Ed Ryder's Blog

Star Trek: Lower Decks. Well, I’m enjoying it!

After coming off an epic 136 hr Mass Effect Trilogy experience, I was looking for something a bit lighter to fill in the gaps as I plan the next Jack Gilmour story. Star Trek: Lower Decks kept appearing on my Amazon Prime timeline, so despite some bad press from various social media outlets, I thought ‘hey, why not give it a try?’

For those unfamiliar, Lower Decks is an animated comedy series set in the Star Trek TNG era, about a year after the events in Nemesis. It’s touted as an adult animation and although the humour didn’t always land for me, there were more hits than misses.

To boldly go where other, more important people have been before

Whereas Star Trek has traditionally focused on those at the forefront of exploration, Lower Decks follows the Starship U.S.S. Cerritos and its dysfunctional crew who spend most of their days doing ‘second contact’ and other such routine missions. Each episode is seen through the eyes of the lowly ensigns of beta shift, comprising of:

Beckett Mariner: the daughter of the ship’s overbearing Captain Carol Freeman, and who hates anything about career advancement, despite being captain material herself.Brad Boimler: a stickler for the rules who’s desperate to impress the senior bridge crew.D’Vana Tendi: An Orion scientist who’s over-enthusiastic about everything to the point of annoyance.Sam Rutherford: an expert engineer with cyborg implants who loves his job and the details in everything.

The format of the show very much follows the same ‘planet of the week’ format that TNG did, with each episode following the beta shift team as they get mixed up in something way over their pay grade. There are some nice sci-fi ideas in many of the stories, and a holodeck episode with some great visual direction throwbacks to the movie franchise.

Brad Boimler (Hologram): Oh my God, Mariner, you gotta get me out of here. They keep showing me lights!

Woke trash!

It’s safe to say that Lower Decks was not well received by many social media commentators (including many of the ones I watch), who dismissed the whole thing as another agenda-driven pile of woke trash, full of flawless female characters and useless male ones who get shown up at every opportunity.

Jack Ransom: She’s finding little ways to inject joy into otherwise horrible tasks.
Captain Carol Freeman:Then give her worse jobs.
Jack Ransom: I’ve got her emptying —- out of the holodeck’s —- filter!
Captain Carol Freeman:… Ugh. People really use it for that?
Jack Ransom: Oh yeah. It’s mostly that.

And for most of the first two episodes at least, I could see where they were coming from. Boimler is shown as a complete wet fish, whereas Mariner belittles him at every opportunity and breaks Starfleet rules whenever she feels like it with no consequences. In fact, I found Mariner such an unlikable character at first that I nearly gave the whole thing up there and then. It was only at the end of the second episode, where we find she’s done something to secretly help Boimler’s self-esteem, that I thought ‘okay, let’s see where they’re going with this’.

And I’m very glad I stuck with it, because once the writers settle down and start telling good stories and you find out more about Mariner’s history, I found myself understanding her motivations and warming to her a lot more. Mariner and Boimler eventually become good friends, with Mariner looking out for him and helping stand up for himself. All the characters get their chance to shine during the show (even the male ones – OMG!), including an unexpected and heartfelt heroic sacrifice later on in season 1.

Beckett Mariner: Brad, when a Starfleet relationship seems too good to be true, then– red alert, man! It probably is.
Brad Boimler : You think she’s cheating on me?!
Beckett Mariner: No! I think she’s a secret alien who’s gonna eat you, or a Romulan spy, or a salt succubus, or an android, or a Changeling, or one of those sexy people in rompers that murders you just for going on the grass!

Bringing back the joy of TNG

Although not in the same league as something like Galaxy Quest, Lower Decks also knows how to gently poke fun at some of the absurdity of Star Trek while celebrating it all at the same time. There are lots of call-backs to old episodes and some TNG races make guest appearances.

At time of writing, I’ve just seen episode 2 of season 2, where Boimler has been transferred to the U.S.S Titan (with a very familiar captain) and has frayed nerves from being barraged with non-stop exciting life and death situations. There’s a great scene towards the end where, surrounded by crew mates who crave nothing but action, Boimler waxes lyrical about how the tales of peaceful exploration on the Enterprise was what really inspired him to join Starfleet. And in the modern Trek era, that’s something to be applauded. If the creative team keep up with honouring the spirit of Star Trek, then I’ll gladly keep looking forward to future episodes.

Clar: If need you to tell me that your senior officers are infallible heroes!
Brad Boimler : Well they’re not, and that’s okay. We all joined Starfleet to dive first into the unknown. We’re explorers, of course we don’t always know what’s going on. Did Picard know about the Borg? Did Kirk know about that giant Spock on Phylos? Did Dr. Crusher know about that ghost in the lamp thing from the Scottish planet that she hooked up with that one time? That whole thing.

Ed Ryder is a research scientist by day and writes in the evening when he can fit it in.
Like a bit of fun urban fantasy or fancy some hardcore dystopia? Check out his books from the links below!

Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer on Amazon 

In Vitro Lottery is out now on Amazon

Book promotion and scientific research: effort vs reward

The definition of insanity

From my 25 year+ career in genetics research, I can tell you this: science is really hard! For every paper that makes it through peer review, there’s a ton of work that never made it to a publishable state. Either the experiments got stuck and failed to yield enough results, funding / inclination ran out before any conclusions could be drawn, or maybe the original idea wasn’t great to start with. Journals, not unlike social media, love positive results, and a paper entitled “We couldn’t determine if gene X is involved in signalling pathway Y or not, sorry, as our western blots sucked for six months” ain’t gonna get that Nature publication you’ve always wanted.

Fancy labelling hundreds of tubes for a living? Why not try science!

Many a month of a researcher’s life is getting experiments to work properly in the first place. Certainly in molecular biology, even with vast amounts of experience, stuff just doesn’t work sometimes for no real discernible reason. If you’re doing method development, then you have a long and frustrating road ahead of repeats, optimisation, or figuring out what small crucial piece of information the authors left out of that paper you read a few weeks ago. The amount of effort involved in ultimate failure, when you’ve exhausted every avenue and have to conclude the technique just won’t work for your application, is huge, but giving up at the beginning isn’t really an option either. Maybe trying a different variation will work? Hold the line, and sometimes it all finally clicks into place and all that pain and effort is worth it.

Well, that’s all very interesting, but what does it have to do with book promotion?

The Cenobites’ Leviathan labyrinth of book promotion

Turns out, quite a lot. You spend a lot of money on editing, cover design and get your book on-target as much as possible. You take all the advice, follow the guides, and plough on with wild enthusiasm trying to sell. For many authors trying to find an audience, after reality bites and several months of struggling to promote their work they probably have:

An author webpage no one visits.A blog with a few posts that no one reads.A newsletter no one signed up to.A Facebook page and Twitter / Instagram account no one engages with.A selection of Amazon ads no one clicks on (or worse, clicks on and doesn’t buy).A YouTube / TikTok channel with a few clips no one watched.Tried several short-term boosts using websites to sell discounted or free books and never made back more than the setup cost.Read lots of social media posts from other people saying how all the above worked for them and now they sell thousands a week and how amazing life is now thanks!A sinking feeling that just watching Netflix instead might be a more productive use of time.

The main problem is this: everything works, and nothing works, depending on who you talk to. Giving talks at village halls may be great for historical novel writers, but possibly less-useful for your shifter-romance-reverse-harem tale. And, just like in research, finding out what doesn’t work takes at least as much effort (usually more) as determining what does. Because when something works, it’s obvious. When it doesn’t, is there an underlying cause preventing it from ever working, or did you just not try enough optimisations and the breakthrough is just around the corner if you stick with it? That doesn’t stop the whole process becoming increasingly frustrating and disheartening, however, and the half-life of effort before giving up on a technique tends to decrease with each failure.

The pilot study temptress

“We give these people hope.”
“A false hope, surely?”
“Perhaps. But hope nonetheless. The brain doesn’t know the difference.”

Morula – In Vitro Lottery part 2, in production

All researchers know the dangers of the pilot study temptress. You do the experiment with a few samples, and yay! It worked! Start writing those materials and methods sections now – this has Nature Genetics written all over it! So, you scale it up to a much larger (and expensive) experiment with your precious, non-replaceable samples and… nothing works. All that time and effort and you’re nowhere nearer an answer, and have to explain to your boss / sponsors where all that money just went. Back to the drawing board, another tweaked pilot and tempered expectations for next time. It’s the same with book promotion. A few early good results and your brain switches to “hurrah! Something’s finally working!” mode before the sinking realisation of another false dawn poking over the horizon. In times like these, it’s easy to let your head drop and skirt around the Swamp of Dispair.

Motivation

“It’s easy to look good riding when your horse is going well.”

Equestrian saying

The most insidious thing about book promotion is the effect it can have on your current writing. When things are on the up, why wouldn’t you pour all those good vibes and enthusiasm into the next project? Readers are actually interested in what happens next! Maybe all this effort is worthwhile after all! Conversely, keeping up motivation when a year+ of work is met with a wall of silence is phenomenally challenging. And sometimes it might be good to take a break for a while and do something else until the itch to create returns.

Conclusions

So what’s the answer? No idea, sorry, and if I did I’d be busy peddling ‘how to write a best-seller’ books and self-help courses. Wallowing in self-pity is certainly an option and in the short-term can be quite cathartic, but long-term it’s not really a productive solution. At that point, and if you’re not trying to do it for a career, when disillusion and cynicism takes over you’re probably better off choosing something else to occupy your time for a while.
As I say to members of my group when things aren’t working; if research was easy, anyone could do it. For every publication triumph, there’s a huge amount of work that never made it in, and for every grad student who gives a headline conference talk about their success, there’s a bunch of others battling with non-conclusive results and hoping for better times. Sometimes, it’s just a case of plugging away, keeping the faith, and trying not to spend too much money in the process.
Apart from that, here are a few comments:

Don’t compare the beginning of your writing journey to the end of someone else’s.If something isn’t working in your promotion, have you really given it every chance before giving up? Sometimes, the first thing you try actually works and everything seems easy. If so, great! Make hay while the sun shines, but don’t project that success as a lack of effort from others.The experiences of others will not be your own.Write for enjoyment for a while, and try not to worry about selling.

Until next time!

Ed Ryder is a research scientist by day and writes in the evening when he can fit it in.
Like a bit of fun urban fantasy or fancy some hardcore dystopia? Check out his books from the links below!

Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer on Amazon 

In Vitro Lottery is out now on Amazon

My experiences with the 5-Day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge

The 5-Day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge is a free course run by Bryan Cohen from bestpageforward.net, focusing on how to set up and run Amazon adverts for your books. But how does it work, and is it worth your time ? Read on to find out!

Course contents

The course takes you from the first principles from setting up your first adverts and bidding limits, to creating good ad copy and blurbs, and everything in between. Wondering how to get keywords without having to splash out on expensive scraping software? The course covers that too.

What you need

To get the most out of the course, you’ll need the following:

TimeEach video is about an hour long, plus that again in homework and any additional time you spend on the FB group.Making ads, especially keyword ads, can also take a while until you get used to it, or if you are grabbing a load of keywords for multiple adverts. I made a template for tracking ads for a previous challenge, which you can get here!Inclination.Learning is hard, but also fun. Even so, no one can do it for you. To get the most out of the course, you’ll really need to follow the advice and do your homework.It’s easy to dismiss Amazon ads as something that doesn’t work, and we’ve probably all been there (I know I have). My book is fine – the system is broken. And perhaps it is. But without everything in place, it’s never going to work. This will involve taking a step back and critically evaluating your ads and book.If you think of the act of selling as a chain of targeting >> cover >> ad copy >>blurb then if any of those are not optimal, the whole thing collapses.A budgetAmazon is, fortunately, fairly frugal when it comes to spending your money, especially when compared to other platforms. This gives you some time to play around with various things without spending too much.You’ll be making multiple ads with a budget for each, and your first thoughts will probably be “OMG I’ll be spending hundreds of dollars!!”. Fortunately, with the bid rates they recommend, you should be fine and the actual spend will be very low.PatienceNow this is the really tricky part. It’s easy to get super-enthusiastic setting up an advert then get instantly disheartened when nothing happens. But this is fairly normal. Ads take a while to serve and impressions (which are free) may crawl out a snail’s pace, with clicks even slower. This is mainly due to the low bid amount Bryan recommends, but the temptation to up the bid to gain speed on an unoptimised ad set could cost you in the short and long term.It’s also easy to make rash decisions based on not enough data (especially when it’s costing you money). As a scientist, I know all too well the dangers of relying on a small sample number to base your conclusions on.While you might get great results straight away, some books will be slow burners and it will take a while for sales to catch on at all. Ask yourself: how many ads on Amazon do you ignore? Probably most of them, and it may take several views of an advert before you’re intrigued enough to click on it to find out more. Project that behaviour on to the rest of the customers on Amazon and you can seen why several thousand impressions may not be enough.Is it really free?

The course itself is high quality and completely free, so there’s nothing really to lose apart from whatever budget you set for yourself for the various tasks and beyond. There is some upsell for their paid Amazon Ad School membership, but it’s up to you to decide whether you’re ready for the next step. Many people take the free course multiple times with different books, and there’s always something new to learn.

Added wizard value

As well as the course videos, there are several Q&A sessions which can be viewed later if you can’t make them at the time. The real meat and potatoes of the added experience, however, is the Facebook group. Here, a veritable army of helpful admin wizards are on call to help out with pretty much any related query you may have. Want opinions and advice on your ad copy or cover, or wondering why your blurb isn’t converting clicks to purchases? The wizards are always more than happy to help out, as are other group members.

The Facebook groups is also a good place to share your experiences as the course unfolds. As usual, some people will have instant success, others will see nothing, and everyone else will fit somewhere in the middle. With most information online these days only showing how successful someone has been, it’s comforting to know that you’re not alone if things aren’t going well.

Does it work? My experiences

I’ve taken the course twice now, once for In Vitro Lottery, and the other for Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer. It’s taken a while, but I’m finally seeing some. Here are my results for the last 30 days for both books combined:

This isn’t the whole story, of course, as the real value of interest is royalties. Getting this out of KDP isn’t very straightforward, but using the getbookreport app, my royalties for the last 30 days across all three of my books (Wish Lawyer books 1 and 2, and In Vitro Lottery) is ~$64. This isn’t all from Amazon ads, as I had a couple of other things going on this last month, but it gives a good indicator of the overall impact. These numbers aren’t exactly huge, of course, but compared to what my sales were over the previous year (ie pretty much zero) this is a huge improvement. For once, I’m actually getting more in sales than I’m spending on clicks.

Conclusions

I’d recommend this course to anyone thinking of setting up some Amazon ads, or who tried for a while but gave up when nothing converted to sales. You might still not get any results (and certainly not instantly), but you’ll get plenty of help trying to work out why.

The course is just the beginning

Like learning to drive, the 5-day profit challenge gives you the tools you need to get started. Since the course is only 5 days long, your ads will be running for a lot longer than that so it’s important to keep to hand what you’ve learnt as the ads progress hopefully into sales.

What I stopped doing

Although international (ie non-US) ads are covered Bryan, he recommends that new users stay away from them. From my experience with UK adverts, I tend to agree. Although the impressions I got were massively higher than the US version per advert, and I got more clicks, the conversion rate was so low that I’ve now switched them off.

What I need to do next

I’ve had feedback from various sources that my cover for Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer isn’t ‘urban fantasy’ enough for the target audience, so that will be something to look at next. On the plus side, it’s averaging 4.3/5 on Amazon from 23 reviews, so the people who are reading it seem to like it. Hopefully this will inspire them to read the next in the series: Demons in the Details.

Ed Ryder is a research scientist by day and writes in the evening when he can fit it in.
Like a bit of fun urban fantasy or fancy some hardcore dystopia? Check out his books from the links below!

Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer on Amazon 

In Vitro Lottery is out now on Amazon

Pre-order Demons in the Details today!

Date: February 21, 2021Author: Ed Ryder0 Comments— Edit

The Las Vegas wish lawyer is back for a new adventure!

Demons in the Details is now up for pre-order and a March 15th release! Grab yourself a copy here!

Jack’s day is thrown into turmoil when a distressed succubus appears at the office. There’s a new hunter in town, her master is dead and others of her kin are missing. While Jack pulls in an old client to help unravel the growing mystery, a shadow of Sebastian’s misspent youth threatens to catch up with him. But what do they want, and why are they so obsessed with the wizard’s coat?

With the stakes raising at every turn, Jack must thread a perilous path to save his friends. And all the while, humans and demons alike ask the same question: just whose side is he on?

Demons in the Details

The Las Vegas wish lawyer is back for a new adventure!

I’m just putting the finishing touches to the next book in the Wish Lawyer series! More details to follow, but here’s the blurb and a taste of things to come.

Jack’s day is thrown into turmoil when a distressed succubus appears at the office. There’s a new hunter in town, her master is dead and others of her kin are missing. While Jack pulls in an old client to help unravel the growing mystery, a shadow of Sebastian’s misspent youth threatens to catch up with him. But what do they want, and why are they so obsessed with the wizard’s coat?

With the stakes raising at every turn, Jack must thread a perilous path to save his friends. And all the while, humans and demons alike ask the same question: just whose side is he on?

Wishonomics, and the cost of getting what you want.

The recent release of Wonder Woman 1984 is a prime example of the mess you can write yourself into if you don’t keep the rules of your world in check. Wishes, and particularly their consequences, can go off the rails incredibly quickly. When anything can happen, everything can happen. So how does Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer deal with this? Read on to find out!

When it comes to world-building in a reality where wishes exist, the main problems to solve are scale and conflict. So, let’s tackle these one at a time.

Scale, and the economics of wishes.

Jack Gilmour’s job is to broker wish contracts between his clients and demons, to make sure those he represents get a fair deal and don’t get caught out in ‘Monkey’s Paw’-style loopholes in the small print.

“You missed out the extent and exclusivity of your injury.”
“What?”
“The word ‘only’. The wording gives them the authority to break every bone in your body, as long as it included your arm.”

But what’s to stop a client from wanting to rule the world or wipe out millions of people? It’s all due to wishonomics.

The natural order – a baseline for reality

“Think of the natural order as a closed door. The bigger the change you want, the more pressure and energy needed to open it.” – Lucia Oredis

The natural order, or fate if you like, represents the way things should be. Changing this requires energy, and energy is not limitless. By anchoring the mechanism of wishes to a cost for the granter as well as the receiver, the problem of scale fixes itself (who could afford all the changes required for world domination?). It also sets up the economy of how the whole thing works on the Demonic Plane. As an aside, I’m a great believer in the importance of setting up the economy when world-building. Once you have that, everything else that follows becomes much easier to understand how it fits together.

Wish currency

“There are two types of energy for the human condition: karmic and soul. Demons use it as a form of currency on the Plane. Think nickels and dimes, versus gold. … They invest their energy stores in making something nice happen for us and harvest the bad, or the soul time, that comes out of the price.” – Sebastian Winters.

Mischief demons are the lower classes of the Demonic Plane, scraping a living together on small karmic energy contracts and hoping for a sucker to give them a big payday. Although they plan to get ahead for each investment deal (don’t we all?), every contract is a consequence of how cunning the demon is, and there’s a risk of miscalculation for them as well as the clients.

“Okay, well you had your fun and you’ll have to take your licks. Probably fail your exams or break a leg in a bike accident. That’s usually how these things work with karmic contracts.” – Jack Gilmour

Conversely, the higher-level demons like those in the Inner Circle of the Ruling Council, are fantastically rich and have huge supplies of energy. This allows them to grant more expansive wishes with the promise of a bigger return at the end. Turns out demons are capitalists – who would have guessed?

“The paper crinkled under my grasp as I unfurled it, the fading ink betraying its age. I squinted down the text: a five-year soul contract for a mother wanting her daughter to marry above her station. A familiar-looking cartouche greeted me at the end. “One of yours?”
“This whole wing is mine,” replied Lucia, with a nonchalant wave.

Rules of the contract

“Demonic laws are there for our protection as well as yours, refined over centuries of experience and persecution.” Lucia turned away from me, and for a brief moment, I saw something I never thought I’d witness in a demon: remorse. “Our first encounters with your species were fraught with disasters and difficulty. We did not understand your duplicitous ways, nor you our gifts.”

With the problem of scale taken care of, the next main problem with granting wishes is the issue of conflict. What if two wishes want opposite results, or you want another wish to change your mind and nullify the first contract? These kinds of scenarios can really punch huge holes in your plot. Fortunately, the Demonic Plane has strict rules on such things

Benny had another great idea. “Can’t I just wish I won’t sleep with her?”
“No can do,” said Lucia with a slow, insincere shake of the head. “Only one contract per demon, I’m afraid. In any case, the original contract takes priority. For client protection, of course.”

All demonic contracts are housed, indexed, and cross-referenced in the Hall of Records, and no demon can initiate a contract in conflict with another active one. The ‘one contract per demon’ clause protects the clients against falling into a continuous debt.

Building a world

To summarise, attention to detail on how the economy works helps build an internally-consistent world for your characters to live and breathe in. As a stress test, it’s always worth asking yourself “yeah, but what if?”, because you can guarantee your readers will. It may not fill in all the plot holes, but hopefully make them more shallow.

If you enjoyed this blog post, and want to delve more into the world of Jack Gilmour, check out the links below!

This article was inspired partly by the book Freakonomics, which is well worth checking out!

Ed Ryder is a research scientist by day and writes in the evening when he can fit it in.
Like a bit of fun urban fantasy or fancy some hardcore dystopia? Check out his books from the links below!

Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer on Amazon 

In Vitro Lottery is out now on Amazon

Science, and the ‘as you know, Bob’ fallacy trap.

One of the problems of creating fiction is how to impart technical information to the audience. The most derided of these is the oft called ’as you know, Bob’ infodump, where characters talk to each other in a way they wouldn’t do naturally. The reasoning behind this is that people familiar with a subject don’t explain things to each other. But when it comes to scientific concepts, how true is this?

[image error](not actually me)

For a bit of background, when I’m not trying to write books, I’m a professional scientist. Over the last 25 years I’ve worked at all levels: from technician to postdoc to principal scientist, lab worker to management and back again, and from academia to industry. And if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from all that, it’s this: people explain basic concepts to each other all the time, and for good reasons.
But before we go more into that, let’s explore the infodump a bit more. All the following examples are from movies because I don’t read enough books to remember good analogies (sorry).

Ways of imparting knowledge

Explaining backstory or technical issues to the audience is often performed in the following ways:

1) The raw infodump

The infodump can take various forms: the beginning text (Star Wars, Blade Runner), a prologue (Lord of the Rings, Dark Crystal series), or dialogue within the movie (Prince of Persia – now there’s a guilty pleasure!). Regardless of the mechanism, the action usually stops (or doesn’t start) so a chunk of exposition can be imparted to the audience.
The ‘as you, Bob’ concept usually belongs to this category, for example the Prince of Persia explaining family connections:

“But since our wise father isn’t here, the decision rests with me. I’ll have one last counsel with my noble uncle, and my two brothers, trusted Garsiv, and… Where’s Dastan?”

I’m pretty sure the guy he’s talking to knows the names of the Princes of the Realm!

If handled correctly, though, you can perform the most naked infodump possible and no one will care. Morpheus explaining the Matrix to Neo is full of movement, revelations and makes for a riveting experience. Another great, albeit sedate, example of this is Jurassic Park’s cinema scene, where the characters sit through a video of how they make dinosaurs. As far as I can work out, this works because a) dinosaurs are awesome, b) genetics is awesome and c) Steven Spielberg is a genius.

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2) The everyman, student, or ‘fish out of water’



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Here, one of the characters is either new to the situation or a hanger-on to the main character and becomes a conduit for the audience. A RedLetterMedia review of one of the Star Wars prequels went into this with plenty of good examples (e.g. The Last Starfighter and Twister), so check them out (warning, NSFW) if you have a few hours to kill. are examples they bring up. The character of Ariadne in Inception is also a good example.

3) The charlatan



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Another variant on the everyman archetype. Here an expert isn’t actually one at all and needs to have details explained to them. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters is a great example of this (see the scene in the prison), or Gracie Hart in Miss Congeniality.

4) Not explaining anything and let the audience work it out



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I remember, many years ago, going to see Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me without seeing any of the Twin Peaks series beforehand. I had no idea what was going on at any time, but I loved the film in any case. Another good example are the early episodes of Game of Thrones, where we are just plonked into a living, breathing world with little explanation of who anyone is or how they fit together, other than the map at the beginning titles. How tempting must it have been to put a 10 min prologue in there at the start of episode one?
Sometimes this goes the other way, though. I’m still waiting for Rick from The Walking Dead to ask ‘hey, where’d all these zombies come from?’

All the science!

Anyway, back to science.
Turns out, science is a pretty huge field of knowledge but there’s often only room for one scientist character in the cast list (as opposed to engineers, where there are whole departments running about talking to each other and explaining things to Riker, the ‘everyman’ of the TNG universe). Consequently, in shows like Star Trek the science character is often an alien (Dax, Spock), android (Data), or a child prodigy (whatever the guy in that Stargate series that got cancelled was called) who has expert knowledge on pretty much anything the plot needs them to have. At least Dax had several lifetimes to accrue it all…

[image error]Dax – paying attention in class for 300 years

There is, therefore, a general conceit that scientists know ‘all the science’, but in reality, we tend to be very specialised. In my current job, I’m a molecular biologist surrounded by analytical chemists, and I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about half the time. I need basic concepts explained to me, as do they when I’m rambling on about something I find interesting. Even when I worked with other geneticists, we often had different expertise, and talking to the transgenics team often needed quite a bit of interpretation.

As someone once said, science is all about knowing more and more about less and less. It’s also about collaboration, and often involves experts from multiple disciplines. You can’t sequence thousands of human genomes without a huge amount of computing and informatics / analysis support, and you can’t create new ways of gene editing without the knowledge of chemists, structural biologists, and molecular geneticists. We all talk in our own dialects, full of shorthand and acronyms, and entering a new field usually requires reading a lot of review papers and recursively looking up terms to understand the first thing you looked up.

[image error]Where’s your safety specs???

The result of all this specialisation is ‘as you know, Bob’ type conversations happen a lot more than you might expect. It acts as a framing device for what you actually want to talk about and doesn’t assume the person at the other end knows all the specifics (unless, of course, they definitely should do). The downside is that it can come across as ‘mansplaining’, but personally, having been on the receiving end of fellow scientists assuming I know everything about the minute specifics of their experimental designs, I usually appreciate it. It’s all relative, of course, and a basic term for one person is gobbledygook to someone else.

Writing the emotion, rather than the technicalities



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So, going back to the original point, I think there’s a lot more leeway for explaining concepts between characters than is usually accepted, although this might need to be highlighted in the text on why this is happening. Dammit, Jim, I’m a PCR specialist, not a protein chemist!

That’s all well and good, but how to write conversations with people who really should know what each other are on about? Personally, I think it’s all about balance and finding a middle ground. Here’s a fictional molecular biology scenario between a grad student and a postdoc:

GS: “My ligation reaction failed again? What went wrong?”
PD: “As you know, Bob, the ligation reaction joins two pieces of DNA together, and the enzyme has to be stored at -20 otherwise it degrades. You left it out on the bench all weekend last time you used it, and that’s why it didn’t work.”

Might be better written as:

PD: “You left the enzyme on the bench all last weekend and it went off, so your DNA didn’t stick,”

which explains what happened and sounds a bit more natural.
In reality, the response would probably be more like:

PD: “You left the enzyme on the bench all last weekend…”

which assumes that the perpetrator understood why that was a bad thing, and what the ligation reactions do, but the readers might not.

When imparting technical information, it’s easy to go into epic amounts of detail, but ask yourself what’s important and what needs explaining. Do the audience need to understand the specifics of the student’s ligation reaction other than they performed an experiment? Is it vital to the plot, or is it mainly to show the relationship between the two scientists? One made a mistake, and the other knew that but let them fail anyway. Why would they do such a thing, and what’s the story behind that decision? Now that’s intriguing.

What In Vitro Lottery got right (and wrong) about the 2020 pandemic

IVL was released back in 2016, and explores the aftermath of a pandemic which wipes out half of humanity in 2020. Sound familiar? But how accurate was it, and what else did the book predict? Read on to find out more!

All the children knew the story of Bjart Lorentzen. The rat catcher. The piper. Patient zero of the Norwegian Death. The man who killed the world.

Covid-19 vs the Norwegian Death



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The respiratory disease Covid-19 is caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, a novel coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China.

In IVL, the pandemic is caused by a mutated version of the bacteria Yersinia pestis, the bacteria responsible for the Black Death. It is nicknamed the Norwegian Death, after the first recorded infection.

…the results of the Norwegian Death, a highly contagious and antibiotic-resistant form of pneumonic plague, had been catastrophic.

The Norwegian Death spreads throughout the world



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For question of why I set the pandemic in 2020, I wanted it to be in the near future but it also had to correspond with a major event. In the book, Lorentzen is an international volunteer at the Tokyo Olympics, with access to to crowds and elite athletes alike, creating the first super-spreader event.

Lorentzen had killed the world, and for weeks, no one even knew there was a problem. The infected went through their daily lives, unaware of the bacteria slowly multiplying within them. At first, it caused nothing more than a bad cough and a raised temperature; certainly not anything worth going to the hospital for. But then people started dying, the surgeries and hospitals began to fill with the sick and doctors woke to the horrid realisation that their medicines weren’t going to help.

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For Covid-19, the rapid spread of the disease has been staggeringly fast and successful. In less than a year it’s infected over 55 million people, and that’s despite our best efforts to contain it. The UK alone is reported to have over 1300 separate introduction events up to May 2020, mainly from Europe.

Despite the different causes, the spread of the disease, from the delayed symptoms to the global reach and the panic, is pretty similar.

Death rates



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Covid-19 has, tragically killed over 1.3 million people so far, and probably many more indirectly (lack of hospital capacity for existing conditions etc. In comparison, the Norwegian Death and associated chaos / collapse of society has wiped out approximately half the population of the world by the time a treatment becomes available,

Overwhelming the healthcare system.

In the UK, at least, Covid-19 has been kept within the working capacity of hospitals. Thank you NHS workers! IVL explores what happens when this isn’t the case, a vision of the future grimly inspired by my memories of the UK Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001.

…for when the hastily built incinerators and crematoriums had become overwhelmed, they’d resorted to scooping up the corpses into open top lorries using excavators instead. The bodies were transported to vast wood-lined pits dotted around the countryside, and then finally doused in petrol. The pyres had burned fiercely for days on end, filling the air for miles around with billowing black acrid smoke and threatening to choke anyone who went too close; a final act of the dead seeking revenge on the uncaring living who had cast them aside.

The UK and world response

So how did the world respond to the Norwegian Death?

By the time the governments and United Nations had woken up to the scale of the pandemic it was all too late, as one by one, the nations fell under the scourge.

Although not quite back to the Stone Age, Europe is described as being primarily comprised as a collection of city states, whilst America is a set of independent fragments and Asia has become primary feudal.
But how about the UK? Did IVL mirror the actual response?

Britain had fared better than most, as the Government of the time had been preparing for such an outbreak since several false dawns had woken them up to the possible consequences. They had closed the borders and cleared the airspace to avoid the infection getting in again, whilst they battled to control the spread of the disease and an increasingly panicked populace. The politicians had wisely given the Armed Forces complete control of order, provisions and disposal. To stop the mobs killing each other over scraps of dwindling food, they descended in a fearful spectacle of uniforms, guns and gas masks; society’s last hope against a tsunami of natural selection.

Well, I got that wrong! Whatever you think of the Government’s response before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, it certainly wasn’t that.

Bizarrely, in IVL, New Zealand is mentioned as having escaped the ravages of the virus, echoing its real-life counterpart, although the reasons for it are slightly different.

The cure?



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The search for a vaccine for Covid-19 has a been a remarkable feat of science around the world, propelling the usual development phase from years to months. At the time of writing, Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna have released exciting results on effectiveness of their mRNA-based vaccines, with the Astrazeneca / Oxford Uni data hopefully coming soon. Russia and China have also begun vaccinating the populace at the same time as running phase 3 trials.

In IVL, however, the UK Government take a much more ‘active’ role, basically stealing the cure and cementing their power over the nation and beyond.

… a revolutionary antibiotic created in a small lab in Cambridgeshire. The politicians had annexed it under the guise of national interests and sold it to the rest of the world at a vast price, propelling the country from near bankruptcy to a rich and prosperous nation in a matter of months.

Word of the year, and Trump speeches



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The term ‘lockdown’ was recently declared the Collins Dictionary word of the year, and is also used to describe the restrictions on society in In Vitro Lottery.

Victor Pearson’s (head of the IVF clinics) take on Lockdown:

There was general bad feeling about the continued use of Lockdown, the Act which continued to promote self-sufficiency and keep the borders closed so many years after the Norwegian Death had run its course. It was originally designed to stop the plague getting back in, but now served mainly to keep people out.

In Vitro Lottery is told primarily from the point of view of Kate Adams, who was born in the aftermath of the pandemic. As a product of her time and environment, Kate is fiercely loyal to the far-right Government, although this begins to falter when her sister is killed and her investigation leads her to confront some disturbing truths about the lottery. Kate’s initial opinion on Lockdown differs somewhat from the older and more cynical Victor Pearson:

The main aim of the LockDown was to preserve bio-security and the society they had strived to create; the last thing they wanted was an influx of people with no sense of investment or responsibility, who would just take and not give in return. If they had something to offer then great, let them in and educate them. If not, then they should stay away and try to repair wherever it was they came from.

Interestingly, a review for IVL noted that that reader found the book difficult to read because the political views of the characters were so far opposed from theirs. Good! That’s the point – it’s supposed to challenge our perceptions and affirmation biases.

Make Britain Great Again!

Even though IVL was released in 2016, it took a year or two to write, well before Donald Trump decided to run for President. It therefore came as a bit of a shock to find Trump peddling the same rhetoric that the IVL politician Caden Schoier gives in a speech:

And look at us now, a beacon of hope, peace and security, the envy of the world. Now, as once long ago, Britain is truly great again.”

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IES: the second plague

So, there you go! Although released several years ago, IVL unwittingly predicted many aspects of the 2020 pandemic, and a few other random and linked events.
In the book, however, the Norwegian Death is just the beginning of Humanity’s problems. A bigger threat awaits them, and forms the crux of the story.

The survivors of the plague, struggling to maintain their way of life in the chaos, soon faced a new threat to the continuation of their species; a disease they called Infectious Embryonic Sterility. The virus buried itself secretly in their genome and made their children barren, with complex and expensive fertility treatment the only alternative. Some could pay, but most could not.
Thus in Britain, vigilant and isolated from the fragmented world beyond its shores, the In Vitro Lottery was born.

Read more about In Vitro Lottery here!

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5-day Amazon ad challenge – a useful Excel template

For anyone taking part in the ‘The 5-Day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge‘ (or indeed, using Amazon ads in general), I’ve created a handy Excel template for tracking adverts. I found that I quickly got swamped in all the different advert types, keywords, ad copy, and categories, so decided to curate them. This makes it much easier to track adverts over time, especially as the number of adverts grow into the dozens and above. Please note, this is for advert tracking, rather than result tracking, although I’m sure it could be adapted for both

Book review: Hidden, by Lisa Sell

Hidden tells the story of Jen, who has spent her adult life thinking she killed a girl after the great UK storm of ’87. Jen’s secret threatens to be exposed when the dead child’s mother (now dying of cancer) asks for her help in uncovering the truth. Jen, with a former school friend in tow, must tread a fine line in both helping and hindering the investigation to cover her tracks. But, as new revelations come to light, is Jen’s involvement really the whole story?

Jen, now in her 40s, grew up in a UK council estate, and the book does a great job of capturing the flavours of the 1980s. From Charles and Diana’s wedding to Live Aid, the landmark moments of the decade and their effects on the residents are brought to life on the page. The Rembrandt estate is a character in itself; the various streets and social strata provide the skeleton, and the families the nerves and muscle.
The estate displays an outward mentality of ‘sorting out its own problems’ and shunning the authorities, when in reality it does nothing of the sort. Child and spouse abuse go unchallenged, people turn a blind eye to injustice, and families mistrust each other’s motives. This is highlighted in the treatment of Kelly, whose tragic story unfolds as the book progresses. Shunned by children and adults alike for her family, odd appearance and behaviour, her loneliness and longing for acceptance seep through the narrative. Jen too, has a difficult upbringing, as the daughter of an overbearing and cruelly controlling mother who dotes on her son and leaves Jen and her sister to fend for themselves. Most of the characters, with a few exceptions, aren’t exactly nice people which adds to the air of being prisoners of the estate and their own choices.

The story alternates between the present and flashbacks to various events in the 80s (usually corresponding to a related event in the present timeline). These are out of order, though, and I found the jumping about a bit disorientating at times. It also has the effect of making the children’s developing relationships with each other a little less impactful. The present is told in first person for Jen, but switches to third for the flashbacks to expand the views of the other characters.

I can’t really talk much about the plot without spoiling things but overall I enjoyed the story, which twists and turns with revelations and false leads throughout. The only thing that didn’t quite click was that there seemed to be a few too many witnesses to a particular event.
Still, for me, the mark of a good book is if the characters and situations stay with you after the final page, and these certainly did.
4* : Recommended.

Hidden is available from Amazon