Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Author: Richard Freeborn (Page 10 of 14)

A Brave New World

May 13, 2022 /

Just over a week ago, I finally took the plunge, and ordered myself a new iPad, even though there wasn’t much wrong with the one I was using. It’s an iPad Air with 128GB of storage.

Even with Scrivener, and a whole bunch of other apps loaded, that iPad never quite made it as a secondary writing device. However, the iPad has done sterling service as a surfing and reading device. As time has progressed even that became suspect. Over the past few months, an increasing number of apps have failed updates because they need more recent versions of iOS. My iPad was running 12.5.5, and the latest is 15.4!

So I ordered a new iPad PRO with the Magic keyboard. When it arrived, I fired it up, started the side-by-side synchronization, and waited less than a minute before it failed! iOS 12.5.5 is too old to automatically sync with 15.4.

Well, the air was pretty blue for a few minutes as I wrestled with how to synchronize manually. The biggest time-sink was manually syncing Music, Books, and Kindle, but once that was done, and Dropbox and iCloud were configured, I realized one benefit of manual synchronization.

Over the years I’ve downloaded and tried several dozen apps. Some of them are no longer supported, and some I discarded after a few weeks. Clearing those out has certainly kept my home screen less cluttered, and helped me focus on the apps I use most frequently. That list has turned out to be Scrivener, Obsidian, Aeon Timeline, and the Office 365 Mobile apps. Plus of course Music, Books, and Kindle! I haven’t configured email, which was a deliberate decision.

The keyboard has also been a revelation. Over the years, I’ve experimented with several keyboards with various iPads, and they’ve never quite worked for me.

The Magic keyboard took a while to get used to, but once I did, it’s turned out to be all I could ask for. I’ve already written two stories mostly on the iPad, both in my office, and at various other locations.

Not having email or any messaging apps immediately available, has really helped reduce distractions, and my iPad is finally realizing the vision I had for it several years ago.

A Busy Time

April 29, 2022 /

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted here, and it’s been quite a busy time.

On the writing front, I’ve completed several short stories that made their way into a spy fantasy collection titled The Vatican Shadows. In addition, I went through all the short stories I’ve written in the past year or so and added two more collections: Making a New Start and Mageweaver.

Making a New Start is a series of stories about Nidintu, one of my Babylon characters, who kept hanging around until I wrote about him.

Mageweaver came about after a conversation with my sister, Margaret, about weaving, and she was kind enough to license the image of one of her latest creations as the cover. Margaret is currently deep in preparation for the latest iteration of Heallreaf, a tapestry exhibition that she conceived, created, and is now in its fourth iteration.

All of these are available in digital and paperback at most stores, or directly from this website in digital only.

Stay tuned as there are two more collections coming from that backlog review, and potentially, a third.

Keeping data, and backups, safe

April 10, 2022 /

I’ve been very fortunate over the years not to have a home or computer event that causes me to lose hard or digital copies of stories or other data I keep on my computers. Dean Wesley Smith tells of how he had a fire in his apartment and lost a novel and uncounted short stories. If I recall correctly, this was back in the 1980’s, so there were no computer backups.

Everything was typed manually, and stored in hard copy.

I have some of my stories in hard copy, but not all of them, and I see that as an option I’ll get to in the fullness of time. I often pride myself with the fact I have three or four thumb drives and a 4 Terabyte external drive where I keep regular backups of all my writing and other data. At less than $20 for a 64 Gigabyte thumb drive, cycling several into the backup process is pretty straightforward.

I was thinking about this one morning last week, reminding myself it was almost two weeks since I’d copied everything to a backup drive. Which was when I started thinking about the location of my computer, and those backup drives.

The computer, obviously, is on the desk in my office. The 4 Terabyte drive is on the right-hand drawer. Two of the thumb drives are tucked into the front pocket of my organizer, and the third is lying on the desk beside the laptop

Which means, if we have a fire, or a tornado rips through, everything is in the same place and those backups won’t help me one bit. Yes, I do have Dropbox, but mostly for current work in progress only. If everything goes sideways, that won’t help, and neither will the fact all my backups are within three feet of the computer itself!

So, the first thing I did was relocate one of the thumb drives into my bedside cabinet. The second was to make use of the one Terabyte of Cloud storage I get with my Office 365 subscription. It’s not ideal, but it’s a start.

Where are your backups?

It’s not Important

March 31, 2022 /

When you’re writing, one of the sure ways to stifle your creative voice and bring an in-progress story to a shuddering halt is to make it important.
When I say important, I mean your mind attaches something to the story that’s not rational. This is the story that’s going to pay off the mortgage, or this is the story that will have Hollywood (or Netflix, or whoever) beating a path to my door.
It might happen but the chances are it won’t. Not for that story anyway. I have several of them in various states of completion, and they’ll probably stay that way.
The thing is, it’s not just in writing that we irrationally assign importance to something.
Up until a few years ago I traded options and futures on a regular basis. I let it slide away because these aren’t buy-and-hold trades. They need to be monitored. With everything I was trying to do in my life at that time, there just wasn’t the bandwidth to do it all, so the trading took a back seat.
I went from knowing where the indexes where at any point in a day, to being surprised at a move of over a thousand points in the DOW because I hadn’t looked for a week or more.
This past week I received notice about an inactive account fee on one of my trading accounts. I logged in, and sure enough it was over a year since I’d logged in, let alone traded.
Well, I thought, while I’m here, there looks to be a nice support level on the DOW, and some profit to be generated. An hour later I’d made a couple of trades, and as I sent the order for the next one. I realized I could push the profit to a nice round number if this one did what I wanted.
Typically, the numbers began moving against me. I found myself hunched forward over the desk, willing the lines in the display to move in the other direction because this was an important trade. I really needed that round number result.
Why?
Truth is, I probably shouldn’t have been trading anyway. There was no plan, and no real risk assessment. Each one of those trades could have plunged quickly into a loss, but the real lesson for me.

The trades weren’t important.
Just like that story I agonize over isn’t important.
I haven’t traded since, but I did look at one of those “important” stories. Now time has passed, it’s just another partial manuscript. And it’s not important, but I do have ideas on how to make it a finished manuscript.

Time Changes

March 20, 2022 /

Last weekend (March 13/14), the clocks moved forward here in the US. In past years this has been one of those almost non-events. The clocks change and we get on with our lives.

For some reason, this year has been different. I did wonder if it might be linked to my trip to England, arriving back the week before the time change, but decided it wasn’t the reason. England to the United States is the easy trip. It’s effectively a long long day which sends me to bed completely exhausted, and after a good night’s sleep, my body clock is back to normal.

This past week though has been a struggle. Every morning it’s like climbing out of a fog. While effectively I’ve been waking an hour earlier than I’m used to, this hasn’t translated to any being ready for bed any earlier in the evening.

I’m sure there’s a scientific study somewhere that explains what happens. This morning I woke up and from the light and how I felt, I knew the time without having to look at the clock.

That’s back to normal for me.

Now to get everything else in my life aligned. But that’s a story for another time!

A Week of Travel

March 8, 2022 /

I spent last week visiting family and friends in England. It’s two and a half years since I last went, with several trips canceled or rescheduled because of COVID. apart from the requirements for more documentation, and a negative PCR test before returning to the US (I’ll talk about the International Terminal in Atlanta later), the biggest thing I noticed was the closed stores and lack of people.


I can count on the toes of one hand how often in the last twenty years, I’ve flown and had empty seats around me on the plane. On both flights with Virgin Atlantic, I doubt the aircraft was more than two-thirds full, and in both cases, I had my section of the row to myself. Inevitably there’s a downside to this, and I think Virgin needs to look at going back to serving wine in bottles, not from cans, but my sister says I’m a snob, and in this case, I plead guilty.


And then there’s the International Terminal at Atlanta Airport!


The domestic terminal at Atlanta has long had a justifiable reputation for crowds, chaos, and confusion. That might be why the planners built the International Terminal on the far eastern side of the airport.
The terminal is well signposted from the three main highways in Atlanta – I-75, I-85, and 285. However, the moment you leave the highways, the signs disappear. I was “fortunate” to have used the International Terminal on my last trip to England, so there were some memory tags that helped get me there.


Getting out is another issue. The moment you pass the sign thanking you for visiting Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport, the signs disappear. GPS is also confused. How do you manage a “U” turn on a four-lane divided highway with no gaps in the barrier? It was probably the most stressful part of the whole trip.


Despite the airport, it was a great trip, and I saw my eighteen-month old grandson, Milo, for the first time.


I’m traveling again at the end of the year for my daughter’s wedding, and this time I think I’ll park off-site, and let the shuttle bus find the International Terminal.

Finding Time

February 20, 2022 /

Back during my January First Thoughts, I talked about finding those extra minutes during the day to write beyond my normal writing time. As with so many things, it got filed into the “must do” folder, and was buried.

Until this past week.

February, to date, hasn’t felt as productive as January, so from the middle of last week, I paid more attention to what I was doing, how I was doing it, and looking for fifteen minute blocks of time that could be put to better use by writing..

Across the four days, I tracked four separate blocks of time on each day, where I could step away from the television, or put aside busy-work. That’s an additional hour a day. Using my lower level of writing consumable words – 600 per hour, and assuming we have about 300 days left in the year, that’s an additional 180,000 words. Say three full length novels, or 45 short stories.

So there’s no excuse in trying to say I have no time to write!

Some Craft Thoughts

February 11, 2022 /

During the past couple of weeks I’ve been studying some aspects of the writing craft, especially openings. How you hook readers at the beginning of a story and keep them there until the end.

There are several types of opening, and they don’t all work in every type of fiction. Summary openings, for example, don’t work well in short stories, but are excellent openings for the right type of novel. Several people recommend not just study, but also typing the opening, as the physical action helps reinforce the technique and structure into your sub-conscious.

I was thinking about this as I read through some recent course notes, and started to cast around for stories to use as research. To my mind, there’s minimal benefit in studying writers at the same stage as me because none of us really know at this stage where we’re making mistakes. The writers to study are those who’ve been professional writers for many years.

People like Dean Koontz, Nora Roberts, and Michael Connolly to name just three.

I have a lot of their novels. In this case, I was looking for short fiction, and prowling through the bookshelves, kindle, and Apple books (or whatever the current name happens to be), when I realized I have a treasure trove.

In the past year I obtained two extensive short story collections: When Worlds Collide and Crimes Collide. Each collection is a hundred short stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. Two hundred stories by two of the top writers currently working today.

If I don’t learn something from those stories, I should probably hang up my keyboard!

Thoughts on January

February 3, 2022 /

I think my first thought yesterday was where did January go? It seems like five minutes ago we were celebrating the New Year, and now here we are in February.

On the writing front I finished six short stories, and submitted three. The others are destined for collections I’m working on. The seventh should have been finished on Monday, but a quick trip out for pizza ended up being much longer than planned for many reasons not relevant here.

January did end up being the most words I’ve written in the month since I began tracking my word count, so many positives there, and a good foundation for February.

As a follow up from my last post, Quiller Balalaika arrived today, and I immediately dived into the first chapter as soon as it was unwrapped.

I’m about 1,500 words from the end of that seventh story, so I’m off to finish it, with the reward of Quiller when I’m done. It could be a late night!

A Successful Search

January 27, 2022 /

At some point in the mid 1970’s, I came across a book titled The Quiller Memorandum. As I look at the cover now, it must have been a re-release to coincide with the BBC series based on the books. A series that sadly had one season and disappeared.

I’d never heard of Adam Hall, but I was working through an espionage/spy thriller phase in my reading, waiting for the next Len Deighton, Robert Ludlum or John LeCarre to appear.

It’s a phase I’ve never really left, and Quiller looked interesting. I read the book in less than twenty-four hours, went in search of others, and Adam Hall joined the list of writers I stalked for new releases.

Somewhere in there I discovered Adam Hall was one of the pen names of Elleston Trevor, the writer of Flight of the Phoenix, about ninety other novels, plus children’s stories, stage plays, and radio plays. I read some of those, but never with the commitment and passion I’d developed for Quiller.

In 1995, I saw the reports of his passing, and had just finished Quiller Salamander, the eighteenth Quiller mission. Over the years, I’ve reread each one several times. I learn something as a writer every time, and always left wanting more, only there weren’t any.


Until in 2014, I found the book Quiller. A Profile. The book references Quiller Balalaika – the nineteenth Quiller novel, finished in the last few weeks of Elleston Trevor’s life, and published in 1996.

How did I miss that?

I searched Amazon and Abebooks, and my local stores with no success. In the years since, I occasionally run a search, with no luck.

Until this week.

There it was, available on Amazon, and I nearly broke a wrist hitting the keyboard. It’s due to arrive next week, and I’ll let you know how it turns out.

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