The 5th Horseman Carries a Dental Drill

So - this will probably be a short post, since I'm also rocking gently and waiting for the next load of painkillers to kick in.

I had to go for an extraction this morning. This has been a bit of an ongoing saga, since my regular dentist managed to snap this one off at the gum, used every instrument she had but stopped short of a hammer and chisel, and at one stage was kneeling on the chair with me, and finally gave up saying that the root had bonded to the jaw-bone.

I love the way that I always get the special weird medical stuff happening. *sigh*

To say I was not looking forward to this would be an understatement, but since I've had quite a bit of pain from the exposed bit that's left, I know it had to be done.

My cousin came with me, which is good, since it stopped me crawling under one of the chairs in the waiting room and howling. She ended up making soothing there-there noises all the way to the surgery, and never laughed at me even when I'd stop chattering (nervous habit) in the middle of a sentence and just whimper. She sniggered a few times, but never laughed outright.

We sat in a waiting room with a few other people, including one toddler from hell, who crawled over the furniture and tried to knock a few pictures off of the wall.
When I got called through I was ... pleasantly surprised.

The dentist was a tall, very good-looking chap who obviously recognised a nervous patient and joked his way through the aesthetic injections. He was smart enough to give me three of them off the bat, so I'm not sure if my normal dentist warned him - I've had two situations already when the legal amount of anaesthetic resulted in a numb tongue and lips and did absolutely nothing to stop me feeling the drill - and I lurched back into the waiting room feeling a lot more cheery. Getting the actual injections still hurt like hell, though.

And then....

Picture this: there are three people in the waiting room. Myself, my patiently waiting cousin, and a blonde woman who looks nervous. My hands are shaking, but they also do when I go to the dentist; I tend to vibrate like a gently tugged bowstring.

Me: This guy seems brilliant.
Stacey: That's good.
(Blond Lady looks a bit perkier.)
Unknown voice from down the hall: Aaaargh! Awoooo! OW!

The three of us look at each other, startled.

Unknown voice, continuing: Oh god! God! Oh, god, NO! GOOOOOOOODDDDDDDDD!

Blonde Lady turns as pale as the white wall she's leaning against. I'm wondering if it's too late to break for the door.

The nurse appears in the doorway, and Blonde Lady gets beckoned to her doom.

About six minutes later they called me back in, and I sat in the chair, sweating gently.

In under twenty seconds the tooth remnant from hell was out of my mouth.

I checked with the dentist and the receptionist on my way out, and I'll probably be coming back to this particular dentist from now on - he's about 2 hours closer than my old one, and anyone that can get a tooth out with that amount of speed and accuracy and lack of trauma is on my wish-list.

Unfortunately as the anaesthetic wears off and my body figures out that I've Done Something and It Doesn't Like Me right now, some fairly serious painkillers are in order.

Dentists are in my top 5 phobias, hence the title of the post - but I think I've just found a  good one. Part of me is relieved, and the other part of me hopes it's a very long time until I see him again, no matter how good he is.

Here's hoping.

The Industry That Ate Itself

There's been a lot of hysteria in both the standard media and all over the interwebz the last week or so about Authors Behaving Badly, or at least, Not Up To The Standard Distinguished Gentlefolk Should Maintain.

We had the John Locke issue, where it was revealed that the author paid for reviews. Shock! Horror! (Explanation for sarcasm slightly further down this post. Pace yourselves, folks, I'll get there.)

Stephen Leather came under fire for daring to thumb his nose at people who were doing the same to him, and using fake accounts to do so. The cheek of it! How dare he not simply bend over and ask for more KY? It's really not done, old boy.

And R.J. Ellory got busted leaving somewhat lavish reviews of his own books and firing what would appear to be small nuclear devices consisting of 1 star reviews at his competition. Out of the three, this one puzzled me the most, but let's look at them in order, shall we?

Locke paid for reviews. I have a couple of responses to the outrage over this one, and the first is: if you think that he is the only author ever to do so, I got a bridge I'd like to sell you. It's all purty and old and stuff. Londoner's have thrown up on it for several hundred years, but they cleaned it up for the Olympics so it smells a bit better than it used to.
Furthermore, if you think that standard publishers never paid for reviews, whether through advertising in the media that employed their reviewers, or by funding things, or even directly (book reviewers need to eat too; I'm fairly sure they don't eat the pages of books they dislike so real food is probably welcome), you've passed the world of naivety and shouldn't be allowed to play with any money that doesn't belong on a Monopoly board.

What Locke did, despite the howls of outrage blowing through the internet, makes sense from a business point of view, and what Locke is, before he ever decided to write, is a pretty successful businessman. It's also worth pointing out that he could afford to pay for these reviews, and a large amount of said howling comes from folks who cannot. (Personally, I looked at the price it's claimed he paid and just about choked. That's a whole bunch of coffee and rent money right there.)

About the only grumble I have is that he never offered it as full disclosure in the book he published about how he achieved his sales. That said, although the reviews might have helped him, I doubt they were 100% the reason for his success; folks read his books, liked them, and carried on buying his stuff.
Screaming about Locke's sales being unfair because he bought reviews is about as useful as a toddler sticking grapes up his nose. It makes you look stupid, and eventually it's going to hurt you.

As for Leather - dear internet, for the love of green cheese, grow up. That news is old. It's also been pretty much an open secret for years; there was chatter about him doing this before I published WolfSong, and that's going on almost two years now. And some of his chirps are pretty damn funny, but maybe that's just me.
Also, dear screaming indignant fans, you can't have it both ways. If an author responds to anything remotely negative, with anything no matter how polite, they'd have a slighter better life expectancy if you strapped a raw steak to their back and dropped them in a shark tank. They'd probably also having a slightly better quality of life at that point in time.

Unfortunately, since authors are not emotionless robots that only live on your bookshelf or in your kindle, and since most of them like other humans don't always have the maybe-I'd-better-not-do-that filter on permanently, sometimes they respond like humans. The danger of the mob-the-author mentality is that it gets to the point where authors cannot say or do anything that might be slightly controversial once they reach a certain visibility, and that is dangerous. That's the whole stick-em-under-the-stairs-so-respectable-folks-don't-see-em vibe that pushes all my alert buttons, and it needs to stop. Don't ask me how - humans sometimes seem very good at tearing others down, and then standing around shuffling their feet and wondering why they don't have anyone left to play with - and I have no idea how to change that mentality. I don't understand it, and all I can do is try to avoid it.

Then there's Ellory, and as I mentioned earlier, this one had me scratching my head a bit. He's not the first author to be busted this way, but he is one of the biggest. That's not what has me puzzled, though, as I mentioned on twitter last week. What does confuse me is this : where did he find the time to do this? And why did he do it?  This isn't the standard jealous indy author with an axe to grind - this is a respected, traditionally published, award winner author, with multiple books to his name. (M&S, eat your heart out.) I have no idea why he did this, and of the three, it's the only one that really irks me, because leaving nasty reviews simply to disrupt someone else's sales is a shoddy move. It's something I associate with people who think pulling the wings off of flies as being high entertainment. Leaving love-letters to ones self in the form of an Amazon review, while cringeworthy if caught is one thing. It's embarrassing, and the authorial equivalent to that scene from American Pie, but it's not quite as, well, dickish as trying to hurt fellow writers and being too cowardly to use your own name.

And for all my points on that, he is still entitled to free speech. The one star review system is abused by people with their own agenda on every site that uses it. I'm not saying what he did is nice, but he is as entitled to do so as everyone else. Case in point - there are now a couple of 1 star reviews against his books by people who posted them because of him being exposed. So what makes any 1 star vendetta more righteous than another? To me it just highlights the fact that review sites and the internet makes it very easy for mob wars to start, for people to be vindictive for whatever weird sense of satisfaction they get from being pretty dickish themselves.

But I really want to know how he found the time. Writing a review takes a bit of thought and effort. Writing multiple reviews using multiple accounts (at this point my mind always starts wailing "How? How do they set up multiple accounts when I can hardly get one to work? Whah!" and then goes and sulks in a corner) and jumping onto the forum boards using those same accounts? While still writing books and living life and getting awards and stuff? My only explanation is that he has access to a real-life version of the Tardis.

Dear Mr. Ellory:

I'd really, really, like to take a ride in your time-space bending machine. I  promise not to ding it too badly and will bring it back once I've sorted out the lottery and kicked my high-school nemesis in the soft parts.

Love,
Me.

Anatomy of a Migraine Attack

It starts off with a dull copper taste in your mouth, like you dipped a coin in blood and then tucked it between your cheek and tongue. You feel a bit cranky, a bit ... other. Almost hungover, but not quite. No pain yet, and if you are very, very lucky and realise what's going on and take a tablet immediately, it might stay that way.
(Most of the time you don't; no matter how many attacks you've had in the past. Part of it is selective amnesia; that taste is so faint to start with it's easily dismissed and it's not until the light show starts that you remember it, the way your teeth suddenly felt a bit furry and you were growling at the keyboard and ignored it as some weird irritation because you had to go shopping, and now you realise that that was your warning sign and ignoring it was a very bad mistake.)

Your vision starts to first blur, then double. The taste in your mouth is suddenly hot and biting. You have trouble stringing a sentence together. That sense of other, of being dislocated from your physical self is stronger. If you're in the supermarket at this moment, you watch your hands pull things from shelves and out of the fridge as though you are standing next to yourself.
There is still no pain, but there is a humming in your ears,  like being enveloped in a thousand flickering lights or surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes and your face feels like it's just been slapped. The skin tingles and burns and fades to numbness around your nose and mouth.
You head for the till, rest of the shopping be damned, because now you know what's happening and you need to get home. You pick the self-serve scanner because you can no longer hear what people are saying to you properly, everyone sounds like they are under water, and the line there is shorter. This is good, because your sense of smell has just gone and thrown a party; the scent of the guy next to you with the deodorant that coats the back of your throat with a chemical taste; the sudden reek when someone at the back of the shop opens the milk and cheese fridge. You pass someone with meat in their trolley and all you can smell is blood and raw flesh.

You feed your money into the till and the god of pain hammers a spike into the space between your right eyeball and your occipital bone. It's a slice of white light that freezes you in place for a few seconds. Your vision clears, then begins to star-burst. If it wasn't for the pain, this would be pretty; fireworks exploding against the walls of your skull in dozens of colours. Especially white, for some reason. Everything goes to white.
When you grab your bags your sense of touch has changed. Plastic feels like silk, paper feels like steel-wool. Most of your skin feels like the pores have vanished and left only nerve endings, raw and screaming, in their place. You fumble your sun-glasses on, cloudy day or not - when you have one of these, it feels like you are under a spotlight from hell, and light can trigger an attack of nausea that will have you on your knees retching on the pavement - and lurch out of the shop.
And by lurch I mean there is almost no sensation of having feet. You have some dim awareness of moving, of the fact that your body is moving itself, but there is no sense of co-ordination. The lines of communication between hind-brain and limbs has diminished while your brain is clawing and screaming at the choking cage of your skull, which is suddenly two sizes too small.

You step into daylight and the pain god swings a hammer at the side of your skull. Sometimes you'll be lucky and he misjudges and gives you a nose-bleed. This is lucky because it seems to relieve some of that awful pressure, that sense that your brain has turned into a swelling balloon that rubs and chafes against bone. One day, you think/pray dully, one day it will find a sharp bit and pop and this will be done with.

You can no longer feel your face. That taste in your mouth is now burning liquid. You are aware that you are sweating because your shirt is clammy and stuck to your body and you are panting, ever so slightly. Like a beaten dog, collared to your pain and no way of pulling this tether loose.

You get into the blessed darkness of the flat, pull yourself up the stairs by the hand-rail - there is no way you can blindly trust your feet to get you there - and stumble into the bedroom. You pull the curtains closed before you take your sunglasses off and scramble for the migraine tablets. There is very little rational thought left at this point; if you bought anything that needs refrigerating it's just plumb out of luck, because trying to re-shelve anything would require co-ordination and is beyond you right now, and your vision is almost totally gone. The world is white, like an overexposed polaroid.

You lie in bed in the foetal position and feel the bed throb and wait for the pills to knock you out, because let's make this very clear - those pills don't cure a migraine. They don't stop it. You might as well throw a child's fishing net in front of a speeding juggernaut. What they do is take you away from it by removing you from the world of conscious thought, for the four hours the pills are in your blood stream. Once they wear off, you either sleep through the rest of it, or the pain wakes you up and you have to take more.
 Part of you mourns your plans for the day - the Skype chat, the writing, the t.v. show you had lined up - but it's a very small part. The rest of you wants oblivion, wants the world to go away, wants the mini-death of being unconscious.

You know that when this breaks you will spend a couple of days with hyper-sensitive skin, hyper-hearing and a sense of smell that would stun a blood-hound, and the fun risk of a rebound attack. You will wake up with crud - there is no other way to describe it - gumming your eyes together. If it's a very bad attack, you will occasionally wake up with blood in your ears and rimming your nostrils. You will have bouts of mild elation and depression, sometimes within minutes, and no way to know which one is coming up next.

There are some triggers you know about and avoid - high-cocoa chocolate, red wine. But the attacks lately don't seem to have a food trigger, happen during all temperatures, weather, times of year and day. The only pattern you can find right now is that there is no pattern, and if that doesn't kick your irony button nothing will.
A mild to medium attack will leave you slightly functional - you slur your words a little, you move very slowly, but you can do things. A bad one.. A full blown migraine attack leaves you begging for death. And if you get these on a regular basis, you will do almost anything to stop it. (Actually, strike the almost. You will do anything. Anything.)
Sometimes you start off with a medium attack and it fades, and then it comes back and stomps you into a little blubbering pile of pain and bile and nausea. It's like replacing a great white with a megalodon. Neither one is fun, and you can't swim away from either of them, and hello, over-kill.

If you have a condescending ass of a doctor, one who doesn't believe in migraines, you can discount any hope from that side. Friends and colleagues who have never had an attack wonder what all the fuss is over what they reckon is a bad headache, at which point you earn negative karma points by hoping they experience one in all of it's glory, and soon.
 Feverfew supplements help to a point, but it takes a few weeks to kick in, and although they help reduce the severity of the minor attacks, they don't touch the big ones, the ones that leave you wondering if the next time your brain will simply leak out of your ears and leave you a functioning cabbage. Botox injections helped - there was a whole glorious year of no attacks - but the odds of me being able to afford Botox right now are about the same of me wearing my underwear on my head and doing the can-can through a nunnery.

So you fade into darkness, you ride the tablet into unconsciousness and you know you will wake up checking your pillow and sheets for blood, checking your ears and nose and bleakly thinking about stroke possibilities and haemorrhaging and waiting for the next one.

And you hope you recognise that taste of blood and copper in time.

Ouch

So yesterday, the day job had the annual summer party. This being an Olympics year, it was decided to have  a sports day with a twist. I usually like twisted versions, and I enjoyed this one, but there are parts of my body now sulking under the duvet, weakly shaking a fist at me, the HR department, and summer parties in general.

I ended up doing a relay race on a space-hopper. On the bright side, I never fell off it, probably due to the fact that I never grew in height much past the age of 12, and also because I was clutching those blasted ears so hard if it had tilted the wrong way the hopper would probably have exploded, and kept me upright out of fear.

There is also a blessedly blurry memory of me in a 3-legged race, which is another reason my body hates me. Let's just say I was firmly banned from the sack-race by my team-mates and leave at that. There aren't enough disclaimer forms on the planet.

The highlight of the day, and probably the reason I couldn't bend over to put my shoes on this morning, was the inflatable gladiator game.

Said game consists of two inflatable podiums on an inflatable base, a giant padded thingy, and the ability to knock your opponent off the inflatable podium with said thingy.

I had the will. Sad to say, I didn't have the balance.

The instructor (who I assume went home afterwards and swore only to deal with pre-schoolers and never, ever run an event for so-called adults ever again) called for a volunteer to demonstrate.

I was willing. I just wasn't very able.

The base wasn't a problem. Getting onto the podium, which might just be bigger than me, was. Several undignified minutes later, I made it. Then I tried to stand up.

Um.

I shook. I quivered. I said several naughty words. Parts of my anatomy moved in ways that defied gravity, and not in ways that Playboy enjoys. (I'm a curvy girl. I have curves in places that other girls don't even have places, and they all moved in opposing directions.)

By this stage most of my colleagues were doubled-up with laughter. I still hadn't been able to stand upright. In fact, I'm pretty sure I resembled a hunch-backed version of Humpty-Dumpty on a vibrator.

Instructor: Keep your knees soft.

Me: They are bloody soft! That's the problem!.

Somebody chucked a safety helmet at me, and I sat down (gratefully) and put it on. Then I rose, in all my wobbling, oh-my-god-I'm-going-to-die glory, and tried to raise the thingy. As phallic objects go, mine was not happy. It drooped. It sagged. It was also heavy enough to tilt me towards the end of the podium.

The instructor prodded me with his own version, which seemed a lot bigger than mine.

"Are you ready?" Prod. "Are you ready?" Prod.

Then he sniggered at me. And prodded again. The podium rippled like the water in a paddling pool, and most of me rippled with it.

There was only one way to make this torture stop before my thighs slapped me around the face.

I dive-tackled the instructor.

Hard.

He made a very gratifying noise as he flew off of his podium - something like "Grragh-ug" and bounced a few times on the base.

Me (peering over podium): How was that?
Instructor (turning a pretty shade of purple, which clashed with his socks) : unnnngh. Gah.

Since the next two guys couldn't even stand on the podium, and had their battle-match on their knees, I felt slightly vindicated. (For some reason they wouldn't let me back on the game).

I also have the strange feeling that I'm never going to live this one down at work, but hopefully by the time I'm back in the office my body and I will be on speaking terms again. In the meantime, I'm making friends with a lot of heat rub.

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J H Sked is the author of WolfSong , Basement Blues , Die Laughing , and Quarter the Moon  and a contributor to Sweet Dreams, all of which are on Amazon as ebooks.

Payments from Amazon for non-US Authors, or, Pass the Valium

This is a bit of businessy post, which I don't do too many of, and it's more to give anyone not in the USA a bit of a heads-up regarding Amazon payments.

There are two options for writers like myself in the UK & EU - I'm not sure about the rest of the planet, so if you're not in the USA and you are waiting for your first payment, double-check your options. For me, the option was BACS transfer or cheque. The cheque has a minimum limit of $100 US dollars before Amazon will issue it. When I first entered my details I was at war with my bank and changing to a different bank altogether, so I opted for the cheque payment, and then promptly forgot about it. To be honest, I was never sure I'd hit the $100 mark, and my priority was on writing more stuff.

This was a mistake. If you have the option, go the transfer route - you need to get International numbers from your bank - if they aren't on your statement, contact your branch and get it that way. The reasons I say it was a mistake are listed below, and keep in mind this is me and I've never had a moment (particularly involving finances) that didn't descend in farce and moments of WTF, so I might have managed my usual SNAFU and other folks won't have these issues.

However...

One magical day I got an email notification telling me my cheque was in the post. Several weeks later, it landed on the front door mat, and I did The Happy Author Dance of Monetary Payment. I pinned the cheque to my cork board and made cooing noises at it for nearly a week, until Saturday came around and I bounced up the road to the local Barclay's bank.

The bank had changed it's operating hours (just this branch, by the way) and was no longer open on Saturdays.

Things went a bit pear-shaped on several levels, and it was some-time before I could get near an open branch, so fast forward three weeks.

Bit of a segue here to explain - my new bank is lovely. Their support is brilliant, and there are no nasty surprises like an overdraft that you can actually go over (still trying to figure that one out) - in fact, there are no overdraft facilities. It goes in, it comes out, I can check everything on-line in a very easy to follow format. They don't have a physical branch - everything happens on-line - but they have an arrangement with Barclay's if you need to pay in to your account - you complete a slip, and it goes through.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told the folks working the counters at Barclay's.

Our heroine bravely explained the situation. The dragon at the counter tapped the cheque. "It's in dollars!" he hissed.
Um, yes. Quite. It's been a number of years since I even saw a cheque, to be honest. I had no idea that you couldn't deposit a US dollar cheque** into a UK bank account. I have no idea why, apart from it being a plot by the powers that be to make me wilt.

I wilted so much that the dragon stopped breathing fire and directed me up the road to a place that cashes cheques and foreign exchange.

I dashed into the little shop, and the very sweet guy behind the counter asked me to come back at 3pm.

(It should be noted at this point that I was zooming in and out these places in between work, and it's at least a twenty minute walk each day. I am still sulking; with that exercise, my butt should be able to crack walnuts by now. It can't, but it still shudders involuntarily when I glance down that road.)

At 3, I ran into the little shop again. Sweet guy transformed into a used car salesman, sucking his teeth, gleefully listing the exchange rate - the commission would have choked a python - and told me it would take 3 weeks to cash the cheque. That isn't a typo. THREE WEEKS.

I wilted again. Then I dragged myself back into the office, and promptly ran into a colleague is from the US.


DINGDINGDING!!!


The cheque got countersigned and then sent back to the US so she could bank it. When the funds transfer, I'll hopefully get the money.

I went home and changed the payment method as fast as I could type.

So the moral of the story is, get the bank transfer. It will safe you a lot of hair pulling, and wilting, and dealing with dragons.

However, make sure you tell your bank that Amazon are doing a transfer and for how much, because most bank assistants seem to stumble over the fact that you are getting paid by Amazon, and not the other way around. It took six emails and several head-desk moments to get the BACS payment through because it confused the hell out of them. However, there is no minimum payment and eventually it does come through.


** The cheque is from Wells Fargo. The only way to open a Wells Fargo bank account in the UK is if you make enough money to think Richard Branson is small beans. From what I can discover opening any US bank account in the UK requires minimum funds that made me choke, a bunch of ID requirements, and possibly sacrificing a small goat.

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J H Sked is the author of WolfSong , Basement Blues , Die Laughing , and Quarter the Moon  and a contributor to Sweet Dreams, all of which are on Amazon as ebooks.

Strange Days Re-visited or, My Life is Weird

It's been one of those special weeks, which if you know me means - yep, Janet Doing Strange Things By Accident Again. (Let's not even go into the previous week, which included me stuck on the front door like a deranged limpet first thing in the morning, and the infamous Iron incident.)

Monday morning started off with me tripping over my own two feet as I turned around after closing my window. Nothing unusual about that; if I had a week without falling over something, my friends and family would start eyeing me strangely and check for possible doppelgänger activity.
I landed face-down on my bed, which was good; I've missed the bed on previous occasions, and it hurts. Once you've passed a certain age, you just don't bounce well any more, no matter how much extra padding gravity adds to your body.

So I sighed to myself, picked myself up, checked to make sure my hand-bag was intact, and froze in horror. Somehow, I had managed to drop-kick my Tenda wireless connector (which was about three feet away from where my feet decided they were no longer on speaking terms with co-ordination, and several inches off the floor plugged into the PC) and it was now in three separate pieces. Two sad little pieces of plastic, and a bit of circuit board twisted like a piece of half-sucked toffee. I spent a few forlorn minutes trying to fit them together, like a sorrowful monkey with a mismatched Lego set. Then I gave up and went to work, and did the dance of  Please, Please Let Amazon Have It In Stock.

Tuesday was fairly good. Got the new Tenda, managed to install it with a minimum of cursing, and only one moment of panic when I thought I had blown up the internet and ended life as we know it.

Wednesday included walking into a wall and making a very bad mistake regarding junk food, which had about as much in common with a real hamburger as I do to a rabid hamster. Then I got on a train to Glasgow, and inhaled the delightful aroma of large wet dog on a rope all the way there. The dog was under the seat in front of me and slept blissfully the entire way.

Thursday afternoon meant coming back from Glasgow, accompanied by the most impressive drama queen I've encountered on public transport. I have no idea what the woman's name is. I can tell you she had three kids with her, seven pieces of luggage included something coloured Pepto Bismal pink, with wheels, an ear-ache, a headache, a sore back, a possible divorce, and a voice that carried the length of the train-car. The relief of finally arriving in London was overshadowed by discovering that the tube line I needed had delays, and that somebody in the public loo had fought a brave but ultimately losing fight with a large curry, and by the time I lurched through my front door at 11:45p.m. I was feeling mildly homicidal.

Friday started off badly. I don't like being late. My body had other ideas, and I slept through every alarm I have (four of them). I staggered into work, apologised, and spent most of the morning feeling like I'd been bitch-slapped by the stupid fairy. I think I can honestly say that I've reached the stage in life where I need my sleep, and if I don't get enough I suffer a mass die-off of brain capacity. There isn't enough coffee on the planet for me to function for the next 8 hours.

So I got home and pretty much grunted my through dinner, passed out cold, and discovered a fairly unpleasant surprise after midnight when I traipsed down to the loo and was greeted by a large striped spider that had claimed squatters rights beside the bowl. In my defense, what I did next was possibly justifiable because (a) both the inhabitants of the house are arachnaphobes (b) my cousin has the most piercing scream outside of a Hammer horror I have ever heard and (c) it had been a long week, and the last thing I needed to top it off was acute constipation.
We have (had) a fairly nifty smelling can of vanilla air-freshener, which apparently striped spiders find extremely offensive. It scuttled under the skirting board and stared out at me reproachfully. I think it was coughing.

I went back to bed and tried not to think about a vanilla-scented beastie clambering up to my room, bent on revenge. Maybe wearing a little red bandanna and waving an Uzzi.  It's been that kind of a week.

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J H Sked is the author of WolfSong , Basement Blues , Die Laughing , and Quarter the Moon  and a contributor to Sweet Dreams, all of which are on Amazon as ebooks.

The best part of the Olympics

The main Olympic games ends today - the Para-Olympics is just around the corner, and I always think it's a pity it doesn't get as much attention or funding - and I've been thinking about the best part of the games.

There were massive highlights:  Michael Phelps bowing out with the most Olympic medals any athlete has achieved; Chad le Clos taking gold from Phelps in the mind-blowing finish of the 200m butterfly, Usain Bolt loping home for gold in three separate races with the indolent grace of  a cheetah; Nicola Adams, Claressa Shields and Katie Taylor making history and taking gold in the women's boxing, Oscar Pistorius getting to the semis in the 400m. Mo Farah winning two golds and Jessica Ennis taking the Heptathlon gold.

There were moments of heartbreak too:  Shin A Lam weeping on the piste for 45 minutes after a time-keeping SNAFU of utter WTF proportions; Ntumba Silva being disqualified because his disgrace of a coach failed to check the stipulated weigh-in time, Tyson Gay missing a medal place by one one-hundredth of a second and unable to hide the tears.

But while those were highs and lows for both athletes and audience, they weren't the best part. The opening ceremony was great, and I'm pretty sure the closing will be too, but nope, not the best part of it. The best part was the spirit I saw displayed by athletes from around the world; the spirit that burned.

It showed when Phelps took le Clos round the pool as the new Olympic champion, both of them beaming at the audience. It showed when Kirani James switched his running bib with Pistorius after the semi, with James taking first place and Pistorius finishing last. It showed when what seemed like half the athletes in the games made it obvious that they supported Ye Shiwen over some very unfounded sour-grape like remarks made by various commentators and coaches. It showed when her fellow team members quite firmly put  a presenter in their place for moaning when Rebecca Adlington didn't achieve gold and obtained a bronze instead. It showed every time an athlete cheered for and congratulated their competitors, or commiserated with them after an event. It showed when they wept on the podium as their national anthem played.

Forget the politicians scrambling for sound-bites and making encouraging noises over sports (it might help if you'd - oh, I dunno - stop cutting the funding, maybe?), and the grand-standing in the media. Forget the pressure put on every competitor to do the almost impossible and win - this is a competition, and somebody has to lose - and the almost predictable back-lash when medals aren't obtained. Forget Boris dangling off a zip-line and the rabid howling of the tabloids and the sheer idiocy of the "plastic-brit" controversy.

These people shone. They burned with spirit, with determination, with sheer guts - Manteo Mitchell finished his section of the relay on a broken leg, which puts him into the realm of bad-ass of the year for me - and they lit up the events they were in with the sheer joy of it.

They were beautiful.

They were why we watched the Olympics.

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J H Sked is the author of WolfSong , Basement Blues , Die Laughing , and Quarter the Moon  and a contributor to Sweet Dreams, all of which are on Amazon as ebooks.

When mainstream media goes bad - or, journalists becoming internet trolls.

Why has it suddenly become acceptable for certain journalists/bloggers to take pot-shots at certain members of the human race through their traditional media posts? And to use the Olympics as an easy way to score points? Is it a way to get hits on a website? Did their commissioning editors decide that trolling is now the next big thing to create traffic?

Opinion pieces are supposed to be talking points, I get that. But deliberately writing an opinion piece that is a  bit of racist bile in the Daily Mail - affectionately referred to as the Daily Fail for the sheer non-quality of  reporting and fact-checking - even though the original has now been pulled from the site, is nauseating. Re-writing the piece to remove the truly offensive remarks wins you no points at all. If you want to see an excellent examination on the piece have a wander over to http://botherer.org/2012/07/28/the-daily-mail-and-how-an-nhs-death-means-racism-is-fine/ and check it out. I can't actually write a better rebuttal without frothing over my key-board, so I'm going to leave it there.

Then we have one of the most condescending - and inaccurate - views on women's judo, written by someone who (a) doesn't demonstrate a basic understanding of the sport at all and (b) is a numpty. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewmcfbrown/100174361/womens-judo-its-disturbing-to-watch-these-girls-beat-each-other-up/

Not only is it appallingly sexist, and gives almost no recognition to an athletic achievement by either of the competitors, it contains one of the creepiest phrases ever, and I quote : "I couldn't help wondering about their soft limbs battered black and blue with bruises".

WTF? (Abbreviation used in case my mother views this later. If you want an example of female aggression, irritate my mom.)

Tell me, dear Mr. Brown, since my poor female brain is struggling to understand it - do you cower at the thought of the strong, mighty limbs of the male athletes battering each other? If so, darling, you are probably watching either the wrong sport all together (judo does not involve battering. It does involve a number of holds and throws, and probably the odd bruise. My poor, soft female body gets these by falling down stairs as well. Strange, that.)

We also have a demonstration of failing to understand basic anatomy, particularly those competing at an athletic standard. (Forgive me if I get this wrong, Mr. Brown. So difficult to get my female brain around these things.) However, having soft limbs would probably mean not having a skeletal structure, in which case the ladies referred to would be some sort of sea anemone, flailing at each other under water. They wouldn't be competing in the bloody Olympics. 

In addition, Mr. Brown, I'm pretty sure that the levels of physical fitness required to compete at Olympic level kind of restrict any softness involved to the average couch-potato gaping at their screen at home. 

Earlier in the piece, Mr. Brown refers to aggression that he - sweet, gentle, sheltered, and partially deluded soul - does not commonly associate with women or girls.  Dear Mr. Brown, I cordially invite you to watch the rowing, the athletics, the badminton, the weightlifting, the women's football, the swimming - actually, why don't you watch any sport containing woman athletes? Aggression in sports doesn't have to result in physically grappling with your opponent. Aggression is a state of mind, Mr. Brown. It's a determination to win, to fight through the burn, to do your best. The fact that an athlete might be female is incidental.

As for female aggression outside of sports? I suggest Mr. Brown picks a lady of his acquaintance, and proceeds to insult her offspring, her partner, her life in general, and see what the results are. I'd give you an additional bonus point for insulting her intelligence, but since you've already managed that quite nicely already it wouldn't count.

Right now, I'm hoping that this piece was designed to get hits on the Telegraph site. Unfortunately, I've had to deal with enough people with this sort of attitude to females (bless my pretty little head) to doubt it. 

So for what it's worth, here's my two cents:

When you judge someone based on their colour, religion, sexual orientation or sex, and when you are quite happy to publish it a piece of writing stating this, a couple of things happen. First, you get a backlash, and lots of very happy trolls feeding each other. Second, you expose both your soul and intellect for what they are worth - sad, shrivelled little bits of charcoal that are only good for generating flames and a lot of smoke. And yes, you will get people that inhale your poison and call it good. But is that really a legacy you want to leave? Do you really want your contribution to the human race be one of bile, and hatred, and sheer out-and-out stupidity? Because if so, go find yourself a nice cave, and beat yourself repeatedly over the head with a large club, and for the sake of the rest of the planet, please don't breed. You'll have a much nicer affect on the gene pool that way.

But you'll still be a numpty.

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J H Sked is the author of WolfSong , Basement Blues , Die Laughing , and Quarter the Moon  and a contributor to Sweet Dreams, all of which are on Amazon as ebooks.

How not to be a twit (Rant Alert)

I realised something earlier this week. Although I love twitter, and I'm on it a lot - not always posting, often just cruising around - I hardly ever look at my main feed any more.

The reason is pure and simple spam overload. Almost every tweet at a given time is pushing something - usually books, since I tend to follow a lot of other indie authors. They beg, they plead, they occasionally compare their writing to the Latest Big 6 Thang (which automatically puts it onto my DNR list, because odds are - nope, your writing is nothing like whatever the hell you claim to be better than). And it saddens me, because I've met some great people through twitter, and even some of them appear to have been replaced by marketing spam-bots. There is a special place in the seventh circle of hell for the inventors of spam-bots, and when I meet up with you in the after-life I intend roasting a marshmallow over you. Just saying.

I've tweeted links to my books - usually when they're free up on the kindle store, but I tweet the link maybe twice a day. To be totally honest, the last couple of times I forgot about it. The thing is, I love reading. But there isn't a hope in Hades of me clicking the link you just posted, and I'm going to list them here.

1) I'm usually broke. I scrape by month to month, and if I'm very lucky, when pay-day rolls around I have a few square quid in my pocket. I discover new authors usually be downloading a freebie, and if I like what I read, I will hunt down and happily pay for the next couple of books if my budget lets me. Anyone pricing their book at higher than £5 gets a fleeting look of regret, because I'm not willing to blow my budget on a single book when I can get two or more for the price of one. I never buy off a twitter link, and I've been on that site for over a year.

2) 99% percent of the authors tweeting only link to the Amazon.com book, which I can't download here in sunny London. It also means I can't even check out the full description or download the sample. Skip. Very rarely I'll remember to make a note of something recommended by someone else - usually not the author, and check it out once I've dragged my sorry butt home from work.  Most of the time, it's a case of get home and face-plant and pray for Friday so I can actually get some writing done on the weekend.

3) It. Annoys. The. Crap. Out. Of. Me. It annoys me because I check out everyone who follows to make sure they interact a bit with folks, and if all they do is promote, promote, promote, I don't follow back. I'm on twitter because I like to chat to folks, and jabber about everything from my latest fun experience with spiders to the evilness of the London transport system. So I have no idea how my feed is suddenly spam-city, but I look at it, growl, and jump over to my lists.

4) To add insult to injury, some of the folks on my lists appear to have fallen victim to the Great Spam-Bot Body Snatching experience, and all they bloody tweet is ...... links. To their books. No more interaction. No more jokes or chats. Just. Bloody. Spam.

6 months ago I'd scroll through my feed, catch up with a few folks and have a bit of a chat. Now, since I haven't updated my lists in a while, I have to hope and pray I remember their handle and search them up - and hope they haven't turned into the author-spam-bot from hell over night.

My response? Well, I haven't done a tweet about my books in a while, unless you count the last blog excerpt, and I'm seriously thinking about culling down my follow list. I have no issues with losing followers who spam me repeatedly, because all I really want is my old twitter feed back.

If you are an author, or blogger - I have no issue with you tweeting about it every now and then. We live in an on-line world where often the only way to get anyone to pay attention is the internet equivalent of flashing your boobs at the bar-tender to get served,  (yes, it works. Only on straight guys and bi-curious girls, though, and only the first time you do it. Be warned.) but be prepared for the back-lash if that is all you do. If you provide no more value to someone following you than the Duracell Bunny, you lose your voice. It gets skipped over in the sea of links, and screams of "Buy me! BUY MEEE!"  are becoming as annoying as the toddler kicking and screaming on the supermarket floor because nobody will give him the candy he wants.

Mix it up a little. Chat to people. If you get my attention that way, odds are I'll at the very least check your stuff out. I might not like it, and I might not buy it - but I'll still talk to you. And auto-DM's are just another form of spam that make me want to roll on the floor and bite the carpet; don't do that either. It puts you back in the boob-flashing/Duracell Bunny category, and trust me - there's no longer anything unique about either one of those.

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J H Sked is the author of WolfSong , Basement Blues , Die Laughing , and Quarter the Moon  and a contributor to Sweet Dreams, all of which are on Amazon as ebooks.

Snippet : Ravens WIP

I've had a few queries on the follow-up to WolfSong (working on it guys, promise!). The bad news is - still working on it. The good news is, it's going well - definitely easier writing this time around. There were a few howls when I mentioned I'd dumped the last version three quarters of the way in, but I have to say it was the right decision. I've learnt a lot since the first book, and hopefully it shows in this one. 


I've pasted a snippet below for you; with the usual caveats - this is still a work in progress, and that means anything posted is subject to change or deletion, especially if my eagle-eyed master beta (hi, Joe) hits it on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. *grin*

In the meantime, hope you enjoy it. This takes place a couple of chapters into the book itself, and once again, Amber is getting herself caught up in all sorts of trouble.

                            *************************************************

Gates’ legs dissolved at the knees half a street away from the inn. Wills caught his left side and nodded at the artist lad, Farding, to take the other.

Amber and Dort strolled along behind them.

“So why are you really staying with Gates?” Dort asked.

Amber was glancing through Farding’s sketchpad as they walked. There was more than enough ambient light for hawk eyes to see. The lad was good.

She closed the pad and thought for a moment, then dipped lightly over Dort’s mind. There was fear there, true – and a bright, burning anger at whoever had killed Dunning and left his body for Gates to find.

“Because I don’t want to find him sliced apart in his bed tomorrow,” she answered finally, and Wills stopped in his tracks and glanced at her over his shoulder.

She nodded at him.  “So far he’s lost two kin to murder, he has a lovely bruise on his face and he didn’t want anyone to think I’d stick my nose into this mess. I think your Commander has a target on his back, and I want to know why.”

“There aren’t that many folk you’ll be able to trust,” Dort said.  “Being a hawk and all.”

“So far I’ve found four,” she answered, and the men looked at each other before they carried on walking.

Dort smiled gently. “And when your squad arrives, there’ll be a few more.”

“What?” Amber stopped and grabbed his arm.

The medic looked at her then flicked his eyes to a space behind her.

“I’ve never heard a panic call on so many levels,” he said quietly. “It was quite an experience.”

Ahead of them, the two guards dragged Gates through the doorway of a small house.

Amber turned around, hands on hips, and glared at Jadah, who shrugged sheepishly.

“Really? ” Amber said. “One little knock on the head and you bring in everyone?”

Jadah winced.

“Oh, stop that,” Amber said irritably. “Call them off, Jadah.”

“I tried,” she answered. “Tarmien reckons he always wanted to travel, Garliaan was as excited as a child on Samhein, and Ariaan told me the whole squad is overdue leave.”

Dort cleared his throat. “My pardon, ladies. But if we don’t get off the street we’ll start drawing a good bit of attention.”

Amber spun away and stamped into the house.

Dort and Jadah followed at a more leisurely pace. “Which squad?” the spirit asked him.

“Black Arrow,” he answered. “We were the first mixed squad on the border.”

“They know about your talent?”

“That’s why they recruited me,” Dort answered.

“So why are you so scared of her?” Jadah asked, as they reached the door.

“I knew her dam,” he whispered, and stepped into the house.

Jadah followed, for once stunned into silence. 

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J H Sked is the author of WolfSong , Basement Blues , Die Laughing , and Quarter the Moon  and a contributor to Sweet Dreams, all of which are on Amazon as ebooks.

The Universe and Society vs Art

Weird things happen when you try to write part-time. I'm pretty sure they happen to full-time writers as well, but since I've never had that perspective, I can only talk about it from the other side of the road.

Sometimes it feels like the entire universe is hovering over you, waiting for the chance to punch you in the face. This usually happens when you've just recovered from the last serious issue, are back on track and writing again, and the birds are chirping and the sun is shining and your mind is in fluffy kitten and unicorn territory.

And it's often arbitrary things. Like the flu. Or the stomach bug I had last weekend that killed four or five writing days for me, because I couldn't look at a screen without whimpering and making gentle heaving motions. Travelling for work and forgetting your power-cord for the net-book, trying to write during your lunch hour and having everything commented on (loudly) in Spanish by some annoying female you don't even know but would dearly like to slap, being too scared to take the net-book in during torrential rain because if it fries you are screwed - and losing those five hours of writing you could have had for the week as a result. Saving your book and realising the next time you open your programme that you had a bug that has just wiped the entire frigging thing off the map, and your last back-up seems to have corrupted.

Sometimes it's not so arbitrary. The first Crescent book I wrote was destroyed by a jealous boyfriend who couldn't accept the fact that I wasn't cuddled up to him on the couch watching t.v. twenty-four seven and cooing adoringly when he opened another beer. This was back in the days when hard disks and floppy's still existed, and believe me when I say they did not stand up to being stamped by a fairly large bloke in work-boots.

That and a few other moments of trauma (not relationship related) meant it was years before I tried writing another book. I still played with short stories but full length stuff - nope. It took a good long while before I did that again.

But the thing is, eventually I did it. I stopped telling myself I couldn't do it, or it wasn't worth it, and I started another one. It was awful. Tried another. Oh, mummy. That one was bad. Start again.

I moved to London and started re-writing the last one, the one that didn't make me cringe too much when I put the disk in and had a re-read.

In the meantime I got a short published in a US fanzine, and pretty much did the happy dance for a year on that one.

Broke my leg. Six months of not being able to spell my own name, (I have no idea why anyone thinks drugs make you more creative. The stuff sure doesn't help me much, and I don't like feeling stupid. Then again, they were NHS strength pain-killers) let alone do any decent writing. Started re-writes again after that. In the meantime, I started a university course and work stepped up a notch when I was allowed back full-time.

The point is, real-life happens. A lot of writers - especially the folks doing this part-time - are also looking after kids, mortgages, and a whole bunch of real-life stuff I don't need to worry about. I have no idea how they manage, but they do. And every time - every single time - the universe bitch-slaps them, they get up and keep doing it. They keep writing.

And the reason this is amazing is because most folks, when you tell them you write, or that you want to write,  don't consider it a real job. The same applies to my musician friends, struggling artists, and actors that I've met.

It's a pretty weird attitude because every single one of those people - the ones that roll their eyes and make comments about you wanting to be the next J.K. Rowling (different audience, but frankly, I'd love her sales) or sweetly advise you that you'll never pay the bills doing it - every single one of them watch t.v. or movies, download music and rave fanatically about their favourite bands, or wait breathlessly for the next book in the series they HAVE to have. Every. Single. One. They all need entertainment, they all desperately want their chosen favourite to lift them away from their everyday life - but they don't consider it a real job. They don't think of it as work.

None of the folks who shake their head when I say I write would do that if I told them I was studying to be a plumber or electrician. They wouldn't tell a kid who dreams of being a footballer to get their head out of the clouds, or laugh at the older girl trying to get her nursing diploma part-time.
I'm not sure why, but I think it stems from the impression that art - all art - is something intangible, that it's created by gently rocking in a hammock while sipping a cold beer, and The Artist waves a little finger and Something Great is Created.
They don't realise that behind the guy on stage making that guitar walk and talk are years of frustration and bleeding fingers and lugging your gear into lousy bars and hoping nobody throws a full beer can at your head tonight. They don't realise that the artist selling their paints for £800 a pop spent three frigging years drawing rotting fruit in a stuffy classroom before they figured out how to see an apple properly, or the absolute ecstasy that came with that switch. The dancer with blood and torn corns in her ballet shoes, the actor that marches into an audition with a confident strut and smile and walks ten miles home because he can't afford the bus fare.The writer that pounds on a keyboard until her legs and fingers go numb because it's snowing and she can't afford to cover the heating bills so the furnace isn't on, and will go and thaw out under a pile of blankets and then write some more.

They don't know, and one of the reasons they don't know is because we sell them dreams. We sell moments of time that transport them and if we do it well, they never know the effort behind it. Because dreams break easily, folks. They splinter and crack like fine crystal in a deep freeze, and we know it, and we will move everything to make sure that doesn't happen. We wrap them in pretty shiny packages and we give them to someone else and hope that dream works for them, just for a little bit, because we can't stop dreaming. We can't stop producing. And that takes work.

I can't fix your plumbing, change your wiring, or perform open-heart surgery. But I can produce little dreams, little moments in time for you, and I will keep doing so. Even if I have to keep the day job.

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J H Sked is the author of WolfSong , Basement Blues , Die Laughing , and Quarter the Moon  and a contributor to Sweet Dreams, all of which are on Amazon and enrolled in the Kindle lending programme. 

New Artwork - Jason McKinney's Hell is What You Make of It

My good friend Jason McKinney has a new collection of short stories up on the kindle store, all with his usual mix of macabre humour and outright horror - everything from a bar of soap POV from the Bates Motel to a rather disturbing - but funny - take on the children's classic, Charlotte's Web.
I'm very proud to have had a small hand in this, since Jason trusted me enough to let me do the cover and some of the beta-reading and editing. Carry on reading for the book description, Amazon links, and of course, the artwork itself - I'll put a few technical details on the painting at the bottom, for anyone interested in them.

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Everyone has an image of Hell. Whether your punishment is to walk an endless desert with redemption always in sight but never within reach or being a bar of motel soap whose soul purpose is to be Norman Bates’ unwilling accomplice, we all have a personal hell.

But what if hell is what you make of it. Being damned can’t be all bad…can it? Take a trip to an alternate dimension where soldiers from World War 1 ferry war casualties to their reward.

Or is it worse than we think? If you step through the looking glass where one of Santa’s elves finds a meteor that has undead ramifications, a Marine combat veteran from Desert Storm has to answer for his sins, and a familiar, beloved female spider spins a web of flesh eating destruction for a hapless pig.


These tales show that at the end of it all, hell is what you make of it.


Amazon.com : http://www.amazon.com/Hell-What-You-Make-ebook/dp/B0084URHBI
Amazon.co.uk : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hell-What-You-Make-ebook/dp/B0084URHBI

For anyone interested in the techie details, the entire drawing was done in CorelPainter 12, and took around 8 - 10 hours or so. I have a huge stock of photos (this is the girl who took 17 pictures of snow on leaves for textures. Don't judge me.) and I love to re-paint over photos and mix it up with painterly effects, like the hat and the flaming lips. The skull itself was painted in chalk and airbrush to get it as photo-real as possible. It's perfectly possible to use a photo and leave it at that, but depending on the rest of the painting you intend, it isn't always suitable; and in this case it would have destroyed the feel of the painting. The hat was done in oils and chalk. The lips were painted in oils, chalk highlights, and the burn tool, then the flames painted in individually, which probably took the longest to do - there is a flame brush on Painter, but it's about as real looking as a blue hippo. There are a lot of layers on those flames, and they were done using the airbrush tool and smudging.
The back ground was achieved by using the gel brush and a couple of shades and then playing with the saturation levels.

The fonts were done in CorelDraw (probably the last time I'll do it that way, since my programmes are on two different machines and it is an utter pain to switch between them) and then transferred over. Tablet used was a Wacom Bamboo, and after struggling on a cheaper version for nearly a year, it's pretty sweet. When it comes to graphic art,  go for the best upgrade you can afford - the difference in what you can achieve is astounding. (If the tooth fairy would like to leave a Cintique under my pillow, btw, no complaints here. Just sayin'.)

Actually, if you're just starting out, I'd recommend skipping the ultra-cheap tablets altogether and moving straight on to one of the low-priced, high-quality versions. Cheap tablets drag, stick, and on occasion have you screaming at the screen, and I'd be surprised if a number of budding artists didn't just give it up at that point.

      **********************************************************************

J H Sked is the author of WolfSong , Basement Blues , Die Laughing , and Quarter the Moon  and a contributor to Sweet Dreams, all of which are on Amazon and enrolled in the Kindle lending programme.

Moving the goalposts - why I don't like amending published work

I'm seeing an interesting trend now by authors to amending already published works. Not fixing spelling errors, punctuation or formatting (oy, formatting. So very much my weak point) but actually changing the story itself. Changing plot points, rewriting character arcs, in some cases changing the ending to something completely different.


Some of this has been in response to reader feedback. Some authors feel this is a good way of inter-acting with readers, and some of these readers agree. This was  bound to happen; in a world where you can publish - and unpublish - at the push of a button, the real surprise is that it didn't happen earlier. But I can't say I like it.

There's a couple of reasons for that, and to lay them out properly I'm going to come at from two perspectives, both as a reader and as a writer.

From a reading point of view, this would annoy the holy hell out of me. If I've invested time and energy (not to mention money) in a book, changing arcs, story lines, character behaviour and endings is going to flip out of that universe at the speed of sound. By all means release an expanded edition - King did this with the Stand, and I loved it - but don't mess with the story itself. It makes me feel cheated. It makes me wonder why the hell you published the first version to start with. If you don't believe enough in your world to hold to its inner core, the truth of the vision you initially put out there for the world to see, how can you expect me to this as a reader?

The books I love I really, really love. The books I enjoy I will come back to; it's rare for me to really like a book and never read it again. And if I come back to it and you've changed integral parts of the story line, you've destroyed that world for me. That's it. The trust I had in your world is gone, it's shattered, and not all the comments of "but this is better" is going to restore that. For one thing, it's condescending, for another, it's whiny, and lastly, a part of me will always feel that justifying what you wrote should remain in the precincts of school reports and keeping your teachers happy. I'm not your English professor.
The odds of me picking up another story from you? Nil. (And if you do this to me while I'm in the middle of the book - which recently happened - this Lil Constant Reader is going to go nuclear. 8 amended versions in 3 weeks. I no longer visit that site, and reminders from it go straight to my junk mail, with a muttered "bugger off" from yours truly.Ugh.)

From a writer's point of view, I can understand the wish to make it better and keep your customers happy. Guess what? There will never be 100% happiness from your readers/customers. Never. That only happens in very cheesy adverts.
There are parts of WolfSong I'd love to go back and re-do or eliminate all together. If I did that, I expect I'd get lynched by the people that read the book and liked it, and rightly so. I write a book, I polish it as best I can, and once the beta-reading and editing is done, it gets published. I've republished Wolfsong previously as edition two in an effort to eliminate formatting issues, but I made it very clear there were no changes to the story itself.

My paying customers are not beta-readers, and treating them as such in both unethical and rude. It's like handing someone a bowl of cornflakes, yanking it away just when they've gotten used to the taste, and replacing half of it with granola. Do that to a customer, and odds are you'll end up wearing a bowl of badly combined cereal on your head, with milk dripping slowly onto your shoulders. And if you're still wailing "But it's better!!!" at this point, you deserve all the karma you are going to get.

The other thing, purely from a practical view-point is - when do you stop writing the bloody thing? Once it's published, you need to move on. Move onto the next story, the next world, the next universe, otherwise you will still be re-writing the first book in thirty years, rocking gently and mumbling to your cats. If you need to rewrite, you need to do it before you push that publish button, because if you intend on rocking your readers world, you want to do it in a good way, not in an OMG if they change this frigging thing ONE MORE TIME kind of way. Your readers trust you to build them a world they can step into and enjoy with the security of knowing that world is fixed. Changing that world - breaking it apart and remaking it into something new - upsets its evolution, both for the reader and for the author. Make it interactive by all means - add pictures, links, and sound-files - make it entertaining, make it exciting, but most importantly, make it trustworthy.


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J H Sked is the author of WolfSong , Basement Blues , Die Laughing , and Quarter the Moon  and a contributor to Sweet Dreams , all of which are on Amazon and enrolled in the Kindle lending programme.