KaraTankee

Well, you know, KaraTe is "empty hand". KaraOke is "empty orchestra". So KaraTankee is "empty tank."

Yep, the new aquarium! Collected from the supplier Tuesday evening, cabinet assembled yesterday and the tank washed out and put in position, and you might just be able to make out a layer of "black glass" gravel at the bottom (so strictly speaking I guess it doesn't qualify as KaraTankee any more).

We bought a bunch of new (artificial) plants too, so they'll be going in tomorrow along with 130 litres of Manchester's finest tap water. We're lucky we still have some actualleh, after yesterday's burst water main. So far I've not done much else apart from wash all the bits of the filter. And my hands, obviously. Very important that, as the set up instructions make clear. Item 2: "Wash your hands and arms. It is very important to remove dirt, moisturiser and other impurities."

Not much chance of there being any moisturiser on my arms. I think the last time I used that was when we went to Greece in 2005 (God, that's seven years ago. SEVEN YEARS!).

The subject of washed hands comes up again later in the instruction booklet, under Fortnightly Tank Maintenance:
"What you will need: A bucket, gravel cleaner, towel, water conditioner, filter supplement and clean hands. All items are available from your local Aqua One retailer."

That's good to know.
"Hello, is that Urmston Aquatics? I'd like a pair of clean hands please. Mine are just too mucky."

The snow is falling

Writing is often referred to as a solitary activity. Even though you may choose to undertake it in company, by  its very nature unless you're writing collaboratively you're obliged to spend a lot of time inside your own head. That's not conducive to social intercourse.

If anything, as a self-published author, it's even worse. No agent to engage with, no editor, no publisher, no cover designer, no... well... you get the idea. And while you're engaged in all that editing, proof reading, polishing, formatting (for Kindle, etc), and spending time wondering what meta-writing to put out there on Facebook and Twitter to promote your work, and what NOT to put out there so as to avoid totally pissing off your mates by blathering on about it the whole time, there's not an awful lot of time left for yer actual writing.

And then one day you find, as Pink Floyd famously did, ten years have got behind you. Only it's not quite ten years since I finished War of Nutrition. It's "only" four. Or one-and-a-half if you count the rewrite (which you should, because that's the one that eventually got published).

So, ever conscious of the passage of time, I've been trying to decide what to write next. And then, having chosen what I thought was the strongest contender from the list of two or three dozen ideas ("log lines") I've assembled over the years, I've been trying to get my head around exactly how I can turn it into a novel-length story.

After several months (intermittent!) work, I'd fleshed out quite a rich world - two worlds actually, since the story moves from one to the other - in which the action could take place, together with a fairly strong (I thought) cast of characters. Trouble was, at this stage, I didn't know what they were all going to do. I mean, I had the germ of a story idea, but beyond that I started to get a bit bogged down in exactly what all these people in this marvellous new world were going to do that was interesting enough to make you all keep reading.

Breaking out of the inside of my head for a while to talk this over with Blythe during one of our journeys back from Yorkshire, she introduced me to Snowflake. I'll just take a sip of tea while you get over your surprise that I'd never heard of it. Sorry, but no, I hadn't. But it sounded like just the ticket to get me over my hump. When I was writing WoN I worked to a template that was ideally suited to a thriller, but this new work is a science fiction/fantasy fusion, and that old template didn't fit. The Snowflake method is open-ended enough to suit pretty much any genre, so I thought I might give it a go.

Today I finished Step 3. OK, much of the work for the first three steps I'd already done while prepping the world and the characters, but that aside working within the framework has already even at this early stage thrown up some great new ideas and directions, and vastly strengthened my view of the characters, who they are, what they can do, and what they will be able to do by the end of the story. It's fair to say that so far, Snowflake is working out pretty well.

Our new aquarium... prototype

During the long project dubbed the "new new lounge" last year, we debated what to do with our fish. We've now had them three years, and I think I can claim that the spectres of my past fishy disasters have been exorcised. We recently discovered another THREE fry in the tank, happily swimming around what has become the "nursery" area (in and around the ocean rock I introduced to solve the acidity problem) which brings to a total of ten the number of cherry barbs we've bred in those three years. Must be doing something right.

But the impending move into the new room gave us the opportunity to introduce a new aquarium. The BiUbe has served us very well and is a doddle to maintain, but it has limitations. At only 35 litres it was pretty much at capacity with the cherries and the ocellated barbs we added about eighteen months ago. Probably over stocked now, if anything, after all the breeding. So the fish we have don't have a lot of room, there's not much scope for adding more plants or rocks or anything to make the tank more interesting for them, and there's no room for extra species. Hence the debate. Were we happy with what we've got, or did we want something new and if so, what?

Armed with my newly built confidence after three years of successful fishy husbandry I was keen to expand. Nikki was too, but had a concern that anything new wasn't TOO big, and wouldn't dominate the new room which she wanted to keep fairly sparsely furnished (despite the - albeit temporary - fact that it is currently home to one more sofa than we actually want. We're hoping eBay or Gumtree will shortly come to our rescue on that score).

After much debate and more than a few visits to local aquarium suppliers and not-so-local websites, we settled on a model. But Nikki retained a slight niggle that it was too big. Too tall. Too dominating. So with the cabinet and tank dimensions off the web and a ready supply of eBay storage and packaging materials, I built the above mock-up. OK, OK, it's not perfect. The top half isn't the right width and the whole thing is too deep, BUT... it's the right height and the right width at the base, so it gave us an idea. Enough of an idea for Nikki to give the green light. I'll be ordering it today :0)

(For a photo of the real thing, here's one on a supplier's website in the Black Ash cabinet we'll be going for to match the TV stand. Ironically the manufacturer's site doesn't have such a good pic)

Incidentally the small green fish visible in the picture above isn't part of our new stock. It's one of the toys Hobo brought with him from his Mum's house, and remains one of his favourites even though it's lost a fin and is looking very tatty these days.

Why we called him Hobo

What with one thing and another it's been well over a year since I posted a cat update. The last time a photo of our lad appeared on here, we didn't even have him yet.

When he arrived we decided to call him Harley, but even as we were making that decision my little voice was insisting it would be better to wait awhile and let his name suggest itself to us without our help. And, as always with messages from the little voice, it was bang on. It turned out he wasn't a Harley at all.

Not half an hour after he arrived, he'd chewed through the telephone cable. Luckily it was the power supply rather than the signal cable, so easily mended (and subsequently wound around the base of a table lamp to keep it out of temptation's way). We had to keep him away from any similar damage - under desks where PC cables abound, and behind the TV being the main sources of "fun" - for at least six months before he was old enough to get bored with cables and seek out other entertainment.

But right from the off, he showed a definite preference for sitting in bins (when he wasn't pulling their contents out), and for sleeping in cardboard boxes, plastic carrier bags, or rolled up newspapers. So we had to call him Hobo.

Here he is in a favourite sleeping place - the cardboard box under my desk where we dump old envelopes, junk mail and other papers on their way to the recycling. Whenever it's less than half full he likes to curl up in there where it's safe, warm and fairly quiet. He's never far away from people and follows us from room to room even though he's not all that keen on being cuddled or stroked. Maybe he'll grow into that, but he's very sociable even so.

In the year we've had him he's learned to stop jumping on the fish, walking on my keyboard (he had a knack of hitting EXACTLY the right key combination to shut down my PC), or parading across the table while we're eating, but he'll still chance a quick strop on the bedhead if he thinks we're asleep, and since we moved into the new lounge he's been very keen to try and find a way up onto the mantelpiece. And he's grown too big to sleep comfortably on my lap :0(

He's still generally as cute as a cute thing though, so just this morning we've been talking about the possibility of getting him a companion. Watch this space.

The eRoute to eSuccess

When I first started writing War of Nutrition (so long ago it even had a different title), self-publishing was frowned upon by "real" authors. It was a route for amateurs and, more importantly, it was the route that once taken could never lead you back to "proper" publishing. Real publishers and agents, it was said, would never touch anyone tarnished with the shame of self-publishing.

What a difference twelve years makes. So what happened? Lots of things:

Computers and the Internet.

Of course the Internet existed in 2000, but there were far fewer of us on it, and outside of the US most of us accessed it over dial-up. Slow and clunky, yes, but even back then it was starting to connect us in exciting and previously unimaginable ways. One of those burgeoning ways was a new route for authors to reach their readers, but much more than that the Internet provided a faster, easier and more accessible research tool. I can't begin to think of how I'd have learned enough protein science, or geography, or helicopter piloting (all of which are essential to the plot of WoN) before the Internet, but it would certainly have involved hours and hours in public libraries and in my case would probably have prevented the book ever being written.

The Recession

While traditional publishers were at first bemoaning, then begrudgingly accepting and then (almost but not quite) embracing the self-publishing revolution, the world plunged into recession. There was no longer as much money to risk on unheard of new authors (there never had been much), and scarce agent and publisher resources were focused on known quantities and guaranteed profit-makers. If you're an Ian Rankin or a Stephen King, no problem. Otherwise getting published became an even less likely proposition (and the odds never were that good).

Kindle

(Other e-readers are available) Obviously ePublishing could never have taken off in the absence of a platform to ePublish to. In the vanguard, Kindle offered not only a device but also a (fairly) simple route for authors to go it alone. Its success has been well documented, followed up in short order by other variants by the same and other suppliers, and eBooks recently overtook hardcopy sales in at least one marketplace. Although there still are, and will continue to be for many years, some dyed-in-the-wool lovers of paper, it's inevitable that these will decline as the generations turn and in a decade or two will be looked upon with the same gentle forbearance currently reserved for lovers of vinyl, 8-track, Betamax or more recently HD-DVD.

Naturally, it's not all good news. Easy access to self-publishing has removed many of the gatekeepers, and there are easily as many deluded authors as there are deluded auditionees on The X Factor. All their friends and family have told them what a good writer they are, they've had this cracking idea for a story which they've knocked up in a few weeks. No, they don't know how to spell- or grammar-check and have no idea what a copy editor is, but why does that matter when they're only a few clicks away from seeing their name on Amazon's bestseller list? With several thousand new works being published every day for e-reader platforms, consumers of fiction have to plough through mountains of dubious quality output to find something worth reading. So ironically, now that it's easier to publish, it's harder to find something that was worth publishing, let alone is worth reading. Not surprising readers tend to stick with what (and who) they know. Unless you're prepared to spend hours online on Facebook and Twatter or in Amazon forums and the like, the chances of you drumming up a readership beyond your list of Facebook friends are slim to none. And even interesting THEM in your creation is hard work half the time.

Not that having those gatekeepers in place was necessarily all that much better. What? You've never read a bad book? Never reached the final page and thought "God. That was *crap* - how did it ever get published"? Lucky you. During my 100-Theme Writing Challenge last year, I had the opportunity to explore reasons why in this post. It's depressing. But like so much in life if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. In the end it's probably better to write your book because you want to write it, not because you're expecting to get rich off the back of it. Very few people get that lucky.

(Originally started writing this in Feb 2012 shortly after War of Nutrition was published for Kindle. Hard to believe almost a year has passed.)

Finishing off at the back

Last time anyone on here saw a photo of our imminent new deck, it looked like the last photo in this post, which was the position after three days' work. Unbelievably, the next ten working days saw the whole job finished, including laying circular patios (two of them) and linking path, fitting a pond, casting a base for a greenhouse, (re)building the entire garden wall at the back, erecting about 50 metres of new fence, lining the old fence to match the new wood, installing a water feature, cabling everything up including various lights, laying a lawn, building two new gates, an arbour seat and two sets of pyramid-shaped trellis, and planting.

At the end of which, the new deck looks like this:
In the almost two months since it was built, I think it's been dry for something like five hours. I'm hopeful that we have chance to enjoy it once or twice this year, but at present it's covered in frost.

You should just be able to make out in that picture the clever planters that the garden designer included on the left and right borders. On the "attached" side, the planter is also backed up with a 5-foot screen so that we get some privacy on the deck. On the other side, the planter forms the edge of the deck, next to the path.

I'll save more photos for now, while the planting gets established and the year gets a little older.

There's only so many times you can say...

..."Nearly There."

But we really are. The "new new lounge" has been occupied since just before Christmas, and there's been quite a lot of progress since we were floored at the end of November.

That new radiator we were waiting for was fitted (and didn't leak), and also in this picture you can see our two new Stressless™ recliners that were delivered on Saturday. They came without hard floor protection so in the end we had to bring the carpet offcut down again for that end of the room, which will be there until the specialised sticky felt pads arrive in March.

The two other observations made obvious by this photo are that we're still waiting for the new curtains (probably worth a post in their own right as it's quite a long story) and replacement sofa (on order, due in about two weeks). Meanwhile the old brown leather sofa from the other room is performing seating duty. Well, I say old, but we've only had it a tad over four years. Nevertheless it'll be on Gumtree pretty soon. Maybe even later today.

This angle gives you a good view of the rug (yes, there's a purple theme developing :0) - it relieves the grey) and my top Christmas pressie from the lovely Nikki which has yet to be used but will undoubtedly also be the subject of future blogging. This photo also reveals that we're still undecided on a new ceiling light - we'd like it to make a statement but haven't found one that speaks loudly enough yet - and we need some kind of console table or sideboard or something for the right hand side of the fireplace.

At the other end of the room things are almost complete...

with the addition of a shiny new Panasonic TV mounted on a gorgeous BDI Avion Noir cabinet in black oak, complete with Arena cantilever bracket. This excellent piece of kit is the absolute dog's danglers in TV cabinets. The build quality is the best I've ever seen and the whole thing sits on heavy duty rubber wheels that allow it to be rolled out easily for access to the cabling, which has proved necessary on more than one occasion since first installation. Our original HDMI cables weren't long enough and our digital aerial signal needed a boost. And then I had to recable the BOSE system so it would work properly with the new kit. Probably also worth noting that both the BDI cabinet and the Stressless recliners have been bought from the proceeds of just over 18 months' eBaying activities and so were, essentially, "free."

The only thing still missing from this end of the room is a new aquarium, which we're still debating, so not quite there yet but... um... nearly.

I used to be apathetic...

...but these days I just can't be bothered.

We had a lovely weekend - the one just gone - spending time with some good friends who were in town to attend Corriefest at the Lass O'Gowrie. Friday night, a double-handed episode from the 1970s re-enacted in the pub by a bunch of really talented actors (some of whom look uncannily similar to the original characters they portray, but ALL of whom had their mannerisms off to a tee), followed by a full day programme of events on Saturday featuring actors, a famous scriptwriter and casting director, and the showing of some "lost" Coronation Street-related TV footage. It was all Corrie gold, and a really enjoyable series of events.

In among all this, the subject of our blogs came up. This one, and the one our friend writes. We had both connected our blogs up to Facebook through a clever widget that copies each blog post into a Facebook post, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately it turned out that for both of us, there was an unexpected downside that had hit us squarely between the eyes.

Writing here, on a personal blog with a small but friendly audience who know what to expect, and come here to read exactly that, feels comfortable. Not in a bullish "it's my blog and I'll write what I like" kind of way, but - well - it IS my blog, and I write about anything I find interesting, whether it's worldly comments on the state of the nation, or using a potato to prevent leaks. But opening the blog up to facebook, where an audience of "friends of friends" not only could be several thousand people but also is likely to comprise mainly those who would think "what on EARTH is he on about now" felt distinctly... less comfortable. We ended up feeling inhibited about the topics we could write about, because there was a kind of implied impetus, or requirement, for them to be somehow more interesting.

It's all in the mind, this, and we both recognised that. Even so, it was coincidentally how we both felt about it. In my case, I was quite happy doing the 100 Themes Writing Challenge and having them posted to Facebook because it was literary. It was "proper" writing. Not just random stuff about the garden, or the cat, or the decorating.

My friend unlinked her blog from Facebook this week and I unlinked mine yesterday, so now I feel liberated from the (probably totally imagined) expectations of people I don't know, and I'm sincerely hoping I'll get back to more regular updates. Lots has been happening both inside and out. And there's a whole weekend coming up for me to write about it :o)