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Beards – fashion statement or unavoidable?

6/4/2015

It’s interesting to see how fashions come and go, repeating in cycles through the decades. The current crop of full beards decorating the faces of Western men are an echo from several eras in the past, most recently the seventies, and already the same articles are appearing that were published then that will probably sound their death knell as a fashion statement. ‘Beards are unhygienic and cause skin disease.’ ‘More germs in a beard than on your toilet seat.’ ‘Food scraps linger for weeks.’ All of which cause men to feel uncomfortable enough to eventually shave off the apparently offending hair growth lest they appear dirty and unappealing. Fashion returns to cleanshaven faces until the next wave of designer stubble or soul patches.

Now imagine the Sunstrike scenario when solar storms have eliminated Earth’s technology so there are no electric razors, those with batteries have run out, and there is no longer a ready supply of disposable blades. Those beards are going to be back with a vengeance. How many men would make the effort to find and maintain a serious cut-throat razor of the kind you see in old Western movies?

My prediction is a return to the full facial fuzz of the 1900s and before with men’s faces as bushy as a badger’s bum in a matter of weeks after the event. It would be one of the most visible signs of the changes in our post-apocalyptic lives – but how often have you seen that in the Hollywood versions of an apocalyptic world where the hero remains clean-jawed and manicured throughout?

How do you feel about men with beards?

What would you miss most if technology died?

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The Perils of being a Specialist

24/3/2015

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As we’re staring down the barrel of an approaching milestone birthday, my significant other and I have been looking at careers and how they’ve changed over the years. Our generation was raised to be generalists, fairly independent and able to do most things for ourselves. It was normal to change your own oil in the car and rotate the tyres, bang up your own plasterboard when building a house, cook dinner from scratch and sew your own clothes. (Okay, I was never strong on that last one, but I knew the theory.)

Here I am with my beloved, hammering up ceiling battens while he plastered. (Himself as much as the wall!) We couldn't afford to pay tradespeople so we learned on the job, and those skills have served us well over the years.

Maybe it's because we live in the city, but these days we seem to be living in a world of specialists rather than multi-skilled generalists. We pay people to do stuff we used to do ourselves, either because we no longer have the skills, or the tools, or the time to do the job. And this worries me a little. It’s one of the reasons I wrote Sunstrike, to look at how stuck we might be if our present comfortable world shut down because solar flares had wiped out our technology. How many of us now know the basic survival skills we’d need?

Those highly-skilled IT specialists would be out of a job for a start with no functioning computers to work on. What other skills would they be able to trade if all their training had been focused on one small area of expertise? They’d have to learn fast or starve.

Stripped of our technology, we’d be functioning as physical human beings again rather than intellectual ones. Our daily needs would be food and water, not a faster internet or newer smart phone. Our social circle would reduce to those in our immediate vicinity because there’d be no way to contact anyone else. We’d actually talk face to face instead of texting, Skype or Facebook. We’d depend on the shared knowledge of just a few people.

These might be the only people you'd see day to day if transportation was reduced to bicycles and horses.

In that situation, generalists would thrive. We know a little bit about a lot of things, so with no recourse to Google or a range of handy experts we’d still be able to muddle through. I guess what I’m saying is that everyone, no matter what their situation, should know how to look after themselves – to find and prepare food that doesn’t come out of a packet, to identify and deal with basic health problems, to be mentally and physically equipped to survive. It may not be the Sunstrike scenario that takes us down – it could be a localised natural disaster or some sinister human action, but we should be ready to cope.

These are the thoughts I cling to when feeling increasingly marginalised by younger, cleverer specialists who dazzle with their highly-skilled online interaction. Tweet that, you smart bastards!

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Death takes Terry Pratchett

12/3/2015

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The world lost a great writer this week with the untimely death of Terry Pratchett, though we’d slowly been losing him ever since the cruel diagnosis of his unusual form of early-onset Alzheimers. He leaves an exceptional body of work. There are very few writers whose books I buy to keep, and only a handful of those are writers whose every book has to go on the shelf, but I have nearly all Terry Pratchett’s right the way from Diggers, Truckers, and Johnny and the Bomb through all the Discworld novels to Raising Steam. His Discworld series is loved by readers everywhere, illuminating the essence of our own lives in the gentle guiding light of fiction to show how we might do things better. Many of his characters have become old and treasured friends –particularly Sam Vimes, the Patrician, Granny Weatherwax, and Tiffany Aching. Through them, Terry Pratchett holds up a mirror to let us see our own lives more clearly. A man of ferocious intelligence, he knew how things worked, from politics to family life to religion to human nature.

I met Sir Terry once at a book signing after one of his talks and found him to be a slightly daunting character. His comments in the talk had made it clear that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and anger was never far below the surface, though he signed books and fulfilled the tasks of publicity and promotion with grace. But that daunting persona was uppermost in our minds when our local theatre group staged a season of Mort, as permission to use the script came with many provisos and warnings. (Royalty payments all went to the Orangutan Rescue society, incidentally.) On Opening Night, a ripple of gasps ran round the theatre foyer as a tall, dark, grey-bearded figure strode in, topped by a flamboyant black hat. Is that HIM? Should we give him a free ticket? Do we tell the actors? No, they’ll go mental! What if he hates it? Will he stop the performance? Yes, Sir Terry’s reputation put the fear of God into us – but it turned out to be a local audience member taking advantage of a certain look-alike quality to get into the spirit of things.

As a writer, I find enormous encouragement from how bad some of his early books were! The Dark Side of the Sun is a confused mishmash of sci-fi fantasy that lacks the apparently effortless coherence of his later works, giving me hope that any writer can get better if they persevere and work at their craft. It tells me that it’s OK to suck at first as long as you get better, and that even the most brilliant writer learns and improves as they go along.

He has entertained and inspired countless people round the world, and worked hard to make it a better place. That’s a pretty good legacy.

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How to Set out Your Word Doc for Maximum Efficiency – Part Two

6/3/2015

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Ah, you came back! Welcome to part two of beating your book’s Word doc into shape, where we’ll be dealing with Headings. You’ll find these up in the top toolbar in Word where you found ‘Normal’ last time. Look along to the right and you should see Headings 1, 2, 3 etc. These are brilliant for authors because they help you to navigate through the document, they provide an instant view of all your chapter headings to make sure they’re consistent (and sequential), and best of all Word can use them to make a perfect Table of Contents that even updates page numbers if you adjust things later.

You can adjust the style of your headings just as you did with the Normal setting – highlight the text you want as your heading – like Chapter One - click on Heading 1 (for example), then set the font and centering as you want it and right-click to on the heading 1 box to ‘Update heading 1 to match selection’. Bazinga! All subsequent chapter headings will follow suit.

A note about centering items on a page – DO NOT TAB OR SPACEBAR them across to the middle! That way madness lies. Use the centre-justify button on the toolbar. You’d normally use centred text for your title, possibly your dedication page or a quote at the front of the book, and those little do-dads you put in to show breaks in the narrative – either a line of asterisks or suchlike. Handy hint – call your row of asterisks Heading 4 and update the style to centre (making sure the first line indent is at the margin for that line.) Then make all your asterisks Heading 4 and they’ll stay centred even if you alter the page size or make other changes. Heading 4 means they won’t show up in your Table of Contents, which only goes to Headings 1,2 and 3.

To see all your chapter headings, use the ‘Find’ function. When you click ‘Find’ and select the first icon in the navigation panel on the left, your heading will show up.

This is invaluable for spotting where you’ve got two Chapter 7s, or gone from Chapter 7 (numeral) to Chapter Eight (word). It also provides instant access to every heading in your document which makes finding your way through the text much easier. Click on a heading in the side panel and you’ll be taken to that place in the text.

Make sure your chapter heading spacing is consistent – for example two spaces down from the top of the page, then the header, then two spaces before the text – whatever you select it doesn’t matter as long as all chapters are the same. It’s helpful to write a style sheet noting your fonts, chapter header styles and spacings to refer to when you are deep in the text adjusting things. Whizzing down the headers on the left makes it easy to check each one and adjust if needed. When you reach the end of a chapter, insert a page break. Top toolbar, insert tab, page break. DO NOT HIT THE RETURN KEY over and over to get to a new page! Then type your next chapter heading on the fresh page, highlight it, and click Heading 1. (Or whichever style you selected.)

These steps will make doing your book layout much easier.

When you’re ready to do your Contents page later, go to the appropriate place near the start of your document where you want the contents page to be, then click on References on the top toolbar, and Table of Contents should appear. Try clicking on Automatic table 1 and Word will create a table of all your headings on the left end of the references toolbar. (When I first discovered this I was giddy with excitement. It saves HOURS of laboriously adjusting page numbers.) You’ll need to update the table if you make changes in your book. That function is in the References tab on the top toolbar, next to the Table of Contents tab.

Now, if you have an existing Word doc that you’ve been fiddling about with for years, with tabs and Track Changes and weird formatting all through it, there is a way to clear it all up. Mark Coker of Smashwords calls this The Nuclear Solution because it’s quite drastic, but if you ever plan to upload your book as an ebook this is worth doing. Copy and paste your entire document into a program like Notepad which comes as standard on most PCs. The simplest text-only program you have should do the job, and it’ll clear almost everything except your paragraph returns. Copy the entire text that you just put in Notepad and open a NEW Word doc to paste it back into. Hey presto – a clean, fresh file that you can now apply just the formatting you want to. Chapter headings, bold, italics, all that sort of thing. The clean file will upload as an ebook much more successfully and you won’t find patches of undersized text or overlapping lines which can drive you demented when they show up in your Kindle file!

Any questions? See me after class, or grab a copy of A Reassuring Guide to Self Publishing to get a step-by-step explanation.

If there are any topics you’d like me to cover in later blog posts, let me know in the comments or drop by and say hi on Facebook.

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What gems are in YOUR Memory?

24/2/2015

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It may have been some childhood reading of prisoner of war stories that fuelled a question that has stayed with me for years. If I was incarcerated without recourse to any other form of entertainment, what cultural gems would I be able to access from my memory?

In Victorian times it was normal to have a repertoire of songs and poems which could be performed at will to delight friends and family in the parlour between games of Charades and pass-the-parcel.

I suspect many mature readers still recall poems learned by rote as children, like The Listeners by Walter de la Mare

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

How about Shelley’s Ozymandias?

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies,

Yes, I thought you’d know it.

Personally, I can recite the entire poem Silly Old Baboon by Spike Milligan as a party piece, along with Monty Python’s sketch about an elderly German gentleman with a name that takes a full twenty seconds to say. And I’ll never forget the antipodean bonds formed on my OE when a bunch of Kiwis all flawlessly recited ‘We are the blokes from down on the farm, we really know our cheese.’

Yep, that’ll keep me entertained when I’m banged up in solitary. Or when sunstrike wipes out any electronic play-back device.

But I fear our culture is declining. Those from later generations may not be lucky enough to have such literary gems in their heads and will have to make do with words like -

What do they make dreams for
When you got them jeans on
What do we need steam for
You the hottest bitch in this place
I feel so lucky
Hey, hey, hey
You wanna hug me
Hey, hey, hey
What rhymes with hug me?
Hey, hey, hey

Ah yes, the classy refrains from Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines. Give me Spike Milligan any day.

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How to Set out Your Word Doc for Maximum Efficiency – Part One

21/2/2015

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As an editor I see all kinds of book files from writers with varying degrees of presentation skill. Some have had typing training that is now obsolete, others are afraid of their computers, and almost all of them could save a lot of editing time if they’d started out writing their book with a few basic things in place. When a Word document is done correctly from the beginning, it’s very easy to make changes throughout the file later without throwing the whole book into chaos.

The first thing to do is make sure the main part of your text is in the ‘Normal’ style. You’ll find that on the top toolbar, highlighted with a yellow box if your text is ‘Normal’. If you can’t see a box saying Normal, try clicking on the Change Styles tab shown in the picture below and choose ‘Default’. The Normal box should appear as one of the Style options.

The beauty of setting up your main text properly is that you can change fonts, change sizes, change indents, paragraphs and justification all in one action in the Style menu.

It’s worth playing around with this feature to get a feel for it before you try it on something terribly important. Copy and paste a chunk of text into a fresh Word page. Make sure it’s ‘Normal’. Now select a couple of lines and change the font and size. Now go to the yellow-edged Normal box in the Style toolbar, the one that the red arrow is pointing to in the picture. Right-click to give a drop-down menu which has as its top line ‘update Normal to match selection’. Select that, and watch your whole page of text change font and size to match the chosen lines.

Easy-peasy! So much better than trying to highlight the whole book to change the font, or battling the Find and Replace menu to alter the format.

You use the same process to choose your paragraph type – whether indented (no space between paragraphs) or block paragraphs with no indent and a space between them. You don’t have to put in a space manually – Word will do it for you, and it can be undone easily if you change your mind and want to use indented paragraphs instead.

Here’s the tab to choose your paragraph style – this post is written in block style with a space after the paragraph, as is common in non-fiction writing. Most fiction is written with indented paragraphs with no space between. Add or remove the space to suit. And hey, look, here’s the line spacing option too. Really handy to alter it back and forth to see how it changes the page count and readability.

That’s enough to get your head around today. Come back next week for a look at headings, and some great labour-saving options that Word provides.

And remember, ‘normal’ is just a style – not a judgement of your brilliant, sparkling, innovative and far-from-normal writing!

Happy typing!

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plunging right into writing

6/2/2015

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OK, the decision has been made. It's time to get writing on this blog of mine. And not just because writing a blog post is easier than buckling down to start the next novel - no, that's not it at all. Hey, I'm a writer - I do stuff like this every day. Starting a new book? Ptcha! (dismissive noise) Setting up a cast of new characters and finding them something to do holds no terrors for me, no siree. Devising a fresh and ingenious narrative is my bread and butter. Why, there's absolutely nothing stopping me from opening a new file right now and making a start on the next Sunstrike novel. I could do it, you know. Just like that. *clicks fingers* But I want to get this blog started first.

Oh, wait - was that an email arriving? Excuse me while I check what it is. Someone may need instant action. No, false alarm. But since I've stopped, I'll just check Facebook while I'm there.

Twenty minutes later.
Ha ha! Oh man, that kitten was SOOOO cute! The way that fluffy little thing just stared into the camera and tipped over the glass. I'm still laughing.

Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yes, getting on with writing. You have to be really disciplined to succeed at this game. It takes grit to sit down at the keyboard every day and just write, no matter what. You have to get the words down even if the story seems lame and you know it's not quite right. Then at least you'll have something to edit. Gotta have that first draft done before you can work on it. Every day, pick your time and stay at your desk until you've completed your allotted hours or the number of words you set as your target. No distractions. No excuses. Unless you need a snack, right? Writers are supposed to drink coffee, aren't they? You're allowed to stop for coffee.

Forty minutes later.
Can't believe how untidy the kitchen was but it's all tidy now, and I got a load of laundry started as well.

Yes, writing has to take priority in your life if you're going to take it seriously. You'll be giving up TV time, family time, even relaxation time in order to make space for it, but remember, if you write 1000 words every day you'll have a novel in less than three months! So no more excuses, just plunge right into your next piece of writing and make it happen. Stay with it, stay focussed. You'll be glad you did.

So, that's a blog post done and dusted. Hah! That wasn't hard at all. Don't know why I procrastinated about it for so long.

I could make a start on the novel now.
I could.

Oh thank god, it's lunchtime.

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Plunging Right In

3/12/2013

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Thanks for clicking this far into my website. I'm afraid I haven't got as far as starting my blog yet, but I'm planning on getting to it any day now. No, really. I have ideas, you know - I'm not just delaying things arbitrarily because I can't be bothered. Very soon I shall begin a series of posts that are sparkling in their brilliance, give eye-popping insights into their subject matter, and will be shared virally from the moment they're posted.

You don't believe me, do you?

Come back next week and let's see who's right.

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Forward>>

Beards – fashion statement or unavoidable?

The Perils of being a Specialist

Death takes Terry Pratchett

How to Set out Your Word Doc for Maximum Efficiency – Part Two

What gems are in YOUR Memory?

How to Set out Your Word Doc for Maximum Efficiency – Part One

plunging right into writing

Plunging Right In

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