Cooking the Books

Photo used for Severe Discomfort's cover

Ever eager to make sure they do the right thing where tax is concerned (ahem!) Amazon have been in touch to let me know that I'll have to put the cost of my books up to comply with new EU VAT rules and regulations.  It'll only be by a few pennies and, as most readers seem to catch on to the freebie timetable quite well, I'm tempted to leave well alone - except that I do wince at the fact that when someone gets so hooked on the stories that they buy the next episode rather than waiting for its freebie day, Amazon snatch 65% of the payment and a mere 35% ends up in the Stoke-on-Trent CAB 'Beverage Fund'.

I need this nonsense to stop, so I have a cunning plan:

I will put all the book prices up to the threshold where I (ie the Bureau's biscuit tins) get 70% of sales and Amazon gets 30%, in the hope that it will either encourage patience in readers to wait for the freebies or that their impatience benefits advisers more than Amazon. 

As the Limited Capability episodes are only a couple of chapters long and that's too little content for a price of £1.50 - £2.00, I'll bundle them into 3 episode chunks (1 to 3, 4 to 6, 7 to 9, 10 to 12 and 13, 14 and the epilogue) which will still allow me to make maximum use of my freebie times, charge paying customers no more than now and yet get more for the Fund. 

The metamorphosis begins shortly...

Meanwhile, I'm also going to review the paperbacks to see if I can make a bargain version of Severe Discomfort/ Continual Supervision available in one cover (using a slightly smaller typeface to save pages) to coincide with the paperback launch of Limited Capability and concentrate on distributing both via Completely Novel and traditional Indie bookshops.  Ideally, I want all that in place before Grand Union is launched, as I have a funny feeling that Daphne's tale could be much more commercially successful than the others.

Meanwhile, back at the Solent Welfare Rights Project, there's another story waiting to be finished off ready for serialisation in the New Year if all goes to plan.

If...

Journey's End?

I wrapped up the first draft of Grand Union yesterday evening, with a grand total of 62,307 words, so officially that's a 'win' for NaNoWriMo purposes.  Result!

What I don't yet have is a novel, though do have a story written down in the order I want to tell it using at least some of the required words.  The plan for the rest of the month is to use the dark and wet parts of my days off and evenings to take the rough edges off this raw material and then produce a proof copy of the book - several copies in fact - for final checks and small tweaks.

But I mean it to remain the 'one month book' - no second or subsequent drafts, no nit-picking.  I want to retain the speed and spontaneity of the original and too much tinkering will undermine that.

I still have two major projects I need to complete.  The Limited Capability paperback needs the proof-reading team's final lists of recommendations and corrections put into place so it can be let loose on the unsuspecting non-Kindle using public.  Claimant Commitment (or whatever it finally gets called - though I think this will be it) needs finishing and systematically reworking with a view to serialising it in the spring, ahead of the General Election of course. 

Despite my previous resolution, I am already having doubts about this being the last outing for Solent Welfare Rights Project; I quite fancy writing a collection of short stories spanning a longer timescale, starting with Hilary's early days as an advice worker and ending... well, later: no spoilers!

As for Daphne - she'll be back too; next November if not before!

Progress

We're half way through National Novel Writing Month and I'm more than slightly proud to be more than half way through writing the first draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, and first attempt at a crime thriller, 'Grand Union'. 

I've reached my last lock and 50,084 words - the official NaNoWriMo target is 50,000, but I started with about 8,500 under my belt so my personal target has to be around 60,000.  In reality, I may need a few thousand more to finish the story and to allow for some loss of 'flab' during editing, though it's equally likely that will add the odd scene or sentence, as I found when I revisited the opening chapters.

Taking on an unfamiliar genre has been interesting.  I have to confess I haven't read a 'whodunit' for years (unless Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban counts - which it should).  I don't tend to get into modern crime-based films or serials either, most of which are far too bloody, grim and depressing for my taste, often with a unrealisticly high body count, disproportionately of women.  I could hand out a proper Daphnesque rant on the subject, but I'll leave her to redress the balance in her own words and her own way.  Suffice to say 'Grand Union' isn't entirely bloodless, but neither is it graphic or gratuitous when things turn nasty.

I'm hoping that the puzzle-solving element keeps the reader interested rather than morbid fascination, with gory death.  I'm having fun sprinkling 'red herrings' though I'll need to check carefully for consistency and continuity issues on the re-read and ideally lay out my Waterways map and move some model boats about on it to make sure nobody has made impossible progress for plot purposes.

I hope readers will also enjoy the central characters' curious relationship and their journey.  Although the sinister possibilities of canals play a role, for the most part the boating episodes inject light and landscape into our tale of crime and corruption.  

Talking of journeys, I must get back to the closing stages of Daphne's - there are only two weeks to go before we reach the finishing line!

First Person Singular

If I were a less honest person, I could claim to be half way to the 50,000 word target set by National Novel Writing Month (that's NaNoWriMo for fans of acronyms) for their novel-in-a-month challenge.  However, having publically declared 8464 words already written, I'm not quite at that point.  It's still not bad going for a week (including 3 working days) and as the word count seems to be keeping pace quite nicely with the actual journey at the heart of the story, I'm pleased with progress.

This little novel is a challenge in other ways too.  My previous stories have followed a large cast of characters and regularly swapped perspectives between them, so the reader (and author) often knows much more than any particular character, setting up situations akin to the 'look behind you!' scenario at a pantomime.  'Grand Union' is narrated solely by women's rights worker and narrowboater Daphne Randall, so the reader knows no more than she does - often less, actually, as she isn't always narrating a entirely coherent, chronological account.  From an author's perspective, this makes filling in the plot details tricky as you can't cut away to another scene to hear first hand from another character.

Daphne's actual voice is a challenge in itself.  Having cast her as a Geordie, it would be all too easy to lay the accent on with a trowel and make her a caricature.  But this unlikely lass has lived and worked well south of the Tyne for most of her life and, though often outspoken and sometimes a bit earthy, she's well-read and well-educated - she was at university in the company of plummy Hilary Carrington, no less - so the rough edges were knocked off some while ago.  So I'm adopting the 'Appleby approach' - as applied to the Severe Discomfort Presenting Officer of the same name - and aiming more for a pattern of speech, a rhythm and cadence suggestive of her native accent, with the occasional dialect word where she might lapse back to using it.
 
It feels right - as I've discovered myself, you don't tend to hear your own accent when you move away from home.  You 'speak proper' - it's everyone else that talks funny.  That's why her co-star's Potteries dialect is slightly more pronounced; Daphne hears the 'conners' and 'donners' and a double 'o' in the middle when he resorts to 'strong language', but is deaf to her own non-standard pronunciation.  We know she has an accent, however - not least because boat-restorer Peter Brassington thinks she's a Scot!

Still, that's enough blogging for today - I want to make the most of another very wet day to get to the 30,000 word milestone if I can - my real half-way mark.  Or Milton Keynes.

They should be in about the same place.

Casting off...

Is it cheating to start 'NaNoWriMo' with 8,262 words already written?  Not, I suggest, if by 30th November you have 58,262 words and a book.  That's the plan.

The plan does not involve spending the morning at the local Farmer's Market and pottering in the greenhouse because it's a shame to waste a sunny day sitting indoors, though that is what happened this morning.  It doesn't involve catching up on friends and fellow activists on Facebook and it doesn't involve blogging - much.  It does involve making maximum use of the fact that it has clouded over and Jon has gone off to watch Stoke City.

It does not involve regular checks on Southampton's game against Hull.  Only it has.

Here's the (first draft) blurb:

Grand Union

When Women’s Aid worker Daphne Randall stormed out of the Council Chamber on a soggy January evening, throwing her political career away in the process, she had absolutely no intention of giving veteran journalist Harry Biddulph an interview, let alone a bed for the night. 

Three months later and the pair are in mortal danger.  Helped by Daphne’s inside knowledge of local politics and welfare reform, Harry’s investigations into an apparent suicide have uncovered financial scandal, high-level corruption and possibly even murder. 

When a series of disturbing incidents suggest that the Potteries are no longer a safe place for either of them, Daphne and Harry decide to leave town.

Surprisingly slowly...

Grab your windlass, Daphne - we're off! 

Update:
Wordcount at 19.55 1/11/2014 = 9,414

A Nightmare on Benefits Street

There's a grim irony that the next 'fifth Friday' when all the Kindle episodes of my 'welfare rights lit' sequel Limited Capability' are free to download, coincides with Halloween.  I've never thought of describing it as a horror story before, but it exists due to the cruel, sometimes fatal, consequences of welfare reform and for the real victims of austerity, it is just that.

Too many people still don't understand the issues or care about the consequences.  They might have noticed something in their local paper - a sympathetic story about disabled veteran wrongly found fit for work, an inquest verdict on a suicide - but the shriek of 'shirkers and scroungers' from the mass media tells you these are the exceptions, the unlucky few that fall through the safety net that makes such a comfortable hammock for the workshy.  We know it's not like that; most people don't, and won't find out unless they're unlucky enough to need that support.

ESA (Employment and Support Allowance) is suddenly news again, with the appointment of US company Maximus to the contract to provide 'work capability assessments' being vacated by Atos and today a 'leaked' proposal to cut the level of ESA for claimants put in the 'Work-related Activity Group' to just 50p above Jobseeker's Allowance.  We're already being told that familiar myth that this will halt a zombie army intent on claiming benefits that give them an easy life.  People unaware of how hard it is to qualify for ESA even at the 'WRAG' rate will believe this, unless someone tells them the truth - that you can have lost the use of your dominant arm and hand and still not be sufficiently disabled to have 'limited capacity for work', for example.

If you want an accessible way in to the complex reality of Work Capability Assessments, benefit assessments and appeals, you'll find the serial here, along with the prequel novels.  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sarah-Honeysett/e/B00CGNAZXQ/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1  All 14 episodes are free tomorrow (31st October) from whenever Halloween starts in Amazonland (usually about 8am GMT). 

If you don't know the story, please read it.  If you do know the story, please share it with those who don't, especially those turned off by reports full of figures and regulations.  The DWP have millions of pounds to spend on their propaganda; I have a laptop, a cast of fictional characters and a small but committed group of readers.  I need to believe we can win the next round.

A New Challenge

I've reached the half-way stage of the latest (and probably last) story about the Walker Family and the Solent Welfare Rights Project and I think I know how various loose ends tie up and subplots resolve themselves, though you can never actually be sure with this cast of characters.

Common sense says I should press on to the end from here and complete that first draft, hopefully in time for quiet reflection and refining over Christmas and, all being well, an ebook serialisation in the New Year.  But siren voices are calling me to try something completely different and more than a tiny bit mad, and one of those voices talks in a distinct Geordie accent.

November, as well as being the month in which some well-intentioned blokes grow moustaches for good causes, is National Novel Writing Month (annoyingly abbreviated to NaNoWriMo which, like quite a lot of acronyms, is harder to say than the phrase it replaces).  The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel during that month.  50,000 is fairly short for a novel (especially one of mine) but a tall order for a month's writing, especially if you have work to do too.  To succeed and produce something worth reading, you need to have done a good deal of preparation and have a clear plan.  The 'Social Insecurity' series had/has little of either.

On the other hand, I have the first draft of a couple of chapters, a notebook full of observations, snatches of dialogue and a well-worked plot, plus photographs for reference, should I decide to commit another story to print.  It would be very different to the other books - told first person from a single perspective and without that neat diary timeline - and while it has austerity politics within its plot, it's no legal drama, social critique or family saga but more of a traditional 'thriller'. 

The tight deadline and limited wordcount might help keep the pace of the story crisp when, as you might have guessed from the photos illustrating this post, the location could slow things down.  The central characters will certainly be lively company.  If you haven't already 'met' Daphne Randall, a snatch of her back story made up the short story here: http://benebook.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/and-winner-isnt.html  She'll have some interesting company on her journey.

I've just about talked myself into trying this now, and there's one extra advantage.  It delays the point where I have to say goodbye to the cast of the 'Social Insecurity' novels, by a month at least.  Sometimes the journey can be so enjoyable you don't want to reach your destination; it's surprising how attached you can get to imaginary friends!