BLOGGING FROM HALLOWE'EN TO THE 1ST OF NOVEMBER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

 In the blink of a wink, I find I’ve been blogging for a decade. Initially, I blogged weekly. Occasionally, I’d blog more than once a week if something came up. Then something else came up, and I switched to blogging monthly.
   Here we are at the start of another month, and I am still blogging. Last night, Hallowe’en, saw light misty rain fall upon the scene. This was not always the case. A decade back, with a self-imposed blogging deadline, I marched through torrential rain to reach the interwebs.
   In those far-off days, I didn’t have much use for the internet. If I really had to use it for something, I would gain access at a friend’s house for the vital whatever-it-was. The internet strangely rose in importance, and more and more services became almost exclusive online.
   My intermediate solution was to travel to a hub of anti-social activity: the library. There I endured the hopped-up persona of a drug-user who had the zero presence of mind required to conduct his business in a way that involved opening his mouth when he didn’t have to.
   I hope he was convicted of cruelty to his dog. He was defending that very case from the public library and proclaiming this to us. We were not fellow-users of the library. No. We were passengers on the same electronic raft, surviving a shipwreck of this buffoon’s making.
   It seemed important to the prick to let us all know he was defending this case. I hadn’t seen any wanted posters up on public buildings. We wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t mentioned it. People who loudly proclaim their presence in libraries had better be dressed to fight fires in libraries.
   Otherwise, shut the fuck up and keep your business to yourselves.
   He disappeared to the toilet and came back far more animated, shall we say. This was the guy who decided he didn’t like the Polish woman, so I was caught in the middle of that unfathomable minor disagreement.
   Flaked-out druggie started swearing at her in Italian. She had the decency to stick to English, though she could have sworn back in Polish. His patience wore thin as the drugs kicked in, and his instinct for survival told this prince that he’d better quit the scene, stage-right. Or stage-right-now.
   Off he went. The Polish woman commiserated with me. Here’s the score so far. Number of Scottish arseholes I’ve met: too vast to list. I have never met a bad Polish person. Record still stands. All the Polish people I’ve met have been absolutely fine. May that state of affairs long-continue.
   I’ve told that story in many different ways. Trying to soften it, I suppose. I wonder if the drugged-out ninja superspy was a dealer who got high on his own supply. All names haven’t been changed to protect the guy. I didn’t care who he was, is, or will be in the future.
   Upshot. I left the library thanks to the charmless encounters I had in there. On the Hallowe’en night in question, a decade ago, things were a lot easier to take. My main obstacle? As ever, when blogging, the barrier was the blogging platform itself. The library’s customers that night were not the worst I’d encounter.
   All changed, now. The interwebs are piped straight through the electrical hose and up the wall to a handy outlet in my office. Of all the office layouts I’ve had, this much-refined latest version is the best. No dog-bashing drug-users here, thank fuck. Just me in an alcove, off to one side. And all is right with the world.
   What changed for the better, over ten years? Internet is harvested and delivered straight to me. The nearest restaurant, my kitchen, isn’t too far away. Sadly, Twitter slowly died a death over the past decade. It’s on life-support now, and has been for too long to pin down to an exact date.
   Twitter became more like Facebook, while Facebook transformed itself into a data mining operation that can only have one possible goal: artificial intelligence. They are almost there now, given that the plastic robot running the operation is, er, a plastic robot.
   Blogger made improvements. I suppose. It is a little bit better and a little bit worse. When I type this entry up, I know I must transfer my text to the platform itself. There, I must adjust every last rat-bastard motherfucker of a paragraph for reasons of…
   Improvement.
   This is a quick fix, but it was something I never had to fix at all in the Golden Age that never was. A decade on, the template is still broadly the same: borrow a radio format from Alistair Cooke, and write at least 1,500 words on a topic.
   Not golf.
   If I want to write more than 1,500 words, I will. And if I have to write less than that, I’ll have my reasons. I’ve since transferred the format over to writing scripts for game-related videos. It works pretty well.
   I just spent a few moments staring at Cooke’s old apartment building on Fifth Avenue, in New York, courtesy Doctor Google. With all the golf Cooke played, how he found the time to pen his near-infinite list of weekly radio scripts is a mystery.
   His Letter from America truly was from there. Not a gimmick. Nearer the end, Cooke didn’t have the option. He was housebound. A brief politically-themed talk framed as a letter about America simply wouldn’t fly as a series being commissioned today. Cooke made his own job, and was captain of that radio ship from the dawn of time until his retirement.
   Retirement was a thing Cooke put off on the basis that…as soon as you retire, you drop dead. Health failing, relying on three pillows in bed, sounding frail but still firing on all cylinders, Cooke covered the politics of the day.
   He could just as easily have covered golf. I endured his golf talks. And I am quite sure many listeners endured his talks on American politics. In the case of his last broadcast, politics of the day meant a day in February, 2004.
   Cooke, being Cooke, ranged across politics from 2004 back to the early 1990s in that final chat, and veered off into talk of Napoleon by way of several American presidents…and Miss Lewinsky. Cooke talked of many things. American cabbages and American kings…
   The telling point in his last broadcast came at the very end and not in the political chatter that made up the bulk of his final weekly broadcast. Except, that, for reasons of the plot, I couldn’t find that point when I went looking for it. His last talk, his farewell letter, is preserved on the BBC archive…
   And yet, it isn’t.
   Cooke’s recorded letter would be made mid-week and sent from America to London. For the Friday night broadcast, he’d record good evening and good night. And for the Sunday morning repeat broadcast, Cooke would record good morning with no farewell at the end.
   News of his retirement was expected. Leaked. Announced. I tuned in for the Friday night farewell. He offered us good morning. Then he talked politics instead of reflecting on his long-running radio show. The archived version, with good morning preceding the letter, was from the Sunday repeat.
   On the initial Friday broadcast, at the end, instead of hearing his saying good night, I may have misremembered the man saying goodbye. It was no surprise that his death came a little over a month later.
   Cooke was a journalist who observed and reported and observed some more and reported again. He was the sort of journalist who knew that the journalist is never the story. When Robert Kennedy was shot dead, Cooke, nearby through an act of coincidence, found himself reporting on the unreportable. As time passed, he would find the unreportable turning to reportable with disquieting rapidity.
   And then, in death, cremated, Cooke had one last story – this time, about himself. His bones were illegally harvested for anti-cancer treatment, despite having died of cancer himself. The scam uncovered, perpetrators were brought to justice.
   Cooke was not always to my taste. And concerning golf, his obsession was insufferable. I suspect this marks me out as a non-golfer. It seems Mark Twain never made the comment about golf being the spoiling of a good walk. I’ll go with Dorothy Parker’s view, and assume that anything witty was coined by Oscar Wilde.
   That itself sounds witty enough not to have been stated by Dorothy Parker, but by Oscar.
   Would you like Alistair Cooke’s writing? I suspect not. You pretty much had to be there, listening to his weekly radio talks, to get what he was about in the moment. He was topical. That now makes him deeply historical.
   From him I learned the arcane wonders of the Electoral College. He dredged that topic up when elections loomed large. Aside from being topical and historical, Cooke was repetitive. The nature of his show made repetition an inevitability. God was a pup and the Devil wore short trousers and neither of those entities had beards at the time of Cooke’s ascension to radio immortality.
   Of course he repeated himself down the decades. Sometimes that’s the point of keeping going. You must make it a matter of deliberate policy to repeat certain and uncertain things. He died in 2004. His coverage of American politics couldn’t quite take in Obama’s run for the Oval Office. Cooke was 95 when he retired. He gets a pass on that score. It’s difficult to take the man to task for not lasting another half-decade so that he could see in Obama.
   Occasionally I think of Cooke when I pen this blog. I reached high in this cubby-hole for a copy of Cooke’s collected radio letters. He wrote in freedom and he found that pleasing. Cooke wrote with the freedom of a man who wasn’t sure what he’d write about for that week’s radio talk.
   When everyone else was being extraordinary topical that week, he’d find a worm wriggling in the patch of mud revealed by an upturned stone and he’d waffle away about that.
   I don’t know what I will write about when I sit to tackle a blog post. As a writer, I feel that level of freedom easy enough to deal with. Some find the level of choice terrifying. But to me the only true horror is to run out of coffee. In a decade of blogging, that has never been an issue. So. It’s a horror I never worry over. I buy in bulk, of course.

WRITING FOR VIDEO: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

You write what you write, and that’s that. When your story reaches a natural or supernatural conclusion, kill it off. Stake it, in the case of the supernatural ending.

   When is a piece of writing finished? Depends on what you are writing. A lean novel is cooked at 75,000 words. An extra 25,000 on top of that is pudding – make sure it isn’t mere froth.

   In cinema, a page of script is a minute on the screen. Your 900-page epic on the life of a coffee shop has too much life in it. Cut to the bone. Or to the coffee bean. To the chase.

   When the writing is just a little over, circumcise it – after all, you aren’t the one feeling the pain…and if you are, you are doing it wrong. I think we’re belabouring the imagery if I say an editor should develop a thick skin.

   Down in the world of the very short story, how much should you write? I considered this when writing video scripts. It’s no secret that this blog was modelled on radio – specifically on what the journalist Alistair Cooke managed in decades of weekly broadcasting.

   I wouldn’t always write to a minimum limit – life gets in the way. But when I did write to a limit, hell, that limit was at least 1,500 words. Yes, I’d write more than that. I am, after all, a wordy cove.

   Now I make videos that run around ten minutes on YouTube, and writing 1,500 words covers the time nicely. There’s room for a pause or three, but 150 words should span a minute of audio without difficulty.

   Pacing is important. What the hell am I doing, though? I come up with a story. There’s a topic worth considering. Just exactly what the hell are dice, anyway? I’ll lay out a few items I want to talk about. And I’ll think about filming with particular camera set-ups and certain props.

   The story takes shape. There’s a lot of research. If I’m backing up a point from my own experience, that’s standard. It’s folly to discuss matters outside your experience as if they are inside it. So, yes, start with what you know. And, double-yes, do your research in case what you know is blatantly bullshit.

   It’s true that I pepper these video talks with boardgaming and roleplaying facts you won’t find anywhere else. I hope it is obvious that when I describe something as a gaming fact, I am, to use a technical term, taking the piss.

   What consumes the time? Research. With the research done, it’s time to write up a script. For the most part, I’ll write first and film later. Then I’ll edit the footage to match the audio recording.

   Sometimes I’ll film first, and then construct a story around the footage. It’s useful to see how much footage there is, and plan a chunk of writing accordingly. Whether the tail wags the dog or the dog wags the tail, from a distance you still see a four-legged animal…

   It little matters which process comes first. Script meets film in editing, regardless.

   I say that, but it isn’t entirely true. Rarely, I’ve recorded the audio track without a script. This calls for a chunk of audio editing as well as the film work, and I hardly ever take this approach. I’ll return to the topic in a moment.

   My first video script was 1,200 words…a little on the short side. But the video was a quarter of an hour long. Next, I wrote almost 1,900 words and finished that second video in eleven minutes.

   Those were the early efforts. I have a sense that I was all over the place, even though I planned to write 1,500 words to cover around ten minutes of film. What of the latest video I filmed? The script is almost 1,900 words long, and the mini-movie runs for…yes, about eleven minutes. Almost the same as my second video.

   Not counting omnibus editions, what’s my longest video? A piece on dead characters in roleplaying games. I spent over half an hour reading from a pile of dead character sheets. The script was only 38 words long – an introduction. Then I worked my way through the obituaries freeform. The character sheets provided the script.

   Collaboration extends the duration. For a video on Tourette Syndrome and gaming, I wrote 1,900 words, but the additional footage by Melissa C. Water, my collaborator, took the finished video to 23 minutes.

   Speaking of footage, how much do I film? I expect to film twice as much material as I use. That doesn’t mean the footage is ignored. For a shot of a prop, I’ll film for twelve seconds to be sure of getting ten seconds I can use.

   To match that shot to the audio, I’ll cut the scene down to five seconds. Yes, I’ve seen videos by people who put one image up for the duration of their talk. But I can’t do that. Running a shot for half a minute feels like eternity.

   What method do I favour? Writing the script and then filming the video, knowing what I am aiming for in matching visuals to the audio. Then I can go daft in the editing. Exceptionally rarely, I’ll have to cut part of the script after the fact.

   It’ll occur to me that a vague-ism has crept into the narrative, and it has to go. The audio is edited, mostly to remove coughs and splutters, but I seldom edit the audio when it is matched to the video track.

   You’ll have that awkward moment in which you realise what you are saying isn’t what you thought you meant to imagine you’d believed you were rumoured to have planned all along. In short, you realise you are talking utter bollocks.

   If I talk utter bollocks in the published video, that’s my problem. I haven’t taken a video down yet. For legal reasons, you must be aware of legal reasons.

   So where do we stand in all this, if I am giving advice for beginners making videos? Start with story. Research. Write your script. As a very rough guide, aim for 150 words per minute of film. I record the audio separately so that I can hop from one point to the next using a visual shift.

   How long does it all take? It takes for-absolutely-ever. I write these scripts in files with single spacing, wrapping up 1,500 words on the third page. The typing itself doesn’t take long, but the research that leads me there lasts forever plus one day.

   In terms of reading the script aloud, I’ll speak for around twelve minutes when delivering a ten-minute talk. Two minutes disappear in audio editing, when I cut the long pause before the sneeze, the sneeze, an aftershock of a sneeze, blowing my noise in as undignified a manner as I can manage, and a long pause as eye-watering settles down.

   I also fluff lines. And I pause while I scroll another screen full of dialogue into position. Occasionally I wait for a noisy aircraft to half-fly overhead. With audio in the bag, I almost always immediately edit that file.

   If you record at the top of the hour, you’ll use a quarter of that hour nailing the basics down by the time you start to edit. When the audio is unusable – and that’s a blue moon event – it’s back to the microphone, with adjustments.

   Editing audio for a minute adds two minutes to the process. Grab your starting duration and triple it. Don’t be surprised if you take a whole hour to record and then edit your fourteen minutes of waffle down to a ten-minute talk.

   Video production is glacial. I’ll know, from the number of words, and the stacking of props, that I am in for a long video recording session. The video on cardboard screens for roleplaying games has a script that’s 4,700 words long.

   If we’re strolling through audio at the rate of 150 words a minute, you’d expect to make a video that runs 31 and a third minutes according to the mystical calculations. In the end, I recorded 37 minutes of footage for a video edited to last a shade under 30 minutes. The estimate worked out, more or less, in that case.

   There is a sense, when making longer videos, recording longer audio sections, that you’ll pace yourself well enough once you are into the swing of things. It’s the shorter videos you’ll rattle through, runaway-train-style, burning up your script at a ridiculous rate of knots.

   I avoid super-short videos. If the script is a third shorter than usual, the finished video is half-length instead of a third shorter. With fewer words in play, there’s far less scope for the dramatic pause. All you can do is rattle through. I learned that from listening to radio. Up to a point, silence on radio is definitely dramatic. Then deafening. And after that, you reach for the switches to see if your radio stopped working.

   And that thought carries me across the 1,500 threshold. How long would this blog post last if I converted it into a video? Let us find out…I’ll add it to the queue.

WRITERS. THE BEST AND WORST CRITICS OF OUR WORK: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

This piece I wrote was great, though that piece I wrote was shit.
   Opinions change.
   That piece I wrote was great, though this piece I wrote was shit.
   And so on.
   One of the influences on this blog was the broadcaster Alistair Cooke. I well-remember a talk he gave on the Supreme Court of the United States and its sloth-like struggle to set views down in law.
   (The internet tells me Cooke's talk was from the 25th of June, 1999.)
   Cooke spoke of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Tom Clancy did not give us the phrase clear and present danger. Step forth, Oliver, and be recognised.
   Wendell Holmes, a Civil War veteran to whose name we must add Junior, was in the habit of writing profound statements. His words would affect the good and bad citizens of the USA.
   He found that writing the piece and leaving it for a few days was no good. Other judges on the panel wondered at the effectiveness of a decision written in unseemly haste.
   Holmes was in the habit of writing his legal decision at one sitting. Letting it lie overnight or across a weekend was good enough for him, if not for his colleagues.
   To get around this problem, Holmes changed his routine. Oh, he did the same thing as usual. He penned the decision in one go - not letting the next dawn rise on his efforts midstream, as it were.
   Then Holmes changed tack. He let the piece lie in a drawer for three months. This allowed the decision to age in the wood.
   His colleagues, let in on the work further down the line, must have thought Holmes possessed of the wisdom of Solomon.
   What's my point?
   As soon as you write a piece, you might love it to bits or hate it to pieces. So shove it in a digital drawer for a little while. Return to it. Read over what you've written. Fix any obvious blunders. And then release the piece to the world.
   The world will form its own views. And those may change with time. So don't concern yourself overmuch with opinions. You write the story you were meant to write...
   Don't let your best and worst critic get in the way of that story. Be there when you write it, and walk away when you are done.
   

COURTNEY LOVE, VAMPIRIC SPAM, AND INFLATED BLOG-TRAFFIC.

Gadgets. Widgets. I have those things on my blog. Hell, why not? Recently I added a listing widget, showing labels affixed to blog posts. You can run down the list, looking for items of interest - or of no interest, if your mind works that way.
   The list is configured to give size-based prominence to much-mentioned labels. Missy Biozarre, being Kacey Vanderkarr's writing buddy, is often mentioned in the same breath as Kacey - their blog labels are of similar size in the listing.
   K. Woodward, having propelled me into blogging, is mentioned far more frequently than Alistair Cooke - who inspired the scattershot methodology behind my blogging.
   Doug Chambers, a character from serialised blog fiction, makes his presence felt well-beyond his influence - in the story, his colleague Roy Falafel is the real star.
   Staring at those labels, I wondered how organised they were. They weren't. I didn't take to labels immediately, when blogging. If I misremember rightly, they were called tags before the great Blogger™ interface revamp.
   I added labels to blog posts on whim rather than by decree, and, with the listing gadget up, that non-policy showed. Well, here they are anyway. I write a post, adding labels for convenience, searchability, and as a sign-off to the blogging process.
   Affixing labels tells me I'm done with a post. If I can find any labels to add. This is all by the wayside. Once I nailed up the gadget that listed labels, I looked short and soft, then long and hard, at what I'd created.
   A few labelling errors and glitches crept in. I'd accidentally listed a load of poets as one entry. For some arcane reason, I'd allowed Courtney Love to lie atop Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson's grave in a combined label.
   I struggled with the peeling of a digital sticker, sorely tempted to let Courtney be. Yes, I had a task separating those two. Peeling the joint label from Queen Courtney's side, I wasn't surprised to find celebrity skin underneath.
   The author of The Body-Snatcher would laugh at today's world, I'm sure. Meanwhile, what I should have done...
   Yes, there's a label on the blog for Craig Ferguson. I should have created a Courtney-Craig combination label. Accidentally-on-purpose.
   In memory of that time Courtney fucked Craig at Carrie Fisher's house. This doesn't feature in Courtney's memoirs. Could you imagine that marriage? Courtney Ferguson. Or would that be Craig Love? (Craig Ferguson's porno label.)
   For legal reasons, I should point out that Craig Ferguson didn't actually fuck Courtney Love - she turned him ten per cent gayer instead. I'm having trouble spelling greyer. Bing Hitler's lawyers, take note.

*

Okay. Time to hit the point of this fucking blog post. (Too late.)
   I organised blog labels. Fixed glitches. Attended to duplication of effort. No big deal. Later, I was back inside my blog looking at stuff and, in the statistics, I noted an absurd rise in traffic.
   Loads of people in America suddenly jumped to my blog. At 7.00 in the morning, going by the East Coast time-zone. Eh? So what were they reading?
   Nothing. Hundreds of hits on the blog. No one accessing articles or dedicated pages. Well, okay, a few people were in - reading items on formatting. Where were the hundreds of visitors?
   Evanished.
   Check the source. Two offenders. One called vampirestat and another called adsensewatchdog. Googling these, I found they were spammer scammers.
   You find the traffic in your statistics, and, wondering what the score is, you might be tempted to visit those sites. All sorts of malice may then occur, according to many sources on the internet.
   How to ditch these ethereal visitors? Google Analytics has an admin page with filters allowing blocking of phantom statistics. Just follow the instructions. That's as far as Blogger is concerned. If you are using another blogging method, your platform will likely have a similar remedy. Root around.
   Why did I start off discussing labels? The phantom-bots keep a lookout for alterations to blog posts. Because I went through my posts like a dose of salts, tidying labels, the posts were published afresh. That gave something for the vampiric spammers to latch onto.
   I'm not obsessed by blogging statistics. Now and again, I'll check the traffic. I was annoyed when I saw this phantom surge. So wild a spray of visitors looked like a scam to me.
   If you are new to blogging, don't become obsessed by statistics. Never click on links to referring sites when you snuffle around in the stats. Type the name of the site into Google, and search to see if scam warnings come up.
   Checking my stats, I see one lone reader is in RIGHT NOW. He, she, or it, is reading up on the adventures of Doug Chambers. Episode sixteen. Doug is mentioned, but doesn't put in an appearance.
   What will my Chinese reader make of that? I'd hope for a realisation that fifteen episodes precede the blog entry under perusal. Maybe the reader slyly read those episodes earlier. I've no way of knowing.
   Though I do know this. I can block phantom visitors with the digital equivalent of bell, book, candle, and Holy Water™. My advice - do the same.

*

Update. Rinse and repeat. Blogger itself eventually blocks the vampiric sites. At which point, the minions step in and remove stakes from chests. I've had to block the vampires again. They spawn and respawn like Space Invaders on commission.

   And yes, updating this blog gives the vamps another vein to latch onto. Stick with my main advice - if you are new to blogging, don't become obsessed by statistics. You can see the real page views anyway. Google links before even thinking about musing about considering clicking a link.



ON THE RUN.

Final blog post in this latest cycle. Now I’m on the run. Foolish in my attempt at optimism, I ended a post by stating the next event would be…

   Whatever that event was. Publication of a particular item.

   When I published to a strict schedule, I made my deadlines. Then my deadlines switched to a looser format and I managed to publish entries in my FICTION FACTORY line with minimal fuss and negligible bother.

   You publish when it is right to. WEREWOLVES was delayed by a week. All these soft deadlines were flexible. Bloody good job, too, as life got in the way. Some days, I may have pushed too hard. But you have to try, to find out what you can do.

   Pacing is important. When I started out with my fixed deadlines, I made sure I could hit those nails on the head. Even if I took a mad detour one night to talk to a fear-filled author in Michigan. I still don’t know what possessed me to do that.

   Helping other authors is an avenue of exploration marked on Google as a two-way street.

   Strict deadlines. Loose ones. Everything came together, roughly or smoothly. This hasn’t quite been the case with collected versions of REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. I learned, the usual hard way, that I had to set up a different production-line for those. Technical considerations and publishing decisions multiplied, swamping me.

   Yes, I still generated (or reformatted) a million words of material in that first year of self-publishing. But I didn’t publish everything I wanted to. Newsflash. I never will. There’s always going to be something simmering away on every ring of that stove.

   Irons in the fire. Fish to fry. You know the drill. I looked at a list of things I planned to write, expand, edit, and format over summer. Too ambitious. Still, I compiled that list anyway. And I’ll get back to most of that stuff before the end of the century.

   This year, the list is twice as ambitious. After all, the first list still haunts me.

   What now? Or…what next? More of the same. Plans. A few of those will run a-gley. I’ll adapt. Survive. Continue. Never give up writing. That’s code for never give up reading. It’s also code for never give up writing.

   I may write fiction in my next run of blog posts. Short queasy zombie stories. Who knows. I have one Zombie Apocalypse to be getting on with as things stand. Hey. Why not add another, just for the hell of it…

   An experiment. In writing. Maybe I’ll scribble about an incident in a lab. An experiment that goes horribly right and cures heavy traffic – the hard way. For now, I’ll stick to the general format. Blog repeatedly. Bundle the blogs with fiction to create an e-book running at least 100,000 words.

   Which reminds me. I have to put those REPORTS out. Finally. The first volume went over the proposed word-count. That’s no bad thing. I feel as if I’ve been learning how to run faster than the wind. Self-publishing is an event. Even if nothing seems to happen, pots are on stoves. Fish are frying. Irons glow in the fire.

   Optimism. I’ll end this post with the news that another volume of REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE is published. And it will be. Not immediately. But it will be. In a pessimistic world, it’s good to have some optimism in that near-empty cracked glass.

   And any announcement that you’ll publish…

   Must be backed up. Each proclamation serves as a goad. I spent a night mapping out hyperlinks for files. Straightforward stuff. Until I uncovered an unintentional glitch. My REPORT series has to be the most gremlin-infested thing I’ve worked on so far.

   I feel that I learn formatting afresh every time I come to it. That’s okay. I feel the same when I write a story. Anything is possible. Much is plausible. There’s a hefty dose of the downright silly. Hell, that’s no crime. Blank space must be filled.

   Ever see a movie? Watch a play? Catch a show on TV? Listen to dramatic action on the radio? Someone wrote it.

   I write these blog posts for collection alongside fiction. Writing regularly for an unseen audience, I play the sedulous scribe. There’s no way to emulate Alistair Cooke, but I can nod in his general direction.

   So what about you?

   You want to publish. Do it. What’s holding you back? Fear. An illusory fear.

   Write a few stories. Plan a book. Rattle off poetry. Don’t forget to read. Anything. Everything. Fact. Fiction. Opinion. Outright rant. Read.

   Learn what you have to deal with, to publish. Look at the Amazon site and scroll down to that obscure line inviting you to self-publish. Check it out. Hunt for articles on formatting for Kindle. Read copyright law. Be aware of legal obligations to noted libraries, be they the British Library in London or the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. To name but two.

   Think about book covers. If you can design your own, great. And if you can’t, ask yourself if you can. Have a go anyway. Yes, there’s much to learn. That’s the fun of it. Be patient. Long-haul. Invest time. Make mistakes. Learn from them.

   Persist.

   Advance your cause every day. Learn something. Even if all you did that day was tie off a loose end or return from a dead one. Write. Read and write crap. Then read the good stuff. Write better. Make sure that what works for you actually works for you.

   Endure.

   Change plans. Shift goals. Be fluid without being wishy-washy. I feel as though I’m in a martial art movie, dishing out advice. Never turn your back on your opponent. Unless he’s really big and you can run faster than him.

   I don’t mind admitting mistakes in a writing blog. It’s important to fail. To rise again and try a second time. A third time. Countless times. It’s important to let other would-be writers know this. Even if you fail, and doubt as a result, you LEARN. And you can always RECYCLE what you attempted.

   If you chase a medal at the Olympics, you don’t just walk into the stadium and take up position. The crowd never saw all the private failure that led you to that public starting-point.

   Survive.

   I think of all the failed stories I attempted. And every failure shows you something. You learn structure. And learn, sometimes, to dispense with structure. Suddenly, it’s all at your fingertips. You remember the trudging you did to get that far. Progress isn’t always enjoyable. But when it is, progress is effing amazing.

   Research. That is to say, search and search again. Try to get it right. I’m not here to place undue emphasis on mistakes. No. The emphasis is on learning from them.

   You mean there weren’t Daleks in Hitler’s bunker? Pearl Harbour wasn’t a stripper? Ghostbusters are all fictional with the exception of Abraham Lincoln? That man behind the curtain is the Wizard of Oz? What do you mean, George Michael is gay? Not Sir Elton too. He was married. (And will be again.)

   I hated myself every time I spotted an obvious typo. At times I marvelled at how good a short piece of writing was – wondering who the eff wrote it. (Then realised that was me. Can’t have been me.) I could soar as a writer, but I don’t. Gravity claims me, every time.

   Oh, I have my moments.

   You’ll have your moments too.

*

Office routine washes over me. I think my printer is destined to have one book sitting on top. It’s a different book every time I mention this in a blog post. You knew that.

   I was learning how to run faster than the wind. At first, the wind obliged me by moving at five lowly miles per hour. Things picked up. I had to learn how to go on the run.

   There’s always the chance that I’ll pull the pin on the blog and cut dead so that I can write more stuff. I like having that pin there. It’s my unsafety-pin. We should all have one.

   Play safe. Sound advice. Here’s sounder…

   Scrape your knees. Learn the pain of flames. Bleed a little. Note the sharpness of vinegar in that cut. Go on the run. Type like a maniac. Race to the summit with a flaming brand and throw it on the bonfire. No one is there to cheer you on. Only the wind witnesses your quiet gasping triumph.

   Try writing a story. Fail writing a story. Recycle the ideas. Arrange a next time and do better. Listen to advice. Go with your gut. Educate yourself. Help others. Feel numb. Ignore the numbness. Keep moving. Try harder.

   Storm the beach. Take the castle. Invent the cure. Save the day. Blow it all up. Put it back together. Run. Then walk. Crawl. Get back up. Walk. Then run. Win by participating. Enjoy reading.

   Ever read a story?

   Someone wrote it.

   Be that someone.

NEXT EVENT: REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE (VOLUME 3) IS PUBLISHED.

*

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

THOUGHTS ON PUBLISHING.

This blog is about whatever the hell I want it to be about. I don’t run a technical or business-based blog detailing the latest industry developments. The woman who inspired my blog, Karen Woodward, does that – and does so well. She often delves into the technical side of things. When not relating horror stories connected to the publishing industry, she relates success stories.

   Plug over.

   So what is this blog about? Time for some tired humour. You were warned. It’s about 1,500 words. Ouch. What is the blog not about? Sex. Politics. Religion. Money. Avoid those four in casual conversation – topics alone or, gulp, together – and your blog will steer clear of the rocks.

   Here’s a word to consider when publishing.

   Wrong.

   Do your best to avoid using the word in talking about how someone else writes. You may know how your story ends before you start writing it. On the other hand, you may only know how your story ends once you reach what you think of as the final scene.

   Different approaches are different approaches. It’s hard to describe much behind writing as wrong. I cling to one exception. Try to avoid blogging in white text on a black background. It’s wrong. For any great length, that is. It’s okay for titles or very short stints.

   Is anything else wrong? Balancing on a seal as you type is likely to lead to the arrest of one of the participants. (Okay. It’s WRONG.)

   I can confirm that no seals were balanced on, or fallen off, during the typing of this entry.

   That word. Wrong. It’s wrong to cheat your readers. How readers might be cheated via storytelling is another topic. It’s wrong to misrepresent the product. Tell potential customers what the word-count is.

   My recent thoughts on publishing took in a few names. Missy Biozarre was a doomed colleague. (Eaten by zombies, I hear.) My jazzy visit to Marjorie Eliot’s was always going to feature in an article. Why not on my blog? And Alistair Cooke served as a major inspiration for blogging itself.

   Does my meandering thought-non-process aid casual readers of this blog? I don’t have time to ponder that as I’m too busy pondering other things. Save your files. Back them up. Preserve your thoughts in type and preserve the files containing those typed thoughts.

   Two melted computers reminded me of that. I was fine. Fuming, but fine.

   We survived the Maya non-apocalypse for this? Hell.

   Quirk of the computing world – I’ve not lost data. And the quirky quirk? Once, hacking and slashing through a file, cutting it to shreds, I regained data. There was a loss of power before I saved my changes – and the autosave routine hadn’t had time to kick in.

   With electricity flowing again, I returned to the file and started over. The jungle had grown back. I regained the data I’d cut. That’s as close as I came to losing a file. Let us hope that’s as close as readers ever come, too.

*

BLOGGERATION.

   Or, if you prefer, BLOGGER RATION. Even though I ration these blogs by unsneakily writing several at once, I think I’ll have to ration posts a bit more. For the blog it is a-changin’. Review.

   What were my options? Kill the blog. Die, you bastard!

   No.

   Put the blog to sleep. That sounds like a euphemism for killing the dog, not the blog.

   No.

   Killing the blog means removing it completely. Deleting all pages. Scrubbing the internet-related bloodstains away. Ghostly fragments linger in cached areas. Sunlight gradually works its magic and the fragments fade.

   Resting the blog means putting up a sign saying that, through semi-seen circumstances, the blog is having a lie down. Feel free to look around anyway. You won’t wake the blog if you tiptoe through.

   Other options.

   Switch to blogging monthly.

   No.

   Not really an option. Blogging quarterly or annually wouldn’t cut it, either. Monthly doesn’t feel right. Forget quarterly. I’d have to put something spectacular out to blog annually.

   So what am I doing? I’m switching the publication rate of the collected editions. It’s been really hard to put those out, as I had far more technical issues than I realised. Every single collection was delayed, conveyor-belt style.

   The idea? To blog eighteen times and bundle the collection with fiction, so the book-version runs to at least 100,000 words. I’ve revised plans. The format will gradually work up to more blogs in the collected editions.

   This is blog fifteen in the current cycle. The end of the next cycle for the fourth volume of REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE coincides with Kacey Vanderkarr’s debut. In that next cycle, I want to say a few words about Kacey’s first book. That calls for a celebratory post. After that cycle is done, I’ll blog until the end of the year.

   If my miscalculations are correct, that’ll provide 23 blog posts for collection. Thereafter, a new year starts and I’ll collect blog posts twice a year. If I’m still blogging.

   Right now, the various collected reports are log-jammed and I want to free that jam as conveniently as I can without rushing or botching delivery. So that’s the story. Everything changes, but stays the same. Instead of being on an eighteen-week cycle, I’ll shift to 24.

   When I do that, I may just run short pieces of fiction for a wee while. Too early to tell. I have regular and irregular books to be getting on with.

*

Let’s talk about losing track of a story. If my mind is still in the right place, the tale that follows in the bundled edition…

   Is a tale recovered from memory. Try as I might, I could not find the original story in my dusty archives. By the time this blog post sees the light of day, I’ll have scoured yellowed paper files once again. I’m looking for two separate pieces of material.

   There’s a reason behind not finding this stuff. Perhaps a piece of cardboard is folded over something that doesn’t resemble the story I’m looking for. There’s a gap a pile of paper slid into. When all the new carpets went in, there was no misplaced material lying pressed flat to the floorboards.

   Where can that story be?

   I found MIRA E. easily enough – and expected my lost story to be in with material from that Jurassic slice of the fossil database. But no. This indicates, to a tired mind, that there’s a solid reason for the misplacing of the file. There’s a gap a pile of paper slid into.

   Not shredding. In all this time, I’ve never once shredded the wrong document. The problem with this missing story is that it was never even typed up. That’s right. It was penned. Scribbled. So I’d know the spiderish manuscript as soon as I saw it. If the tale had been typed up, using the mechanical torturer known as a typewriter, chances are it would later have been typed in.

   But there’s nothing in the electronic record. What to do? The old standby. Recover from memory. The advantage of doing this is that you apply current writing and editing skills to a dusty story clearly created by an individual devoid of said skills back in the day.

   Yes, I get to relive an old story with shiny new words. And I invite the readers to fly along with me. I must invoke Cosmic Law. With the story updated from memory, I am bound to find the original once the reanimated version sees publication. That is inevitable.

*

This blog post was thrown together by periods of disruption. All fiction is.

   The blog faces change with every blog post. This time, the changes to the bundling schedule don’t seem so great. The regular construction of the blog hasn’t altered. I blog a minimum of 1,500 words. Usually, I hit 2,000. Rarely, I’ll open the post with an image. Occasionally, I’ll feature a guest.

   I talk about whatever the hell I want to talk about. That’s a model I use for my fiction. What’s in the literary pipeline? Oh, some more short pieces. Then it’s back to those longer works, with plots and characters and other writerly things spilling out over the edges of the short story into the novel.

   My decision, in self-publishing, was not to clear out all the old material immediately. You get lost in that fiction and find that you aren’t writing anything shiny and new. So I still have a few ancient tales lurking in the vaults.

   New ideas pile up on each other and sometimes merge into newer ideas. Nothing wrong in that. I have many technical issues to overcome – but that’s standard in this line of work. While there’s fun to be had writing, there’s fun to be had writing.

   Though there is drudgery. My computer meltdown led to checking. File after file. You can’t help but create duplicates. Sometimes, those prove very useful. In a near-paperless office, there’s a surprising amount of weeding to be done.

   If that isn’t my cue to leave and see to the weeding of computer files, I don’t know what is. Fire! Martian invasion! Juniper! Any one of those three will usually suffice.

NEXT BLOG: REVISITING AN AUTHOR’S LIBRARY.

ALISTAIR COOKE.

Good evening.

   For years, I’d tune to BBC Radio 4 on a Friday night and listen to Alistair Cooke utter those two words. If I missed a broadcast, there was always the slightly jarring good morning of the Sunday repeat.

   Cooke more or less invented the job of telling worldwide listeners what was going on in America. He may have stolen the idea from H.L. Mencken. Only David Niven seemed more English than Cooke. I hesitate to add other names to that shortlist – readers would just end up Googling the hell out of every paragraph.

   Blogging? Didn’t exist in Cooke’s day. Podcasting? Narrowcasting? Internet? Ah. Broadcasting. Now you’re talking. Cooke gave steam-radio talks and called them letters. With each broadcast running just shy of fifteen minutes, he’d explain aspects of American life on a weekly basis.

   When he wasn’t talking about golf.

   Those familiar with Cooke’s radio broadcasts would see that I paid nodding tribute to him with my obituary of Missy Biozarre. In Cooke’s case, he was talking about the death of Edward Kennedy Ellington – that rare commodity, an American Duke.

   Cooke paraphrased the novelist John O’Hara, and I capered along the same well-worn path.

   When it came time to start blogging, I thought of Alistair Cooke. In particular, I thought of his repetitive manner down the years. He was bound to repeat himself – and did in a way his listeners forgave him for.

   After all, every decade or so he would find himself having to explain the finer points of American politics to new generations and half-generations of listeners. He decoded the Electoral College. Someone had to.

   I decided to repeat myself deliberately. Maybe Cooke did, too. My advice to writers won’t change much with time. Read. Write. Have a think. Write some more. Experience things beyond writing and apply them to writing.

   Never give up.

   Tedious, I know. And saying tedious, I know is tedious…

   I know.

   Good pause night. The clock swung around to 9.00 o’clock and Alistair faded from the airwaves for another week. He was a fixture whose illusory permanency ended only with that fatal move – retirement.

   I used Cooke’s weekly broadcast as a writing exercise, summarising his latest theme as best I could. Over fifteen minutes I’d dash down around 600 words retelling his tale. From this ritual’s archival footprint I know that I stopped the exercise by Friday the 8^th of September, 2000.

Decided it’s time to let Alistair Cooke go. I’ll keep listening in until he really is gone, but, as the weeks go by and the probability increases, it seems morbid to copy out the gist of what he says in his letters from America. Good night.

   Who the hell was I writing for when I wrote that down? Well, who the hell am I writing for now? I always write for myself. If I don’t like writing, who will care for reading? Everything you do as a writer leads to everything you do as a writer.

   Why terminate the outlining of Cooke’s broadcasts? His voice was going. Slowing. Gaining in breathy tones. Showing that tremulous weakness of great age. Cooke was born in 1908, and had what was known as a good run. I wanted to listen to what he had to say, rather than type my impression of it. So I gave the man more of my attention.

   By 2004, he missed a few transmissions. A fall forced him to skip a recording. He was grateful to his loyal listeners for the barrage of letters he received. People the world over wished him well. The show went on without him – repeats were easy to come by. There was no question of asking anyone to fill in for him during a break. David Niven was long-gone.

   I’d suspected (for three-and-a-half years) that Cooke wouldn’t continue the show much longer. Speaking sounded burdensome to him – except when he laughed.

   Flashback.

   Now 8.45 is coming around again, in the week when Cooke announces his retirement. He’s spoken on this before. Never retire – you drop dead as soon as you do. I figured he’d drop dead in the job, going out mid-week, but no. He doesn’t end with good night. Cooke says thank you for your loyalty, and goodbye. Loyalty, for some listeners, that lasted 58 years.

   We had him on air for a few weeks after he said goodbye. Vintage selection of broadcasts. Quite sad. But not that sad. He had more than a good run – the longest talk-based show on radio. Goodbye, Alistair Cooke.

   By Tuesday the 30^th of March, 2004, Cooke’s belief that you should never retire – it leads almost immediately to demise – was proved with the announcement of his death. He was 95.

   “If you retire, you keel over.”

   The BBC repeats generated artificial acceleration of frailty in his voice toward the end. Those repeats were from various decades, aiming to display certain themes, and revealed a strong voice quite a long way in. His regular show still had that intellectual strength to it, but he was obviously struggling uphill at times near the finish. Cooke recorded 2,869 shows, and had very little time off.

   Argue all you like over whether he was prim. Was Alistair Cooke a proper journalist? Very. He certainly disliked the notion of a journalist’s becoming the story, and downplayed his part in observing the events surrounding Senator Robert Kennedy’s shooting in the Ambassador Hotel. Journalists tend to cover the trial, rather than the commission of the crime. For once, Cooke was in the right wrong place at the historic moment.

   I really liked Letter from America – even if the narrator did spend too much time discussing golf. To my mind, any amount of time spent discussing golf is too much time. Better that, though, than no Cooke at all.

   The pale watered-down excuses for journalists who parade around now…just don’t compare. Comparison is difficult. Cooke’s origins were not of the Digital Age, though he lived long enough to puzzle his way through it.

   There must have been something extraordinary about a man who was supposed to stay on air for a mere thirteen weeks, and who ended up doing the job for over half a century.

   Cooke became the story again with the tale of the theft of his bones in a scandal that he’d have labelled scandal from the off. In fairness, he didn’t have much say over the journalist’s becoming the story by that point.

   Journalism would be a step down for me – I’d have to start dealing in fact.

   For a writer of fiction, that sort of factual nonsense will never do. My authorly advice is not to approach the factual. You may catch a disease. Journalitis. Possibly Journalismus. If you must turn to journalism, never become the story.

   My thoughts on publishing are not always thoughts on publishing fiction. For those writers considering journalism, research the name Stephen Glass. Watch the movie Shattered Glass. Stephen thought it good form to invent stories.

   There’s nothing wrong in that. Unless you attempt to pass fictional adventures as news. In the pages of a newspaper. While you draw pay as a journalist. Stephen Glass became the story. Ouch.

   The theft of Cooke’s bones for sale as transplant grafts knocked a few years off his age and transformed his cause of death. I marvel at that. A man so famous in his field suddenly has two widely-differing ages upon death.

   That’s a phenomenon Cooke would cheerfully have ascribed to most actresses. I can hear his chuckle as he says the words I’ve placed in his mouth. There was a hint of Scheherazade to Cooke, as he broke off each weekly tale of Americana. He’d always return to explain Federalism to us, or the First Amendment.

   Presidents were favoured items considered worthy of explanation, or, upon death, of reappraisal. I found his political talks interesting. His golf chatter left me cold.

   Cooke’s radio show was a blog before blogs existed. Somewhere in his mind he may have thought of his show as a Letter from an American – for he took on American citizenship with the zeal of the convert. A convert who did his best to retain that accent. I am afraid I must use a cliché.

   That urbane accent.

   I did my best to make it through a post about Alistair Cooke without describing the man as urbane. Cosmic Law insists upon the label. Ah, I was so close to the tape.

   Cooke was an English-sounding speaker of English throughout his life, though accepted the rubber-stamp of Yankeedom after what would prove to be just about the first third of his time on the planet. I say Yankeedom, for he could never be labelled a Southerner.

   With that accent, it’s still hard to label him American. Can you imagine David Niven as an American? (I find it difficult to imagine David Niven as a Scotsman. Is the Encyclopaedia Britannica still peddling that lie?)

   Why talk about Alistair Cooke? Karen Woodward told me to blog. Alistair Cooke showed me how.

   Good night.

NEXT BLOG: THOUGHTS ON PUBLISHING.

AN AUTHOR’S LIBRARY.

Here’s an advance on a theme. The theme appeared in my blog. Sources of inspiration are meaningless. Now for the advance on that view. You can’t tell a damned thing worth knowing about an author from books stacked in that author’s library.

   Why not?

   You don’t know, and can’t say for sure…

   Which of the books on the shelves were gifts…

   Or which of the books on the shelves were borrowed and await return…

   Which of the books are there by mistake…

   Or which of the books were read…

   Which of the books were enjoyed…

   Or which of the books were useful…

   I could go on. Instead, I turn to stare at the books on my shelves and I think…

   It’s a bloody shame I bought so many at once in that sale, for there’s little worse than an instant backlog. An entire shelf groans under the mass of free books. My free shelf. Free books sitting on my free shelf.

   Yes, through a quirk at the factory, I ended up being sent a free shelf to make up for a minor omission in the number of small metal fixings.

   They could only send out the missing metal bolt with an entire shelf thrown in free. Along with enough fixings for the extra shelf.

   My free shelf of free books.

   Other shelves carry cut-price books. I am a Kindle author, but I read off the paper storage system. There’s a lot of paper to chew through. Sales skewed my view of my own library. I now see shelves I must clear.

   There’s no pattern to this. The clearest shelf is read. Below that shelf, there are seven unread tomes. And below that shelf, lie two untackled books. I just see shelves. My plan is to clear those. So I’ll tackle the shelf with two unread books on it.

   Then I’ll have cleared a shelf. Trumpets may sound. In that slice of the library, just over a tenth of the books remain unread. Lately I haven’t been reading books. I’ve been reading articles for research. Oh, I’d pick up a book and race through the thing. But then I’d not follow the pattern in reading more.

   Now I’ve forced myself to blog about the foolishness of buying too many books at once. It is my fate to be found under a collapsed bookshelf so heavily-burdened that it is in danger of generating its own gravitational field.

   I won’t be found. Fingertips, perhaps.

   Space is important. When the last batch of books came in, I spent over an hour working my way through tomes of different dimensions. There is a pattern to this. I don’t stack books alphabetically. Books are slotted where they’ll fit.

   After the last reorganisation, and the addition of a piece of furniture to take some of the strain, I gained two empty shelves. Unheard-of. I’m down to 1.5 as I type. Something must be done about the biggest lie.

   No more books.

   How can an author say that and believe it? There’s always the floor. I have over half a dozen books on the floor right now. They were removed from shelves so I could read them. You have to take action. This blog post is part of that action.

   I have a book sitting atop my printer. Which shows how rarely I use my printer these days. Four books lie on the floor in my old office. Only four? Must be having an off-day. I indulge in the perilous pastime of stacking books atop bookshelves as well as in them. (Where possible. And sometimes where unfeasible.)

   Just now I was eyeing up a few bookends, with a view to getting more use out of them. How do you squeeze more use out of bookends? You redeploy books that are so thick they’ll act as bookends themselves, freeing you to make more use of bookends.

   Idly, I wonder which book will kill me. It must fall while I am crouched checking another book lying on the floor. This rules out anything below the top shelves. Unfortunately, shelf layout gives the greatest space to the top shelf. There, the tallest books reside.

   Some of the widest, too.

   Had I a death-wish going, when I stacked chunky books so high? Of course I’m not going to be killed by a falling book. The house will explode in flames if ever there’s a fire. They’ll trace the conflagration to that Ray Bradbury volume.

   What do these books weigh? Not very much, on Kindle. What would I do if I replaced these books digitally? I mean, what would I do with the space? Put more books on empty bookshelves, out of habit. I’m in a digital world now. Moving house would be so easy with a Kindle library packed and ready to go.

   One box, and you’re away.

   Near-paperless office. Paper-packed library. My Kindle sits above hardback books. I suppose the electronic device is a hardback, too. It demanded feeding the other day. Paper books don’t request electricity. Strange sigils appeared on the screen, informing me that the digital wonder’s charge was low.

   Annoying. Though I’ve yet to receive a cut from turning a Kindle page.

*

After a break to shuffle some books around, I realised there was a mini-shelf to my left with one unread book on it. Though that book is a chunky one. Where to start? Read all the thin ones first? You can’t tell which book makes for easiest reading, based on girth.

   I stare at the shelves and note a straightforward book I found hellish-going. If I can’t get into the story, I’ll keep on. Things may pick up. The Call of the Wild meant nothing to me in chapter one. I really liked chapter two. Just my mood, on cracking the book open. I knew it wasn’t a bad book. Jack London knew what he was about, in the fashioning of the beast.

   London’s book wasn’t the hellish one. Sometimes, classics can take a bit of getting used to. The Red Badge of Courage left me flat, but I went from one end to the other anyway. I suspect I’ll have to go back in and reappraise the work. Let’s say at the distance of a few years, when I’m in a mood to appreciate the effort Stephen Crane made.

   Casual racism in Edwardian children’s fiction slows me right down. You have to grit your teeth with “family favourites” now and again. Fun for all the family – provided you’re a white middle-class family with plummy English accents and at least half a butler.

   Wow. I’ve really veered off. What was I supposed to say? I’d stopped to look over my bookshelves, and started commenting on what was there. I thought The Power and the Glory would be Graham Greene’s most depressing book, but it wasn’t. Books surprise you.

   An author’s library should surprise you. You can’t tell a damned thing worth knowing about an author from books stacked in that author’s library. How many were stolen? (In my library, not one. And no, not more than one. You’re a suspicious lot, out there in the blogosphere. What do you mean, I’m a fugitive…)

   Would I ever remove books from my library? Oh, I’ve done so. Sometimes duplicates come your way. In this new office of mine, most of the books are hardback. A few paperbacks reside here, hidden away.

   The old office contains overspill from the hardback library. Most of the paperbacks are through there. The only system I have is one of stacking. On the floor, on shelves, above shelves, on desks, in cupboards…

   I really must see to those bookends. If I squeeze the juice out of the system, I can make room for another twenty books at least. Twenty books not-yet-purchased. Don’t ask me what they’ll be about. Fiction and non-fiction sit shoulder-to-shoulder in my collection.

   If there’s a single subject running through my library then my library has failed in its purpose. All writers should read. Scandalously, some don’t. That’s their business. My business is to sigh and tell myself that there’ll be no more books.

   Something rather obvious tells me I’ll fill my 1.5 clear shelves before the year is out. And I’ll have those bookends reclaiming land from the sea to make room for another twenty tomes before long. When all else fails, build up. I could improvise a new miniature bookcase atop a sturdy unit.

   Or, gasp, I could return to stashing bookcases in the kitchen. That was a woeful period, when I still had all the old small storage units. They were abandoned in favour of bigger and sturdier paper containers. The kitchen overspill left me uneasy. I risked encouraging mildew in a steamy kitchen. Inadvertent experiments in biochemical warfare loomed.

   With some tricky manoeuvring, a new tall thin bookcase could be wedged into position behind the door. Yes, I’ve considered removing doors to allow small bookcases to take up the space occupied by a swinging piece of wood. But that’s a step too far, even for me.

   I’ll find a way to get by. And by that, I don’t mean squeezing past another bookcase. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I say no more books. Something must be done about the biggest lie. But I remember that reading is part of the trade. Writing depends on it. The remedy is to sigh as I lie to myself. And to lie to myself when I say that’s a remedy.

NEXT BLOG: ALISTAIR COOKE.