Spatial Unwareness

In which The Author finally has an office

I told you last time about the Problem of the Time-travelling Parcel. It eventually turned up on the Saturday morning, more by luck than judgement. I had a notification from DPD that it would be delivered 'between 9.30 and 10.30'. That gave me time to nip to the shop before the courier was due. At about 10.10 I heard someone knocking my neighbours' door. Thinking it might be the courier dropping off something there first, I waited for a minute. Then my phone rang. It was the courier, wondering if I was at home. He claimed to have knocked my door and had no answer. Now, if I could hear him knocking two doors down, why didn't I hear him knocking my own door?

He couldn't bring the desk in, of course, because nobody is allowed to go near anyone else at the moment. I couldn't even sign his manifest. Instead, he photographed the parcel in my doorway as proof of delivery. It didn't matter. Even with his help, I probably wouldn't have been able to get it around the awkward angles at the top of the stairs. Instead I opened the packaging in situ and carried the pieces upstairs a bit at a time.

Then I had to assemble it.

As I've noted in a previous entry, words are going out of fashion as well these days. The clock has turned full circle and we've reverted to the dawn of civilisation, using little pictures to communicate. To show you what I mean, here's a page from the 'instruction manual' for the desk. No, it's not from Ikea, but I think it might be from another Scandinavian manufacturer – possibly part of their best-selling Bølux range of office furniture.

I'm glad I spent so much time building Lego, Meccano and Airfix kits when I was young, as this is pretty much meaningless unless you're familiar with their assembly diagrams. I'm also fairly used to assembling flatpack furniture. The manufacturers recommend two people to put it together. (How the fuck can you do that when you're not allowed visitors?) At that point it turned into a question from an old maths exam: if it takes two people one hour to build a desk, how long does it take one person?

The answer is: about three and a half hours.

Admittedly, I wasn't working on it to the exclusion of all else. To begin with, there was the disappointing Tom Clancy reboot The Hunt for Red Screwdriver. After that, there were several breaks to study the instructions again, a couple of reassessments of progress hitherto, a few glasses of squash, several posts on Twitter charting my adventures with the bloody thing, and much swearing. Have you ever come across the type of fixings labelled A and B in the diagram before? I don't know what their proper name is, should you ever feel the urge to buy some from a DIY shop. However, 'bastard fitting' seems to work well – as in 'How the fuck do these bastard fittings work?'

At one point I posted on Twitter:

The desk is half completed. If you're a fan of the bizarre SF/martial arts/espionage/occult TV show Alias you'll know all about Project Christmas. Well, now I know why the CIA didn't recruit me straight from university: no bloody spatial problem solving ability whatsoever.

A little while later, I made another reference to the same mind-bending TV drama:

Also in Alias, the main villain kidnaps an expert in Knot Theory to help him assemble 47 artefacts into an extremely complex machine. It's given me an idea.
If a top-flight mathematician goes missing in the next few days, try my house first. He'll be building a desk.

Anyway, with the evening approaching I completed the desk and vowed never to undertake something like that again without help, or at least a shoulder to cry on. I moved the majority of my style guides and reference books to the desk. The following day I moved my history books as well, and they're now conveniently to hand if I need to check something in a novel. That involved dismantling a bookcase, taking it upstairs in dribs and drabs, and reassembling it in its new home. After this weekend-long flatpack frenzy, you can imagine how I laughed when I watched an episode of the aforementioned Alias a couple of days later, which ends on this touching father-and-daughter bonding moment:

 

And speaking of Alias – my recent adventure with online suppliers and useless couriers continues in the next entry. (You've gotta love a good cliffhanger …

A Grant-aided Trip to Swansea

In which The Author meets a proper author

Back in the summer of 2015, I was coming home from a hospital appointment and reading Ben Aaronovitch's latest novel, Foxglove Summer, on the bus.

Actually, I've jumped the gun slightly. Let me start again ...

In about 2013, I was browsing in The Works in Aberdare when I found a book in the history section called Rivers of London. Thinking it was going to be about the actual rivers – the Fleet, Tyburn, Westbourne, and so forth – that lie beneath the streets of the modern city, I picked it up and started reading the jacket.

As soon as I saw the Gollancz colophon (that's a posh word for a publisher's logo, in case you're wondering) I knew the book was in the wrong place. Gollancz has long been regarded as one of the leading UK publishers of science fiction and fantasy. This was turning into a promising discovery.

It turned out to be a contemporary crime novel about a young Metropolitan Police constable named Peter Grant. He's out on patrol in Covent Garden one weekend and discovers a headless corpse in the portico of St Paul's Church. The body is very recent. And the only eyewitness to the brutal murder has been dead for two hundred years. That leads Peter to a secret department of the Metropolitan Police who investigate supernatural and paranormal happenings.

That was enough to spark my interest. I took it to the counter and mentioned to Stacey that it had been misplaced. She laughed, and we compared notes on the 'frequent flyers' you come across when you work in a bookshop. Then Stacey told me that it was in their offer, along with the next two books in the series (Moon Over Soho and Whispers Underground).

I bought all three and proceeded to enjoy them thoroughly over the next few weeks. It took me a while to track down the fourth one, though. Eventually Neil R. bought me Broken Homes as a Xmas present. He knew I was a big fan of the books and I couldn't afford to go hunting it down myself. By now I was using Twitter, and occasionally put a message up saying how much I'd enjoyed reading a particular book. One of the authors I was following was Ben Aaronovitch, needless to say. I always liked reading his day word count, his queries aimed at his small army of Tech Support experts, and his random thoughts on everyday life.

That brings us to the summer of 2015, and my hospital appointment. On the way there I called into Waterstones in Putney and bought Foxglove Summer to read in the waiting room. It had only come out in paperback a week or so earlier, and I made a beeline for Waterstones as soon as I arrived in the vicinity of the hospital.

By then I'd signed up for the Gollancz newsletter, which gives subscribers advance warning of new publications. I'd also looked at the Gollancz website, to see if they ever wanted proofreaders. Virtually the first thing it said was that they 'currently have all the freelance help they need'.

It therefore came as something of a surprise to find a number of production errors in a finished book. I was about halfway through it when I arrived home, and it was like reading one of the uncorrected bound proofs which the trade reps would drop off in the shop. (By chance, one of the reps who generously kept me supplied with practice material was Graham Ireland from Orion.) Some were very minor things – missing punctuation, simple typos like from instead of form, that sort of thing – but some were more like the sort of thing that shouldn't really have made it to proof stage. One officer was promoted from Detective Constable to Detective Sergeant in just a few pages. The spelling of one character's name changed from time to time. Another character's surname changed without explanation.

Pretty much the first thing I did when I got to the library the following day was log into Twitter. I tweeted that I was thoroughly enjoying Foxglove Summer, but added that Orion (Gollancz's parent company) really didn't have all the freelance proofreading help they needed.

About quarter of an hour later I had a notification that someone had replied to my post. I checked, and found a message from someone named Gillian Redfearn. She asked if I was reading the hardback, and added that they'd had the text 'redone since for obvious reasons'.

I didn't know who Ms Redfearn was, but a quick click revealed that she was Deputy Publishing Director at Orion.

Now here was an interesting situation. Should I reply in earnest? Or should I just laugh it off?

I decided to go for Plan A. I replied that it was a paperback, bought the previous day. A short period of time elapsed before Ms Redfearn responded. She invited me ('in that case', as she said) to send in anything I found.

Now, imagine my dilemma. I hadn't done any paper proofreading since leaving university, and I was a bit rusty on the BS symbols. Also, I was reluctant to mark up a brand new paperback and post it back to London without knowing when I'd be able to get my hands on a replacement copy. In the event I decided to go old-school on the book. Luckily for me the weather was glorious that weekend. I took my trusty Chambers Dictionary, my notebook, a couple of pens, a ruler, and Foxglove Summer itself, to Aberdare Park on the Saturday morning. I found a fairly quiet spot to sit in the sunshine and started working my way through the text, line by line, noting anything that seemed not to ring true. I even found myself googling a real church in Herefordshire, to see whether it has a tower or a spire.

But I enjoy doing that sort of thing. It wasn't work, it was a pleasant way to spend a weekend without spending any money. I spent two full days beside the lake, reading the book for the second time, but in microscopic detail. Back at home, I typed up my findings and wrote a nice covering letter explaining a bit about my background. I put everything in the post and sat back to see what transpired.

It was the start of the summer holidays. Probably not the best time to expect a rapid response to a job application, never mind a cheeky 'side door' approach to a large company. Consequently a few weeks went by until an email pinged into my inbox from a chap named Craig Leyenaar. Headed Foxglove Summer - Proofreader, this is what it said:

Dear Steve, Gillian Redfearn passed your notes on Foxglove Summer to me. The close reading was impressive and you caught many errors that we will be correcting. Thanks for that. We are happy to consider this your 'proofreading test', but before we are able to pass on any jobs could you give us some more details? Are you happy to do both proofreading and copy-editing on screen? How long did it take you to proofread Foxglove Summer? What is your hourly rate? After we've received this information and we can all agree on terms we'll put together a contract and move on from there.

Well, that was the foot in the door I'd been hoping for. I sent Craig the extra bits and pieces, and I was away. Sort of …

It didn't take long until my first assignment arrived in the post. It was the final part of a trilogy by Gavin G. Smith: a very strange SF novel called The Beauty of Destruction. Craig also sent me PDFs of the first two books, so I could check for any continuity errors that might have sneaked into the mix. And I'm not lying when I say that this huge pile of paper sat on my desk for two whole days while I pondered what to do next.

You see, from just reading the first few chapters I could see that I had an uphill struggle ahead of me. As well as a great many typos, missing punctuation, dubious hyphenation (especially of Welsh words), and the usual typesetting glitches I was used to from the bound proofs, there were numerous inconsistent spellings, changes of name, incorrect spellings of real places, real companies and so forth … In short, it was a bloody mess. I was afraid to touch it without seeking some advice first. If I fucked it up, I'd never hear from Orion again and I'd be back to square one.

I emailed Rob H., an old friend who's been proofreading for close to twenty years. His advice was simple, practical and sensible – just what I needed to hear, in fact. He reminded me that I was being paid to find mistakes in the text. That's exactly what I should do. Mark everything up, he said, and send it back. He added that he'd come across books where the copy-editor seemed to have 'fallen asleep at the wheel', and pointed out that that's why publishers use proofreaders as the final line of defence. So that's exactly what I did.

In the event I typed out about eighty separate queries, as well as correcting factual errors like the names of various armaments manufacturers. (I was almost expecting to find the library on lockdown, with snipers on the roof of the Jokecentre, because Echelon had picked up my google searches and decided that a major terrorist cell was based in Aberdare.) I marked up the proof with so much red ink that it looked like a crime scene, posted it back to Orion, and emailed all my paperwork to Craig. The die was cast.

I was prepared for an email thanking me for my work on The Beauty of Destruction and paying me off, never to darken Orion's door again. Instead, once he'd had chance to go through everything, I had a very positive email from Craig. This sentence in particular gave me a great boost: 'After going through it, I think I'd be happy to send you some copy-editing work as well as proof reading.'

Craig was as good as his word, fair play. The next assignment I had from Gollancz was the typescript of Rig by Jon Wallace, for copy-edit. This was a bit of a curveball, because that was also the final part of a trilogy. That meant that I was slightly confined by stylistic choices made by the previous copy-editor. (In fact I was rather surprised that the three books weren't assigned to the same person.) It was a bit of a learning curve, because I had to use features of LibreOffice I hadn't come across before. But it's all good grist to the mill. I enjoy new challenges, and I've always enjoyed researching things in books and via the Internet. It seemed as though I'd finally landed the job Rowland and my other friends had told me I should have been doing years earlier.

My reputation for thoroughness and attention to detail was starting to pay off. In fairly short order Craig asked me to work on the 'definitive' texts of William Gibson's 'Sprawl' novels, an anthology of his short stories, and the 'authors' preferred text' of Good Omens by the late Sir Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. These are far from being newcomers to the scene, after all. To have names like those on my CV was quite an achievement, considering that I'd been officially freelance for only six months or so.

It wasn't long until my name started to circulate within Orion. In my first departure from Science Fiction, Craig's colleague Tom Monson asked me if I fancied copy-editing a historical novel by Christian Cameron. Set during the fag-end of the Peloponnesian War, Rage of Ares was the final instalment of the Long War saga. I think I must have been off school ill for the morning we covered Ancient Greece, because I knew bugger all about the period. Furthermore, my grasp of Classical Greek is limited to a few epigrams from Homer I've picked up from crosswords over the years. But I did my best with the typescript, flagging up marginal queries and compiling a fuller list of Notes and Queries (something that soon became my signature). I must have done an okay job, because Christian was very kind in addressing some of my more obvious questions. It didn't take long before one of Tom's colleagues (another Craig) offered me another of Christian's books – this time, set during the Hundred Years War.

This was a bizarre coincidence. The day I finished working on Rage of Ares and emailed it to Orion, I was in London. (See The Oyster is Your World.) I somehow found myself at the Priory of St John of Jerusalem, in Clerkenwell. I took a few photos, wrote a blog about my discoveries in town, and thought no more of it. When The Green Count arrived, I was amazed to find that Sir William Gold, the protagonist of the series, was raised at the Priory of St John of Jerusalem. (This was the original priory, of course, sacked during the Peasants' Revolt.) I sent the link to Christian via Twitter, and he was kind enough to leave a comment on my blog.

Since then I've worked on another four of Christian's books (two historical fiction, two fantasy), and we've pencilled in a couple of pints when he's in the UK next year. (He's based in Toronto.) We work via Twitter and/or email to iron out any problems in the text, and always have fun discussing obscure points of fictional (but real-ish) grammar. He's been generous enough to mention me in the acknowledgments to his books, and to endorse me online. It's going to be great to sit down and talk to him face to face, rather than via cyberspace.

Last October I had an email from an unfamiliar name, sent from a publisher called Bonnier Zaffre. They had a new crime novel for proofreading, and apparently someone in the office had suggested that I was the man for the job. It turned out that one of Orion's editors had moved to a different company and taken her contacts book with her. I knew then that I was moving in the right circles. Since then I've done a number of jobs for them, most recently proofreading the new novels by Lynda La Plante and Wilbur Smith. Yes – the Wilbur Smith.

All of which brings us back to Ben Aaronovitch. At the start of April, Craig emailed me out of the blue:

And so we come full circle . . . the new Ben Aaronovitch is coming up for copy-edit in a fortnight. Would you be available to do it?

Needless to say, I said yes.

It was Lies Sleeping, the latest instalment in the adventures of Peter Grant. I had to refer back to my well-thumbed copies of the earlier books while I was working on the typescript. Ben and I got to discuss some points via Twitter when I sent the edited typescript back, and I think we got each other's sense of humour. And then came the best news of all. A couple of months ago Gollancz announced that Ben would be touring the country, giving talks and signing Lies Sleeping. Best of all, he was coming to Cardiff and Swansea.

Wales tends to get overlooked when it comes to author signings. If they get as far as Cardiff we can count ourselves lucky. Swansea is pretty much terra incognita for mainstream UK publishers. Unfortunately, it's also pretty much inaccessible from Aberdare by public transport.

Cardiff was a more realistic prospect – a Thursday lunchtime signing in an independent shop in the Bay – but by the time Rhian and I got round to booking the tickets, it was sold out. (Rhian's also a big fan of the books, so I made sure she had the day off before proceeding any further.) I commented on Twitter, saying how disappointed we were to have missed out. Luckily Craig spotted it, and said that he could put us on the guest list if needs be.

It turned out that social media came to the rescue again. My old friend John works in the centre of Swansea, and offered us a lift there and back again after the event. I told Craig that we'd be heading for Swansea instead, and he said he thought it would be a better event anyway. Instead of just a signing, Ben would be giving a talk as well. We booked our tickets straight away.

Rhian, Liam (a big fan of Doctor Who, for which Ben wrote a couple of scripts back in the Classic era), and I set off in John's car at 8.00 on a hazy Thursday morning two weeks ago, and were in town just after 9.00. We decided to have breakfast in Thereisnospoon (as good as anywhere), and then jumped on a bus to Limeslade. We had the day to ourselves, and for £4.50 we could kill a couple of hours and get some sea air. We got to the beach at high tide, by which time the clouds had burned off and the sun was well and truly out. We walked the cliff path to Langland Bay, stopped off in Langland's Brasserie (a couple of converted beach huts) for second breakfast, and then walked to Caswell village to get the bus back into town.

We killed some more time at the Waterfront Museum, which wasn't as exciting as I'd hoped it might be, then made our way to the No Sign Bar for something to eat. It's not far from there to Waterstones, and we had time to browse before the event started. I picked up The Gradual, a 2016 novel by Christopher Priest that sneaked into the bookshops while my back was turned. (I finished it on the way back from London on Tuesday, and very good it is too.) Obviously I needed to buy Lies Sleeping. And I needed a new copy of Rivers of London, the first book in the sequence, because mine is currently circulating among the bar staff in Thereisnospoon in Aberdare. I had a nice chat with the Waterstones people while I was updating my loyalty card. I had the rest of Ben's backlist in my bag, after checking with the management that he'd be happy to sign those as well. John joined us when he finished work, and we all headed to the top of the building for the event itself.

The talk was entertaining, informative, and light-hearted. Ben has a rather warped sense of humour (which comes across in his books), and he's very down to earth about his writing, his family, and his writing process. It was good to be with so many people who clearly love the books as much as I do. He was even kind enough to ask if his copy-editor was there. We had a bit of banter about publisher's house style, public transport in Wales (Ben was travelling by train), and assorted odds and ends.

We queued for the signing (towards the end of the queue, because I had half a dozen books as well as Lies Sleeping) and we had a chat with the PR lady from Gollancz while we were waiting. (I can't remember her name, alas, but she was very pleasant.) It was nice to know that we were expected, as she called us 'the Aberdare contingent' when she came over to talk to us. Ben and I had a good chat while he signed my books, and I explained how the paperback of Foxglove Summer had opened the door to what I'm doing now. It was really lovely to tie everything up in a big loop, face to face with the author himself.

Afterwards the PR lady told me that Christian Cameron will be on the Gollancz Authors events list next year. (I knew that already from the horse's mouth, so to speak.) It seems that my name is quite well known in the offices. I asked her to pass on my thanks to Craig, for arranging for us to come to the event. I also emailed him the following day to tell him how the day had panned out and thanking him for having faith in me back in the summer of 2015.

John dropped us off in Aberdare and Rhian and I repaired to Jacs for a pint. It was only then that I realised Ben had given me a namecheck in Lies Sleeping, for my 'meticulous' copy-editing. That's as big a vote of confidence that I could have hoped for. All in all it's been a long, strange trip, and meeting the man who indirectly started the whole thing off was the perfect way to end a very busy, educational, entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable year of freelance work.

No Timewasters

In which The Author does exactly what it says on the tin

Those of us who remember the old days of newspaper classified advertisements will be familiar with this little phrase. (Like the news stories these printed artefacts contained, they seem to have fallen into disuse at around the turn of the century.)

The words 'no timewasters' were usually appended to a 'For Sale' ad – for a car, say, or a musical instrument. The idea was to make sure that only people who were genuinely interested (and, more important, who had the money) turned up to check out the item in question. Otherwise, the seller's house could quite conceivably have looked like the scene in The Commitments, when half of Dublin turns up to audition for the band.

Anyway, the next stage of Project No More Nice Guy does just what it says on the tin: No Timewasters.

It seems that my pal Clint has made the same decision independently of me, to judge from his recent decision to stop offering his photography services gratis to 'worthy causes' – who, we all know, have a contingency fund for things like that anyway.

Like me, Clint is (was?) an easygoing guy who gets ripped off because he's too polite to say 'no' when anyone asks for his help. He's a student, so he needs every penny he can get. Every time someone takes him away from his university work, he has to devote time and energy to a project which counts for nothing professionally, and which might – if he's very lucky – earn him a cup of coffee. Last week, he announced on Facebook that he's no longer willing to lug his gear off to some far-flung place (he doesn't drive) in return for fresh air and goodwill.

Relatable post, as the young people say these days. My proofreading and editing skills are also no longer available out of the goodness of my heart. Just because I once met you in the pub twenty-odd years ago, and you now think you're capable of writing a book, don't think I live on Scotch mist and kind thoughts. If you can't at least match the below-NUJ hourly rates paid by Orion Books, then by all means have a search online and find someone cheaper. If you can.

The same goes for my social media skills. I don't claim to have the expertise of my friends Richard J., Chris D., Andrew C. or Siân S., but I can find my way around Facebook, Wordpress, Twitter and Instagram fairly easily. (I've still no idea what Whatsapp or Snapchat are, and since I'm fifty years old I'll probably never bother to find out.) But I know how to use the main channels, and I can use ifttt with only a few hiccups, so I was a lot cheaper than using a web hosting company and trying to tweak all the settings later on.

In fact, just about a year ago I set up a Twitter feed and a Wordpress site for Plaid Cymru Cwm Cynon, our constituency branch of the Welsh political party. I knew that Richard was a member of the Labour Party, and would more than likely be offering his hosting and design services to them when the council elections were on the horizon. A few months later, Andrew (who runs a full-scale multimedia production company) announced that he and a friend were setting up the Cynon Valley Party in order to contest council seats this spring.

Although we'd had the online drop on them both, trying to get any information about the key players in our group was almost as difficult as getting a tax refund. In fairness, Cerith Griffith's 2016 Welsh Assembly election campaign was fairly switched on electronically. He used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram while we were out and about leafletting, and we both contributed to the Facebook page. The rest of them, though, seemed perfectly happy to use the same tired toolkit that Dad and the late Dafydd Roberts had used when they were standing for election in the early 1970s.

At the March 2016 branch meeting I raised (for, I think, the third time) the subject of magic sufficiently advanced technology as a valuable campaigning tool for the next round of elections. After all, how many young people do you know who read (never mind buy) a newspaper these days? Most of them don't even watch the TV news any more. If they're anything like the ones I know, they get virtually all their information about the world through their laptops, tablets or smartphones.

It was a section of the electorate that we urgently needed to reach out to. The media (even the electronic media) are dominated by a small clique of neo-liberal or neo-fascist entrepreneurs. Plaid Cymru's message is being swamped by a rising tide of racist, anti-European, anti-Corbyn, anti-worker, anti-NHS rhetoric. The only way to reach out to younger voters, I told them, is via the Internet.

Well, I tried to put the message out there, but it fell mainly on deaf ears.

Undeterred, I set up a hosted (i.e. free) Wordpress blog. I made Twitter and Instagram accounts for us as well. Cerith made me an admin on the Facebook page, so that I could link everything together via ifttt. Once I was sure everything was running properly, I emailed the login details for the Twitter and Instagram accounts to the people whose email addresses I already had. I thought if we all had access, we could use them as and when the mood took us. I encouraged them to post photos or information about local issues whenever they found something to talk about.

When I told them that all this wonderful magic wouldn't cost a penny (that's the single most powerful spell I know, taught only to Hogwarts sixth-formers), and that I'd do it in my own time, they were sold.

Or so I thought.

I decided to keep the Wordpress login to myself. Any decent first-year wizard can retweet stuff, or make a Tweet up themselves. Anyone with a reasonable smartphone can use Instagram. But using Wordpress calls for a knowledge of HTML, widgets, CSS, and other Dark Arts which would have left the others standing.

I started retweeting stuff (even my own stuff) immediately. A few of the others would retweet things I'd published, but hardly ever came up with anything of their own. I think I'm the only person ever to have used the Instagram channel. But the Wordpress site was almost dormant from the start. It wasn't as though it called for any technical involvement from any of the Muggles. I was going to look after the whole thing. Famous last words in the Land Where the Apathetic Rule.

I wanted to set up a page giving a bit of background about the key players in the local group: the chairman, treasurer, secretary, our councillors, and so forth. All I needed was about 250 words about themselves and a decent photo. Dai W., the branch secretary, is a fluent Welsh speaker; Gwyn M., my old pal from Trecynon, is also fluent. Translation wasn't a problem. Neither were photos – in theory. Nearly everyone's got a digital camera these days, or at least a smartphone.

The exception, needless to say, was Brian A., the branch chairman (or Chief Muggle). I knew we'd have an uphill struggle putting his piece together. In the event, Pauline J. ghosted a little biography and took a photo when they were out campaigning together. Gwyn translated it, and I added it to the drafts page.

And that was as far as it got.

Pauline eventually sent me something which I thought needed fleshing out, given her considerable experience in local and national politics, and a stock photo.

Peter F., the branch treasurer, sent me a rather underexposed and blurry photo of himself in his office at home. It was OK, but not great. No text, though. Two and half down, several to go.

Meanwhile, Dai and Karen M. (our councillor in Hirwaun) failed to come up with anything at all. I reminded them frequently that they were writing about the subject they know more about than anyone else alive – themselves – and it shouldn't be too difficult to put 250 words together.

I was wrong, apparently.

Anyway, the council elections are on 4 May. We started selecting candidates back before Xmas. As soon as people came forward, I started pointing out at every single meeting (and about once a week by email) that Richard and Andrew were throwing loads of material out via social media, at least once a day, and occasionally more often than that. We'd gone from being Achilles to being the tortoise in a very short space of time.

Nicola B. (whose father Terry had been a councillor back in the day, and whose brother Geraint ran for Westminster in 2005) sent me a rather elongated photo, which I was loth to use on the page. She also sent me a biog which I thought needed a bit of explanation at one point. I sent back my comments, and I'm still waiting for the revised version.

Between Xmas and New Year, I worked on a draft 'Meet the Candidates' page for a whole afternoon, to give everyone an idea of what the finished design would look like. I sent a couple of page previews out and asked for their feedback, so I could tweak it before it finally went live. The response was exactly what you'd expect. Only Danny A. from Mountain Ash West – a bit of a techie himself – told me he liked the general layout. Nobody else even deigned to reply.

I was keeping the Wordpress site ticking over with a motley assortment of community announcements (blood donation clinics, that sort of thing). They were already bilingual, so I didn't have to fuck about getting them translated, which usually took a couple of days.

In the meantime, I was posting stuff on Twitter and Instagram (see Mind the Gap in my public transport blog) as well; I was mostly retweeting news items and press releases from Tŷ Gwynfor, which nobody else seemed able to do – although Nicola claimed to have used the account a couple of times as well.

Danny sent me a very good biog and a decent picture, which I was able to use without too much intervention. Julie W. from Aberaman South was similarly co-operative, and I had their information ready to go live within a few days of its arriving in my inbox. It never did get published, though, as I had too many outstanding queries from the others to make the page public.

Just after Xmas, totally out of the blue, Danny sent me a scan of a two-page newsletter focusing on the plight of Mountain Ash town centre, and asked me if I could publish it on the blog. It featured bilingual text, a black and white photo of Danny, Nicola and Pauline on Mountain Ash Bridge, and contact details for the three candidates. In spite of my frequent suggestions, it didn't mention our Facebook page, our social media feeds, or the blog.

I published the scans as he'd suggested, but at the next branch meeting I'm afraid to say I lost my temper with everyone. I pointed out that by the time the information got to me, the newsletter was through most of the doors in Mountain Ash, and probably went from there straight into the recycling bag.

I reminded everyone that George Michael had died late on Xmas Day – after the Boxing Day papers had gone to press – and so people who rely on seventeenth-century technology for their information wouldn't have known about it until they read the headlines on 27 December. By way of contrast, within ten minutes of breaking on the BBC website, the news of Mr Michael's death was all over social media.

'We're not in the area of reactive news management any more,' I told them. 'It's all about being proactive these days. If I'd had that information at the outset, it would have been on the blog and all over social media even while Danny was still sorting out the DTP document.'

Dai objected, saying that older people don't use social media (which is true, for the most part), but I told him I wasn't suggesting replacing one means of communication with the other.

I added that we needed to use both channels to complement each other. We had to reach the biggest number of people possible, to convince them that Plaid Cymru is a viable alternative to another five years of Labour domination in the Valleys. Older people are going to be the most difficult to shift from their established voting habits anyway (see No Future); they'll turn out and return the same tired faces to Clydach Vale as they have ever since Clement Attlee was prime minister. On the other hand, younger voters aren't going to look at something printed, no matter how exciting it might be. We needed a two-pronged approach.

That was my argument, anyway.

As it turned out, it was also the argument of one of the other parties. They'd accidentally left behind a briefing document after a recent meeting, and it had fallen into enemy hands. It stressed the importance of social media, and laid out a strategy for pumping material out across all channels every single day between then and the elections.

Pretty much what I'd been telling Plaid Cymru Cwm Cynon we needed to do for over a year, in fact.

Anyway, the slow trickle of information continued. Ann J., who's fighting the Cwmbach ward, was fastest off the blocks. I had her information and photo within a couple of days.

Paul J., from Penywaun, is another first-rate Muggle. I bumped into him after a funeral, so I gave him my number and said I'd sit down with him and work on his biog together. So far, not a sausage.

Nor have I heard anything from Dan B. (Ynysybwl), Karen (Hirwaun), Dai (Aberdare East), Dai's wife Liz, or her father John D. (both Aberdare West). I don't even know who's been selected to fight the other seats throughout the Cynon Valley, because I haven't been to a constituency meeting or event since that night. I realised soon after leaving Mountain Ash RFC that evening that I was talking to the fucking wall, and decided to leave them to it.

I last posted something on the group's Facebook page on 10 February; the Instagram feed hasn't been updated since 29 January (me); nobody has used the Twitter account since 5 February (again, me). As for the Wordpress site … Well, I regret to inform you that it went out on the piss for St David's Day, and choked on its own vomit during the night. It seems that nobody else in the group has noticed, because I haven't had any emails asking me what's happened to it.

I've since withdrawn my long-standing offer to the Colstars to look after their Internet presence, as well. It's obvious that Derek would rather rely on an obsolete website, Facebook shares, and a few posters in key locations, to publicise their forthcoming events, than have a full-blown website with links to social media and a rolling blog with news items and features on the group.

It's obvious, too, that he doesn't want me to get involved in any way. I don't know why. We don't have any history between us; I was briefly a member of the Little Theatre group in the late 1980s, but that fell by the wayside when I started working in Treforest. I certainly wasn't party to the Great Cynon Valley Performing Arts Earthquake three decades ago, which gave birth to the Colstars in the first place, and the aftershocks of which continued to ripple down through YES, TUSC and even Showcase, none of whom were even born at the time.

Considering that every amateur dramatics group I've ever known has been crying out for older men to take to the boards, it seems nothing less than fucking rude that Derek has spurned all my attempts to get involved. My old pal Adrian T. told me a few months ago that it's a very cliquey organisation, though; if your face doesn't fit you'll never be welcome, no matter how enthusiastic you are.

(By sheer coincidence, the Colstars have just announced a fund-raising quiz this Sunday night, a couple of minutes' walk from my house. I think I'll have to have a subsequent engagement.)

My own involvement with other people's websites and social media will be limited to Alwyn's artwork site when that's up and running. At least he's going to give me a cut of his online sales, so I'll get some reward for my time and effort. Everyone else, though, is going to be rebuffed with the words NO TIMEWASTERS. Alternatively, in the words of the film, show me the money!

A Flashback to 2012

In which The Author finds history repeating itself again

Now that I've relocated my base of operations from Wordpress to here, I'm taking the opportunity to retrofit the disused blog to a consistent 'house style'. Every so I often I go through the original posts, tweaking the text and the HTML to a standard format. I usually call this 'extreme proofreading for geeks', incidentally.

Anyway, this afternoon I've been revising an entry from the summer of 2012, called Courting Controversy. If nothing else, it goes to prove that there's nothing new under the sun …

Faintheart

In which The Author experiences another mere coincidence

The book I'm currently working on is the third instalment in Christian Cameron's 'Age of Chivalry' series, which began with The Ill-Made Knight and continued in The Long Sword. I’d worked with Christian back in the spring, on the latest part of the 'The Long War' saga, so I was quite flattered when Orion approached me and asked me if I'd like to copy-edit his latest novel. (I won't reveal the title here, because I don't know whether it's been officially announced yet.) I'd like to think I did such a good job on The Rage of Ares that Christian himself asked if I was available. I haven't asked him directly, though. I'm not that conceited, after all.

Since I'm familiar with his style, and I'd had such a great time – buried under a mountain of books in Aberdare Library, some of which had probably been untouched since they arrived on the shelves – I jumped at the chance.

Well, I have to say that it’s been a bit like battling the Hydra. You put one query to bed, only for another two to spring up. I haven’t attempted to draw up a query sheet this time. Instead, I’ve been using the ‘Comment’ feature in LibreOffice Writer (the cheapskate’s Open Source equivalent of MS Word) to insert my Notes and Queries directly into the margin of the document.

Most of them are pretty short – 'Please see my Names Checklist', that sort of thing. A few point out homophones which have crept into the text. It happens to everyone, after all (see The Death of Rhydwen Williams in my other blog). A few of them – concerning points of historical accuracy or linguistic variations – are almost as long as the page they're pinned to.

Needless to say, I've been taking advantage of Aberdare Library's half-decent Reference section to deal with most of the obstacles I've come up against. On Thursday afternoon I took a photo of the collection of books I'd accumulated through the day, and sent it to Christian on Twitter.

(Incidentally, The Chambers Dictionary is the one I donated myself, as I told you in The Gift of Words. The Oxford Spelling Dictionary was also from my own personal stash, but when I upgraded to the latest edition I didn't need them both at home. I figured that Aberdare Library might take it off my hands, simply so they could say they had two dictionaries published after 1992.)

Anyway, I stayed there until closing time on Thursday, and didn’t bother reshelving them. Instead, I left a note on top of the pile, saying I’d be back in the morning, so they might as well stay there overnight. And on Friday morning I returned, along with five books from my own collection. I had the three Oxford University Press ‘Black Books’ -- essential parts of every proofreader’s and copy-editor’s toolkit. I also had John Julius Norwich’s book on the Popes, and a book on the Knights Templar, both of which I’d picked up in The Works in recent weeks.

I checked my emails and Christian had replied to my Tweet. Since he lives in Toronto, it came in overnight: Are all those for TGC? I replied, They're just the ones I was using yesterday. In the afternoon, I took another photo and Tweeted it to Christian, with the caption We're gonna need a bigger table.

As a matter of fact, we're gonna need a bigger library.

I had a quick look in the history section of the Lending department on Thursday afternoon. This might sound shocking, but as far as the reading public of Aberdare are aware, absolutely nothing happened in the world between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Napoleon. That extends the so-called 'Dark Ages' to nearly fourteen centuries: there's nothing on the Carolingian Renaissance, the Norman Conquest, the Crusades, the Hundred Years War, the Renaissance, the Wars of the Roses, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the English Civil War, the Restoration, the American War of Independence, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution …

Even the one book which Rhondda Cynon Taf CBC Libraries do have in stock – a historical account by Judith Barker – covers the second half of the Hundred Years War. I only found that out after I'd requested a transfer. Christian's book is set during the first half. Go figure …

Anyway, the coincidence came about last night, in the Prince of Wales, of all places. Karen and I were chatting about our latest romantic disappointments: mine with Clare; hers with a chap she's keen on, but who – yeah, you've got it in one – 'just likes her as a friend'.

Karen said, 'Your trouble is that you're too much of a gentleman. Girls take advantage of you, because you're kind and good. You've got …' She hesitated for a few moments, searching for the right word. '… chivalry.'

Well, what do you make of that? Karen knew I was working on a book, but she had no idea of the content, or even the historical setting. Why on earth would she have chosen that particular word at this point in my life?

But I thought about it afterwards. As I said in The Return of the King?, I've always been a fan of King Arthur, going back to when I first encountered some of the stories in junior school. In particular, the Grail cycle is a long-standing fascination of mine. And I'm sure everybody knows the bare bones of the Grail myth, even if they haven't read the stories in much detail.

We all know that Lancelot let the side down because he couldn't keep it in his britches. Gawain was a worthy knight and a brave soul, but he failed to find the Grail. Only Galahad – pure of heart and mind and body – was vouchsafed the sight of the Grail, but even he was defeated by his own self-doubt, and the vision faded.

It's still an odd thing for Karen to say, isn't it? I certainly don't fit the description of 'chivalrous' as lived by Sir William Gold in Christian's novels, or as defined by Ramón Llull, who literally wrote the book on the subject. For one thing, with my back and shoulders, I'd be absolutely no bloody use in a fight. I'm hardly a staunch servant of our lord Jesus Christ, either. (We never did heal the schism between the early Church and the Discordian Heresy, after all.) Roistering and wenching aren't really my thing – chance would be a fine thing, as I found out last week.

But, like Sir William, I do like to meet people from different places and cultures, who've had different experiences and hold differing beliefs. My life is certainly richer as a result. In fact, just this morning I was chatting to Jamila on Facebook. I wanted to pick her brains about an aspect of Islam which crops up in the book, and which I wanted to double-check before I finalise the edit. I teased her that, throughout all her time studying Forensic Science, she probably never expected she'd be asked to act as an expert witness in a historical novel.

Anyway, that's this week's mere coincidence. Just thought you'd like to know.