Tag: blogging

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A Tale of Two Topics

When I update this blog, I aim to stick with one topic throughout. But I hope you’ll indulge me just this once as I follow up last week’s entry about copyright and the public domain, and then follow up with the planned topic.

Copyright caveats

A few days after I posted my entry, the YouTube producer Chris Spargo released a relevant video, exploring a section of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 that I didn’t know about.

In 1929, J M Barrie granted the rights of his play Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital so they would benefit financially from its every performance. Although the play fell into the public domain in 1987, this arrangement was specifically written into legislation to make sure it continued in perpetuity – or at least until it’s repealed.

For the avoidance of doubt, the hospital has no creative control over the use of the play and can’t prevent performances from going ahead. It can only collect fees from any performance that is staged.

Disconnection doldrums

It was fortunate you were able to see last week’s entry. Where possible, I like to have at least a draft lined up 24 hours in advance. I can then tinker with the text just before publication at 7:30pm on a Tuesday, which coincides with a weekly writing group.

The staff are very accommodating in the pub where we meet. Probably the only criticism is something outside their control. Because the place was a cinema until 1998, it still has thick soundproof walls that also interfere with Wi-Fi and mobile phone reception.

Often we manage a weak but stable connection with a combination of our own hotspots and the pub Wi-Fi. But on Tuesday of last week, we were out of luck, no matter what we tried. So we stopped the in-person session and moved to the house of the other group leader. Once online, we were able to keep the members of our Discord server informed about what had happened.

One of the strengths of the weekly two-hour meeting is having that ringfenced time either to write or to carry out administration. For example, I picked up an overdue task about transferring my Web domain and hosting to a new plan, as the one I used was being phased out.

This then led me down a path of ‘Do I really need [insert feature]?’ and ‘What if I do away with that email address?’ It took a few days, but I’m pleased to report that the transfer was smooth, so this site stayed online.

In fact, the other group leader and I occasionally schedule admin days where we can make desicions about the direction of the group and/or solve ongoing problems. These are always deliberately held on a non-meeting day and in a different location.

This week, I’ve taken extra time to prepare. I drafted this entry on Sunday night, and made amendments yesterday, so it’ll almost certainly be in the can and ready to go at the appointed time.

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Boulevard of Broken Plans

An artist pal was visiting Dundee from Glasgow this weekend, and he suggested we see a screening of the animé Princess Mononoke. This was newly restored in 4K quality and was showing for a limited time only.

Before and after the screening, we talked about our unrealised projects, and his long-term plan to move to London and make a start on some of these. While I have nothing so dramatic to declare, I do have projects that either need to be started or are now safe to reveal.

It’s a little cliché to do this at New Year, but I promise it’s entirely a coincidence. Here’s a selection of them, not all of which are related to writing.

Unstarted projects

I keep a draft on WordPress with any ideas I think might make for suitable full-length entries. At the time of writing, these comprise:

  • The NoSleep community on Reddit. Members post their own horror stories that might plausibly be true, and other members are invited to share in the world as if it were real.
  • The events of September 11th. With the 25th anniversary happening later this year, this might be the ideal opportunity to explore the aftermath from a literary perspective.
  • Watching animé. I’ve not a frequent film watcher, and the only animé I’ve seen is from Studio Ghibli, so perhaps there’s some room to comment from an outsider’s perspective.

There are also some live events I’d like to start up:

  • Stage confidence classes. Regular readers will know I’ve been bandying this idea about for years. So far, no matter how I’ve approached it, the pieces haven’t yet fallen into place.
  • A dating event. It can be difficult to write a short bio for a dating app and to suss out the other person. So this meet-up event would attempt to solve the problem by inviting a friend to do the talking instead.
  • A spontaneous poetry stall. I would set up my computer and a printer with two-inch wide paper label tape, and improvise poetry for visitors. The templates have been designed and the cost of labels counted out.

Secret plans revealed this year

Roll on January

Every year, I take part in a local project called Fun a Day. This encourages participants to create something during the month, however they wish to define that.

I’d already planned out Roll on January, where I would roll two d6 dice every day for a month and track how many rolls it took to display a double six. I then learnt on New Year’s Eve that there wouldn’t be a Fun a Day in 2026, but I’ve gone ahead with the project anyway.

Double Zero Challenge

The above Roll on January wasn’t the first time I’d experimented with dice-rolling. In fact, I’d been refining the format for more than 12 months.

I tried out a one-off stream on Twitch with two d20 dice, seeing how long it would take to roll a double 20. I then moved to pre-recorded videos on YouTube, with some success, but the videos frequently lasted more than an hour.

As a compromise, I then swapped these for two d10 dice. These still take an unpredictable length of time, but nearly 50 videos in, I think the format has been perfected.

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Who Reads This Stuff Anyway?

The first entry to this blog was posted on 10 October 2013, making it 12 years old last month.

The intent was to create a deadline each week so I would keep writing regularly. That’s going well so far because when this entry is published, it’ll be number 641, or an average of at least one entry a week. But how many people are likely to read it?

Well, that depends what measure you use.

If you look at each entry, you can usually find at least one or two Likes, although some have in the region of eight or nine. The same names tend to pop up week after week. Altertatively, we can look at stats provided by WordPress from December 2024 onwards. The number of monthly visitors ranges from 113 throughout May to 548 in October – with one outlier.

For some reason, August attracted a total of 1,163 unique visitors, most of whom came back two or more times:

Data visualization of site traffic from July to November, showing a sharp rise in both views and visitors during August 2025. Tooltip reveals 2,742 views and 1,163 visitors for that month.

The timescales match up with two entries from that period. The first talked about an Edinburgh Fringe show by Ross McCleary and Stefan Mohamed, while the second addressed the thorny topic of Creative Scotland curbing its funding. I can only expect one or both topics were on the minds of my audience.

All of which is interesting to me, but I haven’t even touched upon the reason I started writing this entry.

Every time I hit Publish, an email is sent to anyone who opts into receiving notifications. I was advised yesterday by a long-term aquaintance that her email provider had suddenly started placing my WordPress notifications into a folder, starting with an entry from June about audio dramas. Before then, the last email in the folder was from a reply I’d made on LiveJournal in December 2016.

Unless something unpredictable happens, I know this blog is never going to reach a wide audience. It helps me to stick to a regular deadline. If it finds an audience, then marvellous, and if not, nothing is lost.

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A Look Back to Ten Years Ago

I have a couple of upcoming projects that I’m not ready to talk about just yet. To fill the gap, I’ve instead looked backwards in time to the entry closest to today: 26 October 2015.

With the title Relentlessness, the entry described a hectic week. The open-mic night Hotchpotch held an event aboard the vintage HMS Unicorn, the Dundee Literary Festival had just been and gone, and the artist studios WASPS held an open weekend. I’d also been to see Hamlet at the cinema, presented by National Theatre Live, while our writing group was gearing up for National Novel Writing month.

As I read back this snapshot of events, they somehow don’t feel like they happened ten years ago, even though I rationally know they did.

For instance, WASPS studios is very much still open for business and Jen Robson is still around, albeit working from a home-based studio. Hotchpotch is still going, although we’ve never been invited back onto the Unicorn. Then we have National Novel Writing Group, which only ceased operations this year.

On the other hand, although none of us realised it at the time, the last Dundee Literary Festival would be held in 2016. It took until March this year for a replacement event, the Dundee Book Festival, to start up.

There’s something both appealing and lamentable about that ephemeriality. No doubt I’ll feel the same when I look back upon this year’s projects from 2035.

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Letter-Writing Season Again

Shortly before I left for Sweden last month, I received two letters from pen-pals on the same day: one from Wales and the other the Republic of Ireland. They don’t know each other, so the timing was entirely a coincidence.

I’d already planned to send postcards to both of them while I was away, along with selected other folks. Since the Swedish equivalent of the Post Office allows you to buy postage online, I was able to stamp and address them in advance; it was just a matter of writing them while I was there.

But it’s now time to reply to the actual letters, so I’ve been plugging away at this for the last week or so.

I keep lined notepads especially for this purpose, particularly the Nu Elite brand. The pages have perforations near the margin so they rip off into perfect A5 sheets and fold in half for a C6 envelope. It doesn’t have to be that brand, as long at the paper is reasonably thick and has similar properties.

It’s all practical, and certainly less stylish than the letters I received.

The one from Wales has a striped coloured border, but not feint ruling on the writing area. If you ask me, it’s quite a skill to write neatly on unruled paper, as mine would start sloping up or down, no matter how careful I was. I typically write mine by hand.

Then the letter from Ireland starts off in a notecard with an intricate Alice in Wonderland theme before continuing on A5 paper, similar to what I use.

And just as I was writing this paragraph, my Welsh friend sent me a message to say the letter had been received. That’s good news, as her very first one to me went missing without trace. Fortunately, she’d kept a copy of it, although I never remember to take a copy of mine before posting. That said, it barely matters, as long as I’m reasonably careful not to repeat the same news every time.

The one bound for Ireland is around 80% complete, and just needs a final push to complete it. As far as I’m aware, the recipient doesn’t read this blog, so there’s no hurry.

I can’t see it happening any time soon, but I’ll maybe one day be able to introduce the two pen-pals so they can write to each other and complete the circle.

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Putting a Full Stop to Scams

I watch a YouTube creator who goes under the alias Kitboga. In 2017, he discovered his grandmother had fallen victim to several scams, costing her hundreds of dollars every month.

Inspired by this, he now produces content aimed at exposing phone scammers and educating viewers about how to spot their tactics. At the very least, he wants to waste hours of their time that might otherwise be spent scamming others.

The style of the channel took some time to grow on me, as it’s rather chaotic. He typically uses a voice-changer to make scammers think they’re talking to an elderly person, before making up nonsensical stories to tell them, often on the spot. Between calls, he explains to the viewers what he’s doing and why.

On Sunday, Kitboga posted a video where he spoke to a scammer who claimed to represent the publisher Penguin Random House. Unusually, the other party agreed to a meeting via Zoom. I won’t give away the outcome, but I promise it’s worth watching the entire 36-minute video as he explains the scam and considers his next move.

This isn’t the first time a publishing scam has been featured on the channel.

Back in October, the channel exposed a group targeting self-published authors with screenwriting deals. At around the 27:45 mark, he even gave a shout-out to the Writer Beware blog, which had been documenting these cases over many years.

Most of us want to see our writing out there in the world, but we also need to be careful. One of the best ways is to be very dubious about anyone who reaches out with an offer regarding your work.

If you’re ever uncertain whether a contact is genuine, be sure to check with the company. You can often find details on their official website, in the indispensable Writers’ Handbook, and/or in the Companies House database. When in doubt, hit the Block button and move on.

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NaNoWriMo – The Last Word

It was quietly announced last week that the organisation behind National Novel Writing Month was to close. Universally known as NaNoWriMo, or even NaNo, this was a challenge to draft a 50,000-word novel during November each year, later expanding to include smaller challenges in other months.

The announcement, made on Sunday 31 March, was so quiet that only those on the mailing list received it. There also exists a corresponding video from the Interim Executive Director, which has not gone down well with the commenters.

And yet, at the time of writing, the official website remains unchanged. So when I heard the news second-hand on April Fool’s Day, I had to double-check it, missing the chance to include the news as last week’s entry. Still, the week-long gap has allowed some time for reflection.

I joined NaNo in 2010. It had been around for 11 years at that point, and was arguably at the height of its popularity, as illustrated by Google search trends over the years. There were dozens of affiliate groups around the world, including one in Dundee city centre. At my very first meeting, my laptop ran out of battery, so I rushed out to buy a notepad and a mechanical pencil. The graphite rods kept breaking, rendering it next to useless.

Fast-forward five years, and I’d graduated from member to organiser in the natural flow of people leaving and joining. I stayed in that role for nine years alongside several different co-leads until we withdrew our affiliation in 2024 over the nonsense that had been happening.

By this time, I’d fallen out of love with the central November challenge, as I found myself with an increasing series of started but incomplete novels. I didn’t fall out of love with bringing writers together, so I’m pleased still to be co-leading the independent group we created to replace it.

So the big question: what caused the closure? It’s a complex story that can best be told by the NaNo Scandal website, which has documented the problems with the organisation from December 2022.

However, the simplest analogy is that of a Fortune 500 company, which will typically act to keep its stakeholders satisfied. In the case of NaNo, the stakeholders were the organisers on the ground who encouraged members to keep writing and to keep donating. After alienating these folks, the cash dried up.

Speaking of cash, search information from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) website makes for interesting reading. From what I can gather, the nonprofit National Novel Writing Month should be filing Form 900 annually, which then becomes a matter of public record. However, the last document at the time of writing dates from 2021.

A screenshot from the US Internal Revenue website illustrating the points mentioned in the plain text.

I’m absolutely no expert, so perhaps there’s a genuine reason why the last four years are missing from this list. But if you’re an accountant or you’re connected with the IRS, you can access the search function and enter the Employer Identification Number 65-1282653 to find out the details.

I really don’t want to leave this entry on a sour note. I was involved with the organisation in some capacity for 14 years, so more than half of its 26-year history. I had some wonderful experiences, and I still speak to so many former participants. So here are three memories that stand out:

  • I held a couple of midnight launch parties at my home, with the plan to start writing in the first hour of 1st November. I had only a two-seater couch at the time, so every chair and cushion was taken up with people, who were also dodging electrical extension cables. As the clock hit 12am, the entire room fell silent for an hour, aside from the tapping of keys.
  • I’d met someone in real life and was chatting to her via Facebook Messenger. I wanted to take a gamble and ask her out, so I enlisted the members of that week’s NaNo meeting for advice, all of whom were in long-term relationships themselves. They helped me to steer the conversation and figure out what to say next. She still turned me down.
  • A local organiser used to be known as a Municipal Liaison or an ML. As the pandemic was easing, the government was permitting people to meet up again, while NaNo was still warning MLs to hold only online meetings. To circumvent this, I told the group I would be in our usual venue at a certain time, and there were spare seats if anyone happened to be passing, but that this was not a meet-up. I even wore a sticker reading NOT ML, which became an in-joke for a long time afterwards.
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Money for Nothing, Join for Free

There are a couple of perennial topics on this blog. One of them is public speaking, and the other is banging the drum about joining the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society.

The ALCS was founded in 1977 to ensure writers are given fair payments for any of their works that are copied, broadcast or recorded. The organisation is the literary equivalent of the better-known PRS for Music, which does a similar job for musicians.

This year, £35,038,136 was shared between 111,415 members. It’s important to note this is not an equal share, but calculated according to the activity of each author’s work. You can bet that bestsellers like Richard Osman and Julia Donaldson took a sizeable chunk of the pie.

My payment this year was around £133. It’s not enough to live on, of course, but it’ll pay my energy company for nearly two months. What’s more, that’s from just nine publications spanning as many years.

So how does an author grab a piece of the action?

The ALCS has recently suspended online applications for reasons unknown, but will accept a postal version. Visit the How to Join page to download and fill in the form.

You don’t need to send any money. Instead, the organisation will deduct a one-off fee of £36 once you’ve earned that figure in royalties. This grants you lifetime membership. Payments are collected for a variety of different visual works, so check the website for details of these.

To start earning, you’ll need to enter the ISBN of each work you’ve had published. This is the 13-digit string of numbers beside the barcode, or 10 digits if the book was published before 2007. Remember to include every publication where you receive credit, regardless of its age.

After all that, it’s just a matter of maintaining your list of works on the website and awaiting the annual payment.

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A Weekend of Minimal Writing

In an entry from 28 January this year, I spoke about visiting the Millennium Bridges in mainland Great Britain, making fleeting mention of a further visit to Land’s End.

The original plan was to pair that with a visit to John O’Groats a couple of days later. My train ticket would allow me to visit both places, but the storms did not, so I delayed my visit to Saturday just gone. My hotel booking couldn’t be cancelled without losing the payment; it could only be rescheduled.

From the January trip, I’d learnt a lot about the logistics of taking long-distance public transport and the luggage required for such a journey. It was almost perfect, but I forgot the charger for my laptop. With eight hours of total journey time between Dundee and Thurso, one of the nearest towns to John O’Groats, that would have been handy.

Yet it didn’t matter too much in the end. I had plenty of battery for the activities I absolutely needed to complete, plus Scotrail didn’t have many three-pin power sockets on this journey.

The trains did all boast USB type A sockets, but they didn’t appear to be at full voltage. This led to the discovery that my phone has an extreme battery-saving mode, so I could at least charge up faster than the power was consumed. If a story idea did occur, I always had a pencil and paper with me.

Once I’d reached John O’Groats, I found I didn’t particularly want to write, other than posting a card from the northernmost Post Office in the UK. I just wanted to wander about for a couple of hours, maybe take a couple of pictures for people back home. Unlike the Millennium Bridges, there was never a plan to chronicle this journey in detail.

I did, however, ensure I stood beside the signpost at each end.

Gavin Cameron in a thick jacket, standing beside the signpost at John O'Groats.
Gavin Cameron in a thick jacket, standing beside the signpost at Land's End.

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The Tour That Didn’t Tour

On Saturday just gone, I was supposed to go on a tour behind the scenes at Dundee Central Library. The visit was organised by Creative Dundee and was only open to members of its Amps network, making it a rare opportunity, especially as their events often happen on weekdays when I’m working.

Fate had something to say about this rare opportunity, in the form of plumbing problems that forced the library to close for the day.

I’ve been to that section a couple of times before, and I subscribe to the city archives blog, so I have some idea of what they do there. Still, making the information available digitally requires thousands of volunteer hours, so I look forward to seeing that aspect when the tour is rescheduled.

So instead of coffee after the tour, that became the main event, with around a dozen attendees descending on an accommodating cafe nearby. This proved to be a time for fruitful discussion and not even necessarily about our creative work.

After a conversation about where we’d travelled last year and our plans for this year – in my case, the Millennium Bridges tour – I possibly have another project brewing which stems directly from that.

Either way, I look forward to the next Amps outing.