From the Ada Lovelace Day blog…

There are just two weeks to go until Ada Lovelace Day 2010, and we still have a fair few bloggers, Twitterers, podcasters, web comic artists, and videocasters to recruit. We have 1114 pledgers and need 1958 more people to sign up. That’s a challenge with only 14 days to go, but if everyone recruits just two more people, we’ll still make it!

There’s loads of stuff going on around Ada Lovelace Day this year. We have events in London and worldwide (Copenhagen, Dresden and Montreal, with the promise of others to come). The London Potluck Unconference, to be held at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in Kings Cross, 6.00pm onwards, still has some places left, so please nab yours now, whilst you can.

We have T-shirts on their way – we’re just polishing off the design and hope to get them up and ready for you to buy very soon. We also now have an Offers page which currently carries a 10% discount from the lovely people at AdaFruit Industries. Again, we hope to have more there for you soon!

If you’d like to get involved, then our main need at the moment is promotion. We need to get more people signed up, and here’s how you can help:

• Send a Tweet, update your Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn status
• Write a blog post about Ada Lovelace Day
• Email your friends and/or relevant mailing lists
• Post an item on LinkedIn or Facebook Groups
• Encourage other people to do something to promote Ada Lovelace Day!

There’s more info on how to help, including a Tweet you can just cut and paste, on the blog!

We do have more goodies in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more news!

The entire ensemble is operated by the cat, via sensors:

I am sure Grabbity and Mewton would love one of these!

Although I really enjoyed many of the talks at yesterday’s The Story event, it wasn’t really possible to take notes. One highlight was Sam Conniff from Livity talking about Jody McIntyre, a young man with cerebral palsy, a wicked sense of humuor and a desire to do stuff that is truly inspirational.

I also loved Cory Doctorow’s The Story So Far … and Beyond aka The Right Book, which you can read on The Bookseller. Neil Gaiman did a reading at last year’s WorldCon, which I include here because hell, who doesn’t love listening to Neil read Cory?

But the talk I got the most out of was Sydney Padua’s Graphic Storytelling. I know I’m biased, because Syd’s a good friend and because I love her webcomic, The Thrilling ADventures of Lovelace & Babbage, but I found her talk both interesting and useful. I will certainly be doing little diagrams of my own short stories in future to help me understand them more deeply. Hopefully Syd will put her slides online, as it really does help to see the digrams and comic frames she’s talking about, but I meantime I hope this video will do. Enjoy!

Yesterday I went to Matt Lock’s event, The Story, at The Conway Hall. The day was billed thusly:

The Story is a one-day conference about stories and story-telling, to be held at The Conway Hall, London, on Friday, February 19th, 2010

The Story will be a celebration of everything that is wonderful, inspiring and awesome about stories, in whatever medium possible. We’re hoping to have stories that are written, spoken, played, described, enacted, whispered, projected, orchestrated, performed, printed – whatever form stories come in, we hope to have them here.

The Story is not about theories of stories, or making money from stories, but about the sheer visceral pleasure of telling a story. Whether it is in a game, a movie, a book, or a pub, we’ve all heard or told or been part of stories that have made us gasp, cry or just laugh.

There have never been so many stories, never so many ways to tell them. The Story will be a celebration of just a small sample of them.

Looking back at that, I should have been a lot less surprised that the day was not a day about stories, but a day of stories. The first few speakers all gave readings, which were entertaining in the main, but I was still sitting there waiting to learn something. I know I wasn’t alone in that. I’m really busy at the moment and so I wanted to have not just an entertaining day but an educational one too. I wanted to be able to very clearly justify to myself a day away from work at a time when I have deadlines screaming towards me like juggernaut with an afterburner cranked up to 11.

That isn’t what I got. (Only two talks that I saw, and I did miss two after lunch, weren’t a story of some sort.) Talking to James Bridle afterwards, he nailed it perfectly when he said that there were quite a few people there who were expecting a conference and found themselves at a spoken word event. I was certainly one of those people.

If this had been a Saturday event, I think I would have been a lot more laid back about it, but it was a Friday, a workday. I spoke to a few people who had had to persuade their bosses to give them the day to attend and were wondering what they were going to report back, how they were going to justify that day out of the office. Holding an event on a weekday does change the tenor of it, especially for people who have less sovereignty over their time than the self-employed.

I want to make clear that I still enjoyed the event. Many of the speakers were fab and there was a lot of laughter throughout the day: It really was a lot of fun. The fact that I came to the day with expectations that weren’t met is my problem, not Matt Lock’s. So none of this is a criticism of Matt or the speakers, it’s just that at about 11am I had to readjust my expectations to fit reality. That’s not an easy thing to do, but I managed it and once I’d done it I really relaxed into the rest of the day.

Because so much of the event was readings, I didn’t come away with very many notes. I did pick up two titbits though, which I shall now share with you:

• Don’t become a one-trick pony. If the only way you have to make people laugh is the non sequitur, use it sparingly lest you wear it out.

• When a character makes a choice, it reveals something about that character. Depth of character correlates with the number of choices they make: the more choices, the deeper the character. The way that people make choices is interesting, even if there’s no risk and no reward. When we make people make choices we make a story. When we don’t tell people the answer, we create mystery. (Not telling people the answer is also rude: It’s rude to ask people to make even a simple choice and then not pay attention to their decision.) — Stuart Nolan

James and I also talked about an underlying theme of lying-as-storytelling to the day. Tim Wright’s entire story was based on a period of his life when he was lying to a friend and perhaps also to himself as his marriage broke down. Stuart Nolan also lied when he sat on the stage with a straight razor set against his wrist, implying that if a member of the audience got the answer to a question wrong that he would top himself. Jon Spooner started off talking about storytelling and science in a way that sounded as if he was a genuine science storyteller and that we were going to be treated to the tale of the neutrino, but then took it off down a rather bonkers path that bore no resemblance to reality and which for a while there looked much more like a lie than a story.

There is of course the question about where lying ends and stories begin, but for my money, the difference is complicity. When you tell me a story I know it’s not true but I’m complicit in that untruth – I accept it for what it is because I know what it is. When you tell me a story as if it’s true and want me to believe it, that’s lying. Obviously the line is blurry and as stories can blur into lies, so lies can blur into stories, but I wonder why that theme came out in yesterday’s events.

That complicity can be a double-edged sword, when a story turns sour and yet you’re still laughing. I noticed that a couple of times, when the performers ran a story down a dark and uncomfortable hole that took the audience to places where not everyone was happy, but they laughed nonetheless. Maybe it was my imagination but the tone of the laughter changed at that point, from belly laugh to nervous laugh and I wonder how many people sat there asking themselves why they were laughing.

Fiction can take us where we don’t want to go, a point noted by Annette Mees & Tassos Stevens when they were talking about their play-without-actors, A Small Town Anywhere. They told of how one audience member (who also becomes a player in this 100% participation play) really took his role as a town bureaucrat (I think) on with gusto and wound up as a Town Mayor who collaborated with the invading army. Although he felt that he had been in charge of his own choices at every step of the way, his character had ended up somewhere that was not where he would have chosen at all.

Me, I’m not really into the edgy stuff. Never have been all that interested in using fiction to manipulate my audience so that they find themselves in places they wouldn’t otherwise willingly have gone. So whilst it was interesting to observe this once, it was not something i feel I want to emulate or explore. I’ll leave that to other people.

So no, I didn’t learn very much that will help me improve my storytelling, which is what I had hoped for, but I did get a lot of food for thought and I did enjoy myself.

(Coming shortly: Video of the best presentation of the day by Sydney Padua. I may be biased, but she was fab!)

Last year, over 3500 people pledged to support Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Over 1200 people added their link to our map mash-up and we got lots of coverage in the national press and even appeared on the BBC News Channel. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We wanted you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, and you did. Thank you!

But our work is not yet done. This year we want 3072 people to sign up to our pledge and to write their tribute to women in tech on Wednesday 24 March. We have 197 signatories so far, we just need another 2875, which is where you come in. Please sign the pledge and let all your friends know about it.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, if you do text, audio or video, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

To keep up to date with what is happening:

The Pledge: http://findingada.com/
The Blog: http://blog.findingada.com
on Twitter http://twitter.com/FindingAda
on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=253179284089

Please, join us on Ada Lovelace Day. Together we can raise the profile of women in technology around the world!

I’ve just joined Graze, a service that mails you a box of fruit, nuts and other goodies for the princely sum of £2.99 per box (P&P included). A friend of mine suggested it the other day and I was so curious I signed up there and then. My first box came yesterday, and this is my unboxing video (I fuzzed out a few bits because I forgot to hide my address. Duh!):

If you would like to try Graze, you can get your first box free and the second half price if you sign up with this code: CVDK8FP. There’s no limit to how often that code can be used, so knock yourselves out.

Overall, I was delighted with my Graze box. The fruit and nuts were very fresh and very high quality. More than once I’ve bought nuts from supermarkets only to find that they have already gone rancid and bitter, and it’s always a disappointment. My Graze box was so yummy that I forgot it was called “graze” and not, say, “hoover” or “bolt”. Ahem.

From a value point of view, yes, I probably could buy all the constituent bits cheaper, but the point is that I don’t. And if I do, I forget to eat them. Nothing like that’s going to happen with Graze because it’s just so easy: It totally ticks the ‘lazy’ box!

I’m also relying on it to replace my mid-afternoon trip to the corner shop to buy Coke and a Wispa. Whilst I’m still spending money on Graze, I am not going to spend money on empty calories that taste nice but don’t do me any good at all. As that’s a decision based on economy, health and want, I’m hoping I’ll stick to it this time.

My next box comes tomorrow. I can’t wait.

In April last year I wrote about a start-up called Kachingle for The Guardian. I explained Kachingle thusly:

After registering with Kachingle, users decide on a maximum monthly donation, currently set at $5 (£3.50). When they see something they like, they simply click on the Kachingle “medallion” to initiate a donation. Kachingle tracks their reading habits, tots up how many times they visit each favoured site and divvies up the money proportionally at the end of the month.

It’s equally simple for site owners, who just need a PayPal account and a snippet of code to display the Kachingle medallion. The revenue split gives content providers 80% of the donations, with the rest covering Kachingle’s costs and PayPal fees.

I’ve been quietly keeping an eye on Kachingle to see when they would launch and was excited to get an email from Bill Lazar, Kachingle’s Marketing Engineer, last week saying that they were ready for beta testers to come on board. They will be launching properly in early February.

I think Kachingle is a really interesting idea, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to test it out. That’s the medallion, up there in the top of the right-hand sidebar. All you need to sign up with Kachingle is a PayPal account and a spare $5 a month (although you can spend more if you want to). That works out at £3.07 per month, which even in a recession I think I can spare!

Kachingle sits very nicely with my recent decision to buy as many hand-crafted present for Christmas as I could. In an economic downturn it is more important than ever to support small businesses and I really like the fact that the vast majority of the money I spend on sites like Folksy go to the person who made the item I’ve bought.

But Kachingle is not just a way that I might earn a little spare change, it also gives me a way to support others. I’m hoping that over the course of the next few months, bloggers I enjoy will be able to join up and let me show them my appreciation.

If you want to sign up as a Kachingler or as a Site Owner, get in touch with Kachingle’s beta programme. And, of course, let me know what you think in the comments!

(Cross-posted from Strange Attractor)

If you are interested in buying something from my Folksy shop, please remember that the last day for posting in the UK is 18th December. That’s just five days away!

If, like me, you disapprove of Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill you can:

• Sign the petition (currently at 25,970 signatories – let’s get it up over 50k!)
• Join the Open Rights Group who are fighting this bill
• Write a personal message to Lord Mandelson
• Write to your MP
• Or call your MP and tell them you disagree with summary disconnection

Whatever you do, do it now.

That is all.

Everyone with more than a passing familiarity with the publishing industry knows that writing is a tough gig. For most authors, it’s almost impossible to make writing books your primary job because the income just isn’t enough to live on.

“No one writes for the money,” we are told, but there is a dream that perhaps – just perhaps – you could be a best seller and, if not make it rich, then at least make enough to be comfortable doing what you love. I think that is the dream that many author’s hope will come true. It’s not about being the next JK Rowling or Dan Brown, although no one I know would turn down that kind of income, but about not having to worry about the rent anymore.

As a freelance, I know all about worrying about the rent and I know that for me, financial pressures make it very hard to be in any way creative. I can’t write when I’m worried about money. I’m sure that I’m not alone in that.

So I was saddened to read Declan Burke’s post, saying that he is giving up writing, although I totally understand his position. I’ve never read anything by Declan, but was pointed at his post by friend and author Steve Mosby.

Declan has had two books published, Eightball Boogie and The Big O, both of which, as he puts it “were decently reviewed and both of which sold like cheese-graters at a leper convention”. He has two more books ready for consideration. He goes on:

[...] lately I’ve started to hear a little voice in the back of my head suggesting that it might not be the best thing for me right now were either book to be published. That’s because, barring a miracle, what will happen is this: an offer will be made that will amount, in practical terms, to no more than a couple of months’ worth of mortgage payments. Following acceptance, edits and rewrites will follow (a good thing, by the way, because I like both stories and their characters, and I wouldn’t mind at all getting back into the stories, especially if doing so is going to improve them). Then the pre-publication promotion will begin, which is very time-consuming; then the publication promotion; and then the post-publication promotion. Most of this will be conducted via the web, given that I am (a) not wealthy enough nor remunerated enough to do it in person; (b) married with a small child, of whom I don’t see enough of as it is; (c) a freelance journalist who works a minimum of 70 hours per week at the job, and can’t afford to take time off, let alone spend good mortgage money on hauling my ass around the world at a time when house repossessions are starting to climb at an alarming rate back home.

There’s no doubt that being a freelance journalist is tough at the moment. Budgets for freelance writers are being slashed, if they even survive. Being a freelance journalist and an author is a double whammy of hard work. I sympathise with Declan and the choice he’s had to make.

I was then pointed via Zoe Margolis on Twitter to a couple of articles by author Lynn Viehl about her royalties statements for her book Twilight Fall. Again, I haven’t read Viehl’s books, but Twilight Fall has been in the top twenty of the the New York Times mass market bestseller list, which is usually perceived as quite an achievement.

Lynn has written two posts that give an insight into her earnings, the first in April this year which looks at her first royalties statement for Twlight Fall, and a another earlier this month that looks at her second statement. Now, I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of the numbers, because the details aren’t important. What’s important is this bit from the second post:

So how much money have I made from my Times bestseller? Depending on the type of sale, I gross 6-8% of the cover price of $7.99. After paying taxes, commission to my agent and covering my expenses, my net profit on the book currently stands at $24,517.36, which is actually pretty good since on average I generally net about 30-40% of my advance [which was $50,000]. Unless something triggers an unexpected spike in my sales, I don’t expect to see any additional profit from this book coming in for at least another year or two.

To my mind, Lynn’s take home pay, as it were, is surprisingly low compared to my expectations of what a best seller would get.

I had a bit of a to-and-fro on Twitter about this, and Jared Earle made this point:

@Suw Most importantly, she writes more than 4 books a year. I’d guess she’s on over $200k a year. Poverty line my arse.

Writing four books a year is a big ask even for a pulp fiction writer and having looked at Lynn’s listing on Amazon, it would seem that she does one or two books a year, not “more than four”. I don’t know any authors who could or would want to write four books a year, and several who take one or two years to finish a single book. Volume isn’t a viable option for increasing auctorial income.

There was also dispute in Lynn’s comments about how much her publisher will have made from Twilight Fall. Lynn estimated $250k but a commenter said it would be more like $3k. In my opinion, it’s irrelevant. Whilst there are many arguments to be had about the disparity between what a publisher makes and what the author makes, this isn’t what I’m focusing on.

What I’m looking at is the fact that the New York Times bestseller list tends to be perceived as a mark of success. If that success nets the author just $25k, then the system is horribly broken. I wouldn’t expect a NYT best selling author to be rich, but I would have expected them to be doing a little better than that.

Of course, the system is horribly broken and has been for ages, if not ever. More people want to write books than can possibly be published, most books that are published don’t recoup their advances and most advances are horribly small. One friend of mine was offered an advance of $1500 for a book that was going to take him six months to research and write. Another British friend got £8,000 for his book. A third got £30,000 for, I think, two book deal. They are a long way off JK Rowling.

Writing has always been hard to break into, but you’d think that all this lovely modern technology we have, which can be brought to bear on marketing and promotion and such, would help to even things out a bit. That the internet would level the playing field. Any author can be found on Amazon now, their book instantly found and bought. Yet for many authors, writing has to be a hobby. Their talent has no bearing on this. It’s just how the industry is. Writing is for rich people and retirees.

Do we value the written word so poorly? Do we despise authors so much that we want them to live in poverty? Do we look at our culture and feel that it would be better off without books?

Of course not. The monetary value of something often bears no relationship to its societal value, as Kevin pointed out the other day:

[T]he social value of an activity is often not directly related to the compensation for that activity. If our societies operated like that, teachers would make as much as bankers because shaping the next generation’s minds would be as important as funding the next generation of businesses.

We do value our authors, it’s just that the only time we get to express that value is through the purchase of a book and at all points in the chain there is pressure to drive prices down. That, for readers, is great because it means that we can have bookshelves full of wonderful words without bankrupting ourselves. But it’s hard on authors. The RRP is discounted left, right and centre; books are sold on sale-or-return with the returns getting pulped; market pressure drives prices down.

The same thing has happened with music, but musicians have a bit of a better time than authors because there’s a rich vein to be mined in live performances, merchandise and the like. Some authors can fill out a bookstore for a signing, but many will be happy if a dozen people turn up. T-shirts might well exist for iconic book covers, but without people turning up to readings there’s little chance of flogging T-shirts as an impulse buy.

For a wannabe writer, it all looks rather bleak. Except I think there’s hope, and I don’t know how much but I do see a scrap of blue sky.

People like to make a difference. We like to make people smile, like to think we’ve done something good, even for a stranger. We like to have a positive effect on the world, on people’s lives. Why else would people give money to help a stranger’s kitten get the operation he needs to survive?

You only have to look at Kickstarter for evidence that people really do value creativity. But what’s important with Kickstarter, I believe, is that you’re not just buying something, you’re supporting a process. Without your support, the project just won’t happen. Kickstarter is enabling, empowering and a sea change, especially when linked to print-on-demand (and maybe even freelance book editors).

Maybe Declan could consider a Kickstarter-like project to help him self-publish one of the novels he has written but which isn’t placed with a publisher yet. He clearly has a fan-base who will pre-order it and take the uncertainty out of deciding on a PoD print run. He also has a blog presence that he can use to promote it. And it might even net him more than going the traditional publishing route.

I really can see such a route being valuable for authors whose careers are stalling, especially as for many the stall is nothing to do with their talent and much more to do with how marketing budgets are apportioned. I hope that we’ll see more authors experimenting with new ways of doing things, because the current system is clearly b0rked and we need, collectively, to figure out what come next.

Gedanken experiments can take us so far, but we really need to start getting real world data on how the hell we remake publishing. We need more people like Lynn to publish their royalty statements so that we can all understand what’s going on here. Yes, lots of insiders know the deal, but us outsiders don’t and we need to know so that we can make informed (insofar as is possible) choices for our future potential careers. And the more data we can gather, the better.

And as for me? I’ll be putting my lack-of-money where my mouth is very soon.

[en]

[cy]

Dw i wedi instalio’r Basic Bilingual Wordpress Plug, gan fy ffrind Steph Booth. Mae’n gwneud dau peth: mae’n creu bocs iaith, a bocs am excerpt yn yr ail iaith. Efallai bydda i’n danfon fy Ngymraeg tipyn bach mwy nawr. Pah, dw i wedi dweud hon bob amser.

I know I’m not exactly completely fluent with Welsh yet, but I find myself now learning Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, whichever you want to call it. I developed a bit of an interest before the hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure was found in Staffordshire, but wow, what an amazing inspiration that is!

I’ve started a new category, so if you just want to read this stuff on Old English then you can just use this RSS feed. I’ll be using the blog to do what I used to do for Welsh (and should do more of, to be honest) which is to collate interesting links and information and maybe even practice my Old English skills.

The book/CD I’m using is Mark Atherton’s Teach Yourself Old English which is so far excellent. It gets you translating and pronouncing Old English right from the off. It’s quite surprising to me how much similarity there is between Old and Modern English, although I am sure that the grammar is going to be very different indeed!

I’ve also finally found a use for Facebook, which is that Dr Stuart Lee runs a Facebook group for people learning Old English, which I think could be really quite useful. Stuart Lee is a lecturer at Oxford University who teaches introductions to Anglo-Saxon history, culture, literature, language and life. I rather wish that I could actually experience Lee’s lectures for myself because the recordings he has put online are great!

Lee has two sets of materials in iTunes:

• Medieval English, which include four “Old English in Context” lectures, audio tours of the Anglo-Saxon materials available to see at the British Museum and British Library, as well as two readings, from Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.

• An Introduction to Old English, which is being recorded this term and includes audio, video and Lee’s slide deck. There are currently three lectures in the iTunes University section, but I think there are more to come.

Both are excellent. Lee is very entertaining as well as being able to communicate very clearly. He has also put together an Old English Course Pack, which is a collection of annotated and translated Old English texts, along with images of the original manuscripts. It looks incredibly useful and I can’t wait to have enough of a grasp on the language to really get the best from it.

There’s a lot more stuff online, of course, and I have a very long way to go before I have found and understood it all. But it does remind me of what I felt like when I started learning Welsh and was searching for (mainly non-existant) Welsh learning content. Perhaps it’s about time I revamped Clwb Malu Cachu too.

Meantime, I shall leave you with this reading of The Ruin, an Anglo-Saxon poem about the changes wrought by time.

My Dad made us a cat wheel so that Mewton and Grabbity can burn off a little energy – energy that they would otherwise burn off at 2am by jumping up and down on our heads. This is a prototype, made of steel, hardened woven kevlar and, yes, duct tape. The wheel is whisper quiet and spins incredibly smoothly (possibly a bit too smoothly!).

I picked the wheel up from Dorset yesterday and we unpacked it and pretty much left the kittens to just get used to it being around. They don’t seem overly bothered by its presence, so we tried to introduce them to the idea of running on it today, using the age old tactic of bribery and corruption. Our attempts met with a modicum of success, but I think it might take a while for them to build up the confidence that they can just jump on, run for a bit, and then jump off again, but I’m pretty sure they’ll get there!

The next prototype will be prettier and if anyone wants one, we’ll sell it at cost plus a wee bit for labour. (This one cost udner £150.) Just get in touch if you’re interested.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to do my self-publishing project for Revenge of the Book of Hay. I’m constantly riddled with doubt: Is it going to be good enough? Will enough people be interested? How will I convince people to support me given I have no track record? What exciting things could I add to the sponsorship options to entice people in?

Robin is offering a “surprise”, which I think is a great idea, but what sort of a surprise could I offer? A picture of me saying “Boo!”? A pop-up picture of me saying “Boo!”? A paperclip and elastic band contraption that shoots a pictures of me saying “Boo!” out of the book when it’s open? (I give all due credit and deference to Kevin Marks for that idea.)

Now Cory Doctorow has given me even more ideas in his article for Publishers Weekly to appropriate. Cory is self-publishing a collection of short stories, With a Little Help, as a free ebook and audiobook, but also as a print-on-demand trade paperback (via Lulu), a premium hardcover edition, has sold a specially commissioned new story (at a fee of $10,000) and is looking for other income streams such as maybe including ads.

The details of the packages are interesting. The trade paperbacks will have four different covers, and there’ll be a custom-cover package for people who want to run events or give-aways.

The premium hardcover really is premium, at $250 for a limited run of 250 copies. It will be printed by Oldacres of Hatton Gardens [Suw makes mental note] and hand bound by Wyvern Bindery [walked past them the other day, makes another mental note]. Each will be embossed with an illustration and will come with an SD card containing the full text of the book and all the audio. Furthermore, every book will have “unique endpapers made from paper ephemera solicited from writer friends, ranging from William Gibson and Neil Gaiman to Kelly Link and Eileen Gunn.”

Now, Cory does have bucketfuls of contacts that he can call upon to send him ephemera or help him out. Some of those people are very famous, some are just quite famous, and some are people he’s worked with before. He’s been doing this for a while so it’s no surprise that he has a fatter address book and, as an already successful author, he has a much deeper understanding of how the book creation process works than I do.

I’m going to have to get to grips with that process myself, and I’ll admit it’s a bit daunting. I don’t know who of the people that I do know has typography or cover design skills. But there are plenty of great ideas in Cory’s piece that I shall be half-inching right this second. A hardback edition is a great idea, for example.

But right now, I need to put details aside and just get enough nerve together to launch the project.

I have been on a lengthy crusade against the evil that is sugar, but must confess to mainly being on the losing side. The summer has been quite stressful and where once I lost my appetite when stressed now I seem to feel constant hunger. Part of that hunger is down to the amount of sugary food that I was eating – for some reason sugar makes me feel hungrier, not less hungry.

Anyway, various schemes to cut down on the number of times I was popping to the corner shop for a Coke and Wispa have failed. I’m not great at willpower and have even less of the stuff when stressed (although that’s because, as I’m sure I’ve said before, you only have a limited amount of willpower, although you can increase it with practice). Going cold turkey failed. Simply trying to cut down has failed. So time for some creative thinking.

Kev and I have joined a new gym which is larger and closer to our new flat than the old one was. It’s a 10 min walk through the park each morning, which is a most pleasant way to bookend one’s work-out. This new gym has machines that weren’t available to us in the old gym, including a crunchie machine (for your abdominals) and a lower back resistance machine.

My new scheme combines and reinforces gym and a reduction in sugar intake and it’s really very simple.

I can only buy treats at the shop when I have burnt off their calorific equivalent at the gym.

It’s very simple and so far it seems to be working. It encourages me to work harder at the gym and gives me some idea of how many calories you actually work off. It turns out that I have been burning relatively few calories at the gym, which would explain why I’m fitter but still getting fatter. In our morning workouts, which are only half an hour long, I spend half my time doing resistance work and the rest on the recumbent bike, treadmill or cross-trainer. In that latter 15 mins, I tend to burn only about 75 kcal.

If you’ve ever tried to find a sugary treat that comes in at under 75 calories you’ll know that it’s basically impossible. A can of Coke is 139 kcal and a Wispa is 210 kcal. People have advised me to go for dark chocolate because it’s less sugary. That might be so, but a large bar of Green & Black’s 70% Cocoa is over 500 kcal.

This means that it takes me two workouts during the week to earn enough kcal to have a Coke, and three to earn a Wispa. Erk! I don’t think I’d ever really realised how much effort I need to expend in order to work off one of my favourite treats but now I know it really has changed the way that I think about them. I always knew that these were empty calories – there’s no nutritional value in them at all. They’re stupid calories. But, well, a kcal is bigger than I thought it was!

The nice thing about this is that I can still have my treats, but only when I’ve earnt them. So I don’t need to go cold turkey and I don’t really need willpower. I just need to make sure that I get up early enough to go to the gym and that I work hard whilst I’m there.

I really do hope that this will result in the loss of a few *cough* pounds because I’m heavier now than I’ve ever been. Trousers that were really loose on me once now fit snugly. I really can’t let that go on otherwise I’ll be a blimp before you know it.

So wish me luck and here’s hoping this tactic really does work.

I hope Grabbity doesn’t see this – she might get ideas.

I’ve had cats all my life, including some kittens, and I’ve never caught one in the act of getting their adult teeth. Usually kittens teethe, swallow their milk teeth and the new ones are there to fill in behind so there’s nothing much to spot. But I was surprised to see Grabbity – who has been chewing on everything in the flat she can wrap her teeth around – has two sets of fangs in her upper jaw.

I first spotted them on Friday, so I’m going to keep an eye on them and if the deciduous teeth (that’s milk teeth to you and me – I had no idea that deciduous applied to anything other than trees! does that make her permanent teeth ‘evergreen’?) don’t fall out within the next week I’ll be talking to the vet to see if they need pulling.

Meantime, they do look rather impressive!

I can’t quite believe it, but I’ve started my Christmas shopping early this year. I mean, it’s only just October and we haven’t even had Hallowe’en yet, but already I’m looking for presents for people. This is mainly because of the knock-on effects of recent strikes by Royal Mail workers which have resulted in a huge backlog of mail, delaying many items. The strikes haven’t been well covered by the media, who mainly seem to want to just bash the strikers, so it’s hard to say where we’re at, but there is a chance there will be more strikes and that could make Christmas shopping online quite hellish.

I have decided this year to buy as many of my presents as possible from Folksy, a new shopping site for artists and crafters. I really like the idea that when I spend 25 quid on something from Folksy, I know that the vast majority of that money is going to end up in the pocket of the person who made the item. Just 20p goes to Folksy, and PayPal take their fees, but the rest helps the maker have a better Christmas themselves.

There is some absolutely wonderful stuff there too. Browsing last night, I saw just a fraction of the items for sale, but favourited a whole bunch as possible presents. All I have to do now is marry up the things I’ve seen with the people I need to buy for.

There’s this Raku bowl, by Jude Allman.

Or this cashmere scarf, by Ellens Knitwear.

Honestly, I could spend my Christmas budget several times over without even breaking a sweat.

Of course, I have my shop on Folksy too and I’m hoping that I’ll sell enough jewellery there, either through people buying what’s in the shop already or ordering a custom-made piece, that I’ll have enough in my PayPal kitty to cover my shopping spree.

So if you want to support British artists and crafters and help them to have a wonderful Christmas, do think about buying handmade presents. And if you find things you like on Folksy, do tell your friends!