Hello, and welcome to Alex’s Ramblings. I’m new to this blogging lark, and it’s going to take me some time to get used to it, but I’ll do my best. Just don’t expect too much at first.
I’ve been looking around at the various offerings for blogging, and at first considered that the effort involved in learning how to use WordPress was time I’d rather spend writing, so I kept looking. I know a lot of people like it, and I can see why, but I didn’t think I had time for it. The next thing I investigated was Blogger. I tried a few of the templates, but none of them suited me as supplied. I don’t mind ‘getting my hands dirty’ using HTML and CSS, so I investigated the feasibility of changing the style supplied to suit myself.
I managed to get a Blogger blog set up, and published to my own website, but I didn’t have the control I wanted, so I had another look at WordPress, found a minimalist fluid layout that I liked, and tweaked it to match the colours I used for the website.
What you’re reading now is presented as a result of my tweaking. I may tweak further yet, when I have a little time, but for the moment, I’m content.
That’s the techie background, such as it is, but what about me? Who is Alex de Kok? Good question! He’s the pseudonym behind which lurks a lifelong reader. I have fairly wide tastes in my fiction, from Jane Austen and the Brontes, via Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson, to Robert A Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Dick Francis, Dean Koontz, Terry Pratchett, C J Cherryh, Raymond E Feist, David Eddings, Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard and Bernard Cornwell, to name some among many, and in no particular order. All I ask of a novel, or any fiction, is that it keeps me entertained. It might challenge me, it might not, but if it stops entertaining me, I stop reading. There are other writers, other books, and life’s too short to persevere with something I don’t care for.
So far as my own writing is concerned, I have a tendency towards the erotic. I enjoy reading it, but so much of what I read on the internet was simply bad, so much so that I told myself to try, to see if I could do better. Whether I have succeeded or not is for you, the reader, to say. Elsewhere on this page you’ll find a link to my web site and on my site you’ll find some of my work. There will be more in time, I promise, but for the moment there are only a few stories. You will, however, find some links to examples of my work elsewhere and I invite you to explore.
Happy reading!