Andrew Hickey

Isabel Hardman has written a piece on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog which essentially says that Liberal Democrat MPs and campaigners are on a bit of a collision course over Part II of the Justice and Security Bill. Liberal Democrat conference voted overwhelmingly in favour of this measure being withdrawn because of its provisions on secret courts.

The article suggests that Liberal Democrat MPs are likely to support the measures now that Ken Clarke has accepted an amendment from the House of Lords guaranteeing judges, not ministers would authorise secret courts. Liberal Democrat Voice’s Nick Thornsby explains why this is not acceptable opponents of this measure within the Party.

It is of course welcome that Ken Clarke has recognised some of the flaws contained in the original bill. But even the amendments made in the House of Lords don’t go far enough. The bill, establishing the principle of court cases where one side can’t hear the evidence from the other, is fundamentally illiberal. It is difficult to see how Part II can remain intact and be acceptable to Liberal Democrats.

Hardman suggests that “this could be as big a problem for the party as the Health and Social Care Bill was”. I think she’s under-estimating the situation. The NHS debate did split the party along social and economic liberal lines. That is not the case with this measure. There is nothing like civil liberties being threatened to unite people across the party. It is unlikely, in any debate that may take place in the future, that you’d see the result turn on tens of votes.

You can read the whole article here.

If you wish to take part in the Liberal Democrat campaign against secret courts, you can do so here.

* Caron Lindsay is Wednesday editor at Lib Dem Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

There's a good reason why the Queen has never attended a Cabinet meeting - or, indeed, that none of her predecessors has attended the Cabinet either, probably since a still-sane George III popped along in 1781.  (A Downing Street press release yesterday, regurgitated by all news outlets, implied that Queen Victoria had done so, but there's no evidence that she ever did; in The Monarchy and the Constitution, Vernon Bogdanor states definitively that "since 1837 [the year of Victoria's accession] the sovereign has not attended cabinet at all".)  The Cabinet, originally a committee of the wider Privy Council, is officially at least the primary political and policy-making organ of government.  It is at the heart of the business of politics which a constitutional monarch is supposed to float above.  Any monarch today who insisted on watching her or his ministers in action, as they discussed what to do about the issues of the day, would rightly be accused of interfering in politics and trying to subvert the constitution.

Queen Elizabeth II's visit to the Cabinet Office today, where she sat in on around half and hour of ministerial deliberations, was of course a purely formal occasion: she was there to receive the congratulations of her Privy Councillors on this summer's Diamond jubilee, along with a set of 60 placemats, and to hear an announcement that henceforth a stretch of Antarctic wilderness was to be named in her honour (which as a Christmas present, is rather less useful than an iPhone).  Nevertheless, it was a proper cabinet meeting, with discussions that included the important topics of Afghanistan and the economy.  It's unlikely that the discussions proceeded quite as they would have done had the monarch not been present.  While she was there only as "an observer", she sat in the prime minister's chair, thus underlining the constitutional anomaly under which government in this country operates.

It is the Queen's government, not the people's.  Too many government functions are still carried out by Royal Prerogative, with inadequate Parliamentary scrutiny.  In the main, however, talk of "the Queen's ministers" is a polite fiction, and understood to be such.  By inviting the queen along to a Cabinet meeting, David Cameron runs the risk of upsetting the balance.  It is constitutionally improper for the Queen to be associated with a party-political instrument of government in this way, even if (perhaps especially if) she is understood by all to be no more than a cipher.  This sets a bad precedent, even if the occasion itself is fairly anodyne.  At best, it looks like an attempt to provide a helpful photo-opportunity for a bunch of politicians in desperate need of some good headlines, by associating them in the public mind with a monarch who's much more popular than they are.  It may not be a monarch interfering in politics, but politicians interfering in the monarchy is the next worst thing.  To preserve balance, the Queen should also be present at a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet - but that would, surely, be preposterous.

Now that this constitutional Rubicon (to use Cameron's own metaphor) has been crossed, it is more likely to happen again at some time.  Perhaps next time it will be King Charles invited along on some celebratory pretext: could he be relied upon to sit politely and listen while others talk of great affairs?  As it is, today's event has brought out the perennial forelock-tugging instincts of the British press.  Timothy Stanley, for example:

How I would have dearly loved her to reach across the table, point at David Cameron and say, “You're fired!” But, alas, things have moved on since the days of Charles I, when the monarchy was the last line of defence against democracy.

There is, though, another interpretation.  The Cabinet is not what it once was. Its meetings are largely formal affairs these days: the real decision-making happens elsewhere, in small sub-committees and informal one-to-one meetings between the prime minister and other members of the Cabinet. It's increasingly for show, too big to be really effective - its ranks swelled, indeed, by inviting along more junior ministers (such as Baroness Warsi) for no better reason than to flatter their fragile egos.  The government is more collegiate than it was under Tony Blair, but if the Cabinet were genuinely effective it's unlikely that Cameron could have got through things like minimum unit pricing of alcohol, a policy which appears to be a personal obsession unpopular with most of his colleagues.  It's been said that inviting the Queen to attend a Cabinet meeting is a compliment to her unimpeachable impartiality: she is so far above the political fray that it's "safe" to have her along to Downing Street without any fear of contaminating the quasi-republican process of democratic government.  But perhaps the Cabinet itself that is now almost as decorative a part of the constitution as the monarch herself.

Queen Elizabeth Land sounds like a slightly tacky theme park where one can watch re-enactments of Francis Drake playing bowls or be served ale by wenches in mob-caps.  It's not negligible, being about 170,000 square miles, and the gesture provides a nice reminder that even in these reduced days the British crown retains technical sovereignty over a number of desolate penguin colonies.  But it scarcely compares with Virginia, named after the first Queen Liz, let alone all the mountains, cities, lakes, waterfalls, islands, provinces and states named after Victoria.  She even has a crater on the surface of Mars.  In retrospect, Victoria was a bit greedy when it came to having bits of the globe named after her, not leaving enough to her heirs and successors.  And yes, she does have her own bit of Antarctica.  It's called Victoria Land.

© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.

Here's a picture of an Aztec calendar. 


To be more specific, it's the Stone of the Sun, which once stood in the heart of Tenochtitlan, the splendid Aztec capital that later became Mexico City. So precious was it that the Aztecs buried it during the siege of the city in 1521 to preserve it from the Spanish invaders.  By the time it was dug up again, during repairs to Mexico City's cathedral in 1790, the Christian rulers were sufficiently enlightened to see it for the important cultural artefact that it was.   To call it a calendar is perhaps misleading, though it does have calendrical markings.  It has been variously interpreted as a representation of the five ages through which Aztec mythology held that the world had passed, as a mappa mundi, as a political statement declaring and legitimising Aztec rule over the four corners of the world, and as a ceremonial basin or ritual altar for use during human sacrifices.  Perhaps it was all of those things.

You probably recognise the picture, because it has been endlessly reproduced these past weeks to illustrate stories about the "Mayan apocalypse".  As you will have heard by now, Friday probably marks a significant date in the Mayan calendar, the ending of the 13th Baktun, or cycle, of that calendar's Long Count.  A much-publicised New Age theory holds that the date will be marked by world-changing or apocalyptic events, though no-one seems quite sure what they will be.  As has also been widely publicised recently (so I don't need to go into it all again) the Maya, whose civilisation was based around the Yucatán peninsula and was at its height roughly during the period of the European Dark Ages, did not in fact have a prophecy of doom connected with this date.  Or any future date, so far as can be established.  The "Mayan apocalypse" is a modern myth.

Not, of course, that the world would be any more likely to end on Friday if the ancient Maya had predicted it.

Most recent reports, at least those to be found in the mainstream media, have accurately noted the non-existence of the alleged Mayan prophecy of doom.  Unfortunately, they have usually reproduced the Aztec Sun Stone as an illustration.  If you type "Mayan calendar" into Google Images, almost all the images that come up are of the Aztec stone.  Whether this is the cause of the confusion or its effect is unclear.  Both, probably.  But the result is now that this is what most people imagine a Mayan calendar to look like, even though it is neither Mayan nor, quite possibly, even a calendar.

This is what a Mayan calendar actually looks like, or at least one version of it.


You'll see the difference straight away. Most obviously, instead of the scary-looking head with the lolling tongue - so evocative of some nameless apocalypse - there's a human figure weighed down with a burden (in fact, a Mayan glyph), more suggestive of the endless, grinding repetition of days which represents the reality of time.

The Mayans and the Aztecs could not have been more different.  They were as different as the ancient Greeks and the Vikings: different in language, in culture, in mythology, in architecture, in attitude, in agricultural techniques, in politics, in artistic expression, in geographical location.  For a start, the Mayans were much older.  Early Mayan settlements cluster around what is now Soconusco in South-West Mexico, on the central American isthmus and date from as long ago as 1800 BC.  Classic Mayan civilisation, associated with spectacular ruined cities in the Yucatán, collapsed around 1000AD although the Maya themselves lived on and are still around today (as are the Nahuatl-speaking descendants of the Aztecs).  The Aztecs, meanwhile, started out as barbarian invaders from the North, who arrived in central Mexico in about the 12th century.  It wasn't until the 15th that they became the dominant power in the region: their empire was still expanding when Cortes arrived in 1519. 

Like many other barbarian invaders (including the Vikings in Northern France, aka the Normans) the Aztecs adopted some of the civilisation of the more settled cultures they came to rule over.  But in their case, it was mainly that of the Toltecs, previously the dominant people in central America, as well as the artistically-inclined Mixtecs in the South West.  There was some contact between the Aztecs and the surviving Maya, but the Maya were never Aztec subjects and by the time of the Aztec empire the days of Mayan greatness were a distant memory, or legend. 

As for the calendar, it's true that some basic principles, such as a 52-year cycles of years, were shared by most Meso-American systems; but each civilisation had its own, which differed in details, nomenclature and underlying myths.  The Mayan version was especially elaborate, involving multiple interlocking cycles including the famous Long Count whose starting date was placed at August 11, 3114 BC - a time centuries before Mayan civilisation got going.  The present "baktun" ends this Friday (or perhaps Sunday), but the Long Count itself carries on.  A far more significant date, experts say, will come on October 13, 4772, when a full cycle of twenty baktuns will be completed, though even that wasn't associated with any known apocalyptic event.  The Mayans didn't really think like that.  They seem to have enjoyed calculating dates far in the future or the past purely for the mathematical pleasure it afforded.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, did have a belief in world ages punctuated by apocalyptic events. According to Aztec myth there had been four previous ages, or "Suns", the ending of each of which was attended by great destruction and renewal.  The present age was destined similarly to end.   But this cataclysm wasn't tied to any particular date - and, in any case, the Aztecs' calendar lacked the mathematical complexity of the Mayan one.  Rather, it was seen as perennially threatening, to be warded off with daily offerings of human hearts to the gods.  Like the Romans, the Aztecs paid great attention to regularly recurring dates of good and bad omen throughout the year and the 52 year cycle.  The year One Reed was especially to be dreaded: by coincidence, it was in such a year that Cortes turned up.  But even that wasn't, exactly, a prophecy - though it is often popularly identifies as such.

Put it this way.  The Norse myths told of the day of Ragnarok, when the gods of Asgard would go into battle with the giants and Valhalla would be consumed.  The Christian calendar takes as its hinge point the supposed date for the birth of Christ.  Putting the two together and making five, a confused Mayan observer might have deduced that Ragnarok was bound to take place on 31st December 1999.  Especially if it represented a publishing opportunity.

© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.

Nick Clegg won the Liberal Democrat leadership by fighting a favourite’s campaign and saying as little about policy as possible. But before that he gained himself the reputation of being something of a thinker and a libertarian. I can recall him, while still an MEP, speaking at a Liberator fringe meeting and calling for “crunchy Liberalism”.

Five years on from that leadership campaign, Nick gave a speech to the Royal Commonwealth Society. And, to be honest, there was not much that was crunchy about it.

The passage that received most publicity was this:

It is at times like these that Britain needs a party rooted in the centre ground, which anchors the country there. 

The Liberal Democrats are that party. We’re not centre ground tourists. The centre ground is our home. 

While the tribalists in other parties desert the centre ground under pressure, the Liberal Democrats have done the reverse. Under pressure, we’ve moved towards the centre.

This is very much where I came in. Back in 1977, when the Liberal Party was finishing behind the National Front, our only remaining purchase on the public’s attention was the idea that we were a moderate party, a party of the centre.

It is far better to be seen as centrist than extreme, but if your only appeal is that you are in the centre the danger is that you allow your opponents to define your policy, because the centre can shift about.

When our major rivals were led by Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot, it was practically impossible for the Alliance to avoid being the centre party. But it is possible that the next election will see Labour fighting a populist campaign that scapegoats social security claimants, asylum seekers and the like.

Will we then try to find some centre ground on the cigarette-paper thin difference between Labour and the Tories? I hope not: I hope we will fight on values like liberty, justice and equality – all of which have are richer and more motivating than an appeal to centrism.

The spirit of 1977 was also recalled in the passage where Nick channeled David Steel and gently told us off:

The greatest strength of our party is our idealism. But in our strength lies our weakness – because sometimes idealism can turn into dogma, or at least an unwillingness to engage fully with the day-to-day experiences and perspectives of the British people we seek to serve. 

A party of government knows that workable solutions need to be grounded in values – but also that they must respond to the hopes and fears of reasonable people. 

This is the lesson we’ve learnt in government. The challenges of governing at a difficult time have given us a harder edge and a more practical outlook.

I am a great fan of pragmatism, but it seems to me Nick is misunderstanding his own party here.

As far as there is dogma in the Liberal Democrats it comes from our libertarian or economic wing – at least that is my impression from Twitter and the blogs. Meanwhile, the more social liberal critics – and they seem to be who Nick has in mind – are disgruntled because, under his leadership, we have lost so much of our local government base in the North of England. They are every bit as keen on being in power as Nick is.

It is true there were no easy alternatives open to Nick and the party after the last election, but it as well for him to understand the reason for his members' current discontent.

Finally, there is nothing at all crunchy about talking of benefit claimants as though there were children:

For us, that relationship is clear: it is the government's responsibility to ensure every person has the opportunity to get on, but every person must take personal responsibility for using those opportunities by working hard. 

We cannot absolve people of their responsibility for improving their own lives, because to do so would be to turn them into dependants – and so deny their agency and compromise their dignity. You can’t build a stronger economy with people lost to dependency … 

Parents know what I mean. You look at your children and yearn with hope for their future. You do whatever you can to give them every advantage. You worry about the obstacles they will face, and you plan to help them overcome them all. 

But equally, parents know that kids need to learn to look after themselves. Slowly but surely, we guide them into independence and adulthood. Because we know that to be happy, they will need the means and capacity to run their own lives – and pass their love and skills on to the grandchildren they might give you one day.

Nick may well see welfare dependency as a problem, but he needs to find better language than this in which to talk about.

Reader reviews: we get them. And, mostly, we ignore them; because, like all other forms of fiction, 90% of book reviews are junk. And reviews by regular readers, as opposed to professional critics, are like the publishers' proverbial slushpile: a seething, shouting mass of logorrhea in which a few gems may be submerged, if you can bear to hold your nose for long enough to find them.

But for an author to make a habit of ignoring feedback is pretty much the first step on a slippery slope down into a mire of self-indulgent solipsistic craziness.

So how should you approach reader reviews in order to separate the ones you should sit up and listen to from the background noise?

My take on the subject is that if you're an author, you can get some useful clues to the relevance of your reviews by psychoanalyzing the reviewers.

We live in the age of social media; corporate entities like Goodreads or Amazon use our natural inclination to communicate to generate free reviews and raise a buzz around the content they're trying to sell. We've come a long way since 1999's Cluetrain Manifesto and the internet marketers have worked out that the best marketing tool out there is word of mouth recommendations. And because individual works of fiction are about the ultimate micro-targeted boutique product, word of mouth is about the only marketing tool that works reliably. So: reader reviews. How should we interpret them?

A sad fact, worth repeating, is that it is impossible to write a work of fiction that everybody will read and understand in the same way. Readers (authors included) all approach a text with their own baggage, and what may be unremarkable or even exciting to one reader may be triggery or otherwise unpleasant to another. Whatever you write, and however well you do so, 20% of your readers will hate it—often for reasons that have nothing to do with the text and everything to do with the babble of experiences and memories that reading the text causes to rise to the surface of their mind. (Read this 2006 blog entry on one-star reviews of famous works and weep—tears of laughter, I hope, rather than despair at one's fellow primates.)

Stories which are intended to induce cognitive dissonance—by setting up a sympathetic protagonist then exposing them as a murderer, rapist, and war criminal, for example ("Glasshouse") often trigger aversive reactions from readers who start out expecting a cosy escapist yarn that stays firmly within their comfort zone. (Ditto the Merchant Princes series, which starts out looking like a classic portal fantasy but ends very uncomfortably, when cosy portal fantasy collides with realpolitik.)

Another point, also worth repeating, is that many readers are incapable of separating their own emotional response to a text from the actual content of the text. "I do not like this" is isomorphic in their mind with "this is a bad book".

So: if your work is anything but a literalistic recapitulation of a traditional narrative theme, with sympathetic characters, clearly depicted antagonists, and a cosy sense of closure at the end that reinforces traditional cultural values ("and the prince married the princess and they all lived happily ever after") you can expect a fairy ring of one-star reader reviews to circle your work on Amazon. And the more challenging the novel, the more readers will feel the need to scream I HATED THIS! I DON'T UNDERSTAND IT AND IT MAKES ME FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE! THIS IS A BAD BOOK!

This is not necessary a bad thing.

(Personally, I think it's a good thing.)

Similarly: if you write and publish novels on a regular basis, you will acquire a core of fans, and they will do their five star cheerleader thing in the Amazon fora and reviews every time you emit a new fart, whether fragrant or otherwise. You should strive to ignore these reviews. No, seriously. While it's probably okay to indulge yourself and roll around in them if you're feeling down, you should not take them seriously. Just as 20% of the audience will hate any performance, another 20% will love it to pieces—often for reasons that have more to do with the contents of their own headmeat than the quality of your writing. (There's no accounting for taste.)

The readers you need to pay attention to are the 60% who fall in between these spectral extremes. And, in particular, those readers who can separate their own emotional reaction to the text from the text itself. They may not be experienced literary critics but they can tell you much about how the regular readers have received your work. And the telling clue is that their comments say things like "I had a bad reaction to this book", rather than "this book is bad", or "I didn't understand why [the protagonist did something]" rather than "the protagonist is unbelievable".

The 20/60/20 spread is also worth paying attention to. I pulled those figures out of my arse, quite deliberately: they actually vary quite a bit from book to book—in fact, Amazon provides a neat histogram for every item, in the shape of that bar graph ranking feedback from one star to five stars.

In an ideal world, we'd look at our reader reviews and see a single fat five-star bar with nothing below it. Failing that, a bathtub curve (lots of one star and five star reviews, fewer two and four, very few three) would be satisfying: it means people react strongly to the book. The worst is an inverse-bathtub curve: lots of three stars, some two and four, no fives or ones. It means readers didn't feel strongly about the book; the typical reaction was "meh". I might be sticking my neck out here, but I know no novelists who set out to write a book to which the typical reader response will be "meh".

So. Beware the curve with a fat belly. Dread the analytical reader who can distance themselves from their subjectivity and who still gives the book three stars. Ignore the five-star fans and the one-star butt-hurt trolls. This is the world we live in, and until we learn to clone John Clute and iterate him in parallel over every genre book that is published, this may be all the help we can get.

Here, from Senator Dianne Feinstein’s website, is a fairly detailed description of an assault-weapons bill that has been under development for more than a year. Feinstein (D-California) plans to introduce the bill on the first day of the new Congress — January 3, 2013. I am confident about how Illinois’s senators will vote: Dick Durbin (D) and Mark Kirk (R) have received F ratings from the National Rifle Association. I will be calling them anyway to register my support for Feinstein’s bill. My representative in the new Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), has an A from the NRA. But I will be calling him too to express my support for the bill.
You’re reading a post from Michael Leddy’s blog Orange Crate Art. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

In ‘Why Wealth can’t be Taxed’ it was alleged that a mansion tax is illiberal. However, as a liberal, I am concerned for the state of the property market in the UK. The average age of the first time buyer is now 35.

Housing is a policy that has been forgotten, with health and education becoming the areas of priority. However as liberals, we can address the state of housing through taxation, for I would say that ‘land is theft’. There is too much concentration of power in the hands of the few. Land Value Taxation is a key to addressing this.

The Liberal Democrats ALTER (Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform) state that Land Value Tax:

“… [s]hould replace some existing taxes. It should not add to the overall tax burden, its purpose is to shift tax away from income taxes.”

Our 2010 General Election manifesto stated that our pre-election pledge to increase the income tax personal allowance threshold to £10,000 should be paid for via, among other things, a Mansion Tax. Now, I accept and am proud that the Liberal Democrats are the party of fairness, but my worry is this: is an increase in the income tax threshold enough to show that we really are the party of fair tax as we approach the 2015 General Election? Our tax policy not only needs to have a long-term goal, we also need a short-term strategic plan. If we are to be the party of fair tax, I suggest that we:

• offer a more radical alternative to the accepted tax arrangements in this country;
• offer an alternative that is acceptable to centre-left leaning voters (a lot of whom we have lost since 2010); and
• to be practical – by offering a Land Value Tax, we have a Mansion Tax to fall back on.

I accept that we have made some progress with, for example, a rise in Stamp Duty. Stephen Williams MP, chairman of the Liberal Democrat backbench committee for Treasury matters, has also been calling for the implementation of a full Mansion Tax. Yet during the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, George Osborne said he “won’t introduce a new tax on property.” The stumbling block has not been our ability to voice our concerns over the issue (there is even a campaign, which you can join here) but of our lack of overall vision for how our tax policy joins up. If we had started negotiations with what we really wanted, then we would always have a poker hand left to play.

A Land Value Tax offers our party a more coherent approach to our taxation policy, as well as an area where we can join with the Labour Party. Those in the Labour Party are already contemplating the tax and it could very well be a key plank of any Coalition talks with the centre-left. Of course, the Labour Party had 13 years to implement such a reform so we must be cautious. Nevertheless, I welcome this opportunity. In a time of austerity and when our campaigners will be met with questions of ‘what have we done for the poor?’, a Land Value Tax would be a credible answer, for it offers both tax fairness and social justice.

But we must go even further than proposals for a Mansion Tax in any future coalition negotiations and commit ourselves to a Land Value Tax.

* Alex Smethurst is a Parliamentary Assistant and Treasurer of City of Bristol Liberal Democrats (written in a personal capacity).

For a great many people, it is simply not enough to mourn the losses in the Newtown massacre. They want to think about preventative measures, to figure out how to stop these events from happening in the future. I too am interested in prevention but I want to avoid a lot of the unseemly ideological reactions to the killing, in particular the instant reaction that the right way to solve the problem is through legislation.

So here’s my contribution. Like most of my co-bloggers, I’m a political philosopher and policy dabbler so I thought I’d share my thoughts on how to learn from tragedies like the Newtown massacre so as to effectively stop such events from happening in the future. I think these nine steps, if followed, would help us to make real progress.

Step One: Calm Down.

The Newtown massacre is a nightmare. You’re right to be upset about it. But don’t let your grief or fury determine your thinking. Making decisions based on raw emotion is often a bad idea and it is an even worse idea when it comes to politics. Politics makes us stupid most of the time. Also remember one of the great lessons of 9-11: making policy based on emotional rage and ignorance can be a complete disaster. The American response to 9-11 was horrific, making us no safer, wasting trillions of dollars and losing hundreds of thousands of lives.

Step Two: Get the Facts. 

We don’t know a lot about what led to Adam Lanza’s decision to kill his mother, several adult educators and twenty little children. We don’t know much about his family life or about his relationship with his mother. We don’t know a lot about him at all, actually. So before determining what to do, we need to get the facts about Lanza’s motivations, insofar as we can.

Second, we need to get the facts about the frequency of such mass shootings, and the kinds of events, circumstances, character traits, family history, firearm access that correlate with these mass killings. Some bloggers have started to put the facts together, but there’s still a lot to know. If you want to learn from this tragedy, wait until the facts come in.

Step Three: Avoid Bias.

Avoid bias if you can, two in particular: availability and ideological bias.

The availability heuristic is a cognitive mechanism people use to make probabilistic judgments based largely on cases that come to mind. For many ordinary decisions, the availability heuristic works well. But it’s bad for making policy because policy applies to millions of people and will affect millions of events. We should not make policy decisions based on a single case. So when learning from this tragedy, try to set the availability heuristic aside and determine the frequency of this event in comparison to the frequency of other terrible events.

Ideological bias occurs when you let predetermined views about your values, empirical judgments and the like get in the way of properly assessing evidence. Unlike many, I don’t think holding an ideology is morally problematic. But be careful that your ideology doesn’t make you insensitive to good reasoning. This is really very hard.

Step Four: Enumerate Causes. 

The next step is to enumerate the potential causes for the tragedy in question. Undoubtedly one necessary condition for the Newtown massacre was that Adam Lanza had access to powerful weapons. But there are a great many other necessary conditions, among them some form of (so far undetermined) mental illness. I imagine family conflict was also a necessary condition, as early reports indicate that he did not handle his parents’ divorce well. I’d also bet that his moral views and desensitization to violence via computer or video games were (mild) necessary conditions as well. I also suspect some neurochemical imbalance was at work, perhaps via a change of medication or a cessation.

But what do I know? I don’t have all the facts. So remember, completing step four requires a successful completion of step two.

Step Five: Consider the Evidence for Blocking the Causes. 

Suppose we decide that the salient necessary condition for Lanza’s actions was his access to handguns. If so, we need to review the evidence on the correlation between legal firearm access and mass killings, or at least whether the availability of handguns makes mass killings more likely in a statistically significant way.

In completing step five, it is critical not to confuse correlation and causation. Even if more available guns correlates with more mass killing, we cannot easily infer that the former caused the latter. Perhaps both are caused by a more general “culture of violence” that would have led Lanza to kill anyway.

Step Six: Ask Whether Coercion Is Required.

One thing that progressives and conservatives can learn from classical liberals is the plain truth that coercion sucks, both morally and economically. In many cases the use of legal coercion is ineffective and usually requires pushing people around. If we can avoid using coercion to solve an important problem, we probably should. So if we can reduce the likelihood of future shootings via cultural and moral change, then we should prefer these options to the use of coercion.

Step Seven: Outline and Rank Proposals (Include Opportunity Costs).

At some point, we will need a list of proposals for solving the problem. We will then need to generate a ranking and determine which policy is most worth the effort. Some proposals will require changes in customs and moral conventions, while others will involve changing laws or policies at various levels of government.

In determining your ranking, please consider opportunity costs. Legislation usually has significant costs, some of which are hard to identify and anticipate. On the other hand, moral change is much slower and harder to bring about.

Step Eight: Discuss With Others. Be Civil.

You’re not that smart, particularly when it comes to making policy. So make sure to share your thinking with others you respect to check for errors. If you disagree with others, make sure to be civil. The point of discussion is not to “win” the argument but rather to figure out whether your reasoning is sound.

Step Nine: Advocate.

If you’ve followed steps one through eight, you have learned from a tragedy and have a high degree of justification for the beliefs formed in the process. So you’re ready to advocate for your preferred norm change.

I know most people don’t have time to complete steps one through eight. In fact, most people don’t even know how to complete them. So in most cases, people will have to rely extensively on testimony from trusted sources to determine which norm alteration to endorse. If you do, you should be especially sure that your sources are trustworthy and smart. Make sure they’re providing you with good information and that you aren’t agreeing with them merely due to ideological bias.

Conclusion: Learning from Tragedy is Hard.

Learning from a tragedy is pretty difficult. There are many potential pitfalls. But if you really care about the children who died, you’ll try to avoid ideology, ignorance and incivility in figuring out how to respond. When it comes to a policy response to Newtown, I’m not going to make up my mind for a while. Maybe you shouldn’t either.

You’ll remember that I recently returned from a trip to Sweden. While I was there, by a curious coincidence, I happened to read a Swedish study from the Public Library of Science: “Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey,” by Hall, Johansson, and Strandberg.

Their results are, shall we say, provocative.

Apparently, illegal immigration is a hot-button issue in Sweden. Hall et al decided to push those buttons during a series of person-on-the-street interviews. You know the type: someone hands you a questionnaire, asks you to rate a series of statements along a 9-point scale where 1 means completely disagree, 9 means completely agree, and 5 means couldn’t give a shit. There were subtleties — some questions were phrased in terms of general principles, others in terms of specific examples — but basically the survey came down to things like It is morally deplorable to harbor illegal immigrants (agree or no?)

Here’s the tricky bit: after a respondent had checked off the numbered boxes, the researchers surreptitiously swapped out that part of the form with a lookalike that reversed the questions (so that morally deplorable became morally honorable, for example). People who hated the harboring of illegals were now on record as loving it, and vice-versa. The questionnaire was then returned to the hapless subject, who was asked to write a brief argument supporting their position.

Fully a third of those who’d registered the most extreme positions — 1 or 9 on the scale — didn’t even notice that their opinions had just magically changed 180°. Not only that, but they went on to construct arguments supporting the exact opposite of what they’d just claimed to strongly believe, effectively enough to convince a blind panel of judges as to their sincerity. And that was only the extremists; if you included those with more moderate leanings a full 69% of the respondents whole-heartedly accepted the turnabout without missing a beat¹.

Really? It’s that easy?

I could go to an Operation Rescue meeting in the USA, hand out trick questionnaires to a roomful of rabid anti-abortion activists— and a third of them would spin on that dime and claim to be pro-choice, that they’d always been pro-choice?

Really?

Sheer gut-level incredulity makes you want to be really skeptical of these results. Even I don’t want to believe that people can be that stupid. So we could start by criticizing the sample size, a  modest 160. Or we could talk about cultural constraints: the study was limited to Sweden, and the Swedes are (in my limited experience) far less prone to the kind of religion-fueled batshit insanity that ignites so many hot-button issues in the US. One can accept that these results apply to one group while still doubting that they’d generalize to a population of delusional fanatics. (Or even among those who are just more actively engaged. Respondents who described themselves as “politically active” were especially likely to detect the reversal— to be “rejecters” instead of “accepters”, in the parlance of the study.)

But you know, N=160 is nothing to sneeze at; if the size of Hall et al‘s sample had been wanting, well, that’s why we have statistics, and according to the stats these findings are significant. And the researchers did choose a politically-contentious issue to survey, so those filling out the form were likely to both be familiar with the issue and to have firmly-established opinions about it. Hall et al‘s’ measure of “acceptance” for a reversed result was very forgiving, too; respondents were encouraged to express doubts or reservations (So, nothing about this study felt kind of odd to you? Nothing at all?), right up to being explicitly shown how they’d been tricked. Even then, if they claimed to remember feeling even the teensiest bit doubtful during the survey, they were let off the hook and reclassified as “rejectors”.

Finally, while political activism may have been correlated with detecting the reversal, simple extremism was not: absolutist 1 and 9 respondents were no less likely to be fooled than the more moderate fours and sixes. You might infer from this that while informed opinion is relatively hard to shake, people whose opinions are both extreme and ignorant are especially easy to reprogram — and that demographic is huge enough to affect the outcome of pretty much any election.

Let’s put aside, for the moment, the fact that this runs counter to everything I’ve ever experienced when dealing with ignorant extremists in North America. Let’s play devil’s advocate, and ask:  why shouldn’t these results be valid? They’re utterly consistent with the haphazard way our brains parse reality. Distracted for a moment, we don’t notice that the person we were just talking to has been replaced by someone else. Watching a circle of people throwing balls back and forth, we don’t notice a guy in a gorilla suit waving at us from the center of our visual field. Buildings pop into and out of existence during any number of perceptual experiments; most of the time, we just don’t see it happen. Why would the perception of our inner thoughts be any more reliable than that of the physical world outside our eyeballs?

Hall et al worry about the implications. They fear that the flimsiness of so-called “strong beliefs” might compromise the very idea of Public Opinion, that without taking such effects into account the whole polling-industrial complex might be founded on shifting sand. My own fears are more proximal. I’m not worried about whether people could correct for these effects; I’m worried about people using them. What state or corporation could resist the urge to take such an easy shortcut? Instead of trying to sell the public on your product, just make them believe they’re already sold on it. Instead of campaigning to win over the hearts and minds of the electorate, why not just commission a quick phone survey to make a good chunk of them realize they’ve already been won?

Scary doesn’t begin to cover the proposition.

I mean, I don’t know what I’d do if someone tried to subvert my deep and abiding love for Jesus Christ, my personal Lord and Savior.

By the time of this records' release in 1962, Louis Jordan had been a performing and recording musician for nearly 25 years, and unfortunately his popularity had waned. Jordan was incredibly successful during the late '40's/ early '50's where, thanks to his popularity, became known as the King Of The Jukebox.

On this track (recorded for Ray Charles newly established Tangerine label), Jordan showed that he was perfectly capable of keeping up with then-contemporary r&b by delivering this MASTERPIECE. Another one of those "blink and you'll miss it" tracks (it clocks in at 1:48), Jordan packs a whole lot of musical sophistication, excellent vocals (both from himself and the backing female singers, probably the Raelettes), and a simply fabulous song, penned by Titus Turner.

from 1962...

LOUIS JORDAN - WORKIN' MAN

I intended the previous mental health article on this website to be my last but, having been amazed by the people sharing personal and moving experiences in the comments section, I felt compelled to add something more.

First, I wish to acknowledge that, while I have often felt that my world is crashing down around me during the last few months, my own problems pale into insignificance compared to those which have been shared on this website. It takes a remarkable amount of bravery to share these in a public forum – bravery which I doubt I would be capable of.

During my first session of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) yesterday, the therapist mentioned, on a number of occasions, how awareness of mental health and challenging the stigma attached to it has rarely been at a greater level.

This is signified by the fact that Nick Clegg has recently called for mental health patients to be given a greater say in how their illness is treated – something which is of huge importance, given how you can sometimes feel that your GP is playing it ‘by the book’ and is not really engaging in what you are telling them or the pain you are going through.

I was very comforted by the care and attention to detail which was shown by the NHS staff during my CBT session, and by the willingness of others to share their own traumatic experiences with complete strangers. It is clear that people are willing to talk about this and defy the stigma. This demonstrates why Lib Dem members and activists should be telling people about the achievements of Norman Lamb and Nick Clegg and why improving mental health provision is one of the achievements in government which the party should be most proud of.

However, this is not something people will know about unless they are told, told and told again. Given that the economic conditions are likely to remain gloomy for some time and that many people will continue to struggle to find work – a significant cause of mental illness – it is clear that this can be a leading and positive issue for Lib Dems to campaign on going into next May’s County Council elections and the 2015 general election.

I do not know in what state my own health will be in by 2015 and I am still very fearful about the future, but I can only hope that a part,y which is fundamentally a campaigning party, will make sure as many people as possible will know about and understand the difference Lib Dems in government are making to their lives and to the lives of the people they care about.

Remember everyone has been affected, or knows someone who has been affected, by the ‘black wings’ of depression, anxiety and other mental health problems. It is a sad fact that mental health has an enormous potential to tear the lives of good honest people apart – the kinds of people that the Lib Dems can and are standing up for.

* Tim Purkiss is a party member from Somerset and blogs at Nation Discussion

Lungbarrow at least attempted to feed directly into the TV Movie. It didn’t last. There’s about three dozen stories, mostly from Big Finish (whether audio or their Short Trips series), that feature an “older” version of the Seventh Doctor. Arguably the first one of these actually comes just three months after Lungbarrow in the form of Terrance Dicks’s The Eight Doctors, but claiming that would involve trying to reconcile The Eight Doctors with the Virgin line, or, for that matter, with anything at all. But I’m two weeks ahead of myself.

A Death in the Family, ironically, only minimally features the post-Lungbarrow Doctor, focusing primarily on what is normally taken as a pre-Virgin Doctor situated between Survival and Timewyrm: Genesys. (Though even that’s difficult to square away, as we’ll see.) The post-Lungbarrow Doctor appears, and is indeed absolutely central to the story, but as a peripheral character lurking in the background. But despite the relative briefness of his appearance he’s central to affairs. A Death in the Family is at its heart a story in the vein of Battlefield in which the infamously manipulative Seventh Doctor falls into the schemes of the one person who can out-manipulate him: his own future self.

But where Battlefield played Merlin as something that put the Doctor off his game, A Death in the Family has the two Doctors in relative lockstep. Indeed, they are sufficiently compatible in their goals that it borders on a plot hole: the older Doctor’s scheme relies on the younger Doctor making specific decisions requiring knowledge of the overall plan, but on the other hand the younger Doctor is clearly unaware of the older Doctor’s plans. This can be explained as the Doctor faking surprise at various moments, but it’s not an entirely satisfying explanation.

But then again, there’s a fundamental difference between McCoy’s Doctor falling into the schemes of some future incarnation and him falling into the schemes of McCoy’s Doctor only down the line. In this regard it’s telling that A Death in the Family straddles the Virgin era as it does. Because much of the story’s theme is right out of the Virgin playbook: an extended meditation on the nature of the Doctor’s manipulations. And it’s telling, then, that there are no particular differences highlighted between the two Doctors. Their manipulations are wholly compatible, such that the younger Doctor can smoothly slot in and finish a plan he hasn’t actually come up with yet.

But this poses a bit of a tension with the Virgin era, which does ultimately posit an arc for the Doctor’s character from beginning to end. This arc is actually for the most part opposite what people claim for the Virgin era, as we’ve noted: the Doctor’s vastly manipulative schemes increasingly fade to the background as more and more writers favor actually chucking the Doctor into unfamiliar situations. Notably, Paul Cornell, who took the manipulative Doctor as far as it could go with the idea of the Doctor leaving notes to himself from the future, actually stopped doing books where the Doctor has a plan going in after Love and War. No Future hinged on the fact that it was actually Ace who was running an elaborate manipulation, and Human Nature on the fact that there was no plan in place at all. By The Room With No Doors and Lungbarrow the Doctor has mellowed out considerably and seems altogether unlikely to launch into any vast cosmic manipulations.

Actually, all of this is just about salvageable. The easiest way to explain the plot is that the younger Doctor comes up with the scheme after discovering Nobody No-One, about whom more in a moment, and then waits until his older self to execute it. (This still requires a bit of causality paradox, but only a smidge.) In this light the plot is actually the opposite of what we’ve been describing - the younger and still ruthless Doctor comes up with a scheme that obliges his older and more mellow self to carry out one last ruthless manipulation. But while this might tie away the continuity issues it does nothing for the underlying tonal issues. The focus of the story is firmly on the younger Doctor, with the older Doctor playing the role of the mysterious mentor who steps in and gives cryptic clues. He gets some lines that gesture at a measure of regret about how he’s affected his companions’ lives, but if the story is about him being dragged back into manipulativeness for one last run then the focus is on the wrong part of things.

No, A Death in the Family seems to be working off the assumption of considerable continuity over the Seventh Doctor’s life such that the older version is perhaps a bit wiser and more weary, but still fundamentally unchanged. Which is to say, it seems to tacitly rely on the whole Virgin era never happening. Which, actually, is probably the easiest explanation. However bad the problems in squaring away the two Doctors with the Virgin line might be, squaring away Ace is just ridiculous. The story has a plotline in which Ace spends several months dating a man named Henry Noone, a relationship that grows serious enough that Henry eventually proposes to her. Ace ultimately abandons Henry, after taking advantage of him, but it’s clear that there was genuine affection for him, and though it’s never suggested that she was considering accepting his proposal, the strong implication is that she does love him.

The problem is that it’s very difficult to square this away with Love and War. The relationship between Ace and Henry renders her relationship with Jan there almost completely unbelievable. It certainly makes her reaction to the Doctor in Nightshade unworkable. Ace speaks of the way in which she’s grown up in the TARDIS, referring to herself as having been a child when she arrived. And this is important, since if Henry is proposing to the teenaged Ace from before the New Adventures the entire thing is phenomenally creepy. If nothing else, the New Adventures make it explicit that Jan was her second sexual experience, and the idea that a character like Ace would live chastely with someone in a relationship that led to him proposing to her just doesn’t wash. She’s not the wait-until-marriage type.

At the heart of this is the fact that Sophie Aldred had been performing Ace for Big Finish for a decade at this point, and A Death in the Family was her twenty-third performance in the role. The idea that Big Finish was going to leave the character eternally undeveloped so as to feed into Love and War properly is ludicrous. Slotting Big Finish’s work into the past of the series is always difficult, though. At least the McCoy material just mucks up the Virgin era - it’s difficult to figure out how The Caves of Androzani can possibly follow the fifteen Fifth Doctor/Peri audios that exist, little yet how the simpering wreck Peri is in the Colin Baker era can.

A Death in the Family is interesting, however, because this long-term planning is absolutely essential to it. It’s a fantastic story, but much of its heft and weight comes from the fact that it pays off years of story lines within Big Finish. Its emotional impact basically assumes you’re familiar not only with the background of the Doctor and Ace but of Hex, Big Finish’s original companion for the Seventh Doctor, the history of the Forge (which goes back to August of 2001), the Sixth Doctor’s companion Evelyn Smythe, and the relationship among all of these things. And knowing who Nobody No One is would probably help too. A Death in the Family is a season finale in the mould established by the new series. Indeed, plot-wise it’s almost identical to The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, which it predates by two months.

The influence of the New Series is all over this, really. In the interviews at the end of the second disc the writer even talks about things being “timey wimey” in the audio. Given this it’s not a surprise that they land at the same structure as Steven Moffat’s first season finale. Though honestly, the basic structure is the same as every other season finale. Since 2005 the model for a Doctor Who season finale has been a narrative collapse. In this regard A Death in the Family borders on the obvious. Nobody No One is a clever conceit, but he’s pretty much designed for season finales. A character who is explicitly able to control the narrative and who exists in language, and who is furthermore a twisted inversion of the Doctor is interesting precisely because he generates narrative collapses reliably. It works, one is left with a satisfying appreciation of the basic cleverness of Steven Hall, the dramatic payoffs all pay off, and the whole thing holds together.

There are some weak spots - there’s nothing like enough time to build up the Ace/Henry relationship to the point where her abandoning him has any impact, especially because we know it’s doomed from the start. Most of Hex’s coming to terms with what happened to his mother happens “off camera.” The wealth of elements mean that Evelyn doesn’t have as much to do in this story as she probably should. She has an entire storyline about an ancient civilization (one that’s more or less just The Face of Evil/Full Circle/The Doctor’s Daughter done again) that takes place entirely in the background, making her feel marginal within a story where her death is the price paid for averting the narrative collapse. But for the most part it’s a perfectly serviceable season finale, if a bit by-the-numbers.

This reflects, to a large extent, the way in which Big Finish has come to work these days. The move to annual trilogies featuring the various Doctors and to distinct story arcs makes them behave more like the television series, only with older Doctors. This is part of what rewriting time means, especially in the conditions that Big Finish operates in. For much of their existence they’ve only had four Doctors to work with. One doesn’t really have a characteristic tone beyond what Big Finish invented for him, and two have very similar tones having been overseen by the same producer/script editor team. And, on top of that, the Davison and Baker eras were deeply flawed in ways that don’t necessarily make nostalgic reiterations the soundest proposition. The McCoy era was the only one it would have ever made sense for Big Finish to attempt nostalgic imitation of, and its eight-year run and extensive exploration by Virgin made that undesirable in its own way.

So Big Finish largely developed its own tone, and, when the new series came along, adapted that tone to the storytelling techniques it introduced. Which it had to - the idea of Big Finish slavishly mining the nostalgia market for over a decade straight is preposterous. Every Doctor who has done Big Finish audios save for Tom Baker has done more audios than they had stories during their tenure. The Big Finish versions of the characters are fully their own thing.

Which is to say that the business of trying to reconcile A Death in the Family with the Virgin line is silly. Trying to reconcile the Big Finish audios with anything other than themselves is silly. They feature “consensus” versions of their respective Doctors, cobbled together out of memories and storytelling necessities. Colin Baker is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of this, finally being handed a Doctor that actually, you know, works as a character, but all of them are modified. So instead of having the arc of development that he had from Time and the Rani through to Lungbarrow McCoy’s Doctor is an amalgamation. His manipulative tendencies are increased in accordance with Virgin’s perspective on the character (if not in accordance with what they actually did), the focus of the ethical debate drifts to modern tastes (the “how it affects the companions” approach being pure Russell T Davies), and the fact that there’s an old and a young version of the character (without, as there is with Tom Baker, a continual production of stories in between) gets incorporated as one particular flavor.

In this regard the search for a “return” to the Virgin era is as silly as that of a return to the Hinchcliffe era or the Lloyd era. There are, for any popular era, a number of homages and nostalgia-fests. But there are very few neo-Hinchcliffe stories, no matter how much Mark Gatiss tries. When pure nostalgia stories do exist they tend to be fundamentally defensive, rehabilitating projects in the vein of Gareth Roberts’s Williams-era Missing Adventures. And so the mark of the Virgin era is not how many new Doctor/Benny stories have been produced since 1997. No, the mark of the Virgin era can be seen in A Death in the Family. The Doctor in this story is far grander in his schemes than anything we saw in the televised McCoy era. The image of the Doctor as an arch-manipulator comes from the Virgin era. It wasn’t their only idea, but it was the best-known one. And it changed the general conception of the Seventh Doctor. A Death in the Family doesn’t need to lead into Love and War. It already leads out of it.

I may not have updated this blog for the last two months; it may be true that nearly every update for the last two years has been plugging a book; there may be 20 or so updates I've promised in the past to put up, easily that many books I've read without reviewing, and any number of interesting thoughts I've been wanting to blog about before ending up simply not having the time... but never let

You, Dear Constant Reader, know just how eager I am to get marriage equality into the United Kingdom (yes, even in Northern Ireland). Am I, however, so eager to get it into law that I'm failing to see the wood for the trees?

I think it hit me this week just how different my views on marriage equality are to most of those who support it. When the Church in Wales, and then the Church of England, announced their "shock" at the Government's plans for a "quadruple lock" my first thought was not "What was the Government thinking?" but "What are the churches on about?"

I would argue that this had more to do with the fact that I'd read the Church of England and Church in Wales's submissions to the marriage equality consultation (and the Church of England's was pretty heavy-handed and quite clear it needed special treatment above and beyond other churches) and that this coloured my response.

Whilst others were aghast at what the Government had "done" (these are proposals folks, not even a bill!), I was a little put out by their own reaction.

Upon reflection, I could have been a little more understanding. The Church in Wales shouldn't have reacted in the way it did, given what it had said in its consultation, but the Archbishop of Cardiff does have a point. The Government should certainly reconsider if the Church in Wales truly doesn't mind only having a "triple lock".

The Church of England's situation is more complicated. Beyond a positive press release, we have yet to hear an official response from the church. Right now what we have instead is political powerplays by the liberal section of the church. I'd rather wait and see what the church actually says than rely on them (and I truly wish Yvette Cooper had had the good sense to do the same before allowing herself to be quoted as calling marriage equality a mess!).

Here is the problem: the Church of England remains divided (as was clearly seen during the women bishops debacle a few weeks ago). Marriage equality is another one of those issues that can be used as a battleground between the liberals and the traditionalists. What saddens me is that, whereas women bishops was more of an internal battle with limited affect upon non-members, this battle will have consequences for people who aren't members. It is already detrimentally dominating the debate on marriage equality.

And that is why I'm mad. I'm not really mad because they are attacking the Government, I'm mad because not only is this silliness a possible cause for delay or derailment of marriage equality but it is overshadowing far more important problems.

What the Government have released is, again upon reflection in the cold light of day, simply a renaming of civil partnerships. It solves the superficial issues regarding the semantic difference, it solves some of the problems for trans people and it resolves our concerns on international recognition. But if does not resolve the status of civil partnerships as it is not offering mixed-sex civil partnerships (which means that trans people in a civil partnership will be forced into a marriage if one of couple transitions), it does not resolve the outstanding pension problems and it does not make any move to reinstate the marriages people were forced to dissolve when they transitioned in the past.

Yes it'd be lovely if the Church of England was to start holding same-sex marriages but that is an issue for them to deal with internally. It is not something that should concern the rest of us. The Anglican vicars threatening to bless same-sex marriages need to think about the bigger picture (and perhaps reconsider their membership of the church!) rather than selfishly use our prospective marriages as fodder for their civil war.

So no I'm not an apologist for the Government, I'd rather like to be a thorn in their side. I'd love to stop having to defend them against ridiculous attacks from other marriage equality campaigners and instead join forces with like-minded folk to get this marriage equality done properly. Who is with me?

If you feel benevolent and particularly generous, this writer always appreciates things bought for him from his wishlist

I watched Hercule Poirot's Christmas earlier this afternoon. On the train journey to the inevitable country house (soon to the scene of an equally inevitable murder), Poirot was offered Brown Windsor soup as the first course of his lunch.

Brown Windsor soup? We know all about that.

As The Foods of England says:

Pick up pretty much any recent book on English food and you'll be told that Brown Windsor was The Victorian favourite, possibly the dominant English soup until WW2. You'll be told that it was always served at Windsor Castle, that it was the Queen-Empress's preferred starter, that it was a staple of boarding-houses and always turned up in railway dining cars. It is described as "the very soup reputed to have built the British Empire." and we're told that it "regularly appeared on state banquet menus". You'll learn, too, that it was thick and stodgy and that everybody hated it.

That's the story we all know. But The Foods of England carries on:

All of which is very odd as we can't find any reference to it anywhere, scour though we have the cookery books, newspapers and literature of Victorian and Edwardian times. It isn't on menus, even railway ones, nor in magazines. It isn't in any novels, it isn't in encyclopedias and the National Archive have nothing on it. It isn't mentioned in any cookbooks, it isn't in Mrs Beeton, or Eliza Acton, and 'Punch ' doesn't even make fun of it. In fact this 'Victorian and Edwardian staple' doesn't turn up anywhere before the 1950's.

Tellingly, Poirot's encounter with Brown Windsor soup was put in by the television scriptwriters. It is not mentioned in the original Agatha Christie story from the 1930s on which the programme was based.

The Foods of England also offers an explanation of this remarkably persistent myth:

Brown Windsor Soap, however, is well attested since the 1830's. Could it possibly be that the name was applied to ubiquitous hotel brown gravy soups as a joke, perhaps parodying the well-known rice-based White Windsor Soup?

We published yesterday Nick Clegg’s latest ‘Letter from the Leader’, focusing on the liberal stand he’s taken this past week on the internet snoopers’ charter and publicly stating his pro-reform/anti-drugs views. But one vexed issue was missing entirely — the Coalition’s proposal to introduce secret courts in the current Justice and Security Bill which has its second reading this Tuesday.

Secret courts were overwhelmingly rejected by the party’s conference in September, and our recent members’ survey showed a clear majority opposed outright, regardless of what compromises might be reached.

Jo Shaw, who leads the Liberal Democrats against secret courts campaign, has replied to Nick’s letter. Here’s what she has to say…

Dear Nick,

Thanks for your email about the Liberal Democrats successes this week on civil liberties. I was very pleased to hear of your decision to stand up for protecting freedoms of the individuals against an overreaching state. And the news about the Equal Marriage Bill is also good news for all who believe in equality.

I was particularly glad to read from you your comment that:

“it is no use standing up for civil liberties in opposition if you then forget all about them in power”.

However I was disappointed in the omission from your email of any mention of the Justice and Security Bill which introduces secret courts into almost all civil proceedings. For reasons which are not at all clear, the Bill has been rushed to its second reading on Tuesday of this week.

This Bill was described by crossbencher Lord Pannick QC as “unnecessary, unfair and unbalanced”. Lord Pannick voted against the Bill in the Lords, even after his amendments to improve the measures somewhat had been accepted.

You know the outcome of September’s Conference – party members voted overwhelmingly to reject secret courts in any form.

You know the importance of standing up for our key Liberal Democrat principles when in government, as in opposition. And you have previously said:

“…you shouldn’t trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.”

You are right. We shouldn’t trust any government, particularly not one that tries to put the determination of the most serious claims – torture, rendition, negligence of the armed forces, false imprisonment, habeas corpus – behind closed doors, excluding press, public and the affected civilian party. Secret courts must not be a legacy of a government which includes Liberal Democrats.

Please do what I know you have the authority to do. Please implement our party policy. Please stop this illiberal unnecessary and offensive Bill.

Please stand up for our civil liberties this week as you have last week.

Yours,

Jo Shaw

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

Nick was spoiled for choice this week on which liberal touchstone issues to focus on in his latest weekly missive… Whether to talk about torpedoing of the Draft Data Communications Bill or perhaps his pro-reform/anti-drugs stance following this week’s Home Affairs select committee report — in fact he talks about both, even linking them to his pro-Leveson position. Manna from heaven to Lib Dem activists. The only surprise is that this week’s equal marriage proposals aren’t mentioned…

Do you want the Home Secretary to be able to order the storage of vast quantities of data about who you email and call, your physical location, your web browsing and Facebook sessions? No, neither do I. Untargeted, blanket powers like these are an invitation for future governments to invade your privacy.

That’s why this week I pressed the pause button on the Communications Data Bill that was going through Parliament. A special committee was established to look at the legislation and its conclusions, published on Tuesday, were crystal clear – the legislation didn’t strike the right balance between our security and our personal privacy. We need to have a fundamental rethink and produce better proposals which give the police and security professionals the powers they need without going over the top.

My decision sparked controversy in some quarters, with the usual allegations that by attempting to protect civil liberties you are, by default, on the side of terrorists and paedophiles. I’m not usually inclined to dignify such arguments with a response, but let me just repeat what I said in the papers: of course we need to look at what new technology means for how we protect people from serious crime, and we will need to take new measures to address the problem. But we can do that by striking the right balance between our collective security needs and our individual right to privacy.

That is a difficult balance to strike – even more so when you are in Government. But it is no use standing up for civil liberties in opposition if you then forget all about them in power. It’s the same pattern that sees politicians rule out a sane approach to drug laws until they are safely out of office and only then they reveal they always favoured the kind of approach this week’s Home Affairs Select Committee suggested – a willingness to look in an open-minded way at all the evidence and alternative ways of dealing with the problems caused by drugs.

In all of this I am bewildered by the way some of the biggest opponents of any kind of independent regulation of the press see no problem with the apparently limitless Government regulation of individual citizens. Liberalism for me is about protecting people from overmighty institutions while enabling people to get on in life. That’s not easy and we must always ensure that we ask ourselves tough questions, but I’m confident we are playing our part in getting the balance right. If you want to help the Liberal Democrats as we campaign for civil liberties you can support us here.

Thank you,

Nick Clegg

Do you know someone who would like to get Nick’s weekly email? Forward this message and they can sign up here:

http://www.libdememails.co.uk/nick

You can read all Nick Clegg’s Letters from the Leader to date here.

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

‘The Ambassadors Of Death’ is an unusual, long, complex and slightly rambling story from Jon Pertwee’s first season of ‘Dr. Who’ (1970). It’s very adult in tone (no, Liz doesn’t flash her knickers, although her skirt is phenomenally short) and contrasts sequences of violent action with a slow but fascinating internecine tale of government conspiracy and xenophobia in its most expansive form, i.e. fear of (literal) aliens.

Originally written for Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, ‘Ambassadors’ is interesting for a number of reasons, not least because it makes some structural changes to the way the story is presented – little, unique touches like the recap taking in place in the middle of the credits, or the title card that reads ‘The Ambassadors’ followed by the zappy twang of a ray gun and the legend ‘OF DEATH’. The feel is different, too, darker and more thoughtful. The aliens are used sparingly and only briefly seen in their full, blue faced glory as the real villains here are humans, either mad, prejudiced men like General Carrington operating out of a warped sense of 'moral duty', or ruthless hired guns like the despicable Reegan (one of the nastiest bastards to ever appear in the programme).

At seven episodes, it is probably at least one episode, maybe two, too long, but I rather like the leisurely approach. The central element of the story clearly references the first ‘Quatermass’ story (the spaceship that goes off the radar then returns to Earth carrying something different to what it set out with), and I like that too. I also like Ronald Allen as space controller Ralph Cornish. You may remember Ronald from his long running role as David Hunter in the infamous soap opera 'Crossroads'. I love watching him in anything because he keeps the straightest possible face under all circumstances, and his permanently pained expression, combined with his deep, sonorous voice is just really funny.  I believe he was rather a fun loving chap in real life, so I like to think he's very much in on the joke. Here's a trailer --

The first two seasons of Pertwee Who are particular favourites of mine. Confined to Earth, the serious tone and reliance on location shooting on wasteground and in semi-derelict factories seems to reflect the grim milieu of early 70’s Britain (although the stories are set a few years in the future), a place permanently under siege and, it seems, under attack, a place where you can trust no-one and, as we discover in ‘Terror Of The Autons’, even an armchair can kill you.

The Archbishop of Wales, Barry Morgan, seemed rightly concerned when he complained after the equal marriage proposals of their implications for the Church in Wales.

How could it be just that a church that was disestablished nearly 100 years ago be banned from choosing whether to marry same-sex couples of not? Isn't it only fair they be allowed to choose, even if they currently are unlikely to choose to do so?

It seemed like yet another omnishambles. They didn't consult the Church in Wales and just went and treated them just like the established church in England. Disgusting. Except...

During the original consultation on marriage equality the Church in Wales gave an official response. The Ministry of Truth quickly found something interesting:

We note that at no point in the consultation document is the Church in Wales mentioned: paragraph 2.10, for example, refers exclusively to the Church of England. The Church in Wales is in an almost identical position to the Church of England with regard to the solemnisation of marriages. The Church in Wales’ concerns about the legal implications are therefore the same as those of the Church of England. We have taken note of these, and would seek assurances that the Government would specifically include the Church in Wales in any provisions for the Church of England under the proposed legislation.

So, without wanting to discuss their needs in too much detail, they just requested that whatever was good for the Church of England was good for them too.

The Ministry of Truth goes on to say:

So, in fact, Dr Morgan is now in the rather curious position of complaining publicly about the government giving his church exactly what it asked for, the exact same provisions in law that are to be applied to the Church of England should the bill pass without any amendments to these statutory locks. One has to wonder, therefore, whether the Church in Wales simply didn’t understand exactly what it was asking for or what the ramifications of its request would be given the unique constitutional position of the Church of England as an established church, or whether Dr Morgan is perhaps being just a little bit disingenuous and opportunistic in his newly discovered opposition to a statutory bar on same-sex marriages within his own church.  

What is true here is that, unless the Church in Wales has a legal duty to marry all-comers similar to that which applies to the Church of England then there is no obvious reason why it cannot be left out of the explicit statutory provisions that are intended to apply to the Church of England, but it did, nevertheless, get exactly what it asked for and should at least have the courage to admit to that fact before it goes on to argue against the fourth lock.

So is this another Government mistake, or is this (just like with the Church of England) a case of a church not really thinking through the implications of what it was asking for in the original consultation?

I think we need more honesty from the churches and a lot less spinning!

If you feel benevolent and particularly generous, this writer always appreciates things bought for him from his wishlist

Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, 1992 ed, Grant Naylor
Somewhere there exists a website detailing, elaborately, how events in the series and events in the novel can be reconciled. I can almost certainly guarantee that.
The notion that “continuity” in Red Dwarf is even less credible than it is in Doctor Who will have escaped the author. Of this I am also positive.

The song Happy Birthday to You (HBTY) has a story to tell, and it’s not wishing you to have a good one on this, the anniversary of your birth. The most recognizable song in the English language – a simple six notes and words - is owned by Time Warner, who will charge you ten grand to legally sing the four verses in a public place like a school or restaurant. But the history of how HBTY turned into a two million dollar a year corporate earner is the interesting part. It’s a case study in the copyright-by-fiat strategy that has recently proven so popular with corporate minions and robots. They allege intellectual ownership where none exists, and they often get away with it.

There are many ways to right this wrong. You could challenge HBTY’s dubious copyright in court, as long as you’re prepared for a foe like Time Warner. Or you could try to shame Time Warner by urging innocent birthday revelers to request permission for every innocent public “performance” of the song. Both are worthy endeavors, but neither one sounds like much fun.

No, for our purposes here, we’ll encourage you to unseat (or at least unsettle) “Happy Birthday to You” from it’s cultural throne by composing possible replacements. The Free Music Archive Happy Birthday contest seeks a few new Happy Birthday songs that are simple and catchy, with great earworm potential (remember: HBTY uses only six notes!) that can be sung in restaurants, bowling alleys, even in TV shows and movies – free of charge. Together, let us shake “Happy Birthday” from it’s fortified cultural throne, and replace it with a melody that the children can sing without fear of being served.

The three top entries will be all dressed up and distributed to the most powerful media companies on earth with colorful, Ross Perot-style financial incentive charts encouraging the recipients to better their bottom line by using one of these shiny new Happy Birthday replacement tracks.  WFMU will organize and pay for the digital and physical mailings of the three winning tracks to the luckiest people on earth-  any media or public organization who might have need for new birthday songs - movie studios; theater troupes, restaurant chains; sport leagues, scouting associations, youth groups; minor league baseball teams, major league Jai Alai squads, bowling alleys and we’ll also send the track to music journalists, bloggers and radio stations to help get the word out and cement the new songs into the cultural subconscious.

Ready to compose the next great Birthday song for the cake-eating masses? Here's where you can learn more about the judges, official rules and how to submit your work.

And here’s more background, if you hanker for more historical details on the very shaky copyright in question. The familiar melody for “Happy Birthday to You” was borrowed from other mid-19th century songs such as Horace Waters' "Happy Greetings to All" and "Good Night to You All," (published 1858) and also "A Happy New Year to All" and "A Happy Greeting to All" (published 1888). All four of these songs had that same six-note melody, and from the 1850’s to the 1880’s those six notes were reapplied to any number of greetings songs, some of which made it into published songbooks of the day.

Two esteemed Kentucky Kindergarten teachers named the Hill Sisters use this same melody with the lyrics “Good Morning to All” and used that version in their classes to greet their students, even publishing it in their own 1893 pamphlet. But over the years, somebody – who, we will never know – modified the lyrics to now public domain “Good Morning to All” with the present birthday lyrics. Were these 19th century wordsmiths The Hill Sisters themselves? Their students?  A class parent? The school janitor? We will never know. But the modified “Good Morning to All” caught on.

If fact, it caught on so much that Western Union used the song for their first singing telegram in 1933. But when the Irving Berlin musical “As Thousands Cheer” made use of the song later that same year, the forgotten Hill sister Jessica sprang into gear like a depression-era Gloria Allred.  Jessica got legal assistance from the Summy Company, who registered for copyright in 1935, crediting the song’s authors as Preston Ware Orem and Mrs. R.R. Forman, whoever they were. Time Warner purchased the Summy Company in 1998, and Edgar Bronfman Jr and friends purchased Warner Music Group in 2004. The song has been scheduled to enter the public domain a few times, but copyright term extensions have now delayed that date to 2030 at the earliest. 

Which is how we got to where we are now – living in a world in which restaurant chains invent their own replacement birthday songs, rather than break the law or pay thousands of dollars in licensing. A world that’s more like a dystopian hellscape, frankly, in which countless movies and TV shows sing “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” rather than fork over the estimated ten grand in licensing fees. Take a look at the video to see just how bad the problem really is. And then create your own Happy Birthday song, either with a melody of your own creation, or a reworked public domain melody with new lyrics. Keep it simple. And let’s put the Happy back into Birthdays, and take the Cease and Desist out of ‘em.

Contest rules |  How to Submit your Song

From April 2014, for the first time, people who need mental health services will be able to choose where they receive their care.

In 2008, the Labour government gave patients the legal right to choose who provides their care when referred by a GP. Scandalously, however, that right was specifically denied to mental health service users – a clear, institutionalised bias against mental health services and service users who had to take what they are given, whether they like it or not.Until now.

On Thursday Nick Clegg announced that all this will change. From April 2013, anyone with a mental illness who needs to see a consultant as an outpatient will be able to choose which doctor will be in charge of their treatment. From April 2014, they will be able to choose which hospital they go to. As well as making a major practical difference to people’s lives, giving them a say over their treatment, this move strikes a clear symbolic blow in bringing mental health services – for too long treated as a Cinderella service – into line with physical health services.

It is clear from posts elsewhere on these pages that the Lib Dems ‘get’ the importance of mental health. This drive to end the bias against mental health services is all down to the Liberal Democrats in Government. I am passionate about mental health but Nick Clegg has always been there arguing exactly the same case. He was the first party leader to speak about mental health in opposition – and, in Government, he has delivered.

By March 2015 we want to see real and meaningful progress towards true equality between mental health and physical care. This ambition was set out in the NHS Mandate published last month. This week’s announcement brings us another step closer to making the rhetoric about ‘parity of esteem’ a reality.

See the Guardian’s report on this here.

* Norman Lamb MP is Liberal Democrat Minister of State at the Department of Health

Not a headline I was expecting to give to a blog post any time soon, but occasionally Nick Clegg does speak up in favour of Liberal Democrat party policy. Today he’s talking about drugs and becoming probably the most senior UK politician to make the argument that if you really want to be ‘anti-drugs’ and cut the number of people using drugs and the harm that’s caused, then you need to be in favour of reforming the current system. There’s coverage all over the place of his statements, but see here for an interview with the BBC (and a report of the same), and see here for Clegg talking about it in The Sun and not getting pilloried. Maybe things are changing.

The Sun also has some interesting poll results, which might have influenced the decision not to go after Clegg on this, which shows that 57% of people think government drug policy has worked fairly or very badly in reducing drug use, 60% of people want a Royal Commission to look into drug policy and more people want either decriminalisation (30%) or legalisation (19%) of drug use than those who want the current law to remain (43%).

I’m reminded of an American study I read about three years ago (blogged about by Mark Thompson here) which showed that while a majority of people were in favour of a more liberal policy on drugs, that same majority consistently thought that their view was a minority one. What makes Clegg’s announcement today interesting is that while many politicians have said that the ‘war on drugs’ is failing, they tend to say that when they’re out of office (Jacqui Smith is a recent example). That he’s made it now – and that The Sun has taken it as an exclusive, not as a ‘Batty Lib Dems soft on drugs’ headline – might indicate that the tide is turning. As people see the evidence from Portugal, from the US states that have legalised medical marijuana and more, the message might finally be sinking in that there are alternatives to the ‘war on drugs’ which like many wars is very good for the generals fighting it on both sides, but hell for those caught in the middle of it.

Related Posts

• Woken up by the alarm clock of nonsense
• Do the Liberal Democrats need a radical centre?
• Now wait for later this year
• What now?
• 2010 General Election Diary Day 28: A 23% swing from Fish to hurricanes

You're not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.

I'll Explain Later

Lungbarrow is the final New Adventure featuring the Seventh Doctor, and ostensibly leads straight into the TV Movie. It dusts off the script that Marc Platt had to revise into Ghost Light, which was originally a bevy of revelations about the Doctor’s past and the nature of Gallifrey. As a book it becomes even more sprawling, finally rendering explicit the whole of the not-actually-Cartmel Masterplan, establishing at long last the relationship between the Doctor and the mysterious Other. The Doctor is the Other reincarnated. So that’s a thrilling shock. At the time Dave Owen wasn’t thrilled, calling it “rather more frustrating than rewarding” and saying that “it’s weird and wunderful - but, unfortunately, never simultaneously.” Lars Pearson, more recently, went with calling it “one of the most ambitious ‘Who’ novels ever, worthy of considerable praise.” Pearson’s view carries the day: it comes in fourth in Sullivan’s rankings with an 83.6%, which is good for a tie with fifth place. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——
It’s March of 1997. No Doubt remain silent at the top of the charts. After two weeks the Spice Girls have a single out - “Mama/Who Do You Think You Are.” That’s not one that charted in the US, but it goes straight to number one and stays there for the rest of the month. The Bee Gees, En Vogue, Bush, Ant & Dec, Boyzone, the Fugees, R. Kelly, the Backstreet Boys, Madonna, and the Pet Shop Boys also chart.

In real news, one of the most famous UFO sightings ever, the Phoenix Lights, takes place. Yes, The X-Files was tremendously popular around now, why do you ask? Hale-Bopp makes its closest approach to Earth, the Tamil Tigers kill over two hundred people in Sri Lanka, and the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cultists takes place in San Diego. While in the UK, John Major calls his doomed election, and The Sun promptly endorses Blair. And Teletubbies debuts!

While in fine literature, Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow. The book’s existence is an oddity. On the one hand, it was inevitable. The simple reality of Doctor Who fandom was that all of Virgin’s playing around with the Cartmel Masterplan had to be paid off. Never mind that there wasn’t actually all that much playing around with it - the Death/Time/Pain set of Eternals feature far more heavily than the mythology of the Other. It had to be done. Whatever one might think of Lungbarrow, the idea that the Virgin line could end without doing this story is unthinkable.

Which is largely a pity, because it’s rubbish. Every revelation in this book is complete rubbish. Neil Gaiman relates the story of how in an early draft of The Doctor’s Wife he had a line about how the Corsair was an inspiration for the Doctor leaving Gallifrey, and Moffat told him to take it out because the Doctor “does what he does for reasons too vast and terrible to relate.” Which is pretty much the problem - a problem we first noticed way back around Season Twenty and Longleat. Fans may spend hours debating things like why the Doctor left Gallifrey, but no answer can possibly be as interesting as the debate. Case in point: why did the Doctor flee Gallifrey? Because of political machinations on the part of one of his cousins. Why can’t he return? Because the Hand of Omega caused the TARDIS to go back into the ancient history of Gallifrey, which violates the new First Law of Time.

Does anyone seriously think that the series is improved by this revelation? Does anyone actually find this more satisfying than the original mystery? Whatever one might think of the Looms and Houses, or even the mythology of the Other, surely nobody would actually say that the explanation that the Doctor fled Gallifrey because of a family argument is a good or reasonable thing. Surely nobody thinks that the series is better for having squared that away. Like any answer to that question the only possible response to it is “oh, is that all?” It’s striving for the mythic and landing with a damp thud. Which, of course, Cartmel knew from the start, which is why his ostensible “masterplan” never actually involved revealing any of this. Cartmel has always been adamant that he wanted to increase the mystery about the Doctor. It would be difficult for this to be more incompatible with that goal.

The business with Rassilon and the Other is only a slight improvement. At least the ancient history of the Time Lords is something that can be revealed without any major damage to the series. The results may be dull and masturbatory, but they are at least inoffensive. The Doctor may be a Time Lord, but Gallifrey is not his milieu, and the Time lords are ultimately just another species for him to cast himself opposite. They can be defined as anything so long as it’s something the Doctor has broken from. In this regard, at least, the revelations about them here are no worse than the retcons of Genesis of the Daleks, which is to say, not bad at all. The problem is in the interplay between the Other and the Doctor.

From the start the point of the Other was that he was almost certainly the Doctor. A mysterious figure in Gallifrey’s past about whom little is known revealed in Doctor Who is obviously going to be eventually shown to be the Doctor mucking around in Gallifrey’s past. Nobody doubted that. The tension around the Other was entirely based on the question of whether the series would pull the trigger on that. After all, there is a heavy degree of point of no return with it. Once you’ve revealed the Doctor as the secret lost architect of Gallifrey you’ve pretty much decimated all notion of him as the little man who brings down empires. He becomes a massive, mythic figure forevermore at that point. So the tension of the Other is one of apprehension - what looks like the natural consequence of the storyline seems unsatisfying, but until that consequence plays out the story looks interesting. This happens to also be the crux of the problem The X-Files eventually ran into.

In this regard Lungbarrow’s solution can be described as serviceable. The Doctor isn’t actually the Other, he’s just the Other’s genetic material reincarnated through the Looms. It’s not quite a cop-out, but it isn’t exactly thrilling either. It’s a deft splitting the difference - the Doctor himself remains distant from the epic sweep of ancient Gallifrey, but the Other still gets resolved in the way that it always had to be. But there’s still something just a bit drab about it. Now we know why the Doctor is special, which leaves the question of why we needed to know that in the first place. Surely thirty-three years of history establish why he’s special well enough without a secret origin.

Which leaves the House of Lungbarrow itself. Admittedly an ancient and sentient house hidden under a mountain and torturing its residents is a neat image. But that’s the problem: it’s an image. It’s designed to look cool in a non-visual medium. The fact that Lungbarrow was originally intended for television is altogether too obvious here. Which means that the good bits of Lungbarrow are the ones we already saw, since all of the visual creepiness of the story was done by Ghost Light. Oddly and ironically, at the very end of the Seventh Doctor’s time in the Virgin Books, we go back to the most basically lame conception of the books imaginable: books that wish they were television episodes. Stories too sensibly vetoed by John Nathan-Turner for the small screen.

Which, at the end of the day, is the dirty secret of Lungbarrow. Yes, it was inevitable. There was never any way that the Virgin line could avoid paying off the supposed Cartmel Masterplan. But the reason why it was inevitable is telling. There was, after all, nothing all that good about the Cartmel Masterplan. That’s why Cartmel had next to no interest in the thing. But because legend had it that this was the lost destiny of the television program it had to be explored. Never mind that it wasn’t. The merest hint that this might have been something that could have gone on television obliges it to be completed. This is, of course, still prevalent logic - it’s why Big Finish’s Lost Stories line exists.

At their best, however, the New Adventures at least aspired to escape that gravity. That was the heart of their delightfully bold claim that they were Doctor Who now. Doctor Who was a line of novels now that had happened to be a television show once. But here, at their end they slink dejectedly back into the orbit of television. In this regard it’s fitting that this is where the Seventh Doctor era ends, feeding obligingly into the TV Movie. albeit with a few small petulances, most notably its tacit rubbishing of the idea that the Doctor is half-human. (The first of many.) The Virgin line was ultimately brought down by the vicissitudes of television, and so, after the swaggering heights of The Room With No Doors we get a story that is painfully beholden to television.

For all that we’ve spent the Virgin years developing a wealth of innovative concepts to secure the future of Doctor Who, the fact of the matter is that a controlling bloc of fandom wanted a television show. The ambitions of the Virgin era might have been literary, but there was no real mandate for it. The Virgin line was always keeping the seat warm for television, and when its end came it was never going to be allowed to be a high concept character study that pushed the nature of the Doctor to new extremes a la The Room With No Doors. It was always going to be Lungbarrow and the slow deflation back towards television.

Implicit in this, though, is the fact that the “cult” model for Doctor Who was still well and truly in place. And remember, this is chronologically after the TV Movie. We’d all seen the cult approach dash itself pathetically on the rocks. But here the logic of cult television is firmly back in place. You have to do an origin story, you have to have big, epic resonances, you have to properly worship at the feet of the larger continuity. Indeed, the only objections anyone bothered to raise against the TV Movie were the ways in which it had violated the larger continuity: the stupid half-human claim. It’s clear that Platt has no interest in the TV Movie or anything it did. He feeds into it grudgingly and perfunctorily, because that’s what the last Seventh Doctor book has to do. His detailed account of the Doctor’s origins in the looms makes a mockery out of the half-human claim. But that’s his only objection, it seems: the fact that the half-human claim doesn’t gel with what we know about Gallifrey and the Doctor. That and snogging are the apparent extent of the objection to the TV Movie. Everyone still seems to believe that if only the TV Movie had been done more faithfully to the original series it would have thrived.

We’ll get to the wealth of things that were wrong and misconceived about the TV Movie in a week and a half. But it’s telling that the logic of this last bit of raging against the dying of the light and the logic that birthed the TV Movie are indistinguishable. There’s nothing Lungbarrow is trying to do that is incompatible with the TV Movie’s goals. The only difference is that the TV Movie is doing standard issue Joseph Campbell where Lungbarrow is doing… well, actually, standard issue Joseph Campbell again. In other words, the logic that made Lungbarrow inevitable is the same logic that led to the TV Movie itself. Which is to say that whatever the TV Movie’s flaws, and there are reams of them, it too was inevitable. It didn’t matter how good the Virgin books were. Doctor Who was doomed to become a crappy American cult sci-fi show, and the Virgin Books couldn’t hope to escape the gravity of that black hole.

Which basically brings this phase of the operation to an end. We’ve got three more entries that are going to go into what will eventually be the sprawlingly massive Sylvester McCoy book - A Death in the Family on Monday (you can buy that here), and then Oh No It Isn’t and Down rounding out the week. As with any era transition, it’s a period of checking off a last few boxes and setting up some themes I’ll have use for as we start the next era. Then on Christmas Eve we’ll do the Pop Between Realities entry that will kick off the McGann/Eccleston book, and do the TV Movie on Boxing Day. And then, actually back to Virgin again twice in the next month. But this is basically how it ends - stuck in a not-entirely-interesting bit of continuity and feeding into a TV story it clearly doesn’t even like.

In the spirit of wrapping up loose ends, then, let’s tug briefly at one strand of all of this: Susan. Lungbarrow, for all its faults, offers the closest thing to a compelling account of the character as exists. It’s clear that the pre-Unearthly Child era is something of a pet project for Platt - in addition to Lungbarrow and a pair of Unbound audios dealing with an alternate Doctor that never left Gallifrey he’s done a Companion Chronicle based on the briefly alluded to Quinnis, plus he wrote an Eighth Doctor audio in which the Doctor and Susan reunite. So there is perhaps no other author quite so interested in the Problem of Susan.

And to his credit, the explanation given here works. Susan is in fact the Other’s granddaughter, and recognizes her grandfather’s essence in the Doctor. This is, of course, a blatant retcon to the Hartnell era, casting Susan as a character who is in key regards more knowledgeable than the Doctor. But it also literalizes the essential tension of Susan. What is challenging about Susan is the way in which she haunts the narrative, insisting on it going in directions it doesn’t want to. In the Hartnell era proper she haunts it by introducing sex and sexuality to the series, both in her own coming of age and the implication her very existence brings that the Doctor has investments and loves and roots. Her existence necessarily posits a limit on how much the Doctor can fall out of the world, and her relationship with the Doctor forces a limit on how much she can grow into it. Then, in the aftermath of the Hartnell era, she becomes the thing that cannot be squared away: the companion that it simply cannot be reasonably explained why the Doctor has never gone back for. The detail of Gallifrey that never quite makes sense. And Platt, by establishing her roots in the ancient past of Gallifrey, finds a way to literally put her in a period where she haunts the narrative, serving as a lost mythology literally as well as figuratively. At last there’s something of an explanation: the Doctor doesn’t go back for her because she is a relic of a mythology that no longer quite connects to the present.

Much like Lungbarrow.

Oh hail, ye mindless daemon sultan, hail
Whose febril writhings in the netherspheres,
Set branes a tremble, impacting, so those,
Vast multispacial planes, thus clash and spring,
Apart to birth the Universes' fires.

This is your icon, look,
Painted in brash, and lead-based, poison tones
The clockwork chimpanzee, under a fez,
That clangs its metal cymbals,
While a spring, runs down, eternally.

What other unknown god,
Amused by you,
First wound your clockwork
Limbs to thrash and curl,
About the heartlands of the hidden worlds?

Nyarlathotep, perhaps?
Your hidden soul,
That mocks and taunts, the feeble wits of earth?
Or were you wound up by the Fourth Wise Man?
That Al Hazrad, who penned in Bethlehem,
How please the babe was to receive his gift,
And coo'ed to see the Blind Ape of Truth,
Ring out the pains of all created things.

The media narrative: The Government has, without consulting the Church of England, unnecessarily banned them from performing same-sex marriages. The Church of England is outraged at being told they will be banned. Omnishambles all round. 

The truth is a little more complex. Let us follow the chain of events (ignoring the Church in Wales stuff, I feel that needs its own blog post which I'll do later).

Between March and June 2012, the Government began a consultation regarding how to implement civil equal marriage. They received many responses, including a thoughtful one from the Church of England with a rather detailed legal opinion as well.

Sadly, for the Church of England, the Government did listen to them. They complained that the Government was only focussing on civil marriage and this was legally dubious. So the Government has included religious marriages in the proposals issued this week. They ignored the Church of England's absolutely clear opposition to any marriage equality for anyone, and decided to focus on protecting the Church of England from the legal attacks it was so worried about. I feel that is a compromise worth making to protect religious freedom and individual liberty.

The Government intends to introduce a "Quadruple Lock" to protect religions who don't want to perform same-sex marriages. A triple lock for most, and the "Quadruple Lock" for the Church of England and the Church in Wales:

• Ensure that no religious organisation or individual minister can be compelled to marry same-sex couples or to permit this to happen on their premises.
• Provide an opt-in system for religious organisation who wish to conduct marriages for same-sex couples.
• Amend the Equality Act 2010 to reflect that no discrimination claims can be brought against religious organisations or individual ministers for refusing to marry a same-sex couple.
• Ensure that legislation will not affect the canon law of the Church of England or the Church in Wales. As a result, if either church wanted to conduct a same-sex marriage, it would require a change to primary legislation at a later date and a change to canon law.

So only consenting representatives of a consenting religious organisation will be able to perform same-sex marriages which seems quite reasonable to me. Thus Catholic priests are just as unable to perform these marriages as are Church of England clergy.

The Church of England was quick to explain that the Government was not giving them any extra protections but respecting their right to opt-in constitutionally if they so wished. Their press release is here (it is their second version. The first was entitled "Equal Marriage and the Church of England". Obviously that couldn't stand, so it has been changed to "Same-sex Marriage and the Church of England. Note the "Same Same Marriage" reference in the left hand sidebar which I like to think suggests someone at the press office wasn't happy with the need to change the title! *EDIT* They have changed it again now to "Same-sex marriage". Sneaky.). An excellent explanation of the Quadruple Lock and the Church of England's position can be found here. But let us quote from the press release.

For Parliament to give the Church of England an opt-in to conduct same sex marriages that it hasn't sought would be unnecessary, of doubtful constitutional propriety and introduce wholly avoidable confusion.

The Church of England, on the 11th, was extremely clear they didn't want an opt-in as they already had one.

There was a great deal of confusion over all of this which I discussed in my blog post here.

Sadly it would appear that some within the media, in the opposition to the current Government and within the Church of England have decided to use the issue of marriage equality to further their own agenda rather than debate the facts.

This Guardian article is an example of all three groups meeting together and spinning things into an omnishambles.

Now the main issue the Church of England representatives have is that they were not consulted on the details of the proposals. Given their initial press release afterwards (where they expressed satisfaction with what the Government was proposing in terms of legal protections) I find this very disingenuous. Do these representatives want marriage equality in the church? The Bishop of Leicester, quoted in the story, certainly doesn't.

Let us be clear: the Government is not "banning" the Church of England from conducting same-sex weddings. It is simply putting the ball firmly in their court. If they want it, then (just as with women bishops) they will need to internally vote for it and put it into Canon Law and send this to Parliament for rubber stamping. 

Ben Bradshaw, no friend of this blog or equal marriage, then decides to put the boot into the Government.

The Labour MP Ben Bradshaw, who was at the Lords meeting, said Stevens' revelation that the church had not been informed had drawn "audible gasps" from members of all parties.  

"It's absolutely extraordinary," he said. "The government gave the clear impression that this had been done at the request of the Church of England … but the bishop of Leicester said: 'We didn't ask for it' … and was very upset about it because it gave the impression that the Church of England were unfriendly towards gays."  

Asked why the government had chosen to propose the "quadruple-lock" guarantee, Bradshaw said: "The only explanation I can think of was that they thought it would help placate some of their homophobic backbenchers. But it seems to have backfired massively because the rightwing homophobes were out in force anyway and the Church of England now appears to be extremely upset that not only was it not asked, but it's added to [the] general misery over women bishops and now this. It makes the Church of England look much more reactionary and unreasonable than it actually is," he said.

It really isn't hard to make a church that is opposing an issue of equality look reactionary. And even less hard to make them seem unreasonable when you give them what they want and then members of the church still moan.

Ben Bradshaw's comments seem almost gleeful at the prospect of the Government screwing up equal marriage and, I'll admit, left me even more angry with him than I was earlier this year!

Rather than allowing the Church of England's civil war between liberals and traditionalists to destroy the prospects of marriage equality, perhaps we can get some clarification from the Church of England. Do they want the protections or do they not? What would they prefer? I can't lambast the Government for destroying their religious liberty if officially the church says they agree and unofficially they moan about it.

I have to think the Church of England is just trying to undermine marriage equality by making the Government look bad! Heaven forbid.

Right now it is not the Government's proposals that are an omnishambles but the Church of England's response!

If you feel benevolent and particularly generous, this writer always appreciates things bought for him from his wishlist

It seems odd now, but The Dave Clark Five were one of the biggest names in sixties pop, particularly in the US where they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show eighteen thousand times and had sixty number ones or something. The DC5 didn’t really bother with things like musical progression, and they didn’t get all hairy and weird like The Beatles, so they may have seemed safer and more palatable to our predominantly more conservative transatlantic cousins. Their music, a pretty basic shouty, stompy take on early rock and roll is probably one of the least interesting things about them. By far the most interesting is the film they made in 1965, ‘Catch Us If You Can’.

Directed by rising star John Boorman, the film is wacky and fun loving for approximately ten minutes before becoming quite amazingly wistful and downbeat. Dave and the lads (the other four aren’t given names. One has no lines at all) play stuntmen (Dave’s job before he became a pop star) who are working on a successful advertising campaign for meat. The star of the ads is Dinah, the ‘Meat For Go!’ girl. She and Dave share an unspoken mutual attraction and both feel confined by the ruthlessly commercial world they have become a part of, a world run by manipulative men only marginally older than them but much more ‘grown up’: men who no longer have dreams, only goals. Dave and Dinah impulsively run away from the latest advert shoot, stealing an e-type Jag and heading for an island off the Devonshire coast that Dinah is thinking of buying.

What follows is an hour and a bit of Dave and Dinah trying to find freedom, pursued all the way by the unstoppable forces of adult life and the press who, in order to generate maximum publicity,  have been led to believe that Dinah has been kidnapped. This downbeat travelogue is occasionally punctuated by DC5 recordings (the band do not play or sing at any point during the film), and, superbly, incidental music from an uncredited Basil Kirchin.

When they finally arrive at their destination (Burgh Island near Plymouth) the young almost lovers soon realise it’s far from being the safe haven they dreamed of - not only is it readily accessible when the tide is out, but the media circus following the couple has already landed. Dinah, swayed by the flash bulbs and the attention, is immediately sucked back in; a baleful looking Dave and the boys drive off in their Mini Moke to their next existential crisis.

A strange, pensive film, it’s interesting to think what DC5 fans would have thought of it, especially under its US title ‘Having A Wild Weekend’, but then I suppose ‘Having A Weird Weekend’ doesn’t sound as much fun (it does to me).  Dave Clark readily admitted that he was not comfortable as an actor and this clearly shows – in fact, he does the strange thing of making the viewer uncomfortable. Described throughout as ‘saturnine’ he is a dark, glowering, monosyllabic presence who spits out his chewing gum on his own floor, the sort of bloke one tends to steer clear of in real life, whatever that is.

Here’s a lovely medley of the amazing Mr. Kirchin’s incidental music. it has never been officially released, so this is an audio rip from the film. I’m not a technical sort, so don’t expect perfection, just a lo fi sound portrait of Basil’s usual brilliance.

I’ve been promising to start a series on how to set yourself set up and plan for 2013 here in December 2012. A couple people actually have asked me when I was going to start that series. Well, I already have.

Part One: Some Perspective on 2012.

Part Two: How to Get Started Selling Fiction in 2013.

So now we move to Goals and Dreams in this post. Any business plan you decide to set up for yourself is made up of goals that can be attained with work. The focus of the goals you set is to attain a dream.

So, the series is continuing, but before reading this, please read those first two parts. It’s all going to build from part to part and I’m going to reference parts of those posts as well at times.

Defining a Dream

So what is a dream?

Be rich, sell millions of books, hit #1 on the New York Times List? Yup, all dreams. How about winning the lottery? Yup, a dream.

How about being published by a traditional publisher? Yup, a dream.

You can send a novel to a traditional editor or put it up indie published for publishers and readers to see. That is working toward the dream of being published by a traditional publisher. But you have no control over the fact that you will be published by any traditional company. None.

That’s why they are called “dreams.”

For the purpose of this series of posts, let me define a dream.

A dream is something that you want that is out of your direct control.

We work toward dreams, but we have no control over gaining them. That’s what defines something as a dream. No direct control.

Defining a Goal

Again for the sake of this discussion, A goal is something you can do that is in your direct control.

Goals are set with the hope of achieving a dream.

Dream: Win the lottery. Goal: Buy a lottery ticket every week.

You can buy a lottery ticket. That is working toward the dream of winning the lottery. Buying a ticket is in your control.

“Making a Living With Your Fiction” Dream

Dream: At some point in the future you hope to pay all your bills every year with only your fiction writing.

So what kind of goals are you going to need to get to this dream? Remember, you set goals to achieve dreams.

Before we set some goals, let me give some basics.

To be a professional writer, you are going to need the following just to start:

1) Determination bordering on psychotic.

2)  The ability to keep standing back up and going on when something knocks you down.

3) The ability to ignore the negative from all those around you, especially family and friends.

4) The hunger to keep learning writing craft and the knowledge you will never be good enough.

5) Fearlessness.

6) The desire to learn business.

7) The ability to control your own time and what comes at you.

If you think you have all seven of those points, or can learn or fake a part of them, then we can move on to the next step.

Please understand that three years ago there was only one path to this dream of making a living with your fiction. Now there are numbers of valid paths and a lot more writers achieving the dream. See my post How to Get Started Selling Fiction in 2013. I tend to lean toward the #4, #5, or #6 paths, but the #2 path will also work given enough time.

So what steps are next?  There are a couple of ways of approaching this as a business person.

#1… Set desired income and work backward to a production goal to attain the income… or #2…. set a production goal and work forward until the income arrives.

I tend to like just setting a production goal and working toward the income as it happens. More in my control. But both methods need production goals set, just as any manufacturing business would.

So that’s where I’ll start.

How to set production goals

FIRST STEP… even if you are writing pretty well already, take an inventory of all the time you spend every day for three or four sample days. Doing everything.

Every minute in fifteen minute chunks. Do a log. And be honest. And also record your mental state during the time frame. For example, up at 6:30 but too tired to think until 8:30 and two cups of coffee.

After you have the log, figure out how much writing time you have.

Add in reading time, research time, and so on.

CAUTION!!!  Writing time is only writing time, creating new words only. Rewriting, researching, reading, taking a workshop is not writing time. Be clear on that because if you start to blur those lines, you will discover your new word production has decreased.

(Honestly, I expect very few of you to do this, even though it might be the most important step you take in production. Most writers fall down on point #7 above and it is often terminal to a writing career.)

SECOND STEP… Keep time over a number of writing sessions how many NEW words you get done in an hour. Round that to a general number per hour. For example, I write slower at the starts of stories and faster at the ends. So the general number I use for myself is around 1,000 words per hour. I tend to be comfortable with that and many professional writers I know are in that range.

Find your own range and be clear on it and don’t tell us. This is for you to figure out for yourself.

THIRD STEP… Look at all your writing time from step one and your word count per hour from step two and figure out how much you could write in A PERFECT WEEK.

Divide that in half and that is your writing goal of new words per week.

Example: So say with your day job and kids, you can carve out ten hours per week of actual writing time. Divide that in half and if you write about 1,000 words per hour of new words, you will be producing 5,000 new words per week. (5 hours x 1,000 words = 5,000 words per week.)

Take two weeks off and you get 50 weeks x 5,000 words or 250,000 new words per year.

That’s just five hours per week.  That’s how you write a lot of words.

If you can manage to actually write ten hours per week of original fiction, just over one hour per day, you would produce a half million words of fiction in one year. (And you would be called one of the fastest writers in publishing if you worked that one-plus-hour per day for a few years. Not kidding.)

What is the next goal?

You can’t do anything without producing and finishing new novels and stories. So the production goal has to be the top importance. Period. Those hours have to be protected like gold. And you have to work during those hours, not play video games on your computer or answer e-mail. You have to protect those hours from yourself mosts of all.

But after setting the production goal, (and defending your writing time and actually writing in that time) it will now depend on your own beliefs in both myths and how you want to go at  the publishing industry. Again, back to my last post in this series, “How to Get Started Selling Fiction in 2013.” You have choices.

Are you writing short fiction or novels or both?  (Again, please only answer for yourself in your own planning.)

Do you also have a dream of traditional publishing novels? Or can you be happy for now indie publishing and making a living that way? (Ignoring that indie publishing is now a route to traditional publishing for the sake of this discussion.)

Again, look at the six roads I laid out in the last post and figure out which one works for you and your dreams.

Let Me Help a Little in the Decision…

Going back to doing a business plan, let’s come at the entire thing from another direction.

First, set how much money you need to live for a year. Say the number is $50,000.00 for the sake of this article.

Traditional Publishing Route: (Path #2 from last week.)

If you are writing for traditional publishers and making $5,000 advances, you will need to write and sell ten novels per year plus to get close to that amount. Or get higher advances. If you want to make $50,000 per year and only write one book, you need to sell it for $50,000 plus. And do that every year.

Yup, that’s a dream like winning the lottery. It’s possible if you buy enough tickets… I mean write enough books.

I have written entire novels for under $5,000 and I have made over $50,000 per book. Both are more than possible. The low end is more likely in this new world. (And plan on never seeing another dime from the book after the first year. You will never get it back with modern contracts unless your advance is way above six figures and you have a great attorney.)

And remember that selling a novel to traditional publishers is a dream, so to achieve that dream you will need to pound editor’s desks (again option #2 from last week) with dozens of novels for years. It will take a long, long time, as it has always done.

But it is possible. That’s how I did it. And for years Kris and I taught that road, the only road before three years ago open to writers.

Remember, I am writing this assuming the dream is to make a living with your fiction. To do so on the traditional route, you would have to set your goals to write a lot of books, far more than one hour per day, actually, or plan on taking a lot of years. The first novel breaking in will speed up the process, but with traditional publishing route, make sure you are clear on all the stuff I have been talking about here. And what Kris has been talking about on her blog. Contracts, agents, and so on. There are thousands of pitfalls on that road, but again, writers do walk it.

I walked it for decades and never really got very lucky. I just worked harder than almost everyone and have now published over a hundred novels with traditional publishers. It can be done.

Do I suggest it as a road to walk in 2013?

No. But it is your career. Your choice.

Indie Publishing Route:

First five to ten novels you put up you will be lucky to sell 25 copies per month average over a year. Average. Some will sell none, some more. (And I’m talking across the planet, not just Kindle.)

But do the math. If you are selling the novels at $5.99 each electronic (ignoring paper and audio for the moment) you make about $4.00 per sale or about $100 per novel average per month. Or around $1,200 per year per novel.

You will not do this with your first or second or even fifth novel.  This path, just as traditional publishing does, takes a lot of product. That is a drawback. If the first year you write three novels (about six hours per week), you would be lucky after the first year to make great dinner money on all three books total every month.

Also, you have to go back to Step One above and figure in the time where you can learn how to do covers and layout interiors of books.  And that can’t be your writing time. You must dig out the indie production time from other time. Not writing time.

And you will need to set up a business as a small press or indie publisher. My “Think Like a Publisher” posts under the tab above are free. (I will be doing a lecture series with that title to help people as well starting in 2013.) So that can be learned, but not on writing time.

Indie publishing route is much easier to do business “projections” on. Say you have finished ten novels in four years (again ignoring paper and audio editions for now). You are averaging 25 copies per month sold over those ten titles. That is a pretty steady income of $12,000 per year. Not $50,000, but a nice start.

As with traditional publishing, this method of approach assumes a few dreams happen given enough work.

With traditional publishing, this method assumes that with given enough years and work, you start selling regularly to traditional publishers.  That’s the dream part.  It might not happen. In indie publishing, the dream part is that you average 25 copies per book per month in sales. That might not ever happen either.

You can’t control if you sell to New York and you can’t control if your books sell to customers.

So that approach does not really work as a business plan because it assumes sales that are out of your control.

So I’m going to back up to what is a goal, what can be controlled.

Control

You control in Traditional Publishing:

1) Your writing output.

2) How many manuscripts you put on the market for sale, meaning how many do you mail to traditional editors and how you keep them in the mail to as many editors as you can over time.

That’s it.

-

You control in Indie Publishing:

1) Your writing output.

2) How many manuscripts you put on the market for sale.

3) You also control the quality of the cover, the blurbs, and where your book is sold (paper, electronic, audio and all markets for everything around the world.)

That’s it.

-

Control of both major paths ends right there. 

So how do you work to get the money flowing and growing and eventually make a living if you don’t control either sales to editors or customers?

Simple.

1) You control where you attempt to sell your work.

2) You control how much you are learning to make your work better every time.

On where to sell your work, my suggestion is this: Attempt to sell your work everywhere you can think of, in as many forms as you can figure out..

Let me repeat that, since it is such a simple sentence and so fantastically hard for people to follow.

Attempt to sell your work everywhere. And in as many forms as you can figure out.

That you can control! You control the attempt to sell. You don’t control the buying or not buying, but you control the attempt to sell.

So a goal can be to get your work out to every market you can get it out to in all fashions. EXCLUDE NOTHING.

A couple of very simple examples:

Example #1: You write a short story.

— First, try to sell it to traditional magazines that pay above 5 cents per word and give you rights back to your story within a year.

— After it hits the top markets, then indie publish it, or if it sells, after you get the rights back, indie publish it as a stand-alone for $2.99 electronic. (Get it in every electronic market you can get it into around the world.)

— Put it with three or four other stories and publish it as a collection.  Do print and audio versions of the collection as well. Get them into every outlet you can around the world as well.

And so on…

Example #2: You write a novel.

Publish it indie first electronically, in paper, and in audio and get it out around the world to every market you can get it out to.

Then mail a copy of the trade paperback with a cover letter and quick synopsis and a SASE to five traditional editors who might buy it for their line. And if they don’t respond or reject it, mail it to five more editors in six months. (Path #5 from the last article.)

There is no either/or in 2013.

Attempt to sell your work everywhere. And in as many forms as you can figure out.

Summary

In the next article in this series, I will break down how to get the production going. The decision on traditional or indie or both does not matter if you can’t get production of new words going.

And keep it going.

That’s a key. I’ll give you in the next post a number of tricks and methods to keep your writing going through 2013. And a few nifty games to play as well.

Also, I will talk about how to keep learning through the new year. That’s also something you can control and will help in money made in the future.

You control production, learning, and where your try to sell your work.

But until the next article, figure out how many hours of writing you can carve out of your life and how fast you write original words.  (And again, keep them to yourself… not our business, just yours.)

And then I’ll help you get to those words and keep them flowing.

And remember the point of this article.

Attempt to sell your work everywhere. And in as many forms as you can figure out.

As I said in last week’s article, it really, honestly, is that simple.

And that hard.

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Copyright © 2012 Dean Wesley Smith

Cover art copyright Philcold/Dreamstime
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This chapter is now part of my inventory in my Magic Bakery.  

I’m now getting back to writing fiction, so every word I write here takes time from that. And I have to justify this column somehow in how I make a living.

So, if you feel this helped you in any way, toss a tip into the tip jar on the way out of the Magic Bakery.

If you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this chapter along to others who might get some help from it.

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