Novel approach

 

I've been reviewing a couple of novels recently, one recently published and the other undergoing its last revisions. This process is interesting and similar to the one I use with my own novels before they fly.

As an experiment, I've decided to write a non-fiction book about novel writing based on my personal experiences. I once helped out with a book about railways for a local charity, but sadly, it never saw the light of day.

So here I am with a handsome stranger poised outside the city walls of an unknown world. There's some kind of drone in the sky, and the stranger looks like he's having a rough time.

Now, I need to think of a Non-Fiction Book structure. Something like:

Introduction

1: Laying the Foundation

2: Plot Development Mastery

3: Character Creation and Development

4: Setting and Worldbuilding

5: Finding Your Unique Voice

6: Scene Construction and Pacing

7: Overcoming Writer's Block

8: Editing and Revision Techniques

9: Navigating the Publishing Landscape

10: Marketing Your Novel and Building an Audience

Conclusion

We'll see.

The circle of scroll

 

I decided not to immediately immerse myself in a new social media system. After leaving the twits, I thought about the multifarious options but then decided... Nah. I'll just keep my old userids to avoid impersonation.

I can get most of my 'updates' from other sources, and anything particularly platform-dependent will be re-syndicated through many channels. Like those nauseous Chinese phone-video things.

So I'll be the person with few friends who doesn't spend hours chasing around after cats riding on Roombas.

The internet is still made of cats

ain't no sideshow now

Without his makeover, here's a multiple convicted felon, a chronic liar who tried to overturn the last election and unleash a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies. Amazingly, he won.

Millions of voters in the states that mattered most chose him anyway. His inflammatory rhetoric about invading immigrant hordes, the macho posturing against a female opponent, and his promise to boost an inflation-battered U.S. economy may sound fanciful, but it stuck in heads. 

He might have appeared as a Sideshow Bob, but his killer malevolence in his Mar-a-Lago lair, leaked slime and a loser's bile.

Like a bad dream, this creature has achieved an unthinkable resurrection. Sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump in 2016; and seventy-four million in 2020. We wait for this final count followed by his threats of retribution and revenge. 

Biden didn't help and threw Kamala Harris a hospital pass and even then didn't shut up. She had just over a hundred days, which was insufficient to get further than a confused deadlock.

I couldn't have predicted the winner's victory from the incessant social media and mainly vacuous analyses. But if America wants a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, once-convicted huckster from New York who lives on a Florida golf course surrounded by stolen secrets, then that's what they deserve.

He's no real interest in the convictions of the G.O.P. candidate. An out liar in every possible way and one the most racist, sexist, and xenophobic titular heads in history. He'll seek pledges of personal loyalty from all of his appointments, like some movie godfather. 

And of course ensure he is released from all of his court cases, before he starts on his enemies. He can liberate  his supporters from the 6th January and use the military to dissuade protests. Anyone with a hint of 'independence' can be fired and his thinking on womens' rights are plain to see. For overseas matters, add big tariffs.  Trump thinks about the money and will kompromat into Putin's hands, where he is regarded as a useful idiot.

'retrograde with the reprobate' - doesn't fit on baseball caps though.

Devil came down to Georgia?

twitter abandoned at last

I've abandoned twitter now. It surprises me it has taken so long. The 'free speech' version has become infected with banal and often offensive tweets, many of which now vector to other time wasting platforms like tik-tok and similar.

There's no point in going to another copy platform either. I'd rather rely on the information that I select than on what a publishing bot increasingly curates.

The dilemma is that like Hotel California, I can check-out but never leave. I experienced this once on Meta, when I dropped a Facebook id which was quickly harvested by someone else. It is best to simply leave the twitter userids languishing but still under my ownership. Oh yes, and I'll keep my automatic posts to the platform, but really don't think I'll need to read it again.

And I get back so much free time.

rookie cleat mixup

 

Time was, when I knew my eggbeaters from my MT-51s. No longer the case. I needed some new cleats for my bike shoes and ordered a set online. Shimano shoes? Surely Shimano cleats? 

Bong. The ones I needed had to clip into Crank eggbeater pedals. I knew it as soon as I'd unscrewed the old ones, put the new ones in and went - click. Except it didn't go click. 

More a sort of scraping sound.

So now I've replaced the old cleats with new Crank gold cleats. The picture shows the 'before image'. More a sort of rust colour.

The new ones work perfectly. I've already done about 20 miles.

Desolation of Smug

I suppose Rachel Reeves played a blinder with the budget. At least it wasn't as comprehensively leaked as the last few by the Eton boyz. Of course there's a few attention grabbers, but the big play is attempting to sweep up the desolation of Smug left by the last lot.

And we see the sly boys and girls playing the markets in its wake. They are simply gambling and messing up everything for the rest of us. 28-30 is the entry age, and it seems that 2 years in business is the typical requirement. Safe hands? eh?
 

But back to the budget...I see that a few things like car tax on electric vehicles didn't get mentioned, yet I received the notification a day before the budget that I've got to pay road tax again from next year. And that fossil fuel tax for cars is being held down again. Not exactly electro-friendly.

Don't get me started on fiscal drag which is 'only' set to last until around 2030. I'd always envisaged that the rise in personal allowance would compensate for essentially a fixed income, but no, that's another source ready to plunder.

There's shenanigans around the employer tax too, which affects smaller businesses. If I still had my company I'd be paying an extra £650 employer contribution per annum or so. Hmm, makes me reconsider if I should restart it again, for my book writing. The interesting aspect is that pensioners are now being pickpocketed. I can't tell you how distressing it is to get those big extra tax bills at the end of the year. 

You could say it's a 'nice problem to have', but I can't help thinking how I scrimped and saved to have retirement income, only to see the government wasting it on frivolous schemes and subsidising big projects like nuclear submarines - oh no - wait - that was the last lot.

Unredacted Steele

A curious book, in which Christopher Steel reveals much of his life story. From school to post-Trump legal battles. I was expecting more new stuff, but I think I'd desk researched much of it previously, so the surprises were limited. 

Steel comes across as earnest, thorough and meticulous, and with huge depth, although his detractors vehemently consider otherwise. A major premise is whether Russia (Putin) interfered in the last US election (probably) and what The Kremlin is doing in the current one. Steele posits that Putin wants Trumpi to win and that the Kremlin have so much Kompromat on Trump that they can easily manipulate him.

He adds, later, that the Kremlin is cultivating anyone they expect to have significant influence, so even if the dice were to fall remarkably in the other direction that things would be covered. I'm guessing that is an increasingly unlikely outcome.

My sense is that Trump has probably done so many terrible things, that most people are inured and desensitised to whatever is discovered next. By hand-selecting most of the High Court Judges, Trump can also leap free from just about anything. I read Company Intelligence Report 2016's rebuttals by Trump's Council and laughed out loud at the very explicit denials.

Then we see that the FBI seem to have played Steele through the more recent events. Someone called Amy was initially a real person and then turned into an anodyne bot respondent to string Steele along in the later stages. He doesn't say that in his book, although I started to get a sense of a Gogol storyline playing out.

It seems as if many people in power don't want his perceptions to surface, presumably because they bring down many houses of cards. Easier to 'move along, please' instead.

So it's an interesting quandary. I suspect Steele, drawing from many detailed sources, is fundamentally correct in his analysis, although he is subjected to an absolute torrent of challenge, from Trump, Trump's supporters, the far right as well as (contrariwise) many people of power in Russia. It means he has somewhat lost his voice in this heady mix of well-known names.

And Steele suggests the shift in emphasis of the Kremlin influence model, with Sergei Kiriyenko in charge of foreign election interference. Not simply US elections, but any where there is a significant angle. 

Trump and others continue to use 'Lawfare' to try to block any attempts to be corralled and we see certain august bodies watching it all from the sidelines. These bodies are not even daring to probe senior resettled Russian officials such as Oleg Smolenkov and others who know what's on the various undisclosed tapes.

We can look at this as the early stages of strategic chaos and as Steele describes it, a new world disorder.

a few more days

I've mainly tuned this one out. It was shouty enough when I was in New York recently. Christopher Steele's book considers the Trump win a catastrophe.  A "new world disorder".

Strategic chaos.

Wobble the market

 

Goofing around, I thought I'd try this little micro-economic exercise in the FT. Interesting...I got it close to the balanced numbers but had to break a couple of Fiscal Rules that the government recently declared. The effect was to make the markets wobble, but I think it says more about the vacuousness of the markets holding the economy in their thrall.

It takes about 5 minutes to set up the parameters for a round. Fascinating.

Chunks of German with the fabulous Anja

I'm pretty sure I blogged once before about Anja, who is teaching me German. The amount of equivalent English words makes German a natural for me.  Some sample Denglisch : Apfel, Baby, Ball, Blau, Boss, Buch, Bus, Computer, Eis, E-Mail, Ellbogen, Finger, Glas, Gras, Hobby, Hotel, Information, Job, Jewel, Knie, Kuh, Milch, Meeting, Mutter, Name, Neu, Park, Radio, Reporter, Radio, Ring, Schule, Sweatshirt, Taxi, Tourist, T-Shirt, Wasser, Zoo. Other words are available.

I'm in a regular German Stammtisch every week and we chat together and discuss German grammar und so weiter. They also make fun of my use of (for example) einchecken - for check-in. I guess you could say registrieren.

I'm always the one who protests at having to learn all of those tables of 'der, die, das' and so on and say it interferes with speaking to one another. I say I prefer a 'Lego block' approach to a language where I can assemble pre-formed phrases to make longer sentences. 

Well, it turns out that Anja agrees and she calls it 'chunking' - from the British Council origination of the word - although I can't help thinking about tinned carrot jokes. 

Anyway, yesterday was a case in point where I was on a one-hour 'party' call with Anja and then jumped off the call onto Zoom with my Stammtisch buddies. For personal reasons I've missed several of the Stammtisch calls and they were surprised to see me return. However, I was immediately asked if it was alright to be tested on definite and indefinite articles and found myself in a world of nominative musculine singulars and so on. 

Now I'm more of a bluffer, so I'll admit my word-endings can sometimes come out wrong, but on the whole I go for what I think 'sounds right'. Anja has the precision to know the grammatical underpinnings and will correct mistakes, but I think we both agree it's better to have a go at the sentence rather than to remain quiet. Here's an introduction...

a Rorschach of my crash - Rachel K.

Rachel's on the left with Emily, in a Photo Booth in Woolworth's. It's not now. 

I'm mad keen on Kushner's The Flamethrowers and also just read (I'll do it again) Creation Lake. I'll review it sometime, - spoiler- five stars. 

Because of Creation Lake, I also read The Hard Crowd, which comprises essays from Kushner on many topics from her life. Starting with the Los Cabos bike race, the Baja 1000, where she's injured as she crashes a 130-mph bike when someone pulls out in front doing 30 mph. The essay evokes the grit, oil and attitudes of the riders. Something of Reno's wipe-out on the salt flats in Bonneville. With a 20-year old's perspective, so not all-knowing.

The inspirations for The Flamethrowers crop up a couple of other times in the collection, notably when she describes some pictures, which I could recognise as the novel's cover art. Weirdly I checked the current cover and found it was something different. 

Kushner is one of the coolest friends you'll meet. From Eugene, Oregon, to San Francisco, working in nightclubs, with the biggest rock bands, mentored by Don DeLillo, time in Cuba, also Jerusalem,  New York, France and Italy. And an interior worldview packed with intelligent and provoking outlooks. 

Always on and challenging. High stakes.