Has You Like It – the Hasiwriters book project
Early in 2014, Michael Sheils came into a session of Hasiwriters* with a book of Short Shorties. To elaborate, Michael writes short fiction which have a charm of their own, best brought out when he reads them in his very own Northern-Irish accent. His work splits into short-shorties, medium-shorties and long-shorties, the latter coming to two thousand words or less. Michael had published this book at his own expense. It was essentially a short story on each page, being 32 pages long. We commented on how good it looked and Joan Malvern commented that it was about time the writing group as a whole put out a collection of their work, whether poems, anecdotes or short fiction, from members past and present. We all agreed to this proposal and I strongly supported it. We each went through our catalogues to see what we could contribute and over the months that followed organised matters so that all pieces to pass through the scrutiny of our senior members – the joint group leaders Joan Atkinson and Joan Malvern and published poet Jim Taylor, who scrutinised my two pieces. Jim proposed the title: Has You Like It and brief bios of the contributors were featured. We decided to commemorate former member Janet Peel, who had helped keep the group going but died tragically young from cancer, by giving her the first and last story positions. As a self-publisher, I knew the mechanics so I wanted a commitment on book length – this would allow me to cost the Lulu output and it would also determine which stories I could put forward, mine being the longest. My initial projection was an A5 booklet about 100 pages long. Given the technicalities I (ultimately) agreed to prepare the cover, format the text and run the project through my Lulu account. The project span off into different areas such as typeface where I investigated word count per page and readability. ¹
Has You Like It ended up 90 pages long. The book launch was an opportunity to improve the profile of Haslingden Library and the library was featured on the book cover. Local dignitaries including the current and former lord mayors attended the book launch which was in the library.
Joan Malvern provided the blurb:
This is a collection of short stories and poems from writers based in Rossendale, Lancashire, with a foreword by renowned poet Jean Sprackland.
The book has no particular theme but the chosen works are representative of the different styles and approaches of each writer. Be prepared to journey through places both familiar and strange in this collection. It is available from Lulu at http://www.lulu.com/content/15766532
Jean Sprackland wrote in her introduction:
This book is alive with places, people and objects – some familiar, some strange, some like nothing you’ve known in your wildest dreams. A motorway, a hospital ward, the ‘forgotten under-ways’ beneath a library, an air-raid shelter, a ghost train, a kitchen table. We see the prizewinning Victoria sponge at a village fete, and take a tour of a museum of typewriters and dumb waiters; there’s an elegy to the lost radios of youth, and a glimpse of a long marriage, warts and all. Some of the pieces take us on extraordinary journeys to different points in space and time, to other realities, to the brink of death and even beyond. Voices rise and fall, weaving together, from the warmth and domesticity of a conversation between father and daughter to a surprisingly humorous chat with the Grim Reaper.
* Hasiwriters is a writing group where local writers can meet, write and get feedback. It is based in Rossendale, UK and meets the first and third Tuesday of each month at Haslingden Library, 17:30 to 19:00.
¹ Serious publishing uses Times New Roman. Why?
Times Roman was introduced in the 1930s. Its narrow shape fit well in newspaper columns, and it had a generous x-height for ease of reading. Its oblique stress made it much easier on the eye than the then current newspaper types, variants of the Scotch Roman family with vertical stress, wide serifs and exaggerated contrast between thick and thin strokes. The distance from baseline to median (effectively the x-height) affects readability. An over-busy typeface benefits if the gap between rows is increased. Single line spacing is used for the examples in this note.
The popularity of Times Roman provoked a reaction against it and an interest in alternative typefaces. Sans Serif fonts become useful when text might be converted into an image. When this happens, resized Sans Serif typefaces transform better. In some cases, however, Sans Serif just looks wrong. For example: Trigonometry diagrams, where variables use Greek characters which look better in Serif.
Discussions on Squint Free Fonts: http://layersmagazine.com/art-of-type-squint-free-smalltype.html and http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3330/what-is-the-best-font-for-extremelylimited-space-i-e-will-fit-the-most-readab
15 Dec 14
Has You Like It
Who believes in God? What about big, bad non-anthropomorphic, all-powerful creatures? Aliens? Evolution? Philosophy was the original method of dealing with abstract and unprovable notions in a scientific way. It doesn’t give answers but those early Platonic dialogues provide a way of cutting through prevailing beliefs – with the object of creating a state of unknowing aporia. Along with Plato, I’d attribute this to his master and teacher, Socrates. Plato then goes on to offers schemes by which knowledge can be organised. Philosophers have been doing this since. Long before I picked up the pen, I read Science Fiction. My reading list was long, stretching from early excursions into the fantastic with H.G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, James Branch Cabell, Robert E Howard and EE. ‘Doc’ Smith; through Pulp, the Golden Age, New Wave and all the way to Cyberpunk. I – I have to put my hand of my heart – I hoped to see good treatment of alien ways of thinking. For the most part I was disappointed. Alien thinking = alien philosophy but for the most part, old ways of portraying character and setting seem to put a brake on any serious attempts to develop in this way. The few exception that come to mind are in Dune – albeit aliens are largely absent from Frank Herbert’s scheme of the universe – and Zelazny’s work. Roger Zelazny – seriously underrated – rarely dwelt on tedious, wordy / worthy analyses of how and what his characters – alien of human – thought. He did show rather than tell and boy did that work. Direct, action oriented, award winning – but you can peek into it and see Roger has done his homework. Recommended: Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Isle of the Dead. The Amber series – a universe of worlds, shadows of the one true primal Earth: Amber. Shadows to light –Plato’s similes: the cave, the sun; pre-Christian, used by Sufis through the ages. The Sufis of course pre-date Islam. Philosophy? Islam? We’ve steered well off course. With A Guide to First Contact I got a whole universe to build. God – rarely appears in Science Fiction and when He does, the belief system around him is invariably kyboshed. Evolution. What were we? What comes after human? How will it happen?
At the outset my key aliens – Star Beings – insisted that the question of God not be settled. Ambiguity was essential to their function. The reason for that is a spoiler. It’s not a spoiler to say that Guide is written on several levels and larger and smaller storylines intersect events in the book, the plot isn’t force-fed leaving the reader to come to his or her conclusion.
Reading a book means constructing a mental framework. If it makes you think then it’s been worthwhile.
– from edited to POD – Q + Kindle + eventually ISBN (the final stage) was one heckuva challenge
11 Feb 14
It's SF so let's talk about God
From its beginnings, my excursion into noir was shaped by the work of Raymond Chandler. Noir bleeds colour out until all that’s left is red, but doesn’t he write it well. I’ve read less than two of his works (less than two? Killer in the Rain and Farewell My Lovely –never completed) but Chandler strides through my imagination, a colossus. Could I add anything to that?
There’s a not-so-secret admiration for the American way of doing things. Sure, life across the pond isn’t perfect, but it ain’t no Shangri-La over here either. There’s an experience that I would want to live first hand, yet I can get a vicarious piece of the action if I’m prepared to write it up. Don’t know about anybody else but that sounds a good deal to me. However, I’m no politically correct apparatchik, I write what I see (and if I can’t, I dig it up.)
Unfinished Tales wasn't conceived as a whole; rather it evolved over a period of months. The origins actually lay in A Guide to First Contact. To give some perspective, when I put that project to bed, it included around 160 pp (50k words) worth of conspiracy, cloak and dagger. Write something and you develop a taste; of course Guide was mostly post-apocalyptic but I wanted to have a go at thriller / detective / Americana without SF genre constraints. That meant standing back from run of the mill catastrophes and dystopias. Now this was a natural evolution – a new facet of the good old US to explore without having to destroy it beforehand! My first port of call was the murky world of opinion pieces that sometimes appear in regional newspapers. Yep – for those who live in the UK, the system of newspapers with national coverage isn’t how things work over there. (The New York Times covers New England region…) now how could an OpEd be subverted to work for money? That became the starting point for Alibi. Six months later I followed that piece up with Tornado Alley. Narratives change people and while my protagonist writes up on the weather station, he gets to discover the Indian Nations…
America has more voices than just the conquered. There are many paths that lead to here and now. In Without Question, begins the process of unpicking bad from good, law-breaker from law-enforcer. Plato defines god in terms of the needs of the state; where guns, people and morality is for hire, where do you hang your values? You reach a point where might is right and your compass only points to power, though sometimes it stops over for the small dollops of money that litter the field of dreams. Money. It rarely takes primacy unless the participants don’t know the score.
Ridge Runner, on the other hand is a straight dip into private investigator territory. The fictional town of Lellegheny has a local legend – the ridge runner. It’s been showing up every few decades and there’s been another sighting. Then there’s a missing husband to track down.
Outside of this, I’ve found an interest in periods of historical change. One such was the period that birthed the West. There’s some debate on how exactly its ascendancy began but there’s no doubt on the events. The East Roman Empire (also known as Byzantine) was losing its grip over the Mediterranean, partly because it no longer had access to Greek Fire (this a consequence of the expansion of the Greater Seljuk Empire westward. An offshoot of the Seljuks would come to dominate Anatolia and later become the basis for the nation state now known as Turkey – but then it was the culmination of the Golden Age of Islam.
The Byzantines also faced threats from the West – the County of Sicily (Norman) was evolving into the Kingdom of Sicily. Soon Byzantium would be sacked – by the Fourth Crusade. On paper the West should be blown away by what the Greater Seljuks evolved into, the Khwarezmian Empire. Corsairs prowled the Mediterranean rounding up people like cattle and selling them on as slaves. What a time to write about. I conceived a five part tale – each tale is independent but linked – set in Malta. Three of these are written: Xewkija, The Central Sea, and Adriana, following three friends whose lives are changed. A tale is never done – it’s possible to seal off the plot elements but we know that life goes on. Completion is a fine thought, suggesting nothing is beyond us. If I leave room it’s because a fundamental part of us needs to have room for other interpretations, for the unknown. It’s how we grow.
Then there’s Winter in Alexandria. Alexandria, once the glory of the Greek ecumene. Absorbed into the Roman world – and why not, Aegyptus was the bread-basket of Rome. A long lost world, coming to terms with the Teutoberger disaster.
10 May 14
Unfinished Tales
