Memory Lane redux

Stanley - Thursday

I am in Denmark waiting to head to the airport where we'll fly (via Oslo) to Kirkenes near the Norwegian/Russian border. Then over the next two weeks we'll take a ferry along the coast to Bergen.

Joining Mette and me are two old South African friends, who have never been in Scandinavia - they are nervous of the upcoming cold. The main purpose of the trip is to find and photograph the northern lights.

Of course, some of the conversations we've had are about South Africa and its customs - which reminded me of an old blog that I wrote of things from my childhood that young South Africans today would probably not recognise. Here they are again,
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I was thinking about my childhood recently - of the Fifties and Sixties.  And how fortunate I was to have a loving family, food on the table, and parents who prized education and, of course, books.

That sparked memories of things that if I told youngsters of today, they would look at me blankly. 

A tickey box

Public telephones used to cost threepence for a three-minute call.  In South Africa, a threepence coin was called a tickey.  Hence the name.

I remember the tickey box at the tuck shop at school - some enterprising future scientist had rigged up a wire from the innards of the box which, if you touched it to a small metal plate on the receiver, completed the call without having to pay.

Abandoned tickey boxes

A one-and-thrup

Comic book stories - longer and more complex than Superman or Popeye - were very popular.  For us they were expensive, but much sought after.  They cost one shilling and threepence (thruppence).

Sherbet

A popular sweet (candy) was a small packet of what we called sherbet that came with a straw.  Sucking the fine powder was wonderful, except if you accidentally inhaled it.  I'm sure it was just flavoured confectioner's sugar.

Brown cow

I still enjoy an occasional brown cow - half coca cola, half milk. 

White cow

I never enjoyed a glass with half milk and half lemonade (Sprite).

A sammy

My family bought most of its vegetables from an Indian man who drove along the streets with a specially adapted bakkie (pick-up truck) displaying his wares.  I guess the word sammy was slang for an Indian man.  I don't remember if it was pejorative, but it probably was, given this was South Africa.

Bioscope

Cinema

Bug house

Bioscope

Antimacassar

Cloth on the back of a seat to protect the fabric from being stained with hair oil (macassar or brylcreem).  "Brylcreem - a little dab'll do ya!" was the radio jingle for Brylcreem.

Anti-macassars on a train

Swimming costume

Bathing trunks

We still use this term in South Africa.

Cozzie

Swimming costume

Spend a penny

To urinate.

Public ablutions used to cost a penny to use.

Monkey gland steak

Exotic simian meal.

Just kidding!  Monkey gland sauce is a tangy sauce to put on steak.  A good recipe can be found here.

Chappies bubble gum

Fruit-flavoured bubble gum

Nigger balls

We never knew that the name of those hard, black sweets was offensive - partly because the word 'nigger' was not in common use in South Africa.  We had our own offensive terms.  They are now called black balls.

Nigger balls

Delivered milk

At the front door - every day. With dollops of cream at the top.

Goof

Pronounced as many Americans say 'roof'.  Or perhaps how Caro would say it. Or a dog barking. It means to swim.

Louis Washkansy

The recipient of the first heart transplant - done at Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town by Dr. Chistiann Barnard on December 3, 1967.  He lived 18 days.

Apartheid signs

No comment necessary.

Ag, Pleez Deddy

The most famous song from the Sixties was what was known as Ag, Pleez Deddy.  Jeremy Taylor wrote and played "The Ballad of the Southern Suburbs", which mildly mocked the language and accent of the southern reaches of Johannesburg.  Taylor was later banned because of his anti-apartheid stance.  You can listen to the song here, scratches and hiss included.


I'm sure everyone reading this will have similar lost memories.  Please share some.

Hiking My Own Spice Trail

Sujata Massey

Political chaos is making me cling to quiet evenings home. As it turns out, I am not alone in thinking that our everyday, intimate life can be a source of restoration.

The idea that our kitchens should remain places of joy was explored beautifully on this Sept. 13 Splendid Table podcast. One of the show’s regular contributors,editor Tucker Shaw from America’s Test Kitchen, suggested replacing old spices with new ones as a profound way to nurture yourself.

A few days after hearing the podcast, I got an email from a home organizing site, A Bowl Full of Lemons, that proclaimed that very day was the one that everyone needed to purge their spice drawer. Yes. In that dream blog world, all the spices come in matching jars, and they take up one small drawer.

The writing was on the wall--or in my case, the kitchen blackboard. I hoard spices the way that shops and libraries store books. In fact, I believe in a library of spices, along with a library of cookbooks. But I knew that any spice organization program in my home would last much longer than the fifteen minutes suggested by A Bowl Full of Lemons.

I like to think that my own spice and dried herb trail is a microcosm of the original spice trails emanating from Asia and the Americas to Europe. In my house, one is forced to hunt down spices in both a kitchen and a butler's pantry. The journey includes stops to view, sniff and taste many dozens of jars that have been crammed like unhappy subway riders in six kitchen drawers, with the overflow packed in three plastic containers in a large cabinet.

There are so many spices that our husband does not know where to start looking, when he wants to cook. His solution is to go to the neighborhood grocery and buy a tiny, six-dollar bottle of whatever he does not see.

I needed Marie Kondo, but she was not available. And predictably, as I began considering the values of my assorted spices, many of them tugged mightily at my heart. It is not the same as wilted celery from a fridge or frostbitten lamb from the freezer. The spices look fine, and they will not make you sick, if you add a tired teaspoon to your soup or stew.

But here's my problem. Removing spices is striking at history of past cooking--and dreams of dishes that could be.

One of the first big jars I regarded was a giant one stuffed with dried purple-red guajillo chiles that I purchased at a bodega, probably around 2009 when I was very ambitious. The chilies traveled with me to Maryland in 2012. quite far, because we have lived in Maryland since 2012. The dried chiles are so large and gorgeous—but could they be a tad too complex for my ordinary enchilada and chili nights?

Probably a third of my spices hail from India. I adore a multi-spice pack from the southern state of Kerala brought to me by a relative a few years ago (who's counting). The pack has locally grown black peppercorns, star anise, whole cloves, cardamom pods and cinnamon bark. This is a key, highly aromatic grouping that goes a long way, either as single elements, or roasted and ground into a kind of garam masala used for Malayali cooking.

Kerala is also the home of my most unused and mysterious item: cocum. Cocum are small sour black orbs that were a subtle flavoring in a fabulous shrimp curry made by Maria Zacharia for my daughter and me in her Alleppey home in 2008. Maria gifted me the cookbook she wrote,  and because cocum was on the ingredient list for many of her fish recipes, I hunted it down in a local market.  Despite the passage of time, the cocum is moist, and it is supposed to be soaked before cooking. It is staying with me another decade, I believe.

In my various drawers and the cabinet, I discovered three containers of the black cumin seeds more commonly known as nigella or kalonji. These were easy to toss, because I had already bought a new bag and discovered the taste of a new kalonji seed is biting and much more interesting than the aged seeds.

Taste-testing and careful viewing were good way to lead a reluctant drawer-cleaner to truth. Cardamom pods might look green and plump, but inside, if the seeds are white, they are far from fresh.  I found that the cardamom I'd stored inside the butler’s pantry cabinet had fresh black seeds inside the pods, making it a snap to eliminate the three other small jars of old cardamom pods.

Spice mixtures are a special problem unto themselves. Anyone who cooks from a good Indian cookbook—and I am thinking most specially of Madhur Jaffrey—is instructed to roast and grind spices and mix them in particular ways for easy use in future dishes. The same kind of spice blend making is encouraged in Mexican cooking and Middle Eastern cuisine. It took me more than a half-hour a couple of years ago to make Madhur’s hot and sour chaat mixture, but I know that the purpose of making these spice mixtures is because the freshly ground spices are more fragrant than what comes from the store. Though I do not hesitate to buy spice mixes that are new to me, like a bruschetta blend I saw in a department store in Milan, or the Ras El Hanout spice blend I found in a Middle Eastern grocery store in Brooklyn.

It is fortunate my sodium level is normal, because my kitchen is packed with salt. We start with coarsekosher salt and finely milled sea salt, but the real adventures begins with the various flavors of Hawaiian sea salt that I brought home from Honolulu. My feelings run deep for silky gray smoked sea salt, Himalayan pink salt in both block and granulated forms, and kala namak, a volcanic salt from India. I was thrilled to find flaky Maldon salt from England at Trader Joes, so it's been in my wheelhouse for a few weeks. I'm also working through various salt specialty mixes with flavorings of garlic, chili, ginger and paprika. Confession: I only threw away one small container. However, I have pledged not to buy another grain of specialty salt for the next three years. 

Midway through the purge, my husband paid a call to the kitchen and requested that I go easy on our tiny collection of American spices (I secretly call them processed vegetable extracts). I am talking about dried, mechanically-minced or granulated or powdered garlic and onion. There is a role for them in some American Thanksgiving dishes and the foods of Louisiana. To each their own. At least their maker, McCormick, is a Baltimore company! 

Salt is cheap, and other spices are very expensive. If I had to go to the mat to save a particular spice, it would be the two containers of Iranian saffron. Saffron is a very powerful spice: so aromatic that even a pinch goes a long way. At $160 an ounce, I am certainly going to keep using the precious saffron threads I have, especially with the political drama going on. Who knows when we can get fresh saffron from Iran?

After five hours of slow work, the drawers are cleared, and I have spare room in all of them. I also know exactly where to find what I need.

The epilogue to the grand clean-out is that I now have several dozen of empty glass jars and tiny meal tins. Some are going to recycling, and others will be washed and saved as containers for the small amounts of fresh spices that I intend to buy in the future. Because that was the point of changing out spices: to get the chance to absorb fresh, thrilling new tastes.

Lalela Means Listen in Zulu

Annamaria on Monday

Two and a half years ago, when I visited Stan and Mette in Cape Town, they took me to an African contemporary art fair.  Many of the works we saw were quite marvelous.  One booth, however, struck a loud and lasting chord with me.

Staffed by a couple of adults and a group of teenagers, it was sponsored by a nonprofit organization called Lalela.  The art it was selling was printed on scarves and other fashion accessories--not the kind of thing that would have caught my eye, except for one special fact: those teenagers were the artists.  

Lalela is a non-profit founded by a New York woman.  The organization’s after school art programs help at-risk South African children, and through teaching them art, increases their self-confidence, imbues them with virtues of cooperation and tolerance, and enhances their notion of what the world has to offer them.

Here is the organization mission in its own words:

Through Lalela's arts curriculum and critical messaging component, we ignite imagination and teach children how to map and manifest their dreams and goals, launching the possibility of a different future for themselves and their communities.Everyday after-school, in the hours when children are most vulnerable to abuse of every kind, we work to break the barriers of challenge. We start early (age 6) in developing the art of imagination and we continue through grade 12 to connect the arts to everything important in a child's life, from core academics to critical life skills.Our role in arts education is to help blaze the trail in whole brain thinking with a proven path to innovation and new job creation. Our programs create permanent change with positive outlooks, community role models and the mindset for our students to design a more certain future for themselves and their communities.

Lalela takes images created by the children and prints them on scarves which they sell to raise money to support the organization's efforts.   Those kids who sold me scarves in the Cape Town Convention Centre were learning a lot of things: That something they had made could impress people, be valuable to perfect strangers.  They also practiced presenting themselves--as artists--to people they might never have otherwise met.

The scarves themselves are lovely.  If you have seen me at a book event in the past couple of years, you very likely saw me sporting one.

Photo by Janet Rudolph
Heaven only knows what I was talking about

I bought three that day, one as a gift and two for myself.  Details of my two from Cape Town:

I have since purchased another from the Lalela website.

Two more that I bought in the last 24 hours are on their way to me now.  How nice!  I get to buy myself beautiful presents and feel really good about it.

Speaking of gift-buying, I know that it isn't even Halloween yet, but why not do some of your holiday shopping by buying gifts that give two ways.  Your recipient gets a beautiful present, and a South African child gets a chance at a new lease on life.  


Please join me in supporting this sterling effort.  Here is where you can find out how:

www.lalela.org

www.thelalelascarf.org

On the Virtual Road – Blog Touring

Zoë Sharp

For the past ten days since the new Charlie Fox novel, BAD TURN, came out, I’ve been on the road—virtually speaking. I’ve travelled halfway around the world without ever leaving my desk. I’ve been Blog Touring—or perhaps that should be Tour Blogging?—rather than the physical kind of touring. And it’s been fun.

Of course, in the past I’ve travelled all over the place to libraries and bookstores for the publication of various books in the series, quite often using a trip to the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention to kick things off. As Bouchercon is held in a different city/state every year (even making it over to the UK several times) it means that the starting point has also always been different.

with apologies to Q and 007

But, this time around I knew I wasn’t going over to Bouchercon and work-in-progress projects are beginning to pile up. So, doing another blog tour, ably organised by the fearsomely efficient Ayo Onatade, seemed like a good choice.

I’m told that sometimes authors rely on their blogger hosts doing a series of reviews but I hesitate over this way of doing things. What happens if one of the reviewers involved really doesn’t like the book? After all, I would have thought they have far too many books on their teetering TBR piles to read it first, just to make sure.

So, I prefer to do guest posts and articles on topics related to the book, mixed in with a few reviews where blogger/reviewers are happy to do them.

For the BAD TURN blog tour, I wrote six guest posts. Some of them were to the blog host’s suggested topic and others were of my own devising. I tried to make them relevant to the book without being outright BSP. (For anyone who may not know, BSP stands for Blatant Self-Promotion.)

For Shotsmag Confidential, Ayo asked me to write something about the European setting I used for much of the book, so I explained why I’d chosen to take Charlie to Italy and rural France, and how I researched those locations.

French chateau that caught my eye

For Anne Bonny Book Reviews, I wrote a piece for Abby Slater-Fairbrother about ‘borrowing’ characteristics or mannerisms from real people to create fictional characters. And also using names of people who have volunteered or bid to be included. There were more than usual in this book and integrating them was a challenge I really enjoyed.

Judith Baxter at Growing Younger Each Day wanted to know about the couple Charlie ends up working for—Eric and Helena Kincaid. So, I explored the nature of their somewhat dysfunctional crime family and looked at what made them tick.

Another location piece was on New Jersey for Tina Hartas at TripFiction as part of her ‘Talking Location With’ feature. I explained why I chose to set the start—and end—of the book in New Jersey, and even where the idea for the cover image came from.

  

Rural New Jersey (Jeff may well recognise this one...)

Sarah Hardy at By The Letter Book Reviews wanted to know about the changes that had taken place between Charlie’s first outing as a teacher of self-defence in a northern English city, to the later books where she’s working in close-protection for a top New York agency. Charlie’s certainly evolved through the thirteen books so far. And I hope she has a way to go yet!

Finally, I was asked to write a piece about HEroes vs SHEroes in crime thrillers for Sharon Bairden at Chapter In My Life. The way women were portrayed in the early thrillers I read frustrated me enough to want to write my own. Sharon also recalled the practical workshop I taught at Crime & Publishment earlier this year. I demonstrated how to defend yourself using a table fork and evidently it made quite a lasting impression…

The tour ends today but it seems a shame not to gather all these extras together and offer them to my readers as Bonus Features. Rather like the ‘Making-Of’ and ‘Behind the Scenes’ documentaries I used to love when I bought lots of movies on DVD. Hm, now that’s got me thinking…

I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks, firstly to Ayo, who organised the tour for me, and to all the bloggers mentioned above, who invited me to contribute to their blog sites. And I’m hugely grateful to the other bloggers who very kindly reviewed BAD TURN: Liz Barnsley at Liz Loves Books; Judith Baxter who, as well as the guest post, also did a review on her other blog, Books And More Books; Karen Cole at Hair Past A Freckle Book Reviews; Jen Lucas at Jen Med’s Book Reviews; and Noelle Holten at Crime Book Junkie. (You are all goddesses of the literary world.)

This week’s Word of the Week comes courtesy of EvKa, a regular in the Comments section. It is aibohphobia, meaning an irrational fear of palindromes. It was deliberately constructed to be one, but is a rather splendid word regardless.

Upcoming Events

I will be appearing with fellow crime author Martin Edwards at the Rochdale Literature & Ideas Festival. We’re presenting ‘A Brief History Of Crime’ at The Royal Toby Hotel in Rochdale, at 6pm on Thursday, October 17.

My Very First Time

Jeff--Saturday


Sorry to disappoint the lascivious among you, but this is a different "first time."  This post is a re-run of my first time blogging as an official member of the Murder is Everywhere crew. I'd guest blogged before, but by November 3, 2010 I'd been honored to join this illustrious crew of now lifelong friends, and my first time at the plate was pinch hitting for Yrsa Sigurdardöttir--think stepping up to the plate for Babe Ruth to properly set my anxiety level on that occasion. As for why I'm posting that oldie today--then titled "What's in a Name"-- the answer is simple. I'm in the midst of packing up a half-year's belongings for our departure from Greece tomorrow, AND completing my edits for Andreas Kaldis book #11.  In other words, an anxiety inducing blog post seemed a proper one to re-run for the occasion. Anyway, here goes Numero Uno...

Hi, bet you were expecting Yrsa Sigurdardöttir. So was I, up until two days ago. But you’re getting another Sigur… slightly different spelling, the “u” is gone, an “e” is added, the rest is missing, and no one seems able to pronounce either name correctly. You think I’m kidding? Say Siger out loud. Wrong, I can tell. The only ones likely to get it right either grew up with me in Pittsburgh or knew me from my life as New York City lawyer, though come to think of it I’m sure some had other names for me. My last name is pronounced “Tiger,” except with an “S” instead of a “T.” Now try Sigurdardöttir. Sorry, couldn’t quite hear you.


Once reason prevailed, and I moved to Mykonos to live and write, my last name was rarely mispronounced. That’s because last names aren’t used in normal conversation. There are so few last names and so many identical first ones (Niko, Mihali, Andreas, Zanni—you get the idea) that it doesn’t help much to say both names. Instead it’s “Andreas with the Tourlos hotel,” “Zanni the fisherman,” or, more often, family nicknames. If you say Niko Nazos or Mihali Apostolou you get a blank stare, but say kremidhas or skordho (onions or garlic, respectively), you get nods of acknowledgment.

How Mykonian nicknames came to be is a story in itself, especially the ones unlikely to clear a censor. But that’s for another time. After all, I must save some material for later.

You see, I’m the new kid on the block, deeply honored at the invitation of the extraordinary writers and individuals who created MIE to be its Saturday blogger. Fate has me pitching in for Yrsa today, allowing me to make rookie mistakes in her slot, but come Saturday it will be all Greek to me—and hopefully not, as Greeks say, “all Chinese to you.” But that, too, is another topic.

I’m writing this as I sit by the old Mykonos harbor on the first day of a new month; so I wish each of you the traditional kalo mina, have a good month. For Mykonians, the first week of this November is shaping up to be an interesting one. The tourist season’s tsumani-like influx of visitors has ended, the locals are back to their traditional island ways, more are getting to sleep at ten at night rather than ten in the morning, and politicians are hovering like...uhh…bees. Yes, it’s local election time in Greece.

In tavernas and coffee shops around the old port politicians are struggling this morning for attention against a local fisherman’s huge catch, a fifty kilo vlahos (Goliath grouper to some), and the fisherman is conducting a take-most-of-the-morning bidding for his prize. A local taverna owner is likely to buy it, and end up making customers of all those who saw such promise in that unusual catch. It will be interesting to see if after trying it they think all the fuss was worth it. 
 

Which nicely segues back into the election this Sunday. It’s for mayor of Mykonos, and though most locals agree it looms as a watershed event for the future of the island, tourists are unlikely to notice a difference no matter who wins. The practical immediate impact is that for this week the town’s lanes are swept clean twice a day (even of political fliers), and roads that hadn’t seen asphalt since the last mayoral election four years ago are getting a new face.

That reminds me of my first trip to Greece, some thirty years ago. My friend was taking great care to show how modern Greeks paid homage to their ancient past by naming many things after the Greek gods. She pointed out names—Hermes for a hotel, Eros for a bar, Dionysus for a shop—and patiently explained the role played by each god in myth. Trying to impress her with my ability to read Greek signs, I pointed to one up ahead and asked, “And which deity does that represent?” Without missing a beat or cracking a smile she said, “That would be our Greek god of road repair, ‘Potholes ahead.’”

 

 

And that should give you a pretty good idea why so many of my Greek friends struggle to spare their native tongue from mine by leaping into English whenever we communicate.  But that has yielded unexpected benefits for my mystery writing. My books touch upon issues confronting contemporary Greece and when I’m interviewing people “in the know,” whose English is not good enough to conceal the meaning of their words, I get the unvarnished truth.

Even though I’m a fiction writer, I’ll try passing along the same to you.  See you Saturday. Yia sas.

Oh, by the way, for those of you who might like to hear my name mispronounced LIVE I will be interviewed on TALK RADIO EUROPE tomorrow, Thursday, November 4, at 2:45 PM Central European Time (9:45 AM New York Time, 3:45 PM Athens Time), by Hannah Murray for the weekly book segment of her daily magazine show. It streams live on the Internet at http://www.talkradioeurope.com/ren/listen-now/  [Ed Note:  If you find it, you've fallen through a time warp.]

— Jeff

Doping, dehydration and determination.

“Athletics Championships

Dire in Doha: world championships ‘catastrophe’ leaves athletics reeling

Empty seats and ghostly silence have been the sad feature of this PR disaster for the sport, the IAAF, Lord Coe and Qatar”

"IAAF World Championships: Annu Rani Breaks National Record; Athletes Wilt in Doha Heat"

Unless you are living on the other side of the moon, you will have noticed that the world athletic championships are on at the moment in Doha.

Controversial doesn't really cover it.

Like many others, I suspect that a bunch of accountants in nice suits who go to the gym three times a week looked at what Doha could offer and said, 'Yes that sounds great, we shall have the world championships there....in the 35 degree heat, and terrible humidity.'  The authorities said the stadium would be  air conditioned ( open topped and air conditioned, I can just see Greta Thunberg rolling her eyes...). And the stadium is, there is even a  sense of a breeze down the home straight.

The warm up area is outside and 32 degrees when it's cooling down.

And it's not really possible to run a marathon round a 400 m track, so the compramise was to run it at midnight local time when the temperature had dropped to around 30 degrees.

The ladies race was on Friday night, 28 of the 68 runners either pulled out or were carried away by medics.  It might be fun to watch the floodlight runners, deviate to the right of the road to pick up water, a sponge, a handful of ice cubes and try to utilise them all - while still running at 2 hour 30 minutes pace. Is that 5 minute miling all the way? It's faster than I can run for ten yards. 

The victor, Chepngetich, is a lady who had run the third fastest female marathons of all time. She won it in 2 hrs, 32 minutes, 43 seconds. The slowest ever to win a world championship.

The authorities were extra vigilant because of the collapse of Callum Hawkins ( who lives two miles from me ) in the Commonwealth games in Sydney last year. He was winning, about 2 miles from the  finish line and passed out through dehydration and heat exhaustion, he was so confused he asked the paramedics 'Did I win?'

There was much criticism of the medical response time to get to him, and the amount of folk who filmed it  rather than offered assistance.

Anyway, it has been known in running circles that it has taken Callum a year to recover from that so with Tokyo Olympics  looming large, both athletes and organisers erred on the side of caution.

So that's the dehydration.

As to the doping, I have a bet on that within two years one of the gold medal winners in particular will test positive. 

And determination?

                                

Well, can you look at this picture for a moment?

What do you think was going on here?

A gold medal performance? 

Nope.

I have blogged about the Ingebritsons before. I wish them to take over the world. They should have the adoration  and social influence of the Kardashians. They are magnificent!

This was them celebrating their failure in the 5000 metres to  be ahead of the Kenyans/Ethiopians/ and those born in those countries now representing Canada!

Older brother Henrik ( a champion cross country skier who started running for something to do in the summer) got burned off the back as the pace picked up. Filip ( middle brother, the vain one) stayed with wee brother Jakob  until 600 metres to go. Then stepped aside as he's really a 1500 meter runner.

The  front runners had been running as a team ( naughty!! ) to keep the Norwegians at bay. And that's all there was for most of the race at the front end. Very small and fast Africans. Very tall and fast Norwegians. And that was it.

Jakob, who is 19, was left in the mix  with 500m to go, was left to his own devices and decided the only way to try and beat them was to run as fast as he could. So he took off and went to the front, too early for his sprinting legs but it was all he could do, the only hope he had.

They caught him of course and Jakob finished 5th, collapsing over the line where he stayed on the ground where his brothers came, got an official to pour water on Jakob's face and the picture you see is them having picked him up. The picture of the brothers made all the papers.

After writing that part of the blog Filip was seen to punch another runner, Teddese Lemi,  in the back. So he's a bit naughty  as well. We watched it live and Lemi had impeded Ingebritson  three times, having a tussle which is part and parcel of middle distance running. Filip cut in behind him as Lemi  cut out in front, legs clashed and instead of another flat hand in his back, Lemi got a small punch with a clenched fist, he fell and  nearly brought down about three others including Ingebritson himself.  They both should have been disqualified. We waited for the Ethiopian team to appeal, but I don't think they did and as I write this no appeal was lodged within 30 minutes. Maybe it was a case that they both gave as good as they got.

Here's a link or googling Filip Ingebritson punch Lemi  and it comes up- many times!

https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/athletics/10064676/filip-ingebrigtsen-punch-video-teddese-lemi-world-athletics-championships/

 I confess I had to look up who won the gold in the 5000 metres, it was the Canadian Mohammed Ahmed!

Caro Ramsay

04 10 2019

Self-printing

Michael - Thursday

Courtesy Authors Guild

All the writers on this blog are “traditionally published,” that is their books are published in paper and as ebooks by a professional publishing house that makes its living as an intermediary between the author and the reader. Their role includes detailed editing and copy editing of the manuscript, cover design, marketing and distributing the finished books to booksellers, and, to a varying extent, publicising the book to the readers. The idea is that the authors can concentrate on writing the best possible books and the publisher (and the author’s agent if s/he has one) deal with everything else. Stan discussed here a couple of weeks ago that this isn’t quite how it works out in practice!

Self publishing has moved on from here!

Mainly as a marketing exercise to introduce Detective Kubu to readers who would like a taste and didn’t want to pay for it, we published a small collection of short stories called Detective Kubu Investigates as an ebook in 2013. We were in for some surprises. We wanted to give the book away, but Amazon wants a minimum of 99c. (Even 66% of nothing is nothing and Amazon doesn’t find that attractive.) However, we also offered the book for free from our website. The first surprise was that no one was interested in the free book. They wanted the convenience of having the book downloaded to their Kindles immediately and were willing to pay 99c for that. The second surprise was that what seemed like a straightforward process to get the book on Amazon turned out to be quite complicated and it all had to be repeated from scratch to make the book available through other ebook distributers. The layout, formatting, typesetting, and cover upload in terms of size and shape and a variety of other irritations meant that it took several days to learn what to do and get it done. Even then, the result wasn’t really something a professional publisher would regard as acceptable. It also took multiple iterations to get it right. We were glad we did it (in view of the last surprise), but also glad when it was done. The final surprise was that we sold several thousand books and are still selling them.

In the meanwhile we’ve written several more short stories and we quite like them, so we thought it would be fun to put together another collection to follow on—Detective Kubu Investigates 2. So I dug out my Kindle Direct Publishing manual and got to work. Another surprise. Amazon has a completely new program - Kindle Create - to do this. It took a few minutes to learn how it worked, and after that about an hour to upload the manuscript and get it into a professional format. I’m not sure why I was surprised because it seems reasonable that Amazon would have done a lot of development in five years. I just assumed that, like most software upgrades, they would have made it still more complicated in order to permit me to do a whole lot of things I didn’t want to do in any case. Amazon has gone another route. The format is still pretty rigid, only allowing the choice of a few styles and layouts. They point out that readers have their own preferences and that they can reset font size and style themselves, so the body of the book needs to be in a standard font. Still, you are offered enough layout and style options to make the book look professional. So much so, that I actually redid the original collection using the same software to make it consistent and upgrade its style and format. In a couple of hours. And there is a previewer that allows you to see the result as if you were using a Kindle or a tablet or even a phone to read it.

KDP Cover Creator

I was sufficiently intrigued by all this to try the paper book version. Why not make a joint collection from the two short story collections available in paper? I imagined that this would be much harder. Well, it is a bit harder because now you can’t actually see the final paper copy and you have to make the cover wrap around the book. But Amazon has Cover Creator. It enables you to set up the cover, using your own picture or offering you a variety of set templates or open source pictures, and various styles for the title text. You can upload an author picture. You can fill in the blurb on the back of the book. And then it tells you what problems it’s found and simulates the paper book for you to view and correct. Once more a few hours was all that was needed. But a warning here is that the Amazon version expects you to sell the books through them. Not so good if you want to print some copies and hawk them around. The bookstores will be expecting a big discount and Amazon isn’t going to pass that on. My advice on this would be to print yourself a couple of copies and look at the result. The beauty of print on demand is that it’s easy to correct text and layout at any time.

I came away impressed. But this was only the first step in the process. I also wanted to make the book available in Nook, Apple, and Kobo formats. We published the first book in those formats through a company called Draft2Digital. (There are multiple options now—SmashWords is another one.) I remember that as being yet another learning curve. But again I was pleasantly surprised. Not only was their software just as user friendly as the Kindle one, but it was just like the Kindle one. Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So, once again, the process was quick and painless. I haven’t tried the paper version yet, because it’s still in beta testing and I’m awaiting my “test slot.”

The moral of all this is that it’s really easy to make something like a collection of short stories or a novella available as an ebook and print on demand paper, and I recommend anyone to who wants to do so to give it a go. BUT. There’s a reason I called this “Self-printing.” These systems do not do the other things traditional publishers do for you. You design your own cover, and if you use their templates it’ll be pretty generic. Perhaps okay for ebooks, but not great for paper—especially if you're trying to get a book store to carry it. Speaking of bookstores, they will expect you to supply the books and take them back if they’re not sold—like the publishers do. Then there is the editing. The self-published ebooks I’ve read look nice but tend to need a lot of editing. The best these ebook systems will do is highlight spelling and basic grammar—but you get that in Word or the like anyway.

Then there is the issue of marketing. Nowadays, authors are expected to do a lot of that themselves anyway, but the publishers do help, and some help a lot. I do know authors with successful, well-edited and well-presented self-published books with great covers that sell a lot of copies. But it’s comparatively rare and lots of hard work.

If you intend to self-publish, my advice—for what it’s worth—is spend your money on a good editor and cover designer. There’s simply no need to pay someone else to set up the book for you. There's really no reason to worry about the physical or electronic nature of the book anymore.

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MICHAEL STANLEY EVENTS

           

Tuesday, October 29: 6:30 pm Murder by the Book, Houston, Texas. Michael joins Yrsa Sigurdardottir for a discussion and signing.

We’ll be at BOUCHERCON in Dallas at the end of the month. It looks like an exciting meeting and we’re looking forward to these panels!

Thursday, October 31:

11:00 – 12:00 Panel: The Novel Stands Alone

  Kendra Elliot, JT Ellison, LS Hawker, Stanley Trollip, Sheri Lewis Wohl

  Participating Moderator: Laura Benedict

Sunday, November 3:

8:30 – 9:30 Panel: Detectives Overseas

  Ian Hamilton, Ragnar Jonasson, Michael Sears, Jeffrey Siger

  Moderator: Nancy Tingley

After Bouchercon we’re on tour. Please join us somewhere if you can!

Tuesday, November 5: 7:00 pm Poisoned Pen Bookstore, Scottsdale, Arizona, with Solari Gentill and Tim Maleeny

Wednesday, November 6: 4:30 pm Totally Criminal Cocktail Hour, Stillwater, Minnesota. Contact Valley Booksellers at (651) 430-3385 for tickets

Saturday, November 9: 10:00 Private book club event

Saturday, November 9: 1:00 pm Barnes and Noble, HarMar, St Paul, Minnesota

Tuesday, November 12: 7:00 pm Mystery to Me, Madison, Wisconsin

Wednesday, November 13: 7:00 pm Centuries and Sleuths, Forest Park, Illinois

Saturday, November 16: 10:00 Nokomis Public Library, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Monday, November 18: 7:00 pm Barnes and Noble, Galleria, Minneapolis, Minnesota. More details to follow.