Tag: movies

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Double Trouble or Double Bubbles

Self-publishing is a necessary evil that I grudgingly enjoy.

The easiest thing in the self-publication process in many ways is writing a book. Getting it out there in front of a critical audience is way harder. Is there a market, does my book fit into its most likely market, is it good enough? How to make it appealing, tempting, attractive when there is no publishing behemoth backing it?

There are numerous steps in the process:

Finishing the product. Having chosen what are hopefully the right words falling in the right order, the Formatting is next on the list. Trying to keep all the words tied down in a reasonable format that allows it to be read without a microscope and is not reminiscent of the equivalent of writing with a quill pen and treacle. Times New Roman, font 11? That’ll normally do nicely.

That is a mere bagatelle when put alongside the Sacred Search For Typos. Having produced letters, emails, opinions and agreements as a lawyer, I am well aware of the need to keep them to an absolute minimum. But THERE IS ALWAYS AT LEAST ONE. In any document of 250-400 pages, there will be glitches. It is impossible to avoid, but still mortifying when one raises its ugly head. The quest for the perfect document…continues.

I have stopped worrying about it so intensely now – OCD-level concentration suffices for me these days, with the accompanying hope that it has been successful enough to be forgiven. Incidentally, I have found this paragraph the most stressful for a while in terms of typos, for obvious reasons… 🙂 I am always delighted to come upon rubbish continuity, anachronisms and typos in professionally edited and published books, and they are surprisingly numerous….

When I was purely on the reading side, I didn’t give much credence to the importance of a cover. It’s the words that matter right? No. It’s the need to stand out, make a first impression in a monsoon of new material.

See what I mean? An intriguing two-faced character. It wowed me when I saw it (thanks, Ellie!)

And thanks, Rose, for the divine divan!

Then, there’s the title.

And the sub-title.

I like them to be multi-layered but, hopefully, not confusing.

Building Memories: a young PI working up through the ranks, creating memories, coupled with places that have their own imprint and echoes.

The subtitle, Bricks and Murder, is of course wordplay on the importance of bricks and mortar and a hint at the path that the book will take.

Divan Inspiration is a more straightforward daft pun. I can’t resist them…

The cover and the title/sub-title preferably match each other.

Raise awareness on social media and everywhere else – that is in itself a mammoth task. How much is too much? But too little is an even bigger problem. Coming up with tag lines and stupid puns and trails of breadcrumbs leading to the new epic: that’s a fun part. And allowing the process to grow and not feel too frantic or rushed? Still working on all that.

Advertising? Don’t think I’ve got the hang of this yet. I’ve followed all the stuff about keyword searches and keyed them into my books, but it doesn’t help…Maybe I’ll give it one more go, but we’ll see. It looks to me more of a way for Amazon and their mates to increase their income stream from independent authors.

Fun, fun, fun.

So this time I decided to do two at once…

2.2.22

The DIVAN INSPIRATION Series: Travels on the Road to Dreamland. Part One: The Good, the Bed and the Snuggly. A non-fiction bedtime story about beds at the movies.

BUILDING MEMORIES: Bricks and Murder. A magical realism, procedural, PI, tormented love story-thriller.

On AMAZON – softback and eBook

Join me on the Road to Dreamland as we build memories…

Cheers,

Alan

Alan Camrose

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2 New in ’22: who knew?

Happy New Year!

I want to share some of the thoughts behind the covers for my 2 new books which will go live on 2.2.22.

The old adage about Don’t judge a book by the cover is all very well when they are not several million books on the Internet fighting for a place in online shopping baskets…

Something needs to be done to try to make a new book stand out from the crowd. I am not a celebrity chef or a multi-million selling author, so I have gone Old School and tried to create an interesting cover about each new book, with the hope that how it looks and a sneak peek at what I have written will strike a sufficient chord in potential readers…

I have looked at DIVAN INSPIRATION: The Good, the Bed and the Snuggly first. My next post will deal with BUILDING MEMORIES.

DIVAN INSPIRATION

A Non-fiction Bedtime Story

I have decided to publish Divan Inspiration as a series of mini-books.

It is mainly aimed at the following proposition: sleeping takes up around one-third of our lives and is reflected in our culture. Often assumed, often hidden, but always there.

How does it peek out from under the duvet into our lives?

Beds at the Movies is Part One of my mini-series that explores this.

When Gary Cooper is waiting for the bad guys to arrive in town for their High Noon showdown, he doesn’t slip away for a quick kip until their train is in sight, when Travis Bickle is out Taxi Driving, we don’t see hours of him cat-napping in his cab before his next call-out, when the Parasite gave us suspense, horror, comedy and thrills, there wasn’t much time for reflecting on the weave of the bed linen.

But even characters in a movie need to sleep, and every now and again that inescapable fact breaks through into the rest of the cinematic universe in one startling way or another…

I wanted a clear link between the movies and beds/sleeping.

I tried cartoony:

Didn’t like that: too difficult to fit a meaningful movie-related image into the circular lozenge on the top right. It did plant the seed for my wanting an image that can be adapted to different parts of the series…

I alighted on an image of a cowboy at the movies, to chime with The Good, the Bed and the Snuggly.

No, not that one…

I needed some travel on the way to Dreamland, and here it was:

Possibly just a teensy bit obscure, but it offered the possibility of a base image again, tweaked to fit the subject matter of each new part of the series. Weird and not quite there…

Then came the popcorn.

As the backdrop.

With something sleep-related on it. Promising.

Then my daughter Rose came up with what I think was the best answer to an admittedly odd question. Inversion. Keep with the core concept of bed-related subjects, go back to the Counting Sheep early stages – above – and insert an image that chimes with, in this case, beds at the movies. Yes, bringing in the spot-on movie tag of popcorn.

And here you have it, the composite final version of the cover, in all its glory. I hope you enjoy it.

Yours to own on 2.2.22

AMAZON Books – in eBook and paperback

Sweet Dreams, Amigo…,

Alan

Alan Camrose

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Premium Bond

Welcome to my Blog at The Lair Of The Camrose

It’s my bespoke stomping ground in the Intermatrix. You are very welcome, and thanks for stopping by…

This time, an affectionate look at a true movie superstar, who will be sadly missed.

I don’t need to tell you who is pictured above.

This week I have taken my time to figure out my response to the news of Sean Connery’s death.

Another lost building block of life, alongside Bowie and Freddie and many others.

I grew up with Sean Connery as James Bond. It’s along the same lines as who was your Who (somewhere between Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee for me – I can never decide between the frills and the jelly babies), and Blue Peter presenters (Valerie Singleton and John Noakes were the ones for me, although Shep and Bleep & Booster were my immediate choices).

It’s about anchoring memories and Connery in his tux and cruel mouth was the one for me. He nailed the character. Sadly for him, George Lazenby doesn’t really count, although he wasn’t in my view as bad as many say. Roger Moore was the next closest in time, but he always had a little too much pantomime about him for me. (Oh no he doesn’t. OH YES HE DOES.)

So, the above paragraph ages me like a guided missile has been fired at the calendar.

Connery has been a waypoint in my life.

By coincidence, I was halfway through Ian Fleming’s From Russia With Love when I heard the news of his death. Funnily enough, when I’m reading the Flemings, SC is the image that my mind projects into the reading, no hint of camp raised eyebrow. The killer for Roger Moore’s cred for me when I was younger was that my mum loved him to bits and regarded him as the one true Bond, so game over…

The book is slightly batty but is nonetheless a strangely gripping tale of spies and lovers in exotic locations, in keeping with the rest of the books and the movies. You know the drill, evolving over the years not necessarily in real time to fit in a bit more with modern sensitivities du jour.

Connery fitted his profile perfectly.

Look at his later works, including the outrageously fun The Rock and playing Indiana’s dad, his comic timing and magnetic star power are there for all to see, and in more up to date roles. Hell, I even liked him in Outland, (High Noon in space) and – at a stretch – The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but frankly only when he was on camera. And Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the one with his spectacular film-stealing cameo.

There are many others worthy of note, including of course The Name of the Rose.

At the edges, I have only managed to get through around 30-40% of Zardoz (weird sci-fi), but over the course of Lockdown 2 I will give it another try and stick with it. And I will gracefully and swiftly pass over Never Say Never Again which, for the purist, should probably have been called Never Again, And I Meant It, but we all have to earn a living, right? The same with The Avengers, which was a disappointment for me: I never saw Connery as the Scarlet Witch.

I want to end this post with a salute to him, for all the movie highlights, thrills and spectacle that he wove. I’m off to pick up From Russia With Love again and get lost in Red Grant’s fight with the one true Bond.

Cheers!

Alan

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Diet Hard

Welcome to my Blog at The Lair Of The Camrose

It’s my bespoke stomping ground in the Intermatrix . You are very welcome, and thanks for stopping by…

This time, tackling the unthinkable…Yippee-Ki-Ay! Relax, take off your shoes and crinkle your toes, rip open a very small pack of low calorie popcorn.

Warning: Mixing blockbuster references, the need to have seen Die Hard is strong in this one…

Die Hard movie the terrorism of dieting and diets
We have fizzy water, cucumber and everything

Buying a new outdoor pizza oven probably wasn’t part of the ruthless unified direction of travel needed for the Family Diet, but hey ho.

Lockdown has proved to be a challenge on the dietary front, ranging from asking when will our next Waitrose Essentials Lobster be available in those dark early days of uncertainty to: did we really have that extra bottle of wine last night? When I say last night, I’m talking 2:12 pm AND NOT A MINUTE LATER…

Eating and drinking became the new leisure activity to while away an hour between repeats of Line of Duty. It introduced the concept of Zoom Dinners and Skype Snacks, afternoon tea from the early part of Lockdown made from lentils and 2016 gooseberry jam, and pasta for every meal.

Something had to give, and it was going to be either my waistband or my liver or both, hence the New Regime, a group of thieving terrorists locking down the fridge, or at least nicking all the snacks.

Slimfast shakes, bars and snacks, gimmicky but very calorie-controlled and not too horrible. Eight pounds lost in two weeks. Not spectacular but I don’t want to push it too far, especially with a periodic pit stop for a glass of Sunday Bay. The cheeseburger at the drive-in didn’t help. Baby steps, right?

Carrot cake – carrots, part of my five a day.

And then there’s the exercise, in a string vest for authenticity.

We have an exercise bike (low-slung with one of those annoying counter-thingys that tell you how much you’ve done and whether you stopped for a cheeky Latte). and my favourite piece of indoor gym equipment, an individual trampoline. That doesn’t have a counter thing but does require me to be careful not to bounce up and hit my head on the ceiling while running on the spot, so I need to concentrate exactly half the time. Life’s a compromise.

Jasper’s my favourite outdoor exercise provider, my personal trainer. Always available, has low rates (a periodic Bonio) and will retrieve until he falls over. See below…

golden retriever worn out by too much retrieving, cute puppy
Nothing left to retrieve…

Other integrated exercise systems include carrying the Sainsbury’s delivery to the fridge, extreme plant watering and UFD: Ultimate Fighting Draughts.

My plan is to do what I can, because I’ve still got to live in this thing going forward. Being Draconian seems like as bad a place to be as hitting the emergency slimming gloop…

If this proves to be too relaxed, then there’s always Diet Hard 2: Diet Harder.

Cheers,

Alan

Alan Camrose with beard
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We’re gonna need a bigger car

Shows Jasper Golden Retriever's great white shark impression

Welcome to my Blog at The Lair Of The Camrose

It’s my bespoke stomping ground in the Intermatrix . You are very welcome, and thanks for stopping by…

This time, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the drive-in….

drive-in movie, view of the big screen for Jaws
Man-eating shark spotted in Marlow

Drive-in movies. Pure American, right?

No! A beautiful Summer’s evening on a showground on the Marlow-Henley Road for an early evening movie on a massive outdoor screen.

We were half an hour early, third in line to get in (can’t trust the M25), it was like arriving four hours early at the airport for a holiday flight, but this time Lockdown-style. Four of us in a reasonably large Volvo SUV, three of us pushing 6′ 3″. What could possibly go wrong?

We were excited to be out out, albeit in in a car-sized bubble, about to be fed and a classic was waiting for us, brooding in the shallows, filing its teeth.

Jaws was on the menu.

I lined up the car within our parking space, a safe distance from the screen: a perfect view for the driver (me) and Mother. For Twins 1 and 2 in the back? Not so much.

Volvo hadn’t really legislated for this cabin configuration. We adjusted the seats, the rear-view mirror and the passenger-side wing mirror; lived with the passenger-side windscreen pillar and non-detachable head-rests, not having packed a chainsaw; slid the back of the driver and front passenger seats down to about 35 degrees each; worked the front seats far enough forward so that the blood supply to my legs started to flatline; regretted – again – not having a convertible.

Perfect.

Food was courtesy of Tom Kerridge / Pub in the Park: cheeseburger and cheesecake. So ethnic, I nearly wore a cowboy hat. Glad I didn’t, it would have blocked more of the screen.

Fortunately, the food was a manageable size…

Yum yum

After that, time for a fun game before the movie started.

Over six foot driver (me), over six foot nineteen-year-olds in the rear passenger seats; less tall Mother in the front passenger seat. Cue an expert session of a combination of Twister and Rubik’s Cube to position all of us to best advantage to watch the movie out of the available windows.

Bonus sessions of movie re-enactment (feeling like we were trapped in a small shark cage) and Ultimate Fighting Yoga in the back were available at no extra charge.

Duly installed, we attacked the food with the enthusiasm of a Great White vieiwng a tasty boatful of humans. And when it came to the line in the movie,

…what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat…and that’s all.

Jaws (1975)

it gave me a vision of the kids standing in front of our open fridge.

And of Jasper, our eternally hungry golden retriever with his latest helpless prey (above)…

The burgers added a 4-D effect to the chomping sounds coming out of the in-car speaker.

The experience was brilliant.

And I love Jaws.

It’s good that it’s so topical, the tension between keeping stuff open and fending off a dangerous threat.

All thanks to the magic of the movies; and a film that contains one of the best ad-libs in movie history.

Roy Scheider's ad lib when he sees the shark...

Cheers,

Alan