In the Belly of the Beast

We have become what our grandparents fought against.

In the UK, people let a right-winger trample over human decency and truth in a way that would have done the old Apartheid government proud, and then wondered how they voted themselves out of the EU and why the pound was doing a gentle backstroke in the toilet.
(I've been told to get over the Brexit thing. Since I'm currently on the receiving end of open hostility in public because of my accent, and I've heard horror story after horror story from friends and strangers about outright physical and verbal abuse,  and since a fairly shallow review of history points out rather emphatically that a country that devolves to an isolationist, rabidly nationalistic stance is usually mere years away from being the aggressor in a war designed to lift the economy it systematically destroyed through that stance - no. No, I fucking will not get over it.)

Then the USA came along, dropped a turd in the same damn toilet bowl, sprayed it orange, and elected it president.

Trump spent the campaign legitimising hate speech against everyone who isn't a white male. He made it okay to sexually assault women. He let everyone know it was just fine to destroy people who are other, different in skin colour, religion, language and sexual orientation. He didn't just let the genie out of the bottle, he gave it a bottle of rum and a hand-job and fed it until it was running on its own power. He hatched the hydra.
Granted, that didn't take much; the racists in the US and the rest of the world have been having an orgy of hysterical proportions since Obama got in. Once Trump got his nomination, I imagine most of the Ku Klux Klan were in thankful tears. Isn't that a lovely, heartwarming frigging thought?

Then Trump gave his victory speech and I face-palmed so hard I have no clue how I stayed conscious. He talked about mending the fabric of society and was ever so bloody gracious. Plenty of people paid attention. The media reported it, played it ad nauseum. The republicans that disavowed him weeks ago fell over themselves to  talk about what a great start it was. The moderates who couldn't trust Hilary with the security codes but decided someone they wouldn't leave their 16 year old daughter alone with was a better alternative. They're all over social media, telling us to give him a chance, despite him operating a campaign that would have got the Nazi party in its earliest incarnation run out of town on a rail. Most of these patronising folk are, strangely enough, straight white males.

Guess who never listened? I'm guessing these guys. And these. And these. And guess what? They aren't going to. They got the permission they wanted to brutalise the other, and the person who gave them that permission is about to run the country. Their views have been vindicated. They used Trump as much as he used them.
Right now Trump could beg them to stop and they'd ignore him. They don't need him anymore. The
genie outgrew the bottle months ago; the hydra won't be stuffed back in its egg sac -  and monsters always demand blood.  Make no mistake, people are going to die over this. The only question is how many and how long it will take.

Today in the UK we celebrate the triumph of good over evil. Right now it's an empty exercise because as a species and a nation we haven't learnt a bloody thing.
For all the fancy parades and  wearing red poppies,  all the footage we've seen of cities and camps inhabited by doomed souls. The mass graves and the gun torn beaches. The things that started because countries chose to listen to power hungry men who chose scapegoats that were other.

We have become what our grandparents fought, and we should be sickened by it.

Things that make you go Wut? What is happening to ebook pricing?

There are a couple of traditionally published authors I adore. Tight plots, great story, amazing sense of humour. Since I like my series books, a new release by one of these authors is a massive treat for me; it's like settling in for a new conversation with old friends and catching up on the news. Candy for the soul, ya know?

So when the latest release day hit, I went over to Amazon and looked at the kindle page. It was over £15 for the ebook.

Me: WTF? Must be a glitch.

Nope. I've gone back to that page every week for the last couple of months. As of now, it's sitting at over £9.00. The paperback is not available yet, and yes, I like this series enough to revert to tree-books if I must. But £9.00 for a kindle book - nope. That reduces my book budget, which at the moment is so tight it makes squeaky noises when I look at anything over £5.99, to something that the universe is likely to set on fire while giggling gently to itself.

It's not just that particular author, either. Pre-order on another favourite is £8.99. Yet another is £9.99, for something out in September.

Me: Um. Wut?

Google isn't showing me much conversation about the matter, but surely I'm not the only one thinking "I love you guys, but that's cat-food and toilet paper and a bunch of other stuff I can't justify giving up to read."

The thing is, those prices are publisher set. These are traditionally published authors, who get paid quarterly and have to earn out their advances. They have zero control over the final price set on sites like Amazon. They are also the ones that will likely be blamed for falling book sales, and possibly lose their contracts. (This is also the reason I'm not naming names. It's pointless calling out authors when it's the damn publishing house that's causing the issue.) While I'm seeing a lot of hissing and booing in the reviews section, most folks seem intent on blaming the writer instead of the publishing house.

A person of a cynical bent (who, moi?) might wonder if this is the latest ploy by publishers to reduce ebook sales and increase paper sales. Or whether this is an epic tantrum aimed at Amazon by the publishers after the Apple debacle last year. Who knows?

I do know that charging close to double the price of a paper-back for an ebook is price-gouging of a sort that would make loan sharks blink in envy. I also don't see anyway this is sustainable in the long run; most folks simply can't afford to pay these prices. Book sales across the board for traditional authors is likely to drop. There might be a short term increase in money, but in the long run, that income stream is on a death march. So are a number of the authors involved, unless they get their rights back and start self-publishing. Most writers - even traditionally published ones - still work a day job because their income from books is so low it's ridiculous. You don't write for the money, kids. You write because you have to.

From an indie author point of view, how does this affect our pricing? Do we put prices up in an effort to keep up, or drop them back down in competition? The time of the .99c ebook creating sales went the way of the dodo at least 18 months back; the majority of readers now associate low prices with low quality, which is a pity. I found some great new authors at that price.

I have no clue what the end game is here. If readers vote with their wallets and go back to tree-books, that gives the publishing houses a grand excuse to stop producing them. If we continue to buy ebooks for prices that would choke a walrus, publishers have no reason to drop the prices. It's an ugly game, whatever the rules and reasons, and in this case, both writers and readers are the losers. The publishers are likely to gallop merrily into the sunset, and wonder why the hell their business is in trouble over the next two years.

Face-punching Tuesday (Right up there in moments of WTF)

Every so often I reach new levels of WTF (At the moment I'm averaging one a week), and I have to take a couple of days to process what I just did to myself.

Take Tuesday. Wednesday has gone by as a (relatively) normal day. We've moved the strange day of the week to Tuesday.

I managed to start this particular Tuesday off by punching myself in the face. In my sleep.

That bears repeating: I was asleep.

One moment I was in happy dreamland, tanning on a really nice beach. There was sun. There was golden sand, and the gentle lapping of waves. I WAS A SIZE FRIGGING EIGHT. This was a nice dream, ok?

And then my body punched itself in the mouth.

There was no warning. No sudden giant wave, no jellyfish pitching up and giving me attitude, no ominous dark fin in the water. 

One moment I was blissed out, the next, I was blinking in a daze at my ceiling, wandering what the hell I'd just done that for.

A few minutes later my alarm went off. I restrained myself from throwing it across the room, probably because it hurt too much to move fast at this point, and lurched down to the bathroom.

I'd split my lip, and facial cuts… well, they bleed a lot. From the base of my nose to my chin, I looked like an escapee from a bad horror movie. My knuckle was swelling. 

I rinsed my face and grabbed ice, and spent the next hour alternating between numbing my lip and my hand. I also *sigh* texted my boss, who might be up for sainthood at this point, to tell him I'd be late.  

The headache lasted until around four that afternoon, my lip hurts when I eat or drink, and my knuckle is still slightly swollen. I can safely say I pack one hell of a punch.

I'm also very, very grateful I got my mouth and not my nose or eye, because I think there would have been a lot more damage.

I'm hoping this closes Tuesday off for strange days, because I don't want to have anything top that. This makes the dwarf episode look positively normal.

A bad day in London - Moments of WTF, universe.

It's been quiet in my little part of the world. Head down, busy writing, busy working, busy trying to figure out whether spraying someone on the train with my deodorant would be considered assault - that kind of thing. (And the guy on the train was pretty rank. He smelt like a refugee from the Mines of Moria had shacked up with that cave troll, and made a baby, and it was on my train. And it hadn't been potty trained.)

Yesterday made up for it.

Yesterday going pear-shaped started around midnight, when the assignment I was working on evaporated as I started the last paragraph. I can swear in several languages, and I pretty much used all of them, treated Stacey to a non-stop litany of curses as I lurched up and down the passage, shaking my fist at the ceiling. I'm STILL fuming about it.

I decided to have a bath. There was a spider in it, dancing around on thin, spindly legs like an elderly ballerina. I threatened it with death and went back to my room.

I was supposed to be heading out of town for the day on work stuff. I got to Kings Cross, got my ticket, got on the train, which for once was ready to board early.

I settled in, decided to read until the train left, yanked out the kindle, and crossed my legs, and promptly fell off the seat. This is what happens when you sit too close to the edge of a train seat with no arm rests.

I caught my elbow on the down and stripped about half an inch of skin off of it, which I didn't notice because I was rolling around on the floor, holding my elbow and making little squeaky noises. Since I hadn't let go of the kindle, I slapped myself on the ear with it.

After I picked myself up and sulkily sat down again, I checked my bag to make sure nothing had fallen out during my encounter with the train floor.  I pulled the tickets out and checked them.
My stomach lurched.
I checked the address I was going to, and felt the prospects for the day nose-dive sadly into the tarmac in front of me.
Wrong city. I had tickets for the wrong city.

It isn't payday yet. I can't afford to buy new tickets because buying them on the day means the train company bends your credit card over a chair without the benefit of KY.

I texted my boss. No response.

I phoned the place I was going to and rescheduled for next week.

Texted my boss again. No response, which is not surprising since neither one of those texts has reached him as I write this. (With my luck, they'll beep through at around 3am on Sunday morning. That should make for a super start to my Monday.)

Then I headed into the office. Sitting down was painful due to large, strange shape bruise I now have on one of my buttocks, and every time I rested my elbow on my desk it screamed at me and called me names.

I can't talk about work, but suffice to say I've attempted to wipe yesterday from my memory banks. When I got home I re-wrote the assignment, realised that my right eye was swelling up (allergies. Yay!), and the left had a couple of burst veins.  I looked demented.
My hair had decided to channel the Bride of Frankenstein, my elbow was stinging, and my butt was throbbing. And then I got dive-bombed by a daddy-long-legs, a flying ant, and a mosquito, in rapid succession.


Wednesday, I'm not talking to you anymore.