It all starts with shoes

Nordstrums in San Francisco is a fabulous store. I particularly like the café on the top floor where they top up your coffee forever. The sales people are incredibly helpful, there seems to be no end to how hard they will try to find what you want.

That level of service tempts you to go for the impossible, which in Lois’s case is all about shoes. We tried to get a new pair of shoes. I think we ended up with three assistants and about fifty pair of shoes spread out on the floor. Maybe we were lucky to get there on a slow day, but I think that was when it dawned on me that it was all beyond us. If Nordstrums can’t find a shoe to fit Lois then there probably isn’t one anywhere.

There’s little point in trying to explain why her feet are weird, it might make sense to an orthopaedic surgeon - maybe. I should know, I once wrote a chapter in a book about the foot. Feet are quite complex and very three dimensional, almost four dimensional when you consider that they change shape when you stand on them. There are bones and muscles and ligaments all struggling to do their bit. Shoes, on the other hand don’t follow the same rules. Ideally you need a shoe that helps your foot; that holds your foot where it happens to be weak. Lois now has orthotics to go inside her shoes that support her feet and keep them in shape so long as the orthotic stays in the right place. That means the shoe has to work with the orthotic and of course shoes are not designed to do that. No matter how hard all those assistants tried, there just wasn’t a shoe that hat did the job.

We did eventually discover that riding boots work OK, they are reinforced underneath to cope with the stirrups. Back when Lois was younger she just had constant problems with her feet and couldn’t wear fashionable shoes. That meant she didn’t wear fashionable clothes, or make-up or jewellery, and that in turn leaves you out of a lot of conversations as a teenage girl.

Lois ended up being the outsider looking in, observing others but not part of the scene. She became a psychologist. Now she’s an artist, both roles seem to involve a lot of observation and wry comment. That’s what bad feet can do for you.

Well that’s the short version; I think the whole story could be a book.

Turn the bloody music off

Here’s a weird thing. Why to they put music behind words all the time? It seems like every thing I watch on TV has music, even when it’s the words that count. They even do it on the radio. Not on the news yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Is this some devious plot by the musicians union?

It seems now as if no one can talk without background music to set the mood. Are the words really so inadequate? Have the collective writing skills of the current crop of journalists and documentary writers got so bad that they can’t convey mood or emotion or drama without a background track?

It is catching, not only is it all over the TV but amateurs are doing it too. At the Writing Festival at York University a few weeks ago one of the guys who was chosen to read his work to the after dinner audience did it with a sound track behind him. I guess it is only a matter of time before I meet someone in the street who has to play a background track when they so hello to me, just in case I don’t get their mood from what they say, or their face, or their body language or all the other clues we have spent thousands of years evolving.

It is nice that I now often get the choice of watching TV in High definition, which makes sense if it is really about the pictures, but what I would pay extra for is some way to cut out the silly music track behind the speech. I realise that this is probably some feature of my increasing deafness – well it might be, I suppose. Maybe my particular kind of deafness makes it harder to separate the words from the music. Maybe I’m weird in wanting to hear the words at all.

OK that is just me being reasonable, trying to see both sides, etc. etc. What I really mean is TURN THE BLOODY MUSIC OFF!

Ashes to Ashes

It looks like the volcanic cloud business is over for the moment. What a fascinating affair and a good demonstration of the inability of the media to talk sensibly about risk.

First we had dramatic stuff about volcanic dust turning to glass inside jet engines and wrecking them, based on several stories about near misses. Excellent. I always like learning from near misses, they do so much less damage but still give us knowledge.

By the middle of the crisis we had questions being raised about whether it was all a panic about nothing. Surprise, surprise, but did we have a sensible discussion? No. At no point did anyone discuss the crucial questions. The first is, I think:

“How many planes crashing are justifiable?”

If the answer is none, then the ban on flights was probably inevitable. I suspect that was the number that the air traffic control people were working on, no increase in risk.

That has a cost, millions apparently lost in cancelled flights etc. I bet some of those calculations will turn up in due course at shareholders meetings and the like. So that’s the other half of the calculation:

“How much money can we afford to lose to maintain a given level of safety?” Again a question not asked.

I heard countless interviews with poor stranded tourists and others affected by the flight ban and no one got around to asking them:

“How big a risk would you take to get home?”

It is apparently the case that the public are not good at assessing risk – people keep doing stupid things because they don’t realise how dangerous they are. Here was a golden opportunity to do something about it. Is flying through a cloud of volcanic dust more dangerous than drinking twenty pints a night or smoking twenty a day for ten years? Is driving back from Spain more dangerous than flying through the cloud?

I think I finally despaired of anything good coming out of it when I heard that Willy Walshe was flying around in the cloud. Given his gung ho approach to industrial relations he was the obvious guy for it but no one asked him the obvious questions.

“Did you restrict the flight to uninhabited areas or the sea?”

“Did you have a parachute?”

He was flying over us and we were living under him, who was taking the biggest risk?

4 Reasons why you might not trust drug companies

4 Reasons why you might not trust drug companies - or why a new drug is the background for my novel ‘A Rag Doll Falling.’

Temptation 1 The price. A patent protects the invention when a new drug comes out, but it doesn’t last forever. The company has to take out the patent as soon as they invent the drug and at that stage they have no idea what it does. They have to try it out on different diseases. Usually they’ll try it on cells in test tubes and then in animals and eventually in people. They test for safety in normal volunteers and then on people who are very ill, the last chance saloon and eventually if things go well it gets on the market, licensed for a particular set of conditions. All that testing takes time and the clock is running down on the patent. The more that the public demand safety, the longer it takes. As soon as it is on sale the company has to try to recover the investment and make a profit. So there is a big temptation to charge the highest possible price.

Temptation 2 Keep testing to a minimum. Do the shortest clinical trials you can get away with. If possible test your new drug against a placebo, rather than head to head with the best drugs so far. That way no one can tell for sure if the new drug is really an improvement.

As the New England Journal of Medicine says “Placebo-controlled trials require smaller sample sizes than active-comparator trials, are less expensive to conduct (and therefore reduce the costs of market entry), and present less risk of producing unanticipated unfavorable findings…Yet placebo-controlled trials that are not supplemented by active-comparator trials leave clinicians, patients, and payers in the dark, providing no guidance on a new product’s advantages or disadvantages relative to existing products.” From (10.1056/NEJMp0906490) published on August 12, 2009, at NEJM.org.

Temptation 3 Stretch the licence. Encourage doctors to prescribe the drug for all sorts of other conditions where it might do some good. It’s not legal to do that and every year we hear of companies being fined by regulatory agencies for going too far. The fines often run into many million, which gives some idea of the profits that are at stake.

Temptation 4 Fund patient groups so that they demand the drug. If you can’t persuade the doctors with advertising and salesmen, maybe their patients will do the job for you. Why don’t patients tell their doctors to stick to the older drugs that are tried and tested? Mostly because illness scares people, cancer in particular, and it’s easy to assume that a new drug must be a better drug. All that media reporting about science and breakthroughs pushes us in that direction. Some of that must be set up by the dug companies mustn’t it - who else can they ask?

OK I don’t want to overdo it, but you have to admit it’s a good backdrop for a novel. Of course in fiction you can throw in some very unethical ambition and the odd murder that I’m sure don’t happen in real life – well I hope not anyway.

Read the book as an ebook at www.smashwords.com/books/view/11358

Living with an artist

It has finally dawned on me that I am living with an artist. I always knew that Lois could paint and draw, but facility is not necessarily art. I think it was Pissarro who warned his son against facility, though it might have been someone else. The point is that if you are good at something then you don't have to work at it. If you don't work at it then you may not really get what it is about.

Compared to me, and to many others I guess, Lois has facility in painting and drawing, but she also finds it hard to work at it. In the last two years she has discovered machine embroidery, what I call fabricollage. Collage with fabrics in other words. Embroidery as we usually know it is all detailed little stitches, careful hand sewing and nimble fingers. Machine embroidery on the other hand is a much more wild adventure.

For a start changing the foot on the sewing machine, or taking it off altogether, modifies the sewing machine. That means you can stitch anything to anything, within reason anyway. If you thing a piece of plastic or a sweet wrapper would look just right for the effect you want, then stitch it on, or glue works, or Bondaweb that you iron on will do. PVA adhesive turns out to be an embroidery material.

This freedom forces experiment. If anything goes, then everything goes, anarchy rules, and it is the final look of the work that determines what is best.

Trying things means that the house is covered with experiments and there is something exciting about living in the middle of art in creation. A writer experiments of course, my computer is full of them, but my experiments are not physical. I don’t trip over them.

It is hard to say exactly what art is, hence the multiplicity of definitions if you look for them. Inspiration is part of it, and seeing things differently and something that Nicholas Serota said about lifting the spirit. The cool thing is that Lois has an idea, sees something differently, and my spirit is lifted. It is an inspiration.

E-Books

My new obsession with e-books started on a train one evening; the journey between Paddington and where I get off in Worcestershire can be boring. It’s busy and too full as far as Oxford and then we ramble through every one-horse-stop in the Cotswolds till we get home.

Some time can be frittered away watching the other passengers. At first the urbanised city business types, commuting out of London, get off in Slough, Reading and Didcot. Next mixtures of those and more otherworldly academics get off at Oxford, and don’t forget the people toting bicycles. After that, things change as we get deeper into the time warp that is the Cotswolds. I guess it is a little known fact that Morton-in-the-Marsh is actually stuck in 1957; visit and you’ll see what I mean. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard for the train company to run the trains on time.

I digress, the woman opposite me is using a Sony e-reader and is clearly just as engaged in her book as I am in the paperback that I bought on the station. Our house is filling up with those books; we have actually had to take some to the charity shops. After another long delay in the middle of nowhere I ask her about the machine and she talks enthusiastically about it for ten minutes. I get a free demo of how it works and a look at the screen. OK it costs some money but it’s a lot less than building an extension on the library, or even the cost a new set of shelve to match the nice mahogany ones we got years ago.

When I got home I did some research and found I could get a free Amazon Kindle app to go on my Iphone and with that I can access the whole Kindle range of books with my Amazon account. They download straight into the phone.

Can I read them OK on the screen? Actually yes. I find it best to turn the brightness down a long way, which reduces glare and also saves battery life. So far I’ve read seven books and I can’t find much wrong with the experience. This week Kindle for MAC has come out so I can get the same books on my MAC air laptop and on the IMAC at home. What’s more Amazon manages to know that it’s me and doesn’t charge me extra for having the books on all three devices. What’s even more clever, is that when I open Kindle on the phone it knows where I got to when I was reading on the laptop and lets me update the bookmark and start in the right place.

Is there any difference between this and reading a book? I don’t have to find a bookmark, the phone fits in my pocket and I was carrying it anyway. The pages are easier to turn, given that my fingers are getting arthritic, this may be a real plus sometime in the future. It can be hard to know how much of the book is left, you know that rush you get as you get near the end of the book when you know there’s only five pages to go and you’ve still not spotted the final twist. On the laptop version there is actually a percent read score in the bottom left hand corner, which is almost as good as feeling the width of the remaining pages. On the phone version, if you tap the middle of the page a graphic appears at the bottom that shows you how far you’ve got. It looks just the same as the thing that comes up across the top of the screen in ITunes to show how much of a song is still left to play.

Another miracle of modern science is that I can put so many books in my Iphone that I would need a trailer if they were paper, but the phone still weighs the same.

Obviously Amazon has made this move in an attempt to stay one step ahead of Apple’s Ipad, which will be out shortly in the UK. It also means that if I buy one of those I can put the Kindle app on there as well and read my books on that, which means Amazon will still be selling me books and able to compete with whatever book store Apple come up with.

So the only questions I’m left with is why do e-books cost so much, and should I try to sell my book as an e-book? Maybe the answer to the first question is hidden inside the second.

Do literary agents know what they are doing?

Do literary agents know what they are doing? OK I appreciate that thinking about this is a reaction to getting rejection letters. I also do know that there are plenty of stories about authors being turned down and then eventually being successful. Keep trying they all say.

Put all that on one side and ask the question, do any of them keep score. So far, on all of the agent’s web sites I have looked at, I have never found an agent that says how good they are at spotting winners.

The sort of thing I am looking for is something that says we have looked at X number of submissions and approved Y new authors and of all the people we have turned down only Z have gone on to be published by someone else. If Z as a proportion of the rejections, is smaller than Y as a proportion of the submissions, then it would suggest that the agent knows what they are doing. If the numbers were the other way around then you would have to conclude that the average of all the other agents was better than the agent in question.

As I have never found any agent who publishes any stats, other than telling me how many submissions they get, I am leaning towards the conclusion that none of them keep score, or if they do then they don’t want to tell anyone about it.

So what does this tell me? I guess the obvious answer is that one might conclude that none of them are particularly good at spotting talent. Does that matter? Probably not. The key thing is whether the agent is any good at representing talent – getting you a good deal if they do take you on. Some data to help answer that question would be helpful, but I don’t see much sign of that either.

There is another problem, if most agents turn down most submissions then any author who gets accepted is likely to just say yes whether the agent is any good or not, so they are in a sellers market.

On balance then, I guess the right strategy is to get an agent, any agent, and get published. After that it must be a lot easier to get a good agent, because all of them are interested in making money and they would rather take on a published author than an unpublished one.

It actually feels like a rubbish system that is ripe for a new business model – I just wish I could figure out what such a model might look like.