When I suggested, as I did last week,
that the time was approaching when Marcia could give her undivided
attention to the book now to be written, I was wrong. I had no idea
that two things would happen within an hour or so of uploading the
blog: the arrival of the page proofs of Postcards from the Past
(which will be published in October in hard back) and a request from
Elizabeth Masters of Transworld's publicity department to write a
five hundred word piece describing Autumn in Devon. More to point, it
is wanted NOW. This is for the magazine 'Landscape' and Marcia's
deadline was last Wednesday.
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| Elizabeth Masters, Senior Press Officer at Transworld who looks after Marcia's publicity. |
So, what with one thing and another,
brooding about the new book –the formal name is research but we
won't go there –has been sitting on the back burner although on
Tuesday (the five hundred words had been written and sent off) we sat
in the sun drinking coffee outside the Brioche in Totnes and Marcia
started to talk about her new characters. The quest has begun.
Did I hear you asking about the page
proofs? You don't have to worry for they are my problem, it being one
of the things I really can lift from her shoulders. The timing, from
my point of view, is not good but is there ever a good time to be
reading proofs? Now, however, this job has arrived just as I was
beginning to revise my web site.
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| "Postcards" will be published in October. |
I have a new version of the programme
on which I design our web sites and this one supports photo galleries
which makes it much quicker to put up photographs but there is a
problem. You need a good flash player on your computer to be able to
see these galleries. Most have them and so do quite a few tablets
(and, for all I know, the new type of mobile telephones) but my
tablet is an example of one that can’.t If I try to view one of
these galleries, I receive an instruction, “Please upgrade your
Flash plugin”. When I click on that link I get the curt (and not
terribly helpful) message, “This content requires Adobe Flash
Player, which is not supported by your device.”
I can't decide what is the best thing
to do.
If I go for the galleries, there will
be a lot more to see far more quickly but some people won't have
access to most of it or I can continue to plod along as I have been
doing which means the whole project will take for ever but . . . Here
is the link to the new gallery format – if you have a moment do take a look at it and let me know what you think.
Meanwhile, as I work through I find
there are huge gaps in the pictures that I have taken – one such
gap being to do with spiders. Now, photos of corrugated iron are
really quite simple: although they may flap about in a stiff breeze,
they don’t run away and they are not really what you would call
small. By contrast, most spiders are very nifty small persons but,
since I am always up for a challenge, I am determined to take some
good spider pictures and, just for the heck of it, a short video
which I shall call “Web Masters”.
I decided the time had come to make a
start and so Googled, “how many spiders per acre of land”. It
seems that (a) the answer is about 80,000 and (b) you are never more
than three feet from a spider – ever. Should be easy then but . . .
Having spent about an hour searching
for spiders to photograph, I admit to near defeat. I soon saw three
or four but then reality kicked in. They are seriously small and that
means extension rings on the camera plus a zoom lens which makes
focussing very critical and there must be no camera shake. So grab
the tripod, attach the camera with the right gear (including a remote
release because hitting the shutter always creates some vibration)
and approach the place where the spiders live. They are in the corner
of the house and no matter how hard I tried I could not get the
camera in the right position. Then I glanced up and there was an
incredibly long-legged spider with a small body but in a dark corner.
I had to use flash to take the picture.
Then I found a spider doing what
spiders do – eating things, in this case a poor (and quite small)
fly. Even so, the spider was far, far smaller than its dinner.
Not
sure that I shall want to revisit spiders for a while.
This week's blog dog is Colin.
