Well I hope you all liked the new story yesterday.
Today I'm having fun with Tinnitus, and my hips/back
are attacking me again, but at least I can walk around the house
Over on Wordpress you are all very busy
World wide coverage, so thanks for that
and downloads galore
https://michaelgcaseyfrombirminghamengland.wordpress.com/2020/07/12/reposted-translations-galore-just-click-to-download-your-language/
so thanks for reading my stuff
No doubt I'll be cursed once Lockdown is finally over
I'm not hurrying to write new material
Enjoying my Kdramas so much
here's something from May 2012 to keep you going
Pens and Penmanship ©
By
Michael Casey
I just
read a piece in the BBC magazine online, it was all about fountain pens. Now I
immediately have to confess my writing is terrible, and no I’m not pretending,
as far back as 40 years ago at grammar school I was told off for it. In fact I
was told off in Primary school too, they even got me to write a few rows of “a”
and of “b” and so on, it failed to improved my writing, I was a massive reader
at the time, for one year I was practically left alone to read, perhaps it was then that my writing died. In grammar
school my friends said my writing was like drunken spiders, or in today’s world
my writing is like spiders on acid. So there you have it, my writing is bad,
very bad. So bad perhaps I should be a doctor.
Once you
have bad hand writing people take the mick when you tell them you are a writer,
as did the nice lady from the neighbourhood office a couple of weeks ago when
my daughter went to collect a prize for drawing. Both my daughters draw and
paint, they are very very good at it, they have a collection of 700 crayons and
paints and pencils, not to mention felts and gel pens and all things that can
make marks on paper. My daughters always need more, so that’s dad’s job to
provide more artists material. I am of course very jealous of their skills, if
I bit the top off my thumb and used that to sign my name that would be an
improvement on my signature.
So what
can a writer who cannot write do? He can type, I remember learning to type in
1978, I stood at the bus stop moving my fingers and trying to remember the
qwerty keyboard. Now I’m a fast typist, when I’m writing my stuff, I’m not so
fast as a copy typist, nothing is more
boring than typing up somebody else’s stuff. I remember one of the more mature
ladies at the law firm who said “I was once clocked at 100wpm” and so she was,
and that why one of the partners gave her two crates of champagne as a personal
thank you for her typing, at that speed the paper would catch fire no doubt, if
we still used the old typewriters.
So how
can this writer improve his writing? I use different fonts on Word, and hope
people like the look, looks do make a difference. If I can give a silly
example, the ASDA near us uses a big bold font, but the size is too small and
the letters touch other. This means to my eyes it’s terrible, and that’s the
only complaint I have about the store, but I’m sure if any ASDA people read
this they may change it. A sign encourages us to buy or to laugh, when we leave
stuff out in the entry for Sky Burial I leave a note encouraging people to take
our junk away. “Sit on Me” for a chair, and “sleep with me” for a bed, as I
look out the window our gay neighbours are getting a new bed.
We get
loads of junk email, if we had an open fire we’d never need to buy fuel, we’d
just toast our bread on junk mail. Junk mail tries to look appealing and is printed
on glossy paper, glossy paper is very heavy as I can remember when I carried
bags at CPNEC, homes abroad salesmen had cases and cases of the stuff. So writing
and communicating all needs words, good
words from a writer, but how those words are written and displayed has a
massive impact, ask any politician. When
contracts are signed it’s done on quality paper that is bound together
with a heat bind seal, and it’ll be a red seal if the contact is for Chinese
clients, I know I’ve done 1000s. So presentation is king, you don’t want “thank
you for your pieces of paper” when you send stuff to a publisher, and yes 25
years ago I did get that putdown. I hope you are all enjoying this Bookman Old
Style, but I know just how important type setting is, another putdown a really
good snide one was when I was turned down for a job and the HR lady replied in flowewry type face and
yes I do know her name.
All I
can say is thank God for word processors, 1988 was the year I bought an
Atari520 just for the word processor and it was very very expensive, it did
play a big part in my life, I had Shoplife accepted by a theatre, I wrote it in
Aug 1988 when the Olympics were on. Yes I’d love to be able to write, but I can
write but not handwrite, so I hope any future readers will accept a rubber
stamp when I do any book signings, my daughters will be on hand to draw a
cartoon on each book.
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