My left eye sees...things.

Publishing fail

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:21:21 GMT

Some of you may have considered subbing work to Undead Press. This article should change your mind.

Thanks to Nadia for the link..

Slugs, snails, and puppy dogs' tails

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:05:53 GMT

Last week my creepy-crawly-mad three-year-old nephew came home from school and said to my sister, "Mummy, I've got a worm in my pocket." And sure enough he had. Poor little earthworm, all squashed up and dry. A few days later, after promising he wouldn't pick up any more worms, he came home with a bulging pocket.

"Jack, what have you got in there?"

Jack, sheepishly: "A slug and two worms."

They were practically welded to the fabric of his pocket.

Ew!

I'm glad I had a girl and not a boy. Sugar, spice and all things nice.

Overrated

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:08:35 GMT

My little pup goes mad for Winalot Shapes, so today I tried one. Can't see why she makes all the fuss to be honest. They taste like unsalted, unsweetened cardboard.

So there you go. A public service announcement. I did it so you wouldn't have to.

Scotland

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:09:06 GMT

The family Stone are home after a few days in sunny Scotland, and for once, the 'sunny' is not sarcastic. It really was blue skies and sunshine all the way, while the good people we left behind in Stoke were lashed by rain and gales (tee, and indeed hee!). Jill and Heather loved the holiday and can't wait to go back. Me, I struggled with the unfamiliar surroundings and was reminded at every turn that my eyesight has worsened considerably over the past two or three years. Also, I'm not very good at socialising and there were many instances when I wanted to just shut myself away from all the people around me. That said, the last few days have left me with many fond memories, none fonder than that of simply sitting in the front room of the Inversnaid Hotel where we stayed, playing dominoes and watching the night draw in over Loch Lomond.

We caught a boat several mornings to the other other side of the loch. To soothe the nerves of passengers, the captain played music such as.Celine Dion's 'My heart Will Go On' and the theme music from Jaws. Judging by the giggles around me it worked. :)

It shouldn't work

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:16:00 GMT

The deep-fried Mars Bar...

Take one sickly, caramel-y, nougat-y chocolate bar, slather it in batter and fry it. They originated in Scotland, where they even fry pizzas, but they've spread south so that now our local chip shop does 'em. I dared Heather to try one. She said she would if I would. So we did and...dear Lord, they are nice. They have no right to be, but they are a taste sensation. Not that I'll make a habit of 'em. I could feel my arteries clogging as I munched.

New addition

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:23:26 GMT

Last Tuesday the family Stone grew to include this gorgeous little creature...

Pippa is a four-month-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel and needless to say Jill, Heather and myself are entranced by her.

End of an era

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:29:45 GMT

This morning they demolished ny old High School.

(I didn't shoot this vid, btw.)

Amazing how a six-story building that has loomed large in my life and memories was practically obliterated in the blink of an eye.

What was also nice was that the dingy fields and woodlands I used to traipse across to get there are now a nature reserve, with proper footpaths, young trees and picnic benches. In my day it was populated by surly teenagers carrying air rifles and riding stolen motorbikes.

And today they removed the final blot from the landscape. Inside I cheered.

:D

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:15:08 GMT

I just got a £228 refund for overpaid taxes. That (almost) pays for the boiler repair. Happy Christmas!

Toast

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:12:41 GMT

We have heating and hot water again. It took four visits by the heating engineer (the stores supplied him with the wrong parts) but we got there in the end.

I've done all my daily chores first thing this morning instead of leaving them all till the last minute, i.e. five minutes before Jill gets in from work, and so now the day is mine. I've even remembered to turn the slow cooker on, something I always forget to do. Tea will be on time this evening! Good, eh? Sometimes I even amaze myself.

Now to get some writing done. I've told myself I have to get at least one scene done before I'm allowed to launch any games or pick up my current read. This is a challenge I am doomed to fail, but at least I'm trying.

Melodrama

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:14:47 GMT

I realised something while working on Ch. 29 of the WIP yesterday, and that is: I don't do melodrama. I've put my main character through the mill from the get-go and she's overdue a meltdown. But her turmoil is not something I can really relate to (thankfully) and every time she begins to crumble I pull her back from the brink.

It's because I'm an Englishman. My upper lip is stiff. I keep myself to myself and if something upsets me I try my best to not let it show. I become uncomfortable in the company of effusive people. Even in fiction, whether it's a book or a movie, characters that are showy, childish or over-emotional irritate the hell out of me. So I'm afraid my poor main character will have to just get a grip. I might let her shed a tear or two and, if I'm feeling generous, I'll let her complain that life is being a bit unfair of late, what with all the death and mayhem surrounding her. But if she's going to carry a book, and not just any book but my book, she needs to be strong. Someone I can admire and respect.

You go, girl!

Or, y'know, it could simply be that I'm crap at writing emotional scenes.

Brass monkeys

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:08:58 GMT

Third day without heating or hot water. The plumber has been out and ascertained that the boiler needs a new motherboard. £195, with labour on top. What makes it doubly annoying is I had the motherboard replaced three years ago, at similar expense, when the boiler was less than two years old. Oh well. No point chinning about it, I suppose. The plumber is coming back this evening with the board so hopefully Jill, Heather and I will soon be losing our blue-ish tinge.

Writing: I'm on Chapter 29 (of 32) of WHITE HIDE. Not sure if I've mentioned it before, but that's the definite title of the werebeast novel I've been working on for the last two years(!!). Books two and three will be BLACK HEART and RED BONES. The series is called The Human Zoo. Took a while for my agent and I to agree on titles but we got there in the end.

Reading: The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty
Listening to: Takk... by Sigur Ros
Playing on Steam: SkyDrift, Serious Sam BFE, and Nation Red.
But not all at the same time, obviously.

Bit of both

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:21:59 GMT

The good: A friend upgraded to a new computer a while back, and last week offered me his old one for Heather to use, with the warning that it took ages to boot up. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth I took it, hooked it up to my peripherals and saw it was slow because of the usual surfeit of unnecessary crap installed - bloatware, out-of-date, trial versions of virus checkers, and apps that promise to speed up your PC but do the opposite when you have several of 'em launching at the same time as Windows. All remedied with a bit of know-how and patience (and when the know how failed, Google). It now boots in about a minute and a half, which is quite acceptable in my book. I then put out a request on the local Freecycle group for any computer peripherals, and yesterday picked up an old (but flatscreen) monitor, a keyboard, mouse and a pair of speakers. Heather thinks Christmas has come early. I'm just waiting for a USB modem/dongle thingy to arrive from Amazon and it will be all tickety-boo. A complete PC set-up for £7. It just goes to show people, friends and strangers alike, are basically good.

The bad: Last night the central heating boiler packed up. We have no heating and no hot water. Not even for a shower as last year we replaced the electric shower unit for a swanky thermostatic jobbie that runs off the boiler. Bah! And the plumber we always use isn't answering his phone this morning. Double bah!

The itch

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:59:12 GMT

I need to start writing in earnest again.

My last writing-related post on this journal was in June, and in it I said I'd sent off the second draft of my werebeast mystery/thriller to my agent in the hope it would be favourably received and start the rounds with major publishers. In fact it took my agent and his assistant just one quick read-thru to find all manner of missed opportunities. Their suggestions for improvements would have filled three sides of A4. Worse, I knew it was entirely my own fault. They gave me good pointers after reading Draft #1, but I rushed things. I took shortcuts -- revising instead of rewriting. In my defence I'd been working on this book pretty solidly for 18 months. My brain was in a rut. I couldn't imagine the story in a different shape to the one I'd written.

Maybe it was because the above followed the removal of my novella Lemon Man from Morrigan Book's publication schedule and the news that the editor working on my Memory Bones collection for Graveside Tales had quit due to ill health, but I kind of threw in the towel. Threw my my hands in the air and, "Sod it, what's the point? Writing is a mug's game." I did start on Draft #3 of the novel, but when the going got tough around the end of July, I stopped opening the file in favour of replaying some of my favourite computer games, like the Half-Life 2 series and the Serious Sam shooters. And anyway, Heather was home from school and we were away to Devon for a week... August bled into September, October came and went, and still I had no desire to write or even think about the WIP. Well, that last bit isn't quite true. The WIP was never far from my thoughts. Random things would spark an "a-ha!" moment. I had a lot of those, and put together, all these a-ha moments would mean completely breaking up the last two-thirds of the novel. We're talking a major rewrite and that's kept me from going back to it. Too daunting. The real pity is that my agent wanted to showcase my book at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, pass it on to his co-agents and generate interest among his contacts there. I feel I let him and myself down.

But now we're in November. Memory Bones has an editor (more of which in a later post) and I've seen a cover painting. For the first time in months I'm excited about the collection. And, you know, the novel doesn't looks quite so daunting. Sure, there's a lot of blank spaces where I don't know where I will go with it, and I'm bound to make wrong turns and run into dead ends, but if I write a bit each day it'll be done eventually, right?

Right.

Further adventures with D-Link

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 11:02:27 GMT

After I had yet more complaints off Heather and Jill about the laptop crashing the wireless modem, I tried to reconfigure the D-Link last night, and after a lot of wrong turns and swearing (in my head. of course) I got the bloody thing reconfigured with both my PC and the laptop connecting to it as sweet as a nut. All was tickety-boo. Until this morning when the modem wouldn't acknowledge me or the phone signal. The red light of doom refused to change to the green light of good cheer.

So I got the old Netgear wireless modem down from the attic, returned that to its factory settings and plugged it in to the PC. I've had two blue screens of death - my first in years, believe it or not, and lots of authentication failure notices from the Netgear log-in page. But, well, I'm here at my PC typing this and my modem is over there beaming internet goodness in my direction so...um, one assumes it's actually working. Perhaps my next task should be to get the laptop out and connect that up too. *offers silent prayer to the god of wireless doodads*

Modem failure

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:34:54 GMT

Can anyone help or offer advice? My wireless modem loses its connection to the Net whenever a laptop is booted up. The connection is nice and stable when its just my desktop, but a few minutes after my laptop (or anyone else's for that matter) logs on, it's as though it drains the modem and it fails within minutes. After a few minutes it will reconnect only to go down again within minutes. I didn't have this problem with my old Netgear modem, but when I changed my phone & broadband provider they said my old modem would stop working and I would need to install the one I have now - a D-Link 2640R.

The phone line is clear and I get a pretty consistent 4mb download speed most of the time. As I say, the problem only occurs when more than one computer connects to the modem.

At the risk of getting a response that is over my head, why would the Netgear modem not work when I changed phone provider, and couldn't it be simply reconfigured?

States

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:28:24 GMT

I had a great story idea come to me in a dream last night. And I haven't forgotten it, which in itself is unusual. More unusual though is that the idea doesn't seem crap after I've become fully conscious. It's about a giant military robot suffering post-war stress and trying to fit into civilian life. He's #990, but names himself Tenshai (ten shy of a thousand) and befriends an earthmover who...erm, okay, this is sounding a bit crap. But look, I can make this work. I really can.

Ahem.

Anyway.

We - that is me, Jill, Heather, and Heather's friend Chelsea - headed to an out-of-town shopping centre today. To boost Heather's pocket money and keep them amused on the journey, I set the two girls a challenge. Name as many US states as they could, and I'd give 'em 10p for every correct answer. I figured Heather would know about ten. Which she did. What I didn't count on was Chelsea being a WWE nut and knowing where all her wrestling heroes come from. So while Heather faltered at ten, Chelsea motored along and earned them £3. Bugger. I shan't make that mistake again.

Q

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:05:02 GMT

I bought Q magazine yesterday as it has a free cover-mounted CD called "Ahk-toong Bay-Bi Covered". Basically it's U2's seminal 1992 album recorded by loads of other artists like Depeche Mode, Snow Patrol, Nine Inch Nails, Patti Smith, The Killers, Glasvegas, Jack White etc. I didn't have high hopes for it but I've been very pleasantly surprised. All the artists have injected their own style into the tracks. They are not so much boring cover versions as reinventions. If you're in the UK and like U2 or any of the artists involved you should get a copy. I imagine it will sell out pretty quick.

Meanwhile, the gaming bender continues with Serious Sam: Double D, a side-scrolling shooter based on the legendary Serious Sam series. I completed a game called Lightfish yesterday, too, as well as buying four more games for pennies. See here: http://www.indieroyale.com/ The asking price has doubled since I made my purchase. The early bird and all that. :)

Simples

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:13:46 GMT

Heather's off school for half term, so today we had a wander up to the library, then carried on into Longton to check out iPod accessories as she wants an iPod Touch for Christmas. And then we mooched along to Pizza Hut for Hawaiians and chocoholic milkshakes before heading back to the library to pick up some books she chose earlier.

I don't know who enjoys half term more, me or Heather.

A shout-out

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:31:07 GMT

My friend and conspirator in writing matters Gerard Brennan has seen his novella THE POINT published for the Kindle. The proper book (I know, I need to move with the times) will follow shortly. Go here to read more about it. It's cheap too. Just over a quid. Bargain if you like yer books in e-format.

And FWIW, I've read pretty much everything Gerard's written. He's a talented guy and THE POINT is probably his best work to date. And it's not just me that thinks so, he's been getting fabulous blurbs. The cover looks like a Who's Who of Irish crime fiction.

“Gerard Brennan is a master of gritty violence.” - Colin Bateman

“...a Coen Brothers dream, via Belfast... Gerard Brennan grabs the mantle of the new mystery prince of Northern Ireland..." - Ken Bruen

"The Point is the real deal -- the writing is razor sharp, the characters engaging, the ending a blast. From start to finish it's true Northern Noir, crafted with style and wit." - Brian McGilloway

"It needs to said that Gerard Brennan’s The Point is terrific. Scorchingly funny, black humour at its finest and the most inventive car theft ever!" - Arlene Hunt

"The Point is top stuff. Engaging from the start, the characters are loveable, the story is strong and the pace never lets up." - Adrian McKinty

"Noir from Norn Iron! A lean slice of grindhouse from Belfast's new crime hack." - Wayne Simmons

Earn a quid for UK dogs' & cats' homes.

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:30:40 GMT

It'll take you less than three minutes, for which Pedigree dog food will donate a pound to pet charities.. Please click the link and take Ripley for a virtual walk.
Your good deed for the day

Seriously

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:22:38 GMT

I just completed Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. Whaddya mean so what?

When I close my eyes, I can hear the screams of the Headless Kamikaze bombers.

Firefox

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:06:39 GMT

I've used Firefox for years now, and have long considered it superior to the alternatives, i.e. Internet Explorer and Chrome. But just lately Mozilla seem to be updating to a new version every few weeks, and each update brings problems. For example, for weeks now I haven't been able to write emails from my web browser - I can read emails in Firefox, but when I want to reply I have open and log on to my email account in IE. Also, occasionally, playing an embedded video in a webpage will cause FF to lock-up and I have to use Task Manager to shut it down. Sometimes it's so extreme I have to warm start my PC. And some of the add-ons and themes I enjoyed are also broken or incompatible with recent updates.

So, anyone recommend a different browser? I tried Chrome but it didn't have anything like app tabs*, which I use a lot, and I'm not sure but it doesn't have a built-in RSS feed toolbar, does it? See, these are the things I like about FF.

*app tabs enable you to create tabs that load every time you boot-up the browser. It means you don't have to open and manually log-on to all your fave sites. FF does it automatically.

Yesterday

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:15:15 GMT

It was 'Come as a historical character day' at Heather's school so we fixed up a Dick Turpin outfit. She looked quite the dandy highwayman, and better still won the top prize for her year. My favourite *ahem* outfit was a kid who looked like she was wearing her normal day-to-day clothes.

Heather: "Who have you come as?"

Her friend, tugging at shapeless cardigan: "Anne Frank."

And that, my friends, is genius at work.

But did you know Heather's teacher had never heard of Dick Turpin? What are they teaching teachers these days?

Another cool thing that happened yesterday was my copy of Terry Pratchett's new novel SNUFF arrived in the post. Always an occasion, is that. Probably won't read it for a while, but it's nice to have and to hold in the meantime. Literally. The dustjacket has a lovely soft silky lustre. I can't stop stroking it. Like a cat.

I'll be back. Soon. Probably

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:41:19 GMT

I need to get back into the land of the living. Well, the virtual land of the living, and that means reviving my lj, logging onto fb once in a while and taking the time to read and comment on my friends' blogs. Consider this post a signal of intent. Or something.

Yesterday...I sent off the novel, again

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 19:13:34 GMT

I decided to draw a line under the second draft of the novel. I could pick over it for evermore, but it reaches a point where you're changing things for the sake of it. I retitled it THE HUMAN ZOO and thought I'd cracked the problem of a title. Unfortunately my agent doesn't think it's a good fit. I'm hoping he'll have a change of heart while he's reading this draft as I love it.

Listening to: Lots of Joy Division and New Order
Reading: Cross by Ken Bruen