Jennifer Mosher, Editor

George - a short story

2013-06-10T21:31:00.000+10:00

George

A short story

(c) Jennifer Mosher 2013

Only a few more hours and she would be on her way to freedom - after 31 years. A new life in America. New money, new friends, and peace. Her only fear was that perhaps George might still reach out from the grave and touch her.

George. When she’d married him at 16 he’d said gruffly, ‘Stop that blubbering, girl. It’s a wedding, not a damned funeral!’ When she’d murdered him at 39, he didn’t say a word - for the first time in 23 years.

All her married life he’d never called her by name, or used any endearments. For the first few years it was ‘Girl, bring me this’, or ‘Girl, I want that’. After she’d delivered him three fine children, he began instead to refer to her as ‘Woman’.

She often wondered why he’d married her. He gave her a pittance to live on, and begrudgingly, despite the fact that she had brought their comfortable Highgate house into the marriage. The house had been left to her by her mother’s unmarried uncle, but George seemed to think it only fair she contribute something of value to the marriage. She’d felt like a burden.

For 23 years she lived without his love or affection, and often without his presence. As a successful ‘promoter’ (as he liked to call himself) he regularly spent nights in London, or in the North, especially if he was touring with his boxing troupe. She would help him to think up catchy headlines for his billboards; he would thank her by telling her ‘It’s time you brought me my dinner, Woman’.

It was in the spring of 1904, when George was ‘on tour’ again, that she went down to the cellar to retrieve some preserving jars and, to her horror, discovered rats. Mr Cooper from the General Store on the Archway Road gave her a powder, telling her to ‘Use it sparingly, now, and be sure to keep it away from food and children - it could do untold harm!’

Within a day, the rats were either dead or gone. Whilst cleaning up, the idea came to her.

She found it less difficult than expected to lever a couple of flagstones up off the cellar floor. For the next five weeks, whenever George was away, she would dig furiously, piling the dirt behind a cupboard in a dark corner of the cellar.

Finally she was ready. As she sat knitting one evening, George issued his usual bedtime command. ‘Time for my hot toddy, Woman.’ In her usual obliging manner she brought him his toddy and watched fascinated as his face contorted with the pain of holes being burnt in his tongue, throat, stomach. When it was over, it took her just less than an hour to bury him, his best suit, hat, shoes, fob watch, and a few other small items which he would normally pack when travelling for just a few days.

That night, she slept better than she had done for years.

The next morning, she knocked on her neighbours’ doors, asking if they had seen or heard George leave during the night. Mrs Goodman was sympathetic. ‘No dear, but I’m sure he’ll be back soon. A man knows when he’s loved.’

Mrs Adams was a little less kind, saying, ‘If you don’t share the same room, how do you expect to keep the man happy?’

With one little question, she had created her own alibi and also satisfied herself that the neighbours had heard and suspected nothing.

After a week, she contacted the local constable. He, like Mrs Goodman, was sympathetic as he searched George’s things for clues. The carefully hidden scented handkerchief with the embroidered ‘E’ and the sweetly written note from ‘Emily’ in his sock drawer left the young constable consoling her. ‘Some men just don’t know when they’re well off, M’am. That’s all as I can say.’ He left, promising to do what he could to trace George, but telling her not to hold out too much hope.

And then, she waited. After six months, she engaged the services of a lawyer who set the wheels in motion to discover all of George’s assets, pending her divorce application. She sold her house and moved to Somerset to take up a post as a governess (she could no longer rely on family for handouts) while she waited some more.

By 1908, her lawyer had discovered cash and property assets in George’s name worth in excess of £400,000. She was astounded. By discreet enquiry her lawyer had ascertained that George had been a womaniser and a gambler, but contrary to appearances, a smart one who managed to hang on to most of his winnings and invest them wisely.

Her lawyer then discovered, to his astonishment, that George had not touched any of his assets or their income since he had abandoned her. It was this that prompted him to suggest that she apply to have George declared deceased after seven years. Perfect, she thought. The result she wanted without even having to ask for it.

For Christmas 1911, she gathered her family and told them that George had been declared dead. Whilst being generous to her now grown children, she managed to retain the larger part of George’s estate for her future. She then announced that that future would be in America, that she had waited all her life for a little luxury and adventure and that she would be sailing in the New Year.

The following spring, on a breezy afternoon, she was introduced to the captain as she boarded the liner which was to take her to her new life. ‘Welcome aboard, M’am. I hope you have a pleasant journey. Would you care to join me at the Captain’s table this evening?’ He was a man of experience, especially wealthy widows. She agreed, before following the porter to her stateroom, the most beautiful accommodation she had ever seen.

Later that evening, as she relaxed on the deck sipping champagne, she wondered what her new life would hold for her. And she wondered how peace and happiness might feel, as the setting sun shone on the polished portholes of the RMS Titanic.

Why it's okay not to be a team player

2013-06-02T11:47:00.000+10:00

I found a rather interesting blog post this week about words that you should stop using on your resume or CV. You can read it here: http://www.news.com.au/business/worklife/stop-using-these-words-in-your-cv-seriously/story-e6frfm9r-1226530364956

Anyway, one of the terms I was surprised to see missing from the list was 'team player' or 'strong team member'.

Now, I'm a business owner, so I'm hoping that I won't have to consider updating my resume any time soon! But if I did, I would have to leave 'team player' off. 'What?! You don't play well with others?' I hear you screaming.

Well, yes and no. And it's taken me a lifetime to 'know my limitations' (Happy belated Birthday, Clint!), starting with playing netball as a young girl.

My father, realising that it was probably a good idea to teach me a bit about teams, sport, commitment etc, enrolled me in a Saturday morning netball competition the year I turned 10. That was fun. For the first two years. Most of my teammates came from my school, we were pretty much the same shape and size, and while I was far from the best on the team (read: won the 'Best and Fairest' award each year!), I could sometimes make a good pass or score the odd goal. But in the third year, the year I turned 12, the netball powers that be decided that it would be better to sign me up to the team a year ahead of me - girls that I didn't know, girls who had started high school that year and were turning 13. I hated it.

For starters, I was the weakest link. It didn't matter what they yelled at me, I could not make my body do what they were able to make theirs do. They weren't my school friends, so I bonded with very few of them. I was often 'on the bench' as a reserve because they only played me when they were, well, pretty much desperate. And despite my desire to help the team, I couldn't. It was awful.

So that was the last season of netball until I played one more (almost as disastrous) season in my early twenties.

I never thought much about it after that. I used to make a joke about how awful I was at sports, but I never got over that feeling of letting the team down.

Years went by and after I arrived in adulthood, I would, from time to time, find myself on a committee or a working party for this or that. And I discovered then that I am not a team player, but not for the reasons you might expect. You see, teams are made up of individuals, and unless those individuals are united in their belief in the cause, and their motivations for working for that cause, you won't have cohesion. You will have a group of personalities where there are always at least two or three distinct personality types from the following:

one person who is a natural leader
one person who is not a natural leader, but is bossy enough to take the leadership position anyway
one person who is there because they want to be the leader because they're power hungry
one person who is there to help their own self-esteem issues
one person who promises to do the tasks handed out to them, but never seems to get around to them
one person who does everything 'because if I don't do it no one else will'
one person who does their best but lets the side down because they're nowhere near as talented as their self-belief would have them think.

I am sure you can think of some more!

My problem is that I vacillate between being the person who promises to do things, then occasionally forgets or runs out of time, so I beat myself up with the guilt, or I get the cranks with the person who fills that role, especially when I've done the things I promised to do!

I tend to be a bit of a natural leader in that I take leadership because I was brought up to take responsibility (my mother would say, 'Stop whingeing! If you don't like it, do something about it!'), and people who take responsibility tend to end up in leadership roles. But then they so often become the person who does everything 'because if I don't do it no one else will'. And if they have any self esteem issues (either low or high) it then feeds into those.

The funny thing is, I'm a great team player when the team needs and wants to row together. If everyone is pitching in, pumping the adrenalin, and all putting the same weight behind the project, I'm there. But the moment I notice someone slacking off, or someone else beating their chest about how much they've done ... my team spirit goes out the window and I get distracted and annoyed with the varying personality types and their motivation for being there.

So I take a hard line these days - the moment someone asks me to consider joining their committee, the first thing I tell them is, 'Thank you for thinking of me, but if you knew me, you wouldn't want me on your team!' because at the end of the day, I end up resenting those few people who will possess those personality types that I know I can't cope with, and then it becomes a miserable experience for me.

But it doesn't make me a bad person. It just means that I have to work differently. I love to work with people, and help them with their projects, but I've learned that I prefer projects that have a sunset clause. Ongoing work such as accounting just depressed me because it's never finished. And I need to work with people who are more or less as committed to a project as I am, because if you're not into it and not prepared to do your fair share, why should I carry that weight for you?

Why marketing is the hardest task for self publishers

2013-05-26T18:18:00.000+10:00

My younger daughter works with me. Technically, she works for me, but we get on so well at the office that I think in terms of her working with me.

She spent her gap year working with me, and by the time her gap year was finished, she'd worked out that the last thing she wanted to do was go to uni full-time. Instead, she kept working for me, signing up for various online courses in graphic design, web development etc, and wrote a book. That's right: at the age of 20, she became a published author. And not just any book - it's a full-colour, magazine-style guide to help teenage girls through those difficult years.

We knew she was writing it, and had a photographer friend (Darren Phillips of Darphi Images) doing the photos (in some of the worst weather imaginable), and had managed to get contributions from a UK 'triple threat' performer (Ben 'R-Tizt' Francis from Luminites) and a careers advisor from New Zealand (Tracy Keith of TMK Consulting), and we helped a little bit here and there as taxi drivers, but for the most part we kept out of it as it was her project.

We expected it to be reasonably good - we had seen the effort she'd been putting into it over two years - but we had no idea how good the book would be, until she showed it to us laid out, formatted, and almost ready to print. And that's when I said, 'Please don't take this to a traditional publisher - please let's do it ourselves.' I still don't quite know why. Perhaps I was worried that they might insist on certain changes to the book, taking it away from what she believed would be best. Or that they would push her into doing appearances and things that she wasn't ready for. Or that they would make more money out of it than she did. Perhaps that was it. I knew she would get 10% of the RRP of every book sold, but what if they were making 20% of the RRP after production and promotion? That just wouldn't be fair.

So we funded the printing, and put it out under our own MoshPit Publishing label, which was a good exercise for us anyway as we'd not published a colour book before.

Now, you would think it would be easy to sell a book called The High School Survival Guide - a handbook for the modern teenage girl, wouldn't you? Apparently, not so!

First off, you have to help your author not be embarrassed about having written such a full book at such a young age. My daughter is a reasonably humble kid, and once the book came out, she suddenly wanted to hide. Turns out it is much easier to say 'I'm writing a book' than it is to go around saying 'I have written a book'. Once you've written and published your first book, you feel like just a teensy bit of a wanker! It gets easier with the second book as by then you start to feel that actually are an author, rather than an imposter. But there's a bit of mind shift with that first book.

Once you get your author to believe in their book, and themselves, the next thing you have to do is raise awareness of the book so that people will buy it. That's all well and good: we have the internet, we have a shop front, we have our online shop, and we've been able to stock it in a pharmacy and a book store in the local area from time to time. We've done mail outs to high school librarians and school counsellors. Ally has presented in front of 30 high school liaison officers. She has written articles for magazines and sent copious copies, in both print and ebook formats, to many magazines and parenting sites. As a mother-daughter/publisher-author team we've presented a double act in front of 170 junior high school girls (now that was an interesting hour!). The book is available on Amazon, and from our own online shop, and it has its own website and Facebook page.

But you know what? That's just not enough. We've managed to sell some bulk orders to some high schools for their libraries, but generally speaking, it's one book at a time.

Now, I know part of the reason is that it's not cheap. At $34.95 it's not the sort of spur-of-the-moment book you grab as you're trawling the internet. But it's also not the sort of book you ignore. With young girls falling victim to the most horrendous side effects of low self esteem and poor parenting these days, you would think that so many adults would see it and think 'I must invest in that for my daughter/granddaughter/niece etc'. But no.

So we've developed ebook versions (at $4.99) and a free sample which means that potential buyers can decide if they want to invest in the print copy or not. And still it's not enough. And do you know why?

Because there are millions of books out there. Millions. And while there are millions of potential buyers, they need to come into contact with your book. They need to see it probably more than once before they commit to buying it. It has to be a book that they're going to be interested in. And it has to be there, ready and available for them to buy it, at that moment that they decide that this the book that they're going to buy next.

So if you're a self publisher and you're finding it hard to shift your book, don't despair. It doesn't mean (necessarily) that what you've written is crap. It doesn't mean (necessarily) that no one is interested. It is all about being in the right place at the right time.

The best advice I can give you is:

1. Be sure that you've written a good book. See if you can get some sort of feedback from people you don't know - people who are more likely going to be honest with you. If perhaps the feedback you're getting suggests that your book isn't as good as you thought it was, then consider pulling it off the 'shelves', polishing it up, and then re-releasing it. If the feedback suggests that it has too many errors, then at least get it proofread prior to re-release. Of course, if you've gone ahead and had 2,000 copies printed and they're taking up parking space in your garage, this isn't so much of an option for you.

2. Get reviews! Wherever it is up for sale on the internet, ask people you know who have read it to log on and review it. However, make sure you ask them for honest reviews. The worst reviews are glowing five-star reviews from people who are clearly your friends and relatives. One of the most honest five-star reviews I have read was for J-L Heylen's book Wisdom Beyond Her Years. A buyer called KB admitted that they were a bit sceptical, but found it worth the read, despite saying that the book was a little too ''explainy' for my personal taste, I think we can put that down to this novel being the author's first' and 'Wisdom Beyond her Years is not high literature, but it is a whole lot of fun'.

3. Don't be afraid to change the cover of a print on demand or ebook version. Ally recently changed her cover to the one above from the plainer, less emotional one below, and sold a print version on Amazon almost straight away:

4. Make sure that you or the book have some sort of website. It's all well and good having a social media presence, but you also need to be able to reach those people outside of social media - not everybody has a Facebook or Twitter account!

5. Set up author pages and profiles. If you have published through outlets such as CreateSpace, KDP or Smashwords, then take advantage of free marketing opportunities such as the Amazon Author profile page (see mine here: http://www.amazon.com/Jennifer-Mosher/e/B00BO1OCTY/ for an example) and the Smashwords author profile page.

6. Think laterally. Ally recently wrote 10 Tips for Surviving Teenage Daughters for SchoolMum.net and organised the free sample as a result of a request from Family Deal Friday. This is not sales, it is marketing. And if all the dominoes are lined up correctly, marketing leads to sales.

7. Find magazines and blogs which need content and send them details of your book. Family Australia Magazine were happy to include The High School Survival Guide on page 6 of their Autumn issue as one of their 'What We Love' items. A good source for Australian writers is SourceBottle (all puns intended!)

8. Keep writing. Write another book, get it out, then use your books to cross promote the other. Ally is now developing plans for a text-only book (rather than an illustrated one) aimed at parents and guardians to complement the girls' book.

9. If you believe in it, don't give up. Keep your eyes and ears open for opportunity and keep plugging it. If it's an ebook or a print on demand book, then time is on your side.

10. Spread your message as far and wide as you can. You can't expect family and friends to do all your sales work for you!

11. Enter appropriate awards. Ally entered her book in the 2012 Global Ebook Awards AND won the best book in the non-fiction teenage literature category!

12. List it on directories and other appropriate places, such as One Thousand Words Plus (OTW+). If you'd like a coupon for a free life-time listing on OTW+, please contact me.

13. Don't bore people stupid with your 'I've written a book, would you like to buy a copy?' message. Yes, you need to publicise your book, but you also need to learn when to stop talking about it!

These are not the only things you can do - there are others, and if you'd like to share what's worked for you and what hasn't, feel free to leave a comment below.

Genetic memory and flying in my dreams

2013-05-17T21:05:00.000+10:00

When I was young, I used to dream I was flying (without a plane!) and truly believed that, somehow, it was quite possible.

Sweet Dream On The Sky by supakitmod from http://www.freedigitalimages.net/

This evening I saw an ad on TV for a supermarket, and damned if I can remember which one now (great marketing, boys!), but in the ad, a young man flies gently through the aisles, carrying his basket, and then through the checkout at the end. The fascinating thing about this ad, to me, is that the way he moves is exactly the way I move in my dreams when I am dream flying. What that suggests to me is that someone else on this planet has experienced that sort of dream - not imagined it, but experienced it.

How? How is it that another human being can dream the same thing I dream? A human being that I've never met and don't have any shared experiences with? A human being that is dreaming something that neither of us can do, and yet we both dream about it in the same way?

A quick search of the internet suggests that I'm not the only one who has these dreams, with the same flying fashion of floating face down, using a bit of breaststroke, then righting myself almost vertically and pedalling a bit of an invisible bike (perhaps a bit of mid-air dog paddle) just to keep the feet off the ground. The feeling of flying is similar to that of swimming, but without the breathing, the stroking, or the pull of the water. There is much more ease in the movement - it's much less hard work.

What if, just what if, man used to be able to fly? What if, once upon a time, our ancestors lived in a world with lower air pressure, less gravity, and were able to move around the planet the way astronauts bounce around the Moon? Step, lope, step, bounce, step, bounce higher, lean forward, start flying ...

And what if, in the way that noses big and small, the ability to sing or dance, freckles and knock knees get passed on from generation to generation, what if the ability to fly was still being passed on ... but we no longer live in an environmental conducive to it? What if our environment has changed, and we have adapted to it ... but our genetic memory passes on the ability to fly, the way it passes on the ability to walk and talk and cough and hum ...

What if we again found ourselves on a planet with low gravity and low air pressure ... ?

Self publishing in the 21st century workshop

2013-04-03T08:34:00.001+11:00

Bookings closed. Please contact me if you would like to be informed about the next workshop.

When:

Saturday, 4 May 2013, 9am to 4.30pm

Where:

The Tower Room
Mt Heritage Hotel and Spa
Cnr Apex & Lovel Streets
Katoomba NSW 2780

How much:

$198 includes GST, morning and afternoon tea, lunch, internet access and course materials

This full day workshop will walk you through the steps required to self publish your book and/or ebook. You will finish the day with a published short story or non-fiction ebook, and a ready-to-print on demand book of your short story.

Numbers are strictly limited to 12.

Participants will be expected to have some confidence using the internet and the ability to use word processing software such as Microsoft Word or Open Office.

I recommend that you wear comfortable clothes, and bring a laptop (or at worst a tablet), plus a short story or other short document you've written which can be formatted in Word or Open Office with headers etc to practise on. You will also need a viable email address for business/writing purposes.

Topics covered (in no particular order):

what makes a good book - fiction and non-fiction
formatting for print - Amazon and CreateSpace
formatting for digital - Amazon Kindle and Smashwords
where to publish - Amazon, Smashwords and other options
marketing tips - blogging, websites, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest
how publishing today is different to what it was five years ago - self publishing is no longer considered vanity publishing
ebooks and why you should consider them
different types of ebook
ISBNs
copyright, territorial rights, former publishers
digital rights management (DRM)
using images - yours and other people's
tax issues to consider
royalties and how they work
publishing companies and outlets you can use - Smashwords for Barnes and Noble, the Apple iBookstore, Blurb, Bookbaby, IndieMosh
to pseudonym or not
cover design
social media - to Facebook or not to Facebook?

Participants will be sent a sheet requesting them to create accounts with Amazon and Smashwords prior to the event. Links will be provided. You will also need to advise if you have any particular dietary requirements.

Book and pay through The MoshShop (click on the Workshops icon) or else contact me directly through the MoshPit Publishing contact page for an invoice or more info.

Bio

Jenny Mosher is the owner/operator of Mosher's Business Support Pty Ltd which is the holding company for:

MoshPit Publishing - providing proofreading, editing and other publishing services across Australia, including self publishing workshops

IndieMosh - providing self publishing ebook and print on demand packages to Australian authors and writers

narratorAUSTRALIA - creative writing competition for Australian short story writers and poets

One Thousand Words Plus - book marketing site for authors worldwide to promote their books

The MoshShop - online retail outlet for Australian books and ebooks

Travel Competitions Australia - online travel competition site for travel companies to promote their competitions and market their travel packages

After a lifetime in accounting, Jenny discovered editing and publishing and since then has been on the enjoyable journey of testing all that new technology can do to help writers self publish their books.

The author of Who Caught the Yawn? and Where Did the Sneeze Go? as well as the popular short free ebook Simple Rules for Effective Business Communication, Jenny has helped many other authors bring their works to life in print and ebook formats under the MoshPit Publishing imprint and writers' own publishng imprints.

Jenny also presented three sessions for Publish! Blue Mountains in 2012 in ebook publishing. See YouTube for the first of these sessions, EBooks 101:

The Master - no masterpiece

2013-03-24T22:11:00.001+11:00

I want my two hours back. Seriously.

If you've ever read any of my book or movie reviews, you would know that I generally don't give bad reviews - if I don't have something nice to say, then I don't say anything. I would rather steer people towards something they are more likely to enjoy, than steer them away from something they probably won't. But today I'm making an exception.

Last night we hired The Master, the Philip Seymour Hoffman/ Joaquin Phoenix movie which is supposedly based around the idea of the birth of Scientology (if I hadn't known I wouldn't have guessed).

Hoffman and Phoenix were brilliant, and well supported by Amy Adams as Hoffman's wife, but the movie let them down. According to Wikipedia (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_(2012_film):

When he [Paul Thomas Anderson] first began writing the script he had no idea what it was, where it was going, or where it would end up, but he kept on working on it and it came together.

Yeah, sorry Paul, but after two hours of watching and wondering, I am quite decided that you should have kept working - it still didn't come together.

Storytelling, whether arthouse or otherwise, still needs to say something. This story didn't say anything! There was a beginning, and a middle. But no end. There were scenes that made no sense. There were scenes that seemed to be there just for the sake of them. You don't need to pander to your audience all the time, but you do need to explain some stuff. For instance, the scene at the end where Pheonix's character takes a phone call from Hoffman's character in a theatre was, according to Wikipedia, apparently a dream. At what point were we told that?

Again, Wikipedia reports:

The film has received mostly positive reviews. Review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 86% of critics gave the film positive reviews ... with a rating average of 8 out of 10. The consensus reads, "Smart, powerfully acted, beautifully filmed, and solidly engrossing, The Master extends writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's winning streak of challenging films for serious audiences."[57] At Metacritic ... the film ended up receiving a rating average of 86, based on 43 reviews, considered to be "universally acclaimed".[58] Kenneth Turan of Los Angeles Times gave the film a positive review, praising both Anderson's directing and Phoenix's performance, ... About the film itself, he stated: "The Master takes some getting used to. This is a superbly crafted film that's at times intentionally opaque, as if its creator didn't want us to see all the way into its heart of darkness."[59] Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a perfect "A" grade, stating: "It's also one of the great movies of the year - an ambitious, challenging, and creatively hot-blooded, but cool toned project that picks seriously at knotty ideas about American personality, success, rootlessness, master-disciple dynamics, and father-son mutually assured destruction."[60]

Well, I'm sorry, but if not being able to get all that from this movie makes me stupid, then so be it. Instead, I will happily let you know the movies I have enjoyed over the last few weeks in preference to this beautifully filmed load of rubbish:

Crazy, Stupid Love

Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling (and his pecs) are a treat in this.

The script is good, the plot quite complicated and a little far fetched, and the whole thing is, of course, a fantasy, but what a fantasy! Has there ever been a red blooded man who didn't want know the secret to getting countless women to simply say 'Yes' at the right moment?

This is one of those little treats that you can't walk away from once you start watching it. This is entertainment. Albeit reasonably light, but certainly a lot more worthy of the effort than The Master. Highly recommended.

Arbitrage

Richard Gere takes us on the journey of a man just holding it all together. He is trying to sell his business, but the stars just won't line up for him. As the days pass, it's just one more piece of bad news after another. Finally, he pulls it off, and he's in the clear. But at what cost?

Arbitrage, put simply, is about trading. About buying and selling. And it's interesting to see what Gere's character has had to trade in this movie.

Susan Sarandon gives Gere a run for his money in a relationship somewhat different to the one they shared in Shall We Dance? Great idea, great plot, great script - and great drama. Highly recommended.

Argo

Another movie worth sitting through - drama, intrigue, action, and Ben Affleck's pecs - ever-so-briefly - plus the ever-increasing John Goodman and Alan Arkin who delivers the best line of the movie when asked what 'Argo' stands for. (And no, I'm not going to tell you. If you don't know, then you'll just have to watch it!)

I can't imagine the terror of the embassy staff as the embassy was broken into - it's funny the things you read in the papers or see on the news and you know that they're not good, but it takes a movie to bring them to life so that you can actually understand the whole experience through someone else's eyes.

Argo - watch it yourself!

Opinionated blogging. It's at the top of the page. :D

Why Telstra shareholders don’t deserve their dividends

2013-03-09T12:53:00.001+11:00

(Update: Wednesday 13 March 2013 - 18 days out and still counting.)

As of 12.23pm today, Saturday 9 March 2013, our small business office will have been without its Telstra broadband connection for exactly 14 days. That’s right - two weeks. How do I know so precisely? Because when I rang to report the outage, the young lady in the Townsville call centre (yes - I got speak to someone located in Australia!) was able to tell me what time it went out. Which it means it happened at the local exchange, not at our end of the line.

This week, some of our software started shutting us out - software which we need to create projects for our clients. Why? Because it can’t connect to the internet to check that our subscriptions are up to date, so it just stops working.

For a fortnight now, my small business in the Blue Mountains, just 35 klms west of Penrith, and 70 klms west of Parramatta, has been slowly brought to its knees by a virtual monopoly that simply won’t honour its word.

And you know what hurts the most?

At the end of the financial year, Telstra will proudly announce their profits and Telstra shareholders will take home money for doing nothing more than lending their money to the company. Shareholders who take no responsibility for how this dinosaur of an organisation operates, with no thought for the little people like us who are being screwed to the wall to provide those profits.

It’s not like I haven’t been patient - I’ve been more than patient, two weeks is evidence of that.

It’s not like I’ve been rude to the people answering the phone - I’ve been very polite. It’s not their fault.

It’s not like I reported it once and sat back and waited - I’ve tried many different approaches over the last fortnight. (See my ‘Diary of an internet outage’ here if you need to raise your blood pressure.)

And it’s not like I haven’t been lied to. My very first call was treated with ‘Here is our guarantee that it will be fixed by 7pm tomorrow evening and here is the reference number.’ That was 12 days ago. And one of three promises ago.

Brad Sugars, Australian entrepreneur and business coach (ActionCOACH) teaches small business owners a very simple four-point rule:
• It’s the business owner’s job to look after their staff.
• It’s the staff’s job to look after the customers.
• The customers will look after the business.
• The business will look after the owner(s).

See, Telstra? Simples, isn’t it?

So why am I attacking Telstra’s shareholders and not Telstra management? Because the shareholders are the owners of the company and I hold them responsible for what Telstra management does.

Telstra staff

I have spoken with some very genuine people at Telstra over the last fortnight - people who are not given the tools to do their job properly i.e. solve my connection problem. These are the front line people who get yelled and abused because Telstra’s internal systems don’t work for them.

Telstra shareholders - you are deficient in looking after these people properly.

How to look after your staff

1. Get rid of your overseas call centres

These people are provided with scripts which do nothing other than frustrate the customer and make a mockery of customer service. These people have no access to tools and information which will effectively help them solve anyone’s problems. It is not fair to them that they should have to cop the abuse that I am sure they would cop from many other people.

The use of these overseas call centres is pointless. Don’t tell me it’s cheaper than using local staff. ‘Nothing’ would be preferable - because that’s what you get as a customer when you call these centres - no actual service of any use whatsoever.

I was once told that these call centres are trained to ‘kill the call’. After my experiences with them, I believe that person had good knowledge - because that’s what has happened to me, not so much on this most recent occasion, but on a prior occasion when my domestic broadband stopped working. I was lied to - black lies, not white lies.

First I was told my computer had a virus (How would they know without connecting to it? And what about the other two stand alone computers and three smart phones that couldn’t access the net? Did they have viruses too?)

On the next call I was told I’d exceeded my monthly usage. (Out and out lie - I’d barely used 10%).

On the third call I was told that my case had been escalated and was given a case number.

On the fourth call I was told that it hadn’t been escalated and that case number didn’t exist.

That is not customer service. That is a recipe for a stroke.

2. Get rid of your telemarketing sales teams

Everybody knows who Telstra is. You don’t need telesales - they only serve to annoy people.

3. Get rid of your ‘Why did you leave us, how can we entice you back?’ telesales teams

I can save you a fortune there. People leave you because you don’t honour your service agreements. And you charge too much for what you do and then you take dividends as profits made out of our losses. There, that’s an easy one.

4. Take all the workers at your current Australian telesales centres (points 2 and 3 above), equip them with proper access to your various systems, and, using the savings from closing your unnecessary and useless centres in 2 and 3 above:

a. Retrain them to diagnose customer’s problems effectively - whether they’re technical, accounts, new service etc.

b. Train them to recognise when they need to refer a customer’s problem up the chain. Ensure that you have people with different abilities and knowledge at consecutive staff levels and have your customers referred once and once only up the chain until the problem is solved.

c. Train them not to make promises they can’t keep.

d. Empower them with ways to keep the customer satisfied until their problem is solved. For instance, had I been offered a free wireless connection 10 days ago it would certainly have helped somewhat, even though it can't solve the problem.

e. Keep them informed with the latest Telstra information. If technicians have been pulled from one area to work in another area, this is the first thing a customer should be told if it affects them.

Seriously, customer service is not rocket science. It’s about supplying service to your customers. Novel concept, isn’t it?

If Telstra staff were able to effectively look after existing customers, Telstra wouldn’t need telesales staff. Satisfied clients are the best advertisement a company can have.

In 2010 we won what was then the Blue Mountains Business Advantage Award for Best New Business in our area. That leap frogged us into the Telstra Business Awards for that year. But I didn’t enter. Do you know why? Because in the fine print, if you won a Telstra Business Award, you weren’t allowed to badmouth Telstra for the whole year. After some of the experiences I’ve had with Telstra, I didn’t want to test that restriction. So I didn’t enter.

We are stressed beyond belief. It’s taking us nearly twice as long as normal to complete our client work due to the movement of files between laptops and server and back and due to having to do most of our internet work after hours. Not to mention hours spent on the phone trying to get this damned problem sorted.

We have started dropping the ball with some clients and our cash flow is slowing to a trickle because it’s too much additional work to stay on top of invoicing etc when clients just want their work done.

Thankfully, we have had some marvellous support from other businesses and people:

There’s the local Telstra manager who has nothing to do with my connection, my complaint or me (I think we met once about 10 years ago) but who has willingly stepped into the fray (after I found his mobile number and contacted him directly) to try to get it sorted, and graciously lent us a wireless modem for a few days until our connection is restored.

But seriously? What’s with that? What if I didn’t know about him? And why should he have to help me on a personal basis? Why didn’t Telstra themselves offer us a free modem in the first place until such time as our connection is restored? (I have not named him here as he does not need the entire local population calling him every time they have a problem with Telstra.)

There’s the wonderful Vent Thomas of iVent Services who kindly called the other day to offer us a desk at his office so that we could get our work done.

There’s our clientele who have been extremely patient with us as we have, bit by bit, started to drop the ball. It is grieving us that we can’t do what you want as fast as we would like, and we are exhausted from trying, but thank you all for your support and patience. Please, hang in there a little longer with us if you can, but if you can’t, we understand.

But no thanks to Telstra who have fed me untruths and a sincere lack of sincerity since this whole saga began. If our line is not restored soon our business will be under serious threat. We cannot keep operating this way - it’s exhausting and not viable. And if we go under, who will pay for that? Not the Telstra shareholders - they will be too busy collecting their dividend cheques despite my loss.

So go on, how about it Telstra shareholders? How about taking some responsibility as business owners for sorting this bloody mess out?

Before my business breaks.

Diary of an internet outage

2013-03-09T12:33:00.000+11:00

Health warning: not to be read by people with high blood pressure! (Or other editors - there exists mixed tense throughout this post, but I am beyond caring this morning. I am sure you will understand why should you choose to read this monologue.)

Saturday 23 February 2013

My business internet, in a company name and connected to commercial premises, stops working at 12.23pm - just as I am trying to do my corporate tax return. Gee, thanks Telstra!

Monday 25 February 2103

On my first call to Telstra, around 7.45am, a young lady told me that yes, my connection had gone out at 12.23pm on the previous Saturday. She also told me that my internet connection would be fixed by 7pm the following evening. She gave me a guarantee - yes, she used that word - and a case number, with the words ‘our guarantee to you is that it will be fixed by 7pm tomorrow evening’. Yay! Only two business days without internet - challenging, but we can cope.

Wednesday 27 February

I arrived at the office to find that the internet still wasn’t working. My next two phone calls diverted to Telstra call centres in the Philippines.

The first fellow couldn’t tell me anything, except he talked about how he would have to reset my modem (didn’t know how he could do that from his end), and asked me to turn it off and back on again (ah, that’s how!). As if I hadn’t already tried that one - several times! Then he rabbitted on about going in the ‘back end’ and someone from the ‘back end’ would have to have a look. Then he gave me a 1300 number to talk to someone in the ‘back end’.

I rang the 1300 number and connected with a female in the Philippines. Yay. She at least seemed to take some details and said she would call back and let us know when the technician would be out to fix it. She rang back within half an hour to say that the next technician was due out on Monday 4 March. WHAT?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!

That evening I went home and looked at my business broadband usage for the month (luckily I still have a good connection at home!). It had flatlined on 23 February and there has been nothing since. While on the Telstra site I found their customer service charter and a form to lodge a complaint, so I did. Their complaints page states that someone will be in touch within 48 hours - not counting an auto responder to let me know my complaint had been received. It took five days before I as much as received an emailed response with a complaint number.

Monday 4 March 2013

On the morning of 4 March I started to panic. What if the technician came again and didn’t fix it? How would I know? What would I do? So around 7am I rang Telstra’s advertised 24/7 number for business faults, knowing that if I rang this early in the day, I would probably get through to their Townsville call centre. After pressing all the right buttons, I got a voice message saying that they didn’t open until 8am and please call back then. WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I rang again at 7.45am - just to make sure - and connected with a fellow who assured me that the technician was due out that day and yes, I was on the list to be fixed by 7pm that evening.

By 4pm it still hadn’t been fixed and I was getting close to panic stations again. If the technician was really coming out today, wouldn’t he have been here by now? Surely the 7pm is just an ‘at worst’ time. So I rang the business faults number again, got diverted to an overseas call centre again, and the girl on the end of the phone told me that ‘yes, there is a technician coming out and he will confirm for you that there is no fault on the Telstra line’. WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! So I repeated it back to her and she said ‘yes, that’s right, he’ll confirm that there is nothing wrong with the Telstra line’. I asked her what would happen if he did find a fault in the line, and she said ‘well, he’ll fix it then confirm that there is no fault in the Telstra line’. Nothing like a well-phrased script for your call centre staff to help them get the job done.

Tuesday 5 March 2013

I arrived at the office and - you guessed it - the internet was still out. Surprise, surprise, the technician hadn’t fixed it.

So I rang the business faults line again at 7.45am and spoke to another fellow in Townsville who spent a good 45-50 minutes on the phone with me. We tried various things - unplugging the phone, the EFTPOS machine etc, testing the line this way, that way, and still it was dead. Good for phone and EFTPOS, but not working for internet.

Eventually he said he would have to escalate it, but still didn’t know how long it would take to be fixed. But he would escalate it. I had told him at the outset and repeated again that if it wasn’t fixed, I would be contacting the Telecommunications Ombudsman as this was beyond ridiculous. He said he understood.

He also mentioned that the technicians were thin on the ground due to all the floods in northern NSW and Queensland. Funny, I wasn’t told that last week when I was guaranteed my service would be fixed in less than 48 hours.

At 10am, my nerves got the better of me and I rang a fellow I barely know who happens to live locally and be a senior manager at Telstra. He had added me as a social media connection some time ago, so I figured - more fool you, love. He was brilliant - took my complaint seriously, took my reference numbers and said he would make some calls.

A bit later that day I texted him, just to let him know we were still out of commission and he said he was trying to find out what was happening. He rang me back again around 5-ish to say that he had escalated it and to sit tight and he’d be back to me the next day.

Wednesday 6 March 2013

I brought an unused, six month old Telstra modem in from home and plugged it in, just to satisfy myself that my modem wasn’t the problem. Telstra modem couldn’t get a connection, either.

Sorry Telstra, it’s you, not me.

Later in the day, I texted my new best friend, the local Telstra manager, just to let him know we were still incommunicado. He rang back to say that he thought it should have been fixed by now. After all, he had a report that a case had been closed at our local exchange at 3pm that day. Was I sure it still wasn’t working? You bet I was sure! He asked me to leave it with him to investigate.

I realised afterwards that the case which had been closed was a possible outage case advertised on the Bigpond website that was scheduled to be closed at 3pm that day - I’d noticed it when I started checking the local area connection status reports when my connection first went down. However, that outage started after I lost my connection.

At 5.30pm I received a call from a lovely man in Telstra’s complaints department in Melbourne - as a result of my new best friend’s work. He told me to go out and buy a mobile/wireless dongle - any brand - to get us through until our connection was restored. And send Telstra the bill for reimbursement. Gee, thanks - but that’s not the only bill I’m planning on sending you, though!

This fellow also let me have his phone number and email address, and told me to feel free to call or email anytime. Sucker!! Gonna make use of that one if this isn’t fixed soon!

He also told me that it had been escalated and that there should be a technician out to fix it within the next 72 hours. Great! Only have to get through Thursday and Friday at the worst and it should be fixed by 7pm Saturday at the latest, if not before. He did say ‘within the next 72 hours’ after all, didn’t he? Even if he did say ‘possibly on Saturday’.

He also mentioned the fact that technicians were thin on the ground due to the floods up north. Funny how he know that but no one in the Philippines knew it and the first lady I spoke to, Monday last week, who happened to be located in Townsville, made no mention of it.

Thursday 7 March 2013

For the first time in a week my stomach isn’t hurting as much as it has been. Stress is an evil task master.

I took my laptop in with plans to get my dongle ASAP. If you were watching me, you might even have detected a slight spring in my step. Oh happy days!

On my way to the office, around 7.25am, I received a text from my new best friend (the local Telstra manager) to say that he’d left something for me at the local service station and he’d be in touch to tell me how to use it when he got into town. We’re like that up here - you can leave something at one business for another and we look after each other. The way businesses should.

This lovely man had left me a Telstra wireless modem with an aerial, just in case. I took it into the office and plugged it in and it seemed to work - except that I have a desktop server and networked PCs, none of which have wireless access. I rang my offsider and reminded her to bring in her laptop. Voila! With laptops we had internet access!! Except with laptops, we couldn’t access our client files directly on our server, so everything had to be done via USB between one computer and the other. But at least we could get some work done!

However, the password we have had to use for this wireless modem suggests to me that this Telstra manager has lent me his personal wireless modem. Surely not? Surely Telstra’s customer service plan doesn’t resort to Telstra employees having to lend their own personal equipment to disgruntled customers?

Friday 8 March 2013

Well, internet access helps, but work procedures are still really slow. We can’t access our work emails via the wireless modem since Thursday morning as our website/webmail host seems to detect it as a hack attack. So we’re back to after hours checking of business emails.

But as the day wears on and I realise that the ‘72 hours’ is ticking wildly away, my thoughts turn again to the terror of ‘what if we’re not fixed this time?’ So around 2pm I try to call my other new best friend in the complaints section in Melbourne, just to be reassured that yes, it’s going to happen, you can relax now. You can trust us. Funny, my call went through to his voicemail. I left a message asking him to call me back before 5pm. Around 4pm I couldn’t wait any longer and I rang him again. Voicemail again. I told him it was me again and I would email him.

So, at 4.30pm I sent him an email (from my personal Gmail account which I CAN access via this borrowed wireless modem - thankfully) telling him that I wasn’t convinced that we would be fixed by Saturday evening. And that while I appreciated that my other new best friend had worked hard to solve this issue for me, I couldn’t go on like this. That if I arrived at the office on Monday afternoon (we have a site visit in the morning) and it still wasn’t fixed, I would be reporting it to the Telecommunications Ombudsman. Sorry, thanks for your help, but …

Saturday 8 March 2013

I logged onto my personal email this morning and there is a message from my now ex-new best friend in the Melbourne complaints department, saying, ‘I apologise I was not able to speak to you when you called. I have not got any update about a technician getting assigned to the fault.’ WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Am in tears and the pain in my stomach is back - with a vengeance. I ring iiNET and speak with a lovely girl there who tells me that while they’d love to help, their service would have to go through the Telstra exchange as they don’t have their own cabling where we are and if she did connect us wirelessly (I think) we’d be too far away to get a decent signal. And that she could sell us a plan, but that wouldn’t be honest because they couldn’t live up to their guarantee to provide what I purchased.

Gee, a company being honest - at the expense of income. HOW ABOUT THAT, TELSTRA?!

I don’t know what to do next. There is no point in changing providers because they all have to run through our local Telstra exchange. I have a friend with a different provider and a similar problem to me, and her ISP has told her they’ve done all they can and she has to take it up with Telstra herself. If they’re not helping me - a Tesltra customer for more than 30 years - then why the hell should they help her when she’s not even their customer? So no, I am not going to put a third party between me and Telstra - that’s daft as far as business sense goes.

We are due back in the office on Monday afternoon, 11 March, and if my internet is not up, then the Telecommunications Ombudsman is going to get a call. After that, who knows?

I have often said that if the apocalypse comes, it will not be a natural disaster, but the collapse of the internet. After this last fortnight, I have enough material to understand how that could bring the world to its knees. It truly doesn’t warrant thinking about.

Monday 11 March 2013

This morning we were out at Liverpool Girls' High School giving a presentation to their Year 7 girls on topics from our book The High School Survival Guide, which was a welcome respite from being in the office and dealing with the whole no-internet thing.

We came back to the office this afternoon, via Vodafone, where we signed up for a Pocket Wi-Fi modem on a 30 day trial. All high spirited - we will switch to wireless and run the office that way! Alas, it's going to take a lot more work than just plugging it in. A call to our tech guy suggests that, due to the type of work we do, wireless will not do it for us - the speeds will be too slow. Also, because we have a cable office with a networked printer etc, our whole configuration will need to be re-done to integrate the wireless wi-fi into our system, and knowing what he does of how we work here, we will regret it. His advice is to to hang on and keep pushing to get our ADSL repaired. Sadly, I know that deep down he is right. Nice to have an honest supplier - one who could easily have charged us a small fortune to reconfigure our system even though he knew it wouldn't be in our best interests.

At 3.29pm I get a text from Telstra 'rescheduling' my 'job' to 25 March by 7pm - another two weeks away. WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I went home and used the F-word on Facebook - a first for me. AND I used capital letters!

Tuesday 12 March 2013

So over this I am almost calm. I start the day by lodging a complaint with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. I also send a copy to the fellow in the Complaints department down in Melbourne. No response is received. Funny that.

Later in the morning, my associate/colleague/fellow businessman Wayne Maber who runs an accounting and taxation service in the other half of our office, starts ringing Telstra and working his way up through the food chain to the CEO's office. He starts extracting promises from senior staff to look into it, telling them that it has gone on for long enough. As the day wears on, the first call he expects to be returned in five minutes takes two hours. There seems to be an agreement to fix it by close of business, and so Wayne says he will call back at 4pm to see what's happening. At 3.50pm he receives a call! No technicians can be assigned to the job - the Service Delivery Manager for NSW (the person in charge of scheduling technicians) doesn't have anyone available.

'Funny that,' says Wayne, 'then how do you explain the two Telstra workers digging up at the bottom of our street this morning?'

Around 5.45pm, a Complaints Liaison Officer from the CEO's office rang Wayne and explained that he 'did not have any good news' and then offered a wi-fi connection as a solution. Wayne politely explained a $50 wi-fi solution would not help as we've already explored that option, and the cost to to our businesses was many times this amount EACH DAY.

Wayne told him he would call him back at midday today in the expectation of 'good news'.

Wednesday 13 March 2013

Started the morning by sending story suggestions to A Current Affair, Today Tonight and 7.30 Report. Let's hope one of them is about due for a telco-bashing story!!

An open letter to the Hon Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia

2013-01-28T11:08:00.000+11:00

Dear Prime Minister

As a business owner and operator, I am not legally allowed to discriminate against gay staff, nor am I allowed to discriminate against gay clients. Fortunately, this isn’t an issue for me, but as a business operator, I need to know that my civic leaders are following the same rules which apply to me. Sadly, even in 2013, it appears that they’re not.

In a week where:

the Parramatta Lord Mayor was publicly embarrassed (read: online petition and social media responses) into making a written apology to GLBT support group Twenty10 after they were asked to take down this banner from their stand at the Rediscover the River event
Parramatta independent councillor Paul Garrard referred to ‘the gays’, and suggested Twenty10 was ‘semi-political’ and likened them to a Right to Life group, and
two people became ex-candidates for Bob Katter’s Australian Party following their own homophobic statements

it seems clear to me that what we need is some leadership from the top to reinforce to the public that it truly is okay to be gay.

I do believe that the public in general are looking for leadership on this issue. For many, many years now, we have had anti-discrimination laws letting us know what we can and can’t do, and yet we still have political aspirants and leaders ignoring these laws altogether while the majority of good folk understand the reasons for them and happily act in accordance with them. Indeed, many of us would happily act just the same, even without those laws!!

Your legacy

This may, or may not be, your last year as prime minister of this great country, but what if it was? What legacy would you like to leave? What if you were the prime minister who legislated for same-sex marriage? The prime minister who publicly said to the rest of the country, ‘It’s okay to be gay’? Wouldn’t that be a great legacy to leave?

Think back over our earlier prime ministers - what legacies did they leave? Gough Whitlam’s was education reform. John Howard’s was gun control. What will yours be? The misogyny statement? Surely you can do better than that …

The bulk of us ordinary Joes are quite happy not to discriminate, but we need leadership on this issue. If our governments are allowed to discriminate, then it’s not really fair on the rest of us, is it?

So how about it, Julia? How about legalising same-sex marriage? What a great legacy to leave this country!

Not a religious issue

This is a government registration/legislation issue, not a religious one. If any particular church is happy to unite gay couples, then good on them - I’m sure their congregation will swell quite quickly. (And congratulations to the Maple Leaf Lutheran Church of Seattle, WA, for their wonderfully embracing attitude! Like you, Julia, I’m an atheist, but it warms the cockles of my little heart to see a church embracing diversity the way this one does.)

If a church would rather not marry gay couples, they should be allowed to decline. But our government should not be allowed to refuse gay couples to marry in the same way as I am not allowed to refuse service to a gay person. If I, as a business operator, am not allowed to discriminate against gay people, then why should our government?

Positives of same-sex marriage

The effect on mental health issues across the country would have to be positive - how many young and middle aged people have mental health issues because they’ve felt forced to suppress who they really are? How many of our elderly are coming to the end of sad, repressed lives because they couldn't be who they were? How many young people commit suicide because they’re ashamed of their sexuality?

The effect on the economy of legalising same-sex marriage would have to be positive. An increase in weddings across the country would surely help stimulate all sections of the service industry!

Legalising same-sex marriage would help increase tolerance and understanding of many other sorts of diversity across society, and this can only be a good thing, can’t it?

It would also allow the children of gay couples to grow up in the same legally recognised environment that children of many heterosexual couples have the privilege of growing up in. If their parents remain unmarried, then it’s a parental choice, it’s about freedom of choice, rather than having their parents treated as second class citizens.

Australia’s place in the world

Legalising same-sex marriage would help bring Australia into line with other countries across the world as they progressively legalise same-sex marriage. Please, it took us long enough to introduce a carbon tax and ratify the Kyoto Protocol: Finland was 20 years ahead of us on a carbon tax and five years ahead of us on ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, despite the fact both countries signed the Kyoto Protocol on 29 April 1998!

As an Australian citizen, it would be really nice to be at the front of the pack on this one, rather than being embarrassed into it by the rest of the world. I mean, seriously, Spain and Argentina are already there - what the hell is our problem?!

Part of a growing demographic

Before I go, you need to know that no, I’m not gay. I’m straight, and have been married to a wonderful, caring man for three decades.

I’m simply part of the growing demographic which believes that it would be nice if the many wonderful gay people and gay couples we know and care about could have the same opportunity for marriage that we have enjoyed. That’s all.

So, Julia? Are you up for it? How about it, hey? How about making the legalisation of same-sex marriage your gift to Australia in 2013?

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

2012-12-09T14:43:00.000+11:00

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

My cousin Karen over in San Diego, California, read this book a few weeks ago and Facebooked me about how much she enjoyed it as her grandmother, my aunt, would have lived in a similar area around the same time. It helped her visualise some of the difficulties Aunt Sarah would have had back then, just in daily life alone.

I trust Karen's book judgement implicitly - she gets what I like (and I have to confess that it sadly doesn't work in the opposite way!) - so I hopped onto Amazon to grab a copy for my Kindle. Bow-bow! The Kindle rights for this ebook do not allow me as a buyer in Australia to purchase it!

I had a quick Facebook whinge to Karen who immediately wrapped up her copy and popped it in the post to me. Such a darling. And I have to say, as a publisher, I have no idea why Ms Walls or her publisher, have restricted the territorial rights. They just lost a certified sale and the only winners were the US and Australian postal services.

This book is faction at its best. Ms Walls has researched her grandmother and the time she lived in and brought them to us in a lovely, slightly-larger-than-life package. No real melodrama, just a tale about real individuals in a time that most of us are now too young to remember.

As my own grandparents (Karen's great grandparents) would have crossed the USA from Ellis Island to Bisbee over 100 years ago, I found MS Walls' descriptions of the Arizona countryside and the way people navigated it and lived in it enlightening, informative and entertaining.

The chief protagonist of the story, Ms Walls' own grandmother, is a truly three-dimensional character. As she ages, you can feel yourself thinking, 'Hold on there girl, there are two sides to that story'. She's a fully fleshed out character with good points and bad, and this is a truly entertaining story.

Get it - if you can.

The Rock Star in the Mirror by Sharon E. Cathcart

2012-11-08T08:11:00.002+11:00

The Rock Star in the Mirror by Sharon E. Cathcart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved it.

Such a nice change to read a story with real, relatable, from-the-heart conflict, rather than the exacerbated, hyped-up, let's get the reader in a lather type conflict which seems prevalent in so many stories these days.

This tale moved along at a well-balanced pace, dialogue and storyline very enjoyable, and it was, simply, good fun to read! As every story should be.

Oh, and it's sort of anchored around David Bowie in a very clever way, but that was just an added bonus for me :)

I will actually re-read this in a few weeks time - which is something I very, very rarely do. So that tells you something.

Get it. Read it. Go on - it will make you smile.

View all my reviews

Alpha Chick - Mal Duane - ebook

2012-10-10T08:00:00.000+11:00

(This post was originally released on 1 March 2012, but was unpublished while judging of the Global Ebook Awards too place. The original post is being republished in October 2012 now that the judging process is over.)

Well, I'm surprising even myself. Despite the fun, stress and exhaustion that accompanies releasing every issue of Narrator Magazine (the latest one came out today), I still managed to read another ebook this week in my role as a judge for the 2012 Global eBook Awards.

This week's book had me thinking deeply - not so much about the book itself, but about how I felt about it. Judging books is a new experience for me. Editing is one thing - you're helping someone bring life to something in the best possible way. But judging? The responsibility is enormous: you could kill a book with a bad review.

I know how much hard work goes into a book, and how, to publish, it's as if you're standing naked in front of the whole world, which is why I don't post unfavourable reviews - I feel it's better to post nothing than to be critical. And there is also the point that my perspective of something may be just that - my perspective - and it might not be such a bad book, it might just be the way I view it and it might appeal 100% more to someone else, and I would not want to damage an author's hope of getting someone to read and enjoy their book by posting something unfavourable.

So, why the ramble? Well, I had to come to terms with how I felt about Alpha Chick. Ms Duane is certainly intelligent (or her editor is very sharp and grammatically correct) - this is no book for dummies. You need a decent vocabulary and to be able to comfortably read good grammar - I am sure there was no sentence in this book with a preposition at the end! But despite the properly constructed sentences, this is a warm, friendly, authentic read.

The book is in two parts with the first part being Ms Duane's basic life story, explaining her initially happy childhood, the changes in her life which led to her alcoholism and poor relationships which were contrasted against her incredible business successes, through to her epiphany/light bulb moment/moment of clarity where she found the strength to face her demons and get her life back on track. The second part of the book is Ms Duane's five steps to help the reader do the same with their life.

I suppose my problem with this book, and which is why I talked about perspective earlier on, is that I have read quite a few similar books, and learned a lot of the techniques Ms Duane suggests, in my career as a business person. I have attended many courses and workshops and devoured many highly recommended reads as suggested by various business coaches, mentors and associates, so reading Alpha Chick I often felt that I wasn't reading anything new, that it had just been re-packaged for a different audience. And then I realised - that's the point.

Ms Duane is talking to women - women who have been beaten by life, by their husbands, by their fathers, by their children, by the mundane and the everyday - women who have lost hope and just don't know where to start looking for it again. Alpha Chick is designed to give them that hope. It's not going to solve their problems just by reading it, and that's the point of the book - the way we live our lives, for the most part and barring extreme misfortune, is our choice. And we have choices, no matter how small, and it's up to us to exercise those choices - to take responsibility for our own happiness because if we don't, no one else will.

But Alpha Chick will let these women know that they're not the only ones in the world facing misery, that it's not impossible to do something about your life, that it's not easy to do something about your life, but that if you want to, you can. Ms Duane provides her five steps with more story than simple 1, 2, 3 - there is plenty of reading in this book - and she also directs the reader to her website, for freebies, feedback and help. Ultimately, this is a business book - Ms Duane has trained as a professional coach and this book is partly a marketing asset to help expand her business - but that's the cynic in me, the cynic who has edited/proofread many similar books under the 21st century marketing agenda of 'You're an expert in your field, write a book and double your authenticity so you can up your prices/attract more clients etc'.

So taking my perspective out of the equation, taking away my editing history and mediocre marketing knowledge/awareness, is this book any good? Yes, it is. It will show you how the only way to help yourself is to hold that big, ugly mirror up in front of your face so that you can see yourself, and the life you're living, warts and all. And if you're ready to do that, then you're ready to start making the changes Ms Duane had to make to begin living a life that's rewarding, that's worth living. And shouldn't we all be doing our best to do that?

Alpha Chick is available in print as well as for Kindle, through Amazon.

Why I can’t wait to pay $20+ for JK Rowling’s new ebook

2012-10-07T17:58:00.000+11:00

Well, it’s out - The Casual Vacancy - JK Rowling’s first book for adults. As if you didn't already know!

Image courtesy of Amazon.com

I saw the hardback in Target last week for $20, or maybe $25, which is a pretty good price for a hardback, especially a new release. But I don’t need any more books on my shelf, so figured I would go home and buy the ebook.

Well, the thing is, the ebook is $20+ as well, so it doesn’t really matter which book I buy, it’s going to cost me pretty much the same. And you know what? Here’s the logic I am applying to tell me that it’s okay to spend that sort of money on an ebook:

The publishers have, apparently, had two million copies (that’s 2,000,000) printed and distributed around the world. That’s a pretty big investment, so they’re going to need to get their money back quickly.
It’s the same story in both the print version and the eversion, and it’s written by JK Rowling, so whether it’s on paper or on screen, it’s a story I’m buying, not paper or computer code.
The editing cost has to happen, whether it’s a print book or an ebook, and so does the marketing cost, so the cost of these and other overheads (such as that really incredible cover - must have cost a fortune to have that designed!) should be split between both books. If there were no print books, the ebook would have to carry the cost of all that overhead by itself, right?
To print two million books must cost a bit, and then they have to be shipped everywhere, so that’s probably going to cost the publisher at least a third, if not more, of the $20-25 they’re charging for the book. Then the retailers will take their commission (around 40%), which means there won’t be much left out of that $20-25 book once local taxes have been paid. So, they’re probably not planning to make much profit on the print book.
The publishers won’t want the retailers to be left with stocks of the print book on hand, so if they have the ebook at a lower price, many people will opt for that instead of the print book. But if they’re the same price, then there’s a better chance that they’ll shift all those print books, then they won’t need to be destroyed and the retailers will be happy.
The publishers are in business and if they don’t make sensible business decisions like charging the same for both print and eversions, then they won’t be in business for long.

So yes, let’s all drop $20+ on the eversion so that we can subsidise the print version of what is, essentially, a gamble by Rowling’s new publishers. That seems a respectful way to treat your potential audience to me.

Opinionated blogging. It’s at the top of the page.

Harry Potter in the Demented Elderly

2012-09-30T10:30:00.000+10:00

With the release this week of The Casual Vacancy, the new non-Harry Potter book from JK Rowling, talk at our dinner table this evening turned to the way Harry had invaded my daughter’s life between the ages of eight and about 13. In fact, she sank so deeply into the books as each one was released, that she lived in Potterville during the reading hours.

And she wouldn’t have been the only one. A whole generation of young folk now know a range of pseudo-Latin phrases, how to cast a wand, how to play Quidditch, and all sorts of things about the Dark Arts.

Which led to a discussion about what form geriatric dementia may take in the Harry Potter-fed generations.

Photo courtesy of Renjith Krishan from www.freedigitalphotos.net

Will we have nursing homes full of ninety-year olds ripping the pot plants out thinking that they’re Mandrakes? We will have elderly gentlemen pointing their butter knives at each other across dining room tables, croaking ‘Expelliarmus!’ and waiting for their opposite number to croak permanently?

Will zimmer frames be zoomed along the carpet by the post-lucid elderly as they endeavour to play Quidditch in the corridors? Will they gather in groups in fear of she-who-must-not-be-named for fear she will increase their daily dosage of anti-senility tablets? Or will they gather in groups of Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs and refuse to share the shuffleboard with the Slytherins and Ravenclaws?

And will we have a generation of geriatricians, 50 years their junior, wondering what the hell is going on in the minds of the old people, and why they insist on renaming every damned nursing home ‘Hogwarts’?

Planes, trains and automobiles ... after the apocalypse

2012-09-02T22:32:00.000+10:00

Seems that the news this week is full of Liberal party promises - state and federal - to build us new roads, provide the M4 East missing link http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/abbott-promises-m4-east-20120629-2180u.html, create a train route through north west Sydney which will be totally incompatible with everything else that currently exists in the state of New South Wales http://smh.drive.com.au/roads-and-traffic/tunnel-too-small-could-make-rail-link-a-bridge-too-far-20120703-21fjy.html, build another harbour crossing http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/harbour-crossing-back-on-track-20120601-1zn5c.html ... and I'm beginning to wonder: why the hell aren't our governments pouring all this money into a more sustainable future?

While there are many different views as to when the oil reserves will effectively run out, it will make little difference in the long run if we don't start preparing now. And by preparing, I don't mean spending more of our country's wealth on more roads to accommodate more cars which, within probably 30 years, will suddenly be something few of us can afford.

Imagine it

The oil reserves start to dry up bit by bit. The oil companies will know it's coming, so they'll slowly start upping the price. Ordinary folk won't be able to afford fuel so bit by it they'll stop driving their cars, dropping back to one per couple etc. Then as supplies tighten further, there'll be government rationing as prices climb (remember the good old strike days of the 1970s when you filled up on the day of the week depending on whether your number plate ended in an odd or an even number?), eventually leading to government-sanctioned purchasing only.

Abandoned cars courtesy of http://chrisescars.com/fossil-fuel-vehicles-maybe-banned-in-europe-by-2050/

So cars will be driven until they stop - left and abandoned as worthless monuments by the side of the road. The Western capitalist economy will screech to a shuddering halt - without oil we can't travel to our jobs, and we can't transport all those wonderful goodies across the world for us all to purchase, so we will lose our jobs because we either can't get to them, or our employers can't afford us because they can't maintain their sales because they can't transport their goods anywhere near as effectively as they used to - so we will get thrown out of our rental properties, or have the banks foreclose on our mortgages ... and there'll be a whole sub-class of people living in the abandoned cars by the side of the road and streets full of empty houses which banks can't sell because no one can afford to by them ... cue sci-fi movie 'The Car Dwellers'.

And in 500 or 1,000 years time, archaeologists and historians will be speculating on what went wrong in our society and why we couldn't see it all coming, and they'll be writing massive tomes about 'The Rise and Fall of the Western Empire' ... and I wonder if they will have any idea about how quickly our wonderful little house of cards came crashing down.

We have a wonderful lifestyle now, but it can't last. The only thing we can do is be realistic about the future and start preparing NOW. Because it will be here before we know it. It will be here before the preschool kids of today get a chance to teach their own kids to drive.

Developing a solar powered car with a wind turbine array behind the front grill would be a brilliant place to start. Then we might actually get some value out of all these roads our governments keep building! But will it be enough? Or even feasible in the long term?

Who knows, but without government leadership which allocates as much thought and planning to a realistic future as it does to an unlikely one, I dare say those 'Rise and Fall of the Western Empire' theses will be churned out in abundance down the track.

Ebooks 101 - The Movie :D

2012-08-26T16:24:00.000+10:00

Wow! What a busy month it's been. Not just for me, but also for Ingrid Raoul who managed to edit and bring together video from my talk at the Publish! Blue Mountains event at the Clarendon Guesthouse, Katoomba, earlier this month. Somehow, she's managed to cut out all my ums and ahs and bring it in at just under 27 minutes - for which most people will be grateful :)

So if you've been wondering:

What is an ebook?
What is an ebook reader?
What is the difference between some of the ebook readers?
What is an ereading device?
What sort of ebooks are there?
What price should I expect to pay for an ebook?
Where can I buy ebooks?

... and a whole host of other 'equestions', then grab a cup of tea/coffee/whatever your poison is, and sit back and learn the easy way:

Alternatively, you may like to just read through my 'rough guide to ebooks' on our (about to be upgraded, so please be forgiving) MoshPit Publishing website. Click on the 'epublishing workshop' link in the middle of the Home page to view my notes.

And if you have any 'equestions' of your own, please feel free to ask them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pages/Jennifer-Mosher-Editor/213860058686004 or in the Comments box below.

Not the only querier in the village

2012-08-14T13:02:00.001+10:00

Still ranting after last week's talk at the Publish! BlueMountains event at the Clarendon, one of the topics which I raised, which then proceeded to raise opinions in the room, was that of ebook royalties paid by traditional publishers who had already produced a print book and were then capitalising on that print issue by also releasing in print.

It started when I queried the income an author might be receiving on a $10 ebook sold on Amazon, and continued to insinuate that I felt the publisher was probably making more money out of the ebook than the author. A publisher in the audience took exception to my insinuations and proved my suspicions wrong by telling everyone how, at her business, they were paying a 25% royalty on ebook sales, a rate which I felt was insultingly low.

Andy Richardson
www.influentialsoftware.com

Today I feel vindicated. I've just discovered this post on 'BookBrunch' about a lawsuit taken against Harlequin by three of their authors regarding ebook royalty payments. Thank you Andy Richardson for your clear and logical discussion of this matter - you're my new hero.

Opinionated blogging - it's at the top of the page.

Self publishing doesn’t mean crap

2012-08-12T15:45:00.000+10:00

So, you’ve written The Great Australian/wherever novel and you want to get it out there.

What do you need? A publisher, right? And how do you get one of those? Through a literary agent. But you’ve never been published before, not even a short story, so how the hell do you persuade a literary agent to take you on when you’ve got nowt but this one novel to show for your writing career?

Answer? You don’t. You give up, because unless you’ve written something really special that they can see fitting with a particular publisher’s market, you’re not going to get a deal. Sorry, but publishers are businesses. If they’re not 101% sure that your book is going to make them money, they’re not going to take you on. If they take on books which are going to incur losses, then they’ll be out of business in no time. Sorry, but that’s the sad truth.

But your book is brilliant - your friends and family have said so. So what do you do next? Answer? You self publish.

Now, here’s where traditional publishers and authors are getting hot under the collar. There are several options for self publishing, and when the traditionalists think of self publishing, they think of it in terms of people just publishing anything and everything, bringing down the quality, and hence the status, of the industry as a whole. But it doesn’t have to be like that - no Sir-ree.

While there are many things a publisher will do to help your book succeed, the bottom line is, there are three things you NEED just to give it a starting chance:

a good story well-told - whether it’s fact or fiction
a good editor - you will be surprised at the difference a professional editor can make
a good cover - it doesn’t have to set the world on fire, but should be something which accurately reflects what’s inside the book.

Now, you probably think I’m being over-cautious, being in the business myself, but consider this scenario:

Let’s say you don’t get it edited. You release it just as it is because, dammit, you were good at high school English and your friends have already pointed out the typos they saw and you’ve fixed those, so how bad could it be? You put it out there, and a few people download a free copy (because that’s a good way to start getting an audience), and then someone posts a review:

Interesting synopsis and could possibly be an okay story, but I couldn’t read more than the first four chapters due to grammar errors, inconsistencies in spelling, poor dialogue etc. If edited, would be easier to read, and then maybe I could form a more helpful opinion.

Joe, Anywhereland

Ouch :(

That’s okay, you think. It’s only an eversion. I can fix it up and re-upload it. But that’s where your thinking is wrong: it has already had a negative review. And depending on where you’ve released it, you may not be able to erase that comment, so any ‘fresh’ version uploaded will still be tarred with the same brush.

Studies have shown that the first thought planted in someone’s head about something is much harder to change, which is why celebrities hate gossip when it’s not correct - it’s much harder to convince people of the truth if they’ve heard a lie first. So, moral of the story, GET IT EDITED FIRST.

Now you’ve had it edited, what’s the other important thing you need to do? GET A PROFESSIONAL COVER DESIGN. It’s certainly doesn’t have to cost you $1,500 (as suggested by a certain publisher in the audience at The Clarendon the other night) but it does have to look reasonably classy - as if someone with some understanding of the text and some decent computer skills has put it together.

Here are two covers courtesy of www.kobo.com for books on Steve Jobs. Neither is intricate or fussy, yet both look to have been professionally laid out. The green cover doesn’t even have an image, yet it works.

Now compare those covers with this one, also from www.kobo.com:

There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it does give the appearance that the book inside might just be an essay with a homemade cover. If the cover looks homemade, what standard is the text likely to be like?

I have not bought any of the books above, so the truth is, any single one of them could be brilliant, or absolute crap - and I wouldn’t know unless I attempted to read them. But the other sad truth is, WE DO JUDGE BOOKS BY THEIR COVERS, so it’s in your best interest (and your book’s!) to have a cover which does its best to represent your book as a professionally produced, cared-for work.

Now, these three things alone won’t make your book a red-hot hit, but they’re the base line things you need to do to just to give it a fighting chance. And if you do these things, then you can at least hold your head high and say:

‘I might be self published, but it doesn’t mean crap!’

Resources:
If you’re looking for an editor, try searching for an editor’s society or association in your state, county or country.

In Australia, you can find IPEd (Institute of Professional Editors) Accredited and Distinguished Editors at http://iped-editors.org/Find_an_editor

In New South Wales, you can find editors at http://www.editorsnsw.com/esd/

In the UK, visit the Society for Editors and Proofreaders at http://www.sfep.org.uk/default.asp

In the USA, visit the Editorial Freelancers Association at http://www.the-efa.org/.

If you need cover design, then I suggest you search for ‘book cover designer [country name]’. Expect to pay from $50 upwards, but an established book cover designer will cost you $300 upwards, depending on what you want. Like editing, until you’ve discussed your cover with someone else, you have no idea of the things that need to be considered!

Good luck!

Traditional publishers and why they make me mad

2012-08-07T21:14:00.000+10:00

Last night, I gave a presentation at the monthly Publish! Blue Mountains meeting at the Clarendon Guesthouse, Katoomba.

I was invited to speak about epublishing, to share my thoughts and experiences, and so I took to the stage armed with my demonstration tools: an 800gm paperback book, a 150gm Kindle, a 450gm NOOK Color, and a modestly evangelical attitude toward this brand new age. I was joined by a colleague-in-arms, the down-to-earth and honest, soon-to-be-epublished J-L Heylen, who followed me with a compelling discourse on why epublishing was her route of choice, not her default ‘I can’t get a publishing deal’ fallback decision.

J-L Heylen in her steampunk Sunday best

I should have had an inkling of what to expect. After all, I’d devoured Catherine Ryan Howard’s article on low ebook pricing and knew that not only ‘traditional publishers’ but ‘traditional authors’ (i.e. those who have been published ‘traditionally’, as in print, through a publishing house), are edgy about epublishing. And I can understand why - major change is always disturbing - so it surprised me to see a traditional publisher and a traditionally published author in the audience last night, when it had been marketed as an evening about epublishing.

But after all the shouting (well, not really shouting, in the end we all pretty much behaved ourselves, but you could certainly feel the temperatures rise), I drove home thinking, ‘Damn them! Traditional publishers have no right to get angry about epublishing!’ And do you know why? Because it’s not like they couldn't see it coming. It’s not like they wouldn’t have seen it in other industries over the last 60 years. But rather than deal with it, the great majority just stuck their heads in the sand and hoped it would go away. And now that ignoring it will no longer work, instead of embracing it and making it their new direction, they’re still trying to make it fit their outdated business models. The publisher last night talked about giving 25% royalties to their authors on sale of their ebooks. Wow - 25%?! Must sign me up with that publisher - NOT!

I mean, seriously - what’s one of the first things any business coach worth their salt will tell you? Innovate or die. Today’s traditional publishers are clinging to the past and, as a result, are rapidly dying.

We saw it in Hollywood in the 1950s - the studio system broke down as the stars began to realise that they were the asset, not the studio, and began to insist on doing things on their own terms … and now the studios no longer control the actors.

Then, we saw it in the music industry - over more than three decades, starting with the release of the cassette recorder in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Not long after that, the introduction of the CD drove many vinyl record pressing plants out of business, then Apple introduced iTunes in January 2001 … and now the record companies no longer control the musicians.

So I have little sympathy for the traditional publishers who have anger towards epublishing. They can see only too clearly - now that they’ve lifted their heads from the sand - that they will no longer be able to play God, no longer be able to send 999 reject letters for every one that says, ‘Yes, we deign to pick YOU!’ They are faced with people who will now epublish rather than paper their walls with rejection slips … and now the traditional publishers no longer control the writers.

And that seemed to be one of the things that steamed out of the underlying frustration of the traditional publisher in the room last night - her lack of control over what was happening around her.

Yes, traditional publishers offer a level of support to writers that they often don’t bother seeking themselves when self publishing - but only to those writers lucky enough to get a contract! The publisher of the traditionally published writer in the room last night refused to publish his book unless he made certain changes to it, as suggested to him by their editor. After three months of resisting, he decided to do it their way, and as a result, his book was a success, and he went on to win a $15,000 literature prize. I lowered myself to snidely congratulate him on getting a publishing deal, because truly very few are so lucky. JK Rowling was knocked back a dozen times before Bloomsbury took on Harry Potter - which just goes to show that, like the record company that knocked back the Beatles - it’s all just a guess. No-one really knows who’s going to be the next big thing.

So why shouldn’t Joe Public have a go themselves, via epublishing? There are plenty of freelance editors, cover designers, ebook formatters around just waiting to help him get it out there.

And whether he takes their advice or not, the book could be brilliant or it could be crap. And if it’s crap, it won’t sell, right? And if it is crap, and it does sell … well, who decides what’s crap anyway? Oh, sorry, that’s right - traditional publishers do!

Opinionated blogging. It’s at the top of the page.

Footnote:

Despite my adoration for the eword, I still believe in print books. I just believe that no book should be printed until it proves itself worthy of a dead tree and all the fossil fuels required to ship it around.

Boring disclaimer bit:

I have generalised (a bit) here, based on last night’s experience, attendances at annual Institute of Editors Conferences in 2009 and 2011, a seminar by the APA in August 2010, and a fair bit of blog reading that I’ve been doing lately. While I admit that not all traditional publishers have had their heads in the sand, the Australian publishing industry as a whole has been really, really slow to embrace epublishing, to the detriment of our writers and readers.

So, to traditional publishers out there who have been releasing ebooks since at least 2009 (the year we at MoshPit Publishing released our first ebook), my apologies.

To the rest of you, get your act into gear!

Michael Collins ... not worth the wait

2012-08-05T18:04:00.003+10:00

Courtesy IMDB.com

In 1996, the movie Michael Collins was released, starring the gorgeous Liam Neeson. For some reason, I never got to see it at the time, and so it's been on my wishlist ever since. Now I don't normally like to bag books and movies - if I can't say something nice, I prefer not to say anything - but we downloaded this movie last night through the T-Box, and as it is now 16 years old, I can't damage it any further.

But why bother having a whinge if it's in the past? I suppose the thing is, I can't work out what was so wrong about it, or rather, why. Neeson's co-stars are fairly well-respected: Julia Roberts, Stephen Reay, Alan Rickman, but the four of them couldn't save this movie.

And it's not like it was Director Neil Jordan's first outing - he'd brought us the brilliant Crying Game four years previously. But the acting was wooden - even from Neeson in parts - and the scenes disconnected, the story too oft confusing and difficult to follow without an understanding of the politics of the time ... and it just didn't gel.

Now, I understand that all movies are a series of vignettes strung together to tell a story, but you could see the joins - or rather, the gaping holes between one vignette and the next. And so many of the vignettes were corny and trite. Michael Collins' personality itself seemed to change from one scene to the next - sometimes he was a strong, fearless leader, other times an immature idiot, and at others an angry pacifist - but none of his personality turns made sense.

And the worst of it was there were two or three attempts to introduce a little levity to the story - a la the sort of light relief you'd get in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But it just didn't fit at all.

It's really sad, because I got the feeling from the movie that Michael Collins was probably a man whose life was worth celebrating in film, that he achieved things on the road to peace and possibly led by example, an individual who history has perhaps overlooked a little. Pity this movie didn't help to rectify that.

Good mental health for your kids - part 2 - ADD & ADHD - no excuse for poor discipline

2012-07-17T20:57:00.001+10:00

Sir Richard's book is available on Amazon.com

I was thrilled recently to read the intro to Richard Branson's new book, Like a Virgin, where he states:

The simple fact is that formal education and I were never really meant for each other. I suffered from an acute combination of dyslexia and what I suppose would nowadays be diagnosed as attention deficit disorder.

I had long held the view that Sir Richard would probably have been an ADD or ADHD 'sufferer' (don't you just love that term - 'sufferer'?) and have always felt that he's a great example of the fact that an ADD/ADHD diagnosis does not have to mean the end of the world.

If you look around you at the people you know, in all walks of life, with all their different levels of 'success' you will probably be able to identify many 'fully grown' adults leading very successful lives who fit the ADD/ADHD category - people who can't sit still, people with enormous energy and drive, people who are 'all over the shop' when you're talking with them. And how are these people different to people in jail and living on the fringes of life who also have ADD /ADHD? For the most part, and barring other issues such as physical brain trauma, chemical imbalances in the brain etc, the successful ones will have been exposed to the same discipline in their early lives as their non-ADD/ADHD siblings and friends. In other words, their parents didn't give up on them because they were ADD/ADHD, and in fact, they probably didn't even know that their children 'had a problem'. Because in reality, they didn't. It's modern society which has caused the problem.

How many times have you had a parent excuse their child's terrible behaviour because 'Oh, he's ADD'? How many times have you seen a child's ADD/ADHD diagnosis used as an excuse for not bothering to teach the child right from wrong? 'Johnny, get down, you shouldn't climb on there. Oh I don't know, he just doesn't listen to me.' Gee, I wonder why? Could it be he's learnt very quickly that there will be no consequences if he ignores you?

Now you don't have to beat the crap out of your children if they disobey you - I'm not advocating that for a minute - but every child, ADD or not, needs to learn that there are consequences to certain actions. Put your hand on the hotplate, it gets burnt. Drop a glass, it breaks. Punch your little sister, she screams, and Mum comes down on you like a tonne of bricks!

So what do you need to do differently with an ADD/ADHD child?

1. Accept that there is nothing actually wrong with your child.
The ADD/ADHD child is a normal person, just like all the other normal people around them. They just have higher levels of energy which need to be directed. Many years ago these people were simply known as 'hyperactive'. It was no excuse for bad behaviour, they were just people that had more energy. Today they're called 'sufferers' - it's bullshit. They aren't suffering anything except a label which modern society has created and which only serves to alienate these people from the possibility of a 'normal' life.

2. Give them attention.
So many of the ADD/ADHD children I've seen are just starved of attention. Not all, but many. I realise these children must sap an awful lot of energy from their parents, but those parents that accept that their children have high levels of energy treat them accordingly. They take them to the park and kick a ball around with them. They enrol them in activities which stimulate other parts of their personalities so that they develop a well-rounded interest in lots of things. They teach their child that sometimes they have to have 'quiet time', such as in the last half hour before bedtime, and they take that time to read quietly to their child, or talk about their day, or whatever's troubling them, or something they're looking forward to.

3. Remember that, like all children, your child needs to have boundaries set and adhered to.
They need to understand that certain forms of behaviour are unacceptable, not just to you, but to society in general. You are not doing your child any favours if you let them behave badly. Teach them the basic eye for an eye as in 'you wouldn't like it if someone poked you in the eye, so that's why you shouldn't poke them in the eye'.You need to explain that it's not okay to damage their friends' toys/games/property etc. They wouldn't like it if that person damaged their things. Show them that if they're nice to people and behave decently, people will be nice back to them. If they're horrible to people, then they won't have friends, and people will be horrible back to them. You would do this for your child if they weren't diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, so why shouldn't your ADD/ADHD child have the benefit of the same education?

4. Take notice of positive things that your child shows interest in such as drawing, running, mechanical things etc.
Encourage them to develop hobbies that they're good at and which they enjoy - this will help build their confidence and self esteem, and give them somewhere positive to focus their energy. Get them into team sports if you can - if they can learn to play as part of a team, this will be good for their development. Many of today's leaders are driven hyperactives!

5. Enrol them in a martial art or golf.
Both these activities require energy, but they also work with the mind teaching focus and self discipline.

6. Keep your child's sugar, artificial food colouring and preservative intake to a minimum.
Until you've seen the effect these things can have on a child, you wouldn't believe it. I can remember the first time my two year old had red food colouring in a drink. She'd always been one of those very easy babies, a quiet child who was happy sitting in the corner doing her own thing. Never needed attention, and didn't really even move around that much. One 250ml red tinted juice and she was like the Energiser Bunny for two hours straight! While it was funny to watch, it horrified me to think of all the innocent little children out there being fed this stuff on a daily basis, wired to the nines, driving everyone around them crazy, getting yelled at simply because they were overwrought from food additives - and that's where bad patterns of behaviour start. So do your child a favour - you don't have be a food Nazi, just don't buy the cordials, the colas, the fizzy stuffs etc unless it's a really special occasion. Same for the chocolates and the lollies and the pre-made cakes from the supermarket shelves. Feed them stuff that's actually going to fill their bellies and satisfy them - not wire them up for hours.

7. Always have a routine.
You don't have to be a slave to it, but if the same things happen on the same day and at the same time most of the week, then the child will know where he stands and what's expected of him at those times. Have a bedtime routine that they're quietly expected to follow - it doesn't have to be a fight, you just explain that this is what has to be done before bed, and you'll remind him at that time that it's his job to do those things.

8. Don't go around telling everyone your child is ADD/ADHD.
Most people will probably guess anyway, but if you label him with it, then he's going to feel different and 'not normal' and none of us would really want our children to feel 'not normal' would we? You have a big nose, or a small nose, you have a good sense of humour, or no sense of humour, you have more energy than someone else, or less energy than someone else. What matters is: are you a good person? Do you do the right things in life or are you continually naughty? Nobody likes a naughty child, so before long you'll have no friends if you decide to always be naughty. It's your child's choice to be nice or naughty, but your job to support him with being nice.

9. Celebrate his wins.
If he gets an award - tell him how proud you are. As you would with any child, reinforce good behaviour, try not to get too distracted by bad behaviour.

10. Keep an eye out for 'complications' such as dyslexia.
The two often go hand in hand, possibly because the ADD/ADHD child is harder to keep seated to learn to read! If you read to your child from the youngest age possible, whether an ADD/ADHD child or not, and teach them the alphabet song (the one Sesame Street characters sing to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) they'll be familiar with the idea of books and the alphabet without even realising they're being taught. Get them singing that song, and bit by bit introduce them to the letters of the alphabet. If they're struggling with the letters, then draw with them. Show them how to draw a square, then add a triangle on top to make it a house. Get them to copy what you're drawing on their own sheet of paper. Add more squares for windows and doors. Add a rainbow and the sun. Keep the lines simple. Draw the same picture over several days, maybe vary things here and there slightly, and colour your pictures together. This teaches them to observe the lines, the direction, the shapes etc, and will help prepare them to identify letters. Then, if your child truly is dyslexic, the signs will be more obvious.

11. If there are other issues such as your child being on the autism spectrum, then a lot of the above will still apply, but may need to be toned down a little.
However, all children need a routine - it allows them to know what's going to happen next, and if there's anything not quite right at any stage, such as they're off colour, it will be easier to pick up and deal with, than if you all just do whatever, whenever.

Your ADD/ADHD child will be hard work - but all children are. And if your child isn't hard work at all, then you're either not caring enough about their development - or they have no personality!

Opinionated blogging. It's at the top of the page :)

Good mental health for your kids - part 1 - self responsibility

2012-06-22T21:11:00.000+10:00

A few days ago, a Facebook friend of mine shared the following cartoon. It came from ‘I Love to Laugh’s’ Facebook page (at https://www.facebook.com/ILTLaugh), and they share things from others, so I have no idea where it originated, but it certainly struck a chord with me. My friend’s comment, above the picture was:

So true. Where have we gone wrong???

My comment was:

We've taught our children to blame everybody else and not take self responsibility.

She agreed with me.

After typing it, I thought back over a few things, and then I got angry.

We are now living in a society where it’s everybody else’s fault. You get hurt at work, sue the company (read: insurer). You break into someone’s house, trip and knock yourself out on the coffee table, sue the homeowner. You get charged with assault, blame your terrible upbringing. My God - we nearly ALL had a terrible upbringing by today’s standards!!

I can remember when one of my girls was little, there was a boy in her class who was earmarked from the word go as being a handful. Yet there was nothing actually wrong with him - he was just quite intelligent in a non government-school fit-the-box manner.

At the age of five (his age, not mine!), he took my hand one day (I used to help in the classroom one morning per week) and he took me to the old manual typewriter at the back of the room, and then proceeded to show me how it worked. Not just ‘hit the button and it makes a mark on the paper’ but ‘this cog turns that cog and that lever moves that’ - he understood the mechanics of it at the age of five. So he wasn’t silly, just probably more intelligent than anyone realised!

He and his brother lived with their mum and the boys saw their dad occasionally, but she didn’t like that he would take them walking through storm water drains etc. Okay, I accept that it’s probably not a good thing teach young boys, but at least he did things with his boys, rather than let them play in the backyard while he sat inside watching tele and drinking beer.

Anyway, we were at the classroom one day, for a parent morning, and this mum said to me that she’d had to have a chat with the teacher because her kid didn’t respond to being slapped (this was many years ago!), he needed the ‘persuasive approach’. I was horrified. And like a coward, I kept my mouth zipped.

The thing is, a boy (or indeed, a girl) that has to be ‘persuaded’ to behave isn’t going to get far in society.

No copper is going to use the ‘persuasive approach’ when he pulls a 17 year old over for doing 100 kph in a 60 zone! It’s going to be ‘You’re nicked, Sonny!’

No employer is going to use the ‘persuasive approach’ when the new apprentice wields a power tool in a dangerous manner. It’s going to be ‘Watch out! Where the hell did you learn to saw/drill/whatever?!’

I’ve been a parent for 22 years. I’ve made mistakes (haven’t we all?), but on the whole I’m pretty happy with the job I’ve done. And I do believe that our generation and those before us were probably smacked (or worse still, caned or given the strap) a little too often - it’s nice to see psychology being brought into and encouraged in parenting.

But sometimes, just sometimes, kids need to know that if they do this, the consequence is that, and they then need to be left to live with that consequence.

My mother always took responsibility for my homework. ‘Do you have homework today? How about you do it before dinner, then it’s done? When’s that assignment due? Haven’t you started it yet?’ It was always a bone of contention and stress in our household. She took control of my homework, so it wasn’t my responsibility, it was hers, but I had to do it.

When I had my own children, I stopped taking responsibility for their homework pretty early on. They soon learnt that if they didn’t do it, the teacher would tell them off - and they didn’t like that! They were warned by me, so they knew what was coming - but I made it their responsibility for them to do their work. Sure, I’d help them, and I’d remind them, but without it being my problem or responsibility.

And as they grew up, it became an interest factor and a source of discussion material. ‘What assignments do you have? What are they on? Do you need any help?’

The same went for their toys and possessions. I’d say ‘Don’t leave that on the floor, someone will tread on it and break it.’ Sure enough, said toy would eventually get trodden on and broken. Tears would flow. The toy would NOT be replaced. They soon learnt. My toy, my responsibility to keep it safe.

I think the litigious mindset of western societies these days truly reflects our shift in taking responsibility for our actions - something bad has happened, so I must blame someone. And hell no, I’m not blaming me - I don’t do anything wrong!

But deep down we know when we have done something wrong, when we’re at least a little bit to blame. No matter what a person says on the outside, only the truly delusional truly believe that they’re not at fault in any way.

So when we bury that knowledge, when we spout blame and point fingers at others, it’s in a desperate attempt to hide the truth of the matter. And when you start doing that, you start living a lie.

‘This copper pulled me over for speeding - he targeted me because I’m on my P-plates.’

‘The bloody boss is a crackpot - all I did was put the saw down without turning it off first. I mean, no one died, did they?’

And when you start living a lie, people start trying to catch you at it - and the hunter becomes the hunted - the haunted - the victim - the one who nothing good ever happens to.

So if you’re a parent, do your child a favour and let them take responsibility for their actions.

If they nick something from the local shop, explain to them that they wouldn’t like it if someone stole something from them, would they? Then explain that they have to take it back and apologise. Ring the shopkeeper, ask them to take it seriously (but not too seriously - don’t want to scare the kid from doing the right thing next time!) and take the kid up, with the nicked item, and hold their hand while they apologise and hand it back. Then tell them how proud you are of them for doing the right thing.

If they forget to take their homework in because they’ve been slack, then don’t run it up to school - let them cop a minus mark for not handing it in on time. Mind you, if they’re normally really good about handing their work in and perhaps have had a lot on their plate, then it doesn’t hurt to once - just once! - support them by running it up if it really has to be in that day - but never make a habit of it.

And so on. And we need to do the same ourselves - if we stuff up, we need to own up. Show our children that we’re human too, that it’s okay to make a mistake, so long as we do our best to ‘own’ it and to make amends wherever possible.

After all, we’re all human, and if we expect others to remember that, then we have to remember it, too.

Ebooks - faster to the finish line

2012-06-05T14:40:00.000+10:00

I gave a bit of a talk down at the Springwood Fellowship of Australian Writers last Sunday afternoon. They were kind enough to invite me to have a chat about ebooks and ebook publishing. Silly people - one of my favourite topics!

Mostly I talked about ebook readers and the benefits of same so that as writers they could get a handle on what their readers were doing, but then I talked about ebooks from their point of view, why they might find it convenient to e-publish rather than print publish.

Free image courtesy of Jon Whiles at www.freedigitalphotos.net

One of the comparisons I drew was that of the time it takes to develop and release a print book compared with an ebook, and it's true. As I explained, if you come to me on Monday morning with your final, edited manuscript in 'Word', I can potentially source a cover image, create a cover, format the guts of your book and have it online, ready for sale, by 10am. Yep, that's right, an hour from go to whoa!

Compare that with a print book which needs to be laid out according to the printer's specs, obtain your ISBN and barcode, layout your cover (front, back AND spine), send it off to the printer's, wait for a proof copy to check (because you just don't know how things will look for sure until it's laid out), place the order to print, wait for the printed copies to be delivered ... if the book is truly ready to go at 9am Monday, you could feasibly have your printed copies in your hand within a month. Maybe.

But the reality of it is that it actually takes something like six to 18 months to get the average book into print form, and while an hour from go to whoa to get an ebook out there would involve fast formatting, virtually no technical hiccups and quick, mutual agreement as to cover design, it is still a much quicker and easier proposition to publish an ebook.

And now, I've noticed today that Smashwords is 'shipping' more frequently to their supply chain, so publishers who use Smashwords are verging ever closer to that real time updating, right across the e-publishing marketplace. Read more about the Smashwords delivery updates here.

Ah, such exciting times we live in!

Sneeze and Yawn finally released

2012-06-01T11:31:00.000+10:00

Well, as a birthday gift to myself, I finally released my first ever children's book yesterday - the two-in-one flip book Where Did the Sneeze Go? and Who Caught the Yawn? The only problem was, we were so busy work-wise, that I never got to announce it!

So today is, briefly, Shameless Self Promotion Day, so go check them out at my 'Sneeze and Yawn' page and if you know any young children who you think might enjoy them, click through to The MoshShop and have a closer look at the information and inside images.

And happy birthday to me :)

Thank you for your indulgence.

To Tweet, or not to Tweet, that is the question ...

2012-05-22T08:43:00.002+10:00

Well, yesterday I did it. I succumbed to the world that is Twitter.

I've got a Facebook (several, in fact, when you count the Facebook business pages), this blog (actually, three blogs, when you count www.narratoraustralia.com and the oft-neglected www.creditcardartist.com), a Google+ page (or three - not quite sure!), a LinkedIn account, a website (or seven/teen/ty, when you count the ones we operate as a business), a work email (or twenty), a private email (or three when you count my husband's), a mobile phone, an office landline (with both local and 1300 numbers attached), and a home landline ... so why would I want a Twitter account? The answer - because I'm seriously not being communicated with enough. Joke.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalImages.net

As a small business operator, it's very hard some days to work out what I should be doing as opposed to what I should be doing. Yes, you read that correctly. There I things I'm being told I should be doing, by all the business and marketing experts, and then there are things that I should be doing simply because they're the ones that are going to help make my business a success (i.e. profitable enough for me to retire in the manner to which I would like to become accustomed).

So again, why did I sign up for a Twitter account?

To work out how to use it before I establish an account for Narrator Australia, and
Because I felt I should.

And what happened? I signed up to follow about 15 other people/personalities/businesses on Twitter, because that's what you do, and by the end of the day I was feeling overwhelmed. There is only so much information the average person can absorb in a day, and with all the emails, phone calls, Facebook posts and other items that go in one ear/eye and out the other, I think I have exceeded my limit.

I once heard it said that, in the Middle Ages, the average adult died after a lifetime in which they consumed the equivalent amount of knowledge held in one edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. They might not have progressed too quickly as a society, but at least they had time to fight plague and pestilence without having to understand it and communicate about it first!

Today is my second day as a private Twitter account owner, and it will probably be my last. I get it, I think, and as a private person, I don't want to. I have enough 'feeds'. However, I will probably bite the bullet again in a day or so and set one up for Narrator Australia, as I can see how that will help Narrator followers, and contributors, but as for this little editor, sorry, but you'll have to talk to me on Facebook!