Increase levity using Milton Marmalade's Remarkably Silly Stories for Grown-ups

If you take yourself lightly enough you may one day learn to fly.

Milton Marmalade's Remarkably Silly Stories for Grown-ups are here to help you into a light frame of mind. They are mostly happy tales with just a bit of necessary darkness.

This is a slim volume of strange tales which struggle with universal questions like the meaning of now, infinity, and why Wolf fell in love with Redcap. The girl who was not a vampire (complete story available on this web site - just click the link) celebrates the condition of being ordinary. Chocolatina is a satire on the odd puritanism that informs some New Age diets and at the same time a paean in praise of chocolate. I have also sneaked in a few poems, mostly silly and one just a little bit erotic (not enough to make you spurt your takeaway coffee in public, although what you do in private is your own affair). In a deliberate protest against the decayed mores of the age, the poems rhyme. A literary tapas time for curly minds everywhere.

At a mere US$5.99 (€5.99, £4.99), a bargain stocking-filler for chuckles over a mince pie. Available from Amazon worldwide and good bookstores everywhere.

We are still birds, and children of the sky

Swims a gloomy fish through muddy weeds,
There hides the flickering tail-fin of despair;
The bottom-dweller on detritus feeds:
A Something sees all this, and is not there.

Between the half-lit gloomy depths and air
Exists a surface shimmering and free:
Beneath this subtle boundary despair
Drifts through an imaginary sea.

We looked below and fancied ourselves fishes;
Our vision caught, we understood not why
Our airy state had turned to brine-worn wishes;
We are still birds, and children of the sky.

*

This is the only serious poem (leaving aside the slightly erotic one) in my forthcoming book of poems and stories, Milton Marmalade's Remarkably Silly Stories for Grown-ups. I shall post a silly poem on this blog soon, together with news of the new book, which should be available in an inexpensive edition in time for Christmas. Suitable for anyone with a curly mind.

This is a draft cover for my new collection of short stories and poems. The revised title will be Milton Marmalade's Remarkably Silly Stories for Grown-ups, and the cover will be very stylish when it's finished.

Here is the copyright notice, because I thought the usual copyright notice a bit dated:

Remarkably Silly Stories are all copyright, all rights reserved, and if you steal my stories and I later get famous my lawyers will certainly be after you. 

My lawyers are called Bloodfang & Wolf and they have a reputation. If you go into their office on a full moon you will find yourself at the front desk where a very pretty woman sits. In one corner is a carved wooden candlestick holding a fat off-white church candle, its tiny flame guttering ineffectually. 

You see the woman by the moonlight streaming through the gothic windows. She is wearing a black dress calculated to show off her figure, in which roundness in all the right places is emphasised by an almost unfeasably small waist. She has raven hair and her eyes are pools of darkness. Though she is beautiful you feel for a moment as though you are staring into the soul of an animal. 

You ask to see one of the partners but she tells you ever so sweetly that since it is a full moon neither of them are in. However she assures you that your case is in the best hands and anyone who steals your work will be sure to regret it. Somewhere outside you hear a scream which you think may be a fox or maybe not. 

Because she is smiling at you, and also because her low cut dress suggests breasts of surpassing wonder, you think about asking her out on a date. The moonlight casts a glint on one of her unusually sharp canine teeth.

You lose your nerve and find yourself out on the pavement again wondering quite what happened. The fox, or whatever it was, screams again, briefly, then there is silence. 

Check back again soon for updates on the book, which will be pocket-size and as affordable as printing costs will allow.

Mermaid at St Doris Island - work in progress

Mermaid at St Doris Island - work in progress

Here is the current state of the latest mermaid linocut. Apart from a few wavy wiggles the sky will be more-or-less white. In the background you can see the volcano on St Doris Island and on the other side is Drake's Golden Hinde at anchor, as described in Sir Henry Herring's book, S. Doris Iland and the Divers Marvells therein, as quoted in A Mermaid in the Bath by Milton Marmalade.

Footnotes and end-notes in the Kindle and other e-readers

About footnotes*

[* and a man with three testicles]

When I am reading a printed book I actually read the footnotes (and I shall explain why you might also want to). If there are end-notes I keep an extra bookmark in the end-notes section (ok, I'm a geek). But doing this in a Kindle is not easy. This is one reason why e-reader formatting needs to be re-thought.

You may be one of those people who never read footnotes or end-notes, so you will not see a problem here. In a moment I shall try to persuade you otherwise (I shall explain about the man with three testicles and what the Pope did about it). But the main point of this article is to question some of the assumptions about book layout in e-readers. Simply transporting a book text unmodified into an e-reader such as the Kindle does not always translate into a good reader experience. This is particularly the case with footnotes and end-notes.

Footnotes, properly used, are there to enhance the reader experience while not interrupting the flow of text. Uses include explaining an obscure reference or phrase with which the reader might not be familiar, or adding an illuminating anecdote that is not a proper part of the text. In Bailey and Love's Physical Signs in Clinical Surgery there is a section describing the harmless swelling called a spermatocele that can arise in a man's scrotum. This can resemble a third testicle. That's all you really need to know. But a footnote adds, "The story goes that, in the 14th century, on petition from a patient with a spermatocele, the Pope granted a gentleman to marry two wives because he had three testicles."*

[*Also in Bailey and Love's Short Practice of Surgery p.1383.]

 The anecdote is not strictly necessary, but it is memorable. I would point out that Bailey and Love do not reference the source of the anecdote, so they may have made it up or copied it from someone else who made it up. If they had referenced it properly they could have put the reference in with the footnote. Perhaps Dan Brown can go and look for it in the Vatican archives, or perhaps it's just a rumour in Piers Plowman.*

[*I've no idea.]

While I am not aware of any strict rules, it seems to me that end-notes are more appropriate where it is less likely that the reader will want to look them up straight away. For example, there may be repeated quotations from a particular source, and you might want to look up the original for context ("A wonderful evening" - Groucho Marx; original quotation: "I've had a wonderful evening, and this wasn't it"), or because you feel inspired by what has been quoted and you want to go right out and buy the book.

With Kindle books, footnotes are more-or-less impossible. This is because the text flows across the screen according to the precise model of Kindle that you have and the size of type you have set as default, and so there is no guarantee that a footnote will appear at the bottom of the screen or even on the same page. In future this ought to be fixable, because if you highlight a word the definition will come up automatically at the bottom of the screen in what is in effect a pop-up footnote. But I know of no way that an author can exploit this. In any event, footnotes are generally translated into end-notes, which are fiddly.

I can move the cursor down to the end-note number (the little superscript number that denotes that there is an end-note) and click on the end-note link and sometimes it will take me to the end-note, and then I can click again and sometimes it will take me back. Not only is this tedious, it is also not reliable. Some writers and publishers do not bother to make their end-notes work, so you click and nothing happens.

In A Mermaid in the Bath* there are a number of footnotes and they are there for humorous effect. Therefore they need to be close to the text to which they refer. The solution that I have come up with is to put the footnotes in square brackets and in a slightly smaller font size immediately below the text which refers to them, and denoted with an asterisk as shown here.

[* A Mermaid in the Bath, a humorous philosophical novel and love story by Milton Marmalade, available from Amazon worldwide.]

Additionally, footnotes could be indented, although I have not done this. (The Kindle version of A Mermaid in the Bath will be available soon.)

I should be interested in any comments on this or any other topic related to Kindle and e-reader formatting.

A Mermaid in the Bath: a new novel by Milton Marmalade - available now

A mermaid turns up in your bath, without explanation or warning—what do you do? It's almost as disruptive as the search for Truth or (worse) finding it. To complicate matters further, Lionel falls in love with her just before she disappears into the clutches of the evil Dr Squidtentacles.

This is a ripping yarn with some very slow car chases involving a Morris Minor and a slow ping-pong duel Matrix-style, not to mention (but I will anyway) a Greek chorus of Cornish villagers, an atomic submarine and a description of the mythical St Doris Island and what took place there in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

Between chapters of adventure not a lot more absurd than real life are philosophical ponderings by Professor Neville Twistytrouser of St Doris College, Oxford together with testy rebuttals by Professor Alphonse Pince-Nez of the department of Saltimbanques de Mer at the Sorbonne, not to mention (but I have, haven't I?) the fully justified complaints of Milton Marmalade's exotic Welsh secretary, Myfanwy.

Milton Marmalade's novel A Mermaid in the Bath is available now.

'Destined to become a cult classic.'

Milton Marmalade—'An idiot at the height of his powers.'