Is monetisation a dirty word?

Above: Quality advertising Bangkok style

What do you think about adverts on blogs?

I'm in two minds whether to mention this or see if someone else does...  I've been dipping my toe in Adsense for the last year - with adverts so discreet neither you or anyone else has spotted them (in the invisible space at the bottom of the right hand column.) They don't earn mega-bucks... but they could!

Here are the easiest ways to earn money from your blog (or website):

• Become an Amazon Affiliate - join up and get the codes to insert an array of Amazon ads - from hyperlinks for individual items to all-singing banners and the little search engine gismo on the top right of this blog. They pay a generous 5% commission if anyone buys through your links (and it'll soon be Christmas again folks!) but only after you reach a £30 threshold.
• Join Google Adsense - again options include anything from a line of text to full bells and whistles. You get a few pennies for certain numbers of people clicking on the ads, not just buying stuff. You can screen out ads on sensitive subjects (e.g. sex, religion, folk-dancing) or things you don't want to promote (e.g. gambling, loans, the Daily Mail). But again, you have to earn £60 before you get anything.
• If you're a member of certain other sites (eg Topcashback) they sometimes pay commission to promote their sites. Only do this if you honestly think they're ace (I do, by the way) or your credibility will be shot!

Personally, my brain edits out adverts - except those horribly distracting moving banner ones (like on this short fiction site where they jump around at the side of the story for God's sake!) - so I won't have noticed if any of you have adverts on your pages. But I've added some - still quite discreet - to test them out and may keep tweaking. I'm aiming here more at casual visitors to old posts, not regulars, but you don't get the option to only put them on old posts... not that I can find anyhoo.

Question:  've been thinking about how much I like blogging but can't justify the time spent on it (my only income is p/time £7/hr  - I make almost nothing from writing). But is it 'wrong' to do it at all? Or I could have more than one blog - one for the usual random stuff, and another, more focussed on e.g. writing which would be more monetised.

What does anyone think? *braces herself for diatribes*

Retro gismo flashback

My previous post got me thinking about having lived through the dawn of this digital age ... cue fuzzy flashback...

I was first in my class to have a calculator and when I started work (as a mere child) in the early 80s computer programs were loaded manually from reels of tape with holes in. The 'computer' was actually just a terminal linked by a modem to the bank's national computer centre. I worked there on the staff help desk after panic set in when they introduced terminals with screens!  The actual computers took whole rooms to house the sort of memory you now get in the average mobile phone.

(An avant garde friend had an early mobile phone as big as his head - and that was pretty big! When he went to the bar we'd run out to the telephone box and call him to ask for crisps.)

Our home's first remote control device was for a video recorder, but was attached by a lead! I used to carry around a cassette recorder (pictured above) before the Sony Walkman, and can vividly remember the first time I heard a CD - Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega.

Apart from a brief foray with a Commodore 64 and flirtation with an Amstrad wordprocessor, I first saw a home PC in about 1990, but as late as 1995 at the local newspaper we sent stories via an Olivetti keyboard and modem. At the printer, stories were quite literally 'cut' and 'pasted' onto mockups and the lines between them were put on manually using teeny tiny rolls of sticky tape with a line down the middle.

By 1996 I had a  PC (a 256 with 4MB memory) and an email address - but I only knew 2 other people with emails! You couldn't imagine in those days that one day you'd own something like an iPad. It is not only music player and recorder, calculator, word processor, camera, means of communication, publishing device and video player. It's also camera, movie studio, orchestra, art studio, reference library and GPS.  I've just been using Facetime (Skype for iPads) to talk to a friend working in Azerbaijan. And it used to take 6 months for a letter to reach my missionary uncle in deepest Congo but he has a satellite powered laptop now and I can wave to him on Google Earth... up to a point.

Care to share some of your 'old tech' stories - what was your most exciting new gadget in the 'old days'?

'Wherefore art thou, Romeo?' she texted.

"Heart of Darkness? I dunno - I'll just check my GPS"

Modern technology really messes with your plots.

I was reading somewhere how the end of Romeo and Juliet would have been completely different if they had just texted each other. And it made me think of other great stories that would have been different today: Jane Eyre could have come to Mr Rochester's side if she'd been following him on Facebook... or subscribed to the local newspaper's RSS feed. If Frankenstein's monster had blogged about how he felt, he'd have been hunted down by paparazzi and chat-show hosts, not irate villagers.

It isn't just the classics either - I know quite a few writers who have had to set their stories in the 80s and 90s because recent technology would bugger up the story. My own first novel - which currently resides both literally and metaphorically 'under the bed' - will always have to be set no later than the early 90s because the reclusive main character would never have to face the world if he could communicate freely by email and share documents over the internet.

So if good fiction means presenting your main character with problems to overcome, often compounded by miscommunication, misunderstanding and lack of information... does this mean modern technology is solving all our problems, clarifying our relationships and supplying us with all the answers?

I'm not sure it does, but do you think it is quietly changing the nature of the stories we tell? And how would other famous stories have panned out given access to Google, YouTube and Twitter?

First Attempts at Animation

Martin P Uppet.. movie star!

I know I said I'd be doing posts about my new iPad... but I've been too busy playing with it to write about it! The bottom line is - it's the best thing I've ever owned and if you locked me in a room for the rest of my life with one (and wifi) I'd be perfectly content. The only thing it doesn't do is make a cup of tea... although I'm sure there'll be 'an app for that' soon!

But what I will show you for now, is my first proper short film... it's only a minute long, but it's a start. I made it using my two new favourite apps - iMotion which turns the inbuilt camera into a stop-motion camera, and iMovie to add a soundtrack, effects and bring it all together.

Martin P Uppet is quite a character in our Wallasey Children's Library - he has lots of adventures with his best chum Suzanne and even has his own Facebook page. So I decided to film what happened to him while she was off...

Fifty Shades

I don't own a Kindle and, as a library assistant, will defend to the death books made out of real paper, but I did download the Kindle app so I could read eBooks by blog chums Fran and Frances.

So if I happened to buy the eBook Fifty Shades of Grey just to see what the fuss is about, at least no-one will know! Of course it's not great - it needed an editor, if only to cut out the numerous times our heroine says 'Holy crap!' - but I'll plow on for the sake of  'research' and of course I can't 'flog it' later on Amazon - a downside of Kindle I hadn't thought of!

And don't say I could have just borrowed it from the library... the waiting list is lengthier than Mr Grey's schlong and every day more furtive-looking women come in and whisper: 'I don't suppose you have...?'

If you want a flavour of the book before you 'submit' to reading it, there's a hilarious critique of the book on Cassandra Parkin's blog and I have a related idea of my own, which I'm sure you're 'gagging' to hear about... but I'm going to make you wait.

p.s. I'm about a third of the way through now, so I may be a little 'tied up' for the next few days, and have to keep you in suspense...


From my iPad

Should chapters have titles?

Work in progress... titles and all!

Here's an interesting question:- should a novel's chapters have titles or numbers? Do you notice chapter titles? Does it make a difference to the book?

The comic novel I'm writing - The UnDead Residents Association - does have chapter titles at the moment. I always liked the idea and it has helped me navigate around the story as I have written it (I think a lot of writers do this - see the NANOWRIMO forum on this) Does it help the reader too?

My titles are relevant to the story: Grave Undertakings, A Spell in the Library, The Stakeout and I even thought I might use bits of relevant local authority jargon as subtitles to the chapter titles ( 'post-preventative measures' 'co-terminus stakeholder agreement' etc)... or maybe just use a bit of that sort of thing as subtitles to the (un-named) three parts the book is also divided into.

There's an interesting view on the subject in the Gotham Writers Workshop which says chapter titles can add layers of meaning, like Quoyle's knots in The Shipping Forecast... kind of what I was going for with the jargon subtitles. And Nathan Blansford's many followers gave titles a general thumbs up too - though it might be different for kids' books.

But I already have 40 chapters, but because I use various points of view, they don't all have a new chapter, just extra spaces with a *** between. Maybe they should all have new chapters? But then there might be too many too reasonably have titles for.


Help!!  What do YOU think?

The Pong of Poetry

I'm off poetry. I am. I've been in a few poetry-related situations recently which have made me think of hanging up my haikus and shoving my anapests up my assonance.

A couple of events where it was only poets performing to other poets, a shouty guest night and an under-publicised and rather forced 'workshop' involving table tennis, balls with things written on them have conspired to make me question what exactly I am trying to do, and why...



Poets empty rooms

In five minutes flat

Poets watch poets... because they're 'up' next

we clear whole tables in cafes and pubs,
causing a disorderly egress
from all kinds of event.

We open our mouths and it’s as if
someone in the back row
has shouted: ‘Fire!’ or ‘Free ice cream!’
the way they scamper for the exits
as though our very words are painful
pointed at them, poisoning their minds.
It’s true – I know poets who do.

Ah, the power of the poets’ words

'Darling, we're leaving. That's Broken Biro!'

to knee jerk you from your comfortable position,
have you running for cover,
covering your ears, refusing to hear.

Poets are faster and calmer
than riot police, less brutal... usually.
Stand us in front of the National Front
at crucial junctions of Tottenham orToxteth,
let us open our frightening mouths
and speak. See those hooded, would-be 
thugs put down their weapons,
look at their watches, mumble something

Batty about poetry... is just plain batty

about having to be somewhere else.

If you need a seat on a bus – ask one of us.
Stuck at the back of a crowd?  See how we
part the sea of people like the Moses of poesy.
How our audiences shrink not swell
at every clerihew and villanelle.

Bring us in at closing time to get the punters
draining glasses, or café’s were pensioners
linger on and buy no drinks,
or parks where youths loiter at sundown
causing alarm by laughing and being young.

a load of balls

Summon us wherever people outstay
their welcome: traffic jams, complaints desks,
refugee camps. Let our self-indulgent sestinas
evacuate tall buildings, entire towns.

Poets clear fields and promenades,
empty the deckchairs around bandstands
faster than a sudden downpour.
Use us in wars: front line rhymesters
who send our enemies back to the bunkers;
or during dubious interrogations
extracting prompt confessions with
the drip drip drip
of our water torture words.