BOOKS AT CHRISTMAS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Not Christmas books. Those are books about Christmas…or they are not about Christmas – just set then. Great Christmas movies? Bah, humbug! That was a hint about a great Christmas movie. I’ll leave you to discover it on your own.
   Christmas movies?
   Batman Returns.
   Lethal Weapon.
   STAR WARS.
   A James Bond film. You’ll have to guess which one, as many of them are shown at Christmas – which makes practically all of them Christmas movies. Do you know how Christmas trees are grown? I’ll leave you to discover that on your own.
   Christmas movies. Okay. But Christmas books? Do I read Christmas-themed books at this time of year? What would I consider a book with a Christmas theme? There’s an obvious candidate by Charles Dickens.
   The Chronicles of Narnia feature…koff, koff, spoiler alert…okay, eternal winter, and no Christmas as a major theme. So maybe, just maybe, if you do believe in fairies, talking lions, and Turkish Delight…Christmas might return to Narnia. Don’t accept sweets from strangers.
   It’s easier for C.S. Lewis to add Santa Claus to The Lord of the Rings than for J.R.R. Tolkien to add Galadriel to The Chronicles of Narnia. Tolkien couldn’t stand the thought of Santa Claus ripping down fictional barriers and being a guest star in a fantasy land. Mainly as he’d been busy as fuck impersonating Santa in letters to his children.
   Narnia is all the better for having Santa Claus in it. If, indeed, Santa puts in an appearance at all. I’ll leave you to discover that on your own.
   Do I consider Christmas books to be those with snowy settings? Is there more to it than that? Vitally, is there less to it than that? For reasons of the plot, C.S. Lewis gave us a Christmassy story. And there is snow. The snow also melts away, in the end.
   What about a story with a Christmas connection, angle, or timeline? The Midnight Folk, by John Masefield, leads to a very festive sequel called The Box of Delights. Perhaps the setting becomes more Christmassy for being written in the mid-1930s. But what sort of festivities feature in Masefield’s tale? I’ll leave you…etc.
   Scrooge inhabits Christmas. He is haunted by it. That was a spooky spoiler. In the land of Narnia, it’s always winter. Christmas was frozen out. Until…ah, but that’s a spoiler. I suppose there are stories you forget are set in December…
   But there are fantastical tales that don’t have the month of December in them, or any other month of the year. Those stories develop their own calendars. And may yet be Christmassy as fuck.
   There’s a rule about much-loved classics. Beware those who tout the phrase around. Particularly if they insert the word holiday into proceedings. A much-loved holiday classic. One we’ve never heard of.
   To return to the movies for a moment…animated movies…there’s a cartoonish cartoon based on the much-loved classic book I’d never heard of. The Polar Express. What the fuck is that, and why the fuck does everyone in the cartoon look like melted rubber?
   You may vomit at the very concept of Narnia, and that’s your business.
   Perhaps you’ll barely make it through more than five minutes of The Lord of the Rings. I read the whole thing and discovered that I’d never need to read one of Tolkien’s stories ever again. C.S. Lewis, being eminently more readable, and with a sense of humour, is an author I return to. But not specifically at Christmas.
   So what of books at Christmas? Not Christmas books. Books I find myself reading at Christmas. Oh. Gifts. Christmas presents. If I think of those books, they aren’t Christmassy in scope, theme, and use of language…
   The best gift of a book at Christmas is always one you are going to buy for yourself, as you know roughly what your own taste in books is like…though even you might unpleasantly surprise yourself with an ill-thought-out choice. So buyer beware – never surprise yourself with an off-kilter purchase.
   But always delight in an off-kilter purchase that proved true.
   You are not buying yourself a Christmas present. No. It’s a festive excuse to buy a book. As if you fucking needed an excuse. You aren’t going to wrap it and leave it under the tree for a stunned you to pick up in wonderment.
   For years, I’d just buy myself music I’d heard somewhere. That was my festive treat. Always have a back-up – music to listen to. I still buy music in, around this time of year. But the point of this blog is to consider books, and not festive discounts on music purchases.
   Books are great gifts if you like the books given. And if the books aren’t for you, they are for someone. Have I ever given away books I received as gifts? People have always chosen well, when furnishing the gift of a book.
   So…that’s never come up. It would be awkward to receive a duplicate of a book. But there are checks and balances in place. What would you like? Do you already have BLAH DE BLAH? I find that saves a lot of bother.
   It would be nice to receive an entire bookcase as a gift for more books that’ll turn up sooner rather than later. But I’d have to be asked if I have space for yet another bookcase. The answer is always NO, and then I conjure up more space anyway.
   How many books sneaked into the house this year? I never care to hear the answer. Why not? I always think the answer is around five. And it never fucking is. How many books leave the house? That’s the tricky part.
   I haven’t had a charity clearout in some time. And I didn’t dump much on the charity shops, even then. If I really need to, I’ll cast a cold eye over one or two volumes. Then I’ll take them to that nice farm in the country, and I’ll point out the rabbits.
   How many books have come into the house in the month of December? That’s easy. No books. So now I’ll set myself an easy challenge. How many books will have come into the house by December’s end?
   No more than…five…is my guess. And I will try to hold true to that. How? I’ll just not buy any. But wait a bit. There are things on order. Damn it. Yes. That’s true. How many? I have no clue. You see, I don’t want to know, and I don’t need to know.
   It’s true. I count my books by tonnage and not by volumes. The only thing stopping the floors collapsing is the lack of floorspace for more bookcases. It’s a complex mathematical calculation, to be sure. And it goes like this…
   Floorspace is represented by the symbol F.
   U, or Utility, covers the usefulness of the assembled volumes.
   From Einstein’s formula, we have C – in this case, standing for CASE. That’s the type of unit which absorbs floorspace and holds books.
   K gives us F.U.C.K. That’s what I think when I have to think of the number of books already here. The K might as well stand for KETAMINE at this point. I’m going to be on horse tranquilisers just thinking about moving another bookcase to make room.
   But I need not add five books to the library this festive-tide. I suspect five. There are 30 days left. If I want to be picky, I wouldn’t place bets on books arriving after Christmas itself. And we have to knock off a few days for lack of postal activity.
   Then there’s a week in which I will be recovering from the annual food coma. Last year I decided to cut back, and foolishly added parsnips to the Christmas dinner. I should have added lumps of concrete. Less filling.
   I suppose the most Christmassy book of all is a Christmas cookery book. That’s a gift once, just in time to be no use that year. But forever available for study, thereafter. I don’t believe I have any cookery books in the library. It’s better just to get on with the cooking.
   But that flies in the face of an entire industry, based around festive meals! So? Do any of these cookery books implore you not to add fucking parsnips to a meal that you are already trying to cut back on?
   Didn’t think so.
   I am reminded of Christmas annuals. Hardback anthologies of comic book characters. They year would always be the next one. So a 2024 Christmas annual is dated 2025. The format is for the next year. You are getting to buy the book early for Christmas, even though it’s technically a book for the New Year. Just a publishing quirk, designed to flog as many copies as possible. It’s like a sell-by date for a much-loved classic.
   A quick online check of Christmas annuals shows this chicanery is still going on.
   This blog post is now host to a question. Will there be more than five new books in the house, by month’s end? It’ll be a very short blog in January.

KARLA’S CHOICE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Fact, in a world of fiction. Clear reflection, for once, in a wilderness of mirrors. George Smiley left the Circus with unfinished business. His chronicler, John le Carré, is no more. The family firm, concerned with the writing of stories, passed to his son. And so, I picked up KARLA’S CHOICE – written by Nick Harkaway.
   The premise is that intelligence officer George Smiley left the secret world of espionage behind, that he’s happy away from managing shady activity, and there’s a decade or so of a gap to fill in the chronology. And now the story can be told.
   What happens between THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY…well, that’s the topic of this continuation/fill-in book. To get into that, just a little, first I must bring an old file from Cold War storage… 

*

George Smiley is a character who sipped, like Horace Rumpole, from a minor immortality potion. Before A LEGACY OF SPIES came out, you could point to assorted Smiley stories and say, with confidence, that the dates didn’t quite match up. Characters simply had their ages revised, for convenience.
   This is the Batman Effect. Batman’s history extends back around a decade or so when considering his many adventures. He stays eternally fit and is forever 29 years old unless stated otherwise. The character is deliberately an older caped crusader in The Dark Knight Returns, for example.
   Inconsistencies in A LEGACY OF SPIES are overlooked. 

*

Why mention this observation from yesteryear? Nick Harkaway, in his introduction to KARLA’S CHOICE, tells much the same tale. He thinks of all the Smiley portrayals. Various actors from television, the movie, and audio adaptations. I think of Smiley once…
   This particular once. Only SMILEY’S PEOPLE puts that character’s name in a book’s title. Harkaway had one eye on that, I’m sure, when he took Smiley’s Cold War adversary, Karla, and bumped him up to star status on the cover.
   Co-star status. The cover tells us this is A JOHN LE CARRÉ NOVEL. Not a George Smiley one. It is a George Smiley one, but it is from le Carré’s universe. Graham Greene has Greeneland, a country of everywheres. No matter where you are in the world, in Greeneland you are always in the same place – five minutes from betrayal if you are on the ball. That’s five minutes after betrayal, if you aren’t.
   But le Carré only occasionally flirted with Greeneland. If anything, he subscribed to Tolkien’s draughty character-building England, and took over management of a small misty corner of it when the resident wizard left for the dreaming spires of Oxford the Far West and a community of weed-smoking elves.
   Not for le Carré the excessive usage of a literary crutch holding Cold War novels upright: flashy expensive science fiction gadgetry of the Yankee variety, which he considered akin to the use of magic in a non-magical world when writing espionage fiction – stripping away the label of espionage fiction in the process of employing said wonders. With one mighty gadget, our hero clichéd free. No.
   Instead, he relied on muddy tea, clanking lifts, Victorian brickwork, and rattling radiators of a between-the-wars vintage. Oh, and Russian interference with same.
   Karla is the bogeyman. He’s mostly an off-screen villain: Sauron, with hints of Lenin’s face. An all-powerful ring in a le Carré story is going to be a spy-ring. And that’ll be an all-powerful spy-ring…with many flaws.
   In the television adaptations, Karla is an almost unknown force of nature. He provides the Russian wind which blows through the Cold War. In portraying him, Patrick Stewart says not one word. But he brings the adversary to life.
   The non-speaking role in the flashback is important as a driver of many plot-threads. Smiley meets Karla and tries to recruit him, early. This encounter plants seeds of doubt in the boss, Control, looking for a traitor. Control considers the possibility that Smiley was recruited by Karla at that meeting, instead. Or that Smiley was already a traitor before then, and used the meeting to catch up with his Russian master.
   Control was strong on paranoia. He took three lumps of it in his toffee – a strange mix of tea and coffee served in Victorian institutions that exceeded their original century by some time.
   TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY has a list of suspects, including Smiley for several reasons, but it is the flashback meeting which furnishes a prominent mark against Smiley’s name. Why mention Karla and his non-speaking role?
   I’ve gone over it several times. When reading this John le Carré novel, written by le Carré’s son, the question of voice comes up. Once Alec Guinness played Smiley on television, le Carré found it difficult to shake the performance from his head. And so, he wrote fewer stories about the character. Guinness, ever the imp, stole more than a few le Carré mannerisms for the role.
   Reading KARLA’S CHOICE, I can hear Beryl Reid when Connie Sachs enters the tale. No one says actually quite like Hungarian Toby Esterhase. He seems to speak that way by bringing remnants of at least two other languages into English and hiring the word actually as the face-paint on the foreign words, to whore its way around a sentence or two.
   There’s a Hungarian connection in this novel, so Toby is brought into the narrative – and a welcome addition he is. Connie Sachs is always great fun, if alcoholically tinged with great sadness. And that’s her point.
   So, yes, characters are preserved. The timeline is a moveable feast, but at least a feast is had. And Harkaway confesses this in his introduction. He’s damned right to do so. Expectation is high. We’ve been down this road before…
    When A LEGACY OF SPIES came out, le Carré went back and filled in a few gaps so that THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD would make sense in light of TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. And there, date-of-birth and character age were on the moveable menu.
   In terms of age Smiley may very well pass for 63 in the dusk with the light behind him. He hovers in the perpetual Twilight Zone of fifty-something years old under your average pub lights on a bitter mid-week November night, and sixty-something to any doctor evaluating him for signs of heart trouble.
   With that loose age in mind, Harkaway visited the well his father had returned to. KARLA’S CHOICE gives us more about that time between THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and TINKER TAILOR…
   In dropping his bucket into the well, Harkaway had to give us another layer between those books that didn’t ruin the extra layer of icing his dad had already added to the cake with A LEGACY OF SPIES. Difficult terrain. Many mines on that field. The best approach was to say…
   Well, dad shifted the dates around a little and where’s the harm…do you want this book or not?
   I am strongly reminded of the oft-mentioned Penge Bungalow Murders. Horace Rumpole, Old Bailey Hack, consumer of Chateau Thames Embankment, and husband to the formidable Hilda, would trot out this running joke on an hourly basis. But Sir John Mortimer left the gag dangling. It was better to travel than to arrive.
   Until, in the end, he wrote Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders. Inconsistent? Rumpole isn’t a reliable narrator. If you believe that, I have Tower Bridge to sell you. And the book? A triumph, meeting impossible levels of expectation? It’s not about the murders. No, it’s about Rumpole’s meeting Hilda. A triumph.
   On a side-note about voice, and image, Leo McKern is Rumpole. His caricature adorns the book covers. Turning back to le Carré, you’ll find all sorts of editions of his books have very vague people on the covers.
   Except for one of the covers of KARLA’S CHOICE. One man, Karla, is inside the head of another – bespectacled Smiley. Smiley could be a vague nod in the direction of Sir Alec Guinness, though reminds me of Alan Arkin in profile. Karla seems to have been conjured up from publicity stills of East German Stasi man Markus Wolf.
   Le Carré almost used Wolf as a character, taken from his lawnmower. Then he learned Wolf was a real spymaster over in the East. If you believe the bit about the lawnmower, let it be on the basis that you’ve checked that brand exists. It does. We’ll leave off there, unless you, like control, also take three lumps of paranoia in your tea. And coffee. It’s toffee.
   What do we get in this book? Karla, scheming. He has a walk-on part. Many cogwheels click around. Do we have le Carré’s voice, and is Harkaway his own man? Yes and yes. He writes in the terrain of his dad, but not in his dad’s shadow.
   Harkaway respects the landscape of lamplighters and scalphunters. He wheels Connie Sachs on for a turn. But Harkaway gives us more. Connie is one of the Norns, weaving a thread and telling the tale of a man’s fate. She can’t do this alone, and has two other Norns in attendance, as is the custom. Harkaway uses another name for them. But they are Norns, just the same.
   This extra level of detail contradicts nothing in the original novel cycle. Even if there were contradictions, remember this is an espionage novel featuring Russian agents. The future is certain. It is only the past that is unpredictable.
   There’s a bit of a blip, but it is easy to overlook. Yes, there’s another book in the series. THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR features Smiley. But it doesn’t matter. He’s hardly in it. That story takes the Special Operations Executive from World War Two and imagines the organisation’s floundering and flapping along well beyond its use-by date.
   In that sense, it’s a bit of a curio that le Carré himself rejected and accepted and rejected by turn. Ultimately, he appeared to have settled on the idea that the bruises died down with the passage of time.
   Voice. Character voice. The voice of the setting. Voice of the argument, theme, being put forward. Those voices of TV and movie and radio/audio book actors. Smiley’s voice as a character and as Alec Guinness.
   Yes, le Carré’s voice and influences on him. His influence on Harkaway’s voice. (Harkaway sneaks in a spot of blurry family background that le Carré used extensively for THE PERFECT SPY. It’s his family history, though. So, fair game.)
   Then there’s the spectre of Kim Philby.
   Graham Greene and le Carré each had to deal with betrayal by Kim Philby. In le Carré’s case, he gave us TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. Philby, in commenting on le Carré, set about a casual almost disinterested scathing dismantling of le Carré’s voice and purpose. By contrast, Graham Greene turned up to see Philby in Moscow, and sloshed vodka as they spoke of old times and a changing world.
   Greene provided a plug for THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, and Harkaway seems to have returned the favour somewhat with a not-so-sly reference to Greene’s work in this continuation/fill-in novel.
   It’s difficult to evade the very long shadow of Greene in writing espionage fiction. Yes, le Carré fell foul of this with THE TAILOR OF PANAMA. That book has everything to do with Greene’s work OUR MAN IN HAVANA. For those embarking on the task of writing spy books, read Eric Ambler first. Then you’ll have a different shadow to leapfrog away from.
   I have to avoid the plot of this book. That means I must skirt around plotting in other books in the series. Where would I place it in the running? Same advice as ever. Read the Smiley books in order of publication…
   Start with the two murder mysteries. CALL FOR THE DEAD. A MURDER OF QUALITY. Then Smiley takes a back seat to proceedings in THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. But events in that book come to haunt him.
   Smiley has a token role in THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR. After that, he’s back in THE KARLA TRILOGY – TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY, and SMILEY’S PEOPLE.
   He turns up almost reluctantly in THE SECRET PILGRIM. Then we have the fix-it novel that connects THE SPY WHO CAME IN WITH THE COLD to THE KARLA TRILOGY. A LEGACY OF SPIES fills in some crucial gaps.
   Okay, but to read this book, KARLA’S CHOICE, I’d say – bare minimum – read CALL FOR THE DEAD, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, THE KARLA TRILOGY, and A LEGACY OF SPIES before even thinking about tackling Harkaway’s continuation.
   I have my suspicions about certain aspects of the plotting that could lead to another continuation book or two. More unfinished business. But I can’t really give you the plot here. Except to say…a man goes on the run, and everyone would like to find him.
   Smiley, called back to the job, goes after this man. Karla, Moriarty to Smiley’s Holmes, lurks in the deep background but haunts many a page. Characters collide, some old, some new, and Harkaway does justice to his dad’s legacy. Of spies.

EMPTY STAR WARS TELEVISION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

There is no spoon, and there never was one. Second and third spoons need not apply. (Plays ROGUE ONE soundtrack in the background. That’s not commentary or subtext. ROGUE ONE has its faults, its high points: I just chose a soundtrack at semi-random.)
   Fans of THE ACOLYTE …look away, now. If you enjoy the show, enjoy it while looking away from this area.
   Where to begin with a non-show in which nothing much happens? Nothing much happens. That’s a non-spoiler non-alert. I was waiting for the show to start when it reached its predictable end in episode eight.
   THE ACOLYTE. We need a bit of background. Not much. This show is set in a galaxy that’s long ago and, oh, so far away. I fell in love with you before the second show. (Shout out to Darth Coolidge, Darth Bramlett, Darth Russell, and Darth Carpenter for the song tie-in.)
   That’s true. STAR WARS is my thing. But I didn’t fall in love with THE ACOLYTE before the second show. Typically, almost a law for Disney STAR WARS, the TV show dropped with more than one episode on release day. And it kept on dropping.
   Spoiler. I didn’t fall in love with THE ACOLYTE after the second show. By the eighth, I wondered if I’d just seen the first zero-content TV series connected to STAR WARS. You may argue that other zero-content shows preceded this one. Who am I to stand in your way…
   To the deep space background, then. STAR WARS gives us a story about the Jedi: interplanetary hippie peaceniks who will, on occasion, dish out death-pain with big sticks of buzzy light.
   The Jedi are in decline, all but extinct, roundly beaten up, and stomped down by the Sith – enemies of all the good things Jedi believe in. A once great Galactic Republic turned into an Evil Empire™ overnight. With a little help from Sith operating in the shadows, you understand.
   Yes, the Jedi are done. But it’s time to fight back. And so, we get STAR WARS movies. At first, three of them. And the word Sith isn’t mentioned once. The actor Don Henderson says the word in a deleted scene from the first movie. I find the lack of its inclusion disturbing.
   Later, that first movie became episode four. And we had three more movies set before it. Easy as 1, 2, 3. Except, there’s a spin-off that links episode three to episode four: ROGUE ONE. That makes it episode four, even though it has ONE in the title, and the first movie that became episode four is now the fifth film in the series.
   To watch them in order, that’s 1, 2, 3, ROGUE ONE, 4, 5, and 6. I have them in 4K and still can’t bring myself to watch 7, 8, and 9 again. It’s going to take an effort. I feel they have to follow on from all the other movies, and that’s a hell of a binge.
   There’s another spin-off with the character Han Solo. That should be after 3 and before ROGUE ONE. It sits off to the side.
   No one counts those Ewok movies. On television, there are many many episodes of spin-off shows. They flit in and out of the main history. Basically, the primary space thrust of the timeline is…
   Okay, 4, 5, and 6 tell the story. Then 1, 2, and 3 fill in the gaps BEFORE. The concept of BEFORE is important. Jump back around a hundred years before the movie series to the televisual time of THE ACOLYTE. The evil Empire does not yet exist. There are no Sith, and there haven’t been any Sith for a long time, a long time.
   The Jedi preside over the Republic as peacekeepers. Cops. Space Samurai. You get the idea. Oh, and there are no Sith. Did I mention a complete lack of Sith? This is what the Republic believed. Before the Dark Times…before Darth Lucas sold the property.
   But they were all of them deceived. For another ring was made.
   Hang on…wrong saga.
   Everyone was deceived. If the Jedi are Space Samurai, and they are, then the Sith are interplanetary spies. Robbers. Space Ninja. You get the idea.
   I’d never heard of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. On this side of the Atlantic there’s the Health and Safety Executive. HSE is also a virus that’ll fuck you up. It’s nasty.
   Anyway, I think HSE looks like just the right sort of name for a Sith character. Greetings, Darth Hse. And you brought the ruins of the battle-droid, I see. Your little joke. We Sith are known for our humour, after all.
    Insert EVIL CACKLE™ there.
   But THE ACOLYTE went with Osha instead. She’s all about health and safety in the workplace. This isn’t generally true of STAR WARS. The saga is full of high walkways with no safety barriers or railings. It’s a science fiction scandal. I’ve asked fellow delegate Binks to arrange emergency powers in the Senate. That should fix a lot of upward mobility problems.
   So. This television show is STAR WARS way before STAR WARS. That’s been done. There’s a whole prequel trilogy covering old ground, remember. But this goes way back before all that. It’s an even longer time ago in the same galaxy we’ve seen already. Before the before.
   If the Republic is doing well, and it’ll be a Republic for a science fiction lifetime yet, then what are the stakes in a story set in the deeper past? Where’s the risk? Can you point me in the direction of the drama? So many options here. Let’s not go with a limiting choice…oh.
   There’ll be Jedi. And they will investigate criminal stuff. Not the regular crime beat. The tough cases. Crime Scene Investigation: Scum and Villainy. But what are the stakes, though? Where’s the conflict? Will we see any operatic drama in our Space Opera? (There is no conflict.)
   This is a hundred years before STAR WARS. You aren’t going to change history, here. Yes, made-up STAR WARS history, but, y’know, still history. We are going to see the Jedi investigate things. Don’t quite know what.
   And there will be Sith. Except that there aren’t any Sith.
   Shock horror, the Sith were around the whole time. Lurking. Skulking. Sneaking. Gollum wasn’t sneaking! Er…maybe he was, after all. We’ll get to that bit.
   Okay. We know from STAR WARS movies that, near the end of the Republic, Sith haven’t been seen for AGES. True story. From a certain point of view. We have the word of the cone-headed Jedi. So it must be true. I searched for cone-head Jedi to reach video clips confirming this.
   If a STAR WARS character in a STAR WARS movie isn’t named aloud in a STAR WARS movie, any name attached to the character is only listed in the closing credits to plug the merchandise related to that character. A tale of many action figures. That’s an old song. If lucky, the character is named eventually on film, somewhere down the line.
   A world-weary view, you say. I don’t make the merchandising contracts.
   Ki-Adi-Mundi, Mr Cone-head, tells us the Sith have been extinct for a millennium. He does this in a movie. His emphasis on the timespan is irrelevant. There was a time when the Dodo had been extinct for five minutes. Dodo ain’t coming back unless someone pulls some Jurassic Park shit with…actual preserved Dodo shit and questionable midichlorian sperm samples.
   Once the Empire is a thing, the Imperials go around announcing the Jedi are all but extinct. Everyone keeps messing this up when considering absent enemy forces. We haven’t seen any. They are clearly dead. Most sincerely dead, as averred by the coroner. What’s the point?
   The point is this. In STAR WARS history, the Sith are gone. They were hiding. The Sith agents make a surprising return and create an Evil Empire™ out of confusion and chaos. So far, so good...concerning the bad.
   And so…in the before the before part of this history, back a hundred years you go into television land, you have a problem.
   In THE ACOLYTE, way before the Dark Times, before the Empire, you can’t throw Sith into the story that’s set ages before all the upheaval. UNLESS. You show Sith skulking in the shadows, being Space Ninja Bastards. (This gets too literal at the end of the show, when Gollum turns up and does a bit of sneaking.)
   What if the bad guys are discovered? As a writing choice, you must then wipe out all the good guys who discover the bad guys. This is a basic building block of any story you attempt to tell in that manner, just to preserve the (made-up) history.
   Reminder of that history. The Sith were destroyed. Then they turned up and created an Empire of pure EVIL. They used the element of surprise to plan a load of shit, before they were discovered too late to stop huge events already long in motion.
   Setting a story before they arrive on the scene is okay…as long as no one knows they’ve arrived on the scene way before.
   Just do Ninja Missions. Have close calls and dramatic escapes under the distracted eyes of the pesky Space Samurai. Make the show heavy on the viewpoint of the Sith. It’s about the baddies as the main characters. Yes. Do that.
   Setting the story BEFORE the other bit BEFORE, you have one job. If anyone spots a villain wearing a Sith label, no one gets out alive. Job done. Can you make it entertaining, though? Please make it about the characters. Conflict. Drama. Upset. Sacrifice.
   Lights. Camera. Inaction.
   Our story opens in the closing seconds of episode eight. That’s my view. Episode eight is a set-up for another series. That’s all it could be. So I thought. And it was, when it arrived. That’s what I found predictable. Not the only problem. But, yes, that.
   Never make your show into a trailer for the next show. That’s liable to get the first show cancelled, so there is no second show. The main symptom of this diseased error is a primary story clearly in the captivity of the secondary story you haven’t told yet. Nor will you tell it, thanks to the symptom of story weakness spread across your meandering tale.
   Part of the problem is this: I want an hour of STAR WARS TV so you can develop characters I could care about. But the longest episode is listed at 49 minutes. Then we knock off the opening titles, recaps, and apocalyptic levels of end credits…
   Okay. You made it shorter. Go for the unexpected bonus. The erosion of screen-time should give us a slam-bang science fiction serial jam-packed into a half-hour serialised format, right? Think Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Hell, I’d take King of the Rocket Men in a pinch.
   Give me chapters full of Plunging Death, Dangerous Evidence, High Peril, and throw in a Molten Menace or a spot of Ten Seconds to Live for good measure. Republic Pictures would repackage these super-short efforts into longer features. I’d take Republic Pictures over the Republic depicted in this STAR WARS TV story, any day of the week.
   Nothing is going to happen. In the trailer we see a masked figure with a red lightsabre facing a Lone Jedi Dude. So. There’s your Sith and Jedi problem in the trailer…
   If you preserve even a hint of STAR WARS by staying true to previous movies set long after this moment in history, if you hope to save the basic integrity of the overall saga, then as storytellers, as TV writers…
   You do so by silencing those characters who witness the mere existence of the masked figure with the red lightsabre. Rocks fall. Everyone dies.
   STAR WARS never cared too much about continuity, scientific accuracy, or avoiding holes in the plot. But we’re talking about a basic bitch chunk of storytelling here. What do we know about this deep past? Nothing. Surprise us. But to connect it to the movies, you must deal with this Sith problem if you show Sith waving Sith weapons around.
   You could have done a story set in the past all about smugglers. No Jedi. And no Sith. Or maybe hints that some people are Sith. Make it a crime/spy story, in space. Test loyalty. Pull the rug out from under the characters. No blasters! Well, no. Loads of blasters. No lightsabres.
   Crime/spy story in space. No Jedi. As far as we know. But ANDOR, hell that’s been done.
   The Sith aren’t there at all, even if they are there. This is how we roll. Beyond preserving that, what do you have? Little, unless you stray from the usual Jedi tales. The stakes, then, are murky.
   Keep the hidden existence of the Sith hidden. That’s it. And so it goes. Phew, that was a close one. After a hell of a high-wire walk, we did it. Spread over eight episodes. We made it. All the way to the end. Which is more than a lot of the audience did. We made it. One job. Success. Until near the end of episode eight and…
   For fuck’s sake. You had one job. Over eight episodes.
   Ah, the episodes…
   They barely pass half an hour of TV each. In at least one case, we were offered just under half an hour. I checked once. Once was enough.
   So, essentially, we’re looking at what amounts to four episodes that run for an hour each. And even looking at that level of the equivalent of two movies, you still ask where the money went. It didn’t turn up on the TV screen.
   Short episodes. And yet, they drag. There is no unexpected bonus of cramming loads of action into a brief episode. The opporchancity is frittered away. Instead, there’s this faffery about hiding the Sith. And little else, beyond the tinny jangling of well-worn keys.
   Keeping the Sith secret could have worked. Maybe it all worked for you. That’s your business, not mine. I wish you well. If the focus of the show had been with the Sith from the start, and the relentless threat of discovery at every turn…then you’d have had tension.
   We’d be on the side of the Sith as they hide out. Almost uncovered. Maybe uncovered, but they laugh it off or throw down some ruse. Hell, I’d be up for a Sith sacrifice to preserve the secret. Would’ve been something.
   Darth Carbonara was awesome. Using those funky moon boots to walk up the walls of the doomed space station as it fell from orbit, I thought she’d jump to the Jedi ship at the last second.
   But leaping into space and taking her secret lightsabre with her, burning up in the atmosphere, was a legendary sacrifice.
   Cue twenty YouTube videos on how Darth Carbonara survived the freefall using her Sith Skillz, based on the type of lightsabre she wielded and a half-remembered bit of advice on attuning to your surroundings she picked up from the deathbed of her old master.
   Instead, we had this series with no content. If you liked the show, you liked the show. Not my business.
   Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
   Spoiler. It was really sad when Jedi #4 and Jedi #5 died to preserve the integrity of admittedly shaky STAR WARS lore. Maybe they were Jedi #5 and Jedi #6. Let’s not trivialise that. Just as sad, really. Whoever they were.
   #TRULYMISSED.
   #GONEBUTNOTFORGOTTEN.
   #TOTALLYFORGOTTEN.
   #IFNOTICEDATALL.
   #SADFACE.
   #SUPPORTTHECHANNEL.
   #BUYMEACOFFEE.
   #UTINNI!
   Here’s the basic tale. Jedi are being hunted. The trailer tells us so. This is a problem with STAR WARS: dialogue is often indirect. The passive statement tells you the Jedi are being hunted. An active statement comes across as dramatic. Someone is hunting Jedi. Hell, now I am interested in someone hunting these Jedi.
   It turns out there are these two sisters. Identical twins, by the look of them. One grows her hair longer, we’ll say. She has a cult tattoo, as well. Covered by her longer hair. Cults feature heavily in the story.
   I feel remiss in not having mentioned Basil the Space Beaver. He’s a merchandising gimmick.
   Once upon a time, on a planet far away, several years ago, there was a cult. That cult was steeped in the lore of the Dark Side of the Force. This is the magical mystical religious scientific stuff that gives Jedi and Sith access to mad funky space powers.
   Too lazy to pick up that coffee cup from across the room? Use the force and levitate the damned drink to you. Communicate across space using telepathic interplanetary Skype calls. And so on.
   Right now, the story is about someone who wants revenge against a particular group of Jedi over an incident that happened sixteen years before. So, in the flashback scenes I guess we’re 116 years before STAR WARS.
   Yikes.
   We’ll get there. Basically, the Jedi turned up years ago and mishandled a mission to recruit two young girls who were very strong with the Force. One twin sister died. For reasons of drama and action, we learn both sisters survived.
   Cue Darth Vader muttering about a twin sister. On second thought, nah, forget that.
   The “dead” sister went off to train with a Sith Dude. And the living sister went to train with the Jedi. It didn’t work out at Jedi HQ. She left the Jedi to become a member of some kind of galactic repair team. Your spaceship is still under warranty and she, Osha, turns up to fix the broken thing.
   Osha has a cute robot that’s a merchandising opporchancity.
   Someone is going around flat-out murdering Jedi fools. She looks like Osha. Therefore, she is Osha. It isn’t long before the Galactic Cops go after Osha. But there must be a better explanation for this. Surely Osha’s Evil Twin™ is still alive and she’s the killer…
   Come on. That’s too obvious. Osha must be the killer. Take her in for questioning.
   I should introduce a spoiler for The Matrix…
   There’s only one Matrix movie. Thank me later. Second and third spoons need not apply. There sure as fuck isn’t a fourth one. Spoiler alert. In The Matrix, Trinity – actress Carrie-Anne Moss – gets into a bonkers fight right there at the start of the movie. She’s trapped in a room.
   Then she’s off and running. She is up against supervillainous agents: Men in Black™. Dramatic shit. She hurtles herself across the rooftops...only to face what looks like certain death.
   EXCEPT. That’s part of the plot. To understand what The Matrix is you really just have to see it for yourself. Or watch videos online, explaining it, I guess.
   Now. Imagine you want to start THE ACOLYTE on a high. Carrie-Anne Moss gets herself into this Trinity-style fight. It’s Carrie-Anne Moss. With a fucking lightsabre. Well, hell, Jeeves, sign me up to that shit.
   And now imagine the start of The Matrix, but Trinity doesn’t make it out of the room alive. Bummer. That’s what we are treated to. And you can hear the committee it took to make this TV show squealing into their ersatz coffees…
   That means, right from the start, no one is safe.
   NO ONE IS SAFE. They tell us that in the fucking trailer. I know no one is safe. Anyone who catches a glimpse of the Sith must die. Of all the stories to go with, you went with a severely limiting tale.
   You gave us Carrie-Anne Moss for a fight knowingly referencing The Matrix, and she dies? This show cost a fortune. You couldn’t pay her for more than that?! Spoiler alert for THE ACOLYTE.
   There’s a whole thing about flashbacks. We’ll be seeing more of Carrie-Anne Moss later in the show and earlier in the timeline. More flashbacks. Too many flashbacks. In one case the flashback-too-far, what else to call it, serves as an extended recap of previous episodes for people who have the attention-span of no attention-span.
   We view what should be a great set-up. Someone is hunting Jedi. So we’ll bring in a character who follows the trail. The good sister. Osha. Your sister is hunting Jedi. It’s revenge for how you were all treated sixteen years ago on that far-off planet with the pretty tree.
   There’s a planet with a pretty tree.
   We see subtitles telling us the names of these planets. Unless you are on an UNKNOWN WORLD. If it’s an unknown world, how did anyone know to go there, or give it a subtitle? Well, the world was so unknown that they didn’t know it was an unknown world: kinda sorta blundered across it. But the subtitle droid stepped in and plastered letters across the screen.
   The planetary subtitles are never explained. Do they have to be? No. But they are bound to be used in YouTube videos telling you why every dead character in STAR WARS secretly survived to come back as a Jedi/Sith or the Bendy Jesuit from the DUNE movies.

KID VADER: I hate sand.

Osha should be the ideal candidate to lead the team in search of Mae, her twin sister. Or I should say “twin” sister. Maybe I should say “twin sister” instead. What would be better than having Osha leading the charge against evil forces?
   Oh, I don’t know. Maybe skip this storyline and show elements of the Republic going after smugglers and scoundrels and rascals, and the like. Show that there are evil factions operating from the shadows, as a precursor to the Empire that’s on the way. Robot armies. Early clone technology. Space werewolves. Hell, at this point I’d accept FINDING SPACE NEMO.
   STAR WARS is A Disney property. I thought we’d be in for an identity switch along the lines of FREAKY FRIDAY. Instead, another Disney production loomed into view: THE PARENT TRAP.
   Fuck, you’d get more mileage out of TWINS OF EVIL, and that’s a Hammer movie about identical twins. One’s a vampire. The other isn’t. Yes, it’s absolute nonsense.
   But you’d be better spending your cinematic time in the company of Jodie Foster on a Friday, Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills trapping some parents, or the Collinson sisters maybe kinda sorta being evil twins, as you’d expect from their movie’s title…
   The big problem with THE ACOLYTE is the reluctance of the twin characters to get involved. If only at least one of them went off on a damn-fool idealistic crusade…
   Your character can refuse the mission at the start. In the first (fourth) STAR WARS film, Luke Skywalker is interested in the idea of taking action. But when he’s presented the choice, he turns that offer down. Then the plot gets in his way and he’s all fired up for adventure. He goes off to the wars out there in the stars.
   But THE ACOLYTE…gives us identical characters who don’t want to travel the path on offer. Spoiler alert. The good one is tempted to the bad path and the bad one is tempted to the good path.
   You see the obvious identity-switch coming from light years away. It ain’t no spoiler. There’s a whole cast of characters, but I’m trying to keep this blog post down in size. Something below the length of a Space Slug.
   Yes, the Jedi are Space Cops. And they have a Space Cop Cadet along for the ride. She’s all about restoring public order and arresting people and clapping cuffs on wrists and taking names.
   On the way to grandmother’s house in the woods, she glimpses a Sith. We’re going to need a bigger spoiler. I should say something about Obvious Bad Guy. How does that go? Obvious Bad Guy is Obvious. What do you call a Plot Twist that runs in a straight line? You don’t call it a fucking Plot Twist, that’s for sure.
   And I have to reference Admiral Ackbar. This fish guy turns up for the defeat of the Empire at the end of the main saga. When not realising it’s a trap or concentrating all firepower on that Super Star Destroyer, he’s a pretty chill dude. A late arrival to the movies, he’s there at the end and that counts for a lot.
   Except…the saga goes on for a few more movies beyond the end. He’s there once more, out of retirement, I guess, for one last hurrah against a new generation of villains.
   Admiral Ackbar dies so fast that you blink and miss it. His death might as well be off-screen for all the difference this makes. There then follows a tragic announcement that he’s gone.
   Not dead. Gone. To the shops, perhaps, for…whatever intergalactic fish guys go shopping for. A space vape. I dunno. Anyway. To casually dismiss a character in an off-screen death, or near as damn it, is to Admiral Ackbar someone.
  With this in mind, I’ll turn to the Wookiee Jedi. Holy flying fuckballs, there’s a Wookiee Jedi. And the Sith Chippendale is sure to hunt him down. This is going to be fucking awesome.
   Wookiee is hiding out in the woods, in his fucking element, while the villain closes in, all Sithed up with no place to go. The clash is going to be absolutely fucking awesome. You’ll see a Wookiee Jedi go full-on prime-fucking-eval on this Sith Bastard and you…
   You fucking wha?!
   Wha?
   Seriously. Wha the fu?
   Did the story just…Admiral Ackbar the Wookiee fucking Jedi?!
   What’s the point? The point is the point of a lightsabre that slashed the Wookiee while he was sitting in his chair. Outstanding action scene of the decade goes to…well, not to that fight, obviously. Off-screen bullshit.
   There’s a lot of cape-flapping, key-jangling, lightsabre-ism, and the truly awful resurrection/reassembly of lines from better STAR WARS products. Ooh, the character said the thing. Wait, saying the thing in that context is absurd. Don’t worry. Another thing will come along shortly, and someone will say that.
   (No, I am not touching that fucking abysmal ALIEN movie, Crapulous, and its recycled mangled characters and recycled mangled lines. Get away from the franchise, you bitch. I prefer the term artificial sequel, myself.)
   Money? I was stunned to learn the average cost of an episode was almost $29 million dollars. And I struggle to see where the money went on the television screen. The huge event in this show is the arrival of the Jedi chorus line in the woods. Need to talk to that Wookiee.   Oh, too late. Killed off-screen in your chair, watching the Twi’lek formation swimming event on the Galactic Olympics. Farewell, Wookiee Jedi. You will be remembered. Who the fuck am I kidding? His name was…
   Toast.
   Everyone is sad. Then the Sith Dudebroguy turns up. Masked, of course. He looks like a serial killer from a slasher movie. Then he sparks up his red lightsabre and the battle is on.
   He’s there to kill all of the Jedi. Any of these Jedi could remember, from training, that the Sith used to be around back in the day and they had red lightsabres. So the Sith are back in town. Except, in the woods.
   Which means…
   Everyone who fights in the woods must die. They can’t report to Jedi HQ that the Sith are back in town, the Sith are back in town. Shout out to Darth Lynott for the musical reference.
   I don’t want to dwell on the cost of an episode and a bunch of unknown Jedi weaving in and out of the woods…but they’d have achieved the same effect filming in a park at night, waving neon tubes around.
   One by one, and sometimes two by two, the Jedi fall to the Sith. And this works. So keep doing this. Wipe out all those who know. You’ve destroyed any hope of suspense, but, hey, you have one job in telling this story. Everyone who realises the bad guy has a red lightsabre…everyone dies.
   What about Space Cop Cadet Blondie? They wouldn’t dare kill off the blonde…if you believe that, I have a Hitchcock movie to sell you.
   After much faffery, we follow Lone Jedi Dude from the trailer, back on the ship and heading off to fix things. And the writing comes in and smacks the story up the side of its fool head. I hate it when the writing comes in and does that to a tale.
   Sadly, the interplanetary telephone isn’t working. It can’t work. Mustn’t work. If a Jedi survives the slaughter, which he does, then he can’t fly back to HQ or even phone home like Spielberg’s Extra-Plastic-Terrestrial.
   You see how tied to the concept the whole narrative is. No deviation. Can’t avoid it, swerve, stumble over, or dodge. The Jedi Team died a fucking death. Leaving this guy to inevitably go up against the Sith Dude once more…and die in the process...later.
   For a whole bunch of characters set on running away, they spend an awful lot of time stopping in the middle of a chase. It’s a thing. A whole thing. But I never got around to the music…
   Heavy spoiler. Come on, you’ve seen clips on the internet. Is there a place for songs in STAR WARS movies or TV shows? Yes. There are musical numbers. Aliens playing in the cantina band back in episode…four. And Jabba’s Palace hosts a musical number in episode…six.
   Is there a place for musical numbers in AGATHA ALL ALONG…yes. That works. It’s riffing off The Wizard of Oz musical. But the musical bit in this STAR WARS show just reinforced the cult theme. You see, kids, the Jedi and the Sith are all about recruiting powerful youngsters to their respective causes. And that narrative paints all sides as horrible.
   The grand notion of a flawed yet benevolent Republic, with its ancient order of magical guardians, the Jedi, is shot down in flames, painting the Jedi as little more than a step removed from being child-enslavers. Or worse.
   Yep. That’s the heavy hint in the narrative.
   Remember this, if nothing else. No one killed STAR WARS. It is still there, on my shelf, ready to watch whenever I feel like it. Even if Disney takes it off the streaming service for eternity.
   I didn’t make it past the first episode of that Willow TV show. And it is gone. Show needed a sense of urgency. More urgent than the one Disney provided. The original movie shares a lot of midichlorians DNA with STAR WARS.
   Plucky adventurers. Mad characters. Encroaching evil. Not a Darth Vader character, honest, guv. And not an Evil Royal behind it all. Madmartigan isn’t Han Solo and he doesn’t fall in love with the princess who happens to be the daughter of the evil one.
   So that’s okay, then. No, the show wasn’t urgent enough. But to kill it off by removing it from the streaming service. Now I know who really fired that shot at the start of Bambi.
   Spoiler alert for Bambi and Finding Nemo. There will be blood. Anyway, look at that interesting thing over there…
   I don’t want to take this over ten pages, so let’s skip to the very end. Ultimately, why can’t we all just get along? There are Sith to fight, that’s why. We reach a point at which all of the Jedi who go up against the Sith…they are taken care of.
   Yes, they went to live on a nice moisture farm in the country. It’s too far to visit, out there by the Dune Sea. But Uncle Owen, the farmer, writes regularly to say everything is going to be okay. We’re all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?
   No, I didn’t mention the Jedi woman with the green skin and the laser-whip. Indiana Jones in Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. Turns out, she whipped the Sith Dudester when he was young, and left scars on his back. And she puts the whole mystery together like an episode of MURDER SHE WROTE on fucking steroids.
   There’s a heavy reference to shifting the Balance of the Force. We didn’t need that, or the idea that anyone else could be a pupil of mine, before he turned to evil. Sure, strip-mine scripts that are set in the future if it makes your typing sessions easier on the fingers. Understand, though, that I will hunt down the people who taught you how to read and write.
   But the context, mutter-mumble. Here is the green Jedi, who had an evil pupil thought dead. She discovers that her pupil is alive. He has to be Sith. So, remember, you have one job. Every Jedi who learns of the Sith must die, to preserve the fucking story.
   Instead, she lives, and she takes her peculiar problem to the head of the Jedi order…Yoda. We see a glimpse of Yoda here, and more of Yoda in later historical documentaries.
   That’s it, though, right there. Fucked up beyond all recognition. You did what you set out to do. Introduce Sith to Jedi for a lively session at the dance in the old barn. And that would have worked, if you’d killed all the Jedi who were up dancing.
   No. You had to go and do that bit at the end, where the green Jedi goes to reveal all to another green Jedi. And I have few words left, beyond raw expletives, at this point.
   Update. I should’ve said the Wookiee had a fight in a flashback, but the damage was done. He couldn’t die in the flashback. Just in the here and now, in a chair, watching synchronised Twi’leks aim for gold in the Space Olympics.
   Oh, and a character showed up, skulking in a cave. It was Gollum, looking for the One True Ring. But it fell through the TV cracks into another show that caused J.R.R. Tolkien’s rotating body to give off a high-pitched whine that fells birds on the wing to a distance of five miles out.
   THE ACOLYTE bows out disgracefully by plundering a scene from the end of another STAR WARS property, giving us the oddball hope that setting this show up for a sequel automatically killed off any chance of making a sequel.
   As for finding faults in ROGUE ONE, here’s a classic: they had Billie Lourd right there. Should have hired her to dress up as her mother instead of giving us CGI Carrie Fisher. If you haven’t seen ROGUE ONE, that’s a spoiler. I haven’t ruined it for you…merely prepared you for that moment.
   With the right hair, makeup, and costume, Billie Lourd would have served as younger stand-in for her mother long enough to make the scene work. Carrie Fisher looked like Debbie Reynolds and Billie Lourd resembles both of them. Why head down the Uncanny Valley™ of face replacement for so short a scene?
   Luckily, I am not in charge of making STAR WARS. Unluckily, it appears no one is. But that’s okay. No one killed STAR WARS. Right there, on my shelf, any old time I want to watch it. Don’t give in to hate. But, also, you don’t have to like sub-standard fiction.

BUYING COMIC BOOKS ALREADY ON MY SHELVES: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Read what’s in front of you. It’s a hell of a lot easier. Easier than what? It’s far easier than climbing into the loft and moving crates of comic books around to get at the stories you hunted for. This is a problem with comic books…
   By the time you discover a story, take interest in a tale, you see the saga in question was released over twelve issues…no problem…back in the Early Jurassic. Ah. Some problem. If this is a cult comic book and not a popular mainstream one, good luck finding issue #blah of Too Much Tea Man™.
   He’s never appeared in a collected edition. The notorious issue #blah, coming between #5 and #8 in the series was a double-length comic with a fucked-up printing of dozens instead of more than dozens: a sad state of affairs, given the death of a major character in that issue.
   The company sent me 23 copies by mistake, if anyone is interested.
   I found it easier reading those rival superhero stories about Too Much Coffee Man™. By coincidence, it’s quite hard to get hold of issues #6 and #7 in that series.
   Time passed. The Jurassic is no more. We are floundering in the Digital Age, now. And yet, we’ve discovered a way to farm trees more responsibly. Physical products are still a thing. So there are more collected editions out there than you can shake a NO-PRIZE at.
   Archival copies. Reprints. Restorations. Anthologies. Super collections. Omnibus editions are omnibus editions for a reason: you need a horse-drawn double-decker bus to cart them around in.
   I decided I had enough spare shelving to store chunky versions of classic stories on. Stories that, for the most part, I’ve already read. Some of the omnibus editions on my hit-list contain comic book works I haven’t read. There’ll be a story segment before the tale I’ve tackled and another leading away…
   This is the episodic nature of comics. What does my spree of purchases lead to? Two things spring to mind. In several cases I am buying stories reprinted in a much larger format. Also, with duplication…what plans do I have for the material already on my shelves?
   The larger format means I don’t take smaller faded stories away from my bookcases and slide massive restored tales into position in place of the same old material. I can’t. There’s a fear that a few of these books are going to be too deep to fit even the deepest bookcase.
   I can, and do, restructure bookshelves when reorganising after a buying-spree. All the shorter books cram in there under a low ceiling. And I make a new roof for the taller books that land on my doorstep. This is the boon of adjustable shelves.
   But books that jut way out off the bookshelf are a problem whether down next to the floor or up nearer my passing face. I will now briefly pause this blog in aid of a rapid study of the premises. Books as hazards. Let me see… 

*

Cracking an ankle on a low-flying hardback book or accidentally brushing your teeth off the spine of a novel at high altitude…these whimsical pursuits are not for me. Or you. My immediate problem was the hallway leading to the books.
   One day, I’ll clear that hall. And, on that day, I’ll fill it up with more stuff that must be moved around, made ready for recycling, or just plain dumped. It’s classed as moderately difficult terrain today. Passable with a low-level dose of mountaineering prowess. Grade two on the Alpine Indoor Exercise Evaluation chart. Let’s leave it at that.
   A check of the shelves spread across the upper level of the house tells me…I have a lot of shelves…tells me that I own hardly any tomes, volumes, grimoires, codices, palimpsests, folios, or plain old books that jut out far enough to cause hazard to life and limb.
   Hardly any.
   These books do exist. But they exist around the corner, out of sight if not out of mind, and I must advance forward to access the mighty tomes. I can’t physically walk past from left to right or right to left. Yes, I double-checked.
   So. I can’t trip up or take an unseen swipe to the head from the side. But this may all change with the arrival of massive archival volumes of comic books. Massive? Bigger than the usual collections.

*

I leaned to my right to inspect a bookcase already frothing with comic book BRICKS. Call it research. These omnibus editions. What to say of those?
   They are tall, some, and wide of shoulder, others, but no comic omnibus there threatens to trip me up as I head to bed. Luckily, if I did trip…I’d land on soft covers. Unless returning from that direction…which is always a risk as I need to head yon way if I want to access the door.
   Pesky considerations of visits to the bathroom and kitchen and the outside world aside, I think I am doing quite well on the book front. Or…I’ll do quite well until the volumes of mass collection arrive.
   Then, I think I’ve had it. The only thing that’ll save me is an empty bookshelf that I can’t walk past, left to right and back again. Luckily, I have a spare waiting in just the right place. But now I must face another consideration.
   Not the old material. The duplicate stuff. If I can’t give the old stuff to friends, I can hand the comic books to charity. That is easy enough to take care of. No. There’s the impractical aspect to the practical business of consuming large tomes.
   Yes. The other problem arises. Where to read mighty books? There’s just enough lack of space here, at the computer, to rule out the so-called space here at the computer. So it’ll have to be the bed. Never read books on the stairs. That’s a top tip.
   And never read books at the top of the stairs. That’s an even topper tip.
   Will the new arrivals fit in? It’s not the size of them, but the sheer bulk. When I think of the books in my library, I tend to think of them in terms of tonnage. How high is the tonnage? To that, we must add the weight of the shelves.
   Yes, I could buy the comic books digitally. Stan Lee was very positive about digital comic books.

The experience of reading a printed comic book will never change, but now, thanks to the digital age, there are many different ways to enjoy the same story.

    And I choose…the physical copy. When in doubt, choose violence. It’s better than choosing more doubt. But I chose book violence long ago. Few things are more dangerous inside a household. Gas. Electricity. Fire. Asbestos.
   Okay, loads of dangerous things are more dangerous than books are. What are you doing with asbestos in your house? Get that fixed.
   Dangerous pursuits? Not checking the position of a switch when changing a bulb. Never get dressed in a hurry at the top of the stairs. That’s the place the irate husband is heading for, after all.
   I’ve learned the hard way that books, like guns, are heavier than they look. The worst culprits have glossy covers. They slip and slide and wriggle, trying to escape from the tidy stack in your hands. Art books are often built for reading on large tables. Those are the awkward books, designed for the size of a hand humanity has yet to evolve. Dust jackets don’t help out.
   He somehow garrotted himself with the topmost book in the stack being transferred from library one to library two, officer…yes, we think the ultra-glossy cover contributed to the disaster…
   Naturally. Being ambushed at the ankles by an oversized tome starring the prints of Hokusai...was also a factor. Strange to think the only book he held firm in his grasp was YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE. Irony.
   I’ll borrow from Krivitsky. 

Any fool can commit a murder, but it takes an artist to commit a good natural death.

    My death at the hands of many weighty tomes…could only go down on the legal paperwork as natural. I see a point in my future, not too distant, when the books arrive. You try to stagger the deliveries, but I suspect they’ll arrive in a great trembling rush of air preceding the cataclysmic depositing of the unearthly stack upon my doorstep.
   And then, I’ll most likely cop it as I try to fill the available shelving. I say I have a spare shelf available, yet I could use the whole bookcase at a pinch. I’m buying books I’ve (mostly) read. Purchasing outsized duplicates and handing smaller volumes to charity.
   I’m in a recycling mood. And I just want one convenient volume to read, instead of thumbing through dusty comic book issues or battered trade paperbacks. No, I don’t collect comics. I just happen to read them. Once I’ve read them, they are still around to read again. I don’t treat them as disposable and I don’t leave them sealed, unread, and yet strangely revered.
   If you collect comics and don’t read them, that is up to you. It’s not something I understand. But it is difficult to condemn you. We both have book collections measured in terms of tonnage. The big question is…will the old books that leave the house weigh more than the fresh duplicates coming in?
   I try not to think about this. Instead, I listen for the creaking of overburdened floorboards.

SCRIPTING A DUNGEONS & DRAGONS™ VIDEO: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

(This is the full version of the blog post. When recording for video, I had to get used to noise suppression all over again. The software cut a few opening syllables from several sentences. I went in and edited the audio rather than doing a second take.)

Usually, when it comes to making YouTube videos on roleplaying games and boardgames…
   Wait a bit. You can’t hashtag board games. That’s where the one-word spelling comes in, and I am stuck with its utility now…
   When planning videos, I’ll have an idea for a Dungeons & Dragons™ explanation or something along those lines. This needs props. I film those, with one eye on the general idea. Okay, I’ll talk about this game, that publisher, and those hobby accessories.
   If I have those hobby accessories, I’d damn-well better film them. And if I don’t have the items to hand, I’ll film around them. This is how JAWS came to be a much better movie than originally envisioned. If you can’t film the broken rubber shark, film around it. Show the shark’s viewpoint, not the malfunctioning shark prop’s flippery-floppery. Rely on John Williams. He’ll see you through.
   Repeat as needed.
   For assorted copyright reasons, I won’t be relying on the score from JAWS in my video. Spielberg maintained Robert Shaw’s sobriety throughout the production by running the actor through a game of Dungeons & Dragons™. Shaw insisted on playing a cleric called Mr Blue.
   John Milius dropped in as Bear “The Bear” Bear. He and Shaw dangled Wizardy Chappie over the cliff until he revealed the secret password.
   Wizardy Chappie was played by Richard Dreyfuss, who then lied about the password anyway. This is why JAWS was a nightmare to film. And that…is a roleplaying fact.
   Lights, camera, action. Place a prop. Film it. Replace it. Film the next one. Switch camera angles. Leave a camera in shot for the sheer hell of it. Film the next thing. Usually I’ll be listening to someone else’s roleplaying video in the background as I film mine. How many shots will I manage in an hour? Enough.
   I drop those snippets into the editing software and strip out the random audio. Yes, I may move the order of shots around quite a lot. And I might have to ditch footage. Shoot things again. Or shoot a new item that I should have included in the first place.
   With the order of shots arranged around an idea, I write up a script. Shots lend themselves to talking-points. That’s why I film them in the first place. The script is done. I record the audio. That audio is edited. I throw the audio track onto the video compilation.
   That’s when the real editing begins. I extend the length of a clip or shorten it, in keeping with the narrative pace. After that, I look at the visual gaps I’ve left behind. Those must be filled. I’ll use clips from previous videos. Or I’ll film more new stuff. Maybe I’ll repeat a clip several times for effect. Gradually, I fill those pesky gaps.
   I might cut more audio out. You realise you’ve made a point that is…bullshit. It’s a technical term. There’s a statement based on shifting sands at high tide. You misread a source. Or you contradict yourself with wild abandon. The primal audio flies in the face of the civilised video evidence, and you retreat to higher ground.
   Usually, not always, I make time to throw in a roleplaying fact. These roleplaying facts are utterly fake. You’ll know this by the phrasing. And that…is a roleplaying fact.
   Or a boardgaming fact, depending on the topic. Rarely, I find that I don’t use the phrasing at all. It’s a thing on the channel, but it doesn’t define the channel. Dry understated caustic humour? That’s just the default setting in Scotland.
   For this entry, I decided to script a blog post and make it the audio for a YouTube video as well. Some people use the term DungeonTube. I asked Doctor Google about this and encountered requests for directions to The London Dungeon by means of underground rail.
   There was also pornography.
   DungeonTubers, apparently, cover topics in dungeons: specifically, that’s Dungeons & Dragons™. Generally, there is also pornography.
   Already, the wearisome term DungeonTuber has gained a pejorative aspect. Whether they’ve accepted corporate cash to shill out products or not, some roleplaying game hobbyist YouTubers…
   Damn it, I half-typed Hobbit YouTubers and I’ve lost the train of thought. It’s underground, and heading in the direction of a London-based dungeon. Hobbit YouTubers. I’m not here to disparage the height of certain or even uncertain YouTubers.
   My point, misplaced in the mists of typing, is that DungeonTuber is heading for a change in meaning. A YouTuber who makes videos about dungeons, dragons, dungeoneering, delving, and the organised looting of ancient temples…could be described as a DungeonTuber.
   Potatoes in The Temple of Elemental Evil are far too easy to describe as dungeon…tubers.
   Anyway. Point. The term is shifting to occupying the space of little more than an insult for house shills, real or imagined. YouTuber accepts money for plugging dungeon products. Oh, a DungeonTuber.
   I take in a whole load of YouTube videos on roleplaying games. There isn’t one channel presenter I can think of who uses the label. We’ll go out on a limb here. I think that’s unlikely to change.
   You always go out on stout limbs. And always fall from shaky ones.
   Speaking of presenters. Yes, we all have limited time on our hands…and around our elbows, I guess. So while recording videos, I listen to YouTube videos in the background. These are accidentally recorded onto my video clips. That’s why I strip out the audio.
   To save even more time, I listen to virtually all YouTube videos at double speed. If you start off with a fast high-pitched voice, I might listen to you at 1.5 speed – otherwise only bats can hear you.
   Why don’t I watch them? Many dungeoneering and dragon-ish YouTubers are talking heads. Low on visuals. I don’t need to see them to hear their points.
   This channel is the other way around. You see the props, miniatures, maps, and so on. My channel was based on watching a particular type of video. I won’t name the exact one. A quick check shows the one I’m thinking of has been taken down since.
   With one eye on making boardgame videos, I watched a video that was all about seeing players having fun. You couldn’t make out the board at all. The camera might as well have been in a field next to the venue.
   I went there to see the board. And, barely seeing the board, I decided I couldn’t make videos of that nature. If I want to illustrate a point in a discussion on this channel, I’ll throw in an illustration if I have to. Here’s the board. The bar is pretty low, but I still vaulted it.
   Now that I’m typing this up, I know I’ll fill in gaps in the video editing with previous shots of game boards. If I show you a game in a video, I could show the box, the game, the components, a few third-party accessories that make gameplay flow more smoothly…
   But at least I will show you the game, and not a distant shot of the house it was played in. From space.
   What else to say of making videos about boardgames and roleplaying games? I used to make videos weekly. Life got in the way. Now I make them when I feel like making them. Often, I feel like making them and life gets in the way.
   The one thing I haven’t been able to shake is cardboard damage. I open and close many a box here at this table when the cameras aren’t rolling. Preparation isn’t everything, but it’s where I start and so should you.
   As a result of all this cardboard activity, tiny particles drift across the black felt cloth. These bits and pieces build over the course of a few seconds into unacceptable levels of snowfall. I wave a magic wand and vacuum the hell out of the surface to make the gaming table semi-presentable.
   Another feature, and this may not be for you, is the unconnected background. I’ll populate the background with items from a different video. Either I use stuff I filmed last time or things I’ll put in videos next time around.
   This is a working game table. Often, I’ll leave the wooden organisers in the background with coins on prominent display. Those are signs of a Buffy game rumbling along. Buffy is a roleplaying game that uses drama points to generate twists in the plot or handy bouts of healing in the heat of battle.
   And I don’t like to disturb the display. Mustn’t knock the coins down into the abyssal depths at the back of the table. Players need drama. So the roleplaying display features in the background.
   No virtual tabletop for me. I run the table from here, in what Mary Shelley refers to as the deserts of Scotland. My players are scattered across the Cosmos. We may be in several countries, operating at different times, but we are united by different dice around the same table.
   And that really is a roleplaying fact. Here's the video.

RETURNING TO A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

This monthly blog post is very late in the day for many reasons. Squirrels. We’ll blame the squirrels. They can’t answer back. Shifty characters. Blame squirrels. That works out for all parties concerned. I was beyond busy in the first week of the month. Luckily, months have spare weeks built into them for safety’s sake.
   The plan, a week later? Blog about a truly atrocious movie. That occupied my thoughts in the second week of the month. Which movie? The film played dress-up, pretending to be the thing it so desperately wanted to be. No, I won’t trouble you by firing up the kinematograph here. Or anywhere.
   I realised, without setting anything down, that I’d go into hellish detail to write of the movie with anything approaching accuracy. Accuracy seemed important, at the time. I can’t imagine why, now. An opinion, peppered with facts, is still just an opinion. Manage your energy well.
   Would I really watch the damned thing again, taking notes as I suffered? No. I abandoned that plan and spent the energy on worthwhile viewing instead. This took me into the third week of the month, and a nefarious scheme to scribble about a truly boring television show.
   What was I thinking? Hell, what were they thinking?!
   Sadly, I worked up a few pages on that folly. I don’t always blog at least 1,500 words. On the other hand, I don’t always limit myself to around that figure. On this televisual opinion, I passed the 1,500-mark and then stopped dead.
   Damn. I’d truly go over the show once more, to confirm a few things, right? Unavoidable? Was this worth the effort? I concluded the endeavour was not worth my continued effort. Task? Avoidable. That’s how I shattered week three on the blogging front.
   And so…
   I steered myself in the direction of mentioning something I liked. Why not blog about Ursula and her creation of Earthsea? Okay. Sounds good. Do it. I turned to my copy of…
   But wait a bit. There is no copy of…
   Check again. I’ve read the books. Have I read the books? There aren’t any here. I borrowed them.
   They were novels. Weren’t they? I had to confirm a vague something or other. Research into Earthsea was a lot easier on me than research into a blasted heath of a movie or a nothingness of a TV show that I hoped would start even as the end credits rolled.
   Ursula K. Le Guin.
   What to say of her? If born the daughter of Henry the Eighth, Ursula would’ve been listed on the announcements as a prince. And no one would go against Ursula for referring to herself as a most excellent prince.
   BILL: Dude, Ursula is a most excellent prince.
   TED: Bodacious.
   But Prince Ursula wouldn’t have given us Atuan or Earthsea or any of her other creations back in the Tudor day. She’d have busied herself with seeing off the Spanish and having people executed.
   We don’t know how many people Ursula executed. But we do know she wasn’t Henry’s daughter. And she wrote stories. Lived them. Breathed them in. Exhaled them on blank pages, magically filling with words as her lungs moved…
   There’s no one quite like Ursula. This is a shame. Her great talent lay in absolutely failing to stay young. I recommend this course of action. Fail at this task for as long as is inhumanly possible. Ursula was slightly ahead of the game. She managed to die before Covid went chasing everyone.
   Timing isn’t everything, but it’s close enough for government work. And a damned sight cheaper. If Ursula survived to see Covid plunder the world in a way no Viking ever could, she’d likely have kept a short diary of her approaching demise.
   If a hacking cough of a death chases me, I like to think of my famous last words as Famous last words.
   She wrote many things. Check them out. I went to check them out and checked again. Must have borrowed them. They were novels, right? No. Ursula produced short stories in the later part of the cycle. The books about Earthsea are divided into two trilogies. Looks as though I only tackled four out of six volumes.
   I suspect a compilation tome was at work, there.
   Ursula walked the same school halls as P.K. Dick. He’s another writer I’ve read, and…no, he isn’t on my shelves. Speaking of him, I’ve seen my share of movie adaptations of his tales. If I misremember rightly, or wrongly, I’ve heard a radio adaptation, too.
   We don’t go near Ursula with talk of adaptations. She was raging at the decidedly bland TV desecration of her work. I left the keyboard behind to examine the fossilised relic of a trailer for said show.
   URSULA K. LE GUIN MARLON BRANDO: Look how they massacred my boy.
   The timing of the TV adaptation carried the stench of many a Tolkien cash-in. Well. Damn. The Lord of the Rings worked its magic at the box office, and a great darkness was rising in the land of adaptation.
   Speaking of Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising was adapted, rather atrociously, as a movie called The Seeker. This, too, followed in the wake of Tolkien’s movie success. A great blight fell upon popular culture as one century turned into another.
   I left the keyboard behind to examine the fossilised relic of a trailer for said film.
   SUSAN COOPER MARLON BRANDO: Look how they massacred my boy.
   Ursula’s books, and the Susan Cooper volume, didn’t see justice when turned into moving images. On the other hand, if you were Christopher Tolkien staring at Peter Jackson’s Mordor Tourist Board information films, you, too, would reach for a bottle of the Brando.
   CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN MARLON BRANDO: Look how they massacred my boy.
   The K. in Le Guin’s name is the same K. as in P.K. Dick’s: both stand for KETAMINE. In later life, they would frequent sewers converted to nightclubs under the rainy streets of a whore-ish Berlin. There, Dick would indulge in the drug. Le Guin generated the same level of outlandish storytelling without recourse to the horse tranquiliser.
   I am interrupted in my endeavours. Instead of being called from the tyranny of typing to accept a parcel of books, I am summoned to the news that my parcel of books will arrive at or around sunset tonight.
   It’s a gloomy summer’s day in the Grand Duchy of Scotlandia, and I suspect true sunset will arrive a shade early if the greying of the clouds intensifies. All clouds and no rain. Like waiting for a tooth to be pulled during an appendectomy.
   I’ve been interrupted by parcel news. The parcel will arrive in the next 31 minutes. It’s nice to be told this 29 minutes into the parcel delivery window. I must listen out for an ineffectual knock as I clatter away at the keyboard.
   As I typed that, I was interrupted by an ineffectual knock. The parcel, lurking on my doorstep, refused to be scanned by the delivery system. Ursula, making her presence known. I can’t believe it took seven e-mails to deliver that to me.
   The six books in the parcel are A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind.
   I could, churlishly, skip the first few and tackle the ones I haven’t read. No. I am here, in this blog post, to revisit Ursula’s work. This raises the question of stories you return to. Earthsea and Narnia, yes. Middle Earth, no. My preference.
   Narnia also benefited by and lost from the resurgence in Tolkien’s fortunes. I cast the weariest eye over the near-criminal output of Walden Media, with the pillaging of Jules Verne’s fiction coming in for a dastardly mention. Dastardly enough to be accompanied by a cartoon dog named Muttley.
   The best version of a writer’s story is almost always the writer’s story. Movies often compress the action. Occasionally, they flatten it. Would any production crew ever earn Ursula’s blessing? Or even go looking for it?
   Earning the original creator’s blessing does not guarantee a good movie or TV show. I am struggling to sear the trailers from my mind. Earthsea envisioned as a TV show comes across as a low-rent nod in the direction of a mighty princess forged in the heat of battle. Xena wore it better.
   And The Seeker is certainly a thing. The problem with adaptations is that they are adaptations. Here’s an enduring rule. If adaptations are bad, they do not destroy the original works. I can go to my shelves and read The Dark is Rising or…once the parcel arrives…any of Ursula’s stories concerned with magical island life, a school for wizards, and a maze.
   Ursula does amaze. To the people who say how can you read books we answer how can you NOT read books…
   That most excellent prince Ursula K. Le Guin is a writer who will get you reading. And keep you reading. Where’s the harm in that?
   Ursula is readable. This is a terrible crime against literature, I know. But the way was signposted long ago. If it’s good literature, it’s not science fiction/fantasy. They steal it in the night, while everyone is looking. Well, they will park under the lamp.

WHEN AMAZON KINDLE DIRECT PUBLISHING TRIES TO REMOVE YOUR BOOK: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

They came after me.
   Let me be clear about this. Amazon KDP didn’t try to remove my book. They simply eyeballed my book’s material during the standard publishing procedure. And they didn’t like what they saw. So they totally tried to remove my book.
   This is publishing death by algorithm. It is removal by default.
   I’d conducted one of my periodic reviews. My Kindle books house hyperlinks leading to the outside world. Occasionally, those links go bust. Either I remove the links or update to better ones. If you change a single thing or many things then you are republishing.
   My deal with my cover model, Totenbraut, included this gem: I’d provide links to her online presence. In the past, I offered multiple links. My recent review showed one link stopped working across several books. Time to update.
   I hired her again to provide a new cover for a book. An updated cover means republishing the whole thing, and submitting the work for review. You can’t update the cover by itself. It’s a fairly painless process, if damnably slow. I’d also need to update the link situation. Line your ducks in a row and then bomb the whole waddling crowd at once…
   One change or many changes, the arrival of the update e-mail is slooooooooooooooooow. So make many changes at once. Don’t change and republish, change and republish, change and republish, not for one book, all in the same day. Oh, the sun has set. When did that happen?
   This wasn’t about updating one book. I don’t leave any books behind. No. I check all the files, update what’s necessary, and republish everything on the list anyway. Whether Totenbraut is on the cover or not, whether some books need updated links or not, everything is checked and it’s all published again.
   Then the material sits in a folder that’s done. Latest book folder blah-de-blah, insert date here. This is a hell of a lot more convenient than the way I used to do things.
   (I knew what was updated based on whether or not the book file had a back-up file. Fiddly, and easy to miss in a sea of files. Therefore…)
   Your one-stop-shop really should be a one-stop-shop. Everything is updated. No book is left behind. Here are the latest copies. No quibbles.
   And so…
   Updating one book with a cover, and updating several books over a busted link, I reviewed the rest and found one thing that needed fixing across all books. Looks like I’ll be publishing all books all over again anyway, and with good reason. Time to update that folder in full.
   And then…
   I slogged through the fixes. Checked. Double-checked. Triple-checked. One by one, the books went from LIVE to LIVE plus a note. The note tells you the book is under review, and reviews could take up to 72 hours.
   This is an arcane process. You republish books one, two, and three…then see book three finish the marathon first. An e-mail eventually states your book is now live. Publishing order depends on the size of the book and the number of alterations. Also, the weather plays a part. And, possibly, chicken bones feature in the equation.
   One by one the books cleared the last hurdle, in no particular running-order. I missed an extra detail, and had to go in and publish one file again. That’s why you quadruple-check the stuff you triple-checked. This took eternity.
   My wayward nag passed the hurdle the second time. And then, out of a clear blue sky, thunderclouds formed. Oh no. One aircraft from the squadron hasn’t returned. Should be back by now. Everyone else landed and went off to the pub. Pilots. Roaring drunk, the lot of them. Thunderclouds formed.
   Not gradually. This was an instant thunderstorm. Dehydrated. Just add water. And maybe an algorithm. I wasn’t the only one conducting a review. Amazon reviews everything you put out there. And then clears it. That’s what Amazon does.
   Amazon cleared this particular book over three dozen times since I first published it. Going by the e-mail archive, that is. I updated or changed a load of links, many times. No drama. I even changed the file when their outdated format was replaced and no longer supported. If I added, subtracted, or altered material, I republished the book. And I never had a clearance problem publishing or republishing the text.
   Did you hear thunder? Must be an incoming e-mail from Darth Bezos… 

During our review, we found that the following book(s) appears to be a derivative work based on previously published content:

INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS. by RLL (AUTHOR)

 We need to confirm one of the following:

• All underlying content is in the public domain
• The underlying content is under copyright and you have the rights to use it

In order to publish the book(s), please take the appropriate action below within 5 days:

Option 1: Provide information for underlying public domain works
If your book(s) is based on a work(s) that is in the public domain, reply to this email and provide the following information for the public domain work(s):

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If your book(s) is based on a work(s) that is under copyright, reply to this email and provide us with documentation and/or verification showing you hold publishing rights.

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For more details about publishing public domain books, visit Help:
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I’d never received one of these Nastygrams™ before. Well. Fuck.
   Why is this message bad? REALLY BAD. WELL AND TRULY BAD. If you don’t comply then the book is gone, and, if you are a repeat offender, Amazon can shut down your entire account. You aren’t allowed to open another account to start all over again. No more publishing on Kindle for you.
   They put you up against the wall, offer you a last cigarette, and shoot you before the tobacco-related cancer kicks in.
   Worse than that, you can be banned on your first time out of the gate. You don’t even gain the luxury of being accused of repeat offending. Whether you are farm-fresh to the Mighty Amazon or you’ve been plying the trade routes for years…doesn’t matter. If this message lands on your doorstep, then it is – to use a highly technical term – some serious shit.
   Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
   It happened on a Friday, close to midnight. I read the message during a late check-in on e-mail. Midnight rolled around. I now had four days in which to deal with the problem, and not five.
   Weekend days. If I replied on Saturday, would I see any response before Monday? It’s careless to load a book into the system and then disappear for two weeks to the Bahamas without reading e-mail. So…never do that. You might return to a ban. Of everything you’ve ever published.
   I had to respond, or else. Amazon KDP didn’t try to remove my book. But they totally tried to remove my book. This is publishing death by algorithm – selecting my title seemingly at random. It is removal by default – if I don’t respond in the five four days left to me.
   What to do? Sieve. Sift through the corporate speech and note the important points. Sadly, the important points were generic. We think you messed up, but we aren’t going to tell you how. Why not? Software selected you. Congratulations. You’ve lost this lottery.
   Had I published material that was already in the public domain?
   No.
   Had I published material that wasn’t mine to publish?
   No.
   Did Amazon contact me in error?
   Yes.
   I had to respond within five four days and tell them so.
   What was evidence? I wrote the material. True. But that wasn’t evidence. They couldn’t accept this on my say-so.
   Now an affidavit from a thunderstorm, or a few words on oath from a heavy shower, would meet with all the attention they deserve.
   Well, what else could I offer? I turned to the interwebs to find out how other people dealt with this. Oh no…
   A few examples proved…less than helpful. Unhelpful. Okay, fucking useless. A scammer or two dropped hot truth bombshells on a crater-infested landscape. They’d been caught out trying to sell the Kindle version of snake-oil and Amazon insta-killed their bare arses – which, incidentally, they were all showing on the High Street. And here’s how to get around the problem…
   No fucking use to me.
   I stared up at the Sword of Bezoscles dangling over my head by an electronic thread. What to do? Write myself out of a hole, obviously. How to say what needed to be said? Swearing wouldn’t cut it. I could ask for further clarification first, instead of arguing my case.
   But why bother, if my response cut the argument off at the knees? Save a lot of pointless e-mail tennis, back, forth, swish, goal, no, it’s offside, wait, that’s not cricket. Without swearing. Swearing wouldn’t cut those knees. I had to base my reply on the facts. Facts I had to back up somehow.
   And no swearing. Also, swear ye not. Oh, and don’t fucking swear.
   I wanted to say What the fuck, Amazon?! without swearing. The Amazon e-mail accused me of ONE of two things. Either, reading between the railway lines, I was up to some sort of scam by publishing material in the public domain…or I was publishing material belonging to someone else without permission.
   What is the public domain? There you’ll find material that is out of copyright. Don’t confuse this term with the public arena. They are not the same thing. I have placed my blog post in the public arena. You can read this post online, very publicly.
   But I haven’t relinquished, re-assigned, or surrendered the copyright in this text. The blog post you are reading is © to me and it is not in the public domain. The copyright is mine. It hasn’t expired. Barring further changes in copyright law, it won’t expire until 70 years after my death. So, as I sit typing, I’m glad it hasn’t expired – this tells me I am still alive.
   Amazon believed I’d published my book…but it was old material by someone else and it was out of copyright. Maybe I was scamming people with that. And there are plenty of scams that tried their luck on Amazon Kindle, based on stuff that’s out of copyright.
   Option two…
   Amazon thought I’d published my book…but it was material belonging to someone else and still in copyright to…whoever. I know a few Romance Writers. They’ve told me the romance industry is full of that shit.
   Grab someone else’s book, slap a cover of a rippling male torso out there under a new title, and…get exposed by an entire internet of romance readers polishing their magnifying glasses and sharpening their kitchen knives.
   Hunky Detective Dude becomes Spunky Mountain Rescue Dude. True to form, the mountain guy spends much of the book investigating a murder. Like a detective. Chad Bradley becomes Brad Chadley, and no one notices. Right?
   Fucking wrong, you fuck-muppets. Why do you keep doing this? Evil romance writers, for frock’s sake. Romance writers. You were meant to provide hope in the world. Damn it, Darth Bodice-Ripper. You were the chosen one. Lady Lace-Gusset threw over Lord Chinstrap’s country estate for…Duke Brad-Chadley the Detectionist?! And his horse. Buick!
   Fuckwits.
   Anyway. Amazon needs to confirm one or the other.
   One. I have put out material that’s from some other century, this is not a scam, and the copyright expired so here’s all my working.
   The other. My book really is my book and I haven’t published anyone else’s work as my own without permission signed in blood.
   Either it’s in the public domain and I’ve followed the rules, so Amazon can fuck off, or it’s in copyright and the copyright is mine. And Amazon can fuck right off. I’m forced to explain myself without swearing.
   And so…
   My response is to deny the first point and move on to the second point. Easy. My book is my book. Or, no, let’s look at this in detail…

We need to confirm one of the following:

• All underlying content is in the public domain
• The underlying content is under copyright and you have the rights to use it

All underlying content is in the public domain? No. Job done. First point denied. No evidence. Just flat-out denial. Moving on to deal with…the underlying content is under copyright and I have the rights to use it. Yes, the work is copyright, and yes I have the rights. Job done, bitches. But how to prove that?
   I turn the cogwheels in my mind, trying to work out what tripped the sensors. There’s an obvious point. Let’s open at the start. 

During our review, we found that the following book(s) appears to be a derivative work based on previously published content:

Is this it? INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS is a collection of short stories. There’s an earlier article in there. And I incorporated blog posts into the text. Those blog posts told the story of building up to publishing on Amazon Kindle.
   I own the copyright in this blog, and in the article I wrote, so I am fine with work published previously elsewhere. Yes, the blog posts were previously published – by me. I own the paperwork on the paperwork. Did I fall foul of an automated process?
   Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
   I can publish collected articles in one volume. They are mine. No big deal. But there’s also Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing Select.
   If I enrol a book in that programme, I agree the material is exclusive to Amazon – and hasn’t been published elsewhere, not even on a blog, so help me, Bezos.
   Of the books I published, two, and only two, were outside the KDP Select programme. One contained an introduction taken from a blog post: that book was MIRA E. Eventually I kept the material inside the book, and deleted the blog post so I could transfer MIRA E. to KDP Select. Removing the blog entry from the public arena made MIRA E. available as exclusive under the Select contract.
   Now I only have one book outside KDP Select. INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS still has the blog posts inside. Those posts are still live on this blog. There shouldn’t be a problem here. The rights are mine.
   Along with all the rest of my books, I published this book again. There was a hyperlink I had to deal with. And that was about it for the text. No other great changes.
   Did I somehow accidentally enrol the book in KDP Select when I republished? If I did that, I’d be in violation of the exclusivity agreement, as the blog posts are still in the public arena. Amazon could have run an internet check on the text and found portions of the text online in my blog. And slapped me. However…
   You must actively enrol in the Select programme. It’s not automatic. You choose. I was sure I hadn’t fucked up on that score. (Spoiler for this story: I didn’t fuck up on that score.)
   Okay. I hadn’t breached a Select agreement – there was no Select agreement to breach. I didn’t select Select. Yes, I’d previously published the content elsewhere…but I didn’t breach Amazon guidelines. Also, it was my content. No exclusivity contract could mess this up for me – if I didn’t sign it. I didn’t sign it.
   What the fuck else could it be, then? Bearing in mind, they never told me in detail. Just said I’d done a no-no. Oh no I hadn’t. What if this is about the first point? The public domain stuff? Is it the title? It’s a jokey title. Like writing an Unauthorised Autobiography.
   Maybe the detectors at Kindle HQ picked up on incomplete and uncollected and tried to match them to public domain collections. Collected letters. Complete collected poems. Along those lines. Short works. This seemed the more likely case.
   OR. Someone put out a public domain anthology and added essays that are copyright to them. And my title triggered a more complex conflict in the Amazon searchlight.
   So have I stumbled over a mutant hybrid combination of point one AND point two, leading to a case of mistaken identity?
   (I’m often confused with the Venezuelan rocket scientist of the same name.)
   My book is electronically mistaken for a work in the public domain based on a similar title, but there’s also new copyright material in this other work and I’ve been labelled in breach of that as well? Amazon isn’t bolting an arm to a torso, in the style of Frankenstein, surely?
   No. It’s all bullshit. This isn’t about point one and point two merging on the slab, down in the lab, fuelled by mistaken identity, unidentified flying conspiracies, or too much/too little booze.
   Get into tiny detail, then. It can’t be a title thing. For a start, there is no copyright protection in the title of a book. (Though there are other protections and remedies available. I won’t go into the finer details here. This blog post is long enough as it is.) Did they think a title of mine was too close to a title by someone else? Well, they never told me. So I don’t know.
   My opening defence would be…there is no copyright protection in the title of a book. Also, I check titles on Amazon to see if someone else has written a book with the words I intend to use. That’s at the start of the story writing process, not left to the end of the publishing process.
   I am puzzled. What have I done? Or…
   Wait, no. What has Amazon done? Down the Kindle years, I’ve become aware of all sorts of scams on Amazon. They flare up, are spotted, and then they are squashed. Was I caught in a net cast for another fish? Did I walk into someone else’s surveillance operation?
   The net tightens. Well, it’s always tightening. Amazon upped (or downgraded) its game and now the devil take the hindmost. Did they use Artificial Intelligence to save on a thimble of perspiration? Maybe. Are we going to see more of this bullshit? If it saves money, and it does, then as sure as night follows day…yes.
   On the topic of Artificial Intelligence, as I went to republish these books I was asked if I’d used any Artificial Intelligence in the creation of my works. No. More galling than that, when I went to check on my potential Amazon ban, I was hit with an advert for making money on Amazon.
   And it came across as the scammiest Amazon advert I’d seen. This woman offered me the secret of using Amazon to make money. Eventually, she told me about Amazon publishing. And, hell, I didn’t even need to write the books myself. I could use Artificially Intelligent tools…
   The only artificially intelligent tools I had to deal with were the robotic ones on Amazon trying to remove my work on a digital fucking whim. Okay. So. Leaving much subtlety and nuance in copyright law aside for the sake of fucking brevity…
   (It’s a bit late for that.)
   The only thing that matters is this: my human response squelches Amazon’s robotic objection.
   No swearing. I swear mentally as I type. The best position to start from was the one they threw at me. If I received their complaint in error, I should say so. And I open right there.
   I believe I have been sent this message in error.
   No shit, Sherlock. But, luckily, I HAVE been sent this message in error…and so I immediately channel their response in that direction. I follow up with the original publication date. So they know it’s been published on Amazon for years with no problems. Until now. And I tell them the book is a collection of my own short stories. All true.
   But wait a bit. They want evidence. 

Examples of documentation we cannot accept include:
• A personal statement by you that you have the publishing rights
• A copyright application for which registration has not been confirmed
• Contracts that have not been signed by all parties

Basically, I am telling them I have the publishing rights. They can’t accept that as evidence. But it is worth telling them. Assert ownership over your material. I tell them I wrote the fucking stories without swearing at them.
   What’s this next piece of legal nonsense? They won’t accept…a copyright application for which the registration has not been confirmed. That’s American copyright law: a quaint notion Robert Louis Stevenson hoped they’d get around to some day.
   As Scottish as Stevenson was, I needn’t register my copyright anywhere. (Oh, services exist for that purpose. For a fee, of course.) My copyright exists in the work from the moment of its creation. However, there is a place to lodge your work: a library of record. So I fire that salvo at them. I tell them the work is lodged as a matter of record…
   This is a quick e-mail, fired off under the stress of that sword hanging o’er my head. I don’t provide documentary evidence. But I tell them plain. And I can back that with documentary evidence if I really have to.
   Even the blurb – the Amazon product description – tells readers this is a collection of my own work. Is that evidence? Add it to the pile. Can’t harm to put it in. Wouldn’t think of leaving it out. Assert your ownership of the material.
   Then I really get into the part they won’t accept as evidence.
   Listen, fuckers. My fucking book is mine to do with as I fucking please. You’ve never fucked with it before. Well now you fucked around and you fucking found out.
   All the fucking times I fucking republished the fucker with minor emendations, and you come to me now, like an ungrateful cunt in a Mafia movie on a wedding day, and you don’t like a minor fucking update to the opening fucking text?
   Not even part of the fucking story. The fucking preamble. Don’t shit down my fucking neck and tell me it’s raining chocolate. How much do you love your pet horse, Jeffy? I’ll fucking see to it that Jeffy the horse gives you a big wet cuddle when you go to bed at night. Make you an offer you’ll never forget in a fucking hurry. And what’s with the cheese? I stick motherfucking provolone in my socks at night so they smell like your sister’s crotch in the morning.
   Yours, sincerely…
   Scotsman with a grievance. Ray of sunshine. P.G. Wodehouse. Google it.
   I didn’t phrase any of it that way. And I don’t recommend writing to Amazon with that level of spleen. I did all that without swearing. Out loud or in print. Mentally, though, the text was spot-on. In your head, that response is the only place for that response. I was calmer and more measured in the e-mail.
   Anyway, I told them the work was my copyright, it wasn’t in the public domain, and that was that. To them, it’s not evidence. But tell them, tell them again another way in the same response, and shuffle the words around to tell them a third time. Amazon says it isn’t evidence, but it’s fucking evidence to you, hell, and definitely to me.
   I looked for duplicate book titles, just in case. Nothing. Again, that’s no crime in copyright law anyway. I returned to the business of their error. A computer search lumped me in with another category by mistake. I invited them to look into this. And I asked them to state, explicitly, the nature of any passage that troubled them – given that they’d offered me a generic error message with nothing to go on.
   Then I ended with the accusation that an algorithm was at play. In other words, don’t come to me and tell me that it is up to me to prove my innocence over a vague issue. You tell me what I did wrong. And show evidence of that. You can’t? I knew that score the moment yon dreadful e-mail landed on my digital doorstep.
   But I didn’t swear. Aloud. Or in print. You’ve made a mistake, Amazon. Where’s your evidence, author? Come on, Amazon, you tell me where the evidence is. Shtrict rulesh of golf, Goldfingerrr. 

EMMA STONE: No, Jeff. You be trippin’.

Long story short, too late, as soon as this went in front of a human pair of eyes, the matter was resolved. 

The following book(s) you recently updated have been reviewed and were successfully passed:

I received a separate e-mail telling me the book was now live in the Kindle store, where it remains. Looks like they’ve added a glitch to the metadata, but that couldn’t have triggered the initial investigation.
   At least the book is there. I wonder if the page-count was a factor. Could be…they thought it was a public domain scam with the same 30 pages repeated many times over, for the page-turn farmers to click through, possibly. Doesn’t matter. They never said.
   Advice. If they come after you and you are a scammer, tough luck. But if they go after you purely as the result of tightening their steely grip on scammers, keep your cool. Gather the facts. Present them without swearing.
   If they come after you when you’ve made a genuine mistake and you’ve fallen foul of the regulations, hope it isn’t the end of your account. Try not to fall foul of the set-up in the first place.
   So much is published that they can’t check it all. They rely on automation. So. Put your complaint in front of a human being. Legitimise your case by simply turning up to argue that case. Scammers are less likely to put in an appearance. Assert your ownership of the material. Don’t swear in the e-mail.
   Much swearing went into the making of my response to Amazon. On the electronic page, the profanity was all in digital invisible ink.