the heat from my thumbs and randomly moves the cursor to other parts of the page when I’m typing. I don’t always look at the screen when I’m typing so this can result in a few minutes typing nothing, because the cursor has suddenly landed somewhere neutral, or a whole bunch of stuff in the middle of an earlier paragraph. Most annoying.

The editing in question has been the equivalent of printing it out and scribbling on it, in this case, sending it by PDF to my remarkable tablet and scribbling on that. I cannot say enough good things about the remarkable. I bought the Remarkable One for about £300 off kickstarter after seeing a Facebook ad.

It was a huge gamble. There are many, many scams – do NOT contribute to the pocket Windows PC, for example – and I did get a bit nervous at the end because it was nearly a year before it shipped but it was brilliant from the get go. Even better it had a plastic screen. It took them a while to build all the functionality. It couldn’t convert handwriting to text or import pdfs to edit originally but as people used them they discovered what we needed and built it in.

The only points of pain: it took ages to boot up and it had three buttons at he bottom which didn’t do much but I kept pressing them inadvertently with my hand while writing and opening a new notebook, or closing the one I was writing in, or going to a new page.

Sad sack branded cover to keep my Remarkable safe!

After a year of seeing adverts for the second generation, I recently took the plunge and stumped up the cash for it; the Remarkable 2. It turns on instantly, it’s even more like writing on paper and the look and feel is really cool; sleek gunmetal grey … er … metal and it’s really thin, about 4mm I think. You can turn the pen round to rub out things now as well. They basically took everything that made the Remarkable 1 hard to use and fixed it. Only one problem … it now has a glass screen. Ulp. I give it a few weeks before I break it. Which is a pisser. But you can’t win ’em all.

To try and keep it going for a bit longer I’ve bought it a case from caseable (it’s the same size as the first ever iPad so luckily it is possible to get a customised cover for it). Hopefully with a bit of protection it will survive a year or two before I smash it.

Another upside, I have won £5 in the Alzheimer’s lottery which I play every month and a princely £25 from the Premium Bonds – so that’s a bit of a bonus.

Also, I’ve had some other unusual luck. The Chaos Fairies are clearly feeling a bit guilty for repeatedly doing me over, as, frankly, they fucking should. But I am eternally grateful that their sense of intense guilt at repeatedly fucking up my life appears to have resulted in some kind of unborking intervention with the version of Windows 10 that my lap top is running.

You see I have two main issues with Windows 1o. First, I bought a lap top with a small fixed state drive (128gb) and a 1terrabyte external drive which I intended to use instead. For three months or so this was brilliant. Then an update to Windows gave the external hard drive the equivalent of an invisibility cloak. It wasn’t just that my computer could no longer talk to the drive. It couldn’t detect it at all. I had to boot up my old lap top – a process which, in itself, takes 40 minutes – and then copy everything from the external hard drive to a usb stick, and from there to an older drive which my brand new lap top could still see. The second piece of Windows 10 based cockwomblery was with my printer. It suddenly stopped printing pdf files. It transpired I’d inadvertently upgraded my version of windows from 34 bit to 64 bit. Naturally there was no roll back. I was stuck with 64 bit. No more freehand illustrator ether. That only worked with 34 bit. The net result of this was that there wasn’t a fix and if I wanted to print the pdf documents I had to buy a new printer.

My only point of pain with the HP was its massive footprint so, after a bit of research, I decided to buy an Epson. I picked one up for a song and it had a scanner on top – also handy as the non-replaceable bulb in my excellent Epson Perfection scanner had just gone. My old printer will print in black if the colour cartridge has run out and will print in colour if the black one is empty. It will print until all the colours in the colour one run out – but I discovered that the drawback with three colours in one is that they don’t all run out at the same time. Usually the yellow dies first, then blue and then you are printing all your documents in pink for a while before that, too, dies and you have to buy more ink. It’s expensive but I can get refilled ones for about £15.

When I bought the Epson printer, which I had to do, urgently, so I could print some pdfs for the Christmas Fayre back in 2019, I made certain to buy one that that had all the colour cartridges separate so I could replace the yellow without feeling a bit wasteful throwing away a cartridge that was still healthily full of magenta and cyan.

Knowing the quality of the scanner I’d had, I thought an Epson printer would be a good idea. I was so, so wrong. It is, frankly, one of the most horrific pieces of shit I ever had the misfortune to buy. It was £35, which, incidentally is exactly half the price of a new set of printer cartridges for it. Not only that but while you can get a set of refilled cartridges for £15 or thereabouts, the printer has some kind of chip in it which tells it they are not ‘proper’ Epson cartridges and it refuses to print in case the sub standard ink breaks it somehow.

I wouldn’t mind so much if it was like the HP cartridges I use, where there is a lot of electrical gubbins on the actual cartridge but this is basically a tank full of ink. Although looking at the price, I suspect there is a great deal of liquid gold inside and possibly some crushed diamonds for sparkle. No wait, those would be cheaper than whatever is in these tiny tanks of ink. It’s supposed to print 400 pages, frankly I’d estimate it’s closer to something like 50. Worse, if a single one of these cartridges runs out of ink the printer won’t print anything.

When it’s midnight on a Sunday, nothing’s open and you need a document printed for Monday morning do you care if it’s blue? Of course you fucking don’t. Something is better than nothing Epson, you bell ends! Seriously. No yellow? Unlucky. Want to try printing in black? Sorry. Nah-uh, not printing in black until you fork out £20 for another yellow. I reckon my Epson prints at about £1 a page. I hate it.

Enter the chaos fairies who appear to have decided to give me a break. A few months ago, I discovered, serendipitously, that my computer had suddenly started printing pdf documents on my old printer again. The elderly A3 Hewlett Packard desk jet I have had for the last 20 years rides again. Jolly dee.

This week, tidying up my desk drawer, I happened upon the spiffy 1 terrabyte external hard drive. It’s so cool. It’s about the size of a cassette tape box – look it up younglings – with a cable and a blue light that comes on when it’s running. I thought about the pdf printing thing and looked at it and wondered …  I plugged it in and it worked. I still can’t quite believe it. So now I have reverted to the original plan, cleaning out my hard drive and putting it all on the external drive – but still backed up to the desk top drive my computer has been able to read all along.

Wow! That’s a bonus. OK so the mouse pad is still all over the fucking shop but as the great Canadian poet Meatloaf once said, ‘two out of three ain’t bad’.

Except, I’d better not speak too soon because I see that Windows has installed an update and would like to restart …

Updates on the stuff I mentioned last week …

Remember that book with the wrong innards? Well, on the upside, I managed to sort all of that out and all the books in the Hamgeean Misfit series on Google are now correct; right covers, right links inside, right series name in the book and on the metadata. Woot. Another major win, I also got the right files to the people who’d got Small Beginnings when they should have had Nothing to See Here. On the downside, nobody reviewed it so I sweated a lot to no useful effect.

Arse.

Second thing … remember the logo? Yeh, well, check this. I think it’s fabulous.

So that’s now on the spine of all the books … when I upload them.

I also managed to fix the hideous Small Beginnings/Nothing To See Here faux pas so that’s done (phew!).

Aaaaand! Dum dum daaaaaaaaaah! Too Good To Be True has gone to the editor. Woot!

In an effort to up maintain my output of at least one book each year I have been sorting out. Tasks include unbodging my website or at least, bits of it, and renaming the K’Barthan Shorts series as K’Barthan Extras.

Sorting the site is … a challenge. I haven’t got that far but I do now have an audiobooks page that is within the main site, rather than drifting in purdah somewhere. I also have a mailing list signup page in the main menu which is the same information but just in a more prominant place position. That caused a bit of a headache as I had to change the name of the directory where some of the pictures are kept from freebook – which is what it was called when I imported it – to images. Luckily I have code view and I was able to use search and replace. Phew. The question is whether https://www.hamgee.co.uk/books/hm is better than https://www.hamgee.co.uk/infohm.html one is shorter but the other is slicker and doesn’t have the stupid html bit on the end that marks me out as the bodging noob I am.

Changing the series is taking a while as K’Barthan Shorts is mentioned in the ‘other books’ section of every single ebook.

Mmm.

Then again, the audiobooks don’t have one! Woot! So that’s just the three Misfit/Extras books for those.

Sorting out the massive update the ebooks project, it seemed best to start with the four books in the K’Barthan Extras, Hamgeean Misfit series. To that end I have pages of notes and tables with tick boxes and itemised lists and all sorts of other lunacy to work through so I can tick each thing off as I go and know exactly where I am and what I’ve done … rather than spending about fifty minutes working it out every morning.

All all the relevant records on the ISBN database now have changes submitted – although they might not necessarily be live for another month or so – and the covers, files and blurbs for the K’Barthan Extras books are done on the Google Store and Too Good To Be True loaded for pre-order.

Next, I have to work out how to change the name of the actual books on Ingram – because I didn’t manage to suss how to do it in their dashboard last time I looked. If I don’t then, when I upload the covers for Extras I can see them just pulling the whole lot from sale because the series name in their meta data is different to the one on the covers. Although I should be able to upload the K’Barthan Series covers straight off and Too Good To Be True shouldn’t be a problem, either, because, what with it not being added yet, they don’t know it isn’t ‘Shorts’. We shall see how that goes.

And at some point the iPad should come back, or at least, a replacement.

Hmm … should be a busy week then.

If you’re interested, and you feel like it …

Too Good To Be True is out on 18th March, fingers crossed. Originally, I’d hoped I’d have got my shit together and managed to set it up on all of the retailers so anyone who wants to could pre-order it from anywhere they like. But you know me. My shit still very much scattered to the four winds. For a start, if I upload it directly to Apple, which was my intention, I have to have an iPad because they insist on two tier authentication so I have to have a code number sent to my iPad and I have no iPad ergo … no code and no entry. I’ll probably end up going through D2D to them. Barnes & Noble hasn’t gone live yet – I’ve gone direct to them, too for the first time – but you should find working links to Smashwords, Google Play, Kobo and Amazon

On the other hand, you can pre-order it from my website or my web shop for a whole £ less than it is everywhere else! Mmm. By Grabthar’s Hammer! What a savings!

Anyhoo, here’s the gen …

Too Good To Be True

When the finger of fate points … hide!

When The Pan of Hamgee encounters some mudlarkers trying to land a box on the banks of the River Dang he is happy to help. Having accepted a share of the contents as a reward he cannot believe his luck. It contains one of the most expensive delicacies available in K’Barth, Goojan spiced sausage. If he can sell it, the sausage might spell the end of his troubles. On the other hand, knowing his luck, it could bring a whole load more.

Suggested UK cinema rating for this one PG (parental guidance)
This is a humorous science fiction fantasy story set in a parallel reality.

To find out more, and for links to pre-order it if that’s your thing, go here: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/infotgtbt.html

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6 Feb 2021 · 5:11 pm

Dunce hats on casa McGuire … yes, once again #youstillcantfixstupid

There are only so many interesting headlines I can give to all these blog posts about my, apparently limitless, ability to fuck things up. Meanwhile I appear not to have come anywhere close to exhausting my ability to bomb in flames, even if I have run out of witty headings to put on my blog posts about it. No matter how earnestly I repeat to myself that we are not at home to Mr Cock-Up, life continues to prove otherwise. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Mr Cock-Up appears to have taken up permanent residence in our spare room, as my professional life lurches from one embarrassing faux pas to the next. Never mind, if I write comedy, living something like a bad sit com is probably excusable, it might even just be part of the job description.

First up, a moderate success. In the absence of an open shop, my iPad with its broken screen has been whisked off by courier for evaluation. I’m told they are normally fixed but that, since it’s a pro, they’ll probably just replace it with a fixed up second. If anything fails QS at the factory the offending part is replaced, a new battery, back and and screen are put on and then it’s sent out as a ‘new’ replacement for the cracked iPads of clumsy dunderheads or heavy cat owners such as myself. Fingers crossed that will be OK then.

In other news, there was a couple clearing out a house across the road and with their kind permission I liberated a table lamp and a couple of giant candle holders for a friend, which turned out not to be the thing she had asked me to liberate. I liberated a table lamp and a couple of other candle holders for us, too and a table lamp for her.

Cleaning the pair of giant ones ready to offer them to a different friend I thought I’d use a brush to gently sweep the gritty bits out from inside. Very carefully I swept the bits out of the first one. Started on the second and … managed to smash a hole in the glass with the top of the brush.

Twat!

Kicking myself.

So now I only have one to offer to my friend. She may not want it anyway but ho hum … my life really does seem to be one balls up after another at the moment. Often all that is necessitated is my mere presence for things to break. I don’t have to actually drop them myself. Clearly I’ve taken my eye off the ball. I wouldn’t mind if the off-ball view was even marginally more interesting than the shite the rest of me is seeing.

On the books front, the odd small success and some salutary learning experiences – or as I like to call them, absolute fucking disasters.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided that, what with the length of Too Good To Be True, I should bite the bullet and change the name of the series from K’Barthan Shorts to K’Barthan Extras. To be honest, this makes sense but I can’t really do it properly until I have new covers for all of them with ‘Extras’ instead of ‘Shorts’. I guess the thing that really tipped me over was discovering that I was able to change the name of a series on Amazon a great deal more easily than I’d realised. After years of being told by Amazon that they would not change K’Barthan Trilogy to ‘Series’ they gave us options and I changed it, I thought, but this simply resulted in them calling it ‘K’Barthan Trilogy Series‘ Arnold’s pants! I managed to change it properly, to ‘K’Barthan Series’ last week, although I didn’t find a way to edit the series name so I just removed all the books and set up a new one. So the original four-and-a-short book series is now called K’Barthan Series everywhere! Woot.

On the down side, I’d quite like to do sub-series so they’ll all be K’Barthan Extras but cross reference. You know the same way all Terry Pratchett’s books are Discworld but some are the Tiffany Aching series and some are the Witches etc, I was hoping to do K’Barthan Extras Hamgeean Misfit and K’Barthan Extras, Tales from the Parrot and Screwdriver or whatever. My cunning plan was to add books to two series. Sadly it seems this isn’t possible. That means they must all be K’Barthan something. That’s because, as I may have mentioned last week, no fucker can spell McGuire the way I do, therefore it has to be K’Barthan something so I can tell everyone to search for K’Barthan and my books will pop up.

There is a fair bit of work involved in changing the series name, it means changing it in the back matter of every single ebook and paperback, and of course in the opening and closing credits of the audiobooks. Then there are the covers of everything too, including the paperbacks. So essentially, I’m looking at reloading every file. Except with the audiobooks.

In March, Ingram Spark, who do the paperback print on demand thing for my books, are going to raise their prices. They always do this and it was never a problem but these days, if your price is different to the one on your book – even if it’s lower than the printed one – they simply remove the book from sale. Then you have to change the price which you can only do on one particular day once a week and it takes several days to show up – so often you can’t tell if it’s worked before the next week’s deadline for submissions has passed. This is an issue because, due to the unfortunate fact that I’m a bit of a moron, my book covers have the retail price on and after the next price rise, if I stick to that retail price, there are going to be some titles on which I’m going to be paying Ingram for each sale. The upshot is that I need new covers for the whole lot without the prices on. That’s not so bad. I have a new book looming so that’ll need a cover anyway and I can get the designer to do them all when he does those. Also, I wanted replace the shiny covers on the K’Barthan Series Books with matt ones and that requires putting the design on a new template. Now seems an excellent time to do that as well, and as I have to change the K’Barthan Shorts to K’Barthan Extras in addition to taking the prices off those and take the price off Escape From B-Movie Hell.

Since I have to have new artwork for all my paperback book covers anyway, it occurred to me that I could have a proper logo for Hamgee University Press to go on the spine. Clearly the obvious candidate for that is Humbert the Parrot. So I had a go at drawing Humbert.

Humbert in black and white but with one claw on the frame

On the one hand, I’d never have credited myself with the ability to come up with an expression of sarcastic intelligence quite like that. On the other, Humbert is pretty bald so either this is a very young Humbert or he has been photo-shopped extensively. Or maybe it’s just the artist doing the portrait, who is flattering his subject the in the manner of Joshua Reynolds and his ilk.

Humbert in colour but minus the claw on the frame

While I’m mentioning books, remember that one I gave away, Nothing To See Here? Well one of my lovely readers contacted me and said she’d downloaded it from Bookfunnel and got Small Beginnings. I checked, and sure enough, the Kindle/.mobi version was, indeed, Small Beginnings.

Gulp.

I’d asked everyone to post a review on Google too. That’s going to look good. People swearing blind they are reviewing Nothing To See Here but patently obviously describing Small Beginnings.

Bum.

Then I had an even more alarming thought. On the whole, I get the .mobi file from Draft2Digital. I upload an epub there and they convert it to a number of different formats and distribute it to libraries, about 101 tiny ebook sellers and of course, Barnes&Noble and Apple Books. What this meant was, that I have, very possibly, had Small Beginnings on sale as Nothing To See Here with all those sellers. Thinking it wise to double-check that, I had a look, and … joy of joys … was it Small Beginnings? Of course it fucking was. It would be wouldn’t it?

Erk.

OK on the downside, that was quite embarrassing. On the upside … actually, no, thinking about it, there is no upside.

Bollocks.

Since I was going to have to redo it as an ‘extras’ anyway, I decided to revisit Nothing To See Here a.s.a.p. and sort out some of the other glaring errors it contains. First of all, we know The Pan of Hamgee was blacklisted aged sixteen. There’s a scene in there where I talk about him being blacklisted three years previously but then I’d put that he was twenty years old. Fuckwittery entire or what? Never mind, I changed that back to nineteen. I also managed to describe the security forces uniforms as black and white with the odd red flash on the collars epaulettes and cuffs when they’re black and red. OK so the officer in question had the odd flash of white on the epaulettes, collar and cuffs because he’s an intelligence officer. Shit. And Gareth’s done the audiobook and everything.

Head Desk.

Except hang on … I’ll have to get him to record the intro and outro anyway because they have to be K’Barthan Extras, now, instead of shorts. So there’ll be some cock up-mending recorded bits to add on the bill for the next book anyway so he may as well do those couple of sentences can do them all at once. OK that’s probably going to work then. He should be able to start recording mid March. Hopefully he’ll be alright with that. At least it won’t be too unexpected. After all, he knows I’m nuts.

Then, of course, having fixed the book, I had to reload the pukka version to Draft2Digital … about fifty times because I kept finding glaring howlers I’d missed and of course I ticked the box to supply it to Overdrive by mistake when it’s already going to Overdrive from Kobo. Then I downloaded the correct Kindle version and uploaded it to Amazon, uploaded the correct epub to everywhere else just in case, and corrected the special word document I have to submit to Smashwords and uploaded that too … and the epub. And then I realised I’d spent the whole day fixing the horrendous results of my never-ending twattery and then I realised THAT is why I write so slowly lovely peps. Because I’m an absolute knob and I have to keep going back to fix stuff I have fucked up. If I could get back the time I spend fixing the dog’s breakfast I make of most things I’d be producing books a lot quicker. Rather in the way that if I could get back the time I spend looking for my keys – which are usually in my pocket – or my mask (ditt0) or my glasses – mostly, they’re perched on top of my head – I’d have so much free time I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Then there’s Facebook. Pestering me to make a shop to sell my ebooks and audiobooks. So I spend Monday making a shop and they approve everything except the ebook and audiobook of The Wrong Stuff and Looking For Trouble. I reapply. The audiobook version of Looking for Trouble is turned down again on the grounds that it’s a digital download and they explain that selling digital downloads of any description through Facebook shops is against the rules. Then they approve the ebook versions of both. Nothing is said about the fact I have 14 other approved products in my shop which are also, all, digital downloads and, therefore, breaking their rules. The obvious answer is to delete my shop, except they’ve approved it, so what’s with that? Do I keep it or will I end up getting rumbled and thrown into Facebook gaol forever somewhere down the line. Did I spaff Monday up the wall for nothing? Head desk again.

Why is AI so unbelievably shit? And if it is demonstrably bollocks, which it clearly is, why do Facebook, Instragram, Amazon and a whole host of others insist on using it to do jobs that it’s just too fucking moronic to be left to do at this stage?

Ugh.

Never mind. Onwards and upwards. Next week, if I remember, I’m going to talk about my latest writing aid, my Remarkable 2. If you ever wanted to feel like Captain Kirk should feel when someone hands him one of those kid’s plastic drawing things to pretend to sign that’s how I feel using this thing. It’s the thing the TV people wanted us to believe Captain Kirk was writing on. Except this one has a glass screen and in light of my current rate of smashage for such things – not to mention McCat’s – that’s a bit of a worry.

____________________________________

And now for something completely different

Last week I had the joyous delight of being interviewed on the Slice of Cake Spot on fellow author Clair Buss’ blog. It was great fun and although it was quite long, I’m hoping you’ll enjoy it.

If you think you’d like to have a look at it, click here: http://butidontlikesalad.blogspot.com …

While I’m mentioning it, I have to say that ‘ButIDontLikeSalad’ just the best name for a blog ever!

There you go, anyway! Enjoy!

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25 Jul 2020 · 1:43 pm

MTM fails at modern life … bleargh and t’ing … but then again #AtHomeYALC

Mary fails at modern life

Good morning, I am feeling monster lethargic this week. I have two book reviews to write, and haven’t and I have to do this and we’re going out tomorrow to some friends. That bit is good, in fact I’m really looking forward to seeing them. But I always have to drive which will be less good. It’s just over 50 miles and 45 minutes, a lot of which is crappy speed cameras and pointless speed limits round Cambridge – lots of points potential for the semi-somnambulant driver late at night. And because the McOthers always fall asleep after the late ones it’s even harder to keep awake because it’s like being the driver for a mobile dormitory. A mobile dormitory that is my husband’s car, too, which always adds that little frisson.

This meh I feel is the famous lockdown fatigue. I’m pretty sure of that. I feel like it all the time, and for the exact same reasons so it’s just an extra dose. I’m just … properly knackered all of a sudden. I have no more capacity to deal with idiots abroad and I’ve had the worst month of book sales since October last year. I’ve also had some lovely correspondence from folks on my mailing list but it’s been slightly clouded by one really pissy one. Because I’m an artsy numpty and the dark side weighs heavy … fork sketch brain.

Re the sales … having managed to increase them I really hoped it might be going to stick for a bit but … no. Sighs. And I really have to release some more stuff that’s not K’Barthan. K’Barthan is marmite. People love it or hate it. But the hardest thing about K’Barthan is that despite many people liking it when they finally read it, I swear that persuading them to open the book in the first place is the actual thirteenth Herculean task.

That said, I need to refresh my facebook ads and I’m going to try some BookBub ads for audio and for a freebie I’m running. The first in Hamgeean Misfit series will be zero pence all next week. I think the sales situation is a part of the meh, too, because they haven’t just tanked, they’ve imploded. Without the new release I’d be back to $35 a month, and that’s with the advertising. This is where I point out that all my books, audio, paperback and ebooks are available from any library. Check your app and if it’s not there, just ask.

Also, despite feeling a bit meh, I know I’m not alone and if you’re with me, neither are you. It seems to have hit us creatives like the plague … oh no wait, that’s the Rona. Gareth and I are in the throes of doing another audiobook and he confessed to feeling totally lethargic, himself. So that’s two of us. I bet there are more. Lock down fatigue is a thing though. So much a thing that I’ve found this link about it. It’s all about the limbic system, which is actually the same thing that makes us suddenly think that cleaning the grout in the bathroom is the most important thing in the world rather than that urgent project we have to finish by this afternoon.

Anyway here’s the gen on why lockdown makes us feel totally meh…

I’ll be fine again tomorrow. I think part of it was because I had a very lengthy and vivid dream that I was taking part in a quiz game with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and my husband at a golf club somewhere. It went on for a sod of a long time and at one point Dudley went off to the loo and his suitcase burst and we were trying to stuff all his things back into it but they were just coming out of the tears in the fabric.

The whole ridiculous escapade ended up with me following my parents and uncle along a river with McMini until it went underground. It was hard to keep up because they were moving faster than us and when it forked I wasn’t sure which tunnel they’d taken and took the wrong one. Then we ended up confronted with a cave wall and I turned round to discover that the walls had closed in and we were stuck in a bubble in the rock that was about the size of a small car. That was the point at which I thought, ‘this dream is fucking stupid,’ and woke up. But after concentrating so hard on the quiz first and then on not losing sight of my parents and Uncle, and keeping McMini with me, I woke up absolutely fucking knackered. Mwahahahargh!

In case anyone was going to attempt dream interpretation, yes, I know that dream is about feeling trapped and that I have no control of my life. Every single dream I have is about that because yes, even now, I haven’t quite grasped that the only thing we have any control over is how we react to what happens to us.

And as for travel. What I need is a giro copter … or the fucking transporter off the Enterprise. Where the hell is science though? Seriously. I know I ask this often but, ‘where the fuck’s my flying car?’ Instead we can invent packaging for meat that is so strongly glued together that I’m beginning to suspect it’s held together with the same stuff they use to glue the wings on Jumbo Jets or put McLaren’s together. MTM rolls eyes. I spent five minutes releasing a rib eye stake from it’s plastic carbonite, yesterday. It was so bad I made a film of my attempt to release the second one. You can enjoy that, if you’re so inclined, by clicking on the thing below. Most of you already have I think.

Publishing Industry news: the storm in a teacup award goes to …

This week one of the big boys of the indie book industry, Mark Dawson, has caused a stir by allegedly gaming the bestseller list. I signed up for his Facebook Ads course back in 2014 … or possibly 2015, I think I was in the second or third round of students anyway. I liked his dry sense of humour and he had a different approach. Didn’t seem to be bothered by the trappings, which made this whole incident come as a bit of a surprise to me.  That said, it could equally have been a case of curiosity more than anything. He is always trying new stuff.

The story is, he did a UK only hardback edition for one of his books and his readers in the states wanted it. He realised there was an opportunity to experiment and bought the books from one of the shops where sales count towards bestseller status. He needed 400 books and it got him into the top 10. This it didn’t go down well. He has since had the ‘ranking’ removed but only on the grounds that the books were for sale to people abroad. And people have done this before and the listing stood but was marked with a dagger, which would suggest this sort of stuff goes on and is viewed by the establishment with ambivalence.

What surprised me was not so much that he did it, I mean, a lot of people do. Brian Epstein went round all the chart shops buying Love Me Do to get it into the charts. What surprised me was that a) anyone cared and b) that Mark Dawson gave a hoot about bestsellerdom since he’s incredibly successful in his own right. Did he really need that stamp of approval? Personally I avoid bestsellers, if something hits the bestseller lists, it’s odds on I won’t enjoy it, you know, like the film Titanic, which was utterly shit and made worse by the fact the ending wasn’t even going to be a surprise.

He does seem to have recovered his sense of humour over it though. After a jokey facebook post, by another author wondering if he could get into the top 25 by buying some of his books and sending them overseas, I was amused to discover that Mark’s reply was, apparently, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’

To read the article that kicked it all off, click here

Do bestseller lists mean anything?

You know what, from my own personal point of view, I genuinely think the answer to that is no. Then again, that may just be me. The whole NYT bestseller or Times Bestseller thing strikes me as a load of piss and wind. I wouldn’t game them like that, and I wouldn’t say no to the label but … am I That bovvered? Ner.

As a dyed in the wool indie music lover, I don’t discount chart bands out of hand, some are great but the chart is not the place I turn to automatically. With books it’s pretty much the same. If you read all sorts of books you’re not necessarily going to be searching the best seller list for new reads. Then again if it finds new fans, I suppose it’s a thing and I should take some notice. Can’t be arsed though. One of my crimes is enjoying mashed genres, especially when they can’t help themselves. The fact that thrillers about real science are beginning to wander into the sci-fi zone is not just brilliant, it’s a whole blog post on its own.

Thinking about this writing gig, though, the big thing is still to share the story. It’s something I am completely driven to do. The title of this blog is the truth as well as a joke. I am an authorholic and it is like a bad crack habit. So earning enough money to not have to do anything else is my real aim I guess. I would be over the moon with say £20k per annum. That would be nice. If I work it out I probably earn about three pence per hour for my creative endeavours. But I keep hoping that if I carry on publishing books, eventually there will be enough cash coming in to draw a salary. Pretty much all the books I sell are the result of my own personal attempts at marketing. Also, the more books there are, in theory, the more people will read because there will be a wider choice, more books different series … win win.

But do I want to be a big hitter, mover and shaker? Nah, not really. Too much like hard work. Even so, the aim is lots of mailing list sign and giving people free books … MTM hobbles on stage in black child catcher outfit with a sack barrow full of books. ‘Try my K’Barthan crack people. Yesssssss. Soon you will be hooked and you will be mine all mine! Mwahahahargh!’ Etc.

A while back, you could do keywords to make your books more visible and I know Amazon used to recommend them to people (case in point Gareth). However, I doubt keywords work that well anymore or that sites like Amazon recommend books the way they used to. As I understand it, those spaces are given to trad, or in the case of Amazon, you now pay for them. As a result, because I still sell more books there than anywhere else, they’re kind of on the back burner as I would like to grow sales elsewhere. And also when I do free runs on other sites, Amazon often price matches so I get readers there that way.

Likewise, I’m not sure that anyone just happens upon my books anymore, except during a free run – but obvs, you have to limit those or they lose their effectiveness. The telling thing, for me, is other authors talking about how many folks have signed up to their mailing through the back of books. In my case, it’s hardly anyone, but judging from the feedback I get, this is not because my books, or list, is unpopular. I suspect it’s simply that most people who read my books are already on my mailing list. Which is good because it does, at least, mean that my efforts at marketing in that direction are reasonably effective.

Events! Woot.

Next week, I am hoping to do a podcast which should be fun. I’m going to be doing the, Biblio Files podcast with Bonnie K.T. Dillabough. The topic we will be discussing is jemmying writing into the kind of life where there isn’t really room! So if you’re interested that’s on Tuesday 4th August at 6pm British Summer Time, I think. Or possibly 5.00 … I’m going to be on standby from then because I don’t know if British Standard Time means British Summer Time or Greenwich Mean Time because I’m so smart.

Feel free to join me a week on Tuesday, or if you’d like to see some of the other podcasts you can find them here

It’s quite new but there are some interesting things discussed. I particularly liked the one about the process of cover design.

Today! At Home Yalc!

Yep, this afternoon, Saturday 25th, at about the time I publish this post – 1.00pm GB time – an author of Young Adult books, Rachel Churcher, is putting on an on line version of the Young Adult Literary Convention. Mainly because the real live one is cancelled. This is basically a whole bunch of authors posting readings back to back. There are giveaways and all sorts of other smashing stuff. The authors are all using twitter and making live broadcasts so if you want to have a look, you can find all the details here.

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Also, if that little lot isn’t enough to get your teeth into, starting on American Sunday – so that’s about 1 o’clock our time and sometime in the evening for my readers in Oceania. I am giving the first in series of the shorts away for zero pence. Hamgeean Misfit number one is going to be free from 27th July until 17th August.

If you are interested you can find more information on this page here.

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