Today's #Tuesday Tip is a fun writers' block/practise exercise to get you started writing for the day.
A great opening line is essential to hook your readers. It needs to grab their attention and have them asking 'what happens next'. There are tremendous examples throughout history. This website compiled by the publisher Penguin lists some terrific opening lines that have stood the test of time).

I happen to be a big fan of Douglas Adams' opening to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

"The story so far: in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."


For this activity, either take a book off the shelf or search the internet for lists of opening lines.

Copy the first line (or two if needs be). Now close the book and write a short piece starting with that line. The object of this exercise is not to retell the author's original story, rather to run with that opener and see what you can come up with instead.

For a real challenge, pick a book completely at random, or search the internet, and force yourself to use that opening. If that seems too daunting, feel free to flick through a few different books until you find one that sets your imagination on fire.


How did you find the activity? As always feel free to comment here or on social media.


If you are a writer with a tip to share, or fancy writing a fictional interview between you and one of your characters, please feel free to email me.


Until next time,
Paul.

About fifteen years ago, I was asked to be a best man (he repaid the favour last year). One of the most important duties, after not losing the rings, is to deliver the best man's speech after the wedding breakfast. For weeks, I slaved over my address, before finally finishing what I hoped was a suitably touching, amusing and not-too-impolite tribute to my closest friend and his beautiful wife-to-be.
A little under a week before the wedding, I returned home from work, where I had been using my personal laptop (I was just starting and had yet to be assigned my own work laptop). I went to turn it on … and nothing happened. Dead as a doornail! There was no hope of getting it repaired anytime soon, and I would need a new one anyway, so I forked out for a replacement. I successfully removed the hard drive, placed it in an external USB caddy and plugged it into the new machine to find that to my relief, there was nothing wrong with it. Except for one tiny problem. It was encrypted and I had no way of unlocking the files. It's still in a box somewhere, encrypted and useless; I really need to securely dispose of it.
Mercifully I didn't lose too much work, as I'd backed everything up onto CD-ROMs and DVDs (remember those?) but my best man's speech was gone.


The moral of the story? BACK UP YOUR WORK.
Of course I'm not alone. The late, great, Jilly Cooper famously left her only paper copy of the manuscript for 'Riders' on a bus in 1970. She didn't finish rewriting it until 1984.
These days, there is no excuse, given that most writers use a computer. Back in the 1980s floppy discs were the way to go. These were superseded in the 1990s by CD-Roms and USB memory sticks. If you had the resources, an external hard-drive could be used to keep a second copy of all your files.
These were fine, but not much use if your house burned down and both your computer and your backup were destroyed. As internet connectivity became more popular, some writers hit upon the idea of emailing a copy of their work in progress to themselves at the end of each working day. Assuming your email provider didn't disappear overnight, it would be safely sitting on Microsoft, or Yahoo or LycosMail's servers when you resumed work the following day.


But the problem is that's a faff. And you can still lose a day's work if your computer crashes before you've sent your daily backup.
Now, with the ubiquity of online cloud storage which can be set to record incremental backups every couple of minutes, in theory you shouldn't lose a single word.
Hah! That's fine until you realise that you set it up wrong, or your tech giant of choice suffers a major data breach. 


These days, reliance upon one method for backup is not recommended.
What you should aim for is both a physical backup - e.g. an external hard drive or USB memory stick which can protect you if your computer's hard drive should fail - and a remote, off-site backup in case your house catches fire. You could email it to yourself, but these days, cheap or free cloud storage systems are far more convenient.
I'm no computer expert, but I mix and match a couple of systems. I have an external hard drive that backs up my laptop's hard drive completely and also saves all changes to files as I go along. In theory, not only does this protect my valuable data, it also contains everything necessary to completely restore my laptop and its software and settings, should it die an unexpected death.
My off-site back up is two different cloud storage systems.
Now before we go any further, I have no idea if this is a sensible set-up, and take no responsibility if it doesn't work for you, but I've been happily using it for years.
The way it works, is to place one cloud storage system inside another.
I have a Microsoft OneDrive account that gives me 1,000Gb of space. I also have a Google Drive account which gives me 100Gb of space.
The folder that Google Drive syncs to is inside the folder that OneDrive syncs to. Anything that is really important, such as my writing or paperwork etc, is saved into a folder in the Google Drive.
Less important stuff is saved directly into OneDrive.
Everything in the Google Drive is therefore saved to both Google and Microsoft. I routinely access these files on other devices, such as my phone, tablet and an elderly mini-laptop, and the files are accessible whether I log onto Google Drive or OneDrive.
The only caveat, is to be patient when closing down your computer - give both the Google and Microsoft apps time to complete syncing.
You will also need to have at least one device that has both Google Drive and OneDrive running, and to use that device regularly, that way the files inside Google Drive will be synced to both cloud services.


As for the best man's speech - it was lost forever. Unable to rewrite it from scratch, I was able to remember the key points and jokes, and so wrote myself a bullet-pointed list of prompts, stayed off the booze just-in-case, and delivered it off-the-cuff. I'm told it was far more natural and relaxed than if I had read out a pre-prepared speech word-for-word, and I even ad-libbed.
Another bonus was that the one joke I forgot turned out to be the only joke that would have actually caused offence (entirely innocently; I had no idea it touched upon a slightly sore point with the groom's mother going back to childhood - I told the groom the joke later and his response was 'thank God you didn't say that'.)


Do you have any tales of woe, when it comes to losing work? Do you have any tips about how to back-up data safely?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Until next time, keep you, your family and your data safe.
Paul

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Welcome back, and a Happy New Year! This week's #TuesdayTip is a review of a fantastic book I received for Christmas.
Murder Investigation Team - How Killers Are Really Caught - is a brilliant account from recently retired Scotland Yard detective inspector Steven Keogh.
Released in 2022 (and containing data up to March 31st 2020 when things changed somewhat!), this is an in-depth insight into the process of solving murders and taking them to trial.
Although it deals specifically with the Metropolitan (London) Police Service, who divide Greater London into autonomous Murder Investigation Teams (MITs) and thus might be operationally slightly different to the way other police forces deal with such crimes, most of it is generally applicable to other forces in England and Wales.


Unlike some books, which are more like reference guides designed to be dipped into and out of, this can be read cover to cover (which I did over three days). I was really impressed with it, and heartily recommend it to authors writing British Police Procedurals, and non-writers who want to learn more about what really goes on. Keogh's writing style is both personal and personable and very accessible, without feeling patronising for those with previous knowledge. It feels almost as if he has been invited to give a lengthy talk to a room full of interested laypeople. And I mean that as a compliment and endorsement.

Divided into chapters, he first takes us through some of the technicalities of what is murder, how it differs from manslaughter and some of the potential defences or partial defences (ie when you would push for a murder prosecution, when you might decide no offence has been committed, and why a person might be convicted of manslaughter, rather than murder). He also describes the structure of an MIT (it might be subtly different in other forces) and the roles of individuals.

The remainder of the book is broadly chronological, dealing first with the crime scene(s). This includes forensics and what they are specifically looking for. Of particular note is the section on phone data. Keogh is fascinated by this and voluntarily took on this role in many investigations, so he has real expertise.
The next chapter is the longest and concerns the investigation itself, but is sub-divided. He looks at investigative thinking, lines of investigation and the arrest and interview of suspects. In this subsection, he describes how modern interviews are conducted. There is then a section where he answers some of the questions that people regularly ask.
Finally, there is a chapter describing a trial and the aftermath.

Throughout the book, he illustrates his points with anonymised case files. As a mark of respect, he doesn't name any victims or suspects, although afficionados of true crime will probably recognise some of the more well-publicised cases. He also has regular "Myth Busters" and "Did You Know?" facts. All crime fiction writers accept that the relating of an investigation in exacting detail would be rather less exciting than they hope for, but I'm a firm believer in the adage that to break the rules, you need to know the rules first. Knowing how your book needs to differ from real life for dramatic purposes can help you choose what liberties to take, whilst minimising the gnashing of teeth (and smart-arse Amazon reviews) of the armchair detective.

The book is refreshingly honest. Keogh is not afraid to admit to mistakes that he and his team have made, and the learning that came from them, and whilst the book is understandably very pro-police, he admits to failings. He is also quite happy to point the finger where necessary at the impact of government cuts, the sometimes cut-throat and often underhand or callous tactics of defence barristers, and the sometimes inexplicable decisions made by juries. Throughout it, he is clearly in awe of the dignity shown by victims' loved-ones.

My wife, who is not a writer, commented that she is looking forward to reading it next because it looks really interesting. I think she'll thoroughly enjoy it, and so will you.

Steven Keogh runs The Murder Academy website that looks at True Crime and the solving of crimes.