How to tell if you are a writer

Do you find yourself wandering off during conversations?

Do you have pens and paper everywhere around your home, including in the loo?

Do you find yourself writing on anything you can find, like toilet roll, napkins and even your arm?

Do you find yourself experiencing lost time because you're so immersed in you writing?

Do you wander off during conversations because you've come up with a new plot idea?

Do you use your mobile phone as a mobile word processor - as I'm doing when I'm writing this?

Then you must be a writer.

A writer is someone who is compelled to write whether they've been published or not.

The angry writer



I said 'I need a picture of an angry lady, not an angry baby.' Oh well, this will have to do.


Instead of doing New Year’s resolutions that I’ll probably break anyway, I thought I’d take this time to reflect upon the bane of many folk’s lives – crap customer service from so called big name companies. The kind of stuff that takes you away from writing.

Bit late you might think to mention New Year’s resolutions. But there’s a reason for that. Well two reasons.

I’ve been without the Internet for over a month.

The first and most important reason for that is BT. The letters used to stand for British Telecom. Now the T stands for terrible service and the B stands for what they used to nastily refer to children without fathers.

You see, in the modern era, the once great BT can’t put a telephone in my new flat for over a month. That means NO landline (which concerns me greatly as my dad has bone cancer and mobile phones aren’t 100 percent reliable) and NO internet.

There’s a phone line in my property, but it’s ‘the wrong kind’ of phone line apparently. If you don’t come from the UK, you won’t know this, but ‘the wrong kind’ is a phrase they trot out whenever things don’t work like the trains. Hence the reason the trains aren’t running is because there are ‘the wrong kind of leaves on the line.’

To go online, I would have used one of the handful of dongles I bought that supposedly will allow me to us mobile broadband, but none of them get a signal decent enough to take less than 20 minutes to load a web page full of rubbish ads and pathetic pictures.

Next on my hitlist is Orange. Why is it so difficult to speak to someone in customer service who doesn’t mangle the English language (I’m talking about British people, here)/sound like they have nasal congestion/thinks because you have a Scottish accent you are speaking Swahili. Apologies to anyone who speaks Swahili. I’ve heard it’s a beautiful language.  

After ten minutes of trying to get the person to understand my flat number – It’s 10E – I finally gave up. Decided to do it online using my phone.  

I had a lot of fun trying to put some money on my Orange phone on New Year’s day. Shops were shut. ATM Machine not one you can put money on your phone with. New credit card because someone tried to tan (use it on a spending spree) just before Christmas, so couldn’t top up the normal way. (Cheers, mate – hope you end up with a turkey rammed up your jacksy.)

As for the sick, perverted monster who invented Captacha (had to use that in a vain attempt to top up my account online), is it just me, or are the letters, numbers and occasional punctuation just a load of rubbish mashed the together that the human eye can barely see?

Footnote – I thought no Internet or phone line was bad enough, until the January storms came and with it went the electricity for THREE DAYS. With temperatures below zero in our home on an island, it was warmer outside.

On the plus side, I got to experience first hand what it would be like to live after a zombie apocalypse with no electricity, which came in very useful when writing Deid Bastards.

Could your publisher give your book away free?

The answer sadly in many cases is yes they can. And the real kicker is that they can do it without even telling you.

And you thought your relationship with your publisher was a partnership. At least I did.

Here’s my tale of woe –

I found out through a message board I belong to that two self-help titles I wrote for Need2Know Books on bullying and caring for dogs were being given away free. This was news to me because I had a contract stating how much ebooks would cost and what my royalty percentage was.

Note it wasn’t at the price of zero, royalty zero. Hey, I worked hard on those books. It was my name next to the copyright symbol. It was my hard toil that crafted the words, did the research. And in the case of my bullying book: spilt my guts.

Hey, I even worked hard to get reviews and some press coverage. Worked hard, when I could have been doing something else – like doing paid work to pay my bills that land on my doormat like bricks.

I contacted the Society of Authors and got advice. I was hoping they’d tell me that the publisher had no right to 1, give away my book free and 2, not tell me.

The news wasn’t good. Apparently the clause in most publishing contracts that allows the publisher to set the price of the book also means they can give it away for hee-haw, nae money, feck all, free.

So, what have I learnt from this? Apart from the fact that this publisher showed a complete lack of common courtesy to their authors (I know of at least another dozen of their authors who were not made aware that their books were being given away free, including one who didn’t even agree to their book being turned into an ebook) I can’t stress this point enough -

Get it stipulated in your contract how many books can be given free and under what terms.

Footnote – when I contacted the publisher about what they were doing they claimed giving every one of their books away free was a ‘marketing tool.’ They had no idea how long they would give the books away gratis, but hoped it would boost sales of the traditional paper books.

I disagree with that. Why if people are getting books free will they pay for them? The answer is they won't. Not unless you're an author writing a free book as a taster (say it's a book in a series or a short story featuring series characters like Freaks by Tess Gerritsen, which features Rizzoli and Isles).

Me? I feel like my pocket had been picked and it’s pretty empty these days anyway.