Obviously I lucked out. Having an unusual name means that when I got to the internet party late I nevertheless managed to secure my domain at a reasonable price and there’s not much confusion in this world of a “oh, you’re that Leo Stableford, I thought you were that other Leo Stableford who…” type.

My comrade in imagination and top artist Phantomdoodler, aka, Justin Wyatt, cartoonist is not so lucky. You see, there is another Justin Wyatt, which were this other Justin Wyatt a plumber might be a mere inconvenience but the other Justin Wyatt is an underwater photographer. Although there is a distinct and special difference between an underwater photographer and a cartoonist the casual observer might point out they’re both trying to sell you things you look at, you know, visually, and might even frame.

That’s how I learned that I lucked out. I am alone in a world that contains some Leos and some Stablefords but not both in that order and certainly none who write books about the history of UK pottery or some similar literary endeavour that might muddy which one I am.

If you, like the Doodler, are stuck with a common name there really is no option but to reinvent yourself in the crucible of net identity, carve yourself a niche and stick to your branding guns. I actually almost wish that I could hide behind the One Monkey name but having novels written by One Monkey (with One Typewriter) is maybe a little beyond the pale. An author seems to be expected to wield their name as their brand so I guess that means I am lucky in another way also.

Anyhow, I need to help my colleagues out with their branding requirements so forget the name Justin Wyatt as it could as easily refer to the producer of an attractive portrait of sea turtles in their natural environment as a fine comic artist and producer of exciting imagery. From here on out he returns unequivocably to the status of Phantomdoodler.

As ever,

One Monkey

So I was just working on a post about Book Glutton in my lunch hour and a Blue Screen of Death upped and ate it.

The gist of what I was saying was that actually this virtual book club thing seems like fun. At the moment you can browse BGs entire library in 20-30 minutes and the titles available swerve sharply between tasty and bizarre. Obviously they’ve started out with largely Public Domain publications but there’s an interesting button marked “Upload”, which implies that you can upload your own books, in appropriate format into the Book Glutton engine.

This was what I really wanted to talk about. Imagine being a POD author with no distributed publications who had a book group devoted to one of their works. How fantastic would that be? People can also annotate the texts as they read. That’s exciting too.

Personally, I’d like to read some of the non-fiction or archetypal fiction (they have Grimm) with fascinating annotations.

Some of their stuff, on the other hand, I really wouldn’t want to read, discuss or annotate. I am maybe unusual in unpublished authors in that a couple of my books (one of them only nearly complete) might benefit from annotation and discussion. A hypertext of Starfall, for example, would be a rewarding product, and a hypertext of Confessor’s tale would be none too shabby either.

The only thing that puts me off a bit is that there’s no “Book Group Bundle” section showing what kinds of discussion points are available for a book.

The meta-information available for any given book is quite weak and I hope this is something the developers plan to improve.

Anyway, I’m willing to check it out. I think you should too.

(I liked my joke about not being surprised to note that Cory Doctorow had got there before me, but the BSOD ate it. Bah.)

This article may also be found, along with loads of other stuff on the 6 Icons Blog which is a journal of my current primary incredibly exciting project. Exciting mostly because it’s the first thing I’ve ever worked on that I thought might turn a coin… Read on at that location.

It’s a well known fact that a writer with little to do will retreat into a corner and write something. That, after all, is how they ended up becoming writers in the first place. We seem to have entered a phase in the development of 6 Icons where I have very little to actually do.

I’ve animated about a third of the first episode and written some notes for further development but aside from that I’m just hanging about waiting for the first pictures to emerge.

There’s the continuing problem of the music, of course. But we’ve got a direction we really need to have more of an episode for that.

So this writer has little to do.

Guess what he’s done next.

I didn’t want to start something new in this inevitable downtime while the Doodler gets his head properly round the project (after all as any fool knows writing a decent script is child’s play, drawing all the pictures for it… tough, very tough). So I went back to revise an old work. This is going well but I’m even reaching the end of that project now as well.

That leads us into a calendrical coincidence. It is now creeping up on Mid September. Which means it will soon be October, and after October comes November.

And what does November mean?

Well, that’s a question I’ll leave you to think about until nearer the time. Until then I shall just drop the title “Uncian” which may mean something if you have been paying attention.

So, as usually happens, while doing something unrelated that final key piece of Starfall kind of, er, fell into place. I was reading up on alchemy again, just for a bit of fun and I hadn’t realised how much the book I have on the history of alchemy had resonated with me the first time. Deeply enough that when I re-read I started to see things I hadn’t noticed on my first pass through the book.

Well, those bits and pieces consolidated a final part about one of the characters, I wrote my tentpole sequence and now I really feel I’m into a tidy up the grammar, lick of paint to the outward facing displays and tighten up the last few details part. I’ve actually never re-edited a work to such a great depth before. I can understand how some people get lost in the editing process. I have more ideas about alchemy and the metaphysical aspects of the story, but I’ve been in Starfall now for so long I can see what’s Starfall and what’s another novel entirely.

Anyway. I’m just repeating some advice I heard several times. Write, edit, edit, edit, edit… so on, abandon. That’s how you get a piece of quality work out there. Hell, been editing this sucker for about six months longer than it took to draft it!