Grayling, the fourth game fish.
A bad day's fishing beats a good day's writing

I have had this marvellous money making idea:

I invite you round for dinner. When you arrive you will be greeted with all of the customary politeness. I then ask you for £20, hand over all the ingredients for the meal, show you to the kitchen and leave you to cook the dinner. The ingredients will have been bought for £12 earlier in the day at TESCO.
So, I have my meal cooked and presented on the table, enjoy a delicious meal with ‘friends’ and come out with 8 quid in my pocket: simple and profitable.

I see you are not convinced.

=> Read more!

Why?

This is an option from my blog settings:

Allow customized blog CSS file: A CSS file in the blog media directory will override the default skin stylesheet.

Surely no-one but a computer professional can understand this? Your common or garden blogger is lost.
What exactly am I opting for?

=> Read more!

We went to see Atonement last night. It is 'Orange Wednesday', when your phone allows you to BOGOF. I handed over a tenner to the young lady at the ticket desk. "That's four pound eighty," she said. My immediate thought was that they were offering an even cheaper rate than usual. As we walked away from the desk Olga whispered in my ear, "She sharged you the old farts rate."
Oh dear. I am still a few years short of collecting my pension. I put it down to the extreme youth of the young lady and her inexperience in estimating ages. Although I did recently tell my daughter of 29 years that...."I look like a grandad and feel like a grandad; isn't it time I was one?"
"Shut up you old fart," she reposted.

Now 'Atonement'. It is a film based on a book about a writer writing about writing a book. I am always wary of writers' tendency towards narcissistic self indulgence. Think about it - we are told to write what we know. When you have been writing for years you don't know much else but writing, so, you write a book about writing a book. This was a case in point, but, the story the writer wrote about the writer writing a book was just amazingly brilliant; a heart rending tale of loves, lies and life destroying errors. I was gripped and moved. Sometimes the director held on to silent reflections and meaningful looks a mite too long, and the chaos of the Dunkirk beach was overplayed: we saw a lot of chaos but not much actually happened and it did little to advance the story-minor moans. Not to be missed.

Alexandra’s adventures

The warmth meant nothing to Alex now. She had always loved her visits to the warm seas and much of her life had been spent longing for the next time. The warm water had inhabited her dreams through the cold days of the year. In this formless existence the warmth never penetrated: neither the cold.

=> Read more!

Waste management and recycling:

Would you please bundle together all of your wasted time and send it to me. I will then distribute it fairly to working mothers, junior doctors, delivery drivers in white vans and their close associates, the taxi driver. Also included will be primary school teachers required to fill in lesson evaluations after 20 years in the job, policemen chewing their pencil ends whilst the police car is being stolen and the lone nurse standing in the middle of the ward summoned simultaneously by three flashing lights.

Contributions are particularly welcomed from:
Solicitors on golf courses on a Friday afternoons, writers with ‘block’ sat staring out of the window, people who finally go in to their 9.30 appointment at 10.47, those waiting for the man coming to connect the gas, innocent people sitting in gaol cells and road repairers leaning on shovels........
......oh, and writers spending precious hours trying to navigate round an overcomplex blog site.

Next moan: (I know! yawn, yawn!)

When I write a comment my text keeps disappearing outside of the right hand side of the box. I Ctrl/scroll to get it back, but as soon as I start to write it disappears again. Yet another example of how the writers fail to deal with the 'front end' effect of their barmy blog design.
You can wake up now.

Next moan:

When text is uploaded into my blog all the spaces between the full stops and the initial capitals appear to be removed. They might still be there but the font does not make the space apparent - ambiguous! This is a bad example to set for aspiring young writers.

Philip continues to explore the strange new world he is in and discovers something rather sexy!.............

Through the short, pale summer night I wander past all the familiar locations; knowing when I will drift through deep slow flows and anticipating when the fast ripples will tumble me on an exhilarating ride. I occasionally see the silhouette of a bridge; or the umbrella of a familiar waterside sycamore under which I have sheltered from summer storms or used its cover to creep up on the unsuspecting fish.

=> Read more!

There are some people with whom it is almost impossible to hold a dialogue:

“……And the guy came out of this horribly mangled car with just a broken leg.”

My sister once broke her leg you know the sister who married the solicitor he was disbarred for cheating and nearly got 3 years in jail it would have ruined her life if he had gone to jail.(But how did she break her leg!!) The marriage was bad enough already and it nearly ended in divorce if it wasn’t for the kids Joseph and Emily it would have Emily was really upset by the troubles

=> Read more!

This time I will try the !M button and see what happens - thanks Mater!

Alexandras story:

“This isn’t bad. Not as bad as I thought. No pain. How do I get back?”

Alexandra’s head had just been smashed in by the hull of a speedboat. She had been skulling gently, rising and falling on the see-saw of the swell after having swum a hundred metres from the beach, mind wandering over the happy events of the last few days, when the boat struck her at 20 knots. She knew she had been hit but she was now four metres below the surface and feeling remarkably well. She had no problems with breathing at the moment.

“This is wrong. I feel odd.”

=> Read more!

Next moan:
Every time I try to LOG.......... IN (!) from the Writelink website the program crashes.

Now to the Waterborne.
The next part tells how the adventurous, sea-loving Alexandra had joined the community of the Waterborne a year before Phillip's suicide.

Thanks to Mater for some encouraging and useful comments.
Advice on the use of this blog site is especially welcome. It will be a long, slow process getting there, but I will get there.
In the meantime I will continue to add to my (long) list of criticisms. I am surprised that so many other users don't seem to notice. I wonder if it is a) I will struggle on and find my way around this cybermaze because I don't wish to appear stupid or b)This is the first time I have used a Blog and I thought they were all like this.
Next moan:
'Deprecated' means 'disapproved of'. It is derogatory. I am not sure what it means in the context of this Blog but it seems a little strong. I think it means 'removed'. If it does then why not use 'removed'?

I hope one day to learn about trackbacks, pings and workflow properties! In the meantime, if you can read this then I am relatively content.

The Waterborne, part two:

See that body? That is me, or was me. It has left me and floated away – useless, discarded; like the shoe with a hole in it. This is me, here, held still beneath the water; the flow going through and around me like the warm breeze on a hill top in another place and another life. I gaze on the landscape of this new element without the fog of corruptible eyes. The mystery of the fathomless bridge pool is revealed. Down here all is clear.

=> Read more!

The next part of the novel is about to appear in which our hero, having commited suicide, finds himself in another world: beneath the surface of the water. Here he learns to deal with his new form and starts to explore the river from within.

I have decided to keep the pressure on the blog designers with a grumpy, critical comment each time I write. Today's grouse: Why do I have to scroll a long way down my blog page through lots of various unrelated links looking for the 'log in'(TWO WORDS!!!!) link?
It should be highly visible and close to the top. I have no doubt that there are more direct routes to the back office - if there are then why are they not obvious!

I have posted the first part of the novel in my first sub-category. It was originally a short story but it kept growing - getting fatter, not taller! It is tale of lost love and the quest of the two lovers to be re-united.
I was encouraged to receive some excellent comments from my peers on the Arena when this first part was posted. So if you saw it then remind yourselves and the next part will be along shortly.

I stand up here, parallel with the tree tops, because of an anniversary that plunges me to the depths of sadness, but the view from here is amazing. It is a view brimming with memories of my fishing life.

=> Read more!

I have had to submit to the cyberspeak tyrrany of the blog. It baffles me as to why the simple operation of writing a diary has to be accompanied by so much IT gobbledygook, complex page changing and deviations from standard formats and abbreviations.
My conclusion is that the designers do not know how to make a user friendly front end and probably don't really care because they are happy to bathe in the mistique of their own invented world.
There is so much to criticise I will not even bother to start. But, just to demonstrate - next time you visit your back office look to the right at 'visibility/sharing' and ask the questions: Why have the options got explanations in brackets and subsequently, why did the writers simply noy use the (plain English)words in brackets in the first place?

Well I'm here now and I will have to deal with it. I'm here because the Arena is not receiving much attention. How can a writer achieve 'spotlight status' if the most any entry receives is 5 reviews?

My (working)novel will be posted here when I fathom out how to do it.