Will Once's Blog, page 15

Random thoughts on the election

The UK election of 2015 is over and it is time to pause and reflect. What conclusions can we draw? The voting process is fair, but inefficient. We can take a lot of comfort from the whole business of putting an X on a piece of paper and stuffing that paper into a ballot box.…

The UK election … from the inside

It has been a strange couple of days. I spent the whole of Thursday as a presiding officer for my local polling station. From seven in the morning until ten o’clock at night, my team of three people (myself and two poll clerks) managed the voting process. We checked people against the register of electors,…

Just an update…

Today’s blog is an update. Nothing more, nothing less. We are about to release a new edition of Love, Death and Tea with the new cover. I am also going to add an “also by Will Once” section, to give links to the other books. I have a new cover for Global Domination for Beginners.…

Cover me, I’m going in…

This hasn’t happened the way I expected. When I set out on this book-writing adventure, I thought it would be a mostly creative process. I had thought that the job of being a writer was ��� well, you know ��� about writing. Plunking words onto the page. Being all arty an’ stuff. I would sit…

The great self help con

I am a sucker for self-help books. I can’t help myself. I am in the bookstore idly browsing the bestsellers when I hear the siren call. It seems that just about every book and magazine is making seductive promises: how to make money succeed in business be calm be creative lose weight have a great…

The great ebook scam

I had a strange experience the past few days. Come with my, my friends, into one of the murkier corners of the internet��� I’ve known for a long time that my own book covers are ��� let’s not beat around the bush here ��� awful. Amateurish. Letting the side down. The books themselves seem fine.…

Do you “like” sex?

I was chatting the other day to my internet friend Gingerlily, when a weird thought occurred. Could we have an internet rating system for sex? We rate just about everything else. If we have a bad cup of coffee, we can get our revenge by leaving a one star review on Tripadvisor. Just wasted two…

It could be you

This is a picture of the surface of Mars taken by the Viking Orbiter spacecraft in 1976. Spooky, eh? It looks for all the world like a human face staring up from the Martian landscape. And this is when the conspiracy theorists and science fiction geeks go into overdrive. How did it get there? Surely…

That new watch itch

I would like to introduce you to my watch. �������������������� It is a perfectly functional quartz watch. It tells the time as well as I could possibly want it to. It doesn’t need winding. I change the battery once in a blue moon, but apart from that it does exactly what I want, day in,…

After the gold rush

One of the fascinating things about being a self-published author is watching the industry grow and change. It feels like the California gold rush. There’s gold in them thar hills! So saddle up an ornery mule, pack a Winchester rifle and a banjo, and let’s grow a beard. This time next year we’re going to…