Now wash your hands!

While the next episode of 'Claimant Commitment' (part 4) slowly takes shape, I've been continuing with marketing plans for 'Grand Union', the unlikely waterways-based thriller with Geordie lass Daphne Randall at the tiller in the company of Potteries hack Harry Biddulph.

Hopefully, I can come up with a plan for a boat-based book launch, as there is now a paperback in addition to the Kindle version - currently only available via CompletelyNovel,  but hopefully soon to be on general release.  In anticipation of this, I ordered a small batch of books last month, only to realise when they arrived that, while I had amended the manuscript for the printers to correct the last few typos (hopefully...) and iron out some page-numbering glitches, I had failed to upload these changes to CompletelyNovel's system, so the books came out with the errors still in.

Not wishing to hand out 'seconds' to people I hope to impress, and wary of inflicting yet more of my dodgy books on my long-suffering friends, I am disposing of a handful of these in a manner even their harshest critics might feel is a little too cruel: they are being abandoned in lavatories!

Actually, it's not quite as grim as it sounds, since the loos in question are actually the Canal and River Trust sanitary stations to be found alongside the canal network, many of which have an additional function as boaters' libraries.  Boaters drop off books they have finished reading, sometimes exchanging them for another that catches their eye. This isn't a book-borrowing arrangement likely to appeal to anyone who is a bit 'OCD' about hand-washing and hygiene, but appears to work well nonetheless and there is usually an interesting variety to chose from.  One copy of 'Grand Union' was exchanged for Jennifer Worth's fascinating Call the Midwife (on which the Sunday evening TV show was based), an extraordinary piece of compassionate but unsentimental social history that Mr H read from cover to cover in a couple of days and I have now prized away from him to read myself, so thanks to whoever left that at Gailey Wharf. 

I would be curious to know where the books end up and how they migrate about the system - I'm making a note in the front cover of where they are first left, and though it is possible that one or two might become permanent fixtures of a boater's bookshelf, I rather hope they'll roam about.  I've had a cheery message on Facebook from the finder of one volume, which was very thoughtful; I hope Daphne has made a new friend, but whether she has or not, there may be a copy for collection somewhere along the Shroppie in due course.  All being well, none of the books will actually end up being used in lieu of loo paper!

I've still got a couple to release - one at least should find a home somewhere on the BCN, and perhaps Fradley Junction for the last, as it lies along the route of Daphne's first adventure.  I've been doodling notes for more stories, so Daph will definitely be back one day - battling up the Wolverhampton 21 in a raging gale, perhaps, though with whom and to investigate what remains to be seen.


Kindle users can find the story here: www.amazon.co.uk/Grand-Union-Sarah-Honeysett-ebook/dp/B00T3CG5KU/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Making History

With Richard III about to be laid to rest (again), here's a topical, humorous little snippet from Claimant Commitment, primarily a story of Bedroom Tax troubles and sanctions, currently being serialised as often-free Kindle ebooks (all three episodes published so far are free to download on Sunday 29th March).  It's not all doom, gloom and austerity, however.  Find the first part here:

SPOILER ALERT (if you haven't read/finished Severe Discomfort and Continual Supervision, and don't want to know whether Hilary Carrington finds herself a man!).

It's the evening of Monday 4^th February 2013.  Tom Appleby is completing a banner for a newly-formed protest movement while waiting for his beloved wife to come home from work... 

Listening to the radio, he followed the breaking news avidly.

He was tidying the sitting room and putting his paints away when he heard her car pull into the drive.  He opened the door for her as she entered the porch.

‘Have you heard?’ she exclaimed, letting him take her coat and kissing his lips.  ‘After all this time!’

‘I know!  It’s extraordinary!’  It was indeed incredible that a body unearthed in a Council car park had proved to be that of England’s last Plantagenet king.  ‘It’s almost too good to be true!’

‘I honestly don’t know how he thought he could get away with it,’ said Hilary.  ‘People expect certain standards of their political leaders.’

His wife was no historian, but of course everybody knew the tragic tale of the Princes in the Tower.  Tom poured a glass of wine for Hilary and another for himself, and started ladling out their beef casserole supper.  

‘He ought to have told the truth at the beginning,’ Hilary continued.  ‘It would all have blown over soon enough!’

Tom glanced across at his wife, somewhat taken aback.  ‘I don’t know about that, my love.’  He was surprised to find her taking such a tolerant attitude of something that, even by the ruthless standards of the Renaissance, was regarded as a heinous felony.

‘But plenty of people survive much worse scandals.’ Hilary persisted.

‘That’s as may be,’ Tom said, placing their meals on the table and taking his seat.  ‘But if you commit cold-blooded murder, even if there are sound political reasons for it…’

‘Murder?’ she queried.  ‘It was a driving offence!’

‘Eh?’

‘And perverting the course of justice, arguably the most damaging aspect of the case.’  Hilary peered quizzically across the table at him.  ‘What on earth has murder got to do with it?’

Naturally, Hilary would be focused on the politics of the day rather than those of the fifteenth century.  Archaeological revelations apparently came a very poor second.

‘Sorry, my sweetheart,’ Tom laughed, feeling slightly foolish.  ‘I thought you were talking about Richard the Third, not Chris Huhne!’

‘Oh Tom!  You are such a silly old boffin at times!’

But she evidently still loved her silly old boffin, as she leaned across the table and kissed the end of his nose.

Reviews and Redemptions

Last lock before London?

'The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.'  Well, that Oscar Wilde fellow knew a thing or two about writing and writers, and as I watch for reviews of Grand Union, the 4mph thriller with windlass-wielding Daphne Randall as its heroine, I'm not going to disagree.  Reviews are how you know that there's anyone out there reading your 'stuff'.  It's lovely when your friends say a kind word or two, but when they are from people who don't know you and aren't afraid to be honest, they are especially valuable - even if they aren't brimming with superlative praise.

For example, there's a '3 star' on Amazon.com which gives good marks for technical merit but fewer for artistic interpretation, but that's fine - it would be dreadful to make a bad job of describing the 'boaty bits' when they are an integral part of the story and likely to be so whenever Daphne next casts off (not for a little while - maybe next NaNoWriMo).

The other independent opinions are both 4 stars, which is tremendous for a book dashed off in a month, and include some lovely and helpful comments. 'Liked the feisty main character, Daphne'.  Good news, as I suspect some readers will despise her from the moment she bids Margaret Thatcher 'good riddance'.  I have to agree that 'The plot has some implausible elements' - not least the bit where Councillor Randall quits politics on a point of principle, one might cynically suggest, having sat through the real version of that budget meeting! - but hopefully the worst of the proofing errors mentioned have now been zapped and the revised version has uploaded successfully.

The other review is also friendly and encouraging, concluding with the possibly slightly suggestive, 'I empathised with Daphne her main character and I would willingly share a lock with her anytime should our boats be travelling along the same stretch of canal!'  All the way to the pub, perchance?

Careful now...!

Close to home - Ivy House lift bridge, Caldon Canal

I remember how excited I was with the first couple of reviews of Severe Discomfort - also unsolicited - started to come in.  The first, which started, 'Have just read this, and really rather enjoyed it. It was quite difficult to get in to, but after a while the characters grew on me-at the beginning they seemed unsympathetic and dull, but now I want to know what happened to them...' is about as good a review as you could hope for, encouraging people to stick with it and give Lyn and Terry a chance to develop as characters.

Many of the original cast have reunited for another tale and Claimant Commitment is being released in monthly episodes (the third part free this Sunday).  I've been publicising it, and the earlier books, via various anti-austerity and disability support Facebook Groups.  There have been some really encouraging and supportive comments from readers on some of these too, but also some quite sobering observations.  Just recently, sharing a link for Limited Capability, two people commented that they had started reading it but had stopped because they had found it too realistic and too close to their own situations for comfort.  It was tempting to wade in with some reassurances, though how to do so without ending up in spoiler territory?

What it did make me appreciate is that, when you are writing about real situations, even through the eyes of imaginary characters, you have to be mindful that readers will include people facing the same challenges.  The laughs and the love scenes (which aren't always a hit with serious activists) are in there to lift the clouds and lighten the load for them, and for anyone who isn't a complete benefits geek and needs to take a step back from the misery for a moment.  Life is hard enough for claimants and their families, without adding to their fears by bringing too much unremitting trouble down upon people they have identified with.

So I try to stay real, without losing hope.  My heroes have to win through, at least to some extent.  Especially with an election on the horizon, we all desperately need some optimism. 

And part of that optimism might be an unexpected redemption, or at least a partial rehabilitation, for an old foe.  Gary Pike may yet get to play a somewhat Gollumesque part in the current tale, though with Garys allegedly an endangered species, I had probably better not actually kill him off!

"Are you Daphne?"

Someone had to ask.

If you're a fifty-something female writing characters of the same age, I suppose readers are going to be curious about how much of yourself is tucked away in little corners of their personalities, and how closely their experiences are based on your own.  If I'm really not a well-disguised version of the sophisticated, sexy, compassionate and slightly vain Ms Carrington, am I in fact her old university chum, the opinionated, beer-swilling skipper of The Lady Eowyn?

Well no; no more than I am Hilary.  Or to put it another way; yes, to some degree.
  
Except I really don't like beer, unless diluted with quantities of lemonade that folks serious about their real ale would find utterly heretical and, while I occasionally enjoy a Guinness, a half tends to be enough.  I've never, ever dyed my hair any colour at all, let alone candy pink or kingfisher blue, and I'm a long, long way from being a Geordie, being Hampshire born and bred.  But I do have a narrowboat and, although it's not my only home, Mr H and I did complete the very journey undertaken by Daphne in Grand Union, if in somewhat milder peril, and others that may yet turn into excellent adventures for 'wah lass'.  

Lock 92, Rochdale Canal, Manchester

I turned some of the photos into a little slideshow with music and 'Grand Union - The Movie' (which is too big a file to share in a blog, apparently) has been quietly doing the rounds of Facebook, clocking up over 3,000 views and attracting perhaps - er - 2 downloads of the ebook.

You can understand why none of my 'strong female characters' are marketing executives...

'Uppie' at Little Venice, London

I need to find a way to promote Grand Union and, despite previously slating them in much the same terms the entirely fictional Daphne Randall slates the entirely fictional Six Towns Gazette, my best bet is almost certainly to drop a copy of the book with a suitably up-beat, eye-catching press release in to the local newspaper office.  There's at least one local journo who's championed another local writer and also been a sympathetic voice covering 'welfare reform' issues, so that's seems as good a place to start as any.

I probably do need to reassure him that I won't be dragging him off to the pub, or back to my boat afterwards, though - just in case he thinks I might be Daphne too!

You can read the first few chapters of Daphne's adventures here: completelynovel or here: amazon

Absolutely No Shades of "That Sort of Thing"

You have to hand it to B&Q.  If there was an award for the most creative leap onto the bandwagon of that film they surely win it for the 'leaked email' supposedly sent to staff advising them how to deal sensitively with customers asking for (ahem) supplies not required for conventional DIY.  Having grabbed headlines across the entire media spectrum, they've 'fessed up to it being a spoof.

Cynical, wicked - and sheer bloody marketing genius.

Arguably, I'm missing a trick here myself.  There are 'shady' jokes and references I could be using to push my own work, not least the old anti-austerity line about being the only novelist writing about being screwed by sadistic millionaires who can't make any money from it.  I considered a short story tie-in (tie-up?): a serious tale, perhaps with our Daphne the lone placard-wielding protestor at her local multiplex, watching a lass she knows to be a victim of serial domestic abuse going to see it with her latest unsuitable boyfriend: a funny one, inspired by the B&Q story, with Sally Archer trying to buy cable ties for her electrician and getting the nudge, nudge, wink, wink from the guy behind the counter: or a 'really rather saucy' one with Hilary perusing the wares in her local Ann Summers but concluding that nothing on offer improved on nature - at least as far as her man was concerned!

In the event, one of my colleagues (you know who you are, SJ!) got there first with a splendid little snippet of Grand Union 'fan fiction'

Daphne exclaimed “at last an internet connection.”  She hastily searched for the nearest B & Q; to her delight there was one a short walk away, 
She called out to Harry.  “Just nipping out to pick up some supplies pet”
“Do you need some company duck?”
“No, you carrying on thinking, I will be back in about 20 minutes”
Daphne walked along the clarty tow path and then cut through the factories to B & Q
“Can I help you madam?” asked the sales assistant.
“Yes please, I need some cable ties and gaffa tape”…

Mercifully, she left it with the reader wondering how this little escapade would end - perhaps arguing the merits of a running bowline over a clove hitch while six pints west of sober, waking up the next morning both tied up in positively Gordian knots, neither able to reach the scissors to set them free and one of the villains on the prowl close by?  (Damnation!  Wish I'd thought of that sooner.  Note to self - remember for next Daphne Randall adventure!)  

But no.  For all the joking about, a big part of me stands beside Daphne with her placard, deeply concerned about this romanticising of a creepily unequal and unhealthy relationship, and yet another 'flawed hero' who we're supposed to drool over for being insanely rich and powerful.  Like their author, 'my girls' don't go for Mr Grey.  Daphne would gladly hand him down a lecture on respect, Hilary would have a few very sharp words on consent and as for Sally, she'd be investigating just how kinky his company's accounts were, especially that deal with HSBC... 

And she'd tell him that his skyscraper was 'crap' too.

We are not alone!

On Tuesday I was in reflective mood, looking back at two years of increasingly polarised debate on Social Security and the infinitesimally small part Severe Discomfort and its successors had played in that debate, something of a lone voice in danger of being drowned out by the baying of 'reality TV'.


Yesterday, something changed.  I saw this:  http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/04/jobcentre-adviser-play-benefit-sanctions-angela-neville   A former Jobcentre adviser, disgusted with the persecutory culture in her former department, has written a play exposing the cruelty of the sanctions system.


It's a funny coincidence that the latest Solent Welfare Rights Project story includes (minor spoiler) dissenting workers within a Jobcentre trying to spare their vulnerable customers from the wrath of a Social Justice Ambassador, though we have always known that there are 'good guys' within the DWP - just ask Hilary Carrington!


And, after a brief, unworthy gnashing of teeth that Ms Neville's play had earned a front page slot on the Guardian website while the copy of Severe Discomfort I had sent them two years ago might as well have been hung on a nail in a privy (and may have been, for all I know), the positives started sinking in.

• Someone else thought that a work of fiction had the potential to change the debate, so wrote it.
• A national newspaper has picked up the story and promoted it heavily.
• The comments (987 at the time of writing) are overwhelmingly support of the ex-Jobcentre worker's efforts and evidence.
• The article is flying round social media and getting lots more support for the cause of a fair and humane Social Security system.

So good for you, Angela Neville!  I have my fingers crossed that Can this be England does get made into a short film or radio play and, in the great tradition of Cathy Come Home and The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, inspires the change its writer dreams of.
 
It doesn't matter whose trumpet hits the note that brings down the walls of Iain Duncan Smith's citadel - only that someone's does.

Two Years On...

Tomorrow, it will be two years to the day since Severe Discomfort was published.  It seems a good time to re-read the preface and see whether there has been any progress.  After all, I claimed that: 

I wrote this tale to challenge the popular ‘cheats’ and ‘scroungers’ view of benefit claimants that, as I write this introduction, is leading to some particularly barbed rhetoric and unhealthy competition between politicians to look ‘tough’ on ‘welfare’.  Although all the characters and events in ‘Severe Discomfort’ are fictional, their dealings with the Department for Work and Pensions and Tribunals Service are firmly rooted in reality.  The Walkers’ predicament is exactly that faced by many supposed ‘benefit cheats’.  That isn’t to say there aren’t cheats out there, but they are neither numerous nor typical, despite what certain politicians and papers might have us believe.

Since that was written, the rhetoric has got nastier and the policies crueler, with worse promised from the Tories and only the demise of the Bedroom Tax offered in redress from Labour, the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary famously promising to be 'tougher' on 'welfare' than the Tories and just this week attacking the Government for not doing enough to reduce 'fraud and error'.  Not a word about the continuing underclaiming of benefits, especially by vulnerable people, pensioners and increasingly young people ashamed or afraid to attend the Jobcentre.  No pledge to review Personal Independence Payment with its open agenda of cutting the cost of disability benefits.  No word on fixing the Work Capability Assessment so sick people aren't told to get up and walk by incompetent assessors and a flawed points system.  No promise to roll back the draconian sanctions regime.  Indeed, at conference last year the Shadow Chancellor promised to keep the Benefit Cap and to freeze Child Benefit.

If in May I end up putting a cross in the box next to my Labour candidate's name, it will be with gritted teeth and the knowledge that the Tories have already promised to cut the Benefit Cap still further (effectively allowing poor families one less child than at present - that's what a cut of £3,000 means in Child Tax Credit terms after all) and prevent young people under 21 from claiming Housing Benefit.  That they believe both policies are not just acceptable to the public but vote-winners means we are still losing this fight.

Without a major political party on our side, it can only be a grossly unequal fight - a handful of principled MPs, a few public figures, a network of bloggers and Facebook pages up against the majority of the political establishment, strident voices at the heart of the media, a mass of anti-claimant hate-speech on social networks, and the broadcast vomit known as 'Reality TV' - Too Fat to Work, On Benefits and Proud, My Big Benefits Family, Saints and Scroungers and, most notoriously and back for a new series just in time for the General Election, Benefits Street.

Are you not entertained?

As if that's not depressing enough Citizens Advice published their ideas for an alternative 'welfare' system last week.  It looked not at all like the system [minor spoiler] Hilary Carrington describes to her friend Daphne in Continual Supervision, suggesting instead a fragmented system with local variations in benefit rates, more discretion in administration and the following illustration of how it might work:

Greater Manchester would have a simple statutory responsibility for using this funding to promote core social objectives.  Within a fixed budget they could use the framework of existing benefits, or they could adjust the design of those benefits. They could reduce unemployment benefits for young people, for example, in order to strengthen incentives to work or stay in education, as part of a wider skills and labour market strategy.

Yes, you did read this correctly - the Citizens Advice Bureau advocating reducing benefits for young job-seekers, who are already expected to survive on only three-quarters of the adult rate.

It would be easy to lose all hope, were it not for the rise of the Green Party with their policy of a Citizens Income.  Okay, Hilary or any of her colleagues might have made a better job of explaining and defending it than Natalie Bennett, but at least the idea is out there, very publicly, and being advocated by a party whose star is in the ascent.  When the promise of greater social justice - the real sort, not IDS's fake tears and cuts disguised as tough love - was put at the heart of the 'Yes' campaign for Scottish independence, it came closer than anyone expected to success by bringing people out to vote who had given up on politics and politicians.  The rise of anti-austerity parties Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain is proof that people want better than kick-the-poor-to-save-the-rich policies and parties that differ only in the number of hobnails in their boots.  

In the meantime, my small counter-propaganda campaign rumbles on, with free ebooks whenever possible and a new 'exclusive to Completelynovel and cheaper than Amazon' paperback version of the original story and its sequel out soon.  And yes, when my volunteer proof readers have finished fine-tuning Limited Capability there's a paperback of that to publish too (before the Election please, ladies!!) with Daphne's thriller Grand Union hopefully acting as bait to draw in some unsuspecting new readers.

Let's see who blinks first, Channel 5!