• My Olympia production schedule stares down at me from my pin board. There’s so much to do and yet things are progressing on time, so far. Next month I am hardly at home. I’m visiting schools and libraries all over the place, so I think the schedule will drift for a while, but I’m confident I can bring it back in line again.

    As you can see the covers are all designed now and we are very happy with them. This week I finished the inside artwork for the first book, Run like the Wind, and sent them off to my publishers.

    I’ve just now finished the first draft of the first draft of the fourth book, Throw for Gold. I’ll let it cook a bit and see how it is. I’m sure it will need some editing before I send it to my editor, even though I edit madly while I’m writing.

    It turned out well from the short synopsis and the fairly detailed plan I had for the story. Half way through I decided to change a major scene and introduced a wonderful new character, Nestor, who cooks for the elite Athletes in Olympia. He’s a bit of a Jamie Oliver really. He can’t understand why everyone is so obsessed about sport when there is so much wonderful food in the world to be cooked and eaten.

    I’m always amazed how characters appear out of nowhere and muscle in on a story. Nestor has really made the story much more interesting and added a new element of humour too.

    Now – back to pencil sketch corrections for “Wrestle to Victory.”

  • In all the kerfuffle over my database slip-up, I thought I’d already posted this.

    An egg may seem like a simple shape, but if you have difficulty drawing one, maybe this will show you how they are constucted and so help you get the feel of where to put the lines.

  • When I first started my blog, I had to turn the comments off, as I was inundated with spam. I tried having readers register, but no one could be bothered, so I forgot all about reader interaction.

    Then came Akismet, a brilliant spam fighting plug-in that comes built into wordpress. It catches pretty well everything, so I feel fairly confident having my comments open. (Having written this I’ll probably be inundated!)

    What I find interesting is the spam I get. xxx sites seem to have calmed down and almost disappeared recently. There are quite a few promoting medicine sites, but most now seem to be trying to promote what seem to be quite legitimate businesses. Some are quite local businesses too, that couldn’t hope to gain business from my site.

    I think those businesses are being sold a dream of being first on the Google page of their business. One way to do this is to get links on other websites. One way to do that is to spam unsuspecting blogs who will end up with piles of spurious comments, all with links to business websites across the globe. If you know what you are doing, it’s money for old rope.

    I’ve learned not to take it personally. I know that a button is pressed and robots troll off into the web looking for private installations of WordPress or other blogging software. They test the site to see if unsolicited comments are allowed, and then they post a spam message. This can either be a blatant list of links to other sites, or a carefully crafted and often quite flattering message about what a great blogger you are and what a scintillating post you just wrote. I’m sure many bloggers approve those by mistake.

    They seem to come in waves. When they find they can leave a message on my site they must send out a signal to others, who all turn up in hope. When they get spammed, they disappear again and, thanks to the way Akismet works, everyone else is then protected from the same messages

    It all seems such a waste of time and effort to me. And what must those spammers think of themselves? Do they think they are the knights of the internet, hacking their way to the front page? Yes, cream does float to the top, but so does scum. How do they live with themselves knowing that they are irritating little parasites, like useless tapeworms, living off the hard work of others, adding nothing to this life? I suppose some people just have no conscience.

    I’m sure they must have skills that could be put to much better use. I suppose that, like big fleas that have smaller fleas, even spammers have someone living off them. I hope they find that irritating too!

    Meantime, thank you Akismet!