MORE INJURY FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

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

*

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

And did those files in ancient time

Unfurl with ease upon the computer screen:

And was the formatting odd

On ev'ry effing paragraph seen!

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

REPUBLISHING KINDLE BOOKS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Once a story is out there, I like to say I've cut loose of it.
   For reasons technical and strange, I often go back and republish a book. If a change occurs in the front or back matter of a story, I am forced to republish all my books.
   Change.
   So it went. Amazon changed the way it did business, paying out borrowing fees for books on a page-by-page basis.
   I didn't trouble myself too much over the statistics, as Amazon's Bookshelf service rolled over and croaked. It ran almost as fast as frozen treacle. I couldn't access the bookshelf, to run a test on a file.
   My Amazon Bookshelf contains live books and books to come. There are a few empty shells for testing.
   I try out awkward formatting techniques on the shellfish books, and my failures fail to make it into the finished products.

*

When the bookshelf blipped into existence again, I accidentally found myself staring at pages read. This system showed a book with two pages read.
   So the reader browsed free books, made it beyond the cover, and stopped dead on the title page.
   Without knowing why, I hazarded the best worst guess. My holdover from the days of paper publishing didn't go down well.
   There's no place for blank pages in an e-book unless you are up to something clever in the staging of the plot.
   I'd cut the opening of each book. Cover. Title page. Copyright page.
   And the Table of Contents is cut down. I don't publish books with hyperlinks like this...

CHAPTER ONE.
CHAPTER TWO.
CHAPTER THREE.
CHAPTER FOUR.
CHAPTER FIVE.
CHAPTER SIX.
CHAPTER SEVEN.
CHAPTER EIGHT.
CHAPTER NINE.
CHAPTER TEN.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
CHAPTER TWELVE.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
CHAPTER NINETEEN.

   And so on, and on, and on, down to the 36th chapter stored under a locker belonging to Davey Jones. I was stuck with that formatting initially, as I had a problem producing a sawn-off Table of Contents without glitching the hell out of the e-book.
   But I learned. Kill your glitches. With fire.
   Divide your book into sections and put those at the start.

ONE. SPRING ONIONS.
TWO. SUMMER STOCK.
THREE. AUTUMN IN OLD NEW YORK.
FOUR. WINTER BLUES.

   Then link through to mini-lists of chapters later.
   On seeing that statistic about page two, I revamped all the books. I just combined the title page with the copyright page. No big deal. Yes, I republished. And I killed off a page in each book.
   (Though I saw scope for shortening the Table of Contents in one book, and that generated two mini-lists further in.)
   And I tested out-of-book hyperlinks while I was there. Found defunct links. Killed those off.
   Yes. Cut loose of your work once it is done. But, for technical reasons, go back in and fix things. Will readers stop DEAD on the title page because it has the title page and copyright nonsense on it?
   Maybe. But I removed something that irked me for a while. The title page, sitting there, all alone.
   That wasn't the beef. I had to format the follow-up copyright page in a peculiar way to avoid an invisible gremlin.
   With two pages rolled into one, that glitch never surfaces - and the need for awkward formatting vanishes.

*

Beyond all that...
   When I say I republish books...yes, I mean update. I don't unpublish the book and then publish again as a new edition. Only copyright incidents or defamatory statements lead down that thorny path.

*

After writing this blog post, I republished my books yet again. I hadn't taken account of the way Amazon operates, and a one-word fix in the back matter solved that.
   Always cut loose of your work. But check the front matter, the back matter, and the product description every now and again. And review hyperlinks that lead out of the book to the vastness of the interwebs. If the links don't lead there, remove or revise.

*

Here I am, publishing again. Updating. One of the problems with hyperlinking to a book on the Kindle Store is that the link leads to a particular region.
   Unless you make use of a linking service. I decided to add Universal Links to the back matter in my products. No matter where you are in the Vast Uncaring Void, clicking the link takes you to the nearest Amazon site.
   I tested a service called BookLinker. Creating a link, I clicked and went through to Amazon. Then I sent the same link to Some Foreigners, to see where the link led them.
   It all worked out.

*

On top of that, my resuscitation work on slim thriller continues. Somewhere along the way, slim*thriller lost its asterisk.

   More importantly, excerpts from the novel had to go from my collected edition...

   INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS.

   Yes, that's a Universal Link.

   The collection houses blog posts that I won't remove from this blog, so Amazon exclusivity is ruled out. I want slim thriller to run in Kindle Direct Publishing when the time comes, and that meant sacrificing the excerpts...

   I cut 5,000 words from the short story collection, but threw in a story from inventory...adding 10,000 words. Elaborate updating occurred.

   In addition, I threw in a new section at the front of the book. A short piece, outlining the refundability of Kindle books. If I write a story that's not for you, grab yourself a refund.

   I'll be rolling that refund policy note out to all my products, as I set up more Universal Links in the back matter.

*

There you have it. I republished a book today. Cut material that had to go. Injected more material, to keep the word-count up. Killed routine glitches. Added a refund policy. Threw in extra hyperlinks.

   Cut loose of your stories. But remember to maintain them.

   

SLIM*THRILLER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Awkward half-arsed technical considerations prevented publication of SLIM*THRILLER. Problems. That's what I meant to say.
   I tried my best, and worst, to overcome the technical difficulties. The story makes use of diagrams and maps built using drawing shapes in Microsoft Word.
   Those diagrams weren't supported in Amazon Kindle. Now they seem to be. Not entirely to my satisfaction, but at least each map is no longer visible only as a black rectangle.
   I tried all sorts of tricks, dodges, pieces of legerdemain, sleight of programming, and nonsense.
   Every year, since I started putting out Kindle books, I returned to the unloved monster and tried to build up its strength with kind words and acts of computer magic.
   No go.
   Until now. All writing is experimentation. And so. Whether or not the maps, clues, diagrams, and buildings are supported...
   The repellent fact remains. Even breaking the story into four volumes, the files are unwieldy. Just trying to preview one book broke Amazon.
   It doesn't matter if I use the Microsoft material or if I generate my own image files off those earlier diagrams. There's a lot of stuff on file. And I'll go purple in the face on top of the blue that's already there, if I try yet another annual review and trudge nowhere.
   So, what to do?
   My solution is to restructure the tale so that it survives without those images. I'll drop hyperlinks in there, leading from the story to a dedicated blog. That blog will house the original visuals, recreated as bonus material.
   Result? The files drop drastically in size, and I can preview my books before they go on sale - without snapping the Amazon Bookshelf under the crushing weight of what went before.
   It's a fiddly solution. No more and no less fiddly than all of the other so-called solutions I tried, it's true. We'll see how it goes.
   If it means publishing, I'm all for that. The writing lab survives each blast. And that's the main thing.
   Upshot? I have a story sitting at a loose end. My INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS contains excerpts from SLIM*THRILLER, running to 5,000 words...
   If I want SLIM*THRILLER to appear in Kindle Direct Publishing, that material has to go from the INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS. Exclusivity, and all that.
   I'll drop my loose end story in there as a replacement. The new piece is 10,000 words long. Readers get more for their cash in buying a slightly-expanded anthology.
   Why must SLIM*THRILLER feature in KDP, with its exclusivity terms? Even with all the diagrams farmed out to a dedicated site, the files are still long...
   The story is divided into four sections. Breaking the book into four volumes is a neat solution. Will the public go for that? All writing is experimentation. Self-publishing is a mad science lab. Quite right, too.
   If I put the book in KDP, I can offer the first volume free. Will a serialised approach work? Only one way to find out.
   It's better to publish a mad science experiment than leave it lurking on a hard drive for want of perfect technical solutions.
   Time to use the technical solutions left to me, now that I've exhausted all of the others.
   This means revisiting the story again. Much to do. Recreating maps. Setting up an easily-accessible blog site. Revising INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS. Publishing one massive story in four volumes of 100,000 words each, give or take.
   Annual review of SLIM*THRILLER. The last one. I'm for publishing the damned thing within the year.

UNBLOGGING.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Nurse, the screens!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT BLOG: SPAM ALERT.

LET’S TALK ABOUT MY FIRST BOOK.

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2011.

There isn’t one. I looked at the electronic pile of rejected novels, and decided to convert files from Microsoft Word to the Kindle format. What was in the pile? There were books I’d written on a whim under a time-constraint, just to prove to myself that I could. To jolt myself into doing those, they were books written using other people’s toys.

   TV tie-ins. Right. I’m going to rattle those out. The characters belong to some organisation. So I can’t afford to waste endless oceans of time constructing the stories. If the organisation says no, I’ll have spent…a week on a book. And a week on the sequel. Do two, to prove the first one is no fluke.

   If the outfit says no, I’ll have picked up a lot of information about how I work under harsh constraints. On top of that, I think it’ll be fun. I used the word rattle. What do the blog readers make of that word?

   Some people think there’s no skill involved in rattling a story out. I’m here to tell you that my use of the word stems from the days when I’d rattle stories out on a manual typewriter. Skilfully. Do I miss those days? Of course not. I have a decent heating system now, for one thing.

   Yes. Writing by typewriter in a cold room works wonders for the concentration. I no longer possess the muscle memory for manual typewriting. If pressed back into it, I’d be forced to take double-handed sledgehammer blows to the typewriter keys. All the while yelling WHY IS THIS LIKE LIFTING BOULDERS?! YE GODS! WHYYYYYYYY…

   Younger readers may be forgiven for failing to understand the effort required of manual typewriting. Let’s quiz the audience. Test your age. Look at a keyboard. Now turn your attention to the big button. No, not the long thin one. That’s the space bar. Where tipsy astronauts pretend they are walking through high orbit, hanging around in low company. Nothing to do with the rocket-fuel-expensive cocktails imbibed.

   The other big button. It resembles an upside-down L. If you call that the carriage return, you have served time in the trenches of manual typing. It is likely that you are of a certain age. This is a euphemism. However, if you call it the enter key, you are, in fact, a young person.

   Writing evolution. Let’s look at the cave-paintings, stage by stage. In school, I started with pencil and paper – writing to a time-constraint. Later, the pen was forced on us. I wrote with pen and paper – to a time-constraint. The evolutionary leap to a typewriter slowed my speed as I picked up the memory patterns required to access keys without jamming the mechanism.

   Did anything change in my writing? No. Writing by pen, I couldn’t alter the story. This forced me to think about what I wanted to put down on paper, to a time-constraint. Working by typewriter, I knew that I would have to REPEAT a COLOSSAL effort if I changed ANYTHING. So I never developed the habit of rewriting material. Even in the pencil days, there was only time to flip the pencil over to the un-business end, erase a shoddy word, fix an awkwardly-scrawled letter, and move on.

   What of Tipp-Ex, you cry? A proprietary name for typewriter correcting fluid reliant on brush-based technology. I used this goo in the same way as I used the un-business end of a pencil. To fix an error. No more than that. Strike the wrong key. Utter exclamation. Remove the errant letter by performing a peculiar ritual akin to painting The Last Supper. Pause to admire handiwork. Hit the right bloody key. Stare at result. Move on.

   In schools, there was a ban on the fluid for a time. To discourage pupils from engaging in unwholesome nasal-based activity. Did that edict suppress the sniffers? Hard to say. In my day, school was awash with hay-bales of marijuana, weapons-grade LSD, and other contraband substances I needn’t spend time listing. If the asbestos didn’t get you, the clouds of smoke from illicit cigarettes wafted in to finish the job. Tipp-Ex was never a priority. Enough of that. Time to ponder an evil lie.

   There was an evil lie circulated by young writers, foisted on old writers, with the advent of electronic writing machines. You should definitely buy a computer. It’ll make your writing faster. The old gunslingers would eye the new dudes and mutter under their soup-catchers. Just what I need. Some young punk kid coming along off a dude ranch, telling me my writing needs to be faster.

   I knew this was a lie. As a young writer I made the evolutionary hop from typewriter to computer, and had to learn a whole new set of skills. Slowing my writing down, for a time. There I was, learning how to use a typewriter, all over again. (I’d liken it to a cyclist becoming a motorcyclist. Don’t start your very first motorbike journey at 150 mph. It’s likely to be your last.)

   On top of that, there were new options at my disposal. More choices, slowing me down until I was up to speed. Cutting and pasting text. Extra tools. Spellcheckers, and grammar machines. I’ll say this of spelling – I’m good at it. Regardless of that, I always carry a dictionary. Just in case. And I’m prepared to dip into any number of dictionaries and word guides, just in case. Doesn’t matter how good my spelling is. Dictionaries are tools. Make use of them.

   My spelling’s better than my typing. Flailing around on keyboards generates mistakes. Typing creates patterns that don’t occur when actually scribbling. So I’m grateful if an electrically-powered tool spots a typo or format glitch. I’m not so grateful when some bolshie feature of the computer adds awkward clutter to my work. For that reason, I say this of the grammar checker. Caution.

   The grammar checker is likely to be alien to your small part of the world. For, in your small part of the world, grammar always operates at the local level. With local meaning. Try this on for size. I doubt it’s going to rain. Obviously, I’ve cleaned that up a bit for international consumption.

   Ah doot it’s gonnae rain.

   This is a contrary statement in many parts of Scotland. It means I DON’T doubt it’s going to rain. In terms of local grammar, the fishwife is saying…it’s going to rain. An electronic grammar checker has no more notion of this intended meaning than it has of the taste of milk.

   Eventually, I developed a speedier pace when using the computer. There were things about the manual typewriter I was glad to see the back of. (All things. The whole effing machine, basically.) But I still carried the notion in my head, that I could rattle out stories.

   Those TV tie-ins were rejected. No big deal. I hadn’t spent years writing them. The © in other people’s toys belongs elsewhere. For that reason, when looking for a self-publishing candidate, I looked closer to home. Once more, I had to learn new skills. In formatting.

   The potential candidate for conversion had to be wholly © to me. Uncomplicated. slim*thriller had loads of technical issues requiring resolution, on top of the Kindle formatting. That technical mess informed my choice.

   Go with the shortest book that is © to me. Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords. That is my first book to be released on Amazon Kindle. Is it my first book? No. LYGHTNYNG STRYKES was written around the same time. There was my Hamlet adaptation to consider. It didn’t matter which book I chose to convert to Kindle. These were all later books.

   My very first book was written to a time-constraint for a competition. Well, why not. A treble goal. Complete a manuscript, to a deadline, and win a publishing deal. Cheating? No. There’s a Berlin Wall of snobbery relating to certain types of publishing. Drive a tank through it, I say.

   Famous writer’s famous offspring writes. It’s not what you know, but who you know. Conveniently overlooking the possibility that it’s what Senior drummed into Junior about writing and about the business that played a part, more than any oleaginous publishing contact ever could.

   Winning a writing competition will never lead to a career in writing. Alistair MacLean won a short story competition, kick-starting his career. I’ve enjoyed almost all of his novels. That’s a compliment, and a great one. The compliment would have made no difference to him, of course.

   Self-publishing is evil. Well, publishers with a vested interest in not missing out will say that when they miss out. I’m reminded of the view that a defendant who acts for himself in court has a fool for a client. A statement most-often made by lawyers missing out on fees.

   Anyway, that first book of mine was awful. To the extent that I demolished all but one memorable passage that had potential. First book? It’s gone. Believe me, you weren’t missing anything. Did I learn from it? Hell, yes. And did I still try the odd writing competition? Of course.

   Your writing isn’t judged in a writing competition. (I mean the judges aren’t standing over you, cheering or jeering. Keep it distant. Take emotion out of the picture.) The entry wins, or doesn’t. Winning isn’t automatically success. Not winning isn’t automatically failure.

   slim*thriller was a story I kept in my head for years as I wrote other things. Ah doot it’s gonnae rain. That phrase comes from chapter six. A writing competition popped up. Same challenge as before. Time is against me. I must set the work down on the page and finish the damned thing. Win the deal. The snobbishness remained. Winning a writing competition will never lead to a career in writing.

   Did I win? No. Did I see the potential for a larger canvas? Hell, yes. With technical concerns relating to illustrations, I couldn’t jump in and convert the book directly to Kindle. Not immediately. I had to get a feel for the Kindle format with something simpler. Learn.

   The moment I overcome the problems with the illustrations, I’ll convert slim*thriller to Kindle. A lot of things came together in that book. So I think of it as my first book, even though it followed one disastrous attempt, one over-ambitious experiment, and one valiant effort. Oh, and dead ends? A labyrinth of those. All grist to the cliché.

   On Kindle, I think I’ll divide slim*thriller into four volumes and serially release it – just to see how many readers I hold with each issue. Insane? Self-publishing is what you make of it. And that’s what I choose to make of it. What will I learn? Much. That famous quantity that’s never quite enough.

   slim*thriller represents unfinished business with the publishing world. I felt like stating that in my blog. In case people clamour for more stories about Neon Gods. Let me work my way through the pile of really good rejected stories first, kiddies. Every single one of which feels like my first book, if I’m brutally, scar-baringly, honest. Do I feel that way about books-as-yet-unwritten? Aye.

   That’s Scottish for yes. It is not a contrary statement.

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