Will Once's Blog, page 22
May 18, 2014
The good news asteroid
Sometimes a piece of good news hits you so forcefully than it feels like an asteroid impact, but a very pleasant one. It is almost as if the asteroid is coated in emeralds and diamonds.
Your world changes, but in a remarkably good way.
In the last few days the Once household has been hit by a very large good news asteroid indeed.
We have always known that our son, aged 13, is a bright boy. Top of his class in just about everything. Way way above his age range in reading, maths, science, writing.
Admittedly he's not much of a sportsman, but that doesn't worry him or us. It's not where his interests lie.
Over the last few months he has been working towards one thing - his scholarship exams for Charterhouse school, Godalming, Surrey. And we were delighted to hear a few days ago that he has been successful.
Not just that, but it seems that he has come at or close to the top of the scholarship intake for this year. In the top five of a very competitive process.
To say that we are proud is an immense understatement. He has done something which neither of us ever managed.
And, sure, there is an element of privilege here. His existing private school has helped him to get where he is, and that certainly didn't come cheap. He has already received, and will continue to receive, an education that most could not afford.
I look at it this way. Two generations ago my family were coalminers. Three or four generations ago they could not read or write. They were amongst the poorest of the poor. My mother was the first in her family to go to college. I was one of the first to go to university. My son is now a scholar to one of the country's most prestigious fee-paying boarding school.
The socialist side of me quivers a little at the thought of our son going to somewhere like Charterhouse. The father side of me says to hell with socialism - he has as much right to go there as anyone. More than most, because he has earned his place through his own efforts.
What we have got has been the product of a lot of hard work over generations. No-one has given us anything apart from opportunities. There has certainly been no silver spoon anywhere in the family tree.
The good news asteroid does bring a little bit of pain. Our little boy is one step closer to leaving the nest. From September he will board (although the school is literally yards from our house). We will see him for barely 24 hours each week. Then beyond that university, work, life ... this house will seem very quiet.
Apart from two very pleased and smug parents basking in reflected glory.
Your world changes, but in a remarkably good way.
In the last few days the Once household has been hit by a very large good news asteroid indeed.
We have always known that our son, aged 13, is a bright boy. Top of his class in just about everything. Way way above his age range in reading, maths, science, writing.
Admittedly he's not much of a sportsman, but that doesn't worry him or us. It's not where his interests lie.
Over the last few months he has been working towards one thing - his scholarship exams for Charterhouse school, Godalming, Surrey. And we were delighted to hear a few days ago that he has been successful.
Not just that, but it seems that he has come at or close to the top of the scholarship intake for this year. In the top five of a very competitive process.
To say that we are proud is an immense understatement. He has done something which neither of us ever managed.
And, sure, there is an element of privilege here. His existing private school has helped him to get where he is, and that certainly didn't come cheap. He has already received, and will continue to receive, an education that most could not afford.
I look at it this way. Two generations ago my family were coalminers. Three or four generations ago they could not read or write. They were amongst the poorest of the poor. My mother was the first in her family to go to college. I was one of the first to go to university. My son is now a scholar to one of the country's most prestigious fee-paying boarding school.
The socialist side of me quivers a little at the thought of our son going to somewhere like Charterhouse. The father side of me says to hell with socialism - he has as much right to go there as anyone. More than most, because he has earned his place through his own efforts.
What we have got has been the product of a lot of hard work over generations. No-one has given us anything apart from opportunities. There has certainly been no silver spoon anywhere in the family tree.
The good news asteroid does bring a little bit of pain. Our little boy is one step closer to leaving the nest. From September he will board (although the school is literally yards from our house). We will see him for barely 24 hours each week. Then beyond that university, work, life ... this house will seem very quiet.
Apart from two very pleased and smug parents basking in reflected glory.
May 3, 2014
Defusing the population time bomb and the myth of gridlock
We have started an interesting discussion via Goodreads about the population timebomb and what this means for the future of mankind.
A bit of background on Philip Henley’s blog here …
The basic issue is this:
• For much of the history of mankind, the human population of Earth struggled to get much above 100,000 people.
• With the advent first of agriculture and then cities we started to grow in fits and starts. Improvements in agricultural technology meant that one man could feed hundreds instead just himself and his family. That meant that other people were freed up to specialise in non-farming activities, leading eventually to cities which rely on a large agricultural hinterland to supply themselves with food.
• We reached 1 billion people on this earth somewhere around 1804.
• It then took another 123 years to get to 2 billion in 1927.
• We hit 3 billion 33 years later in 1960, despite our best efforts to wipe out a large proportion of Europe in WW2.
• Roll on another 14 years and we hit 4 billion in 1974.
• Since then we have been adding another 1 billion population every 12-13 years.
• The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2100, the population of the world will be anywhere between 16 billion (high estimate) and 6 billion (low estimate).
Or, to put it another way, I am a few weekend beers away from my 50th birthday. Since I was born on 22 July 1964, the population of the world has more than doubled.
More statistics here:
The $64,000 question has to be: why is this happening, and more importantly what can or should we do about it? And when you think about it, that is a question that seems to be worth quite a bit more than £64,000. It may not be overly dramatic to say that the future of the human race could depend on how we deal with this.
We are in uncharted territory. Mankind has never had to deal with these levels of population before. We can’t look to other civilizations or past times to find a solution. We have never ever been in this situation before now.
How has this come about? There seem to be several factors – improving healthcare means that more children are surviving childbirth, better agriculture means that more people can be fed, better medicine means that we are living longer.
The net result is startling. In the early 20th century, the average world life expectancy was 31 years. It is now 67.2 years. The best place in the world to live is apparently Japan with an average life expectancy of 86 years. The worst place is Sierra Leone where the average is 47.5 years.
Let’s rewind the clock to 1911 – around 100 years ago. At that point, a man in the UK could expect to live for a shade under 50 years. The average is now around 79 years for men (and over 80 for women). By 2062, one estimate is that the average life expectancy in the UK would be 100 - except for Scotland (which may or may not be part of the UK). All those deep fried Mars bars and super-strength fighting lager, eh?
But what does it all mean?
The starting point for the UK at least is that we have a mounting public spending problem. When the average working man died in his fifties or sixties it did not cost the state much to pay his pension and for the National Health Service to look after him in his declining years. A high proportion of the population was in work paying for a relatively small number of elderly people. The welfare state was affordable.
But an increasingly elderly population needs to be looked after. If you retire at sixty and then live to be a hundred, you will draw pension for 40 years – possibly longer than you worked for. Healthcare also becomes much more expensive for the very old. One estimate is that it costs four times as much to care for a person in their 80s as a it does for a person in their 60s. Add to that the cost of care homes, and we can see that the state will have to pay an increasingly large public health bill.
This is one reason why the UK’s finances are currently in a poor state. We are borrowing more than £100 billion every year because we are not attracting enough income (in taxation) to pay for the cost of running the country. And the biggest costs by far are in social spend – education, healthcare and social services.
At this point, people tend to get distracted and say that the real problem is one or more of these:
• Europe
• MP’s pay and allowances, and similar scandals
• Fat cat salaries
• Inefficiencies in Government departments
• Spending on the armed forces
• Overseas aid
• Social security payments to the unemployed
• Social security payments to immigrants
In varying degrees, these all add to the cost of running the state. But the amounts involved are tiny compared to the social care budgets. These little issues make for good political footballs and newspaper scandals, but they are all small change in the grand scheme of things. That’s a subject for another time.
The only thing we need to know right now is that the big costs are all connected with looking after people. In 2013, the UK received £612 billion in taxes and spent £485 billion of this on social protection, health care and education.
If we continue on current trends, there will come a time when all of our spending is devoted to these areas of spend and nothing on anything else. That means no money for libraries, transport, environmental protection, police, defence, energy, building…
But then roll on the predictions a few years later and we will not have enough money in the state to look after our residents, even if we do nothing else.
The nightmare scenario looks something like this:
• We all live longer (hooray!)
• The state gets more and more bankrupt (boo!)
• Housing becomes more and more expensive because the elderly aren’t moving out of their homes to allow the next generation to move in.
• We all use more energy, depleting our stocks of fossil fuels more quickly.
• Meanwhile climate change leads to unpredictable weather patterns which leads to flooding, snow, tsunamis, earthquakes. We will struggle to deal with these because the state is bankrupt.
• War, pestilence, disease, the full end of the world apocalypse, but without the need for zombies. Or maybe we become the zombies?
Now you might think that the classic solution is to ask the elderly to pay for their own care. The problem with this is that up to now we have been telling these people that the state will look after them. Old folk will fiercely tell you that “I’ve paid my stamp”. It would take a very brave (aka foolish) politician to say otherwise.
I’ve got some good news (I think). The world is not about to end, although we are going to have to make some massive changes to the way that we live. And to understand that we next need to talk about road congestion - the subject that pays my mortgage until people buy my books in large enough quantities.
You see, there is a very similar worry about road congestion. It is what I like to call the gridlock myth. Politicians and economists will tell you that as we become more wealthy we buy more cars. We have more free time and more disposable wealth, so we use those cars more. Roads get busier until the point of congestion and ultimately gridlock. Nobody can move. We all find ourselves living in a non-stop traffic jam.
It’s a great theory. Many a politician has earned votes by tub thumping on this very theme. We must do something now otherwise we will have gridlock. And everybody nods sagely because avoiding gridlock sounds like a Very Good Thing.
Except that gridlock very rarely happens, and then only at certain times. Sure roads get busy, we all have awful journeys from time to time, but somehow it all keeps bumbling along. We never get to permanent gridlock, although we do certainly have it for some parts of some days.
I first noticed this when I was working with a team of traffic forecasting consultants. They carried out a computer forecast of the amount of traffic using one of the UK’s motorways. This forecast showed a nice linear growth in traffic. Each year the traffic levels grew as the population grew and people bought cars. Doh – well what else would you expect to happen?
But right at the end of the simulation the traffic model did something unexpected. Instead of the traffic continually growing it reached a point where it stopped increasing. It took several decades to reach that point, but eventually we arrived at a time when people were still buying more cars but they were not using them so much.
At first the traffic modellers couldn’t explain this. So I asked them to go back and investigate why the model was predicting this levelling off of traffic growth.
What they discovered was that the model was predicting people’s behaviour in extreme traffic conditions. When a road gets too busy, people stop using it.
That was more than 10 years ago. Since then I’ve found dozens of examples of the same thing. It seems that we never truly get to gridlock. As we get close to it the roads become borderline intolerable. At that point, people stop using them. They look for alternatives, which includes travelling at different times, car-sharing, using public transport and not making some journeys at all.
When our motorways are closed for repairs, you might think that the rest of the road network will grind to a halt. It doesn’t. People adjust. The 2012 Olympics didn’t cause traffic problems for London or the South East of England. People who didn’t want to watch the games stayed away.
The thing is that people are not wholly stupid. If a situation becomes intolerable they do something else. We are not frogs who can be boiled without realising it if the temperature is increased a little at a time. We are more sensible than that – although opinions vary on just how sensible we can be.
So what does the future hold for the earth given the trends towards hyper-population and climate change?
The answer, I think, is the same as for the gridlock myth. We will adjust our behaviours to suit the circumstances. The retirement age will increase so we all work longer. Health care will be rationed, which will incidentally slow down the increase in life expectancy. We will learn to adjust to lower levels of energy use. Extended families will come back together again and live under the same roof. That may be the only way that there will be someone to look after Granny, and also the only way that the young ‘uns can find somewhere to live. Granny exchanges board and lodging in her house in exchange for her children and grandchildren looking after her.
We will travel less, live in smaller homes, work and shop locally. This probably means a shift away from a society which produces goods and more towards a society which cares for its residents.
In short, the human race has been living well beyond our means for at least the last 100 years. Next comes not just a period of austerity, but an age of austerity. We will all need to learn how to live small, look after each other, use less fuel, build less, consume less, throw away less.
The 20th century may come to be seen as an age of excess – a jet age where we consumed resources and grew our population without heeding how much it costs. For the 21st century and beyond we will need to live within our resources.
It is time to switch off the jet engines and learn how to glide.
A bit of background on Philip Henley’s blog here …
The basic issue is this:
• For much of the history of mankind, the human population of Earth struggled to get much above 100,000 people.
• With the advent first of agriculture and then cities we started to grow in fits and starts. Improvements in agricultural technology meant that one man could feed hundreds instead just himself and his family. That meant that other people were freed up to specialise in non-farming activities, leading eventually to cities which rely on a large agricultural hinterland to supply themselves with food.
• We reached 1 billion people on this earth somewhere around 1804.
• It then took another 123 years to get to 2 billion in 1927.
• We hit 3 billion 33 years later in 1960, despite our best efforts to wipe out a large proportion of Europe in WW2.
• Roll on another 14 years and we hit 4 billion in 1974.
• Since then we have been adding another 1 billion population every 12-13 years.
• The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2100, the population of the world will be anywhere between 16 billion (high estimate) and 6 billion (low estimate).
Or, to put it another way, I am a few weekend beers away from my 50th birthday. Since I was born on 22 July 1964, the population of the world has more than doubled.
More statistics here:
The $64,000 question has to be: why is this happening, and more importantly what can or should we do about it? And when you think about it, that is a question that seems to be worth quite a bit more than £64,000. It may not be overly dramatic to say that the future of the human race could depend on how we deal with this.
We are in uncharted territory. Mankind has never had to deal with these levels of population before. We can’t look to other civilizations or past times to find a solution. We have never ever been in this situation before now.
How has this come about? There seem to be several factors – improving healthcare means that more children are surviving childbirth, better agriculture means that more people can be fed, better medicine means that we are living longer.
The net result is startling. In the early 20th century, the average world life expectancy was 31 years. It is now 67.2 years. The best place in the world to live is apparently Japan with an average life expectancy of 86 years. The worst place is Sierra Leone where the average is 47.5 years.
Let’s rewind the clock to 1911 – around 100 years ago. At that point, a man in the UK could expect to live for a shade under 50 years. The average is now around 79 years for men (and over 80 for women). By 2062, one estimate is that the average life expectancy in the UK would be 100 - except for Scotland (which may or may not be part of the UK). All those deep fried Mars bars and super-strength fighting lager, eh?
But what does it all mean?
The starting point for the UK at least is that we have a mounting public spending problem. When the average working man died in his fifties or sixties it did not cost the state much to pay his pension and for the National Health Service to look after him in his declining years. A high proportion of the population was in work paying for a relatively small number of elderly people. The welfare state was affordable.
But an increasingly elderly population needs to be looked after. If you retire at sixty and then live to be a hundred, you will draw pension for 40 years – possibly longer than you worked for. Healthcare also becomes much more expensive for the very old. One estimate is that it costs four times as much to care for a person in their 80s as a it does for a person in their 60s. Add to that the cost of care homes, and we can see that the state will have to pay an increasingly large public health bill.
This is one reason why the UK’s finances are currently in a poor state. We are borrowing more than £100 billion every year because we are not attracting enough income (in taxation) to pay for the cost of running the country. And the biggest costs by far are in social spend – education, healthcare and social services.
At this point, people tend to get distracted and say that the real problem is one or more of these:
• Europe
• MP’s pay and allowances, and similar scandals
• Fat cat salaries
• Inefficiencies in Government departments
• Spending on the armed forces
• Overseas aid
• Social security payments to the unemployed
• Social security payments to immigrants
In varying degrees, these all add to the cost of running the state. But the amounts involved are tiny compared to the social care budgets. These little issues make for good political footballs and newspaper scandals, but they are all small change in the grand scheme of things. That’s a subject for another time.
The only thing we need to know right now is that the big costs are all connected with looking after people. In 2013, the UK received £612 billion in taxes and spent £485 billion of this on social protection, health care and education.
If we continue on current trends, there will come a time when all of our spending is devoted to these areas of spend and nothing on anything else. That means no money for libraries, transport, environmental protection, police, defence, energy, building…
But then roll on the predictions a few years later and we will not have enough money in the state to look after our residents, even if we do nothing else.
The nightmare scenario looks something like this:
• We all live longer (hooray!)
• The state gets more and more bankrupt (boo!)
• Housing becomes more and more expensive because the elderly aren’t moving out of their homes to allow the next generation to move in.
• We all use more energy, depleting our stocks of fossil fuels more quickly.
• Meanwhile climate change leads to unpredictable weather patterns which leads to flooding, snow, tsunamis, earthquakes. We will struggle to deal with these because the state is bankrupt.
• War, pestilence, disease, the full end of the world apocalypse, but without the need for zombies. Or maybe we become the zombies?
Now you might think that the classic solution is to ask the elderly to pay for their own care. The problem with this is that up to now we have been telling these people that the state will look after them. Old folk will fiercely tell you that “I’ve paid my stamp”. It would take a very brave (aka foolish) politician to say otherwise.
I’ve got some good news (I think). The world is not about to end, although we are going to have to make some massive changes to the way that we live. And to understand that we next need to talk about road congestion - the subject that pays my mortgage until people buy my books in large enough quantities.
You see, there is a very similar worry about road congestion. It is what I like to call the gridlock myth. Politicians and economists will tell you that as we become more wealthy we buy more cars. We have more free time and more disposable wealth, so we use those cars more. Roads get busier until the point of congestion and ultimately gridlock. Nobody can move. We all find ourselves living in a non-stop traffic jam.
It’s a great theory. Many a politician has earned votes by tub thumping on this very theme. We must do something now otherwise we will have gridlock. And everybody nods sagely because avoiding gridlock sounds like a Very Good Thing.
Except that gridlock very rarely happens, and then only at certain times. Sure roads get busy, we all have awful journeys from time to time, but somehow it all keeps bumbling along. We never get to permanent gridlock, although we do certainly have it for some parts of some days.
I first noticed this when I was working with a team of traffic forecasting consultants. They carried out a computer forecast of the amount of traffic using one of the UK’s motorways. This forecast showed a nice linear growth in traffic. Each year the traffic levels grew as the population grew and people bought cars. Doh – well what else would you expect to happen?
But right at the end of the simulation the traffic model did something unexpected. Instead of the traffic continually growing it reached a point where it stopped increasing. It took several decades to reach that point, but eventually we arrived at a time when people were still buying more cars but they were not using them so much.
At first the traffic modellers couldn’t explain this. So I asked them to go back and investigate why the model was predicting this levelling off of traffic growth.
What they discovered was that the model was predicting people’s behaviour in extreme traffic conditions. When a road gets too busy, people stop using it.
That was more than 10 years ago. Since then I’ve found dozens of examples of the same thing. It seems that we never truly get to gridlock. As we get close to it the roads become borderline intolerable. At that point, people stop using them. They look for alternatives, which includes travelling at different times, car-sharing, using public transport and not making some journeys at all.
When our motorways are closed for repairs, you might think that the rest of the road network will grind to a halt. It doesn’t. People adjust. The 2012 Olympics didn’t cause traffic problems for London or the South East of England. People who didn’t want to watch the games stayed away.
The thing is that people are not wholly stupid. If a situation becomes intolerable they do something else. We are not frogs who can be boiled without realising it if the temperature is increased a little at a time. We are more sensible than that – although opinions vary on just how sensible we can be.
So what does the future hold for the earth given the trends towards hyper-population and climate change?
The answer, I think, is the same as for the gridlock myth. We will adjust our behaviours to suit the circumstances. The retirement age will increase so we all work longer. Health care will be rationed, which will incidentally slow down the increase in life expectancy. We will learn to adjust to lower levels of energy use. Extended families will come back together again and live under the same roof. That may be the only way that there will be someone to look after Granny, and also the only way that the young ‘uns can find somewhere to live. Granny exchanges board and lodging in her house in exchange for her children and grandchildren looking after her.
We will travel less, live in smaller homes, work and shop locally. This probably means a shift away from a society which produces goods and more towards a society which cares for its residents.
In short, the human race has been living well beyond our means for at least the last 100 years. Next comes not just a period of austerity, but an age of austerity. We will all need to learn how to live small, look after each other, use less fuel, build less, consume less, throw away less.
The 20th century may come to be seen as an age of excess – a jet age where we consumed resources and grew our population without heeding how much it costs. For the 21st century and beyond we will need to live within our resources.
It is time to switch off the jet engines and learn how to glide.
April 30, 2014
Coming soon
This one is to answer a question from Donna. What am I working on next...?
I have three books at different stages of development. The next to be published is "Global Domination for beginners" - a light-hearted comedy about the real meaning of democracy. What would happen if the megalomaniac bad guy in a spy story somehow managed to win? What if James Bond or Jason Bourne or Spiderman wasn't able to stop the Dr Evil character, and he really did take over the world?
Would that really be such a bad thing? Perhaps this megalomaniac would make a better job of it than the current Governments?
But that wouldn't be democratic, would it? And democracy is supposed to be a fundamental right, an unashamed "good thing". Could we accept a world ruled by a benign dictator?
"Global domination for beginners" is fully written and my wife is currently proof-reading it. We are aiming for 20 June as a publication date.
While that book is going through the I-dotting and t-crossing phase, I'm working on my first non-comic novel. It's a mixture of science fiction and fantasy without the Tolkieny bits. The novel is set in an artificial world which the inhabitants don't realise is artificial.
That book (working title "The Dark at the edge of the world") is about utopia versus dystopia and freedom versus rules. The inhabitants have to unravel the puzzle of what their world is, without having any frame of reference to guide them. It's all they know.
This book will probably come out towards the end of the year. I'm about a third of the way through the first draft.
The third book is a bit more niche. It's a chess book looking at games played between very strong players and rank amateurs. I have a theory that these games (which are not often written about) are actually very instructional.
Already published is "Love, Death and Tea" - a non-gory zombie love story and comedy. If I had known how many other zombie books there were I would probably have chosen a different anti-hero. But I think it stands up as a comedy in its own right.
... and "Once upon a chess game". Mad chess and humour. But again probably a bit niche for most folk.
I have three books at different stages of development. The next to be published is "Global Domination for beginners" - a light-hearted comedy about the real meaning of democracy. What would happen if the megalomaniac bad guy in a spy story somehow managed to win? What if James Bond or Jason Bourne or Spiderman wasn't able to stop the Dr Evil character, and he really did take over the world?
Would that really be such a bad thing? Perhaps this megalomaniac would make a better job of it than the current Governments?
But that wouldn't be democratic, would it? And democracy is supposed to be a fundamental right, an unashamed "good thing". Could we accept a world ruled by a benign dictator?
"Global domination for beginners" is fully written and my wife is currently proof-reading it. We are aiming for 20 June as a publication date.
While that book is going through the I-dotting and t-crossing phase, I'm working on my first non-comic novel. It's a mixture of science fiction and fantasy without the Tolkieny bits. The novel is set in an artificial world which the inhabitants don't realise is artificial.
That book (working title "The Dark at the edge of the world") is about utopia versus dystopia and freedom versus rules. The inhabitants have to unravel the puzzle of what their world is, without having any frame of reference to guide them. It's all they know.
This book will probably come out towards the end of the year. I'm about a third of the way through the first draft.
The third book is a bit more niche. It's a chess book looking at games played between very strong players and rank amateurs. I have a theory that these games (which are not often written about) are actually very instructional.
Already published is "Love, Death and Tea" - a non-gory zombie love story and comedy. If I had known how many other zombie books there were I would probably have chosen a different anti-hero. But I think it stands up as a comedy in its own right.
... and "Once upon a chess game". Mad chess and humour. But again probably a bit niche for most folk.
April 23, 2014
Building, building
It's a whole six months since I started this new adventure. No longer a wage slave, I'm now an independent consultant with the freedom and permission to write more often.
It's not been quite how I expected it...
The consultancy work turned out to be working more or less full time for one client. Which has felt more like being a salaryman than a freelancer. The extra free time I had hoped for hasn't really materialised. I've been working long hours to get a major project finished.
But there are compensations, and I'm starting to realise that they are substantial. I now work from home, which means a settled environment, the support of the best wife in the world, an infinite supply of good coffee and my choice of music.
With one or two exceptions, I get to choose how each day goes. Consultancy work or writing? A day off or nose to the grindstone? Work on Sunday and shop on Monday?
The difficult bit has been learning how to publicise my writing. I'm naturally shy and modest, so it doesn't come naturally to promote my books. But there is little choice. I've done a tiny bit of publicity for my chess book - and it's sold nearly four times as many copies as Love, Death and Tea, which I haven't publicised at all.
So the adventure continues. No big breakthroughs, but it's progressing nicely. Building.
It's not been quite how I expected it...
The consultancy work turned out to be working more or less full time for one client. Which has felt more like being a salaryman than a freelancer. The extra free time I had hoped for hasn't really materialised. I've been working long hours to get a major project finished.
But there are compensations, and I'm starting to realise that they are substantial. I now work from home, which means a settled environment, the support of the best wife in the world, an infinite supply of good coffee and my choice of music.
With one or two exceptions, I get to choose how each day goes. Consultancy work or writing? A day off or nose to the grindstone? Work on Sunday and shop on Monday?
The difficult bit has been learning how to publicise my writing. I'm naturally shy and modest, so it doesn't come naturally to promote my books. But there is little choice. I've done a tiny bit of publicity for my chess book - and it's sold nearly four times as many copies as Love, Death and Tea, which I haven't publicised at all.
So the adventure continues. No big breakthroughs, but it's progressing nicely. Building.
November 16, 2013
Doing the business
It has been a strange week - my first week as a self-employed consultant.
In many ways, the work has been easy. I'm finally able to concentrate on my core knowledge and a single focussed project rather than spreading myself thinly as a senior manager. For the first time in a long time I feel sharp and incisive, instead of trying to cover a thousand diverse problems. It seems that I have morphed into a brain surgeon with a scalpel instead of an octopus with a Swiss arm knife in each arm.
The weirder bit is the marketing side of the work. It's a bit like writing. You fondly imagine that a writer's life is about the business of putting words on a page, living either in an artists' garret in Paris or in a hi-tech mansion with only a word processor for company.
The reality is that the writing ... or the consultancy work ... is only a part of the job. You also need to promote yourself, find customers, build an audience.
And that is why I've just spent the last couple of hours designing and printing business cards. I've had business cards for decades, but this is the first time that I have been responsible for designing them. Would I like a fancy picture, a pithy quotation, a splash of colour? Too little design and it looks plain and boring. Too much and it would seem over-fussy.
Fiddle with font sizes, preview different designs, type in my details and through the miracle of technology the inkjet printer churns out an impressive sheet of cards.
I distinctly remember the first time I ever encountered the idea of a business card. As a very young boy, I was watching the very first James Bond film, Dr No. In almost the first scene - and before we've met "Bond, James Bond" - an agent from MI5 enters a casino. He presents his card to a flunkey asking him to present it to B, JB. And when B,JB reads the card he instantly knows that he is needed back at the office for some exciting mission.
At the tender age of not very much, that made a huge impression on me. What it must feel like to live in a world of business cards, foreign travel and Walther PPK's in shoulder holsters! Funnily enough, the casino did not impress me as much as the business card. Well, they were only playing cards, weren't they? I'd done that lots of time, admittedly not whilst wearing a dinner jacket or a strapless dress with no obvious means of support.
There was a time when my first business card meant seniority. It was a little pat on the back to say that I'd risen through the ranks sufficiently well in order to have a degree of importance.
Now the business card has a different meaning. It whispers "you're on your own this time". I will only have myself to blame if I make a mess of this ... and likewise only myself to pat on the back if I am successful.
And that scares and exhilarates in equal measure.
The shame of it is that I've had no time for writing in the past week. All my energies have been devoted to the consultancy, the project and little bits of marketing like those business cards.
The third book "Global domination for beginners" is still waiting for Hilary to proof read. There's the fourth book to start and the first two to promote. Not to mention the books I've set aside to read and review on goodreads, the chess world championship to follow, the flat battery on the sports car ...
In many ways, the work has been easy. I'm finally able to concentrate on my core knowledge and a single focussed project rather than spreading myself thinly as a senior manager. For the first time in a long time I feel sharp and incisive, instead of trying to cover a thousand diverse problems. It seems that I have morphed into a brain surgeon with a scalpel instead of an octopus with a Swiss arm knife in each arm.
The weirder bit is the marketing side of the work. It's a bit like writing. You fondly imagine that a writer's life is about the business of putting words on a page, living either in an artists' garret in Paris or in a hi-tech mansion with only a word processor for company.
The reality is that the writing ... or the consultancy work ... is only a part of the job. You also need to promote yourself, find customers, build an audience.
And that is why I've just spent the last couple of hours designing and printing business cards. I've had business cards for decades, but this is the first time that I have been responsible for designing them. Would I like a fancy picture, a pithy quotation, a splash of colour? Too little design and it looks plain and boring. Too much and it would seem over-fussy.
Fiddle with font sizes, preview different designs, type in my details and through the miracle of technology the inkjet printer churns out an impressive sheet of cards.
I distinctly remember the first time I ever encountered the idea of a business card. As a very young boy, I was watching the very first James Bond film, Dr No. In almost the first scene - and before we've met "Bond, James Bond" - an agent from MI5 enters a casino. He presents his card to a flunkey asking him to present it to B, JB. And when B,JB reads the card he instantly knows that he is needed back at the office for some exciting mission.
At the tender age of not very much, that made a huge impression on me. What it must feel like to live in a world of business cards, foreign travel and Walther PPK's in shoulder holsters! Funnily enough, the casino did not impress me as much as the business card. Well, they were only playing cards, weren't they? I'd done that lots of time, admittedly not whilst wearing a dinner jacket or a strapless dress with no obvious means of support.
There was a time when my first business card meant seniority. It was a little pat on the back to say that I'd risen through the ranks sufficiently well in order to have a degree of importance.
Now the business card has a different meaning. It whispers "you're on your own this time". I will only have myself to blame if I make a mess of this ... and likewise only myself to pat on the back if I am successful.
And that scares and exhilarates in equal measure.
The shame of it is that I've had no time for writing in the past week. All my energies have been devoted to the consultancy, the project and little bits of marketing like those business cards.
The third book "Global domination for beginners" is still waiting for Hilary to proof read. There's the fourth book to start and the first two to promote. Not to mention the books I've set aside to read and review on goodreads, the chess world championship to follow, the flat battery on the sports car ...
November 9, 2013
Gulp!
Well, that's that. I've handed back my IT equipment, said my last farewells, surrendered my beloved blackberry, given up the parking space. Elvis has left the building and Will Once (in his alter ego as Salaryman) has left the office.
As of today, I am officially self-employed as a freelance consultant.
How does it feel? Mixed. There's a warm front of excitement and energy sweeping up from the South, and a cold front of nervousness and worry bringing in icier blasts from the Arctic. This may be the craziest thing I've ever done, the best thing, or simply an interim thing until a new Salaryman role comes by.
It's the little things that take you by surprise. Like realising that you can take a holiday whenever you want and for as long as you want, with the proviso that you don't get paid while you are not working.
Ditto for sick leave. Man flu has suddenly become expensive where it used to be merely embarrassing and annoying.
Then again, on the positive side it now means that there are seven earning days in the week and not five.
Thousands of people have done what I'm doing. If they can do it, so can I. And I'll keep on saying that in the darker moments when self doubt starts to creep in.
Maybe it's the new paradigm for work. We no longer have a job for life working for one organisation. Instead we live in multiple partitions, balancing paid work across several employers, plus hobby (which may or may not pay), plus voluntary work.
Interesting times. My wife and I have just had a business meeting together - our first as a new partnership. It was a meeting which started with all of the participants in the same bed and ended with coffee and shortbread biscuits at the kitchen table.
It was also the first meeting in my life where I was able to pat my business partner/PA/ head of finance on the bottom and we concluded the business with a hug.
Maybe if Salaryman's meetings had all been like that, I would not have wanted to leave?
As of today, I am officially self-employed as a freelance consultant.
How does it feel? Mixed. There's a warm front of excitement and energy sweeping up from the South, and a cold front of nervousness and worry bringing in icier blasts from the Arctic. This may be the craziest thing I've ever done, the best thing, or simply an interim thing until a new Salaryman role comes by.
It's the little things that take you by surprise. Like realising that you can take a holiday whenever you want and for as long as you want, with the proviso that you don't get paid while you are not working.
Ditto for sick leave. Man flu has suddenly become expensive where it used to be merely embarrassing and annoying.
Then again, on the positive side it now means that there are seven earning days in the week and not five.
Thousands of people have done what I'm doing. If they can do it, so can I. And I'll keep on saying that in the darker moments when self doubt starts to creep in.
Maybe it's the new paradigm for work. We no longer have a job for life working for one organisation. Instead we live in multiple partitions, balancing paid work across several employers, plus hobby (which may or may not pay), plus voluntary work.
Interesting times. My wife and I have just had a business meeting together - our first as a new partnership. It was a meeting which started with all of the participants in the same bed and ended with coffee and shortbread biscuits at the kitchen table.
It was also the first meeting in my life where I was able to pat my business partner/PA/ head of finance on the bottom and we concluded the business with a hug.
Maybe if Salaryman's meetings had all been like that, I would not have wanted to leave?
November 4, 2013
Uncertainty
It's an odd time. I'm in the middle of changing jobs - or, more accurately, I am about to leave one job with an uncertain future ahead of me.
My current employer is downsizing, so I have taken the bold/foolish decision of taking a severance package with the idea that I will either get another permanent job or start my own consultancy, mixed in with spending more time writing.
It is quite possibly the biggest gamble I have ever taken. It could pay off handsomely or I could end up with egg on my face.
All of this uncertainty is making it difficult to write at the moment. It is hard to be creative when you are not sure how you are going to pay the mortgage.
Right now it feels like the right thing to do. I only hope I still think that way in a few months' time...
My current employer is downsizing, so I have taken the bold/foolish decision of taking a severance package with the idea that I will either get another permanent job or start my own consultancy, mixed in with spending more time writing.
It is quite possibly the biggest gamble I have ever taken. It could pay off handsomely or I could end up with egg on my face.
All of this uncertainty is making it difficult to write at the moment. It is hard to be creative when you are not sure how you are going to pay the mortgage.
Right now it feels like the right thing to do. I only hope I still think that way in a few months' time...
November 3, 2013
Beta fun
As Forrest Gump said "life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."
Giving a book to a beta reader is a bit like that. You never know what you're gonna get. Like my wife pointing out that an Italian character wouldn't eat chicken pie. Or that a particular comic character can't make his mind up whether is accent is Scottish or pirate or Brian Blessed on aceeed.
So I am having a delightful day working my way through the latest book "global domination for beginners", responding to a page full of comments.
Mind you, it's considerably happier than book one where her first comment was "Zombies! Yuck! I don't like horror stories..."
Giving a book to a beta reader is a bit like that. You never know what you're gonna get. Like my wife pointing out that an Italian character wouldn't eat chicken pie. Or that a particular comic character can't make his mind up whether is accent is Scottish or pirate or Brian Blessed on aceeed.
So I am having a delightful day working my way through the latest book "global domination for beginners", responding to a page full of comments.
Mind you, it's considerably happier than book one where her first comment was "Zombies! Yuck! I don't like horror stories..."
October 31, 2013
My first blog
Interesting times! I don't know whether to be excited or frightened or both.
In the past month we have published book number 2 - "Once upon a Chess Games". We are starting to market that book much more heavily than we did with book 1.
Actually, that's not quite true. We haven't marketed book 1 at all so any promotion of book two will be more than nothing.
That is something that we are going to address, with promotion for both of them.
Meanwhile, book #3 "Global domination for beginners" is in beta. We are aiming for a publication towards the end of November.
The more frightening bit is that it looks as if I will be parting company with my paid job. Uncertain times ahead.
In the past month we have published book number 2 - "Once upon a Chess Games". We are starting to market that book much more heavily than we did with book 1.
Actually, that's not quite true. We haven't marketed book 1 at all so any promotion of book two will be more than nothing.
That is something that we are going to address, with promotion for both of them.
Meanwhile, book #3 "Global domination for beginners" is in beta. We are aiming for a publication towards the end of November.
The more frightening bit is that it looks as if I will be parting company with my paid job. Uncertain times ahead.
