I’ve just been reading a couple of posts about favourite (or otherwise) movies at The Fearless Blog and Thoughtful Reflections and since I spend a lot of my time copy-editing journals about films and cinema from across the world, I’ve drawn up up my own list, based on the format used in the blogs I’ve just mentioned, so here goes!

1. One movie that made you laugh: Blazing Saddles by Mel Brooks. There are dozens of others. I just love movies that make me laugh.
2. One movie that made you cry: I can’t think of one at the moment.
3. One movie that you loved when you were a child: Snow White; in fact, anything by Walt Disney!
4. One movie you’ve seen more than once: Mary Poppins. However, my brother once insisted on seeing this movie several times in a single week when it was first shown at our local cinema back in 1964.
5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it: Any of the Carry on… series that were popular in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. However, I’ve watched a few recently, and they seem very dated when compared with movies nowadays.
6. One movie that you hated: The Night Porter, with Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling.
7. One movie that scared you: I don’t go to scary movies!
8. One movie that bored you: The Night Porter. See above.
9. One movie that made you happy: Shakespeare in Love (another movie I’ve seen more than once).
   
10. One movie that made you miserable: Braveheart. How could the English treat the Scots so badly!
11. One movie you thought would be great, but it wasn’t: Young Frankenstein, by Mel Brooks.
12. One movie you weren’t brave enough to watch: The Exorcist.
13. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with: Deanna Troi, of Star Trek. Okay, I’m cheating a bit here, because I fell in love with her when she appeared in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and she appeared in the subsequent follow-up movies.

At long last, my new business website has gone live! Go visit it at www.jeremylockyer.co.uk at let me know what you think of it. It has a number of additional features including an all-new portfolio page, an expanded FAQs section as well as a direct link to my blog. It also has a completely new and much more powerful content management system, called Joomla, that can be adapted and grow as and when I need it. I’ve also signed up for Google Adsense so that I can display ads on my site and get paid for them (I hope!).

It seems to have taken ages to get this far. It was back in January that I started looking for a web designer. The first one I found was very cheap but he lived on the other side of the country; he also wanted me to complete a very long and complicated questionnaire and his content management system couldn’t be used on anything other than Internet Explorer and a PC (I’ve got an iMac and I use Firefox)! So I found someone else who lived locally, who used open-source software, who quoted a very reasonable price and whom I could pop round and see for a cup of tea and a chat about what I wanted. And, he was already a friend of mine and a fellow member of The Business League. Sam Fisher and his assistant James Quick have done an excellent job! A classic example of why it pays to ’shop locally’!

As a writer, I have a passion for words. I also enjoy networking. So, imagine for a moment that your favourite business networking organization (mine is The Business League) was run by management consultants, and that you all talked in management speak.

Instead of a business breakfast meeting you would have an “early morning enterprise-synergy bacon-and-egg scenario”. And the main advantage of having just one member per profession in each chapter or branch would be that “we marginalize our sector rivals to a point where they are almost nil as a potentially competitive market factor, which means that we can dominate, in a total way, all the marbles”.

Instead of finding ways of passing referrals and doing business with your fellow members you would “innovate front-end methodologies to empower inter-commercial deliverables and thereby maximize your mission-critical schema”.

However, if you are faced with this sort of mumbo-jumbo in your company literature, perhaps you ought to be employing an editor (like me!) to make sense of it all.

I’m sure that you’ve all got your favourite examples of management speak or business buzzwords. Perhaps you could share them with me and we could all have a good laugh! Just send me a comment listing them and I’ll collate all the ones that I receive. I look forward to reading your contributions in due course.

Recently, while looking around for subjects to write about on my blog, I came across the story of the Reverend Robert Shields, who died a few months ago.

His claim to fame is that for 25 years he kept a diary – but not any old diary! From 1972 until 1997 he would spend at least four hours a day recording every detail of his life in five-minute segments. Nothing was left out – he even recorded his visits to the toilet (and what he did there) – to ensure that the entire day, every day, was accounted for. In his small office at his his family home in Dayton, Washington State, he kept half a dozen typewriters (Do you remember those?) on his desk just in case any one of them broke down due to over-use. He had them arranged in such a way that he could reach any one of them by using his swivel chair without having to get up.

Each day he would type about 3,000–6,000 words describing in fine detail his daily activities on to single sheets of paper. Eventually, he would bind these sheets into ledgers, which were stored in huge cardboard boxes and stacked to the ceiling just outside his office. As well as detailing his trips to the bathroom, he recorded his body temperature, blood pressure and his daily medication; he described every piece of junk mail he received, every meal he ate and the cost of virtually everything he bought. He even attached a nostril hair to one page so that scientists could study his DNA. He would sleep for just two hours a day so that he could describe the dreams he had experienced. In a good year he would write three million words, but in a bad year he would manage just one million. He would type everything down spontaneously as it came into his head and didn’t correct or edit anything. He said that he didn’t read any of the entries afterwards because if he did he wouldn’t have time to do anything else.

Eventually, in 1997, he succumbed to a massive stroke that curtailed his writing activities although he did attempt for a while to dictate his journal entries to his wife but, perhaps not surprisingly, she quickly became bored with the task. In 1999, he handed over his diary to Washington State University in 91 boxes on condition that it would not be read or subjected to a word count for at least 50 years. However, one sample page has found its way on to the Internet and can be viewed here.

I wonder what Robert Shields would have made of today’s blogging technology. Would he have used it to update his diary for all of us to read and comment on or would he have shied away from it because it was just too public an arena to reveal the details of his private life and personal thoughts? At his age, would he have understood or been afraid of Web 2.0, Windows XP/Vista or Mac OS 10.4/10.5? Or would he have become the world’s ultimate blogger and acquired the same sort of following that ‘Geriatric1927‘ (Peter Oakley) has amassed on YouTube. I suppose now we shall never know!

You may have noticed that my last post was over two weeks ago and may have thought that nothing was happening on the Lockyer front. On the contrary, I have been very busy. During the first week of March I was editing articles for three different journals for Intellect and was out every evening either socializing – it was my birthday last week – business networking, attending committee meetings or dealing with entries for a local road race I’m the director of.

In addition, for some time now I have been looking for ways to increase the number of visitors to my blog. As a result of reading a very interesting article by Jack Humphrey of SocialPowerLinking.com recently I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time putting together a social marketing campaign. So, over the past week I’ve been signing up to join the various social media sites, such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Propeller and Mixx, as well as the blog communities at MyBlogLog and the BlogCatalog. The results have been almost instantaneous – within a few hours I have had half a dozen e-mails from other bloggers wanting to be friends and one very complimentary review of my blog. I had already signed up to Facebook and MySpace so my next job in this compaign is find my existing friends (in the physical world) whom are on these sites and start interacting with them in cyberspace.

Finally, I suppose I ought to start writing articles for this blog. I’ve already got a few ideas that need to be worked on – so watch this space!

Last Friday I took part in a game of ‘Call My Bluff’. For those readers who don’t know the rules, the object of the game is to guess the correct definition of an obscure word from the three or four different ones given to you by another team.

Although I work with words professionally on a daily basis, I was surprised to find that even I’d never heard of any of the words used in the game. Mind you, the English language is renowned for the richness of its vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary lists over 600,000 different words and their definitions, and technical or scientific terms can add millions more to the total. Altogether, there are about 200,000 English words in common use whereas an average well-read educated person can have a total vocabulary of between 15,000 to 20,000 words, and only use about 1,500 of them in a normal week. So it is not surprising that such words as ‘laroid’, ‘lagan’ or ‘xebec’ are totally unknown to most people.

What is particularly interesting is that, despite being rather complex to learn and difficult to master, English is probably the most widely spoken language in the world. Approximately 375 million people speak it as a first language and up to 1,400 million more speak it as a second language. English is the dominant international language in aviation, business, communications, diplomacy, entertainment and science and is an official language in 53 different countries. And what is even more interesting is that each of these countries has its own version of English. We all know about the differences between American (US) English and British English, but what about Australian English, New Zealand English, Canadian English, Caribbean English and South African English – all of which merit having their own specialized dictionary being published by the Oxford University Press. And then there is Indian English (the bain of all those British people who hate being put through to certain telephone call centres!), Malaysian English and Chinese English. Professor David Crystal, who specializes in linguistics, has claimed that if you combine native and non-native speakers, India now has more people who speak or understand English than any other country in the world. India is closely followed in this respect by the People’s Republic of China.

Coming closer to home, there is Scottish English, Welsh English and Irish English. Each region of England itself has its own dialect and even the Isle of Man and Guernsey have their own form of the language. So, you could say that there is no officially correct form of English – not even the ‘Queen’s English’ (after all, her family originally came from Germany and her husband is Greek!) – but this is probably the reason for its beauty, its flexibility and its attraction. Long may it continue!

I’m a member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders and I’ve been following a recent thread about books sales on their e-mail discussion forum, SfEPLine.

Apparently, a book publisher told one of our members that over half of all the books published in the United Kingdom sell less than 200 copies in their entire lifetime (or should that be shelf life?), which at first sight may seem somewhat surprising. However, with the advent of self-publishing and print-on-demand services, this sort of statistic does have a ring of truth about it because a large number of self-publishers don’t print that many copies of their book anyway and would consider themselves extremely lucky to sell even 100 copies to their friends and family.

Then another SfEP member, who specializes in editing works of fiction, told us that sales of a first novel in hardback produced by a commercial publisher are commonly very low and that total sales of just 600 copies per book was not at all unusual. Although the traditional way of publishing a book is to bring it out first as a hardback and then in paperback if potential sales warrant it, a lot of novels are published just as paperbacks. On the other hand, a lot of hardbacks are sold to public libraries – in fact some books would never have been published in the first place if it hadn’t been for the library market. Unfortunately, the bottom has fallen out of this market recently, which has caused big problems for publishing companies who produce fiction titles.

However, to a certain extent these lost library sales have been replaced by sales to a new breed of ‘collectors’ who buy autographed hardbacks as an investment. The rumour is that these collectors don’t actually read the books but keep them locked away so that they remain in mint condition so that they can be sold at a premium at a later date – perhaps when the author’s later works have broken into the best-seller lists.

Nowadays, public libraries are buying as many books as possible in paperback in order to save money but publishers prefer to sell them hardbacks instead because they have to sell far more copies of a paperback in order to break even financially. This means that novels with a smaller market (e.g. by a first-time author) are not viable to publish as a paperback. So unless publishers feel that they can sell enough hardback copies of a novel (or any other book) to make even a small profit they will reject a first-time author’s manuscript every time. And that is why there are so many hardback copies of celebrities’ autobiographies, cookbooks, etc. on the shelves in bookshops irrespective of how good they are – enough people buy them to make it worthwhile for publishers to produce them.

So, my advice to anybody who is writing their first novel is to publish it yourself! It will give you a great deal more satisfaction than receiving all those rejection slips and you will learn what it takes to produce, promote and sell a book. Give it a go and see where it takes you!

For those of you who enjoy puns, here is another story, this time from Sandy Toksvig who related it in her column ‘Seven’ in the Sunday Telegraph last summer.

Two young men so enjoyed their fishing holiday beside a excellent trout brook that they made a vow to repeat the trip in twenty years’ time.

Two decades later they meet to try and find the nirvana of their youth. They search the woods, but for the life of them they cannot recall exactly where they had set up their tent all those years before. At last they reach a stream and one of the men shouts: ‘This is the place!’ ‘No, it’s not,’ says the other. ‘Yes, it is,’ says the first man, ‘I recognize the clover growing on the bank.’

The second man shakes his head and says, ‘Don’t be silly, you can’t tell a brook from its clover.’

Some chess enthusiasts had booked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament successes.

After about an hour, the manager of the hotel came out of his office and asked them to leave.

‘But why?’ they asked, as they moved off.

‘Because’, the manager said, ‘I can’t stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer.’

(Spotted in Link, the journal of the National Association of Writers’ Groups (NAWG), edited by Mike Wilson, who loves this kind of wordplay and who is asking his readers for more of it. He is even offering to give a prize to the person who submits the best example.)

A few months ago, on 12 November to be precise, I resolved to get up early each morning so that I could spend time keeping this blog up to date with fresh content, and follow a regular schedule in the same way that I went jogging each evening.

However, shortly afterwards, on 15 November, I developed a deep vein thrombosis in my right leg, which not only put an end to my jogging but also made sitting down to try and write material for this blog very painful. I had to keep walking (which was painful in itself) to prevent my leg seizing up completely. So, for the past three months my blog has taken a back seat while my focus has firmly been on getting my health back.

Luckily, I have now substantially recovered and I am no longer in pain, so I can concentrate once more on my plans for this blog. So much has happened just recently that I have several writing projects that need my attention and I think it is important to make sure that I don’t repeat myself in any of them.

To assist me in this respect, I’m drawing up a list (or more precisely, a series of lists) of what needs to be done for each of these projects, including this blog. A list is a great tool if you have a great deal to do but don’t know where to start. Listing all the various tasks that need to be done can help you to prioritize your workload, and there is nothing more satisfying than to cross off an item on a list once you have completed the task that it relates to. But don’t make the list too long – there is a danger that it will become a vast, indigestible and growing heap of unfulfilled wishes and you will find that for every item you cross off the list you will think of least another three items to go on it. And if your list is more than one page long, there is the added danger that you will just concentrate on those tasks on the first page (i.e. the page on top) and forget about all those other tasks that have been relegated to the second, third and, heaven forbid, subsequent pages. Therefore, your list should never be more than one page long!

And finally, but most importantly, allow room on your list for the unexpected! A wise man once said that God looks at our plans and laughs. Remember that man proposes but God disposes. So, submit to the will of God and enjoy the ride!