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Letter to the reader - November 2008
________ Michael Graeme " I for one am very pleased that the technology is finally moving off our cramped desktops and has begun to mingle with the real world" |
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Letter to the reader Autumn 2008
Once again, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank all those who have written to me since my last letter. I'm grateful for your kind words and your encouragement. In particular I've had a very positive response to my "Hexagrams of the Book of Changes". This has been available on the website as a PDF e-text for a few years now, but since publishing it on Lulu.com, last summer, it's become very popular, prompting more than the usual number of e-mails. Meanwhile, my novels, "The Singing Loch" and "The road from Langholm Avenue", also published on Lulu.com, seem to be achieving a respectable download rate. Once again, it's very positive, very encouraging, and I thank all those who have taken a chance on my work. Actual book sales are a different matter of course, just 35 since I started out, but this is 35 more than I expected, and to those who have purchased copies, I offer my special thanks. Although none of the money you have paid actually finds its way to me, I recognise that for you, the reader, it's still a considerable outlay and something of a risk. I do hope you were not disappointed. My main project for the past few years was a novel called "The Lavender and the Rose." This now is also available on Lulu.com, since I decided more or less from the outset to spare myself the trouble of sending it out on the usual rounds of the traditional print publishers. This might seem a peculiar thing for a writer to do, but really I get more satisfaction from the knowledge my work is being read these days, than spending several years trying to interest a long line of unenthusiastic editors in publishing it. I am not a professional writer - the day job pays the bills, and long may it continue to do so! Some men play golf, while others write. For the golfer I imagine the satisfaction comes from the gradual improvement of his handicap - while for me its the knowledge of an invisible readership gradually nudging The Rivendale Review's hit counter up towards 20,000. The Lavender and the Rose is a strange piece of work, as those of you who have had a look at it will no doubt agree. It's something that's been gestating since the early 1990's, and is possibly the product of a deranged mind, or the vehicle that guided me away from the psychological minefield I seem to have been negotiating since the turn of the century. As with all my other work, it is free to download. In addition to the Lavender and the Rose, I also recently made available "Push Hands", a romantic novel of a somewhat lighter tone and one hopefully more accessible. Both of these works have achieved a respectable download rate, and again, I thank everyone who has taken a chance on them. In my last letter, I mentioned I had upgraded my computer equipment and invested in a Broadband connection. Broadband in the UK is still rather expensive - I'm currently paying about £16.00 per month, but it really does open the Internet up to a thorough exploration, and it's my understanding that most people in the UK have now abandoned their slower dial-up connections. It also has the advantage of allowing one to go "wireless". As I write this, I am not sitting in my cramped study-cum-box-room, hunched over my desktop. It is early evening, overcast but warm and I am sitting in my garden, here in the rural North West of England, tapping these words into a laptop. The clickety click of the keyboard is accompanied by the songs of Blackbirds, a Thrush, and I think a Robin - as well as next door's lawnmower. I shall, in a moment, add this letter to the Rivendale Review via my Wi Fi link. (all right I know it's now winter, but this is one writer who doesn't have to work to deadlines) I can smell my freshly cut lawn and the heavy perfume of roses and I for one am very pleased indeed that the technology is finally moving off our cramped desktops and has begun to mingle with the real world. As a repository of knowledge the Internet has been second to none ever since its inception. Some of that knowledge is scholarly and reliable, while some of it is not, and I suppose telling the difference will always be something that will have to rely upon the reader's common sense. But but this detaching of itself from fixed locations is making the information more powerful, and more useful. Google maps is the most amazing thing and has seemingly happened overnight - granting any of us the ability to get street level mapping, or satellite photographs of any location in the world, while repositories like Google Books and the Internet Archive puts virtually the whole of the Nineteenth Century's literature at our fingertips. One of my other hobbies is researching the life of an obscure Victorian writer and traveller whose grave I chanced across while out walking int he summer of 2004. This is a task that might normally involve trawling every library in the land, poking through dusty tomes for scraps of information, but thanks to the Internet even an amateur sleuth like me can navigate his way through the past and turn up PDF copies of the most hard to find journals and books from the Victorian era. This project too, will eventually end up here, or on Lulu.com even though I suspect the subject matter is so obscure no more than a dozen people will ever bother to glance at it. The other area I have stumbled into is a thing called the Metaverse - in the shape of the massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) called Second Life. Unlike Google Earth and the Internet Archive - both magnificent creations - I have mixed feelings about the Metaverse. I have found it at times interesting, but also disturbing, and while I believe it is an important development, I'm coming to the conclusion that it doesn't really deliver what either its champions or its critics are claiming. At present the most I can say about it is that it's there, it's growing, and I've a feeling it will evolve in ways we do not expect. I've established a couple of outposts in there for the Rivendale Review, and I'm keeping my eye on the webcounter. I'm represented "in-world" by the avatar known as Cuchulain Graves, so if you're a Second Lifer, feel free to message me or look up our location.
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