Why I'm not a fan of anonymity

It seems someone has exposed the blogger called Fleet Street Fox, and sparked one of those perennial debates about anonymity on the web. I never had strong feelings about this until we ran the campaign against development in my nearby village of Wye, a battle documented in my book Saved (now available for pennies on Amazon for Kindle if you’re interested).

We’d no experience of running a blog which is what the website behind save-wye really was. So to begin with we let anyone comment, anonymous or not. Big mistake. Most anonymous comments were OK but some were simply horrible. Bad-tempered, personal attacks that we had no intention of carrying. So we had to spend hours moderating each and every incoming comment to make sure it was acceptable.

Still, they came in, and in the end I banned them altogether. You can read the story in the extract from Saved below. I wish I’d banned them from the beginning to be honest. Anonymity encouraged the worst in some people. We even had one chap arguing with himself wearing three hats, two of them fictitious. It was ridiculous and just plain nasty on occasion.

What I learned about anonymity was this. Yes, there are occasions when it’s required because of someone’s position. But that’s rare. Most people stay anonymous because they don’t want their names known. A few will use this to say things they’d never dream of uttering if their identity was known. All round it’s just a bad thing which is why I never do anything anonymously on the web.

Feel free to comment though - but with a real name please. Now to the extract…

By the beginning of June The Future Group’s planning unit had settled into ‘engagement’ with anyone who would talk to it. We were never included naturally, though most of their reports quickly found their way to us. Diana Pound, she of the ‘forming, performing, storming’ theory, was closely involved in the discussions, many of which involved Ashford’s planning department under its head Richard Alderton. Much of the talk was about planning jargon which we failed to understand, though we were genuinely pleased to learn that the group was using material we produced on save-wye as the basis for their questions. This was exactly why we existed: to uncover information others could use to their advantage.

On June 9th Justin ran a story about an e-mail despatched by Alderton to every Ashford councillor after each of them had been contacted by Ben Moorhead. The letter repeated the council’s position that there was currently ‘no specific proposals of any sort’ for Wye and advised members of the planning committee that they should express no specific views, to the Future Group or Imperial, until the ‘relevant information’ was available. It was a fairly routine story, and its main point was an important one. Alderton, who wasn’t criticised personally in any way, may have been interpreting current local authority practice in offering such advice. But where did this leave Paul Clokie, leader of the council, ex-officio member of the planning committee, and signatory to the two concordats, both of which pledged support to Imperial? Why he was allowed to be partial when everyone else was told to keep their mouths shut?

For Diana Pound this rather anodyne piece proved the breaking point. She went on the site using the pseudonym Danny M and stormed…

I wish you two would find out more about how the planning system and local authorities work – you guys seem able to read the most suspicious things into everyday happenings and I get concerned about the worry and anxiety this causes to other people in the community.

As well as the hostility it generates towards the planning process and professionals concerned… Come on guys – bone up on planning procedure and the way councils have to work under the 2000 and the 2004 acts and then be a bit more careful and responsible about deciding whether or not something is suspicious.

All of this happened on a beautiful Saturday morning when I’d been hoping to mow the lawn. I was bemused by her remarks. Firstly because she made them pseudonymously, though it was clear to us who she really was. But mostly because she had missed the point of the story altogether. This was nothing to do with the acts she cited. It was a conflict between common council practice over planning issues and the highly uncommon, if not unique, decision of Paul Clokie to sign the concordat. She was also deeply wrong about our generating ‘hostility’ among the professionals. When Wye Park was over both of us had the chance to speak to people like Richard Alderton off the battlefield as it were. Council officials were extraordinarily nice to us considering how rough a ride we’d given them. Many were fascinated by a campaign that was quite unlike anything they’d experienced before, and several confessed they missed the site, which they’d come to visit ever day. 

Bemusement did not describe Justin’s condition when he saw the comment. Journalists are accustomed to being told their work is inaccurate. Cooling was whispering the selfsame thing to anyone who would listen at this time. Sometimes reporters do get things wrong. We had only one complaint of inaccuracy throughout the entire life of save-wye, from Pete Raine, over a story I would have been happy to correct if he would only clarify his rather vague complaint, something he declined to do. I’m sure we got more wrong than that, and that we interpreted events in ways we now regretted. Journalism is written without the benefit of hindsight. 

But on this occasion Justin was bang on the mark, and naturally determined both to say so and identify Diana as the author along the way. We never discussed this. I had qualms when I saw what he’d done but by then it was too late. People who commented pseudonymously undoubtedly felt they had the right to keep their identity hidden. We’d never exposed anyone before. Yet anonymity could work against us. Here was the Future Group’s own planning expert using a false name to accuse us, wrongly, of an inaccuracy. It was unacceptable behaviour, and it got unacceptable behaviour in return. 

Justin replied…

I’m sorry, Diana, but it is not David and I that need to ‘bone’ up on planning law it is, rather surprisingly given your self-appointed role acting on behalf of WFG in drawing up the village’s ‘response’, you who needs to get out the planning revision books.

The gagging of local councillors across the UK is a recent phenomenon and has nothing to do with any of the revisions to the Local Government Act. It has nothing to do with declaring a pecuniary or non-pecuniary interest, something which is enshrined in law.

As I said in the original piece, which you seem to have failed to notice, it is all to do with councillors somehow holding what are described as ‘pre-determined’ views on potential applications. This was drawn up in John Prescott’s infamous Code of Conduct for councillors and it has no standing in law. It is enforced by the Standards Board for England and Wales and I am happy to note that many councillors across Britain are openly defying this anti-democratic nonsense.

I’m happy to point you in the right direction if you are having difficulties with this. Given your role, it is important that you don’t start negotiating with Ashford from a position of weakness.

Diana Pound’s firm belief in the importance of dialogue and conflict resolution was about to go out of the window, and my lawn would stay unmowed. She came back with a wholesale onslaught on save-wye itself, one that could only, I felt, reflect what she personally thought of us. 

Your stance is losing or has lost influence with some of the great and good who are now tending to dismiss your site and what you say as inaccurate and misinformed (though they still check it out). It is undermining the value of working with the planning/environmental decision making system to protect the village (if ICL do proceed it is via this system that the argument will be won) - and to win this way we need people to believe the system can work in our interests and it is worth putting resources towards that. And your site is causing others in the community to feel defeated and disempowered before we have even really got into the fight and they are giving up - and there is lots that can and must be done.

Justin was incandescent. He’d been spending weeks patiently working on contacts and sources inside this entire project, people who were slowly leaking us material, but in ways where we had to be very guarded about its origins in order to protect their identity. This was, always, the problem with journalism at the very edge; it was often impossible to prove what you were saying was true. He wrote back…

I’m afraid to say that you are as misinformed about the ‘great and the good’ as you are about planning procedure. Where do you think we get this stuff from? Thin air? Who do you think talks to us? If the ‘great and the good’ are losing interest then I find it strange indeed that we regularly get calls from people at the heart of this process responding to stories we have written and giving us information and new ideas. Who have I been talking to all this time, I ask myself? Martians?

I had a different concern though. What if Diana was right? What if our aggressive approach really was making the community feel ‘defeated and disempowered’? No-one I talked to felt that way. They may have believed we went a bit over the top from time to time, but that was one of the strengths of the site. We were aggressive, we were funny, we personalised stories and didn’t pull any punches. Was I suffering from the curse of all ambitious journalists, over-sophistication? Did the real audience, the average villager of Wye, feel differently about us?

There was only one way to find out. While Diana and Justin hissed and spat in the comments column I put together a very straightforward story that repeated her accusations then added, ‘We are keen to know if this is the general opinion in Wye. The site is a lot of work frankly and if it seen to be a bad thing it should stop. You can express your opinions in the comments below and in a poll which will be available shortly.’

It was now midday and the site was humming. We’d carried polls before. This one would simply tell us whether many people agreed that we were damaging the cause. If that was the case, I would have had no hesitation in closing the site. Sometimes journalists can become distanced from their public. A reality check from time to time was no bad idea. The early comments we got were utterly one-sided… in our favour. The poll was scarcely under way when Diana was back on the e-mail again in an entirely different mood, contrite, complaining about the stress she’d been under, pleading for everything she’d said to be taken down immediately. In a way I think she genuinely felt we had bullied her into this position. Her original statement that we were damaging the Wye cause and making the community feel ‘defeated and disempowered’ seemed to have slipped her memory.

I was fed up with the whole thing. I killed the new story and the poll, but turned down her request to remove the original comments. Plenty of people had seen them by that stage and if I took them off someone was bound to say this was censorship on our part. Justin and the Two Connies thought I’d been overly kind, and that Diana should have been left to deal with the consequences of the quite serious accusations she made. Looking back I realise they were right. Diana Pound genuinely believed what she said and had a right to say it. Others ought to have had the right to respond with their views. I was weak in falling victim to a spot of emotional blackmail. But the entire episode left a nasty taste in the mouth. The journalism of the site, our efforts to disclose what truths we could find about Imperial’s plans for the village, had never felt in better shape. We had been brought down by our someone else’s words, not our own. 

From this point on I would ban all anonymous comments, something I should have done from the very start. They created unnecessary work and stress, and allowed people who didn’t have the courage to say nasty things in public the ability to utter them from behind a mask. Even so the wider remit – to generate different viewpoints and encourage debate – still felt out of kilter somehow. 

Three steps to revision heaven (kind of)

This is a preview of a talk on revision I’ll be giving at Craftfest/Thrillerfest in New York in July.

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Is an iPad a laptop replacement?

Two years ago, the last time I tried this test, the answer was a definite no. I took the iPad and the iPad alone on a brief trip to the Helsinki Book Fair. Couldn’t write on it properly. Couldn’t see web sites that had Flash. Couldn’t handle some incoming work queries that involved looking at big Word files.

This week I headed off on another trip and tried again. Result? A turnaround I think. I took the new iPad 3 and Kensington’s Keyfolio Expert keyboard case and cover. And, bar a few omissions which we’ll come to, I managed very well.

iPad with Kensington Keyfolio Expert keyboard case

The key, I think, lies in the software rather than anything Apple have done. Apple’s Pages app is still the dog it was two years ago. But a lot of other stuff has come along. Evernote works pretty well (except that on the iPad it mysteriously lacks stacks, which allows you to bundle notebooks into ‘folders’). There are several excellent writing apps around, and good Dropbox integration. And when it comes to dealing with pdfs, something that was not good last time around, there are excellent markup apps like Remarks and Notability that are very much like putting pen to paper.

And there’s the Storyist app which, until Scrivener’s iPad app turns up, is the app of choice for anyone putting together a book project. Very good it is too, and able to export both text and rtf files of anything — from writing to index cards and research — you care to put in there, as well as sync up with Storyist’s desktop app on the Mac.

I lugged the iPad around for research, working in cafes and bars, running up notes and even taking the occasional picture. After three days I had a pile of research stored in Storyist, and I’d written three thousand words. The Kensington keyboard is excellent and the sticky pad system used on the case means you can put the iPad in portrait mode for typing too.

I had a normal case for the iPad as well. For going walkabout I used this and typed on screen. Since the Kensington is a Bluetooth keyboard you can use that while the iPad is in another case too. Which is what I did when I felt lazy back in the room in between outings — leaned the old case on top of the Kensington and typed away. For more sustained bursts though I simply put the iPad in the Kensington case and used it like a little laptop or netbook.

Here are some of the delights…

• I took along one power adapter, the iPad’s, and used that to charge my Android phone and my Sony camera. No more massive power blocks or tangles of long leads. I could have charged the Kensington keyboard through this too if needed, but it can work for weeks between charges anyway.
• I could type and revise in British Airways economy without a problem.
• Storyist’s Dropbox sync feature meant that all my work was backed up so it would still be there if the iPad broke or was stolen. And I could open it in the desktop app when I got back today and everything was there. One tip though — use the same font on both Mac and iPad otherwise everything defaults to Helvetica. I found Optima worked fine and looks great on the new iPad retina screen.

Here’s what’s still annoying. 

• A browser that can handle forms. Safari still chokes on some for me at times.
• The absence of Flash on the iPad still causes problems, though fewer than there used to be — the BBC seem to be using video without Flash a lot these days. Two years ago the lack of Flash drove me nuts. Now it’s more a minor nuisance.
• The standard iPad mail app isn’t wonderful with Gmail — searching for old mail is a pain. Google’s own GMail app is OK and does search back mail. But it doesn’t integrate with a lot of other apps (Storyist can’t send text through it, for example, nor could I find an easy way to attach documents to it outside a few set folders). 
• Boy do we need a proper Word editing app, both on iPad and Android. By that I mean one that can handle and edit track changes and comments. It’s a huge omission. Come on, Microsoft. You’re the guys to supply it. So….?

It’s a lot better all round. Here’s what I’d really like next though: an integrated iPad keyboard combination that follows the form of the Transformer Prime. In other words there’s a separate iPad but it attaches to a keyboard too to form a solid netbook-style device. Like the Prime, the keyboard comes with its own substantial battery and can power and charge the iPad. Like this, only as an iPad, not Android.

Give it the iPad’s retina screen and I’m done. Now that I’d buy like a shot. 

Two other Mac novel-writing apps you may have missed

This morning’s post about Storyist seemed to generate an amazing amount of interest. A lot of it came from Mac users who’d never heard of the software. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve grown into the habit of trying, and usually buying, pretty much everything that comes on the market in my field of work. Call it a hobby. Or a mild obsession. I’m trying to lose it, honestly.

But since Storyist was a surprise to lots of people I should mention two other Mac novel-writing apps that have caught my eye over the years (though there are doubtless more out there if you look).

The first is Storymill which is $49.95. I first bought this ages ago when it was called something like Avenir I believe. Then Mariner came along and took it into their fold. Storymill is an attractive, easy-to-use piece of software that looks like this.  

You’ll notice there’s a full version of Treasure Island in Storymill format in the Mariner download area, a very good idea and one you should look at if you’re considering buying. 

The app follows the standard format of separating out scenes. But it stores the scenes, all of them, in a separate folder. You then drag them into the order you want into chapter folders. There are also places for characters, research tasks and locations too. You can annotate and take snapshots of scenes before revising them. 

A unique aspect to Storymill is that it comes with a timeline function, allowing you to plot out scenes across a specific time period. Like this…

It’s fiendishly clever. So clever I don’t quite get the hang of it if I’m honest, though I’m sure that’s my fault entirely. If you’re into timelines I imagine it’s wonderful. But I don’t want a timeline function. Tagging something somewhere with a date and time as a note is enough for me.

I like Storymill. It’s well thought-out and easy to learn. I didn’t go much for the very basic full screen option which doesn’t play well on a 27-inch iMac (though may be fine on something smaller). I also found I started to get a bit annoyed by having the scenes and chapters separated out, especially when you started to have a lot of scenes. Yes, they’re together when you drag them into the corresponding chapter. But you still end up with a scenes folder full of the things too which I found distracting. There’s currently no mobi or epub export either (though you can export as Word and use something else of course). This is in the works apparently, along with an iPad app.

So while I was quite taken with Storymill I never got very far with it. You may feel differently.

The second app I ought to mention predates even Scrivener, and that’s Ulysses (now available in the app store for $19.99 which is a lot less than I paid for it when it first came out).

Ulysses was the first writing app I encountered that came up with the brilliant idea of separating out a book into discrete scenes and chapters, not a single chunk of text. That was an eye-opener for me. Brilliant. Unfortunately not a lot else was, for me anyway. Ulysses seemed dedicated to rewriting the way we worked. And you had to go along with it.

One rule was that formatting was bad — all text was plain text. You couldn’t write italics because that was distracting. The fact I had to write italics from time to time, since I use foreign words, was irrelevant. If I wanted to do that I had to set up some kind of code to force italics or something… it was all so horrendous I soon gave up because screaming at a computer is not good for your state of mind.

Worse too was how Ulysses handled scenes. Like Storymill they stayed separate until grouped together, but this time the grouping bit was nothing a simple as a plain chapter folder. To gain an insight into how Ulysses offers to handle the business of tying scenes together you could pluck up the courage to watch Episode 5 in the screencasts here. If you’ve got any clue what the hell is going on — and why this level of complexity is needed — you’re way ahead of me. One result though is you cannot, as far as I can work out view your book as consecutive text across scenes and chapters (what Scrivener calls Scrivening and I call ‘seeing it as a book’). 

I did put up a couple of pleas on the Ulysses forums explaining why I really needed dreadful things like italics from time to time. But it was no good. I was just plain wrong in wanting what I wanted and one of the commentards there declared I was just plain old and stupid even to crave such things. So I drifted off.

Shame really. This is a very clever piece of software in many ways. The full screen mode is quite amazing and will let you view your work in a different font to the usual one — which I liked a lot. There’s still a demo on the website if you’re curious. Have fun — but remember to walk away if you start screaming.

Incidentally the same people have a neat writing app for the iPad, Daedalus (which I’ve bought, naturally). It does things differently too, but doesn’t work with Ulysses as far as I can see. I haven’t found a use for it yet but it does look rather good. One day maybe…

I’m not buying any more writing apps in the near future by the way. So this thread ends here.

Storyist - a novel-writing app for Mac and iPad

I’ve been a Scrivener user almost since the software came out, and will, I suspect, remain so for the rest of my working days. Once you’ve mastered this extraordinary piece of software it’s difficult to imagine working in anything else. But here’s the truth. Not everyone likes or gets Scrivener. From time to time at book events I get someone come up to me and say, ’ I tried that and it’s just too complicated.’ Or, ‘I don’t like writing in bits.’

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