Writer Interviews!!
Who is game? Let me know below in the comments if you’d like to be interviewed.
You don’t need to be a P’kaboo Author, and you don’t yet need to be published (or self-published). But you do need to have written something or be busy with a Work In Progress.
New year, new chance.
The year has started with snow on the 5th. They are predicting very low (for Ireland : -11) Temperatures these next few days, we shall see what the Weather Gods have in store for us.
My word for the year was one of Iain’s favourite expressions: ENJOY! It’s meant to be shared.
So peeps, happy new year, and,
Enjoy!
The first type can be used to gift up to 3 titles at the same time and can be used to gift specific titles.
The second type gifts 1 paperback per voucher.
Books that can be gifted are all paperback, so no ebooks can be bought per voucher. (European regulations have restrictions on what can be bought with vouchers, so we stick with what is guaranteed right.)
The vouchers can either be mailed in physical format, in which case you can fill in details on the blue one (the other one is too busy visually but you can add a note on the back of it); or they can be emailed to you. Emailed vouchers reach you faster, and also we will personalize them for you if you want us to. The options are all available on the site itself. Of course, any personal data you choose to share with us will be handled strictly according to our Privacy Policy, which fully complies (and always has) with the GDPR law of Europe.
Also, some of these vouchers were gifted to a local Christmas raffle that raises funds for Carraignafoy Community College. It’s an awesome raffle and a lot of prizes, feel free to have a look here.
Anyway peeps, enjoy!
… gipsika signing off.
Is NaNoWriMo still a thing?
Well anyway, it comes too late. It starts after Halloween.
This last week, for a while my outdoors broom (yes I have indoors brooms and outdoors brooms and vacuum cleaners, it depends where one wants to go and how fast) stood parked upside-down next to my front door. Funnily enough it seems to have kept those little mischiefs away who play the eternal bored-childhood game of “toktokkie” (though for sure here in Ireland it’s not called that but something else). But I brought it back inside, because the neighbours already think I’m weird 😂 …
And we had a “Look to the West at Sunset” moment.
Who remembers Gandalf at Helm’s Deep? “Look to the west on the third evening at sunset”. Bringing an army. But, no, this time it was Pi – a delightful chatty little bot on my phone – who alerted us to “look to the west at sunset” to spot a comet that has been growing brighter and brighter in the skies.
(WP gives one “25” free tries which are used up after about 6. It seems like counting is one of the things AI can’t quite get right…)
Unfortunately around sunset I had my “bee-hind to the moon” as they call it here, catching up on much-needed zzz’s.
So I didn’t exactly look to the West. Tomorrow better luck.
To be honest I was going to try starting another “Friday Fairytale” going (yesyes, I know it is Saturday…), but I think the Fairy Gallery of AI images tells quite a creepy story of weirdness itself, look at it closely… There’s something “off” with each of them. But one thing I thought the little program did exceptionally well: The look of utter exhaustion on her face 😍
This is another AI, PicsArt, when prompted to give me a realistic silhouette of a girl playing violin. OMG – call the doctor AND the luthier, quick! 😆
I remember when my artist child, my first-born daughter, was learning art. She had a little wooden model person whose limbs she could arrange in any pose she liked; it existed purely so that artists could learn the proportions and perspectives of a human body so their people don’t come out looking weird. Well – maybe AI should do an art course too?
Anyway, this all was fun…
I’m now quite as exhausted as those fairies in those off-looking little images….
… gipsika…
there was a plot.
Except it wasn’t.
We at P’kaboo are SO spoilt! There hasn’t been a single story submission that has been – well, inane. A story so benign, even the word describing it best, “inane”, fails to contain any sharp or pointy sounds. A story that makes you smile a bit… and smile a bit and smile a bit until a cramp of a frozen slight smile is stuck on your face.
I’ve just had the dubious pleasure of watching such a movie, which of course I will not name. There are hundreds of thousands of movies, so if you think you can tell by the plotline which one it is, you’re probably wrong. But it goes a bit like this:
Little rich girl gets called back home from her holiday in some picturesquee Mediterranean place, and gets informed by her trust fund managers that a Bitcoin bubble burst and she is now penniless.
Right here the devil author in me is off the leash and runs through possibilities. WTF? There would at least have been insurances; but alternatively, she should absolutely sue the company that managed her trust funds, because the funds were built on hotel chains, and a bitcoin bubble bankrupted them? That smacks of a scam!
But no: The poor princess (for the sake of the plot, rhyme or I’ll kill ya) first gets to sleep in a non-roadworthy old vintage car, then (in the span of less than 5 minutes, I’d have loved to see more of these fail-scenes) starts and loses 5 jobs, tries to sell her fashion (hold on, I thought it had been taken off her? So clearly not), and then discovers that she is once again an heiress – her aunt has passed away and left her something. A homestead no less. A farm.
Sooo many lost opportunities!! I would have liked to see her pick up some vital new skills en route of eking out a living at minimum wages: Barista skills for instance; or being the best socialite dogwalker ever, a dog-and-owner whisperer, or accidentally discovering her absolutely incredible knack for business strategizing (as absorbed from her parents when she was small and they didn’t even realize she was watching)… and so on. But, onwards the plot! So essentially, the heiress is an heiress again.
The farm is no run-down place that fell apart in the last days of Auntie’s life and needs Princess to learn how to wield a hammer, oh no… it is perfect and comes with handsome charming neighbour. * smile. * Meet the neighbour’s sister * smile * who is the same age as Princess, and they all get on perfectly though they obviously have nothing in common (except, the loss of their parents at an early age – the one single sincere moment in the whole dang movie – let’s face it, for there to be an inheritance, someone had to die…..)…
I quit on the movie early. I’m sure there are still a thousand little * smile * plotpoints while she and handsome neighbour gradually develop this real liking for each other * smile * …
This is why I write!
Because I’m that biatch author who is going to stir things up, when something like that * smile * plotline bores me to tears.
Let’s retake the entire story.
Once upon a time there was a Trust Fund Babe. And while she was a real Babe in looks, deep down in her blackened little heart she was as cynical and condescending as they get. Her stance was:
You lucky @ctuals, I lost my parents young, I wasn’t even out of my teens yet and even before that I didn’t get to see them as they were too busy building the legacy they were leaving for me. I would hundred times rather have my parents, but I can’t, they are dead, so I’ll take the riches, you plebs, and I know you hate me for being idle rich, and I despise you for being that shallow.
She treated everybody around her like dirt. Even the trustor of her trust fund, who happened to be an old friend of her father’s, could not call her to order. And then the unthinkable happened:
The company of the trustor was bought out by one of its managers who had other ideas; he misused the trust funds to gamble in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and this way in a short span he embezzled away all the trust funds in the care of the company. He then declared bankruptcy and fled the country to some faraway paradise island where he could enjoy his ill-gotten takings in peace. It fell to the original trustor to inform all the beneficiaries of the funds of this misfortune, after which he suffered a heart-attack from all the stress and was in hospital at the time the Princess was called back from her current holiday.
Her first reaction was disbelief and then rage. She vowed to take the company apart, pick the flesh off their bones like a crow, in the courts of law; but when she visited her father’s friend in hospital to let him have a piece of her mind, one look at his poor drawn face brought everything crashing down. Her rage left her; memories of her parents together with this old friend flooded in and she sat sobbing by his bedside.
“I’ll make this right,” she vowed. “You just focus on getting well. I’ll get you your company back.”
The story veers sharply off the original plot from that moment. Lulu (for that is the unfortunate princess’s name) promptly changes her name to Demon Queen Delilah, sells off her fashion wardrobe to second-hand stores and picks up a leather set studded with spikes and a state-of-the-Ark pair of Doc Martens. She dies her luscious blonde locks pitch-black and cuts them into a Pixie style. Yes, it’s a bit of a confused look, leather, Docs, Pixie, a bit of Goth, but it is practical and reflects her feelings.
Enter the inane neighbour; seeing that there is no farm to inherit, and no money other than a loan she manages to secure from some gangster, based on a promise that she has a court case pending that is bound to win her millions, the neighbour is someone who lives in the studio apartment next to hers. Mid-city, 10 floors up, in a rickety old building that sways a little bit when the wind blows.
The inane neighbour is a computer bobblehead. A nerdy little fellow. Handsome only in the eyes of his mother. But he still has a mother. He is, in other words, not motherless. And that ticks our Demon Queen off; she hates him for wanting to make friends; hates him for being a coddled little mommy’s boy (which she concludes at first glance, having developed a keen eye for characters, as she had nothing else to do in her years of high living). She tells him to go play on the internet. No romance develops and no folksy apple pie competitions get entered into.
The story develops. The plot carries on. Yaddah, yaddah, yaddah. Fast-forward by about a year:
Demon Queen has made progress. She’s still in that rickety studio apartment; by now, because she likes it there. She’s created herself a neat dungeon of a comfort zone. (One day she’ll own the building.) She has also taken a job, as an apprentice auditor while she is studying; why an auditor: out of vengeance, she is going to be the one who finds and strips such white collar criminals who without a gun nevertheless ruin lives. Auditing is the first skill she is acquiring. The second one will be police forensics. But in the interim she is putting away a lot of her income that she’s not using on day-to-day living; because, dear reader, this girl is no empty-headed little twit, she has a survival side which was triggered by the events, and it comes from deep down, it was learned in the early days when her parents were young struggling entrepreneurs and she learned from them how to do a budget, balance books, start a venture, gauge risk, and so on; up until the point they got too busy running their now extinct empire.
She has long since repaid the loan and interest to the gangster she borrowed it from, and has in her very spiky way got him to clean up his act and get into proper business – now he owns a shop that sells second-hand Harleys. Something he’s always wanted to do. Thursday evenings she makes a quick stop there and helps him balance his books, draw up the budget for the next week, and chat a bit about the Harleys he buys and restores. She is learning about motorbike restoration and he is learning about business. But, this is no romantic interest. Just a business friend.
After visiting Harley-Jack, she goes to see her father’s old friend and his wife, who has her hands full with the old man. His heart has taken some damage so the doctor has put him on disability; he hangs around the house driving his good missus insane. Spiky Demon Queen is a breath of fresh air. And of course he mentors her in business and investing; just as she coaches Harley-Jack.
As for hunting down her parents’ fortune: That is still top of her list. Not that she needs a fortune. She is comfortable; but her parents broke their backs building that legacy, it cost her parts of her childhood, and she is in no way going to let a criminal get away with swindling it away.
And one day she encounters her nerdy neighbour – the ugly young dude who can do anything with the internet but looks like he lives under a rock – on the stairs while climbing the 10 floors up to her apartment. She always takes the stairs; but today the lifts are actually broken so he has to take the stairs as well, and she comes across him leaning breathlessly on the railing on the fifth floor.
“C’mon, slacker!” she edges him on. In her altruistic, selfless act of accompanying him up the stairs, she finds herself subjected to a lot more involuntary charity work; she finds herself having to listen to Nerdy Larry. He jabbers on about internet tunnelling and how he can find anyone online, and burrow into anything, locked, encoded or otherwise. And a small evil grin.
Short story long:
No, they don’t get together! But he does help her find and tunnel into the bank account of the crook who stole all her money, and steal it back; the problem with the courts was that the embezzlement was not provable, so she never did win the case. But, taking it back is the next best – wait: it’s the Better thing! Together they syphon the funds right back into the original trust fund account which was never closed due to the unexpected heart condition of the trustee.
Then she goes about putting her father’s friend’s company back together. But the old man is not allowed to work any longer, so she leaves him a generous pension and takes over running the company herself. Part-time, after hours, because she is still studying auditing and then forensics.
Now there is a kick-butt heroine for you. And: No, she doesn’t get together with anyone! Why would she have to? But she does leave a trail of small businesses in her wake, with every person whose head she turns.
Trust Fund Baby? Ya – take a closer look!
… gipsika signing off with an evil grin, which is so much better than
* inane smile *
I’m always amazed (and a little amused) at what brings views on the blog and what doesn’t. Clearly, posts about ads, subscriptions and social media don’t exactly amuse (or amaze) you peeps, my cherished readers. I’ve thought about this. Likely it is because, reading on a blog on the internet about stuff that is 90% of the internet these days, is very circular and creates a “no thanks” reaction in people. Even if the point was ironically, how to break out of
the goldfish bowl of internet, games, apps, ads, and reading about them.
It’s another form of “shoelacing” (posting a selfie of oneself brushing one’s teeth, on Facebook – remember that era?, or, describing in detail how one ties one’s shoelace while doing it).
Shoelacing
is a term that originated with my friend and editor, Les Noble; whenever an author went into too much detail describing an action, he’d highlight this as “shoelacing”. “And she tied her shoelaces, left over right, right over left, make a loop, round-and-round the loop and through…”
The “Google Bubble”
A few years back, search engines (and on the forefront, Google) started wrapping people into a bubble by showing them ads of things they had already shown interest in (tracking ads, sticky ads, etc). Also, searches came up “curated” with links that tapped back into what people had already searched for before. This served to create a kind of personalized goldfish bowl environment around people, leading them round and round the same topics and sites. This is classically how people of a specific opinion are directed to blogs and sites that reinforce their opinion, and eventually lose all doubt that what they believe is true. Meanwhile it might be half-truth, or entirely wrong; the internet is made up of a glittering web of opinion interspersed with very little actual fact.
What makes a blog or blog post different?
It needs to be “outside the goldfish bowl”. It only inspires when it brings fresh wind from places where people have NOT been (or not been recently). And seeing that many blog readers tend to spend a lot of time on the internet, a.k.a inside their goldfish bowl, the post needs to be from the “outside” to entertain and inspire.
So my next post will be from outside the Goldfish Bowl – promise!
This strikes me as very funny. We use ad blockers and I personally feel that the number and length and also the style of many ads that get pushed in our faces while we go through our normal online activities, are all highly offensive (even if it’s just an ad for kiddie toys). I feel affronted when I’m listening to a beautiful Schubert Andante or an angelic rendering of The Voice, and in the middle of it, it gets interrupted with a loud, flashy, offensive ad for the best growth milk for 2-year-olds (I routinely opt out of tracking, I’m old-school about being under surveillance, so I get “irrelevant” ads – but where I’m concerned, I know what I want, all ads are irrelevant). And yeah yeah, I know Youtube (and every other web app) is trying to push (bully) us into subscribing. And I refuse.
But from a business perspective: Let’s get real.
Youtube used to be a free service. Why: Because they receive the content they run, for free from countless vloggers. Of course you could also monetize your Youtube via Google Ads (and probably in many other ways). But the platform itself – how was that funded?
Once someone has received something for free, they want to keep getting it for free.
The direction of money flow: If no money flowed, it’s unlikely to flow now. If you were paying, you’re unlikely to start receiving; and if you were receiving, you should not be changing direction into paying.
So either you’re giving the service and receiving money, or you’re receiving the service and paying for it; and how you pay for it, depends. There is, in the business world, no such a thing as a “free” service. There is always a string attached. The “free” is there to buy something: Your loyalty; your data; your future payment. And buyer beware: Usually if something is for free, you are the product.
So far, I’ve likely told you nothing new. But it gets more interesting, and funnier:
Web apps and games, and Your Time
So I’m Gen X. That means nothing; I’m as susceptible as anyone else to small little gaming apps to pass the time while I’m waiting for something; to self-help tracker apps (Lose Weight, Track your Steps, Better Thoughts, Get Organized), and to entertainment. And boy, do they waste time if you allow yourself to get caught up in them.
Until those ads get smooshed into my face.
There is a little “Undo the Planks” wood screw game that I play on occasion. But: It is so highly laced with ads, every time you have managed a level (and you get 2 1/2 minutes to complete each level), even if you succeed, you get to wait through an ad. And it’s a LONG wait. It feels like a full minute. And frustratingly it’s always the same ad, so the effect is, “this is a minute of my life I’ll never get back”- but WAIT….
in fact: you’ll never get the 2 1/2 minutes back in which you solved the little brainteaser.
So, holistically seen, those ads are your best friend. They stop you from gaming compulsively. When the ad comes on, I switch my phone off and go back to doing something productive. The blessing in that: Those ads limit my time wastage to a fraction of the time I would spend on that addictive little app if there were no ads (addictive because the designers have clearly mastered our dopamine reward circuits in our own brains, rewarding us for completing increasingly complex puzzles in a short time).
A word on subscriptions
So with other apps, typically the self-help variety, they will only allow you access to a part of the app options, giving you a little preview of the rest and inviting you to subscribe to unlock that rest.
Which is classic; and of course, if that part is going to be super useful to you, go ahead and subscribe. But a word of caution:
Subscriptions are the new credit cards and monthly payments.
Gen X and the generations before us fell into the debt trap. “Buy now, pay later”. It is seductive to have that new sofa today and only have to pay for it over the next 3 months in portions. We’re even happy to pay a small (sometimes not that small) interest rate for that. But it doesn’t stay at the sofa. Soon enough you have a house full of stuff (a lot of which you wouldn’t even really need), and you’re bleeding out your income in a thousand tiny cuts every month; no sooner do you get your paycheque, and it all runs away…
So some of us wised up, payed back all our debts, cut up our credit cards, closed our loan accounts, and operate above Zero now. We only buy if we have the money for it, in our bank, right now. We pay first, use later. And Gen Y and Z are growing up on our learnt wisdom and a lot of them are avoiding debts. Good kids!
The “money world” has noted this. And they have devised another way to push that button. Subscriptions. It starts small, “only” 1.99 a month (who would miss that? A cup of coffee costs more…), and then we observe the upwards creep…
and before we know it, we have a host of tiny apps and utilities we subscribe to, and we’re once again bleeding away our incomes from a thousand tiny cuts…
What it is really about: Value
We earn our money not only so we can live, but also so we can have some fun with it. Who would want to work only to pay living costs, all the time? How dreary, how depressing! Nope: We do deserve having a little bit of fun with our money.
The key is to be very discerning about what value we are getting for what we are paying.
Is what I’m paying, worth what I’m getting?
A subscription of 9.99€ (many streaming services for instance) costs you essentially 120€ a year. Would you pay that to the service provider in a single lump?
Or would you rather spend it on something else that brings you more joy?
It all went so fast!
She saw a flash and heard a muffled thump, something massive slamming hard into the ocean a good distance away. Then there was a whoosh! of wind that nearly blew her out of the rigging where she was holding on. And then…
There was no time to slide down the ropes and dive under the deck. That wall of water rushed in so fast, all she could do was yell a warning – “get below!” – and – the gasp of air went in by itself as she faced straight into the wave, let go of the rigging, curled as it hit…
She was drowning. The water slammed the air back out of her lungs and dragged her down. Panic screaming in her mind, she swirled with the water, praying that it wouldn’t pull her down too deeply…
One of her soul friends had said to her once, the wave represents love. If you dream of water, of a tidal wave, it’s love you’re dreaming of. She held onto that while the green churning water mangled her senses, spun her around randomly like a bit of flotsam. Could love kill one?
Flotsam drifts to the top. Another thought to hold onto. Had the Solar Wind made it? Had they managed to seal the ship in time? There had been no time!
How long can one breathe under water without air? What a nonsensical thought. But it jogged her mind. She dug in her pocket and found the mask, managed to unfold it, yanked off the cap and bit down around the valve as it self-inflated with air. A chemical wonder invention. Enough oxygen to buy her some time. There would be eight to ten minutes of breathing in that little mask.
The swirling was slowing a bit. She had not been struck by any part of the ship or any other objects, which was only blind luck. How deep down was she? She opened her eyes cautiously and peered out into green gloom. Established where Up was, where the light came from. Took a deep breath from the mask to help with buoyancy and started swimming upwards with strong strokes. It took control to breathe only when the mask was ready, refilling itself between each time she drew from it. And she broke through the surface, let go of the mask and gasped the fresh sea air.
Not too far away there was the form of the Solar Wind, on the massive waves. The rigging had taken bad damage. But the ship had not sunk. Her next gasp for air was a sob of relief. Thank the absolute Stars!
And then there were three of them swimming towards her at top pace. Federi; Ronan and Ailyss.
“Thank God, Sis!” Her older brother was the first to reach her.
“Is Shawney okay?” she asked. He had been in the rigging with her.
“We’ve got him,” confirmed Ailyss. “He’s alright.”
Paean let out another hiccup of relief and relaxed into letting them help her back onto the ship.
Later the whole crew sat huddled together in the galley, some looking a bit battered but thankfully nobody seriously hurt. Federi had made a huge pot of hot chocolate for everyone and laced it with rum. There was enough work lying ahead, and it was only time to celebrate surviving, right now. They had lost nobody.
“The Solar Wind seems to be particularly prone to catching freak waves,” Ronan observed laconically.
“That was an explosion,” commented Paean through her teeth.
“Another explosion,” Ronan pointed out. “Sort-of underscores my point, a bit?”
“Freak wave in Pacific, freak wave in Antarctic Seas, missile from Venezuela,” Federi muttered to himself, counting absently on his hands, “massive tidal freak wave on Lornalon… hmmm…” he looked up innocently. “Reckon we have a hostile author?”
😉 hope you enjoyed that…
… gipsika …
A young caterpillar hadn’t heard
The Wisdom of Wiser Worms’ word…
He stuck out his head…
The news headline read:
“Early Worm Gets Eaten by Bird.”
Amidst loud chirping and squirms
And jostling and pushing in the ferns,
Mama bird does her best
to feed all her nest:
Squeaky Beaks get to eat Early Worms.
I wish I were Les who always had a lovely way of putting something into rhyme.
“There once was a wheel that squeaked
It had everyone’s attention piqued
The sound was so bad
They needed to add
More oil to it week after week.
The trouble with such wheels that sing
Is the maintenance costs they bring
Such wheels when they squeak
Much havoc they wreak
To the one who must pay everything.
So squeaky wheels, take this to heart;
Shut up, do your job, play your part;
If everyone squeaks,
the entire cart creaks:
Too many squeaky wheels just break the cart.
And in case anyone needed an explanation: None will be given! 😂
the red ant 