Kathy Reichs, Magnus Mills…

I always have a novel ‘on the go’. I don’t mean writing them (thought that is also true, because I just can’t stop writing), I mean reading them. Sometimes I read two at once (come on, I’m sure you know what I mean) but I only do that if they are chalk and cheese: Nick Hornby and Graham Greene, for example. Or Magnus Mills and Kathy Reichs. I have favourite authors: Ian Rankin, Robert Harris, Kathy Reichs, Michael Connelly, John LeCarre. I am sure you can see a pattern here, and because I am scared I will get stuck in a writing rut, I occasionally walk into a book shop, pick a book at random, buy it and then try to read it right through. It is how I discovered Magnus Mills. And Reichs. And several more. So why not walk in and buy a book written by someone you have never heard of? Take it home, open it and read it. You might discover a superb writer who is new to you. With me, unfortunately, more often than not, I struggle to get beyond the first few chapters. Is it me, or is it the writer?
So – yes – Kathy Reichs. Because I am creating my own website I have been looking at others. I checked Kathy Reich’s site. Unfortunately it isn’t finished yet, but I was impressed by the backdrop of limestone cliffs (yes, I am a geologist as well as a writer, so things like that turn me on. I can even date that limestone, give or take a few million years). I was so interested in the limestone that I didn’t notice the hand. [HER WEBSITE NOW CHANGED]

Finding Nemo

I don’t mean the fishy Nemo as in Disney, I mean Captain Nemo as in Jules Verne. And I didn’t actually find Nemo, I found the next best thing, Captain Nemo’s submarine. Edinburgh has an amazing skyline and I am in the habit of looking up at things. I know that can be dangerous. There is always the danger of stepping in something nasty or being squashed by a bus. Ideally I would have taken this picture with the sun behind it, but the weather was bad so I have had to turn it into a silhouette myself. It is how I always imagined Nemo’s Nautilus. No? Okay. Can’t win them all.

Hector the Collector

I bought a robot vacuum cleaner last week. It isn’t something I had planned to do, I didn’t even know they existed, not reliable ones anyway. The purchase was on the recommendation of a very good friend, who said she hadn’t had such fun watching a domestic appliance since her mother bought her first front-loading washing machine and they all sat in front of it and watched their clothes going round. The robot isn’t what Isaac Asimov or Sony would call a robot (though Sony’s is very impressive). It roughly resembles, in size and shape, a curling stone. But flatter. Think Babybel cheeses. But much bigger. And not red and waxy. The odd thing about Hector (yes, okay) is the way he/it has been accepted as if it is a real pet, rather than just a domestic appliance. It is easy to see why. It trundles around, doing its stuff, quietly avoiding things. When it has finished a room, or when its battery runs low, it heads for its docking station and goes to sleep. Scary. Oh – and it does sweep the floor extremely well. Even if it stops sweeping we might keep it.

police bikes…

In my last post I mentioned a bootload of motorbike parts. That’s a car boot, not a wellie boot. Perhaps I should explain. You may have seen from my ‘About Me’ page that I was once a policeman (I really must deal with that page, it is awful) and rode a motorbike. To cut a very long story short, a few years ago I found one of the bikes I rode. It had been done up like a boy racer’s bike and bore little resemblance to the bike I had known. Like a fool I bought it (why do we do these things?) and it is now in my garage in one thousand bits. A motorbike, whole, doesn’t take up much room. A motorbike reduced to its component parts does, it takes up more space than a car. Lots more. Even worse, it has been like that for about three years. Perhaps now, with all this rain, it is time for me to do something about it.

moBILE PHONES

Neon sign in Edinburgh shop window: BILE PHONES. You would think that if someone had gone to the expense of buying an illuminated sign, they would have taken care not to obscure its first few letters. The best I have ever seen was on the double wooden gates to the yard of a scrap merchant in Edinburgh. When the left hand door of the yard was open, the ‘S’ of SCRAP disappeared. The signwriting was no amateur job either, it was professionally done. I would have photographed that last week too, but I didn’t want to trek over to Fountainbridge in the rain. Also, I seem to recall that my son (who used to live nearby) telling me that it had been painted out. Shame. I thought that no publicity was bad publicity. Had it still been there I would willingly have paid a bootload of scrap motorbike parts (and thereby cleared my garage) for permission to close, and then photograph, that right-hand yard gate. Life is tough. Things like that are meant to cheer us.

www.richardwhittle.co.uk

Constructing my website is like swimming through treacle. Not that I have ever engaged in that particular pastime (but imagination is all). I don’t want my site to look naff, which is why I am spending so much time on it. I have managed to get http://www.richardwhittle.com and http://www.richardwhittle.co.uk, which presumably means that the Man Who Talked To Hitler (hey – what a name for a new novel! Copyright – okay?) is presumably dead and buried and has no need for a website. Don’t bother to check my websites yet, you will only get the 123-reg holding page. Oh – and for those of you who asked for the name of my children’s novel, mentioned in an earlier blog, its name is KEEWATIN. Try Googling it, not for my novel, but for its setting.

Richard Whittle meets Hitler

You know how you sometimes Google your own name? No? Never done it? Really? Perhaps you should not. Look what I found today when I did it: In 1933, Adolf Hitler met Richard Whittle and Ferdinand Porsche and stressed the need for a “VolksWagen” which Third Reich citizens could buy for the price of a small motorcycle. Is that scary, or what? Had my name been something like Fred Schmidt then I might have expected it. It’s wasn’t me, Guv, honest. Unless this particular RW was a boy wonder, it would make him well over one hundred years old. Though I’m no spring chicken, I am not that old. So who was this guy? No… the more I think about it, I really do not want to know.

A reprieve for Twitter

I gave Twitter a bit of a kicking in my last blog. Since then I’ve been wondering if that was fair. Time was when I did a forty mile commute into London, not daily but often three times a week. I would have dearly loved a way of whiling away the time that did not directly involve work. All I had was that house-brick cellphone – it was so heavy I’d swear it had valves. So, a reprieve for Twitter, maybe. It’s still raining, but the fire engine has gone from outside Asda.

Do you think you could make it just a teeny bit smaller, Mr Dyson?

Sorry, couldn’t resist it. Another pic from my snap-happy day last week. This was in the Royal Botanic Gardens.

I recently joined Facebook. It is one of those things I have been meaning to do for a while, but couldn’t really be bothered to do it. Soon afterwards I joined Twitter. What’s that all about, really? I read somewhere that it is something for people to do during the day when they should be working. I persevered with it for a few days before giving up. It reminded me too much of what happened when mobile phones became easily affordable, of those life or death messages that clogged the airwaves. You know the kind I mean: I’m on the bus… it’s just started to rain… there’s a fire engine outside Asda.

Facebook, however, is useful. There are people out there I know but never see. At Christmas I send cards to them. I don’t do ’round robins’, but I occasionally write a short note on the card. Chances are that our cards cross in the post, so we respond to the notes one year later. Or not. Now, through Facebook, I am in contact with people I lost touch with years ago. Also, I have swapped chat with several of those ‘Christmas Card’ friends. Thanks to Facebook, my cards will take less time to write and that can’t be bad.

Bob the Builder meets Braveheart

In between hours of writing I am battling with my new website. I am creating it from scratch, so there is no way it will ever compete with websites produced for the likes of Robert Harris or Kathy Reichs. Having said that, it is looking at least as good as those of some published writers. But so what? At least they are published, unlike me (hey – not sour grapes – good luck to them, it’s tough out there). I am using one of those DIY website building programs, which is rather like learning to program again. Years ago I was a dab-hand at writing in dBase (anyone remember that?). I had hoped that I would never have to program again – not that this is real programming…

Today I made the mistake of going out without my laptop. I felt like Bob the Builder without his JCB. I took a camera instead. The camera is a good one, but wasted on me because I take snaps, I am no David Bailey. I did, however, discover Robert the Bruce on a rooftop – or is it William Wallace (better known to the silver screen as Braveheart, alias Mel Gibson)? You decide.