L'Stok Press

29/05/2023

I find this idea utterly charming: a story told in letters! Yes, letters! Hardcopy mail that you get through your mailbox, the one at the end of your driveway.

I miss correspondence. 😶

The Tea Room Diaries

02/05/2023

It's not often we get the opportunity to recapture a part of our youth but it can happen. I've just acquired a near-perfect copy of the 1969 Longman's edition of Andre Norton's "Moon Of Three Rings" off eBay. I read this in my senior years of high school, 1970 or 71 when it was a new release in the school library but I'd already read a lot of her books although this is one of only a few that I can remember the name of now.

Asimov was narrative, Heinlein was space opera but Norton was... magical. Not just in her oft-crossed borderline between Science Fiction and Fantasy but in her resolution of the tension between the two. I remember the story had a certain delicacy, a softness about it that the equally impressive cover by Robin Jacques echoed. I didn't realise that I was reading fiction with women in it who were written by a woman.

I'm sure I didn't know that she was a woman writing under a male nom de plume. The androgenous name made the relationships in her books strangely unsettling. As a product of all-boys schools my experience of the female half of the world was circumscribed by my mother, sisters, movies, TV and books. Could women really have ambitions, passions and power? Ah, puberty! No one has ever died from blushing but I think I came close a few times.

03/04/2023

Interesting piece of concept art.

30/03/2023

This is absolutely immense news! They have literally discovered a lost book of major importance from antiquity! Not only that, it appears to be the key to recreating a scientific instrument that Ptolemy used in his investigations!

Technology is giving us eyes to see into the past that seem almost magical!

The eighth-century Latin manuscript Milan, Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, L 99 Sup. contains fifteen palimpsest leaves previously used for three Greek scientific texts: a text of unknown authorship on mathematical mechanics and catoptrics, known as the Fragmentum Mathematicum Bobiense (three leave...

21/03/2023

One of the building buzz-words over the past few years has been "Tiny Homes" as if it is something new. They have been around as long as people have been needing shelter. This is from Sunset's Cabin Plan Book from 1938 from another one of Archive.org's many collections! These are a serious time trap late at night! As an owner builder I could browse through house plans all day...

https://archive.org/details/buildingtechnologyheritagelibrary?&sort=-date

13/02/2023

I read an article a few weeks back that has resonated with me ever since and it has made me realise how much society has changed in my lifetime. The article was 'Writer's craft is now a ghost in the machine by Steve Meacham in the Sydney Morning Herald from way back in 2012 which was itself a condensation/review of a 10,000-word essay for the Australian Book Review by Dr Rachel Buchanan...

Obsolescence is built into computers,'' Buchanan says. ''That's why it is so hard to preserve any of this digital material. It rots. It leeches. It decays. On the other hand, paper, which seems so fragile and transient, can last for centuries.

What stimulated the historian's interest in what many might consider a stuffy subject was a story about a first-generation nuclear power station in Britain, written by an English librarian. When the plant was decommissioned, the librarian pointed out, the British nuclear agency was required to preserve the complete record in perpetuity. But how? Much of the original record was stored on forgotten formats on long-obsolete computers. ''They decided the only way of preserving the records in perpetuity was to print them out and keep them on paper,'' Buchanan laughs. ''When I read that, I realised paper is the solid medium. Digital is the fragile one.''

Her verdict was reinforced when she asked Australia's latest Nobel prize winner, astrophysicist Professor Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University, how the correspondence and research that resulted in his award is being preserved. ''I emailed him, and a spokesman got back to say no one was collecting his personal papers. And even if they wanted to, bad luck, because he works electronically and most of it is lost.''

Yet Einstein's letters are included in Handwritten, an exhibition at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, along with handwritten documents by the likes of Beethoven, Galileo and Michelangelo...
https://www.nla.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/handwritten #
[See the transcript pdf on the end]

In Peter Carey's award-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang, the novelist metamorphosed into an archivist, claiming to be publishing 13 parcels of soiled and rust-stained papers supposedly written by Ned Kelly in the unmistakeable grammar and syntax we recognise from the bushranger's famous....

14/01/2023

That Internet Archive 'Collection' was a gateway to finding the other collections that the IA has, particularly their Publications which covers pretty much every collection with 2,017,077 results!!! Finding things like this is a 'side-quest' in my journeys over the Interwebs: interesting and potentially useful but it really doesn't advance any of my own priorities. I've whiled away a pleasant afternoon browsing it and salivating over the amount of fascinating material that it offers us but let’s be realistic, over two million entries? That’s a lifetime’s work to read!

Periodical publications including magazines, trade magazines, and journals.  Please peruse the growing list of publications.

11/01/2023

"The Pulps" were the predominantly US market of digest-sized, cheaply printed magazines between the late 19th to 20th century. By turn reviled and made fun of by the establishment, they were the spawning grounds for dozens of the last century's most popular authors of speculative fiction. The Internet Archive has an absolutely massive 'pulp collection' that make this era of publishing available for free to all. From Amazing, Argosy, Asimov's and Astounding to Twilight Zone, Unknown Worlds, Vampirella and Weird Tales. This is an astonishing resource!

Pulp magazines (often referred to as the pulps), also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long. Pulps were printed...

31/12/2022

For the past five months I've been keeping a journal on my portable hard drive which I've been using to record the inner thoughts that social media isn't ready to see yet plus notes about the things I do over the day. This ranges from my exercise results, hiking logs, etc plus a sandbox for the things that I want to publish.
In the process of doing that I've created a book template that ticks almost all the boxes that you might need to make your own book. This odt file is made for LibreOffice Writer and has covers, end-papers, stylesheet and a working contents & subject index.

13/12/2022

In the case of Alexandre Dumas, it's antiquated writing style has to be combined with the challenge of translation. We live in a world which is undeniably anglo-centric with regards to language and yet, who has not heard of Don Quixote, Dante’s Inferno or The Three Musketeers? If you think these are amazing from your experience of them in English, imagine how much better they could be if experienced in their native tongues! Sadly, like many, my knowledge of French is limited to high school lessons - which in my case were over half a century ago! - my Latin is even more minuscule which is why the skill of the translator is so important!

29/08/2022

I remember reading an article on modern journalism, I really must try to find it, that was a revalation with regards to how I viewed my writing. It spelled out how commercial news media is now "cross media". When a journalist does an interview, they won't just take shorthand notes, they will record it, take a few photos or even record the interview in video. This is because, although they might work for a newspaper, their work could conceivably be used by any of the other news media outlets that are associated with their paper. If it turns out to be topical, it could have audio grabs used by the local radio station or the snaps and information could be used in a TV news report. As a part of their newspaper's archives, it could contribute towards a magazine article, a book or documentary.

I found it interesting because it made me realise that my own work need not be a one shot item for wherever I submit it.

Ever thought about all the workhours you put into your Facebook posts? I like to think I have dropped some gems that deserve to be polished up and used elsewhere. How do you transfer your work from social media to... wider horizons? Well first you have to get it onto your computer hard drive!

The Help section of Facebook can’t seem to keep up with the “improvements” that they are rolling out on an almost monthly basis. This is the official Facebook instructions but updated for today...

17/07/2022

Like most I like to create and when I don't I put it down to procrastination or distraction by social media. In my case, because many of my goals are based on research, my problem is getting sucked into the black hole of internet data! Whilst writing up notes on an article for the Lemairzine on the Lemair Swing'n'sew, not only did I find cousin machines rebadged as Penncrest, Nelco & Crown Point, the Crown Point opened up a massive 'side quest' identifying the Sanwa cousin machines!

Fascinating stuff, but at some point you have to draw a line under it and publish!

14/02/2022

Sloppy publishing exists in PD books, even on that bastion of the freeword, Project Gutenberg. I remember finding such glaring errors in copies of RE Howard's El Borak books that I downloaded.

The answer is *not* to throw the baby out with the bathwater and condemn all PD works, rather the errors need to be corrected. Whilst there's little chance that a low budget printer will care, in a group like Project Gutenberg there probably is.

Think of it as 'market forces' when a free PD book is demonstrably better than a cheap for profit job. 😄

F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is the latest title to appear in a cheap modern version after copyright expires

10/02/2022

As someone who has tried, semi-successfully to create ebooks, this bears more investigation. I'm not a great fan of 'vending machine' apps that can churn out an acceptable but bland product, this could be good if you have the tools necessary to individualise your work.

Dear Friends of Smashwords, This letter isn't a goodbye; it's a new hello. Today we announced that Draft2Digital is acquiring Smashwords. We...

06/02/2022

There is a strong case for saying that a bio link service like Linktree is not needed if you have a web site.

So the question then becomes: what position does my web site take in my online project? What do I need in it and how simple or complex does it need to be?

Somewhere along the way, we forgot about the power of our very own website. We started prioritizing a 3rd party service over our own business. Well, I'm here to tell you to stop that ✋🏼 and bring the attention back to your website.

06/02/2022

The problem that most people and organisations can no longer have a single presense on the internet to be effective! Say for example you are a fan production group, maybe making fan films or audio dramas. It's not enough to just put your output onto the internet and expect people to beat a path to your door to watch or listen to it, you have to tick pretty much all the same boxes that a professional production group does. The only difference is that, whereas there is a commercial imperative on the professional group for them to see a financial return for their backers, a fan production just hopes for positive feedback.

- You need an an output platform. For video it is Youtube or Vimeo, but it could be a fan film competition or as a download from your website. For audio dramas, the conduit to their audience is usually through one of the podcasting channels, most notably iTunes
- You need to get the news out to your audience that which means getting it noticed by one of the fan news platforms such as FanFilmFactor, Trekzone or Star Trek Reviewed.
- You need to develop a rapport with your audience. This used to be through the forums like TrekUnited but is now almost exclusively through social media, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
- Back in the day, production groups used to have their own forums which were the social media of the time, not just places to discuss the hosting groups work but the work of other, particularly smaller productions. The Star Trek Phase II and Hidden Frontiers forum were incredibly influential in this respect! The Trek BBS is probably the last vestige of those days...

Star Trek forums for Star Trek fans - chat about the series and the movies here.

06/02/2022

Further to that last post about, "Over 2,400 words for the optimum blog post". I think the line between a blog and a web site is being blurred here. My idea of a blog is probably closer to the idea of the essays that used to be published in the last century - musings on a single idea rather than a reference page on a subject. I've been looking at the newer Blogger templates and they seem to have expanded into mini, and in some cases, not-so-mini, websites!

I have always liked the idea of graphics in a blog entry and some of the graphics-heavy, magazine-style blogs are great. My beef is with the way that they are moving more towards heirarchical, top-down online references rather than the more casual, journal entries that you can run off when you have a rant bigger and more complex than would be appropriate for a social media post.

'Basil' is a great mini-website with everything that opens and shuts but is it a blog? My experience with these is that aren't very entry-level, user friendly, either.

The template for Basil is here...
https://copybloggerthemes.com/basil-blogger-template/

YOUR DESCRIPTION HERE

10/01/2022

Over 2,400 words for the optimum blog post? Wait a minute! I'm sure I’ve read that our attention span is supposed to be shrinking!

Hmm evidently this is a bit of misinformation...

Is there any evidence that the internet and smartphones have shrunk our attention spans?

06/01/2022

Although that last article mentioned blogging as social media, it only listed Tumblr and Reddit. Reddit? Reddit is a forum rather a blog. A blog to me is more of mini-website that is yours, or at least dedicated to a single group, and the content is text-heavy, in-depth, often on a single subject and more of a periodically published series of essays. I think of them as something like the old fashioned idea of a journal, although less of a diary but more along the lines of periodic, personal thoughts on a particular subject.

This is a good article from Wix...

We don’t just answer “how long should a blog post be?” but also explain why blog length matters and how to write long-form posts that will rank.

03/01/2022

Quick post to mull over some ideas about diversity in social media posting. The linked article has some good info and data but is heavily focussed on monetizing social media, using it for commercial engagement. It applies just as much to personal use though: if there is a goal to your posting, you want to gain the maximum amount of value out of your time online.

In my case, I want to merge and extend on a few aspects of my creative life that I'm focusing on at the moment and in doing so I thought it would be a good chance to test some ideas about getting the maximum effect from the minimum effort!

LOL! If that sounds lazy just remember what Heinlein said on the subject - “Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”

To help you make informed decisions about which social media to use, this post will guide you through some of the coretypes of social platforms.

10/10/2021

Our three month lock-down is going to be relaxed tomorrow so, for a giggle, I did a faux DVD cover as a take-off of "Escape from L.A." and it reignited my interest in the media.

Given that cd-roms can hold pretty much anything digital, they represent a viable form of 'digital family album'. For each year you could put copies of your Facebook archive for a year, your photographs and videos, the eBooks you read, your music, scans of letters, receipts, movie ticket stubs, anything!

But if you're going to do that, why not do DVD covers for them?

What would you do...

19/09/2021

I downloaded a quote from Peter Pan today and it struck me that Peter was actually quite dark and wild. Was it a product of its times? Certainly when you look at the stereotypes that it fostered. Doodled around with a couple of graphics manipulators to generate a cover...

31/07/2021

Resurrecting one of my old blogs to publish the articles about the fundraising challenge that Milady of L'Stok and I will be doing in August.

09/05/2021

Much is made of the fact that a book is an artifact that has a physical presence that outweighs the words that make it up. This is the reason we have book designers, cover artists, font designers, it is the art and craft behind printing and publishing.

The designer here was given the remit of creating a broshure/catalog that allowed the company to capitalise on the fact that they welcomed their first students in the same year that the first VHS cassette was released in Japan. He created an artifact that looked like a VHS cassette, complete with period graphic design, but was in fact a glue bound book that had a practical purpose in laying out the curriculum.

The words, the information, are wasted unless they strike home with their target, their audience. In this case the designer has made the tract into a physical artifact that can be stacked on a bookshelf, arranged in a display. The design creates a strong context for the words: the VHS cassette in 1976 was cutting edge, it suggests that the current curriculum could be a similar cutting edge. It certainly drives home a sense of continuity with the past.

Dieline is a global package design community and showcase of package design inspiration. We cover industry news, sustainable packaging news, design trends, and host our own packaging conferences, package design events, and Dieline packaging design awards.

10/03/2021

Taking into account my last guest blog for Jacqueline Lichtenberg about the definition of 'success' with regards to writing fan fiction and the fact that one of our fan fiction Trekzines has been included in a time capsule - which has been engineered to resist potential centuries on the moon - I've decided to take as my subject how posterity will view the literature of today.

You think that only the best and most significant works will be celebrated in the future? Look at the books which are classified as the great works of the western world, look at the authors and the great characters they created, then look at their origins. There is every reason to believe that 'posterity' is a fickle goddess at best! 😅

Question from Don Krieger: I have a question about longevity of the memory card which will be used. Will the ambient radiation on the moon degrade and eventually destroy the data on the card? If so, how long and is the card hardened or protected from radiation? Thanks very much for all that you do.....

09/03/2021

In return for Jacqueline Lichtenberg contributing an article for TrekUnited's third Personal Logs, she asked that I contribute a guest blog for her series on 'Marketing Fiction In A Changing World'. With the zine's acceptance as a stowaway to the Moon, she has challenged me to contribute another. This is a reprint of my original where I asked, how can you measure how successful a fan fiction story is?

This is an article I wrote for Jacqueline Lichtenberg's blog Alien Romances back in 2015. It was part of her series entitled ' Marketing...

07/03/2021

At the end of January my good friend, writer, poet and all-round creative, Bron Rauk-Mitchell, signed on for the "Writers On The Moon" Project created by Susan Kaye Quinn: 'a rag-tag fleet of stories for a Lunar Time Capsule' which is going to be on the Peregrine lander.

Bron was allowed 20MB but has graciously given up some of her space on the mission to fellow creatives and I was lucky enough to be invited to submit one of my fanzines. As you can guess, space was at a premium, only one book/file could go, so I picked Personal Log 3, Spock's Katra, the Trekzine I edited for TrekUnited Publications in December, 2015 to commemorate the passing of Leonard Nimoy as something that might interest future historians.

24/01/2021

Which brings us, of course, to ebooks!

At their worst they can be as unimaginative as a MacDonalds Big Mac: they feed you but there's no style to them! At their best they can rival the printed page. That excellence though doesn't come easy! You have to work for it!

Consider that last link I gave to the Project Gutenberg Australia html edition of "A Princess of Mars". You can read that online or download it to bring up on your browser later - assuming that it is out of copyright in your part of the world!

If you want the convenience of using an ebook reader - read it on any size screen, remember where you were in the text, change the font size - you can download this book as either an ePub or Kindle (mobi) edition.
http://gutenberg.net.au/epub-and-kindle-ebooks.html

24/01/2021

Form follows function ...or at least it should! If you are publishing something that is heavy in graphics and the placement of those grapics is critical to the success of your work then pdf is for you! There is a reason why manuals are predominantly in pdf. Whether it is for a Role Playing Game, a sewing machine or a fencing manual, the clarity and placement of the graphics needs something that is unambiguous.

[Facebook tells me that the link to the sewing machine manual that I wanted to put in here is nagainst community standards. I'll update this when I can get some degree of sanity from the alogithm] 🧐😠

24/01/2021

Something came up this week that makes me realise how much I rely on pdf as my output media. From a publisher's point of view it gives you total control over the reader's experience of the page on the screen in front of them: the page size, margins, graphics, font. A pdf file is literally the electronic equivalent of the hard-copy page it could be if you ran it through a printer.

Consider the difference between some of the things I have published over the years as pdf's. The most recent comics for Star Trek: Eagle: all graphics from p3 on a US Letter page...https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcPuNxChm_co9v8Gxb1tfS93sbWg1pL-/view?usp=sharing

30/07/2020

As discussed, I've got my listing started of locations where you can legally download or borrow copies of the first ten book of TGBOTWW. I'm going to aim at adding ten books a month to this. https://lstok-epress.blogspot.com/2020/07/tgbotww-01-10-from-homer-to-hippocrates.html

So I have completed my listing of online locations where the first ten books of the Great Books Of The Western World can be legally download...

28/07/2020

I went looking for free versions of The Great Books Of The Western World a while back (that was fun) found that the free ebook library of the University of Adelaide has been closed down (that's TERRIBLE!). Such a travesty could not be allowed to go unchallenged! So now I have a new reading and publishing project. To find them, precis them, and record for others what I have found. I've started a Google Sites website to record a comprehensive catalogue of the books in the collection, on a number of levels...

Like many people I was challenged during the lockdown to list ten books that I loved. Pft! With all due respect, that's like asking Giacomo ...

25/07/2020

I used to be a prolific reader. Going from one author to the next and reading everything he had written was my modus operandi with library books of fact & fiction thrown in at the same time. Over the last 10-15 years though my focus has been on writing and publishing books so that my list of books read has shrunk dramatically!

This Youtube video popped up as No.1 on my feed yesterday and I was sucked in from the start by the narrator's identical problem! Like most issues, there's no golden bullet that can kill this problem but it did give me some good ideas along with some bookstore eye-candy!

Bookstores have always driven me crazy. So much to read and so little time! And now with our lives chock full of CONTENT--Netlflix, podcasts, social media, Y...

12/06/2020

Interesting!

One of the sticking points to creating works which are in the public domain has been the worry of being stopped by entities that own trademarks on the names or phrases that are pivotal to the work. I'm thinking specifically of a C&D sent by a company that owned the trademark for "Conan" to a producer who had done a rather good audio drama of RE Howard's "Red Nails".

This would seem to specifically rule that out! El Borak is MINE! Mahahaha!

Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003), was a copyright and trademark case of the Supreme Court of the United States involving the applicability of the Lanham Act to a work in the public domain.[1]

16/10/2019

This is all very well and good, you might say, but it would be even better if someone would write a book about Lemairs! Well, that's what I'm doing! The LemairZines are in effect a 'part work' whereby the individual articles are added to a constantly expanding body of work that will be updated after each issue of the zine.

This is the October edition of the "Galah's Guide To Lemair Vintage Sewing Machines" available as a free download from this link...
https://drive.google.com/open?id=17CTWSR0R5KHGWfPJ272cpR4-Q36ZDca6

16/10/2019

The LemairZine is exactly what it sounds like: a semi-regular 'zine about Lemair sewing machines. Like most modern fanzines it is not expected that readers will print it out although it can be. It's meant to be a topical update of articles that I have written about Lemairs plus some news from the month on the inside back cover. The second issue, 1908 for August, 2019, is available from here as a free pdf...
https://drive.google.com/open?id=18eK1k1ABEzeJ_7xo10L-GboC6KeX301q

16/10/2019

Fanzines were not always about fandom. Back in the 80's I used to get a printed 'zine called AZUA by snail-mail from the Australian ZX Users' Association. I still have them in the attic!

So when I was working out how to publish the large body of work that I've accumulated about Lemair sewing machines, it was only natural that I would base it upon the fanzines I have done in the past. I've gone for a retro look - these are machines from the 60's and 70's! - but there's a subtle twist to it.

The individual zines build into a 'part work'! The first issue of the LemairZine, issue 1907 for July, 2019, is available for free from this link...
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1DR51i16lSzpt_sOHxER2JsliIUg2EtIw

15/09/2019

Traditional fanzines - 'zines written by fans about their fandom - have taken a backseat in this digital age as the average reader has a short attention span. Not many made the leap from paper to digital but some fandoms are still attempting to keep the spirit of the old fanzines alive in digital format.

I stumbled on this trove of REH fanzines by the Robert-E-Howard Electronic Amateur Press Association who have "a vision and a model of an online "Electronic Amateur Press Association" [EAPA]-- modelled after the proven methods of Amateur Press Associations in the print medium."

A collection of Robert E. Howard Studies. Robert-E-Howard: Electronic Amateur Press Association

06/02/2019

I need to create a website to host the publishing I would like to do. I am taking as my inspiration the absolutely smashing AntipodeanSF webzine which to me has set the bar in this category. I can create a blog that covers my requirements but how on Earth do they get it to have a different front page every issue instead of being pushed down the page? Am I looking for a content management system or is there some way of doing this on a blog?

The only way I can think of doing it is to have a "Front Page" blog that links to "child" blogs for Acrux, Becrux, Gacrux, Decrux and Ginan. Am I missing some new setting on modern templates? Suggestions? Links to a page that might have the answer?

08/01/2019

Just to put what I've been doing over the past two weeks into perspective, I've created seven fanzines in fourteen days, totalling 129 pages and 174,722 words along with graphics for cover pages and Facebook releases. They are all available for free from the L'Stok Press page!
Now for the last four...