Shall I tell you a story?

Remembering Keren

28/4/2015

Thinking aloud for a second. The absence of racism requires the absence of race awareness. We don't discriminate on the grounds of hair colour because it simply doesn't occur to us to do so. This thought prompted by a conversation on Facebook about whether "black" is an offensive word when asking for coffee (the conversation didn't get onto the word "white", which I suppose is indicative of something).
When I was young, I read The Trigan Empire in Look & Learn, which was the magazine (sic) my parents bought for me; it came on Saturday mornings. I had to buy my own Strange Tales to follow Doctor Strange (all of this is on Wikipedia now). Anyway, one of the characters in The Trigan Empire, assuming my memory is still accurate, had blue skin. I rather envied that. There was a lot of racism going on in the early/mid-sixties, but it didn't reach my bedroom. His name might have been Keren.
Being aware of racism while ordering a cup of coffee is a problem, possibly for both parties to the transaction. But I don't know how close we get to harmony by changing the words we used. It's a step, maybe, but a conscious step.

While genius steals...

27/4/2015

Something you never hear. A political leader responding to a rival's initiative by saying: "That's a good idea! If we win, we'll do it too!" It's kind of obvious that no leader would say that, but if the fate of the nation really is at stake, surely we need a more constructive debate than we're getting now? Talent borrows, genius steals, and politicians fixate on each other.

The Crow Goddess and CreateSpace

24/4/2015

Just published, cover by me. I'm not a designer, but I do have an old version of Adobe Creative Suite. The picture is a young girl wearing beads and a party dress, acknowledgements MorgueFile again, but some pretty serious cropping turns her (I hope) into the Morrigan, Celtic Goddess of Battles, also known as the Crow Goddess.
    Next, I'm working on Unicorn's Blood (Patricia Finney again) followed by the first book in the Chronicles of the Dragon Sisters series by Peter Quatrine (who does his own artwork).
    At the same time, I'll be setting up a trial paperback edition of A Shadow of Gulls (scroll down) on CreateSpace. This will be my first time with CreateSpace, and actually with POD (Print On Demand) at all, and if it works out, we'll be saving massively on print bills.
    First discovery is that CreateSpace offers a choice of white or cream paper, but that distribution options vary according to colour choice. So: white after all. Inside paper is 60gsm, I think. Wide range of both custom and industry-standard dimensions. I think maybe a straightforward trade paperback?

Available on Kindle, coming again soon in paperback

Covers

21/4/2015

Having a think about cover design today. Finished the cover for Patricia Finney's The Crow Goddess over the weekend. Good pic, happy with the overall result. But I wonder ... I don't do this often enough to develop a style, or whatever is the visual equivalent of a tone of voice.
Anyway, here's one I prepared earlier. Note to self: spend more time in bookshops, looking at the work of 'real' designers. Acknowledgements to Morguefile for the pic; Adobe for Photoshop. Cover for The Crow Goddess coming shortly.

Available now on Kindle, soon in paperback. First published a while ago; first editions change hands for serious money.

Election reality check

20/4/2015

So many questions are hypothetical now. What will parties do if there's a hung parliament? Will you work with the party that said yesterday, it wouldn't work with you? liked the politician the other day, don't know which one, who said: "I'm sorry if my answers are getting in the way of your questions," and shut the interviewer up for a good, oh, two seconds. Bored with the leading questions, pushing for an answer that can be used in the next news bulletin.
Even a six-week UK general election isn't really producing enough content to fill twenty-four-hour news. Nothing substantive happens. Journalists interview each other, or open up items by posing questions that they've cooked up themselves. "Should we be concerned that ..." Remembering all the fuss about the televised debates, I love the way they were scheduled for before the launch of the manifestos.

In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

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What happens here

This site is no longer updated weekly because I've taken to writing at Medium dot com instead. I may come back, but for now, I'm enjoying the simplicity at Medium.

No data is kept on this site overnight. Medium posts might sometimes turn up here, and posts from here might sometimes turn up on Medium.
Mind you, if you get a sense of deja vu when reading my work, that may be because you've lived this life before.

There's a page for this [edit: there isn't], but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.

Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. More.

You found me!
Welcome. Thank you for coming. But am I the right
William Essex? Click here
to meet some more.

Read My Shorts?

Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.

Roads without end

Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

Also available in English. Look further down.

State of the Union

Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

Categories
(Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

Kitchen parenting

I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
   "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
    "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
    "Anything else?" More.

Variously available online, in a range of formats.

No pinpricks

Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.

Ceased to exist. Sorry.

Making mistakes

We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

Man down?

There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.

Offending the status quo

Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

Thinks: populism

Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

9th May 2014

On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

Riddle. What are you? You're a conversation!