Book review: Lie With Me by Sabine Durrant

This was one of my holiday reads, and in that regard it's absolutely perfect: just the thing to take with you for a few hours spent on the beach. (I picked up a humdinger of a mosquito bite, but I can't blame the book for that).
The story is straightforward enough: Paul Morris, an author who's light faded after his first novel, finds himself in need of someone new to sponge from. He hooks up with Alice, a woman he barely remembers from his university days, and begins the rather tawdry process of ingratiating himself so deeply into her affections that she'll let him move into her house. (Having had to leave his rent-free digs, Paul is living with his mother).


Part of this plan involves romancing Alice during the yearly vacation she takes with friends and family on the island of Pyros.
Unfortunately, Paul doesn't realise that many of Alice's friends remember him from the last time they met on Pyros ten years ago, the same time that a fourteen-year-old girl vanished from a house close to where they were staying…
Continue reading “Book review: Lie With Me by Sabine Durrant”

Ulysses switches to paid subscriptions… Faeries wither and die all over the internet

I rarely cover tech stories, but Ulysses is used by so many writers (myself included) I thought it was worth chatting about what is becoming an increasingly popular revenue model for software developers.

You can find the announcement and pricing on the Soulmen website, but the short version is that you can no longer buy Ulysses as a one-off payment; you now pay every month/year if you want to keep on using it.

Realising this won't sit well with their use base, software companies often write a tome of a blog article explaining why this is necessary and why it is good for their customers. You can pretty much skip over whatever they write because it always boils down to two points: Continue reading “Ulysses switches to paid subscriptions… Faeries wither and die all over the internet”