Out there

If I'm not here, I must be somewhere else.

There's a little something of mine at Flashpoints, for example.  This gorgeous site offers tiny pieces of site-specific flash fiction. A story written in and about a specific location  is left there. I wrote my story in the library and left it on the Mills and Boon stand (left). A week later it was still there. If anyone noticed they didn't say.

I read a blog recently where the writer ( sorry, but I can't remember who it was or find it now - if it was you, fess up and I'll put a link in!) ) had over 100 submissions awaiting response.

She inspired me to send more stories and poems out - I'm up to 54 so watch this space for yee-hahs or ya-boo-suckses.

I'm also on (at? in?) the Lancashire Writing Hub being interviewed about Poetry24, the daily ezine I co-edit with Martin

My Klingon for a horse...

If you're writing science fiction and running low on plot, it's not unheard of to dip into classic literature and... erm... borrow a story (I'm looking at you, Russell T.)

There are only so many plots, right?

Anyhoo, I was just about to go to sleep the other night when someone on Twitter started up  #SciFiShakespeare - a 'hashtag (or should that be mashtag?) game' with an irresistible combination if ever there was one.

As some of you are not on Twitter and so miss it's more fun elements, I have listed as I sometimes do here, some my favourites (some in the screen grab on the left, and some pasted below).

Do chip in with your own Shakespeare / scifi mashups in the comments below:

@Dr_Dmo: My Klingon for a horse

‏@JohnMoynes: 

But soft, what beast through yonder stomach breaks?

@Beanmimo: 

(Stolen from Spitting Images a long long time ago) To be not not to be, that is illogical Captain.

‏@HefSan:

Close Encounters of the Richard III Kind

 @sturadernie:

To take arms against a sea of tribbles and by opposing, end them…

And of course, not to be outdone, I came up with:

For in that sleep of Darth what dreams may come? and Don't Panic and let slip the dog of war!

Talk like a pirate day

On 19th September it be International Talk Like a Pirate Day - so don't say I didn't be warnin' you!

Avast behind! (but enough about me).

It's important you be fully briefed on the 'arr's and the 'grrr's but if you don't want to be forkin' out for dusty great tomes like How to Speak Pirate: A Treasure Chest of Seafaring Slang (which at least has a likeness of the great Cap'n Jack Sparrer gracing it's cover) wet your whistle now, for here be Talk Like a Pirate Day's official guidelines on how to actually be talkin' like a pirate:

• Double up on all your adjectives. Pirates never speak of "a big ship", they call it a "great, grand ship!" They never say never, they say "No nay ne'er!"
• Drop all your "g"'s when you speak and you'll get words like "rowin'", "sailin'" and "fightin'".
• Dropping all of your "v"'s will get you words like "ne'er", "e'er" and "o'er".
• Instead of saying "I am", sailors say, "I be". Instead of saying "You are", sailors say, "You be". Instead of saying, "They are", sailors say, "They be". Ne'er speak in anythin' but the present tense!

Me and the Cap'n at the New Brighton Pirate Muster 2011

There likewise be a whole heap of fascinatin' terminology at The Pirates Realm and at Black Bart's Pirate Glossary.
e.g. Dance the Hempen Jig : a hangin'
Jolly Roger : not what you be thinkin' you filthy-minded lubber
Loaded to the gunnells : dead drunk

And those landlubbin' university boffins have even coughed up this handy, if a bit scurvy Pirate Translator.

Go on! Unleash Your Inner Buccaneer

Funny Submission Guidelines #1

I wish I'd started this post when I first began sending out poems and stories for publication. But here are a few little gems I've found in submission guidelines recently for your delectation - you may even want to send some of your writing to these markets ...

"Please no poetry, we don’t understand it." The Safety Pin Review (short fiction)

"750 or fewer words. Weird. Surprising. Preferably no elves." Brain Harvest

"We’re just not the best market for doom-laden go-nowhere stories which push the boundaries of the English language into new and unfortunate places." Andromeda Spaceways In-flight Magazine

"We're not looking for poetry. Feel free to submit limericks. We won't publish them, but we might read them. Limericks are cool."  Crowded Magazine  (Who also need to be clear on this point: "No purple midgets, gay pirates, or unicorns. Actually, that's a lie. If you have a great story about a unicorn-riding purple midget battling a fleet of gay pirates, drop it in the queue. Really. We don't see enough of that kind of thing.")

And finally, two favourites from Short, Fast and Deadly:

"We're pretty sure our mothers read this page. Yours might too. We don't mind if she flinches a bit but we don't want her keeling over or anything."

and...

"No Haiku! For the love of God. No Haiku."

Let me know if you come across any other good ones... I feel this may turn into a regular feature!

p.s. And of course, the best place to find out the best places to send your submissions to is the excellent free writer's database and submission tracker called Duotrope which I can't recommend highly enough

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?