Robert Cubitt's Blog

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage." Matthew 2: 1-2

Caspar sat beside his camp fire and offered up his hands to its warmth. He had travelled far but soon his journey would be ended. A noise made him sit upright, alert and ready. He reached for his stout staff and gripped it tightly.

“Caspar, you old goat. Mind if I join you by your fire?”

Caspar looked around as his name was called, peering into the darkness. At last he made out a figure, leading a camel by its rope.

“Melchior. Old goat yourself. I should have known that thing would attract your attention.” He gestured towards the bright object that illuminated the night sky. “Come and be welcome. Do you have food or wine?”

“Plenty of both, and I’ll share them willingly in exchange for the use of your fire and your company for the night.”

As the new arrival settled his camel for the night and took his seat next to the warming blaze Caspar re-started the conversation.

“What do you think it is, that bright object?”

“A new star, perhaps. It is surely a sign.”

“It is a comet.” A fresh voice echoed out of the darkness.

“I know that voice.” Melchior barked out a laugh. “Balthasar, were you following me?”

“Not so much following as going the same way.”

“Come, friend Balthasar, sit with us.” Caspar beckoned him forward.

“And you, too, may share in what food I have.” Melchior added.

“No, let me contribute. I don’t have much, just some dates and a stale loaf of bread, but it will add to your feast.”

“So, friend Balthasar.” Caspar was anxious to ask a question. “What is this thing, this comet?”

“It is something we have seen before, though not in this lifetime. There are descriptions in the books of knowledge. You can tell it’s a comet by the tail that follows it. Its coming is a sign of great portent.”

“So what is the difference between a star and a comet?” Asked Caspar, tearing a lump off of a loaf of bread.

“The only difference I have seen is that the comet moves through the firmament but the stars stay more or less constant. No one knows more than that.”

“Does this comet have a name?”

“I was thinking of calling it Bailey’s Comet. It seems to fit with the season. I have some in my bag if you would like a sip.”

Caspar and Melchior laughed at their friend’s joke as they passed the bottle around.

“So what is this comet made of?” Melchior asked, his interest piqued.

“I have no idea. We would need to send some craft up there to find out.”

They all laughed at this new ribaldry. Send a craft into the sky to find out what a comet was made of, indeed. Such an implausible act.

“Where do you think it will lead us?”

Balthasar answered. “Bethlehem, I have no doubt. I passed through Jerusalem on my way here. The temple scholars are abuzz with gossip. They say that the star, sorry, comet is a symbol of the birth of the Messiah who will lead the Jews to freedom.”

“The Jews breed Messiah’s by the dozen. Or so it is said.” Melchior commented.

“True, but King Herod takes it seriously. He commanded me to find the child and return to him with news of its location, so that he may go to worship.”

“King Herod will do many things, I’m sure, but worship the arrival of the Messiah isn’t one of them.” Melchior counselled. “I advise you to return home by a different route and give Jerusalem a wide birth.”

“Why he didn’t just have you followed I don’t know.” Caspar grunted. “He might even have offered you an escort to protect you from bandits.”

“I’d be more worried by Romans than bandits.” Balthasar commented dryly as he patted the hefty Arabian scimitar that he had laid on the ground beside him.

Together they chanted “What did the Romans ever do for us?” then laughed so much they nearly choked on their food. The bottle did another circuit.

“So how’s the Magi business treating you two?” Caspar asked his companions.

“Rubbish.” Melchior answered for them both. “How can you make any money out of being a wise man when the internet can answer any question almost instantly.”

To read the rest of this short story please visit my website http://robertcubitt.com/bobs-blog.html If you read this after 27th December 2014 please look in the December 2014 archive. May I wish a Merry Christmas to my reader.

Chapter One
Death crept into Pakistani airspace at the relatively slow speed of 170 knots. From the ground far below it was invisible to the naked eye. So small was it in comparison to its height that it didn’t even cast a shadow on the sides of the mountains.

In the air conditioned control room at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, Captain Cory Duncan of the United States Air Force checked the position of his aircraft.

“OK guys, we are now in Pakistan air space.” He flicked his radio switch. “Achilles One Zero this is Catcher Five. What is the status of hostile aircraft?”

“Achilles One Zero, we have six PAF aircraft in the air at present. We classify them as two pairs of Chengdu Sevens and one pair of Mirage Threes. All are deployed along the frontiers with Kashmir and India. No hostile aircraft in your sector.” The radar operator of the E3 Sentry aircraft, flying high above the Indian Ocean, signed off with a cheery ‘“Have a nice day”‘.

“OK guys, we have 400 miles to target. No hostiles in the area.” At the current cruising speed of their aircraft it would take more than two hours to reach the target.

The mission specialist sitting at the next console raised his head. “We are under radar surveillance, but no missile signatures at present.”

Their General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper RPV would show up brightly on the Pakistani air defence radar systems, and no doubt half a world away a radar operator was tracking their 170 knot progress across his airspace. It was well within the capability of the Pakistani Air Force to locate and destroy a Reaper, but for reasons best known to themselves they had never tried. They raised merry hell every time a mission such as this was carried out, but never raised a finger to stop them. In the meantime mission Catcher Five flew on towards its target at 50,000 feet.

* * *

In the far off city of Abbottabad in North West Pakistan a man settled himself onto a roof to carry out his part of the Catcher Five mission. He was born in Pakistan and regarded himself as a Pakistani patriot, but his wages had been paid by the United States of America ever since he had returned home from his short trip to that country.
In this town the leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist movement had been tracked down and killed by U.S. Navy Seals. Now it was his mission to bring about the end of another enemy of Uncle Sam and, as far as he was concerned, an enemy of his own country.

From his battered rucksack the man pulled out a metal clad attaché case. Opening it he withdrew a rectangular object from its foam rubber packing. It was painted in a camouflaged pattern and had an aperture at one end housing a lens. He laid it gently on the parapet of the roof and took out the other object in the case, a collapsible tripod. The tripod was screwed into the base of the device, the legs were extended then the whole assembly set down carefully behind the waste high wall that surrounded the roof. On hot nights people slept up here and it wouldn’t do for a sleepy child to fall over the edge of the roof.

The man sighted along the device and lined it up carefully on the house that was providing temporary accommodation for the second in command of the Taliban in North West Pakistan.

A check on his watch showed it was still a long time to go before the aircraft would be in range. No point in wasting valuable battery life by switching the device on too early.

* * *

Trying to overcome his boredom Cory remembered back to when he had joined the United States Air Force and had imagined himself screaming across the skies in a jet fighter, dog fighting with whatever enemies Uncle Sam asked him to fight. For a while that is what he had done, flying F17s in Germany and then South Korea, though he had never been engaged in a dog fight. On 20th March 2003, Cory had flown his F17 into Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was disappointed when the Iraqi air force refused to take to the skies to fight him and his comrades.

Now he was posted to 432nd Fighter Wing at Creech, and wore his flight suit only as a way of distinguishing himself from the ground staff at the base. The aircraft he flew was controlled by signals bounced off satellites while he sat at a console in Nevada and the Reaper was high above the mountains and plains of Afghanistan and Pakistan and, more rarely, Iran.

This mission had started out as a routine tasking to detect the incursion of terrorists along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. It was a search and destroy mission, and they were ‘weapons free’ to engage any hostile targets they encountered. About an hour into the mission they had been re-tasked to this new operation, a missile attack on a house in a city a third of the world away.

“OK, target is confirmed at location.” The intelligence analyst announced, looking up from his computer screen.
“What is our target?” Cory asked out of curiosity.

“A house.” The analyst replied.

“No shit Sherlock. That’s so helpful.”

Staff Sgt Willy Westheimer blushed in acknowledgement of his gaff. “Sorry, Sir. It’s a senior figure in the Taliban, that’s all they’ve told me.”

It was the job of the intelligence analyst, the third member of the Reaper flight team, to confirm the nature of the target before they released any weapons. It was his responsibility to decide if they were the enemy or just a bunch of kids on their way to school. In this case, however, he wouldn’t even see the human target, so this time he wouldn’t be responsible for identifying him when the time came. That was the responsibility of a man risking his life on the ground in Pakistan.

Time ticked by and the crew chatted to relieve the boredom. An imaginary line in the sky was finally passed and Lieutenant ‘Ace’ Vincent, the weapons specialist, announced that Catcher Five was within range to begin the attack sequence.

“Taking us down to attack height.” Cory pushed forward the joystick mounted on the arm of his leather chair. It was hardly any different from that used to control a games console. In the sky above Pakistan the Reaper’s nose dropped and the aircraft began to descend to 20,000 feet.

* * *

On the sweltering roof in Pakistan the man checked his watch again. The mobile phone in his hand vibrated to indicate that a text message had been received. The message contained only one word, the code word for the mission to proceed.
The man flicked a switch on the side of the rectangular object, then sighted along it again. Half a mile away a miniscule green dot appeared on the side wall of a house.

* * *

“We have laser lock.” ‘Ace’ informed the team. Like Duncan he had joined the Air Force to fly in fast jets, but now flew a technology driven operating console instead. Still, it wasn’t too much of a hard life, playing computer games at Uncle Sam’s expense, and just down the road was the city of Las Vegas. For a gambling man like ‘Ace’ that could only be good news. Meanwhile, the Raytheon sensor systems aboard the Reaper had picked up the electromagnetic signature of laser light being reflected from the target, which was all that ‘Ace’ needed to carry the mission through to its conclusion.

* * *

The man turned as he heard voices approaching up the stairs that led to the roof. The house was supposed to be empty, and he had paid hard American dollars for it to be so. The door at the top of the stairs was jammed shut from the outside, a stout chair wedged under the handle, but if someone wanted to gain access to the roof it wouldn’t take much effort. The voices faded and the man relaxed a little. The tiny nudge of his foot against the tripod that held the laser target designator went unnoticed. Over the half mile space between the roof and the target the tiny angle of error was magnified so that it now shone its slender beam not on the original house, but on a very similar one a few metres further along the street.

* * *

“I have visual.” Ace called, informing his pilot that the on-board camera had aligned itself to the source of the laser reflections and was now providing a visual feed to them. The TV screen showed an oblique angle view of a typical concrete and cinder block building arranged in a square around a central courtyard. The same pictures were being viewed in an operations room on the other side of the country, just outside Washington DC. There were no people visible in the house, even when Ace zoomed the camera to get a close up. In the heat of the day all sensible Pakistanis sought the cooler interiors of their homes or workplaces. The lucky ones would have air-conditioning, but a lack of vents on the exterior walls suggested that this house wasn’t that lucky.

“Visual identification confirms target. You are weapons free.” Willy announced as his computer screen displayed a fresh message. “I repeat, you are weapons free.”

Raising the safety guard Ace pressed the weapon release button. “Missile launched.” He stated flatly, as though they were engaged in a practice drill rather than actual warfare.
It took 1.2 seconds for the electronic command to reach the Reaper and release the missile carried on one of its external stores pylons. The AGM-114 Hellfire missile streaked away under the power of its solid fuel rocket. The aircraft lurched slightly as it reacted to the sudden loss of the 100lb weight.
The missile’s electronic brain adjusted the angle of attack as it responded to the laser signal that originated on the ground and the missile powered the final 2 miles to its target. Dropping from 20,000 feet it hardly needed the power of its rocket, which only served to speed its descent. The sonic boom created as it broke the sound barrier wouldn’t be heard above the blast of its explosion.

* * *

Youssef left the Madrassa at the end of his school day and headed for his father’s house. He felt quite elated; his tutor had just told him that he was making good progress in his studies. It would soon be time for him to start repaying some of the cost of his education by teaching English to the younger students.

It was about a mile from the school to his home and the heat made him uncomfortable. He hadn’t yet become acclimatised. When his parents had returned to Pakistan to manage the building they had inherited from Youssef’s Grandfather the boy had remained behind in Britain to finish his education. Now that he was here he was finding it difficult to adapt to some features of his new home.

Keeping to the shade the man on the roof went unnoticed by Youssef, as did the laser designator that directed its needle thin beam across the rooftops of the quiet suburb. The sun glinted off the Reaper’s wing as it went into a turn to maintain its position, but that too went unnoticed.

* * *

“Target destroyed” announced ‘Ace’, as the view at the centre of his TV screen disappeared in a bright flash of light. As the burst subsided the TV screen showed a cloud of dust and flying debris. The blast of the metal augmented 18lb explosive charge had left only one wall standing. Along the street debris crashed to the ground, risking the lives of anyone in the open at that moment. In a richer country glass would have shattered, but here there was no need of it and little money to pay for it even if there had been a need.

“Taking us home.” Cory announced. By home he meant back into Afghan airspace. Their mission to Pakistan might be complete, but their patrol still had several hours to run. He pulled the joystick backwards and to the right and the aircraft at once climbed and reversed its course. With the Reaper capable of staying aloft for up to 42 hours it wouldn’t be them that landed the aircraft back at Bagram Air Base.

* * *

On the roof the man stared aghast as the dust cloud cleared to reveal that the wrong house had been destroyed. His ears were still recovering from the blast of the detonation, so it was some minutes before the noise of panic in the streets reached him. Running men, some of them armed, drew his attention. Rats leaving the sinking ship.

The man returned his gaze to the place where a house had once stood. He hoped that it was unoccupied, but knew in his heart it was unlikely to be so. Women and children had been observed at that house and any hope for them was already lost. He offered up a fervent prayer for their souls, then dismantled his equipment. A few minutes later a text message was on its way to Islamabad, telling of the terrible mistake that had been made.

Turning his back he didn’t see the drama unfolding at the stricken house. A young man being physically restrained from throwing himself into the wreckage to search for survivors. It was a sensible precaution as the last remaining wall of the house collapsed inwards into the space the man had been heading for.

* * *

Youssef felt the blast before he heard it, the vibration travelling through the earth in a straight line as the sound bounced and ricocheted off the walls of the buildings to assault his ears a split second later. Smoke and dust rose in a plume. He had been in Abbottabad long enough to have a good sense of the source of the plume. His eyes opened wide in fear and he started to run. The heat of the day no longer mattered as he built up his stride to his full bowling pace and then beyond. He bounced off walls as he refused to slow down to round corners.

As he rounded the final obstacle between himself and his father’s house he was left in no doubt. Where there had once been a happy home where he had lived for the past several weeks. Now there was just a heap of rubble, the dust settling back onto it. He howled in anguish at the loss of his family. He continued his headlong run towards the rubble, desperate to start searching for survivors. Surely someone must be alive. There was no time to waste.
Strong hands grabbed at him, the first few slipping off as his weight and speed carried him forward. But they slowed him enough and other hands completed the job, holding him back. He was forced almost to the ground and pinned in place.
“No brother. It isn’t safe. You’ll get yourself killed.” Youssef heard the words but his brain refused to comprehend their meaning.

“My Father. My Mother. The children. I must help them.” The men struggled to restrain him.

“No, brother. They are beyond your help now. Let Allah take them.”
Youssef collapsed onto his knees, his body wracked with sobs, his laboured breathing combining into wheezing gasps. Satisfied that he wouldn’t attempt to approach the wreckage of the house again, the men relaxed their grip. Sirens indicated the approach of rescue vehicles and they moved out of the way, anxious not to become casualties themselves. Youssef reluctantly went with them.

A lone man approached the distraught Youssef and he felt something hard bang into his side. He registered the presence of a weapon. They weren’t unusual in this part of Pakistan, but he wasn’t used to seeing them in this quiet neighbourhood.

“After you have buried your family, look for me outside the mosque.” The man said, then turned and walked away. Youssef saw him climb into the front of a pick-up truck that already held half a dozen other armed passengers in its cargo space. As the rescue vehicles arrived the pick-up drove away at a pace that wouldn’t attract attention.

Author's note: I hope you enjoyed this short extract from my latest book. If you would like to read on then please visit my website http://robertcubitt.com/books to find out how to buy a copy.

With my latest book about to be launched, my publisher and I were discussing how to promote it more effectively. When I tell you that my publishers are so small that their Christmas party is held in a dog kennel, you will understand that they don’t have much of a marketing budget. So eventually our discussion strayed to the subject of reviews.

Reviews are important to the author. People buy books because other people recommend them. The majority of the books I have bought this year were recommended to me by other people, either directly or through the review sections of retail websites such as Amazon.

Log in to Amazon and there is the welcome and the link to ‘recommended for you’. So I scroll through the recommendations. Of course these haven’t really been recommended. Its just part of Amazon’s website algorithms to present titles by the same authors or in the same genres that I have purchased before. So to find out if they are my sort of book I have to click on the title and go and take a closer look.

If its an author that I have read before I can be pretty sure about what I’m getting. I’ll either have enjoyed the book or I won’t and I’ll purchase or not purchase accordingly. But what if it’s an author that’s new to me? Well, the books ‘page’ will tell me about the author and give me a summary of the plot, but will I actually enjoy it? So I have to scroll down further to find the reviews.

If there are no reviews then there’s a problem. Either no one has read the book, or no one has enjoyed it, or hated it, enough to post a review.

Then there are the books with a dozen 5* reviews. These I must treat with suspicion. The likelihood of all those people enjoying the book are slim, so there is a strong possibility that the reviews have been posted by the author’s family and friends. A quick check normally betrays this. The reviews will probably be the first ever posted by those people and they will all be remarkably similar in tone and content – probably written by the author themselves and e-mailed around the family.

What I am looking for is the mixture of reviews. Some 5*, some lower. That will convince me that the reviews are both genuine and also representative. No matter how good the book some people will love it and some people won’t and genuine reviews will reflect that spread.

My publisher suggested that it needs 200 sales to generate a single review. So if a book has 20 reviews that suggests 4,000 sales. That’s pretty good these days, especially for less well known author.

As an author, what does it mean for me?

I don’t deliberately go looking for my reviews, but somehow I seem to find them by ‘accident’. Now, let’s say I find I have 20 reviews. 12 of them are 4* and 5*. Another 5 are 3*, two are 2* and one is 1*. Which review am I going to read? Of course I’m going to read the 1* review. I have to find out “why this person doesn’t like me”.

Now, here’s the thing. That 1* review won’t be written in exemplary English, well punctuated and containing pithy observations on style and plot. It will be written in barely intelligible English by someone who doesn’t know how to use spell check and for whom ‘grammar’ is an old lady who gave birth to his mother. Because review sections are the hunting ground of trolls and trolls enjoy being nasty.

Not all 1* reviews are written by trolls of course. Some are a genuine reflection of the quality of the book, but those stand out because they are well written.

I give you a quote from Werner Herzog: “I don’t spend sleepless nights over bad reviews.” So as an author you have to develop a thick skin – and stay away from the review sections unless you are prepared to have your vanity pricked.

So, what about this new book of mine?

Having read this far you will probably have worked out that I’d really like you to review this for me and I hope you will enjoy reading it.

You can find out how to buy it by clicking on this link to my publisher’s website and you can find out more about my books or read my weekly blog by going to my website

I hope you enjoy the experience.

As my Facebook friends will know I have been invited to give a talk to Men’s Breakfast Club in the village where I live. It’s not a big deal, just 20 or 30 men from the village who get together once a month to eat bacon rolls, drink tea, gossip and listen to a guest speaker. I was asked because there was a small piece about me and my writing in the last edition of our parish magazine. I’ve been given a free choice of topic, but a suggestion was made that I talk about the difficulties of being a writer in the 21st century. Wow, quite a wide ranging topic, I thought. Plenty of scope for a good moan there. And there is.

One of the most frequent questions I get asked is “How many books have you sold?” This is, of course, code for “are you making any money?” A fair question but I’m not about to get my bank statements or tax returns out for public scrutiny. So I did a bit of research on the subject (yes – I do research) and what I found was quite an eye opener. Firstly the American perspective.

The USA is the biggest market for writers and probably has more writers per head of population than any other country on earth. So how much money do American writers make?

I found an article on Forbes, the on line version of Forbes magazine, dated 12th September 2013 that suggested that the mid-point of earnings for self-published author is less than £2,500 (they give everything in $ so my conversions are rough estimates). But 20% of all self-published authors make no money at all. Only 1.8% make more than £50,000.

In the conventional world, where a publisher is used, earnings of between £2,500 and £5,000 may be expected, but 8.8% of authors may expect earnings of above £50,000. Because this is conventional publishing all authors sell a few books so there are no authors that earn nothing at all.

So how does this compare with the UK market? Well Sara Sheridan, herself an author, writing in the Huffington Post suggests that you need to sell about 33,000 books a year just to make the average UK wage of £26,500. That is because the author only gets about 10% of the sale price of a paperback book. That’s about 80p for a paperback that sells for £7.99.

She goes on to say that according to 2005 figures (the latest available in 2013 when she was writing her article) the average earnings per author were about £28.340. But of course that average is skewed by the earnings of the highest paid authors, eg J K Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Bernard Cornwell etc. The top 10% of all authors make a whopping 50% of all authors’ earnings from book sales. The mid-point earnings for all authors is about £12,300. If you translate that into an hourly rate, based on 242 working days a year at 8 hours a day, it works out at £6.35. The statutory minimum wage for an adult is £6.50 an hour.

It’s even worse if you’re a female author. They only earn about 77% of what the male authors earn because male authors seem to be more popular. That’s purely down to total book sales, not to poorer contractual terms.

This has an impact on the credibility of authors. Imagine the following conversation:

“What does she do for a living?”

“Well, she says she’s an ‘author’ but I know for a fact she works on the deli counter at Tesco.”

Of course she works on the deli counter at Tesco. If she didn’t she’d starve to death. She then goes home at night and spends another 8 hours writing a book which may or may not be published. But because she works on the deli counter at Tesco she is denied any credibility as an author. More than half the authors currently working in the UK earn less than minimum wage for their writing. That doesn’t mean that they’re bad writers or that their books aren’t good. It doesn’t even mean that their books don’t sell. It just means that it’s a crowded market place and its quite hard to make money.

Well, everyone knows the big money is in film and TV rights. Er, No.

Sara Sheridan again. In 1999 an ‘option’ was taken for one of her books to be made into a film. She was paid just £3,000 for it. When Random House awarded bonuses of £3,000 to their staff for the phenomenal sales produced by 50 Shades Of Grey the author was awarded ….. nothing.

So how many books do you have to sell to make the Top 100 list? This is from the Guardian list for 2013:

1. My Autobiography by Sir Alex Ferguson - 647,153
2. The Inferno by Dan Brown - 626,250 (Why? it was awful)
3. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn - 607,359

No book below 3rd place sold more than 500,000 copies and no book below 13th place sold more than 250,000 copies. So what about the bottom end of the scale?

98. Zog by Julia Donaldson - 104,835
99. Revenge by Martina Cole - 104,497
100. 11th Hour by James Patterson - 104,375

So, to make the top 100 you have to sell more than 104,000 copies of your book. That’s a tall order without a major publishing house behind you. According to Sara Sheridan the average first novel sells about 1,000 copies. So imagine how many copies the self-published authors sells. More on that subject later.

It’s actually quite staggering that the bestselling books in the UK barely sell more than half a million copies. Of course they are read by more than half a million people because they are borrowed from libraries and passed around from hand to hand, but it still means that less than 1% of the UK population will have bought the bestselling book. Even allowing for the fact that you may not be interested in Sir Alex Ferguson that doesn’t account for the sales of the other books at the top of the list.

And this is where the difficulties of being an author in the 21st century start to be felt. To make money you have to have a publisher. Not one of the major publishing houses, and only a hand full of the second tier publishers, accept submissions direct from the author. The second tier publishers tend towards the specialist genres: sci-fi, fantasy, erotic etc. To get at a publisher the author has to be either very lucky with a second tier publishing house, or they have to have a literary agent.

According to author and blogger Nathan Bransford literary agents receive over 15,000 query letters for new books per year. That’s basically a letter that says ‘Here’s my book, can you get it published for me?’. If an agent receives a query letter then it usually means that it’s the author’s first attempt to get a book published by conventional means.

How many of these books actually get published? Writers Type supports the suggestion that 15,000 books are submitted to literary agents every year and then goes on to say that an agent will forward perhaps a couple of dozen to publishers for consideration. Of these maybe 15 or 16 will end up as published books.

Once published, of course, it’s a different story. The author has a track record. The publisher will often give the author an advance to allow them to eat while they write their next book. But they have to be one of the 200 or so authors out of that 15,000 that get a publishing deal.

Are those 200 or so the best of the new writers? Maybe, but quite possibly not. Both agents and publishers tend to go with the market. If you were writing children’s fantasy stories at around the same time as J K Rowling was publishing the Harry Potter books then you might well have got a publishing deal. Ditto if you were writing erotica-for-women when E L James was having her success with 50 Shades Of Grey. But if you weren’t then you were taking part in a lottery.

Very few agents take risks by forwarding stories of a type that aren’t making it in the best sellers lists. The market is currently bursting at the seams with authors writing Jack Reacher clones. Once a year one of the major publishers will take a chance with something new simply because it stands out from the crowd, but it will be a calculated risk, not a wild headed gamble.

I mentioned self-publishing earlier in my article. It’s also known as vanity publishing for fairly obvious reasons. Before the internet came along an author that wanted to self-publish paid a printer to produce a few hundred copies of their book then they went round the local book shops trying to persuade reluctant book sellers to sell a few copies for them. Since the internet, however, things have got much easier and less expensive. Sites like Amazon, Lulu and Troubador allow budding authors to upload their books and then the site takes a commission on sales. Do they sell? Well, you saw the figures for self-published authors. 20% never make any money and over 50% make less than £2,500 a year.

Why isn’t self-publishing more successful? It’s all down to marketing. Publishers spend huge amounts of money promoting both writers and their books. But once the self-published author has badgered friends and family into buying their book (they usually expect to get a copy for free) then it’s pretty hard to get their book in front of a wider audience without spending quite a lot of money on marketing and also having the know-how to do it. If you’re only going to earn a couple of grand out of the book anyway then the marketing costs become prohibitive. That becomes a vicious circle of cost vs earnings so most self-published authors never sell more than a few copies.

So what does the self-published novelist do? They write blogs like this one in the hope that people become interested enough in their writing to actually go and buy a copy of their book. Does it work? I’ll tell you when I see the next sales figures for my own books.

What you have just read took me over three hours to research and two hours to write and for which I will receive no income. It will have taken you less than ten minutes to read. I hope you enjoyed your free entertainment.

To find ut more about me and my books please visit my website http://robertcubitt.com/index.html

The two women tapped their way into the bar on their high heels, giggling and whispering. He looked up and gave them a smile, welcoming but not encouraging. He was used to seeing them sitting poolside at this time of day, stretched out on sun loungers and sacrificing their skin to the heat of the Mediterranean sun. Not today though. The fine, unseasonal drizzle discouraged the pool users.

He turned his attention back to his laptop and continued to type. He was briefly aware that after leaving the bar with their drinks the women had taken seats at the table next to where he sat, but he kept his eyes on the screen and tapped in the next sentence, focused on his self-appointed task.

There was a loud cough, clearly designed to attract his attention.

“Your wife not with you today?” One of them, the brunette, asked. She was always the one to start a conversation, he had noticed. His wife had referred to her as ‘the gobby one’.

He wondered whether to answer. It might signal the start of a longer conversation, which he didn’t really want. In the end good manners took control. He looked up. “No. She’s not feeling too well. We think it was something she ate.”

“Here?” The woman sounded alarmed at the possibility that she might get food poisoning from the hotel cuisine.

“No. We’re only on B&B so went out for dinner last night. I’m fine but Bernice had the prawn cocktail and that may have been the cause. We both had the same main course so it couldn’t have been that.”

“Oh, poor thing. Is she really bad?” The blonde spoke for the first time.

“Upset tummy. She doesn’t feel up to coming down. She doesn’t want to be more than a few feet from the loo.” He grimaced. The two women sympathetically mirrored his expression.


“Where was it you ate?” Gobby asked, determined to keep his attention.

“Big place on the sea front in the Old Town. It’s called Miguel’s, I think”

“Thanks for the warning. We’ll be sure to give it a wide berth.” The woman stuck the straw from her drink into her mouth and pursed her lips to suck some of the liquid into her mouth.

He used the opportunity to return to his typing and he could hear the murmur of conversation at the next table. It wasn’t loud enough to be intrusive. He was given a few minutes to concentrate before they interrupted him again.

“Are you working during your holidays?” The brunette, Gobby, broke in accusingly. Her accent was north western, not as broad as scouse nor as harsh as mancunian. More Lancashire perhaps.

“It helps to pass the time on a damp day like this.” He defended himself.

“What are you working on?”

“Writing a book. It’s what I do for a living these days.”

“Anything I’ve read?”

“I don’t know what you’ve read. Have you heard of Professor Little?”

“No. Can’t say I have.”

“Nor me.” The blonde didn’t want to be left out of the conversation.

“He’s an amateur detective and he’s in all my books. Well, he’s a professor at a university really, but he always seems to get involved in murder investigations.”

“A bit like Father Brown.” The blonde commented

“Yes, a bit.” He acknowledged.

“Whose he?” Brunette asked, a little bit confused.

“You know, him off the telly, in the afternoons.”

“I never see telly in the afternoons. I’m at work, remember. We can’t all afford to sit around all day watching the telly.”

“Not all day.” The blonde protested. “Only while the kids are at school and after I’ve finished the housework.”

He tried to get back to his typing, but the two women were obviously bored and looking for some distraction. They had decided it would be him.

“So where do you get your ideas from?” The brunette persisted.

He stifled a sigh but conceded defeat. Picking up his beer glass he took a swig before answering.

“Stories are all around us. All you have to do is keep your eyes and ears open and you have the start of a story. Then you just have to make it interesting enough for people to want to read it.”

“Aren’t people interesting enough as they are?”

“Not really. Not interesting enough for a book anyway. People don’t want to read about people who have lives just like their own. They want to read about people who have adventures. The characters may appear to be like themselves, at the start, but then something happens to make the story more exciting. Then people will read on.”

“So how would you make that work with a couple of girls like us?”

‘Girls’ was stretching it, a bit, he thought. They were both in their mid to late thirties, but he thought he may as well go for it. After all, they’d started the conversation.

He checked out a few key indicators, just as his protagonist Professor Little would have done, then took another pull at his beer to give himself time to think.

“OK, well, here you are, two women in your early thirties” he flattered them and the blonde had the decency to blush. “One of you is married and the other not. Perhaps you’re in a long term relationship.” He looked at the brunette and she gave a slight nod of encouragement. “You’ve known each other for years, maybe since school. Each year you take a holiday together without your partners.”

“That’s good. How did you know all that?” The blonde asked, slightly in awe of his deductive powers.

“Wedding and engagement rings and ear wigging on your conversations when you’ve been sat beside the pool. Not really clever, just nosey. It’s an occupational hazard.”

“We’ll have to be more careful about what we say, Maggie.” The brunette said. Maggie, the blonde, giggled.

“So, that’s got the basics. Each year you go on holiday for a bit of fun and freedom without your partners. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, you agree. You have a few drinks, flirt with the blokes a bit but nothing serious. Maybe a kiss and a cuddle with the men, but no more than that. You’re nice girls.”

“Too right we are.” Maggie said with emphasis. “I would never cheat on my Darren.”

“Nor me. With Mike I mean, not Darren” The brunette crossed her arms, her whole body posture changing as she took offence.

“Calm down, ladies. It’s only a game. I don’t know either of you and I’m making this up as I go along.”

The brunette relaxed a little, but stayed alert for the possibility of more slights against her character. He wished he’d never started this, but he was committed now.

“So, there we are, just two women having a fun holiday together. Thousands of women do the same thing every year, so that wouldn’t sell any books. From that I’d have to make it more exciting.”

“How do you do that?” Maggie asked.

He tapped the side of his head with his index finger. “Imagination. I have to think of something to make the story more interesting. Maybe you become involved in a crime or terrorism. You start off as innocent bystanders and get drawn in by what you witness. Whatever it is it has to be believable for the reader, but it also has to be exciting. In your case I think I’d go for a romance angle.”

“We’re not like that. We told you.” The brunette crossed her arms again, once more on the defensive.

“You’re not, but you aren’t you anymore. Now you’re my characters. I can do anything I like with you in my story. After all, it isn’t real. It’s all out of my imagination.”

“OK. I’ll buy that.” Maggie said. “You’ve got me hooked. What happens next?”

“Well, it’s more about what happens before. I have to go into your back story to find things to change in some way for you to do what you’re going to do. So you, Maggie, maybe your marriage is getting a bit stale. Things aren’t the way they used to be. Maybe your sex life has dried up, or has become so boring that you wish it had dried up. So the chance a little bit of an adventure would be quite appealing. You, on the other hand,” he turned to the brunette, “are just about to get married. This is your last taste of freedom before the big day. You’re tempted to go a bit wild; have one last fling before you settle down to a life of domestic bliss.”

He saw Maggie look down at her hands, folded neatly in her lap. He thought she might be close to tears. Had he gone too far? Was he too close to the mark? Was her marriage really in trouble? No. They had encouraged this conversation and if they didn’t like it they could stop it any time they wanted to.

“So what happens next?” The brunette’s eyes shone with curiosity. She now seemed to be enjoying the story.

“You go to a night club. You drink a bit too much and you meet a couple of guys who try to chat you up. We’ll call them Boff and Knobhead. You both fancy Boff and neither of you want to know Knobhead, but neither of you realises how the other feels about Boff. All four of you get a taxi back here together and end the night sitting beside the swimming pool drinking and talking. Knobhead is so drunk he falls asleep, so he’s out of the game. Both of you wish that the other would go to bed, leaving you alone with Boff. One of you has to go to the loo, let’s say it’s you Maggie, and when you comes back she finds Boff and… sorry, I don’t know your name.” He had narrowly escaped calling her ‘Gobby’.

“Debra”

“Ok, Debra, when Maggie comes back she finds you in a clinch with Boff.”

“So what happens next?” Maggie was now caught up in the story as deeply as Debra.

“Maggie grabs her handbag and says she’s off to bed, she’s clearly angry. Boff says no; why not stay together? Maggie says she can see what’s going on and doesn’t want to get in the way. Boff suggests that she wouldn’t be in the way if she joined in.”

The two women exchange startled looks. He’d caught them on the hop. They hadn’t been expecting that. Almost as one they raised their hands to their mouths and giggled nervously.

“So what happens next?” Maggie and Debra both spoke at the same time.

“See, I’ve got you hooked. The lives of two ordinary women have just become interesting enough to want you to read to the end of the book.

“But you have to tell us what happens next.” Maggie demanded, an edge to her voice.

“I don’t have a clue. That would be the end of the first part of the book, what we writers call the first act. The second act would change the lives of the two characters. It would probably create conflict and break up their friendship. Books, all books, are basically about conflict. Act three, the last part of the book, would bring the two of you back together again, but as different people with a different, stronger relationship. And they all lived happily ever after.”

“But I still want know what happens next. Do Boff and Debra and me……”

“It’s only a story, Maggie.” He tried to placate her. “It didn’t really happen and, according to you both, it never would happen.” He closed the lid of his laptop and stood up, ready to leave. “Tell you what. It’s still raining so you won’t be going back to the pool any time soon. Why not tell each other the rest of the story. You might be surprised at how it turns out.”

He turned and strode off towards the bank of lifts that would take him back to his room. He could feel the eyes of the two women boring into his back. He allowed himself a small smile. Perhaps he had already changed their lives.

He found his wife as he had left her, lying on the bed in the darkened room with a damp towel across her forehead. She stirred slightly at the sound of his arrival.

“What are you doing?” She said, he voice barely audible.

He sat at the small table that occupied the corner of the bedroom. “Sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

She murmured a negative.

“I’ve just had a really good idea for a book. I want to get the basics down before I forget them.”

He clicked on a table lamp, opened his laptop and started typing once again.

A slightly different version of this story will be posted shortly - which one will you prefer?

When is a bargain not a bargain? This is something I started thinking about when I received an e-mail last week from a certain budget airline inviting me to complete their customer satisfaction questionnaire. This was a new departure (pun intended) for this particular carrier so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to give them a piece of my mind.

The actual booking didn’t relate to me at all. I had made the booking so that my dear lady wife could visit her sister, however, I had travelled with this carrier on numerous occasions so I have a well-developed opinion of them based on several years of travelling experience. As regular readers will know I’m not shy about giving my opinions.

The first thing they wanted to know was how happy I was with their new policy of allocating seats to passengers. Now, for anyone who travelled “pre-budget airline”, which I shall abbreviate to PBA in future, the idea of having an allocated seat on the aircraft is so normal that it seemed unreal that the airline should think this worthy of asking questions about. All the more so because the airline had actually charged for allocating me, well my wife actually, a seat. That’s £5 each way, so another £10 on top of the “bargain” fare.

Then I realised that I wasn’t making a comparison between similar products, but making comparisons between dissimilar products. It then made me realise that what I had always thought of as a bargain wasn’t so much of a bargain after all.

To illustrate, let me use an analogy. Let’s say you need a new sofa so you go along to your local SofasRus big shed and you see one you like. It’s the right size, the right colour, the right degree of comfort. Then you look at the price tag and you see that it costs £700. Oh no. You can’t afford £700. So you go home sans sofa.

That evening you’re sat in front of the TV and on comes the adverts. Tomorrow! SofasRus are having a sale. Yippee. The next day you hurry back and yes, there it is, the sofa you wanted to buy and now its marked down to just £350. You reach for your credit card and ten minutes later you are the proud owner of a new sofa. You got a bargain.

But let’s try a slightly different angle. You hurry back and there’s your sofa, still marked at £700 so you still can’t afford it. But sat next to it is something that looks like the same sofa but is marked at £350. However, on looking closer you can see that the upholstery isn’t as good quality, the cushions aren’t so well stuffed and when you sit on it you can feel the frame digging into your bum and your back. Is it a bargain? No, of course not, because it’s a different sofa manufactured to a different quality standard. The fact that it looks similar to the higher quality product is irrelevant.

That’s why budget airlines aren’t a bargain, because they’re not selling the same product as the normal priced carriers.

Let’s start with the allocated seating. On Airline A you go to the check in and the helpful member of staff prints out your boarding pass and there is your seat allocation. It was included as part of your booking. On Airline B you have a choice. You can check in on-line and print your boarding pass or you can pay a huge premium and check in at the airport. You can pay extra for allocated seating or you can take your chance. Maybe you and your partner will be able to sit together, or maybe you are in row 10 and he or she is in row 26, sandwiched between two sumo wrestlers who haven’t showered since 2005.

Then there’s food. On Airline A you get a meal if the flight is of more than a certain duration. On Airline B you have to buy your food or eat before you board or try to smuggle a sandwich past the guards, sorry, I mean boarding gate staff. OK, airline food isn’t the best in the world but having to pay extra for it just rubs salt into the wound.

If Airline A says it will fly you to Dusseldorf you will get off the aircraft and find that you are at Dusseldorf Airport. Airline B, however, will take you to Dusseldorf (Weeze) Airport, which is actually 80 km from Dusseldorf in a straight line and there’s no direct train or bus service to Dusseldorf even when you take the local bus service to the small town of Weeze which is where the railway station is. Weeze is quite a nice little town by the way. I lived there for four years, but it isn’t Dusseldorf is it?

Finally there’s the baggage allowance. With Airline A you are able to actually pack a decent amount of clothing to take with you, and add books, tea bags, biscuits, snorkel and flippers and still have room for the five pairs of shoes your wife can’t fit into her own suitcase. On Airline B you pay extra for luggage, £15 for a 15kg bag, each way. So you have to try to cram everything into a tiny carry-on bag. Result, you take less clothes, which means you spend a lot of time in the bathroom hand washing your undies in the sink and the balcony of your hotel room (and you paid extra to have a balcony) is festooned with dripping laundry when you want to sit on it and drink your G&T as you watch the sun go down. Of course you also had to spend hours traipsing around supermarkets to buy the gin and the tonic locally because you can’t put liquids in your carry-on luggage.

Now, is Airline B a bargain, or is it a different product entirely, provided to a different and much lower quality standard? I would argue that although they both involve aircraft and they both involve flying, they are very different products.

I won’t go into the surliness of the staff or how basic the seats are, the lack of leg room, the extortionate credit card charges (an extra £3 per passenger, each way) and all those other “hygiene” factors. I think I’ve made my point.

A bargain is only a bargain if you feel satisfied that the product you bought at the lower price is of the same quality as that which you could have purchased at the higher price. If you’re prepared to be treated like cattle and accept that you will be charged for breathing then saving a few quid by booking with Airline B may well be the option for you. For me I’m starting to think that I’d rather spend a few pounds more and actually feel like the airline is pleased to see me and is trying hard to make me feel welcome.

I’ve also done a few price comparisons over recent years and found that I wouldn’t necessarily save money by flying “budget”. By the time I’d added in the cost of the “extras”, which may include longer travelling distances before departure or after arrival, I’m not actually making a significant saving. In some cases it would actually cost me more than flying with a more traditional carrier.

That is perhaps where the budget airlines have done us all a favour. By introducing real competition into the travel market the traditional carriers have had to look at their pricing and have had to cut fares. On routes where there is little or no competition you’ll still pay through the nose to “fly scheduled”, but on routes to the more popular destinations such as Spain, Portugal, the Balearics, Canaries etc there is competition and its keeping prices down across the board, so it pays to shop around.

Another example of this variation in product quality to get a so called “bargain” is the purchase of e-books, especially for Kindle. As a Kindle owner I always try to by the e-book version (a) for convenience and (b) to be “greener”. I am a big Bernard Cornwall fan and when his latest book, The Pagan Lord, was released last year I wanted to buy it for my Kindle (well, for me really but you know what I mean). It would be a Christmas treat for myself, I thought. However, the price of the Kindle version was just 45p lower than the hardback version. OK, so Amazon were charging less for the hardback than I would have paid on the High Street, but that’s not the point. You can see where the money has gone on a hardback: the artwork, the paper, the printing, the distribution etc. and of course the author’s royalties and the publisher’s profit. You can display this book on your shelf with pride. But an e-book? It’s a collection of 1s and 0s that have no resale value and no aesthetic value other than in the story itself. So I decided to wait for the price to drop, as I knew it would.

Since then the paperback version has been published and of course the paper, printing and distribution, author’s royalties and publisher’s profit have once again cost money. So what is the new price differential? Surely the Kindle version is now cheaper than the paperback? Well, at today’s price The Kindle version is £4.99, the hardback is £7 and the paperback is …. wait for it….. £4. Yes, the e-book is more expensive than the paperback. How does that work? I can also tell you that until two weeks ago there was still only a 45p difference between the Kindle version and the hardback. The price has only dropped because the paperback is now available. So which is the bargain? With free delivery it’s the paperback, so I bought that. Not very “green” I’ll grant you, it won’t save any trees, but please complain to Amazon and not to me. Dibs for the(free) used paperback once I have read it by e-mail only please.

Now, what really is a bargain are my books. Where else can you get quality like that at such a low price? They are only available on Kindle so you don’t have to worry about the hardback or paperback price differential, and they’re cheap. So why not treat yourself?

My thanks to those people who have risen to the challenge and suggested ideas for future blogs. I’ll e-mail you individually with your prizes and also to tell you the date on which I will post a blog based on your suggestions.

To read more of my blogs, download free stuff and find out more about my books please visit my website http://robertcubitt.com/index.html

One of the questions most writers get asked, even newcomers like me, is “where do you get your ideas from?”. While it’s a predictable enough question, It’s also one that’s easily answered.

Ideas are all around us, we just have to look and listen and then let our imaginations take over. The book I am trying (unsuccessfully) to get published at the present is called “The Girl I Left Behind Me”. The title came first. It’s the last line of the chorus to a traditional song and was used in the sound track of three John Ford westerns about the US Cavalry, titled Fort Apache, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande. For some reason the tune popped into my head one day and I couldn’t shift it. But then it occurred to me that it would make a great title for a book. I quickly Googled it to make sure no one else had had the same idea (they appear not to have) and then put it into my list of book ideas and let it ferment for a few weeks.

It’s the fermentation that is important here. I had a title but no idea what to do with it, so I let my unconscious mind work on it. I also looked up the origins of the song and found that it was traditional, probably 17th or 18th century British or Irish and had been popular with both sides during the American Civil War. Its rhythm makes it very suitable as a marching song which is why it has come down to us through a military and cinematographic route.

Letting that information ferment alongside the title eventually gave me the idea of writing a story set in modern times about two young men who are born just a few streets apart but who go off to war to fight on opposite sides and who leave their girls behind them. The story is as much about the two women as it is about the men. I won’t give any more away as the book has still to be published, but I’m sure you can see that once I had the basics mapped out then writing the story became something that was achievable. Not only that, but one of the characters I created for the book then went on to feature in the sequel. Of course the first book has to be published before there can be a sequel, but that’s another story.

I have a list of about a dozen more ideas for books that may, or may not, eventually see the light of day and they have come to me by a number of routes.

They say that everyone has a book inside of them. American author Jodi Picoult added the rider “the problem is winkling it out” while British writer Christopher Hitchens is credited with adding “and that’s where it should stay”. But it is true. Everyone has a story that can be told, even if they aren’t able to tell it themselves. The problem Hitchens alludes to is making the story interesting enough to make people want to read it, which is the author’s job.

For the author the only task in relation to coming up with new book ideas is to keep their eyes and ears open and the story ideas will come. At the moment I’m helping a fellow aspiring author by providing feedback on a book she is writing. I can’t give away the subject as that would be a breach of confidence, but the idea for it is straight off the front pages of the daily newspapers. She was so touched by what she was reading that the idea of not writing a story about it was probably more bizarre than the idea of writing it.

Does that mean that anyone can write a book? Technically yes. If you can write your name you can write a book. However, there is no doubt that some people have an aptitude for it and some don’t. Thanks to the capability to self-publish books that’s available through the digital revolution there are many books that I’ve read in recent years that really shouldn’t have been written, at least not by the people that wrote them. They are living proof of Christopher Hitchen’s corollary. But that doesn’t mean that someone with more aptitude couldn’t write a very good book using the same plot and characters.

By the way, don’t put too much trust in some of the reviews that are posted on Amazon with regard to some of the Kindle books that are on sale (and the same applies to other e-publishing sites). If the book hasn’t been published on paper then it is probably self-published and along with self-publishing goes self-promotion, or loyal friends and family who haven’t read the book and never will read the book but who are willing to post a good review to help the author to make sales. This was brought home to me in stark relief a few weeks ago when I purchased a Kindle book that had over a hundred four and five star reviews. It was, without doubt, one of the worst written books I’ve ever read. At least now it has a one star review from me.

You can see the same syndrome on programmes like X Factor when some poor deluded soul with the singing talents of a rusty chain saw has just murdered a beautiful song and their family is looking on saying how talented he or she really is and the judges don’t know what they’re talking about (which may be true but that’s another issue). Am I similarly deluded? I don’t know. Read my books then make your own mind up.

Of course those comments don’t apply to any of my books that are available on Kindle. All of my reviews are, I’m certain, written by people with the critical skills of the writers of the Times Literary Supplement. They must be as they are generally favourable. By the way, if you have read one of my books and enjoyed it but haven’t posted a review then it would be doing me a favour if you could post a review on Amazon. Reviews help to sell books, but please be honest.

Do all idea become books? Most certainly not. The length of books vary, but generally fall between 80,000 and 120,000 words. I have taken some ideas and barely made it to 10,000 words before I’ve run out of steam. That tells me that the story just hasn’t got any legs and there’s no point in wasting any more time with it. Of course I don’t delete it. I may have some sudden inspiration that will take it off in a completely new direction, but for the time being it goes into the file marked “not quite as good an idea as I thought”.

As for suggesting your own book ideas to authors, please don’t. It’s not that they aren’t good ideas, it’s that there are legal implications.

Most big name authors will tell you that at some time they have received letters or e-mails claiming that the idea for a book was stolen because they (the letter writer) once said or wrote down some of the words that are used in the book. The writer of the letter or e-mail then goes on to try to claim money for suggesting the idea or, even worse, for plagiarism.

Terry Pratchett’s agent told me that he received an e-mail threatening legal action from someone who had once suggested, in another e-mail, that Terry Pratchett set one of his books in Australia. The threatening e-mail arrived shortly after the publication of The Last Continent in 2008, where Pratchett sets the story in the country of Fourecks on his imaginary Discworld. Fourecks bore a passing resemblance to the country we call Australia. That was enough for the loony who wrote the e-mail. And that’s why authors would prefer it if you didn’t suggest ideas for books. It’s nothing personal.

So I took my idea that I had pitched to Terry Pratchett’s agent and wrote the book myself. It’s called The Inconvenience Store and is available (here comes the plug) on Amazon.

How did I come up with the idea? Easy. I had just been to a convenience store to buy something that they didn’t have on their shelves. When I asked the manager why they didn’t sell it (it was a common enough item) he told me that people often asked for that item, but they didn’t stock it because there was no demand for it. The manager was a totally irony free zone. My response to the manager about his store being more inconvenient than convenient gave me the title for my book and the rest, as they say, is history.


For more information on my books please check out my website http://robertcubitt.com/index.html

Lists are a common phenomenon on the internet and I occasionally get the urge to create my own. I previously posted this one on a website called Readwave.com and I have revisited and revised it a little.

Ten things that the British government can’t do (regardless of political hue).

1. Control the weather. They could, however, be a little better prepared for when weather happens, and they could also listen to experts a bit more to understand the consequences of certain practices, such as chopping down trees or not dredging rivers.

2. Control the economy. Perhaps some explanation on this one. Economies are influenced by global factors far more than by local ones. If China reduces its spending it doesn’t make a spit of difference what the UK government does to try to compensate. Governments can make minor shifts in policy that can make minor changes to local economic conditions, but in macro terms they’re about as much use as a chocolate tea pot. The post of Chancellor of the Exchequer is the most futile job in the world and doomed to failure or even disaster. When that happens the Chancellor gets to retire on a fat tax-payer funded pension while we suffer the consequences of their hubris.

3. Stop teenagers from being rebellious. This is a good thing. Teenagers need to be rebellious in dress, language culture and attitude. It teaches them that they don’t know as much as they think they do, and it gets it out of their system in time for them to become responsible adults. That may not occur until they are 60, but it will eventually occur.

4. Stop people taking the piss out of governments. It keeps us sane and reminds them of how insignificant they really are. There is a long and very rich history of political satire that goes back to ancient Greek theatre and maybe even before that. It’s healthy. democratic and fun. If the politicians don't like it then they shouldn't go into politics.

5. Stop the taking of mind altering substances. Leaving aside that some of these are actually legal (Pint of beer anyone?) if someone wants to pump poison into their bodies and they have the money to pay for the privilege they will eventually find some way of doing it, despite anything that the government does.

6. Produce a World Cup winning football team for any of the home nations. If their own football associations can’t do this then politicians have no chance.

7. Convince the French that British food is actually quite good these days. The same might be applied to many other aspects of British life, but the French are particularly scathing about our food.

8. Convince the Scots and the Welsh that the English like them really. The Scottish people are very balanced, they have a chip on both shoulders. Ditto for the Welsh, but sung by a really good choir. This, above all, is why the Scots want independence. It has nothing to do with having their own parliament or the ability to raise taxes (who in their right minds would vote for that?). To use an old Scottish quotation, “be careful what you wish for, because your wish may come true.”

9. Make us love Europe. They’ve tried. The best we will ever do is tolerate it. If we pretend very hard we can even believe that it doesn’t exist, until we want to go on holiday of course. The government does have a habit of trying to remind us of the existence of Europe by holding elections for the European Parliament, which puts even more snouts in the trough, but we can still try to pretend. Then we will go somewhere hot, complain about the food and the beer, be rude to the natives and generally make everyone wish that Britain didn’t exist.

10. Make me believe that politicians are worth a single penny of their over-inflated salaries.

To read more of my work please visit my website at http://robertcubitt.com

It was one of those conversations that only happen in pubs when drink has been taken. They usually don’t make sense the next day and are quickly forgotten. Well, usually they’re quickly forgotten.

The subject was fantasy fiction. You know the sort of thing: Wizards, orcs, elves, dragons, enchanted swords etc. My friend said he didn’t read that sort of book because he wasn’t able to suspend his disbelief. I was duty bound to argue against him because… well, because we were in a pub and that’s what blokes do when they’ve had a pint or two. But then afterwards I thought about it a little bit more.

Why would it not be possible to suspend disbelief and read fantasy fiction?

Billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews believe that there is an invisible God in his heaven, or Paradise or call it what you will. We may not share those beliefs but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I would challenge my friend to stand in the holy square in Mecca and tell the assembled throng that it’s all a fantasy and their holy book shouldn’t be read as it requires too much suspension of disbelief. It’s OK. It’s quite safe. I won’t be going with him and I know what hymns he wants sung at his funeral.

If billions of people can suspend their disbelief in order to believe in a God, then what’s so hard about suspending one’s disbelief over a story that is to be found on the fiction shelves? No one is saying its true (well a few deranged people may be but I’m not going to count them). All we fantasy fans are saying is that it’s an escape from the real world and into another.

The stories are as valid as they are in any other genre. They usually take the form of a battle of good against evil, during which quests are undertaken of duties carried out. Honour is high on the agenda, as is bravery, selfless devotion and many other altruistic character traits. Perhaps this is what’s wrong. Perhaps these things are so lacking in our modern world that some people can’t believe that they might still exist in a fantasy world.

There is an old tradition of fantasy fiction, of course, though it isn’t always recognised as such. First we have Arthurian legend. Now, on the surface we have a story about men battling against evil, which forms the core of many a good novel. But we also have a wizard (Merlin), a witch (Morgana), a magical sword in a stone (Excalibur), a mysterious lady in a lake(anonymous) and so on. In its basic form it’s no more fantastic than Tolkien.

Then we get to the legend of Robin Hood. There is no evidence that he ever existed and what few historical bits of evidence that suggest someone resembling him did exist don’t portray a picture of the hero of the medieval peasants that robbed from the rich to give to the poor, but a petty criminal who robbed from anyone and kept the loot for himself. OK, more of a legend than a fantasy, but one we buy into.

We mustn’t forget the Daddy of them all William Shakespeare. In his plays we have a ghost in Hamlet, another one in Macbeth along with three witches, in The Tempest we have a fairy and some sort of troll (Caliban) and of course A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream which is littered with fairies and in which Bottom is given a pair of donkey’s ears, as though that were normal. Charles Dickens isn’t averse to using ghosts if it suits his purpose, as he shows in A Christmas Carol (which I parody in a short story posted on my website), while Bram Stoker gave us Dracula and Mary Shelley provided us with Dr Frankenstein’s hand built monster. None of these books or plays were aimed specifically at children, which is where my friend thinks is the target audience for most fantasy fiction lies.

Now, I’m probably going to upset a few diehard fans here, but I’m going to suggest that the great British Hero James Bond is no more believable as a character than Bilbo Baggins. What is my justification? I hear you ask (I have good hearing). Let’s look at the evidence. Cars that turn into submarines, wristwatches that contain lengths of garrotte wire, cars with ejector seats and so on and so forth. But that’s all boy’s own gadgetry and no more of a fantasy than a sword that glows blue when there are orcs around . The real fantasy is Bond himself. A suave, debonair killer who’s also a babe magnet and can get into a fight with half a dozen Kung Fu masters and walk away leaving them in a crumpled heap. He’s been shot so many times he must resemble a colander. He’s fallen from trains, planes and ski slopes. While Ian Fleming and the writers who continued the franchise never claimed magical powers for Bond, does this not require just as much suspension of disbelief as it does to read about Gandalf? Bond may not have “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” But that was because Q never quite got round to finishing it (But just wait for the next movie – you read it here first).

There is of course another literary genre that is just as fantastical and requires just as much suspension of disbelief. No I don’t mean horror, which I regard as a subset of fantasy, I mean Sci-Fi. People who will gladly suspend disbelief to accept the premise of strange creatures inhabiting worlds far from our own are sometimes reluctant to do the same for stories containing wizards and dragons. Why?

Science does suggest that life may exist on other planets. Indeed it’s been said that it would be a strange universe if life didn’t exist on other planets. However science has no idea what form it may take and what its capabilities might be. This is the space that the sci-fi writer inhabits, if you’ll pardon the pun. The space where anything is possible providing the author doesn’t actually ignore the laws of physics. But sci-fi writers do that all the time as well. Time travel, warp speed, sub space, hyperspace, dilithium crystals. Do these sound familiar? Which ones are made up and which does science accept as being possible? No I don’t know either. Dilithium does exist, you can Google it, but can you use it to power a space ship? So, where’s the difference between fantasy and sci-fi? Why is one believable to my friend but the other not?

So where do you stand on this issue? Do you read fantasy novels? If not, can you tell me why you don’t? For those that do then you may be interested in reading my novel The Inconvenience Store. While it is set in the 21st century here on the Earth It definitely requires the reader to suspend their disbelief. There are two stories for the price of one, and I’m working on a third story in the series for publication later this year.

For more information on my books visit my website http://robertcubitt.com/index.html

With the disappearance of flight MH370 it has been happy time for the conspiracy theorists. The latest one to do the rounds is a claim that MH370 landed on Diego Garcia where there is a “secret” US air base. There is an air base on Diego Garcia operated by the US Air Force and leased from the British government who “own” the island. However it’s about as secret as Heathrow Airport.

It’s an extremely badly researched claim, full of errors of fact that a ten year old child can spot a mile away, but of course that won’t deter the conspiracy theorists. You see, there is a Catch 22 at work here. If anyone points out the flaws in the argument then the conspiracy theorists will immediately claim that the person is part of the cover up, so a “no win” situation emerges. The best one can do is smile politely and ignore them. Rational argument just won’t work.

What is it about conspiracy theorists that make them believe that the Illuminati are sending probes back from the future to capture people and take them into the future to enrich a failing gene pool? That by the way is just one of the battier theories attached to MH370. You can read more on any one of a number of conspiracy theory websites. This is one of the more amusing http://gawker.com/5886988/a-comprehen...


There is a clear leader in the world of conspiracy theories. Mr David Ike, I do mean you. This former Coventry City goal keeper turned sports broadcaster turned self-proclaimed exposer of the dream world will tell you why just about anything in the world is part of a conspiracy and cover up. From the Royal Family being giant lizards in disguise to the disappearance of MH370 David will tell it how it is. If you want a bit of a laugh then a visit to his website is well worth it. http://www.davidicke.com/

Of course conspiracy theories have been around for a lot longer than David has, but he is the Crown Prince of the art form. The Daily Telegraph published a list of the top 10 conspiracy theories http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newst... Unsurprisingly 9/11 is on there, as is the assignation of JFK and the faking of the moon landings by NASA. I wonder which one they’ll take off the list to accommodate MH370. The thing is, someone sits down and creates these myths and then moulds the facts to fit their whacko theories.

Psychologists have done studies on this phenomena and about 6% of the population truly believe this stuff. What is more disturbing is that up to 50% of the population will give it some credence even if they aren’t total believers. The psychologists found that if you believe one of these conspiracy theories to be true then you are likely to believe another one if its told to you. How did they demonstrate it? They asked people which of the most popular ones they thought might have some truth in them, then they told the person a complete lie about something else being a conspiracy. If the subject believed in one of the theories then they were more likely to believe the lie. Even more worrying, when they were then told it was a lie many of the subjects refused to accept it and continued to profess belief in it. Scary!

So, my top ten reasons why conspiracy theories don’t work.

1. To have a conspiracy you need conspirators. People just can’t keep secrets that well. Politicians are particularly bad at it. Our MPs couldn’t keep their expenses fiddles a secrets; Bill Clinton couldn’t keep his sex life a secret; so how the hell are those sorts of numbskulls going to keep something as big as a the JFK assassination a secret?

2. Sometimes shit just happens. It doesn’t mean that there is anything sinister behind it. People make mistakes. Things break. There are nasty people out there that want to harm us. It doesn’t mean the US government killed its own people just so they can start a war.

3. The truth is sometimes difficult to believe. That doesn’t mean it’s not the truth. The truth is often more boring than the alternative explanations, but that still doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.

4. Not all questions have an answer. We may never find out what really happened to MH370. But that doesn’t mean it’s been hijacked to Diego Garcia or taken into the future by the Illuminati.

5. You may think the US government is responsible for every bad thing that happens in the world, but that doesn’t make it true. Any country that can breed politicians like Sarah Palin and George W Bush is going to struggle to control the world.

6. Scientists, journalists, academics, lawyers. These people are clever. If they don’t think there’s any truth behind these conspiracy theories then there probably isn’t. The Illuminati, even if they existed, couldn’t silence everyone.

7. What people claim to be a secret very often isn’t. You can read all about Area 51 and Diego Garcia on the internet and I mean on reputable websites, not the ones written by conspiracy theorists. I’ve known about the existence of an airfield on DG for at least 40 years and I’m not privy to many secrets.

8. The Americans, Russians, Chinese, French and British all have surveillance satellites. One of those will always spot something on the ground if there is anything to spot. The spooks may keep their discovery to themselves for a while for political reasons, but at the right time they’ll reveal what they know in order to embarrass another country. This is one of the biggest flaws in the “NASA didn’t go to the moon” theory. The Russians were able to track the Apollo missions. In 1969 Brezhnev would have loved to have been able to expose the Americans as liars if he could. He didn’t though, did he?

9. Science doesn’t yet have all the answers. Maybe it never will have them. But that doesn’t mean you can make up your own and expect people to believe you.

10. If you’re that clever, if you know so much, why aren’t you, the conspiracy theorist, running the show? Oh, sorry, I forgot, there’s a conspiracy to stop you. Be careful, there may be an Illuminati assassin right outside your door at this very moment, waiting to silence you. Only you know the truth.

The truth is out there, and its probably quite boring.

Finally, whether you believe in a God or not, can I ask you to spare a thought for the relatives of the passengers and crew of flight MH370 in their hour of suffering.

For more of my writing please visit my website http://robertcubitt.com/index.html