down to zero

Caught out again.

There I was editing the Raven novel, and I noticed that the main characters go into a restaurant as part of one of the sub-plots. Its a real restaurant and brilliantly positioned for what they are doing. The only problem is that it is a Wagamamas, which is another of the chains which have announced significant closure as a result of the virus. The related chains are Frankie and Bennies and Chiquitos, as the demise of the high street and retail parks march on.

Of course, these detail changes to a novel are nothing compared with the changes to the UK economy, which is predicted to tank by 10%. Over 1.8 million people are reported to have claimed Universal Credit in the United Kingdom, which suggests over 10% unemployment.

Getting paid by the government up to the day when the 80% government thing stops doesn't bode well, and the UK government must already know this. Pre COVID, the unemployment rate had been under 4% in UK, and already people were struggling, because of soaring underemployment, and non-enforcement or evasion of labour rights.

Shuttered shops and bust businesses doesn't bode well for these people, yet it isn't really getting commentary. Instead of Labour picking at Boris' latest statistics error, it could frame the post COVID situation with some intelligent questioning.

I can remember when working for a pan-European firm that the workers' councils and similar systems in other countries, (eg Germany, France and Italy) were enough to keep people employed significantly longer than in the UK.

UK job security laws require that an employer gives reasonable notice of at least one to twelve weeks before dismissal. An employer cannot, at any time, dismiss an employee in a way that breaches the basic ‘duty of mutual respect’, and after two years’ work, an employer can only dismiss for a fair reason as assessed by an Employment Tribunal. Also, after two years’ work, employers must give a redundancy payment. For significant cuts, most companies hire one of the axemen consultancies to come in and assist the process. Roll out the 'compromise agreements'. It's not quite George Clooney's 'Up In the Air' but significantly along those lines.

Job security, workplace democracy, and labour law matter: they are the best defence against depression, and of prosperity. Otherwise, we will be hitting a depression after the pandemic. Maybe not as serious as in the Trumptonian USA, but deep cuts nonetheless. Now we see an emerging crisis of confidence afflicting business, forcing them to plan for a future of mass unemployment, and emerging from fear of collapsing demand. It's especially the fat cats among the retailers protecting their own cash at the expense of everyone else (mentioning no names). The fear exists if the government fails to lay out the principles for a credible recovery plan - something one would expect the Conservatives to be all over - except they are not, but then, neither are the opposition.

Dali's Tarot

One thing I'd semi-forgotten in amongst writing was that once the novels were published I'd eventually get royalties. Thank you very much, dear readers. Anyone who can remember my royalty scheme from before when I published The Triangle as 'rashbre', will know that I re-invested my meagre royalties in the National Lottery. It lasted for years because of occasional wins, plus the occasional booster top-up. Well, I just received some royalties from January, and I decided to invest them in something that I was tinkering with for a novel, instead. I spotted a set of Salvador Dali tarot cards and plumped to purchase them.

This appealed to me because they were by Dali, quite unique, and I was sure they would be like 76 miniature pieces of art. This ties in with my last post too, because apparently Dali was originally commissioned to design the cards for the movie Live and Let Die.

I was not disappointed. To begin with, I'd imagined the box they were in to be playing card sized.

How wrong I was.

It is a lovely purple textured velvet finish box, embossed and with a card stuck to the font. Inside, there's a large format, thick-paged book which details each of the cards and describes the painting inspiration. Then there's a golden box with the individual cards inside.

It feels like a sumptuous gift, and an Isolation Days visit to a gallery all in one. Tarot-reading people might say that the minor cards don't carry numbers, which would make them difficult to use (9 of wands, for example) but notwithstanding this, the whole set feels like a well-executed piece of artwork.

I was impressed and will huddle away in a quiet corner on one of these LockDown days to enjoy it.

Live and Let Lie

There's an irony in Trump's choice of Live and Let Die as a campaign song, while he's using the pandemic as campaign material. Now he's talking about dismantling the coronavirus task force he had assembled to oversee the national response.

Having said that one day, the next he'd changed his mind. He told reporters that he had no idea how “popular” the coronavirus task force was, a curious form of words for a public-health catastrophe that has already caused more U.S. deaths than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined and still running at 2000 per day.

But the man who tours an N95 mask factory wearing safety goggles instead of a Covid-19 mask defines himself as out of step.

It all amounts to nothing for the Republicans whose devotion to Trump is so strong that it has not faltered even in the face of the President’s reality-defying response to as he portrays it the 'Chinese virus' pandemic.

The US numbers are still going up, as Wednesday showed 2600, Thursday 2700 deaths. That's more than the World Trade Centre's 2606. Yet Trump's message is “I’m viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent, and to a large extent, as warriors. They’re warriors. We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country. Will some people be badly affected? Yes.”

Trump is money motivated, even more than power. He may be clueless but now he is panicking about his re-election and only listening to the voices inside his tiny brain. More a case of Lie and Let die as he hate-tweets his way out of another inconvenient jam.

It's thirty years on from his ghosted memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” in which Trump bragged about the sheer, addictive effectiveness of lying—his host writer snuck it through by calling it “hyperbole”—in service of his goals.

That's where he acknowledged, “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”

lies, damn lies and statistics?

That Health Minister Matt Hancock must be under a lot of pressure. He lashed out at an Labour MP Dr Rosena Allin-Khan who also happens to be a GP. The shadow health minister has been doing A&E shifts at a London hospital during the coronavirus outbreak and asked some perfectly reasonable questions in Parliament yesterday.

I'm wondering if the pressure is pushing Hancock to show his true colours? A few times I have listened to the explanations of numbers or the evasive way that questions have been answered. There was that 100,000 tests target by the need of April, which was mysteriously met by including home test kit send outs, but hasn't been again met since that original target date. And we are still hearing from Care Homes that they can't get tested.

Bluffer Boris has doubled down on Hancock's target, saying it will be 200,000 tests by the end of May.

Then there are the 400,000 PPE gowns flown from Turkey that are now deemed inadequate because they don't meet UK standards, although not actually saying (as of yet) what is wrong with them.

It's a bit rich, when we've seen people desperately making protective clothing out of bin bags and home sewing circles making masks, or hospital staff visiting their local DIY warehouses to get masks and other suits.

None of the much-heralded Dysons or Formula 1 ventilators have arrived either, so it all sounds a bit dubious around the thinly veneered Hancock podium.

Ed Adams - The Square - the one with the neurotoxin plot

Fascinating to hear Trump using some of the plot moves from The Square in real life.

A small extract...
Elisa started, "When I lived in [redacted], I used to work with the [redacted] government on virus research. The funding provided by the government to this was exceptional and it was a great place to work."

"My own research was purely medical-related and was looking for advances in immunology. I knew many of the other scientists and although we didn't talk directly about the classified material, it was obvious that there was another group working on munitions style virus product. - A reverse take on scientists that build and those that destroy. This was science to kill and science looking for an antidote."

"At some point one of the labs was closed down completely. We were told it was electrical problems, but everyone knew it was a toxin-related closedown. The whole lab system had to be sealed off. I wasn't directly involved in any of it but several people I knew were and they looked pretty scared about what had taken place."

"And then I noticed that the team were all transferred away. It was overnight, and they just disappeared. I have not heard from any of them since."

"So how did this link to the threat to you?" asked Clare.

"It didn't," answered Elisa.

"But I did spend some time thinking about what seemed to have happened."

"They were making something nasty and then disappeared?" asked Clare, glancing towards Chuck.

Elisa continued, "Clare's right. They were working on a type of biological weapon. Using some form of airborne viral carrier - which is actually more difficult than it sounds. Let me explain..."

Oh, and this old cartoon shows how Chuck Manners met Elisa Solomon, then travelling under a pseudonym.

Will the Great Seal get a great kite?

I see that ITV is discussing 'kitemarking' news to show that it is real. I wonder how that will work, when we still have oppositional politics who can both claim to be right on issues that seem diametrically opposed?

It also sounds like a powerful weapon in the hands of, say, the US President, which he could apply stamped onto everything he broadcasts from the One America News Network, which he is in the process of acquiring via his son.

I thought this 'behind the scenes' shot from his recent presentation at the off-limits to the people Lincoln Memorial calls things out quite nicely. After the theatre of mono-spaced reporters 6 feet apart at the White House, take a look at the back-up suits in this picture. They are probably some of the same ones that file in to sit shoulder-to-shoulder along the edges during Pressers.

The Lincoln Memorial didn't really give a backstage area for people to hide, so a few more surfaced on this occasion.

As an example, Hope Hicks, who quit as an advisor to the President is back in circulation. In 2016, she gave nine hours of closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee during which she acknowledged that she sometimes had to tell "white lies" in her work as communications director.

She agreed to testify in a closed-door session during which lawyers for the Trump administration forbade Hicks from answering questions 155 times, claiming that due to "absolute immunity", Hicks "may not speak about anything that occurred during the time of her employment in the White House as a close adviser to the President". We can only speculate where that one was going.

Then, un-redacted search warrant documents from the Michael Cohen criminal case were released and it appeared a strong possibility that Hicks had known about hush payments made by Michael Cohen on behalf of Donald Trump before the dates she had previously claimed.

No wonder Trump has rehired her to a top spot back in March.

And then, standing in the middle is the I-visit-Covid-Wards-without-a-mask Vice President Pence, and standing close up and personal with him are Trump acolytes only one of whom is wearing a mask - no wait, he's from the TV Production company.

Less fortunate the heavyweight Fox interviewers who show the necessary separation from Trump, but not from each other. Still, if Trump gets his way the only non-fake news will soon be coming from a channel controlled by his son.

a GIFT of love songs from Ukraine

A spin-off from this world of lockdown is that everything is going online and virtual.

No wonder Zoom has become the weapon of choice, we are running out of time to install other ones.

The GIFT festival in Gateshead is a case in point. Shifted excellently from live performance to almost live and online, it illustrates what can be achieved with some Zoom, SoundCloud and a bit of Vimeo. The Guardian was gushingly praising of the event, which I reckon marks a new high point in accessible theatre - taking the shows well beyond Gateshead and the North- East.

Not only that, by limiting some of the sessions to small-theatre sized audiences, it preserves the material for taking on the road at a later date.

From the very open nature of the event - introducing the performers in a Zoom sequence before it all started, akin to having them lined up on an interviewers' stage, and then seeing the shows, some at specific times and other that could be either dipped into or downloaded after a certain time. Strangeness included.

Undercover performer … Gudrun Soley Sigurdardottir. Photograph: Julia Bauer

It certainly recreated the feeling of a visit to a curated event.

The challenge comes as everyone piles into the format and we find ourselves drinking from a firehose of options. NT, Guardian, Phoenix, SWSX.

I'm optimistic though. Good curation marks the better events. I guess that Theatre Makers who have that skill will still rise to the surface.

Yes, right now I'm listening to the magical RadiOh Europa playing love songs from Ukraine and Northumberland.

fake truth

I suppose it is important to be patriotic during the current crisis. To ignore the doubletalk of some of the politicians who say one thing one day and then contradict it the next. To not notice when a politician studiously avoids answering a questioner. After all, the questions are only from a mere journalist, not an expert. And wait, we've also been told not to listen to experts or read their reports in any case.

It would be entirely wrong to bring out fact-checking at this time, to indicate that the NHS has been underinvested for the last ten years.

Nor to look at any fat-cat monetisation of the catastrophe. The Americans are fast to begin to sue China, with aggressive lawyers pursuing billions oops - trillions - of dollars of claims against Beijing. No-one in Europe thought of that when America tragically exported the Spanish flu from Kansas on troopships.

It pushes the shorting of crashing equities for profit in UK markets into the shade. Then there's the squabble over PPE warehousing, a UK example of which was outsourced to the Americans, who now, during the crisis, are in the middle of selling the site to the French.

We shouldn't blame anyone either. Not for the decline in funding, nor reduced staffing number in the NHS. Not for the removal of protections suggested after the last epidemic hit to Britain which was WBM (within blogging memory).

I looked back to the H1N1 epidemic and noticed that there were various committees and papers produced, some of which seemed to make good sense. They are tricky to find because some of the key links have broken, so the material isn't where you'd expect to find it. For example, all of the papers and findings from the last wave were stored in a tidy grouping.

Unfortunately, the link to the helpfully named www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publichealth/Flu is now a 'link not found'. Still, with a little persistence, it is possible to trawl around the National Archives to find some of the original papers and lessons learned. However, not everyone has a Doctorate in Information Science, so the searches may prove rather difficult.

Thank goodness then, for the alternative link, which still works here:

Permafree Ed Adams Archangel

I seem to have got that book up on Kindle now with a zero pricetag. It's part of Kindle Unlimited, which means it can be downloaded like a library book and then checked back in after reading. Or, I'm told, it can be purchased outright for 2.99.

I'll let it run for a few days, at least until the other copy of the Kindle comes on-stream, which is mid May, I think.

My theory about the race to the bottom doesn't quite pan out though. It appears that plenty of people are using Kindle Unlimited to have a sample book available for Permafree. It's just taken me a while to cotton on to how it all works.

I suppose plan B is to provide offers for books 'free', although I don't think Amazon would approve of that.

My mailing list for Ed Adams is click here

Archangel

Author's Note on extract from novel

This book is an attempt to piece together the story of Christina Nott, variously known by a multiplicity of other names in her past.
...
She's changed identity again now, so there's no direct way to pin her to this and I've been asked by lawyers to describe the whole thing as a work of fiction, which gets around several matters, which will be resolved as the story unfolds

Agnes Örnólfsdóttir

We are in Iceland at the start. Agnes was born to the Örnólfs and gained the name Agnes Örnólfsdóttir. On Iceland, the last names of everyone reflect their family and so Örnólfsdóttir literally means Örnólf's daughter.
...
Christina continues:
I was not an immigrant in Iceland. It is where I'm from, but I've moved so many times I feel like an immigrant everywhere now. At least I do not feel of the place. More like an outside observer.

I can only remember a few events from my time in Iceland. We lived on a smallholding with a selection of sheep and horses. If it sounds in any way glamorous, it was not. My Pabbi worked the land and managed the animals. The horses were the typical Icelandic type, which sometimes people mistake for ponies. They taught me to ride from an early age and have memories of being on a horse, helping Pabbi bring in the sheep.

I am sure that's what has toughened me to the elements too, Iceland was cold and very snowy. When the winds blew it could be icy, yet the overall climate was well-tempered. Mamma used to put me outside when I was a little elskan, in all weathers. I have since heard that this was considered cruel by some people, but the culture in Iceland is to do this and ensure the baby gets fresh air.

Our place was about three hours outside of Reykjavík on the F35, sandwiched between two glaciers. There was always a view out towards ice both to the east and to the west, although Pabbi said that the eastern ice was melting quickly.

It meant that in my early years I learned from the land. How to read the skies, of animals and their ways and their tracks. We had a small local school, but I was told that I would need, at some point, to go to a big city for my education.

In the evening, indoors, we would sing songs, and I learned to play the piano, except I could not reach down to the pedals on the old upright piano that we had.

I discovered that my other source of learning was television. The Americans had an Air Force base at Keflavik, and they'd installed a huge aerial that transmitted American television to the whole of Iceland. I think it was to make the Americans feel at home when they transferred to Iceland, but it also meant that most of Iceland learned English from the broadcasts. We also learned about a lot of American products which we could not get in Iceland, but that the Americans had flown in on their transport planes.

I could play many of the jingles from the television on the piano. At one time, as children, we even formed a small band who practiced together in one of the bedrooms of the farm-house. I think it was a subtle way that Mamma ensure we had music lessons.

I had not accounted for Pabbi's other job. As well as his business as a smallholder, unknown to me he was paid to watch the sky. One of our farm sheds was off-limits to me. When I had friends around to play, we were told never to go into the Ullarverslun - the wool store. I was told I was allergic and that it would make me ill.

The threat of illness was enough to keep me away until one day when we were playing some kind of hide-and-seek game. Hekla - my best friend - had run towards the Ullarverslun and made as if she was going to hide somewhere near it. We were past the window weather and into the warm summer months with bright sunshine.

There was a sudden crack, and a piece of timber fell from the store. It turned out Hekla was trying to climb over the top of the door to a flat area of roof, where she could both hide and catch some sunlight.

Instead, she fell through the roof and into the building. It wasn't much of a drop, maybe two metres in total, and she knew to lower herself through the gap so she'd only need to drop about a metre. No problem for a nine-year-old.

Then she came back to the door and opened it. I was expecting to see wool piled up from floor to ceiling. I'd never really thought about it being any different.

Sure, we had sheep. Proper Icelandic sheep which did get woolly in the winter months. They were sheared by Pabbi and Kristján, who used to come up from the town to help. I'd never really thought about where the wool went, except that it was in the wool store.

So, it was a surprise to finally see inside the store. It looked electrical. There were several boxes with lights flashing, a desk and a computer terminal.

There was also what looked like a huge satellite dish, pointing upwards, although there was a roof above it.

Hekla was as surprised as me.

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.