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Nice plug
http://www.konaworld.com/index_en.cfm for Family Cycling from Kona.
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Pres. Quote
Here's the sort of thing I like to hear U.S. presidents say:
"I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British, during World War Two, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said 'we don't torture', when all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And the reason was that Churchill understood you start taking shortcuts, and over time, that corrodes what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country."
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Climate change requires no action
I haven't posted about climate change for a while. The last time I did, nearly all of the many comments were about how we don't need to do anything. That seemed strange to me given the level of scientific consensus to the contrary. And what was also interesting was that everyone had a different reason for why no action was required. And recently I've been reading about even more reasons to do nothing. If you have a favourite do-nothing justification that's not on this list, maybe you'd post a comment.
Continue reading "Climate change requires no action" »
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A wonderful thing
Click 'continue reading' to look at this marvellous thing. Mark, a freelance comic artist and illustrator, enjoyed The Affinity Bridge and has taken the time to create an illustration of it. Aren't there some super people in the world?
Continue reading "A wonderful thing" »
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Snowsales double whammy
Last week the reporting was late from LBS so this week you get two weeks for the price of one. And since it's free anyway, that's even better value, right? Plus you get a rant about the daftness of discounts from me, which is nice.
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One book, two twins, three minute review
I mentioned CompletelyNovel the other day, and wouldn't you know it, they recently video-reviewed one of our books in their inimitably quirksome way. This particular review is by CompletelyNovel's Anna and her twin sister, George. They took a crack at Underlife by Robert Finn, and they liked it. And as they point out, you can read it For Frees, because the publisher (that's us) has made it available to download on a Creative Commons licence.
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That's better
I was grumbling a bit at how hard the London Book Fair was: lots of travelling, seven hours of standing up... the need to smile. But then I've just read what my friend Verity was doing yesterday on her little island and I no longer have any complaints. (warning: it's a bit gross.)
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Yes
An Art Deco keyboard. Mmmmmm. Surely something like that would ensure one's writing was stylish. Click on the picture to go to the site.
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LBF day 3
One word: Michael Tamblyn. (I *know*. It is the humour.) He's my hero - I have watched his speech a gazillion times. Crucial viewing if you haven't already seen it.
PS. I'm not that fat in real life. Nor do I have such stupid hair. And there's normally a baby in that sling. Anna had taken him for a walk around the block so I could get a word in edgeways.
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Barnes has last word on ebooks
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LBF day 2
Picking up the mantle where Rob left off, I report on LBF day 2. Another good but roundly knackering day. We met the new owner of our printer Haynes, now JF Print, and were thoroughly impressed with the steps the company is taking to become ever stronger. I think a trip down to Yeovil will come in the not too distant future. Rob and I saw an old chum from our Superdrug days - it's getting on for 15 years since we'd last seen each other which is slightly horrifying. We had some rights interest from some pretty cool publishers. And on the Onix Central side of things, Robin had about a million meetings, all highly positive.
And me? Rowan and I went together, so I arrived late and left early. But it was long enough to see some old friends, to make some new ones and to get that sense of invigoration, of new plans and opportunities, that comes from chatting and swapping notes at the Fair.
And now, flicking through the papers whilst winding down for a good night's sleep in preparation for the third and final day, I read this:
"Astronomer Arnaud Belloche said: "It [ethyl formate] does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries."
Quality reporting at its finest.
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LBF
So, Day One of the London Book Fair is over. All I had to do was stand up and occasionally hold a conversation and yet it seemed strangely exhausting. It's probably the contrast with my usual day of sitting down and occasionally pushing a button. Lots of interesting people have come by our tiny stand (which is in the IPG section of the floor). We've also had visits from a couple of our authors (I'm not contrasting that with 'interesting people', merely getting specific). Paula Brackston (pictured with Anna) has even gone to the extent of offering to fetch coffee when we needed it. We also had a chat to the people of CompletelyNovel about what it is they do. I think I'm going to find out more but you can go and explore their site for yourself right now. There are books to read for free online - or you can buy a printed copy. You can likewise find an online home for your writing and have help self-publishing it and selling it through the site. And there's a community aspect with reviews and discussions and virtual book clubs and blogs. Plus, what imaginative new venture would be complete without a collection of three-minute video book reviews complete with 'helpful' advice (I use those quotes advisedly)? I think the video book reviews are really a Machiavellian ploy to make Anna Lewis and her accomplices there seem likable. And it's working.
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Oh wow
This looks totally awesome! I can't wait!
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Shiny new manual
I've just published the new 160-page Onix Central Handbook. It's pretty...
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Delay
Sorry there's no snowsales yet. LBS have not updated their systems. I don't know when they will.
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Corvid Tales
Leila has mentioned a certain book to me a couple of times, and as you longtime readers know, I'm interested in how brainy crows are, so why wouldn't I want to read the true story of a lady who ends up raising a rook and a magpie? Turns out there are no reasons. So if you like the same things I do, pick yourself up a copy of Corvus by Esther Woolfson. Esther writes in an almost pedantically eloquent style that on its own wouldn't tell you whether the book came out last year or in the 1890s. Initially I thought her refusal to be hurried through a sentence might annoy me (as you know, I have a hair-trigger prose allergy that can easily flare up) but very quickly it becomes relaxing. Unlike much catchy, cool, enthusiastic writing, this won't give you a headache. You start to feel like you're in a vintage rowing boat, gliding downstream, reaching out to brush the hanging blossom while someone tells you about the peculiarities of their life and the wonders of the natural world as they pertain to the mysteries of crows. And that makes for a good book.
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I don't know why it bugs me, but it does.
It's all one word. All one word. ALL ONE WORD. ONE. WORD.
It is not Snow.
It is not Snow Books.
It is all one word.
One word.
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Hello, my name's Emma
and I'm addicted to domain names.
Snowblog readers, it's over to you. As my many, many domain names come up for renewal over the next few months I need your help to decide which ones to keep and which ones to ditch. I have lost all objectivity about it now.
First up: FreeBeeBooks.com. Worth it? You decide. Comments most welcome!
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One disappointment after another
MEP. The post has arrived, bringing, just in time, my lovely AI books for the book fair. And some bugger at the Post Office has managed to bash the parcel so effectively that all three copies have a huge fold down the middle.
I am really upset. (I mean, I am upset as far as one can be upset by a ruined book.) I was looking forward to having these gorgeous articles to show off our lovely books, and now they have a big fold down the middle. I have them currently in the nipping press, trying to de-crease them. Later, I will get the iron out.
This is Lulu's fault. Poor packaging. I was getting on so well with them until now. FAIL.
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Helps how?
Just got a mailshot email from Business Link. 'Urgent support for failing businesses', it says. I am mildly interested. I mean, if they're sending out bags of money, might be worth reading on. So I do. It reads:
"We have recently launched a new Rapid Response service to provide urgent help to established businesses struggling through the recession." Oh good. Nice to see. What is the nature of this urgent help, I wonder?
Their idea of help, as I read on, is to provide help with dissolving your business. Oh. Oh that's just what a struggling business is most in need of. Well done The Government for being not only useless, but mildly offensive to boot.
There are, in their defence, other sevices that they offer, like advice. Here's a fantastically useful piece:
"One thing that is critical is to be on top of your financial performance and costs, managing cash flow and having proper systems to monitor these - don’t take your eyes off that." I'm sorry to be rude, but - no shit? Honestly, it infuriates me that people think they're helping - and get paid for 'helping' - but in fact parrot the blindingly obvious. Take the advisor's salaries and gift it to companies in the form of short term interest free working capital loans - that would be of immeasurably more use.
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Family Cycling
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A lovely review
Here's a lovely review from Amazon of our current book of the website, Paris Immortal Absolutions.
Continue reading "A lovely review" »
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Is it up to me?
Rob's on holiday. I haven't spoken to him since Doctor Who special at the weekend, but I can't leave the Snowblog without a review of it for much longer. He'll do a proper one on his return.
My review.
It was pants. Well, at the least, it was like a pantomine. "What the blazes is going on," exclaims our over-wrought heroine. Poor David Tennant, doing the very best he can with a script which was astonishing in its lack of ambition.
Anyway, Rob can tear it to shreds more eloquently upon his return.
Update, a second after posting.
Oh, there's Rob, posting below! Hi! Hi old pal!
Continue reading "Is it up to me?" »
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Verity's Island
See that picture? That's a little island in the Bristol Channel where my friend Verity now lives. She's volunteering there as part of her training to be a conservation warden and she's going to be there for most of the next six months. She was about ninety percent persuaded to keep a blog of her adventures before I even tried to sway her in that direction. She's only been there about a week, so if you want follow her island experiences from the start head over to http://atraineewarden.blogspot.com/ now. Part of me is a little hesitant about directing so many professional i-dotters and t-crossers towards the words of a self-confessed bad speller, but bear in mind that Verity undoubtedly knows a lot more about critters than you do, and that she's grabbing a hasty few minutes on the communal computer at the end of each busy day. She's hoping to figure out a way to get some of her photos and drawings up soon, which I'm looking forward to, but the island's low-speed internet connection is currently holding that up. I hope I won't be the only person who will get a kick out of comparing my day to one that involves counting butterflies, collecting driftwood, copying down the day's weather report and checking to see how many eggs the hens have laid.
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Baby Ponies
The little Shetland ponies in the field across from me are having babies at the moment. Here's what one born last week looks like. Click on the image to get a bigger version.
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Snowsales
A day early today. Blame the baby jesus.
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New podcast
There's a lovely shiny new podcast waiting for you to subscribe to. Go to your iTunes and into the iTunes store, search for Onix Central and click on subscribe, or click here. Enjoy! Requests for topics most welcome.
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Thomas Emson
Great interview here. Find out what's in store from our wonderful horror writer!
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Oops
Oh! That last blog post was number 1500. Oops. We should have done something noteworthy. Oh well.
This blog post is to say that Mslexia magazine have done a nice little profile on us this month, on page [looks...] oh, there's no page number. Well, the column is green and on the other side of the page is a big toad. That should help you to track it down. Somewhere in the middle.
It includes nice mentions of The Book of Shadows, The Other Eden and The Letters. And Mslexia is always worth buying, anyway.
Sorry about missing post 1500. We'll throw a party for number 2000.
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Celebrate those rejections
I wrote a guest post on why you should be glad to be rejected, some of the time.
I hope that link works. The last two I've done have had to be fixed by Rob. Three would be beyond the pale.
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Free and quirksome
When Leila Johnston isn't writing books for us, and doing a million other things, some of which seem to involve being on television, or scriptwriting for the radio, she puts her few remaining minutes a day not into sleep, but into editing and publishing an eclectic, monthly, internet-only publication called All The Rage. An appreciable part of every edition is humorous, but it's a whole heap of other things besides. It's scruffy and unpredictable and it's just there waiting for you to read it - or even contribute to it, if you can manage to not be rubbish. Go, browse, pick an edition at random and start reading. If you find something you don't like, keep looking; there's something for everyone*. Link.
*Well, obviously that's not literally true, but you know what I mean. There's enormous and impressive variety.
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Our allies
Ooh, here's a thing I'm going to regret saying. It seems to me that all countries do bad things, but when Israel does them, criticising them is denounced as anti-semitic. Well, I don't care who bombs civilians, I'm not in favour of it. I don't like it when Britain does it and I don't like it when Israel does it. If we'd taken Israel's approach to security, when the IRA let off a bomb in a London pub, we'd have flown a couple of helicopter gunships into Belfast and fired some missiles at a few blocks of flat we thought militant republicans might live in as a way of persuading the community to police their own. Fortunately, this sort of behaviour occasionally gets criticised by people who it's hard to accuse of anti-semiticism, i.e. Israelis. See the Guardian's story 'Terror without mercy' here.
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Interview
A lovely interview with the (frankly ravishing) Paula Brackston here.
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New short story
Oh, do read this - a great new short story from the wonderful Thomas Emson. And hey! You can listen to it too. Bargain.
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Sea creature and chips
jellyfish salad
Oh bums. I recently wrote about how I don't eat meat but I do eat fishes. Partly that was for reasons of empathy (I don't really empathise with fish) and partly environmental. So I was bit disappointed to read an article in New Scientist about how the remaining stocks of edible fish in the oceans are plummeting. We've eaten nearly all of them. So we're shifting to littler fish and hence thinning them out too. My first thought was that this would leave the oceans half empty, but apparently it's more complicated than that. Fish eat jellyfish and squid. Without the fish, their slimy prey go into overdrive. And we're still going to need to eat, so... The New Scientist article does a lovely job of guiding one through the process of eating jellyfish instead of cod or squid instead of tuna. Yum.
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Snowsales
Are up in which I reveal a cruel coincidence.
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Family Cycling
The latest Snowbook has hit the shops: Family Cycling. Here's an extract. I think this is going to be very, very popular.
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TV
I sometimes get confused: what are we here to talk about? Joss Whedon? Or was it indie publishing? Well, until I can get clear on that, I'd better make sure you're kept up to date with Joss-related news. Dollhouse will air in the UK on the (what now?) Sci Fi UK channel on Tuesday, May 19th at 9pm. Hmmm, that'll ensure it's a hit. For those of you who didn't know there was a Sci Fi UK channel, it's buried on your cable or Sky box planner somewhere, half a dozen pages below all the channels you've heard of.
And while we're on the subject of TV, Anna (the most blogwardly reticent of the Snowbooks team) will actually be in the UK on the 11th of April when the Doctor Who Easter Special is on. That means I won't have to record it, make a DVD, mail it to the U.S. and wait ten days for us to agree about how awful it was. Isn't that great?
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Remember when?
Isn't this great? A search engine for a more civilised age. Click on the picture to see what I'm talking about (if you don't know). It comes from here (via boingboing of course).
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It's late, I have to go to bed
But before I do I must tell you about Microsoft Accounting Pro. Call me crazy but I'm so excited to have discovered it. I have used Sage and Quickbooks and despise them both for their obfuscation and lack of beauty. But MS's Accounting software is just about perfect. My god, I even did a few journals in it today without screwing them up. I set up four currencies, just like that, and amended a template so it looks just as I wanted it - easily, in MS Word! It has an excellent help file. I can import all my contacts from Outlook, should I want to. And I think I've barely scratched the surface.
I heartily recommend that you check it out. There's a free trial should you want a tinker.
Five stars, two thumbs up, fine holiday fun.