JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO GO BACK IN THE WATER-BASED PAINT: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

In creating a dedicated video channel for boardgames and roleplaying games on the YouTube, where the interwebs live, I added boardgames to the bookshelves, true, true. And that should’ve remained the limit of my limit. For a year, though, the first year of video production, I contemplated the unthinkable.

   A return to painting figures.

   I still paint figures. But I considered returning to painting with a major investment in materials. To paint, I needed a place to paint and all the tools that go with the activity of slapping overpriced coloured wetness on overpriced metal miniatures. The video studio, which sits to my right as I type, has an alcove in it.

   A large echoing vault.

   That vault is padded with sound-management foam, to reduce the echo. Painting at the video table would disrupt video production unless video production magically becomes all about videos on painting.

   I’d rather watch paint dry than make painting videos. That’s why I’ll be editing my painting videos to within a hair’s-breadth of their non-existent lives.

The problem, as ever, was of space elsewhere. I’d need a painting table. The solution was to remove a bulky chest of drawers from a cluttered elsewhere and dump it in the alcove right here.

   Though the alcove was an empty echo-chamber of a place…it wasn’t exactly empty as I stared over at it, and I had to move stuff out to make way for the incoming monolith.

   And so, I danced the dainty dance of shifting stuff from one room to a second room to make room for the stuff that would leave the third room, giving me room to move through halls from room to room. Or something. Those rooms have no room in them. It was all a blur – and anything but dainty.

   I started by measuring all the things, real and imagined: the things that existed and the things that would exist in fresh-cleared measured spaces. In a movie-like dream-sequence, I planned what would happen if I removed the bulky set of drawers. Bookcases danced before my eyes, Disneyed up and singing their hearts out.

   When the music stopped, the bookcases left an illusory space for a table. I was in business. Make your dreams real, even if they are merely dreams of tables.

   And so things went, day after day, long into the night and the beyondness of beyond, with yours very truly shuffling bookcases around to make room for a path. The chest of drawers huffed and it puffed and it trudged the path down. I measured and I ordered equipment and I hunted for bargains.

   My idea of a bargain is not buying a thing for £10 at the cheap and cheerful cost of £5. No. Life is more complex than that if you are creating a miniature workshop. I’ll spend £200 to save £100. Harsh, I know. I budgeted for the workshop itself, tools, paints, and storage for figures. There was a budget for figures, too. But buying figures is all about buying storage for figures. An old song.

At the end of my eye-watering fiscal study, I knew I’d spent GASP money and saved EVEN GASPER GASP money on top of that. The cost was ridiculous, but the saving was even more ludicrous. I told everyone about the ridiculous ludicrous luminous saving, and then took a flight to the moon by wet-air balloon. Yes. That mad.

   Then the work began. The unpackaging. Recycling of cardboard. Assembly of tools. Mostly, this meant reaching for a large bottle of glue and something to wipe the glue away with. Occasionally, I’d hammer a bit of wood with another bit of wood.

Where are we now? I dare not relate the fable of the table, a tale too terrible to put in print. I may arrange spaghetti letters on a plate spelling it out, but that’s as far as I dare venture. Let the record show only that I based my purchases on a certain size of table. And that I had to move to a larger table-size for reasons of bullshit and mayhem.

   Luckily, that improved the situation and adjusted the weather for ten minutes. All was right with a small part of the world for a time.

Upshot. Done with huffing glue and peeling myself off the ceiling at night, I set the glue bottle aside until such time as the kingdom required its return. And, inside a week, that time arrived.

   An arm rose up from out the bosom of the Glue Lake, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, holding the glue bottle. The Lady of the Glue Lake passed the bottle to me in the hour of need, and nations wept.

   Remember that the key to using glue is ventilation. So unlock those doors and windows. No need to turn teary-eyed or all clogged up with nowhere to go.

   With a larger table installed, I knew I could fit a few more wooden modules in place. Those are on the way. A fabled messenger bleep told me. Pigeons are so last millennium. And the millennium before that...and that.

   Everything settles. Eventually, you reach a point at which you’ll no longer move bookcases around. And I’ve reached that point many a time. It’s like déjà vu all over again. Well, I was finished with it again again.

   Definitely done.

   Except, of course, I went after something different this time. I wasn’t moving bookcases around to make room for more bookcases. That saga ended a long time ago, back in November of 2019. Yes, I write this in December, 2019. What of it?

   This time around around, I moved things around as recently as last night. The table is in position. Most of the modules are locked in place aboard the Good Ship Painterly. I’ve glued units, hammered magnets into wooden panels, avoided cutting off my fingers, and pledged not to move any furniture ever again.

  Truly, I’ve run out of space.

   All to give myself space in which to paint. Painting used to be done in a well-ventilated kitchen on a folding table that went against one wall, down the side of the room and out of the way.

   Or painting took place in other venues, with varying degrees of space, lighting, and ventilation. Now, consistently, there’s a painting table. It’s also a preparatory table, with room for tools that I’ll hack away with. I mean…I’ll prepare figures for painting using surgical skill and precision moves akin to the dance of the bullfighter.

   No bulls will be hurt in the process, though one or two minotaurs may require assembly.

This is a return to the world of trimming flash and lines, drybrushing armour and fur, applying glue and mixing up clay, and – horror of horrors – pinning. In the Olden Times, I’d find inventive ways to avoid pinning…

   Now, frankly, I just can’t be arsed and I’ll have to get on with it. Welcome to the fiddly world of cyanoacrylate and epoxy. Glue only takes you so far in fixing one part of a model to another. With metal miniatures, there’s little to no realistic bearing of a load on a rough join. Always accept that the join is rough, no matter how great the manufacturing process is.

   I have to fill in the flawed areas with model putty and/or epoxy resin, possibly throwing in superglue when appropriate. Moderately rough handling knocks all that work into the bin. Superglue is great for a quick fix, but one sharp tap shatters your dreams.

   The only way to be sure your dragon’s wing will stay attached to your dragon’s body is by drilling into the metal and fixing pins to the pieces. Then you finish the job with glue. And a prayer to a satanic god.

   It’s a super-fiddly world. Can’t wait to get back into it. What I’ve lost in terms of reflexes down the centuries can and should be made up for by the wealth of experience garnered down in the modelling trenches.

   I’d put that wealth at a £ or two. 

   Buying material in meant staring long and hard at the material that remained. War-torn paint pots and battle-scarred brushes. To replenish supplies, I started with a budget of no money and stuck that budget in a rocket to the moon.

   If I thought painting materials were expensive before, I thought right. Oh, to return to those “expensive” days. My budget for a painting station was about right. Paints and tools consumed the money they consumed. I planned that part of the operation in two stages.

   First, update, replenish, buy in – and save money by purchasing a paint set. Stage two is about buying individual paint bottles. Memory tells me we bought paints that way in the Olden Times.

   I stare at the enamel paints, those high-flying chemicals and their magic carpet fumes. Individual pots. Specialised metallic pots. And the multiple purchases. Black, for everything. Flesh tones. White paint, utterly absent. I culled the dead pots, and the multiple white paint pots had died a death. They were truly most sincerely dead.

   Moving from one size of table to a proper size of table, I could go back in and order a few more wooden storage modules. With the painting bottles now camped out at the paint station, it’s time to consider going back in and buying multiple pots of black, white, flesh-tones, strong primary colours, and as much metallic variety as I can lay a brush to.

   We don’t need figures and floorplans to enact roleplaying games. They are handy, though. For video purposes, figures on maps go a long way to aiding description. And so, a-painting I must go.

*

The photos in this article depict unfinished HobbyZone modules, sitting at all sorts of rough angles without the connecting magnets fitted. I assembled modules, left the glue to cure, slapped those boxes on the table to see how I'd organise them in the end, and then...

   Went back much later, sure of the glue, and hammered the magnets into position.

AN AUTHOR’S LIBRARY AT YEAR’S END: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Did I clear loads of shelves when I tackled unread books? No. I set out to read at least a book a week in 2013. Did I demolish 52 tomes? I did, with weeks to spare, for I read more than 60 books this year. Action. Consequence.

   I knew I’d take a hit on word-count, going in with that attitude. Here’s the thing. I wanted to. More time reading and more time organising meant less time writing. I’d radically reinvent time if I could, but I just don’t have the space.

   Last year I put out a million words. I think I may have been lucky to read a dozen books that year. More than likely, I managed half that.

   Did I fare badly, one orbit later? I published a third of a million words this year. Life stumbled in the way. Would I have been happy with a greater output?

   No. Truth is, I’m grumbling about managing a third of a million. Should have settled for a quarter. Yes, writers fear burnout if they are smart about writing too damned much.

   What does the future hold? Jetpacks for all. No, wait, that’s some weird American 1955 future world. So my future holds water, if nothing else. As the year’s end loomed, I felt I wanted to achieve a realistic writing goal.

   Realistic goal? Write an instant smash-hit genre-defining cast-iron classic. Realistic? No. You’d employ steel of a stainless variety, for starters. This is what I went after. The Amazon carousel on my blog holds up to ten items. I had nine sitting there.

   Put a tenth item on that carousel by year’s end. Doable?

   Done. And now? Finish projects I started. Help other authors. Continue blogging. Begin a new archive. Engage with the internet, now that I have the internet.

   How much did adding the internet affect my writing? I gained the mystical line to the web in September. By then I was hovering around 300,000 words of output in one form or another. I could have closed off another project and added 100,000 to the total, putting me one novel shy of a half-million.

   Instead, I found myself spending a huge amount of time throwing some blogging plans together for the world’s first ever READ TUESDAY. There was much to learn. And there still is.

   The wind howls at my back, pressing on the windows. Hell, it could be a Scottish summer I’m describing, with the amount of rain that worries the panes. I write from the depths of winter. 

*

Yes. Begin a new archive. I recommend doing that by first putting the old archive in order. Recently I discovered Amazon has no outward memory. I updated book blurb by adding bold type. To feed that massive change into Amazon, the whole book must be republished. You gain a new publication date as a result.

   Internally, on the Amazon dashboard, the original date of publication is preserved. Saves a lot of hassle if your ability to keep records is somewhat lacking. Watch out for those quirks.

*

So now there are ten items on my carousel gadget. Ten products. Go and buy them. Buy one, at least. Okay, at the very least, go and read the start of one of my books on Amazon. They are all free to read at the start. What’s stopping you? Nothing.

   I know. World doesn’t owe me any favours. Well, I turn up to write these books. The people who turn up to read them are few and far and rare and…entertained. I don’t much care for the notion of reaching my audience one reader at a time. Good, but slow.

   Those who turn up to read the stories like them. Spread the word. Get people reading. Yes, do it for me. The more people do that for me, the more stories I can write. It’s a virtuous circle – if you believe what I do for readers is virtuous.

   Being a digital author with no access to the internet was hard. I published from my phone. This was easier than blogging from my phone. Now that I have access to the internet, I am swamped by advice on how to crack that audience and make myself millions. I don’t care. Seriously. I think what I should be doing is writing and publishing more stories.

   Should I automate my Twitter feed and aggravate everyone with endless plugs for my work? I’d rather post a photo of a cream bun I am about to demolish. (Been there. Done that.) That’s how much I care about the dreaded Search Engine Optimisation and the much-lauded (and derided) Return on Investment.™

   If I turn myself into a robot, only the machines will read my work. Right now, I have maybe half a dozen people and two weevils reading my stories. They are uproariously entertained. It can’t go on like that, of course. Weevils are not noted for adherence to tales featuring gerbil porn. 

*

What was that about? Stating a mission? That, with the internet at my fingertips, I should now devote myself to grabbing an audience through fair means or foul? I love writing stories. They can’t take that away from me. So I’ll look into gaining an audience without turning into a clockwork writer.

   Bzzzt.

*

READ TUESDAY was set up as a winter sale day for books. How many books did I buy? None. My book embargo is in place. Finish writing what I started and finish reading what I bought. On the day I plugged other authors and their discounted works, I couldn’t walk an extra step in the book-buying direction. A mile in those shoes is a long bloody trudge…

   And so I have resolutely battered sale after sale out of my way. Each mightier than the last, to steal from Tennyson. Even chopping down more than a book a week, I’ll be a long time chewing through those free shelves I’ve stacked up and racked up.

   Support for authors comes and goes in many forms. Featuring people on the blog. Going backstage and chatting about formatting problems. On the 25^th of December 2013, I was recovering from a massive meal and giving copyright and contract advice to another writer.

   Yes, that was my Christmas.

   Writers are always on the job. I should have been editing MURDER BOX, which I published on the 27^th anyway. Mr Scrooge let me have a minute or two off. 

*

The future? Helping more writers, even when I haven’t the time or inclination. For I’ll never have the time. I am always stuck with the inclination. Somehow, I’ll get by.

   Writers call in and leave notes. I’m being told, in dribs and drabs, that my stories are entertaining and that I’m going to make it in this business. We’ll see. There’ll be more to discover on the risks and rewards of editing. Books are built to be consumed.

   (Though I keep looking at H. Melville, and end up backing away each time.)

   Just there I wrote a story about murderous characters and their waspish comments. For many reasons, MURDER BOX was one of the hardest stories I’d written. I was glad to see the back of it when I was done. But I still enjoyed writing the awkward thing.

   If you read this far, go all the way to Amazon. Pick up a free Kindle reading app. Then grab one of my stories. Grab some other writer’s story, too. No rivals here. ;) 

*

After writing that post, I felt like slashing the hell out of it. Changed my mind. Thought it negative. Well, I say positive things behind the clouds. So I’ll end with this…

   Thanks. To anyone who picked up my books in the recent sales. I’ll thank everyone for the honesty of their reviews. Behind the scenes, I received help from assorted authors who made a point of giving their time to me even though they had no time to give. (Cough, Vanderkarr. Splutter, Biozarre.)

   And I helped authors. Sitting there on the 25^th of December encouraging a writer to get out of her publishing contract as soon as physically possible, I knew I was doing good. Offering to format and edit stuff so that writers had a shot at getting out of a financial hole. That was good too.

   I’ve yet to commit to a single project in that area. If my next year’s word-count is lower than this year’s, I’ll shoulder the blame of editing other writers into publishing existence with a song in my heart. Must choose that song.

   Insert your choice of song in the comments below.

COLLEAGUES.

What use are colleagues, to someone who writes alone? I write alone, though publish as part of a community. The blog posts you’ve been reading reflect that. Some of my musing to colleagues was recycled for use in these blog posts.

   Other thoughts come to me in the night, and I fictionalise those by turning to characters Darth Sinister or Sergeant Jock MacBastard. I should have another character do that in the COLD WAR struggle with social networking, but nothing springs to mind. Hmm.

   I don’t look for consensus, and I’m not here to set down the law. Blogging is part of writing, and writing is about learning. In chatting to other authors, I bump into contrary views rather than consensual ones. These interest me greatly. The best example being that provided by…

   Kacey Vanderkarr. Coach Vanderkarr. Baby Seal. Young Vanderkarr. Potentially, Darth Vanderkarr. Crippled by writing fear. An alien specimen, this one. Studied under the microscope, she displayed unusual behaviour. I treated her as though a baby seal, ready for bludgeoning on the ice.

   Yes, I was a bit rough on Kacey. For those of you who don’t know the story, I’ll repeat it here with some amplification. I spent months researching Amazon Kindle in 2011. Self-publishing was for me. During the summer of 2011, I discovered there were writers out there scared of publishing anything. Yes, publishing anything. Ever. Aliens. These people were aliens, to me. I never found any of them. Kept reading about people who used to be like that. Not quite the same thing.

   Cut to early 2012, and one of these aliens follows me on Twitter. I’ve published twice, and am set to publish a third time. Anyway, I hike back to her blog where I discover she is an inspirational person in several areas of her life – just, not in her writing. She can write. But she is scared. Wife, mom, hospital worker, High School coach. Scared writer.

   I take the night off editing a book, and I write 5,000 words to her. To me, that’s a medium-sized e-mail. I try to get her to see that she should be scared of NEVER being published. She takes the advice and faces her fear. This is beyond odd, as I NEVER give major advice and she has a problem TAKING major advice from anyone. On top of that, I NEVER give major advice on WRITING.

   Somehow, the universe aligns and we put up with each other. She describes me as having given her the biggest lecture of her life. One she sadly needed. That’s how Kacey Vanderkarr and I started chatting about writing.

   You can’t mix those two views in a flask! There’ll be an explosion! A universe-shattering detonation. He doesn’t give advice. She won’t take it. He treats writing as an arcane alchemical art. She’s scared to go near the unexploded bomb of her own work.

   Tape off the area and mark the scene DOES NOT BODE WELL.

   I had the courage to send her that e-mail. She had the courage to act on it. Kacey faced her fear. What was I going to face? For my part, I felt that I couldn’t use critique groups, groups for writers, or Beta-readers. In all my time writing, I hadn’t even heard the term Beta-reader or the phrase critique group until I did my research last year.

   Now, come on. That doesn’t make me a bad person. I just didn’t move in that world. Kacey dragged me along to the BLOGVEL so that I could meet other writers and join in writing a story by committee. Viewpoint? I don’t write stories by committee. But if I can make Kacey face her fear, she can make me face mine.

   First, I have to find out what BLOGVEL means. A BLOG NOVEL. I turn up. The list is handed out. I see that this is about writing a story and about blog-exposure. Social networking. So this is what I do. I look at every single blog on the list. If a contributor is on Twitter, I follow that writer. That’s what BLOGVEL is about, surely. Not just writing the story.

   This is also about writing a story, based on a theme beyond my control, to a deadline, and with a word-limit. I act as caretaker during the assignment, and have the responsibility of handing the tale to the next writer in line without utterly screwing the whole thing into the dirt at the speed of sound.

   My personal carer, Dr Anton Phibes, wouldn’t hear of this social networking nonsense. Which is why he was put off the trail. It’s quite clear to Dr Phibes that the transitory distraction of Nazi shark documentaries was a vicious ploy allowing my artistic freedom to flourish unchecked. Once he realised I’d been collaborating with authors behind his back, the equipment was deployed.

   I am writing this by the old pen-to-mouth technique which bypasses even the strictest straitjackets. The finished text will be typed up by my unseen accomplice. Dr Phibes has administered a jumbo-sized syringe of the green liquid, and I feel the effects hitting my kidneys as I scribble.

   His job is to bar my discussion of unpublished plots. To that, he has now added the function of preventing further communal silliness in the form of BLOGVELS, Beta-readers, and critique groups. There’ll be no more handing out pre-edited slices of fiction to people on the far side of the globe. Not on his watch.

   It may be some time before I venture near that territory again. If there were a way to bump Dr Phibes off without serious injury to myself, he’d be gone. Alas, given his penchant for spooky biological experiments, he has radio-linked his heartbeat to mine.

   The BLOGVEL experiment was for the benefit of others. After offering to compile short stories with several writers, I couldn’t then turn Kacey down in a stunning act of hypocrisy when she made the counter-offer. She was right. I had to participate in the BLOGVEL. Even if only to discover that awful thing…

   I worked out my part of the story in my head, based on a photo I took. This, I considered research. The whole idea was to read chapter one and build my thoughts on whatever I found. Plants. The woods. An evil brother. Right. I’ll look at that park I went through on a mock-train.

   The photo jumped out at me. I’m going to invent a story based around that. All I have to do is wait for the first few participants to do their chapters. Provided no one introduces the brother, I’m set for action. After reading chapter four, I slapped my attempt down on the night and seized the introduction of the evil brother for myself.

   Yes, it was great to write. I distracted Dr Phibes and sent the initial copy to the next author, Cat Woods. And I sent a copy to Kacey in advance. To let her see the initial piece. After that, I edited. So that Kacey would gain something from seeing the published version. Almost the same as the one I wrote on the night. Well I did that for Kacey, as she has problems with editing.

   Write your story. Edit your story. Publish your story. Sending the unedited work to a relative stranger was a way of giving added warning to the next person in line. Cat Woods might have found my stint as storyteller jarring. Or events could have conspired against her, with life taking over. So, I gave her as much time as possible to write her own piece.

   Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t do that. If I wrote a piece of fiction for my blog, I’d read it. Edit it. And then my blog’s readers would be the next to see it. I wouldn’t usually hand over the goods to colleagues.

   (I have done so with some blog entries, as I had to clear permission on a few points. Also, I’ve written e-mails that I later plundered for blog entries. Generally, though, I won’t preview a blog posting by touting it around fellow-scribblers first.)

   Yes, I could use critique groups and alter my writing. But then I wouldn’t be me. It’s still one step too far for me. Only one step. But a giant leap, where I’m standing. I hope that my 0.75 readers won’t be disappointed by the sense of failure that I’ve taken away from the BLOGVEL.

   Part of me, open-minded, says that I tried – and that doesn’t count as failure at all. The same part of me says…maybe next time there’ll be a sense of achievement. There could be a next time. And one day, there might be a critique group too – especially after all the plans I made in that direction. I just didn’t flip the switch. The circuits are still in place.

   I feel my writing is floating somewhere in the 19^th century, where I’m not chasing after the latest fad. History has passed me by, but the passing of it is of little import. I just do what I do, and try my best to be me.

   BLOGVEL verdict. I think there was a sense of a letdown. Of letting my colleagues down. That awful thing…I’m here to learn, yet the BLOGVEL didn’t teach me anything. It’s shocking to feel that I didn’t learn anything from participating. But that’s what I carried away from it.

   Kacey would have been more disappointed had I not tried something different. Yes, better to try, to fail, than not try…never know. I’m left feeling unsure. As though, perhaps, I had to move a little way forward in a new direction this time out. And that I might make it that way once I’ve had time to get used to it. Even though I feel I did little more than tread water.

   Tennyson comes to mind. Ulysses. The closing lines of his poem.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

   This stirs in the wake of the sentiment that it isn’t too late to seek a newer world. So I’ll strive to seek, and hope to find. Convinced I’d learn something from the BLOGVEL, I walked away from it surprised to learn that I hadn’t learned a thing. If you call that learning. We’ll see if I can ditch Dr Phibes one day. Not today. But, even so, take this from my musing. Failure to learn doesn’t halt you in your tracks. Don’t give up. I’ll do my best not to yield. You should do your best not to, too.

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