Last month, when I wrote that we need a female Dr Who, I was struck by the fact that, in the discussion on Twitter, quite a few people were mentioning female writers that I hadn’t heard of. I realised that my own knowledge of women writing in my favourite genres of science fiction and fantasy was lacking. I have vowed to remedy this through the simple expediency of reading the same number of books by women as by men. I couldn’t easily remember how many books I’ve read this year, though, so decided to list them (series are listed on a per book basis). I’ll keep this list up-to-date as the year wears on.

Women

1. Anne McCaffrey, Crystal Line (in progress)
2. JF Penn, Pentecost (in progress)
3. Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth
4. Rosemary Sutcliff, The Sliver Branch
5. Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers
6. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
7. Helen FitzGerald, The Duplicate (novella)

Men

1. James Henry, The Cabinet of Curiosities (in progress)
2. James Everington, First Time Buyers (short story)
3. Nick Spalding, Love, From Both Sides
4. Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
5. James Oswald, Natural Causes
6. John Scalzi, Old Man’s War
7. F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
8. F Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned (abandoned)
9. Lloyd Shepherd, The English Monster
10. Danny Rubin, How to Write Groundhog Day (non-fiction)

To reach a nice state of equilibrium, I need to read three books by women next. Already on my Nook I have Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City, Kelly Link’s Strange Things Happen and Magic for Beginners, Mercedes Lackey’s Secret World Chronicles, and Mimi Johnson’s Gathering String, and I do want to finish the Hunger Games trilogy so that’s another couple of books.

On my list of books to buy are Jo Walton’s Among Other, Sarah Pinborough’s A Matter of Blood, Jane Margolis’ Unlocking the Clubhouse (non-fiction), Cate Gardner’s Theatre of Curious Acts, and Molly Tanzer’s A Pretty Mouth. Who else should I add?

As regular readers will know, I’ve had two ovarian cysts over the last year. The first one was removed August 2012 but within five months a second one had grown on the left ovary again. The cysts are endometriomas, which means that a little bit of uterine lining has made its way into my ovary and started filling a cyst with blood.

I finally had my appointment with my new consultant this week and learnt some new information about my cyst. Apparently the last cyst, which I thought had just been drained, had actually been mostly removed although it burst during the procedure and thus complete removal wasn’t possible. The new cyst hasn’t grown much since the last ultrasound four months ago and is 7.2 x 5.5cm in size. That’s a fair bit smaller than my first cyst, which was 8.0 x 8.5 x 9.5cm in size when diagnosed two months before removal.

The smaller size of the cyst probably explains why it has not given me as much trouble on a day-to-day basis as the first one did. Although it’s sometimes uncomfortable, particularly when I lie on my front or when a cat sits on me with paws in the wrong place, it’s rarely painful. I’m most grateful for that, as it means that I’m not needing the painkillers I required last year which made me so fuzzy-headed.

So my choices are:

1. Wait and see. Not really my favourite option.
2. Have another cystectomy. The normal risk of recurrence is 10%, but given that I’ve already had one recurrence it seems likely that for me that risk might be higher. Can’t say that I’m overly impressed with this option either.
3. Partial oophorectomy. Rather than just remove the cyst they will remove my lefthand ovary as well. This will prevent recurrence. There’s no reason to believe that my righthand ovary will start producing cysts and it should be capable of picking up the slack with regard to hormone production.

So, partial oophorectomy it is, then. I should get an appointment within the next eight weeks and it should again be an outpatient appointment, done and dusted in one day.

I was expecting this outcome, though it was still quite odd when it became clear that this was the best option. For a moment on Wednesday I felt that there was something almost symbolic about it, losing an ovary, that I’ll always know that there’s a tiny almond-sized bit of me missing. But it’s really no more symbolic than losing a wisdom tooth or four, or an appendix or tonsils.

I’m not fussed about fertility. Kevin and I jointly decided years ago that children weren’t our thing and that we’d prefer not to have them. Some people find that an odd decision, but it’s very definitely the right one for us. Indeed, the rightness of that decision was strongly reinforced shortly after we got married when we had bit of a pregnancy scare – when the test came up negative we both heaved a sigh of relief, rather than disappointment.

I’m looking forward to being on the other side of the operation. Although the staff last time were fantastic and I’m not worried about the op, it’ll be nice to have it out of the way. I will, of course, keep the blog updated as things progress.

A while ago I stumbled on this post from Eric Hellman exploring the question of what sort of front- and endmatter makes sense for ebooks, given that many of the pages that we see in the front of paper books have a purpose related to the printing process. Says Hellman:

A good example is the bastard title (or half title) page. This a page, usually printed with only the book’s title, that precedes the title page in the book. When dinosaurs roamed the earth, the function of the bastard title was to identify and physically protect the paper text block until it was bound. Sort of like the tissue paper they still put in fancy wedding invitations. I daresay that ebooks do not require any such protection. It is utterly without use in an ebook. Begone!

Next, consider the title page. It typically displays the books title, author, and the publisher.

In a print book, the title page is a declaration of bookiness. You don’t have title pages in magazines or newspapers. The title page says “get, ready, here comes a book, so go find a comfy chair.”

But a digital book needs something different. It needs a start page. Think about the start screen of a DVD. (You DO remember those, don’t you?) Now think a bit more generally. Modern ebooks share their underlying technology with websites, so why not convert the title page of a book into a home page for the book, with the sort of utilities you expect on a home page?

Frontmatter choices (click to embiggen)

That got me to thinking, which then got me to asking questions on Twitter, and finally, to setting up a wee questionnaire. Rather than try to guess what people might want, I thought it was easier to just ask them, and 137 people gave me their opinions. The results were in some ways surprising. But first, the not so surprising bits.

For the front matter, people mainly want to see the cover, dedication and table of contents. Several people on Twitter made the point that the Kindle dumps you in at the first page of text, meaning that you then miss out on seeing the cover, so a link to it in the table of contents to the cover is actually rather useful.

Although people aren’t massively keen on seeing a copyright notice, I think it’s only fair to tell people what they’re getting up front, so I personally think that should be retained. And the title page, which Hellman suggests could be replaced by a ‘start’ page, got a pretty good response despite the fact that it serves no real purpose in an ebook.

Perhaps it’s just that a title page is for many people a key part of the visual language of the book, it’s comforting and expected. That ‘declaration of bookiness’ is still important, so whilst removing it might make logical sense, does it make emotional sense?

Endmatter choices (click to embiggen)

For endmatter, people wanted to know about the author, find other books by the same author, see acknowledgements and other credits, get information about the author’s mailings list, blog etc., as well as get sample chapters of other books.

Interestingly, some of the stuff that an author’s ego might be tempted to include scored very badly, such as the blurb and quotes from reviews, and there was little interest in offers and discounts. I’m surprised by the latter, to be honest. Who doesn’t like a bargain? Book readers, apparently.

After some really vehement reactions about ‘share this’ links on Twitter, I asked specifically for people’s reaction to them. What did they think of them? What I got was, well, interesting and, again, a bit surprising.

Yes, some people said that they appreciated ‘share this’ links, and a lot of people said they were non-plussed by them or ignored them, but others were quite vocal in their objections. Here are some of the positive responses:

“I think they’re fine. I like to share things I like with friends.”

“I like the idea of sharing what I’m reading with my friends/followers.”

“Just seems natural to me.”

And some of the, erm, less positive responses:

“I’m trying to read. Leave me alone!”

“Really irritates me. Naked attempt at marketing, very offputting. If a book is good I wont need reminding to word of mouth it.”

“I find them annoying”

“an irritating page to be clicked past – I have no desire to share my reading habits with others”

“Yuk…”

“I don’t getting social points for what I’m reading, but I don’t want to be seen as *seeking* social points for what I’m reading. So screw you, “Share this” links.”

“Don’t use them – I find them intrusive.”

“Get annoyed and ignore it.”

“I think ‘not fucking likely’.”

“HATE, HATE, HATE them. I don’t “share” every minute of my time on FB or twitter, and resent the assumption that I might want to.”

“I find it extremely irritating – I have no desire nor need to ‘share’ everything I buy with everyone I know or might know!”

“I think OH MY GOD AM I ALLOWED A SINGLE THING IN MY LIFE THAT ISN’T CONNECTED TO BLOODY FACEBOOK AND TWITTER?!”

“If I like a book I’m more than capable of typing the title and author name in myself to recommend it to others- and if you use the “share this” button people can always tell when its a prewritten message.”

“Basically, these links are a bad thing, probably the worst thing about ebooks from a reader’s point of view, and I am against them.”

Although many were entirely unbothered by ‘share this’ links, the intensity of emotion amongst those who disliked them was so fierce that I think it’s just not worth risking antagonising readers by including them. If someone’s taken the trouble to read my book, the last thing I want to do is accidentally leave them with a sour taste in their mouth. If they want to share it, then they will, and they’ll do it however they wish, whenever they wish.

Finally, I asked people whether they actually read front- and endmatter, with 1 being ‘never’ and 5 being ‘always’:

I’m actually quite surprised that people mostly do read front- and endmatter, so the question of what to include really is worth carefully considering.

I think I’m starting to get a standard set of front- and endmatter that ticks the right boxes for me and hopefully for my readers too. But the nice thing about ebooks is that they are easy to change and I’m still interested in people’s opinions, so please do leave a comment!

Right at the end of last year, I wrote the first draft of a short story, The Lacemaker. It’s had a good ol’ polish and now it’s an ebook – in mobi, epub and pdf format. I’ve put it up on Ganxy, where you can buy it for $1.49 or, if you fancy getting it for free, you can join my mailing list and you’ll get a special link in the welcome email that will give you a 100% discount.

Here’s a taster:

All the threads looked the same to the innocent eye, but Maude could see the black heart running up through one strand as it wove its way through the lace roundel. 

“How on earth do you manage it?” the woman asked, as she looked at the mats on the craft fair stall. Maude chose to treat the question as a rhetorical one and busied herself with tidying her bobbins as the woman browsed.

“I’ll take this one,” the woman said, holding up a square piece, twelve inches across. Maude winced, picked up the piece she had just completed and held it out to the woman for her consideration.

I hope you’ll like it, and if you do, please tell your friends!

We need a female Dr Who. We also need women writing Dr Who. I was quite shocked to read in an excellent piece by Mathilda Gregory that the last episode of Dr Who written by a woman was in 2008. Said Gregory: 

[S]eason seven of Doctor Who will feature no female scribes at all. Not in the bombastic dinosaurs and cowboys episodes that aired last year, and not in any of the new episodes we’re about to receive. In fact, Doctor Who hasn’t aired an episode written by a woman since 2008, 60 episodes ago. There hasn’t been a single female-penned episode in the Moffat era, and in all the time since the show was rebooted in 2005 only one, Helen Raynor, has ever written for the show.

In my opinion, it shows. Whilst some episodes Dr Who are amazing examples of storytelling, some are really quite dreadful, bad ideas that are emotionally flat with little complexity or depth. I think this comes, at least in part, from a lack of diversity on the writing team. Homogenous groups only too easy go along with each other’s ideas, even bad ones, because they lack dissenting voices. The best way to diversify your ideas is to diversify the group of people having them. Which doesn’t just mean having women in your writing team, of course, but looking at all other areas of diversity. 

But whilst having some female writers on the Dr Who team would be a great step forward, an even bigger, better step forward would be to make Dr Who a woman. Not just for a novelty episode, but for several series, just like any other Dr Who actor. 

With Ada Lovelace Day, we focus on the importance of role models to women and girls, and work towards raising the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (and other related fields). We do this because women’s achievements and contributions often go unrecognised, and the women themselves are often sidelined in favour of their male colleagues. By pointing out women’s achievements, we hope to slowly build new role models from whom girls and women can draw inspiration. 

One area that’s just as important but less easy to address is the role of women in fiction. As a teen, I was absolutely entranced by the novels of Anne McCaffrey not least because the vast majority of them featured strong female leads. These fictional women were people I could relate to, that I wanted to be. It’s much, much easier to be inspired by someone of your own gender, because you can more easily imagine yourself as them. And research has shown that female role models are important to women, more so than male role models are to men. 

Dr Who is one of the most important science fiction shows on TV in the UK, and yet the lead role is always a male. Females are always companions or tertiary characters there to advance the story. Whilst many of the Drs companions are very strong, intelligent women, they are still secondary characters. The message they give girls and women is that it doesn’t matter how smart, strong, or independent you are, there’ll always be a man in charge. 

It’s about time that the Dr Who team took the bull by the horns and cast a woman as Dr Who. Preferably a woman who’s got the experience to show the Doctor as the complex emotional creature we know her to be. And preferably this female doctor would be written by a team that includes a couple of women as permanent members, rather than having the occasionally female-penned script thrown in every now and again. 

I’m very obviously not the first to think about Dr Who in these terms. Indeed, I had a great conversation with some women scientists recently where we were wondering who we would have to lobby to get a female in the lead role. And in a rather wonderful piece, Alasdair Stuart runs us through an alternative history of Dr Who, reflecting on who might have played her if she’d started off as a woman. 

Having a female Dr Who, well co-written with female scriptwriters, would be utterly fantastic. It would provide a strong female role model for girls, it would provide a great opportunity to explore some complex themes around identity – something that Dr Who has done so well in the past – and it would be a great watch for us women who are so fed up of seeing a male world reflected to us as if we don’t exist. 

So come on, BBC, get your act together. More female writers and a female lead is exactly what the Doctor ordered. 

Javier Celaya, Dosdoce

How can we have publishers working with start-ups? How are publishers using new technologies. Asked 174 publishers and start-ups and asked what were the relationships with them? 

Tech is changing the publishing world. First transformation has been content driven. Next stage is driven by devices, not devices, but services. 

Moving to service driven industry – services mean different things. Tech companies help define those services, they think in a different way to publsihers. 

What are the difference between publishers and tech companies? They have different legacy, different managerial structure, different way of doing business. 

Hard to find publishers that are already working in this collaborative way. 

When publishers meet with start-up, they have a different objective than the start-up. Publisher wants to know what’s going on, what are the trends. Start-ups want to close a deal. Few follow-ups because different goals. 

Start-ups are desperate for feedback. Is their tech, their idea, validated? Any feedback, if it needs extra features, those comments are strongly appreciated by start-up community. 

Appoint someone in the oragnisation who’s responsible for meeting regularly with these people, so they have someone they can have that conversation. And that person should be responsible for going to conferences and finding new trends. Internet has no frontiers, so have to look globally for technology. 

Try to engage. Not about investing, but can do many things with these companies. All about data, engagement, direct sales. Whatever problem you want to solve, there’s probably a start-up out there doing it. Start-ups believe publishers can give them value. 

Publishers – 83% said they were willing to invest but felt there wasn’t anything out there. But there is a lot out there. Start investigating. 

Other sectors, big companies invest in start-ups because they are going to investigate opportunities. 

Few publishers investing in the start-up community. 

Have to jointly transform ideas into products and services. 

Anna Lewis, ValoBox 

Make web-friendly books. Take ebooks and deliver them through the browser. Interested in a particular question: How do you sell books to people who aren’t looking for them. 

By  making books a part of the web, have opportunities open. Each page on ValoBox has a unique URL and can be linked to from anywhere. Can preview any page. Can share and are rewarded for that. 

Start-ups are good for doing something by what big companies can’t. Very hard for small company to deal with larger companies. How do you make the relationship work.

Advice for publishers who might want to work with start-ups: 

Laying the groundwork – make sure that you as a business are ready to work with start-ups. Be in a place where you’re looking to work with start-ups.

Tell me how you want me to work with you. Job titles mean nothing. Tell them who to go to, who to pitch to.  Give the start-up an idea of the kind of process that they can expect to experience. Have some indication of how the process might look like, what are the stages. 

Have well-managed files and metadata. So much easier when the building blocks are solid. Stops so much back and forth between you and the start-up. O’Reilly are brilliant at this, and that’s one reason they do work with start-ups, it’s all very straightforward. 

Ask stupid questions. If you don’t understand when a start-up is blathering on, then do ask them. If they can explain it to you, then they understand it. If they can’t then maybe you should be questioning whether you want to do business to them. And if you like the project and need to sell it to your boss, you need to do it well. 

Getting the most out of the relationship: 

Keep it lean. Once had a bit project but it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and then it just got out of control and was shut down. If had started small could have seen what was working and deveop that. Do a small, meaningful trial then expand. 

Take advantage of a start-up’s skill and flexibility. Tell them what your problems are, what questions you have. Start-ups are flexible, can adapt. Is there a product tweak that will help solve your problem? 

Innovate in small steps. 

“If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” Woodrow Wilson. 

Start-ups have to make the new sound boring and un-innovative. It’s much easier to meet in the middle. 

When it’s not meant to be. Say no if you’re not ready. Would rather be told up front. 

Don’t be afraid to try. Sometimes it won’t work out and that’s fine. 

“Failure is simply the opportunity to being again, this time more intelligently” – Henry Ford. 

Molly Barton, Penguin Books

Investors are reticent to invest in start-ups that involve publishing at all because they see publishers as too slow. 

Typical hurdles for publishers. 

Structural: Who should the start-up talk to. Is it distribution? Product? Business development? Depending on the answer to that is who gets to talk to that contact. Need to find the right people to consider the idea. 

Sales people focused on making their numbers, but need to set targets through new channels, including unknown channels. Asserting that structural forecasting can be really helpful to encourage people to take these opportunities seriously. 

Contractual: How does the idea affect existing contracts. 

Cultural: There’s discomfort with how people use some language, so be careful. 

Hurdles for start-ups. 

Lack of industry knowledge: A few people in NY who act as a concierge, work with them for 3/4 months at a time, coach them in language, connect them with the right publishing houses. Can be a productive way of moving forward. They are almost literary agents for products. 

Taking models from other media sectors, eg TV or movies or music, without thinking of what makes books different. 

Competition: Been pitched ‘Netflix for books’ by more than 20 companies. Lots of people working on similar ideas. Productive way forward is for those companies to talk to each other, be aware of the value proposition others have. Either collaborate or be clear on what makes you different. Know your competitors. 

Pivoting too fast or too slow. May start with one idea which takes you somewhere else. That’s normal, but be careful how you communicate that to partner companies. 

Goals not aligned with the publisher: A lot of start-ups coming up with a particular idea and their goal is to be acquired. For a publisher, that’s anxiety-producing because who’s going to buy that platform? Amazon? Google? Be straightforward as possible. 

Examples of Penguin’s efforts to collaborate with start0ups and funding innovation. 

Penguin/Pearson team choosing ten business problems and inviting start-ups to embed themselves into the business to help look at solutions, and sending execs out to embed in start-ups. 

Inkling is an start-up, exposing the guts of a book to search, very media rich ebook experience. Now partnering with Penguin. 

Citia, addressing an interesting problem, bit ahead of the curve, most people know that fiction sells better than non-fiction. Why is that? Why aren’t they picking up ebooks? Lots of information available on the web. But also, we’re changing the way we consume information. 

Kevin Kelly, ed of Wired, take a book that he wrote about ‘what tech wants’, Citia took that, stripped away most of the content, and  present it. “Table of contents on steroids”. It’s cards. Faster way of reading non-fiction. How can we make reading non-fic faster but not stupider. 

Small Demons, trying to enrich metadata around books, connect books more effectively with pop culture. 

Those are all start-ups that came to Penguin. 

Penguin-funded start-up: Ebooks by Sainsbury’s. Sell print and ebooks. Rnadom House, Harper Collins, Penguin, wanted to create new market place. 

Bookish, independent company, sell ebooks, print books and audiobooks. Focused on discoverability. Recommendation engine. Have editorial team covering books. 

Book Country, start-up within a corporation, within Pearson. Wanted to start a community where people could improve their books and go on to self-publish if they wanted. the goal in doing that was really to create a brand that wasn’t a penguin brand where could experiment, learn what it’s like to really create a community, that was a new experience for Penguin, and learn what’s it’s like to run a direct to consumer business. 

Would recommend that you set aside money for R&D and experiments. Don’t put those experiments into business as usual analysis for 18-24 months. Allow things to be confidential if they need to, don’t make people defend their ideas every day. 

Create targets for trying things you’ve not done before. Share what’s working and what’s not working. Come to conferences like this! 

Nille Svensson, Publit

If the printed book is not going to die or be replaced by the ebook, what can we expect from the future?

Assumptions:

- Commerce moves towards an on-demand economy. People will have more influence on the things they consume.

- Physical objects will increasingly become integrated parts of the digital world.

Digital printing made print-on-demand possible, so can print shorter runs, and ‘demand’ is the publisher’s assumption of the demand from the market.

Publishers still has to make an informed guess about the demand, but talking in 100s instead of 1000s, so doesn’t change much of how the business works.

Is now possible to print one book at a time, which is real print-on-demand, where the demand is the demand of the reader.

Best vantage point to talk about on-demand economy is is the point of purchase, where the decision is made by the end consumer to buy something.

For mass production, point of purchase is the end of a long chain of production, logistics, distribution etc. Business opportunity is upstream of the point of purchase.

On-demand economy turns it upside down, the purchase is the beginning of the process, nothing is produced until it is bought. Business is located downstream.

Don’t produce anything until it’s sold. Can understand where is the end consumer? That guides production, where the book should be printed. Order goes to printing press closest to consumer.

Consumer can also decide how the book will be produce: Is it paperback, hard cover, should it have a dust jacket. What was a publishing decision becomes a consumer decision. May be ways to customise the product.

What is going to be produced? A book is traditionally looked upon as copyright protected material, as artwork, as a set form that can’t be changed.

But what way can we change the content in a way that everyone is comfortable with.

Every book will be unique, no one will an exact copy of others.

Part of a larger trend, we have a consumer society, able to surround ourselves with things that are the products of our own wishes, influenced by how we want things to be. A situation that’s more like a pre-industrial society than the current period of industrial society where everthing is mass produced, clones of each other.

Changes how people look at things. Will expect things to bear the marks of our own personalities.

Physical objects also connected to the digital world, eg QR codes, augmented reality, RFID, conductive ink/printed circuits.

RFID – every copy of the book can trigger something unique to happen or have an identity in the digital world.

Conductive ink – will be able to print electronics directly on to the pages of the book, so the book will in itself becomes an electronic device. Could create a printed book able to display ebooks.

The book of one:

- Produced only when it’s wanted, when bought and paid for. Near future, this is how all printed books will be produced.

- Produced in a way that is influenced by that demand, is unique

- Connected to the digital world, as a uniquely defined object, may have own IP number.

Svein Moe Ihler, Océ Nordic

Cross-media environment we are in, strength in the different channels, working together to find their space.

Communications started as one to one, then mass communication, now back again to one to one.

Today’s publisher’s challenges:

- increasing number of titles

- need to reduce stock levels

- manage backlist titles

- reduce cost of returns and pulping

- ned to reduce transportation costs and time

- 40% waste in trad book value change

40% waste is crazy from environmental and business point of view. Wasting energy producing and moving books around the world, warehousing, etc.

Average order size in print on demand is 1.8 books. Need to have sophisticated system, need to create enough volume to have good margins.

“We canot continue ourgrowth by building new storehouses.” Hans Villem Cortenrad, Centraal Boekhuis.

Have to make a shift, new business model. But tough to shift to the future, as business based on one model and changing can hurt.

Going from long runs, inventory, stock, waste and long tail, to short run production, on-demand production, cost optimisation.

Changes in job run length – long runs decreasing, short run lengths and one-offs gaining influence, down to 1 item.

Mass produced static content is under pressure.

If something can be digital, it will become digital.

But have intermediate period, and have to find a way to run a business during it.

Production environment based on steady content and long runs results in massive cost explosion.

Digital print also changed, moved from short run to on-demand.

High efficiency needed for small orders. Need to automate and process jobs, and need no warehousing for on-demand. But need to make sure that have the resources in place, eg enough paper.

Joakim Formo, Ericsson

Belongs to small group of researchers in Ericsson, try to make the abstract visions of future technology into more concrete examples or product designs.

Was going to talk about the Internet of Things, about connecting things to the internet and then perhaps remotely controlling them. Used as a bucket term for everything related to the mix of physical objects, digital collection, networks, clouds, big data. It’s a soup, but it is happening.

Graph of usage of networks is showing typical hockey stick shape. Number of people using internet-connected things is increasing eg cars, electricity meters.

But Internet of Things is also about the things, not just the internet.

Shows demo of a book that when you turn the pages also turns the pages of an electronic version. Object is related explicitly to something else.

Looked a few years ago at how to enhance video with metadata. Tagged a movie catalogue with location data for the scenes in those movies. Use the data as a hub for other interactions with the movie. Can use that data to connect to other movies, eg with scenes filmed in same location. Use the data to go from movie to movie.

Another project, Social Web of Things, trying to make the networked-ness of things more visible. Not a one-to-one connection between things, but full many-to-many connectivity. So created a Facebook for things. So these are connected things and their data is shared. Things connecting horizontally.

Berg and Google Creative Labs, Smart LIghts, augmented reality and connected data. Made a projector wit eyes that could identify things and then project stuff on to them. Enhance the real world, rather than having an introverted world for one person. Can be used on dumb things, not just internet connected smart things. This has been done, so will become cheaper as it is done more.

Flipboard prototype for machine narratives. Robot-jouralism on data from things. Take date from things, ingest into an algorithmic journalist bot, which has read a lot of newspapers and found a way to replicate the pattern or templates in those, so can generate readable text in article format directly from data from things.

Can take that one step further by ingesting that output text into a web animated avatar services with text-to-speech and lipsync, then ingested that into a news studio template, to do a news report of your things.

What is possible today with these technological environments?

Moving towards things having apps, but won’t stop there will explode sideways and connect with others. So will become, metaphorically, socially connected. World of fuzzy objects, composites with physical materials and internet services.

Expectations will change. Products will increasingly be expected to have interrelations with other ecosystems.

So what is a book? What is an artefact in this future?

Will need some new competencies. How to product and compose physical-digital ecosystems.

Tove Leffler, The Swedish Bookseller

Discoverability: how do we find books and how do we find readers? Over last ten years, number of books in bookstores has decreased, see less books and more other stuff like cards and toys.

Death or the physical bookstore that has happened in UK and US is not yet here, in Sweden bookstores have grown since 2005. Per capita, Sweden has more bookstores than US/UK. But, in small decrease, 3% have closed in last few years.

In 2011, 75% of bookstores decreased turnover. More stores will likely have to close.

Don’t buy as many books in bookstores as we used to. Apart from that being a problem with revenue. There is another issue to face: Where do people find their books.

Article in Swedish Bookseller about struggling literary reviews. Reviewers are paid less, fewer books are being reviews, newspapers facing huge losses in readers, so reviews not necessarily a good way to reach readers, esp young ones.

Internet can be  useful, all familiar with concepts of ‘also bought’ algorithm. Easy to search for a book that’s been recommended. But what we lose with the internet is serendipity. Hard to find things we don’t now we want or have never heard about, or outside our comfort zone. That is something that online bookstores have to figure out. Because it’s not really about randomness, it’s about being told about something you would never think of, or that people who have the same taste as you would never think of.

Bookish is trying to work around that with its recommendations from staff, and make recommendations from a more complex algorithm than other systems. But that’s hard, because when you come to computers someone has to do the coding and you lose a bit of ‘human error’, and that error is vital to finding new reading, or new readers.

Need to understand readers. Eg. Where are they? What else to they buy? What do they read? Why do they read? What do they eat? What music do they listen to?

Finding this out is easier on the internet.

“If you like this book, you will most certainly not like this book.” Good to recommend the unthinkable.

Nick Sidwell, Guardian

Guardian Books is a very small publisher, trying to do something that is different, have access to the wider environment of the Guardian newspaper.

Have access to a vast range of different writers, and to an enormous audience. 30m monthly unique browsers, 215k print circ, global audience, millions of followers on social media, 10,000 of bookshop customer.

Useful to tap into this audience, but these figures are the equivalent of sales figure in that they are straightforward measurements of a single factor, but what’s more important is the data behind these figures.

Based on what was popular amongst the paper’s reader, decided to publish a book called Swim, which is about swimming in wild places.

Now trying to construct more of a story from the data.

Guardian Shorts, ebook only short-form non-fiction or long-form journalism. Same thing. No longer just taking popularity factors, but also asking questions of that data and understandings of the audience. So understand how they engage with content, how they behave on the website. Team of data analysts take from that deeper, richer more targeted and more focused understandigs of what it is that people want. Then apply that to editorial decision making.

Three questions to ask ourselves:

1. Which subject areas should we focus on?

2. What should that content be?

3. How big is the potential audience, who are they and where can we reach them?

Have a lot of data about who these people are, where they are, what devices they have. Can answer some of the questions Tove mentioned in the intro.

Most popular areas on news website: news, sport, culture, travel, tech. So develop shorts in those areas.

Now have nearly 60 titles. Take a lot of archival content from both the Guardian and Observer, and with editorial work can curate that into short packaged ebooks.

Now trying to move beyond curating archive content, into commission new stories, not just a title or subject, but to use that extra data for how we structure of the book itself.

Facts are Sacred is about data journalism. Used how people were engaging with the Guardian data blog, knew there was a very engaged audience and looked at what they were interested in, and looked at what was keeping them coming back, what was important. Decided on eight chapters to understand what was done, whether they could do it themselves, to how it changes the role of journalism.

Simon Rogers, editor of data blog, wrote the book. Were able to use understanding of the engagement that people were showing to predict what their possible sales were. Knew that 10% of 1mn audience were engaged, knew how any had ereaders, how mmany in UK or US, and how many read short-form non-fiection — 4,844. Also knew from archive content, and knew 50% of sales came from non-core Guardian readers, so realistic figure for sales target is 9,699. Have sold 7,000 copies so far, but that ebook is no longer available as redeveloping it.

Felt happy with that, was a very useful proof of what we were trying demonstrate. Could take this deeper analysis of how people respond to the newspaper to inform decision making for book content.

New editions published next month, moving to a printed book an a rich ebook developed for the iPad, which is better for the type of content, including videos and interactive elements.

Been using marketing data to try and match where we’ve got to with our editorial decision, and then to make sure that we bring it to the right people, commercial profiling of customers, so can match up characteristics of book buyers who have shown engagement with similar products.

What lies at the heart of this is the editor. It’s still the editor that makes the decisions, the data without someone to make use of it is just a big spreadsheet of numbers. Even when the different metrics are put together to generate insight, unless we know what to do with it, ask it specific questions, have a goal, it remains a spreadsheet full of numbers. Editor remains central.

Still need all traditional editorial talent. Don’t let the data dictate what we’re doing, use it to inform decision making and understanding. It’s a tool much as an editor will take on all sorts of information about a market, the data about our reades is just another tool. Allows us to make wiser, more informed decisions.

Been doing this a year and a half. At the beginning of this year we made a switch, moving away from the archive material, commissioning more new titles. All of those titles have come from an understanding of our audience.

Great opportunity to gather more data. Want to not just use data to commission, but also to develop how we distribute. If you understand how people read your books, that’s possible digitally, not always easy to get hold of, but if you have channels that feed back to you, it can be enormously valuable.

- be data first

- data is a tool editors shouldn’t be without

- data needs organising and interpreting

- use data to prove your assumptions

- …but also allow it to change your mind.

Andrew Rhomberg, JellyBooks

Industry gorilla – Amazon. How do we not get squashed? Where is that gorilla weak? Discovery. Amazon is where you go to buy book, few peopel discover new books on Amazon. Amazon doesn’t share data. If we have a data-focused approach, can we use that data and collaborate around it? Can we be DRM free? Can we share book samples?

Discovery is not one thing. Five forms of discovery:

- Serendipitous

- Social

- Distributed

- Data-driven

- Incentivised

Jellybooks.com had just covers, no price, no text, because it’s easier to browse pictures.

Want to make books more viral and engaging, so create a ‘twitter card’ which is easy to share.

Widgets for book sampkes so authors, agents, publishers and reviwers can embed them on homepage blog or website. Samples which are easy to include, and people can download a sample later for reading.

Oldest data-driven discovery is the best-seller list. Can have a data-driven approach that’s unique to each person, not just mass popularity. In a wider concept, think of book as the paper book, butthinkn of the ebook as a file, a container. Couldthink of a book as a URL, maybe to the produce page, Goodreads review, quote that has been pulled out on readmill, these links are shared over the internet – blogs, Pinterest, emails. These links are accessible, can’t see amazon sales data but can see how People share link to Amazon product pages.

Who’s sharing? Who’s acting on that sharing? Use a book link as a reference, and because have index the links, can track them.

Data is very messy, so track it, clean it up, and put it out as an open API, so that others out there can use that data and create fabulous new ways of discovery. People can do data visualisation, data mining, and others benefit from their work.

Jellybooks data: want to know what people are reading, without asking them or them telling us. If you ask someone what they are reading they will not tell you the truth. Books on the shelves are what they want you to believe they are reading.

So through the links on sharing and consumption can get an idea of what they are really doing.

If we want to influence a reader, can you influence the people who influence them rather than spam them?

Any publisher can participate, and then they start tracking the books. Discovery only of interest when it’s their books being discovered.

Incentivised discovery – you get a special discount but only if you can get enough people to join in. Group deal. So get an email, download the sample over breakfast, first 10% of book, share it with others, and if you like the deal you sign up with your credit card. But you need to share it, and get others to buy it as well.Can monitor how you are progressing, don’t tell you what the minimum is (set by publisher) the deal is activated and you get the book discounted by 50%.

Deadline is 6pm, so there’s only 12 hours to do it. Most people in London commute home at about 6pm, so they can then get the whole book to read on homewards commute. Change those times in different countries, eg. Spain is 9am – 9pm.

Not about trying to kill Amazon, but about an alternate strategy.

Soon launching in Spain, US, Latin America.

May be targeting a smaller market than amazon, but because it’s such a big world, can make this niche big enough to be viable.

I’m at the IfBookThen conference in Stockholm today. Later on I’ll be talking about direct sales, but in the meantime I’m looking forward to some really interesting sessions which I will, of course, blog here in as much detail as I can capture. As usual, I’m live-blogging, so expect errors!

Joanna Ellis, The Literary Platform

Stories sit at the heart of publishing, without them we don’t have a business, and storytelling is shaped by the technology at hand. Shames the relationship between author and reader. 

Digital technologies shape the network, which shames the story. Rich opportunity to evolve.

A few key themes emerging: how the audience is becoming participatory; how the creative impetus of digital tech is bleeding back into physical and shaping the print world. 

Inanimate alice

Episodic novel for teens, readers drive the story forward by performing various actions. Students & young people encouraged to hack the story themselves, so readers can add their own media. Was conceived as enterntainment, but now adopted by teachers in 70 countries as a way of developing digital literacy. Shift away from the auteur to collaboration, created by team of 8-9 people and the audience. 

The Silent History

Dystopian future story. More adult than Alice, but also episodic, short episodes delivered as you read, written by team of 5 people. Using GPS, stories are located in the physical world that you have to go to. Can contribute in term from that place back into the story. 

Dreams of Your Life

Interactive story, written by AL Kennedy. Quite dark, written to go with a documentary about a woman who died and wasn’t found for three years. As a reader you respond to questions and the responses shape the story. Unfolds over one half hour. Responses are pre-designed but still feel tailored to each reader.

Composition No. 1

Another in which the reader shapes the story. Box contains 1000 pages, each page has a self-contained narrative, and the reader chooses which order to read them in. But readers were unwilling to shuffle the pages, they felt it “breaks the rules”. But in iPad version the pages shuffle automatically and only stops when your finger is on the screen. Technology liberates us from rules and conventions we’re used to. 

Enchanted Books

Not released yet, part of Library of Lost Books. using physical computing tech to bring life to an old print book. Sensors are hidden in the spine, and send data back about whether the reader is turning pages, and triggers the sending of audio back to the reader’s iPhone. 

What we see more and more, there has been one way of being for so long. Vanilla ebooks are an extension of the print book world these projects are more individual. 

Heard from authors that they felt excluded from the process of discussing the future of publishing, so set up The Writing Platform. Are trying to pair writers with technologists, got two writers, two technologists for three months to experiment and see what happens. 

Evan Ratliff, Atavist

About two and a half years ago, was working as a freelance journalist for a magazine, and was complaining to editor about how they couldn’t do stories of the length they wanted to do. And sometimes, when print stories moved to the web, it was just thrown up and didn’t take advantage of what you could do with the web. 

So came up with the idea of a digital publication something in between magazines and books. So built a platform. Asked journalists to pitch a story to them, but people were not interested in writing for something that didn’t exist. 

So Ratliff heard about a robbery in Stockholm, so came here and researched it, and wrote the first Atavist story, Lifted. Story opens with the actual footage of the robbery, landed a helicopter on the roof of a cash depot and robbed it. 

Wanted to tell the story but happy to mix media. Decided that footage was a better lead than anything they could write. Chapter one is about the planning of the robbery. 

If you don’t know where the locations are, you can call a map up, you can see the view from the bench that the robbers sat on when they planned it, photos of the people involved you can bring up by tapping on their name. 

Evolved over last two years to be a story telling company. Make short books. Set out to tell true stories, what you call that – book, magazine – doesn’t matter. 

Recent one was primarily a documentary film with text built in. 

Created tools to allow them to write stories, but provide those tools to publishers and soon to individuals. 

Stories are sold individually or by subscription. Can download to ereader, or read online, or through an app on your phone. The story is the key thing, where it gets told is just a matter of technology. Multimedia designed into everything. 

Country Club in Baghdad – first chapter is an animated narration of how the story starts. 

Try to do stories once a year about music, as this model is perfect. Piano Demon is a story about a musician from the 20s/30s, with original recordings of his music. The idea is to give the reader an experience that feels different. Feels like reading but has a cinematic quality. But it’s not the same for every story, but every story has something. Try to keep it different. 

Had to find an audience, and some people read on ebook readers, so that strips out media, but need a broader audience. 

Software: helping others tell their stories. Platform: Creativist. Eliminates the need to create tech middlemen to converts files. Tech allows you to do everything in one place.

User agnostic: needs to be usable by the storytellers, not coders. 

Media agnostic: doesn’t care if a chapter is video or audio or text. 

Platform agnostic: doesn’t care where you want to send it, so can do video heavy version or it can strip out the video and make it text-only. 

Everyone can create something that looks different. Paris Reviews, TED Books. 

Going to be doing full-length books, fiction and non-fiction, taking these principles to apply it to print and see what goes. 

Opening up Creativist to individuals too. 

Frank Rose, author

Talking about the idea of story worlds, re-imagining it and making room for the reader or viewer to explore it. 

Looked at the Steig Larsson’s character Mikael Blomkvist, how would he have reported a story? Did the research and produced the piece. 

Expanding the story of the film. Part of a project doing with Fincher to explain his take on Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Puzzles, treasure hunt. 

Immersive. Immersion not a new idea – Don Quixote lost his mind due to reading too much.

Dickens, participatory story telling. Era of migration from countryside to city, at a time of social upheaval. Cities good for publishing – literacy rates soared, 30% to 67% in ten years 1830 – 1840. But no one had money, but had better printing presses, paper was better quality and there were railways to distribute stuff. So publishers decided to print novels cheaply and sell in instalments, a few chapters a month at an affordable price. Almost all of Dickens’ novels were serialised. He knew his audience very well having lived it. 

What Would Google Do? People should turn for guidance to Google.

Perhaps ask, What would Dickens do? Industrial revolution created mass media, generated new industries like newspapers and magazines, and book publishing. But didn’t allow audience to connect with author. 

Dickens’ serialisation did allow connection. He was writing chapters at a time. He worked at a magazine called Master Humphrey’s Clock which was weekly. Wanted to shorten the “intervals of communication” between him and his readers. 

People over time forgot what Dickens did, and how he was in constant contact with his readers. They wanted some sort of voice in his stories, though he didn’t always listen. There was pandemonium when it became clear that Little Nell wasn’t going to make it in the Old Curiosity Shop. Ship coming into NY harbour greeted by a crowd of poeple shouting “Is Little Nell alive?”

If a story wasn’t going well, eg Martin Chuzzlewit, he listened more to his reader, so moved the action to America. 

What would Dickens Do? He would have had a blog. His web skills would have been good, but he would have faced issues. And challenges of daily publication would have been worse than weekly publication. Might have done like John Lanchester, wrote Capital, about the residence of Pepys Road. 

Matt Locke worked with Faber & Faber to create online version of Lanchester’s fictional world. 

Personalise the story through a game. Get a series of emails, including news stories tailored to your circumstances, would learn how you’d be effected by the next ten years, the ‘lost ten years’ predicted by economists due to austerity. 

Another example, The Strain Trilogy, website that takes the story further. What would life really be like if you lived in a world where vampire were in charge and humans were just food. 

Pottermore. Would Dickens have done Olivermore? Oliver Twist the serial was different to the novel. 

Readers have been trained to think of a book as a book, but now starting to see books in a different way. Want books to embrace them and draw them in. New relationship with readers. 

Progress is being made on the final draft of Queen of the May, so it’s time for me to start thinking about the Kickstarter project for the physical book. Just like with Argleton, I want to produce hand-bound copies of Queen of the May with a variety of options for cover material. And, as usual, I want to produce some extras for different reward levels.

There are so many things I could offer, but I’d like to keep the extras down to manageable levels of complexity, so I thought that I would ask you, my potential Kickstarter backer, what interests you. Mostly the items are self explanatory but a few need elucidation:

• Laser-cut bookmark – I’m not sure what material this would use, as I need to do a bit more research. But I’d pick something lovely.
• Bookplate – This would be a single bookplate commissioned from Andy English, most likely.
• Illustration print – This would be an unframed print of an illustration for the book, such as the frontispiece or if the project takes off enough that I can commission other illustrations, those as well.
• Book slipcase – Probably hand-made by me, unless it proved very popular, to perfectly fit your copy of Queen of the May
• Figurine – A long shot this one, but if the project raised enough money, I’d look at getting key character made into figurines.
• Badge – or ‘pin’ as they are known in America

So please tick the box for every reward type that you would genuinely be interested in receiving. And if you have other ideas that you think I should consider, then let me know using the ‘other’ option. And feel free to leave comments below, too!

Results

Thanks to everyone who voted. I closed the poll with 100 votes, as that seemed like a nice tidy place to stop. The five most popular choices were:

• Leather bookmark
• Laser cut bookmark
• Book slipcase
• Bookplate
• Illustration print

So those will now go forward to the pricing stage. I’ll add options for ‘name in a future story’ and ‘dedication’ because they don’t need pricing and are easy to fulfil, and even though there wasn’t huge demand for them they will be limited by nature so they don’t need mass interest.

The full bar chart for all options is below. The two ‘other’ suggestions were ‘special ebook version’ and ‘cotton badge’.

Enclicken to enbiggen

Towards the end of last year I had an idea for a short story. I scribbled it down in my notebook – see my blog post on Forbes for how I’m trying to get the best out of my notebook – and promised myself that I’d get it finished by the end of the holidays. I spent quite a lot of falling-asleep-time planning it out and coming up with a half-decent ending, notes about which I was careful to make as soon as I had had the ideas, but I didn’t get a chance to write it until the year’s end.

Tentatively called The Lacemaker, it’s the first actually short short story I think I’ve ever written, coming in at around 1,500 words. Usually my ‘short’ stories turn into novellas before I know what’s happened to them, but this one behaved. Well, mostly. 

I had also promised myself that I’d finish the second draft, aka total rewrite, of The Queen of the May before the end of the year. It’s been a bit of a slog, in part because I’ve just not had the time to set aside to do what needed to be done. Freelancing and running what is essentially a non-profit and trying to start a writing career can turn into a bit of a clusterfuck if you’re not careful. 

However, I dutifully found the time in the dying days of the year to sit and finish the rewrite, rounding it off mid-afternoon on 31 December. It has come in at a bit over 32,000 words and I have to say I’m moderately pleased with it. I immediately sent it off to John Rickards, a friend who helped me get over a major hump a few months ago when I hit a brick wall with the whole rewriting process. John read the first 8,000 words, gave me some great feedback and helped me see how to finish it off. 

A proper published author himself under the name Sean Cregan, John has begun providing editorial services. I commissioned a detailed critique and am now in possession of an excellent set of notes that will help me with my next draft. John is great, by the way, and I can’t recommend his services highly enough. 

I haven’t had much time to act on John’s notes, as January has been pretty much solid with work. (Yay!) However, I’m hoping to find the time next week, whilst travelling and without internet, to sit down and start the next draft. 

Finally, I have also started analysing the script that I wrote years back, Tag, ready for novelisation. I billed it back then as ‘Buffy meets Highlander in Reading’, and that pretty much still fits the bill. But although the core is solid, there are a lot of things that need rethinking, adding or developing before it can be written as a novel. That’s a fairly slow process at the best of times, but it’s coming along nicely. 

Overall it’s been a pretty good start to the year. I hope to have The Lacemaker rewritten by early February and once it’s been through a few beta readers, I’ll post it here. I hesitate to put an ETA on The Queen of the May, which still has to go through the next rewrite, beta readers and copyeditors before it’s even vaguely ready. Hopefully it won’t take me as long to do all that as it did to do the second draft!  

After my ovarian cystectomy last August, everything seemed to be going very well indeed. I healed quite quickly, stopped aching all the time, started sleeping properly again, and soon felt incredibly energised. It made me realise how much waking several times in the night was wearing me out.

I was supposed to get another ultrasound scan in October to see whether the cyst has truly gone, but due to an administrative error, that scan didn’t end up happening until last week. The bad news is that my cyst is back, and very nearly as big as it was last time. In just five months, it’s grown to 7cm across, which is a bit too rapid for my liking.

Now before I go further, this next bit may stray into ‘too much information’ for some of you, so if you’re squeamish, don’t read on.

My consultant told me that the first operation simply drained the cyst. The hope, obviously, was that that would be enough and that it wouldn’t recur. My assumption is that draining a cyst is easier than removing it, and so that’s the first thing they try.

The cyst itself appears to have been an endometrioid or endometrial cyst, also disturbingly called a ‘chocolate cyst’. What happens is that a little bit of the lining of the uterus comes away, travels to an ovary and starts to grow. Just like it would in the uterus, it bleeds, and the cyst grows.

So rather than being full of mucous, as some cysts are, mine was full of blood. And it will continue to grow unless it is removed.

Whilst my consultant generously gave me the option to wait and see what might happen, it was pretty clear that the next step is another operation, but this time, rather than just draining the cyst, they will attempt to peel the sac itself away from the ovary. That’s likely easier said than done, not least because the photo clearly showed how the ovary had stretched as the cyst grew inside it. Contrary to what I had imagined, the cyst wasn’t a sort of balloon on the outside of the ovary, but embedded in it, which will make it a bit tricky to remove.

The weird thing is that I didn’t feel any of the pain or discomfort that I had had for the first nine months of last year… at least, not until a couple of days after the ultrasound. I don’t know if it was because the process of doing the scan poked it about a bit, if it was psychosomatic, or if the inflection point is just co-incidental.

But what I can say is that I’m now at the same stage I was around April last year with regard to symptoms, and I know it’s going to be a while before the surgery’s arranged. So, fun time ahead. At least, though, I know what to expect.

Over the Christmas break, I had a couple of quiet days where I could pretend I was a full-time author. Having plotted out the new end of The Queen of the May early in December, and having promised myself that I would finish the second draft before the end of 2012, I spent 31st December writing like crazy. I finished the second draft well within time and it’s now time to get editorial feedback from my trusted readers.

I also managed to draft a short story that I drafted late last year too, provisionally called The Lacemaker. That’s going to sit for a bit and then needs a polish before I publish it here. Historically, I’ve always had a bit of a problem with short stories: they tend not to stay short. This one, however, is a bit over 1,500 words, which is by itself a small miracle. 

Finally, I’ve now sorted out my own webshop to sell Argleton directly to those of you who’d like to buy it directly. You can still download it for free, of course, but if you wanted to contribute a wee bit to the Charman-Anderson coffers, then you can get the mobi, epub and pdf for just 99p. If you’d like to buy the bundle, just click the “Buy Now” link in the sidebar. 

This year, my plans are to: 

• Finish and publish The Queen of the May
• Finish and publish The Lacemaker
• Analyse, tweak and novelise my script, Tag
• Redraft The Books of Hay
• Try to think of more short stories to write (not my forte but I’ll give it a shot)
• Make more books!

Remember, if you want to stay up-to-date with all I’m up to, join my roughly-monthly mailing list! 

“Brace yerself,” said Michael in a 2004 email, as he sent me a photo of himself and his three children, Charlie, Lily & Ruairi. “A tad more up to date,” he said of this snap. “Gone, the floppy fringe of my Martin Fry period. Back to the wash-it-and-leave-it version.”

Back then, Michael was in PR and I was struggling with a mutating freelance gig that had way more marketing and PR work in it than I was comfortable with, having no experience of either. We chatted on IM about the problem, and Michael offered to talk it all through with me on Skype. He spent a lot of time with me, helping me craft a strategy, pointing me at the best resources, and giving me the moral support I so desperately needed at the time. In short, I was at the bottom of a big hole and, from the other side of the Atlantic, Michael dug me out of it.

That was typical of Michael. No matter how busy he was, he always had time to help his friends out. He always found time for that call, that email, that chat, that pep talk.

We were friends mainly through electronic means, through our blogs or IM or IRC. Indeed, three days before that email, Michael had celebrated the opening of my new Corante blog about social media, Strange Attractor. Michael also blogged at Corante for a while, at Flackster, a blog which is still funny, sharp and insightful all these years later.

Michael was one of a small group of bloggers who opened their arms to this digital waif, back then looking desperately for purpose and peers. Michael gave selflessly of his time, support and friendship, and it was always a great shame that we didn’t get to meet up more often.

When we did have the opportunity to get together, it was always for far too short a time. Conversation flowed so easily and Michael’s sharp wit, always evident in chat and email, was even funnier in person. His intelligence, compassion and empathy shone through. No matter what I was going through, Michael would always have something wise and apposite to say. But our meetings were never long enough, never often enough.

Michael was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer over the summer. Kevin and I hoped as hard as we could that he would make a swift and complete recovery, but it was sadly not to be. We heard this morning the awful news that Michael passed away yesterday.

Michael leaves many legacies, including Toronto’s annual HoHoTO fundraising event that he helped found and which has, to date, raised $165,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank. He touched so many lives, directly and indirectly, and made those lives that much better. He was a great friend, despite the fact that he often protested that he wasn’t.

Michael’s was a life lived with love. Love for his wife, Leona, for his children, for his family, for his friends and for strangers, for the causes he believed in, for the little things and the big things. Michael, we love you and we will miss you.

Brixton Book Jam

I’m  going to be reading an extract from Argleton for the Brixton Book Jam on Monday 1 October, if you want to come along and see my first ever book reading! Zelda Rhiando, who helps organise it, describes it as “a free quarterly literary event, where famous and not so famous authors do a five minute reading each to a highly appreciative and attentive audience.”

Some of the other authors, and their books, that I’ll be sharing the stage with are:

• Jim Bob (Carter USM) – Driving Jarvis Ham
• Courttia Newland – The Gospel According to Cane
• Adam Mars-Jones – Pilcrow
• Martin Millar – Lonely Were Wolf Girl
• James Dawson – YA thriller Hollow Pike
• Keith Kahn-Harris – The Best Waterskier in Luxembourg
• Doug e. Graves – Homerton Sweet Homerton

There will also be a popup bookshop featuring Herne Hill Books, local presses and indie authors.

Date: Monday, 1st October 2012
Time: 7.00pm
Location: Hootananny Brixton, 95 Effra Road, SW2 1DF

Download the flyer.

Women in Publishing

I’m also going to be participating in Women in Publishing‘s upcoming panel discussion on the recent sockpuppet furore, which I’ve covered extensively on my Forbes blog. We’ll be looking at the scandal itself; how it has been handled by the media, the publishing industry and readers; and what we think could or should be done about the issue of sock puppets now.

Details are still forthcoming, but the panel will be on the evening of 10 October, from 7pm. I’ll update this post when I have more information.

I’m delighted to finally reveal the new cover for Argleton, designed by Thomas James. I asked Tom to put together something for me that was stylistically simple, informed by the effortlessness of classic Penguin designs, and which could form the basis of the covers for my next few novellas. The design also had to work digitally too.

We started off thinking about the hardcover design, which will be quarter bound with a gold foiled title. Tom has also designed fantastic endpapers, which I’m not going to show you now because then it won’t be a surprise when I do a second print run! Cruel, I know, but suffice it to say that when this beauty is finally turned into a real book, it’s going to look just gorgeous.

We then moved on to the digital cover. The challenge with the digital version is that if we kept the exact same sizing as the hardback, the title would impossible to read when the size of an Amazon thumbnail, so we had to be a little bolder. I love the shade of green that Tom chose, it fits nicely with the original design and the hardbacks’ forest green endpapers. I also adore the hare, it’s so beautifully drawn. Now I just need to find someone who can create a sterling silver necklace from it!

And this is the mock-up of how the digital cover will look, roughly speaking on an iPad:

All the ebook versions on this site have now been updated not only with the new cover but also to remove a few typos that slipped through our proofreading fingers first time round. Do feel free to download a replacement copy for the first edition, and to email whichever files you like to any friends you think might like it. I’ll also be getting the new version up on Amazon as soon as I can!

Dear The British Media, especially Freeview broadcasters,

You may have noticed that something extraordinary happened this summer, something wonderful. The Great British Public were treated to the most amazing sporting spectacular – Sportsmas, as one friend of mine puts it. We saw, in the Olympics but especially in the Paralympics, years and years of hard work, training and sacrifice coming to fruition for some of our most talented athletes. And it was beautiful. 

We saw Helen Glover and Heather Stanning taking the first British gold of the Olympics in the women’s pairs at Eton Dorney. We saw Andy Murray winning gold at Wimbledon, a victory all the sweeter for his loss only a few weeks earlier on that very same court. We saw Mo Farrah completing the 5,000m and 10,000m double, wining gold and the hearts of everyone who watched. 

Then, a few weeks later, came the Paralympics and many of us found ourselves unsure of what to expect, but what we got was even better than the Olympics. The disabled athletes may have been categorised by their disability, but they weren’t defined by it. They were defined by their performances, by their successes. And what successes we saw! 

David Weir thrashing the field to take home four golds and, with pitch perfect timing, showing his mastery not just of speed but of endurance. Ellie Simmonds taking two golds and breaking two world records in two days, triumphing with grace and humility. Jonnie Peacock powering past Oscar Pistorius to take the 100m in one of the most anticipated races of the games. Sarah Storey taking four cycling golds, a feat all the more spectacular because of her astonishing medal history as a swimmer. 

So much sporting excellence, so much passion and love and talent and tenacity, I’d be here all day if I tried to write a complete list. Even those of us not really ‘into sports’ shared in the joy of our athletes’ success and the pain of their failure. We sat, glued to the TV screen, willing our athletes on to greater and greater achievements. 

For those of us lucky enough to go to the games themselves, the experience was one we’ll never, ever forget. The television simply doesn’t do justice to the roar of an 80,000-strong crowd, on its feet, screaming for David Weir to go faster, faster, faster and then exploding with delight as he crossed the line first. It. Was. Amazing. Awe-inspiring. Astonishing. Beautiful. 

And what about those sports that we barely knew existed? Murderball, known also by the name (or should that be euphemism?) wheelchair rugby, turned out to be one of the most exhilarating sports of the Paralympics. Wheelchair basketball, much more exciting and much less squeaky than its able bodied version. Blind football, in which sight-impaired players locate the ball solely through the sound of the bell inside and show a level of control of the ball that seems often to escape their sighted counterparts. 

Whilst we’re talking about sports less often broadcast, what about the women’s football in the Olympics? What an amazing display of skill and talent! The men’s football was staid and boring by comparison, lacking in any real flare or excitement. Given the choice between seeing a men’s international, full of shilly-shallying, diving and egotism, and watching a women’s international, I know which I’d choose for maximum entertainment value. 

And here we are at the nub of it. Sportsmas comes but once every four years, and I don’t want to wait until Rio before I get to see some women’s football on my TV again. I don’t want to wait four years before I see David Weir or Jonnie Peacock storming past their rivals. I don’t want to wait to see Hannah Cockcroft or Natasha Baker or Jonathan Fox or any of our other brilliant Paralympians compete. Because let’s face it, it’s not like our athletes sit around on their arses in the four years in between the Games, as Jody Cundy so eloquently explained. 

There are more sports in heaven and earth, dear broadcasters, than are dreamt of in your scheduling philosophy. And, not to put too fine a point on it, we want to see them on TVs. Get the murderball on our screens, the women’s football, the fencing, the single/double amputee sprinting, the wheelchair basketball, the vision-impaired footie, the boccia, the synchronised swimming… 

We have tasted the glory of disabled sport and we fucking love it. We have seen the lesser-known Olympic sports, and we fucking love them too. Sports coverage in the UK has become focused on just a few big-ticket events, and that’s boring, unimaginative and exclusionary. We’ve seen you do better now, oh BBC and Channel 4, and we want to you to keep that momentum going. And for you other Freeview broadcasters, you have seen now how popular these sports can be, so you can join in, safe in the knowledge that we care enough to watch, so long as you don’t shove stuff on at stupid times of the day.

Furthermore, that cynicism you lot so cherish, that you think shows how sophisticated you are? The pointing and sneering and laughing at people on ‘reality TV’? Yeah, that can stop now too, please. We’ve seen what reality looks like, and it looks like the Weirwolf giving every last little drop of blood to cross that marathon finishing line in first place. That’s the reality we admire, that we love, and that we want to see more of. 

Grasp the nettle. Broaden your sporting horizons. And give us the chance to follow our Paralympians and Olympians all the way through to the next Games in Rio. Do them the honour of supporting them all the time, not just at Sportsmas. 

Best regards, 

Suw

Ada Lovelace Day, the international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering & maths that I launched in 2009, has gone from strength to strength in the last three years. I’ve been amazed at how much support it’s garnered and how much enthusiasm there is for it.

This year, it has become really clear to me that there’s a lot more that I could do with Ada Lovelace Day, if only we had a bit of cash to pay for it. Since its inception, Ada Lovelace Day has been run entirely by volunteers and by partnering with organisations like the Women’s Engineering Society, Association for UK Interactive Entertainment, London Games Festival and BCS Women. We have managed a huge amount through the kindness and generosity of our volunteers and partners, but there is more we could do.

I now want to create a formal charitable organisation to support women in STEM, not just on one day of the year, but all year round. Some of our goals include creating educational materials about iconic women, providing media training, and building a directory of expert speakers. The fundraiser uses the ‘keep what you earn’ model so all money donated will go towards helping women in STEM.

So if you have a moment, please take a look at our fundraiser and donate what you can.

We also have a couple of events that you might be interested in:

Ada Lovelace Day Live! Featuring the WES Karen Burt Award
Last year’s Ada Lovelace Day Live! event, held with BCSWomen, was such an amazing success that we decided to do it again on 16 October at the IET in London! We are collaborating with the Women’s Engineering Society who will be presenting the prestigious Karen Burt Memorial Award to a newly chartered woman engineer at the event. Performers include:

• Dr Suzie Sheehy, accelerator physicist
• Gia Milinovich, technology and TV presenter
• Dr Helen Scales, marine biologist
• Helen Keen, comedian
• Dr Alice Bell, science communicator
• Sarah Angliss, robot maker and thereminist
• Sydney Padua, creator of the Lovelace & Babbage webcomic

All hosted by inimitable songstress and one third of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd, Helen Arney!

It will be an fantastic evening of science, technology, comedy and song, featuring all manner of wonders, from marine biology and particle physics to the secrets of fridges and performance robots. We would love to see you there if you can make it!

Tickets are £10 and available from WES.

XX Game Jam
ALD is delighted to have partnered with the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment and the London Games Festival to put on the XX Game Jam, an all-female games hackday where teams will compete to produce the best computer game in just 24 hours. Held on the 26th and 27th October, it’s the first all-women* event of its type.

We’re looking for programmers, producers, artists, designers, sound designers or composers, who would like to try their hand making a game! Direct experience of game development is not required.

Sign up for free!

* We believe the terms ‘XX’ and ‘woman’ are self-defining, so anyone who self-identifies as female is welcome.

There are more events being organised independently by grassroots Ada Lovelace Day supporters both in the UK and (coming soon) around the world. So come along and get involved!!

I interviewed The Guardian’s Sam Jordison about the challenges of expanding the current Not The Booker literary prize to include self-published books for my Forbes blog, but didn’t really have room to consider how one might actually run a meaningful award for self-published authors. The Not The Booker awards currently works by allowing people to nominate traditionally published books in the comments on an opening blog post. These are then winnowed down to a shortlist through public voting, but for a vote to count the voter must include a short review of the book to show that they’ve actually read it.

The problem with a self-publishing award based on the same principles would be just the enormous tsunami of shite books nominated in the first round and the horrendous gaming of the voting system in the second. Because, let’s be brutally honest here, there is a lot of dreadful crap put out by self-published authors who have yet to develop the skill to understand that their work is sub-standard.

And, as Sam put it, “there are some real loudmouths with monstrous egos” out there, and you can guarantee that any system based solely on a popular vote would cut out lesser known authors with awesome books in favour of the egotists. Given the apparent correlation between being a loudmouthed twat and producing shite work, the results of such a contest would likely be disappointing.

So, how would one do it? First, let’s examine some of the problems we’d have to solve: 

1. Scale. There are a lot of self-published authors out there now, over a million by some accounts, and any prize for them would have to have a nomination system that could scale well. It is, however, unclear how many self-pubbed authors come from the Not The Booker catchment area of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe, but even if it’s only a tenth, that’s still a lot of people. (The Not The Booker has basically the same rules as the Man Booker Prize, which is its foil.) 

2. Quality. As mentioned already, a lot of self-published novels are awful, with bad dialogue, characterisation and plotting, dreadful grammar, and typos scattered liberally throughout. Many that tackle those problems lack the polish that a good novel has, reading more like a first than a final draft. 

3. Plagiarism. I’m not sure how big of an issue this is, but certainly there’s enough of it about in self-publishing that I think it’s worth considering as a potential issue. 

4. Gaming. There is absolutely no doubt that there are some self-published authors who would find a way to game the system to ensure as high a ranking as they can, thus pushing out more modest and lesser-known authors. Any system has to ensure a level playing field for all nominees because popular doesn’t mean good and in my opinion what’s needed in self-publishing isn’t another popularity contest. 

My feeling is that, because of the nature of these problems, much of the process would simply have to be automated or crowdsourced. I’ll outline first stab at a possible process, but I’d be more than happy for people to point out flaws and better ideas in the comments. 

I’d start off with a system where the authors self-nominate by uploading their manuscript, in full, complete with their details and any relevant metadata to the awards website. The current system that the Not The Booker has where books are nominated in the comments of a blog post simply isn’t scalable and would become a massive headache. 

The first phase of checking would run each manuscript through plagiarism software to make sure that someone’s not sneakily uploading another, more talented author’s work under their own name. It wouldn’t necessarily be perfect but it would stop the most egregious cases. Any manuscripts flagged by the system would be reviewed by a human being and the flag either lifted or the work disqualified. I doubt there would be many so this stage shouldn’t be a big deal. 

I would then run the manuscripts through a spellchecker. It’s amazing how many typos some self-published books sport, many of them mistakes that should have been picked up by a simple proof. Any book with a significant number of typos is likely to be shite in other ways too, so manuscripts over a certain typo threshold would be flagged for review by a human.

For this, the human checkers could easily be crowdsourced through something like Mechanical Turk. Anyone with half a wit can tell the difference between a typo and an exotic noun and it’d be simple to create a test to make sure that people know the difference, and a sensible interface to allow people to mark the genuine typos. Manuscripts with too many typos would be tossed. 

For the next step, we’d need a large pool of readers, preferably with some sort of experience in editorial but definitely with a clear understanding of what makes a piece of writing good or bad. I think you could probably recruit these volunteers from the public if you put together a short test to make sure that people had the ability to discriminate between competent and shite writing. 

Then the first 1000 words of each manuscript would be anonymised and given to an odd number of randomly selected readers, say three, and they’d be asked to mark it out of ten simply on the quality and style of the writing, not on characterisation, dialogue, plot etc. The manuscripts with the worst total scores would be discarded, and those with the best would go on to the next stage.

Because you would have more than one person reading each excerpt, you’d get not only a fair view of how competent the writing was, but also a sense of how certain people were that the writing was competent. I’m nicking this idea off Galaxy Zoo, the citizen science site where people classify galaxies according to type. If everyone who views a galaxy says it’s a spiral, then you have 100% confidence that it is a spiral, but if half of people who look at it say it’s a spiral and half say it’s an elliptical galaxy, then you have less confidence. 

So if a manuscript got all 8s, 9s or 10s, then you could be very confident that on a technical level, it was competent. If it got all 1s, 2s or 3s you could safely discard it. And if it got some 8s and some 2s, you would know you had Marmite on your hands. 

I think this is how to deal to deal with the scaling issue. If you got 1,000 manuscripts submitted, and you want each excerpt read three times, and you think each person is, on average, going to bother to read five excerpts, then you need 600 volunteers. That might seem like a lot, but I don’t think it is, given how many people volunteer for citizen science projects. This is citizen literature! What could be more fun? 

By the end of this stage, you’ve winnowed out manuscripts that include plagiarism, have bad spelling, and those with the worst abuses of grammar, punctuation and style. You’re now left with a selection of works that are, hopefully, competently written.

Here, there’s an option. You either insert another stage where the readers with direct, relevant editorial experience grade anonymous manuscripts based on their literary merits, or you just pick the top 100, say, and there’s your longlist. The best route would depend on how many good judges you’ve got and how many manuscripts you have left. 

The process thus far should avoid any biases on the part of the readers because of the anonymisation, and cannot be gamed because the authors aren’t involved. What’s more, it’s gender blind and genre blind, allowing for plenty of surprises in the longlist. 

I’ll note the Not The Booker longlist this year had 72 entires and was about one third female, though none of them made it through to the shortlist. I leave the question of why that should be as an exercise for the reader.

The next stage, though, could then take on the normal Not The Booker format with a public contest based on 100+ word reviews, rather than simple votes, to create the shortlist. This is when the authors get to rally the troops, the passionate discussions happen in the comments, and everyone gets to dig in and dirty their hands. The final judging of the shortlist happens the same way as usual too, with reviews and discussions and so on and so forth. 

Now, it is true that the system I’ve outlined would require some setting up, but it’s more than possible to do. We have, as they say, the technology. And if a self-publishing Not The Booker was established, it would be well worth the trouble of developing a robust system to deal with the submissions as it would not only get used year after year, it could also reveal some interesting trends in, say, the number of women authors, the popularity of certain genres, the increase/decrease in overall quality year on year etc. 

Of course, I’m sure I’ve missed something blindingly obvious, or made it too complicated in some way, so please do say so in the comments! 

I’m back at my desk today for the first time since I had my grapefruit-sized ovarian cyst removed last Thursday. Although I’m not feeling particularly intelligent today, I am free from pain for the first time in months and I’m very happy with the speed of my recovery.

I thought it might be worth just recounting the full story, because in my search for information on ovarian cysts I got a lot of the same basic facts over and again, and lots of fora where women get together to discuss their experiences, but very little in the way of “this is what it was like for me”. I could have really done with reading someone else’s story of their ovarian cyst, if only to have some sort of frame of reference.

That said, if you find this blog post because you either suspect you have an ovarian cyst or because you’ve been diagnosed with one, please bear in mind that different people have different experiences. You might find that yours is radically different to mine, so don’t take anything here as medical advice or any sort of prediction. This is just my story.

It’s actually a story that I think started years ago. Now that the cyst is gone, I realise just how it made its presence felt. Looking back, I realise that it was there at least five years ago, if not longer. I can recognise a point at which my periods got heavier, longer and more painful. More recently, probably a year or so ago, I started getting minor spotting before and after. That was, I suspect, another warning sign.

Yet another long-term warning sign was the sensation that there was ‘something in the way’, something that seemed to move out of the way, but which had been there so long that it seemed just normal. It’s funny how we can convince ourselves that something which, when you spell it out like that sounds deserving of immediately medical investigation, can become just a part of normality.

But all those warning signs did become a part of normality. I ignored them, assumed that they were just a sign of getting a bit older. I even ignored a brief episode last year of hot and cold flushes, which may have been some sort of bug or may have been the cyst causing a temporary hormonal wobble.

I really was foolish not to go and get a check-up. Partly that was down to my ongoing irrational fear of doctors (long story), partly it was down to not really believing that anything was wrong and not wanting to waste anyone’s time.

If you have had any of the above symptoms and haven’t been to see a doctor, go now. You aren’t wasting anyone’s time and the doctor will be as happy as you are if it turns out to be nothing. But if it’s a cyst, or something else, you want to get it treated sooner rather than later.

So, fast forward to early January. That’s when symptoms really started to manifest, specifically I started to find that pretty much everything inside my pelvis had become tender. Going for a wee was just slightly painful. Sometimes going for a poo was the same. I ignored it again, or tried to.

Deep down, I was worrying a lot and wondering what the hell was going on. I didn’t tell anyone, I just fretted away to myself, lying in bed, wondering why having a wee sometimes felt so much like hard work. I didn’t even mention it to my husband, I just tried to rationalise it away. I can be a real idiot sometimes.

Because the tenderness came and went, though, I felt that the symptoms were too vague for me to take to a doctor. Again, that was stupid. Have I mentioned that I can be really very stupid at times? I can. Persistently.

Over the Easter long weekend in early April, however, I woke up in agony and Kevin and I went to the walk-in clinic at the local cottage hospital. They took a urine sample, diagnosed a mild urinary tract infection and gave me antibiotics. The end of that week we went to the US for a holiday, but the pain returned. I had had a urinary tract infection – the analysis of my urine was clear on that – but that was a side show. The main act had yet to reveal itself.

As the discomfort and pain increased, I realised that I was going to have to go and see my doctor, except I hadn’t actually got round to registering with one in the months we’d been in Woking. We managed to do that pretty quickly, thankfully, and I was given an appointment with a doctor who has a good reputation on gynaecological issues.

She took a look, had a poke about, and said that the only way to know what was going on was to do an ultrasound. She gave me a number to ring at the local hospital and sent me off.

Now, herewith a lesson for local hospitals: When you switch your lines on, don’t have an interim message that says “All appointments are full for today” in between the “Lines are closed” message and the point where people are actually answering the phones. I was calling at 8am, as lines were only open between 8am and 10am for appointments that day or the day after, and I kept getting this damnable message that all appointments were full. That wasn’t actually true. Only when I rang one day at 8.10am did I find out that there were plenty of appointments each day,  I’d just been served the wrong message because I was ringing a fraction too early.

The ultrasound easily picked up the cyst as the source of my problems. It was 8.0 x 8.5 x 9.5cm, sitting centrally in my pelvis and crushing my bladder into a boomerang shape. It was also crushing pretty much everything else that got in its way.

As cysts go, it was one of the better sort to have: a simple sac of fluid with no signs of any solid bits. They did a blood test for any cancer markers, just in case, but a simple cyst like this is very unlikely to be cancerous, I was told. The tests came back clear.

It was a huge, huge relief to know finally what was going on, and I wished I’d acted earlier. If I had, the wait that ensued then to get my op would have been much less unpleasant. As it was, I experienced a lot more pain than I would have. My poor bladder struggled to cope with my normal levels of tea drinking and I had to ensure that I didn’t ever let it get full because that was agony. I was waking every night in pain as the cyst settled on top of one organ or another, crushing it. Painkillers became essential every day, but they often left me feeling woozy and vague.

I didn’t have a particularly long wait, as waits go, but it really was an unpleasant time. I found it hard to focus on work and didn’t really want to go out. I didn’t dare drink alcohol as I never knew if I’d need painkillers later or not. I wasn’t able to go for more than about an hour or two without needing a wee, which is fine when working from home, but less good if you’re not near a loo. And I would be woken two or three times a night either from the need to pee or the pain.

I could have avoided all that if I’d just gone to the doctor in January. Or a few years ago.

The pre-op assessment was pretty easy going: Just a few questions about my health, allergies, and habits, another urine test and an MRSA swab to make sure that I wasn’t infected. (MRSA doesn’t just hang out in hospitals.)

In the end, the operation went off without a hitch. The surgeon told me that they would first insert a needle in through my belly button, inflate my abdomen with gas, then open up an incision in the same spot to send in the camera. Once that was there, they’d be able to see exactly which ovary my cyst was attached to, as that had not been clear in the ultrasound. As I expected given the relative pain, it was my left ovary.

They then made very small incisions along my bikini line both centrally and on the left, drained the fluid out of my cyst, then removed the sac itself. The operation scars are small, neat and tidy, and I’m healing well.

(Note, I might have the exact sequence of events wrong, so any gynaecologists who want to clarify the procedure, please be my guest in the comments and then I’ll update the post.)

The nurses, doctors, surgeons, everyone I met at St Peter’s in Chertsey were wonderful. They were kind, friendly and comforting. I was especially happy to see a nurse by my side in the recovery room as I came round. She stayed with me the whole time, watching my monitors and making sure that I was ok and although we didn’t exchange a single word, I was very grateful for her presence.

Coming round is, though, a strange experience. I had been told that there was a high likelihood that I would be able to go home that day, but I was very aware that time was ticking. There was actually a clock in my line of sight, and having been walked off to theatre about 3.15pm, I was surprise to see myself not waking up until 5.45pm (precisely).

I really fought for consciousness, because I didn’t want them to think that I wasn’t going to be well enough to go home. But that whole fluttery eyelids thing you see on TV? Yeah, did that. Once I had my eyes open, the next battle was to keep them open, and to start really getting a grip on consciousness instead of just idly batting it about like a cat with a dead mouse. Overall, that process took a full hour, and then there was a bit of a wait for someone to take me to the ward.

Kevin happened to call the ward just as I was being wheeled in, and was by my side within minutes, which was a relief. Then it was a case of waiting, both for more painkillers, although I felt pretty damn chirpy by 9pm, and for the various layers of nurses, junior doctors and senior doctors to come and see me and say if I was ready to go home. I was, and we left at about 10.30pm. It was glorious to sleep in my own bed!

Now, one of the odd things about abdominal operations, I was told by the surgeon, is that the nerves that serve your diaphragm also serve the tops of your shoulders and any irritation to your diaphragm can cause pain in your shoulders. My diaphragm did indeed get irritated, and oh boy, they were right about the pain! If I breathed wrong, it felt as if someone was trying to stab their way in through my shoulders. Painkillers helped, but I found myself regulating my breathing to reduce the pain. It worked. Mostly.

Thankfully, that was gone within 24 hours, though, and the rest of the pain has been very manageable and happily decreasing more each day to the point where today I feel almost none.

So there we are. I’m still recovering, though I’m very happy with the improvement over the last week. I spent this morning at my desk but suspect this afternoon might be spent napping and watching crap daytime TV from the sofa. I’m determined to take the advice I give everyone else when they are recuperating: Take it easy! There’s no point rushing a recovery, you only make it take longer overall.

And finally, if you’re in any doubt at all about whether to go and see a doctor about some vague and nebulous symptom, please, just go. Better to find it’s nothing than inflict unnecessary pain and anguish on yourself.