The Windows installer was put on here yesterday and the Mac ones should be online very soon.
Sign up for Mac installer as it will be on soon, and has the same download password as the Windows one. We will let you know when it is online.
Kindle software – new features delivered via wifi
I just got en email about new features on Kindle, which are delivered via wifi. Aimed at adding social media features…
All quite useful if you can be bothered – well we have to ‘smile or die‘. Social media is for bullies? Nah…
Features are:
Real Page Numbers
These only show when switched on, but they are the same location (text wise) as those in print editions which means you can switch between the two formats. This is part of the idea of having real and electronic systems side by side.
Public Notes
This allows you to comment in a kind of social media way, depending on settings. This is a sort of book club idea, and is quite useful for new authors assuming you can get your pals to hype you a bit.
You can follow other people’s comments, join discussions and so on.
You can also use it a bit like bookmarking so you can keep track of what you have been up to, including recommendations etc. Also view notes you have made.
Before You Go…
At the end of a book can go online to rate it, comment, read others on it, buy more, did I say buy more…
New Newspaper and Magazine Layout
Have not seen yet so can’t comment – this is in response to the iPad and tablet dominance in ereading of color magazines format.
More when we actually receive it… via wifi Whispernet – that is quite neat as I am now on an island in the Andaman Sea…
How to Tips for exciting stories or novels – The Pianoplayers, Anthony Burgess
From:
The Pianoplayers 1986
Anthony Burgess
Burgess The Pianoplayers
P23
What he wanted in a film:
Plenty of variety
Which means:
- A railway train
- A house on fire
- A scene by the lake for lovers
- Galloping horses
- A fist fight that did not go on too long
- A ball scene with the Blue Danube waltz for preference
- Soldiers marching down the street coming home from war
- No battle scenes
- (machine guns OK, big guns, not OK)
‘He’ is the narrator’s Dad, who is a piano player at a cinema in the time of silent movies… which explains this list.
This is a very readable novel, it is more like a memoir than a conventional novel. Which is what it is supposed to be, an old lady reminisces about her life, mainly her early life with her father, an itinerant and drunken piano player.
How to write a story or book – try some of these in a short story and see how it goes – if your imagination is stuck, use some of these as modifiers. For instance, add Galloping horses – this will always liven up a scene. Perhaps use them as a metaphor if you do not want actual horses charging about in your existential office drama.
Science Fiction – SF – Sci Fi – glamor space gnomes – how to write
“Science fiction is a genre that makes use of the political, the historic and the social to garb space gnomes in a cloak of glamor that they are unlikely to have achieved in actuality.
The standard-issue content is a result of its barely-examined acceptance of progress in technological, ideological, economic religious and social life.”
Alfred Bork: ‘Deep Vanishing’ in Jeff Lint’s Science Fiction. Jeff Lint is a great and underrated writer.
There is also the tragedy of the person who wants to be an artist but has the mind of an inspector, perhaps they end up writing science fiction, which has the most literally described fantasies. Star Trek is full of this invented technical gobbledygook.
Gnome sf sci-fi use of weapons iain m banks
Jeff Lint is very interested in the philosophy of ‘tentacled beauties‘ – which covers nearly all alien types (all of which are invented, despite their looming preponderance in the modern world) – just think how much better Darth Vader would be with tentacles instead of (as well as?) the Force.
Just watched movie Skyline – lots of tentacled beauties in there. War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise, Independence Day… all those tentacles.
Michael Crichton [RIP] added a giant squid scene to Pirate Latitudes – although this had the feel of a book that had not been given the final gloss, so that scene might have been cut if he had been working on it.
How to Write task: add a tentacled beauty to a new story, whatever the genre. Try adding a tentacled beauty to a dinner party scene.
