15 Years of Typos - an internet lifetime?

 It's been a while since I published anything on this blog, but I haven't been idle.  Some of you may recall I mentioned a (long) while back that I write for the UK satirical website NewsBiscuit.  NewsBiscuit was founded over fourteen years ago by British TV comedic scriptwriter and author John O'Farrell, who was one of the main scriptwriters on the original Spitting Image TV series a lifetime ago.

Time indeed passes and I now not only contribute to the website with satirical and comedic offerings but also spend a week every eight or so weeks as duty editor, selecting and preparing articles for publication on NewsBiscuit.  As the website provides new material every day, 365 days of the year, this is sometimes a challenging but rewarding task.

Anyway, back in the start of lockdown one of the senior editors suggested that it might be worth looking at producing an anthology of some of the best articles published over the lifetime of NewsBiscuit.  As one contributor noted recently, internet years are like dog years so to still be around publishing original material for nearly fifteen years is an achievement.  Anyway I threw my hat in the ring and shortly afterwards four other editors came on board.

Over the duration of NewsBiscuit it has published literally tens of thousands of submissions especially when you consider the site publishes one-line tickers as well.  So we had the unenviable task of wading through those, but not before we'd requested permission to use material from contributors.  Unlike other websites of a similar ilk, one of NewsBiscuit's unique selling points is that the writer retains full rights to their material - in essence they loan it to us - so we couldn't use anything that belonged to anyone who didn't reply to our request.

Once we had a list of agreed writers to cull stories and tickers from a bit of crude data mining with our database revealed how many submissions each writer had had published over the years - it wasn't perfect but it gave us a starting point.  Writers were allocated to editors for selecting articles and we worked on a percentage value that differentiated between the prolific big hitters and the infrequent writers, with the prolific group getting a smaller percentage allocation to avoid swamping  the book with prolific authors.

Once editors had selected and trimmed articles they allocated them to genres such as World News, UK News, Science and Technology, Faith and quite a few more.  We sorted and arranged the submissions into what we felt was a logical order, continuing to edit and tidy them up and then the sections were rotated again for sense checking.  More tidying up and the book started to take shape and, because I have previous in this area, I undertook the formatting for the eBook and paperback versions.

Meanwhile a couple of the editors started looking for suitable charities to receive any royalties from the sales.  From the outset we agreed to make this a charity affair and all of the eventual contributors, all 80+ of them, agreed up front to waive any fees despite the fact we hadn't identified a charity at that point.  We approached national and international charities and at best received an out of office message.  Most didn't respond at all despite we were offering to donate all royalties without deductions.  However we did find two very deserving charities that did return our calls - the award-winning mentoring charity and support network Arts Emergency (arts-emergency.org) and English Pen (englishpen.org), one of the world's oldest human rights organisations that champions the freedom to write and read around the world.  

One of the editors is a professional proof-reader so we had him working flat out correcting misspellings and grammatical howlers while the wife of one of the other editors also proof-read the first draft and provided valuable feedback.  I formatted the paperback, ordered proof copies and distributed.  There were still issues that the six of us trapped including my choice of margins and the book was altered.  On December the first it was released.

With over 500 short comedic stories and several hundred one-line gags we have produced a very professional and fun to read anthology.  With the Christmas period looming this might just be the stocking filler you need, or the book you want to buy for yourself.  The book is titled 15 Years of Typos and is currently only available on Amazon (UK link provided - I'm sure Amazon will direct you to the best local version of their website).  

Save yourself a headache - order copies for friends and family.

Four books on free promotion

Amazon are running a free promotion on four of my books in the next week - Hotel California, Assassin, The Journeymen and Parallel Lives.

Make a bookmark and download them while they are free.

Hotel California is the story behind where celebrities go after they 'die', where they retire to.  Inspired by the song by the Eagles it follows the trail of a British punk rocker who retires to the remote location and a life of luxury after faking his death in LA but realises he has made a mistake.  He teams up with an octogenarian rocker called Elvis who has spent the last forty years plus scheming to escape from his self imposed prison, but they'll need the help of a British music journalist, Aiden, to help them escape.

Assassin is a dystopian novel set in an England in the near future.  Democracy has been suspended, ties with Europe and the US have been severed and it follows the extraction to safety of a scientist hiding from the government agents by a man known as the Assassin - a gun for hire to almost anyone but the people who made him what he is - the congress, which is the name of the governing body of the country in the book.  Worth reading now as the sequel is in progress as I type.

The Journeymen is the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories.  Don't understand how your boss got the job? Can't stop shaking your head at the antics of the people at the top?  The Journeymen might just provide you with answers to this and many other questions.  It's a thriller too, and you'll be hanging on by the seat of your pants.

Parallel Lives is my first novel, written a long time ago.  It's science fiction and a thriller.  Some of the Sci-fi stuff is now real stuff such is the pace of change but it has a sneaky twist that many readers miss altogether.  See if you can spot it (hint - it has a reference to a character that later appeared in Hotel California)

Enjoy.

Assassin is on countdown in the US

Assassin, a dystopian look at a future UK, is on a countdown deal in the Amazon US store for about a week, currently retailing at $0.99.

The assassin in the book is a literal gun for hire, who will kill for anyone with the means as long as they aren't part of the congress - lower case techie 'c' deliberate.  The congress are what replaced the duly elected government to keep the lid on terrorism, for the good of the people and with the intention to revert to democracy when the time is right.  This is set in the relatively near future - it recalls the famous fire of Chester in 2035 so can't be that far in the future, right?

John, the assassin, is holed up with a beach bum in Cornwall during the mother of all storms and in a drunken lapse reveals his occupation to the beach bum.   To allay his fears he tells the tale of how he became the man he is, how he was incarcerated by congress agents after surviving the worst terrorist atrocity on mainland UK in living history, how he was isolated and learned of his families demise at the hands of a terrorist known only as Morris, who hides from the congress in the notionally independent nation of Wales.

However all is not quite as it seems.  There are congress agents staking out the beach accomodation and John has to arrange an escape for himself and his new friend, who turns out to have his own secrets.

The book is action packed and describes a UK I once thought we were heading towards a few years ago.  Interestingly I have started work on the sequel and, in the time honoured fashion of sequels I've built up the backstory, drawing from the original book and adding other events that have happened.  The pandemic and the impact on world economies plays a  part in that storyline, set around 2060ish, so look out for hat before the end of the year.

In the meantime, if you are an Amazon.com customer, why not pick up a copy of Assassin while it is on countdown and find out what is in store for the UK after Boris has finished with it?

Of course, for anyone with Amazon Prime or access to the Kindle Library you can download Assassin or any of my eight other books for free as part of your membership

The Journeymen is on Countdown offer

My second novel, The Journeymen, is on countdown offer at Amazon for a few days (until the 26th April).  This novel should ring a few bells with those of you who believe you've been unfairly passed over by inferior colleagues or that some people seem to have a disproportionate amount of good luck.  In fact, it is a conspiracy theorists book of choice.

Unlike most conspiracy theories this doesn't just make unsubstantiated links between what we see and hear and draw conclusions that many think are outrageous - it provides an entirely fabricated backstory to hand the lot off.

OK, bit of background might help you here.  We're not the only planet that has created civilisations, or indeed created the means to destroy itself many times over. Part of the focus in this book is one such planet approximately 9 light years away that has been there, done that, destroyed the Tee shirt.  In the book it is going through a renaissance following a period, a long time ago, when war nearly destroyed the planet and everything on it.  Critically the human stock, who are genetically very similar to us guys and gals, has depleted its genetic diversity to the point that the race is slowly dying out.  

Before the terrible wars that created this situation the planet had developed technology that allowed easy space travel over immense distances and had populated a planet nine light years away (coincidence? I don't think so).  They don't have the technology they had so embark on an intergenerational journey to what we call home, only to find things have changed a bit.  These guys, by the way, are the Journeymen.  A subset of them are a group that becomes sworn enemies, they are known as the Sons of Arlgon, nowadays referred to as the Sons.

The main problem when they got here, apart from the total loss of the technology they were hoping to harness to return with suitable DNA samples is that the original Journeymen have embedded (and bedded) the original humanoids on our home planet.  Luckily for the project, but arguably not for most us, many had kept to their own kind, but many had also bred with the indigenous population.  This resulted in the people discovered on arrival as the Colonists (AKA original Journeymen) and Interbreds (AKA IBs, also known as you and me, in the main).  

The Journeymen resolve to protect the Colonists, who generally had managed to secure positions of power and authority, by forming the second tier of authority - the Civil Servants and captains of industry, defending, protecting and directing the Colonists through the generations while the technology necessary to capture DNA and send it through space is developed from an extremely poor starting position.  And you thought HS2 was challenging.

The book starts, though, in the present day when a space vehicle engineer, Tom Roberts, presents a novel invention to help make long term space travel possible.  He is attacked, possibly by Sons who will do anything to thwart their sworn enemies, and rescued by a pair of Journeymen who happen to have their own agenda.  Tom is effectively imprisoned and ultimately framed for the murder of an ex colleague.  He escapes and through a series of adventures helped by a former lover and a reluctant senior Son seeks to secure his freedom.  The book interleaves Tom's story with the original Journeymen story, so aspects and subtleties of the history are revealed throughout the novel.

Back to my original statement about being passed over by less capable colleagues - and I bet you have - they were almost certainly either Journeymen being propelled to a position of power to better protect the Colonists in theoretical power.  Don't take it personally and don't try to stop it - none of us have that much power.

Obviously, if you have access to Kindle Unlimited then this book and its sequel, Journeymen II: Day of Reckoning, are free.  Otherwise, if this sounds like your kind of lockdown reading then why not grab a copy while it is price reduced?

Hotel California is free on the 8th & 9th May

Hotel California is free for two days only,8th & 9th May Amazon Standard Time about 08:00 onwards.

The book is a fast paced adventure, detective and, I'll admit, slightly speculative novel.  it's not based on the song by the Eagles, but I freely admit it was inspired by the song.  There's no dark desert highway, nor any mention of a mission bell either, come to think of it.  

It does have references to people who you may consider to be dead - they almost certainly are not around anymore and the characters described might just have a passing resemblance to them - you know, the likes of Elvis, for example.

The book isn't about a character named Elvis.  It's about a UK punk rock come reality TV star Ricky Maggot who wants to escape the world of celebrity (don't we all) and books a one-way ticket to a South sea island nicknamed in the music industry as Hotel California.  He soon realises he's made a massive mistake and teams up with the eponymous Elvis, who realised the same thing forty years earlier, and sets about trying to escape.  Add a couple of Russian gangsters who are hiding from their previous mafia life, a resort manager without a conscience, a killer on the payroll and a music journalist who asks just too many questions and you have a book that you'll storm through in a couple of days, especially if you are on lockdown.

It's on free for one day only so bookmark it and make sure you take advantage.

Obviously, if you have access to Kindle Unlimited then you can download this book for free anytime.  But for those who haven't got access to that, or as Prime members have already used up their monthly allowance, then this promotion is an affordable way to add it to your library.  Put the date in your diary.
My other eight books are also available for free to Kindle Unlimited members and you can access links to them here.

Skin is on Countdown promotion starting 14th April

Skin is going on an  Amazon countdown deal starting 14th April - not sure which time zone, probably 8 o'clock in the morning somewhere on the West Coast of the US, and runs to the 21st.  The way the countdown deals work is that the normal selling price for the book is discounted, with a bigger discount at the beginning of the promotion getting less of a discount the longer you leave it.

So why Skin?  Well, it is a book based in the near future with elements stuck firmly in events of the second Gulf War.  There are flashbacks to a failed special ops mission just inside Iraq on the days running up to the shock and awe phase of that war that had unresolved questions for one person in particular, Rory Callum.  Rory was engineering support on a Chinook that crashed on that mission and was the only member of the mission to make it out of Iraq alive, however years later there are many important details of his journey back to Kuwait unresolved, while other parts of the mission are on an endless loop every time he sleeps.

In the book's present, our future, Rory is now working on the fringes of legality, acting as an industrial spy being inserted into manufacturing companies at a low level, usually, and sneaking out details of next year's big product.  This time he's inserted into a local manufacturer that has developed something really big, life changing and worth a lot of money to the right investors.  It's a development being watched all the way up to the top, with the British Prime Minister of the day indulging in some sneaky insider dealing - no, not Boris, a later replacement for him further down the line.

But parts of Rory's past start to catch up with him as he carries on his job, working for the enigmatic Max and the sexually disturbed and violently dangerous Melinda and Rory finds himself facing up to a madman called Fabin, who has an ex-Royal Marine killer to assist him.

The title refers to the process Rory is spying on - a method to create artificial skin that was just science fiction when I wrote the book but is now looking like it will hit the mainstream in some form in the near future.  There are parts of the book that are still science fiction, or at least technically difficult and improbable at the moment, but I'll leave you to decide which parts are in which compartment.

There's a lot of action in this book, from pitched battles in Iraq to manhunts in London in the book's present day.  It's a long book, but thanks to the pace you will race through it running from battle to battle, past to present as the story and, critically, Rory's missing memories, are revealed.

Obviously, if you have access to Kindle Unlimited then you can download this book for free anytime.  But for those who haven't got access to that, or as Prime members have already used up their monthly allowance, then this promotion is an affordable way to add it to your laibrary.  Put the date in your diary.

My other eight books are also available for free to Kindle Unlimited members and you can access links to them here.

Project: Evil – The Coronavirus Meeting

‘Why are we all sat two metres apart?’ asked O’Feld, fiddling impatiently with his revolver.  Daw sighed.

‘It’s the Government directive.  To slow down the spread of Coronavirus everybody has to keep a social distance between themselves and everyone else.  It’s playing havoc with the Thugs, grade three on kill missions,’ he said.

‘Sod the Government directive, I want a group hug,’ said O’Feld, holding his arms up, not securing any enthusiasm.  Everybody remembered the last time he’d offered a group hug and it turned out to be a body double wearing a suicide vest.

‘I’ll pass,’ said Daw, tapping his notepad with his pen.  Silence hung in the air as everyone watched O’Feld’s reaction, relaxing when he merely shot a henchman delivering sandwiches to the boardroom.

‘He looked like he hadn’t washed his hands properly,’ explained O’Feld, tucking into the beef and horseradish.  ‘Brown bread, my favourite,’ he added.  ‘So, why the emergency?’ he asked.  Brian sat up as he’d been detailed by Daw to present the technical briefing, which consisted of five minutes on Wikipedia and ten on the BBC website.

‘It’s a pandemic, sweeping across the world, killing people left, right and centre,’ said Brian.  O’Feld looked interested, then a cloud crossed his face.  ‘It is one of ours, isn’t it?’ he asked in his Irish brogue, levelling the revolver at Brian.  Brian flushed, then washed his hands.  As he always did whenever he shit himself.

‘Well, yes, I’m working on a biological weapon, but you always said you wanted it deployed from space and since we lost our rocket capability it’s been on hold.  I’ve been concentrating on a simpler pocket-sized thermo-nuclear weapon system recently, tapping his breast pocket.  ‘Oops,’ he said, pulling the device out and stopping the countdown timer.  O’Feld sneered.

‘So, which one is responsible?’ he asked.  ‘Brass Digit?’

‘Gold Digit,’ sighed Daw scribbling on his pad.

‘Or that nippleless bastard Scaramouche?’ asked O’Feld, reeling off his direct competitors, not that anyone in the room would suggest any of them was competition for O’Feld.  Not waiting for Brian to answer he added, ‘Or is it Doktor Negativ up to his old tricks again?’   Brian shook his head.  

‘It started in China,’ he explained.

‘Who did it?’ asked O’Feld, only to be interrupted by the Diversity Officer.

‘Mr O’Feld, that’s a terrible racial stereotype,’ she said.  ‘You’re capable of much better racial stereotypes.’  O’Feld shrugged his shoulders and looked back at Brian, who continued his explanation.

‘It appears it is just a random mutation of an existing coronavirus existing in the animal kingdom that has crossed the species line and is infecting humans,’ he said, breathing in for the big spiel.

‘Enough of the science talk already,’ said O’Feld, ‘how does this affect our business?’  The catering manager looked up eagerly.

‘Half of the staff are self isolating, so my budget is going to look pretty good next month,’ he said.  The finance manager looked at Brian.


‘How is this affecting our staff levels?’ he asked.

‘Well, here in Basildon there is a lot of absenteeism at the moment,’ he confirmed, adding, ‘and the hookers and the thugs have agreed to work from home for the foreseeable.  There’s no reports that it has reached our uninhabited island in the South Seas yet, but I’m concerned that if it does it’ll sweep through the uninhabitants like a dose of salts,’ said Brian.  The meeting fell silent as the members considered the slave labour uninhabitant population for approximately three seconds.

‘Can they be replaced?’ asked O’Feld. Daw nodded.

‘That’s why you pay me the big bucks to be your HR director,’ he said.  O’Feld glowered.

‘I pay you?’ he asked.  The finance director leaned across the table.

‘Don’t worry, his salary is tax deductable.’

‘I pay tax?’ asked O’Feld, panic rising in everyone downwind of his revolver barrel.

‘Not so much pay as claim State benefits,’ explained the finance director, defusing the situation and, critically, the C4 bomb O’Feld had brought out of his bag.  He put the detonator to one side while O’Feld turned his attention back to Brian.

‘So, what’s the impact on the business?’ he asked Brian.

‘Well, it’s pretty much business as usual.  The protection racket’s going well, especially as we take PayPal now.  We’ve just issued social distancing guidance for thugs smashing up premises behind on their payments,’ he explained, ‘although the hookers are struggling to comply.  

‘And everyone is washing their hands,’ he added.

‘To eradicate the virus?’ asked O’Feld.

‘Oh, er, yes, that as well.  But mainly for corporate plausible deniability,’ he explained.

‘What about the people who work here?’ O’Feld asked.  The finance director was all over this.

‘We can claim 80% of our employees’ salaries from the Government if we furlough them,’ he said.

‘We pay employees? This gets worse by the minute,’ said O’Feld, his head in his hands while he contemplated whose head he’d prefer to be holding.  The finance director’s head looked favourite for leaving his shoulders.

‘Of course not, we feed them, clothe them, kill them when we’ve had enough of them.  But we’ve got a wonderful forgery department that can produce any amount of documents pretending to pay them,’ said the finance director, feeling his head was a little more secure.  Brian pitched in, if only to ensure his head didn’t replace the finance director’s.

‘But, the best bit is, we now know how much they’re prepared to pay.’  O’Feld looked up, questioningly.  Brian continued.  ‘Up until now, when we’ve decided to hold the planet to ransom getting the amount to ask for has always been the hardest.  Pitch too low and you’re the laughing stock of the megalomaniac underworld, too high and you’ve got a brace of nukes on your hands,’ he said, popping the pocket-sized thermo-nuclear device back in his pocket.

‘But now we know the UK are prepared to pay £350 billion, the Yanks up to $2 trillion and the Italians 25 pizzas.  It’s easier to make our demands,’ he said.  The finance director pulled a sheet of paper from under his notepad that had ‘pay us £2.3 trillion in used notes or the planet gets it, signed B L O’Feld’ using letters cut out from daily newspapers.

‘I’ve had this awhile, I only had to insert the amount,’ he crowed.  O’Feld was impressed.

‘I hope that typeface isn’t from the Daily Mail,’ he said, standing, indicating that the meeting was over.  ‘Hateful newspaper’, he said.

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I hope you enjoyed this topical extra Project: Evil instalment.  If you have and you missed Project: Evil first time around then catch up on Brian, Daw and, of course, Barry Liam O'Feld, the famous Irish Megalomaniac in the original book.

You can catch up on any or all of my books in ebook and paperback format on the links provided on this page.  If you are a Kindle Unlimited member then these books can be downloaded for free.

Random thoughts on random Covid 19 testing

Back on my current hobby horse - the corona virus pandemic. I've been reading lots of various views around the world today (and the last few days) and there is a consensus forming as far as I can tell.  Apart from the fact that most places aren't testing anywhere near as necessary, which I bleated about a couple of times already, the testing isn't helping anywhere near as much as it should.

OK, many countries are choosing their own way of testing, that's their prerogative in the absence of an international standard.  Although the World Health Organisation has stated test, test and test again, and I don't think you could get a bigger nudge towards standardisation than that, it's a little light on direction.

Statisticians are now claiming that the methods used up to now are not suitable, and the arguments I'm hearing are compelling.  We had, in the UK, the herd immunity argument that suggested that by voluntarily socially distancing people you could flatten the now famous curve and save the health care system from imploding, while getting the majority of relatively fit people exposed and presumably immune for the short haul.  Completely isolating the vulnerable - and that means identifying them and ensuring they have a suitable support network for the twelve weeks that seems to be the common standard - while the rest of us get the disease, shrug it off in the main, treat the few that react badly sounds like a plan.  However the numbers of deaths started to stack up, and the simple requests around social distancing to allow the herd immunity to develop in a controlled manner wasn't being followed by a significant number of people.  If it helps, I followed it as far as my employer let me - cramming 22 students into classrooms designed for 18 at a push and rotating them from classroom to classroom every hour and a half didn't help.

The real problem, well two problems actually, are that many people didn't take the sensible measures to avoid mass contamination seriously and on top of that there wasn't any apparent plan to identify the vulnerable and support them.  They're working on that now, but only because we're in lockdown and I'm hearing anecdotal reports of clearly vulnerable people not being on the database the government has compiled.

But testing as it stands is way below useful.  As a minimum the NHS staff need to be tested - and by the way there are 1.2 million of them.  Not all doctors and nurses, of course, but receptionists, cooks, cleaners, admin staff all working in close proximity and interacting with the front line guys and gals.  And one test each is only a start as someone could be given the all-clear and pick up the virus fuelling up on the way home.

But the real challenge is knowing where the country is in relation to infection rates.  The current process of only testing people who are showing signs of the illness is going to give a fairly high success rate, if determining someone is suffering from Covid 19 can be called success. It makes the hazard rate appear larger than it is, for one thing, and fails to tell us anything about how prevalent the disease is.  An analogy I'm going to steal here is one I read online a day or so ago:

Suppose you wanted to know how popular Ford cars are in your area.  One way is to pop over to your local Ford main dealer and ask everyone who walks through the door during a determined period of time, say one day, what make of car they drive.  Many will say Ford, because many of us are creatures of habit.  That is what the testing has been like in the UK, testing those exhibiting signs of CV.  Alternatively pop over to your local Asda (Walmart for US readers) car park and count how many Fords there are and also how many non-Ford cars there are.  Don't advertise it, choose a day at random, and you'll get a pretty good idea of how popular Ford cars are in your locality.  There should be random testing in supermarkets - there would need to be legislation and the government would need to provide strong guarantees that the data will only be used for CV testing purposes as they would need to know who provided the sample.  They would need to provide assurances that persons tested wouldn't have DNA information provided to the police, because that would provide people reasonable excuse to not participate.

That way we would have a better picture of the distribution of CV in society.  It would have been useful to have known where it was before lockdown, but we can't go back there.

I for one wouldn't have any objections, and would happily share my DNA if it was for a useful purpose.  In another world, maybe, I might be more circumspect - if you've read the Journeymen, and especially its sequel Journey Men II: Day of Reckoning you might wonder if the information was being used for other, nefarious reasons.  But right now I'd like to think that sorting CV 19 out is our main priority.

You can access my books on Amazon using the links provided on this blog post.  Stay safe and follow the rules, please.

Why measuring the virus is important - could a truck skew the CV stats?

As I mentioned in a recent blog, the numbers presented nationally and internationally, are virtually useless.  The amount of people diagnosed with CV 19 is likely to be a fraction of the likely infection rate, and what size fraction depends on which country you look at.  South Korea has invested in aggressive testing and have a better idea of the demographics affected by the disease than most other countries.  In the UK we are still waiting for front line NHS staff dealing with the pandemic to be tested.

Another worrying number is the number of recorded deaths.  It's not at all clear if the deaths recorded against CV 19 are reporting deaths that are wholly or largely attributable to the virus, or just recording the number of people known to have died while the virus is live within them.  As the main health scientist for the UK admitted a few weeks ago, there 'may be some overlap' between the number of CV 19 deaths and deaths that would have occurred with or without the virus.  In all probability many of those deaths may have been brought forward by an indeterminate period of time - hours, days, possibly weeks - but it could be argued that it didn't substantially change the outcome.

Put another way, suppose a bus was transporting 30 CV 19 patients who were otherwise fit enough to travel in this way to one of the field hospitals being set up around the country.  A truck goes out of control and rams the bus off the motorway, killing everyone on board.  Would we class those deaths as CV 19 as all 30 passengers were diagnosed with the virus at the time of death? I know, you could argue that without the virus they wouldn't have been on the bus in the first place, but the distinction is still important.  Without knowing or appreciating how dangerous the disease is to those of us with a reasonable expectation of life into the end of this year, into next, hopefully the decade after it will be difficult to maintain the lockdown conditions.  Assuming it is considerably more than the imminently dead that are at serious risk then until the population have a reason to believe this then many will start to challenge the lock downs until perhaps the stats locally show them that there is a reason.

Getting clarity on the recording is difficult, and this in itself isn't a new thing.  The annual winter flu deaths are openly recorded in the US - they seem to be available in the UK but are harder to drag out into the open - but seem to make the same assumption that I suspect is being made with CV 19 - if someone dies while fighting the flu it is recorded as a winter flu death.  I suspect not all are only attributable to the winter flu and many wouldn't have seen the spring without being infected.

Some are openly critical of the UK government's stance, notably a renegade Scottish GP based in Cheshire, England.  I'm generally a fan of Dr Malcolm Kendrick, he makes bold and well measured arguments about over medication and is particularly outspoken on Cardio-vascular disease (CVD), which he has spent all his professional life studying and unravelling.  He is especially critical about the apparent and officially supported link between cholesterol and heart disease, and the subsequent mass distribution of statins.  If you have an apparently high level of cholesterol and are on or being advised to take statins then I highly recommend your read his book The Great Cholesterol Con.  I also recommend his book Doctoring Data where he looks critically at the way Big Pharma distorts data to support their industry, at our personal financial and health costs.

Dr Kendrick has taken a pop at the way the CV 19 pandemic is being managed in his latest blog entry  (dated 29 March 2020 in case you're stumbling across this some time after being published) - be warned, the man doesn't pull his punches and doesn't mind being controversial.  He thinks the costs associated with the government strategy outweighs the good it actually will do, particularly if we are merely helping to prolong very ill people for a relatively short duration at the expense of other people who will suffer harm through missed appointments and the harm to the economy that affects peoples' health - he has evidence of this which is repeated in his books.  I'm not convinced by the good doctor's opinion in this case, although I believe it bears reading and discussing.  There are many reasons I'm unconvinced, but one reason is back to the points I made at the top of this blog - I don't think we have enough quality data from anywhere to make a really hard-nosed decision.

My greatest fear is not the virus but the missed opportunity governments around the globe are creating by not testing and retesting early and often enough.  This is data we really can only obtain in the here and now - what we've missed already, we've missed.  We need to start gathering quality data now, if not for this pandemic then for the next one so the world can be better informed and better prepared.

The Last Simple is free to download on Amazon

My latest promotion is the parody 'The Last Simple', written a long time ago, in 2011.  I had read most of the Dan Brown novels published up to that date and had enjoyed them, up to a point.  Dan has a method of writing that keeps the story moving and gives the impression that much of the storyline is well researched.  However, in line with most novels, you only have to stray into your own sphere of knowledge and specialism to realise that the author is winging it a little.

That's not a criticism, by the way.  We all do it, when we have to write about things we have limited experience of.  For me the warning bells sound when authors start writing about aircraft, and how they fly.  I've spent enough time working around fixed and rotary winged aircraft to know when someone is making assumptions, based no doubt on snatched views of a flight deck and scenes from movies.  I'm sure practically every reader with specialist knowledge cringes with  every book they read and film they watch, it's just that we all cringe in different parts.

Anyway, the winging was one thing. The trend towards ever shorter chapters was another.  I get it, write short, punchy chapters and readers can park the book after two stops on the subway, the perfect commuting aide.  Dan, or more probably his publisher, took this to a new level.  To me a chapter is a self contained unit.  Sometimes it can contain several perspectives but there should be some form of unity from start to end of the chapter.  Many of Dan's chapters ended in the middle of a subject and the next chapter picked right up where the previous one had ended.  That's a very artificial way of breaking a story up and to me it jarred, however after the Da Vinci Code became an international best seller the technique appears to have become legitimised.

So The Last Simple was born.  In part it is a parody of several of Dan's novels - if you've read any of his books you should be able to spot most of them fairly easily.  But it has it's own life as well and is pretty tongue in cheek.  For starters, the characters in the book know they are characters in a book.  In the case of Bradford, the lead character, he knows he's the lead in a third rate parody of a Dan Brown novel, but his ambition is to be one of Dan's lead characters.  The trouble is, he doesn't know if he has to dumb up or down for the gig.

There is a lot of wordplay, puns and silly gags running through the book and none of these are meant to reflect on Dan Brown.  I tried to cram in as many silly jokes as I could on every page. Some will make you groan, hopefull many will make you smile.

The promotion is time limited and finishes before the next weekend, probably Friday morning UK time.  Of course, if you have access to Kindle Unlimited then the book is free to download any time you choose.  For those stumbling across this blog entry too late, the book is reasonably priced anyway.

Is the lockdown necessary?

I'm going to start with a spoiler alert, if only to save you scrolling to the last paragraph.  Yes, I fully believe the lockdown is necessary and, if I'm honest, started way too late.  My last week in work before the lockdown I was identifying students clearly unwell, and others that openly were stating that members of their household were self isolating because of displaying symptoms.  I sent a fair few students off campus and hopefully home during the week.  At least two such unwell students asked me to take assignments off them before they left - er, no chance.

I'd complained the week before to management about being asked to teach in classrooms with half the students clearly unwell - there wasn't any government advice in place at that time but common sense and a brief scrutiny of the world news was sufficient evidence to me that we shouldn't be cramming twenty plus students into rooms designed for sixteen with the corona virus spreading so quickly.

Social distancing isn't a problem for my wife and I - I've been practising it for decades anyway and my wife has been preparing for Armageddon all our married life so we really didn't need to worry about the idiots panic buying.  But it's clearly a problem for a lot of people, as locally and nationally people were ignoring the pleas to not visit places that are traditionally crowded.  I suspect many agreed in principle, but didn't think it applied per se to them.

It's easy to see why some might think that way.  Outside of the large cities most of us haven't experienced personally anyone definitely contracting the virus, let alone falling seriously ill.  That's going to change dramatically - today in the UK the death rate increased by 25% of the total to date in one day.  It's accelerating and it's not going to slow down until the lockdown takes effect in at least two weeks' time, possibly longer if people keep on flouting the rules.

The stats, horrible that they are, are far from useful.  Like many of you I'm frequently referring to the Johns Hopkins Covid 19 tracker website, watching the numbers ratchet up.  There's three key numbers on there - amount diagnosed, deaths and amount recovered.  None of the numbers are remotely useful when we think about them.

Take the deaths total - that should be useful as it records the known deaths associated with CV19, however we know that many of these deaths would have happened anyway, perhaps not on that date but within a reasonable time.  What we really need to know, if only to focus minds, is how many deaths are absolutely as a result of the virus, that the person who passed away would be with us and living a normal life if only they had avoided the virus.

The recovered statistic is almost certainly an underestimate.  Most countries aren't testing anywhere near enough to determine the infection rate, and most have put retesting people who did test positive to see if they have recovered on the to-do list.  Perfectly understandable, but if we want to be reassured that most of us will survive this then that statistic is the one most will look at.

The infected stat is, as suggested above, almost certainly meaningless as most people with symptoms are not being tested.  Front line staff dealing with patients aren't being routinely tested in the UK at the time of writing - that will change in the next week, but as well as staff in the NHS and other allied services being exposed to risk without sensible health monitoring, there's a risk that  some of them are passing on the virus inadvertently to vulnerable patients.

This pandemic, terrible that it is, is almost certainly the dress rehearsal for the pandemic to come that doesn't spare 80% with a mild cold but kills a serious proportion of those who contract it.  I wrote in Parallel Lives about the race to prevent such a pandemic in a future UK that was isolated from the world but was under terrorist threat of a SARS type infection.  Incredibly, the pandemic situation wasn't the worst event in the book, but there you go.

In summary I think the worst is yet to come, please play your part in containing the spread.  If not for yourself, if you're youngish and fairly healthy it should do you little or no harm, then for the vulnerable in your circle of influence - those you know and those you pass in the street. Stay safe and follow the rules.  If you never stray onto my blog again or ever consider reading any of my books that's fine, I just hope you and many, many more have that choice.  What all of us do in the next few weeks will determine how many people have the choice.

Working from home

Writers, even part time writers such as myself, are used to working from home.  I've a sneaking suspicion that even the most successful of authors are unlikely to have an office away from their home for the purpose of writing.  Sure, a few will have dedicated rooms in their homes that they use, possibly, exclusively for the purpose of producing prose, but I reckon most of us don't.

I'm very fortunate in that I actually do have a dedicated home office room complete with a custom built oak desk and bureau - we had them built by an artisan woodworker twenty years ago or more when I was studying with the Open University and, partly because it is a timeless design and the builder was such a good craftsman, it's still as good as new.  Perhaps the odd bit of distressing here and there, but that's the beauty of this type of furniture.  The room's not used exclusively for writing - far from it - we have a wall mounted TV and a leather recliner sofa in the room as well, and during the late autumn to early spring we both use it as our TV room in the evenings.  Most of my work, all year round, is actually crafted on my knee regardless of which room I'm spending time in.

In fact my second novel, The Journeymen, was written in large part on a Palm PDA - remember them? -with a folding keyboard.  It was very portable and until it let me down on a transatlantic flight in 2003 it had become my go-to resource.  I guess that failure was my personal wake up call - I'd written a large part of the battle scene in the Journeymen on board the facility on the comet between the J-Men and the Sons of Arlgon and the battery failed, taking several thousand words with it.  I dragged a foolscap pad out of my bag and scribbled down what I'd just spent a large part of the flight typing.

However, like a lot of you guys, I've been working from home - mainly by email - as a result of the Coronavirus crisis.  The desk has really come into its own.  I've resisted the temptation to sit on the sofa and put my feet up for the slightly irrational feeling that it wouldn't feel like work if I did that, even though the end result would be the same.  And maybe that's one of things about writing, why I can choose to write on my knee, on an aircraft, on a bus or wherever.  Because writing doesn't feel like a job.

And because we can access all our work resources via VPN and can chat using WhatsApp it feels like I'm still in the office.  I just don't have to face students four or five times a day, and I'm not complaining about that.  I'm sure the lockdown is going to result in a lot of issues for many people, most need some form of physical social interaction and at the time of writing this lockdown looks like a long haul but I've been practising (anti) social distancing most of my life, so I should be OK.  I may even find time to complete my tenth novel.  Even if I don't, I reckon my Kindle will take a hammering this summer - when I'm not working from home, naturally.

If you're looking to stock up on reading matter to weather the lockdown - it looks like practically everywhere on the planet is going through lockdown at the moment, then at the time of writing - 24 March - Digital Life Form is free to download.  It looks like that offer is good until about 8 a.m. Friday morning, UK time.  Be my guest.

If you're entitled through subscription to download Kindle Unlimited books for free then you can choose any of my titles, to keep you occupied when working from home loses its appeal.  Otherwise I like to think they're reasonably priced.  Links to them all below are to the Amazon US site - I'm sure you'll be redirected to your regional website if you are outside the US.

Hotel California
Assassin
The Journeymen
Journeymen II: Day of Reckoning
Project : Evil
Digital Life Form
The Last Simple
Skin
Parallel Lives

Digital Life Form is free on Amazon - limited promotion

Following hot on the heels of the free promotion for Project: Evil, which ended this morning, Amazon are offering Digital Life Form for free for a limited period.  Digital Life Form is a science fiction adventure written with my tongue in my cheek - it's fast paced, exciting but should bring a smile to your face as  you read it.  If you're self isolating, on shut down or just keeping out of the way of other people while Covid 19 wreaks havoc in your locality then you can do worse than blag yourself a free copy.

Here's the blurb from the book:

In 1978, meteorites striking a remote part of the Mojave desert preceded severe disruption to all radio frequencies in the California district. The disruption was mistakenly believed to be a Soviet sleeper cell mobilising or a Middle Eastern terrorist attack on the US. It was triangulated to the last known location of a bunch of oil roughnecks drilling in the desert and the US military intervened, with a massive loss of innocent life. The cause of the disruption is now known to be DLFs,

DLFs (microscopic, bacteria-like Digital Life Forms) have been landing on Earth for Millennia, clinging to meteorites, looking for the right conditions to thrive. To DLFs electrons are like oxygen, silicon is like food and computer code is their DNA. Since the middle of the 20th Century we have all benefitted from DLFs, without which there wouldn’t be Plasma TVs, microwave ovens or iPhones. But DLFs have to be carefully managed and controlled. Given free rein they will take over and modify electronic equipment in the most unpredictable way. Consequently there has built up a massive, secret international industry manipulating DLFs so that they produce the right products for modern consumers while ensuring DLFs don't disrupt the international infrastructures such as the electricity grid or the Internet, an industry that is policed by a secretive arm of the United Nations.

Royston, a post graduate geologist from the University of Manchester inadvertently becomes embroiled in the secret, dangerous world of DLFs and rapidly finds himself on the run behind the wheel of a drive-by-wire, rally specification Subaru infected with the strongest and most adaptable DLF ever discovered. He is being pursued by Winston Grace, an ex FBI, now UN agent in a Maserati sports tourer, an Apache gunship, a Chinook bearing eight SAS soldiers and two Hawk jet fighters. And that’s just the good guys. If they catch him, he may live. If they don’t, then there are more ruthless people on his tail, too, as he tries to evade capture in a world that doesn’t value human life and where the stakes are as high as can be imagined, in an industry that lives by just two mottos:

Life ain’t fair

and

Sh!t happens

This promotion will only run for a few days, so grab yourself a free copy before the price is raised b ack to its normal price.  Like all my books Digital Life Form is available for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers all the time, of course

Free copies of Project: Evil stop at midnight Pacific Daylight Time

That's 8 AM on Sunday 22 in the UK - I think.  After that the book reverts to its normal retail price of £1.99 in the UK, should be $2.99 in the US and 2.99 Euros in Europe.  It will still be free to subscribers of Kindle Unlimited - that is Kindle lending library and Amazon Prime customers going forward.  the promotion has been quite popular - I hope there hasn't been any panic buying going on!

If you've just been locked down or are self isolating then this bizarre but funny book might just be what you need to keep a smile on your face.

Hotel California is on a Countdown deal in the UK (and as far as I know only the UK, but check your location just in case).  Also free to Kindle Unlimited customers

All of my books are available for free on Amazon Unlimited

After posting my last blog I made a rash, and heavy hearted, decision.  For the time being I've gone exclusive on Amazon instead of the halfway house I'd considered.  I can revert to non-exclusive listing sometime in the future, but I'm going to give this a good go first.

One of the opportunities of being in KDP Select is that I can run promotions and have a raft of these scheduled for the next few months.  In fact two are running as of right now.  

Project: Evil is currently free to anyone through Amazon (link is to UK store, but should let you redirect to your registered location).  This book is almost certainly the only comedic book on Project Management, a subject close to my heart.  I always felt project teams took their role over-seriously and secretly found much of the environment funny.  In this book I've tried to capture the funny side of PM, albeit from an unusual viewpoint - just how would you go about project managing the building of a super secret evel lair in the South Seas complete with planet destroying missile capability?  Act before 21 March and find out for free.  Otherwise it is free to all Kindle Unlimited customers - those of you self isolating with your Amazon Prime subscription could take advantage at any time.

In addition Hotel California is on a Countdown offer where the price is reduced to £0.99 for a period, before rising to a price a little higher for a few days longer.  Follow the trail of Ricky Maggott and find out what really happened to Elvis.  Offer ends 24 March, but again the book is free to Kindle Unlimited customers.

Please feel free to take advantage of these offers, and don't forget to spread the word to your self isolating and free friends.  My other seven books are also on Kindle Unlimited so are eligible for free download for those with the right subscriptions, plus they will all feature in promotions sometime soon - watch this space.

Self Isolating my books in Amazon

Some years ago I railed, often ad nauseum, about how wrong KDP select was.  Before I continue this post I'll say up front that I haven't substantively changed my mind.  While the concept of Kindle unlimited and allowing Amazon Prime members access to read  for free is a brilliant marketing strategy, I just don't believe Amazon have to insist on exclusivity for the service.  I think there's enough space for Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Barnes and Noble and Kobo.

So a long time ago I ranted, several times, on these pages about the model and said I wouldn't enlist in KDP Select.  Of course Amazon are in this for the long game and gradually I've seen my exposure on Amazon dwindle to the point where I sometimes find it difficult to find my own books, and my sales via the other channels has become a little on the rare side.

So a little while back I quietly listed Hotel California on KDP Select.  I did this with a heavy heart as I don't agree with the exclusivity concept, but like King Cnut I'm unable to order the tide to pull out.  I've just listed two other titles - Digital Life Form and Skin - on the programme and I'm going to evaluate how it goes.  For those of you who prefer to shop in non-Amazon shops there are six other titles listed there, but I can't say for how long.

If you are a Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime member and find yourself needing to self isolate from Covid 19 and want to lose a few hours inside a book or three, why not look up one or more of these.  For you guys it is free - for me, I'm waiting to find out if it is worth the admittedly small effort of listing the books but I'll give it a try.  If it looks like it is worth going down the exclusive route then I guess I'll self isolate with Amazon.