Engine Punk

Regular readers of this blog will know that I don't check ranking on Amazon. Not very much. I had some visitors today and was just showing them my website when they asked me how did it look on Amazon and when we looked The Horsepower Whisperer was ranked 29,683 overall. I couldn't believe it. It is also currently (as I write) No.32 in Contemporary Fantasy and No.97 in Sci Fi Adventure! That last statistic is a new one. I've never been in the Sci-Fi Top 100 before. And I'm just a gnat's whisker away from getting into the Fantasy Top 30!

It's happening again. First there was the giant lamb born to one of Caroline's ewe. In fact, they're Jacob's sheep but belong to Caroline. This means that as sheep they are usually quite modestly sized. Then there's been all the soul-destroying influences we've been subjected to. We can't do anything fun because it damages the environment. We have to think about everything before we do it, audit our actions and ensure they stand up to scrutiny. Whose scrutiny? Why the Conformorians of course! Did you ever doubt they didn't really exist? And now here's Monika-Sandra, a third instance of real life following my fiction (although I suspect the Conformorians have been around for years before I ever wrote about them). You know the character called Heidi in The Horsepower Whisperer had a pet bat? A friend of mine called Heidi has rescued this little person. Unfortunately Monika-Sandra the Pipestrelle bat had a broken wing and died a few days after the...

I was very impressed by Stiff Little Finger's support act in Falmouth. Dave said he'd seen them before last year when they supported The Damned in Falmouth. Dave's like that. He's so committed he arranges his holidays to coincide with his fave bands touring. Anyway, The Eyelids are a female four-piece outfit who play paired down spooky psychobilly punk. I think this stuff sounds easy to do but have a strong suspicion it isn't. I'd heard of The Eyelids before because I'd stumbled across their MySpace page and they're already World famous in Cornwall but wasn't sure if they played my sort of stuff. I am now. They definitely do. I reckon the double bass gives them a USP - a unique sound proposition. It's certainly very distinctive and I reckon the four of them have really got something. Kelly's got a great voice, Michelle has to be one of the smiliest drummer's you'll ever see while she blats out complicated rhythms, Josie's gui...

Stiff Little Fingers played in Falmouth last Saturday (15th August) and of course we went to see them. As hardcore fan Mr Larcombe says, "It's worth going up to Bristol to see 'em because they're consistently so good." He's right, too, so I met up with the usual suspects of Gary and Dave outside the Princess Pavilion in Falmouth at 2000 hrs. Julie, who has at times expressed a fondness for Cliff Richard, came along, too. Gary has persuaded her that The Stranglers are a great live act and after hearing so much about SLF she had to see what all the fuss was about. As Jake said to us that night, Falmouth is a long way west but I hope the reception they got will see Stiff Little Fingers down this way again soon. Dave was on holiday from Gloucester and looked fit and tanned despite camping in Cornwall for a fortnight. Mr Larcombe and Julie were staying in a guest house across the road and took three minutes to walk to the venue. I had travelled the furthest fro...

I found this chap and his demonstration models of Stirling engines in the model tent at the Boconnoc Steam Fair. I'm afraid I forgot to ask him his name but I had a long chat with him about the Stirling engine and the principles involved. I'd heard of Stirling engines many years ago but had discounted from my sphere of interest because they didn't have any automotive application. Stirling engines operate simply on temperature differentials. Low friction materials have given a new lease of life to this very old concept, named after Rev Dr Robert Stirling who patented the idea in 1816. Boyle's Law states that as the temperature of a gas in a sealed container increases so does its pressure and the Stirling engine exploits this principle by have a heat source and a heat sink, such as air fins. When gas is allowed in contact with the cold and heat alternately, it can move a piston, displacer or diaphragm, which in turn can drive a crankshaft. Stirling engines operate...

I've been a bit under the weather recently. I don't think it was the rain at the Calstock Bike Show because I was in the tents and enjoying the company and facilities. But it was there that I noticed that I hard a sore throat and here I am, a fortnight later, having had some days off work and with the tail end of a persistent cold to get rid of. I have the feeling that I've made the most of the rotten weather. First there was the website re-vamp (indoors work) and more recently there's been the re-design of my book covers (more indoors work). Meanwhile, motorsport events and traction engine rallies have been cancelled and farming friends are going to have to pickle their corn crop with acid because it's so damp has little prospect of drying out. But here's a re-vamp of the cover for The Horsepower Whisperer. The jury is still out on the white space around the illustration but for the moment I like it. The drawing will change but I feel good about th...

Just look at this beauty! As a Vintage Thing it's practically over-qualified. This gorgeous 1000cc JAP v-twin powered, wideline Norton Featherbed won best competition bike at this year's Calstock Bike Show and when they fired it up in the tent there were huge grins all round. It sounded like a racing Morgan trike, which isn't surprising since they use the same engine - really crisp and nothing like the "potato, potato, potato" of a Harley V-twin. These engines also went into Brough Superiors and many Shelsley specials. John Bolster used two of them chained together in Bloody Mary and went on to use no less than four of them in the ultimate Bolster hillclimber. However, the resulting 4-litre eight cylinder monster proved too difficult to start. Without electric starters, bumping it was the only way to do it and if one engine didn't catch it just right, the shocks to the chain transmission system would snap the links easily. As for the frame...

I am a landscape person. I have discovered this during the work on my new book covers. The original drawings were all in landscape format so when I came to incorporate them into my cover designs there was a lot of white space above and below. I started off liking the crisp white space but have realised that the original drawings limited the cover design and didn't make the best use of space. I am now trying to become a portrait person. After years of drawing cars and motorbikes that are longer than they are tall, it's difficult to adapt. I'm also having to get used to the idea that there should be plenty of blank illustration where the text can go. But the text should flow naturally around the illustrated action. Because I don't know where the text is going to go, I don't know where action needs to be and where to put the vacant spaces. It's not a question of the chicken and the egg - it's a re-iterative process until you have the chicken and the...

The Wormton Lamb is even more nearly ready than when I last typed this. After some jiggery pokery when the revised textblock didn't upload onto Lightning Source's site, I now have a corrected proof with the right maps in it - just like the one here. But having sexed up my website I think I need to do the same to my book covers. I like the colour co-ordinated go faster stripes (even if some people call them chav stripes) and they look okay on Amazon as thumbnails. But okay isn't good enough. I want them to leap off the page into the face of the beholder and off the shelf into their hands. They should be irresistible. It's a tall order but I reckon that if I'm happy about them then most other people will be, too. Obviously I'm ignoring Cousin Lisa's advice below. However, our policy here at Anarchadia Publishing is on of continuous improvement so that's what I'm up to. And once I've done the new cover for The Wormton Lamb then there'l...

At the Calstock Bike Show it was so wet underfoot even the pedestrians were aqua-planing. Never mind the bikes doing it - if you proceeded at anything above walking pace and braked injudiciously then you lost all steering and down you went in a great plume of water. And it proved incredibly difficult for the girls and boys of Calstock to stop aqua-planing once they'd got a taste for it. Was this show one of the summer's best kept secrets? Pete Low - he of Ginetta G21S and Armstrong MT500 fame already on this blog - told me about this show last year and now that he's moved up to Essex he was determined to come back for this year's event. Last year he got roped in to do the judging. He knew the organiser Malcolm Wright through the Armstrong Rider's forum and positively raved about what a good event this was. As I hadn't seen him since he'd moved up country and decided to go along and see for myself. Calstock is on the River Tamar just below Gunnislake. ...

Calling all Steam Punks! Here is the Murdoch Flyer, a replica of a road locomotive that might pre-date Cap'n Richard Trevithick's engine of 1801. It's been built by a group called the Murdoch boys based in Redruth. Construction was financed by voluntary contributions and grants including sales of a song called "The Ballad of William Murdoch" by Ed Hamilton. As interest in steam punk increases on the back of stories such as Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy, models of steam engines inspired by such speculative fiction are being made all over the world. But here we have the grandaddy of them. Or at the very least, one of the granddaddies. Cornwall can justifiably claim to be the birth place of steam traction. In 2001, we celebrated 200 years of Cornish motoring but the Murdoch Boys who have built this replica of the Flyer point to a tantalising account that Murdoch rode around the Cornish tin mines in a full sized development of the models he...

"Don't put yourself in a double bind. It's better to do something now than wait until you can do it perfectly." This came from Dr Lisa Turner, psycademic and mechanical engineer. It put into words an odd feeling that I'd had for some time. A number of people have mentioned to me the importance of book signings and giving talks to increase your profile as an author and my reaction so far has been "Great idea! But first I need to be a bit better known." Lisa's point is that this is all part of building your reputation. At some stage you need the PR chicken to lay the publicity egg that will eventually hatch into a magnificent soaring eagle and cure you of mixing your metaphors for ever. (Here's hoping anyway.) But that's what Lisa's on about - there's none of this hope business. You get out there and just do it. "Time travel," she says. "Travel forward in time to where you want to be, then come back in time and take...

The good weather that we had for the Boconnoc Steam Fair in July is now nothing but a distant memory. Everyone I spoke to said what a great event it was. In previous years, some have said that the atmosphere was a bit "clicky" and that previously the organisers were only interested in the steam engines but this year there was a good overall balance and no complaints about unfriendliness. There was a fine range of exhibits, too, although decent autojumbles seem to be things of the past. Everybody seemed to be there. If you hadn't caught up with old friends for a while, here they were, polishing their cars or riding on their tractors. The surroundings in the great park are magnificent with the big trees and rolling landscape down to the house and the lake. Some of my neighbours from up the line called Boconnoc Bock O'Nock when they moved down here and those of us who should know better have started saying it, too. It should be said like B'con'c with the ...

Here's another first on the Anarchadia book blog - a photo of the new computer I'm using. I'm not really a computer enthusiast - stuff with engines and wheels gets my motor running - but after all the problems I've had with I.T. I can't fail to be excited with this new grey box with lights on it. For a wireless connection there's a lot of leads going all over the place. I had to call orange 5 or 6 rimes to get connected and after setting all this stuff up in my study upstairs I brought it downstairs to eliminate the connectivity problems. It turned out that it was the browser settings at fault on my new machine. Anyway, those helpful people on the end of the Orange phone line sorted me out. As if one photo of it isn't enough, here's a picture of the screen. Cor, though, it's big, innit? That's so that I can do my graphics more easily. As you may recall, I spent most of my Easter holidays trying to format a word document into a ...

It's mainstream and the accepted thing among motoring fascists to hate these cars so immediately I don't. And having sampled one for myself I can see the merits of an Austin Allegro The Austin Allegro has been voted the Worst Car Ever and I feel compelled to leap to defend this much misunderstood little car. Allegros are far too mainstream to normally feature as a Vintage Thing but if those of us who make the rules can't break 'em, who can? Aye, and there's the rub. Everybody's heard about Allegros, especially after this dubious accolade. They are famous for all the wrong reasons. But at least they are famous. Who ever remembers the Chrysler (later Talbot) Sunbeam? Or the Datsun Cherry? What about all those grey porridge Japanese cars like Datsun Cherrys and Mazda 626s that sank the likes of British Leyland? Okay, so they may have had some help from cars like the Marina, the Maxi and - yes - the Allegro but hundreds of thousands of these ostensibly better...