Tag Archives: I fucked this up so you don’t have to

12 Mar 2023 · 12:44 pm

Come with me on a journey through my exciting life!

Obviously, I use the word, ‘exciting’ advisedly, the ironic implication being somewhat the reverse.

This week, I have mostly been … running around like a blue-arsed fly! As previously implied, it’s not exciting and sadly it’s not even that funny either. But this is my blog, so I can do what I sodding well like, which means I’m going to tell you about it anyway.

On the Mum front … more admin popped up, just for a change. There is so. much. admin. Ugh. Never mind, it is what it is. I can’t fix that. It’s dealing with it in the most effective way possible that counts.

A few years ago, Mum very wisely decided that she would put all the bills with one provider. At the time this wasn’t the cheapest way but from the point of view of suddenly having to take care of Dad’s side of the admin for the first time in about 50 years while, at the same time looking after someone with dementia (Dad at that point) it was worth paying a little extra for the reduction in hassle. From the point of view of someone who takes to this sort of stuff like a duck to quantum physics and is now looking after a mother with dementia, I regularly give quiet thanks for this decision.

However … the company that looks after her electricity, gas and phone had been taken over by something called Ovo, yes that’s OvO people not OvUM. Needless to say, I can’t remember their bloody name because all I can think of is ovum. Yes well … moving on. We’ve been waiting to have our account ‘switched to Ovo’ for some time, inhabiting an uneasy limbo between the two which made it tricky to do anything. However, I reckoned we’d finally achieved splash down because something had happened to the direct debit so Mum suddenly owed them money. When I checked Mum’s post on Wednesday I discovered a welcome to Ovo letter with a phone number to ring to sort it out.

On, on… probably …

On the up side, despite the fact that all the operators were busy helping other customers, I only had to listen to a hilariously 1920s version of the Blue Danube before someone answered. I got someone nice, as well, which always helps. Her english had a slight midwestern twang and she kept calling me ‘ma’am’ so I suspect she was in India, or possibly Singapore or Thailand? It was all very straightforward though. Mum needs a smart meter but one of the carer’s partners, who fits them, had recommended waiting as long as possible … except that then the whole takeover thing began and we got stuck in the twilight zone between belonging to the old company and being absorbed into ~~Ovum~~ Ovum. Shit! I’ve just typed Ovum twice. Bloody Hell! OVO chuffing buggering OVO. Er … yeh. Sorry about that, where was I?

Right yes, ringing Ovo. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to speak to them about Mum. I had special dispensation from the old lot but as we had a bill and I suspected this was because the Direct Debit hadn’t transferred over from the old supplier to the new one, I wasn’t certain the special dispensation would have transferred either. As a result, I saw no point in making things complicated so I did the usual trick of fraudulently pretending to be Mum so I could circumvent the security protocol without having to wait however many days it was for them to process a copy of Mum’s power of attorney or speak to her so she could give them permission to talk to me (which would have been difficult with her in Sussex and me in Suffolk). While I was on the line, I managed to book the installation of a smart meter on Tuesday, even better they have sensible slots so instead of 8-12 and 12-6 which involve a large gap when staff levels are thinner and I have to get an extra person in to make doubly sure that there’s someone available to deal with the engineer, they had a slot from 10.00 until 1.00 and from 12.00 until 2.00, which fitted into the right time frame for us and was surprisingly sensible and accommodating of them.

A quick message to the carers’ chat while I was on the phone and the engineer is now coming to fit a new electricity smart meter between 12.00 and 2.00 which is the time when there is absolutely guaranteed to be enough folks about for someone to take care of the meter ~~man~~ person. Even better, if Ovo turn up before 12.00 or after 2.00, Mum gets £30. Jolly dee … probably. So much could go wrong but … I’ve done my best.

I have also managed to end up running the bank account for McMini’s band, because I’m a special kind of stupid. That shouldn’t involve much, but this week I was busy sorting out T shirts to sell at their next gig. I managed to get more money, and therefore more shirts, by having the band member friends and family put our orders in up front. So that’s grand. I’ve also managed to set up a paypal account for the band with a Gmail address. Next step, when the money pours in after the gig, if it does, get an iZettle so we can take card payments.

Other news, this week, I went to a gin tasting with a group of ladies from Parents’ Swim, at McMini’s school, along with a wider group of folks, who I tend to run into when they’re walking their dogs on the school site and I’m going for a walk if the swim is cancelled, or I’m looking for mushrooms, or if I’m simply passing the time before the traffic dies down a bit and I can get home quickly (I see zero point sitting in traffic for 40 minutes when I can go for a 40 minute walk, get all my exercise in for the day and then drive home in ten minutes).

The tasting was in the bar part of the concert venue in my home town and was billed as being gin and ‘nibbles’. Naturally, all of us being either menopausal or a little older, we knew what our priorities were and a lengthy discussion ensued as to what ‘nibbles’ comprised. Would it be enough to absorb a substantial amount of gin? In the end, we decided it was probably canapes and as a result we all ‘lined our stomachs’ before we went with the kind of hearty fare designed to absorb large quantities of alcohol. The event started at 6.30 so the McOthers and I had supper early; spag bol.

It was absolutely lashing it down with rain, the kind of rain that would look far too unconvincingly heavy if you saw it in a film. I had to do that thing where you need to hold your coat out in front of you or the water runs off and soaks your trousers, leaving you with cold damp thighs all evening. I still got a bit damp but on the whole, it worked. I took photo of the town in the rain which I was quite pleased with, and also a picture of water running down the street because I thought it looked abstract. It does.

Rain soaked town … I think this would be a new Grongolian development if it were situated in Ning Dang Po.

Squigly lines and dots or running water?

Imagine our surprise, and possibly a little consternation, when we arrived to discover that it was a seated event and there were tables set for a three course meal. We started off with a cocktail that contained a lof of gin and an even greater quantity of Campari and probably some more stuff as well. On repairing to the furthest table from the others, so my laugh wouldn’t deafen people (I have had people on adjacent tables ask to be moved in restaurants before now) we then proceeded to get the giggles repeatedly about the fact we were going to have to do a Vicar of Dibbley and ~~three Christmas dinners~~ two suppers each.

We were immeidately identified as the Naughty Table so when two members of another party couldn’t make it, we were given their cocktails which we shared amongst ourselves.

The gin was fab by the way, the company is called the Heart of Suffolk Distillery and they have three gins out at the moment, the first was called Betty’s Gin, the second Rosie’s Gin and the third Ivy’s Gin. All were a bit of an eye opener as they were so much tastier and more aromatic than just … gin, but I liked Rosie’s Gin best, with Betty’s a very close run second and Ivy’s third. All of them were head and shoulders above what you’d normally expect in way of flavour, aromatics and general deliciousness. I bought a bittle of the Rosie’s becuase it had really lovely coriander kind of undertones and was delicious served with tonic and a strawberry floating in it.

The dinner was, indeed, three courses and was very good and luckily not too huge, although it would have been plenty on it’s own, without the large helping of spag bol I’d imbibed first. There were three little eats for starters; avocado mouse with a delicious home-made taco, a sort of salsa thing and a parsnip puree washed down with a lovely herby aromatic gin called ‘Betty’s gin’. It was followed by a kofta with some really good home made slaw and some ham croquette things, couscous with pomigranite seeds and a bit of curried parsnip soup on the side. This was served with Rosie’s Gin which was equally herbal and aromatic but where Betty’s was rosemary, this was definitely coriander, it would have been fab with a light thai curry. Pudding was a lemon tart with rasperry coulis served up with Ivy’s gin, which was more gluveinish in aroma, I could definitely smell cloves, and taste them too. McOther wouldn’t have liked it.

It seemed a waste not to finish everything so we drank all of the gin and I cleaned all three of my plates and the others did pretty well on theirs, too. Nom. But also sort of bleargh. Even now, two days later, I’m slightly feeling it … says the woman who bought a massive cake in the market this morning and snarfed it with lunch but … you know.

Next up we thought we might try doing pottery.

The following morning, in a somewhat debilitated state, hangover-wise (it took me until this morning—Sunday—to recover fully) I had to go for a blood test at the hospital. I didn’t get up in time to drive, it takes about 40 minutes that time in the morning, especially when some of the roads were flooded. I also left it too late to walk which meant the electric bike. It was still throwing it down so I put on my waterproofs and set off, aware that I’d only really left fifteen minutes for a twenty minute journey.

Unfortunately, I discovered that my usual route was blocked with an enormous puddle, however, there was no time to go round so I just had to plough on through and hope it wasn’t too deep. Needless to say it came up to the bike’s axles but somehow even though, when the pedal was at it’s lowest point, the tops of my boots were well below the surface of the water, none got through my waterproofs. I did pedal as fast as I could of course which may have created some kind of vacuum induced waterproofness … (is that a word?) I dunno. I arrived in time for the blood test. The check-in thing didn’t work but I managed to sort that anyway and apart from misreading someone else’s name and blundering into one of the bays while some poor chap was having a blood test it was more or less OK. Then I came out.

It was snowing.

A lot.

Never mind, I thought, it’ll stop in a minute. So I started off home. Pumped by my success on the way, I took the quick route which entailed going back through the enormous puddle. Once again, the feet stayed dry but the waterproof trousers caught on my pump, ripping it out of its holster. It disappeared into the murky depths with a plop. Since the water level would have been just below my knees if I’d put my foot down, I had to leave it and chalk the loss up to experience. If I go back in drier weather I might possibly find it … who knows … mind you, it’ll probably have tadpoles in by that time. As I exited the enormous puddle it began to dawn on me that snow is fucking painful when it hits your eyeballs at high speed. It was blowing a hoolie and I was riding into it as fast as I could, which was about 15mph with maximum electronic assist. The journey sounded like this.

‘Ouch!’ pedal pedal, ‘Fuck off!’ pedal pedal, ‘Ow that fucking smarts you fucking fuck!’ pedal pedal, ‘Fucking snow! Fuck! Owwww! Fuck!’

It only took me 10 (very unpleasant) minutes to ride home, but because snow on the eyeballs is so painful I was riding squinting out of one eye for most of it. By the time I arrived, I looked like this.

Lovely.

With all this extra eating, how is the eating thing going? Well … my weight this morning is 11 stone 8lbs and on Tuesday it was 11 stones 4lbs. Then again, it’s fairly arbitrary at the moment because two days before that 11.4 weigh in, I was clocking in at 11 stones and 7lbs. I have concluded that water retention affects this and some of it’s also about how much food there is in the system. For the most part, if I eat 1600 calories a day or more, the weight loss stops. If I hit my protein targets, it slows down. If I aim to hit my calorie target I get nowhere near my protein target.

At this point, I’m more concerned with which clothes I fit into and since there hasn’t been much change on that score I’ll not worry. I probably ate about 1750 calories yesterday and I was absolutely stuffed.

Other news this week. I am moving to a new ISP which means I’ve kind of broken my hamgee.co.uk website, on a temporary basis, though, I assure you. I need to do a couple of final steps in set up this morning and then, when the name servers are pointing to the right place, I need to reinstall the SSL certificate. After that, hopefully, everything should work again. Next steps after that will be to slowly rebuild it. I’m afraid it will probably be glitchy for a while.

And finally … once again, the chance to grab 12 hours of fabulous audiophonic joy for 99p (or 99c) continues … if the link works.

Yes. If you like cheap audio books, Few Are Chosen is on sale for all of March 2023. After that the price goes up again. As always, I’m cutting my own throat here. It’s 99c on Apple, Kobo and my own website. For anyone in the States, it’s also 99c on Barnes & Noble and Chirp (which is USA and Canada). I’m trying to walk the line here between offering a bargain from time to time and turning into a kind of audio DFS where there are only five days or so in a year when there isn’t a sale.

If you want to grab it while it’s mega cheap, though. You can find store links and a bit more info below …

Grab it direct from the author for 99c:

MTM’s Store

Or get it from one of these retailers:

Apple
Kobo
Chirp
Barnes & Noble
Spotify

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as author blog, author blogs, author parent, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K'Barthan Series, K’barthan audio, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire

5 Mar 2023 · 6:02 pm

The chaos fairies … just for a smecking change

Holy shizz, this has been a hell of a week. But there have been successes among the rampant chaos. As you know, if you read this regularly, the chaos fairies frequently play havoc with my life. They’re dogged little bastards and their latest escapades have been more than a little annoying. Yes, it’s time for the Insurance Story.

OK, so I insure my car because if I don’t then, in this country, it’s illegal. I am under no illusions that it will be easy wresting any cash from the most compliant and efficient insurance company should anything happen. I drive a completely stupid car. I admit it. It’s this car.

The thing about this car is that it has a tiny, teeny little 1.6 toyota yaris engine. It does 40mpg. But it goes from 0-60 in an excitingly short length of time, even if it’s 6 seconds rather than 4. It also goes from 60 to quite a lot more in a similarly short, blink-of-an-eye type of time. That makes it fun to drive but reasonably straightforward to insure. Cos … small engine. You know …

Another one of its advantages is that it’s mostly made of aluminium, carbon fibre and fibreglass. This is great from the point of view of it not rusting and many bits of it degrading more slowly than normal cars. On the downside, if you prang the fibreglass it is an absolute bastard to fix. That means that, ideally, you need a fibreglass specialist rather than the lowest bidding contractor.

A few weeks ago, somebody backed into me at Tesco’s filling station (it’s always bloody Tesco’s filling station). I’m pretty sure this is not news to anyone, I think I mentioned it. The result is a couple of cracks in the wheel arch. The chap wanted to pay for it himself but I explained that it would be expensive and when I showed him the quote he did, indeed, have conniptions so I contacted my insurance company.

The insurers are a bunch called Geoffrey. The main call centre I am dealing with there is the most lovely bunch of folks up in the North East somewhere. So far I’ve spoken mostly to people with Geordie, Middlesbrough, County Durham or Northumberland accents and one Scottish lady. They are uber helpful and respond magnificently to humour, which is fairly essential when someone’s backed into your car. I cannot praise them highly enough. I always try to be decent to call centre staff, even if I’ve been waiting a while, because they’re just people and often, if you’re even remotely decent to them, they will respond warmly and make that extra effort to help you.

OK, so, like most companies these days, Geoffrey, itself, is really a sales and marketing company, they contract out the hire car side to Enterprise Rental Car, the nitty gritty of organising the work to be done is contracted out to a bunch called Incident Management Solutions, and the policy is underwritten by a company called Markerstudy. This is how capitalism works. Indeed, having worked for National Express, which contracts the nitty gritty of running many, many routes to other operators, this sort of thing is pretty standard. I understand that.

Fibreglass is an absolute bastard to repair.

I think I mentioned that.

This being the case, I usually ask if I can use my own repairer. I did have to use the insurance company’s repair service once. They were a decent lot. They did the bodywork on some of the vehicles at the coach company I worked for at the time. However, they didn’t get the paint curing right on the fibreglass and the first time I passed a gritter the newly re sprayed front of my previous car ended up pitted with white holes.

Most insurers are more than happy for me to use a local Lotus specialist. Geoffrey, and then Enterprise, said they were fine with it. They just had to agree terms with the mechanic. The guy who fixes my car is extremely competitively priced. Furthermore, he knew he could fix this without replacing the whole front of the car. He also knows that many companies will automatically say they’re going to replace the entire front, but often end up not doing so. The difference being a quote for the work without changing the front is about £800 and it’s about £1,500 for the parts from anyone else.

Gerald, that’s his name, is the most honest person you could happen to meet, likewise his colleague Neil. These guys are not ones to charge more than the price of gold for the oil used in an oil change. Small bolts and washers do not miraculously become £10 on their bills unless they’ve had to buy them for that from Lotus. They are also really, and I mean really good at fixing weird niggles. It’s a Lotus and it gets lots of weird niggles. And if there are two options and one is cheaper, they will advise you to take the cheaper one if it’ll work just as well.

As a result, GST, that’s the company name, is well in demand so I rang them and provisionally booked a slot for the work while I was on holiday. Then I broke the back of my car, which I am not claiming for because the work would cost about the same as my excess and we agreed they’d fix that at the same time.

Someone rang GST to negotiate but they couldn’t get hold of them. When they called back it rang out or a message said the call handlers were all busy. GST have better things to do with their time so I rang Geoffrey, who put me through to Incident Management Solutions. I waited for … quite a long time … and got hold of someone who was able to give me a direct line for GST to call which I passed on and all was well …

Except it wasn’t. Because GST’s hourly labour rates were too high. I’m not sure how because their labour rates are, quite frankly, lower than pretty much anyone’s. Also, the time they were doing the work meant that there was no need for a hire car, so no cost there, and of course, they hadn’t said it would need a new nose cone so that was a few grand off the ticket right there, too.

Yes, but the labour rates were too high. They needed to reduce another 8% before VAT and pay a £20 admin fee to be in with a shout …

So basically, as I understood it, if GST had committed fraud, by quoting for a new nose cone to up the price, but not fitting one, so they could then reduce their labour rates to £25 an hour, or whatever it was that was stipulated in the rules, they’d have got the job even though it would have cost the insurance company more money.

That’s fucking bats. This might be the world of capitalism but that’s Nationalised Industry levels of mental, pointless, hoops, rules and inefficiency right there.

Yes I was fucked off.

Anyway, I rang Incident Management Solutions and asked what I could do to get GST in with a shout and they explained that basically, nothing. I’d have to go with their approved repairer. I knew from the bumpf I’d received that Markerstudy, who underwrote my policy, were prepared to allow me to use my own repairer. I was advised that I should go back to the insurer, which I did and they, in turn, advised me that now I would have to go direct to the underwriter.

My first call to Markerstudy, I was put through directly from Geoffrey (the insurers) to the new claims department, because they weren’t sure Markerstudy would have all the paperwork yet. I spoke to a lady who had an accent like Gina Ahluwalia when she’s doing an impression of her mum. She explained that they had the paperwork and that she’d put me onto the existing claims department. Markerstudy don’t tell you where you are in the queue so after 45 minutes I reckoned something must have gone wrong and hung up.

I tried again but this time I got a menu and chose existing claims, I then got another menu of items, none of which applied to my situation, so I chose 7 ‘anything else’. I’m not sure if it was a bad line or the guy at the other end didn’t seem to speak much English and certainly couldn’t understand mine. I explained what had happened.

‘So you had an accident that was your fault?’

‘No, it was the other guy’s fault.’

‘So you want to use our approved repairers?’

‘No. I don’t. I want to use my own.’

‘I will put you through to the existing claims department.’

‘Hang on, you are the existing claims department. I chose existing claims from the menu.’

‘No this is not existing claims.’

‘It should be. Honest. I picked existing claims. Then I got a menu of seven options, none of which applied to me so I chose number 7 for “anything else”. Please can you tell me what item on the menu I should choose to get put through to the existing claims department straight away.’

‘What were the menu options?’

‘I can’t remember them all but there definitely wasn’t one for using my own repairer.’

‘Then ma’am may I suggest that next time you listen to the menu carefully, then you can select the right department.’

‘Why thank you for your advice, which wasn’t condescending at all,’ I told him sweetly.

‘No problem ma’am,’ oh. I made a mental note that, clearly he’s immune to sarcasm. ‘I will put you through to the existing claims department now, yes? I am putting you through now?’

‘Yes, you may as well.’

Another heaven knows how long on hold. I started this at 10.00 am and it was getting on for 12.00 now. I was due out to lunch with a friend in 20 minutes. I decided I’d try again because no-one’s answering and knowing my luck it’d go back to the beginning and I’d end up talking to this bloke again. This time I wrote down all the menu options and chose number 3, ‘I wish to use our approved repairer.’

I got through to another man with an equally strong Nigerian accent.

‘I will put you through to the right department,’ he said after I’d explained my predicament.

‘But … I chose “existing claims” and then “I wish to use our approved repairer” how can I be at the wrong department?’

After a long conversation like those ones you have on holiday when they only speak a few words of English and you only speak a few words of their language, except I didn’t speak any of his language at all, he basically told me that he was in a kind of triage area where they answered the phone and then put people into the queue for the relevant department. In short the menu was an irrelevant and pointless waste of time. So that was grand.

I thanked him, and as it was 12.20, and I was due to meet my friend at half past, I told him I’d ring back later.

Later that day at 4.30, I arrived home. I googled Markerstudy reviews. I invite you to do the same. There are some 5 star ones, from people who are chuffed their insurance is so cheap and there are the others, which are all 1 star, from people trying to make a claim. A big red flag for me was how many people in non-fault accidents had ended up paying their excess anyway and how many people had to involve the ombudsmen, or lawyers, to get the faintest sniff of their money. Others; more people than I was comfortable with, ranted at what a shower the approved repairers were and how comprehensively they cocked it up.

Shit. I needed something between these people and me. Also, my excess is just shy of £300. It was definitely worth paying the difference.

I rang Geoffrey Insurance and explained that I really didn’t want to go direct to Markerstudy. They spoke to Enterprise and managed to get them to agree to reopen my case if I promised to go with their own insurers. Then I rang Gerald at GST and told him to agree to whatever they asked and that I’d pay the difference. Then it was supper time.

The next morning, bright and early, I rang Geoffrey and asked for advice. Had anyone ever paid part of the claim? The lovely geordie I spoke to said I could but ask although he’d never heard of it happening and that I’d been very lucky that they’d agreed to take my claim back after closing the file.

Back to Incident Management Solutions. Number 9 in the queue this time and only fifteen minutes or so on hold. I got a lady who sounded really bored and pissed off, but she thawed considerably over our conversation and turned out to have a wonderful droll sense of humour and the bored sounding delivery transpired to be mis diagnosed laconic. She was great. I explained that I was going to pay the difference. She said that was unfair because the accident wasn’t my fault. I explained about the reviews of Markerstudy online and that I thought it was probably cheaper in the long run. She therefore made it all official by ringing GST while I was on the phone, and then confirmed that yes, they would be doing the work. Halle-fucking-luja!

This also means that they can fix some other niggles on my car for that tiny bit less because they already have it for the insurance claim, and since I’ll be on holiday at the time they’ll have it for two weeks so there won’t be the same time constraint.

I can’t help thinking that this experience represents a kind of Livy’s circle of capitalism. These days, the customer is no longer king, it’s the shareholder. Doubtless Markersure is worth billions and doing really well on the stock market because they are buying everything that moves. At ground level, that rapid expansion, which, most likely means buying a company, firing the staff routing the calls to their own call centre and piling the load for their sales advisors, rather than employing any more, results in absolutely shit customer service, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s expanding, so the shareholders still get a bonus, and it’s still a ‘successful’ company even if it’s running at a loss. (Did you know that Spotify has never made a profit?)

The cumbersome nature of behemoths, generally, coupled with all the petty, box-ticking dos and don’ts by which decisions are made within them is so very similar to the aspects of nationalised industries in the 1970s that were crap. It’s all about box ticking, rather than any form of logic or business acumen at ground level. Stuff I read about British Leyland in the 1970s and 80s and other examples of the worst inefficiencies of Britain’s nationalised industries in the that period echoes through all my experiences with modern help desks and call centres. Not to mention our government bodies now.

Take the NHS, everything contracted out, nobody has agency … remember the problem I had getting them to deliver Mum home? The transport people box ticking, no tick, no delivery; Mum is taken home to her house and then back to hospital again. The ward administrator is livid but can do nothing because the drivers don’t answer to her and in the long run, neither does the transport company. They’re the lowest bidder so however shit the service, they’ll always get the job. All those double journeys and mistakes … is it any cheaper than organising it in house? Probably not.

So we have this weird situation where, as far as the customer is concerned, the down-to-earth, nitty-gritty of dealing with capitalism is exactly the same as dealing with a government department or everything that was shit about nationalised companies. Because it turns out that one behemoth—be it the passport office, the NHS, Google, Audible or Markersure—is very like another. Just as governments are often, flabby, inflexible and inefficient because they’re massive and complicated; so companies, when they reach the same size as a small country, seem to become the same. Full of illogical conflicting rules and guidelines that hinder rather than help. A culture of box ticking and back covering rather than actual action or customer service. But what do they care? They own their markets andtheir consumers have no choice, right? Except no. We do. It’s more difficult sometimes but we have to think about it.

There we go then.

Caveat emptor.

Check who underwrites your insurance. If it’s Markersure steer well clear.

Which leads me onto this … A few days ago someone on Facebook shared this quote from Ursula LeGuin.

‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.’

What interested me was people’s reactions. They got all democrat and republican about it. The internet is rather Little America, after all. Lots of people saying yah boo you leftie twat! You think communism (that’s what the Americans call socialism) is better do you? You think shitty inefficient communism crushing our freedoms is better do you? etc.

But it strikes me that shitty inefficient communism was exactly like the events I’ve just described. I have Mondays and Fridays, along with some Thursdays to write. The simple job of getting my insurance claim sorted out took me all my spare time on all three of those days. Obviously, the post of Ursula LeGuin’s words being on Facebook, and having seen it once, I’ll never find it again. Facebook doesn’t want you thinking about stuff before going back to make a measured response. But that’s the whole point isn’t it? Keep the customers busy doing pointless shit and they won’t notice how shit you are. They’ll be too busy concentrating on the pebbles on the path to look up and see just how shit the view has become.

Except some of us do look up. We see their shite. We so, so do.

Everything right now, at every level of life, is about box ticking, arse-covering, bureaucratic pissyness. Nothing is about what might work, what is logical, what is sensible and certainly, never, never, ever about about what is right. That’s why my parents have paid three quarters of a million quid in care fees and we will be pursued to the ends of the earth if Mum is deemed to have tried to give anything away to us—you know, so we have something to inherit the way she and Dad would have wanted, for example—rather than paying it all on care fees the government promised them it would pay, before pulling the rug from under them and a whole generation of people when it was too late for them to act.

I don’t know what the answer is but it might be in here. If you haven’t read this book, read it right now. It makes so much sense of the way modern business and modern life runs.

Is religion such a bad thing done the right way, you know, so it gives people principles? If today’s help-yourself-and-bollocks-to-the-rest-of-them society is anything to go by, some kind of belief system — other than ‘I want it all’ might be worth having.

And finally … once again, here’s a chance to grab 12 hours of fabulous audiophonic joy for 99p (or 99c)

Yes. If you like cheap audio books, Few Are Chosen is on sale for all of March. After that the price goes up again. As always, I’m cutting my own throat here. It’s 99c on Apple, Kobo and my own website. For anyone in the States, it’s also 99c on Barnes & Noble and Chirp (which is USA and Canada). If you want to grab it while it’s mega cheap you can find store links and a bit more info here

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, markerstudy, Mary Fails at Modern Life, massive rant, MTM gets stroppy, rant, writers

26 Feb 2023 · 7:45 pm

Discombobulation … is the name of the game

Yes, you find me all arse-about-face this week. Well that’s the default state, I grant you, but in this particular instance I’m probably a bit more arse-about-face than usual. Yeh. I know. Impressive. Even for me.

One of the difficulties I’ve experienced recently with my blog is that there’s been so much to write about I haven’t really known where to start, so then I’ve just gone a bit droopy and given up on it.

The past few weeks have been rough.

On the Mum front, nothing much seems to be happening about getting her an official diagnosis for dementia and we are reaching the stage where she does need one. It’s a pain to have to keep chasing her doctor and getting absolutely nothing back. He’s normally excellent so I don’t know what’s happened but I think I’ll have to book a call next week and get to the bottom of what’s going on. If he can’t refer her to the NHS memory people for some reason then presumably I’ll have to try and get a diagnosis done privately. It will cost money but the expensive bit is the brain scan which has already been done in hospital and should be with her NHS record.

On the upside, having done my tax return which showed I owed tax, and having paid said tax, it now turns out I don’t so they’re going to give it back to me. On the downside, some numb nuts reversed into me at bloody Tesco’s filling station … why is that place always trouble? Turned out he wasn’t insured because he was driving his friend’s car and didn’t want his friend to know. I explained about fibreglass and the cost of repairs and he looked at the bill and decided he couldn’t pay so I reported it to my insurance company. Apparently they’ve agreed that the repair can be done by the bunch who always look after my car. Unfortunately they’ve told Enterprise rent a car that, and they’ve rung the fellow who will be fixing the damage and have left a message that he must call but when he does all they get is a message telling them that all their operators are busy and to ~~piss off~~ call back at another time.

Incidentally, since every single call centre has been experiencing ‘an unusually high demand’ since covid, I’d be tempted to say that the level of demand has been like this for three years and therefore it isn’t unusually high; it’s simply a case that they sacked everyone after covid and have decided they’ll make more money if they sacrifice any customer service principles they had and run on a shoe-string staff. But I digress.

As the mechanic apologetically explained to me, after making five attempts, there are only so many times you can call. So now I have to ring my insurers between 10.30 and 4.30 (nice hours if you can get them) and they’ll put me through ‘because they’re more likely to answer’ and get the bloody job number myself. FFS.

The next week, going to Mum’s because I’m so fucking intelligent, I was a bit upset by seeing a rolled horse box and car on the motorway and the green we’ve-just-shot-this-horse screens. Late for Mum’s and in a dither I reversed my car into a flint wall, fucking the other end of it although—thank the lord for small mercies—the wall was unscathed. Since it was the random wall of someone else’s drive that is a Good Thing. Why? Because I can’t claim on my insurance or I’ll lose my no claims bonus and my excess is just shy of £300 so unfortunately the £800 for this one is on me because if I lose the no claims I’ll only be getting about £100 for a claim in real terms and paying the rest in increased premiums and excess. It’s tough being this much of a twat but someone’s got to do it.

Another up and down one, I had planned to see Abba Voyage with a friend this week. She’s one half of a lovely couple who absolutely get me. They also like me as much as I like them and there is a huge amount of mutual respect and ditto with McOther too. McMini also loves them. The chap has had cancer on and off since just before lock down. It’s been a virulent bastard. He’s been playing bash-the-rat with it and we’ve been seeing them in the gaps between bouts of chemo. He’s not had much respite between ending one lot of chemo and it popping up again which is highly unfair.

He faced it with a great deal of courage and liberal dashings of his habitual droll humour. Last time we saw them, at the back end of last year, he was unable to eat all of his dinner round ours and suspected he had another tumour somewhere causing a blockage which would mean more chemo.

Knowing this, we sort of left them to it. McOther and I tend to take a, ‘you know where we are if you need us’ approach to this kind of thing and then give people space. We have a kid and if someone’s immune system is compromised with chemo we’re probably more likely to bring pathogens than most people—although McMini doesn’t get all the colds like some kids, it’s probably me that will bring the bugs in. Typhoid Mary anyone? Oh yes.

Long and the short, friend messaged me on Tuesday to say that he was in the hospice. I was particularly amused that, as a keen Viz reader, he should have ended up in the J Arthur Rank … which is ryhming slang for a wank, snortle. But it is a fab hospice and the original J Arthur left a lot of money for cancer care (I’m not sure if he died of it or someone close to him did, I should probably check). She explained that her other half had talked to her about Saturday and told her she had to go, whatever stage he was at. However, she felt her attendance still might depend slightly on him. I totally got that if he was dying, she would probably want to be holding his hand rather than watching Abba Voyage with me and I assumed, from this, that the odds were, he might be. I said that whatever she needed was fine.

Looking at the map, I realised that the hospice was only about 10 minutes out of my way on the way home from Mum’s so I arranged to pop in and see her the following day, and him if he was up to it. You know how with some people you can be really quite rude and abusive to one another and know it’s a joke. If you don’t you should as it’s an incredibly joyous and liberating thing to be able to insult people ironically because you love them.

These two were like this, with one another but also with us so I also told her that if his sense of humour was still in evidence to tell him that all she and I wanted was to nip down to London for a day to watch Abba and he had to make it all about him!

The next morning she contacted me to say that he had died very peacefully in the early hours of that morning. She must have told him I was coming to see him. I mentioned that to her, but obviously I offered condolences first. Then I cried a great deal, most of the way to Mum’s.

JD, the chap in question, was the absolute best of people. Much like my friend Duncan, he was into cars and was not remotely phased about speaking his mind—well, he was a Yorkshireman—or pricking the bubble of the pompous. He saw the humour in everything, but not to the point of offence, or at the expense of the humanity or pathos. Both he and his Mrs coped with the world using gallows humour, and wit, the way McOther and I do. Presumably that’s why we all got on so well.

He was very intense—but not in a way that was at all wearing—very intelligent and well informed about many things. He had an enquiring mind, so I guess if he was interested in something he needed to know about it. Properly. Among the things were music and cars to name two but history and wine, F1 … he was also a fabulous cook. Oh and he was endurance fit, one of these people who gets up at 6 am and goes for a 50 mile bike ride before breakfast. He was also highly amusing. He had a way of calling everyone by their surnames but in a way that felt rather less formal than using first names would be, although he always called me Sweary, for that is my nickname with that group of friends and they all call me Sweary.

His dry wit made the world a better and kinder place and when the cancer appeared he faced his affliction with so much positivity, pragmatism and courage. It’s clear, from talking to his Mrs, that he never gave up until acceptance was the best path. I will miss him dreadfully but, I’m very aware as I say this, that his wife and his mother (God love her, poor woman) have this way, way worse.

His Mrs is being as brilliant as I’d expect her to be. They were great friends, anyway, and clearly grew together rather than apart as his illness progressed. It can’t be easy though. They’re in their mid 50s. And I mean, as it is, I feel as if someone has turned a light out. There is so little humour in the world right now, so few people with a light touch. So few people who will catch my eye, in a situation where everyone is taking something far too seriously, and I will know they’re laughing inside as well. It feels like the world is being run by clones of Biff from Back To The Future. The Biffs are on the ascendant and those of us who understand the importance of humour to civilised living and discourse are fewer and further between than ever. And lightness and humour are so important. If you can be funny about stuff, you can explore some really scary shit in comparative safety, or at least, in a way you can’t if you are a humourless automaton.

The day after breaking the news, my friend contacted me to say she wanted to go to Abba because he would have wanted that and also that he had left instructions that his life should be celebrated. I said that was OK and did she want me to come and pick her up and drive us down there. She said that yes, if I could, that would be great.

I took a half bottle of champagne and on arrival we drank a toast to him. I think it made us both feel better. Then we had lunch and went to watch Abba Voyage which was very impressive and which I can recommend. It did strike me that some of the words were a bit close to the bone but it was only the second to last song where I thought she looked a bit wobbly and gave her a hug. She hugged me back so I think she may have needed it.

The audience was dancing but I was amused to see that, while they clearly wanted to dance the way they had as teenagers and kids, they were nursing the kind of backs, knees, ankles and collapsed arches that meant the couldn’t quite do it the way the used to. The intent was there though. There was a woman about our age near us who stripped down to her bra like it was some kind of 1990s Ibizan foam party, which we thought was hilarious, if a trifle weird. She came over as insecure and wanting to impress, like a teenager, rather than just being overheated, menopausal and giving no fucks. But what do I know?

When we came to leave we had to walk miles round the houses because West Ham were playing at home and turning out at the same time as us. All the streets had been barricaded so you simply could not leave them. I stopped to take a few photos, including a rainbow. A promise? Maybe.

The shopping centre we’d walked through to get to the Abba Arena was closed off with massive metal shutters like the blast doors out of a nuclear shelter and the streets lined with unhelpful stewards who said we had to go round.

We’re not football folks though, we’re here for Abba and we want to get a coffee. Never mind, that. You have to walk round the outside in the pissing rain with the West Ham peps.

Is the car park open? Are we allowed to go into the car park to get our car?

You have to go round. That way.

Yes. We have twigged. But are we going to be allowed into the car park to get our car?

You must go round.

Yeh, right. Thanks that’s been a great help.

On the upside, they demonstrated, clearly, that Westfield shopping centre could survive the Zombie Apocalypse, which is useful to know.

It was bizarre though.

Luckily, we were able to get into the car park, although not into the shopping centre from street level. But by climbing to the next floor we were able to walk into the shopping centre from there and go with our original plan to grab a cappuccino and an arancini.

When it was time to leave we found that the pay machine in the car park was one of these ones where you put in your number plate and it just tells you how long you’ve been there and presents you with a bill.

Except it didn’t.

It kept presenting us with pictures of wildly inappropriate and unmatching vehicles. The more times I tried to find my car’s numberplate, the more bizarrely wrong the suggestions it offered; enormous munter trucks, saloons, and the odd van. Each time it was kind of going, ‘well, there’s an A in the numberplate on this one, is this your car?’ I’d press ‘no’ because it was a bus/estate car/motorbike etc and it would start again. Finally it suggested a massive van which shared one of the same numbers as my car’s number plate, ‘What about this one?’ it says hopefully.

‘Nah-uh.’ Say I. And so on.

After we’d done about seven of these we were both snorting with laughter because we reckoned it would be just our luck to get trapped in the car park forever, unable to leave. In my head I could just hear JD laughing at our antics. There were many jokes about how us two could get in to the most ridiculous scrapes. McOther calls me The Woman THINGS Happen To and they had a similar gag running themselves. I pressed the help button and was told that we should just drive to the exit and ring them again and they’d charge us then.

Off we went. I managed to tell two lurking motorists that I was leaving, by mistake, but my friend explained to the second one that we’d told the other we were going first and so we avoided precipitating a hand bags at sundown situation over our parking spot. Phew.

When we reached the exit, I discovered that the help button was about 3 feet above the roof of my car. I dunno, maybe there were some exits for buses or something and I’d inadvertently picked one of those, but they’d all seemed to be the same. Then again, there were about 60,000 West Ham fans making their way home and most of them seemed to be parked in that car park so maybe it was just that there were cars over the top of the writing on the ground and I’d not seen the bus label on this one.

On the up side, there was a guy there and I explained what had happened and asked him to help. He pressed the button for me, not quite what I was expecting, I’d assumed he’d be able to work the machine. Never mind, it was a start. The sound of a distant phone ringing drifted down from above me as the help button attempted to make the connection. It went on for a while. Some of the West Ham fans behind us tooted.

‘I’m going to let you go,’ said the man and proceeded to raise the barrier just as a tinny voice 3 feet above my head said, ‘Hello?’

I’m afraid I didn’t reply. Instead, I thanked the man, hoofed it out of the car park and headed for home. As I drove, my friend had to ring some folks to explain when her husband’s funeral was. I listened as she spoke a cross between Italian and dialect to a cousin in Sicily. And tried to shut up Margaret (the sat nav on my phone) who seemed to be shouting orders on full volume. (It’s called Margaret because it sounds like Mrs Thatcher.)

As we got to the bottom of the M11 she (my friend, not Margaret, the sat-nav, obviously) was saying, ‘Caio, Caio, Ciao …’ exactly the same way Brits say, ‘bye’ successive times, really quickly, when ending a call. But then the person on the other end clearly asked her something and they started talking again and went on for another ten minutes.

This got me chuckling because I could imagine her husband laughing at this so vividly it was almost like he was in the car with us and I could hear it. And I immediately remembered a conversation the four of us had had with him and McOther ripping the piss out of myself and her over our inability to say goodbye quickly. McOther complained how, when I was leaving my parents, we’d suddenly start another conversation in the doorway and talk for another twenty minutes in the cold instead of getting into the car, at which point JD had cited examples of similar behaviour from her while visiting the rellies in Italy.

Once her call was done, we put on my Abba Gold CD and did some hard core singing as we drove up the motorway. I managed to get cramp in my shin on the home straight going to her house, which was interesting and made us laugh some more. It did go the minute I got out and went inside to say a quick hello to JD’s mum and have a wee. Then it was home for a well earned spag bol. I’d done 23,000 steps and an hour and a half of dancing so I had no qualms about eating a generous portion!

So yeh … all in all … a bittersweet few weeks. I haven’t written anything, and I can’t, but that’s OK.

On a vaguely book related note …

Graphic book cover with two old ladies silhouetted against a darkened street If you have the remotest interest in any of my books, I have a page on my site where I list all the stuff that’s reduced or free so you can try it out and see if you like it. If you think that sounds interesting (oh yes you DO think it sounds interesting) then click on this link: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot3

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as death, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T McGuire, M T McGuire audiobooks, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic, women in sci-fi

4 Feb 2023 · 5:09 pm

2022 in Focus, career version

picture of a factory with sunlight shining on it

The Bury Beet Factory in sunset hue … Less Silver Spoon and more Golden Spoon in this one …

This blog post is written over a couple of weeks but I’ve not harmonised the timeline. Instead I’ve left it in as-I-wrote it mode because it seems to read better like that …

This week I have suddenly developed sciatica, or at least a trapped nerve but same end result. It just gradually appeared over the course of Wednesday evening as McMini and I watched TV. Yesterday it wasn’t great but I exercised a lot to try and keep it all moving. This was the right thing to do on paper, but unfortunately, I woke up this morning with the most evil pain in my lower back. It got better as the day wore on with a heat pad pressed against it pretty much all the time, and concentrated itself in and just above my left bottom cheek. Lovely. Lowlights of the week, trying to get dressed yesterday, today and the day before. Friday, especially, my socks were causing too much friction for me to be able to get them into my trousers without extremem pain. When you are standing on one leg shouting, ‘fuck off you fucking bastard trousers!’ at the top of your voice to an inaminate item of clothing you know you are in trouble but when it acctually makes you feel better, rather than an idiot, you know it might be piss-poor day, painwise. Still the only way is up. Except it wasn’t. Although let’s face it, things may improve from here. A friend came round to lunch on Friday which was lovely though, and it did take my mind off the pain.

Having googled myself extensively, if you see what I mean, I’m pretty sure I have what I had last time which is a tight piriformis muscle but I may have a disc pressing on the nerve too somewhere, too. The piriformis is a pathetic little muscle in your arse which, if it gets tight, traps the sciatic nerve, which hurts, which makes your arse clench, which makes it tighter, which hurts more … you get the picture. When I do a specific stretch aimed at helping this it … well … you know … helps. However, when I do stretches to releive a blurpy disk pressing on the nerve that helps too. Knowing my luck I’ve scored a full house. So now I just have to keep doing the stretch and moving around regularly, even if that does involve walking like Clive Dunn. No sitting at my computer for more than ten minutes. Productivity levels may vary. I have some absolute horse pills that they gave me last time which do seem to help but it means no alcohol if I take more than one a day. I did virtual church this morning, which was nice, except they had a collection of some of my absolutely favourite hymns … on the other hand, communion just happened to arrive at the same time of breakfast so I communicated with a glass of water and a slice of Lorne sausage. Probably quite unholy in the grand scheme of things but it helped …

Interestingly, I have been a bit more productive like this. Sitting on the sofa in my office with the omnipresent heat pad and getting up for a little walk round for ten minutes on the hour I seeem to be getting more done. So far I’ve read quite a lot of a book on antique bottles and have been able to look up some of the ones I have and come up with an approximate date. I’ve also written the thank you/Christmas letters I do to keep elderly friends of my parents and relatives to keep them in touch with what’s happening to Mum. Once the first is done, obviously, it’s easier to do the others because I’ve already written a lot of what I want to say and kind of … you know … got it down pat.

Never mind, onwards and upwards. I was going to talk about the year in book sales, although looking at the volume of sales, I am sorely tempted to say, ‘let’s not!’ On we go then …

MTM’s Year out of in Focus 2022

Aims

Ooo! Get me, all organised with my headings and subheadings but yes, despite my efforts, and my business looking like a completely random and chaotic shit-show from the outside (and the inside if I’m honest) I did start off with some actual aims last year. Rather loose ones, to be honest, and I probably hadn’t given enough thought as to how I would achieve them but they were:

Write and publish another book … er hem. Yes. Oops.
Increase my audio sales and see if I could get some sales of soemthing other than my two first in series
See if I could do some face-to-face events and sell more paperbacks.
Attempt to grow sales at outlets other than Amazon and Audible.
Try something new in marketing, possibly a kickstarter, and be more organised with other marketing efforts (social, mailings and ads).

Let’s have a look and see how I did then shall we?

1. Publish a book

Yes, that one fell victim to pressures at home but I’m hoping I might finish one in 2023. I won’t be able to publish it because if I do finish, that’ll happen in April after which I probably won’t have time to do much else but if I fail to finish I’ll throw caution to the wind and write another novella in the interim, or extend The Last Word or … I dunno. Something.

To be honest, if I want to get anywhere I have to write some straight medieval fantasy and something about a dorky american bloke in space. I haven’t done anything straight medievel fanatasy wise but I do have a dork in space (not american because america doesn’t exist in that version of reality but a guy who lost one leg just below the knee in an accident). In the meantime, I just have to go with what’s flowing, sigh, which is more K’Barthan shizz. Oh dear.

2. Audio sales

My figures for audio are not as complete as sometimes, mainly because I haven’t got round to finishing the spreadsheet where I log them all. However, this one actually went better than I thought it was going to at the start of 22. Gareth and I share a steady £60 or so from Audible each month but obviously, I wanted to grow my sales on other retailers. I did several promos on Kobo and tied in Apple and Chirp, adding Barnes & Noble as Findaway added those retailers to the promotions section. For future promos I can now add Spotify as well. On the whole, each sale was around two weeks long.

On average, my effots (bookbub ads and the odd post on social media) garnered between 30 and 40 sales of the first book in the K’Barthan Series at 99c during each promo. These were mostly on Chirp but occasionally on my site or on Kobo too. In the first instance, there was little or no readthrough but when I ran the second sale, I noticed there were some downloads of the second K’Barthan book or the box set, although these were mainly from Libraries. Third sale, more read through and even some purchases of later books so things are looking up there. In 2020 I earned about 2/3 audible and 1/3 Findaway.

Overall, audiobook sales are climbing and to my joy the non Audible portion is growing. It is rather wearing to read my royalty statements from Audible and see sums like $395 earned with $90 going to Gareth and I to share 50:50. Worse, ACX are now reducing the prices of books so we sell more. Great on paper, I mean Audible’s book prices are fictional anyway, they are twice as much as everywhere else to make the price of a credit look good but at the same time, the books they are selling a la carte on Audible for £24.99 are piped through to Apple at £10.00 so they know how much audiobooks actually cost. However, they say that the publisher compensation is governed by the published price so if they reduce my books by 20% then presmumably my royalty goes down by 20% too. Other authors whose books have already been reduced have seen this borne out on their statements. I have had the odd very low payment but I haven’t managed to track down if it was a sale or an offer or what … So far on Audible UK they haven’t reduced my books. I am unable to see prices on any of the other audible sites, or, indeed look at them … even in ‘private’ browsing it funnels me back to the UK store. So yes, the Gorilla is still providing 2/3 of the income but only from one book and I am beginning to think seriously about pulling all the others. I just see no point exposing myself to anymore of Audible’s shit than is absolutely necessary. I’d keep one book on there and keep my account so I can claim any new books as I publish to stop other people putting them on Audible. Otherwise, I’m close to just telling them to do one with their contract that reads like an unenforcable software contract and their punishment royalty rates for putting my books in libraries.

On the upside, although the Findaway portion dropped dramatically in 2021 this last year it appears to have gone up again. It’s still only 1/3 which is annoying but at the same time, if I’m earning 1/3 of my income from 10% or less of the readers it goes to show a) how shit Audible’s royalties are and b) that I should keep promoting my wide audio. Oh and I forgot to add sales of my own books which are tiny but were definitely a thing last year (along with Kobo) both of which had very little action the year before … zero on Kobo and a few quid on my store in 21 but some earnings in 22. Gareth and my earnings in 2022 are up by about 20% overall on the year before and that’s with December’s figures missing.

Conclusion: I might be doing the right thing for audio so I’ll carry on and hope it keeps improving and that the wide/my store share keeps growing.

3. Face to face events

This one was a bit of a mixed bag. I didn’t do as well as I have at previous events before lockdown. However, at the same time, I was able to attend a lot of events in a group that wouldn’t have been commercially viable for one person alone. And I earned £349 quid that I wouldn’t have earned otherwise and yes, the others earned way more than that, indeed one earned that figure in one appearance, alone, at the Christmas Fair during which I earned £35 but I’m still pleased with the overall figure. There’s an enormous £8.00 from Ingram Spark, the people who distribute my paperbacks online, on top. I think when I add Bookvault, who are similar to Ingram but much cheaper, I may well find things easier.

Will I do more face to face stuff? Yes because it was fun. However, I may try to be a bit more smart about which events I attend. For example, Ely Cathedral Christmas Market is one I should look at and I will definitely try Bury Cathedral if they do an event for Bury’s ‘Not’ the Christmas Market next year. I must also approach some schools offering to do a library talk, although I have to find out if I need CRB checked first. That’s expensive but might still be worth doing. Overall the most important thing was that barring one bit of one event, where I was a little bit embarrassed, I had fun and that is the main point, after all.

4. Grow sales on sites that are not Amazon

I can only really go on a hunch with this but as far as I can see, the non-Amazon portion of my earnings is growing. Now, admittedly, this could be because Amazon is pay-to-play and runs the most bizarre, opaque and arcane advertising platform so my choice is to get to grips with that one thing, or do everything else. I’ve chosen everything else. I’ve been doing the standard operating procedure with the others, I have a first in series in a free box set, I have a short and a novella permanently free and I have an exclusive story that people get for signing up to my mailing list. It’s OK but not hugely successful. Having looked at other people’s success I have decided to try running a kickstarter. After Brandon Sanderson ran the highest grossing kickstarter of all time, there are a fair few fantasy and sci fi fans on there and as yet it hasn’t been swamped by romance like everywhere else. Doubtless that will come but I need to try and sort one of those out before the Romance authors pile in and fantasy becomes a sub genre of romance on there like it is on all the other sites.

Unfortunately the only thing standing in my way is that I haven’t finished a book. I need the finished article ready to go and then I use it as a pre-order system essentially.

Looking year on year, at the nice easy fix that is Scribecount sales tracking, things appear to be going in the right direction.

In 2019 28% of my sales were off Amazon.
In 2020 it was 25% and I earned three times as much. I also had orders for books from non Amazon outlets where there had been no traction beforehand. I think a lot of that was the Pandemic but also that Amazon seemed to relax some of it’s algorithmic twiddling so people could find stuff they wanted rather than the nearest fit to what they wanted from the stuff in KU or that was advertised. This has since been tightened up again as far as I can tell and my Amazon earnings have dropped accordingly.
In 2021 the percentage of non Amazon sales was up to 33.3% (woot) including 6% from my own store but that may have been skewed by the launch of Too Good To Be True which a lot of lovely people bought from my store rather than any of the retailers. If that was you, thank you another 20% of those royalties went to me instead of ‘The Man’.
In 2022 39.5% of my income was from elsewhere than Amazon. (So close to 40%!) Kobo and Google Play were 12% a pop and my own store was 4.4% although I suspect that was mostly audiobooks (I can’t separate them out at the moment).

Pie chart of sales showing where they happened for 2022

2022

Pie chart showing where sales were made

2021

Sales pie chart showing vendor share

2020

I hadn’t really looked at the figures until now but that’s heartening because it is going in the right direction; the non Amazon share is definitely going up. Or to put it another way, the share I rely on from the most morally shonky, high maintenance of the stores is going down. I’m not sure what’s happened to my print sales though, I used to do about £40 a year from Ingram and this year it’s £7. I’m guessing this is Amazon no longer ordering my books in batches of six, which it then bins off for less than it costs me to buy them from Ingram at cost so I always purchase those and put them into stock! Mwahahargh, not that I’m devious or anything.

On the whole that’s a pleasing result though. I’ll keep doing what I do with that one then and hope that I can keep my dependence on Amazon and Audible dropping throughout 2023 and my earnings from other less abusive stores and/or sources of income rising. Also I haven’t posted my print sales on here because I can’t add sum up to the spread sheet as yet.

5. Try something new …

I didn’t do too well on this front. I guess I could call the in person appearances as trying something new because I hadn’t attempted that sort of thing regularly. They netted me the same as I’d usually have earned from my previous single appearence at the Christmas Fair but I do think it’s worth doing more. I bought a stand-up course to help me think about how I would talk to readers in public. I also bought an epic Kickstarter course and have so far got to about step two, but I’m slowly working my way through it with a view to reaching more readers of fantasy and sci fi books. With that in mind this year, I’m definitely hoping to ditch preorders and start using Kickstarter to get sales in advance. The upside of that being that I can give people more than just the book for buying in advance in a way that I can’t with the stores.

Other stuff to try. I’d like to expand my efforts on live appearences with two biggies:

Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair
School visits – time to contact local schools and offer a library talk
Move from pre-orders to doing a kickstarter for my next book, and possibly starting with Googly Joy or Eyebomb: therefore I am, depending on what I decide to call it.
I should sign up as a speaker to the Women’s Institute. I’m not sure how many sales I’d get but I should imagine it would be similar to the library talk I did at my local library, which was great fun.

Conclusions …?

Not many really. I think I’m doing the right thing. I think it’s been good to get out more among the people so to speak. Apparently, as authors get more successful, the profitability of in person appearances drops but at the moment compared to the vaguaries of internet marketing, personal appearances are like shooting fish in a barrel. They are not easy and on a couple of occasions I have been roundly humiliated. However, they are still an absolute piece of cake compared to trying to get some jaded online reader with ten million books they will never look at already parked on their e-reader to open mine and start reading. I won’t do the routine with about the wi-fi free island, the telephone directory and the lavatory because I suspect you’ll remember that but you get where I’m going …

Plans for 2023?

Yeh, there are some …

Last year I definitely made a little bit of progress so, at the risk of sounding as if I’m repeating myself, this year’s aims are pretty much the same:

Write and publish another book.
Continue to increase my audio sales, especially away from Amazon/Audible and try to build on my print sales too.
Pick the right events to sell more paperbacks face to face.
Attempt to grow wide sales (i.e. at outlets other than Amazon and Audible).
Try something new in marketing, possibly a kickstarter, and be more organised with other marketing efforts (social, mailings and ads).
Try to visualise how I could do these things and break down what I need to do to actually get them done.

Any progress so far?

Yes. I’ve started as I mean to go on. Work out what I want and then break down what I need to do to get there so I have small, easily implemented steps to take listed out and can consult the list and just do them on brain fog days. For something big like a kickstarter this is going to be especially important. I’m listing the stuff I’ve set in motion here so I have a reference document that I can return to, in order to keep myself accountable. Whether it’ll work I don’t know but I can try right?

1. Writing another book

This is where the Eyebomb: Therefore I am, easy win comes in. There will be another book this year and it’ll be that one. Another easy win is a short book; in this case, I’m doing a talk in December about coming to terms with failure. Achieving less by doing more is what it’s called but being a failure is what it’s actually about. Being a failure and being totally OK with that. The talk is schedulued for December 2023 and will run for 30 – 40 minutes online with powerpoint slides. Clearly, by the time I’ve written that, I’ll have pretty much written the entire book anyway, so it’s a case of setting out my thoughts and doing the slides early enough for there to be time to make it into a book. I think I’m going to call it, ‘I fucked this up so you don’t have to’. No obviously not fucked, the Americans will go mad. I’l

2. Increase Audio and Print Sales

The eyebombing book would be a great fit for Christmas markets if I can do it at a stocking filler price, I’m thinking 10″x 10″ hardback for £9.99 but I can take that down to 7″x7″ if that means I can make it longer for that price. I have found a cheaper printer and set up an account with them. Their books are good and so I reckon I’m going to try printing it through them. They also distribute across the UK and in The Great British Bookshop. So I’ll be using them for UK distribution and possibly for drop shipping if I do a kickstarter, in conjunction with drop shipping from Ingram Spark for the Americas, Africa, the Far East and Oceana. Ingram are between £1 and £2 more expenisve per book, wholesale and make me add a 50% margin to distribute whereas I can do 35% with the other bunch so I will definitely be using BookVault where I can.

Another important thing to do is to link my payhip shop to bookvault. I hope to move to an integrated woocommerce store on my website eventually but until I can fix that up, it’s possible to use Payhip and connect it to bookvault for direct sales via something called Zapier, which, I think is free until I make 100 transfers a month.

Likewise, if I can finish the next misfit book I will. I think it’s possible that I could but it will be important to keep up all the other stuff alongside so I won’t feel the pressure as keenly. Yes, in a strange twist of reverse phychology, doing other stuff that brings results at the same time may take the pressure off and help me finish this one. I need to do the carer’s memoir, too, as that’s very now and again, there’s a lot of stuff on my blog and in other places that I’ve already written and can use for that. However, that particular book is probably something I should attempt through trad. Hybrid is the way to go really as a trad deal shows the bigots you are good enough to get a deal and opens doors that will be closed to me forever otherwise.

3. Pick the right events to sell more paperbacks face-to-face.

picture of two people smiling in front of a table at a sci fi convention

Yes, I’m going to flex this photograph on you yet again.

I’ve already sent in my application for the Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair. Ooo get me! Will I get in? Who knows. They wanted a web address and my HUP website had just gone down so it’s actually quite likely I will fail this year. It’s also a bit of a conundrum trying to add product photos to a pitch, when a lot of the products haven’t been made yet. However, if I get a spot I will start printing up cards and merch over the course of the year; a few things each month to defray the cost pre Christmas. If I don’t get in, I’ll probably still do that ahead of any other Christmas Markets I might do, I just won’t print as many. I’m not going to inherit any money. It’s going to go on care so I need to earn some capital of my own, fast.

4. Attempt to grow wide sales (i.e. at outlets other than Amazon and Audible)

Here’s hoping I can keep the momentum going and hit 40% of my sales being from non Bezos companies. To that end, all I can do is keep trying to find readers on other platforms and continue to advertise to them.

Other stuff, finish uploading all my books to Barnes & Noble direct. I have seven on there and five to do. Then I need to sort all the Barnes & Noble links on my site so they go to the books I’ve uploaded direct. Then I need to contact Barnes & Noble and ask them to move any reviews on other versions to the ones I’ve uploaded and then I need to cancel distribution where I’ve used an aggregator. I also need to sort out the rest of my links pages at Books2Read.com this is a brilliant thing that lets you add all the links to a book for audio, paperback and ebook format. The only trouble is, it’s immensely buggy so you can only do about two at a time, then you have to clear the cache turn the computer off and on again and do another two and so on. So I tend to do a couple here and there when I remember because otherwise it’s so frustrating that I may be forced to smash my laptop to pieces. That would be bad. But really, I have to bite the bullet and do it.

5. Try something new in marketing

Gulp. This year, I may see if I can resurrect my Facebook ads again, perhaps doing one or two aimed at readers on Apple, where I get crickets, or Kobo, which is rather good. Ideally, I’d get them going to my own store and buying stuff there. This is another thing I could use Zapier for, I think … as I can also have books for sale on my Facebook page. Nobody buys them and the store is hard to set up and edit but I’m a great believer in having things available in as many places as I can. Then … I’m going to try a kickstarter. I’m going to do it for the eyebombing book, to start with, because it’s easy to explain what it is and there’s no mashing of genres involved, it’s a humorous non fiction art book. I’ll design it and build it first, then, when it’s proofed and finished and ready to go I’ll do a kickstarter campaign to try and recoup as much of the money as possible. If that works, I’ll try a kickstarter for the next Misfit book again, waiting until all three versions are ready to go before I start … and possibly adding an under-the-table hardback.

6. Try to visualise how I’ll do this and plan it in bite sized pieces so I am able to.

That’s kind of what this post is for … The minute I start writing or explaining it I come up with a very straight forward list of stuff I need to do. But when I sit looking a blank screen or sheet of paper trying to type, or write, it up I find myself completely unable to think. Doubtless something terrible will go wrong because it usually does. Not least, if I get into the Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair you can guarantee something will happen to Mum about ten minutes into it and I’ll have to do a mercy dash to Sussex and chalk £275 for the stall (and probably a life time ban from exhibiting ever again) up to experience. If that’s the case, I’ll just have to pack up and leave the stall because I have no back up. Here’s hoping …

In theory I could update myself, and you, on where things have got to over the course of the year but you may well lose the will to live and people will be leaving in droves! So. Instead, why not lose yourself in a book?

Astonishingly cheap ebook and audiobook alert …

Yes. Spoil yourself with your good taste (Ambassador) and a wonderful free book. Mmm hmm. If you are looking for a fun novella–to relieve the considerable tedium you may be experiencing after reading this blog post, for example … or if you’d like to listen to an audio book in the car, or at work or on the commute and you are just fresh out of ideas for fabulous newness … well, you can fix all those things by grabbing a free book.

This book.

Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Extras, Hamgeean Misfit: No 1.

It’s free to download in ebook format from most of the major retailers (except when Amazon is dicking with me) while two and a half hours of glorious K’Barthan audiobook deliciousness is a mere 99p or c from Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Spotify, Apple and Chirp (if you’re in the States). It’s also free to download from my web store.

If you think that sounds interesting and would like to take a look, just go here.

Oh and PS … my back has recovered and my knee is getting there. Onwards and upwards eh? A bientot!

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as author blog, author blogs, book marketing, comedy fantasy fiction, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K'Barth, M T McGuire, trying to be a writer, writer parent, writers, writing

1 Oct 2022 · 12:01 pm

Enjoy yourself …

It sounded as if the Dalek operator inside was laughing as I did this.

OK, it’s a bit of a long one this week because woah! Norcon! What a gas! And I want to give you the low down. Yes, you will remember—if you wade through my outpourings regularly—that last week, through the wonders of modern technology, I was talking to you, in my absence, from Norcon where I was flogging books. Now I’m going to tell you all about it. Oh yes I am.

Why? Because it was brilliant! That’s why, one week on, I still haven’t quite returned to earth.

During the summer, I did St Albans Comicon with some author friends and we had great fun even though it was hot enough to cook meringues by just leaving them outside, and even hotter inside.

This time it was not hot, or at least not inside. I dunno about outside because I didn’t go out there during the day. Hang on, I’ve gone off on a tangent there. Right, yes, back on track now, the same three of us were sharing two tables, plus another lovely East Anglian author who we met at St Albans Comicon: Mark (Book of Souls Saga) Ashby. So half a table each, which worked out just peachy. A few feet round the corner was A E Warren (Tomorrow’s Ancestors Series) another East Anglian author who is a member of the author zoom group of which we are all part.

Norcon bills itself as the most friendly convention and it certainly lived up to its name. The atmosphere was very relaxed which was lucky because we had to get up at insane o’clock in the morning to get there and I am not at my best before seven a.m. Not even after coffee. Julia Blake (Erinsmore, The Forest, Black Ice and many more) and I were sharing a car; her car on day one, my car—which had arrived back from lengthy and convoluted (not to mention expensive) repairs the Friday before—on day two. Because the loading doors closed at 8.30 and we weren’t sure where we were going we decided to leave at six a.m.

As you know people, I have a light dash of IBS. What this means it that certain THINGS have to happen before I leave the house. Thank the heavens above, my body was in a cooperative mood that morning and I was ready for pick up at six. But to achieve that, I still had to be up by FIVE am. Gads! We decided that we would do cosplay too so we were all going to be dressed to match the characters or genre of our books.

Having scratched my head about the number of books I should bring, I decided in the end that I should assume I’d sell double what I sold in one day at St Albans over the two days … but then I got cold feet and in an act of hopeless optimism, I packed all the books into two huge boxes.

‘Blimey! How many books have you brought with you?’ Julia asked me as I heaved them all into her car.

‘Yes!’ I replied.

Us and our stalls

There was a small hiccup was that a large part of the A11 is down to one lane and Google chose to direct us the quickest way which involved Julia navigating her brand new car down single track roads. But something else happened to Google, or maybe I touched the screen of my phone with an unwitting fingertip, but it took us to someone’s house on Church Street, in a small village about ten miles short of our expected destination; the Norfolk Showground.

Oookaaaay …

Luckily, we got there unscathed, although I felt horrendously guilty for putting my friend through the crap in her BRAND NEW CAR (yeek!) or at least, for letting my phone do it.

Paul McGahn, Nigel Planer and Chris Barrie sitting at sci fi convention signing tables

Paul McGann, Nigel Planer and Chris Barrie with members of Norcon Crew

We set out our stalls and I discovered that we were opposite the signing tables — I hadn’t realised this but the others had cunningly planned it because that way we might have a captive audience of people queuing for signings to pitch our books to. The three opposite us were Paul McGann, who was the radio and film Dr Who, Nigel Planer who is the voice of the first 24 (I think it’s 24) Terry Pratchett audiobooks but, more importantly, was Neil in a comedy show called The Young Ones which my friend Kirsty and I watched pretty much on loop as teenagers. Then there was Chris Barrie, who is Rimmer in Red Dwarf. Julian Glover was down at the end somewhere and there were two more folks, stars from StarTrek the New Generation and another from StarWars, I think, in between, but the three opposite us were the ones I genuinely admire; being, as I am, a monster fan of Dr Who, Red Dwarf and The Young Ones.

Chris Barrie sitting at a table

Chris (Arnold Rimmer) Barrie

The stars were sitting with a Norcon team member each and in most cases they were chatting away and it all seemed very relaxed. Meanwhile we were doing the same thing our side.

As I was banging on about something in the voice of Dr Evil to my neighbouring author—Rachel Churcher (Battleground Series)—and primping and reprimping the books on my stall, I was aware of someone tall in a dark jacket reading the blurbs I’d pinned to the front of the table cloth and taking a picture of me. I looked up and the only person in a dark jacket in our neck of the woods was Nigel Planer, who was wandering back to his table.

‘Did he just …?’ I asked Rachel.

‘Take a photo of you? Yes,’ she replied.

‘Woah. That’s cool.’

So we had a quick squee moment and told the others and then got on with selling our books, photographing each other looking excited and holding books or arsing about, flaunting our costumes—or in my case, trying to prove my books were amusing by Being Funny at people—and generally Being Authors … er hem … probably.

During the gaps in traffic we looked at people’s costumes and took photos which the organised ones shared to instagram and Facebook but I just whatsapped them to the McOthers at home, or we watched the martial arts bunch behind us doing light sabre training with legions of pint-sized Jedi and Sith or photographed passing Daleks, because who’s going to pass up an opportunity to do that?

Meanwhile the signing tables were busy but in the gaps, Mr Planer appeared to be doing exactly the same thing as we were (sensible chap) wandering about with his phone taking pictures and clearly living his best life and enjoying at all. He kept stopping to look at my stall, and me, presumably trying to work out who on God’s green earth I was supposed to be. He was wearing an affable smile or an expression of intelligent enquiry (or both) for most of the time, but above all when he wandered past us, he appeared to be genuinely intrigued by the books I was selling. Which was a bit of a thing. And which threw me completely.

As the day wore on, all the others noticed and they kept teasing me that if Nigel Planer was looking at my stuff, I should go over and sell a book to him. I was just wondering if I could swing that and deciding that no, I very much could not, when I looked up and there he was, standing in front of the stall, like an actual … um … customer.

Shit.

‘Hello,’ I said, although, to be honest, it might have come out as a bit of a squeak.

I think he asked if my books were humorous sci fi to which I said yes and then, before I could stop myself, I sort of blew it. My brain went into overdrive.

You can’t sell him a book! Some of it told me. You have to give him the book.

I know but what if he insists on paying? The rest of me asked it. I can’t take his money. It’s really bad form.

Use a short. Then he’ll only have to pay £3 if he insists and you can accept his money without looking like a charlatan taking advantage.

And so it was that before I could stop myself, while the larger part of my brain was still attempting to compute, I grabbed the nearest short, Close Enough and I blurted.

‘Can I give you a book? Seriously, I would be honoured to, if you wanted one.’

Noooo! What was I doing? Where was the calm sensible, let’s chat about the books, let’s allow the customer to ask me the questions and choose the one they want selling policy that I try, and fail, to pursue with everyone who approaches my stall? Nowhere, that’s where. There’d been some kind of brain coup and sensible, mature Mary was now gagged and tied up in the corner. Gibbering fan girl was firmly at the wheel.

Worse, that was the wrong book! I’d picked a short, which he would be least likely to enjoy, because it would drop him in the middle of everything with minimal world building. But it would have to be a short because they were the cheapest. Except that if it does have to be a short Nothing To See Here is the one to throw them in with. And I didn’t even fucking ask him which one he wanted, poor sod! And if I was going to do that why, in heaven, didn’t I just sell him Escape From B-Movie Hell at cost, since that’s the one which eases the uninitiated into my style gently and I could have charged him a fiver for that without looking like I was grovelling but it would still not be rudely expensive.

Head desk.

On the other hand, he’d seen and heard me selling books all day so he probably had some idea what he was in for. And I didn’t dribble or start quoting vast tracts of The Young Ones at him and my Traffic Warden Clemency Begging Gland didn’t pump two gallons of spit into his face while I was talking to him either, so that was a bonus. Also, it wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as the time I met Dudley Moore (I die a little inside every time I remember that) which, I suppose, was a small win. I guess I was just a bit … starstruck though.

Rolls eyes.

Encore de head desk.

And the others chimed in and I think Julia gave him a book because … share the love!

He did insist on paying and I took his three quid. I also devalued his copy by signing it for him.

Nigel, thank you for being Neil (and Nigel) all the best … I wrote, drew him a picture of a snurd and signed it. In sharpie. God in heaven.

Then he told us he’d written a book which he’s crowd funded on Unbound and that it’s humorous sci fi, a time travel story. So we chatted about that and he had a flyer so I asked if I could keep it and Rachel (Battleground Series) asked for one, too, and he went back and got one for her, as well. Then, clutching mine and Julia(Black Ice, Erinsmore, The Forest and many more …)’s books, our hapless victim returned to his station. He left us bobbing up and down like overexcited pontipines.

Hmm, maybe not so hapless, then, since I’ve bought his book; the deluxe hardback version, signed by the author with my name printed in the back so I think he might have had the last laugh. Then again, he was so friendly and generally affable that how could I not? And it’s comedic sci fi and this is me so that I’ll buy the book is pretty much a given really.

I also apologised to him for being a bit starstruck on twitter and sent him a picture of Extra Special Deadpool man (I’ll come to that) and told him I’d bought the book. He dutifully liked the picture said he hoped I enjoy it.

Back to Norcon.

A bit later on, I was suffering with raging guilt over 1, taking money off actual Nigel Planer for my crappy book and, 2, giving him a book he’d probably loathe so I thought I’d better go and buy a photo. Then Amy (AE Warren; Tomorrow’s Ancestors Series) said I should try and get a selfie except there was a sign over each person saying what they’d do and how much for and Mr P’s said no selfies. Amy reckoned he was quite louche about that though and assured me that she’d seen him doing selfies with other people.

So I took my courage in both hands, waited for a quiet moment and went over to him.

‘Since you’ve been kind enough to buy my book, the least I should do is return the compliment. How much would you charge me for a selfie?’ I asked him, pretending that I was either terribly myopic or too stupid to have read the sign. Well, I wear spectacles and he’d already spoken to my by this time so I reckoned I could swing it.

‘I’m not really supposed to do them but I doubt anyone will find out if we go over there,’ he said cheerfully, waving his hand in the general direction of my book stall opposite.

‘Oh! Thank you, very much,’ I said.

He wandered over and positioned himself in front of the banner but also a bit to the side, you know, so people looking at the photo could read it. I trotted over in his wake.

‘There we are!’ he said as I stood beside him. ‘You can just pretend you are taking a photograph of something over there,’ he told me, pointing in the general direction of Chris Barrie. There was definitely a slightly gleeful vibe coming from him at this point, as if he was feeling the joy of doing some small piece of rebellion that’s Naughty and that he Wasn’t Meant To. That, of course, is something I can always get on board with. I was just about to start a light hearted sort of, ‘Oh look at that over there!’ in a suitably wooden comedy voice and hold up my phone when, bless her, up popped Rachel.

‘Shall I take the photo?’ she asked.

Brilliant. So I handed her the phone and he put his arm round me and we grinned at the camera. Rachel wisely took two photos, both of which are fabulous; like, really decent shots both of him and me, which might be natural for him but trust me, for me, it’s something approaching a miracle.

Woah.

What was lovely was that it came over as totally genuine interest in another professional, which from one so stratospherically elevated from us made all four of us feel good. Mwahahahargh! I guess that’s the power of fame but it’s amazing how such a simple kindness from someone who has that power can make another person’s day. If I ever make it off the bottom, I hope that I, too, will show the same generosity of spirit and encouragement to the people coming up behind me.

Where could I go from there? Well, on the Sunday, things did feel a bit flat at first but then I looked at the costumes and on the up side, I did get a belly laugh out of Chris Barrie by asking him, in the voice of the Toaster from Red Dwarf whether he wanted some toast. And obviously, I went and shook hands with Paul McGann as well because … you know. He’s The Doctor. And Terry Malloy, who played Davros quite a lot in Dr Who (one of my favourite villains) at a time when I avidly watched the programme every Saturday night.

Another delight was watching the Dalek operators. There was an impressive selection of Daleks; from the 1960s and 70s ones I remembered as a kid, to the copper-coloured David Tennant era ones. They were fenced off in an area close to us. The fellow in charge had brought his parents, who were in their 80s and absolutely sweet and would sit in deck chairs each day happily watching the action, or wander the hall, hand-in-hand, looking at all the other exhibits.

And then we heard the martial arts folks giggling and saying that ‘he’ was here so we asked them who ‘he’ was and they said,

‘Oh you’ll know.’

Sure enough, when this gentleman turned up I suspect we did. Yes. Dead pool. With a euphonium. Mwahahahargh!

Awesome.

He followed the people in particularly excellent costumes about playing their themes or the theme from their film. I asked him if his instrument was heavy and he told me that yes, it’s hard on the core strength. Apparently he has to wear a back brace to help with that.

I particularly like the way he’s wearing the trumpet like a side arm. I didn’t see him play it but I should imagine it would be too difficult to get to when the euphonium is in position and you’d need some extra arms to hold the euphonium while you used your main set of arms to play the trumpet.

On a final note, it was one of the safest spaces I’ve seen for a while. There’s a whole other level to cosplay. Nobody cares if you’re 20 stones and want to dress as Wonder Woman, nobody cares if you’re a he, a she, a they or a ze. Nobody cares if you’re a biological bloke but you feel more comfortable, and more yourself, in a dress. I should imagine there are a lot of folks who might be on the end of some serious prejudice in Real Life, who can come to a con and be who they really are. Not only be who they are but be applauded for it. I’d imagine that’s pretty freeing. I loved how open and accepting it was.

Yeh.

It was golden. All of it.

How many books did I sell?

Hardly any. In fact, sales were pretty dismal. I sold exactly half the number of books I sold at St Albans in one day, over two days at Norcon.

But fuck me! I sold one of them to Nigel Planer! Mwahahahrgh!

Will he read it? Who knows, but that’s not the point. He bought one. And I hope I haven’t got him into trouble posting the selfie. Sorry, Nigel, if I have and you’re reading this*.

* Well, you never know right?

And I managed to get a guffaw out of Chris Barrie. In fact lots of people actually laughed at my crap jokes, which made my day. Both days; because the principal aim when I do these things is to meet people, be funny at them so they think my books must be funny too and buy one, oh and have a gas, because then the books sell themselves. And anyway, without laughter what do you have? Well … no fun, that’s for certain.

I came home feeling the same way I used to after a really good gig in my very, very brief flirtation with stand-up. To be honest, I was so high I still haven’t quite come down.

Not a commercial success then, but will I go back next year? You bet your arse I will.

And finally … last chance to grab 12 hours of audiophonic joy for 99p (or 99c)

Yes. If you like cheap audio books, Few Are Chosen is on sale until Monday. After that the price goes up again.

As always, I’m cutting my own throat here.

It’s 99c on Apple, Kobo and my own website. For anyone in the States, it’s also 99c on Barnes & Noble and Chirp (which is USA and Canada).

If you want to grab it while it’s mega cheap you can find store links and a bit more info here

Oh and one more thing …

Here’s a little bit of Nigel Planer in action as Neil …

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as book marketing, book sales, cheap quality books, cosplay, Events, Events and signings, humour, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K’barthan audio, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, mtmcguire, norcon, quality books cheap, The Pan of Hamgee, women in sci-fi

2 Jul 2022 · 9:15 pm

Siberian hamsters and other alarums and excursions …

Well that was an interesting day. Or perhaps more accurately, morning. But it explains why there has been no blog post until now … that said, ‘now’ will probably be tomorrow (Sunday) in light of what time it is already, and the gargantuan amount of time that the activities of ‘this morning’ involved.

Originally, McOther and I were heading off to a car boot and from there to the garage to get his car fixed. However, when push came to shove we realised he wouldn’t have time to do the boot and the garage so he went to the garage and I eschewed the boot and went to the market instead. I also have some secret knitting that I wanted to do in his absence. More on that story … later.

McCat came running in and to my complete and utter horror, I realised he had something hanging out of his mouth. Something grey, with a tail.

Remember a few years ago when that McCat brought that vole in? I can’t find the original post but it ran under the fridge in the utility room and then to the units where it disappeared and I never saw it again. I always hoped it had found its way outside again but then the room began to smell and it wasn’t McCat’s earth box or McMini’s socks. Yes, it died and I did find a post I did later about discovering its lifeless body in the washing machine while I was on the phone to my mum, six months after its disappearance. If you need to jog your memory, it’s here.

So there’s McCat running about and there’s another chuffing vole with it’s tale and arse hanging out of his mouth one side and it’s head and front paws the other side. It’s squeaking,

‘You absolute cockwomble! Put me down immediately! Ow! That fucking smarts you smecking furry gobshite!’ etc. Actually I have no clue what it was saying but I think we could safely assume that it’d be something along those lines so that seems about right.

Come here you little bastard! I shout (because I’m classy like that) and rushed after him. I’m speaking to the cat at this pint, obvs. not the rodent in distress.

Luckily, I cornered McCat in the hall and because it was his vole and not mine and he was not dropping it at any cost. I was therefore able to pick him up and carry him to the door, deposit both of them on the mat outside, shut the door and lock the cat flap before he could bring it back in.

There was no rescuing the poor little critter now, so it was best to leave them to it so he killed it quickly. I grabbed my kit and ensuring that I didn’t let him in, I went to the market to do my shopping.

Upon my return, McCat was lying on his back on the door mat chirruping and burbling in his most loving manner. He showed me his tummy and it was clear that the dead vole on the mat beside him was a gift. Yes. This was an effort at reconciliation.

‘I know you are head of the house mummy,’ he was saying, ‘but I just couldn’t give up the vole. My natural instincts wouldn’t let me but you can have it now.’

Likewise, I cannot guarantee that was what he was saying but I know the mentalist tabby git so well now that I suspect that was a pretty good approximation.

Naturally, I thanked him for his gift, because it was only polite. Then I explained that it was a lovely thought, but if he didn’t mind, I’d just pick it up with this trowel here and pop it in the dustbin. I thought of burying it but he’d only dig it up again.

I went inside, put away my purchases and I was just bumbling about the house when I heard McCat scampering about. Uh-oh, that was the kind of scampering he does when he’s playing with Mr Squishy (his favourite toy) or when he’s playing with something else …

‘Squeak!’ said somebody, who was very definitely not McCat!

‘Fucking fuck!’ I yelled and leapt into action. McMini had a second vole cornered behind a box in a corner and of course I arrived, grabbed said box and the vole disappeared underneath the book case. But wait, not quite underneath. He was under the large books on the bottom shelf that stick out, leaving a tiny half inch gap between their bottoms and the floor.

I started removing the books but by this stage McCat had lost interest, the absolute bastard, or maybe he’d decided that I’d claimed the vole. Whatever the cause, he’d wandered off. The room we were in was full of places where a small vole could hide, die and then smell impressively. I was determined to ensure that when I poked it out from its hiding place, there were no other crannies for it to run to. In short, despite trying to rescue it from McCat I could have done with a tabby backstop and I’d definitely have preferred to let him kill it quickly it was that or a second round of let-me-die-under-your-furniture.

I surrounded the vole with a wall of heavy hardback books. Got a piece of cloth and grabbed it. I picked it up and took it outside. It looked as if it had had a nasty bump on the head but I left it to recover near the place where I thought McCat had caught it.

McCat locked in, I went out and had a look.

The vole was not well. It appeared unable to move its hands. It was clearly injured, it was squeaking and it was in distress. I rang the vet and explained that I had this rodent that was probably a vole only now … looking at it … I wasn’t 100% sure and could they help.

Clearly if my furry friend was, as I was beginning to suspect, a young rat, I wasn’t too bothered if McCat murdered its family. If it was a vole, I should probably take it somewhere for treatment and leave McCat locked in. McCat’s vet informed me that they had a pigeon and chicken specialist but nobody who was too good on small feral critters. They recommended I phone a different vet surgery, which I did.

I explained that I thought I might have an injured rat but that I didn’t know and though it seemed a bit nasty of me, I felt that, if it was a rat, I was OK about letting McCat out to murder the rest of its family, because there are millions of rats but that, if it was a vole, I’d keep him in. I also explained that I thought it might be dying, that the kind thing to do would be to kill it but that I wasn’t a farm kid and I doubted I could dispatch it cleanly without subjecting it to more physical and emotional trauma. Our cat used to catch mice when I was a kid and Dad used to have to kill the ones she hadn’t quite killed. He was really good at delivering a swift blow to the head but it always used to upset him … not to mention us.

Bring it in, the vet told me and they would take a look at it.

Going back to the ‘vole’ which very much might not be a vole, I decided I’d wear gloves to handle it. Good thing that, because it was a great deal livelier than it had been when I put it out and it bit me as I tried to catch it. Although the bites didn’t break the skin they did pierce the gloves. McOther was home by this time and helped me put it in a cardboard box. I walked up to the vet’s with it and they took it in to have a look.

Turns out I was right to doubt and it wasn’t a vole after all. Just call me Manuel but it was a bona fide Siberian hamster although it escaped the ratatouille so that’s nice. I do know we have rats in our garden, but … yeh. Probably a good thing if the cat eats them then. The rat did, indeed, have some kind of head injury which was making him unable to move properly and they put him to sleep so he didn’t suffer any more.

And the vole last time? Er hem. Yeh. That was a rat and all. Even with a light bite, the vet warned me about Weil’s disease and said that if I start to develop cold symptoms I must go to the doctor’s and explain what’s happened. Me, I’m just wondering what my half-rat-half-human superpower might be.

Other things

It looks alright on the claret one (right).

What I should have been doing this morning was working on my latest and top secret knitting project while McOther was out, which is his fabulous birthday present. OK, this is me, so you know, by now, that it’s not a fabulous present especially if it involves my knitting prowess, which is more knitting prowless to be honest. On the upside, it is something he’ll use and ~~enjoy~~ … he’ll use and at least there’s thought in it. It’s a wine sock. Yeh. Don’t all fall over with excitement.

People who like wine do blind tastings, which basically means you put the bottle in a sock, except socks are a bit shit because they make the bottom of the bottle uneven and more likely to fall over. Enter the um … wine sleeve? Wine sleeves leave the bottom of the bottle clear so it will stand up, no matter how drunk you are when you place it on the table.

I’ve made the bit for the neck of the bottle too short. The bit of metal over the cork can give tasters in the know a bit clue, so I need to unpick five rows of ribbing, add six rows of plain knitting and then do the ribbing bits again. It looks shit flaccid but when you put it on the bottle … yeh, OK, it still looks a bit shit until you get to a claret bottle … then … Oh yeh. Ish.

Oh alright. It’s a disaster really. I decided to use some wool I had left over from making a pair of socks for McMini and a pair for me. But there wasn’t quite enough to get it to the shoulders of the bottle. I didn’t want to buy another ball of wool to do three stripes of fancy knitting so I bastardised another ball of similar wool and to be honest, it almost looks deliberate. I will have to knit him another less bodged one as well, clearly, but this is a nice start.

Other news …

It’s a long time since I’ve mentioned McMini here. But rest assured he is no less eccentric. He is older, and even more sarcastic, but still a delight (to his parents anyway). He did once tell me that he wanted to do the teen thing and rebel against us but he liked us too much. I’m not sure that’s anything we did, it’s just luck of the draw. Luckily there are some people at his school that he prefers to rebel against more.

Anyway, last week we were we’ve been watching the tennis as a family and supporting one player, the underdog, naturally, because we’re British. The audience on the telly were mostly supporting the other more famous player. Between each point there were shouts from the audience,

‘Come on Oojah!’ or ‘You’ve got this Thingy!’ etc.

Then as it all died away after the ‘quiet please’ one bloke right up in the gods at the back shouted something that sounded like, ‘bollocks!’ into the silence.

‘That sounded like, “bollocks!”’ said McMini. ‘Did he just shout, “bollocks!”?’

Next point, same male voice did it again and again, McMini said,

‘I’m sure he said, “Bollocks!”.’

McOther and I admitted, giggling, that it did sound like it and he might be right.

Next up to serve was the player we were not supporting. She threw the ball up and as she swung to hit it, McMini shouted, ‘Bollocks!’ and she served a fault.

She served again and in spite of McMin’s rousing cry of, ‘Bollocks!’ it was in. The lady we were supporting returned it and as the other swung her racket to hit the ball back, I shouted, ‘Arse!’ and it went into the net.

‘Woah! She can hear us!’ shouted McMini.

It opened the floodgates. They played a tie-breaker with McMini and I continuing to shout bollocks, arse and for some reason, follicles. Our lady won. I made a cheer which reminded McMini of an impression I do of Dad doing an impression of one of his teachers dropping dead in the middle of assembly (he yelled ‘eeeeeruuuuuw!’ and keeled over apparently). So McMini adds the part of the story following that which is the boing, boing diddly boing this teacher’s wooden leg made after he’d measured his length.

Despite this coming out of nowhere, I knew exactly what McMini was referring to and started to guffaw at which point McOther who was actually watching the tennis turned to us briefly, smiled indulgently in an oh-here-they-go-again sort of manner and reverted his attention to the TV.

McMini and I sat there crying with laughter and all was right with the world.

It’s competition time …

OK. Have you ever seen extreme ironing? If you haven’t it’s worth looking it up because it’s mad. Here’s a potted summary.

Let’s do our own variant Blog peps! Extreme Reading. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Here’s how it works.

1. Get one of my books. It has to be an actual M T McGuire book. No other authors’ books are admissible. You can use a paperback or your e-thing with your e/audio book open and showing really obviously.

2. Go the area you have selected in which to read in an extreme manner, be it upside down, hanging from the ceiling. Tobogganing down the Cresta run, *sitting in the fountains at Trafalgar Square in your swimming cozzie or whatever.

3. Get photographed in your extreme reading position and then submit your photos to me. I think I will probably put them to the public vote.

* don’t do actual this though. You’ll get arrested.

How do I submit my photo MT? I hear you ask.

Well, I don’t to hear you ask but let’s not complicate this. Let’s pretend, for the sake of making this section that tiny bit more interesting, that I did. Here’s what you do.

Attach your photo photo to an email. You’ll need to give me your name and me some brief details saying where and when the photo was taken (date, place/town and country) and any witty commentary you wish to make about it. Then send it to me by email with the header, EXTREME READING TOURNAMENT, like that to list at hamgee.co.uk. You can send a maximum of two entries and it will cost you nothing to enter.

If you want to, you will be able to share the entries you submit on the Hamgee University Press Facebook page. I’ll make a specific post and pin it to the top so you can comment and add a photo but that’s not obligatory because I totally get that not everyone does Facebook. I wouldn’t do much social media if I didn’t have to.

Small Print: Nothing above 3mb please or Google won’t deliver them to me and a maximum of two entries per person. You may have to resize mobile/iThing photos to get them to me.

Obviously, it goes without saying that you shouldn’t do anything dangerous or stupid. This is an extreme reading tournament, it’s not the Darwin Awards or a game of who dares wins. Happy snapping.

And finally …

The Last Word is available in Audio.

If you enjoyed the short story, The Last Word, the audio of that is also available or at least, still available. If you need it, here’s a quick reminder of the blurb.

When Mrs Ormaloo brings the terrible news to the Turnadot Street Businesswomen’s Association that the Grongles are going to burn some more banned books on the night of Arnold, The Prophet’s birthday, Gladys and Ada decide to Take Steps. They even enrol some of the punters from their pub to help out. The books are in a warehouse being kept under guard. Gladys, Ada, Their Trev and the rest of the group embark on a plan of devilish cunning to rescue as many banned books from the flames as they can. But the key player in their plan is Humbert and there is no guarantee that he’ll cooperate.

Corporal Crundy is determined not to mess up his first assignment since his promotion. It should be easy. All he has to do is guard some books. Yeh. It should be a piece of cake but somehow that’s not the way it turns out.

To find it, go here.

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as an author with children, author blog, full time mum writing, humour, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K'Barthan Series, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, M T McGuire audiobooks, McMini, off topic, trying to be a writer, women in sci-fi, women writers, writer mom, writer mum, writer parent, writers, writing

19 Jun 2022 · 6:46 pm

Spigotry …

Yes, I am still alive, although you could be forgiven for wondering if I’ve quietly shuffled off this mortal coil the amount of time it’s been since I wrote a blog post. I suppose the main reason for this is that the mood to waffle about my life tends to hit at the weekends, therefore, if I happen to be Doing Stuff several weekends in a row, the blog grinds to a halt. Case in point, when I came to write this post I found two others that I’d already begun before going out. On the upside, all this Doing Things does come under the heading of Putting Stuff In which is probably what other people call ‘refilling the well’.

So what’s been happening. Well, Mum stuff although less of it, Mc(Not So)Mini stuff and too much stuff of my own. I suppose you could say I’ve over-peopled but it isn’t really the social that’s hampering my efforts to achieve anything. I just keep on having to do things because I make trouble for myself. Yes, the reason for my absence is that I have been, mostly, trying to put out the fires I’ve inadvertently started in the dry grass of life. Or trying to unfuckup the fuckups, of which there are legion.

This week I went to see my writer friends where I used to live. For years they’ve been coming to me but now that I don’t have to collect McMini from school until 5 on the day we meet – or because, a lot of the time McOther picks him up – we have started going to the house of our eldest member and having lunch in the village pub. On the way I pick up the other lady in our group. She has a great deal of difficulty getting in and out of my car and this week, I discovered that taking the roof off merely made it worse. It was hot and I was wearing my prescription shades so while I was getting ready I took my actual spectacles out of my pocket and put them, in the little bag in which they come, on the back of the car because I didn’t want to bend them. The last thing I remember thinking is, ‘I must remember to put those back in the care before I drive off.’

Can you guess what happened next?

Of course you can! Yes. That’s right, I drove off with the glasses on the back of the car. Obviously, the fates didn’t do anything kind to me, like arrange for them to slide off on the side roads leading from the estate on which my friend lives. Oh no. They fell off as I turned onto the main road. When I reached my destination and went into the house I found I no longer had my specs. It being a social event and there being a table booked for lunch, I couldn’t just say, ‘Guys, I have to nip back and check.’ It would have been rude. The lady I had just picked up rang her husband and he went and looked but found nothing.

Resigned to their fate – I didn’t hold out much hope for my glasses surviving, unsquashed, until I dropped her back – we read each other our work, had lunched and talked writing things. When I dropped the lady back, it turned out her husband had popped out for a bike ride and found the glasses on the main road. They had sustained a small amount of damage, as you can see from this picture.

picture of smashed spectacles

When I break something, I like to do it properly.

Strangely, I had to visit the optician the next day to pick up some contact lenses for a friend’s daughter who’s a border at McMini’s school so I took my glasses with me along with another pair of frames that I’d picked up for a song at TK Maxx about twenty years previously (when I’d bought the smashed pair). I asked if they could fix my specs.

Yes well … at least I gave them all a good laugh.

Naturally, it turned out that they’d have to send the new frames I had away because it involved drilling the actual lense. In addition, it turned out that I was due for an eye test so they recommended I do that first, in case my prescription has changed. On the up side, they did have a slot sooner rather than later, on the downside, ‘sooner’ was next Friday. I found a similar pair on ebay for £24 and sent off for them so I do have those, although when I put them on they exaggerate the fact that I have asymmetrical ears and one is a lot higher than the other. On the up side, they don’t involve drilling the lenses so I can get them sooner and, if I have to go varifocal, maybe I can get the send always done as varifocals and the other as bog-standard prescription.

So now I’m wearing my sunglasses most of the time, Roy Orbison style, although he went on tour and left his prescription specs at home whereas I … yeh. If I ever can find another set of the others I’ll buy them and replace my old ones as they suited me better than any specs I’ve ever had before. In the meantime, I’m wearing a pair from 2008 which are more-or-less OK, although slightly weaker than the originals.

Add taking the cat to the vet, me to the gym and all sorts of other stuff and somehow, I achieve very little. That said the writing is still going. I’ve been going through Misfit 5 editing it and picking out where I’ve added tracers for plot development. I usually know where it’s going at the time and I put the tracers in but if I’m not writing for a long time, I then forget what they are and end up writing off in the wrong direction. This is a Bad Thing.

Other news, McOther has been a bit busy at work recently and McMini has had a gig with his band again. Their singer left, which looked as if it was going to be a bit of a disaster, but they’ve found a new one who is less experienced but I think could be very good so that’s a win.

Picture of a hitler european tour t-shirt

Height of bad punk taste.

We went to a re-enacters’ event today which was excellent and McMini spotted a Hitler European Tour T-shirt to wear on stage (it’s a punk band, after all). I bought it for him.

Lord but this is not Setting A Good Example, but since I had one when I was about his age, I’d be a special kind of hypocrite to point that out. Also it’s actually slightly less offensive than the T-shirt McMini was wearing, which advertises a band called Deicide.

On the up side, it’s black and white, and a lot more understated than the enormous red and black, front and back printed white one I had when I was the same age which also featured a huge swastika.

It’s also a bit easier to wear these days, I think. There were many instances when I simply couldn’t wear mine because it might be taken the wrong way. McMini’s is a great deal more understated than mine was, which is no bad thing, even though, as a whole, it’s still a bad thing and I am still a Bad Person for caving in.

It is difficult with gallows humour. I strongly believe that actually jokes do occasionally need to be offensive. I also believe that comedy is often far harder-hitting than the heaviest of moral-lesson type stories. I also think that one of the reasons Britain is such a horrible place right now is because we have lost our ability to laugh at ourselves in ways that are a bit sick, and we’ve lost the ability to trivialise the things that scare us to a manageable level by making jokes about it. Nonetheless, McMini has promised me this one is on stage only.

On a different note

My audiobooks are on sale again, so you can grab Few Are Chosen for 99c and Small Beginnings for 99c or free.

I’ve also reduced the other books in the K’Barthan series though some stores (a.k.a. where I can). Help yourself while you they’re cheap. They’re on sale until the end of June.

If you’re interested and would like more information about that, just click here.

AAAAAAND! There’s more!

The Last Word, available in Audio.

If you enjoyed the short story, The Last Word, the audio of that is also available, to find that, go here.

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as an author with children, author blog, cheap quality books, comedy fantasy fiction, humour, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K’barthan audio, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, off topic, women in sci-fi

15 May 2022 · 5:26 pm

Still hanging in there …

Still here … 🙂

There’s been a bit of a long break and I thought I should probably pop in here, if only to reassure you that I’m still alive. There is a reason for my absence. First up, I was away on holiday for two weeks, during which I incredibly cleverly managed to get COVID 19. We all had it, the boys for a couple of days each. Me? Like all colds it went on for chuffing ever. First a week of really bad allergies during which I consulted a pharmacist in the resort and as it only appeared at night she reckoned I was right in thinking it was allergies.

Then, on our last day at the ski resort, I woke up with a temperature and a full blown cold (I get a temperature for the first couple of days with most colds, I’m rubbish at them). The cold turned into a two week sinus infection. After that there was a period where I felt very post viral. Once I’d been clear five days I went to church (I sing in the choir) and at the end of the first hymn I was surprised at how weak and sweaty I felt. I think it’s pretty much gone now but I’m still really tired and I feel terrible about all the people I met and spoke to over the second week on holiday, when I was huffing COVID cooties over everything. I sincerely hope I didn’t give it to any of them.

On the up side, although I didn’t know it was COVID I knew I had a cold and I felt it was only polite, in the current pandemic, to wear my mask for every and any interaction with other people. I also sanitised my hands to the point where they were so sticky I could probably have used them to climb up the sheer sides of glass buildings. Probably.

Hopefully all that protected everyone from me. I think masks probably stop more coming out than they stop going in. I hope so. The fact it was Easter and everything was shut also helped as it meant I didn’t sit in restaurants infecting people the way I might have done if any of them had been open.

While I was feeling drippy and post viral, I ditched anything that I absolutely didn’t have to do. So that meant everything except a bit of writing here and there, my monthly newsletter and Mum stuff, of which there is a craptonne right now. I also included ditching the blog. Although, I’m beginning to think that ditching blogging might not have been such a good idea. Not in the long run.

Overwhelm

I didn’t mean to talk about this today, but I’m going to because, fuck it, this is my blog after all.

The thing is. The Mum stuff has been really hard. There was so much of it that at first I was afraid (I was petrified!) ~~Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side~~. At first I did just go into fluffy-bunny-in-the-headlights mode but after a few weeks of going, ‘shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!’ I managed to belt up and did what I always do in situations like this. ~~Ignored it and pretended it would go away.~~ No! I stopped looking at how much there was to do and divided it up into little tasks; began at the edges if you like, chipping away at it one small job at a time. Phone this, post that, check these etc. Trying to do one small thing each day.

Net result; I’ve finally broken the back of it. I should be smug and yet, I still feel a bit overwhelmed with it all at the moment. I know why, too. I’m coming up to the anniversary of Dad’s death and I miss him, real him. When Dad was sliding into insanity, I could always ask Mum stuff. But now Dad has gone and Mum is sliding into insanity and there is no-one to talk to. Well no, there is but I’m making these decisions without the ultimate authoritative input of the demented person’s spouse, whereas when we made them about Dad it was simply a case of discussing it with Mum.

This is the hardest and loneliest thing I’ve done. It’s worse because I know my brother doesn’t really agree with what I’m doing. I love my brother dearly and I don’t want to fall out with him but the stress of continually going against what he wants, and what is actually the most sensible course of action, is a bit grim. The trouble is, the sensible thing isn’t what’s best for Mum, and if I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning for the rest of my life, then I have to do what Mum wants. Even if she is as mad as a box of frogs. Even if, were I to ask her aged 50, she’d be horrified. It’s a bit of a shit position to be in.

Also, with the mountain of stuff I had to do, and the fact I was recovering from COVID and couldn’t do much else, I did have to have a bit of a sprint at it eventually. Drop everything and sort it. This approach is OK for a short time but with the COVID it went on longer and … I suppose I’ve looked too hard into the face of Mum’s dementia for too long and that always leads to trouble.

The trick with dragging the millstone up the hill is to know what’s happening but at the same time, not acknowledge it. Like some warped Magic Eye picture, I can see the image but I mustn’t uncross my eyes and let reality creep in or I will be undone, and god knows I can’t be undone.

If I allow myself to think about what is happening in the wrong way—or at all really—there are tears. But not useful, get-it-all-out tears. They’re the pointless crappy ones that achieve nothing and just fill your nose with snot.

Also. I’m so fucking angry. I’m absolutely incandescent that my parents were promised free health care and then, at a point when it was too late for them to do anything about it or plan for alternatives, it was taken away. Oh I could rail against the Government, and NHS’s institutionalised discrimination against certain mental illnesses while it happily treats others but what’s the fucking point? I could write letters, I could write to my MP and get the usual boilerplate reply referring me to the statements she has made about the issues that most concern her on her website. She doesn’t even pretend to give a shit.

All it will get me is a sore throat or numb fingers. I could keep on asking the powers that be why, if two people have the exact same symptoms, one can be treated on the NHS for free and the other is forced to pay—not just their money but their house, possessions and everything they own, simply because their illness has a specific name. I could ask why people with dementia are taxed to the tune of all they own, unless they’re fortunate enough to die first. I could ask them if that’s just. Or right. Or building back better.

I suppose it might make me feel I’d made myself heard but I doubt it. Trying to do anything about it is like pissing in a wetsuit. Doubtless it will give me a nice warm feeling for a moment or two but it’ll make fuck all difference in the long run.

And I suppose it doesn’t help that we seem to have one of the most morally destitute bunch of stone-hearted cocksuckers ever to darken the doors of Parliament running this country right now. A bunch of feckless, misogynistic lounge lizards who also, unfortunately, appear to be completely teflon.

We have someone at the head of the nation who is an international joke and, possibly, one of the most unsympathetic and bone-headed premiers since Cromwell. Except, stone-hearted, empathy-free bastard that he might have been, at least Cromwell appears to have had some kind of moral compass and seems to have genuinely believed he was acting to help his people rather than just blatantly helping himself.

The present shower appear to pride themselves on having the kind of moral standards that make the Emperor Nero look like an exceedingly uptight nun.

Sorry, where was I?

Mum stuff and it being hard. I guess what makes it hard is that everything takes ages. Twenty minutes on hold, minimum, for a three minute telephone conversation. Then there’s the whole fact that we are mortgaging Mum’s house so we are basically gambling on how long she has to live. And we can only mortgage half so if she lives more than four and a half years, we’ll have to sell the house and move her into a home anyway.

Then

I guess what I’m saying is that it is possible I need to do some serious self care.

If you are looking after someone with dementia, this is probably the point where you’re hoping I’m going to share some amazing coping mechanism with you, right? God in heaven! I wish I could. But to be honest there just isn’t one. I guess the almighty (who I’m also pissed off with about this) has just decided that the camel WILL through the eye of the needle and 50% of people over 70 will get gold plated entry into the Kingdom of God by din’t of a whistle stop visit to hell before they die. Going nuts and spending everything they own on care.

Seriously though, one of the things not writing my blog for a few weeks has taught me is that actually, it’s pretty vital I that write my blog. By venting all the anger and weirdness and tension on here I get to be effortlessly normal in the Real World.

Well. No. That’s not exactly true. Normality is always an effort but you get the picture I’m sure.

For example, having a Basil Fawlty style rant on here and will make people laugh. It might make them think and it might make them sympathetic but by making it funny and airing it here I can cut the sense of overwhelm I feel down to a manageable size. Laugh at it and it loses it’s power and all that.

Conversely, having a Basil Fawlty style rant in real life leads to awkward silences. I’m clearly not funny enough to carry it off face on. Or maybe I’m just too desperate and too angry. Like a young woman I saw on Live at the Apollo a few years ago who did a fabulous stand up routine about nursing her mother through cancer. It was so powerful, but it was also painfully raw and the audience looked like they wanted to hug her, not laugh.

Even worse, by not ranting it all out here, it spills out when I talk to Real People. Yes, I have fallen into a terrible habit. When people ask how I am, I’m fucking well going and telling them.

This is not good. This is so, so not good.

I do not want to turn into the kind of person people hide under parked cars to avoid. I don’t want to be the dear woman my mother used to hide in the coat cupboard from (she was lovely but she was enduring very tough times and she talked soooo much).

Am I there yet? I don’t fucking know! But I fear I’m perilously close. I’m going to meet up with some of my old school friends this week and I am actually quite nervous. I have lost so many friends by meeting them during a crisis after a long time apart and then being too intense, too weird and too chatty to the point where they quietly delete my details from their address books and move house.

A big part of the stress is that I’m appalling at this stuff. Seriously. In my 20s, I had an IQ of 149. One point off genius level. But the side of my brain for maths is … it’s so stupid. Brain 1 is sitting there looking on in complete incredulity as Brain 2 tries to understand compound interest. One side of the house is mercury quick, the other is like wading through semi congealed tar. It’s weird and frustrating and thank God McOther has agreed to attend the mortgage meetings with me so there is someone there to ask pertinent questions and understand it all straight off.

Then there’s a fair bit of guilt. One of the things that cropped up, doing all of this, was how badly I’ve taken my eye off the ball. I confess that while Mum was reasonably well and not deteriorating as much, I kind of let things slide. I wrote stuff and did things with my spare time that normal people might do. IE nothing particularly looking-after-Mum related. She was very frail after Dad died, and although I knew that the Almighty is far too hell bent on crapping on us all from the stratosphere to do us the mercy of having Mum’s money outlast her, there were three years of it and logic said it should.

I really should have known. Again, it might be easier for us to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of God but I’m sure that, with the help of a blender I could— yeh alright. Moving on.

Returning to my derelict duties I discovered that Mum’s payments from Dad’s work pension had stopped and that she is on the lower rate for one of her benefits when she should have been on the higher one since she started to need carers at night (April 2019).

Gulp.

On top of that, I realised that if the council tax definition of severely mentally impaired goes on levels of dementia alone, she should be eligible for a council tax disregard, which means her council tax payments are waived. As these are over three grand a year it seemed quite a good idea to get the forms for those and ask her Doctor if he was prepared to sign them. If he doesn’t, I am now at the point where I can safely say I’m spending over 35 hours a week on Mum and I will claim carer’s allowance with a clear conscience, instead, and bung some of that her way. (You can’t do both).

None of this is quick. Oh my goodness no. But I stayed on hold for the prerequisite 20 minute plus to each of the august bodies I was required to contact and got the forms sent out. In the case of the pension, although Mum had signed a chitty to say they could talk to me, it was too long ago. They gave me an email address to send my power of attorney to and then told me I’d have to wait 10 – 12 working days before it would be ‘on the system’ and I could ring to ask my question again, at which point, they assured me that they’d answer it. I put a note in my diary to ring on the magic day and relaxed knowing the forms would arrive at Mum’s while I was away and I could pick them up a couple of days after getting home.

But then I arrived home and discovered I had bastard COVID and I couldn’t get to Mum’s to pick the forms up before they expired.

Can you guess what happened next kids?

Urgh. Yes. That’s right. I had to phone them all again. I swear the Man has decided that the new way to keep us down will be to give us pointless shit to do, like sitting on hold for a fucking eternity to ask a question that is answered in about ten seconds.

So over the past couple of days I’ve been writing covering letters and filling in forms. In black ink and in capitals. Needless to say, I ballsed up the forms extensively but hey, Tippex is my friend. I sent one form to Mum’s for her to sign with instructions to the carers as to what they needed to add (her list of meds) and bless them, she signed the forms yesterday and they put them in the post. So that’s one job done that I’ve been meaning to get round to for several months.

Meanwhile at the beginning of the week, I sat down with the next round of paperwork the mortgage broker had sent, filled that in, decided how much we needed to borrow and sent it off.

Yesterday, I filled in the council tax form and sent it to Mum’s doctor, with an SAE to send it back if he signs it. Once that comes back to me I can send that on, or apply for carer’s allowance if he can’t sign without a pukka diagnosis. Mum is doing fine thinking her memory is crap. She can maintain the illusion that it isn’t dementia, even though she kind of knows it is. But if she formally hears she has it she’ll be undone. So I can’t get a diagnosis if she has to be told about it too, it’s too unkind.

Good news is, the fucking mountain of administriviatative shite is nearly all in the bag, except for signing up to the actual mortgage, which will require the services of a solicitor. Oh yes and getting rid of the last of Mum’s shares, which are in an old family firm but needs must. They have to go.

This is not the end, or even the beginning of the end but it is the end of the beginning for this particular period of intense Mum-based activity. Once we’ve got this bit done she’s set for another three or four years and it’s like I can see the end of the tunnel on this batch now, after which there will be a calm period.

Sure it will be horrible when the mortgage is spent and we have to sell the house and put her into a home, but there’s no point agonising over that until it happens. I guess what I’m saying is that, I should be able to write some more soon.

Talking about writing …

There is an outside chance I will finish the current W.I.P. this year. There are 102k words of it so far and I have a horrible feeling it’s going to be three books. I might be able to break it up into 50k instalments though. We are only half way through but it’ll need tightened up and when I’ve done that I suspect I’ll have three 50k instalments, two 85k novels or one absolute monster. As the other books are short but the first book featuring Goojan Spiced Sausage is also 85k I’m thinking two at that length would work really well. Otherwise one 50k and one 85k (if I can keep the prose spare enough) would also work with the some books short, some books long nature of the rest of the series.

Lastly, I’m thinking of entering Too Good To Be True for a sci-fi book award. The books have to be over 50k, a stand alone or a first in series. I’d be entering it as a stand alone. Unless it isn’t. Decisions decisions. The competition is adjudicated by sci-fi bloggers. They’ll probably hate it. They usually do. But what do I know?

Right. Until next week, that’s me … although it might be after next week, but it might not because I have to tell you about my pathetic efforts to do a calorie controlled diet and my new electric bike! Woot. I’m also thinking of doing a kickstarter to raise funds for the next book in the Hamgeean Misfit series, Starting at $10 but it gets all the other books too, or something like that. Let me know in the comments if you think that’s a good idea.

If you’re bored …

Why not try the audio box set of the K’Barthan Series from my shop with 30% off. If you’d like to give that a go, click on the link and type ARNOLD at checkout.

K’Barthan Box Set Audio in Reduced Circumstances

Alternatively, if you enjoyed the books and have the inclination, why not write a review of one of them. A list of them, with links to them on the main stores can be found here

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as dementia, full time mum writing, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic, women in sci-fi, women writers

19 Mar 2022 · 2:38 pm

This week I have mostly been … poisoning myself.

Yep. Straight up. Don’t laugh. It’s serious … well, OK, it’s not. No. Not at all, really. In fact, today, I have a story to share which, I hope, will make you laugh. It is a tale of such gobsmacking stupidity that I’m almost proud. Yes if you had doubts about my bumbling cockwomblery and general, all-round ineptitude then, I think this morning’s events might possibly put it beyond all doubt.

As I write this, it’s Friday, although by the fabulous, time-travelling magic of scheduling, you will be reading this tomorrow, Saturday, just in case you’re wondering.

McOther was away over night so I was taking McMini to school. I woke him up and while I was waiting for him to get dressed I had my breakfast, made some coffee and pottered around the house. This included opening the blinds in the two front rooms.

picture of the flowers described in this blog post

Daphne Odora, outside in it’s natural habitat … well our garden at any rate, its natural habitat is the Himalayas

In the drawing room we have some gorgeous cut flowers from the garden; a plant called Daphne Odora, which does its thing about this time of year. It smells fabulous and comes with its own handy greenery attached, too, so it also looks pretty with minimal arranging effort.

The blooms in the drawing room were getting a bit long in the tooth, I noticed, as I went in there to open the blinds. Indeed, on closer examination, I noticed that some of them were decidedly dead. As McMini hadn’t come down yet and I had a few minutes, I determined to remove them and bung them in the compost before they dropped dead bits everywhere and I had to hoover the sodding carpet. Yes, I would pick some more when I got home, I decided. Quite a lot of the flowers fell off when I picked it up but I took the rest of it out to the kitchen anyway and put it on the side next to the sink.

Checking the time, I realised there were ten minutes until we had to leave. I had finished my breakfast and so I grabbed a couple of vitamin pills, which I take each morning, picked up the glass of water which was also by the sink, next to the dead flowers, and chugged the pills. A whole pint went down and in the last mouthful I noticed there was something else.

Have I washed a bit of toast stuff on my teeth? I thought, except I’d actually had a crumpet but it just takes too long to explain what a crumpet is and anyone who doesn’t know will get a handle on what I’m talking about if I call it toast. Anyway, I picked this thing out of my mouth and was it food? Was it bollocks. It was a particularly dead flower off the Daphne Odora.

Oh.

A quick look in the bottom of the glass revealed some other bits of Daphne Odora. Hmm. I looked at the glass and I couldn’t help wondering if I’d swallowed any other errant blooms, along with the pills, and hadn’t noticed.

Well, no bother, except— I wonder if Daphne Odora is poisonous, I thought and then I did the stupidest thing. Yes people.

I CHECKED ON THE INTERNET.

What was the answer? Yes, obviously because it was the fucking law that if I’d eaten something by mistake it was going to be something that would kill me.

How poisonous? Extremely. The word ‘deadly’ was also used. Jolly dee.

OK Monsieur Google, when you say, extremely do you mean yew/oleander put the-wrong-bits-in-your-mouth-and-you’ll-die-swiftly-and-horribly toxic or do you just mean … you know … might feel a bit grim-level.

Oh. I see. A-very-small-amount-will-kill-you kind of poisonous. Marvellous.

How very small? Will one dried flower do it?

WHAT????? Thanks Google kind of you to NOT FUCKING SAY! YOU UTTER UTTER BAST— calm … breathe … think logically about this.

OK.

Had I swallowed any? I didn’t know. Probably not but at the same time, if I had, and I didn’t do something about it, then from what the internet said, I was going to die. OK so that was probably bollocks but at the least, I was going to be very ill.

Bit of an aside here:

In my defence, there is a family story that did colour my view about a fellow whose name has long since been lost in the annals of time. The name of the unfortunate hero being lost, the story is known simply as The Tale of Paraquat Man. Paraquat was a weedkiller in the mid twentieth century that was well known. Paraquat Man was friend of my grandparents (probably all four because they knew a lot of the same people). He was putting weedkiller on his garden path when he heard the phone ring. He came inside carrying the weedkiller, and put it down by the phone. The weedkiller was in an old wine bottle.

Next to the phone was a very similar wine bottle containing a bit of wine from the previous night’s dinner. The poor bloke picked up the wine bottle and distracted by the phone call and not really thinking what he was doing, he took a swig, only to realise he’d drunk the weedkiller. He made his excuses to the person on the phone, dialled 999 and then, while he was waiting for the ambulance, he ran to the bathroom and made himself sick. He was dead within the week.

This family legend has somewhat coloured my view of ingestion-based accidents …

If I had just eaten something as ‘deadly poisonous’ as the internet said then, even now, Death was probably waiting outside to tell me it was the salmon mousse or to attempt to put a positive spin on my impending demise by telling me to try and ‘THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH’. Yes so it probably wasn’t that poisonous but just in case it was then, if possible, I needed to … er … expel it. Right then.

Was I really in that much though? Was I really going to stick my fingers down my throat and make myself barf up two glorious cups of coffee, a delicious crumpet a whole pint of water and some vitamin pills? If I was, I was going to have to get the hurling done pretty fucking fast because in ten minutes McMini needed to be taken to school and since McOther wasn’t around and there was on-one else to do it, I had to have finished chundering by then, or decide not to chunder and do it when I got home an hour later.

But hang on! Food only stays in your stomach for 20 minutes doesn’t it? I dunno does it? I can’t remember. A little knowledge is such a very, very bad thing. Should I google that, I wondered and then decided that, going on the results of my search about Daphne Odora, it was probably best not to. I looked at my watch.

7 minutes.

Yes. Um … right then. On we go. Better out than in.

At this point McMini came down and asked, through the closed door of the lavatory, if I knew where his jacket was. I didn’t and he then asked me if I was OK. I explained about my inadvertent blossom eating and told him to go and look again in his room.

A few minutes later, I had managed to throw up quite a lot of everything I’d eaten, but not all of it. And in the broad scheme of things, I suspected that my only achievement was that, as well as being poisoned, I now smelled of sick. It would probably enough to stave off any symptoms until after I’d dropped McMini off though. He, meanwhile, had found his jacket. Except he was worried when I explained why I was hurling and wanted me to go straight to casualty. So …

I had to ring McMini’s school and explain that he wasn’t coming in because his mother thought she might have poisoned herself by mistake a few minutes earlier and had to go to casualty. Could he do e-school?

Yes, they said, without laughing at all, which was pretty impressive.

Then again, I grew up in a school. These people are bullet proof. I’ve listened to Mum answering enough similar calls to know that.

Lovely McMini, as I left for casualty I said I’d keep him updated by text and asked if he’d be OK. He told me he’d be fine. Then he told me, ‘I’m only saying this because you might die but, I love you, Mum.’ [Saturday a.m. edit: He’s back to smearing his earwax on the door handle of my office this morning] Which was definitely the loveliest thing that happened to me all day. I told him I loved him too, we hugged each other tight and off I went.

You couldn’t make this stuff up though, could you?

I made a desultory attempt at an eyebomb while in casualty.

Then I had to explain what I’d done to everyone in triage at A&E, plus the doctor. Although at least it made them laugh. And I got an ECG so I don’t have to wait on tenterhooks for the results of the other one (normal, woot).

Also, I do know how the flowers got into the water, now. I usually put a lid on my water glass because otherwise the bloody cat drinks it. However, I took the lid off to take some of the pills put it on the kitchen counter before putting it back over the glass. I put the lid on the surface underside down. There was condensation on it and some of the drier, deader blossoms — which had fallen onto the counter without my noticing — stuck to it. Then, when I plonked it back on the water, they fell in. And I drank them.

Having now made sure that every single corner of that worktop is wiped down, I’m hoping there will be no further ingestion.

I mean … for bald fuck’s sake!

Fast forward and it’s now the afternoon. As instructed by the doctor at casualty, I’ve been ensuring that I drink lots of water, and carried this over to lunch by having soup. I have done no work and I have failed utterly to take the nice long walk I was going to have after dropping McMini off. I am fine, although I do actually have some very light symptoms. I was feeling sick but felt better for eating a little and drinking the soup. And I sidestepped the stomach pump, which has to be a win.

Hopefully, by later on this evening, I will no longer be living in a piss-poor, badly plotted, second-class imitation of an Alan Ayckbourn play.

I probably shouldn’t bank on it though, should I?

On a different note … here’s news of two bargains which might interest you!

Kobo Box Set Sale until 28th March

Yes, our lovely friends at Kobo are doing it again. If you haven’t grabbed the K’Barthan Box Set in ebook already, now’s your time to get a lovely 25% off. All you have to do is put ‘MARCH25’ in the have promo code box at check out and you’ll get it cheaper. You can also use this code as many times as you like on as many of the other box sets in the promo. Just click the Kobo25 link, below or go here.

Kobo25

Massive collection of free sci-fi and fantasy books (oh yeh).

Patty Jansen, fellow author and all round good egg has set this up. It’s actually finished but as I write (Friday) the page is still there. Over 120 books are listed, most of the ones that aren’t exclusive to Amazon will be free for a few days more. If you’d like to have a look, there they are, anyway. Just click on the SFFBOOKS link below.

SFFBOOKS

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic

13 Feb 2022 · 7:44 pm

Fucks given? Zero. And a book review

Today at church we were celebrating a new C of E service theme, Racial Equality. The service was brilliant, mentions of Martin Luther King Jr’s dream which seems depressingly far from coming true.

It all sounds a bit bland. Some might say it’s a message we’ve all hoisted in and no longer need to hear, others might call it ‘snowflakey’. I, on the other hand, think one of the saddest things about modern life is how desperately the world still needs to hear this stuff.

Seriously though? What happened to the way Britain was in 2012 when we had the olympics and smugly showed people what fair play and openness and an inclusive society looked like. What made people turn from being friendly and open to being so bitter and petty.

Melanin? Skin colour? How is it that anyone still gives a fuck about this shite? What is wrong with us? It’s all such absolute cobblers.

Guess what colour my great to the times of lord knows how many grandfather was? Black. How do we know? Because the boys in my grandfather’s family all had a blood factor that only occurs in North African black people and it only goes from father to son.

Know what colour I am?

Yeh. White. Skin colour means absolutely fuck all. It does mean we have black people to thank for the Crystal Palace though, even if they were white by that time (look it up).

You really would have thought that ‘love thy neighbour’ would have sunk in after all this fucking time wouldn’t you? But no.

The fact is, dickheads come in all shapes, sizes, abilities, colours and backgrounds as do saints. Not all Christians can love their neighbours, some seem to think the point of their religion is to judge people, or change them. That’s not your job if you’re a Christian. It’s God’s. Jesus said so. ‘Judge not, lest you be judged,’ oh and all that bit about ‘when I was poor you clothed me, when I was in gaol you visited me,’ etc etc. Nothing in there about, ‘when I was poor you told me it was my fault and that I was a scrounger.’

We have to start giving zero fucks about all this stupid petty surface shit.

Seriously.

Stop looking at the fucking box. It’s what’s inside that matters. Is this person good? Yes or no? Don’t read the Daily Mail to find out for fuck’s sake! Just talk to them. Often.

Years ago my Mum went to Worthing to collect me from school. She turned up early so she could nip to the shops first. When she got back to her car she had a flat tyre. She got the jack out, positioned it in the right place, ready, and then started loosening the wheel nuts — obviously, you have to loosen the nuts (without taking them right off) before you get the car off the ground while the weight keeps the wheel still otherwise it just spins.

Mum knew what to do, but the wheel nuts had been done up with one of those compressed air nut gun things and she couldn’t get them undone. I needed picking up from school, too far away to walk there and back before the time on the parking meter ran out and she got a ticket. She couldn’t feed the meter because she was supposed to park for two hours or less and then not return for an hour. So, leave the car she’d get a ticket but at the same time, if she didn’t leave the car, she’d have to leave me.

This was before mobile phones. No ringing the school. She had fifteen minutes. All was not lost. She was standing on the wrench, probably swearing a bit, and jumping up and down, when a group of really scary hell’s angels came by on choppers. They were properly frightening; smelly weed on jeans, chapter back patch on the jackets, german helmets with horns on (this was the 1980s so they still could) tattoos (in the 1980s it was still quite rare for normal people to have tattoos) the works. As one, their heads snapped left and they all looked at her as they drove past.

‘Yikes!’ she thought.

A few yards up, where there was a double yellow and parking wasn’t allowed. They stopped. They all got off their bikes and walked back to her.

‘Double yikes!’ she thought. ‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Here Mum. You can’t do that,’ said one. ‘Stand aside, we’ll fix this in a jiffy.*’

*That’s probably not exactly what he said, but it’s what Mum said he said.

The hell’s angels, or possibly just, ‘angels’ in this case proceeded to remove the tyre in record time and popped the spare on. It took them about a minute and a half and they put the spare back in the boot and the jack back in the compartment under the boot floor.

Then, with a cheery, ‘There you go Mum!’ they waved away her effusive thanks and buggered off.

Mum thought it was hilarious, as well as rather lovely. She told me about it when she picked me up in a kind of, ‘you’ll never guess why I’m actually here on time’ kind of way. Neither of my parents would judge anyone on what they wore, but the fact is, twenty hells angels ambling along the road towards you is always going to be a little bit scary. Perhaps less so now that my son is a metal head.

A while ago I was chatting to someone on facebook who had taken enormous umbrage with some blog post I’d done. I’m not sure how they found it, I think one of my more right wing friends had shared it—one who doesn’t self actualise by their political beliefs—and I guess it got seen by someone who did.

I think I’d said that there were some people whose political convictions were to the left of Attila the Hun who weren’t necessarily evil, or mentioned that some of my friends are Muslims or … I dunno … showed tolerance something. I’m not 100% certain but I think it was the Muslim thing that set them off. The basic gist was that this person had met a group of people from the middle east who were the absolute back end of awful and that, as these people were Muslim, it followed that all Muslims were awful. Other news and experiences of friends had bolstered this view.

As a woman, it’s difficult avoid taking a dim view of the way my fellow women are treated in some countries and this is where I have to fess up to the fact that I often do exactly the same thing. Yes, I subconsciously base my judgement of entire nations on their government or the idiots in the population who make world news. Other times, I’ll base my view on the few subjects I’ve personally bumped into. These things are so massive, you deal with them the only way you know how and often, that can only be on your own, inter-personal, small-scale level. Which is OK so long as you’re prepared to be surprised and … you know … wrong in your assumptions.

Because looking at my technique rationally, it’s like someone meeting me and assuming that everyone in Britain is ~~a wishy-washy, liberal melt~~ an Anglican/Episcopalian because I am. Or, it’s like someone thinking that, because I, the only Briton they’ve met, am a lady, there can be no men living in this country. Sounds ridiculous, right? But that’s the logic we are looking at here. The fact is any nation is only as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as the people who lead it. During the 2012 Olympics, people probably thought Britain was lovely. Now they probably think we’re a bunch of absolute knobs. The people living in any nation are going to be the same mixture of saints, sinners, idiots, wankers and non-wankers as we find everywhere else.

But you have to make judgements don’t you? No. I’m beginning to think not. Sure we all go in with preconceptions but the point, surely, is to realise that’s what they are. To be prepared to be surprised by … well … you know … benign Hell’s Angels.

Making a fair judgement about anyone can only be based on actually meeting them in person. It never ceases to amaze me how many seemingly kindly, benign people I know will casually state that the homeless are there through their own fault, that anyone on benefits is a scrounger and that asylum seekers or refugees are just here to take advantage of our welfare system.

OK, so I expect some of them are, because, as I may have mentioned, the law of averages states that there will be wankers among any group of humans. Some. That’s my point. I find it really hard to understand how someone can condemn a brown man who leaves the Congo and comes to Britain with his 14 year old son because he doesn’t want the lad to be conscripted while, at the same time, lauding someone from Belfast who emigrates to America because they want a better, non-sectarian life for their children. Both are doing exactly the same thing. Why is one brave and good and the other a scrounger? I dunno.

If the person from Belfast gets a job in the USA, they’re broadening their horizons and taking a brave step to better themselves. Why is it that the brown man who comes to Britain, works for less than minimum wage and lives in a caravan without electricity, because there wasn’t electricity or running water where he came from, is ‘taking jobs from British people’. How come it’s perfectly fine for the company he works for to pay him a pittance because they won’t pay the minimum wage but he’s wrong to take what, for him, may be the chance of a lifetime? Why is it that we are happy to earn less and less than pay what things actually cost to produce and less stuff?

How is it that some people can look at the Kindertransport and see it as an act of goodness but the very same people are unable to see a modern equivalent, like, say, people rescued from a similar regime in Afghanistan as human? Is it because the Afghans are brown? Are we really that shallow? It fascinates me. Well … yeh, you know it does, I’ve written a 500,000 sci-fi series about this exact anomaly. That only people are good or bad and nations are the sum of the decisions made by their leaders.

Perhaps it actually takes bravery to be a liberal melt. Thinking about it, being open, putting aside your preconceptions and trusting people takes courage. Being generous of spirit takes resolution and effort. You are exposing yourself to looking a right dick if you’re wrong and possibly even potential harm. Maybe that’s it; perhaps with COVID and the fact that the world economy is pretty much down the lav people have a too much to worry about to care about being decent. Or maybe, after all crap they’re dealing with, there isn’t any spare courage left to be open.

Perhaps the only universal rule is that that there will always be wankers … and to give zero fucks … in the right way.

Which brings me on to the book I’ve just read.

Subject 21 by A E Warren.

This book is about a girl called Elise, who, as the blurb states is a Sapiens, ‘a member of the lowest order of humans. Elise and others like her are held responsible for the damages inflicted on the world by previous generations.’

Every aspect of Elise’s life is controlled by the two groups of humans above her, even her name has to reflect her status and can only contain two syllables. The top tier of human, the Potiors, are busy recreating as many extinct species as possible using DNA harvested from fossils, etc. These are then exhibited in a Museum of Evolution.

Some of the exhibits are Neanderthals. Our heroine, Elise, gets a job as the companion of a Neanderthal, number 21, who calls himself Kit.

This book is all about the idea that not all the gits in the top two tiers are gits and not all the supposed gits in the bottom layer are, either. Indeed, this is one of the many areas in which the book excels. It’s also about the inability of some members in each group to see those in the others as human and, of course, the inability of some humans—regardless of the order in which they belong—not to be complete and utter wankers. It’s an absolutely brilliant concept and I loved the way it was so realistic at the same time. The way some of the museum staff have completely de-humanised Kit and his fellow Neanderthals, was also, sadly, extremely human.

Other highlights, the plot, the whole concept is really left field, I loved it as an idea. It was deftly executed and the characters well drawn. I was fully invested very quickly and had trouble putting it aside to do other things. Definitely gets five stars from me. Recommended.

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as an author with children, cockwomblery, I fucked this up so you don't have to, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, moaning on and on and on, MTM gets stroppy, off topic, rage against the machine, raging over inconsequentialities, writer parent