Little Known Author

It’s true. Just tonight, January 14, I have updated my FAQ to reflect various developments since the last update, including on the vexing subject of food. There are also a few new questions. And, just now, thinking about it, I realise there’s one more question to add. Bugger. I’ll post this, and go and do it. [LATER:] There, all done. So, new questions, lots of updates, and much else besides!

[Geez, I just had a lengthy post here, but then I stuffed up the computer, and lost the whole thing. Bugger.]

If you’ve been coming here long enough to be asking, "Is the blog dead? Can I eat it?" then you’d know that I really have no real idea what I’m going to do with this site. I’m inclined to keep it, but I don’t know what to put on it. The blogging urge has largely passed, for the most part, although it’s also true that I do still blog, of a sort, on my Facebook page, where I post very brief items about what I’m doing at a given moment. Not Twitter-type brief, but brief nonetheless. One from yesterday, for example, indicated that I was currently watching an episode of Inspector Rex . Not the stuff of gripping reports, I know, but it’s what I was doing.

Thing is, I know there are people who read this site and who are not also Facebook members. This is very likely to their enormous credit. Facebook is a huge time-suck. I spend a huge amount of time on it each day, but then, that’s pretty much my social life these days. I spend most of each day on my own (other than the snoozing dog or the snoozing bird), and since I’m not much for going out and being all extroverted, socialising with people via brief comments on Facebook pages suits me fine. Which is great for all of that, but it doesn’t help those of you who come to see what I’m up to here.

So. First, my apologies. I will try to do a better job of posting here as well as on Facebook.

Second, there is a bit of news, which if you only looked for me here you might not already know: Publisher Brian and I have sold TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT to local publishing house Fremantle Press . This October they will release a shiny new edition of the book (with some minor changes) here in Australia and in New Zealand. It’s pretty exciting, and I’m looking forward to doing library readings/signings, etc.

Third, the other big news lately is that I’ve started a new book, a sequel to TIME MACHINES, tentatively titled TIME NEVER SLEEPS. Today I finished the first full week on the job, with 7500 words, and the conclusion of the first chapter. It’s a year after the events of the first book, and things in the world of time machines have and are changing fast. Spider’s got a new boss, for one thing, but worse than that: he’s been infected with some ghastly disease and as of the conclusion of the first chapter, is languishing in a hospital isolation unit, worried out of his gourd. And things are about to get much worse. [evil laugh]

Otherwise things are okay, mostly. I say "mostly" because it appears that my headaches are back, in a big way. Wednesday night I had one so bad it made me throw up everything I’d had to eat that day. Pretty grim stuff. Last night I had another one, not quite as bad, but plenty bad enough for my taste. Why are they turning up now? Is it related to me starting a new book? I don’t know. Hope not. In other medical news, or non-news: I still know nothing about whatever the hell it was that happened to me last December, and which put me in hospital with a suspected heart attack. It wasn’t my heart, but we have no clue what the hell it was.

Michelle is blasting through at least 1000 blood specimens each shift nowadays, and is putting in some very late nights. She’s pretty tired, and has a lot going on, but is bearing up okay. The global financial crisis isn’t affecting us yet. Our mortgage interest rate is down to record lows, which helps, too. All in all, things are pretty decent. I worry about my parents, I worry about Michelle, and I worry about myself, too. Doesn’t seem to help much, all this worrying, but it’s what I do.

Things have been a bit lively since last I posted here, so here’s a bit of an update.

1. I didn’t complete Nanowrimo. At first I thought it would be great sitting there writing absolutely anything I fancied, regardless of whether it made sense or not. And the first few days, scribbling the very silly adventures of Mr Ian Wrimo, Master Sleuth, was pretty good. But it wasn’t long before I found myself feeling guilty (yes, guilty) that I was wasting my time on rubbish when I could have been working on something saleable. So I bailed.

2. I spent five days in Joondalup Health Campus around the beginning of December, being tested really quite extensively to find out just why I’d had those mysterious chest pains and shortness of breath. It’s now quite some time later, but still, nobody knows. The pains and other symptoms have not returned, I’m pleased to report, but I would like to know what the hell happened. That day, on my own, having to call an ambulance, wait for it, thinking, “Hmm, I should update my Facebook page, but what if I get up to  go and do that, and I drop dead in the middle of something like, “Adrian Bedford is jusldkasjdkljdh;agkljjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjds” I decided to skip the update. The whole experience was deeply, surprisingly upsetting. Michelle and my folks have been brilliant through the whole thing. The day I came home my dad hugged me—my dad who’s never hugged me in his life. It was a big deal. Last week I had a CT scan to measure my calcium score, or something, which should tell my cardiologist whether I have blockages, and how big they are, or what. I’ll be going to see her next week, probably.

3. I posted here a few times about a new book idea I’d been working on since late last year. Sadly, the bottom fell out from under it. It proved unviable. This was very depressing, and I moped a long time, even after getting what so far seems like a better idea (this time for a possible Time Machines Repaired follow-up volume). I haven’t started actually scribbling yet, but it’s going well.

4. I heard recently that my book has made the shortlist for the Philip K. Dick Awards. Holy frakking heck! Am very worried. This past Saturday evening, in Brisbane, my book won the 2008 Aurealis Award for Best Australian SF Novel. Michelle and I were there for the big event, and it was terrifying, the tension (and the humidity) unbearable. I don’t know how my legs got me across the vast gulf of the stage in front of all the clapping people. I remember blinding lights, happy people, thanking lots of people, particularly Michelle, and not much else. The award is very shiny indeed.

5. Am trying the Windows 7 beta on my laptop, and in fact using the Windows Live Writer service, linked through to my Wordpress blog, to post this. So far I’m liking Windows 7 a great deal (it helps that I got it for free, of course), and may keep it here on the laptop. My desktop is still running Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex”, and Linux remains my True Love. Win7, though, gives it a good run for its money.

6. I’m reading lots of books lately. I’ve been posting mini-reviews of most of them through the iRead service on my Facebook page (look up “Adrian Bedford”).

There’s a lot to talk about today, so let’s get straight to it:

Item 1. Check this out:

Once written, it is the book that has the relationship with the reader, not the writer, and it is the minute that I see that actual book… the finished thing - I realize that if I’m holding it in my hands, that more copies of this book are being sent to real people right this minute (and some of them even pre-ordered, and how terrible is that going to be when it sucks) and that from this moment forward - for the rest of my life- this book has made it absolutely certain that some people are going to stand around in yarn shops talking about how I’m a complete moron, I don’t deserve to earn any money (even a fraction of a dollar per book), and that frankly they wish that I wasn’t so full of myself that I thought I was special enough to write books at all. When I hold this book in my hands, that’s what I know.. and since every person has a voice inside them, the voice of their supremely unsuccessful self (a 16 year old short- skinny-bad hair-braces low self-esteem self, in my case) saying that anyway, the fear catches, and coalesces into nausea and a certainty that this can’t end well.

It’s an extract from a phenomenal essay by "The Yarn Harlot", Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, who writes books about her knitting experiences, her life and family, and everything. She’s funny, perceptive, truthful, always unfailingly honest, and someone whose blog Michelle and I have been reading now for years. We love her stuff. And I don’t knit. I’m honestly not that interested in knitting (though I’ve developed a fair understanding of it), but I love the way the Harlot writes about writing. She understands exactly what it’s like to be a writer, the good and the bad, the anxiety, the sheer terror, the bliss, the pain, everything. In this essay she’s writing about the publication of her latest book of essays, and it’s just exquisite, the way she opens herself up and tells the truth about this whole "published author" thing. Go and read the whole thing. Heck, read the whole blog.

Item 2:

American author David Foster Wallace , aged 46, died this week, apparently a suicide, possibly related to long-term depression. It was a stunning thing to hear about. I’ve loved his work for years, ever since reading his novel, INFINITE JEST , perhaps the most maddening, frustrating, elating, wonderful, overwritten novel I’ve ever encountered. At a whopping 1079 pages, plus 100+ pages of fine-print footnotes which are as fascinating as the main text, it was a tough thing to read, a marathon, sitting there day after day, letting this extraordinary story unspool itself through my head, following, one one hand, the intensely imagined lives of teenage tennis prodigies, and on the other hand, the equally intensely realised lives of drug addicts, and, for good measure, on the third hand, the bizarre French Canadian separatist terrorists who are searching for a videotape, a film, said to be so entertaining you die from the sheer pleasure of watching it. Rarely have I read a book that so cried out for serious cutting, but which also presented such a uniformly amazing/frustrating text that you couldn’t decide which parts to cut, even if you could bring yourself to do it.

In the wake of Wallace’s death, I’m now sorely tempted to go and re-read it. No amount of description or discussion about the book is ever going to do its extraordinary gonzo strangeness justice, but in the past couple of days plenty of other writers have been trying to do just that. It grieves me that there will be no further such volumes from this author. His work reminds me that fiction, and perhaps especially science fiction, can and perhaps even should be so much more than what it usually is. I know in my own work, I’m usually satisfied if I can manage an exciting sequence, a well-visualised image, conveying some degree of appropriate realism. Next to Wallace’s work (and certainly his work is something of an acquired taste), his towering ambition and evenly matched ability, I do feel like a damp squib.

Item 3:

Today work on my own new project, EVEN STARLIGHT BURNS, continues to accumulate. I’m at the point where I’m starting to get a sense of the other characters in my protagonist’s life (unlife?), and what they might mean to him. There’s quite a crowd of these people, too, and that’s not even counting the assorted ghosts and ghost fragments who show up, wanting rides around the city in the middle of the night. I was very concerned that the lot of a taxi driver, particularly one who drives full-time, was such that he wouldn’t have much time for being the protagonist of a story, so to speak; since then Charlie Stuart suggested that this problem could in fact be a plus: yes, the protagonist doesn’t have time for adventuring or chasing down story-related stuff. He has to earn his living or he doesn’t have a place to stay, etc–and yet, stuff is still happening. He is drawn towards finding out about his past, about who made him a vampire, and maybe finding out about the strange war brewing out in the Red Centre. So good on ya, Charlie! You really helped me out.

This is me trying, really trying, to post a simple YouTube video here. I tried it in the previous post, without success. Now I’m trying again. Clearly, I must be mad.

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/BfX-s4dcYBg&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/BfX-s4dcYBg&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Okay. That didn’t work. I’ve just got a bunch of code. Previously, when trying to post videos of the Colossal Squid being dissected, I got some joy from going into “HTML” mode. Let’s try that.

Okay, that actually appeared to work. In the preview screen, it looked exactly right. Now let’s see if it’s worked. And if it has worked, what on Earth is different that I’ve done now that I wasn’t doing earlier? Baffling bloody thing.

Hmm. Have now checked and it now does work. I am in “admin” mode, rather than “user” mode; earlier this afternoon I was only in user mode. Why should that matter? If anybody knows why that might matter, please let me know.

Have you ever noticed how, when you’ve got some kind of computer-related problem, the kind of problem that makes you thump the desk with your big meaty fist, that makes you cry out with unsavoury language, that drives you up the flippin’ wall, that at least 95% of the time the solution to the entire horrible time-consuming bother proves to be a single check-box that either needs checking, or unchecking, or some similar piddling fix?

I have. I’ve noticed this on many occasions. Which, no doubt, suggests I have poor attention to detail. However, all of my ranting in the previous post about the miseries of WordPress as a blogging tool should be disregarded.

You see, I spent a good portion of last night and today trying to import the backup file I made of the previous version of this blog–without success. I kept getting an error message asking if I had write permission for the directory into which all that material would be uploaded. I checked said permissions. I checked them many many times. And at each check, the permissions appeared entirely suitable. Yet blog would not go.

Just now, I checked some more online WordPress documentation, and came across the advice that when setting the write permissions on the directory in question, you might need to go for the big “777″ or “rwx-rwx-rwx”. I had not taken the permissions quite that far, thinking all was sufficient. Nonetheless, I tried applying the recommended settings.

And then I started thinking. Hmm, thought I, what if, what if, now that I had changed the write permissions for that directory so much, I tried one last time to upload that backup file? What might happen? So I tried it. I found the file, got the system going uploading it, all the time thinking that I don’t have to proceed with the actual importation of the backup file. I just want to see if the upload thing would work.

It did work. Oh, my, but it worked. Presently, I had a big long list of posts, the great majority of them with the phrase “post already exists” appended. See, I had been concerned about having a blog chock full of doubled posts, but WordPress had me covered there, too! It would only import the new posts, or the ones that weren’t already here!

I think my poor head exploded in shock and wonder.

This means that I could have not only all of the posts from good old Modem Noise (RIP), but even those from the original, pre-WordPress version of Little Known Author , and the posts from this new-fangled new version of the blog. All in one place! Something that had bothered me all along.

So. Let the word go forth from this place at this time that I am all wrong about WordPress. It is a fine blogging tool. It is the dog’s bollocks! It cocks its hind leg and wees all over Movable Type’s cowering, shivering, pale form.

However, just remember, if you’re a WordPress user and you’re trying to import your backed up WP posts into your new installation, and you’re wondering why you keep getting that annoying error message asking whether you have write permission for the directory you’re trying to upload your backup thingy into, MAX OUT THE PERMISSIONS FOR THE WP-CONTENT DIRECTORY.

Now, if I could just figure out how to get pictures going as well, I’d be very chuffed indeed. Even repulsively smug, quite possibly.

UPDATE: A Few Hours Later: Houston, we have smugness!

It all started out so innocently. I got a note from old friend Cheyenne Grewe, telling me she’d spotted something odd in the way my blog was displaying italicised text. Always pleased to hear from her, and equally pleased to sort out problems with the blog, I leapt on the problem, diagnosed it (turned out to be a dodgy blog theme, something WordPress makes easy to fix), and while admiring my handiwork, noticed that a post I had up about the recent dissection of a Colossal Squid in New Zealand should be updated to say the dissection was by now finished. This led me to a site at the museum in NZ where the dissection happened, and from where you can find all manner of interesting links regarding the dissection, including a lot of video.

I was particularly taken with a selection of YouTube videos, two of which contained wire service TV news items about it. It was while attempting to post one of those videos to the blog that everything went pear-shaped. Let’s try and post the sucker now…

So, right now, I’ve got a block of YouTube embed code, but do I have a cool squiddy video? I’ve just been to check, and it would appear that I have no video, but lots of code. Bugger.

Anyway, after wasting an afternoon trying to figure out what went wrong yesterday, I resolved to upgrade my WordPress installation to the shiny new version 2.5. This went reasonably well, though getting it to import the exported file from the earlier version of the blog proved unbelievably difficult. No amount of reading outdated helpfiles actually helped. In the end, there was nothing else for it, but to re-export my old blog (both versions) and see if WordPress would import them–and it did, eventually.

Note for those contemplating installing WordPress for their blogging needs: if you need to export an XML file containing your blogging history and files, etc, and then need to import it back in once everything’s sorted out again, beware! You might not like the thing’s attitude. Of course, I’m prepared to believe I was at fault, and screwed up somehow. Indeed, I’m still trying to suss out just how to post a sodding photo here without stirring up more of this attitude I have found so charming. Blogging should not be this hard, it seems to me. (And yes, I did backup my wp database, too; and that, too, refuses to cooperate.)

Anyway, that’s another story. The upshot is this: as a consequence of my inability to get WordPress to let me post a YouTube video, I wound up trashing everything and starting over. And now, of course, as you can see, I still can’t get that damned video to show up. The irony, it burns.

UPDATE: Three minutes later! I just tried posting the YouTube html code into this post via the “HTML” text entry window, rather than the usual “Visual” entry window. And lo, now it works! I tried this same manoeuvre many times yesterday, without result, but now, in version 2.5, it does work! Huzzah! Behold the squiddy goodness! Take that, foul irony! Ha! I laugh at you!

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following post will not make much sense to you if you stop by here after 2:14pm, May 8, 2008. I’ve been fiddling about with this blog’s appearance or theme, something WordPress makes very easy to change. The theme I did have, called Talian, was this lovely green and black three-column affair that was splendid in every way–no, not every way: it rendered italics in a very odd manner. The post that follows was my attempt to find out just what the frack was going on, italics-wise. This is now sorted, and I’m now using a new theme called Glossy Blue, and at least so far, all appears copacetic.

* * *

This is me seeing if there’s a way to prevent WordPress putting italicised words on a separate line. Here in the visual post editor screen, it looks all nicely wysiwyg. Now when I switch to the code post editor screen, I see that my italicised word isn’t surrounded by italic markup signs, but emphasis markup signs. To see if there’s a difference, I’ll try italicising a word with the italic markup available here. Hmm, it puts the emphasis tags on the word. It’s starting to look like I might have to italicise the old, manual, way. Let’s see how that looks. [jets off to look at actual page]

Well, that was illuminating. It seems that when the emphasis markup tag is used, I get the italicised bit on a separate line, all emphatic-looking; but when I use “old-fashioned” italic markup, I get simple <i>italic</i> text, like Grandma used to make. This sounds like a job for…the CSS Editor! [jets off for another look again]

Oh no! Now it turns out that using manual italic markup, ie, <i> and </i>, I just get code. Nerts. Switching now to the Code post editor screen…

Let’s try italicising with Grandma’s old-fashioned italic markup here…

Now the italics show up as proper italics. Good grief. There is a lot I love about WordPress, but this little feature is starting to bug me. Could it be something as simple as fiddling with the CSS? Let’s have a look. [jets off again]

I remember, in the olden days of blogging (lo, five or six years ago), fiddling directly with one’s blog’s CSS files was a fairly straightforward matter, once you got yourself some howto files or books or whatever. This is no longer the case, at least for me. I’ve just been to have a look at the CSS for this blog theme I’m using, and while I can see why it’s treating <em> and <i> tags the way it is treating them, I’m at a loss as to how to fix the matter. It’s annoying seeing the way the theme renders the code, so at this point I’m off shopping for a new theme. One of the things I do love about WordPress is that finding and switching to new blog themes is very easy (much easier than it was in Movable Type), so I just have to find one that renders italics sensibly. Be right back…

And I’m back, more than an hour later, with a new blog theme. I had no idea there were so many to choose from, and none of the demonstration pages indicated how each theme would handle italics. Argh. All the same, I appear to have lucked out with this new one, which handles italics sensibly, at last.

I’ve now heard from a few different people reporting difficulty in posting comments, saying that they couldn’t find or otherwise found themselves unable to comment. I’ve just been noodling with alternate blog templates and have, at least for now, settled on the Wordpress classic theme called Kubrick, the default template. It’s plain, but it’s temporary, while I see if this helps overcome the commenting problem. If you’re reading this, and you feel like doing me a favour, please have a go at leaving a comment.

Fingers crossed!

UPDATE: I think I found the problem, thanks to a useful tip from stalwart supporter Charlie Stuart. There was a check box in the Wordpress Options screen which specified you had to be “registered” in order to comment. It wasn’t making me register because, of course, I’m the blog owner, so I never realised this was a problem. Have now unchecked the box, visited the blog in the crafty guise of a random punter, and the comment thingy now works like it should. My apologies for the stuff-up! And thank you, Charlie! :)

Here’s the current state of play as of 10:40pm on February 6: I’ve created the directory for the new blog. I’ve determined that I can upload content to said new directory and have it show up (ie, I made a dummy index.html file and uploaded it, and lo, there it was in the browser). What I can’t do is get Movable Type here to complete the process of publishing new entries to said new blog.

This is starting to fry my shorts.

UPDATE: as of the following day, Feb 7th, it’s working beautifully. I really have to thank Patrick Michaud, of PJMco.ca, my hosting provider, for walking me through some curiously baroque problems. He’s a terrific bloke, always helpful, and always very prompt with replies. I can’t recommend him or his company, highly enough.