Back in November 2010 I started a blog on the Opera site. Having actually nothing very much to say, the second post wasn’t until almost a year later: Sunday, October 2, 2011 10:28:05 PM. And that was the end. So much for that.
Opera have just announced that they’re closing down their blog space, and I thought it might be worth rescuing at least one of the two entries. So, for the sake of irony, if nothing else, here it is…
∞
Gosh – almost a year since my first and last blog post… for someone who uses computers so much, I’m really bad at the social side of e-life. Facebook is a thing other people force me to use, and weeks can go by without me checking who’s doing what and what other random people think about it. Twitter is just too baffling for me to bother with, although I can see the value in it for some people.
Anyway, this is not a rant. I rarely rant, although interestingly my novel started out of a major rant against, well, life, the universe and everything… a sort of spiritual meltdown. It’s difficult to live in a world that is going to hell in a handbasket. So, while working on my PhD during the day, in the evenings I played Bach and Brahms at high volume and fused science, gods, vampires, wizards and magic rings into a fantasy that startles me when I re-read it over ten years later.
I finished the novel just as Harry Potter became the only book in town. An absurd stupid series of books that I refused to read until my best friend gave me books 1-3 for my birthday a few years later. Grr… Well, okay, Azkhaban wasn’t bad, but the series started out as a tongue-in-cheek book for children, and then became a series obsessed with its own importance and seriousness.
In a serious book, magic is both wonderful and dangerous, and very few books have shown this as well as Lord of the Rings. I love that story. A little tedious to read in places, but wonderful in vision. And the films, fantastic, brilliant, came out shortly after my novel was complete.
Sigh. Here I had crafted a book with wizards and a magic ring, only to find that wizards and magic rings were suddenly everywhere! – I lost the will to publish after one very half-hearted attempt.
Since then, vampires have also flooded the market with trashy teenage romances. I’ve loved vampire stories for a long time, since long before the excellent Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I particularly like stories where vampires are not mindless or soulless killing machines, but where they are killers forced to live with their nature. Recently it has become very difficult to find a new vampire novel that is intelligent.
However, Amazon have made it very easy to self-publish, so I decided to convert my book to EPUB format, rather painfully since I have lost the original LaTeX source files and only have the PDF (calibre and Sigil have proved very able tools). And now, finally, it’s there, for the whole world to buy if they want… and who knows, maybe somebody actually will.
Francis James Franklin (Alina Meridon) 