Author Archives: Tony Ballantyne

Writer and Tech blogger

Microcosms

From Eric Brown’s introduction…

THIS VOLUME CAME ABOUT ONE summer a few years ago when Tony came up to Scotland with his family. We were wandering around the pretty seaside town of North Berwick and talking about recent short stories we’d written. Tony happened to mention that he was working on some short- shorts, which he hoped to place with Nature, and I mentioned a short-short market that I’d recently sold to, Daily SF. I then suggested that, when we had enough tales to form a volume, we should gather them all together and attempt to find a publisher. Years passed; we wrote short-shorts between bigger projects, and Keith Brooke who runs Infinity Plus Books expressed an interest in publishing Microcosms.

Microcosms: 42 pieces of flash fiction by Eric Brown and Tony Ballantyne

Published by Infinity Plus

Buy the Paperback Edition on Amazon UK | Amazon US

But the Kindle Edition on Amazon UK | Amazon US

 

The Human Way

The Human Way appears in the March/April 2017 Issue of Analog

Fans of the Recursion series may recognise Craig, Armstrong and Joanna – as well as the Eva Rye – from the beginning of Divergence.

The story continues the Fair Exchange series that has been appearing in Analog over the past few years. It takes place in the Recursion universe around 10 years after the events depicted in the novels.

Six Reasons why Maintaining a Blog will make You a Better Writer

  • It will make you write regularly
  • It will make you finish something – you’re not a writer if you’re only producing half finished stories
  • It will make you publish something – no more constantly rewriting, trying to get something perfect
  • It will mean your stuff will be read by somebody else – no more stories silently gathering dust in the drawer
  • It will make you engage with feedback and criticism
  • It will let you move on – time to start something new … and better

See Also

WordPress Pharma Hack

Someone kindly emailed me to point out that my writing site had been hacked. Links for Cialis were now appearing scattered throughout the text.

A quick Google search revealed that this was a common hack, and was probably the result of some rogue code embedded in a file after a brute force attack. I ran a site security check (there are many free services if you search for them) which suggested that the problem was located in wp-config.php. I could have paid for a clear up, but taking a look at the file in question it was clear the code wasn’t exactly trying to conceal itself. Once snipped out, my site’s performance improved immediately.

… or so I thought.

A few days later, the adverts reappeared. This is a clever hack – snip out the code and it regenerates itself.

There are various flavours of the Pharma Hack, (a search for WordPress Pharma Hack will give you all the details you need and more) the one that hit me had added an innocent looking file: /wp-includes/init.php

I only discovered this after I’d deleted all my themes and plugins and installed fresh versions of wp-admin and wp-includes. When I restarted the site, the following message appeared at the top of the page:

include_once(.../public_html//wp-includes/init.php) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in .../public_html/wp-config.php on line 93

Checking line 93 of wp-config showed the offending line (I’ve surrounded it with **s):

** include_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/init.php'); ** 
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');//Disable File Edits
define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true);

I removed the line, reset my passwords, including the database passwords, reinstalled my plugins and (hopefully) that’s it.

I should have noticed this sooner, of course, but I’ve not been blogging recently as I’ve been concentrating on finishing my next novel.

Even so, I must hold my hands up and admit that I’ve not given my sites the attention they deserve. I’ve installed some security software following a quick search for WordPress security plugins on Google, I’ll take some time to monitor what’s going on in future.

Martin Carthy

I wondered about going to see Martin Carthy last night at the Band on the Wall

I’d heard that his voice isn’t what it was, that he can’t always form the chords any more. Well, that’s what happens when you get older, and as my companion Crofty pointed out after the show "I love a musician that at 70+ doesn’t try to be anything other than themselves at 70+"

So last night wasn’t a virtuoso performance, but to be fair, that was never Carthy’s shtick. What we got was an engaging show, a bit of chat and an overwhelming sense of folk heritage.

On playing Bruton Town:
"I learned this from Davey Graham"

On an English version of Mrs McGrath:
"I didn’t realise there was an English version until I heard Tim Hart and Maddy Prior play it in ’68"

It would seem reasonable to assume that most of us in the audience had been part of the folk scene for the past decades, attending gigs in little pubs and clubs up and down the country. Carthy, of course, has been at the heart of all this.

I don’t listen to much folk music nowadays. Too many of the performers learned their craft in the conservatoires, and that doesn’t seem very folky to me.

Last night’s show may have had its imperfections, it was all the more enjoyable for it.

(And whilst not suggesting for a moment that Carthy is second rate, I’ve written more about performance here: Second Rate Entertainers)

Remembrance Sunday

I played at two services this Sunday. Every year, I forget about what happens at the second service.

Before the last post is played, a number of wreaths are laid, most of them by members of the uniformed services.

Every year, for the past four years, a girl has come forward to lay a wreath for her father.

Despite her best efforts to be brave, she always cries as she lays the wreath.

Heading off to College?

Now that the A level results are out, many students are about to leave home. There are many articles out there giving advice on what to do when arriving at college for the first time.

Here’s mine.

I’m sharing this because a friend recently asked me this: what I would do if I could go back in time and speak to myself when I was 18? What one piece of advice would I give myself?

It was a good question, and I thought about it for some time. This what I came up with, and I’m convinced it’s the best guidance a young adult could have.

Here it is.

Learn to drink your tea and coffee black.

I stopped adding milk to my drinks after an illness when I was 25. Since then my life has been so much easier. No more running out to buy milk in the evening, no more coming back from holiday to find there’s nothing to put in the coffee. No more having to get involved with the milk kitty at work (honestly, we order hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of IT equipment on a regular basis and yet still never have enough money in the tin to buy a carton of long life).

And just think of all the time saved when making a hot drink. All those trips to the fridge add up.

If only I’d know that when I was 18. I’d never have got into stupid arguments about who was using whose milk in the communal fridge.

Oh yes, and don’t forget this:

Drinking black coffee is cool.

That’s it.

Second Rate Entertainment

I love second rate entertainers.

I encountered a fine example whilst on holiday in Madeira last week. He had a residence in the hotel: 8:30 until 10 every night. Keyboards and vocals, he was a competent player with a good voice that came into its own when doing Elton John covers.

As is the nature of a great second rate performer, he’d arranged everything himself. He switched between keyboards to play different parts, occasionally improvising, all this done over a drum track. Such performances are necessarily individual in a way that singing along to a backing tape never is. He did 70s and 80s covers: Hotel California, Sacrifice, that sort of thing. Given that he was singing in what was to him was a foreign language his phrasing was odd, but hey, he was singing in a foreign language.

It would be easy to dwell on his faults: the arrangements that didn’t quite work, the bland repertoire (necessary, given the venue), his intonation.

But then again that’s sort of the point. I’ve written about second rate performers before at the end of my novel CAPACITY, when the Watcher listens to just such a performance (the scene was based on a concert I attended in a church in France when I was writing the book).

It’s so easy to see perfect performances nowadays. They’re the result of multiple retakes and remixes, they can be autotuned and airbrushed… I don’t have a problem with this. But this can give the impression that all performances should be perfect. That everything should be first rate, all of the time.

No. None of us are capable of that.

That’s why appreciating second rate performances, appreciating people who are willing to make a go of it despite their imperfections, is such an important thing.

Because, for the most part, that’s who we are.