Are they clones?

My first attempt at building a web site was a mammoth affair. First there was a hunt for an ethical provider.  Ethical! I was looking for a provider for goodness sake – computers all on 24 /7- where the ethics?  Well, a cleaner one than most then. I was also looking for a local UK one, with a vague feeling that one should promote home grown industry where possible.  I found one.  With eco credentials.  I explored their software for creating the site but my computer took a dislike to it and refused to have any contact with it.  What to do?

That was the first time I met one of those splendid faceless devotees of their job.  The man (and it always has been a man so far) sat at the other end of the email trail with helpful, patient advice. How their hearts must sink after the first million e-mails for assistance, view my signature with dread.  Do they show it? Utter a sharp word? No never. If these fellows are as nice in real life as they are in cyberspace then they are the kind all right minded mothers would wish their daughters to bring home to afternoon tea!

Do they ever sleep? I ask them and can feel them smiling gently as they assure me they do. When? This first one was UK based so I can’t even see the international time zones confusing me.  When I struggle with internet thingies, I am often there in the small hours.  Maybe at 2.30 a.m I’ll stretch my aching back, rub my red rimmed eyes and call it a day – sending an e-mail plea as I do.  When I struggle to the machine a few hours later I find the answer waiting, having been sent at some silly o’clock like 3.00 a.m. He would be there at 11.00a.m and 11.00 p.m. Early morning and early evening.  Monday through Sunday.  Did he ever have a day off I asked once?  Oh yes, was the gentle smile.

Friends suggested he wasn’t a real person but I do not think machines have been made to answer the personal questions, quips and joking references I sent him – no he was a real person.  He was amazing and holding on to his metaphorical hand I finally managed to – ta da – unveil a sparkly website.  Somewhere along the way I learnt about parent, child pages, I learnt about royalty free photographs, I found my way around widgets and Paypal buttons.

There was a man over in USA Pacific Time who ran a site one could put up one’s books and ask folk to post their reviews and comments.  It was a great idea and I thought it would be a good place to be.  It was for the year it stayed but, although one book delighted in its new home the second fought shy and would not, despite my best efforts, even try it.

Yet another person who never slept or took time off – a fellow indeed who would email from his mobile as well as from his base.  If he travelled to another zone he was still picking up the distress calls.  Once, for interest I translated the times and sure enough he also seemed to work the clock around. There have others in this long process of trying to get to grips with cyberspace. I have a fondness for them all.

This year I decided to move my website to another place – still keeping my original platform and when I inevitably came across a hitch and called for help – that original, gentle, kind man answered my call and helped me out.

I am a bit of a dimbo I realise but I also know I am not the only one yelling for help.  So, are these fellows

a) working impossible hours or have they,

b) as I suspect, been cloned!

alberta’s vanishing week

Where oh where has this week gone? Vanished like sun melted snow. I was buoyant and sure on Monday, uncertain on Wednesday and downright indignant today. Gone!

Well it’s not as if they were wasted days, much was achieved here at home with an extra parcel of training being unwrapped for my sister – pre- guide dog arrival – which has been moved forward three days and will now happen at the end of this week.  Another weekend gone:)  Visits from the local blind association with a few new gadgets.

A visit from the pensions fellow – I am now the official carer for my sister.  I never got around to applying after Mum died, so it was long overdue.  Then my Living History Group which had already been moved twice this month convened and because two of the stalwarts failed to turn up I contacted them afterwards to find he had been rushed of to hospital with a heart attack.  He’s going to okay we think but his wife is no driver, nearly 80 and frail so the rest of the weekend has been taken up with ferrying and reassuring.  Life is what came and stole the days away.

Life also brought my friend from forever/editor and her husband to help me finish the dog pen for new guide dog and rescue my sanity!  So alls well that ends well.  This week will bring more of the same and the new dog arrives on Friday morning.

The sun has been shining the skies blue and really there’s nothing much to whinge about! On the writing front progress has been okay.

1:  Blue Moons had another 3000 words added, a great deal of thought on the part where the body has to vanish and 1/2 slightly knotty problems of faith and ethics resolved ‘ish.

2: Three blogs have gone up –on this site you can read

a) A fine Romance- my contribution to Valentines Day and again                              b) on this site a continuation of my blog on reading                                                          c)  Over on Alberta reads I put up a short blog on reading groups, recommendations and rereads and
d) On kiss afrog -the first part of my spider phobia . Also                                               e) on Sefuty Chronicles another peice on diminishing resources .                                         So a good week on the blogging.

3:  Have re-registered for NaNoEdMo for March where hopefully Blue Moon will be licked into shape!

4: Managed after a lot of whinging and help to get connected to ROW80 tribe

5: Networking on FB, Twitter, Novel Publicity, Rachael Harrie Campaign and Goodreads quite a lot achieved there in the odd moments of the days

6: Have made a great start on A-Z  challenge ideas, research and pictures

7: Exercise? well I am exhausted – all you who work out every day, who do hot gyms and long runs will fall on the floor laughing at my attempts – take care you do not pull any muscles with the humour:) I have walked 7 miles this week!! 7 miles.  I will have you know this is probably the most I have walked for years.  It is amazing, and worthy of comment.  I did not enjoy any moment of it but am I proud of myself. Well up on exercise goals

This coming week I am leaving the novel alone, getting ahead on blogs, and networking. Hours available for writing will be limited and bitty so going to be realistic.

How did everyone else get on? – good I hope.  All the best for coming week.

Still addictively buying print!

While discussing the various means of absorbing fictional tales recently I began contemplating the various forms.

 I am a book lover, it’s in my DNA, from a long line of book readers. Complain, if one dared, of boredom in my childhood home and we would be firmly led to the overflowing bookshelves. We had no ‘out of bounds’ or ‘censored’ books, as far as I am aware, of course Mum and Dad may well have kept any such from view!

 I always had one or two books at the very least on the go, a book for every mood. Indeed I still have the trio of books I read only when feeling ill: Black Beauty, Smokey and Beautiful Joe, all absolutely guaranteed to make me sob my heart out – just right when tucked up in bed feeling sad! Maybe I will re-read them one day. In my adulthood it was Georgette Heyer I turned to when ill; her historical romances could make me smile, even laugh, she had a wit that made even the most stubborn of colds feel better.

 My distrust of film to narrate books was learnt very early on, apart from a couple of exceptions it appeared to me the medium ruined a good book. Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird and the Fellowship of the Rings spring to mind as exceptions. Of course, film cannot deal well with the physiologies, insights, complicated emotions or slow thoughtful pacing and indeed that is not what film is about, film is a visual experience.

 So is film like a play? I am not so keen on plays either, so maybe for me, brought up so solidly on reading, my receptiveness to a tale will always struggle with the visual.

 Thinking around this aspect I examined what childhood books I had still left in my possession 6 decades later. They were, in comparison with children’s books of the past 50 years, fairly devoid of pictorial content.

 Our family were also quite late in acquiring a television set, so that I was well into my teens before I could ‘watch’ stories on a regular basis. Most of my early theatre experience had involved comedy or music of some kind The Whitehall Farces, Operetta and musical. So my synapses are obviously underdeveloped in the visual storytelling department!

 I did enjoy going to the cinema, saving my pocket money, walking to places to save the bus fares towards entrance tickets. My friend from forever/editor and I would spend most Friday and Saturday nights in the dark watching the silver screen. These were tales I never read, such as westerns (I have never had any desire to ‘read’ this genre ever, they are to be watched) and musicals.

 I was introduced to audio books in my 40s when I was exploring this possibility for my sister whose sight was vanishing like burnt away mists. She was also a bookworm and we needed to find a way. It took her a long time to switch, to accept she could no longer ‘read’ her stories. It took me even longer to even try them.

 When I nursed my mother, over the years, I listened to many audios because, as another of the family bookworms laid low, we had persuaded her to try them and once hooked she would listen for hours with great pleasure to old favourites and new delights. I had perforce to listen as that’s where my life was, in her room. I discovered the most curious thing. I heard the stories, some very familiar, to me on a whole new plane of experience.

 If I ‘listen’ to a book, forced to wander through the pages at the speed of the reader, there are layers upon layers of new experience to discover. I have more than enough time to listen to the ‘words’, the construction of the sentences. Time, especially with the classics such as Dickens and Thackeray, to enjoy the descriptions.  It is worth the time. I know that realms of purple prose are not fashionable these days but those Greats could summon up whole environments, listen to the words – glorious. I found I was enjoying the experience.

 However film, apart from a brief foray in my teens, is a medium I know little about. If there is a choice between seeing a ‘drama/film’ or ‘almost anything else’, I will usually choose ‘almost anything else’.

I now have books on my e-reader as well as on my shelves and Audio books waiting patiently for the day I will need them, but always at heart I’m a ‘reading’ girl. Still addictively buying print.

A Fine Romance

Romance

I shall be truthful and upfront about this – I am the most unromantic person I have ever met! True – I don’t do romance, well not modern day romance – I don’t understand it or trust it.  In fact I am totally rubbish at Valentine’s Day type romance.(I may be a little odd but quite harmless!)

This modern day ‘romance’, chained, confined and stripped of most of its glory is, to my mind, a trifling shabby thing.  In the same way as its cousin ‘love’ has been shorn and straitjacketed into a shadow of itself, romance now has to be content with being a pink heart, bedecked with ribbons, sugar coated and marshmallow soft.

My view of romance is an altogether grander, wilder, rip roaring affair.  Sweeping epic narratives – of lands filled with heroism and quests.  Dangers sweeping in from all sides against those who would dare and fight to their last breath, to defend the good, the poor, bringers of justice to those voiceless victims.

The mighty heroes of my romances would grapple with dragons, demons, with giants and ogres.  Romance narratives born out of mythology, folk tales and legends.  Beowulf, the Green Knight and Arthur.

 Loyalty, honour and truthfulness (hilarious that last, as the whole point of the tales was untruthfulness!!) Allegiance to codes of behaviour and character I still try to emulate today, decades later. Love was not only pure but also not restrained to one person of the opposite sex.  Love encompassed your brothers in arms and sisters in adversity, your country, your cause.  It seemed to me that a human could endow fierce, faithful and to the death love on everyone and anyone.  I do do love, in it’s wide context, a great fan of it. (not alltogether odd then!:)

Love was huge, extravagant, in those old tales and even when I grew into Tolkien I was not let down.  Now there was a romance worthy of the old epic narratives.  Lands filled with  other-worldness and fantasy.

I was a romancer myself – a loner for various reasons I lived in a fantastical world of untruths and half truths, populated by quests and courage beyond all human endurance. I was always the hero, because they appeared to have more fun than a heroine whose only role it seemed was to sit at home and weep – not for me:)

When I set out to explore the exotic lands of my old narratives I took my exaggerating imagination with me. Free from those who knew me I could be anyone and I often was.  I invented wonderful other lives for myself, according to my audience. If they wanted me to be intrepid I was, if they fancied me to be downtrodden I could be.  I lived in my own romances.

I could distort the truth and play my games, the latent author struggling to find an outlet I suspect now. How many of us I wonder exaggerate and/or distort the truth when relating an incident – to make it/us more interesting, more amusing.  As writers, inventors of exaggerated fictions, we seek to persuade, we are in fact fantastical liars – the  clue being in the name of course, we write fictions.  Sometimes we write romantic fiction (old style) and don’t even know it!

Definitions of Romance from The Shorter Oxford Dictionary in no particular order

 To exaggerate or distort the truth esp. fantastically – talk hyperbolically

To have romantic or fantastic ideas

To use romantic or extravagant language

To have a romance or love affair

To seek to persuade (a rival or client etc.) esp. by attentiveness or flattery, court the favour

A writer of romances (esp. Medieval) – inventor of extravagant fictions – fantastic liar.

new website nearly there:) ROW80

This is a short one this week! Do we believe that I wonder?:)

Horrid cold cold week – many of you hardier folk will think I winge at nothing but here in the UK we do not get temps of minus 15 usually!  We have done and I do not appreciate it: (

1) So my exercise goals well met by shovelling snow and trying to walk over snow and ice to the village and back – do not wish to play this game.

2) Because of snow shovelling I managed to write 5000 words on Blue Moon – bursts of mental energy after the exercise in the cold! I know, I know,  you are all going to point out this is one of the reasons why exercise is good for one!

3) Have spent many hours this week on completing new web site – today am struggling with SQL databases and cPanel hosts! To uplift it in all its glory in cyberspace (it’s not that good don’t book seats or anything:) if I get it up today will report on FB page

4) On the same subject I have linked web site to all my blogs and social sites and also created a special blog just for the website where I am collecting all my posts on self pub. Inspiration, writing of publications – this site is working independently so if you’d like to pop over and check out going it alone  – it is a very pretty colour

5) Managed a blog on sefutychronicles on how we might/not manage without electricity in our lives

6) Networking – joined Rachael Harrie campaign and have been busy saying hi to fellow campaigners – not there yet!

Have been participating in Novel Publicity (see FB) hops on Goodreads and Facebook – meeting new authors and flashing myself around a bit!!! Had to update my Goodread page to an Author page.  Have twittered and followed and managed to read over 30 posts.

7) Have completed 2 more books for my challenges (mostly for my pleasure)  Ruby’s spoon which is a great book and Rachaels Holiday which I have mixed feelings about I will be posting on them both on albertareads hopefully next week – if the website gets there!!!

Failed in

Doing trailer, finding people to read and review books (must get down to that) I also have left an empty Red Carpet so if any wishes a spot just say it’s free for a while.

Next week – more of the same (well I hope not the website:) need to do a lot of Blue Moon to get to editing by March.  Am behind on blogging so must get those sorted as well.

Wasn’t too displeased with this week – I knew the website would gobble all my time – it always does I just take so long to figure everything and this time I was re-doing the entire site onto WordPress every page is new as well as updating content – one day I’ll be able to do stuff like that in my sleep – actually I probably am already- its been keeping me up in the far small hours:)

I hope everyone has had a good week and is content keep smiling everyone:)