Photos and writing

11 April

Jan showed Kile his photos from Thursday and he was very happy with them. The flamingo shot I mentioned yesterday has not gone as well as I had hoped once I got it on my computer though. My monitor colour settings are a bit dodgy, as you will see later. This one image has made me see just how far out it is, and I need to get it sorted. The problem with the SD card in my D5200 has now been formatted so hopefully that will be OK now too. I need to get out and try it again I suppose, just not sure when.

My AP arrived this morning and I’m not impressed with it really. Most times I can read most of it, but not todays. Even the Roger Hicks last page piece isn’t as good as normal, and I normally enjoy everything that he writes. That of course happens with all magazine and books. Every writer has off days and produce a weaker piece than normal.

Having said that, I’ve read a good few of James Herbert’s books and not read a weak one yet, including Portent that I’m currently reading. Stephen King seems to produce constant good quality work as well. In his On Writing he said that his favourite novel was Cujo, well, it’s not mine! I thought it was very weak. Peter James is another one; one of his breaks one of the many rules we writers are not supposed to break, that is using an identical twin at the end. I could see it coming from around a third of the way through.

At least these writers are getting on and producing work, whereas I’m only doing the odd bits n bobs every so often, which has been getting me down a good bit. I think it all started when Amazon took my books down from sale after I didn’t give them the US tax code they asked for. Things is, I don’t have one and I can’t be bothered about trying to get one. My thinking has been to wonder why I should bother if they are not being listed? And yet I do have an account with Lulu; what I need to do is to make sure I get my work sorted out and put out through Lulu. It’s another of those ‘round tuit’ moments.

And so to today’s photo … 

That flamingo I told you about, caught by Kile.

And today’s funny …

When a zoo’s gorilla dies, the zookeeper hires an actor to don 
a costume and act like an ape 
until the zoo can get another one.

In the cage, the actor makes faces, swings around, and draws a huge crowd. He then crawls across a partition and atop the 
lion’s cage, infuriating the animal. But the actor stays in character—until he loses his grip and falls into the lion’s cage.

Terrified, the actor shouts, “Help! Help me!” Too late. The lion pounces, opens 
its massive jaws, and whispers, “Shut up! Do you want to get 
us both fired?!”