experimental Archangel

I've just completed Archangel.

I know it seems excessive to have written this one so closely on the heels of the last one, Edge. However, I want to test the 'free-giveaways' aspect of publishing.

Most authors I've met seem to reckon that a freebie is a good way to encourage readership, and they also say that the free books are likely to get around 10 times as many 'sales' as the paid-for ones. I was sceptical of this approach, given that a novel takes x hours to write and a further y hours to get ready for publication. If all we do is train people to expect free product then I'm not sure we are doing it right.

Anyway, I designed this novel to a specification. Less than 150 pages, so that it looks slim and not too off-putting. A similar cover style to the other novels and also that this one would be a lead into some of the other novels.

I've also tried publishing this one directly through Amazon, which I assumed would be a way to be able to manage the pricing.



I was wrong about that. Amazon wants me to minimum price it at 99p and then to put it through Kindle Direct Publishing. I've gone along with this at the moment, but it means I'd have to resort to tricks to get the price reset to 'free'.

Apparently, I need to put it onto another platform, price it low and then tell Kindle that there's the lower price. Of course, KDP interferes with this, saying that I can't do it, because I've given exclusivity to KDP.

I presume Amazon are trying to avoid a race to the bottom, where everyone is trying to undercut everyone else resulting in a West Texas Crude Oil pricing scenario for novels. The race to the bottom results in cutthroat competition and consumer expectations of lower prices may mean any eventual victors find profit margins permanently squeezed.

Meh, I'll leave it to rumble through the system now, which seems to take another 72 hours before it will hit the store. I have doubts about whether it will automatically link it with my other published books at that point.

It seems complicated, when all I want to do is have Amazon list it as 'permafree'. KDP won't allow that in any case and wants me to have a total of 10 days on special offer as free.

At this rate, this story of Christina Nott won't get read at all. I'm going to leave it to simmer for a few days and then decide whether it is worth republishing it through firstelement, with a different ISBN.

grifters

Like many, we're in a world of Zoom calls now, with most people able to use it. I suppose we could be worried by the security concerns around the package, alongside everything else, but in the scheme of things it seems a less significant concern that the need to communicate. And 'X popular software has security concerns' is always a winning clickbait.

We've not been beset with problems, although one meeting I was in did allow a suspicious uninvited person as far as the waiting room. We worked out that it was an AI system and soon ejected it. Then there's the little situation of whether Zoom shares any data with, say, Facebook.

That leads towards the number of scams observed in the new world. The more obvious involve simple overcharging for products and services, but there's also a few new "Free Tesco Coupons" style scams too - which seem to me to emanate from Facebook.

Other, broader scams ask us to send all details to a friendly site in Beijing. Then there's the scams directly associated with the virus itself. Phishing and smishing social engineering.

Fake lockdown fines, HMRC goodwill payments, Free school meals... The list of scams goes on, mostly using the old techniques of FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, to attempt to put one on the hook.

These are small-time compared with the market gamblers, who are stockpiling their cash and waiting to scoop up cheap shares. No wonder they are all asking the incessant 'are we nearly there yet?' style questions, so that they can line up their bets.

As Government minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s investment firm tells their clients it provides a chance to make “super-normal returns”. Somerset Capital Management (SCM), which manages investments in emerging markets, told clients that the dive in stock market valuations around the world since the pandemic took hold had made “excellent entry points for investors”


And now there's the debate about a V-shaped or a U-shaped rebound in markets. Hint: The U-shaped one is a much slower recovery than a V.

And then there's the weirdness from the USA. Now the so-called President is deflecting causality from himself by blaming the World Health Organisation, and simultaneously slowing welfare payments to hard-up Americans by insisting his name is featured on all of the cheques being issued. Electioneering or what?

'Never let a good crisis go to waste,' as Niccolo Machiavelli might have said.

COVID-19

Today's post is a guest post from family member Geraldine, an NHS Professional. She's written this in her own Facebook and asked us to share it:



Just so I NEVER forget..... 3rd April 2020
Petrol at Sainsbury's was £1.05
School cancelled
GCSEs cancelled
A-Levels cancelled

Self-distancing measures on the rise.
Tape on the floors at shops to help distance shoppers (2m) from each other.
Limited number of people inside shops, therefore, lineups outside the doors.
Non-essential shops and businesses mandated closed.

Pubs, theatres, restaurants are closed.
Entire sports seasons cancelled.
Concerts, tours, festivals, entertainment events - cancelled.
Weddings, family celebrations, holiday gatherings - cancelled.
Churches are closed. Graveyards are shut.

Don't socialise with anyone outside of your home.
Children's outdoor play parks are closed.
We are to distance from each other.

Shortage of masks, gowns, gloves for our front-line workers.
Shortage of ventilators for the critically ill.
Panic buying sets in and we have no toilet paper, no disinfecting supplies, no paper towel, no laundry soap, no hand sanitiser.

Bread, pasta, flour, chicken and chopped tomatoes are sold out everywhere or in limited supply and purchases are controlled.
Manufacturers, distilleries and other businesses switch their lines to help make visors, masks, hand sanitiser and PPE.
All non-essential travel banned.

Fines are established for breaking the rules.
Police patrolling the streets of many cities.

Arenas open up for the overflow of Covid-19 patients.
NHS nightingale is opening in London to look after 4000 patients.

Press conferences daily from the government.
Decisions about our daily restricted life is reviewed every three weeks.
The government throws money at businesses to try to keep the economy from imploding. Grants and loans. The government to pay 80% of employees wages where businesses cannot continue to do so.
Daily updates on new cases and deaths.

The dead are denied wakes or funerals and barely anyone is allowed at the graveside. Max 10 at a funeral, possibly going to be further restricted.
Barely anyone on the roads.

People increasing wear masks and gloves outside.
Essential key workers are worried to go to work.
Medical field workers are worried about going home to their families.
Thursday nights at 8pm nationwide people go to their doorsteps to clap to say thank you to NHS and key-workers.

Children paint rainbows 🌈 on the pavements and hang posters in their windows. Toy bears are placed in windows to entertain children going on a bear hunt as their controlled once-a-day outdoor activity.

This is the Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) Pandemic, declared March 11th, 2020.

Why, you ask, do I write this status?
One day it will show up in my memory feed, and it will be a yearly reminder that life is precious and not to take the things we dearly love for granted.

We have so much!
Be thankful. Be grateful.
Be kind to each other - love one another - support everyone.
Copy and share.

Geraldine

The Wake Knot : a quiet village on the edge

I've been enjoying The Wake Knot, by a friend of this blog R F McMinn

The novel starts in the rural French Dordogne, in a bucolic village somewhere to the north-east of Bordeaux. The beginning builds as group by group of English visitors arrive at a holiday-let to enjoy a French way of life. There's a slight Home Counties air, with many locals also being from the UK but, for example, owning the village restaurant.

Without over-spoiling, this altogether pleasant lifestyle suddenly changes as one of their number - Chris, a holidaymaker cyclist - is forced from the road by a careening 4x4. Fortunately, two other holidaymakers, the lithesome Meg and Charly, find him. Then things get darker, with a mystery which develops around the initially unnamed church, which displays the whip-touting Guthlac, who I'm inclined to describe as an olden-days warrior-monk from Lincolnshire.

I'm hearing the faint background of Sheryl Crow singing "maybe angels" in Guthlac's troubled head, while the characters play Sinatra, back at the holiday-let.

As I'd hope, the mix of characters is well-up for a mystery and can use their combined backgrounds to create a superteam, whose blended skills should be able to solve an increasingly darkening puzzle.

The story-telling is mixed with epicurean delights, as there's plenty of French food on offer and a few riffs on the evolving state of French cuisine in the age of social media. There's also the Zen-like absorption of the cyclist and his preparation for MAMIL-style travel. The main town is something of a citadel, surrounding and protecting the church. The separate holiday-lets and the pool drift towards alchemical symbolism and significance as the story unwraps.

But then, I realise I've been sucked into the mystery. I'm like one of the characters, puzzling over co-incidences, too-good-to-be-true giftings and curious anomalies while musing about Hereward the Wake, Burgh, greenwood and Mandy on the Moon tarot. Part II arrives, and we've flipped to London's media district, around Soho, where more things get piled on to our central characters.

I think I got an inkling of an outcome around now. Chris was being cross-examined by Charly and suddenly I felt a centime begin to drop. It's been done on purpose, I'm sure, to allow me the reader, to check the knotty theory in my head with the increasingly gory occult picture being developed.

An entertaining read.

edge

Practising for Edge, which I suppose needs to be set in space. I've used Artificial Intelligence to create the image - it's not bad, actually.


MONDAY EVENING

He heard the apartment judder from the impact. A kind of mournful sigh. This one had been close, but not that close. He knew the building was meant to take it in any case.

He looked towards the window, grey night skies, something resembling clouds, thin trails, raked towards the horizon.

Now he looked at the clock. Ten minutes to midnight. This would probably go on until the morning. He expected there to be more crashes and thumps as the battering continued.

He was better indoors. Going outside just added to the tension. If he was able to stay inside he could watch some streams to take his mind off the situation.

He moved from his bedroom into the main living area. He flipped the switch and could suddenly hear the weather. Gentle rain and a rustling of leaves. The occasional spatter of water dripping from branches. He had kept the weather set to April for several months now. Outside it was the end of summer but somehow it didn’t matter what the official calendar said; he had decided to run it at his own speed.

He flipped the main screen. Not the full screen but the one designed to show just entertainment transmissions and data. It opened on a news feed and he gestured for it to move across to his messages. He expected they would ask for him, but so far there were only a few spams that had missed his filtering.

The main room had noise cancellation and so he was now no longer aware of the crashes from outside. Just a slight feeling underfoot as the building absorbed more impacts.

"Peter, give me status." he requested. A small window appeared on the top right of the screen. Everything was green. At this rate, he didn’t need to do anything at all.

the ox stunner

Well, I've finally completed the Triangle Trilogy, which means I could also bundle them into a single volume. There's The Triangle, The Square and The Circle, which creates a kind of Bauhaus construct.

Secretly, I've always wanted to a book called 'The Ox Stunner', which would, of course, have a tag line of 'Thick enough to stun an Ox'.

Of course, in this family, I'm not allowed to get away with such things, without other helpful suggestions.

'Why not print it on thinner paper so that it isn't so heavy to read'...etc

I pointed out that it wouldn't be thick enough to stun an ox, in such circumstances, but we've gone on to design the cover, anyway.

Watch out for it on Amazon, or click here to join the Ed Adams mailing list.

useful zoom backgrounds

A modest sport in these days of Video conferences is to have the best backgrounds. I know it sounds like slackers' work, but I can't help noticing good images that drop into my inbox and are ideal for creating a background. The one of the Economist's office (shown above) is a good example. Here's a version with me sitting in it.

Instead of everyone being able to see my usual work environment, they can see this rather sleek-looking deserted office. Then there's a couple of room suggestions, which came in a John Lewis mailshot. Instead of buying all the furniture and reconfiguring everything, why not fake it with a good background?

It can look respectable enough, and one doesn't have to let on either.

Then there's the more urgent looking office, you know, the one stuffed with paper. This is particularly effective with routine office dwellers who are slightly self-conscious of their own mess, and can make them feel that they are not the most untidy kid on the block.

I like to have a background reminiscent of the area where I live too, so this one can do for that purpose. It's from the other side of the river, by the passenger ferry.

Then the ever-important London one. Suitable fake with the Elizabeth Tower unscaffolded.

And I like to have a real one of my office, except it is deliberately blurred to give a sense of depth.

And maybe a moody dark one from a different angle to confuse everyone. These last two have the advantage that someone can walk into the real room but be undetectable.

And something for when in a busy VTC and need to get attention:

But I think we can all get the idea, and it does brighten up the videocommute.

can't go to the beach? maybe this'll help.

The light burns on. Clark Hutchinson. Gestalt.

now wash your hands

I thought I'd have a look at the shorters. The people who are trading stocks against the market. Betting on a crash and making a large profit. Some could say it is exploiting the coronavirus for financial gain.

Let's see, there's BlackRock, Citadel, D1 Capital, and Adelphi Capital betting against a blend of airlines, cruise companies, movie theatres, and mall owners. There's a few information providers to help these companies operate. A helpful diagram from Breakout Point explains the process.

Carnival Cruises has been targeted by BlackRock. Some might remember that George Osborne works for that company. Carnival owns the Princess cruise line, which made headlines with those infected passengers in Japan.

Allegedly the short created gains of roughly $75 million.

Rick Rieder oversees $2.3 trillion as chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock and offers predictions about areas of the credit and stock markets where investors with medium to long time horizons could shop for cheap assets.

Citadel decided to go after the airlines, building short positions on European airlines including Lufthansa, which has fallen by roughly a fifth since last week. Other Citadel shorts included Air France, EasyJet, Wizz Air, and SAS. Lufthansa and Air France have generated around $77 million in gains for Citadel.

The shorters are moving in on the early effects of social isolation now, targeting shopping malls and movie chains. No doubt they are building a 'Top of the Pops' chart of the expected order of misfortune.

D1 Capital placed a large short position against EPR Properties, which owns the real estate of hundreds of movie theatres, golf courses, ski resorts, and other "experiential" venues, as well as London-based Cineworld, which has seen its stock price fall by roughly a third since the start of the year.

Adelphi Capital shorts against three different European real-estate companies - all of which run shopping malls — two Dutch companies, Wereldhave NV and Eurocommercial Properties NV, and Hamburg-based Deutsche EuroShop AG.

Of course, shorting the pound is another more abstract approach. There's a well-known fund that moved to Dublin ahead of Brexit to clear its trades inside the EU. It bet against the pound around Brexit time and made a tidy sum. One of its part-owners, a well-known MP, must have been pleased to trouser several million. I suppose the ongoing pound drift is further encouragement to the shorters. Pass the hand gel. Then watch this FT conference call.

Bianca, Oberon, Miranda and Titania

Well, the video conferencing seems to be going okay.

We're ahead of the curve around here and various space-age local groups are launching the Skype or Zoom instead of heading for the pub or the restaurant at the end of the Universe.

It put a couple of other minor stresses on the household LAN, but I've resolved that now. It was slightly strange to receive a message to my Apple watch from the coffee machine, along the lines that the coffee machine had dropped offline.

It could only mean one thing. That the home LAN had dropped out.

Now, I did see a couple of men digging the road yesterday, close to the front of the house, so I'm not sure, just maybe.

I did the thing that any good technician would do and switched everything off, counted to 30 and then progressively restarted everything.

Fortunately, it worked and we are back in business.

And I took a few extra minutes to get the garage's G-Bianca access point to sweep across the sunny garden, wirelessly uplinked from K-Titania.

(*Strictly the moons shown are Puck, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon; Bianca is too small)

Let's play videoconferencing

The rise in video conferencing over the last couple of days has been extraordinary. Here's my experience of a few varieties.

APPLE FACETIME GROUP CALLING

This is the easiest one to use, but it only works for people with Apple hardware. It's so easy to just add extra people to a call and doesn't cost anything. Need to pursuade the rest of the WIndows-owning or android-owning family to shift allegiances.

SKYPE

Ah. The venerable skype. Also relatively easy to set up and on many computers already. Works across multiple platforms (Windows/Apple etc), but can be troublesome to get the right version which needs to interface with the right browser. Can have a tendency to sound like it is underwater.

Still, it fairly reliable and also cheap. I particularly like the blur background feature with this one. We are using it for the German Group.

ZOOM

For the cool cats. It used to cost about £11 per month, but there's a free option now which gives 40-minute calls. I like Zoom and it is very simple to set up and use with simple big buttons. Used by thesixtwenty.com and the local choir.

Good audio and can handle many dial-ins. I like the fun ability to change the animated backgrounds - swaying palm trees and surf rolling in.

TEAMS

Microsoft Teams come with Office 365, although it is hidden and does not show up as an option for download. It think itused to be called messenger. It is one of the least friendly systems, and contains some amazing error messages, which are okay if you are a systems developer, with good internal knowledge of Azure Active Directory. We are attempting to use it as a family facility.

Of course, there's more than this list - Google hangouts and Facebook are a couple of examples, but I think I've picked the common ones, at least the ones that get used around here.

sign O' the times

Yesterday was a tricky day for me. I made the 378 mile drive from Newcastle in the North East to Exeter in the South West, planning to go to my German Stammtisch in the evening.

I was back in time to meet at the pub, but during the journey, the bluffer came onto the news and advised that we shouldn't go to the pub. It left me with something of a dilemma because I knew that several people would make the effort to attend, and so I decided to go, making it an exceptional visit ahead of the new lockdown.

By today we are operating in new times. Any sense of control from the government is illusory, with markets tanking, insufficient healthcare provisioning, and fibs from the people at the top about such things as liaison with supermarket chains.

We can recognise the moves too. It is covering up the unpreparedness for the emergency. The flip-flop of decisions and the background scrape of whiteboard markers dreaming up new charts to show how things are All Right Really. Our frontman claims that the UK is leading the world in handling the emergency. Bunkum. The UK is trying to catch up.

The picture shows 2020 gift suggestion of loo rolls, pasta and hand sanitiser