charles barrow's writing

I watch a lot of Youtube videos, or more accurately, BookTube videos - BT being the corner of YT where people discuss books (naturally); what they own, what they've read, what they intend to read. It's full of reviews, recommendations, warnings (sometimes), encouragement, and interesting, fun people that I enjoy spending time with. It also has a broad timetable of monthly events that viewers can choose to join. I've spoken previously about the short story theme in September, and the Victorian literature in October or, so called, Victober, both of which I chose to take part in this year. The upcoming event for December is Remember December, during which viewers/readers are encouraged to re-read a book they once read and can't recall anything about. I have a long list of those. I'm not sure I'll take part in this event, other than incidentally, firstly because I want to get festive and read some Christmas stories in December, as I also like to get festive by watch...

I'm re-reading books 1, 2 and 3, and giving them a buff and a polish: a comma here, a carriage return there, a shiny new adjective dropped into a sentence. No major changes, then, just a few tweaks. All of this is in preparation for them being uploaded to Amazon, to make them available on Kindle. I have had qualms about doing this, but I have to concede that Amazon is the largest shop window in the world, and if I want to find a wide audience for my writing, for my stories, then they need to sit on a shelf in their store. I don't think I can afford to have moralistic qualms when I'm an unknown writer looking for readers. I've given myself thirty days to get my reading and editing done, and to get the books uploaded and launched.

I've been reading short stories recently; micro-fiction, flash fiction. This morning I've been dipping into 'Stories On The Go- 101 Very Short Stories By 101 Authors.' Edited by Andrew Ashling. This book was the culmination of an idea launched by Hugh Howey (author of the Wool trilogy) on 'Kboards', a forum for Kindle readers that has attracted a community of indie authors too, it tells me in the introduction at the front of the book. 'Stories On The Go.' is an anthology of indie writing and each of the 101 stories is of 1,000 words or less and can be read on laptop, tablet or phone in under five minutes, even when you're on the go. I tore through a dozen tales this morning in no time so I know that last fact to be true. As ever, with an anthology, I found I liked some stories more than I did others, and they were of varying quality. Each story is followed by a short author bio and I fancy I could soon tell by the quality of the story writing wheth...

So the Government continues to slash public spending and public services continue to suffer. Ensuring that those with the least have access to even less.  There is more talk of yet more library closures. Those that survived the first few rounds of cuts by tightening their belts until they could barely breathe will finally have their oxygen machines switched off completely. A defender of this policy missed the point, I thought, on a radio interview when he claimed that libraries are an irrelevance because all the literature that they contain is available on the internet. All apologists for library closures miss the point I reckon when they offer up the internet as an alternative library.  I think there is an obvious distinction to be made here. Literature is available to download from the internet, books aren't. Books as physical objects are available to borrow free from a library. Books as beautiful physical objects to be handled and cherished. As a child I fell in love ...

I recently read The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith, a.k.a. JK Rowling, on my tablet's Kindle app. I'd been wanting to read a 'grown-up' book by JK for a while and I wasn't disappointed. However, there was some weird shit going on with the text formatting. Random words would appear in a much smaller font size, or be italicised for no apparent reason, or change font together. Weird. Weird but comforting. If the JK juggernaut can't get the formatting right then I don't see that I should lose sleep over mine. Of course, I suspect it was probably perfect at the point of sale and simply got mangled by my reader, but this is the problem with ebooks, they are at the mercy of reading devices of varying quality. We never have this problem with printed books, apart from the fact that they are read by optic nerves of varying quality. Customer, 'I want my money back, all the print in this book is out of focus.'  Maybe one day there will be just the on...

Now I'm not normally one to recommend products publicly (unless they are Moleskine notebooks) but I have to go on record singing the praises of a piece of software called Calibre . It's free. Go get it now. It's a little miracle machine. I feed in the pages of my story (in a .doc format) and it spits out an eBook. I repeat the process with a jpeg image for the cover and I get an eBook with a photo cover. Bloody fantastic. I turned my story into a PDF, a .mobi file for Kindles and an .epub version which I can read on my Kobo. My very own eBook, with cover, in my Kobo library snug between Asimov and Conan Doyle. Oh happy day. ps I also (in a very small way) helped to fund The People's E-Book on Kickstarter, as I saw it as, perhaps, an investment in my own future. Well done to Hol Art Books for getting this project funded. It's another miracle piece of software that'll turn my pages into eBooks. I mean to try it out in due course.