Genuine question for indie authors as I’m thinking about an ‘author’s newsletter’. Not to be rude, but it would surprise me if anyone gave a fig about my ‘process’. Do you get much traction for posts about how you’ve had a great/terrible/random week’s writing?
Read: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck 📚 East German love affair round end of East Germany, trans. Michael Hoffman, booker winner 2024 Intense and Germanic and pervy. Worth another go at reading when I have the headspace.
Read: Death on the Island by Eliza Reid 📚Christie fanfic, right down to the island location, and Roger Ackroyd shaped red herring. Passed the time and didn’t annoy me, so there’s that.
Read: City of Vengeance by D. V. Bishop 📚Very readable and atmospheric. I kept wanting to return to it despite the central murder mystery being puny and the outcome of the Medici political shenanigans being well known.
Squeaky stairs and the Upside Down Marshmallow test
I learned by my teens that the sides of stairs don’t squeak. I needed to stay inaudible and invisible to my parents while they screamed at each other in the living room.
Even though it was past bedtime, I knew they could easily turn their venomous, never ending vitriol on me instead of each other, and I needed to hear them to get an early warning. That was why I was creeping down the stairs. And I needed to stay invisible while I got close enough to the plywood doors in their 1960s suburban chalet while I did it.
Does anyone have a cloud service that works seamlessly across Windows and Linux? So far I've tried OneDrive, iCloud, pCloud, Filen, Mega, Dropbox and Box. Nothing meets my simple needs.
I want one that ‘just works’. I want to be able to work in Linux or Windows in my dualbooting laptop with my data in its own partition, so LibreOffice on Windows and LibreOffice on Linux are accessing the same files. Then I want those files from that partition to sync to the cloud, whether I’m using Linux or Windows.
Not feeding AI, and keeping my stuff private in general would be great, but at this point I’m ready to settle for ‘Just Works’ which seems to be beyond the abilities of any cloud services.
Here’s my experience:
It is a dead parrot.
Read: Death on the Island by Eliza Reid 📚 Christie fanfic, right down to the island location, and Roger Ackroyd shaped red herring. Passed the time and didn’t annoy me, so there’s that. #Bookstodon #BookSky #booksky #iamreading
Linux is Right and Righteous, but I don't want to pay a cloud service over the odds and still have to tit about with rsync
Asda: re your Times Radio advert in which someone identifies herself as a ‘colleague’. Your corporate decision to replace the word ‘employee’ with the less exploitative sounding ‘colleague’ does not make this woman my colleague. I do not work with her. #asda #uk #TimesRadio
Breaking news: a slim young guy on the opposite pavement suddenly stopped, put down the coke bottles he had in each hand, pulled his t shirt up, and watched himself slapping his pale white stomach a few times. Then he replaced the t shirt, picked up the bottles and moved on. #writing
Rewriting is so much easier than the initial writing. Sadly, I can’t rewrite without having writ. #writing #amwriting #writingcommunity
Abandoned: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck 📚 DNF. East German love affair round end of East Germany, trans. Michael Hoffman, booker winner 2024 Intense and Germanic and pervy. Worth another go at reading when I have the headspace.
Read: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚 Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes Rebecca, and both elements are Good Things. #booksky #BookSky #bookstodon #amreading
Read: Astor by Anderson Cooper 📚 Wearying and padded out with tangential ‘context’. Most bios can be top and tailed: first 2 chapters for the origin story, then the last quarter of the book because there’s actual story. Everything in between is predictable. #booksky #BookSky #bookstodon #amreading
Read: Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel 📚 Recognisably, POTUS goes mad and wants to take over Canada, and surveil everyone. Unrecognisably, the power elite try to stop him rather than saying ‘where’s my share?’. Shonky and dated in some ways but weirdly relevant. #booksky #bookstodon #amreading
Very, very difficult to get my head round the most powerful, richest, and until recently, in many ways the free-est country in the world flip into authoritarian Fascism in a few months. It’s going to change everything in the same way the fall of Communism did.
What’s the most rock solid and smoothest cloud storage that works across iOS, Windows and Linux?
I only need 100-200g and I’m fine with the standard levels of security. I’m using it for synching mostly documents and photos across devices, and as an offsite backup. Not scraping for AI would be good, but it’s not a dealbreaker. What I definitely need is synching and mounting automatically. I mostly work on Win11 or Linux Mint laptop but being able to get at documents sometimes on my iPad and occasionally on my iPhone would be useful.
Currently, I’m using …
Read: Ardis - A life on water by Timothy Paleczny
Read: Ardis a life on water by Timothy Paleczny 📚 I’m a sucker for wartime shenanigans and science, so this was great for me, with spying and marine biology against the backdrop of WW2 Portugal, plus walk on parts for Ian Fleming and Kim Philby. It weaves together a cast of characters as a nuanced way into the humanity and morality of the hard moral choices forced by wartime, More Graham Greene than James Bond, but more charm and warmth than either of them.