A Moan, A Change of Title, A New Cover - and a Chance for YOU to Contribute some Ideas

I have had to take on some desk research for a market research company to earn a crust (which is now grinding to a halt) and in between there have been bouts of depression during which I haven't done much at all. Quite a lot of the latter has been due to LULU messing around and f*%*ing everything up. I had hoped to just finish and get out INSTITUTIONALISED volume 3 (A CONTINUUM of DISCIPLINE) and then dump everything and get on with a new project and never think about any of it ever again.
But even as sales were taking off LULU was hard at work in the background putting a halt to it: "We are unable to distribute volume 1 as its title comes to close to the edge of the cover to print correctly" But INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1 had been distributed through Amazon et al via LULU since May 2008!!! (I have 3 printed proof copies myself). Then they came out with: "There are too many characters" in the full title of volume 2. But once again this was near-on two years after it had been published. Now they have removed all the PDF downloadable versions.
I am not sure how successful their new strategy is going to turn out commercially though, either for LULU as a company or their authors, at least insofar as my experience to date. Now I know we are not exactly talking 'Harry Potter' here in terms of sales but I had been shifting 2 or 3 most days, but since all the changes they have made at LULU I have yet to sell one single copy of any of my three volumes. In fact, sales just stopped dead after 21st of September (other than two print copies of the first title via distribution – Amazon or whatever - which obviously date to a much earlier time as they take a while to filter through).
And there are other concerning issues too:
My first volume in particular once had several really glowing reader reviews, all of which – bar two - have disappeared (and I had about eight on volume 1 including one that said "destined to be a classic of the genre" which I was particularly proud of!). Admittedly most of these reviews vanished a long time ago, after a previous reshuffle at LULU (about the same time that the ranking device seemed to cease to function and the hit counter that used to feature on their site disappeared).
Secondly: When I use the LULU book search facility, entering the usual keywords pertaining to books in the same genre as mine, I am hard pressed to bring up my own books, despite the fact that I know what I am looking for. In fact only my second volume surfaces at all now. And it is not just me that thinks there is a problem in that department, either. Several folks have emailed me saying that if not for following the links from my blog they would have never have stumbled across any of my books from a random search of LULU (though they had come across and bought others via LULU previously).
But all is not necessarily negative; I have a strategy of my own: What with my paid work now coming to an end and there being no sign of anymore in the pipeline for the foreseeable future I am at a loose end. I plan to spend a little time fixing the cover of volume 1 to keep LULU happy, but using it as an excuse for a cover redesign since my skills have come on somewhat since 2007 when it was created and I'd like to make it appear a little more like Volume 3 (volume 1 is apparently occasionally mistaken for a psychology text book!!!). While I am at it I plan to change the title: It will still say ‘INSTITUTIONALISED: BEYOND THE STANFORD EXPERIMENT’ on the front cover but will be recreated on LULU under an alternative title – one hopefully more eagerly grasped by their picky search engine.
Now this is where you - my readers and other visitors - come in to the equation. If you were given the task of re-naming this, my first ever book (or had you been its author) what would you call it? All suggestions welcome. Please bear in mind that from as far as I can tell LULU’s search engine looks for keywords in the title. So words such as ‘spanking’, ‘caning’, ‘corporal punishment’ and so on need to be incorporated as early as possible in the title but without it becoming too ‘cheesy’. Perhaps do a search on LULU with a few key words and see what crops (Ha, Ha!) up? Meanwhile I am going to carry out a quick (I hope) experiment involving volume three.

Deviant Art for Deviant Days (or something like that)

Hello again! Less than a week since last time – blimey!Well, here we are, almost October and it's blazing here in London like a chubby teen's well-whipped backside. What a deviant, you are probably thinking, even applying spanking metaphors to meteorological phenomena. But the weather has been pretty deviant in recent years, so why not? And talking of deviance (a gossamer-thin link at best) having finished with the commissioned piece I was writing I have at last begun to turn my attention to exploring photo manipulation and computer art, albeit in the evenings as I am presently tied up earning a crust in the daylight hours.

All of which brings me to DeviantArt.com (there's a link in the sidebar somewhere I'm sure, listed under 'Useful Resources' ). It's a great vein of inspiration waiting to be explored. As a starting point try these examples drawn and produced by 'Jogbol' (not to worry, you legal minded types – I have the artist's permission). What I like about these images is the plethora of tales that pop into the imagination, partly because of the built-in uncertainty of the context, by which I mean the lack of background detail. By focusing on the subject and the more immediate surroundings greater scope is opened up for what I would call 'personalised imaginative embellishment' (Ok; fantasizing – if you must!). Anyway, if you like what you see just click on the artist's name to visit and then surf from there.

As for that commisioned work, in case you were wondering; I am pleased to be able to tell you that, from the feedback I have recieved thus far, the client seems happy – even delighted - and is apperently enjoying the piece, which is what it's all about! I have to say I was somewhat releived. It turned out to be not at all easy to avoid drifting into my own areas of interest and those other areas I have grown more accustomed to accomadating in my writing over the years. For the latter reason I had become a little concerned towards the end that I might not have placed sufficient emphasis on the client's more specific personal interests. All in all though, it turned out to be a rewarding and inspiring experience! Bye for now!

A Back-to-School Adult - An Anonymously Penned Tale

Hi chaps and chapesses ! Well, I finally finished the piece I was especially commissioned to write, at least in so far as I could take it under the present circumstances. Who knows, some part of it may someday see the light of day in book form as a short novelette, although I very much doubt it. I have become a little disillusioned when it comes to publishing – at least as far as publishing through LULU goes! I have plenty of unfinished, part-written fragments, though, that might be of interest to some and which in due course (perhaps with a little additional 'polishing') I will be putting out on here.
Meanwhile an anonymous contributor sent in the following piece, inspired by the tabloid appearance of one Christine Bleakly, a UK television celebrity, back in school uniform. Originally appended as a comment to my last posting I decided to give it an airing here as not everybody reads through the comments added to blog entries (I know I often don't on other people's). Consequently I have deleted the corresponding comment to avoid duplication. I have also done a little judicious editing to make it clear it is a work of fiction based on a fictional character and merely inspired by the antics of the well-known newsreader – one cane never be too careful and it doesn't do to blatantly refer to a living character directly by name, not even in an obviously fictional context! They often don't take to kindly to it.
And if you are wondering what all the fuss is about here are a couple of the pics that are currently bouncing around all over the blogasphere – and now on with Mr (or Miss, Mrs, Ms) Anonymous’ tale of sting-in-the-bum delectation. But where should it go from here? Why not add your suggestions? There's plenty of inspirational potential in those shots, I think. Perhaps our anonymous might then incorporate the best into the next part (I hope there is a next part!).

.....

BACK TO SCHOOL

Christine – now 'Chrissie' blushed slightly under the Headmaster’s appraising stare, rolling her eyes up and smiling in that special way she had before straightening her tie and folding her hands behind her back.
The Headmaster’s eyes twinkled as he watched the anxious schoolgirl “polish” the front of her left shoe on the back of her right calf. Three weeks before Christine had sat with her producer in this very office. In her smart red dress Christine had been the very picture of professional self-assurance: poised, confident, and in control.
In contrast, the nervous schoolgirl fidgeting in front of his desk looked like the gangly and awkward teenage daughter of the young woman who had arranged her visit.
The Headmaster smiled. Poor Chrissie! She had been so confident, so cocky! And now she was just another teenager, trying to look her best for uniform inspection!
“Your uniform is acceptable,” he said stiffly, secretly relishing the chance to grade the once self-assured ex-celebrity as if she were one of his pupils. “Assuming of course you don’t rub shoe polish onto the back of your socks!”
Chrissie froze, horrified at the thought, and the Headmaster’s chiding. She frantically twisted her to look at the back of her sock, afraid of what she might find, almost falling over in the process.
Pleased to have knocked her off balance, the Headmaster quickly issued his next command as he turned to finish mixing his drink. “For goodness sake, sit down before you break something. The last thing I need is another clumsy schoolgirl busting a lamp!”
Christine looked around the massive study for somewhere to sit. She was standing next to the incredibly comfortable and leather wingchair. But somehow, it didn’t seem right…
Much to the Headmaster’s surprise, when he turned around he found that Chrissie had selected the simple Windsor chair he kept against the wall, moving it across the room so that she could face him as they talked. It was a simple but sturdy low backed wooden chair, unpadded, with wooden spokes and a hard wooden seat. Clearly a relic of years gone by, somehow it seemed appropriate.
Chrissie squirmed awkwardly in her chair, clearly uncomfortable at the way the unbending seat was pressing into her tender bottom. The Headmaster considered offering her the other chair, but decided instead to simply sit back and enjoy the sight of her wiggling on the hard wooden seat.
“Rather uncomfortable, isn't it?” he said, chuckling in amusement as she fruitlessly attempted to shift her weight to one of the large armrests. “It’s the “naughty girl” chair. Of course in your day, girls usually used it for kneeling, not sitting!”
Seeing her puzzled look, the Headmaster crossed the room and opened the cupboard door. the one-time celebrity’s jaw dropped as the Headmaster revealed a razor strap and cane hanging on the inside door.
“You still have those?” she gasped.
“No, but I keep them here, on display, so that pupils know they are present. Scares the heck out of the little devils, even if they’re only for show, and to keep the little miscreants in line."
“It certainly kept ME in line!” Chrissie admitted, swallowing as she stared up in awe at the naughty schoolgirl’s nightmare. “The whole time I was here, I was terrified I was going to be caned! Fortunately, I was clever enough never to get caught.”
“Or lucky enough,” the Headmaster said, bristling at Chrissie’s absurd suggestion that somehow she had repeatedly outsmarted him. Chrissie grinned back at him, flashing him her best “cat-that-ate the canary” grin.
The Headmaster did not return her smile. Christine was a visitor, but she was also a student, even if it was only for the day. As a condition of her return she had cheerfully promised “to obey all of the rules” and there were certainly rules about impertinence and disrespect.
There was a certain cheekiness about this TV favourite, an impudence in her manner and tone, that suggested the need for an old-fashioned correction…

Eggs and Bacon, Trials and Tribulations on the Line

Hi Orage and others who may have been wondering about my protracted absence from the bloggersphere! No, I’m not being lazy, far from it! I'd got the date of my return from the Greek island of Kos (yes, I'd got the spelling wrong) wrong - it was 14 nights, not 10 nights. This meant I was scheduled to join my kids at their grandmother's place (just outside Clacton, by the sea on the east coast) more or less immediately on my return, having spent an additional night in a hotel in Gatwick due to a delay occurring to my return flight which meant I got back to the UK too late to travel on. Since then I have been pouring all my creative energies into fulfilling the commission I have spoken about previously having fallen behind schedule due to various other commitments. This latter endeavour has been complicated a little by the fact that my kids were scheduled to return to school later than I had been led to believe they were supposed to - and so for a few days the privacy I need to work in has been somewhat limited (they went back for the first time since the summer school holidays yesterday. The other problem I encountered upon my return home was a severely limited broadband internet connection, with the connection intermittent at best and failing completely to connect at worst!

Now it wasn’t my intention to update the blog again until I had completed the commissioned piece but I am visiting a friend’s place today who has a good fast broadband connection as I needed to quickly look up something for that piece. As I blundered into a blog I had not come across before I thought I’d take the opportunity to add it to the blog list (see right hand sidebar) and briefly update you all as to my progress. Called ‘Domestic Discipline Digest’ you can visit by clicking on the above picture taken from the blog, clicking on the blog title here or checking out the sidebar blog list. By the way; I have also added a reply from yours truly to a comment made on the previous entry which some of you may be interested in. Click here to read.

The problem with my home internet access is ongoing and is clearly due to electrical noise on the phone line. The phone sounds like eggs and bacon frying in a pan whenever it rains - and it is not exactly a desert here in the UK! As I said to someone else in an email recently by way of explanation: You are probably thinking 'just report it to the phone company'. In theory this sounds simplicity itself; in practice it is somewhat a pain in the arse! You see we don't get our phone line from the phone company (British Telecom),,, Oh no! We get our phone service by way of the post office (mail company) and oddly they are based in Ireland and don't seem to know what they are doing (although they get out a British Telecom engineer to fix the fault if they find it). Weird isn't it. I wonder if it is like that where you are in the world?

Here we get our electricity from the gas company (or is it the other way around?) and bank accounts and mobile phone contracts (and insurance and banking) through the local supermarket.

The utility companies are a real mess though. It was supposed to lower prices through increased competition - and perhaps it can lead to lower bills sometimes, when it all works - when anything goes wrong though, all hell breaks loose. And there are cases I have read in the UK press of people receiving multiple bills from different utility companies for the same service!

In our case; our telephones, internet router and internal wiring are all ours and our responsibility. We get the bill for our phone calls from the post office but rent the phone line from British Telecom, the phone company. The broadband service provider is someone else entirely, although their equipment rack is housed in the local British Telecom telephone exchange (to whom they pay rent to house it and provide access to the phone lines).

So guess what happens when there is noise on the line and the fault is intermittent and difficult to localize? Yeah! You got it! Everyone points the finger at everyone else and it goes around and around and around.... You get the picture. For now I’m off to get some more writing done and the blog will return to full service just as soon as I get the commissioned piece satisfactorily completed. At that point I intend to start to add some original creative content by yours truly on a weekly basis. Bye for now!

'Wringing' Out the Inspiration

Hi folks. I was going to put up a few views of post-'riot' Wood Green North London but I have just had a change of heart. I have now worked out how to download the photo's off of my phone (took all of two minutes) but while reorganising the various folders on the desktop computer I came across an archive of 'Wringer's' photoshots that I had gathered together for my own enjoyment from various sources.

No matter what has been stamped across one of them, these are - to my knowlege at least - all the work of 'Wringer'. My first inclination was to load these on to a memory stick and upload them from my holiday hotel (WiFI extra but 'reasonable' I have been assured). On second thoughts there is always the chance of said memory stick falling into 'judgemental' hands while passing through customs or what ever, by being stolen or indeed lost and so I decided to quickly upload now and to take the riot pics (not very exciting, frankly) and a couple of pics from my last holiday (Pompeii, Herculaneum, Mount Vesuvius - that sort of thing) and upload them later in the week from the island of Koss. Some of these Wringer pics you will have seen before, perhaps here, and other's you will have not.

They are also widely variable in terms of resolution etc - but this reflects their various sources; all now lost in the mist of time but including several Yahoo Groups I seem to remember. The thing is how one almost automatically tends to weave a multitude of tales around them, individually or as a set - I think it has a lot to do with the ambiguity of the background (especially in those atmospheric black and white shots) along with the institutional appearance of the bed, leaving one's imagination to fill in the gaps as to whether one is being made privy to a domestic or an institutional scenario. Wonderful stuff!
I have to be off now. Gym first (if it ain't been burnt!) then off to Gatwick, leaving North London around 4 o'clock this afternoon. The flight is not until tomorrow, but it is at 4 o'clock in the morning!!! and so, I am staying in Gatwick for the night. I guess in theory I need not leave London until late this evening, but I want to miss the rush hour (about four hours these days) and also preempt some genius coming up with the idea of burning the stations... Just a matter of time!!!

Hi to 'Orage' there! Good to hear from you too! Hi, too, to anyone who has emailed and still waiting for a reply or who has not heard from me for some time (especialy 'Snooze' and 'Miha')- I hope to catch up on my emails while away, along with completing my commissioned piece (which I must say has down much to reawaken me!), and so you should hear from me in the next week.

Oh! And I forgot to say: INSTITUTIONALISED volume 3 is now available in the Ebook format through Andrews UK LTD at Amazon Kindle (click to visit). I be setting up a direct link in the right hand sidebar sometime in the near future.

Riotous in Tottenham

Hi folks! It has been a hell of a long time I know but here I am again. After the completion of the mamoth (for me) work that became in effect INSTITUTIONALISED volume 3 almost by default and the marathon writing task it turned out to be - taking well over 18 months from concept to completion – I was left feeling drained. I have had liitle enthusiasm since and a similar dearth of inspiration. What little inspiration I have had has come by way of the private commision I received and that I have mentioned before and what creative energies have been unleashed through that route I have ruthlesly harnessed to that cause. Even then progress has been slower than expected, though mostly that has been due to my having to take time off to do other things in the background to earn a crust and though I could of course put aside an hour or two every day to work on the project the ideas just do not come to me as if on schedule in that manner, on demand whenever I have a couple of free hours. I prefer to work in an uninterupted burst of at least a day at a time, though entire weeks are so much better. Still, quite a lot has been achived although I have held back on comleting the project until next week. I am going to the greek island of Koss (hope I spelled that right) for 10 days and it is poised to be one of those quite holidays with very little to do during which I'll easily have time to fit in at least 5 full days writing or more – and so that will be that. I recently went away for 7 nights to Sorrento in Italy but that was another story entirely having an itinary so packed with museum and archiological site visits that I didn't even bother to pack the netbook computer I ordinarily carry around with me.

The photo incidently represents one of the few moments of inspiration on my various travels, being the window I alluded to in an earlier entry that I photographed in Marbella, Southern Spain. The reason I have posted it up is that I intend to use the shot as the basis for a little experimental photo manipulation project I have in mind and the results of which you'll be able to judge for yourselves right here as I go along. Talking of photographs, I have been contacted by 'Wringer' the creative force behind what must be one of my favorite photo sets of all time saying that he is happy to have his pics featured here as long as they are correctly attributed to him – which is fine by me. Many you will have seen before – but possibly not all – and all have fired my imagination, spawning miriad scenarios and diverse creative pathways: Watch this space, as they say!

Now: why the odd title? You may well ask! Well we have just had a riot here in sunny Tottenham. I'll hopefuly have a few pics next time (before Wednesday when I fly out) as soon as I can work out how to coax them off my (not so smart) 'smartphone' 'camera phone' thingy. Not that exciting I know but I'll be more on the ball when I get back from my hols and it's all gonna get a lot more busy on the blog then. Just like the good ol' days when it got started! Bye 'till then!