Autumn colours

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Outside it’s all autumn colours now. Assiduous followers of my various blogs (I know there are a couple) will have noticed that I am having difficulties keeping the front page of the main site updated. (The main site is TheSupercargo.com – where you are now if you’re reading this.) Sadly despite all my efforts to find a way of automatically updating the front page nicely, and despite all the various themes and plug-ins I’ve tried out, I’m driven back on doing it manually. And sometimes, I’m afraid, I find other things to do with my time.

So it goes. I will try to do better in future and have added this task to my new to do list. (I’m trying out an app called Todoist.)

At least the front page today – the day this is published – is up to date.

I’m also a week late with this blog entry summing up September and looking forward to October, but at least it’s here – unlike the ones for February, April and August 2015.

So, what happened in September?

First, I managed a Stops and Stories blog entry for every week of the month. It’s true some were less than inspired, but I was very pleased with The Worst Journey in the World, published on the 9th September, and actually not unhappy with 10 Things Out of Africa (17th September) if only because for once I was able to follow standard SEO advice and write something with a number in the title. On the other hand I did think Details and Swimming (23rd and 30th September) could have been better. (And I’ve even found my self sketching out redux versions of both. Did you know the word “redux” and the word “reduce” come from the same Latin root? Strange, isn’t it, that adding “redux” to a title – as in Apocalypse Now Redux tends to lead to extended rather than reduced versions of the same material?)

I also managed a Soundcloud recording for all the September posts on Stops and Stories except Details. Soundcloud tells me my free allowance of 180 minutes of recorded material is almost two-thirds used up, so I will soon have to start thinking which of the recordings to take down to make room for more. Soon – but not yet. In the meantime, if you’ve not heard them all, I encourage you to listen to them before they vanish!

It’s been good to see that I’ve managed to reactivate At the Quill too. I won’t be posting there this weekend (I’m writing this instead) but it’s my ambition to post there as regularly as at Stops and Stories from now on. The most recent entry at the time of writing is A New Blogging Policy which is all about my new effort to organise myself for Stops and Stories.

An older piece is about my latest effort to write a complete draft of The Long Way to London, the first book in my historical novel series Elin’s Story. Writing Elin’s Story (re)introduced readers to Elin’s Story and announced that I would be dedicating September to doing a NaNoWriMo act. That didn’t work out so well. Three days into the month, food poisoning (if that’s what it was) tripped me up and I never really regained momentum. I gave up reporting progress on my Facebook page and hoped no one would notice. However, I do continue to write and we are currently at 19,530 words – roughly 55 pages for those of you who think in those terms. If I can get back into a regular swing of things I might start posting on FB again.

Forthcoming posts At the Quill are likely to consider what John Cleese has to say about writing comedy in his warm and funny biography So, Anyway and the start of an occasional series about using social networks. Watch this space!

Looking ahead I’m going to be travelling a little over the next few weeks. Most directly I’m off to England to visit my mother and what I hope will be another fruitful recording opportunity. She’s had time this summer to read transcripts of some of the earlier interviews I made with her and I’m hoping they may have helped her unlock other related memories. We shall see.

I’ve also found time to book a couple of nights in Brighton – once my home town. I’m going back largely for reasons of nostalgia, but I’m hoping the visit will also stir up som buried memories of my own which may result in something creative. I’ll be taking my camera, recorder and a notebook so there may be a Stops and Stories or even an At the Quill entry from there to share. Perhaps also a story for Articulations, which is my third blog. Articulations is my website for poetry, short stories and “doodles” and it’s been moribund for nearly two years. It would be very nice to revive it and see it active again. We shall see.

Apart from that there is another project related to English language learning that I don’t want to say anything more about in case I jinx it. (I may have said too much already!)

As you’ll see, there is still no cookies warning and no privacy policy on this, the main website. Nor are there links to the social networks where I’m active. Hopefully they will come up in October or November. They’re also on my list of things to do. In the meantime, if you would like to follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Soundcloud click on those links and get a heads up when something new is published. Like my “Photo of the Week” chosen from the archive of my no-longer-active photo blog from Gothenburg GBG365.

waving handOK, enough now. And I have at least done another of those things SEO types are always recommending and filled this post with links – mostly to my own material.

Here hoping you have a great – and colour-filled – October.

Bye for now!


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