Red Branch Chronicles

In addition to attempting to promote my soon to be published Ebook, Raiding Cúalinge, available from 20 April from all ebook retailers – and free for the first month if you get one of my freeby coupons – I thought I would mention some of the books I am currently reading – I often read several books ath the same time one in the living room, another beside my bed, another in the back room overlooking the garden, another in the … oops TMI there, you don’t need to know that.

OK, let me get my book junk out of the way right here here’s a link to it

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Serkeen

OK, enough said about that for the moment – although later I will maybe do a reading of a chapter, or include some photos of the locale where the story takes place, that sort of thing And of course I will provide my freeby book coupon later on – whenever I get a chance to work out how to do it.

Anyway, despite having said somewhere that I really like historical novels and so on, I still read fairly widely in a whole load of different areas.

I just finished a book called The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols that I really enkoyed when I first read it more than, I think, 30 years ago. I think it has stood up pretty well to the tests of time – a wetback Latino (I hope that is not seen as an offensive term, I’m not 100% actually sure what it means other than a Mexican migrant into the US, but if it is racist, please let me know and I will apologise and withdraw it – farmer illegally irrigates his pathetic beanfield, thereby using water reserved for a high flying golf/dude ranch planned development for the area. Funny, great characters and an endless supply of them, a bit like one of those S.American novels or even, dare I say it, a Dickensian array of characters.

I followed that up with Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. I loved the movie with Alan Bates, Irene Papas and whatshisname – it’ll come to me in a minute. Anyway, what I think I really enjoyed then was the music by Theodorakis – I think that is the right spelling – and of course, Zorba’s dance. I remember actually buying a vinyl LP of the sound track I was so impressed with it.

That said, this time around, I was less than impressed with the book. Maybe I shouldn’t go back and reread stuff that I so much enjoyed when I read them 20, 30 40, 50 years and more ago (beginning to give my age away here, I suppose) but this time around there was something about the style and the dialogue between the two main characters, -the intellectual and the rough diamond, salt of the earth guy – ahh, played by Anthony Quinn in the movie – that just didn’t seem to ride easily. Bit of an effort to plough my way through it this time around, I have to admit although there were some great scenes zorba cursing and sneering at the old widow woman, yet still being drawn to her faded charms.

Incidentally, now that I think of it, I subconsciously stole a line from Zorba when I was writing Raiding Cúailnge but I won’t say what it was right nopw. Read the two books yourself and see if you can fine the one adapted line! Good luck to you.

Ok, I think this is the start of my learning curves. All I have to do now is start linking my website or blog – I have to admit that I am not one hundred percent sure which is which at this point but I suppose that is the point of a learning curve – to things like FaceBook (another black hole in my cyber knowledge) and Twitter and Google and … Gawd, what else is there?

Anyway, I have my toes in the water and I don’t suppose there is any fear of my drowning just yet although I am struggling a bit to know just exactly what I am doing. I can’t quite seem to get a handle on my different pages / posts that I want to have – one for Celtic Trivia, another for Book Stuff and then this third one for my Learning Curves.

OK, Another day, another crack at this daft thing.

I wonder should my Celtic Trivia stuff should be a post or a page?

Where are my menus? I want to have a home page with menus directing you – the insatiable reader to the different parts of my thingy – Gawd, that sounds a bit weird.

Easter Sunday Night

I haven’t made much of an effort recently on this thing so I am going to try something new on – I’m going to put up an album of photos on Facebook.

Oh Gawd! you all groan, pictures of -my mother and her generation called them snaps) stuff we don’t remember. Anyway, here goes – actually, should the pictures (snaps?) be in WordPress or FaceBook?

Going to try FaceBook first.

Cheerio

01 April 2016

(Red-faced with embarrassment) well, under the influence of an excellent bottle of Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz – like drinking a dark, rich liquid velvet – I stumbled onto my Facebook page on Easter Sunday night and attempted to create an album of Gargoyles (why I couldn’t tell you) but all I seemed to have managed was to upload about 80 random photos but nothing like an organised album. Surely it can’t be that difficult! Anyway, ‘Nuff said about that for the moment.

On to other things.

Yesterday, surrounded by, no doubt, out-of-date library reference books on Word Press and social media, my laptop open to online tutorials beside the desktop computer which seemed to have at least a dozen open tabs, I lurched unevenly from page to post and screen to screen, and finally managed to change my background Theme and to – I think – set up some menus to guide whatever unfortunate lands on these muddled attempts. Oh, by the way, I also discovered that what should have been Posts were, in fact, Pages so having laboriously changed that, I now should have two (2) static pages (Home & About Me) – that means the info’ there will probably not change dramatically over the course of this learning curve – and three (3) Posts (Celtic Trivia, Curves & Book Stuff) which I will add to several times each week (if I can think of anything!)