THE CASE OF THE SPLIT BOOK: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

In August 2015 I blogged about the best and worst books on my shelves. Not in terms of content. Best-preserved. Worst-preserved. There are hundreds of books that I’d categorise as well-preserved. And hardly any books that are truly falling apart.
   At the time, I lamented the disintegration of a movie guide compiled by Leonard Maltin. If you are the sort of movie snob who sneers at Leonard Maltin and his cinematic output, preferring Leslie Halliwell’s dissection of cinema greats, note that even permanent grumpy bastard Halliwell acknowledged Maltin as someone who paved the way for so many writers in that field. Including the many writers who contributed to Maltin’s guide…
   Maltin comes across as a bright and breezy team-player. Halliwell was more of a lone gunman at a funeral, looking to settle non-existent grudges with the friends of deceased movie directors.
   The chief criticism of Halliwell? Still doing the rounds on the internet. In the case of Maltin and his crew, at least Maltin and his crew watched the movies they wrote about, whereas Halliwell, er, didn’t always see the stuff he panned.
   We can say that about him. He’s dead, and unlikely to sue.
   After that, the other criticism of Halliwell is that his view of cinema had a severe before and after phase. He liked the stuff he watched while growing up, and came to detest the stuff he saw floating past him as he grew old.
   What a grumpy bastard.
   I view Halliwell’s legacy as more about bringing old movies to television. That was his job. If you watched a black and white film on Channel 4 on a rainy day, chances are Halliwell was the guy who brokered the deal.
   No, I don’t have Halliwell’s guide on my shelves. Reasons. I saw his books on the shelves of movie snobs whose taste in films had clearly disappeared up someone else’s arsehole, never mind their own arseholes. And so, my perception is a little tainted.
   So. I have these Maltin guides. They are slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate interpretations of the source material. (John Donne, reviewing Hamlet for Leonard Maltin’s guide. The Zeffirelli version of the play. Three stars, with slightly catty comments in iambic pentameter.)
   Why do I use Maltin’s books? They list the movie running time very clearly, unlike many a Blu-ray cover. I see, glancing at the reference shelf, that I inherited an encyclopaedia on film personnel by Ephraim Katz. Had to move some dust out of the way to access that one.
   What don’t I use? Clearly, dustily, the Katz volume. I don’t put faith in star-rated movie review systems. Neither, it seems, did Halliwell. For roughly the last twenty years of his life, he stopped handing out four star awards to movies.
   Tell me the year of release and how long the picture runs. Note if it is in black and white. Don’t put spoilers if you can avoid them. By all means, give me your view of the film. Don’t tell me my view of the film, though. I’ll provide my own appreciation of the movie, thanks all the same.
   Without spoilers.
   Halliwell in particular had a reputation for spoiling movies. He gave zero stars to Titanic, and noted that this sort of Hollywood depiction of a real-life boat crash in 1912 was constructed squarely with one eye on a sequel.
   I made some of that up. He died in 1989. His books survive on reference shelves to this day. Turning to another work on my reference shelf – the Biographical Dictionary edited by Magnus Magnusson – I see there is no entry on Halliwell.
   Magnusson himself was such a figure of note, translating breezy Icelandic sagas to English, that he could have included himself in that dictionary, but, presumably, was too modest to say anything.
   Maltin’s crew served up enough atmosphere in short entries on cinema to satisfy the grumpiest tastes. If anything, Halliwell reminds me of Thayer David in Save the Tiger, meeting in a dive of a cinema to arrange a plot-based activity that I will not spoil for you here. Jack Lemmon wants him to (REDACTED), as that would save a lot of bother.
   I don’t know why Thayer David reminds me of Leslie Halliwell. Add glasses and a beard and you are nearly there. You could say that of Leonard Maltin, too, I guess.
   Don’t look at me. Watch the screen.
   Wonderful advice from Thayer David, for all professional movie writers. It’s not about you, but about the movie you watched. Or think you saw…
   I’ve sat through movie reviews in newspapers that dropped American political assassinations into the wrong year, put the wrong Bruce on the battlefield at Bannockburn, set forth a view on a movie based on the music that didn’t actually surface in that film – invalidating the point, and, most tellingly, threw a spoiler into American Beauty – Annette Bening’s character kills him.
   More accurate spoiler: she doesn’t kill him at all. What fucking film were you watching? Spoiler for the spoiler: Kevin Spacey’s character tells you, in his introduction near the start of the film, that he has less than a year left on the planet.
   Newspaper and magazine reviews of films. Yes, I guess they were a thing, once. Back in 2015, Leonard Maltin’s movie reference work lay just behind me, on the floor, in three chunks. I am about to remember the office layout. Just behind me is the wall. And I mean right behind me, right now.
   There was a time, in this book-festooned alcove, when the desk was turned to the left and I had space on the floor behind me. Space enough to leave the room, for that is where the door lives.
   The reference book was in three chunks. Now I write of the tome again, and it sits above me on a shelf, ahead, slightly to the right of this keyboard. Still in three chunks. Why mention it? I’ve only just replaced the book.
   But the new version isn’t a new version. It’s split in two chunks. I should say…in two volumes. Eventually, when Maltin stopped doing those annual paperback guides, the body of work was split into two pieces. The classic movie book takes us through silent movies up until the talkies in 1965. And the later, slightly thicker, volume goes up to the end of civilisation as we once knew it: revised, 2017.
   That was in the Before Times, when you could go to the cinema without catching the plague. For movie information, I head to the internet. This will always cover the latest releases, as if by technology. (Possibly, as if by magic.) If I want the Maltin-flavoured cinema observations of yesteryear, I now have those two books on my shelves.
   They are chunky paperbacks, and will not stand the test of time. Perhaps both volumes will split into three slices, as the earlier guide did. These replacement apples didn’t fall far from the tree. I described the broken volume as being a thick paperback made of thin paper with no more durable a spine than that of a liquidiser-fresh jellyfish.
   And I commented that the internet is the place I head off to for movie information. Maltin’s illness and the rise of the internet combined to bring his era to an end. It was a good run. He had decades out of publishing the guide, which went annual in the mid-1980s.
   But how to make money off that, in the digital world? Could it be done? Maltin and his team had a stab at it. But the book is the book. Creating an annual guide doesn’t translate into a minute by minute guide, online. The atmosphere is wildly different.
   Books like that, reference works, provide an alternative to just using the Wikipedia. (Shout out to Jennifer’s Body. Two stars from Leonard Maltin. Ah, taste is taste, opinion is opinion, and rarely the twain shall meet.)
   Reference works should be dead. I have a full shelf of them above me, with other reference books bleeding onto many a bookcase elsewhere. But they aren’t dead. I don’t want every snippet of information to come from the Wikipedia.
   Seek multiple sources. Granted, Wikipedia will provide you with multiple sources – nearer the site of the initial explosion of knowledge. If you are to read the Wikipedia at all, pay attention to the TALK pages. You’ll learn a little more.
   For example, if you accidentally stumble on a Korean pop-singer’s Wikipedia entry, you’ll note the invisible collision between Wikipedia’s standards and the standards of the average pop fandom.
   All those entries demanding the height of a poodle be returned to the main page as socially relevant…are cruelly crushed by soulless editors who simply state NOT DONE. The heartless fiends go on to complicatedly state, acidly, why Wikipedia is not a fan magazine.
   As for internet movie sites…
   No, I never go near Rotten Tomatoes. I only use the Internet Movie Database to check the extensive cast listings. Siskel and Ebert? Weren’t they on The Muppet Show…
   Metacritic? I don’t believe I have, though everyone’s a critic online. Including Halliwell, who is resurrected there. And who remains grumpy there, even when handing one of his cherished films four stars. Yes, I’ve read Halliwell’s line in movie chat…
   Offline? Halliwell? No thanks. Not on my shelves. Grumpy and Deaded. Deaded being one of the forgotten characters in that Snow White cartoon. (Four stars from Maltin. And from Halliwell. You can all stop arguing about this. Disney’s first gay character was the Wicked Queen from that cartoon. The end.)
   Movie guides provide opinions by teams of critics, reviewers, and space cadets wired to the back end of the moon. There are capsule overviews and space capsule overviews. You sometimes wonder which planet these opinions were formed on.
   But there are facts. Production details. Snippets. Trivial items. The overall writing style of Maltin and his crew appealed to me. And the book, falling apart on my shelves, bugged me. So I replaced that with two books that I reached for while researching films mentioned in this blog post. There. I’ve had my use out of them already.

A YEAR IN THE BLINK OF A TWELVE-DAY WEEK.

Not to go all Solomon Grundy on you, but time flies when you’re having a Pandemic Attack.
   For the convenience of rhyme, Solomon Grundy was born on a Monday. He didn’t last long. And 2020 didn’t last long, either. It’s been a twelve-day week instead of a twelve-month year. And what a week it’s not been.
   Festina Lente isn’t Elon Musk’s babysitter or his new electrical perambulator. Latin is a universal language in the sense that every single phrase in Latin offers up the same universal truth: Latin is dead. You are not. Remember this.
   Make haste slowly. If there’s one thing to make a speeded-up year of not doing awfully much zoom in like a Zoom meeting on LSD, why, it’s not one thing but many things. The Pandemic was (and remains) many things.
   When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in raging flaming clouds of fleets of swarms of zillions of fucking battalions.
   I quote loosely from the general text. Hamlet is the go-to manual for studying the effects of Covid-19 on just about everything. To be. We would have a proper year. Alas, turns out it was more in the line of…
   Not to be.
   Much happened on a personal level that I will not relate here. So what else is there to talk about? Plans that slid sideways from under me, making way for new plans, seem as though from another world.
   On the reading front, I no longer know and no longer care how many books I’ve read this year. It was a short reading year, and felt like twelve days. The last time I read a book, I read it in a sitting. But it’s all a blur, at this end of the short year.
   Everything dragged, and suddenly it was Christmas.
   Books came into the house. A few books were read by someone who may have been me. My plan to keep score of the overall gain or loss on the bookshelf front…that went utterly nowhere. Did I buy in nineteen books and read twenty? Well, I’m ahead of the game by one book, right?
   No clue. Kept score. Lost score. I could sift through electronic receipts, but what’s the point? Does reading an old book again count for anything? For the experience I gained in revisiting a story, yes. But I gave up the arithmetical quirks of what to add to and what to leave out of the mystical calculations.
   I ran my YouTube channel for two years and managed an average of a little over one video per week. Life under the pandemic got to me, and I took a fucking break. Had to. Other priorities. But I will return to video production.
   Life is what happened to Allen Saunders while he was making other plans.
   The reading of books was a thing in 2020. My solid stainless steel plan to note how I was doing on that front? That plan stood out in the rain, softened, split, and then…only half of it sagged into the leaf-strewn street. Even fragmenting plans, it seems, cannot fall apart in a regular way.
   If I misremember rightly, I read three short books in one day. They didn’t count, being really short. But they were books. I have them on my shelves. Somewhere. So maybe they did count. We all did stuff in 2020. But finding those handy bookmarks in the compressed diary of a twelve-day week, telling me what I did, is proving difficult.
   The bookshelves themselves came into play once more. I had a crushing need for space downstairs. This led to the return of furniture to this floor. The office floor. And that forced me to hack a farm-fresh clearing from the jungle of bookcases.
   This was a mighty feat. I accomplished the task by wriggling bookshelves across the floor, in a dance that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a barn. Generally, my bookshelves line the walls and also project deep into the room. In this latest bookcase case, I found a way to rearrange the puzzle pieces. At one end of one room I’ve created an area in which the bookcases line the walls.
   Mostly.
   It’s been a year of hurry up and wait. What a fast week it has been. The year is a has-been of a year, all right. Delivery drivers played chap-door-run-away with parcels the size of televisions.
   Out shopping, those who didn’t queue in masks queued in scarves. With gloves. Autumn-wear came early. We were counted into supermarkets as we shuffled through the airlocks, and we were counted back out as we fled with prized loot.
   Toilet roll.
   No one can explain the scarcity of toilet roll to me. Covid-19 is a shitty disease, not the shitting disease. I left a supermarket with a pack of 24 paper nuggets, each more precious than gold. You could wipe your arse with gold toilet paper, but then you’d be King Midas. Sitting on a golden throne.
   There will be signs of the coming Apocalypse. A well-worn idea. In our case, the signs asked us to wear a face-covering and to wash our hands. Please don’t touch your face. Or anyone else’s face. We should add more signs.
   Change your underwear frequently.
   Rattling pots and pans at night in support of people isn’t in support of those people if they are trying to sleep come mid-evening.
   Being in government and sticking to rules is a thing people in government should stick to. This last item simply exposes people in government as never sticking to any rules during the working day. Covid-19 merely unveiled an entire approach to living. It’s not as though the official in charge of that thing decided, spontaneously, that it would be okay to break the new rule for reasons of no reason at all. No. That fucker was clearly breaking all the rules every live-fucking-long day.
   I feel as though it were only yesterday, a million years ago, when young idiotic Americans (with names reminiscent of models of electrically-driven cars) were determined to have their spring break and damn the fatal consequences.
   It has taken me this long on my wayward journey to realise that spring break means the Easter fucking Holidays. But that is a mere aside. It is of little or no consequence. An electron microscope could provide a sturdy result on a scientific point, but…
   This is December and there are no flying fucks left to give. Those vanished in the first wave of toilet roll hoarding. Flying fucks were rationed at the rate of two per customer, and soon ran out. That was late in March.
   The march of the mood of the year was a slow one, to the tune of a popular little ditty by Chopin. Covid-19 turned the speed up to 11. Even Chopin’s Funeral March gets the squeaky squirrel treatment, played fast during a Pandemic Attack.
   When I watch videos on YouTube, I almost always hit double speed. With rare exceptions, everyone’s a squeaky squirrel. Unless I watch a video featuring a voice that starts out squeaky or fast-paced. Increase the speed in those cases, and only bats hear the results.
   I am a very patient person, I am here to tell you. Yet I find myself listening to videos that are 40-minute rambles to start with. At double the speed, a rambling video leaves me twenty minutes to go and stare out at the empty streets during a Pandemic. Priorities, right.
   Last blog post of the year. School’s out for Christmas. I’ve resisted the Covid-19 waffle that the world’s been indulging in all year/twelve-day week. So I know I am not adding anything to the talk. Except talk of vaccine today.
   Jam tomorrow, then.
   And what of tomorrow? New plans? Old plans, dusted down. I scrapped my notions of keeping score. How many books will I read next year? And how many will I buy? (I am awaiting a parcel of many books as I type.)
   The real question is how many books will I enjoy? How many are going to be useful? The tally, the score, is not important. It never was. And that’s no secret. You’d think I’d have spent the year hunkered in the bunker, all Covid-proofed and high on coffee, rattling through a book a day.
   And each day, a book on a wildly different topic at that.
   Fuck. I’ve just remembered there’s a pizza in the oven. I’m five minutes away from that meeting. Prompt. I will remain prompt as long as I can. In anticipation of sleeping in, I set the alarm and I climbed out of bed just as the alarm decided to warn me of its existence. Prompt today. For once, no hurrying.
   And only a wait of a few minutes for food. Not exactly waiting. Hurry up and wait. It is still a thing. Just as the virus is still a thing. And it will remain a thing, even as the first waves of vaccines hit the veins.
   This is not the fucking time to go fucking daft. Unless it is time to go daft…for pizza. It is socially distanced, being on a separate floor. I will mask the flavour of the pizza with sauce. That’s the only mask I can use, when devouring food.

EIGHT FOLDERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Time to eat eight folders. Then I can say I ate eight folders. The major reorganising of the computer archive was always going to leave loose ends. I look back on that change now and I see eight folders left dangling in the wind. They have their slice of the sub-folder pie, it is true…but I’m down to those eight folders at last.

   Am I, though?

   No. The point of the archive was to duplicate effort here, there, and avoid loss of data. As far as I am aware, in all my time computing, I haven’t lost any major data. I’ll tell this one again, about gaining data. There were files that had to be cut down.

*

It was important to keep the files, with their file names, but data inside those files had to die. I started weeding. Select text. Delete text. Select text. Delete text. The autosave hadn’t kicked in. I worked rapidly. The power went.

   Bzzzt. Except, without that sound.

   I hadn’t saved the file. And the system hadn’t autosaved the file. The only changes made were in data erasure. All those cuts were gone when the power was restored. I faced a power-cut and gained data in the file I worked on. All the erased material waved back at me. I had to delete that stuff again. Careful in what I deleted, I saved as I went.

   This brings up a point of procedure. When generating data, I save regularly. It’s a habit of mine to save every paragraph, and to save mid-paragraph if I feel the need. There are times when I save every sentence. This is not a difficult process. I hit the left CONTROL button and the letter S and the save goes ahead.

   No matter the state of play in terms of sentences or paragraphs, I save if I have to step away from the machine. There’s always an exception, and my exception is data removal. I am cautious in what I delete, and ensure the right thing goes. Later, I’ll save it. Obviously, the power-cut intruded on that routine and here we are with this anecdote all over again.

*

To stress the vital point: save often, and save early. I don’t believe I’ve lost vital data. There are many back-up systems in place. As far as an author is concerned, the best back-up for your work is always going to be publication of it. Write it. Check it for typos. Back it up by putting it out there into the void.

   Tackling eight file folders is a mammoth task. I’m not deleting the information inside those folders. Instead, I am moving things around to sit, neatly, under new signposts. That’s the tricky part. This feels like having moved house. And, having moved house, looking from room to room and seeing packed boxes lying around…hell, that is inevitable. Life-draining. Unavoidable. Part of existence.

   Let’s see how many folders I can face tackling as I write this blog post.

*

These folders are, typically, all sub-folders themselves – falling under the category of archives to 2017. This is clearly a lie, as two of the folders are for 2018 and 2019. I know exactly why I didn’t change the main heading…

   There’s a desktop shortcut leading to these files for my convenience, and to change the folder title is to destroy the link to the shortcut while leaving the shortcut icon mocking me on the desktop. Once I’ve reorganised the lot, the shortcut goes. But not a second before. That way, madness lies.

   Nothing is ever straightforward in the archive. How many empty sub-folders will I encounter across the archive? There’s no way to ever truly know that number. It is one of the last great mysteries of the universe.

*

One coffee and a bit of wrestling with categories later, and the folders are what I’d call manageable. I find myself creating more folders…what a surprise…to deal with the way I categorise things now. Then, there were categories with different names. Ah, simpler times. It’s all about managing signposts.

   A few things defy categorisation. That is what the miscellaneous folder is for. I discover miscellaneous material from 2011, but no folder to house that stuff in. I see that 2011 was a year for quite specific things, and not that many miscellaneous items. Not enough to warrant the building of a mighty folder, back then.

   Now, it is but the work of a few irritable seconds. Though…the new folder is far from mighty. How much deletion is involved? I find a spot of duplication. It would be unutterably strange to find zero duplication. Accept this.

   I find obsolete files that should give pangs on deletion, but I feel nothing. They are, after all, truly obsolete. Other entries give pause for thought, Horatio.

   For there are more things in files than mere data samples. I see and hear people who flitted in and out of my life and work. Some I could call on today and take up conversations where we left off, even at the distance of GASP time. Others wandered into different universes.

   Also, there’s a fucking shocking record of prices in 2011. A few items from back then would be bargains now. If you could get them at all. And other necessities, being necessary, shot up in price with rockets strapped to the tags.

*

My digital archive is as random as are the books on my shelves. I store things where they need to go at the time and under the circumstances. The storage of those things makes sense, then, and makes sense to me now only in the sense that it all made sense then.

   A missing file from 2012 turns up in the 2012 folder. Colour me stunned.

   Only a few seconds of work in it, and the 2013 folder sees its wayward sheep herded into a large miscellaneous pen.

   I’ve written with a miscellaneous pen from time to time. The last time I wrote with an actual physical pen was at the end of 2019. And with a pencil? Oh, the week before that. There are still reasons to scribble things down, away from the digital archive. And, yes, I take notes on the digital archive by pen. Sometimes, it’s the easiest way to fly.

   In the cosmic scale of things, I am approaching another coffee. It’s clear to me that not everything in the archive was in the archive. Now that I’ve eaten eight file folders, noted by year, and deleted the obsolete shortcut leading there, I am certain that…

   Not everything in the archive is in the archive. When a new year unfolds, I’m forced to unpack the months. I keep a folder of sub-folders with the months of the year running numbered 1 to 12, listing the first three letters of each month.

   No, I don’t know why I arranged things that way. I suspect, if pressed on the matter, that this notation is the orphaned remnant of a far earlier computer system. Let me just run a check on something. No, I don’t see what I wasn’t looking for.

   Inside an entirely different system, I used to have aardvark files. Yes, this was purely alphabetical. Priority files went at the start start, with the double aa in aardvark. But that primitive computer system gave way to this primitive computer system, and I don’t truly need aardvark files any longer.

*

As I type this entry, I am minutes into 2020 and already I need to set up a monthly file entry. Generally, I use monthly sub-folders to keep track of communications with people across the year. And people are using the internet to wish me a Happy New Year. I’m buzzing on mints and the notion that the last day of the year was one of the frostier ones in an otherwise mild winter. That thought resides in this file. Soon, it’ll be in a monthly folder.

   Archiving with aardvarks may have ended long ago, but archiving itself never ends. It’s one thing to look forward to 2020, and quite another to actually set the files up to cope with the admin of looking forward into the future of right now, just this minute.

   The feeling haunts me…I should set these damned things up well in advance instead of having a microwaved template that I drop into folders as and when needed. But the point of a template is to have a template just for these moments.

   It’s better to wait around and see who and what I’ll need to set the monthly archives up for. Copying and pasting into every last corner is too much duplication of effort. Even for me.

   I ate the eight errant folders a million years ago, whoosh, and need never concern myself with those loose ends, stowed away as they are. But I’ll always have months in years to deal with. Life is set up that way, and I don’t see any other system coming along to replace the calendar any old time soon.

MORE INJURY FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Another day, another injured digit.
   I suspect I'm on a quest to damage a finger or thumb each dawn. Some of those digits are definitely going to be mine.
   Despite the latest trauma, I republished seven times today. My recent formatting war with the back catalogue of prehistoric files forced something from the mirk.
   When that something surfaced from the depths, I went tsk. In the sense that I said fuck.

*

The project irresponsible is slim thriller. I've split the book into four chunks. Not hard to do - I wrote the book in four chunks.

And did those files in ancient time

Unfurl with ease upon the computer screen:

And was the formatting odd

On ev'ry effing paragraph seen!

   Sometimes, bringing old stories into line with e-book conventions is easy. That's not the case with this fossil.
   However, I spotted something awkward - meaning it wasn't wrong.
   It was, infuriatingly, right. I speak of the gargoyle. There's a gargoyle in the book. And I researched the word gargoyle before I wrote the gargoyle into my tale.
   A gargoyle gurgles.
   If a gargoyle doesn't divert water away from a building, it isn't a gargoyle.
   Remembering this bit of research from the hinterland of yesteryear, over the hills and very far away, I did the obvious thing.
   I ran a search for the word in my published works.
   And I saw that, in at least three cases, I'd gone on to use the term incorrectly much later.
   This brings up an important point. If you must correct something in an e-book, run a check on all of your books. When factual errors creep in, as they must, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
   If you research gargoyles, and write properly about them, hell, that doesn't stop you from writing improperly about them later.
   Gargoyles crawled over my work like, er, gargoyles on a cathedral. And I'd let the definition drift. That loose masonry needed fixing.
   I fixed.
   On top of that, I'm from the last generation to be taught the use of whom. If you find yourself using the word in your writing, here's some handy advice.
   Kill it - kill it with fire.
   I went through my published work and checked for usage. The word has the odour of bottled creatures to it.
   Though I didn't use the word much, I had the advantage of knowing how to use it. I'd say that's the same as not using a scythe much, but professing great skill just the same.
   Raymond Chandler defended the word, but I am not here to defend Raymond Chandler.
   And so...
   Welcome, anatomically accurate gargoyles. Farewell, whom. It lingers in my blog posts, but no more in my fiction. Gargoyles and whom forced me to republish seven books today. Our world survived the tumult.

HAMLET OR NOT HAMLET. THAT IS THE QUESTION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

When I was generating a final copy of my annual archive, I spent time on the Twitter describing that process. I invented new words for slow.
   Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh wasn't one of those words.
   I sailed into the night, back and forth, between two computers. One machine, at least, had the internet. So I whiled away some of the time in random searching.
   The name of an actress came up.
   I thought I'd check out the internet's opinion of this actress. She gave excellent performances in a few movies I'd seen. I'd long-ago decided she'd serve as the model for a character in one of my books.

*

Which one? That character is in my Hamlet adaptation. To avoid confusion, the story's called not hamlet. And that's perfectly true...
   Better to say that it's not just Hamlet. Another story intrudes. One of the features of Hamlet that always interested me was the notion of a play within the play.
   Strolling players visit the castle. Hamlet manipulates them into putting on a particular play. He does this to drop heavy hints about his father's murder.
   Hamlet has no concrete proof - he's playing a hunch based on a chat with a ghost...
   But the play's the thing. Hamlet wants to see the murderer's reaction to the play.

*

I thought, suppose the strolling players have their own plot going on. A tale following the murderous trail of the clown, Pagliaccio. Anyway, in my mash-up, Pagliacci works with Hamlet.
   Deep into the night, my archive takes an age to sort out, and, internetting, I stumble on this actress. She's the one I think of when I imagine the character Columbina.
   I fix files. And I copy files. I use the Twitter to reveal the slowness of file-movery. At some point, it's 2.00 in the morning and I'm reading the blog of an actress.
   She has a blog? Worth checking out?
   As events showed, yes. There were insightful gems on that blog.
   The night before, I was writing until 1.00 in the morning. Odd hours? I don't think so. Normally I wouldn't go far beyond 1.00 if writing.
   Background archiving was looking after itself, but I had to look after that too. I owned that paranoid feeling. Must do this now. If I switch the computer off and wait until morning, the whole system might fritz.
   Of course, that paranoia stems from an actual event. HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT.
   This is why I stayed up until 2.00. Archiving wasn't allowed to stop for mere sleep.

*

My Hamlet adaptation stalled after six chapters when no one wanted to publish it. After writing just six chapters, I decided I'd shop a story around unfinished.
   Confidence in the finished article, nestled in some futuristic world we'd reach one day.
   The future, though, was floating on the mighty Amazon. I published the first chapter of not hamlet in my INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS.
   Kindle's there to be used.
   I've been looking at that excerpt. And I'll let it stand as it is, in the collection. But for release into the wild as a full novel, I think my early attempt at Kindle formatting must go.
   Hamlet's adventures deserve shorter paragraphs. They'll be the same paragraphs - just chopped in half for ease of digital reading.
   Midnight descends. I'll finish this post another time. Sleep is considered essential by some. But only if you wish to function. No staying awake until 2.00 this time around.

*

Where were we? This is not a tale of evil kidney transplantation. (With regard to a non-functioning external hard drive, we're in the realms of dodgy transfusion.)
   Hamlet. I stayed up late, fixing the archive. And I read a blog. That actress was on my mind. Obviously, I thought of Columbina. In my tale, she's Pagliacci's second wife. She serves as inspiration for Pagliacci's move into Hamlet's world...

*

But this blog post isn't about any of that stuff. At 2.00 in the morning I'd read the woman's blog, archived my fiction, and had enough.
   Come morning, even though I was thinking of Shakespeare and Leoncavallo, my main thought was of the archive. I bring things forward each year, so my freshest vault contains the latest copies and updates of Kindle PRC files.
   That's in case I iron out a glitch or alter some blurb.
   Projects in progress as one year ends are archived within that year. Then they are copied to a new year for further work. The old archive is then left lying around on the off-chance that something catastrophic happens.
   Though for something catastrophic to happen to fresher chunks of files and NOT to me too, I'd have to be out of the building when that plane hits.

*

My thoughts went to Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords and all its sequels and offshoots. I knew I had to weed out that sub-archive. So that's what I've been doing. Weeding.
   The books that follow the first volume don't exactly follow the first volume. They exist at the same time. Same setting. A few scenes overlap.
   Old ground. Different viewpoints.
   It's a nightmare, juggling those characters. She's here, and hears that news. So she can't be there when that event happens, as she's come from yonder to be here.
   Like that. Multiplied.
   I can't let things fester beyond all rational and irrational control. With this in mind, I started destroying duplicate files. Devious ones.
   Files with different names containing duplicated text. I had to cap a lid on that bullshit.
   And I created a massive table, showing the first book's timeline, with the out-of-sequence flashbacks set down in chronological order.
   Yes. The fun part of writing. Continuity is important to some people. Maybe it's a phase readers are going through.
   So far, only part of the plot of book four felt the strain. Sorting out the action in books two and three should smooth the running for books four and five.
   Especially as she's here when she hears that news.

*

Lots of ideas. Plenty of books on the unwritten pile, waiting to go. Where does that leave Shakespeare, if I turn my attention to a sprawling series instead?
   I'll get to those assorted tales. Without rushing. Every year, my ambition is to write a whole bunch of books. And this year is no different.
   Every year I take interesting detours into reading, or experiencing stuff, or damn-well thinking through ideas that are no good and must be worked on. Sometimes, worked over. As in...
   Tied to a chair. Blowtorches are waved.
   Anyway. I published. And I'll go on publishing. Every detour into another project creates another project.
   I must away, to see to more archiving. There's a file (with chapter titles in it) that flies in the face of the plot of at least two books...

  
  



  

UNBLOGGING.

You cannot unblog that which you have blogged. Better to say, perhaps, you cannot kill that which does not live. A blog can be shut down. Left, mouldering, with a stake through its heart. Pull the stake out, and Blogula Lives!

   I’ve been staring at my electronic version of the blank page for a few minutes. The duration of a song playing in the background. Windows Media Player tells me I’ve been staring at the blank screen for a 4:06 chunk of my time on this world.

   Valentine Heart, by Tanita Tikaram. (From her debut album, ancient heart.) Eclectic doesn’t mean special. It means you are all over the place in selecting sources of inspiration. Those sources are quite meaningless.

   Blogger and Twitter changed my plans. I have a Zombie Apocalypse story to write. Why couldn’t I use that as a source for inspiration? Time plays its part. I had thoughts, in the dim and distant. Two novels. I’ll write these two novels. First, I’ll write other things. Become a decent writer.

   Kept two stories in my head for years. Then I kept more and more stories in my head for years. The two that sat side by side were untitled. One was the skyscraper story. The other was the Quaich story. They were novels waiting out in the street. Not waiting in the wings. They’d have to work up to that.

   I became a better writer. A feat that wasn’t hard. All I had to do was stop writing utter crap. Let me know how I’m doing. No. Don’t. Looking back, every twelvemonth, I sense improvement. And room for improvement. Your future self is always your worst critic. My future self will pour scorn on that last sentence.

   Events in 1993 and 1995 altered my views of what would be possible in writing the skyscraper story. By 1995, the Quaich story had become slim*thriller. I was a world away from these novels. Other stories concerned me. Stories I was writing down. In 1998 I may have written a note about coinage for slim*thriller. Coinage seemed important to me. By 2000, I must have started plans to write the book.

   Music plays in the background. Sometimes that’s a source of inspiration. I also take photos, or scan images from a wide range of sources. My archive is shot to hell. Migrating from one computer to another screws up the dates. Files are absorbed into other files. Occasionally, only the content of a file screams the original date of creation. All the statistics and properties are out of whack with reality.

   Still, I dig. There are some gems. A few images with intact dates attached. I must have made notes in early 2000. Before I laid hands on the coinage I sought. There are prototype scanned images with year 2000 date-stamps. Once the coins were in my hands, I set up plans for my novel in early 2001.

   Then I turned away to other things. I had a plan, and the plan didn’t involve the skyscraper story or slim*thriller. By the end of 2001, the skyscraper story was dead. I’d lost one. Yes, I’d lost short stories before. I’d vapourised an appalling novel, too. But now I’d lost an unwritten book.

   I am outraged amazed now that I’d advanced all those stories in my head after taking few or no notes. The Quaich story only just started to appear in files after a little over a decade in my head. Alongside the skyscraper story, the Quaich story burbled away at the mercy of traffic. One wrong step in front of a bus, and worlds are destroyed.

   My plans for slim*thriller were set aside in favour of other tales. At least I’d made a start. I returned to the prospect in late 2004. An arcane note concerning coinage became the chapter I’d always meant to write. The Quaich story became the book I’d always meant to write. Had the World Trade Centre not been destroyed, the skyscraper story would have been written. Knowing me, I’d have dropped a few slim*thriller references in there for readers.

   Stories stay inside my head for years. This is true of the Zombie Apocalypse book. Only a few years, in the case of the zombies. Preparing to publish books in the autumn/winter period of 2011/2012, I started to have ideas for something…new.

   Gasp. What am I thinking? That I’ll keep a story in my head for a few months and then write it? Not let it stew for years, forming part of the production-line. Just throw it out there? Of course not. Let it stew. Do the Zombie Apocalypse story.

   Then I remembered that I’d wanted to try something different, related to the zombie story. It would be good to throw a story out there. As a source for inspiration. I don’t mean to go all Japanese on you. As though I’m in a rock garden, poised over a parchment, waiting hours to strike. Creating the perfect poem.

   No. I’m far from that image. No rock garden, for starters. I write rapidly. My ability to edit is powered by the Dark Side of Publishing™. Many Ewoks died to fuel the process. So why haven’t I written a bajillion books? Life gets in the way.

   Ideas stay in my head as they aren’t ready for the world. I’m not saying learn to edit in your head. That may not be for you. To concoct stories, and conversations within stories, and keep them unwritten. Adding to them. Elaborating on the chatter. All that stuff might poison your mind. Doesn’t seem to affect me as I throw another Ewok on the fire.

   Plans change. But I don’t unblog that which I have blogged. Yes, I’ll still do the zombie story. It is easier to turn to fresh material lacking illustrations than to tackle the technical minefield that is slim*thriller. So I tackle short story collections, and blog compilations, novels in the backlist that constitute unfinished business, and…new ideas.

   My fiction factory is full of things I’m tinkering away at. Special projects. Not-so-special projects. The whole while, I’m looking at the business of business and not worrying too much about things that drag other people down.

   So many people out there get sucked into the need to advertise. I do short plugs for my books on Twitter, and leave it at that. It doesn’t cost money. My advertising budget is ZERO. You may be shocked. Well, I’m darting around my factory, seeing to fiction.

   Yes, I will put out a book called Clanjamfrie. It’s proving a tricky customer to nail down. Without getting into it, the problems are technical, plot/character related, and not for public consumption. My personal carer, Dr Anton Phibes, sees to that.

   Nurse, the screens!

   I resolved some Kindle-oriented technical issues over my not hamlet adaptation, and hope to bring that to a semi-suspecting public one day. What do I have in mind, as I type? REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE as a blog collection featuring a giant space cockroach. Clanjamfrie, Clanjamfrie Tales, not hamlet, slim*thriller once I fix the pictures, REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE as a blog collection featuring a lost story I’ll recover from memory, JUST ANOTHER ZOMBIE STORY, and assorted volumes of Neon Gods. (Including a short story collection which will house The Chalice in the Snow.)

   Oh, and other stuff besides. How long will it take to put all this material out? It takes as long as it takes. Life gets in the way, remember. I’d like to spend a mad weekend bringing all this stuff to the boil. Then, on the Monday, I’d hit the big red button on the end of the machine and watch e-books roll out at a frightening rate.

   Mm. I wanted to write a story, rapidly. Not on the backlist of books. Nothing that constitutes unfinished business. Material I’d thought over, at the start of the year. Oh, I’m constructing a new story in my mind. How long will I let this stew in the old brainbox?

   Not long, I decided. The world has gone digital. Immediate. I could rattle this out as an example of how to do things. Yes, I’ll do that for Kacey Vanderkarr. And show her how easy it is. That was wrong of me.

   For starters, I’d already shown her that she had to confront her fear of publishing. No need to bludgeon her with a book. To finish on, I should be writing a book to write a book – not to help out a single named individual. What was I thinking. Clanjamfrie has a delicate mechanism at its heart, if I choose to wind it up and link it to the heart. I must tread lightly.

   But I see that I am walking close to the edge of the room, where visitors from the outside world pass by. There, my personal carer, Dr Anton Phibes, stands ready to foil my plans of discussing my plans. One day, someone will get at him. Without knocking me out of action, for he has radio-linked his heartbeat to mine.

   I just wanted to waffle in a blog post about my works in lack of progress. They all proceed in dribs, in drabs. Even though I write quickly. Something technical comes up, and my writing day is shot to hell resolving it. For the technical must be resolved. As must the writing.

NEXT BLOG: SPAM ALERT.

NEXT BLOG.

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2012.

This next blog is written before the release of my second Amazon Kindle book. I am gambling that I will have the thing ready for D-Day. My first Deployment-Day was chaotic. I managed to stay calm. Did the job. Four hours after I pressed the button, Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords went on sale.

   Now it’s the turn of INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS, which I published just before I posted this blog. LYGHTNYNG STRYKES is out next, six weeks from now if all goes well. (Whenever NOW is, given that I’m writing ahead of the game.) Then, I’m faced with decisions.

   Commit to a genuine formatting war in carving four volumes out of one story, illustrations and all. Revisit old material. Or? Write something new. Tackle more stories about Neon Gods. The Chalice in the Snow is set for publication in a short story collection. That gathering goes by the title Neon Gods Adrift in Mist. Unless I change my mind, and call it The Chalice in the Snow and Other Tales. (Or, being Scottish, Ither Tales.)

   I could knock out a short story every week, for a volume like that, and stop when I feel the book’s large enough to go on sale. And I could still work on other things, or ither things, besides. Decisions. I may just be making those decisions as I type.

   So far, I’ve managed to stick to the initial plan. Write six blogs and post those in the run-up to my book’s publication. Follow that by repeating the formula. Write six more blog posts in the run-up to publishing a second book. For my next trick, it’s the same trick. Keep blogging. Write six final blogs, and put out book three.

   Then what? Shut the blog down while I take stock? That seems likely. I could blog weekly, turning myself into an internet version of Alistair Cooke. It never occurred that I’d follow in his footsteps, yet I’ve done that.

   I doff my hat to Cooke for having invented his own job as he went along, and for having held on to that job decade in, decade out, until retirement was forced upon him. Death will do that to a writer. Cooke held tenaciously to his place in broadcasting. The longer he held on, the more likely that his place in broadcasting became a place in broadcasting history.

   There’s an obvious lesson to be had from that. He did repeat himself. Impossible to avoid. Embrace the fact that you will repeat stuff. This is called creating a style. These days, it is also known as developing a platform.

   What do I hope to achieve by blogging? I hope to gather an army of fans who will feed me. Kind strangers will provide sustenance by purchasing my fiction and furnishing me with handy paper tokens which may be exchanged for goods or services. If that army swells to actual army-size, my war-chest will pay for exotic trips to locations which would then feature heavily in my stories.

   Cooke observed the world, and gave his radio audience glimpses of that world. He met Duke Ellington, and was present when Robert Kennedy was shot. For my part, as a mere constructor of this blog, I’m no great observer as Cooke was. I was simply once part of Cooke’s audience.

   So I’m no Alistair Cooke. And I’m no Studs Terkel, or Harvey Pekar. Though, like Harvey, I have dabbled in the world of the comic book. Albert Crabbe has a comic script attached to his name. As does Julio Mud. The cover art for INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS was meant to be part of a comic strip.

   It was always my intention, from the moment Karen Woodward thumped me over the head prodded my career as a blogger, to write selective blog entries that I’d collect and publish alongside my fiction. This, I have now done. Are these blogs worth reading? Of course. You’d expect me to say that, for two reasons.

   One. When it comes to my writing, though critical of it, I cannot avoid being biased. Two. As I sit typing, I read the words aloud. Shades of Alistair Cooke, there. He was speaking to a radio audience. I speak to myself, and the worms in the walls, just to keep a lid on sentence-length.

   What level of planning goes into a blog entry that’s bound for a collected edition further down the line? Should I lie, and say that I read up on Alistair Cooke and his work? I listened to his work while he was alive. All I did was check the spelling of his name. I did this by summoning the memory of the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.

   Cooke’s television work was spoofed as Cookie, with the monster in the role, reminding me that the broadcaster’s name ended in an e. Yes, that’s what passes for research in this blog. Be thankful that I apply these high standards on your behalf.

   I also struggle, heroically, with the punishing limitations delightful quirks of Microsoft Word. My wild flailing superb typing ability comes in handy, too. I considered being as grumpy as Harvey Pekar. No one on the face of the globe, Pekar included, could be that grumpy and live as long as Pekar did. You must accept my curmudgeonly nature with a mountain of salt.

   Does this make it difficult for the accidental reader to deal with my sense of humour? Of course. I managed to type that with a straight face, even though I was reading the words aloud in a high fluting tone – mimicking the speaking style of H.G. Wells.

   For no reason other than that I could. If nothing else, it added (that is to say, padded) a paragraph. Though I set out to collect my pre-publication blogs in a book, I didn’t sit down at the keyboard with the express intention of ensuring every proclamation became the Statement of the Age. That way, madness lies.

   This blog entry has been the most disjointed, in the writing. I find that I must tear myself away from the typing now, to see to my dinner Lofty Affairs of State. That last swipe was not true. In this part of the world, dinner is what other people call lunch. The main evening meal is not called dinner, but tea.

   Not to be confused with the drink. Which is also called tea. To confound the issue, it is possible to have tea with your tea. My wild flailing fingers admirable typing skills added a t to the end of the first tea in that last sentence. I do check this stuff for errors of that nature.

   Though I do not check in silence. Typing in the foreground is inspired by music in the background. I won’t always have music playing as I write. Generally, something is burbling away. Perhaps I’m looking for a sense of mood, or atmosphere.

   Maybe I’m revisiting music I haven’t heard in a little while. The soundscape of typing is no longer the thunderous rattle provided by the manual typewriter. It has softened from rattle to clatter. What do I listen to, as I type? Voices inside my head, is the short answer.

   I battle, constantly, to replicate human speech-patterns in text. Casting runes onto the blank page. I listen to music, too. Movie soundtracks, if I want to concentrate on the unfolding tale. Songs by artists who love to sing impenetrable lyrics, if I don’t want to be caught up in the words.

   Occasionally, I’ll decide that there’s something in a song that is of direct consequence to what I’m writing about. Windows Media Player allows me to set up my own playlist, tailored to the way I think a story is going. I have a playlist set for my Hamlet adaptation. Half an hour of music.

   There’s another playlist for Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords. Specifically attuned to the stories of the past. Almost 90 minutes of material. Not one song connects to the main plot featuring Gilach Mac Gilach. The playlist was created for the tales in Sir Bradwyn’s section of the saga.

   I still have the cassette I cobbled together for that, back in the day. The technology has improved somewhat. Now I’m looking at the actual playlist for Neon Gods. Twenty minutes of music that I use to visualise a few scenes from the book and several scenes from future tales of past exploits.

   This musical swirl reminds me of the original inspiration for the villainous King Valentyne. The Battle of Evermore was a collaboration between Led Zeppelin and Sandy Denny. There’s a clear mention of a tyrant. Valentyne the Tyrant was born. He became Valentyne the Conqueror. Then he switched to his final title. Vortigern the Tyrant. I just couldn’t shake the tyrannical character conjured up by that song. So the villain stayed.

   I used the song that followed The Battle of Evermore as a continuation of inspirational themes. In Stairway to Heaven, the lady who buys the stairway to heaven becomes the Red Queen in my stories. This is on the fourth Led Zeppelin album. Yes, the untitled one.

   The Battle of Evermore inspired scenes that led to the start of the war between Vortigern and everyone else. A war he thought he’d won after a year. Stairway to Heaven was a song I used to form images of Sir Bradwyn, old beyond his years, dozing by a fire. Remembering the final battle.

   A fight he barely wins, as Robert Plant sings about being a rock. With the lady herself, her kingdom, and all her people, lost in the deluge of a defeat that drags most of her foes down with her. Does this mean anything to my readers? It needn’t.

   As I’ve stated elsewhere, sources of inspiration are meaningless. Here’s the playlist. Babe I’m Gonna Leave You. The Battle of Evermore. Stairway to Heaven. Kashmir. Charlie Big Potato. Kashmir. (No Quarter.) The Battle of Evermore. (No Quarter.) Stairway to Heaven. (How the West Was Won.) She Moves Through the Fair. Road to Your Soul. Scarlet. Only One Reason. Drowning.

   Led Zeppelin songs to start with. Charlie Big Potato is by Skunk Anansie, all Paranoid & Sunburnt, conjuring images of the tragedy relating to the Fair Elaine and her brother the Knight of the Glass Shield. Then it’s familiar Led Zeppelin stuff performed by Page and Plant or done live. After that, from She Moves Through the Fair on, music is by the band All About Eve featuring the haunting tones of Julianne Regan. She’s a MASSIVE Beverley Craven fan.

   Irony. Look it up.

   There’s a song in which Julianne’s spectral voice is buried under layers of technology, to great effect, and that inspires a scene I’ve not yet committed to paper. The song is Phased, and the scene involves alteration of the perception of time. That song’s on a separate playlist dominated by Annie Lennox. Those songs do inspire scenes from Gilach’s side of the story told in Neon Gods.

   Sparks fly. I’d like to say I didn’t listen to any lightning-based music while writing LYGHTNYNG STRYKES. Shelter from the Rain is another All About Eve song, and uses the phrase lightning strikes again in the lyrics. Lightning is a Thea Gilmore song that played merrily away as I typed. But tales of lyghtnyng are for another tyme.

NEXT EVENT: BARRING GREMLINS, A SECOND BOOK IS DEPLOYED.