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

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

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.

A STUNNING BRUNETTE BLOWS ME A KISS, AND I SELL A BOOK ON A RAINY STREET.

Is that strictly true? Not strictly true, no. Oh, brunette? Yes. Stunning? Certainly. Then the story falls apart on that pesky kiss detail. Let us examine the build-up to that non-blown non-kiss. This is something of a non-prelude. There are people I come into contact with relatively rarely.

   (After reading that last sentence, I could only laugh.)

   I came into contact with one of those people today. A nod in the crowd, and conversation was had. So we chatted, on a rainy street within a stone’s lob of a supermarket. What happened to so-and-so? Have you seen you-know-who? You’ll never guess, no, you’ll probably guess what happened to insert-obvious-candidate-here. We veer into a sub-plot about alien probes. Genteel readers, look away now.

   My wildly flailing fingers couldn’t control that last sentence. Genteel readers, leak away now. Well, if you have to empty your bladder at the first sign of an alien probe, perhaps that’s for the best. Gradually, the conversation turns to me. I can’t think why. What have I been up to? Am I still writing?

   (Are bears still Catholic? What’s the Pope doing, in the woods?)

   A powdered white periwig is dropped atop my head. The sundered cherry tree is planted in the background. I am no Presidential candidate, and the George Washington story is nine-tenths hogwash to one part baloney. Still, I am left staring at the bloodstained axe now in my hand. I cannot tell a lie. (Untruth is a separate issue.)

   So I admit to this wanderer in the desert that I am published. This leads into the fantastical land that is self-publishing. How different authors deal with the prospect of writing books then publishing books. I drop technical details in there, indicating the (frankly, scary) lengths I’ll go to when editing a book.

   (The week before, to someone who knew I was published, I let slip that I’d written the book in eighteen days. Cries of astonishment told me that I shouldn’t get into technical discussions with civilians. Readers grow flustered when faced with facts. They prefer to think elves crawled downstairs in the night and left the manuscript on your kitchen table. The book sparkles, wrapped in a scarlet bow made from unicorn satin, sprinkled with Rainbow’s End™ icing sugar.)

   Real rain threatens the landscape. Precipitation is ready to turn our entire world grey. Out comes the other guy’s Kindle. He shows me the electronic shop. Types RLL into the machine. My books pop up. I’ve already explained the concept of KDP sale days, when the book will be available free. So I could make the book free, just for him. Before we get into that, a purchase is made.

   He doesn’t even check the price. Just clicks the book, and a transaction occurs right before my very knees. A double-check on the book shows that it has travelled through the atmosphere intact. I look at the clouds.

   Past.

   In the past, it’s early in the morning. I rise and walk to town to take the train to the big city. There I wander the streets until I reach the temple to books. I am on an expedition. Floor after floor. Packed with books. I go in search of fiction and non-fiction.

   There’s always an operating budget on the day. I don’t exceed it. Sometimes I have a list. Once, I even arrange to order a book, knowing it will take a second expedition to pick the thing up. Expeditions in rain are commonplace. In the past.

   Wandering a massive bookstore, I see my people. Readers. They stepped in out of the rain to browse books. What do they do? They buy coffee. Sit down and enjoy the atmosphere. Expeditions…are no more. Fun while they lasted, they’ve been replaced by other things.

   Present.

   I’m standing in front of a supermarket, watching as one of my books is sold. It’s a bit freaky, but not that freaky. The future is now, and has been for some time. People used to go on expeditions for books. Some of them still go.

   The book is bought. Rain falls. I am staring at the typical customer. The user of a reading device. Isn’t the ink concept amazing on a Kindle? Yes, it is. Two parts of the equation meet on a rainy street. Someone, somewhere, writes this stuff. Remember that. Someone, somewhere, buys it.

   Rain ends the meeting. The purchaser is reminded that, knowing me, it is poor form to review my book on Amazon. I walk in out of the rain, marvelling at the notion that the book fell out of my brain over the course of just under three weeks. And that it was purchased in seconds, spilling across the Kindle interface for me to see.

   Reader and author meet on a street, and I’m one book up in the statistics. The Kindle is a magnifying glass hunting for books. It is a librarian, of sorts. And the bookstore. In a sense, it can be the helpful assistant, recommending a book on the basis of what you bought before. It is also the library. And the book itself.

   This chain, with author inches from reader, or thousands of miles from the reader, is electronic. No paper is involved. I think about the paper. When I sought a paper publishing deal, I printed excerpts. But when I created a Kindle book, very little paperwork was done.

   I filed a few sheets here and there for tax. That was about it. I pressed loads of buttons in creating the book. Did that more than a million times. (Not an exaggeration – I checked the file.) My customer hit a few buttons and the book was sold.

   On close examination of the device, I see it is called kindle and not Kindle. Perhaps to make it easier on the eye. Yes, I’m contemplating ease-of-use. I contemplate that as I sweep through the supermarket. In vegetables, I fly past a stunning brunette. Always on the lookout for characters, I wonder how I’d describe her. (My customer, well, he’d probably be typecast as a pirate. I’d be a Dark Lord of the Sith™.)

   Description. Brunette. Stunning. White top. Let’s not get too fixated over every piece of clothing. Sometimes it’s important for your story. Often, it’s not important at all. I don’t even really need to say much more about her, except…stunning brunette. And you have an image, depending on what you think of as stunning.

   Yes, spider legs emerging from the lower torso would be classed as stunning. I’d like to think I’d include important details like that in my narrative. Unless I’m in a mood to surprise readers. I’m not quite sure what happens next.

   Let’s be generous, and suppose that she ambushes me. I could waffle nonsense about her ability to teleport ahead from vegetables to the meat counter. Okay. Let’s try that on for size. She teleports ahead of me to the meat counter. There’s no other possible explanation.

   Well, that’s not true. She might be twins. Or triplets. I may simply not be all that observant, lost as I am in thoughts of Kindle and where in the world publishing is going, having come from the Dark Ages. I look at shelves. There’s a woman in front of me now.

   I must whirl around her. She comes the other way, deciding to whirl around me. From a distance, it appears that we are engaged in a dance routine. I whirl around her as she whirls around me. At this point in proceedings, she pouts and moves her head in contemplation of foodstuffs.

   As I move around, it looks as though she is blowing me a kiss. Momentarily, I wonder if she’s at it. No, it’s just the optical delusion provided by our movement. This reminds me that I find characters when shopping. Could she be one? The incident might fill a few paragraphs in a blog. ;)

   I emerge from the supermarket and make my way through Blade Runner rain. Through Frank Miller’s Sin City rain. I cling to the belief that Frank Miller was a character in an E.C. comic book. My wildly flailing fingers italicised Frank’s name instead of his work’s title. What was I thinking? Maybe Sin City wrote Frank Miller.

   How hard is it to sell your book? Well, I talked someone into it on a rainy street. Converting a semi-suspecting public, one punter at a time. I am not tempted to ambush people as they nervously clutch Kindles to their chests.

   Curious note? The guy I sold the book to served as inspiration for one of the characters in the book. Beyond that, he was present when I took the photo that served as the book’s cover. Those weren’t selling-points. Just coincidences.

   This blog’s title is the wrong way round. I SELL A BOOK ON A RAINY STREET, AND A STUNNING BRUNETTE BLOWS ME A KISS. For some arcane reason, I seem to have placed primacy on the brunette’s activities. Must be a reason for that.

NEXT BLOG: UNBLOGGING.