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.

BETTER LATE THAN NOVEMBER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

I sat staring at published blog posts. These posts are published monthly by pixies under the stairs, usually within the first week of the month. Late-month blog posts are almost always extra blog posts.

   If I feel the need to scrawl an obituary, I’ll do so. Usually I wait until confirmation of the unliving nature of the supposedly-deceased. I had to wait a wee while for groper Harlan Ellison to drop dead, and he inconvenienced me by going out in the wrong week of the month.

   That obituary was ready to roll the moment he karked it. This was my Batman-style vow. So I published near the end of the month. I could’ve waited a few days and gathered more sources confirming the Old Fart’s death, but no.

   Life gets in the way, even of death. I have the strange sensation that someone died and I was meant to write an obituary of that uncertain someone. This is a regular sensation, and it soon passes.

   Y’know, I think it was Mark Twain. Others have covered the event in endless detail, and I must let this pass with little meaningful comment.

Mark Twain, who has died in a mountaineering accident at the tragic young age of 183, leaves a grieving widow and a vast CD collection of old-timey music. Twain, who was visiting Amsterdam on a fact-finding mission, found himself in an argument with the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions.

   Twain’s contention, that his recent discovery of a Dutch molehill should be classed as a mountain, upset the Board as a body – leaving the organisation no option but to redraw all the maps or face Twain in a duel to the death. The Board chose the latter path to posterity, and promptly shot at Twain to preserve the honour of the country.

   Only 99 members of the organisation could muster at short notice, and all of them missed. Twain died laughing. Coroner’s verdict: death via mountaineering dispute.

Occasionally, life really gets in the way and I publish late in the month. Last month’s blog post was last week: better late than November. What happens if I really can’t make the monthly quota?

   Nothing. Doesn’t mean I’ve died. Might mean I’ve died. It’s just as likely that my computer has died. If one machine died, I’d have to take it off life-support and unplug all the cables. (Shudder.)

   Yes, I shudder. After recently revamping the layout, I told myself I’d never need to climb back there and mess with the cables again. Until the computer karks it, of course. The double-task is remove latest dead computer from life-support and plug old barely-living computer into life-support…to be continued…

   Purchase brand-new computer. Unplug feeble reserve computer from life-support. Set up brand-new computer, hoping, wildly, that the very latest computer is so advanced that it no longer even needs cables.

   Life got in the way of my train of thought on life getting in the way. I wandered the country in rain, rain, and more rain. Autumn leaves provided the only brightness to the day. It was, to use a technical term, dreich.

   That is a bad word to use if you are describing someone’s cooking, given that it is almost always employed to explain the nature of the weather.

   I’d have published this blog post on the 1^st of November, explaining why some blog posts are delayed, but this blog post was delayed. Yes, late-month posts are usually extra posts, adding to the quota. Not always. Sometimes, being busy keeps you busy and makes you busier.

   After walking through a rain-filled world, down by swollen rivers, past leaf-filled landscapes, I reached that point. It’s the point at which you return home and know you’ll be struggling out of your outdoor gear for a million years before you can reach that coffee.

   I reached that coffee in record time. And then, thinking I wouldn’t be busy, I grew busy. There was the matter of relocating wiring in the loft without illuminating my skeleton. The wiring was never put in neatly. Neatly, in the case of wiring, is another way of hoping the wiring is put in safely.

   With this thing moved around and that thing ripped out and this bit of wood cut short and that nail removed to help shift that pipe away from there for a moment or two…

   The wiring went where it should have been all that time ago, when it was put in at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon…same as all the other slightly wonky things around the place. My good self most likely included, now I think on it.

   Yes, it is important to produce blog material regularly. In the earlier phase of the blog, I’d write at least once a week. Then, in the later phase of the blog I switched to at least once a month. But it’s fine if it isn’t possible to blog.

   My efforts are heading more and more into video production, and it is difficult to produce a video every week. Somehow, I manage. It’s just like blogging…I try to write 1,500 words for a video script.

   That stems from one of the main inspirations for the blog – listening to Alistair Cooke’s radio talks. He’d do a fifteen minute talk every week for a million years. I felt I could parcel a thought or two into 1,500 words of waffle. That’s how the blog went for a good while.

   Eventually, I felt that I’d get by on whatever I wrote. If I only wrote 1,000 words and said what I wanted to say, that’s what I did for that entry. I’m still here, typing nonsense. Now, though, I’m recording what I type and turning that into video nonsense.

   The world doesn’t end if I don’t blog for a wee while, or even for a big while. But what of the sudden end? I contemplated that as I used electrical tools to chew bits out of things in various parts of the house.

   Sudden internet silence might be down to sudden incapacitating injury. Don’t confuse a keyboard and a power tool of any kind. Keep your fingers off one. And keep your fingers off the other, too, if that’s how the mood flows. It’s moods that flow and blood that pumps…all over the rafters.

   Yes, my typing is that severe.

   I look around at a crowd of bloggers who no longer blog, and I wonder what it is that keeps me going. No, I don’t have anything meaningful to say. But I say it. Type it. Think it aloud as I hit the keys.

   If the blog stops, I’ve mistaken a keyboard for a power tool and written my thoughts in my own intestines. Always preferable to doing that in another person’s intestines. It’s considered rude not to ask first, and rude whether asking or not in any case.

   And that’s all I wrote. I was clambering around again, and making sure I didn’t fall into anything, that nothing fell into me, that I didn’t land on lumpy objects, that lumpy objects didn’t land on me, and that all sorts of dangerous things were safe. Shaky, but safe.

   I could’ve used that for the title of this blog post. SHAKY…BUT SAFE. A report from a clumsy author who didn’t need an ambulance, after all.

   Delays to blog posts are technical or non-technical. They may involve coffee and biscuits. Or cakes. Coffee and cakes. By law, delays to blog posts must involve coffee and biscuits. And cake. Cakes, preferably.

   I opened this blog post by contemplating published blog posts. But there are unpublished ones. I had obituaries ready to go for groper Harlan Ellison and Time Lord Terrance Dicks. Who would I do an obituary for, now? Three people…

   Me, myself, and I.

   This won’t work. I could write it up without difficulty. But publishing would be awkward. Set it up to auto-publish by a certain date, and then keep changing the date. That won’t work very well if I’m in a coffee coma.

   Is a coffee coma a coma from too much coffee or not enough coffee? I feel more non-scientific research is required in that sphere.

   Time for blogging advice. Write regularly. And write irregularly. Type with coffee. And type with coffee. There is no typing without coffee. Stay as safe as you can. There is a risk that you can never eliminate risk. Be vaguely aware of this. Avoid cables. Don’t trip over them, slice into them, or entangle yourself in their cabley entrails. Use machines that limit the number of cables. Or avoid machines entirely.

   I’m pausing to check for coffee, cables, and switches that are meant to be off. This is important stuff, and writing will see you through it. Blog when you can. If you blog to a routine, then that’s blogging when you can. Better late than November. That was true of my October post. I should say something about November 2019 and Los Angeles and replicants. But others are covering that, elsewhere.

VANITY PUBLISHING AND SUBSIDY PUBLISHING. THE VENUS FLYTRAP MODEL: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

No disrespect to the Venus Flytrap.
   Technically, the carnivorous plant is pretty much an ant-trap. Creepies and crawlies wander across the plant’s surface…
   There’s a hair-trigger. The plant doesn’t want to waste time and energy trapping and releasing pebbles or twigs that blunder by. So there are other triggers.
   It takes two trips within a twenty-second period to drop a hint that a creature has wandered over the trap. Snap! The prison walls close and a creature is caged.
   Creatures find it almost impossible to break through the bars of the cage or force the prison walls open again. Harsh? We farm cattle.

*

The Venus Flytrap is American. And the term vanity press seems to have originated in America. Vanity publisher is a variant. And vanity publishing is the resultant insult derived from the business.

   I’ll also call it subsidy publishing here, for that is yet another important term.
   How to publish a book? Let me count the ways.
   First, go to YouTube and search for Paperback Writer. Listen to that song. I’ll wait.

*

You want to be a paperback writer. So you try famous publishers. They don’t want to know. And they don’t go out of the way to court your business. Important point.

   But wait a bit! You spy publishing companies that ask, in adverts, if you want to be published. They tell you to publish.
   Are you an author? Publish with us!
   Fantastic.
   Bear in mind that advertising ALWAYS lends an air of legitimacy to proceedings. That’s a Top Tip™.

*

The sarcasm filter’s intermittent performance may affect your enjoyment of this blog post.

   A vanity press preys on ants. Lots and lots of ants. They blunder in and are consumed. There’s no way out. A vanity press gains from consuming this regular trickle of ants. The ants give up everything.
   Those ants are small. When eaten in vast quantities, they provide enough sustenance for, oh, the Venus Flytrap. Or a subsidy publishing company.

*

How to publish a book? Let me count the ways.

   Publishing Model 1. Traditional conventional publisher. You manage to sign a deal with this behemoth. The book will see publication. In hardback first, most likely. Paperback to follow.
   You don’t pay to publish that book. The publisher pays production costs. And the publisher edits the book. You’ll have little say in the cover. That’s the publisher’s business, and the publisher pays for the art or photography.
   The publisher may front you money out of the eventual proceeds. That’s an advance on royalties. The publisher palms a cut of the take. Everything I’ve listed in this publishing model is grossly oversimplified.
   For example, the massive advance shamelessly announced in the media never matches reality. The advance is sliced into chunks, paid out when certain conditions are met. Signing the deal. Turning in a manuscript to the publisher’s satisfaction. Publication of hardback. Later publication of paperback.
   But this is a blog post, not a book. Simplification will do.
   The standard publishing deal involves giving a large slice of the book’s profits to the publisher in return for all the work the publisher says the publisher does.
   Sarcasm filter is working just fine.
   No money goes directly from the author’s pocket to the publisher’s bank. There will be many clauses in the contract relating to who does what, when. Getting into a contract takes a signature.
   The business of getting out of the contract should be written into the contract.

*

Publishing Model 2. Self-publishing. So many options here. The one I use is digital. Kindle. I write my stories and publish electronically through Amazon.

   Go to Amazon Kindle Store. Type RLL.
   Amazon hosts my bookshelf. And Amazon takes a cut of the proceeds. I don’t give Amazon any cash directly from my pocket. That’s an important point.
   This is a blog post, not a book. We’re here to talk about the other model…

*

And Publishing Model 3. The utter bastards.

   Publish with us! And pay us! Never escape from your contract! We do so much for you. That’s why we’re too busy to respond to your entreaties.
   In the dusty dim and distant days, when I chased paper publishing deals, I was all-too-aware of the vanity press. Yes, I knew the danger back in my schooldays.
   I recall a conversation with a young woman who said to me…
   You can pay to have your work published.
   (Fucking hell. Did everyone know I was headed for the writing game?! She was a year younger, and that put her in a different universe within the same school. But somehow, she knew a writer at fifty paces.)
   I said nothing in reply. Mentally, though, I had this floating around…
   You can pay to have your work published, but why would you?
   Out comes the derogatory publishing term. Vanity.

*

The vanity/subsidy publisher signs a deal to publish books that you must pay for. Your target audience? That’s you, immediate family, and friends. If you are lucky, friends of family, and friends of friends.

   And that’s all. The end. Your subsidy company sets the price of the book. That price is massive. As author, you probably receive a discount on any copies you want for yourself. The first few copies, anyway.
   What does the company do for you after that? Everything – at a price. For a further fee, the company will actually edit your work. A book published by a vanity/subsidy outfit is easy to spot…
   High price. Zero editing. Disclaimer at the start, stating that the publisher allowed the author to publish the work without editorial interference.
   Public-spirited.
   No, it’s one of those WHAT THE FUCK?! moments. That disclaimer is an odious piece of legal claptrap. It pours scorn on all, and splashes more back on the pourer.
   Backstage, the contract cuts deep. To escape the contract you’ll have to carry a gold ring to a volcano, and throw it in.
   You’ll have an in-box. That in-box will flow with entreaties from your publishing company, offering special deals on bonus features for your book. All at a price. Horses die under the flogging dished out by the subsidy publisher.
   I could go on, and I should. So I think I will. You want out of the contract? Hell, that can be arranged. At a price. There’ll be a shakedown for cash as you squeeze out the door. To be released from the contract, as a favour to you, there’ll be special production costs the company must reclaim in order to stay solvent.
   A diet of ants.

*

You are caught in the cage of the contract, and you’ll be slowly digested. The carnivorous publisher squeezes every last drop out of you. For you are valuable to the subsidy publisher. You are subsidising the publisher.

   They’ll sell your e-book on Amazon. And they’ll flog the anatomical distortion that is the bloated cost of the physical page-turning version. It’s on Amazon too. As a Print on Demand production. If someone orders a copy, it’s printed. So the company shouldn’t be charging you a shakedown exit-fee for production costs it must recoup.
   Do you want out of that flytrap or not?

*

I could go on, concerning specified sales-targets. By that, I mean the chicanery of Find-the-Lady proportions exhibited by the company in ensuring you don’t find that prize. They set the terms, and shift the field on a whim.

   Playing basketball on a football field is tough. Tougher when you thought you were on a basketball court for the duration of the game. Half a minute in, and the world blurs.
   Dealing with a subsidy press, money bleeds from your pocket. Every struggle is uphill. Still feel like playing basketball, knowing that?
   I was not bitten, and I am not even once-shy. This is a point of publishing I knew in my schooldays. And I mocked it then. Away with sepia-toned reminiscence. You want to know about now. Now, these utter bastards are on the internet…
   They have been for some time, and they are not going away. Curiously, the utter bastards have their supporters. I say that as I suspect their supporters of being phantoms. Let’s reel out Mark Twain. Supporters of subsidy publishing often do just that, with a fishing-rod. It’s a cheap trick to drag a spinning man from his grave.
   Twain is often cited as an example of a writer who paid to have his work published. Twain was this wonderful self-publishing bankrupt. Sarcasm filter held its head high until that last word.

*

This isn’t a detailed feature on why you shouldn’t sign with a subsidy publisher. One isn’t required. Don’t sign with a subsidy publisher. I’ll rephrase. Don’t sign with a vanity publisher. Not quite there. Don’t sign with a vanity press.

   If you have done so, get out of your contract. Read copyright law. Talk things over with an Intellectual Property lawyer. If a shakedown for cash is the only way out, pay the bitter price of experience and reclaim work you can publish yourself.
   Format the work for digital distribution. Look into Print on Demand publishing. Ask yourself what services are worth paying for. A subsidy publisher will charge cash for editing. What’s the difference, in going to a freelance editor? You still own the work after paying a freelance editor. There’s no flytrap.
   I’ve hit 1,500 words and barely scratched the surface. Run a search on vanity press, vanity publishing, and subsidy publishing. Look for publishing scams. I won’t name subsidy publishers here. They don’t deserve the publicity. Google the terms I’ve mentioned, and they’ll come up anyway. Then you’ll know what to steer clear of.
   Check out THE SOCIETY OF AUTHORS.
   Have a look at WRITER BEWARE.
   And beware.

MARK TWAIN.

Writing isn’t always about writing. Sometimes reading strays across your plans. Then there’s maintenance to consider. I’d just filled in a form for the tax. This parchment was due under penalty of penalty.

   The scroll was destined for delivery and receipt before Hallowe’en. Why? Tax is so complex that the relevant department is literally arcane. Yes. Run by supernatural beings. Let us ponder the fiction of Mark Twain.

   Now he went back to his treasure-house, and carefully placed himself just as he had been standing when he tossed the marble away; then he took another marble from his pocket, and tossed it in the same way, saying:

   “Brother, go find your brother!”

   Tom Sawyer wishes to find a lost marble by means supernatural and arcane. He throws one bauble after the other. How absurd. Really? Not in the least. My work was interrupted by the need for maintenance. I will now relate that tale of woe.

   Things used every day tend to work just fine. Leave them be and they may fall apart while you aren’t looking. I use my computer daily. It’s a rare day that doesn’t see the machine switched on. Sleep aside, if I am away from my desk the break is never long.

   It is important to take breaks.

   I was on holiday. Returning, I found the house still stood. Gremlins walked all over the equipment in my absence. The computer monitor tired itself while I clambered over a foreign landscape looking for story material. Broken? The damned thing took ten minutes to wake.

   Ordinarily, I wouldn’t care. Ah, just one more quirky piece of equipment. The printer that insists on chewing every third envelope. I endure the quirk. Why? I run a near-paperless office. A few times each year, I’ll have to print an actual letter. There’s little point in upgrading to a new printer just to avoid a torn envelope.

   An office without quirks is a sterile place.

   One of my DVD drives refuses to open on the first use of the ejector. A second stab at the button does the trick. My shredder developed the tendency to gather most of my shredded material in its jaws and hoard the wedge for reasons best known to itself. This only becomes a problem when I attempt to empty the beast. Suddenly, the shredded flakes decide liberty has come. They seek the carpet. The carpet is welcoming.

   Quirks. Petty annoyances. You put up with them, until you don’t. After the second incident of sleepy monitor sickness, I’d had enough. I bought a cable to connect my television to the computer, and unplugged many many things.

   My computer sat in my office. I moved the machine to my library. For various reasons of the plot, the television isn’t moving from the room full of books. I tried the new arrangement. Sitting on the floor in front of the TV wasn’t a great solution.

   I decided to improvise. Why don’t I hunt that old PC monitor out of storage and try that? A temporary fix. Can’t do any harm. I moved many many things back to my office and plugged those things into other things. The ancient monitor was retrieved from storage.

   Cold storage. The garden hut, to be exact. After a spot of mountaineering inside the hut, I scrambled and clambered to my goal: a tired old monitor that had weathered a good and bad seven winters. In my office, an awkward cable was plugged into an awkward receptacle. Click. Fizz. Buzz. Zap.

   Everything worked. The monitor was darker. That was my only problem. I had difficulty gauging the state of my cover art on a darkened machine. My best option was to buy a small computer desk and shift everything back to the library. There, I’d use my TV as a monitor again.

   I braved the elements. This is a Scottish cliché meaning I went outdoors. Many a mile I trudged in search of self-assembly office equipment. The day was dry, and I had no fear of raindrops. More to the point, the cardboard box containing the desk had no fear of raindrops.

   At the edge of reason, and my library door, I assembled the creature. “It’s ali-ive!” This creation was a simple metal desk with a shelf beneath for the computer keyboard. I plugged many many things in and fixed them around the new desk.

   My library was now my office. The office was now somehow empty. My old computer desk had nothing to do but support a tired old monitor from the Dark Ages. In my library, a folding chair – interposed between PC desk and comfy TV chair – saw the job done.

   Word reached me that I’d be offered a new computer. Great. I could put that where the old machine once sat. My office’d be an office once more. All was right with the world. And so things went. My new computer, a free horse, was not examined in the mouth.

   Let me turn to this afternoon. I’d finished inscribing the illuminated manuscript with runes. The tax was fixed. Seated in my library, at my old computer, my world exploded. The new computer desk, with its sturdy construction, survived the explosion. My problem lay within the handy sliding shelf that held the keyboard.

   That shelf shattered on the left. I was showered with shotgun pellets. Tiny ball-bearings. They flew everywhere. I caught the free end of the shelf, and did my best to stop the keyboard from flying off. In this, I was unsuccessful. The keyboard gradually slid away and clattered onto some TV equipment stationed below.

   What went wrong? The shelf’s runner failed. I saw a tiny clip which still contained ball-bearings. Other, more rebellious, shiny pellets were scattered. I secured the shelf and gathered ball-bearings. Count those.

   Twelve spaces in the clip. That didn’t mean there were twelve steel trophies to be had. If twelve were packed in there initially, then yes. I couldn’t be certain of that. So I danced on the floor. Whirled and swirled like a dervish. My hands scoured the carpet for these missing steel spheres.

   I had to look. The basic components were all intact. Nothing sheared off. The shelf was fixable. Therefore, I had to look. The main body of the desk was perforated with circular holes. Those circles lay just shy of the size of each sphere. I found two bearings nestled on the desk in these circles.

   My swirling dance continued. I applied Cosmic Law. The spheres pinged all over the place. Most would be on the desk or lying in the carpet. Some may have popped and pinged into the nearby bin. A few could’ve loitered in the desk’s superstructure to the rear. I’d check.

   Where did I look? Everywhere, of course. I uncovered ten spheres and two tiny chunks of rock. Then I found an odd piece of plastic from nothing in particular. Under my chair I detected a crumb of fossilised food. Ew.

   One piece of twine later, I finished my search. Nothing more to see. The metallic glints in the carpet weren’t helping. I’d never considered the carpet to have a metallic pattern. Until I went hunting ball-bearings.

   Cosmic Law dictates that the impossible direction is the one in which hardened seekers must travel. I found myself behind the computer desk, swirling my hands on the floor in that strange low-level dance of mine. Cable after cable, I checked.

   Where were the two missing bearings? Patience is its own reward. Luckily, patience also rewarded me with the eleventh ball-bearing. I had marked one. Could I mark twain? Now all I had to do was uncover Judas. This twelfth apostle lay hidden. I turned my attention to deconstruction and reconstruction of the shelf.

   Bomb-disposal. I had to be careful. The old TV stand, glass, was now to the right and served as my printer stand. I definitely didn’t want to knock anything over onto that. Oops, seconds later, there flew the keyboard.

   Klunk.

   Ah, toughened glass. Glad to see that level of design in an otherwise fragile object. Be more careful. I’ll be much more careful than that. Clatter. Oops. Okay. Calm down. The design of the shelf is tricky. I’ll remove the shelf to get at the runners.

   This was achieved with minimal dropping and fumbling of bits I removed as I went along. (Believe me when I say a radical revision of the word minimal occurred in the previous sentence.) Finally, I had the eleven ball-bearings to hand. They could not be assembled in place. Resignedly, I knew I’d have to remove the left runner, flip that on its side, and apply the ball-bearings with great care.

   Situation. I’m one down. Judas has escaped me. What will I do anent that? I’ll try to fit the loose bearings inside the clip. Clatter. I drop a bearing. The metal globe rolls under the desk and settles on one of those small circular holes down there.

   “Brother, go find your brother!”

   The words come unbidden. I look right, to the nearest bookshelf. There sits Mark Twain’s story. Come on. Seriously? Am I going to follow in Tom Sawyer’s footsteps? The one place I haven’t looked is on the right of the floor-level bottom shelf. My tiny computer desk has no more secrets to relinquish.

   I haven’t looked on the right as the right side is taken up by the computer itself. There is no way that a ball-bearing could have ricocheted under there. As soon as this is put to me, I realise Cosmic Law dictates that the impossible direction is the one in which hardened seekers must travel.

   So it proves. Judas ricocheted under the rectangular computer. The twelfth apostle wormed its metallic way into hiding. Tom Sawyer helped me find the missing piece of that puzzle. I assembled everything with great skill and panache. (That is a lie.)

   After clumsily fumbling for eternity, I reassembled the whole runner. Bolted the tricky piece to the frame. Then watched in horror as the entire assembly pinged out again. Three bearings escaped. They clustered around the same dim part of my desk.

   I began again. With some cajoling, the job was done. I fixed the shelf into its awkward spot. There’s a tidy solution. Be wary when using the desk. That’s all. Yes, a flawed design was responsible. It’s possible to extend the shelf in full. Doing so on both sides extends the right side a shade further than the left. Leading to a twisting of the parts on the left. Twisting and popping of ball-bearings.

   The same is true in the other direction, when sliding the shelf away. There’s a slight uneven quality to an otherwise smooth operation. Why am I telling you this? Maintenance disrupted my writing routine. The least I could do was fashion a blog post out of the disruption.

   As for the circular black plastic clip that fell out of something, I’m sure I’ll learn where that came from. The item sits on my desk, mocking me. I am certain I dislodged the clip from one of many many things in my office/library.

   Pulling an item apart is followed by assembling that item and declaring it fixed. If you don’t have any spare parts at the end of the process, Cosmic Law dictates that you are doing something wrong. I considered throwing the clip away, to see if the thing might find its brother…

   In the time it took to write this blog post, I discovered another two black plastic clips. I can’t throw one away to locate more. If I do that, I may be swamped. Nothing appears broken or wobbly for a lack of three black circular clips. If the last you hear of me is that I was felled by an unsecured bookcase, consider the mystery solved.

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