…an endangered species.. the Punster Par Excellence…

…the art of the well-placed, and even better, well-timed pun, accompanied with the throwaway panache to make the pun sound brilliant, is a talent given to very few… a few decades ago, when this ol’ Jurassic earned his coin in Her Britannic Majesty’s colony of Hong Kong, the court magistracy’s bench was populated almost exclusively by British, Kiwi and Aussie barristers and lawyers… one such giant of that learned profession has stories told about him which became ‘instant legend’ around the taverns of the expatriate brigades… we shall not print the name, in order to protect the guilty, but one particular sample of this gentlemen’s wit and speed of thought in the court room stands out… he was acting as Counsel for a husband whose wife was suing for divorce… the proceedings had turned rather nasty, with vitriol slinging across the court room, principally from the mouth of the supposedly maligned wife… the sitting judge was of the ancient variety, not the most alert legal creature ever to preside over domestic courtroom squabbles…

 

…Counsel had asked the wife to proffer some specific grounds as to why she sought to end the marriage… being somewhat flustered, she stammered, ‘well, he’d come home sometimes from trips abroad with these…these …social diseases‘… the poor Lord Judge, not being much of the world of affairs, in or out of wedlock, raised his eyebrows and leaned over to enquire of the wife, ‘social diseases?… what do you mean by social diseases?’… at this juncture, she became even more flustered and blurted out, ‘you know, social diseases… Venetian Disease’… the Judge looked askance, even more none-the-wiser, and beckoned to Counsel for enlightenment… the genius of the barristerial robes, raised his finger and explained, ‘Ah, m’Lord, a clear case of Gondolier!’…

…it is not recorded whether the lady won her case or not… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE/RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

Dylan Hearn’s Pay It Forward for self-published authors …

…fellow Author , Susan M. Toy, captures precisely the reason for, and the priceless value of, reader reviews … whether the reader is already an author himself or herself… a reader’s a reader… and the reviews, of whatever rating, so long as they are honest, are gold dust to we scribblers … well done, m’Lady, Susan… and thank you for the inclusion of yours truly …you’ve made my week…again… :):)

Books: Publishing, Reading, Writing

This morning, I received an update from Dylan Hearn’s blog, Suffolk Scribblings. In Pay It Forward – an update, Dylan has followed through on his earlier promise to “support my fellow self-published authors by buying their books and promoting those that I enjoyed both on this blog and through leaving reviews on Goodreads and Amazon.”

After having bought and read them, Dylan has listed a number of Authors on his blog post whose books he now recommends.

I had commented on one of his first blogs on the subject, even reblogged on this blog, then promptly forgot about the idea (beacause that’s the way my brain seems to be working these days …). I have, however, continued to promote Authors and their books over on my other blog, Reading Recommendations, and I have been reading books by these Authors whenever I have a chance. A few of these…

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…when is an Iconic Author not an Iconic Author?… when he’s being a scaredy-cat sissy at the dentist…

…they breed ‘em tough where I come from in Docklands Govan in Glasgow… a hard crew, not to be meddled with lightly… sculpted and hewn by centuries of aggression we are… except when it comes to the dentist… ‘fess up time… if had to choose between walking across molten coals barefoot, or a session in that reclining ‘yeez-won’t-feel-a-thing’ lounger, give me the former every time… after six-plus decades, ‘decayed’ is the operative WURD for some of my chomping gear… for over half a century, this ol’ Jurassic has plied himself assiduously to undermining his natural dental apparatus by an unending ration of chocolate (who hasn’t?), ice-cream (but only by the bucket-load, mind) and all manners of edible stuff, non-conducive to healthy molars… little wonder then, that the infrequent sojourns to the gob-driller fill me with trepidation, bordering on outright anticipated terror… this bold Iconic Author the Nobel Literary Prize Panel has grown to LUV and ignore transmorphs into the biggest wuss on the planet… the dilemma develops when the bluudy toothache overrides the anxiety of the impending visit to the clinic… choice to make… suffer.. or suffer… yeez have to make tough calls in life sum’times… so, yesterday, this excuse for a transformed Braveheart fronted up to my dental pal, a genial bloke in his civvies, Dr Mark Partridge of the British Dental Clinic here in Abu Dhabi…

…when he started talking dirty to me, i.e ‘root canal’, ‘anaesthetic shots’, ‘impacted wisdom tooth’, I was jelly in his chair… okay… ticked off the life insurance coverage (does it cover ‘being a lily-backed coward’?), invoked the divine intercession of umpteen different prayer Gods, and pleaded with the good Doc Partridge to ‘be gentle with me’… and behold and lo, d’yeez know what?… the man was terrific… how often do yeez hear that said about a dentist?… I don’t know about ‘bedside manner’, but his ‘dental-chairside manner’ is magnificent… he talked me through every bit of what was going on… for the first time in that horizontal-gazing-at-the-surgical-dentist’s-light position, I actually felt comfortable… I will not lie and say it was enjoyable, but the experience was absent the usual knuckle-tensed gripping of the lounger… it was all over in an hour… and it only felt like 60 minutes… well done, hats off, and fillings off, to Dr Mark Partridge… this was not intended as a ‘puff piece’ for he and his practice, but what the hell… for what the guy did not put me through, here’s where yeez’ll find him, if ever yeez are here in Abu Dhabi Kamel Kuntry and need a place to get yer ‘wallies’ fixed:

Doctor Mark Partridge:  http://www.britishdentalclinic.ae

 

…see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE/RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…yeez’ll have to call me back later, there’s not enuff people listening to me yet…

…one of the oldest computer and communications gadgetry Jurassics I may well be (I do a lap of honour every time my Mac lights up when I click on it), but there’s other folks who take it all a bit too far… today I made a short flight on business, which meant about an hour’s wait in the airport lounge… it was modestly busy, and the breakfast fare (free) was edible… I got the internet password from the lounge receptionist and began to get updated on my day’s SOSYAL NETWURKIN stuff… then in walked THE MAN…

…yeez’ve all seen him… and what’s more, yeez’ve all heard him… not just a mobile phone, but one of those weird contraptions where the bit sticks in yer ear lobe, and a wee aerial makes it look as if yer brain’s taking in satellite signals… the end he talked into was like a one-inch-diametered black leech on the side of his face… strapped there like a telephone operator’s apparatus… now, whoever the poor b*stard was listening to his diatribe at the other end of the link, (decidedly more of a monologue than a dialogue) received, at a minimum, two dozen instructions from MISTER IMPORTANT… all in the space of ten minutes… the rest of the other fifteen or so of we transient occupants of the lounge were not spared from overhearing the ‘eloquence’ (new definition of ‘eloquence’=‘bullsh*t’) spilling out… in that wonderful kinship that instantaneously develops among those of us too polite to tell MOTORMOUTH to shut the feck up, the knowing glances at each other with the eyebrow raised ceilingward spoke silent volumes which became the morning’s entertainment… this new Lord of the Airwaves, rabbited on and on and on… we were treated to an aural barrage, as the topics switched from supposedly big business matters, to more personal deals the man seemed to be involved in… the repeated dropping of the words, ‘millions’, and ‘hundreds of thousands’ caused stifled smirks from his unknown-to-him,-by-now-enraptured-audience… it took me back almost thirty years to Hong Kong… when mobile phones were the latest ‘must-have’ phenomenon… back then the mobile contraption was the size of a small house-brick, and the louder the conversation, the more impressive the user thought himself or herself… I often imagined in those days part of the poser’s conversation might have been, ‘yeez’ll have to call me back later, there’s not enuff people listening to me yet’… that’s where I must have seen MISTER PONTIFICANT before… deja vu all over again, Mabel… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE/RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…accepting gifts from the reviewing Gods… an Author’s perfect present…

…no self-respecting quill-scraper is embarrassed to admit the frisson of ecstasy yeez experience when an out-of-the-blue glowing review for yer WURK hits the Amazon and Goodreads pages… here’s what arrived on those review pages yesterday… LUV IT!…

..there are certain reviewers whose opinions I value so highly they are off the upper scale… one such is Chris Graham,( Graham Christopher ) The ‘Storyreading Ape’ Blogger, and superb supporter of authors everywhere… I’m indebted to him for seeing fit to honour my SELF-PUBLISHING GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL SALES with the following 5-star review… thanks gazillions, that man…

5.0 out of 5 stars

Written by someone who knows what he’s talking about.,

22 Aug 2014

By Chris Graham (Manchester, UK) –

This review is from: Self-Publishing Steps To Successful Sales (Kindle Edition)

I’m not an author but if I was THIS is the book I’d use to guide me through the process of getting it published, promoted, advertised, marketed and placed in front of potential readers WITHOUT SPAMMING.

Seumas certainly successfully practices what he preaches and gives sage, hard won advice at every level covered in the book.

If you believe that being an author stops at writing terrific stories, guess again.

This is a practical, unembellished, step by step business plan of action that every self-published author should read, whether they are just starting out or already seasoned veterans.

Highly recommended.

USA  : http://amzn.to/1lt6bcv

UK    : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Publishing-Steps-To-Successful-Sales-ebook/dp/B00JBL6K80/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1396072562&sr=8-6&keywords=seumas+gallacher

 

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE/RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…may whatever God you have, be with you, Paul Gascoigne… and thank you, Harry Redknapp…

..a wee serious post…I’ll do this once, and once only… like many others who LUV the great game of football, I’m more than saddened to see the continued mental and physical turmoil that Paul Gascoigne is suffering… but more than that, I feel intensely for the guy inside fighting all that hurt and pain… only those who have been there and suffered this dreadful illness, alcoholism, can even remotely understand what he’s battling…. I note with disdain the uneducated snipers and gutter press who batter the headlines with pejorative insults against the man… they have no idea… I’m also uplifted with a news snippet where I note QPR’s Manager, Harry Redknapp, has offered to let Gazza train some of his youth academy, and will even pick him up at 5.45 every morning to go to London, and drive him back home afterwards each day…

…apart from the professional medical help he obviously still needs, what Harry is offering is equally important… an opportunity for Gazza to regain some of his human dignity… to let his spirit rebuild by being usefully employed, applying some of the God-given talents he possesses… may whatever God he might have, look after an ex-player who has given so much pleasure to others earlier in his life… and thank you, Harry Redknapp, for restoring a bit of my own faith in human kindliness… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE/RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…reading the book before seeing the movie…

…I reckon most movie scriptwriters will tell yeez it’s difficult to capture on screen exactly an Author’s masterpiece… making films is a craft in and of itself… and all yeez good Lads and Lassies of Blog Land appreciate that sculpting a novel has its own myriad nuances, particularly in the use of language… almost by accident, I read first the book before watching my all-time favourite cinema trilogy, ‘The Godfather’ series…

…I’ve watched the movies too many times to count, but I marvel at how well the film reflects much of Mario Puzo’s monumental mafia saga… even so, the ‘backfill’ that I have from reading the novel first, gave me tons of unspoken insights to the on-screen behaviour of the various characters… having become conscious of that over the years, I rarely watch a lauded, adapted-from-novel, film version without first buying the book… and what depth and added enjoyment I’ve derived from doing that… ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, and ‘East of Eden’ from the pen of the maestro, John Steinbeck are only partially captured in the admittedly excellent movie versions…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…when all the hullabaloo was in full cry before the release of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ series, I purchased Master Tolkien’s output first…

…similarly, prior to that wee Lassie Rowling’s offerings getting to the flicker-theatres, I devoured all of the ‘Harry Potter’ stuff…

…and much the better the films appeared from knowing the characters so well before watching them… I also recall, ‘way back, the enormous pleasure from how well the director had traced Richard Llewellyn’s  ‘How Green Was My Valley’…

…another outstanding tale, Umberto Eco’s  glorious ‘The Name of the Rose’ starring ol’ Lishhpy-Shhcottish-Burr himshhelf, Shhhhean Connery, is brilliantly processed on screen…

…so, next time any studio P.R. propaganda machine starts drumming up the ‘spin’ for a blockbuster movie, go get the book first… yeez’ll get better value that way… I’m sure yeez’ll think of many more of these that yeez liked yourselves… tell us about them…see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE/RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…no, Mabel, I’m NOT a self-publishing guru… but sum’things I do, actually WURK… #TBSU…

…some of yeez out there are really, really nice people… about six months ago, I threw some ideas together about how this ol’ Jurassic handles bits of the mysteries of SOSYAL NETWURKIN and published it on the Great God Amazon Kindle as SELF-PUBLISHING STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL SALES… now yeez are asking me to share how I managed to ‘divine’ all that stuff… the bare, stripped-down honesty is that I did not ‘divine’ anything… I merely collated some of the things that I found helped me as a neophyte wannabe independent author… in reaction to yer requests, here’s the Foreword to the wee tome… I hope it gives yeez an inkling and more…

                                                                   

Foreword to SELF-PUBLISHING STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL SALES

 

I started writing my first crime thriller novel in early 2009. I finished the first draft in a matter of a few months. Then, I thought, all I have to do is to send it off to a few Literary Agents in London. One of them would be sure to throw lots of money at me for the right to carry my masterpiece into the public readership market.

In fact I sent off forty Query Letters, submitting the novel for consideration. In the beautiful balance that is the writing universe, I received back precisely forty Rejection Slips. It took a while later for me to understand from fellow authors, that such rejection was the standard, the par for the course. Indeed, many famous names in the libraries had initially racked up several times that number of rebuffs for their work.

Around the same time someone suggested I put the thing onto Amazon Kindle. I looked blank and explained that I had never heard of Kindle. You see, then in my early sixties, the whole computer business and social networking fields were distant concepts to me. All my commercial life, my offices had been run by a succession of personal assistants who did ‘that stuff’ for me. I was faced with the option of forgetting the whole authorship idea or adapting rapidly to the realities of modern self-publishing.

The result has been astonishing. Sales and downloads of my books (currently three crime thrillers, with a fourth as Work In Progress, and three collections of Blog Posts) have surpassed 75,000 copies.

It has been a wonderful and gratifying trip. I will not pretend to be an expert on the social networks nor on the ePublishing business. I simply want to show what worked for me.

SELF-PUBLISHING STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL SALES is intended to share with others the various steps I took on that journey, and to encourage independent writers never ever to give up on their dreams.

Seumas Gallacher

Abu Dhabi

2014

… yeez can cop a wee look here :

http://amzn.to/1lt6bcv

…see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE/RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

 

 

 

 

…seems like I still have the capacity to get into trouble… I’m glad to say… #TBSU…

…‘act yer age’ is a term I just can’t accept… my Comedic God, Billy Connolly waxes lyrical about his own rebellion against the idea… and to quote from the Big Yin himself, recently I turned 60 years old… even more recently I turned 65… and now, well… the kind of bother that magnetised itself toward me through infancy and early youth never resulted in gaol time… back then, justice and punishment went hand in hand with proximity to parents… and more precisely was doled out liberally from the hands of parents… sum’times, merely the nearest parent, whether he or she was yer own or not… mostly we kids got into ‘scrapes’, got up to harmless ‘mischief’… seldom requiring more than the presence of the local street policeman, whom everybody in the district knew by name, and for we children, more known by nickname…

 

 

…ours was ‘Ginger Malky’, coz he had red hair… behold and lo, if yeez ever got a ticking off from Ginger Malky and yer Da got to hear about it…yeez would cop another censure, generally accompanied by a few belts on the backside… so with all that history of discipline, yeez might think that sumb’dy like me would be incapable of incurring the wrath of authority of any sort these days… well, yeez would be sorely mistaken, as today’s events have proved… an innocent enuff saunter to the local shopping mall… a casual stroll through the mall’s wide spaces, and right up to my feet arrives a football… directed there, or more correctly, mis-directed there from a wee boy, hardly older than four years old… I demonstrated the soccer skills that made me a legend in my own changing room about a hundred years ago by passing it deftly back toward this budding Cristiano Ronaldo… he promptly whacked it with a beaut of a left foot, straight back to me… I passed it back again, and this happened a coupla times…

…before yeez could say ‘World Cup’, a posse of kids were streaming around me, kicking that ball all over the place, but generally in my direction… I was having a blast… a blast, I tell yeez… about half a dozen tiny, shrieking, squealing Wayne-Rooney-wannabees laughing and having fun in the middle of the shopping mall… and then it happened… the long arm of the law… or more like the short brain of the law, in the guise of a Security Guard intervened and picked the ball up… he handed it to me (it wasn’t even my ball!), and said ball games weren’t allowed and that really I should know better… it took all of my considerable constraint not to belt the guy in the teeth… but, of course he was right… b*gger that !… I handed the offending ball back to my Lilliputian-sized new buddies and told them the referee had given me the proverbial red card… I don’t know who was more disappointed— the kids or me… at least I left feeling good about knowing that it seems like I still have the capacity to get into trouble… see yeez at Wembley Stadium later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE/RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…it’s all about ‘comfort’… how yeez ‘wear’ stuff…and not just clothing… #TBSU…

…during the course of my career it was necessary to do a lot of business travel… mostly abroad… pastures foreign… sum’times, it was a bit like, it’s Tuesday, it must be soup, it must be Belgium… it’s Thursday, it must be sirloin steak, it must be Geneva… and so on… one country pretty much looks like the next when yeez are on the move… an airport, a hotel, a bed, a taxi or limo to another airport, etc, etc… by the time this ol’ Jurassic had done his gazillion air miles of flying hours (days/weeks/months/years), it had boiled down to ‘comfort’… what I call ‘wearing’ a place… a hotel fr’example, some of yeez who follow this blog will know I have a wee writing corner in the lobby of the Jumeirah Etihad Towers Hotel in Abu Dhabi, and very grand it is too… but it’s not about the swank of the place… it’s about the ‘comfort’ I feel about sitting in it… I do the same when I’m in London… there’s a little coffee shop around the corner from where I normally billet… nothing posh, but I ‘wear’ the place well… the same thing goes for being on the SOSYAL NETWURKIN circuit… there’s stacks of garbage on there, which if I chose to, I could let it make me rattled… but I don’t… instead, I elect to find my ‘comfort’ with the people whose posts I enjoy… ‘comfort’ again… I ‘wear’ their virtual friendship like a pair of ‘falling-to-bits-but-can’t-possibly-be-thrown-away-yet’ slippers…

…for we quill-scrapers, I think it can also boil down to our scribbling patterns… some are morning creatives, others peddle their wares better in the dusk, and some nutters belt at it 24/7… ‘comfort’ in the WURK routines, that’s called… when I’m in the company of actual people (yeez know they do exist outside of the internet, don’t yeez?), I switch to ‘auto-comfort’ mode… some folks I just simply walk away from… others I keep close… ‘comfort’ in friendships… so what are yeez all ‘wearing’ this week?… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE/RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!