One Year On

8 Feb

Roughly a year ago I gave up my boring office job and released my first novel, Leda. I intended to take stock after one year and see how the old writing career is going. So how does it look?

I would like to be able to support myself entirely by writing but that still seems to be a distant goal. As well as looking after my niece I’m currently back at the office, albeit only temporarily to cover staff shortages. (It seems I am indispensable. 😉

On the positive side, out of a print run of 500 copies Leda has so far sold over 350. I think that’s not bad for the first year (a Christian children’s publisher agreed) and sales are holding up steadily rather than tailing off. Someone, somewhere must be buying this book.

Then the best news of all: I have a book commission from the aforementioned Christian children’s publisher. All being well my children’s biography of St Augustine should be published in the early part of 2014. So I may still be skint, but at least I feel like I’m getting somewhere in my impecunious career.

Coincidentally, the weekend that I am looking back on my year is also Chinese New Year. For this reason my latest collection of short stories, A New Year’s Trio, will be free for Kindle download from now until Tuesday.

It’s also my seventh wedding anniversary in a few days, a significant milestone but more memorable for me than for my husband, it seems, since he accidentally booked a boys’ holiday to Spain over it. Oh well, I suppose there’s always next year.

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Give Keynes a Chance!

19 Jan

george osborne dartboard Wicked as those extortionate loan companies are, they are right when they say in their adverts that it’s always when you’ve got no money that something breaks. My electric shower has just gone caput, in the middle of the skintest month of the year.

At times like this I find myself wailing, “Will this recession ever end?” Not if George Osborne had his way, it wouldn’t. Of course, it will end eventually, but it will be in spite of him, not thanks to him (although I expect that is what he will say at the time, if he’s still in goverment). Why is this? Because it is basic economic theory that you don’t make cuts in a recession – it only makes things worse, and prolongs the recession.

It was John Maynard Keynes who first explained this, a long time ago. I know it sounds a bit paradoxical, but it does actually make sense. I’ve explained it in more detail on Suite101 but in a nutshell, when times are tight, everyone sits on their money, and the economy stagnates. (That includes banks, by the way – the reason why they’re not lending.) If the government cuts, everyone clings on to their money tighter, and businesses close, and people lose their jobs. If the government uses monetary policy (giving banks money, or reducing interest rates) then the banks sit on the money, and everything is awful. However, if they increase people’s income by increasing benefits and, most importantly of all, creating jobs, money starts flowing around the economy again, and everything gradually gets back to tickety-boo status.

George Osborne should know this. If he doesn’t, he shouldn’t be Chancellor of the Exchequer. I suspect that he does know, and that he is just pretending not to for his own nasty ideological aims. The Conservatives believe in small goverment – not much taxation, not much spending – and if the easiest way to get there is to demonise the poor, blow smoke in the public’s eyes and, yes, extend the recession, that is what they will do. At least, that’s what they appear to be doing. (They are also picking on the disabled in a nefarious manner – another example of why the Tories are sometimes known as “the nasty party”.)

It doesn’t have to be like this. Iceland, which was hit particularly badly by the global crunch, is now doing quite nicely, thanks to keeping welfare, education and health spending high, and writing off ordinary people’s debt rather than banks’. Meanwhile, in Greece, austerity continues to wreck the economy so that there seems to be no prospect of it ever paying off its bail-out loans.

Mr Osborne says that we are in a “debt crisis” and the most important thing is to pay off our debts as quickly as possible. He thinks that borrowing in order to invest in the economy would be ridiculous, downright criminal, when we are in such a “debt crisis”. But we are not in a debt crisis, we are in a recession. Borrowing to stimulate the economy would be exactly the right approach. Avoiding borrowing through austerity measures has actually led to us, ahem, borrowing more – but without doing anything useful with the money, like creating jobs.

Take this analogy: A woman has a lot of credit card debt but she is managing to meet the repayments. George Osborne would have her sell her car, which she needs for her work, so that she can pay off the debt quicker, since that’s the most important thing. She will then have no way of working and have to borrow money just in order to live, but hey, you need to make tough choices in a “debt crisis”.

Yes, Mr Osborne, you do, but the ones you are making aren’t just tough. They’re wrong.

(Economics rant over. Normal service will be resumed in the next blog post, which will hopefully be about something much lighter and fluffier.)

Primed for a Laugh

11 Jan

Prima FebruaryThis month’s Prima features my story “A Recipe for Disaster”. It’s a very short, funny little piece about a couple working in their short-staffed restaurant after a very busy evening when famous food critic Clive St John decides to make an unexpected appearance.

“This month’s” Prima is of course February, due to the logic of magazine dating. The cover is as in the photo, and my story is on page 144. Prima is priced £2.99, and this month you can also get a Maybelline mascara, free but for P&P, meaning that it practically pays for itself.

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Goodbye 2012

31 Dec

“So this is Christmas, and what have we done? Another year over, and a new one just begun.”

(from Happy Christmas (War is Over), in case you hadn’t guessed.)

I’m in a reflective mood, what with it being Hogmanay. As a Scot I can’t help but think about the year that’s passed and the year to come, even though I know that all the gradations we put on time are just human constructs, and nothing significant really happens at midnight tonight. Still, it feels significant, and I think human beings need to break time up somehow, if only to give the illusion of a destination, of starts and finishes and progress in-between.

For the last few years I’ve been very glad to let the old year go, hoping that the new one would hold better things, and for the last few years I’ve been disappointed – until this year. This year has been good. It started off well, with my knowing that I was leaving my job, which I intensely disliked, to write full-time and look after my beautiful niece. It went on well, with the successful launch of my first novel, Leda (350 copies sold to date, not counting ebooks), and later a collection of short stories, Office Life and Death. I’ve evenA New Year's Trio just published another short collection specifically about New Year, A New Year’s Trio.

My husband has also become self-employed this year, and he’s enjoying it too. Financially it’s been a difficult year (Will this recession ever end? Not if George Osborne has anything to do with it, but that’s another story.), but personally it’s been great. A post from Read to Awake, which I follow, asked “what can you do now that you couldn’t do this time last year?”  I think that’s a pretty good viewpoint to take. This year I can play the tin whistle (not well, but I can knock out  a recognisable tune) and translate passages of Virgil’s Aeneid. That’s enough in itself to make me feel that I’m not stagnating.

I’m entering 2013 with mixed feelings, however. This year my sister goes on maternity leave, removing the steady income from babysitting which has made it possible for me to give up my job and write. Come the summer, things will have to change in some way, and as yet I don’t know what shape that will take. For the first time in a long while I’ll be sorry to say goodbye to a year. Twenty twelve brought me independence, hours of fun with my baby niece, creative success and lots more. Even the Olympics turned out to be pretty good, and it was the 100th anniversary of Albania’s independence (from the Ottoman Empire, since you ask).

Still, although 2013 is the unknown, I don’t think there’s any reason to fear it – and even if there is, I choose not to. Wherever I go, I go with God and with the support of my friends and family. I hope I’ll be just as sorry to say goodbye to 2013 in twelve months time.

“The year is dying in the night. Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.”

In Memoriam, Tennyson

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Nature and Nurture

15 Dec

Pink Nail PolishHave I created a monster? (Although if I have she would be the cutest, most adorable kind of monster you could imagine.) My 21-month-old niece is the girliest girl possible, and I fear I may have a lot to do with it, since I look after her three days a week and she sees me putting on makeup, using various lotions and potions, wearing high heels etc. She insists on copying me, putting on pretend make-up and real hand cream, and picking out high-heeled shoes for me to wear even when the weather, and carrying a two-stone toddler, would make them quite impractical. She loves playing with my handbag, which keeps her amused for minutes on end. (That’s pretty good, with a one-year-old.)

But I don’t think I deserve all of the blame for this. Her mother would have to take a portion too, since my niece often comes to my place smelling of mummy’s perfume and dressed in very cute outfits, but that’s not what I mean. I don’t think this girly obsession is entirely due to her upbringing at all. I think pink blood runs in her veins, so to speak. I know it’s easy to fool yourself that you’re not imprinting gender stereotypes on your kids when in reality you are, without realising, but I have good evidence that there is something deeper. For instance, she’s obsessed with handbags, and often goes after other people’s on the train (I really must train her as a pickpocket). She’s also fascinated with painted nails. Now I rarely paint my nails and, as I’ve written before, I’m just not that into handbags. She’s not getting that from me, and I don’t think she’s getting it from my sister, either.

The thing that decided me, though, was watching her with my husband yesterday. She adores her uncle, and follows him round watching what he does – but she doesn’t copy him. She doesn’t want to put shaving foam on her face or gel in her hair. When I use deoderant she’s after me for the bottle to pretend to spray it herself, but when he does, she’s content to watch. (So am I. He has the body of a Greek god.) In other words, she knows she’s female without being told, and knows that mummy and I are too, so she models herself on us and other women. This is not conditioning, this has to be inbuilt.

Actually, she’s not as much of a girly girl as this post makes her appear. She’s also quite tough and loves being tossed into the air or chucked on the bed, and as well as handbags she likes to carry all sorts of other bags and containers, some of them very heavy. She’s also taken recently to sticking her finger up her nose, which I consider very unfeminine. Of course, children go through phases and in ten years’ time we may be laughing at the fact that she was every girly. She has a baby sister on the way now, so it will be interesting to see how that affects things, for both of them. In the meantime, I’ll just keep a wary eye on my blusher.

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Shadow’s Dawn by H K Miller

8 Dec

Shadows Dawn coverI must plug this book that my cousin has just released on Amazon, not just because he is my cousin but because it is good.

I can’t tell you about the plot arc properly because I haven’t read it right to the end (something I will put right very quickly) but I’ve read large sections of it to help edit it and I can tell you that the boy can write. I’ve suffered through too many badly written books to take that lightly.

It’s a fantasy novel set in a time when humans live in primitive hunter-gatherer tribes while the elves are far more civilised, but a threat is going to force them to work together. The characters are more real and earthy than in many fantasy novels – they’re irritable, they get drunk, they worry about the future not just of the world but of their tribe’s food sources. It’s got a bit of bite and realism that makes the story matter, avoiding the “so what?” reaction that can greet world-shattering crises in fantasy novels.

If you like fantasy, and you have a couple of quid to spare (I know it’s a recession, but you can stretch to £1.93), download Shadow’s Dawn, and let me know what you think.

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Snowflakes, Real and Homemade

3 Dec

The first snow in Glasgow fell last night, so it seems the right time to write about something a bit Christmassy – crocheted snowflakes!

crocheted snowflakes

crocheted snowflakes

The ones you see here are my own creation, the pointy one from an online pattern and the chunkier one from a YouTube tutorial. These are made out of thread. You can make them out of wool, of course, but then they’re not so sweet and delicate.

I learnt to crochet in Albania, where all the women seem to crochet, because there’s not much else to do when the electricity goes off (as it did at that time) every evening. I’ve never been any good at knitting, so it was good to find an alternative handicraft.

I think everyone understands the thrill of creating something yourself, especially if it’s something good enough to show people or put to use. I have made a scarf that I still wear, a baby blanket, and a tablecloth, amongst my bigger projects. At times it feels like you will never finish but the good thing about crochet, unlike knitting, is that a lot of patterns are either made up of small pieces, so you have a sense of completion as you go along, or look good after the first 50 stitches or so. With knitting, at 50 stitches it would still look like a straight line.

The wee snowflakes here didn’t take anything like as long, although I did make the pointy one in a silky thread and cursed my decision several times through the hour it took to make it, as the slippery thread slipped away again. Anyway, they took less than an hour each and will now decorate my Christmas tree – whenever I can be bothered to get it down from the loft. I prefer to ease myself into Christmas, not jump right in on 1st December.

If you would like to have a go yourself you will need thread (or wool) and a hook (just the one – another advantage over knitting) which you can get for a quid or two from a department store or haberdashers. There are loads of sites that will teach you the basics, and then the world is your crocheted oyster.

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Amazing Adverts

22 Nov

As a balance to the last post about annoying adverts, here is a list of the top five adverts of all time.*

5) Google Superbowl Advert (2010)

I had to be persuaded to put this one on the list, since it’s by an evil multinational conglomerate, and it’s probably never even been shown in Britain (I stand open to correction), but when I agreed to watch this it did make my eyes go a little moist. It’s sweet, and true, if you know what I mean. It deserves a place.

If I hadn’t put the Google ad in, it would have been the John Lewis ad in which a baby girl grows up until she’s a grandmother. It’s lovely, if only because of the Billy Joel song backing it.

4) Irn Bru Snowman (2006)

This is quite a recent advert, but very funny. The visuals are just like the film “The Snowman”, and so is the angelic choirboy’s voice. The lyrics aren’t. “Now I’m falling through the air, I wonder where I’m going to land. He nicked my Irn Bru and let go of my hand.” It’s The Snowman if it had been set in Glasgow.

(A note of interest for those readers not from round here – this advert shows cartoon versions of many famous Scottish landmarks, including ones from Glasgow, and the boy actually lands in George Square in the centre of Glasgow.)

3) Boddingtons – The Cream of Manchester (1992)

Dusk. Plush surroundings. A beautiful woman in a black cocktail dress applies white cream to her face while a voiceover tells you how luxurious it is. Then we see it’s beer foam. A suave man in a suit comes in, embraces her and bursts out, “By eck! You smell gorgeous tonight, petal!” in a broad Northern accent. I think it works because there were plenty of Milk Tray and perfume adverts that looked much the same, so you really didn’t see it coming.

2) Batchelors Mushy Peas (1994)

This is how Batchelors make peas mushy: They get Craig Charles to talk to them about the good old days, back on the farm. Cruel, but funny. (A word of warning about the link – there is other stuff before the Batchelors ad. The advert itself starts 28 seconds in.)

1) Clarks Magic Steps Shoes

This is a magical blast from the past. I think this advert is from the 80’s. It absolutely hooked the target audience – wee girls, of which I was one at the time. It was probably about the same time as the film “Labyrinth” was around, and it goes for the same normal-girl-in-magical-world conceit. To really understand the appeal of this ad, though, you have to watch it and then consider this fact: the shoes actually had a key in the sole! This advert has stayed with me for many, many years, and deserves first place in my little list.

* These adverts have not been selected in a scientific way and may not actually represent the best five television advertisments of all time. Please do not complain to the Trading Standards Authority about this post. Instead, complain about those Channel 4 “Top 100” programmes where the best item is always at number 2, while number 1 is some piece of drivel.

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Adverse Advertisements

12 Nov

There are some deeply irritating adverts on (British) TV at the moment. The wee tip-off that alerted me to the fact is that I find myself shouting at the TV. Admittedly I’ve been under a bit of stress lately, but my flatmate confirms that it’s not just me, there really are some stupid adverts around at the moment. So here is our top five:

5) Chanel Number 5 (with Brad Pitt)

So much has been said about this ad that it seems unnecessary to offer further criticism. One commentator said that it sounds like it’s been Google-translated through 12 different languages and back to English. It does. Another said, “It’s not a commercial, every commercial ends but we go on. The stomach turns and we turn with it. Truth disappears, fakes take over. But wherever I go, there you are…my bad luck, my fate, my torture.” I think that about sums it up.

4) Find My Past sponsorship ads

These appear at the start and end of history / antiques themed programmes. They involve a woman with a laptop, lots of ‘actors’ playing dress-up with stereotypical period costumes and mannerisms, and occasionally a weak joke (“Use the dishwasher.” “But ma’am, I am the dishwasher!”) Lazy, boring, pointless. Grr.

3) Vaseline Essential Moisturiser

This is the one that says something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a moisturiser that feels good and does good?” What a unique selling point! My current moisturiser, for instance, feels great but is made out of asbestos, while the one before that was deeply nourishing, but sadly contained pieces of shrapnel. Silly, pointless, patronising.

2) Muller Greek-Style Yoghurt

The two [spoiler alert!] centaur women discussing yoghurt on a Greek island. Leaving aside that fact that it probably does contain fat (“fat-free” doesn’t mean “does not contain fat”, strictly speaking), once again it’s the acting that makes it terrible. The fake little laugh in “It’s a myth” makes me want to chew nails, and I have to change the channel immediately.

1) Windows Tablet (with annoying dancing woman)

Pride of place is reserved for the Windows Tablet ad. There are a few of them, and some are ok, but this is the one with the awful song to which an awful black and white woman is doing an awful dance. So irritating that sparks fly from my ears, and it makes the product look clunky, busy and hard to use. An utter failure.
Next time, to lighten to mood somewhat, I think we might do a run down of some adverts that are actually good.

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Who Cares?

3 Nov

There are places in the world that matter, and places that don’t. There are people who matter, and people who don’t. That, at least, is the attitude of our media. I was reminded of this by Hurricane Sandy, which devastated large parts of the Caribbean, then hit New York and other parts of the USA. While the hurricane was sweeping through the (poor, black) islands, the BBC and most other news outlets just talked at great length about what was likely to happen when it hit the States, and then about what did happen, and then about the clear-up. This is because Americans (rich, culturally similar to us) matter, whereas Caribbeans do not. The 69 dead in the Caribbean managed a princely one sentence out of a thousand-word BBC web article on the effects of Hurricane Sandy.

Of course, there was some coverage. There is a blog post on the Guardian site all about this skewing of the media, and another BBC web article about the effect on Haiti, where 54 people were killed out a population of 10 million (compared to 90 out of the USA population of 300 million).

This isn’t an isolated incident. In one of those strange co-incidences that life seems made up of, there were a number of bus crashes over the space of a few months, most of them involving students or young people. The one in Surrey in September, returning from Bestival, you’ve probably heard of. Three people were killed, others received horrific injuries. The ones in Iran (26 dead) and India (11 dead, not students) in October, you may or may not have done, but I can pretty much guarantee that you heard not a peep about the terrible crash in Albania in May. Thirteen students were killed and another twenty badly injured when a bus plunged over a cliff. One girl was left in a coma and had to be told, upon recovery, that her fiancé had died in the crash.

I know about it because I get an Albanian newsfeed through Facebook, and have a lot of Albanian friends and family, too. Over the years I have been annoyed, although I’m no longer surprised, whenever there have been wildfires or floods or droughts or violence around the elections in Albania, and there has been not even a one-sentence mention of it on the TV news. Albania is a place that does not matter, as far as our media (and, I suppose, most people) are concerned. The country would have to sink into the sea like Atlantis or (more realistically) help or threaten one of our allies or enemies before it would warrant a mention. (Although I should say that, once again, there is a BBC web article. Some Albanian news is there if you go looking for it, but if you’re looking for it then you probably know about it already.)

Now I understand why the Bestival crash received more attention. It’s natural to be interested in things that happen in your own country to your own people, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s also understandable that we get more news about our allies or, in the case of Iran, or enemies, since these things have a more direct effect on us. Human nature means that we’re probably more interested in the two Brits who died in an (hypothetical) air crash than the 70 non-Brits.

The amount that news is skewed towards us and our allies is out of proportion, though. OK, Albania is a special interest of mine, but how can it possibly be right that the 6 o’ clock news can fail to mention the trail of death and devastation Sandy left in Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, the Bahamas etc., but can give 5-10 minutes (of a half-hour programme) to speculation about how the hurricane will affect the election of the leader of a foreign country? Of course, the main TV news is not the only information out there. I should probably listen more to the world news programmes, and it’s a failing on my part if I’m not interested enough to do so. But I just wanted to express my conviction that the dichotomy in the mainstream media between the “matters” and the “don’t matters” is unfair, morally pernicious, and makes things worse for the suffering areas of the world that we should care about more.

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