marypcbuk

Over the last year I've done several pieces looking at cloud options for business that don't assume you're going to give up all your servers, in Grey Matter's Hard Copy magazine. I didn't really see that as a theme in advance, but looking back over them, it strikes me that digging into the details of cloud services - both business services and consumer services used for business - has both changed my views and reinforced them.

I used not to want to keep things in the cloud in case I couldn't get to them, but having the notes on my phone in SkyDrive and syncing to all my systems in OneNote has been so useful I've transferred the big OneNote notebooks I use for writing and research up there, along with the spreadsheet in which I manage all my writing and invoicing. I haven't put all my accounts information and other personal details up there; I'm assessing how comfortable I am with that personally and in a business context. But what we did do was write our entire book in the cloud.

With our business Windows 8 bookhttp://www.sandm.co.uk/post/25093729976/windows-8-for-it-decision-makers we worked from the Windows Server and used offline files to get copies on notebooks to take out of the office (and urgh, VPN to sync on the road). With How To Do Everything in Windows 8, we knew we had to work with a technical editor in the US - and the official FTP server didn't work for him at first. So we quickly moved the chapters from our server to SkyDrive where we could all work at the same time, and that's been a great way to work with only a few hiccups when we started using Windows RT.

But I'm still not all in on the cloud in the sense that I think it's all anyone needs. I'm not switching from a Surface to a Chromebook. I want rich local software, like Office 2013. And if I had business systems more complex than spreadsheets and email and OneNote I'd want the option of running those in house as well as online, maybe splitting things so the the confidential information stays in the building. When I looked at business cloud applications, the really interesting ones weren't web apps you only use in the browser; they were cloud subscriptions that integrate storage, sync and services with those rich desktop programs like Excel and Photoshop that web apps can't rival more than a couple of features at a time.

This piece on Integrating with the cloud started out as just being about private clouds, where you treat your internal systems like a cloud - standardising and automating. But it quickly expanded to add the idea of hybrid clouds because there are things you want to keep in house. Like the SQL Server 2012 and Business Intelligence services I looked at a few months back - but even then, the data you're making sense of might come from whatever the Azure Data Market is called this week as well as from your own servers.

I'm more positive about cloud than I was when it was all hype and Salesforce, but I'm positive about it as another layer to add the other tools we have.

One of the reasons I'm in the 'plague on both your houses' camp on Amacmill-fail is that they're quibbling about which of them gets most of the money form ebooks and who gets to decide how much to charge for them before they inevitably fall to the $4.99 price the mass market will accept for them in a rather deckchairs on the Titanic way. Neither of them has a solution for getting mid-list writers the mix of editing support, marketing support and income stream they need. Take one of my favourite writers, T A Pratt. His four Marla Mason books are fantastic (magic plus snark plus PUNCHING); you can get the first one as a free ebook but that didn't make the rest of them sell well enough for book to get picked up. That's bad for any fan; worse when book 4 ends on a cliffhanger. Pratt wrote a near-novel-length novella prequel that he put on his Web site and solicited donations for; it did better than he expected but he told me he didn't want to get into the self-publishing game; as both a writer and editor myself I completely understand that. Good editors make good books better; good publishers make good books sell better. This is the quandary neither Amazon nor Macmillan (nor Apple nor Barnes and Noble....) is really addressing. So, I was really excited to see him say this today:

"I'm debating whether or not to write Broken Mirrors -- the fifth full-length Marla Mason novel, which will resolve the cliffhanger in Spell Games -- this spring, to be published online as a reader-funded serial in the summer or fall... I suspect I'll use this model: I'll put up the first chapter, and post subsequent chapters as soon as I receive a certain amount in donations for each chapter (probably between $200-$300 depending on how many chapters there are), not to exceed one chapter per week... If I get a pretty healthy response to this call for interest, I'll do it. If I only get a handful of responses, well... I probably won't."

So, if you wouldn't mind wandering over to http://tim-pratt.livejournal.com/105839.html or mailing tapratt@marlamason.net to say Make Mine More Marla, I'd be very grateful...

Somewhere in the mists of December last year I wrote a post about new writers I'd come across over the previous year. I can't keep track of what I read book by book because I binge read (one book can last me weeks (I've been reading Wodehouse's Picadilly Jim for well over a year) but then I have some time or a journey and I go through ten books in a week (restarted Jim on Thursday, have got to the part where all the impersonations are in place and the farce can begin to unravel)), so I wanted to highlight writers I've recently found and really enjoy, like Donna Leon (the Brunetti mysteries, set in the Venetian police department) and Wen Sansom (who writes everything from fantasy to fantasy-SF-manga) and T A Pratt, who writes the wonderful, snarky Marla Mason series. Run, don't walk to somewhere you can buy the first four, to encourage the publisher to buy the fifth (I want to know what happens, dammit), read the Pale Dog story on the site, find Blood Engines as a free ebook; hell, you can follow Marla on Twitter. And then go bookmark Bone Shop; starting June 29th this will be a regularly-published-in-chapters prequel fo which you are invited to donate.

I think most of my friends and connections know that unless you are very lucky as well as very good, fiction is not a paying career; Pratt is one of several authors who are good enough that one feels instinctively they should be swimming in money - instead I believe they're more wading through the shallows of Layoff Beach. I keep being told that the disintermediation of the Internet is an opportunity for us content producers; I hope so...

Sometimes I pick books with the same ‘flavour’ to follow each other because I don’t want to leave the place the first book has taken me, sometimes it happens by accident. Reading Miss Garnett’s Angle (Sally Vickers) right after In Cold Domain (Anne Fine) brought out similarities in two very different books. They both have characters trapped in being who they are, not happy but with no thought of considering whether who they are is who they want to be. In both cases they’re redeemed into happiness or at least experience (passion or suffering – passio either way). It would be crude to say they’re redeemed by Catholic men; Miss Garnett’s Carlo and the Monsignore in Venice, Barbara’s Spanish fiancé Miguel-Angel are quite explicitly Catholic and that’s part of the plot but more as a functional element than a signifier. Really, they’re redeemed by otherness – and by an openness to the possibility that they can be other than they are. Barbara says to her brother William that she likes his boyfriend Caspar because he knows what is right for William and what makes him happy and her Miguel-Angel asks her to change her obsession with her dysfunctional family and her passive-aggressive mother not because he doesn’t like it but because he doesn’t like who it makes her be. No-one tells Miss Garnett what’s right for her but she discovers what’s been wrong for her, as she finds a luminous sense of wonder about angels and the people she meets and love (human and divine).

Both books have that very English attention to large emotions trapped in small situations, like Barbara Pym or Orwell in the Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying or Stella Gibbons in the books that aren’t funny; a badly cooked cutlet or an unwelcoming reception of your donation to the jumble or your unworthy wish not to take the communion cup after someone with wet lips or the subtle cruelties of bringing someone ‘down to earth’ ‘for their own good’ are at the time, everything there is in the world. The larger situations - breaking relationships, suicide and deception - are behind the smaller situations, pulling them out of shape but they’re not addressed. It’s emotion denied, turned in, constrained as a weapon or hoarded as a defence, parcelled out in fear or ground down by dreariness, but suddenly flashing out as a gleam of gold – turning the tables or just seeing for the first time what’s on them . A turning in of energies instead of out, as the Goot Doctor tells Judith Starkadder (one reason Cold Comfort Farm is so biting is that it takes this convention and shreds it completely). Both books have fairy-tale elements; quests, treasure hunts, the frog discovered to be a prince, the unexpected legacy. Those give a sense of lightness and wonder to a story that could be dark or grim, but it’s the opening to emotion and possibility and the eventual truths and lettings go that make the transformations.

In Cold Domain has more bite, more sex and more wheelchairs; Miss Garnett’s Angel has more Venice. They both have a lightening sense of seeing, and moving beyond, human frailty .

"It's the perception of being in control, not the reality, that determines our success in navigating the world... In short, successful writers are rats with islands. They can't see the island, they have no logical reason for thinking there's an island, but as God is their witness, they know there's one somewhere and they're going to keep swimming until they find it. "

Jennifer Crusie on How to Survive your Publishing Career

when we helped tamaranth clear out her shelves for moving, she gave me Welcome To Temptation, recommending the scenes about writing sex scenes; personally I like the water tower that looks more phallic every time they repaint it to stop it looking phallic. I picked up another 3 or 4 Crusie novels in San Francisco and have been binge reading them ever since. They're smart, sassy and loud-mouthed ('spaghetti-spined weasel' is a typical insult), but they also remind me of Georgette Heyer - in terms of conflic, resolution and character, as well as in the irony. And the sex scenes are nicely written. Following a link from a link from a link I found her Web site, including this column from Romance Writer's Report, talking about how facing reality isn't necessarily a good thing, especially for fiction writers, and using examples from Half Empty, Half Full. Like the experiment where they take two tanks of opaque liquid, one with an undersea island and one without. Sunk rats are rescued, but rats who've found an island in a previous tank swim for twice as long before sinking.

Her conclusion is a variation on 'writers write' combined with 'no surrender' - which sounds good to me. But it's making me think about what is coping and what is a coping mechanism; what are the things to be worried that I do and what are the things that may seem weird but are a good thing for me to do because they help. For me half empty is when I'm drinking and half full is when I'm pouring and days when I remember that are always better than days when I don't.