Clive S. Johnson's Blog
May 19, 2013
.
1 A Loss Foreseen
Falmeard sat at the kitchen table, mug of tea in hand, and tried hard to remember. Doing so had become more of a problem of late, not helped by a thump that shook the joists above his head, lifting his eyes from his brew.
Another thump, as a second bed-warmed foot stamped into its night-chilled boot, and then came silence - a short while for laces to be tied. It released Falmeard’s eyes, to sink back to his fast cooling drink.
Chores now clearly put in hand, boot-shod feet stomped their way across the floor above, bursting forth to flood the stairwell with a fast descending clatter. Falmeard’s gaze swept across the table’s bleached-white boards, to the bustling form that then so briefly filled the door.
“Morning Falmeard!” Grog boomed, as he burst in to fill the kitchen. “Where’s Sis, then? She amilking?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m doin’ t’Ten Acre today. Any tea in t’pot?”
Falmeard stood, the legs of his chair scraping back against ancient stone flags, flags whose slate grey lustre had long been worn to a wood-stained groove. By the time he reached the stove, however - even before his hand had touched the old, stained-black kettle - Grog had reached the yard, his carrying voice shouldering its way back through the thick, oak door now swinging to.
“Ah’ll get t’phlogran sorted then, while you do that. Any naphtha in t’tank?” Falmeard still didn’t answer, knew full well there’d be no need, knew Grog would soon clomp his way across the yard to see.
An easy and brief task, the kettle now hung above the coals. It left Falmeard in despair, though, at the loss of yet more memories to such a short aside. He stood before the stove, and there tried hard to bring to mind a favoured view across Whitsand Bay.
What good was it being a Master of Time - as his old friend Nephril had called him - if you couldn’t even remember your own previous life? What purpose, if Rame Head’s finger no longer pointed across your plain recall at the Eddystone Light? Falmeard knew it was there, though - or had been, perhaps some long time ago.
He could still clearly see its shape, that of a maiden promontory, one to lie full-breasted below an ancient chapel teat. It saddened him now to think how its feminine outline had so long since deserted his inner eye.
The phlogran’s mechanical chirruping soon brought him back, its noise filling the yard as it spilled from the barn. The sound almost seemed to giggle its way through the gaps between the boards of the farmhouse door. It sang and it trilled, insistently, in short, sharp bursts, until settling to an infant’s innocent burble.
It made way for the clucking of hens, flapping wings barely softening their falling escape, as they fled the barn to litter the yard. A brief respite at best.
Grog appeared, atop the darting phlogran, and chased through the yard - scattering the birds yet further still. Finally, he jerked to a halt before the door.
In the time it took him to sweep in - a short time indeed - Falmeard had already come to a decision. He’d vouched that this time he’d not let this realm of Dica elbow aside his own true world, wouldn’t let his passage through time so completely rob him of his once true self.
“But how?” he asked himself, only to bring Grog to a rare halt, hand still on the doorknob as confusion filled his face.
“How do I make sure, Grog? How do I make sure I can always remember what time’s slippage says I must not?” But Grog’s bafflement, quite unusually, kept him rooted to the spot.
1 A Loss Foreseen
Falmeard sat at the kitchen table, mug of tea in hand, and tried hard to remember. Doing so had become more of a problem of late, not helped by a thump that shook the joists above his head, lifting his eyes from his brew.
Another thump, as a second bed-warmed foot stamped into its night-chilled boot, and then came silence - a short while for laces to be tied. It released Falmeard’s eyes, to sink back to his fast cooling drink.
Chores now clearly put in hand, boot-shod feet stomped their way across the floor above, bursting forth to flood the stairwell with a fast descending clatter. Falmeard’s gaze swept across the table’s bleached-white boards, to the bustling form that then so briefly filled the door.
“Morning Falmeard!” Grog boomed, as he burst in to fill the kitchen. “Where’s Sis, then? She amilking?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m doin’ t’Ten Acre today. Any tea in t’pot?”
Falmeard stood, the legs of his chair scraping back against ancient stone flags, flags whose slate grey lustre had long been worn to a wood-stained groove. By the time he reached the stove, however - even before his hand had touched the old, stained-black kettle - Grog had reached the yard, his carrying voice shouldering its way back through the thick, oak door now swinging to.
“Ah’ll get t’phlogran sorted then, while you do that. Any naphtha in t’tank?” Falmeard still didn’t answer, knew full well there’d be no need, knew Grog would soon clomp his way across the yard to see.
An easy and brief task, the kettle now hung above the coals. It left Falmeard in despair, though, at the loss of yet more memories to such a short aside. He stood before the stove, and there tried hard to bring to mind a favoured view across Whitsand Bay.
What good was it being a Master of Time - as his old friend Nephril had called him - if you couldn’t even remember your own previous life? What purpose, if Rame Head’s finger no longer pointed across your plain recall at the Eddystone Light? Falmeard knew it was there, though - or had been, perhaps some long time ago.
He could still clearly see its shape, that of a maiden promontory, one to lie full-breasted below an ancient chapel teat. It saddened him now to think how its feminine outline had so long since deserted his inner eye.
The phlogran’s mechanical chirruping soon brought him back, its noise filling the yard as it spilled from the barn. The sound almost seemed to giggle its way through the gaps between the boards of the farmhouse door. It sang and it trilled, insistently, in short, sharp bursts, until settling to an infant’s innocent burble.
It made way for the clucking of hens, flapping wings barely softening their falling escape, as they fled the barn to litter the yard. A brief respite at best.
Grog appeared, atop the darting phlogran, and chased through the yard - scattering the birds yet further still. Finally, he jerked to a halt before the door.
In the time it took him to sweep in - a short time indeed - Falmeard had already come to a decision. He’d vouched that this time he’d not let this realm of Dica elbow aside his own true world, wouldn’t let his passage through time so completely rob him of his once true self.
“But how?” he asked himself, only to bring Grog to a rare halt, hand still on the doorknob as confusion filled his face.
“How do I make sure, Grog? How do I make sure I can always remember what time’s slippage says I must not?” But Grog’s bafflement, quite unusually, kept him rooted to the spot.
May 11, 2013
A Sci-Fi, Mystery Romance with a Fantasy feel.
~ A tale that can be read without knowing the Dica Series, but can also be seen as part of it. Treat it as a taster, the choice is yours. ~
Death is carried abroad
In cold angel days,
Chasing aloft dawn’s ire
As dusk’s inky choir
The ancient engers knew it as a theoretical entity, one so remotely implausible that the idea only survived in an obscure verse. How could an ages-old poem give rise to the reality of the days of the Cold Angel, days that threaten the realm’s very future? And why does a woman’s determination to do right by her sister put her at the heart of a mystery, one that threatens to destroy the only love that sister has ever known?
Someone’s lost memories lead her to a strange meeting with a man in an even stranger tower, one that pricked star holes in the sky until but a few days before. What of it now, though, and its keeper’s determination to put things right at all costs? How is she to deal with the painful dilemma he draws her towards - when she’s asked to weigh the love of her sister against a duty to save the realm?
Currently due for publication sometime late June. If you'd like to be emailed when it's available, just click here and press the 'Let me know...' button.
You can also get a taster by clicking here, and reading chapter 1 - A Loss Foreseen.
******** COMPETITION - FREE PREVIEW COPY ********
If you’d like a FREE preview copy - sent to you by email before publication - then all you need do is have a look at the verse above, and work out what it is about it that relates to the Dica series. When you see it, it’ll be obvious, and you don't need to have read any of my books to solve this riddle.
Then you just need to go to the Cold Angel Days page of my website, click on the ‘Let me know...’ button and put the answer in the email it will create for you.
Just send it, and the first 10 correct replies will receive their FREE copy before publication. So, you should get it sometime towards the end of May.
May 6, 2013
You know, I feel like the trees I can see from my window, as I write this. It's May! I know it, you know it, but nobody appears to have told our climate, or the wildlife that takes its cues from it.
May the 6th, and the leaf buds are fast unfurling in an attempt to catch up. Some seem not to have bothered! We have a Flowering Cherry at the back, from which only about half the blossom has bothered to come out, and only in the past day or so. To me it looks like it’s dipping its toe in Spring’s sparse water, only to find it too chill.
I feel like them not so much because I’m climatically confused - nay, nor even simply flummoxed as a result of my age - for my life isn’t as clearly linked to the cycles of light, temperature and lack of rainfall. Mine’s more to do with my own literary compulsion. So, it’s my fault, clearly. Nothing to lay at the door of profligate human exploitation of sequestered carbon.
This morning I finished writing Cold Angel Days, and I seemed - like our trees - to have been caught short by how far the year’s progressed. There’s still a fair bit of editing to be done - isn’t there always - but the bulk of the work has been canned (to mix a metaphor).
Some of you may be aware that I changed my writing process for this book, and so have arrived at this point with a work that’s already largely edited. There’s still plenty to do, but the wordsmith aspects should be a minor issue. You can judge for yourself, for I’ve made the first chapter available on my website. If you fancy a looksee, then pop along to my Latest State page.
Between you and me, though, I’m actually bloody pleased with it. My highly critical editor has been very complimentary, and even reckons I might one day become a proper author - we’ll see. Many of the things I have left to check are to do with the rather foolish challenge I set myself in its writing. You see, I was intent on producing a standalone volume this time, something that can be read in isolation. Read as a damned good story, you understand, but one that makes complete sense in its own right.
Well, isn’t that what most books are, you cynically cry? True, but I also wanted it to be a natural progression for those who’ve followed my Dica Series. Tall order, everyone said, so that sealed the challenge.
The upshot should be a book that can be read separately from the Dica Series, but without spoiling it - so you could move on to the series if you fancied. On the other hand, those who’ve read all three current volumes in the series will find Cold Angel Days a worthy fourth volume, adding substantially to a world they already know and enjoy, and it seems hugely love.
Time will tell, as in all these things, but my new book looks extremely promising. I also feel I’ve matured enough as a writer to say, with all honestly, that it’s my best work to date. OK, yeah, I know, most writers do improve with each book, but this one came from fingers that flowed with ease, so it’s already found a special place in my heart.
Speaking of which, it’s also a Romance. The same Science Fiction foundation upon which the familiar Dican Fantasy world is maintained, of course, but with a rather more touching story. It’s also a tale about the strength of a woman, an everyday Dican who finds herself drawn into extraordinary events. If you’ve read Last True World, then you may be interested to note that Cold Angel Days is a similarly faster paced story, but with a far less complex plot. A story of everyday folk in an everyday world removed from our own.
It is, though, still very much a Mystery, so I can’t tell you too much more. We’ve yet to put together a synopsis, so there may be things added yet in that. Until publication, I’ll add anything extra here, and of course on my dedicated website page given above.
I hope Cold Angel Days tempts you into reading it, and more so that you enjoy doing so - certainly as much as I enjoyed the writing, at the very least. Let’s hope we’re all enjoying less extraordinary weather by then, and that the world comes into bloom for us all.
May the 6th, and the leaf buds are fast unfurling in an attempt to catch up. Some seem not to have bothered! We have a Flowering Cherry at the back, from which only about half the blossom has bothered to come out, and only in the past day or so. To me it looks like it’s dipping its toe in Spring’s sparse water, only to find it too chill.
I feel like them not so much because I’m climatically confused - nay, nor even simply flummoxed as a result of my age - for my life isn’t as clearly linked to the cycles of light, temperature and lack of rainfall. Mine’s more to do with my own literary compulsion. So, it’s my fault, clearly. Nothing to lay at the door of profligate human exploitation of sequestered carbon.
This morning I finished writing Cold Angel Days, and I seemed - like our trees - to have been caught short by how far the year’s progressed. There’s still a fair bit of editing to be done - isn’t there always - but the bulk of the work has been canned (to mix a metaphor).
Some of you may be aware that I changed my writing process for this book, and so have arrived at this point with a work that’s already largely edited. There’s still plenty to do, but the wordsmith aspects should be a minor issue. You can judge for yourself, for I’ve made the first chapter available on my website. If you fancy a looksee, then pop along to my Latest State page.
Between you and me, though, I’m actually bloody pleased with it. My highly critical editor has been very complimentary, and even reckons I might one day become a proper author - we’ll see. Many of the things I have left to check are to do with the rather foolish challenge I set myself in its writing. You see, I was intent on producing a standalone volume this time, something that can be read in isolation. Read as a damned good story, you understand, but one that makes complete sense in its own right.
Well, isn’t that what most books are, you cynically cry? True, but I also wanted it to be a natural progression for those who’ve followed my Dica Series. Tall order, everyone said, so that sealed the challenge.
The upshot should be a book that can be read separately from the Dica Series, but without spoiling it - so you could move on to the series if you fancied. On the other hand, those who’ve read all three current volumes in the series will find Cold Angel Days a worthy fourth volume, adding substantially to a world they already know and enjoy, and it seems hugely love.
Time will tell, as in all these things, but my new book looks extremely promising. I also feel I’ve matured enough as a writer to say, with all honestly, that it’s my best work to date. OK, yeah, I know, most writers do improve with each book, but this one came from fingers that flowed with ease, so it’s already found a special place in my heart.
Speaking of which, it’s also a Romance. The same Science Fiction foundation upon which the familiar Dican Fantasy world is maintained, of course, but with a rather more touching story. It’s also a tale about the strength of a woman, an everyday Dican who finds herself drawn into extraordinary events. If you’ve read Last True World, then you may be interested to note that Cold Angel Days is a similarly faster paced story, but with a far less complex plot. A story of everyday folk in an everyday world removed from our own.
It is, though, still very much a Mystery, so I can’t tell you too much more. We’ve yet to put together a synopsis, so there may be things added yet in that. Until publication, I’ll add anything extra here, and of course on my dedicated website page given above.
I hope Cold Angel Days tempts you into reading it, and more so that you enjoy doing so - certainly as much as I enjoyed the writing, at the very least. Let’s hope we’re all enjoying less extraordinary weather by then, and that the world comes into bloom for us all.
March 23, 2013
Ever wondered what the real meaning of life is, and where destiny is taking it?
THE DICA SERIES
Far more than meets the eye, but have you got the eye to see it? And if so, have you the courage to believe what science tells us is the simple truth?
Where and what is the Realm of Dica, and why the mechanicking embrace of Leiyatel, what's woven as weft and weave through the realm's very fabric and why does it turn out to be the last of all true worlds?
The Dica Series, where mystery unravels to reveal Life's sole meaning - Dare YOU read it?
THE DICA SERIES
Far more than meets the eye, but have you got the eye to see it? And if so, have you the courage to believe what science tells us is the simple truth?
Where and what is the Realm of Dica, and why the mechanicking embrace of Leiyatel, what's woven as weft and weave through the realm's very fabric and why does it turn out to be the last of all true worlds?
The Dica Series, where mystery unravels to reveal Life's sole meaning - Dare YOU read it?
February 5, 2013
You may remember - in my previous blog post, ‘An Honest Answer’ - how I bemoaned the seeming lack of a creditable arbiter of indie book quality. It’s clear that the market is fast becoming drowned in widely differing standards of ‘wordmanship’, if you’ll excuse my coining a new word. There are many wonderful, high quality and immensely enjoyable indie works out there, but they’re largely swamped by the unappealing or downright unreadable.
It’s a real shame that however good those works, the sheer volume of competition simply obscures them. It’s like trying to spot the few gold grains amongst the beach’s sand. ‘Quality will always out’ has never been true, and even less so these days. Even ‘quality’, if starved of the light of attention, will eventually wither and die.
It was fortunate that I brought it up, for Terry Tyler - bless her highly attractive cotton socks - pointed me in the direction of an initiative of which I’d previously been ignorant. Now, Terry’s a straight-talking, no-nonsense, breath of fresh air - I’m sure she won’t mind me saying - and so, for me, her recommendation carried a great deal of weight. What I then discovered, when I investigated, I believe did indeed bear out her words.
Now! Here comes the plug - but not one for anything commercial, or packed with messianic zeal or promising eternal life. No! This is a plug largely aimed at the increasingly disappointed reader, the fast growing numbers of the disenfranchised, all now becoming deafened by indies shouting out their wares. It’s for those, I’m saddened to note, who are now retreating to the old familiar publishing establishments.
To those valuable readers I say, go and have a look around the listings of books held on the Awesome Indies website, where Tahlia Newland has gathered together highly qualified publishing professionals to review submissions from independent authors. She’s clearly created a creditable arbiter of indie literary quality. The reviews are as objective, demanding and unbiased as can humanly be achieved, aimed at providing readers with an honest rating of a book’s crafted quality.
I’ll take the liberty of quoting from the site, so you can see just what is being assessed and scored:
■ the plot is well structured, well-paced, conceptually sound and engaging.
■ the characters are well developed and their dialogue and interactions with others are believable.
■ the book is not excessively wordy, particularly, no rambling descriptions, dumps of information, unnecessary repetition or irrelevant scenes.
■ changes in the point of view of the writing are clear, specifically no confusing quick jumps from the thoughts of one character to another and back again, (head-hopping).
■ the writing is immediate and engaging. This means that the story is generally shown rather than told, and the writing is active rather than passive, e.g. doesn’t overuse forms of the verb, ‘to be’.
■ the grammar, spelling and punctuation are correct for the author’s country of origin.
In the ‘old days’ you could go into any bookshop and take down a random volume from the shelves, and there find a work that adhered fairly closely to the above list of requirements. It meant that you were left only with having to decide on style, genre and perhaps length. Currently, that reassurance doesn’t exist for indie works, and so discovering enjoyable new authors is so hit and miss that many give up, and even more never get started.
The Awesome Indie Listings promise to bring readers back into that old bookshop ethic, but a bookshop dedicated to indie authors alone.
Now, it all sounds dead straightforward and wonderful, doesn’t it? Hang on, though, this is the real world. In the real world things are never that simple. Yes, it’s good news for readers, but then there are ramifications for the author.
Over the past couple of years there has grown up an almost unprecedented, apparent brotherhood of writers, a level of cooperation inconceivable in the old traditional publishing days. Magnanimity, generosity and teamwork have all typified the war-cries of many indie authors, each gaining their own benefit amidst the common good.
The problem I’ve seen with this seemingly laudable pursuit is the one that touches on review objectivity, mass ‘Like’ parties, and all the other unintended devaluations of the only mechanism that has ever worked, or ever will - competition.
Instinctively, I hate that word as much as many a next man or woman - but my dislike doesn’t make it any the more invalid. Competition - however carefully it may be dressed up as other things - is always at the heart of everything we do. My dislike of it just means that my blindness has stopped me becoming a captain of industry, or a leading movie actor, or whatever else you see as the pinnacle of a chosen endeavour.
Although I deny being competitive, I am undeniably so - like everyone else. Maybe with me, my natural lack of its acceptance is to do with fear, the fear of failure in all likelihood, or some such psycho-babble. I’d love everyone to succeed, and all life forms to experience long, happy and fulfilling lives, but I know it can’t be. It can’t be because we all want the best, usually and quite naturally for ourselves and loved ones in the first instance. I don’t want just any old pint of beer, or any car, or holiday, or book to read, I want the very best I can get. That’s me imposing competition, whether I like it or not.
In the case of the indie author, there’s competition because there’s a very finite market of readers and an even smaller finite number of ways to connect with them. Each reader also has a very finite amount of time in which to read. The end result, however much we’d love to bemoan it, is a highly competitive industry - one of the most competitive.
So, coming back to the Awesome Indies Site: How, as someone disinclined to the competition ethic, could I square being enthused by an endeavour whose purpose is to arbitrate such competition? It had the smack of elitism! And this, my friends, is what has occupied my thoughts these past few days, since Leiyatel’s Embrace qualified to enter its Science Fiction Listing.
There’s something else about the ethos of Awesome Indies that I’ve yet to mention, an aspect that I didn’t immediately recognise myself, but one that embodies the solution to my disquiet. Where an author’s submission doesn’t meet the criteria for acceptance, constructive criticism is offered with a genuine eye to helping that author improve their skills, so they may eventually become acceptable - or at least produce work that more people will want to read.
Yes, it is a competitive process, as we can’t and shouldn’t really try to avoid, but it has within it those very laudable indie aims of mutual support, fellowship and shared values. The very aims that have, in their currently unmanaged form, led to the present chaotic and collapsing indie market.
I am a child of the sixties, an aging hippy perhaps, but not too old to learn a new lesson, to see some ultimate good in a competitive market. The Awesome Indie initiative is the best prospect I’ve yet come across for adding some sensible management to what will otherwise careen on as a disintegrating indie movement, one where we will all, irrespective of worth, wither in the eventual desert.
The traditional publishing industry must be rubbing their collective hands in relieved joy, watching the indie lemmings swarm towards the cliff edge, the one unthinkingly created by the likes of Amazon, Smashwords and Barnes and Noble. Don’t give them that joy. Think about what you do in promoting your own work, and those of other indie authors. Think what the longer term impacts are likely to be.
Get smart! Recognise the importance of quality, and support the efforts of those genuinely striving to make a land of gold and honey, where everyone has the chance to thrive. But don’t forget, get real, it is a competition - with winners and losers; so you’ll have to work hard, work smart and for long hours to stand a real chance, but at least this way there is a chance.
Visit the Awesome Indies website, and make up your own mind. See what it offers you. For the reader it’s a no-brainer, but the massive benefits are there for the taking for any indie author who’s serious about their work, who knows that writing is a skill continuously learnt, one that’s never really ever perfected.
I became so convinced that I offered my own services, and was pleasantly surprised when I was asked to become one of the Awesome Indie reviewers. It’s my own way of trying to help other indie authors, whilst at the same time improving the product for our valued readers’ enjoyment. Without satisfied readers, don’t forget - and a lot of them - there just won’t be any indie authors left, and that would be a crying shame, to say the very least.
It’s a real shame that however good those works, the sheer volume of competition simply obscures them. It’s like trying to spot the few gold grains amongst the beach’s sand. ‘Quality will always out’ has never been true, and even less so these days. Even ‘quality’, if starved of the light of attention, will eventually wither and die.
It was fortunate that I brought it up, for Terry Tyler - bless her highly attractive cotton socks - pointed me in the direction of an initiative of which I’d previously been ignorant. Now, Terry’s a straight-talking, no-nonsense, breath of fresh air - I’m sure she won’t mind me saying - and so, for me, her recommendation carried a great deal of weight. What I then discovered, when I investigated, I believe did indeed bear out her words.
Now! Here comes the plug - but not one for anything commercial, or packed with messianic zeal or promising eternal life. No! This is a plug largely aimed at the increasingly disappointed reader, the fast growing numbers of the disenfranchised, all now becoming deafened by indies shouting out their wares. It’s for those, I’m saddened to note, who are now retreating to the old familiar publishing establishments.
To those valuable readers I say, go and have a look around the listings of books held on the Awesome Indies website, where Tahlia Newland has gathered together highly qualified publishing professionals to review submissions from independent authors. She’s clearly created a creditable arbiter of indie literary quality. The reviews are as objective, demanding and unbiased as can humanly be achieved, aimed at providing readers with an honest rating of a book’s crafted quality.
I’ll take the liberty of quoting from the site, so you can see just what is being assessed and scored:
■ the plot is well structured, well-paced, conceptually sound and engaging.
■ the characters are well developed and their dialogue and interactions with others are believable.
■ the book is not excessively wordy, particularly, no rambling descriptions, dumps of information, unnecessary repetition or irrelevant scenes.
■ changes in the point of view of the writing are clear, specifically no confusing quick jumps from the thoughts of one character to another and back again, (head-hopping).
■ the writing is immediate and engaging. This means that the story is generally shown rather than told, and the writing is active rather than passive, e.g. doesn’t overuse forms of the verb, ‘to be’.
■ the grammar, spelling and punctuation are correct for the author’s country of origin.
In the ‘old days’ you could go into any bookshop and take down a random volume from the shelves, and there find a work that adhered fairly closely to the above list of requirements. It meant that you were left only with having to decide on style, genre and perhaps length. Currently, that reassurance doesn’t exist for indie works, and so discovering enjoyable new authors is so hit and miss that many give up, and even more never get started.
The Awesome Indie Listings promise to bring readers back into that old bookshop ethic, but a bookshop dedicated to indie authors alone.
Now, it all sounds dead straightforward and wonderful, doesn’t it? Hang on, though, this is the real world. In the real world things are never that simple. Yes, it’s good news for readers, but then there are ramifications for the author.
Over the past couple of years there has grown up an almost unprecedented, apparent brotherhood of writers, a level of cooperation inconceivable in the old traditional publishing days. Magnanimity, generosity and teamwork have all typified the war-cries of many indie authors, each gaining their own benefit amidst the common good.
The problem I’ve seen with this seemingly laudable pursuit is the one that touches on review objectivity, mass ‘Like’ parties, and all the other unintended devaluations of the only mechanism that has ever worked, or ever will - competition.
Instinctively, I hate that word as much as many a next man or woman - but my dislike doesn’t make it any the more invalid. Competition - however carefully it may be dressed up as other things - is always at the heart of everything we do. My dislike of it just means that my blindness has stopped me becoming a captain of industry, or a leading movie actor, or whatever else you see as the pinnacle of a chosen endeavour.
Although I deny being competitive, I am undeniably so - like everyone else. Maybe with me, my natural lack of its acceptance is to do with fear, the fear of failure in all likelihood, or some such psycho-babble. I’d love everyone to succeed, and all life forms to experience long, happy and fulfilling lives, but I know it can’t be. It can’t be because we all want the best, usually and quite naturally for ourselves and loved ones in the first instance. I don’t want just any old pint of beer, or any car, or holiday, or book to read, I want the very best I can get. That’s me imposing competition, whether I like it or not.
In the case of the indie author, there’s competition because there’s a very finite market of readers and an even smaller finite number of ways to connect with them. Each reader also has a very finite amount of time in which to read. The end result, however much we’d love to bemoan it, is a highly competitive industry - one of the most competitive.
So, coming back to the Awesome Indies Site: How, as someone disinclined to the competition ethic, could I square being enthused by an endeavour whose purpose is to arbitrate such competition? It had the smack of elitism! And this, my friends, is what has occupied my thoughts these past few days, since Leiyatel’s Embrace qualified to enter its Science Fiction Listing.
There’s something else about the ethos of Awesome Indies that I’ve yet to mention, an aspect that I didn’t immediately recognise myself, but one that embodies the solution to my disquiet. Where an author’s submission doesn’t meet the criteria for acceptance, constructive criticism is offered with a genuine eye to helping that author improve their skills, so they may eventually become acceptable - or at least produce work that more people will want to read.
Yes, it is a competitive process, as we can’t and shouldn’t really try to avoid, but it has within it those very laudable indie aims of mutual support, fellowship and shared values. The very aims that have, in their currently unmanaged form, led to the present chaotic and collapsing indie market.
I am a child of the sixties, an aging hippy perhaps, but not too old to learn a new lesson, to see some ultimate good in a competitive market. The Awesome Indie initiative is the best prospect I’ve yet come across for adding some sensible management to what will otherwise careen on as a disintegrating indie movement, one where we will all, irrespective of worth, wither in the eventual desert.
The traditional publishing industry must be rubbing their collective hands in relieved joy, watching the indie lemmings swarm towards the cliff edge, the one unthinkingly created by the likes of Amazon, Smashwords and Barnes and Noble. Don’t give them that joy. Think about what you do in promoting your own work, and those of other indie authors. Think what the longer term impacts are likely to be.
Get smart! Recognise the importance of quality, and support the efforts of those genuinely striving to make a land of gold and honey, where everyone has the chance to thrive. But don’t forget, get real, it is a competition - with winners and losers; so you’ll have to work hard, work smart and for long hours to stand a real chance, but at least this way there is a chance.
Visit the Awesome Indies website, and make up your own mind. See what it offers you. For the reader it’s a no-brainer, but the massive benefits are there for the taking for any indie author who’s serious about their work, who knows that writing is a skill continuously learnt, one that’s never really ever perfected.
I became so convinced that I offered my own services, and was pleasantly surprised when I was asked to become one of the Awesome Indie reviewers. It’s my own way of trying to help other indie authors, whilst at the same time improving the product for our valued readers’ enjoyment. Without satisfied readers, don’t forget - and a lot of them - there just won’t be any indie authors left, and that would be a crying shame, to say the very least.
January 25, 2013
Guess what? He he! Yep, I've started the next volume of the Dica Series. The first chapter's already in the can - well, in the Word format file, actually.
I'm not going to clog up this blog with stuff about my writing, not directly anyway, and so you can follow this latest volume's progress on my web site's 'Latest' page: The Dica Series - Latest News
Don't forget that high resolution maps for each book can also be found on the site - from those books' own pages. Just click on the appropriate 'Map' button at the bottom of the page. Even in the paperback version, the maps aren't quite as clear as those on the site, so they're well worth downloading (right-click and select 'Save picture as').
I'm not going to clog up this blog with stuff about my writing, not directly anyway, and so you can follow this latest volume's progress on my web site's 'Latest' page: The Dica Series - Latest News
Don't forget that high resolution maps for each book can also be found on the site - from those books' own pages. Just click on the appropriate 'Map' button at the bottom of the page. Even in the paperback version, the maps aren't quite as clear as those on the site, so they're well worth downloading (right-click and select 'Save picture as').
January 19, 2013
A few people have asked what brought me to my decision to withdraw from promoting my books. I don’t know what they expected my answer to be, but I suspect there’ll be something in there that they’ll recognise, to some degree or other, whoever they be - whether author or reader. Each time I’ve been asked I’ve had to think, and each time I’ve come to a different conclusion. So, I thought, I need to put my answer in writing, for the very act of writing does seem to get everything so clear in the mind.
Firstly, a little history: You may already know that Leiyatel’s Embrace started off life some thirty years ago, back in my youth, when one’s time always seems so infinite. It was genuinely nothing more than my need then to capture a world that my mind had for some reason conjured up. It was a very real world, a very immediate and close knowing, as of somewhere I’d recently been but then largely forgotten.
At first I drew and painted that world, for I’m a natural artist - no big shakes, it’s just the way I am - but I always found the images far too constrained. However much ‘magic’ you can mix into pigment, however much subtlety of stroke, the result is always a moment in time, at best an intimation of a past and possible future. I soon realised - more by gut feel than intellectual rigour - that in order to capture my imagined world, I would need spend the rest of my life drawing and painting.
Of course, I knew exactly where other such worlds already existed, ones of the conjuring of other’s minds. It struck me how those worlds so readily embodied the fullness of time, the panoply of feelings, the wealth of mood and character, and of weather and season, that I’d tried so hard to get into my artwork. Those worlds achieved that seemingly impossible task through the simple medium of the written word.
I am not, unfortunately, a natural wordsmith. I wasn’t born with the right wiring to achieve beauty and power, and graphic expression through words alone. So, my fevered, youthful attempt to capture my imagined world achieved little more than an inept record of place and story. It lacked so much, from the rudiments of grammar to the soaring passions of prose, that it was plainly destined for nowhere better than a cardboard box in a cold and dusty loft.
In the time it spent yellowing, I steadily ploughed my way through all manner of books, in all kinds of genre, and through it absorbed a lot about the engineering of the written word. I also learnt a lot about our supposed real world, the various forms of life that inhabit it, and much of the truths that all life - by virtue of its very existence - is normally made blind to.
When the manuscript was finally unearthed, I was mere moments from throwing it away - but something made me hesitate. It was very likely only nostalgia, but that dry, crinkly and dusty sheaf of foolscap brought so many memories flooding back. To cut a long story short, I vowed to rewrite it. I vowed to rewrite it for two very simple reasons: Firstly, I hate loose ends, and secondly something from deep within this supposed real world raked the very hairs at the nape of my neck.
I’m not going to try to rationalise this, nor expect you necessarily to believe me, but the story long hidden within that manuscript, behind the clumsy and amateurish words, breathed hot breath in my face, and beat its warm heart in my hand. Had I thrown it away, it would have haunted me.
My vow had been to bring the manuscript to fruition as a tangible volume, and that’s exactly what I did. In the process I learnt much about the demanding skills of a wordsmith, so much so that had I known then what I know now, I’d no doubt never have continued. Sometimes the fool be the victor, where the wise fear to tread.
The volume you see above was an early imprint, one I made myself - and I mean made, with my own fair hands. It was paginated in Microsoft Word, printed out on an inkjet printer from my home PC, and then perfect bound and guillotined by hand - in my shed. The cover lettering is Letraset!
So, job done! Story told and recorded - loose end tied off. Or so I thought. I’d forgotten the hot breath and beating heart.
I just happen to have a friend who is a keen Fantasy reader, who - like almost everyone these days - is currently writing her own books. She was interested enough to read this early version, and despite its numerous faults found it a good read. To say the least, I was gobsmacked, but it was her casual mention of self-publishing that actually started me on the long, slippery slope - it wasn’t your fault, Gill, I should have known better - I am, after all, old enough!
Whoever writes whatever they do write, they always want someone else to read it. That rule is written in clay tablets - but with loads of small print you just can’t quite read. At one time you had the hurdle of finding an agent, then a publisher and then a market - enough of a hurdle to put 99.9% of potential authors out of the running. It was largely nothing to do with merit, but a whole raft of other more commercial considerations.
Leiyatel’s Embrace came at just the right time to take advantage of two hurdle-leaping innovations. Before I knew it, the book was available from Smashwords and Amazon. It left, though, that final un-leapt hurdle of marketing. Can you feel the taste of bile rising at the back of your throat yet? No? Then you don’t yet fully understand what marketing your book is all about, and to be fair most authors don’t - it’s not what writing’s about, after all.
Now, in my own naivety I believed the urban myth doing the rounds, that all you had to do was get yourself active on the various social media platforms and, hey presto, like magic, the world would soon beat a path to your virtual bookstore. It was quite possibly true, certainly to a far greater extent than it is now, but only for a relatively restricted gamut of genres. Even those are now beginning to feel an impact from the rapid growth in promotional noise that people are beginning to complain about, or that has already turned them away from the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
It’s not all down-side, you understand. I have met a good few genuine folk, folk it’s been a real pleasure getting to know, and who’ve help make it all fun. The point is, this is what the system was intended for - socialising, not marketing. The mechanisms available, such as the ‘Like’ tagging of posts, were intended to lift interest from the general hubbub of chatter, so that notable topics became more widely known.
The latest fevered ‘Like Parties’ - where authors exchange 'Likes' between each other - is doing nothing but make it harder for any one author to be seen. It’s just lifting the height of the parapet - so we all have to be that much taller to be seen over it. The whole point of the ‘Like’ mechanism is one of competition: The site or post with the most interest or benefit rises above its lesser competitors. All the unqualified exchange of ‘Likes’ does is whittle away at that value, until there’s nothing left at all.
When it happened I don’t know, but I suddenly found myself in something akin to a gambling frenzy, doing mad things like setting up automated tweet playlists, arranging my followers into lists according to author genre, reader types, high or low re-tweeters, etc. etc. All the anal kinds of things a hardened gambler tends to do, with the unthinking mind-sets to match. And what was it achieving? Nothing. Worse than nothing, I was losing that genuine contact with the small body of people who enjoyed reading my books, or who were likely to enjoy reading them.
I’d lost sight of the important things in life - things like; friendship, interesting conversations, mad dialogues, crazy chats and surprisingly often deep and poignant discussions. I’d sleep-walked into swapping enjoyment for chasing a book-sales dragon, with a not dissimilar narcotic effect.
And that’s the answer, my friends and followers and frenzied chasers of a fast diminishing market: I’ve gone cold-turkey.
It’s not easy. I still find myself twitching a re-tweet for someone. Done before I realise , before I remember that I shouldn’t be adding to the massive wall of promo-noise that’s already grown up around us, a wall that’s hiding us each from the other. Individual Twitter and Facebook promotions worked in the past because they didn’t have the same degree of competition. They were rarer, therefore stood out more and were easily tolerated - found useful in fact. It’s now getting a bit like watching commercial TV, but where the ratio of programming to adverts has been reversed. Not pleasant!
And to answer your next question: I don’t know! Personally, I’m going back to socialising for socialising’s sake, trying to rediscover the simple enjoyment of exchanging ideas and thoughts with others, about all manner of things. You’ll find me more on Goodreads, getting my feet under the table to chat about books, certainly, but I’ll still be on Twitter and Facebook, but I won’t be chasing the dragon.
I’ll be advertising the fact that I’ve done a review of someone’s book, or that there’s a new blog available, or that I’ve read something on someone’s site that’s of interest. I’ll be doing all these things, and more now that I’ve freed up time from carpet-bombing tweets, but they’ll all be genuine and honest endorsements. If I ‘Like’ your site, it’s because I like your site, the same with your book, or whatever else. I will certainly not be blindly exchanging recommendations for anything, and would not be happy you doing that for anything of mine. Only like my Facebook page if you actually like it for some real reason.
I know I’ve rambled on a bit, but then that’s the way with thinking things through. It was the only way I knew of to be honest with you, to bring you as near as I could to an understanding of where I’m at and why. After all, you did ask.
Firstly, a little history: You may already know that Leiyatel’s Embrace started off life some thirty years ago, back in my youth, when one’s time always seems so infinite. It was genuinely nothing more than my need then to capture a world that my mind had for some reason conjured up. It was a very real world, a very immediate and close knowing, as of somewhere I’d recently been but then largely forgotten.
At first I drew and painted that world, for I’m a natural artist - no big shakes, it’s just the way I am - but I always found the images far too constrained. However much ‘magic’ you can mix into pigment, however much subtlety of stroke, the result is always a moment in time, at best an intimation of a past and possible future. I soon realised - more by gut feel than intellectual rigour - that in order to capture my imagined world, I would need spend the rest of my life drawing and painting.
Of course, I knew exactly where other such worlds already existed, ones of the conjuring of other’s minds. It struck me how those worlds so readily embodied the fullness of time, the panoply of feelings, the wealth of mood and character, and of weather and season, that I’d tried so hard to get into my artwork. Those worlds achieved that seemingly impossible task through the simple medium of the written word.
I am not, unfortunately, a natural wordsmith. I wasn’t born with the right wiring to achieve beauty and power, and graphic expression through words alone. So, my fevered, youthful attempt to capture my imagined world achieved little more than an inept record of place and story. It lacked so much, from the rudiments of grammar to the soaring passions of prose, that it was plainly destined for nowhere better than a cardboard box in a cold and dusty loft.
In the time it spent yellowing, I steadily ploughed my way through all manner of books, in all kinds of genre, and through it absorbed a lot about the engineering of the written word. I also learnt a lot about our supposed real world, the various forms of life that inhabit it, and much of the truths that all life - by virtue of its very existence - is normally made blind to.
When the manuscript was finally unearthed, I was mere moments from throwing it away - but something made me hesitate. It was very likely only nostalgia, but that dry, crinkly and dusty sheaf of foolscap brought so many memories flooding back. To cut a long story short, I vowed to rewrite it. I vowed to rewrite it for two very simple reasons: Firstly, I hate loose ends, and secondly something from deep within this supposed real world raked the very hairs at the nape of my neck.
I’m not going to try to rationalise this, nor expect you necessarily to believe me, but the story long hidden within that manuscript, behind the clumsy and amateurish words, breathed hot breath in my face, and beat its warm heart in my hand. Had I thrown it away, it would have haunted me.
My vow had been to bring the manuscript to fruition as a tangible volume, and that’s exactly what I did. In the process I learnt much about the demanding skills of a wordsmith, so much so that had I known then what I know now, I’d no doubt never have continued. Sometimes the fool be the victor, where the wise fear to tread.
The volume you see above was an early imprint, one I made myself - and I mean made, with my own fair hands. It was paginated in Microsoft Word, printed out on an inkjet printer from my home PC, and then perfect bound and guillotined by hand - in my shed. The cover lettering is Letraset!
So, job done! Story told and recorded - loose end tied off. Or so I thought. I’d forgotten the hot breath and beating heart.
I just happen to have a friend who is a keen Fantasy reader, who - like almost everyone these days - is currently writing her own books. She was interested enough to read this early version, and despite its numerous faults found it a good read. To say the least, I was gobsmacked, but it was her casual mention of self-publishing that actually started me on the long, slippery slope - it wasn’t your fault, Gill, I should have known better - I am, after all, old enough!
Whoever writes whatever they do write, they always want someone else to read it. That rule is written in clay tablets - but with loads of small print you just can’t quite read. At one time you had the hurdle of finding an agent, then a publisher and then a market - enough of a hurdle to put 99.9% of potential authors out of the running. It was largely nothing to do with merit, but a whole raft of other more commercial considerations.
Leiyatel’s Embrace came at just the right time to take advantage of two hurdle-leaping innovations. Before I knew it, the book was available from Smashwords and Amazon. It left, though, that final un-leapt hurdle of marketing. Can you feel the taste of bile rising at the back of your throat yet? No? Then you don’t yet fully understand what marketing your book is all about, and to be fair most authors don’t - it’s not what writing’s about, after all.
Now, in my own naivety I believed the urban myth doing the rounds, that all you had to do was get yourself active on the various social media platforms and, hey presto, like magic, the world would soon beat a path to your virtual bookstore. It was quite possibly true, certainly to a far greater extent than it is now, but only for a relatively restricted gamut of genres. Even those are now beginning to feel an impact from the rapid growth in promotional noise that people are beginning to complain about, or that has already turned them away from the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
It’s not all down-side, you understand. I have met a good few genuine folk, folk it’s been a real pleasure getting to know, and who’ve help make it all fun. The point is, this is what the system was intended for - socialising, not marketing. The mechanisms available, such as the ‘Like’ tagging of posts, were intended to lift interest from the general hubbub of chatter, so that notable topics became more widely known.
The latest fevered ‘Like Parties’ - where authors exchange 'Likes' between each other - is doing nothing but make it harder for any one author to be seen. It’s just lifting the height of the parapet - so we all have to be that much taller to be seen over it. The whole point of the ‘Like’ mechanism is one of competition: The site or post with the most interest or benefit rises above its lesser competitors. All the unqualified exchange of ‘Likes’ does is whittle away at that value, until there’s nothing left at all.
When it happened I don’t know, but I suddenly found myself in something akin to a gambling frenzy, doing mad things like setting up automated tweet playlists, arranging my followers into lists according to author genre, reader types, high or low re-tweeters, etc. etc. All the anal kinds of things a hardened gambler tends to do, with the unthinking mind-sets to match. And what was it achieving? Nothing. Worse than nothing, I was losing that genuine contact with the small body of people who enjoyed reading my books, or who were likely to enjoy reading them.
I’d lost sight of the important things in life - things like; friendship, interesting conversations, mad dialogues, crazy chats and surprisingly often deep and poignant discussions. I’d sleep-walked into swapping enjoyment for chasing a book-sales dragon, with a not dissimilar narcotic effect.
And that’s the answer, my friends and followers and frenzied chasers of a fast diminishing market: I’ve gone cold-turkey.
It’s not easy. I still find myself twitching a re-tweet for someone. Done before I realise , before I remember that I shouldn’t be adding to the massive wall of promo-noise that’s already grown up around us, a wall that’s hiding us each from the other. Individual Twitter and Facebook promotions worked in the past because they didn’t have the same degree of competition. They were rarer, therefore stood out more and were easily tolerated - found useful in fact. It’s now getting a bit like watching commercial TV, but where the ratio of programming to adverts has been reversed. Not pleasant!
And to answer your next question: I don’t know! Personally, I’m going back to socialising for socialising’s sake, trying to rediscover the simple enjoyment of exchanging ideas and thoughts with others, about all manner of things. You’ll find me more on Goodreads, getting my feet under the table to chat about books, certainly, but I’ll still be on Twitter and Facebook, but I won’t be chasing the dragon.
I’ll be advertising the fact that I’ve done a review of someone’s book, or that there’s a new blog available, or that I’ve read something on someone’s site that’s of interest. I’ll be doing all these things, and more now that I’ve freed up time from carpet-bombing tweets, but they’ll all be genuine and honest endorsements. If I ‘Like’ your site, it’s because I like your site, the same with your book, or whatever else. I will certainly not be blindly exchanging recommendations for anything, and would not be happy you doing that for anything of mine. Only like my Facebook page if you actually like it for some real reason.
I know I’ve rambled on a bit, but then that’s the way with thinking things through. It was the only way I knew of to be honest with you, to bring you as near as I could to an understanding of where I’m at and why. After all, you did ask.
January 17, 2013
I thought it only right to post here what I've just posted with the Fantasy and Science Fiction Group, as I suspect many of those who follow my blog won't otherwise spot it:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Although I've been around Goodreads for a while now, I have to confess that I've always been too busy writing to get properly involved here. I have, though, now got my Dica Series to a point where I believe it can stand on its own two feet - well, three to be precise:
The trilogy came into Kindle being in December of last year - with the publication of 'Last True World' - and since then I've been formatting each book for paperback release. This month saw all three paperbacks reach Amazon.
So, what is the Dica Series?
Well, here goes: Imagine the bastard offspring of Mervyn Peake, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, David Gemmell, Olaf Stapledon, and Stanislaw Lem, with Henry David Thoreau’s lyrical prose ... No, maybe not!
OK, try this: Imagine a novel that feels for all the world like classic, Epic/High Fantasy but doesn’t actually turn out to have any magic, or elves, or orcs or wizards. Imagine then that it steadily unfolds a vast and ancient mystery, one littered with twists and turns and innumerable surprises, all set amidst an exquisite, finely wrought, and wholly innovative world, one seen through the eyes of real yet idiosyncratic, and sometimes macabre characters.
With me so far? Good! Well, the Dica Series is most definitely pure Science Fiction.
If you’re intrigued enough to want to know more - well, you might be - there’s always the plethora of reviews knocking about; on here, Amazon, Fantasy Book Review, and Darkiss Reads. They do an admirable job of giving you a genuine and honest feel for what would be in store for any reader.
I will say no more, for this post marks the very end of an episode, the culmination of a number of years of overt writing, a joy and pleasure I have now decided to draw back into being purely covert. Although you’ll quite likely spot me flitting around on here, sticking my two pennyworth and snotty nose into discussions, this post constitutes the very last mention I will ever make of my writing.
You see, I was never cut out to be an author - the cravat and cigarette holder didn’t quite suit me - just a reader who had a go at writing, for my own pleasure you understand, the way it should have stayed. So, I now look forward to getting to know more of you here, as a fellow reader of course, and nothing less.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Although I've been around Goodreads for a while now, I have to confess that I've always been too busy writing to get properly involved here. I have, though, now got my Dica Series to a point where I believe it can stand on its own two feet - well, three to be precise:
The trilogy came into Kindle being in December of last year - with the publication of 'Last True World' - and since then I've been formatting each book for paperback release. This month saw all three paperbacks reach Amazon.
So, what is the Dica Series?
Well, here goes: Imagine the bastard offspring of Mervyn Peake, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, David Gemmell, Olaf Stapledon, and Stanislaw Lem, with Henry David Thoreau’s lyrical prose ... No, maybe not!
OK, try this: Imagine a novel that feels for all the world like classic, Epic/High Fantasy but doesn’t actually turn out to have any magic, or elves, or orcs or wizards. Imagine then that it steadily unfolds a vast and ancient mystery, one littered with twists and turns and innumerable surprises, all set amidst an exquisite, finely wrought, and wholly innovative world, one seen through the eyes of real yet idiosyncratic, and sometimes macabre characters.
With me so far? Good! Well, the Dica Series is most definitely pure Science Fiction.
If you’re intrigued enough to want to know more - well, you might be - there’s always the plethora of reviews knocking about; on here, Amazon, Fantasy Book Review, and Darkiss Reads. They do an admirable job of giving you a genuine and honest feel for what would be in store for any reader.
I will say no more, for this post marks the very end of an episode, the culmination of a number of years of overt writing, a joy and pleasure I have now decided to draw back into being purely covert. Although you’ll quite likely spot me flitting around on here, sticking my two pennyworth and snotty nose into discussions, this post constitutes the very last mention I will ever make of my writing.
You see, I was never cut out to be an author - the cravat and cigarette holder didn’t quite suit me - just a reader who had a go at writing, for my own pleasure you understand, the way it should have stayed. So, I now look forward to getting to know more of you here, as a fellow reader of course, and nothing less.
January 13, 2013
Some of you who follow me on Twitter may have sussed out that Kit and myself like to get out and about a bit on walks. Nothing overly strenuous these days, you understand, maybe a moderate four or five mile bimble through some of our country’s wonderful landscape. We're not too fussed if a sizeable hill or small mountain’s included - all the better for improving the view. We’re also not too fussed about it necessarily being in the most picturesque of settings - as long as it’s interesting and can be fitted, at this time of year, into a short Winter’s afternoon.
Over the years, we’ve managed to exhaust most of the spots within easy reach - or so we’d supposed. Previously, we’ve tended to take advantage of our National Trust membership, and so have frequented such places as Tatton Park, Dunham Massey, Lyme Hall and Park, and more further afield attractions like the Fylde Coast and Little Moreton Hall.
Kit recently got an iPad, one reason being the ease with which it surfs the web. With its help, she’s become quite adept at teasing out some really interesting places we never knew existed.
Last week we had a lovely walk around Lymm Dam, and so with a pretty good weather forecast for today, Kit launched into a web search for somewhere else nearby. It was during her trawl that she came across something that rang a very distinct but rather surprising bell. She’d found a site for a country park in Salford (now come on, it’s not quite as daft as it sounds). In addition to a sizeable lake, extensive trails and open land, bridleways, fishing and open air sculptures, Clifton Country Park has the remains of one of the area’s earliest coal mines - the Wet Earth Colliery (dating from the early 1700s). We must also say that it has one of the most helpful and friendly visitor information centres we’ve come across.
But, to come back to the point, what was it that had caught Kit’s eye?
Well, along with the description of engine sheds, wheel chambers, cottages and follies, there was the following:
“Gal Pit - This large circular brick structure used to have a wooden frame around which a horse walked to pull ropes up from the pit. For many years the Gal pit was used for extracting coal, as an access for mine workers and for pumping out flood water.”
Kit was quite simply gobsmacked! When she read it out to me, I was then gobsmacked myself! Generally, if either one of us is ever gobsmacked, then we do tend to follow up whatever was the cause. To be both so meant it was a cert’, and so we spent an interesting, and pleasant if somewhat cold few hours this afternoon investigating
If you haven’t read the second book of the Dica Series - ‘Of Weft and Weave’ - then the cause of our gobsmacked state may elude you. So, to illuminate, may I present a picture of one of the park’s metal, explanatory sculptures (a very recent installation) and an extract from the said novel, where the ‘asinine engine’ is both described and illustrated. If we were gobsmacked before we got there, then imagine our degree of gobsmackedness after seeing this:
In the writing of the Dica Series, there have been quite a few ‘odd’ occurrences, but this one easily ‘takes the biscuit’!
Over the years, we’ve managed to exhaust most of the spots within easy reach - or so we’d supposed. Previously, we’ve tended to take advantage of our National Trust membership, and so have frequented such places as Tatton Park, Dunham Massey, Lyme Hall and Park, and more further afield attractions like the Fylde Coast and Little Moreton Hall.
Kit recently got an iPad, one reason being the ease with which it surfs the web. With its help, she’s become quite adept at teasing out some really interesting places we never knew existed.
Last week we had a lovely walk around Lymm Dam, and so with a pretty good weather forecast for today, Kit launched into a web search for somewhere else nearby. It was during her trawl that she came across something that rang a very distinct but rather surprising bell. She’d found a site for a country park in Salford (now come on, it’s not quite as daft as it sounds). In addition to a sizeable lake, extensive trails and open land, bridleways, fishing and open air sculptures, Clifton Country Park has the remains of one of the area’s earliest coal mines - the Wet Earth Colliery (dating from the early 1700s). We must also say that it has one of the most helpful and friendly visitor information centres we’ve come across.
But, to come back to the point, what was it that had caught Kit’s eye?
Well, along with the description of engine sheds, wheel chambers, cottages and follies, there was the following:
“Gal Pit - This large circular brick structure used to have a wooden frame around which a horse walked to pull ropes up from the pit. For many years the Gal pit was used for extracting coal, as an access for mine workers and for pumping out flood water.”
Kit was quite simply gobsmacked! When she read it out to me, I was then gobsmacked myself! Generally, if either one of us is ever gobsmacked, then we do tend to follow up whatever was the cause. To be both so meant it was a cert’, and so we spent an interesting, and pleasant if somewhat cold few hours this afternoon investigating
If you haven’t read the second book of the Dica Series - ‘Of Weft and Weave’ - then the cause of our gobsmacked state may elude you. So, to illuminate, may I present a picture of one of the park’s metal, explanatory sculptures (a very recent installation) and an extract from the said novel, where the ‘asinine engine’ is both described and illustrated. If we were gobsmacked before we got there, then imagine our degree of gobsmackedness after seeing this:
In the writing of the Dica Series, there have been quite a few ‘odd’ occurrences, but this one easily ‘takes the biscuit’!
January 10, 2013
I’m old enough to remember a time when all a thing needed to be to be the ‘bee’s knees’ was to be new, or in the parlance of the time ‘new-fangled’. It was at a time not long after the second Great War - Great as in huge, you understand, not wonderful, far from it. It was a time when the world was getting to grips with ‘change’, and to be blunt about it, change for its own sake.
Formica was fast covering acres of kitchen worktops, displacing perfectly serviceable materials like pine, traditional because of its natural antiseptic oil content. Early polymers like Bakelite were finding their way into homes, with thermosetting plastics moderately hot on its heels, if you’ll excuse the pun. They were all sweeping a new and freshly colourful outlook into the lives of previously monochrome Brits.
It was an understandable reaction to post-war austerity, but also the result of economic engineering. The UK was broke - the war was, after all, a very expensive event, and one against which we’d borrowed heavily from the US. A conscious decision was made to ‘kick start’ the economy, to get the UK back on its feet as quickly as possible, and so it was that consumerism was born, and the supposed short-term growth policies that went with it.
People of my generation and later all carry with them the ethic espoused by a one-time prime minister of the UK - Harold Wilson. He it was who described the Labour government’s promised future as ‘the white heat of technological revolution’. It meant that life was going to get better, on the back of new and improved technologies. More for less, everything for nothing - you get the idea. Well, he was after all a politician.
The reality is, though, that what is new is not always the best - I’m afraid, Lord Wilson. Sometimes it’s just different. It seems to me that eReaders are a case in point. They’re not de facto better than the old traditional paper book, they’re just different - however new-fangled they may look. Both the new and the old each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and so each comes out better than the other under certain circumstances. When Kit and I go on holiday, we no longer take boxes full of books, we take a couple of Kindles. They're great for that task, certainly, the best in fact, but it doesn’t mean to say the reading itself is any the better.
Convenience is one thing, and often an important thing, but there’s more to reading than getting words from an author's head into the mind of a reader. If you have the time, may I direct you to a previous blog post of mine, one that illustrates the point quite succinctly with a short extract from ‘Of Weft and Weave’: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
In a very roundabout way, I’ve finally brought you to my announcement - one you may have guessed already - that each book of my ‘Dica Series’ is now not only available in thermosetting plastic but also in good oldfashioned paperback. They may not be quite up to the tactile experience of velum and leather, but then there are limits
If you would like to enhance your own reading pleasure of the ‘Dica Series’, of ‘Leiyatel’s Embrace’, ‘Of Weft and Weave’, and of ‘Last True World’, then you can get them all currently from https://www.createspace.com/pub/simpl... They will all be available on Amazon, of course, within about a week, alongside their digital counterparts.
So, may you at last enjoy the pleasure of holding my work as you read it.
Formica was fast covering acres of kitchen worktops, displacing perfectly serviceable materials like pine, traditional because of its natural antiseptic oil content. Early polymers like Bakelite were finding their way into homes, with thermosetting plastics moderately hot on its heels, if you’ll excuse the pun. They were all sweeping a new and freshly colourful outlook into the lives of previously monochrome Brits.
It was an understandable reaction to post-war austerity, but also the result of economic engineering. The UK was broke - the war was, after all, a very expensive event, and one against which we’d borrowed heavily from the US. A conscious decision was made to ‘kick start’ the economy, to get the UK back on its feet as quickly as possible, and so it was that consumerism was born, and the supposed short-term growth policies that went with it.
People of my generation and later all carry with them the ethic espoused by a one-time prime minister of the UK - Harold Wilson. He it was who described the Labour government’s promised future as ‘the white heat of technological revolution’. It meant that life was going to get better, on the back of new and improved technologies. More for less, everything for nothing - you get the idea. Well, he was after all a politician.
The reality is, though, that what is new is not always the best - I’m afraid, Lord Wilson. Sometimes it’s just different. It seems to me that eReaders are a case in point. They’re not de facto better than the old traditional paper book, they’re just different - however new-fangled they may look. Both the new and the old each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and so each comes out better than the other under certain circumstances. When Kit and I go on holiday, we no longer take boxes full of books, we take a couple of Kindles. They're great for that task, certainly, the best in fact, but it doesn’t mean to say the reading itself is any the better.
Convenience is one thing, and often an important thing, but there’s more to reading than getting words from an author's head into the mind of a reader. If you have the time, may I direct you to a previous blog post of mine, one that illustrates the point quite succinctly with a short extract from ‘Of Weft and Weave’: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
In a very roundabout way, I’ve finally brought you to my announcement - one you may have guessed already - that each book of my ‘Dica Series’ is now not only available in thermosetting plastic but also in good oldfashioned paperback. They may not be quite up to the tactile experience of velum and leather, but then there are limits
If you would like to enhance your own reading pleasure of the ‘Dica Series’, of ‘Leiyatel’s Embrace’, ‘Of Weft and Weave’, and of ‘Last True World’, then you can get them all currently from https://www.createspace.com/pub/simpl... They will all be available on Amazon, of course, within about a week, alongside their digital counterparts.
So, may you at last enjoy the pleasure of holding my work as you read it.
