Category: blogging

A Short History of Blogging – reblogged!

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, history, humour, satire, writing17 Comments

Here’s a post from a couple of years ago which might be of interest if you haven’t read it before. (I would say that, wouldn’t I?)

Blogging has always been about self-promotion. The first known blogs were on cave walls, although they were pretty crude, to be honest, and it is often really difficult to make out what the bloggers were on about. There is speculation, indeed, that to refer to them as ‘blogs’ might be a little misleading. The fact that they tend to be short and that it is very hard to make out what they mean, leads some experts to assume that they were an early form of Twitter. And then the fact that they frequently depict crude human figures, especially exaggeratedly female ones, and various animals, suggest that even in these early times, social media were largely the preserve of the young person.

cave paintings

‘Share if you think these babes are hot.’

By the time of the rise of the first true civilisations in Egypt, they were beginning to get the hang of it. They have left massive numbers of inscriptions all over walls and columns and pretty well anything else that they could get a hammer and chisel near.

Egyptian carvings

‘Amenhotep snubbed in Big Brother Pyramid game – LOL’

Some even see the Rosetta Stone as a forerunner of Google, but others don’t.

The first English blogger was The Venerable Bede. His blog is one of the main sources of our knowledge of Saxon times, which is a bit of a bugger really, when you consider how reliable social media are today as a source of modern history. He probably missed out most of the good stuff. But he blogged in Old English, anyway, which no one can understand nowadays so it probably doesn’t matter.

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Leonardo da Vinci did a wicked selfie, but would probably be criticised nowadays for how few he produced. To be anyone on social media, it is probably necessary to post a minimum of twenty selfies in any twenty four hour period, but Leo was never up to that. But most of his blogs were all about what would then be science fiction and art and politics…so he’d have fitted in quite well with today’s bloggers really.

Samuel Pepys’ diaries are, of course, just the notes he took for his blogs. They are a mix of politics and news and what his family were up to, and his ‘conquests’ of various ladies. Wisely, he wrote most of this in shorthand and, even more wisely, put the more salacious bits in code. Nowadays, it is unnecessary to use code, since language is now changing so fast that no one can understand anything that was written more than six months ago anyway.

The Puritans thought blogging might be fun so they banned it, along with just about everything else, except breathing and praying. Well, praying, anyway.

A little later, newspapers were invented. These were not really blogs, since they were filled with news, rather than self-promotion, and it took a number of years before newspaper owners and editors realised that. Once they did, however, they worked very hard to make up for lost time, and now there are very few newspapers in the world that print mainly news.

And quite a lot that do not print any news at all.

In fact, they tend to be full of primitive opinion and often depict crude human figures, especially exaggeratedly female ones, and various animals.

And thus life turns full circle.

 

Photo credit (picture 1): jmarconi via VisualHunt.com / CC BY         

Photo credit (picture 2): PMillera4 via Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-ND

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Clouds

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, clouds45 Comments

It’s one of those days, today, when the clouds are thick and dark and slightly threatening, but are shifting rapidly across the sky and continually changing shape in a rather exciting way.

I’ve always loved clouds.

When I was young, I was always very conscious of the sky. I still have a copy of a poem I wrote when I was fifteen or sixteen, which I won’t reproduce here, but was titled ‘Clouds’ and compared their shifting shapes with dreams and ambitions. Quite prescient, in my own case, as it happens, but I’ll not go into that now.

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I wonder whether the average fifteen or sixteen year old even sees the sky on a day to day basis, now. After all, you tend to look down at your ‘smart’ phone, do you not?

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Summer clouds…

When I dream about getting away from the daily grind, running away from it all, whatever you care to call it, the image in my head is always a compound of the Himalaya, and clouds. Or English Downland, and clouds. Anywhere remote and away from crowds, really. With clouds.

Ethereal, ephemeral, forever changing shape, never boring.

Untitled-Grayscale-01a

Dramatic clouds…

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Clouds like a painting on a masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci…

dusk

Clouds in my own paintings…

I’m tinkering around with a short(ish) story absolutely stuffed full of clouds at the moment, too. perhaps that’s what led me here.

In which case, I’d better chuck in one more…

Untitled-Grayscale-02

From Nepal in 1988. *Sigh*.

Advice to New Bloggers (from Bob)

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, Bob, humour, posts, satire, writing40 Comments

Bob has decided to go into journalism. Did I have any hints, he asked me? How should he go about it? In the end, I suggested he write a guest post for me.

‘What on?’ he asked.

Oh, I don’t know, I replied, possibly a little too casually. How about blogging?

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that.’

Over to you, Bob:

‘Right, so…why do we follow blogs? Obviously, it is so we can read the pearls of wisdom they scatter before us mere mortals. And if every post is a literary delight, then how much better would it be if we could get twice as many? Or three times? Or more? Everyone wants to read 20 new posts a day from their favourite blogger, all the more so if they receive email notifications of each one, as they get the added frisson of a ‘ping’ every few minutes as another notification arrives; an anticipation of the huge pleasure they will get when they read the new post!

‘Black print on a white background is so yesterday! Experiment with colours – green on blue, perhaps, or if you must use black, try it against a dark grey background. This ensures the reader gives your post the attention it deserves, rather than perhaps just scanning it quickly and moving on to something else.

‘But don’t stop there! Times New Roman and all that ilk are boring, boring, boring! Fonts such as Blackadder or Edwardian Script make it so much more fun! Again, your reader must work hard to prove how much they adore your posts if they are going to get to the point of posting any sort of relevant reply.

‘Size is everything. there is nothing better than a 4,000 word post to read because, let’s face it, your readers have nothing better to do with their time than read your post. After all, it’s probably the highlight of their day, so why skimp on their reading pleasure? Especially so if you have employed fonts and background colours similar to those mentioned above!

‘Is that okay, Mick?’

‘It’s a bit short, Bob. I thought you were in favour of long posts?’

‘Um…I ran out of stuff.’

Thanks, Bob. I’ll let you know.

Jim’s Newbie

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, books, Fiction, writing4 Comments

Some further nuggets from my special guest, Mr Webster! Over to you, Jim…

photo of Jim Oct 2015

‘Did I ever tell you about Chik, who used to sell spiced eggs from a stall on
Tithetakers Lane?

‘Chik was by heart a gambling man and he was fond of a wager. One of his
favourites was that you couldn’t eat four of his spiced eggs, one after the
other. If you accepted the challenge he would take your money for four eggs
and then lay them out on his counter, already shelled. Very few people ever
managed it. Some of this was that, to be frank, it is comparatively easy to
have too much spiced egg. But also because Chik would ensure that the third
egg was one to which he’d added extra spice. When you bit into it you could
feel your lips burning and by the time you’d finished it you were breathing
with difficulty.

‘The only person I ever saw defeat Chik was Flobbard Wangil. He did not bite
into the eggs but due to an almost obscene flexibility, managed to swallow
them whole. Still I shudder to think what the after effects were when his
digestive tract started to attack the four eggs.

‘Now you might ask how Chik made any money from his wager. Admittedly he was
paid for any number of eggs that nobody would eat, but that hardly amounts
to a grand sum. The real money was made by Chik’s lady wife who had the
stall next to him and sold an over-priced and somewhat thin ale in large
tankards. It’s amazing how much beer you had to drink to cleanse your mouth
after the third egg.

‘Or there was Esnard, sometimes called Esnard corpse-salesman. As you know,
there are lots of temples scattered around Port Naain. Some once stood in
their own grounds, but now have been swallowed up by the expanding streets,
and many are now little more than shrines visited only occasionally by a
celebrant.

‘Yet many of these shrines had crypts and other burial places. This is where
Esnard came in. You might ask why unchancy folk from the darker parts of
Partaan wanted corpses. You might indeed wonder at their willingness to part
with good silver for old bones. Not Esnard. When the call came for somebody
who was willing to work to satisfy this demand, Esnard was not found
wanting. When he discovered another lost shrine, he would visit it nightly
to pour oil on hinges and into locks. He was willing to do this for weeks if
need be, until finally he managed to get the door to open. Then he would
enter and work his silent way through the shrine like nothing so much as a
particularly methodical ghost.

‘In a back room of his house on Queercoats Lane he had his merchandise laid
out for discerning purchasers. Whole cadavers here, next to them skulls
lacking bodies; then on another series of tables, piles of mixed bones,
heaps of grave loam, and even a heap of leaden sphincter clasps.
Obviously his trade wasn’t widely popular and there were various groups
within the city who disapproved. Ghouls were apparently a problem, as were
officials from the municipality attempting to levy a business rate. Finally
Esnard was forced to slay a particularly unrelenting ghoul and found to his
evident pleasure that nailing the ghoul’s head to his front door not merely
kept other ghouls away but also deterred the forces of petty bureaucracy.
It may be that you might not realise that Tallis Steelyard has just produced
his second book of stories and anecdotes. This is book, ‘Tallis Steelyard, a
harsh winter, and other stories,’ is available from the first of June.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B071LH1THB

‘Were Tallis less busy he’d doubtless remember to thank me, Jim Webster, for
the efforts I make on his behalf. But you know what it is with someone like
Tallis who is constantly in demand. So I just get on with writing his stuff
down for him and from time to time making collections of his wit, wisdom and
jumbled musings available for a grateful public.

‘Tallis does have a blog, it is apparently de rigueur now for all writers. It
is available at

https://tallissteelyard.wordpress.com/

‘Riding in on his coattails I’ll merely mention that my own books can be seen
at Jim Webster’s Amazon page.’

Welcome to my Crisis!

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, internet, Making Friends with the Crocodile, promoting, Short story, social media, writing49 Comments

I’ve been hiding from the internet.

No, I didn’t go away, unfortunately, although a holiday was what I both have been and am still craving. I made a rash promise some weeks ago to put up a Facebook Author page, to do a minor relaunch of my novel, and to serialise a bawdy Elizabethan detective story. Really, I should know myself better than that.

dawn panorama

I think it was the short story that finally broke me.

Writing, for me, is a pleasure, comparable to painting. It is all about crafting the finished product, taking my time and eventually producing the best I can. When all goes well, the process is immensely satisfying from beginning to end.

Within that process, of course, there are times of writer’s block, false starts and finishes, wrong turnings, and many other things to go wrong. And the editing can be an infuriating process. But overall, there needs to be a flow.

Making Friends with the Crocodile worked for me at the length it was (45,000 words), since I wrote it almost as a stream of consciousness as the story unfolded in my mind. It came out in a rush partly because of its importance to me, and partly because I found I could visualise the characters, the story and the setting clearly. Once I had reached the end, I knew that was the end.

Obviously, many stories take a lot more coaxing to get down on paper. I’ve struggled with ones that need to be forced, certainly in places, partly because at that point they are not ‘me’ at the heart of them; I have lost that flow. But sometimes because of the length.

One reason I stopped entering short story competitions is I write a lot of long short stories. I am perfectly aware of the dictum that whatever you write can be edited down to the required length and that, indeed, they should be edited down.

But I also strongly believe that when a story presents itself to be written, that story has an internal length that needs to be respected, even after editing. Some require a few hundred words, some a lot more. But to attempt to turn Making Friends with the Crocodile into a 120,000 word novel or a 5.000 word short story, I am sure would have meant a lesser read. It would have been padded out for the sake of it, or stripped down to bare bones that would have meant that the characters could not have been drawn as strongly as I wanted them to be, and therefore encouraged less empathy from the reader.

Where is all this leading?

I began the short story / serial. It was working quite well, and I had a good few chuckles to myself as I was writing it and then, suddenly, it was almost 10,000 words long and nowhere near finished.

Oh dear.

So I attempted to cram and trim and edit and get it down to a suitable length for serialisation, but I was not happy with the result. Oh no. And I had one of my minor panic-I-can’t-cope-stress attacks and decided the only way to deal with it was to hide.

So, I’m not going to serialise it after all. I will finish it, but the attempt to condense it into a few instalments simply wasn’t working, and what I ended up with felt completely wrong. I will return to it at some point in the future, and finish it as the novella that it clearly is.

There is another strand to all this:

I made the Facebook Author page. That was the easy bit, and I’ll show you where it is next time. And I put together the re-launch promotion piece by the simple expedient of gathering together extracts from lots of the kind reviews the book has had.

But I am in a state of recurring panic, once again, over this huge need to self-promote to sell books. Of course, we all want to, but we are forever urged to use this or that platform, accept this or that offer, etc. Now, we are told that we ‘must’ have a YouTube channel. Really? And a presence on all sorts of social media. Are we not ‘serious’ writers if we are not prepared to move heaven and earth to sell a couple of extra books? That we should ‘invest’ a hundred or five hundred dollars here and there to advertise ourselves?

I have sold a few, and what is really important to me is the tremendous feedback that I’ve had.

Blowing my own trumpet is anathema to me, as I have written in the past. I just can’t do the selling and marketing the way that seems to be presented as essential. It’s an aspect of life that I hate, and a reason I have never gone into ‘business’. Everything around the promotion and marketing just seems relentless and is something that I cannot cope with.

Fortunately, I am not interested in fame. The idea frightens me.

And I really struggle with social media. I have had two goes at being on Facebook, and cope with it at the moment by not going on it very much. I spent ages trying to see the use of Linkedin, and have solved that one by closing my account last week. I really see no use for it.

And I am not doing Twatter.

So here I am back on WordPress, which is a platform I do enjoy. I’ll dip in and out of it a bit over the next few weeks or months, I suspect, since I still feel a bit panicky, but I will be there.

Thank you for your patience!

A Bit of a Hiatus…

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, writing18 Comments

Well, blimey. Another of those passages of time when I’ve been just so stupidly busy, that I’ve hardly had time to take breath, never mind look at blogs or think about doing any writing myself. And…it’s going to be quite busy for another couple of weeks.

Yet, here I am grabbing an hour to write something and, hopefully, catch up with one or two other blogs. And I have no idea what to write about! I usually have a few ideas mulling over before I sit down at the keyboard, and one or two half-finished posts on the computer that I can draw on. Today, though, zilch. I have one finished post that is on a somewhat contentious subject, which I’m going to leave a few weeks so I have time to properly respond to any comments it generates (who knows, though, perhaps there won’t be any?), and a couple of partly begun travel posts. I need more time than I can spare at the moment to sort out photos for those.

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Random and totally irrelevant photo of the week.

Yet…a blog is a personal thing. We’re not journalists, with deadlines to meet and news stories to tackle before they go cold. We’re not being paid to produce highly detailed technical notes on a particular subject. So my personal blog, today, is simply about my progress, or lack of, with my writing.

So, yes, nothing for the last couple of days. But I promised that I would produce an Author’s page on Facebook by the middle of the month – I will!  – and that I had a bawdy, riotous, Elizabethan short story to post in a couple of instalments at the same time. That one is a bit more interesting! Having promised I would do that (primarily to give me the impetus to write it), I got stuck in and by the end of last week I already had over 8,000 words done.

Far too long for a couple of posts, which I feel should be limited to around a thousand words. Certainly, I almost never read posts that are much longer than that. I don’t have the time, unfortunately. So I have a bit of an editing job to do on that.

When that is out of the way, I am going to collate some of my longer short stories together to publish as an e-book and, perhaps, a POD paperback. I won’t have the novel ready this year, so the short stories will be this year’s publishing project. I hope I have enough decent ones to be able to produce a themed collection.

And then? Back to the novel!

Tally ho!

The Admirable Jim Webster Presents…

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, books, Fiction, writing2 Comments

I am delighted to host a guest post from Jim Webster today, since he…well, perhaps I’ll let him explain.

photo of Jim Oct 2015

Hi everybody, Mick kindly allowed me to drop in as part of a ‘blog tour.’
Given that Mick discovered my writing at Tallis Steelyard’s blog, I thought
I’d let Tallis, poet and raconteur from the city of Port Naain, tell you why
I’m here. Over to you Tallis.

I assume you are aware of the situation. You are summoned to the office of
some petty functionary and on arriving you find you are expected to join the
queue.
Or you need to visit a physician or tooth puller and arrive to discover that
even the city’s most glamorous courtesans cannot hope to find themselves as
sort after as the practitioners of these professions.
To be trapped in a queue is one thing, but in all these places where one has
to wait in line, they employ one whose task is to act as guardian of the
queue. These people are the ones who, with attitudes of supreme disinterest,
ignore the fact that you have an appointment for a certain hour and merely
gesture to the back of the line. So there you sit, secure in the knowledge
that to the minor functionary in charge, your time is of no value. They sit
there, blithely apathetic to the fact that there are people you need to see,
places you have to go, work that has to be done.
So what to do? How do I, Tallis Steelyard, cope?
It is an interesting question. I have tried using the time profitably.
Unfortunately the troll lurking behind the reception desk took umbrage at me
spreading my papers across her desk and borrowing her ink to make a fine
copy of some of my poems. I felt this was extremely petty of her. After all,
not only had she not paid for the ink herself, but I could not see why she
could not merely glare contemptuously at us from a different chair. There
was nothing that she was doing which demanded her sole unrestricted access
to the desk.
On the other hand, one of my finest hours came when I was faced with a room
full of dour and miserable people for whom time appeared to have stopped,
leaving us trapped in some grim limbo from which there was no escape. I
recalled a comic tale that had amused me when I heard it and decided to tell
it. I stood up, faced my audience, and started to recount it to the best of
my ability. I gave a fine performance. Any of my patrons would have
considered that Tallis was pulling his weight to get their party going with
a swing. I was especially pleased when one man at the head of the queue
voluntarily gave up his place to another, so that he could catch the ending.
The monster in charge of us was most put out. She tutted audibly, she even
tried to interrupt with the words, “Really Master Steelyard.” To my delight
she was shushed into silence by a young woman nursing a baby.
But normally, in all candour, I just take a good book with me. I take my
place without protest, make myself comfortable and start to read. Between
ourselves I feel that bursting into spontaneous laughter as you read is well
worth doing. It cuts your tormentor to the quick, forcing them to admit to
themselves that they are no longer in charge. They can no longer deny you
life’s pleasures.
To be really successful, you have to adopt the correct mental attitude. It
is rare that one has a legitimate reason for sitting and reading during the
working day. Far too often you are left feeling that you are indulging
yourself in a guilty pleasure. But in a queue you can indulge to your hearts
desire.
So remember, when you take your seat, wear that expression which tells the
world that you are not some put-upon victim, trapped against your will. This
is not an imposition, it is a window of liberty to be seized and enjoyed to
the full.
Trusting you all keep well.
Tallis

Ah well, Jim here. That went as well as can be expected I suppose.
Basically, what Tallis was supposed to tell you but somehow forgot was that
I have just published the sixth in the Port Naain Intelligencer collection.
(They’re a collection because you can read them in any order.) This one is
called ‘Keeping body and soul together,’ These novellas chronicle the antics
of Benor the Cartographer when he was staying in Port Naain. They do feature
Tallis, just not perhaps as much as he’d like.

Cover Keeping Body and Soul together

Rescuing random strangers on a whim may be the good deed for the day, but
will Benor survive the blood feud he has unwittingly become part of. More
importantly can he buy back the victim’s soul?

And me? I’m married with a wife and three daughters, dabbling in farming,
writing and journalism. I lead a quiet life in the north of England.
My blog is at

https://jandbvwebster.wordpress.com/

The blog of Tallis Steelyard can be seen at

https://tallissteelyard.wordpress.com/

I am on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/jim.webster.10297

And there is even a facebook page for the books!

https://www.facebook.com/Land-of-the-Three-Seas-426394067386022/

If the few kind words Tallis did write have stirred your compassion and you
feel the urge to support a starving artist, (me not him) then a quick look
at Amazon will let you see what I’ve written

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jim-Webster/e/B009UT450I/

There is a lot of it, all reasonably priced.

Oh yes, and the book,
It’s at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XRKQBLQ/

Are those blasted kittens still there?

On By Mick CanningIn advertising, blogging, Making Friends with the Crocodile, promoting, publishing, writing21 Comments

Having posted a few days ago about my inability to finish one project before starting three others, I’ve attempted to organise myself a little to try to deal with that.

And not too long ago, I also posted about my inability – fear almost – to promote myself effectively.

Coincidentally, several days ago I took part in a Webinar aimed at small businesses (theoretically, that includes writers trying to sell books), about using social media effectively, and whilst I was pleased to discover that I seem to be doing a fair bit right already, there are several things that I should definitely change, which I will do shortly.

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Not kittens.

The first thing I’ll do, will be launch my own Author page on Facebook; something I really should have done before now. And to promote it, I plan to serialise a new short-ish story on this blog, over several posts. It’s something slightly different, for me, in that it is a spoof/satire ‘gritty urban detective drama’, but set in Elizabethan England. So, cue daggers, bawdiness, vomit and lots of mud and sour beer.

This will probably be during the second week of next month.

I have also learned a little more about publishing, from the company Wet Zebra at our local writers’ group, and from a few other independent sources, which might possibly lead to my attempting to publish my next book a little differently.

That next book will, I’m now reasonably certain, be The Assassin’s Garden, which has picked up momentum again. If all goes according to plan (!), it will be the first book of a series, stretching in time from the sixteenth century to the late twentieth century, and set variously in Persia, India, Europe and England.

So, what’s it about? I’m so glad you asked. A secret, something stolen, a pursuit, crossing time and continents. Revenge. It has elements of detective story, a bit of classic Gothic horror, a touch of fantasy, a soupcon of sex and violence, some ‘straight’ historical drama, and kittens. Yes, really.

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Not a kitten either.

I’m nothing if not ambitious.

And, bearing in mind how easily distracted I am, the research will give me huge opportunities to prevaricate and wander off at tangents to all sorts of odd corners of the internet.

Making Friends with the Crocodile cover

Buy it, read it, make me happy!

And for Making Friends with the Crocodile, my published novel, I am going to re-write the promotional blurb and have another attempt to push it out further into the big, wide, novel-reading world.