Writer T. James' Exploration of Words, on the Internet.
Post fight, it’s time to face forward and hang up the gloves.
We all know the date: Thursday, June 23rd, 2016: Independence Day or the End of Civilisation, depending on your worldview. Reaction to the Leave victory varied, of course, but most common was the initial shock. For those backing Remain, it came as a hammer blow. The lost referendum was, for many, like opening the front door to find two police officers standing on the step:
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Every so often a mere mortal mind is visited by an idea of such transcendent magnificence its origin can only be extra-spacial.
Let me present the World Premier of The Boob-in-ator™—the twenty first century’s latest and greatest must-have devices—and another reason why women think that men are boys who never grew up…
The best pieces of equipment for the holidaymakers are always small and have multiple uses. As I’m on holiday this week I thought I would pass on my recommendation for a useful travel aid that few people seem to know about. It is portable, versatile, mouldable, and edible—ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a round of applause for your friend and mine, the underappreciated BLOCK OF LARD. Continue reading
Next week I’m on holiday, and this got me thinking… My online writing friends are an unusually mobile and outgoing lot; some of them like to travel, even when they don’t have to. As anyone knows, spending more time on social networks than penning words is essential for the serious writer. But when you are on-the-go, how do you keep writing and hooked up to the intravenous drip-feed of tweets, posts, and comments that we all need so desperately? Today’s interconnected technology would appear to provide the answer, but other’s experiences have found it wanting. In this post you will find the solution—innovation isn’t dead—read on and be amazed! Continue reading
So what do you do when your creativity goes to sleep? How do you respond when readers tell you that your character’s actions and speech are inconsistent and erratic? How do you smooth out those kinks in your plot? When your creativity implodes, rolls over and dies; or when it’s buzzing along so fast on turbo-charge that your characters morph and change faster than Play-Doh being pummelled by a hyperactive four-year-old; when your plot has more holes in it than a rusty cheese grater—it’s time to stop writing, give the right side of your brain a rest, and reach for your internal Mr Spock. Continue reading
Since I self-published my first eBook in March this year there has been around 200,000 books added to Amazon’s Kindle eBook store; that’s over 65,000 new titles per month. If my guess is correct, then this may only be the start and the floodgates have yet to open. Continue reading
A month ago I posted my first ever guest blogger Faye Ling, who brought with her her ‘special’ personality, way of expressing herself, and unique insights. But no matter how unique Faye is, the strangest thing about that blog post was that Faye isn’t a real person. How many of you this will actually be news to I don’t know, but after a few interesting email exchanges this week I thought I’d better put the record straight: Faye Ling is a man; in fact, Faye Ling is me.
Inspiration for a character can come from the strangest places.
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This week I found a new toy—the I Write Like online writing analyser that apparently compares your writing style to those of famous authors. So I decided to experiment, to see what it could tell me about my style and maybe even a little about my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. The results were quite interesting (at least for me).
I thought it would be fun to cut-and-paste in pieces I’d written from different genres. Before we start, I thought I’d include the necessary reality-check and disclaimers: I’ve no idea about the algorithms they use under the hood, so I can’t comment on how accurate or thorough the analysis is. Also, the analyser doesn’t profess to assess the quality of the writing it looks at, so however much I would like to be able to claim my writing is as good as these authors, the analyser gives me no basis for believing that claim, however much I would like it to. Continue reading
This week I am hosting fellow writer, Faye Ling, who is new to the online world, and blogging in particular. Blackmail is such a dirty word, so let’s just say I owed her a few favours that she recently called in, and so today I ‘ve been forced to offer her this opportunity to try her hand at blogging. She is outspoken, often controversial, and takes no prisoners. Before I nervously hand over to my first guest blogger, I feel the need to issue a disclaimer:
EDITORIAL NOTE FROM T. JAMES: The views expressed in the following guest post are entirely those of its author, Miss Faye Ling. I have given editorial control to Faye for the purposes of this post. Except for her use of expletives, which I have edited, I take no responsibility for the opinions she expresses, or the way in which she chooses to express them. The words are entirely hers and in no way reflect my own beliefs or opinions. After some negotiation, I also managed to get Faye to agree to issue the following statement (although she has paraphrased my original wording):
“T. James has insisted that I say up front that I had no one in particular in mind when I wrote this post. I mean, I can think of several people this post applies to, but for some reason T. James has refused to introduce me to anyone he knows online, so obviously I’m not thinking of any of you. But because the hard-of-thinking assume that any negative generalisation somehow applies to them as an individual, any offense taken is completely the fault of the idiot choosing to be offended. Go and get some therapy for your low self-esteem. If you have low self-esteem and you aren’t prepared to embrace the darkside, do not read this post. If you’ve had a sense-of-humour bypass in the last twelve months, do not read this post. In fact, it is probably just better for you if you do not read this post.” Continue reading
Everyone says, “Make a backup. Always make a backup,” of everything—photos, files, music. Why? Unless you have been living under a rock for the last thirty years everyone knows that computers fail, hard-drives fail. Breath on them funny, look at them funny, switch them on when the wind is in the wrong direction, and they’ll break, crash, and take all your valuable information with them. They are the weak link in the chain, right? Wrong.
Who says, “Beware of the Cloud?” In the mindset of most people, myself included, cloud storage has been touted as the panacea for all our storage woes. It seems everyone, Apple, Google, Microsoft and hundreds of smaller companies, are heralding cloud storage as the great Fluffy Knight in the Sky, our protector and saviour, guardian of our virtual world. Computer fails, it doesn’t matter, just download your stuff from the cloud. All is well.
Then you have your completely online solutions, e.g. Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365, Blogger, WordPress and others: Don’t just backup to the cloud, but do all your work there, reports, emails, everything—your information is safe with us. Is it? Continue reading
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