HOW MANY BOOKS IN DECEMBER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Recap from December 2024’s blog post. 

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How many books have come into the house in the month of December? That’s easy. No books. So now I’ll set myself an easy challenge. How many books will have come into the house by December’s end?
   No more than…five…is my guess. And I will try to hold true to that. How? I’ll just not buy any. But wait a bit. There are things on order. Damn it. Yes. That’s true. How many? I have no clue. You see, I don’t want to know, and I don’t need to know. 

*

Now that I’ve caught up to January, how many books actually came into the house in the long month of December? Two. Okay. That’s no more than five. Easy guess. But how many books did I read in the month of December? With last month’s blog post in mind, I decided to keep score throughout December. If I tracked the number of books in, I had to track the number of books out. And something else, besides.
   Zero books went out. One day, this will be a problem.
   What else, though? I knew I’d track the number of books read, as well. December is a monumentally busy month, or feels busier. Yes, there’s a holiday atmosphere, and that contributes – paradoxically – to the feeling of great activity.
   Maybe it’s the colder weather that makes things feel as if more’s going on. Nat King Cole never sang about those lazy, hazy, crazy days of winter, after all.
   How many books did I read in the busy month, then? My tally says sixteen. Maybe seventeen. Not sure if I noted the last one on a scrap of paper. We’ll say sixteen, for sure. I was on a mad mission to read a book a day, but life intruded. Could I read a book a day for a month? Yes, if I pick out loads of short books to read. True, they’d be short. But…those light tomes still take up space on the shelves. And a book read is a book read.
   How many unread books are on my shelves? Unknown. Books are crammed…everywhere. Across how many rooms? Oh, and hallways. It’s a rule that I don’t keep books in the kitchen. Unless they are pamphlets. Instruction manuals for kitchen gadgets. They go in a drawer, and are fine there. One day, the kitchen gadget is done. The corresponding instruction book is recycled.
   No, the kitchen isn’t a tribute to clouds of cookery, but steam does form on occasion. I kept a bookcase or two in the kitchen for a short time while I rearranged things upstairs. But nothing permanent sat in the kitchen on slick shelves that would attract condensation.
   Never read in the bath. That’s a top tip.
   I was told plumbers spend a ludicrous amount of time fishing mobile phones from toilet bowls. Unjamming dead electronics sounds like no fun. So…never answer the telephone while you are on the throne. Maybe that’s a better tip than not reading in the bath.
   Off the top of my head, I don’t know how many bookcases there are here. And I don’t have to care. As I don’t know how many books are on my shelves, I can’t really say how many unread books are on my shelves.
   If I could divide the books into read and unread collections, gradually adjusting the dividing line, a slow rising tide of reading, then I’d need an extra five rooms. Books go where they fit. And to store them in read/unread sections is impossible at this stage.
   Instead: chaos. Occasionally, this means I will accidentally read a book I thought I hadn’t read before. Chief suspect here was a book on renaissance art. This was a gift. And it was time to read that gift. Except, after delving in…yes, I realised I’d read it before.
   It was a good book, so I finished it again. What’s at the other end of the scale? A book I’ve walked past, convincing myself I’ve read it. No, I don’t think so. But then…how would I know for sure.
   Is such a volume more likely to be wedged into the top end of a distant bookshelf? Almost all books here are upright. And almost all books here have writing on the spines. Almost all books here have spines readable if you tilt your head to the right. There are exceptions.
   Hardly any books lie flat. Those that do lie across a line of books of equal height. The uppermost volume is almost always connected to the books it lies atop. An author puts out one more book before death. And there’s just no way to rearrange the books on shelves. Can’t be done. But there is that tempting space on top of books…
   I use that space rarely. While I still have space elsewhere, I needn’t resort to using that awkward gap at the top. Books that lie flat feel a bit isolated. Maybe I think I’ve read all of those. Some books will remain unread…
   Dictionaries. Those are dip-in tomes, and you are a fool to read a dictionary from cover to cover. I say that having read The Devil’s Dictionary in its entirety. Trust me. It’s a dip-in book, too. Ah, well. A book read is a book read, whether I liked it or not. At least I needn’t read the damned thing twice.
   How many books will come into the house this year? I must cut back, as ever. Let books come in, but read more than you let in. I must review the concept of sending books out. There’s charity. And there’ll be gifts.
   You can’t recycle hardback books. That’s what charity shops are for. I’d have to think really badly of a paperback book to recycle it. There are categories, I guess. Outdated books. But those might be useful as snapshots of history. Would I feel the need to stare at those snapshots? If not, do I need to store those?
   Taking a look at the shelves above my desk, I see they are accessible. The shelves below my desk are obscured by my desk. There’s a book hierarchy. In this case, it’s a lower-archy. Some things I won’t need quick access to. Until suddenly I do, and then I curse the arrangements.
   What are the arrangements? They are office-based. I can’t operate the computer and its many gadgets without clamping a few USB hubs to the shelves. Books lurk behind the cables. Why waste the space back there? It’s a bookshelf, after all.
   Books in and books out. Need to work on that second one. Books read and books unread. Then there are books read again. At the thorny end of the scale there are abandoned books. Books I tried to read and noped out of finishing…are few and far between.
   You need to be really bad at writing to come up with a book I won’t finish. Hell, my allergic reaction to Ambrose Bierce half-killed me. But I made it through The Devil’s Dictionary. Once. A second time would send me into author-phalactic shock.
   Books damaged beyond reading? No fires and no floods. There’s no mouldy old manual or worm-infested writing. Books produced to the very limits of reading? I have a few. There’s a limit to the concept of the tiny font. If I have to be miniaturised so that the letters appear as vast sculptures on the horizon, then maybe rethink your book production process.
   Odds and ends. My entire library seems to be made up of those. Massive manuals, tiny tomes, and a few items that barely qualify as books – they are all here. I want to read all of them, apart from the reference volumes. And I mean to dip into all of those.
   Will I keep score this year? I still have items on order, and feel I always will have. My guess for January is…two books in. I am definitely cutting back…on books in. Books on? Well, books on the shelves are going to keep living on those shelves. Worn-out books? I try to look after them, so that’s a small category. Dusty books? I have no way to avoid those. All bookcases with doors on them had the doors removed for reasons of space. I don’t need to provide space in which to open the doors if I take the doors away. Every room with books in becomes an aisle. And the upper hallway has gone that way, too.
   I think taking the doors off rooms is a step too far. Going by the layout, I’d only get one extra bookshelf in here, and that’s hardly worth the bother.
   Yes, I have glossed over digital books. The space they take up is time. Priority goes to physical books in front of me. And to the left of me. To the right of me. Not behind me. I have some limits. Need to leave room for the chair at my back.

A TALE OF TWO ARCHIVES: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

It was the best of archives, it was the worst of archives…
   Make copies of your work. I’ve made copies of copies of files. And accidental copies of those. Where does the madness end?

Great files have little files and more back-ups to byte ’em.
And little files have cloned folders and so ad infinitum.
And the great archives themselves, in turn, have branching files to go on,
While these again have duplicates of duplicates, and so on.

   (This has always been with me, but conjures up memories of a blog post going back nine years. Damned archiving.)
   To business. I stumbled into a folder and found a file that shouldn’t have been there. This is the hazard of dragging files and dropping them.
   You will occasionally drag the right prisoner to the wrong cell. Moving the file to the right digital jail, incarcerating that piece of information for eternity, was but the work of a moment. I fixed it.
   However, this set me to thinking. How many more files are in the wrong places? Is this number unknowable, unfathomable, and non-fixable? I dealt with a particular category of file. Okay. How many folders do I need to check, here? And how many sub-folders?
   Let’s swirl the stick in the stew and see what pops up unexpectedly…
   One folder with two sub-folders. Enthusiastically, I head off to the sub-folder. Loads of folders in the sub-folder. These are sub-sub-folders, now. And there are eight of those. But they all have sub-folders of their own, as I’d expect…
   And yet, even allowing for a fair degree of organisation…there are additional folders that sneaked in under cover of the electronic mist. On top of that, there are loose files scattered all over the shop. Well. Damn. My work proceeds into the realm of individual files, down around the Ninth Level o’ Hell…
   The result? I created more folders, temporary ones, on the desktop. Five of those, to contain the plague. There’s an entire folder that was utterly misplaced, buried in the archive, so that headed over to the desktop as well.
   Action. I shunted stray files from my archive into the five temporary folders. How many strays, in this vast ocean? The offenders were 28, 58, 1, 1, and 3. Not many misplaced files, after all. The truly wayward folder had five files in it. Very low numbers.
   The first two on the list are higher as they have whole categories to work off. And the rest are the result of isolated dragging-and-dropping mistakes. You’d expect, even in the best of organised offices, to have stray cats wandering the digital streets. So far, so normal…
   But another folder was made. In the land of Mordor Microsoft…
   What’s this, lingering in the archive? Not even a hundred stray files. All is well in shaded country lanes. And yet, here’s this wood that I can’t see for the trees. What the fuck is THE FALLEN ARCHIVE, and why the fuck would I create such a creature?
   This fallen archive is four years old, and sits in a folder that’s a back-up. Says so. Okay. But looking inside this mess, I see it’s a duplicate of many file folders with different categories and flavours of ice cream with all the toppings and…
   What.
   The.
   Actual.
   Fucketty-fuck.
   My best guess? This monstrosity is, itself, a temporary thing. I’d set it down as a place-holder while backing up loads of things. Added layer of security, just for a short while. The problem is that…I set it down in an obscure place. The wrong sub-folder. So I did all my archiving, and checked to make sure I’d swept the floor clean…
   But the duplicate fallen archive wasn’t on the floor, or even in that building. I’ve done periodic reviews to make sure I’d eliminated redundant duplicated efforts. Oh, I have no problem duplicating efforts – that’s the point of backing things up.
   Over time, though, you create an extra layer of duplication here, there. I’ve reviewed the files, scanned the landscape, and studied the folders like Gandalf on a fucking mission to answer riddles in the dark. Sure, I’ve found mini-archives that escaped my notice before…
   You dig deep. But yesterday upon the stair, I found an archive that wasn’t there when I conducted my deep dig. Yesterday, I accidentally journeyed to the centre of the archive. The fallen archive. Cast out of digital heaven, its wings scorched and torn off by the descent into electronic hell…
   What fresh level of fuckwittery is this? We’ll find the villain responsible and…oh. Right. Nothing to see here. Jog the fuck on. Except. There was a lot to see here. The fallen archive had two subfolders, damn it.
   Two horns on which to gore my tired flailing corpse. I was undead by this point. The red glare behind each eye, source of my necromantic power, came into the world fuelled by what was left of the last coffee I consumed before the arcane ritual took hold.
   I’m glaring at the folders now. In one, 3,572 files. And in the other, a mere 675 files. All loose. No sub-sub-sub-rub-a-dub-dub-flub-flub-glub-glub-sub-woofer-sub-tweeter-submarine-sub-folders. Over 4,000 duplicated files, risen as though Lost Atlantis resurfaced for a bit of a lark.
   Well that’s just fucking great. Warp nine, Mr Frodo.
   Nine GIG of space. I’m saddened that there aren’t any sub-folders in there. Fucking should be. Would make my life a hell of a lot easier. I can see whole fields of files grouped by similar theme. But there are no fences, separating those fields.
   I hope this is the largest unholy duplication on the machine. It feels like the lumpiest accumulation of over-duplicated data in the one forgotten space. How do I manage this mound of multiplicity? Delete? Oh, that’s too easy. This information has to be checked against the real archive before I delete a thing.
   And the real archive is also the back-up archive, stored on the external hard drive. It’s over on the external drive that I must do all my serious checking. Do these files exist on the spare machine? Yes. Why do they exist as a fallen archive? Guessing, now.
   I’m sure there is a reason. My main hope is that I never blogged openly about setting up a fallen archive, explaining that reason in public. Awkward. Let’s fire up the external device, and see what we can see…
   Atomic batteries to power. Turbines to speed…
   Unsurprisingly, when backing up the main archive…I backed up the fallen archive as well, right there on External Avenue. How to proceed from here? I’ll work my way through the fallen archive on the computer, checking against the main archive to see that every file in the fallen archive is definitely a duplicate based on information stored in all the right wrong places. Those fallen files can go.
   At the end, I believe the fallen archive will be empty as I murder pointless duplicates. Absurd notion, I know. If it isn’t empty, there’s more digging to do. And if I mess up, hey, the fallen archive is already there on the external drive anyway. I’m still safe. If I make a colossal mistake here, there’s stuff stored on the cloud as well.
   Time to dig deep into the digital dust. I’ll start with the smaller of the two photocopied archives. Fewer files to deal with. Maybe more difficult files to corral into the field. Putting fencing up as I type…
   Step one. Disconnect the external drive. No need to confuse the issue.
   Next. Go to the fallen archive, part two.
   Step three. Sigh.
   Next.
 

*

 

Of course there was a NEXT. Dim realisation shone upon my fevered brow, and I quickly switched over to the first part of the fallen archive. There, I secured large sections of duplicated material, and I deleted half the overall problem inside a minute. Around four GIG of stuff. I realised about half of what I’d done in setting the mess up in the first fucking place.
   Doing so well.
   But another another folder was made. In the land of Mordor Microsoft…
   Think of it as a desperate movie-pitch. Lord of the Rings 2: Revenge of the Sith. What if, right, hear me out, no, hear me out. This is it. Sauron had a twin brother: Zauron. And it’s Zauron who was the big eye guy at the end of the trilogy.
   So this is his ring, which is almost identical to Sauron’s. That means…Zauron was destroyed. But Sauron was unaffected by the loss of the twin ring. Zauron’s ring grants the power of immunity to flame. Including lava. Though, ironically, it couldn’t save itself. Never mind that bit. It’s borrowed from STAR WARS.
   Movie opens with Darth Vader climbing out of the volcano. Gollum, who fell into the volcano with Zauron’s ring – Mjollnir – has returned as Darth Vader. He jumps out, right, he jumps out of the lava a microsecond before Zauron’s ring dissolves in the lava.
   The ring writhes and transforms as it dies, turning into a hand and giving Gollum one final thumb of approval, before melting forever. Now, scarred beyond belief and wearing a primitive steam-powered life-support suit crafted by the Dwarf Alberich, Darth Gollum Vader must seek out new life, and new civilisations, and boldly Gollum where no Hobbit ever Hobbited before.
   He must find Sauron’s ring before Sauron does. Meanwhile, Sauron has been using his growing magical powers to transport his new body to Japan, where he receives a Mecha-upgrade and turns into a fifty-foot-tall Killer Death Robot with rocket launcher arms and an armour-plated greenhouse for a head.
   Darth Gollum Vader/The Batman then faces off against Sauron the Greenhouse Mecha-God in a best-of-three wrestling spectacular in the depths of Bank underground station in London. This is a railway station so deep that even Balrogs fear to tread the haunted ruins.
   I fear readers may suspect that I have moved away somewhat from the initial point.
   The point was…while wrestling with the fallen archive I noticed, out of the corner of my screen, another folder. CLEANUP. A temporary folder. Forgotten. Dusty. Forlorn. Musty. Forfuck’ssake. Rusty.
   And this fucker held sixteen GIG of shit, making the fallen archive look sleek and aerodynamically elegant by comparison. I believed, with the fever of a thousand stars, that I’d nailed this over-duplication down long ago.
   Also…as standard, one folder was empty. An easy fix, that gremlin.
   And a slightly more…annoying…fix? On the way to the end of this blog post, I stumbled over another another another folder. Duplicate Archive. At least I made that easy for myself. This blob ran away with two GIG of data. I blitzed it with a howitzer.
   Well fucketty-fuck-fuck-fuck, how wrong could I be? Just slightly wrong about everything. That’s far worse than being very wrong about one thing. Unless I’m wrong about that. Back to the data mines I go, 28 folders of doom ahead of me – sitting crooked, like tombstones, in a lost graveyard. File this mess under the hashtag #NOHASHTAG.

YOU CAN’T NEGOTIATE WITH A MESSY ARCHIVE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Days grow shorter until they grow longer. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the “shortest” day of the year will, invariably, be followed by a day with an extra minute of sunshine added to it…minus half an hour of daylight from a torrential downpour at 3.30 in what’s laughably referred to as the afternoon.   Why mention this? It’s the “shortest” day today, and that’s no good to me. Looks like the blog ate my homework. It’s been a busy month, and I’m only just getting around to blogging. In a little over a week, I must blog again.
   Yes, I’d have preferred to blog on the 1^st of the month. But, in the wink of a blink, it is now the shortest day. There’s glorious artificiality in creating a yearly archive. Soon I’ll have to copy those dusty template files over into next year’s farm-fresh folders. Always feels false. Like doing taxes.
   Never falsify your taxes when you can fake someone else’s.
   Plastic cheese levels of artificiality abound, when it comes to archives. But for the sake of convenience, we divide sizeable chunks of time into years. Winter weather eerily tells me it is winter. In Scotland, that sensation can occur in June. December tells me, with long frosts and short days, that I must carve a new statue from a block of marble…and call that statue the next year’s archive.
   What of the main archive, though? The collection of files, year to year? How messy is that? There’s an area of the data factory that is the messiest. It is the part of the whole collection that is the hardest to deal with…though it contains the fewest files.
   And that part is on the dreaded desktop.
   I leave files there for convenience in handy folders with temporary names. TEMPORARY, TEMP, TEMP 1, TEMP 2, BODY DUMP LOCATIONS, RESERVE COFFEE VAULT GRID REFERENCE, etc. It’s my duty in life to ensure that they are all temporary files. And that they don’t contain much.
   But…by fuck…getting rid of them is hard. They are joined by more files. At one end, the folders are deleted or join the main archive stream. At the other end, random stuff wanders in and clogs up the system. These items penguin-walk across the screen.
   Let us be clear. The “system” is a clean desktop. Free of file folders. I allow links to pesky services: shortcuts to the recycle bin, media playing apps, this bit of software, that control panel, and so on. Links are useful.
   Folders, while handy, aren’t a permanent part of the system. They are tiny fish who come in and make themselves useful to the shark by cleaning things up. But then I have to clean up the stuff that was cleaned up.
   If I create a folder in the archive itself, away from the desktop, for this purpose of housing temporary things, then I create a folder that is in a drawer. Unseen. Easy to forget. Letting files slip onto the desktop is my way of having an alarm system in my face.
   Information builds up. I don’t quite know where to archive it just yet. Or I must work on it for a bit, and then archive. Time-specific items sit on the desktop for a day or until a particular date. Come the appointed hour, I sweep the area as clean as I can.
   Well, the big hour approaches. I must always have an empty desktop in December. At some point in the last two weeks of December, preferably. Definitely in the last week. Always. This is a lie…sometimes the quick level of change required from December into January isn’t as quick as I’d like.
   Hell, I’m still eating Christmas treats in January and cooking tinned food from December in March at the latest. Files don’t need to be updated by the stroke of midnight as the 31^st of December steps out into the night.
   I foolishly decided to research the shelf-life of tinned goods. There’ll be supermarket data, I said to myself. Not reams of articles in preparing your bunker for the forthcoming Zombie Apocalypse™.
   It’s fine to eat cans left over from December in the far-off realm of March.
   What’s the state of play right now? There are 67 items on the desktop. Files or folders. I’m not counting shortcuts. One of these is the file I am typing into and another is the file marked backup that auto-generated when I saved my work.
   We’ll drop that to 65. Let me just take a load of images away and file them where they need to go. Or delete, as applicable…
   A good (indifferent) 90 minutes, and here I am. There’s one item left – this file. And there’ll be a copy of it as soon as I save. There. That leaves 26 links. I zapped a few of those shortcuts, as well.
   Oh. And one curious folder that has no properties but isn’t quite a shortcut. Things are tricky in the world of archiving. You can’t negotiate with a messy archive. I suspect you can’t really negotiate with a tidy one, either. There’s less room for manoeuvre, there.
   Can I now copy the archive for safety reasons? I should be able to. Copying never copies the stuff on the desktop. And so. That’s why I clear the decks. Stow loose cannons. Shiver some timbers. Scunge the lungeons. Make ready for sail, abaft the Braithwaites…

 

*

 

Somewhere along the way, the sun set on the shortest day of the year. Not as early as it did earlier in the month during ALL THE RAIN IN FIVE MINUTES, but rain has that effect on the light sensors.
   I also found time to make a brief trip into the woods, and, importantly, managed to come back again. Things stand in the way of blogging. Another day may pass before I publish this blog. So how did I do, in sweeping the digital dust off my electronic desktop?
   A few things had to be swept under the carpet. I moved them to next year’s archive using a spot of time travel, a flux capacitor, and a cup of coffee. Yes, I like the annual archive to be tidied promptly. Sometimes I really jump the gun in setting the next year’s archive up, though. I may be late with blogging, but I am now a bit early for next year.

 

*

 

Up before the dawn, I resolved to publish this blog today. How fares the desktop? I’d added three more files there overnight. Easy to move to the “right” locations. So we’re more or less in the clear again, right?
   The image in this blog is from the Tomb of Dracula. (Pencils by Gene Colan, and inks by Tom Palmer. Colan did a few comics direct from the pencils. No one inked Colan the way Tom Palmer did. And that...is a Comic Book Fact™. Palmer died back in August. He was 81.)
   A copy of it sat on the desktop, but I’ve moved it to a file inside the archive. And a copy of the illustration has the starring role of BEING the desktop itself. That’s the background. You’ll never see the desktop that clean.
   This morning, the desktop is almost empty. On the blank space to the left, I keep all the shortcuts. The blank space to the right is reserved for temporary file and folder placement. As it is harder to see things on the central image itself, I try to keep the desktop as clear as possible.
   That’s my traffic management system. As the files penguin-walk their way across the wasteland, they bunch up against the image…and then I have to do a spot of cleaning. I recommend this visual approach to people with cluttered desktops.
   Put an image on the screen centrally. Keep shortcuts on one side and the random stuff on the other. Never the twain shall meet, and good luck to you with that.
   Right now, the desktop contains this file. It’s here as a reminder that it is here. I work on it. Return to it. I am alarmed that it is on the desktop. There’s the copy, saved on the desktop. And, while I am in here, there are several phantom copies as literal temporary files – with the extension .tmp. Those vanish when I save and close the file.
   What’s left? Finish writing. Save the work. Transfer it to the blog. Publish. Archive the entry. Stare at a clean desktop. Start saving everything, all over again. Some of it to the cloud. And all of it to a portable hard drive. There are two of those hard drives. Copies of copies. I can snatch one from the shelf if I must evacuate…
   But if there isn’t time, and there isn’t, I’ll rely on the essential material that’s saved to the cloud, to rebuild after a fire. I have no personal copy of myself in the event of a fire, so, as usual, I have sixty seconds to be outside once the alarm goes. If I have a hard drive with me, fair enough. And if I haven’t, there’s the cloud. Also, if I must, I will reconstruct things from memory. Let’s hope, if it comes to it, that I improve on whatever I rebuild.
   And now, with one mighty sweep of a digital hand…mouse…the desktop is free…

FILE MANAGEMENT IN SPRING: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Spring sprang.
   I look at my archive on a regular basis. The archive doesn’t wait for the masked ball to begin. Spring signals a change in the weather. It is an alarm clock that serves as a reminder that I can check my archive whenever I please. Speaking of which…
   Every single time I decide to tale a long hard look at my archive…
   I think I’ve dealt with duplication of effort. The two items go together so well. I’ll look at my archive. Duplication? I dealt with that already. Right? Wrong. No, no. I am right. Think about the components in this recipe for disaster.
   Copies of copies of files. Weeded. Duplicate folders. Thinned. Clones of directories. Murdered in the dark. Excess excessery. Excised.
   But…
   No.
   Here I am again again, taking the world’s biggest flamethrower to it all. Just like a heist merchant going after one last job, this is for the last time. And. Just for once. This time it’s real/personal/revenge. But this time, things are different, as I go in armed with a flamethrower in each hand. How do I tackle the eternal problem?
   I stare at duplicate files, not realising that they are duplicate files.
   In terms of paper files and folders, I’m staring at someone else’s conspiracy. I glare at boxes of time-wrinkled folders with sheets of paper in each folder and more sheets of paper lying loose on the floor.
   The loose leaves are, in the end, duplicates of the sheets tidied away inside folders within boxes packed in stacks across five rooms in two buildings. Red threads connect the dots.
   That would be the paper equivalent. And the world is a happier place in that equivalent setting. Meanwhile, back on a real planet near you…
   The digital reality is nowhere near as tidy as that mess. I go looking for my own published works. How hard is that? In each case, I head to a folder. The tales are all corralled there. Except that they aren’t. Not even remotely.
   In two cases, I am forced to go looking in an area of the archive that is through a very creaky door and along an unloved hallway daubed in flaking green paint. The kind of paint you see in run-down hospitals. Folders are along that hall, somewhere. Not true. Folders are down that hall. Everywhere. At each junction. Spilling from every cupboard.
   I went checking for the stuff I truly needed to check. And I discovered the ruins of all the files that I squeezed dry to create the stuff I needed. My recipe is nailed loosely to a wall. And empty packets of ingredients lie scattered down three corridors. Those are all files and folders, too.
   Somewhere in there, I’ve pinned the latest files, the important files, to a board made from cork. And I’ve taken that vital bulletin device and slid it into the back of a cupboard somewhere in this or another universe.
   Investigation is virtually endless. But, yes, it comes to an end. I was updating all the vital files. That’s what led to this blog post. Electronic books containing hyperlinks leading out of each book and onto the interwebs…those books must be maintained.
   Oh, they must.
   If you have to update your fiction book, the thing you are most likely to update is the dreaded hyperlink to someone/something/somewhere else. For want of a file the update was lost. And for want of the update the hyperlink was stale. For want of the hyperlink the reader was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
   Or something like that.
   Non-fiction works definitely require far more regular tending and weeding, especially of links, than do their fictional counterparts. I admit that the moon turns blue before I go into the tedious business of checking books for hyperlink issues. But these books are fiction. Factual works need regular watering, permits, X-Rays, complex tests, and planning permission applied for long after the fact.
   Managing hyperlinks. Let me count the ways.
   I found, for example, that one creator’s two separate links had somehow merged into links that went to the same internet page. This was clearly not the case when I plugged the artist’s work initially. I pruned his links with the snippety-snip of the digital shears, and all was well once more. Well. Until next the moon turns blue.
   This is not on the same level as refreshing the tree of liberty from time to time.
   The upshot, though, was noticing – really noticing – even more duplication of effort that I thought I’d rid myself of the last time I thought I’d rid myself of the time before that…
   And so on, to the horizon and beyond.
   What was the problem area I’d missed? Oh, just a whole slice of circles within spirals and wheels within wheels. Endless filing is endless. At least, with paper, you know you’ve reached the point at which the door into the room won’t open/close – delete as applicable.
   The danger with digital files, even the wordy ones, is that you’ll never fill the storage device to capacity. Text files confirm that talk is cheap – at least in terms of the amount of space taken up. Photos and videos. Those are horses of a wildly different colour.
   I will now change some file folder names to protect the indifferent.
   My problem lay in the CHOCOLATE folder. That sat in a sub-folder marked AMBROSIA. Also in the AMBROSIA folder was a sub-folder marked EARTH. Digging deep into CHOCOLATE, I discovered a sub-folder marked MISCELLANEOUS PASTA. In that sub-folder, I found a sub-folder labelled AMBROSIA 1 and another called AMBROSIA 2.
   All of these folders held files. The chocolate files. Ambrosia files. Earth files. Digging into the AMBROSIA 1 folder, I discovered the chocolate files all over again. So the chocolate files were in the CHOCOLATE folder where you’d expect them to be, but an accidental copy of those files sat in a sub-folder within a pocket universe.
   This was just the start of the beginning of the opening of the first bit of the tip of a very large iceberg. I repeated the crazy paving pattern at the front of my digital house as well as at the back. Copies of things should sit in other folders, not in sub-folders within the main folder.
   CHOCOLATE folder can have a CHOCOLATE folder copy sitting next to it in the main ARCHIVE folder. But CHOCOLATE folder shouldn’t have a copy of CHOCOLATE folder deeper inside the CHOCOLATE folder with a further copy of CHOCOLATE folder even deeper inside the copy of a copy.
   High levels of fractal energy there. Frac that bullshit.
   This is what I’d missed the last time, somehow. And all the times before, I guess. I had book files listed in folders by year. Each year, the old book folders stayed untouched. I copied them over to the new folder for the new year, and added to the new folder over the course of that year.
   Things are more complex than that over time, and quirks develop in any system. I decided I only needed all of the book files once. So I checked each yearly entry for quirks. For files that only appeared in one year and not the year before or after.
   Just double-triple-checking. The usual.
   Gradually, I reduced the book folder’s level of duplication to near-zero. Individual projects all have their own blank file I can write in. Very small handy level of duplication.
   The entire folder is duplicated in cloud storage and in at least two portable hard drives. But on the computer itself, there is one folder to rule them all. It is most precious to me.
   Taking a detour into checking hyperlinks of published books, I realised that more than mere quirks still existed in the system. Then I discovered this nesting Russian doll problem. Folder 1 contains files and also folder 2. Folder 2 contains different files, but also a folder you’ll find in folder 1. What do you do about this?
   Fire up the flamethrower.
   Open folders in different windows. Compare files. Check for names. Then for size of each file. Date of last alteration. If there is doubt, open the duplicate files together and check every page on both files. Then make a decision about what you are keeping and what you are deleting. You will be deleting.
   Later, this will have a knock-on effect on how much data you are storing on the cloud and on any physical storage devices. If I slim down the duplication, I want that slimmed down on the emergency copies elsewhere.
   As far as I know, I’ve never lost data. Never shredded a document by mistake. Haven’t deleted a file or a folder that I was meant to keep. I may be a bit shaky on the generation and storage of duplicate files as time flows by...
   But I am on far sturdier ground when it comes to quintuple-triple-double-triple checking the deleting or shredding of material.
   People have lost data about me. But that is another story.

WHAT THE HELL IS THE ARCHIVE, ANYWAY? A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

At the start of each year I attempt to put my archive in order. We’ll define the start of each year as The Entirety of January. I put my archive in order at other points throughout the year, but this business in January seems more final.
   It’s not quite the start of something. Rather, it’s about putting the previous year’s archive to bed. Except, of course, I am sitting here asking myself…just exactly what the hell is the archive, anyway? It’s this bit of information, and that file, and those things over there behind the low clouds. Don’t forget the entire landscape ahead.
   The archive isn’t exactly annual. But there are annual features to it. The archive isn’t entirely electronic. There’s paper aplenty in this so-called paperless office. I only have to glare at the stockpile of ink boxes for the printer to understand that.
   My paper archive is, for the most part, organised and not chaotic. (It is chaotic.) Regular correspondence is arranged in boxes by individual. Years of correspondence in the one place. Letters. Cards. Oddments. Official correspondence is saved up in boxes, too.
   The official material is a collection of fossils. Paperwork. You need it. Don’t think you don’t. There’ll be a query half a decade down the line, and you’ll be thankful that you held on (by your fingernails) to the piece of paper that saves your clichéd bacon.
   Offers to “go paperless” are treated with suspicion. Certain government departments insist on paper, to this day. And I’m thankful that I can, on occasion, wave an original document in the stern faces of those who disbelieve they’ve made an error at their end.
   I make very little effort to put my paper archive in order each year. There’s not much paper coming in. What arrives is vital. It is stored in the time-honoured fashion. The system works. In some cases, evidence is corroborated by the existence of electronic documents.
   There’s the business of shredding. Certain documents don’t outlive the hour in which they flop through my letterbox. Others are kept for years. There is a clearout once in a blue moon. I am very careful about the things I shred. So far, I’ve not shredded the wrong document. Keep your shredder in a separate room from the office housing the paperwork.
   My shredder is on a separate floor. I have to make the pilgrimage to mince a document.
   Inside the electronic archive, I store all sorts of nonsense. I tend to store things by the year. Though there are items outwith annual storage. Pillars of the Ancients, that stand separate from the Great Library of Electronica, mark eternity unchanged by the sands of time.
   What am I talking about? I mean the files that let me set up the annual archiving process in the first place. There’s a folder on monthly entries with sub-folders marking out the months of the year. Every January, I create my new annual archive based on that monthly folder.
   It sits outside the annual scheme of things, but it serves as the backbone for so many annual categories. People come and go. I create a folder for people every year, and I build entries based on whoever turns up in the correspondence.
   The moment someone contacts me over business or personal stuff, that person receives a named folder. I’ll drop the monthly folder into that archive entry. Then I can check to see who said what and roughly when, going by so-and-so in the people folder for the year blah-de-blah. That person contacted me in January. The other person conducted business with me in March and April.
   Seeing to my archive every January isn’t about finality. No, there’s the fresh annual archive to set up. There are other organisational files sitting there, waiting to go. Construction of a new wing of the Great Library of Electronica is swift.
   All the basics are up and running in January. Yes, it took time to set up the system I use now. That’s why it takes hardly any time to create a new annual framework on or around the 1^st of January. Yes, occasionally I jump the gun and create next year’s files ahead of time. Depends how busy things get, as one year makes way for another.
   Construction of the new is easy. Preservation of the old should also be easy. Quick. Think not these thoughts. They’ll do you no good. I have copies of copies. And that can be a problem. Duplication of effort.
   But is the duplicate an exact duplicate? The paper archive is smaller, and, though tedious to explore, is easy enough to explore. Electronic folders multiply in the dark, mushrooming, and their purpose is to deceive.
   Yes, I really must take a digital flamethrower to the electronic side of things. What is important? Where are the relevant files? What became more important? Is anything redundant? Are certain files no longer usable? What arcane sorcery must I perform, just to be able to open and read an old piece of data? How many files fell to corruption without notice?
   And I speak only of the computer.
   The archive’s tendrils extend into e-mail and more. Every tendril is a burst of energy provided by coffee while I typed on a rainy night. Paperwork. Computer data. Internet files. Miniature space-time maps of me, and of organisations interacting with me. People. Places. Things. This glitch. That gremlin.
   Errors corrected and terrors deflected. Hilarious things that can never be explained as funny. Not only did you have to be there, but also…you had to be there for those seven minutes. What is the archive?
   It’s me. And not me. Hell, it’s my biting response to spam e-mail in a mock-rant on The Twitter. My archive is a portrait of the interwebs. The information super-country-lane. And that stack of paper in the room across the way. Also, the stack out of sight behind the first stack.
   I reorganised everything. And now another year trundles in. I must reorganise all over again. The archive is also my copy of the archive. At least, in electronic terms. So it is that dark plasticky box, storing information in reserve. An external drive.
   And there’s cloud storage on the interwebs as well.
   Don’t forget my reserve computer. If this one fails, I have a very slow emergency machine to lean on. It’s similar to flying on no engines and a hefty dollop of wishful thinking dished out in a slow treacly manner.
   But what is the archive, really?
   Preparing to set down another layer of it, to handle the next year’s files, I can say – with no fear – that the archive is a steaming disorganised mess. Just the annual tax files alone. My flamethrower is hissing and sparking at the ready.
   Every year, I think I fix this as I put an archive layer to bed. And every year I go out of my way to stir the spaghetti into deep unsolvable tangles. By the time I post this blog, I’ll have finally deleted stuff that’s no longer required. (Dream on.)
   I believe much of that was never required in the first place. Do I revisit the archive? Can I make use of those files of old? Yes. That’s the point of the archive, after all. To make use of stuff that’s sitting there waiting for the call.
   Yes, I’ve faced the accusation that I am organised. But my own better organisation gets in the way of my own disastrous organisation, giving the mere illusion of a tidy office. Beneath the surface, there isn’t even a concept of anything being beneath the surface.
   And so…
   This time, I really look at the paper archive. As there’s not much lying around, this should truly be easy to navigate. Except, with a slow dawning sense of ultimate terror, I realise I am once again talking utter bullshit about my archives.
   The official files in see-through plastic boxes are (more or less) okay. Yes, they are in a bit of a jumble. But that jumble is self-contained. There’s a plastic vault holding the forces of chaos at bay.
   However, there’s another category…
   Once upon a time, long ago and far away, over seven hills and seven woods and seven streams, in the land of fucking make-believe, I stored stacks of paperwork on shelves. This was a straightforward system, before the days of see-through boxes.
   I should’ve gone directly to see-through boxes.
   This year, more space is given over to books and to boxes of boardgames and roleplaying game supplements for the video channel. What can I cut? Time to weed out useless pieces of paper in the stacks.
   Why did I never transfer the stacks to see-through boxes? The stacks are less official. Doesn’t make them less important. If I must locate an official document, I head to my see-through boxes.
   So what happened in January this year? That pressure, to investigate small inconsequential stacks, headed into the red zone of the steam dial. And I was aghast. Shocked. Dismayed. Lots of words like those.
   Small stacks of paper. They are hellish to go through. Hellish, only more so. Densely-packed fossil records glare back at me. I’ve allowed this stuff to grow disorganised in a peaceful manner.
   Back to the coal-face it is. I chip away at the layers, knowing that each small separate stack will consume hours (if not days) of my life. My archive seems organised. Yes. It seems so. Seeming is believing. I disbelieve that. This is death by a thousand paper-cuts.
   The good news is…that I only have to tackle this paper archive once. I have yet to shred the wrong document. It’s also true to say that I have yet to shred a load of right documents that have had this coming to them for a very long time.
   Nurse, the smelling-salts. And a large coffee.

THE ARCHIVE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Files generate filing. So do I have a filing cabinet?
   My archive is digital.
   But there’s another archive. Made up of papers, scraps, notes, articles. This is the original archive. It exists across rooms, across time, across space, across offices. In some ways, the paper archive represents all the office layouts I’ve ever had.
   Data. Information. Scraps. The paper archive is where ideas go to die. I write story ideas down on paper and file them on my desktop. That is the top of a real desk. I suppose it’s a memory cache, of sorts.
   Gradually I type the written notes up, and they enter the Matrix. What happens to the paper notes after that? They are checked – both sides of the paper – and then they are shredded. To be sure I’ve checked them, I scribble along the used notes in circles – line by line. Any plain text left over is dealt with right there and then or at another time, depending on the nature of the information.
   I may have to stand up and leave the office to head to my library for further research. Not all research takes place online. I’ll return, coffee to hand, with the coffee well-isolated from the electricals, and complete my research by scrawling yet another note. And when that note is finally transferred to the digital archive, I scribble more circles on the paper. Then, inevitably, it’s off to the shredder we go, down in the kitchen.
   Keep your shredder away from the room in which you store documents. That’s an added safeguard against shredding the wrong thing. I’ve yet to shred the wrong thing. Quite rightly, I once shredded an entire novel.
   But wait a bit, you cry.
   If you cache your paper archive on your actual wooden desktop, and then deal with notes line by scribbled line, there can’t be a paper archive beyond the small stack of sheets on your desk. Ah. How quaint a notion that is.
   My paper archive isn’t just about story notes. There’s correspondence. I’m a writer, damn it, and I still send letters to people. Hell, people even reply.
   And there’s official correspondence. I once talked my way out of a computerised tax-dispute simply by turning up armed with paperwork dating back years. (They were having none of it over the phone.) Admittedly, incoming government paperwork is on the decline. But there’s enough of it around to keep handy in the event of a horrendous mistake.
   Miscellaneous stuff. Yes, there’s all that. Of course there is. I have a file category for that in the digital archive. Let’s just say the paper equivalent is far less tidy. But I see that I didn’t answer a question.
   Do I have a filing cabinet?
   A small one. I dimly recall clearing it out in recent years. The problem with clutter is that it’s so cluttered. The time has come to sift through the piles of paperwork and shred the absolute fucking shit out of anything that is useless.
   Blunt? Let me tell you how I really feel. This miscellaneous pile of bullshit becomes a miscellaneous pile of bullshit with time. I can’t throw it out, in case the paperwork is still useful. Time must pass. It’s the only cure for the huge stack of paperwork. Wait for as much of it as possible to grow obsolete, and then pounce.
   The shredder stands by, silent, obedient, waiting for the moment. The cull. A call to arms. I think it’s high-time since the last time. The problem is…sifting through the paper stacks takes a miniature eternity.
   And the solution…goes for recycling. Bulky stacks of paper disappear. Space is reclaimed. And I am all for recycling the limited space I have. This provides more room for books. Books, technically, have an archive all to themselves. My library.
   As I type, my library is split across four rooms and a cupboard. This is the best of a bad situation. A small library encloses my office. I type from a book-lined alcove. It is by far the best office layout I’ve ever had.
   Not perfect, it’s true. But damn close.
   And the main library lives across the hall. I am only reorganising my bookshelves in the sense that a few cubbyholes are taken up by stacks of paper. Those are in need of serious fixing. I’ve yet to shred the wrong thing.
   Oh, I was right to shred an entire novel. I kept the good bit in my files. There are working prints of my stories. I like to read those physically once I’m done writing. Typos that evade electronic spellchecking do exist. They seem easier to spot on paper.
   To the handy piece of advice from C.S. Lewis about reading your work aloud, I must add emphasis in this digital world to another obvious requirement – read your work in print. Once I’m done fixing the fixable, I dispense with the working print. I’m not precious about that. It takes up too much space.
   I’m in a mood to remove clutter. Yes, I keep lines of books in front of lines of books on deep bookshelves. What of it? Yes, I keep far too much paperwork in my so-called paperless office. It’s not that I want to hang onto this stuff. I really don’t. Sometimes you need it.
   The Digital Age dispensed with that absurdity of the Stone Age – the original manuscript. I don’t write stories out in full. Just notes. If you write in longhand to solidify the main story idea, that’s fine. Get it down. Fix it on the page. Build on that foundation.
   How many of my original handwritten stories are still around the place? I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. I’ve been told that I write like a spider going backwards on acid – in terms of my actual scribble as well as the content. Whether related to handwriting or to the ideas conveyed by the handwriting, the notion of an LSD-dosed spider dipped in ink set loose upon the world…
   Yes, the notion covers what I do, quite nicely.
   I face hours, nay, days of work in setting out the paper archive for demolition. What will stay? Should everything go? Is there anything written down that hasn’t been transferred across to the digital realm?
   My knowledge of the archive is patchy. I can think of, perhaps, two items that are missing in action. Again, I resist the temptation to rely upon my faulty memory. Though, it was recently drawn to my attention that I once reconstructed a bundle of misplaced story notes from memory…
   When I found the original notes, I realised that I carry too many story ideas in my head. I fix them there. It’s my very own very personal very portable brain archive. This is the problem with being a writer. So many story worlds die with you, if you don’t write them down. Not enough time.
   Fixing things firmly in my mind, I was shocked to discover the fixing was so damned useful. Repeating stories in my head, over and over, improved the cohesiveness across time. The missing story notes were so similar to the reconstructed notes that I was better off relying on the reconstructed ones. At least they were typed up.
   I was then told…
   Y’know, people generally don’t do that.
   It is a failing. Writers carry ideas around in the head. I carry them around for far too long. Instead, I should be like the writers who scribble everything down all the time. No need for a paper archive, then.
   Would my archive become paperless as a result of this change?
   Bless your hearts for thinking so. I still have a printer, and a large stack of ink cartridge bullets to fire from the printing gun. Damn it, I am that most digital of writers – the kind of scribbler who will always run a papery office.
   I’d love to go paperless. But reality intrudes, even this far into the Digital Age. I’ll go a wee bit mair paperless, aye, it’s true, for I’ll be shredding. Not entirely sure what I’ll be shredding or how far back it all goes.
   Blasts from the past. How much of the fossil pile will remain relevant? I am heartless when it comes to the removal of once-important items. And I say that staring at a pile of nonsense sitting on my desktop right now. I’ll be sweeping that downstairs in the next few minutes.
   For once, this archival talk turns to paper, to shredding, to recycling. There’s a reckoning to be had over on the digital side of things, it’s true. But that clutter merely clogs up a hard drive. It’s rooms I’m clearing out, this time around.
   Rooms. Memories. The memories of the arrangement of sheets of paper in clusters, as well as the memories in those piles, are all about to be cleaned up. Slowly. I wish I could just take the lot to a bonfire. But I might throw away one treasure in a stack of dross. And we can’t have that.
   It’s possible to recover a deleted computer file. Not so easy with the paper sheets falling from stout bookshelves as though they are yellowing leaves falling from the trees outside. Shocker. I’m in an autumnal mood in autumn, and it’s time for some sweeping.

JUST ONE MORE LOADED BOOKCASE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Thoughts trickle through filters and drip into cups. After I’d published my last blog post, I thought over the knock-on effects from moving a bookcase sideways and assembling a new chair. Initially, I didn’t think there were any snowball effects.

   Usually I have to move a thing, and I know that greatly disturbs the landscape. Avalanche. Now I must shift that, alter this, take that thing down, put that other thing up, count those, hammer that, apply pliers to these…

   This time, nothing much happened. Unscrew those connectors. Shift that bookcase around. Assemble the chair. Done. It’s easier to lean back and reach for items on the moved bookcase than it was to twist and reach for things when the case faced me, strangely enough. Nothing else? Well, no. Nothing else.

   Except…

*

Memory takes a strange battering when you make a major move. The bookcases change. And the order of the monoliths in your own personal Bookhenge…the order goes to hell. In an attempt to draw order out of the chaotic changes, I made things harder for myself by preserving the order of books on new shelves.

   A massive bookcase must travel from the left side of a room to the right side of another room just to give me room to move things around the first room. That bookcase is coming back to this room later. It’s too big to move loaded. You have to unload those groaning shelves.

   It’s worth repeating this. An author’s library is a crazed beast bolted into shape by the demands of the books themselves. Authors gather many tomes down the centuries. Even in the Digital Age, that’s still true. I check my Kindle.

   Of the 116 items on there, 44 are files of mine in various stages of development. I used to throw files into the tappokita machine and watch as the story sausages emerged from the flopperiser. I’d take the results and load them on my Kindle to see the state of the fart.

   Amazon ended support for those highly-processed files. It’s now easier to drop the raw story ingot into the online preview machine and check formatting issues that way.

   What am I saying? It’s the Digital Age. I’m a digital author. Yes, I’ve been loaded into Tron World by a powerful laser more times than I care to remember. But even so, I don’t use the Kindle much. Almost half the files on that Kindle are test files from days of yore. My books are, mostly, made of paper. And that leads me back to the topic of physically bulky books and physically bulky bookcases.

   It should be easy to preserve the order of books in an alphabetised room full of books, right?

   Wrong. An author’s library is a crazed beast bolted into shape by the demands of the books themselves. Authors gather many tomes down the centuries. And authors do not store those tomes alphabetically. Authors store those volumes by volume. Size matters. Width, especially.

*

You can’t transport books off shelves and onto tables and floors in a jumble and then rely on the alphabet to help reconstruct the exact order once the furniture is finally as you like it. No. You must create a space on the floor for the queue of books, and line the bastards up like victims in a firing-squad. They must fall back into place in a new part of the room – exactly as you laid them out. By the combination of sizes that fits.

   And, for the most part, laborious as this stacking process clearly is, the book-moving and order-preserving engine works.

*

Until…

   You move furniture around and create a tiny new space that allows you to flip a whole bookcase around – opening up a vista crammed with possibilities. And you cram it…with a new bookcase. This opens up space in another room once you transfer a whole case from one side of the building to another.

   And that, in turn, opens up another vista crammed with possibilities. So you cram it. With another new bookcase. And you reorganise absolutely everything.

*

At that point, you have space on bookshelves once more. Ah, the luxury. The only space that’s cluttered now is in your mind. Why? The shelves are a uniform length, for you purchase uniform bookcases.

   That’s a trap.

   You remove a whole shelf of books. And you preserve them in order on the carpet. It’ll be easier to move them to the new bookshelf. In that utterly new location, protruding books won’t catch a wayward author with a quick one-two combination. There’s extra space in that new locale.

   Same width of bookshelf. Wider avenue to walk down. Easier to move past, on the hunt for other tomes. You gather five books at a time and pop them on the new shelf in the same order. When you reach for the last three books they fit just exactly in there at the end. Job done.

   Except…

   Uncluttering your mind is the knock-on effect of moving things around. The books are in the same order, based on fitting the bastards onto that shelf. But they aren’t on that shelf. They aren’t even in that room any longer. You wander rooms looking for the memory of a place that almost exists. It’s still there, from left to right and back again on that shelf. But you know it isn’t that shelf you are looking for, now.

   Today, you look for a shelf that’s the width of that shelf. When you find it, you’ll locate all those books, crammed in where they are meant to be. Wherever that may be.

*

Though I don’t believe that I have a good memory, I am told that I have a good memory. At least, I remember being told that I have a good memory, an amazing memory, I’ve got some memory on me…if I misremember correctly. And the difficulty is…

   Remembering arrangements of shelves from the last big organisation. That’s the problem. And recalling the one before that. Also, the one before that. When I walk into these mini-libraries, I see them as they are now, and yet, I remember shelf combinations from the dim and distant past. This is especially annoying if I have to walk down an aisle looking for a book.

   Yes, it’s a crime to have bookcases protruding into a room. They are meant to line the walls only. In the interests of sanity, and in an insane quest to determine the load-bearing capacity of the floor, I’ve sent bookcases sailing insanely out into the deeper waters of the carpet.

   Here be Sea Monsters.

   Okay. It’s true. There are aisles. And I positioned extra lights to guide me down those aisles, into the gloom. This is the mad situation I find myself in, after a thousand years of bookery and chapteronomy and page-itis. The office is rearranged. It’s now different. Yet it’s strangely the same.

   Layers of memories tell me where the books are. And they just aren’t there. Except, of course, that they are there. Just to the side. Or one shelf up. On the same bookcase in a different room. I’ve cut down lending books out. If the books are far from the house for too long, I’ll fill the gaps left behind. This is the way of things.

*

I thought about this visible and invisible knock-on effect after I moved a bookcase sideways. There. I won’t need to move anything again for a good long wh…

   This blog post is really about moving a second bookcase sideways within days of shifting the first one. I resisted. Ah, but that resistance flew (low and at slow speed) in the face of the facts. For every bookcase moved, there is an equal and opposite bookcase you must move.

   I’d moved a bookcase located nearby and to my right. The laws of physics demanded that I balance the universe in moving a bookcase located far away and to my left. So the tale went. And I didn’t even have to take pictures off the wall. That was an achievement.

   Things are more organised to the left and to the right of me. What changed? I tidied the usual spew of cables. Look at all that new space to the left of…what do you mean I just filled it up instantly?! Well, that’s never happened before. And the bookcases…

   The order of books stayed preserved. I didn’t unload any bookcases to get those jobs done. Winged it. No need to stack anything on the floor. I stare at the books. If anything alphabetical is going on there, it’s by accident. That small shelf: crammed. And the one below it: crammed.

   Strange alchemy fills the gap. I know I’ve shuffled books around to fill the narrowing space. If I shift this one to another room, I can fit these three new books in that space. The rule for the top of a bookcase is different. Chunkiest tomes and boxed sets to the edge, with no chance of falling over. Slim volumes in the middle of the stack. Occasional support provided by bookends. Additional support from specialised bookends. No, not the decorative kind. The practical kind should be renamed bookmiddles when they sit halfway along the top of the bookcase. Can’t see the term catching on, for, y’know, reasons.

   I moved another piece of furniture. It didn’t land on top of me. And now, this time, I won’t be moving bookcases for a very long wh…

MOVING A LOADED BOOKCASE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Restructuring. I moved a bookshelf. Turned it sideways. That’s it.

*

The chair died. I leaned back in it. Too far. Must have had a screw loose. And the chair, too. I typed that so you wouldn’t have to say it. Time to adjust…what the hell?! The base plate was cracked, creating all that leeway. Time for a new chair. The same model of chair? No. A different chair. Swivel? Of course. It’s the only way to fly.

*

An office chair must meet essential legal requirements. Vitally, it has to be easy to build. (It never fucking is. I almost ripped off a knuckle building the new chair up into a usable state.) Even more vitally, it must fit in. This is the tricky part. Office physics.

   The first thing I did, on seeing the crack in the chair, was reach for the tape. I measured available floorspace. This is important when your chair sits in a neuk. Then it was off to chairlandsville, a place on the interwebs, to hunt down a wild seat with the proper requirements.

   Revolving. Of course. With space not terribly spacey, I automatically ignored chairs with arms on them. Until I saw a chair with arms that folded up. Sit in the chair. Slide forward on those castors. Engage desk engines. Away we go. And then…

   Finished with desk. Push back in chair. Lift folding arm, swivel chair, eject from office…okay, sounds like a plan. Now measure the shit out of that fucking seat. Measure, measure, measure…

*

Yes, on paper it almost worked. Never good enough, is it?

   The neuk I created for this computer and that desk…was too neukish for my chosen chair. There are corner brackets at the floor, and on top of the cases, keeping my bookcases together in very tight formation as they curve around this space.

   It’s all rather neat. And awkward to change.

   The last case in the line was a bookcase too far. New chair didn’t want to know, on paper. I undid the screws and shoogled the final bookcase out of its floor fixing without unloading a single book.

   This is a skill acquired through millions of years of bookfolly, endless piling of pagement, and untold toil related to wordation.

   Moving loaded bookcases is not for professionals. It’s only for amateurs. There’s a risk of being killed, on a level with being hit by lightning…possible, though unlikely, but…if it happens, you’ve been blasted. I didn’t move the case far. This was more of a swivel on the spot to turn the case flat against its neighbour.

   Professional types will unload bookcases first, the fools.

   With that wobbly move out of the way, there was now just enough room for the new chair…which I then ordered in. The end bookcase is solid in place. There’s space to slide and swivel and turn and sit and stand and all those regular office things that go with chairs.

   The room is still divided into office neuk and studio space. Usually I must plan for days before moving bookcases around, and I make use of at least three rooms as stages on which to drop off and from which to pick up. It’s all about securing far-off space for books to congregate in, followed by securing nearby space to flit the bookcases through.

   This latest change to the office was a major one that called for minor adjustment. As long as there’s room for a chair, and I can drink coffee without resorting to gymnastics, I’ll do okay.

*

Wait. Were there no knock-on effects? Normally, we have to run office changes by Newton’s treasured law – for each and every action there is an equal and opposite crash of a train through your delicate plans. I quote loosely from the general text.

   No. There weren’t any knock-on effects. This time, all I did was move one bookcase around a bit and then I had room for the new chair. The avalanche from a snowball never happened this time. Why not? I believe it’s thanks to all the other avalanches I went through.

   It’s staggering to think that I have moved the absolute eternal fuck out of the furniture. There’s very little left to change, now. Once you cut a hole in the back of a bookcase to accommodate cables, you know you’ve done just about everything.

   In moments of madness, I consider wall-mounting or ceiling solutions for the studio lights in here. Setting the studio lights up on walls or on the ceiling gives me more floorspace. However, instinct tells me to stick to the tripods and stumble through the studio doing my contortionist act just to switch the lights on.

   All the electrical devices conveniently merged with extensions, oh, long ago. I even took the time to uncover a buried electrical socket to assist in my mad quest to fix space problems. These maintenance matters are of the past, and needn’t concern me.

   I’ve played the bookcase game to the point of saturation so many times, and it’s a losing game…how could it not be? There are only temporary victories in the war against fleets of incoming books. I think hard about this, and remember a massive reorganisation from a bajillion books ago.

   Sometimes, all you can do is take the Skyscraper Option. Build up the way. The shorter metal cases came down and the taller wooden cases climbed up. I thought I wouldn’t have to shuffle things around again for a long time. A lie was told there, surely.

   Yes, I had more space on more shelves. But the illusion of space is a trap. It’s an ambush you’ve set yourself. I simply ended up moving taller bookcases around, despite all that extra space I’d allegedly gained. How am I doing, in terms of space? Have I reached saturation yet again? No.

   Will it take me long to reach saturation yet again? Hard to say. Incoming boardgames, for use on the YouTube channel, now threaten saturation in ways that I never considered when dealing with mere hardback books. But I planned ahead for the influx of low-flying boardgames. When I handled books, I endured and endured and endured some more before relenting and reorganising. Madness, I know.

   So things are definitely different, now. Book-buying is down. I’m finally seeing a slight upswing in digital book purchases. There are always things that can go bye-bye. First to fall are paintings or posters on the walls, as I reclaim the space and build up to the ceiling.

   I won’t claim all the major moves are done. But I recognise that I’ve made minor bookcase moves, technical adjustments, and electrical alterations that helped avoid having to spend a week of my life shuffling books around one last time, one more time, all over again.

   It’s the space against a wall that goes, long before I contemplate sending books out of the house. There’s a balance, and it goes like this…

Considers giving books away.

(Bahahahahahahahaha!)

Measures room for new bookcase.

(Bahahahahahahahaha!)

   I find it easier to reach for the tape than for a box to drop books into. That’s as it should be. Oh, I am no hoarder. It is easy enough to escape from the house in the event of a disaster. That view contributes to my definition of hoarder.

   You will always have unread books on your shelves. Book hoarders are not compulsive buyers of tomes, but, rather, compulsive storers of books, with a vast volume of volumes at their non-disposal. If you buy a load of books and place them on bookshelves, you are not a hoarder. No.

   If you buy a load of books and stack them in rooms, to the extent that you can’t leave any of those rooms in under a minute, then you are hoarding. Let us suppose, for a moment, that you march your books up the stairs, around the corner, and into the rooms up there, narrowing an already-slim hallway as though the hall is an artery clogged by booklesterol. No, that is not a word.

   Death, by a thousand books. I must stress that the scene pictured does not depict my book collection.

   There is no saving you from the dreaded bookalanche. Accept your fate with as much dignity as you can muster, as the massed ranks doom you to a dusty demise.

   I have dozens of books nestling in each bookcase. To hoard books, I’d rip a bookcase out and store hundreds of volumes in the same space – unable to gain easy access to most of the hoarded stories. Casually, I wonder at the storage capacity of floorboards, the breaking-point, and believe I am nowhere near the limit.

   If there’s a crash and you never hear from me again, I’ll have crossed a line imposed by physics. The only thing left to ponder is the nature of the book that breaks the floor’s spine. Knowing my literary choices, the book that brings collapse will be witty, and, in a sense of irony, must fall into the category of rather light reading.

SENDING BOOKCASES TO LIVE AT A NICE FARM IN THE COUNTRY: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

They gambol in the fields, those bookcases. The nice farmer sends picture postcards. I’m kept informed. It’s all rather lovely.

   I didn’t dismantle the bookcases in my torture dungeon. Honest.

*

A lie was told there, surely.

   The bookcases truly had to go. I tried keeping them together using all sorts of fiendish tricks. No, I don’t mean keeping them together as a family of three. I mean maintaining structural integrity, uprightness, and holdabookability.

   Borrowing from Comden and Green, the party’s over. The fundamental flaw in bookcase design killed them off in the end. Those bookcases weren’t designed to be moved around once constructed.

   A shift here, a relocation there, a move to the back of beyond and back again…and again and again, over and over again – again – only more so…

   The whirling storm of office updates down the years exacted the ultimate cost. Ask not for whom the bookcase creaks. It creaks for thee.

*

Rest in Pieces, Awkward Bookcases…we hardly knew ye. They are dead – most sincerely so. Oh, I suppose I could resurrect them from the imaginary ashes. I didn’t burn the awkward cases.

   Instead, pulling nails and pretending they were teeth, I dismantled, unscrewed, removed, and cancelled…

   The cracks showed. Revealing the naked underbelly of the bookcases, I discovered the situation was a little shakier than I thought when I shoogled a bookcase here and tested stability there.

   But this isn’t the story of bookcases long-past their best.

*

It is, inevitably, the tale of space vacated. This is the story of floorspace uncovered. It is the saga of finding replacement shelves for books dumped unceremoniously on the carpet.

   The dead bookcases…

   Whoops. No. They live on, in spirit, frolicking in the farmer’s fields…

   The belly-up bookcases live on, in the loft, lying there in bits. I could have them refitted at a small cost. Project for another era.

   Those deceased bookcases were half-size, located under the windows. They just coasted into place and no more. Perfect size. Ideal height. But move them, well…

   Never move them.

   You learn freely with ease and you learn the hard way to your cost. Both forms of learning are, sadly, valid.

*

I moved swiftly. Other half-sized bookshelves were all over the place, curling around each other for warmth. Out came the tape. Down went the figures. Scribble scribble, scratch, shaky diagram, miscalculation, measure twice and measure some more…

   The casualty in liberating floorspace is the imprisonment of wallspace. I killed three half-sized bookcases at the window, and more half-sized units, bookcases, and strange items rushed in to secure the territory.

   And that liberated a few sections of wall elsewhere…if I took pictures down. Down they came. I now have four full-sized bookcases where half-sized articles lurked before.

*

Once more, I elude the danger of saturation. You reach the point of no return all over again, and tread beyond the natural limit of things for a short time. It’s a dangerous pirouette.

   This year, clearing bookshelves takes on a different meaning. Usually, clearing a bookshelf means finishing the last of the unread books on that shelf. But I’ve been all over the place with storage. Looking around the shelves in front of me, I see STUFF perched here, balanced there, or “temporarily” stored yonder.

   Permanent features start out as temporary affairs. I must clear these shelves of items that are, bluntly, not books. There’s a box of bulbs – light, not daffodil. What’s that bottle of glue doing, sitting there? Gluing itself to the bookcase, clearly. Well, it dries clearly.

   How did it get to this? Gradually. An answer that covers a growing multitude of bookcase sins. Fear not, readers. I don’t store food there. Not yet.

*

Festive cards are time-stamped. They go soon. I can’t do anything about the bottom shelf to my right – it’s set up to carry the plugs for my computer. The office is a paperless office. (Insert rabid laughter here.) And the office is a cableless office, too. (Continue rabid laughter here. Try not to trip over the cables.)

   These Blu-Ray discs need to go somewhere else, though. I should just bite the bullet and go digital in film and book. But I can’t do that – what would I do without physical books on cases? It’s only the weight of all these dead trees that keeps the carpet in place.

   I couldn’t allow DAYLIGHT back into the writer’s crypt. Look what happened to Max Schreck in that F.W. Murnau documentary.

*

Yes, some things that aren’t books must, by law, remain on the bookshelves. What else would I do with my Spider Glass? I can’t leave that lying around the kitchen. The glass has played temporary home to a legion of spiders and lions and bugs, oh my.

   I keep meaning to add a label to the glass, saying SPIDER GLASS. Clue’s in the title. You may suspect, but, if you must know…

   The Spider Glass contains a fold of paper. These items serve as a spider trap. The Spider Glass does whatever a spider trap can. First, spot your spider. Next, curse your spider for stopping at an awkward spot high on the wall.

   Your stepladder is always in another room. If you leave to fetch the ladder, your steps are bound to set up warning vibrations – alerting the arachnid. No go. Instead, teeter on tiptoe with the Spider Glass at the ready.

   Pop the glass over that spider. Slide your fold of paper under the glass. Whisk the contraption outside, and deposit the arachnid in the wild.

   That’s the short version. There’s usually more of a struggle, with the odd threat to life and limb. If you don’t hear from me again, a spider got me. A spider got me to throw myself carelessly down the effing stairs and the glass shattered across my throat.

*

The Spider Glass must stay in place on the bookcase, with the warning piece of paper inside. I could write Spider Glass on the paper, warning people off. My heart’s not in it. Besides, I know the purpose served by the glass with the fold of paper inside.

   Readers of this blog who find themselves in my company are forewarned, and need never fear accidentally quaffing a libation from the Spider Glass. There’s a remote chance that a visitor might seize the Spider Glass in a fit of madness and rush to the sink for a thirst-quenching session that takes in whatever invisible spider shit happens to be in the receptacle at the time…

   I, for one, think the possibility unlikely.

*

Anyway, I’ve freed up wallspace by liberating floorspace, and the films sitting on my bookcases here will soon open their plastic cases and flit, batlike, to a far-off stamping-ground.

   Yes, I know I’ve bought the last of the very last of the last-ever lastest final never-again no more lastestest latestest bookcases. And I’ve hefted them, danced with them, narrowly avoided being butted in the head by them…

   The only difference this time around was the use of an electric screwdriver to cut assembly down to something resembling an aeon.

*

Every single time a new bookcase arrives, there’s the opporchancity to review the array of books on the old bookcases. Can I finally take that one awkward book and reorganise half a library just to fit the bloody thing upright instead of in that unfortunate yoga position the tome adopted?

   Maybe.

   And that is the long answer, as well as the short one. Buying a bookcase isn’t about placing new books on new shelves. It’s all about easing the congestion elsewhere. How long before I reach saturation again?

*

Sooner than I think, I think.

   I bought a few more digital books this past year. Not many. A few. Book-buying shifted again, into different types of physical book. I bought a lot of rulebooks for boardgames, so that I could run my boardgaming channel on the YouTube…

   Sadly, these slim rulebooks are accompanied by bulky games. There seems no way around that arrangement. (I downloaded a lot of digital rulebooks, read them, and deleted them if I thought the games no good. Saved me a lot of bad purchases.)

   There are no boardgames on bookshelves here in the office. (Okay, there’s once small card game in a bag, perched on a few jazz albums. And a prop statue with a gaming theme. That’s all. Apart from the prop watch. And two parts of a Terminator model from a cheap boardgame. The glue isn’t for use with that model.)

   No boardgames here in this office. (Fifth edition D&D sits on the studio table, but that’s not a bookshelf. And I never use the table as a bookshelf or impromptu storage area between video shoots. Honest.)

   My library is split between three rooms. I could consolidate, and shift all of the fiction and non-fiction books into Library One from Library Two, and then move all of the games out of Library One to form a game library…

   But that means altering the height of adjustable shelves to account for game boxes in one location and altering the height of adjustable shelves to cram more fiction books into place…

   That’s a lot of adjusting. Truth be told, I prefer to wander from one room full of books to another room full of books…

*

And that means reintroducing the writerly rule. An author’s library is not a library in the conventional sense. Books are not stored alphabetically. They are stored where they damn-well fit in.

   Pauses to think hard about the next bit…

   No, I am fine. I am living carpet-clear now. Books are on shelves, and all is right with the reading world. There was a carpet migration, back in the depths of time. Do not store your books on carpets – store your books on dead trees on top of carpets. The alternative is to stack books freely, and that way madness lies.

   Madness and a peculiar death brought about by a bookalanche triggered on hunting a particularly devious spider. We’ve all been there…we’ve all died like that. And then recovered at the last gasp, also a last grasp, seizing the one piece of stable stone in the place and clinging to it for dear life.

   Spiders, I am informed, never have that problem themselves. It’s a technical thing: they just don’t go around trying to trap humans under glass.