Saturday 26 March 2016

My Weekend Art & Literature Articles Round Up

Dear all,


Today is the final print edition of one of the newspapers I read weekly, ‘The Independent’. I buy it every Saturday and Sunday along with The Telegraph and The Guardian and every now and again The Times. I have very mixed feelings because on one hand it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to ensure they are financially viable (of course it would be far, far worse for them to simply go out of business) and transfer to a digital only edition purchasable on a subscription basis, but on the other hand, I love the experience of reading the paper out in the open and I have several ‘spots’ that I go to where there is a certain level of peace, quiet and solitude (i.e. not the coffee shop) and I can relax and enjoy flicking through the pages and reading the articles. I spend far too much time as it is staring at screens all week, and I also have spent a lot of time over the last two years or so reducing the amount I am reliant on subscriptions and direct debits and all that stuff. So as much as it pains me to say, because I love the paper so much and by far it is my favourite, I am not convinced I will subscribe and read it digitally. Truthfully, I haven’t made my mind up yet.



A photo posted by R.G Rankine (@rgrankine) on





I am writing this blog for another reason. It is for the guilt I feel in being part of the cause the newspaper has to go digital. I don’t think my personal actions have had any impact on their decision, don’t worry, I’ve not gone crazy, but it’s the principle behind what I do, multiplied by tens of thousands of times that has slowly eroded the profitability of non-subscription news. For quite a few years now I have been sharing the articles I read online. I can’t remember how it started but at some point perhaps as long ago as 2010 I started to post some of the more interesting articles I enjoyed. As I bought the papers every week it became a regular thing. I found myself marking the pages I enjoyed, or ripping them out, and then when I had finished reading them all some time late on a Sunday afternoon, I would go back to all the articles I had marked, look them up online (this was back when even The Times was free to access) and share them on Facebook. Over time, I became quicker at reading the papers (I read every Saturday and Sunday edition cover to cover including every supplement and magazine – yes, cars, property and ‘Saga Holiday Specials’ too as you never knew when an interesting article may appear – and as you can imagine it took a few hours to start with), it became part of my routine and before I knew it I didn’t even think twice about it. I didn’t think of the impact of my actions at all, it was just a fun thing for me to do. I’d enjoy getting the odd comment and response on an article and having the odd debate or argument when I sided differently to someone. The thing is, I should make clear, I only ever shared ‘art & literature’ articles, not that that makes any real difference but it’s just to show I did it for a purpose. All of my social media pages are set up for my interest in writing so I only shared pieces I thought would be of interest to people following me who in the main would also be interested in writing. I didn’t just share the whole lot, it wasn’t just a wholesale cut’n’paste job. It was the pieces I enjoyed (well, actually not enjoyed, for instance I never ‘enjoyed’ sharing an obituary, but it was more I enjoyed the article because it had a pedagogic element that I thought would in some way benefit being read by people, even if it was due to a sad or upsetting reason) which after a while, because as I said I became quicker, would be around 20 articles give or take (in total, from all three papers and both Sat & Sun).

As you can see, I’m getting the excuses out; a typically guilty response! When The Independent announced they were stopping their print editions (about six weeks ago or so is when I read it I think) it made me think about my contribution to this somewhat inevitable evolution of digitalization.

First, let me say why I stopped buying The Times. It’s very simple. They introduced a subscription service. So you couldn’t read their articles online unless you paid. It didn’t bother me initially as I bought them in print anyway, it’s the way I enjoy reading newspapers (I love reading fiction on digital readers or ereaders just as much as I love reading them in print for the record – they both offer their own pleasures and benefits) but then after a while I realised I couldn’t share any articles as people who clicked on them wouldn’t be able to read them unless they had a subscription, which for the most part they wouldn’t have. So I started to think of reading The Times as a waste because as much as I enjoyed it, I couldn’t pass it on. Eventually, I kept to the other three I mentioned. The Telegraph soon introduced a limit on the amount of free articles a website visitor could access without buying their subscription, I can’t remember exactly how many now, but it was still enough that if I shared a handful people who clicked on the link could read them.

The financial impact of me sharing articles never occurred to me. Not really, not in any significant way. I assumed it was just a minor thing that was part and parcel of the digital and social media age. People won’t pay for the Internet…

I never thought that I would be directly responsible for people not buying the physical papers, that in some way they could access what they want to without the need to buy their own print copy or click through countless adverts online. First of all, I’m a nobody in the online world, I have hardly any followers, I don’t have any fan sites or forums or anything that could remotely be seen as having an impact on peoples’ decisions; I was just a drop in the ocean. Then a friend commented recently that I have had over a million hits on my Google+ page (one of the platforms I share the articles on) and it made me think that although as an individual I don’t have an impact; the culture of my thinking, of my decisions, of my assumptions are far wider reaching and it’s not that hard to contemplate the snowball effect… a thousand nobodies like me share articles… what about the worldwide sites that have a serious amount of followers who also share articles… the automated social media feeds… the gossip sites… and so on.

If you think of the combined effect of sharing, then my insignificant amount of followers becomes a bigger problem. I have absolutely no idea how these things are calculated so I am about to present a totally unscientific and mathematically irresponsible sum, sorry, it’s just to highlight a point: Let’s just say that 1% of those million hits may have been from repeat visitors, from people who have a serious interest in keeping up to date with the news and reading art and literature articles. That would be 10,000 hits. Let’s say that is solely from 10 people. Let’s just say, for invalid arguments sake that 10 people regularly follow me every Sunday to read the articles I share. That would be approx. £150 I am taking out of the newspapers income every weekend. That is also 10 people who are not looking at their physical adverts and also navigating the website in order to find these articles and adding pennies into the ad revenues. That is every week. If we say they have done that for two years, that’s £15,600.

Now that equation is rubbish because as I said it’s as loose a calculation as you ever find but it was just a thought explained in numbers. It’s meaningless as evidence but just stick with me for one more moment. It is meant to show that the cumulative effect of sharing a paid-for-service, for free. I repeat, I’m a nobody. But imagine if I had not just a million hits, but a million followers! A million real living breathing people and I shared just one single article. All those people would be getting that article for free and that in itself is not a bad thing, in one sense, it’s marketing. Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world where everyone said, ‘I really enjoyed that article, I must buy that product next time,’… But of course in reality, that’s not how it works. Now, I am not saying that people would have bought that product (or newspaper in this example) in the first place. I am not saying that by sharing things we are directly stopping someone from going to a shop and purchasing it in person. All I am saying is that once I stopped and thought about it, I understood that my weekly habit of sharing articles is not as innocent and as harmless as I first thought. It doesn’t take much of a progression to see why such possible dramatic losses of income means it becomes impossible to fund a national newspaper to the level of first rate global journalism required and the changes that papers such as The Times have already made are only a matter of time for everyone else.

I don’t know if I will continue sharing articles after this week. One of the reasons I enjoyed sharing the articles is that they came from three different sources so I didn’t feel like I was promoting any one particular agenda. If I start only sharing things from two or possibly even one, then it looks a bit propagandarish doesn’t it? I mean, by sharing an article from The Telegraph (Conservative and on the right) and directly next to it sharing an article from The Independent (Neutral but on the left) surely no one can accuse me of only sharing sources that propagate my personal views? I’m not sure if I feel comfortable continuing if that should change. I’ll have to think, I’m far from making up my mind.

Anyway, whatever happens I wanted to share my thoughts on this issue and understand my own feelings better too. I like sharing and I wasn’t doing anything wrong yet that doesn’t mean it didn’t have an impact. Our culture changes and we need to change with it and as much as I’ll miss reading the paper in the park, I can’t allow for selfish sentiment. The most important thing is to maintain a free press, first rate investigative journalism, educate the population and promote new culture; things always change and if I have to change the way I access information then that’s just what I have to do, I don’t matter, what matters is that information will always still there to be accesses, no matter in what form.

Enjoy the weekend!

R.G Rankine

Monday 21 March 2016

SHORT STORY ENTRY: Flash 500 Short Story Competition

Dear all,

The long-list for the Flash 500 short story competition has been announced so I am now free to post my entry. You can find out details about the competition here:

&

You can find my entry below but to repeat myself (which I do often) I will post this ‘disclaimer’ whenever I post a short story entry: I decided that 2016 would be the year I enter competitions and at present I have around four or five a month on my list. Every time I enter one I will copy the story as a blog post ready to go and share it with you. Let me put my hands up in surrender now, I do not expect to be shortlisted or win any of them. That’s not an easy excuse, it’s just being honest. I don’t think these will be my best work and I have a lot of years ahead of me in which to improve my writing but this is my reasoning… it’s more of a compromise. I have two main objectives this year, to grow my company (a little bit) and complete the first draft of my novel. They are ongoing projects that occupy my mind night and day, however, I have a lot of scraps of ideas that I have set aside (as I won’t be spending time developing any short stories to self publish this year) and I felt bad at just leaving them to rot. They are playing on my mind so why not use them to enter short story competitions? The ones I self publish are always a minimum of 10k words (up to around 20k) and take me weeks to work on but the competitions can be as short as 500 words. I think that by allowing myself to spend a few hours (at most) on these entries I will firstly feel better than I am keeping myself busy when not working on the novel (which again, is often), secondly improve and test out new ideas or techniques (that may come in handy later) and thirdly reach out to new people and new content which is naturally a frightening thing because you are exposing yourself to people who are better than you. That’s the only way to learn though and I have never shied away from that. The only negative is that I know I won’t be spending enough time on the stories to show off the best I can do, but that’s the compromise isn’t it? I get a lot out of it without spending huge chunks of time. You can’t have both. So, is that a good enough excuse for you?


Beautiful Reflection

I had beautiful wavy blond hair. Some days it glowed, like it was alive, not literally of course, I’m not strange, but that’s how I used to think. Alive, because it did what it wanted; there was no controlling the thing. I felt that with all parts of my body. I repeat, I’m not strange, but back then I believed I had such a forceful vitality that every little bit of me was its own being, talking back and forth with my brain as if the whole body had to agree before doing anything. I’m saying it now like it was a good thing but it’s simply the extra thick, Melchizedek-bottle-sized rose-tinted goggles I wear these days. To level with you, I was always anxious about my appearance. I hated that hair. Thought I looked like a girl. It’s upsetting because no one ever said that. I knew that no one was criticizing me. No one. Everyone loved me… and they loved my hair, always saying how good it looked, so where I got my paranoia from I wish I could tell you. I wasn’t soft, I’ll tell you that much. I was… maybe a touch sensitive. I was twelve years old and I felt like a tough guy. A tough guy with wavy blond hair who looked like a girl. I looked really young too. So there you go, girly and young. I can see it now. Silly obvious. I mean, joking, ridiculous, blatant, in your face, obvious. I look at old photos and it’s hard to understand why I was so pent up all the time. I can’t drag up any trauma to tell you about, to explain it. I liked myself. I really remember liking myself (like, maybe too much). I barely looked old enough to be at secondary school, soft luminous peachy skin, no hint of spots, a roundness – not chubbiness – around my mouth and cheeks that made you think I’d never wrinkle... those photos I swear, you’d say it'd be impossible to imagine that child as an adult. That damn hair though. I’ll tell you something that I know doesn’t explain everything but I’ll tell you anyway… I wanted it to be thick and sleek, metal, you know, I wanted to look metal. No chance. My hair rose up and fell down in curled - powerfully held - waves, a firmness that would make any adult cry. People spend their life trying to get that bounce: creams, sprays, mousses… buy all you like, nothing could give you that shiny thick beast I had, every cell as fresh as a North Sea January morning, yet I hated it, I was consumed by detesting it, what can I say? It was far too boy band. I wanted Satan’s fingers, covered face, straight-down-the-back metal hair, and all I saw was this fake teenage ballad crooning make-girls-cry shallow poster-on-wall heartthrob. I got it all wrong. I messed my time up like it was a competition. Can you imagine the fun if I had gone with it?

It was the boys from my street I wanted. No, not in that way. It wasn’t romance, it was heroism. I wanted to be the action movie hero. A star. Legend. Force. See, I know this is making excuses after the fact, but if I had just been presented with one opportunity to prove myself, one rolled-red-carpet-spotlighted-event… then maybe I would have stopped worrying and just got on with letting the girls paw me. What a waste.

First, it was the pink milkshake. The boys had emptied a carton over my front door. It wasn’t liquid and it wasn’t solid but this sort of disgusting… sludge. Like the dirty thick foam you get on seafront waves. Full of crap you don’t want to think about, never mind touch. That day, pink milkshake day, I turned into the little paved path that led to my door and I swear, I saw them do it, but without actually seeing it… do you know what I mean? I could replay it in my head like I was a security camera. I saw them huddle together, I saw them push and shove each other, goading each other, taunting and teasing each other until finally one of the bastards found the courage to step to the front and do it. I felt like our house had been marked. Not the way you’re taught in religious class where the marked are the blessed and will be saved… no, it looked like we were the plague, the stricken: cheap pink milkshake for diseased blood. All our neighbours would see it. Look, here’s the poor, here’s the unworthy. Those damn boys.

There were a few other occasions on top of that but it was all the same sort of stuff - eggs one day, silly string the next. You should have seen how I worked myself up preparing to catch them, to confront them. I would think about it before the final bell of the day had rung. I would start thinking about it at lunch sometimes. I would see the journey home in my mind hours before it came.

Grey road…
Grey pavement…
Count the chewing gum stains…
Grey houses…
Face down, eyes up…
Low wooden fences…
Grey parked cars…
Count the cracks between the paving stones…
The old grey metal shutters…
Mum’s friend’s house I’d rush past…
Scratched swear words in grey lampposts…
Slap the top of the wooden bollards crossing the road…
Half full skip of greyness…
One hundred paces to go… count them…
Scowl…
Fifty paces to go… count them…
See the corner…
Nearly there…
Clench fists…
Face sweating…
Back and shoulders tighten…
Faster…
Turn the corner…
Faster…
Look straight ahead…
Don’t blink…
Don’t turn…
Don’t slow…
Clench jaw…
Stomach convulses…
See my house…
No one there…
Relief…
Self disgust…
Cowardice…
Hatred…
Long for revenge…


I told you before how everyone liked me. It’s true. They did. I had loads of friends. Loads. But I never told anyone about the boys. Not my closest mates. Not the school, not my cousins, not my mum… nobody. It was me alone, all about me and all up to me. Which is why saying I wanted to be a hero is so messed up. Shows a bit of psychological damage or something, don’t you think? I don’t know. It’s hard to admit but it wasn’t about being seen to be the hero, I wanted to be the hero to myself, in my own story, in my own universe… and I have no clue why. I would shuffle the keys out of my pocket and into my hand, open the front door and run upstairs. The first thing I would do is check how I looked. I would find myself staring at this red faced little angel, full of bitterness and restlessness for a fight. It’s remarkable. I didn’t know who this heavy-breathing, excessively salivating, frightening devil-angel looking back at me was. There had been no confrontation, yet I imagined myself with black eyes and a bruised forehead, with red lumps from the impact of bullies' knuckles. I would force this psychotic square smile and picture what I would look like toothless. Then after a short period, just two or three minutes is all it was, I would be calm. The redness from my own induced pressure would dissipate and the devil-angel would be the boy band heartthrob again. Then I would rush back downstairs and clean up the mess. I’d get my mum’s mop and her cardboard box of cleaning stuff from under the stairs - I had no idea what all the bottles were – and wash away whatever the boys had done. By the time my mum got back home from work and I’d hear her familiar shout from the door, the mess would have been long gone and any water I’d used in the cleaning dried up. As the saying goes, she’d be none the wiser. Then, like countless nights before and countless nights yet to come, I’d be her little angel, her blond haired cherub, always a good boy and always the popular lad.

Kind regards,

R.G Rankine

Thursday 17 March 2016

SHORT STORY ENTRY: Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook Short Story Competition


Dear all,

The shortlist for the 2016 Writers’ & Artists’ competition has been announced:


Which means I am now free to post my entry. You can find it below.

To repeat myself (which I do often) I will post this ‘disclaimer’ whenever I post a short story entry: I decided that 2016 would be the year I enter competitions and at present I have around four or five a month on my list. Every time I enter one I will copy the story as a blog post ready to go and share it with you. Let me put my hands up in surrender now, I do not expect to be shortlisted or win any of them. That’s not an easy excuse, it’s just being honest. I don’t think these will be my best work and I have a lot of years ahead of me in which to improve my writing but this is my reasoning… it’s more of a compromise. I have two main objectives this year, to grow my company (a little bit) and complete the first draft of my novel. They are ongoing projects that occupy my mind night and day, however, I have a lot of scraps of ideas that I have set aside (as I won’t be spending time developing any short stories to self publish this year) and I felt bad at just leaving them to rot. They are playing on my mind so why not use them to enter short story competitions? The ones I self publish are always a minimum of 10k words (up to around 20k) and take me weeks to work on but the competitions can be as short as 500 words. I think that by allowing myself to spend a few hours (at most) on these entries I will firstly feel better than I am keeping myself busy when not working on the novel (which again, is often), secondly improve and test out new ideas or techniques (that may come in handy later) and thirdly reach out to new people and new content which is naturally a frightening thing because you are exposing yourself to people who are better than you. That’s the only way to learn though and I have never shied away from that. The only negative is that I know I won’t be spending enough time on the stories to show off the best I can do, but that’s the compromise isn’t it? I get a lot out of it without spending huge chunks of time. You can’t have both. So, is that a good enough excuse for you? Anyway, when each competition closes I'll post my entry in between my normal rambling blog posts or news announcements, some will have themes (the one below was on 'ageing') and some don't but I'll always leave the link so you can visit the website and check out the shortlists and winners... and maybe take note so you can enter yourselves next year?

Focus

‘Well, would you look at that!’

Flo places the tip of her finger on a worn photograph and caresses the face of the young girl looking back. The creases and torn edges are invisible, and despite being blurred and grey she sees the red glow on the cheeks of the worn out twelve-year-old who Flo remembers would be fresh from skipping across the heath. Flo’s fingertip hovers on the brown mole prominent on the flushed and surprised gaze. The birthmark, a small round bump the size of the girl’s contracted pupil, sits above the left corner of her mouth, halfway between her top lip and the bottom of her nose. Flo’s touch is gentle, as if pressing too hard will damage more than the delicate film.

As Flo spreads out more photographs, the beauty spot repeats and repeats. Her dining room table, rustic and rugged but well polished with a rosewood hint, transforms into a page from an artist’s notebook. Images from a lifetime of recorded moments shine. 1950’s greys mix with more vivacious modern tones; spring greens from birthday picnics in the park, deep chocolate browns in thick spirals that spread-in-bloom across oversized poet collars, and dazzling white from a wedding in a church courtyard where rain has collected into silver puddles forming a children’s game of mirror-like stepping stones.

Flo leans close to the table, her nose an inch above the photos, and lets her squinting eyes scan freely. She picks up the scent of beeswax from her daily chores but the musty aged photographs overpower the present and she moves from year to year with each framed still of her life; there is the garden with the perfect grass that they never managed to grow again; there’s teenage Peter and Billy, when tight corduroys and band t-shirts were pleaded for. Flo stops when her inspection meets John.

‘Why do some leave and others stay?’

Flo stands and walks to the mantelpiece. She presses a razor-thin cream-hued button on her new radio; a recent gift. It is a sleek, cutting-edge digital radio designed to appear like a utilitarian yet post-war domestic luxury appliance of yesteryear. Flo breaks her own rule and looks at herself in the mirror above the fireplace before sitting back down at the table and shuffling the photographs together. She wraps tissue paper around the neat pile, slowly and carefully, making sure to align the edges with the beveled folds dug from decades of protection and isolation. Flo doesn’t put the pile away immediately; she fears she will take one more look later, perhaps after soup and tea.

Flo’s fingertip circles her mole. It hasn’t changed. They say all of your cells replace, that you aren’t the person - physically speaking - you were decades ago; except those buried deep in the brain or deep in the something-or-other of your bones. Yet, this mole hasn’t changed. It is ageless; perfection embarrassing decay. This mole is still the ruddy-faced tomboy racing the next door neighbour’s stick-in-the-mud little boy that died of tuberculosis. This mole is still the shocked smile of saying ‘yes’ to Gerald when asked for her first dance. This mole is still the beautiful young woman who had everything. This mole is that woman in the mirror who is still beautiful and wants everything all over again.

R.G Rankine