"Write what you know" they say.

Even of what you know is benefits advice work and writing stories about it only pays enough to keep your colleagues in biscuits!



Friday 29 July 2016

Fifth Friday (and Saturday, and Sunday...)

This is one of those rare weekends when, even if you aren't sure Welfare Rights Lit is your thing, you can stockpile the entire Social Insecurity series on your Kindle for nothing, just in case it is.


Severe Discomfort, in which you're introduced to Lyn and Terry Walker - who are neither heroes, nor anti-heroes, merely disabled people getting on with their lives until someone decides they're benefit cheats - is free today (29th July), along with the sequel/second half of the story, Continual Supervision.  If you enjoy these, or if you have genuine, constructive criticism you would like to share, please, please do a review - either on Amazon or Goodreads.  You might also like to track down the Solent Welfare Rights Project on Facebook and say 'hello' to the (entirely fictional) team. 


Do tell your friends about the books, so they can download them free too - next on 5th August for SD and 12th for CS.  You could even suggest your MP reads them!
You can catch up with the Walker family and their advisers a couple of years on in Limited Capability - a sometimes grim but ultimately uplifting tale of Employment and Support Allowance assessments - with all three episodes free on Saturday, and individually on consecutive Saturdays throughout August.


The last in the series, Claimant Commitment, in which the characters find themselves in the Coalition-era of sanctions and the Bedroom Tax, is free on Sunday, and in individual instalments on successive Sundays throughout the month, except for Part 2 which I can't programme free that day as it starts a new Kindle Direct term that day, so that one will be free on Saturday instead this time!
Grand Union, the 4mph thriller, isn't free, as the (real) benefits team need biscuits more than ever right now as we go onto short-time working and await the outcome of another funding bid.  Depending on the weather, I may get a lot of gardening done in the next few months, or a lot of writing, or a little of each.  Either way, a new Daphne Randall adventure is well on its way.

Thursday 28 July 2016

Benefits, Books and Brexit

Waking up to a changed world...?
I realised a couple of days ago that it's over a month since my last blog post. It's not that I have writers' block or nothing to say.  On the contrary, there is as much to talk about as ever, whether it's the apparently increasingly unstable and disquieting state of the world or, more happily, the progress of my latest Daphne Randall adventure (working title now Daphne of the Four Counties).  The problem is more that things have been moving so quickly that, no sooner have I started to collect my thoughts into a post, than events seem to have overtaken them. 

The Brexit vote was certainly a shock and not the result I had hoped for.  Whatever the flaws of the EU, the principle of European unity and co-operation is something I have long held dear.  That the Leave campaign succeeded on the back of a staggering weight of untruths is, perhaps, every bit as depressing as the actual result.  'Post truth politics' is, apparently, this season's look.


We'd voted postally several days before and cleared off for a week afloat, mooring at the glorious Bugsworth Basin on the Upper Peak Forest Canal on the day of the Referendum.  After a busy day cleaning and painting our boat we had an evening stroll around the basin, listened to the Radio 4 ten o'clock night-time news, including a report that Nigel Farage had conceded that the Remain camp had probably managed a narrow victory, and settled down contentedly to sleep.  Early the next morning, I put the radio on again, to news was of crashing stock markets.  A crowing Nigel Farage declared it 'Independence Day' but appeared to have not a clue what to do next.  Tim Farron of the LibDems decided it was somehow all Jeremy Corbyn's fault.  Before breakfast, the Prime Minister had signaled his resignation.


In the run-up to the vote, and since, I started to pay more attention to these little blue plaques...

With UK politics still running in Game of Thrones mode, this one seemed a good example to share although I could have used the one from Bugsworth Basin, or one of several scattered along the Ironbridge Gorge or even the one in the Citizens Advice Bureau building where I work.  I'm sure the Brexiteers will be quick to point out that if we aren't paying in to the EU, we'll have more of our own money to spend on projects of this kind.  Really?  They've already admitted there won't actually be £350 million extra per week for the NHS, so where exactly are the funds going to come from now for regional cultural development?

Perhaps I should ask the new Culture Secretary?  After all, she is the MP for our neighbouring Staffordshire Moorlands constituency!