Iain Cameron's Blog, page 5
September 20, 2016
Writers – Problems Finishing Your Book?
Are you experiencing problems finishing off the last chapters of your book or can’t get your head around editing? Then here’s an interesting solution. Jojo Moyes the best selling author of Me Before You and After You is offering writers, published or not, the chance to spend a week at her writing cottage in Suffolk without charge. If you’re short of cash she’ll even help with travel costs (UK only). This is what JoJo posted in Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/jojo.moyes/posts/10154345691905944)
Are you a writer, and wish you had some peace in which to write? I know what it meant to me when I was trying to get published. To this end, we are offering our cottage, free of charge, for up to a week to a writer – published or unpublished – to kick-start, or even finish their work. It is fully furnished, welcoming, and set near us in deep countryside on the Suffolk borders. The week must be taken before the end of this year. If you are on a limited income, we can also provide help with travel and food (UK only). (We will even remove the television and turn off the wifi if that helps…) I can’t guarantee I’ll be around, but if I am I’ll be happy to have a coffee and offer any advice I can. Or you can just enjoy not having to speak to anyone at all! To apply, simply email us at writerscottage1@gmail.com with no more than 500 words on why this would make a difference to you. All voices welcome. Deadline: 30 September 2016.
I personally think this is a very generous offer and if I hadn’t already finished the manuscript of my latest book, Red, Red Wine, due out later this year, I might have applied. Good luck to you if you do.
August 28, 2016
My Holiday Reads
I’ve been reading quite a few books this summer, a sign that I’ve finished writing my new book and it’s gone off for proof reading. I’m not one of those who only reads on holiday, although I do that too, as I read most of the time – mostly to give me a break from writing and last thing at night.
Here’s a list of my summer reads in no particular order.
Hide and Seek – Ian Rankin
The second outing for John Rebus sees him chasing the truth about an assumed suicide, a case which eventually touches the upper echelons of Edinburgh society. Excellent.
The Mine – John A Heldt
A geology student goes down a mine and travels back to 1943. He falls in love and faces a dilemma. The conditions that send him back in time will reappear in a few days time. Does he stay in 1943 and marry the woman he had fallen in love with or travel back to the 21st century without her? Good.
The Twelve – Stuart Neville
The premise of the book – an IRA killer, Gerry Fegan is followed around by the ghosts of 12 people he killed – reads like a paranormal thriller, but it’s not. To keep his sanity, Fegan has to kill the people who ordered him to kill the 12 and as he does so, one by one the ghosts disappear. A gritty novel set in Ireland during the Troubles. Excellent.
Collusion – Stuart Neville
This is the follow-up to The Twelve (above) when the killer comes out of hiding to protect a woman and her child. Good in its own way but essentially a re-hash of The Twelve.
I Let You Go – Claire Mackintosh
Winner of the Theakston’s Novel of the Year, tells of woman who disappears after a boy is killed in a hit and run. To tell you more would reveal too much of the story but the book is a worthy award winner. Excellent.
The Black Ice – Michael Connolly
The second book to feature detective Harry Bosch. Who says you don’t learn from crime novels? In an effort to eradicate a medfly pest desimating California’s fruit crop, every year millions of sterile fruit flies are released to mate with the medfly and produce no offspring. Clever, eh? Excellent.
The Reader on the 6:57 – Jean-Paul Didierlaurent
A man working in book pulping factory reads pages he rescues from the pulping machine every morning to commuters on the 6:27. He finds a memory stick on his regular seat, and on it a lavatory attendant in a shopping mall, reveals details about her life in a book that she is writing. Our hero falls for her and eventually tracks her down. Do they fall in love? That would be telling. Quirky but interesting.
The Harder They Come – TC Boyle
A gritty drama about a family with a son who has mental problems, and how his grip on reality gradually slips away with tragic consequences for all involved. Excellent.
Started but Didn’t Finish
The Strontium Factor – Mason Forbes. Badly written,
Rise of the Enemy – Rob Sinclair. Too much introspection.
The Various Haunts of Men – Susan Hill. As above.
Kiss Me Quick – Danny Miller. Didn’t take to it.
August 8, 2016
25% of Murders Remain Unsolved
Data published by the Sunday Times 07/08/16 revealed unsolved homicides in England and Wales, 13% in 1995-6, have risen to 23% in 2014-15. This is against a background of a rising population and falling criminality, and points squarely at reduced manning and falling budgets at all police forces.
Unlike the TV depictions of Waking the Dead and New Tricks, cold case reviews take painstaking amounts of work, done over many months and years, a commitment many police forces are loathe to fund, given the pressure to solve current caseloads. Pete Beirne, the lead investigator at the ‘cold case’ unit in Thames Valley Police said, ‘On a live investigation the pressure is on to get a result and they do a lot of forensic work very, very quickly, whereas,we don’t do that. Unfortunately it all comes down to the finances. You can jump the queue but you have to pay a premium price.’
The good news is the increased accuracy of DNA. Nowadays, if a family member of an unconvicted perpetrator is involved in petty crime and required to give a sample, the system will flag the similarity of the family member’s DNA to the perpetrator’s and alert the relevant officers.
July 27, 2016
Someone is Watching You
Do you ever feel in a hotel that someone is watching you? Could there be a camera behind the mirror in the bathroom or in the smoke detector above your bed?
The subject of a new book bought a motel near Denver in the US to do precisely that; spy on his guests. The Voyeur’s Motel by Gay Talese tells the story of Gerald Foos who drilled holes in ceilings and covered them with ventilation grills, and sat there for hours watching couples go through every sex act imaginable. This included a man who dressed up as a goat and ran around bleating, to murder. He concludes that the only couples who seem to enjoy pleasing one another are lesbians.
The book has been mired in controversy since publication. Initially The New Yorker published an excerpt and Steven Spielberg lined up Sam Mendes to direct the film, but later it was discovered that Foos didn’t own the motel for eight years when he claimed he did. The author reported Foos’s antics to the police but they declined to take any action.
On reviewer summed the book up as thus: ‘The Voyeur’s Motel is of negligible literary importance or merit. But it is outstandingly sleazy and creepy.’
July 22, 2016
Clare Mackintosh Wins Crime Award
Clare Mackintosh has beaten off strong opposition from Adrian McKinty, Robert Galbraith and Eva Dolan to win the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Book of the Year. Mackintosh won the award for her top selling novel, I Let You Go, about a woman whose son is killed in a hit and run and decides to leave everything behind and disappear to Wales. Mackintosh spent 12 years in the police, latterly as a public order commander, and her book became the fastest selling crime novel by a new author in 2015.
The crime writing prize is now in its twelfth year, with previous winners including Val McDermid, Lee Child, Mark Billingham, Sarah Hilary and Denise Mina. Mackintosh, who will receive £3,000, beat off competition from a shortlist of six British and Irish authors whose novels were published in paperback between May 1 2015 and April 30 2016. At the awards ceremony, previous winner McDermid was also presented with a special prize, the Theakstons Old Peculier outstanding contribution to crime fiction award.
July 18, 2016
ARM To Be Taken Over by Japan’s SoftBank
ARM Holdings, the company that makes chips for the iPhone and iPad is to be taken over by a Japanese bank. Why am I telling you this?
The sharp-eyed techies amongst you will probably have realised that Markham Microprocessors in Driving into Darkness is modelled on ARM. For Sir Mathew Markham, read Hermann Houser, the founder of Acorn Computer, the company than later became ARM. The story in the book of two software engineers working in a monastic atmosphere where ‘they produced a brilliant piece of computer code, frugal in its use of computer memory and power but devastatingly effective in the way it executed commands’ mirrored the work done in real life by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber. It’s my tribute to a great British success story.
July 16, 2016
Box Set Now Available
A box set of the first 4 DI Angus Henderson books has just been published. It’s only available in Kindle format and is currently for sale in the UK for £4.99, a saving of over 25% on the published books. The 4 books are, as if you didn’t know:
One Last Lesson
Driving into Darkness
Fear the Silence
Hunting for Crows
Each book in the box set is an exact copy of the single Kindle version, nothing added or taken away, and enough to keep you entertained for many hours. For more information, click on one of the links below:
June 29, 2016
Problems with wi-fi?
If you live in a rural area as I do, you’ll be familiar with the feeling when you click on a website and Safari tells you it’s unable to connect as you’ve lost your wi-fi signal. Where I live, this can be caused by power cuts when the electricity company cuts back trees lying near power lines, engineering works as BT are upgrading many junction boxes to fibre, and heavy rain which can damage cable ducts. Fear not there is a solution which works as I’m using it at the moment because my router has decided to go on strike. It is to use your 4g phone. I use an Apple Mac and an iPhone but I’m sure this will work with other equipment combinations.
When your wi-fi goes off, click the ‘Network’ tab at top of the screen. Your Mac will list all the networks it can find, which in my case is none. Leave it a second, and it will find your phone’s 4g signal, assuming it can’t find a wi-fi signal either. If it does, goes to ‘Settings’ on your phone and switch wi-fi off; it then revert to 4g. When the Mac finds your phone’s 4g signal, click on it and a few seconds later, you will be working as if you still had wi-fi.
Please let me know if you find this useful.
June 18, 2016
Libraries Cost More to Close
Here is an interesting article from Kayleigh Lewis in the Independent
Two London libraries which temporarily closed in March due to budget cuts are currently costing up to three times more to guard than they did to keep open, according to a Freedom of Information request. Lambeth council paid private security guards £2,212 a day to secure the two sites, when previously the running costs – according to the council’s budget – was just £874. This didn’t include spending on books and computers services, but those expenses are taken out of another budget, according to the Guardian which obtained the data about the Carnegie and Minet libraries.
The FOI only covers the time from 31 March, when the libraries closed, and 15 April, when the request was made. But in those 16 days alone the Labour-led council spent £35,392.68 guarding the two sites. However, a council spokesman says the claim is inaccurate. He said: “We are working across the board to achieve the huge savings required in response to a 56 per cent Government cut to our core budget.
“To balance the books, between 2010 and 2018 we’ll have had to make savings of more than £238 million, and in the last financial year Lambeth council cut 500 jobs. That programme includes saving £800,000 from our annual libraries budget this year. Fortunately we have found a variety of ways of keeping all our libraries open, including handing the running of one branch to a community trust and potentially adding a gym to two others which will re-open, for longer hours, as soon as possible. We acknowledge changes to library services have raised concerns, including a costly library occupation, but the council is doing what it can to maintain services, protect those most in need and make the required cuts.”
Initially the majority of the security costs – £25,000 – were spent at the Carnegie library in Herne Hill, south-east London, as local residents were occupying the building, the Guardian says. However, even when the occupation ended the daily security cost of £,1382 was still apparently three times higher than the daily running costs, while guarding the nearby unoccupied Minet library were almost double the previous running costs at £677 a day, the paper said. The two sites are intended to be re-opened next year as “community hubs” – part private gym, part unstaffed library, but the Guardian says building work on the two sites has yet to begin. The closure of the two libraries was widely criticised, in part because of the timing, just ahead of the exam period for students, and also because many feel an unstaffed library hardly fulfils the role of a staffed one.
The 40 people who were initially occupying the Carnegie library received a letter of support at the time from 220 writers and illustrators, including Nick Hornby, David Nicholls, Ian Rankin, Sandi Toksvig and Sophie Kinsella.
June 14, 2016
Waterstone’s Ebook Store Closing
Waterstone’s the UK biggest bookshop chain are closing their ebook store. This follows on from the news last October when they announced they would no longer stock the Amazon Kindle. Such announcements only serve to widen the gulf between published authors who sell mainly paperbacks, and independent authors who sell mainly ebooks. This in a month when the latest Author Earnings Report showed that since January 2015, the independent authors’ share of ebooks earnings has overtaken that of the Big Five publishers, and has continued to grow while the ebook earnings of authors at the Big Five publishers has continued to decline. This may encourage some publishers to exit from the ebook market which would be a travesty for consumer choice. We shall have to wait and see how this issue pans out.
If you have purchased any ebooks from Waterstone’s, they are being transferred to the Kobo platform. You should have a received an email to inform you of this, but if not, drop me a line and I’ll forward it to you.
