While struggling a little with the major projects, I’ve amused myself with rearranging the site menu a little, creating a sub page and section for short stories no-one would really be interested in.
First offering is an odd little tale entitled ‘Christmas in Space‘. I’ve got a few others, but I’m wondering whether I’m brave enough to let them out into the public domain. For what that’s worth.
Times are tight, as is the money supply, and this year we’ll be sending gifts and money to close friends and family as usual. As well as sponsorship for youngest daughter, who is firewalking for charity this year. But with the kids (Grown up young women really) and other family on the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific, Angie and I will be making this festive season a very low key affair. We’ll have a guest and friends over for Christmas eve and day but won’t be making a big thing of it. Don’t think I’ll bother with a tree. I might string up a few lights, but that’s all. I’ve even managed to avoid the day job Christmas party. Which gets me out of the interminable gift giving I can’t afford to people I hardly know. Fine if you’re well paid and have money to spare. Not so fine if you aren’t and haven’t. My boss was surprised when I told her I didn’t want to come, but respects what I do, at least enough to acquiesce. She even sat down as if expecting an explanation. I just hunkered down to begin my shift and said it would take a decade to explain why this time of year always makes me uncomfortable. Which it does.
This doesn’t mean I hate Christmas or any other time of year. No, I say live and let live. Respect the rights of others. If they want to participate, fine. Just don’t judge me for wanting to have a quiet time instead. Maybe work a little, go easy on the whole conspicuous overconsumption thing, smile affably, nod, walk on by. Chill away from the fuss, noise and ‘fun’. Most of it’s for the kids anyway.
John Grisham has a little novella called ‘Skipping Christmas’ about a couple who want to take a break from interminable ‘celebration’ and go on a cruise. Like all these cautionary tales it doesn’t end well for Luther and his wife. Charles Dicken’s ‘Christmas Carol’ and other like works of emotional blackmail are, like Santa, fantasies for small children. “Be like everyone else or bad things will happen.” Is the implied threat. Real life is usually somewhat more forgiving. ‘Couple go away for Christmas, save money and have a really nice relaxing time’ wouldn’t have made much of a story.
As I shall be working on and off, as well as putting in time and energy on my major writing projects, the TV will stay tuned to Netflix and YouTube. We’ll spend time with close friends. New year calls for study, when I intend to improve my various Technical Writing certifications. Writing novels is all very well, but it’s not very good at paying the rent.
There’s been a trend for some time with TV shows for episodes given punnish titles intimating brief hints about the episode content. While with ‘Stars’ I went for the rather dry numerical convention like with a technical document. In the Cerberus series I’ve taken a leaf out of the TV playbook, and gone with the pun. Not so much in ‘Head of the Beast’, but definitely in ‘A Falling of Angels’. Three sample chapter headings being ‘Breaking the bad’, ‘The End of a Beginning’, and ‘Lloegr’ (Which means ‘England’ or more poetically ‘Lost Lands’ in Welsh). For an additional example, I’m currently writing a chapter entitled ‘Travelling in Hope class’ which starts to take my hero back to his beginning, and final confrontation with the current bad guys. Possibly. While pursued by another bunch of bad guys who have him pegged as a terrorist. Kind of.
It’s complicated. A lot of fun to write, but quite involved.
I’m sitting in our front room, looking out towards the islands, watching a very fine first snow fall. Tiny, uncertain flakes wending their way to the ground. Wandering with air currents, mostly down, sometimes up, but down they come, settling in small crystalline spots, lining up like migrating birds on top of the deck rail, blanketing windscreens in translucent white, but as yet not braving the ground.
Our local Ravens don’t seem to mind the extra crowded air. They sit on the wires as if critically examining each flake, discussing the merits of each ghostly crystal. “That one settle?”, “Nah, won’t last long.” before arguing and clumsily flapping off to some new perch.
So here I sit, dog at my feet, watching the visibility crowd slowly in, daydreaming of sunnier times before I finish my tea and start work.
For Christmas this year I’ve decided; I’m treating myself to a full copy of Corel WordPerfect. I’ve always liked its functionality as a piece of word processing software, and liked the way I could always get deep into the code of a document. Unlike Microsoft Word, or Lotus, or OpenOffice which are basically very similar. All right, they’re fine for the basics, but when you need to turn out a document untrammelled by spurious code, you can’t beat WordPerfect. The ‘Reveal Codes’ command is the kicker as far as I’m concerned. It reaches the parts all the others can’t or won’t. Takes the Bloat out of the Bloatware, and makes a nice clean job of it. Especially when outputting XML or HTML formats for web based documentation.
I’ve always liked WordPerfect for its virtuosity as a piece of word processing software, although it requires a higher level of expertise than all the others put together. Yes, maybe the menu system looks a bit complex and old fashioned, but once mastered, you can do far more with it as an application. What has brought this desire to change on is my increasing frustration with the self correcting facilities in Word, OpenOffice or Lotus. When saving across formats, I tend to lose language settings and special characters, which in documents over 50,000 words long means a lot of extra proofing and re-reading. I’ve tried switching these features off, but even then MS-Word, OpenOffice Write and Lotus keep on losing the details, which is very frustrating. I actually gave up working in MS-Word when I found code fragments creeping in and ruining anything up to two months of work during document conversion. Yes, fine, Word can output PDF’s, it’s fairly intuitive, but because the code structure is not completely transparent and correctable, Word and its various clones won’t let you clean the whole document up properly. This has previously cost me time, money and energy that I could better spend elsewhere. There’s also the issue that WordPerfect is often the choice of Law Offices because it is more secure than most.
With the climax of ‘A Falling of Angels’ looming on my mental horizon, I’d far rather be writing than constantly correcting stuff that was already corrected.
Martyn K Jones 