Tag: blogging

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Pencil, Paper and Privacy

I’m in a poetry circle called the Wyverns. Each month, we write a piece and share it with the rest of the group, inviting constructive feedback from the others.

This month, the prompt was Cartoon characters. With only four days until the next meeting and a hazy idea about what to write, I churned out a piece and an introduction directly into an email. After checking it over for any obvious errors, it was then sent to the other members.

When I told the group about how I’d composed the poem, it started off a discussion about the writing process, primarily whether we used paper to start, or entered it straight into a computer.

Typically, my pieces do start on paper. I make sure to buy a diary with plenty of note pages because these double as my notebook. It was a habit I developed a few years ago because I was typing all day at work, and it was a relief to pick up a pencil instead.

As I’m a touch-typist, writing by hand is considerably slower, but it can also allow more time to think about the text while composing. Paper also affords a less linear approach, freely allowing the addition of words with a carat mark or margin notes. A word processor, by contrast, typically likes to restrict the user to one line. There are odd exceptions like Microsoft OneNote, which can be used as a digital scrapbook.

I find writing by hand works best for prose and poetry. These blog entries are composed much more quickly, often in reaction to something that’s happened the same week, so these are entered straight into WordPress. I run a writing group every Tuesday and I often use that time to polish them off.

While we’re here, if you do a lot of writing on a computer in a public place, my advice is to buy a privacy screen immediately.

You can see the image straight on, or slightly to the left or right, while anyone looking at too steep an angle won’t be able to make anything out. Mine attaches with unobtrusive clear pads and stays permanently in place, but some other designs are removable.

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Fun with Fandoms

The website Archive of Our Own – or AO3 to its users – has existed since 2008, growing in popularity over the next few years. Writers can use it to post fan fiction, taking characters that already exist from books, films or even real life, then placing them into new stories or retelling existing stories from another angle.

Despite knowing about the site since almost day one, I didn’t open an account because I only used it to read the stories of one pal who would use characters from Star Wars.

More recently, it’s been brought to my attention that another pal writes and collaborates on steamy romances between two male Formula One drivers, so I finally opened an account in September to read them. Then, quite independently, I learnt someone else had published a multi-part tale placing the members of a 21st-century alternative rock band into a 1930s adventure story.

I’m being deliberately imprecise in these descriptions because all three writers use pseudonyms and don’t necessarily want their identities associated with their pseudonyms.

It’s common for fan fiction authors to stay anonymous, as some published authors actively dislike their characters being used in other work, even when the resulting work isn’t earning any money. Anne Rice and George R R Martin are two prominent examples. In other cases, there is potential for libel where living people are featured.

While mere threats of legal action are a dime a dozen, I can think of just one case involving fan fiction that actually went to court. In 2009, Darryn Walker was arrested on charges of obscenity after writing a story imagining the kidnap and murder of the pop group Girls Aloud. Ultimately, the author was cleared of all charges. If you’re interested, the offending text has been archived.

Although I’ve published many short stories online, they all featured original characters rather than existing ones. I think if I were going to write any fan fiction, I’d probably pick Rosaline from Romeo & Juliet. For starters, there’s no risk of legal action from William Shakespeare. For seconds, she’s a seriously underdeveloped character considering how pivotal she is to the early plot; if she hadn’t rejected Romeo, the events of the entire play might never have happened.

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Poetry Connections and Train Connections

Although it happened too late to write up in this blog, I was at the Inn Deep bar in Glasgow last Tuesday for the launch of The SpecBook 2024. One of my poems had been published by – as the name suggests – Speculative Books.

Copies of the collection had been sent out to contributors, but as mine was lost in the post, I collected one there. What I didn’t realise is that there are actually two small volumes. It was great to see my name in print other than in poetry group pamphlets.

Part one of the schedule was devoted to the published readers, so the first section lasted for a long while. The audience were reminded to support rather than heckle, which is exactly what I would say.

Part two was given over to an open-mic, where anyone could read a poem, whether they were in the book or not. I even met someone I knew from my former open-mic, but I wasn’t able to stay long enough to hear her work.

That was because I’d never visited Inn Deep before and I’d booked my travel cautiously. I’d allowed plenty of time between connections, going from one coast of Scotland to the other. As it happens, this worked out so well that I was home an hour earlier than expected.

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Site Stats for Gavin Cameron

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about dipping back into an older blog. Further to this, WordPress sends me an email every month about my site statistics, displaying the number of visitiors, views, likes and comments received, along with an indication of changes from the previous month.

The most recent one, received yesterday, showed that November brought 144 views from 131 visitors, who left 17 likes.

I don’t typically monitor such statistics – if I look at them at all – but that’s a decent ratio, even if all the figures were all down from October. There were also no comments, but this page tends not to attact them and I’m happy enough with that.

The core purpose of this blog is to give me a reason to write every week, and it’s served that purpose for 11 years now. Whether anyone actually reads it is a side-issue.

What I do hope people will read is The SpecBook 2024, published by Speculative Books, as I have a poem included there. The launch was supposed to be in Glasgow in September but was cancelled due to illness.

So let’s hope tonight’s rescheduled launch goes ahead as planned, and I’ll report back next week on how it went.

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Dipping Back Into an Older Blog

I must preface this entry with an assurance that I’m not ditching this blog. Rather, I’m here to talk about two others that still exist but are largely disused.

My first is LiveJournal – known to its users as LJ – which was once the enfant terrible of blogging and is now the senine grandparent. My profile page has always shown the start date as 15 March 2004, but I suspect there’s some longstanding technical glitch because my first entry was written three months previously on 19 December 2003 and I definitely didn’t backdate it.

I do have cause to visit LJ regularly to read entries from one person who’s never stopped updating. But I only update it when I believe it’s the most appropriate medium. The last time was for an art project in January 2022.

But that’s not the blog I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about the other one.

In 2008, two former LJ employees set up a new site called Dreamwidth that addressed their concerns over the user experience. When LJ was the target of several Distributed Denial of Service attacks the following year, several users began to crosspost there, fearing their own blogs might be taken offline. Because both sites share a similar codebase, it was simple to adapt.

I used it differently, taking the opportunity to curate a circle of close friends where I would post more private thoughts. To this day, every entry remains protected and the profile has no connection with my profiles elsewhere.

I updated a lot back then, to the point where I bought a seed account for $200, which is essentially a lifetime membership with premium features. Looking back, I now realise I needed to fix the root of my angst earlier rather than analyse it extensively every month or two while taking no real action. Once I did, the updates ground to a welcome halt and there have only been a handful of entries since 2013.

That said, I updated once again a couple of weeks ago after I felt it was the only possible outlet.

This entry wasn’t quite like the older ones. For a start, it was much more measured and positive. This was more the digital equivalent of writing a letter to someone and placing it in a filing cabinet instead of posting it. There’ll be only one still-active person likely to read it, but I simply had to spill out my thoughts before I could move on.

As I write, I realise I’ve been updating WordPress regularly for more than 11 years, which is approximately equal to the 11 years I was regularly updating LJ. It won’t be too long before I’m past the balance point. Even so, I’ll be keeping that site and Dreamwidth active for the foreseeable future, just in case they come in handy.

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A Matter of Presentation

It’s probably no surprise to regular readers that I’m not a full-time writer. Rather, my main income is from an office job. More accurately, I’m expected to be in the office for two days, with the other three at home.

While I’m at home, I like to listen to YouTube videos, particularly factual and educational ones. Since I started doing this, I’ve become more choosy about the types of videos I like and dislike.

For a start, I need audible narration rather than music and captions. I’ll be looking mainly at my work laptop and it’s not practical to turn to another screen every few seconds to find what I’ve missed. I also find it difficult to listen to synthesised narration; it has to be done by a person if they want my attention.

I have two particular go-to channels that fit this criteria. Firstly, I’ve long been a fan of Tom Scott, who’s now moved on from educational videos to focus on a gameshow called Lateral. Secondly is The Rest is Entertainment, where Richard Osman and Marina Hyde discuss show business, both in front of the camera and behind.

Next, while I don’t travel much in real life, I do it vicariously through channels such as Emma Cruises and Tips for Travellers, who prefer budget and luxury cruises respectively. Conversely, Ruth Aisling and Tom the Taxi Driver like to drive around, albeit in very different places. Jago Hazzard and Geoff Marshall travel on trains, whereas Mentour Pilot – that’s Mentour, not Mentor – talks through aircraft accidents in a way that doesn’t make you want to give up flying.

The connection between this list is that these creators know their subjects inside-out and present them clearly and factually. On the back of these, I’ve reasonably been shown suggestions for other similar channels, with mixed results.

Tom Scott indirectly led me to Wendover Productions who make 20-minute educational videos about all sorts of subjects, plus five-minute versions for smaller topics. On the other hand, watching Mentour Pilot routinely brings up 74 Gear. Both creators are equally qualified aviators, but 74 Gear tends to comment and respond to viral videos in an aggressive manner that I don’t relate to.

There is, however, one exception in the commentary genre, and that’s Gabi Belle, who does it with a lot of humour and insight. She also appears to be madly in love with Gordon Ramsay’s projects. It also took me a while to warm up to Pierogi and Kitboga who go after phone scammers, but I’ve learnt that both have had elderly relatives lose money this way and they don’t want anyone else to fall victim.

This is only a representative sample of my taste, but they all help the working day pass that little more enjoyably.

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Lost and Perhaps Found

When I started writing around 2010, I made a point of keeping an archive of my work.

Every story and poem has its own directory, and dated revisions are kept within each one. Plain text doesn’t take up much storage space, so there’s plenty of scope to keep doing this into the future.

About two or three years ago, I was looking for a particular poem I’d written; I knew its title, many of the words, and roughly when it was written. So when the archive showed no results after several attempts, I realised my system had broken down somewhere and wrote it off as a loss. I could have reconstructed it with a little effort, but I never did.

There’s a common misconception about Snapchat that it deletes every picture you send. In fact, you can set it to keep a copy of every picture you add to the My Story feature.

Fortunately, I’d not only set this up, but I’d taken a clear picture of the original handwritten verse four years earlier – and I’m not in the habit of doing that. In February 2022, while looking for something else, I found that picture. The original verse had almost certainly been shredded along with other papers. I swiftly copied the words into a Word document and placed it in the archive.

Luckily this was only a 16-line poem. Other writers have suffered far greater losses. Jilly Cooper, for instance, lost the original manuscript of Riders on a London bus and it took her years to rewrite.

Not all losses are accidental. A significant quantity of drama has been wiped from BBC and ITV archives, including episodes of popular shows like Doctor Who and Dad’s Army. Before the advent of home video, there was little incentive to keep old programmes except to resell them overseas.

In some cases, collectors and members of the public have discovered recordings; some in great condition, others needing significant restoration. The BFI used to hold an annual screening called Missing Believed Wiped, featuring a selection of recovered footage, but I’m unable to find any recent events.

It remains a mystery whether I typed out the poem in 2018 then lost it, or whether it was never typed up in the first place. I’ve nonetheless started backing up my archive locally and online so no further mishaps should happen.

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Eight Weeks of Writing Group Independence

Every Tuesday, I run a writing group with a pal. Until eight weeks ago, the group was affiliated with National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo).

We broke away to form an independent group after we felt the organisation was not working in the best interests of its members. You can read a previous entry exploring the reasons for this.

In the weeks following the announcement, we fielded a few questions from members, largely to reinforce that the new group would feel as familiar as we could make it. Only a couple of people have left, but no more than would have happened anyway.

In short, it’s been something of a velvet divorce.

I’d been running the group for about nine years, while my pal came on board about two years ago. We feel we know what works with our members and what doesn’t, and this secession allows us to take our own actions without needing to toe the line of an umbrella organisation with their own differing priorities.

There are still aspects we need to work out. For instance, we have an outstanding question of how to attract new members without being overwhelmed by new recruits. This, however, is not an urgent problem and we’ll work it out in due course.

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Ideas Coming Out My Ears

Occasionally, I sit down to write this blog on a Tuesday only to find my tank of ideas is empty.

At the moment, I have a different problem. I have a list of subjects, but I can’t find a way to start on any of them. For example, today’s entry was meant to be about the problem of plagiarism among poets, but I couldn’t move past the first line.

Instead, let’s pick this up next week, once I’m able to articulate one or more of these ideas.

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Sky Writing

If you’ve flown with Ryanair before, you’ll know the company doesn’t have a generous baggage allowance. So when I head off to Dublin for a few days tomorrow, I’ve had to be selective about what I bring for reading and writing for the journey.

I’m definitely bringing my laptop, which will sit alongside my plastic A4 document holder. This comfortably holds my A5 paper diary and a commercial-sized paperback. My current read is The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman, and it’s the first time in a long time I’ve wanted to read a whole series.

However, I’m going to visit a pal from university on her birthday weekend. We typically swap cards by post, so I’m taking the opportunity to hand it over in person and I’m including a book, which will take up the other half of that document holder. As such, I’ve decided to take my copy of Writing Magazine to read instead, as it’ll slot nicely into the holder.

This gives me just enough room left to slip in some postcards. I know these went out of fashion with the advent of the text message and they’ll likely arrive home long after I do, but I specifically wanted to send some. I’ve already stuck on the address labels, so it’s just a matter of writing the messages and taking them to a post office, no doubt to the bemusement of the cashier.