Category: AUTHOR LAZLO FERRAN

21 June – Back to the Future

Excerpt of the Week might have to replaced by moan of the week at the rate things are going!
First of all, I have badly pulled a muscle at the base of my back so that’s one reason for the title Back to the Future this week! The other is that I simply feel I am going backwards at the moment. I simply cannot get my blog accessible in mobile devices whereas it did work before I pointed my domain lazloferran.com at it. But more of that later!

Problems with Barns & Noble
As promised here is the story of my problems with Barns & Noble on their website BN.com. Theirs is the most useless Customer Service system I have yet come across. I participated for the last 5 years in the Premium programme for my books sold through Smashwords.com. This meant that other affiliates like Sony, BN.com could sell the books for their own devices (Sony Reader and Nook). Now I want to try the Amazon KDP programme, as you may know, and this requires me not to have my ebooks (entered in the programme) for sale anywhere else than Amazon. Consequently, I removed most of them from the Smashwords programme and they should have been removed from all the affiliates’ websites. However Too Bright the Sun was still available on bn.com two weeks later. Continue reading “21 June – Back to the Future” →

Friday 14 June Update: ‘Like a Virgin’

Blog Updated 16 June in Other News section

Update on Blog access issues
I am still working with the service who I pay to manage my DNS settings. They have omitted to delete an old record, which is giving conflicting data to the new record and thus causing issues, particularly for Mobile device users. Despite my repeated emails this still hasn’t been fixed, despite their reply that it would. I can only hope this is fixed very soon. Continue reading “Friday 14 June Update: ‘Like a Virgin’” →

‘Avatar’ – A Walk in the Forest

A break in tradition this week. I will be talking about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – OCD.

I found a new place to walk last weekend. On many weekends I like to take my car and drive out of London to somewhere peaceful. I grew up in deepest Buckinghamshire, and while it is an insular community, I do very much miss the stunning countryside. Chalk soil leads to a wonderful variety of woodland: beech, oak, sycamore, giant and very ancient cherry trees and hawthorn trees as high as a house. Yes, my favourite woodland is very ancient and will remain a secret for now.

However, I am not yet rich, so Bucks is too far to go regularly. Consequently I usually explore closer to North London. In the last ten years, in my little car, I have discovered villages with beautiful streams and lovely quiet woodland walks where the solitary can find solace. I have had two favourite spots during this time, but I was getting a little jaded. Continue reading “‘Avatar’ – A Walk in the Forest” →

18 May Updates – Preview of Lacunashka

This Week’s Excerpt
Instead of a preview this week I have something different for you. For a long time I have been a fan of Russian literature. As a tribute I wrote Lacunashka some time ago, but it has been languishing quietly on my computer. I think I may have published it briefly on Amazon or Books2Read but I withdrew it, probably because it is such a relentlessly dark tale. People who lived through the terror of Stalin’s reign must have experienced such darkness and a bleak existence, so as a tribute to them I have placed it inside Vampire: Beneficence (Short Stories Volume III). Here is an excerpt:

Lacunashka

Lacuna: a blank gap or missing part.
-shka: Russian diminutive ending for male names.

For Comrade Ilya it was like any other day in the Ministry. At 9.30, after already working for two hours, they broke for coffee or a shot of vodka. Volodya, as usual, was holding forth in his loud voice, leaning back against the edge of his desk.
“Ilya! Have a shot of vodka. Just once?”
“No, Misha,” he said placing his hand over the dirty porcelain cup. “I have to work anyway.” He walked the short distance, past dirty mullioned windows to his office and started to check through the list of mail for the day. Continue reading “18 May Updates – Preview of Lacunashka” →

New Features on Blog – RSS and Emails

Dear subscribers, you will now notice that you can subcribe for email delivery of notifications for this blog as well as RSS feeds, and you can recommend me more easily too. You can also translate this page into many languages, follow me on Google+ and follow my twitter feed (although I cannot work out why you can’t see my latest 5 tweets here, which is what this service is supposed to do. If anybody knows why, please let me know). Finally, if you already follow this blog, you will probably like to add yourself to my Google+ circle or use one of the above methods to make sure you get the blogs. Until now I have only been able to notify you by commenting on my own blog which sends an email to a custom list I created. I am not going to do this for much longer.

Experimenting with Adverts on my Blog

I am going to experiment a little bit monetising (as they say) my blog. It’s not that I am desperate for the cash or anything – just that I have an idea in the pipeline for a few years time and I want to understand better how this stuff works. At first I am just doing the ads to the right here, but may experiment with them in different places. If anybody feels they distract too much or are an irritation, let me know. If I feel they are, then I will remove them.