Oh and another thing

I remember a story told me by mate who was some years older than me, old enough to have done National Service out in Malaya.

One of the lads in his platoon had been engaged to be married. Now he’d heard rumours at home about his fiancée’s behaviour. So it wasn’t a complete shock when she wrote him a letter breaking off the engagement and asking for her photograph back.

He’d decided that he was going to get his own back, so he went round the base collecting unwanted photos of girls from everyone in the base. Then he put them all in an envelope, along the one his fiancée had previously sent him and posted them back to her.

With the words “I cannot remember which is you; please take it and post the others back.”

Given the number of times I’ve heard the story, I suspect it might have been done several times in several armies.

Anyway, for once, I’ve got news

War 2.2 is coming out on the 1^st March! It’s the second book featuring Haldar Drom and the Tsarina Sector.

And the cover blurb?

“Haldar Drom is starting to worry. The long running insurgency in the Zala Delta suddenly starts to spiral further out of control. Who is arming the insurgents? How and why? Then a leading local politician who is using his influence to try and keep things calm is threatened with assassination. It’s obvious that things are moving to a climax.

All Haldar has immediately available is a third year university student who gets given a dissertation project she’ll never forget; young journalist who he convinces to investigate the situation of the ground; and a retired marine librarian whose job is to keep the politician alive. As the investigation proceeds, from the mud of the Delta to the luxurious surroundings of the Drake Islands, Haldar comes to realise that he may be facing Wayland Strang’s counter-attack. Faced with a coup d’état spearheaded by off-world mercenaries Haldar has to react quickly to stop a major war.”

Fourteen Days in the outer darkness

Imagine it, you wish to communicate with someone. You scribble a note, summon one of the boys, thrust note into cleft stick he’s holding and send him on his way.  That was my world!

 

Yes we’ve had fourteen days without broadband. We’ve had about five BT engineer days of work on our wire. (We’re rural, there’s an awful lot of wet copper between us and civilisation.)

They have found faults, fixed faults and done great things. But we still had a problem. My desk top computer would talk to the BT Business Hub for a full four minutes before the broadband crashed. (Fifteen minutes if we were really lucky.)

It was a new router, all the wires were new, a modern laptop could talk to the router by wireless for ever without problems, what a pity we don’t have a modern laptop for work.

Then we remembered that at one point in the fortnight, one of the engineers, for test purposes, had stuck a standard domestic router into the system in the place of ours. We also remembered it had worked without problems for the twelve hours it was in the system.

So I contacted Steve Irwin, a mate who is up on all this techie stuff, (having daughters he’s short of boys with cleft sticks to bear his messages for him, so he’s got to keep the technology working.)

Steve loaned me a battered old router from a previous generation, I plugged it in, stuck the wires in, and lo! We had broadband. Stable broadband, broadband that has now worked without problems for about forty-eight hours so far; what more can you ask? Well I’m going to discuss the router issue with BT in their role as our ISP, but that’s a technicality.

So a fortnight without broadband; before you ask, yes it was a nightmare. I have a book to launch, Justice 4.1 (The Tsarina Sector) is out as ebook and paperback on 1^st March.  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Justice-4-1-Tsarina-Sector-Webster/dp/1908208236/

 

There is a blog tour to organise, people to contact, things to do, articles to arrange, and frankly there weren’t enough boys or cleft sticks to do it with. Now I’m back on line things are getting hectic.

There are other things that I’ve missed. Because we don’t have TV, I have just realised how dependent on the web I am for weather forecasts (for example), or finding companies I do business with, or getting scientific papers and suchlike information I need to be a freelance journalist. Now I was a freelance journalist in the days when I used a typewriter and posted my copy to editors. That world is dead! It isn’t possible to work like I used to. Quietly, unassumingly, without excitement or upset, everything I need has drifted gently onto the web.

 

Was it all bad?
Actually, and perhaps embarrassingly, no it wasn’t. I’ve mentioned that Justice 4.1 is to be published on March 1^st (just thought I’d mention it in case you’d forgotten. You could go here and see an excerpt on the publisher’s page http://www.safkhetpublishing.com/books/fantasy/Justice_41.html   )

Well the second book set in that background is with the editor, and thanks to having no broadband, I did the last 30,000 words for the third book, which is now ‘finished’. Note that by finished, I mean I’m ignoring it. In three months time I’ll read it again, spot problems and errors, fix them and then it’s ready for the editor.

In some ways I’ve got so much work done without the web. But I’m still glad to be back.

(Oh yes, and if you have a blog and want to be part of the blog tour, let me know and I’ll be in touch)