OK, on the downside – let’s get it out of the way before we begin – I have not written anything new, although I’ve been working on some edits for the sweeping, complicated epic K’Barthan sff Book which I pick up and prod at from time to time. We have just finished introducing the main characters and setting up what they want to achieve and who is stopping them. I’m about 120k in. Oops.

That said, there’s a reason for the lack of writing. I do most of my writing in Scriviner on my iPad because the mousepad on my computer is really irritating. It used to be excellent but then one of Windows’ many updates borked it. Now it picks up the heat from my thumbs and randomly moves the cursor to other parts of the page when I’m typing. I don’t always look at the screen when I’m typing so this can result in a few minutes typing nothing, because the cursor has suddenly landed somewhere neutral, or a whole bunch of stuff in the middle of an earlier paragraph. Most annoying.

The editing in question has been the equivalent of printing it out and scribbling on it, in this case, sending it by PDF to my remarkable tablet and scribbling on that. I cannot say enough good things about the remarkable. I bought the Remarkable One for about £300 off kickstarter after seeing a Facebook ad.

It was a huge gamble. There are many, many scams – do NOT contribute to the pocket Windows PC, for example – and I did get a bit nervous at the end because it was nearly a year before it shipped but it was brilliant from the get go. Even better it had a plastic screen. It took them a while to build all the functionality. It couldn’t convert handwriting to text or import pdfs to edit originally but as people used them they discovered what we needed and built it in.

The only points of pain: it took ages to boot up and it had three buttons at he bottom which didn’t do much but I kept pressing them inadvertently with my hand while writing and opening a new notebook, or closing the one I was writing in, or going to a new page.

After a year of seeing adverts for the second generation, I recently took the plunge and stumped up the cash for it; the Remarkable 2. It turns on instantly, it’s even more like writing on paper and the look and feel is really cool; sleek gunmetal grey … er … metal and it’s really thin, about 4mm I think. You can turn the pen round to rub out things now as well. They basically took everything that made the Remarkable 1 hard to use and fixed it. Only one problem … it now has a glass screen. Ulp. I give it a few weeks before I break it. Which is a pisser. But you can’t win ’em all.

To try and keep it going for a bit longer I’ve bought it a case from caseable (it’s the same size as the first ever iPad so luckily it is possible to get a customised cover for it). Hopefully with a bit of protection it will survive a year or two before I smash it.

Another upside, I have won £5 in the Alzheimer’s lottery which I play every month and a princely £25 from the Premium Bonds – so that’s a bit of a bonus.

Also, I’ve had some other unusual luck. The Chaos Fairies are clearly feeling a bit guilty for repeatedly doing me over, as, frankly, they fucking should. But I am eternally grateful that their sense of intense guilt at repeatedly fucking up my life appears to have resulted in some kind of unborking intervention with the version of Windows 10 that my lap top is running.

You see I have two main issues with Windows 1o. First, I bought a lap top with a small fixed state drive (128gb) and a 1terrabyte external drive which I intended to use instead. For three months or so this was brilliant. Then an update to Windows gave the external hard drive the equivalent of an invisibility cloak. It wasn’t just that my computer could no longer talk to the drive. It couldn’t detect it at all. I had to boot up my old lap top – a process which, in itself, takes 40 minutes – and then copy everything from the external hard drive to a usb stick, and from there to an older drive which my brand new lap top could still see. The second piece of Windows 10 based cockwomblery was with my Printer. It suddenly stopped printing pdf files. It transpired I’d inadvertently upgraded my version of windows from 34 bit to 64 bit. Naturally there was no roll back. I was stuck with 64 bit. No more freehand illustrator ether. That only worked with 34 bit. The net result of this was that there wasn’t a fix and if I wanted to print the pdf documents I had to buy a new printer.

My only point of pain with the HP was its massive footprint so, after a bit of research, I decided to buy an Epson. I picked one up for a song and it had a scanner on top – also handy as the non-replaceable bulb in my excellent Epson Perfection scanner had just gone. My old printer will print in black if the colour cartridge has run out and will print in colour if the black one is empty. It will print until all the colours in the colour one run out – but I discovered that the drawback with three colours in one is that they don’t all run out at the same time. Usually the yellow dies first, then blue and then you are printing all your documents in pink for a while before that, too, dies and you have to buy more ink. It’s expensive but I can get refilled ones for about £15.

When I bought the Epson printer, which I had to do, urgently, so I could print some pdfs for the Christmas Fayre back in 2019, I made certain to buy one that that had all the colour cartridges separate so I could replace the yellow without feeling a bit wasteful throwing away a cartridge that was still healthily full of magenta and cyan.

Knowing the quality of the scanner I’d had, I thought an Epson printer would be a good idea. I was so, so wrong. It is, frankly, one of the most horrific pieces of shit I ever had the misfortune to buy. It was £35, which, incidentally is exactly half the price of a new set of printer cartridges for it. Not only that but while you can get a set of refilled cartridges for £15 or thereabouts, the printer has some kind of chip in it which tells it they are not ‘proper’ Epson cartridges and it refuses to print in case the sub standard ink breaks it somehow.

I wouldn’t mind so much if it was like the HP cartridges I use, where there is a lot of electrical gubbins on the actual cartridge but this is basically a tank full of ink. Although looking at the price, I suspect there is a great deal of liquid gold inside and possibly some crushed diamonds for sparkle. No wait, those would be cheaper than whatever is in these tiny tanks of ink. It’s supposed to print 400 pages, frankly I’d estimate it’s closer to something like 50. Worse, if a single one of these cartridges runs out of ink the printer won’t print anything.

When it’s midnight on a Sunday, nothing’s open and you need a document printed for Monday morning do you care if it’s blue? Of course you fucking don’t. Something is better than nothing Epson, you bell ends! Seriously. No yellow? Unlucky. Want to try printing in black? Sorry. Nah-uh, not printing in black until you fork out £20 for another yellow. I reckon my Epson prints at about £1 a page. I hate it.

Enter the chaos fairies who appear to have decided to give me a break. A few months ago, I discovered, serendipitously, that my computer had suddenly started printing pdf documents on my old printer again. The elderly A3 Hewlett Packard desk jet I have had for the last 20 years rides again. Jolly dee.

This week, tidying up my desk drawer, I happened upon the spiffy 1 terrabyte external hard drive. It’s so cool. It’s about the size of a cassette tape box – look it up younglings – with a cable and a blue light that comes on when it’s running. I thought about the pdf printing thing and looked at it and wondered …  I plugged it in and it worked. I still can’t quite believe it. So now I have reverted to the original plan, cleaning out my hard drive and putting it all on the external drive – but still backed up to the desk top drive my computer has been able to read all along.

Wow! That’s a bonus. OK so the mouse pad is still all over the fucking shop but as the great Canadian poet Meatloaf once said, ‘two out of three ain’t bad’.

Except, I’d better not speak too soon because I see that Windows has installed an update and would like to restart …

Updates on the stuff I mentioned last week …

Remember that book with the wrong innards? Well, on the upside, I managed to sort all of that out and all the books in the Hamgeean Misfit series on Google are now correct; right covers, right links inside, right series name in the book and on the metadata. Woot. Another major win, I also got the right files to the people who’d got Small Beginnings when they should have had Nothing to See Here. On the downside, nobody reviewed it so I sweated a lot to no useful effect.

Arse.

Second thing … remember the logo? Yeh, well, check this. I think it’s fabulous.

So that’s now on the spine of all the books … when I upload them.

I also managed to fix the hideous Small Beginnings/Nothing To See Here faux pas so that’s done (phew!).

Aaaaand! Dum dum daaaaaaaaaah! Too Good To Be True has gone to the editor. Woot!

In an effort to up maintain my output of at least one book each year I have been sorting out. Tasks include unbodging my website or at least, bits of it, and renaming the K’Barthan Shorts series as K’Barthan Extras.

Sorting the site is … a challenge. I haven’t got that far but I do now have an audiobooks page that is within the main site, rather than drifting in purdah somewhere. I also have a mailing list signup page in the main menu which is the same information but just in a more prominant place position. That caused a bit of a headache as I had to change the name of the directory where some of the pictures are kept from freebook – which is what it was called when I imported it – to images. Luckily I have code view and I was able to use search and replace. Phew. The question is whether https://www.hamgee.co.uk/books/hm is better than https://www.hamgee.co.uk/infohm.html one is shorter but the other is slicker and doesn’t have the stupid html bit on the end that marks me out as the bodging noob I am.

Changing the series is taking a while as K’Barthan Shorts is mentioned in the ‘other books’ section of every single ebook.

Mmm.

Then again, the audiobooks don’t have one! Woot! So that’s just the three Misfit/Extras books for those.

Sorting out the massive update the ebooks project, it seemed best to start with the four books in the K’Barthan Extras, Hamgeean Misfit series. To that end I have pages of notes and tables with tick boxes and itemised lists and all sorts of other lunacy to work through so I can tick each thing off as I go and know exactly where I am and what I’ve done … rather than spending about fifty minutes working it out every morning.

All all the relevant records on the ISBN database now have changes submitted – although they might not necessarily be live for another month or so – and the covers, files and blurbs for the K’Barthan Extras books are done on the Google Store and Too Good To Be True loaded for pre-order.

Next, I have to work out how to change the name of the actual books on Ingram – because I didn’t manage to suss how to do it in their dashboard last time I looked. If I don’t then, when I upload the covers for Extras I can see them just pulling the whole lot from sale because the series name in their meta data is different to the one on the covers. Although I should be able to upload the K’Barthan Series covers straight off and Too Good To Be True shouldn’t be a problem, either, because, what with it not being added yet, they don’t know it isn’t ‘Shorts’. We shall see how that goes.

And at some point the iPad should come back, or at least, a replacement.

Hmm … should be a busy week then.

If you’re interested, and you feel like it …

Too Good To Be True is out on 18th March, fingers crossed. Originally, I’d hoped I’d have got my shit together and managed to set it up on all of the retailers so anyone who wants to could pre-order it from anywhere they like. But you know me. My shit still very much scattered to the four winds. For a start, if I upload it directly to Apple, which was my intention, I have to have an iPad because they insist on two tier authentication so I have to have a code number sent to my iPad and I have no iPad ergo … no code and no entry. I’ll probably end up going through D2D to them. Barnes & Noble hasn’t gone live yet – I’ve gone direct to them, too for the first time – but you should find working links to Smashwords, Google Play, Kobo and Amazon

On the other hand, you can pre-order it from my website or my web shop for a whole £ less than it is everywhere else! Mmm. By Grabthar’s Hammer! What a savings!

Anyhoo, here’s the gen …

Too Good To Be True

When the finger of fate points … hide!

When The Pan of Hamgee encounters some mudlarkers trying to land a box on the banks of the River Dang he is happy to help. Having accepted a share of the contents as a reward he cannot believe his luck. It contains one of the most expensive delicacies available in K’Barth, Goojan spiced sausage. If he can sell it, the sausage might spell the end of his troubles. On the other hand, knowing his luck, it could bring a whole load more.

Suggested UK cinema rating for this one PG (parental guidance)
This is a humorous science fiction fantasy story set in a parallel reality.

To find out more, and for links to pre-order it if that’s your thing, go here: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/infotgtbt.html